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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I Don’t Need Anna Hazare

Posted on May 18, 2012 by secondsaturn

I Don’t Need Anna Hazare.

by Susmita Dasgupta on Tuesday, April 12, 2011 at 10:51am ·

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I don’t need Anna Hazare. I never needed him. I never felt the need to blackmail anyone even if it is the Government. I can command the Government to do what I want it to do. The demands that I make on the State are justified and legitimized by the Constitution and I know my texts. I have an idea of the offices, the respective duties of officials and know where to find them. I am educated and articulate and not lazy in writing. I was only twenty three when I knew my first victory against corruption. Since then I have got policemen suspended, workmen transferred, officers investigated as and when I have felt offended by them.

I was only twenty two when I was helping an elderly relative in Delhi for some work in the post office and the man behind the counter was pugnacious. I wrote a complaint to the post master against this chap with a copy to the Post Master General and Minister of P&T. After three weeks a letter came to me, and after a month, yet another and after three months a third; while the earlier two were from the local post office and Sarojini Nagar respectively, the third was from the Ministry and all confirmed that the offending employee had been transferred with a warning. My subsequent visit to the post office was only greeted by salaams.

My next “victory” was a rude conductor in the DTC Bus no 507; then a bank clerk in JNU’s State Bank of India, followed by yet another post office personnel in the IIT Post Office Speed Post counter. I have had refunds from MTNL and BSNL and from the DESU, the electric supply corporation of Delhi before it was privatized as the BSES. Once I was travelling to Kolkata by the Rajdhani and encountered an eve teaser on one of the berths. I had him detrained at midnight in Mughal Sarai. I had a parking attended picked up by a police patrol 100.

But my most sterling victory was against the Delhi police only three years ago when some of them came into Haryana in the wee hours of a chilly winter morning and picked up my cook, Malati on the charges that she was a Bangladeshi !! My cook who hails from Canning is nowhere even remotely connected to East Bengal, ranted, raged, stomped and stamped at the impunity of being sharved into the police jeep. Though the Delhi police have no clue on how to identify Bangladeshi’s from their accent, yet felt intuitively that Malati spoke, dressed and behaved rather differently from what a typical illegal migrant did. They let her go almost immediately and she returned fuming at the insult that was meted out to her, a free citizen of the country. In the evening she poured out her woes and I did a literal translation of her agonies in English and sent them, with a covering note to the Home Minister. The next morning, Madhusree and Vinod made 345 photocopies of the letter and sent them to each and every member of the Parliament. In the letter Malati asked whether the rounding up of Bangladeshi migrants was not a surreptitious way of ethnically cleansing of Delhi of Bengalis. This astounded Mr Chidambaram and the few days that followed saw the press and Deputy Commissioner of Delhi and Inspector General of Haryana swoop down to Malati to seek her forgiveness. I was personally made to witness the order by which seven policemen that included a woman were suspended. The suspended policemen called me up several times for forgiveness but I advised them to go through the punishment for a better after life.

In the same combing of Bangladeshis, a Bengali Muslim man was also picked up. He was an auto driver who had come to India as an infant from East Pakistan as a refugee. He had since then lost his parents and lived with relatives who had opted to stay back in India after 1947. This man had married a woman, who like him also was a refugee in a Delhi slum; the only problem was that her parents went back to Bangladesh sometime in the 1990’s, after the Babri Masjid riots. The Indian State decided that she was a Bangladeshi and deported her, leaving her husband behind. The couple had two infant children and the police decided that one of the children was an Indian citizen and hence was to remain behind with the father. The man, Khalil came howling to me with his bawling baby son. I took them along, went to the confinement area of the FRRO, requested the Deputy Police Commissioner to at least take in the son, who should not be separated from the mother so that the mother could have both her children together. This having been done, I again made rounds of the FRRO to help Khalil hand them over warm clothes, because it being winter they would be suffering. Then the problem came of deportation because women thus deported can also be trafficked. It was out of this fear that I met the civil society organizations. It was here that I encountered the civil society.

I first spoke to Prof Zoya Hassan of the Minorities Commission trying to explain that the deported woman, Salma was not a Bangladeshi because her parents migrated to Bangladesh much later. She was very dismissive of me, almost said that it did not really matter to her if some Bengali poor Muslim was picked up. She taunted me with my pronunciation of “kh” of Khalil, because mine was not from the epiglottis, so I knew the politics of the epiglottis as soon as I watched the film My Name Is Khan. Next I went to Shabnam Hashmi, who again refused to extend any assistance whatsoever. Then I visited Apne Aap, a NGO that was won international accolades; alas, no help. I appealed to everyone so that Salma had someone to receive her in Bangladesh when she would land up there so that she would be safe in an alien land. The civil society was high flying, it was supposed to step in when the State behaved badly with its citizens; but I saw them in their true colours. Anyway, I went to the Seelampur mosque, got the clerics to make some contacts in Bangladesh, persisted till they made some phonecalls to Salma’s father who came as far as India’s border to pick her up with her children. Khalil eventually got his passport and a job in Kuwait. He will be visiting Bangladesh and carry his family away beyond the Arabian Sea into the shores of safety. All through this ordeal, Shabnam Hashmi, Zoya Hassan, Ruchira Gupta remained silent, indifferent and aloof.

Some years ago, I carried a child into the CRY office and asked them to take his custody. CRY refused saying that I could not directly recommend a child and had to sponsor via a cheque. I have since then stopped my donations because I have charity to do all by myself.

Recently I requested Vandana Shiva to provide me with details on POSCO and we will take it up in the Ministry of Steel, where I work as an economist. I gave her a CD into which her office was to copy a documentary film showing the outrage that the State has committed. I explained to Ms Shiva how the Ministry must take action whenever graft gets reported in a file to them and becomes a file noting. She refused to use this space to negotiate a better deal for the people; instead she maintained the people’s victim status because she insisted on maintaining her own power as their champion. I repeatedly try to convince Navadanya to place Posco’s issue with the Ministry and to enter it as a discussed matter in the Steel Room; after which no affair may be disposed off without a concrete action, Ms Shiva steadfastly chose never to try out this path of a possible solution because were the Ministry of Steel to take a positive view of displacement, Ms Shiva’s “power” as an activist would have been compromised.

I have a very poor opinion of the civil society; I have realized that they intend no solution to problems; all that they need is the problem so that they can emerge as champions. The civil society has slowly conspired to keep status quos and perhaps never made an honest attempt at empowerment of any kind. This is why, the so-called moral leaders of our country were so rude to me when I was trying to find some solution for a helpless woman with her infant children!! I find it impossible to deal with a set of supercilious self righteous humans who have only a deep contempt for the people whose causes they supposedly champion. They use people’s distress not to help them out but to “shame the State”. Beneath the mask of philanthropy, the civil society is a will and a desire for power. This is why, I wish to have nothing to do with them. The State, I can handle; I know my rights and I know the limits to my rights. The civil society is a devious space in which the elite of the society wish to wield power against the State and against the political class. Sometimes, this may turn into an anti-people zone where the elites position themselves as intermediaries through whom the people must themselves be represented. When this happens, the civil society becomes worse than a despotic State, for the latter is constrained by elections, whereas the civil society is free of this encumbrance. I find the State to be far more responsive to me than the civil society.

Anna Hazare’s movement is strange because there was hardly any build up to the fast. It seemed to emerge suddenly out of nowhere with big image supporters like Kiran Bedi, Kiran Majumdar Shaw, Kabir Bedi, Ramdev, Ravi Shankar and with these names came an avalanche of support. Getting such celebrities could not have been out of nowhere; it is possible that elaborate whispers had already got the groundswell going before surfacing as the hunger strike.

The huge support in favour of the Lokpal Bill shows that beneath the seemingly indifferent middle class of India, there is a spark waiting to be ignited; India’s win in the World Cup Cricket also put the middle class into such a participation mode. The middle class finds a far greater affinity with Anna than it finds with Binayak Sen, or a displacement over Vedanta or even the firing at Nandigram or Kalinganagar. Anna fights big capital and political power, both of which the middle class aspires to enter but gets classed out. The middle class loves the rich and the powerful and often its moral tirade against big capital and big power is a concealed envy of them. Apropos to this psychology is also its hatred for those who are behind them, the poor, the Muslims, the tribals fall under this category. Hence Hazare hails Narender Modi, a man who exemplifies this sentiment of the middle class. The huge support of the middle class for Anna is the class’s desire for power; will to rule, albeit not through the process of democratic politics but by denouncing it via the authoritarian assertion of morality.

I do not need such a middle class, hence I do not need a Anna Hazare. I am far more concerned about the everyday corruption that disrupts my everyday life, distracts me from pursuing my excellence and sabotages my access to opportunities presented in the public space. For me, the RTI, the sexual harassment bill, the woman police, the operation of the PDS, the containment of the corrupt police who disturb my service providers, the officers who do not perform their duties, the tea drinking man at the post office counter who does not attend to customers, the bank manager who staves off poor people from opening savings bank accounts are worse offenders; it is on their immorality and dishonesty that the huge edifice of corruption is built upon. No Mayawati could be she if her staff were dead honest. No Raja could be he were his electorate was immune to bribes. The Lokpal Bill tries to catch the more visible faces while wholly ignoring the sources where corruption begins, namely the people taking as well as paying bribes. We need vigilance below the surface of media beams, governance down under, perhaps vigilantism in a manner.

I understand that corruption can be without the exchange of money. The surreptitious elimination of names from the voters’ list of certain people, landlords who refuse to rent out apartments to some other kind of persons, the subtle discrimination that happens when the social affiliations of a candidate overrides her merit in selection for jobs, the biases and prejudices of the judiciary against some kinds of persons are also corruption, because these, like money also distort signals of a “free market”. To address these I will file an RTI, or PIL and for these I know what is there to be done; I don’t really need Anna Hazare.

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Oath of Bhanurekha, d/o Pushpavalli

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

Bhanurekha, alias Rekha, born on the 10th of October, 1954, the daughter of the Telugu actress Pushpavalli took her oath as a Parliament elder on the 15th of May 2012. Nominated to the House of elders on grounds of excellence in her achievement in the field of arts and culture, Bhanurekha who the world knows as Rekha attains a landmark in her life. Rekha’s biological father, Gemini Ganesan, never acknowledged his paternity and Rekha was left along with her mother, Pushpavalli also a film actress to fend for themselves. Money was a matter with the household and soon Rekha was withdrawn from school to join cinema to earn for the family. Despite being born of a Tamil Brahmin, Rekha and her mother were relegated to lives of Devdasis. Sobha De’s soulful portrayal of her character in her novel, Starry Nights draws out painfully how Rekha as a child artist was sexually abused and exploited. With a truncated education and lost childhood, Rekha emerged as a star in films such as Sawan Bhado and Rampur ka Laxman when the world of Hindi cinema was exploring the feudal, rural, tacky and violent zone of the male characters. Rekha was a part vamp, part siren and definitely not the image of a woman to be followed either for fashion or for virtue. For years she remained space filler, a prop whose sexual image was also up for a voyeuristic exploitation by a growing number of the male audience as cinema tried to spread to the vernacular lands. Rekha was pushed forward by the lobby the south Indian investors and distributors.

Despite a poor career graph all through the 1970’s, Rekha’s debut which was in Hindi and was called Sawan Bhado in 1970 formed the basic script upon which Rekha’s image was founded. It was the image of a powerful village belle, tomboyish, a fighter, fearless and good enough to run the show. Personally then Rekha had already emerged as the pater familias with her being the main breadwinner for her mother and siblings. Hers was the real life image of Meghe Dhaka Taara, the seminal cinema of Ghatak, said to be a mother of all cinemas. In many of her better known films, Rekha’s image of the fighter impresses us. In Mr Natwarlal she fights a tiger; in Khoon Bhari Maang she takes revenge on the villains, and in Bhrastachaar, she simply excels.

Rekha was a middle range star who took her career as a breadwinning proposition and remained essentially a street fighter. For the likes of Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Rekha was essentially a slum girl who was to be Rajesh Khanna’s love interest in Namak Haram. Despite her patrilineage of being the daughter of an eminent film personality and a Tamil Brahmin, Rekha’s state of being an illegitimate child declassed her into the gutter. Hers was a life that was a journey into an endless night of neglect, drudgery, boredom and hopelessness. Then she met Amitabh Bachchan, a man who transformed her because he saw in her a princess, a lady second to none. It was through his mentoring that she emerged into the epitome of beauty and sophistication that we see her endowed in. She fell in love with her Pygmalion but who like her biological father again disowned her and denied as having anything to do with her. She soon became the lady who pined for her lover, the eternal Meera swooning at the thought of her beloved who seemed to be vanishing without recovery every passing day. She claimed that her love was not one-sided; he claimed that there was never any. But like Ekalavya, Rekha grew from strength to strength in beauty and grace, completely as an autodidact.

Amitabh Bachchan is a man of ambitions and like every man with ambition he suffers from a sense of deprivation. He imagined his family to be poor, loved to play the father, loved the idea of him being the source of wealth and fame for his family and uphold the dynastic mantle. These were Amitabh’s fantasies; while Rekha truly was all of this. She was the man of her home, the father to her siblings, head of the household who made decisions and provided for everything. Amitabh had been a student of chemistry, Rekha’s father, Gemini was a teacher of chemistry in the Madras Christian College. Did the story of Jurmana emerge from this?

Amitabh struggled to get a foothold in the industy; Rekha struggled for dignity. However, I think that Amitabh had truly admired Rekha for having shouldered the responsibilities of a family and to this extent had fallen for her. Amitabh’s Deewaar ended a whole life for Amitabh that was before him and started a new one with a new sense of purpose; according to Rekha’s own admission, Deewaar was also her discovery of the “Book”. I think that they discovered a higher purpose of life together after Deewaar; Amitabh was the image that Rekha dreamed of, secure in family, living with parents and emotionally well chaperoned and guarded by them. In Rekha, Amitabh too may have seen a self of his which perhaps lived in the corners of his mind where he was helpless, discarded and ignored which he indeed was in the days of his struggle. In many of Amitabh’s later films especially Lawaaris and Sharaabi, scenes from Rekha’s film especially Sawan Bhado have been replayed with Amitabh in the narrative. This was a time when the Rekha and Amitabh affair was supposed to have got over! There are more instances like this in which one gets an idea that Amitabh has continued to explore and seek Rekha long after they were no longer acting together. Unfortunately Rekha’s imitating Amitabh was more apparent despite the fact that Rekha was the original fighter who could crush tigers and shoo away dacoits.

Amitabh has been Rekha’s fatal flaw; it was to be desirable to him that she compromised on her spirit. She became glamorous and sophisticated, graceful and restrained in a manner of offering herself to “Him”. She relegated herself to his shadow, trying to find a shelter in his chaperone, a shade that Amitabh, like her father, Gemini refused to extend to her. Rekha was not wrong in hoping for Amitabh; in her mind, second marriages and concubines were not wrong for she came from a society of bigamies and out of wedlock relationships. She also saw Hema and Dharmendra get married without the man divorcing the first wife; indeed bigamies were all around her in the film world and only Amitabh made such a big case with monogamy. If I know Amitabh well, he would never have brought Rekha home; she was not the social kind from whose wombs he would have liked to have his seeds flow. Extremely conscious of social status, Amitabh could never have taken a woman born out of wedlock and denied by father as his wife. His respectability would have revolted.

Days on she waited for him making her almost into a joke. She was the eternally jilted woman, the Umraao Jaan reincarnate, a role for which she was justly awarded and a role which was her autobiography. A woman who could stall a thousand ships on the high seas incarcerated herself indoors almost into invisibility assuming the role of a woman in love abandoned by her lover. She was lucky to have admirers like Ramesh Sippy and Rakesh Roshan who cast her in apt roles. Hrishikesh Mukherjee gave her a role of a lifetime in Khubsoorat, a character she truly could be had Amitabh Bachchan not cast his shadow over her.

Amitabh sequestrated Rekha, keeping her guessing, waiting, weeping and sighing over him. When quizzed by Simi Garewal he denied having anything to do with her except the routine interactions demanded as a co star. Shobha De, who was fond of Rekha and supported her case by incessantly spilling out the stories of their affair in Stardust suddenly called her a liar and said that she was making things up about Amitabh Bachchan. Shobha De, now respectably married to an already much married Dilip De has suddenly become a harbinger of monogamy and a thorough patriarch who supports Amitabh in shooing Rekha away from his side. The episode of Amitabh darkened Rekha’s dignity which came her way after a long struggle away from her position of an underdog in the industry.

As Rekha stands today in the Rajya Sabha to take her oath, I feel somewhere that she has won the war, especially on Amitabh Bachchan. Amitabh’s arrogance of social respectability because he had people close to the government now stands challenged. Rekha is on the same grounds as the Bachchans; she has been awarded by the very instruments with which Amitabh has looked down upon her. As she is accompanied by Farzana Sheikh, Rekha becomes the synosure of all eyes; no nomination has been so lauded as Rekha’s has been. She faces a grouchy and grumpy Jaya, the wife of the very man who she loved, and the man who seemed to have completely ignored her, just as her father did. The wife’s misdemeanour clearly hints that while Amitabh may have always denied their love story, the wife’s intuition has seen through the lies.

I think that Rekha’s nomination has conferred upon her respectability which she deserved many times over but was belied by a brutish, selfish and a cruel father who opened her to abuse and exploitation knowingly and willingly. She has suffered endless indignity at the hands of Amitabh only because she was devotedly in love with him. I think that today the balance has been struck right; what would a father not do to have a daughter in the Parliament, and what a leading male filmstar would not do to see his most popularly paired co star in a position which his family and he had always covered and cherished. The two men are braced today by the very woman who they decimated with their patriarchal arrogance and false consciousness of social respectability.

 

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Formula Won

Posted on May 16, 2012 by secondsaturn

We are just recovering from the headiest yet audio visual event ever on Indian soil, the Forumula One Car Racing. It is said that the spectators in Europe and America and later in Singapore had tired themselves of this tournament and the sponsors had lost habitat. India, just at this time suited them with its rapid liberalization, mammoth real estate projects, ruthless land acquisitions and mindless speculative investments into what one today knows as megacities. In India, the virus of global finance finds a willing host and settles down to produce numerous maggots in the shape of car racing fans. Formula One Car Racing in many ways is central to India’s neoliberal society, economy and polity.

The image of a racing car is so close to the performing, winning, surging, rushing and gushing individual who is literally racing, pacing, huffing and puffing her way through the maze of competing claims on her. She is stressed out by many “obstacles” of many demands made on her time through multiple tasks. She has to earn, drop children to school, face the perennial threat of retrenchment and pink slips, risk danger of pursuing career at the cost of certainty of employment, leer at the latest fashion trends at the shopping malls and then be able to afford a coffee and an ice cream at the side at costs that must cover enormously high rentals of the malls. So she races all the time, she gives into such races, only when race thrills her she will be able to live with her life; if she resents the pace that life demands of her she is left behind without that branded purse, without the latest cut in fashions, without her avant garde make up, without the dazzle of diamonds. And without social respectability. So the races, the shine of the metallic patina, the roar of the engines, the ground biting speed, all rev up imageries that suit the overriding rhythm of life as it unfolds in today’s India.

The only way to be honourable in life is to win in a race. Femina Miss India, Crorepati, Indian Idol, Bigg Boss, X Factor, Just Dance is all about racing to be the one and only at the top. At work, the workforce is always getting downsized, race to survive; one races up against spiralling prices, galloping bills and bloating EMIs; one races to buy property and gold and invest to hedge against the erosion of the value of savings in the free run of inflation. Education costs a lot, employment and pay packets are tenuous, so race to make up margins. You have to rush to buy that block of gold, you have to hurry to avail of the last opportunity to buy homes cheap. Opportunities are few; windows narrow, everything opens only for a Divine Moment, race up to grab these or else you will miss them forever. The life is one of only racing ahead.

Race therefore is the central motif of our lives. It means speed, it means beating a competitor, and it also means tricking time by moving ahead in step. The television images that sense and replay such central motifs of our lives could only move towards creating a mega event out of the world’s largest motor car racing. National Geographic Channel also beams out the Himalayan Rally, but those are images more of danger, of terrains, of geography, the glades, slopes, snows and storms that surround and constrain speed. The car race is the thrill of pure, abstracted thrill.

There was a film named Race directed by Abbas Mastaan released a few years ago. It was a murder mystery, with dollops of suspense and conspiracy thrown in. Films like Dhoom 1 and 2 have tended to prize out an abstracted sense of speed from its embeddedness in the narrative. But cinema and television are not the same. Raymond Williams is very categorical about television being a continual flow of images, defining life as it appears, or helping define life as it should appear. Unlike a film, it does not break expectations and patterns to seep in the new. The television, says Williams must appear to be a continued flow even in its commercial breaks. This is why, it is the television that helps establish continuity with social pace and the opportunity for the Indian television to beam in car racing is so well timed.

The Formula One Race brings into India a kind of a national pride, we have done it, and we have arrived on the global scenario, a kind of a pride that comes from belonging to an organization, a herd instinct that beckons the meek and the passive. The Mallyas, the Jaypees, and the many sponsors of the event are lauded as heroes doing India proud. No one questions that it is an event for the rich to spin more money, hosting global capital to become richer among the rich. No one ever asks what happens to equity when such money is spun around in such high echelons, whether the nation that gets agitated about Swiss Banks should also not question the source of such humungous outlay of finance on such monstrous opulence. It is alright as far as the Indians go because the racing tracks, the high barriers, the controlled traffic, all add value to the venue as a mega city, the engine of growth for the future. Yes, hosting of the car racing is a way to develop the city value of the space, the ultimate aim of global finance. This is why, money from grain trading, mineral trading, and other businesses are gravitating at top speed into real estate, the ultimate industry that uses the ultimate scarce resource, land.

India sold its liberalization pogrom on naïve and trusting persons like us on the promise of developing markets and industries. One imagined that opening up economies and globalizing markets would mean even greater competitiveness for the Indian industry which will also help the small and medium enterprises grow. But people like us missed out the “catch” that soon industries would rush for raw materials which at the end of the chain constitute the finite and exhaustible natural resources. Neoliberal politics, the State and corporate nexus, the pursuit of super profits by firms, the striving of companies towards becoming monopolies are all with the aim of grabbing more and more of the inexhaustible natural resources. Land, just plain land is at the top of the charts. The Formula One Car Race is a way of grabbing land via the hugely legitimate motifs of national pride and the race interlaced into one another. The Mallyas and the owners of the Jaypee Greens have made a killing, so have the global financial companies involved in circulating their funds through this event and while only a few have benefitted from this extravaganza, those of who as spectators have had to pay astronomical sums for theatre tickets believe that this few, richer of the richest have made us, as a nation very proud !!

What really slips from one are that the very process of and acquisition creates irreversible inequalities of income that pushes many of us down the ladder of purchasing power. An economy with rising wealth for a few sends the rest of us into the abyss of penury in terms of relative incomes and from there into the race again to forever catch up with things that slip out of our shopping carts. The race begins again.

Some kinds of people have contested this bonanza; the farmers who feel that they sold their lands rather cheaply to the real estate companies or the government are an unsatisfied lot. They defy the race wallahs by playing kabbadi near the tracks. There has been one Mr Yadav who wants to charge into the security zone in a Lamborghini; he seems to ask if he is any inferior to the people in the stands in view of this substantial wealth which he possesses via the Lamborghini. These are acts of defiance because the qualifying level to be a part of the races is not to be merely rich, but to be the elite among the elites, the cream in the creamy layer. For this one has to have style and elaan besides the might in the banks. The act of Liberalization does not spare the rich, it impoverishes many of them with its tendency in redistributing every kind of capital, financial, cultural, intellectual and even emotional towards fewer and fewer heads. The large pool of poverty that neoliberalism creates happens because it impoverishes the rich in its logic to create fewer and fewer of the ilk, and this is because the final source of opulence resides in the ownership of natural resources, limited in supply and restricted in availability.

My historian friend Rakesh Batabyal, also in FB points out the repeated motif of the Buddha as in the Buddha circuit, Buddha International and so on. I think that the oft dropped name of Buddha too has a hidden code. Buddha, in India is a code for Dalits and the venue of the races, Greater Noida is under a Dalit leadership. The Dalits much like the Muslim League in 1942 who sought prizes from the British by opposing the Quit India Movement, try to break the mainstream society of caste Hindus. Dalits today are eager to race ahead of the mainstream caste Hindus; nothing sabotages the mainstream economy and society than neoliberalism. Neoliberalism will kill the economic agents in India among who the Dalits are not in any way counted, and then the Dalits will rise on the ashes expressing their solidarity with the neoliberalists, offering to serve them as workers and reserve such positions for people of their kind. Reservation politics lie at the root of the Dalit support of neoliberalism.

Years ago Pune University organized a Seminar on Dalits and Economic Liberalization in which I presented my confusions over what would happen to reservation politics when the State under whose employment such affirmation has any meaning ceases to be an active agent of development? As the State withdraws from production what would happen to the Dalits because a government job is the basis of entering the mainstream society for the Dalit groups. Little did I realize that there was another route, to rise from the cinders of the fire that neoliberalism sets on domestic economies, a fire that would not touch the Dalits because they are not even included in it. Neoliberalism has a great scope for clearing off forests, lands, settlements and economic networks and when all those who oppressed the Dalit were wiped out by bigger oppressors, Dalits would rise. The Formula One races thus works with a definite plan of the political party in Uttar Pradesh.

Friends who have been to the races have come back with the sounds of the cars in their ears. It is an event that they would remember for many more months to come. It has not only been a great visual, but a great aural experience as well. It is now the new thing to be in; a new mark of social respectability, of class, of elegance and indeed of privilege and a stepping stone into making new social contacts and occasion for networking.

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