To many more conversations as we continue to think of a way out of the present morass. Love, Revati. This is how she signed off my copy of her book The Anatomy of Hate. I was meeting author-journalist-filmmaker Revati Laul in person for the first time at the Bhau Daji Laud Museum where she spoke on Understanding Hate. There was a distinct informality in which she squatted on the floor and greeted members of the audience. Thanking everyone for sparing a Sunday morning to listen to thoughts on communal mob violence, she started on a chatty note. Of course, as described in Junoon Theatre’s social media teasers publicizing her talk, she lived up to the `compulsive contrarian’ tag. “If you said the sky is blue, I may say, not necessarily,” she began on a light note.

For me, the highlight of the morning was the manner in which she shared the thinking that went into the making of her 2018 book on Gujarat violence. Many journalists cover news on a daily basis. Even if they report at periodic intervals, they monitor news breaks on a day-to-day basis, rather minute-to-minute. This process can be exhausting. It tires the best of agile reporters, analysts and editors; it causes a burn out feeling; the daily grind robs the energy needed to sit back and reflect and add perspective heft to the everyday rigor. This is one of the primary reasons why many news reporters are unable to invest time to document the conflicts/agitations-of-the-day in book form, despite being around for long. Despite having witnessed defining moments in India’s social-cultural-political history, veterans shy away from chronicling or commemorating the slice that they are so conversant with. Not only is it their personal loss, but it is a loss for journalism as well.

The intellectual discipline needed to reflect and comment on events, case studies, riot cycles, civic uprisings, iconic personalities and trends, does not come easily. It has to be instilled with practice, for which there has to be an inner-driven willingness to showcase the past in a contemporary context, and also an ability to scrutinize one’s own instincts-feelings while being caught in the heat of the moment. Revati Laul has that reflective ability along with the gift of succinct writing, which shows in The Anatomy of Hate (Rs 599, 223 pages, published by Context, Westland Publications). Laul of course has a different take on book writing. She feels journalists don’t take to long form writing because they are not sure of the financial support systems that are required for taking on such assignments. Referencing her own example, she says, it is difficult it is to be single minded about a book theme and leave the rest of life aside. “To leave your home (Delhi) and operate from another city (Ahmedabad) for over three years (2015 to mid-2018), so as to enable audio interviews of 100-odd people, is a privilege that I was fortunate to have. For me the book became my life, it still is.” She continues to follow the lives of two of the three perpetrators of hate that she chose for her book; whereas she is in close contact with the wife of the third one. Laul’s reason for writing the book was to reach out to those who needed to be talked to, to be understood, if at all long-term solutions have to be arrived at. She felt the perpetrators and executors of violence remained unaddressed (and not approached) in most reporting of genocides and mass violence. “I did not have sympathy for these characters, but there was a deep urge to experience their feelings and be in their shoes for a while. They deserved to be understood.”

Laul acknowledges the fact that the book would never have materialized without the crowdfunding it received from 105 supporters, of which 27 did not even want to be thanked in public. “Its only when you know that a large body of well-wishers believe in your central idea that you feel sufficiently encouraged, ” she adds. As the book completes a year in December 2019, people ask her about possible regional language translations and a reflection in the film space. As an author, she will be happy to see the book’s appreciation in another avatar, but the funds for such projects are again elusive. Ideally, a Gujarati translation is imperative because the book is about a set of people who live in parts of Gujarat and do not speak-read English. Laul’s reason for writing the book was to reach out to that section, which is not necessarily touched by English India. She felt her journalism was not giving her opportunities to have more meaningful conversations with people who believed in violence as a means.

Laul (45) was born, raised, and educated in New Delhi; she did her Masters in history from the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has been equally at home in electronic and print media for long, and has served in key editorial positions in a range of media houses — Headlines Today, NDTV and Tehelka magazine. She has witnessed the formative years of Indian news television and covered a vast variety of conflict stories — from Kargil to Kabul to Lucknow to Mumbai. She was stationed in Gujarat for a year where she led the NDTV news room. In short, she had her fill of the maddening pace of activity of TV crews chasing subjects in search of live action. Like most journalists who covered riots and communal carnage in India over the years, she felt benumbed by the news cycle at one point. She started feeling that after each conflagration, and after each heinous crime, journalists (and people in general) sort of accepted their role as mere witnesses and also, in a way, accepted the possibility of its replay. They mourned, they felt sorry, they shared video clips (almost like the way voyeurs do), they cursed the perpetrators, and then continued with life, until they came across similar form of mob violence.

Laul wanted to break the circle and her way of doing this was by trying to understand the psyche of the violent person in the context of the 2002 Gujarat riots. As she shared at the Mumbai Local exchange, she decided to examine why hate and violence seem so attractive to some people. What is so ‘sexy’ about the act of ripping apart the foetus of a pregnant woman with a sword after raping her? What drives some people to burn down houses and grocery stores of old neighbors? What makes a person perceive another one as a threat to his or her religion? What makes them lob a soda bottle at an unarmed passerby? Laul zeroed in on three perpetrators, belonging to three distinct social spheres within Gujarat, who (after years of persuasion, one of them took ten years to allow her to tell his story; two protagonists’ names have been changed to protect their identity, one is a known legal case) agreed to be documented.

As she states in the Afterword of the book, she had met around 100 people accused variously of participating in crimes of 2002 in Gujarat. She realized that the larger canvas of stories was impossible to grasp. It was too expansive and people were not open to telling their stories of hate, guilt and complicity; some accused were caught in long legal battles and did not have the energy or inclination to talk to a journalist. Also, Laul interviewed the accused for over a period, which involved long gaps in the middle. Many were not ready for this extensive back-breaking process, as revisiting the inner demons was more difficult than the act itself. She decided to limit herself to three narratives, fully admitting that these stories (however layered they may be) are neither geographically nor demographically representative of the whole. One is touched by her clarity of purpose and her dogged determination to persuade three men to share their unspeakably violent karma.

Also Laul makes it very clear, as she did during the talk too, that writing the book was her emotional need. She doesn’t claim to be an academic who is trying to get to the political root of the problem. Electoral politics, caste equations, electioneering, politics of relief aid, gender disparities, Gujarat state leadership, Hindu-Muslim rivalry, educational chaos, radicalization of youth — all these themes are an integral part of the book. But that is not what she is seeking to unravel. She is trying get up close to three minds who adopted violence as their way of life.

For me, and for many others who attended Revati Laul’s talk, the observations she made towards the end provoked thought. Apart from her experience as an author, and as a journalist who has devoted rare energy (12 hours a day) to one project, her voice as an enabler mattered to me. As people who call themselves liberal and open-minded, she said, it is necessary that the liberals reach out to those whose ways they question. If we condemn a certain type of behavior or thought as ‘narrow’, we have to be broad-minded enough to address the people who show those ‘objectionable’ behavioral traits. For instance, we have to see why certain people want to belong to radical militant terror outfits? What other options has life offered them? Is there something in their personal backgrounds, possibly an identity crisis or a financial crunch, that propels them towards an ideology? Have they been treated as ‘unacceptable’ and ‘unfashionable’ by the liberal intelligentsia at some point? Are enough bridges being built to facilitate an exchange with the so-called radical elements? Or have liberals been too ‘sanitized’ to accept anyone other than their `type’ in their fold? Isn’t this also a sort of polarization that liberals perpetrate in the name of protection of core values? Her questions were purposeful and hopefully will prompt all of us to seek long-term answers, in Mumbai and elsewhere!

Sanjna Kapoor and team should be congratulated for inviting Revati Laul to Mumbai. Junoon Theatre’s Mumbai Local series, curated since 2014, has so far hosted 150-odd speakers in three vibrant venues, including the MCubed Library and Kitabkhana. Speakers have hailed from colorful backgrounds, one unlike the other — performing artistes, physicists, trade unionists, cinematographers, puppeteers, animators, instrumentalists and architects. Very rarely does a theater arts group solicit such a broad spectrum across disciplines. The series has also enjoyed patronage of diverse Mumbaikars — that breed which negotiates long distances and braves menacing traffic, to listen to vital voices. Isn’t life so much more meaningful when one listens to passionate people who speak of our times, our arts, our issues, our cities, our present, and our future!