Amitabh @ Prateeksha

Posted on October 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

This is the full version of my published piece in Crest, TOI on the 6th of October 2012.

 

 

I was being a Great Gambler when I cast all prospects of my academic career into the winds and decided that for my doctoral programme I would work on Amitabh Bachchan who I in my student days often thought of as the usherer of my life. This was in the 1980’s when perhaps working on the sociology of cinema was unthinkeable. But to me cinema was a social phenomenon; it addressed people universally beyond class, caste, gender and age. I suspected that every human being had a conception of herself and in that mental image of hers, she ceased to be trapped in her socio-economic boundaries and transcend into a being. Of many lives I had seen, I realized that people latch on to film stars for an inner life and this inner life of humans, to my mind, was sociologically very important for shapes that societies take, for the kinds of histories they have, for the levels of cultures they acquire and so on. I was a student of JNU’s MPhil-PhD programme and because of my formidable performance in class; the academic panel did not know how to deny my research proposal in which I decided to create a space for a film star in the academic curricula. When my proposal was cleared I immediately contacted Soumya Bandopadhyay to introduce me in person to Amitabh Bachchan. Soumyada was Amitabh’s biographer and in the year 1989 very close to him. So on a bright autumn day of September in 1989 I went to meet Amitabh in his rented bunglow in Delhi’s Vasant Vihar.

Amitabh Bachchan’s style in those days was moist back brushed hair and spotless white khaddar with Kohlapuri sandals. He doused himself liberally with some expensive perfume, served us excellent Darjeeling tea and at once started speaking about how he felt that his being in Hindi film brought a new kind of energy in the people precisely because the characters he played always delivered solutions. Amitabh had just resigned from the Parliament and was shooting for Agneepath. I sensed that Amitabh developed some kind of a nervous discomfort at being studied and observed. But after a while he felt less threatened and turned to face me directly. “You are a good student”, he said, “a great career in the Universities and academic research I foresee. Why are you working on Amitabh Bachchan? Do you realize that you will be ruined?” I laughed condescendingly. ‘I don’t care”, I said, “ Copernicus was put to death for introducing new theories, so was Socrates. Main kaun hoon, kya naam hain mera, Socrates ko jab hemlock peena padha?” Amitabh showed adequate knowledge how the academic circle worked, what kinds of projects they valued, what kind of candidates they chose; he seems to have been very close to his father’s life as a an academic.

Though Amitabh had promised me help with my work, he did not keep his words. My questionnaires were never filled up, my queries sent to him by post never answered. I had to work around my project in a way in which interviews with the star had to be eliminated. I wrote my MPhil dissertation as a treatise in Idealism, using theories from the Germans from Fichte, Schelling, Kant, Hegel and down to Adorno. I wrote like them, using categories of aesthetics in my analysis where Amitabh turned into a Super consciousness, an ideal universal which was a process of continuous becoming. These were very tough issues to wade around and if one was not familiar with such expressions such as art being the moment where the world worlds, it was likely that one could get badly thrashed by the intellectual shrapnel of this school of philosophers. I sent a copy to Amitabh after I cleared my viva with flying colours. By this time, winter had set in with its salubrious days and cold nights.

One such afternoon as I sat working over an evaluation project of Tata Steel, my landlady called me up frantically in the office and insisted that I return home at once. I lived in a one room in a bungalow across my office with a Shrivastav couple. It seems that one Mr Gurudutt had come looking for me at home saying that Amitabh on receiving my dissertation has desired to immediately talk to me. I had no telephone at home and it seems that Amitabh had called up the Shrivastavs and they already had some exchange over both being of the same surname. Amitabh called me up that evening and said that he was overwhelmed with my work because I seemed to write the very words that he often thinks of. I assured him that I was no mind reader but I merely translated his films into a language with which he was also familiar because of his general access to literature and philosophy. He insisted that I visit him as soon as possible and that he would send me the air tickets and while I stayed with him he would take care of me so I did not need to worry. I was worried; I prefer hotels to homes and feel uncomfortable at being a house guest, Amitabh Bachchan notwithstanding. He must have read my mind and his secretary called me up to say that I could retire to the Centaur Hotel for my bed and bath while all meals and all waking hours will be spent at Prateeksha.

When I finally landed in Prateeksha I realized that I had internalized Amitabh Bachchan so deeply that nothing I encountered there was a surprise for me. I had anticipated every detail of Amitabh’s daily life. What I missed was how much Amitabh’s family seemed to look upon me as if I was the star and that they were hosting some celebrity. When an elderly relative visited them I overheard Teji say to the gentleman in a hushed tone that she was overwhelmed by me because I was so unassuming !!. Her reasons for being in awe of me was because Harivansh read through my work and then looked at my bibliography and had said to her that so many books even he had not read. Amitabh was certain that I be projected as some kind of a celebrity and this stance of his cowered Abhishek and Shweta down so much that when Shweta had to recite Harivanshrai’s poetry to me she shuffled and fidgeted nervously. His staff stood around me looking on eagerly whose preparation I relished most at lunch.

The family at Prateeksha was more eager to lay bare before me their failings and weaknesses rather than prove that they were better than the best. Weaknesses in maths, low scores in social sciences, fear of injections, allergies to food, incapability in business, failures in examinations, and denial of appointments were discussed openly and frankly. Children and the elderly participated equally in all conversations; nothing was held back, nothing was pushed under the carpets. It was a talkative house, an open house, where light and breeze flowed in as freely as discussions.

Amitabh was in command even in his private space. He commented on every course, where the okhra needed to be fried more, where salads had to be cut finer and where the curtain had to be placed so that the slanting rays of the winter sun did not hit the eye. Food was an important affair in Prateeksha; the diet intake of everyone at the table was taken note of and the nutrition followed carefully. One had to have the share of greens, of fibres, food had to be plentiful and eaten with respect and care. Amitabh’s family records of the past seven generation showed the family to have suffered hunger and deaths due to malnourishment.

Amitabh made a few rounds of appointments for me. I met Javed Akhtar and Subhash Ghai. I accompanied him to the sets of Akayla. I was introduced to Salim Khan and Ramesh Sippy as a genius. I wished that the earth would open up and swallow me in because here right in front of me were seated the makers of Sholay, the very film that had opened up my consciousness to the world of cinema and to Amitabh Bachchan. On the sets, Amitabh laid open my dissertation. He had marked certain portions of my work and asked me, what I meant by justified anger, what was the final destination of a rebel, does the ego always invoke an alter ego, when is existence threatened, what is violence, when is violence creative, what is death, what is the Heideggerian Being, is aesthetics only specific to art, what is poetry, what is epic, how is the cinematic experience different from watching a football match, what is a cinema, what is a star, what kinds of cinema succeeds and why and so on. I felt as if Amitabh was the proverbial crane and I was Yudhisthir as we sat by the breeze of a lake stretched out in a large swathe in the premises of Chandivili studio.

Amitabh’s home was grand, grand because of its simplicity. There was no sign of ostentation, whites dominated; floors were of grey kota, furniture sprawling but neat. Care was taken so that at no point of time wealth got shown off. There was austerity, discipline, organization and tidiness. What also delighted me was that writing stationery was kept at every nook and corner. Amitabh wrote down everything and insisted that at every conversation one needed to have writing things. This was a habit I valued very much and could easily see that such habits came from homes of academicians, also my family occupation.

In my inner eye I knew Amitabh very well and it really mattered very little whether I met him in mortal body or not. But it was Jaya who I really looked forward to see. I had been a fan of hers since I watched her Bengali film Dhanni Meye and never lost an opportunity to watch her films. As much as I took Amitabh normally, I actually gushed when I met Jaya. We had conversations around Amitabh in which Jaya expressed her displeasures with her husband’s choice of cinema, his performance and acting skills; Amitabh would try to defend himself often citing my dissertation in which all his absurd films were interpreted as specialized spiritual quests of mankind. Jaya, much exasperated sought my support in claiming that the Bengali culture was on the whole much superior to the UP tastes. Jaya had emerged from a brand of cinema we know as art cinema having worked with masters like Ray and middle of the road director, Hrishikesh Mukherjee. She regarded the commercial cinema more as plan B to fill in the blanks of idle time in the life of an artist. She felt betrayed that Amitabh, her thick friend and husband had changed over to emerge as a superhero in films that require him to dress like a eunuch and sometimes to drop off his lungi that too under the full gaze of Hema Malini !! “I am curious about one thing in Amitabh,” Jaya asked me, “what about his relations with women?” Then she added hurriedly, that she did not think that it was possible for Amitabh to have any lasting relationships with any woman. I felt a sense of insecurity lurking in her.

After a while that I conversed with her I felt like many of Jaya’s fans that she married the wrong man. They may have started off together but their paths had grown increasingly apart. Yet she was very much in love with him and in her vocal critique of him there was a desire to draw closer to him, possess him ever more. She felt that Amitabh had done quite the wrong thing by quitting politics. She read the step as being selfish and not willing to walk that extra mile for the people who loved him so dear. Sometimes I feel Jaya’s coming to politics and remaining there despite pressures to quit is an attempt to continue, on behalf of her husband, the journey which he abandoned. She continues the pilgrimage on behalf of her husband. More than self-fulfilment, this is her way of serving her husband.

Amitabh was his star self in his home looking over neatness and order from his towering height and overpowering gaze; unfortunately no one quite thought of him in this way. His employees were clearly ever alert at being pointed out for having missed out something like leaving doors open in the twilight hours when mosquitoes found their way into the house; his wife thought that he was waylaid and in bad company of men; his children felt he poked and teased too much, and his brother felt that he needed to be managed. But there was no one who regretted as much as Teji that Amitabh never studied English literature for then he would surely have been a professor by now. The more she heard about our faculty in JNU the more she felt that Amitabh had indeed lost a chance of a lifetime when he came to films and not the University!

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X and Y

Posted on October 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

X and Y.

by Susmita Dasgupta on Tuesday, August 7, 2012 at 8:52am ·

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We referred to this gentleman as Y..da. The only thing I recall about him is that in the past thirty years that I have occasionally bumped into him he has never spoken. I never heard his voice. I think that I classify him in my mind as the man I have never spoken to. Y..da is one who recedes into the shadows at any social gathering. His wife, who we call as X di is beautiful, tall, with long dark hair falling straight and thick beyond the waist into a fat braid, her eyes always shining with natural kohl of her thick eyelids, her teeth framed as pearl and her body held gaunt and upright as her hips swayed rhythmically with every step. She is the personification of the stuff that the novelists in the 1970’s Bengal wove their pens with. I always wondered why this graceful and charming lady at all married a gawky and toad eyed man who always slipped back into shadows if you ever ventured to even greet him in your courtesy as the host of the party. Theirs was an arranged match, negotiated by parents through advertisements in Ananda Bazar Patrika. I was a high school student in the days they were married and in my first flush of feminism I realized that the parents of X di must have merely responded to the lines such as wanted a beautiful girl, tall, slim, fair and educated without ever wondering what the advertiser had to offer. Y da was dark, toad eyed, broad faced and without a personality to reckon.

Yet Y..da was supposed to be brilliant; he was an IITian, a class fellow of my pishemoshai. Pishe said that he was the class topper. Y da for most of the times I knew him had no job. He tried to do some business here and there but to no avail. X di did all the earning; she was brilliant too and soon found herself a teaching job in one of Kolkata’s top schools. She also did a lot of tuitions, she being a science teacher; students just did not stop flowing into her home. I never visited their home but my parents warn me never to venture anywhere near it. The reason was simple; the rented flat that they occupied for generations was so dilapidated that strong twines were used to secure a crashing stairway and a loosely hanging balcony. When Kolkata faced some mild tremors or got vulnerable in torrential rain, X di arranged to get someone to change the ropes. They were hard up for money because Y da never really earned and how much can a school teacher though loaded with private tuitions earn? definitely not as much to remain in our social class. So I, despite my socialisms never thought much of them. Perhaps so did many among us in the social circle. Yet X di was unfazed; she attended all the social functions with her usual confident dazzle, wore nice sarees and gave worthy gifts. Never did she let her money come in the way of her socializing.

They had two children; a girl and then after a few years a boy. The children grew brilliant. X di got them the best education. They rose and rose. They were soft hearted, modest, but brilliant. Soon they got wonderful offers with unimaginably high salaries. So the scenario around X di changed; she was now well rested, well nourished, well cared for in a plush flat that her daughter bought for them. The daughter never married though her qualifications, income levels and fair skin forever attracts a slew of proposals; I do not think that the young woman intends to marry because if she has to be a bread winner what does she want a passenger in the form of a house husband for. The son married and just bought a flat.

Y da died three days ago; his family is crashed. X di and the children are devasted; they say how they are going to ever live without the father. In a sense of ending, I go back to the story that I left thirty long years ago in Kolkata to think about Y da. How daft of me to never have noticed. Y da never could work because his professional pride did not find a suitable employer. He was a IITian topper and he deserved freedom to pursue his innovations to take India to the next level of technology. But he is of a generation when not technology but profits came to dominate and soon all IIT graduates would be selling chocolates and edible oils as IIM pass outs to earn salaries in order to have sprawling drawing rooms. Y da never cared for such plush; he had no problems staying on in sooted rooms without white wash for years; he wished to look after his parents and so he never ventured out of the city. All he wanted was to be able to do higher things in life those which necessarily did not give him money. His ethics did not suit the Marwari brand of business that was developing in Kolkata who laughed at the Bengali because all that brilliance could not beget money. He was too proud to work to make money for his employer. He lived in an idealized world of ethics and morality, of intellect and self-pride. Such a world was not to be and so Y da would recoil into his shell and never thought of interacting with anyone of us. All the while we looked down on him; he was probably the arrogant one thinking of us as being beneath him.

Anyway Y da stayed at home. He cooked, looked after the children, taught them, honed their brilliance and brought a sense of focus into their lives. He looked after his parents, kept them company and became the comfort zone to which his family could come home to. He was the one who shouldered the backroom tasks while his wife and children performed in the world outside. The success of his children, the bloom of his wife and the comfort of his parents when they died of old age bears testimony to the fact that Y da must have looked after the home very well. But these are unpaid services we never notice; not in women and even less so for men. And all the while at home, he taught ethics to his children, made them into good human beings even while they were unusually brilliant and now unusually successful.

Everyone is sad for X di, surely she deserved better than Y da. Even my eyes are so coloured by patriarchy that I never saw Y da in his place; my vision is so blurred by associating happiness and success with money that I never noticed how rich the family was in self-honour, pride and morality. While we talk of men as sharing the housework, allowing the wife to take all decisions, looking after children and having non-competitive sensibilities I realize how little we get to value such men should they be our husbands and sons-in-law. Y da died young considering that we get to live longer these days. May be he finally felt like a loser and so illness crept upon him and claimed his life. But he made a valiant struggle to hold on to his ideals and principles against patriarchy, against capitalism, against materialism. We were probably his class enemy and so he never opened up to any of us; I am curious to know who were among his conversation circle, or the adda circle as we call in Calcutta. I will ask my mother to find that out discretely when she attends Y da’s shraddha.

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Zindagi Badi Honi Chahiye, Lambi Nahin…

Posted on July 19, 2012 by secondsaturn

The first Hindi film I saw which I also happened to follow and recall was Aradhana. It was in a large group of uncles and aunts and cousins that we went to watch the film in a modest theatre in Behala of Kolkata. I think that Bulimashi got married and she being the youngest of her eight siblings, the large family of my mother’s decided to celebrate the moolah obtained from her husband as the gatekeeping money to the hilt by watching the new release called Aradhana with Sharmila Tagore in it. This was the film that also catapulted Rajesh Khanna to superstardom. The fall out of this film on us children was that my cousins and I could mimic the film, scene by scene and dialogue by dialogue. In such acts of imitation, we would identify with the heroine. Rajesh Khanna was not the principle point of view.

But for the world around me, Dola Aunty, my private tutor, Geeta, our young maid servant, Saloni Pandey, my class friend were all ready to swoon by Rajesh Khanna. Dola Aunty bought piles of magazines those carried stories of the star; she would conspire to teach children of those mothers who subscribed to a large number of film magazines. Geeta lived from one Rajesh Khanna film to the other while Saloni Pandey showed an amazing academic talent in referencing enormous material on the star. Soon we were inundated by Rajesh Khanna look alikes; the tailor, the barber, the vegetable vendor started sporting the Rajesh look. Baidyanath, my grandfather’s driver from Chaibasa tried to have a wave of hair over his forehead notwithstanding the “tiki” at the back of his skull. He was the repository of the lyrics of the songs of Rajesh Khanna. Even my young cousins proudly wore “Guru shirts”, shirts more like kurtas and designed after the ones that Rajesh Khanna wore in the film Kati Patang.

Frankly, I remained out of all this. Rajesh Khanna invoked femininity. I was not a pursuant of such sentiments. So when Amitabh Bachchan came, I took to him like fish to water. I also revelled that he and not Rajesh Khanna was the superstar. But even as I worked on Amitabh Bachchan, I could never quite get over the fact that it was Rajesh Khanna who brought forth the first ever idea of a superstar. I heard these stories that Geeta collected; she was illiterate and the media not being what it is today, I have no idea where she got her facts from. We made fun of her when she would tell us that women wore sindur on their partings with Rajesh Khanna’s photograph in front of them. Later I read from published sources that these stories were true. Rajesh Khanna was God and Geeta was the devotee; his exploits had a way of reaching her, I don’t quite know how. In one of his interviews Amitabh said that he has seen women take the dust from the tyres of the car that carried Rajesh Khanna and rub that on their heads. Such was the madness that Rajesh Khanna commanded. The more I worked on Amitabh Bachchan, the more uncomfortable I felt about not being able to analyse Rajesh Khanna well. After all, he was India’s first superstar and generated certain madness about him that no one but no one has ever been able to match.

Many decades later when I moved in Delhi’s Sarvapriya Vihar, Rajesh Khanna was my neighbour. There was a tiff with him once or twice over parking of cars and hence with much trepidation I used to often peep into his ground floor drawing room to see whether he had retired for the day. He often had curtains drawn open, would change into his night clothes and with his reading glasses on would handle high piles of files using the centre table as his writing desk while he sat on the floor. Those days he was in the Congress Party and had rented the flat in our locality. I was always struck by his single minded focus on the files; such attentiveness I have never witnessed in anyone I knew. This power of concentration struck me with an extraordinary amazement.

One day I sent him a note saying that I wanted to see him. In the note I said that I was sorry that I never made efforts to study him while I worked on my doctorate thesis on Amitabh Bachchan and if possible I wished to now start the process of unpacking his magical appeal. He granted me an appointment immediately. As I sat sipping Lopchu tea, Rajesh Khanna was very angry that when I was Amitabh’s house guest in Mumbai, the latter had misled me into believing that Rajesh never wanted to see me. How untrue all this is, he exclaimed. He believed that Amitabh had played really dirty politics with him especially manipulating Hrishikesh Mukherjee. Rajesh Khanna was also angry with Rishi Kapoor, who according to him was even more serpentine in crookedness. Clearly Rajesh Khanna was a person who had resentments. After he had spoken his mind and was more receptive to my presence, I asked him, where does Rajesh Khanna live now? Rajesh Khanna? He repeated; well Rajesh Khanna is a very big star, he told me, a larger than life figure, he overshadows everyone else on screen but I am Jatin Khanna yaar. It was this sentence alone that made me interested in Rajesh Khanna the person ever since.

Truly, as Jatin Khanna had said, Rajesh Khanna is a shadow; he lives nowhere. He is actually no one. He never was anything except an illumination. Very recently, Cine Durbaar arranged a memorial service for Shakti Samanta, the director who created the superstar called Rajesh Khanna. In the memorial service the director’s son gave us a snapshot of his father’s life. Shakti Samanta’s father was in the airforce and was martyred in the 1947 war. He came away with his young widowed mother to live among his relatives. In Aradhana, Rajesh Khanna too is an air force pilot who loses his life in a campaign and Sharmila Tagore is widowed pregnant with her dead husband’s child. Aradhana was Shakti Samanta’s story around his mother. The image of the young widow has featured also in Kati Patang and Rajesh Khanna is the angel who comes in to rescue this widow out of her loneliness. I had a distinct feeling that Rajesh Khanna was Shakti Samanta’s search of a lover for his young widowed mother. Rajesh is a saviour who comes in to breathe life and loveliness into women, ignored and isolated. No wonder then Rajesh Khanna is a fantasy for those who are hemmed inside homes, pincered inside spaces defined for them for incarceration into their fixed social roles with predefined expectations. He is an invitation for such souls to fly out, to float out, and to experience the openness of space and the lightness of air. This openness was his appeal; this lightness, his illumination.

Rajesh Khanna’s progenitor was Shakti Samanta, but the man who settled him in superstardom was Hrishikesh Mukherjee. In two films namely Anand and Bawarchi, Hrishikesh makes the final articulation of Rajesh Khanna’s spirit; the man who provides pleasure, the man who assures but he himself remains unnoticed and unseen. This is why the huge life giving force of Anand had to be concealed in his imminent death and he had to disappear into oblivion after he settles everything for the chaotic household in Bawarchi. Oblivion was Rajesh Khanna’s final destiny for the light giver cannot be seen; for in order to be seen one has to absorb light. Rajesh Khanna could never have been “around” in the way Amitabh Bachchan is. Principally such continued presence beyond the screen would have been contrary to Rajesh Khanna’s appeal.

The time that I met Rajesh Khanna Shah Rukh Khan’s Devdas was released. Rajesh told me that he wanted to watch the film. I offered to take him to take him to PVR’s Premier Class. He did not agree. He said that he wanted to whistle wildly at Madhuri Dixit and that was not possible in civilized society. He would not like to stay on in Aashirwaad because while his daughter really looked after him well, he would like to open the verandah door and stand in the rain and that would wet the carpets and cause inconvenience for everyone. He wanted to be just wild, melt into the nature, mingle into the light, and dissolve in the rain. He could not be among people with routine, with lives to lead and schedules to abide by.

I suddenly realized that Rajesh Khanna was also the person who created two other superstars, namely S.D.Burman and later R.D Burman and Kishore Kumar. Kishore Kumar wanted to expand; give me more space to move he would say; make me faster, carry me further, lift me higher. S.D would despair at Kishore because the scale had only seven notes. Then all of them found Rajesh Khanna, the body so rhythmic, one that had such lightness of being, such potential of dissolving into emptiness, just like S.D’s rhythms. In the opening song of Aradhana, Rajesh Khanna atop the jeep drives alongside the train singing in Kishore’s voice, Mere Saapnon Ki Raani, with Pancham’s mouth organ keeping the beat and as Rajesh sways almost like the thin breeze against the vast landscape and rolling hills, Kishore’s voice gets the broad movement that he has always looked for. Kishore’s voice leaves his body and embraces the world, moving at the speed of the train. Rajesh carries the voice, impersonates the spirit of the music and together with Kishore Kumar’s voice and S.D’s music weaves together the vastness of the landscape and the pace of the train. One wonders whether S.D.Burman and R.D.Burman or Kishore Kumar could have been what they were had Rajesh Khanna not lived on screen to embody the music. I sometimes feel that Rajesh Khanna was the personification of the song in the Hindi film; that song which is supralingual, comes into play where articulation must be transcended. No wonder it is difficult to talk about him but easy to sway in small pulses to the softer rhythms of music, just like his mannerisms were.

We left Sarvapriya Vihar to come away to our present locality. Rajesh Khanna also changed his flat to occupy the one adjacent to the one that had been ours. Our maid Tara continued to work with the new occupants of our flat. Rajesh Khanna would often stroll in the terrace right next to her. We used to be Tara’s confidantes; the last time we met Tara it seemed that Rajesh Khanna was her advisor in matters of daily interest.

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Theory of Art, A Reply to Charles Broys

Posted on May 21, 2012 by secondsaturn

Anita Vasudev posts a link on my wall on an article from e-flux by Mr Charles Broys which talks of this compulsive need for modern art to theorize itself. After a rather longish attendance of art as religion and then of modern avant garde, Hegelian theses against art, Nietzche and Foucault’s anti art stance because of art’s definitiveness about Truth, the author concludes that the need to theorize art is all about extending its appeal from the cultural locatedness of the artist and hence the particularity of the artwork into a universal appeal. Broys says that the increasing dependence of art on theory to make art work is a characteristic of modern art which must universalize because modernity itself is all about universals. When art was religious, there was a less need for it to be universal because it was all about talking to converts.
To my mind, there are problems with the above thesis. Art has some defining features which survive across ages and these features are beyond the historicity of art; such features inhere irrespective of whether art is prehistoric, ancient, medieval or modern and post modern. The purpose of art is not its defining feature because the purpose of prehistoric art as in the Chauvin caves in France dating back to a period of 14000 years attempts to capture the spirits of beings especially bisons as they leave the body of the animals. The purpose of ancient art is to propitiate Gods for the human has just invented God; in medieval times, art is religious, spiritual, beyond mere worship and goes into devotion, following, pilgrimage, wonderment and awe. Here we have art as spectacle and in Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo, art also as monuments. Paintings became monumental much before monuments were made a la Ochterlony in Cacutta, now Kolkata. Modern art is different from all of the above because it is secular, addresses profane subjects and celebrates the human spirit and its agency. Modern art is too wide a definition for modern art contains the baroque, the expressionists, the impressionists, surrealists, Dada avant gardists, cubists and now the post modern. Divided they may be, these styles of art all say the same thing, the human agency has to be celebrated; God is dead, long live Godliness. Observed closely, art has differed over time in terms of its context, the location out of which it originates, the particular situation upon which it grows. But the fact that it grows out of a context, its outward motion of overcoming that which is merely factual has remained constant to it.
Then what is art? Art is itself the universalization of particulars, the generalizations of specificities, the abstract categorization of the concrete and the recovery of essences from content. If this be the characteristic of art, then what theory does for art? Theory, like art, too is an abstraction out of the concrete facts, a generalization of contents specific to a context into universal rules applicable to all. Those who call theory to be objectifying and homogenizing also find art to be ideologically dominating. But art and theory have a crucial difference and I think that Broys is not aware of this difference. This difference between art and theory lies in claims; art merely presents itself before us as the Truth; theory presents to us the Truth. Truth emanates out of artworks as its contents jostle among themselves, conflict, cooperating, co-opting, and contradicting one another to produce resolutions those which absorb antonyms and make opponents coexist; the rendering of the mutually exclusive propositions into a transcendental unity makes art True. For theory, things are different. Here the world is selected into rules and exceptions, into what falls into the scope and lies outside it; theory’s truth is neither self contained, nor it is self evident. Theory must establish itself as truth by validating itself against newer facts which in turn it is required to classify into rules and exceptions. Theory, unlike art has no internal movement, no inner dynamics. Theory unlike art fulfills itself in controlling matter, manipulating it from outside; art fulfills itself by playing with matter and emerging out of it bearing the shape of matter. Matter remains outside theory; art is itself matter.
When we speak of theory of art, there are two possibilities. One we manipulate art in the same way as matter, generalize it across works into rules and hence destroy the uniqueness of individual works and try and place it in an Idea of Truth outside of itself. Here theory constrains art, deadens it and eventually kills it. Art resists this kind of theory. But if theory suppresses its purpose of classifying, organizing and regularizing matter according to concepts held outside of such matter and instead uses its skills in articulating concreteness of things as abstract concepts, it can talk about art for art itself is a generalization of specificities, it becomes art by raising the content into concepts. Then theory will become art and attain art’s purpose of revealing the Truth from within matter instead of outside matter. In that case, theory will be a translation of art into articulation, and will be able to extend arts cause rather than curbing its intent. For theory to be able to understand art, it needs to become philosophy.
Hegel said that art was the less developed form of philosophy; true because philosophy, by articulating in language the sub and the supra linguistic elements of art kills it only if merely through translation. Philosophy articulates in language the constituent elements within art and also the dynamism that processes such contents into the concepts to become art. Philosophy is a translation that, according to Hegel, renders art useless. Aesthetic theory, which is actually a philosophy and not a social theory developed with Hegel’s Berlin Lectures on the Art, central to which was his explanation of the Bhagavad Gita.
In sum, theory seeks generalizations over and outside the facts it deals with while art seeks to generalize the facts themselves. While theory subserves the world to a higher purpose defines outside the world, art finds a larger purpose within the world with the world itself. Theory and art in a way are contradictions in terms; one cannot be easily translated into the other. When theory tries to explain art in terms of phenomena outside its realm, it insists that art is functional, structural, and finally crashes into calling art as phenomenological. All explanations of art are wrong. Art is located in society, is born of society and expresses social concerns precisely because art is a way of responding to social constraints in order to escape, overcome, resolve, transcend, and sublimate these. Art’s purpose is the artist’s purpose; if the artist looks at herself as a person located within society, fulfilling herself as a social member art’s purpose is bound to be social. Should the artist construe herself as an individual, beyond the profane, beyond its pettiness, her art would express a pristineness, a vacuum, a superstardom and even super humanity. Nietzsche’s critique of art was this. Overtly aware of the art’s power to reach out to people, Nietzsche’s fear that art may impose the mind of the artist over his society emanated from individual artists who imagined themselves to be above the society, unconstituted by its forces, unmoved by its demands. It is in his theory of art that Nietzsche moves so much closer to Marx; I suspect that fascists were good students of Marxism.
Foucault’s idea of aesthetics as yet another form of power; for Foucault power is everywhere and in everything; and to say that art is also a power is a mere repetition. The question is not whether art is power or not; the question is what kind of power art is. Art challenges an entrenched power; medieval art challenged established ancient and pagan religions and modern art challenges the power of the King. Dadaism challenged the bourgeoise society, surrealism challenged materialism, still life and impressionism challenged war. Aesthetic theory must reveal the target whose powers art wants to undermine; for that alone is enough to talk of art. Art has camps; fans are divided, critics are at loggerheads. Such divisions among admirers of art vindicate the Foucauldian thesis of art being all about power.
When artists and their friends talk about their art and their kind of art, the attempts to theorize often revolve around the artist, her ways of working, and her techniques and so on. In such theories, one suspects that there is an attempt to celebrate the artist and project her as a celebrity. These theories often fail except with follower artists those who wish to learn to be artists themselves. For viewers and audiences, one needs a new kind of theory, the theory where what art attacks becomes important. For we as viewers for who art is a part of our larger social existence, seek in art, a solace, a meaning, a purpose for our existence which art provides to us apparently by emerging as this sublime, transcendental resolution but secretly empowers us by slaying our enemies, sometimes the inconsiderate parent, the intolerant teacher, the nasty neighbor and so on.

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Kamla Does A Slut Walk

Posted on May 19, 2012 by secondsaturn

I don’t have much to do with sluts as I don’t have to do much with shaving cream. I am not a man and I have no use for either. I also don’t quite buy the argument that sluts are a helpless lot with sex being forced upon them night after night; I don’t also imagine that sluts don’t enjoy being fucked around for most of the times. Yet they are exploited, exploited by the very men they are used by; men don’t make them poor and destitute or don’t attack their livelihoods, but they exploit them by refusing to acknowledge their existence. This relegation into invisibility, the denial of their beings constitutes one of the greatest indignities that are heaped upon sluts. Sluts, being what they are, cannot claim to do otherwise. Poets, artists, authors and scholars whenever they have tried to see a slut from her point of view have invariably seen her pain at missing being a woman. The slut desires to be a woman because she wishes to emerge as a visible, veritable and vindicated entity in the society. But when a woman wants to be a slut, I become curious. In the Slut Walk that will be held in Delhi on the 31st of July 2011, women will identify themselves as sluts and speak on from such position.
The feminist movement notwithstanding its many victories has encountered some serious challenges. In a recent article in the Hindustan Times Brunch magazine, Tavishi Rastogi writes of any woman called Kamla who returns home after giving up a successful career because her womanly chores like housekeeping and child rearing demands more and more time from her. In fact, Geetanjali Prasad in her book the Great Indian Family says that the Indian joint family is coming back precisely because women find their in-laws to be a positive contribution in the form of child minders and house managers. But in Tavishi’s article, the Kamlas of India in particular and the world in general are returning home unable to cope with the burden of their own successes which are landing them up in high paying and high demanding jobs. While it is understandable that child rearing and home making is becoming more resource intensive by the day, and there has to be a pay off between the money the woman earns for the household versus the value of the time she devotes to her domestic duties, what gets largely unnoticed is that slight under the breath statement about office politics being a decisive factor in making her leave her job. Indeed, when our office announced a VRS, the women among us who left were also the ones who were victimized in office politics. They of course did not say this and instead cited distance, cost of travelling and so on.
Kamla’s coming back home is her invisibilization, her glass ceiling, the cede of her F word. Had she been steeped in her traditional role of a woman, the final authority of the domestic space, it would be one thing. But it is quite another thing that she looked down upon her meaningless life at home, she decried her status behind the drapes, she defied her veil and looked outwards into a wide world where she would be free irrespective of her gender. Then why did she chicken out? Why did she return with her tail tucked between her legs, head down and shoulders drooped? No one but she herself has to be blamed for it.
An important training that I had in mathematics was to understand that the solution to a problem lies concealed within the premise of the sum. The better one understands the premise, the better one would do in solving the problem. A possible reason why Kamla could not sustain her F was because she rushed through the premise in haste. Kamla did not observe well that the degradation of the feminine lay in a manner in which she was constructed as being an appendage to a man’s role and functions in the world. Kamla did not observe well that if she asserted equality with men and also her femininity, the two were becoming irreconcilable terms. As an equal she could not be adjunct to a man and were she to be free of him she would be seriously compromised in her femininity. The age turned so that its wisdom often called out to the Vimlas, Kamlas and Sarlas that what was the use of them being women if they were not put to a man’s use? It was inevitable that in her demand for equality Kamla was faced with a choice, either to be equal or to be a woman. This choice she could not make; much less she never understood that this was a choice that had to be made.
Why does a man claim superiority over a woman? He does this because of a Durkhemian social division of labour associated with social differentiation and when such social differentiation is put to use to create new societies with new possibilities as the ones Emile Durkheim studied, difference brings about hierarchy. If women are to challenge this hierarchy then women must also challenge their assignment to gendered roles. While women did the former, they hesitated like hell in leaving their gendered roles. This is why work is a choice for so many women, but marriage and child bearing, cooking and cleaning, ironing the husband’s clothes and having sex with him is a compulsion. When in the case of the Kamlas of the world, work and home begin to conflict with each other, it becomes a struggle of choice over compulsion; she returns home to her compulsions. The woman who returns home is therefore a loser in the eyes of her man. She had been there, done it all, tasted everything and then seen that the world is not for her, she is not a fit in it. Kamla’s assertion and then the cancellation of that assertion jeopardize the Vimlas and the Sarlas who anyway would never have asserted. It is like a terrorist bomber; one mad person and the entire ilk get stereotyped. My mother is an exemplary person in my family as a career housewife; the kind of respect she earns is not possible for a woman of my generation. If today’s woman is a devoted housewife then she is a loser because she does not work; if she is a worker then she is to be pitied because of her daily failures at home.
The problem with the woman is that she refuses to give up her domestic space while asserting her rights in the work area. The separation of the home and work and the rendering of the domestic as the private were the two episodes that really feminized the female and made the feminine into something associated with sex and reproduction, leaving the rest like property, work and wealth to men. If women must assert their presence in the public space, the one thing they must agree is to dissociate with the domestic sphere where she gets trapped as a sexual object. This duality of the female persona has terrible consequences for women in all walks of life.
The “must” of marrying and having children, the flaunt of sexuality by women even as they wish to be as equal as men, the much lauded “management” of home and work by “superwomen” of advertisements pathetically jeopardize the feminist cause. It is here that men catch them, ridicule them for being a woman after all of this, for needing them despite seeking freedom from them. It is here that women become the object of a man’s contempt, her sexuality is cast aside to be merely a means for his fulfillment and she as a whole being is rendered as a hopelessly ill-defined human being. As one who wants to work, she is unfeminine; as one who wishes to remain a woman, she becomes a slut. The slut walk reaffirms the same mistake that she has been making all the while, asserting her sexuality and also her individuality when it is clear that they are contradiction in terms.
Why does a woman try to be both the public and the private, why does she wish to be in both places at the same time? The social differentiation has happened because the spheres are articulated and distinguished, why then does she deny the very process that rendered into a non entity in the first place? Who said that sex is important? If sex is a need of the body, then yoga is a greater need, aerobics is also a need, then do we exercise compulsively? If not, then why do we need sex? Until and unless women can deny sex, give it up, treat it like a dispensable episode, women can never be free. Like Kamla she will be defeated repeatedly, raped, molested, violated and murdered. These are the occupational hazards of a slut, and they will be so for women who insist on sex as being indispensable to staying alive.

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My Many Eids

Posted on May 18, 2012 by secondsaturn

I have been upon this earth and in a secular, plural and multicultural India now for half a century. I have known many Eids. Eid, is usually a national holiday for one to relax, have a nice breakfast, kachuri and torkari when one lived in Kolkata and paranthas with dahi and achaar now that I am in Delhi and then go for a movie. When I was in school I heard how women friends of the family would partake in the sweets prepared in the homes of their Muslim friends followed by liberal helpings of biriyani. In those days, biriyani was not as commonly available as it is now and only when my mother’s brother’s wife especially cooked it for us we could have the delicacy. In my school there were a few Muslims friends but they were never quite intimate to call us over for their ceremonies. It never occurred to us that we would call them over as well.

But the days just before Eid there was the roja and of that I have many memories. There was a workman who fell unconscious while painting one of our walls; he was fasting the day long and the hot sun of autumn got him. As he lay almost unconscious, my mother looked on helplessly since he could not be given water to regain consciousness. There was also Jalil, our scrap dealer who would refuse tea or refreshments while he weighed cast away books and old newspapers on his scale. Then of course there was Gaja, our gardner who invariably haggled for his Eid bonus. Grandfather would despair because Gaja wanted a bonus every Durga Puja too. Please make up your mind Gaja, Grandpa would say, whether you are a Hindu or a Muslim, you can’t celebrate a Durga Puja and an Eid. Grandfather was urbane, educated, professional middle class and he had no idea that Durga Puja was perhaps a festival that Bengalis celebrated irrespective of whether she was a Hindu or a Muslim. An uncle who is a doctor of course had his iftaar invitations from homes of his students and colleagues who had their fasts during Ramadan.

Then came JNU; a secular and a liberated University where religions were not supposed to matter. So no Muslim in the campus ever spoke a word about Eid and we were, in our turn, careful never to acknowledge that those born as Muslims lived on campus as one. Days and years passed on with Eid being only a holiday for us, a day for movies and meeting up for coffee.

This Eid has been different. We now live in a down market colony of the NCR. We have a Muslim family in a flat that overlooks ours. On one morning I happened to wave out at them when I felt that the lady looked towards me and smiled. After that day we often exchange smiles across the stretch of road that runs between our houses. Then one day we met this lady at a neighbour’s house where she learnt of our addiction to biriyani. From that day onwards, she sends a bowl of steaming hot freshly cooked biriyani whenever she makes it. Through this steady flow of biriyanis we have learnt to keep track of Shab-e-baraat, bakri id and meethi id. The biriyani bowl progressively is being accompanied by rezala, siwain and kheer.

Just as we were wondering which film to watch on Eid, Nusrat calls me up. Nusrat and Imran, a couple who I met as fellow passenger on my flight to Kolkata are our new found family. “Aunty”, says Nusrat, you must be with us for lunch on Eid. Imran is a fantastic cook and is jealous of his culinary secrets. He cooked the most amazing biriyani that can be ever made by a human hand on earth. Both Nusrat’s and Imran’s mothers are visiting them and they have a son, Aman. The five of them chatted with us thrilled to see Kolkattans after a long time, complaining how they hated their exile in Delhi since Imran is now posted in a Delhi hospital and how they were looking for a more decent accommodation than the cubby hole into which they were cramped up in a Laldora colony. Two of Imran’s colleagues joined us for lunch, eager for biriyani, savouring the sweets of Meethi id and talking of the travails of healthcare in Delhi. My dream of having homecooked biriyani was fulfilled at last and Nusrat filled a huge bowl of biriyani for us to take home so that we could have another helping on the following day. From now on, they said, every Eid they will expect us over, because in Delhi they have no family but us. I assured them that the family for them will increase with each passing year as we will introduce them to more of our friends. In the evening we visited our neighbours with some sweets and they returned our visit with a huge box of kaju barfi. This was my first ever Eid in a plural, multicultural, secular India of which I am a free citizen.

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My 50 Years

Posted on May 18, 2012 by secondsaturn

In the year 1960, when Mughal-e-Azam released in India and the Challenger depth was explored off the US coast as the deepest point that man has been able to dive till then, on the day of the Autumn equinox, I was born. That year, my birthday fell on the fourth day of the Devipaksh and I am told that it was a bright day of blue skies and heaps of white cumulous clouds that made the earth look as if it was on a glorious vacation. In the long 50 years that I have been alive, my life so far has been just the way the Universe appeared to everyone on that 24th day of September, joyful, relaxed, serene and festive. I have everything that any human can possibly desire and what I do not have are not worthy of human aspiration. Today, I sit back with barely a few days to go before I turn 50, wondering and not without some guilt, what I did to deserve this wonderful deal.

It is customary for Bengali families to pray that the first born is a girl child because it is believed that the girl who is the first born is the Lakshmi of the household. My family on both sides of my parents believed little in such superstitions but they prayed for me to be born as a girl because in those days, half a century ago, it were women who were poised to have better opportunities to do well in life. More professions were open for women; better schools were available for them and they had access to other cultural refinements such as music and dance. Boys were expected only to study and get jobs and since Kolkata offered little open spaces for children to play, Bengali boys were also removed from sports. Boys spent their time chatting or writing poetry and became either extremely cynical or masochistic in their outlook. It were the women who moved ahead in everything and if she decided not to marry and instead pursue a career, she became socially well established and a high consumer individual. Life for women looked significantly better than what it was for men. This was the common perception in the 1960’s among families like ours when feminism was sweeping across the Western world.

Strangely enough my parents became unapologetically feminists. So they were thrilled to have me born as a girl child so that I could become a grand experiment in their pursuit of women’s liberation. Though my parents are looked upon as being the most compatible couple around yet I feel that not mushy love but strong ideological agreement has drawn them to each other. They were united in their idea of what an individual should be and I am the visible manifestation of that ideology.

Neither of my parents believed in the institution of marriage. My mother was not so vocal about it because somewhere she felt a nice romance could lead up to a nice marriage, but it was my father who completely saw through the hoax of marriage and romantic love. Never, he observed, is a woman a man’s equal. He warned me that if I were to ever marry, the man would assume that he was my natural boss. My father wanted me to be the boss of my own life. He never saw the reason for me to marry if I could finance my way through. How you are any less than the strongest man, he would ask me. You are good in studies, brave in spirit, can argue your way through, talk as an equal to the President of India and have the will and ability to learn anything that you want to? Why do you want to marry and lead life as so many others would want you to?

My father’s idea was not to make me into a man but to say that a woman can be an individual in her own right just as anyone else can be. My father wanted me to be an individual, free of social stereotypes, free of predefinitions, to make my own judgments and also to abide by them. He was a fan of Dev Anand, and he perhaps wanted me to be an individual like him, smart, suave, self reliant and of course very intelligent. Interestingly, Dev Anand and I are born only two days apart.

My mother’s influence has been the greatest in my life. She has nurtured my soul more than my body. She dropped out of college when she was married and never was she the one to be interested in her studies. She said that she was never taught through systemmatic instructions and what she meant by it was perhaps was that her stuff was not neatly placed in a tabular form, columns and rows, boxes and diagrams. She always systematizes things, classifies and tabulates them and that’s how she taught me. I learnt my alphabets in two days flat when I was barely two and a half years old. I seem to have inherited her kind of mental abilities, and was she to continue her academics; I would have been nowhere near her in merit.

My mother often talked of a strange desire; she imagined herself relaxing in a dark room with instrumental music playing in the backdrop and light and lacy curtains slightly swaying in the breeze. In all her life of 70 years, she never has been able to fulfil this dream. She imagined a life for me in which I could afford to live out this fantasy. Of the greatest reasons why I am neither married nor in a relationship is that I did not want to share in lonely darkness in my life in which the lazy music played in the background to the soft breeze around me.

My parents grand opinion of me even while I was barely a child made the rest of our ilk regard me as a crown princess, someone who was only after Queen Victoria in reckoning. My uncles and aunts always made me their first priority; I have aunts who stayed up all nights nursing my asthma attack, miss examinations and drop grades, I have uncles who stood all night in queues to catch the doctor early in the morning for my medicines and if I ever felt unhappy or bored all I had to do was to call on any of the adults around me and they would appear highly obliged to do whatever errands I asked for. All this doting could have made me swollen headed had it not been for my mother who taught me my greatest value, never to take anyone or anything for granted. It is not merely relatives but thereafter my friends, my colleagues, and even casual strangers have thought of me and treated me no less than an Emperor. I wonder what I have really done to deserve all this. These I feel are my rare privileges that sheer Providence have given me. A real luck by chance..

My mother prepared me to repay and compensate for each little deal I got from the world and alerted me always to my privileges in life which I actually did nothing to earn. Whatever you want to have, she would say, you must see whether you can afford it through your own means. She would tell me how I must be prepared to work for everything that I used, sunshine, water, air, people’s affections and the tiffins and school fees that my father earned for me. This is how she taught me frugality which could have been totally belied by all the easy goodies that was constantly flowing to me. I started learning the price of everything along with its value.

As I am heading towards my 50th birthday I realize that the span of life I have before me will be shorter than the one I have lived through. I suddenly get a sense of belying hopes of people on me. I realize that while I have enjoyed every possible bounty of life I have not commensurately paid the world back of what it deserves of me. I was paid perhaps an advance in the form of my endowments and now I must quickly deliver back. I have enjoyed life far too much and now the few days that I have left, I must count my life in moments so that I can hurriedly fulfil expectations that every person dead, alive and yet unborn have on me because they have not had, do not have and will not have the privileges that I was born with in the form of family and friends who have always been so indulgent and affectionate towards me and thought me as being the grandest presence in their lives.

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Nirmohi Akhra – Ramlala Virajaman

Posted on May 18, 2012 by secondsaturn

Archaeologists are divided over the issue of whether a Ram Temple at all existed under the dome of the Babri Masjid and the Muslim theologicians are divided over whether the Babri is a legitimate mosque at all because in Islam if a mosque is built over a heathen’s structure of worship then it is not fit for prayers. Historians from JNU are almost universally concerned that whatever the archaeology is, the mosque should remain intact as a historical monument. The secularists are upset that the fictitious Ram Lalla be accepted as a party to a dispute and every structure of the Muslims could be pulled down on the flimsiest belief that the land archaeologically belonged to the Hindus. Such a judgment would then be a precedent in pulling down every mosque in the land and may even cast aspersions on the continued existence of the Taj Mahal and Red Fort !! I, too share similar concerns.

But historians of such caliber have failed to note the greatest anomaly of the case and which is the confounding of the Nirmohi Aakhra as Hindu. The aakhraa is a gymnasium, a place where people are supposed to do their exercises, train in weights and various kinds of martial arts and athletics. Aakhraas were somewhat like the youth clubs and became as central to various mystic cults like Sufis, Bauls, Vaishnavs and Rampanthis and even certain sects of the Sikhs. The aakhra was the same to these cults as the temple was to the Hindus and the mosque for the Muslims. Important saints like Ramdas, Namdeo, Eknath, Tukaram and others had veritable aakhras. These sects were usually opposed to organized and/or textual religions like Hinduism and Islam and claimed themselves to be non-Hindus. They were influenced by Vaishnavism, the Bhakti and even some surviving remnants of Buddhism and Jainism. These sects also had influences of the yogis, a cult based around the yoga method of exercises, which developed around the 12th century AD. The confounding of physical exercises with spiritual achievements is not new to India because such have been the ways of the Ninja in Japan. In fact, martial arts have invariably been tied to monasteries that were outside the fold of ecclesiastical religions. Nirmohi Aakhra as the name suggests was one of the numerous instances of a “non-Hindu” sect.

An important ingredient of defiance against the organized religion was the worship of balkishan and ramlalla, infants or child gods. This is because the child has no sense of social discrimination, and because of its defecation and urination breaks the purity barriers constantly, the image of the God as a child is therefore a profane one. In due course of time, the Krishna worshippers could climb into the Hindu fold because Krishna has a Puranic backing. Unfortunately Ram who was only a fiction hero without a Puranic text to validate him, remained a God worshipped by these marginal sects, eventually the untouchables. Nirmohi Aakhra is one such sect of marginals who exist autonomously and with equal mixing of Hinduism and Islam. The Ramlalla Virajaman as God literally means a star, a fictitious character that evolves, grows, matures, ages and even dies rather than the absolute and fixed God like a Hindu deity or a Semitic God. Therefore, the Hindu appropriation of Ram is the greatest anomaly in the case and the cause for the dispute.

The historians should have ideally argued over the Hindu claim over Ram rather than proceed to sieve archaeological evidence of whether there was or not a temple beneath the mosque. One has no idea of how the Hindus could suddenly lay a claim on Ram worship, which typically has never been a God in the Hindu pantheon. There are numerous deities across the country, tasla devi, bhadu, phullara, ashaan bibi and many others who are worshipped by the local persons irrespective of their religion. These deities pertain to sects that do not belong to the mainstream religions. The worship of Ram Lalla at the premises of the Babri Masjid, where the Muslims also prayed together with the Rambhakts have been a vindication of practices in India that are neither wholly Hindu nor fully Islamic. The anomaly in this case was that a local worship became appropriated and hijacked by interests of the metropolis and this the historians of eminence should have noticed and investigated rather than fall into the trap of having to categorize something in terms of mainstream religions.

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Facebook – For Sarvani

Posted on May 18, 2012 by secondsaturn

This note is for my friends Sarvani Gooptu and Morihiro Ogasahara, both of whom I met through Rakesh Batabyal, also on my friend’s list in the facebook. Rakesh is a maverick adacemicians who believes that good minds must mingle as friends for good scholarship to emerge and Mahalakshmi, his wife and he try to get as many of us to meet up andbecome friends. Sarvani and Ogasahara are such friends. They and I share an important common interest – the facebook. Sarvani and I are fairly regulars on the site while Ogasan and I share a sociological interest in the pattern of its use, the sociological profile of its users and the uses that they intend to put the facebook into. Now that Sarvani made such a statement as her status that people think that she is into facebook because she has nothing else to do made me want to write this note.

I am into facebook. The days I have nothing to do, I do not open the facebook; the reason is that I don’t get to open my computer because I am not doing anything. I use the Internet for everything; my quick reference, my news, my music site, my dictionary and now with facebook, also a way to always track those who are always on my mind. Madhusree gets put off by so many people always hanging around, I am assured to know that all my loved ones, friends, friends of friends, nieces away in the south, nephews locked in deep mining areas, cousins working their heads and hearts off, their children with fever and stomache are all fine and all very well. Long lost housewife friend calls me, she is bored; but I am too busy to take her call and I know when bored friends call me such calls can last over three fourth of an hour. Come to the facebook, I tell them because a comment on the face book which takes only a few seconds has the impact of an hour long deep chat. Uncle complaints that I do not visit him; who says, I defend myself to him, don’t I chat with your daughter in the USA everyday. Uncle is assured and is even pleased. Facebook helps me socialize more intensely at a remarkably short span of time.

I have the facebook on all the time while I am working. Whenever I am bored I visit it, responding to comments, reading poetry, listening to music and use that visitation to catch my breath for a renewed engagement with my work. As I am writing this short note, I have already visited the FB once and this has helped me regain my concentration without going for that cup of tea that would have taken at least five minutes to prepare. Harder I work, more into the facebook I am, because harder work means the Internet, which means the facebook.

But there is another thing to it; the facebook makes me very comfortable as I feel that I am with my familiar world all the time, the corridors of school, the portico of college, the walks in the University, the alleys of old localities where cousins lived and in that home that grandfather had but sold to tide over an eventual penury. Nothing seems to be lost, all is regained in this site; this helps memories, as much as identities, as much as one’s sense of self. These contribute intensely towards our performance by creating psychological security. At least, I draw a lot from my surroundings, the facebook is one by which my environment becomes teeming with voices, merriment and dialogue, helping me to find enough peace to concentrate better and deeper and deliver assignments before deadlines.

Hail Sarvani !!

I hope this will be helpful to Ogasahara.

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Female Genocide

Posted on May 18, 2012 by secondsaturn

Samar Harlankar writes in the edit page of Hindustan Times, 27th January 2011 that girls are getting killed off in India as the country progresses economically and materially. Natural theory has it that the female in every species has higher chances of survival than the male because nature intends to protect the female reproductive capacity to hold the foetus and finally to give birth. Therefore, the sliding number of females per thousand male in India at a steady pace means that someone somewhere is interfering with the natural process. Females can only not be born at all if they are aborted as foetuses or they are killed off physically. The Census data shows that in the age group 0 to 6 years, girls have declined from 1010 per thousand boys in 1941, to 945 in 1991, then to 927 in 2001 and now in the 2011 census they are below 900. This amounts to 1370 girls killed off each year as compared to 250 deaths due to road accidents and 6 in case of terrorist attacks. What is worse is that more educated the household is, more economically prosperous and more urbanised it is, chances are higher that they will kill its girls. Attitude towards girls and economic prosperity are related, the question to ask is, what way is the relationship. Do attitudes towards the girl child become intolerant with economic progress or whether the nature of economic opportunities is such that it requires women to be killed off?

I am not sure whether the rich kill their women. In pre modern times when work was more of physical labour and riches meant that one could live off un laboured surplus, it must have been fashionable to draw women out of economic participation. In those days before modernity, labour often was not free and one way to assert the worker’s unfreedom was also the exploitation of female bodies by classes who paid the working class. Further, in the pre modern days, knowledge was not an essential category for work and hence work did not have the professional calling that people were expected to have with Weberian modernity. In those days, women who did not need to go out of homes were looked upon as being privileged.

With modernity this changed. Modernity came riding on the back of capitalism, a regime in which the entrepreneur was valued, the non working woman was valued as well. But because the political regime fought privileges of feudalism in the name of individual freedom and civil rights, it was forced to also recognize women as human beings. Of course, intense feminist struggles helped achieve this goal. But there was one thing in European development and which is with the rise in prosperity, the need for economic reproduction declined and which then saw rich men being contended with their only daughters as heirs to their estates. All through this period when weak and frail women were married to couches in rich men’s homes as decoration pieces while the husbands developed flings for the more physically robust red cheeked girls. The romantic love was brought in a major way to be projected as the best thing that can happen to a woman and because she was to marry after falling in love, she was also given access to the public space such as “gatherings” and “parties” where men could see her with their fixed gazes a la Darcy. Apropos to this game plan, women were also taught skills that would make them pleasing to men and also at the same time steadily move them away from the public sphere of economic participation. No wonder then Florence Nightingale was such a scandal, Mother Theresa such a rebellion, Sister Nivedita so much of an impudence and character of Jane Eyre so pitiable.

In India, modernity came to a privileged class of the rich and English educated. Women in this class were more liberated thanks to the social reforms and Freedom Movement. Women of the privileged class were relatively freer from the pressures of the society and their riches immunized them from patriarchy in a large way. The poor women of course continued as usual with their physical labour and drudgery. The high class as everywhere else is one that sets the rules, the low class is one which is excluded out of the rules and there is a huge middle ground where rules are blindly repeated and followed. The middle class that holds this large middle ground is a dangerous element in human history.

Because the middle class requires only reproducing the order, it necessarily needs to stereotype rules and roles. It becomes a non reflective mass given to the herd instinct of competitiveness. When its population increases and people who were hitherto poor rise into this class, this class suffers from over population because opportunities available are fewer than the number of aspirants. There is always a tension in the middle class; it has an anxiety of falling back into poverty and a compulsion to do well so as to secure its economic position. The lethal combination of anxiety and compulsive upward mobility makes it seek spaces and resources. In politics, this translates into communalism and ethnic assertions and within the family it translates into fewer resources for girls. In middle class homes, girls have to struggle to survive. They have to survive on less food, less investments on education, and at the same time must be presentable in the marriage market to marry well. Hence they must have lean bodies, wear enticing clothes, use fairness creams and do “computer” courses where they have a chance to meet boys. A love marriage is actually okay because it saves on the dowry. In most of north India, girls work outside the home, not as liberation but to earn their dowry. All is well except girls must have anuloma marriages, i.e. marry up the social ladder. More girls struggle for resources, less they are equipped to have incomes that would help them find their own feet, and more women depend on male approval and the hooking the man route to material comforts. A girl finds that the only way for her to survive is by pleasing the men folk. The media picks up this need of the young females and weaves its narratives and constructs its images. No wonder modern young women shun feminism and even seasoned feminists are so apologetic these days (one had to only witness the Women’s Reservation Bill debate).

The more girls are starved of resources the more they are subject to the structures of patriarchy and less they can emerge as persons in their own right. Girls are in no mood to fight patriarchy and too eager to get into the reproductive positions and kill off girls born and yet to be born unto them repeating the same middle class processes that upholds the order. The trigger for this girl killing machine namely the middle class, lies in a growth where the only opportunities for a dignified life lie in occupations designated as middle class and where every other kind of livelihood for a decent living are wiped off through a predatory capitalism that takes away farm lands and destroys local industry. The more opportunities get restricted and the variety of opportunities decline, more is there a competition for resources; in politics this leads to ethnic hate and in the family, it gets adverse on girls.

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