Let’s play a little game. Pour yourself a drink every time the phrase “social climber” comes up to describe and damn Indrani Mukerjea, in newspapers and TV discussions, or watercooler huddles and Twitter timelines. Then, raise a toast to the enduring snobbery of the Delhi elite.
A woman accused of murdering her daughter is damned enough. Why then is it important to establish her as an upstart, as the arriviste “with diabolical eyes” who led poor pedigreed Peter Mukerjea by the nose? When did Delhi, where fixers open closed doors with smooth talk and the right connections, where to not race ahead is to be left by the wayside, decide that someone’s ambition was a grubby thing? What explains the viciousness with which her reputation has been savaged, her indiscretions dredged out, through diagrams of family trees and footage of men who hide behind helmets to denounce her as money-minded and capable of murder?
She came out of nowhere, goes the narrative by now playing in endless loop, to “snag” the good match and turn herself into a media tycoon in Delhi, a city intoxicated with power and the powerful. She was a nobody out of nowhere. But where is this nowhere?
Guwahati, where Indrani grew up, is a city of nearly a million, the capital city of the biggest state in the northeast. It teems with ambition and talent, with the restlessness of the young who want to pack up and move — and some who return to shape it in a new image. It is a city with a rich past and a complicated modernity. Only to an imagination that cannot see beyond the limits of the Republic of Lutyens’ Delhi can it resemble an area of darkness from where philistines emerge to rattle the gates of privilege. Pori Bora did find her dreams too big for Guwahati, but she was not alone. If there’s something that she shares with me and perhaps you, with the millions of economic migrants criss-crossing India everyday for a better life, for a new deal, it is this: She staked her claim on the big city.
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But this is not a piece that is about Indrani Mukerjea, whom I know nothing of, who may or may not have been qualified for her job, who may or may not be guilty of the many alleged misdemeanours she is accused of. I am concerned only with the many images of her that are being produced and consumed while an investigation goes on. Whether she killed Sheena Bora, the daughter she passed off as her sister, has to be determined in court, no matter how many theories Mumbai Police puts out. Crime stories, but naturally, fascinate and repel us, especially when they involve the rich and the powerful, and it was expected that this would be a story closely followed. But routine salaciousness cannot explain the doggedness of the primetime jury that has sat on daily judgement on Indrani Mukerjea. It reveals their and our fundamental anxiety about women with ambition, about the elite’s fierce, reflexive distrust of the outsider. Whom do the Suhel Seths and the Nina Pillais and the Rina Dhakas speak for when they talk about Indrani? What line are they drawing between their privileged enclaves and the one who managed to break in?
Amplified through such talking heads and studio gladiators is the voice that says, over and over again, “She was never one of us”. You might celebrate social mobility all you like, but here is Economic Times columnist Reshmi Dasgupta helpfully explaining how it really works: “In some circles in Calcutta, Bombay and Madras still — and in Delhi once upon a time before the invasion of the carpetbaggers — everyone has to be contextualised before being accepted. Without common school or college mates, neighbours, relatives, or at the very least, a kosher spouse or partner, it is hard if not impossible to break in.” She goes on to describe Indrani as doing the “clever thing by marrying into the circle by snagging Sanjeev Khanna, who was plugged into all the right social circuits [of Kolkata]”, as “a poster girl for what some may call social climbers”. “They are basically nobody’s nobodies out to make it by becoming somebody’s anybody: Friend, lover, spouse, confidant, helpmate, dalal. Whatever.” All the righteous indignation about Indrani cannot drown the panic at the breach in its defences, at the possibility that an outsider, who without old money or a St Stephen’s degree, played the game better and won — till she lost, and all was right with the status quo.
By all accounts, Indrani played the game with a fair amount of ruthlessness. That she married more than once, or had children with multiple men, is offered as the most definitive proof of her opportunism — what were Sanjeev Khanna and Peter Mukerjea to her but stepping stones? Even if that were true, even if you wish to caricature relationships between people you know nothing of into “hey, she was a golddigger”, she is neither the first nor the last person in the world to monetise marriage. A society where marriages are institutionalised on the give and give of dowry, where IAS officers and doctors fetch higher prices than others if they are men, can’t afford to be judgemental about marrying for money. But Indrani breaks the cardinal rule. She is a woman and used marriage as a means to get ahead, instead of being bound by it. She was “a social butterfly” and she dared disturb the universe.
It’s perhaps as a woman who transgresses so obviously and so frequently that Indrani offends us the most. The Hindu, in its editorial, goes at the issue with a pious sledgehammer: “Ms Mukerjea’s chronicle and the new mores she could be seen as representing reject the one value so dear to old India — the sanctity of motherhood.” The hysteria of the statement is laughable; the possibility of Indrani murdering her child shocks precisely because it is rare, because even mothers “with new mores” are trained and ordained to make the care of their children their prime responsibility. But beyond the common sense is a deeper truth: One needs to make a myth of the holiness of the mother-child bond — increasingly now, when a minority of women are moving out of its unquestioned thrall — precisely because it is a complicated transaction, a spectrum that ranges from love and attachment to resentment and bondage. It is a truth not often acknowledged that children hold mothers back, tie them to the thankless, Sisyphean work of the house — and that mothers are sometimes filled with loathing for their offspring. Indrani makes the unthinkable look possible: She is a mother who wanted out, who disowned her children and moved on.
If she did kill her daughter, she committed the indefensible human transgression, and that guilt and the punishment is hers to bear.
But to all those who point a finger at her, who have tried and found her guilty for her choices and lifestyle, for her ambition and background, look at all those fingers pointing back at you.
amrita.dutta@expressindia.com
