Towards A Theory of the Indian Popular Cinema

Posted on January 4, 2013 by secondsaturn

Introduction:

The present paper attempts to place in perspective the Indian popular cinema in the backdrop of film theories and shows that the cinema in India has a distinct historical context and social reality which makes it difficult for film theories originating the Western world to make sense of the Indian popular cinema. The paper suggests that the popular cinema in India is itself a theory of the reality surrounding it, it is a kind of politics in which the individual agency is exercised to modernize a traditional society and it is a format in which arguments and opinions put forth by the film makers are tautologically resolved as truth in the filmic form. Theories about the Indian popular cinema are therefore theories about the relatedness of cinema to the cultural needs of the times which the cinema tries to capture and when the cultural needs change with changes in the political system, cinema changes too. The cultural needs which the Indian popular cinema covers are basically four; idea of perfect happiness and definition of legitimate social aspirations, the notion of an ideal person as expressed in the star, and the faith that the star will succeed in her/his mission through the exercise of agency. The last can only be guaranteed by a polity and this makes the cinema explore its possibilities within the given political system and not by rebelling against it; this is the fourth component of the theory of reality which the Indian popular cinema carries. The paper suggests that if any of the above changes the cinema changes, either in its idea of utopia, legitimate aspirations of the individuals, the notion of an ideal person and the level of faith that the agency of the individual will succeed in fulfilling her/his aspriations.

Kinds of Theories of Cinema

Theories of cinema are of two kinds. One set of theories emanate from a sense of being disturbed at the popularity of cinema with the masses. The ones who feel disturbed are the contenders for mass appeal; the Church, ideological politicians, intellectuals, educationists and creative artists with other kinds of medium including, in case of India, the makers of realist cinema. The above mentioned people appear to be losing control over the people’s minds when a star studded multi crore worth production hits the theatres bringing in the throngs of viewers. These theories accuse the formula film of being ideological in the sense of promoting social conservatism and status quo and in accepting in an unquestioning manner, the establishment. These theories insist that popular cinema is conservative and it attempts to create elitism by destroying all progressive political critiques.

At the other end of ideological theories lie another set of accusations which say that the formula film is too erotic, too liberal and loosens all kinds of constraints on social behaviour. This is a position of social conservatives who seem to be saying quite the contrary thing vis-à-vis the political progressives.

Feminist theories combine both strands when they accuse cinema on the one hand of constructing the image of the woman in a manner in which her position in society is reinforced into her assigned spaces and yet on the other hand, uphold her body for a free male gaze and thus construct her as an object of eroticism. Feminist theories speak once for the political progressive hailing cinema as conservative and also from the perspective of the conservative saying that the cinema might go too overboard in exercise of free will.

The other kind of theories explore how does cinema create the impact it does with its viewers? A host of theories such as formalism, structuralism, phenomenological, psycho analytical insist that the way parts in the film move towards the whole in which moments of cinema become a holistic text actually creates the necessary appeal of cinema for the medium to be able to influence the viewers. Formalism and phenomenological theories of film intend to tell us the various ways the cinema appears as a meaning to its viewers through organizing the individual moments into a consistent whole. Formalism tries to insist that cinema develops its own “form” by repeating certain elements in storytelling, stock characters and ways in which problems are resolved. Phenomenology, on the other hand treats each film as a unique occurrence and meaning to emanate from within the film itself than from the rules of cinema in general. Structuralism deals with codes, symbols, signs and icons and seems to suggest that the elements of the cinema derive their meanings by invoking the larger cultural texts circulating in the society. Formalism, phenomenology and structuralism together constitute the aesthetic theory of cinema in the sense that they propose that meaning is created in cinema by its parts coming together into a whole.

While the ideological theories and the aesthetic theories seem to suggest that the film makers intend to influence the audience with their cinema, the psychoanalysis theories say that the film maker has no control over how the audience will respond to the film because each viewer watches films differently and according to her own unconscious repertoire of associations and symbols. Psychoanalytical theories do not agree that films are produced and consumed in specific social context and propose that cinema in particular and art in general is non-lingual just as dreams are.

Theory and the Historical Context of Cinema

Needless to say that the above theories have originated in the West, namely the United States and Western Europe and expectedly they are generalizations out the contexts and histories of those regions. The emergence of Europe through extensive colonization of Europe by Europeans, the rise of Christianity and the crusades, Reformation, Protestant Ethics and the rise of capitalism, the Renaissance, French Revolution, civil rights, socialism and then aggressive nationalism, one observes the constancy of a conflict and competition and which is between the aristocracy and the commoner. The commoner or the subject rises through a sense of individualism which perhaps Christianity brings about and reinforces with Protestantism, the language of rights and then ideas of citizenship albeit as consumers of public goods. All through such conflict, textual traditions have braced the commoners’ consciousness and helped her rise as a conscious individual. Art in Europe, which ran parallel to religion often arguing with and competing with the Church, also developed sophisticated formal principles especially since the 16th century. European music is composed in notations; its paintings and sculpture have developed formal principles in the studios of Leonardo Da Vinci and Rodin and so on. These formalizations were needed precisely because art was competing with another highly formalized and structured institution the Church and later on the monarchy. Europeans therefore theorized everything; novels, poetry, popular music, folk drama and even Avant garde. Vladmir Propp’s work on formalism wherein he traced formal principles in Russian folk tales bear a political relationship with the modernization, Europeanization and socialism in Russia around the October Revolution of 1911. Propp, like his Western European counterparts was attempting to seek out similar texts to fight the texts of the Orthodox Church and the Czar.

In the United States, adventurers landed on its shores and conquered its lands. The vast wild land of intemperate climate made it hostile for habitation. People had to fight together to establish settlements and this common struggle therefore required larger cooperation on the one hand, but also possibilities of being fairly and justly rewarded for spoils. America was thus both a land of adventures as well as of opportunities where one could change one’s class. Civil space, mutual respect and fair rewards became the cornerstone of America. The main conflict areas were actually between those aristocrats who carried the baggage of their privileges in Europe and the ones who came to America to start a new life with a fresh slate. The racial conflict in America happened actually much later with the country’s capitalists using slave labour in cotton farms and has a rather distinct trajectory of its own. Cinema, when it eventually developed in the 20th century in Europe and America concealed the histories of these nations.

The cinema is audio-visual and aural and it is large in dimension. This is why it acts like everything; a bill board, a spectacle, a pulpit, a road signage. It is at once a recollection and reconstruction of the past as it is an usher of the future. Cinema uses history to foray into the future and hence the form of the cinema depends a lot on the sense of society in which it is located.

Cinema In The Indian Context

The Indian cinema too emanated out of its history, or like in the above instances out of an attempt to write history and construct the future. Unlike in the West, India’s major conflict was with its tradition and hence with the way its society was constituted over ages and since time immemorial. The main conflict within India was the management of modernity while keeping something of its tradition and also to attack its tradition where it blocked the path of modernity. The peculiar form of cinema in India emanated from this context. The present paper attempts to articulate the form of the Indian popular cinema.

What Is The Indian Popular Cinema?

The Indian popular cinema is distinguished from Indian realist cinema which is also known variously as art cinema, as parallel cinema and lately as auteur cinema. The popular cinema is also called as the formula film, with foregone conclusions and expected endings in which the hero always wins, the heroine saved, the villain vanquished and everything neatly ends up in a state of happily ever after. The formula cinema is not realistic in the sense that unlike in the realistic cinema, the dissatisfactions, defeats and disequilibrium of everyday life are neatly overcome in the cinematic narrative and that too through the agency of its protagonists. Realistic cinema finds the ‘hero always winning’ theme of the formula film as absurd and day dreaming; while the audiences of the popular cinema finds the realistic films as being pessimistic and imposing. Realistic cinema is often known by its directors; formula cinema is known by its stars. Realistic cinema is an authorial critique of the society at large; the formula cinema is about theorising problems of the society as constraints on the exercise of individual agency those which must be overcome. In the realistic cinema, the situation and the context of individuals are explored and revealed; in the formula film the individual’s powers and will are redeemed.

Star As Theory in Indian Popular Cinema

The sociology of the Indian popular cinema is the best expressed in the personal of the protagonist of its narratives, the star. Films are recognized, remembered, recalled and classified according to stars. Stories are written to suit the persona of stars; music is composed and dance choreographed according to the innate style of the stars. In a popular film, the viewer is expected to enter the film space through the persona of the star. It is from the perspective of the star that the entire narrative is set up. Cinema becomes sociology because of the star; the star is an ideal universal person of the society and must emerge as a concept which at once is seen to create solutions to problems which are most commonly faced. For instance, films which star Amitabh Bachchan are different from those which star Shah Rukh Khan. Amitabh Bachchan’s concerns are more to do with upward social mobility, about the hegemony of law, issues of governance and access to public goods, of enemies and friends, of realization of powers of the self and discovery of higher reason. Shah Rukh Khan’s films are about fulfilment through romantic love, exercise of will, discovery of limits of faith, belief in the Universe and the discovery of a higher justice awarded metaphysically.

The respective stars address rather different sociological needs; Amitabh’s films are located more in the milieu of the displaced and dispossessed, whose life has been thrown asunder by the violence of capitalism and now the hero must rise to conquer and eventually rule those very forces that had ruined him. Amitabh’s victory in the films must appear to be believable and the belief is possible if the polity is geared towards policies and politics in which upward social mobility is promoted. All through the 1970’s and 1980’s the Indian politics revolved around the creation of opportunities for upward social mobility through small enterprises, self-employment, and land redistribution, extension of agriculture and science and technology policies. In an age as the present one in which small enterprises are encouraged to die out yielding space to large foreign investment driven projects, Amitabh Bachchan’s films are no longer believable.

Shah Rukh Khan, on the other hand is a compulsive and persistent person who just wants his way even if that means stalking and nagging. He lives in an age when one must live more as an image, use the various media channels to emerge as a celebrity and is an unapologetic consumer and possessor of both tangible goods and intangible fortunes; the fact that heroes are typical is sociology, but to appear as believable and convincing to the public they need to have polity that supports them.

Stars need two things; they need to position themselves as a person that the society seeks universally and on the other hand they need a polity that helps them attain their goals. Stars change as societies’ idea of the ideal person changes and also as polity changes. Since polities create an environment is which the citizen is ensured of success, cinema cannot appear to be convincing if the polity does not support the cause of the person they seek to promote as universal. The importance of politics and the cinema’s alignment with the incumbent political system makes us say that the cinema is an ideological tool.

Stars are thus neither charismatic religious leader, nor are preachers who deliver through the pulpit. Stars are the egoes of the viewers. The viewer finds himself or herself in the star. The cinema must appeal to an audience across all socio-economic particularities and this is why, audiences irrespective of caste, class, gender and age must be able to identify with the star. It is this strange requirement of universality that disembodies the star and makes him/her into an idea, a concept, a position, a manner of thought, and a way of behaviour. The star’s ability to move out of the body into a generalized concept, a language, an idea, and a discourse makes a star into a world view. Ideology gets invariably associated into a star; it is a certain attitude towards the world which promises the viewer the best possible rewards from her exploitation of social opportunities. The star is sociological precisely because it helps the viewer in her fantasies and dreams to emerge out of her concrete ‘fact’ness into a life where constraints seem to drop off and she gets liberated to pursue her utopian ways. The transcendence of the star from a concrete body into a set of concepts helps the viewer also to emerge at least in her dreams as one who overcomes her socio-economic barriers to attain a fuller life as the one she desires. The overcoming of the social concrete is the sociology of the film; the imagination that by following the star one can get a better life is the fantasy aspect of cinema.

The star is the reason why cinema gets its style; the colours, rhythm, music, dances, fights, spaces are constructed to give the star her/his most apt setting. The star is an actor who lends a distinctive and unique style to every character that she/he plays in. The various characters stars play out may vary widely; some characters may be poor, others rich, some may be young and some old, some grave and some playful, in other words, various sorts of beings but in each of these the becoming is always unique, the problems and situations may vary but the principles of solution out of the problem is invariably the same. This sameness is due to the same star playing out these several roles.

It is not true that stars cannot immerse themselves in the roles they play. Stars often play roles to stun method actors; Nargis’s negative role in Raat Aur Din, Amitabh Bachchan’s role in Paa, Sharmila Tagore’s younger role in Mausam, Sanjeev Kumar in Aandhi are sterling performances by stars who seem to only repeat themselves. The quality of a star is to be able to retrieve their unique persona out of every act and not to merely immerse indelibly into the characters they play in. This is to say that stars carry characters rather than riding on these characters. This peculiar feature of the Indian stardom is essential to the formula of the cinema.

The Form/Formula of the Indian Popular Cinema

When the viewer does not naively believe in the film and instead accepts the cinema as a mathematical model with assumptions and abstractions intended to draw out rules of behaviour and probability of events; the cinema opens out metaphysical possibilities. At this level, the cinema emerges as cultural texts, at par with myths and legends, epics and traditions. The song and dance which are integral to the Indian cinema are linked to this search for a metaphysical aspect. When the cinema is viewed as an abstract model of earthly possibilities and metaphysical assurances the resolution of the individual moments in the cinema into a conclusion must bear two attributes. One, the conclusion must emerge as the logically most complete solution leaving no better alternatives in the minds of the viewers and the other; in this perfectly logical conclusion the processes in the narrative which brings all the separate, distinct, varying and conflicting moments together, law like propositions must be generated. The last are film slogans, like Safal Hogi Teri Aradhana in the film Aradhana; Love is Life in Kabhie Kabhie, or Dil Ki Suno in Dil To Pagal Hai and so on. These slogan like propositions are sometime articulated in dialogues, or songs or appear as writings with credits.

The form of the Indian popular cinema is abstract and hence its dialogues are arguments than aspects of the narrative. The Indian popular cinema needs to be formulaic; its formula ensures that no effort is spent in getting the hang of the narrative and instead on a structure of anticipated events, arguments can be set into sharper relief. The abstractness of the formula film is a vehicle for arguments about world views, morals, desired direction of social change, limits of human liberty and the responsibilities of the individual will. These arguments take place through dialogues and often because these arguments incorporate views of both traditions as well as of modernity in moderation attempting to take a middle path. It is the Indian popular cinema’s refusal to deny an extreme modernist position that often attracts criticisms of being conservative and promoting the status quo.

While the arguments and resolutions articulated within the narrative of films seek moderation, its songs transcend boundaries and seek a new level of liberation. Hence songs are supra lingual; they reach levels of cognition beyond that which can be articulated. Songs are the soul of cinema that genuinely transcends the concreteness of its form; cinema is remembered, associated and in fact circulated via the song. Songs are released before the release of the cinema and the appeal of the music pulls the audience to it. It is interesting to observe that the cinema in its arguments and conclusions seek a compromise between liberty and conservatism but in its songs abandons inhibitions and rises to eroticism. The song in cinema expresses many things; they may help develop the narratives, they may establish images of stars, they may articulate the spirit of the film and set the overall tone.

The popular cinema is organized very much like a mathematical problem, it has a premise and the problem is contained within the premise. The solution is obtained by manipulating and reworking the premise. Interestingly, a song is structured much like this; it has a base, the base is reworked to produce the ascents and descents when eventually the tune returns to the base. Songs of a cinema are very crucially reflective of its core and express its spirit.

Dance is the rhythm of the cinema; it aligns the rhythm of the body of the star to the rhythm of the film narrative. Dance is the medium through which the star is bodily integrated to the film, just as the song spiritually integrates her. Dance reflects the intensity of the drama of the film; the more intense its drama is the sharper the movements of the dance are.

The misc-en-scen or the composition of the film set is also important for setting up the image of the star. Film stars have their favourite backdrops; Rajesh Khanna is best set against open spaces; Amitabh Bachchan is best set in large and imposing spaces and this has helped directors to develop rags to riches stories around him. Nargis was often set up against water; Madhubala was set up in palaces. These backdrops are not accidental; these are frames which hold images of stars.

Historical Context of the Star-Centredness of Indian Popular Cinema

The historical conditions of the cinema in India are rather unique. The cinema was born amidst a growing Freedom Struggle in which India was emerging into a new society by embracing new ethos and new ethics of the West and yet trying to keep the best of its traditions. The modernization of tradition was India’s efforts at reforming its society according to the Western ideals of liberty and equality and individualism while trying to maintain the social ties of the family and its emotional bonds. Individuals and individualism were very important to this project and constant focus on personalities and role models such as Raja Rammohan Roy, Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar or Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose. These personalities were sources of new morals just as the stars in the popular cinema were the sources of new morality for the people. The star was a personality one needed to emulate; the source of ethics, the source of law. The film space talked of problems which the stars solved to emerge as the source of resolution and hence of new laws. Through cinema, the directors, the story writers and others actually advanced their interpretation of the contemporary reality of India and its future direction. Viewers were expected to be able to take charge of their own worlds and through their being in it, change it in the way the star in a film narrative would do.

Hollywood Stars, Bollywood Stars

The other cinema that works through star power is Hollywood. Hollywood stars are individuals with great charisma; but unlike the Indian stars are not worldviews and consistent ideological systems. Stars are performers with distinctive styles, very much like players in a baseball team. Unlike the Indian stars, Hollywood stars are not explored over a body of work where each film is like a variation in the context to test out the vitality of the star’s philosophy. Unlike in the Indian popular cinema, the directors of Hollywood cinema are not rendered invisible to the stars. We recall our major films by their stars; few would remember the director of Mother India, or of Mughal-e-Azam. The star and the director are in an unequal relationship as each tries to reach over the other; gossip magazines often report stories of star-director ego battles. It is not unusual to see stars starting their production companies in which they will get directors to direct them as they (stars) want.

The difference between Hollywood productions and the Indian popular cinema arises from the difference in the histories of these two nations. The United States were formed out of adventure, exploitation, raids, campaigns and exploring opportunities and subjugating wild lands. Here individuals were fighting unknown terrains and winning unexpected opportunities. While the individual was supposed to be powerful and capable; s/he had no finitely defined game to play. In India, on the other hand, modernizers and social reformers were forever setting out social agendas and individuals could become powerful by setting a social agenda. Ramkrishna Paramhansa, Swami Vivekananda, Dayanand Saraswati, Nayanar, Jyotiba Phule and even Gandhi were keen to set the agenda for the society. The film star is an agenda setting individual; but not as a leader but as everybody and anybody. The star is an attempt to make every individual emerge as a leader in herself. One can easily infer the closeness of the star to a participative democracy.

Melodrama versus the Indian Formula Film

Some scholars confuse the form of the Indian popular cinema as melodrama; a form of drama with music and dance and loud dialogues and high strung emotions which originated around the time of the French Revolution. Melodrama, much like the Indian popular cinema had stock characters, expected flow of events, similar arguments over morals and was a vehicle to address and adapt to social changes that were sweeping France. The context of melodrama resembles the context of the Indian popular cinema as well. But the centrality of the star in the Indian popular cinema creates all the difference. The star brings about a sense of individual agency, makes the individual the source rather than the instance of law. The sense of individual agency makes cinema close to politics; pure melodrama would have made it merely into a social dialogue among contending systems of morals and ethics.

Since the star in the Indian popular cinema is a theory of the Universe, the theory needs to be tested against a variety of possibilities. Films are made with varying possibilities in which stars must acquire consistency. This is the inter textuality of cinema where films must refer back to one another to articulate out the star’s philosophy as completely as possible taking into account every possible variation in context. Stars are placed in different roles; serious and playful, moral and immoral; good and the bad, loyal and treacherous and so on, so that each time the star evolves out of the cinema as more refined and better articulated world view, rising above variations into a purer image with more abstract qualities. A star means a body of work which when strung together represents the biography of the star as an image.

The Indian popular cinema is often criticized for not being able to break out of the formula; but the Indian popular cinema does not want to break away from the repetitions and in fact actively pursues the formula. Film directors blame the distributors for declining to buy unique productions and the distributors in turn blame audiences by saying that unexpected formats of cinema surprises the viewers and turn them off. Just as we mentioned above that the formula of the cinema helps to set up its arguments more clearly with a higher level of conceptual abstractions and generalizations, the formula cinema is also helpful for directors to talk among themselves, compare merits against a standardised format. Intertextuality is possible with the standard format of the popular cinema and without intertextuality neither the star nor the director can aggregate their respective efforts at producing discourses. The formula is in the interest of the directors, producers, stars and of course the viewers.

The characters of the film narrative are also abstract; the father represents the protective and the nurturing forces of the society, as men are often seen caressing young children and showing overt affection more than women do; the mother is the social conscience, siblings are the images of the protagonist but without the consciousness of agency. The heroine is the feminine aspect of individual agency while the hero is the male aspect of the same. The protagonist acts according to the spirit of the right; to seek and establish the truth. The villain is one who moves counter to the discovery of the truth and the establishment of the good. He is opposed to the protagonist because he sabotages the prospects of the former’s fulfilment. The villain is bad because he is a saboteur. It has been discussed later in this paper that the Indian popular cinema explores of sexuality as a liberating force of the society. However, like everything else, sexuality too needs moderation and vamps tempt the hero to adultery. Villains often attack the heroine’s modesty, which the hero must protect making the protection of female sexuality as the good man’s concern.

The cinema’s mainstay is drama; but drama is only one ingredient of cinema as the pace of the drama appears to be the main constituent of cinema. Cinema captures the spirit of its times by discovering the pace and the rhythm. In fact, sometimes films are made which intend to capture the speed of the times. Films like Dhoom, Race, Don and other similar productions have often captured the pace. Truly, speed also tests the levels of technical achievements of cinema.

What Does The Popular Cinema in India Try To Attain?

Like speed, the cinema also tries to attain visuality. For this it pursues spectacles, extravaganzas and special effects. These test the technical craft of film making; the directors would like to establish themselves in technical finesse as much as they would like to set social agendas and make money by producing stars. As far as directorial intent goes we can identify three kinds of purposes; one is to show off technical skills by which spectacles are produced. The other is to raise social issues which produce ideological films. The third may just be to help the audiences consume star images in which s/he explores star charisma. Very rarely a director can combine all of the above purposes into a single production. Raj Kapoor has been an exceptional director precisely because of his ability to combine all kinds of directorial intent into single films.

The abstractness of the Indian popular cinema makes it difficult to deal with concrete subjects. Indian directors are not comfortable with real historical events or with biographies of national leaders or historical personalities. The Indian cinema is also not comfortable with adventures and detective genres; this is because although adventures and detective genres also deal with problem solving, they do not deal with negotiations of human emotions. The formula of the Indian popular cinema and its stock characters and expected set of events revolves around human emotions and hence cannot comfortably accommodate genres in which these emotions are not central. One of the most coveted challenges in a popular cinema is the pet animal; it is in the pet animal that emotions in its purest form are discovered. Tere Meherbaniya, Haathi Mere Saathi and Khoon Bhari Mang explore the most heartrending emotions through mute animals.

Controversies of Sex and Violence

Two controversial areas of cinema are sex and violence. The popular cinema brings these issues into the public view. The popular cinema advocates romantic love and through it seeks the erotic. The hero often teases the heroine and then makes her get attracted to him in a way that the Indian popular cinema feels liberates the feminine agency. Conservatives protest that in the images of the erotic, the female body is set up for consumerist male gaze and hence insults women’s sensibilities. This is perhaps true to an extent but sometimes female erotica helps women to feel liberated from many constraints imposed upon her through the curtail of her sexuality by the society. It remains a matter of debate as to whether the erotica is aesthetic or obscene.

Violence is yet another matter of grave concern. Art often addresses violence because it wants to absorb violence and destroy the conditions from which violence emanates. The formula of the film ensures that anomalies are corrected, injustices are evened out and the violence is existentially eliminated. In such cases, even the most violent cinema might bring a sense of peace if the injustices are retributed. However, films even when they do not show anything overtly violent, may invoke a sense of violence among the viewers by not resolving its inner tensions clearly. The viewer may feel a sense of unfulfilment and even meaninglessness which might increase anxiety and invoke violent emotions. It is therefore, very important for tensions to be resolved one way or the other in cinema.

The Hindi Film and the Regional Popular Films

The Indian popular cinema, irrespective of the language it is made in displays certain discernible features which make any production in this genre identifiable as a popular movie. We instantly know something as a Bollywood movie, or a Bengali commercial cinema, or a Tamil popular film even if we catch few fleeting moments on the screen, or even when we watch a film poster. The instant recognition of a few audio visual moments on the screen happens because of the manner in which these cinemas use the basic ingredients of film making like movement, rhythm, colour, music and ordering of the space. The variations in the style of films across regions and then the existence of a Hindi film industry which has fairly a universal appeal at least in the rest of India save the North East and the Deccan tells us that India has a vernacular identity as well as a national identity. The self-image of a viewer as a respectable person in her vernacular society determines the style and content of the regional popular cinema whereas the Hindi popular cinema reflects the self-image of the viewer in the national public space. The distinctness and yet the formulaic patterns of regional popular cinema derives from the fact that viewers of Indian popular cinema seek the same kind of agency; the difference in style takes place because the kind of agency in the vernacular society differs from the sense of agency at the national level.

The formula film must create tensions and then resolve them; the conflictual elements must be brought on board and then judged. The idea of the conflict in a popular Indian cinema is one which opposes the fulfilment of the protagonists’ purpose. Sometimes the protagonist might wish to extend his/her will too far and conservative forces in the society must come and oppose; sometimes the society is too constraining on the individual agency, the protagonist must oppose. The conflict of opposing forces is usually resolved into a middle ground where all ends thoroughly well without any loose ends. This happens also in tragedies where the main characters die. In Mother India, Radha becomes the extreme instance of virtue when she punishes and kills her own son for the good of the society, or in Mughal-E-Azam Anarkali agrees to be executed in order to save the Mughal Empire.

Threats to the Film Formula

The form of the cinema which has been so long resistant to change is however under threat in the films which are being made after 2000. We call the present times as the new age of Indian cinema because there are many film directors who want to break free of the problem solving and individual agency type. Clearly the threat to the form has come from a change in the polity where there is little scope for individual agency, the rise of corporations, the dissolving of boundaries of a nation and the migration of Indians to the West. The coherence of the society has suffered as a result of such changes and hence the universality of the Indian popular cinema has also been compromised. The multiplex culture of small screens, the circulation of the video format, the television broadcast of films have extracted cinema out of its time and space context and shorn it of one of the major attributes, the large screen. These changes have struck at the very chord of the popular cinema, namely shared viewing.

Applicability of Film Theories to Indian Popular Cinema

The above discussions of the Indian popular cinema shows to us that the cinema in India is not a collection of individual films which must be theorized in abstract generalizations and then made sense of against a wider understanding of concepts. The Indian cinematic form is itself an abstraction, a high level of generalization of concrete moments. Therefore, the popular cinema in India is itself a form of theory; the very pursuit of form is an exercise at building theory out of a complex and random reality.  The film maker’s own ideological slants and belief systems are presented to the viewers. Here ideological theories of cinema can be applied well. Ideologies of the film maker regarding ideas of utopia, individual aspirations, individual happiness, virtues and social morality come into play through the persona of the star and the formula of the cinema. These ideologies pertain to the constitution of the public space.

The manner in which a rather individual position of the film maker is presented as an absolute truth is a play of structuralism in which the concrete contents in the cinema are rendered into rather abstract ideas which have meaning only in relationship to the whole. The play of these concrete instances to dissolve into a whole and derive meaning only in relation to the whole is the deftness of the script, camera work, music, dance, editing and the star. Here rules of aesthetics are used; Amitabh Bachchan had to die in Sholay to give it sublimity. The vast empty spaces, the clear sky, the bare terrain were already positioned to raise the film into a transcendental realm and with the death of a vital character the mood of the film seems to become as empty as the backdrop. Viewers emerge from the theatre with the epical realization of how war was inevitable but also futile. In Deewaar, Amitabh’s death crushes us into the confined spaces of the temple, the police station, the cramped flats, the underbelly of the urban spaces. The death of the hero puts us down, depresses us and leaves us with an unresolved anger at the world and we finally see the hero’s point and become one with his concerns. Familiarity with aesthetic theory might help us understand these processes within the Indian popular cinema better.

Psychological theories do not always hold for analysis of the Indian popular films because of the sameness of its form across individual films. The characters represent points of view which have already been formed in them; for instance the social conscience in Radha, the protagonist of Mother India already inhered in her the values which she projected throughout the film. In Sholay, the characters were already pretty similar all through the film and did not change in their mental profile. There are no inner processes of characters in an Indian popular cinema; this is also why psychological thrillers, science fictions become so difficult for the Indian popular film format to accommodate.

Yet another reason for the irrelevance of psychological theories of cinema for the Indian popular film is that the Indian cinema does not seek to produce dream like features; the light is often uniform, the dialogues are loud and clear, turn of events are anticipated through the use of formula and hence there is little scope to create dream like visuals.

We may not apply phenomenological theories to Indian cinema as well because of the form it pursues across films whereby a film can immediately be identified as being a Bollywood film or a Tamil popular cinema or a Bengali popular cinema. The repetition of patterns takes a film away from being a unique production and pushes it into the realm of inter-textuality where it speaks to other productions. Phenomenology has little use because the cinema cannot be suspended in time and space.

Feminist theories, which assert that the feminine principles are derogated in the Indian popular cinema, are fairly applicable in the Indian context. While the hero is supposed to protect the feminine space, the idea of female agency does not seem to have developed in India. The disappearance of the vamp and the progress of the heroine in the image of the temptress show that while the cinema is keen to explore sexuality of women, it does little in terms of agency.

Can There Be A Separate Theory of the Indian Popular Cinema?

As we have already analysed that the form of the Indian popular cinema is itself a theory. The form has two sources of genesis; one is the faith that individuals can assume charge of their lives and fulfils their aspirations by removing obstacles and the other is that the Universe ensures the success of the values and the virtues that the protagonist upholds. While the former pertains to the sense of individual agency the latter draws upon the overall faith that people have in the system. If either changes, the cinema is bound to change.

The Indian popular cinema seems to be at crossroads of change. While we seem to laud the release of new age cinema which challenge the form of the conventional commercial cinema, we often overlook that through this new wave the Indian popular cinema has lost much of its legitimacy as a bearer of civilizational morals and that it far less inspires a universal viewing. The over powering image of the star, the set out formula of the film with expected twists and turns in the narrative and almost foregone conclusions about happy ends without loose undigested matter gave the cinema its abstractness which helped people across a variety of socio-cultural backgrounds to come to the theatre as a public sphere. The “multiplexisation” of cinema, the toning down of the star, the bringing down of larger than life dreams into the mundanity of everyday life and then trying to achieve the spectacular extravaganza of cinema through the use of high definition camera and speed editing and item songs and sound effects might raise the film into an art form but reduce its political and moral power.

While it is true that the polity of India has changed from a moral space to a consumerist and corporatist one and consumerist aspirations are increasingly shaping families, education, political morality and ethics of national life, it is also true that the film makers are opening up the cinema to more and more of audio-visual sensual consumption. The so-called technical finesse of cinema is an attempt to “feed” the viewer with new senses. The conventional formula film despite its extravagant visuals was flat and presented the content on a flat space under a consistent tonality to the viewer. It was as if the director was placing a case before the judge, the audience being the judge who would then pass a judgment considering all aspects of the appeal made before her. The technological manipulation of today’s director shows that the director wants to gain the better of the viewer, fox and flummox her. The cine director does not care about the viewer as a complete entity and instead treats her like any other consumer.

A part of the new directors’s superiority comes from the fact that s/he has so many audio-visual media to combat with. The television, the FM radio, the DVDs, i-pad, computer, Internet and even the shopping plazas and stage shows gnaw away at the monopoly which cinema had on the minds of its viewers. The cinema, despite the new wave is losing its authority among its viewers.

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The Hate In The Gang Rape

Posted on December 19, 2012 by secondsaturn

As per reports of a citizen journalist in Hindustan Times of 18th December 2012 front page headlines, a 23 year old physiotherapy student who was returning from a movie in the Select City Walk in Saket in the evening was gang raped in a luxury bus by seven men and then thrown off at a highway toll plaza from where the police discovered her lying unconscious. The girl was accompanied by her male friend, a 28 year old software engineer both of who were headed for Uttam Nagar. It appears that troubled by the fact that they were getting late; they boarded the above mentioned chartered bus headed to Dwarka, a locality close to their homes. The victim and her friend were discovered by the police lying unconscious at the spot where they were thrown off. The girl was not only raped brutally but also assaulted by a blunt instrument being hit several times in the stomach. In every act it was a show of destruction of the feminine in the public sphere. What seems to be even worse is that the crime was apparently unprovoked; the girl was just encountered accidentally and the victims did not seem to know her at all. Her mere presence provoked the hate and contempt in the offenders making it a hate crime of the worst possible degree. If the victim succumbs to her injuries, then unfortunately the offenders will only qualify for the sentence awarded in the rarest of rare cases, death.

What makes the crime ever more heinous is the fact that the circumstances of it all are so normal and routine. The girl went for an evening movie; it was only 8 pm when she left the Saket Mall, not late by any stretch of imagination. She was not partying as late as past midnight. She was not alone; she had a male chaperon, a responsible and young adult. She was anxious about getting late and boarded a chartered bus which is very usual in Delhi. Before her friend and she boarded the bus they faced many auto refusals. She took some extra caution not to board crowded buses where she would have been poked and mauled by male passengers; she was in all probability not of the social class where she would call a radio taxi because of its costs.

The offenders were out on a joyride looking for victims. The fact that they had looted a fruit vendor and likewise thrown him off at the IIT flyover shows that this was a regular criminal gang looking for victims as game. The main accused of the crime also has a brother in jail on rape charges. This is a serious matter when crime is pursued just as entertainment. This alone makes it into a matter to qualify as rarest of the rare.

Ritwik Mallik posts a video on his FB Timeline where a television reporter from a news channel was testing out the safety of Delhi roads at 11.30 pm and she got lewd comments from a tacky set of boys aboard a badly maintained Indica. The boys challenged her to capture them on camera. I have no idea why the police are not catching the boys for obscenity. But certain things are evident from this small video clip about the intent of the rapists and muggers. It is true that they pursue crime as game but also that they are eager to show off themselves as being criminals. These acts are not merely directed at the usual hate categories, the poor vendor, the woman, and the elderly but also are acts to shock the public. The public outrage which brings together the people and the Parliament, the demonstrations and the candle lights, the press coverage and the social media site communications are all those the offenders are looking to arouse. Like terrorists, these offenders also want to create terror, tear through the fabric of the public sphere, and puncture the public space and somewhere even if they are convicted with the death sentence they feel that they have made their point, which is that they have revealed the vulnerability of a world confronted with their prowess. In this manner, the offenders of the gang rape, the shoot outs in the US, hate crimes in Europe and terror attacks are one and the same only.

As individuals they might be nice in their private spaces but in that part of them which is social happens to be deeply impaired. Kasab was nice, Dhananjay Chatterjee hanged for the rape and murder of a minor was polite and intelligent and even spiritual and cultured, Adam Lanza an absolute darling; no problems here with individual personalities. But come the social persona, these offenders are in deep danger. While the personalities of these offenders seem to be absolutely fine within the family set up, the moment they encounter the society something in them snaps. What snaps, why does it snap are some of the issues which lie in the preserve of sociology.

Looked at carefully these offences seem to say one very simple things to their victims and which is why are you so contended, why are you so smug, why do good things happen to you and why are you not ruffled? This means that there is something which deeply unsettles them. In case of the above mentioned offenders, one thing seem to be common to all of them and which is that they seemed to have attained everything that they felt was there to achieve in society and yet when they reached their current consumer class they find that they cannot belong to the core society. Take for instance, the offenders of the gang rape case; they had a level of income which is very new to them as they have made more money than their families ever could earn; they own gadgets the early generation in their families never heard of and indeed when they dress up in fake or even genuine brands they cannot be made out from those who have been urbanized and anglicized over generations. Yet, these wannabes are not accepted in the society of the elite.

Ranjita Mohanty observes the rising incidence of crimes especially car theft and eve teasing in her colony in Vasant Kunj. The offenders are boys from Kishangarh who have used the money paid towards compensation of land when Vasant Kunj was being built, used the money to buy cars and transport, saw fortunes rise and entered the high consumer class. It is through the consumption of brands or their imitation that they imagined they could date girls from Vasant Kunj. The girls never cast a glance. Contempt had them eve tease, make lewd remarks, become obscene, put on blaring microphones, ravage the colony by over speeding and other acts of defiance and indecency. It is a mistaken notion which these wannabes have that they can belong to the club class by only spending like them. This is a malaise which has badly affected the youth of that zone which today emerges as literally the cultural no man’s land between well settled agricultural villages and the megacity of Delhi as the former grows into these areas.

The violence of the exhibitionist kind is warfare of those who wish to be assimilated into the culture of the city and yet are disallowed entry, those who are therefore dressed up and nowhere to go. The attack on women is an attack on the city life at large, the city which makes them feel inadequate at every step by rejecting them even when they are the required qualifications like ownership of mobile sets, I Phones, cars, jeans, sunglasses and all. The rejection is a surprise to them because the public discourses are so arranged in advertisements that dominate not only the visual culture but the overall meaning of life where it seems that if one eats that packet of chips or drinks the cola and swishes past in that car, life is fulfilled. Our entire development process tries to make consumers of us; we treat politicians as people who fetch us water, supply us electricity and render us with various services; our idea of citizenship is slowly turning into consumerism. Our citizenship rights are locked in aadhaar cards which are needed because we need to consume cooking gas, buy a car or register property. The relationship of the State and the citizen is in the bundle of goods the latter demands and the former supplies.

What this consumerist philosophy obliterates is that there is a culture class one that grows over generations of cultural privilege and exclusivity and which lies at the core of our social differentiations; this culture class is very possessive about who gains entry in it. And this cultural capital is not easy to acquire by only watching television and moving about in the shopping malls. It is this barrier of culture that really angers those who seem to have attained the entire necessary consumerist aggregate performance indicator scores. That frustration shows itself in an attack on society. Hence rape of the kind just discussed may be treated as a hate crime and punished thus, by death whatever the circumstances be producing it.

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Habermasian Public Sphere and Cinema

Posted on November 24, 2012 by secondsaturn

For Sanil

23rd November 2012

 

Looking for Habermas in Cinema as Popular Entertainment – Cinema as Public Sphere with special reference to India

Susmita Dasgupta

(references to be inserted)

 

Introduction:

The idea of public sphere as constituent of the modern society and its politics, as a condition for the emergence of a Constitution based State and eventually for democracy and of the modern welfare State was extensively explored by Jurgen Habermas[1].  The importance of Habermas’s treatise on the public sphere emanates from the extensions of concepts of the various spheres of human activity namely the State, politics, family and economy which intersect one another in the public sphere generating ideas and public opinion relating to the mutuality of the above mentioned spheres. The way these various spheres of social life reinforce or repel one another has important consequences for the modern State and a functioning democracy. The present paper explores the various ideas that Habermas explores in his conceptualization of the public sphere in the context of the Indian popular cinema.

India is the world’s largest film producing nation[2] and its cinema especially Bollywood[3] now underlies the parameters of the global visual culture; it will not be wrong to say that much of the credit for sustaining India as the world’s largest democracy[4] goes to its popular cinema which has produced a cultural and a moral density for people to develop a shared culture and universal norms and a sense of a larger society, if not a nation. It is the contention of this paper that the cinema in India is the public sphere and the interesting manifestations of the cinema have important implications for the shared norms of the Indian society.

 

What is the Public Sphere?

The public sphere is really not a concrete space but a set of discussions, discourses and reasoned debates around issues in a manner that they are circulated into a circle of people who then emerge as opinion makers. The aim of such public opinion is to contain the absolute power of the sovereign and direct the same towards the fulfilment of interests of the society that constituted what Habermas describes as the private sphere, namely the economy and the family[5]. The public sphere which is actually a set of conversations, discussions, debates, petitions and prayers around and to the State presupposes and inheres the civil society, a term which he borrows from Hegel. For Hegel, the civil society is a set of relationship which accrues among individuals who look beyond their selfish interests and their position of merely being in the society towards becoming people who speak for the society as a whole. For Hegel, the civil society is rooted in the person’s idea of an ideal State and a space where “ideas” towards the Ideal are formed through discussions.[6]

But Habermas adds a few more attributes to this civil society by asking who exactly are its members and how does a civil society come into existence? He finds that such societies come into being through the meeting of educated and literate minds reading literature and engaging themselves in fruitful discussions of artistic products. The people who can access the products of culture are people with money because they are lettered and well-read but also because of their meeting spaces which are at coffee houses, salons and in reading rooms in England, France and Germany respectively. In fact, among the above three, coffee houses of England seems to be the most accessible to the “public”, people at large while salons and reading rooms are often extensions of private homes of the well to do. However, the people who participate are not always the ones people always knew and while property and education were uncompromised qualifications for its members, being a familiar face from the established families was not. Clearly, these spaces of literary circles reflected the emergent bourgeois class, a class in the sense that they defined themselves with respect to property and education, both of which under the circumstances of an emerging capitalist order could be achieved and not inherited instead of being identified with respect to communities, language, sectarian order or positions held in government. Such literary circles were later to emerge, along with the development of the printing press and journals into political spheres via the route of public opinion.[7]

A worthy observation may be made between civil society groups and the public sphere. The groups raise and discuss issues which subsequently inheres the public sphere. Transformations in the composition of the civil society itself change the contents and the structure of the public sphere. It is contention of this paper to suggest that with the emergence of the cinema public spheres appear to have changed all across the board because of deep changes in the nature of civil society and associative patterns of the human beings.

In India royal courts, village panchayats, Hari Sabhas, Vaishnav Akhras, temple trusts and other similar spaces of interaction were public spheres. After the emergence of the printing press, the rise of the novels and the publishing industry, the public space dissolved and inhered in small discussion groups and circles. During the Freedom Movement, public sphere actually rises in its true form. There are groups of ideologically motivated friends, there are women’s social service groups, religious associations like the Brahmo Samaj and the Ramkrishna Mission, there are political parties contending the monopoly of the Indian National Congress and there are various watchdog groups like the Anushilan Samity and other youth organizations that sometimes take active part in communal clashes but equally help in relief camps. Whether the Harisabhas of medieval India or the Anushilan Samity of modern times, these groups, much like their European counterparts in the coffee houses discussed and debated ideas of society, its rules, laws of events. The main points of differences between the European civil society organizations is that while Europe discoursed much regarding the nature of the modern state, discourses in India pertained more towards the ideal society which sometimes contained the requirements of the king is upholding dharma, or what is the same thing the ideal way of being for the society. The role of the cinema must be looked at from these perspectives.

 

 

 

Cinema as Public Sphere:

The cinema is a unique innovation of our times; it is a combination of every form of art which has ever existed for mankind, namely painting, music, art, dance, pottery, crafts, architecture, dress designing, ornament designing, make up and others. All of these are rolled under technology to produce something that presupposes universal appeal cutting across class, culture, creed and community. The universal appeal and the universal circulation of the cinema largely derive from its economics; it is expensive to produce cinema and until and unless it can access a large market, it cannot sustain economically until and unless it collects revenues from large volumes of sale of tickets. Economics and the technology of the large screen and it being an audio visual medium make cinema itself a public space. Discourses and debates in the cinema appear to have had a circulation among the cine going public and cinema has been able to create its own public which becomes active in the public space.

Just as the public sphere has its coffee houses and salons, cinema has its journals, film clubs, fan clubs, film parties, gossip magazines, star interviews and memorabilia all discussing about how some films are good and some could have done better and some are avoidable. What underlie these discussions are sets of normative propositions about what an ideal film should be and how it should appeal to its viewers as universal truth. Film stars who try to experiment with different kinds of roles which challenge their established image among their fans are usually constrained because of such normative hold of cinema over its viewers.

The way in which cinema visually overpowers its viewers, towers over them and grasps all their attention by its projection on a large screen accompanied by loud sound and music in a darkened theatre, absorbs the viewer within its frames. Cinema interestingly loses its frames once the viewer encounters it and the latter makes it a continuation of her life and her journey. The public sphere which the cinema creates interestingly is not one of debates and discourses over ideology though ideology is very systematically the objective of its narratives, but rather styles, attitudes, values and other such attributes which help the individual attain a semblance of respectability as a social being in the public sphere. The crucial factor of cinema being the public sphere rather than as something that invokes the public sphere emanates from its characteristic of losing its frames.

When the cinema loses its frames to its people, it becomes a life to be led by the people as characters and participants in that life. Identification happens with cinema as it happens nowhere else. The risk that cinema carries with it is not that it would influence politics and business but that it might itself emerge as politics and business. Narratives and stock characters help people assume their most advantageous positions as players in their real life, take up apt performative stances. The politics of cinema lies just here; it neither challenges the State nor the society but purports to become a self-contained society in itself. The factors through which cinema acquires this attribute is contained in its very technology.

The cinema presents to us a moving image, a moving image in the scale in which it comes to be exhibited to us becomes the defining pace of our world. The cinema provides us the pace of our times; we tend to adjust our step with the pace in films. The visual culture tends to be dictated by cinema, television serials tend to have similar scale of sets in them and commensurate levels of gloss; the advertisements have similar faces, with similar expressions as characters in our films, our drama tends to be set to the pitch of cinematic drama as so on. Cinema, in a way sets the pace of our societies. This it does by its framelessness, its scale of display and the range of its dimensions.

Scholars have often said that the cinema represents the modern day myths. The crucial difference between cinema and myths is that myths are supposed to be cosmic truths and hence fixed in time. The viewers are fully aware of cinema’s fleeting temporality and regard it as the defining truth of the moment. Myths are truths while cinema should be true. Viewers want cinema to be true while they know that they believe myths to be true. Despite the timelessness of myths and the temporality of cinema, the myth like quality of cinema derives once again from its universality. Cinema assumes that it speaks about everyone though not everyone accepts a film. There are many who have not liked Mughal-E-Azam, or Sholay or even Sound of Music but this does not alter cinema’s intention. Cinema intends to appeal to everyone just like myth does.

In its universality and temporality while defining how the world ideally should like at the present moment in the viewers’ life the cinema emerges as the public sphere. Just as the Habermasian public sphere decides what the values should be for the present moment, what kinds of ideals the society should pursue at the defined moment of time the cinema too defines the stance that an individual must adopt towards her world so as to be best fulfilled in her life’s objectives. In the way the cinema assumes morphology like the Habermasian public sphere, it contends politics; but where the cinema becomes anti politics is in the way it renounces any ambition of becoming the State and instead focusses on the individual. The individual addressed in the cinema is a universal individual who is supposed to relate to cinema irrespective of her class, caste, creed and community and in this abstractedness of her being constructed; she is also supposed to become apolitical. In the universalization of the viewer lies her de-politicization.

 

Political Sphere and Cinema:

Despite the fact that cinema raises political questions, questions political morality and ethics of public life, the cinema is not political precisely because it isolates the viewer from her moorings and absorbs her as a viewer of itself. Yet, interestingly because the viewer is absorbed by the cinema into its frames, the viewer ceases to be merely private and emerges as a social and a public being. The public being of the viewer is not with respect to her real existence but in a virtual existence in which she lives her life as a character in cinema and relates to the cinematic world where she is thoroughly ensconced not in a cocooned space but in active relationships to other virtual characters. This life is virtual and hence non participative in the earthly realm; but it acquires every attribute of a perfectly participative person. This is the greatest contribution of cinema in the de-politicization of its viewers.

In the Habermasian text, the 18th and the 19th century were watershed centuries when the public sphere was formed; the main reason for the public sphere to exist was to negotiate with the monarchical powers, greater autonomy for the emergent bourgeoise class. The bourgeoise class, a section of individuals with capabilities of earning incomes as entrepreneurs, producing goods and commodities by the use of machines and energy a la Kantian lemma of objectifying imagination, now demanded equal political power/patronage to consolidate their economic powers. While the Hegelian idea of the civil society helps the bourgeoise attain a space from which he negotiates with the State, Habermas’s public space is extended to include many values and ideas which the bourgeoise regards as the ideal but knows them to be contrary in the real world. Thus Hegelian aesthetics is contained in his civil society and eventually in the reason of the modern State, Habermas’s aesthetics is under cloud in the real world but surfaces in the novels of the times being read in the confines of homes and among like-minded friends. Reading clubs, book clubs, salons and coffee houses and then the changes in the lay outs of private homes with the emergence of the drawing room in English houses points out to a public sphere which is separated out from the political sphere quite unlike the Hegelian idea of the civil society in which the two are collapsed.  Habermas says that the family becomes the ground in which the fine sentiments of a cultured humanity are played out knowing fully well the market sphere was underscored by greed and other sentiments those are far from being fine or humanitarian or both.[8]

When we look at the Indian scenario, we observe a sudden change in the architecture; it is not so much that homes have changed, but certain kinds of homes are now in the forefront. These are the homes of the rich and upper class individuals who have courtyards at the centre with balconies framing rooms all around the courtyard. This is a sea change from homes that were designed like forts as among the officers and nobility of the Mughal era. Satyajit Ray’s films Charulata and Shatranj ke Khilari show the contrasts in architecture very well. While in Charulata we see a Habermasian public sphere which develops inside the home’s demarcated public area where Charu’s husband discourses with fellow intellectuals about the novels, poetry, and religious texts, in the latter film, we observe two men, placed in the middle of the public sphere of the nobility as upholders of State power sink into the privacy of their own world defined by the game of chess.  The chess board becomes the world and an excuse for the players to withdraw from the world.

The 19th century India was a world where the emerging public sphere as in the Brahmo Samaj or other such associations devoted to social reform and modernity negotiated with the political powers in order to seek support for the State in reforming the society. The exercise of power of such public spheres was over an obscurantist society that seemed to lose its refinement by the day. The Ramkrishna Mission established in the penultimate years of the 19th century actively distanced itself from any political engagement; instead drew upon the rich patrons like the princely states especially Rajasthan to fund its social activities like education, famine relief, education for the girl child, development of professional skills and so on. Therefore, the public sphere in India seems to be placed squarely inside the social sphere, addressing issues of the private life. In a way, the public sphere in India raised the private affairs into public debate. The public sphere during this time dwelled in the reproductive economy of the society.

The novels which were written during this time, especially Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay were in total opposition to the values of the Brahmo Samaj; bravado instead of refinement, aggression, revenge, political rebellion against the Mughal powers constituted the major themes of his themes. In the later novels like Bishbriksha, Rajani and Indira, Bankim writes about powerful individuals who are more in the spirit of the Brahmo Samaj. Bankim graduates from political assertion to social reform. What one intends to bring out is that the novel was born in India in a different context than in Europe though Walter Scott and Dickens inspired Bankimchandra to no end.

The birth of the Indian National Congress in the early 20th century brought about sweeping changes in the Indian scenario.[9] The Congress led Freedom Movement was the largest mass movements of the modern world. The reformed individual, infused with values of modernity was now supposed to demand political power for her fuller development. Political agency was seen as facilitating for a holistic development of personality. The birth of the cinema happens in this space; and after some films on mythology and epics, the Indian cinema shifted towards romantic love. Romantic love was seen as the finest realization for human beings; modernizing societies in the process of accommodating and facilitating romantic love. Romantic love was seen as the fullest realization of the self; a self which the politics of the Congress was trying to project as an autonomous political being. It seems that the cinema and the politics of the Congress divided up the personal space between them; cinema took on the intimate sphere while the Congress took upon the political sphere. In both these cases, the private individual along with her privacy was raised to the public sphere; India’s public sphere is about the private lives of individuals whether it is politics or the cinema. The cinema has aided India’s project for democracy through the Freedom Struggle against colonialism by a constant effort of raising the privacy of individual lives into the public realm of shared ideas and values about life and how individuals should ideally behave.[10]

 

Private and the Public of Cinema:

One of the important ideas of Jurgen Habermas in his work on the public sphere is the manner in which the public and the private have combined into producing the nature of the public sphere. In the context of monarchy, the public was there for all to be seen and hence forts and palaces and other insignia of royal power were part of being public but were produced by private individuals, whose spaces were guarded away from the public. This peculiar production of the public by the increasingly guarded space of the private spells a monopoly of power.[11] The cinema in India is similar to the monarchical power of Europe. It is public for no one is excluded from its viewing but film stars and directors and producers of cinema are hopelessly private people guarding themselves away from public eye, refusing to emerge in the public space and very often also avoiding bringing in any opinion in newspapers, television on political subjects. Film stars have however fought political elections as candidates of one political party or the other but they have used politics to consolidate their social power earned through their public recognition. Such crossover from the cinema into politics has not made them public persons or political leaders. The persona of MG Ramachandran, at once the hero of Tamil cinema and the leader of his political party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham, or DMK were two arenas from the both of which he as an individual drew public recognition. His politics and cinema remained separate; his presence in politics was only a reinforcement of his popularity in cinema. As a political leader MG Ramchandran was vital, but he was a very different persona in politics than what he was on screen; politics of Ramchandran did not emanate out of his cinema, though cinema helped him already have a place in his people’s hearts when they cast votes for him.

The intense private space of the cinema makers and the public nature of its exhibition create a kind of monopoly of the cine makers with respect to the production of ideas; there is really no scope of validating of how much the viewers really agree with such productions or whether the framelessness of the cinema hands out to them a set of rules which appear to them as the givens of their lives. Whatever it is, the neatness of the cinematic form, the discovery of pace, the presentation of movement of bodies on the screen present its own logic of solutions make the cinema appear to its viewers as if it is life. The presentation of cinema as life creates its own privacy; people feel shy to admit that they are influenced by cinema and that the cinema has failed to fool them while presenting itself as reality. Outwardly people try to deny that they have been influenced by cinema while inwardly they put themselves down in place of the stars they like. Film stars are our secret selves.

When people feel shy outwardly to admit that they have been influenced by the cinema for the fear of public ridicule, they secretly seek others who have similarly taken to cinema. Fan circles are like secret circles, gossip magazines are circulated beneath the classroom desks, and views on private lives of stars exchanged through hushed whispers and smothered voices. When cinema is publicly discussed or reviewed, it is done in a manner of scrutinizing where the discussant tries to be as removed as possible from the object of discussion, the cinema in this case. This distance is forced upon between the cinema and its fan because the cinema produces a reason which is purer than what the pragmatic reason of reality is. Reason that is put forth by the politics of the modern State and the democratic process of universal franchise often conflicts with the pure ideals pursued by the cinema. The ideals of the cinema are itself born out of public reason and pursued as pure, too idealistic to be pursued in the pragmatic world. People who take cinema seriously are thus supposed to be naïve.

The desire of sceptics to regard cinema in terms of everyday plausibility tries to put a frame around the medium. Academic studies of the cinema are basically concerned with placing this frame. Fans, on the other hand are readily dissolved into the frames of the cinema. Cinema is not reflective of the public sphere, it is the public sphere. It generates a certain level of private within the private self of the individual in which it then creates its own “publicness” in which fans unseen to others find a role for themselves in the world upon which they impose the reason of cinema. Cinema divides the fan’s self into a private and public; there is at first a retreat into the private from the socially defined roles for her and then within the private self searches for the public. The entire business of cinema becomes a secret life which emerges into the open with vengeance when it finds an opening like the persona of MG Ramchandran who enters the more pragmatic sphere of politics.

The private of the cinema which is a private sphere within the private becomes public when a film is popular. Films as the ones made with social messages or are openly critical of the society like Shyam Benegal’s Ankur does not seem to be able to create this vast public of secret private selves. Shyam Benegal is a film director of great reputation but not quite regarded as a popular director with box office collections. Another film, Zanjeer, released in the same year gave India its megastar Amitabh Bachchan. Ankur and Zanjeer were both placed against the social classes with entrenched privileges, both films ended unrealistically with the protagonist fulfilled and vindicated. Yet Zanjeer’s hero could take charge of his life and actively bring about solutions; solutions happened to the protagonist of Ankur. The main point of difference between Ankur and Zanjeer appears to be the fact of social agency and the forms of these films differed because the latter had to make individual agency seem believable while the former did not have such a task to undertake. Zanjeer’s speed of events, its form of developing an entire biography of the hero instead of making him a social type, reducing the supporting cast to stereotypes created by cinema produced before it, positioning of a problem and the imagination of a solution and then pursuing the imagined solution as the inner dynamics of the film makes Zanjeer have a distinct formula. The formula which is a typical arrangement of the form of the narrative ensures that the hero always wins, whether actually or as in Deewaar where the hero dies, morally. The victorious hero becomes the victorious “I” of the viewer who then takes the stance in her own life as if she is the hero in the story of life.[12]

Popular cinema is marked out by the stars; fans recall films by its star cast and not by its directors. Directors place frames, stars work inside them and it is only natural that recalling cinema by its stars is the natural way to be. It is through film stars that cinema unites the privates of the private selves of people, binds them into a secret community of believers and thus secures their orientation towards a consensual sphere. The consensus that a successful democracy requires comes not from ideology of the political sphere but from cinema through the identification of people with characters in films which are viewed universally. The cinema offers people a common game to play and this creates a sense of society where many differences in ideologies and even interests are tolerated. The cinema cuts across differences in politics, straddles across differences in society. It sometimes unites people with diverse backgrounds into a communion. The power of cinema is to generate a new sense of life, a kind of a “Book” to live by its rules.

 

Transformations in the private and public in cinema:

Just as the public sphere undergoes a transformation in the Habermasian schema as the relationship of the private and the public changes, cinema too undergoes transformation with a change in the public and private aspects in it. Cinema became the monopoly that it is because of the use of technology, an expense that few could afford and which kept the production of cinema into the preserve of a privileged few. The increase in the affordability of technology especially the digital camera helped more people capable of affording the use of the cinematic medium and films of all kinds proliferated. The privacy of the small group of filmmakers collapses as more and more directors and producers come in the fray. The monopoly now shifts from producing and directing cinema towards distribution. Small film makers do not get viewing spaces and abnormally high rents of theatres or television spectrum makes film distribution difficult. As the cinema production becomes public, its viewing is confined to being more and more private. The monopoly over what gets shown is compromised; instead the monopoly extends now to those who exhibit films. Film theatres increasingly take on the appearances of private salons, tickets are prohibitively priced and the audiences exercise choices in viewing. Accordingly cinema has now become varied; showing various kinds of new compositions and the formula of the cinema that revolved around the protagonist’s problem solving programmes is now giving way to many new ways of accessing the world of the cinematic characters. The variety in cinema however takes away from the medium its consensus building property. Cinema is therefore, no longer the other side of the coin for democracy.

In India the genre of popular cinema has undergone a sea change; while there are box-office formulaic films such as a Dabbang or a Rowdy Rathore, there are films like Khosla Ka Ghosla, English Vinglish and the entire genre of crossover cinema which are realistic as a contrast to being formulaic[13]. The space for a variety of cinema is made possible by the entry of a new class of film producers and directors made possible due to the wider affordability of the film making technology. The wider bouquet of offers have cut through the universal audiences and the rise of the multiplex that caters to smaller but a niche audience shifts the power from the films to its viewers. Such a shift in power from the film to the viewers has curtailed the cinema’s power to be an overarching reality and hence of being the public sphere itself; instead there is now a frame around the films, discussions on cinema and views of critics taken ever more seriously. Film studies rises as a discipline which objectively dissects cinema as if it were an object, distanced, out there, to be consumed. Cinema as consumption has risen before us almost as a cult and has punctured the power of being a reality for its viewers.

Nowhere is the culture of consumption more evident than in the progressive closeness between cinema and advertisement. Music directors, play back singers and film directors would work for advertisement films ever since advertisement film making emerged; Lata Mangeshkar’s voice would ring out for the anacin tablet Saridon. But never before making advertisement films became a reason for producers to fund director’s projects or working in advertisements became a path to making it big in cinema. Models are incubating film stars and directors like Balki and Pradeep Sarkar are essentially advertisement film makers.[14] Such closeness would not have been possible if films were also not projected as consumables rather than machinery for expressing the soulful angst of its protagonists. The crash of the song in cinema, its relegation into a background music, the rise of “item numbers” which are stand-alone dance performances and the use of camera angles and cuts and of colours show that the cinema has moved beyond the spectacle and inheres the space of visual aesthetics pursued together with advertisement films, hoardings, shopping malls, luxury hotels, landscape gardens, high end apartment blocks, town planning, and civil constructions such as bridges, fly overs and airports.

The films of today are far cries from the days when camera persons pursued aesthetics by tracking the loose tresses of hair across Meena Kumari’s face or eye lashes on the drooping eye lids of Madhubala; cinema today focusses on bodies. The actors no longer invest in coiffeurs; instead they focus on six packs. The face is today passé; the body with its six packs is in focus. The proliferation of gyms across cities even in small towns caters to the private world of individuals in which they wish to emerge like film stars. The focus on bodies rather than on emotions, the focus on consumption instead of ideology has strangely brought cinema into the world of objects where it is far freer for an individual to publicly acknowledge her alignment with the medium. Films have all along dictated fashions for the society as a whole; today designer brands define fashion for films as well as its viewers. The filmic world and the viewers world are today in tandem with very little reason for cinema to take over the lived in space. The viewer no longer has to make a secret of her wish to be filmic; she does it openly by organizing theme parties, or pursuing not fashions but the brands that films endorse.

Apropos to the above, film stars are no longer ensconced in their high privacy; they are now everywhere. They endorse advertisements, appear for private functions, dance on the stage and entertain people in reality television, in short, far beyond what they do in films. The film today exists beyond its frames and instead of absorbing the world into itself, the cinema now walks into the wider world to mingle into its daily conundrum. There is now a reverse effort; there is an effort of the world to look like the cinema. Wedding parties, birthday parties, the digital camera, mobile phone video cameras, the uploading of photos on social networking sites

These changes have affected the public sphere of public opinion on politics and the performance of the political class. The rise of the Hindutva or the Islamic terror where each side competes with the other in putting up equally spectacular riots and bomb blasts, where each side recruits secret soldiers, runs secret governments much along fan clubs and reading clubs show that the privately endorsed views of which there exists no public legitimacy are now being increasingly put up for public display. In a manner in which the cinema before the present millennium used to be made by intensely private individuals and then set up for public gaze these acts of civilizational clash are also put up for public display and hence attempts to hold a monopoly over the “show business”. The space vacated by frameless cinema is now attempted to be taken over by the civilizational terror industry.

The rise of terror and the decline of cinema in its frameless avatar reveal a new crisis in our civilization. It tells us what our action cinema was trying to convey since the past four decades that our ideologies and institutions, our judgments and opinions emanate from and circulate within a narrow band of society in full control of its privileges. The desire of a certain section to gate keep privileges out of wider segments of prospective claimants also lies at the core of our institutionalization and institutionalization in the Habermasian schema is a certain way to shrink out the public sphere. The rise of institutionalization is the death of the public sphere.

Film scholars in India have often observed the modernization project of the popular cinema in India; it is evident that cinema stood in lieu of institutions which could carry the modernization project in the Indian society. The rise of terror as a visual spectacle and the decline of cinema as a routinized object of consumption show that technologically cinema seems to have exhausted its visual capabilities. Today audio visuals are everywhere; the Internet, downloadables in the form of you tube, electronic photo frames, live shows, television and so on. There is perhaps nothing further to be attained; terror being perhaps the newest form of visual and which absorbs every individual into its frames by making them possible victims. This scale of Thanatos[15] is the greatest challenge of our present civilization and a curse spelt upon us for pursuing our visual culture far too much.

 

Reorganization of the Private and the Public:

Despite the flak that television draws from the civil society, it is perhaps only the television that can help us redeem ourselves from the failure of the cinema as the public space. Unlike the cinema which is finite, the television is continuous. It has no beginning, or middle or end. It runs just as well in the background. It is invisible because it goes on in the background and satisfies fully the addiction of viewers to the visual culture. In it being always on, the television is today frameless. The framelessness of the television is nowhere better observed than when viewers mistake the footages of terror attacks as clips from some action films. The television is a one stop for everything; one watches films in discs in the television screen, one can use the screen to blow up images from i-pads and mobile phones, one can use the television to do one’s shopping and even take lessons in English and mathematics. The television actually frames us. We tend to be raised into the television; television at once is installed in our privacy and even more so now because each member has her own set and can watch television on lap tops and i-pads and yet it braces us as consumers and through this again sets us up in the public sphere. The public sphere which emerges out of numerous homogenized individuals all aspiring for a uniform set of consumer products can have opinions only as consumers and not as political persons. The consumerist public sphere throttles every kind of social and political public sphere into the institutionalization of democratic politics where politics becomes a consumer product, ideologies as shopping carts.

Conclusion:

As a conclusion we might say that the public sphere is threatened by the global and universal rise of the audio-visual culture. The audio-visual culture has the ability to relegate people into privacy, sometimes also into secrecy and manifest their publicness as exhibitions like terror attacks and exhibitionism in the social media and social space by private individuals instead of as opinions which relate to politics and the State. Consumerism is promoted while democracy is thwarted with such transformations of the private and the public.

 

[1] Jurgen Habermas. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. MIT Press. USA. 1991.

[2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_industry

[3] Bollywood is a term to denote the Hindi commercial cinema, or the Hindi popular cinema produced in Bombay, now renamed as Mumbai.

[4] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India

[5] Habermas, op cit 1. Pp 25-37

[7] Habermas, op cit 1. Pp 47-52

[8] Habermas. Op cit 1. Pp 151-157

[9] The birth of the Indian National Congress was in 1885.

[10] Popular cinema during this time referred to are Vidyapati, Chandidas, Street Singer, Gramaphone Singer, all produced between 1925 and 1937.

[11] Habermas, op cit 1. Pp 10-12

[12] Ankur, directed by Shyam Benegal was released in 1974. Zanjeer is directed by Prakash Mehra and released in 1974. Deewaar is directed by Yash Chopra and is released in 1975.

[13] These are popular films. Dabbang released in 2010, Khosla Ka Ghosla was released in 2006. Rowdy Rathore and English Vinglish were released in 2012.

[14] Balki directed Cheeni Kum (2007) and Pa (2009). Pradeep Sarkar directed Parineeta in 2005.

[15] Thanatos is the Greek God of death.

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Sandy, Nilam and Obama

Posted on November 9, 2012 by secondsaturn

It was only on Pritha Sen’s satus which asked of us that while we were so concerned with Sandy in the US, we seemed to be less bothered about our own Andhra coast, ravaged by the storm Nilam. There was in our concern for Sandy and lack of concern for Nilam, a kind of slavery towards the US, our new found colonial master. I took her words and put it up as my status in which friends from the US commented that since no one they knew lived in coastal Andhra, they did not bother to ask. It did not cross their minds that people are always visiting these places on work, especially while so many of us are in the development sector that requires travelling to such places where none of our kin would live. But on hindsight, friends in the US were right not to be concerned about the Nilam, because really in India, no one of our social class, especially those inhabiting the Facebook are ever in trouble, whether in floods, or famines, or epidemics and droughts. Our class in India is well protected against vulnerability. This is not the same for the members of our class when they go to the US. They face what we probably would have never faced in generations; evacuation, food rations, no electricity, no water supply, floods, immobility and in short vulnerability against calamities, natural, or manmade. While some suffered the Partition or the earthquake as loss of property, people in the class we come from has not sunk into the depths of poverty as a result of that. In India, our class is protected; in the US, our kith and kin are not.

If we were to construct an index of vulnerability, then the middle class in the US is far more vulnerable than what we are ever in India. I have used some simple math to settle the vulnerability score. Would I to earn the same number of dollars as I earn my rupees, I would be as rich as the Jindals or the Tatas. Would my friends to earn the same number of rupees as dollars, they would be at the level of my house manager or my driver. The vulnerability of my friends in the US and my house help is at the same level. However, due to the differential value of the dollar, my friends in the US earn four times more than I do.

I have often wondered that the middle class in India is a different proposition from the middle class in America. In India, the middle class is a political class, the intelligentsia. Having emerged from the upper castes of various professions, the middle class in India via the bureaucracy and the political class has been a ruling class. The middle class in the US has been a class of skilled workers. The civil servants, lawyers, and the political class have been in an intermediate space between the working class and the ruling class but has never quite been the ruling class. The ruling class in the US has been the corporates; in India, till as recently as the UPA 2, corporates have struggled for legitimacy. No wonder then in terms of vulnerability to calamities, the Indian middle class, due to its position as a ruling class is better off than the corresponding class in the US. This is why, elections and change in the government just as in the case of the present Presidential election affects my friends as deeply as it did. I am not much bothered with a change in the government except ideologically of what the future of my country would be as a consequence. Since I am a ruler, I am worried about larger things in life those which do not directly affect my fate.

The middle class in America is a consumer class; defined by income and occupation rather than by learning and culture. The middle class in India is a culture class; defined by values and attitudes, beliefs and practices. While the middle class definitely needs money to reproduce itself in a minimum modicum of dignity and to pursue culture the way it would like to, culture and not money defines the middle class. The American middle class is a working class; not culture but incomes and the level of consumption it can access defines its status. The American middle class looks towards a level of consumption. The American middle class consumes culture; culture which someone else produces for it. Theories of film, culture and communication those emanate from the American Universities assert that the role of the media is to produce culture so that the recipients consume the same. In India, because the middle class is a ruling class, it is itself a producer of culture. It produces culture to create culture, to share culture, to put culture into currency. When the Indian middle class produces culture it tries to define culture; when the Americans produce culture they seek to hegemonize a culture consuming class. The intent of producing culture is not the same for the two countries.

The above plays an interesting part in American politics. Politics in India is not about the ruling class which is as secured against politics as it is against calamities; politics in India is about challenging the ruling class, not by taking away from its powers but sharing and partaking in the exercise of the same. This is why; politics in India is all about giving the poor a fairer share, including the excluded community like the minorities and Dalits. The US politics is about macro issues; policies that subject an entire nation to some kind of a discipline and morality which then contains the individuals. Citizenship in India is about ruling; citizenship in the US is about consuming. Green Card is a major issue, as social security is. The American middle class wants shelter, a chaperon, a shepherd. It does not have a desire to rule as the Indian middle class has.

Politics that shape India and America are thus bound to be shaped by differences in the middle class of these two countries. When America wants the FDI in retail, it promises to help its corporate class by opening up avenues for larger revenues. With the value of rupee falling ungraciously vis-à-vis the dollar, any retail chain from America can use the Indian economy to earn very large market shares and attain global dominance. This is a palpable opportunity that a recession hit America can hardly let go. But FDI will not stop at retail. The US trade policy which is up for review in the WTO shortly is clear about shifting investments into India if the outsourcing jobs are cut. Instead of outsourcing, the US companies will shift lock, stock and barrel in India. This will again help corporate profits but will leave the unemployed at the very same 7.5% in which it presently resides. Obama only promises that he will prevent Indians from staying on in America for good. For the present moment this is about students who go for higher studies in the US, but once this discourse is voted for, such ethnic discrimination is bound to only rise against the Indians.

 

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Rajat Gupta

Posted on October 27, 2012 by secondsaturn

For Rajat Gupta, the worldwide head of McKinsey Group, all good things in life has ended with his sentencing by the US courts. His crime has been insider trading, a crime which to an Indian is no crime at all. For an Indian, while it is important to accumulate and show that wealth off it is not his priority to respect the wealth of the others. Indians do not respect property rights in general; in trains one does not respect seat reservations, one grabs land by hook and crook, callously evicts slums and villages in the name of development, one throws rubbish in front of neighbour’s homes, one never repairs damaged walls of neighbours caused by own renovations. There is also no respect for property because public services like water, electricity and sewage facilities are almost always denied to most people, especially in the poorer colonies and the city suburbs. In fact, since in India the only route to upward mobility has become money, not only the mindless acquisition of money becomes legitimate but those who are too weak to defend their own property against the onslaught of attack by the powerful are looked down upon as being lesser beings who do not deserve protection because they are too weak to protect themselves. This creates a tremendous scope for the use of force and physical power in the society, obviously backed by money power. Most of us therefore acknowledge that making money by any means whatsoever is quite fine and it is also fine to defend that ill-gotten wealth by fraud and force and of course influence created through bribery. Rajat Gupta’s model of making money by fraud was therefore a legitimate and commonplace Indian aspiration, namely to have a desire for wealth without any respect for those of others. And he had the commonly found Indian stupidity not to understand that in America destruction of one’s wealth can be of lethal consequence.

Rajat Gupta has been brilliant in the sense of clearing the IIT examination. This means he must have been good in his PCM. But in affairs of the liberal disciplines, which consist of sociology, history, politics, philosophy and ethics and even the wider range of humanities as in literature, he must have been in the pits. Further, because India was poor and his own family of humble means, he probably looked down upon them as being defeated. What he did not understand was that the accommodation of the Indian society to wannabes or the parvenus in the sense of upwardly mobile humanity is much more than anywhere else in the world. This tolerance of wannabes actually makes India a freer country than probably any upon this earth. America does not tolerate wannabes. America appreciates talent, pays well for it, but will never allow crossing certain boundaries. Rajat Gupta was fine as long as he generated intellectually vapid papers based on rubbish macroeconomics which seemed like business strategies. I have had the good fortune to read through some of McKinsey’s output and I moved papers immediately proposing a training centre in our office to train people in Indian economy. But his papers were doing just what so many of the neoliberal financiers desired; to promise profits where there were none so that they could wash off some of their non-performing assets to other wannabes. The sale of coal properties in Australia priorly owned by the world’s largest mining company, the BHP Billiton is an illustration of such deals.

As long as Rajat Gupta was an instrument in making money for the American capitalists, he was fine. But when he started buying property which were part of the American dream, when he moved close to the American propertied class, put his children into the best schools as in Harvard, Rajat Gupta became a lice in the headful of hair for the American capitalists. Hence Rajat Gupta had to be thrown out. America is not India where the Lalaji Jindals can become industrialists. America is not India where only the lower castes have become Emperors in its long history of two thousand years. America is a place where wages and salaries may be fair, but any attempt to cross the threshold of class can be put down as severely as crushing down a rebel by having them trampled over by elephants.

America has severe sentences; Rajat Gupta’s two year in jail is actually a mild sentence. What is much ruinous is the pecuniary fine. He has to dissolve and surrender all his wealth and return to his original humility. Rajat Gupta is a reminder to all Indians who despite having behind them a Freedom Movement which is the world’s largest mass movement, now competes among one another to surrender that freedom to become a slave to America. Remain that slave, silent and subservient; if you imagine that you can ever be a master of your own fate in America, beware; Rajat Gupta is exemplarily held up before every wannabe, stupid, slavish Indian.

 

 

 

 

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ebaar Uma ele….

Posted on October 22, 2012 by secondsaturn

Purna Chowdhury’s status on Mahalaya day, ‘ebaar Uma ele” makes me think why Bengalis invariably organize the Durga Puja? One has to be a Bengali by birth to be able to organize this enormous event called the Durga Puja. It is a mammoth event of which the decorative pandals and the exquisite clay figures of Gods, Goddesses, Demon and animals are actually the tip of the iceberg. What lies beneath is a colossal coordination among weavers, carpenters, wood carvers, pandal makers, screen painters, artists, conceptualisers, architects, florists, lightmen, electricians, makeup artists, copyrighters, printers, publicity managers, queue managers, caterers, space marketing people, public relations persons to negotiate with the police and neighbours, accountants, cooks, mechanics, fitters, welders, and of course the fund raisers. One needs to acquire some kind of a social status to rope in celebrities, to be able to convince friends and friends of friends to be able to put up a show of this grand a scale. This is not all, every Puja must reveal some kind of a wider consciousness in the themes they adhere to. Themes may cover anti-terrorism, Iraq aggression, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, anti GM food, anti-clones, anti-female foeticide and so on.
A puja pandal is also a veritable forum of social reform, something that Bengal seems to have patented with its Renaissance. Durga Puja is not worship alone; worship is only incidental to it; the Durga Puja is actually a cultural event of the Bengali, an attempt to present before the world its consciousness about the various things that make up our contemporary reality. It is Bengali’s contribution to installation art, long before the concept was ever invented. It is Bengali’s spreading out of the public sphere where the electronic and the print media seem to fall short. It is the Bengali’s emergence into a civil society that operates between the reproductive society and the political society; it is the maturation of the Bengali club, of peer bonds, of friendship and camaraderie.
A Durga Puja once rolled out is easier to maintain, but to start it anew is sociology of community mobilization worthy of documentation. While we have had histories of Durga Puja, we never had sociology of Durga Puja. Bengalis, constructed as a loser community, doing well only when outside Bengal, a community known for internal bickerings and mutual envy does put up a show that requires the dense accumulation of the finest variety of social capital. I wonder why did sociologists never study the Durga Puja?
Durga Puja is perhaps the only event in which not only the emotions and passions of the Bengali comes to fore but also his enormous spirit of entrepreneurship. Those who imagine that Bengalis have no business mind, no entrepreneurial capacity and no initiative to work hard must watch the puja preparations. Actually, the Durga Puja is the great displaced symbol of the Bengali enterprise and industry. Durga Puja happens precisely because avenues for a Bengali are blocked on so many fronts. Thus, to my mind, a study of the Durga Puja must be located in Bengal’s industry and not so much in its worship. A Bengali goes into Kalibari for worship, to the Ramkrishna Mission for sublime transcendence but a Durga pandap is never to be confused with her search for God. For the Bengali, the Durgamandap is her ramp walk, her ballroom, her art exhibition, her theatre for spectator art, her club lounge, in short, her space to locate and present her entire Being.
Bengal has always been an industrialized state; it was in the way of the Silk Road where India exported the chequered cloth known to Bengal as the gamchha but used as a hood by Arab men, medicines, oilseeds, mustard, poppy seeds, textiles, and other crafts like woven baskets and fishing nets, ropes and wooden planks for boats. After colonialization, trade of Bengal shifted expectedly to agro based products like indigo and jute and later to pure agricultural produce, paddy, or dhaan. Paradoxically, the destruction of industries also urbanized Bengal, built out of a culture of babudom, where babus were petty zamindars making money out of paddy auctions. Durga Puja was set up by this urbanized noveau riche, where the riches made them desirous of power but the colonial government denied its exercise to them. Durga Puja was thus a paradox; it was at once the manifestation of a new wave of cultural renaissance made possible with the rise of the new bhadralok class and at the same time a moment of tremendous powerlessness because of the usurpation of the government by the East India Company.
However, Durga Puja continued well into Independence and even after it; it only increased in number, scale and scope. It grew out of the Bengali’s sense of industry and innovation; out of its culture and creativity. It was Bengal’s Ala Mohan Das who raised foundries in Howrah to such a standard that even today manhole covers and drain cases are exported from here to Canada and Western Europe. Bengal’s printing is one of the best in India, textiles continue to rule and interestingly it is the only province where displacement due to Partition, or retrenchment from locked out factories has only spurned trade and manufacturing. The local train in Bengal sells stuff through which China once captured the world market. Bengal’s industries are based on community capital, social networks, patronages, creativity and innovation; the Durga Puja adds another vital angle, namely aesthetics. Durga Puja is Bengali’s dream industry, it has a team, camaraderie, social capital, community resources, civil society, civic consciousness, public relations, public sphere, and with that culture and arts. This kind of business also has another attraction; it ceases to be after a week leaving the Bengali to pursue other kinds of interests. Unlike a Marwari, the Bengali’s business is not about money-commodity-money, but money-product-culture. While the Bengalis has done business like nobody has, yet she cannot indulge in industry for money. Unfortunately for Bengal, Independent India’s polity has always supported the Marwari model of money making instead of the Bengali model of innovation, culture and the production of aesthetics. No wonder then Bengal has never trusted the “Centre” and always resented the Marwari.
Durga in her image of the warrior gives us the strength to defy the demon of the Marwari hiding behind the buffalo of the ‘Hindustanis” at the centre. It is an impulse of Bengali industry against the mindless and brain dead capitalism that the rest of India seems to laud. This is why, we cling to Durga. In Mamata Banerjee’s greeting card which she designed and painted she is seen ensconced in Durga’s lap, her protection against all that Bengal opposes via Durga. There is hardly an eye which is not tearful when Durga is immersed into the Ganges to return to her home with Shiva. We see in her immersion the pain of having to send a daughter away to her in-laws. Stories in Bengal are rife with Uma’s mother weeping at her imminent parting with the daughter as she marries and joins Shiva in the faraway mountains. Every Bengali, much like Uma’s parents fantasizes of keeping Durga with her for good. So we say, this time when Uma comes visiting we will not send her back, or as the saying goes ebaar uma ele..

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Bodoland via the Brahmaputra Assam 1/4

Posted on October 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

Rakesh dropped in at my office in Delhi and put forth an interesting proposal. He was going on behalf of the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, henceforth the NCPCR to Kokrajhar, one of India’s nine most disturbed districts and asked me whether I would like to go along with him. Rakesh is my brother who is presently leading a carefree bachelor’s life with his wife and sons away for a holiday with his wife’s parents. I, on the other hand am stuffed with schedules of meetings and deadlines for submissions. While my head reasons with me not to distract myself with too many interests, my heart tells me that I will never get another chance to visit India’s politically disturbed areas like this. So after a bout of inner agony and ecstasy I submitted to my instincts and packed a small bag for a four day trip into lower Assam, or what today is known as the Bodo Tribal Council Area. I will call this place as Bodoland.

 

The NCPCR’s position is that children must be given education in the districts that are torn asunder by civil unrest so as to catch them early and mainstream them so that they do not grow up to handle arms. Only a body as far removed from the reality as the NCPCR could think like this. Those who handle arms especially in the north east are more often than not students, produced and frustrated by the very education that the Commission was trying to entrench and deepen. Also, I do not believe in the exploitation and oppression theory behind violence; I feel that it is a desire to dominate over the rest of the society by groups in situations where no one group has any clear domination over the others. Anyway, eager to jump into the field, I called the cab and swished into the swank T3 airport to catch a Jet flight to Guwahati.

 

Aboard the full flight from Delhi to Guwahati I sat beside a mother and child duo. The child, a boy of about eight years sat by the window, the mother in the middle and I, by choice sat at the aisle. The boy agitated by his entrapment into the cramped bucket seat thumped and stomped irritably. I was getting very angry as I tried to catch some sleep and read Dave Prager’s book on Delhi at the same time. The mother was indisciplined too and after several berated warnings by the steward to stow away her front table, she continued to keep her bag resting there. Soon my ears buzzed and I knew that the plane was dropping altitude in preparation for landing when suddenly the boy child nudged sharply at his mother and said dehho, Brahmaputra !! (Look, the Brahmaputra). I pretended to rise to go to the toilet and peeped over the boys head at the proud, robust swathe of water that stretched timelessly into the earth. So confident, and so overpowering. Indeed, majestic! The boy kept looking at the Brahmaputra, singing to the river, saying rhymes in its ode and he calmed down without another noise. I was amazed how the Brahmaputra calmed the boy.

 

When I was planning my trip, I asked my Assamese boss which would be the best way to travel to lower Assam. Well, he said, and fished out a blank sheet of paper and drew an inverted L on it. This is the Brahmaputra, he said in his Assamese accent and here is Kachar, called the lower Assam which was to go to Manipur and lies now within Assam. He had no idea of how to get there because no Assamese would ever like to go into that land infested with wild tribes of the Santhals and Bengali Muslims who look like the Chinese. I marked that he never mentioned the Bodos and yet this was what was for all practical purpose the Bodo land. I think that for the Assamese, Assam is the valley of the Brahmaputra. Where there is no river, there is no Assam; it is the river that marks their homeland, keeps them close to the soil of Assam and lends meaning to their everyday existence. Bhupen Hazarika, the Tagore of Assam lived and sang by this river. He saw his entire world in the waves that loll at the heart of the river, carrying the waters of the mountains to feed and nourish the lower rivers of the Bengal delta. Assam is the Brahmaputra and vice versa. Lower Assam is not Brahmaputra’s land and hence it is not Assam.

 

Rakesh and I reached Guwahati by noon and headed straight to the railway station of Kamakhya. I thought of dropping by at the temple but I was put off by the goat sacrifices and decided not to venture into unpleasant sights. So we bought tickets for the inter city express which could be boarded only after four hours. We used this long waiting time to treat ourselves to a sumptuous lunch of boiled eggs, local buns, soft and sweet, thick sweet milky tea, a piece of cake, some packed salty snacks and fresh stick of sweet and watery cucumber with stingy hot concoction of common salt and red chilly powder. Then we used the morning newspapers to squat on the platform doing our own reading of the NCPCR progress reports. Trains arrived and then proceeded for the onward destinations every now and then and the platforms filled with people speaking Bengali, Hindi, Bhojpuri, and Assamese. A man asked us for a train to Jaunpur in Uttar Pradesh, someone was to go to Coochbehar; a boy made preparations to go towards Jaipur while some were headed towards Chennai. The scene that emerged slowly over the minutes and then hours was one of undivided Bengal Presidency, Muslims speaking in East Bengali dialect, Biharis speaking in musical Bhojpuri and Maithili, Oriyas, Nepalese and even people speaking the Santhali language loitered along the railway platforms, chewing paan, drinking tea, nibbling biscuits and simply looking for a place to sit and sink into. The serenity of Kamakhya, the wet green of the land, the damp cool breeze and the occasional rain transported me to the yester era of the Bengal Presidency from where time in this railway station has not seemed to move. What was lodged in my mind as being just a corner of the country now appeared to me to be its very centre. West Bengal, in comparison to Assam looked provincial and vernacular.

 

We reached Kokrajhar well past the evening. We could see the Brahmaputra for quite a while as we chugged over bridges and trailed over culverts. As long as the Brahmaputra was visible, not a single passenger in the compartment spoke. All eyes were fixated on this mighty flow of water. Again I saw the power of the Brahmaputra to mesmerize the Assamese.

 

The NCPCR resource persons and the teachers from Kokrajhar Government College came to receive us at the station. They drove us to the Circuit House where we heard that the All Assam Koch Rajbanshi Students Union, AAKRASU had called a strike which included a rail rook. The teachers told us that a bandh in Assam means a bandh when life becomes literally stand still. The resource persons had made a meticulous schedule by the half hour for us to visit various places in the field area and they were disappointed that such plans went haywire. Bandh is the disturbance of Assam; bandh is the very reason why the area is disturbed. It appears that a AKRASU bandh turned violent and the police instead of using force on the students for fear of retaliation arrested the leader. The bandh was in demand for release of the leader.

 

Assam politics is student politics; the politics is wholly controlled by the students, irrespective of whether that politics is violent, terrorist, extortionist or mainstream, participative and democratic. Hence the thesis of the NCPCR that the students will stay out of terrorism if they are educated flies in the face of the ground evidence that politics in Assam is education. The AKRASU’s demanded Kamatapur, an independent state which was to be carved out of Kokrajhar, Dhubri and Goalpara in Assam and Coochbehar in West Bengal and stretched as far as Patna in Bihar and included Sikkim and Bhutan. Kamatapur has been an ancient princely state out of which the Bengal Presidency and later Assam was carved out. The Koch Rajbanshis who ruled Kamatapur are now claiming their lost kingdom back. If there is Kamatapur then there will be no Bodoland and possibly no Assam. Kamatapur is impossibility but AKRASU uses this plank to consolidate its demand for a ST status, very much in the same lines along the Bodos. At the heart of Kamatapur is reservation for seats in colleges and jobs in the government. In absence of a robust economy, government remains the largest employer and everyone imagines herself in the role of a government servant. Hence the politics of Assam is largely the competitive democratic politics of reservations.

 

The following morning there was nothing to do. The resource persons were determined that we should not waste our day and with some effort fixed up an array of government officials we could meet. We met the officers from the Bodo Tribal Council, an autonomous self governing area consisting of the four districts of Kokrajhar, Baksa, Chirang and Udalgiri. The demand for Bodoland however stretches up to much larger tracts of Assam stopping short of just those lands from which the Brahmaputra comes into view.

 

The District Commissioner, a Bodo received as many as ten phone calls from Delhi and the Assam state government asking him to clear the railway tracks on which the Koch Rajbanshi students sat and to use brute force if needed. The District Commissioner diplomatically handled these instructions and without stepping on to any toes steadfastly refused to use violence. I could see in his face a determination not to use force. We asked the officer what the nature of disturbance in the BTC area was, he said that there was too much of violence, too many strikes, too much extortion, and kidnapping. The picture which the Commissioner presented was dismal; I imagined that there was no peace in Bodoland, no one could do any business peacefully, and all buildings were unfinished due to extortion. The resource persons too corroborated the Commissioner’s version of things in Bodoland.

 

One by one the officers irrespective of whether they were from the Bodo community or from the Santhals, or Assamese or Bengalis told us unsavoury things about the Bodos; they were wild, uncultured, uneducated, could not produce teachers, ate away the midday meals, stole cement and steel from buildings, absconded duties, ran side businesses, and captured all posts of primary teachers, anganwadi workers and Asha workers. When the news reached us late in the evening that the strike has been called off and we could travel into the villages, I had already made notes on the Bodos using their political autonomy for genocide against the Santhals to exterminate their population.

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Travelling in Bodoland – Sham Called School Assam 2/4

Posted on October 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

We set out early in the morning with a hearty breakfast of luchi and ghoogni cooked by a family of Bengali speaking Assamese staff in the Circuit House despite Shobhan, one of our resource persons fearing indigestion after the lavish helping of the oily refined wheat product. Shobhan is from Telengana, dead serious about his duties as a resource person. He is so serious that even if we sighted the odd urchin fishing in a swamp by the roadside instead of being in the school, Shobhan’s heart would sink, he would clasp nervously on to his bucket seat and look furtively at us apologizing that he has been an underperformer.

 

Throughout my stay in Assam I sensed this deep anxiety, a fear of failure that seemed to grip the people. Teachers’ faces went white when we would alight at the premises of a primary school. People would immediately say that the school buildings were not in place, there was no drinking water and there were no toilets when apparently things did look perfect. Our education campaigns have created such a fuss over toilets and class rooms that having only a building with its sanitary facilities seemed to be the be all and end all of education. Nothing can be as ridiculous as to have a school being defined in terms of its infrastructure; no one by a city based stupid policywallah can think like this. In the open fields of villages, a pucca building is the last thing which is required and sending children to a closed toilet without proper water supply and drainage is to harm them even more. Village people have their own ways of defecating; to my mind there is no tearing hurry to imitate city people especially when the required infrastructure is not there. Who needs a pucca classroom when one can easily keep the school together with bamboo poles and straw? Such classrooms are less intimidating for the children; schools with classrooms inside closed walls look like prisons anyway. But a pucca building, toilet, drinking water flowing out of a pipe seems to be the defining features of our education system. What really goes unnoticed that the children can neither understand the meaning of the letters they learn by rote, nor can “read” the illustrations and pictures contained in the pages of their books, yet teachers are tense with worry, as books have not arrived. For Heaven’s sake teach one single book for the entire duration of the school years but teach that perfectly, it will do. But the NCERT must have its own syllabus completed. What it designs for children from families of the educated, it also designs for children from families who have never seen letters from the time their species took birth upon earth. The pursuit for equality and uniformity everyday creates wedges and deepens inequality and the universal education lays the foundation for that.

 

Does the community participate in the child’s education? Yes, they do by complaining against the teacher who is more often absent than present. Unfortunately when the teacher does arrive, in almost all cases it is a man, he fails to teach. It is not as if he is not trained, but he is trained in a syllabus which is one size that has to fit all and it does not fit his. A Santhal or a Bodo does not come from a literate culture. Theirs is an oral culture. The two cultures have very different sets of cognition and one does not always easily translate into the other and each require a set of processes while transforming from one to the other. An important way to move from an oral to a literate culture is to learn how to verbally articulate. I suggested to a Bodo teacher, why you don’t allow the children to be on their own, play their games or just play truant for a while and then come and speak out what they did while they were out. The teacher gaped at me, but, he said, this is not in the teaching manual! How daft our programmes are, what takes only a few minutes for me to find out has never occurred in these long sixty five years to our educationists? I started doubting my ingenuity, for questioning the foolishness of so many people over so many years seemed absurd.

 

Whenever I insisted that every child should have cultural education, learn her own songs, memorize folk tales of the community, exercise through the dance forms and martial art, I appeared to have offended the communities. We want none of our stuff, they said. I sensed Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed was flowing out in action here. The communities felt that they were oppressed by people like us, the middle class, the government officer, and the English speaking gentry in towns. Hence education was to create their children in the images of such oppressors. The children were thus to be as far from their own communities as their oppressors were. Universal education was intended to create internal colonizers and exploiters of one’s own community. No wonder the Bodo officers were so eager to show the members of their own community in poor light. Education seems to have created monsters for our civilization, denying our historicity, our context, and the inner dynamics of our communities.

 

When I met the ABSU leaders later in the course of the day, they too had the same narrowness of vision. Their politics was over education, reservation, quota, appointments. But what does your community control? How would you control the means of production? What of your life will you command? There is no answer. Education would make them officers and with that they will command those who command and exploit them. Politics also serves a similar purpose. When communities lose control over their means of production, they seek to control those who control them; politics and education become the twin tools. I understood now why Rakesh every now and then would think aloud, education is not welfare, it is politics. When education and politics converge into the same intent, social conflicts are bound to arise.

 

Kokrajhar is a disturbed district and I had a question in my list to ask around, what constituted the disturbance? It appears that in recent times, especially since 2010, everyday violence has ceased; I could frankly see no apparent damage. But now the non Bodos have come into the mood of retribution and hence they have chosen a more insidious path to violence, bad mouthing Bodos. I soon found out that I had been fed on a heavy dose of lies. I was told that all anganwadi posts were filled by Bodos. False. Every community had its own member as the anganwadi worker. I was told that every teacher was a Bodo. Wrong again, the Santhals had their own teachers. I was told that every school building was incomplete because the contractor was extorted and exhorted out. Wrong. School buildings were completed, even when they were only with a single class room. Bodos were constructed as villains through rumours and bad mouthing. They were the monsters to eliminate, the virus to be exterminated. Santhals were the worst in this respect. The Bengali Muslims merely “heard” such tales, but the Santhals seem to face genocide every day.

 

I was also told that the Bodo women stole rations from the midday meal. I was shocked but then Bodos were supposed to be animals, a species of homo sapiens less developed mentally and emotionally. He truth was contrary; in all the Bodo schools, midday meal was being cooked, the community paid out of their pockets when rations from Assam were not released. It was in the Santhal schools that midday meal scheme suffered because women had no role anywhere near the school. Wherever women were strong the meals did well. It did best in the Bengali speaking Muslim community where women were assertive and also had money.

 

The entire eastern region is culture conscious. People here have their standards of cultural refinement and cannot tolerate anyone not falling into such standards. This is why the Assamese have a deep contempt for the Bodos, disown them all the time. I recalled that my Assamese boss tried to tell me that in Kokrajhar there are Muslims who look like the Chinese; he was referring to the Bodos and he was an Assamese, he was in Assam at the height of the AASU movement, then why did he lie. He also lied that Kokrajhar could only be approached through Bengal and not via Guwahati. This was to mislead me; Kokrajhar is nearer to Guwahati than to New Jalpaiguri in West Bengal. And now Assam state government was on some fiction that Bodo women were stealing food from their own children stopped supplies meant for children’s nutrition. Also, they were under the influence of some corporate house to supply biscuits to the children. In fact, many teachers paid out of their own pocket to procure food for the children in the schools. Such sacrifice by teachers must also be recognized and lauded. But let the Brahmaputra not be generous to wash the sins of the Assamese.

 

If Santhals were against the Bodos, Bodos were ever so eager to appease the Santhals. They took up issues of the Santhali language, the appointment of the Assamese teacher who taught at a school of mixed communities and they were very eager to campaign against witch hunting among the Santhali communities. Bodos treated their girls very well, Santhalis in a bid to modernize, acquire political power have started marginalizing their women. The denial of their culture is also a part of the package to marginalize women. Girl child trafficking flows out of similar intentions. Had they access to facilities of the ultrasound, the Santhal community would also have killed the female fetuses.

 

The violence that was external has now travelled inside into social envy, prejudice, witch-hunting, rumour mongering. Santhals need someone to flay for their own desire to and failure in creating their oppressors. At one level they seek money at any cost even if that is through sale of children and prostitution because they are as yet too weak to become extortionists, at another level they create scapegoats to cover their deficiencies.

 

But why did the violence on the ground, a violence that was perpetrated by gangs of boys settle down after 2010? The key to this is the balbandhu scheme. The Balbandhu scheme is a rather clever move by the NCPCR, a kind of its own Salwa Judum to protect child rights which are abrogated during times of civic unrest. The Balbandhus are a band of young boys and girls who move about in the community beseeching the children to return to school, gathering community initiatives to put the school system back in place, invigilate other deliveries such as health and nutrition through the community health workers. Kokrajhar district has 37 Village Clusters, each cluster containing anything between four to as many as twenty villages depending on the population and size of these villages. The Balbandhu scheme operates in 20 out of the 37 village clusters and there are 20 balbandhus. But these balbandhus are not confined to single village clusters as they freely move around the community, throwing their weight at contractors who employ child labour, parents who do not send children to school, families who marry off young children, agents who smuggle children across borders into flesh trade and begging and reporting such matters to the police and the National Commission. The NCPCR has a list of indicators with which it wants to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the balbandhu scheme such as whether enrolment into school has improved, drop outs decreased, attendance improved and teaching become better. These are important things to do; but what has really happened due to the balbandhus is that the communities seem to have got a new purpose in living and thinking about their future, which reflects in an increased awareness towards education. In Kokrajhar, the balbandhus have brought about a new role model for the youth to follow rather than the rash, extortionist mafia image.

 

The balbandhu is a smart idea; they are in the same age group as the terrorists and the unsurrendered violent students groups and hence offer certain kind of competition to the glamour of the extortionists. The balbandhus are equally vigilante and yet they work to integrate rather than intimidate the people. The balbandhus have created not merely awareness about the Right to Education among the villagers but infused them with a new purpose in life after which they look more gathered up and sorted.

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Assam’s Multiculturalism 3/4

Posted on October 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

Assam’s Multiculturism

 

Assam is multicultural but not plural. No one culture dominates over others here; no one’s culture dominates here. People pursue a soulless alienating modernity. These were only words for me from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and had I not visited Assam I would have never known that such a reality exists. The elite of Assam are government servants; education is a step by step preparation towards appointment in various government posts. As government servants the elite is supposed to control society, verify identities and eliminate wannabes from true claimants. Such elite is an internal colonizer whose idea is to destroy the life of a community and the soul of its culture. Assam’s economy is such that there are government servants and contractors; those who cannot be employed in the government and cannot be contractors become politicians and if the space in mainstream politics is to narrow to accommodate them, then they become extortionists and militants. Education thus serves the only purpose of acquiring social power, inter communal competition over educational quotas thus constitutes the core of politics in the North east. Education neither creates a community life, nor deepens genuine democracy, and much less creates civil societies, skills, innovations or social leaders. In fact, education, the way it is designed can only create oppressors for the society. There is no culture in education, no power in cultures. Assam is a state, which like its other north eastern sister states, is progressing towards culturelessness.

 

The Bengali speaking Muslims are the socially dominant group. Despite a small demography they have done economically the best. And they are not contractors. They are farmers but so are the Santhals and the Bodos. But the Santhals and the Bodos farm to feed themselves, the Muslims farm to produce surpluses which are then reinvested in shops and agencies of consumer durables or taxi services. The attack against Muslims during the All Assam Students Union days in the plea that Bangladeshi migrants were infiltrating into Assam was a way to intimidate the Muslim community who always seemed to get large supplies of farm hands, who were neither the local Bodos nor the Santhals.

 

The Muslims could have had their say in Assam politics had they a better participation in the Freedom Movement. Partition of Bengal also cramped their style to a great extent. But the Muslims of Assam were part of the Mughal nobility and in some cases the generals of Hussain Shah as he invaded Kamatapur. Like the rest of their ilk, these Muslims stayed away from the vernacular nationalism of the Assamese Hindus and the Bengali Hindus. Many Muslims of Rangpur presently part of Bangladesh had worked their way up into moderate riches, the very same Muslims of who the famous sociologist Radhakamal Mukherjee regarded rather skeptically. To the Bengali Hindu, the economic prosperity of the Muslim was a problem because not being, to the Hindu mind, of a progressive culture Muslims might use their wealth to enter the elite intelligentsia and corrupt the exclusivity with a lesser culture.

 

The Santhals are obviously cast away workers of tea estates in Assam who inhabit the trenches and swamps of lower Assam. Poor and backward, the Santhals have awoken to a new consciousness and seriousness after the genocidal attack upon them by the Bodos in 1996. Ever since that year of insecurity, Santhals have become attentive to education, gained more social awareness, come up with a students’ union. But they have also become scheming, wicked, perverted, anti women, female child traffickers, politicized and socially envious and back stabbing. The line is straight; oppression, awareness and then desiring education and falling in the trap of a dehumanizing syllabus where one is straight jacketed, extracted out of culture and hate that self which is located within a system of community and human relation.

 

The Bodos demographically the most numerous tribes in the north east are expert bamboo craftsmen and weavers. Clans of the Bodos have ruled Kachar, or what is known as lower Assam. It is this space that they wish to rule again as the Bodoland. Assamese deny Bodos their existence as the Bodo demand for Deodhahi script shows. Assamese have not allowed the Bodos to use their script nor allowed Bodos to resuscitate the Deodhahi; the Bodos have to be content with devnagri, a script that does absolutely no justice to the language and its diction.

 

Apropos to the Bodos desire to return to a pre-British history, there is a demand for Kamatapur as well by the Koch Rajbanshis. Koch Rajbanshis ruled over Kamatapur, an area which covers a huge territory covering Bhutan, Assam, Meghalaya, Cooch Behar in West Bengal and the northern states of Bihar. Maharani Gayatri Devi was from the princely family of Cooch Behar, a Koch princess, who was married into the royal family of Jaipur. The Rajbanshis take this connection seriously and this has taken a stream of migrants from lower Assam into Jaipur and Jodhpur where it is common to find rickshawpullers, cooks and drivers from Bengal and Assam. For the Bengali Muslims who because of their economic wealth are also better educated find Jaipur an ideal city to send their children for higher education. For a small section of families who are directly related to the grand Mughals, Jaipur is home of their historical allies, the Rajputs. History continues here unpunctuated by British colonialism and by the modernizing nationalism of Freedom Struggle. Child marriage is still practiced in the region as witch hunting is a vestige of a medieval tradition. Balbandhus are a modernizing force, who intervene into such traditions and try and reform these.

 

The Bodo reassertion, the demand for Kamatapur, the rising envy of the Santhals and the gradual cultural marginalization of the Muslims show that every culture is now uprooted and its people fired into the vacuum of an alienating modernity. No wonder then that social conflict among communities becomes irresolvable. Everyone is rendered into cultural homelessness and bereft cultural capital, communities cannot mobilize social capital to sustain economic production or create assets needed for social status. There is only an empty space of the universal human being, uprooted, standardized, branded, and ahistorical. Neither education nor its alter ego politics, tries to revive the community’s soul by which it can become a productive agent, commanding life and controlling life chances. As dehumanized and standardized atoms, they command nothing, control nothing; they play communal politics by which one standardized atom  clings to others on the basis of some ethnic tie to become a larger homogenous mass than the others. No wonder then demography becomes important in democracy.

 

I am the last one to suggest that the citizen should return to the community; I am the last one to revive local ties and reinvent the feudal authority. All that I am saying is when we develop into universal citizens; we should universalize and liberate our cultures to enrich the universal. I am suggesting that if we are pursuing generalizations let not that abstract content dominate us from above; instead become a manifestation of our specific concrete. History becomes crucial to this project and I can see where the demand for Kachar and Kamatapur comes from. But there should be more to it. I ask the Bodo and the Koch student, do you want to rule your lands again? Yes, they nod enthusiastically. Then, imagine you are aleady kings and behave like one; kingdom will follow. But when you raise only demands and stall trains and block highways, you are behaving like victims, like beggars, stripped of all means, and now fighting with other beggars for the crumbs that the state government throws at you as grants and public investments. Communal politics is dog fight over territory for crumbs that someone happens to cast at you; it is not a politics where you command the means of production.

 

Notwithstanding the close link between demography and democracy, population for every community in Bodoland is declining save the Muslims. No wonder child marriage is so prevalent among them despite being better educated and culturally rooted. What a paradox ! Of the various challenges that democracy faces, demography interestingly is also one. No wonder that slowly, politics of the world’s largest and wonderful democracy is pulling into a zone beyond the will of the people. Political propaganda and the media are creating images to manipulate what people want; I think that I want a plush apartment in a gated colony, why though I have no idea.

 

Despite the many bandhs and frequent disruptions to normal life, life when it runs it does so with precision. An appointment at 9 in the morning means 9 in the morning; a person waiting at the Gosaingaon crossing means you will find him there. People are hardworking and dedicated and it is possible to call a rickshaw on mobile at the wee hours of the morning when you have to catch the 5 am Intercity Express to Guwahati.

 

Rakesh and I boarded a rickshaw for the railway station; fixed rates, no haggling and fixed points of boarding and alighting as well. Trains run on time whenever they are not held up. Our train stood there right on time but a backlog of goods trains carrying oil and coal were jostling for signals to clear them. I asked the students how come they continue to tolerate this colonial exploitation of Assam where the non renewable minerals move out of the state and no one but the companies get their royalties? They had no answer; it is so much simpler to fight the state and the political parties than to fight the companies. It has ever been so easy for Bengalis to fight Hindus-Muslims, East Bengal-Mohun Bagan, CPM-TMC than to fight the real looters, the Marwaris who lock up factories and migrate out capital and spread the rumours that Bengalis do not work.

 

Aboard the train a young woman lawyer who sat next to me told me exactly in five minutes the crux of our story. We are facing the Crisis of civilization; all of us are now consumers and towards this consumption we run exhausting our resources and reducing our opportunities; conflict and not cooperation dominates us. This is low thinking which pervades across Assam; here people imagine that the next door neighbor is the problem. For Assamese, Bodos are the problem, for Bodos everyone else is the problem, for Santhals their own people are problems, for the Muslims loss of power is the problem. Assam’s common life is defined by extreme standardization, mobile and motorcycle.

 

Back in Guwahati, I called up Tahir Ali, the man who drove us from the airport to the station on our way to Kokrajhar. Tahir was now to carry us back from Kamkhya to the airport. On the way we stopped for lunch at Paltanbazar and opted for a restaurant called Mahalakshmi, the same name as Rakesh’s wife. We ordered for some Burmese food. The man behind the counter refused to serve us the delicacies; they are not good he said. Then get us Assamese thali please, I said. The man said it was better for us to try the Bengali Thali. I understood what he meant. He suffered the same fear of failure I have seen throughout the Kachugaon bloc of Kokrajhar; he deprecated his own culture, felt ashamed of his cuisine, felt that it was not good for our palate. Assamese thali it is to be, I was steadfast. The meal came, sumptuous, salubrious.

 

Thoroughly pleased with myself after this hearty meal and relieved that Rakesh’s work had been partly complete, I looked around to absorb the sights and sounds. I suddenly realized that all through Assam I have seen something that I often do not get to see in Delhi; namely, the abundance of girl children! I realized that little girls were less seen around in north India, they were so abound in Assam, well dressed, well fed, confident and contented. I thanked Ma Kamakhya.

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Assam 4/4 Ma Kamakhya

Posted on October 16, 2012 by secondsaturn
Ma Kamakhya…. Assam 4/4
by Susmita Dasguptaon Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 9:26pm ·
Ma Kamakhya is one of the prime pilgrim attractions of Assam. Kamakhya is the name of the peetha, which means a place where parts of Sati fell when Lord Shiva danced around with her dead body and Vishnu used his sudarshan chakra to dissect the body into small pieces. At Kamakhya, a place in the Nilachal mountains in Guwahati, Sati’s uterus fell.  Hence the name Kamakhya; Kama means both desire as well as sex. I am particularly close to Ma Kamakhya, she being the family deity of my mother’s family and has a temple dedicated to her in a village in Burdwan.

I heard and believed in stories of how my mother’s ancestors had come from Kamarup and established a Hindu temple according to the farman of Murshid Kuli Khan, the then nawab of Bengal. My mother’s temple has no deity of the Goddess; instead there is a small figurine about six inches high which is seated on a lotus upon a waist high stem. Two female figures guard the lotus on either side and two old bearded men, one fair and one dark stand in the positions where Kartik and Ganesh stand in a Durga image. We assume that the two females are Lakshmi and Saraswati while the two bearded men are some sages, who they are we do not know. When we passed through a densely populated, well to do Nepalese village to reach to Kachugaon at whose heart lay a Santhal relief camp for our meeting with the balbandus meandering our ways through well fed and well cared for bovine population, I noticed a temple or two with exactly the same formation of the idols as in my mother’s village temple. Mother’s temple was not an anomaly; it was the way Kamakhya temples were usually organized. Kamakhya is invisible, she is an icon, invoking larger images through the hint of signs and symbols; she is niraakar, formless, empty. Her representations are not automatic as they must be sought and imagined. Whatever it is Kamakhya lends herself to imaginations, incantations and interpretations. All through the history of Kamatapur ruled by the Koch kings of Coochbehar, Kamakhya has united the left hand and the right hand of worship, the Brahminical and the Tantric worships and integrated the image worshipping Hinduism with the formlessness of Buddhism. Kamakhya is a unity in diversity, much like Assam herself, absorbing differences, resolving conflicts to integrate different paths into a common destination. I took a renewed interest in Ma Kamakhya.

What strikes me is the non visual aspect of the Indian culture. I have been only taught to understand the literate and oral cultures; it is now occurring to me that India has yet another axis, visual and non visual culture. Kamakhya belongs to the non visual tradition of the worshipper of the formless, Tantric, Alakh Niranjan, Nirankari, Bhakti, Sufi and other mystic branches of various religions. No wonder then the children of this region cannot “read” pictures. I could see from the face of the school teacher of Kaimari village of the Kachugaon bloc that he too was unable to interpret illustrations given in the book in a manner in which I did. Non visual cultures have a strong connection to non literate cognition in India, visual culture is perhaps related to literate cultures as well. Sensibilities of the two kinds are important to understand and build into pedagogy.

Kamatapur is also an area of metallurgy, of castings. Exquisite and delicate figurines from a mere inch in height to about eight inches are cast of alloys of as many as eight metals. It is an area of the textile trade, trade of betel leaves, arecanuts, jute fibre and now of coal, oil, natural gas and tea. Assam has always been the commodity hub of the land route of trade that would directly connect the Indian subcontinent to the Silk Route. Silk is produced in Assam as well. Assam is the last post for salt because after that when we trek eastewards, oil and salt disappear from the common person’s diet.

Kamatapur is also very central to the entire route of the Mongols from the north and the contending Pathans from the south eastern regions of Bihar and Bengal; it is the hub from where one proceeds via the cult of the Goddess into Himachal, Kashmir and from thereon to Punjab on one hand, to Nagaland and Manipur all along the Buddhist trail right upto China on the other. As for Bengal, one finds a tantric trail right from Nilachal Hills holding the Kamakhya Temple travelling all the way to Kolkata. Kamakhya, a deity that rose to prominence in the middle of the 17th century out of the patronage of the Koch Kings of Kamatapur is the very expression of its cultural diversity and the historical need for such pluralism.

Back in Delhi to 45 degrees dry heat from the cool rainy pre monsoon of lower Assam, or Kachar, or Bodoland.

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