By this time next week, Phoolan Devi's candidacy to the Nobel Peace Prize will be history. But the mere fact that her name could be floated in the public sphere, sanctioned by political authority on another continent, picked up by the international media and reacted to by Phoolan herself in India, is sobering. Phoolan's candidacy is mildly amusing. The methods used to advance it are anything but. Long before Malthusian meltdown gets us, it appears, progressive advocacy will.The prime mover of this funny-peculiar story is the touching human need to be seen as progressive. To be liked for one's ideas, just as people are liked for their clothes. No postmodern affliction, it has been with us at least from the dawn of the industrial age. A single instance will suffice to demonstrate that. Medical researchers in Guy's Hospital in Victorian London suggested that children working in British factories, the world's first sweatshops, suffered from rickets because they were denied sunlight. Rubbish, reacted AndrewUre, one of the first evangelists of industrialism. Everyone knew that the gaslight on the shop floors was just as good as the real thing! More important, it was progressive.In the post-industrial world, we know better than to make an icon of progressive technology. Now, we make icons of progressive ideas, and flesh them out by draping them on people. The validity for Phoolan's claim to the Nobel derives from two or three biographies, an autobiography and a film based on the latter. They glorify her transformation from common bandit to Bandit Queen (and thereafter to lawmaker), which was ironically based on her efficiency as a killing machine and given moral value by the idea of retributive justice. The biographies were written in Western Europe and freely use Phoolan's life as feminist parable. The autobiography is also written by other people, who turned 2,000 pages of audiotape into 460-odd pages of print - and imposed their own normative ideas in the process of editing.In a note, the publisher ofI, Phoolan Devi wrote about the unique challenges of an illiterate writing her autobiography and that of publishing an illiterate author. To his list, he might have added the very unique challenge posed to the western reader, who finds the ideas in the book so comfortingly familiar, in decoding the Indian signal from a lot of European noise.In the West, Phoolan is not a person. She is a convenient household icon of the little tradition. She is a living parable, a person who had a very personal difference with society and settled it her own way. Each paid its debt to the other - society with the Behmai massacre, Phoolan with her jail term, and the moral order prevailed. Phoolan is a progressive, normative idea.This must be the first time that an idea has laid claim to the Peace Prize. Another first: never before has the great validation machine of the information age operated on this scale. Every summer, great numbers of the undeserving manage to get themselves recommended to Sweden. Suomotu, the media routinely shortlist the usual suspects. But it must be unprecedented for the claims of an Indian to be put forth by a fan club, validated by members of the British Parliament and reported in the world media.The Nobel Foundation usually sends a polite reply to all such pleas and just gets on with its life. By next week, Phoolan Devi will be a non-issue. But the fact that such a campaign could be mounted is frightening. The information industry - including public relations and, therefore, the lobbying machine - is slated to be the fastest-growing trade of the next century. To maintain its credibility, it will eventually evolve its own authentication codes. Mere branding will no longer suffice. Information, so to speak, will be ISI-marked and Blaupunkted.Until then, the world will be an uncertain place. Were the Nobel Foundation to take Phoolan's candidacy seriously, for instance, where would it seek initial validation? The Encyclopaedia Britannica immediately springs to mind.Solidly branded information. The biographical entry for Phoolan in the 1996 edition begins with the words, "India's folk hero." It's enough to make you lose faith in the power of information. But then again, it's progressive.
