Our country’s official Leader of the Opposition has undertaken a trip to Latin America. This is not a continent that we have paid close attention to or which has had an extreme impact on our psyche. However, there have been some exceptions.
In 1948, MK Gandhi asked lawyer and statesman CP Ramaswami Iyer to write a note on the prospects of Indians migrating to Brazil. Former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru later appointed Minoo Masani to be India’s ambassador to Brazil.
On the other side, Rabindranath Tagore had admirers in Argentina, and in the 1950s, Mexico chose to appoint Ottavio Paz—a great poet and a future Nobel Laureate—as ambassador to India. In 1984, when I was living in Caracas, Venezuela, the venerable Carlos Andrés Pérez, visited the Indian embassy to sign the condolence book, expressing anguish at the death of India’s Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi.
However, all of these were episodic and by no means central to either Indians or the inhabitants of Latin America. What has changed? The answer to this question lies in an overview of Latin America’s intellectual contribution to the rest of the world, and tangentially to India over the last eighty years.
Che Guevara, the central figure
The first and, in some respects, the most important person is not Paz or the great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda or even the Argentine savant-writer Jorge Luis Borges, who has been a favourite of so many Indian readers. The central figure is Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary who made his career in Cuba and later on elsewhere in South America.
Che has been a controversial figure, and recent revisionist views of him are not flattering. But he was, and he remains a charismatic symbol for many on the Left in all parts of the world, including India. I distinctly remember from my college days that in the sixties, Che was a hero in Calcutta. In his youth, Che travelled around South America on a motorcycle. Later, he was part of the revolutionary Fidel Castro’s entry into Havana. Unlike Castro, who resembled Stalin and stuck to Cuba, Che resembled the communist internationalist Leon Trotsky and tried to take the revolution to other countries. He failed. And like Trotsky, he had an ignominious death.
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Impact of literary oeuvre of magical realism
The second major contribution of Latin America, which has impacted Indians, has been the literary oeuvre of magical realism. We can argue with some credibility that our own incandescent Salman Rushdie preceded the Latins in developing and establishing this genre. But none can deny that it is from the bowels of Latin America that magical realism really took off.
And for many years now, the celebrated Gabriel Garcia Marquez has been selling well not just elsewhere but in India too. This is not surprising. Given that Maya is so central an idea in our civilisation, magical prose is almost certainly likely to find a good audience here, with the aside that we prefer our magic in verse. Magical realism is an aesthetic doctrine and does not favour any political ideology, even if one admits that it is partial to the Left. So, one cannot really look here for the interest of the Indian political class in embracing Latin America.
The other important intellectual trend that has come out of Latin America over the last sixty years is Liberation Theology—a quaint mixture of Marxism and Roman Catholicism. The key name here is Gustavo Gutierrez, who coined the phrase in 1971. It is interesting to note that the first assembly to expound this idea was in 1968 (the same year as the Berkeley and Paris riots and Dubcek’s failed attempt at socialism with a human face) and was held in Medellin, Colombia.
That would suggest that Colombia is central to the discourse of the Left to this day. The Latin American liberation theology doctrines, which combine atheistic materialistic Marxism with a humanistic, rather than a transcendental vision of Roman Catholic Christianity, have become very popular with large sections of Catholic priests in India.
Cardinal Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict, had serious problems with Liberation Theology’s attempt to distort Christian ethics. He later abdicated and was succeeded by the Argentine Pope Francis, who was more sympathetic to Liberation Theology. It is interesting to note that Pope Francis and his successor, Pope Leo, are more concerned about the handful of Catholics in Gaza and not so much about the hundreds of Catholics murdered in Sri Lanka or Nigeria. And Pope after Pope continues to be friendly with the Communist Party of China which has veto rights over the appointments of Catholic bishops in that country. Clearly, Marxism is attractive to today’s church and Guiterrez’s ideas have successfully influenced the Curia in the Vatican.
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Little sense of realism in Latin America
Latin America may seem peripheral to most of us. But if you are a trained “intellectual” from JNU, Jadavpur, or TISS, then Latin America, its intellectual contributions, and its centrality in the worldwide fight against ugly capitalism are not to be downplayed.
I lived in Latin America in 1983 and 1984. I met several Liberation Theologians, including some who were close to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. While their sincerity could not be questioned, it was obvious that they had very little sense of realism. When I pointed out to them that their regional hegemon would never permit an extreme left dispensation on their continent, their response was filled with passionate intensity bordering on the suicidal.
They also had no interest in empirical data—capitalism had moved millions out of poverty, and socialism only created privileged apparatchiks. They were so convinced about their radical interpretations of the Gospels and the Old Testament and that Marx was actually a Christian in disguise, that very soon I realised that it was best not to pursue these conversations too far and to make anodyne remarks about “solidarity” between Indians and Latin Americans.
The solidarity bit, however pointless and tangential, went down really well. And even as I disagreed with their attempts to downplay the spiritual and keep on talking about capitalist oppression, I congratulated myself on being a polite conversationalist.
Net-net, I am not surprised that the Indian Left has found a connection with Latin America. It is implausible, but by any means, not at all impossible. It may lead to fruitless quicksand. But that, as so many of us know, is the genetic ailment of the Left.
Jaithirth ‘Jerry’ Rao is a retired entrepreneur who lives in Lonavala. He has published three books: ‘Notes from an Indian Conservative’, ‘The Indian Conservative’, and ‘Economist Gandhi’. Views are personal.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)