The funny thing about India is that so many don’t see the funny side

Amrit Dhillon says officialdom in India should get a sense of humour

Pep Montserrat for The National

Humour in Indian public life is rare. Privately, Indians can be very funny. But there are no famous comedians or comedy shows. Among stuffy politicians and civil servants, humour cannot survive because the air is too thick with self-love and egotism.

That is why the advent of the comedy collective, All India Bakchod (AIB) a few years ago was such a blast of fresh air. This group of comedians does stand-up routines and makes humorous videos poking fun at the foibles of Indians. One spoof shows an Indian man packing to go abroad and filling his suitcase with his mother’s home-made pickles.  At an event titled AIB Knockout – The Roast at a Mumbai stadium last month, Bollywood actors Ranveer Singh and Arjun Singh were “roasted” – mocked by the comedians – and the host was the film director Karan Johar. The jokes were, by all accounts, smutty and the language crude. The audience, which included Johar’s mother, was in fits of laughter.

But all hell broke loose when a video of the show was uploaded onto YouTube. Some Hindu organisations filed police complaints on the grounds of obscenity. The police are investigating the “crime”, although since AIB had all the necessary licences for the show, it’s hard to understand what exactly can be investigated. That didn’t stop outraged television anchors foaming at the mouth about how “the modesty of Indian culture” had been desecrated.

Things took an ugly turn when Ashoke Pandit, a member of the Censor Board, tweeted an obscene comment about Johar which cannot be reprinted here. Then a regional political party, the MNS, threatened to disrupt screenings of the three men’s movies unless they apologised. The final idiocy was the news that the Maharashtra state government is investigating the issue.

What a waste of police and government time. Surely the police should be clamping down on rape, female foeticide, dowry killings and corruption rather than harassing a bunch of comedians.

One deeply distasteful feature of Indian society is the belief in some quarters – more quarters than you might think – that Indian culture is the purest and best in the world. Whenever the followers of this belief come across anything they dislike – a book, a film, a play, a painting – a primal cry goes up that it is “against” Indian culture.

If only this moral indignation extended to violence against women. If only similar outrage erupted when politicians made hate speeches against minorities. All that is perfectly acceptable, it seems, but comedy is, as many have said of AIB Knockout – The Roast, a “national shame”.

There is certainly one thing that is against Indian culture: humour. When former minister Shashi Tharoor made a harmless remark about travelling “cattle class”, few got it. Many Hindus thought he was being rude about the cow. The film industry is not much more evolved. Bollywood’s idea of comedy still revolves around banana skins.

The norm in India is to do three things: boast, boast and boast a bit more, about yourself, about your family, your work, your children. All with a straight face, without a trace of self-consciousness or irony. Indians make statements that in other cultures would make people cringe.

The national style is pompous and bombastic. At conferences, the introductory remarks made about the speakers are pure puffery. A classic case of this involved Pandit of the Censor Board. When asked whether his shrill reaction to AIB betrayed a lack of a sense of humour, he was less than modest. “I have done many comedy shows,” he said. “I am the king of comedy.”

Self-deprecation is a rare beast, hardly ever sighted because the habitat surrounding it is so hostile. If it ever surfaces, it leaves many Indians bewildered because they don’t “get” the idea of making fun of yourself. This is why India could not hold an event like the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner, where the US president is the butt of endless leg-pulling, not least by himself.

But the younger generation, mercifully, have started making fun of themselves and their society and the AIB is a great example of this new humour, both acidic and good-natured.

Humour is such a subjective affair that one wonders about the grounds on which the police complaints have been based.

The AIB Knockout show was not broadcast on Indian television. If it had, there might at least be some justification for debating what constitutes suitable content for family viewing. But this was a private affair attended by adults who chose to be there. Politicians need to understand that a whole new universe of humour has opened up on the internet and the old paternalistic approach of “guiding” Indians about what they should watch or hear is no longer possible.

The conduct of those who were offended or outraged over the AIB show is merely the latest example of moral policing by the “guardians” of Indian culture and the atmosphere of intolerance that has been building up for more than a decade.

This intolerance for differences manifests itself in many ways. High-caste Hindu vegetarians living in swanky Mumbai apartment complexes ban meat-eaters from renting a flat. American author Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, was pulped because the endless litigation by a Hindu fundamentalist wore out the publisher.

Artist MF Husain had to flee his home for exile in Dubai because right wing Hindu extremists persecuted him in one court after another until he could take no more. And most recently, south Indian author Perumal Murugan announced on Facebook that he had given up writing because he couldn’t stand the virulent opposition to his novels by religious and caste-based groups.

The more these intolerant groups succeed, the more it emboldens others to attack. This time, comedy is the target and this attack, too, seems to be succeeding in that the AIB has taken down the video from YouTube.

It has yet to say what it plans to do in the future. But Johar should have the last word. “Not your cup of tea?” he tweeted. “Don’t drink it.”

Amrit Dhillon is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi