Excerpted with permission from the publisher Why The Poor Don’t Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians, Manu Joseph, published by Aleph Book Company.
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When I was in college, I read Nani Palkhivala, who was always described as an ‘eminent jurist’. I had a lot of respect then for anyone who was called ‘eminent’. I was twenty-one when I finally met him. He was by then an old man. He told me India’s poor were wonderful people. He conveyed that nonsensical praise rich Indians and foreigners often give the poor—‘so hospitable’. The eminent jurist turned out to be yet another affluent Indian simpleton. The inner beauty of India’s poor is a popular mainstream opinion. There would be many Indians, today, who would with flared noble nostrils say the poor do not kill the rich because the poor are such wonderful folk. It is not that I dispute this view; it is just that the visible niceness of the poor is nothing virtuous—it is a consequence of compulsion. As in love, so in society, people who do not have power are quite nice. And in the case of the poor, it is another layer of retardation inflicted on them through very low self-worth.
A bit of that submission of the poor is also plain acting.
As foolish as it is to assume that the poor are made of milk and honey, is the suspicion of rich India, expressed and secret, that the poor are prone to criminality and violence, and that they are kept in check only by religious or other mystical forces, and of course, the fear of the law. In my view, human beings are not intrinsically good or evil. I think they are intrinsically cautious. This caution has the appearance of a virtue, or maybe it really is a virtue. Maybe that is all there is to being humane—a sort of caution. Whatever it is, it is good enough for peace. It is good enough for India’s poor to shun violence or even abhor it. But it is also true that the poor are reined in by powerful forces, like the many leashes of morality, and the promises of hope that the rich have consciously and unconsciously designed to control the poor, to make them fall in line.
There are reasons why the poor don’t revolt that are not so obvious. In this book, I chiefly discuss those reasons. Let’s begin.
How India’s chaos and ugliness protect us
The Arun Jaitley stadium in Delhi looks so third-rate and ugly, it would reassure 95 per cent of Indians that the nation has not left them behind—something the suave former finance minister himself could not do in his lifetime. Almost all of India is like this.
Most nations try hard to look richer than they are; India, in plain sight, is a lot poorer than it is in reality. This municipal ugliness of India conveys to the poor that the nation belongs to them, that it has not left them behind. The street chaos and our general civic disorder, too, have the same effect.
Exquisite urban beauty or postmodern design, on the other hand, make the poor of that society feel worse than they should, and that they are encroaching on the f iefdom of better people. In the discontent of advanced economies and upper-middle-income nations, some blame should go to architectural glitter.
I do not have any romantic association with disorder and ugliness. I hate that about India. I just say they play a part in peace, for that is the nature of human beings.
The poor are the worst enemies of the poor
Like us, the poor have a theory of whom they must hate—‘the big people’. But, like us, the people they hate the most are their equals—their neighbours and relatives and others like them. Poor women face the worst harassment from poor men. Poor men face destructive competition from other poor men. The poor do not envy the rich. That notion arises from a common fallacy of how envy works. Envy is a thing between equals. The poor envy others like them who have done better. Many Indian caste atrocities emerge from ordinary envy between the poor. The poor migrant’s worst enemy is the local poor for it is him the migrant undercuts.
Meanwhile, the rich do beautiful things for the poor—they make lovely movies about poverty, they feed the poor, and indignant young women from good families speak of so many humane things.
The absence of human rights for the poor protects us
In some aspects, India is safe not only compared to middle-income countries in Africa and Latin America, but also in comparison with the West. And that is because of an Indian quality that is not exactly noble, which is also why it works. What protects us is the brutal side of India. If at all there is anything worse than poverty, it is an Indian jail and to be caught in the Indian judicial system for criminal activity. It is a deadly deterrent. Also, criminals and rapists of children are routinely bumped off, and the society is not interested in investigating the circumstances that led to their ‘encounters’. What India cannot do with competent legal systems, it accomplishes in informal ways.
Also, Indian social life, especially in the under classes, is a natural filtering process. People who are dangerous, or even mentally ill, do not survive too long. They are killed or apprehended soon after they become a danger. Or, they just die alone of neglect and disease. In comparison, dangerous people can survive in more compassionate societies like the United States and Europe.
The miserable are not as miserable as we think
Our darkest fears come true in some people, and we expect them to be miserable. But are the unlucky as miserable as other people think? Is it possible that the bereaved and the disabled, the jailed and the whores, and most people who are said to be tragic, are somewhat better than what the others think? Can it be that the poor, too, are fine and that they may even be happy? After all, an unsung cause of human happiness is low standards. For friends, for the spouse, for the nation. Maybe, just like some people find misery in everything, most people are programmed to find joy in their lives no matter what. Maybe, the poor are not as miserable as we fear. The persistence of happiness, the inevitability of happiness, maybe that, too, protects us.
In this book, you will read more about these reasons, and several other reasons that are yet to be mentioned, all of them explaining what keeps the peace between the classes.
But this peace is fragile.
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Manu Joseph, Why The Poor Don’t Kill Us: The Psychology of Indians, Aleph Book Company, 2025. Pb. Pp.280
In this diagnosis of contemporary Indian society, with a tinge of dark humour, acclaimed writer Manu Joseph explores why the poor don’t rise in revolt against the rich despite living in one of the most unequal regions of the world. The poor know how much we spend in a single day, on a single meal, the price of Atlantic salmon and avocados. ‘Why,’ he asks, ‘do they tolerate it? Why don’t they crawl out from their catastrophes and finish us off? Why don’t little men emerge from manholes and attack the cars? Why don’t the maids, who squat like frogs beside kitchen sinks, pull out the hair of their conscientious madams who never give them a day off? Why is there peace?’ Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us shows iin pitiless detail just how hypocritical and exploitative people of privilege are, and it also shows how and why they get away with it. It’s a sharp, at times searingly witty, but a very perceptive critique of the many faults of the India we live in.
Why The Poor Don’t Kill Us has also evolved into a stand-up act by Manu Joseph. He prefers to call it 'stand-up anthropology'.
Manu Joseph is the author of the novels Serious Men, The Illicit Happiness of Other People, and Miss Laila, Armed and Dangerous. He is the winner of the Hindu Literary Prize and the PEN Open Book Award, whose jury described him as ‘…that rare bird who can wildly entertain the reader as forcefully as he moves them’. He has been nominated for several other prizes. He is also the creator of the Netflix series, Decoupled. He was the editor of Open Magazine and a columnist for the New York Times. This is his first work of non-fiction.
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