3 - A Story Half Told: The Moral and Political Claims of Purusharth

Summary

On the one hand are those [critics of demonetisation] who talk of what people at Harvard say, and on the other is a poor man's son, who through his hard work, is trying to improve the economy…. In fact, hard work is much more powerful than Harvard.

—Narendra Modi (The Hindu 2017a)

In the previous chapter, I drew attention to how stories of purusharth comprise dramatic tales of physical labour. Stories of purusharth did not include stories of everyday office work or any other kind of stable, long-term employment. In contrast to the former, stories of the latter were devoid of any details. Ravinder Kaur (2007: 141) observes this contrast in the stories of Partition refugees and writes that such stories ‘were presumed too ordinary to mention, as it had little to do with the general theme of struggle successfully waged by the refugees’.

I am drawing attention to this here to argue that due to this recurring trope of the helpless refugee waging a dramatic struggle in pursuit of success, stories of purusharth place the individual at the centre of their narrative. In doing so, the framing of this narrative obscures the state's active role in the rehabilitation of refugees. Yet a closer reading of these stories reveals the state lurking in the background.

For example, in the previous chapter, Mahendar mentions that his family was allotted a house in Ambala in compensation for the property they had lost in Pakistan. While the compensation may have been paltry compared to their former wealth, it nevertheless meant that despite riding a rickshaw for a living, Mahendar's family was never at the same socio-economic level as those workers who could only ride a rickshaw for a living.

Similarly, while Bhanwarilal extols the ‘sacrifices’ of Punjabi refugees and alleges the lack of adequate reparations, his stories are also laced with occasional descriptions of the compensation their family received. For example, in his passionate exposition on the sacrifices of Punjabi refugees at the beginning of this chapter, Bhanwarilal acknowledges that his family received agricultural land worth INR 10,000. While this was significantly less than their former wealth, it nevertheless provided the family with an important source of capital.