ABSTRACT
And then, having opened up a new space for the imagination, a new way to think about society and politics, we color it in and fi ll it with life through empirical work, empirical work that this rethink has made possible. Once this process gets rolling, it will take on a dynamic of its own. It will continuously reveal the weaknesses of accepted ideas and suggest new ways to improve them. (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 21)
For Beck, the individual of the future will survive as a human by living in “the rubble” of the old, accepted ideas “in ruins of values that have authority for him, if at all, only through himself. He enacts his laws-even if they are the old and prevailing ones” (Reinvention of Politics 165). Roy, with the central metaphor of Chappu Thamburan, “Lord Rubbish,” and Rushdie with his Ormus Cama and other Orpheus/Shiva characters of destruction and preservation, have proclaimed the same prophecy-Roy by stating that the individual must secede from her country (“If protesting against having a nuclear
bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and antinational, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no fl ag” (“The End of Imagination” 15); Rushdie by declaring that “[t]he only people who see the whole picture are the ones who step out of the frame” (The Ground Beneath Her Feet 203). Roy vows to fi ght for the individual’s right to make her own narrative:
I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes, and speak our secondhand lines in this sad secondhand play. But let’s not forget that the stakes we’re playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and fi nd the strength to think. To fi ght. (Harper Collins 1997)
Likewise, as anyone who has read Rushdie-or has read only the celebmedia’s account of his doings-knows that he, too, fi ghts against the “accepted” ways of thinking (for the casual reader who would get to the bottom of Rushdie’s opposition, the essay in Imaginary Homelands entitled “Is Nothing Sacred?” is perhaps the best introduction to his thought). Following Foucault’s dictum that “[a]nyone who would learn the ‘art of living’ must practice the art of doubt,” Ulrich Beck emphasizes the need to oppose the “horror visions of scepticism that have been cultivated and circulated for centuries in the culture of certainty to deter anyone from having a fl ing with doubt” (Reinvention of Politics 165-6). Beck further emphasizes that this particular new kind of doubt (“Doubt-refl exive modernity-will have more names for it than the Eskimos have for snow!”) must be distinguished from the “linear” and fi nal doubt of the postmodern project:
For this task, postmodern thought is inadequate. It explains why the old ways of conceiving modernity are no longer valid, and then it stops short. It explains why the old ways of drawing boundaries rested on hidden and unjustifi able assumptions, and then it stops, leaving it a complete mystery how social life continues on. It seems unconcerned with that. There seem to be two obvious inferences to be drawn from this attitude. One is that the ruling ideas must not matter much, because if you destroy them, things carry on much as before. The second is that there must not be a real crisis. It must only be a confusion of ideas, because if there was a real crisis, a turning point in reality, there would be some urgency about addressing it. (Conversations with Ulrich Beck 26)
The proof that Roy and Rushdie are reinventing politics lies in their depiction of the real crisis that is engulfi ng the planet, and in their terrible urgency-which itself has evinced further proof of the accuracy of Beck’s
sociological analysis: the litigious, dogmatic, and vehement reactionary attacks launched from the citadels of power upon these mere novelists. The on-again, off-again fatwa issued against Rushdie is well known, as is the wrath of Indian fundamentalist powers who sued Roy for “obscenity.”
