Disheartened by India’s defeat at the hands of Pakistan in the Champions Trophy at the Oval? Take a break. Pack your bags, go to Rajasthan. There is something in the bracing desert air these days that brings cheer to bruised egos. Give yourself at least a week, seep it in, and you just might learn that India defeated Pakistan, after all.

The Raje government has adopted Mahatma Gandhi’s three monkeys as its mascot: see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil. Of course, no functional government can keep its eyes and ears shut—and moun vrat, everyone knows, is only meant for stringy old men with an unreasonable penchant for powder-blue turbans and standing in for the Italian mafia. This apparent conflict between vigilantly keeping your eyes, ears and mouth functional and following the Mahatma’s monkey dictum would have baffled ordinary mortals. But not those schooled in the ancient Indian tradition that everything around you is maya, illusion, and the learned brahmin alone knows true reality.

So, one just needs to banish evil, by replacing evil with good. Brave India being trounced by 180 runs, that, too, by the Enemy, represents, no one can dispute, unalloyed evil. It should not be seen, heard of or spoken of. Replace it with the vastly more acceptable version of truth and history, that India actually won. Spread the word on a few thousand Whatsapp groups and websites like BBCNewspoint.com and soon people will discard the evil, seditious version put out by Presstitutes on live TV and replace it with a version of truth more in sync with nationalism and popular sentiment.

Do you feel sceptical about this notion of different versions of truth? Are you colonised by the western notion of one, invariable, absolute truth? If you wish to be colonised, go ahead, by all means. But be properly colonised. Learn about Einstein, a western Johnny-come-lately to the theory of relativity. Or about quantum mechanics that hase replaced the certainties of Newtonian mechanics with clouds of probability. Or, if these things are too complex for your simple brain, learn something about the philosophy of the current leader of the western world.

If niggling doubt still makes it difficult for the bracing desert air at 40 degrees Celsius to do its job for you, take a look at Rajasthan’s recent advances in historiography. For long, historians of mediaeval India held that Akbar the great defeated Rana Pratap at Haldighati. How could this piece of evil sustain, in today’s Rajasthan? For one, lots of mediaeval historians are Muslims, unreliable characters like Irfan Habib who is an apostate and a sickular. For another, Akbar was just a foreign invader—Rajasthan’s school textbooks have dumped that western appellation, great, for this Uzbek marauder—while Rana Pratap was the pride of Rajasthan.

The most important consideration, of course, is that this was a clash between Hindus and Mlechchhas. How could Hindus be defeated, come on? Of course, sickular historians will try to confuse you by pointing to the Afghan soldiers in the Rana’s army and to the Rajput commander of Akbar’s army, and tell you that it was just a struggle for temporal supremacy between two principals, which had nothing to do with spiritual differences. But today’s Rajasthan knows better.

Just ask any of the brave warriors who attack and crush movie sets of cultural vandals who dare to film deranged foreigers’ defiling dreams about romancing Rajput queens. Now, few historians who follow the western fashion of demanding actual evidence to validate a narrative hold Rani Padmini to be anything more than legend.

The story of Padmavati, or Padmini, Sinhala princess who married a Rajput king, was coveted by Allaudin Khilji and led the women of Chittor to fiery self-destruction to avoid being violated by the foreigners’ victorious army, first appears in Padmavat, an epic of love, magic, talking parrots, war, bravery, treachery and tragedy by a sixteenth century poet of Awadh, Malik Muhammad Jayasi, a couple of centuries after Khilji’s actual siege of Chittor, contemporary narratives of which make no mention of Padmini. Be that as it may, repeated renderings in Urdu, English and Bengali over the centuries have blurred the distinction between legend and history. Which makes Rani Padmini all the more salient in today’s Rajasthan. The point being that honour is real, and has to be defended, whether assaulted in history or in legend, whether by rewriting history or by ransacking movie sets, where reality, of course, is produced and reproduced.

Or, to put all doubt at rest, you can ask the ultimate authority on historical veracity, Rajasthan’s minister for higher education, or his able supporter, the erstwhile minister for school education, who together are banishing seditious history and replacing it with glorious victory for Rana Pratap over that garden-variety emperor, Akbar, at Haldighati.

You might worry all this deconstruction of sixteenth century received wisdom will not help when it comes to dealing with contemporary developments such as the Champions’ trophy tournament. Rest assured, Rajasthan knows how to deal with illusion and reality in today’s world as well.

Many people, for instance, would think that photographing women without their permission amounts to invasion of privacy. And that photographing women when they are in the act of relieving themselves amounts to outraging their modesty. Such people must learn a thing or two on how to walk the fine balance between illusion and reality from the government of Rajasthan. In its books, it is absolutely the honourable thing to do—to photograph women as they defecate.

Five honourable civic officials were doing the honourable thing in Pratapgarh, 400 km or so away from Jaipur, one fine recent morning. Zaffar Hussain, a man given to organising labourers and demanding that money be released to build toilets at the villagers’ homes, interfered with official work. He had the temerity to object to the municipal commissioner and his team of officials taking photographs of women committing the offence, in Swachh Bharat jargon, of ‘open defecation’. Thereafter, he died a sudden, violent death.

Now begins the tussle between myth and reality. The wife, daughter and neighbours of the deceased claim he was beaten to death by the team of civic officials. The officials claim he attacked them. And since they are honourable men, they must be right. But the attacker it was that died. It must have been the fury of honour violated that did it, although in Indian myth, it is normally violated female honour that has the capacity to destroy. When we move from myth to reality, some minor detail like gender could, indeed, change.

Now, this man, whose demise the chief minister kindly noted and described as unfortunate, was a tricky customer, in any case. His name, to begin with. It was written as Jaffer Khan in his Aadhaar card. Having an alias is bad enough. He was a member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist Leninist, to boot. If that was not seditious enough, he demanded that toilets be built at the homes of villagers.

In parts of Rajasthan, as in many other parts of the country, it is true you have to trudge kilometres to fetch a pail of water for your home, and you would be loath to throw it down the WC. Unless, of course, you were consumed by nationalist pride in the Swachh mission or could afford to employ a small army of water-fetchers. So, when those lacking in nationalist pride demand toilets be built at home, they are demanding piped water supply as well.

There, you have the man who died attacking honourable civic officials who had woken up at the crack of dawn to perform their paid duty, however crappy it might strike the less dutiful as being. He had two names, belonged to an anti-national party and asked for a mile when given an inch of community toilet. Do such people deserve to pollute the air we breathe any more than cattle smugglers? And hasn’t the chief minister already commiserated his demise?

Some pseudo-sickular types might suggest that photographing women as they relieve themselves robs them of dignity, and suggest toilet-training the cow as the most effective tool against open defecation, on the ground that educated mothers bring their children up educated, too. That would be deliberate mixing up of fact and metaphor, to undermine the grand experiment to merge myth and reality that is underway in the land of fabled valour. That must not pass. Most Indians do need respite from the shocking rout in the Champions Trophy.