The Death of A Stunt Biker – Divine Justice

Posted on August 1, 2013 by secondsaturn

I don’t like deaths and especially the unnatural ones. I don’t like accidents or murders and much worse, I hate suicides and executions. The only reason I oppose the death penalty is because I cannot stand the gore of someone being put to death; whatever it is I don’t like it when the army kills terrorists in Kashmir or in Batla house and lays out the bloody bodies up for display. But much to my surprise, I seem to rejoice the death of Karan Pandey just as Ram’s army rejoiced the death of Ravana. Karan Pandey is an enemy of the civilization which hones me and this boy, to my mind was the enemy of all that I stand for. His death brings a sense of Divine Justice; his death conveys to me how much I wish to eliminate the whole ilk that this teenage boy seems to represent.

Karan Pandey is the teenage boy who died in the police firing while performing a bike stunt atop a pillion. The policeman fired at the tyres of the bike just at a time when this boy did a wheel stunt in which he bent down almost touching the ground only to rise up again. Unfortunately for Karan, he fell to the bullet that caught up, seered through him and left him as a corpse. Thus ended Karan’s life. As a brief obituary, Karan was raised by a single mother, a very middle class mother who slogged at work and toiled at home, managing roles of both being a breadwinner and a homemaker, taking on responsibilities and worries of raising a child. Yet this child did not cooperate with her; he kept bad company of bikers, was out at wee hours past midnight, and exhausted his energies in bike stunts. We also know that he was out of school, was trying to work through his education through correspondence; and when we add to this his nocturnal activities we know that he was desperate, rash and disobedient. His mother, tired from a full day at work and exhausted in the kitchen and wrapping up the clothes, the sheets, the linen, the towels, books and papers, payments and plans of the day, was unable to have a good night’s rest because of her son’s truancy.

Stunt biking is expensive; it costs as much as Rs 20,000 per month for its upkeep. Stunt bikers need special fuel which comes at Rs 700 per litre, the brakes cost Rs 30,000 and must frequently be changed and relined. This means that stunt bikers need money which is unaffordable for most middle class homes and yet these bikers come from the lower middle classes. It may be easily concluded that these boys put enormous pressures on their families to part with the money. Fathers take to corruption, sisters to prostitution; mothers take on the chores from the maid servants, often crowding occupations like massage, beauty parlours and also insurance agencies. Boys of this category exploit and destroy the very fabric of their families. The demand from these boys disturb the contentment that the middle class was so blessed with and along with this comes the avalanche of the Durkhemian anomie where the values, norms and the morality of the society are executed at the altar of the Mammon. And all this they do because they are born as boys !! Few of us have ever noticed that it is the boys in the category of Karan Pandey that is at the root of a rapidly declining society of India in the 21st century. Hence he is the enemy of our civilization.

Karan had many things going for him; he was a boy child, he was upper caste and a Hindu and he lived in South Delhi. Ask the girl child, ask the Dalit, ask the minority and ask the children from small towns what enormous Karan’s privileges were. And yet he threw them all; only a deep contempt for the mother, a desire to punish the mother can push him to such limits which gave way easily and ended his journey at the Malviya Nagar crematorium. Karan was brought up only to demand what other boys got; he had no clue of what he had which many more boys like him did not have. Karan, like the Mahabharatic Karna was indeed cursed; for he lived a life of dissatisfaction, never been able to recognize the gifts that the Universe arranged for him. Among the Bengalis we never name boys as Karan, I have little idea why in North India this is such a favourite name.

The whole idea of stunt biking is to disturb the public space, disrupt the discipline of the public roads. Stunt bikers attack policemen, pelt stones and it is this psychology of offending the public space, the public norms and the public discipline that girls are also raped. The rape of Nirbhaya was a defiance of the police, of law and order, or citizen sensibilities and of civic sense. Stunt biking, rape, arson, riot, terrorism, hacking of Internet sites are crimes of the same hue; they are ways in which unspent energies of the youth are expressed. This energy could have been spent in becoming a Bose or a Marconi, another Amitabh Bachchan, a Sukanto Bhattacharya, a Milkha Singh, a Tiger Woods, a Bill Gates. The fact that the youth become terrorists, rapists, rioters, arsoners, stunt bikers, auto lifters show that they choose to walk the path of destruction and death making our contemporary culture a dying culture. These young men have an excessive will which instead of using in creative pursuits squander away in cheap thrills and going for the kill. Once upon a time, the game of buzkashi developed in Afghanistan; a keen sighted sociologist would have easily understood that Talibanism would just be the next step; the economy of youth energy is similar in both the cases. Karan Pandey was thus the carrier of a demonic energy which unchecked is leading to a total breakdown of law and order and eventually of the society. It is he who disturbs the concentration of the middle class youth; it is his image that corrupts minds away from focussed application in higher pursuits.

The story of civilization has often been the story of mental concentration; civilizations have risen on the merit of mental concentration of its people, they have declined on their being unmindful. Karan’s activities are not those of focus; they are of distracting oneself from those activities which need more focus more concentration. He is also completely bereft of spirituality because he has not learnt to value his gifts, namely born in a class that has far more beneath him than the numbers ahead of him.  Besides he is unkind and cruel to his mother, perhaps blaming her always for being single, holding her in contempt because she has to earn a living, harassing her because she is weak from overwork and all this because he is a boy. Karan is the scourge of the Indian middle class, its most corrupting influence, and the cancer cell of our civilization. Sometimes I believe in Divine Justice, Karan’s death is one instance of the same.

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Rituparno Ghosh, My Preparatory Notes

Posted on July 20, 2013 by secondsaturn

Rituparna

Rituparna Ghosh was a maverick film director who heralded a new age in the Bengali avant garde cinema. Ritu, as he is known in his close circles, revived the sombreness of the classical renascent Bengali culture. His dense and detailed style of cinema and especially his classical timbre revived an interest in the culture and aesthetics of Bengal. Armed with the weapon of a Tagorean culture, Rituparna waged a war upon the popular cinema and popular culture of his times and established his new politics that seemed to create an elite set of cinema viewers. This cultural warfare marked Ritu’s style of film making, the cut of his clothes, the design of his jewellery, the décor of his sets, the colours of his frames and the depth of his visuals. Though his cinema is avant- garde in form because he exploited new styles and angles of film making, Ritu derived his material from the legendary past of Renascent Bengal.

His admiration for classical style and his internalization of Tagore made him pursue a rather different style of dress and speech. Initially his effeminacy was carefully cultivated in order to convey a state of cultural refinement but slowly he became the icon of trans- sexuality. He presented himself as a hermaphrodite against a certain crassness that defined masculinity in his times. Intellectually he seemed not only to question the various notions we uncritically accept in our cultural socializations but he even went deeper into reinterpreting many motifs of the Bengali culture of famous novels and religious texts. He usually wrote his own stories in which he delved deep into human minds by putting bits and pieces of remote information together in a logical and consistent whole. No wonder then Agatha Christie’s detective, Miss Marple was his self-image! Each of his films seems to probe very acutely into what lay behind events and episodes that seem so predictable, commonplace and patterned. Just as in Miss Marple’s village where life never seemed to move at all and yet were spaces of simmering crimes, Ritu’s world too is apparently still, routine and clichéd underneath which lay strong currents of sexual politics and emotional manipulations where the roles of the oppressor and the oppressed would often exchange places.

Home is very central to Ritu’s motifs. He stylizes the home in great details. It is said that he revived the Bengali aesthetics of interior decoration just as he stylized jewellery and the saree. In fact, in the television talk show, Ghosh and Company that Ritu hosted he used his own sitting room as the studio to set standards of home décor. Ritu’s cinema was as much about style as it was about stories told rather differently. The home was where Ritu’s style found their ultimate expression. Ritu was all about decorating the home and just as he would dress himself up with eye liners and turbans and long alkhallas and achkans, he also used chest of drawers, book cases, lamp shades, designer dining sets, heavily upholstered sofa sets and expensive wall covers to deck up the interiors; these were his statements about his cultural tastes and status.

The family was sacred to Ritu; it was the space into which people returned and retired, where the sick would be nursed and the hurt would be consoled; it was where the child would be nurtured and the elderly would be cared for. He could detect even the slightest disturbance to the equanimity of this sacred space. Ritu’s films were status quoists; they were about securing the peace of the home and he could mercilessly strip anyone who he felt could be a threat to the peace of this home. Home is also the safe refuge for a young mind like him who found the competitive and harsh culture of his times to be too loud and definitive for his comfort. The home is also the haven where the genius is honed.

Although he is wary of macho men, Ritu is sceptical also of strong women. He feels that strong women, like egoistic men are detrimental to the peace of the home. He feels that strong women should have the grace of the victor rather than wear the gawkiness of the victim. He blames the confident and capable women of disturbing domestic peace and invariably upholds the emasculated male as the repository of good sense. As a story teller, Ritu is not the one to be overwhelmed by feminist discourses; instead he finds feminism to be a great lie of civilization, one which can do more harm than good, one which is more rigid that creative, more ideological than pragmatic. Despite this, his ideal is Miss Marple, the homebird, the post-menopausal, one who is a great housekeeper but lives all by herself helped by maids and one who is beyond usual demands made upon her by social relationships. And because of her being utterly ensconced within the society and largely unnoticed except in a charitable way because of her age and slight infirmity, she can get an unabashed view of the truth in which humans are not what they seem. Ritu’s characters are complex, mired within their fixations and notions, trapped in self-obsessions and untrue socializations. Such characters Ritu explores just as Miss Marple does through close surveillances in order to draw studied inferences.

In many ways Ritu is post gender; he does not believe that men and women can really ever be gendered. Instead they are fluid across gender, often changing roles. Human relations are not about negotiating across gender roles as feminism makes them out to be; instead they are about helping each other grow into realising their fuller potential. Relationships in which one partner looks towards the other for assurance is a failed relationship and women do this more because they look upon themselves as victims. Beautiful and talented women often look towards their love interests as their mirrors that would always assure that they are the most beautiful persons in the world. Should a man claim his existence as an individual instead of a mirror, the grand dames would sulk and be peeved. Men are quiet doormats in Ritu’s films while women are acerbic, sarcastic and abrupt.

A recurrent motif of Ritu’s films is death. The obsession with death is perhaps a Tagorean influence on him but it is also the inner most anxiety in nuclear families in which we live extremely isolated lives, disconnected with a wider network of kins. Also death becomes an anxiety to those who can no longer live up to the standards of their earlier generations. Death seems to worry Ritu and hence he raises it to a sublime affair; it is the ultimate peace, the final rest. It is the grandest equilibrium.In those films where there is no death, indispositions in health closer to death are portrayed. Death creates a distance which increases our abilities to reflect upon those who leave us and rediscover them anew now that our conflicts with them are transcended.

Rituparna started his work as a copyrighter in an advertising firm and then was the editor of a film gossip magazine, Anandalok. Both these strains have prominently marked the treatment in his films. He uses gossip to disentangle complexities that underlie human characters, their failings and their secret selves. He uses advertisement montages to attract a niche audience to the theatres for whom the lifestyle portrayed through his cinema becomes the aspirations of the upper middle class intelligentsia of the Bengalis. His films gave his audiences a culture, a lifestyle and which was his politics. His television talk show, Ghosh and Company, in more than one way was an extension of his films where he used the same gossipy style of the quintessential Bengali adda. In a manner, he reinstated the “drawing room” culture of the Bengali society, something that went amiss for many years all through the decades of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Ritu’s cultural statement was so loud and clear that every celebrity in Bengal wanted to be a part of his projects to earn the legitimizing Rituparna tag.

Rituparna was a self-taught film maker. His father, Sunil Ghosh was a documentary film maker and it is possible that he was born into the craft of cinema. But Ritu drew heavily from Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen using their compositions, the angles of their camera, their way of setting up scenes, the density of texture and their rhythm. What is interesting is that Ritu makes no attempts to hide the fact that he has borrowed heavily from the works of these maestros and this is because Ritu reinterprets many of their films and extends the scope of their narratives. A very good example of this is Utsab in which Ritu reinterprets Ray’s film Sakha Prasakha and Antarmahal is a revisitation of Ray’s Devi. Similarly Ritu’s film, Bariwali is a punch of Mrinal Sen’s Akaaler Sandhane and Khandhar but the auteur director goes far beyond the vistas that Sen had set up.

A major lack that kept Rituparna away from winning his accolades as a master director was his utter inability to handle pace in cinema. His cinema was unable to follow events; they merely followed situations and while they could create the borders of a Universe, they could generate no energy for activity in the viewer. However, because his characters lacked an inner energy and were not driven by larger goals of life, or by aspirations to achieve statuses higher than where they lived, and the film narratives were driven more by the director’s will than by the logic of events, Ritu, like all the auteur directors was seen as the ‘author’ of his cinema. His stars were mere actors in his films. Even the mighty Bengali superstar, Prasenjit who would spit fire with his aggressive dialogues and powerful fights became an emasculated man, heavily laden with his sentiments and emotions, more comfortable to stay at home than to conquer the worlds. This flayer of demons and slayer of Gorgons lay helplessly stripped of his ego and bereft of his wilfulness in the face of the irate exasperations of his lady love. Aishwary Rai too was reduced to playing characters rather than herself in Ritu’s films viz; Raincoat and Chokher Bali.

Yet, Ritu started his career as a film maker by directing a popular film. His first film, Hirer Angti, was based on a children’s novel of the same name by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay. Ritu made all the right moves composing his shots mainly as Satyajit Ray would, using similar camera angles and lighting and in some places he worked also like Shyam Benegal and Mrinal Sen especially in the scenes with the gangs of the dacoits. Unfortunately the film was a massive failure and Ritu, taking Sandip Ray’s (Satyajit Ray’s son) advice that one must always study one’s failures in order to go ahead in life seemed to have learnt that making commercial cinema with universal appeal was not his forte. Ritu perhaps understood three things from this failure; one is to never attempt making movies on others’ stories, two, not to attempt a commercial cinema and three, that he lacked a major ingredient of cinema and which is pace. Ritu simply had no conception of pace or of rhythm. He thus concentrated on art house and stylistic cinema which was the main reason why he revived lifestyle and eventually raised it into his own brand of politics. Ritu wrote his own stories and while he still used Ray and Sen’s misc-en-scen he heavily started reinterpreting them.

While Tagore was always in his mind and Ray was his role model, Ritu was inspired by Abanindranath Tagore. Abanindranath wrote children’s novels but the prose was so picturesque and poetic that they made audio visual frames automatically. The sterling line in the opening paragraph of Abanindranath’s novel, Shakuntala described the clear and still waters of the river, Malini and this set off in the minds of Ritu, then only a boy of seven, images that rhymed with the stillness of the river. Ritu was seven because Shakuntala was a rapid reader for class II in the West Board of Madhyamik Education. It is my surmise that Ritu had a refined sensitivity which pushed him into reading poetry of Tagore and novels of Abanindranath. He appears to be little interested in the stock of children’s novels of his times like Satyajit Ray, Shashthipada Chattopadhyay, Sibram Chakaraborty, Narayan Gangopadhyay and others. He seems to be steeped in the yester years of Bengali culture and this perhaps alienated him from his peers. The accent, the demeanour, the stance, the body language, the gaze and the sensibilities and aesthetics that Ritu developed were distinctly of a Tagorean era, mistakenly read as being effeminate.

While Ritu succeeded as an avant garde film maker, he could never reconcile with the failure of his first film, Hirer Angti. He understood that though he was a competent art house director, he missed out on the knowledge of commercial cinema. He can be seen trying to understand the formula of the commercial cinema in his interviews with various personalities from commercial cinema when he hosted the talk show, Ghosh and Company. I wonder whether he ever understood the crux of the popular cinema; popular cinema is about aspiring and achieving individuals while Ritu’s concern was with individuals trying to accommodate with one another within the confinement of their homestead. Ritu’s films much like him never left home.

Ritu’s stay at home attitude, search for Tagorean aesthetics, involvement in the classical Bengali culture and his love for the soft and innocent pictures of Abanindranath Tagore alienated him his peers in an age of growing competition and consequently of masculinity. The jibes, leers and the snide remarks which his manners attracted from his peers may have continued in his professional field as well. This made Ritu pose as a gay, work for gay rights and even attempt feminine roles in Arekti Premer Golpo and Chitrangada. Ritu’s being as a gay person and his search for a sexual partner could have been a search for a companion which unfortunately he never got. He was too involved in the pursuit of his genius to spare time for marriage and family and though the institution of the family was sacred to him, he did better at being a child to his parents, yet another motif that seemed to mark many of his films. Ritu found no friend and the donning of sexuality was perhaps his way of luring people into being friends with him. The disguise of a homosexual was perhaps the saddest of all episodes of Ritu’s life.

Ritu directed a major television serial which he produced with the actor and superstar, Prasenjit Chatterjee, Gaaner Opare. The serial was running narrative to create situations for the play of various Tagore songs. The aim of the serial was not the story but the songs, pretty much the reason why Ritu also made his film Nouka Dubi. Ritu’s Tagore obsession can be seen in the use of his poetry, background scores, the use of songs, and cinematic representations of two novels and one play, namely Chokher Bali, Noukadubi and Chitrangada. Ritu, inspired by Tagore, also learnt to write Brajabuli, and wrote lyrics in the language! He wrote the lyrics in Brajabuli for his film Raincoat and also for Sanjay Nag’s film, Memories in March, and he acted in a lead role in the last mentioned.

While he lived, Ritu steadily cultivated a group of influential friends. His talents took him places but he realized that until and unless he had friends in high places, he would not get the stage he requires to express himself. He carefully cultivated celebrities and Aparna Sen was the main person who Ritu befriended. Through her Ritu found his first few steps to enter into the film world. Ritu walked straight into Aparna’s heart by tapping the innermost recesses of her heart in which lay betrayals of the men she loved. Unishe April and Titli are also Aparna Sen’s stories of her pain just as the Last Lear is the story of Amitabh Bachchan’s dark and deeply held secret. Ritu found an immediate invitation into the lives of these celebrities by his empathy. Indeed, the character, Rangapishi, played by Rakhee in Ritu’s film Shubho Maraharat, based on Agatha Christie’s novel, The Mirror Cracked From Side to Side, plays up to the culprit and extracts a confession just as the way in which Ritu could have anyone and everyone open up to him. This was the secret behind his plum post as the editor of Anandalok.

Despite these manipulations, Ritu’s film making talents can never be gainsaid. He understood clearly that he was not the one made for popular cinema in which protagonists fight with the wider world and overcome their constraints through a flow of energy transforming their lives and the objective realities facing them. Ritu wished to rule the world from the confines of his home, seated firmly in his position from where, like a conductor in an orchestra he would guide and nudge the world to fall in line with his will. Art house cinema is all about maintaining the equilibrium of the status quo and this, Ritu understood very well. The masters who he internalized, namely Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, were award winning directors and they made art house cinema. For Ritu, art house cinema seemed to better suit his style which derived heavily from the above mentioned master directors. Reflected upon, in another way, Ritu, together with his style and film making styles ensured that he cracked the formula of winning film awards and praise from cine critics. Thereafter, the fact that he could never make a popular film on the lines of Tapan Sinha did not worry him. Aparna Sen seems to have influenced Ritu the most among his contemporaries. Ritu developed his style so close to Aparna Sen that films like Unishe April and Titli are often mistaken as the latter’s works. Interestingly, these are also films in which Aparna Sen played the lead role and Ritu may well have move towards her style in an effort to explore her essence. Like Aparna Sen and every other auteur director, Rituparna’s style evolved out of his world view.

Ritu was not only unabashed about imitating the masters but he seemed to insist that the viewer’s notice these parallels. This was because he was as if competing with the masters, showing off to them that he indeed could make better films. Mrinal Sen says in his tribute to Rituparna after the latter’s death that it seemed to him that Ritu was trying to beat him at his craft. Ritu adopted the craft of the masters out of which he developed his own film making style as an art. He drastically reinterpreted Ray’s film, Sakha Prasakha and Devi and dug out the forgotten tale of Binodini and her mentor Girish Ghosh and pasted it on Satyajit Ray’s affair with the actress playing Charulata, Madhabi Mukherjee in Abohoman. Ritu challenged Ray in his cinematic rendition of Tagore. Just as Ray had created Charulata, Ritu creates Chokher Bali and Noukadubi. Ray had made a film out of the famous Bengali detective Byomkesh Bakshi created by Saradindu Bandopadhyay and Ritu’s latest and as yet unreleased film, Satyanweshi is again a story around the detective. Ritu did compete with Ray. However there was a major difference; Ray normally used novels written by others while Ritu mainly wrote his stories himself. In his story writing, Ritu seems to be most influenced by Suchitra Bhattacharya, a strong feminist writer who Ritu again twists and tweaks to give it a flavour not very kind to women. In the last, Ritu seems to have really internalized Tagore because his novel Chokher Bali is extremely unkind to intelligent women.

Ritu’s quarrel with Mrinal Sen was on a different plane altogether. Mrinal Sen was steeped in his political ideology and this Ritu felt stood in the way of his analysing reality in its microstructure. Ritu teared through Sen’s macro vision which placed characters as pawns in Sen’s ideological matrix while he slowly, with the deftness of a chiropractor prized out deeply hidden nuances from the minds of men and women and laid them bare on the screen. Ritu’s contribution lies in discovering types of women; there is a self-involved artist and a neglected child in Unishe April, a successful career woman who lacks emotional intelligence in Asukh, a set of overreactive ideologues in Utsab, a naïve idealist and a smart victim in Dahan and so on. Undoubtedly, Ritu, like Tagore creates categories out of women rather than of men; his films often are known for the women players.

Ritu is more likely to be the one who worked with stars rather than launching new stars. In his films, he was the star. Like many of the important characters in his films who remained unseen on screen, Ritu was the great presence who remained behind the scenes but clutching every moment  of the film in his tight grip, never letting characters take on lives of their own. While this confirms his position as the auteur, Ritu’s films, unlike those of Ray’s could not create characters that would become icons within the timeless cultural stock of Bengal.

One wonders how would the generation next recall Rituparna Ghosh and his films; to the best of my guesses made from the study of opinions and comments floating around in the social media, Ritu will be noticed more for his bold sexuality especially his homosexuality than his much deeper understanding of asexuality. Looked at carefully, Ritu’s ideological stand seems to veer around platonic relationships where the sexuality of the respective partners do not matter. This is why Kaberi, of Dosor forgives her unabashedly infidel husband and sinks back into marriage; or in Shob Choritro Kalponi Ritu extols a marriage in which the wife, Radhika is attached both to her lover and her husband while in Abohoman, the Aniket does not seem to spoil his marriage with Deepti despite his flings with Sikha. Ritu just tramples upon sex, moves it aside and goes in search of a spirit higher than the impulses contained just in the body. This is why he seeks Tagore so deeply, not only in his films but also in his own life, where Ritu, unable and unwilling to fall into the masculinity of his times, retreats into a shell, emerging out of it in public in the disguise of a transgender. Ritu was no transgender, he was also not a feminist; he was completely a man with partiality towards men, those men whose sensitivity had marginalized in a world of competitive and gross males. Ritu’s eloquence also helped him to distract his viewers. He used his enormous command over the Bengali language and measured and chewy accent upon the Tagorean timbre of his voice to say how empathetically he tried to understand his women making us believe that he was a feminist.

Ritu went to college to study economics; one infers that he wanted to be in employment or write competitive examinations. This, as his own film Chitrangada says, he did to please his parents. But it was a subject that would have led him to professions without any sensitivity towards the arts and music. The choice of a career as a film maker was perhaps to remain in a profession where his proclivities towards cultural refinement would have been satisfied. There was yet another reason which I surmise must have been the case; directing a film is a definite way of defining the cultural rules and standards of a society and Ritu, himself marginalized by a crassly masculinizing society decided to set the rules of the game by which he would set such norms that the leering and jeering society would be defeated in his hands. This he did and very successfully because Rituparna led the new film movement in which the Bengali film aesthetics were rediscovered and rejuvenated and a whole new language of film making could be established. No film is a better example of this new language than Shob Choritro Kalponik.

Unlike Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Aparna Sen, Rituparna has been vocal outside of his film sets. He has designed clothes, jewellery, recited poetry, hosted talk shows and written long letters and commented on cinema. In all of these activities Ritu has been more like a school teacher correcting accents, criticising dress sense, disapproving attitudes and deriding the use of short forms of names, like Ash for Aishwarya. He writes a letter to the actress saying that were he to be her, he would never have conceded to writing his name in the corrupt form. In every possible way, Ritu insisted on his classicality and ticked those off who did not measure up to his standards. He seems to have used his talk show, Ghosh and Company to the core to spread his cultural superiority upon his guests and through them on the viewers at large. He even would give large and heavy coffee table books to his guests much like the prizes for academic performances in school!

One is tempted to raise a question, what would it have been to live life as Rituparna Ghosh? It was a life of glitter and gloss and glamour but beyond the party, when guests would leave, the home was empty. As much as Ritu would stuff his home with antiques and paintings and pile up his books on table tops rather than use book cases just in the way Satyajit Ray would keep his coffee table editions one upon the other, at the end of the day heavy sighs and silent tears rather than the sound of laughter would fill his private space. Ritu never thought he was good enough for the world of men, choosing to operate from outside its frames rather than participate in it, which explains why he would often instruct his music director of many films, Debojyoti Misra to make the background score in a manner that it only plays without requiring any active listening. This non participation in life did not permit him to marry and have a family of his own and yet at the same time his yearning for company. He perhaps thought that friendship with women might create its own problems and which is why he looked for male company. His greatest tragedy is that he tried to ensure friendship with men by arousing in them a sexual need for him; this was his great undoing, a tragedy which he confesses in his film Chitrangada. Ritu, like the protagonist, Rudra, decides to revert back to his moorings, abandoning his attempts at changing his sex. Ritu, like Rudra too wants to go back home where his mother has refurnished his room with new curtains except that by that time both his parents were dead, and a return to them could only be through his.

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Obituary Rituparno Ghosh

Posted on June 2, 2013 by secondsaturn

I was drawn to Rituparna Ghosh  for his craft; he had magic with his camera, he could weave poetry with his lens. He followed several styles; I think that he began with Ogo Bodhu Shundori of Salil Dutta in his debut film Hirer Angti with characters going up and down long flights of staircases and prancing about in open spaces. Later in Unishe April, Bariwali and Titli he was like Aparna Sen, in Dahan he was Satyajit Ray in his later day style, in Utsab, he was distinctly Goutam Ghosh and later in Doshor, he tried to be Renoir. But it was in Shubho Maharat that Ritu developed a style of his own. The film was an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s novel, Mirror Cracked From Side to Side and no one and no one could do greater justice to the essence of Miss Marple. And after this film, Ritu took off onto his own in which he became a master class. He left the art house film directors like Aparna Sen and Goutam Ghosh far behind and became the formidable artist of style. His frames and compositions spoke in a language of their own and as the characters spoke out their dialogues, Ritu’s backdrop actually carried the story. Soon Rituparna Ghosh became the auteur of an entirely new genre of Bengali film making within which Anirudha Bhattacharjee, Arindam Nandy, Shrijeet Mukherjee worked and lived. Even the popular potboilers had to change their style in the onslaught of Rituparna Ghosh’s film making.

Ritu loved Tagore, he gave a new context to Tagore songs in his serial Gaaner Opare and even made a documentary on the great poet. His aspirations may have been to become Tagore, the creator of an entirely new culture and sensibility, a figure towards which every kind of style in serials or reality shows, or film making would gravitate. It has been my personal observation that every artist in Bengal lived in the hope to become a part of Rituparna Ghosh’s endeavours; like Tagore he was the great ocean towards which every river would flow in for its fulfilment. Indeed, Rituparna used Tagore songs like no one else in cinema. It was Rituparna who created the cult of returning Tagore to classical Indian music.

The other figure whom Rituparna secretly admired was Amitabh Bachchan; his film with the superstar Last Lear was perhaps a single piece of work but the director seemed to have discovered a Tagore like essence in Amitabh; otherwise he would not have used the song Aaj Jhorer Raate in the voice of Rashid Khan, a song that explored the contemplative surrender of the superstar that so underlie his otherwise angry and rebellious image.

But there were two themes that really marked his cinema; one was the pain of the Bengali male and the other was the peace of death. Whether it is the dead father of Unishe April, or the lost lover of Titli, the director caught between his wife and love in Abohoman, the hapless suitor of Binodini in Chokher Bali, or the ever sacrificing husband of Nouka Dubi, and the star of them all, the unemployed poet played by Prasenjit in Shob Choritro Kalponik, were perspectives of the suffering male in a world order of ever dominating and demanding women. I have a fancy that Ritu’s effeminacy also came from a fear to avoid his failure as a man, a man who could run corporations, manage companies and earn money for fast cars and posh apartments. These deficiencies he hid through the cultivation of his style, his pretence to be a woman, and this is why Arekti Premer Golpo and Chitrangada will continue to be the core of his works.

Ritu believed in death; in many ways he welcomed it. The Tagore song Jibono Moroner Seemana Chharaye in Shubho Muhurat perhaps is the theme song that silently underscores each of his films. Death becomes a relief, redemption, a resolution of every kind of interpersonal conflict.

The media carried his death as a sudden cardiac arrest; but later I learnt that he was suffering from pancreatitis. It could well have been malignant given his unavailability to his friends, his baldness, loss of hair from his face and body and how nicely it was covered up as being another expression of his idiosyncratic experiments in style. I was watching the opening shot of Ogo Bodhu Shundori, a film I feel actually inspired him to make cinema and the shot was a tribute to Uttam Kumar who beneath his smile for everyone, his concern for the sake of cinema, his creativity took all the suffering within him and died in silence. I think in his last moment, Ritu had transformed into Uttam Kumar !!

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Lunch With A Prostitute

Posted on May 3, 2013 by secondsaturn

Of the many kinds of people I wanted to meet in my life, one was a prostitute. The others would include a convict on a death row, a hangman, a magician, and a Supreme Court judge who just upheld a death sentence. It was therefore a moment of interest when a mutual friend said that he would bring along with him, his “friend”. It seems that she was very keen to see me. She has been asking a mutual friend in much details about me because a woman like me who is more kicked by reading and writing than by having sex, a woman who finds it too much of a botheration to decorate herself, and feels low at the very thought of being nice to men and one who finds power in earning her own living rather than by sleeping it off with a man, is a wonder of the world. When this lady walked into my room this afternoon, I almost mistook her for a eunuch for she had a broad face, wiped white with bleach, loud make up, broad shoulders, narrow waist which disappeared into very narrow hips. Her skin was thick, and though she was in her early fifties, she insisted on dressing up like a new bride. Her coy, her coquetry, her downcast eyes, her side slopped smile all were calculated to please the male eye. It took her sometime to believe that I was a woman too because I was so much beyond my body, my gynaecology so little impacting me that she was at a loss at my neutrality. But sitting across my desk, I saw her trembling so badly that I suspected that she was going to have an epileptic attack ! So hurriedly, I ordered for lunch.

She was clear that she did not want to eat any lunch. She said that she had to maintain her figure and lived off fruits and salads. I apologised because I could access none such fancy food in the menu. So I thought she could do with some chapatti and aloo matar tamatar. She ate apologetically, apologising more to her conscience than to me, insisting at every bite that it is so improper for her to eat. Eating for women is very unsexy and while I ate with relish with my bare hands licking my fingers all the way through lunch, she pecked at her food with the slight touch of the tip of a teaspoon. There was no common ground on which to break into a conversation. I asked her about her family and learnt that she has her daughters in law and grandchildren, she is the main breadwinner of the family; no husband earned quite a bit but then she wanted a large flat in a posh locality, how one could ever do that without any extra income and political connections. These connections which she developed over her long career paid her off handsomely because she does have a flat in a posh locality now. She wanted to have a political career as well but men, being men, were so chauvinist that they pushed her away. So her dreams of a career in politics were over. An influential politician however gave her a good advice and made her into a social worker. Her job was to address issues of domestic violence in Delhi homes and quite a few women had bad battering husbands who she could “rescue”. These women helped her expand her network of influence and extend her market shares; with age no longer on her side and no one much caring for middle aged hags, the drop in her income was compensated by commission accrued through the rescued younger women.

I asked her about crime against women and she was so quick to ask for the resignation of ‘so-and-so’. Who is the person who should resign, I asked, the CM, or the Police Commissioner? She did not seem to know and looked around picking at her nails painted in deep green while the light green glass bangles tinkled away at her indecision. Why do you think women are being raped? I asked her; again a coy smile, no answer. I see her fingers are shaking violently; I stop my probes, fearing again the epilepsy. What should women do in order to intimidate men from attacking? Again, no answer, no idea. She has no position on the issue of sexual violence, the most pertinent question especially in the world she inhabits. She seems to be too much into the Stockholm syndrome, desiring men all the more keenly more violent they become.

According to the lady, husbands create prostitutes out of women; not always by battering for some can be quite nice, but by not earning enough, not giving enough to satisfy the feminine needs. Women eke out their own worlds in prostitution; they get to sleep with men, they get to wear good clothes, look good, go for slimming packages, have salads and healthy food and when they earn good money also garner freedom from domestic controls upon them. Prostitution is the only way to become free of the controls of marriage even while remaining in it. A very long winded way towards freedom, I felt.

I am a very tolerant person like my parents. For me to be repulsed by another human being is cruel. But it was sitting across this lady that I genuinely felt impure and dirty; not because she was sleeping with all kinds of men, but because how tied to sex she was, how oblivious her attachment to her desire had made her to the questions of female autonomy, violence against women, how ignorant she was to her rights, how little she ever thought of anything beyond her gratifications about public order, law, ethics and governance; how little else in the world mattered to her except he addiction to men and where she could get her next fix from.

 

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Strange Sariska, Ghostly Bhangarh

Posted on April 1, 2013 by secondsaturn

Madhusree and I have a thing about forests; both of us seem to become one with the verdant wilderness. We love sitting inside the foliage, listening to the sound of silence. This silence left unbroken soon becomes as loud as the roar of the seas; wind rustles through leaves, a shriek here and a drango there flutters across the branches, a peacock caws, owls flap their wings and the tree pie whooshes past at great speed snatching away a piece of nachos from your hands. We love the coolness of the bower created by branches of trees that roll into one another and through the gaps in the leaves watch the translucent blue of the sky. Sometimes we are surprised by a few drops of rain from a passing cloud. The smell of the soil just wetted is intoxicating and especially heady if mixed by the fragrance of neem flowers. What could be better than going to Sariska, a forest which is just a few hours away from Delhi, on a long week end?

So, Madhusree pottered round the Internet, clicked on a resort called the Tiger Heaven, booked a cottage for the two of us and spoke to one Mr Ghose who seemed to welcome us as fellow Bengalis who love nature. I am a bit selective about who I entertain in my resort, he cautioned us, because I want only quiet people. We were looking forward to a “quiet” resort only to find that Ghose considered young men with whisky bottles and music CDs as noisy; the majority population with shrieking children jumping about in the swimming pool, hanging like monkeys from hammocks and speeding across the gravel paths of the property did not fall under the category of being deafening. We had to find a way to avoid this “family” crowd. So we made a quick exit towards the far end of the property from where we could watch the dense forest on one side and a field of straw on the other.

As a child I loved the sea; I loved its constant activity in the eddy of its tide. There seemed to be so much energy in the sea, always simmering with the desire to flow and yet caught and trapped in its own vastness. Today, I identify with the forest. I think that I am like the forest. Beneath the apparent contended composure, the forest conceals in its gravity deep dialects of competing claims upon it. Too thick foliage retards the free movement of animals, too much of water produces methane which leads to warming of the atmosphere, too less of it makes animals and plants thirsty; birds disturb reptiles, reptiles must be bred to contain rodents; without rodents one cannot have burrows inside the soil which are needed as shelters for insects and termites which beaked birds and pea fowls feed on. The forest makes a constant effort to appear normal and unruffled; within its methods there lies madness and what is apparently unkempt and not groomed actually becomes a beauty in aesthetic balance.

The forest of Sariska unfortunately is endangered. In 2004 census of tigers, not a single tiger was found and indeed in our trip into the forest we did not find even a single pug mark. The guide who knew very little though a trainee Indian Forest Service Officer, failed to emerge beyond the pet thesis of poaching as a cause for the tiger to have disappeared from the forest. Tiger is not the only animal to have been poached; deer, antelope, peacocks have all been subjected to poaching and yet these species seem to have really struck back into survival under the protection of the forest authorities. The tiger is the most pampered species among all. Few days ago I saw a daft cartoon of a man carrying a tiger in his pillion which said would you rather have a girl or a tiger? Tigers are big and carnivorous and are feared. The survival of the tiger is essential for the ecology; because without a significant number of tigers, deer will not be killed and too many deer is a sure recipe for damage of flora. Yet the deer must survive because excreta are a natural fertilizer through which plants draw their nourishment. This is the balance of the forest, a delicate one because a lack in one or an overdoing in the other can tip nature’s equilibrium.

Aravallis have a problem and which is that of a crack in its bed; the Saraswati river is supposed to have disappeared through this crack and because water can literally fall through such cracks, water tables are always shifting. The shift in water tables produce shifts in moist lands and hence shifts in arable lands. The part of Rajasthan that lives in the cradle of the Aravallis has remained not only tribals but have comprised of roaming tribes, much like the Roma, or the gypsies, locally known as the banjaras. Stretches of land from where water has shifted away becomes a den of the thorny acacia making it difficult for animals to access the leaves and grass. We saw antelopes strolling about in the highways in search of shrubs planted alongside the paved roads; they had nicks and cuts all over their bodies and the babies among them, had bleeding lips and chin. Obviously the acacia that today fills the forests because of the growing aridity of the soil is so barbed, sharp and spikey that it hurts the animals and restricts their free movement. No animal more than the tiger can be a victim of this strange vegetation. The forest department does not allow humans to collect fire wood from the forest and no wonder that the bristled acacia remains on ground, becoming harder by the day. Sariska has fewer birds than many other forests precisely because of its thorny thistles. However, the relative scarcity of population has helped the cause of the migratory birds and we saw the black stork for the first time in our lives, a rarity in Bharatpur. The Siberian cranes were there too preparing to return to their moorings at the end of winter, in fresh spring.

Sariska’s visitors are more casual about the forest than it is elsewhere in the country. There is a fair number of villages inside the forest; many villages belong to the banjaras who used to have a near monopoly of supply of medicines from plants but many are now encroached areas by the local Gujjar farmers who play loud music and politics in securing a right of passage for buses and cars for pilgrims making their way to the Neelkanth temple. The Neelkanth temple was supposed to have been submerged mysteriously under a mound of earth as if there had been an earthquake. This strange phenomenon which has never been witnessed in modern times is difficult to explain, but could this strange phenomenon been a cause for the city of Mohenjodaro to have been buried under the earth seven times during its existence? Could this phenomenon be related in some way or the other to the “cracks” in the mountain beds? There is certainly more to geology than what is contained in the syllabus. The fragile ecology of Sariska makes it fragile also in terms of human habitation; tribes are always passing through the territory, Meenas, Rajputs, Gujjars and others, making Sariska a pathway rather than a home for one or the other.

The strange submergence of the Neelkanth temple lies at the core of the myth of the curse; curse seems to dominate the region. There are palaces and forts suddenly abandoned because of the disappearance of water from the ground. Fatehpur Sikri is the star among them and so is Bhangarh, again a cursed fort, contemporary of the above mentioned, today propagated as the world’s most haunted place. Rumours float all around Alwar of the haunted palace of Bhangarh and so we decided to detour about fifty kilometres on non-existent roads to visit the ghostly venue.

Bhangarh totally surprised me; built by Bhagwandas of Amer, the father of Jodhabai and father-in-law of Akbar, probably out of the bride price, it was actually a shopping mall which can hold ten Burrabazaars at one go. The ultra-modern lay out of the retail spaces makes one wonder whether the posh shopping malls of Delhi have an identical layout of the Bhangarh mall. Bhagwan Das’s matrimonial alliance with Akbar made new sense to me; he was one who wanted to build on the retail economy and thus hand over every responsibility of military protection to the Mughal. The idea of uniting India through business rather than warfare had been a traditional theme in the Indian history; one of the earliest protagonist of this view being none other than Buddha. Bhagwan Das had an imperial dream based on peace and the Bhangarh campus contains temples styled along Lingaraj and the southern temples with pillared halls and the Gopuram!! The dream of a pan Indian land through a retail space must be a strangely modern idea. Was this also not the famous area of the Painted Gray Ware of the Indus Valley civilization, suggesting that Bhangarh has been very much a pathway for trade since the hoary days of history?

Akbar’s vision seemed to have been reformist and many of his initiations like the abolition of Sati, of animal sacrifice at ceremonies, abolition of untouchability and the access of public education for the girl child are modern even by the present day in India. In Bhagwan Das we get an idea that Akbar also had friends who were progressive in their outlook. Interestingly, it is the same Alwar royalty that patronised Swami Vivekananda to visit Chicago and stay on in America for a while and become a brand! The history of Alwar is worthy of pursuit.

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Lincoln The Movie

Posted on March 15, 2013 by secondsaturn

I have more relatives living in the USA than I have in India, I think. I also have some friends living in America. They are not recent emigrants; many are there for the second generation now. Thanks to the Facebook, I see them in pictures; most of them I never met in flesh and blood. There was a time when only the dead would be inside frames; today it is the young and the living that must be mediated through their camera lucida, or is it the mobile upload? I get to know of America through them; it is a land that allows most Indians a level of prosperity that they would otherwise never possibly have at home. And of course they love to construct those of us who stayed back as pathetic losers, technologically unsound and incompetent performers. But of America, the nation, the society, the people, the ethos, I gather nothing from these souls. To say of understanding America as a civilization, I cannot even hope to expect from my ilk. My friend Ranjita Mohanty points out that even in the case of the brilliant author, Jhumpa Lahiri, all that we gather is how the Indian community with the sorrow of exile wallow together in their mutually shared tragedy of being rootless. The woes of the Indians sound so much like the blues of the Coloured; the only difference is that while the latter were forced into slavery, the former are voluntarily slaves. So what to do? Where to know of America?

I have never gelled with Hollywood cinema, I have a difficulty in empathizing with the emotions and reflections; I also have problems in vibrating with jazz. Cinema and music, especially popular culture is invariably so contextualized in the societies that produce and consume them that it becomes difficult for a stay at home hopeless case as me to appreciate the American pop culture. However, I wanted to watch Lincoln, a man who I was taught to admire and whose photo, my grandfather, now dead for 38 years had cut and pasted on a piece of card paper and slipped under the glass on my writing table. Always look at this man, Mithu, he would say; one day you should draw power from his life. My mother was forever keen to tell me how the mothers of Abe Lincoln and Tom Edison were instrumental in the growth of their intellect; a way to make me listen to her, which I always did more out of fear of the consequences of disobedience than from a desire to be Lincoln or Edison.  However, Lincoln is our household name and a film on him must be on the to-do list. So I went to watch Lincoln by Steven Spielberg.

The film focusses, not on the life of Lincoln but on a single and the most defining episode of his life, the passing of the 13th Ammendment which ends slavery in America. Lincoln is the President, he begins what we know as the Republican Party and finds himself in a state of affairs in which America is slowly transforming into a nation, albeit a federal one, and in which there is a desire of the various territories to come together. It is in this state of excitement, and not yet after a century of the Declaration of Independence, America is threatened by a civil war because one man, a hajji (don’t know the Jewish equivalent of the term) decides that inequality among people is a sin in the eyes of God. This hajji is Abe Lincoln, one with a beard and a shaved off upper lip, a very tall and gawky man, walking in a stoop, always seeming to move away from the screen than into it, into the light and who seems the happiest when playing with his young son, Tad. It is then that he meditates the best, and it is perhaps then that voices of his Conscience speaks to him as Gabriel. These voices are nothing but everyday affairs in the courtroom in his career as a lawyer, which he tells as stories to his people, even in the middle of deep crises and situations that require immediate attention. Please stop your stories, his colleagues would say, but for Lincoln these were the angelic revelations, reminding us a bit about Miss Marple who would often solve mysteries involving ladies and knights using parallels from the commonplace events around her gardener and maid ! The similarities between the Prophet and Lincoln are unmistakeable.

The insistence on equality just at a time when America is congealing into a nation threatens the very existence of this infant nation-state, albeit federalist. Yet Lincoln persists; in his dreams he finds himself aboard a ship, very fast, a motion he has not known before. Everything is dark but the light of the stars tell him that the shore is not far away. His eccentric and clairvoyant wife tells him that it is the 13th Amendment he is dreaming of, not of war. War rages all around, dead bodies pile up, in this epical destruction, thousands die, more are disabled and impaired; stop the war everyone seems to say. But Lincoln goes on; he draws on every power that the Constitution has given him and when opposition gets too much for him, he raises his voice assertively to say I am the repository of Infinite Power. People call him a tyrant and a dictator, but he goes on undeterred. Spielberg is known for his attachment to India and while many scenes are straight off from the various Amitabh Bachchan starrers, one cannot but miss the similarities from the Bhagavadgita. Like Arjuna, Lincoln too is devastated and he appeals for its end. How does one call for the end of that war which he has himself started? This strange anomaly is because his is a war to end all wars, a violence to destroy the source of violence. So, he calls for the original violence to stop, the original sin to be penanced and there will be no need for Lincoln to continue his war. Yet he is merciful as he signs pardon to condemned to death prisoners liberally.

The democrats sing praises of America, by invoking its natural beauty, its deserts, swamps, rivers and hills. But to Lincoln, the compass does not show such spaces; all it does is to point to the north. Are we a nation because of the territory we occupy? Or are we a nation because we move humanity into a direction? It is not the boundaries of land occupied that makes for a nation, it is the pilgrimage, the journey of a people that makes a nation. Many years ago in college I was asked to make a distinction between culture and civilization; I could not answer the question. Today I know that a culture with a direction becomes a civilization. The direction is the absolute, unimpeachable truth and it is to find this truth that through the 13th Ammendment to its Constitution that America will, on behalf of humanity pursue equality of all humans. America is not a nation; it is a journey and it is in the sense of a journey that it assumes its arrogance to push its case brooking no opposition.

Lincoln faces opposition but he refuses to bow down to them. Like a true Jew, he goes for the revealed truth, the self evident truth. He tells a young engineer whether he remembers the Euclid’s theorems; the young man does not but Lincoln does because Lincoln never forgets what he reads. In the theorem, if two things are equal to one another then they are equal to each other; this is a self evident truth. There is no greater call for Monotheism which is also not the call for equality. Lincoln is an extremist, for one whom means justify the end. There are bribes, and offers of plum positions for the defecting Democrat senators. There are some however who will not be broken. They are approached variously; sometimes through appeals to ethics, sometimes through appeals as a fellow Jew who has already been on Hajj (for want of knowledge of the Jewish equivalent). For one Senator who has lost his only brother to war against abolition of slavery, killed by Negro soldiers, it would be a betrayal of brotherly love if he concedes to Lincoln. For this man, the Prophet himself arrives, where is my Friend’s Home, he knocks at dusk, who sits indoors? Please open the door. Lincoln appeals why not make your loss into a gift of martyrdom, when one is dead, why not find him in the eternity of a holy war?

In the Senate men debate over laws, articulate principles of governance. In the gallery sit the friends and family of the members of the executive and sometimes the members themselves. America’s Constitution separates powers and the two wings of the government do not sit together. From the well of the Senate, the gallery looks like a picture of the Last Supper, indeed so, because immediately after the passing of the 13th Amendment, Lincoln will be assassinated. But the positioning of the visual field is suggestive; does the positioning of the figures of the Last Supper tell us that Gods watch us from the gallery as we men make our laws and do the Gods, like the executives in America, execute our laws for us, through their Invisible Hands? Indeed so, this is why it becomes so important for humans to create replica of Heaven upon earth. As the Senate puts the motion to vote, Lincoln quietly plays with Tad in his lap, together they seem to be studying the anatomy of insects. A beam of light enters through the window, telling us that these are the last few moments in the Prophet’s life. Soon, the light will claim him. The 13th Amendment is passed as spring blooms in America and Lincoln sits with his wife in a buggy, apparently a wholly enjoyable moment of peace. But his mind is away in the deserts of Jerusalem, his gaze fixed far away seeking the company of David and Soloman while his wife complaints of his indifference and injustices towards her. In this Holy War to make America the Holy Land of equality, mothers and sons have been sacrificed; so many Isaacs are sacrificed by the hands of Abraham. Mothers cry mercy; fathers demand martyrdom. We know that in the future, this will emerge as one of the greatest anomalies of American politics.

One person who steals the show is Steven, a fellow Republic Senator. He is a pragmatist and though a fervent advocate of racial equality, on the floor of the house he demands only equality for law. He is berated for his betrayal to his cause but he knows that he can at most demand equality for law if the 13th Amendment has to pass the vote. When accosted Steven says that men are not born equal like his opponents who are nimble of wit and impermeable to reason are not his equals, unfortunately before law they must be. Steven is a believer in equality for all, like Lincoln, but where the latter pursues his case with a Prophetic zeal, Steven manoeuvres strategically. While Lincoln’s housekeeper is a Negro, Steven’s wife is a Negro, though outwardly she is only his housekeeper. Steven may be a greater believer in racial equality than even Lincoln. Equality would make the American home, where men can have wives and not have to keep mistresses.

Mrs Keckley, Lincoln’s housekeeper asks him why he is so attached to the cause of Coloured? Does he know any of them personally? No, says the President, but after Freedom, he would very much like to know some. To him, the ascetic of Moses, all men are equal and especially the coloured, the originals of Africa, with who Moses crosses the parted sea into the Holy Land. Lincoln leads America into being that Holy Land. Lincoln’s politics is shaded with autocratic dictatorship but this is for the good he alone has seen; ahead of the consciousness of his age, in the dream in which he experiences a speed as never before, in a ship of Time that bridges two eras of mankind, one before equality and one after that. As the dead body of the shot President lies upon his bed, we see his knees bent; too tall for him to fit in the standard dimensions of his furniture, too large to fit into a world of his times. The misfit is Lincoln’s tragedy which makes him in the comeliness of spring to think about a walk with David and Solomon in Jerusalem.

Lincoln was resisted; his entire ethos has been resisted in America from time to time. Judaist transcendentalism and nihilism has been contested with this-wordly Protestant ethics and flanked by Orthodox pragmatism. During Europe’s period of anti-Zionism, America too had its rabid nationalism, Japan was attacked because Jews were supposed to have flown money out of America and parked in the banks of Tokyo. Time and again the clash of fundamentalists has threatened the fabric of the nation. Jazz and hippy generation sought Hindu wisdom again for that unity which keeps diversity together. Swami Vivekananda has been such a fever in America for speaking on the unity of religions and many a time, Semitic and messianic spirit of the United States has made it the big global bully that it often is. One cannot understand America until one understands its intensely spiritual nature. All kinds of spiritualisms do very well in the US; the Americans flock to gurus, saints and clairvoyants and holymen everywhere. My uncles would tell me that when people are very rich,as the Americans are, they seek spiritualism. How wrong they were! For the American, spiritualism is the very essence of their articulation; they would like to use transcendental terms in order to understand the world. The film Lincoln reveals that to me as clear as daylight.

A man in his early forties was sitting two seats away from me, all by himself watching the film. He seemed to me to be a regular mall visitor. I sensed that towards the end when Lincoln bids adieu to his colleagues and leaving his pair of gloves behind walks out of the door into his assassination as if he is entering a prayer room where he needs to wash his hands and offer prayers in bare hands, the man was sniffing. His sniffs grew into sobs as Lincoln lay dead and no later than the title cards appeared, he left with hurried steps as if to avoid being noticed crying. What an emotional man I thought. Then suddenly I sensed a loose end in the film. What happened to Lincoln’s son, Robert? The film did not have anything on that. I checked in the wiki this morning, it seems that Robert wept openly at his father’s death bed.

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Ganesh Pyne

Posted on March 13, 2013 by secondsaturn

Ever since my family has suffered a downward social mobility, there is hardly any celebrity that we have among our everyday interactions. Many years ago we had celebrities in our family circles; but since then we seem to have dropped out of the glitterati circuit. Ganesh Pyne happened to be a sole celebrity who I knew through my father. He and my father were neighbours in Santiniketan; both had extended themselves to Santiniketan as part of the same exodus in which to have a bungalow in the outlying areas of this University town is just the thing to do. Ganesh Pyne spread himself to a sprawling bungalow in the village of Boiradihi while my father built for himself a neat little cottage to compensate for the unwieldy house of Kolkata. They were neighbours. Father and Pyne were both office bearers in the resident welfare association. This was serendipity because more than twenty five years before now, my father had designed his office calendar with Ganesh Pyne’s paintings. He just liked Pyne and wanted to promote his talent. I promptly cut out these calendar reprints and mounted them on cardboard and hung around my small one room apartment in Delhi. I have two of his reprints still with me and never ever I wish to apart with them.

I do not know why I liked Pyne. I liked the colours in his painting, sometimes, slate, sometimes a brownish grey and overwhelmingly a dirty, sallow moss green. I loved staring at these works; they seemed to stare at me out of very old walls made of brick and cement, whose plasters would precariously peel off with that moss in the rainy season. Pyne’s paintings had my favourite season in them; I do not know why I would find the light of autumn emanate from them, a gloss of a shiny blue sky with occasional darkness of some leftover rain. I found that his were faces from walls that would stare at me from the gathered up moss at the end of rain. Only Bengal’s autumn could bring this effect out of old houses whose inhabitants often would have to save for years to have their homes painted.

Some silly Delhite would often comment, why do Calcutta houses look so black? Well, to have money is not a major care in Kolkata. Inflation beats our incomes in Kolkata; we do not speculate over property, we do not change locations so often; we like to have continuities and familiarities around us. No wonder then we do not buy and sell property frantically. We have little scope for money making, the city being as yet relatively free of brokerage where the most of Delhi’s and Mumbai’s money comes from. This Kolkata with its old houses, where afternoons are spent gazing lazily at walls with a small slit of the sky above them, with some anticipation of the glory of autumn at the end of the rainy months is the crux of Pyne’s paintings. And from amidst these mossed walls that speak of the Bengali’s defeat in the eyes of shining India arises images of Pyne. And what great images are they! There is Jesus with a crown of thorns, there is the Qing Emperor with his Mongolian head gear, there is Lord Krishna with his flute, but not as a shepherd boy; instead he appears fully regal as the Lord of Dwarka. Powerful faces, avert gazes, taut expressions make my wall in my apartment look good. More than decorations, I treat them as windows towards my home, my wall, covered with moss at the end of rain, with tips of peeled plaster catching the rays of the sun that seems to have momentarily been relieved of its cover of the rain bearing clouds.

I was curious to see Pyne in action when he moved into Santiniketan. I never saw him paint; it seems that he did not find inspiration in his new abode. It was too fresh, too swank, and full of shine and gloss. For a painter who saw the world and its heroes from the cramped opening of his narrow room at the end of a long alley full of moss walls with peeling plasters, this new home of open spaces and clear grounds and freshly grown poinsettias upon a meticulously manicured garden was sheer loss of inspiration.

There was a time when Pyne was a struggling artist and his paintings would hardly fetch about a twenty rupees; in those days, he struggled out of his narrow room at the end of a long alley with a wall covered with dark moss and peeling off plasters catching the glint of the blue autumn skies that were opening up after the rains. Then there is a time when each of Pyne’s painting would fetch at least half a crore and Pyne moved to the glitter of galleries, went about the wide world, saw the Empires in real and concrete world of those very faces who were once streaks in the moss walls. Pyne lost his alley with the peeled off plasters to success and with that disappeared the slit of the sky, the brown of the old bricks, the slate of the peeled plasters. Pyne lost the faces. Before he died, father tells me he had become unusually quite, recoiled in a shell of his own and did not keep too well. Sometimes, when they met, he would talk to my father. About what? Well, so many things but mostly wanted to know of his old home and if ever father remembered their mossed walls.

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Ashis Nandy’s Angst

Posted on February 12, 2013 by secondsaturn

Ashis Nandy has been perhaps India’s most prolific and readable social science writer. His style, his perceptions, his inferences are so endearing that one is attracted to his writing as one would do for a top of the list popular author. I make it a point to grab a copy of his latest publication as soon as it is released and then comfortably perched in my seat, with a cup of strong and bitter Darjeeling tea devour breathlessly all that he has to write. It is not that I agree with all that he says but I love reading him. He has a perspective, a very distinct one and one that is consistent. He writes from a stance; his world view, his interest position, his politics become all so evident. Ashis Nandy is one who deconstructs the Indian mind and I love to deconstruct him.

Ashis Nandy has a thesis which he holds as a normative standard against which the everyday reality as it unfolds in India is weighed and judged. This thesis is that of tradition. India, he feels must uphold a tradition, a tradition which has helped it to survive as a civilization for an unbroken length of time. This tradition has some strength, the most important of it being its resistance to being reified into antonyms. This tradition has a sense of a fine balance, the rhythm of cyclical time, of seasonality. The tradition has relativity of concepts and accommodates dualities; for instance the ardhanariswar, the harihara and the like. Therefore, contextuality, relativity, plurality, diversity, flexibility, assimilation of antonyms and balance and equilibrium mark the Indian tradition. Conflictual dualities are therefore treated as being outside of tradition, as a corruption of its purity.

Nandy is a Bengali bhadralok who emerged as a category of historical agency with the Bengali Renaissance. Nandy is also a Christian by faith and belongs to that category of bhadraloks who converted to Christianity in open opposition to the harshness of the Brahminical tradition of untouchability, Sati and various injunctions on women. Among the prominent Bengali Christians was Michael Madhusudan Dutta, an epical poet who established the blank verse and the sonnet in Bengali poetry. A major point of difference between the Brahmos and the Christians seems to be that while the former looked towards a wholly changed social order, the Christians looked towards self reflection and self-reform. Brahmos positioned theirs as a separate religion which would ‘convert’ Hindus into a more spiritual and elated version of their own religion. Christianity, in contrast was a different religion that required formal conversion. Yet, unlike the Brahmos, the Christians looked more into themselves, changing themselves instead of wanting to change the world at large. Paradoxically, therefore, Christians were in many ways more entrenched within the traditional society albeit themselves retreating into a world of difference.

Interestingly, Bengali Christians never really thought of themselves as distinct from the mainstream society; they held a moral high ground from which they exercised a certain kind of cultural refinement. The times of which we speak, namely the early 20th century, cultural refinement had already become an important social capital and could land people in good jobs and elicit kindly treatment by landlords, money lenders, neighbours and other principals constituting the social world. Bengali Christians freely married into the Hindu communities but were close knit nuclear families with values of cooperation and mutual support. Children of these families fared well in life, marked by cultural refinement, sophistication of the mind and were regarded for their integrity and good values. Brahmos, on the other hand, intermarried within the community, became a closed caste like social group and emerged as a socially dominant group claiming higher ritual status than the rest of the Hindu society. The Bengali Christians were thus a reflective and inward looking people, who had really no borders drawn against the society at large, but who garnered inner resources to emerge as a favoured category through their integrity and loyalty to the prevalent culture of the mainstream. Surprisingly, the Bengali Christians were loyal to mainstream Hindu culture, although opposing its ritualism as immorality.  Ashis Nandy’s psychological profile must be seen in this context.

Politically, Nandy is a Gandhian. Gandhi too is deeply influenced by Christian morality. Gandhi is more of a Christian than a Hindu, believing in self-control, self-discipline and that inner integrity and inner strength to emerge into the society purely upon virtues. Ambedkar’s discourse against Gandhi is not over the latter’s Hinduism, a religion which has created untouchability and thus disadvantaged and discriminated against Ambedkar’s community; instead Ambedkar’s problems lie elsewhere. They lie in Gandhi’s acceptance of tradition. Modernity for Gandhi has problems; Christianity does better for him. Modernity’s instrumentalist rationality, its secular morality, its selfish and competitive individualism, its consumerism, its domination through reason, its legalism over emotions, its pursuit of universalism without regard for contexts, its merciless jurisprudence were as abhorrent to Gandhi as it is to Nandy. For Ambedkar, modernity has a great promise to dissolve completely the category of untouchability as unreasonable and irrational. For Gandhi, tradition has enough scope to overcome untouchability through its holism, through its assimilation of diversities and unity of dualities. Ambedkar is not convinced and launches a brand of politics in which the untouchables and the marginalized are ensured of spaces within those areas in which the upper caste dominate. This is the politics of reservation.

The politics of reservation is immoral by both Gandhian principles as well as by Christian morals. It is against both these traditions to seek dominance by dividing the society. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, perhaps India’s most popular novelist ever was avowedly against Brahmos for trying to divide the larger Indian society by assuming the status of neo-Brahmins. Christians, on the other hand have never been divisive, absorbing the social disabilities without resentment and instead work on the inner strengths, working on family bonds and integrity to move on in life. They believe in self refinement rather than cosmetic empowerment by trying to sit among those who exclude them. Dalit politics focusses far too much on external appearances, on the outcomes of games of numbers as they count their achievements in terms of how many of them are in positions of power. In this manner, they seem to reproduce the same society with its similar structures of oppressions those continuously try to exclude them. The only way out for dalits to fight their exclusion is to become exclusionists themselves. This is the danger of politics of reservation.

Unfortunately for a Gandhian framework there is nothing more damaging than politics conducted in this manner. The oppressed feels that the only way to overcome oppression is to become like the oppressor. This peculiar behaviour comes with modernity, its singular rules, its zero sum outcomes. Were Gandhi to live today, he would have found it rather strange that even in the sixty years of affirmative action life for the Dalit has not become any better, despite everything apparently going in their favour. He would have thought that until and unless the foundation of exclusion is not attacked, there cannot be a hope of improvement. To attack the foundation, the Dalit should have risen like a sect, a whole new sect, based upon the discovery of new values and new ethos with which a new social order should have been constituted. Ambedkar, in a way moved in this direction with his Buddhism, trying to make Dalits into a new religion.

Unfortunately for Ambedkar, Dalits used the new identity to stand in conflict and competition with the rest of the society and like the Muslims, also were part of a separatist politics. Only there was no clear territory which they could partition out of the Indian republic. This was never the Gandhian position. Gandhi wanted the Dalits to emerge as new social leaders, with new dignity in their identities, new pride that raised them to the valued statuses and as Harijans they would have brought a new sense of enlightenment in the Indian society. Ambedkar fought the individual’s rights to overcome her community, the location of her birth and to emerge as anybody else in the society and to be like anyone else. Ambedkar’s politics was of power and not of values where the Dalit should be like anybody else and not confined only as a Dalit in her identity.

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Afzal Guru’s Case

Posted on February 12, 2013 by secondsaturn

I am against death penalty when it is Afzal Guru; I am for death penalty when it is a rapist; depends on the degree of hurt I feel. Afzal Guru has not offended me and so I am sad that he is hanged. I am not too taken up by the like of Arundhati Roy whose case against Afzal’s death penalty was to say that the evidence against him were not impeccable. As in the case of Dhananjay Chatterjee, one to be hanged as early as 2004 in Kolkata for rape and murder of a minor, evidence against Afzal Guru was not above doubt. The two other co-accused, Afsan Guru and SAR Geelani were acquitted and since Afzal was no one important, it is unlikely that the courts would have gained any mileage for singling him out for scape goating. Hence I am interested in Afzal Guru.

Afzal was only 43 when he dies. He had been convicted at the age of 32. By then he had attempted the Indian Civil Services, tried his hand at medicine but went away to Pakistan to take arms training. His friend whose post I read via Kavita Chowdhury on Face book recalls him as the best student of his class. He loved his books; he was intelligent, witty and argumentative. He was not only well read in texts but he was also fond of poetry. It is not difficult to see that he names his son Ghalib, who told the ex President of India, Dr Kalam that he too wanted to be a doctor when he grew up.

Afzal Guru was born in an affluent family and lost his father early in life. He was brought up by his uncle, a renowned cardiologist in the Valley. Afzal too studied medicine but left it to take military training in Pakistan. He soon gives all of that up and surrenders to the Border Security Forces. He becomes associated with the Special Territorial Force, the STF. He tries to crack the civil services and the JNU exams but does not seem to make it and then joins Delhi University for Political Science. Geelani was in all probability his teacher. Afzal works as an executive for a pharmaceutical company and does very well and is promoted into its area manager very soon in his career. In his career as a medical representative, Afzal faces harassment from the police. It is possible that he returns to terrorism after that. A boy who is more mentally agile that physically active, according to the charges against him, sits back at home and plans this massive attack on the Parliament. I do not wish to contest these charges against him because in my mind they fit the picture and complete it.

Afzal started his career in terrorism when his uncle, the renowned cardiologist who was bringing him up became ideologically affined to the separatists. Afzal is an affluent Kashmiri and three attributes mark him like any other person in his location. One is a pride in Kashmiri culture and identity and a feeling that it is his bounden duty to promote that culture; to step into the shoes of his father as early as he can as the oldest son and in absence of father, in gratitude to his guardian to carry forward the latter’s cause. Since his uncle believed in separatism, Afzal carries forward his mission into militancy, which according to him is a logical step. The second is this desire to be a role model, the good boy everywhere. This is why his behaviour has been exemplary, in school, in office, at home, in prison and even while walking towards the gallows. The third is that people from proud families who think of themselves as ethical epicentres of their societies are invariably creative and develop multiple interest which emerge out of a desire for commanding culture. This makes Afzal move rapidly from one profession into the other and get easily bored by being in the same location. The desire for creativity, not totally innocent of a will to power rises in societies in which the economy is turning against them. No wonder then Afzal’s idol is Ghalib, a man who faces a terrible paradox of being intellectually creative and yet economically to impoverished to sustain that intellect. Ghalib has inspired and continues to inspire the many who are critical of capitalism.

Afzal was charged with planning; he could well be a planner because of the tremendous intelligence he had. He was not one who could take in physical pain and in fact, according to a post from the Hindu on the FB, it seems that he asked the executioner whether the noose will pain him. He was assured that it would not. Afzal seemed to be less scared of dying than in the pain of the noose. He was, scared of physical pain, also a fact that explains why he forever wanted to emerge as the model of good behaviour because boys with good behaviour are never whipped or hit with rulers. Yet, his tremendous desire to be effectual may have put him as a grand planner of things, one who can move the world, albeit invisibly. This seems to be a hacker mentality, also a terrorist mentality and perhaps a mentality of our times.

Throughout his tenure in jail his desire was to be a role model. His words were always measured and never tempestuous. His last letter to his wife he was calm and temperate. The only issue that he ever created in jail was that he feared losing his mind in isolation. He was fond of his mind and guarded it very well, again a class symptom of his affluence and cultural capital. In this backdrop, it is difficult to believe that Afzal’s confession was so obscene that the courts had to impugn it. The use of obscene language is intriguing. Either Afzal has a split personality or else someone had put it there. Actually both are possible; it is quite possible that Afzal really let his mask down and let out his repressions or else the police investigators so annoyed by Afzal’s holier than thou attitude had composed the confession in coloured language. Since Afzal was a ‘nobody’ and yet so confident and self assured, he may have provoked contempt from the police.

But Afzal Guru read both the Koran as well as the Vedas. He was well read in the religious texts and spoke of the oneness of humankind. This is endearing; Afzal was not against the Hindus but perhaps he was fighting separation itself. He was for the unity of Kashmir as well as for its autonomy. Culture and autonomy are the two sides of the same coin. I am not sure what Afzal was first, whether a Kashmiri or a Muslim. For me it does not really matter. What matters is that we never noticed that it was Afzal’s creative agitation that made him somewhat misguided; an anxious excitement that could have been made use of. For this we are all to blame, those of us who do not bring about creativity in education, culture, science, and most of all, in politics. Afzal’s death is the death of energy, much like Ghalib himself, all dressed up and nowhere to go, a tragedy of spiritual unemployment that so marks a nation falling everyday into the abyss of unreflecting and unmediative, anxiety ridden mundanity called life style.

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A Hundred Years Since…Phalke and Digital Cinema

Posted on February 5, 2013 by secondsaturn

I

As we celebrate one hundred years of filmmaking since the release of Raja Harishchandra in 1913, the Indian film industry seems to be in a déjà vu of sorts. Just as cinema during Phalke was breaking fresh technological grounds, cinema today appears to be breaking newer grounds with a new technology of digital cinema. One is likely to observe many parallels between Phalke’s times and now, with similar dilemmas, similar despairs and also similar possibilities and exuberances. The arrival of digital cinematography, in more than one way changes the way cinema responds to society and produces and circulates culture, just as once the arrival of the technology of cinema changed the Indian viewing culture. The change in technology that the digital cinema brings about produces some major changes in the kind of cinema that gets made and viewed and accordingly also interact and partake in the constitution and the politics of the society in which it is made and watched. The aim of the present paper is to understand the major changes in the viewer politics which the digital cinema is likely propagate.

Dadasaheb Phalke worked and lived between 1870 and 1944 and led India’s grand success as one of the most vibrant film industries of the world. Phalke indigenized the film technology, invented many cinematic tricks and visual possibilities which were ahead of anywhere else in the world, including the USA. Phalke worked closely with Baburao Painter and later Prabhat Film Company which went on to produce full length films with stories, fiction and later sound building upon the basic technology that Phalke furthered and promoted. Today, after a hundred years, new possibilities have arrived once again through the digital cinema where the technology changes the cinematic frames and creates possibilities for new visuals and thereby changes the parameters of aesthetics of cinema. The present paper tries to compare and contrast the two moments, that of Phalke and that of the new age digital cinema, separated by a hundred years.

II

The digital cinema in a sharp contrast to the analog cinema is shot in digital cameras and has picture resolutions in pixels. As the technology stands today, digital frames are more intense in the short range and have difficulties in capturing long range shots, or speed of moving objects over real time. Speed is digitally manipulated, produces sharp and fast cuts but not producing real motion. For instance, speed is shown through moving frames and not by capturing movement within the frame. Digital cinema is great for sharply focussing on close range objects, for portraying heightened and bleeding colours; it is good for the capturing images of the home but not of the world. Just as a hundred years ago, Phalke used cinematic techniques to bring out our myths and legends in the public domain to be viewed by one and all, universally and together in the same shared space of the exhibition ground, today’s digitalized cinema inverts this trend and moves us back into the home away from the world. It is said that people would flock from far away villages in bullock carts and camp for days to catch shows of Lanka Dahan, Mohini Bhasmasur and Shri Krishna Janma. Phalke’s films were like festivals and like festivals; they created spaces for people from diverse backgrounds to come together.

I think when you are talking about digital cinema you need to further distinguish within the paradigm and talk about the traditional digital camera which came with fixed lenses and the new age digital camera, which allows you to add lenses and hence variable focus and depth of field. When you are talking about the cinematic shot it is possible to get the hugely cinematic large canvas backdrop shot if you add a wide angle lens to a RED camera or even with a DSLR like Canon 5D, which is comes with a full bank of lenses.

“There was not one problem during the 300,000 feet of film shot, and it would have been hell shooting on a digital camera. Film cameras are so comfortable to use handheld because they are correctly balanced.” Giles Nutgens (DOP Midnights children). In counter point to what is said above it would be pertinent to add that handheld camera actually works out better because of their weight and the modern digital camera like Arri Alexa are actually as large as traditional 16mm cameras to address issues of balance. The handheld technique or steady cam shooting techniques are essentially techniques developed for the film camera.[1]  Digital cinema when it was first conceptualized was used primarily to add a home movie feel to a film like Blair Witch Project or a Paranormal Activity this is a far cry from the way it has been used in Slumdog Millionaire where it was used to get multiple angles of for the same scene thus adding to the frenetic pace required for the chase through the slums sequence. The sum and substance of the above arguments are that there may no longer be a clear divide between the analog and the digital technologies. Yet, the differences in the two are compelling.

When we observe a digital film, Slumdog Millionnaire, we immediately know the contrasts. People do not unite under the film’s common symbols; instead, the film produces reactions and responses that crack universal acceptance. Slumdog Millionnaire purports to puncture our prime mass medium, namely the television by caricaturing the famous game show, Kaun Banega Crorepati. The idea of the digital cinema is to challenge, invert and even to subvert the universal space by withdrawing into the close range of images and shrinking the periphery to restricted zones of pixel density.

The constraints of the digital cinematography translate into the particular kinds of cinema it can make. Narratives become personal; characters are inconsistent, incoherent and live in contradiction rather than heroic as in the analog cinema. Spaces crash into the specific and particular. Visuals are free of their locations, even dismal slums appear artistic. A mossed wall may seem  The apparent aesthetic value of visuals increase, reality merge with the artistry of paintings and computerized manipulations introduce some kind of a cuboid bricolage that tear images from their realism into the realm of representation. The overused term, representation finds its zenith in the digital cinema making. Quentin Tarantino, the noted Hollywood producer and director says that he is never going to use the digital medium for his cinema. It is an offence on cinema by making it into television. Indeed, the frames of digital cinema are more suited to be telecast than be projected on a cine screen. [2]

One has to observe films made by Sandip Ray on the popular fictional character, Feluda. Royal Bengal Rohosyo, a digitally made film is already different from Bombayer Bombete shpt on the analog. The frames are sliced off as if to fit a television screen and the film perhaps fails to capture the sense of deep dark forests and far away mountains amidst which sit quaint bungalows in which reside strange men. Royal Bengal Rohosyo is watched through a window; one walks into the frames of Bombayer Bombete. The frames of films absorb the viewer; the films become the truth that seems to contain the viewer and her reality. Instead, the digital cinema appears to slice off reality and create peep holes through which one has to catch unholy glimpses of the untruths.

 

III

Digital cinema can be better understood if one observes the progress of the television as the most dominant mode of mass medium overtaking the radio and the cinema. The television brings the public space inside the home, to be ensconced within it, to be contained, held and bordered off by it. The outer frame of the television lies within the home, its inner frames forays into the world, like a lighted torch, intensely focussed but otherwise darkened and shut off from vision. The television is the opposite of the film; in a film, the audience sits in the dark, where the surrounding area is shut off from her vision. In the television, the audience sits in a well-lighted room, well perched in her couch or bed, with her world everywhere gathered and organized around her and her daily life in a systematic and planned rhythm. It is within the screen that the world gets truncated, interrupted by advertisements and truncated and distracted by marquees of breaking news. The world in the television is never a whole world, not even in the reality shows does a viewer get a sense of having watched the entire thing. This is so unlike in a film which really exhausts the world.

The form of film is such that it appears as though it has said everything that is there to say; films which flop at the box office are typically productions where the audience does not get this sense of exhausting the entire world. The television in contrast whirls itself more and more into the seams and complexities of domesticity. Unlike the film which simplifies, straightens out and places things in universality, the television complicates and twirls and tweaks things around. No wonder then the soap serials are so intrinsic to the television. The film star is therefore a conquering hero, one who overcomes, transcends and emerges victorious from the struggles. The television star is one who is subjugated and victimized by her situation. When digital cinema making would become the mainstream way of doing things, one can easily imagine that the universalising and conquering hero would be dampened into a victim of circumstances. The entire politics is likely to change as a result.

 

 

The politics of a culture where heroes live is distinctly different from politics without heroes. The former has a sense of society, a purpose of history, a feeling for the future. In the latter, politics is about competition, envy, exclusion, creating gangs and setting up entry barriers. The former thrives in a system of expanding opportunities, the latter in a trap of decreasing entitlements and certainties. Digital film making expresses the frames of a constrained society, an envious society, a society of competition and internecine struggles. Its technology is therefore about highlighting an enclosed space, instead of bringing into frame and borderless world.

One of the best instances of a film fully shot in the digital mode is that of the Malaylam film director, T.V.Chandran’s Bhoomiyude Avakashikal[3]. This is a film on the endangered insects and small animals in the earth. Digital film making is the best suited for observing insects, close shot of leaves and micron view of nature. In the film Life of Pi, the digital mode is used very well to show underwater life, a close view through opaque medium. T.V.Chandran finds digital film making very well suited to the non-human, or the non-actor. He mentions that the star of the digital cinema is the technology. Needless to say that this cinema attacks conventional film making by reducing the importance of story and the star and instead increasing the worth of the camera, technicians and director. In terms of power structures within the cinema world, we may anticipate a shift and in terms of visuals we may return to the days of Phalke when films were only magical spectacles to be watched in awe but not as discursive texts circulated through mutual discussions, reviews and gossip.

IV

The present paper does not suggest that digital film making will create a new kind of constrained cognition but what it says is that in many ways, digital film making will reflect those changes which constitute our life world. Today’s age is an age of global capital. Interestingly, two major boundaries namely that of the State and the nation both stand diluted. The state performs mainly the role of a facilitator of investments while nation has become an emotional entity thanks to global migration instead of being a shared space for social opportunities. The age of global capital also renders an individual into a consumer rather than a worker who contributes to the production of wealth. The consumer is still a citizen and a bundle of rights but she is so much of a consumer that her being a citizen is defined with respect to her consumables. For instance, in China, only citizens can buy automobiles, in the UAE, only citizens can buy real estate; in India, only citizens can access public health and public distribution. The citizen is defined as a consumer with maximum consumption rights. The idea of civil rights too is consumeristic; law and order is the right to consume peace and not to have rights to assert oneself for justice. Digital film making by presenting its visuals at close range with heightened intensities and unreal focus and colours only pander to our consumerist needs.

We take some of the productions of Shri Venkatesh Films into consideration. The film 22shey Shrabon, a murder mystery and crime thriller aestheticized the gruesome portals of the prison, and the lanes of slums. The film hero, the iconic superstar of the Bengali cinema Prasenjit is trapped into the restricted frames and within stiff camera movements to reveal his repressions rather than his victory over them. Expectedly, his character is forever hurling verbal abuses representing as if the frustrations of a larger than life character on the analog screen into the constraints of the digital frames. The film Autograph, a remake of Satyajit Ray’s film, Nayak that starred the doyen of Bengali stardom, Uttam Kumar has a similar flavour. Ray had critiqued Uttam Kumar’s stardom, showing the star as one despite his success is a failure in life. But the film Autograph showed that despite every criticism, the superstar Prasenjit is still a hero, and he can extend his powers beyond imagined limits. Between Uttam Kumar in Nayak and Prasenjit in Autograph, the latter is portrayed as being more iconic. Unfortunately due to the constraints of the frames and lack of depth, the iconic image of Prasenjit emerges more commonplace while that of Uttam Kumar, despite the criticism of the director remains larger than life.

The closed frames of the digitally shot cinema do not always allow for a free play of the narrative and thus heroes suffocate for want of narrative range. Stunted characters become mundane people whose efforts yield only marginal rewards; observed in very close range, they remain tied to their moorings. They are so oppressed by their situations that they are fortunate to only arrive at steady states of beings; to embark on a journey of a long pilgrimage or to have the courage of an ascetic is very far reached. The small scale of characters also reinforces our beliefs that it is naïve to dream big, to sacrifice for our ideals or to have ideals in the first place. Digital film making upholds this lack of idealism; riding upon the back of pragmatism, the digital cinema, kills ideals, kills the sublime and presents instead as its redemption those very things that bind us and keep us imprisoned among our prejudices and notions.

We may speak of the digital cinema as that which withdraws from the public sphere. It is not the mere frames that necessitate this withdrawal. Digital cinema helps independent producers to make films; in a way it democratizes the film making business helping many individuals to become film makers. The broadening of the film making base, unfortunately does not translate into universalism and/or inclusion. The democratization of the film business paradoxically takes away the legitimacy of democracy. Individuals become individualistic, instead of purporting to speak for an entire people, or nation, or collectivity, they speak of themselves often placing their personal agenda against the collective. At the International Film Festival of Kerala, 2012, Manoj Kana, the director of the film Chayilyam said that the film was made with donations, starting from Rs.5, from the public, and so has nearly 2,000 producers to give credit to, somewhat on the lines of what the legendary John Abraham did for his Amma Ariyan in 1986.[4] Amma Ariyan was not the typical star based popular cinema; instead it addressed the unspoken incidences of mental disturbances among the youth in the Kerala society.

 

V

Too many independent film makers try to divide the universality of the public space among them and in this endeavour thwart the public sphere, filling it up with unresolved personal issues, particular visions, specific notions and prejudiced opinions.  The fragmentation of a public space eventually undermines democracy, paving the way for private idiosyncracies of various kinds thus curbing the universal language of communication. Digital film making has robbed us of our commonly viewed cinema, our commonly held interests around stars and our commonly discussed and debated merits of directors.

The above may be illustrated by studying Mainak Bhowmik’s film, Aamra, on which the Hindi film, Dil Kabbadi was based. Aamra portrayed the frailty of intimate relations against a backdrop of wider choices of mates and freer sex and also the challenges to the human ego made by a society of increased competition and uncertainties. The analog film, Dil Kabadi was somehow capable of showing the sustained importance of marriage and intimate relations notwithstanding that these were challenged by the ways of the world. The analog cinema is eager to establish truths against the world; the digital cinema wants to break certainties, affirmatives, and absolutes.

The digitally manipulated film Ra One built upon the model of a game show undermines the human feelings in the narrative through the insistence on techniques of a created mascot, Ra One and digitally produced imageries. The film dehumanizes the human elements. On the other hand, Robot which has portions shot in digital films with the bulk in analog appears to humanize the robot.

The economics of digital cinema lies in its reproducibility. It is more important for films to be available for downloads and DVD formats or in the cloud than it is to be watched on screen. Digital cinema is made to fit the frames of a television rather than that of a public theatre. When a film is released to a large screen in a theatre, there is a temporal life to the film. It is released, it is watched and this viewing by many people within a span of time gives the cinema a peculiar historicity. Digital film making, because of its diffuse circulation takes away from it not only the collective of viewing but also its temporality. Digital cinema was in any case a-spatial due to its concentrated and closed frames; it is because of its manner of circulation also a temporal. The extraction of cinema from its time and space takes away a fundamental feature with which cinema has always been associated, namely politics of nation building.

Let us consider the upbeat film, Hemlock Society. The film is digitally made and produced by Shri Venkatesh Films. Hemlock Society attacks the rather egoistic suicidal drive among the youth of Kolkata. The film builds up on optimism, shared public space, conversations and speaks in terms of common causes and cooperative existence. It frequently uses mainstream popular Hindi films to make a case against the fragmented individualism of modern times. Unfortunately, it again returns to the same problem of seeming very personal. The film becomes a life style cinema rather than one where specific life styles are minimized to create a semblance of universality of shared existence.

It would be pertinent to place our observations on digital film making against the backdrop of Dadasaheb Phalke’s endeavours. When Phalke wanted to make films, cinema was expensive in terms of raw stock and equipment, both of which had to be imported. Phalke a professional photographer in the early 20th century raised some funds from small money lenders and gathered some equipment to produce his first film. His films were produced at home and members of his family acted in these. These small details go to prove that Phalke was also an individual making cinema. He had financiers when his films did well and he mounted debts when they did not do well. The absence of steady finance goes to show that as a film maker, Phalke was not supported in any consistent manner by the industrialists. He was also not supported by the political leaders of Swadeshi. Phalke made cinema on his own initiatives, but in making his films, he thought on behalf of an entire humanity; his personal pains never emerged in his films and in each of his production there was a desire to transcend above his specific life situation to emerge into a realm where such petty affairs of everyday life never arose. Phalke’s films were dreams, fantasies and escapes into utopia.

VI

The digital cinema, in a sharp contrast restricts the viewer to the rather personal details of the characters in the story; they are more about rather specific situations. The digital cinema, Slumdog Millionnaire is a point in the case. The film’s irreverence was perhaps possible because it was shot in the digital format. The film was sabotage, a subversion of a culture created by the television of India appearing to be happy and prosperous, achieving every middle class dream. Slumdog Millionnaire used the popular television game show, Kaun Banega Crorepati to contest that what are matters to be “known” by a middle class who lives completely cut off from the harsh realities life is actually the everyday lived in world for the poor. The film shows the gruesome associations that the “right choice answers” of the contest has for a poor boy in the slum. Digital cinema’s principle source of power lies in its subversion of faith, beliefs and ideas of common life. The analog cinema that Spielberg asserts his loyalty to emanates from building up a common life by assimilating particularities into a grand universality. This is the language of participative creation.

In an interesting anecdote, Bapu Watve the biographer of Dada Saheb Phalke writes that Nashik was a religious pilgrim centre and the economically and socially dominated class were that of the Brahmins. After Phalke went to Nashik and produced his cinema from there, the Brahmins too opened their film company and were making films. Since cinema had to appeal across a section of caste and class, the Brahmins made cinema of universal appeal; Brahminical dominance had to dissolve. The digital cinema encourages a withdrawal, non-participation and in this, inadvertently makes the entire public domain of watching films into zones of private affairs. This increases voyeurism and consumerism and takes away the crux of aesthetics of the German Idealism, namely a feeling of asceticism. Digitally shot films through its compressed frames encourage withdrawal and reaffirm the selfhood of a consumerist culture.

The manipulated images in the digital technology creates a case for consuming non-realistic visuals; the value for the real world image thus lies underrated and the disjunction between the real world and the world mediated through a series of consumables gets ever more established. Digital cinema becomes equivalent to processed food as opposed to real food.

It is generally believed that digital film making being low cost enables many independent film makers to emerge in the arena of cinema. This statement is partly true. But there is yet another angle to it. The softwares, the skilled people to run these softwares and the powerful computers needed to run these programmes are unlikely to be afforded by many. Companies like Hindustan Levers and Reliance immediately take up the technology just as it is released so as to be able to encash super profits before the technology becomes cheap and ready to be superseded. These companies help films attain gloss and help in distribution. Not many directors can access these high contacts and directors; directors who are in the high league are mainly advertisement film directors. It is only to be expected that when a class of ad film directors come into the scene, cinema can only follow the format of promoting consumption. Going back a hundred years to Phalke, many industrialists came forward to finance his films. But between Phalke and the industrialists, it was Phalke who had the upper hand, refusing to be helped many times by capitalists and changing financiers repeatedly. The upper hand of the corporates was not evident as it is the case at present because the cinema is a product for consumption instead of being a movement for swadeshi and swaraj.

 

VII

A possible reason for Phalke to have stood his ground was perhaps because his eyes were set upon creating symbols for the entire nation; he sacrificed the certainties and comforts of his life for his goal, his goal being to create symbols for his nation, sovereignty, people, humanity and civilization. This made Phalke indifferent to rewards. Phalke was also not competing against any one. He swells with pride when Baburao Painter makes an indigenous version of the film camera; he walks with his head high as Wadia makes his narrative cinema. He is exhilarated with D.N.Ganguly; he is excited by Madan’s cinematic presentation of Bankimchandra’s novels. For Phalke, the successes of his colleagues only add to his mission and movement.

Unfortunately, among digital film makers, despite each one only holds a small portion of the ground of cinema, there is a fight to finish. This mindless competition among peers can only be explained by the fact that despite each is only breaking a united view of the world; each also wants to be seen as the ultimate idolator. Every director seems to be vying with the other to catch eyeballs, catch attention of the viewers because whether it is the analog or the digital, in the final tally, films must circulate to be known as films. There is no sense in producing films for limited viewership though many film makers would want us to believe in such thesis.

However when films with rather personal viewpoints desire universal viewership, cinema becomes partisan; there is not only a fracture of the assimilative public space but there is a desire of one single point of view to dominate over others. Such domination requires a posture of being holier than thou and this stance is fascist. In recent times, we observe how culture is used for partisan gains, how hard politics is fought over the body of art.  The present paper does not claim that digital cinema has produced such a state of affairs but what is merely being suggested is that digital cinema reflects the aesthetics of such times.

VIII

The rules of aesthetics change with digital cinema. While in the days of analog cinema, artistic pleasure appears to emanate out of unity of diversities, of specificities merging into generalities, of the concrete being raised to the level of the concepts. In the days of digital cinema, art redefines itself as one where it never leaves the body; unlike in the conventional cinema, the appeal of films travel from tactile and physical pleasure towards a spiritual fulfilment, digital cinema tends to reduce pleasure back into the body. Conventional popular cinema has located itself in politics; digital cinema locates itself in lifestyle. The consumption of life style items which includes the body is central to digital cinema; it is about the discovery of the body amidst rare sensations of digitally intervened technologies.

One can compare the film Sholay and Ra One to illustrate the point related to aesthetics. Sholay is opening up of vistas, of release of energies and space. Ra One is more interior, experiencing that which is inside a game world, or lie hidden inside the computer chip. Digital cinema is a peep inside, a travel into things, mostly inanimate worlds of technology from which emanate energies to drive and control the world around us. Sholay, on the other hand is about the release of the body from within its surroundings so that it hits the hard rocks, runs across the fields, travels in trains and speeds through the openness beyond the home. Sholay empowers the body and through it, the mind. Ra One is indifferent to the body, except as a site for experience; the mind must see different things, often those which are not in this world. It constitutes a serious undermining of the body as a source of agency and tries to reach into the zone of the mind, from which emerges magic to control things around oneself as an automaton. The difference in aesthetics lies therefore within the sense of individual agency; politics of art in our modern times also derive from the same concerns. Aesthetics of Sholay arises from putting the body in charge of the physical world where there is work to do among real things and real people. Aesthetics of Ra One is about the need to control the world. In Sholay, we see action; in Ra One we observe remote control.

Phalke used cinema to expand our horizons of the visual field bringing into it superlatives like a giant, Ravana, the muscular body of Hanuman, the ornate portals of Kansa, the power of Krishna dancing on the giant serpent Kaliya. Life of Pi and Avatar too showed enormous proportions of nature, but by making the individual small. The search of spectacle at two distinct moments of time separated by a hundred years tells us of our polity. Phalke’s search was that of Swadeshi and rapidly coincided with the mass movement under the leadership of Gandhi and Tilak. Only Swadeshi could not have created the spirit of individual agency though it did create a sense of indigenous enterprise. The Swadeshi produced the Indian capitalist. In a sharp contrast to this, the mass movements produced the idea of an individual citizen, a person with rights and obligations towards a virtuous society, one who would be in the ordinary business of life, exercising rational choice, fairness and responsibility. The latter is the idea of citizenship rather than of the entrepreneur. Phalke’s efforts were entrepreneurial but he created a space where mythical characters moved about and were present for longer duration and thus were humanized from their mere states of icons and idols. Cinema as Phalke developed was perhaps the greatest idolator ever where Gods and Goddesses were converted into dancing stars.

When we return to digital cinema, the restrictions of frames and limitations of depth also limit the dimensions of the characters portrayed. In this sense, digital cinema too is iconoclastic. It breaks the star system by capturing multiple angles to her body and by locating bodies into well-ordered spaces to contain colour spill. But unlike in Phalke where juggernauts and lifeless idols became flesh and blood characters, in the digital cinema, flesh and blood characters are squeezed into frames. This mirrors the process of our consumerist societies where people protect the levels of consumption, and thereby guard wealth and spaces within which consumption takes place.

IX

The arguments set out above need to be contextualized in the backdrop of India’s visual culture, and especially in view of the fact that the historical conditions in India have been different from those in Europe and America and hence require unique theories of visual culture. Unlike in Western Christianity in which the visual was often a contrast, a break in into what usually was the way of life and represented a new kind of moral domination, the visuals in India, like elsewhere in the Orient is bringing to light, setting forth and revealing in its form and fullness something that already lay latent and innate. Phalke’s images of Gods and Demons thus brought into revelation of the hidden resources of the Indian epics and myths and revealed them to a public. The politics of Phalke’s visuals lay in the fact that it was as if a collective consciousness congealed and stood before the viewers; the hitherto unseen had become visible. For over a hundred years, for most viewers of cinema, films mean the bringing into vision what lay so long latent in one’s consciousness but hidden from the eye.

The world of cinema moved from Phalke’s collective consciousness into the star system, perhaps the most narcissistic phase of cinema. Stars were people who were seen both as models to be followed as also the self of the viewer. However narcissist the star system has been, it has nonetheless created a sense of individuality which is located within and integrated to the society. The digital cinema takes away the collective from the narcissist and leaves the viewer revel in her abilities to move away from the herd of humanity instead of moving with it. In this, digital mode collapses the cinema into a private viewing; either in the premium lounge, or on the laptop, or the I Pad or even blown up on a wall to wall flat television inside the living rooms. The darkness of a public theatre helped to keep the world out of the viewer; the privacy of cinema viewing now keeps the viewer shielded from an audience. The main inspiration for Phalke was the calendar art, or the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma and the itinerant theatre of Maharashtra. In these visuals were invariably shared. The inspiration for digital cinema comes from advertisements and hence the cinema, much like the products which the digital mode projects, has also become objects for consumption.  Consumption is individualistic; it reduces when partaken, unlike shared culture, which proliferates when perceived as common concern.

With the arrival of digital cinema, we already feel that the relationship between cinema and the society is changing. To the best of my understanding, Phalke discovered a whole new social participation through cinema; cinema being something around which fragments of humanity could collect. Cinema produced common symbols, spoke of common causes. Digital cinema’s individuation, its atomization of the viewer and the extraction of the viewer from the audience appears to be a reversal of such trends. The television serials, shopping malls, live shows, mobile applications, SMS, games, Internet and the social media are rapidly taking way the charm of cinema. Cinema has given up trying to be all things to everybody; instead it has comfortably relegated itself into a niche of viewers pursuing highbrow culture. While the Rs 100 crore cinema like Son of Sardar and Jab Tak Hai Jaan still get made, yet there is nothing to show that such films stand in any better state than small budget cinema like Matru Ki Bijli Ka Mandola, or Kahaani or an English Vinglish. Indeed, in terms of introducing new discourses, new cognitive categories, a forte of cinema, the small budget films seem to do much better than the big budget ones.

 

 

 

 

 

Appendix:

DIGITAL   CINEMA’S VANGUARD
Company
Year of digital cinema launch		 UFO Moviez
2005		 Real Image (QUBE)
2005
Revenue   model Per   show fee for first two weeks, digital print licence fee for D-cinema,
advertising		 Per   show fee, digital print licence fee, advertising or a combination thereof   including for D-cinema
E-cinema   screens (units) 2,770 2,374
D-cinema   screens (under scrabble) 410 133
Total   screens in India (units) 3,180 2,507
Revenues   (FY 2011, Rs crore) 110 110*
Proportion   from advertising (%) 33 12**
Profitable EBITDA   positive EBITDA   positive
Total   screen target (March 2012) 4,700 3,000
*Not   total revenues, only the one from digital cinema; **Net revenue; selling ad   rights only in Tamil Nadu so far Source: Companies

Source: business standard http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/how-digital-cinema-is-changingfilm-business/459438/

 

References:

Internet Sources

  1. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-05-18/news-interviews/31750548_1_digital-cameras-digital-filmmaking-canon-5d
  2. “Digital Cinematography” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_cinematography.
  3. David Denby, “Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies?” in http://www.newrepublic.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/107212/has-hollywood-murdered-the-movies.
  4. Peter Csathy, “Indie Film Makers and the Digital Dilemma.” In http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-csathy/digital-film-making-_b_1937489.html

 

Books:

  1. Bapu Watve. Dada Saheb Phalke. National Book Trust. Delhi.
  2. Nicholas Mirzoeff. The Visual Culture Reader. 2nd Edition. London and New York. 2001.
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