As I write this, I return to December 2016, my first in India after many years spent in North America. That had felt like an unsettling month, nursing a fateful single week when Prime Minister Narendra Modi demonetised the Indian currency, Donald Trump won the US presidency, Leonard Cohen died, and the Delhi area experienced the most suffocating smog in decades. It was a week that made the globe feel like a small pit of a single nightmare and shaped my realisation that an impossibly muddled sense of the world was now my reality. The Trump victory still felt like an immediate disaster as my social media timelines filled up with shocked utterances by US-based friends and colleagues. My Calcutta-bred lungs were still in miraculous denial of the pollution outside, notwithstanding the northern California air I’d just left behind. At home, our domestic helps struggled with bank accounts and electronic transfers of salaries as circulating currency notes had suddenly become useless coloured paper.
The world had become a smaller place. Certainly for many of us with strange migratory lives and, more crucially, with strangely migratory minds. I recall a time when we longed for that compression. Struggling with the vast, grey alienness of the American Midwest as a student fresh from Calcutta in the last year of the last millennium, I’d breathed in relief when a move to the east coast brought the proximity of a big, noisy city strangely redolent of the one left behind. A first job brought me to Canada, a country more deeply browned than its southern neighbour, with South Asian culture almost mainstream. And nine years in the San Francisco Bay Area, which began with a fledgling Facebook in a small office in downtown Palo Alto, revealed a startling start-up culture that often felt closer to Taiwan and Singapore than neighbouring Menlo Park. Circumnavigation by non-white people had come a strange full circle, climaxing in the satsuma-saffron smog unleashed by Modi and Trump.
We had longed for the globe to shrink. When it happened, it was a disaster. My personal week of catastrophes that December told me that henceforth disaster was global and the breathing air of the planet was heaving under apocalypse across latitude and altitude. The dream of progress had become the nightmare of totalitarianism, pollution — the megaphone of hatred — and the death of the “Tower of song” — a December of destruction.
But we survived — in a kind of way, breathing through a pandemic that shrunk the world to darkened lungs to conclude 2023 with the globalisation of war. The previous century got its baby steps shattered by a new, fatal praxis — that of the World War, where nations, god forbid, ‘civilised’ ones, flew on new, fatal technology to wipe millions off the face of the earth. Less than twenty years of fragile peace later, ‘civilisation’ was at it again, at a more colossal scale, to end, which Robert Oppenheimer had to invoke Krishna’s lines from the Gita to empower, a conscience that would unleash one genocide with the promise of ending another.
And ‘civilisation’ is the word that lags breathlessly behind its moral hue. Anything but dark, can it seek a greater darkness? Is it darker or lighter depending on the skin-tones of slaughtered innocents? As World War gave way to the ‘globalisation of war’ in the new millennium, the terrifying phrase, according to the Canadian economist and writer, Michel Chossudovsky, was essentially “America’s Long War against Humanity” in a post-9-11 world, where the US-NATO military machine joined hands with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of regime change to cast long shadows across the world.
We end 2023 with the globalisation of violence far more chaotic than Chossudovsky’s language of absolutism can suggest. Hegemony is now deep-seated enough to fragment and democratise violence among all participants, including the poorest and most vulnerable ones. The globalisation of violence has brought with it the globalisation of apathy. For those of us in Delhi, we’ve had a ring-side view of a nation and its leader’s indifference to a heavily armoured, hi-tech war that has ravaged a part of the country that is too far from Chanakyapuri, too remote from its consciousness. A day’s violence in Gurgaon gets a far higher proportion of attention in the national media. Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine has play-buttoned more financial-industrial woes than humanitarian ones. Globalisation ties purse-strings a lot tighter than heartstrings.
Memory remains a nightmare. Three Hindi-speaking states have now cast their assembly verdicts in support of saffron authoritarianism. As we stare at the possibility of a 2024 Trump return to the White House and the extreme right-winger, Geert Wilders, begins to articulate the ambition of loosening the Netherlands from the European Union, the world rewinds to the abrupt finality of Brexit, which, along with the first Trump presidency, destroyed Anglo-American liberalism. But a terrifying replay is in order as the globalisation of war is a long and inevitable war against humanity. The Hamas attack on Israel this October brought up the memory of the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers; in 2001, I was an international student not far from their shadows. Many of us lost TV and phone connections in the aftermath of the blasts, and brown people lived in fear for the longest time to follow. Iraq and Afghanistan followed, and they still do.
The globalisation of war turns the beauty of migratory friendships painful. I write to Israeli and Palestinian friends worldwide, just the way some of them touched base with me during Delhi’s horrifying Covid wave in 2021, or during unrest at our university a couple of months back. The globalisation of minds feels more ineffectual than ever. Having spent the first six months of 2023 in South Africa, I’m haunted by the long conversations I had with the eco-geographer in the next office at my host institute. She’s a relatively new American of Israeli origin and the most brilliant edge of her activist scholarship on settler colonialism in Palestine was a chronicle of the Zionist dream of recreating the mythical landscape of flora and fauna across the contested land, transplanting and populating it with creatures big and small from the Bible. Settling Nature: The Conservation Regime in Palestine-Israel by Irus Braverman haunts me as Israel looks forward to a Gaza-free world.
Saikat Majumdar is Professor of English & Creative Writing at Ashoka University
