Gaslight at the end of the tunnel

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Gaslighting is the Mirriam Webster word of the year with good reason. In quantitative terms there was a 1,740 per cent increase in lookups, and sustained searches for the word through the year. In contextual terms, the proliferating vehicles of deception, like fake news and deepfakes added resonance.

Language, which is like the data of experience, is as amazing as stories, and as potent. Gaslight is a 1938 play and film in which a man makes his wife doubt her own sanity by denying that their gas lights are flickering (they are). Over time, the story's shape and dynamic have been used to pinpoint similarly undermining experiences in very different contexts, until the analogy has become a verb. To gaslight means psychologically manipulating someone into doubting their own validity and sanity.

Gaslight's journey from story to analogy to a word that make sense of disparate experiences is testament to how powerful art and language can be in expressing and re-shaping social realities. The Mirriam-Webster website noted that, "Unlike lying, which tends to be between individuals, and fraud, which tends to involve organisations, gaslighting applies in both personal and political contexts… formal and technical writing as well as in colloquial use." That's because gaslighting is a word that encapsulates how the political and the personal are linked.

From colonialism labelling all native pleasures vulgar so that we are embarrassed about our food, bodies, accents, ways of loving; to caste equating education with intelligence, creating false ideals of elite men; to equating fairness with beauty, so that we doubt our own attractiveness and also, our attractions to any other beauty; sexism declaring women's art isn't part of all human wisdom; governments, communities, families controlling us ‘for our own good'; lovers pretending a relationship was never really real - gaslighting is the very way in which power asserts control and upholds abuse.

Consider the recently viral video where a professor at Manipal Institute of Technology told a Muslim student "oh you are like Kasab", equating the student's religion with terrorism by implication. When the student called him out, the professor responded with "You are just like my son." "You are just like my son/daughter/father/sister" line is the favourite soft power press release in our society to deny meanness, rudeness, cruelty, prejudice and unwanted advances, deem the person subjected to violence unreasonable, while reaffirming patriarchal (yaniki family style) power equations (yaniki patriarchs can do what they want). The student's clarity and courage, refusing to let the professor gaslight their way into denying their bullying, was breathtaking. After the furore the video raised, Karnataka's education minister demonstrated more gaslighting, as he dismissed the anger with, " this is just a small thing."

The examination of the numerous levels at which gaslighting takes place shows us how the smallest things are connected to the biggest ones. How the authorities authorise a culture's authoritarianism. Social media has many frequently discussed demerits. But it has also allowed a quantity of qualitative data - often dismissed, yaniki gaslit, by some as just anecdotes - to surface. A sea of stories, experiences and emotions identifying the web of injustice and prejudice beneath lip service about equality, diversity, romance, wokeness. So it gives me a strange sensation to think of those millions of word searches, like burning not flickering lights pushing towards the end of some tunnel.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com