(Published in Himal Southasian March-April 2004 and January 2013)
In their famous conversation about words, Humpty Dumpty confides to Alice that while verbs are short-tempered and proud, "you can do anything with adjectives". Humpty also insists that whenever he makes a word do a lot of work, he always pays it extra.
By this token, the adjective 'normal' must have been paid an astronomical bonus for the truly stupendous amount of work that it has done in Gujarat over the past two years. Although his claims were met with disbelief at the time, Chief Minister Narendra Modi has been retrospectively vindicated in his insistence that, except for the first 72 hours of the 'action-reaction' sequence, post-Godhra Gujarat has been, well, normal. Indeed, we ought to be grateful to him for drawing attention to Gujarat's most significant contribution to the national ethos since Mahatma Gandhi – the establishment of a new notion of normalcy.
An important term in social theory, the word 'normal' has three main meanings in everyday language – a common or usual state of affairs that carries the additional connotation of being ordinary or unremarkable; a healthy condition, the opposite of diseased or pathological; and finally, the sense derived from its root-word 'norm', indicating an ideal state that is worthy of emulation. These meanings suggest that 'normal' is a boundary-marking word whose job is to separate the mundane from the extraordinary, the healthy from the sick, and the legitimate from the delinquent. Although every society and every age needs such boundaries, their actual location keeps changing according to the balance of social power in each context. The political potency of the word derives from its ability to link a populist-majoritarian fact (that which is most common) with a moral-ethical ideal (that which is most right). What we have witnessed in Gujarat is an unprecedented attempt to normalise communal oppression by representing it as popular practice and proper precept.