Life often imitates art, but sometimes life is squeezed, bashed and bent into the shape of art because the complexities of reality are too bothersome to express, and in any case, fiction has been there first with a better version. We want fiction's echo, and you can hear it on the news.
Recently, the BBC was determined to present Sushil Kumar as "a real-life Slumdog Millionaire" after he was shown winning 50 million rupees(Dh3.7 million) on India's version of the British game show — Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. This makes Kumar the biggest winner so far, and until that moment he certainly wasn't rich: the basic facts coincide with the fiction of Danny Boyle's film. But for the BBC News those parallels weren't quite enough. A report that mixed omission with obliqueness would have suggested to all but the most wide-awake viewer that Kumar, just like his fictional predecessor, had struggled up from the Mumbai slums. Kumar's story was squeezed to fit the template of a hugely popular feature film, a story we knew and liked.
Poor people share the common condition of their poverty, but poverty has degrees, and the poor can't be made into an undifferentiated lump. In any case, what Kumar represents to India, especially its richer sections, isn't so much poverty as that stalwart and much put-upon character, "the common man".
The show's host, the film star Amitabh Bachchan, used the phrase when he praised Kumar's knowledge and conduct: "An incredible feat! This is what the common man is all about." Bachchan is not a common man. Common men (and women) in India pack the buses and trains and wobble from factories and offices on bicycles. In the days when more men wore traditional dress, VS Naipaul knew them as "the great white crowd of India". They use ration cards and Indian languages rather than English. They face a torrent of everyday difficulties overcrowding, bad drains, inflationary prices and better-placed people tend to acknowledge their uncomplaining resourcefulness and pluck. A common woman, a Muslim sewing-teacher from a village in the old Bengal coalfield, won the contest last year. Perhaps because she withdrew at the million-rupee stage, or didn't quite fit the rubric, this went less noticed.
Joint family
Sushil Kumar, however, shows that ‘common man' is just as opaque an archetype as ‘the poor'. Everyone has his or her story, and Kumar's goes roughly like this: he was born 27 years ago, the third of five sons, in Motihari, a town of about 170,000 people that lies a few dozen miles north of the Ganges on the road to Nepal. One of his elder brothers works in a garment shop, the other as an insurance agent. The younger three are still at school or college. All five live with their parents (and wives, if they have them) as a joint family in a district called Henry Bazaar named in imperial times, I suspect, after a British administrator, Sir Edward Henry, who, as the head of the Bengal police, devised a system of fingerprint classification that still bears his name. Kumar's father works as a contractor's clerk. The house is rented and cramped; the Kumars live there because their ancestral home ("dilapidated", according the Times of India) has been taken over by a moneylender in exchange for a loan. Some of the prize money will be spent redeeming this loan and returning the house to the family.
Kumar's education: he attended Hindi-medium schools and then two local colleges for a first degree and then a master's in psychology, which qualified him for a job as a clerk and computer operator in an ambitious government scheme, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), which promises paid manual work for every rural household for a minimum of 100 days annually. He earned 6,500 rupees a month, or slightly more than £1,000 a year.
Poverty's house, like the Lord's, has many mansions. But wealth is also relative. After Kumar's winnings are taxed at 30 per cent, he will be left with 35 million rupees, or about £445,000. In Mumbai, that would buy a small flat in a coastal suburb. In Motihari, it amounts to a fortune. Even so, he intends to sit the exams next year for the Indian Administrative Service, and with any luck will join the senior layer of a system of local governance that owes its fundamentals to the old Indian Civil Service run by people like Sir Edward Henry and served by many more junior figures such as Richard Blair, father of George Orwell (Jaarj Arwil was how he came out in Hindi).
Blair arrived in Motihari towards the end of a long and undistinguished career as revenue officer in the opium department, at a time when poppies still filled field after field around the town, and opium remained a valuable export. It was here that his son Eric was born on June 25, 1903, though nobody in Motihari was aware of that when I visited the town in 1983 to try to identify Orwell's birthplace, which, so far as I can tell, nobody before had ever attempted to do.
Early on the second day we went to see the godown, the warehouse where the opium had once been stored. It lay behind a high wall at the centre of what India knows as a compound. Nearby, backed against the wall, stood a long row of single-storey dwellings, slightly tumbledown, but still lived in. One occupant, a teacher, said the houses had definitely been built for ‘gazetted officers' in the British administration. For my friends, anxious for a resolution, that clinched it: we'd found Jaarj Arwil's birthplace.
But these doubts are better quashed. In the years since, the local Rotary Club has erected a sign at the site, there has been talk of an Orwell museum, and now and again stories appear in the Indian press about the disgraceful condition of the writer's first home. As with Sushil Kumar, a kind of fiction may have triumphed over the uncertain facts. Mea culpa, if so; but at least Orwell has been remembered, some townspeople feel proud, and the sign looks very nice.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd