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Magazine
COMMENT
Beyond prejudice
VIKRAM KAPUR
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In divisive times such as ours, the life of Oskar Schindler has an urgent relevance.
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Contemporary relevance: A scene from "Parzania".
IN the summer of 2005, I began reading Schindler's Ark, a Booker Prize-winning book that was adapted into the Oscar-winning film "Schindler's List". I had just been at the receiving end of a brutal racial attack, while doing my Ph.D. at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The experience had severely shaken my belief in the fundamental goodness of humanity, if not entirely punched and kicked it out of me. Against such a backdrop, the story of Oskar Schindler, a German who put his life on the line to save more than 1,000 Jews from the gas chamber during World War II, was both refreshing and illuminating.
What I found most fascinating about Schindler was that he was all too human. He didn't come wearing the saintly cape that envelops a Gandhi or a Mandela, lifting them to a pedestal that mere mortals can never hope to achieve. Rather, he was a deeply flawed man. He was a Nazi and a war profiteer. A compulsive womaniser, he was frequently disloyal to his wife. After the war, he even abandoned her in Argentina to return to Germany. An incurable spendthrift, he lost millions in his pursuit of the good life. When he died, he was penniless...
The call of conscience
Yet, at a time when far more moral men and women had been caught up in Hitler's xenophobia or reduced to being mere spectators to what was happening by their own fear, this man answered the call of conscience. At the time, he had no crystal ball to tell him that his actions would make him the subject of an award-winning book and a celebrated movie. Nor could he gaze into the future and see that the grateful Jews he saved, Schindler's Jews as they came to be called, would be key to his financial survival after the war. In fact, the only reward he could have fathomed for his actions at the time was death by a Nazi firing squad in the event of discovery. Furthermore, in doing what he did, he spent his entire fortune in providing for the Jews he saved, while bribing Nazi officials to look the other way. His act was entirely selfless, which is what makes it heroic.
Nearly one-and-a-half years after reading Schindler's Ark, I find the example of Schindler increasingly relevant in contemporary India. The potential for the kind of upheaval xenophobia caused in Schindler's Germany exists in our society several times over. Our divisions are not merely religious and racial. They are also linguistic, regional and caste-based. Our political landscape is dotted with politicians of every stripe trafficking in divisiveness in the name of preserving culture and identity, redressing past grievances, or asserting community rights. The wave of economic liberalisation, while enriching and empowering some, has left its own residue of malcontents who make ideal cannon fodder for these xenophobic designs. It comes as no surprise that in the past 15 years, while experiencing unprecedented economic growth, we have also had Godhra and the Gujarat riots, the Babri mosque episode in Ayodhya, the Mumbai blasts and the Mumbai riots, the Maoist and Naxalite uprisings, and God knows how many lesser-known conflagrations in the Northeast. As if to prove that fact is truly stranger than fiction, today we not only have more millionaires than ever before, we also have more militants.
Essential humanity
Schindler did what he did, because he looked upon Jews as people, rather than through the prism of popular stereotypes. To that end, his friendship with two Jewish boys, who lived next door to him when he was growing up, was crucial. He could always hearken back to it, as well as to other associations with Jews, to retain his humanity towards the community, while disavowing Nazi propaganda that frequently depicted them as rats eating up the German nation. That is, perhaps, the most important lesson we Indians can draw from him. That is not to say that people like Schindler have not existed in our society. When I was researching my first novel, which was based on Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984 and the anti-Sikh riots that followed, I came across several heart-warming accounts of Hindus who had helped Sikhs, at times at considerable risk to themselves. The recently released movie on the Gujarat riots, "Parzania", has a poignant episode, where a Hindu bucks the trend to save a Muslim. The history of Partition, too, includes several instances where Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs went against the popular grain of their times to help people who were different from themselves.
Beyond stereotypes
But in the divisiveness of our times, such a quality can often get lost. As it is, being a group-oriented culture, we are socialised into an environment where group loyalties are paramount. Any kind of close association with someone who comes from a different background is often frowned upon, if not actively discouraged. Consequently, many of us go through life without forming a single meaningful relationship with someone who speaks a different native tongue, or belongs to another religion, caste or social class. As a result, when we view the other, it is, more often than not, through the prism of popular stereotypes, most of them negative. In past generations, at least we had overarching sociopolitical leaders whom we could look up to as universal heroes. But, nowadays, even those are few and far between. Isn't it a travesty that when we go looking for a universal hero, we have to continuously dig into the dustbin of history to resurrect Gandhi?
As "Black Friday", the docudrama on the Bombay blasts of March 1993, amply illustrates, xenophobia merely begets more xenophobia. The only people the Hindu xenophobes ended up helping, by their actions during the Bombay riots of December 1992 and January 1993, were the Muslim xenophobes, who used those riots as a war cry to motivate ordinary Muslims into becoming bombers. Going a little further back in history, Delhi's anti-Sikh riots of 1984 reaped a similar harvest, giving real impetus to the fledgling Sikh separatist movement.
Therefore, an Oskar Schindler cannot help but be relevant. His life tells us, however ordinary our circumstances, each one of us is capable of the extraordinary in the pursuit of what is right. We don't have to get caught up or cave in to the destructive cycle of xenophobia that marks our age. Instead, we can step outside it and choose to listen to our conscience to look beyond prejudice and stereotype. And if we have the courage to do that, like Oskar Schindler, we all have it in us to be heroes.
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