Abdul Kalam – A Joyous Death

Posted on August 14, 2015 by secondsaturn

My school friend, Debjani told me this hilarious story about her grandfather, a reporter with the Stateman who claimed that Gandhiji knew him. How come Dadu, my friend would ask to which the grandfather replied that once he nearly bumped into the Mahatma when Gandhiji seemed to have exclaimed “Oh Reporter!” Well, this is nearly how I also knew the former President Abdul Kalam.
Once I had the distinction of being invited for a play written by my celebrity friend Shivani Tibrewal, which Mallika Sarabhai performed as a dance drama. Since I was the guest of the playwright I was fortunate to be seated in the VIP enclosure with Mrinalini right beside me. Then Mr President arrived and sat in the seat right in front of me. The dance drama started and frankly, I felt rather disappointed at Shivani’s powerful script being so sullied by depressive stage lights and hackneyed body moves. No sooner than I saw the head of silver tuft move also in disapproval that the President actually turned almost to face me in the row behind him and started whispering that Mallika was only repeated Tagore’s Chandalika which her mother Mrinalini has almost copyrighted. I have seen all of this before, he remarked, nearly within the hearing range of Mrinalini, and despaired why the daughter had nothing new to invent? Mrinalini must have heard Kalam as well for she fell very silent while I stiffened up stoically to such expressed criticism. Then the President turned around once again, are you Bengali? He asked. Yes sir, I replied as silently as I could. You from Santiniketan? He asked again, No Sir, I studied in Jadavpur University and JNU, I said. Someone from the President’s coterie who sat next to him started a conversation and Kalam and my communication was disconnected. This is as much as I encountered him in person.
But I knew Kalam and I think that I knew him pretty well because I know his type and I could immediately connect with him in a strange manner of souls. Kalam was actually Prof Shonku and a bit of Lalmohan Babu, pen named Jatayu, both immortal characters of Satyajit Ray. Kalam was a scientist much later; he was born to be amazed at the wonders of the Universe. For him the world was magic, opening up its treasures to him with every ray of the sun. He was excited with everything, as if he clapped when flowers bloomed and birds flew. But what excited him the most was the activation of the cosmos in the form of intense energy and this made him love the fireworks. His work on the missile was far less an endeavor of weaponry; instead it was the invention of a grand firework, he bringing to life the giant dragon, a contraption that could break barriers and swoosh into the sky, his world of wonderment. This is so like Prof Shonku or Jatayu both of who lived in a world of fantasy, not of make belief, but of ultimate possibilities. Kalam was just this kind; he sincerely believed in the magic, in dreams, in light and motion, in the cosmic energy and longed deeply to be a part of it. I have often noticed, albeit in televisions, how his eyes always bore a strange light, this was the light of a child’s eyes who looked only to gaze at the wondrous illuminations of the Universe. This made Kalam an excited soul, one who forever was in utter enjoyment of the world. The titles of the books he authored, Ignited Minds, Wings of Fire were so much like the title of Jatayu’s novels or Prof Shonku’s inventions. For Kalam, science was play. This was the energy and happiness he brought around him and this is why, even when people were speaking of his death, they were only smiling.
Prof Shonku had died in Ray’s pen but Ray wrote of his death as being his never ending journey into the vast unending Infinity of Space. As Shonku went up along with his cat, Newton, Man Friday, Prahlad and the pet robot, they could only see the strange and lovely lights of the space as if pouring down in a torrential psychedelics. Shonku is imagined around Sukumar Ray, Satyajit Ray’s father who dies while Ray was only two. Sukumar Ray was a scientist at heart, given to experiments around light and motion; like Shonku he too lived in a world of imagination and science for him was a play of his imaginations. As Sukumar Ray lay dying, he penned his last poem ever in which he feels so excited at the prospect of death that his heart beats like a tabla. Death is only the beginning of a new adventure, a renewal of a new kind, an experience to be looked forward to as the revelation of yet another Divine wonderment.
Kalam was a scientist by play, a child of God’s creation and this is why he was so free from issues of ego, power and protocol, of style and status just as a child would be. His world was one of continuous discovery, of constant exploration, of endless journeying into the dance of lights. Death must have excited him much in the way it did for Sukumar Ray and if he had ever read the poet, he would have surely said, “aaj ke amar moner maajhe, dhnai dhopadhob tobla baaje.” I can sense that Kalam’s death is joyous; it is strange that his death bears the same aura of celebrations as every moment of his life did. The voice of the television reporters, the radio jockeys, the celebrities who are invited to speak on the former President and even my mother to who I spoke this morning and who admired and loved Abdul Kalam had the same tone in which I could hear the upbeat rhythm of Sukumar Ray’s line as if all were saying “aaj ke amar moner maajhe, dhnai dhopadhob tobla baaje” (today within in my mind, the tabla beats dhnai dhapadhap)

Posted in Obituaries | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Myth, Media and Poetry – Jagannath’s Rathyatra

Posted on July 21, 2015 by secondsaturn

The Rath Yatra of Jagannath is among the grandest sacred spectacle of India and till only recently, which is before the Bengalis discovered the Durga Puja, it was the grandest fair of them all. The rath, or the car festival seems to be a throw from ancient Egyptian car festival and goes to prove the connections between Egypt and Orissa, both major maritime powers in their time. Lord Jagannath is a site of multiple myths and meanings; he straddles between the forest and the city, the mountain and the ocean, the tantric rites and tribalism and has distinct similarities with Tibetan Gods and their representations. The face of Jagannath and Balaram, more so of the latter than the former has bird like features, in costumes akin to the kathakali or the chhou dance, resembling both deities from Tibet and from Sri Lanka and Bali. Indeed, one of the more important festivals of Odisha is the Bali yatra, signifying the seting off of ships on the ocean for trade to Bali, once again hinting at the connection between the two above mentioned cultures. One could then draw a lateral line from Egypt to Odisha and a vertical line from Sri Lanka, through Kerala, Bastar, Odisha and Jharkhand right inside the western provinces of China; zhou and chhou being phonetically similar and perhaps mean the same thing. Jagannath’s geography then draws from the oceans on the three sides of the Indian peninsular and unites China and Tibet in the north and Kerala in the south. One particular myth of Jagannath claims that he is the unburnt body of Lord Krishna which had come floating in the sea. Given the fact that Krishna died in the western coast of India and Puri, the abode of Jagannath is on the east coast, the cult has already united the two coasts of the peninsula. If Jagannath is the corpse of Krisha which is eventually discovered in a secret zone of the forest, then we have the tantric rites of using corpses for gaining access to the occult. The “soul transfer” which takes place at the dead of the night of the nobokolebor is supposed to be sensational, resulting in the death of the senior most priest who does the honours.

In an Internet post http://forum.davidicke.com on the 4th march 2011 by Bibhu Dey Misra tells us of the Opet Festival of ancient Egypt that used to be celebrated in Karnak during the monsoon season of the flood of the Nile. Here three deities, namely Amun, Mut and Khonsu were carried in decorative barques. Amun is a God with blue colours dnning peacock feathers. Karnak and Konarak are similar sounding and both are places of Sun worship. Somewhere icons coincide.
Jagannath is the Lord of the forest. He resides in the dense foliage of the plateau with his older brother and younger sister. In the folk tales of Bengal, the trio, Arun Barun and Kironmala who appear similar to the Jagannath, Balaram and Shubhadra are little children from princely families who are lost in the forests, die and emerge from trees. The trinity is also made out of wood of neem trees, the trees having the necessary properties which are taken as being revelations of the Gods being hidden in those. Jagannath and his siblings have large pupils and podgy faces, their hands and feet are in stubs hinting that perhaps they are children, a possible reason why none among them is married. As children they need to be fed at regular intervals, bathed, tucked away to bed at night and entertained. For seven days in the monsoon month of Sraban or Ashadh, they also go on a vacation to their maternal aunt’s home. The vacationing out is the rath yatra.
Specifically, maternal aunt in case of Jagannath is the mother’s sister. In view of Jagannath’s origin as a tribal and his kidnap and instatement within the patriarchal milieu of the Ganga kings, kinship is problematic. This is largely due to the fact that tribals are often matriarchal and relatives bear different levels of significance in different systems of kinship. But the mother’s sister in either case is a neutral person, in whose home the Lord’s visitation is without any loading of meaning. Also, the mother’s sister has the least possibility of developing any kind of long term legal bonds with her sister’s son and hence the possible retaining of Jagannath into her home may well be ruled out.

While there are diverse myths around the Jagannath, varying from the pantheon being babes in the woods to them being the unburnt carcass of Krishna and his siblings, they are united in one thing and which is that Jagannath and his siblings visit the maashi, or the mother’s sister. Politics may revolve around the myths but kinship structures must remain above board, there must never be any contestation around the structure of the family. This is perhaps the sole reason why Jagannath, despite the unity of the tribal and the mainstream, the Dravidian and the Aryan styles, the Tibetan touch and the oceanic imprints, Lord Jagannath has never tolerated the “non Hindu” which includes the Jains and the Buddhists. Jagannath’s intolerance of the religions derives from the fact that kinship cannot be moderated and to my mind, this is the deepest secret of the myth.
The reign of the Ganga kings was the Golden Age of Odisha during which Indradyumna was supposed to have, through trickery and cheating, stolen Jagannath from the forest and instated him inside the temple.

The forest and temple conflict becomes evident and it is possible that the Ganga kings ravished the dense vegetation to build their boats, cut their paths and establish their suzerainty. Indeed, many a time tribes from the Sambalpur region have come and burnt down the Jagannath deity inside the temple. The grand fair that takes place around the rath yatra is focused on the sale of saplings hinting that the rath is also the time of planting the tree, hinting at the predominance of the forest.
However, built in the 12th and 13th century, Jagannath becomes the first deity among the Hindus to be placed inside a temple for the purposes of worship; before this only the Buddhists worshipped deities and Hindus, though animistic did not worship the human form. The grand processions of Jagannath perhaps is very Buddhist as well because nowhere in the Hindu worship deities are taken out in a rally. There are raths of the various gurus but they are propaganda rather than be the core of a religious ceremony. Jagannath gets the final stamp of authority when Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu settles down in Puri and worships the pantheon as Krishna, Balaram and Shubhadra, part of the Puranas and integral to the cult of the Krishna worship of the Vaishnavas.
On the occasion of the rath, my kind and enthusiastic friends on the facebook have posted some poetry around the rath. There are two poems from the early twentieth century, one somewhere in the 1960’s and one written only recently. The first one addresses the incredulity of idol worship by cynically regarding the devotees as they prostrate on the streets in obeisance of the Lord. The poet says that as the devotees prostrate themselves on the path of the rath, the path thinks herself to be God, the rath thinks herself as the Divine and the idols tend to regard themselves as celestial. But, the real God smiles at such mistaken identities, knowing fully well that He is the real one. The poem demolishes the holiness surrounding the entire episode of the rath yatra by taking away its Divinity and rendering the phenomenon as an empty shell. For this poet, the spectacle of the rath is a lie.
The next poem to be posted is the one by Tagore in which he observes that the poor and the down trodden especially the ones from the untouchable castes are not allowed to participate in the festival. Drawing upon the loneliness of one such woman Tagore raises the rath into a metaphor saying that it is the vehicle of Divine manifestation, which for the woman in question happens in the form of two freshly bloomed flowers. The flowers in bloom for this social outcast is the rath of the Divine, for it is through such manifestations that God arrives at her doorstep. The latter is a second layer of meaning which says that if the devotee cannot go to the rath, the Lord appears at her precinct in His vehicle.
The third is a poem of the 1960’s, the time of socialistic sensibilities in Bengal. The poet observes the great enthusiasm around the fair where children are busy gorging on the goodies while the child of the poor parents look on unable to access any of the toys, especially the flute which he so wanted for himself. The flute is an essential accessory of Lord Krishna, whose avatar Jagannath is supposed to be and the poet observes the paradox of the festival in which the image of Krishna is worshipped while excluding the Krishna in real life.
The fourth composition is the recent one by Srijata in which the poet observes the children draw their own decorated replica of the Jagannath rath on the moss lain slippery floors of their terrace and yet two Muslim children are kept out of the laughter and the gaiety of the celebrations because of their religion. Srijato extols the children to play together, saying that let the rath touch the skies to catch the moon of Id, let the semolina of Id be served on the same platter as the papad of the rath. Let the celebrations be a unity of the diversity of religions, let the festivity wipe off differences between communities.
If the above poems are any indications of poetry in general, then one may conclude that the function of poetry is to puncture spectacle. Poetry is reflective and in such reflection sabotages the visual. The spectacle is the visual that belies the event. The spectacle of Jagannath conceals the conflicts around the deity, holds up the pantheon as if the conflicts have already been resolved; spectacles need to be unchallenged by contradictions. Poetry is the enemy of media; if you wish to demolish the myths of the media, then poetry is the weapon. The novel, the cinema, the painting, the sculpture and even music, in short all of those which puts together the diverse parts into a unity cannot challenge the spectacle as well as poetry does. Spectacle can be analyzed and disaggregated but its essence can only be obtained from its unity and this is why, despite the hair splitting semiotics, spectacles must be analyzed in terms of its unity, its coherence.
Media is the modern day spectacle; it uses the principles of the spectacle to conceal the conflictual events that lie within. The ravish, the demolition, the conquest are subsumed inside the spectacle. The media becomes the mainstream, the poet remains the marginal.

Posted in Festivals, Media Sociology | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Cinema and Partition 2

Posted on June 11, 2015 by secondsaturn

Well Ms T seems to have made up her mind. She was faking all that euphoria as the theme of displacement in Partition being attached to her own biography. Yes, she feels uncertain and distressed at the possible wrenching out of the path of a career and fall into marriage, the latter being an institution that will confine her into child bearing and cooking for her family. And surely there is dislocation to be sensed in her passing over from her father’s shelter into her husband’s ownership, but she is not intellectually endowed enough to be able to raise all of this into the grand metaphor of the Partition. Hence she was only trying to be in league with me when she appeared to be excited and emancipated with the discovery that the displacements that women face with the Partition is all of a metaphor of the general and rather usual condition of life for this segment of humanity. In order for a person to think in terms of metaphors, I realized, rather late in life is a matter of intellectual training, a certain level of cerebral maturity, an elevated command of language. No wonder then popular cultures especially our formula films, the Bollywood in particular tries to inculcate a sense of metaphorical imagination. In the absence

Anyway, Ms T has sent me her finalish proposal. She is back at the same position where she was before I confused her with my pet habit of the metaphor. She intends to study the films around Partition to get a sense of the different ways in which people have suffered in the west Punjab and East Bengal. She intends to use the cinema as evidence or narrative of such sufferings. She then intends to compare the states of women post Partition to the promise of Mother India which she accesses through the paintings of Abanindranath and other songs of Freedom around the imaginations of India as the Mother. To her, the cinema is a document rather than being another work at an attempt to create myths. To her the truth of cinematic representations are unimpeachable. She intends to use cinema in order to defy and decry the myths built up and circulated through paintings and modern music. Then is there a secret desire to establish the cinema as truth and every other medium, paintings and music in particular as false, or better still falsified. In order to reinforce cinema as truth Ms T then proceeds to extend the medium to establish sociological nuances about the differences in culture of Punjab and Bengal. The differences in cultures as seen through the cinema and cemented as sociological fact will turn around and reinforce the cinema as truth. Ms T wavers about what she thinks about the Partition, but sticks to cinema as the subject of study precisely because she wishes to infer the irreproachability of this medium.

The cinema attracts loyalties from the Indian masses; its spectacle, its wonderment, the largeness of the screen, the high standards of the theatres makes the cinema stand over its viewers as the pronouncements of gospels atop holy mountains. The dramatic form of the cinema, together with its physical dimensions and technological capabilities create a world of truth, which is absolute albeit tautological. This is the cinematic bug that has caught Ms T and not Partition. The Partition merely positions herself in the cinema, having heard stories of gore of the world’s most violent civil strife from her ancestors; and now in a city which is not hers, she intends to draw her identity from her strange history and to etch her boundaries against the variety of her Punjabi neighbours who also have descended from families affected by the Partition at the other end of the nation.

Posted in Media Sociology | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Partition and Cinema

Posted on May 10, 2015 by secondsaturn

Partition and Cinema
.
May 8, 2015 at 8:24am

I will call her as Miss T because I have to conceal her real

identity for purposes of privacy. No, her name does not start with a T, far

from it. But I thought that it would have been rather nice if she were to be

called Tapati, this would have been the right kind of name for her. But modern

girls are not named so poetically. Anyway, the reason why Miss T came to me

this morning is because I am supposed to be her supervisor. Supposed to be

because she had me sign sheaves of paper to the extent and said that she would

revert back to me once her course work got over. She has done so this morning

because tomorrow at forenoon she must submit her research proposal to the

University. And when she rang me up this morning I was somewhat surprised

because she was supposed to meet me on the previous day and not showed up. I,

for my part, actually had quite forgotten her research interest. Her tardiness

irritates me; she said that she did not get in touch with me because she was

very upset with all the politics that happened in her department.

She has not really learnt to work through her way despite

obstacles; she gets distracted when people try to break her concentration. She

is a bright girl but gets easy caught up in social relations. This has

something to do social class; students who emerge from socially dominant

classes do not bother about social relationships and accordingly do not get

caught up in the so-called politics. Such students do not have to depend on

personal gratis, are above favours and attacks, have enough resources of their

own to make their living. Such students are freer to focus on studies. But Miss

T gets caught in politics, she is easy to intimidate, easy to bully and easy to

be smothered under the theories and concepts that are showered on students from

the pulpits of Universities. Miss T is really a victim of her social class,

which is the professional middle class, idealist, upright, principled and yet

conservative and conforming.

Miss T wants to work on the Partition and cinema. Her focus

is on memory and trauma of the Partition. As a Bengali I am a privy to

Partition and its memories. One can safely say that among the middle classes in

Bengal every second family has suffered the Partition. Bengalis are replete

with memories of the Partition but strangely those memories do not have the

trauma. In fact there seems to be a dismemberment of the trauma; except for

writers who speak about the “Other Side of Silence” or the “Bitter Fruit” of

the everyday life in a run up to Partition. The most dominant memory is

nostalgia, of homes left behind with gourds supine across thatched roof and the

lost calf looking for its masters. And of walking, miles and miles into the

sunset. Memories of home, the loss of shelter where one would go to at dusk

fall, and the room with the view of dawn where one would rise with the sun the

following morning.

Such memories are not unique to the Partition but inheres

many other forms of displacements like social harassment as in Dewar,
famines as in Adalat, persecution as in Mahaan, simple disappearance as
in Mother India, or death of spouse or simply rinning way from marriage as
in Aradhana and Kati Patang respectively. These films portray displaced
families in which the structures that offer solace to couples, care to the child,
the old and the sick, support to the weak and draws succour from the
strong are broken leading to enormous suffering to the women and children and longing for the

men. The Bengalis tend to be more attached to the land while the Hindi film

appears to be more wary of the family. Ghatak’s concerns have more to do with

women’s statuses and roles and the loss of land which translates into loss of

livelihood for the men invariably changes the family equations for women. The

pampered eldest daughter of

Meghe Dhaka

Tara, Neeta sets out to become the family’s
only breadwinner while Sita, in Subarnarekha finds her shelter in a

brothel as her brother is unable to protect her from sinking into economic

ruin. Pather Panchali’s tragedy too

is a displacement when Apu and his family are forced out of the village due to

poverty. The changes that Apu faces subsequently can once more be traced to the

loss of precinct.

Despite the differences between the Punjabi and the Hindi

writers and the Bengalis, the former’s concerns with family and the latter’s

with land, Partition is merely seen as displacement. Such displacement from

one’s cultural and social milieu, economic foundations and homeland are

typically the concerns of the property owning male. For a woman, who has no

land, no choice in matters of her social milieu and no right to a homestead

since all of these she loses in a flash as she is married off, these concerns

of the Partition cannot be hers. A woman who is fated to be constantly

displaced and circulated between classes of men with no more dignity than as

chattel, Partition is just another episode. No wonder then when women make

films of post Partition it turns out to be something like the Goynar Baksho, a hilarity of the jealous

and possessive widow who turns, albeit through the grand daughter in law into a

financier of business and then sponsors the Bangladesh nationalism of 1971.

The Partition seems to have given the women of the family

some space to emerge as economic agents and then participate in larger

activities with transcendental political goals. The Partition may have helped

women to fill in spaces vacated by men, now too shocked and too stunned to pick

up the threads of their lives severed from the moorings. Many women hold on to

the more enabling memories of economic independence and an opportunity to enter

the workforce albeit perforce of the economic uprooting that comes along with

geographical displacement. Such memories even today constitute the hidden

support of women for the right wing discourses which are male centred and treat

women as barely tolerated obscenities. The right wing diktats on women’s

clothes, freedom of her movements and other similar comments on her being should

have raised strong feminist forces against these elements. Instead women seem

to be very well inclined towards the right wing especially those whose

predecessors have suffered the Partition. Partition truly cracked through the

family structures, the very same structures which are designed to curtail

feminine agency perhaps across human societies but more so for India. No

thinker seems to have noticed this except perhaps Aparna Sen, the director of

the film Goynar Baksho.

Then what does Miss T do with her thesis, Partition and

Cinema? What is she looking for in these films? How can I say what you are

looking for? I despair. She looks a kind of hurt and blank. Then I slowly try

to delve into her mind, wonder why does she look for such cinema? Why is she

searching through these films on Partition? I have realized through my long

years with research students that topics of their research seem to be connected

to their lives, to the questions which their lives pose for them, the answers

which they seem to be looking for. What could be Miss T’s search? Where could

have been the pilgrimage of her spirit headed to?

I took stock of Miss T’s anxieties and all of these

pertained to her future, a future which she should have been able to command

with her levels of academic attainment but which she may not be able to with

the impending unavoidable doom of marriage that awaits her. She is worried

about her marriage, when, where, with who and how her future will turn over due

to it? She is capable of earning her way through in life, she desperately wants

to help her parents into old age and she is capable of earning for her flat and

a car with the kind of brains that she has. Yet the oppression of the society

may force her into matrimony. Who should she be? Neeta of Meghe Dhaka Tara? Or

Sita of Subarnarekha, the old mother, the wife or the daughter of Garam Hawa?

Shall she meet the fate of Khamosh Pani? Or will she meet the fate of Pinjar?

Her life’s limits are emerging ever clear in her mind, and she regards her

future more with trepidation than with assured hope. She is on the anvil of

being uprooted from the coziness of her caring parental home. Like her thesis,

her life too has the Partition in the background.

What then is her search? Not the cinemas really but to look

into these cinemas deeply and then by some fantasy or escape find a way out of

its frames. Her intention to study the cinema is not to be in the cinema but to

move beyond it, ponder whether through those sad endings, some possibilities of

emancipation were left out? She is not really a cinema person, but a life

person who wishes to travel beyond the cinema. Her thesis uses the cinema as a

starting point but it will not end here, for she is not resigned to fates that

befell the women in the narratives but to create her own story line, create a

new narrative, albeit in the form of the cinema but where the endings of these

films she will draw differently. At least, this is what Miss T’s thoughts are,

to the best of my understanding of her in particular and of young people in

general.

Posted in Film Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mirza Ghalib and The Public Sphere

Posted on April 11, 2015 by secondsaturn

I subscribe to the Tata Sky and within the bouquet I get Javed Akhtar Active. This is really the channel I usually watch apart from the standard detective serials like CID, Monk, Castle, Mentalist and Adalat. All of these add substantially to the way my mind works. The other day, Javed Akhtar was discussing rahguzar, an Urdu word whose closest meaning in Hindi is the public space. We know of Habermas born in the year 1929 and dead only recently as the master theoretician of the public sphere. It was he who in a step by step manner through the use of historical memories of Europe arrived at the development of a public space which apart from the street squares and its cafes, its painting galleries and critique clubs also included the much circulated print media and literature. The idea of the public sphere was actually to stand between the State and the economy, economy as that being wholly located within the household of Europeans. The development of capitalism and the market then becomes the development of the public space; the exchange of goods and services being done through impersonal means of the famous “invisible hand” of Adam Smith. The crisis of the public sphere, according to Habermas, then lie in the confusion of economics with the public space and which then becomes corrupted by the interests of the capitalists.

The Urdu poets of India also imagined the public space. Since Urdu poetry has heavily influenced the Hindi films all through the decades of the 30’s to the 70’s, the idea of the public space in the popular Hindi film is developed out of the ideas of Urdu poetry and among them, the star is Mirza Ghalib. Ghalib wrote profusely in Persian and also in Urdu. Rah Guzar, a common theme among the Urdu poets is best imagined as the path which is passed and since this is a path, literally a road it is a public space. The public space of the Urdu poets is not merely a space beyond the home but it is also a moment in one’s journey, a moment, which because of the journey will necessarily pass into its next. The public space in Indian thought is therefore also one of mobility, which in the Hindi film becomes open to possibilities of upward social mobility. Protagonists are forever taking the road to find romance, love, lost parents and siblings and even large and unimagined fortunes. The Hindi film’s idea of the public sphere is typically a legacy of the Urdu poetry.

Ghalib imagines the public space as a space of liberation; it is typically without walls and enclosures and hence it is not a salon, nor a café. And because it is without enclosures it is emancipatory and liberating and liberating it is because within walls lie our social norms and rules that divides people into castes, religions, creeds, gender and age. It is the public sphere where these particularities are all mixed up and become the universal. Ghalib and the entire ilk of his followers seek this liberation of universality. Ghalib is no Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, the man who influenced modern Bengali poetry to no end, albeit through the prose of his novels. Unlike Ghalib, Bibhuti Bandopadhyay imagines the universality of the human being in his (he did not mention her) quest for transcendence and sublimity. There are then two moments, one is to move beyond the social barriers and the other is to sublimate beyond the realm of earthly affairs. Popular cinema combined both these; the Hindi cinema was more of Ghalib with a sprinkle of Bibhuti while the Bengali cinema was essentially Bibhuti with somewhat of Ghalib sprayed in. The differences between Ghalib and Bibhuti also mark the differences between much of northern India and the Bengalis.
Ghalib’s idea of the public sphere as a space for universality, where because the walls are broken and the frozen moments of the Being dissolved into the journey of the Becoming, is indeed the most emancipatory project in a caste ridden, ruled restricted society of India. The colonial rule of the British had one great contribution to the Indian life, it substantially undermined the powers of the Brahmins to call shots in burning widows and beating the Dalits. Thereafter, the “Hell” of emancipation appears to have broken lose aided fully by the creation of new forms of public space, namely the railways, “pice hotels”, hostels, “mess homes” and of course the “saudagari office spaces”. But there were two other major opportunities; one was the Freedom Movement itself and the other was cinema. Far more than the media or the novel, the printed books or calendar art, it were the Freedom Movement and the popular cinema those which gave a vent to the Indian being’s grandest dreams and which was the “dance freely with abandon on the streets”, the quotes being a sentence from a vaishnav kirtan. The street dance of the followers of Chaitanya, led through the thoroughfare of Bengal roads by Nityananda is the most cherished memory of liberation precisely because it helped pull people out of their enclosures into the universal public sphere, or the road, or the rah guzar which the Urdu poets speak of.

The cinema is full of the flavour of the road; and mostly women are placed into open spaces where they freely romance men, something which the walls of their homes would not allow. There are two ways of looking at the issue; the woman is given the right to be and occupy the open spaces and yet at the same time, she is invariably in the glare of the male consumer of cinema. By constantly bringing a woman into the open sphere, the cinema may have helped in creating a visibility and hence a right for a woman to inhabit the public spaces. But at another level, her being in it helped her being ‘seen’ and “gazed at” or “tasted” by men. Ghalib’s poetry speaks from a male point of view because he relishes the fact that in the public space he gets to see women who he may never have been able to see among his social milieu. But if it is a matter of intimacy then the public space is useless; one should go indoors and once more get into the wrangles of social rules and restrictions. The frangibility and the fragility of the public sphere lie in the desire for intimacy. This is a far cry from Habermas’s apprehensions that the pristine quality of the public sphere may be corrupted by the spilling over of capitalism. The anxieties around the public sphere in the West come to rest in capitalism, while for India it is sex. The crux of critique then which, for the modern world is all about the protection of the public as universal becomes weighed in terms of possibilities of sex in India. Sex, and not class constitutes the crux of the Indian society.

Then will our sociology be different from that of the West? Yes, beneath our theorizations of caste and class and the access to more equal opportunities and to the material resources of the society, is the Levi Straussian anxiety of women. Women are our wealth, she constitutes our opportunities and she must be protected just as a diamond, locked up indoors, guarded, as the lawyer defending the Nirbhaya’s assailants say of Nirbhaya. The politics of India at the core is around sexual access and this perhaps explains why our popular cinema which except perhaps of Amitabh Bachchan, rests solely around the question of betting and getting women. This also in all probability explains why sexual violence is so much on the rise, for sex is our politics and high costs of living, women’s liberation, the high fashion of cities and the growing inequality of both material as well as cultural wealth is creating more and more unequal access to desired women. Our politics of the growing right wing, our democracy getting more and more influenced by spheres of influence of the wealthy and celebrities and the fact of market now taking the place of the nation, intensifies our anxiety of being able to get the women we want, who are getting costlier and pricier to obtain.

Posted in Media Sociology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Bangladesh in ICC Quarter Final – The Idea Of A Nation

Posted on March 26, 2015 by secondsaturn

Iam a nationalist; I believe in nations and I love them too. I have never considered going abroad, working or even studying there for the fear that once I cross the political boundaries of my nation, I might lose my basic coordinates and thus become disoriented in the world and thereafter steeped in nostalgia may stop in the tracks of my spiritual, intellectual and emotional growth. NRI relatives and now friends really never inspired me except for their bags full of money, and which because provenance had kindly bestowed upon me, I was relaxed enough not to have pursued with any serious intent. Nations are sublime ideals which help you to consider yourself in larger dimensions, exist beyond your own time, find a continuity of purpose; people who do not seek larger entities for themselves cannot be nationalistic. I loved the USA, so I loved the UAE, the only two places I have ever been beyond my own country and after this I spent years reading up on their histories and cultures, cuisines and fads, religious sects and the ecclesia only to get under my skin, the feel of nations which become historical entities out of long journeys that their people have made together in time. I cannot realize myself wholly as an individual until and unless I have a nation. I am constitutionally not an NRI. Perhaps this is why I respect nationalism, take interest in national struggles even at the risk of those being, by specific arrangements of territories get treated as subnationalisms.

Sometimes I carry nationalism too far into competitive sports in which I want
India to win so badly that I lose focus from the game and forget to enjoy games
as games. This is why I stay away from the sports channels. But circumstances
made me watch for the first time ever, the ICC match between Bangladesh and
India and this is when my innate nationalism leaves me confused. During my childhood, the cricket matches were played more on the grounds to the galleries and less on television sets to couch potatoes. Our galleries were noisy but grounds, which were far away were usually silent except for the occasional appeal for “out” by the bowling teams. Sometimes, bats clicked as shots were played. But in the day and age of the television, now voices of players can easily be heard through close range microphones. Under such changed and “mediatically” evolved circumstances I was forced to partake in the India-Bangladesh match because my parents watch cricket keenly. It was then that I heard the players speak; and it was Bangla.

The Bangladesh players looked like Bengalis, they spoke in Bengalis, and their
mannerisms were stereotypically Bengali. They emanated from a culture that I was primarily socialized into, its literature which I read and they lived in lands around which my collective and historical memories have grown. And these are typically the very things that extend and enlarge me, place me into the transcendental and sublimated ideal like the nation. In sharp contrast, I never speak in Hindi, do not have any consonance with the so-called “Indian” festivals of Diwali or Ramnavami, I have no interest in their marriage rituals, or in their daily routines, I understand none of their family politics, or the meanings of their everyday lives. Suddenly I felt myself turn against in repulsion towards the so-called Indians; the bunch sitting on the spectator benches looked so crude, so uncultured, and full of the boorishness that non exposure to the refinement of the Bengali culture consists of. India was just an imagination; it was never a lived in reality in which I learnt to sublimate myself. In which language did I think of Mother India? In which language did I learn that India was the first among the nations in the world? It was not Hindi; it was Bengali. What was the Golden land that had to be freed from the British? It were the green paddy fields which lay in a limitless stretch under the vibrant blue skies which I often watched in the afternoons from the window of the mother’s village home. These were neither the Sahyadri, nor the Thar, neither the sea side nor the snow-capped hills. The lived in reality of a nation is the culture that you use to sublimate your mind. Bengal is a nation; divided or not. India is not one, united or otherwise. Not for a person like me who draw so much from her surroundings rather than be given to imaginative fantasies.

I suddenly wanted Bangladesh to win the match. I felt as if my identity, my moorings, my bearings depended on the victory; just as I felt moments ago for India. Bangladeshis played fabulously, bowled fiercely and compared to the relatively puny Indians, they looked robust and muscular. They stepped heavily, moved bodily and screamed violently; all the right kind of voice, eye and body language to make any nation proud. But then they all collapsed and lost the match rather timidly to India. The commentators, now known as the fourth umpires said that the Bangladeshi captain changed bowlers too often and experimented far too much rather than stick to the conservative strategies that was ensuring them wickets. To my mind, this was not so. The reason for Bangladesh team to lose the game were the three consecutive wickets which the umpire decisions refused to let them take. From what it appeared on television and me not really in sync with cricket these days, drawing up solely from my long term memory since my father went up to go to the washroom and my mother throwing holy water on a small make shift temple in one corner of our study board just in that short interval of bowler appeals, I was fairly convinced that Bangladesh was right and the umpires were wrong. This could have devastated any team and it did to Bangladesh as well.

But there was a caveat; the umpires’ decisions hurt the team so badly that they started destroying themselves. It was very clear that the Bangladesh game was self-destructive, suicidal and on purpose plotting defeat. This was a very strange behaviour emanating out of a set of young men purporting to represent their society and nation, thorough bred in the art of the game, excellent of technique, remarkable in physique and fitness. Is this then the character of the Bengali? Is it possible to break the Bengalis so easily? It seems that it is. Bengalis, it is said are emotional. It is easy to break Bengal by promoting bad press, spiteful media publicity. Bengal’s concentration can easily be broken. Speak of one Sarada scam, Bengalis lose faith in their leader; speak of non-industrialization political parties bend backwards to give away land to corporates like the Tatas and Jindals. Bengal has been easy to break, to colonize, to incite into violence, to crush under debts, to steal away from and to exploit. No wonder then Bengalis love dictators; Hitler is admired, his book Mein Kampf, is one of the best sellers. Part of Subhas Bose’s appeal lay in his ideas of dictatorship as being the best form of government for India for the first decade after Independence. In contrast to this, “India” seems to be staider and less emotional in its approach. Why this difference?

The difference between Bengal and India can be linked to homogeneity in one and diversity in the other. Bengal as an idea is homogenous in culture and continuous in territory; this culture can easily be produced through biological reproduction; languages are taught at home. Homogenous nations have poorly developed public spheres, less of formal interactions and exchanges between individuals are familiar, informal, and casual and if such cultures lose the hierarchies of feudalism and fall into the equality of democracy, the process of informalization gets accelerated. Those nations, or those universals like India which has not an iota of homogeneity, on the other hand develop a sort of outwardliness, a public space and hence attitudes and values of being capable of self-control and self-distancing which requires a great deal of formal behaviour. The informalization of the self of Bangladesh, the complete letting go of the attitude happened precisely because the homogeneity of culture gives the nation a certain familiarity whereas the facelessness of India helps provides the right kind of unfamiliarity that requires individuals to hold themselves more dispassionately. Dispassion is the fundamental requirement of rationality, of impersonal and scientific attitudes and indeed of performance and achievements. Too closed cultures are unable to achieve, and fall into the trap of garnering resources to reproduce their cultures in its purest forms. Brahminism was one of this kind, and it is not surprising that Bengal had seen the most fanatic version of this trait. Brahmins practiced high polygamy in form of Kulinism and Sati mostly in the manner of purification of culture. The idea of a Hindu nation came up from Bengal and the germinator of the idea of the Hindu Rashtra, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee being a Bengali and a kulin Brahmin was no coincidence.

Let us all teach ourselves a lesson from the Bangladesh debacle in the ICC quarter final match. Pursuit of homogenized cultures can leave us as under achievers in real life. India presently is enamoured by a homogenous culture; one of a Hindu-Gujju dominated axis, a culture in which the bania pursuit of immediate gain and gratification appears to rule. The advertisors such as Ray Titus is lauding the universalization of India’s youth and the television serials are converting these impulses of the homogenizing of a diverse people into family soaps. The significance of locating a universal culture in a family soap is to give it the right of emotions so as to make it appear as if the universals are procreated from wombs and nurtured among infants through primary socialization. The loss of cultural diversity can be a great loss to people for it takes away from them the sense of a distanced rationality, steeps them into emotions and hence “de-modernizes” them and eventually makes them go out of step with world constituted of formal,
rational and scientific and impersonal forces.

Posted in Media Sociology | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Amitabh Bachchan – Cricket Commentary

Posted on February 22, 2015 by secondsaturn

I have long stopped following cricket; I find that it was taking up far too much emotional space in my life. I decided to free myself of the affective efforts associated whenever India plays its cricket matches so that I could retain the focus in my mind on affairs at hand. Hence it is nearly after four decades that I sit in front of the television to watch a India-Pakistan match, part of the current Cricket World Cup season. The reason is simple. Amitabh Bachchan is in the commentary box, yet another chip added to his highly diversified portfolio. I follow Amitabh Bachchan for the compulsions of academic research and hence out flies my notebook and ball pen ready to pick up points that might help me to consolidate the idea of his persona.
The commentary is interesting because it helps me look inside Amitbah’s head; the way he looks at the world, the points he picks up, the images he constructs out of the labyrinth of what streams out as images apparently available to all uniformly and universally. It is here that I see how what Amitabh sees in a game of cricket. There are others in the commentary box as well; namely Kapil Dev and a professional commentator. I admit that I have not been following cricket for long now so I have lost touch with the names of commentators and the journalists. Kapil Dev’s commentary is much like that of the professional commentator because both are insiders of the game. They describe what unravels in front of them in terms of the strokes and balls, the fielding and the umpiring. They underscore what is there to be seen, they add background for the viewers of television the careers of the players, records of matches and explain to lay persons of the game why some shots are difficult and what kind of scores are comfortable and which are worrisome. They discuss strategies of games, in terms of the order of batsmen and comment on the quality of the cricket pitch. In short, they are in the game. Let me add that despite my gender and notwithstanding the fact that I never quite watched cricket after Gavaskar and Viswanath, Prasanna and Bedi, Solkar and Engineer, I am quite a connoisseur of cricket.
Amitabh’s comments are on a different plane. He of course reckons the statistics of players and knows through the laws of numbers the right kind of runs a team needs to make in each over of bowling. He also keeps track of historic data of past wins and losses. But he does something more. He analyses each player in terms of his mind, his habits, how he has trained, what his natural tendencies are and what he does with those. He also analyses performances of players in terms of their tendencies to perform under stress, he maintains secret diaries and noting on how people can perform under stress. He knows from the way Rohan Sharma holds his bat and plays his strokes if he has made up his mind to be in the game or is in a haste to score big runs. He guesses absolutely correctly that Shikhar Dhawan despite his discomfort with full toss deliveries the player intends to scrore sixerrs in order to overcome his own weakness and also to communicate his intentions to play the very same lollies which are so uncomfortable to him. Amitabh’s study of players are individuals in their various states of mind, their psychologies, their innate dispositions draws me to the game of cricket more as a field of study of capabilities, of skills and attitudes with which individuals sublimate themselves as parts of a larger whole, namely the team .
Amitabh quickly makes an assessment of the kind of physical fitness which cricket requires; more power and vigour in shoulder and arms for the bowlers and greater flexibility and strength in the hips for the batsmen because they have to stoop for such long hours. He compares the requirements of body tone of a cricketer to that of a film star and concludes that in terms of body fitness, the game demands more than his art and hence cricket is “superior” to cinema. Cricket is also psychologically more challenging than cinema because it holds players in a constant mode of competition with a pressure to win.
The stadium at Adelaide is packed with Indians and Pakistanis; in one corner a group of spectators of the match are holding up the tricolour with the overwriting “Indian Army”; indeed the cricket team is a metaphor for a battalion which has to win a war against the Pakistani attackers and save the nation. The cricket team of Indians is also called as the “India”, reinforcing the idea of the team as belonging to the imagined concept of the nation. I realize that viewing a game like a war pumps all that adrenalin inside my body and eventually turns me off from such supreme emotional investments. But Amitabh rescues the game from such strings and tie ups and raises the match is a plethora of human initiatives, their minds, and their spirits. The match ceases to be a war and graduates instead to an activity in which the human endeavours are extended to their limits. Cricket returns to me as a challenge. It is no longer a war in which a cricket team becomes a substitute for the Indian Army trying to reclaim territories lost to Pakistani infiltrators.
The commentators ask whether Amitabh supports India to which he replies resignedly that he has to because he stays in India; the superstar mentions that he may as well belong to Pakistan because that is where his mother hails from and were it not for the Partition, Pakistan may well have been his home. I am guilt free to appreciate and clap for Misbah, who has been my favourite for quite sometime now.

http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column-amitabh-bachchan-s-cricket-commentary-is-on-another-level-2061937

Posted in Media Sociology | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Rock Music

Posted on January 28, 2015 by secondsaturn

Text to be added

Leave a comment

Snehalata’s Suicide

Posted on December 16, 2014 by secondsaturn

On the 30th January 1914, Snehalata, a yet to be married teenager doused herself in kerosene and set her own body afire. According to the eyewitnesses who tried to rescue her, Snehalata had committed suicide. She pleaded her kin not to save her as she had willingly embraced death. No suicide note was ever found around her and she maintained her stoic silence in the hospital as she lay dying. The only communication that she at all had with the hospital staff was when she asked for gangajal to drink because she was a devout and a spiritual person. The immediate trigger of the suicide seems to be a letter that Snehalata chanced upon in which her father assures one Harendranath Bandopadhyay, father of Dhirendranath, a prospective groom for her, that he will arrange all the money to be paid as dowry by mortgaging his property in North Calcutta. Disgusted and despairing at the impending financial ruin that her father would fall into, Snehalata committed suicide before her marriage. Her suicide inspired many yet to be married girls of Bengal to similarly set themselves on fire and succumb to burns. Snehalata’s suicide alerted Bengal to the menace of dowry in its society. In the contemporary Bengali society of the times, these suicides were related to the issue of dowry. Snehalata’s biographer, Rebatibaran Bandopadhyay, her father’s friend portrayed her as a martyr to the cause of a better society while Prabahini, a Bengali newspaper construed the Snehalata’s suicide as one which was a result of a sense of agency by which a young girl assumed total control of her body and decided to annihilate the same. Prabahini condemned the suicide as having been influenced by the Western sense of individualism, death being the final emancipation. Even in death the forces of patriarchy as represented by the newspaper resented Snehalata’s assumption of control over her body. There were some interpretations of the extreme conservative forces which saw Snehalata as being one who stood against the Westernization of the society, given Rebatibaran’s account of her devout nature.
Tagore put forth his own explanation, namely the bleak domestic life facing a married woman was good enough a reason for her to commit suicide, where death is the only means for emancipation. Later discourses which reviewed and reinterpreted the suicide said that since there was neither a note nor a dying statement and Snehalata, being a loner and withdrawn girl given to obsessive religious fervour, her suicide was dysfunctional and misled. This discourse also insists that dowry may not have been quite the reason for taking her own life for the phase of social reforms were quite over and the country was given to nationalism. All of the above discourses are true but partially so. The truth lies in the combined wisdom of all of the above.
Snehalata’s suicide was not an isolated episode of protest or of existential doom; instead given the fact that it encouraged and inspired many other girls to follow suit and the slew of deaths that followed Snehalata’s suicide raises her act from a case of an individual into a social fact. What forces were gathered in Bengal of the times so as to inspire suicide?
Bengal, during the life and times of Snehalata sufferred from death wish; the boys often took to the bullet, assassinated the British officers and died in the gallows. There was also, due to Swami Vivekananda’s inspiring life, an attraction of men towards celibacy and mendicancy. Death and renunciation combined together to create a life denying proclivity of the spirit. There was also at the same time a growing sense of opportunities both in terms of the emergence of a public space, expansion of the State administration and definitely an increase in the opportunity of professional jobs. The social reforms, which were primal before the Sepoy Mutiny were now complemented by a political activism but was neither dead in Bengal nor in any manner waned. Instead, the social reform spread from Bengal into other parts of India and was integrated into the pan Indian political movement. The overriding flavour of the times was the development of a politics which was mired in and not exclusive of the social reformist agenda. Indeed, the last letters by the revolutionary martyr, Dinesh Gupta shows his overt concern with social ills, especially those found in the Bengali society.
To the best of my mind, the rise of the Ramkrishna Mission, Bharat Sevashram like organizations, the rise of Anushilan Samity and even the RSS and the inspired martyrdom of the Bengali young men have the desire to exercise an individual agency in the larger cause of the society. In the language of Emile Durkheim, this can be characterized as being altruist suicide, where a culmination of a high ground of morality, the desire to articulate an ideology, a desperation to change the system and an excitement of the soul causes an explosive annihilation of the self and the body. Snehalata’s suicide can be placed in the overall death wish of the Bengali society of its times. Indeed, for girls it was suicide because boys had a better chance to die by the gallows. Indeed, a few decades later, there was rise of Bengal women terrorists and the two generals of the Chittagong armoury raid, Kalpana Dasgupta and Pritilata Waddedar show very similar personality trends of being withdrawn and reticent as Snehalata did. Snehalata, thus has a universal dimension to her case.
The decades of the early twentieth century is known as the Bengal Spring, the age of the Sobuj Patro days, a journal literally called as the Green Leaf to signify the onset of spring. Snehalata may have desired to blossom in the spring as an individual, a person in charge of her own destiny and yet while the promises were galore, the real opportunities were rather restricted and her destiny appeared to be immutable from marriage and domesticity made worse by dowry. The rise of popular culture, which the Prabahini insists was a corrupting influence has a rather consistent impact of imbibing in its consumer a sense of individual agency, a sense of destiny, of serendipity and a higher meaning of existence which invariably imbibes a consciousness of being special and marked out for larger purposes of life. For a woman, or a young man, who faces only the bleak reality, the lure of a higher purpose might topple her over the top into self destruction. Despite heaping upon Snehalata the death wish in vogue among the youth in Bengal, one cannot deny the fact that dowry was definitely a growing evil of the Bengali society and that there was also a deep feminist angle to the suicides inspired by her.
Bengal has a rich tradition of feminine protagonist. Women have composed texts, spelt moralities, fought ethical battles. The feminine domain in Bengal has existed since ancient times in contest, competition and often in conflict to the male domain. We have Khana and Mihir fight over what should constitute astrology and whether astrology should be used for the prediction of the weather and crops or should it remain clearly a means to foretell individual fortunes. Khana was Mihir’s daughter in law and her popularity grew to overshadow the fame of her celebrated father in law. The latter is said to have killed Khana by pulling out and severing her tongue and leaving her to bleed to death. The post Vaishnav days saw the rise of Monosha who fought for space with Lord Shiva and consequently the battle of the Gods translated into a battle between Behula, the young bride and the ego of her father in law, Chand Saudagar. Debi Choudhurani, a female dacoit during the Sepoy Mutiny also stood against her greedy father in law, who exiled her because her widowed mother was unable to arrange for a good dowry. Women in the early 19th century were also great renouncers who often took shelter among the wandering minstrels to escape being burnt as a Sati or plain domestic violence. Women often stood as a moral force against patriarchy and many times like Khana, Behula or Debi Choudhurani faced the risk of being assassinated by the men in their own families. Therefore, it should not be very surprising if Snehalata and the others who followed her were actually protesting against dowry.
Historians may contest the above thesis by saying that were she to protest against dowry then where were her letters, pamphlets and so on. This strain of thought show a clear lack of understanding of the feminine spaces and feminine discourses in Bengal. The femininity of Bengal is also low economic class and hence of a lower social standing. Women’s power in Bengal comes from her subalternity.Bengal is overwhelmingly agrarian; rice cultivation is intensive and focussed and useless in larger fields. Much of the village economy also consists of processing simple food products like rice puffs and rice crisps; congealed pulse pastes, papad and above all, gur. There is also a substantial vegetable and fruit cultivation which requires the tending of leaves, shrubs and trees. These become women based occupations while weaving, oil crushing, trade are male activities. Feminine and the masculine are thus often in a Marxian conflict over issues of appropriation of surplus. Women have their own spaces, ow channels of communication, own set of coded friendships like mouriphool, juiphool, secret names by which close associates are referred to and communicated with. Denied of communication through the public sphere, women spread their messages through rituals, fables, folklore; a communication made possible by the peculiar arrangement of their economy. This network today translates into kitties of village women, which manifests today as microfinance. Women’s agency translates as silence into the public sphere precisely because the latter does not have the necessary auditory apparatus to pick up the sound bytes. Snehalata is not silent; she appears to be silent because she does not have the same timbre as the voices in the public sphere. Yet in a tradition inherited from Khana and Benhula, Phullara and Prafulla, she is a very articulate woman, who wishes to claim her dignity in the new age that dawns and when denied of the same by an impending marriage without which the society has not been able to accept the existence of a woman, extinguishes that very life of hers which must be defined in terms of fetters of social customs and hence denied human freedom. Snehalata claims her dignity by denying her body to patriarchy; her suicide speaks a language which even the present day and age is scarcely capable of decipher.

Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

On Bhai Phnota Day.. Some Random Thoughts

Posted on November 3, 2014 by secondsaturn

When the autumn holidays and the delirious celebrations of the festivals would draw to a close and we would scurry everywhere to collect our school exercise books, pens, maps, atlases and the books and notebooks, bhai phnota would be our only solace of that one more time of gaiety and gathering. The season of festivals start with the Mahalaya and end with bhaiphnota. Grandparents would explain that we start our revelries by tarpan, remembering our ancestors and end it with marking out our brothers as the ancestors of our future generations. Some of my girl cousins would balk at such explanations of only boys being considered as ancestors of the future family and when grandmothers insisted that the women will be remembered by their husband’s families, severe arguments would break out. Aunts intervened invariably to suggest that we enjoy our dalpuris instead of nit picking on meaning of ceremonies and rush us to book advanced shows of latest film releases. Bhai phnota nonetheless remained an important festival, not because each of the nuclear families had brothers but because each nuclear family drew its identity from a larger joint family. Bhai phnota conceals at its core the idea of the Hindu Unidivided Family; if it were only between a brother and a sister, the festival would not have transcended and transformed into a festivity. Families which do not have a larger dynasty to refer to do not and cannot celebrate bhai phnota in a manner of which I knew in my childhood.

I remember the long trains of bedcovers, one following the other to make a large square when brothers in each generation would sit cross legged on the floors with a plate full of savouries, the larger the number of sisters larger the number of items were on the plate . While there could be differences in platter across generations; elders would have made different stuff than what our generation offered, there was no difference among the boys within the same generation. This is because none of us, out of an unwritten code ever discriminated between own siblings, first cousins, second cousins and those who we called as brothers. Servants of the family were not left outside the ambit, even they had their share of the phnota. Neighbours and tenants were converted into “brotherdom”. Bhai phnota’s charm lies not in a family reunion but in the inclusive and exhaustive enumeration of males as being associated with the future of a dynasty. Unlike rakhi, bhai phnota is not about a brother and a sister, but about a ceremony of ancestors, of a recognition of the veins where blood should flow, of major alliances of a family, a network of brotherhood from which one can draw support. Bhaiphnota is an accumulation of social capital.

I have seen bhaiphnota decline and slowly disappear in my family. Mother has lost nearly all her brothers to old age and most of us, in our generation live in other cities and other countries. We have to rationalize our visits back home to coordinate surgeries, illnesses, births and deaths. We have our college and school reunions, we have our various tasks of home renovation, signing of tenancy agreements and many a times club visits with some kind of career pursuits like book launches and seminar presentations. Bhai phnota seems to be the lowest in our list of priority. It seems that this is one festival we would rather like to forget. Even cousins who live in Kolkata treat the festival as only occasions for eating out rather than for the sobriety of the ceremony. Resistance to patriarchy is indeed a possible reason for the loss of popularity of the festival in our kind of families but there is a larger process at work. I think that we have lost our sense of the larger family because we have lost our sense of future.

Bhai phnota is growing in glamour and importance. Servant maids, drivers, and the various other service providers like plumbers, electricians, taxi drivers are closed for business because they are away at the celebrations. It is here that the institution of the family is being discovered anew, perhaps for the first time in the aeons. A section of people who never had known of something like bhai phnota, typically only reserved for the high echelons of the city of Kolkata, tables are turning very steadily and rapidly. It is the proletariat which looks towards organizing and uniting, for they are enjoying a standard of life, levels of consumption as never before. They are the upwardly mobile who are now discovering relatives and kins, finding ties, seeking roots, and in short, slowly, bit by bit building up social capital. While inequalities sit pretty tight, the differences between the elite middle class and the hitherto downtrodden service class, the Shudras of the Bengali bhadralok society are now closing. This closure seems to have sent the upper middle classes into a tizzy of survival when every penny one earns is dedicated towards maintenance of the self into the verisimilitude of one’s inherited class. And assuredly when survival within a class is imperilled, one is struggling to belong to her social class and to keep up with cousins and kins, unsure when at least an equal status will all at once be denied to her, it is difficult to keep up a sense of the family.

Indian sociologists have studied the institution of thefamily generously, noting the changes in the structure of the family from its state of undividedness into nuclearization. They have assigned every class of causes to such a transformation, urbanization, size of family, modernity and individualization, change of occupation from agriculture and business to individual professions. These explanations mark the change in the family from one state to another but do not relate these to the processes within the family, the constant switch between the private and the social investments. When individuals feel the pressure of being downwardly pushed out of her social class, investments are directed at the self and then at the nuclear family. The situation is one of urgency, the immediate concern is to save oneself and one’s nuclear family rather than indulge in the luxury of cultivating the larger civic groups such as the extended family. The danger of loss of social position is then the issue behind the loss of a sense of future and with that of the larger family. Conversely, among those who sense a rise in their relative prosperity and thus acquire a sense of the future move on to the larger social planes of extended families. Bhaiphnota has settled in these quarters after having moved out of our kinds of homes. The rise of the festival among the lower social classes and its imminent dissolution among the upper classes is therefore an indication of the redistribution and reorganization of wealth in the society.

Democracies reflect such changes in politics of anti-incumbency and change, the promise of a Poriborton or the Second Republic of the Hindu Rashtra or any other form of politics which may reflect such a structural upheaval without a visible and apparent or violent revolution.

Posted in Festivals | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment