Review: Barkha Dutt’s ‘This Unquiet Land’ Surprisingly Unbiased

Barkha Dutt has managed to maintain an unbiased point of view in this debut book of hers.

I have to confess that when I first came across Barkha Dutt’s This Unquiet Land, I was somewhat sceptical of a mainstream journalist’s ability to narrativise the complexity of the morass that is contemporary India. This is, after all, an age of sharply conflicted ideologies and for someone in the business of media, it cannot be easy to be part-historian, part-memoirist, while maintaining some semblance of an unbiased point of view. Surprisingly, that precisely is what Dutt accomplishes in her book.

Writing from within a space where every national/regional event is now covered by television crews or phone cameras and hashed out (and hashtagged) relentlessly on social media, Dutt compacts her journalistic experience into a schema of seven biggies – gender, war, terror, religious fanaticism, Kashmir, dynastic politics, as well as the emerging responses to it and the changing social order.

None of these categories exist in hermetical isolation, of course, and a certain repetitiveness does creep into her reminiscences/analyses of, say, Kashmir or the Indo-Pak relationship. There is, however, a rootedness in history that the narrative insists on. Whether she is writing of militancy in Kashmir or the rise of Hindutva ideology in the Hindi heartland, Dutt delves into the past and builds a cogent, coherent picture of the whens and the whys.

Anti-Rape Laws, Religious Extremism, Hindutva Agenda

Barkha Dutt calls herself an unapologetic feminist and it is heartening to see her engagement with and commitment to gender concerns. She speaks of her own experiences as a student at the University of Delhi and the disconnectedness of that middle-class, protected, fairly cosseted position from the reality of rural or even small-town India. She writes of cases that brought about a change in public awareness as well as legal redressal of violence against women, like Bhanwari Devi’s gruesome rape and the consequent framing of the Vishaka Guidelines to protect women from sexual harassment at the workplace.

To read Bhanwari Devi’s story in Dutt’s words is to be made uncomfortably aware of the hold of caste on Indian society as well the power dynamics of rape – simply an instrument of punishment, a stripping away of the individual’s dignity. Dutt steers clear of sentimentality and makes a solid case for emphasis on rape laws and against the very real menace of child sexual abuse.

Dutt’s formulations on the changing face of terror make for a fascinating reading. Terror is no longer confined to conflict zones and has instead wormed its way into urban India. Religious extremism, another undeniable facet of contemporary history, is closely entwined with the same. Dutt writes of 2002 as her first experience of religious conflict and also India’s first “television riot”.

The stories are horrifying and presage many episodes of violence that have since been beamed into our living rooms. In writing of the Gujrat riots, Dutt is critical of Hindutva and its alienating agenda. She is equally critical of separatist terror while bringing to the reader moving, heartbreaking stories from Kashmir and other such frontiers of apparent and non-apparent war.

Questions Failure of Governments

To introduce the word “intolerance” here is perhaps  to flog a dead horse. It has, however, to be said, that instead of being an apologist for liberal secularism, Dutt raises crucial questions about the failure of all governments to “uphold the principles of natural justice”, thus diluting the very concept of secularism in India. She refers to the murders of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and MM Kalburgi as attacks on rationalism and good sense.

She also makes an extremely relevant point about the distance between the bubble-wrapped existence of the upper middle class and the poverty-stricken masses, and the attitude of indifference this spawns. It is interesting to see how the writer implicates us all in this culture of isolation.

If you have followed Barkha Dutt’s reportage and have admired her ability to inset herself into difficult, often dangerous situations in pursuit of a story, you will probably come across many points of resonance in the book. If, on the other hand, you think “liberal” and “secular” are pejorative terms, it is probably best to avoid reading This Unquiet Land altogether. The fault lines might not be visible.

Published by Aleph Book Company, This Unquiet Land: Stories From India’s Fault Lines by Barkha Dutt is priced at Rs 599. It is a non-fiction, hardcover.

(Saloni Sharma reads an absurd number of books each year and is hopeful it’ll become a paying profession some day. Meanwhile, she teaches Literatures in English at Kirori Mal College, DU.)