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Business News/ Opinion / Divergent: An accidental parable about a casteist dystopia
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Divergent: An accidental parable about a casteist dystopia

Educated, and seemingly enlightened, defenders of the caste system and yes, there are legions of them typically offer five rationalistic arguments

A still of Hollywood movie Divergent.Premium
A still of Hollywood movie Divergent.

Dystopias have been the flavour of Hollywood for a while now. As one might expect when Hollywood invests in a theme, there has been a steady erosion of the political content of the dystopian fantasies that commercial entertainment has been offering us of late.

The romanticizing of dystopias began with the Matrix trilogy, which offered digital salvation to a world just coming to terms with the increasing blurring of boundaries between the online and the offline. It also marked the shift of the dystopian imagination toward an instrumental orientation where the dystopian element receded in importance, and became just another exotic setting for the same old narrative stereotypes of traditional genres such as romance, action thriller, horror, etc.

In recent times, cinematic dystopias have been repeatedly, and rather predictably, overrun by vampires and zombies. The latest pestilence to strike Hollywood dystopias is the teenage romance, mixed, in varying proportions, with youth rebellion, initiation rites, and candy crush revolution.

Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy, which has already spawned two blockbusters, represents the most spectacular introduction of the teen or young adult (YA) romance into a technologically advanced but morally stunted dystopia. Collins’ Hollywood success has now been emulated by 25-year-old American author Veronica Roth, who, too, has produced a dystopian YA trilogy whose first instalment, Divergent, directed by Neil Burger, released in India last week.

Though it has been panned by many as a knock-off of Hunger Games, Divergent holds its own as an altogether different kind of thematic marriage between YA romance and dystopian fantasy. But the most intriguing feature of Roth’s dystopia is something that should be of particular interest to us all in India: a society structured a lot like our very own caste system.

Though it is unlikely that either Burger or Roth had an Indian audience in mind, I am by no means the only Indian to be struck by the eerie similarity between the factions of Divergent and the castes of Hinduism.

Educated, and seemingly enlightened, defenders of the caste system— and yes, there are legions of them — typically offer five rationalistic (as opposed to tradition- or faith-based) arguments.

First, they argue that the caste system was not hereditary to begin with, and it wouldn’t be so terrible if the hereditary aspect was done away with. Two, it wouldn’t be so terrible if the compulsion to take up a given occupation was done away with and every individual was allowed the freedom to choose a caste or occupation depending on her talents and inclination; three, it wouldn’t be so terrible if caste-based discrimination (including untouchability) were done away with; four, the caste system offered a definite place and identity in society to every individual, which helps to maintain social peace and harmony; and finally, the security of an identity conferred by caste, and the access to some form of community that it opens up, is valuable in the face of the anomie and the insecurities brought on by the advent of technocratic, consumerist modernity.

Divergent, in a matter of 140 minutes, busts each of these arguments by dramatizing the evil inherent in the project of structuring society around watertight socio-political identities, no matter how progressive or rational or technologically efficient those identities might be.

The action is set in futuristic Chicago, a city-state whose population is divided into five castes or factions based on their predominant character trait or virtue: Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Erudite (the intelligent), Candor (the honest), and Amity (the peaceful). While the film is not fully clear about the division of labour among these factions, it is roughly as follows: the Abnegation faction runs the government, the Dauntless are the warrior caste who make up the security apparatus, Candor has something to do with the law, Erudite, being knowledge-driven, supplies the technology and intellectual labour, and Amity are into agriculture and food production.

True to the logic of caste, Roth’s world also has a population of outcastes – the factionless. They are the bottom of the social pyramid. They live on handouts, are allowed to do only menial labour, and have no possibility of upward social mobility. The biggest fear of every member of the faction-based society is being ejected into the realm of the factionless.

The faction-system of Divergent incorporates all the progressive changes advocated by the defenders of the caste system: it is not hereditary, people can choose their caste, officially all the factions or castes are equal, it is the primary source of identity and community to all citizens, and the faction system, according to the state propaganda, has been effective in maintaining social peace and harmony.

But notwithstanding all these reforms, the faction system turns out to be as exploitative and repressive as the system encoded in Manusmriti, and for much the same reasons. Despite the element of choice, the social pressure to confirm to one’s inherited caste is overpowering. The faction that, by definition, does the most selfless or thankless work, gets treated the worst. And power, not surprisingly, gravitates toward the same two castes or factions which have been historically dominant in the Hindu caste system: the Dauntless (the Kshatriyas), who have a monopoly over arms, and the Erudite (the Brahmins), who have a monopoly over knowledge.

Besides, it is inevitable that such a system, by its very logic, will be confronted with individuals who display the characteristics of more than one faction — who might be, say, equally Dauntless, Erudite and Abnegation — as the protagonist of Divergent, Beatrice Prior or Tris (played by Shailene Woodley) is.

These misfits are the divergents. Since they call into question the very system around which the state is organized, they are a danger to society, and are hunted down and eliminated with the same fervour and ruthlessness that real world democracies reserve for so-called terrorists. Tris’s fight for survival, and her battle against the assorted evils of such a toxic system, supplies the narrative energy of the story.

Divergent’s world of factions demonstrates that a caste or faction-linked identity extracts a heavy price – typically paid in the form of a loss in liberty and equality, and in the disappearance of simple human solidarity for those outside one’s faction or identity group.

But the human urge to classify and categorize, which may not be immediately problematic when applied to the inanimate world, begins to implode when it targets other human beings. Knowledge production is inextricably tied up with power, and the moment human beings are classified and filed away into factions or castes or any other system of universal enumeration and categorization one might care to construct, repression is bound to follow, and so it does.

Of course, one could argue that the invention of artificial categories to belong to — be they based on caste, religion, nation, race, class, or any other abstraction or subset within any of those categories — is at the heart of society or civilization, and who knows, maybe it is.

But trouble starts when these invented social identities, rather than being understood as the useful constructs that they are, become the primary source of life’s meaning, or acquire the reality of essences. When that happens — it is the reason why the state wants to kill all divergents such as Tris — essence assumes precedence over existence, which is but a step away from saying it is alright to kill (end existences) in the name of a collectively shared identity.

All this is not to suggest that Roth took inspiration from the Manusmriti for her compelling portrayal of a casteist dystopia. But thanks to one of those rare conjunctions of imaginative serendipity and box office cupidity, we now have a Hollywood blockbuster that, almost in passing, makes a powerful argument against any form of caste system, including the most enlightened versions of it.

It is in its exploration of the logic of caste that Divergent acquires an unlikely — and no doubt, wholly unintended — political dimension that adds a much needed piquancy to an otherwise unexceptional but competent production.

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Published: 15 Apr 2014, 02:06 PM IST
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