What Is Political Cinema

Posted on May 12, 2011 by secondsaturn

On Sunday the 26th April 2009, we discussed what is a political film? Is there something called a political film? If so, then what kind of film it is, does it have a specific kind of topic or does it have a technique? In my view all films are political because films by nature are political. Actually to be able to address what a political film is we need to really understand what we mean by the term political. Politics is anything and everything to do with power. Films are political because they seek to change the existing power relations in the society. Films inherit this attribute from the art. Art is always political because it seeks a change in the power relations.

It may be slightly confusing for you to comprehend what this change in power relations mean? Not all films show heroes beating up villains and not in every film do we have heroines arguing their heads off with their fathers. Then what is the power change? Actually, power works through various ways that are not always visible to the common sense. Michel Foucault alerted us to this possibility of power operating through invisible and almost imperceptible ways and one of the ways it does so is by our understanding of what is right and what is wrong. Our opinions make us assume some positions in the society and this is the society’s power over us. When we learn to look at things in a different manner, we untangle ourselves from the habits that had bound us in terms of our thoughts. This is how we challenge the powers that constructed us. Hence films, because they must challenge the powers that bind us by allowing us to look into things more carefully are inherently political.

Notwithstanding the above assertion we often have cinema that reinforce our traditional thoughts and beliefs. One way in which films do this is by creating stereotypes that reinforce community and gender identities and do not allow them to emerge out of their contemporary states. In this case too the film is political because it tries to re impose the existing power structure. Defined in this way, we have nothing to specify as political cinema since every film becomes political cinema. What should we do in order to recover something as political cinema?

I do not subscribe to the view that political cinema must be something which is a genre by itself. Many times, political cinema only articulates ideologies and refers to metaphors that are already in the political public sphere. In this way they only repeat that which is already in politics and thus attempts to challenge no notion or norm. Hence such films collapse as political cinema. Compared to such films that overtly talk about the political cinema, cinema that does not do so but challenges the existing beliefs in society through its narratives are more potent as politics.

This brings us to a possibility of discriminating between the political essence of films and political films. Could we then define political cinema as that cinema which tries to influence viewer into activities that are political? Now we have said that all that changes ones attitudes is political and so how can there be any specific desire of a film maker to make cinema political? Yet, intuitively we all know that there is something which is called a political cinema. I think that some films help us to look around us and realize that we can actually change ourselves. We feel liberated as a result of this and proceed to be better organized in the world. In some cases, we feel liberated but as a result of such liberation suddenly begin to see how the world is organized around us, how it constrains us and how we can raise ourselves to changing it. When we are thus empowered not merely in being able to change ourselves, our lives but the entire world that we live in, we encounter the political cinema. The political cinema thus should discuss constraints not only around us and which we can easily overcome by moving away from them, but those constraints in our external environment and those which determine us and impinge upon us from above like the law, state, institutions and other similar things. Political cinema must enable us to see what is presently beyond us but which we can manipulate and change by engaging ourselves.

Posted in Media Sociology | Leave a comment

Ravan Badh – E.K.I

Posted on May 5, 2011 by secondsaturn

I was not around in the times of the Ramayana when Ravana was killed. It was a great killing, I read. On the side of Kishkindhya, Ayodhya, Panchavati there were ecstatic celebrations, on the side of Lanka there was mourning and loss. It was a killing that was to hitherto divide humanity permanently into naras and rakshasas. But I am here to witness the killing of Osama bin Laden, a great killing, a grand killing that ever has been, an epic written all over again, and a feat that will be made into legends and ballads and tales those will be sung by modern day minstrels, written about by muses, ruminated and reinterpreted by philosophers. It will also permanently divide the world into two kinds of persons, the humans and the terrorists. For long, like our theories of Aryans whether they were a distinct race or merely a linguistic group will now move around the grand puzzle of civilizations, whether Muslims are terrorists.

Obama the killer is black and Muslim, both coordinates that have been ever so difficult to surmount in America; he has got past them but like our own Sita he has to pass through fire again and again. This time, he was to get Osama. He had to, more so because he is a Muslim, he must never been seen to shield his ilk. Such extrapolations are ridiculous, tomorrow one may say that I am a Hindutvawadi because I am born a Hindu. But for Muslims, it is so. Unlike a Hindu, Muslims have never emerged as a social force reforming their religion. We have reformed ours. When the Renascent bhadraloks cried that widows should remarry, the echoes were sounded across the length and breadth of the country, reaching sundry printing presses and touching the hearts of so many. Islam have never been revised and reworked. What is worse is that any attempt at humanizing that religion has divided the Muslim community, the progressive forces termed as the elite, and the masses clung on to fundamentalism. It is as though that clinging on to the practices of Islam conservatively helps gather social capital for the less privileged. One must study civilizations closely to understand why this is so. But things have become so effete that a Muslim in our midst must prove his social class and therefore his social worthiness for us by killing eagerly men who happen to also believe in the same religion.

Obama and Osama were never the same; but the killing brings them together in a strange and unexpected way. Obama had to prove that he was an American and not a Muslim by killing Osama; Obama proved that he was indeed a Muslim by being able to find Osama because we know that loha loha ko kaata hai. Obama sunk Osama into the sea, only a Muslim knows what such unsung burial does to his fellowmen who lives his life around the motif of a jihadi or a khadim. Obama by finding, killing and disposing Osama has proved his own closeness to Islam and its beliefs and also revealed his familiarity about the hideouts of Islamic terrorists. Obama has sought out his Vibhishan’s in Pakistan; in all probability gives out that sinking feeling to his fellow black Americans whether he has not used the same tricks to trade the privileges of his own community and gain in legitimacy in an America that has more or less always been aligned in favour of the whites. Osama’s terrorism shows the effeteness of Islam to deliver anything to the world anymore; Obama’s venture shows that for a Muslim and a black to prove himself must sacrifice his own brothers. Hai Hussain ! Hai Hassan !

I think that Osama’s killing should be mourned like Muharram. If we mourn his death, mourn the death that he caused to so many innocent ones who were nowhere in the game, mourn the death that he caused to the nobility of his Prophet and the grandeur of his Faith, only then we will release the way that Obama represents, the path of having to kill one’s own tribe in order to win favours from the ones in power. This will be then the beginning of a new era, like the Muharram, punishing oneself to evolve, suffering for both the victim and the offender, recognizing that they were together in a crime and that only suffering can unite and yet release them together.

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The Strike .. of Air India

Posted on May 1, 2011 by secondsaturn

Many moons ago, when our sweet little dupleix in Dover Lane was enlarged into a three storey house to make space for a tenant, our first tenant was an Indian Airline pilot. Similarly, many modern condominiums in our locality were being rented out to pilots and air hostesses. This was a mark of Dover Lane having arrived as a respectable colony in Ballygunje from its rather modest middle class veneer. The airlines are always looked upon as a creamy layer of the middle class; offering prospects and possibilities that are matched only by the IT, bureaucracy and the army. It has the class of being high salaried, elan of professional excellence and the allure of a closed group cadre. In other words, it has the best of all worlds notwithstanding the attraction of international travel with sops like free tickets for dependent members of the family. The pilots, who are the core of this sector, are on strike in India’s only public sector in the aviation sector, namely Air India.

The pilots strike strands women, children, the elderly, the sick, the infirm and the rest to an uncertain halt. Air travel has picked up in India after the opening up of our skies to competition and cheap tickets that run without meals on board has pushed prices of tickets down thus expanding the market into ever increasing consumer base. Despite the rise in competition, the national carrier has grown only in importance over the years, plying in zones where the private airlines do not find it economic to travel. The importance of the public sector is precisely this; the large capital base makes the public sector actually extend its operations into areas where the private sector cannot delve as the former constantly subsidizes its operations with previously held monopoly profits. Contrary to common sense constructions that competition is detrimental to the government, it actually helps the public sector consolidate its profits and sometimes even steer them away from the private sector players. The company data from the CMIE clearly shows that the companies in the government sector do consistently better than the ones in the private sector, though the erstwhile sick companies that the government had taken over do worse than both of the above. Were the public sector companies to be removed from operations, private players would have done enormously better in terms of market shares and turnovers.

The scam that is forever a possibility in the Indian scenario is thus the decimation of the public sector. The CMDs are easy targets for bribing so that they like Trojan Horses destroy companies from within. Were the CMD to defy the Minister in such destruction, he is ferreted out as being corrupt with charges of misappropriation of funds leveled against him. The story of Krishnamurthy of SAIL is a case in the point. The other very suspicious category is the BSNL; a company, which in the smaller towns just refuses to operate. My experience with the BSNL is ridiculous; they never send bills on time, they never attend to complaints and should anyone study their website for registering online grievances, she would find that the site simply does not operate. In all these cases, they purposely drive customers away so that they move to Airtel, a company that seems to be just waiting in the wings. The case of Air India is no different from the above.

The intention of the government is to destroy its own airlines that will sky rocket the profits of the private players. There have already been murmurs about Jet heavily bribing the national carrier to hand over operations. Praful Patel’s steps at merging a loss making international carrier with a profit making national company without merger of pay scales and perks was purposely geared towards generating this level of employee resentment. The arrogance of the Minister and that of the CMD in resolving the issues shows the intention of the government very well. This is yet another scam no less than that of the 2G spectrum. Privatization arrives with ever burgeoning wads of dollars in the Swiss Banks.

Public sector employment is really about a security of employment rather than fanciful salaries. The private sector salaries are much lower than the public sector on the whole. The private sector may have one single individual at an astronomical salary but the next rung languishes at packets that barely sustain a dignified middle class life. No wonder so many families are now double income with neither the time nor the money to have children. No single institution but private capital has so systematically destroyed the stability of the social institution of the family. The public sector has been more equal in salaries, attracted always the creamiest layer of talents, and been better at R&D because retention of talent has been higher, accumulated expertise through security of employment. The life of private sector has been much lower, companies have barely survived beyond three decades, less than the life of Amitabh Bachchan, or Dharmendra on screen, retrenched workers, locked out, and never been able to move up the knowledge chain to become price makers in any segment of international trade. Vis-à-vis the public sector, the private sector has only to be resigned to normal profits. Only with the public sector gone, the private sector’s stocks will shine helping it to scrape off the shareholder’s money and then scoot. In sectors where the public sector is absent namely the real estate and entertainment, stocks have tumbled, creditors have lost, properties been attached. The aviation sector gets all set for such unholy gains only if Air India is out of its way.

At the level of the common man, such moves are deadly. People have EMIs to pay, children to send to school, old parents to take care of and insecurity of employment and income can play havoc with middle class calculations. Eastern India had been torn asunder by the manipulations of large private companies all through the decades of the 1960’s when people had factories locked out, provident funds stolen, crashing them out of middle class existence into poverty. The rest of India managed this with self employment and no wonder then the 1970’s and 1980’s saw the growth of self proprietary units largely called as the cottage, tiny and small scale units. The opening up of the economy to the unbridled play of private capital wiped out the niche for these self employed swelling the ranks of the jobless. It is then a scandal that the NSSO rounds on employment reports a steady decline in employment over its various rounds since 1972 till 2008 !! The existence of the public sector created some steadiness in rules of hiring and firing and in the absence of the same will leave the ever expanding population of job seekers and the already employed into a mayhem of madness of uncertainty, anxiety, depressions, divorces and suicides. Slowly, the middle class will disappear, leaving India widely divided into a minority of the very rich and a sea of the poor, looking like Africa, or Latin America, Bangladesh, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan or Zambia, or Ethiopia, or Greenland, or Dutch Surinam.

The pilots strike is an event that apprehends and resists such a downward slide in our society. It is up to my friends to take the case forward or to oppose it.

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Bhaskarjyoti Basu (ed) Explorations in Economic and Social History 1200 to 1900. Viswabharati. 2008.

Posted on April 25, 2011 by secondsaturn

24th April 2011

 

Dear Prof Bhaskarjypti Basu,

I have just finished reading your edited volume Explorations in Economic and Social History 1200-1900 all in a day. I could not put down the book once I begun reading the papers one after the other. In more common parlance, your book is “unputdownable”. I must congratulate you and hence the letter.

Before I read your book, I was reading volumes edited by Shireen Moosvi and Upinder Singh, both of which had scholars from eminent institutions, writing eruditely in polished language of high literary standards. The papers in your volume had little pretensions of erudition but the scholarship was vital and articulation direct. I get an immediate picture of India in the period 1200 to 1900 which I have never found so clearly in the works of the so-called eminent historians.

Your book challenges the idea of a single history of India by gleaning through regional sources of history that throw up a variegated view of what we largely know as the medieval and early modern period. The papers form pieces of a larger jigsaw puzzle, a puzzle that throws up a consistent picture of India despite the regional specificities.

Prof Suchibrata Sen’s study of Birbhum is especially close to my heart because I have become keenly interested in the history of this region as part of my campaign to end animal sacrifice. In this paper, I find that one way of upward mobility of a caste is to increase its numbers, then link assets, production and markets and consolidate its economic position even further. This is what happened in case of the Sadgops in Bengal and it is in the upward mobility of castes that Brahmins play a role. The Afghan zamindars seem to be indifferent to the goings on within the local economy and this indifference gets construed as benevolence. The principle of caste becomes a means of social control precisely because the State is so aloof from the economy and society. The Santhals seem to have spilled over into Birbhum from the Chhotanagur plateau, and are not really indigenous to the region is interesting. However, what really intrigues me is that how did the Sadgops become the numerically dominant caste? How did families unite together under the label of Sadgops? Did religion, worship of a deity play an important role? Or was the scale of production of food crops and size of land holding the crucial factors behind families coming together as a caste. In that case, class is the basic determinant of caste. I think that Prof Sen’s paper raises these rather important questions those might go into understanding caste more holistically for Indian sociologists.

The other important set of observations and inferences in the paper on Birbhum was religious syncretism. If the syncretism was an expression of communal pluralism, then why were famines not managed? Did famines occur in the Muslim rule because the State was indifferent towards the economy? Who maintained armies of henchmen? Was violence a means of accumulating surplus? How much of violence was part of everyday life? These are some of the interesting questions that came to my mind while reading through Prof Sen’s paper on Birbhum. Birbhum seems to be a better developed zone of West Bengal in terms of refined religions like Vaishnavism, Bauls, Fakirs and Sufis and such refined syncretism, when read together with Shouvik Mukhopadhyay’s paper on Tamil Nadu tells us, could not have been possible without the presence of a strong State, albeit non- interfering in everyday social life and the economy.

In Bipasha Raha’s paper on Raja Rammohan Roy and Akshay Dutta’s thoughts on the economy, one could see so many motifs emerging of modern India as we know it today. Rammohan’s discourse on the need of the State to step into protecting the peasant, in discussing how mechanization of farming could improve productivity on land and on how certain “measures” of surveying land and measurement of revenue on the basis of standing crops could help improve land and labour productivity in farming actually upholds the various systems of revenue assessment drawn out by the Mughals. Hence, Rammohan seems to repose faith in a medieval system for achieving modernization of agriculture in India. This is a great revelation. In Akshay Dutta’s thoughts on the economy, one finds seeds of agrarian policy of Independent India already taking shape where he places the tiller of land rather than the title holder of land in charge of improving farming practices. Dutta’s thesis that the farmer had to be socially strengthened in terms of education, morals, customs, religion and health so that they could directly claim titles to land rather than the absentee zamindars and their rural agents. Dutta saw that the new rural middle class was a menace to the reconstruction of a new India and tied revolution in farming with empowerment and capacity building of the rural masses. Nabin Krishna Bose of Bethune Society actually hinted at land reforms and the State entering into a direct dealing with the farmer. I wish the author could dwell more on Nabin Krishna. In all the three thinkers we see an imagination of the constructive role of the State, which in India, as Suchibrata Sen and Shouvik Mukhopadhyay tell, was never really as inconsequential as we imagine.

When Bipasha Raha’s paper is read together with Chhanda Chatterjee’s paper on Punjab, one is intrigued to see that many of Nabin Krishna Bose’s recommendations were actually put into practice by the East India Company in this region. The reason why the Permanent Settlement never really happened in Punjab was perhaps because this was the area for recruiting the soldiers for the British army and land was a way in which the Sepoy could contentedly live; it was important that the interests of the peasant-Sepoy was maintained. It is interesting how the award of land titles created, through a land market, a huge circulation of credit and when land to the tiller was actually awarded as Nabin Krishna Bose had recommended, the economy shrunk, farmers suffered poverty and even land alienation. Setting up of cooperative banks shrunk retail commerce, encouraged speculation in grains and threw off many off their small businesses, completely the reverse of what one expect. Interestingly, both in Bengal and Punjab those very institutions that helped Europe to modernize and develop derailed the economy.

One could sense so much of the present day Punjab and the Punjabi culture through this paper. The inner competition and conflict among Punjabis, their ostentation and showing off because that is the only way they can increase their social net worth, the contempt for civic discipline and the talent to duck laws and rules seem to have emerged from those very tenets of the colonial government that Bengal and Maharashtra would hold as beneficial. Could the Partition been an extension of such sentiments? Could the virulent sub nationalism that ravaged Punjab in the 1980 have also been a continuation of such a social organization where rules and laws that we extol of modern and beneficial cease to be benevolent in Punjab?

Only a sense of society, a sense of sovereignty and a sense of the nation or of the State present in Europe and absent in India could lead to such different outcomes as the authors mention in the above papers. It is in this perspective of social cohesion that I could place Arpita Sen’s paper on the Khasis along with Sandeep Basu Sarbadhikary’s work on Burma. The papers on the Khasis and the Burmese helped me understand that while these are very different societies, the structure of production is organized in manners that require constant movement over large tracts of land of humans and animals. This makes such tribes repeatedly clash with settled agriculturists, contest with other claimants on land and defy the State. Burma and the Khasis are both tribal, very different from the caste societies with distinct culture, language group and religion and both were subject to colonial aggression and eventually to annexation. Both resisted and resented modernization but because of greater degree of social cohesion among the Khasis than among the Burmese, the Khasis evolved, revolted, modernized and grew into positions of strength and moral cohesion; while the Burmese became violent, intolerant, and rebellious but also criminals. The modernization of the Khasis, albeit not without internal debates and differences cultivated the Khasi culture that was circulated through literature, printing press and village arts, theatre and dramatics. The Burmese, on the other hand degenerated into amorality and anomie. Popular culture and social cohesion, political integration and economic success are seen to be critically connected. Social cohesion thus plays a crucial role in how communities would adapt to new situations and respond to political exigencies; this has been my learning from the four papers that I mention above.

Shouvik Mukhopadhyay’s paper on the military culture of Tamil Nadu has been an eye opener. Indeed, like many lay persons, I also imagined that the south is staid and civil, but one learns through the present paper that this was far from true. The more violent tribes may have lived in the regions of drier agriculture and then extended into the plains and finally integrated into the peasant society. This transformation is captured through the Goddess cults where vicious deities that were closer to ghosts and spirits became more benevolent and finally spouses of leading male Gods like Shiva and later Vishnu. I am familiar with this process in Burdwan where many deities who were virulent blood suckers are absorbed into the pantheon of the Puranas. In either case, such transformations hint at the emergence of peasant States like the Pallavas in south India and the Senas in Bengal. To the best of my understanding the transformation of a spirit like presence into a deity also means the consolidation of a sthal, or sthan into a mandir or a devasthan and in such spatial transformations, one finds new forms of social relations among groups around the temple. Such new social relations may also have been important aspects of caste society as it emerged out of tribal societies in many places.

In your paper on the weavers and Jeyaseela’s paper on the indigenous merchants in Pondicherry, we find that the success of a capitalist class rests on the success of commodity production which in turns depends on stable food production economies. For all of these things to happen, apart from law and order, one needs a relative distance from the powers of the State, and a fine balance in social cohesion among the various communities and castes. The crash of the indigenous economy of India was mainly due to this crash of the balancing points in which the foreign powers like the French and the Dutch were among other factors and definitely not the only ones. The exhaustion of possibilities of the mansabdari system and yet the insistence of the Mughal powers based out of Golconda on its imposition, the Maratha marauders that ripped through such administration played equally important roles in ending the prosperity of merchants and weavers and eventually through pressure on farming land overcrowded agriculture, made caste competitive and exploitative and finally lost political autonomy.

Syed Eijaz Hussain’s work on Patna mint is intriguing because the history of coinage that emanates out of this area despite there being no silver mines boggles one’s mind. There are two things that come to the mind on reading through this paper; one was the superior technology of casting, stamping and forging, not to forget the arms factories in Mungher and other places in North Bihar and the rise of Sher Shah from this place. Patna seems to have a pre-Mughal history, and later Patna seems to be the only place to have had a substantial Sikh religious power outside Punjab. Who then were the Biharis? How did they acquire such superior knowledge, did they continue to have a passage with the more superior Chinese through the Buddhist routes beyond Nalanda? These are some of the questions that immediately arise in the mind.

Tilottama Mukherji’s paper on pilgrimage is interesting too. One would have wondered that pilgrim spots were created to mark out the culture of India in terms of territory but the paper under discussion shows that these were also veritable tourist spots and the prevalence of pilgrimage shows that contrary to our image of India as being locked up in little villages, one gets to see that Indian’s are great travelers and adventurers. The economy around pilgrim centres, these being also shelters for vagabonds euphemistically called as sanyasis, fakirs and so on. The culture of fairs, festivals, street theatre and other performances that develop around the pilgrim spots can be called as genuine popular culture in a sharp contrast to the Khasi plays that are especially composed as instruments of cultural and political ideology. The popular culture at the fairs involve spectacles, movements, colours, audio visual stimulations that contrast sharply with the more argumentative and discursive components of the drama. Both these trends seemed to have come together in the modern cinema.

I am truly impressed by the level of scholarship in the present volume which despite is rather shoddy production has nonetheless made me feel very enlightened and therefore, enormously intellectually satisfied. I wish you well for your future endeavours.

 Regards,

Yours sincerely,

Susmita Dasgupta

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Revisiting Charulata – Sangeetha Padmanabhan’s Film Just Calle Charulata

Posted on April 20, 2011 by secondsaturn

Sangeeta Padmanabhan, also in my friend’s list of film makers, has just canned her debut film, Charulata encore. I forget the exact name of the film but I think that it is just called Charulata, implying that Satyajit Ray’s masterpiece Charulata has been revisited and also reinterpreted. Ray’s Charulata does not occupy the Bengali minds and its imagination in the same way as it does for film students across the country. Ray has never been a popular film maker and the Bengali film viewer has never aligned her personal journey with films of this Oscar winning director. But for film makers who wish to make a difference especially the auteur kinds like Sangeeta, Charulata stands out as the lode star providing directorial inspiration and guidance.

Charulatha, Sangeeta’s film is about a young woman who is talented, self-willed, educated and enjoys freedom of movement and of association. She is an award winning poet, has a boyfriend and yet is up as a prospective bride of a rich and well-to-do groom from a family that can match hers. The film shows how even an apparently empowered young girl falls to the pressures of a conventional marriage. The jewellery shop, the maid’s gossip about marriages in the neighbourhood, the condescending and the ultimate male chauvinism of her boyfriend, a woman has no place in society until and unless she conforms to one institution or the other that has the will of the man at its centre.

The film is shot in the rhythm of the swing, the trope in Ray’s film. Sangeeta’s shots of an empty swing rocking and swaying in the garden set against the sharp contrast of a similar scene from Ray’s film in which Charulata is seen to be swinging and singing conveys to us the central mood of the film. Charulata is rediscovered and reconstituted in each frame, with a mild sway of the body, the tilt of the head, the way she looks up, and most importantly her gaze. Sangeetha uses the pace of Ray’s film to dictate her own rhythm and the uses very similar dimensions of objects in the sets, placed in rather similar geometry as in the original film. The placement of the characters, the timing of their appearances, the spacing of lone shots of the protagonist are aligned to Ray’s film. But the major difference lies in the motif; while in Ray’s film the primary sense one got through the celluloid reels was that a woman was peering out into the world; in Sangeetha’s film, one gets an idea that the woman on the swing is the central moment and hence the overriding feeling. It is an interesting piece of cinematography especially when revisiting and reconstituting a classic film and its protagonist.

Posted in Film Reviews | Leave a comment

My Cousin Filmmaker and Dead

Posted on April 19, 2011 by secondsaturn

My male cousin, two years older to me, the only filmmaker in my mother’s dynasty, died of a massive cerebral attack recently. Pam called me up this morning to say that he, this cousin, is no more. He leaves behind his ageing parents, his married siblings, and wife and adolescent children. I have not seen him for the past thirty years, never knew when he married and who he married; never knew what films he made and where they were being exhibited. It seems that he did make a feature film or two which were shown in “Delhi” as yet a very distant place for me some forty years back. Later, I inferred that he must have got a Prasar Bharati grant to make some children’s films. But he did make some promotional films for the Government of West Bengal, visited some important directors of his time like Satyajit Ray, Buddhadeb Dasgupta and much later, Mrinal Sen.

Yet, these were small successes that broke the prolonged struggle. He was neither a bad photographer, nor a bad composer of the misc-en-scen and he was annoyingly subservient to the Master Director, Ray himself. Despite these cousin never made it; in short, he never arrived. Slowly he went down, came to depend on his father, stretched the family resources, left huge unpaid bills, quarreled and fought with his family, withdrew from society, angry and depressed and finally succumbed to a fatal cerebral stroke.

I was reconstructing his life backwards in my memory. He was a fairly good student, expressive and creative. He would have made a great student of literature, or of fine art. But he was a good student, oldest of his three siblings and fortunate enough to be admitted in a school that has Satyajit Ray as its alumnus and hence science, he was to study. Clearly he plotted for his release from the boring routine of his curriculum and one way he tried to get away from all of this was to walk to Ray. In the Ray household he tried dabble as a sub-editor in a children’s magazine that the family edited and published and in fact, also got one of my writings that I did for a classwork in school published in the same magazine. That was my first peer reviewed publication. I was livid with rage after seeing it appear in Sandesh, the name of the magazine in discussion, because my cousin took away all the zing and instead, recasted it in a boring prosaic language. I immediately knew that he did not have the creativity required to be a copy writer, or a film maker.

But this cousin insisted on being a film maker. In the 1970’s that was what men yearned to do in order to gain acknowledgment and acceptance in the respected society. It was in the late 1960’s that Amitabh Bachchan, who was in Kolkata’s corporate world, also decided to join films; something was in the air that made people imagine that in order to move up to the creamiest layers of the society, one had to have something to do with films. Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray, Buddhadeb Dasgupta were role models for the Bong boy, because they were filmmakers and intellectuals too. The commercial formula film that revolved on Uttam Kumar was not respectable enough for one to be in and thank God for that because such films needed heavy investors and big time infrastructure including elaborate marketing networks. My cousin strategically chose the path of the parallel cinema or of the art film maker.

It appeared easy enough because the master directors all were apparently self taught. So cousin, being a good student, also could teach himself. He therefore, jumped immediately to being an assistant director to Ray and of course, Ray only allowed him to hang around, devoting neither the time nor patience to teach him the tricks of trade. What my cousin did not know was that there was so much to know about the trade. Ideally, one had to be trained, then one had to start really low below, and one had to know that one needed the right kind of contacts in the right kind of places, for which one either had to have money or political clout or belong to the right kind of family circles. Political ideology propagated of a free society, free democracy, film heroes could take charge of their own lives and solve their own problems, but such was not the reality. In reality, a space that ensured you social respectability was reserved for those who had various kinds of entitlements, economic, financial, social and political. My cousin, the aspiring filmmaker had none of the above.

Slowly cousin fell along the income curve; in the earlier days of the Left Front rule, when the party was recruiting new young persons, they did throw in some cookies to cousin. But cousin seemingly hailing from a different background remained aloof. Also, he never believed in using his art for political propaganda and therefore, in a scenario where the civil society was merging with the political society, cousin remained out of its bounds. Towards the end, he did polish his craft, he became sharper, mastered the art of light and shade, but he was only defending his position as a middle class and not critiquing it, and he never quite developed a point of view. That finally did him in, his never knowing what to stand against. I never really met him except fleetingly once as he was running to board the Rajdhani Express, but were I to do so, I could have at least told him that I have chanced upon a secret of artists, they create art by standing against something and not for something.

Cousin did not know what he had to stand against. He came from a social milieu where boys and girls were appearing for competitive examinations, IITs, IIMs which meant that they were playing by the rules of the game and not challenging them. Politically, the Left Rule made it an incentive to hunt with the foxes; soon, the Bengali cinema collapsed because popular art, public art, invariably stands against something rather than for it; theories of ideological propaganda read so contrived and conscious failing instead of succeeding to explain the popularity of such low brow, mechanically produced and mass distributed art. Everything in Bengal in those days only stood for the Left Rule.

As he failed repeatedly, he wanted to learn the art of making cinema professionally. He had little idea about the prospects, the Internet not being available and one really never knew where and how to get forms for the FTII. In any case, it was never easy to get forms that were issued over the counters in Pune from Kolkata; the office was never honest, they misled and even waylaid wannabe film directors who came from cities beyond Mumbai and Pune. It is strange that if one goes through the list of alumni of film direction in the 1970’s one finds such little representations from southern, eastern and northern states. Cousin now wanted to go abroad, his father was a middle class, salaried bank employee; so he relented. Cousin wanted money for his own production house, sometimes to pay a distributor upfront a sum of guarantee money; father was again a middle class middle income, salaried person employed in a nationalized bank. Filmmakers never say that they have rich fathers to back them up, rich families to cover their risks in business and so cousin did not know of this. He became very angry with his father.

As he fell off his income mark he was forced to move in with his father in the same house. A Bengali middle class is westernized where adult children usually do not stay on with parents. While novelists like Ashapurna Devi has acknowledged and ruefully articulated a parents’ agony when children wish to move away, little has been spoken about the parents’ agony when adult children insist on staying in the same establishment. Cousin’s parents were about to enjoy a little luxury off their measly pension when cousin descended upon them. Wife neither worked nor brought money from her parents; working women are seen to reduce the macho power of husbands and money from family is definitely the outlawed dowry. Cousin’s parents were hugely threatened because their savings depleted alarmingly and cousin started misbehaving with the very same parents who fantasized that he would be the great Director one day. His father repeatedly kept calling my mother up seeking protection against this exploitative son; he even thought of going to court to stop his son from further claiming his dwindling bank balance.

So it was nice that cousin died much sooner than have the court oust him, or the police book him on charges of harassing parents. His was a story of naivety by which millions of middle class believe that the world is full of opportunities for them. It is never so, it has been never so; family wealth, political contacts, alumni power, in short, social networks or gangs of supportive friends in right places dictate one’s chances in life. Cousin’s siblings are doing well; they never aspired to be anything more than school teachers and in their chosen profession they have reached the top.

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Ekta Kapoor’s Coffee and a Tale of Wives

Posted on April 7, 2011 by secondsaturn

Ekta Kapoor turned out to be effortlessly articulate with a definite command over the English language. This is notwithstanding the fact that English is the lingua franca of the Hindi film industry and one of the markers of success in the business is able to speak the language effortlessly. But Ekta’s choice of words, her vocabulary of adjectives, her syntaxes, her figures of speech reveal fluency over the written form of the language in a sharp contrast to the glib of Karan Johar. Ekta’s accent too is of an educated Renascent Indian, a relief from Madhuri’s poor English spelt out in a forced yankee tongue, or the effulgent Preity Zinta or Kareena who seem to think and talk in English but may not be able to construct sentences requiring more education and erudition. Ekta’s huge empire in the television, she said, was the by-product of her desire and ability to tell good stories. Indeed, Ekta does have the ability through the use words and phrases and metaphors to create vivid images in the minds of the listeners. And hence Ekta also vividly bared her mind and heart to the listeners when she spoke of a peculiar psychological affliction within her – an intense female jealousy by which she can stand no woman purporting to be in an affine relation with a man. This includes her father’s female fans all of whom she imagines as potential threat to her father’s fidelity and she cannot seem to stand her brother’s girlfriends.  This jealousy is serious because in her childhood when she was not as yet wholly socialized, she would scratch, maul, hit, or punch any woman irrespective of her age that included little girls.

The suspicion that any and every woman is interested in having sex or possessing otherwise men of her blood family is a serious psychological disorder, emanating from the strange social world that we inhabit. In broader terms, this mental illness among women like Ekta can alone go a long way in keeping women out of participation in public and civic life and circulate the thesis that if a woman is not married, she is a threat to the society. Such a mentality had once been very cruel to widows; it is this mentality that is now harassing women who decide to be independent entities. It is this mentality of Ekta’s that she shares with the nation that makes her tell stories of such suspicion of women towards women and make its viewers consume them greedily. The problem with such construction of every woman in the civil space as a potential threat to a married couple is unfortunate; unseen to most feminists and gender social scientist, women empowerment can never happen until and unless women overcome the fear of women. This fear lies at the heart of women oppressing women, a fact that men love to cite whenever they sense female bonding. The gay activists by seeing sex in everything have also contributed steadily to possibilities of larger female and hence human bonding.

As I was mentally composing this note to post it in the facebook and walking through the corridors of Aurobindo Place, I heard a shrill voice in an unstoppable outburst. I looked around for the source of the sound until I found it emanating from within one of the shops and not an irate customer but the wife of the shopkeeper, who also sits at the counter shouting her head off at her husband. This was the third casualty of the shopping complex!! There are two other shops where I have seen the husband and wife, both of who sit in the counter quarrel in a way in which the woman publicly humiliates her husband. The other day, at the stationery shop from where we have been buying our papers and pens for over quarter of a century now, the wife now in her mid-fifties misbehaved with Madhusree. On another occasion, the wife at the counter of the appliances shop misled me in such a way that I came out of the shop empty handed. The goal that these women work towards is to disgust and discourage customers away from their shops; a sly way of sabotaging their husband’s wealth, something that so many women do but we never seem to recognize as an academic problem. At the root of this sabotage by wives lies a deep insecurity, an irrational fear that husbands may stray. Why stray? With who? No, this is not true but women conjure this up in their own minds. So when the teenaged daughter of the owner of the appliances shop steps inside the air-conditioned zone, her mother screams at the top of her voice within my hearing that her father has many “female friends” and is enjoying himself. I am revulsed enough to move out of the shop and decide not to visit it again.

Aurobindo Place Market is like the atavistic Meena Bazaar of the Mughal forts, where the women of the modern day aristocracy visits. It is a shopping complex where women do almost all the shopping; this is not a small fact, but a rather significant one because only socially empowered and economically independent women do their own shopping, in the rest of the cases where women have less power, they are either accompanied by the men or as in the lower middle class Kolkata, they never emerge in bazaars. Women shopping are thus a matter of social class, the higher you go, the more relatively, I insist relatively, independent the women are. They drive their own cars, they do their own shopping, they take their own purchase decisions, wear resplendent clothes and perfume, they have interesting hairdo. This “bibiyana” instills sharp pangs of envy among those wives who yearn for such wealth and its consequent freedom.

Looked at more empathetically, the wives of Aurobindo Place are a trapped lot. They emerge from social classes that have little money to let women be free; they must depend on their husbands for their needs. The fathers never handed them over what was due to them has legacy and instead has passed it on to the husbands as dowry. With this dowry the men have set up shops; sometimes even pressurized women to leach their parents for more. In these shops now visit the women they always yearned to be but cannot be. The unbearable jealousy against the women of the upper class gets construed as imagined romances and infidelities of their husbands; the dainty, flowery, genteel fair sex will not even cast a glance and paan chewing, oily faced, pot bellied ugly men that the shop keepers are. But the wives would love to think that way because using such excuses husbands can be cornered, mentally tortured and also be beaten out of the shop floors where the wives would emerge as the sole proprietors, collect the money, steal much of it and then on the sly slither into the corner of the complex and so what their women clients do, grab and gulp an aloo tikki. I have seen this happen many times with the wife at the counter of the stationery shop. She (and I realized this only now after twenty five years) would charge a rupee or two more each item and then sneak out behind Wimpy’s to bite into a burger. After I realized what I saw, wives have become persons to be pitied. All that uncontrolled outbursts and public humiliation of their husbands, snide comments, rude behavior and dishonest business are concealed class wars that are fought between woman and woman, secretly, silently and invisibly.

I have often wondered why Ekta focuses so much on the family and what the role of the family is in the larger scheme of things and why the family must now be the metaphor of everything starting from the office, to the club, to the apartment home and the State ! The format of the family where every kind of conflict must arise, be located and also resolved is typically a domain of the woman. The protagonist is a virtuous wife because of her sexual insecurities emanating from other women; she senses no threat to her being from her husband, but from other women related variously to her husband or known to him as his colleague, or friend or even neighbor. Ekta, in her own insecurities betrays the fact that she too holds in her mind an image of herself as the wife. No wonder then that she denounces sex, finds sin it all the time, fears it as a danger to her existence and snubs it as “down-market”. Interestingly Bollywood insiders had never been so class conscious before now because before Ekta, Sonam was saying that trying to look sexy was tacky; this is a way of admitting in a manner of self defense that sexiness is a property of the upper classes in which they wish to belong to but do not and that women of the reference class are all threatening to the women of their class. The metaphor of the family then centers around women, and through this women break their bonds with every other woman, suck up to men, give them powers, make them the masters, get abused and beaten up and hold the giant structure of patriarchy. The family is then a silent process of patriarchy, not run by men but by women. Women steadily give up all that is valuable to them by subjugating themselves when they draw on the powers of men to give them identity, security and social worth. This is the feminine constitutiveness of our society, something that is so subtle, so hidden and so speechless that it has remained invisible and silent even to the feminists.

Ekta Kapoor places herself in the midst of this war. She uses woman against woman; her protagonists are usually the wives from the social class of the shopkeeper, a class that earns money more easily than it earns its freedom. These virtuous wives, no matter how much they tout their traditions, their devotional arsenals, within their hearts they know that they are incarcerated, harassed, dependent, subjected and controlled. These women therefore displace their frustrations against other women who they construe and construct as vamps. Hence smart, rich, successful and independent women in Ekta’s serials are also the dangerous ones who the wives can only contain and compete against when they themselves get trigger happy, or corrupt or lascivious. The good woman turns bad when she must emerge out of her oppression while an entire issue of the class war is relegated into the unconscious and woman gets pitted against the woman. This huge class war which is fought at the level of women is then neatly packaged and put forth in tele soaps as the consensus of the media. It is through these soap operas that the powers of the lower middle class housewife, through who women are everyday breaking bonds with other women, taking themselves away from public life, compromising on their autonomy are constituted as a grand consensus. Everyone is supposed to be happy to be or to be with a Parvati or a Tulsi. But Parvatis and Tulsis are miserable in their everyday lives; the wives of Aurobindo Place show all.

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Days At Avadi

Posted on March 31, 2011 by secondsaturn

I got some old photos from home this time, taken many seasons ago, when one winter for the Christmas vacation, we went to Avadi to create some entertainment for Dadu. The “we” included my parents, my younger brother Pam, Madhukaka, a much younger cousin of my father and his elegant and charming wife, Chitrita Kaki. Dadu, who was then in the seventh year of his widowerhood, often fell to nervous anxiety and depression out of a feeling of boredom. One way he could overcome this was by meeting the members of his family, most of whom, in their prime years were away in the towns of their postings. In Avadi, lived Dadu’s nephew, my father’s older cousin, Montu, who Pam and I just called Jethu.

I never knew of Montu Jethu a.k.a Jethu, till he suddenly visited our home in Dover Lane while Ma, Pam and I were away visiting Bachi, who had just been posted to Bombay to “man” SBI’s research wing in the Head Office. When we returned, we heard from Dadu that Dhirenda’s son had visited home with his family. I recalled this name as belonging to one of Dadu’s brothers who died young leaving behind his adolescent children and wife, one that also died in a short while after her husband’s death. The young children were brought up by the oldest boy, Montu who left his studies and joined the “military” as a soldier. This very Montu “returned” home so many moons later and one of the persons he met up was my grandfather, known to him as Chhobu Kaka.

The house was agog with intense excitement, not so much with our return but with the accounts of Montu’s visit a week before that. Gita, our young maid was so excited that she had seen a soldier in flesh and blood who called Dadu as Kaka, wore a kara like the Sikhs and was very smart. His wife, the other household help Kanakdi gushed, was so smart, had such a sharp nose and wore a beautiful sari. It seems that she sang a devotional song for Dadu and her sweet voice was heard resonating in Gita and Kanakdi’s ears even then. Baba could not stop raving about the daughters, Shubhra and Shukla and while I had not yet seen them, I knew that they were to be my role models hence on. Jethu was just at that time posted into the Indian Army’s military research wing to design what we now see as the Vijayanta Tank. His home was to be at Avadi, a suburb of Chennai, fourteen kilometers away from Mount Road. It was to this home that we were now to repeatedly visit, sometimes as a transit to other places in Tamil Nadu, or to be dumped when the sambars and Chettinads got too much on Pam and my stomach as Baba and Ma tireless travelled through South India, or when we fell ill and needed to be diagnosed, or when we were just bored and needed a holiday.

Avadi’s home was idyllic; it was like a first class train compartment with rooms in a row and a covered corridor in front. The lattice of the corridor was tiled and painted brown while the house was painted in white. From the tiles hung flowered creepers, trees threw in huge shades; shrubs marked the borders of the premises. In the backyard, jackdaws cawed, squirrels ran as Jethi laid out her pickles to dry. The bathrooms were huge and so was the kitchen and spacious nooks and corners where Jethi stored her jellies and homemade wines !! The corridor was lined with books, the windows dressed in cute checked curtains and simple mats and durries with minimalistic wooden furniture made the home look more like a scholar’s than a soldier’s. The living room had an elaborate music system that Shubhradi would put up each morning and dance away to Santana’s music, while Shukladi would tune in to radio Ceylon to catch Hindi film numbers. The home oozed of peace, focus, concentration and of the family’s moral and intellectual confidence. No wonder then a visit to Avadi would fill me up with the right kind of vibrations that one needed to go on with.

Jethu and Jethi knew everything. Jethu knew all about machines; he could fix anything from hair dryers to jeeps. He had an amazing thirst for knowledge and read books on all subjects. He made elaborate notes on everything and anything, right from washing clothes to local history of Mylapore. If he had to accompany us on a trip to the Deep South Jethu made sure that he knew mythology, history, architecture and geography of the Pallavas, Cholas and Vijayanagar back and forth. He was also a very talented photographer and a good amateur sound recordist, recording Dadu’s songs, my reading of Jane Eyre, Pam’s giggles and much to Jethi’s changrin, her eternal arguments with Shubhradi and agitated exchanges with Rayappa or Nagamma, the domestic helpers on whose stolidity the home at Avadi stood firm and organized.

Jethi did everything; she cooked, made pickles, stitched, embroidered, made doodles, fixed toys and trinklets and sang. But she also knew how to wince a lathi and a dagger and knew some essential Krav Maga; being a soldier’s wife was never easy. Jethu labeled each one of her kitchen jars as sugar, salt, holud, dhone, randhuni and so on. Jethu fabricated special spoons and jammed them into the sugar pot, or the oil can so that at each pouring not more than one spoon could spill out. This needed intense research, but Jethu did all of that. He re-engineered his ambassador with dual control systems because Shubhradi and Shukladi were taking driving lessons. For most of the times, the car was painted ink blue and was called the Saptarshi, after the seven soldiers who were in his company and died fighting when he charged into Rawalpindi in the 1967 campaign against Pakistan.

I loved every inch of the home at Avadi. The convenient hooks where one could hang one’s clothes, the giant tub where Rayappa, the orderly soaked the linens, the stove on which water for tea would boil on through the day because the Dasguptas are heavy tea drinkers, Jethu’s corner for Jethi’s harmonium, and the pen for the chickens when Jethi experimented with poultry farming. There was a first aid chest kept conveniently in the pantry at the end of the house, from where Jethi rushed out with cotton and betadine when a squirrel sharply bit into Rayappa’s forefinger when he tried to catch the rodent at Pam’s request. There was also a bathroom beneath the staircase where Shukladi cut out and pasted Amitabh Bachchan’s photos, because in the halcyon era of Rajesh Khanna, Amitabh was the underdog and had no right to be seen in the more public spaces such as the study desk or the library along the corridor.

Jethu was a typical Dasgupta male, who believed that marriage meant the end of life for a woman. He tried to plan careers for his girls sitting in his exile at Avadi. Shubhradi was to study medicine and had made up her mind; Shukladi was flummoxed over what she should pursue, modeling or painting, or prepare herself for marriage. Rajada was away at IIT and in Avadi, he was a mere photograph on Jethu’s desk. It was a home a la Jane Austen, girls and a father with Jethi being forever exasperated at Jethu’s leeway to his daughters. Jethi complained often of Jethu’s leniency between her domestic chores, her music practice and her tending of the huge hound, Jackie, the mildest mannered, friendly and affectionate dog that I have ever met. Jackie had once killed a Cobra, his trophy that Shubhradi put in a solution of formaldehyde obtained from the Madras Medical College laboratory.

Shubhradi and Shukladi were enamoured by Chitrita kaki, who according to them was the most beautiful and dainty creatures ever created. Madhukaka was a typical St Colamba and IIT Kanpur person, abrupt, smart, matter of fact and a workaholic. So Shubhradi and Shukladi thought that he was not romantic enough and insisted that Madhukaka develop some romance into his personality. All of us used to laugh and Jethu recorded our laughter. The days at Avadi went on like this; just like a slice of life from a Hrishikesh Mukherjee film. This photograph is one among such million moments. Rayappa took the picture; he omitted Jackie who was slouching at Dadu’s feet and in the subsequent photographs we can see him more clearly.

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Reading about Autism – Mark Haddon: The Curious Case of the Dog At Nighttime

Posted on March 25, 2011 by secondsaturn

I have just finished reading Mark Haddon’s book called the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. The protagonist is an autistic child and like all autistic children, excels in observing details closely but unable to absorb a gamut of information to obtain a holistic picture. He focuses deeply and acutely and is unable to make a holistic picture of things around him. All that he does is to note the details down and leaves the reader to piece together his numerous observations into a grand story. One glance at the pages leaves us in no doubt that Karan Johar’s film, My Name Is Khan has been totally inspired by this curious case of the curious child written in a curious style of the autistic mind. As a film produced in the industry assembly line of Bollywood, the Khan film belongs to the larger group of films made on disabilities – Black, made after the Miracle Makers, a take on the life of Hellen Keller, Koi Mil Gaya, a story of a spastic child with amazing learning skills and life skills, Pa, a film on a child afflicted with an ageing diseases. When different abilities have caught Bollywood imagination, surely it has to do with some advantage that such “disabilities” now accrue.

 I think that somewhere the digital society is inundated and choked with a surfeit of information that beat us down through every moment of our existence. There is too much news, too many views, too many visuals, too much music, too many books, too many films, too many events and not to miss out, too much food to eat and taste. We get breathless by trying to even glance at every option that comes to us and making a well reckoned choice is a near impossibility. In such a state of affairs in the world, our disabilities become the only way to eliminate some options and slow down the rate of stimuli hitting upon us every moment at an alarming pace. Being disabled gives us the time to absorb things at a pace at which our brains would be more comfortable with. When the world is far too fast for us, it is only by slowing ourselves down that we can bring some sanity into our existences. Hence being disabled is a preferred state of being, like Picassian portraits, utterly broken to the point of being repulsive and even grotesque for those challenged the idea of the world doled out to us as being the most perfect while it was not. In a world like ours where choices drown our sanity and a surfeit of images camouflage reality, the only way to beat the gloss to access the gross is through disability. Disability has truly become a different ability.

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Bhangra on women’s day..

Posted on March 9, 2011 by secondsaturn

Madhubani posted a series of songs renditioned by Kali Dasgupta together with his interviews. In the ensemble of songs from many regions, there were a few bhangras along translation of lyrics. Hence I knew for the first time in my life what Bhangras were really about. I always associated the Bhangra with the exuberant and joyous culture of the Sikhs, shrugging shoulders with a musical nasal snort to keep the beat on; a vivacious and vigorous movement of the body and colourful costumes of silken lungis, pagris and dupattas. I felt that the Bhangra was an invitation to actually shrug the woes of the world off with a wnahu, wnahu..little did I realize until Madhubani opened my eyes to it that it is indeed so. I used to imagine that the Bhangra is by males while the Giddha is by females. Only after Madhubani’s post I realized that in either case, the lyrics were composed by women.

In one of the lyrics among Madhubani’s posts was a song composed and sung by women as they made their chapattis in the community oven, known as the Sanjha Chula. The women sung how unfortunate they were because their husbands were away fighting wars. If they returned home alive, there was little comfort for they would have to return to fight each time till they died. If, however, the husband came back home dead, there also was no comfort because the husband was fighting for the British and his widow could also not be called to be a martyrs widow. So either way, a woman was doomed, wnahu, wnahu, khair, chhaddo ji.. koi nahi, koi nahi. This is almost ascetic resignation, an active, this worldly asceticism, something we have all along imagined to be the monopoly of the Protestant Christianity, but is seen to be very much present among the women of Punjab, Sikh women, who beneath the soot of the oven live life in the mundane everyday routine and cope drudgery and despair with the sublimity of saints !

There is another point I cannot fail to notice. Which British were the Sikhs fighting for? If it was for the East India Company, then the song may be dated to the Mutiny of 1857. If it was later, which is unlikely, given the archaic nature of the language used, it could refer to the later wars that the British fought. But why was the British an enemy of the Sikhs? In those days, one would imagine that the enemies of the Sikhs were the Mughals and the Afghans; why would the British not be just another power in the game? Were the Sikhs thinking of themselves as a nation? Were the Sikhs imagining a sovereign India? Surely, historians would say that the idea of the nation was not yet formed. Whatever the case may be, whether it is Sikh nationalism, or Sikhs in Indian nationalism, it is the women, from behind the sallow salvers and sooted ovens helped weave the discourses of the nation through their songs of sorrow that one had to shrug off and proceed on to live another day. It is possible that the weeping women of Punjab laid the foundation of nationalism. It is also possible that elsewhere in the country, it is so. When intellectuals accuse men in Nandigram and Singur of putting women in front of the human pile to protest against military crackdowns, I think that they miss this huge hidden history of women who actually founded the idea of the nation and nationalism.

Logically speaking, at least in India, women are the ones to discover spaces. This is because they migrate on exogamy, they are traded as slaves and carted as prostitutes; they also leave homes to become Mira. Who else but they would know the value of space, who else but they would know similarities of culture and religion across disparate lands?

I also see women at the foundation of the modern State, raging amazons in the French Revolution charging through the Bastille; a Matangini Hazra, the veiled women in Iraq, the armed woman holding up her children in Afghanistan. It is women who are vulnerable to disorder in a society; it is they who suffer from the lawlessness of the Hobbesian states; it is they who desire the rule of law, the institutionalization of justice the most.

.. all of this light comes to me from the Bhangra sung by sad women sitting down in circles as dusk falls on the land of the Punjab and it is time to roast the rotis.

Thousand thanks Madhubani ..

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