Freedom and Destiny: Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India 0195679911, 9780195679915

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wu

X004897174

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA ALDERMAN LIBRARY THE INTERNATIONAL STUDIES COLLECTION

Freedom and Destiny

Freedom and Destiny Gender, Family, and Popular Culture in India

keg PATRICIA

UBEROI

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

PRESS

OXFORD UNIVERSITY

PRESS

YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford

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First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate Treprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 13: 978-0-19-567991-5 ISBN 10: 0-19-567991-1

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YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001

jor EuNICE HUGHSON 6 July 1907-13 April 2004

Acknowledgements

eg

I acknowledge with gratitude the following sources for permission to republish materials from the works cited: ~ Sameeksha Trust, Mumbai, for ‘Feminine identity and national ethos in Indian calendar art’, from Economic and Political Weekly, volume 25,

number 17 (1990), WS, pp. 41-8 (Chapter 2).

Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., and the Editors, for “Baby” iconography: Constructing childhood in Indian calendar art’, from Sujata Patel,

Jashodhara Bagchi and Krishna Raj, eds, Thinking Social Science in India: Essays in honour of Alice Thorner (Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2002),

pp. 264-81 (Chapter 3).

Nehru Memorial Museum

and Library, New Delhi, and Meenakshi

Thapan, for ‘Dharma and desire, freedom and destiny: Rescripting the man—woman relationship in popular Hindi cinema’, from Meenakshi Thapan, ed., Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity (Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997), pp. 145-71 (Chapter 4).

Oxford University Press and the Editors, for ‘Imagining the family: An ethnography of viewing Hum aapke hai koun! ...’ from Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, eds, Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Popular Culture in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 309-51 (Chapter 5). Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi and Institute of Economic

Growth, Delhi, for ‘The diaspora comes home: Disciplining desire in

DDL’, from Contributions to Indian Sociology, volume 32, number 2, pp. 305-36 (Chapter 6). Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd., and Centre for Women's Development

Studies, New Delhi, for ‘Learning to “adjust”: Conjugal relations in

Indian popular fiction’, from Indian Journal of Gender Studies, volume 1, number 1 (1994), pp. 93-120 (Chapter 7).

viii

Acknowledgements

Thomson Publishing Services on behalf ofTaylor and Francis Books and

Shoma Munshi, for ‘A suitable romance? Trajectories of courtship in Indian popular fiction’, from Shoma Munshi, ed., Jmages of the ‘Modern

Woman’ in Asia: Global Media/Local Meanings (London: Curzon Press,

2002), pp. 169-87 (Chapter 8).

Patricia UBEROI

Preface

ig

o far, sociologists and social anthropologists of India have had very

little to say on the theme of Indian popular culture. Presumably

they think that there are many more portentous themes for sociologists to address, or that the study of popular culture is best undertaken within other disciplinary frameworks—by media specialists and literary

scholars, psychologists, folklorists, or historians. To the contrary, this

volume of sociological essays on aspects of Indian popular culture seeks tocommend popular culture as an important resource for sociological insight into contemporary social issues. At the same time it invites Indian sociologists to participate more actively in the challenging interdisciplinary enterprise of Cultural Studies. The eight essays that comprise this book explore aspects of Indian family and gender relations in three different genres of popular culture: in ‘calendar art’ (popular colour prints); in commercial cinema; and in the romance fiction of women’s magazines. Written over the last decade or so, each essay has separate history and context of production that has to some extent shaped its individual orientation. But hopefully, bringing them together within a single frame will serve to foreground their essential thematic unity across these distinct genres of popular culture. The conceptual and methodological challenges of such an exercise will be ad-

dressed in the introductory chapter. Fora long time I had lived with this book under the title, Dharma and Desire. In some moods, I still do. . . . That title privileged the tension (on which feminist scholars have provideda robust commentary) between the

acknowledgement of female desire, and culturally normative expectations of feminine deportment. Indeed, it is a tension intrinsic to dis-

courses on gender relations in South Asia. In rather impetuously changing

the title to Freedom and Destiny, | sought to signal not merely the contradictions in-built into the moral economy of family and social life under

an atemporal cultural regime that one might label ‘tradition’. I sought

also to signal the challenges of modernity wherein—for men and women alike—the goals of individual autonomy and freedom of choice and

x

Preface

action are seen to be constrained by a social ethic that demands the deferral of individual self-gratification on behalf of the family and, beyond and via the family, the national society. This change of emphasis commends itself in the context of the increasing pace of globalization since policies of economic liberalization were instituted in the early 1990s, at the beginning of the period to which most of these essays refer, irrevocably changing the face of the media in India and—along with this—legitimizing and glamourizing the appeal of global lifestyles. While the long-term effects of these changes on family and gender relations are still to be sociologically evaluated, it may appear in retrospect that these essays belong in a temporal cusp wherein the moral economy of Indian family life became subject to particularly intense scrutiny and challenge. I have been privileged to present one or another of these chapters in different seminars and colloquia in India and abroad: in particular, at the Sociological Research Colloquium of the Delhi School of Economics, at

the Indraprastha and Lady Shri Ram Colleges in Delhi, at the Universities ofBombay, Poona, Sydney and Wollongong, at the Macquarie University, Sydney, the La Trobe and Monash Universities, Melbourne, at the Austra-

lian National University, Canberra, and ina series of lectures delivered

when I was Visiting Professor at the Punjab University, Chandigarh, and

the Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, at the beginning and end of 1999. Comments received on those occasions have greatly enriched my understanding and suggested new themes for the future. I have also gained much from the experience of curating an exhibition of Indian calendar art, ‘From Goddess to Pin-up’, presented ata number of galleries in India and abroad. I am particularly grateful to the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, whose beautifully produced catalogue has made some of this delectable material available to a wider public, as well as to Gallery Espace, New

Delhi, for making space for our calendar art ‘babies’ in their saucily titled

exhibition, ‘Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai’ (March 2001).

A book that has come into being in such an incremental manner has accumulated many debts in the process. Innumerable friends have kept

me company along the way. Among them are aficionados of calendar art, the popular arts, Bollywood cinema and romance fiction; sociologists of the family; friends in the Indian women’s movement and publishing

worlds; my former colleagues at the Delhi School of Economics and the Jawaharlal Nehru University; and my present colleagues at the Institute of Economic Growth and the Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi. Too

many to name individually, but among them I would like to pay tribute

Preface

xi

to: Kumool Abbi, Bina Agarwal, Esha Béteille, Christiane Brosius, Urvashi Butalia, Uma Chakravarti, Radhika Chopra, Prem Chowdhry, Veena Das, Satish Deshpande, Rasna Dhillon, Rachel Dwyer, Shohini Ghosh, Omita Goyal, Dipankar Gupta, Kajri Jain, Madhu Jain, Kathy Hansen,

Malavika Karlekar, Raiji Kuroda, Philip Lutgendorf, T.N. Madan, Ritu

Menon, Shoma Munshi, M. Nadarajah, Tiplut Nongbri, Rajni Palriwala, Sujata Patel, Carla Petievich, Chris Pinney, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Geeti Sen, A.M. Shah, Pooja Sood, Sanjay Srivastava, Nandini Sundar, Meenakshi

Thapan, Carol Upadhya, Ravi Vasudevan and Sylvia Vatuk. Of course I owe special thanks to my family: Safina, Prem, Zoe and Jit—especially Jit, with whom I have shared the enterprise of collecting calendars for near on four decades . . . and ever so much else besides. And how couldI forget the staffat home—Somwati, Prem, and Krishna—but for whom the production of this book might have taken even longer! T also owe thanks to Aradhya Bhardwaj for the cheerful support she has rendered at all stages of this project, and to Swargajyoti Gohain and Anamika for their timely editorial assistance; to Amita Tyagi Singh, coauthor of Chapter 7 in its original version; and to Yasmeen Arif for her contribution to the production of Chapter 8. I am grateful to the British Council for a Travel Grant in 1995, and to the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi—the IEG library, computer unit, staff and administra-

tion—for institutional support of every kind. I have sometimes suspected that my colleagues see my activities as more good fun than serious ‘research’, but I trust that this book will prove just how serious having fun can be. This book is dedicated to my mother, Eunice Hughson. No doubt the ethnography reported here would appear exotic to her, but I am sure that Chapters 7 and 8 would strike a familiar chord, for Eunice was in her time atruly prodigious reader of English Women's Weekly romances. The tribute to her equally prodigious appetite for murder mysteries is still to come! Delhi

.

Patricia UBEROI

Contents

Acknowledgements Preface

ix

List of Illustrations 1

‘BEAUTYFULL Wire, DENGER LiFe’: ENGAGING WITH

PoputaR CULTURE I A Moving Message ‘Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

II

Reading Popular Culture The Concept of Popular Culture

The Semiotics of Popular Culture Imagining the Nation III Gender and Genre Visual Culture and the Controlling ‘Gaze’ Reading the Romance Gender and Resistance IV __ Rethinking the Family

2

1 1 1

3 3

7 10 12 13, 16 17 20

20

Arranged Marriage

24

22

Dowry and Brideprice The Limits of Family Change The Moral Economy of the Indian Family

26 28 29

Dharma and Desire, Freedom, and Destiny

33

FEMININE IDENTITY AND NATIONAL ETHOS IN CALENDAR ART I ‘Woman/Goddess/Nation: A Contemporary Controversy

Il

xvii

The Kinship Map of India The Indian Joint Family

Vs

vii

Defining Calendar Are

48 48

49

xiv

Contents

Ill

Ravi Varma and the Invention of Calendar Art

52

IV

Deciphering the Archive: Gender and Calendar Art Objects of Desire/Commodities on Sale Icons of Nation Plurality and Difference Trajectories of Change?

58 60 62 66

Vv 3

“BaBy’ IcONs: FORMS AND FIGURES OF A New GENERATION I Introduction II Envisioning Childhood Il South Asian Childhoods Child Socialization as Pathology IV

Childhood between Tradition and Modernity Cosmologies of Childhood Representing the Child God-baby

Welcome-baby Citizen-baby Hero-baby Customized-baby 4

Desire AND Destiny: RESCRIPTING THE MAN-WOMAN RELATIONSHIP IN POPULAR CINEMA I Prologue: On a Personal Note II The Body Language of Popular Cinema Il The Problematics of Romance Dharma and Desire

Freedom and Destiny A Paradigm of Desire

97 98 100 102 103 104 114 114 117 119 121 123

Bhoothnath and Chhoti Bahu

Happy and Unhappy Endings

130

Chhote Sarkar and the Courtesan Chhoti Bahu and Chhote Sarkar

5

85 85 87 90 91 93 95

124 125 126 127 129

Jabba and Bhoothnath

Vv

68

IMAGINING THE Family: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF VIEWING Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! I ‘What Makes a ‘Clean’ Movie?

The Lack of “Vulgarity’

138 143 143

Contents

II

III

The Display of Affluence The Spirit of ‘Sacrifice’ The Family as ‘Tradition’

148 150 152

The Constitution of the Ideal Indian Family

155

The Ideal of the Joint Family Affinity as a Value The Truth-telling Voice

156 158 159

The Pleasures of Viewing: Voyeurism, Narcissism, and a Happy Ending

162

IV __ The Emblematic Family in DDL]

I

Prologue

180 180

II

_Indianness: At Home and Abroad

181

Ill

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge

IV__

Romance, Indian Style

185 189

V_

The Tyranny of ‘Tradition’

196

VI

‘Pardes: Reinstituting the Contradiction of India and the West

200

VII

‘American Dreams, Indian Soul’

204

VIII

Indian Dream, Transnational Location

206

LEARNING To ‘ApyusT’: THE DYNAMICS OF PostT-MARITAL ROMANCE I Domesticating Romance Fiction

217 217

II

Woman’ Era

220

Ill

Twenty Tales of True Romance Tales of Courtship Tales of Conjugal Love Sources of Marital Tension Mediation Resolution

222

True-life Tales of Marital Breakdown

232

Prescription for a Happy Marriage

235

Conclusion

238

2

7

Tue Diaspora Comes Home: DISCIPLINING DESIRE

a
she analyses the textual structures of

those novelettes which her readers deem either highly satisfying or really awful to determine what narrative structure and characterization may

have to do with a ‘good read’.

Similarly in the visual arts, in reference to the genre of calendar art (or

chromolithography, as he prefers to call it), anthropologist Christopher Pinney’s ‘Photos of the Gods’ (2004) combines biographical material on the painters and the publishers, analysis of the subject matter and style of the prints, and observations on their mode of consumption—whether by

a nation fighting for independence against colonial rule or by common folk in a nondescript village in present-day central India. Indeed, Pinney

goes further to examine what he terms the ‘inter-ocular’ conversations”®

across the several media of fine art, chromolithography, theatre, and

photography, and—violating Saussure’s methodological antithesis of synchrony and diachrony/structure and history—traces the complex and often circular trajectories of particular visual representations, recycled, adapted and plagiarized through over a century of visual history (see simi-

larly Neumayer and Schelberger, 2003; Uberoi, 2002).

Nonetheless, as already remarked, few analysts can achieve this degree

ofall-round balance, and indeed some purists (even Pinney himself in an-

other mood [2001]; also, Hermes, 1995: 144ff) assumea sort of advocacy

Freedom and Destiny

10

position on behalf of one or another emphasis. In particular, many socio-

logists and anthropologists, reacting against the high tide of decontextual-

ized structuralism,7’ insist that forms of representation are sociologically

meaningful only or especially in so far as they relate to aspects of social

practice, performance, and consumption”® (or, rather more crudely, have

demonstrable behavioural effects).

None of the essays that comprise this book can claim to have achieved the perfect balance. Mostly they focus on the written text or archive of

visual representations, with only limited attention to either the ‘author’

or the ‘audience’. The exceptions are two: Chapter 8 takes specific note of the readers’ responses to the romantic stories and to other features,

notably the interactive advice columns, of the magazine in which they were published. More frontally, Chapter 5 on the ‘family romance’ Bollywood movie, Hum Aapke Hain Koun .. .! looks specifically at audience response, and then works backwards (as it were) to consider the stated

intentions of the director and actors, and the formal structure of the text

as a species of cinematic ‘romance’. Indeed in this case, neither the text in itself, nor even the testimony of the producers and ‘stars’, was adequate

preparation for the revelation that many viewers perceived the film as a statement about ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ and the value of ‘sacrifice’, as well as about the challenges and dilemmas of national modernity.

Imagining the Nation

In his very influential work, Jmagined Communities(1991 [1983]), Bene-

dict Anderson had pointed to the role of what he termed ‘print capi-

talism’—the industrial organization of mechanical reproduction—in making it possible for ‘rapidly growing numbers of people to think about

themselves, and to relate to others, in profoundly new ways’, that is, as

co-members of the ‘imagined political community’ of the nation (1991: 36, 6). As a number of commentators have since pointed out, Anderson's observations require modification in several respects. First, it is obviously

important to look beyond the phenomenon of ‘print capitalism’, narrowly conceived, to consider other products of the modern culture indus-

tries—including, and especially, forms of visual culture. Thus in India over the last century and a quarter, not only the vernacular press, the news-

paper and the novel (the chief foci of Anderson's attention), but also

chromolithography, cinema and photography (and latterly television) have contributed importantly to creating and disseminating a shared

sense of national identity and belonging.” Second, the creation of a ~

‘Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

11

national public was not merely the benign and unintended outcome of the advent of print capitalism, as Anderson's exposition proposes. On the contrary, the new technologies of reproduction were very actively and deliberately deployed in colonized societies for the propagation of nationalist and anti-colonial sentiment, in cat-and-mouse games with the

colonial censors (e.g. Mitter, 1994; Pinney, 2002, 2004).*°

Indian nationalism, as Partha Chatterjee has argued (in both exten-

sion and revision of Anderson's thesis), had a double thrust: on the one

hand, the imitation and appropriation of Western skills in the ‘outside’,

‘material’ domain of the economy, statecraft, science and technology; and

on the other the protection against appropriation and contamination of the ‘spiritual’ domain of Indian ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, identified with the ‘inner’ sphere of marriage and family life (1989, 1993: 6). This ex-

plains why questions of the conduct and deportment of women, and of the relations of the sexes in the domestic domain, were such important foci of discursive attention on the part of colonial authorities, social

reformers, and cultural nationalists alike (ibid.: 9).>!

Chapter 2 in this book takes up this question directly in relation to the medium of calendar art, dwelling on the ‘iconicization’ of the figure of the woman as symbol of the national society. Calendar art was the product

of ‘modernizing’ trends in the fine arts in India—the domestication of

techniques of oil painting and the mastery of Western perspectivism— allied with the dissemination of new technologies of reproduction. From the very beginning, mass-produced colour prints lent themselves to the expression of nationalist sentiment, envisioning the nation through its landscape, its bounded territory, its gods and goddesses and sacred sites, its myths and legends, its heroes and martyrs and, especially, its women.

A peculiar characteristic of the medium of calendar art in the Indian set-

ting was the co-production by the industry of sacred icons for worship and secular prints for instructional and decorative purposes, resulting in a semiotic conflation of the figures of goddess and woman. Significantly, as I will shortly argue, Hindu polytheism has enabled and encouraged the exploration of multiple femininities—both mortal and divine—notwithstanding the overall thrust towards homogenization of the visual field in accordance with the commercial logic of mass-production on the one

hand, and the political logic of nation-building on the other.

A great deal has now been written—by lar—on the way in which the figure of the the signifier of the national society—in the gle and in the articulation of post-colonial ‘Mother India’ is a conspicuous example

feminist scholars in particuIndian woman has served as course of anti-colonial strugmodernity: the ‘invention’ of of this. Conversely, other

12

Freedom and Destiny

aspects of national domesticity have received relatively scant attention. For instance, what was the nature of ‘the family’ that occupied the inner space of the home, signifying unsullied ‘tradition and the moral bedrock of the nation? It’s hard to say. From the late nineteenth century, studio photography had begun to endorse the bourgeois ideal of companionate marriage, and calendar art of the post-Independence period—perhaps influenced by the heroic vision of Socialist Realism—presents us with the image of the conjugal couple, productive and procreative in the service of

the nation (see Uberoi 1999-2000). On the other hand, the popular films discussed in Chapters 5 and 6 (and even the romantic stories analysed in

the subsequent two chapters) embed the conjugal couple very firmly in the disciplining framework of the Indian ‘joint family’, the form of family organization that—in nostalgic recall—is seen to represent the best of Indian ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’. On the projection of the figure of the child as a sign of the nation— a theme taken up in Chapter 3—there is remarkably little social scienti-

fic meta-discourse,”? though in fact the trope is ubiquitous through the

contemporary media. Just as the attributes of femininity are modulated by the conflation of goddess/woman/nation, so also the imagination of childhood in calendar art has tended to conflate deity, child, and nation. (The ‘deity’ concerned is, of course, the mischievous child-god Krishna.)

The child is seen as closer to god, as well as god-like; as the auspicious instrument of the continuity of the family and society; as the embodiment of the future citizen, innocent of the social conceits that divide man

from man; as the future guarantor of national security; and as the instru-

ment of the neo-liberal agenda—the consumer par excellence. The visual representation of childhood in popular prints thus provides an example of the way in which the exploration of the popular media may open up and highlight issues on which Indian sociologists have scarcely bothered

to reflect.

TIT. GENDER AND GENRE From the 1960s onwards, feminist scholars and activists have been especially sensitive to the issues of representation of women, seen in relation

to questions of authorship and production on the one hand, and consumption on the other. Several aspects of this meta-discourse deserve brief attention. The first is a range of theorizing concerning the gendered nature of the ‘look’ or the ‘gaze’, developed initially in the context of feminist

cinema studies. Secondly, reflection on the genres of both folk and mass

‘Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

13

culture that are produced by women or for a largely female audience— romance fiction and TV soap operas are examples commonly given, but in the Indian context we should also consider women’s expressive and performative folk genres. Thirdly, and relatedly, one must address the literature on ‘resistance’, that is (in different theoretical paradigms), non-

elite, subaltern, antinomian and oppositional discourses and genres, and counter-hegemonic moments and moods within dominant discursive formations. Visual Culture and the Controlling ‘Gaze’ Several theoretical traditions, at various levels of abstraction, address the

social, ideological and psychic components of subjectivity formation, based on the idea that the individual's subjective capacity to interpret visual imagery is significantly modulated by his or her social position, among other factors (see e.g. Hall, 1980). A major influence in this line

of thinking has been the work of Michel Foucault, who has explored the

constitutive relationship of power and knowledge in a variety of discursive practices. Foucault’s theory of the controlling power of ‘the gaze’ exercised through modern instruments of ‘surveillance’—from the clinic to the prison to the census operation—has been particularly influential in interpreting artifacts of visual culture.*4 From another direction, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis has emphasized, firstly, the way in which the image as fetish serves as the focus of unresolved and unexpressed emotions; the erotic compulsion to ‘look’ (the ‘scopophilic instinct’) and its inverse, the pleasurable desire to be seen; and the power of fantasy by

which the self, as viewer, identifies with the object of the look (see Freud,

1977: 69-70).

Gender is obviously a critical ground of social positioning and influence on the scopic regime. As art historian, John Berger has written in analysing the role of the female ‘nude’ in Western oil painting (see also Chapter 2): In the art-form of the European nude the painters and spectator-owners were usually men and the persons treated as objects, usually women. This unequal

relationship is so deeply embedded in our culture that it still structures the

consciousness of many women. They do to themselves what men do to them. They survey, like men, their own femininity. . . .

Today the attitudes and values which informed that tradition are expressed through other more widely diffused media—advertising, journalism, television.

14

Freedom and Destiny But the essential way of seeing women, the essential use to which their ima-

ges are put, has not changed. Women are depicted in a quite different way from men—not because the feminine is different from the masculine—but

because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male, and the image of

the woman is designed to flatter him (Berger, 1972: 63).35

Both the Foucauldian and Freudian/Lacanian perspectives have contributed to the elaboration of feminist theories of the controlling power of the ‘male gaze’. In her foundational paper, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, first published in the film criticism journal, Screen, in 1975, Laura Mulvey sought to highlight the way in which the medium of ‘mainstream’ cinema gives rein to scopophilia in both its active and its

narcissistic aspects:

In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passivelfemale. The determining male gaze projects its

fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with

their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be

said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Woman displayed as sexual object is the Leitmotifof erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, she holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire (Mulvey, 1999:

383, emphasis added).

Mulvey then goes on (in an increasingly complicated argument) to link the gendered bifurcation of the gaze to the ‘narrative’ aspect of mainstream cinema, wherein the woman temporarily ‘freezes’ the flow of narrative action ‘in moments of erotic contemplation (1999: 384), while the

active male protagonist ‘controls events’ to advance the story-line (ibid.). Ultimately, she proposes that the ‘look’ of the camera, the ‘look’ of the audience and the ‘look’ of the characters vis-a-vis each other combine to affirm the controlling power of the male gaze (ibid.: 388). As noted, Mulvey’s brief essay has been exceptionally influential, both in film studies and in feminist analyses of gendered representation in a variety of visual media, but it has not gone unchallenged and Mulvey herselfhas had afterthoughts.*°Is the gaze always ‘male’? Is there a role for the female spectator that is neither passive nor narcissistic? Is it possible for the gaze to objectify the male figure as erotic Other? Whatare the psychosexual dynamics of gay and lesbian spectatorship? To what extent does empirical audience research confirm or reject the psychoanalytic hypotheses? And to what extent can Mulvey’s insights be productively extended

‘Beautyful Wife, Denger Life’

15

to other genres of visual culture, and to other cultural contexts (such as

South Asia in the present instance) that may be informed by qualitatively

different theories of seeing?

For those who have worked in this field, myself included, Mulvey’s

characterization of the ‘male gaze’ is suggestive and productive in some respects, particularly at the interface of global and local scopic regimes. The ‘pin-up’ of calendar art is constructed and displayed as an object of male attention; the ‘item number’ of commercial cinema suspends the narrative for a moment of erotic spectacle; and the ‘vamp’ character of the Bollywood movie attracts the male gaze but—resisting control—is ultimately punished. In other respects, however, Mulvey’s proposition appears problematic, both in respect to ‘mainstream’ cinema in the non-

Western world (if not in Hollywood cinema as well), and also in its ana-

logical application to other genres of popular visual culture. For instance, utilizing the insights of L.A. Babb (1981) and Ashish Rajadhyaksha

(1993a; see also Eck, 1981), art historian Woodman Taylor has argued

that Indian popular cinema mobilizes a scopic regime based on the indigenousconceptsof drishti/darshan (the visual exchange between devotee and deity/guru) and nazar (the romantic eye-contact of lovers), operat-

ing in ‘interocular’, ‘hybridizing’ dialogue with other ‘systems of visual coding that include what may be labeled as “western” modes of viewing’

(Taylor, 2002: 320-1; cf. Freitag, 2001). Similarly, in reference to the

medium of calendar art, Kajri Jain has made the case that the act of ‘viewing’ sacred images is very much a two-way process: ‘the image is consecrated and becomes an embodiment of the divine, so that the gaze becomes an almost physical incorporation of divine substances’ (2002: 57). Indeed, it is widely believed that calendar images may have direct

effects—whether efficacious or malign—on the viewer (ibid.), which ex-

plains the generalized preference for ‘auspicious: themes—‘most obviously the deities, but also other potent or pleasant and fecund themes such as the babies, the “leaders” and landscapes’, . . . ‘depicted in bright,

cheerful and auspicious colours, with a great deal of attention to surface

decoration’ (ibid.).3”

As to the more specific question of the depiction of femininity, art historian Vidya Dehejia has argued that the sensuous femininity of an-

cient Indian sculpture is not adequately accounted for in Mulvey’s theory

of gendered spectatorship.>® Dehejia’s particular example is of two semi-

divine female figures of the Buddhist stupa of Bharhut (ca. 100 Bc): ‘Neither necessarily commissioned by men, nor intended to be viewed solely by them’, these sensuous figures testify to ‘the positive association

16

Freedom and Destiny

of woman with fertility, growth, abundance, prosperity and, hence, the auspicious’ (Dehejia, 1997b: 5). This quality of sensuous auspiciousness,

interpreted in the context of the overall prominence of female deities in Hindu-Buddhist visual imagery, produces in the Indian art tradition what Dehejia calls ‘positive engendering’, complicating the assumption of the controlling power of the male gaze as the self-evident and universally valid explanation for the exhibition of female sensuousness. Similarly, in the case of calendar art, the centrality of the feminine figure—goddess or woman—provokes reflection on the enabling potential (or perhaps otherwise) for women’s real lives of ubiquitous icons of feminine power? and on the multiplicity of feminine role models afforded by a polytheistic religious system (see Chapter 2). Reading the Romance

Popular romance fiction has long attracted the attention of feminist cultural scholars (and others)“ on account of its two special characteris-

tics: It is mostly authored by women, and it is also mostly consumed by women. These two features commend a genderized reading of the narratives, linking the phenomena of women as authors and women as readers with a decoding of the narrative and symbolic structures of the texts.*! Romance fiction may be interpreted as a sub-type of ‘women’s writing’, expressing women's sensibilities and desires in a way that male-authored

writing can and will not,’ or as filling the psychic and emotional needs

of a predominantly female audience. For instance, in her pioneering and very influential study, Reading the Romance, already referred to, Janice Radway suggests that romance fiction provides an emotionally satisfying escape from the psychological stresses of the wife/mother role in contemporary urban America (1987: esp. Ch. 3). Similarly, Leslie W. Rabine (1985) links the changing contents of more recent romance fiction to the increased participation of women in the workforce, and the reduplication in the workplace of women's domestic subordination to men. ‘Romance’,

according to Rabine, works to transcend the homologous asymmetry of the husband/wife and boss /employee roles, and simultaneously compensates for the alienating nature of women’s work in the contemporary ‘age of electronics’. Both studies suggest that women derive great pleasure from romance reading by identifying with the heroine whose true worth is eventually affirmed by the hero's undying love (Radway, 1987: 82-5; also Giddens, 1992: 44; Williams, 1976: 80-2). Romance reading in

this view is escapist, cathartic and addictive, and serves the same genderspecific functions for women as pornography does for men.“4 Certainly,

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

17

the very existence of a genre of romance fiction addressed almost exclusively to a female audience seems to testify to a real feminine need for fantasization on the themes of love, sex and marriage, and to the positive value for women of the idea of ‘romance’, in India now, as for long in the

West.

Gender and Resistance For feminist scholars, as for Marxist and more broadly Cultural Studies

scholars, the notion of ‘resistance’ has been of central concern. Is the

hegemony of the mass media in advanced capitalist societies absolute? Under what circumstances, as Gayatri Spivak has so eloquently put it in another context (1988), ‘can the subaltern speak’? And where—if at all—

is one to locate the woman's voice against patriarchal domination if ‘patriarchy’ is to define the initial condition of women’s existence? The idea of alternative and dissident voices coexisting with and challenging hegemonic ideologies derives from several sources: in particular, from Gramsci himself, as counterpoint to his concept of hegemony (1971;

see also Brooker, 1999: 99-100); from Mikhail Bakhtin’s notions

of dialogics and heteroglossia (1981); from the work of anthropologists on antinomian rituals, inversionary moments in rites of passage, and

‘liminal’ States, stages and processes (see e.g. Turner, 1969); from Stuart

Hall’s concept of ‘oppositional’ decoding, challenging ‘dominant-hegemonic’ and ‘negotiated’ reading positions (1980); and from Raymond Williams’ useful paradigm of ‘dominant, ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ cultu-

ral practices, in constant interaction (1995: 203-5). Indeed, if the truth

be told, the location of resistant voices has become something of a com-

pulsion in contemporary Cultural Studies, as also in feminist studies,

where the earlier focus on women’s ‘victimisation’ (see e.g. Creedon, 1989) has now yielded to preoccupation with strategies of ‘resistance’ (see Sunder Rajan, 2000: 153; also Agarwal, 1994: Ch. 9). ‘Don’t you think the idea of resistance can be a bit overdone?’, a despairing young teacher asked me recently, evidently dismayed by the challenge of finding redeeming pro-women features in a woman-authored text of popular fiction that was, to all manifest appearances, little better than confessional

exhibitionism. Feminist scholars have tackled the challenge of ‘hegemony in cultural discourses in several ways. One strategy is to focus on women as authors, and indeed, the study of ‘women’s writing’ has become a veritable aca-

demic industry.*° We might remark here (in reference to the present task

at hand) that very few women are recognized as painters of calendar art,

18

Freedom and Destiny

though many are believed to help behind the scenes in the artists’ atelies, and that women have no role in the calendar publishing industry and commercial networks of traders. Moreover, excepting as stars (underpaid as compared with male stars), women are relatively few in the Bollywood film industry—whether among producers, directors, or technicians. In the case of romance fiction, however, authors are predominantly

women

(in India as elsewhere), writing for a female audience from a

female-centric perspective, and invariably privileging the heroine as chief protagonist.‘” However, it is a matter of some debate as to whether and to what extent romance fiction can be interpreted as a credible form of resistance against male domination. Certainly, the romances analysed in Chapters 7 and 8 (and other features of the particular women’s magazine in which they are published) appear blatantly didactic in their endorsement of patriarchal family values and their counsel to women that the best course is to ‘adjust’ to the prevailing order of gender relations, no matter

what (see esp. Chapter 7; cf. Williams, 1976: 80-2).

Asecond strategy is to focus on specific expressive genres that are mostly created or consumed by women—the woman's magazine and the daytimeTV ‘soap’ are examples of such genres in the mass culture line. In the South Asian context, some of the most interesting work in this area is on

thewomen's folk songs and stories thataccompany life-crisisand calendrical rituals. Women's folk genres, Raheja and Gold write in their illuminating analysis of women’s performative traditions in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (1996), openly challenge the ideological basis of the north Indian family and kinship system: Atleast some of the speech genres used by women in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan tend more frequently than men’s to stress the desirability of disrupting patrilineal unity in favour ofa stress on conjugality; they speak of neutralizing

hierarchical distinctions between the bride givers and bride receivers, of the

emotional significance to women of affinal prestations, of the enduring nature of a woman's ties to her natal kin and the shifting evaluations of marriage that this entails, and of the moral obligation to reject sometimes a subordinate role vis-a-vis one’s conjugal kin (Raheja and Gold, 1996: 20).

Through these expressive genres, Indian women appear notas passive and voiceless, subordinate and sexually repressed, but as active agents in challenging the conventional dichotomization of dangerous versus procreative female sexuality, of natal loyalty versus conjugal ties, and of female power versus female virtue (Raheja and Gold, 1996: 27-9). Finally, complementing the shift in orientation from textual to reception studies, a number of feminist authors have sought to understand,

‘Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

19

in practical and everyday terms, the active pleasure that women derive from the consumption of popular culture genres. “To categorize and deplore a text as patriarchal’, Tony Bennett writes in his survey of popular fiction,

does not displace the pleasures it produces, and sometimes goes on produc-

ing—even for women—after it has been so named. But it also means recognizing that the effects of patriarchy are not limitless and that, even within texts whose governing properties are properly described as patriarchal, there are

contradictory tendencies at work, so that, in the ‘rub’ between them, conflicting

pleasures may be produced as the reader’s inscription in the text oscillates— caught ina dialectic of collusion with and subversion of patriarchal conceptions of the feminine (Bennett, 1990: 131-2, emphasis added).

In the long run, critics like Bennett argue, women should be seen not merely as victims of false consciousness, or infinitely manipulable by the culture industries, but as having the capability to read actively ‘against the grain’ to draw immense pleasure from texts that appear grimly patriarchal in both intent and execution (see Stacey, 1994 as a much cited empirical

case study in reference to Hollywood cinema). Ultimately, as Radway and

others have demonstrated in the case of romance fiction (see also Hermes, 1995; Snitow, 1983: 246-7), the publishers are obliged to give their audi-

ence what they desire and need if they are to survive in a competitive commercial environment.*? In other words, while the mass media embody and reproduce society’s dominant ideologies of class, race, and gender, they may also, paradoxically, serve as a means of escape from, even resistance to, these ideologies and valorizations; or as a space of intense struggle—of resistance and conformity at once (Krishnan and Dighe, 1990; Mankekar, 2000: 28—9; Modleski, 1980: 442, 448; Rabine, 1985: 253-5; Radway, 1987: 12, 217).

The studies just referred to, one might add by way of conclusion to this

brief discussion, locate ‘resistance’ variously: for instance, (i) in the dis-

juncture between text and reading; (ii) in aspects of the audience's iden-

tification with specific characters; or (iii) in the audience's selective or

oppositional appropriation of messages and internalization of values. One should add that contradictory processes are also at work in the pro-

duction of a text or message, manifested, for instance, in the notorious

struggles between authors and their publishers, or between film directors and their producers, as well as in the psychic constitution of individual authors; as a result, many cultural products exhibit their own internal

tensions and contradictions (cf. Bennett, 1990: 132-3). This is well il-

lustrated in the case of the popular films analysed in Chapters 5 and 6,

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Freedom and Destiny

where we see counter-hegemonic, oppositional perspectives expressed by specific characters or classes of characters in these movies (women and

children, and also the family servants), contesting the patriarchal order of

things. In fact, the episodic, ‘variety’ entertainment provided by the commercial Hindi film, played out over two or three hours, structurally enables oppositional readings through a number of formal devices—for

instance, through the character of the ‘comic’, through the persona of

the servant or social under-dog, through the vamp, through the Sufi saint or the renouncer, through women and children and, most importantly, through the interruption of diegesis by song-dance spectacles.*° TV. RETHINKING THE FAMILY

The seven studies of popular bearing on a number ofissues highlighting these questions comments might be in order ship studies in general, with inputs.>!

culture genres that comprise this book have in Indian family and kinship studies. Before in reference to the separate essays, a few regarding the sociology of family and kinspecial reference to feminist insights and

The Kinship Map of India Social and cultural anthropologists have contributed importantly to mapping the wide variety of kinship systems and practices that have historically characterized the Indian subcontinent and that make India a genuinely plural society at the most basic level of its social structure. South Asian communities differ radically in their rules of descent, resi-

dence, inheritance, succession and marriage, and in their patterns of

authority and socialization, all of them factors that impact on women's

real lives. While most of India follows the rule of patrilineal descent, there

are also significant pockets of matrilineal kinship—in the northeast and the southwest (extending down into Sri Lanka), and bilateral communi-

ties as well.>? There are important differences in family and kinship between Hindus and others, which have been given official recognition in (and are thus perpetuated by) community-specific customary and statutory law; and according to socio-economic and caste status. The kinship norms and practices of lower status groups often deviate markedly from those of the upper strata. On the whole, however, anthropologists see the regional dimension of Indian kinship organization as prevailing over the other diacritical

markers. In her pioneering work, Kinship Organization in India (1965),

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

21

first published in 1953, anthropologist Irawati Karve had identified four major regions of Indian kinship, correlating with the major linguisticcultural regions: the Indo-Aryan/Sanskritic ‘northern’ type, covering Sind, Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, parts of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal, Assam and parts ofNepal; the Dravidian or ‘southern’ type, covering the area of the Dravidian languages across south India; a ‘central’

zone, combining features of the structurally antithetical northern and

southern types; and an ‘eastern’ zone, something of a residual category in Karve's account, covering the area of the Mundari and Monkhmer languages and encompassing many tribal communities of central, eastern and

north-eastern India (Karve, 1965; also Trautmann, 1979; 1981: Chs 1 and 3). In a rough sense, as numerous studies have demonstrated, these

regions of Indian kinship correlate with a number of social demographic variables, and also with various of the accepted indicators of social

development and women’ ‘status’.*> It was recognition of the antithesis

of northern and southern kinship systems that provided Indian social anthropology of the post-Independence period with one of its abiding problematics, namely, does India havea ‘unity’ that overrides these fundamental differences at the most basic level of social structure and—if so— how is this unity expressed? There is no need here to go into the details of the arguments on this question, on which much ink has now been spilled; we may simply note the form that some of them have taken. Karve herself, for instance, as-

serted that Indian unity derives from the countervailing presence throughout the subcontinent of two major social institutions—the Hindu joint family, and the caste system (1965: 5, 8). Similarly, in his influential early account of Indian family and marriage, K.M. Kapadia (1966) proposed the Hindu patrilineal joint family as the unique and universal form of the Indian family (the Muslim, Christian and matrilineal families being essentially variants on this basic type). Other scholars have looked to similarities in the patterning of marriage relations that may override the typological differences between the northern and southern systems.™ For instance, Thomas Trautmann, an authority on Dravidian kinship, has

postulated the Hindu ideology of kanyadana (‘the gift of the virgin’) as the overarching, subcontinental principle of Hindu kinship (1981: Ch. 4), while in a somewhat different take on the same question the

French sociologist Louis Dumont has argued that the unity of Indian society lies in the special importance accorded relations of affinity (re-

lations by marriage) over relations of descent, specifically, in the marked

cultural and social differentiation of ‘wife-givers’ versus ‘wife-takers’.°>

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Freedom and Destiny

One possibility that has not been seriously developed in the anthropological literature is that Indian ‘unity’ may be the outcome of a modern process of ‘class formation’—in particular, the formation over the last century or more, and with increasing velocity in the post-liberalization period, of a ‘secular’ middle class whose habits of mind and lifestyles are determined more by their class location than by their regional, caste, reli-

gious or linguistic affiliations.*° Schooling, particularly English medium

schooling, is an important instrument of this process of class formation,

consolidation and reproduction (see Béteille, 1991), which is also materi-

alized (so to speak) through the burgeoning market for consumer goods,

by the modern media (TV and cable networks, cinema, print culture,

product advertising) and, increasingly, through the transnational connec-

tions of the Indian middle-class diaspora. This said, two caveats must be immediately introduced. First, this cosmopolitan, all-India middle and

professional class is not conspicuously cosmopolitan in its kinship and marriage practices, and the same is true even of the very wealthy and of Indian diasporic communities. Second, insofar as there has developed a

secular and cosmopolitan culture of family life across the upper and professional classes of Indian society (ibid.), this new ‘culture’ of kinship has not necessarily ‘trickled down’ to the populace as a whole. On the contrary, it may well have worked to polarize Indian society into the ‘dual cultures’ that sociologist M.N. Srinivas had prophetically spoken of (Srinivas, 1977b).

The Indian Joint Family Compared to their anthropologist colleagues, sociologists have mostly had a rather different perspective on the Indian family. According to postWar ‘modernization’ theory, the nuclear family of the modern western type (comprising parents and unmarried children) is demonstrably the

family form best suited to the requirements of a modern, urbanized, industrial, society founded on individualist values (Parsons and Bales,

1955). Itwas assumed that modernizing societies would inevitably follow the developmental path travelled by modern western societies. First, and most importantly in this model, the extended or joint family form would be replaced by the nuclear type; second, the practice of arranged marriage would yield to marriage by free choice; and third, marriage payments (whether dowry or brideprice) would no longer be a critical component of matchmaking and marriage arrangements (e.g. Goode, 1963; 1964). Such changes were presumed to be merely a matter of time once the modernizing process had begun, though the transitional period might be an extended one, and more or less destabilizing.

‘Beautyful Wife, Denger Life’

23

Actually, things have not worked out like this; or not in India, at least. Though the Indian public at large, and many social scientists as well, are convinced that the traditional Indian joint family is fast disintegrating and that numerous social ills can be ascribed to this single cause, socio-

logists of the family are still to be convinced (see Shah, 1996, 1998, 2005;

Uberoi, 2000, 2003a). Of course, the question is an extremely complex one,” not least because we know very little about the actual composition

and functioning of domestic groups in past times. There is a great deal of

uncertainty, too, as to whether the term ‘joint family’ should properly refer to a property-sharing and ritual group, as in classical legal usage; to aco-residential group; or toa ‘hearth’ or ‘household’ group (the basic unit of domestic consumption, several of which may inhabit a single residential structure). To add to this confusion, the contrasting categories of ‘joint family’ (understood as a family composed of at least two married couples) and ‘nuclear family’ (a married couple, with or without children), in terms of which the debate is usually conducted, are scarcely ade-

quate to capture the empirical variety of household types.*® In any case,

the attempt to classify households into one or another exclusive type obscures the fact that all households undergo cyclical processes of growth and contraction, recruitment and partition, in the normal course (see e.g. Madan, 1989: Ch. 4).

Again, this is not the place to go into details of the debate on the fate of the joint family, but some cautious generalizations may be attempted. To begin with, joint households (the ‘household’ is defined as the coresidential and commensal domestic group) are rarely the predominant household type; nuclear households are usually much more numerous,

and this was probably the case in past times too. There are, however, wide variations in the incidence of joint households, with the central and northern kinship regions having greater proportions of joint households than the South. In general, too, households appear to be larger, and probably more often joint, in rural as against urban areas, but here again there are wide variations—by community, by economic levels, and by length of urban residence. In fact, many long-established urban communities favour joint household living. Also, for certain types of occupations or modes of livelihood, joint household arrangements are economically advantageous, and these may range from powerful and wealthy business families, to very poor cultivators and urban immigrants. Second, according to the few available longitudinal studies of family size and composition in India, population growth and longer life expectancy have contributed to larger families and to a greater frequency of complex and joint households than was possible earlier, except for the

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Freedom and Destiny

relatively wealthy. However, in regions and population strata that have

undergone

fertility transition (the professional classes, for instance),

nuclear families are increasingly the rule; alternatively, the joint household is likely to assume the restricted form of the ‘stem family’, that is, a family unit comprising the parental couple or single surviving parent living together with a married son and his children (or even, nowadays, with a married daughter).

To the extent that onecan sum up this complex and uneven picture one might say that, empirically speaking, nuclear families remain, as they have long been, the predominant family form in India, but that the joint family also continues to be an empirically significant household type which, contrary to popular perceptions, is not conspicuously in a State of disintegration. Probably most individuals will have spent some years, if not the whole of their life, in a joint family. Moreover, nuclear families are very often encompassed within a neighbourhood kin network, in which case the etiquette of joint family relations (codes of deference, veiling of women, and other marks of respect) remains largely in place, regardless of actual household composition, and new brides are typically incorporated into their husbands’ households in the first instance. Arranged Marriage

It was widely expected that the custom of ‘arranged marriage’, so-called,

would decline as India modernized and as an individualistic ethos took

root. Indeed, the institution has no legal status according to the Hindu

Marriage Act (1955) or the Special Marriage Act (1954), the latter

(among other things) enabling marriage between adult citizens belonging

to different religions and caste communities.*? Moreover, romantic love

is a conspicuous motif in the popular mass media, and young people frequently express a preference for ‘love marriage’ in the course of attitudinal social surveys. In both urban and rural, communities, young men and women may have the opportunity to meet, fall in love, and get married, and in some subcultures (or class fragments) this may even be the general tule. Additionally, since it is believed that ‘love marriage’ does not require the giving of dowry, parents of girls may covertly welcome this solution to the dilemmas of finding suitable matches for their daughters in what is seen to be a highly competitive market. All this notwithstanding, the institution of arranged marriage has proved surprisingly robust, continuing to account for the vast majority (an estimated 90 per cent) of marriages in all communities, and this is by no means restricted to the ‘traditional’ sector of rural society. Probably,

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

25

the role of traditional matchmakers has now declined considerably. Matches may be found through kinship or other networks, but increasingly, given geographical and social mobility, through avenues such as the matrimonial columns of newspapers, matrimonial agencies (sometimes specializing in particular social categories or horoscopic matching), caste associations, temples, and the Internet.®! As the social institution of caste

assumes new functions and as caste groups become internally more differentiated, the boundaries of endogamous groups are loosened and redefined (though by no means disregarded), allowing a wider choice of marriage partners. Within limits, too, matching class status may override other considerations in the fixing of an alliance, including, in the south Indian case, preferential kin marriage (see Srinivas, 1984).

Though arranged marriage remains the rule, parents have also shown increasing willingness to adjust to their children’s romantic aspirations. Both boys and girls (boys more than girls) may be allowed a right of refusal of the partners suggested for them and, once a match has been finalized, modern parents may even encourage the young couple to go out together in a well-supervised form of courtship. Alternatively, a young couple who fall in love (with a socially appropriate partner, that is) may take their respective parents into confidence, and the marriage will then go ahead as for a parentally arranged match (see Chapter 8). Of course, not all love affairs can end so satisfactorily. Family elders

may be incensed at the young couple's disregard of their authority; or

the match, though legally permissible, may be held to violate customary tules of caste endogamy, of hypergamy,” or of gotra, sapinda, or village exogamy. The young couple may then be obliged to elope, forfeiting family support ata stage of life when few would have independent means; or their defiance of custom and family authority may even be visited with violent reprisal (see e.g. Chowdhry, 1998: 339-42). Altogether, it is clear that, despite changing lifestyles, the ideas of romantic love and courtship continue to provoke a great deal of public anxiety. An important reason for this is the high premium placed on a

bride’s virginity, in line with the ideology of kanyadana, the purest of all

gifts. Traditionally, in most communities, marriages were performed before, or immediately after, a girl’s puberty, and the practice continues to some extent, though unevenly through the country. However, with the legal age of marriage now 18 for girls and 21 for boys and the actual age of marriage rising steadily as well, a phase now exists between sexual maturity and marriage for which, cognitively speaking, there was no pro-

vision under the traditional order. A post-pubertal girl’s actions must therefore be very carefully monitored, since any indiscretion on her part

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Freedom and Destiny

would seriously compromise her family’s honour and impair her chances ofan advantageousalliance. For this reason, romantic courtship is socially acceptable, if at all, only if it leads to marriage; it cannot decently be a period of open-ended experimentation in relations with the opposite sex, as in a true ‘courtship culture’. The situation is somewhat different for young men but, even in their case, when it comes to the question of marriage, the family exercises all possible control.

Dowry and Brideprice Traditionally, marriage in India has been accompanied by payments both of dowry and—among certain groups and in certain regions of the country—of brideprice (sometimes termed ‘bridewealth’). Dowry refers to gifts of cash and goods given by the bride's family to the married couple and the groom's family, while brideprice refers to the gifts from the groom's family to the bride’s family in consideration of the marriage. Of the two, dowry has been the most prestigious arrangement for Hindus, in line with the kanyadana ideal, and an important index of social ranking. In some communities, particularly those with a tendency towards hypergamous marriage, middle status families may have to pay dowry to marry their daughters into families of equivalent or higher status, and brideprice to enable their sons to acquire brides (see Parry, 1979: Ch. 7; Srinivas, 1984; van der Veen, 1972).

In popular opinion, and indeed in the perception of some anthropologists, dowry should be seen as an inheritance that daughters receive on

marriage, while sons receive their inheritance in the redistribution of

property following the death of the parental generation (see Goody and

Tambiah, 1973; also, for a critique, Agarwal, 1994: 134—40).To be sure,

dowry is a major means for the dispersion and devolution of parental property. However, it is not a fixed share of an estate but rather a portion

determined by the current demands of the marriage ‘marker, the relative

numbers of sons and daughters in the family, and the bride’s looks, edu-

cation, and other attributes. More to the point, only a fraction of the

dowry gifts is intended for the bride herself and is hers to control (the portion known asstridhan, ‘woman's property’). The greater portion becomes

a fund of goods and cash, managed by the husband’s family and often put

to the service of the marriages of his sisters. Historically, marriage has always been the occasion for making status claims in terms of the relative social status of the intermarrying families, the lavishness of the hospitality and entertainment offered, and the number and importance of the guests in attendance, as well as the value of

the gifts given to the daughter and transferred through her marriage to

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

27

her husband's family. Writing in the 1920s, the colonial administrator,

Malcolm Darling (1925), deplored the culture of the Punjab peasantry who repeatedly drove themselves into debt with extravagant weddings (and equally extravagant funerals!), and many writers over a century and more have proposed a malign nexus between high rates of dowry, femaleadverse sex ratios, and female infanticide, most conspicuously in India’s northwestern States (e.g. Agarwal, 1994; Oldenburg 2002). Far from declining as India modernizes, the ‘dowry system’, as it is now called, has actually gained ground. Over the years, and increasingly, dowry has become the rule even in regions of the country and communities that formerly practised brideprice (see Srinivas, 1984). Along with the expansion of the dowry system to new communities, its quantum has also increased immeasurably. A generation or so previously, a dowry might consist of cash, jewellery, and items produced and accumulated by

the women of the household over along period, mindful of the standards

operating in the local community (see U. Sharma, 1993). However, burgeoning consumerism has produced an insatiable demand for the new luxury goods that the liberalized market now offers. In addition, the burden of feasting and entertainment, which falls most heavily on the bride's family, is an occasion for conspicuous consumption and the affirmation of social, political, and economic standing.

Within two years of Independence in 1949, the legislature had sought

to curb the giving and receiving of dowry, deeming it a ‘social evil’,“4and

this was followed up by guest control regulations introduced during the

Indian Emergency (1975-7) to restrict conspicuous spending on feasting

and hospitality. Discretely flouted even during the Emergency years, these regulations have increasingly been disregarded. From the 1970s, the gruesome phenomenon of ‘dowry deaths’ and some well-publicized cases of suicide by young women despairing of finding husbands in the competitive marriage ‘market’ becamea major focus of attention in the second phase of the Indian women’s movement (Gandhi and Shah, 1992:52-61,

218-20; Kishwar, 1999: Chs. 1-3; R. Kumar, 1993: Ch. 7). Yet clearly,

and. notwithstanding successive State interventions, the ‘problem’ of dowry has not gone away. If anything, it has become exacerbated, and taken on new forms. There appear to be no limits now to the concupiscence of grooms and their families, and the ambitions of the brides’ families to turn their daughters’ marriages into displays of unrestrained opulence. In any case, the regulation of consumption is essentially incompatible with the present regime of economic liberalization. If you have the money, the current thinking goes, it’s surely your business how you want to spend it—

whether in good taste or in bad!

28

Freedom and Destiny

Acommon public response to the ‘problem’ of dowry in contemporary Indian society is the assertion that the present dowry system is a perversion or distortion of a reputable ancient practice through which parents demonstrated their affection and their concern for their daughters’ com-

fort in their married homes, as well as endowing them with a share of

ancestral property. Whatever the case in the past—and one may note that neither feminists nor anthropologists are convinced by such arguments (see e.g. Agarwal, 1994: 134—40)—it is clear that there are now new sources of social prestige in contemporary Indian society and a greatly enlarged arena, beyond the local community, for status competition. First, as already suggested, the regime of liberalization since the early 1990s has opened up a huge market for consumer goods and de-legitimized the Gandhian rhetoric of simple living and self-denying nation-building (see Deshpande, 1993; also, 2003: Ch. 3). Second, there is now a substantial

diasporic Indian population for whom festivals, rituals and marriages have become the insignia of Indian ethnic identity in foreign lands. Indeed, the diaspora is the special audience for, and perhaps the driving force behind, Bollywood enactments of life-crisis rituals, especially marriages; for the emerging fashion industry which finds its real bread-andbutter in wedding costumes; for the wedding melas that have recently begun to feature prominently in the annual social event calendar in India and abroad; and for the new crop of niche magazines that instruct an eager public on how to stage a splendid ‘ethnic’ wedding—and where to shop forall they want to buy. Third, as already remarked, there is the emergence ofa new, cosmopolitan, upper-middle-class elite whose identity is rooted in a combination of professional qualifications and spending power, and a global language of consumption. Finally, post-‘Mandal’ politics has legitimated a new political assertiveness on the part of lower caste groups that had previously been relatively excluded from political power and economic opportunity: opulent marriages provide important public demonstration of their status aspirations and attainments. Clearly, contemporary dowry must be interpreted with reference to a wider political, economic, and cultural context.

The Limits of Family Change As cosmopolitan lifestyles spread via transnational flows of people and ideas and the power and seduction of the global media, one sees some indication of the disaggregation of the bourgeois-romantic ideal of conjugal intimacy to allow of sexual satisfaction outside heterosexual mar-

riage; the partial dissociation of sex and reproduction; the routinization

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

29

of ‘serial monogamy’ and ‘reconstituted families’; and the deliberate choice of childlessness by some modern working couples. These are contemporary (though by no means uncontested) global trends that also impact on particular segments of Indian society. The popular media in India, too, give considerable publicity to new lifestyles and family mores such as premarital sex, unwed motherhood, alternative sexualities, live-in arrangements, spinsterhood and bachelorhood, adultery and divorce, and especially to the lifestyles of the rich and internationally famous in the worlds of business, politics, sports, fashion, and cinema.

This openness is itself a change, of course, but it must be said that these

are the lifestyles of a minuscule minority. Besides, the religiosity and neo-

conservatism of different fractions of this same class tend to pass un-

remarked in the media. Similarly, the ‘progressive’ modern lifestyles of a segment of the new middle class—those who have eschewed arranged marriage, dowry, and gender-discriminatory inheritance practices, while not embracing sexual libertarianism—represent only a very small fraction of the Indian population, and their innovation in the area of kinship and marriage practices is contradicted by strong trends in the opposite direction. This is not to assert that processes of social, economic, demographic, and cultural change have had no impact on the family, kinship, and marriage systems of India. Apart from the changes already referred to, sociologists have pointed to the growth of the ideal of companionate marriage (see further below), the gradual influence of legal reform, family planning, and public policy in engineering a more bilateral emphasis in kinship behaviour, a degree of relaxation in the rules of etiquette gov-

erning the relations of in-laws, and so on. These changes are certainly not

insignificant, and they may also work to cumulatively improve the situation of women within the family context, though Indian feminists urge caution on this score.§” But on the whole it appears that the Indian family system continues to be culturally and typologically distinct from the Western (Euro-American) system, unexpectedly resilient, and remarkably adaptable to changing circumstances.

The Moral Economy of the Indian Family The empirical investigation of ‘the household dimension of the family’ as a basic social unit of production, distribution and consumption is obviouslya question of considerable importance to the sociology of India, as well as for policy makers concerned with issues of distributive justice within the household. However, the studies that comprise this book are

30

Freedom and Destiny

actually about a different dimension of family life, and one that is relatively independent of observed kinship behaviour.° They are concerned with the Indian family notas it really is, but as itis imagined to be through the contemporary media—that is, with the culture, ideology, or what I prefer to call here (rather stretching its original meaning) the moral economy” of the family. I see this moral economy as a dialogic (rather than a monologic) construction,”! dialogic in the sense that it is framed in

terms of a set of moral patrilineal joint family form of Indian family A rough-and-ready

dilemmas and contradictions, even as it posits the as the ideal, ‘traditional’ and culturally authentic life.” outline of this dialogical familial ethic might high-

light the following features and tensions:

First, the Indian family instantiates, for the most part, the typical prin-

ciples of a patrilineal kinship system whereby descent, succession and inheritance are reckoned in the male line, authority is vested in senior males and the residence rule is ‘patri-virilocal’ (in the technical language

of kinship studies), meaning that the new bride should be brought to live

with the husband’s family. Daughters are undervalued in this system, to whose continuity and reproduction they can make no contribution, for they are destined to be only temporary ‘guests’ in their natal homes. And

yet, the loss of the daughter is commemorated with great pathos in the

ritual performances that accompany a woman's transfer from her natal to her conjugal home, and indelibly etched into the collective consciousness

as the root metaphor of ‘loss’ (see V. Das, 1998; Minturn, 1993: Ch. 2;

Trawick, 1996: 163-70). Indeed, it isa loss not only for the woman's natal family but also—for the woman herself—a loss of her own selfhood. In her new family, the bride acquires a new personality, a new status (at the bottom of the pile), new responsibilities (often unreasonably onerous), and perhaps even a new name.

Second, the ideology of the patrilineal joint family privileges the lineal relation of parent(s) and son over the conjugal relation of husband and wife. Should a choice become necessary, an adult son's ‘duty’ to his family is expected to prevail over his desire for his wife. This principle is encoded in the joint family etiquette that requires the understatement of the marital bond in public. All the same, the lure of conjugal intimacy is conceded—both feared asa disruptive force, and intensely desired, especially, no doubt, by young women.” This is the root of the tension between dharma—moral code—and desire that runs through most of the essays in this book. Third, the collateral bond between brothers should properly prevail over both the parental and the conjugal bonds. In the context of the joint

‘Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

31

family, that is, a man must strive to give the same love to his brother's

children as he gives to his own,’”° and refuse to allow the wiles of women

to wreck fraternal solidarity. Nonetheless, the ‘naturalness’ of parental affection—and particularly the strength of the mother—child bond, forged through the mother’s ‘sacrifice’ during pregnancy, parturition and nursing—is acknowledged and cherished. Fourth, the brother-sister tie is seen as precious and inviolable—in-

deed, in some reckonings, it is the hinge on which the whole kinship

system is structured (see Jamous, 1991; Nuckolls, 1993; Trawick, 1996:

esp. Ch. 4). A sister must ultimately be given away in marriage and replaced by a wife, but the mutual responsibilities of brother and sister continue beyond the sister’s marriage, to be articulated in the next generation in the sister’s/brother’s special ritual relation with the sibling’s children. Fifth, marriage is not projected, primarily, as a means of individual

self-fulfilment, contracted on the basis of the romantic/sexual attraction

ofa boy anda girl. Itis, first and foremost, a union between families. Thus, when it comes to selecting a marriage partner, young men and women should be prepared to forego their individual hopes and desires in de-

ference to family and social obligation (and indeed, even to astrological

predetermination!). Nonetheless, the ideal of romantic attraction—registered for instance in the passionate exchange of lovers’ glances (nazar,

see Taylor, 2002)—is also treasured, albeit somewhat furtively, and celebrated in the folk and classical arts and the popular media. The institution of arranged marriage is the crux of the tension between obedience to elders and the contradictory desire for personal autonomy and individual freedom of choice that is invoked in the title of this book. Sixth, marriage should properly be a union of status equals within an endogamous community (the ‘caste”) whose existence and reproduction are dependent on the observance of this principle. But this ideal is in turn contradicted by the hierarchical superiority accorded wife-takers over wife-givers, based on the concept of the bride as a pure ‘gift’ presented to a ritual superior without expectation of worldly return (see Trautmann, 1981: Ch. 4.4). In fact, a vast anthropological literature explores the tension between caste-endogamous marriage (the marriage of status equals,

technically known as ‘isogamy’) and a woman's marriage into a family of superior caste status (known as ‘hypergamy’); on the trade-off between status and wealth that can be effected through dowry-giving; and of course on the long-term social ramifications of the hypergamous ideology (as reflected in such social phenomena as female-adverse sex ratios, dowry

deaths, and so on).

32

Freedom and Destiny

The contradictions and tensions indicated above in the context of the joint family and the wider kinship system are obviously of different types and orders. On the one hand—to invoke Claude Lévi-Strauss—is the contradiction that lies at the very heart of social life, reflected in the universality of the incest taboo.’6 The roles of wives and of sisters (or of brothers-in-law, thatis, wife-takers versus wife-givers) are structurally opposed, howsoever these roles are culturally scripted in different times and places. Secondly, there are what one might call ‘systemic’ contradictions, inbuilt into the system of kinship and marriage. For instance, patrilineal kinship systems have their own characteristic tensions (though anthropologists have regarded them as generally more ‘harmonious’ than matrilineal and bilateral kinship systems [see e.g. Fox, 1967]), particularly when it comes to the recruitment of women to the patriline through marriage, and the residual rights of out-marrying daughters (cf. Uberoi, 1995b); or a patrilineal ‘joint family’ requires the amicable co-residence of agnatic kin. Then there are the contradictions between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’, so to speak. The nuclear family form and companionate marriage are widely taken as signs of modernity, while the conventions of joint family living are nostalgically recalled to epitomize a bygone ‘tradition’, doomed to extinction in modern times. Indeed, the promotion of

the ideal of companionate marriage had been an important thrust in efforts to ‘reform’ the Indian family after the Victorian model from the latter half of the nineteenth century onwards (see Roy, 2005: Ch. 3). Similarly, the exercise of individual freedom of choice in the matter of mate-selection is associated with adulthood, liberal democracy and modernity. As a Member remarked during the parliamentary debates on the Hindu Code Bill: ‘If [people] can have political freedom in other spheres

of life, I do not see why they should not have freedom in their choice of

partners.’””

Reading together a number of the left-hand features of this matrix of familial values, one might discern the typical features of a ‘patriarchal’

kinship ideology (see Moore, 1988: Ch. 4; Uberoi, 1995b). It is an ideo-

logy that not only justifies the authority of the patriarch over women and juniors (male and female) in the family but also, sad to say, influences notions of entitlement to household resources, to the material disadvan-

tage of women and girl-children in particular.”®As many feminist scholars have pointed out, this gender-discriminatory familial ideology has deeply inflected law and public policy in post-Independence India, notwithstanding the lip-service paid to the ideal of gender equality (see Agarwal, 2000; Kapur and Cossman, 1996: Ch. 2).

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

33

This much conceded, it would bea mistake, I believe, to read this familial ethic as merely an ideological justification for systematic discrimina-

tion against women and girls (though it is that as well). For instance, the

brother-sister bond does not fit neatly into a hierarchical matrix of crosssex relations. In the moral economy of the family, the brother is meant to act as a trustee, as it were, of his sister’s welfare, just as the patriarch acts

on behalf of the whole family, and it is quite another matter that, in the political economy of everyday family relations, some brothers do not conform to this ideal,”9 or that family heads do not always act impartially in the best interests of all family members. On the other hand, and more importantly, not only women, but abo men (junior as well as senior), may be required to sacrifice their individual self-interest for the collective good. That is, the moral economy of the Indian family requires not only the disciplining of others—women and juniors in particular—but also se/fabnegation and se/fdiscipline, including on the part of the patriarch/family head, whose responsibility

as trustee is all the greater.®°In other words, this moral economy of family relations is not based on the ideal of the pursuit of individual self-interest,

that foundational principle of neo-classical economics,*! but rather on

the ideals of selflessness and altruism, duty and sacrifice. The surrender of a daughter to another family for all time, the denial of conjugal love, the sublimation of parental affection, and the constraint on individual autonomy and freedom of choice are ‘sacrifices’ that are seen as ennobling of men and women alike. And, while women are regarded as temperamentally better suited than men to make such sacrifices, men, too, must expect and aspire to forgo individual self-gratification on behalf of family

unity.

V. DHARMA AND DEsIRE, FREEDOM, AND DESTINY

In their several ways, as the essays that comprise this book illustrate, the

contemporary mass media in India articulate and explore the tensions,

ambiguities and dissonances embedded in the moral economy of Indian family life, linked to the challenges of nationhood, citizenship and modernity. They do so in two major modes, the ‘iconic’ and the ‘narrative’ .® In the iconic mode, calendar art prints categorize women and children in various styles and roles, effecting a partial conflation with divine imagery and recalling the distinctive attributes of the various figures of the Hindu pantheon (see above; and Chapters 2 and 3). In the narrative mode, the

popular films and romantic short stories analysed here seek to resolve

34

Freedom and Destiny

certain existential contradictions of family life—hopefully, to bring about a happy ending solution. Thus, Guru Dutt’s Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam(1962) sets up a paradigm

of love—love within marriage, love outside marriage, love as duty, love as passion, unconsummated love—seeking in particular to reconcile the tension of wifely duty (dharma) and sexual desire, and to instantiatethere-

by the ‘modern’ ideal of romantic conjugality (Chapter 4). In fact, as the

narrative unfolds, the defiant attempt of the young wife (Chhoti Bahu)

to take on the extra-marital role of the courtesan and provide her husband with companionship and passionate love is tragically doomed; her errant husband’s excessive fascination for the town’s most beautiful dancing girl comes to nought; and the transgressive love of the humble retainer for the mistress of the house is never consummated. Instead, the film's only ‘happy ending’ relationship—such as it is—stands on the negation of these excesses of sexual passion to reiterate the social and cosmic predestination ofa couple who, unbeknown to themselves, had already been mar-

ried in their childhood.

One of the most popular Bollywood movies of all time, Sooraj Barjatya’s romantic family drama, Hum Aapke Hain Koun .. .! (“Whatam Ito you’, acronym, HAHK, 1994) explores several aspects of the moral economy of the South Asian kinship and marriage (Chapter 5): The first is the tension between individual freedom in the selection of a marriage partner, and obedience to the will of family elders. It is only after many melodramatic twists and turns of the film plot that the young couple are finally united with the blessings of the family elders—freedom of choice and social necessity happily reconciled. Second, are the structural contradictions inherent in the institution of the patrilineal joint family. In HAHK, the sticky roles of mother-in-law and sister-in-law—that staple

source of melodramatic tension in Indian television ‘soaps’ —are for good

measure eliminated; the authoritarian father-figure is absent; and the

narrative unfolds so as to exemplify the moral values of the joint family through various acts of self-abnegating ‘sacrifice’: the uncle ‘sacrifices’ a family life of his own to bring up his orphaned nephews; the younger brother ‘sacrifices’ his love for the happiness of his elder brother; and the sister ‘sacrifices’ her personal happiness in deference to the decision of family elders and for the good of her dead sister’s motherless infant; and so on. (Indeed, it is the willingness of individuals to make such sacrifices

on behalf of the collective that allows the imagined community of the joint family to epitomize so naturally and so perfectly the encompassing imagined community of the nation.) Third, is the tension between inter-

marrying families. The respective patriarchs are scripted as ‘good friends’,

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life

35

not ranked as wife-takers and wife-givers, while the cross-sex joking and horse-play between the bride’s and the groom’s parties sanitize the sexual innuendo implicated in the marriage contract: it’s all just good fun, we are told. Chapter 6 presents an analysis of two Bollywood movies, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (‘Those with the heart win the bride’, dir. Aditya Chopra, 1995) and Pardes(‘Foreign land’, dir. Subhash Ghai, 1997), that

explore the moral economy of family relations in diasporic locations. In both cases, the hero's se/f-restraint—his acquiescence in the patriarch’s right to ‘gift’ his daughter in marriage and his sexual self-control—bring about the simultaneous reconciliation of individual desire and social expectations—also, significantly of ‘American dreams’ and ‘Indian soul’4— to stay the moral depletion that must eventually attend translocation. In these films we see the popular media light years ahead of the sociologists in addressing the identity problems of the Indian middle class diaspora and—through the interrogative voices of women—foregrounding from their perspective issues of gender, sexuality and personhood. The woman's perspective is not back-stage but unapologetically highlighted in the romance fiction of Indian women’s magazines analysed in Chapters 7 and 8, though closure ultimately endorses the patriarchal contract. The former chapter, focusing on romantic stories ofpost-marital love (a Subcontinental contribution, one might say, to the genre of romantic fiction), addresses two interrelated problems of gender and kinship. The first, recalling the case of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, seeks to

bring romantic love into arranged marriage as a young married couple overcome various problems in their relationship to put their marriage on even keel. Narratively, this resolution is achieved through a process of ‘adjustment which, sadly, is overwhelmingly scripted as the responsibility of the wife. (It helps, of course, if the husband—wife relationship is already asymmetrical in all the physical and socio-economic indicators that matter: in terms of age, height, social status, occupation, salary, prospects, etc.) The second is the problem of the wife's loss of selfhood and autonomy within the conjugal relationship and in her marital home. She needs to /earn to adjust to this reality, the stories tell us, and to recognize

that marriage is more important to her in the long run than a false sense of independent selfhood. More problematic in terms of their narratival logic are the romantic stories concerning the vicissitudes of courtship that are presented and analysed in Chapter 8. Socially speaking, courtship continues to be a fraught area in contemporary Indian social life, and there is obviously no guarantee that romance will lead to marriage. Quite to the contrary, a

36

Freedom and Destiny

failed romance can lead to a damaged reputation—irretrievably so, if the relationship has already been sexualized. The inspired indigenous solution to the dilemmas of romance and mate-selection—the contradiction between the impetuousness of youth and the wisdom of age, modernity

and tradition, freedom of choice and social conformity—is the insti-

tution of ‘arranged love marriage’, in one of its two well-recognized forms. Either a marriage is parentally arranged, and the engaged couple are thereafter allowed to go out together in a well-supervised approximation of romantic courtship; or else a young man and woman (appropriately matched by all the usual criteria) first fall in love, and then bring their parents into the picture to conduct the marriage negotiations as for a proper ‘arranged marriage’. Either way, the danger of romance is neutralized, and parental authority happily reconciled with individual desire. Nothing

could be more ideal—for the couple, for their parents, or for the nation,

whose icon is, and remains against all challenges, the family. Despite the conservative and ultimately masculinist solutions that are ultimately offered to the dilemmas of courtship, marriage and family relations in the age of globalization, the popular media afford resistance of sorts, and alternative perspectives and emphases which deserve attention. This is the case in both the iconic mode, which suggests a multiplicity of models of the relations of the sexes, or highlights unexpected features of indigenous ideals of childhood, and even more so in the narrative mode,

especially through the projection of women’s roles and women's voices. While the ‘woman's voice’ thus appears as the voice of ‘resistance’ against adominant and patriarchal familial ideology, it is also—dialogically—the voice of the Other’, independent of gender identity. We might allow feminist author, Carol Gilligan, to have the last word on this:®

The different voice I describe is characterized not by gender but theme. Its association with women is an empirical observation, and it is primarily through

women’s voices that I trace its development. But this association is not abso-

lute, and the contrasts between male and female voices are presented . . . to

highlight a distinction between two modes of thought and to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex. In

tracing [moral] development, I point to the interplay of these voices within each sex and suggest that their convergence marks times of crisis and change. . . . My interest lies in the interaction of experience and thought, in

different voices and the dialogues to which they give rise, in the way we listen to ourselves and to others, in the stories we tell about our lives (Gilligan, 1982:

2, emphasis added).

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

37

Notes 1. Anxiety over the debilitating effects of semen loss and the valorization of celibacy are recurrent themes in ethnographic studies of Indian masculinities (see e.g. Allen, 1982: 2-8; Alter, 1996, 1997; Daniel, 1984; John and Nair,

1998b: 15-19), and highlighted in writings on Gandhi's theory and practice of brahmacharya (see e.g. Caplan, 1987; Kakar, 1989: Ch. 6, among others). To put matters in perspective, however, Steve Derné’s study (2003) of men’s attitudes to conjugal sexuality, based on north Indian ethnography, cautions that fear of female sexuality characterized the responses of only 6 per cent of his sample of largely upper-caste, middle-class men, whereas over one-third claimed to value close relations with their wives (ibid.: 110, n.9). On the psy-

chological basis for the ambivalence towards women, rooted in the mother— son relationship, see Kakar, 1981a: Ch. 3; also Nandy, 1980.

2. See similarly Kakar (1989) and Ross and Kakar (1986), subsequently challenged in the revisionist account of Kurtz (1992). Feminists, too, have

pointed to the misogyny embedded in such literature (e.g. John and Nair,

1998b).

3. On the whole, Indian sociologists have kept their distance from Cultural

Studies (as well as from Post-modernism and Post-colonialism), and additionally seem unsure as to whether popular culture is a suitably respectable

object of their disciplinary attention, or an unwelcome deviation from the straight and narrow. Some have been overtly critical of the Cultural Studies orientation. André Béteille, for instance, has seen the recent engagement of Anthropology and Cultural Studies in the US academy as sufficient reason for urging a distancing of Indian Sociology from Anthropology. (Earlier he had argued that Sociology and Social Anthropology were to be regarded as overlapping disciplines in the Indian context.) Others have sought to reclaim selected aspects of the Cultural Studies project, while critiquing others (see e.g. Rege, 2000). 4. Forsuccinct summaries of the concept and its several usages, see e.g. Brooker, 1999: 167-8; Fiske, 1989; Kazmi, 1999: Ch. 1; Mukherji and Schudson, 1991: Introduction; Storey 1993: Ch. 1. Seealso Appadurai and Breckenridge’s argument (1988) for using the term ‘public culture’ instead. 5. The work of Theodor Adorno is pertinent here (see Adorno, 2000; Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972). In India, high culrure—‘culture’ per se—is linked to

notions of ‘tradition’, ‘religion’, and ‘classical’ art forms. For useful reflections on Indian popular culture in this light, see Mitra (1993: esp. 52-60), and

Pinney (2001). . 6. See, notably, Bakhtin (1984) on the Rabelaisian world view; also Storey

(1993: 130-4).

38

Freedom and Destiny . Pierre Bourdieu'’s notion of habitus (see 1990) is a useful reference point, as is Michel de Certeau’s concept of ‘the everyday’ (1984). See K. Jain (1995)

fora serious attempt to analyse aspects of Indian popular print culture within the framework of the sociology of everyday life. - I am thinking here particularly of the work of the Subaltern Studies historians, for instance, Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insur-

gency (1983), among others. . This concept is particularly associated with the work of Antonio Gramsci

(e.g. 1971), but, in one form or another, is widely prevalent within Cultural Studies. Several studies of popular culture in India, for instance Mitra (1993) onTV mythologicals (see also Krishnan and Dighe, 1990), and Kazmi (1999: esp. 67-8) and Pandian (1992) on popular cinema, have located themselves

within Gramscian frameworks.

10. The idea that folk cultures will inevitably be eclipsed by mass culture is open

to challenge in the contemporary Indian context, where one sees a complex and dynamic—if unequal—relationship between mass culture and folk artforms (see e.g. a number of essays in Appaduraiet a/., 1991; Banerjee, 1989b; Chatterji, 2003). While many traditional folk arts (and classical arts for that matter) have fallen into oblivion with changing fashions and declining

patronage, others have been revived through State support or appropriation into the market economy, albeit often changing their forms and functions in

the process. Importantly, in the post-colonial Indian context, folk art genres arealso the focus of social mobilization around issues of language politics and regional identity. 11.

For a useful explanation of ‘culture industries’, see Brooker (1999: 52-3).

While conceding the ‘ideological’ nature of the culture industries, it will be

clear that I allow a greater role for the subjectivity of the consumer and for resistant voices and moments within otherwise hegemonic cultural texts. 12. As Pierre Bourdieu (1984) has reminded us, however, all such distinctions must be regarded as judgments of taste, that is, as the socially agreed-upon

cultural markers of superior class status in modern bourgeois society.

13. Notably with respect to the establishment of lithographic presses in Calcutta in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (see Guha-Thakurta, 1992; Mitter, 1994: esp. Ch. 4; Pinney, 2004: Ch. 2), in the career of Raja Ravi

Varma, widely regarded as the founder of the Indian calendar art industry (see Chapter 2; also Mitter, 1994: Ch. 5; Neumayer and Schelberger, 2003; Pinney, 2004: Ch. 4); and in the careers of commercial artists trained in the

colonial art schools, some of whom made their living painting for calendars and other such commissions (K. Jain, 1998).

14. Jyotindra Jain, personal communication. Jain linked calendar art in this res-

pect to the mural art of the Shekhawati mansions of Rajasthan.

‘Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’ 15.

39

Foran excellent discussion of the negative and pejorative characterizations of Indian commercial cinema by the Indian intelligentsia, see Vasudevan (1993); also S. Chakravarty (1996: 44-6, 235-48). Other attempts to ‘socio-

logize’ the evolution of post-Independence cinema genres include Kazmi (1999: esp. Ch. 2); Nandy (1995a, 1995b, 1995c); Prasad (1998); Rajadhyaksha (2000); Vasudevan (2000b); and latterly Virdi (2004: Ch. 1).

16. On Indian women’s writing in general, however, there has been important new reflection (see e.g. Tharu and Lalita, 1993: esp. 1-37). For further refer-

ences to writings on Indian romance fiction, see Chapters 7 and 8.

17. See similarly Virdi (2004: esp. Ch. 1). 18. An example of the latter orientation is Mary John’s feminist analysis (1998)

ofa series of recent public scandals in which so-called ‘Indian’ values were put under test or purportedly threatened by the Western ‘cultural invasion’ (see also Ghosh, 1999: 238-59). John uses materials that conspicuously register

the new tastes of the post-liberalized 1990s, foregrounding new contradictions of political and sexual economy: the hedonistic advertisement for Kama Sutra condoms;

the glossily fashionable,

revamped

women’s

magazine,

Femina, and its up-market competitors (as against the staid Woman era on

which I draw in Chapters 7 and 8); the thematically adventurous Mani Ratnam films, Roja and Bombay (as against the ideologically conservative box-office hits, HAHKandDDL/that I analyse in Chapters 5 and 6), and the

whole new ‘business’ of beauty. Her concern is obviously with the cultural consumption patterns of the cosmopolitan upper-middle-classes who are seenas the crucial link between the local and the global, and as consumerspar excellence. See also in this line, Butcher, 1999a; Dwyer, 2000; Munshi, 1997,

1998, 2001; Rajagopal, 1999; and Thapan, 2000, 2004.

19.

See Satish Deshpande’s useful discussion (2003: Ch. 6) of the methodological

difficulties in estimating the size of the much-vaunted Indian middle class, and in identifying ‘fractions’ thereof. My use here of the term ‘middle class’ and reference to fractions such as ‘upper middle’ and ‘lower middle’ is admittedly imprecise—even tautological insofar as I identify these fractions by what they consume in the way of cultural products, and in turn rank the products as indices of class status. See also in reference to studies of popular

culture, Purnima Mankekar’s study of lower-middle-class households and.

their tele-viewing practices (2000: esp. 74-80; 367n.40). 20. Page 3 of the magazine section of several national daily newspapers is devoted to pictorial coverage of the social life of the metropolitan upper classes. ‘Subalternism’ refers to the Subaltern Studies series of publications, begun (1982) under the editorship of social historian Ranajit Guha and dedicated

to writing the counter-official history of the non-elite classes. See Ashcroft et al., 2004: 215-19; also note 8 above.

40 21. 22.

Freedom and Destiny For explanations of Saussure’s principles of semiotic method, see e.g. Barthes (1967, 1972a); Culler (1976); Leech (1974); and Lyons (1967). See in particular Roland Barthes’ Elements of semiology (1967) and his

important essay, ‘Myth today’ (1972a), for an attempt to broaden the scope

of Semiology; Claude Lévi-Strauss’ recuperation of Saussure as the basis of his ‘structural anthropology’ and the structural study of myth and totemism

(1963: 31-54); Christian Metz (1974) and de Lauretis (1984) on the semiotics of cinema; also Hawkes (1977); Silverman (1983); Sturrock (1979), and Williamson (1983), among many others. 23.

Useful handbooks of visual culture studies are Evans and Hall (1999), and

van Leeuwen and Jewitt (2001). For writings on visual culture in South Asia, see e.g., Asher and Metcalf (1994); Brosius and Butcher (1999); and

24.

Ramaswamy (2003), in addition to numerous monographs on individual visual art genres.

See Wellek and Warren's early discussion (1963) of ‘intrinsic’ versus extrinsic’

approaches to the literary work of art.

25. See Propp (1968); also Lévi-Strauss (1978). 26. Inter-ocularity—an extension to the visual field of the principle of intertextuality. 27. Leading the fray on behalf of British empiricism against French structuralism

was Edmund Leach’s edited collection of anthropological essays on the

structural study of myth and totemism (see Leach, 1967).

28. Anumber of scholars have also critiqued the excessive focus on the consump-

tion aspect of popular culture, insofar as this emphasis tends to erase issues of the politics of cultural production and thus to dilute the agenda of the Cultural Studies project as first formulated by the Birmingham Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies in the 1980s (see e.g. Halleta/., 1980). From a South Asian location, Sharmila Rege also contends that focus on consumption privileges mass culture, effectively excluding folk popular cultures from

29.

the ambit of the Cultural Studies project (2000: 1038-40; see also Note 10 above). See Freitag, 2001; also Chakravarty, 1996; Dirks, 2001; Dwyer and Pinney, 2001; Guha-Thakurta, 1992; Mankekar, 2000; Mitter, 1994; Pinney, 2002, 2004; Uberoi, 1990b, 1999-2000, 2003c; and Virdi, 2004.

30. They continue to be critical to the articulation of the nationalist agenda. See

e.g. Brosius, 1999b; Doraiswamy, 2003; Mankekar, 2000; Rajagopal, 2001; also, papers in Brosius and Butcher, 1999; Dwyer and Pinney, 2001; Ramaswamy, 2003.

31. There is a huge literature on this theme. See among others Chaudhuri, 1996;

C. Gupta, 2001; Hasan, 1994; Roy, 2005;T. Sarkar, 2001; Uberoi, 1996d.

32. See the references cited in Chapter2 in reference to the visual field. The figure of the woman was also used to iconicize sub-national and communal iden-

tities (see esp. Ramaswamy, 1999).

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

41

33. But see the references cited in Chapter 3. Much of the research currently undertaken on the theme of children and the media is concerned with

measuring the supposedly harmful effects of the media on children. Forasummary of theoretical positions on the controlling power of ‘the gaze’,

see Stuart Hall’s comments in Evans and Hall (1999: 309-14); also Brooker (1999: 89-91), Gamman and Marshment (1988: 1-7); among others.

35. Erving Goffman’s well-known symbolic interactionist analysis of ‘gender

advertisements’ (1979) provides ample illustration of these principles, albeit within a different theoretical paradigm. See Mulvey (1989, 1990); also Gamman and Marshment (1988); Stacey (1994); Storey (1993: 139-46), and, related to Indian popular cinema,

Rajadhyaksha (2000).

37. T have illustrated this in Chapter 3 in reference to the auspicious ‘power’ of ‘baby’ imagery.

38. To be fair to her, it should be recorded that Mulvey herself was specifically referring to the medium of cinema and the experience of movie-viewing ina cinema theatre.

39. A question hotly debated by Indian feminists, and others. See the literature cited in Chitgopekar (2002); also Appaduraiet al. (1991: 8); Pauwels (2004).

For instance, and notably in the present context, the sociologist Anthony Giddens, who sees romance fiction as an important source for reflection on ‘the transformation of intimacy’ in modern society (see Giddens, 1992). Giddens describes romance fiction as ‘the counter factual thinking of the

deprived’ which ‘in the nineteenth century and thereafter participated in a

major reworking of the conditions of personal life’ (ibid.: 45). See also

Raymond Williams’ preliminary but suggestive analysis of the content of women’s magazine fiction (1976: 80-2).

41. For similar reasons, TV ‘soap operas have been a special object of feminist

attention and deconstruction (see e.g. Brown, 1994; also Mankekar, 2000:

esp. Ch. 3).

42. Such a perspective was the basis of much of the feminist literary criticism of the 1970s and 1980s, following Kate Millett’s critique of the stereotyping and

sexual objectification of women in contemporary ‘male’ writing (Millett, 1969; also, de Beauvoir, 1972). While feminist criticism has succeeded to an

extent in revalorizing the works of many women writers, formerly dismissed as sentimental or trivial and usually excluded from the literary ‘canon’, this concern with canonical recognition may well have deflected attention from the fact that mass-market romance is aéso an example of ‘women's writing’,

albeit of debatable literary quality. 43. The pointisalso made by Joke Hermes (1995) in her reception analysis of the readership of women's magazines (romance fiction as well as other features)

in the Netherlands. Hermes argues that the consumption of these magazines is connected not so much to their actual content, but to their role in the

42

Freedom and Destiny everyday lives of women readers, where they are not only ‘put-downable’, but

equally ‘pick-upable’. See also in this regard Jackie Stacey's three-fold analysis (1994) of the pleasures of popular cinema-viewing for British women who had been keen viewers of Hollywood cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, in terms of themes of ‘escapism’ (from the dreariness of wartime and post-wartime

discipline), ‘identification’ (with the glamour and power of Hollywood stars),

and ‘consumption’ (of excitingly transgressive, American models of feminin-

ity, signifying ‘an assertion of self in opposition to the self-sacrifice associated with marriage and motherhood in 1950s Britain’ [ibid.: 238)).

Recognizing this complementarity, Snitow (1983) had sarcastically characterized romance fiction as a kind of ‘pornography for women’. 45. See Note 16 above. 46. See similarly Lyons (1997) on the women painters of the Nathdwara school.

One of the few women calendar artists who sign their work is ‘Nirmala’,

located in Kolkata. 47. The mass-market publishing industry per setends to be male-dominated. As has been well documented in a number of feminist accounts, the publication

of romance fiction in the West expanded enormously through the 1970s when the North American Harlequin publishers, and in Britain, the Mills and Boon enterprise, became the models of successful entrepreneurship in the publishing industry, combining well-tried romance formulae with new and imaginative advertising and marketing strategies to create an ever-growing ‘need’ among women for romance fiction (see Chopra, 1998; Modleski,

48.

1980; Rabine, 1985; Radway, 1987: esp. Ch. 1).

I follow up on this theme in Section IV below. See similarly some of the

literature cited in this regard in Chapter 5, where I discuss the appropriation of these critical women’s genres into the repertoire of the conventional

Bollywood family romance. 49. Reader response is actively solicited and monitored by the publishers of romance fiction and the product formulae adapted accordingly, with differentsub-types of romance and different degrees of eroticism pitched to differ50.

ent segments of the female audience. The same observation applies to women’s magazines in general.

The song-dance sequence is an aspect of the popular Indian film that is as yet insufficiently studied (but see Beeman, 1981), especially considering the fact that the lyrics are often in a ‘different’ language, i.e., Urdu as against Hindi (see Kesavan, 1994; Vasudevan 1993).

51. See, for instance, Agarwal, 1994; Dube, 1997; Palriwala, 1994; Uberoi,

1993a, 2003a, among others. 52. See the mapping in K. Singh, 1993: 48-9, 52-3. 53. See, for instance, Agarwal, 1994; Basu, 1992; Bhat, 1996; Dréze and Sen,

1996; Dube, 1997; Dyson and Moore, 1983; Harriss-White, 1999; Kolenda,

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

43

1987; Miller, 1989; Palriwala, 1994: Ch. 2; Rajuetal., 1999; K. Singh, 1993;

Uberoi, 1993a: 45-112.

54. Essentially, the southern system enjoins certain types of kin marriage

(between matrilateral and patrilateral cross-cousins, or even between a maternal uncle and his niece), which are taboo in the northern system. See Traut-

mann, 1981: Ch. 3. 55. This differentiation, Dumont maintained, is expressed in north India in the status differences between inferior wife-givers and superior wife-takers, and in south India by marriage rules which divide close kin into marriageable and unmarriageable types and which function to maintain relations of alliance between intermarrying groups over generations (Dumont, 1966; 1983). 56. Admittedly, the definition of the ‘middle class is itselfa notoriously problematic area, driven more by media and marketing compulsions than by sociological rigour, and measured in consumption patterns rather than in terms of culture or social organization (see Deshpande, 2003: Ch. 6; and Rajagopal, 1999). 57. I follow here the argument elaborated in Uberoi, 2000; see also Uberoi, 2003a.

58. For instance, one may draw rather different conclusions about the prevalence

of joint families and trends of social change depending on whether one classifies the empirically very common family type consisting of a married couple, their children, and an aged parent as a joint family (depleted) or as

a nuclear family (augmented). See papers in Kolenda (1987); also, Shah (1974, 1998, 2005).

59. Fora robust defence of ‘arranged marriage’—or rather, a demystification of ‘love marriage’-—from the perspective of a well-known feminist critic, see Kishwar (1999: Ch. 14). The article raised considerable controversy when first published in 1994. Jauregui and McGuinness (2003) provide a recent

sociological reflection on intercommunity marriages in contemporary India (seealso Parry, 2001).While such marriages are presumedipso factoto be ‘love marriages’, not all ‘love’ (i.e. self-arranged) marriages are inter-community. Figures are hard to come by, and attitudinal surveys are not necessarilya good guide to actual behaviour. Young urban respondents, in particular, might seek to appear ‘modern’ in their expressed attitudes to love and marriage. Sudhir

Kakar (see Sharma, 2003a: 162) quotes an unidentified survey of 25,000 to

30,000 respondents, of whom 87 per cent in rural and 82 per cent in urban areas ‘preferred’ arranged marriage (see Ch. 4, fn. 27). Similarly, Madhu

Kishwar (1999: 200) reports an Eyewitness-Marg poll conducted in 1994 in

five metropolitan cities in which 74 per cent of women and an almost equal number of men expressed the view that arranged marriages are more likely to succeed than are love marriages. Interestingly, in the light of our later discussion, some 80 per cent of the same sample of informants also stated that

44

Freedom and Destiny

a young married couple should live with their parents (presumably, the husband’ parents) wherever possible. 61. See the special feature, ‘Rearranged marriages’, India Today, 18 October 62.

2004.

“‘Hypergamy’ is the name that anthropologists give to a marriage system in

which women are married to men of superior family status. (The opposite is

known as ‘hypogamy’.) For an explanation of the operation of ‘hypergamy’ in the Indian context, see e.g. Pocock, 1993; also Parry, 1979: esp. Ch. 7, among many others. The extreme of hypergamy was manifested in Bengal in the well-publicized system of marriage alliance known as ‘kulinism’, whereby upwardly mobile families paid huge dowries to marry their daughters to

Brahmin men of the highest status (kulins), who promptly deserted them to contract further pecuniary marriages. 63. Under classical Hindu law, and also customarily among many Hindu

communities, intermarriage was banned between persons belonging to the samegotra (i.e. patrilineal descendants of eighteen mythical Hindu Sages), or members of the same patrilineal clan or local lineage. In addition to the taboo on marrying kin (or quasi-kin) in the same patrilineal line of descent,

marriage was also banned between those bilateral kin deemed to have a

‘shared body’ (sapinda) relationship (calculated as seven degrees in the father's line, and five in the mother’s). Gotra exogamy has no validity under the Hindu

Marriage Act (1955), and thesapinda restriction is reduced to 5/3 degrees of relatedness (see Uberoi 2003b:

Madan, 1989: 90-9).

159-64; also Hershman,

1981:

133-7;

The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, amended in 1984 and 1986 following

pressure by women's organizations. 65. Arguments advanced in New Delhi Television (NDTV) panel discussion,

“We, the people’ (Barkha Dutt), on the supposed trend towards conspicuous

consumption in contemporary weddings, 30/11/03.

Cf. Giddens (1992). In a textured, ethnographic account of love, sex and

marriage among industrial workers in Chhattisgarh, Jonathan Parry (2001)

has questioned widely-held assumptions regarding the antithesis of local and global/’western’ sexual mores and marital arrangements. He suggests that ‘liberalized’ sexual mores and patterns of family life (frequent divorce and remarriage, etc.) were typical of some segments of ‘traditional’ society in South Asia (particularly lower castes, tribals, specialist occupational groups such as entertainers and hetaeras, etc.). For such groups, ‘modernization may imply either ‘sanskritization’ (the mimicry of upper caste mores), or cooption toVictorian bourgeois standards of social respectability (see papers in 67.

Uberoi, 1996c). See e.g. Agarwal (1994: Ch. 5); Nair (1996); also Uberoi (1996e; 2003b);

and a number of papers in Agarwal (1988); and Uberoi (1996c).

‘Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

45

68. The term from A.M. Shah (1974). 69. I take inspiration here from David Schneider's pioneering work, American

Kinship:A Cultural Account (1980: esp. 4-8). However, my use of his work differs from the more direct application by Inden and Nicholas to the understanding of the principles of Bengali kinship (1977; seealso Ostoreral., 1983), and owes much toVeena Das cultural account of Punjabi kinship and of the tensions between Punjabis’ ‘front-stage’ projection of kinship norms (the realm of ‘culture’) and their ‘back-stage’ recognition of an alternative system of values based on Punjabi concepts of ‘natural’ relatedness (Das, 1976). See also Trawick (1996).

70. The term ‘moral economy’ was introduced as a social science concept by the

historian E.P Thompson in a famous essay, ‘The moral economy of the

English crowd in the eighteenth century’ [1971], to refer to the notions of

social and economic justice that underlay the ‘food riots’ of this transitional

period of English history (see 1993: Chs. 4 and 5). It was deployed effectively in a non-Western context by James C. Scott (1976) in his study of the

‘subsistence ethic’ of poor peasant households in Southeast Asia. ASThompson has observed (with both gratification and dismay), subsequent usages in many cases depart widely from his original frame of reference, as indeed does the present case. 71. See Bakhtin (1981) for an explanation of the concept of dialogism. 72. Needless to say, feminists and others have sought to deconstruct the hegemonic claims of joint family ‘ideology’, as well as to illustrate the collusion of indigenous elites, nationalist agendas and colonial authority in the modern reconstitution of a patriarchal familial ideology. See e.g. Chowdhry, 1994: esp. Chs. 3; C. Gupta, 2001; Roy, 2005; Sangari and Vaid, 1989;T. Sarkar, 2001; Uberoi 1996c; 1996d.

73. Useful sources for this discussion are Prabhu (1995), referring to Indological

sources; and Daniel (1984); Derné (1995); Madan (1989); Minturn (1993);

Raheja and Gold (1996: esp. Ch. 1); Seymour (1999: esp. Chs. 3 and 8);Trawick (1996: esp. Chs 3 and 4); and Vatuk (1983), for ethnography-based observations in different regions of the country. In one way or another, a number of these authors refer to the internal tensions and contradictions of roles and relationships. 74. See, e.g. Bennett, 1983: 172-9; Das, 1976; Dehejia, 2004; Derné, 1995; Kakar, 1986, 1989; Raheja and Gold, 1996; Trawick, 1990, 1996: 93-5, 170-86, among many others. 75. Ora woman should make a point of ‘fostering’ children other than her own in the joint family. See e.g. Trawick (1996: 155-7).

76. The incest taboo requires that, for the establishment of society, transiting

from natureto culture, men must relinquish their sisters and acquire wives (or,

46

Freedom and Destiny from a woman’ point of view, her role as sister and daughter in one family

must be ‘exchanged’ for that of wife in another). See Lévi-Strauss (1963: Chs 2 and 11; 1969).

77. D.C. Sharma, Lok Sabha Debates, 17 December 1953: cols 2370-1. 78. There isa vast literature on the systematic discrimination against women and

female children at the household level in India. See among others, Agarwal (1994: esp. Ch. 2, and Ch. 9.1); Das Gupta (1987); Das Guptaet al. (2000);

Papanek, 1990; and Sen (1993). Paul R. Greenough (1980) provides stark demonstration of this discrimination with evidence from the Bengal famine

of 1943-4 in which many male householders abandoned their wives and

children. (Note, however, E.P Thompson's critique of this thesis [1993: 344— 7)). In a recent article, Bina Agarwal (2000) lists a number of ‘embedded

assumptions’ of the South Asian kinship ideology that are evident in land reform legislation and other public policy in India, to the material disadvantage of women: for instance, the perceptions ‘(a) that men are the natural heads of households, resources directed to whom would be shared equitably for the welfare of all household members; (b) that men are the appropriate representatives of the family in public decision-making forums; (c) that men are the primary producers and thus the legitimate claimants to productive

resources such as land; (d) that women are largely dependents; and that this

dependent status is unproblematic, even desirable; and (e) that marriage is typically universal and stable’ (ibid.: 6-7).

79. Despite the provisions of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, sisters often in

practice give up their inheritance claims in favour of their brothers, preferring to retain their brothers’ long-term goodwill rather than stake claims in

competition with them (see Agarwal, 1994: 260-8).

80. In practical life, and in biographies and autobiographies, one finds numerous

accounts of the family head’s denial or postponement of his own self-grati-

fication on behalf of the family as a whole. For instance, a young man whose father dies prematurely may postpone his own marriage until all his sisters are

married off, and younger brothers educated and ‘settled’. 81. It is on this account that the Hindu family was seen in some quarters as an obstacle to economic ‘development’ (see Madan, 1993)—denigrating the profit motive on which capitalist economies are founded and encouraging

both the self-sacrifice of some family members and the perpetual dependence of others. 82. Corresponding generally with the semiotic categories of metaphor and meto-

nymy respectively. While I deal with calendar art more in the ‘iconic’ mode, and cinema and romance fiction more in the ‘narrative’ mode, this is a ques-

tion of relative emphasis; both modes are of course implicated in all commu-

nicative genres.

Beautyfull Wife, Denger Life’

47

83. The roles of Jabba (Waheeda Rehman), the upper-class Brahmo social reformer’s daughter, and ‘Bhoothnath’ (Guru Dutt), a poor but educated

Brahmin boy from the countryside, temporarily quartered in the great house.

84. From the publicity stills of Pardes (see Chapter 6). 85. Gilligan was discussing the contrasting patterns of moral reasoning of young men and women in the US.

CHAPTER

2

Feminine Identity and

National Ethos in Calendar Art!

keg I, Woman/Goppess/NatTION: A CONTEMPORARY CONTROVERSY

E

arly in October 1996, India’s best-known contemporary painter,

octogenarian M.F Husain, became embroiled in a massive public controversy. It was alleged that certain of Husain’s religious and mythological paintings (works in fact executed some years earlier) were

offensive to Hindu sensibility, and several complaints and a criminal case

were registered against him on that basis. Particularly offensive, it was claimed, was a ‘nude’ painting of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of learning and the arts, a deity who is usually—as Hindu goddesses go—rather on the demure and well-clad side. Aseveryone knows, controversy is nothing new for Husain. Indeed, he has always seemed to thrive on it, and is regularly accused of ‘gimmickry’ and ‘showmanship’ in the name of artistic licence. The previous year had been dominated by media accounts of his artistic love affair with screengoddess Madhuri Dixit (recalling perhaps his early career as a painter of film hoardings) and of his—quite literal—painting of horses: live ones! But this new controversy had a rather nasty edge to it. Among other things, it resulted in the vandalization ofa large number of Husain’s paintings and tapestries, which were to be displayed in a gallery in Ahmedabad. As the debate raged, it escaped neither his detractors nor his supporters that Husain was not only an artist but also, significantly, a Muslim. This explains why his supposed denigration of a Hindu deity was immediately likened by his critics to the notorious iconoclasm of medieval Muslim conquerors; and, contrariwise, why the destruction of his paintings and tapestries was read by others to index a rising tide of Hindu fundamentalism and majoritarian intolerance. In London for the Sotheby's auction

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

49

of modern and contemporary Indian art, Husain (quite uncharacteristically) tendered a public apology, saying he had not intended to cause hurt and that he valued people much more than his own paintings.” Expectedly, the overall focus of the public debate on the Husain affair was on issues such as the social responsibility of the artist versus his right

to creative self-expression; on the relevance (or otherwise) of notions of

‘obscenity’ in reference to a genuine ‘work of art’; on the meaning of the idea of ‘nudity’ outside the parochial context of Western art history; on the proper role of the State in regulating the arts; and on the artist's constitutional right to freedom of expression against the intimidatory tactics of self-appointed guardians of Hindu sensibility and public morality. But, despite their considerable differences on these several issues, Husain’s

critics and his defenders actually had much more in common than either side would have cared to acknowledge. This common universe of discourse was constituted, on the one hand, by both parties’ insistence on distinguishing genuine ‘art’ from the debased style depreciatingly referred to as ‘calendar art’;‘ and on the other by the semantic conflation of categories of woman, goddess, tradition and nation (see Uberoi, 1997a). In

fact it is this categorical merging of sacred and secular, religious and profane, that explains why the debate on the Husain affair took the particular and somewhat bizarre shape it did; why the artist’s individual meditation on a Hindu goddess should be construed as reflecting not only on the Hindu religion, but on Indian ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, and on the honour

of Indian womanhood; and why a critic should take the insult so personally as to equate its effect with that of seeing his own wife or mother in the centrespread of a ‘girlie magazine’ (Verma, 1996)! There is no need to dwell on the details of this unfortunate controversy, on which much ink has been spilled and much passion spent. Nor need one elaborate on the simultaneous construction of feminine imagery and nationalist ideals in the history of modern Indian art ‘proper’, a subject that has been ably explored in a number of excellent studies (for example, Guha-Thakurta, 1992, 1995; Mitter, 1994; Sen, 2002). Here I confine

myself to consideration of the overlap of sacred and secular feminine imagery in the ‘everyday’ visual medium of calendar art. TI. DEFINING CALENDAR ART

‘Calendar art’ is a generic name for a style of popular print art that takes several forms and performs varying functions. The term refers primarily to mass-produced colour prints, but in a wider sense encompasses a

50

Freedom and Destiny

variety of other forms as well: cinema and advertising hoardings, and electioneering iconography; cut-outs of film stars, and religious and political leaders; match-box, fireworks, and bidi wrappings and other forms of packaging; religious tableaux in domestic shrines, temples, and wayside stalls; stylized pictures painted on trucks, rickshaws and auto-rickshaws;

computer screen-savers; backdrops to TV religious discourses; postcards and greeting cards; key-rings and magnet stickers; and so on. It is, all in all, a ubiquitous aspect of the visual aesthetics of everyday life in South

Asia (K. Jain, 1995).

The various functions of the colour prints are suggested in the several names by which they are commonly called, each of which encapsulates a different facet of the medium. ‘Calendar art—the generic name I personally preferS—refers to the fact that the pictures are often, but not invariably, overprinted with calendar date-sheets,’ and are sold, or distributed by businesses to favoured clients, particularly around the festival of Diwali (October/November), in the Hindu ‘new year’ through much of

India.® Coincidentally, this name also suggests the ‘pin-up’ or ‘fi/mi’ aspect of the medium, this being one of the recognized categories of calen-

dar art in the retailers’ informal four-fold classification of types (see

below). Presumably ironically, the style has also been referred to as ‘Indian

kitsch’ (M. Jain, 2001; Pinney, 1995b; Uberoi, 1990b), emphasizing its

_ mass-produced aspect, technical lack of sophistication, and generally low-brow taste. Sophisticated critics like to dismiss it as ‘garish’. A similar ambience attaches to the term ‘bazaar art (Archer, 1953), for calendars

are typically sold on festive occasions in small stalls, on pavements or at pilgrimage sites, reaching through such commercial networks into the

very remotest parts of the country (see Blurton, 1988).? One authority,

focusing on the iconic use of the prints as objects of domestic and temple worship, has favoured the rather quaint term ‘god-posters’ (for example, H.D. Smith, 1995), while the Indian-English term ‘framing pictures— also an industry term—tefers particularly to framed (and often decoratively embellished) religious icons (Inglis, 1995; K. Jain, 1992). Other

commentators, again, choose to term the calendars ‘oleographs’, ‘(chromo)lithographs’, or simply ‘posters’ or ‘prints’, emphasizing the aspect of mass reproduction (Pinney, 1995a) and underlining the continuity of

calendar art with other forms of modern mass media; or ‘display prints’, a term indicating both the technologies of mechanical reproduction and the use to which the prints were primarily put (Neumayer and Schelberger,

2003: 5).1°

For me what is interesting about Indian calendar art is that it is none of these separate features alone, yet all of them together. Religious,

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

51

patriotic, fi/mi and decorative prints are all products of the same ‘culture industry’.'! They are executed by the same artists (allowing for a certain degree of specialization), produced by the same processes, distributed nationwide through the same channels and networks, and—in a general sense at least—subject to the same overall aesthetic. In other words, this medium is constituted by the simultaneity of these different functions so that each type evokes the others in a complex semiotic interplay. This fact

will be of crucial significance towards our understanding of the feminine imagery of calendar art.!?

\g I begin my discussion by considering the origins of the calendar art genre in the colonial period—in particular, the work of the late nineteenth-century salon painter, Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), who is widely credited with establishing the representational style, defining the parameters of the archive, and pioneering the mass reproduction of colour prints. >This somewhat exaggerated focus on a single individual, Ravi Varma, is a re-

minder of the fact that fine art and mass art participate jointly and symbiotically in the history of Indian artistic modernity (Guha-Thakurta,

1992; Mitter, 1994) even as calendar art draws heavily on several indi-

genous traditions of visual representation, both classical and folk: Tanjore religious iconography (with which Ravi Varma was himself familiar [Ramachandran, 1993]); Bengali pata (scroll) painting and Kalighat

prints(J. Jain, 1999; K. Singh, 1995, 1996); Sikh janamsakhi woodblock prints (McLeod, 1991; Singh and Singh, 2003); the painting traditions

of the Nathdwada pilgrimage town in Rajasthan (Ambalal, 1987; K. Jain, 1996, 1998: 56-62; Maduro, 1976; Lyons, 1997; Pinney, 1995a, 1997b;

Tripurari, 2000); the conventions of courtly and religious miniature

painting (Singh and Singh, 2003); the rediscovered ‘classical’ arts of Ajanta and Ellora, Khajuraho, Konark and Mathura (Guha-Thakurta,

1994b; Malandra, 1994; Mitter, 1994: 303-6), and so on.The individual

career of Ravi Varma is also an important reminder that the production of calendar art was at one time expressly conceived as a nationalist enterprise, associated on the one hand with the domestication of new techniques of artistic production and new ways of seeing, and on the other with

the articulation of Indian national identity in the context of colonial rule (Guha-Thakurta, 1992; Mitter, 1994; Pinney, 2002; Singh and Singh,

2003).

Finally, I consider how the processes I have posited at work in the pro-

duction of calendar art images of women are materialized in the artefacts

52

Freedom and Destiny

themselves, remarking first on the objectification and commoditization

of women and women's bodies that is so conspicuous in this medium and

in related media such as advertising, film hoardings and the like, before considering the several ways in which contemporary calendar art images of women work as tropes for the ‘nation’. Though I have confined my at-

tention here to calendar or bazaar art, it is clear that similar processes are

at work in popular cinema and commercial advertising on the one hand, and in political and electioneering iconography on the other (see Brosius, 1997, 1999a, 1999b; Chakravarty, 1996), and there is clearly a case for the extension of these perspectives to other genres of visual culture, both mass media and elite art forms. IIT.

Ravi VARMA AND THE INVENTION

OF CALENDAR ART

Recent writings on the cultural and intellectual history of the colonial period in India have highlighted the centrality of femininity in the symbolic constitution of an Indian national identity (for example, Nandy,

1980; Sangari and Vaid, 1989; Sarkar, 2001). Conversely, the attributes

of modern Indian femininity were also being actively negotiated at this time. The ingredients in this Anglo-Indian joint venture were multiplex and often contradictory: co-option, compliance and resistance all at once. Nonetheless it is possible to discern a common discursive universe in which both rulers and ruled participated. This shared universe was characterized (i) by the privileging of the Indian woman as the central object of discourse (see Chatterjee, 1989; S. Sarkar, 1985: 71ff 2001; Tharu, 1989; Uberoi, 1996c); (ii) by substantive convergence in interpretations

of femininity; and (iii) by agreement on the canon of textual and ritual practice that was to define and authorize an emerging Indian cultural ‘tra-

dition’ (Chakravarti, 1989; Mani, 1989).

To begin with, it was assumed that the ‘status of women is the pre-

eminent signifier of the nature and condition of society—Indian society

in this case.'4 Crystallized in what feminist historian Uma Chakravarti

has felicitously (and memorably) called the ‘Altekarian paradigm’ (Chakravarti, 1988; see Altekar, 1962), Indian ‘cultural nationalism’ essentially

followed the same logic, constructing an imagined ‘classical’ age of Indian civilization and Indian womanhood along with a narrative of progressive decline under the twin forces of corrupt Brahmanism and Muslim invasion.

Second is the conflation of the cultural ‘tradition’ with the sacred tra-

dition, that is, with religion; and the sacred tradition in turn with

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

53

Hinduism, whether in its Brahmanic or its Rajput emphases, but distin-

guished from its popular and regional manifestations (Mani, 1989).!> As art historian Geeta Kapur has written in this connection (1989: 68):

The notion of the past usually dovetails with the notion of the classical. Both derive from a quite obvious desire to retrieve at the imaginative level that golden age of Indian civilisation when itis said to have been purest, most pros-

perous and supreme. The period from the epics to the puranas, and then Kalidasa, usually provides the time-frame as well as the wealth of legends that are to be glorified. (Ideologically speaking, the classical past is set against the

medieval which is regarded as having been corrupted by a medley of foreign

influences and by the psychology of subordination showing up in Hindu civilisation. Not only the Islamic but curiously also Buddhist culture, though

falling squarely within the classical, is excluded from mainstream Indian culture, when a civilisational memory is sought to be awakened. The touchstone for nineteenth century Indian renaissance is thus Hindu civilisation.)!®

In this way, a national identity was constituted through the construction of the ideal Hindu woman, and her characteristics derived from a hierarchy of textual authorities: the Vedas, Shastras, epics, puranas, and so on. In the process, obviously, a number of exclusions came into play: (i) of other religious and cultural traditions by the newly-constituted Hindu tradition, as already suggested; (ii) of lower caste practices by

Brahmanical and Rajput/Kshatriya models (Chakravarti, 1989); (iii) of folk genres by the new genres of the compradore bourgeoisie (S. Banerjee, 1989a; Rege, 1995); and (iv) ofindigenous aesthetic values by those of the

colonial power through the psychology of identification with the aggressor (Nandy, 1983). Simultaneously, (v) regional varieties were transcend-

ed in the search for a pan-Indian cultural reality, or appropriated and domesticated within an aggregative vision of nation such as that unfolded annually in the Republic Day Parade.’ In all, it seems that the modern period has seen womanliness subjected to processes of hegemonization and homogenization as the national culture defines and stakes its distinctive identity. The mass media, whether controlled by the State or articu-

lating the demands of the market, have been active instruments of this

transformation. Whatever its precedents—and we have seen that calendar art has now acquired many separate genealogies—the coming into being ofa calendar art ‘style’ was effectively coterminous with the artistic career of Raja Ravi Varma, a member of the ruling family of Travancore State (in present-day

Kerala). RaviVarma’s particular distinction was that he was one of the first

native Indian painters to have satisfactorily mastered the techniques of

54

Freedom and Destiny

western academic oil painting and to have received critical acclaim and recognition for this both at home and abroad. Encapsulating in decades the essence of four centuries of European art history, he then pioneered the setting up of one of the earliest lithographic presses in India which reproduced some ninety of his mythological paintings in thousands of copies.'® According to a number of art critics (for example, Chaitanya, 1960: 5; Ramachandran, 1993), this overproduction of paintings for the

press, magnified by the technical limitations of the reproduction processes at the time, was ultimately disastrous for Ravi Varma’s reputation

as a serious artist, for his work then tended to be evaluated on the basis

of the prints (see Mitter, 2002). As one critic lamented, echoing the supercilious judgement of the rival Bengal School:'?

That these distressing pictures, vulgarised by cheap and popular oleography should reign in every Indian home is a commentary on the degenerate per-

ception of the time: that, incidentally, Ravi Varma became a nationalising influence or provided devotional sustenance to the masses is highly irrelevant to his aestheticappraisement. . . .An untrained, undiscerning public, valuing his paintings for their devotional content and, utterly ignorant of aesthetic criteria, worshipped Ravi Varma (R. Rao, 1953: 9).?°

The point to be stressed here is that the calendar art style was not, in its origins, reallya popular art form, buta hybrid, Anglo-Indian style produced for British patrons and the anglicized Indian elite in continuity with the so-called ‘Company’ style of portraiture and Indian ‘sceneries’ (Guha-Thakurta, 1986). It was the outcome of a two-way process of the westernization of taste of the Indian aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie and of the domestication of a foreign medium in Indian soil, a process

which produced thereby quite new ‘ways of seeing’. In India, to quote Geeta Kapur again: [t]he modernising impulse is signalled into the visual arts in the use by Indian artists of the medium of oils and the easel format. There are several aspects to this choice. One, that the know-how is not easily obtained by an Indian. The

fact and fiction of RaviVarma’s struggle to learn oil painting becomesa legend. Here is not only the struggle of the astigt tp gain a technique but the struggle

ofa native to gain the source of the master’s superior knowledge, and the struggle of the prodigy to steal the fire for his gwn people (Kapur, 1989: 60).

Kapur goes on to stress the special chafacteristics of il as medium and

the implications of these features for what one might call the politics of representation:

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

55

Oil as paint matter encourages the simulation of substances (flesh, cloth,

jewels, gold, masonry, marble) and the capture of atmospheric sensations (the

glossiness of light, the translucent depth of shadows). Realism flowing from

such material possibilities of paint is a way of appropriating the world, saturating the consciousness with it. It is also a way of appeasing the acquisitive impulse. This realism is then inalienably related to bourgeois desire, bourgeois ideology and ethics (Kapur, 1989: 60).

The ‘Victorian Indian’ art style pioneered by Ravi Varma has been deprecatedas inauthentic by later art critics, seeking an essential Indianness in other ways,”! and denigrated for its conservatism and obsolescence in the light of emerging new trends within European art (Guha-Thakurta, 1994b; Kapur, 1989: 69; Rao, 1953:9; Sen, 2002: 26-30).??But, be that as it may, an art style which was ‘modern’ and innovative in its time, and produced fora relatively upper class market, has now sedimented as authentic Indian ‘kitsch’—a style regarded as the very antithesis of proper ‘art’. The images that Ravi Varma created were shortly transposed into

celluloid with the first motion picture, and since then the calendar art and

film (and now television) industries have existed in relations of symbiotic

give and take. By the late 1980s, calendar representations of Ram and

Sita looked unashamedly like Arun Govil and Deepika (the stars of the televised serial of the Ramayana),?4while the stars themselves appeared as flesh and blood embodiments of the aesthetic canons of calendar art. The subsequently televised Mahabharata had the same effect, bringing calen-

dar art to ‘life’ even as it established individual physiognomic models

for deities and mythological figures, and the inter-textual/inter-visual en-

gagement continues in numerous modalities.

In his subject matter, too, Ravi Varma interestingly prefigured the range of themes and stereotypes that were to become the staples of calendar art. As noted, distributors of calendars informally classify their wares into four categories: ‘dharmic (religious themes and icons and scenes from the epics, particularly the Ramayana and the Mahabharata); ‘leaders’ (political or patriotic calendars and portraits of national figures, past and present), a type that merges imperceptibly with political and electioneering iconography and pedagogical materials; ‘fi/mi’ (essentially pin-ups and portraits of sports and movie stars); and ‘sceneries’ (decorative posters, which differ from the former categories by expressly excluding depiction of the human form). In the first three of these categories, the representation of women is a prominent focus. The works of Ravi

Varma and his so-called ‘school’?> covered the same range of themes, being

especially preoccupied with feminine imagery (Chaitanya, 1960: 12-13;

56

Freedom and Destiny

Guha-Thakurta, 1986: 191ff.; Neumayer and Schelberger, 2003; Schel-

berger and Neumayer n.d.), and encompassing both sacred and secular themes in unruptured continuum.” At one end of the spectrum are religious icons, destined to be sacred objects of worship in homes and shrines; at the other, purely decorative pieces and daring, almost erotic, pin-ups. In the continuum from the dharmic through the patriotic to the filmi, the sacred and the secular poles appear to be mediated by the patriotic, as in the figure of ‘Mother India’: woman/goddess/icon of nation. In another sense, the polar opposites mutually invoke each other—in calendar art as in Ravi Varma’s paintings. Goddesses are luscious women, and luscious women goddesses, as has so often been remarked (Mode, 1970;

Neumayer and Schelberger, 2003: 63; Parimoo, 1973: 3).”” Perhaps this is one reason why the analysis of apparently secular images of Indian women seems to spontaneously call forth the conceptual distinctions and oppositions that have structured analyses of the female deities of the Hindu pantheon (see, for example, Gatwood,

1985); in fact, why so

many discussions of Hindu women’s lives today begin with a deconstruction of sacred imagery (for example, Chitgopekar, 2002; Nandy, 1980;

G. Sinha, 1999; Wadley, 1977). This elision of the sacred and the secular, which is a peculiar and dis-

tinguishing feature of Indian calendar art as a genre, is one that makes its analysis somewhat problematic according to certain of the generally accepted theories of art history. Sociologists are used to seeing the rise of modernity in the separation of the secular from the sacred, and there has been posited a similar process of ‘desacralization’ in art history as well (see Benjamin, 1973: esp. 225-8). To the contrary, an examination of the archive of calendar art, and of Indian TV and popular cinema for that matter (see Das, 1981; Mankekar, 2000; Mitra, 1993; Rajagopal, 1999),

suggests that these media have witnessed a continual process of ‘resacralization’ over the last century,”® consistent with the ongoing project of ‘cultural nationalism’. A first step in this process was the identification of significant events and cameos out of the great corpus of Indian myth, history and legend. Specifically, the invocation of a notion of the ‘classical’ involved: (i) the

definition of the canon, especially emphasis on the ‘Aryan’ and the privileging of (particular versions of) the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as foundational pan-Indian texts; (ii) the identification of central

themes from the canon, for instance, the romantic celebration of conjugal love and self-sacrificing wifely devotion (as of Ram and Sita, Nala and

Damayanti, Shakuntala and Dushyanta), themes which incidentally had

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

57

enormous ‘Orientalist’ appeal for Europeans as well (Chakravarti, 1989;

Guha-Thakurta, 1994b); and (iii) the encapsulation of these themes in

significant dramatic episodes such as the ‘swan messenger’ bringing a message of love to Damayanti, or Shakuntala removing a thorn from her foot as pretext for a lingering backward glance at Dushyanta, or Ravana ab-

ducting Sita.?° Sets of paintings on mythological themes were among Ravi

Varma’s most important commissions, and one senses an almost religious mission underlying their propagation toa mass public through thousands of cheap lithographic reproductions. The idea had first been put to him in 1884 by his patron, SirT. Madhava Rao, the Dewan of Baroda State,

in the following words:

There are many of my friends who are desirous of possessing your works. It would be hardly possible for you, with onlya pair ofhands, to meet sucha large demand. Send, therefore, a few of your select works to Europe and have them

oleographed. You will thereby not only extend your reputation, but will be

doing a real service to your country (Chaitanya, 1960: 5, emphasis mine).

The other aspect of Ravi Varma’s project, again one consistent with the goals of cultural nationalism, was the construction ofa pan-Indian material representation of Indian womanhood through the creation of physical ‘types’ that were both racially authentic yet universal, realistically individual yet typical and, more important, regional yet national (Kapur, 1989: 62). This rather paradoxical-sounding ambition led Ravi Varma twice on major tours of the country to record its physical types and landscapes, domesticating the variety within a single aesthetic frame which was effectively ‘Aryanizing’ in its ideological thrust, upper bourgeois in its taste (in costume, jewellery, accoutrements and theatrical settings), and “Orientalist’ in its mode of appropriation of other classes and ethnic types (Kapur, 1989: 62-3; cf. Berger, 1972: 103-4).

In 1892-3, Ravi Varma achieved the highest international recognition yet accorded an Indian artist when he won several awards for a set of ten paintings exhibited at the International Exhibition in Chicago. Significantly, all ten of the paintings had women as their subjects, including women from different regions of India, from different communities and from different walks of life.! The citation expressly commended their ethnographic interest—an extension here, surely, of the Orientalist gaze: The series of well-executed paintings give an idea of the progress of instruction

of art [in India]. They are true to nature in form and colour, and preserve the

costumes, current fashions and social features . . . (Guha-Thakurta, 1986:

190, n.110).

58

Freedom and Destiny

Similarly, The Galaxy, a famous and now much commented upon paint-

ing of eleven Indian women musicians (Kapur, 1989), reveals on close

inspection a tableau of women from different regions and communities of the country, each an authentic physical type dressed in recognizably regional apparel, yet subject to a single aesthetic. One is strongly reminded of the evergreen ‘Brides of India’ calendars, parades and pageants— self-consciously parading India’s fabled ‘unity in variety’, Aryanized, and united under a bourgeois aesthetic. Furthermore, where women of other groups and classes are on display—that is, women disqualified by reasons of race, class or profession from the narcissistic self-imaging of modern

India—they are either appropriated within a bourgeois mould (complexions made ‘wheaten’ for instance), or exoticized/eroticized as ethnogra-

phic curiosities; or both at once.32

TV. DECIPHERING THE ARCHIVE: GENDER AND CALENDAR ART

In India, as elsewhere, a most important thrust of feminist social science

has been that of making women ‘visible’ and their muted voices audible

in society and history (Chakravarti, 1989; Chakravarti and Roy, 1988). Thisis undoubtedly a critical, iftheoretically not altogether unproblematic, agenda of contemporary feminist research and practice (see Uberoi, 1990b: WS41-42). But equally important, as studies of the contemporary mass media demonstrate, is address to genres of representation in which women are not merely visible, but are the conspicuous and central objects of attention—even of adulation and worship. This phenomenon

has been the source of some theoretical speculation in the realm of art

history, as well as in feminist approaches to the visual arts, cinema in particular (see Chapter 1). Of particular interest has been the interpreta-

tion of the representation of women in one of the privileged genres of modern European art—the tradition of ‘nude’ painting, covering the period roughly from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth centuries. In this period, or so John Berger and others have persuasively argued (Berger, 1972: Ch. 3), there seems to have been a historical convergence

involving the subject matter of painting (the nude female form being a

major focus), the consolidation of the new medium of oil painting (giving texture, depth and a sense of tactility to the objects depicted), the mastery of techniques of perspective (creating a sense of verisimilitude or realism) and the institution of a new socio-economic order, that is, capitalism.

Indeed, the social order of capitalism is especially implicated as one in

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

59

which the objectification and commoditization of women reached unprecedented heights.

Originally, works of art displayed in the homes of the aristocratic and

the wealthy functioned as signs of individual rank and wealth, the nude female body being an object of the privileged gaze of the male patron and

his friends (Berger, 1972: Ch. 3). Techniques of mechanical reproduction

(lithography, oleography, and photography) have been crucial in increas-

ingly generalizing this mode of appropriation to a class of mass consumers

(Benjamin, 1973), a process which reached its apogee in the invention of

cheap colour photography a few decades ago. Colour photography, as Berger has perceptively written:

can reproduce the colour and texture and tangibility of objectsas only oil paint

had been able to do before. Colour photography is to the spectator-buyer what

oil paint was to the spectator-owner. Both media use similar, highly tactile means to play upon the spectator’s sense of acquiring the real thing which the

image shows. In both cases his feeling that he can almost touch what is in the image reminds him how he might or does possess the real thing (Berger, 1972: 140-1).

In other words Berger suggests that in modern western society the glossy ‘pin-up’ has the same social function as the nude once had, though on a mass scale, and that this is one of the characteristic markers of modern

consumer societies (and of the socio-political order of capitalism) in their construction of gender relations. The contemporary advertising industry and the commercial mass media depend on and promote the objectification of women as objects of male desire (‘sex symbols’), such that women tend to function as insignia of the wealth, status, power and virility of the men

who possess them, and of the desires of those who would want to possess

them. Metonymically co-associated with a range of consumer products— and not only those identified especially with feminine roles—they subtly and surely become commoditized themselves. Feminist film theory, as noted earlier (see Chapter 1), has developed a parallel theoretical position on the issue of objectification, proposing that the woman is ‘othered’ and ‘controlled’ as the object of the ‘gaze’ of the camera/male spectator (see Mulvey, 1999). We will not seek to enter the debate that has arisen regarding this proposition,” but merely note

here that theories of objectification and commoditization do not seem to account satisfactorily for the veritable deification of women in the visual media, particularly through the stereotypes of the pure virgin, the loyal

and obedient wife and, most important, the mother. That is, women do

60

Freedom and Destiny

not simply index the power of control and possession of the individual (male spectator-buyer) whose gaze they return, or serve as iconic objects of reverence just on that count. They are also, in turn, the second-order signifiers of other meanings.>4 This is the phenomenon referred to in the rather inelegant phrase, the ‘tropizing’ of women; or, as I have (no less inelegantly) termed it here, the ‘iconicization’ of women. Anthropologists have been especially sensitive to the phenomenon of the tropizing of women as signifiers of caste status in South Asia. They argue, for instance, that the caste system rests primarily on each community maintaining control over the purity and sexuality of its women (through practices such as child marriage, puberty and initiation rites, sati, purdah, the regulation of widows, marriage to divinities, and so

on). Similarly, women may signify the religious community, the race

and the nation, while these new identities themselves come into being

through communitarian (re)constructions of femininity.>° In my consideration, here, of the imaginative constitution of the femi-

nine in Indian calendar art, I see these calendar art representations as

instancing both of the contradictory processes referred to above: (i) the commoditization and objectification of women; and (ii) the tropizing of the feminine,” within (iii) an overall cultural context which, though generally both homogenizing and hegemonizing in the service of the nation, nonetheless allows a limited but legitimate space for the ‘local’ and sectarian. In fact, I venture to go one step further and—with perhaps a little hesitation—claim for this medium resistant, non-orthodox, and anti-

structural potentialities.

But now, at last, to the ‘archive’ of calendar art.38

Objects of Desire/Commodities on Sale First, it is obvious that women and women’s bodies are very much on display, exhibited before the male gaze as objects of desire. They may boldly return the gaze, as in the case of the scantily clad reclining ‘vamp’ figure, evocative of Manet’s Olympia, surrounded by wine bottles and grapes, the hands of her mantle clock suggestively stuck at 10 p.m. (see Figure 2.1; cf. Sen, 2002: 75-6). Or the glance may be deflected, and

near-nudity draped in clinging wet white garments, full breasts and erect nipples showing through; a hypocritical mixture of pure innocence and sensuality. The gopis cover their nakedness with their hands and plead with a smug Krishna for the return of their clothes, neatly folded beside him on the branches of a tree. Adam and Eve hold their figleaves coyly in

2.1

Reclining woman

with wine bottles. K.K. Prakas,

2.2

Cycle-wali. V.G. Narkar, Delhi, 1967.

NN

1973.

Moti Calendar Company,

2.3

Girl with motor

= oma

2.4

scooter and assorted

market commodities.

c. 1970.

|

Sita’s ordeal by fire, published as an advertisement for an incense and ritual paraphernalia

firm. c. 1983.

_

2.5) Peasant woman

with sickle.

A. Parshuram,

1975.

2.6

Peasant/tribal woman labouring on a big dam project. Rang Roop Studio, 1966.

27;

Lakshmi as Goddess of national prosperity, 1968.

2.8

Yashoda and the infant Krishna. M. Abbayi, Brijbasi & Sons, Mathura, n.d.

2.9

Indira Gandhi and/as the Goddess Durga presiding over the destruction of the § Pakistani armed forces.

H.R. Raja, 1974.

2.10

‘Ma ki pukar’

(The call of the Mother

Mother India blesses

freedom fighters Bhagat Singh and

Subhas Chandra Bose. Murari Fine Arts,

Delhi, c. 1966.

2.11

Peasant couple. V.G. Narkar, late 1960s.

2.12

Celebration of the festival of Rakshabandhan. H.R. Raja, 1978.

2AS

Mirabai,

the Bhakti saint-poetess. Ram Singh, Rang Roop Studio,

2.14

1967.

Ardhanariswara, the androgynous form of Shiva merged with Parvati. Sapar Bros, c. 1970.

2:15

The equality of religions. Ram

Verma,

Belgium Glass House,

Ludhiana, 1974.

Prone 11259

BELGIUM GLASS HOUSE Frames Merchants All Kinds of Glass, Pictures, Calendars & Photo

Bazar,

Basati

qafraa

ward

ANY

FER I MARY

APR

AY

LUDHIANA.

wa

esa

crore, qftarar ae sary aoa

YU

(aaa aay (uae Jy [Hea] pws] Habe dap (ian) 1 (anal RR |W amet_ [ater | renin]

raiie [ta[ea_[4 in

2.16

The Mother Cow and India’s four religious communities. Sapar Bros, c. 1968.

Fe

“4

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

61

place, watched by a smirking serpent. The disrobing of Draupadi is enacted before a court of spectators and the voyeur-buyer. The veil of a burqa is provocatively raised to confer a seductive glance on the viewer. Aset of Muslim women of all ages are revealed at prayer, unveiled before an invisible beholder. With the exception of Adam, whose predicament was the fault of Eve, men are not so ubiquitously on display.*? While the commoditization of women through calendar art is implicit in their visual ‘display’, it is made explicit by the consociation of images of women with a range of consumer products. A common reaction to a

calendar art frame is: “That must be an advertisement for such-and-such

product’ (a watch, transistor, bicycle, pair of sandals),4°and indeed, com-

mercial advertising uses essentially the same language, similarly exploiting images of women and displays of women's bodies.*! This frequent consociation of women with material products reinforces and ‘naturalizes cultural stereotypes of women’s roles, with particular stress on the

domestic role (see also Mode, 1970). Little girls are ‘cutified’*? as little

women, playing at ‘house-house’, while little boys anticipate responsible future careers in the armed forces and the professions.*? The shy bride is clad in brilliant scarlet, and weighed down with ornate gold jewellery. The housewife is surrounded bya set of modern kitchen appliances, or is seen busily at work on her sewing machine. A college girl in tight and revealing salwar-kameez poses beside a bicycle (a sub-type expressly titled ‘cyclewal? [Figure 2.2]), while a shiny new motor-scooter features as a prop for a pin-up in shorts and tee-shirt, along with an impressive range of household goods (Figure 2.3).4

All very ‘natural’, one might say. But the innocence is compromised when one details the consumer items with which women are thus metonymically linked: fine clothes, jewellery, cosmetics, lingerie, kitchen

appliances and utensils, tea set, sewing machine, wrist watch, table fan, TV, cycle, scooter, sofa set, dressing table and coffee table—in fact, the

complete range of lower middle class dowry items of the day (excepting

the double bed). The woman is assimilated with this range of status-en-

hancing consumer products and, in the process, effectively commoditized herself. True, neither the bicycle nor the scooter is an especially ‘feminine’ product per se, but, along with the radio andTV (which often occupy the same frame), they represent the set consumer items that typically go along with women in the material transactions that accompany Indian marriage.* Processes of commoditization and objectification are conjoined in the display of the female form along with an enticing panoply of market goods.

62

Freedom and Destiny Icons of Nation

The tropizing of women as signifiers of the national society isa more complex, and to my mind more interesting, phenomenon. Let us examine it more closely. It has been a running theme in this chapter, working backwards from

the Husain controversy, that the genre of calendar art has been characterized by a metonymical juxtapositioning of sacred and secular imagery. To this one must add the rather obvious reminder that, unlike Christianity, polytheistic Hinduism enables and authorizes multiple alternative stereo-

types of female divinity.*© There is a ‘structure’ to this plurality, however,

which we will now seek to explore in relation to calendar art iconography, both sacred and profane, before finally reflecting on the significance of pluralism per se. Anthropologists analysing the Hindu pantheon frequently contrast ‘consort or ‘spouse’ deities (those represented along with their divine husbands) with goddesses represented alone; and similarly, ‘mother-goddesses’ depicted with children, and those without (for example, Babb, 1975; Gatwood, 1985; Harman, 1992; Wadley, 1975, 1977). Specifically, the goddess alone is more powerful (if ambivalently so) than the goddess as consort; the ‘mother’ without child more potent than the mother-goddess

proper.

As might well be anticipated, the annual harvest of calendar art regularly endorses the ideal of wifely subordination, particularly through the figure of Sita. Continuing the project begun in the nineteenth century, the archive of calendar art establishes a ‘tradition’ for the present, recog-

nizes certain texts as authoritative, and legitimates certain ideal roles.

Episodes from the Mahabharata and Ramayana take pride of place,

paralleling and evoking the televised serial versions of the epics in the late 1980s.4” We have Sita accompanying Ram into exile; Sita abducted by Ravana; the return to Ayodhya; the ordeal(s) of fire, and so on

(Figure 2.4). The emphasis is transparently on the theme of wifely fidelity and subordination, and alternative renderings of the narrative are sup-

pressed (Chakravarti, 1983), if not entirely erased.“®

Against thisi image of the dutiful wife is counter-posed the figure of the temptress or ‘vamp’, a stock role of the commercial cinema (see Chapter 4). On one level a mere sex object, pin-up par excellence, her existence is cognitively necessary to underline by way of contrast the opposite qualities of the good and obedient wife. Unlike the wife, however, she has the

potential to exercise power over men, provoking the male gaze to her own

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

63

ends. The theme of female power, protective or destructive, is one to

which we will return shortly. But while Sita exists primarily in relation to Ram, and indeed Parvati in relation to Shiva, the beneficent goddesses Saraswati and Lakshmi may

either be paired in their wifely roles with their divine consorts, Brahma and Vishnu, or arraigned with each other (often along with the elephant-

headed Ganesh) to represent good fortune and invoke divine blessing.

The two goddesses may also stand alone as auspicious objects of worship in their own right, Saraswati representing learning and the arts, and Lakshmi the fertility of the earth, the bountifulness of the harvest, the procreativity of women and the prosperity of the family: sacred and secular, woman and nation, indissolubly merged.

Asacase in point, one might take the print reproduced in Figure 2.5.°°

Purchased in north India in the mid-1970s, this calendar belongs in asub-

series of images of ‘peasant’ or ‘peasant-tribal’ women, representing at once the innocence and the bountifulness of rural life. The calendar is

dominated by a curvaceous female figure, holding aloft in one hand a

sickle, and in the other, stalks of coarse grain. Our beauty is clearly a ‘pin-up’, frontally constructed as the object of the male gaze, which she mod-estly but unflinchingly returns. Her sari pallu has fallen from her shoulders to reveal a full bosom and rounded belly, the curves of hips and thighs accentuated by the folds of her garments. As an object of male desire, the rustic background against which this figure is rather inappositely set might appear coincidental, irrelevant, opportunistic; justa backdrop for the display of the female form. But the fact that the ‘village belle’ is a consistent ‘type’ through the archive of calendar art commends closer attention to its detail. In the foreground we

see a basket of fruit and harvest produce, a huge pile of grain pods, some

sheaves of grain and two neat bags conveniently labelled ‘Fertiliser’. Further back is a series of lovingly constructed scenes of agricultural activity,

and in the distance a cluster of exceedingly neat village houses, framed

against snowy peaks and a luminous sky. Judging by her features, hairstyle and jewellery, our peasant girl is recognizably a southern beauty of the Vyjanthimala*! type. The southern ambience is further affirmed by the basket of harvest festival tribute (identified by several informants with the

festival of Pongal), and the style of jewellery and costume. But, as one’s sight moves upward, one finds oneself in the expansive fields of Green

Revolution Punjab, signified by the tractor and electrified tubewell, the

snow-capped Himalayas rising behind. This background not only maps asacred territorial space, through the length and breadth of India, but also

64

Freedom and Destiny

charts the annual cycle ofagricultural seasons—from ploughing, reaping, threshing and winnowing, to the celebration of the harvest’s bounty. In this idyllic rural scene, the old and the new meld seamlessly together. The

introduction of fertilizer, tractor, electricity and tubewell seems not to

rupture the serenity of rural life but rather to enhance its pleasures and augment its plenitude. The calendar pin-up who presides over this imagined scene of new India’s rural prosperity is not simply an object of desire, which she conspicuously is, but simultaneously an evocation of the auspiciousness of the Goddess Lakshmi, whose image in her form as Dhanyalakshmi, goddess of grain and the harvest, is often associated with sheaves

of grain. Pin-up and goddess are semiotically merged in the regenerating project of Indian modernity whose other half, barely glimpsed in the background here, is the building of a strong industrialized nation.*? Ina figuring reminiscent of socialist realist poster art, the tribal woman worker, hammer in hand, is also co-opted to this task of nation-building

(Figure 2.6). No less curvaceous than the peasant woman, radiant in the

joyful labour of national construction, she joins the myriad workers en-

gaged in the building of the mega-dam icons of industrial progress:

ennobled, not diminished, by her gift of labour. Together, the peasant woman with sickle and the tribal woman with hammer evoke the nation through identification with the auspicious and life-giving qualities of Goddess Lakshmi. A particularly striking calendar of the late 1960s (Figure 2.7) makes this point explicit. It shows a typical representation of Lakshmi with her insignia of wealth and prosperity, seated in a lotus on a bed of harvested wheat, against a background of factory chimneys or oil rigs. Together, the wheat and the factories symbolize a Nehruvian vision of national prosperity, at once agrarian and industrial.*4 It is from this vantage that one may reconsider the shapely cycle-wali beauty of Figure 2.2, not merely as pin-up displayed for the male ‘gaze’, but as an icon of national modernity and progress. Executed by an artist (V.G. Narkar) who also produced many village ‘belles’ (usually, once

again, set in verdant fields irrigated by gushing tubewells), the cycle-wali’s background here is a contemporary (1967) cityscape. This is not, how-

ever, the congested, filthy face of the real, organic Indian city, but an

orderly and planned grill of wide avenues and solid monuments to capitalist enterprise, sparsely peopled by well-dressed, modern citizens. In the main street, complementing (not competing with) the bicycle, we see a taxi, a bus, and a sturdy four-wheel drive vehicle—all of them signs of

modernity and development, while a mountain range glimpsed in the

background suggests that this might be Corbusier's Chandigarh (the taxi’s Mumbai number-plate notwithstanding).**

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

65

Nurturant motherhood is very explicitly celebrated in calendar art. Here, Christian imagery of the Madonna and child merges with representations of the affectionate, tender, playful, almost erotic relationship

of Yashoda with her mischievous butter-stealing foster-child, Krishna (Figure 2.8). These sacred images are among the most charming, and the most beloved, of the whole corpus of calendar art, finding their secular

form in innumerable kitschy portraits of mothers and their bonny babies, a favourite subject commanding its own specialist artists. Mother-child images may connect with the idea of ‘nation’ both directly (see also Chapter 3) and also indirectly, through the symbol of the mother cow, boundlessly giving, immensely pure (see Hershman, 1977; Uberoi, 2002).°SOf course, as innumerable popular film scripts testify, the violation of the mother is the most terrible of insults, a call to avenge. The mother goddess figure is not only nurturant and beneficent, but

also—as Durga/Kali—protective, fierce and powerful; sometimes vengeful too. She infuses the figure of ‘Mother India’ as the protector of the land and its people and the vanquisher of enemies. The qualities of the goddess Durga also animate Mrs Indira Gandhi in her role as leader of a nation at war,” as in the calendar reproduced in Figure 2.9. Here, a portrait of a stern Mrs Gandhi occupies the foreground, set against the image of Goddess Durga, whose features in turn bear a strong resemblance to those

of the young Mrs Gandhi (or the other way round!). Under the terrible

claws of the goddess’s lion ‘vehicle’ lie the prostrate bleeding bodies of enemy soldiers, while in the far background are cameo scenes of the destruction of the Pakistani army, navy and airforce. Alternatively, the female

warrior, as Rani Lakshmi Bai of Jhansi, her child strapped to her back,

may herself ride heroically into battle, brandishing aloft her unsheathed sword—an eternal inspiration to the martyrs of India’s freedom

struggle.*®

It is not only in relation to Mrs Gandhi’s personal charisma and the serendipity of her prime ministership during the 1971 war with Pakistan

that the nurturant/destructive power of the goddess is made dramatically

manifest.5° The imagery tends to invade the secular domain whenever the theme of patriotism is invoked: the earthly mother, the mother goddess,

the motherland, Bharat Mata, all combined. To cite an example: a set of national heroes (Shivaji, Rana Pratap, Subhas Chandra Bose, Bhagat

Singh, Chandrashekhar Azad) surround the image of a beautiful woman carrying apuja lamp. The accompanying text reminds us that “The lamp of the heroes burns in the temple of the Mother’. There is a long history to this sort of imagery, of course, stretching back through the century to the very beginnings of the freedom movement (see Singh and Singh,

66

Freedom and Destiny

2003), and continuing today in the iconography of right-wing Hindu political parties (see Brosius, 1999a, 1999b; McKean, 1996; Ramaswamy,

2001; G. Sinha, 1999: 115-24). But, while the imagery of Mother India may often evoke the fierce Hindu mother goddess and her demand for blood sacrifice, the conventions of representation have simultaneously a ‘global’ dimension, recalling the patriotic poster art of the First World War, or Soviet propaganda art. The print reproduced in Figure 2.10 might illustrate more graphically the polysemous connotations of the word ‘Mother’ (Ma): biological mother/mother goddess/Mother India. Entitled ‘Ma ki pukar’(Call of the Mother), the centre of the print is dominated by the radiant figure of Mother India. She stands against an outline map of South Asia, the borders with Pakistan (East and West) clearly inscribed.®! Behind her are the Indian tricolour and the goddess’s trident, while on either side kneel two freedom-fighters, Subhas Chandra Bose, leader of the Indian Natio-

nal Army of the freedom struggle, and the martyr, Bhagat Singh. Bose, in

INA uniform, salutes the Goddess/Mother India, while Bhagat Singh

offers her his serenely smiling, blood-dripping, severed head. In the foreground, fists pumping in triumph, are two girl soldiers, perhaps NCC (National Cadet Corps) cadets, but their co-presence here along with Bose evokes the role of Captain Lakshmi Sahgal of the ‘forgotten’ women's regiment of the INA (see Sahgal, 1997; Singh and Singh, 2003: 84-5).

Behind them, in scenes of bloody battle on a snowy peak, the Indian flag is being unfurled. Territory regained; woman as nation.

Plurality and Difference The very plurality of calendar art images of femininity, linked to the polytheistic profusion of divine stereotypes, provides a number of alternatives within and against the otherwise homogenizing imperatives of the modern mass media“ and the hegemonic ideal of a unitary nation-state. ‘Whether one derives these alternatives from non-Sanskritic influences,

from popular or folk cultures, or from especially resilient elements in the indigenous ‘tradition’, still untouched by modern processes of hybridiza-

tion or westernization, what matters is the ‘space’ thus created for multiple articulations of gender relations. Indeed, reading the general social science literature on the ‘status of women’ in India (preoccupied, as it no doubt rightly is, with issues of ‘victim’, ‘violence’, and ‘voice’)® leaves

one rather unprepared for some of the themes that are very insistent-

ly foregrounded in the calendar art medium. Several of these, I feel, deserve special attention: (i) the valorization of the ‘couple’; (ii) the

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

67

emphasis on the brother-—sister relationship; (iii) the celebration of ‘love’

between the sexes—of the female devotee for the male deity, or of man

and woman, within or outside marriage; and (iv) the sacralization of

the principle of androgyny.®® These all fall outside both the hierarchical model of ‘sexual politics’, based on relative power, as well as the moral

matrix of good woman/bad woman or wife/whore.

The Bengal ‘Renaissance’ of the late nineteenth century began the

process of refashioning the family around the ideal of companionate marriage, with the conjugal couple at its core. Visually, this change was

captured most dramatically in the new medium of photography (both studio and amateur photography),

whose

European

conventions

of

representation were mediated through Indian practice.” Calendar art

represents the couple not only as instruments for the reproduction of individual families, but as symbols of national regeneration—of the

potentialities of the land and of the labouring people, indeed, of the

developmental project of Indian modernity. Once again, as one sees here in Figure 2.11, the contradictions of Nehruvian nation-building are transcended, as industry and agriculture are brought into a symbiotic

relationship. 7°

The relationship of brother and sister—the exchange of metaphysical for material protection—is prominently enacted in calendar art.”| A

possible mundane reason for this is that the Bhai Dhuj festival (which

some observers believe is assuming increasing importance in contempo-

rary India)”?follows close on the festival of Diwali, when the calendars are

normally sold and distributed in north India. But it is also clear from the prints that the brother-sister relationship is especially associated with the Rajput/Kshatriya/non-Brahmin tradition within Hinduism, valour and

heroism against (Gandhian) non-violence. Typically, the print portrays a sister ceremonially tying a rakhi on her brother's wrist, or putting a tika

on his forehead, while the brother reciprocates with a gift of money.

Almost invariably, a portrait of a tubby Subhas Chandra Bose watches benignly over them. This is the routine and now conventionalized image, but an occasional print—such as Figure 2.12—may be more complex.

The foreground of this print is occupied by a brother and sister engaged

in the rakhi-tying ritual. To the rear, witnessing them, sits an old Rajput man, his gun resting across his knees, while a richly-decked married

woman looks on. In the background one sees evidence of agricultural prosperity—bountiful fields and a tubewell. Former Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri (a rather rare figure in calendar art, brief and uncharismaticas his tenure was), who is identified with the slogan Jai jawan,

jai kisan’ (‘Salute the soldier, salute the farmer’), presides at the top of the

68

Freedom and Destiny

print.” The total complex of features represents a statement of what one

might call the ‘Rajput ethos’, within which the brother-sister relationship occupies a privileged place. Every year’s collection of calendar art yields a representation of the Bhakti saint, Mirabai. Sometimes primly pious, she may also be ecstatic, abandoned, and oblivious to social decorum in her devotion to Lord Krishna. Her depiction often verges on the erotic (Figure 2.13). Cynics might say, and obviously with some justification, that the story of Mira is simply exploited by the manufacturer as a pretext to exhibit the female body before the voyeur-buyer. All the same, Mirabai’s unrestrained sensuality suggests an alternative, relatively unexplored paradigm of femininity,’4acknowledging woman as the desiring subject. This is a theme which is very vividly expressed in calendar art portrayals of the raslila of Radha and Krishna, the eternal love story of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Begum, and the tragic romances of the Punjab. Female sensuality, transparent here, contrasts both with the non-sensuality of the faithful wife/devoted

mother, and ako with the negative and dangerous sexuality of the temptress/vamp. But while the sensuous woman in the popular cinema must ultimately be scripted as wife or as vamp, or come toa sticky end asa cate-

gorical embarrassment (see Chapter 4), in calendar art she enjoys abrief

moment of legitimacy, notwithstanding the overall thrust of the medium towards the classical, the Aryan, the Brahmanical and the bourgeois.

Like the brother-sister relationship, the love of the devotee for the deity, and the passion of true lovers defy the conventional, hierarchical paradigm of relations of the sexes under the supposedly traditional Hindu ideological order. Along with the little-explored theme of androgyny— that is, of the perfect complementarity of the sexes in the fused figures of Shiva and Parvati (Ardhanariswara, Figure 2.14)—an invariable offering in the annual archive of calendar art, these are themes which should surely

command further attention and feminist interrogation.”° V. TRAJECTORIES OF CHANGE?

In its celebration of the couple, the brother-sister pair, the relation of true lovers and the ideal of androgyny, calendar art appears asa site ofresistance against dominant (patriarchal) ideologies, past and present. Similarly, the conspicuous representation of female ‘power-—good and bad, protective and destructive—challenges the conventional construction of Indian women as forever powerless and subordinated. Of course, one should be wary of romanticizing the medium simply because it iszon-elite, or of forgetting in one’s endorsement of ‘pluralism’

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

69

the overall hegemonizing thrust of the modern mass media. But one should abo be wary of concluding too hastily—on the basis of contemporary disturbing trends in the political sphere (see Section I)—that plur-

alism is now, and inevitably, a thing of the past, that the visual field has

been irreversibly hegemonized according toa ‘saffron’ agenda. It is true that Mother India now visibly colonizes public space as the sign of the ‘Hindutva political parties; that Bharat Mata/Durga occupies the map of India, holding aloft the tricolour/trident in a sign of symbolic protection; that the figures of Ram, Hanuman, and even Ganesh appear to be increasingly muscular and militant.”°One may also observe the continued consolidation of a new compromise/cosmopolitan type of femininity—a woman marked by herc/asscharacteristics rather than her regional origins (fair, plump, well-groomed, ‘sharp’-featured, amply ornamented; both demure and confident””)—while other classes and groups (the fisher girl, peasant girl, tribal girl, industrial worker), the typical subjects of ‘genre painting’, are appropriated within this aesthetic scheme, or clearly identi-

fied as ‘other’. Perhaps, too, the consociation of women from different

communities and regions of the country, as in Ravi Varma’s Galaxy (see Kapur, 1989), has now become relatively muted in calendar art’® though

the archive as a whole presents feminine figures in recognizably regional attire (Punjabi, Kashmiri, Maharashtrian, and so on, as in the song-dance items of commercial cinema), and the Republic Day Parade still conforms

to its old-established format. But a perspective on calendar art in a /onger historical frame suggests that the tension between ‘unity’ and ‘variety’ has been endemic in Indian

calendar art from the very beginning (cf. Kaur, 2002; Pinney, 1997b; Sen,

2002: 35-6; Uberoi, 2002), and that ‘pluralism’ continues to characterize

the medium and its conceptualization of femininity. This is both implicit in the total range of calendar art representations, including specifically Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist calendars (and with-

in these categories, a certain catering to sectarian allegiances and caste status), and alsoexpiicit in the frequent consociation of different communitarian and sectarian motifs within a single frame. Of course, the balance may bea delicate one for, depending on how the consociation is rendered and read, the message may either be one of equality, or of the appropriation of the non-Hindu ‘other’ within a Hindu-hegemonic order. For instance, in one case I have in mind, visual representation and text appear to indicate the parity of all paths to spiritual enlightenment: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian women are portrayed against the background of their places of worship (temple, mosque, gurudwara, church),

70

Freedom and Destiny

the four paths converging to a single ‘lamp’ (see Figure 2.15).’°In another case, male representatives of the four communities (differentiated by their headgear) partake of the milk dripping from the udders of a cow. The caption of the latter reads: ‘Desh dharam ka nata hai; gai hamari mata hai’ (‘The ties of nation and religion bond us; the cow is Mother to us all’),

confirming the appropriative message of the visual (see Figure 2.16; also, Uberoi, 2002).°°

gg The corpus of calendar/bazaar art is open-ended, the nation an entity still under negotiation, and ‘femininity’ a quality ever in the process of redefinition. This brief account has tried to indicate the complex ways in which representations of national ethos and understandings of womanliness tie in with each other as mutually entailing aspects of a modern Indian identity. This conjunction is embedded in the peculiar character of Indian calendar art as a genre in which sacred and secular images constantly interpenetrate—the ‘iconic mode’, one might call it, somewhat

tongue-in-cheek—which can so easily lend itself to the hegemonic project of the modern nation-state. At the same time, the multiplicity of representational possibilities afforded by calendar art simultaneously

threatens to undo the hegemonic national project and to subvert the

attempted saffronization of the visual field. Indeed, looking back from the bitter controversy over M.F Husain’s rendering of Saraswati, yet anticipating many more to come, one can see the genre of calendar art as a ground on which the tension between ‘unity’ and ‘variety’, between ‘hegemony’ and ‘pluralism’, between gender hierarchy and sexual difference, between asymmetry and complementarity in the relations of the sexes is continuously played out, especially—though not exclusively— through the deployment of women as signifiers. Notes 1. This chapter draws substantially on two earlier papers (Uberoi, 1990b and. Uberoi, 1997), retaining the title of the former. When I first began working

on Indian calendar art some years ago, trying to make sociological/feminist sense of a large archive of prints that J.PS. Uberoi and I had collected since the mid-1960s, the literature on this genre of popular culture was very meagre indeed. I could cite only Varma (1976), Vitsaxis (1977) and Ghosh (1978) specifically on calendar art; and allied work on popular bazaar paintings (e.g.

Archer, 1953); on RaviVarma (e.g. Chaitanya, 1960; Guha-Thakurta, 1986;

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

71

Kapur, 1989); and on Indian popular cinema in general and the mythological

film in particular (V. Das, 1981; Kapur, 1987; Nandy, 1981). (I had not at that stage accessed Venniyoor, 1981.) Since then the literature on all these

themes has expanded enormously, as the references in this chapter and else-

where in this book will reveal. In particular, one can cite the work of Stephen Inglis (1995), Kajri Jain (1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2002), Larsonet al. (1997), H.W. McLeod (1991), Neumayer and Schelberger (2003);

H.

Daniel Smith (1995), Amrit and Rabindra K.D. Kaur Singh (2003), Christopher Pinney (1995a, 1995b, 1997a, 1997b, 1999a, 2002), and Rao

etal.(2001). (Iwas notable to make full use of Pinney’s beautifully-illustrated book ‘Photos of the Gods’ [2004], which incorporates material from several of

the papers mentioned here—and much else beside—which appeared after this book was substantially complete.) Kajri Jain, whose own work lies at the intersection of the disciplines of art history and cultural studies, has identified anumber of separate emphases in the literature on calendar andallied popular

arts (1998), among them: (i) the changing interrelations of religion and the

media (see Babb and Wadley, 1995); (ii) the dynamics of the ‘public sphere’ in colonial India (see South Asia special issue, 14, 1 [1991] edited by Sandria Freitag); (iii) the question of ‘modernity’ in Indian art history (see G. Kapur, 1987, 1989; Rajadhyaksha, 1987); (iv) an emerging literature on cultural

studies, with particular focus on cinema (Prasad, 1998); and (v) a range of

feminist perspectives on popular visual culture (Dehejia, 1997a, 1997b; Uberoi, 1990b, 2003c, 2004b).

. Though the dust appears to have settled on this sorry affair, the issue continued to have explosive potential, as was indicated by eventsa year later when the Ahmedabad gallery was reopened. See the report by R.K. Misra, ‘Saffron war paint on a secular canvas’, the Pioneer (New Delhi), 21/09/97. The

Husain imbroglio was followed in 1998 by a controversy over Deepa Mehta's film, Fire, in which the lesbian relationship between the two female protagonists, originally named Sita and Radha, was deemed an insult to Hinduism

and to Indian culture. Protesters subsequently disrupted the filming of Mehta's sequel film, Water, again on the grounds that it portrayed the Hindu religion and Indian culture in a poor light. On the spiral of episodes of ‘moral panic’ over the exhibition of sex in the media during the 1990s, see Ghosh

(1999: esp., 238-59).

. Of course, ‘nudity’ is not merely the absence of clothes, as art historian

Monica Juneja has pointed out in a very perceptive comment on the Husain affair (1997a: 156). Husain, she argues, simultaneously ‘genuflects’ towards

the indigenous sculptural tradition of nude representation of deities and

engages in ‘critical dialogue’ with the western tradition of nude painting— but essentially rejects both. ‘For all its suggestive erotic power’, she concludes, Husain’s drawing of Saraswati ‘resists the gaze’.

Freedom and Destiny

72

4. Conventionally, the fine art of the ‘art gallery’ is sharply differentiated from

the arts of everyday life and of the mass media both by its mode of production

and its mode of consumption

(Bourdieu,

1984). In modern

times, the

authentic ‘work of art’ is usually required to be individually authored, the product of an original creative vision, and possessed uniquely by a patron or

buyer (though modern techniques of mass reproduction may allow a wider public to vicariously share that act of possession). The ‘creativity’ of the Indian calendar artist is of quite a different order, however, and lies in the ability to negotiate between the reproduction of familiar, stylized images and the production of novelty for a mass market which is as notoriously unpredictable as is the market for commercial cinema (cf. Akbar, 1994: 93).

. Cf. Blanc (1976) on the artwork of the Afghan truck; also Fukuoka Asian Art

Museum (1994) on Bangladeshi rickshaw painting; Rao et a/. (2001) on the art of the chart; and Srivatsan (2000: Ch. 3) on cinema hoardings. See also Guha-Thakurta (1991); and Jain (1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2002). Tt is not known exactly when the ‘calendars’ (i.e. date-sheets) first came to be

associated with the popular prints on religious and other themes, printed in

Germany or by local presses, that were already circulating widely in India by the turn of the century. I recall that one source, which regretably I can no

longer trace, mentioned 1910, but Neumayer and Schelberger (2003: 5) date the ‘calendar’ from as late as the 1930s, arguing that the term ‘calendar art’ is thus a misnomer for an art style and technology of production which by this time was over 40 years old in India. The production of presentation calendars was a routine advertising strategy of merchant business houses

worldwide in the early twentieth century and one notices interesting thematic and stylistic similarities between Indian calendars and Chinese commercial calendars published in Shanghai and Hong Kong in the 1920s and 1930s, of which the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum has an interesting collection. Calendars, along with diaries and other gifts, are also sold and presented at

the beginning of the new year according to the Gregorian calendar. In eastern India, the main calendar ‘season’ is March/April. Additionally, calendar printsare sold to coincide with most major festivals and are found as souvenirs at important pilgrimage sites. The same prints—without date-sheets—are marketed as ‘posters’ all the year round. . Ina recent article, Kajri Jain (2002) gives a fascinating account of the panIndian spread of the calendar art trade and its organization of production and

distribution through informal trade networks based on trust (the hundi system of promissory notes), operated through a hierarchyof commissioning

10.

agents.

Foran excellent account of the technical processes of lithography, oleography and half-tone printing, and their adaptation to India, see Neumayer and Schelberger (2003: Chs 1 and 2).

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

73

11. See Chapter 1, for an explanation of the concept of ‘culture industry.’ 12. This is the starting point also of Kajri Jain’s paper (2002), already referred to, where she seeks to go beyond and behind the ‘representational’ level in which

sacred and secular imagery interpenetrate to a consideration of the ‘material’ significance of the calendar as simultaneously an object of exchange in the modern marketplace and a ritual object of worship. This emphasis entails a somewhat different recuperation of the history of the medium to that presented here in Section III, and economically accounts for certain of the peculiarities of the genre: the modalities of the distribution process, linking the ‘bazaar ethos’ with ‘industrial mass production’; the privileging of the subject matter of the prints (‘Shankar’, ‘Mata’, ‘Ganesh’, etc.) over the individuality of the artist’s personal signature, except in outstanding cases; and the

habitual plagiarism resulting from what Jain coyly describes as the manufacturers’ ‘different approach to the notion of authorial property’ (see also Jain, 1998: Ch. 3; Uberoi, 1999-2000).

13. One may note here the contending view of Pinney (1997b, 2002, 2003) who

privileges the Nathdwara lineage in the genealogy of twentieth-century chromolithography, dismissing Ravi Varma’s role as little more than a blip on a wider screen. For more on the Nathdwara school, see Ambalal (1987), Lyons (1997) and Tripurari (2000).

14.

See my discussion of the parallel discourses on widow immolation in India

and foot-binding in China (Uberoi, 1990a); also, various of the essays on

social legislation in the colonial and contemporary periods in Uberoi, 1996c, especially Uberoi, 1996d and Vasudevan, 1996. 15. Christianity, Islam and Zoroastrianism do not serve the same function, being

deemed exogenous in origin, while tribal religions are localized, not pan-

Indian. Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism can be appropriated—as they are under contemporary Hindu law—as variants within the greater Hindu

tradition.

16. Cf. Guha-Thakurta’s essay, ‘Recovering the nation’s art’ on two early Bengali accounts of the ‘history’ of Indian art (1996: esp. 63, 68-9). 17. See Sangari (1989: 3); also Roy (2002). For a discussion of the role of the

museum in representing a national culture, see the paper by Kavita Singh

(2003) who points out that the Indian national art history that is expressed through the exhibits of the National Museum (New Delhi): (i) separates the fine arts from the technical arts and crafts (after the nineteenth-century British model); (ii) presents a teleology of artistic development that reached

its apogee in Gupta period sculpture; and (iii) celebrates the mature male body as embodying the excellence of the Indian cultural-artistic tradition. The latter is an observation that clearly deserves further reflection. Significantly, as far as I know, there are no public collections in India dedicated to the preservation and exhibition of popular prints such as the calendars that

74

Freedom and Destiny are discussed here, and few private collectors either, though the ‘marker’ value of calendar prints and other such ephemeral printed material (matchboxes, ‘tickets’ [cloth bale labels], and especially film posters) is now escalating

rapidly in reponse to global interest.

18. The Ravi Varma Press was actually preceded by other efforts in places which

were epicentres of early revolutionary Hindu nationalism, most notably the Calcutta Art Studio, founded in 1878 by former students of the government art school (see Mitter, 1994: 176-8, 210, 2002; also Guha-Thakurta, 1992;

Pinney, 2002, 2004: Ch. 2; Schelberger and Neumayer, n.d.), and the Poona

Chitrashala Press, one of many set up in western India around the same time.

The Poona Chitrashala Press was especially well known in the 1880s for its prints on heroic, epic and nationalist themes (Mitter, 2002). Neumayer and

Schelberger (2003: Chs 1 and 2) emphasize that it was the introduction of

steam-driven high-speed presses, rather than the technologies of lithography and oleography per se, that made the Ravi Varma Press a true advance in the scale and reach of technologies of mass reproduction. Neither Ravi Varma himself, nor his brother, Raja Raja Varma, who managed the press, was able to make a commercial success of it, though it subsequently flourished in the 19.

hands of Fritz Schleicher, the German technician andlater owner of the press. On the Bengal School of modern Indian art, see Guha-Thakurta (1992, 1994b, 1996: esp. 76-89 and Mitter (1994: 228-33 and Ch. 8).

20. An exhibition on Ravi Varma held at the National Museum, New Delhi, in

1993 (see Sharma and Chawla, 1993) generated a heated public debate on Ravi Varma’s role in the history of modern Indian art, but nothing has done so much to rehabilitate his damaged reputation than the soaring prices of his paintings in international art markets. There is now a burgeoning market among private collectors for RaviVarma prints—and indeed for any products in what is now perceived as the Ravi Varma ‘style’ (Pooja Sood, art curator,

21.

personal communication).

Including, paradoxically, the search for a pan-Asian artistic heritage and sensibility that privileged ‘intuition over reason . . . aesthetic sensibility over orders and systems, . . . spiritual empathy over acquired knowledge’ (Guha-

Thakurta, 1996: 89). 22. The irony is that the Indianizing efforts of these critics and their protégés now appear equally inauthentic, if in rather different ways; for in the ultimate analysis, a// movements in modern Indian art history have been parasitic on the West even while seeking to articulate a genuinely Indian sensibility (Mitter, 1994; Parimoo, 1973).

23. On the fascinating interrelations of photography, chromolithography and

cinema through the biography of D.G. Phalke, see Pinney (1997a: 91-7).

Rao et al, (2001: 12) refer to the interrelations and mutual influence of

cinema, TV, religious iconography and Western landscape painting/photography. The biographies of calendar and chart artists (see H. Daniel Smith,

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

75

Fieldnotes, Smith Poster Archive, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse; Rao

et al., 2001: 128-9) confirm how many have been involved with multiple media: theatre, film, photography, outdoor painting, etc. besides studio

painting. ‘Because the same hand does a variety of work’, Rao et al. write in

reference to the art of the educational chart, ‘modes of rendering seep in and

out ofall the graphic forms that the chart artist creates. Charts carry the boldness of posters, the drama of wall paintings, and the elaborate stage sets of cinema. Conversely, chart art can be seen in traffic signs, calendars, wall plaques, advertising posters and cinema hoardings’ (ibid.: 132).The cross-media commonalities are so striking that Rao et ai, classify all under the meta-term, ‘urban arts’. See also John (1998: 378) on ‘intertextuality’ in the visual field; also Freitag (2002); Lutgendorf (2002);T. Sarkar (2001: Ch. 2); and Singh

and Singh (2003). 24. See the Rang Roop Studio calendar, dated 1989, in FAAM (2000: 20, plate 1.4); and a similar or identical matchbox version in G. Sinha (1999: 138;

similarly, Pinney, 2004: 10, plate 2). Photo-stills of the TV Ramayana and Mahabharata stars also circulate as calendars and posters. 25. ‘So-called’, because they were mainly family members who collaborated with him on his major commissions, or carried on the tradition after his death.

I make a parallel point in the following chapter in reference to ‘baby’ icono-

graphy.

27. A similar point has been made by art historian Jyotindra Jain discussing the

female ‘types’ of Kalighat painting in the late nineteenth century:

As the Kalighat artist delineated the new female types, such as actresses,

[stage] heroines, nayikas, fashionable ladies, and courtesans, he took his cue largely from pre-existing models of goddesses and divine consorts. There was hardly any differentiation between the pictorialisation of images of goddesses and [divine] consorts and the courtesans, actresses and

the fashionable ladies of Calcutta in terms of their postures, gestures, figuration, composition, or in the manner in which the sari was draped, exposing or covering limbs, or general ornamentation (J. Jain, 1999: 123;

see also ibid.: 100, 191).

28. For a discussion of the sacralization of the secular image of the globe, or of the map of India, see Ramaswamy (2002). 29. See the plates in Lalit Kala Akademi (1960); Sharma and Chawla (1993); Neumayer and Schelberger (2003); Singh and Singh (2003), etc. The fam-

ous Amar Chitra Katha series of children’s comic books and storybook pre-

sentations of Indian culture for children go over much the same ground, as Nandini Chandra has illustrated in a recent study (1996; see also Hawley,

1995; Pritchett, 1995).

30. Indeed, Neumayer and Schelberger (2003) argue that the Hindu deities were

similarly appropriated to a nationalist-bourgeois aesthetic. The “industrial colonization” of the visual media . . . virtually exterminated the gods and

Freedom and Destiny

76

goddesses of many a minor tradition (ibid.: 15), or appropriated them to the major traditions through morphological innovations (ibid.: 122). However,

they ako note, in reverse, that the later introduction of half-tone printing allowed artists to introduce much more of their own ‘folksy’ iconography in

smaller-scale printing, as it were, enabling Indian pluralism to reassert itself

(see below).

31. According to Kapur (1989: 79, n.28), the set comprised: two paintings of

upper-caste Kerala women; two paintings of women from the Muslim courts; a Parsi bride; a Maratha girl with her domestic deity; a Tamil Brahmin

‘daughter-in-law’; an Ayyangar lady; a group of south Indian gypsies; and a Bombay nautch girl.

32. The kitschy ‘Vegetable seller’ by RaviVarma’s younger brother and oftentimes assistant, C. Raja Varma (see Lalit Kala Akademi, 1960), is uncomfortably

reminiscent of the sort of middle class enactment of the women of ‘other’

classes found at every fancy dress parade in an Indian ‘English medium public school’. Portraits of ‘fisherwomen’ and ‘village belles’, contemporary genre productions, are also favourite types that invite the class-sex gaze.

33. Among the problems addressed in the literature are (i) the disregard of the

male body as an object of the male gaze; (ii) the disregard of the position of

the female viewer, except as masochist; and (iii) the possibility of ‘subversion’ of the code by female artists (see e.g. Sen, 2002: 83; and Ch. 1).

34. Roland Barthes’ famous analysis (1972a) of the Nigerian soldier saluting the French flag might be an inspiration here. 35. See, e.g., Allen (1982: 4-8); Derné and Jadwin (2000); Dube (1986, 1988, 1997: esp. Chs 4 and 5); Uberoi (1996c); Yalman (1963). 36. See, among others, Bacchetta (1994); Das (1995: Chs 3 and 4); C. Gupta (2001); Ramaswamy (1999); Sarkar (2001: esp. Ch. 6); and essays by Menon

and Bhasin, Kannabiran, Rouse, and Sangari and Vaid in Jayawardena and de

Alwis (1996).

37. I make no apologies for the fact that these two perspectives—of commoditiz-

ation and iconicization—rest on very different conceptual foundations; at this stage in our interrogation of genres of Indian popular culture, one merely assumes that such eclectic approaches are justifiable in the first instance. On the problematics of notions of ‘commodification’ and ‘objectification’ in the

discourse of the contemporary women’s movement, see Ghosh (1999).

38. The archive on which this discussion is based is a set of several thousand

calendars collected since the mid-1960s by J.PS. Uberoi and myself, with some pieces from the 1950sand earlier. A selection of the calendars, including many of those discussed in this chapter, was presented in an exhibition, ‘From goddess to pin-up’, in the Eicher Gallery, New Delhi, February-March 1996, subsequently travelling to several other venues in India and abroad (see Sood, 1996; Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, 2000). Interesting collections of calendar artare to be found in the Wellcome Institute, London; theVictoria and Albert

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art Museum,

77

London; the Museum of the University of British Columbia,

assembled originally by Stephen Inglis; the H. Daniel Smith Poster Archive, now housed at the Syracuse University Library; the Ainslie T. Embree Collection of the Asia Society, New York; and the private collection of Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Vienna (see 2003). See also Singh and

Singh (2003).

39. One should qualify this observation with the remark that there has developed

in recent yearsa ‘niche’ market for pin-ups of male body-builders, sports stars and martial arts exponents, as well as for currently popular male cine-stars, especially those of the ‘hunk’ variety. Close observers of contemporary mass media are struck by the increasing visibility of the (homoerotic) muscular

male body, a development which also commends close attention from a gender perspective. This development may be linked with the weakening of what Kajri Jain reports (1998: 135ff) as a convention in calendar art against painting the gods ‘with muscles’, a rule often frustrating for artists keen to display their grasp of anatomy. It may also reflect the récent, much commented on, development by the ‘Hindu Right’ of a strongly muscular and hyper-masculine image of Ram (see Anudradha Kapur, 1993; Jain, 1998: 214-18; Kaur, 2002; Lutgendorf, 2002; Pinney, 1997b; Uberoi, 2002). A. Kapur (ibid.) sees the ‘en-masculinization’ of Ram in the 1990s as the logical

culmination of a process set afoot under the colonial regime, a proposition questioned on grounds of historical accuracy by both Pinney and Jain, and also Raminder Kaur (2002).

40. Though many large firms and public sector enterprises do commission special annual calendars for publicity purposes (some of them are eagerly sought after as collectors’ pieces), these only rarely incorporate, or even relate to, the firm’s product. Most usually, a firm places a bulk order with a wholesaler for a print in his current catalogue, and the latter arranges to print the firm’s name, logo and other publicity material, along with the date-sheet, at the base of the calendar. The calendars are then distributed to favoured

41.

clients, reinforcing the ethos of exchange relations in the market. See K. Jain (2002) for more on this. See, e.g., Bhatia (2000: esp. Ch. 9); Chaudhuri (2001); Goffman (1979); Munshi (1997, 1998); Srivatsan (2000: Ch. 5). Art historian Geeti Sen

(2002: 88-9) comments perspicaciously on the parodying of the advertising industry's deployment of women by contemporary women artists like Gogi

Saroj Pal.

42. Educationist Krishna Kumar (personal communication) has described one

aspect of the treatment of little girls in this society as cutification—suggesting that it is perhaps a reflection of the sentimentality provoked by the prospect

of the girl’s eventual transfer through marriage to another family. I find the

idea of cutification quite useful for characterizing and interpreting the images of girl children in contemporary mass media (see also Chapter 3).

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43. Of course, one also sees occasional self-conscious attempts to create new and

‘progressive’ gender images—the little girl (or androgynous infant) playing

doctor (see Chapter 3); the woman scientist at work in her laboratory; Indira

Gandhi as the leader of a nation at war.

On the intertextual connotations of the image of the woman on the motor-

cycle, seeThomas (1996: 181, n.8). Thomas was describing the process of the

incorporation of ‘non-traditional’ elements into the legitimate definition of Indian femininity. Thus, Manmohan Desai’s Naseeb (1981) consolidated the

saucy calendar art imagery of the 1960s and 1970s with film industry dreamgirl, Hema Malini, picturized riding a motorbike.

45. I was impressed to see most of these items in an anti-dowry hoarding dis-

played in Delhi some time ago. In the corner of the frame, along with these items, was an image of a woman in flames. The hoarding was subsequently

removed after protest, since it seemed possible to construe the message of the hoarding as: ‘If you do not give all these things to your daughter, this is what

might happen to her!’, a message which even the conspicuous cross through the items apparently failed to dispel.

46. Cf. Marina Warner's account (1983) of the historical evolution of the cult of the Virgin Mary, each historical era encouraging an elaboration of one or other of the Virgin’s multiple roles—as Queen, Bride, Mother and Interces-

sor—in relation to the ‘repentant whore’, Mary Magdalene. In Hinduism, there are not only multiple deities, but multiple forms of each deity, each with different associations, qualities, and functions (i.e., the nine forms of Durga, the eight forms of Lakshmi). Calendar iconography frequently portrays these multiple forms, often identifying each type by name, as they do also for the rather better-known ten avatars of Vishnu. 47. For reflections on the impact of the televised serials, see esp. Mankekar (2000); also Brosius (1999a); Chakravarti (1998); Mitra (1993).

48. Aclose inspection of calendars that appear to endorse a conservative cultural/

political agenda reveals that these are sometimes more subversive than their explicit themes suggest. I can give an example of this in a painting executed at the well-known Rang Roop Studio in Delhi for reproduction asa calendar. Itshows Sita begging Ram to take her with him into exile. However, Sita’s very sensual body language makes her request appear more the product of a

woman's desire than ofa sense of wifely duty (see FAAM, 2000: 20, Plate 1.5).

Similarly, scenes of Ram and Sita banished to the forest are often romantically sensual. Note that recent feminist scholarship has contributed to disclosing the plurality of Ramayanas that comprise the traditions of women's folklore (see, e.g. Richman, 1991), and to critiquing the repression of women’sagency

in the televised renderings of the legends of Sita and Radha (see Pauwels,

2004). 49. Some recent feminist writings have suggested that the vamp role should be viewed as a much more complex representation than simplistic theories of

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

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objectification and the male gaze allow, and that she has more positive

qualities (for instance, asan actively desiring subject) than her roleas the mere antithesis of the good wife suggests (see e.g. Mazumdar et a/., n.d.). 50. I follow here the analysis and exposition of this calendar presented in the catalogue of the Eicher exhibition (see Uberoi, 1996a).

51. ‘Vyjanthimala was a south Indian film star popular at this time in Bombay cinema.

52. The challenge of modernizing Indian agriculture may also be expressed in a

‘masculinist’ idiom, as in an example from Singh and Singh’s Images of Freedom (2003). Expressly titled ‘Modern age’ (dated between 1947 and 1952),

the calendar has insets of Gandhi and Nehru along with a realistically executed scene ofa well-dressed farmer plowing his field with a tractor-drawn hoe. But the accommodation with ‘tradition’, one might suggest, was not as happily achieved as in the female- and couple-centred images, for the traditional bare-chested plowman with his simple plough and pair of bullocks is not superseded by the man-machine combine but floats ethereally in the clouds above—a nostalgically recalled past (see Singh and Singh, 2003: 62 and Plate 23).

53. Educational charts, in particular, bear witness to the State’s modernizing

agenda through celebration of big industries, big dams, satellites and the modernization of agriculture. Rao et al. (2001) reproduce numerous examples, commenting: ‘A rural idyll of plenty and technological progress are the two sides of the nation-building coin’ (ibid.: 77). From the same period we

note that Mehboob Khan's Mother India (1957) opens with a scene of the

inauguration of a big dam, before turning its focus on Radha, the village woman, who signifies the eternal India. In fact, many scenes in the film are iconicized in calendar art of the 1960s and 1970s—the peasant woman with sickle, the harvest of millet pods ( jowar, not wheat or rice)—with the difference that the evil money-lender of Mother India, who grows rich on the labour of an exploited and impoverished peasantry, has no place in the calendar evocation of bucolic prosperity and pleasure under the regime of Green Revolution. An interesting motif in Mother India is a brief glimpse of a village threshing operation which takes the shape of the map of India. 54. See Uberoi (1999-2000); also Pinney (1999b: 100, Figure 1). Neumayerand Schelberger (2003: Plate 56) reproduce a fascinating print (c. 1930) of the

triad of auspicious deities, Lakshmi, Saraswati, and Ganesh, against a theatrical background of a modern cityscape. Their comment on this print is pertinent:

During the twentieth century, when the means of riches were to be found more in the capital markets of the cities, Lakshmi too was brought out and placed against a cityscape. The origin of the cityscape as an environment fit for gods goes back to a print of the Hindu monk, Vivekananda, who is shown standing in front of the high-rise skyline of Chicago, where he . . .

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participated in the Parliament of Religions during the World Columbian Exposition in 1893 (ibid.: 79).

55. Or perhaps Bombay's chaotic urban modernity is here transformed into the

rationalist idiom of planned development. See also the calendar illustration

of two girls on bicycles against a Bombay cityscape, reproduced in Uberoi (2003¢: 202).

56. For a contemporary artist’s appropriation of the symbol of Kamdhenu, the

half-woman/half-cow ‘wish-fulfilling cow’, see Geeti Sen’s comments on a painting by Gogi Saroj Pal (2002: 84-5).

57. Mrs Gandhi's Durga-like qualities were also affirmed at the time of the

declaration of national Emergency in 1975, when M.F. Husain had painted acontroversial triptych showing Indira Gandhi as Durga. Asa matter of fact,

the imagery had already been anticipated in bazaar art at the time of the

Bangladesh war, when Indira Gandhi took on the mantle of the goddess to

vanquish the country’s foes (cf. Chakravarty, 1996: 152). See also photo-

graphs of Mrs Gandhi conjoined with an icon of Durga or enshrined as

goddess in her own right in Sinha (1999: 23, 49). Apart from Indira Gandhi, whose ‘deification’ is well-recorded, other successful and aspirant female political leaders have also attracted iconographic deification: Sonia Gandhi,

Mayawati and Jayalalitha. In particular, one sees the interpenetration of politics, cinema and religion in the massive ‘cut-out figures that are produced

on behalf of ALADMK leader and former filmstar Jayalalitha (ibid.: 62; also Jacob, 1997). 58.

For an example of the iconography of Lakshmi Bai as female counterpart of

Subhas Chandra Bose, see Singh and Singh (2003: 48 and Plate 17).

59. Sometimes the protective-nurturant aspect takes precedence over the powerful destructive, as occasionally in the iconography of the Bangladesh war, where Mrs Gandhi is seen providing shelter to hordes of refugees from Bangladesh, symbolically enfolded in the pallu of her sari.

60. The format of the title is apparently frequently used, with variations. See, for

instance, the plate, ‘Desh ki pukar’, in Brosius (1997b). ‘Ma ki pukar’ dates

from the mid-1960s. There is nowa robust literature on the literary and visual

depiction of Mother India, for instance, McKean (1996); Ramaswamy (1999, 2001, 2002); Sen (2002); Sarkar (2001: Ch. 8); Singh and Singh (2003); Uberoi (2002), among others. While Mother India is often fierce and vengeful, endorsing violent struggle, she may also have a nurturant-maternal

manifestation, as when she is shown cradling Gandhi or Bose on her lap (like Parvati with the infant Ganesh) (see Neumayer and Schelberger, 2003: 57—

8, 125 and Plates 139-41; Sen, 2002: 35-6; Singh and Singh, 2003: 65, 88—

9), or even the beneficent qualities of goddess Lakshmi (see FAAM, 2001:

36-7, Plates 4.6 and 4.8). See also Geeti Sen's analysis of the famous painting

of Bharat Mataby Abanindranath Tagore (commended by Sister Nivedita as

a perfect icon of the eternal Indian woman), her four arms holding

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

81

not weapons but the four promised symbols for a reconstructed India:

anna (food), vastu (clothing), siksha (education) and diksha (spiritual salvation). . . .Sheseems demure and comely, without the fierce, mesmeris-

ing look emanating from icons like Kali or Durga. She wears a saffron robe

and remains asexual, raising questions about her identity: is she virgin or married or renunciate? Is she goddess or woman? (Sen, 2003: 161; also Mitter, 1994: 294-6; Frontispiece and Plate XXI).

While Abanindranath’s Bharat Matawas acontrivedswadeshi image, popular Calcutta Art Studio lithographs of a muscular Kali astridea pallid Lord Shiva, in circulation from the early 1880s, could equally allegorise regenerate India overwhelming Britain—or so over-sensitive British authorities were con-

vinced. See Mitter (1994: 178, and Plate XII); also Neumayer and Schelberger (2003: 125-7, Plates 124, 126, 128); and Pinney (1997b).

61. Christiane Brosius (1997) has drawn attention to the special importance of

the map in the production of ‘an elaborate visual rhetoric to express the need of a nation for a territory, be it imagined or derived or, in the case of postcolonial India, a real though partly contested one.’ In patriotic calendar art, as Brosius shows, the map may be ‘anthropomorphic’, merging with the figure of Bharat Mata. It may also combine with or encompass mythological or historical figures, nationalist symbols (e.g. the flag) and natural elements (fire, water, etc.), or it may incorporate pilgrimage sites to construct a ‘sacred

geography’ of the nation. See also Brosius (1999a: 106-9, 131 n. 18); Juneja

(1997b); Neumayer and Schelberger (2003: 129 and Plate 131); Ramaswamy (2001, 2002); and Chakravarty’s interesting discussion (1996: 170) of the

function of the map of India at the beginning of the film, Mughal-e-Azam {K. Asif, 1960). 62.

Bhagat Singh was of course hanged. See Neumayer and Schelberger (2003:

133, Plate 139) or Singh and Singh (2003: Plate 47) which shows the God-

dess/Mother India receiving Nehru’s offering of the severed heads of the notable martyrs of the freedom struggle; also Pinney (2002) on Rup Kishore, a painter who executed a large number of patriotic posters, many of them proscribed during the British period, including one of Bhagat Singh presenting his severed head to Mother India (ibid.: 137 and Plate 6). See also Sen (2002: 32).

63. The print may well have been NCC promotional material.

See note 30 above. 65. The ‘3V’s’, memorably amplified in conversation with Veena Das. In the following chapter, I also comment on the iconographic originality of thecalendar art mediumin its imaginative elaboration of the idea of the GodBaby, a calendar art theme that has scarcely been noticed.

67. This is a theme that I had overlooked earlier, focused as I was then on the

containment of female power through ‘spousification’ (cf. Gatwood, 1985).

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Its importance became salient only when I considered the archive from another point of view, that is, as witness to the developmental agenda of Nehruvian socialism (see Uberoi, 2002).

68.

Interestingly (and quite independently), all four foci are proposed by William

Harman (1992) as the root metaphors of gender relations exemplified in the sacred marriage rituals of the Minakshi temple in Madurai. In this tradition, the goddess Minakshi and Vishnu are scripted as sister and brother, so that the divine marriage of Minakshi and Lord Shiva establishes the kinship relationship of brothers-in-law between the two gods and thereby—in the

South Indian cultural context—a symbolic reconciliation of Shaivism and Vaishnavism.

69. See n. 23 above on the intertextuality of photography and calendar art,

including in the careers of individual artists and photographers; also Freitag

(2002); Pinney (1997a: Ch. 3); and Schelberger and Neumayer n.d. The importance of photography in creating and recreating the ideal of ‘the couple’ is underlined in a photo exhibition, ‘Re-presenting Indian women, 1875 to 1947: A visual documentary’, curated by Malavika Karlekar (India International Centre, 14-23 December 2001); see also Karlekar (2003).The contri-

bution of Indian women photographers is documented in the recent work of

Sabeena Gadihoke. 70. One can see this in a number of calendars of the 1960s and 1970s. For ins-

tance, a popular Yogendra Rastogi calendar (1974, author's collection) portrays peasant couple holding sheaves of wheat in a medallion at its centre, surrounded by vignettes of industrial production. Similarly, a socialist-realist style print of the same period (author's collection) shows a labouring couple and their sturdy child at the site of a mega-dam project, the child triumphantly holding aloft a frond of wheat. 71. Although it occupies a prominent place in calendar art, and also commercial cinema, the brother-sister relationship is one that has been relatively neglected both by sociologists and by feminists. But see Jamous (1991) for an

interpretation of kinship and ritual which places the cross-sex sibling relationship at the core of Hindu social organization; and essays in Nuckolls’

edited volume (1993) on siblingship in South Asian cultures, though admittedly the main focus therein is on the relations of brothers (e.g. Derné, 1993). 72.

Personal communication, Kumkum Sangari, reflecting on the new fervour that seems to surround this festival in north Indian cities and towns. It is generally assumed that the new religiosity in India inevitably has what one might term ‘patriarchizing’ implications, but the enthusiasm for Bhai Dhuj

may complicate this judgement. 73.

But see Pinney (2003: 645-6 and Figure 12). This is a calendar painted by the well-known Yogendra Rastogi (mentor of H.R. Raja), which centrally

Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Calendar Art

83

features Lal Bahadur Shastri along with scenes of agricultural prosperity and an unfolding battle scene in snowy mountains. 74, There is continuity here with the representation of the nayika figure: the woman dreaming of her lover, and regretting separation (see J. Jain, 1999). On Mira, see also the Manushi special issue on Bhakti women poets, Nos 50— 75.

51-52, January to June 1989; also, Mukta (1994); Prasad (1998: 111); Sangari (1990); and Uberoi (2004). See Uberoi (1993b) on ‘androgyny’ as a theme to which South Asian femin-

ists may make a special contribution. 76. See the sources cited in n. 39 above.

On RaviVarma’s feminine types, see also Arunima (2003); Chaitanya (1993: 29-30); Neumayer and Schelberger (2003: Ch. 6). Describing the female

figures of ‘chart art’, influenced by calendar art styles, Rao et al., write: ‘The representation of women projects a certain feminine type from popular art, at once traditional and contemporary. Adorned in the modern sari, but proportioned according to the aesthetic norms set out in classical Sanskrit

texts, these women have full, round faces, flowing hair, and permanently coy expressions’ (2001: 77). It is perhaps premature to suggest that the international beauty queen or anorexic cat-walk model has supplanted this type, though the compulsions of globalization may sooner or later succeed in transforming the physical articulation of ideal Indian femininity (see John, 1998; Munshi, 2001; Thapan, 2004).

78. It may bea personal impression, but one feels that the endorsement of ‘secul-

arism’ no longer has the salience in calendar art that it earlier had. I date the decline from 1984 (this is clearly a perspective from the Delhi/north India region), after which one noticed also a change in Sikh self-representation in calendar art, a polarization between militancy and martyrdom. Shahid Amin (2000) has also pointed to the routinization, the draining of meaning, and the caricaturing of the ‘other’ in many oft-reprinted calendars on the theme of national integration. He was referring in particular to a well-known one of a set of children of different communities, assembled under the slogan, ‘Ham sab ek hain’ (We are all one). See also Brosius (1999a: 106-9) on the ‘Sangh

Parivar’s’ construction of national unity in its Vande Mataram project (1997). Brosius writes: ‘Everyone is given a label and “diversified”, only to be united again under the flag and Vande Mataram: the perfect scenario for a popular slogan . . ., “unity in diversity” (ibid.: 109; see also Sarkar, 2001: Ch. 5). I explore this tension at greater length in Uberoi (2002). 79. The text, apparently taken from the Upanishads, reads: ‘O Lord, the different paths which men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee’. Of course, it might be argued that the diya flame which crowns the picture is not, in fact, a communally neutral symbol. See D. Smith (1963: 168); also Uberoi (2002).

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80. One is reminded here, intertextually, of a reverse scene from Manmohan

Desai’s Amar, Akbar, Anthony (1977), where the mother’s Hindu, Muslim

and Christian sons, lying in separate hospital beds, provide blood transfusions to their mother, with the temple, mosque and church glimpsed through background windows (see Thomas, 1996: 167).

CHAPTER

3

‘Baby’ Icons Forms and Figures of a New Generation!

ig

When Mohan grasped the churn At the touch of hand to curds, clay jar and churning-cord, The sea, the mountain and the Serpent knew fear. Sometimes he measures the world in three steps;

Sometimes he can't cross the doorstep;

Sometimes the very gods cannot reach him; Sometimes he plays with Nanda’s wife; Sometimes he’s not content with the whole Sea of Milk; Sometimes he delights in simple butter and curds. Not even Sesa can tell the tale

Of the lila of the Lord of Siirdas. Sitirdas?

I. INTRODUCTION

p | 1 his chapter is suggestive, more than definitive, for it addresses a topic on which there is, as yet, only a rather patchy social science literature; and it does so through materials which are quite different from those normally utilized to present and explore such a theme in the Indian context. The theme is that of the conceptualization of the child and of childhood—not merely as a ‘natural’ developmental stage in the human life-course, but as a problematic conceptual category, which is historically produced and must be contextually located. I shall bring to

my hermeneutic task a set of printed images from a large personal col-

lection of Indian calendar art of the post-Independence period acquired

over the last thirty-five or more years,’ a focus that seeks to give to visual

culture a role of central importance in the writing of ethnography and social history, where it is usually only ancillary or illustrative (see Rama-

swamy, 2002; also Arunima, 2003). Indeed, it is serendipity that one of

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the inspirational contributions to contemporary understandings of the historicity of European childhood, Philippe Ariés’s Centuries of Childhood

(1962 [1960]), drew its data largely from visual materials of one kind or

another (popular woodblock prints, paintings, portraits and sculptures), textual sources being, to the contrary, relatively peripheral.‘ In the previous chapter, I had pointed to several important features of ‘calendar art’ asa popular visual medium that has its own specificity. First, calendar art is the product of a finely-tuned, modern ‘culture industry’ that both expresses and modulates popular taste. Second, it is quintessentially a hybrid medium, working on the principles of ‘citation’ and ‘collation’> to combine the consumerist imagery of global capitalism with indigenous folk and classical art forms. Third, the industry simultaneously produces religious icons for worship and secular images of various types, each engaging the other in complex semiotic interplay. So, just as Ravi Varma’s goddesses were luscious women, and his women goddesslike, similarly in this instance we will see the child endowed with the attri-

butes of the child-God, Krishna, and the child-God himself portrayed with distinctly human, child-like characteristics (as so wonderfully rendered in the verse from Siirdas). Fourth, as noted, the advent of mechanical reproduction coincided historically with the rise of Indian nationalism,

culminating in the founding of the nation-state of independent India. Thus, throughout the last century and still today, mass-produced prints have been instruments of, and witness to, the aspirations of nationhood,

and within this wider compass to the expression and consolidation of regional, religious, and sectarian identities. In the previous chapter we have seen that tantalizing pin-ups may sometimes be read as invocations of the sacred and statements of collective aspirations, even as they incite

the ‘male gaze’. Similarly, ‘kitschy’ landscapes (‘sceneries’) and bonny baby pictures, in their own way, may be direct and indirect evocations of nationalist ideals. This point will be illustrated here in regard to ‘baby’ iconography. In the recent explosion of writings on the medium of calendar art, on

which I had earlier commented (see Chapter 2, n.1), the ‘Baby’ theme of

Indian calendar art has been almost completely ignored.° This is a

somewhat curious omission in the sense that pictures of babies, infants,

and children—along with cute pet and flower pictures and improbably idyllic landscapes—are both numerous and conspicuous in the medium. In fact, babies are everywhere for the looking, and certain artists and

studios are known to ‘specialize’ in baby pictures, just as others do in specific deities, or in ‘beauties’, filmstars and ‘sceneries’.”

‘Baby Icons

87

So, why the omission? Perhaps the baby pictures seem aesthetically too nondescript, too everyday and unremarkable, or too semiotically transparent, to deserve critical comment and scholarly deconstruction? Or perhaps, unlike certain other calendar art themes—Mother India, the Sacred Cow, the militant Ram, the warrior Ganesh, the hyper-masculine Hanuman, for instance—they may appear too innocuous to be bothered with when other, more menacing and provocative visuals invite public scrutiny and concern.® To the contrary, however, we assume here that there is nothing ‘natural’ or transparent about childhood; that decontextualized aesthetic criteria are hardly relevant for assessing the function and social meaning of mass-produced prints; and that ‘baby’ iconography can be every bit as political (though perhaps relatively benignly so) as the overtly political iconography sponsored by the ‘Hindu Right’. II. ENVISIONING CHILDHOOD

As comparative and historical evidence attests, the notion of childhood deployed in contemporary social science is one that has developed in Europe relatively recently, and under particular historical circumstances. The story is quite complex for, as Ariés and others have illustrated, even

within Europe itself different culture-areas have had quite different reckonings of childhood and its sub-stages, as well as of mature adulthood

and old age. For instance, sometimes ‘childhood’ was held to encompass the whole of a person's life prior to his marriage, whether that be at the

age of thirteen or thirty;? sometimes it was distinguished from life-stages of infancy, on the one hand, and from adolescence on the other. There

were also marked differences according to social class and economic means, and by sex as well (though this latter differentiation is regrettably quite muted in Ariés’s account). In general, Aris proposes that society in medieval times gave little social recognition to the infant (perhaps, he suggests, because of the precariousness of life at this stage). Post-weaning, however, the child participated actively in the world of adults. Children were just little adults, clad in miniature adult costumes, sharing public space with adults, and engaging, albeit in their own childish way, in adult activities. Modernity, Ariés argues, saw a gradual process of separation of the child, and of childhood as a life-stage, from the world of adults. The child gradually came

to have distinct clothes and distinct activities, and was subjected to a selfconscious disciplining routine to equip him or her for adult roles. This

differentiation of the life-stage of childhood was associated with other

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notable transformations of social life from the seventeenth century onwards, specifically, the privileging of the conjugal couple as the core of family life, the development of notions of ‘privacy’ dividing the public and domestic spheres, the institution of comprehensive schooling, and the obsessive focus on the child as the unique instrument of the family’s social and material aspirations in bourgeois society. Education was the key: Nowadays our society depends, and knows that it depends, on the success of its educational system. It has a system of education, a concept of education, an awareness of its importance. New sciences such as psycho-analysis, pedia-

trics and psychology devote themselves to the problems of childhood, and their findings are transmitted to parents by way ofa mass of popular literature.

Our world is obsessed by the physical, moral and sexual problems of childhood. This preoccupation was unknown to medieval civilization, because there

was no problem for the Middle Ages: as soon as he had been weaned, or soon after, the child became the natural companion of the adult (Ariés, 1962:

395-6).

Modern childhood, according to Ariés, is endowed with two primary attributes. First, it is scripted as a time of ‘play’ when—ideally—the individual is free of the twin responsibilities of adulthood: production and

reproduction, work and procreative sex (see also A. Gupta, 2002: 53,

n.7).!°The special sign of this life-stage is the ‘toy’.!!Second—and in partial tension, it must be admitted, with the former attribute—childhood is conceived as a period of ‘training’ for responsible adulthood, beginning with weaning and toilet training.'After the family, schooling is the chief instrument of this process in modern societies, equipping the individual

with the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy without which s/ he would be unable to manage elementary, everyday tasks. Within these

broad parameters, childhood may be further sub-divided into a series of

psycho-social and developmental stages: the dependency of infancy yields to the playfulness and individuation of early childhood, and thence to more disciplined training, culminating in the liminal phase of adolescent induction into regimes of work and sexuality. This construction of ‘childhood’ was a process that developed unevenly through Europe over several hundred years, Ariés maintains, and it particularly affected—in a way it both constituted and defined—the emerging middle classes. The aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie on the one hand, and the working classes at the bottom end of the social spectrum, for a long time retained rather different (in some ways ‘medieval’)

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norms of family life and sociability, but ultimately it was the middle-class norm that triumphed (Ariés, 1962: 390-1). Of course there are many

variations on this pattern (one can think immediately of the contrasting

schemas of Freud, Lacan, Piaget, Erikson, and so on), and challenges to Ariés’s formulations as well (see, for example, Viruru, 2001: 50-1), but the overall scheme is well-established, naturalized and now normative.

It has become a sort of common sense that informs both the academic disciplines that deal with childhood (child development, developmental psychology, and the like) and the increasingly assertive literature on the

‘rights of the child’ to a life free of labour and exploitation, '¥as indeed it did the earlier debates in the Indian context on juvenile (male) sexuality

and the individual and national importance of semen retention,!4and the

even more publicly contentious social issue of ‘child marriage’.!5 Katherine Mayo’s notorious ‘gutter-inspector’s’ account of child bride patients in a hospital in northeast India isa case in point, graphically highlighting the pathos and pathology of the girl-child forced into premature womanhood and conjugal sexuality, when she should have been free to learn and to play: ‘Now what can be wrong here?’, Mayo asks as she stops beside the bedside of

a ‘wan-faced child whose bird’s-claw hands are clasped around a paper toy’.

The doctor accompanying her explains that the girl had earlier been a pupil in a Government primary school, ‘a merry wee thing, and so bright that she

had just won a prize for scholarship.’ Married off during the school holidays to a fifty-year old man, she had been subjected to violent sexual abuse and psychological trauma, ultimately arriving in the hospital with internal wounds

‘alive with maggots’:

‘For days after she got here, she lay speechless on her bed. Not a sound did she utter—only stared with half-blank, half terror-stricken eyes. . .. Now her

mental balance is mending, though her body isstill sick. . . . Shelies there with

her toys, wondering at them, feebly playing with them, or with her big eyes following our movements about the room. She is pitifully content. Meantime

her husband is suing to recover his marital rights and force her back into his possession. She is not yet thirteen years old’ (Mayo, 1998 [1927]: 109).

In sum then, to return to Ariés’s formulation of the history of child-

hood, childhood has now come to be assumed as an unproblematically identifiable and ‘natural’ stage in the individual life-cycle, self-evidently non-sexual, and characterized by the combination of schooling and play (or, ifnot active play, at least the absence of ‘labour’). Indeed, this conceptualization has been so all-pervasive through a century or more in Europe that all other conceptualizations of childhood and the human life-cycle

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tend to be pathologized; or else they are consigned to the time-frame of pre-modernity or ‘tradition’. III. SourH AsiAN CHILDHOODS

As yet, we have no history of South Asian childhood comparable to that which Ariés and others have constructed for Europe. Or perhaps, more likely, we have never asked the right questions of the materials that we do have, for childhood is certainly not an issue politically on a par with the questions of wifehood and womanhood that have featured so prominently in public and scholarly discourse through the last century-and-a half.!° And while we can find obvious points of similarity with Ariés’s

account—for instance, the increasing focus since the late nineteenth cen-

tury on the conjugal couple as the core of the modern family (see Sarkar, 2001; also Nandy, 1992: 61)—it is surely important, before transposing Arits’s Europe-centred account into a different socio-cultural milieu, to be alert to the specificities of the Indian situation. In thus introducing a comparative dimension, one may also be in a position to critically evaluate the universalist pretensions of Ariés’s construction of the attributes of modern childhood (cf. A. Gupta, 2002: 37).

As RadhikaViruru has reconstructed the history of childhood in India, admittedly from patchy secondary sources (Viruru, 2001: 54-64), the received account is primarily a narrative of the history of schooling, rather than of childhood as such. It starts with a description of the idealized asrama system of early times (a schema that begins with the education of the male children of the two upper varnas) and the expansion of indigenous education (Hindu and Muslim) through the medieval period, to focus ultimately on the educational ‘reforms’ introduced during the period of colonial rule and their appropriation into the educational policies of independent India. Viruru argues (and she is not alone here) that colonial education, and particularly the use of English as the medium of advanced and scientific knowledge, has effected not only acolonization of the mind, but simultaneously a colonization of childhood, for modern

education has embedded within it notions of childhood and personhood which are culturally alien to the South Asian environment. Ultimately she asks—presumably rhetorically—whether we ‘need’ a ‘childhood’ in India if this loss of selfhood is what modern childhood is all about (ibid.:

Ch. 3).

Viruru’s brief attempt at a historical account of Indian childhood,

culminating in despair over the cultural self-alienation imposed by colonialism and perpetuated through the post-colonial educational system,

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91

condenses several of the themes that persistently recur in writings on

South Asian childhood. First, is the idea that Indian modes of child socia-

lization produce individuals who are inappropriately socialized for their role as agents of the developmental agenda of the modern nation-state. Second is the related idea, conceived within the tradition/modernity

paradigm of post-War social science, that patterns of Indian child social-

ization are bound to change as processes of modernization, and latterly globalization, proceed apace. Third is the proposition that the conceptu-

alization of childhood in South Asia is culturally distinct, based on a

cosmology quite different to that of Christian Europe. We may briefly unpack these notions here as prelude to our examination of the ‘baby’ iconography of contemporary calendar art. Child Socialization as Pathology

Certain ideas and expectations regarding childhood are undoubtedly embedded in the perspectives and protocols of the nuts-and-bolts academic disciplines that focus on the child (child development, developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, and the sociology of the family and its socialization practices), making Indian child socialization appear more or

less defective from the perspective of producing socially competent, ade-

quately individuated adults who are psychologically well-adapted to the requirements of a modern society. For instance, in her 1953 essay on

‘Roots of tolerance and tensions in Indian child development’, originally

prepared as part of a UNESCO-sponsored study on ‘human behaviour and social tensions in India’, Lois Murphy described Indian children as friendly, responsible, artistic, cheerful and spontaneous—a result, she

had come to believe, of ‘the acceptance of children in the everyday pattern

of family living, [and] the easy participation of people of any age in the activities of the rest’ (Murphy, 1953: 58). But she hastens to add the other

side of the story, namely, that Indian children over the age of eight or nine—anticipating the fully socialized Indian personality—lacked both the ‘stimulus to problem-solving or the practice in cooperative thinking and planning that would match the spontaneity and capacity for relation-

ships with people which we saw so often [in younger children]’ (ibid.: 48).

In this regard she could foresee that the expansion of schooling—or some ypes of schooling—might qualitatively transform the experience of

Indian childhood, adding rather wistfully that there could be losses as well

as gains in this development (ibid.: 57-8).

Building on Murphy's ethnography a few years later, sociologist Dhirendra Narain identified Indian child-rearing (actually, mothering)

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practices as the root of ‘the two besetting weaknesses of the Hindu character’, namely, an ‘over-severe conscience’ and an ‘over-indulgent childhood’ (that is, lacking the levels of frustration and anger supposedly required for successful individuation and character-building)

(1957:

Ch. 7). Narain concluded his brief essay with the hope that Western influence on Indian child socialization would help counter the excessive passivity and mildness of the Hindu personality to allow (as he put it, in transparently Freudian terminology), the id to emerge, the super-ego to be moderated, and the ego to be strengthened (ibid.: 189-90).!” Other writers have similarly identified ‘maternal enthralment’ (as the intense mother-son bond is sometimes described), compensating for the moth-

er’sown vulnerable position in her conjugal family, as the root of the peculiarities of the adult Hindu personality (see, for example, Carstairs, 1957; Hsu, 1963; Kakar, 1981a: Ch. 3; Nandy, 1980). This is because the unusually long period of infantile dependence is inevitably (if belatedly)

followed by the psychic trauma of the male child’s incorporation into the world of adult men represented by the hitherto distant and authoritarian father.!8 Empirical studies by anthropologists of Indian child-rearing prac-

tices!? have tended to unsettle this view, however, for in many cases it is

observed that the mother is herself not the sole, nor indeed the most attentive or intense, of infant care-givers, her role being shared among several women of the joint family and neighbourhood (Kurtz, 1992; Seymour, 1999), while the father’s authority is similarly diffused among several

adult males.?° As Susan Seymour has remarked, summarizing her fieldwork observations of infant care and socialization in Bhubaneswar,

Orissa, over several decades:

The more intimate dyadic relationship between mother and child, which is

often assumed in contemporary American psychological literature and is part of middle-class cultural models of child care, is controlled and muted in this joint family context. Here the child must learn early to value the pleasures of

group membership over those of intense dyadic relationships. Attention and

affection, he learns, will come more consistently from the joint family than

from specific individuals. He also learns that some degrees of emotional control and personal sacrifice are required of him to sustain such group member-

ship. A sense of individuation and personal autonomy, the expected outcomes

of middle-class American caretaking practices are not the intended outcomes of Indian child rearing. A very different cultural model is operating (1999: 82-3, emphasis in original).

3.1

®

“Makhan Chor’ (The infant Krishna as butter thief). J.P Singhal,

Oriental Calendar Company, Calcutta,

“Clause No. 512

inting No 1 on top& bottom, Complete calendars in 11” « 18 size with advt. in one colour. Datepads No. 2 and with customer's esNo. 51/2 of the pricelist. see clause For Pric

3.2

Baby Ganesh with Shivalingam. S.S. Ramani, Sivakasi Calendars, Sivakasi,

2000.

1966.

3i3

Infant Trimurti (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva). Ram

*

3.4

Baby Ram. Ram/Babu Singh, Rang Roop Studio,

Jothi Company,

Delhi, 2001.

Krishna,

Publicity calendar for Bamba Automobiles, Jammu,

2000.

3:5

Babies in plenty, sometimes titled ‘Touch and tell’.

Tekeshwar,

Delhi, 2001, after a Chinese print of the 1930s.

3.6

Engineer baby.

Yogendra Rastogi, 1974.

37 Farmer babies. Studio S.V. Aras, c. 1970s. sou ae

3.8

‘Jagriti’ (Awakening),

M.K. Gandhi with infant.

Oriental Calendar

Company, Calcutta, 1966.

39:

3.10

‘Ghar ka chirag’ (The light of the home). Ram Singh, Rang 3.11

Roop Studio, Indian

Book Company,

Infant servicemen. SPP Company,

Delhi, 1972.

Delhi, 1997.

3.12

’Kaka' (Kiddie). Fateh Chand,

Bharat Picture Publishers, Delhi, c. 1966.

3.13

Siblings in modernity.

Kalamandhir Studio, Anant Ram Gupta Company, Delhi, 1969.

‘elrmeyg ueumnumpy Aq sydesZ0j0yg

‘sdiy s9y ‘so4o ray ‘adej Jay 0} syey aze8 s yyeuYooug ‘jaded [e104

UP

B ssodde Joay payUOULUIO Jay JO YSIS ay} WOIZ “NYyeg HOYYD YIM JayUNOduA ysIy s,yyeUYOOYg

vF

‘Baby Icons

93

In other words, Seymour suggests that the delay of individuation and the encouragement of dependence in Indian child-rearing practices are not necessarily dysfunctional.To the contrary, they disclose an active effort to

promote the ethic of ‘familism’ (so called by some sociologists), a cultural

ideal that is embedded in, and in turn sustains, the institution of the joint family (see Chapter 1). From this perspective, the apparent lack of individuation in Indian childhood need not be read asa failure of the socialization process, but rather as a mark of its success in reproducing the ethos of family life that Indians value most. Childhood between Tradition and Modernity Focus on the rupture produced by the colonial encounter, which is quite,

a prominent theme in writings on Indian childhood, effectively de-

historicizes the history of Indian childhood to re-formulate it in terms of a simple contradiction between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’, or indigenous and Western, conceptualizations of the child.

So, how is the child conceived of in the Indian ‘tradition’??! A lot

depends, it seems, on where and how one looks at the question. Psycho-

analyst Sudhir Kakar, in a pioneering essay on ‘The child in Indian tradi-

tion’-—actually an appendix to his well-known study, The Inner World (1978/1981a: 191-211)—has mined a wide range of textual sources to

construct a rather heterogeneous image of traditional Indian childhood and its component stages. The traditional Hindu legal texts, he tells us, emphasize that the child belongs conceptually at the base of a social pyramid whose apex is the twice-born, adult male householder: children, the sick, the aged, pregnant women, etc. are all seen as persons requiring ‘pro-

tective nurturance’ (ibid.: 191—). This dharmashastric theory of child-

hood, as Kakar observes elsewhere (1979: 4), rather discounts the years

of early childhood (pre-natal, neo-natal, infancy), the phase regarded as the most crucial in the psychoanalytic framework, for the clock only

starts, as it were, with the initiation of schooling (for male children of the

twice-born castes). Before this, it is true, a series of life-cycle rituals (samskaras), including some that take place even before birth,?” begin the pro-

cess of incorporation of the child into the kinship and caste group to

which he or she belongs,”’ but social personhood is achieved only with the (twice-born) boy’s sacred thread ceremony (ibid.:7) and the girl’s (or non-

twice born boy's) marriage.”4 Then there is the perspective of the Ayurvedic medical system which, Kakar suggests, conceives of the child as essentially part ofa mother-child

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Freedom and Destiny

unit, established at the moment of conception (ibid.: 195). Drawing on

yet another source of tradition, the Hindu epics (the Mahabharata and

the Ramayana) emphasize the child’s personhood as the product of karma (deeds in the previous life) on the one hand, and heredity or biology (the father’s ‘seed’) on the other, minimizing the role of nurture, environment,

and maternal inheritance (ibid.: 197-200). Finally, in the ‘literary’ conception of the child, notably the Bhakti poetry of Siirdas and of Tulsidas, the childhoods of Krishna and of Ram are ‘placed at the centre of poetic consciousness and creativity, rather than at the periphery’. Surdas’s verses express a pervasive nostalgia for childhood asa time of ‘freedom and spontaneity, simplicity, charm and delight in self” (ibid.: 202), ‘feminizing’ the Krishna legend and transforming the stern moralist of the Mahabharat into lover, friend, and child.

Howsoever the features of a ‘traditional’ Indian childhood are defined—and Kakar’s exposition is rather too heterogeneous to sustain a clear tradition/modernity contrast—one is left with the question of whether Indian socialization norms and practices will survive in modern times. In the most common view, an elaboration of the ‘modernization’

hypothesis, modernization requires the replacement of joint and extended families by nuclear families, rendering traditional patterns of socialization dysfunctional and unsustainable (see Chapter 1; also Uberoi, 2003a).

This is the ‘theory’, and also the prevailing wisdom, but the empirical demonstration is nowhere near so clear-cut. The supposed breakdown of the joint family is not established as a secular trend throughout society; nuclear households are often merely a stage in the family developmental cycle; and upbringing in a nuclear household does not preclude constant and intense interaction with the wider family and the internalization of a joint family ethos in a variety of social contexts, including through the modern media. Indeed, the transformation of the objectives of child

socialization from the inculcation of a sense of collective responsibility and lifelong interdependence to the production of autonomous, independent and competitive personalities has been a long struggle over a century or more. And it has not been won one way or another. Rather, Indian ideals of childhood and patterns of socialization are—and are likely to remain—quite heterogeneous, mediated in complex ways by factors of caste, socio-economic class, occupation, and lifestyle aspirations (cf. V. Das, 1989: 279ff.; Raman, 2000; Seymour, 1999).

As in other aspects of social and family life, the transformation of Indian norms of childhood over the last century or more under the impact of the colonial experience, post-colonial nation-building, and the

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contemporary pressures of globalization has resulted in a culturally hybridized or bifocal view of childhood. In fact, there are now at least two

distinct and competing cultures of childhood, only imperfectly integrated (cf. Srinivas, 1977b). One of these, represented by India’s cosmopolitan upper-middle-classes, may indeed resemble that described by

Aries for the modern West. We could call it, in short and for want of a

better term, the ‘customized child’ syndrome.

Asis well known, the family was the fulcrum of attention in the emerg-

ing Indian nationalist discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, identified as the site of reform and social transformation, of

refuge from the brutalities of the outside world, and of resistance against colonial power and intrusion. Most of the discursive attention was focused on women (see, for example, P. Chatterjee, 1993: Ch. 6; Pernaz,

2003; Sarkar, 2001; Walsh, 1997), but childhood also came under close scrutiny (Bose, 1996). Children were seen as innocent and vulnerable.

They were to be protected against the dangers of the world beyond the home, as well as sternly trained for responsible citizenship through modern methods of character-building, neither over- nor under-disciplined (ibid.). To this extent, as Ashis Nandy argues, ‘middle-class urban children [in Third World countries] are often handed over to the modern world

to work out a compromise with culturés successfully encroaching upon

the traditional life-style’ (1992: 65). Even conservative parents seek

Western education for their children, ‘partly to fulfil their status ambitions and partly to create a manageable bicultural space or an interface with the modern world within the family’ (ibid.). In this way, Nandy concludes, childhood is turned into a ‘battleground of cultures-—a peculiarly modern form of ‘ill-treatment’ meted out to children in non-Western societies where modernity implies not merely a transformation from within, but an exogenously induced rupture. The result is that [e]ven in societies not dominated by the [modern] ideology [ofadulthood and childhood]—in societies where the child has often enjoyed a certain dignity,

autonomy, and, as in India, a clear touch of divinity—the encroachment of the

modern world on the traditions of nurture and child-rearing is helping to turn the childhood of the third world into an ethnic variant of the first world’s (ibid.: 68, emphasis added).

Cosmologies of Childhood For Nandy, to continue under another head our exposition of his perspective on the relationship of adulthood and childhood under the regime

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Freedom and Destiny

of modernity, modern childhood involves not merely a social transforma-

tion (in family form and conventions of socialization). Coming into existence along with industrialism, Protestantism, modern science and

technology, and colonialism, it involves a more fundamental transformation at the level of cosmology (Nandy, 1992: 61):

As Calvinism and the spirit of Protestantism consolidated their hold over im-

portant aspects of the European consciousness, the growth of the idea of the adult male as the ultimate in God’s creation and as the this-worldly end-state for everyone was endorsed by the new salience of the productivity principle and promethean activism, both in turn sanctified by far-reaching changes in Christianity. By about the sixteenth century the imagery of the child Christ,

like that of the androgynous Christ, started becoming recessive in European Christianity. Instead, it was a patriarchal God, with a patriarchal relationship with his suffering and atoning son, that became the dominant mode in the culture (Nandy, 1992: 59).

Encapsulated within a universal teleology of Progress, child-likeness was sentimentalized, but childishness—whether of the child, the savage or the

colonial subject—was feared, reprobated and despised (cf. A. Gupta, 2002: 50).

Theories of rebirth (karma) and of reincarnation imply completely different conceptions of time, of personhood, of the relationship of childhood and adulthood, and of sin and responsibility to those of modern,

Christian Europe (V. Das, 1989: 264-73; A. Gupta, 2002; also Keyes and Daniel, 1983). The child is not a savage to be civilized, an animal to be

trained, or a product of sin to be redeemed, but a being whose childhood is prefigured by adulthood, whose sudden smiles or cries disclose memories of a former existence, in whose play the gods participate as partners, and whose gradual mastery of language scripts detachment from the past life, or from divinity. ‘Along with memories of his past life,’ writes Veena Das, referring to ethnography among the Hindu Newars of Nepal, [the child brings with him an ability to communicate with gods, goddesses,

jinn . . ., and other fabulous creatures that cohabit our world but with whom we, as adults, cannot communicate unless we have special powers. The infant's

babbling is often seen as another language with which he is ‘talking’ to these creatures, and it is said that as the child learns human language he forgets the divine language with which he came into the world (Das, 1989: 265). Not only baby-talk but ‘play’ as well may have a completely different meaning in cultures that are not dominated by the typically modern ‘fear’

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of childhood (Nandy, 1992). At least in the Vaishnavite tradition, gods

play with people; gods play with each other; children play with gods; and

women worship the child-God through play.?°Alll this isa far cry from the

spaces, places, and modes of play permissible under bourgeois modernity which, while typically opposing work and leisure, schooling and play, has also invented ‘learning through play’! In her anthropological fieldwork among Kashmiri Pandits (explicitly conceived within Ariés’ constructivist framework), Urvashi Misri (1986)

describes the Pandits’ conceptualization of the child as pertaining along

three distinct but interrelated axes: (i) a divine-human axis, whereby the

child is seen as both a gift from God, yet the product of human copul-

ation; (ii) a collective-individual axis, whereby the child is seen as sharing

bodily substance with patri- and matri-kin, yet is an individual with a unique karma and pre-ordained destiny; and (iii) an inalterable-transformative axis, whereby the child is endowed with inalterable qualities, yet undergoes transformation through the agency of life-crisis rituals (samskaras). Originally, in this view, the child is both impure (through the process of birth) and innately pure and sacred; he or she is not subject to the ritual taboos and restrictions that constrain adult conduct, nor marked by the

signs of sexual differentiation. Socialization represents a gradual, and seemingly paradoxical process of confirming individuality on the one

hand, and acquiring a sexual and collective (familial, communitarian, class) identity on the other. At the same time it produces an irretrievable distancing from divinity. Here are suggested some themes that will be pertinent to our understanding of contemporary Indian ‘baby’ iconography: the child’s sacredness and proximity to divinity, an idea for which Aries’ work ill prepares

us;?6 and the symbolic significance of the child’s marked, or alternatively

unmarked, body. We will also see the inauguration of a new axis of understanding, that is, the tension between the child’s individual selfhood, his/ her membership of a group (family, community, class, etc.), and his/her role as citizen of a transcendent nation-state. Let us turn, now, to consider the calendar babies themselves. TV. REPRESENTING THE CHILD

The very existence of a recognized sub-genre of calendar art dedicated to

the child testifies to the social acknowledgment of Indian childhood as a distinct life-stage meriting an iconography of its own. Whatever its roots

in older art forms, on which we have little information,’ this is consistent

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Freedom and Destiny

with other features of contemporary social life: for instance, the expan-

sion of formal schooling, and the development of ‘markets’ dedicated to the child (books, toys, clothes, food and consumables, and so on).

At present, we know little of the original sources of inspiration for this iconography in the early twentieth century but, as for the medium as a whole, the imagery presumably drew heavily on western prints currently in circulation (see Neumayer and Schelberger, 2003: 13), even as—in re-

verse—English business enterprises sought to advertise and promote their products by appropriating Hindu sacred imagery. In contemporary times, too, we find that child images (along with ‘sceneries’ and cute pet pictures) are often products of the global market, touched up—sometimes quite incongruously—to local tastes. For instance, a current favou-

rite isa poster showing a naked little boy with Far Eastern features, playing with a plastic bucket and beach-ball, and pissing conspicuously. Around his neck, rather surprisingly under the circumstances, is a little medallion inscribed ‘Jai Hind’ (Hail India)!?8

God-baby We noted earlier (Chapter 2) that calendar art as a genre produces sacred icons for worship as well as purely secular and decorative images and that, in representations of femininity, goddesses take on the features of beautiful women, and beautiful women the attributes of goddesses. But the Hindu pantheon includes not only gods and goddesses, but also childgods—boy-child gods, that is, for it seems that the female deities are all and always mothers. The archetypal child-god is Krishna, flirtatious, flute-playing cowherd, mischievous butter-thief, infant conqueror of the monster-serpent, Kaliya. Astriking feature of the calendar art representation of the Bal-Krishna is the blurring of the boundary between divine and mortal. Sometimes, the child-god is pictured in his divine, miracle-performing role: perhaps through a series of legendary, superhuman accomplishments. Sometimes

he is both naughty child and divinity, encompassing the whole universe.2?

At other times he is portrayed as a mischievous child, in loving-teasing relationship with his foster-mother Yashoda, engaged in everyday childish pranks rather than awe-inspiring feats. The butter-stealer isa favourite and perennial icon, as also are vignettes of Krishna's adolescent flirtation with thegopis, the two together, as John Hawley argues (1989), reflecting

on the very paradox of divinity in human form.”

Visually, the humanizing of the god-child is often achieved through

the idiom of photo-realism. Indeed, a renowned S.S. Brijbasi image of

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Bal-Krishna, dating to the 1930s, was based on a photograph of a child dressed up as Krishna, and widely circulated in postcard form (see K. Jain, 1998: 57-8; Pinney, 1997a; also Hawley, 1989: 7, plate 2); and similar,

updated, photographic reproductions were on sale once again through

the 1990s (Jain, 1998: 21).3!Or the child deity may be painted as though

in a candid family snap-shot, his divinity marked only by the bluish skin tones, the flute, the peacock feather or the spilled butter, or perhaps mere-

ly by a certain radiance around him. Even the bluish skin tones may be optional, as the artist acknowledges the deeply-rooted cultural preference for fair-skinned children. Plate 3.1 is a good example of this. Painted by well-known calendar artist, J.P. Singhal, famous for his photo-realistic renderings of fi/mi and tribal ‘beauties’ (their colouring, once again, exceptionally fair), the blue god is rendered as a fair, blond-haired and very human-looking child, guiltily looking up as he is snapped in the act of stealing butter. Besides Bal-Krishna, the elephant-headed Ganesh, too, is often por-

trayed as an infant. Typically, he is seated alongside his divine parents, Shiva and Parvati, with or without his brother Kartikey (Kumar or Muru-

gan). The overall appearance mimics that of a bourgeois family portrait,>? the father’s matted locks and ascetic garb and the child’s elephant head notwithstanding. This humanization of the ‘holy family’ provides an endorsement of the modern centrality of the conjugal family. Alternatively, and probably quite innovatively, Ganesh may be pictured in his infant form, asleep on a leopard-skin rug high in the Himalayas,

blessed by a beneficent Shiva and a glowing Shivalingam (the phallic sign

of Shiva). A recent variation on this type has Ganesh curled up on a yoni (symbol of Parvati or the female principle), like Krishna on the peepal leaf, watched over by Shiva from within a giant Shivalingam™ Alternatively, in an image which is currently ubiquitous, the charming infant Ganesh languorously embraces the sign of his divine parentage—an outsize, flower-decked Shivalingam-yoni (Plate 3.2).

The sudden popularity of images of the infant Ganesh seems to be part of a wider phenomenon—the unprecedented proliferation of the ‘baby’ forms of different deities. These baby gods possess the same general qualities as their adult counterparts; yet their nature is also significantly mediated by the endearing and innocent attributes of babyhood. They become

cute and lovable, and accessible to all. With the multiplication of godchildren, we now have the Baby Shiva, peacefully asleep in the Himalayas,

his adult ‘third eye’ keeping watch. We have the Hindu triad in the form

of three infants—Baby Vishnu, Baby Shiva and a multi-headed Baby

Brahma, presided over by the Mother Goddess (Plate 3.3). There is also

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Freedom and Destiny

the Baby Hanuman, clutching his outsize mace, supervised by an ethereal Ram; and the Baby Ram himself, sound asleep with his little bow and arrow by his side, rendered as a studio baby portrait. Iconographically speaking, according to well-informed critics, this is rather innovative (see Pal, 1997), though one must hasten to add that it is not inconsistent with

a popular ‘women’s tradition’ of emphasizing the childhood phase of divine and saintly biographies (Plate 3.4).>>

Indeed, I put the question of the multiplication of god-babies to a respected calendar publisher and distributor from Old Delhi. ‘I am familiar with the imagery of the child-Krishna, but what do you think of this trend of presenting all the other gods as infants?’ I asked him. Mr Sharma was categorical: ‘Tes incorrect. It’s all something new. Think of it like this. You have a President or Prime Minister, right? But [rhetorically], do you put his childhood photos up on the wall? You do not!36

What could be the explanation for this unprecedented god-baby boom? Is it just a passing fad, or does it inaugurate or witness an important theological innovation at the level of popular Hinduism, as some commentators have suggested (cf. Pal, 1997)? Is it merely an expression

of the creative licence of a living iconographic tradition? Is it another example of the ongoing ‘cutification’ of Indian childhood, spearheaded by the booming advertising industry and the cableTV and cartoon channels? Or is there some other sociological significance to be read into the presentation of the gods in their child forms? Since baby-gods are cute and universally adorable, and never exclusive and sectarian, might we not read

their recent multiplication asa gesture of reconciliation in our communally polarized world, post-Ayodhya? While a number of critics are not to

be convinced that the Baby-Ram image is merely cute and harmless,?” the

sleeping baby-Ram is surely a benign image when compared with the militant adult Ram astride the (still to be built) Ayodhya temple. Similarly, the adorable baby Hanuman isa far cry from the aggressive, humanoid body-builder type of contemporary Hanuman iconography (see Lutgen-

dorf, 2002), while the cuddly baby Ganesh creates a very different im-

pression to the upright, armed, and militant iconographic form of the

elephant-headed god (see Kaur, 2002).38

Welcome-baby As divinity takes on the attributes of the child, so the child partakes of the auspicious nature of divinity, conferring blessing on those who witness

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and adore him. While demographers may wring their hands in despair, the birth of a baby is generally considered an auspicious event and a cause for family celebration—especially, of course, if the child is a boy! Obviously, the baby’s arrival confirms the fertility of the conjugal union, and portends the continuity and potential prosperity of the family line but, as Margaret Trawick observes, [c]hildren are valued not only as future providers for their parents, but also in

and of themselves, for what they are as children—beautiful, affectionate, mis-

chievous sources of joy and constant surprise (Trawick, 2003: 1158).

One of the contemporary fads in the fashion-sensitive medium of calendar art is the ‘Welcome’ poster, and it is surely not insignificant that bonny babies feature prominently in this genre—as do Lakshmi and Ganesh, arti lamps, auspiciously bejewelled brides, and apsaras in

spangled bikinis. The deliberate cuteness of these ‘welcome’ images is often magnified by the English captions that adorn them: ‘U RWelcome’,

says one, in orthographic, ‘SMS’ pun; ‘Keep on smileing [sic]’, says another, showing a cute toddler stepping out uncertainly in a flower-filled landscape; ‘I am fearfully and wonderfully made’, says another, amaz-

ing caption. It is attached to a portrait of a naked baby lying stomach

down on a baby bath towel, evoking the style of family photo-album snapshots.” This particular case apart, the babies are mostly fair, plump, and androgynous (though on the whole more ‘boy’ than ‘girl’), and fashionably togged out in ‘baby’ clothes. Particularly striking (and counterobservational) are the cute little shoes, a status symbol of sorts, worn even

by infants in a crib.*!

We know relatively little about the ‘consumption’ aspect of calendar

art (but see Bhatia, 2000: Ch. 9; K. Jain,1998; Pinney, 1997a, 2004:

Ch. 8), but ethnographic observation confirms that baby pictures are seen to confer blessings and fecundity on those who adore them.‘? One may

find numerous baby pictures on sale outside shrines where devotees seek cures for infertility; or in maternity homes and doctors’ clinics. Eager mothers-in-law display such images to promote the fecundity ofa newly-

married couple, and are sometimes gratified to find the fruit of their efforts as beautiful as the pictures!*4 Fecundity is celebrated without limit, as the print reproduced in Plate 3.2 shows.**In some versions, titillatingly titled ‘Touch and Tell’, this picture has been frequently reissued for a de-

cade or more under the signatures of various artists. It shows a fat rosary-

telling ascetic encrusted with six plump and smiling infants seated in a Himalayan valley of flowers. In fact, the poster is a slightly modified version ofa Chinese print of the ‘Laughing Buddha’, originally published by

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a Shanghai company and circulated in India, probably as far back as the

1930s (Plate 3.5).4

Citizen-baby The child embodies the future of the family, for it is through the child— the male child, in particular, in this predominantly patrilineal society— that the family ensures its continuity and fulfils its social, spiritual, and

material ambitions. More than that, though, the child ensures the con-

tinuity, prosperity, and strength of the nation. This is why the nationalist reverence for ‘the mother’ (goddess or woman

[see Chapter 2]) and

nationalistinterventions to ‘reform’ motherhood and child-birthing practices in the early decades of the twentieth century, were discourses not merely about motherhood per se, but about the child as the spiritual and material embodiment of the nation’s future: only a healthy mother will produce the virile sons on whom the nation will ultimately depend for its

freedom and salvation.‘”

Many ‘baby’ calendars and posters use child portraits to itemize the adult roles that contribute to the making ofa progressive, prosperous, and secure nation: the priest, the sportsman, the scientist, the parliamentarian—and especially the soldier and the farmer (see also Rao et al., 2001:

84). Education is pictorially eulogized: ‘Padho aur insaan bano’ (Study and become human) is written in the copy-book of a child reading by the light of a Bunsen burner, overseen by a huge gorilla (a reminder, presumably, of humanity's unenlightened past).*® ‘Doctor-baby’ is a perennial; and so is ‘Engineer-baby’ (Plate 3.6). These are not only reminders of the

lucrative professions that families aspire for on behalf of their children, but signs of ‘technological modernity (K. Jain, n.d.) and of the challenges of nation-building. Posters in the 1950s and 1960s were often rendered in the heroic Soviet socialist realist style, bodies sculpted against the monuments of India’s industrial progress. For instance, a print titled ‘Progressive India’, dating from about 1960, shows a nuclear family (sturdy man, woman and child), set against the background of a towering dam.

A map of India radiates light over the scene. The couple are presumably

labourers engaged in the construction of the dam, but the child is trium-

phantly holding aloft stalks of ripened grain as though to underline the symbiosis of agriculture and big industry in the making of the new,

progressive India.‘?

Parallelling the perennial ‘Village-belle’ type of girlie pin-ups, though without their sauciness, Farmer-babies have an especially nostalgic place

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in the corpus of calendar art (Plate 3.7). The Farmer-baby iconography foregrounds the reassuring idyll of Indian ‘rurality’, but we note once more that this is not opposed to urbanism or industrialization. To the contrary, the bountifulness of village life is portrayed as wonderfully enhanced, and certainly not spoiled, by the introduction of the tractor, the tubewell and chemical fertilizers, the potent insignia of industrial progress and the Green Revolution. The Citizen-child is also the ground for asserting the goals of nationbuilding (Plate 3.8), in particular for representing, albeit in cute and charming mode, the beleaguered ideal of Indian ‘secularism’—‘Hum sab ck hain (Weareall one)’ (see Amin, 2000; Raoetal., 2001: 76, 80; Uberoi,

2002). These prints are not necessarily uncontroversial, for baby iconography may lend itself both to a Hindu ‘majoritarian’ definition of

nationhood, or to a more egalitarian understanding of the equality of all religions within the nation-state. For instance, sometimes the Hindu

Mother Goddess, or the Mother Cow, presides over India’s religious diver-

sity, compromising the message of ‘unity in diversity’ (see Chapter 2). Sometimes, too, we observe that the induction of non-Hindu children into the national’ project subjects them to stereotyping and caricature (cf. Amin, 2000). But sometimes it is the innocent, usually androgynous,

figure of the child, still unmarked by the religious exclusiveness of adult

citizenship, through whom the ideal of the unity ofall religions is realized. In fact, divinity is made manifest through the child-citizen, as Plate 3.9

suggests. Captioned ‘Perceived the Almighty to be a child’, the print foregrounds an androgynous infant reading a book (a scripture?) by candle-light, surrounded by images representing Hinduism, Jainism, Christianity, Sikhism and Buddhism, the major religions that comprise India’s multi-religious polity.

Hero-baby But the nation must also be defended, and the little ‘light of the home’ is also the hope of the country in defence of its borders against external

aggression. In ‘Ghar ka chirag’ (Plate 3.10), the flame of a burning lamp in the foreground discloses the portrait of a little boy, clasping a rifle and looking steadfastly into the distance. The rays of a new dawn radiate out from behind him, illuminating a modern cityscape and the line-up of tanks on its perimeters. Elsewhere, little boys masquerade as soldiers, sailors, and airmen (Plate 3.11); contribute their last mite to national

defence as the Chinese dragon breathes fire over the North-Eastern front-

iers; or, battle-ready, worship a rifle implanted in the snow alongside a

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flower-bedecked Shivalingam, somewhere high in the Himalayan borderlands. At home, little boys in army uniform are blessed by their sisters in the Bhai Duj ritual, under the watchful eyes of Subhas Chandra Bose. ‘Playing soldiers’, Ariés observes (1962: 87), is essentially a modern

pastime, an aspect of the child’s preparation for mature citizenship. The child is also the exemplary and most pure hero, a potential fully exploited in Sikh calendar images of the martyred sons of Guru Gobind Singh.*° Customized-baby

For the contemporary Indian middle classes, children are not merely the product of divine grace. To the relief of demographers, perhaps, they are nowactively planned for, possibly sexually pre-selected, ruthlessly schooled, closely supervised, and provided—often lavishly—with the appropriate effects of ‘childhood’. All this is designed to steer the child into a successful and socially approved adult career. Simultaneously, and almost paradoxically, ‘childhood’ is scripted as a time of leisure, pleasure, and play, these being the envied attributes of upper-class lifestyles. ‘We can see the beginnings of this transformation in ‘Kaka’, a print dating from the mid-1960s (Plate 3.12). Here, a chubby child in the typical

‘crawling’ pose of the child-Krishna°? is seen at play in a flower-filled pas-

ture before a palatial mansion. Overhead flies an aeroplane, symbol of modernity, while a toy truck in the foreground indicates the developmental agenda of the Nehruvian State. The child wears gold jewellery, a sign of auspiciousness, and a wrist-watch, a valued consumer product. Fruit

and sporting equipment signify health and well-being; an abacus, education; and the see-saw and swings in the background, the pleasures of leisure and play. This example is a reminder that, from its very beginnings, calendar art has shared an interface with commercial advertising, and, indeed, we find

early examples in the ‘tickets’ used as cloth bale labels, or the use of the figure of the child-Krishna for Woodward’s Gripe Water advertisements.

Art historian Partha Mitter reproduces one of the latter from a 1932 calendar or advertisement, the original painted by the well-known ‘salon’ painter and former headmaster of Bombay’sJ.J. School of Art, M.V. Dhurandhar. With text in English, Italian, and Spanish, the print foregrounds a frontal image of an ornamented Krishna, hand dripping butter, and

behind him two fair, plump infants consuming butter, while Yashoda in acontemporary middle-class style of sari peeps in through an open door.

One of the butter-pots carries the Woodward logo, an image of the infant

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105

Hercules throttling a snake (this itself an adaptation from a painting by

Joshua Reynolds).*?

In advertising imagery, the customized child is portrayed as an object of desire, both metonymically associated with the goods of the market-

place and, increasingly, a consumer in his/her own right (Plate 3.13).°

Our customized baby is fair and plump and pretty; wears beautiful and

fashionable clothes; is surrounded by the latest in toys; lives in a palatial

home in sylvan surroundings; and anticipates ownership of all the con-

sumer items that money can buy.*4 S/he loves electronic goods, watches,

cameras, scooters, cars (all the dowry items, in fact), the latest and most

prestigious toy being that fetishized symbol of India’s entry into the global economy: the personal computer. A recent print by a Delhi company,

titled ‘Whiz Kid’, says it all. A playful, diaper-clad infant, one hand on the keyboard, reaches out eagerly to the illuminated computer monitor.

Here we see reflected both the family’s aspirations, through the child,

for upper-middle-class status and diasporic location, and recognition of India’s potential in the global economy as a market for computer goods

and an exporter of IT professionals. Postscript

I recall once traipsing along a back path in the Shimla hills, carrying a

child over my shoulder. For a long way, an old villager kept pace behind us, apparently communing silently with the child. As he drew abreast, and

then overtook us, he pointed to the child and said: ‘I’ve been looking into the face of God.’

The baby posters of contemporary calendar art remind us of the per-

sistence of this widely-held belief, even as they confirm the relentless cons-

truction of Indian childhood asa still-to-be-tapped market opportunity, awaiting vigorous commercial exploitation. Nores

1, Some of the ideas in this chapter were worked out in the course of organizing an exhibition of ‘baby iconography’ for the Gallery Espace exhibition Kitsch Kitsch Hota Hai (curator, Madhu Jain, India Habitat Centre, March 2001).

I am especially grateful to Philip Lutgendorf who drew my attention to a range of popular textual sources on divine childhoods of which I was till then completely unaware. A fuller exploitation of this insight will have to await another occasion. 2. An ‘epiphany’ poem, translated and brilliantly analysed by Kenneth Bryant (1978: 72ff), who comments on it as follows:

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The icon is neatly framed; the poem develops an ordered contrast between

cosmic and commonplace, child and god, by confining the halves of Krsna’s

identity within distinct prosodic units. . . . All the time this cosmic reflection and trepidation have been going on, we are reminded, the child Krsna has been idly twirling his mother’s butterchurn. The frame closes, the icon is restored to life (ibid.: 74).

. See Chapter 2, especially n. 38. In other work on contemporary calendar art (Uberoi, 1999-2000; 2002), I have proposed an ideological rupture in the post-Independence period, roughly coinciding with the Emergency years and parallel to that proposed by film historians (e.g. Prasad, 1998). It is worth

noting that a number of authors have reflected on the new ‘globalization’ of

feminine imagery that has characterized the liberalized 1990s (e.g. John, 1998; Munshi, 1997, 1998, 2001; Thapan, 2000, 2004; and studies of the immensely popularTV soap operas by the Centre for Advocacy and Research [CFAR], New Delhi), though some suspect that the changes are only skindeep. My own materials are not at present adequate to introduce fine distinctions in relation to ‘baby’ iconography, though a tracking of advertising imagery through the last five decades should be instructive. So far, itis the role of mother and status of motherhood, rather than of the child and childhood, that have received most critical attention (e.g. Munshi, 1997, 1998). Obvi-

ously, of course, the two are not unrelated. . While Aris was sensitive to the historicity of genres (portraiture, for instance) in relation to evolving patterns of social life, he did not make much of the distinction between elite and popular art forms per se. I believe that the distinction may be important, however. . The terms from Jyotindra Jain (personal communication), referring espe-

cially to the work-style of Ravi Varma, documented by Schelberger and Neumayer (n.d.), but also to other popular visual media, such as the murals of Shekhawati mansions (Rajasthan).

There are some exceptions, of course, which may be noted. For instance, in an account of child socialization in a village on the outskirts of Delhi, Dinesh

Sharma records in passing that: Pictures of young male children hung in homes, representing the child-

hood of Krishna [and] Rama, or simply pictures of babies from commer-

cial advertisements, alongside pictures of movie stars and fierce goddesses (2003b: 30).

Sharma added—and the metonymic association is significant, in my opinion: ‘Parents wished to have healthy, happy and beautiful-looking children, even though they generally wished for males’ (ibid.). Similarly, John Stratton Hawley, who clearly has an eye for popular iconography, has perspicaciously linked the ‘literal idol’ of the child-god Krishna with other types of ‘baby’

imagery (doctor babies, MP babies, and pious Muslim babies [1989: 11-12

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and Plate 3)), while Kajri Jain (1998) has remarked on the ubiquity of ‘baby’

iconography as witness to the ‘paternalism’ of the Nehruvian developmental state. Not unexpectedly, child pictures also feature prominently in educational charts, especially those seeking to inculcate the virtues of hygiene and good manners (see Rao et a/., 2001).

Particularly well known is the ‘Studio’ of S.V. Aras (see plate 3.7), which is

also strong on ‘beauties’. K. Jain (1998: 235) reproduces a set of S.V. Aras

‘baby’ images. For discussion of these, see e.g. K. Jain, 1998; A. Kapur, 1993; Kaur, 2002;

Lutgendorf, 2002; Pinney, 1997b, 2004: Chs. 1, 3 8¢ 6; Uberoi, 2002. The definition of childhood continues to be heterogeneous, even in contem-

porary legal discourse. On the one hand, there is disagreement regarding the

commencement of childhood/personhood, as in the issue of the legal status and rights of the unborn child; on the other hand, there is variability in the

age of achieving legal adulthood according to different socio-legal needs and purposes. Fora contemporary survey in the South Asian context, see Goonesekere (1998: esp. 78ff).

10. Stone (1982: 199) maintains that the valorization of ‘play’ as an attribute of

childhood is a twentieth-century reaction against ‘the excesses of capitalism’, and must be interpreted in that specific historical context (see also Jenks,

1982).

11. One is conditioned to assume that the toy is a simple facilitation of the child’s

spontaneous capacity for play. This is only partly the case, it seems. To begin with, objects now identified as ‘toys’ are often not intended for children’s play, but are projections of adult nostalgia for the State of childhood (see e.g. Tokyo National Museum, 2001). Moreover, in ‘bourgeois’ society, as Roland Barthes has powerfully argued, referring to the French case:

{a]ll the toys one commonly sees are essentially a microcosm of the adult

world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus

to whom must be supplied objects of his own size (1972b: 53). French toys, Barthes goes on to say, are ‘always entirely socialized, constituted

by the myths or the techniques of modern adult life’, prefiguring the world of ‘adult functions’ (1972b: 53). The ‘substances’ of which they are made—

‘the product of chemistry, not of nature’, ‘at once gross and hygienic— similarly betray their ‘bourgeois status’ (ibid.: 54). Barthes’ critique was based on the understanding that children’s toys should ideally be by or for children, and nota vicarious projection of the adult world or a covert form ofbourgeois ‘taining’.

12. The tension between these two attributes of modern childhood—carefree

play versus precocious training for adult roles and careers—is brought out in arecent debate (‘View and ‘Counterview)) carried on the editorial page of the

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Times of India (26 May 2003) and inspired by reports of ambitious parents

grooming their children (of two to six years) for future careers in the new,

post-liberalization modelling and entertainment industries. ‘Childhood was about guileless excitement’, was the position summed up with nostalgia under the heading ‘The brat-race spells childhood’s end’: It was about the incomparable elation of climbing the neighbourhood mango tree and tasting of its forbidden fruit. Why have we robbed children

of those carefree moments? Todays young have to carry on their slender

shoulders not just the weight of a loaded schoolbag, but the burden of the Lucrative future their parents have meticulously chalked out for them. Look at the grotesque spectacle of celebrity new-borns and toddler fashion-queens.

Or consider the fact that the starting age of computer training schools is 0—2 (emphasis in original).

As against this was posed the counter-assertion that ‘Children have never had it so good’:

.

Far from hemming in childhood’s horizons, modern technology—from the

Net and satellite TV to cheap air travel—has hugely enlarged the scope and immediacy of young imagination. . .. [I]nnovative technology acts as a mental vitamin tonic which invigorates flights of fancy (emphasis in

original). 13.

For address to this problem in South Asia, see e.g. Goonesekere, 1998; Nieu-

wenhuys, 1994, 2003; and Raman, 2000.

14. PK. Bose quotes an early twentieth-century manual of child-rearing that

explicitly recommends that parents should convince their children at the proper time [of] the necessity for conserving their semen. The parents should especially explain to them that wastage of semen causes immediate death, that misuse of semen is responsible for physical, mental, moral and spiritual degeneration, that preserving of semen is the principal component of brahmacharyaand that by conserving their semen the Brahmins of India reached the pinnacle of glory... . (Bose, 1996: 139).

The link between nation-building and semen retention is explored at length in several of Joseph Alter’s writings on India’s wrestling tradition (e.g. 1996,

1997), aswell asin discussions of Gandhi's theory and practice of brabmacharya (both a life-stage of young adolescence for twice-born males, and a State of

sexual continence) (see e.g. Caplan, 1987).

15. See e.g. Bagchi, 1993: 2216; Karlekar, 1991: Ch. 2; Mayo,

1998: esp.

Chs. 3, 4 and 5; T. Sarkar, 2001: Ch. 6. 16. For instance, inspired by the questions from the Indian Women’s Movement, we now have a number of accounts of the construction of sexuality, conjugality and motherhood through Indian history (the work ofhistorians Uma

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Chakravarti and Kumkum Roy comes immediately to mind), and especially for the colonial period (see, e.g. C. Gupta, 2001; Roy, 2005; Sarkar, 2001;

and several papers in Uberoi, 1996c and references therein; also Whitehead, 1996). 17. Narain’s brief but pioneering socio-psychological essay is rarely referred to nowadays, although his general position is echoed by many others (for

instance, Francis L.K. Hsu [1963]; and Sudhir Kakar [1981a)]).

18. Most of these writers discuss the mother-infant bondexcludingthe girl-child. For explicit consideration of the girl-child, see especially Das (1988) and

Dube (1988). 19. For instance, Derné, 1995; Minturn, 1993; Minturn and Hitchcock, 1966; Seymour, 1999; D. Sharma, 2003b.

20. The theory of ‘maternal enthrallment is particularly associated with the work of Sudhir Kakar (see Kakar, 1979, 1981a), contested subsequently by Kurtz

(1992) and by the revisionist psychoanalysis of Roland (1988). The careful fieldwork observations of Susan Seymour, conducted originally in the mid1960s and revisited in 1989 (see Seymour, 1999) have been especially influential in the questioning of established psychoanalytic approaches to Indian childhood. See also the articles in D. Sharma (2003a).

21. We suspend for the moment our scepticism regarding the essentialization of the Indian ‘tradition’ in much of this literature (cf. Raman, 2000, who

correctly insists on the ‘plurality’ of Indian childhoods, by region and by social status), to give a fair hearing to attempts to describe the dominant

features of a South Asian ethno-sociological construction of childhood.

22. See the authoritative chapter on the Samskaras in Kane (1968: vol. II, pt. 1 23.

[1941], Ch. 6); of, for ethnographic observations, Mrs Sinclair Stevenson's The Rites of the Twice-Born (1920/1971). In another context, Kakar has attempted to show that these rituals, albeit in

a rudimentary and incomplete way, instantiate a ‘suggestive convergence’

with Erik Erikson’s eight psychosexual ‘stages’ of infancy and childhood (1979).This effort to demonstrate the universality of Erikson’s neo-Freudian

scheme with evidence from another culture area also coincidentally appears

to endorse the prescient wisdom of shastric knowledge by the standards of modern psychoanalysis. There is a pronounced tension in Kakar’s writing between universalist and particularist (or ‘cultural’) perspectives. His exposition of the heterogeneity of traditional Hindu childhoods and his theory of ‘maternal enthrallment are instances of the latter emphasis.

24. As we will see, however, the relative absence of ‘marking’ of early childhood

can be construed as a positive absence, rather than lack, privileging presociality as a state of grace, closer to divinity. 25. Perhaps the nearest equivalent in the European Christian tradition is the folk celebration of the Nativity.

110 26.

Freedom and Destiny Even when referring to the role of the infant Jesus in Christian iconography,

Ariés sees the Christ-child primarily in the context of the cult of the Virgin, rather than as instancing the iconography of the child per se. However, a recent exhibition on childhood in Japanese art affirms the centrality of the portrayal of the Divinity as child, and of the childhood precociousness of gods, saints, and savants (see Tokyo National Museum, 2001; also A.Gupta, 2002).

27.

But see Hawley (1989, esp. Ch. 2) for a historical account of the rendition

of the child-Krishna in the sculptural tradition. I know of no attempt to document or analyse secular child imagery, or to relate sacred and secular child imagery. (By contrast, for whatever reasons, images of women in different South Asian art forms have long been a favourite object of scholarly attention. See Dehejia, 1997a; Mode, 1970; and other references in Ch. 2).

28. The pissing boy is obviously an affirmation of masculinity, but also suggests

an endearing lack of restraint, unacceptable for the adult. One is reminded that pairs of pissing boys are a common adornment of Delhi three-wheel scooters. Arits, incidentally, records the prominence of the pissing boy in medieval and early modern European art (1962: 125), though one is not

suggesting any direct citation. 29.

Calendar art frequently represents the scene of Krishna opening his mouth at Yashoda’s angry command, to reveal the whole universe of divinities inside. See also V. Das (1989: 268).

Hawley (1989) appears to argue that the divinization of otherwise socially reprobated conduct—stealing primarily, but also flirtation/seduction/abandonment—provides ground for creative speculation on the nature of divinity and of the human condition. Similarly, the tension between the two forms of love explored in the Bal-Krishna imagery—mother-love and erotic love—is the psychic basis of the Vaishnavite tradition. 31. Photo-studios frequently pose infants and children—boys as well as girls— dressed as Lord Krishna. Local editions of newspapers habitually mark Janamashtami, the festival of Krishna's birth, with photographs of cute children dressed in Krishna costumes for their school functions. 30.

32. The god of war, but also—as Balasubramanayam—a beloved child-god in

the South. See examples in Neumayer and Schelberger (2003: 120-1, Plates 117-19). 33. Cf. Pinney, 1997a: 116 and Plate 60; FAAM, 2000: 19, Plate 1.3. Lest Pinney’s observation appear contrived, one may note the cover illustration of an India Today issue (28 July 2003) whose cover story, ‘How Indian families live: Amazing findings from the latest Census’, provides a statistical insight into the new, post-liberalization lifestyles. The cover was a calendar picture,

in the photo-portrait style, of Shiva, Parvati, and the infant Ganesh. The

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studio photographic portrait provides an important record of the new

valorization of the conjugal family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her recent work, Malavika Karlekar (2003) has utilized the

medium of photography, both family photographic albums and studio portraits, to reflect on the creation of a new Bengali middle class in this period.

34. I first came across this fascinating print, a recent innovation as far as I know,

in the collection of Dr Ben Meulenbeld of the Royal Tropical Museum, Amsterdam. 35. Philip Lutgendorf, personal communication. Contrary to the opinion of the calendar publisher cited below, the biographical iconography of political leaders and martyrs, like that of many of the Bhakti saints as well, includes scenes of childhood in the person's ‘circle of life’. See Neumayer and Schelberger’s reproduction of Gandhi's life-cycle (2003: 137 and Plate 145). Indira Gandhi also merits an iconographic childhood. 36. Fieldnotes, January 2003. As I went on to record: Mr Sharma clearly felt strongly about this topic, and maybe he had thought about it earlier, too. ... He was not actually averse to ChildKrishna imagery, but his forte was restrained, heavily-ornamented renditions of the Krishna-lila; or pictures of temple images of Krishna. He did

not care to give other deities a child-form—even Ram, though the ‘Ram-

lalla’ figure has wide currency in popular culture. Though Mr Sharma was the local agent for a Calcutta calendar firm, whose catalogue included a large number of ‘baby’ pictures (naked, usually male, infants with East

Asian features), occasional ‘cute’ children dressed up, and copies of West-

ern kitsch photographic

child portraits, he himself never commissioned or

published them. Indeed, he sounded appalled at the suggestion.

37. For instance, Anuradha Kapur (1993) has suggested that the baby-Ram

image obliterates the ‘ambiguities’ of character associated with the adult Ram, and is therefore consistent with the portrayal of Ram as actively aggressive.

Similarly, Richard H. Davis (Davis, 1996: 41; also Jain, 1998) sees the infant

Ram imagery as a potent reminder of the struggle to rebuild a temple over Ram's birthplace in Ayodhya. Such an interpretation is strengthened, one might add, by the Jain Studios video cassettes on the Ram Janambhoomi

issue, which depict a beautiful but pathetic child Ram excluded from his

temple (see Brosius, 2002). Neither of these explanations, however, accounts

for the proliferation of god-babies other than Ram. 38. One is constantly reminded of the importance of context, particularly in the light of the allegorical potential of Hindu religious iconography (see Pinney, 2002, 2004, esp. Chs. 2, 3, and 6; also Uberoi, 2002, dealing with aseemingly

innocuous print of the Sikh Gurus incorporated in the body of a cow, which suddenly becomes politically inflammatory issue in the context of the SikhHindu polarization of the late 1990s).

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39. Cf. Kakar, 1981a: 12; D. Sharma, 2003b: 3. 40. The infant has Far Eastern features, suggesting that the print originated else-

where.The caption, which I had earlier imagined to bea local value-addition, is actually a biblical text (Psalms 139.14).

41. I have in mind here a 1970 presentation calendar for a toy and ready-made

garments retail chain, showinga perfect, fair baby in snowy-white clothes and cute little shoes. This photo-realistic rendering of a hybridized, bourgeois

aesthetic of babyhood was the work of the well-known calendar artist,

Yogendra Rastogi. Rastogi’s work covers a wide range of themes, and includes some of the well-known calendar art portraits of Indira Gandhi.

42. See K. Jain (n.d.) who also notes the other side of the picture. Some images

can be dangerous and harmful, too, and are best not displayed in the home or the business, but propitiated at other sites. 43. For instance, I found a full range of contemporary baby prints in the market adjoining thedera of Baba Vadbhag Singh in Una, Himachal Pradesh (where devotees seek boons and cures of various kinds), along with religious prints showing the Guru blessing a childless couple (see Uberoi, 2002: 216). . Interview, Delhi, 2001. This practice also accords with indigenous theories of pre-natal influences. There is a (possibly apocryphal) story of a celebrated Delhi public intellectual, then located at the University of Oxford, who had

taken his pregnant wife on a comprehensive tour of the great galleries of

Europe with the prime aim of ensuring the beauty of his unborn child. It is not known whether his wife appreciated this concentrated exposure to the masterpieces ofWestern art, but it is generally conceded that the project was eminently successful. Note that, as Sudhir Kakar points out (1981a: 195), in

Ayurvedic medicine the period from conception to birth isheld to beacrucial stage in the individual’s development and character formation.

45. This print, bought in 2001, is signed ‘Tekeshwar’; an identical piece acquired

a decade earlier is signed by Anil Sharma, a prolific contemporary calendar artist whose work covers a range of themes (see the biographical note on Sharma in Singh and Singh, 2003: 120-1).

46. The Chinese print is in the collection of Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger, Vienna.The Osian exhibition, ‘Revisualising India (New Delhi,

Aug.—Sept. 2005) showed a ‘nationalist’ version of this calendar (1940?) with

insets of Gandhi, Nehru, and Subhas Chandra Bose, along with the Congress tricolour and the slogan ‘Jai Hind’.

47. See Whitehead (1996) for readings on early twentieth-century eugenic

movements and the reform of child-birth and motherhood practices; also,

Rosselli (1980) on physical culture movements in late nineteenth-century Bengal, connected with the rise of nationalist sentiment. 48. See Kajri Jain’s perceptive analysis of this relatively unusual poster from the Uberoi collection (1998, n.d.).

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49. See also Uberoi (2003c) and the discussion of the ‘couple’ in Chapter 2 above. 50. See McLeod (1991) for examples. Note also the iconography of Khudiram,

the child martyr of the Indian freedom struggle, who was hanged at the age of 15. See Neumayer and Schelberger (2003: 133 and Plate 137). 51. Erwin Neumayer (see Neumayer and Schelberger, 2003) has in his collection avery similar print dating from the mid-1930s, of which this is presumably a copy. That print is explicitly titled ‘Balakrishna’, though the child is com-

pletely secularized and, excepting the crawling pose, has none of the typical

signs of Krishna. Neumayer glosses the print as follows: ‘Krishna, here a rather fat European baby in a European interior, plays with apples and grapes instead of butter and Laddoos, the traditional Indian sweets’ (ibid.: 97, and

Plate 81). This print provides good confirmation of the overlap of sacred and secular imagery in calendar art, and of the role of Bal-Krishna imagery in that symbolic merger. 52. The print brilliantly captures the bhakti image of Krishna as simultaneously god and child:

It is almost as though the Krishna figure has a doubled presence, once as an ordinary, everyday infant about to suffer indigestion, with an ordinary sibling and mother, and a second time in his explicitly godly form, as a materialization from another world . . . (K. Jain, 1998: 64).

Another Woodward’s advertisement (see Neumayer and Schelberger, 2003:

96 and Plate 80) uses the image of Krishna taming the monster-serpent, Kaliya.

53. One of the best-known advertising images of the 1950s was the ‘Murphy

Baby’, an infant shown along with the Murphy brand radio (Alice Thorner,

personal communication). The history of the Murphy Baby clearly deserves follow-up. 54. In contemporary advertising on the electronic media, the child is also a discriminating connoisseur of multinational ‘junk’ food and soft drinks. Recent research by Delhi sociologist Anjali Bhatia looks into the way in which the multinational restaurant chain, McDonalds, privileges the child customer, particularly in the context of the ‘birthday party’. She argues that the identification of ‘target’ consumer segments (c.g. ‘children’, ‘teenagers’, ‘couples’, ‘families’) represents a powerful form of social classification that both reflects and encourages new global/local forms of sociality and new ways of thinking

about social and family relationships.

55. Publisher: Nirmal, Delhi, 1999.

CHAPTER

4

Desire and Destiny Rescripting the Man—Woman Relationship in Popular Cinema

NY

I. PROLOGUE: ON A PERSONAL NOTE

T

he backstalls of Shimla’s old Regal cinema, nestled against the

slope of Jakko Peak; the rhythmic roar of roller-skates on the

wooden floor of the adjacent skating rink; cacophonous background music of no recognizable genealogy or vintage. . . . Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam (1962, producer Guru Dutt, director Abrar

Alvi)! was one of the first ‘real’ Indian films I saw. Of course, during my student days in Australia I had joined other aficionados of avant-garde and foreign cinema to watch Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955) and Merchant-Ivory’s The Householder (1963). And, like my companions, I was under the impression that these were ‘Indian’ movies—that is, until

I saw first Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam and then Brahmachari (1968, director

Bhappi Sonie), at the Regal. Where Pather Panchali had seemed exotic, but somehow aesthetically familiar, the latter films (good examples of what came to be classed as ‘middle’ and ‘popular commercial’ cinema respectively) were a completely new cinematic experience—both cognitively and aesthetically. There was one particular scene in Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam that left a very deep impression on me—at the time, and in subsequent recall. It is the innocence and authenticity of that moment that I attempt to recapture in this chapter, against the grain of conventional anthropological good sense: ‘Never trust first impressions’. The advice would seem particularly pertinent, considering how very little I had understood of the dialogue, sporadically translated for me, and how unprepared I was for the whole experience. ‘Rather “Russian”’, I remember remarking to my companions, in lieu of any more profound opinion.

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Contemporary reception theories, however, have recently sought to valorize the remembered fragments of viewers’ experiences. They suggest, moreover, that these condensed moments may disclose resistant readings of cinematic texts whose narrative structures tell quite different stories. Not unexpectedly, such studies are often the work of feminist critics seeking to identify the sources of female viewers’ pleasure within manifestly androcentric texts (e.g. Mash, 1995; Mazumdar et al., n.d.).

Though I can claim no such elevated rationale for my own selective recall of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, | do believe that there is a purpose to be served in affirming the authenticity of that moment when I found myself confronted by a truly exotic aesthetic, and a completely unfamiliar body language. This moment (which I will revert to later) was the meeting of the film's female and male protagonists—Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari)

and ‘Bhoothnath? (Guru Dutt). It was clearly a moment of mystery, for the film narrative unfolds in flashback from the memory of that scene: the echo of a woman's voice saying, ever so gently, ‘Come, come here’. It was a moment of heightened eroticism, artfully anticipated in the preceding scenes. And it was a moment of transgression, as Bhoothnath enters the private space of the grand Aaveli, becomes party to its secrets and sorrows, and transgresses on the relationship of another man, of an ‘other’ class, with his wife. That this double transgression is the focus of attention and the site of desire is signalled by the film’s polysemous title—King, Queen, KnavelJack; King, Queen, Slave; or Master, Mistress, Servant (Rajadhyaksha

and Willemen, 1995: 348)—which privileges this particular love triangle

over the two other three-cornered relationships that the film narrative also

explores: (i) that of the husband, the wife, and the ‘other woman’, who is a courtesan; and (ii) that of the man, the woman he is destined to marry, and the woman who is the object of his fascination. Indeed, when the film

was first released, this transgression proved unacceptably explicit, and

Guru Dutt felt obliged to replace the final scene, showing Chhoti Bahu

resting her head on Bhoothnath’s lap as they journey out of thehaveli together, with an alternative sequence, less offensive to conservative audience sensibilities, and less morally and narratively open-ended (see Kabir, 1996: 113-14; and plate illustration).

Now, follow Bhoothnath’s gaze as he hesitatingly enters Chhoti Bahu’s

chamber—the room which, as we have now come to know, her husband

never deigns to visit:

Black and white tiled floor.

A small mat is placed for him to sit on.

Across a floral carpet, the sight ofa woman's painted and ornamented feet.

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Three slow steps across the carpet, and the feet come to rest. Her face, in close-up.

Her eyes and forehead. Her lips, smiling.

Her seated figure, beautiful, bejewelled.> Her seated figure in the wider frame of the bed-chamber. Again, the seated figure. She leans forward, as though to confide. That the spectacle of a woman's feet should focus this intensity of mystery, of desire and of transgression was the beginning of my awareness of the cultural ‘otherness’ of the body language of desire in Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam. No doubt it was my own cultural otherness that had inscribed

this podoerotic scene so unforgettably, but a re-viewing of the film some

thirty or so years later only affirms and reinscribes that first intense impression. It suggests, moreover, that the podoerotic rendering of this encounter was merely an aspect ofa more complex podosemiotics, an almost obsessive focus throughout this film on feet as the most condensed of corporeal signifiers. Here (i) as already remarked, women’s feet (or feet and hands together) are presented as the erotic objects of the camera’s/the male gaze, alook then returned with eyes of extraordinary expressiveness;* (ii) male as well as female feet serve as the diacritical markers of different

social roles, statuses, relationships and professions; and (iii) feet function

as the highly condensed visual foci of dramatic moments in the unfolding of the cinematic narrative. Specifically, in the matrix of man—woman relationships that Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam explores, feet present the very first objects of gaze, in one way or another: women’s feet as objects of male desire, or male feet to index the man's social status and role-relationship

vis-a-vis the woman observer, and the tensions and ambiguities inherent within their relationship. This podosemiotic rendering of first encounters throughout the film is surprisingly, almost inexplicably, consistent, and assumes special significance in the light of Guru Dutt’s reputed concern, as director, with the initial images of all dramatically important scenes

and songs.> The foregoing account of the impact of my first viewing of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, of my sense of wonder that an erotic encounter should be

rendered so powerfully in the concentration of a man’s gaze on a woman's feet, suggests the contours of a distinctively south Asian corporeal aesthetic. It illustrates Marcel Mauss’ observation (1934) that the human

body, though universal, is very differently understood and deployed in different cultural settings. On the other hand, it might also be possible—

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though this would require a closer investigation ofbody language through-

out Guru Dutt’s corpus of films—to construe the podoerotic and podosemiotic focus of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam as an ‘idiolect’, expressing the

filmmaker's personal vision/obsession.® Alternatively, one might point to the role of local and contextual factors—notably the notorious censorship policies of the Indian government and the self-censorship code of post-Independence Indian film directors which, puritanically suppres-

sing display of the kiss and scenes of explicit love-making, deflected the expression of sensuality into other modalities (Prasad, 1998: esp. Ch. 4; Rangoonwalla, 1979: 100-5).

But beyond the contingent, the personal, and the culturally particular, one may also acknowledge the several insights of Frazerian anthropologists, clinical psychologists, Freudian psychoanalysts, scholars of com-

parative religion and symbolism, sexologists, and self-confessed foot fetishists’ who, in their different ways and from different vantages, have pointed to some universals of foot imagery. Such studies have demons-

trated the consistency with which, across human cultures, (i) women’s feet

serve as the signifiers of the female genitals in particular, female sexuality in general; (ii) the big toe serves as the signifier of the phallus (in fact,

much better than that organ itself, for the toe is never flaccid) (Rossi, 1977: 4); (iii) the kissing and caressing of feet is simultaneously an act of

homage and of sexual pleasure;® (iv) styles of footwear convey psycho-

sexual messages, as of sexual availability or repulsion; and (v) shoes and

boots disclose, apparently with great economy, various social roles and statuses.” The fact that podoeroticism is often categorized as ‘abnormal’ sexual response—the most common form of sexual ‘fetishism’ in a continuum from normal to abnormal sexuality—need not detain us further here. II. THE Bopy LaNGuAGE OF PopuULAR CINEMA

Though a number of critics and Guru Dutt’s former colleagues have testi-

fied to the importance he attached to the expressiveness of eyes (e.g. Kabir,

1996: 45, 71, 73), the podoerotics and podosemiotics of Sahib, Bibi aur

Ghulam have not, so far as I know, been the subject of critical notice or comment. Thus Kabir, for instance, identifies the scene in which Chhoti Bahu and Bhoothnath first meet as a pivotal one in the film narrative, but

construes Bhoothnath’s gaze at Chhoti Bahu’s feet—as she herself does—

as merely an indication of his extreme shyness in the presence ofa woman:

‘this is as high as Bhoothnath’s eyes dare venture’, Kabir concludes (ibid.:

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112), completely discounting the complex erotic overtones of the encounter.!°

But whatever the interpretation of the camera's gaze in films such as

Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, on one matter there is very widespread public agreement—thatis, that the body language of popular Indian cinema has undergone enormous change over the last generation, particularly through the last few years. For the most part, this change is deplored, and attributed to the crude tastes of the lowest common denominator of the viewing public, to the concupiscence of unscrupulous directors and producers, and lately to the seditious influence ofan alien ‘cultural invasion’. Countless articles and public statements condemn the body language of the song-dance items, particularly the simulated coitus that has now substituted the erstwhile innocence of ‘running around trees’, near-miss kisses,

and ever-ruptured embraces. But even more than the display of aggressive masculinity, the explicit display of female sexuality, collapsing the longestablished cinematic opposition of ‘good girl’/vamp, wife/whore, has

become the subject of widespread and continuing public comment and

indignation.!! Of course, guardians of public morality have always warn-

ed of the corrupting influence of popular cinema—on women, youth, and the uneducated masses—but from today’s vantage films like Sahib,

Bibi aur Ghulam have now come to be viewed, with great nostalgia, as

representing both superior histrionics and—linked to this—more controlled, less ‘vulgar’, body language. As some articles in the Indian ‘men's magazine’, Debonair, have put it, where Waheeda Rehman (the film’s

other female lead) could express great depths of passion simply through ‘her large soft eyes’, and where Meena Kumari ‘could evoke deep personal grief merely by raising her eyebrows’ (Khubchandani, 1993: 44),'? the heroines of today tend to express themselves almost entirely through ‘their assets’: ‘the bigger the better’ (Gangadhar, 1993: 22)!3

There is no denying a major discontinuity between the idiom of smouldering eyes and that of heaving bosoms and gyrating bellies, between heroines counter-posed against vamps and heroines who act (dance) like vamps. But before making facile judgements about the changing values of popular cinema, it might be as well to attend first to the underlying problematics that popular cinema addresses, albeit with the materials at hand and in the idiom and body language of the day. In this sense, recognizing the podosemiotic idiom of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam cannot be an end in itself, but is merely an entry-point to interpretation of the film’s message, a set of sign-posts to the quality of significant relationships and to critical moments in the unfolding of the film narrative.

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TI. THE PROBLEMATICS OF ROMANCE ‘What is the problematic that Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam addresses? One answer, the most common, is that Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam isa

story about the demise ofa decadent feudal society which is subverted not only by its own inner corruption but by the emerging consciousness of the exploited classes, by the relocation of political power in the hands of the British colonial rulers, by the rising fortunes of the ruthless new commer-

cial class that prospered under colonial patronage, and by movements of nationalist self-reform such as the Brahmo Samaj.'4The set of male protagonists presents these various alternatives. The zamindar and his younger brother (Rehman) represent the dissolute feudal-landlord class; the rival

zamindars, the equally corrupt and rapacious new moneyed class; the

Brahmo factory owner, the idea of non-violent social reform towards the

goal of national liberation; the nationalist revolutionary, violent opposi-

tion to foreign rule; the hero, the new India of the professional classes. 1

The decline of feudalism is indeed the explicit backdrop of the film,

whose story is told in flashback through the eyes of an engineer super-

vising the demolition of a ruined mansion. As an innocent and rustic young man, the engineer—Bhoothnath—had once been witness to the extra-vagant lifestyle of its owners, the Chowdhury family, and to the corruption that underlay its magnificent facade.The estate owners whiled away their time in the characteristically decadent pursuits of men of their class—in drinking and dalliance with courtesans, in celebrating with pomp and ceremony the wedding ofa pet cat, and in competitive pigeonflying!°—equally oblivious to the sufferings of the peasantry they mercilessly exploited and to their own growing indebtedness to money-lenders. Confined within the zenana quarters, their womenfolk were unhappy and unfulfilled. The senior woman of the household, the zamindar broth-

ers’ pathetically deranged, widowed sister-in-law, was incessantly immersed in superstitious and purificatory rituals, while the elder brother's mean-mouthed wife was preoccupied with the petty vanities that became her husband’s status as the master of a great house. Forever disconsolate,

the younger brother's beautiful and neglected wife, Chhoti Bahu, yearned for her husband’s attention, and for someone to call her ‘Mother’. But the

young zamindar’s desire lay elsewhere, with one of the city’s most famous and beautiful courtesans. All actors in this drama of barren decadence seemed. unaware that time was running out for them and for their selfdestructive way of life, though the reminder was ever-present in the symbolic figure of a madman, obsessed with clockwork, who inhabited the

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liminal space between the public and the private quarters of the mansion. The process of self-destruction was ultimately completed with the brutal elimination of Chhoti Bahu by the elder zamindar’s henchmen in their final act of loyal service to their master. Asecond opinion has it that Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam wasa revolutionary film in allowing for the frank expression of a ‘good’ woman's sexual

desire.!” (Conventionally, in Hindi cinema, only the bad woman, the

seductive ‘vamp’ figure, could openly and unashamedly call attention to her sexual needs.) The reference is to Chhoti Bahu’s (ultimately unsuc-

cessful) attempt to seduce her husband into staying away from the kotha (courtesans’ house) by herself playing out the part of the courtesan. This observation comes somewhat closer to the line I will be pursuing here but, in valorizing Chhoti Bahu’s transparent expression of sexual desire, it

misses the crucial fact that her acknowledgment of desire was not eman-

cipatory, but actually personally humiliating and deeply transgressive; conceivable only when she was intoxicated and rewarded, ultimately, with death. Thus the good wife's display of desire is merely a voyeur's

delight. In the end, deviance finds its just reward and the viewer is re-

turned, through fantasized transgression, to endorsement of the normative moral order. The two interpretations cited above affirm the politically and socially ‘progressive’ features of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam against a more general theory of the development (or maldevelopment?) of commercial Indian cinema, counterpointed against Western cinema on the one hand, and the emerging Indian art (or ‘parallel’) cinema on the other (see Vasudevan, 1993). By the same token, however, these are perhaps more assessments of political correctness than insights into the social problems that the film seeks to address, and to which it provides some fictionalized resolutions.

To my mind, the story of the decline of the old feudal order in Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam merely constitutes the backdrop for an elaboration through the cinematic narrative of the dynamics of the man—woman relationship and the limits of feminine desire for modern times and for the new

nation.!8 In other words, I see Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam not so much as a treatise on feudalism butasa treatise on ‘love’-—love within marriage, love

outside marriage, love as duty, love as passion, unconsummated love—set against the background of an emerging society. The acknowledgment of feminine desire, and the plotting of its limits, is one aspect of this exploration—and undoubtedly a most important one (c.f. Orsini, n.d.: 12; Vasudevan 1996). But it is not the whole of it.

There are altogether four man—-wornan relationships explored in the

narrative text of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam: (i) that of the Brahmo reformer's

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daughter, Jabba (Waheeda Rehman) and Bhoothnath (Guru Dutt), the

chief male protagonist, from whose perspective the story unfolds; (ii) that of the younger zamindar, Chhote Sarkar (Rehman) and a courtesan;

(iii) that of Chhoti Bahu (Meena Kumari) and her Chhote Sarkar; and (iv) that of Bhoothnath and Chhoti Bahu. Taken together, as I will seek

to demonstrate here, this matrix of relationships presents the problematics of the man—woman relationship in terms of two dominant conceptual oppositions—of dharma (social duty) and desire; and of freedom and

destiny—transposed on to the world of the imaginary (cf. Jayamanne,

1992: 150). And while the expressive idiom may have been transformed

over the years since 1962, from feet and hands and eyes to bosoms and bellies and ‘pelvic thrusts’ (so called), the problem of reconciling duty and desire, and freedom and destiny in the context of love and marriage remains a constant preoccupation of the romantic genre of popular Hindi

cinema, as well as of other genres of popular (and possibly elite) culture.!?

Before looking in greater detail at the four relationships presented and

explored in the cinematic narrative of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, it might

be well to try and identify, howsoever crudely at this point, the sociological referents of the conceptual oppositions that I have posited here as defining the problematics and dynamics of the man—woman relationship in popular cinema. Dharma and Desire The classical or normative Hindu understanding of conjugality enumerates the goals of marriage as: dharma (duty), praja (progeny) and rati (pleasure)—in that order of importance.” Obviously, progeny are the outcome of sexual union, but carnality is not conceived as an independent

end in itself (except, possibly, in the Tantric tradition); nor is sexual passion considered a proper and lasting basis for marriage. On the contrary, it is felt chat the conjugal relation should be governed by the notion of duty: the duty ofa husband to provide adequately for his wife according

to his means, and to impregnate her in her proper ‘season’; and ofa woman

to make her body available for this purpose, and to serve her husband as

her ‘god’ with loyalty and unquestioning devotion.?! In this conceptual

scheme, that is, the ‘love’ of husband and wife is ideally seen as one of

affection and respect, protection and service; but not—essentially—of sexual passion (see Chapters 7 and 8).?2

Though this is an ideal, enshrined in rules of etiquette that require

husband and wife to avoid all public displays of intimacy, and in the overall cultural valorisation of sexual continence (brahmacharya), it is widely

recognized that sexuality is a very strong bonding force which has a logic

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and potentially threatening dynamics of its own (cf. Das, 1976; Derné, 2003; Trawick, 1990). Thus, while a wife's fertility is highly valued (and indeed necessary in order to establish her position in her husband’s home and consolidate her marriage), her sexuality can be a source of danger

(Carstairs, 1957: 167). A man over-infatuated with his wife is likely to

forget his primary loyalty to his parents and siblings and, if provoked, to demand the division of the joint family. As sociologist M.S. Gore has put it in the typically dry language of his discipline, ‘minimising the significance of the conjugal bond’ is ‘a functional requirement of the joint family, as a system’ (Gore, 1968: 34-5).

Anthropologists, too, have consistently recorded the duality and alternation of themes of auspiciousness and danger, as well as purity and impurity, in South Asian puberty and marriage rituals (as a well-known instance, see Yalman,

1963), and related this to the ambiguousness of the

feminine principle as expressed in the structure of the Hindu pantheon. That is, in the role structure of the pantheon, goddesses may be benign and auspicious, when paired with and controlled by a male deity (the ‘spouse’ goddesses); or independent and powerful, either protective or destructive as the situation may require, or downright malevolent unless properly appeased (see Harman, 1992: 9-13). Psychologists and psychoanalysts have their own explanations for the salience of this split-feminine phenomenon in South Asian cultures: they identify it as the fantasized projection of the Indian male child’s intense relation with his powerfully protective/punishing mother (e.g. Carstairs, 1957: 159-60; Derné, 2003: 92ff.; Nandy, 1980; Kakar, 1981a: Ch. 3;

Nagpal, 2003). This in turn is construed as the outcome of the mother’s

unfulfilled longing for an emotionally satisfying relationship with her husband, beyond the constraints imposed by the joint family structure. Be thatas it may, the conceptual separation of functions of procreativity

and sexuality found an institutionalized form in some of the traditional lifestyles of the aristocratic and wealthier classes of Indian society—for instance, in the leisure culture of the nobility of Awadh (see e.g. Oldenburg, 1991;V. Rao, 1996), or in the system referred to as ‘temple dedication (e.g. Marglin, 1990; Srinivasan, 1988). In either case, the ‘other’

women were independent professionals and property owners, highly cultivated in music and the arts. They were not only considered permanently auspicious, since technically they could not be widowed, but they conferred social prestige on the powerful men who successfully won and maintained them. As the elder brother's wife reminded her younger sister-

in-law in Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, she ought to have been proud, and certainly not resentful, of the fact that her husband had both the material

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means and the potent masculinity to attract and retain the affections of the most sought-after of the city’s courtesans.

As is well known, the conceptual and institutionalized separation of

roles of wife and courtesan came under challenge in the colonial period, when efforts were made to reform or refashion the ideal of Indian marriage after the Victorian model of monogamous companionability. This created a legitimate and widened space for the expression of romance and sexuality within—rather than outside of —the marital relation. However,

since the joint family remained (or now was consciously advocated as) a cultural ideal, an immense tension was created between the ideal of

conjugal intimacy and the renunciation of that intimacy in the wider

interests of joint family solidarity.”

In the Hindi cinema, as has often been observed, the opposed dimen-

sions of wifehood—procreativity and sexuality, love as duty and love as sexual passion—have typically been separated into distinct social roles

and assigned to different social spaces.”4 The wife is loyal, dutiful, and

fulfilled through motherhood, while the’‘other’ woman—the bad girl,

‘vamp’, prostitute, courtesan—is the repository of sterile sexuality. She must be narratively kept in her separate place lest she endanger the family

and the social order. The wife belongs to the home; the other woman to

space outside the home—the street, the kotha, the night-club floor.?>

Though ideally the categorical opposition of wife and ‘other woman’

should not be blurred, popular cinema constantly plays with the challenge of bringing about a seamless fusion of wifeliness and sexuality, dharma and desire. Needless to say, this is a very dangerous game, everpregnant with the possibility of disaster. Dharma may negate desire, or desire overwhelm dharma, leaving nothing but the ‘vulgarity’ that contemporary public discourse on the deportment of screen heroines so deplores. Indeed, it normally requires an extraordinary happenstance to make the inconceivable conceivable and to engineer the reconciliation of opposed social roles and their attendant moral values. This is surely the function of many of the convoluted plots of Hindi commercial cinema, that is, to mediate the tension between social duty and individual

desire.?6

Freedom and Destiny As problematic as the reconciliation of dharma and desire is the resolution of the opposition of freedom and destiny in the process of mateselection. Despite a century or more of the introduction ofWestern liberal values and the valorization of modern individualism in other aspects

of social life, marriages in India are still usually parentally arranged.

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Indeed, this is widely believed to be the safest and most appropriate method of mate-selection. Sexual experimentation before marriage is for the most part deeply disapproved of (though differentially for boys and girls), while ‘romance’ is conceived not so much as a legitimate prelude

to marriage but rather as an aspect of the successful consolidation of the conjugal relation, i.e. affer the marriage (or at least engagement) has already taken place (see Chapter 8). So-called ‘love’ (i.e. self-arranged) mar-

riages are viewed with considerable suspicion, no doubt justifiably so in the sense that (by definition) they undermine parental authority, threaten the basis of the social order of caste, rupture the chains of reciprocity that unite affines in relations of material/marital exchange and, in some understandings, also defy the forces of destiny that are believed to link two individuals uniquely through several successive lifetimes of partner-

ship.2”

However, if romance has only a dubious and limited role in the man— woman relationship in India before, or even after, marriage, it is fulsomely celebrated in myth and fantasy—for instance, in representation of the playful passion of Radha and Krishna (Kakar, 1986), in the popular thea-

trical traditions (see e.g. Hansen, 1992: esp. Chs 6 and 7), and latterly in

the mass media, especially stories, novels, popular musicand films. Nonetheless, even in the contemporary media there exists a marked tension between the value of free individual choice and social or cosmological

necessity.”® Obviously, the best resolution—in celluloid as in real-life— is that one should freely choose as a partner the sort of person whom

elders, or a procedure of horoscopic matching, would have chosen for one: this is the sub-continental meaning of the phrase, ‘made for each

other’. The plots of many popular films do exactly that, albeit with many devious twists and turns, and one cannot imagine a happier ending to a

romantic quest. Alternatively, the aspect of sexual attraction that under-

lies romantic love and invests it with danger should be domesticated and transformed in the course of the film narrative into the idiom of dharma: of protection and self-sacrificing service. The exercise of unalloyed free

choice, without these other mediations, is usually a prescription for

doom—cognitive and, for that matter, commercial. TV. A PARADIGM OF DESIRE

As might be expected, the dynamics and problematics of the four man— woman relationships explored in the cinematic narrative of Sahib, Bibi

aur Ghulam are made evident in the very first encounters of the respective

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protagonists. We take up each of these encounters in turn here, focusing as a point of entry on the corporeal imagery of feet. Jabba and Bhoothnath ‘Bhoothnath’ is the pet-name of a simple but educated young Brahmin

man whose brother-in-law, the tutor in a great house, finds him a job as

a clerk in a workshop owned by a wealthy and cultivated Brahmo social reformer, Suvinay Babu. The workshop produces a very special sindur (vermilion),?° according to an old family formula, which claims for it the

power to inspire passion; conjugal passion, that is. Bhoothnath’s first worry, on learning that his future employer is a Brahmo, is that he might incur impurity in eating the food his employer provides as part of his contract, but he is reassured that a Brahmin cook will prepare his meals

specially for him.

Bhoothnath’s initial encounter with his employer and his employer's sophisticated daughter, Jabba (played by Waheeda Rehman), is a disconcertingly embarrassing occasion, for his entrance is presaged by the loud squeaking of his brand new leather shoes.» (The same squeaking also precedes his first meeting—alone—with Jabba). Jabba laughingly mocks him for his comic pet-name and his rustic awkwardness; and the scene ends with Bhoothnath standing apologetically and tongue-tied in front of her, clutching the offending shoes to his breast. Despite her mocking tones, however, it is clear that Jabba is instinctively, almost inexplicably, attracted to this gauche young man. He, for his part, iscompletely disconcerted by her unwomanly forwardness. Gradually, to Bhoothnath’s perplexity and embarrassment, Jabba begins to take over some of the personal functions that family members perform for each other: as he later complains in confidence to Chhoti Bahu (actually, in the course of their very first meeting), Jabba treats him

as though they have some sort of ‘relationship’ (sambandh) with each other. The corrupt Brahmin cook who had been purloining his rations is

sacked, and Jabba herself begins to cook for him. (His high-caste scruples

are apparently overcome now by either hunger or gratitude.) When he is accidentally injured in police firing in the bazaar following a bombthrowing incident, she takes it on herself to nurse him. Significantly, too,

she reveals herself as rather unreasonably suspicious and jealous of his

undisguised adoration for Chhoti Bahu. There are, however, some seemingly insurmountable obstacles to the recognition and declaration of their feelings for each other. The first

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is Bhoothnath’s ‘innocence’—his unwillingness to recognize and acknowledge the stirring of physical attraction when, in two memorable scenes, the two come into very close physical proximity,?! and his failure to understand the many hints that Jabba drops, in prose and in verse. This tongue-tied innocence is complemented by Jabba’s own transformation from a forward, ‘modern’-type girl to a demure woman who shyly hides her growing love and waits patiently for its recognition and consummation.*? The second are the considerable religious and class differences that

make the rustic and orthodox Bhoothnath a misfit in the sophisticated and westernized society of the Brahmo social reformers. The squeaking shoes index this social incompatibility with remarkable economy. As it turns out, however, the incompatibility is more apparent than real, for the two were actually already husband and wife, married in their childhood before Suvinay Babu’s conversion to Brahmoism.*? Thus, their mutual

attraction was not transgressive under the circumstances, but an affirmation of their destiny with each other. They did, indeed, already have a ‘relationship’. Chhote Sarkar and the Courtesan We first see the courtesan in the kotha as the reclining and intoxicated zamindar himself sees her—as a pair of peremptory but alluring feet, teasingly offered for his eager grasp as she sings of her intoxication with him.

Dalliance with courtesans, as we are told in the course of the film, is both

a recognized aspect of the lifestyle of men of Chhote Sarkar’s class and a natural outlet for the ‘hot-blooded’ masculinity that a wife could not be expected to satisfy. But his infatuation with the dancing-girl is, clearly, quite excessive and his neglect of his wife too complete; he provides her neither sexual satisfaction, nor the satisfaction of motherhood. It is this double excess that indexes the moral corruption of this declining way of life: the system is no longer stable. Expectedly, despite her bold declaration of undying passion, the courtesan quickly switches her affections to a rival zamindar when Chhote Sarkar is persuaded to indulge himself at home with his wife. In the fight that ensues when he decides to resume his old ways and return to the kotha, Chhote Sarkar is seriously injured. Bedridden and paralysed, he is ultimately potent neither for his wife nor for his mistress.

The zamindar’s relationship with the courtesan is an elective one, based on both mutual sexual attraction and cultural compatibility. But it

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is asymmetrical; the zamindar’s excessive passion is not genuinely recipro-

cated. More to the point, it is neither endorsed by destiny, nor trans-

formed into a quasi-conjugal relation by appropriate acts of protection, devotion and self-sacrifice. Under the circumstances, surely, it could have only a tragic outcome. Chhoti Bahu and Chhote Sarkar

Chhoti Bahu’s relationship with her husband is expressed in two contradictory registers that merge dangerously as the narrative proceeds. The first is that of the dutiful and self-sacrificing Hindu wife, who worships her husband as god and seeks to please him in every possible way. The second, as already suggested, is that of a woman who so actively desires her husband’s presence and love that she dangerously exceeds the proper limits of wifely devotion and seeks instead to become the sole object of her husband's sexual desire. Blinded by her frustration, she becomes in-

volved in a socially transgressive (if sexually innocent) relationship with the young Bhoothnath. Two scenes in particular give expression to the ideal image of wifely devotion. In the first of these, Chhoti Bahu is represented by a proxy, the loyal and sympathetic man-servant, Bansi, who goes on her behalf to the zamindar’s private chamber to dip his employer's big toe into a cup of water. Without first ritually consuming this water, the young wife refuses to break her fast. In fact, for this reason she has remained hungry since the previous day as her husband, unmindful, was whiling away his time as usual at the kotha. Bansi tries first to achieve his goal by stealth, and then

by pleading, and finally succeeds in distracting the still half-intoxicated zamindar with a glass of wine, awakening his recollections of the pleasures of the previous night. All in all, Chhote Sarkar is revealed as callously indifferent to his wife’s conventional gesture of devotion. The second scene is a climactic one. Rejected and taunted by her husband, infuriated that she had called him back from the kotha on a false

excuse, Chhoti Bahu recklessly accepts his malicious challenge to provide

for him the sort of services (seva) that the courtesan provides—to drink

with him, and entertain him. Though

their relationship is thus consum-

mated, to the eerie echo of Chhoti Bahu’s delirious and drunken laughter,

Chhote Sarkar in due course feels suffocated by votion, dishonoured by her unwifely deportment, new domestication. He decides to resume his old passion. Desperately, Chhoti Bahu tries to detain

his and life him

wife’s cloying deunmanned by his and renew his old with a song—the

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famous Na jao saiyan (Don't leave, beloved)—in which wifely devotion and sexual passion merge seductively: Beloved, do not leave the gentle embrace of my arms. My eyes fill with tears.

I long for your embrace.

If you will not stay What will become of me? This cascade of hair These kohi-darkened eyes

This glittering veil

The desire of my heart— All this is for you alone.

Today I will not let you go.

I am devoted to you I thirst for you You are my love, the light of my eyes. I shall take the dust from beneath your feet

And powder my brow with it. You who elude me T implore you to heed me I am all yours lam at your feet. Here I shall live, and here I shall die.34

Predictably, she falls at his feet, but he is unrelenting. In the bitter

exchange that follows, she defends her alcoholism as the great ‘sacrifice’ (balidan) that she, a good Hindu woman, has had to make for her hus-

band’s sake, but her protestations of innocence are subverted by the excess of desire that had motivated her and betrayed her wifely dharma. Resolutely, Chhote Sarkar slips on his shoes and walks out of the room, heading back to the kotha, where his erstwhile mistress has meanwhile found

herself a new admirer. Though Chhote Sarkar had initially found the idea of wifely sensuality transgressively exciting, he ultimately seeks to re-establish the proper separation of the wife/courtesan roles; too late, perhaps, for Chhoti Bahu

(like the real life Meena Kumari) has become an alcoholic. Finally, from

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his sick bed, he asks Chhoti Bahu to give up drinking. ‘I began drinking

for your sake; now I will give it up for you’, she answers, with rather un-

convincing bravado.

Bhoothnath and Chhoti Bahu The relationship of Bhoothnath and Chhoti Bahu, the last of the set to be presented to the viewers, is one of intuitive understanding and barely sublimated eroticism. Somewhat to his consternation, Bhoothnath is told by the man-ser-

vant Bansi that Chhoti Bahu wishes to see him in her room, alone, at night. This isa most improper suggestion, but the innocent Bhoothnath— though nonplussed—does not read it as a sexual invitation, for he has already formed a poignant image of Chhoti Bahu asa sad and pining wife, forever awaiting her husband’s return from the pleasures of the kotha. At the outset of their first encounter, like Lakshman in the presence of Sita,

Bhoothnath’s gaze is first focused on her feet. With trepidation he looks up—at her face, her eyes, her soft lips, her seated figure. This vision is iconic of the cinematic image of Meena Kumari, whose beautiful aspect both conceals and discloses a life of personal sorrow and tragedy. Unlike the haughty Jabba, Chhoti Bahu speaks kindly to Bhoothnath. She doesn’t mock his name: ‘It’s one of the many names of God,’ she says. Instinctively, he feels that she understands him, and he blurts out to her

his embarrassment over Jabba’s familiar behaviour with him. The feeling

of closeness is clearly reciprocated as Chhoti Bahu reveals to him the

reason why she had called him and, despite herself, discloses something of her sorrow and frustration. She asks Bhoothnath to bring her, very

discreetly, a pot of the special love-inducing sindur that is manufactured in the Brahmo’s factory where he works. Bhoothnath willingly does so, and is deeply dismayed when he later learns that it has failed to enchant the neglectful zamindar. Chhoti Bahu next sends for Bhoothnath for a very different sort of errand, to procure wine for her so that she can be her husband’s drinking companion/lover: ‘If my husband asks me to drink, I must drink’, she says

defiantly, overruling Bhoothnath'’s reluctance. In this scene, she is no

longer sitting, adorned, smiling, in the light, but standing in the dark, face

averted with shame.?>

The physical effect of Chhoti Bahu’s attempt to play the courtesan for her errant husband is apparent when Bhoothnath next visits to ask her to keep some money for him in safe-keeping. She is now reclining, draped

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carelessly over her bed. The words she had first used to him, kindly, are now uttered in slurred and seductive tones: ‘Come, come here’. ‘Are you afraid of me?’ she asks, as he hesitates. Protesting against her drunkenness,

Bhoothnath momentarily takes on the disciplinary role of the proper husband: ‘You can’ drink in front of me’, he says angrily, forgetful of his station and his relationship to her. “You can drink in front of your husband if you like.’ Snatching the bottle away from her, he grabs hold of her arm. “What, you laid hands on me’, she shouts in fury and collapses, as Bhoothnath retreats in dismay from her room. It is only when her husband, from his sick-bed, finally requests her to stop drinking that Chhoti Bahu determines to make the effort.>° Chhoti Bahu asks Bhoothnath to escort her to meet a famous sadhu—to pray for her husband’s health, or perhaps for the strength to renounce liquor. Touching her head to her husband’s feet in parting, Chhoti Bahu leaves the Aaveli in the company of Bhoothnath. This is yet another act of impropriety on her part, observed by the elder zamindar, who orders her execution at the hands of his henchmen. In the carriage, alone with Bhoothnath, she seems to have a premonition of her impending doom and asks him to see that, when she dies, her corpse is dressed in bridal attire

and sindur put on her forehead so that everyone will know her for a virtuous wife. That her corpse was ultimately buried secretly and ignominiously in the crumbling Aaveli suggests, perhaps, that her virtue was indeed in doubt, that she had suffered the punishment that was her due.

Chhoti Bahu and her husband were linked by destiny in sacramental marriage, and Chhoti Bahu protests the sanctity and eternity of this bond to the end. But her love was not reciprocated. On the other hand, between Chhoti Bahu and Bhoothnath there existed an instinctive and reciprocal understanding: ‘You're the only one who understands me’, were her last words to him. They were in so many senses kindred spirits, instinctively attracted. But their circumstances did notallow the self-recognition of the transgressive and adulterous passion that the film’s title iconicized and that ultimately provoked Chhoti Bahu’s execution. The problem was that both Bhoothnath and Chhoti Bahu were linked by destiny elsewhere. V. Happy AND UNHAPPY ENDINGS

Across several genres of popular culture, ‘endings’—happy or tragic—index right and wrong, true and false. Only one of the four man-woman

relationships of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam ends happily, and this, surely,

carries an important lesson for the viewer.

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The attempt to reconcile the roles of wife and seductress, husband and lover, as articulated in the tragedy of Chhoti Bahu and her husband,

Chhote Sarkar, is unsuccessful. Excess of passion in a relationship outside marriage, with the ‘other’ woman, and excess of passion, asymmetrically,

within marriage, led equally to tragedy; to paralysis, death, and murder.

When not endorsed by social sanction and cosmological destiny, relations

of instinctive companionability and sexual attraction could lead nowhere, whether they were sexually fulfilled, as in that of the zamindar and

the courtesan, or continent, as between Chhoti Bahu and Bhoothnath. The only relationship that ended happily from the protagonists’ point of view—that of Jabba and Bhoothnath—was one where the end was preempted in the beginning. They were already married, and their rediscovery of each other, despite the Brahmos’ repudiation of the custom of child

marriage, was almost foreordained. This was also a relation in which the

slow growth of sexual attraction was firmly subordinated within the compass of normative conjugal proprieties. This is no doubt a neat solution, but ultimately an unsatisfactory one. Almost a sad ending to a happyever-after story.>” The reason is, quite clearly, that the romance of destiny has almost eclipsed the romance of individual freedom and desire, such

as Bhoothnath did indeed have with his soul-mate, Chhoti Bahu. For the more satisfactory resolution of this tension, one needs to look elsewhere—for instance, to the story of Pakeezah (1971, again starring Meena

Kumari and directed by her husband, Kamal Amrohi)?®&—which plays

dangerously with the same elements, dharma and desire, freedom and

destiny, and arrives at a less ambivalent resolution.

Perhaps Guru Dutt was too much a realist, or too sad a person, to have

indulged such a fantasy. His marriage to Geeta Dutt (playback singer

Geeta Roy) having broken up, his affair with Waheeda Rehman ended,

depressed and drinking heavily, he committed suicide not long afterwards without completing another film. Notes 1, After the failure of Kzagaz ke Phool (1959), Guru Dutt never again signed a film as director. Direction of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulamwas credited to his close friend and long-term lyricistand dialogue writer, Abrar Alvi, for whom it won

the 1962 Filmfare award for direction. (Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam also won

the awards for best film, best actress [Meena Kumari] and best photography [V.K. Murthy].) Understandably under the circumstances, and considering

also Guru Dutt’s depressed State of mind during the making ofthe film, there has been some controversy over who is to be considered the ‘real’ director of

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the film, Guru Dutt or Abrar Alvi. Here I treat Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam as a Guru Dutt film, as do most others (see Kabir, 1996: 120; also Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, 1995: 348).

. ‘Bhoothnath’ [Bhutnath], an epithet of Shiva, the pet-name given by the child’s aunt for the reason that he had been born on the night of the festival of Shivratri.

. This is the same image that Bhoothnath’s imagination superimposes on the

skeletal remains of the body exhumed from the ruined Aaveli. The lastingly

iconic quality of this image is affirmed by its evocation in a jewellery

exhibition advertisement (Art Karat Gallery), featuring the former filmstar Rakhee (who, coincidentally, like Meena Kumari, had also reportedly had an alcohol problem) (‘Rakhee with other gems’, Times of India, 20 December,

1944). By contrast, Chhoti Bahu’s image of Bhoothnath, interspersed in the same sequence, is of a shy, artless, and endearingly childish young man. . Looking is conceived very much as a two-way process in India, epitomized in the devotee’s visual interaction with the deity. See Babb (1981); Eck (1981:

w

5); Taylor (2002). Asa filmmaker, Guru Dutt was reportedly very conscious of the communicative power of eyes in close-up shots; as an actor he was always worried that his own eyes—usually hidden behind strong glasses— lacked adequate expressive power. See Kabir (1996: 45, 71, 73). . Comment on BBC Channel 4 programme, ‘In search of Guru Dutt’ (1989). . Available analyses of Guru Dutt films (as Kabir, 1996; or Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, 1995) do not indicate such an obsession. On the other hand, these

critics have also not remarked on the podoerotic and podosemiotic focus of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam either.

. See for instance the sources cited in Rossi (1977). I am grateful to Veena Das

for reminding me of the Freudian reading of the big toe. . Rossi (1977: 11) quotes Dr G. Aigremont, a German psychologist andauthor

of Foot and Shoe Symbolism and Eroticism (1909) as follows: ‘In India, in the

art of love, there exists a toe kiss, which serves as an exceptionally strong and successful erotic arousal. The woman kisses the big toe of the man in order to arouse him to love.’ This is one of the few references to Indian podoculture in Rossi’s book in which, not altogether unexpectedly, his chapter on ‘Oriental podoerotomania’ is dominated by Chinese examples. . Rossi (1977: 69-70) refers to a number of psychological studies whereby respondents, shown only pictures of faces and shoes, succeeded with a high degree of accuracy in identifying the persons’ occupations and personalities. Rossi concludes from this that: “The shoe appears to be a particularly expressive item in the identification of roles and statuses.’ 10. Kabir's description of this scene is worth quoting in full here: The entiresequence of Chhoti Bahu’s introduction is seen from Bhootnath’s perspective and because he is terrified of meeting her, his eyes are lowered: the camera takes Bhootnath’s angle of view and follows the patterns of a

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rich carpet on which he walks to enter the room. We hear Chhoti Bahu, still off screen, telling him to be seated. Then we see a pair of feet adorned by altavermilion colour walk across the room; this is as high as Bhootnath’s eyes dare venture. He sits humbly on the floor and is asked his name. Finally when he does look up, the camera tracks in dramatically and holds ona close-up of Chhoti Bahu. Her intense and tragic aura startles Bhootnath, and from that first look, he becomes her slave—her ‘ghulam’, as referred to in the film's title (1996: 112-13).

11. Swimming against the tide of popular and feminist indignation, some

feminists have sought to reinterpret the role and character of the vamp, and to revalorize—positively, rather than negatively—the recent sexualizing of the heroine. See e.g. Mazumdar e¢ al., n.d.

12. The burden of the article quoted here, a piece titled ‘Some women are

forever’, was that the most ‘ethereal’ Indian screen beauties, and the most memorable screen performances, have always been by ‘women in love’, typically, with ‘the directors who created them’. Waheeda Rehman’s outstanding performance inSahib, Bibi aur Ghulam was seen as animated by her reputed affair with Guru Dutt. Meena Kumari’s emergence as a ‘tragedienne par excellence’ through her performance in the same film was similarly seen as coloured by ‘the pathos in her life’ (presumably referring to the breakdown of her relationship with her husband, Kamal Amrohi, which dated from that time). Public reactions to this film, at its release and in retrospect, illustrate

the typical elision of on-screen and off-screen personas and events (cf.

Vasudevan, 1996: 103-6). Meena Kumari’s father was a music director, and

her mother, Iqbal, a film actress—scarcely a ‘respectable’ profession for a woman in those days. Vasudevan remarks that Meena Kumari, along with other actresses of similar background ‘whose public images were generated by “fraught” off-screen narratives’ (Nargis, Nimmi), ‘were often selected for

scenarios of transgression, suspicion, even marginality.’ He goes on to remark that ‘it could be argued that by subjecting these actresses to a punishing narrative fate, the cinema evoked an illicit history beyond its fictional sphere’ (ibid.: 106). 13. This article was a spoof on the notorious song-dance item, ‘Choli ke peechey kya hain?’ (What's behind the bodice?) from Subhash Ghai’s Khalnayak (1993).Though ultimately banned in response to public outcry, this song was immensely popular nonetheless. See also Chapter 5. 14, This is especially the interpretation of those familiar with Bimal Mitra’s Bengali novel, Saheb, Bibi, Golam (1952), on which the film, and its earlier

Bengali stage and screen versions, were based (e.g. Chakravarty, 1996:

173ff.). (The novel was also reportedly available in Hindi translation.) The

film's scriptwriter and ‘official’ director, Abrar Alvi, also made the same comment on the BBC Channel 4 ‘Movie Mahal’ programme, ‘In search of Guru

Dutt’ (1989). See also Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (1995: 348) and Kabir

134

Freedom and Destiny (1996: 115) for the comparison of Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulamwith Satyajit Ray's

Jalsaghar (1958), which has a similar ambience. 15.

Similarly, Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (1995: 348) see the contrast of the

past and the future exemplified in the contradictory attitudes of the two female figures: represented in Meena Kumari’s impassioned plea to her husband not to leave her (i.e. as in the song ‘Na jao saiyan), counterpointed against Waheeda Rehman’s ‘robust and girlish presence’. See also Chakravarty (1996: 180-1).

16.

Pigeon-flying was a favourite pastime of the Muslim nobility, as recalled with considerable nostalgia in both cinema and fiction (for instance, Ahmed Ali’s

Twilight in Delhi). In Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam, the motif of pigeon-flying has

rather the same function as an index of feudal indulgence, as does chess-

playing in Satyajit Ray's film, Shatranj ke Khiladi (1977). See also Kesavan (1994: esp. 251-3).

17. For instance, comments by Shabana Azmi on ‘Movie Mahal’, BBC Channel 4 (1989); also Kabir (1996: 113).

18. A similar case is argued by Orsini in her paper (n.d.) on the ‘social romance’

type of popular fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. She noted that in these social novels, ‘the element of romance often came to overshadow the original aim [i.e. of social critique for social reform]. Social critique became part of the plot, a voice, the cause of further frissonand of dramatic, extreme situations,

while feelings of love and the “vicissitudes of desire” emerged as the crux of the narration’ (p.14). Referring in particular to J.P. Srivastava's novel, Dil ki

ag urf diljale ki ah, she comments that in this novel ‘only a brief mention of

[a social] issue is enough to recall the whole argument about it. The thrust of the novel is the multiple romance, the “mise en scene” of desire—meeting,

romance, separation (penance) and fulfilment—hindered by family, class and social propriety, or by Chance and Destiny’ (p.17). 19. Ofcourse, such a sweeping characterization of the romantic mode across time and genre needs further substantiation, especially since ‘romance’ is not

usually recognized as an independent genre of popular cinema. Sahib, Bibi aur Ghulam is conventionally identified as a ‘melodrama’, a genre in which Guru Dutt is said to have specialized, and/or as a ‘social’ film (see entries

under these titles in Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, 1995). In view of its horrific and tragic elements, the film might plausibly be classed as ‘gothic’,

to use a category that is not conventionally deployed in the classification of

types of popular Indian cinema. Writing on a similar problem in reference to genres of twentieth-century popular fiction, Orsini has coined the term ‘social romance’ to emphasize the consistent melding of social (reformist) and romantic themes in these novels which, as she notes, ‘bear strong resem-

blances to the “social” of commercial Indian cinema (n.d.: 1). Interestingly, and conversely, the romantic element is characteristically downplayed in ‘serious fiction’ (ibid.: 17-18).

Desire and Destiny 20.

135

See Kapadia, 1966: 167ff. These three goals equate roughly with three of the four Hindu aims of life—dharma, artha and kama—these goals being

opposed to the highest goal of spiritual liberation (moksha). Liberation implies withdrawal from productive and reproductive roles, and the elimination

of desire. See Allen (1982) for a useful analysis of the conceptualization of

women that each of these goals entails.

21. Admittedly, something of a caricature of the classical view, following Kapadia

(1966: 167.) 22. Steve Derné has written at length on the wariness on the part of men of close emotional ties between husband and wife, and of women's contrary desire to escape the joint family and forge stronger ties with the husband (see Derné, 1995, 2003). Derné also notes, however, that about one-third of his largely upper caste, middle class, north Indian informants saw closeness with their wives ‘as means to the good life’ (2003:

emotionally closer cided with greater wives in the joint became senior, and

(ibid.: 101-2).

101). Men

tended to become

to their wives with age, a development that often coinfinancial independence of family resources. Conversely, family became less manipulative and resentful as they began to identify with the interests of the joint family itself

23. See the recent interview with Sudhir Kakar in D. Sharma (2003a). 24. Writing of Bengali attitudes to ‘love’ versus‘arranged’ marriage, Lina Fruzzetti observes:

Bengalis stress that prem [love] is a part of the husband-wife tie, but that love has to develop through time, growing in and through the swami-stri (husband-wife) relationship. Bengali marriages are not devoid of love, but

prem is not the main reason for the union . . . (1990: 12).

She goes on to distinguish prem as bhakti (worshipfulness) from prem as

sexual love (ibid.: 12-14). Similarly, Harman (1992: 12-13), citing Frederique Marglin’s work on the temple dancers of Orissa (1982), describes the ten-

sion—both separation and overlap—between carnal love within marriage (kama) and erotic extra-conjugal love (prem), as in the adulterous ‘play’ of

Krishna and the gopis: ‘the categories of lover and spouse do not always go together, even in the later and more puritanical strains of Vaisnavism. Nonetheless, they are frequently associated . . . (ibid.: 13).

25. For reflectionsalong these lines, see e.g. Chakravarty (1996: Ch. 8); Kasbekar (2001); F Kazmi (1994: esp. 237-8); Kesavan (1994: 253-5); Prasad (1998:

182).

26. Hansen (1992: 163, 169-70) has made a similar observation regarding the

popular Nautanki theatre of north India. Dwyer (2001) has also commented

on this tension in popular cine magazines’ constructions of the personal lives

of the ‘stars’.

27. There is some evidence to suggest that self-arranged marriages are increas-

ingly tolerated, so long as they are reasonably caste/class isogamous, one

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reason being that in self-arranged marriages, dowry is usually not required. There are innumerable attitudinal surveys, especially of college student populations, to determine changing attitudes to love/arranged marriage.

Sudhir Kakar cites a recent survey (source unidentified) of 25,000 to 30,000

respondents of whom 87% in rural areas and 82% in urban areas “preferred”

arranged marriages (see Sharma, 2003a: 162). Attitudinal surveys do not, of

course, reflect actual practices, which are believed to be less liberal. This is probably especially true of student respondents, who soon enough buckle to family pressures. 28. The tension is also expressed in popular romance fiction, such as that analysed in Chapters 7 and 8.

29. The red powder used by married Hindu women to mark the hair parting, a symbol of the married State, removed on widowhood (see Fruzzetti, 1990:

30.

92, 97, 105). Bhoothnath, who has arrived at the great house barefoot, and in rustic attire, is now dressed in the garb of a babu-—dhotiand jacket, socks and garters, and shiny leather shoes. He is uncomfortable not only in this new attire, but in the Westernized ambience of a tea-party.

31. Significantly, (i) in the domesticated space of the kitchen; and (ii) by the sick-

bed. It is actually Jabba, not Bhoothnath, who first acknowledges erotic arousal, in a series of flashbacks, as she watches Bhoothnath leave to take up a new job after the closing of the Mohini Sindoor factory. 32. This change is signalled in the song that the formerly bold Jabba sings as Bhoothnath departs to take up his new job: Meri bat rahi mere man men

Kuch kah na saki uljhan men (Whar I wanted to say remained in my heart In my confusion, I could not utter a word) (Kabir, 1996: 118-19). In contemporary films also—for instance, Hum Aapke Hain Koun ...! or Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge—a romantic commitment marks the end of youthful playfulness and boisterousness, and the beginning ofa new restraint, responsibility and seriousness, for women and men alike (see Chapters 5 and 6).

33. In the film narrative, the opposition initially set up between the enlightened

and modernizing Brahmo, Suvinay Babu, and the ritualistic and traditional Bhoothnath is also dissolved: Suvinay Babu's factory actually turns out a product—the love-inducing sindur—whose efficacy is shown to be illusory. Bhoothnath, on the other hand, becomes in time a professional engineer,

westernized in manner and lifestyle, and dressed in the costume appropriate to his profession—‘safari suit’, boots and solar topee, blueprints in hand. This is how we see him in both the first and the closing scenes of the film.

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34. Translation, BBC Channel 4, ‘Movie Mahal’, 1987.Thisis arguably the most famous scene in the film, both summarizing the tragically asymmetrical

relationship of Chhoti Bahu and her husband, and demonstrating the considerable histrionic talents of Meena Kumari. In fact, all the songs and song-dance sequences in this film are regarded in nostalgic recall as classics of their type. Guru Dutt was reputed to take unusual pains over the songs in his films, insisting that they advance the dramatic narratives (see Kabir, 1996: 25-6; 54-5, 57), rather than being opportunistically inserted for mere

entertainment value (the charge against most contemporary directors). ‘Na jao saiyan’ was one of the top ten film songs of 1962. 35. This scene is almost repeated when he brings the wine flask to her: her face is invisible as her shaking hand takes delivery of the substance of her selfdestruction. The scene of the delivery of the wine flask contrasts sharply with the scene earlier when she receives the pot of love-inducing sindur—with the reverence with which one receives prasad, or a sacred blessing. 36. Reportedly, in the film as first released, Chhoti Bahu begs her husband to let her take one last sip of liquor. Guru Dutt deleted this scene in response to public disapproval, and instead had the paralysed zamindar repent his ways, finally showing Chhoti Bahu the respect and affection she had so desperately 37.

craved (Kabir, 1996: 114).

Possibly this ambiguity was the reason for the film's commercial lack of success, despite its starring both the leading female stars of the day, and despite Guru Dutt’s formidable reputation as a director following the recent commercial success of Chaudhvin ka Chand (1960). Reportedly, in the

Bengali novel on which the film was based, Bhoothnath refrains from revealing his true identity as Jabba’s husband, and encourages her to marry the

Brahmo man her father had chosen for her (see Chakravarty, 1996: 175), a

different but hardly more satisfying resolution of the tension between freedom and destiny, desire and social conformism.

38. Pakeezah, released after Meena Kumari's death, is incidentally also podoerotic/

podosemiotic—indeed,

if one might coin another such phrase,

podosadomasochistic—text. At least one critic (Chakravarty, 1996: 293) has

remarked on the ‘fetishization’ of feet as a motif throughout this film.

CHAPTER

5

Imagining the Family An Ethnography of Viewing Hum Aapke Hain Koun . . .!}

keg ‘T’'m for the joint family system, because the joint family represents Indian culture; nowhere else in the world have they got this system still’ (Miss India contestant, 1995).?

| iving in the city of Delhi, there is one quite certain means of deciding when a movie has caught the popular imagination: a catch-phrase from the film is to be found inscribed on the back of a threewheeler auto-rickshaw. Jostling for space and visual attention along with numerous other insignia of the owner's social and sectarian identity— salutations to gods and goddesses, expressions of gratitude to gurus and

parents, salacious comments and naughty verses, aphorisms and proverbs, warnings to other road-users and curses on the evil eye—these evocative phrases index both the extent of the movie's box-office appeal, and its privileged iconic status across several domains of popular culture. Even today,? mementoes of the 1975 blockbuster, Sholay, remind harried commuters of a larger-than-life epic contest between Good and Evil, enlivened on the sidelines by romance and sacrifice: ‘Chal Basanti. Numerous three-wheelers still carry the expressive legend, Maine Pyar Kiya (I'd fallen in love), the title of Sooraj Barjatya’s 1989 romantic hit.‘ But the really contemporary graffito for the Delhi roads is the teasing title of Barjatya’s latest blockbuster, the spectacular Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (What am I to you!) (1994).

In a year of numerous box-office ‘flops’, the romantic family drama,

Hum Aapke Hain Koun . . .! (HAHK, as it is familiarly referred to, and as

we will term ithenceforth), was a phenomenal commercial success, reportedly grossing more than any other film in the history of Indian cinema.> After more than six months, the film is still showing to packed houses in

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Delhi and elsewhere;® tickets for matinees are still sold ‘in black’; and

many viewers—and not only the dedicated ethnographer—are returning for their third, fourth, and fifth viewings,’ clapping, cheering and weeping at appropriate moments, anticipating the dialogue, and strumming to the beat of its very popular songs. Delighted distributors compare the film to some of the great blockbusters of yesteryear—Sholay and Mughal-EAzam, for instance. With opulent sets, no fewer than fourteen melodious songs,® a star-studded cast with Madhuri Dixit and Salman Khan in the

lead roles,? and a canny marketing and distribution strategy,!° this movie has enticed cinema audiences back to the theatres in unprecedented numbers, allaying industry fears that Indian commercial cinema had entered a phase of irreversible decline. In a single stroke, HAHK appears to have neutralized the subversive effects of the contemporary alien ‘cultural invasion and the debased cultural values of the front-benchers, bringing back

nostalgic memories of a bygone golden era of Indian cinema. This is nothing short of remarkable, for HAHK completely lacks the masala (spicy) ingredients of sex, sadism, and violence that are believed to be de rigueur for a successful ‘Bollywood’ production. Action, such as it is, begins only well after the interval when the film becomes, for better

or worse, ‘just like other movies’.!! And though the music is undeniably catchy, it was certainly not as innovative and varied as that of some other films, Roja, 1942:

Love Story or Bombay, for instance. Besides, it is well

known that even exceedingly popular song-dance items cannot redeem a

film otherwise destined to ‘bomb’ at the box office; or rather, with the expansion of cable and satellite TV, the films and their songs may increasingly follow independent trajectories of popular appeal (Doraiswamy,

1996).

It is now conceded, with a mixture of wonder and relief, that the unprecedented commercial success of HAHK may actually lie in the fact thatitis not a masala movie. Post facto, film critics have belatedly attempted to construct a genealogy for this rather unanticipated development in popular Hindi cinema. For instance, Nikhat Kazmi, the well-regarded

film critic of the Times of India, has seen the film as indicating an emerg-

ing trend—a pendulum swing in ‘low brow taste away from ‘blood and gore’ and back to the uplifting themes of ‘the family, the nation and love’

(cf. Mayaram, n.d.: 11). Postulating a sort of psychological saturation of Indian cinema audiences with themes of violence and revenge, Kazmi

writes:

Clean: this is the current new word in the common man’s lexicon for good

cinema. In an age when cinema seems to have lost its soul to the nasty, brutish hero, both the viewers and the film makers have had their fill of the death wish.

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Now, they are turning from revenge, the reason for all the blood and gore in popular Bollywood cinema, to the family, the nation and love. There is a ubiquitous demand for good, clean cinema. A demand which is reflected in the

stupendous success of Hum Aapke Hain Koun, a film which has nothing more than good, clean music, nice characters and a drama that falls soft and easy (Kazmi, 1995a).'2

Asa good ‘clean movie, Kazmiputs HAHK ina series with the recently released patriotic melodramas, Roja and Krantiveer, and latterly Param Vir Chakra, to which she could well have added the romantic 1942: A Love Story, a film set against the background of the freedom struggle. But the singular feature of HAHK in this series, which I seek to address here,

is that it is quintessentially what is classed in popular parlance asa ‘family’

film—‘family’ understood in the double sense of (i) fora family audience;

and (ii) about family relationships, inclusive of, but much broader than,

the true romance that provides its basic story-line. As one viewer is reported to have said: The family in this film is very important. It’s not a Madhuri or a Salman film [the romantic leads] but the story of a family (Mishra, 1995).

Mopping her tears, she further explained to the interviewer that [e]lverytime she watched it she cried in the same scenes, because she lived in

a joint family and could relate to the happy and sad moments (ibid.).

Despite the supposed authenticity of detail, on which many viewers commented, HAHK is not actually a work of cinematic realism (see also

Section III below). As Madhuri Dixit disarmingly conceded while ac-

cepting the Filmfare award for Best Actress of 1994: HAHK presents

‘a perfect utopia —about ‘simple values and guileless people’.!3 In other words, the film is not about the family as it is, but about the family as people would dike it to be: ‘I would want my daughter-in-law to be as nice and

sweet and domesticated’ as Madhuri and Renuka, a middle-aged businessman was reported to have remarked (Mishra, 1995)—suggesting,

perhaps, that not all daughters-in-law match these exacting standards. Indeed, several viewers self-consciously recognized, and took pleasure in

the fact, that this film portrayed an ideal of family life. Said Asha:'4

What I liked is that everyone has good relations with each other, which is not

generally found in families. . . . This is how it should be. It’s an ideal family. Clearly, HAHK is the story of the Indian family as a form of ‘imagined community’

(to rather stretch the meaning of Anderson's felicitous

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141

concept [1983]). Beyond this, as I seek to illustrate, it is also about the

family as an icon of the national society.

For some time now, social scientists, cinema critics, and concerned

citizens have been at pains to find explanations—material, social, or

psychological—for the high levels of sadism and violence in Indian popu-

lar cinema (e.g. Nandy, 1995a; 1995b; 1995c). Indian feminists have

recently begun to keep a vigilant eye on the stereotypes of femininity purveyed by the film industry, the commoditization of women's bodies, and the violence against women routinely displayed on the Indian screen.!° A new generation of film critics and historians of cinema have utilized the optic of psychoanalytic film theory to speculate on the play of desire that the cinematic fantasy sets loose (Vasudevan, 1996; see also Kakar, 1989;

Nandy, 1981). And there has also been a measure of interrogation of the political agenda believed to inform the recent series of patriotic films, Mani Ratnam’s Roja in particular, linking this to the class and communal character of the Indian State (Niranjana, 1994). But, until the unexpected

phenomenon of HAHK, romances and clean family films had not attracted the same degree of critical attention or hermeneutic effort.'6 Per-

haps the general feeling is just one of enormous relief that family movies

like HAHK can be commercially viable after all. Indeed, critiques of the politics of representation in such movies tend to be greeted with some resentment. Asa middle-aged woman lecturer at a Delhi women’s college asked me aggressively, after one such exercise: “That's all very well. But tell me the truth now. Didn't you enjoy it?!” Anda young reporter, attempting to probe the ‘anti-emancipatory’ female stereotypes she found in HAHK, was told firmly by a college girl interviewee: ‘Oh, come on. Don't give it a feminist angle. I would love to get married and lead such a life’ (Mishra,

1995).

:

On the contrary—and hereI draw sustenance from Rustom Bharucha’s

critique of the same film (1995)—I would insist that clean family movies

are just as demanding of critical and political interpretation as the ‘blood and gore’ films that have attracted so much public and media attention: and that not merely because they have proved exceedingly profitable! Thus I look here at some of the responses to HAHK of film industry personnel

(directors, stars, producers, distributors), film critics, and

north Indian viewers, privileging the voice of the latter and seeking to understand what is meant by the universal classification of this film as a clean and morally uplifting ‘family’ film. I then look, as a sociologist of the family, at the ideal image of the family that the film narrative of HAHK seeks to construct and project, and the deliberately incomplete erasures that this process entails. Finally, I reflect on the wider social

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functions that such a fantasy of ideal family life might perform in the light of the sort of social science critiques I have referred to above. Before embarking on the analysis, however, it would be as well to give

a brief, if albeit unsatisfactory, outline of the film plot. As already men-

tioned, the film barely has a story line,'® the excessive length of the film (almost three hours) being accounted for by the unusual number of songs

rather than by the proliferation and complexity of sub-plots. In this sense, HAHK lacks the ‘prodigality’ of narrative detail that is often regarded as a hallmark of South Asian popular cinema (see Jayamanne, 1992: 147). Some viewers, and the female star herself, thought this ‘simplicity’ a great asset,!° though Bharucha, speaking as a connoisseur of the ‘variety’ entertainment that popular Hindi cinema usually provides, condemned it as a ‘ruthless’ and ‘claustrophobic’ levelling of narrative and dramatic possibilities (1995: 801; 804).

Kailash Nath (Alok Nath) is a bachelor industrialist, and guardian of his two orphaned nephews: Rajesh (Mohnish Bahl) and Prem (Salman Khan).

Through the mediation of the boys’ maternal uncle (Ajit Vacchani), a mar-

riage is arranged between Rajesh and Puja (Renuka Shahane), the elder daughter of Prof. S.S. Chowdhury (Anupam Kher) and his lovely wife (Reema

Lagoo), both of them, as it happens, old college friends of Kailash Nath’s. Side by side, through a series of life-cycle rituals of engagement, marriage,

pregnancy and childbirth, Rajesh’s younger brother, Prem, is attracted to Puja’s younger sister, Nisha (Madhuri Dixit), and determines to marry her as

soon as he can set up independently in business. He confides in his sister-in-

law, who has incidentally been charged with the responsibility of finding a

wife for him.

Puja has Prem tie a necklace on Nisha as a token of his love and commit-

ment, but immediately afterwards she falls to her death without communicating this development to the rest of the family. Both families are grief-stricken over Puja’s tragic death, and Rajesh is quite distraught worrying over the up-

bringing of his motherless son.

Unaware of the troth between Prem and Nisha, the elders in the family decide that the best solution to Rajesh’s dilemma and sorrow would be for him

to marry Nisha, who is already giving her sister's child a mother’s love. Nisha

agrees to the match, mistakenly believing she is to be married to Prem, while

Prem conceals his personal anguish out of love and concern for the well-being

of his elder brother and infant nephew, and obedience to the will of senior family members.

As the marriage of Rajesh and Nisha is about to take place, Lallu, the loyal

family servant and Prem’s confidante and friend, appeals to Lord Krishna to

intercede. With the help ofTuffy the dog, the true situation is revealed in the

nick of time. Prem and Nisha are united with family blessings.

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I. WHat Makes A ‘CLEAN’ Movig?

There are obviously several different components to the widespread categorization of HAHK asa clean and morally uplifting movie, suitable for ‘family’ viewing and contrasted by the same token with the majority of Bollywood masala productions. I will deal with these features separately, while suggesting that there is an intrinsic conceptual link uniting them.

The Lack of ‘Vulgarity For the last several years, the Indian media and the general public have been obsessed with the sexual content—what is euphemistically called ‘vulgarity —in popular cinema, particularly in the song-dance items. The charge of vulgarity is not at all a new one: it has been made from the very early days of Indian cinema (Kakar, 1981b: 11). But it certainly reached acrescendo in 1993—4 with the notorious (and indubitably catchy) song, ‘Choli ke peechey kya hai? from Subhash Ghai’s Khalnayak (The Villain)?°—(a song, incidentally, picturized on HAHK’s

Dixit).

heroine, Madhuri

Cinematic vulgarity is popularly believed to stem from two distinct sources, operating in baleful combination: from the culturally alien and morally corrupting influence of Hollywood movies; and from the debased cultural values of the lower classes—the ‘front-benchers—on whose patronage the success of any movie ultimately depends (Kakar, 1981b: 12-13). From its early days, the Bombay movie industry has imitated, indeed often plagiarized, Hollywood movies, but this process of mediated adaptation has recently been threatened by the direct entry of Western films into the Indian scene: for the middle classes and urban dwellers through satellite and cableTV channels; and, more generally, through the dubbing into Hindi of Hollywood films, beginning with the commercially successful Jurassic Park. These developments had caused panic in the Indian film industry, at least momentarily, but HAHK now appears to have restored confidence that clean, indigenous, ‘vegetarian’ products can hold their own commercially while simultaneously stemming the supposedly rising tide of sexual promiscuity and moral depravity. In fact, the Barjatyas are credited with taking ‘an explicit position against erotic, abandoned sexuality . . . in favour of a restrained sexuality’ (Mayaram, n.d.: 12).

In all interviews, my informants were at pains to stress that HAHK

contained no ‘vulgarity’. This is clearly one aspect of its classification as a ‘family’ film, that is, that the whole family (grandparents, parents, and

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children) can watch it together without embarrassment. This isa criterion that apparently carries great weight in the popular mind (Mishra, 1995; Zaveri, 1994a). The songs and dances are deemed clean—saaf-suthra— and ‘tasteful’ (Zaveri, 1994a). Thus, while Salman gets a drenching on

two occasions, Madhuri correctly (in the opinion of some viewers) passes up the opportunity to get soaking wet too and ‘burst into an obscene

number (Mishra, 1995). (Indeed, a sceptical onlooker, presumably a dis-

tributor-financier, witnessing the filming of the movie’s most spectacular song, Didi, tera dewar diwana, had declared that such a song would never catch on with the general public unless it had at least a dash of ‘rain’ to

jazz it up [Zaveri, 1994a]!) Moreover, as Asha pointed out to me, ‘there is no bedroom scene’: the ‘first night scene’ and the ‘honeymoon scene’,

those staple ingredients that she insisted were often ‘deliberately created’ in commercial Hindi cinema—and, given the stress on pre-marital virginity, the focus of much sexual fantasy and anxiety”!—are carefully ‘avoided’. Curiously, Asha’s comment discounts the chase after the groom's shoes that fortuitously lands Prem and Nisha together on a bridal-type double bed, to the whistles and applause of the audience. Curiously, too, neither

she nor anyone else took offence at, or even bothered to remark on, the

blatant suggestiveness of Prem’s symbolic seduction of Nisha on the billiard table: Prem acknowledges her as the woman he’s been waiting for; their eyes meet across the table; and with calculated precision and understated exhilaration, he shoots the billiard ball into the waiting hole.”

Asked how she viewed the relationship between Nisha and Prem,

82-year-old Daljit Kaur?> deemed ita bit ‘free’ [English term]. On investi-

gation, however, it appeared that she was not referring to their romance and its rendering in song and dance, but to the initial joking relationship of the pair as affines, that is, as the younger sister and younger brother of the bride and groom, respectively. However, as she then went on to explain, the latter relationship was still within proper limits. This, she said, was shown by the fact that, when Prem was leaving Nisha’s home after the

marriage and the customary tussle between the bride's ‘sisters’ and the groom's party over the groom's shoes, he had whispered to her: “Please forgive me if I’ve done anything wrong while having fun’, thereby dis-

arming would-be critics and showing that it really was just good clean fun after all.

Daljit’s comment draws attention to an interesting aspect of the relationship of Prem and Nisha as it develops through the course of the film. From a carefree,

mischievous, chocolate-licking lass on roller-skates,

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145

Nisha becomes increasingly demure, soon expressing her growing affection for Prem in rather ‘wifely’ ways: waiting up for him when he is working late; cooking for him and serving him at table (including paring his apple for him); preparing his favourite halwa; and sharing with him the baby-sitting of their infant nephew. Simultaneously, she outgrows her adolescent boldness and becomes so bashfully tongue-tied that she finds herself, at the critical moment, unable to confess to her love for Prem and

to reject the proposal of marriage to Rajesh (even when she is given a good opening by Rajesh himself). Similarly, Prem matures from a teasing kid

brother to a young man in love—‘Shit! I love her’, is his exclamation of

delighted self-recognition—to an established man-of-the-world with a business of his own, prepared to sacrifice his personal happiness for the higher good of his brother and family. In other words, the blossoming of romantic love and mature sexuality is not scripted as increasing licence, but as increasing inhibition—the end of playfulness and an induction into the discipline of conjugality, within the larger discipline of joint family living. There seems to be some substance, then, in the disenchanted Filmfare

reader's observation, already cited, that both Puja and Nishaare ultimately ‘true to their traditional role models’ as Hindu wives—domesticated and bashful—despite their liberal upbringing and, in the case of Nisha,

apparent boldness.” Sunita, an outspoken young woman lecturer, was more explicit. Declaring the film to be ‘nauseatingly’ conformist, she complained that it had managed to eliminate ‘sex’ from the very place it should be—the conjugal relationship—while shamelessly celebrating fecundity. In an anthropological perspective, however, Sunita reaction appears rather superficial. Sex may not have been foregrounded, but its ‘backstage’ presence (cf. V. Das, 1976) was nonetheless acknowledged, albeit relatively subtly for a Hindi movie. As filmmaker Shohini Ghosh has pointed out (n.d.), a// the man—woman relationships that are explored in

the course of the film in fact disclose a greater or lesser degree of ‘erotic tension’.”> Particularly suggestive, however, are the customary cross-sex ‘joking relations’ of the north Indian kinship system,”6 which can plausibly be read as playful surrogates for the sexual relation of husband and

wife (cf. Kolenda, 1990: 144) and which are typically the subject of

bawdy songs in exclusively women’s rituals at the time of marriage (Kolenda,

1990; also Fruzzetti, 1990; Hershman,

1981: 163-8;

175;

185; Jamous, 1991: 197ff.): the relations of jija—sali (sister’s husband/

wife’s younger sister); of dewar—bhabhi (husband’s younger brother/elder

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Freedom and Destiny

brother's wife); and, very often, of samdhi-samdhan

(cross-sex co-par-

ents-in-law).?7 Each of these relations is explicitly foregrounded in one or another of HAHK’s spectacular songs. The jija—sali relationship is foremost in the shoe-stealing incidentand the song through which it is articulated. While the choreography pits the boys of the groom's party against the ‘sisters’ of the bride (a group marriage

fantasy?), the libretto makes clear that the relations are of the ‘groom's salis’ and the ‘bride's dewars’. And, as already noted, the song ends with

the bride's sister, younger brother. of cross-sex joking song ‘reiterate[s] establish a sexual

blushing, on a bridal-type bed along with the groom's As Pauline Kolenda has remarked in reference to the set relations between affines in north Indian kinship, this the purpose of the contact between the two groups—to relationship between a male member of one group and

a female member of the other’ (1990: 144). Simultaneously, it also hints

at the institutions of sororate and levirate, both of which emerge as dramatic possibilities in the unfolding of the film narrative (ibid.: 130, 140— 1; cf. Hershman, 1981: 195-6).

Of the many viewers I spoke with who insisted that HAHK represents

‘traditional’ Indian culture (see below), not one thought to point out that

the content of such women’s marriage songs is typically irreverent and bawdy to the point—very often—of obscenity (see e.g. Hara, 1991: 103;

S. Singh, 1972;Werbner, 1990: 260).”8 (In fact, the Arya Samaj and other

social organizations have worked hard over the last century to reform or

eliminate these undesirable genres—genres which are, incidentally, a

specifically female form of expression and protest [Chowdhry, 1994:

392-7; cf. also Banerjee, 1989a].) So, while the teasing songs of HAHK

are themselves innocuous enough, judging by cinema hall reactions, there is every likelihood that, for many in the audience, they conjure up recall or anticipation of the sexually explicit content of the traditional marriage songs, and of the wider popular culture of affinity in north India (S. Singh, 1972; Srinivasan, 1976).

On the surface, Rajesh and Nisha, as jija—sali, appear to havean appropriately restrained relationship, which in fact becomes more inhibited as the sali prepares to become the wife. But the erotic potentialities of this relationship in the idiom of popular culture are unmistakeably disclosed when, in the course of a party game, Rajesh volunteers a couplet alluding to a three-way relationship of husband, wife and sali: ‘eye your sister-inlaw, while chatting with your wife.’ The sexual innuendo of this verse was not lost on one young woman, who wrote in her college magazine that the projection of the sali as the ‘half-wife’ was surely ‘one of the most offensive concepts still prevalent in Indian society’, and she went on to castigate

Imagining the Family

147

those viewers of HAHK ‘who find nothing questionable in a man desiring his nubile sister-in-law and then using his wife to satiate his desire’

(S. Das, 1995: 25).

.

Similarly, the teasingly affectionate relationship between Puja and

Prem,”? iconicized in the film’s most famous song, ‘Didi, tera dewar diwand’ (in the course of which Nisha becomes Puja and the mock

dewar—Rita in drag—is replaced by the real dewar), would seem to have more than a hint of sexuality—or so the ethnographer fancied. For instance, Rajesh is clearly rather miffed when his wife and brother (andTuffy the dog in sunglasses) gang up against him in a family cricket match. Moreover, at one point the film narrative definitely seems to be leading towards a leviratic outcome: ‘I know what will happen’, my companion on one of my viewings hissed to me when Rajesh is suddenly called abroad on business, commending his heavily pregnant wife to the care of his

bashful younger brother: ‘He's going to die ina planecrash, and she'll have to marry the younger brother.’ But suspicion of sexual overtones in the relation of Puja and Prem was

clearly the ethnographer’..*° Their relationship, she was assured by all and

sundry, was exactly as it should be: affectionate and respectful. Though Puja was presumably about Prem’s age, she was actually—as the film script explicitly states (over-states?) at several points—expected to be like a mother to the orphaned boy who had never known a mother’s love. Besides, Daljit Kaur added, on my further probing, it is actually important for family solidarity that the bhabhi—dewar relationship be close and affectionate. Perhaps she also meant that the joking and teasing may contribute actively to the growth of affection and solidarity in a situation where the bride is initially a stranger in her husband’s home (cf. Kolenda,

1990: 143-4).

There seems to be no agreement in north Indian ethnographies on whether the relation of cross-sex parents-in-law is typically a flirtatious joking relationship, or one of avoidance (Kolenda, 1990: 135, 138-9; 147 n. 12; Hershman, 1981: 203; Jamous, 1991: 197ff.; Vatuk, 1976:

181-6).3! HAHK suggests something of both: a restrained relationship

when the bride’s mother, as her husband’s wife, represents the bride-giving

party vis-a-vis the bride-takers (see below); and a flirtatious, mock sexual

relationship when she identifies with her daughter as an object of marital exchange. This latter, embedded in the song ‘Samdhi-samdhan’ , was variously interpreted by my informants: some saw the relationship as respectfully affectionate, but not at all improper; some, like Mrs Goel (see

below), thought the song alluded to a past affair and the ‘sacrifice’ by one friend for the other. A sophisticated film critic and student of cultural

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studies identified this as the moment of ‘transgression’ he had been waiting for, while another informant—himself a sociologist—thought the song improper by ‘traditional’ standards. In his opinion, a woman could not, even in jest, admit in mixed company to a past love affair, though it might well be the subject of speculation, teasing, or ribald joking in

women’s gatherings.>”

There is a final aspect of HAHK’s appropriation of the ‘folk’, non‘sanskritic’ or ‘indigenous’ rituals of Hindu marriage that might be commented—or speculated—upon here. Along with the bawdy songs and anticipation of cross-sex joking relations, ethnographers record a variety of competitions between the bride and groom designed, all seem to agree,

to augur which of the two will ‘dominate’ (sexually or otherwise?) in their married life, as well as to enable the bride and groom, and their respective

relatives, to ‘get to know each other’ in an atmosphere of fun and competition (Srinivas, 1942: 83, 85, 104; see also, Vatuk, 1976). Well brought-

up girls, it is said, contrive to let the boy win! HAHK ignores this particular motif, at least explicitly.? Leaving such speculations aside, one might conclude, in sum, that HAHK’s supposed elimination of ‘vulgarity’ seems to carry a double meaning: one, explicitly foregrounded, is the avoidance of the masala ingredients found in so many contemporary Hindi movies; the second, unacknowledged, the sanitization of a bawdy folk tradition of women's songs, making them fit—ora/most fit—for mixed viewing, and for ‘representing’ Indian culture and tradition.*4 Perhaps this is what has made this film so recognizably one of'and for the Indian middle classes, rather than

for the class of ‘rickshaw wallahs’, that is, the front-benchers, who are

usually regarded as the arbiters of popular cinematic style and taste.?> The Display of Affluence

Judging by several viewers’ comments, another notable aspect of HAHK’s overall impression of decency is its unembarrassed endorsement of upperclass, indeed affluent, lifestyles—no poverty or ‘simplicity’ here. As Rustom Bharucha has pointed out (1995), in terms of its sets, props and

costumes, the film is a veritable parade of fetishized middle-class status

symbols; in homes, cars, children’s toys, clothes, and so on.36 Even Tuffy the dog, who drew applause and appreciation for his several cameo performances, is the epitome of Indian middle-class aspirations in pet dogs. The two homes on display, including that of the less prosperous professor, were much admired by my companions (my attention was called to the

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beautiful kitchen, the ‘tasteful’ marriage decorations, and the like); cos-

tumes are gorgeous, and now much copied in the subsidiary fashion industry this film has spawned (Zaveri, 1994a: 6-7); lavish gift-giving is a conspicuous feature of all ceremonial occasions; and the food is utterly mouth-watering (cf. Bharucha, 1995: 802), and frequently deployed to index the quality and intimacy of social relationships. ‘Look, Papa, they are eating,’ said a little girl sitting behind me at regular intervals through the film, reminding one of just how often sumptuous food was offered up for visual and gastronomic consumption. Viewers were for the most part very appreciative of all this opulence, construing it as evidence of the elite social status of the two families. There were some minor misgivings, however. The picture-book cleanliness of the temple-ashram was thought to be a bit ‘unbelievable’ (cf. Bharucha, 1995: 803), while the lavish costumes of the maid, Chameli, were deemed.

‘over done’. The same could well have been said of the costumes of the village belles and the appurtenances of the rural village through which the romantic pair briefly romp; but none of my informants thought to point

that out.?” Asha was perturbed by one detail, however. She found very

worrisome the scene of the bridegroom's party being feasted in a supposedly ‘traditional’ style, seated on the floor and eating off leaf plates. Rich people might do that in their homes, or in the context of a religious ceremony, she told me authoritatively; but, having attended several ‘highclass’ weddings, she was quite sure that the bride’s family would treat the bridegroom's party to a feast laid out formally on tables with all the plates, cutlery, and so on. Asha’s critical comment suggests that the film's effort to meld haut bourgeois lifestyles seamlessly with religiosity and with traditionalism in rituals—thereby legitimizing affluence as a value in itself—was not altogether successful. But, on the whole, the display of opulence was accepted without guilt, and with no indication—in the film narrative or in audience reactions—that affluence might be corrupting or ill-gained, as was so often the case in the Hindi movies of an earlier era, where poverty signalled virtue and wealth, spiritual depravity (cf. Jayamanne, 1992: 150; also Bharucha, 1995: esp. 802).

The good breeding of the two families (the word khandan was often used in this context, both descriptively and evaluatively) was also thought to be reflected in the gracious treatment of servants— ‘like family members’.38 In reverse, the mean-mouthed Mamiji and her silly niece Rita disclose their lack of genuine class by their scornful and inconsiderate

attitude towards the servants. The man-servant Lallu is Prem’s friend,

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co-conspirator, and trusted confidant—even more so than Prem’s own

elder brother, Rajesh, in whom Prem had hesitated to confide his growing love for Nisha. Symbolically—and the symbolism is very heavily laid on ina tear-jerking (‘emotional’) soliloquy by Lallu—Puja gives her own life in exchange for that of Lallu’s sister-in-law; and she blesses the romance of Lallu and Chameli just as she does that of Prem and Nisha. In other words, fictitious kinship almost succeeds in overriding class differentiation (Bharucha, 1995: 803).3?

The gracious treatment of servants and their incorporation into the family were spontaneously commended by many viewers. Said Satinder® in praise of the film: The director has given equal importance to all the characters, even to the servants of the house.

Though my socialist feminist friend found the transformation of class differences into family relationships ‘phoney’ (one indication among several others of the film's sinister political agenda), this was not an issue that worried many others. Excepting the commenton Chameli’s inappropriate attire, most viewers were content to debate whether this combina-

tion of features should be regarded as characterizing the lifestyle of a

traditional ‘feudal’ society, or of the nouveau riche—or something of both. In either case, it is clear that HAHK’s supposed lack of ‘vulgarity’ implied a distancing from the carnal desires of the working classes and was metonymically linked in some subtle way to the film's consistent display of the fetishized symbols of middle-class consumerist desire.

The Spirit of Sacrifice Though romantic love is a prime ingredient of the popular media in South Asia, as elsewhere, it is obviously deeply problematic (Jayamanne, 1992: 150). HAHK, like many other popular Hindi films, sets up, and then seeks to resolve in the course of the unfolding of the film narrative, a tension between the desire of the romantic protagonists for each other, and their dharma or social responsibility (in this case, to the wider family); between their exercise of free will and choice in the matter of marriage, and social (or cosmic) imperative (see Chapter 4). Sometimes the attain-

ment of larger social ends requires the sacrifice of immediate personal gratification. Several of my informants assured me that, in one way or another, HAHK is essentially a film about ‘sacrifice.’ As Asha explained to me:

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The story wants to highlight the theme of sacrifice. That’s why it makes Puja die in an accident.

You see it in the scene at Rajesh’s bedside. Prem goes out of the room. Then he comes back in—and makes the sacrifice.

Prem’s ‘sacrifice’ was superior to Nisha’, Asha elaborated, because he

‘sacrificed his love and will deliberately for the sake of an ideal joint family’. Though Nisha appeared to do the same, she did so only ‘under misunderstanding’. In fact, she was initially under the impression that she

was to be married to Prem and then, when she realized the truth, simply

‘didn’t get time or chance to show her reluctance’.4? Sacrifice, of course, involves a genuine dilemma: one precious thing

has to be given up for another. It is natural, therefore, that viewers should

be in two minds about whether in particular instances the sacrifice was,

or was not, justified. “Why did they have to kill Puja?’, a young companion asked resentfully after the show. But clearly the tragic death of Puja, staged as a typical Hindi cinema deathbed tableau (cf. Jayamanne, 1992:

150), was essential in order to give meaning to the sacrifice that Prem and

Nisha were then called upon to make for a greater good than their own love for each other. While none of my informants queried Prem’s conduct (with the exception of the visiting British anthropologist, Ronnie, who declared our hero a ‘wimp’), Nisha’s ‘sacrifice’ produced mixed reactions. On the one hand was the reaction of Asha, already cited, who thought

Nisha’s sacrifice involuntary, and thus (compared to Prem’s) imperfect; on

the other the disappointment of some viewers who felt that HAHK still showed women ‘in their traditional role models’, though Nisha is initially introduced as an emancipated modern girl, with a will and mind of her

own.’ This dissonance of character was obviously felt by the film's leading lady who commented somewhat defensively:

There is some criticism that Nisha gives in too easily to her family’s deci-

sion . . . that she’s kept in the dark about a major decision like her marriage.

But I would like to emphasize that once I come to know what's going on, I try

to make amends. But before I can reveal my true feelings, Alok Nath [Kailash

Nath] points out my soon-to-be-husband happily playing with the baby and

thanks me for giving them a new life. That's when I decide to sacrifice my love to keep my sister’s little family together.“ For Daljit Kaur, waxing eloquent on what was obviously a favourite

theme, this spirit of sacrifice was a value that was now rarely to be found in families. Illustrating her statements with examples, good and bad, from

families she knew and from the plots of popular Hindi novels (which she

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recounted as though they were real personal histories), she spoke at length on the unselfishness that several of the film characters displayed. Ignoring the tear-jerking sacrifice that Prem and Nisha intended, but happily were not ultimately required, to make, she pointed instead to the unselfishness of Mamaji (the mother’s brother) who took a special quasi-paternal inte-

rest in his dead sister's children and was responsible for arranging the match between Rajesh and Puja: ‘He wanted to arrange the sort of marriage for Rajesh that would be good for the khandan,’ she said. (Mamaji was quite the opposite of his wife in this regard, as we will see). She was even more admiring of Kailash Nath, the boys’ paternal uncle who, while himself remaining a bachelor, had selflessly brought up his elder brother's

children as his own: ‘Nowadays,’ she said authoritatively, ‘people only

care for their own (cf. E Kazmi, 1999: 146-7). Like a mama [mother’s brother] would think, “there’s not enough to go round in my home [so why should I take on the burden of someone else’s child?]”’ (cf. V. Das,

1976).

Asha also stressed that it requires great nobility of spirit to love an-

other’s child like one’s own, adding, with her own illustrations from family histories, that once they get married and have children of their own,

brothers and sisters cease to care so much for their siblings’ children. Mrs Goel, a 60-year-old housewife, suggested another dimension to the sacrifice theme, and to the nobility of Kailash Nath’s character. Inquiring how much Jhad really understood about the film, she explained it for me as follows: [Mrs Goel]:

It’s about ‘Indian culture’ [English phrase]. There were these

two boys at college. They were both in love with the same girl. . . .

When they realized it, they held a competition. One married her and the other

stayed a bachelor. But when his nephew’s marriage was arranged, it was with that woman's daughter. You get the story from that song, Samdhi-samdhan.

The story begins there.**

[PU.]: The girl’s mother had tears in her eyes when she was singing. [Mrs Goel]: Yes, she was saying, “Take care of my daughter. Now she’s going

to your house.’

The Family as ‘Tradition’ Any number of viewers stressed—and, I like to think, not entirely for the benefit of the ‘foreign’ ethnographer—that HAHK is not only a film about the Indian ‘joint family’ and the sacrifices individual members have

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to make on its behalf; it is simultaneously a film about Indian ‘culture,

society and tradition’. Said Asha, summarizing the opinion of her friends:

Everyone likes and enjoys it. It shows Indian culture and society and tradition. . .. What we see in our families, we see it on the screen. She then went on to give examples of what she meant, for instance, the

play of hiding the groom's shoes by the bride's sisters and friends, a practice of which she had earlier said, during a viewing of the film: ‘It was

common; not now.’

The element of nostalgia was even more prominent in the testimony of Daljit Kaur. In her rambling reflections on HAHK, she repeatedly emphasized that the film shows domestic rituals and family relationships as they once were and as they should be, but not as they currently are in a degenerate world. In praise of the film, she noted: ‘It shows all the rasmas (ceremonials), and in a most enjoyable way.’ Now this (like Asha’s comment) is a rather unexpected perspective on the Indian cultural tradition, for it clearly identifies folkways, rather than sanskritic rituals, with the essence of ‘tradition’.6 Indeed, for an anthropologist it is rather striking that HAHK focuses, particularly in its spectacular song-dance items, on the non-sanskritic and often exclusively women's rituals that run parallel to, interweave with, and even challenge in gestures of symbolic reversal the hegemony of representation of the sanskritic life-cycle rituals—the sanskars proper—that are performed by the purohit following the rules elaborated in the shastras (cf. Fruzzetti, 1990; Hanchett, 1988; Inden and Nicholas, 1977: esp. Ch. 2; Jamous,

1991: 96ff Kolenda, 1990; A.K. Sharma, 1993). Though this evocation

of the folk tradition goes rather against the grain of Indian modernism

which, as already noted (see above) has mostly sought to purge the Indian

tradition of the excrescences of the folk tradition and restore it to its pristine and uncontaminated

form

(Chakravarti,

1989; Chowdhry,

1994; Mani, 1989; Nandy, 1995c), it is consistent with an alternative

modernist strategy whereby the folk tradition in its manifold forms is appropriated for nationalist and developmental ends (e.g. Rege, 1995:

30-2, 35-6; K. Singh, 1996). In the unfolding of the story of HAHK, a series of life-crisis rituals—

betrothal, engagement, the mehndi and marriage ceremonies, a seventh-

month pregnancy ritual, and celebrations of childbirth (including the

visit of the Aijras [eunuchs] to bless the new-born child)—are all pre-

sented in their non-sanskritic idioms, albeit purged of the ‘obscenity’ with

which they are often associated. The most remarkable instance is the

marriage ceremony itself, the centrepiece and indeed the raison détre of

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the movie. Here, the sacramental saptapadi marriage rite, the seven cir-

cumambulations of the sacred fire, is no more than a suggestive back-drop for the enactment of the ‘teasing’ of the young men of the groom's party

by the bride's sisters and friends. “Be careful,’ Lallu warns Prem as they

enter the wedding reception: “We're surrounded by our enemies here.’ The bride’s sisters first try to make fools of Prem and Lallu by persuading them to sit on a specially prepared couch of crackling papad. Then, in a long-extended sequence, charted by the exceedingly popular song, ‘Jute do, paise lo’ (‘Give the shoes, take the money’), the bride's sisters steal the

grooms shoes; the groom's party, aided by the invincible combination of Lord Krishna and Tuffy the dog, recover the shoes; and finally the bride’s

friends regain the shoes and claim the reward, only then allowing the groom to proceed home with his bride.‘” (Of course we all know that this is a pyrrhic victory, for the extended chase after the shoes has not only landed Prem and Nisha compromisingly on a double bed together, but has given Prem the opportunity to twist Nisha’s arm and—had he only chosen to—wrest the shoes from her.‘8)

The long marriage sequence concludes with the doli (bidai) ceremony,

which expresses most poignantly the anguish of the daughter leaving the love and security of her father’s home (see Chowdhry, 1994: 310). Many in the audience are now weeping unashamedly, as they do once again when Puja dies—an irrevocable departure. AsVeena Das has pointed out, such moments of loss are those where the feminine briefly finds voice to interrogate the normative values of the patriarchal family and the justice of the cosmic order (V. Das, n.d.). Strange indeed that such interrogative

moments ina popular cinematic narrative should be held to epitomize the Indian tradition and its ideals of family life!

eg Altogether, judging by the comments of viewers, it seems that the classification of HAHK asa ‘clean’ movie involves a complex of features: the avoidance of the routine Bollywood masala ingredients of sex, sadism,

and violence; the display of affluent lifestyles, effortlessly achieved and maintained; the exploration of the ennobling theme of individual sacrifice on behalf of the family (rather than, for instance, the celebration of violent revenge); and the evocation of ideals of Indian culture and tradition, subtly Hinduized,”? embourgeois-ized (to coin a horrible neolog-

ism) through the naturalization ofaffluence and, for that matter, Aryanized,

for the tradition of Indian kinship that is celebrated is a generalized north

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Indian one (cf. Chapter 2; also Uberoi, 2003b). How these disparate feat-

ures hang together to constitute a contemporary sense of self and society, and the politics of this construction, are questions to which we will shortly

turn, but meanwhile it is important to address the central theme of the

film: the Indian family. What are the features of HAHK’s construction of the ideal of Indian family life? Is there a ‘politics’ to this construction, too? And what is the relationship between this ideal and the common assessment of the film as a good, clean movie?

II. THE CONSTITUTION OF THE IDEAL INDIAN FAMILY

In an early essay on Indian popular cinema, Sudhir Kakar had drawn attention to the important role of the family in Bollywood movies—not only in explicitly ‘family’ and so-called ‘social’ films, but in ‘action’ films as well. From his disciplinary perspective as a psychoanalyst, he suggested that the stereotypical roles and narrative structures of these movies are collective projections of the anxieties generated by early childhood or adolescent experiences in the family (1981b). The chief locus of this anxiety, according to Kakar, is the mother-son relationship (and to a les-

ser extent the father—daughter relation), resulting in the splitting of the maternal image between the idealized, self-sacrificing mother and the

cruel, rejecting mother-figure,°° and a parallel splitting between the good and bad aspects of the self. Kakar concedes that the mother—son relation

is significantly inflected by the wider context of the Indian joint family, with its underplaying of the husband—wife relation (1981a: Ch.3; also Nandy, 1980),*! but the joint family is for him merely the local backdrop fora universal narrative of psychosexual maturation, focused on the crosssex dyadic relations of the nuclear family. Undoubtedly, HAHK would provide some grist to the psychoanalyst’s mill, particularly in regard to the interpretation of the bhabhi—dewar relationship. Thus it is several times stressed that, of the two brothers,

Prem had never known a mother’s love; Puja, as the new ‘lady of the house’, was to be likea mother to him (and also to the man servant, Lallu).

These and other hints clearly weighed heavily with my informants who,

as noted, had erased all suggestion of sexuality from the bhabhi-dewar relationship despite the familiarity of their horse-play and the unfulfilled fantasy of levirate. Mamiji was of course the very archetype of the bad mother, though neither of the boys seemed to take offence at her conduct. However, where the psychoanalytic perspective focuses on the elemen-

tary relationships of the nuclear family, HAHK posits the naturalness or

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‘just-so’ status of the patrilineal joint family within a wider system of kinship and affinity.

The Ideal of the Joint Family There was one aspect of the film narrative that rather puzzled me. I asked my informants: ‘Why did Kailash Nath have to be the uncle (caca [FyB])

of the boys? Wouldn't the story have been the same if he were their real father?’ ‘It’s just a coincidence,’ I was told. “There’s no reason!” On closer look, however, one could say that there was, structurally speaking, a very good reason for Kailash Nath to be the boys’ uncle. Apart from demonstrating his selfless nobility of character (see above), it is this crucial fact that makes this family a joint family, if nota joint household in the strict technical sense (see Shah, 1974; 1996). Asa moral institution,

the Indian joint family is one in which the claims of individual members, the sexual relation of husband and wife, and the biological relation of parent and child are subordinated to the larger interests of the family col-

lectivity (V. Das, 1976; also Derné, 2003; Kakar, 2003). Kailash Nath

exemplified the values of the joint family for the reason that he was able to renounce his right to an elementary family life of his own, and bring up his orphaned nephews with the same love that a biological father would have shown. As my informants commented, this is a rare attribute, much to be admired. In turn, in the next generation, the dramatic climax of the film hinges on the crucial questions of (i) whether a stepmother can or cannot give achild a real mother’s love; (ii) whether a close blood relation (in this case, the mother’s sister) is or is not the obvious and best substitute for the bio-

logical mother; and (iii) recalling in a way Kailash Nath’s own life history, whether a brother's wife can give her nephew (HBS) the same love that she would have given had she been married to the child’s father. HAHK rules that a close biological relation is self-evidently a more appropriate foster-mother than a distant relation or outsider; but that, ideally speak-

ing, and in the assumed context of the joint family, the fostering can be done equally well by the woman as caci. She does not have to become the child’s father’s wife. Similarly, though Rajesh and Puja appropriately fall in love with each other after their marriage is arranged, Puja’ role is, first, to be the ‘house-

lady’ in a house which has been without one for many years (a part she plays with distinction); and, second, to produce an heir for the family (which she immediately does). And while Rajesh genuinely mourns her death, as does everyone else, including Tuffy the dog, his real worry is the

upbringing of his motherless son. It is the pathos of Rajesh’s situation that

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persuades Nisha that she should accept the elders’ mandate and marry Rajesh. In caring for ‘her sister’s little family’ more than her own love, Nisha demonstrates her internalization of joint family values; and she has only to be made to publicly acknowledge that she will care for the child as caci as much as she would as stepmother, for the film drama to come

to a happy-ever-after conclusion.

ig For the last century-and-a half, if not longer, public opinion in India has been obsessed with the spectre of the imminent break-up of the Indian joint family system through processes of urbanization, industrialization, westernization, individualization and the liberation of women. Many

professional sociologists of the family are sceptical on this score (e.g. Goode, 1963; Shah, 1974; 1996; Vatuk, 1972), but even the most sceptical of them concede that the joint family is, if not a fact of traditional Indian society, at least a deeply held traditional value that continues to provide the underlying principles of household-building strategies in South Asia, though differently for different regions, castes, and commu-

nities. A.M. Shah, in typical ‘sociologese’, has termed this the principle of ‘the residential unity of patrikin and their wives’ (1974: 48ff.). Ttis notable that HAHK’s cinematic affirmation of joint family ideals has been achieved through the consistent erasure of the set of factors that characteristically puts the joint family structure under strain. Thus, there is no antagonism between the father (or father-figure, Kailash Nath) and the sons, for Kailash Nath simply does not act like a despotic patriarch (cf. Mukherjee, 1995); he is also not in competition with the sons for their

mother’s love, for their mother is long since dead. There is no tension between the two brothers—the younger one willingly sacrifices for the elder when the moment comes. There is no tension between mother-inlaw and daughter-in-law: for good measure, the mother-in-law role has

been eliminated from the story-line? and Puja comes into a home where

she is the unchallenged, and very welcome, ‘house-lady’. And there is no tension between sisters-in-law: had Puja not died, her devrani (HyBW) would have been her own, much-loved sister, a prospect with which she

was obviously quite delighted.*?

All this is almost too good to be true, as my informants remarked with

candour, no doubt reflecting on the complexities of their own family

situations. The sort of individual sacrifice required to keep the joint family harmoniously functioning ‘is not generally found in families’, I was told. Nonetheless, my informants remained convinced that the ideal was

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possible and worthy of attainment, if not in their own families, due to various contingent reasons, at least in other people's families, or in the Indian family as it had once been.>4 We will address this question again in due course.

Affinity as a Value> Meanwhile, it can hardly be sufficiently emphasized that the joint family of HAHK is conceived as only a unit in a system of families linked by marriage. The film focuses centrally on the marriage of Rajesh and Puja, on the affinal relationships which this event brings into being, on the projected replication of this family alliance through the marriage of Rajesh and Nisha, and on the ultimate happy-ending marriage of the younger siblings, Prem and Nisha. There is a lot of word-play on the transformation of consanguinity into affinity (Puja’s younger sister becomes a devrani),°° and of maternal into paternal relations (the child’s mausi [MZ]

becomes a caci [FyBW]).The most popular songs are unabashed celebra-

tions of affinity and of the joking relations that affinity creates.>”

Once again, however, there is a consistent process of erasure at work.

The characteristic feature of affinity in north Indian kinship is the

inequality of status between the inferior bride-givers and superior bridetakers which is expressed both in ritual and etiquette and in the asymmetrical flow of gifts from the bride’s to the groom’s family. In HAHK,

the structural tension (and oftentimes emotional antagonism) between

wife-givers and wife-receivers in the north Indian kinship system* is happily neutralized by making the fathers-in-law old friends. Professor Chowdhury, the bride-giver, spontaneously says “Thank you’ to Kailash Nath when the latter, now a prosperous industrialist, comes with a proposal for Puja. But this is brushed aside by Kailash Nath who nobly demurs: ‘It’s I who should thank you’ for providing a bride for his home

anda ‘mother’ for Prem. A wealthy man, Kailash Nath makes it clear that

he is not seeking material or social gain from his nephew's marriage; he

wants only a well-bred, ‘simple’ (sidhi-sadi) girl to preside over the home and care for Prem.

Professor Chowdhury, rather improbably, given the tension that exists between wife-givers and wife-takers in north Indian marriage, positively clowns his way through the important mi/ni ritual (when the senior men

of the bride's side greet the senior men of the groom's party), before the two fathers-in-law embrace as friends. This clowning continues in one

form or another through all their interactions, to the great delight of the audience.°? When Puja’s mother demurs that it is not correct to overstay

at their daughter's married home (where they have gone to celebrate the

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birth of their grandson), her husband reminds her that Kailash Nath was

his friend before he was their daughter’s father-in-law. As though to emphasize this non-contradiction, notwithstanding the newly-instituted affinal relation, the two ‘grandfathers’ wear identical costumes—by de-

sign, so that the (classificatory) dada (FF) and nana (MF) could be ‘as

one’. It would be rather difficult to devise a more trite symbolic representation of their non-differentiation. With these highly motivated erasures and structural adjustments, much of the tension that normally invests north Indian marriage is neatly

disposed of. Of course, not everyone was convinced of the adequacy of this solution. Asha, as we have seen, was quite perturbed at the informal

(‘free’) treatment of the bridegroom's party. She also felt that a great deal

of unpleasantness can occur if the children of friends marry and some-

thing goes wrong—it can ruin a friendship for one thing—though she hastened to add that there is usually some other cause of tension in such cases (for instance, a breach of affinal etiquette on matters like inquiring

after a sick relative, or attending a funeral). Similarly, she insisted, the

quantum of dowry becomes an issue in the relations between affines only when there are other sources of tension. On the whole, she believed that

tensions both within joint families and between affines were less likely where material resources were ample, and people had no money worries.”

Clearly, the credibility of the family ideal constructed in HAHK was

closely linked, at least in the minds of some viewers, to the effortless

affluence of the intermarrying families. Though the professor was reput-

edly not as well offas Kailash Nath, a fact to which Mamiji rather meanly

drew attention, the two families had no material cause to quarrel over anything. In this sense, the film's opulence is functional, removing what is popularly believed to be a major irritant in real family relations, and allowing the free play and development of other elements. The outcome isa highly satisfying and nostalgic fantasy of ideal family life, a mediation of desire and reality which almost, but not completely, succeeds in erasing the unpleasant truth of practical experience. As one viewer summed it up for me: ‘It’san ideal nostalgic world. No rich, no poor, no villain, no obsta-

cles. The only problem is an accident’—without which, as it happens, there would have been no story to tell.®!

The Truth-telling Voice There is, however, a truth-telling voice in the film, a comic yet rather unpleasant character who, at every turn in the plot, questions the sanitized

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ideal of the joint family and of affinal relationships that the film is seeking to construct and project. Perhaps this injection of evil is necessary, lest the film fantasy be just too unreal—all desire and no reality. The character who takes on this important role is the archetypal ‘bad mother’—the childless Mamiji (MBW)—played bya siren of yesteryear, Bindu.* Vain, overdressed, selfish, opinionated, she ultimately gets her just reward, a public slap by the long-suffering Mamaji. Thus tamed, she conceives after all, and is co-opted to the possibility of a ‘good mother’ role; but not before she has had her say, contra Mamaji, at all dramatic

points in the film narrative. Mamiji’s role, though a small one, clearly demands careful scutiny. I now take up the more important of Mamiji’s unpleasant interventions in the film narrative, in the order of their occurrence:

1. Mamaji and the overdressed Mamiji appear in almost the first scene of the movie, colliding with Mamiji’s foolish niece, Rita (‘Bum Chum’ written across her roundly filled-out tee-shirt), at the entrance to Kailash Nath’s house. This scene establishes their contrasting characters—Mamaji's goodness and Mamiji’ selfishness—in the context of arranging a match for their nephew, Rajesh. Daljit Kaur said: If a sister dies, the brother has to take care [of her children].

Mamaji’ ‘character’ is very good. He wants to get the sort of girl for Rajesh

who would be good for the khandan. [Long aside on the plot of a novel of which she is reminded.]

The basic idea is that you need a good girl for the khandan.

With this in mind, Mamaji had been doing his own scouting, and had come up with the ideal choice. Mamiji, however, had quite a different agenda—to promote the candidature of Rita’s elder sister, Sweety. Sweety’s father, Mamiji announces, is a wealthy Delhi businessman, who would

surely give his daughter a magnificent wedding. When Mamaji demurs that they want only a simple, well-bred girl for Rajesh, Mamiji accuses him of being out of touch with reality and the ways of the world. As Asha summed up this exchange for me: Mamaji loved the boys like his own. That’s why he took the initiative in arranging Rajesh’s wedding. Mamiji was just scheming for her own nieces.

2. Having failed to promote her own candidate, the spiteful Mamiji never passes up an opportunity to point out what Kailash Nath’s family are missing by turning down the opportunity of a marital alliance with Sweety’s well-heeled family. As preparations for the engagement party

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are under way, Mamiji arrives fresh from the temple (‘from the beauty parlour, more likely’, remarks Mamaji in an aside). She volunteers the comment that there cannot have been any worthwhile discussion regarding the ‘giving-taking’ aspect of the alliance, because a professor would obviously not have been able to put aside very much for his daughter's marriage expenses.

3. Mamiji’s spitefulness and bad taste are revealed again when, standing in for the lady-of-the-house, she welcomes the new bride and groom to Kailash Nath’s home. After a perfunctory blessing, she taunts Mamaji for his part in arranging a marriage that has brought in so little by way of dowry. Lallu reacts defensively by telling her—rightly or wrongly—that a very ample dowry had actually been given—a TV set, diamond jewellery, an imported car, aVCR, and so on—but that, when weighed against

the qualities of the new bride, these items were so paltry that the groom's party had left them all behind. Mamiji is incredulous, and again castigates her husband for his unworldliness. She adds, as Mamaji presents Puja with a copy of the Ramayana (a reminder of the conjugal fidelity of Ram and Sita), that had the bride been her niece, Sweety, she would have

loaded her with gold. 4. Mamiji’s bad taste and hauteur are revealed once again in her attitude to the family servants. Puja is about to visit her parents’ home with her baby when Lallu receives a telegram that his sister-in-law is seriously ill. Puja spontaneously goes to get him some money to tide over the crisis. Mamiiji is infuriated and comments, overheard by the dismayed Lallu, that servants cannot be trusted, that this is the sort of ploy they use to extract money from their employers, and that Puja will never see either Lallu or her money again. (Puja gives Lallu a generous amount nonethe-

less, and together with Chameli they pray to Lord Krishna for his sisterin-law’s recovery. Of course, the prayer is fulfilled.)

5. Rajesh is unwell, grieving for Puja and worrying over his motherless child. In an impassioned outburst, Mamiji remarks—and this is one of the dramatic points of the film—that Rajesh would have been better off had he married her Sweety in the first place. But Sweety is still available, she says, and would bring a good dowry. Sweety would also be willing to marry Rajesh, on the one condition that an ayah beemployed to look after the child. This fuss going on over a child is quite unnecessary, declares Mamiji shrilly. After all, babies keep coming; it’s nothing special. At this point, the normally docile Mamaji slaps her. ‘It’s probably because of these sentiments that you have never managed to have a child yourself,’ he shouts at her. (The audience is thrilled.)®

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Freedom and Destiny 6. Ina final brief scene at the wedding of Nisha and Prem, Mamiji

appears glowingly happy and roundly pregnant, to the delight of the audience, which seems to find the idea of her pregnancy quite funny.

Until the final taming of this overdressed shrew, via motherhood,

Mamiji has given voice to a range of opinions that strike at the very basis

of the joint family as a moral institution. She demonstrates, first, that

family members can be selfish, rather than selfless, in arranging matches for the younger generation, and it is probably not irrelevant in her calculations that Kailash Nath’s family is exceedingly affluent. She is very conscious of the material transactions that go along with marriage, scorn-

ing the match between Rajesh and the less prosperous professor's daughter, mocking the sentimental gift of the Ramayana that her husband gives the young bride, and suggesting that Kailash Nath would have had much to gain materially through a marital alliance with Sweety’s family. She makes it clear that her husband's high moral sentiments are better suited to the classroom than to real-life situations. Equally to the point, she sees Rajesh’s second marriage as an opportunity to make a materially advantageous new alliance from which she might directly benefit, rather than as the best means of ensuring the physical and psychological welfare of the infant heir of the family, which is the chief concern of all others in the family. She does not concede the biological and social uniqueness of the child, nor his need for genuine ‘mothering’: after all, ‘babies keep coming, it’s nothing special’ is her opinion. That is why she endorses Sweety’s condition that an ayah should be employed to care for the baby, and fails to appreciate that Puja’s closest biological relative, her sister Nisha, a person who is ‘exactly like her’ and

who has been caring for the child day and night, is the only person who would be truly able to bring up the child as her own. It is only consistent with Mamiji’s mean character and ill breeding that she is unable to accept the servants as fictive family members, and insists on redrawing the nearly erased line of class differentiation. Her niece, Rita, is no better in this regard, and the Aalwa she attempts to prepare for Prem is salty in consequence. (Naturally, Nisha’s hafwa is just right!) III. THE PLEASURES OF VIEWING: VOYEURISM, NARCISSISM, AND A Happy ENDING

HAHK is a film that has given immense pleasure and satisfaction to millions of Indian viewers. It provides the pleasures of spectacle, but amazingly does so without the usual formulaic ingredients of Bollywood

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163

movies: blood and gore, violent sex and sadism. And it exploits erotic tension, short of explicit sexuality, right through to the climax. At the

same time, as Bharucha convincingly argues (1995), itis very much a product of the Indian liberalized capitalist economy of the 1990s. The old antimonies of South Asian melodrama (Jayamanne, 1992: 150; F. Kazmi,

1999: 144-5):

rural

:

East

:

poor

good

urban

:

rich

:

bad

West

—antimonies which, it has been suggested (Kakar, 1989; Nandy, 1981:

81, 95-6; 1995c) are reflective of the psychic conflicts and existential circumstances of popular cinema audiences—no longer hold good. In HAHK, bucolic pastoral scenes are merely romantic interludes between one urban setting and another.© The heroines are modern, educated

young women (Nisha studies ‘computers’), and the heroes successful young businessmen (cf. Mayaram, n.d.: 7-9). Wealth is effortlessly acquired, and accepted without guilt, an effect achieved both through the display of the fetishized objects of the capitalist economy, promised in

unlimited abundance, and through the consistent erasure of the signs of

labour and poverty. Plenitude is convincingly naturalized. The tragic

death of Puja, as Bharucha points out, is only a brief interruption in the

heady flow of fun and frolic in this ‘non-stop roller-coaster of laughter, food, songs and games’ (1995: 801). Moreover, the pleasures of consump-

tion are subtly (or not-so-subtly) linked with the valorization of the

family, reinforcing the opinion held by many of my informants that affluence is an important enabling factor in harmonious family life. Similarly, wealth is no longer opposed to, but is metonymically linked in the film with, Indian culture and tradition: indeed, some informants took voyeu-

ristic pleasure in observing life-cycle rituals being celebrated on a scale

that their own limited means would never allow:

It is impossible for a middle class father to celebrate his daughter's wedding on such a scale, so my daughter and I would rather watch it in a film (Mishra,

1995).

Needless to say—and the focus on life-crisis rituals naturalizes this elision—the national tradition is assumed to be Hindu, ‘otherness’ being

either excluded, or co-opted through caricature.°’ As Bharucha sarcastically sums it up, HAHK exemplifies

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the ease with which the market has been embraced within a matrix of upperclass, ‘traditional’, Hindu cultural values, with an appropriate dose of religiosity to keep the ‘family’ happy, and very discreetly. . . to keep the others out. Of course, if they wish to enter this matrix, they will always be welcomed with a cup of tea and absorbed (1995: 804).

In this interpretation, the pleasure of viewing is effectively the pleasure of voyeurism, that is, of being witness to a spectacle of unlimited consumption. This assessment is confirmed by several viewers’ comments, and by the participatory reaction of the cinema hall audiences: when, for instance, the new icon of Indian femininity,“* Madhuri Dixit, comes

down the stairs in her gorgeous purple and gold costume for the ‘ Didi, tera dewar diwana’ sequence, she is greeted by sighs and wolf-whistles of appreciation.® But the comments of viewers also suggest a strong, and very narcissistic, identification with the happy family ideal, no matter what their personal family circumstances. In the defining of ‘taste’ in Indian cinema, two interrelated criteria are characteristically employed to differentiate the high-brow or parallel cinema from the low-brow commercial cinema: (i) the absence/presence

of music, song, and dance (see Beeman, 1981); and (ii) ‘realism’ (e.g.

Chakravarty, 1996: Ch. 3; Nandy, 1981:92, 95-6; 1995c; Rajadhyaksha,

1993a), a concept which (as ‘naturalism’ has been critical in reference to developments in the fine arts, too (for example, Mitter, 1994; Mukherjee, 1985). HAHK, as already noted, has an unusual number of songs—in-

deed, in a different cultural context it would be classed as a ‘musical’ or ‘operetta —but the presence of these songs does not apparently detract from the appearance of realism as far as the viewers are concerned. One might argue that this is because the film focuses on a segment of Indian social life—marriage and other life-crisis rituals in their non-sanskritic aspects—where music, song, and dance are always much in evidence, but

this of course does not explain why courtship and the declaration of love, ora lovers’ phone conversation, should also be rendered in song, as indeed

they are. The deployment of the criterion of ‘realism’ to discriminate the good from the bad in Indian cinema may appear to imply the rather patronizing assumption that the masses of viewers, like primitives or children, are unable or unwilling (given their individual or collective psychological compulsions) to distinguish fantasy from reality, myth from truth. It comesas something of a surprise, then, to find a wide spectrum of viewers self-consciously complimenting HAHK on what they see to be its trueto-life, mimetic projection of the realities of Indian family life. (Of

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165

course, one should not discount the possibility that ordinary Indian viewers have internalized the critique of Indian popular cinema vis-a-vis

high and middle cinema, or Hollywood productions.) Mr Sharma's”?

comment was typical: “This is a very good film. Seeing it is like being in one’s own living room, with all the family around.’

Satinder had something similar to say:

Although there is no concrete story, the director has very successfully shown an ideal Indian family. While showing the family through their family functions [i.e. domestic rituals], the director has taken the audience along with

him. It seems you are moving with the family.

And a middle-aged woman interviewed on television declared: ‘It’s as though you're watching a video cassette of a marriage in your own

home.”

Significantly, interviews with the director-scriptwriter, Sooraj Barjatya, also seek to locate the genesis of the film in his real-life experiences in a way that would be scarcely conceivable for the majority of Bollywood films, particularly of the blood-and-gore variety: [Barjatya] When I started out I was conscious that I was going against the accepted norms. Yet the film flowed naturally. [have lived the kind of life which

is shown in the film.

have lived ina family of wonderful buas, chachas, chachis,

and other elders. . . .

[Q.] Like the characters in the film, do you stay with a joint family? [Barjatya] Yes, 15 or 16 of us stay together in our house in Worli. There's a sharing, a bond between us. [Q.] Do you also have a wonder pet dog like Tuffy? (Barjatya, smiles] No, but I’ve seen other families doting on their pets. [Q.] And what about those home cricket matches?

[Barjatya] They're straight out of my family life. . . .” Conversely, criticism of the film often focused on details that, in the eyes of viewers, impaired the verisimilitude of the representation. Some of these have already been mentioned: the unbelievable cleanliness of the temple; the maid Chameli’s outrageously ‘ethnic chic’ costume; the

careless feasting of the barat; the filmi ‘misunderstanding’ that makes

Nisha think that she is to be married to Prem until she actually holds the

wedding invitation in her hands; to which one might add the detail that

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Freedom and Destiny

most offended the English anthropologist Ronnie, Madhuri Dixit’s inflexibly pointed breasts, and so on: all minor blemishes really. The intervention of Lord Krishna, though miraculous, was not adversely commented on. Perhaps viewers did not consider the idea of the participation of the deity in their domestic dramas unrealistic; and in any case this intervention is neatly naturalized through the agency of the wonder-dog, Tuffy. The appearance of verisimilitude in HAHK is artfully enhanced by a number of fantasy scenes, well marked out as such. Nisha’s cousin Bhola, smitten by Rita, sees her transformed into the legendary Shakuntala on every encounter. As Prem watches a video of the wedding revelries, Nisha

suddenly materializes in the room with him. The ‘Didi, tera dewar diwana’ sequence (the pregnancy ritual) has two surprising fantasies— discounting, that is, Prem’s swinging from the chandeliers and flipping backwards up onto the balustrade: Prem finds himself suddenly surrounded by half-a-dozen or so infants, and then, inexplicably, appears pregnant in a clinging white shift: a terrible and misplaced excess of fecundity! But these little flights of fancy, much relished by the audience, serve only to reinforce the overall impression of the verisimilitude of representation. This was the case even for those, like Daljit Kaur, who insisted that

the film portrayed a bygone era more than a contemporary reality of family relations; or like Asha, who felt that it portrayed an ideal of harmonious family life that was, as she frankly put it, ‘not usually found in families’. Such is the magical illusion created by HAHK, that its picture of ideal

family life carries the stamp of authenticity and provokes narcissistic enjoyment even when contradicted by the personal experience of viewers. In other words, it has succeeded in creating what Govind Nihalani has so

aptly termed ‘believable fantasies’, fantasies just within—or just out-

side—reach (cf. Kazmi, 1995b; also Gupta, 1996): Ifnot one’s own fami-

ly life, which is contingently imperfect, viewers see HAHK as a truthful rendition of the family life of others in the imagined community that is modern India. This ‘utopian’ effect, as I have argued above, is in no small measure achieved by the erasure—or near-erasure—from consciousness of the harsher realities of Indian family and social life, leaving only the faintest traces in Mamiji’s several mean-mouthed comments. This is

actually a rather unusual strategy in Indian popular cinema which characteristically (or at least until heroes began to act like thugs, and heroines

like vamps) had white and black, good and evil, well differentiated, with

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167

little space for shades of grey (Nandy, 1981: 89). HAHK is almost all

white: ‘saccharine-sweet’, said Sunita dismissively.

Besides the pleasures of voyeurism and narcissistic identification,

HAHK also affords the pleasure of following a stereotypical romantic story through to its happy ending, though it does so almost at the expense of the sense of realism that it had so carefully built up. This perhaps explains both the cathartic effect of the last-minute resolution of the nar-

rative crisis (and release of ‘erotic tension’) for many in the audience, for

whom such strategies are familiar, and the disappointment of some viewers, the more educated and sophisticated perhaps, who felt that the dramatic twists of the love story (Puja’s death and Nisha’s ‘misunderstanding’) made the film, ultimately, too much like other Bombay commercial

movies.

As already noted, the narrative code of the HAHK romance is a very restricted one—‘perfunctory’, Bharucha dismissively terms it (1995: 801):

(i) Prem and Nisha meet in the context of arranging the marriage of their elder siblings;

(ii) their relationship, though initially teasing, develops slowly into love;

(iii) they pledge themselves to each other; (iv)

(v)

(vi)

asudden event occurs (the tragic death of Puja) and a misunder-

standing arises (Nisha’s assumption that she is to be married to Prem) to place obstacles in the way of their happiness; aresolution of the crisis is effected through the mediation of Lord

Krishna and his instrument, Tuffy the dog; the young couple is united with the blessings of all (‘Hum aapke

hain’ (I'm yours] remains on the screen as the koun [who?] is erased).

Despite its highly simplifed structure, this is a universal love story (Radway, 1987), but it is peculiarly inflected by the mythic conflicts that typically structure the constitution of a romantic narrative in the cultural context of South Asian popular cinema: the conflicts between dharma (social duty) and desire, and between freedom and destiny (see Chap-

ter 4). These conflicts have to be reconciled before a love story can be brought to a satisfactory happy ending. Prem and Nisha nobly renounce

their desire for each other, out of love for their elder siblings and concern for their infant nephew; in effect, in deference to the wider interests of the

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Freedom and Destiny

joint family as a moral institution. Yet ultimately, thanks to the intervention of Lord Krishna and Tuffy, they are enabled both to do their duty by the family as well as by themselves. Ronnie summed it up in his own English way:

The film celebrates the power of parents and the power of money. Everyone does their duty, and love wins out!

The second conflict is that between the freedom to choose one’s own

partner, and the need to conform to social expectations or to the force of ahigher destiny. When asked by his sister-in-law what sort of marriage he wants—an arranged or a ‘love’ marriage—Prem replies without hesitation: ‘an arranged love marriage’. And this is what he finally gets, though for a while it seems he will have to forego his own choice of partner in deference to family elders and in the context of an unexpected and tragic turn of fate (cf. Nandy, 1981: 95). Judging by audience reactions, the resolution of this mythic conflict at the very last minute is a source of enormous emotional satisfaction, albeit somewhat undermining the impression of mimetic realism that the film had earlier conveyed. TV. THE EMBLEMATIC FaMILy

This chapter began with a reflection on the contemporaneity of a different medium—the moving graffiti of Delhi roads. Quite coincidentally, Prem, our hero of HAHK,

drives a white Jeep scrawled all over with

graffiti after the style affected by Delhi ‘yuppies’. Prominent among these inscriptions is the phrase: ‘I love my family’, signed, for good measure, ‘Prem’. Presumably, this unusual graffito is an instruction on how to read the film’3—as the story of a young man, serendipitously named ‘Prem’ (‘love’), who is prepared to sacrifice his individual love for the sake of his family. This gesture, as we have noted, was interpreted by viewers as an act of great nobility on behalf of an institution which is believed to epitomize at once the singularity, and the excellence, of the Indian tradition. For quite understandable reasons, a number of recent critiques of the mass media in India have addressed themselves to the ideological impli-

cations of the iconicization of women, or of the Hindu tradition, or of

both together, as representing the modern Indian nation, and linked these motivated representations in turn to the caste, class, and communal

orientations of the governing and non-governing elites of Indian society. In this context, it is interesting to note that the promotion of the joint family ideal as an emblem of Indian culture and tradition—not only in

Imagining the Family

169

HAHK, which is an outstanding contemporary example, but ina large number of movies in the century-long history of Indian cinema—is a question that has hardly been acknowledged, except insofar as it overlaps (as ofcourse it must) with the question of feminine roles and imagery. Nor have continuities or changes in the cinematic representation of family

relations been the object of the same degree of scrutiny as, for instance,

the changing roles of heroes and heroines, linked to the character of the

wider social, cultural, and political order of contemporary India.

Why this should be so is a matter on which one can only speculate,

given the quite inadequate charting of this field. Butitis surely significant that, unlike caste, class, and religion, the family manifests as an especially

unifying institution throughout Indian society. There is probably a degree of sociological accuracy in this judgement. While there are significant regional differences in styles of kinship (particularly north versus south), these differences in the culture of kinship, at least in the eyes of some authorities, are underlain by certain unifying principles and, in any case, are increasingly being eroded. I have no wish to rehearse here the complex arguments for and against this proposition, but certainly it is possible that the differences across classes, castes, and religions within specific kinship regions are much less than is often supposed—indeed,

that there is a commonality of underlying structure despite differences in detail at the level of individual features of kinship organization (for example Kolenda, 1983: esp. 183-92). Perhaps this explains why HAHK manages to convey the impression of verisimilitude to a remarkable range

of people of different class and caste backgrounds, communities, and re-

gional origin living in Delhi. Sociologist André Béteille has commented on the fact that, as com-

pared to class, caste, and religion, there has been remarkably little social

critique of the Indian family system. Béteille may not be strictly accurate here,’4 but one can only agree with him that the family is certainly a very important agency for the reproduction of social inequality in contemporary Indian society. This occurs not only through the process of child socialization, butalso through the system of arranged marriage and through the deployment of ‘social capital’ to ensure that, insofar as is possible, children inherit or surpass their parents’ social class position (Béteille,

1991). The only exceptions to this relative silence regarding the role of the family in modern India are a handful of disgruntled feminists, divided among themselves, whose opinions on this issue are widely seen as testimony to the perfidious influence of an alien culture anda sinister political agenda (see Bhattacharjee, 1992).

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Freedom and Destiny

For longer family signify

the rest, as India globalizes, and as the ‘imagined economy’ can no convincingly iconicize the nation (see Deshpande, 1993), the remains, and not merely by default, the sole institution which can the unity, uniqueness, and moral superiority of Indian culture in

a time of change, uncertainty and crisis.

sg The year 1994, which saw the release of HAHK, at that point in time the

largest grossing film in the history of Indian popular cinema, was also coincidentally celebrated as International Year of the Family. It is interesting to note that, albeit in a very different discursive field, this event produced a comparable linking of the family with Indian culture and tradition, similarly underlining its vulnerability in the face of mounting

external challenges. As the Minister of State for Welfare remarked while inaugurating the official programmes marking this event (see Uberoi,

1994b):

India is proud of its ancient heritage of a united and stable family system. The Indian families have demonstrated a unique strength of keeping themselves

together despite the growing stress and strain and external influences on

Indian culture. An Indian family is by and large still perceived as a homo-

gen[e]ous unit with strong coping mechanisms. Notes

1. Lowe special thanks to Aradhya Bhardwaj and to my other companions and interlocutors at several viewings of this film in cinema halls in north Delhi between January and May 1995. For this project, I conducted informal

interviews with a variety of persons, for the most part of middle- and lowermiddle class status, at the theatres before and after shows, and in other settings. For various contingent reasons, my informants were mostly female,

though I did consciously try to remedy this bias as my study progressed. I was

not able to correct the middle-class and urban bias of my sample of interviewees, but viewing the film in cinema halls, rather than on video, gave some indication of the responses of the ‘front stalls’. However, the reactions of rural viewers remain opaque, as do those of viewers in other regions of the country 2.

(see also n.26 below). Contestant at the Femina Miss India International contest, when asked: ‘Are

you for or against the joint family system?’ (Metro TV, 13 February 1995). Her answer was enthusiastically applauded by the audience.

Imagining the Family

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. For the most part I retain here the present tense in which the paper was written in the first half of 1995, though details have subsequently been added or corrected in the course of revision. Asa

result, some of the statements may

no longer hold true—for instance, on the revival of cinema hall attendance in consequence of this film. . Sooraj Barjatya belongs toa ‘dynasty’ of distinguished filmmakers, headed by the late Tarachand Barjatya (to whom the film was dedicated). Tarachand

Barjatya is identified as one of the main sponsors of ‘middle-class cinema’ (Prasad, 1998: 127; see also the entry in Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, 1999: 519). . Over Rs 200 crore (est. 2002), a figure subsequently equalled by another romantic family drama, Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (see Chapter 6). HAHK was similarly said to have broken all records for the sale of Hindi film music (Zaveri, 1994b), the plagiarization of the music cassette

generating a notable court case. . HAHKwent on to celebrate its ‘jubilee’-—i.e. a 100 week run—at Mumbai's Liberty cinema in August 1996. . As with other very popular Hindi movies, viewers delight in boasting of how many times they have seen the film (cf. Derné and Jadwin, 2000; Kakar,

1981b: 11-12; Mukherjee, 1995). Such enthusiasts include, for instance, the

celebrated octogenarian painter, M.F. Husain, who claimed to have seen the film twenty-four times and to be planning another fifty visits while working

on a series of paintings of heroine Madhuri Dixit (the Times of India, Delhi Times, 5 May 1995; the Pioneer, 10 May 1995). By the time his Madhuri series was complete, Husain had reportedly seen HAHK 54 times (the Times of India, 13 November 1995; also Shahani, 1995), with a round-figure count of 100 viewings by June 2003 (the Times of India, 23 June 2003): ‘I wasn’t

watching the movie,’ Husain apparently said. ‘I was watching Madhuri. She is the most complete actress in the past 10 years of cinema (ibid.). Amid great publicity, Husain also cast Dixit in a film of his own, Gajagamini (2000).

. ‘Two-and-a-half songs, including the much-hummed ‘Chocolate—lime

juice—ice cream—toffees’ (said to be a tribute to Madhuri Dixit’s ‘sweet tooth’), which echoes through the film on the background score, finally had

to be eliminated to save 11 minutes’ running time. These songs have now been restored in ‘unabridged’ versions of the film, shown selectively (interview with HAHK’s producers, Rajshri Productions, Filmfare 4 [1995]). See also Doraiswamy (1996: 127).

. Others in the cast include: Renuka Shahane; Mohnish Bahl; Reema Lagoo; Anupam Kher; Alok Nath; Ajit Vacchani; erstwhile ‘vamp’, Bindu; Sahila Chadha; and Laxmikant Berde.

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10. For the first time in Indian cinema, the Barjatyas made imaginative use of

local cable television to promote the film and to publicize the ‘family’ feeling

that went into its making and that purportedly existed between the stars on the sets (Doraiswamy, 1996: 127). Rajshri productions had imposed a moratorium on release of video rights, releasing the film in a select number

of cinema halls: initially at only one cinema in Bombay, followed by the release of twenty-nine prints for India and six overseas, to a total eventually of just 450 prints (Filmfare4 [1995], interview with Kamalkumar, Rajkumar and Ajitkumar Barjatya of Rajshri Productions, following the Filmfare Best Film Award (1994); see also Doraiswamy, 1996; Kazmi, 1995b; Majumdar, 1995; Sangwan, 1996).This strategy of keeping control over the distribution

process against the widespread practice of video piracy has meant much greater returns for both producers and cinema hall owners, some of whom were able to improve the facilities in the theatres on the strength of the profits from HAHK alone (interview with cinema hall owners and a representative of Rajshri Productions in theTV programme, ‘Show Biz Masala’, DD Metro Channel, 4 April 1995). A number of my companions viewing HAHK

remarked on how many years it was since they had last watched a movie in

a suburban cinema hall—and how very shabby the theatres had meanwhile become. 11. Comment ofa disappointed reviewer, who had found the first half of the film engagingly ‘different’. 12. A judgement reiterated by Kazmi several months later in a survey of trends in popular cinema through 1995 (see 1995b). 13. Interview with Madhuri Dixit (Filmfare 4 [1995)). 14. Educated working woman, aged 35. All names of interviewees are pseud-

onyms. 15. A ‘rape’ scene is often regarded as compulsory for an ‘action’ movie, setting the plot in motion. In the present case, it is Puja's tragic, and in a way inexplicable, death that initiates the drama. 16. See, however, Veena Das’s analysis (1995b) of the exceedingly popular Indian soap opera, Hum Log, which, though modelled after Mexican soap operas

with their proliferation of narrative detail and ‘challenge to the ordinary’, was—on the contrary—characterized by its extreme ‘ordinariness’. 17. Asimilarly resentful reaction was reported to me bya young woman who had given a critical lecture at another Delhi women’s college on the film, 1942:

A Love Story (Udita Das, personal communication). Contrariwise, the guilt of the critic who disapproves of HAHK’s ‘degenerate ideology’, yet finds the film pleasurable, is the starting point of Shohini Ghosh's deconstruction of the ‘pleasures of viewership’ in relation to HAHK (n.d.). Interestingly, the tone of Bharucha’s devastating critique of the banal ‘utopia that HAHK presents is notably self-defensive, as though he was already anticipating such indignation (see 1995: esp. 801, 803).

Imagining the Family

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18. According to one of the actors, Laxmikant Berde, who plays the comic-

‘emotional’ role of the family servant, Lallu, ‘none of the artistes knew where the movie was heading, with the exception of Sooraj Barjatya, the director’ (Sharman, 1995: 27). Barjatya, who won the 1994 Filmfare award for HAHK's screenplay, felt that the lack of story puta great responsibility on the scriptwriter to construct what he called ‘little-little scenes which would

absorb the viewer’ (interview with Sooraj Barjatya, Filmfare 4 [1995}).

19. Interview with Madhuri Dixit (Filmfare 4 [1994)). 20. Ghai claims now to regret that particular number, which was responsible for

spawning a series of even more bawdy film songs. In a recent interview, Ghai reportedly said: The profundity of other songs in Khalnayak was spoilt by ‘Choli ke peechey’. Sensationalism made my asset a liability. . . . Vices are more habitforming than virtues, but they have a very short lifespan. Which explains why a ‘vegetarian’ film like Hum Aapke Hain Koun is a total hit (Ghai, 1995). Ghai’s classification of HAHK asa ‘vegetarian film may have been anallusion

not only to its relative lack of vulgarity’, but to the producers’ self-imposed taboo on showing non-vegetarian food, and their reluctance to show alcohol ‘unless it’s relevant to the situation’ (Filmfare, April 1995, interview with Sooraj Barjatya). On the ‘moral panic’ created by the ‘Chol?’ song and the ensuing debate regarding cinematic vulgarity, see Ghosh (1999: esp. 38-40). 21. See also the discussion of the motif of ‘virginity’ in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Chapter 6. For some reflections on the symbolic role of the ‘first night’ in a very different type of discourse, that is, contemporary judicial discourse, see Uberoi, 1995a: 334-42. 22. The billiard table is an important prop later in the narrative when, at the conclusion of the love duet, Prem carries Nisha to the same table. 23. Daljit Kaur had visited the cinema house for perhaps the fifth or sixth time

in her long life in order to see HAHK. She was, however, an aficionado of

television soaps and serials, a compulsive consumer of Hindi romances and thrillers, and a woman of strong opinions.

24. Prize-winning reader's letter to Filmfare (4 [1995]: 161), concluding with the

disillusioned exclamation: ‘So much for women’s lib’. See also Manchanda (1996: 86), endorsing Ashis Nandy’s proposition (source not given), that ‘the bolder the Bollywood heroine becomes in dance and dress, the more submissive they are required to be as wife and daughter-in-law after marriage’; also Ravinder Kaur’s comparison of two contemporary cinematic heroines— the submissive Nisha of HAHK, and the rebellious Bandit Queen (1996).

25. She lists here the relationships of: Prem—Puja; Rajesh—Nisha; Kailash Nath—

the girls’ mother; the man servant Lallu-maid-servant Chameli; Bhola—Rita; Prem-Rita; Mama—Mamiji; Prem—‘Chachijan’ (the Muslim doctor's wife).

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26. As some critical south Indian informants pointed out, HAHK presents a typically north Indian perspective on the kinship system (see also Bharucha, 1995: 802). Understandably, north Indian viewers see it as simply a film about the Indian family. This naturalization of the values of north Indian kinship may be seen as consistent witha larger historical process of cultural

hegemonization of the northern over the southern culture of kinship, a

process that has probably intensified in recent times (see Uberoi, 1993a: 33— 4, 45-9; 2003b; Trautmann, 1979). 27.

Strictly speaking, the terms may refer to either set of cross-sex co-parents-inlaw, but the joking relation, if at all, pertains especially between the groom's father and the bride’s mother. One could speculate that the opposite would

suggest an inappropriate reversal of the hierarchical relations of wife-takers and wife-givers. On the etiquette of avoidance between the samdhis and the samdhans, see Vatuk, 1976.

28. See Srinivas (1942: 80-3) for parallels in south India. Rejecting the hypothesis of earlier anthropologists that such customs represented the residue of

‘marriage by capture’, Srinivas observes: ‘This social institution [the “Rabelaisian” women’s songs sung by affines] serves only one purpose: it enhances the fun of marriage for the womenfolk and brings them together’ (ibid.: 82).

29. Bharucha likens it to the bantering between Renuka Shahane and Siddharth

Kak on the popular TV cultural magazine programme, Surabhi, the context in which Renuka first established her media reputation, and patented her famous smile (1995: 804 n.3).

30. Shohini Ghosh is the only critic 1 know of who has commented on the

eroticism of this relationship (n.d.: 4-5). In fact, she virtually derives the romantic relationship of Prem and Nisha from that of thedewar and bhabhi. 31. Note that for anthropologists both avoidance and joking relationships are evidence of nodes of structural tension in the kinship system. 32. Similarly, he insisted, an unmarried girl would not dance and express longing in public as Nisha does in the Mze-ni-mae number, though she might express her feelings in confidence to her girlfriends or to her mother. 33. The nearest HAHK comes to this are two flirtatious and competitive inci-

dents focused especially on Prem and Nisha: the shoe-stealing sequence, and the ‘pass the cushion’ party game.

Cf. Niranjana’s discussion (1998: esp. 128-31) of the ambiguous role of

chutney-soca, a popular Trinidadian song form derived from north Indian women's folksongs, in the articulation ofIndian ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ in the West Indies. 35. Film director Vidhu Vinod Chopra, pronouncing on the success of HAHK

and the successor blockbuster, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, in an interview

with Nikhat Kazmi (1995b).

Imagining the Family

175

36. See also the comments of Rachel Dwyer (2001: 261), who suggests that film magazines make pleasurable reading partly by virtue of their ‘display of conspicuous consumption’.

37. See, however, Gavaskar (1995: 35) who notes how the film erases all signs of

‘work’ and makes ‘alienating features of the outside world . . . hospitable for relaxation and enjoyment.’ One of the examples he cites is the ‘toy-like’ yellow hand-cart in the village scene, a hand-cart being ‘otherwise a symbol of drab exclusion’. 38. Kajri Jain (personal communication) has suggested that the presence of servants in the home is one of the important markers of India as the ‘homeland’ for diasporic Indians. This comment points to the need for an independentdiasporic reading of this film and its representation of notions of national ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’. On the institution of domestic service in South Asia, and its virtual erasure as an issue of either social scientific or 39.

feminist attention, see Uberoi (2004a). Shohini Ghosh (n.d.: 2) interestingly interprets HAHK’s

erasure of the

master-servant distinction as an instance of what she terms the film's

‘carnivalesque egalitarianism’. Similarly included as ‘family’, she notes, are Tuffy the dog, a Muslim couple (family friends), and the family gods. This is obviously a theme that could be further developed. For another example of the erasure of class differentiation in contemporary commercial cinema, see Tejaswini Niranjana’s critique of Maniratnam’s Geetanjali (n.d.: 4). A 35-year-old research assistant.

. Foranother reference to the importance of the motif of ‘sacrifice’ in discourse on the family, see PK. Bose’s analysis of an early twentieth-century Bengali text on correct methods of child-rearing. Bose writes (1996: 124):

The family asks for sacrifices from the parents so that children remain unspoiled and upright; the child . . . has to make sacrifices because he is not in this world to enjoy its luxuries but to be guided by the ideals of renunciation and sacrifice. In protecting and preserving all that is meaningful, the child should learn to sacrifice his own pleasures.

The correct upbringing and disciplining of children, Bose emphasizes, was conceived as a ‘national enterprise’ (see also Chapter 3), so that the parents’ ‘sacrifice’ in not spoiling the child, and the child’s internalization of the value of ‘sacrifice’ of personal desire and pleasure contributed not only to individual ‘character’ formation, but to the reinvigoration of the nation. On the psychological roots of the expectation of ‘sacrifice’, see Nandy

(1992: 68); also Kurtz's theory of the socialization of the Indian child for ‘renunciation’ (1992), such that the child’s separation from the mother leads

to immersion in the fzmily, rather than ‘individuation’ according to West-

ern middle class (and psycho-developmental) norms (cf. D. Sharma, 2003b: 17-18).

Freedom and Destiny

176 42.

Such ‘misunderstandings’, according to Asha, are typical of Hindi film

dramas. 43. See fn 24 above. 44, Interview with Madhuri Dixit (Filmfare 4 [1995]). Note the change from

third to first person here. 45. Mrs Goel may have over-interpreted this song and the scene in which it occurs, but her reading is endorsed by Ghosh (n.d.: 3-4):

Fleeting references to college days, looks that linger longer than usual and

double entendres evoke images of unrequited love. The song they are made to sing for each other during the engagement ceremony, . . . “There is a strange dilemma in our hearts today’, can be reread asa re-working of their failed relationship and the forging of a new one. For two people who are

denied the exclusive space to ‘rework’ their feelings the song becomes a vehicle for renegotiation. The ‘carnivalesque’ suspends judgement set by moral and social norms, thereby providing space for the play of unconscious desires.

46. A similar observation has been made by Pnina Werbner in reference to the wedding rituals of UK Pakistanis (1990: 260).

47. For an anthropological interpretation of the ‘joke bargaining’ between the bride's sisters and the groom (in UK Pakistani marriage rituals), see Werbner

(1990: esp. 278-9); also Jamous (1991: 196ff).

48.

That he chivalrously passes up this opportunity and thereby earns Nisha’s love and gratitude provoked adverse comment from a college student who considered this scene to be ‘as blatant a reinforcement of the myth that a

woman needs to look up to a man as is possible’ (S. Das, 1995: 25). 49.

A point made by several critics, notably Bharucha (1995), F Kazmi (1999:

150ff); and Mukherjee (1995), alluding in particular to the agitation over the Ram Janmabhoomi temple issue that had resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992 and widespread riots thereafter (cf. Rajagopal, 1999, 2001).

50. Presumably the wife/vamp dichotomy of popular movies is another encoding

of this anxiety (see e.g. Nandy, 1981: 93-4; O’Flaherty, 1981). 51. See Nagpal (2003) for a sympathetic exegesis of Kakar’s position. Nagpal and other contributors to the collective assessment of Sudhir Kakar’s understanding of the Hindu ‘inner world’ (see D. Sharma, 2003a) explore the tension

in Kakar’s work between commitment to the universalist presumptions of Freudian theory, and awareness of the psychic importance of culture and social institutions. 52. The same narrative strategy is followed in a subsequent family film, Subhash

Ghai's Pardes (1997), considered at some length in Chapter 6. Note that the nearest role toa villainness in Pardes, the spiteful Neeta, isasenior kinswoman

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in the affinal home (i.e. the groom's caci). Her role is not unlike that of Mamiji

in HAHK. 53. Not everyone found the idea of two brothers marrying two sisters a proper solution to the typical joint family problem of the potential hostility between

sisters-in-law. Some said it would ruin the relationship between sisters, rather than consolidate that between brothers (cf. Kolenda, 1978).

54. Ethnographers have often noted the ‘continued faith’ in traditional family values and ideals of joint family living even when their informants themselves livein supposedly modern, ‘urbanized’, nuclear family set-ups. See, e.g. Sinha (1993: 32, 273). 55. From the title of Louis Dumont's collection of essays on marriage alliance in South Asia and Australia (1983).

56. The indignant young college student, whose condemnation of the culture of

the bibi—sali jokes has already been noted, saw a sinister plot here to valorize the affinal relations of sisters-in-law over the prior and biological relation of sisterhood. Quoting the title line of the song sung by Puja in celebration of the wedding plans of her younger brother-in-law and her sister—‘Lo, chali main, apne dewar ki barat leke’ (Look, here I go in the groom's party of my brother-in-law), she remarks that Puja is now ‘totally the “bhabhi”, never the “didi” [older sister]’, a role which both expresses her total alienation from her

parental home and which gives her ‘someone to rule over’ (i.e. a junior sisterin-law) in her new home (S. Das, 1995: 24).

57. Samdhi-samdhan; Jute lo, paise do, Didi, tera dewar diwana. 58. The status inequality between wife-givers and wife-takers is not absent in

south Indian marriage, either. Describing Brahmin marriage in Mysore, M.N. Srinivas writes:

The demand for bridegrooms and the humiliation of the bride's party are seen clearly if one visits a Brahman marriage.The bride's party, in addition to bearing the expenses of the marriage, will be submissive and eager to please the bridegroom’ relatives. The bridegroom's relatives, on the other hand, will always be insisting on their rights, ever on the lookout for grievances, real or imaginary, to complain about. The women of the bridegroom's

party, especially, will definitely be on the warpath. The entire atmosphere

of the marriage is strained, reminding one of anything other than two groups of relatives coming together for the rest of their lives (1942; 58). 59. Anupam Kher, who plays the role of Professor Chowdhury, is highly rated as a comedian, and has received four Filmfare Best Comedian awards. Audi-

ences were delighted with his many comic acts in HAHK, particularly his parody of a scene from Sholay during a game of ‘pass the cushion’; and his

loving-teasing equation with his wife. 60. Acertain empirical support for her views comes from Promilla Kapur's study

of the marital adjustment of urban educated women (1970: esp. 423-33).

Freedom and Destiny

178 61.

Comment by a woman journalist. Her statement echoes Barjatyas own understanding: ‘Since I was going to talk of love, warmth and family relationships in my film, there was no place for a well-defined villain. You can say that circumstances and fate are villains in my film’ (1995). See, similarly, Fareed Kazmi (1999: 139-40) regarding the film's ‘blissful’-ness and absence

of a true villain, something he described as ‘unique’ in the history of Indian conventional cinema.

62. Mamiji’s role would conform to what Rosie Thomas describes (1996: 1712) as one of the three types of ‘semi-villainy’ in Hindi film melodrama (and

a type that abounds in contemporary TV soaps:

members of the key protagonist's domestic unit . . ., frequently women

(wicked mother-in-law, aunts, elder brothers’ wives, ‘lazy’ daughters-in-

law). Their crimes are primarily transgressions of moral ideals of kinship solidarity and support and result from foibles such as jealousy or selfishness. They are generally ultimately repentant, capitulate to the demands of family harmony, and are made to see the error of their ways and reform. They do not, on the whole, arouse audience sympathy (p.171).

See the similar role of the mean caci in Pardes, discussed in Chapter 6. 63. After this outburst, and the threat of a stepmother neglecting Puja’s child, the

onlookers to the scene come round to the view that it would be best if Rajesh were married to Nisha. The initiative in this is taken by the professor, who recognizesa need, and an obligation, to strengthen the family alliance already

made, and to protect the interests of Puja’s child. 64. My informants could give no explanation for this unanticipated develop-

ment, ‘and so quickly, too!’ On the other hand, a feminist-conscientized student thought it highly significant that Mamiji conceived only after being literally slapped into place by her husband. Alternatively, Shohini Ghosh points out (n.d.: 3) that Mamaji’s slap marks the belated assertion of his manhood vis-a-vis his shrewish wife. This explanation is endorsed by the audience's enthusiastic applause of Mamaji’s conduct. There was altogether little sympathy for Mamiji, though a student complained that her character

was ‘a grotesque caricature of the director's notion of a childless woman’, . . . ‘as though her childlessness was a result of some innate essential flaw in her nature’ (S. Das, 1995: 25).

65. Indeed, as Shohini Ghosh perceptively remarks (n.d.: 2), most scenes are set

in the private space of the two homes of the intermarrying families, and there is quite minimal engagement with the outside world. Interestingly, the original film on which HAHK was based, Rajshri Produc-

tions’ moderately successful Nadya Ke Paar (1982), had the heroine as a

village girl, nota city girl (interview with Sooraj Barjatya, Filmfare 4 [1995]).

67. For instance, the role of the poetry-spouting Muslim doctor (played by Satish Shah) in the film.

Imagining the Family

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68. The reference is to publicity around M.E Husain’s series of paintings of Madhuri Dixit (the Times of India, Delhi Times, 5 May 1995).

69. It is relevant that in this song Prem is first a voyeur on a desirable spectacle

(‘gentlemen not allowed’), then witness to a parody of himself within the

spectacle, and finally himself a participant in the action, taking the lead and

vanquishing the false dewar. 70. A 55-year-old administrative officer. 71. ‘Show Biz Masala, DD Metro Channel, 2 May 1995. Videotaping the mar-

riage ceremony is almost de rigueur in urban areas now, even for the working

classes (see Sengupta, 1999).

72. Interview with Sooraj Barjatya, Filmfare 4 (1995), emphasis added. 73. After all, Prem might well have used that favourite among motorized

graffitithe bleeding arrow-pierced heart (zakhmi dil)! 74. See, e.g., Madan (1993: esp. 415-18) forasummary of critiques of the Indian joint family as an impediment to economicand social development; also Bose

(1996: 121-2) on the late nineteenth century ‘progressive’ discourse on the

‘new family’, based on the presumption that the traditional Hindu joint

family, in practice, ‘was unable to fulfil the demands being made by the new desires and sentiments . . .’ , such that a new type of family was required to rejuvenate the national society. The remarkable women who were the pioneers of the Indian women's movement were also very outspoken on the evils of the Indian family system (see, e.g. Chaudhuri, 1996: 227-32).

CHAPTER

6

The Diaspora Comes Home Disciplining Desire in DDL]

Keg I. PROLOGUE

I n this chapter I analyse two exceedingly popular commercial Hindi films of the mid-1990s: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Those with the heart win the bride), familiarly known by its acronym, DDL/ (Director Aditya Chopra, 1995), and Pardes (Foreign Land, Director Subhash

Ghai, 1997).! The two films have much in common; so much, in fact, that

the second is often deemed to bea mere ‘clone’ of the former. Both are love stories involving Indians settled abroad. Both identify a specific set of ‘family values’ with the essence of being Indian. And both elaborate certain dilemmas of moral choice that resonate profoundly in contemporary Indian society, particularly for the new middle classes. The moral dilemmas that DDL/ and Pardes address are of two kinds,

interwoven in and through the cinematic narrative. The first is the conflict between individual desire and social norms and expectations in respect of marriage choice; one could call it the animating logic of South

Asian romance

(see Chapters 4 and 5). Its felicitous solution is the

contemporary ideal of ‘arranged love marriage’, that is, a style of matchmaking whereby a romantic choice already made is endorsed post facto by parental approval, and treated thereafter like an ‘arranged marriage’ (see Chapter 8): ‘Have your cake and eat it too’! The second is the contradiction between transnational location and the retention of Indian identity. To this latter problem, I suggest, these two films provide contrasting solutions, notwithstanding their superficial resemblances. In their address to these two moral dilemmas, DDL/ and Pardes touch

upon practical questions which have been of some interest to sociologists of Indian family and kinship. On the one hand, many sociologists had

expected that the modernization of Indian society would undermine the practice of ‘arranged marriage’, encouraging an individualistic ethos and

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181

subverting the rules of endogamy that have sustained both communal separatism and the hierarchical system of caste in South Asia (see, for example, Shah, 1998: Ch. 8). (This, needless to say, has not happened— or, at least, not to the extent once expected.) On the other hand, being set among Indians living abroad, the films register and comment on an important development in Indian family life in the final decades of the twentieth century: the internationalization of the middle class family and the consequent challenge of reproducing Indian identity in transnational

locations. Indeed, foregrounding the social and psychological effects on diaspora, these two romantic Bollywood hits have engaged with issues

that professional sociologists and anthropologists of the family have only latterly begun to confront (see Appadurai, 1997: esp. 43ff.).? For this reason, if for no other, such films should command our urgent—and un-

apologetic—attention.

TI. INDIANNESS: AT HOME AND ABROAD

Indians ‘at home’ have had quite contradictory attitudes to their own diaspora.‘ So long as the diaspora was constituted largely of the descendants

of indentured labour in the ex-colonies, of farmers and lumberjacks in

Canada, or—by the 1960s—of working-class immigrants in Britain, the diaspora could be both out of sight and, mostly, out of mind. But with professional middle-class emigration in the 1970s and 1980s, and the Indian community's attainment of a ‘model minority’ status in the North American context, the diaspora could no longer be ignored. Simultaneously, a new role was discovered for emigrant Indians as patriotic in-

vestors in their country’s future. The less than satisfactory outcome of the investment incentives for

Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) has by now somewhat impugned their

patriotism, which was in any case compromised by the decision to emigrate to greener pastures rather than serving the homeland, as well as by the association of some of them with Indian separatist movements on foreign soil. On their part, the NRIs tend to resent being treated like Kamadhenu, the wish-fulfilling cow, ever in milk. They also begrudge

Indian citizenship and taxation laws which, notwithstanding official government policies of economic liberalization, appear to them to match every incentive to invest in the home country’s development with bureau-

cratic obstacles, infrastructural snags, and generalized mistrust. Political

instability at the national level, the nuclearization of the South Asian region since 1990, and the impact of international terrorism have only added to the miasma.

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At the level of the imaginative, the emigré, or foreign-returned Indian, or the excessively westernized one, has been defined as the moral antithesis of the one who stays behind, the one whose values remain steadfast. This projection of the anxieties of modernization and identity loss, typically focused on women's sexuality, has been a fairly consistent theme in Indian commercial cinema and other media of popular culture over the last half-century or so (see, for example, Chakravarty, 1996: esp. Ch. 8; Prasad, 1998: esp. Ch.4; Rangoonwalla, 1979: 47; Thomas, 1985, 1996; Vasudevan, 1996). And, one should emphasize, it certainly remains so. But DDL] challenged this polarization. In this film, contemporary Indian identity is constructed not in antithesis to, but rather through, the romantic engagement, emotional travails, and psychological conflicts of protagonists who are both NRIs. As in real life for the NRI community, the crisis of identity in DDL]

(and in Pardes also, as we shall see) condenses around the marriage choi-

ces of the children of first-generation immigrants. Marriage advertisements in Indian newspapers at home and abroad bear ample witness to this dilemma of continuity as parents seek to channel and discipline the romantic aspirations of their children and to ensure the perpetuation of Indian ‘culture’, ‘tradition’, and ‘values’ into the next generation even as they continue to enjoy the material and professional advantages of expatriate living. Indian newspapers soliciting marriage advertisements play on this parental anxiety, and Sunday morning brings a large crop of advertisements seeking mates with ‘Indian values’ for Indians settled abroad. A single, randomly chosen example might suffice here: Very highly placed Hindi speaking Kayastha parents in the U.S. are seeking avery beautiful and sweet natured bride for their high achiever 27 year old son, M.B.A. from a U.S. university and employed as an international executive in a leading U.S. multinational firm. The boy is very handsome and cultured,

with Indian sensibilities and international outlook, and is seeking a girl who is similar and who can adapt to a cosmopolitan life in the upper echelons of society in different countries without relinquishing rock solid Indian values and traditions. The ideal girl will be from a very well educated, refined, gentle and loving upper or upper middle class family with strong family values and

will be able to receive and give love and respect with grace over a lifetime. Caste no bar. Please send details to. . . .° While the sexual behaviour and marriage choices of first- and secondgeneration Indian emigrants are a matter of major concern for the NRI community, both in real life and in diasporic fiction, drama, and cinema,

these are not questions that have hitherto specially concerned the home

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community. But with DDL/, their problems of being Indian ina foreign setting are projected as our problems of identity as well. Conversely, our problems of constituting a ‘moral universe’ of family relations are seen to be their problems as well. That is, the challenge of being (and, more im-

portant, remaining) Indian in a globalized world is one that must be met equally by those who stay at home and those who live abroad, by the ‘yuppie’/‘puppie’® as much as by the NRI. Second, whether at home or abroad, it is the Indian family system that is recognized as the social insti-

tution that quintessentially defines being ‘Indian’ (cf. Butcher, 1999b;

Thomas, 1996).’ Itisan institution that is now projected as portable. And itcan remain firm—or so it is fervently hoped—even when all else changes. Whether in accounting for the superior academic achievements of second-generation Indians, or for the fortunes that have propelled some of the emigrants into the roll call of the richest Britons today,® Indian ‘family values’ are proposed as the crucial markers of Indianness. (Happily, and enviably, they are also believed to correlate positively with the achievement of worldly success in competitive foreign settings.) The dissident minority within the expatriate community which questions these values from a feminist standpoint is branded as shamelessly antinational (Bhattacharjee, 1992).

At home, the iconic status of the Indian family as an institution representative of the nation was already evident in the rhetoric surrounding Hum Aapke Hain Koun. . . .! (Director Sooraj Barjatya, 1994; see Chapter 5 and Uberoi, 1996b). According to Aditya Chopra, DDL/’s director, the earlier superhit had demonstrated that ‘the public . . . reacted over-

whelmingly to the fact that the lovers . . . were willingto sacrifice their own

feelings for their families’ (Mohamed, 1996a, emphasis added). DDL

reiterates the HAHK formula quite self-consciously, but now links it explicitly to the question of defining Indian identity.” Thus, at every turning point in the film narrative, and with every existential crisis, the protago-

nists pause to remind themselves and each other of what it means to be ‘Indian’ (usually rendered as ‘Hindustani’ ). In fact, the gesture is so conspicuous that it is just short of comical.

ig I begin now by looking closely at the several dramatic situations in the cinematic narrative of DDLJ in which specific features of Indian family,

kinship, and marriage are identified—and, one should add, valorized—

as being especially Indian. Substantively speaking, whatare these features, and what are the circumstances and modalities through which they are

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Freedom and Destiny

manifested? However, as with every complex cultural text, one also finds in the narrative structure and ideological edifice of DDL] some untied

ends and discrepant notes which commend special attention. That is,

along with the insistent valorization of the Indianness of the Indian family at home and abroad one finds also a muted and inconclusive critique of the Indian ‘tradition’ (parampara). The opposition thus posited between ‘culture’ (with positive connotations) and ‘tradition (negative) echoes the

sort of distinction that some articulate members of the NRI community themselves seek to make when defining their Indian identity in multi-

cultural settings.!° What are the repressive features of this ‘tradition’, and

how are they manifested through family dynamics? And what is the line that separates the positive quality of Indianness from the impugned features of ‘tradition’? I then take up, though in rather less detail, a successor NRI-focused romance, Pardes. As already noted, this latter film bears close resemblance to DDL/,"

but it arrives at a different, and indeed more pessimistic,

assessment of the possibility of maintaining Indian identity in diaspora. That is, where DDL/ proposes that Indian identity can survive translocation, albeit requiring renewal and replenishment through periodic return to the homeland, Pardes discloses a deep ambivalence with respect to diaspora—glamorizing its material benefits and enabling possibilities, while deploring its moral consequences. The dilemma was rather neatly summed up in the review of Pardes published in the conservative Englishlanguage women’s magazine, Woman’ Era:

The dilemma of the Indian people who migrated to the land of promises,

the USA, in the 1960s and the 1970s to strike it rich there, is that they cannot

detach themselves from India, where their emotional roots are planted deep into the earth, and they cannot leave America either for all the material wellbeing it offers them.

. . So they look for excuses which would enable them to stay in America and remain Indians at the same time.'?

In its narrative closure, Pardes would appear to suggest that it is indeed possible to preserve Indian family values in diasporic settings. But other voices insist there can be at best postponement, but ultimately not avoid-

ance, of the loss of cultural identity; that, in the end, national identity has

to be territorialized. Taken together, the dissonant voices within the cinematic narratives of DDL] and Pardes, and the discrepant solutions proposed, indicate that contemporary popular cinema has emerged as an important site for engagement with the problems resulting from Indian middle-class diaspora,

The Diaspora Comes Home

185

and for the articulation of Indian identity in a globalized world (see Appa-

durai, one: a of the at this

1997: Ch.1). They also suggest that the issue is a deeply contested true dilemma to which there can be no easy solution, in the world imaginary, as also—presumably—in real life. As a cautionary note point, before proceeding with the analysis, one should be reminded

that the Indian screen also offered through these years (as it has subse-

quently) quite a range of issues, besides romance and the family, through which to construct and assert Indianness: the restoration of the pristine values of the freedom movement in the face of social and political degeneration (Hindustani); the undeclared war against terrorism and secessionism (Roja, Maachis); and the re-enacted battles to secure the country’s

territorial integrity (Border). It also offered some contrasting, and more

deeply conflictual, images of family relations (Di/).! But, as noted earlier,

the assertion and endorsement of Indian ‘family values’ in an uncertain and globalizing world has become a conspicuous and insistent theme in popular culture in the 1990s. It is this phenomenon that I seek to address here.

TI. Dicwate DULHANIA LE JAYENGE

DDL] was the first directorial venture of a very young and still media-shy

director, Aditya Chopra, made under the ‘Yashraj’ banner of his father,

the formidable and long-established Bollywood director, Yash Chopra.'4 Aditya Chopra had devised the plot and scripted the screenplay for the film,'° and ultimately directed it, since his father was not especially fired by the idea or—alternatively—since the latter had thought this film a suitable vehicle through which to ‘launch’ his son as a full-fledged director.!° The primary aim of DDL/, according to the younger Chopra, was simply ‘to make a very honest love story . . . a love story that would make it at the box office. . .. A wholesome film which I wouldn't mind seeing again and again’ (Mohamed, 1996a). Interestingly, he also wanted ‘to show the international audience that India isn'ta country of snake-charmers . . ., to acquaint them with how we Indians live, love, think, and react

today’ (ibid.)—a rather curious ambition considering how few foreigners (excluding NRIs, with whom the film was reportedly exceedingly popular'”) would be likely to volunteer to see the movie. To these Chopra added two further, if somewhat more abstract, considerations:

I was also trying to get something out of my system. I'd be quite troubled by watching those love stories in which the boy and the girl elope. I'd wonder how can they just cut themselves off from their parents who've done so much

for them? How can they be so callous? They have no right to break the hearts

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Freedom and Destiny

of their parents. I wanted to say that if your love is strong enough, your parents will be convinced about your love ultimately.

Talso wanted to comment on the position of the girl in Indian households.

In fact I’m especially proud of the scene between the girl and her mother.!® I think it describes the situation that Indian women are caught in very clearly. ‘We may be in the 1990s, but there are certain things about the Indian family structure that haven't changed at all. In this statement, one finds both endorsement of the normative order

of Indian kinship, and resistance to it from the perspective of women

(cf. Prasad, 1998: 80). This dissonance, as it reveals itself in the film nar-

rative, will be the subject of discussion in due course. The plot of DDL/ is an exceedingly simple one: indeed, it is so simple that the hero, Shah Rukh Khan, described the film as merely ‘made up of so many beautiful moments’, with ‘no story’ to it at all!!° Chopra himself claims to have deliberately restrained himself from developing intricate sub-plots in the profligate style of so many Bollywood movies, or from unnecessarily elaborating on the character of the (quasi)-’villain’ (the

heroine's jilted fiancé), the better to concentrate on the central romance (Mohamed, 1996a). I give the gist of the plot, such as it is, below: typical Bollywood. Raj (Shah Rukh Khan), the exuberant son of a very successful self-made NRI

businessman, Dharam Vir Malhotra (Anupam Kher), living in London, has

just failed his degree examination. Before joining his father in business, he plans a holiday in Europe with his college friends. Coincidentally, Simran (Kajol), the elder daughter of an NRI shopkeeper, Baldev Singh Chowdhury (Amrish Puri), has persuaded her conservative and authoritarian father to

allow her to go on a European holiday with her girlfriends, before returning

to Punjab for an arranged marriage with Kuljeet (Parmeet Sethi), son of her

father’s old friend, Ajit (Satish Shah). Temporarily separated from their

friends in Switzerland, Raj and Simran spend time together and fall in love, despite the shadow of Simran’s impending arranged marriage to Kuljeet hanging over them.

On return to London, Simran confides in her mother (Farida Jalal). Her

mother is sympathetic, but her father, when he comes to know of it, is furious

at her betrayal of his trust. The family leaves immediately for Punjab for Simran’s wedding. Sensing his son's disappointment, Raj’s father persuades him not to give

up the quest for Simran. Raj thereupon pursues Simran to Punjab, where preparations are already in motion for her marriage. Simran is not attracted to the uncouth Kuljeet, and continues to dream of Raj. Raj and Simran are

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reunited in the golden mustard fields, but Raj refuses to consider elopement, insisting that he will marry Simran only with her father’s consent and blessing. Raj insinuates himself into Kuljeet’s household (where he is incidentally identified as a suitable husband for Kuljeet’s pretty younger sister, Preeti), and thence into Baldev Singh’s household, where he tries to win the approval of

Simran’s father. On her part, meanwhile, Simran contrives to avoid ritually pledging herself to Kuljeet, secretly breaking the Karva Chauth fast with Raj.

Meanwhile, the senior Malhotra arrives on the scene to take Raj and his bride

back to London. In a sudden turn of events, the marriage date is advanced in deference to the wishes of Simran’s elderly grandmother, and a State of crisis is reached. Simran’s mother, who has come to know of Raj’ true identity, urges the two

to elope, but Raj again insists that he will marry Simran only the ‘right’ way, with her father’s approval. However, when Baldev Singh discovers that Raj is the boy with whom Simran had romanced in Europe, and also recognizes him as one of a group

of Indian boys who had once taken advantage of him in London, he orders Raj out of the house.

A defeated Raj and his father are waiting at the railway station when Kuljeet and his friends arrive there, armed with guns and sticks and seeking

revenge for Kuljeet’s humiliation. A bloody fight ensues, stopped only by the arrival on the scene of Baldev Singh and Kuljeet’s father, along with Simran and her mother.

As Raj and his father get into the train to depart, Simran pleads with her father to let her go with Raj. At the very last moment, as the train is pulling

out, her father relents. Acknowledging the sincerity of Raj’s love and his willingness to sacrifice that love for the wider interests of the family, he finally

lets go of his daughter. Simran flies into Raj’s outstretched arms.

There has been little public comment on DDL/, apart from the regu-

lar fare of film magazines. Perhaps film critics, feminists, and public

conscience-keepers of the left and the right had already spent themselves

in commenting on the commercial success, unprecedented popularity, and ideologically conservative agenda of the rather similar HAHK the previous year (see Chapter 5). Understandably, under the circumstances, such comment as there has been on DDLJ has focused on the extent to which the film resembles (in general) or differs (in detail) from HAHK.

It is almost impossible to avoid doing likewise. Like HAHK, which Aditya Chopra has confessed to greatly admiring,

DDL] was a stupendous success, outdoing HAHK’s

takings within the

year and confirming that the commercial success of such movies was no

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mere ‘flash in the pan’ but raj Productions followed, tion strategies developed video rights and policing

evidence ofa decisive turn in public taste. Yashmore or less, the canny publicity and distribuby the Barjatyas: withholding the release of video piracy, thereby continuing to draw the

middle classes back to the cinema for wholesome entertainment (S. Chatterjee, 1996). Close observers have noted some minor differences in

the producers’ promotional strategies, reflecting on the slightly different (home-grown or cosmopolitan) audiences they were presumed to be aiming at; but this may be making rather a fine point of things (see Dorai-

swamy, 1996). In terms of content, both HAHK and DDL] provide what is regarded as clean, non-violent, ‘family’ entertainment, in contrast

to the violence and revenge fare that had dominated Bollywood films of the 1980s and that still continues as a major idiom in Hindi popular cinema.”° And in either case they do so by foregrounding marriage rituals and festivities, a strategy which, as I have pointed out in the case of HAHK, has the additional function of naturalizing the song-dance items and making them seem less artificial to sophisticated and westernized tastes (see also D. Gupta, 1996). That is, the songs and dances that are an

almost obligatory ingredient in commercial Hindi cinema appear to blend more ‘naturally’ into the film narrative. Ona

more critical note, it is obvious that both films endorse glamor-

ous lifestyles, and effortless and guiltless consumption (see Bharucha,

1995; also Dickey, 1996: 147).?1 Unlike HAHK, where Lord Krishna

himself (assisted by Tuffy the dog) joins the action at crucial moments and where religiosity is very much in the air, religion per se does not play much ofa role in DDL/.” But in terms of its communal cast, the superficially more secular and cosmopolitan DDL] may well appear more sinister. For here we have contemporary Punjab fervently eulogized (‘mera desh, mera Punjab’) and soundly caricatured (the golden fields of mustard flowers, makki di roti and sarson da sag, a \ot of eating, drinking, camaraderie and jollity, machismo and male bonding, hunting and horse-riding”*), with

no mention whatsoever of the undeclared civil war that had driven a

wedge between Hindus and Sikhs in the region, in the nation and in the diasporic communities as well. HAHK may have hada ‘token’ Sikh decorating the front line of the boys’ chorus; Raja Hindustani (Indian King, 1997) may have rehabilitated the comic figure of the erstwhile ‘sardarji’ [Sikh] jokes; Maachis (Matches, 1996) may have confronted the problem

of terrorist violence head-on . . .; but DDL/ returns to the villages and mustard fields of Punjab without a single Sikh, or for that matter AK-47

rifle, in sight!

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Assuming a mimeticist point of view, DDL/s erasure of the harsh fact

of communal conflict (along with caste and class differences) would ap-

pear to impair the film’s authenticity as a social document. On the other hand, such gestures of systematic erasure are themselves significant social facts, contributing importantly to the construction of a utopian vision of social order. That is, they are critical pointers to the film’s broader ideological agenda (see Prasad, 1998). In practical terms, they also allow the director to focus centrally and without unnecessary diversion on the elementary aspects of romance, the transference of a woman from one man (and one family) to another, and on the exploration, through this romance, of the existential dilemmas of being Indian, at home as well as abroad. It is to these that we now turn. TV. ROMANCE, INDIAN STYLE

As already remarked, throughout the film narrative of DDL], the chief protagonists are constantly reminded of the moral responsibility of being ‘Indian’. Significantly, these reminders constitute major signposts and crisis-points in the unfolding of the film narrative. I set them out here in their order of occurrence: (1) Inthe opening scene of the film, providing the background for the

titles and credits, Baldev Singh Chowdhury is shown walking through Trafalgar Square en route to his shop and, as is obviously his wont, feeding the pigeons. Talking to himself, he reflects: This is London, the biggest city in the world. T’ve been here now for 22 years.

Every day I pass down this road and it asks me: “Who is Chowdhury

Baldev Singh? Where has he come from? What is he doing here?”

What can I reply? I have spent so many years of my life here, and still this land is alien to me.

Nobody knows me here, except these pigeons.

Like me, they don’t have a country; they go to the place where they get

food. Now necessity has enchained me.

But one day, definitely, I will return to my country!

Thescene cuts briefly to golden mustard fields, icon of Punjab, a colourful

Punjabi folk dance, and Baldev Singh in the mustard fields, feeding his

pigeons. As is shortly evident by a metonymic juxtapositioning, the questions, ‘Who am I?’, ‘Why am I here?’ have clearly been provoked not only by

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the crisis of Baldev Singh's middle age, but also by the coming into matur-

ity of his elder daughter, Simran. Our first glimpse of Simran at her home, hair blown across her face, conveys an impression of barely controlled sensuality. She has been writing love poems—to no one in particular, she assures her mother in confidence—but the film shortly interleaves cameos of her life with Raj’s to establish their destiny with each other against the background of the very sensually rendered song, Mere khwabon men jo aye (‘Someone has come to tease me in my dreams; ask him to come before me’). The con-

nection of Baldev Singh's identity crisis with Simran’s budding sensuality is further underlined by his joyful reaction to the coincidental arrival that very evening of Ajit’s letter, redolent with the flavours of Punjab (the

famous makki di roti and sarson da sag!), renewing the proposal for

Simran’s marriage to his son, Kuljeet.

(2) Simran, reading out Ajit’s letter to her father, suddenly breaks off

and runs to her room. Her mother intuitively realizes that news of the proposal has upset her daughter, though Simran has been aware of the

possibility of marriage to Kuljeet since she was a little girl. But her father interprets her moodiness as the ‘shyness’ appropriate to a modest young girl facing the prospect of marriage and, of course, mature sexuality: B.S.

See, This Even You

Lajo, she is feeling shy. is our culture. . . . Indian culture. today a daughter feels shy in front of her father. see, I haven't failed.

I have kept India alive here in the heart of London.

In the privacy of her room, Simran tears up her love poems, the record of

her unspecified longing. (3) Raj and his friends, on a night out together, pull up to buy some beer from Baldev Singh’s shop just as he is closing for the day. Baldev Singh refuses one of the boys, but Raj tries another tack. Pleading a migraine, for which he needs medicine, Raj appeals to their shared identity as ‘Indians’ (‘Hindustani’). Baldev Singh relents and obliges him, but when

Raj then tries to buy some beer, Baldev Singh realizes that he has been taken advantage of. He is furious, and demands to know how such ruf-

fians can dare to call themselves ‘Indian’. Raj makes off with the beer anyhow, tossing the payment on to the counter. Baldev Singh is still fuming

over the incident when he reaches home. Clearly, boyish exuberance is a challenge to the deadly serious role of being an emigré Indian. It is also an index of a liminal stage in the male

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life-cycle—the ‘boys will be boys’, male-bonding, ‘I hate girls’ phase of flirtatious and teasing relations with the opposite sex, prior to acceptance of the responsibilities of adult heterosexuality. As will be seen, the attainment of mature adulthood, scripted as acceptance of Indian identity, is exemplified in the first instance in the exercise of sexual se/f-control (cf. Uberoi, 1996d: xx).

(4) As their paths cross in Europe, Simran and Raj establish a teasing, attraction/hostility relation with each other. Thanks to Raj’s pranks, Simran misses her train to Zurich, and attempts to hitch a ride there. The

Swiss police are questioning her, when Raj comes by in his car and claims her as his wife. She petulantly accepts a lift from him under the circumstances, but they gradually open out with each other and confirm that they are, indeed, both Indians. (5) This confirmation of shared Indian origins is only the beginning of a major test which is, arguably, the most dramatic episode in the first

half of the film. Their car having broken down, Raj and Simran are forced to spend the night available. Mindful Simran stalks off to to eat something or

together in a small hotel where only a single room is of the compromising situation she has got into, the barn. Raj joins her there. He tries to persuade her share some rum with him, but she instead berates him

for daring to drink in front of an Indian girl. He appears to drop off to sleep. As the snow falls through the roof and she shivers with cold and hunger, she eyes the rum bottle and fantasizes an intimately romantic relationship with Raj (the song, Zara sa jhum lun main). In the morning, to her consternation, Simran wakes up back in the hotel room, dressed in Raj’s pyjamas. Raj, bringing her tea, comments that she looks even more beautiful in the morning, adding for good

measure that this must have been her ‘first time’. Greatly perturbed, she demands to know what had happened in the night, and he teasingly leads

her to believe the worst. ‘What happened last night is what is meant to

happen,’ he declares, revealing a cluster of lipstick ‘love-bites’ on his bare chest. She becomes quite hysterical. Suddenly, Raj stops joking and

becomes serious. Looking into her eyes he swears that, rogue though he may appear to be, he is after all ‘Hindustani’, and is well aware of what an

Indian girl’s ‘honour’ (izzat) means to her: ‘Nothing happened last night to make usashamed; I was only joking with you.’ She concludes with relief that she has not lost her virginity after all, while Raj on his part promises not to make such upsetting jokes again.

(6) Something changes between Raj and Simran after the episode in

the hotel, though Simran’s disclosure that she is engaged to be married

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casts a pall over the developing relationship. Learning of it, Raj expresses surprise that Simran could think of commending her whole life to some-

one she had never met:?° S.

I don't feel the need [to meet him]. My father has seen him. He’s my father’s friend’s son. In our society [India], that’s what happens.

Nonetheless, before they rejoin their friends, Raj discloses his love for Simran.

(7) Back in Punjab, where marriage preparations are well under way, Simran and Raj are reunited. Simran begs Raj to take her away, but Raj declares: No, I have not come here to steal you. True, I was born in London. But I am an Jndian.

I will persevere till I marry you, and your father himself will put your hand in mine.

(8) At a gathering at the Chowdhurys, Rajs father meets Baldev Singh. The senior Malhotra identifies himself as ‘Hindustan?’: My country, my land! Everything is available [over there], but not this

culture. .. . Everywhere I go, I have India in my heart.

He announces that he has come to India to fetch Raj’s bride.

(9) Simran contrives to avoid drinking water and taking food from

Kuljeet at the breaking of the Karva Chauth fast. She is discovered by her mother as she completes a ritual bonding, exchanging food with Raj on the terrace. At the sight of them together, her mother urges Simran not to sacrifice herself for ‘tradition’ (as she herself had done). Handing over

abundle of jewels, she advises the two of them to elope. Again, Raj refuses: R.

Mother....I

lost my own mother when I was very young.

But I remember one thing she said to me: ‘There are two paths in life. One is right and one is wrong.

Maybe one has to suffer a lot in choosing the right path, but there is success in the end. That doesn't happen with the wrong path.’ I want my Simran with her father’s consent. Now don’t you worry. She's my responsibility.

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‘You don’t know my husband,’ the mother warns. ‘But your husband

doesn’t know me,’ replies Raj. The stage is now set for the denouement.

(10) Raj seeks to win Baldev Singh’s affection by sharing with him his

early morning communion with the pigeons in the mustard fields. In one

of these encounters, Baldev Singh confides how he has loved to feed

pigeons ever since he was a small boy. This gives Raj an opening, and he asks if there is any difference between the pigeons of Punjab and those of London. Baldev Singh replies: ‘I know the pigeons here, and they know me. We are of the same soil. The London ones are foreign to me.’ Raj replies: ‘Maybe you haven't got to know them [i.e. the London ones] pro-

perly yet.’ That Raj is the metaphorical ‘London’ pigeon, seeking recognition for his true self in contrast to the local pigeon is immediately made clear. A shot rings out. Kuljeet gallops by with his rifle in his hand and a wounded pigeon flutters to the earth. Raj picks it up and dresses its wounds with the healing powers of the soil of Punjab, disclosing his identity as the boy of the London episode and asking Baldev Singh's forgiveness. (11) In the final showdown between Baldev Singh and Raj, Baldev Singh recalls this conversation, and accuses Raj of insinuating himself into the household to steal both his daughter and his honour. In a grand soliloquy, which fortunately did not make the cinema audiences either hoot or titter (indeed, it was touch-and-go, according to the director [Mohamed, 1996a]), Raj renounces his claim over Simran, and returns

her to her father’s care. Once again, his sentiments echo those that he had earlier characterized as being quintessentially ‘Indian’: Our mother and father gave us life and love.

We have no right to disobey them. [to Simran] I’ve got no right over you.

Your father was right. I’m a tramp (awara).

I should have known love can't fix everything. [to Baldev Singh] Here, she’s yours.

It is this simultaneous assertion of love and of the willingness to renounce it for the sake of honouring parental authority that ultimately persuades Baldev Singh to relent and forfeit his personal bond of honour with his friend Ajit. He commends Simran into Raj’s outstretched arms. Comment

Asalready noted, Baldev Singh’s anxiety as an ‘Indian’ takes an acute form at the moment when his elder daughter is sexually mature and ripe for

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marriage. This makes it incumbent on him to arrange her marriage with-

out delay. The arrangement takes the form of the revival of a ‘deal’ made

between two friends when their children were infants. Baldev Singh's honour (izza#) is now implicated not only in fulfilling his commitment to his friend, but in ensuring that his daughter's virtue is untainted. He is most reluctant to allow her to go on a holiday with her friends in Europe, and relents only when Simran promises that she will give him no cause for complaint. The discovery of Simran’s European romance with Raj threatens Baldev Singh’s honour as an ‘Indian’ in several ways. First, it challenges his authority as a patriarch; his daughter has been disobedient to his will, and

must be corrected. Second, it threatens his sacred duty as a Hindu father to gift his daughter in marriage, for the troth involves only the young couple, Simran and Raj. Third, it challenges the principle of ‘alliance’, whereby marriage is construed as a union between two families through the ‘exchange’ of women, rather than just an arrangement between two individuals setting up a new conjugal family together. Fourth, by compromising Simran’s virtue, her purity as a gift-object is depreciated, and his own honour therewith. The whole effort of the film thereafter is to provide reassurance on all these counts such that Raj succeeds in winning Simran not by eliminating or displacing her father but by becoming ‘Indian’ himself in his commitment to the crucial principles of the Indian culture of kinship. Thus, Raj refuses to defy Simran’s father, but works to bring him round. More

important, he does not contest the father’s authority to bestow her. Twice

given the chance to elope, he refuses to do so and vows that he will marry

Simran only the ‘right’ way, the ‘Indian’ way, that is, with the father’s active consent. This tribute to paternal authority is rationalized as ‘gratitude’ to the parents who gave her life and brought her up. It is Raj’s stubborn stand on this principle that almost spells personal disaster, while at the same time constructing him asa true Indian, respectful of parental authority to the point of self-denial. (Ultimately, of course, his willingness to make this ‘sacrifice’ stands to his credit.)

Director Aditya Chopra's commitment to the authority of parental will over individual freedom of choice and youthful desire has already been quoted—in words that are in fact almost identical to those mouthed by Raj in his statements first to Simran and then, more elaborately, to her mother, as justification for his refusal to elope (see below). The final, and

even more elaborate statement, eyeball to eyeball with the enraged Baldev Singh, is also to the same effect. Reading backwards one recalls that Raj

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had earlier identified these sentiments as springing from his Indian heritage. Apart from the director, the film's hero Shah Rukh Khan also echoed

the point that gratitude to parents should take precedence over individual self-gratification. Interviewed after receiving the Filnfare Best Actor

award for his role, Shah Rukh Khan, in an interesting conflation of his offscreen and on-screen roles, stressed his personal experience of the same

moral dilemmas (as were faced by Raj in DDL/) in the course of his inter-

communal courtship of his wife-to-be, Gauri. It may be significant here that the script was supposedly written with Shah Rukh Khan in mind for the role of Raj. Q. _: How close did you feel to Raj? SRK : I’m like Raj in the film. I live recklessly like him. Like Raj who was

so confident about winning over Simran’s parents, I knew I could win

over her parents and Gauri would be mine. Q.__: You had to go through all those troubles even in real life? SRK : Sort of. Gauri’s parents were dead against the marriage. Her mother threatened to commit suicide. Her father called me over and said it wouldn't work out... . They're a typical Punjabi family. Just like Simran's. . . . I managed to patao [butter up] all her relatives one by one... .

Q. _: What about the trying times? SRK : Ya, things weren't working out. Gauri was locked up at home... . Like Simran in Dilwale . . . she would keep telling me, ‘Shah Rukh, you don’t know my parents... You take things so lightly’, and I would tell her that things would be alright.” Q.__: You never thought of eloping? SRK : No, like Raj and Simran we never wanted to go against the wishes of our parents. The thought of running away from home never cros-

sed our minds. But we knew we'd get married for sure.

When I met Gauri’s parents, I just couldn't get myself to say that I loved their daughter. That, I thought, was a stupid thing to say ... because J could never love their daughteras much as they loved

her. They had given birth to and brought up Gauri... . My love would never be a substitute for their love (emphasis added).”” Initially it appears that Raj’s success in marrying Simran would subvert

the principle of marriage as alliance between two families (rather than

between two individuals). After all, the (chaste) consummation of young

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love takes place in a setting—neither his home nor hers, neither London nor Punjab—where the protagonists have temporarily shed both their families and their respective peer groups: it is just between themselves. And God, of course. But the satisfactory conclusion of the romance in marriage requires the active participation of the parents. Raj is in fact as quick to involve his father as Simran is to involve her mother, and it is Raj’s father, identifying with his son, who urges him not to give up his quest just because Simran is promised to someone else. The senior Malhotra doesn’t leave matters there. He shortly proceeds to Punjab, announcing that he has come to fetch Raj’s bride home and lending a hand in various ways (including showing up Kuljeet asa rather nasty piece of work). When he finally meets

the lovely Simran, who spontaneously drops at his feet,”* he actively gives his approval: “Terrific, fantastic, done,

challo [let’s go].’ True, Baldev

Singh’s good friend Ajit is displaced as the affine of first choice, but the principle of affinity as a value’ (to use Louis Dumont’ apt term [1983]) shows every sign of robust renewal. Finally, when it comes to the point when Raj has Simran alone and drunk, desirous and very desirable, he recalls that he is after all an ‘Indian’

and that he understands what an Indian girl’s ‘honour’ means to her. It may be remarked here that Simran’s ‘honour’ resides in her ‘virginity’, understood in the narrowest physiological sense, for Raj has already undressed and ravished her. Similarly, what passed between them in a subsequent night together in the mustard fields is left to the imagination,

but the assumption is of continued chastity: at least in its most literal figuration.” This is all consistent with the ‘blushing’ reply of Aditya Chopra to an interviewer's question about the ‘sexual permissiveness’ of the 1990s: ‘Sex is there . . .,” he conceded. ‘It’s on everyone’s mind. You just have to know when to exercise se/control and not take advantage of the other person’ (Mohamed,

1996a, emphasis added). The remark is interesting for its

valorization of maleself-discipline,*° whereas, at least going by the text of DDL, female sexuality requires either control, or else self-denial by the male ‘other’. V. THE TYRANNY OF “TRADITION” Let us now retrace our steps to chart the undertow of resentment and critique that lies beneath the accepted and normative culture of Indian

kinship. I single out four episodes in particular. Significantly, in each case the perspective is that of female characters.

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(1) Simran is trying to win over her father to allow her to go to Europe with her friends. She first impresses him with her religiosity (he discovers her, early morning, bathed and dressed in a sari, praying at the family

shrine), confirming in his mind his success in instilling Indian values in children raised in a foreign land (see above). Simran then pleads with her

father in the following terms: She is about to leave for Punjab, in deference

to her father’s wishes, to marry a man she has never met. And she may never come back. Before she does so, she would like to visit Europe, to

have just one month of her own life for herself, to fulfil her own desires. She promises that she will do nothing to embarrass her father.

The suggestion here is, first, that a girl’s desires are of little account when it comes to arranging her marriage. Though we (that is, the audience) now know, and her mother knows, of Simran’s longing for a still un-

specified object of desire, the father sees only the modesty (sharam, ‘shame’) proper to a well brought-up Indian girl discussing the prospect of her marriage with her father. Nor is there space for her exercise of freewill in the matter of mate selection: the choice of groom is entirely her father’s, and her abiding by that choice a question of his personal honour. Itis in this context of the negation of both desire and agency that she begs

for just one month of her life to be herself, between her present role as daughter and her impending role as daughter-in-law.

(2) Following the intimate incident in the Swiss hotel, already des-

cribed at some length for its crucial importance in defining male Indianness, Raj confides to Simran that he is still waiting for the girl of his dreams who will one day materialize before him. He seeks to know if Simran hasa similar longing. Implicitly critiquing her own lack of agency (for she has, after all, been brought up in the same foreign setting as Raj),

she replies matter-of-factly:

Pron

S. There is no place for any unknown, unseen person in my dreams. I’m already engaged to someone in India. Oh. What’s he like? He must be very handsome. I don't know. I have never seen him.

You haven't seen the person you are going to marry? I don't feel the need to. My father has seen him. He's my father’s

~

friend’s son.

How can you think of spending your life with a person you don’t know, whom you've never seen. Can you commit your whole life to him?

S. With us, that’s what happens.

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(3) Simran’s grandmother observes to her father that Simran does not seem as happy as a girl should be at the prospect of her marriage. Her father assures his mother that there is no problem—that Simran is merely unfamiliar with the place, the people and the food, and so on. But, recalling Simran’s European romance, he tells his wife in no uncertain terms

that Simran had better forget the European affair:or ele. . . ./ Meanwhile, Simran’s mother takes her daughter aside and cautions her: M.

When I was a little girl, my grandfather used to tell me that there is no difference between a man and a woman. Both have the same

rights. But once I grew up I understood that it was not the case. My

education was stopped so that my brothers’ education could be con-

tinued; their education was more important than mine. After that,

I sacrificed my life; first as a daughter and then as a daughter-in-law. But when you were born I took a vow that you would never have

to make the same sacrifices I did. I wanted you to live your own life.

But, Simran, I was wrong. I forgot that a woman has no right to make

such a pledge. Women are born to make sacrifices for men, but not

S.

the other way round. I beg you, give up your happiness and forget him [the boy]. Your father will never allow it.

You're right, mother. I was being foolish. I don’t even know whether he [Raj] loves me or not. My father has done so much for my happiness. Can't I make a little sacrifice for his happiness?

This scene, which was regarded by the director and the actors as a crucial and challenging one, is interesting in two respects. First, though it is not explicitly stated, the mother’s instinctive identification with her

daughter's longings and with her present dilemma (being married to someone against her will) suggests that she herself may have had a similar

and never forgotten desire in her own life,?! though she has been a dutiful

and loving wife and mother for many years. (There is a hint, justa hint, of transgression here.) Second, the condemnation of the injustice of

‘tradition’ (parampara) is paradoxically the very ground on which the mother asks Simran to give up her own aspirations and ‘sacrifice’ her

personal happiness. Simran is asked to be obedient to a tradition which they both recognize as unjust—for the simple reason that, realistically speaking, women in this society have no other option. The result is that

Simran tells her mother to convey to her father her willingness to go ahead with the marriage to Kuljeet. Actress Kajol identified with this defeatism; maybe not personally, but on behalf of many girls she had known.

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I will never forget that scene where Simran tells Faridaji [her mother] that

she’s ready to get married. And there was that scene where I break down [as

Raj leaves her house]. I don’t get hysterical or anything. . . . I just seem to

give up. It was almost as if I don't care what happens to me anymore. I just give up, like many girls do in real life when they don't have an option. I must have met 120 they have not always I think Dulhania . . . pens to their children

girls like Simran, girls who have fallen in love... . But seen a happy ending like the characters in the film. also made thousands of parents think about what hapwhen they try to force them into marriage with some-

one they don’t know . .

., let alone love.>?

(4) Simran’s mother has discovered her on the terrace in the moon-

light, breaking the Karva Chauth fast with Raj, and she realizes that this

must be the boy Simran had fallen in love with. She now repeats her condemnation of Indian tradition, but with a different conclusion this time: defiance, not submission.

I won't let what happened to me happen to my daughter. She will not be

just a daughter or a daughter-in-law. She will live her own life... . You need not sacrifice your love.

[to Raj] My blessings. She will be happy with you. Take her away. I’ll take care of the rest. :

But, as already noted, Raj declines to run away with Simran and insists he must win her father’s approval. In so doing, he identifies with patriarchal authority, with the ‘law of the father, and distances himself from the socially subversive and sentimental complicity of mother and daughter. Comment In the subtext of DDL/, when women ‘speak’, it is to criticize a culture of

kinship in which there is no space or time when they can legitimately be the subjects of their own desire and destiny: they are first daughters, then daughters-in-law, the objects of exchange between men. Atthe same time,

when they sacrifice their personal desires, it is not seen as an assertion of individual agency, but simply as recognition of the fact that they have ‘no option’ in a situation which is inherently unjust.

The position is different for men. When faced with a conflict between

individual desire and conformity to social values, they may choose to

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sacrifice the former, but this exercise of agency is ultimately ennobling, not diminishing.>> The happy ending that can result from the resolution of this conflict—parental endorsement of a romantic relationship—is for them at once an affirmation of individual agency and a consummation of desire. For women, the resolution of the crisis is just ‘good luck’. As Kajol acknowledged, Simran was simply luckier than most other Indian girls in real life: She gave in to the system, yet she was happily able to achieve the object of her desire. VI. Parpes: REINSTITUTING THE CONTRADICTION OF INDIA AND THE WEST

DDL/Ibelongs not only ina genealogy of immensely successful ‘clean’ and ‘simple’ romantic dramas, with gorgeous backdrops, catchy music, and old-fashioned ‘family values’. It was also, as subsequent releases have demonstrated, one of a new series of popular movies in which the NRI is positioned as hero. This in itself seems to bea social trend worth watching and reflecting on—a testimony at once to the enabling opportunities of the liberalized economy of the 1990s, and to the emergence of a new transnational Indian elite class as the reference group for the upwardly mobile Indian middle classes (Arvind Das, 1997; also Appadurai, 1997: Ch. 1; Prasad, 1998: esp. 81-8).

Now, exotic foreign locales are nothing new in Indian popular cinema,

and there have been times when they have seemed positively de rigueur for enhancing the visual pleasures of a film, and its song-dance items in

particular.*4 But DDL/ had introduced an element of novelty in this

practice by its attempt to define Indian identity for Indians both at home and abroad through the emotional travails of a young NRI couple in love, rather than through the more conventional confrontation of Eastern versus Western cultures and values. Following soon after DDL/, however,

Subhash Ghai’s Pardes (1997) reverted once again to the old formula.

Before commenting further on this film by way of both comparison and

contrast with DDL/, one must perforce, and with the usual disclaimers,

try to provide a brief summary of the plot:

Kishori Lal (Amrish Puri), an NRI millionaire, has returned from America

to find a bride for his son, Rajiv (Apoorva Agnihotri), brought up in the US.

He selects Kusum Ganga (Mahima Chaudhary), the young and lovely daughter of his old friend, Suraj Dev, whom he meets by chance. Back in the States, Kishori Lal asks Arjun (Shah Rukh Khan), his adopted

son, to escort Rajiv back to India to meet the girl and persuade him to marry

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her. Rajiv, a bit of a playboy, is reluctant, but when he meets Ganga he agrees to the marriage on the condition that Ganga first try out living in the US for a month to see if she can adjust to the change. Suraj Dev’s family members

are initially disapproving, but relent when Kishori Lal assures them that Ganga and Rajiv can get formally engaged first, and that an aunt can

chaperone Ganga to the US.

Once there, Ganga is dismayed to discover Rajiv's weakness for cigarettes, drink, and women, and to learn of his earlier physical involvement with a

long-term girlfriend. She comes to rely increasingly on Arjun who, despite his unacknowleged feelings for her, continues to try to smoothen things over between Rajiv and Ganga in deference to his foster-father’s commission.

Their closeness is noted by Arjun's friend, who urges him to declare his love; and by a malicious aunt, who sows suspicion in Kishori Lal’s mind. At the malicious aunt's insistence, Kishori Lal sends Arjun away, and Rajiv and Ganga go on a trip together to Las Vegas. Here Rajiv attempts to rape

Ganga. She knocks him unconscious and runs away, but is located by Arjun

who escorts her back to India.

Incensed, Rajiv and Kishori Lal pursue the couple to India. Ganga’s father attempts to kill Arjun for compromising his honour. Arjun draws his own blood on the sword, and leaves, declaring his and Ganga’s innocence.

At a Sufi shrine, while qawalis sing of divine love, a fight takes place between the rival ‘brothers’. Kishori Lal and Ganga’ father arrive to intervene. Though Arjun concedes that he has fallen in love with Ganga, he denies

betraying his foster father’s faith and maintains that he has never laid hands on Ganga. Ganga displays the signs of Rajiv's brutal attempted rape.

Recognizing the truth and purity of Arjun's love for Ganga, Kishori Lal proposes that she should marry not Rajiv, who has proved himself unworthy,

but Arjun. Father and foster-son, and father and daughter, are then happily reconciled.

Like DDL/, Pardes has been exceedingly popular with NRI audi-

ences,?> though its commercial performance in India was somewhat

uneven through different circuits of the movie distribution network, and different constituencies of the viewing public. This unevenness of response may represent a degree of public saturation with the ‘clean’ NRI-

as-hero formula (at least, that is what the critics and distributors seem to

think), but it may also express popular discomfort with the rather un-

satisfactory narrative closure thatPardes ultimately arrives at: the storyline hinges on just too many ‘unbelievable’ details, a disappointed viewer

assured me.36

Detailing all the instances in Pardes where Indianness is directly invoked, as was just done in the case of DDL], would be a thoroughly

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tedious and nearly impossible exercise, for the contradiction of India and

the West permeates and structures the whole text. This was not quite the case with DDL/: Though set in the NRI community and show-casing the scenic attractions of England and the Continent, Aditya Chopra had used this exotic background, as he put it, simply ‘to create the character of a

rigid father’,>” that is, someone whose patriarchal ‘rigidity’ in the context

ofaromantic drama is given plausibility by his situational alienation from his roots:

I felt that the character of Amrishji [i.e. played by Amrish Puri] could be

shown to be far away from his roots. In a sense he is a displaced person and

yet his outlook is very stubborn. Without intending to, I touched upon the

issue of the major generation gap that exists between Indian immigrants and their children (Mohamed,

1996a).

Pardes, on the contrary, explicitly problematizes the opposition of India and the West in its narrative structure which unfolds through a series of situations of conflict between characters marked by their different degrees of Indianness. Thus, there is the aptly named heroine, Ganga, a girl so innocent of the larger world that she has never been out of her village. There is the foreign-born and bred Rajiv, who smokes, drinks, and womanizes, and despises everything about India and Indians.There is the ‘Little Master’, Arjun, Rajiv's foster-brother, whose roots are still in India

and whose dream girl conforms to the ideal picture of the Indian woman

(the picturization of the song, Meri mehbooba, evoking the ambience of

‘calendar art’ renderings of Indian womanhood). There is the millionaire

Kishori Lal, 35 years resident in the US, for whom every visit to India feels

like return to the love and security of the mother’s lap. A caricature of the nostalgic NRI, his ‘long-distance patriotism’ (Arvind Das, 1997) is now

focused on his self-deceiving search for an Indian bride for his son Rajiv;

he needs Ganga to remove the accumulated toxins of life in America. As a villain (of the comic more than the menacing variety), there is even a phoney NRI, Amir Chand, whose claim to the prestigious status of NRI is compromised by the fact that his stint abroad was merely in Sri Lanka. As will have been evident in the plot summary, there are two major crises in the storyline of Pardes, both of which are privileged moments for reflection on the problematics of transnational Indian identity. The first

critical point is reached when Rajiv tries to force his fiancé, Ganga, to

make love to him. After all, he remonstrates with her, they are going to get married in a few days. Besides, his American friends all have sex with

their girlfriends and see nothing wrong in it. Rebuffed by Ganga, who

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insists that they should wait for the consecration of their relationship through the sacrament of marriage (the ‘seven pheras’), Rajiv gives voice to his contempt for India as a land of shit, of hypocrisy, and of sexual double standards; a land where people mouth sanctimonious platitudes

about chastity but where the population goes on increasing anyhow.”® ‘It

stinks,’ he adds for good measure. ‘How dare you insult my India!,’ Ganga screams at him as she sends him flying. A furious Rajiv then forces himself on her until she manages to knock him out and flee. The second crisis is the film's dénouement. Following a bloody fight between Rajiv and Arjun, Rajiv is exposed for his assault on Ganga’s chastity asa person morally unworthy to call himselfan ‘Indian’ (‘Hindustani’): ‘Go back to America,’ he is told, ‘that’s where you belong.’ For his part, too, Kishori Lal is exposed as someone living a lie, vainly trying to stem

the process of Americanization in his family by marrying his playboy son toan innocent Indian girl. And Arjun is revealed as the true hero, his love

for the heroine expressed in, and ennobled by, his exercise of sexual self

restraint. Though his heart registers his love almost independently of his

will (the song, Yeh dil, diwana), he restrains himself from declaring his

love, first out of loyalty to his foster father’s commission to bring about

the marriage of Rajiv and Ganga, and second—even when he has the op-

portunity—because he is a true Indian in his respect for the sacred institution of Indian (Hindu) marriage.

Initially a mediator between Rajiv and Ganga, Arjun’s ultimate victory in the love triangle is testimony to his mediating position between India

and the West.? He can translate one for the other, and combines in

himself the best of both worlds. Though his future will presumably lie in

America, he remains emotionally and morally an Indian, as his dedication

to building a music school in India in his father’s memory and his spontaneous choice of a pure Indian girl as love object both indicate. Arjun’s true affinity with the motherland contrasts with that of his foster-father. ‘In America,’ Kishori Lal expansively informs his astonished foreign friends as they wonder at the perfection of the Taj Mahal, ‘love is give and take. But in India, love means give and give.’ But Kishori Lal’s Indianness has been irrevocably corrupted by his wealth and power. His arrogant self-deception leads him to believe that he can re-Indianize his spoiled son by marrying him to an Indian girl. The women in his family

know better, however. Whether kindly, like the bua (FZ) Krishna, or nasty, like the peevish caci (paternal aunt [FyBW]), Neeta, they can see

that preserving Indian family values through the challenges of diaspora is ultimately an unsustainable ambition. One can only ‘adjust’ to this fact

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as best one can, while enjoying the compensatory material benefits of living in the West. Even the pure Ganga, they warn, will sooner or later have to become one of ‘them’.

VII. ‘AMERICAN Dreams, INDIAN Sout’*? The voices of women are not the only interrogative notes that are first registered, and then repressed, as Pardes proceeds towards narrative closure, for the film explores not only the problematics of love and sexual desire in the context of diaspora, but the problematic desire for diaspora p

er Se.

On the one hand, in matters big and small, Pardes is manifestly an

exhibition of Indian patriotism even as it is an affirmation of Indian familism.*! Released to coincide with the celebration of 50 years of Indian Independence (it begins and ends with the banner tribute, ‘Long Live India: Celebrating 50 Years of Independence’), it prominently displays the tricolour logo of the anniversary celebrations; it even, rather implausibly, endorses the national carrier, Air-India! The mood is captured in one of the film's most popular songs, J love India:* T’ve seen London, T’ve seen Paris,

T’ve seen Japan.

T’ve seen Michael,

T’ve seen Elvis, I’ve seen them all, beloved. But in the whole universe,

there’s none like Hindustan.

In this world India is like the jewel on the forehead of the bride... I love my India,

I love my India.

The song is initially sung, very early on in the film, by Kishori Lal, remonstrating with the America-worshipping children of Suraj Devs family. Its background (of mountains, rivers, palaces, forts, Hardwar and

Rishikesh, an idol of Lord Krishna, verdant fields, a beautiful young girl

ripe for love, cute children, a large happy family bursting with patriotic

joy) recalls national television's promotional imagery of India as both a

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charming tourist destination and as the embodiment of patriotic sentiments transcending regional and communal differences.*? But the familiar sights and nostalgic sentiments of J love India are subverted by the seductive visual splendour of America that unfolds in the second half of the film. As Ganga looks down in awe at the lights of New York, we hear in the background the exultant beat of a pop song, My first day in the USA (sung in English by Hema Sardesai), which tells a different story and indexes a different desire: the new immigrant’s desire for freedom, for opportunity, for the living out of fantasies—in America: On my way to a new place A whole new world and new ways. So many questions on my mind Pll find answers here though every time. America, America.

There's a fascination of things to come

And no doubt now can be done.

I feel a sense of freedom up above I know this is where I'll find love.

America, America.

Tm finally here in America It’s where I want to be. I'm finally here, with my fantasies This is where I’ll find my destiny. Destiny, destiny.

Improbably, as though to neutralize the seductive spell of America, this triumphant paean to the promised land is framed at either end by a chanted invocation to the Hindu trinity, Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva (an extraordi-

nary instancing of musical fusion in the age of globalization), and followed shortly afterwards by Ganga’ rendering of J love India for an

Indian embassy function. But the splendour of Pardes’ visual imagery of

America ensures that the truth of America as the land of desire and the desired land cannot be entirely suppressed. In sum, then, the narrative structure of Pardes is semiotically dependent on the contradiction of India and the West, a contradiction which

is resolved through the agency of a hero who embodies the best of both

worlds and exemplifies the possibility, howsoever utopian, of the retention of Indianness in diaspora. But other voices—and they are, once

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again, women's voices—warn that such a solution is unrealistic, unstable, and ultimately unsustainable into the next generation, notwithstanding the hero's marriage to a heroine who is Indian to the core. These voices,

contrariwise, foretell the depletion and alienation that must inevitably

attend the process of dislocation; or else, even more subversively, they

celebrate without inhibition the liberation of fantasies come true—in America. . . .

Interlude I happened to meet a Sikh taxi driver of my acquaintance outside the local cinema hall after a showing of Pardes. ‘It’s a very good film,’ he assured me on enquiry, and then volunteered by way of reaction: ‘And it’s quite true that our girls are often unhappy when they marry abroad (pardes). They have so many problems of ad-

justment.’

‘Then why do their parents arrange these marriages for them?’, I queried. “You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘These marriages are so that their brothers can some day go as sponsored immigrants.’ His comment was a reminder of another contemporary truth of the diasporic condition that Pardes fails to confront, even in its subversive

subtext. The other side of seeking to reproduce Indian family values through the marriage of an NRI boy to an Indian-born girl is the facilitation of emigration by others in her family, her brothers in particular. In either case, of course, the girl is a taw in the games that men play before she is the subject of her own desire. VIII. INDIAN DREAM, TRANSNATIONAL LOCATION In this chapter, I have pointed to both similarities and differences between

DDL] and Pardes as two contemporary popular films that link the institutions of family, courtship, and marriage to the articulation of Indian identity in the context of diaspora. It remains now to detail these conti-

nuities and discontinuities and to comment on their wider sociological import.

Tt will have been obvious that there are many points of superficial and substantive resemblance between DDLJ and Pardes, confirming popular opinion in this regard. Apart from the commonality of two principal

actors (Shah Rukh Khan and Amrish Puri), and the use of foreign locales,

there is the shared focus on the NRI nostalgia for India, the return to India

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for the denouement, the emphasis on family values as the core of Indianness, the attempt to discipline the younger generation by marriage with Indian partners, the prurient preoccupation with feminine virtue in general and virginity in particular, the role of women characters in critiquing patriarchal authority, and so on.There is even a bizarre coincidence which a committed structuralist would recognize as a perfect example of symbolic inversion: the fake love-bites that index Simran’s fantasized but chaste desire for Raj in DDL/, and the brutal teeth marks of Rajiv's real assault on Ganga in Pardes! More important, as ‘formula’ romances set in an Jndian culture of kinship, the romantic happy endings in both DDL/ and Pardes require the reconciliation of paternal authority and individual desire. In either case, the objective is achieved not by the young couple’s defiance of the normative order of Indian kinship, but by their demonstration of adherence to

this order. In particular, the hero is required to exercisese/frestraint in two crucial respects. First, he should not contest paternal authority, but should concede its rightfulness even at the cost of forfeiting the object of his desire. Second, he must not allow himself to ‘sexualize’ the love rela-

tionship“ in advance of its sacramental consecration, an act of self-denial

that incidentally maintains the heroine as a pure object worthy of bestowal. On her part, similarly, the heroine is required to submit to an arrangement that is man-to-man and family-to-family before it is the consummation of her own desires. Interestingly, in both films, women

(especially older women) and children are able to recognize and articulate

the injustice of ‘tradition’ and the constrictiveness of ‘society’ from the woman's point of view, though such misgivings are discounted in the final

resolution.

Taken together, these common features can be read as pointers to a

shared ideology of family and kinship which has three important and characteristic constituents. The first, albeit relatively muted in this case (as compared, for example, to HAHK (see Chapter 5]), is the idealization

and naturalization of the institution of the patrilineal joint family. Thus,

for instance, both films assume that the pattern of recruitment to house-

hold membership will automatically follow the principle of patri(viri)local

residence. That is how the senior Malhotra in DDL/ and Kishori Lal in

Pardes both return to India to ‘fetch’ their sons’ wives, and stand around

to supervise at the melodramatic dénouements. Second, and relatedly, the family is construed as a patriarchal institution,“ the father having the authority and responsibility to arrange his children’s marriages, or to endorse or reject the choices they have independently made. For the father of a daughter, this authority is scripted as

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the right and duty to gift his daughter in marriage, and on the purity of this gift and the solemnity of his pledge is staked his personal honour as a patriarch (cf. Prabhu, 1995: Ch. 5). When this honour is compromised, he can be expected to take drastic action—to insist on the girl’s marriage to the person of his choice. . . ., ‘or else’ (as in DDL/); or to attempt to kill her and her suspected lover to assuage family honour (as in Pardes).

Third, is the principle of marriage as alliance—family to family— rather than just an arrangement between a young couple in love. For those unfamiliar with the wider Indian culture of kinship, Pardes would seem

to have a rather curious ending—for a Jove story. Here we do not find the young couple embracing each other, or even uniting with each other

with parental blessings. On the contrary, the final scene shows father and (foster)son on the one hand, and father and daughter on the other, em-

bracing.*” The happy young couple merely eye each other over the respective shoulders of their fathers as the tricolour banner tribute to 50 years of Indian Independence comes on to the screen. This reconciliation of parents and children, of the conflict of parental authority and youthful desire, allows the two fathers to reaffirm their troth as affines. Indeed, at

this moment Kishori Lal reminds his samdhi-to-be that they had simply pledged to transfer Ganga from the home of Suraj Dev to that of Kishori Lal. In the final dispensation, this troth would remain intact, with only the minor difference that Ganga would marry another—and more

worthy because more ‘Indian’—son!48

In both DDL/and Pardes, all three elementary principles of the Indian culture of kinship (that is, the institution of the joint family; the patriarchal authority to dispose; and marriage as interfamily alliance) are challenged in the context of diaspora—and finally reaffirmed. In both films, the heroes refuse to elope with the heroines, but chastely await paternal blessing. This not only indexes their Indianness, but also facilitates the bride’s eventual patrilocal incorporation into her husband’s

household. It endorses the parents’ authority to arrange the marriages of their wards. And it confirms that marriage is foremost an arrangement, family to family, via the gifting of a daughter. Women realize that they are

thereby the objects of these transactions between men, that the system

denies them their subjectivity; but they know that they can only ‘adjust’ to it all and hope for a happy outcome.

However, while DDL/ and Pardes are similar in their constitution of

the moral economy of Indian family relations, with just a hint of dissatisfaction from the viewpoint of women, the two films are at variance

on the question of whether or not Indian identity can survive de-territorialization. DDL] proposes that Indian family values are portable

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assets, which may be replenished through periodic visits to the source. But Pardes answer is ambiguous. Reinstituting the well-tried opposition of India and the West, at one level it endorses the hope that Indian culture

can survive de-territorialization; at another it suggests that westernization/Americanization can at best be delayed. While the hero, Arjun, is able to combine in himself the best of India and the West, this is not the

case with Kishori Lal, 35 years resident in the US, and his American-born son, Rajiv. Insistently, women’s voices foretell the depletion that must eventually overtake the long-term immigrant, though he may sing ever so robustly J love India.

ig It may appear from the organization of this chapter and from my taking DDLJ as my point of departure, that I regard DDL/ as registering an epistemic break with certain established representational idioms of Indian popular cinema, and Pardes, conversely, as a retreat from that position. To some extent I do, but it is not clear which, if either of them,

represents a definitive trajectory for the future. For the moment I would simply propose that, read together, the two films register an important site of ideological transformation and contestation as popular culture comes to terms with the new reality of middle class diaspora and its challenges to national identity—for those at home, for many of whom the West is now the desired destination, as well as for those ‘pardes’, nostalgically recalling the imagined homeland. The consistently conservative agenda for the Indian family that the two films share—almost a parodic instantiation of the normative order of Indian kinship—is not merely an expression of the complacency and cynicism of the post-Independence generation, for whom the compulsion to defy family pressures and societal conventions no longer holds much attraction. Nor is it merely an index of the self-indulgent mood of the 1990s which sees no need to choose between ‘arranged’ and ‘love’ marriage when one can enjoy the social and material benefits of an ‘arranged love marriage’. Metonymically linked in the cinematic narrative of both DDL/ and Pardes, this conservative construction of family values is also a reflection of the anxieties regarding national identity that have been provoked by the Indian middle class diaspora of the last two or three decades. The new social contract that Indian Independence brought into being a half century ago has now to be renegotiated for a globalized environment.

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Freedom and Destiny Notes

1. Ido not have figures for the earnings of Pardes, but DDL/had at least a 400 consecutive week run in Mumbai's Maratha Mandir Theatre, becoming thereby the longest running Indian film in a single theatre (Times of India,

14 June 2003). It grossed altogether more than Rs 50 crore, and has beaten

even Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay in terms of longevity. 2. ‘Arranged love marriage’ hasa second modality, that is, when acouple proceed to fall in love after the parentally-arranged match. This is a variation on ‘postmarital romance’, analysed further in Chapter 7. 3. There is a rapidly-growing literature on aspects of the family life of emigré Indians in the UK and North America and other diasporic destinations,

particularly from feminist and social work perspectives (see e.g. Bhattacharjee,

1992; and references in Bharat and Desai, 1995: 65-72). However, studies

of the family in India have barely registered this development (though I am told that a project conducted at the University of Baroda aims to remedy this lack [A.M. Shah, personal communication]). This asymmetry may be seen as an aspect of a larger phenomenon. That is, while much attention has been

focused on the ‘nostalgia’ of diasporic peoples for the imagined homeland (see e.g. Appadurai, 1997), the complementary opposite, that is, the longing for translocation/transnationality and the visualizing of family dispersion, have received little attention. An exception here is Leela Gulati’s book (1993) on the effects on families of working-class male migration to the Gulf. This

represents a peculiar case, however, since only certain classes of workers have been permitted to take their families along with them, thus militating against permanent settlement abroad. The sense of ‘Indianness’ of the Indian diasporic community in the Gulf might also be inflected by the fact that a large proportion of such workers have been Muslims. See also Naveed-IRahat, 1990. 4, lam aware that there is a ‘politics’ involved in the use of the term ‘diaspora’ for persons of Indian origin settled abroad (see e.g. Nadarajah n.d.; Rayaprol,

1997: 4; also R.K. Jain, 1993, 1998). The term represents an effort to cons-

truct as a unified ‘community’ peoples with very different histories and class backgrounds. For a recent summary of the changing connotations of the terms ‘Non-Resident Indian’ (NRI), ‘People of Indian Origin’ (PIO) and

‘Indian Diaspora’ with reference to changing official policies, see Siddharth Bhatia, ‘Cashing in on the “Indian” in the NRIs’ (Pioneer, 30 June 1998).

5. Pioneer (New Delhi, 20 March 1997). In an ongoing project at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, Aradhya Bhardwaj is examining marriage advertisements by and for NRIs. uw 6. Slang for the Punjabi nouveau riche ‘yuppie’.

7. This is, if you like, a secular solution to the challenge of transnationality. In

practice, the other social institution that functions to represent Indianness is

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the Hindu religion (see Rayaprol, 1997), a connection that feeds back, materially and ideologically, into Indian communal politics (see also, Appa-

durai, 1997: Ch. 1; Rajagopal, 1999, 2001).

‘Britain's “Tandoori Fortune 500”, Pioneer (New Delhi, 9 March 1997). RosieThomas has argued that in Indian popular cinema ‘ideas about kinship and sexuality feed directly into ideas about national identity’ (1996: 160; cf. Chakravarty, 1996: esp. Ch. 1). As noted in the previous chapter, Delhi

cinema audiences consistently affirmed that HAHK was a film about Indian

‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, though Indianness was not a theme that was explicitly invoked in the cinematic narrative of HAHK in the way it is in DDLJ or, even more saliently, in the subsequent Pardes. 10. For instance, actress and writer Meera Syal told an interviewer that her generation of British-born Indians constructed their identity, whether consciously or unconsciously, by drawing a distinction between ‘culture’—‘the core, the fundamental essence, of a way of life and beliefs-—and ‘tradition. — ‘a series of habits and practices which can safely be jettisoned without affecting essential identities’. See Ranjana Sengupta, ‘Warm beer and chicken tikka masala’, Times of India (12 December 1998).

ll. Pardes’ director, Subhash Ghai, has had to continually defend himself against

charges of ‘copying’ DDLJ, the more so because Pardes appears rather different from the action films with larger-than-life villains that had been regarded as Ghai’s usual stock-in-trade. See Subhash Ghai, ‘Straight answers’, Times of India (19 November 1997).

12.

Woman's Era, September 1997, no. 2, p.141. Interestingly, fictional short stories in this magazine have begun to focus on the problematics of diasporic romance, while numerous articles simultaneously introduce readers to the pleasures of foreign travel and the advantages and tribulations of expatriate living. With economic liberalization, foreign tourism has become an increasingly affordable luxury (and status symbol) for the Indian middle classes. A

considerable measure of this international travel and tourism is presumably funded by diasporic relatives. For more on the profile and politics ofWoman’ Era, see Chapters 7 and 8. 13. I am grateful to Shohini Ghosh (personal communication) for this observa-

tion, and for raising the larger issue on which this bears: How, sociologically speaking, does one account for contemporary Hindi cinema’s neo-conservative agenda in respect of family values, especially as compared to the oftentimes more radical solutions of earlier eras? 14. DDL/ lays claim to this lineage in an intertextual allusion of the sort that delights connoisseurs of popular cinema. This is the moment when Amrish Puri joins in the singing of marriage songs with Ai meri zohra jabeen, an exceedingly popular number from the opening scenes of the film Wagt (1965), directed by Yash Chopra. As in the earlier film, the song was

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Freedom and Destiny addressed to Achala Sachdeva, who in DDL/ plays the role of the grandmother (Shohini Ghosh [personal communication).

In their encyclopaedic survey of Indian cinema, RajadhyakshaandWillemen

have described the senior Chopra's films as ‘plushy, soft-focus, upper-class

love stories (Kabhie Kabhie), battles over family honour (embodied by the mother: Deewar, Trishul), and the conflict between the laws of kinship and those of the state’ (1995: 75). See also Prasad (1998: 79-80) who notes in

Chopra's films both the ‘promotion of middle-class consumerism in the

course of narratives of love, betrayal, sacrifice and reunion’, and also ‘an

attempt to represent the woman's point of view or to centre the narrative on a woman caught between desire and an oppressive tradition’. Others of Yash

Chopra's well-known films include Kala Pathar, Silsila, Chandni, Lamhe, and the Shah Rukh Khan starrer, Darr. Chopra is the younger brother of

B.R. Chopra, a senior figure of the Bombay film industry and maker of the

TV Serial Mahabharata (see Mankekar, 2000: Ch. 5; Mitra, 1993: Ch. 4).

15. There has, however, been a somewhat unseemly dispute with Honey Irani

over the credit for the script. See ‘Best director, best screenplay, best dialogue—Aditya Chopra’, Filmfare 43, 4 (April 1996). 16. The younger Chopra had already assisted his father with several films, including Aaina and Chandni, and was intimately involved with the produc17.

18. 19.

tion of the critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessfulLamhe(1991). See ‘Des pardes’, Times of India (New Delhi, 22 November 1997). A number

of commentators have noted the important role that Indian popular cinema plays in constituting the NRI ‘community’ (see e.g. Chakravarty, 1996: 3— 4; also Appadurai, 1997). The taste for Bollywood movies is probably growing steadily among non-NRls, and also in countries where NRI presence is limited. In Japan, for instance, a ‘niche’ audience sees Bollywood cinema as the last remaining bastion of the great tradition of the Hollywood ‘musical’. The nomination of Lagaanfor the Oscar in 2002 and the screening of Devdas at Cannes will surely have enhanced the visibility and acceptability of Bollywood among non-Indian film-goers. The problematic scene analysed in greater detail below.

“Best actor, Shah Rukh Khan’, Filmfare 43, 4 (April 1996). One might

compare this with the similar comment of Madhuri Dixit on the plot of HAHK, a film which she described as constructed of just ‘little-little scenes’

(see Chapter 5). The lack of a strong storyline is not peculiar to these films, however, but is a characteristic and defining feature of Bombay commercial cinema, and one which some critics see as intrinsically linked to the ‘frag-

mented’ mode of production of Indian commercial cinema (that is, the

specific division of labour between directors-producers-financiers-distribut-

ors-exhibitors) as well as to the indigenous aesthetic traditions and genres on which the popular cinema draws. See Prasad, 1998: esp. Ch. 2; alsoThomas, 1985: 122ff.

The Diaspora Comes Home 20.

213

See Prasad (1998: esp. Ch. 6) fora linking of the establishment of this trend,

which he terms ‘the cinema of mobilization’, with the wider political economy of the 1970s. Films such as WAHK and DDL/ could be said to mark

the revival, or consolidation, of ‘middle class cinema’, the other significant trend of the 1970s (ibid.), though these films have also proved immensely 21.

popular with the ‘front-benchers’.

Rachel Dwyer (personal communication) sees the absence of poverty and of servants as characteristic of Yash Chopra's recent movies where, as she says, ‘everyone is rich, usually way beyond any possible earned income, although their jobs are often mentioned (doctors, architects, TV presenters, etc.)’. The

foreign setting of DDL/ functions to naturalize this affluence. However, one might note two instances in DDL] where the principle of what one might call ‘metaphysical bonding’ is conspicuous. Both are moments of dramatic tension. In the first, in the course of an engagement ceremony, Simran contrives to avoid Kuljeet’s putting a ring on the ring finger of her left hand by producing a bandaged finger. (She receives the ring on another finger, however, and gives a ring to Kuljeet, too). The situation is repeated, but with

enhanced tension, shortly afterwards. As the married women of the assembled families break the Karva Chauth fast with water offered by their husbands, Simran fakes a swoon, and is opportunely revived by a sip of water administered by Raj. Simran and Raj subsequently consummate this ritual bonding in the moonlight on the terrace by an exchange of food. These two instances of avoided and consummated ritual bonding are sociologically interesting in themselves. The former is something of a hybrid

custom, melding the Christian practice of the exchange of rings and vows and the dedication of the ‘ring finger’ with Hindu custom. Though Karva Chauth has long been an important Hindu festival, it is one of the domestic rituals which, like (Bhai Duj), appears to have gained massive ground in recent years through the castes and classes of north Indian society (Kumkum Sangari, personal communication).

23. A jarring note for Punjabi viewers: “Where is the shikar these days?’, they complained to me. 24. Aditya Chopra's mother, Pamela, is from a Sikh family, and the family is said

to follow some Sikh rituals, Several of Yash Chopra's movies have had Sikhs

in major roles, and Hindus are shown participating in Sikh ceremonies in

Silsila. The conspicuous avoidance of Sikhs and Sikhism inDDL/Jwould thus seem to indicate the deliberate avoidance of a politically sensitive issue (Rachel Dwyer, personal communication). Sumita Chakravarty notes that, in general, ‘the Bombay film treads its ground gingerly, not willing or capable of upsetting the two major divisions in Indian society: those of religion and language. (Intercommunal or interlinguistic love-affairs or attachments have been taboo on the Indian

screen.) Class, the other major division in Indian society, on the other hand,

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is seen as a less crucial barrier to peaceful co-existence and citizenry and is routinely transcended through ‘magical’ upward mobility’ (1996: 312; cf. Rangoonwalla, 1979: 46-7). It is interesting to the sociologist that caste as

a divisive factor in society is not mentioned by Chakravarty in respect to post-

colonial Indian cinema, though issues of caste and untouchability were prominent in the social films of the pre-Independence period and, post-

*Mandal’, continue to wrack the social fabric. The overall reluctance of popular cinema to portray or confront the problems of inter-communal relations makes films like Mani Ratnam’s Roja and Bombay, or Gulzar’s Maachis (even the Deols’ jingoistic Gadar [2001])

appear both unusual and courageous, the critical comments of prominent

public intellectuals notwithstanding (see Dirks, 2001; Niranjana, 1994; Vasudevan, 2001).

25. NRIs are well aware that the institution of arranged marriage—marriage to

a person they have never courted and often never met—appears particularly bizarre in the cultural settings in which they now live, though they sometimes argue defensively that Indian-style arranged marriage is demonstrably more

stable than so-called ‘love marriage’. Experientially, the institution of ar-

ranged marriage is a major point of contention between first and second generation emigré Indians, the latter often sharing the cultural presuppositions of their western peers. 26. Again, these are almost the exact words of the film script used on two

occasions: (i) in Raj’s conversation with Simran when she begs him to take her away; and (ii) in conversation with her mother, when the latter advises Raj

and Simran to elope.

‘Best actor, Shah Rukh Khan’, Filmfare 43, 4 (April 1996). Shah Rukh’s final comment here echoes the words used by Raj in his penultimate and most dramatic confrontation with Baldev Singh. 28. A gesture so nicely rendered that Aditya Chopra describes it as ‘brilliant 27.

acting on Kajol’s part (Mohamed, 1996a).

29. While the heroine's chastity must be maintained, the definition of chastity is

pushed to its narrowest. This is consistent with a point made by Rosie Thomas (1996), namely that popular cinema must perforce operate within the moral code acceptable to viewers, but that it is always negotiating (and transforming) its limits. A similar literalness in respect of virginity is often invoked in judicial discourse in rape cases (seeV. Das, 1996; Uberoi, 1996¢e: 199-200; Chapter 8).

30. See Alter (1997); also Chakravarti (1998); John and Nair (1998b); and

Uberoi (1995b, 1996d: xx), for the valorization of chastity and the linking of

individual brahmacharyawith national regeneration. See also AnujaAgrawal’s

discussion (1998) of popular Hindi magazine short stories on the theme of

the encounter of a male protagonist with a prostitute. Agrawal makes the important point that the male exercise of sexual self-restraint is what marks

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215

out the object woman as one of his own community: paradoxically, both marriageable, and requiring control. The women of ‘other’ communities are, as it were, ‘fair game’ for a man’s sexual impulses. For a contrary perspective on male sexuality, based on ethnography among male cinegoers, see Derné and Jadwin, 2000.

31. One is reminded here of the similar hint of disappointed desire in HAHK

disclosed in the staging of the samdhi-samdhan song. See Chapter 5. 32. “Best actress, Kajol’, Filmfare 43, 4 (April 1996), emphasis added.

33. See in Chapter 5 the comments of viewers of HAHK who regard Prem’s knowing sacrifice as superior to Nisha’s, which was, after all, unwitting.

34, See e.g. Chakravarty (1996: 202-3, 210). The famous examples of an earlier era, combining the attractions of consumption and an ultimately moralizing

voyeurism, were Sangam (1964), Love in Tokyo (1966), An Evening in Paris (1967) and Purab aur Paschim (1970), but the trend continued with Jeans

(1997), at the time the most expensive popular movie ever made, in which international beauty queen Aishwarya Rai dances in front of seven wonders of the world. Some observers link the present fondness for foreign locales with the unavailability ofKashmir for film shooting due to terrorism. Incidentally,

Yash Chopra is well known for setting scenes of his movies abroad—Rekha

dancing in the Dutch tulip fields in Silsila is a well-remembered example— and he has been actively wooed by British tourism authorities for more of the same (see Mohamed, 1996b).

35. The film reportedly celebrated a 100-day run in 14 of the 16 centres in the UK, USA, and Canada where it was being shown. See ‘Des pardes’, Times of India (22 November 1997).

36. She was referring to the ‘unlikely’ events (i) that a father would arrange his daughter's marriage with an NRI without checking adequately on the boy’s

character; and (ii) that an Indian girl would be allowed to go and live with her

fiancé’s family before actually getting married. Though ethnography suggests that the second is indeed unlikely to happen, it is sadly true that parents overeager to arrange advantageous matches for their daughters with NRI grooms often fail to make adequate inquiries about the prospective mates. However, as Rosie Thomas has pointed out (1985: 128), viewers’ criteria of verisimili-

tude ‘refer primarily to a film’s skill in manipulating the rules of the film's moral universe. Thus one is more likely to hear accusations of “unbelievability” if the codes of, for example, ideal kinship are ineptly transgressed . . . than if a hero is a superman who single-handedly knocks out a dozen burly henchmen and then bursts into song.’

37. Typically, the mainspring of a Bollywood romance is provided by the factor

of parental opposition (e.g. Rangoonwalla, 1979: 36, 39), often justified by differences in socio-economic status or by long-term feuding relations between the young couple's families.

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38. This last statement, a forthright condemnation of Indian sexual hypocrisy,

drew massive applause from the ‘front-benchers’ in cinema halls in Delhi.

Seemingly contradictorily, there was also spontaneous applause for Ganga’s riposte—perhaps not so much for her indignant verbal defence of national dignity as for her spirited assault on the unattractive Rajiv.

39. On the function of the characteristically ‘mediating’ role of the hero/heroine 40. 4l.

figure of popular Hindi films, see Thomas (1996). From the publicity posters for Subhash Ghai’s Pardes (1997). It was presumably owing to this combination of virtues that the film was exempted from entertainment tax in some circuits.

42. This song is often compared both to popstar Alisha Chinai’s saucy music

video, Made in India, and also to the famous song in Raj Kapoor's Shri 420 (The Gentleman Cheat, 1955), whose chorus line goes:

These shoes are made in Japan. My trousers are fashioned in England. The red cap on my head is Russian. But my heart is ‘Hindustani’.

See also Butcher (1999b), and Chakravarty (1996: 203-4).

43. In this, national television in some ways succeeds to the earlier role of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Films Division documentaries in constructing and ‘visualizing’ Indianness (see e.g. Brosius, 1999a: 130 n.5;

Roy, 2002), though the theme of national socialist construction (the big

dams, big industry, etc.) is perhaps now losing its former centrality in favour

of the picturesque and the ethnic. Butcher (1999a) further points to the

continuation of this imagery through commercial advertising, for instance in the Pepsi Azaadi dil ki campaign launched to coincide with fifty years of Indian independence, or the spectacle of the Miss World pageant staged in Bangalore in 1996.

The useful term from Veena Das (1996).

. Some critics might like to connect this acknowledgement of women’s subjectivity with the history and characteristics of ‘melodrama asa genre (see e.g. Prasad, 1998).

46. The term ‘patriarchal’, despite its importance and ubiquity in feminist discourse, is a troublesome one, for reasons I have discussed in another

context (see Uberoi, 1995b). Here I use the term in its original and literal

sense, pertaining to the authority of the male head of the family over both females and junior males.

47. As a variation, the great romance of the decade, the Barjatyas’ Maine Pyaar Kya (1989) fades out over the couple's fathers’ embrace! See Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (1995: 451).

48. Note the similar solution to a conflict between desire and social obligation in

HAHK: the young woman simply marries another brother—without, thatis, disturbing the original affinal contract (see Chapter 5).

CHAPTER

7

Learning to ‘Adjust’ The Dynamics of Post-marital Romance*

leg his chapter looks at the way in which conjugal love is constituted in another genre of contemporary Indian popular culture— romance fiction—within a particular context of production: the women’s magazine. Analysis of the narrative structures of a small set of romantic short stories from the English-language fortnightly magazine, Woman’ Era, is supplemented by other materials from the same

source—personal advice or ‘agony’ columns; supposedly true-life stories of marriages that ended in divorce; and non-fiction articles on courtship

and conjugal relations—and interpreted in the light of the rather sparse

sociological writings on the dynamics of marital adjustment in contemporary Indian society.! In general the analysis suggests that the tales serve important instructional and cautionary functions. Contemporary fables,

they socialize women readers to appreciate the hazards of courtship and

‘love marriage’ on the one hand, and on the other to accept the inevitable asymmetry of the conjugal bond through the promise of a fairy tale happy ending to problems of marital adjustment. I. DoMEsTICATING ROMANCE FICTION

Superficially at least, the romance fiction of Indian women’s magazines like Woman’ Era is modelled on that of Anglo-American women’s maga-

zines (cf. Naipaul, 1990: 406—7),? and on romantic novelettes of the Mills

and Boon/Harlequin Romance type. Though it would seem reasonable

to suppose that such romance fiction fulfils the same functions for Indian

women readers as it does for those in the West (see Chapter 1), this is

something which we cannot assume a priori, even in these days of rapidly changing mores and globalized lifestyles. In Western society, at least since *Written jointly with Amita Tyagi Singh.

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the beginning of the nineteenth century, the institution of courtship has

been regarded as a necessary prelude to marriage, and romantic love its

constitutive justification.? But in India, romantic love is mostly regarded

asa fickle basis for marriage. Courtship is viewed with suspicion, except— in theory much more than in practice—among youth, and so-called ‘love marriages are regarded, probably quite mistakenly, as especially problematic.* Most marriages continue to be parentally-arranged, and matchmaking is still governed by considerations of caste and class endogamy, gotra and sapinda exogamy, horoscopic compatibility, material incentives, and so on, features of Hindu marriage practice which do not appear to have changed to the extent and in the direction predicted in conventional sociological models of modernization (Anand, 1965; Goode, 1963; Wiebe

and Ramu, 1971). All the same, as noted earlier (see Chapter 4), the idea

of romantic love has a great hold over the collective imagination. Fuelled by popular cinema, it draws also on a long tradition of the expression of the sringara rasa in classical and folk genres, as for instance in representations of the archetypal love of Radha and Krishna, or of Shiva and Parvati (H. Dehejia, 2004; Kakar, 1986; Lynch, 1990; Pauwels, 2004; Ross and

Kakar, 1986). ‘Love’ may also now have a certain ambivalent legitimacy by virtue of its association with the modern Western ideal of individual freedom of choice (Gore, 1968: 7; V. Shah, 1975: 290).

In the realm of the imaginary, as popular Hindi cinema demonstrates, it is always possible to resolve the contradiction between parental authority and youthful ardour, between societal pressure and individual choice. The fantastic plots of these movies do just that. The incompatibilities can be reconciled in real life, too. An ideal solution, now, for urban, Western-

ized, upper-middle-class families is to permit the young couple to ‘choose’ from within a set of college, professional, or social contacts the sort of mates their parents might well have chosen for them (see A.D. Ross, 1961:

253); or, better still, to allow and encourage the couple to gradually ‘fall in love’ through a series of carefully monitored meetings, outings, and dates, after a parentally-arranged but mutually consensual engagement (see Kurian, 1974; A.D. Ross, 1961: 269-70). So-called love marriages,

even inter-caste and inter-community, may now win grudging social acceptance, provided that other important criteria of homogamy are met (for instance, comparable class status), and in fact they may even be covertly welcomed in so far as the immediate families are spared the anxieties of matchmaking and the not inconsiderable burden of dowry and of wedding entertainment (L. Caplan, 1984; Gore, 1968: 204-7; Ramu, 1988:

Ch. 2; Sinha, 1993: 117ff.).

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‘In India,’ as one sociologist has succinctly put it, ‘. . . one marries by arrangement and then falls in love’ (Kurian, 1974: 351). But it appears that love is conceived as somewhat problematic even within marriage, as indeed it was in the pre-modern West too (see Giddens, 1992: esp. Ch. 3). Conceptually, the conjugal relation in Hindu society stands opposed to the path of ascetic renunciation on the one hand, and that of erotic sensuality on the other (Carstairs, 1957: 156-7, 167; Madan, 1987: Ch.2; Misri, 1986). Until recently, and even now in novellas and the commercial cinema, romantic love was often counterpoised against conjugality, as the courtesan (tawaif) is to the wife (see Chapter 4; cf. Giddens,

1992: 43), and the conjugal bond itself set against the strong moral but

definitionally asexual bond of love between mother and son,° and brother

and sister. While the emotional and physical bond between husband and wife must be understated in public deportment, its potential strength is

widely acknowledged (Das, 1976): feared by mothers-in-law and eagerly cultivated by young brides. Sensitive ethnographies have noted the many ploys and strategies that women consciously employ to win their husbands away from loyalty to sisters and mothers or, in some cases, from co-

wives (Bennett, 1983). Of course, sexuality is the special weapon of wives.

Wicked mothers-in-law recognize this and in turn, or so it is alleged in

some of the texts that we have been reading for this study, try to limit the opportunities for intimate physical contact between husband and wife to the bare minimum (Srinivas, 1942: 196-8; Geetha, 1998). A favourite

ruse, if these stories are to be believed, is to have the husband's sisters share

a same room with the married couple (Karve, 1965: 129). In any case,

given general conditions of overcrowding, lack of privacy must bea perennial problem for many Indian couples. As one sociologist, reporting ethnography in central India in the late 1960s, rather coyly explained (in

a text notable for quaint malapropisms and revealing ‘typos’):

The physical arrangements in a traditional Hindu family are usually such that privacy can be obtained only briefly, hurriedly and in darkness. In rural areas

in fine weather, the fields offer some heaven [sic]. But in the presence of other

persons, especially elders of the household, the two must keep their distance, and the husband’s aloofness must prevail (R. Sinha, 1993: 121).

Of course, by the same token, such challenges might well make fleeting

moments of conjugal intimacy all the sweeter! In this light it is not surprising that the romantic fantasies of Indian women should focus as much on the problematics of a couple’s relationship after marriage as on the vicissitudes of their courtship. Linking the

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analysis of some contemporary literary texts and his psychiatric interviews with middle- and upper-class Indian women, psychologist Sudhir Kakar endorses the salience of women's longing for romance within the conjugal relation: What these novels only hint at and which becomes an overwhelming issue in fiction (and patients) from (and of) the middle and upper-middle-class social

milieu is the profound yearning of a wife, as a woman, for a missing intimacy with the husband—as a man. Generally fated for disappointment, the fantasy of constituting a ‘couple’, not in opposition to the rest of the extended family

but within this wider network, isa dominant theme running through women's lives, actual and fictional (Kakar, 1989: 22).

This ‘two-person universe of the married couple,’ continues Kakar, is ‘the real sasural to which a girl looks forward after marriage and which even a married woman keeps on writing and rewriting in hidden vaults of the imagination’ (1989: 23; see also Derné, 2003). He might have added that

the desire to reconcile love and marriage and to legitimize the conjugal relation without necessarily destroying the joint family were conspicuous elements of the social reform programmes of the colonial period (see P. Chatterjee, 1989). TI.

Woman’s ERA

Woman’ Era, known under its felicitous acronym, WE, is distinguished

among English-language women’s magazines in India for its regular fea-

turing of short stories and serialized novelettes, especially romantic fiction (see Oshikawa, 2000: 81-91). Produced fortnightly and published in Delhi by the Delhi Press, it is one of the group’s series of women-,

children-, and family-oriented magazines in English and some Indian vernaculars—Hindi, Gujarati and Marathi. (Interestingly, the chain also produces, in Hindi, Saras Salil, ‘India's only fortnightly magazine for young men’!’) According to its publicity material, Woman’ Era carries ~ women-oriented fiction, articles of general social and political interest as well as articles on ‘family affairs, exotic food recipes [and] latest trends in

fashionsand films.’ It also hasa regular personal column which deals especially with problems of mate-selection, marital adjustment, intra-family relations, pre- and post-marital affairs, problems of tobacco, alcohol, and

drug addiction, and so on; an aptly named “Teenache’ agony column; a write-in childcare column; a health advice column, featuring many que-

ries on female disorders and sexual matters; and a beauty advice column,

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221

all features that make Woman’ Era the most interactive of the English language women’s magazines (see Bajpai, 1997).® ‘Sagging breasts’ is a complaint that spans several categories and seems to worry a number of readers (and their husbands). Unfortunately, it seems that there is nothing

much to be done about it. Editorially, WE presents a ‘progressive’ stance on social issues, particularly women’s ‘uplift’. However, it hasa marked horror of the independent women’s movement, for which it sees no contemporary political justification, now that basic rights and liberties have been guaranteed (see below).

WE announces prominently that it does not accept advertisements for

government-run gambling (lotteries); cigarettes and tobacco; alcoholic

drinks; vim, vigour and sex-strengthening drugs and treatments; and home-made educational degrees and courses. It also refuses to publish astrological forecasts, though such features are invariably popular in the mass media, and it offers 50 per cent concessional rates for matrimonial

advertisements that refrain from mentioning the caste or religion of the advertisers or potential respondents.” Editorials regularly and roundly denounce superstition, political chicanery and opportunism, and corruption in public life. Generally speaking, Woman Era is reckoned to have had phenomenal success in the dynamic and competitive world of Indian women's magazines. Starting in 1973 as a sister to the popular Hindi magazine, Sarita, it soon became India’s largest-selling English-language women’s magazine, effectively polarizing the market between itself and the more recent, and more sophisticated, Savvy, and pushing aside long-established and reputable competitors, Femina and Eves Weekly.'° This has made Woman’

Era something of an enigma, for it manifestly has little to commend it.

Rather ordinarily produced, a critic has described it depreciatingly as ‘uneducated’, ‘reactionary’, ‘backward’, ‘dull’, ‘unglamorous’, ‘unprovocative’

and heavily ‘instructive’ (Naipaul, 1990: 400-19; cf Bajpai, 1997). The

Trinidadian writer, V.S. Naipaul, who was drawn to investigate the riddle of Woman’ Era during a visit to India in the late 1980s, summed up his

bafflement at this magazine’s success in the following words:

Family love [rather than romantic love], articles of simple instruction on un-

glamorous subjects, advertisements for a Proctor and Gamble lice treatment,

advertisements for antiseptic creams, water-heaters: there was nothing here to exercise the fantasy, to encourage longing. Who would ever have thought that this was the formula for a best-selling women’s magazine? (Naipaul, 1990: 404, emphasis added).

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And he puzzled that the sort of women who spend scarce rupees on an English-language magazine could be so lacking in social and cultural am-

bition and sophistication, so insensitive to the indignities that women in India are obliged to suffer (his specific example was the custom of ‘brideseeing’) and so apparently content with what he called their ‘old, shut-in world’ (Naipaul, 1990: 400). Matching the style, language, and content of Woman’ Era with a rough profile of a typical reader—English-educated, urban or metropolitan, materially not very well-off, possibly struggling with the double burden of job and family—Naipaul concluded that Woman’ Era may be successful simply because it does not ‘intimidate’ its readers.!! Rather, it reassures them that they can indeed cope with the stresses and drudgery of their everyday lives and the challenges and emotional demands of family relationships.’ It does this, he suggested, in two

modalities: (i) through express instruction (that is, given that marriages are still largely arranged, readers should learn to successfully manage the custom of ‘bride-seeing’, however repugnant it may appear to feminine dignity); and (ii) through fictional portrayal of life-like situations and dilemmas with which women readers can easily identify and which culminate ina happy ending (ibid.: 409). One is reminded of Bruno Bettelheim’s characterization of the role of the fairy tale in the child’s psychosexual maturation:

The fairy tale is presented in a simple, homely way; no demands are made on the listener. This prevents even the smallest child from feeling compelled to

act in specific ways, and he is never made to feel inferior. Far from making demands, the fairy tale reassures, giving hope for the future, and holding out the promise of a happy ending. . . . (Bettelheim, 1978: 26, emphasis added). III. Twenty TALes oF TRUE ROMANCE Like folktales, fairy stories, and myths, romance fiction has a strongly

formulaic character that makes it particularly amenable to the analytic strategies that have been devised for the analysis of folktales (for example, Propp, 1968). There are only a limited number of actors and activities— Propp’s ‘functions —and possible sequences of narrative development underlying the proliferation of detail at the surface level. Writing of the readers’ ‘ideal’ mass-market romance of the early 1980s, Janice Radway outlined a typical 13-step narrative sequence that ‘mark[s] the heroine's transformation from an isolated, asexual, insecure adolescent who is un-

sure of her own identity into a mature, sexual and very married woman

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who has realized her full potential and identity as the partner ofa man and

as the implied mother of a child’ (1987: 134). Needless to say, the three-

or four-page short stories of Woman’ Era operate with a much more restricted formula; in fact, they effectively consist of just the three most

basic functions that Radway had identified: (i) an initial situation; (ii) a final transformation of that situation; and (iii) an intermediary inter-

vention that causes and explains the change (ibid.: 133-4; cf. Agrawal,

1998: 66).

The stories we examined fall almost evenly into two distinct categories,

each with a characteristic pattern of narrative development. On the one

hand are tales of courtship, that is, of romance before marriage; on the other, tales of conjugal relations, that is, of romance after marriage. It is

in the latter especially that one senses an important quantitative and qualitative difference from the Western romance fiction which these tales superficially resemble. In the Western romances, to somewhat caricature the genre, the heroine’s quest for mature selfhood usually coincides with a narrative sequence of events from boy-meets-girl to marriage-

and-living-happily-ever-after (cf. Modleski, 1980: 437—8).' The sheer

volume of stories of conjugal relations not only affirms (by way of con-

trast) the vulnerability of boy-girl romantic encounters outside the con-

text of the marital relation but, more positively, confirms that romance after marriage is a major preoccupation for Indian women." In fact, one is tempted (rather tongue-in-cheek) to suggest that stories of post-marital romance may be a significant Subcontinental contribution to the international genre of women’s romance fiction! Tales of Courtship

Tales of courtship are narratives of a boy-girl relationship from first en-

counter, through a series of vicissitudes, misunderstandings, and crises, to

a happy ending in the marriage of the chief protagonists—the stereotypical Mills and Boon formula. Alternatively, as in real-life courtships, one of the protagonists may end up marrying some other person—an old flame, for instance; or the relationship might break up. These latter types would barely qualify as ‘romance’, for Western readers at least, for true romance is defined above all by its happy-ending reconciliation of the two

chief protagonists.!>

In this set of stories, it was interesting that only about half of the boygirl romantic encounters ultimately led to the marriage of the two protagonists, while the remaining half were almost evenly distributed between

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the other two outcomes. There is surely a covert element of warning here, a suggestion that courtship is inherently problematic, and certainly not a necessary preliminary to a happy marriage. Significantly, the personal columns of the same magazine are also rather equivocal on this question. They neither actively approve nor actively disapprove so-called ‘love’ (chat is, self-arranged) marriages. They also warn that if a courtship cannot be consummated with marriage before the girl is 20 years old, she would be advised to agree to a parentally-arranged match before it is ‘too late’ (Tyagi, 1989: 53). Tales of Conjugal Love There isa lot more that could be said about the tales of courtship and their structure, content and message (ideology) (seeTyagi, 1989: Ch. 3), achal-

lenge we will take up in the next chapter in reference to a later series of

Woman’ Era love stories. Here, however, we focus on the other type of

story, that is, the tales of conjugal relations, of the vicissitudes of love affer marriage, of the thorny path to the ultimate ‘happy ending’ of marital bliss. On the whole, the narrative structures of these stories are more regular, and outcomes more predictable, than is the case with the tales of courtship. This in itself, I suggest, is a matter of some significance.

In the analysis that follows, we seek to identify, ethnographically as it

were: (i) the substantive problems that are pictured as threatening marital

happiness; (ii) the agency or agencies through which these problems are

resolved or mediated; and (iii) the nature of the solutions offered as the

narrative proceeds from the initial situation of marital crisis through to

a final resolution of that crisis. In other words, we have here a fictional or

fantasized reflection on the dynamics of ‘marital adjustment’ which may be read in the context of the explicit advice that the magazine offers on problems of matchmaking and conjugal relations. Finally, we interpret this evidence in the light of the sociological literature on family and marriage in India. As remarked earlier, the thrust of much of the ethnography of family relations in India suggests that, structurally speaking, the conjugal relationship can develop only at the expense of the solidarity of the joint family; that the bride is inevitably—and structurally—pitted against the mother-in-law for control over the son. This rivalry is conspicuously articulated in the folk tradition, which dramatizes the trauma of the young girl’s transition from the love and security ofher natal home to the initially suspicious and often hostile environment of her marital home. It is certainly true that mothers-in-law do not usually figure as positive characters

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in the stories analysed here; interestingly, however, they are not the primary source of marital tension either. On the contrary, the romance fiction of these women’s magazines, like the non-fiction articles and advice columns, is essentially ‘conformist’ in the sense that it insists on the noncontradiction of conjugality and joint family values (note again the earlier

quotation from Sudhir Kakar [1989: 22]). Thus, to anticipate what is to

follow here, reconciling love and marriage in this romance fiction is not a question of reconciling a woman to her mother-in-law. It is, rather, a

question of reconciling a woman to her loss of autonomy, individuality, and selfhood in relation to her husband. Where the Harlequin-style romances narrate the successive steps in a woman's quest for selfhood in relation to her love for a chosen man, these stories seem to chronicle her loss of selfhood. Ironically, this is construed as a happy ending to a developing conflict situation.

Specifically, contradiction in these stories is located in the woman’ as-

sertion of her individuality and personality, and/or in her failure to compromise when marital problems become manifest. This is what threatens the stability and endurance of a marriage. If not corrected in time, it can

lead to marital breakdown—seen as the ultimate disaster for a woman

(Section IV below). Readers, too, sometimes sense that this is the ‘moral’

that underlies many of the stories, whatever their superficial differences.

As one reader put it in a letter to the editor (significantly captioned ‘different attitude’):

Yours is one of the few magazines I consider worth buying these days. Filled as it is with pages which reveal many facets of life, one rarely skips even a line.

However, one thing I object to in your magazine is the fact that many a time the advice given and the moral behind the stories is that it is a woman's duty to sacrifice.

The writer goes on to explain: I wish to differ from this attitude of yours and with good reason. I do agree that to an extent everyone must make a few compromises to maintain a harmonious family life. However, where giving up one’s dignity and to a cer-

tain extent one’s pride is concerned, I consider ‘sacrifice’ to be demeaning and

degrading to women ( Woman’ Era, 2 May 1990: 87).'6

Let us now look at the stories of marital relations in greater detail. The plot outlines are very simple. The story begins with a married

couple facing problems in their relationship. An event occurs or a medi-

ator is involved to give the story a new turn. If mediation is successful, the

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couple are reconciled (presumably to live happily ever after). This is the paradigmatic situation. However, occasionally—and this amounts to a warning—the mediation fails, and the marriage breaks down. Very occasionally, the story is left tantalizingly open-ended. Examples of all three kinds of narrative structures are presented here. Sources of Marital Tension Substantively speaking, a strained relationship between husband and wife can be manifested in open conflict—the wife does or wants to do something of which the husband does not approve—or it may be the outcome ofa feeling of anxiety or insecurity on the part of one partner (usually the

wife, in fact).

Open conflict can occur over a number of issues. For instance, to cite

some specific examples that came up in our texts:

— the husband may disapprove of the wife’s friends, and try to forbid her from meeting them;

— the wife may wish to continue in her job after marriage, even if it entails living in a different city, whereas her husband may expect her to resign her job and join him (cf. Derrett, 1976: 56-7);

— awife may be unwilling to accompany her husband when he is transferred to a distant and insalubrious place; — awife may feel offended when her husband, without consulting her, with-

draws a large sum of money from their joint account to buy a car.

And so on. There isa conflict of will or interest between husband and wife. Either may be self-evidently in the right, or each of them may have a point. It doesn’t really matter. The crucial factor in turning a mere difference of opinion into a marital crisis is what is called in popular parlance an ‘ego hassle’ (cf. Kapur, 1970: Ch. 6) Anxiety arises from a number of sources, including of course the wife’s suspicion that her husband cares for his mother and sisters more than for her (cf. Kapur, 1970: 304). Childlessness is a major source of feelings of insecurity, vulnerability, and worthlessness. So, too, is suspicion of a hus-

band’s real or imagined attraction to another woman. A woman may also feel vulnerable on account ofa past indiscretion, fearing that her husband will reject her if he finds out about it. Incidentally, this latter is a problem

that regularly crops up in the personal columns, too. The wife feels anxi-

ous and wonders if she should confess to her husband about some past relationship. She is usually advised against this, thatis, unless the husband

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is likely to find out about it otherwise.!” Significantly, a husband’s pre-

marital indiscretions do not make him feel excessively anxious. Rather, once again, they make the wife feel vulnerable, for she suspects that he must still be in love with his former girlfriend! Mediation Having set up a situation of husband-wife conflict, the narrative then sets about its resolution. Sometimes the mediation is almost effortless: for instance, a very minor incident or gesture persuades an anxious wife that her suspicions are unfounded and that her husband loves her best (and not his mother and sisters) after all. Or a supposed ‘affair’ is revealed as a perfectly innocent relationship. But usually it requires the mediation of

athird person, or a dramatic (indeed, melodramatic) event, accidental or contrived, to set the relationship back on course. Occasionally, the medi-

ation fails and the story concludes unhappily (perhaps unsatisfactorily for the readers, too). Sometimes the story is left open-ended. Let us look at some typical examples randomly taken from a more recent issue of Woman’ Era. Quite coincidentally, the first two concern

women called Sunanda. The stories are summarized below.

Sunanda was, by all reckoning, an unusually beautiful and talented woman, used to getting her own way, but her marriage to an eligible, handsome and well-qualified husband soon turned out to be a bitter disappointment. Though ‘physically there was nothing wrong with him’, Jay rarely evinced passion, even on their honeymoon. He remained preoccupied, withdrawn and

uncommunicative despite all Sunanda’s efforts to be pleasing. Unable or too proud to confide her problems in anyone, and perhaps hoping to provoke Jay into a positive demonstration of affection, Sunanda announced her intention

to take up a job as headmistress of a primary school in some distant town.

Though Jay was clearly upset at this, he did not try to dissuade her. “Was this man made of rock or metal?” she asked herself ruefully. ‘Couldn't he have told

me at least not to go? If he were in love with me, he would have taken me in

his arms and with a kiss ordered me not to go.’'® Sunanda began to suspect that he must be having a clandestine extra-marital affair. Sunanda had barely joined her new job when she found herself pregnant.

She did not inform her husband about this, but determined to bring up her son (!) as best she could, single-handedly. It was at this point that she was called upon to handle a difficult child, son of a divorcée, whose severe behavioural

problems appeared attributable to the fact that he was missing his father. Though the child’s mother had been the victim of dowry harassment, even to the point of fearing for her life, her son's maladjustment had now convinced

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the mother that her family had unnecessarily rushed her into gettinga divorce: “My husband would perhaps have changed. At least the child would have felt secure if he saw both his parents together, even if they fought occasionally, In these matters, discretion and patience should not be forsaken.’ Realizing that she and her own child might one day be in the same predicament, Sunanda returned home and confronted her husband with the

news of her pregnancy: he appeared to be moved and excited. She then demanded an explanation for his indifference and prised from him the story of

his betrayal, earlier, by a college sweetheart. In due course Jay had come to love

Sunanda, though he had married her only to make his mother happy. But he had hesitated to openly express and acknowledge his feelings for fear of being betrayed once again. He now begged Sunanda for forgiveness, and promised to make amends.

“What a gem ofa husband I had got!’ Sunanda reflected. ‘I would have lost

him forever if things had not been clarified in time. And this happened only because of the new life which was taking place within me’ (‘An affair to forget’, WE, 17 [395], 1990).

As is evident from this summary, the turning point of the story comes

when the mother of the difficult child (unaware of Sunanda’s similar pre-

dicament) narrates her own story to Sunanda. Sunanda realizes that this story (a fable within a fairy tale) could well be her own, and draws the correct lesson from it. She returns at once to her husband, bent on getting to the root of his seeming indifference to her and—even at the cost of her pride—effecting a reconciliation for the sake of the unborn child. Such mediation is very common: Athird person, accidentally encountered or deliberately sought out, tells his or her own story. The protagonist immediately identifies with that person, and accepts the advice implicitly or explicitly proffered. The case just cited is somewhat unusual in that the unconscious mediator (the problem-child’s mother) is ina sense ofa lower

social status than Sunanda (that is, she has come to her as supplicant, un-

aware that Sunanda is in something of the same plight). More often, the

mediator is ina position of relative authorityvis-a-vis the protagonist. The

mediator may be an older person—a mother or grandmother!>—whose

real personal history was till then unknown. (For instance, a young

woman, whose marriage is threatened by her careerism, learns that her comfortable, stay-at-home, and unambitious mother had once forsaken

ascholarship abroad for the sake of her family.) Or, the mediator may be an older friend or confidante whose life story reveals unexpected similar-

ities to that of the protagonist. It may also be just a person in a position

of relative authority. Thus, for instance, where a young newly-married

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woman was unwilling to resign from her job to go and live with her husband, her boss revealed the tragedy of his own life arising from similar circumstances, and urged her to join her husband (Tyagi, 1989). Or the mediator may simply be a person of the opposite (that is, male) sex, for instance the husband's best friend, who resorts to a ruse to make the woman jealous and thereby get the young couple together again. In one case of a failed mediation, the mediator wasa child. Perhaps this

was the reason why the distressed wife could not accept the advice proffered (instead, the poor child had his ears boxed!); or, alternatively, the

wife was too set in her ways to make the necessary adjustments in her lifestyle. This was the case with the other Sunanda, the one who ultimately died of a ‘broken heart’: Sunanda was exquisitely beautiful—vain and self-confident in her good looks, which she took enormous pains to preserve. She was therefore dismayed to discover, after many years of (childless) marriage, that her school-teacher husband had become attracted to a widow, mother of two boys whom he used to tutor in the evenings. One day she sent a favourite nephew to report on the other woman. ‘No, she’s not at all beautiful,’ reported the nephew. ‘But she

looks so nice even in her faded sari and with hair flying all over her face. . . . And. . . Unclesort ofcamealive there. . . . Helooked so different . . .happy. . . . If perhaps you tried to become more like that lady, uncle will talk and laugh with you as well. . . ” As the aunt slapped the boy for his frankness, he repressed a final comment: ‘Dear aunt. You have spenta lifetime tending your looks when the time would have been more worthily spent in tending your mind and spirit. You beautified your body and neglected your soul. It is the latter

which lasts and lasts and the former is as shortlived as the morning dew or a blade of summer grass . . .’.

Shortly afterwards, the aunt died—in the little boy’s opinion, of a

‘broken heart’ (‘That Summer of ‘56’, WE 17 [395], 1990).

Clearly, then, it is not enough for an example to be set or advice offered:

the lesson has to be internalized and acted upon. In fact, as we will see,

it requires compromise, even sacrifice, on the part of the woman for the higher goal of a happy marriage. The following case is open-ended, but a happy ending isa distinct possibility. Here the mediator is the protagonist's younger sister—unambitious, homely, and happily married to a ‘knight in shining armour’ of the Indian Army’s Armoured Corps. Her moral superiority over her greedy and ambitious elder sister shines through the text. Ultimately, she counsels her sister to seek help from the husband’s parents, and the reader is

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allowed to think that this advice will probably bring about a happy out-

come. Incidentally, this is one of the several stories that demonstrate the

principle that a smooth conjugal relation may flourish in harmony with good relations with in-laws (or, to be more specific, with good relations between mother- and daughter-in-law): Asa child, Shalu’s ‘Didi’ [elder sister] was in awe of a wealthy cousin who had

settled in the US, and she yearned to follow his example. Married in due course to Shubhash, ‘a nice simple boy, an engineer in the governmentservice’,

she nagged him into resigning his job and emigrating to the States. By hard work, ambition, and a good measure of greed, the family had prospered. Suddenly, Didi returned home, distraught and shattered. To her stay-at-home, plump and unambitious sister, Shalu, she confessed that her son had become

a drug addict and that her daughter had left home and was living with a ‘hippie’. Moreover, her husband was having an affair with a barmaid and had

justified his conduct with the retort: ‘You might be able to sleep with green

dollars, my dear, but I can’t....’ Didi had hitherto resented Shubhash’s parents, had prevented him spending too much time with them on visits home and, in her greed to save every dollar, had never allowed him to send his parents money. She now realized that her only hope lay in seeking their help to ‘talk’ to Shubhash. In a dramatic ges-

ture, Didi set fire to the material symbol of her unhappiness—a 10-dollar note

presented to her many years before by the emigré cousin she had so much admired (‘Funeral ofa dollar’, WE 17 [395], 1990).

In almostall the stories examined, the mediator—by positive or negative example or by good counsel—provides the impetus for the reconciliation of the estranged couple. There was just one case where the example of the mediator (the girl’s grandmother) inspires an unhappily married woman to seeka divorce from her brutal and unfaithful husband.The case stands out as quite unusual.

\g Sometimes it is not a human agent but a dramatic event that marks a turning point in the narrative and shocks the protagonists into a more realistic understanding of their true position and of their feelings for each other. As in popular commercial cinema, the incident often has a rather

melodramatic quality. The story of Brinda Devi is a typical case in point: Brinda Devi had always resented her marriage to the ‘plain and staid’ Naren-

dranath which put to an end her flirtation with a rich, jet-setting playboy. She

was reluctant to undertake motherhood, too, and conspicuously disliked her

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231

only child, Janaki. When the time came for Janaki’s marriage, she even refused to part with a portion of her jewels for the girl’s dowry. Overwhelmed with

resentment at the mere suggestion, she carelessly failed to prevent Janaki accidentally consuming poison. The girl was taken to hospital, and her father collapsed with shock at the news.

At this point, ‘Brinda Devi’s veneer of indifference was shattered. . . . For

the first time in her comfortable existence, Brinda Devi was exposed to cruel reality. It was forcefully brought home to her that, except for the two who were

struggling for life in separate hospital beds, she had no one else in the world.

Without them, she had no life.’ In a dramatic gesture, she sold off her precious gold bangles to pay her husband's medical expenses, gifted her jewels to her daughter on her wedding day, and was reconciled at once with both husband and daughter (‘Precious no more’, WE 17 [395], 1990).

Resolution

In all four of the cases cited, the wives had rather unattractive personali-

ties. The two Sunandas were both vain, and accustomed to having their

own way on account of their good looks. Shalu’s Didi and Brinda Devi were both greedy, and both aspired, successfully or unsuccessfully, to fulfil their own social ambitions through their relatively unambitious hus-

bands. The women were also possessive, often domineering, and intole-

rant; Brinda Devi even hated her own daughter! But the wives were not always shown up in such poor light in these stories. On the contrary, the husbands were very often shown at fault. They were either too weak—and thus dominated by their mothers—or too authoritarian, for instance, vetting all the wife’s social contacts. Quite often the husband’s grievances appear inequitable and unreasonable: for instance, the ‘natural’ ‘expectation that a wife should automatically resign from her job after marriage; or that he could withdraw money the wife had earned from their joint account without consulting her; or that his extra-marital escapades would not adversely affect his family life. But wheresoever the fault resided—with the husband, with the wife,

_ with both or with neither—the fictional reconciliation was brought about in the overwhelming number of cases of marital tension by the wife making compromises—‘adjusting’, as the very useful Indian English expression has it. (In reverse, marital breakdown was the outcome of the

wife's failure to make the requisite compromise.) That is, on the whole,

the ‘adjustment’ was asymmetrical on the part of the wife.

The overall consistency of this solution to a marital crisis suggests that a wife's assertion of her will, autonomy, and personality, right or wrong,

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against her husband is the primary source of marital tension which, if not

corrected in time, would surely lead to marital breakdown. Problems with

‘in-laws are merely secondary, or are encompassed within/adjuncts to the other major problems. Howis resolution effected and ‘adjustment’ manifested? In cases where the wife has left her husband (usually to live with her parents), she unconditionally returns to him. An important motivation in this return—as in the case of the first Sunanda—is the interests of the children. A wife may also be required to change her character or modify her habits. Brinda Devi did so, and Shalu’s Didi also, if belatedly, signalled her intention to do so.

Poor Sunanda (the Sunanda of the second case) was not prepared to turn herself into the homely, motherly type that her husband admired, and paid dearly for it. Ifa woman cannot have her own natural children, the

tales tell us, she would be wise to agree to adopt a child—it is, after all,

better than suffering rejection. A wife can learn to overlook or rationalize her husband’s faults, including infidelity; she has to accept that she would be infinitely worse off without him. She is also often expected to curb her career ambitions in the higher interests of domestic accord, especially when that ambition requires separation from her spouse. She should not seek to compete professionally, directly or indirectly, with her husband. Working wives are not necessarily disapproved of, but clinging to economic independence for its own sake can be construed as an act of defiance—in fact, as an adverse reflection on the husband’s manhood and

capacity to provide.

IV. TRUE-LIFE TALES OF MARITAL BREAKDOWN

In contrast with the Woman’ Era tales of courtship, the fictional tales of conjugal relations almost always end happily—that is, with the reconciliation of the estranged couple. The narrative sequence is thus: marital crisis => mediation => ‘adjustment’ => reconciliation with the proviso that adjustment is usually asymmetrical, on the part of the wife. Only rarely, as in the case of Sunanda in the second story, does mediation fail to stem the deterioration of the relationship. Woman’ Era also regularly carries a number of exemplary tales of failed relationships. Presented as true-life stories volunteered by readers, one might class them as cautionary tales or contemporary fables. The magazine requires a declaration from the author that ‘the story is based on facts’, but the tales nonetheless have a rather formulaic quality and the language is so markedly stereotyped that one might be excused the suspicion that,

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along with some of the letters in the personal columns, they were ‘cooked up’ by the editorial staff (cf. Bajpai, 1997). Certainly they conform to the

worldview of the publisher of Woman’ Era, Vishwa Nath, who declared in an interview to Naipaul (1990: 418): ‘The family is the hinge of civil-

ization. My stress is that the family should be strengthened, not destroyed. ‘Women's Lib is responsible for quite a good deal of the disintegration of

the family’.?°

The storyline of these first-hand accounts of marital breakdown is preempted by the blurb: Are you a divorcée. . . . And wish you'd not gone into it? This series, which is open to both men and women, aimsat presenting before the readers the causes that can lead to breakdown of marriage and divorce, so that they can take care

of their own lives and ensure a happy married life.

The few stories of failed marriages that we examined were telling, ifnot

conclusive. We summarize them briefly here. In the first case, significantly titled “Towards loneliness and misery’: An employed woman does her best to adjust to her more orthodox husband

and in-laws. She gives up her hobbies—painting and pen-friends—and tries not to resent her reduced personal spending money (since her husband routinely gives all his salary to his mother), and to tolerate her husband's persistent

demands for sex. ‘I wanted a firm foundation for my marriage’, she wrote, ‘and

hence submitted myself to his desires and views at every cost.’ They had just achieved equilibrium in their marriage, despite the strains, when her husband

was transferred to a distant place. The wife decided against resigning her job togo with him, but six months later, plagued by loneliness, decided to pay him

a surprise visit. To her dismay, she found him with another woman, and ina rage returned to her parents. Two years later she got a divorce. But she now regrets the decision:

‘Of course, I am economically well-off; still I need security. I need, above

all, a man. A lonely life is a curse and horrible to live. . . . ‘I think I was too hasty in my decision in seeking a divorce. I could have brought my husband to the right track, if I tried.

‘I should have given him a warning, or at least, a chance to improve. . . .

My daughter Asha .. . is the major sufferer through no fault of hers. . . . I

should have recognized the fact that [his] loneliness might have mingled with

a chance happening to ultimately result in sex.

‘Patience, maturity and more understanding might have saved our marriage, but my friends misguided me. I blame myself for listening them’ (WE 16 [369], 1989).

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In this supposedly true-life story (as against the fictional tales with happy endings), the mother-in-law is shown as an unpleasant, greedy, and unaccommodating person, and her son, a mother’s boy. Nonetheless, the wife is persuaded that it was her own unreasonable stubbornness that was to blame for her plight and for that of her fatherless daughter: she could, and should, have made more efforts to ‘adjust’.

The next true-life story makes clear what is implicit in the case just cited, namely, that the wife’s failure to ‘adjust’ is in direct proportion to the moral and material support she receives from her parents. In the account, titled ‘It’s over spilt milk that I cry’:

The husband is a mother’s boy with a dominating ‘shrew’ of a mother who

‘could not bear to see her only son”snatched” away from her by a mere slip of

agirl’, and made every effort to restrict the couple's opportunities for intimacy. The wife felt constricted in the hostile atmosphere of her husband’s home, and resentful that her mother-in-law had taken away all her jewellery and com-

mandeered her salary as well. She returned to her parents’ house for her deliv-

ery and was deeply dismayed when no one came to visit her: ‘ My in-laws liked neither the fact that I had gone home for the delivery, nor the birth ofa female baby.”2! Ultimately, to her joy, the husband came to see her, but they were

scarcely reconciled before she found herself pregnant again. Against her hus-

band’s and mother-in-law’s wishes, she had an abortion, and returned to her

parents’ place to recuperate. But her husband never came to see her: ‘I had committed the ultimate offence in getting the foetus aborted against their

wishes. It’s not legal sanction alone but also social sanction that matter[s] in

affairs such as these, and I learnt this the hard way that day!”

In due course, her father encouraged her to go ahead with divorce.

However, with her father now dead (of a broken heart) and her brothers’ wives hostile, she regrets the decision and wonders whether her father was

actually friend or foe:

If he had not spoilt or pampered me, I'd have a different story to tell. If only

he had not encouraged and abetted me in my lack of adjustment—if he had

given me sound advice and taught me to win over my in-laws with love—my life would have been different.

Why, there wasa friend of mine who had to part not only with her jewellery

but her entire dowry, which was utilized for her sister-in-law’s marriage. She gave her consent graciously and won the love and respect of her in-laws almost simultaneously. To this date they worship the very ground she walks on.

What a fuss we had made over a few items of jewellery. . . . What's a neck devoid of a gold chain, as compared to an existence devoid of the zest of life...

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A few years of patience and endurance and everything would have worked

out.

My sisters-in-law would have got married in due course, and time would

have taken the sting off my mother-in-law’s tongue, or I would have myself acquired tolerance and immunity (WE 15 [361], 1988).

The third case is of a rather different kind: ‘A modern liberated woman’, professionally successful and mother of two children, had been unhappily married for 11 years to a drunkard who, in her

own words, ‘could not even begin to realise [her] worth, nor meet her on any

plane, be it mental, physical or emotional’. In this vulnerable condition, she fell in love with a wealthy exporter and, abandoning her husband and son,

went to live with him. Immediately, he became domineering and possessive. To make matters worse, the man’s unsophisticated village wife and sons turned

up. Realizing her mistake, she left the exporter, and now lives independently with her daughter. But she misses her son, worries for the future of her daugh-

ter, and regrets her ‘fatal mistake’:

‘If my husband was a drunkard, perhaps I drove him to drink. It was when my job began to interfere with my housekeeping and his irritability at my

habitual absence took its toll on his work, that his promotions had ceased

while mine had increased. Ego problems cropped up and he hit the bottle. ‘I was equally to blame for living as a stranger with my husband under the same roof. If only I had traded my pride for understanding, our lives would have been so different’ (“The fatal mistake’, WE 17 [395], 1990).

Once again, the djvorcée fears for her child, longs for the social security

of the title ‘Mrs’, and blames herse/f for the divorce—not merely for her impetuousness in running off with the wealthy exporter, but for her failure to ‘adjust’ to her husband in the first place, to tolerate his drinking habit, and to realize that she was herself partly to blame for it, if only by virtue of her own conspicuous success as a professional woman! The theme of ‘adjustment’—that is, of the asymmetrical adjustment by the wife to the husband—looms large as a motif in these ‘real-life’ tales

too.

V. PRESCRIPTION FOR A Happy MARRIAGE

Quite coincidentally, a non-fiction article in Woman’ Era, published around the same time as these stories and titled, conveniently, “What

makes a happy marriage?’ (WE 17 [389], 1990), corroborates some of the points that emerge from our analysis of the narrative structure of the fictional tales of conjugal relations. Focusing on the first step towards

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marriage, that is matchmaking, the author dismisses the usual criteria that

feature in matrimonial advertisements in India: caste, beauty, colour of skin, age, height, weight, convent education, language, nationality, and

religion. These should be merely secondary considerations, the author opines. The really important ones, it is suggested, are of the kind that a sociologist would call ‘social structural’, for they effectively place the husband ina position of superior status, authority, or power over the wife. For instance: (i) the girl should be of the same social (chat is, class) status as the boy, or of a slightly lower status, but zor the reverse; (ii) the woman

should preferably be less educated than the man: ‘If the man is less edu-

cated than the woman, they will be sitting on the top of a volcano’;?? and (iii) the husband should earn more and also have better career prospects:

‘The groom is the provider and breadwinner’. Hence, ‘if the man wishes to live on the wife's wealth, a positively mismatched condition will come about’. Moreover, significantly: ‘If both are earning members before marriage, the groom's income should be greater than the bride’. If the earnings are more or less equal and if the woman holds a position with rapid promotion prospects, an alliance between the two persons had better be avoided.’ Additionally, the couple should share the same food preferences;”° and they should have the same religion, or else one of them should

be ‘neutral’ in respect to religion. Almost as an afterthought, the author adds that it isa good thing if the couple feel ‘attraction’ for each other. This last is obviously a factor to be considered only after other desiderata are

met.

If all these criteria are fulfilled, this instructive article then goes on to tell us, one has a round peg and a round hole, but a further process of ‘grooving’ is required before the husband and wife become ‘one body’.?6

This is what the author calls ‘mutual adjustment, that is, a process of ‘give

and take’ or, more accurately, ‘giving in’: ‘Keep on giving in, giving in and giving in until there is nothing left for the other to ask for any more giveins’ [sic]. What the article does not explain in so many words—in fact, the term ‘mutual adjustment’ disguises the true situation—is the social expectation, so blatantly revealed in the fictional accounts of marital crises and implicit in the fact that women are the addressees of this well-meaning advice, that it is the wife, not the husband, who will most often be required to give in. Structural asymmetry—of socio-economic status, education, and career prospects, and of course, of age which is assumed.

as self-evident?”—is built into the ideal match,?8 but satisfactory marital adjustment demands, even beyond this, that a wife learn to give in gracefully whenever a conflict situation develops, and regardless of the rights or wrongs of the issue at hand.

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Leaving aside considerations of gender equity, this would appear to be

quite sound and practical advice, for it is evident that a woman has much

more at stake in a successful marriage than a man. In her empirical study of middle-class employed women of comparable background to typical Woman! Era readers, sociologist Promilla Kapur concluded ‘that wives had to make more adjustments in their marriage than husbands had to. Wherever there were disagreements between husband and wife, the wife

gave in two anda half times more frequently than the husband did’. ‘[O]f

the well-adjusted wives 63 per cent were found to be making more efforts

to bring about harmony in married life’ (1970: 413). She added wryly

that a ‘wife’s being too individualized proves particularly detrimental to marital harmony because men still like to marry less individualized

women’ (ibid.: 419).

Kapur identified several typical ‘patterns’ of marital adjustment in which adjustment was mostly from the wife's side.”? In the first, ‘the wife carries out all the household responsibilities herself without even feeling the pinch of sacrifice . . . because she is brought up in an atmosphere where [the] husband is supposed to be a god and [the] wife is supposed

to serve him in every way’ (1970: 432). In the second pattern, ‘as her hus-

band does not make the required contribution towards marital adjustment, she does most of it herself to compensate . . . and bring about

harmony in marital relations’ (Kapur, 1970: 432). As an informant re-

ported to Kapur on her relationship with her husband:

Once she came to realize that obstinacy was a weakness of her husband, she

took care not to give him any occasion to get into the obstinate frame of mind. She made it her practice to agree to whatever he said whenever he was in an obstinate mood and thus she avoided hot arguments and unpleasant quar-

rels. . . . [H]er husband appreciated her giving in and agreeing to whatever he said even when he was unreasonable and wanted to do a certain thing only

because he liked to assert his superiority (Kapur, 1970: 124).

Of course the couple lived happily ever after. In the third pattern, whose narrative structure is homologous with

many of our fictional tales, initial tensions are solved when the wife ulti-

mately learns to ‘adjust’. Kapur describes this pattern (in strikingly ‘unfeminist’ language) as follows:

The wife is too enthusiastic about her job or profession, whereas [the] hus-

band is keen that she should take equal interest in the house and his comforts.

She has very individualized interests, likes, dislikes and values of life, and in

her vanity of individual status and independent income she does not make any

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efforts to adjust to her wife-and-mother role. . .. The husband, though he cannot stand her excessive enthusiasm for her job, specially when it is at [the]

cost of his care and that of [their] children does not treat her harshly. He does

demand attention and care and reminds her of her duties. Though they have lots of friction for a few years after some time the wife undergoes a change in her ways of thinking and looking at things mainly due to the passing of years

and other bitter experiences and frustrations, and she realises her mistake in neglecting her wife-and-mother role. Due to this change in her outlook she starts making efforts to bring about harmony in her married life and the husband cooperates and they develop feelings for each other. They become more tolerant and adapt to each other's ways of thinking and living, accept weak-

nesses of each other as normal and start living harmoniously (1970: 433). VI. CONCLUSION

Our conclusion from this preliminary exploration of the representation of marital relations in a small sample of Indian popular fiction can at best be tentative. The sample was a rather small one, and we are not in a position to compare this archive of largely women-authored texts aimed at a female, English-educated, middle-class audience with, for instance, stories by male authors, stories in male-oriented and gender-neutral publications, in Indian vernacular languages or in reading material directed at a different class of readership: at the present time, the study of popular culture, especially from a woman-sensitive perspective, is still very much

in its infancy.?°

We have also not been in a position to compare this representation of conjugal relations in any disciplined way with that found in more ‘literary’ contemporary texts. Though the wife’s longing for intimacy with the husband is apparently a common preoccupation of both popular and literary works (see Kakar, 1989: 23), it would seem that the latter may be

more explicit in their recognition of female sexual desire. Also, being richer in texture and characterization, literary texts may give more play to women’s subversive voices through a range of different female characters and dramatic situations. But, unless preoccupation with romance is itself deemed to be subversive—which is indeed a possible construction in the light of what we have said earlier about family relations—it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the stories we have analysed are ideological products in the sense that they surely work to reinforce a woman's position of structural and emotional dependence, vulnerability, and subordination within the conjugal relation.

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The stories begin by arousing the female reader's anxiety ina conspicuously mimetic fashion. Unlike the Harlequin or Mills and Boon romances, which tend to portray exotic or historical locales and glamorous lifestyles, these tales are located in very ordinary middle-class Indian families engaged in everyday tasks. The issues that precipitate marital tension are, if not part of the personal experience of readers, at least part of their personal knowledge and environment. ‘Compromise’ or ‘adjustment, the stories then go on to tell us, is the key to marital happiness. It may be a mutual process, with husband and wife jointly taking the initiative to settle their differences, or it may be the outcome of an unexpected and surprising occurrence. Most often, however, compromise is effected through the agency ofa mediator—mother, boss, friend, and the

like—whose own story holds out lessons for the protagonists. Typically, though not invariably, it is the wife who is advised to ‘adjust’, so that compromise is for the most part asymmetrical, an affirmation of male dominance in the family, as in society at large. If mediation fails and adjustments are not made in time, the marriage will end in separation or divorce, but this is not seen as a proper solution toa state of marital discord.3! On the contrary, it signifies a woman's personal failure and worthlessness in a social clime in which the marital state is a woman's primary source of self-validation, as well as the sine qua non of blissful motherhood. Wherever the fault might lie, ultimately the wo-

man will blame herself for not making the necessary compromises with her husband and in-laws from the very beginning of her married life.

sg It would be rather too facile to attribute this emphasis on wifely adapt-

ability simply to the Indian (or Hindu) ‘tradition’, but social psychologist PH. Prabhu probably hasa point when, basing himself on textual sources, he drawsa connection between the principle and practice of patri(viri)local residence (where the wife moves after marriage to live with her husband’s

family) and the requirement of adjustability on the part of the wife:

All the other members of the family have already imbibed the family traditions, customs and usages; and the family sentiments have become quite a part of their lives. The newly wedded wife, on the contrary, is in these respects a perfect stranger in the family. Her first important duty on entering her new

home, therefore, would be to exert towards adapting herself to the traditions and sentiments of the house of which she now becomes a member (Prabhu,

1995: 229, emphasis added).

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Prabhu goes on to emphasize that the husband in particular, and the other members of his family, have a responsibility to constructively assist and ease this process of adjustment and ‘take a lenient view of her acts of omission and commission until she has acclimatized to the new atmosphere’

(Prabhu, 1995: 229). But in the end he concedes that ‘the wife herself

seems to be held [by the Hindu writers] to be the most responsible of all

for her own adaptability into the family’ (ibid.: 231). He therefore endorses early marriage before the couple’s likes and dislikes have become so set that there is ‘no room left for mutual give and take, mutual adjustments and psychological compatibility’ (ibid.: 183-4). Notes

1. A preliminary content analysis of a set of 20 romantic short stories from

Woman’ Era published during 1988-9 was reported at greater length inTyagi (1989). This exercise was supplemented here for illustrative purposes by a detailed analysis of some further tales of conjugal relations, picked out randomly from a subsequent issue of the same magazine (2 May 1990).

Chapter 8, which focuses specifically on tales of courtship rather than on conjugal love, is based ona later series of the same magazine, with greater focus on the interactive columns. Though a careful content analysis of Woman's Era and its romantic tales through the decade of the 1990s may reveal some changes in the imaginative constitution of pre- and post-marital romance, the general impression of a seasoned reader is of remarkable consistency through the period, notwithstanding the volatility of the print media in the wake of economic liberalization (see also Bajpai, 1997). This may be because alternative worldviews could be represented in the new, or massively revamped, women’s magazines that have subsequently appeared in the market, especially those aimed at a sophisticated and upper-class readership (ibid.: 1997). One change thatés noticeable in Woman's Era, however, is

the more frequent engagement with the problems (and the fantasy) of the

Indian diaspora (see Chapter 6). See also Chaudhuri (2001); Munshi (1997); Thapan (2000).

2. We were told by informants associated with one of Woman’ Era’s more sophisticated rivals that their management regularly subscribes to English and North American women’s magazines, whose contents are routinely ‘adapted’ by the editorial staff, changing only names, locales and minor details. We have not been able to verify this independently. It would appear that an occasional non-fiction article has been more or less lifted from a foreign source, but this is relatively rare, and the journal gives the overall impression of being an authentic, home-grown product. Perhaps it is this home-grown quality, as Naipaul opines (1990: 400-19), that explains WE's unusual commercial success.

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3. See, e.g. Beitel (1951); Giddens (1992); E. Ross (1980); Schneider (1968); Smart and Smart (1980), among others. 4. See, for instance, Fruzzetti (1990); Goode (1963); Gore (1968: 204-10);

K.M. Kapadia (1966: 119); Kapur (1970: 57, 72); Kurian (1974: 357);

A.D. Ross (1961: 240-4, 251-60); andV. Shah (1975). Defence of arranged

marriage as against love marriage has recently (and controversially) come from an unexpected quarter, feminist writer and activist Madhu Kishwar (1999: Ch.

14), who maintains that ‘the outcome of marriage is more

important than the mode of selecting one's partner’ (ibid.: 207). She argues, on the one hand, that self-arranged marriages can be as calculatingly materialist as family-arranged marriages, while on the other hand family and community support can be critical in ensuring the stability of a marriage through trials and tribulations. 5. Thenormatively approved and legitimate focus ofbonding between the sexes is the mother-son relationship. In some readings (e.g. Carstairs, 1957; Kakar, 1981a: Ch.3; Nandy, 1980), this is construed as a displacement of, or a compensation for, the oftentimes unsatisfactory relationship between husband and wife. In Gore’s survey of family life in a north Indian business

community, a large proportion of men declared themselves ‘closer’ to their mothers than to their wives. Interestingly, many of the wives of these same men declared that their husbands cared more for them than they did for their mothers (Gore, 1968: 188-9). The relationship of fathers and daughters has been barely addressed (but see Kondos, 1991), while that ofbrother and sister

has received attention only relatively recently (see Nuckolls, 1993). See

Jamous (1991) regarding the structural implications of the brother-sister relationship in north-Indian kinship; also Carstairs (1957: 70-1); and

Chapter 2 for some comments on the visual representation of the brothersister relationship in the medium of calendar art. 6. A problem rendered with sensitivity, finesse, and overtones of transgression in Mani Ratnam’s Bombay, 1993 (see Vasudevan, 2001).

7. Saras Salil, avery low-cost publication aimed at the neo-literate working class, started publication in 1993, and is reputed to be Indian's largest-selling Hindi magazine, selling over 750,000 copies (1997), mostly in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Saras Salil contains four to six short stories per issue, a surprising

proportion of them, apparently, on the theme of a male protagonist's unintended encounter with a prostitute; this is the central theme of a paper by

Anuja Agrawal (1998).

8. Subsequently, in a concession to liberalization, WE added sections for film reviews and Bollywood gossip, regular features on domestic and foreign tourism, and instructional articles on investment and financial management, the latter apparently a unique feature in women’s magazines (Bajpai, 1997). It also greatly enhanced and glamorized its fashion section.

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Aquick glance at the matrimonial columns of WEwill confirm, however, that very few clients have availed of these attractive discounts!

10. On Sarita, see A. Deshpande (1984: esp. 34-5); and Kumar (1997). Shailaja

Bajpai (1997) has discussed WE’s profile in relation to both FeminaandSavyy in the wider context of the explosion of publications in this niche of the

popular magazine market (see also Oshikawa, 2000; Thapan, 2000). She

concludes that WEhad managed to maintain an overall consistency through the years, despite the competition from these and other glossier rivals. While

Eve’ Weekly closed down in 1990, Femina under new management has since staged a comeback, repositioning itself as the magazine for ‘the woman of substance’ (see Munshi, 1997). Film magazines also command a large read-

ership among women; clearly, the love-lives of the ‘stars’ provide a powerful focus for fantasizing on the pleasures (and dangers) of romance. See Rachel Dwyer's analysis of the cine-magazine, Stardust (2001).

ll. The same has been said of the most successful of Delhi Press’ publications,

the Hindi-language Saras Salil (see n. 7 above). Though pitched to male neoliterate readers, it contains a similar mix of instruction, information, and fiction (see Agrawal, 1998). Naipaul’s comment reveals a rather patronizing lack of empathy with the Woman's Era reader. It may be true that WEdoes not intimidate its readers or unduly challenge their values and lifestyles, but this would scarcely account for the pleasurable, indeed addictive, nature of read-

ers’ engagement, so evident in the interactive columns of WE, as well as in its

substantial sales figures. 12.

Radhika Chopra (1998: 196) has reported an interesting comment by a

successful American writer of romance fiction, who wrote in self-introduction that: ‘romantic novels are birthday cake and life is often peanut butter and jelly. I chink everyone should have lots of delicious romance novels lying around for those times when the peanut butter gets stuck to the roof of your mouth.’ Cf. Rabine (1985: 252); Sita Chanda (1991: 67-8).

13. This is the stereotype of Mills and Boon/Harlequin romances. But at least in

Radway’s study (1987: 122), seven of twenty couples in fact got married in the first quarter of readers’ choices of ‘ideal’ romances. See also Chopra's characterization of romance fiction as ‘life-cycle narratives’ that tell the story of the ‘liminal journey’ of a heterosexual couple between ‘the two fixed states’

of being single and being married (1998: 187-8). Chopra adds by way of

qualification that: ‘Some narratives may begin at a point within a marriage, transforming it, through the course of the narrative, to a successful union.’ 14. The theme has also been important in the ‘middle-class’ cinema of the 1970s

and 1980s (e.g. Abhiman, Kora kagaz and Aandhi) in which the stability of

the marital relationship is challenged by the individualistic aspirations of the husband or wife (see Prasad, 1998: 163, 178-81, 186).

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15. As with the classical European fairy tale, interpretation of the genre's social

(or psychological) function takes the inevitable ‘happy ending’ as its foremost

feature. Writes Bettelheim (1978: 26, 39):

The figures and events of fairy tales also personify and illustrate inner conflicts, but they suggest ever so subtly how these conflicts may be solved. . . . The fairy tale offers fantasy materials which suggest to the child in symbolic form what the battle to achieve self-realization is all about, and it guarantees a happy ending. 16. See, however, the reflections on the theme of ‘sacrifice’ in the context of viewers responses to HAHK (Chapter 5 above; also Kurtz, 1992).

17. This problem, which is often brought up in the personal columns of women’s

magazines (see also Chapter 8), is obviously a source of widespread anxiety. For instance (as an example from a different genre), in answer to the problem: ‘If the husband of a young girl comes to know of her love affairs before her marriage’, a (soft-porn) handbook of advice on sexual relations is quite categorical:

Our advice to all wives is not to make any confession of their premarital

sex relations to their husbands, because they must know that men are most

sentimental and helpless in the affairs of their hearts. Many good families have been ruined by such innocent confessions on the part of the wives’ (Dutt, n.d.: 106).

As a matter of fact, Promilla Kapur’s study of the lives of Indian ‘call girls’ provides several accounts of the unhappy results of women confessing to having experienced sex before marriage (1978: 142-4). 18. Several readers have commented on the Mills and Boon quality of the language here. As noted, Mills and Boon and other mass-market romance

fiction is widely distributed in India and is presumably familiar to many

readers, and more particularly writers, of Woman's Era fiction (Naipaul, 1990:

404). 19. There are many instances of mother-daughter solidarity in these texts, but it should be recorded here that the mother is usually for the system, not against it. She definitely does not encourage the daughter's resistance. Rather, in her role as mediator, the mother ensures that the daughter is reconciled with her husband. (Contrast here Kapur [1970: 423], who pictures the mother as

sometimes actively abetting the daughter in her defiance of her husband and in-laws.) In a recent example, the mother is a sympathetic go-between, hearing both sides of the story before telling her daughter her own story in such a way that the daughter begins to see the problem more reasonably. In this story, to quote its blurb: ‘Amita was convinced that Rajiv was jealous of her progress and advancement in her career. She left him forever, believing that she was asserting her intelligence and talents in doing so. But a revealing

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process [i.e. the mother's intervention] followed in time to save her marriage

from breaking.’ In actual fact, Rajiv was not really jealous: he just did not want Amita to have an inflated idea of herself! (Amita’s father’s supportiveness is shown to ultimately work against the daughter's real interests, confirming her in her intransigence in relation to her husband and in-laws. The problem seems to be that the father feels his own honour to be at stake in the good or bad treatment of his daughter by her in-laws [see the cases cited in Section IV; also Kondos, 1991]). Our texts also contain a number of examples of grand-

mother—granddaughter affection—the solidarity of alternate generations that anthropologists often talk about. Striking examples of the ambivalence of mother—daughter relations and the solidarity between grandmother and granddaughter may be found in the recent popular films, Dilwale dulhania le jayenge (1995) and Pardes (1997), analysed in Chapter 6.

20. In fact, the publisher went on to suggest that he had founded Woman’ Era

precisely to counter the pernicious influence of “Woman's Lib’: I had to reach women who don’t read Hindi. It is the English-reading, English-speaking people who control things in this country. All this feminist Woman's Lib movement is conducted by English-speaking people. You don’t find it so much in Hindi or the Indian languages’ (Naipaul, 1990: 418).

The magazine continues to be dismissively hostile to international feminism and the Indian Women’s Movement (see, e.g. Bajpai, 1997; Kumar, 1997).

Aneditorial of April 1994 (in the time-frame of the courtship stories analysed

in Chapter 8) spoke of ‘women's liberation’ in India as the agenda of ‘urban elite women’ who looked towards the West for inspiration. Women’s lib for them meant what they wanted it to mean. And what they want amounts to domination over men. Creating problems in the family and rifts between husband and wife were the results of this aggressive women’ lib (‘Editorial’, WE 21 (1994)

[495]: 7).

21. A problem cited in this form in several of Promilla Kapur’s empirical case 22.

studies of unhappy marriages (1970: 130, 143). Another story recounts the efforts of a rich girl married into a poor family to win her in-laws’ acceptance: they always treat her as an honoured guest, and even the husband seems deferential to her to the point of indifference. Ultimately, husband, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law have to be struck down

with food poisoning before she can win their hearts and take on the role of a humble bahu (daughter-in-law) (‘The high and mighty bahu’, WE [389],

1990). This is one of the few romances of the set analysed that was ostensibly written by a male author.

23. The soft-porn manual, How man tempts woman, already referred to (see note

17), addresses this problem at several places, warning that: ‘Every learned

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scholar—whether he or she—becomes sexually frigid and, as such, becomes also unfit for conjugal life . . .’:

If [a learned woman] is not married, she develops homosexuality and, if

she is married, she becomes excessively cold to her husband. She has neither the mind nor the capacity to bear a child. A too highly educated woman may sometimes develop into a professional flirt because her intellectual nature does not allow her to rest content with one man, just as a learned male professor is either completely averse to women or most religiously addicted to prostitutes. . . . Besides, a learned wife is a misfit as a companion to her husband, because she always suffers from [a] superi-

ority complex while no man on earth can acknowledge even equality with any woman whatever may be his own disqualification. It is therefore a real tragedy for a man to have a learned wife (Dutt, n.d.: 115-16). The dangers of a wife having a ‘superiority complex’ in terms of her educational level or family circumstances are often remarked upon. ‘Professor Dutt’ unequivocally advises that ‘one must always marry within one’s own

rankand preferably below one’s rank so faras the wife is concerned’ (ibid.: 45;

see also Kapur, 1970: 212-13, 230; A.D. Ross, 1961: 276; Seymour, 1999:

55). It may also be noted here that higher education for girls is thought to seriously limit the field of eligible grooms, increase the likelihood of delayed marriage, or even result in spinsterhood (see, e.g. A.D. Ross, 1961: 276-7; Sinha, 1993: 79). 24. In Kapur's sample, all cases where the wife earned more than the husband fell into the ‘maladjusted’ or ‘extremely maladjusted’ categories. She adds, rather quaintly: ‘this may be either because of the overdeveloped ego of those women who earn more than their husbands or because of the ego-threat to the husband who may react aggressively to overcome that threat’ (1970: 50).

25. The idea that ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach’ pervades

factual and fictional stories alike, and is sometimes explicitly stated. Of course, cookery is a major focus of this, and other, women’s magazines.

According to Rabine (1985: 252), speaking of the North American social and

cultural environment, the implicit programme of women’s magazines, as a distinctive genre, is to reconcile the women’ roles within the home and at the

workplace, to demonstrate that, if she tries hard enough, she can excel in

both. Kapur's study also demonstrates that the successful marital adjustment of employed women was most characteristic of super-efficient housekeepers

who planned their schedules to the last detail (and who also did not expect or ask for substantial domestic help from their husbands) (1970: 419, 423).

26. The suggestively phallic metaphor from the original. 27. According to Prabhu (1995: 179-80): ‘Regarding the [correct] age of mar-

riage of a girl or a boy, there is a great variety of opinions among the Hindu writers. . . . The only thing which they agree about is that the age of the bride must be less than that of the boy (emphasis added), preferably by three years

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or more. Prabhu continues: ‘And even to this day, a contrary instance of marriage in which the boy is younger than the girl may be hard to find among

the Hindus.’ This is, of course, a typically upper-caste perspective (see, contrariwise, Chowdhry, 1994: 63ff.). The question of the ‘proper’ or ‘ideal’ age difference between husband and

wife is an issue occasionally addressed explicitly in

Woman’ Era advice

articles. For instance, a lead article by Dr Rup Kumar Roy, ‘Ideal age differ-

ence between spouses’ (WE 23, no. 535, March II [1996]) tackles the ques-

tion in a biologistic idiom, focused on the achievement of compatibility between the libido of the post-menopausal wife and the ‘male sexual status’

(MSS)—low, medium, high—of her husband. The wife being older than the

husband is also a major source of anxiety regularly aired in the magazine's

personal columns. One reader asked for reassurance that an age differential in favour of the wife would not result in deformed progeny! See also Ramu

(1988: 51); A.D. Ross (1961: 249-50; Seymour, 1999: 55), and, in reference

28.

to rural Muslims in East Bengal (now Bangladesh), Hara (1991: 76).

This is clear also from several sociological studies of marital advertisements

(e.g. Anand, 1965, M. Das, 1980: Kar, 1975; Niehoff, 1958-9; Wiebe and

Ramu, 1971). Although these studies report sex-differentiated criteria for mate selection, their emphasis is more on change or continuity in supposedly ‘traditional’ criteria of matchmaking (e.g. regarding linguistic and caste

group endogamy, horoscopic matching, dowry), rather than on the ‘political’

implications for the husband—wife equation of asymmetries in age and socioeconomic status in favour of the husband. Interestingly, our stories give virtually no clues to the anthropologist seeking information on the continuance of traditional rules of caste and sub-caste endogamy, gotra and sapinda exogamy, etc., and present a cosmopolitan Indian worldview which is implicitly upper-caste, upper-class, urbanized and Aryanizing (see Uberoi, 1990b and Chapter 2). For dharmashastric advice on matchmaking, see Prabhu (1995: 159-63). 29. Kapur also identified other patterns of marital adjustment: (i) where the husband made greater efforts than the wife; (ii) where both worked to make

adjustments; and (iii) where adjustment was barely necessary because of the partners’ easy and privileged circumstances (Kapur, 1970: 432-3).Typically, however, it was the wives who had to make the most compromises. See also Seymour (1999: 232-3) who quotes a middle-class daughter-in-law’s response to the question, ‘What makes a good husband-wife relationship?’ as follows:

I think it’s adjustment—adjustment with one another—with your husband. Both should adjust—the wife 80 percent and the husband 20 percent. There is more making of decisions together. Still, the major decisions lie with the husband.

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30. Butsee, for comparative purposes, the set of articles on women and the media

in Seminar 300 (1984); and another set in the Economic and Political Weekly

26 (43): WS 50-99 (26 October 1991), especially those by Bannerji, Shukla,

Sita Chanda and Wolf. See also Krishnan and Dighe (1990); Kumar (1997);

Media Advocacy Group (1997); Minault (1998); Punwani (1988); and

Talwar (1989). Agrawal’s paper (1998) on another magazine of the Delhi Press group, Saras Salil, a Hindi magazine that is directed towards a lower or lower middle-class male constituency, is useful by way of comparison (see Note 7), asis Anjali Deshpande’s earlier analysis of Hindi journals (1984). See also Dwyer (2001) on the English language film magazine, Stardust.

31. It is interesting to observe how few of Kapur's cases of ‘very maladjusted’

couples actually sought divorce: 31 per cent of the wives were still living, albeit unhappily, with their husbands; 38 per cent were separated but not actually divorced; and 31 per cent were divorced, some of them remarried (Kapur, 1970: 435).

CHAPTER

8

Scripting Romance? Tribulations of Courtship in Popular Fiction

leg I. INTRODUCTION: CONSTRUCTING THE PROBLEMATIC

ontinuing the exercise of the previous chapter, this essay analyses the narrative structures and substantive characteristics of a small set of romantic short stories published in Woman’ Era (WE), from

March 1994 to October 1995.!- Identifying several contrasting trajecto-

ries of narrative development in these stories, we seek to understand, in

particular, (i) why and how romantic courtship is constituted as so problematic in contemporary Indian society; (ii) the criteria ofa suitable ‘match’ that the stories construct and endorse; and (iii) the set of circumstances

that are expected to lead to a happy conclusion toa romantic encounter— that is, obviously, the marriage of the chief protagonists. As in the earlier

exercise, these fantasized accounts of romantic relationships are used in

conjunction with other materials published in the magazine at the same time—especially editorials, non-fiction instructional articles, and the several medical and personal advice columns. The magazine's section of matrimonial advertisements, very often on behalf of rather over-age or otherwise matrimonially defective parties, are of corroborative interest,

too. An interesting feature of the stories analysed in the previous chapter, dating from 1988-90, was the preponderance of tales of the development of romantic relationships afer marriage. This was both surprising, given the models of romantic fiction that the writers apparently followed (that is, the format of the stories in English magazines like Women’s Weekly and Woman’ Own, and Mills and Boon and Harlequin novelettes) and yet-—

surely—not totally unexpected, given the continued prevalence of the

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practice of arranged marriage in India. These stories characteristically begin with a newly-married couple experiencing problems in their relationship. An event then occurs to put these problems in a new light. Adjustments are made accordingly, and the conjugal relation put on an even keel. Whatever the immediate cause of marital tension proposed in these stories (and itis interesting that the dreaded mother-in-law was rare-

ly in fact the villain of the piece), the real problem threatening conjugal harmony was what is called in common parlance an ‘ego hassle’. That is, the husband and wife have got themselves into a situation of mutual confrontation in which one or the other has to give in, or both have to com-

promise if the marriage is to be saved. Typically, if not invariably, the fictional resolution of this conflict involves an asymmetrical ‘adjustment on the part of the wife, who is often assisted in coming to terms with

her reality by the advice or example of a kindly person in authority. Con-

versely, the wife's failure to make such adjustment in good time, as in the ‘real-life’ confessional tales of marital breakdown also published in the magazine in these years, leads inexorably to that most disastrous of outcomes: divorce. These tales of post-marital romance were the most consistently formulaic and structurally predictable of the Woman Era love stories; and they almost always ended happily. They conformed in a sense to an expected

model of romantic fiction—though with the not insignificant difference that they began with marriage and ended with love, rather than the other

way around. They were also, clearly, cautionary tales, consistent ideologically with the overall conservative social attitudes of the magazine in which they featured (see Chapter 7). Needless to add, the recommenda-

tion of ‘adjustment’ makes sound practical sense in the context of the sexual politics of Indian marriage (see, for example, Kapur, 1970), disap-

pointing though it might be to a feminist sensibility. The tales of romantic courtship from the same period were also, albeit in a different way, cautionary tales, but they were narratively much more

varied. In fact, only half followed the classic romantic formula, from first

encounter through difficulties to a declaration of love and a proposal of marriage. Properly speaking, the remaining stories scarcely qualified as

‘true romance’, either ending unhappily, or concluding with one of the

protagonists marrying a third person—an old flame, for instance, or the person their parents had selected for them. Lacking the compulsory fairy tale happy ending (Bettelheim, 1978: 26), these stories of pre-marital romance suggested a marked authorial ambivalence regarding the practice of courtship, a fictional ambivalence endorsed in the WE

instructional

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and advice columns which were similarly equivocal on the question of ‘love marriage’, neither approving nor disapproving it per se, yet hedged with warning. As romantic stories, these tales of romantic courtship appeared to us less satisfying than those of post-marital romance, and analytically much more intractable. This is why we had set these texts aside to focus instead on exploring the more regular narrative structures of the tales of conjugal love, and on documenting the substantive ethnographic details regarding the sources of marital conflict that these stories disclose. But in this chapter, I take courage in hand to return to the theme of romantic courtship, acknowledging that the heterogeneity of narrative formulae in these stories and their unsatisfactory endings—though offensive no doubt to the analyst's sense of order—themselves testify to a significant area of anxiety, uncertainty, and conflicting norms and expectations in contemporary Indian social life. There is reason enough for this anxiety, for the stories speak of a phase of the female life cycle, between sexual maturity and its containment within conjugality, for which there is, cognitively speaking, no legitimate space under the traditional culture. Where the norms of the traditional system required that girls be married before or immediately after puberty, the social changes of the last century or more have entailed that girls of the class of WE readers remain unmarried well after maturity. Yet they are still expected to enter marriage as pure virgins. If once ‘sexualized’ outside the context of legitimate marriage, the girl’s chances of a ‘decent’ marriage are severely impaired.? The mature sexuality of the adolescent girl is thus asource of immense anxiety and danger, both to herselfand to the reputation of her guardian and family. As WE warns readers of its aptly-named “Teenache’ column: ‘A wrong decision or indiscreet move can spell disaster and ruin a life!’ A recent WE story, ‘No beating about the bush’, parodying its own thematic of the virtues of plain speaking, States the dangers of adolescent sexuality quite bluntly. I paraphrase: Leela and Bhanu, the young college-going daughters of Susan and Ragunath Menon, are resentful and defiant of their mother’s restrictions on their move-

ments. Realizing that she is getting nowhere with her daughters, Susan appeals to their father, well known for his plain-speaking approach to life, to do some plain speaking with his own daughters. Primed to his task, Ragunath confronts the girls:

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‘And, Bhanu, did you say that in the United States, boys and girls enjoy live-

in arrangements when they cross 18 and it would be a good idea to introduce ‘Listen,’ ... ‘do you want to get pregnant by some foolish overstep-

ping... .?”

“Yes, that’s what will happen if we give you unlimited freedom. You

wouldn't know when and where to say “no” . What would be the consequences then?....” “We want you to get married as virgins. Understand? Without any premarital sex experience. Understand? No man will marry you, if you are experienced. An Indian groom wantsan untouched woman. Understand. . ..’ ‘Do you want to lead the life of an honourable housewife or that of a dishonourable harlot? It is impossible to remain an unmarried woman in our Indian society. Or as a single mother. Never!’ The girls bowed their heads in shame. . . .

‘Actually’, sighed Bhanu, ‘Daddy is right. It’s all right to complain about our parents to friends and talk about wanting more freedom—but weall know

in our heart of hearts that our parents have only our welfare in mind when they make rules for us!’

The girls then apologize for their defiance and their mother is overwhelm-

ed with relief (WE 494 [(July I, 1994]: 128-9).

The forthrightness of this story on a delicate theme is actually quite unusual. Perhaps the bluntness is made excusable by the story’s supposedly humorous tone, or by its sound—if somewhat embarrassing— commonsense. However, for the most part the WE love stories (whether

of the pre- or post-marital variety) avoid direct mention of sex. When sexual attraction and arousal are mentioned, they are usually hinted at indirectly in phrases such as ‘sensuous lips’, ‘fiery eyes’, ‘glowing skin’, ‘ttim body’, ‘tumultuous emotions’, and so on.‘ ‘His touch had sent her heart strings vibrating’; ‘his electrifying touch had sent a thrill down her spine’. . . are some typical phrases used to describe a situation which,

fleeting though it might be, often marks a turning point in the heroine’s

mind and in the storyline. Displacing the problem of sexuality to the personal columns, whose very existence bears witness to a heightened anxiety or to a pathological breakdown of normative order, the WE stories of romantic courtship propose and seek to resolve an entirely different dilemma. This is the conflict between the lovers’ duty towards their families and their desire for each

other, between conformity to social norms and expectations and indi-

vidual freedom of choice, between the wisdom and experience of age and

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the impetuousness of youth—in all, between the enduring, if supposedly now threatened, values of Indian family life and the individualist values

of the West. This conflict manifests as a problem of choice between the alternatives of ‘love’ (that is, self-arranged) marriage and ‘arranged’ marriage (alliance settled by family elders, with or without the express approval of the young couple). The perfect solution to this dilemma is that

articulated by Prem, the hero of the 1994 blockbuster Hindi movie (at the time the most successful Hindi movie ever made), Rajshri Productions’

Hum Aapke Hain Koun . . .! (see Chapter 5). The hero is asked by his elder brother's wife what sort of marriage he wants: an ‘arranged marriage’ ora ‘love marriage’? Seeking the best of both worlds, the traditional and the modern, Prem replies without hesitating, an ‘arranged love-marriage’, and thereupon reveals to his sister-in-law that he has fallen in love with her younger sister and wants his sister-in-law to arrange the match. The remainder of the film is dedicated to making this fantasy come true, despite the formidable obstacles that have to be overcome before individual desire and family responsibility can be reconciled. TI. NARRATIVE TRAJECTORIES

‘We now look in greater detail at some of the typical trajectories of the WE tales of romantic courtship, paying particular attention to their conclusions, happy, unhappy or open-ended, and noting the factors and circumstances that characteristically determine these contrastive outcomes. Making ‘Love’ Respectable A number of the WE love stories follow, in general, a rather standard

romantic formula—albeit in an impoverished or restricted transformation: (i) a young couple is thrown together by circumstances and fall in

love; (ii) there are certain seemingly insuperable obstacles to their union; (iii) an event occurs that crucially transforms the situation; and (iv) the

young couple are united to live, presumably, happily ever after.

A typical example, of the several we came across in this set, was the

story titled ‘The Resignation’:

Aruna was a smart and pretty 26-year-old pharmacist, who wanted to pursue

her career and was averse to marriage. Her boss of two years, Deepak, an

eligible but ‘confirmed’ bachelor, has become attracted to her, but hesitates to

declare his affections because of her known views concerning marriage. After

consulting his brother on the problem, Deepak adopts a policy of alternate bossiness and consideration. This unnerves Aruna. ‘Her nerves were on end.

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Of late, Deepak had disturbed her peace of mind and she could not understand why. The answers lay in her heart, but her ego refused to accept them.’

Aruna decides to quit her job, and Deepak appears to endorse this,

insisting that ‘a woman's place is in the home’ and that she has no need to work

if she gets married. Meanwhile, however, Aruna has to accompany Deepak to a business conference, and they go sightseeing together on a lake. Aruna falls into the water and is rescued by Deepak: ‘His touch had sent her heart-strings vibrating. His electrifying touch had sent a thrill down her spine.’ Deepak proposes to Aruna, but she rejects the proposal. She later regrets her action and confides in her mother. Next day at work, Aruna hands her resignation letter to Deepak. Deepak begins to apologize for his earlier, impetuous behaviour, but Aruna reveals her real motivation: she knows he doesn’t expect his wife to work after marriage!

Aruna’s parents invite Deepak’s parents and relatives to meet them (WE

496 [August I, 1994]).

There are certain conditionalities for a happy ending in narratives of this kind. The first is that the partner should be of appropriately matched class status, with the man, if possible, in a position of relative authority or seniority (see Chapter 7). For instance, as is often the case in these sto-

ries (and in their Mills and Boon archetypes), the relation may be that of employer and employee. Though the match may be self-arranged, it should be of the kind that the young couple's parents would have arranged for them. If there seem to be problems in the match, from the point of social compatibility or physical desirability, the storyline is geared to showing these problems to be irrelevant or illusory. Thus, a lame girl who is self-conscious of her limp walks ‘almost normally’ once her beloved has declared his intentions (‘Miss Tamerlane’, WE [June I, 1994)]); or a girl

with a nasty skin allergy has merely to seek proper dermatological treat-

ment for all to end well (‘An unforgivable omission’, WE [December I,

1994]). An Anglo-Indian girl in love with her German employer, but hesitating to marry him because of the cultural difference, is delighted to find that her fiancé’s beloved ‘mother (that is, stepmother) is actually an Indian woman: he’s really an Indian at heart, that means. Another young girl with a rather dark complexion discovers that her German boss is less colour-conscious than her Indian fiancé, who in any case is two-timing

her with a fairer friend. Cultural differences in this case fade into the background, compared to the young man’s superior human qualities. Such fictional devices for neutralizing apparent mismatch in physical attributes or social status do not, however, carry over into real life, as the personal columns of WE fulsomely attest. On the contrary, the

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personal columns do not offer much encouragement to couples with very diverse backgrounds, especially—significantly—where the woman is of a higher status or economically better off than the man. Intercommunity affairs are handled cautiously, depending on the maturity of the couple

(cf. A. Deshpande, 1984). A 21-year-old college student from a conservat-

ive family who has fallen in love with her American pen-friend is given a stern warning and advised not to ‘mess up’ her marriage prospects: Your plans are risky and impractical. . . . American society and its values and

expectations are extremely different from ours. Since you have led a conservative and sheltered life, you will be completely at sea in it. ‘Westerners feel that Indian women are docile, obedient and accommodative—refreshingly different from their own independent-minded, assertive

womenfolk. This tempts many of them to marry Indian women, often with

disastrous consequences due to the vast disparity of culture, principles and thinking (WE 491

[May I, 1994]: 89).

The second conditionality is parental approval of the relationship. It is rarely sufficient for the couple to simply melt into each other's arms as

their misunderstandings are dissolved. An elder is usually around to bless or authorize this solution; the couple’s parents step into the act and arrange to meet each other; the bride-to-be touches the feet of her prospect-

ive mother-in-law; and so on. Without parental approval, it is difficult to make a marriage work, as the WE counsellors constantly advise all but the most mature and economically well-established of correspondents.> In answer to an 18-year-old girl who was worried that her 24-year-old boyfriend might not marry her in the face of strong parental opposition, the adviser queried: Why are both your families against the relationship? Do bear in mind that it is notan easy matter to marry without family support. Setting up a home, rearing children and looking after a family need a loving family infrastructure. The disapproval of elders can cause rifts in a marriage with each spouse

holding the other responsible for the unhappy state of affairs (WE 495 [July II, 1994]: 50). There is also the real material problem of setting up house independent

of the resources of the joint family. The final conditionality is that the loverelationship should preferably

not have a sexual expression, for sexual intimacy prior to marriage raises the suspicion that the relationship is primarily a carnal one, unlikely to

translate into the enduring ‘love’ relationship of Indian marriage. The

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only happy solution in such cases is that the relationship should be formalized and sacralized in marriage—providing, that is, that the partners are otherwise well suited to each other. Two stories of our set address this

theme explicitly. One, ‘Making commitments’ (WE 494, 495 [JulyI & Il, 1994)),

is about a young man, Varun, who returns from the US along with a live-in

American girlfriend, Suzy. His conservative parents are horrified, and his

mother gives Susan 4 dressing-down in which she reminds her of the cherished

values of Indian marriage and family life, and insists that living together without marriage can only do harm to all concerned. Suzy and Varun see the

wisdom of all this, and decide to get properly married after all.

Another such story concerns an established career woman, Jaya, who has a live-in relationship with a successful executive, Kashyap: They ‘make love when the urge takes them’, but otherwise live in different

worlds and cherish their individual freedom.

In the course of a long train trip, observing her fellow passengers and reflecting on the satisfaction she felt while caring for a friend’s young daughter, Jaya realizes that her life lacks something. She now sees that her relationship with Kashyap is a form of escapism from the responsibilities of family and home. Jaya decides that she and Kashyap should now makea proper commitment toeach other, without necessarily jeopardizing their respective careers (‘Changing perceptions’, WE 525 [October II, 1995]: 20-5).

Elders do not actively intervene here, but it is the example of a caring middle-aged couple on the train that sets Jaya’s thoughts in motion in the first place and makes her realize the value of ‘commitment’. Varun and Suzy, and Kashyap and Jaya, could hope to put a sacramental seal on their sexual relationship because they were, in any case, suitably matched. Were it not for the corrupting influence of alien ideas and lifestyles they would surely have been married. But the same is not true of the majority of examples of pre-marital sex that are aired in the agony columns of WE. Very often a lack of commitment has already been shown, the boy perhaps breaking off the relationship and leaving the girl to face

the dire consequences in terms of her reputation that WE constantly

warns of.° Worse still, many of the sexual involvements aired in WE personal columns are actually incestuous. Disturbingly, the counsellors in

such cases, as also in the numerous rape cases reported, often blame the girl for leaving herself open to such a disaster.

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Asurprising number of stories in our set deal with a young couple already engaged, but one of the parties feels uncomfortable with the arrangement; this bodes ill for the success of the marriage. It requires a dramatic

(melodramatic) event, or some wise counsel, to eventually reconcile the

young couple. These stories structurally mimic the narrative structure of the tales of post-marital love already described in Chapter 7. A good example of such a story is ‘Hidden Depths’: Aina is resentful of the fact that, though an educated girl, no one had thought

of asking her opinion when her ‘autocratic’ father had fixed her marriage to a good-looking and eligible young man, Chaman.

“Why should she toe the line and accept him just because her family wanted it? Had she no right toa will of her own? Shouldn't she decide for herself with whom she wanted to spend her life? It certainly wasn’t fair!’

What is worse, she did not care for Chaman’s manner and comportment. A reserved person herself, she found Chaman flippant, frivolous, and supercilious, and was irritated by his constant chatter and bantering. Her mother urged Aina to give herself time to understand him and appreciate his ‘hidden

depths’. One day it so happened that Aina’s sister-in-law collapses and has to be taken to hospital. Aina is alone with Chaman, who handles the emergency calmly and efficiently, and with sensitivity to her anxiety. When the news is broken that the sister-in-law is not seriously ill but merely pregnant, Aina

rushes into Chaman’s arms shedding tears of relief. Despite herself, Aina’s attitude to Chaman begins to change.

Soon after, Aina discovers that she has ‘uterine’ problems. Realizing that

she might never be able to have children, Aina tries to break off her engagement to Chaman, but he nobly refuses to do so:

‘Aina lay wondering how she could have been irritated with such an adorable man. Yes, she loved him and he really and truly loved her. But she would not marry him if the operation [hysterectomy] was performed. She cared too

much to spoil his life. But would he be able to live without her?’

As it turns out, asecond medical opinion confirms that Aina does not need an operation after all. Chaman throws himself on the bed crying. Aina ‘cuddles his head’ and they laugh and cry together. Shortly afterwards, they get married, Chaman ‘completely mesmerized by her bridal finery’! (WE 510 [March I, 1995]: 52-8).

‘Hidden Depths’ suggests two distinct problems in arranged marriage. The first is that of reconciling to the loss of autonomy involved in having

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257

someone else—for example, the ‘autocratic father’—choose one’s marriage partner for one. As Aina’s affectionate sister-in-law chides her in this case: ‘You do enjoy [Chaman's] company, Aina. You are just averse to the idea of your father deciding whom your husband should be. You don’t have anything personal against Chaman!”To this Aina’s mother added the conventional assurance that: ‘We have your interests at heart, child. We

love you and will do the best we can for you.’ Indeed, it is widely believed that family elders will be wiser than the young people when it comes to mate selection (cf. Kishwar, 1999: Ch. 14), since the latter's judgement

may be impaired by passion or based on frivolous considerations. In ‘Hidden Depths’ the parents’ judgment was indeed correct, but Aina had

to be made to realize this through the unfolding of events.

Parents and elders who fail to take the initiative in arranging their wards’ marriages in good time, or who find fault unreasonably with all proposals, are shown to be doing a disservice to their children. This is all the more so since respectable young women are not expected to be out in the market finding husbands for themselves.’ In the only story of our set which deals with this issue, ‘Speed Breakers’ (WE [December I, 1994]),

the girl is commended for boldly making her own choice, regardless of whether the man meets all the different criteria laid down by her unreasonably fastidious family. This is not a welcome situation, clearly, but itis the best that circumstances allow, and certainly preferable to spinster-

hood!

The anxiety attendant on the failure of parents to arrange their child-

ren’s marriage is reflected in the following letter to the personal columns of WES

Tama 25-year-old working girl hailing from a respectable family. I am earning

a good salary. My parents do not at all seem concerned about getting me

married. Till now they have not seen a single boy for me. Due to this, I remain

very worried. I have now started hating my bhabhi [brother's wife], who is of my age and who is not only enjoying the bliss of married life, but is also going to have a baby very soon. Please tell me what I should do (WE 508 [February

I, 1995]: 123).

Significantly, the writer is not advised, as she might be in a ‘courtship’

culture, to be more sociable, join a club, make herself more attractive to

men, etc. Rather it is suggested that she make an ally of her sister-in-law to bring the question of her marriage to the parents’ attention. The second problem is that of ensuring the personal compatibility of a couple whose marriage has been arranged on the entirely different

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considerations of matched social and class status, perhaps astrological suitability, or a contract of material exchange (dowry). The initial deci-

sion having been made, further negotiations regarding the marriage typically put the girl and her family (the wife-givers) in a disadvantageous bargaining position vis-a-vis the boy’s family (the wife-takers) (see Chap-

ter 1). Young women are extremely sensitive with regard to personal defects which, if known to the boy or his parents, may affect their marriage prospects or their acceptibility in the eyes of the chosen partner. They are also aware that not admitting to these defects beforehand may be a cause for complaint later. Drooping breasts and weight problems are persistent preoccupations in health, beauty, and personal columns, as already noted. So, too, is short-sightedness. Writes one young woman to “Teenache’:

Next month I am getting married to a man whom I have not yet met. It is an arranged match. I am short-sighted and wear specs at home. When I go out, T use contact lenses.

I will meet my fiancé soon. I keep wondering whether I should tell him

about my short-sightedness. I am worried that he and his family might notlike

this fact. Do you think they will feel cheated if I hide this from them before the wedding?

The adviser recommends honesty as the best policy here: You could, when conversing with your fiancé, mention casually that you use

contact lenses. Do not sound apologetic, guilty or fearful. Just be matter-offact. It is unlikely then that he will make a big issue of this. Of course, you are not obliged to declare all your shortcomings to your fiancé: but if you are frank and open, you will enjoy a relaxed relationship. Your fiancé will be gratified to find that you are an honest person who does not keep any secrets from him.This could also encourage him to trust you with

the truth at all times (WE 492 [June I, 1994]).

A broken marriage in the parental generation can also prove embarrassing and threaten marriage prospects. This is the theme of a story

entitled ‘Family reunion’:

Amritaand her husband Pritesh had divorced many years ago, and Pritesh and

their son had subsequently moved to the States while Amrita remained with

her daughter Meghna in India. Looking back, Amrita realizes that ‘she could

have, with a little patience, easily salvaged her marriage.’ Now Meghna’ marriage to Neel is almost fixed, and the young people too have taken to each other. But Neel’s parents are still unaware that Meghna’

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mother and father are divorced. Meghna’ family is concerned that Neel’s parents may not agree to the marriage when they come to know of it, Neel’s

mother being most ‘particular that her daughter-in-law comes from a good

family.’ Even if Neel insisted on the marriage in defiance of his mother, it

would be bound to create ill-feeling and land Meghna with a host of problems. As it happens, Pritesh and his son are visiting at this time, and Pritesh proposes the obvious solution—to remarry Amrita and ‘become one happy family again.’ Now wiser, Amrita vows not to ruin this ‘second chance’ in life, ‘to pick up the broken threads’ and to ‘build . . . dreams anew’. Neel is suitably impressed by the family’s warmth and mutual affection (WE 496 [August I, 1994]: 98—

104).

The ultimate stigma, needless to say, is a broken hymen. The WE counsellors try to argue reassuringly that the existence of a hymen is not a fool-proof indication of virginity, since the hymen may be ruptured naturally, through menstruation: only a doctor can tell the difference, they insist. But sexually experienced girls on the brink of marriage fret, nonetheless, and continue to inquire about the possibilities of reconstructive surgery.

kg Beneath the anxiety shown by readers on account of their looks or selfpresentation lies the usually unasked question: is sexual attraction and arousal a necessary element in making a viable marriage? A letter in the “Teenache’ section of WE, however, brings this problem into the open:

Q.: Can love be created? My marriage was fixed a few years ago and now we are soon to be married. But I find that whenever we are together he does not arouse romantic emotions in me. In fact, I quite often fantasize about another boy and weave romantic dreams about him, although I have not even exchanged a single word with him. Please help. The WE answer seeks to distinguish the lasting ‘love’ of an arranged marriage with the ‘so-called “love” ’ that is merely infatuation, but leaves the question of sexual compatibility within marriage unaddressed: A.: Love in arranged marriage grows with time. Affection, concern, caring and tenderness are all preludes to a deep and abiding love which stands the test of time growing between husband and wife. The so-called ‘love’ you are

feeling towards this other boy you only see but do not speak to is simply an

infatuation based on imagination. Make a sincere effort to get to know your

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fiancé, learn to care for his feelings, hopes and dreams—and you will soon find that you love him too (WE 510 [March I, 1995)).

This was obviously what Chaman was trying to tell Aina in the story already cited when, half-jokingly, half-threateningly, he said: ‘You will like me when you live with me and have no option but to remain with me, for

I hate divorce’ (p. 56).

Though sexual attraction is discounted as a grounds for marriage, it is clear from the hints provided in the WE stories, and from other ethnographic evidence (see Uberoi, 1995a: 334-42), that sex within legitimate

marriage, or specifically the sexualization of the virgin-wife in marriage, is expected to mystically transform into the enduring attachment of regular conjugal love. (A pathological example of this reasoning is to be found in a letter from a frustrated young man who wants to know whether he should ‘force [his girlfriend] to have sexual relations with [him] so that she knows that she belongs only to [him] and nobody else’! (WE 508 [Feb-

ruary I, 1995]: 26).) It is therefore of a qualitatively different order to the

infatuated quasi-love that physical intimacy generates outside marriage.

eg While structurally similar to the tales of post-marital romance analysed in the previous chapter, these stories have their own specificity. For one thing, an engagement does not have the sacramental status of a marriage. Thus, once a marriage has taken place the problem is simply that of clearing misunderstanding and ensuring the couple’s accommodation with each other. In the case of an engaged pair, the issue is somewhat different, namely, to decide on whether, and under what conditions, the marriage should go ahead as planned. Breaking an engagement is a serious matter, not to be undertaken on trifling grounds or personal whim, and certainly not on grounds that the couple fails to feel attraction for each other! WE advice columns are cautious, steering a delicate path between upholding parental authority and family reputation, and endorsing the pro-

gressive social values (as on untouchability and secularism) that the magazine claims to espouse. For instance, advising an educated Muslim woman whose fiancé doesn’t want her to work after marriage, the coun-

sellor suggests: (i) clearing the air on this before entering marriage, lest there be frustration afterwards; (ii) taking elders into confidence; and

(iii) coming to a compromise on the issue, namely, ‘working till the birth

of your first child when you should start devoting your full attention to

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family and home.’ Children need full attention and care from their mother, the adviser adds in explanation (“Teenache’, WE 508 [February

I, 1995]: 26).!°

In another representation to the personal advice column, a young girl writes that her fiancé had found fault with her nose and suggested she have cosmetic surgery. The girl’s parents were furious when told of this, feeling that the young man should never have agreed to the match in the first place if he found his fiancée’s nose ugly. The boy’s mother had apologized on his behalf, but the girl feels that she has now lost respect for him.

The counsellor advises breaking off the engagement, not merely on the

grounds that ‘the boy has displayed a hidden desire for beauty’ which may

resurface after the marriage, but more on grounds that ‘there has already

been a heated exchange of words between the two families and that does

not augur well for a good relationship’ (emphasis added). Moreover, the boy’s ‘ego is already bruised’ by the reaction of the girl and her father, ‘and there is every possibility that he may create problems after marriage.’ In another instance, an engaged girl from a ‘very orthodox family’ reports her regret and worry at angrily dashing off a letter of protest to her fiancé when his parents demanded a Rs 50,000 dowry. The adviser is reassuring in this case, and counsels discretion: Although demanding dowry is considered a crime nowadays, many boys’

parents ask for it to help the newly-wed couple get a good start in their life."!

Since you have found this family to bea decent one, extortion may not be their intention. . . .

Do not make your parents unnecessarily anxious by confessing your deed. Relax and look forward cheerfully to your wedding (WE 495 [July II, 1994]: 50).

III. ConcLusion

The stories of romantic courtship presented in WE in the period under discussion follow multiple and complex trajectories, which I have only briefly indicated here. But beneath the profusion of details and outcomes is a very persistent anxiety and a consistent philosophy. The institution of Indian marriage and the Indian family system are seen to be under threat from an alien value system and a powerful and irresponsible feminist movement. While it is conceded that ‘love marriage’ is a practice that is consistent with a modern and democratic way of life, these stories affirm

that sexual attraction in itselfis a fickle basis for marriage. In the fantasized dreams of WE readers, love marriage becomes viable and desirable only

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to the extent that it is simultaneously ‘arranged love-marriage’. Alternatively, married couples are invited to inscribe ‘love’ more actively into their relationship. But in no case is courtship and marriage an affair between two souls: they are merely units within the wider family to which they belong, and their desire must be firmly subordinated to their responsibility to the family collectivity. Notes 1. Altogether 20 issues of WE were examined, and a total of ninety-eight short stories or novelettes. About three-quarters of these were what one might term ‘romantic’ stories about a man-woman relationship, the majority being husband-wife relations. Our focus here is on the twenty-eight stories that deal with love relationships before marriage.

2. Seee.g. Das (1979: 90-3); Seymour (1999: 90, 287); Yalman (1963). Fora

psychiatrist's reflections on the issue, based on clinical experience a generation ago, see B.K. Ramanujan (1972: 31-3).

3. The useful term, ‘sexualization’, is from Veena Das’ discussion (1996) of the

sentencing structure in cases of child rape. 4. I thank Yasmin Arif for bringing this point to my attention. 5. Madhu Kishwar (1999: Ch. 14) makes the same point, arguing that ‘love’ or self-arranged marriages often do not have the stability of parentally-arranged marriages in which, besides the couple concerned, both sets of parents and the community at large typically have a strong interest in the continuity of the marriage.

6. See the article, ‘Chastity till marriage’, WE 519 (July II, 1995).

7. Inonestory on this theme, ‘Hunting Hearts’ (WE498 [September I, 1994]), a father despairs of finding grooms for his three strong-willed daughters and challenges them to find their own husbands, adding the catch thathe will not pay a paisa in dowry either. The three girls rise to the challenge—‘the hunt so far initiated by the males of the species had been taken over by the members of the fair sex—and eventually nail their young men. This unconventional approach to matchmaking was obviously redeemed by the jocular tone of the story—and by the girls’ ultimate good choice of the sort of young men their parents might have chosen for them. 8. See PH. Prabhu’s discussion (1995: 150-1) of the Hindu classical legal texts’

position on this question. The texts rule that if girl’s parents fail to arrange her marriage within three years after her attaining puberty, ‘it is permissible for such a young lady to take the whole responsibility on herself of choosing her life-mate and enter into wedlock with him.’ 9. One is reminded of the problem often encountered by social workers dealing with cases of domestic violence. Women may hesitate to leave an abusive

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marriage, or the women’s parents fail to render timely help or provide refuge, lest this impair the marital prospects of the women’s younger sisters. 10. WE editorials are constantly vigilant on behalf of Muslim women, especially on issues of triple talaq and polygamy. This situation is a tricky one, for in general WE endorses women’s education but gives homemaking priority over acareer outside the home. At the same time it sympathizes instinctively with the supposed plight of Muslim women. Cf. A. Deshpande’s comments (1984) on the sister journal, Sarita’s similar preoccupation.

11. This construction is particularly ingenuous, since it is well known that in

practice a woman's dowry is not in her control, nor even at the disposal of the young couple to help them off to a ‘good start’, but under the control of the parents-in-law, who may sometimes use the proceeds to marry off their daughters, educate younger children, or otherwise augment family capital and assets. See, e.g. Kishwar (1999: Chs. 1-3) for the changing stance of the Indian Women’s Movement on the dowry question; also U. Sharma (1993)

for a more sociological analysis.

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Index

Keg

adjustment, marital, 34-5, 206, 217-47, 249, 260-1

Adorno, Theodor W., 5, 37

adulthood, 88; see also childhood

advertising, 6, 13, 22, 50, 52, 61, 97, 104-5

affines/affinity (relations by marriage), 21, 29, 146, 158-60, 177, 194,

195-6, 207-8, 216; see ako marriage

Agarwal, Bina, 17, 26-8, 32, 42, 44-6

Arunima, G., 83, 85 audience, 8-9, 42; see also consumption; reception

auspiciousness, 100-1, 122-3

author/authorship, 8-10, 12, 16-17 Babb, Lawrence A., 15, 62, 71, 132 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 17, 37, 45 Banerjee, Sumanta, 38, 53, 146

Barjatya, Sooraj, 7, 34, 138, 143, 165,

age of marriage, 25, 60, 89, 249

171-3, 178, 183, 188 Barthes, Roland, 40, 76, 107-8

Allen, Michael, 35, 37, 76, alliance, marriage, 208; see also affinity Altekar, A.S., 52

Bennett, Lynn, 45, 219, 222 Bennett, Tony, 19

Agrawal, Anuja, 214, 223, 241-2, 247 Alter, Joseph, 108, 214

Althusser, Louis, 4 Alvi, Abrar, 114, 131 Amin, Shahid, 83, 103 Anderson, Benedict, 10-11, 140

androgyny, 67-8, 83, 103

Beeman, W.O., 42, 146, 164 Benjamin, Walter, 56, 58-9

Berger, John, 13-14, 57-9 Béteille, André, 22, 37, 169 Bettelheim, Bruno, 222, 243, 249 Bhai Duj (festival), 67, 213 Bharat Mata, 65, 69, 80, 81n; see also

Aris, Philippe, 86-90, 97, 104, 106,

Mother India Bharucha, Rustom, 141-2, 148-50, 163-7, 172-4, 176, 188 Bhatia, Anjali, 113

‘arranged love marriage’, 36, 180, 196,

Bhattacharjee, Anannya, 183, 210

Appadurai, Arjun, 37, 38, 181, 185, 200, 210-12 110

,

210, 214, 252, 256-9

arranged marriage, 23-6, 31, 35, 43, 125, 135, 168-9, 180, 209, 215, 218, 241, 249, 252, 259

art, 49; classical, 86; folk, 4, 86; nationalist, 49; popular, 49 art cinema, 5-6

Bhatia, Tej K., 77, 101

Bollywood cinema, 5-6, 15, 18, 28, 42,139, 143, 154-5, 162, 165, 173, 181, 185-6, 212-13, 215, 241

Bombay (dir. Mani Ratnam), 39, 139, 213, 241

Bose, Pradip Kumar, 108, 175

Index

302 Bose, Subhas Chandra, 104, 112

Chopra, Aditya, 7, 35, 171, 180, 183,

brahmacharya, 108, 121 Brahmo Samaj, 119, 131, 135-7 bride-givers/bride-takers, 21, 32, 34, 147, 149, 158, 174, 177; see also wife-givers/takers brideprice, 22, 26-9

Chopra, Radhika, 42, 242 Chopra, Yash, 185, 211, 213, 215 Chowdhry, Prem, 25, 45, 146, 153

Bourdieu, Pierre, 38, 72

- Brosius, Christiane, 40, 52, 66, 78, 80-1, 83, 111 brother-sister relations, 31, 33, 46, 67-8, 82, 213, 241

Brown, Mary Ellen, 41 Bryant, Kenneth E., 105-6 Butcher, Melissa, 39-40, 216

Calcutta Art Studio, 74, 81 calendar(s)/calendar art, ix—x, 3, 5, 9,

11-12, 15-18, 33, 45, 49-51, 55,

58-70, 72, 77, 85-7, 98-105;

definition of, 5, 49-51, 55, 86;

feminine imagery in, 15, 33, 50, 58-70, 86

Caplan, Lionel A., 218

Carstairs, G. Morris, 2, 92, 122, 219, 241

caste system, 21, 25, 28, 32, 44, 60,

135-6, 181-2, 189, 218, 221, 246

celibacy, 37; see also sexuality

Chakravarti, Uma, 52-3, 57-8, 62, 78, 108-9, 153, 214

Chakravarty, Sumita S., 39, 40, 52,

81, 133-5, 137, 139, 164, 182,

211-16

Chatterjee, Partha, 11, 52, 95, 220 Chatterji, Roma, 38 Chaudhuri, M., 40, 77 child/childhood/children, 12, 40-1, 85, 88, 90, 107, 171, 232; as

symbol of nation, 102-4; cultural

understandings of, 86-8, 95-7;

Indian, 90-1, 93-7; modern, 93-6 childlessness, 29, 226

185-6, 194-6, 202, 212-14

chromolithograph/chromolithography, 9-10, 50

cinema, 10, 15, 52, 118; and diaspora, 212; commercial, ix-x, 5-6, 15, 52, 62, 120, 123, 139, 164, 212, 230;

Hindi, 123, 139, 142; middle class,

6, 165, 213, 242, 246; parallel,

5-6, 164; popular, ix, 3-6, 34, 49, 117-19, 139, 142, 165, 167,

212-14; romantic, 121, 184; see

alo art cinema; Bollywood; film class, 22, 25, 43, 125-6, 213, 218, 235; middle, 6, 28-9, 43, 88, 95,

104-5, 182; upper, 104, 246 commoditization, of children, 104-5; of women, 58-61 conjugal relations/ conjugality, 2, 12, 30-1, 66-7, 88, 102, 121, 148,

217ff, 249; in calendar art, 67 consumption, 7-10, 12, 16, 40; see also audience; reception courtesan(s), 119, 123, 126-7, 129; versus wife, 123, 126

courtship, 25-6, 36, 217-19, 223-4, 240, 248fF

cultural nationalism, 11, 56-7; see abo nationalism

Cultural Studies, ix, 3, 17, 37, 40, 147 culture, Indian, 10, 12, 49, 148, 184, 202-3, 211

culture industries, 5-6, 51, 86

danger, 2, 36, 122, 250 Daniel, E. Valentine, 37, 45, 96 Darling, Malcolm Lyall, 27

Das, Veena, 7, 30, 45, 56, 71, 76, 94-7, 109-10, 122, 132, 145, 152, 154, 156, 172, 216, 219, 222

Das Gupta, Monica, 46

303

Index de Beauvoir, Simone, 41 de Certeau, Michel, 38 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 7-9, 40 Dehejia, Vidya, 15-16, 45, 71, 110 Derné, Steve, 37, 45, 76, 82, 122,

family, 11-12, 20-4, 30, 35, 45, 157,

descent, rules of, 20, 21, 30 Deshpande, Satish, 28, 39, 43, 170

22-4, 43, 92, 123, 138, 156, 162,

135, 156, 171, 215, 220

desire, ix, 30, 121-3, 127-8, 167, 180;

women’s, ix, 97, 114, 120, 121, 199-200, 206, 251

destiny, 130, 205

dharma (social duty), ix, 30, 33ff,

121-3, 128, 131, 150, 167, 251

diaspora, Indian, 22, 28, 35, 105, 175, 181, 184-5, 204, 209-10, 240;

and family, 208, 210; see also Non-Resident Indian(s)

Dickey, Sara, 188 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDL)) (dir. Aditya Chopra), 7, 10, 35, 39, 136, 171, 173, 180, 244

Dirks, Nicholas B., 40, 214 divorce, 44, 233-9, 249, 252, 258 Dixit, Madhuri, 48, 139-40, 142-3, 164, 166, 171, 176, 179

Doraiswamy, Rashmi, 40, 171-2, 188

dowry, 22, 24-8, 31, 44, 61-2, 78,

159, 161-3, 218, 261-2; deaths,

27, 31 Dube, Leela, 42-3, 76, 109

Dumont, Louis, 21, 43, 177 Dutt, Guru, see Guru Dutt

Dwyer, Rachel, 39, 40, 135, 175, 213, 242, 247

Eck, Diana L., 15, 132 endogamy, caste, 25, 31, 181, 218, 246 engagement, 260-1 Erikson, Erik, 89, 109 exogamy, 25, 44, 218, 246

fairytale, 222, 243

164; and Indian identity, x, 95, 168, 183; and modernization,

23-4, 28-9; and patriarchy, 30, 210; as tradition, 12, 152-4, 168; change in, x, 23, 28-9; joint, 12, 179, 207, 228; middle class, 92,

221; moral economy of, ix-x, 29, 42, 45, 92-3, 182-3, 204, 207-9;

nuclear, 22-4, 43, 55, 99; relations, 30-2, 168, 216, 222, 243;

sociology of, 3, 20-23, 35, 91, 141, 141, 210; values, ix, 18, 168, 180,

185, 200, 207, 211, 252; women and, 11, 33-6, 159-62, 196-200;

see also joint family; nuclear family

family film, 14-223

Femina (magazine), 39, 221, 241

feminism/feminist, 3, 7, 11-12, 14,16-17, 20, 28, 29, 32, 37, 45, 59, 210, 244, 261

fiction, romance, 4, 6, 10 16, 225fF

film(s), 5, 20, 150, 157; family, 140-3,

155; Hindi, 153; popular, 5-6, 12,

20, 124, 153; theory, 59, 141; see

also cinema

Fiske, John, 37 folk culture(s), 4-5, 12, 18, 38, 86,

148, 153, 174, 222; see abo Little

Tradition Foucault, Michel, 13-14

framing picture(s), 50; see also calendar(s)

freedom, 205; of choice, ix, 123-4, 150, 168, 218, 215, 257

Freitag, Sandria B., 40, 71, 75, 82 Freud, Sigmund, 13-14, 89, 117

Fruzzetti, L.M., 135-6, 145, 153, 241 Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, x, 72, 76, 78 Gadihoke, Sabeena, 82 Gandhi, Indira, 65, 78, 80, 111-12

304

Index

Gandhi, M.K., 28, 37, 79, 80, 112

Gandhi, Nandita, 27 Gatwood, Lynn, 62, 81 gaze, 12-16, 59; male, 14-16, 60, 79, 116; theory of, 13-16 genre(s), 4, 8, 16-17; and gender,

12-18; folk, 13; women's, 13, 18,

146, 216 Geetha, V., 219 Ghai, Subhash, 35, 133, 143, 173, 179, 180, 200, 211, 216

Ghosh, Shohini, 39, 71, 76, 145, 172-6, 178, 211

Giddens, Anthony, 41, 44, 219, 241 Gilligan, Carol, 36, 47

globalization, x, 183, 185, 205, 209, 217-18

goddess/goddesses, Hindu, 11, 62, 64, 66, 86, 98, 123; in calendar art, 16;

see also mother goddess

Hasan, Zoya, 40 Hawley, John, 98-9, 106, 110 hegemony, 17-18, 20, 53, 66, 70; cultural, 53; notion of, 17-18 Hermes, Joke, 9, 19, 41 Hershman, Paul, 44, 65, 145-7 Hindu Marriage Act, 24, 44

Hindu Succession Act, 46 Hinduism, 87, 98, 122

Hollywood (films), 42, 143, 165

household (co-residential, commensal

group), 23; see also family; joint family; nuclear family

Hsu, Francis L.K., 92, 109 Hum Aapke Hain Koun....! (HAHK), 7, 10, 34, 39, 136, 138, 140, 183, 187-8, 215, 243, 252 Husain, M.E, 48, 62, 70, 71, 80, 171

husband-wife relations, 120, 127-9, 219, 222fF

god-poster(s), 50; see also calendar(s)

hypergamy, 25-6, 31, 44; see also wifegivers/takers

Goode, WJ., 157, 218, 241

icons/iconography, 11, 86, 98; of children, 86; of goddesses, 98; Hindu, 86

Goffman, Erving, 41, 77 Gold, Ann, 18, 45

Goody, Jack, 26 Goonesekere, Savitri, 108

Gore, M.S., 122, 218, 241

gotra, 44, 218, 246

Gramsci, Antonio, 17, 38

Great Tradition, 4 Greenough, Paul R., 46

Guha, Ranajit, 38-9

identity, Indian, 10-12, 18, 28, 53, 180,182-4, 189-97, 208-9, 213

imagery, of children, 97-105; of women, 51, 58-68 ‘imagined community’, family as, 140, 152ff, 168-70

Guha-Thakurta, Tapati, 38, 40, 49, 51,

Inden, R.B., 153

Gulati, Leela, 210

inheritance, rules of, 20, 30 inter-ocularity, 9, 40, 75

54-7, 70-4

Gupta, Akhil, 88, 90, 96, 110 Gupta, Charu, 40, 45, 76, 109

Guru Dutt, 47, 114-16, 117, 121,

131-3, 137

Hall, Stuart, 13, 17, 40, 41

Hanchetr, S., 153 Hansen, Kathryn, 124, 135

Harman, William P, 62, 82, 122, 135

Inglis, Stephen R., 50, 71, 77 Jain, Jyotindra, 38, 51, 75, 83, 106 Jain, Kajri, 15, 38, 50, 51, 71-3, 77, 99, 101-2, 107, 111-13, 175

Jamous, Raymond, 31, 82, 145, 147, 153, 176, 241

Jauregui, Beatrice, 43

Jayamanne, L., 142, 149, 151, 165

Index John, Mary E., 37, 39, 75, 83, 106, 214, 217 joint family, 12, 21-4, 30, 34-5, 43, 45, 92-4, 123, 138, 151, 159, 162, 168, 177, 181, 208, 210, 223;

definition of, 23, 43

joking relations, 143, 145, 147-8, 158, 176

Juneja, Monica, 71, 80-1 Kabir, Nasreen Munni, 115, 117-18,

132-4, 136-7 Kajol, 186, 198, 200, 217

305 203, 207-9; Dravidian/south

Indian, 21-3, 25, 43, 173; Aryan/ north Indian, 21, 146, 154,

208-9, 212; patrilineal, 18, 30, 32;

studies, 20; see also family;

marriage; patriarchy Kishwar, Madhu, 27, 43, 241, 257,

262-3 Kolenda, P, 42-4, 145, 153, 172, 177

Krishna, Lord, 12, 60, 65, 68, 86, 94, 98-9, 104, 106, 110, 113, 124, 135, 142, 154, 166, 167, 204;

Bal-Krishna, 98

Kakar, Sudhir, 7, 37, 43, 45, 94, 109,

Kumar, Krishna, 77

Kalighat prints, 51

Kurw, Stanley, 37, 92, 175

112, 122, 124, 135-6, 141, 145, 155-6, 163, 171, 176, 225, 238, 241

Kane, PV., 109 kanyadan(a) (gift of the virgin), 21, 26, 208 Kapadia, K.M., 21, 135, 244

Kapur, Anuradha, 77, 107, 111

Kapur, Geeta, 53-5, 57-8, 69-71, 76

Kapur, Promilla, 177, 226-7, 241, 243-7, 249, 252

Kapur, Ratna, 32

Karlekar Malavika, 82, 108, 111

Karva Chauth (festival), 187, 192, 199, 213 Karve, Irawati, 20-1, 219, 222 Kaur, Raminder, 69, 77, 100, 107 Kazmi, Fareed, 37-9, 135, 152, 163, 176-7 Kazmi, Nikhat, 139-40, 166, 172,

Kumar, Radha, 27 Kumari, Meena, see also Meena Kumari Kurian, George, 218-19, 241 Lacan, Jacques, 13-14, 89

Larson, Gerald, 71

Lauretis, Teresa de, 40 law, customary, 20; Hindu, 44;

statutory, 20; family, 20

Leach, Edmund, 40 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 32, 40, 45 liberalization, x, 28 lithography, 53; see also chromolithography Litde Tradition, 4-5, 148 love, 2; conjugal, 34, 120-1, 125, 131, 135, 217ff, 223, 225, 259;

extra-marital, 34, 120, 130, 135; romantic, 34, 124, 145, 218, 221; sexual, 2, 121

174 Kesavan, Mukul, 42, 135

‘love marriage’, 24, 124, 135-6, 168,

khandan, 152, 160

Lyons, Tryna, 42

Khan, Salman, 139, 140, 142-3 Khan, Shah Rukh, 186, 194, 200, 206, 212

Kher, Anupam, 142, 186

kin/kinship, systems of, 18, 20-2, 30,

32; culture of, 32, 194, 196-200,

209, 213, 217-18, 223, 241, 250,

252, 263 Lutgendorf, Philip, 75, 77, 100, 105— 6, 111

McLeod, H.W., 51, 113 McLuhan, Marshall, 6

306

Index

Madan, T.N., 23, 44-6, 179, 219

Maduro, Renaldo, 51 Mahabharat(a), 55-6, 62, 75, 94, 212

Maine Pyar Kiya (dir. Sooraj Barjatya), 138

Mani, Lata, 53, 156 Mani Ratnam, 39, 141, 214, 241

Mankekar, Purnima, 19, 39-41, 56, 78 Marglin, Frédérique A., 122, 135 marital relations, 217, 224 marriage, 2, 18, 23-6, 31, 36, 44, 60, 194, 207-8, 249; adjustment, 217f6 arranged, 22-5, 31, 36, 43, 123, 135, 168, 172, 180, 209, 214, 222, 262; and sex, 207, 121;

breakdown of, 232, 239, 241, 249; child, 60, 89, 249; companionate,

32, 34, 67; love, 43, 121, 124, 135, 170, 209, 214, 217, 262;

payments, 22; rituals of, 122, 148,

153-4; rules of, 20, 44, 246; songs, 145-6; see also affinity; arranged marriage; love marriage Marriott, McKim, 4

Mira (Bhakti saint), 68, 83

Misti, Urvashi, 97, 219

Mitra, Ananda, 37, 38, 78 Mitter, Partha, 11, 38, 40, 49, 51, 54, 74, 81, 104

Mode, Heinz, 56, 61, 110 modern/modernity, 11-12, 32, 33, 36,

64-6, 87; concept of, 10

modernization, 24, 32, 44; and family, 24, 180-2

Modleski, Tania, 19, 42, 223

Moore, Henrietta L., 32 moral economy, 29; concept of, 29, 45; of family life, ix-x, 29, 42, 45, 92-3, 182-3, 204, 207-9

mother goddess, 3, 99, 102-3

Mother India (dit. Mehboob Khan), 79

Mother India, 11, 56, 65-6, 69, 80-1, 87; see abo Bharat Mata mother/motherhood, 59, 65-6 mother-child, imagery, 65; relations, 92-4, 110, 155

mother-daughter relationship, 243 mother-son relation(s), 155, 241

masculinity, Indian, 14-16, 37

Mughal-E-Azam, 139

37, 53, 58-9, 66; see also popular culture match-making, 22, 25, 36,123, 180, 215, 227, 236, 246, 248; see also

Munshi, Shoma, 39, 77, 83, 106, 241

mass media, 4-6, 12-13, 19, 22, 33,

affinity; arranged marriage

Mauss, Marcel, 116

Mayo, Katherine, 89, 109

McKean, Lise, 66, 80 McLuhan, Marshall, 6 Meena Kumari, 115, 118, 121, 130,

131-3, 137

Mehta, Deepa, 71 metaphor/metonymy, 8 Metz, Christian, 40n

middle class, 6-7, 104, 148, 184, 200, 209, 211, 238-9 Millett, Kate, 6, 41

Minturn, Leigh, 30, 45, 109

Mulvey, Laura, 14-16, 41, 59-60 Murphy, Lois, 91

Nagpal, Ashok, 122, 176

Naipaul, V.S., 217, 221, 233, 240-3

Nair, Janaki, 37, 44, 214

Nandy, Ashis, 6, 37, 39, 52-3, 56, 71, 90, 92, 94-7, 122, 141, 153, 155, 1634,

167-8, 173, 175-6, 241

Narain, Dhirendra, 91-2, 109

narcissism, 164-6

narrative (structure), 25, 124, 132, 167-8, 222-32, 239, 248, 252-9

Nathdwara temple/school of artists, 42, 51,73 nation, x, 10-12, 35, 48, 86; and childhood, 102; and women, 10-11, 35, 48; iconography,

307

Index 10-12, 48-9, 62-5, 86 102-4;

imagination of, 10-12, 34, 170-1 nation-building, 94, 102-3 nationalism, 86, 102, 204-6 Neumayer, Erwin, 38-9, 50, 56, 71-2,

74-5, 77, 79-83, 98, 106, 110-13 Nicholas, Ralph W., 45, 153 Nieuwenhuys, Olga, 108

Niranjana, Tejaswini, 174-5, 214

Non-Resident-Indians (NRI), 181