Essays in Celebrity Culture: Stars and Styles 1785277863, 9781785277863

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Essays in Celebrity Culture

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Essays in Celebrity Culture Stars and Styles

Pramod K. Nayar

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Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com This edition first published in UK and USA 2021 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA Copyright © Pramod K. Nayar 2021 The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935802 ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-786-3 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 1-78527-786-3 (Hbk) Cover image: AlexanderLipko/Shutterstock.com This title is also available as an e-book.

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CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Stars, Styles, Society and Spectacle

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Part 1. Bollywood and Celebrity 1. Victims, Bollywood and the Construction of a Cele-Meme

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2. Brand Bollywood Care: Celebrity, Charity and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism

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3. Celebrity, Charisma, and Post-truth Relations: Agnogenesis, Affect, and Bollywood

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Part 2. Celebrity and Lifewriting 4. What the Stars Tell: Celebrity Lifewriting in India

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5. Biopics

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6. Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs

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Part 3. Celebrity, Culture and Politics 7. Indian Writing in English as Celebrity

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8. Watery Friction: The River Narmada, Celebrity, and New Grammars of Protest

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9. Mobility and Insurgent Celebrityhood: The Case of Arundhati Roy

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10. Desecration and the Politics of ‘Image Pollution’: Ambedkar Statues and the ‘Sculptural Encounter’ in India

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11. Authors, Self-Fashioning and Online Cultural Production in the Age of Hindu Celevision

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Index

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PREFACE Celebrity Studies has been a part of my academic work consistently, and one essay a year has been an average. The current volume’s intentional and contextual diversity and variety stems from the fact that these essays were written for specific contexts, adhering to the demands made by anthologies, journals and special issues. Hopefully, these same features will reveal numerous shades (more than fifty) of the celebrity. The essays brought together here represent work that has appeared in the last decade, and since my first foray into the field, in the form of Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society and Celebrity Culture (2009). They appear here unrevised and unedited from their original published version. Hyderabad, India December 2020

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS These essays first appeared in anthologies and journals. I am very grateful to editors of volumes for inviting me to contribute and the referees for their prescient and probing comments and suggestions, which made the essays much better than they would otherwise have been. Victims, Bollywood and the Construction of a Cele-Meme. In Anthony Elliott (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Celebrity Studies. Routledge, 2018. Brand Bollywood Care: Celebrity, Charity and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism. In David Marshall and Sean Redmond (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Celebrity. Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Celebrity, Charisma and Post-truth Relations: Agnogenesis, Affect and Bollywood. In J. P. Zúquete (ed.), Routledge International Handbook of Charisma. Routledge, 2021, 408–17 What the Stars Tell: Celebrity Lifewriting in India, 2017–2018. Biography 42.1 (2019): 62–68. Biopics: The Year in India. Biography 40.4 (2017): 604–10. Bollywood Stars and Cancer Memoirs. Biography 43.1 (2020): 86–93. Indian Writing in English as Celebrity. In Om Dwivedi and Lisa Lau (eds), Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. Watery Friction: The River Narmada, Celebrity, and New Grammars of Protest. Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 292–310. Mobility and Insurgent Celebrityhood: The Case of Arundhati Roy. Open Cultural Studies 1.1 (2017): 46–54. Desecration and the Politics of ‘Image Pollution’: Ambedkar Statues and the ‘Sculptural Encounter’ in India. Celebrity Studies 11.1 (2020): 116–24. Authors, Self-Fashioning and Online Cultural Production in the Age of Hindu Celevision. In Xenia Zeiler (ed.), Digital Hinduism. Routledge, 2019.

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Introduction STARS, STYLES, SOCIETY AND SPECTACLE From studies of renown (Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown) and star bodies (Richard Dyer, Stars) to celanthropy (Chris Rojek’s term for celebrity philanthropy, 2013), from desecration of celebrities (Andó and Redmond 2020) to celebrity-suffering memoirs (Christopher Reeve’s Still Me and the numerous Bollywood star memoirs from India), Celebrity Studies has trekked a long way. The essays collected here signpost some of the features that mark these trek and star tracks. Most of the work collected here emerges from studies of Bollywood stardom, genres of celebrity textual/cultural production and the culture and politics of celebritydom. In this introduction, I map select frames within which the essays may be broadly located, not as protocols of reading but to demonstrate the expanse of celebrity culture of which this book and its contents are a modest instance. The frames as detailed here may appear as far too discrete but that is precisely the idea, given the contents of the essays that follow. In their introduction to a volume on Celebrity Studies, Anthony Elliott and Ross Boyd speak of a ‘democratization of public renown’ (2018: 4) where there has been ‘a very broad change from narrow, elite definitions of public renown to more open, inclusive, understandings’ (4). They propose that contemporary celebrities ‘transform and reinvent their identities today’ and ‘many of them embrace and indeed celebrate a culture of inauthenticity’. They continue, citing Chris Rojek, ‘Parody, pastiche and, above all, sudden transformations in a star’s identity are the key indicators of contemporary celebrity’ (4). While it is arguable that ‘inauthenticity’ marks the current climate and culture of the celebrity – one could say, following the Frankfurt School’s exposition on modernity and popular culture, that such an inauthentic simulacra has been around long enough for the public to expect nothing less than the façade, the pastiche, the parody – the framework of a ‘democratization of public renown’ leads us into interesting ways of perceiving and studying celebrity culture.

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A discussion of democratization is not necessarily, or only, about a shift in definitions of ‘public renown’ but in the very nature of celebrity identity and processes and technics of celebrification, embodying a ‘demotic turn’ as Graeme Turner termed it (2006). This discussion can begin, given the emphasis on public renown, with the very idea of the public, and its link with celebrity culture. P. David Marshall in his work elsewhere argues for a ‘publics’ rather than a ‘public’: Publics became a way to express new generations of political and cultural visibility in a culture and thereby relied definitionally on how the concept of public is fundamentally associated with attention. The emergence of new publics … depended on a media economy that privileges difference, novelty and distinctiveness, which could be characterized as formations of publicity and were important methods of conveying news from the centres of power. In conjunction with communities, publics emerged as political entities related to visible cultural movements. (2016: 6) Merging the idea of a ‘democratization of public renown’ with Marshall’s ‘publics’, we can begin to make a case for the celebrity as enabling and constitutive of such a ‘publics’. This democratization can be conceived of in two ways. One, celebrities who, by virtue of their public renown, perform actions that thrive upon their celebrity status and, in the process, bring attention to bear on the causes they espouse. These actions and campaigns relocate the celebrity into the realm of grassroots involvement, addressing issues generally deemed to be of value and worth to the public. They lend their celebrity status to a cause. Second, actions undertaken by otherwise unknown individuals catapult them to celebrity status. In this two-route model, I am adopting Dan Brockington’s classification of ‘conservation celebrity’ (2007: 2). I will begin with the second model and the opposite end of the spectrum: ordinary people who, by becoming celebrities through their actions, signal a democratization. Actions by certain individuals – and Greta Thunberg (now the face of a global movement) and Ieshia Evans (later on BBC’s 100 Women and the subject of Jonathan Bachman’s award-winning photograph, as she stands calmly facing cops rushing towards her in the Baton Rouge protests) – come to mind as recent instances. Individuals who are hitherto unknown acquire celebrityhood through the performance of the action that connotes a specific cultural value

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(resistance to climate and racial-social injustice in these two immediate cases). An action that spectacularizes a singular cultural and ethical value produces the celebrity, in sharp contrast to the acts performed by the celebrity. This shift is a democratization because those who were ‘nobodies’ have become ‘somebodies’, provoking a surge of interest in them and their actions that are believed/perceived as response-able acts. Generating a fair amount of affect – celeaffect, like cele-effects, are profound, even if often they are brief – the acts and the persons become nodal points in the eddying of emotions and values in the social. The publics cohere around a set of actions performed by individuals and produce the celebrity as an effect of the actions. Celebrification that drives the democratization of celebrity culture, then, grows from a set of cultural values. This celebrification as the valorization of particular values may be best instanced in sports celebrities and the cultural productions – such as biopics – around them. With the media coverage and documentation of the career, event by event, match by match, there is a renewed attention to feats of endurance, training (for long years) and bodily fitness (but also injuries) that render the sports celebrity an icon of both bodily enhancement and ‘performative excellence’ (Andrews and Jackson 2001: 8). They come to represent (national?) values of hard work, training, consistency and social mobility as the biopics, for instance, capture the transformation of the sports person into a sports star. Moving from actions that produce celebrities to celebrity performance of action, one can see that celebrities function as a sort of connective tissue for the publics to be formed. David Marshall and Sean Redmond write, Celebrity culture offers us companionship; it is the regenerating plasma that will end our loneliness. Celebrities are often anything but lonely, their consumption lifestyles and networks suggest a life of rich connectivity. Their companionship is inviting and seductive, and it offers forms of intimacy through the way it communicates in sensuous forms of expression. We don’t have to be lonely. We can find real and meaningful companionship in, with and through our celebrities. In a postsecular age perhaps it is only in and through celebrities that we can find solace and tactility. Even when celebrities are signified as lonely, sufferers of depression, addiction, or other mental health problems, they offer us the space to collectively share so that we are not isolated sufferers. They are higher order healers and soothsayers whose wonderment lifts us up and out of ourselves so that we can be productive citizens and workers. The

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neoliberal sleight of hand here is quite remarkable. Our individualist lives can be maintained, we can develop selfhood that is goal driven, but we can connect with celebrities, who also propagate the neoliberal will to produce and consume. We can be terribly lonely and deliriously connected at the same time. Or can we? (11, emphasis in original) The sharing of similar but not identical suffering through circuits of mediated affect, including the published memoir, talk shows (one credits Oprah with creating the ‘glamour of misery’, where her ‘persona seems to have emerged not in spite of but precisely thanks to her failures’, Illouz 2003: 32), social media-driven biosocial networks and such, is a form of democratization as well. Generating a discourse around misery, personalizing it and sharing it ensure that a certain ‘intimate publics’ (Berlant 2011) is brought into being. I propose that the creating of intimate publics produces the context in which autobiographical stories of loss and triumph, suffering and survival are readily invited, shared and circulated. That said, it is also likely that stories of celebrity suffering and particularly their deaths, which Chris Rojek terms ‘celebrity supernova’, subsume everything else in public life into the celebrity’s news. Celebrity supernovas present a sense of being in touch with cultural immensity. With the death of a Michael Jackson or a John F. Kennedy, the age changes. It translates into something else. The occurrence of a celebrity supernova involves the pain of group loss and the bitter gall of personal mourning. There is no other news. (Rojek 2012: 1) The democratization of visible suffering via celebrity biosociality does, however, in the form of intimate publics, speed up the production of the ‘misery memoir’. The academic and popular attention paid to disability memoirs, for instance, bestows upon the text and the author/patient the status of a ‘some body’ rather than a ‘nobody’ (Couser 2012). In the company of star victims, so to speak, other victims also (can/will) speak up, obtaining a publication, a talk show and a few seconds of air time. Films documenting and/or fictionalizing victim lives (of ordinary people) are a means of democratizing victimhood itself. Excluding the spectacles around mass victimhood, such as the Holocaust or war, stories of individuals who survived or didn’t, thrive on the making of intimate publics too. In the era of competing victimhood, ‘media rituals’ (Couldry 2003) these publics enable the victims to become, however, temporarily, celebrities. The commodification of suffering, in multiple formats and genres, (re)constructs the victim as celebrity-victim. This celebrification of the victim belongs to the third wave of the democratization of celebrity, as

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identified by Olivier Driessens. Driessens notes the ‘introduction and growing but often temporary popularity, both for the audiences and the celebrity and media industries, of reality TV and DIY celebrities’ (373). The celebrification possibilities for the ordinary individual, he implies, are driven by the new technologies and cultures proliferating across media. Films, TV talk shows, biopics and such offer a form of reparative and restitutive narrative that in focusing on the person-who-suffered enable their celebritydom. Moving from the individual to the collective, the mediated documentation of communitarian suffering, resistance, survival and the spaces in which these are performed or enacted – voluntarily, as in Wall Street, Narmada or Tahrir Square – also produces celebrities. Here, as W. J. T Mitchell (2012) and others have pointed out, in the anonymity of crowds with no identifiable ‘hero’ of the movement per se, the key ‘sign’ of resistance is the space itself: that is, the space of Wall Street is the celebrity. Here, evidently, Celebrity Studies has moved beyond identifying celebrity power within a face, or even a person, locating it now in entire topoi such as Wall Street, even if the power is temporally limited. The making of an affect-driven intimate publics demonstrates not only celebrity power but also the values placed upon certain conditions, events and acts: suffering and victimhood, resistance, survival, triumph, and so forth. Celebrities are also, then, expected to affirm these cultural values by the same publics. As Joke Hermes and Jaap Kooijman put it, Celebrities may have charisma bestowed on them by the magic of being in and of the media; in everyday life they are held to account for their usefulness in the ongoing negotiation about society’s (or, indeed, the nation’s) needs, burdens, challenges and faults, whether as example (good or bad) or point of reference. (2016: 495) The affirmation of values is a part of the ‘everyday uses of celebrities’, in Hermes and Kooijman’s reading. With everyday life, and celebrity culture, increasingly structured around digital media, the speed of celebrification has drastically altered. Campaigns, news, slander, scandals and auto/biographies circulate faster than ever before. Tweets, blogs, instagramming and memes contribute to the rapid dissemination of celebrity news or events and people who then become celebrities. Romano Andó and Sean Redmond offer another insight into the age of digital celebrification when they note,

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There is an amnesia that leaks into the flows of celebrity culture. In fact, within the new media ecosystem, the fallen celebrity may potentially reach an even higher level of elevation in the public sphere. (2020: 2) This means that the rise and fall of celebrities can be almost instantaneous in real time: It [digital media] can give rise to instantaneous celebrities, consecrated without formal ordination; and, due to the possible shortening of the chronological interval between celebrification and desecration, it can quicken the processes of degradation. (2) For celebrities to ‘emotionalise themselves’ (3) is now a matter of minutes, altering significantly their public persona and the reception by the public of this persona. Within the broad ambit of ‘celebrity activism’, one could argue that, on the one hand, this humanizes the celebrity by bringing her/him closer to concerns and issues on the ground and, on the other, reinforces selfconsciously the star status in this performance of activism. Some scepticism remains about the role of celebrity activism. One strand of thought sees it as ‘rationaliz[ing] the very global inequality it seeks to redress … [and] is fundamentally depoliticizing’ (Kapoor 2012: 1). Other strands argue for and against the commodification of politics at the hands of celebrities, the relevance of ‘public shows’ with celebrities that evoke themes in, say, human rights and the ‘moral authority’ they lend to political agendas (Street 2004; Gies 2009; Kellner 2010; Wheeler 2013). But the ability to enter into multiple domains of public life, from politics to culture, constitutes the celebrity as a mobile insurgent (‘insurgent’ comes from ‘insurgere’, meaning ‘to rise up in revolt’, signifying movement) whose potential to generate public awareness is enormous, as I have argued in the case of Arundhati Roy. In many such cases, they also enable the linkage of the local with the global, marking the rise of a vernacular cosmopolitan celebrity. Hollywood star activists campaigning against war and championing conservation or such humanitarian causes would approximate to this form of celebrity. That said, it requires more work to unpack, as Nahuel Ribke cautions us, ‘the specific dynamics of the relevant fields within the cultural industries where these stars gained their celebrity status, and examine the specific social and economic conditions under which celebrities have successfully moved from one field to another’ (2015: 8–9). This work, historically specific, would help us understand the macro and microdynamics of celebrity activism and celebrity politics.

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Celebrity activism is a part of the democratization of public renown, through shared ideological and political commitment with people around the world and enabling (or fitting into) communities of interest. Therefore, Lisa Ann Richey in her introduction to a volume of essays on celebrity politics writes, ‘Celebrity humanitarianism can be read as a performance between the celebrity as benefactor and the public for whom the celebrity functions as a proxy philanthropist’ (2015: 4). For Richey, celebrity activism and politics has changed the Global NorthSouth relations in humanitarian work. Celebrity activism asserts the primacy of specific values, such a humanitarianism, in politics and the role of these values when enmeshed in networks of power. Richey writes, Celebrities (and corporations) become increasingly involved in shaping the meanings of humanitarianism, the field itself will be increasingly shifted toward the elite, the profitable and the photogenic. It would be naïve to imagine a time when ‘development’ was more ‘authentically’ concerned with mitigating the negative effects of poverty and inequality. (2015: 21) Observing that ‘celebrity humanitarianism entails bringing highly visible mediagenic people to places which need attention, but then requires them not to speak out on important political matters’, Dan Brockington writes, Do they spread to other realms, to policy changes? Do the policies effect any other change? Do they affect urgent development issues such as refugee flows, nutrition, education, capabilities and capacities? (2015: 211) But for those who embody a more pragmatic approach to celebrity activism, Celebrity humanitarianism provides a mandate because celebrities signify the public. They act as a proxy for public involvement. They simulate the public to politicians even if, as Cox notes in pretty much all cases they, the public, were not engaged initially. (Brockington 2015: 213) We have to ask, Brockington emphasizes, ‘what sort of world is being constituted by celebrity humanitarianism’ (217)?

The essays collected show parallels and resonances with some of the arguments outlined above. Written for specific purposes, they remain one-off

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explorations, but brought together here, hopefully they illuminate multiple corners of the field of Celebrity Studies. The essays are organized into three parts: ‘Bollywood and Celebrity’, ‘Celebrity and Lifewriting’ and ‘Celebrity, Culture and Politics’. The first part deals with the industry that provides India the largest number and the most visible of celebrities: Bollywood (and that is a truism). Bollywood in India gives the stars, the scandals – I write this in the immediate aftermath of the ‘suicide’ of one the brightest upcoming film actors of recent times, Sushant Singh Rajput, and the attendant drugs/politics/cinema nexus that the media seems to be uncovering each day – and success stories. Whether this is the classic story of hard-work-fetching-results for an unknown young man (Shah Rukh Khan), or the media power radiating out of the oldest film dynasty in India (the Kapoors), or the ‘bad boy’ stardom (Salman Khan, Sanjay Dutt), the film industry has thrown up many shades of celebrity. The essays in this part focus on three specific subthemes emanating from Bollywood star cultures: celebrity victimhood, celebrity philanthropy and celebritydom’s awkward connection with post-truth ‘agnogenesis’. The essay ‘Victims, Bollywood and the Construction of a Cele-Meme’ studies the films made about celebrity women victims and those women whose violent victimhood has rendered them celebrated and celebrities: Phoolan Devi, Bhanwari Devi, Jessica Lal and Kiranjit Ahluwalia. It argues that a celememe around women and empowerment is constructed around the image of the woman victim. It proposes two models of women victims, the reproachable and the therapeutic one, before turning to their transformation into moral icons. I then turn to ‘Brand Bollywood Care’ (BBC), my nomenclature for celebrity humanitarianism and philanthropic works. The essay proposes that the work of Bollywood stars at activities that resonate and connect with global concerns enables their insertion into a global humanitarian project. While utilizing their ‘vernacular’ origins to position themselves in particular ways, the Bollywood campaigner for women’s rights, environmental causes or animal welfare generates a membership in the global citizenship of benevolence and charity. My third essay in this part studies charisma. Theorizing Bollywood charisma as a form of mimetic capital generating a sensuous fidelity in the audience, I propose that this same charisma induces a certain cultural ignorance, or agnogenesis. This agnogenesis is directly linked to affective investments in certain images of the star and is a response to the anxieties around ‘algorithmic governance’ of the twenty-first century. Part 2 occupies itself with the celebrity auto/biography. In the first essay I look at the memoirs of Rishi Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt, Karan Johar and

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Soha Ali Khan. Star memoirs, I demonstrate, reinforce her/his star value through the generation of an interart work, in which the life story is framed within the film history of the individual, and the films are framed by the life of the actor. The subject that emerges in these memoirs is an ironic subject where the star component of these celebrities’ lives is toned down and the sentimental accentuated in order to demonstrate the humanness of the star. Recent hagiographic biopics have been produced around cricket stars M. S. Dhoni (incidentally the recently deceased Sushant Singh Rajput played Dhoni to considerable critical acclaim) and Sachin Tendulkar, the criminal Charles Sobhraj and the airhostess Neerja Bhanot killed by hijackers. It shows how the family and the nation remain nodal points in the representations of the lives and careers and how these representations enable the making of certain aspirational models for the country. Two cancer memoirs by Bollywood stars, Manisha Koirala’s Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life and Lisa Ray’s Close to the Bone, are the subject of the next essay. The essay shows how these celebrity somatographies move outward, from a focus on the star’s body to the biosocial network. Part 3 consists of essays that are at the intersection of celebritydom and celebrity politics, although by no means does it imply that, for instance, celebrity activism is apolitical. The first essay examines the genre of Indian writing in English as a celebrity within the context of literary festivals and the demand for the postcolonial exotic. The essay on Narmada argues that it is now a cultural icon and holds continued relevance to the cultural formations that give meaning to protests and critiques in contemporary India. Narmada’s iconicity generates a whole new grammar of protest, having become a part of India’s collective cultural memory and the popular imagination, through an iconicity constructed within two major intersecting discourses: environmentalism and social justice. Reading Arundhati Roy as a celebrity, the next essay makes a case for her ‘insurgent celebrityhood’ created through her mobility into and across many public domains. Then there is her generic mobility (across genres), the mobility from the cosmopolitan domain to the vernacular. And finally one discerns a mobilization of ‘ínsurgents’, those with political views opposed to the state’s and involved with social justice struggles. The desacralization of the iconic Ambedkar statues, which occurs periodically in parts of India, the next essay proposes, is a mode of once again rendering the Dalit an ‘outcast’. The statues are a part of honour systems, embodiments of a public history and represent a whole new iconicity. Reading

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the ‘profane semiotics’ of statue desecration and the symbolic economy, the essay proposes desecration as a counter-spectacle. In the final essay, I turn to the websites of celebrity Indian authors, Ashok Banker, Devdutt Pattanaik and Amish. I demonstrate how a certain selffashioning by these authors occurs through a careful engagement with a Hindu ancestry and tradition. The self-fashioning is linked to, and manifests as, their literary location within scriptural-mythological narrative. The three authors appropriate and leverage existing conditions in which spectacular, hyper-visible Hinduism is writ across the cultural landscape and collectively produce a celevision in the self-representation.

References Andó, Romano, and Sean Redmond. ‘Desecrating Celebrity’, Celebrity Studies 11.1 (2020): 1–7. Andrews, David L., and Stephen L. Jackson. ‘Introduction: Sport Celebrities, Public Culture, and Private Experience’, in David L. Andrews and Stephen L. Jackson (eds), Sport Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity. London: Routledge, 2001, 1–19. Berlant, Lauren. ‘Life Writing and Intimate Publics: A Conversation with Lauren Berlant’, Biography 34.1 (2011): 180–87. Brockington, Dan. Celebrity and the Environment: Fame, Wealth and Power in Conservation. London: Zed, 2007. ———.‘Epilogue: The Politics of Celebrity Humanitarianism’, in Lisa Ann Richey (ed.), Celebrity Humanitarianism and North–South Relations: Politics, Place and Power. London: Routledge, 2015, 210–17. Couldry, Nick. Media Rituals: A Critical Approach. London: Routledge, 2003. Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Lifewriting. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. Elliott, Anthony, and Ross Boyd. ‘Celebrity and Contemporary Culture’, in Anthony Elliot (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Celebrity Studies. London: Routledge, 2018, 3–25. Gies, Lieve. ‘Celebrity Big Brother, Human Rights and Popular Culture’, Entertainment and Sports Law Journal 7.1 (2009). https://www.entsportslawjournal.com/articles/10.16997/ eslj.53/ (accessed 27 June 2019). Hermes, Joke, and Jaap Kooijman. ‘The Everyday Use of Celebrities’, in David Marshall and Sean Redmond (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Celebrity. Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2016, 463–82. Illouz, Eva. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Kapoor, Ilan. Celebrity Humanitarianism: The Ideology of Global Charity. London: Routledge, 2012. Kellner, Douglas. ‘Celebrity Diplomacy, Spectacle and Barack Obama’, Celebrity Studies 1.1 (2010): 121–23. Marshall, P. David. ‘Introduction: The Plurality of Publics’, in P. David Marshall, Glenn D’Cruz, Sharyn McDonald and Katja Lee (eds), Contemporary Publics: Shifting Boundaries in New Media, Technology and Culture. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016, 1–13.

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Marshall, P. David, and Sean Redmond. ‘Introduction’, in David Marshall and Sean Redmond (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Celebrity. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016, 1–13. Mitchell, W. J. T. ‘Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation’, Critical Inquiry 39.1 (2012): 8–32. Ribke, Nahuel. A Genre Approach to Celebrity Politics: Global Patterns of Passage from Media to Politics. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2015. Richey, Lisa Ann. ‘Introduction: Celebrity Humanitarianism and North–South Relations – Politics, Place and Power’, in Lisa Ann Richey (ed.), Celebrity Humanitarianism and North– South Relations: Politics, Place and Power. London: Routledge, 2015, 1–23. Rojek, Chris. Fame Attack: The Inflation of Celebrity and Its Consequences. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. ———.‘ “Big Citizen” Celanthropy and Its Discontents’, International Journal of Cultural Studies 17.2 (2013): 127–41. Street, John. ‘Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture and Political Representation’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 6.4 (2004): 435–52. Turner, Graeme. ‘The Mass Production of Celebrity: “Celetoids”, Reality TV and the “Demotic Turn” ’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9.2 (2006): 153–65. Wheeler, Mark. Celebrity Politics: Image and Identity in Contemporary Political Communications. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.

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Part 1 BOLLYWOOD AND CELEBRITY

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Chapter 1 VICTIMS, BOLLYWOOD AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A CELE-MEME Hindi cinema, also known as Bollywood, the world’s largest producer of films, is a prime example of a celebrity ecology, which includes media construction, consumer, spectacle and power (Nayar 2009) that nurtures interesting, challenging and, expectedly, even revanchist views of gender, caste, nation and the individual. Bollywood and its cognate industries – publicity, poster-designers, fashion shows, advertising – is a fertile ground for the study of Indian forms of celebrification. The stars move into politics, are worshipped as gods and demigods, generate a wholly different order of buzz, in India and globally, with their humanitarian activism, all of which offer us complex discourses and representational strategies for celebrity studies. I shall touch briefly upon some of the ways in which Bollywood stars contribute to a deeper understanding of celebrity studies in India. Bollywood stars display what S. V. Srinivas in his study of the South Indian, specifically Telugu, star, Chiranjeevi, termed ‘cinematic populism’ (2009). Cinematic populism merges off-screen and online roles. This is particularly true of the first generation of actors-turned-politicians. Many of the actors in the 1950–1970 period, especially in the film industries of Southern India, were well known for their portrayal of gods on screen (Nayar 2009: 94–95). The visual rhetoric of the deity and the film hero relies upon a frontality. This viewing of the divine face is called darshan in Hindi and the frontal portrayal of the Indian film heroes has reinforced this quasidivine association of the film hero/ine. The deity and the film hero/ine, and particularly the hero, gaze out at the audience/viewer, thereby meeting the viewer’s gaze in a darshanic visual linkage, both on screen and in advertising posters and notices, as commentators have noted (Prasad 1998: 74–78; Dwyer and Patel 2002: 33). This frontal viewing often transforms the viewed object into a desirable object, with the darshanic, which has specifically religious connotations of the visual, blurring into the nazar, or the gaze of romance (Taylor 2003). The fan clubs around these stars, especially in the case of Southern Indian

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stars like Rajnikanth (Tamil films), in their iconography (in terms of film star portraits, cut-outs and material culture practices) merge religious devotion with film consumption (Rogers 2011). The film star’s fan club has been a key component of social mobilization, class and caste identities and electoral/political campaigns as well (Dickey 2001; Jacob 2008). Visual rhetoric therefore establishes a certain layered order of celebrity – as human, as divine – of the film star in India. This form of cinematic populism enables the crossover into politics as well. Recent trends of celebrity activism constitute another layer to celebrityhood in India. Bollywood stars’ humanitarian activism in the recent past has enabled a global citizenship for the celebs. Originating in a ‘developing nation’, armed with and represented through the discourses of case, compassion and charity operating at local levels but resonating with similar discourses across the world, the Bollywood star acquires a different order of celebrityhood (Nayar 2016). The staged battles of good and evil, the triumph of the good hero and the decimation of the villain, returning to Hindu epics and mythology in many cases, have always been a sure-fire mode of capturing the audience. In Bollywood iconography, the villain has ensured the amplification of the hero and the heroic (Ghosh 2013). Part of the celebrity appeal in Bollywood stems from this iconography as well, and needs to be investigated to see what, if any, social codes and cultural imaginaries are being reconstructed in definitions of good/evil, tolerable deviance/unacceptable crime, among others. Celebrity culture’s links with the larger social and cultural imaginaries are, I think, fruitfully explored through Bollywood – a point I come to toward the end of this essay when examining the victims on screen as moral icons. Bollywood’s traditional depiction of women has been stereotypical: sacrificing mother, vamp, devoted wife/sister, seductive beloved (who morphs, post-marriage – always the culmination of a romance in the regular commercial – into devoted wife/sister), tyrannical mother/sister-in-law. They are symbols of virtue, family values and tradition. Fareed Kazmi writes: The subconscious hold of socialization patterns inculcated in girls through the popular mythological stories of the ever suffering Sita as virtuous wife, or the all suffering Savitri who rescues her husband from death are all part of the preparation for suffering in the roles of wives and mothers. (2010: 63) Even variant models, of the ‘avenging’ woman for instance, tend to eventually reinforce the ‘safer’ stereotypes. However, woman-centred films from the post-1990s period sought, not always successfully, to construct a ‘new

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woman’ for India, endowed with agency, individualism and choice. Post-2000, as critics such as Sukanya Gupta note, the spectrum has shifted further toward empowered women roles, so that by showing how women can exist and have meaning beyond the confines of patriarchy and social expectations, these new queens of popular Bollywood films set a precedent, provide some much needed inspiration, and become empowered role models that resonate with the population (Gupta 2015: 2). Gupta’s argument is in line with Nandana Bose’s work on the Bollywood star Vidya Balan, whose films, Bose proposes, are feminist in their emphasis on women with agency, and thus mark a new trend in contemporary Hindi cinema (2014). Star actors and their films – Rani Mukherjee (No One Killed Jessica), Madhuri Dixit (Gulaab Gang), Kangana Ranaut (Queen), Vidya Balan (Kahaani) – have contributed in recent years to this shift so that, along with the celebrity actor/star, the theme of women’s empowerment, often independent of male ‘support’ and in the face of systemic resistance, itself makes its appearance. I think of this theme, current across academia, reportage, legislation and even occasionally the political class, especially in the wake of the December 2012 rape in New Delhi, as a celebrity theme, or a meme. I therefore see the celebrity victims as central to the formation of a celebrity idea, a programme of cultural (and eventually legal) action and an attitude. Women’s empowerment as an idea is a cele-meme in contemporary India, where meme is a replicable cultural idea or belief, transmissible across populations and functioning as a sociocultural contagion. This meme emerges because putative ideas of equality and women’s rights already exist and the celebrity victim triggers the cultural symptom of protests, calls for legislative action, campaigns for social reform and a change in attitudes, that indicates the expression of the ideas and brings collectives together. There are two principal modes through which recent Hindi cinema constructs this cele-meme of women’s empowerment. The first mode might be seen in films such as Gulaab Gang and Kahaani that explicitly reference agency, individual choice and even a certain militant stance (both films depict women clearly at ease with inflicting violence). The second mode is a more unusual one, where the filmmakers take the stories of celebrated real-life victims – by definition those denied agency and individual power of choice but also subjects of violence – and use these in films to present implicitly the need for empowerment. In most cases the victims are rendered celebrities, both due to the nature of their trauma, the subsequent social irruptions, media hype or campaigns and due to the films made around their lives. I suggest that victims who become subjects of films, while becoming celebrities for what their lives (or deaths) have catalysed, help generate the cele-meme of women’s agency

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precisely because the films implicitly signal the absence of any such agency. The celebrity ecology has already constructed the victim through extensive news coverage and media spectacle, as well as the protracted legal battles around them. The feature film takes the already available celebrity victim, and recasts it as a trope that then enables the making of the cele-meme. Phoolan Devi, Bhanwari Devi, Jessica Lal and Kiranjit Ahluwalia are celebrity victims around whose lives and trauma feature films have been made. These have been commercial successes in multiplexes catering to niche audiences, and often critically acclaimed. Shekar Kapur’s controversial film Bandit Queen (1995), about the woman dacoit Phoolan Devi, was produced for BBC’s Channel 4 and scripted by Phoolan Devi’s biographer Mala Sen. It starred the art film and multiplex actor Seema Biswas in the title role. Provoked (2006), starring the hugely successful beauty-queen- turned-star, Aishwarya Rai, was based on the life of abused wife Kiranjit Ahluwalia, set in England, and directed by Indian-born British film-maker Jag Mundhra. Mundhra’s earlier attempt to do victim stories had been responsible for Bawandar (2000), about the 1992 gang-rape of social worker Bhanwari Devi (called Saanvari Devi in the film), in Rajasthan. Bawandar starred the activist-film-maker Nandita Das in the title role. No One Killed Jessica (2011), directed by Raj Kumar Gupta, was a film around the 1999 murder of model Jessica Lal, whose murderer, Manu Sharma, was acquitted after a long trial – subsequent public outrage sparked a second legal process and eventually Sharma was found guilty and sentenced. It starred Vidya Balan as the grieving sister of Jessica, and Rani Mukherjee as a fire-and-obscenity-spewing journalist who creates the proper celebrity ecology around Jessica. A cele-meme of women’s empowerment demands victim discourse.

The Celebrity Ecology of Victims The celebrity ecology around these victims is crucial for any understanding of the subsequent cele-meme of women’s empowerment that the films generate and transmit. A discourse of victimhood generated in the media and through public debates is already in place, from which the film feeds and feeds into. The discourse takes the individual and transforms her into a celebrity victim, even as the idea of empowerment and agency finds its own space of enunciation around the victim-discourse. The idea of empowerment becomes a cele-meme precisely because it draws upon and responds to this ecology of victimhood. The cele-meme of empowerment emerges because there is already a victim-discourse. Phoolan Devi was a media celebrity well before the film. Born into a ‘lower caste’ family in a tiny village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh,

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Phoolan Devi’s story became the stuff of media hype, speculation and opinionmaking. Treated in the film as a victim of the sexual abuse she had suffered right from childhood, her subsequent exploits as a bandit in the ravines of northern India, a fugitive, the object of a massive manhunt, the caste tensions that ‘created’ a bandit (she was raped by upper-caste men, as the film version goes) and her acts of cruelty that were at once deplored and justified, Phoolan Devi was a victim-outlaw in media texts. She was the subaltern Indian woman who rebels but ultimately sought out the state for support (Sunder Rajan 2003; Murty 2009). The ‘malleable quality’ of her gender (Murty) meant that Phoolan Devi ‘transformed from the accursed feminine position to the masculine’ (unpaginated). The film highlighted the embedded violence of casteridden and rural India, and located Phoolan firmly within this context. The Bhanwari Devi case, as an early commentator, Kanchan Mathur, put it, ‘highlighted the vulnerability of poor, rural, low-caste women who are groomed to be change agents in a complex feudal society’ (1992). Underscoring the rigid traditional value-systems that tether and circumscribe individuals, Mathur and others again signal the trope of embedded violence and ready-to-wear victimhood that women who seek change are forced to adopt. Change, as such commentators note, does not come easy and legislation is no deterrent for social evils (in the film when the policeman arrives to stop the child marriage and tells the local headman that the law prohibits the practice, the head-man notes that the law is only recent: the tradition goes back to antiquity). Bhanwari Devi is projected as the victim of uneven change in a postcolonial society: social change lags behind legislative processes. She is later incorporated into discussions and debates about sexual harassment and women’s rights, and thus enters the academic, public and political discourse as victim yet again. For instance, Apurva, writing about sexual harassment in the workplace in The Indian Express, opens her report with the Bhanwari Devi case. She ends her piece with: ‘the crime and Bhanwari Devi emboldened other victims to come out and complain’ (2010). Bhanwari Devi’s case and her fight for justice led, of course, to a landmark judgment regarding sexual harassment, and she became the face of the campaign. Kiranjit Ahluwalia’s case caused the UK government’s legal system to redefine ‘provocation’, for having endured physical and mental abuse in her marriage. Arrested and convicted of murder, the charge was later altered to manslaughter and new medical evidence offered at the later trial suggested ‘diminished responsibility’ as a result of protracted abuse. The ‘free Ahluwalia’ campaign (in the film spearheaded by Nandita Das, of Bhanwari Devi fame) focused on the Battered Wives Syndrome, rendering her as a victim in biomedical, psychiatric and legal terms. Commentators, especially those who

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approach law from a feminist standpoint, noted that in Ahluwalia’s case a sympathetic portrait of her constructed her as more feminine than aggressive and therefore the legitimate and acceptable victim of conjugal violence. That is, the binary of battered women consists of ‘good victims’ and ‘bad victims’ and Ahluwalia fell into the former category (Tyson 2012: 27). Danielle Tyson summarizes this form of victimhood: ‘whether women defendants are treated as mad or harshly treated as bad depends on a cultural judgment’ (26). The Jessica Lal case that enraged the nation added class to the conflagration: the rich in India get away with murder, literally. The public outrage, protests and discourses targeted the politically connected upper classes for their disregard of life and the law. The numerous witnesses who turned hostile in the course of the trial pointed to, said the protests, the purchasing power of the rich, for the witnesses had been bought (when they were not threatened). Even the New York Times thought the class-centred public anger was worth reporting (Sengupta 2006). Jessica Lal here is projected as the victim of upperclass arrogance and the corruptibility of the Indian legal system, but also of middle-class apathy (or resignation). We thus have a celebrity ecology in place for the four victims who become the subject of feature films. Media coverage maps the embedded violence of rural India, the patriarchal Indian male, the corruptibility of the Indian legal system and the ominous links between caste, class and patriarchy. In each case the celebrity ecology constructs a victim for the social imaginary to dwell upon. I propose that this social and cultural construction of women victims from Phoolan Devi to Jessica Lal implicitly offers the cele-meme regarding women’s rights. Women’s rights are, to phrase it differently, a cele-meme because these are mediated through celebrity victims and their contexts, and then call upon us to see women differently. The cele-meme of women’s empowerment in these films based on reallife incidents and around celebrity victims generates the desirable and necessary idea of agency and individual choice through the construction of two victim models. Each model offers us a version of female agency, decision- and choice-making. The first model is of the reproachable victim. The ‘reproachable victim’ is one who contrasts with the ideals of femininity and where the victim status does not relieve them of the shame and blame (Jackobsen and Skilbrei 2010: 208). Phoolan Devi and Kiranjit Ahluwalia are reproachable because they killed and thus violated the law, as victims. The second model is of the ‘therapeutic victim’. By ‘therapeutic’ I mean the survivor in the case of Bhanwari Devi who proceeds to overcome her trauma and sets about campaigning for women’s rights, social awareness and justice. Her victimhood becomes the departure point for social-oriented therapy. In the case of Jessica Lal, while she did not

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survive, her victimhood serves to generate a therapeutic discourse in the film, one that seeks to cure the evils besetting India.

The Reproachable Victim in Bollywood In Provoked at a key moment in the trial the prosecution notes that Ahluwalia had the time to ‘cool off’ from her last beating at the hands of her husband and so what she did later – set him on fire – constituted premeditated murder. In Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi is depicted as consciously setting out to visit her vengeance upon the upper-caste landlords who had raped her. In both these instances from the fictionalized representation of the events in their lives, the films underscore the agential dimension of the victims’ acts. If Ahluwalia set about mixing caustic soda and petrol to produce the napalm which she then poured over her sleeping husband, Phoolan Devi forges a gang of armed men and attacks the village in order to kill the landlords. Both the victims as portrayed in these films possess some agency, albeit an agency circumscribed within the structures they inhabit: marriage and domesticity (Ahluwalia) and an identity located within the caste-gender-poverty triangulation (Phoolan). That both the victims are victims of their structures is noted in the film version. Yet, by drawing our attention to the acts of inducing a chemical reaction (Ahluwalia) and arming herself (Phoolan) leading to cold-blooded murder, the films blur the borders of victim identity. The reproachable victim is never a ‘true’ victim in these representations because it is left ambiguous as to the degree and nature of victimhood when the film focuses on agential acts such as the ones described above. Several layers of complication of victim identity might be discerned. Ahluwalia in Provoked is presented as a quivering, wide-eyed, delicately feminine woman. Phoolan is initially represented as a gutsy but waif-like girl, hardened by her constant exposure to poverty and the severely patriarchal social order in which she lives. In the former, Ahluwalia’s femininity becomes the object of suspicion when the camera tracks her husband’s jealous and annoyed expression at a party where the diminutive Ahluwalia dances with a male friend of the husband, at the husband’s insistence. The camera’s focus on the lustful and aggressively masculine faces of the men in Bandit Queen as they leer at the young Phoolan also offers us a version of the traditional Bollywood trope: femininity that attracts unwanted male attention. She represents the sexually ‘available’ woman as interpreted by the landlords, the police and even by the villagers, often slandered as promiscuous and harassed for her body. And because she leaves her marital home (she is a childwife at the time) she is asked later whether it was because the husband could not sexually satisfy her – thus suggesting that she is insatiable and sexually aggressive. Firmly inscribed

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within the cultural text of femininity-as-seductive, both the films suggest that the feminine is itself an invitation to the scopophilic gaze. While the films stop short of blaming the victim by indicting the lecherous male, they do point to the risks of being feminine. Meera Kosambi has argued about Bandit Queen: Most unfortunate is the film’s romanticised construction of Phoolan as a perpetual sexual victim turned avenging bandit, and its preoccupation with her victimisation rather than with her subsequent empowerment. It leaves the viewer with the impression that the real-life figure who terrorised large parts of central India and who eluded all efforts by two State governments to capture her, was trapped in sexual exploitation and humiliation except for a brief spell when she turned into a ruthless avenger. Instead of a formidable and legendary bandit queen, we see a vulnerable woman whose pain as well as pleasure is tied up with her sexuality. (1998: unpaginated) If Bandit Queen harnesses sexuality for its purpose of creating a victim, Provoked offers femininity and maternity. A second key layer that complicates victim identity in both these celebrity cases (in real life and film) is the renovation of the feminine by the protagonists themselves. In Provoked, after being told that Ahluwalia comes from a large family desperate to get rid of their daughter through marriage – a common tale in India – we are shown how she adapts to life in England. She objects to her husband’s philandering, to which he then responds with beatings and rape. Ahluwalia’s toughening occurs, in the film version, after her conviction for murder and within the confines of the prison where she learns to stand up to bullying, acquires English and joins the informal sisterhood of inmates. By the time of the retrial Ahluwalia is presented as a fairly competent woman, far from the bewildered and delicate feminine. The film shows her standing up to a bully on behalf of a friend and acquiring a make over (at the inmates’ insistence) before she steps out for the retrial. In Bandit Queen too, the daughter is described as a ‘burden’ in the early moments of the film but the young Phoolan is presented as a feisty kid, with an utter contempt for men, all of whom, she says, are ‘motherfuckers’. As the film proceeds Phoolan’s femininity is constantly the subject of lecherous male attention, where her fiery temper itself is seen as a sign of the not-quite-feminine by the men. Both the victims are shown toughening themselves up due to the circumstances in which they find themselves.

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A third dimension to the films’ troubled representations of femininity that invites the descriptor of ‘reproachable victim’ is the ambivalence cast around the stereotypical ‘shy’ and ‘modest’ Indian woman in the case of both Ahluwalia and Phoolan. Ahluwalia’s interactions with her fellow inmates enable her to shed her self-consciousness about herself while Phoolan’s training – to be a quiet wife – seems to lose its hold over her right from the first conjugal experience when she runs away from her marital home. Within the confines of the home Ahluwalia remains loyal to her training and indoctrination, pleading with her husband, obliging him, and so on. The ambivalence around this ‘good woman’ stereotype makes its first appearance in the scene where the couple visit a physician to examine injuries on Kiranjit. The physician, who is suspicious of Deepak’s (the husband) explanation for Kiranjit’s injuries – which are clearly marks of beatings – offers the victim the chance to speak out, which the ‘good wife’ refuses. The moment is interesting because a possible avenue of agency is being proposed for the victim, and the victim, in fear of her husband, refuses to opt for it. If in Phoolan’s case the altered femininity produces the subsequent events in her life, in Ahluwalia’s case it is her trial, conviction and prison experience that do so. But in both cases the ‘good’ feminine is called into question. A final layering is visible in the filmic representation of these celebrity victims. Ahluwalia and Phoolan both turn aggressors and while both are embedded in circumstances of exploitation and abuse, they commit acts of violence (in Phoolan’s case, several) and thus step outside the law. Combining the discourse of afflicted femininity with the discourse of legality, both films present the celebrity victim as reproachable, wherein her actions are explained but illegal, aggressive and violent. Both films produce the cele-meme that women’s oppression demands a response. The nature of the response is of course kept open-ended in the films: Ahluwalia pleads diminished responsibility and Phoolan surrenders to the state. Whether they were right to take to violence is something the films push us into considering, even as they indicate that the feminine can be violent too. When Phoolan beats up and tortures her former husband, she says she wants to send a message: that she would kill any man who marries a child-wife. Given that child marriage is prohibited by law in India, Phoolan is voicing a legal doctrine, even as it is couched in a rhetoric of revenge against the man who had ‘consummated’ his marriage to her when she was still a child. The propaganda against child marriage itself is a cele-meme: an idea, ideal and opinion regarding the marriageable age for boys and girls. Bandit Queen goes some way to explain her unlawful violence by showing her as an advocate for the law of the land and the rights of the girl child.

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The reproachable victim asserts a certain agency in choosing to kill her abuser(s) in both films. Yet the films remain ambivalent about this agency because the women are shown as coerced into making this choice, given that there is no social recognition of what they have endured. For instance, in Bandit Queen, when Phoolan returns to the village where she was raped, stripped in public and humiliated, the rest of her gang suggest that the women and children be spared. Her retort, practically hissed out, goes: ‘they stood by and watched me being humiliated and dishonoured, didn’t t they?’ Provoked too addresses the issue of determined agency by underscoring the absence of social empathy for Ahluwalia’s cause. For instance, Nandita Das in the film tells Ahluwalia in prison that her defence lawyer had not done a good job of highlighting the history of Ahluwalia’s abuse, and so the jury did not quite understand the situation in which she committed the act. In the absence of a social narrative about rape victims and abused wives, the films suggest, the theme of individual agency needs to be tempered so that we can better locate it within a frame of coerced agency. For the cele-meme to be powerful, and perhaps carry the seeds of social transformation, these films explicitly take the affective route when representing the victim. Underscoring the maternal woman, Provoked has Ahluwalia tearfully asking for her children at her interrogation. In Bandit Queen, Phoolan Devi’s terms of surrender, read out in a voice-over in the film, asks for land for her family and protection for them, among other demands. Enunciated in a teary voice, breaking with emotion, the charter of demands generates powerful empathy, as the movie’s narrative strategy suggests: soon after the list is read out the crowd starts chanting her name, almost as though they have been moved by the contents of the list. Thus the reproachable victim retrieves a measure of femininity by highlighting the maternal and ‘softer’ side of her personality with such pleas and requests. The mobilization of public sentiment, as Provoked clearly demonstrates in one scene where the campaigner Nandita Das takes photographs of Ahluwalia meeting her children in prison, hinges on the victim’s display of her emotional side, and implicitly effacing her agential act of aggression. With the shift to the affective, the film constructs a reproachable victim who is not yet beyond hope, or redemption, given that despite her murderous rage (both Ahluwalia and Phoolan are killers), she remains prone to emotional stresses and strains around her family. This effaces the intentionality behind the victim’s actions and instead presents a supremely emotional person, but also locates the extreme act of agency within a social context of indifference, patriarchy, caste and oppression against women. The films generate the cele-meme around empowerment by offering troubled maternity, femininity and sexuality, as embodied in Ahluwalia and

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Phoolan. By using the trope of the vulnerable woman in the case of these celebrity victims the films implicitly gesture at the need for rethinking women’s lives, but cannot escape the normative representation of the sexual-maternal woman. What is constantly at stake in both these films about celebrity victims is the woman’s embodied agency, and an embodiment that focuses primarily on sexual and maternal processes/characteristics.

The Therapeutic Victim If Ahluwalia and Phoolan represent the reproachable victim whose assertion of agency complicates her femininity, Jessica Lal and Bhanwari Devi represent a different kind of celebrity victim, a therapeutic one. Survivor victims such as Bhanwari Devi and the ones who survive victims like Jessica – in the film, it is her sister and the family – are points of departure for a public feelings project demanding change. In Bawandar and No One Killed Jessica, troubled femininity of the soon-to- bevictim protagonist is partly the result of the agency she asserts. Saanvari Devi, the protagonist of Bawandar, takes up the job of a ‘Saathin’, meaning friend. She is a friend to the women of her village but, more importantly, leads the campaign for women’s rights and against child marriages. Things begin to turn ugly when, as a result of her actions, the police stop a child marriage in an upper-caste home. The gang-rape and beatings of Saanvari Devi are the result. Jessica Lal is shot dead for denying a rich young man a drink at a party bar. She stands by the rule that the bar is now closed, and is shot by the furious man. In a flashback sequence her sister recalls how Jessica had run after a man who had groped her (the sister) and beaten him in public. The films present a militant femininity in both cases. Militant femininity in the case of the celebrity victim, as the movies represent them, is a femininity that is located in principles, directives and the law. Women assert their agency in terms of the principles they fight for: the law in the case of Saanvari Devi, the closure of alcohol retailing hours in the case of Jessica. The women adhere to a set of normative practices despite social opposition and this positions the women ‘agents’ as being located within the ambit of political-legal citizenship but outside the social-civic one. Thus, both Jessica and Saanvari Devi serve as models of the ‘good’ victim because they are penalized for following laws. Their political and legal citizenship is at odds with the social citizenship they occupy. In the case of Jessica she goes against the socially acceptable behaviour of being flexible about the bar’s working hours. The man offers her Rs 1000/- for a drink, and assumes that the money would motivate Jessica to break the rules. In the case of Saanvari Devi, she is warned by various elders of the community that she is interfering in the social

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norms of the village, even though these norms might be in defiance of the law of the land. Given this tension between political-legal citizenship and social-civic citizenship, the celebrity victim is one who is unable to reconcile the two. The agency asserted in opting for the former rather than acquiescence to the latter sets them up against the civic society they inhabit, and which the law of the land is unable to alter in any significant manner. The victim is one who abides by one set of laws but in the process defies another. It is a form of militant femininity because the victim readies herself for battle in defence of the politicallegal citizenship she occupies, and militates against the social-civic one. It is this tension that generates the therapeutic victim. Adherence to laws and insertion into the political-legal citizenship render the woman vulnerable. The campaigns around Jessica and Bhanwari Devi in real life called attention to the fragility of the witness, the law-abiding woman and the solitary hero who, despite social odds, seeks to stand by the principles laid down as normative legislation. Since vulnerability becomes structural helplessness when the institutions designed to protect persons themselves collapse, the Jessica-Bhanwari Devi victimhood proceeds from the collapse of the institution of the law. The law does not protect Bhanwari, neither does the medical profession, in the immediate aftermath of the rape. The police mock and threaten her, the medical officer claims the physical ‘verification’ of rape will be conducted by a male doctor. In the Jessica case the law demonstrates its ineffectual nature when witness after witness turns hostile. The victim and/or survivor battle on seeking justice from the very institutions that have produced her vulnerability. The victim is cast as therapeutic because, beyond the justice to be granted to her as victim, the films call for a cure for the institutions themselves. That is, in the process of granting justice to the victim, the films propose that it is the institutions that need to be strengthened. Therefore the films use the victim’s case as an instantiation of the diseased system: she becomes a metonym for a larger erosion of values, principles and laws. That it is the feminine which serves as a metonym is troubling in and of itself, because yet again it reinstates the woman’s body upon which any form of social grievance and violence might be visited. James Dawes has proposed that Human Rights fiction is characterized by this metonymy: where one individual stands for many (2007). Both the Bawandar and No One Killed Jessica films indicate that Jessica’s and Saanvari’s stories signify a larger social condition. While Jessica and Saanvari Devi serve as exemplar metonyms the films drag our attention to the contexts in which free thinking agential women are reduced to helplessness. Therefore the therapeutic victim is the victim of a social evil, and requires redress not as an individual, but for what she represents: a value, an idea, a law.

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The therapeutic victim imbricates the corporeal vulnerability of herself and the social vulnerability of the body-politic. For instance, in No One Killed Jessica the campaign around the acquittal of the suspects emphasizes that sisters and daughters across the country are at risk and ‘Justice for Jessica’ (the name of the campaign) ensures that her corporeal vulnerability is treated as intercorporeal: the vulnerability of all women because the body-politic is flawed. If social evils and injustices are inscribed primarily on the woman’s body, the subsequent cures begin with the restoration of justice, dignity and rights to the woman’s body. When Saanvari Devi refuses to be silent or silenced about her rape, she presents her traumatized, broken body to the world; she makes a spectacle of an injury so as to draw attention to the contexts in which the woman’s body can be injured with impunity. The therapeutic victim generates a key cele-meme that links the socially induced helplessness of the vulnerable woman and the necessity for social resilience. The campaigns led by Saanvari Devi in Bawandar and by those affected by Jessica’s death call for recovery from this kind of violence by proposing that recovery and renewal of the social order disrupted by violence should involve a transformation of ways of being rather than a restoration of the way things were. The campaigns clearly indict the social order and the law, in addition to patriarchy and class structures, that inhibit being, especially for women. I propose that the cele-meme articulated in these films with their emphasis on transformation of ways of being is about interdependency as the foundation of true being. Both films call for an investment in the structures that enable us to live, for instance the institution of the law. Further, this investment, the films suggest, is a collective enterprise because the victim is fungible: ‘it could be your daughter tomorrow’, as a character in No One Killed Jessica puts it. These films envisage the transformation of India into a political community alert to its own fragility but whose epicentre lies in the damaged body of the woman protagonist. That the campaigns in No One Killed Jessica hold up placards with Jessica’s photograph suggest this centring. The victim is a therapeutic victim because her injury is the agent of campaigns, activism and legal reform.

Moral Icons, the Cele-Meme and Heteropathic Empathy The four victims on whose lives the films were made represent, therefore, variant models of femininity and victimhood. Subsequent debates in India about women- victims have appropriated these models: the provocative, ‘loose’, club-hopping woman who is raped (the Kolkata 2012 rape case), rape as a problem of ‘rural’ India alone (Badaun rape case 2014), women who go

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out of the safety of their homes late at night (the New Delhi December 2012 rape case), among others. Thus, the ‘character’ and behaviour of the victim have been centre stage in the debate around women’s safety and women’s rights in contemporary India and the implicit categories of ‘good victim’ and ‘bad victim’ have been rehearsed endlessly. There is no campaign or public discourse that does not, at some point, invoke one or other category of victimhood. My point here is, however, slightly different: the victim catalyses a specific idea, of rights, safety and dignity for women. Whether these victims are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, they eventually acquire the status of moral icons that then produce the cele-meme of social reform. The celebrity victim functions as a moral icon in contemporary social and political discourses as represented in the films. I adapt Vicky Goldberg’s idea of a ‘secular icon’: I take secular icons to be representations that inspire some degree of awe – perhaps mixed with dread, compassion, or aspiration – and that stand for an epoch or a system of beliefs. Although photographs easily acquire symbolic significance, they are not merely symbolic, they do not merely allude to something outside themselves … for photographs intensely and specifically represent their subjects. But the images I think of as icons almost instantly acquired symbolic overtones and larger frames of reference that endowed them with national or even worldwide significance. They concentrate the hopes and fears of millions and provide an instant and effortless connection to some deeply meaningful moment in history. They seem to summarize such complex phenomena as the powers of the human spirit or of universal destruction. (in Brink 2000: 136–37) Phoolan Devi, Bhanwari Devi, Kiranjit Ahluwalia and Jessica Lal become moral icons through the victimhood perpetrated upon them when the social codes and institutional processes break down or turn predators. Moral icons, alongside the awe, compassion and aspiration, also inspire anger and the urgency toward transformative politics. They represent the need for an underlying moral code to legislation and legal processes but also to social norms. They also emerge as moral icons because their victimhood ‘concentrates’, as Goldberg puts it, the despair, disappointment and desperation of ‘millions’ and offer an ‘instant and effortless connection’ to a larger meaning. This connection is effected through an affective sociality that returns us once again to the family. The man watching the news on television about the Jessica murder in No One Killed Jessica turns to look at his daughter leaving the house, and his anxiety

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about her well-being is writ large on his face. In Bawandar parents, especially mothers, look at and draw their children into the home when the crisis erupts over the rape. At the public humiliation of Phoolan Devi, the villagers pull their children indoors in Bandit Queen. The celebrity victim in the films first and foremost provokes an alertness and awareness around their loved ones. Writing about ‘attachment figures’ in the wake of celebrity deaths Didier Courbet and Marie-Pierre FourquetCourbet argue that when individuals hear of celebrity deaths, their attention turns to their loved ones. The death ‘also meant the loss of the attachment figure from the micro-social environment’ and the ‘fans were afraid of losing the attachment figure’ (2014: 279–280). Watching the drama unfold around a woman, a nation watches its children, daughters and sisters. The distant suffering of celebrity victims generates an intense inwardness, where families look at themselves. Indeed it could be argued that it is the attachment to their loved ones that is amplified with the victim’s story and, conversely, bestowing celebrityhood upon the victim through the fungibility process described above. When the spectators and masses look at the celebrity victim – masses within the diegetic space of the film as well as masses viewing the film – they are also forced to turn toward their loved ones, generating a heteropathic empathy. Heteropathic empathy resists identification with the other, and is defined as an ‘affective relation, rapport or bond with the other recognised and respected as such’ (LaCapra 2001: 212–213). Such heteropathic empathy retains difference but acknowledges similarities of the Other to oneself. The films, by highlighting the abused and assaulted bodies of the victims, generate heteropathic empathy through the heightening of our sense of shared corporeal vulnerability. Phoolan’s bruises and public shaming, Ahluwalia’s bruises, Saanvari’s unsteady walk after her rape and Jessica’s head-splattering blood ensure that the senses most alerted and active are the tactile ones primarily because of the state of the assaulted bodies. In each of these films the camera lingers on the expression on the faces of eyewitnesses to these victims’ sufferings: the villagers in Bandit Queen and Bawandar, the doctor and the lawyer who examine Ahluwalia in Provoked and the eyewitnesses to her murder in No One Killed Jessica. We, watching the films, bear witness to the horrified eyewitnesses. We bear witness to this affective bind that brings together the victim and the eyewitness on the screen, and thus triangulate a relation: victim, eyewitness, we-who-bear-witness. As cultural texts the films record this circulation of affective energy of compassion and angered impotence that then defines individuals as well as the collective. The dual movement of looking at the victim and at the loved ones both within the cinema’s diegetic space and outside, among the audience, informed

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by the inherent fungibility of victimhood, is also determined by the iterable nature of a Phoolan, an Ahluwalia or a Jessica. This iterability highlighted throughout these films, especially by treating the victims as metonyms, ensures that we affiliate with the victims in affective and moral terms: because we come to see that these things ought not to have happened to this other person. A moral icon enables the making of a social imaginary around even abstract concepts such as justice. Moral icons are technologies through which our perceptions of ourselves are organized. They cease, in many ways, to be persons and instead serve as catalysts for this reason. They force us to make inferences (as icons traditionally do) from what we see unfolding before us. Thus No One Killed Jessica highlights the necessity of a visual discourse that bombards people with the idea of injustice, whereas Provoked, which also depicts the campaigners making use of visual texts as noted above, alerts us to the limitations of legal diagnostics of violence against women. What emerges from these films is not the iconicity of a Phoolan or a Jessica, but the iterable iconicity of a set of ideas about justice and equality, women’s rights and transformative politics. The films may have treated these as singular victims but they constantly bring us back to the structures within which victimhood is engendered. The iterability of Phoolan Devi (rape-victim-turned-vigilante/ dacoit), Kiranjit Ahluwalia (battered-womanturned-murderer), Bhanwari Devi (rape- victim-turned-activist) and Jessica (murder-victim-as-social-victim) relocates them into a space where laws that ought to protect do not. Writing about icons and brands Celia Lury has argued that ‘the relation between an icon and its ground of abstraction is increasingly subject to intervention’ (2012: 255). When it comes to the moral icon, such as a Phoolan or an Ahluwalia, the abstraction which it engenders (justice, empowerment, equality) calls for intervention. This is a moral iconicity that engages the social imaginary to intervene on behalf of the icon by not only iterating it but also forcing the linkage between the icon and the systems of meaning-making such as the law. Thus, the moral icon in the films is a call to action and an idea that requires execution. This idea is the cele-meme. The moral icon enables the convergence of pre-existing motivations and aspirations. The cele-meme emerges when the moral icon as the ‘face’ of this convergence brings collectives together around these pre-existing motivations. The celebrity ecology I outlined in the first part is this ecology of motivations, thinking about women’s rights and putative forms of empowerment and equality that, when given the face of a Bhanwari Devi or a Jessica or even a Phoolan, enables the visible enunciation of the cele-meme.

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The cele-meme in contemporary India is what drives collectives to gather in protest on various women’s issues – whether it is the praise for Phoolan’s militancy (by Mayawati, the then Dalit Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh) or the massive social media campaigns for Jessica Lal’s murderer to be brought to justice or the nation-wide protests over the 2012 rape. The cele-meme, here and elsewhere (for instance, in sports), needs to be explored because popular culture is a domain in which larger social issues, problems and possible solutions, and even theoretical and philosophical disputes emerge. The celememe represents collective aspirations, and collective despair, of a nation. It serves as cultural instruction and frame of interpretation for various womancentred issues, including the representation of women in popular Hindi cinema. That the meme acquires celebritydom due to its origins in a woman’s victimhood is of course tragic. Yet, because memes are constitutive of social and cultural evolution, this cele-meme of women’s empowerment has enabled the evolution of Indian laws, however slowly and incrementally and perhaps not with adequate effect or efficacy. The cele-meme of women’s safety and empowerment, albeit elitist and so far urban-centred, is therefore actionable. It is an idea that demands enforcement. It informs the social imaginary in ways that focus on the imminent vulnerability of women in India and Indian families. The cele-meme is a transmissible idea whose assertion in various cultural texts demands action.

References Apurva. 2010. Sexual harassment in the workplace. The Indian Express. http://archive. indianexpress.com/news/ sexualharassmentatworkplace/ 571636/ (accessed 22 October 2015). Bose, N. 2014. ‘Bollywood’s fourth Khan’: Deconstructing the ‘hatke’ stardom of Vidya Balan in popular Hindi cinema. Celebrity Studies, 5 (4): 394–409. Brink, C. 2000. Secular icons: Looking at photographs from Nazi concentration camps. History & Memory, 12 (1): 135–150. Courbet, D., and Fourquet-Courbet, M.-P. 2014. When a celebrity dies … Social identity, uses of social media, and the mourning process among fans: The case of Michael Jackson. Celebrity Studies, 5 (3): 275–290. Dawes, J. 2007. That the world may know: Bearing witness to atrocity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Dickey, S. 2001. Opposing faces: Film star fan clubs and the construction of class identities in south India. In R. Dwyer and C. Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The history, politics and consumption of public culture in India (pp. 213–246). New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Dwyer, R, and Patel, D. 2002. Cinema India: The visual culture of Hindi cinema. London: Reaktion. Ghosh, T. 2013. Bollywood baddies: Villains, vamps and henchmen in Hindi cinema. New Delhi: Sage. Gupta, S. 2015. Kahaani, Gulaab Gang and Queen: Remaking the queens of Bollywood. South Asian Popular Culture, 13 (2): 107–123.

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Jacob, P. 2008. Celluloid deities: The visual culture of cinema and politics in south India. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Jacobsen, C. M, and Skilbrei, M.- L. 2010. ‘Reproachable victims’? Representations and self-representations of Russian women involved in transnational prostitution. Ethnos, 75 (2): 190–212. Kapur, G. 1987. Mythic material in Indian cinema. Journal of Arts and Ideas, 14 (15): 79–108. Kazmi, F. 2010. Sex in Cinema: A history of female sexuality in Indian films. New Delhi: Rupa. Kosambi, M. 1998. Bandit Queen through Indian eyes: The reconstructions and reincarnations of Phoolan Devi. Hecate, 24 (2). La Capra, D. 2001. Writing history, writing trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Lury, C. 2012. Bringing the world into the world: The material semiotics of contemporary culture. Distinktion, 13 (3): 247–260. Mathur, K. 1992. Bhateri rape case: Backlash and protest. Economic and Political Weekly, 27 (41): 2221–2224. Murty, M. 2009. Reading the perplexing figure of the ‘Bandit Queen’: Interpellation, resistance and opacity. Third Space, 9 (1). Nayar, P. K. 2009. Seeing stars: Spectacle, society and celebrity culture. New Delhi: Sage. ———.2016. Brand Bollywood care: Celebrity, charity, and vernacular cosmopolitanism. In P. D. Marshall and S. Redmond (eds), A Companion to Celebrity (pp. 273–288). Malden, MA: Wiley- Blackwell. Prasad, M. M. 1998. Ideology of the Hindi film: A historical construction. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press. Rogers, M. 2011. From the sacred to the performative: Tamil film star fan clubs, religious devotion and the material culture of film star portraits. Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 23 (1): 40–52. Sengupta, S. 2006. Acquittal in killing unleashes ire at India’s rich. The New York Times, 13 March. www. nytimes.com/ 2006/ 03/ 13/ international/asia/ 13india.html?_ r=0 (accessed 22 October 2015). Srinivas, S. V. 2009. Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu cinema after NT Rama Rao. New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press. Sunder Rajan, R. 2003. The Scandal of the state: Women, law, and citizenship in postcolonial India. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press. Taylor, W. 2003 Penetrating gazes: The poetics of sigh and visual display in popular Indian cinema. In S. Ramaswamy (ed.), Beyond appearances? Visual practices and ideologies in modern India (pp. 297–322). New Delhi: Sage. Tyson, D. 2012. Sex, culpability and the defence of provocation. London: Routledge.

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Chapter 2 BRAND BOLLYWOOD CARE: CELEBRITY, CHARITY AND VERNACULAR COSMOPOLITANISM The Hindi film industry, commonly called “Bollywood,” has since the 1990s, as Ravi Vasudevan points out, been “reframing … the nation-state”; “rather than the territorial nation … we witness the emergence of the global nation” (2008; see also Sinha and Kaur 2005; Bose 2006; Kavoori and Punathambekar 2008).1 This essay argues that one way Bollywood achieves this reframing of India as a global nation is through the creation of a globally viable, respectable and recognizable brand: celebrity care. Brand Bollywood Care (BBC for convenience) is a brand in and of itself. Retaining yet subtly erasing racial, national and geopolitical identifications by merging, in distinctive fashion, with transnational organizations like the United Nations or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, BBC is a marker of India’s coming of global age by inserting its—India’s—most recognizable, that is, celebrity, faces into a global humanitarian project and semiotic universe filled with signs of benevolence. While this line of argument suggests a homogenization, even mimicry, of Western ideals and agendas of benevolence, charity work and development models, a certain amount of legitimacy accrues to BBC due to its vernacular origins and roots. I use the term “vernacular” fully alert to its racial and imperial roots, and to signal a binary with “global” here. The reiteration of the vernacular is not, let me hasten to add, an attempt to claim greater authenticity for the project of BBC. I wish, rather, to suggest that the legitimization integral to any charity work, in the case of BBC, is achieved by drawing attention to its local roots. This essay is primarily concerned with the discursive constructions of celebrity humanitarianism, of BBC, my generic name for India’s globalized film celebrity working for international goodwill, charitable causes, and the alleviation of at least some of the world’s lingering malaises. Care and charity work are technologies of global citizenship for the Bollywood star. My contention

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here is that a global citizenship is available for Bollywood celebs, whose origins lie in a “developing nation,” through the discourses of care, compassion and charity operating at local levels but which resonate with similar discourses across the world. It is a citizenship that, as David Jefferess (2013) with a different emphasis and inflection argues, aspires to a postracial, culturally plural “signature” of modernity in the form of benevolence. Bollywood Care, while sounding suspiciously like a jingle for insurance or a medical facility, is a brand name that partakes of this shared aspiration—shared across cultures, races, nations, united by common concerns toward the suffering Other—and retains the uneasy balance between local and translocal, local and global in a form of vernacular cosmopolitanism. After establishing a case for reading the Bollywood celebrity as vernacular cosmopolitan, the essay turns to specific steps in this construction. It locates, first, a discourse of antiquity in the claims made by Bollywood celebs about their humanitarian interests, suggesting that their global role was always already anticipated and prepared for in their local one. Second, it examines what I have called above the “uneasy balance” in the discursive construction of the vernacular cosmopolitan that might be theorized as a double move, of an interesting iteration of local history and activist practices and a simultaneous erasure of or detachment from an imperial history of benevolence leading to a certain unavoidable Manicheanism.

Vernacular Cosmopolitanism Rahul Bose, Bollywood star, heads The Foundation, an umbrella organization running numerous projects for education, mainly for children from India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Its tagline is “a world without discrimination” (emphasis added).2 Bollywood stars exemplify a vernacular cosmopolitanism as it has been defined by Pnina Werbner (2006), among others, as one that is rooted in a particular place but has the potential to move outward into the world. In celebrity modernity, the condition of celebrityhood is portable, across geopolitical borders. If mobility itself is a condition of modernity (as John Urry’s work (2007) seems to suggest), then Bollywood stars are part of a celebrity modernity where benevolence becomes the vehicle for global circulation. Vernacular cosmopolitanism, then, is the combination of local specificity with universal concerns. It is the effect of a certain portability of celebrityhood and the celebrity body (about which more later). In other words, the vernacular cosmopolitan as embodied in the Bollywood global celebrity is an instance of the metamorphosis of the national popular into the global popular.

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The stars’ vernacular cosmopolitanism begins, first, as an instantiation of the national popular. The national popular is, clearly, the mass appeal of their films, faces and fictions. Indianness is itself constructed around Bollywood— which is frequently referred to as “Indian” cinema, although this implies an erasure of regional language films—and its fictional-mythical rivalry (such as that among the three Khans of Bollywood: Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan).3 The film from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC), One Life, No Price (whose production team is Indian, and which is scripted by Dr Sunita Krishnan, a renowned activist against human trafficking), is an excellent example of vernacular cosmopolitanism. First, of course, are the conditions of cultural production: Indian events, Indian expertise and endorsed/sponsored by the United Nations, now available on the global internet via YouTube. Second, various Bollywood stars give voices for the film. Third, the instances depicted, based on real life stories but enacted for the film by actors, are all Indian. But after these Indian instances have been documented the statistics provided are not Indian: “1.2million people are trafficked throughout the world each year” (from the UN Population Fund, 2006). The revenue generated is “9.5 million dollars … each year across the world” (US government estimate, 2006). Only then is India “fitted” into the global statistical narrative: “300,000–500,000 children in prostitution in India” (UNICEF in 2006). The campaign against human trafficking in India is a “joint Government of India/UNDOC initiative,” as the film tells us. The language used is, of course, generic, so Preity Zinta speaks of “human dignity.” Amitabh Bachchan in his now-famous baritone declares that “no human being should be a slave … no human person deserves this hell.” He also calls people to join him in the “global fight” against human trafficking. The Indian story is made to fit into a larger story. The language of universalism here suggests that what happens to these boys and girls, while singular to them, is not exceptional. The fight against trafficking, as Amitabh Bachchan tells us, is a global fight, and when we participate in a global campaign we have a trickle-down effect in India, just as, when we battle these ills in India, we contribute to the well-being of the world. The stars’ vernacular cosmopolitanism is the potential of fitting the local battle into a global frame. None of the stars in One Life, No Price demonstrates the global nature of their actions, but their actions might be seen as fractal reiterations of a global campaign, where each dovetails into the other. It is in this portability of stories and actions that the star finds a useful technology of global citizenship.

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The portability of stories is accompanied by the fungibility of victims, from the local to the global and back again. The Indian victims of human trafficking and slavery could be interchangeable with any such victim anywhere in the world, and vice versa. Bollywood Care’s recognizability lies in not only the victims’ incipient vernacular cosmopolitanism in this fungibility, but also in the generic nature, oddly, of celebrity diplomacy.4 A celebrity’s hyperrecognizability, I propose, effaces the cause in favor of the celebrity persona. Anti-landmine campaigns, cleft lip, cancer patients, or starvation—all local conditions and contexts of suffering—become adjuncts to the celebrity persona in a sense. The vernacular cosmopolitan aspect of celebrity humanitarianism which generates this problematic relationship between the local and the mediated global thus seems to affirm Dambisa Moyo’s claim that aid has now become a “part of the entertainment industry” (cited in Yrjölä 2012: 359). The global entertainment industry of which, say, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan or Preity Zinta are constituents establishes, unquestionably, a set of power relations across the world. Bollywood, like Hollywood, constructs the political and cultural imaginaries of populations around the world. Vernacular cosmopolitanism of celebrity humanitarianism articulates—I use “articulate” in the dual sense of enunciate but also “to fit together” into a coherent form or shape—a (global) humanitarian imaginary within, into and against the globalized cultural imaginaries of star lifestyles, fantasies and heroism. Riina Yrjölä proposes that celebrities need to be “approached as social, discursive conditions and effects that are linked closely to world politics at large” (2012: 365). I extend this line of thought to suggest that a global humanitarian imaginary of the celebrity kind is built ground upward relying on (1) the globalization of a cultural imaginary originating in, say, India (Bollywood), and (2) its articulation with the moral universals of the Red Cross, the UN or Amnesty. Vernacular cosmopolitanism is my name for this articulation where both cultural imaginaries and humanitarian concerns proceed outward from local to the global mediated through the entertainment industry and its ancillaries. Riina Yrjölä has argued that there is now a palpable shift in liberal governance with “increasing western involvement in the internal affairs of the developing world” (2012: 366).However, vernacular cosmopolitanism of the kind I have outlined above reverses this, even though the humanitarian project of Bollywood stars is mediated by First World (Western) entertainment industries. The very value of the star here lies in a vernacular celebrity’s cosmopolitan potential and its articulation into global structures of humanitarianism. What we now perceive is the intervention of the Bollywood celebrity in the affairs of other Third World nations and within the structure of the global media-entertainment industry and the humanitarian project. Thus vernacular

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cosmopolitanism is a departure from the traditional model of humanitarianism that constructs the spaces of Africa or Asia as “lacks” for the Westerner to intervene in and fill up with aid and charitable acts. We are looking in fact at a whole new order of global humanitarian politics. This politics cannot at any point be disconnected from the media-entertainment complex (itself rooted in unequal economic, social and political structures of the industry around the world) that, first, produces the narrative documentation of suffering (visual, verbal, storied); second, produces the high-profile celebrity whose origins are in the same geopolitical region as the suffering; and third, enables the celebrity to articulate (with) a global humanitarian imaginary and project. There is one more dimension to the theme, or problem, of vernacular cosmopolitanism in celebrity humanitarianism. Humanitarian action, argues Tanja Müller in a perceptive reading (via Giorgio Agamben), is based on the “conceptualization of human life as ‘bare life” ’ (2013: 64). Because this “bare life” “is dependent on humanitarian compassion within the humanitarian space, the parameters of political and social aspirations ultimately become determined by the benevolent giver,” writes Müller (2013: 64). Bare lives, like ghosts (Gordon 1997), are the “wastes” of any society and the result of uneven processes of development and modernity. That is, bare lives are almost always the consequence of localized socioeconomic processes and structures, even if these processes are themselves affected by global crises or policies. Thus, in India, farmer suicides in specific regions are the effect of the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other global organizations that take away subsidies, increase debt and force the farmers to take to genetically modified (GM) seeds and foods. These farmers are the bare lives of the region. We could make the same arguments about the famine victims of Somalia, the rape victims of Rwanda or the displaced of Sudan. These same bare lives, when they attract the attention of any humanitarian effort, cease to be bare lives and acquire political value. Humanitarianism makes them, Müller notes, “beneficiaries of charity rather than subjects under the law” (2013: 64). It is local law and local socioeconomic conditions that produce bare lives: humanitarianism takes them out of these conditions, in a sense, and globalizes them as subjects of global humanitarian regimes that see them only as biological bodies (bare lives) and ignores the local conditions that created them in the first instance. Müller’s point is remarkably similar to Craig Calhoun’s suggestion (2008) that the modern age is marked by the condition of imagining human beings in the abstract, in their bare humanity. There is an insistence on equivalence (shared vulnerability, potential for suffering) rather than on differences of ethnicity or color. Such an “abstraction,” while detrimental to effecting real changes in socioeconomic policies on the ground, enables the global humanitarian regime to “pluck” the victim and translate him into a global icon: the

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embodiment of suffering itself, minus ethnic, racial and local markers. (I will have reason to return to the question of icons later in the essay.) Humanitarian regimes acknowledge the suffering of such bare lives but only to shift the focus on to the globalized (figure of the) “giver.” A certain anonymity of the victim—except as Victim—remains even as the spotlight is on the celebrity carer. I propose that under such conditions celebrity humanitarianism (1) implicitly celebrates the global reach of the “giver” by universalizing “bare lives,” while (2) simultaneously ignoring the conditions that produce bare lives, and (3) effacing the global structures that construct and empower the celebrity. Thus, the project of celebrity humanitarianism addresses the bare life delinked from its localized structural inequalities of bare lives, just as it ignores the (unequal) globalization processes that have produced both bare lives and the global celebrity. That is, I am calling attention to the ambivalence at the heart of celebrity humanitarianism. The globalized structures that produce bare lives at very local levels in Africa or Asia also, subsequently, pluck the local celebrity, globalize him and insert him into a global humanitarian project. When we think of humanitarianism’s focus on bare lives, as Müller proposes, we ignore the alignment of the structures that produce both bare lives and the “givers” setting out to alleviate the miseries across the troubled geography of the world. Celebrity care will not address local policy and economic conditions that produce the bare lives, just as it will not take cognizance of the structures that produce and posit them—celebrities—as givers: processes such as globalization that are themselves partially responsible for producing the bare lives or depictions of these bare lives on global screens. Vernacular cosmopolitanism of the celebrity care variety, by offering minimal therapeutic and palliative care, runs the risk of ignoring real material conditions of inequality and injustice in favor of a simulation of a humanitarian geography of the world. Michael Marks and Zachary Fischer do have a point when they write: “entertainment celebrities who have adopted political roles, rather than challenging the prevailing political order, have relegitimated it” (2002: 384). Further, they write, “the civic body represented by participatory democracy may be replaced by the corporal body of the celebrity activist” (2002: 385). The instant media spotlight—necessarily cosmopolitan and global—on celebrity acts of charity, compassion and care shifts the focus away from local material conditions of gross injustice and exploitation. As Julie Wilson (2011) has argued in the case of Audrey Hepburn, arguably the contemporary world’s first major celebrity diplomat, while her femininity helped redirect the star power in particular ways, her own stardom acquired a certain cosmopolitan touch. Such a cosmopolitanization, driven as much by the “pastoral power” (Wilson 2011) as by the media focus on the celebrity body, runs the risk of evading the material issues of vernacular (bare) lives in

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favor of a simulated universalization of celebrity work and ameliorative care. The fact that states are rarely under any compulsion to take note of or address celebrity diplomacy and actions suggests that the real work of participatory and grassroots activism lies elsewhere and not in the realm of Bollywood care. Bollywood care seems more to do with potential than results, in other words.

Antiquity, Antecedents, Authenticity The first discursive move made by the Bollywood-celebrity-as-vernacularcosmopolitan in the process of self-fashioning is to generate a narrative of antiquity. This antiquarian discourse and construction of a local genealogy is an integral component of celebrity diplomacy and charity work. After Aishwarya Rai Bachchan was appointed UNAIDS goodwill ambassador her first official statement was cast in the language of antiquarian discourse: “I am honoured to accept this appointment. Spreading awareness on health issues, especially related to women and children, has always been a priority for me” (UNAIDS 2012, emphasis added). The same UN press release draws attention to the antiquity of her work: “Mrs Rai Bachchan has been involved in humanitarian issues for many years …” The discourse of “I have always been …” suggests a naturalization of the role of celebrity diplomat and brand ambassador, a logical outcome of a set of “natural” predilections, attitudes and competencies. For the Bollywood star to claim antiquity and antecedents to her or his work is to add a further dimension to the theater of care. Abhay Deol, recently a campaigner for animal rights with Animal Planet, makes one shift: he claims “we are known to be traditionally and culturally inclined to conservation” (“Tiger Talk,” emphasis added), thus suggesting that an entire culture has always been given over to conservation. It makes the glamour and the lifestyle secondary to the “natural” features, or “essences” of the individual. That is, antiquarian discourse relegates the glamour and the sex appeal to second place, almost as though these are incidental to the “making” of the star and what is crucial, or integral, to the star is the love they have always had for children or their fears about cleft lips or landmines. In a sense, antiquarian discourse appears to reveal the “private” individual, and depict, implicitly, her celebrityhood as the public face. If, as Richard Dyer and later Chris Rojek have argued, our fascination with celebrity lives is primarily about their private selves (Dyer 1986; Rojek 2001), then antiquarian discourse in celebrity diplomacy offers us glimpses, supposedly, into the “true” individual behind the persona. (That this true self is itself a persona constructed within a context of crisis, development diplomacy and suffering is something we of course miss.)

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The beautiful, highly paid, popular Bollywood star also humanizes herself through the antiquarian discourse because of a process Jackie Stacey has termed “extra-cinematic identificatory practices.” Stacey’s argument is of course directed at the spectator’s transformation driven by the need to be more like the admired star. Stacey writes: “This transformation does not only take place at the level of fantasy, but also involves activities in which the star becomes part of discourses of the spectator’s identity outside the cinema” (1993: 159). I propose that with antiquarian discourses the star inserts herself into the everyday life of the “ordinary person.” The love of dogs, the adoration of children, or the anxiety over a facial anomaly expressed by the stars is an instantiation of role-playing where the star puts herself in the place of the spectator, mimicking our ordinary lives. The star has become a part of the discourses of our lives, outside the fantasy world of the film. The simultaneity of the antiquarian and extra-cinematic identificatory practices results in an “ethicalization of persona” (Chouliaraki 2013: 92). This ethicalization draws upon a moral universalism—all people love children, most people love animals, all of us are afraid of being maimed—that remains unnamed but implicit. The ethicalization of persona is an appeal to these universal categories that then involves a performance of the emotion of the sufferer. But in case we leave with the impression that all this ethicalization is mere role-play, the star’s “roles of charity-giver and humanitarian are not just presented as separate or add-on roles, but as profoundly interwoven with the roles of mother, carer, actress and celebrity, as imbricated into the story of her life,” as Jo Littler says of Angelina Jolie’s humanitarian work (2008: 238). Personal belief, personal experiences and public cause come together to produce the Bollywood care discourse, as we can see in Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s statements about her role as goodwill ambassador for UNAIDS: as a new mother, I can personally relate to this—the joys and concerns of every mother and the hopes that we have for our children. I strongly believe that every baby should be born free from HIV. And I wish that every woman living with HIV stays healthy and has access to treatment. I promise that with UNAIDS, I will do my utmost to make this happen. (UNAIDS 2012) Preity Zinta, speaking after accepting an honorary doctorate from the University of East London for her contribution to the arts and her humanitarian work (as the Vice Chancellor put it), comes first to her own childhood, when her father urged her to grow up into an independent woman and her parents gave her the opportunities to be one. Using this as a backdrop,

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Zinta goes on to plead with the women in the audience to empower themselves through education. And finally, she calls attention to the opportunities given her by the Loomba Foundation (the charity organization Zinta works with, focusing on widows and girl children) to help women in India (Zinta 2010). In the case of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, it appears as though it is her recognition of the vulnerability of her own child and her role as mother that leads, naturally, to her humanitarian work. In the case of Zinta, her role as humanitarian work for destitute and helpless women/girls carries into practice her parents’ advice. In both cases, the sincerity of the star is established through the imbrication of the antiquarian and the “authenticating device” of returning to one’s personal life. It is from this personal experience that the larger project of saving the world arises. As Mark Wheeler puts it: “celebrities command credibility through a conjunction of deinstitutionalisation, personalisation and parasocial familiarity to transcend other forms of social authority” (2011: 10). The (re)turn to personal stories, whether of trauma or privilege in all these star cases offers a slice of personal information, usually dramatic and emotionally loaded, in order to suggest both the “natural” wellspring of their charity work and to authenticate this work. Motherhood, childhood, education and the professional success that all celebs speak of (even as they speak of their charity work) positions them interestingly as ordinary individuals but also successful individuals within a system. If, to turn to Jo Littler once again, [The] performance of celebrity soul, or the performance of the internalisation of social anguish, becomes a necessary part of contemporary celebrity, acting as an attempt to gesturally redress the insecurities of the system it is part of … Such a performance can be enacted, as here, in terms of fortune and pity rather than acting to confront a system of wealth and power they are part of. (2008: 248, emphasis in original) The “hyperindividualism” (Littler 2008: 248) of the celebrity extends their individual agency to respond morally to suffering since addressing the inequities of the system is beyond them—since the system is what affords them the privileges of being hyper-individualist in the first instance. I am further proposing, via David Jefferess, who speaks of benevolence as the “signature” of modernity, that benevolence and charity become signatures of what I think of as a “celebrity modernity,” a modernity characterized by mediated spectacularization, the clever regimentation of private/public (where privacy rights and publicness clash on occasion), extensive culture talk,

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hyperindividualism and, now, charity work. Celebrity modernity necessitates using one’s hyperindividualism for the aid of the unfortunate Other. Charity work and activism are technologies of citizenship in this modernity. Proceeding from a highly personal experience and extending into personalized care, celebrity modernity’s benevolence is an essential method of self-fashioning. Reconstituting the world minimally through one’s own emotional response and ethical responsibility in recognizing the less fortunate Other in such a modernity is never about tackling the historical (transnational) foundations for the misfortunes of the Other, the glaring social inequalities or the failure of the nation-state. The entire apparatus of authentication and antiquarianism that I have discussed in this part is central to the self-fashioning of the “benevolent celebrity” in the age of iniquity and inequality which addresses a personal history but ignores a larger one. It appears as though celebrity modernity’s care and compassion can thrive only within an absence of history and an excess of individual effort. This celebrity modernity is also the space of a curious form of cosmopolitanism, to which I shall now turn.

Local Star, Global Stage The Bollywood star emphasizes local roots, local work, local fan following, and local practices, often, as noted above, going back in time, even as she moves outward into the territory ahead of global humanitarian projects. Lilie Chouliaraki (2013) argues that celebrity activism is built on an “aspirational performance of solidarity” when the offstage persona is conflated with onstage performance. This is clearly evidenced in the UN video of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan’s speech as UNAIDS ambassador or the star-driven UN documentary of 2007 against human trafficking, One Life, No Price. Priyanka Chopra, goodwill ambassador for UNICEF and now campaigner for the UN’s Girl Up says this about her role: I come from a country where girls are not treated fairly—many girls are kept out of school, get married at a young age, and don’t have access to health services … I am joining Girl Up because I firmly believe in the campaign’s mission, that every girl, no matter where she is born, should grow up safe, healthy and empowered. Every girl should have the opportunity to reach her full potential. (Girl Up 2015) Celina Jaitly, now UN “equality champion” for its Free and Equal project for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) rights, began an interview in the Cinema Plus section of The Hindu (Hyderabad, August 25, 2013) by citing the

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instance of a gay Delhi professor harassed till he committed suicide, and then went on to cite the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As with Zinta, Shah Rukh Khan’s honorary doctorate, from the University of Bedfordshire in the UK in 2009, came from a nomination filed by a nongovernmental organization, Routes 2 Roots (founded by Rakesh Gupta), that focuses on cultural activities in the South Asia region, for his work in the education sector in the state of Rajasthan. Khan’s work is local, like Zinta’s—in the Indian government’s Pulse Polio and AIDS campaigns, in addition to performing for numerous disaster relief and other campaigns. That Khan is an internationally visible star—unusually for a non-English celebrity, he inaugurated an English historical tourist space, the eleventh-century Warwick Castle, in 2007—is traceable to his cinematic sale ability. The shift from films to activism he makes in India amplifies his stardom in entirely different domains, such as global humanitarian work (most recently as global ambassador for the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council). I propose that for Bollywood stars this means merging their offstage local (Indian) persona and an onstage global one. This is evidenced by the fact that the Bollywood celebs, when appointed to global ambassadorial positions, invariably speak of their work on the ground in India, which ostensibly prepares them for a global stage. It can also be suggested that the global role played by a local star inserts them into the transnational discourse of benevolence. Their work in India gets a global validation—in the form of UN ambassadorships— and a presence, therefore, on a global stage. This at once separates them from the Bollywood “base” by relocating them, literally and figuratively, on to the global media’s celebrity circuit and foregrounds their origins. They enter, in other words, the hallowed portals of international celebrityhood through their acts of benevolence at local levels. The local star’s acts on the ground are embodied manifestations of a discourse of care and compassion that is already global, and hence is not unique to India, or the star concerned. Shah Rukh Khan’s engaged, for example, with Cosmopolitan magazine’s Real Men Don’t Hit Women, and Men against Rape and Discrimination (acronym: MARD, where “mard” in Hindi stands for “male” but, in colloquial usage, connotes masculinity, even machismo). Coming in the wake of the gang rape of a student on a bus in New Delhi in December 2012—which, it must be noted, attracted attention and activism from all over the world, including Harvard—the campaigns fit into the larger global concerns of gendered violence. Thus the star moves seamlessly across sociopolitical concerns even while working at local levels. Benevolence as an already existing discourse becomes a frame for the interpretation of the star’s actions. Conversely, the star, speaking the language of, say, the UN against slavery or trafficking, is able to suit their local action to the global word, even

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though—and this is important—by the very fact of their being celebrities in the local context, they are distanced from the people and events they set out to improve or alter. The vernacular cosmopolitan that/who is the local star on the global stage will forever be caught within a troubling Manicheanism. This is the irreparable distance from local context as a Bollywood star and yet a proximity, as a local, to local disaster/people/conditions. The Bollywood star is a racially and culturally distant individual in the galaxy of Hollywood personalities, and yet is proximate with all of them by virtue of both class privilege/ identity and local actions. Further, their actions fit in with a larger cosmopolitan project, represented in and by transnational organizations from Amnesty to the UN. This larger cosmopolitan project, founded at least partially on, or in resonance with, a philosophical approach—the obligation of the affluent to the less privileged— redefines the local-global connection in quite interesting ways. First, the discourse of benevolence or charity into which the Bollywood star’s actions fit has a colonial history. This is a history whose relevance to India, or any South Asian nation, is now almost a truism. To think of, for example, the social reform measures of the Clapham Sect or Rudyard Kipling’s (in) famous articulation of the “white man’s burden” in India—concomitant with similar humanitarian projects that encircled the globe (Lester 2000) from the early nineteenth century—is to think of the problematic imperial origins of present-day cosmopolitan benevolence with its very real material effects. That is, Bollywood care’s insertion into a global discourse of benevolence effaces the historical construction of benevolence, the historical roots of inequality and the historical structuring of (racialized) binaries.5 If, as Ruth Frankenberg points out (1993), benevolence was a set of cultural practices wherein whiteness was unmarked, then contemporary global discourses of benevolence in which the Bollywood star participates are a set of cultural practices that strive to erase a racialized history by demonstrating how the “Third World” star has arrived on a global stage despite (because of ?) his origins. That is, cosmopolitan benevolence is a project that effaces the racial and national identity of the star and the problematic history of his own country, a history of inequalities that is messily the product of global/European colonialism in the past. It becomes a mode of establishing a postracial, even posthistorical discourse of feigned equality, embodied of course in the privileged body of the Bollywood celebrity. Let me turn briefly to this corporeality. I have already made the point that the Bollywood global celebrity does not address local material conditions of policy that produce the “bare lives” they then set out to save, and nor do they draw attention to the structures of globalization that enable them, themselves, to achieve global stardom. In what might be read as an allegory of screen culture itself, munificence on screen invisibilizes

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the efforts—and wrongs—behind the glitter. The local is effaced and simultaneously retained when the Bollywood star travels west. The face and body of the Bollywood star suggests an “incorporeal materialism” (Massumi 2002). We perceive the Bollywood body in the form of a movement, or portability, from East to West—if we retain an older binary reflective of a history of migration in the twentieth century—and in its recall of local corporeality (“I have always …”). Bodies in movement, Massumi proposes, are corporeal but seem to have an incorporeal dimension to them: of the body but not it. Given their insertion into both a ghostly, invisible colonial history of benevolence and global media assemblages, this incorporeal materialism seems a major constituent of BBC’s faces and bodies. The Bollywood global celebrity is at once corporeal—it is the face that sells, after all—and yet is inscribed, by the very nature of the task, into movement and therefore incorporeality. It is her body that launches the campaign, product or manifesto across the world, and yet it is in this very order of movement, from local contexts to global and its different localities (Aishwarya Rai Bachchan in Africa, Jolie in the Philippines), that this body’s local histories have been invisibilized. I think of the star’s incorporeal materialism as symbolic of the invisible flows and structures of globalized/ing charity itself. If there is now a palpable Bollywood-inspired culture “effect” (Mishra 2002) writ across the world, then this effect demands an incorporeal materialism. Gavin Fridell and Martijn Konings claim that we can see these activists as other than just pop stars or celebrities and more as “icons”; for them such activists are “embodiments of the tremendous potential and promise held out by Western capitalism” (2013: 4).6 “Embodiments,” of course, they are, but as I have proposed, it is as incorporeal materialism, bodies in movement, transformation, relocation and transcoding into multiple media formats and across platforms—this last, literally, for the characteristic of the celebrity is to move from a “native” domain of expertise into any other—that they function as icons. Another kind of incorporeal materialism is also manifest in global celebrity culture that spills over into the humanitarian project. Shilpa Shetty, Bollywood actress, was conferred the UK’s Silver Star Award for her contribution to international humanitarian causes, especially HIV/AIDS activism, in June 2007. The timing of the award was particularly significant. A few months prior to the award, Shetty was a participant in the UK’s Celebrity Big Brother TV program. The participation had already amplified her global, or at least British, celebritydom as a result of racial bullying at the hands of fellow-participant Jade Goody. The abuse once again foregrounded the irreducible corporeality of the (Asian) body. Despite the clear movement from East to West within the (classed) domain of celebrity culture that in a sense deploys skin color as exotic appeal, the incident on the one hand ostensibly

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established solidarity across races in the age of globalizing celeb-culture and on the other pointed to the unchanged, or perhaps even hardened, racial formations in the age of mass media. The award drew attention to Shetty as an ambassador whose skin color and racial identity did not matter in the larger cause of humanitarianism. Yet its timing, immediately after the abuse charges and notoriety, seems to signal an attempt both to overcompensate for the highlighted racial identity and to ignore it. The Möbius strip of Shetty’s celebrityhood constantly twisted pan-racial, global humanitarianism around her racial identity, embodied as corporeality, in the incident. Corporeality does, and doesn’t, matter. This aspect, of course, is not to downplay the efforts made by the Bollywood star. My aim is, rather, to locate the significance of the role assayed by the star, a role whose very contemporaneity—saleable face/body, contemporary agendas of the UN, recent actions and activism—proposes a simultaneous rootedness and a certain ethereal detachment, even erasure. The global stage on which the postcolonial Bollywood star performs becomes, to phrase it perhaps a bit too caustically, a performance that masks the history of colonization and concomitant humanitarianism in the very country from which the star emerges. The postcolonial star partially erases colonial histories, creates a supposedly more empowered contemporary Indian history, while invisibilizing the neocolonial, global-imperial flows and structures (including Western funding) that enable the performance of this erasure-hypervisibility move. Global citizenships of benevolence that were once associated with white races now position the Bollywood star, based on their work on the ground, as a contributor to global actions. Such a global citizenship of benevolence also ignores the impact of varied global actions on the very ground where the star’s actions are documented. Thus, the historical role of transnational organizations such as the WTO or the International Monetary Fund, or companies like Dow Chemicals or, formerly, Enron, and their actions on the ground in India—whether the Bhopal gas tragedy that claimed thousands of lives in 1984 or the disappearing subsidies of farmers due to WTO policies or GM seeds from Monsanto—get erased in the all-new history being written, in which the Bollywood star plays a part. Larger local contexts of global interventions disappear in favor of select sites of high-emotion, glamorized intervention by the celebrity. To return once more to Fridell and Konings, “superhuman feats are performed with only modest, pragmatic outcomes” (2013: 4, emphasis in original). My argument is that the local star gets on to the global stage through a process of erasure of history, an overriding emphasis on the contemporary and a careful splicing together of local acts of benevolence with a global discourse of humanitarianism, plus of course a certain incorporeal materialism generated

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as a result of movement and relocation. This is a postracial scenario—I use the theatrical-cinematic term consciously—staged for public consumption thriving on star power, appropriating an already existing discourse and history of benevolence and erasing an-Other history of this same racialized benevolence.7 There is one further point to be made. The Bollywood star situated within this global discourse, working with and beside the victims and suffering Other in Africa, pleading for an end to slavery in other parts of the world, or campaigning for better treatment of animals, establishes an affective affinity across races and cultures, even when the work is restricted to a particular locality or region. The visuals of stars with maimed or sick children in interior Congo is an “embeddedness” in local trauma but exhibit universal concerns. Michael Goodman and Christine Barnes argue in their essay on “development celebrities” that “authenticity becomes embodied in development celebrities through the processes of ‘bearing witness’ to crises and underdevelopment that they do for us as the audience, potential carer and potential consumer/donator” (2011: 80).8 What I am referring to as the embeddedness that exhibits universal concerns is a performance which includes “their reflexive approach and their self-reflexive use of ‘I’; without it the confessional doesn’t work, we don’t see or hear about them being touched, made sad/overjoyed or describe how it is they, and of course, we should feel” (Goodman and Barnes 2011: 80). Smile Train’s video clip of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, its ambassador, performs authenticity and embeddedness in a different fashion (Smile Train 2015). Aishwarya, as she starts to speak to us about cleft lip, suddenly begins to develop a cleft lip on screen. Since her speech afterward would be unclear, we are given subtitles. When the speech ends (it is a 40-second video), she has pleaded for corrective surgery just as the cleft lip on her face begins to be repaired and she can speak normally again. We are not shown the star’s work with cleft-palate children: she becomes the cleft-palate individual herself on screen. This is the “aspirational performance of solidarity” that Chouliaraki says is at the heart of humanitarian work, when the morphing transforms “the most beautiful woman in the world” into a victim. The video calls upon us to see one of the world’s most beautiful women with this facial anomaly, thereby rendering her the very opposite of the fantasy she represents: she could have been this way. Bollywood Care is a brand that therefore benefits by fitting into a wholly new media regime—global humanitarian projects—and cementing its position within the celebrity discourse of the global entertainment industry. Just as bare lives in interior Congo or Vidharbha become global icons of suffering—the subjects of global humanitarian regimes—Bollywood care

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offers a global citizenship for its celebrities. However, we need to see this citizenship as an assemblage that necessarily originates in the local, in their pasts within a developing nation with its colonial histories of benevolent and other interventions, before moving on to the world stage, albeit with the Manicheanism I have identified above. Without a vernacular “connection” and the flows—finance, people, profits, audiences—of the global Bollywood industry, its stars would not become global brands, or brand ambassadors.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7

8

For some skepticism about how exactly Bollywood has gone global see Derek Bose (2006), especially chapter 10. See http://www.thefoundation.in/rahul-bose.html (accessed May 2015). Here we perceive the politics of the popular where particular relations structure the field of cultural practices and classify cultural forms into “dominant” and “subordinate.” Hindi cinema’s dominance has been the subject of considerable attention and critical work. In a recent essay film reviewer and journalist Bharadwaj Rangan puts it plainly, “the implications of institutionalizing Hindi cinema as Indian cinema … are disturbing,” and points to the “symbiotic relationship [Bollywood has forged] with the English-speaking media” (2013). On celebrity diplomacy see, among others Cooper (2008) and Wheeler (2011). For a quick survey of the universalizing discourse of colonial benevolence and paternalism in British India see Fischer Tin´e and Mann (2004). Dan Brockington, likewise, points to the closing gap between conservation and corporate capitalism in celebrity conservation campaigns (2009). Marta Bolognani, writing about cricketer Shoaib Akhtar, argues that he uses the “constraints of post-colonial fragmentation as a resource for his celebrity; his different personas have privileged different audiences, challenging the Jungian archetype of celebrity as transcultural and ahistorical” (2011: 33). In a similar fashion, Bollywood stars appropriate their experience—experience at least in terms of the visual evidence of poverty and suffering in India—as a resource for their global celebrity role. Authenticity has also to do with questions of expertise. Examining the downside of celebrity diplomacy, Heribert Dieter and Rajiv Kumar summarize the problem of celebrity competence to make pronouncements on complicated issues: “The world is painted in black and white and good is pitted against evil. Nuance is inevitably lost. Historic experience is disregarded. Celebrities provide their followers with easily understood, morally couched messages, but the process of development is much more complex” (2008: 260).

References Bolognani, M. (2011) “Star fission: Shoaib Akhtar and fragmentation as transnational celebrity strategy.” Celebrity Studies 2 (1): 31–43. Bose, D. (2006) Brand Bollywood: A New Global Entertainment Order. New Delhi: Sage. Brockington, D. (2009) Celebrity and the Environment: Fame, Wealth and Power in Conservation. London: Zed.

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Calhoun, C. (2008) “The idea of emergency: humanitarian action and global (dis)order.” In D. Fassin (ed.), States of Emergency (pp. 18–39). Cambridge, MA: Zone. Chouliaraki, L. (2013) The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Cambridge: Polity. Cooper, A. F. (2008) Celebrity Diplomacy. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Dieter, H. and Kumar, R. (2008) “The downside of celebrity diplomacy: the neglected complexity of development.” Global Governance 14: 259–64. Dyer, R. (1986) Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. London: British Film Institute. Fischer-Tin´e, H. and Mann, M. (ed.) (2004) Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India. London: Anthem. Frankenberg, R. (1993) White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fridell, G. and Konings, M. (2013) “Introduction.” In G. Fridell and M. Konings (eds), Age of Icons: Exploring Philanthrocapitalism in the Contemporary World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Girl Up (2015) “Priyanka Chopra.” At https://girlup. org/?champions=priyanka-chopra (accessed Apr. 2015). Goodman, M. and Barnes, C. (2011) “Star/poverty space: the making of the ‘development celebrity.” ’ Celebrity Studies 2 (1): 69–85. Gordon, A. (1997) Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jefferess, D. (2013) “Benevolence, global citizenship and post-racial politics.” Topia 25: 77–95. Kavoori, A. P and Punathambekar, A. (ed.) (2008) Global Bollywood. New York: New York University Press. Lester, A. (2000) “Obtaining the ‘due observance of justice’: the geographies of global humanitarianism.” Environment and Planning D 20 (3): 277–93. Littler, J. (2008) “ ‘I feel your pain’: cosmopolitan charity and the public fashioning of the celebrity soul.” Social Semiotics 18 (2): 237–51. Marks, M. P. and Fischer, Z. M. (2002) “The king’s new bodies: simulating consent in the age of celebrity.” New Political Science 24 (3): 371–94. Massumi, B. (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mishra, V. (2002) Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire. New York: Routledge. Müller, T. R (2013) “ ‘The Ethiopian famine’ revisited: band aid and the antipolitics of celebrity humanitarian action.” Disasters 37 (1): 61–79. Rangan, B. (2013) “Century bazaar.” Caravan, June 1, at http://caravanmagazine.in/ perspectives/century-bazaar/ (accessed Apr. 2015). Rojek, C. (2001) Celebrity. London: Reaktion. Sinha, A. S. and Kaur, R. (ed.) (2005) Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens. New Delhi: Sage. Smile Train (2015) “Aishwarya Rai Bachchan appeals for Smile Train.” Video at http://www.smiletrainindia.org/about-smile-train/celebrity-support.php (accessed Apr. 2015). Stacey, J. (1993) Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London: Routledge. “Tiger talk” (2014) The Hindu, Metro Plus, Hyderabad, Feb. 26, p. 2.

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UNAIDS (2012) “UNAIDS appoints global Indian icon, Mrs Aishwarya Rai Bachchan as International Goodwill Ambassador.” Press release, at http://www.unaids.org/en/ resources/presscentre/pressreleaseandstatementarchive/2012/september/20120924 prgwamrsbachchan/ (accessed Apr. 2015). Urry, J. (2007) Mobilities. Cambridge: Polity. Vasudevan, R. (2008) “The meanings of ‘Bollywood.’ ” Journal of the Moving Image 7, at http://www.jmionline.org/articles/2008/the_meanings_of_bollywood.pdf (accessed Apr. 2015). Werbner, P. (2006) “Understanding vernacular cosmopolitanism.” Anthropology News 47 (5): 7–11. Wheeler, M. (2011) “Celebrity diplomacy: United Nations’ goodwill ambassadors and messengers of peace.” Celebrity Studies 2 (1): 6–18. Wilson, J. (2011) “A new kind of star is born: Audrey Hepburn and the global governmentalisation of female stardom.” Celebrity Studies 2 (1): 56–68. Yrjölä, R. (2012) “From Street into the world: towards a politicised reading of celebrity humanitarianism.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 14: 357–74. Zinta, P. (2010) “Preity Zinta at the University of East London receiving an honorary doctorate.” Speech, Oct. 29, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNJhKLia_2w/ (accessed Apr. 2015).

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Chapter 3 CELEBRITY, CHARISMA, AND POST-TRUTH RELATIONS: AGNOGENESIS, AFFECT, AND BOLLYWOOD Introduction: Defining Charisma and Post-Truth Max Weber famously defined charisma as “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary” (cited in Potts 2009: 127). Charles Lindholm defines it thus: “the admiration offered to glamorous movie stars, exciting sports heroes, and Kennedyesque politicians – adulation which goes far beyond mere admiration of someone with special expertise” (1990: 9). Moving beyond the traditional Weberian analysis of charisma, Stephen Jaeger sees charisma as a kind of force and authority exercised by people with an extraordinary personal presence, either given by nature, acquired by calculation, training, or merit. In contrast to most forms of authority, charisma is always seen as benevolent and life-affirming, at least until disenchantment sets in. (2012: 9) Further, “[T]he effect of charisma is ‘enchantment,’ engaging the whole range of meaning of that word from a shallow moment of pleasure (‘Enchanted to make your acquaintance’) to a spellbound state of participation and imitation, to idolatry and transformation” (9). The Oxford Dictionaries (2016) defined post-truth as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”1 The language of reporting and information lacks any reference to facts, truths, and realities. Bruce McComiskey in Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition writes:

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In a post-truth communication landscape, people (especially politicians) say whatever might work in a given situation, whatever might generate the desired result, without any regard to the truth value or facticity of statements. If a statement works, results in the desired effect, it is good; if it fails, it is bad (or at least not worth trying again). (2017: 6) When a Bollywood star exudes the charisma effect, I suggest, the “scene” is ripe for the adoring audience to affectively believe in the star, whether it is in Salman Khan’s innocence or Sanjay Dutt’s “reform” in prison, in Karan Johar’s sexuality, in Alia Bhatt’s low intelligence, or in sharp contrast, Aamir Khan’s image of the “thinking star.” Charisma, then, is primarily an affective condition, an appeal to the sentiments. Linking Bollywood’s charisma effect with the regime of post-truth is the operation of two specific processes in the realm of representations: mimetic capital, and sensuous fidelity.

Mimetic Capital and Sensuous Fidelity Star/celebrity representations draw upon and benefit from “a stockpile of representations, a set of images and image-making devices that are accumulated, ‘banked’ as it were, in books, archives, collections, cultural storehouses, until such time as these representations are called upon to generate new representations,” what Stephen Greenblatt in Marvelous Possessions terms “mimetic capital” (1991: 6, emphasis in original). This capital stays open to repetition and reuse, and it is malleable in a variety of (imitative) contexts. There is cultural capital to be made out of such imitative repetition. Mimetic capital can be banked upon because of a very specific feature of celebrity culture: iterability. Consequently, the aura, the enchantment, and the illusion around the celebrity no longer require the star-presence as a corporeal entity. These images generate capital – economic and cultural – and endless mimesis is at the heart of the process (“the images that matter, that merit the term capital,” as Greenblatt phrases it; [6]). Stars are drawn upon and mimetically mined as models, objects of desire, and fantasies because they are, more than anything else, trusted and believed in due to the sensuous fidelity of their cinematic and public representations. Advertisements, biopics, and auto/biographies draw upon a particular image of the star – Salman Khan and the action hero in the Thums Up ad (his contract ended in 2016, and he has since been replaced by Ranveer Singh) comes to mind – irrespective of the common knowledge that action stunts are performed by body doubles in almost all cinema or that what we are watching/reading

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is a mediated, edited, redacted version of a life. As in the case of all celebrity culture, the charisma of the star is made available through the circulation of hairstyles, clothing, posters, interviews, and other cultural apparatuses. Over time, these adaptations drawing on the (supposed) magical nature of the hero/ine ensure that the representation is the hero/ine for all purposes. Dutt becomes an embodiment of Gandhiism as a result of his film, and Khan becomes an embodiment of humanitarian causes because of his non-filmic role. This oscillation between the filmic and the non-filmic generates a mimetic capital that owes its existence to both domains. This mimetic capital in turn can be banked on for generating affective attention. Mimetic capital, then, is also the miming of reel-life roles by their real-life actions and affiliations. The capital that emerges among fans and audiences is indispensable to the charisma effect which, I propose, does not distinguish between the fleshly body and the cinematic body of the star in terms of the reception accorded to it. The miming of one by the other is charismatic, so that the charisma is inseparable from the images (cinematic, popular) circulating of the star. The mimetic capital of films, advertisements, biopics, etc., generates a “sensuous fidelity,” as Michael Taussig theorizes it (1992), a condition between fidelity and fantasy, where the copy or mimetic version draws so much power from the original that it may assume the power of the original itself. It is nearmagical, argues Taussig. Sensual fidelity is the loyalty to the image of the hero, his cinematic body. We “know” the hero only in terms of the cinematic image on screen and in marketing (“promos,” meaning promotional) materials. Taussig’s use of the term “sensuous” implies an affective element but also gestures at the sensory and sensual appeal of the cinematic image. But sensuous fidelity relies on the star’s two bodies, the corporeal and the cinematic, and it is a hybrid of the two that circulates publicly even when the actor/star appears in the flesh. Charles Lindholm, writing about contemporary charisma, has argued that in consumer culture certain symbols (or symbolic goods) “serve to convince the shoppers that while supporting capitalism they are simultaneously participating together in a shared vision of a more vital and sensual world” (195). This emphasis on the sensual world in Lindholm’s reading is for me the affective nature of the parasocial relations (Rojek 2004) of celebrity culture that is the epicenter of charisma. Sensuous fidelity as generative of star-charisma is seen in other genres of pop culture such as the biopic and the star-auto/biography. In Sanju, the biopic on Sanjay Dutt, just out from prison for possessing terrorist weapons, and in Yasser Usman’s biography (Sanjay Dutt: The Crazy Untold Story of Bollywood’s Bad Boy), he is still referred to as “Sanju Baba.” The infantilization (the reduction of adults into child-like traits through tropes) implicit in the term ties in neatly with the supposed craziness and careless behavioral traits (“foolish and

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impetuous,” is how he is described in Usman’s book, [6]). I will return to this infantilization theme later in the chapter. Legally admissible evidence notwithstanding, the biographical mode seeks an affective “understanding” of the star’s several crises (from drug addiction to owning guns). In the blackbuck poaching case when Salman Khan was convicted in April 2018 – Khan and a few friends, in 1998, shot a blackbuck in Jodhpur – the media was filled with disbelieving Bollywood responses.2 Several referred to his kindness toward people (and animals) and the “humanitarian work” that he undertakes. Fans gathered outside Jodhpur Central Jail, according to media reports, after his conviction, many holding up placards and boards with his filmic representations on them. Pictures of Dutt and Khan in prison talking to police officers went viral on the internet. One report says about the day of Khan’s conviction: April 5 was a ruinous day for Salman Khan’s fans as the actor was sentenced to five years in jail after a court in Jodhpur convicted him in the 1998 blackbuck poaching case. Outside Jodhpur Central Jail, where Salman Khan spent his Thursday night, locals gathered with posters of the actor, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the actor.3 Coverage of Sanjay Dutt’s last day in prison was documented by Deccan Chronicle in some detail, focusing on his simple life therein.4 Charisma is the carrying over of the filmic hero into real life, as in the previously mentioned cases. I suggest that when the “hero” appears in the flesh – as both Dutt and Khan do – he wears the aura of the star, and the star on-screen is also evaluated for his real-life crises. The choice of films made after these crises in their lives are some indication of the charisma effect managed by necessary PR firms and the creative industries: Munna Bhai M.B.B.S (2003); Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) in the case of Dutt; films where he is a Samaritan and/or an “innocent” like in Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015); Tubelight (2017); and jingoistic nationalism-driven Ek Tha Tiger (2012) and Jai Ho (2014) in the case of Khan. Dutt’s “Gandhigiri” in Lage Raho Munna Bhai altered the cinematic and public image of the convicted star, meriting a Wiki entry for the term “Gandhigiri,” and global coverage of “Sanju Baba.”5 Another channel went on to claim that Dutt taught us the “5 principles of Gandhigiri,” in which Hirani’s film was described as the “perfect ode to Gandhi Ji.”6 Chris Rojek has argued that [c]elebrities may slip out of role in chat show interviews so as to appear more human. But if they do so continuously they neutralize the charisma on which their status as exalted and extraordinary figures depends. (2004: 76)

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While the conviction, public opprobrium, and imprisonment does render Khan and Dutt more human, as Rojek suggests, it does not quite alter the charisma. My proposition is that the charisma effect survives the negativity when the negativity is presented as aberrant behavior. It is not a flawed personality, but an aberration. It is not an embittered or angry man, but one prone to flashes of temper and irrational actions. The charisma effect needs to be seen, then, as an “explaining-away” of such actions and events by fans, so that sensuous fidelity is the same as affective filiations. The “bad boy of Bollywood” image serves the star’s charisma effect very well. Being misfits in real life has some advantage to the kind of screen roles they play. Part of their charisma, as celebrity theorists have argued, stem from their mishaps and mistakes (then built up as the “wronged” Dutt or Khan) that then render them vulnerable. Their public images, especially of those in court, emerging from prison, in the police vehicle, render them of the public in an affective sense: generating sympathy. David Aberbach has argued: “charisma is closely linked with impulses and actions which in normal conditions would be socially unacceptable or illegal. The art of charisma creates a hypnotic spell by which morality is redefined” (106). The acceptance of the star despite the legally and socially unacceptable actions they are proven (in courts) to have committed, creates the “hypnotic spell” that Aberbach speaks of. Indeed they thrive on the gap between the ideal and idealized “hero” and roles they enact in real life, including gun-ownership, violence, mafia-involvement, substance abuse, among others. Aberbach writes: The Public’s deflection from the charismatic’s distorted inner self and the potential for disaster onto the selfish question: what can he do for me? In its purest forms, charisma transforms politics, religion and the media into art, disguising and sweetening the risk. (1996: 105) Further, the star incorporates the mediated symbolic materials – imprisonment, legal arraignments, and the media images of these events – into his life. A celebrity’s gestures of authenticity, David Marshall argues, have significant affective power and are useful for creating and enhancing celebrity–audience relationships (1997). These gestures, in other words, humanize them and bring them just a bit closer to their audience, which then is “moved” by the “genuineness” of the star. Gestures of authenticity in these two cases also include their fraught expressions going to and from courts or prisons, the relief writ large when Dutt is freed, or when Khan is granted bail. Thus, despite the common knowledge that these stars emote for a living, their stricken expressions carry enormous

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weight before reporters and fans, who quickly detect contrition, guilt, apologies in their expressions – and find them authentic. In the era of a heightened emphasis on transparency and visibility, there is an assumption that being exposed to the public gaze reveals the inner workings of people, organizations, and processes (Nayar 2014: 16). The crucial democratic challenge, writes Andrea Brighenti, is to “achieve a deployment of power that is ideally without secrets… . [T]he device of public representation is necessarily public” (2010: 54). Visibility, writes Brighenti, “contributes crucially to the demarcation of the public domain” (58). Thus, scenes of a penitent Khan/Dutt, their arrests, and their families in mourning are assumed to render them transparent to the public gaze and more accountable for what they did. That is, the public spectacle of arrests, mourning, and emoting are deemed to reveal the truth of their interiority – reform, penitence, guilt – because this interiority has been revealed in public. These gestures of authenticity, or staging of authenticity, in public view, hinge upon the affective belief in their “genuineness” and become acceptable as truth. This is a version of enchantment too, wherein people whose life depends on their ability to emote are deemed to be not-performing when they appear teary-eyed in public: on the contrary, they are believed to exhibit genuine contrition at their acts. Enchantment in the age of charisma and post-truth demands not authenticity but the public staging of authenticity, where the publicness (and transparency) is believed to make emotions genuine. Therefore, continuing the previously mentioned line of argument, when interviewed, stars like Salman Khan admit to financial difficulties – he mentions his high lawyer fees in one7 – supposedly rendering them vulnerable, like all middle-class Indians, and therefore believable in very affective terms. In an appearance in the show Aap ki Adalat, Sohail Khan, preparing to leave the “witness box” says this [as in a court appearance/witness box] is a first time for him, but Salman Khan “is used to it.” The constant referencing of Khan’s legal troubles is part of the charisma wherein to be accused, tried, and even convicted does not necessarily detract from the star persona and appeal, but instead renders them human and transparent. That is, the charismatic stars, Khan and Dutt, incorporate the symbolic materials of socially unacceptable behavior into their very self-formation, so that Dutt will forever be the star-turned-terrorist-turned-Gandhian, merging the corporeal Dutt who went to jail and the cinematic Dutt who showed us the Gandhian path. Likewise, Khan will be the good-Samaritan-with-atemper who behaved rashly (running people over on a pavement, shooting blackbucks), again incorporating the corporeal Khan who is photographed outside the court and the cinematic Khan who is this daring vigilante, nationalist soldier, etc. The reformed Dutt and the nationalist Khan, as they circulate

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in the media, constitute post-facto “ethicalization of persona” (Chouliaraki 2013: 92), which enables the two “bad boys” to communicate a new persona itself. It is in the flawed-but-believable nature of the star that the charisma effect originates, and which appeals to the audience. If the origins of the word charisma (in the Greek charis) means “spiritual gifts” (in addition to attractiveness and charm), then it is the very opposite of such gifts in Dutt and Khan – manifest as their tendency to perform socially unacceptable actions – that drives their charisma in the post-truth era. The charisma effect, then, is integral to post-truth relations.

Post-Truth Relations and Agnogenesis Post-truth is the era of plausible and non-verifiable truths, made possible, commentators note, through social media apparatuses. In post-truth relations, no matter what the evidence of villainy, stupidity, or bad behavior is, he or she remains a loved, bankable star. Knowledge about the star drawing upon a fund of circulating suspicions – Salman Khan’s underworld connections, his temper, the role in the black buck killing, or Dutt’s involvement in the 1993 terror attacks – cannot be fully believed in because the exact opposite is what the mimetic capital of his representations draws upon: Salman the action hero, the do-gooder (fronted by his organization, Being Human, with clothing and accessories), the bumbling golden-hearted messiah (say, Bajrangi Bhaijaan). Throughout Usman’s biography, for example, Sanjay is described as: “unaware” (39), “nobody had the slightest inkling” (48), “unaware of the magnitude of his errors” (125), in order to paint the picture of a rather naïve young man. The affective appeal is very clear: here is a bumbling, drug-addled star who has taken leave of common sense. Indeed, Usman’s biography makes the connection between this image and his on-screen roles: On screen, Sanjay’s fans loved to see him play the spoilt brat – macho, unintelligent and naïve. His most successful films were based on that formula. And many of his films were centered on the underworld and crime syndicates. Many believe that an unthinking Sanjay let himself get carried away by his love for guns, cops and robber games. That he was just plain stupid, didn’t know what he was doing, and didn’t mean any harm. (128) After the legal cases and the indictments, the reiteration of this image enables post-truth relations unfounded on anything provable or proven about Dutt’s

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real intentions (Usman admits Dutt knew his guns, and was aware of the “lethality of various firearms,” 126), but founded on the affective and affecting image of the star-gone-wrong. Post-truth relations are marked by what Zizi Papacharissi (2014) terms “affective attunement” in which we engage in meaning making of situations unknown and unknowable to us by evoking affective reactions, itself reminiscent of the sensuous fidelity of charisma effects discussed earlier. Affective attunement is less about an intellectual or rational appeal to the audience than about the appeal to the emotions, supposedly universal, in all humans. We begin, as a consequence, to interpret from our emotions toward a star rather than our knowledge of the star. As the audience, we are prompted to interpret situations “by feeling like those directly experiencing them, even though, in most cases, we are not able to think like them” (Papacharissi 5, emphasis in original), instantiated in the form of publicly circulating images of a sorrowful Salman Khan, a penitent-looking Sanjay Dutt, among others. This affective attunement may be transient, but it spreads virally in the age of social media, and generates the aura around the star, again, as Papacharissi suggests, because the media creates the “affective feedback loops that generate and reproduce affective patterns of relating to others that are further reproduced as affect – that is, intensity that has not yet been cognitively processed as feeling, emotion, or thought” (22–23). We are no longer expected to cognitively process innocence or guilt, truth, or falsehood, only to trust the emotional “truth” writ large on their faces. With affective attunement, the necessity to believe in binaries like true/false is done away with. I go a step further. In the case of celebrities, the affective attunement even preempts and disbelieves any inquiry into the star. This means, irrespective of what the law may interpret and make meaning out of Dutt’s or Khan’s actions, the charisma effect generates its own set of affective meanings. In other words, the popular and populist meanings around Khan and Dutt occupy a different meaning domain and therefore truth regime, from that of the law. We do not need knowledge or meaning as determined by the law, as long as affective attunement and fidelity to the star continue. Affective attunement and the sensuous fidelity of the charisma effect induce what has been called by Kevin P. Martyn and M. Martin Bosman as “agnogenesis,” or culturally induced ignorance (2018). In the case of stars and their post-truth relations, two principles work in tandem: “even if it didn’t happen, it is true,” and its converse, “even if it did happen, it isn’t true.” The charisma effect ensures that evidence and documentation, fact verification and establishing authenticity do not necessarily generate alternative knowledge, they only create uncertainty in the minds of the audience that then enables a retention of the status quo of the star’s “real” nature. Post-truth in celebrity

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culture is not necessarily alternate facts or patent falsehood. It is primarily an indifference to the false or true nature of information about the stars. I suggest that the agnogenesis made possible by the charisma effect may be seen as a form of resistance to the alethic discourse of the law, and the consequent alethicism in public discourses about public figures. Adam Chmielewski (2018) argues about the role of alethic populism in political life: Alethic populism is adamant belief in the validity of truth and an unwavering demand that it be restored to, and respected in, political life. Alethic populism as a moralistic defence of truth is a progeny of a naïve belief in the unproblematic status of “truth,” and is a ground on which many forms of populism forage. Believing in the moral dimension of truth, alethic populists demand respect for truth, but usually only the truth they profess themselves, while at the same time seeking in it a justification for an exclusivist, and not infrequently exterminative, brand of politics.8 That is, when alethicism informs discourses on public life, affective attunement generates its exact obverse, agnogenesis, in the case of celebrities. The celebrity’s charisma then may be said to owe its existence in the case of Khan and Dutt to the intersection of two specific economies and their discursive strategies: the alethic, as embodied in the discourse of law, public morality, and public life, and agnogenesis. If alethic populism drives the exact opposite in terms of agnogenesis, neither can exist without the other. We at once know and not know, it matters and yet does not matter, whether these stars are guilty in the eyes of the law. Charisma is the antithesis to alethicism, because it does away with the necessity of proving or disproving anything called truth. Post-truth relations are therefore essential to the charisma effect and vice versa because they constitute an aura independent of the alethic discourses and render the star vulnerable. Post-truth relations produced between alethic populism and agnogenesis are a part of truth regimes with multiple techniques of establishing truth. The law is only one of them. Affect, however, is the most dominant. Truth regimes, writes Susanne Krasman determine what counts as a true and false statement, and how this is sanctioned; they accept particular modes of how things come to be presented and represented, and they encourage and constrain the subject to perform truthfully in accordance with particular rules. (2018: 5–6)

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In the case of Dutt and Khan, as is very evident from their biopics, interviews, and public reception, the truth regime of affective attunement is the dominant mode, distinct from and often opposed to the alethic populism of courts and the public. One final point. Agnogenesis is also willful ignorance, the social construction of ignorance and a cultural refusal (or refutation) of specific information and visible data. In the case of stars like Dutt, infantilization is an integral part of their affective attunement. I have already referred to the “Sanju baba” epithet used to describe Dutt. It is no coincidence, surely, to note how both, Karan Johar’s autobiography (2017) and Usman’s biography of Dutt (2018), use “boy” in the title. To describe 40+ adults, successful stars at that, as “boys” is, I suggest, a form of cultural agnogenesis. Through this, we first deny they were responsible for their actions, being mere “boys,” and second, we relocate their adult actions to a pre-awareness and pre-rational age (“playing cops and robbers,” in Usman’s phrase). Rather than discrediting the veracity of evidence produced out of the relations between legal processes and biographical data that dominate star “knowledge,” it could be argued that the very field of publicly “acceptable” evidence has been structured by these relations. Charisma determines not only what is known within these domains (legal, juridical, fictional, biographical, etc.) but also what is or believed to be knowable. I am not proposing that this is a willful production of ignorance but rather that the epistemic form that law has acquired – its evidentiary norms, an emphasis on causality – render many relations invisible, such as that between “influence” and the law. For example, Usman suggests that Sunil Dutt’s appeal to the Thackerays made a difference in the legal outcome of Sanjay Dutt’s case, and he was consequently granted bail (153). Now, what exactly is the role of political influence/intervention in legal processes which are supposed to “objectively” establish “truth”? Here legal “knowledge” as a domain is at odds with the common “knowledge” about the role of social capital and influence. There is, subsequently, an interesting creation of a specific kind of black hole around the bail: what caused the courts to grant bail? This construction of ignorance occurs at the intersection of legal and common knowledge – objective evaluation by the law of guilt/innocence and the subjective, affective and tangible influences asserted by social capital. The audience is left uncertain as to whether the bail petition was granted on any kind of legal rationality or whether emotions, pressure, and influence were instrumentalized toward the approval. In a study of the scientific discourse around a particular medical condition and the construction of ignorance, Emilia Sanabria writes of

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the instrumentalization of uncertainty in vertical relations between scientific elites and disempowered publics or their governments. Undone science [David Hess’ idea] refers to those known unknowns that civil society organizations highlight as having potential public benefit but that industrial elites may actively seek to elide through their influence. (2018: 133) In Sanabria’s evocative phrasing, it is the “epistemic and social goals of science, against which practices of ignorance construction can be measured” (133). That is, the charisma effect enables the public to situate legally established knowledge alongside mediated biographical knowledge or even screen knowledge (which is fictional but believed in) of the naïve Dutt or the innocent Khan. It is no longer possible to claim either knowledge or ignorance in the age of agnogenesis when it is eminently possible to continue to see (and address) aging stars as naïve and “baba.” This agnogenesis is a part of the key component of charisma: enchantment.

Conclusion and Future Research I suggest that charisma effects that generate post-truth relations driven, as noted here, by affective attunements and an investment in affect, may be read as not only a diminishing trust regime but also as a form of resistance to algorithmic governance. Such algorithmic governance (Crampton and Miller 2017) is described as the ways in which our digitally mediatized experiences of the world are shaped by artificial intelligence of algorithms designed according to commodified, consumer-oriented logics. On the basis of accumulated data from profiling a user’s history and preferences, the user is fed personalized findings which functionally determine one’s windows on the infoworld. I extend this concept of algorithmic governance to mean the following: the outcome of court cases, legal investigations, and even the confession make little or no difference, because such information has come to be seen as part of the algorithmic governance assemblage, leading to a distrust of such previously reliable modes of “truth.” Rather, the audience turns away from such sources toward affective accounts and image making as a perceived counter to such algorithmic governance. The point I wish to emphasize in the case of the “bad boys” of Bollywood is this. In the case of stars, we are used to a set of characteristics and attributes drawn from on-screen and off-screen representations. We attribute such-andsuch a character to such-and-such a star. We are not surprised at their actions (as Usman notes about Dutt, we are used to seeing him in gangster flicks,

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and involved in illegal and illegitimate actions in his film roles) – it is as if we know them already. Then, how do the biographer, the biopic, and the memoirist represent the unrepresentable aspects of the star (such as naiveté or innocence) for it to be believed in? It has to hint at something more behind public knowledge or legal knowledge. As stated earlier by Emilia Sandriana, it is the very episteme of the law and its processes, a component of both alethic populism and algorithmic governance where all things are quantified, that is at stake in the charisma effect. I see charisma, then, as enabling enchantment often in the face of any other evidentiary systems of law, biographical data, or recorded behavior. Sanabria quotes commentators who speak of “evidential landscaping,” wherein influential corporations change the terms of policy debates by misquoting evidence, mimicking scientific critique, and introducing alternative research (150). Charisma effects are an instance of such evidential landscaping where questions of law are elided in favor of questions of, say, temperament (Dutt’s acquisition of guns against the law versus Dutt’s stupidity). When Dutt’s or Khan’s image is so overdetermined by the public’s preconceptions and affective attunements, how does a biographer demonstrate impenetrable and unknowable depths to these humans? Within the affective, sensuous fidelity already circulating of these stars, biographies, biopics, and memoirs work so that the charisma effects generate post-truth relations, leading to a public belief in the naïveté of a Dutt or the innocence of a Khan. This naïveté and innocence is what has to be drawn out, played upon and played out, informed, and influenced by the enchantment they command, irrespective of any legally established knowledge about them. Charisma, then, is integral to the post-truth era, especially when it comes to celebrities, public figures, and public processes. While this chapter stayed focused on the role of charisma in generating willful ignorance and forms of governance, there are other areas this discussion could go into. For instance, it may be productive to see how charisma is employed to further public opinion making: does the “mis-use” or abuse of charisma by cult leaders, priests, physicians and movie stars reported in the media determine the reorganization of their glamour? How does public opinion get leveraged through, say, scandal or rumormongering, which, as research has shown, actively contributed to the star’s celebrity power? As an extension of the above, it would be challenging and interesting to consider how a “celebrity public sphere” itself emerges around the star persona: the influence they have on trends in clothing, makeovers, housing, cell phones, leisure, etc., which would also arguably be forms of governance.

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Notes 1 2

3

4 5 6

7 8

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year-2016. www.timesnownews.com/ entertainment/ news/ bollywood- news/ article/ salmankhan- blackbuck- poaching- case- verdict- 5- year- imprisonment- shera- varun- dhawansimi-garewal-twitter-fans/214559. www.timesnownews.com/ entertainment/ news/ bollywood- news/ article/ salmankhan- fans- gather- outside- jodhpur- central- jail- after- his- conviction- in- blackbuckpoaching-case/214556. www.deccanchronicle.com/entertainment/bollywood/260216/the-man-walks-freewe-follow-his-trail.html. See, for example, www.freepressjournal.in/entertainment/lage-raho-munna-bhaiactor-sanjay-dutt-remembered-mahatma-gandhi-on-martyrs-day/1212908. www.timesnownews.com/ entertainment/ news/ bollywood- news/ article/ gandhijayanti- when- sanjay- dutts- lage- raho- munnabhai- taught- us- the- 5- principles- ofgandhigiri-bollywood-news/292915. www.youtube.com/watch?v=17MDEbKjBos. https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/6-2018-34/post-truth-alethic-populism/ .

References Aberbach, David. 1996. Charisma in Politics, Religion and the Media: Private Trauma, Public Ideals. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Brighenti, Andrea Mubi. 2010. “Democracy and Surveillance.” In Kevin D. Haggerty and Minas Samatas (Eds), Surveillance and Democracy. London and New York: Routledge, 51–68. Chmielewski, Adam. 2018. “Post-Truth and Alethic Populism.” Public History Weekly, 8 November. https://public-history-weekly.degruyter.com/6-2018-34/post-truthalethic-populism/. Chouliaraki, Leila. 2013. The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Crampton, Jeremy and Andrea Miller. 2017. ‘Introduction’. Intervention Symposium – Algorithmic Governance. Antipode. https://antipodeonline.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2017/05/1-crampton-and-miller1.pdf. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jaeger, C. Stephen. 2012. Enchantment: Of Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Johar, Karan and Poonam Saxena. 2017. An Unsuitable Boy. New Delhi: Penguin Books. Krasmann, Susanne. 2018. “Secrecy and the Force of Truth: Countering Posttruth Regimes.” Cultural Studies. DOI:10.1080/09502386.2018.1503696 Lindholm, Charles. 1990. Charisma. London: Blackwell. Marshall, P. David. 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Martyn, Kevin P. and M. Martin Bosman. 2018. “Post-Truth or Agnogenesis? Theorizing Risk and Uncertainty in a Neoliberal Nature.” Journal of Risk Research. DOI:10.1080/ 13669877.2018.1454497.

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McComiskey, Bruce. 2017. Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition. Logan: Utah State University Press. Nayar, Pramod K. 2014. Citizenship and Identity in the Age of Surveillance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Papacharissi, Zizi. 2014. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Potts, John. 2009. A History of Charisma. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rojek, Chris. 2004. Celebrity. London: Reaktion. Sanabria, Emilia. 2018. “Circulating Ignorance: Complexity and Agnogenesis in the Obesity ‘Epidemic’.” Cultural Anthropology 31.1, 131–158. Taussig, Michael. 1992. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Usman, Yasser. 2018. Sanjay Dutt: The Crazy Untold Story of Bollywood’s Bad Boy. New Delhi: Juggernaut.

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Chapter 4 WHAT THE STARS TELL: CELEBRITY LIFEWRITING IN INDIA Four Bollywood stars—three established and one “moderately famous,” as she describes herself—contributed to the genre of star auto/biographies in India in 2017–18: Rishi Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt, Karan Johar, and Soha Ali Khan. Two of the books list a coauthor, although the extent of the collaborations is unspecified. As befits the star memoir or biography, each text is interspersed with photographs of the star’s illustrious family, the star in the company of other celebrities, and occasionally film posters or stills. These books include a considerable amount of family history, which in all cases is also a history of Bollywood’s top film-families. They offer glimpses into scandals, rumors, and individual moments of despair and uncertainty. In what follows I will discuss select features common to these star biographies.

Life Writing, Adaptation, and Interart Star biographies, especially those that have their provenance in the world of arts, may be profitably read as adaptations that result in “interart” forms (Kamilla Elliot’s term, cited in Andrews 368). Discussing the use of poetry in biopics of poets, Hannah Andrews argues that the incorporation of artwork into the written life of the artist emphasizes the “biographical understanding of artwork.” Further, it raises questions as to whether poetry is an appropriate form for “textual transferal” (370). Following Andrews, my proposition is that the star reinforces their starvalue through the generation of an interart work, in which the life story is framed within the film history of the individual, and the films are framed by the life of the actor. The films are the subjects of the adaptation process, and they underscore the fact that the life of the star has been adapted for life writing in print. In other words, we as readers recognize that the star’s life has been adapted for our consumption precisely because the filmic elements are part of this narrative. We are never allowed to move too far away from the

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auto/biographical subject because the art—the films—is always intruding in the form of a paratextual apparatus. In star life writing, the paratexts—or the films—extend the main text, as Gérard Genette suggests. The filmic photographs included in these print biographies are paratexts that move from one form of narrative representation— memoir, biography—into another, the film, and back again. The film and the life narrative are bracketed off from each other, but osmotically feed off each other. We can see how Sanjay Dutt looked in his first film in 1981, Rocky, from the reprinted film poster, or a collage that shows Rishi Kapoor in his various celebrated screen roles. Karan Johar’s An Unsuitable Boy gives us photographs of the events that happened behind the scenes during the shooting of his films, thus creating an additional layer of signification: the director-producer is himself filmed when speaking with the stars. This additional layer, via posters, shots of the filmmaking process, among other things, ensures that we understand the auto/biography is a sum total of the star’s filmic roles but also a star-bildungsroman. This last becomes evident when each of the star auto/biographies attempts to map the growth of the boy or girl (the star-child) within the space of the home but also within the space of the film industry itself. Thus, Johar and Kapoor recall how, in their childhoods, several film stars visited their homes and interacted with their families. They record their own awe but also quiet acceptance that their families were different in the sense that the stars whom others could only see on screen came to their homes. The additional layer of signification that adapts the art to the life and vice versa is further complicated by the family portraits that every single star biography includes. Thus, we see the entire Kapoor clan, the Khan family, the Johars, and the Dutts represented in family portraits. Each film star, as noted before, comes from a distinguished film family. Rishi Kapoor reminds us twice that of the over one hundred years India has had cinema, the Kapoor family has been a part of it for more than ninety years. The “interart” of the star auto/biography may then be seen as intergenerational art as well, since we are offered glimpses, in two-dimensional form, of a wholly different art scene, one made possible by the star’s strategic mixing of the older and younger stars, and their film texts. The family portrait, as Marianne Hirsch argues, generates an “affiliative look” and a “familial gaze.” Viewers identify with the family portrait because they are responding to “dominant mythologies of family life,” even as the family members in the photograph “define themselves in relation to each other in the roles they occupy as mother, father, daughter, son, husband, or lover” (vi). More importantly, such portraits are situated, and can be read, at the intersection of the public and the private, “between the family album and the public memorial, between personal and political expression and

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meaning” (vii). The family portrait indeed generates the affiliative look, and not because we recognize the star-subject of the immediate text alone, but because we locate them among numerous other affiliates whom we also recognize. The affiliative look, then, is not only the one that each member of the family photograph gives another, but extends to include numerous others as part of the “film fraternity” (the common, patriarchal term used to describe Bollywood even today). That is, the family portrait is at once diachronic and synchronic for the reader because we see faces that have been a part of the Bollywood family for decades. Parents of the present generation of readers of these biographies belong to the earlier generation of stars. That is, the presentgeneration readers who are familiar with Sanjay Dutt or Soha Ali Khan are children of a generation of readers who grew up in the age of Dutt’s and Khan’s star-parents and their films. Both generations of stars come together, and both generations of audiences come together, in the consumption of these family portraits within the space of the star auto/biography. Second, the star as a public figure lets us into the private sphere of their home and family. Central to the celebrity, as critics have argued (Marshall; Rojek), is the splicing of the public and the private. The star auto/biography does this exceptionally well. We read about Kapoor and Johar being terrible students at school, Dutt’s drug problems, and the courtship of their parents in all cases. While these revelations humanize these stars, they also force us to link the public with the private. Yet, what these revelations and the family portraits ought to alert us to is the staging of this linkage: the portraits, in print or in photographs, are staged, carefully selected narratives. The portraits and the printed life stories in the biography are also “roles” the star assays. The difference is—as in any Hindi film which foregrounds the family—the print biography of an individual star also draws their family into the printed text, and thus makes it a “family picture/film” in which the star-subject of the biography shares space with other characters from their life. The family portrait is also a form of adaptation because it serves as a conduit for the “textual transferal” of earlier film genres and earlier generations of stars into the life story of the present subject. So we hear of Raj Kapoor’s cult films, Sunil Dutt’s successes and flops, the cricketing skills of the Nawab of Pataudi that then segue into contemporary films and texts of Rishi Kapoor, Sanjay Dutt, and Soha Ali Khan. The star auto/biography, then, is framed within an individual as well as a familial auto/biography, but one in which each parent, sibling, aunt, and distant relative has literally and figuratively played a role. Continuing this line of thought, I suggest, following the work of Elizabeth Bruss on the autobiographical film, that by inserting so many details in both print and image form into their life story, the star auto/biographer

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demonstrates a diffuse subjectivity. It is no longer a single body we see in these texts, but an entire family line where Rishi Kapoor’s or Soha Ali Khan’s future filmic subjectivity is expressed in and as that of their parents or siblings. The future star staging a play, being part of a band or fancy dress event, and being photographed by parents and families (one assumes) is therefore an anterior moment to facing the camera as an actor decades later. The filmic subjectivity of playing a role, the narrative implies, is already in place by virtue of belonging to such a family and being an object of the camera from a very early age.

The Ironic Subject of Star Auto/Biography The star auto/biography differs from the traditional, earnest biopic and auto/ biography in one key feature: its irony. The biopic, as commentators note, approaches its subject with seriousness, with both reverence and sentimentality (Lupo and Anderson). Rishi Kapoor begins his book by saying he was born lucky and stayed lucky (3). Karan Johar admits to being “overwhelmed” and uncertain when the reigning superstar, Shah Rukh Khan, asks him to direct a film in which Khan would star (53–4). Soha Ali Khan’s first anecdote in her memoir is of being recognized as the sister of Saif Ali Khan, who is a more luminous star in the Bollywood pantheon, and so she describes herself as “moderately famous” (4). There is no celebratory tone in Usman’s biography of Sanjay Dutt either, but rather a clumsy attempt to downplay Dutt’s youthful missteps (from taking drugs to stockpiling guns at home). For instance, another star, when informed that Dutt had stashed guns to blow up the Stock Exchange, is said to have retorted: “Don’t be ridiculous. He would not even know what a Stock Exchange is” (128, emphasis in original). Many other stars are reported to have characterized him as foolish, idiotic, or irresponsible, but not a criminal (130–1). A self-conscious, ironic representation of the star enables the auto/biography to “rehabilitate … life and career through layered tones of irony, affection, satire, and sentiment” (Lupo and Anderson 106). That is, the star component of these celebrities’ lives is toned down and the sentimental (including foolish sentimentality, as in the case of Dutt) component is played up to demonstrate the humanness of the star. Anecdotes about being scolded, being wrong, being teased or mocked, failure (professional and personal), and criticism abound so that we approach the hero/ine as the ironic subject of auto/biography rather than as an admirable subject. In Lupo and Anderson’s pithy phrase, “the man redeems … the artist” (106). This ironic subject, the star, is a carefully crafted persona portrayed as a regular person, often countering the jet-set lifestyle of stars represented in the

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media. Thus, the ironic subject of star auto/biography is shown, on many occasions, relaxing with friends, taking care of their children, spending time with aging parents, unwinding and wasting time, or enjoying street food. Admittedly, their star power gives these activities a new signification—of being hip and cool, for instance, because it is Johar or Khan doing it. It also lends their public persona a different layer of meaning: stars take what is essentially a personal, if not private, activity and moves it into their public domain. The documentation of routine and everyday activities contributes to the ironic subject of star auto/biography in another way. The depictions of the star slowing down their life and taking time out for ordinary things are the exact opposite of the frenetic lifestyles assumed of stars. In a neat essay on celebrity knitting, Wendy Perkins argues, Knitting can be seen as a reaction against the speed and dislocation of global post-modernity, part of an attempt to live differently at a different temporality, and to find meaning and identity in the practices of everyday life. Celebrity knitting, in particular, implicitly situated against the pace and frenzy of celebrity “jet-set” life, points up the complexities of postmodern subjectivity, negotiated around varying temporalities and mobilities. (426) Accordingly, the star auto/biography creates a different temporality with a documentation of the mundane, the quotidian, and the banal. These moments carve out a niche in an otherwise fast-paced globe-trotting life, suggesting a slowing down in the midst of all the jet-setting. This strategy of interweaving the glamorous lifestyle with the ordinary contributes to the ironizing of the star auto/biography by pointing to the lessthan-starry roles the celebrity plays in everyday life, in the mundane world of families, social life, and local community. It takes the star’s on-screen persona—and as argued, it is difficult to see the on-screen and off-screen hero as two distinct people—and paints it with the brush of the ordinary, rendering the larger-than-life screen role into a more human one when situated within the structures they, like other people, also occupy.

The Co-authored Life Narrative In two cases, Karan Johar’s An Unsuitable Boy and Rishi Kapoor’s Khullam Khulla, as noted earlier, list a co-author, signified only by a “with …” and no more details. This strategy raises several questions. Does the use of a co-author or ghost writer take away the stars’ agency in crafting accounts of their lives? If we assume writing one’s life is part of

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the star’s performance qua star, then what is the nature of this performance when there is a co-author? Further, what is the amount of labor the star puts in when there is a co-author involved? Katja Lee notes: “The ideal outcome of such thinking would be that readers approach all celebrity texts, not on the hunt for evidence of a celebrity’s labor but with the understanding that such labor is present until proven otherwise” (1268). Lee proposes that, besides the multiple voices in the text, the texts embody the fact that “the celebrity has the potential to be an active producer of her memoir; after all, the celebrity memoir is predominantly designed to function within a complex network of strategies for image management” (1260). G. Thomas Couser has argued that the partners’ contribution in such a co-authored text is uneven: one emerging from lived experience and the other invested in documenting the lived experience. Couser also distinguishes between the subject of the auto/biography (the star) and the writer. The star, Couser notes, outranks the biographer in terms of visibility, social capital, and profitability. The co-authored star autobiography may be read as a manifestation of the other qualities and abilities of the star, beyond their on-screen roles. Thus, Kapoor’s or Johar’s recall of childhood events and their ability to arrange them in the form of an auto/biographical narrative, with the right quantum of emotions, reflection, and introspection, are embodied in the star-text. The star-text also embodies the celebrity’s agency to control their image within the network of cultural production, which includes, besides the star, the coauthor and the publicity machinery that constitutes the celebrity’s context. In other words, following Lee, the co-authored auto/biography is in line with the image-management undertaken by the star in collaboration with various networks (from film production to public relations events). Rishi Kapoor, for instance, attributes a lot of his success to the music directors and film directors in his long career. He clearly acknowledges the role of the film networks that have enabled his career and success by crafting his image for public consumption. The co-authored star auto/biography is, like all autobiographies produced in order to present a certain self to the world, an exercise in impression management, but one which, in keeping with the very nature of the film industry, is only possible through a collaborative process.

References Andrews, Hannah. “Recitation, Quotation, Interpretation: Adapting the Ouevre in Poet Biopics.” Adaptation, vol. 6, no. 3, 2013, pp. 365–383. Bruss, Elizabeth. “Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film.” Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney, Princeton UP, 1980. Couser, G. Thomas. “Making, taking, and faking lives: the ethics of collaborative life writing.” Style, vol. 32, no. 2, 1998, pp. 334–350.

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Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin, Cambridge UP, 1997. Hirsch, Marianne. “Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory.” Discourse, vol. 15, no. 2, 1992–93, pp. 3–29. Johar, Karan, with Poonam Saxena. An Unsuitable Boy. Penguin Random House, 2017. Kapoor, Rishi, with Meena Iyer. Khullam Khulla: Rishi Kapoor Uncensored. HarperCollins, 2018. Khan, Soha Ali. The Perils of Being Moderately Famous. Penguin Random House, 2017. Lee, Katja. “Not Just Ghost Stories: Alternate Practices for Reading Coauthored Celebrity Memoirs.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 47, no. 6, 2014, pp. 1256–1270. Lupo, Jonathan, and Carolyn Anderson. “Off-Hollywood Lives: Irony and Its Discontents in the Contemporary Biopic.” Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 3, no. 2, 2008, pp. 102–112. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. U of Minnesota P, 1997. Perkins, Wendy. “Celebrity Knitting and the Temporality of Postmodernity.” Fashion Theory, vol. 8, no. 4, 2004, pp. 425–442. Rojek, Chris. Celebrity. Reaktion, 2004. Usman, Yasser. Sanjay Dutt: The Crazy Untold Story of Bollywood’s Bad Boy. Juggernaut, 2018.

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Chapter 5 BIOPICS The biographical movie has seen a resurgence in India in recent years. Biopics have revolved around sports stars such as the athlete Milkha Singh in Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (2013), cricketers M. S. Dhoni in M. S. Dhoni: The Untold Story (2016), Mohammad Azharuddin in Azhar (2016), and Sachin Tendulkar in Sachin: A Billion Dreams (2016). Films have also been built around other real-life people whose actions in extraordinary, often inimical and daunting conditions become the subject of the biopic: Neerja Bhanot, the flight attendant who died in the 1986 Pan Am hijacking, is portrayed in Neerja (2016); Manjhi, a man who, over twenty-two years, carved a route through a hillock armed with just a hammer and a chisel, is portrayed in Manjhi: The Mountain Man (2015); and Charles Sobhraj, the conman and killer, is portrayed in Main Aur Charles (2015). The nation figures prominently in the biopics, especially the ones around sporting stars. The family is an equally important theme. They propose, implicitly, a cultural citizenship founded on aspirational models and attitudes. They also embody a complicated, layered aesthetic that conjoins artifice and artifact.

The Notable Subject Admittedly, the hagiographic biopic bestows a certain immortality upon the “character” of the story. In addition, this immortality is also bestowed through the concentrated attention audiences bring to bear upon the figure. Murray Pomerance writes, We participate to some degree in the experiences and events by virtue of which some other person has apparently become notable. We explore the notability that lingers in the story as a kind of shadow trace that follows the subject. The biopic subject is at once notable in objective terms, having become what he is; and notable dramaturgically, since the adoration of crowds is an ostensible component of the subject’s story as recounted on the screen. (30)

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The notability of the subject is the effect of a dual discourse in the biopic. First, the sporting biopics, appropriating the public discourse around figures like Tendulkar, highlight their grandest achievements, which are presented as being nearly miraculous. “Sachin’s magic” was a commonly heard comment in connection with his batting, and Dhoni’s great powers in finishing off a match to India’s advantage was also often deemed miraculous in public discourse. When India won despite all odds, mainly due to Tendulkar’s batting, it was described as a “miracle.” Second, the biopic shows us what exactly— action, behavior, achievement—has made the subject notable: Manjhi toiling away with the entire village laughing at him, or Tendulkar practicing in the rain on a squelching wicket.1 The biopic moves from the miraculous and the magical to the marvelous, where the former is associated with the domain of the supernatural and the divine, and the latter with human wonders. If the first discourse renders the stars supernatural beings (Tendulkar) or eccentrics (Manjhi), the second casts them as mortals endowed with extraordinarily amplified but decidedly human virtues: grit, determination, ambition. The biopic’s rhetoric works at the level of both process and product, oscillating between the two, so that the magic of a Tendulkar or a Manjhi is explained as the product of a strenuous but very human process. Further, in this shift from the miraculous to the marvelous, the biopic offers up an aspirational model for the rest of the nation, and reframes the marvelous as a success story that could serve as such a model.

National Identity “Life picturing” has been seen as driven by the generic plot of “national identity” (Epstein 8). This is decidedly true in the case of India’s sports biopics in which the lives of its sporting heroes—Tendulkar, Dhoni, Azhar—are very clearly cast as national lives, their work (and play) as embodying the nation’s interests. The biopics focus on the affect generated when the cricketer on screen scores or is out: the nation mourns or celebrates accordingly. A Billion Dreams in the Tendulkar biopic’s title is precisely that: he embodies the dreams of the entire Indian population of one billion. The biopic constructs the sporting figure as a key “national symbolic” (Berlant 155) around whom a public coheres. Berlant defines the functions of the national symbolic thus: the collective possession of its official texts—the flag, Uncle Sam, Mount Rushmore, the Pledge of Allegiance, even now, perhaps, JFK and Dr. Martin Luther King—creates a national “public” that constantly repudiates political knowledge where it exceeds performatively mythic national codes. (155)

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The Indian biopic, often hagiographic in tone, makes the sporting hero such an official text—one that generates a sense of affective belonging. Therefore, Azharuddin’s involvement in the match-fixing scandal, in real life (2000) as well as in the biopic, introduces disaffection, discontent, and downright repugnance precisely because the act is treated not as an individual’s tragic flaw or error of judgment but as an act of sedition and national betrayal. This conflation of the individual and the nation makes the biopic a key element in the making (or unmaking) of national identity, because the success or failure of the sporting “hero” is a national symbolic in which the hero embodies the aspirations, virtues, and promise of an entire country. With every six runs Tendulkar scores, with every onslaught Dhoni launches on the opposition bowlers, the crowd—a metonym for the nation—roars in these films. Just as watching a film in a movie theater and participating in the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of the protagonists is a symbol of democracy’s constituency (Rajadhyaksha). The people in the stadium, those at home, and those on the streets looking at TV monitors in shop windows when Tendulkar bats all embody the diverse demos of India’s democracy, brought together, as the biopics highlight, by the talent of one man. “Cricket is our religion, and Sachin is our God” reads the famous banner at matches in which he played, and the biopic dwells upon this national text: the man, the slogan, the game. In the case of nonsporting biopics, the nation figures in different ways. Manjhi’s story becomes a national symbolic of a different kind in the biopic: he embodies resilience. Poor, illiterate, and unskilled in geological and engineering techniques, Manjhi conquers, literally, a mountain. Because he was equipped with the barest of implements, Manjhi’s success is presented as the power of his persistence and resilience, before which the mountain yields. At various points when the villagers mock him, when he doubts himself, and when his ailing wife looks askance at his efforts, Manjhi discovers hidden resources within and continues his battle. In a similar fashion, Neerja foregrounds the courage of a woman who, when faced with a hijacker (who has already beaten and pistol-whipped her), stares down the barrel of a gun and does not flinch. Ensuring that the passengers are safe, the hijackers mollified, and finally seeing many of the passengers escape when the opportunity arises, the protagonist of this biopic becomes a national hero (she was posthumously bestowed India’s highest peacetime bravery award, the Ashok Chakra). If Manjhi is about one man’s persistence, Neerja is about individual courage. While neither of the two real-life characters has made it to the kind of national stage Tendulkar occupies, these biopics alert us to the unsung, forgotten heroes who did not set out to be heroic. The slightly melodramatic biopics therefore portray ordinary people who do extraordinary things: Manjhi wants adequate treatment for his wife; Neerja wants a yellow dress. By pointing to the essentially unheroic

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nature of their dreams and aspirations, the biopics offer us a new version of the national symbolic: the ordinary person’s resilience and integrity is as heroic as that of Tendulkar’s when he takes on the mighty Australian-pace bowling attack. They celebrate the ordinary-as-hero because the ordinary serves as a “national heroic” when the individual performs a task and achieves something greater than individual glory: the hero embodies metonymically the spirit of the nation. Infamy, in the case of Azhar and Main Aur Charles, also serves as a national symbolic because these real-life characters come to embody the flaws in the individual but also, perhaps, in India’s cultural makeup. In a sense, they present lives that disrupt the triumphant narrative of the nation, embodied in Dhoni, Neerja, Sachin, Manjhi, and highlighted in their corresponding biopics. These biopics of disreputable figures rupture the texture of the audience’s beliefs, claims, and metanarratives about India. Crime, deviance, sociopathology, and corruption are also as much a part of India as Tendulkar’s heroics, Neerja’s courage, and Manjhi’s persistence. The current crop of Bollywood biopics, then, counterbalances the dominant narrative of the national symbolic— which offers up hard work, courage, determination—with the performance of deviance and corruption. Villainy and heroism both occupy the national symbolic in biopics. If Neerja, M. S. Dhoni, and Sachin generate a certain culture of victory, Main Aur Charles and Azhar temper it. The second key feature of the biopic in India is that the film is based on real-life people, and therefore the audience often knows how the lives of the protagonists shaped up and how they ended beyond the representation on screen. The biopic, then, is an already circulating life story. Pomerance writes, With the biopic subject in mind, the viewer does not have to stretch the imagination, as in standard fiction film, in order to find some bridging that allows for the transfer of the subject’s putative experience as his own; the biopic, after all, takes place in the world space of the viewer’s own life and experience. Even if removed by glory, power, or fame, the subject is always also a person one could have touched. (28, emphasis in original) Thus, the experiences of a Tendulkar or an Azhar, or the short-lived one of Neerja Bhanot, is something the audience shares through two modes: by preexisting knowledge of their accomplishments in real life and the dramatic representation of these experiences on the screen. That is, on the one hand, we are part of the real world of these characters and on the other are witnesses to a certain magical compression of that world into a three-hour spectacle on screen. We both participate in and distance ourselves from Tendulkar’s

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successes and Azhar’s follies. The national symbolic works on this continuum, from the known/knowable world to the fictional one.

The Family If the biopic emphasizes, in most cases, the life of the individual as a national symbolic, the biopic also retains the traditional trope of the Bollywood film: the family. Throughout the films, the family lives of Tendulkar, Dhoni, Azhar, and Manjhi are central to the plot. The support the protagonist receives from the family, and the family’s stresses and sacrifices, are variously foregrounded in each of the texts. Thus, even as we are shown Tendulkar fighting on behalf of the nation, it is his family’s tense expression that the camera and the plot cut to. In the case of Neerja, too, as the hijacking is in progress, the frame shifts to Neerja’s home, with her anxiety-ridden mother and brothers. But the biopic also makes an interesting dramatic shift. The focus on the immediate family members of the sporting hero, who are by turns worried, anxious, and thrilled, ideologically positions the family as the holding place for the hero’s aspirations, success, and even failures. Yet throughout, in the sporting biopic, the camera also pans across the stadium crowd and the country itself, capturing the worry, anxiety, and thrill on the faces of vast crowds of people. In Neerja, likewise, the shots showing anxiety on the faces of Neerja’s parents cut away to show a similar anxiety on the faces of the family members of the passengers trapped on the hijacked plane, the armed forces, and the administrators (on both sides, India and Pakistan, since the flight was grounded on Pakistani soil). These biopics, I suggest, subliminally signal the nation-as-family, united in grief (Neerja) or triumph (Sachin, M. S. Dhoni, Azhar) by depicting the same emotions across the faces of millions of strangers, as affectively connected to the sporting hero and the flight attendant as their blood relations. The biopic, one could say, conflates filiation with affiliation and in the process serves up, again, a crucial subtext of the nation, one that demonstrates and pleads for a cultural citizenship founded on aspirational qualities such as the ones embodied by the biopic subjects.

Artifactuality The Bollywood biopic also adopts a multilayered aesthetic, being positioned somewhere between the documentary and the feature film. The incorporation of real-life scenes and the biographical subject himself in the case of Sachin, for instance, lends an air of realism to the plot, which is then immediately altered in dramatic ways by the entry of professional Bollywood actors such

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as Anupam Kher (as Dhoni’s father) into the frame. There is a sense of alienation and immediacy as a result of this stylistic technique of the montage, using real-life people and professional actors, to convey the point. The inclusion of the real (as in footage from the matches, TV grabs, people) functions as internal paratexts that add to the information being given to us by the first diegetic level, the protagonist’s life story. The representation of the real in the form of a documentary, as Elizabeth Cowie argues, through the “selection and ordering of the images and sounds of reality constitute an account of the world; however, it thereby becomes prey to a loss of the real in its narratives of reality” (1). That is, when the biopic orders frames and selects archival footage or interviews so as to generate a sense of the real, we as the audience become aware that what is shown on screen is not the entire life of the sporting star. It is precisely in enacting the real that the biopic leaves us wondering: what else is left out, or what Cowie refers to as “reality unexcerpted, that is, unfilmed, whole, and without loss, thus not only unrepresented but also unrepresentable” (31, emphasis in original). This attempt at documenting, albeit dramatically, the real life of the star gives the biopic the air of what Stella Bruzzi calls a “performative documentary” (185).2 The “self-conscious performances by its subjects” ensures that we see “the enactment of the notion that a documentary only comes into being as it is performed, that although its factual basis (or document) can pre-date any recording or representation of it” (186). The film itself, argues Bruzzi, “is necessarily performative because it is given meaning by the interaction between performance and reality.” As a cumulative effect, the so-called truth “acknowledges the construction and artificiality of even the non-fiction film” (186). When the real-life Dhoni, Tendulkar, or the other real-life Indian cricketers appear in the diegetic space of the biopic, the artificiality even of the biopic is made clear. The biopic, then, as performative documentary is an instance of what Michael Chaney terms “artifactuality” (181), combining artifice (the film) and artifact (footage, newspaper records). The making of a public history around the individual, as constructed in these biopics, draws attention to the mediated role of not only history (India’s cricketing history, for example, in the films) but also of the celebrities themselves.

Notes 1 2

“Magic” can also be a human achievement, but the miracle is invariably associated with the divine. See Greenblatt and Platt for a discussion. Bruzzi writes, “the performative documentary uses performance within a non-fiction context to draw attention to the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation” (185).

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References Azhar. Directed by Tony D’Souza, Balaji Motion Pictures, 2016. Berlant, Lauren. “America, ‘Fat,’ the Fetus.” boundary 2, vol. 21, no. 3, 1994, pp. 145–95. Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, Routledge, 1995, pp. 291–322. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2006. Chaney, Michael. “Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels.” MELUS, vol. 32, no. 3, 2007, pp. 175–200. Cowie, Elizabeth. Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. U of Minnesota P, 2011. Epstein, William H. “Introduction: Strategic Patriotic Memories.” Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity, edited by William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, SUNY P, 2016, pp. 1–21. Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Clarendon, 1992. M. S. Dhoni: The Untold Story. Directed by Neeraj Pandey, Fox Star Studios, 2016. Main Aur Charles. Directed by Prawaal Raman, Wave Cinemas Cynozure Networkz, 2015. Manjhi: The Mountain Man. Directed by Ketan Mehta, Viacom 18 Motion Pictures and NFDC India, 2015. Neerja. Directed by Ram Madhvani, Fox Star Studios, 2016. Platt, Peter G., editor. Wonders, Monsters and Marvels in Early Modern Culture. U of Delaware P, 1999. Pomerance, Murray. “Empty Words: Houdini and Houdini.” Invented Lives, Imagined Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity, edited by William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, SUNY P, 2016, pp. 25–48. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “Viewership and Democracy.” Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, edited by Ravi S. Vasudevan, Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 267–96. Sachin: A Billion Dreams. Directed by James Erskine, 200 NotOut Productions, 2017.

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Chapter 6 BOLLYWOOD STARS AND CANCER MEMOIRS Two cancer memoirs from Bollywood heroines were published in 2019: Manisha Koirala’s Healed: How Cancer Gave Me A New Life and Lisa Ray’s Close to the Bone. Koirala’s text begins with her diagnosis, and concludes with her healing and subsequent attempts to establish a new lifestyle. Ray’s text arrives at “cancer time”—Nancy Miller’s term, defined as the time spent in “diagnosis, staging, prognosis, protocol,” where the “only future fixed chronology is that of treatment sessions” (217)—almost two-thirds into the narrative, with the bulk of her book focused on her childhood and career. Ray’s work lists “with Neelam Kumar” under the author name, though the extent of authorial collaboration and contribution is unclear. Celebrity culture in India is constituted, primarily, by film stars and their lives. Sports stars are famous, but it is film personalities that take up maximum space on page three of major newspapers, with reams of glossy tabloid paper devoted to “uncovering” their private lives. Bollywood stars remain the cornerstone of India’s celebrity culture in terms of their affective impact: their lifestyles are the subject of reportage, their appearances and fashion the subject of imitation, and their controversies the stuff of the rumor mills. Scandals, as in any celebrity culture, are important events in Bollywood lives as well: their extramarital affairs, divorces, legal crises, substance abuse, and squabbles feature in magazines such as Filmfare. The stars’ philanthropic work and activism are also highly visible and the subject of public debates (Nayar, “Brand Bollywood”). Deaths in their families, or of the stars themselves, such as Sridevi’s drowning in a bathtub in 2018, also receive intensive coverage. In the recent past, revelations about stars’ unhappy childhoods or depression have also made the news, most notably the case of top-ranked star Deepika Padukone, who was the face of depression in a nationwide campaign about mental health. That she went public about her history of depression was often touted as playing a pivotal role in drawing attention to a national crisis. It is in this context of the high visibility of their lives as stars that memoirs of their diseases are consumed. These disease memoirs may

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be termed “celebrity somatography,” extending the original meaning of the term “somatography”—body visualization, but also employed by G. Thomas Couser to speak of memoirs by people with disabilities (Signifying Bodies 2)— from a focus on the star-body to the biosocial network engendered by the disease and its treatment processes.

From the Cosmetic to the Pathologized Body The most notable feature of the celebrity somatography is the careful account of the body and the ontological instability that appears with the disease, mapping a shift from the cosmetic to the pathologized body. Both Ray and Koirala, as film stars, present their glamorous, highly visible lives and bodies. They discuss their roles on screen, the progress of their careers, and their social networks within the film industry. Their books are interleaved with images and stills from their careers.1 Ray speaks of her stage performances (116–17), her modelling (120–22), and the parties where she is constantly on show as a glamorous, doll-like public figure. She records, self-reflexively, the sense of being on display, of roleplaying: “A large chunk of my early life had been about looking like someone else” (190). But she is also intensely aware of her ontological and corporeal identity: “It was a vital shock of oxygen, this idea, that it was my individuality that was sacred, not fitting into an arbitrary standard of beauty” (190–91). Like Ray, Koirala also records how her public image began to slowly generate an emotion different from triumph or happiness: “I became a robot— instantly donning another persona at the snap of ‘Lights, Camera, Action’ ” (78). The focus on appearance and the public consumption of a star’s good looks foregrounds the “cosmetic body.” “Cosmetic body” is my shorthand term for the star’s body that foregrounds the looks, style, and fashion of the star over anything else. That is, the “cosmetic body” is the star-body fashioned out of raw material. In Richard Dyer’s justifiably famous formulation from Heavenly Bodies: First, the person is a body, a psychology, a set of skills that have to be mined and worked up into a star image. This work, of fashioning the star out of the raw material of the person, varies in the degree to which it respects what artists sometimes refer to as the inherent qualities of the material; make-up, coiffure, clothing, dieting and body-building. … (5) The celebrity somatography shifts from the made-up, fashioned body of the star to the “raw material,” which in this case is a pathologized corporeality. In speaking of the disease within, the celebrity somatography foregrounds the ontologically real by contrasting it with the stars’ on-screen role-playing

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and public personae prior to the disease’s appearance. The ontologically real is the pathologized body that is in sharp contrast to the cosmetic one. In Ray, the awareness of the pathologized body begins, tellingly, with the changed nature of her appearance: “I was very pale, my complexion grey and sickly, and very tired. I shrugged it off as normal …” (224). In its focus on the pathologized body, the celebrity somatography develops an autobiology narrative. Anna Harris et al. write: Autobiology—the study of, and story about, one’s own organism—is a term we use to capture narratives told at the molecular level, stories which concern genetic markers, alleles and ribonucleic acids, interweaving family histories of illness into wayfaring … narratives. They are also autobiological narratives in the ways in which they document a sense of self-making through forms of biological practice and scientific experimentation, practices which exhibit a form of playfulness, while simultaneously being bound up with consumerist concerns. (62) The autobiology narrative is a component of the autobiography. Couser has argued with regard to genetic testing and personal genomics that the “awareness that one is predisposed to a medical condition can induce intense, even excruciating self-consciousness,” which serves as a “stimulant” to “selfmonitoring,” and by extension composing in genres such as the diary (Vulnerable Subjects 175). Intensely aware of the cancer cells inside their bodies, Ray and Koirala begin to map their bodily changes from the disease and also from the treatment. The monitoring of bodily conditions, from the minutest to the macrolevel, is characteristic of celebrity somatography. Ray and Koirala record the processes and stages in their medical treatment, the changes in their bodies as a result of the treatment (chemotherapy, notably), and their bodies’ responses. After diagnosis, the autobiology narrative lapses into the military language of an invasion: The treacherous enemy had stealthily invaded my body and reproduced its tribe until it was swelling and ready to break free of its confines. A takeover plan was about to be executed in the dimness within. The shadowy enemy was scheming about how and when to obliterate the host—me. (Ray 41) Ray lists her medications (294), and tells us how she experienced “an intense buzzing through my whole body, like a surge of electricity starting” (299). She records the changed shape of her face (301) and her craving for all sorts of

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foods (301–2). Koirala begins by speaking of the weight she was putting on in some parts of her body before the diagnosis and the loss of weight from other places (6). During chemo, she tells us, she watched for the side effects, which she had read up on, and which thankfully did not occur (99–101). She records her hair loss and fatigue (124).

The Connected Self and the Biosocial Network The pathologized self is one that is located amid a host of connections: the family first, but also their contacts, friends from the film community and a network of advisors, well-wishers, healers, and therapists. When, toward the end of their accounts, both Ray and Koirala claim to have found a new appreciation for life, or a new self, it may be interpreted as a reorganization of corporeal identity and self-fashioning itself. They move from cosmetic to pathologized bodies, but conclude with a new self—what Lisa Ray terms Lisa 2.0 (374)—that recognizes its vulnerability and a new chance at life. The pathologized body, discovered through disease and its treatment, enables the recognition that the self is a connected self. Ray and Koirala admit their lives were dependent on machines, doctors, attendants, the chemicals being pumped into them, friends, and family. Koirala acknowledges the clinical and medical apparatuses that saved her. “My equation with my family changed permanently through the course of my treatment,” she writes (113). Koirala notes the number of tubes and apparatuses that “wire” her body (83). The medical staff at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and other clinics, she says, were helpful, particularly when they discovered she was a film star (82). She offers sustained praise for Dr. Chi’s positive outlook throughout the narrative. She “learnt the art of picking up each moment carefully … filled with a deep appreciation for every little bit that life generously handed to me” (87). Dr. Galal, a myeloma specialist, tells Ray, “we will kick this disease’s ass” (291), a statement from which she draws considerable courage. Ray also describes in detail her discovery of yoga, Buddhism, and healing in India, all from varied sources, each one offering her an insight into life. As she puts it, she was moved by “the sudden emergence of all these people around the world offering themselves in kindness” (321). Ray’s and Koirala’s emphasis on the process of healing as determined not just by biomedical modes, but through other processes as well, promotes the idea of holistic practices, lifestyle changes, and a social self. That they were aided in their recovery by more than just physicians—and their constant attribution of this recovery to the goodwill, wishes, and blessings of fans, friends, and family—highlights the connected and embedded nature of the self.

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Writing about his heart transplant in L’Intrus, Jean-Luc Nancy asserts that life does not reside in any one organ, but a host of organs, including foreign ones. Nancy goes on to say that life is polymorphic, embedded and enmeshed in networks: there comes a certain continuity of intrusion, its permanent regime: added to the more-than-daily doses of medication, and being monitored in the hospital … the general feeling of no longer being dissociable from a network of measurements, observations, and of chemical, institutional, and symbolic connections, which do not allow themselves to be ignored, as can be those of which ordinary life is always woven. … I become indissociable from a polymorphous dissociation. (12) While Nancy is focused on the non-dissociable apparatuses that sustain his life, the larger point about the dependency of life on external elements is, I think, clear. The sense of such a connectedness in the process of treatment and healing is, therefore, a recognition of a different order, or nature, of the individual self. In Healed and Close to the Bone, one more dimension to this discovery of the connected self is the urge in both Koirala and Ray to generate a biosociality that extends beyond the immediate settings of their lives. The term “biosociality” was coined by Paul Rabinow in 1996 to describe social identities and sociality founded on genomic diagnosis, but it may be extended to include social relationships based on a sharing of knowledge about shared disorders, syndromes, and conditions. According to Carlos Novas and Nicholas Rose, the new biosociality is defined by individuals for whom medical results, treatments, and monitoring from diagnosis to healing construct life courses, lifestyles, and identities. Nova and Rose also argue that such biosociality represents ethical and responsible conduct on behalf of individual patients and survivors. As I have argued elsewhere, “biological states of being constitute emergent identity practices … biological and pathological conditions become cultural markers of identity through these sites” in what may be termed a “biosociality of vulnerability” (“New Biosociality” 3). It is then possible to see blogging, storytelling (Koirala’s term), and narrative appurtenances, such as the list of recommended books in Koirala, as attempts to reach out to a world of (similar) sufferers—to offer life lessons from their case histories. Ray begins blogging about her illness, and thereby takes biosociality into the online world. She begins her blog, she says, in a “fit of steroid-induced mania in the middle of the night … the steroids also fortified me; they let me be fearless about speaking out” (305). Koirala writes in her preface: “while going through that phase of my life I kept fragmented notes

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in my diary, hoping to spin them into a book later … bits of this book were written in my head during my chemo days” (ix). Then she states her ambition: “To become a true storyteller for the readers’ sake as well as my own” (ix). After an account of her cancer treatment and pain, Koirala writes, “Now that I am healed, I wish to help others. I am curious to learn how I was cured so that I can pass on my learning to you. I was afflicted by stage-IV cancer that had metastasized. I know many such patients who did not survive. Somewhere, I feel the survivor’s guilt” (173). Further along in the narrative, she tells of her life as a social worker: So has cancer changed me? Yes … I share precious life lessons at various schools, hospitals and organizations… . I feel expanded in heart, generous in spirit. It is my time under the sun now. I am burning with the desire to give back to society. (206–7) Koirala concludes her book with a list of “Books and Resources,” subtitled “My Portable Magic,” consisting of books and blogs that supposedly helped her (217–19). Ray speaks of cancer patients and survivors “who had turned their private experience of illness into public good.” One such man, she says, “nudged me into philanthropy by teasingly reawakening my competitive side… . I ended up raising $25,000 CAD for him by leading a team walk for multiple myeloma awareness and finding a cure” (319). The two Bollywood stars align on a plane of disease, recovery, and the social responsibility of survivors, and in the process advance a biosociality. The ethical response of reaching out to the world after their cancer experiences and healing is also an instantiation of a retrieved agency for the self. For Ole Andreas Brekke and Thorvald Sirnes, biosociality enables patients and sufferers to contribute to medical science and social awareness. Examining campaigns like “Portraits of Hope,”2 they argue that patients actively contribute to the discourse of science-as-hope: However, also in these cases, the effect of the story is not easily contained, especially since the portraits are constitutive of a larger discourse of action/inaction, where medical-scientific action is the only hope. Again, they serve as general “vectors” in the construction of biosubjectivities, thereby also influencing the interpretation of less definite cases. (354) Brekke and Sirnes argue this makes such patients agents. While Ray and Koirala do not explicitly advocate research or biomedical solutions, they both offer other resources and thereby suggest alternatives to being just patients.

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The cultivation of hope suggested by the two memoirs is, in the arguments outlined above, an act of ethical advocacy that is also the assertion of an individual’s agency. I have one final point (perhaps more of a speculative leap) to make about the biosociality reflected in Healed and Close to the Bone. When Koirala and Ray narrate their experience with cancer, much of what they say is imprinted with the consciousness of being public figures—of being recognizable and adored. But in the process of recounting illness and recovery, they also highlight the publicness of their biomedical conditions: building on film stars’ attentiondrawing and affective power, which has been evident in the Indian context for decades. In 1982, when Amitabh Bachchan suffered a life-threatening injury during a shoot, almost the entire nation—pre-internet—followed the daily updates on his condition and held mass prayers for his recovery. References to fans and followers are scattered throughout Ray’s and Koirala’s memoirs. That is, their cancer time is imprinted with the celebritytime of their careers. Once they are healed and in remission, their biosociality and narratives thereof suggest that this present and the future are imprinted with their (past) cancer time. Victoria Pitts-Taylor argues about the “body’s time”: A developmental, plastic, epigenetic, situated view of the biological body sees it as entangled with the environment, including culture, over time. An understanding of the body as becoming over time can render a material dimension to socialization and can address how social inequalities can get under the skin, or how intersectional identities are materially embodied. (487–88) The advocacy and biosociality, the portrait of the emergent/new self (as an example, perhaps?), the discourse of alternative lifestyle, and the message of hope and courage implicitly and explicitly employed by Koirala and Ray are all imprinted with their cancer time. That is, their biosociality is grounded in the “material dimension” of possessing bodies imprinted with cancer. This does not mean they remain cancer bodies, but both Ray and Koirala conclude by underscoring that they once had cancer inside them. Their future actions and present biosociality are both undergirded by the irreducible material reality that cancer left on their bodies: a past that shaped their bodies of today. Star memoirs about disease, hospitalization, and recovery are integral to Indian celebrity culture, just as their marriages and financial or legal crises are. They render more transparent the star’s vulnerability and generate an affective economy beyond star-charisma. Images of Koirala with a shorn head (from chemotherapy) made headlines in Indian newspapers, and the

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deglamorized star commanded no less an affective pull than from her filmic appearances as a glam-girl.

Notes 1

2

In an earlier essay in Biography, I argued that “the star reinforces their star-value through the generation of an interart work, in which the life story is framed within the film history of the individual, and the films are framed by the life of the actor” (“What the Stars Tell” 62). “Portraits of Hope,” an art initiative founded by Ed Massey and Bernie Massey in 1995, is described as a “motivational art project” (“About Us”). It aims to bring public art into the realm of creative therapy for hospitalized children, but also to serve as a component of the civic education of students.

References “About Us.” “Portraits of Hope,” https://www.portraitsofhope.org/about/about-us/. Accessed 6 May 2020. Brekke, Ole Andreas, and Thorvald Sirnes. “Biosociality, Biocitizenship and the New Regime of Hope and Despair: Interpreting ‘Portraits of Hope’ and the ‘Mehmet Case.’ ” New Genetics and Society, vol. 30, no. 4, 2011, pp. 347–74. Couser, G. Thomas. Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Lifewriting. U of Michigan P, 2012. Couser, G. Thomas. Vulnerable Subjects: Ethics and Life Writing. Cornell UP, 2004. Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2004. Harris, Anna, et al. “Autobiologies on YouTube: Narratives of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing.” New Genetics and Society, vol. 33, no. 1, 2014, pp. 60–78. Koirala, Manisha, with Neelam Kumar. Healed: How Cancer Gave Me a New Life. Penguin, 2019. Miller, Nancy K. “The Trauma of Diagnosis: Picturing Cancer in Graphic Memoir.” Configurations, vol. 22, no. 2, 2014, pp. 207–23. Nancy, Jean-Luc. L’Intrus. Translated by Susan Hanson, U of Michigan P, 2002. Nayar, Pramod K. “Brand Bollywood Care: Celebrity, Charity and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” A Companion to Celebrity, edited by P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond, Wiley-Blackwell, 2015, pp. 273–88. Nayar, Pramod K. “The New Biosociality.” eSocialSciences, 1 Apr. 2016, http://esocialsciences. org/oldSite/Articles/ShowArticle.aspx?qs=bGp0Ut9EHmCw/EpGtd/DaIE8VVQ/ w0MdtaFGJc6DHEU=. Accessed 6 May 2020. ———.“What the Stars Tell: The Year in India.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, vol. 42, no. 1, 2019, pp. 62–68. Novas, Carlos, and Nicholas Rose. “Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual.” Economy and Society, vol. 29, no. 4, 2000, pp. 485–513. Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. “A Body’s Time: Ontology, Biosociality, Power.” Theory & Event, vol. 21, no. 2, 2018, pp. 487–94. Rabinow, Paul. “Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality.” Essays on the Anthropology of Reason, Princeton UP, 1996, pp. 92–112. Ray, Lisa. Close to the Bone. HarperCollins, 2019.

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Part 3 CELEBRITY, CULTURE AND POLITICS

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Chapter 7 INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH AS CELEBRITY Raj Kamal Jha, an author whose works are rather difficult to get hold of in a physical bookstore today, was described by India Today as having secured ‘a reported advance of over $275,000 – the largest paid to a first-time Indian novelist since Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things.’1 This was possible because he was signed up by Picador. Stories of similar advances paid to Vikram Seth, Ramachandra Guha and others are not infrequent in Indian newspapers. We do not now see Jha, he does not figure in discussions of Indian writing today – but wait till the news of his next whopping advance comes along. Demonstrating the power of global publishing, such news items not only tell us that an Indian author is a celebrity because she or he commands this kind of money from a global publishing giant, but also subtly suggest that the advance presents the author as a celebrity even without a word in print – a celebrity in advance, shall we say? ‘Celebrity culture,’ writes Tom Mole, ‘has changed the way it operates, reflexively revealing some of its mechanisms. The structure of the apparatus is becoming as much an object of fascination as the individuals it promotes.’2 I propose in this chapter that Indian writing in English (hereafter IWE), mainly its fiction, is one such celebrity genre that draws attention to the apparatuses and mechanisms that have made it a celebrity. By ‘celebrity’ I mean an instantly recognizable ‘face’ or space that is a regular presence in various media and whose presence within the public sphere cannot be ignored. IWE’s celebrification – the process of becoming a celebrity – is possible through a convergence culture (a term from media theorist Henry Jenkins to describe the convergence of multiple media and functions into miniaturized, single-platform devices3) that brings together the public sphere, media, festival culture, literary production, academic discourses and author-centred discourse to produce an amplification of the genre itself. It should be clear that I am interested less in specific texts within the genre than in the factors of ‘cultural production’. I use Pierre Bourdieu’s term4 here because it describes perfectly, in my view, the process of the ‘making of IWE’. Essentially, studies

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of cultural production ask how cultural forms are produced, disseminated, contested and preserved in any given moment. It probes the role of various agents in the making of a particular cultural artefact and even in the imagining of an abstract concept such as nationalism. By cultural production, therefore, I mean the ‘agents’ (Bourdieu’s term again) that bestow economic and symbolic value on a work of art, including the artists/writers but also the literary agents, publishers, critics, reviewers, academics, organizers of literary festivals, censors and others. Thus, an informing assumption of this chapter is that it is not individual authors or texts but the convergence of a diverse set of the agents of cultural production that ‘make’ IWE, just as a celebrity becomes so not simply because of innate skill or features but through a series of factors acting in concert. I am interested in the celebrification process because what was once unobtrusive and elite (restricted to certain bookstores and a particular readership) is now visible and more accessible (at least in terms of availability and public presence), thus indicating the hypertrophic nature of the genre that has changed its very apparatuses.5 By apparatuses I mean reviewing, book launches, public readings and academic discourses around a literary text. I should perhaps underscore the point that I am not devaluing the high visibility that a genre/author/book attains today. I am neither mourning (nostalgically) the passing of the ‘good ol’ days’ when authors were read and not heard or seen, nor do I resent the media-savvy Chetan Bhagats, Salman Rushdies and Arundhati Roys with their tweets and interviews on all subjects social, political and cultural. The nature of cultural production has changed across media – the cinema is a case in point – and IWE has been influenced by that change as well. I examine in this chapter several elements that converge in the celebrification of IWE, a convergence that becomes visible in IWE’s media presence globally (hence my term from Tom Mole for it, ‘hypertrophic celebrity’). I argue, in short, that we need to pay attention to the discursive-material contexts in which IWE itself achieves celebrity status as a ‘significant’ genre.

The Authenticity Debate Contemporary cultural production causes IWE and its authors to engage more directly with the public sphere than ever before, and this is central to the celebrification process. I am not speaking only of Chetan Bhagat’s tweets and social commentary that now appears in numerous newspapers or of Arundhati Roy’s polemical essays. I am referring to a public debate that is centred around and/or driven by IWE and that drives IWE in its turn. I propose that a major debate that has brought celebrity iconicity to IWE is the one about authenticity.

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My proposition is that IWE’s stature in India is not due to its content or form – although the shift from ‘serious’ writing to ‘popular’ writing styles in Bhagat, Anuja Chauhan, Amish Tripathi (or just Amish, as his name occurs on his books) and Ashok Banker would be a major factor – but because it occupies a special place within India’s never-ending language debates and increasingly strident identity politics. IWE’s amplification of itself ensures that it secures a place in the several public debates around language and identity, not merely language and literary representation. Further, it amplifies the debate as well, especially in the controversies around questions such as ‘What is the readership for IWE?’ Indian writers in English (IWrE) have for a very long time been asked to explain why they wrote in that language.6 Raja Rao kick-started the crisis when he pointedly observed in his zillion-quoted Preface to Kanthapura (1938) that it was not possible to write about indigenous affections, sentiments and concerns in a language that was not indigenous but was, to wit, the colonial master’s. Nayantara Sahgal, Shashi Deshpande and numerous others have had to write rebuttals and responses to the question ‘Why do you write in English?’ Since then, nativist critics of many hues and persuasions and with varying degrees of success have accused IWrE of catering to Western audiences; ignoring the folk, native and vernacular traditions in India in their source material; being inauthentic; and being elitist. Whether IWrE are re-orientalizing7 the Orient with their exotic appeal to the West is a good question, but not one in which I am interested at this point (I shall return to exoticism a little later). That great supplier of the proverbial cat-among-pigeons Rushdie, never one to lose out on an opportunity for controversy, added jet fuel to gas fire by claiming that there was no vernacular literature worthy of its name in India.8 Later, The Hindu, India’s respectable English-language newspaper, carried the great authenticity debate. Vikram Chandra’s report of his displeasure with charges of inauthenticity levelled against him by noted academic Meenakshi Mukherjee was originally published, ironically, in The Boston Review.9 It prompted responses by US-based academic Rajeswari Sundar Rajan,10 which in turn resulted in a response from Chandra.11 That said, ‘Indianness’ in various guises, political hues and metaphysical conceits continues to haunt IWE, as Emma Dawson Varughese’s recent study of ‘post-millennial’ Indian fiction in English demonstrates.12 I propose that the authenticity debate, which became a public debate with the newspaper coverage, came at a time when the question of English as a language had shifted its demographics. Dalit activists and journalists (Chandrabhan Prasad, known for his statue of ‘English, the Dalit Goddess’13), academics (Kancha Ilaiah) and publishers (S. Anand), among others, campaigned for English as the language of emancipation. Quickly the debate therefore moved

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away from the authenticity question of IWE to the emancipation question of Indian English itself. IWE as a genre does not become a celebrity for its in/ appropriate use of English as the language of Indian sentiments and affections. The debate is now no longer about literary representations but instead is about the politics of English as a language for self-representation and rights for the hitherto marginalized and oppressed. Authentic self-representation, one might now say, is possible for the marginalized not in the caste- and classridden Indian languages but in the language of the law (handed down from the colonial era), science and administration: English. The question, in short, is not whether Kiran Desai’s language authentically captures the Gorkha lifestyle in a small town, but whether previously oppressed groups have acquired the ability to read what she has written. It is not the content’s authenticity but the access to the content. So the question remains: how many Indians from rural or working-class backgrounds read Indian fiction in English? As Pavithra Narayanan points out in the case of England, ‘English does not erase hierarchical structures.’14 That said, the demographics of English-language speakers in India are changing. It is also interesting to note that English, more than a link language across the several Indian languages, has now come to occupy the second position behind Hindi as the most spoken language in India, according to the 2001 national census, with a massive increase in rural speakers of the language as well.15 My emphasis here is on the widening of the readership for English-language books itself – of which, let us note, IWE is only one genre. The question of readership is not a question of the authenticity of content but of linguistic, and eventually cultural, competencies that enable the reader to discover, to question or to be horrified by the inauthenticity of the representation. IWE is one element in a process wherein language, especially the English language, is at the centre of re-visionings of Indian modernity in which issues of empowerment, social mobility, emancipation and political subjectivity – identity politics – are at the forefront. In other words, what I am suggesting is that the debate about the authenticity of IWE’s content, of the representations of various groups and ethnicities in the fiction, only follows the larger question of who reads IWE. However, there is a related argument about the widening of authorship. The inauthenticity of representation of marginalized groups by ‘upper’ castes needs also to be addressed. S. Anand, in his critique of Manu Joseph’s novel Serious Men,16 argues that ‘the garb of satire – where almost every character cuts a sorry figure – gives the author the license to offer one of the bleakest and most pessimistic portrayals of urban Dalits’. Anand’s problem is with the inauthenticity and insensitivity of Joseph’s representations at a time – and this is important – when a formidable body of Dalit literature (writing by

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Dalits about Dalit lives) has created a distinct space for itself. The question of authenticity of representation has to do with both the identity politics of contemporary India and the presumed ‘usurpation’ of authorial rights by the IWrE that, in Anand’s account, produces such a misrepresentation. Until such time as literacy in English – both reading and writing – reaches a stage at which communities can represent themselves (authentically), this tension of ‘speaking for the Other’ will haunt IWE. This is precisely why I locate IWE’s celebrity status within the language, authenticity and identity debates in contemporary India.17 Both identity politics and the language debates, which are now part of the public debates in India – carried on, very often, in English-language newspapers – are what make IWE a celebrity as well. Debates about the language of Chetan Bhagat or the necessity of translation that we see in The Hindu’s literary review periodically dovetail, I propose, into the larger identity politics in which the role of language is a major one. IWE as literature, in other words, amplifies not the politics of literature but the politics of language. It gains considerably from the public debate, while also drawing attention to it.

Prizes and Awards The Booker lists are as eagerly awaited in India as in the West, especially after Rushdie, Roy, Desai and Aravind Adiga have been winners and the numerous Indian nominees over the years from within and without India. The spectacular rise of Indian authors (Rushdie, Roy, Desai) in the global literary marketplace, and the transnational nature of English publishing (with a strong presence in India, represented by HarperCollins, Picador, Random House, Penguin and academic publishers like Routledge, SAGE and the older Oxford and Cambridge University presses), contribute to the arrival of the Indian author on the First World publishing scene.18 This is not a simple case of what Narayanan in condemnatory terms describes as ‘the “Other” [being] discovered’.19 It is not one more instance of ‘marketing the margins’, as the subtitle of Graham Huggan’s book phrases it.20 I am not disputing or debating the politics of prizes. Neither am I proposing that the shift towards ‘exotic’ writers in Booker and Nobel lists – I wonder what Narayanan has to say about the Morrisons, the Walcotts winning Nobels, or are the West’s ‘internal Others’ excluded from the politics of exoticization? – is merely a form of Othering. Both of these I shall take as given. What I wish to claim here is that by being fitted, for whatever reasons, into the global literary industry, IWE as a genre acquires celebrity status, no matter who the author is. Exoticization alone does not explain, or explain away, the stature of IWE today. I suggest that this is because the genre of IWE is a positional celebrity,21

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not simply reliant on exotic descriptions and alien cultures served up for Western consumption. A positional celebrity is one who becomes known due to location, lineage and connections with already famous figures and spaces. IWE becomes celebritized for its connections, lineages, achievements and attributions. Primarily, it is its location and geography that furnish transnational media coverage and even readership. IWE’s landscape might be described as follows. It originates in one of South Asia’s economically and politically influential countries; a country that contributes in a major way to the diasporic population in the First World (a population that therefore ‘introduces’ the country, its languages and culture to the receiving society); that also supplies a major share of the yuppie workforce in the First World; that has produced one of the most high-profile and controversial authors in modern literature (Rushdie); that has its film stars gracing the red carpet at Cannes and inaugurating a ‘proper’ British tourist spectacle (as Shah Rukh Khan did for Warwick Castle in 2007); it gives the United Nations ambassadors for various charitable and humanitarian causes; its beauty queens win pageants; it has a presence at Madame Tussauds; and it is a country that has given cricket the greatest batsman it has ever known (Sachin Tendulkar) and whose film industry is now a global presence. IWE cannot, I argue, be separated from this globally recognized lineage, and part of its celebritydom accrues to it automatically as a result of this lineage. These images that produce India’s global iconicity converge and therefore IWE finds a ready slot for itself. It partakes of – and this is my thesis here – a cultural citizenship around the world such that readers who have ‘heard of India’ might ‘try out’ an Indian author. With the increasing globalization of tastes, a novel by an Indian author – or a Chinese one, for that matter – becomes a marker of global cultural citizenship, and this contributes, I suggest, in some small way to the celebrification of IWE as a genre. IWE is one more element in what is being spoken of as India’s ‘soft power’, which includes Gandhi, Bollywood, the democratic tradition and so on.22 That said, I do not wish to dismiss completely the ‘exoticization’ argument, although I would like to qualify it as follows. The exotic has been delinked from its ‘natural’ habitat (India, the Third World) and made an object of admiration and spectacle in the First World, thereby mitigating the possible harshness and frightening strangeness of the exotic, since it is now in a more comprehensible environment of the Western literary tradition and award system (I am adapting here Christa Knellwolf ’s work on the exotic).23 That is, awards and prizes remove and dislocate the Roys and the Rushdies from their local habitation and give them a new pedestal, curiosity cabinet or museum to be exhibited in/on, seen and admired, but among other things Indian. It is not only a Roy or a Rushdie who gets showcased with these awards, it is India

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itself, and vice versa. Just as in the Crystal Palace Exhibition and the other Great Exhibitions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England there were India sections where India’s artists, artisans and arts were displayed,24 but as metonyms for India, these prize-winning books and authors serve as metonyms for an India that has already received considerable attention in the First World, and is already a part of the global cultural economy. What I am arguing, in short, is that it would be reductive to see IWE as simply a means of exotic access into an otherwise unknown India, just as it would to say that it is because India is already well known that these books and authors gain attention. In what is a mutually reinforcing, converging process, IWE and India both acquire visibility as positional celebrities on the global literary scene.

The Critics’ Choice IWE has also gained visibility due to a decisive shift in academic disciplines. With more South Asian courses being offered in history and literary studies at Euro-American universities – I have lectured on quite a few of these, from Brighton to Bowling Green – IWE becomes source material for PhD work as well as undergraduate courses. Journals from Taylor & Francis, Johns Hopkins, Oxford and Cambridge, as well as numerous respected online journals like Postcolonial Text, carry serious academic work on IWE. Detractors like Narayanan claim that in order to become a ‘supraterritorial voice’ a postcolonial critic must publish with a Western publisher,25 since Indian academics who publish with Indian presses do not gain so much visibility (one notes, in passing, that Narayanan teaches in Vancouver, and she makes this critique in a book published by Routledge, a supraterritorial publisher, I would say). Citing Makarand Paranjape extensively (whose recent work appears from Londonand Delhi-based Anthem Press), Narayanan concludes that ‘the question of postcoloniality and the issues of representation are part of this context of unequal academic power and exchanges’.26 Narayanan does have a valid point about academic publishing being determined by the Western ‘standards’ of peer reviewing and that if a work makes its theoretical points it should not ‘matter to those who review tenure and promotion dossiers where it has been published’.27 Despite these politics of academic publishing, Indian and South Asian academics writing on Third World authors and topics have, I would think, refused to be ghettoized within the ‘postcolonial’ paradigm when their work does not figure in designated postcolonial journals (Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Global South, Postcolonial Text). Third World academics, writing out of India, Sri Lanka and other regions – unlike Narayanan, whose paean to

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‘Indian’ publishing is sung from within the Anglophone academic publishing system that she derides – have appeared in journals that have traditionally been associated with Euro-American concerns and literatures (diacritics, Angelaki, SubStance, Boundary 2, Oxford Literary Review, 1650–1850, Yeats Eliot Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Prose Studies, Cambridge Quarterly, Radical Teacher, Journal of British Studies, Milton Quarterly, Shakespeare Quarterly, among others). This breach of the wall of academic publishing, however small it might appear to be, does constitute a breach nevertheless. I would like to think, perhaps naively, that the journals are forced to accept work coming out of the ‘global South’ of academia not only because these are exotic ‘poco’ topics – which again is not accurate, since several of the ‘southern’ academics have published on canonical white authors like Eliot, Pound, Milton, Hawthorne, Coleridge, Lawrence and of course Shakespeare – but because it is well done. The hierarchy has not been inverted yet, but it is not rock solid either. My point is that the globalization of Indian academics has been going on for some time. It is true that it is with postcolonialism as an academic discipline that some of these Indian voices have been heard globally; but squeaks and even the occasional growl from a Third World academic were heard well before the age of supraterritorial publishing, because the Third World academic’s reading skills and writing standards did get through the gatekeepers of peer reviewers and such, even when writing about Shakespeare. That said, the rise of academic interest in not only IWE but in postcolonial interpretative frameworks situates the work of literary/cultural criticism within a larger global shift in criticism. This shift is towards race studies and race theory, exemplified by collections such as Race Critical Theories: Text and Context (1982). When a new prism is made available – since at least Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and, before this, the writings of Frantz Fanon – academia struggles to negotiate new ways of reading. Race becomes a critical category of analysis in the work of Hortense Spillers, bell hooks and Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and in the anthropology of Frederick Cooper, Nicholas Thomas, Jean and John Comaroff, Arif Dirlik, Laura Ann Stoler and others; and this is not specifically Indian at all. Nevertheless, Indian academic work – Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, but also Dipesh Chakraborty, Aijaz Ahmad – dovetails into an already existing mode of reading: critical race studies. Debates around the globe about modernity, Empire, sexuality and urbanism, refracted through the prism of race, enable Chakraborty, Spivak, Bhabha, Ahmad, Janaki Nair, Charu Gupta and Sanjay Srivastava to participate in a global academic culture. We have indisputably benefited from a global turn to critical race studies. IWE therefore becomes a domain within this global disciplinary/theoretical shift, since criticism becomes an important agent that legitimizes the genre.

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‘Lit.Fests’ As a land known for its exuberant festivities, India now has literary festivals to match the Hay and other globally renowned literary festivals. IWE and its authors might only be bit players on a stage graced (in the past) by Orhan Pamuk and J. M. Coetzee, but there is no doubt that the showcasing of, say, Dalit writing, partition literature and Indian popular fiction from Blaft and politically committed publishing houses like Navayana has produced a convergence. While controversies inevitably dog such literary events, India as a destination for the world’s literati offers IWE a role on the global stage of literary deals (advances, co-publishing agreements, translation, etc.). There is no ranking of literary festivals, so we do not know how, say, the annual Jaipur Literary Festival or the more recent Hyderabad Literary Festival stands alongside the Hay Festival. Still, the availability of a literary itinerary that now includes India ensures a fair amount of visibility (and mutual invitations) for IWE as well. Involving literary agents, authors, publishers, critics, editors, film celebrities and the ‘interested’ reader, literary festivals are a means of cultural production that foregrounds not the book but the author. As Joe Moran has pointed out about literary stardom, literary celebrity ‘is not simply an adjunct of mainstream celebrity, but an elaborate system of representation in its own right … it raises significant questions about the relationship between literature and the marketplace.’28 Surely this is borne out every year at the Jaipur Literary Festival, where the perennial debate, now tiring, is whether Sir Salman will put in an appearance or not. The ‘Lit.Fest’ is the place where the author draws attention to the mechanics of celebrification – from the ethnic chic worn by authors to the speeches.29 The author’s book/s and tastes in fashion are both on display, each partaking of the other in a convergence of two registers: global consumerism and global literary artefacts. It is this convergence that creates the celebrity status of the literary festival and of the author. Writing about literary festivals, Wenche Ommundsen says that they function as ‘extensions of [the silent communication between writers, texts and readers], enactments of literature as cultural form and as commodity’.30 Ommundsen and Joe Moran note perspicaciously that the domain of literature extends into cultural markets, and (as commentators such as Douglas Bruster31 have demonstrated in the case of Shakespeare) that a certain aura around the author enables the market to construct celebrities as well. People, Ommundsen notes in passing, do not always read the books of the authors whom they meet at festivals; they come for the author, not the book. Lit.Fests constitute the publicizing of ‘serious’ literature, the adding of a ‘popular’ tag to a different regime of value (‘classic’ or ‘serious’ or ‘high’

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literature) because these are rituals that borrow from pop/mass cultural forms. As a constituent of the celebrification process, they add considerable popular gravitas, so to speak, to serious authors. Literary festivals are places where branding is performed and brands revered. Despite the apparent frivolousness of this remark, I am deadly serious. Before Roy there was no author-brand in India. The brand, as we know from cultural studies scholars such as John Frow and James Twitchell,32 is the telling of a story about a product with a combination of names, signs and slogans. The Lit.Fest is a semiotic universe in which the Fest supplements the author-brand and the author-brand bestows a certain meaning on the Fest. Each is the supplement of the other – I use supplement in the Derridean sense of both excess and completion – in a complicated manoeuvre. Take the Jaipur Literary Festival as an example. The news coverage is devoted to the star authors, and the star authors are identified as those who get invited to the festival. Several things happen to the author-brand or ‘text’ (I am here calling the author a ‘text’, a set of signs). The author is contextualized in a brand history, as a ‘Penguin author’, a ‘Bloomsbury author’ and such like in terms of the publicity and the theatre of the Lit.Fest. The author-brand is also decontextualized by being taken out of the publishing house/showroom, temporarily (for they cannot be unhoused from say, Random House), and placed within the house of the Lit.Fest. The author-brand’s ‘meaning’ is added to – therefore resignified – through the Lit.Fest’s styling. In the media ritual that is the Lit.Fest, certain actions of signification are publicly performed, such as signing and speaking. However, and this is important, the author-brand does not have to speak about herself/himself: the Lit.Fest as a publicitygenerating semiotic universe that bestows ‘meaning’ on its authors does the speaking. Thus, the Jaipur Literary Festival is attended by celebrity authors and it is resignified as the preferred brand that Coetzee, Rushdie, Desai, Adiga choose to be seen ‘wearing’ (as name badges, perhaps!). The Lit.Fest has been recontextualized and a new text emerges that is a composite of the narratives of the authors who attend it, just as the authors get resignified within the melange of brands of the Lit.Fest.

Practitioners and Polemicists Rushdie and Roy have gained renown for their fiction, and for their controversies. Roy, currently the voice of the Narmada movement,33 has spoken in major forums across the world against globalization, cultural imperialism, development and so on. Her polemical works now have as much visibility as The God of Small Things (1997). I have elsewhere argued that Narmada is itself

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a celebrity today, not as a ‘face’ but as a ‘space’,34 and Roy’s move to social justice platforms gives her global standing that adds to the value of her novel.35 Rushdie’s engagements vis-à-vis freedom-of-speech groups and Islamist radicals are what enable his status and stature, not necessarily his literary productions; certainly not of late, after The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). The activism on his behalf by even those who perhaps do not read his work has made him what is traditionally called a cause célèbre. If the celebrity is situated at the intersection of the financial and cultural economy, as I have argued (2009), we need to think of the sales figures of authors such as Rushdie as co-articulated with their cultural role as commentators, opinion-makers and controversialists. In terms of literature, people like Roy and Rushdie function as literary activists whose work then must be situated within accounts of high-profile cultural productions – activist writing, petitions, campaigns – that intervene in global debates that may have nothing to do with their literary productions, but from which their literary texts gain considerably. What I earlier called ‘convergence’ is what is demonstrable here. Figures such as these, whose writings and speeches locate them beyond the ‘merely’ literary along the lines of Gore Vidal, Harold Pinter and Art Spiegelman from the Anglophone world, have an amplified value because they come to symbolize something (a set of values, an ideological position) that is perhaps almost entirely unconnected to their fiction. It is not their writing, speech or polemics alone but the cultural ‘spaces’ in which these are performed – globalization, environment and big dams in the case of Roy, the fatwa and fundamentalism around the world in the case of Rushdie, the refusal to participate in the competition for the Commonwealth Prize in the case of Amitav Ghosh, among others. It is important to note that such polemics in which the authors engage are important constituents of the public field of literature. The irony that underlies these public polemics and controversies is, of course, that they cause the convergence, however accidental, of opposing regimes of value (of the literary versus the popular, activist writers versus ‘mere’ entertainers, committed postcolonials versus exoticizers, and finally high-flying money-spinners versus socially committed authors). First, the authors are celebrity voices because they have done ‘serious work’ that has given them massive commercial success, accrued cultural capital, tapped into processes of globalization and acquired for them credibility as serious authors. Second, it is their commercial and cultural success in a globalized arena that then enables them to speak out against the commercialization of literature, the politics of literary prizes or the questionable effects of globalization. In an ironic self-reflexivity, IWE in the ‘form’ of these authors’ polemics draws attention to the very structures – globalization,

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commercialization – that have made it and the author a globally viable and appreciated product.

Conclusion Celebrity culture, Tom Mole notes,36 has always structured the ‘production, distribution, and reception of texts around the mystique of a particularly fascinating individual’, although it has always ‘concealed the industrial conditions in which its texts were produced’. This is precisely what the hypertrophic celebrity alters, by revealing the processes of celebrification. My argument in this chapter has been that the agents of cultural production construct the IWE as celebrity even as IWE with its celebrity status at Lit.Fests, awards, critical reception and controversies reveals to the public – among whom it hopes to gain economic and cultural success – the process of its own celebrification.

Notes 1

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Ashok Malik (1999) ‘Night writer’, India Today, 15 March. http://indiatoday.intoday. in/ story/ raj- kamal- jha- indias- best- paid- debut- novelist- since- arundhati- roy/ 1/ 253470.html (accessed 15 June 2012). Tom Mole (2004) ‘Hypertrophic celebrity’, M/C, 7(5). http://journal.media-culture. org.au/0411/08-mole.php (accessed 10 June 2013). Henry Jenkins (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Pierre Bourdieu (1993) The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. R. Johnson, New York: Columbia University Press. It is significant that today there are only a few independent booksellers and publishers. Most publishers, academic as well as trade, are now part of massive global conglomerates and publishing chains. Random House thus incorporates in addition Knopf Doubleday, Ballantine, The Dial, Lucas, Crown, Anchor, Everyman’s Library, Pantheon, Vintage, Schocken and others. A perceptive study of global publishing (Stuart Glover (2011) ‘The rise of global publishing and the fall of the dream of the global book: The editing of Peter Carey’, Publishing Research Quarterly, 27(1): 54–61) points out that the earlier, traditional link between author, editor and publisher is now no more. Further, instead of a single authorized edition we have competing editions. Massive advances for authors, signing programmes and global publicity have been of great help to Amitav Ghosh, Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie of course and the new generation of Kiran Desais, Aravind Adigas and others, partly as a result of the push towards globalized publishing. In an interview Shashi Deshpande states: ‘One of the things one is always asked is “why do you write in English?” for a person like me, whose father wrote in Kannada and who lives very much in this kind of a middle-class milieu, it’s always asked of me, and it’s asked in a kind of accusing tone, as if I’ve done something wrong. There was no choice in the matter. That’s what I always say. It’s not like I sat down and said,

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“Look, I’m going to write in English.” That was the only language I could write.’ Shashi Deshpande (1998) ‘Interview with Sue Dickman’, Ariel, 29(1), p. 131. Lisa Lau (2009) ‘Re-Orientalism: The perpetration and development of Orientalism by Orientals’, Modern Asian Studies, 43(2): 571–590. What Rushdie wrote was: ‘The prose writing – both fiction and nonfiction – created in this period [the 50 years of independence] by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen “recognized” languages of India, the so-called “vernacular languages,” during the same time; and, indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, “Indo-Anglian” literature represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India has yet made to the world of books. The True Indian literature of the first postcolonial half century has been made in the language the British left behind.’ Salman Rushdie (1997) ‘Damme, this is the oriental scene for you!’, The New Yorker, June 23 & 30, p. 50. Vikram Chandra (2000) ‘The cult of authenticity’, Boston Review, 1(Feb.): 42–49. Rajeswari Sunder Rajen (2011) ‘Writing in English in India, again’, The Hindu, 18 February, http://www.thehindu.com/2001/02/18/stories/1318067m.htm/ (accessed 11 June 2013); (2001) ‘Dealing with anxieties – II’, The Hindu, 25 February, http://www.thehindu.com/2001/02/25/stories/1325067a.htm/ (accessed 11 June 2013). Vikram Chandra (2000) ‘Arty goddesses’, The Hindu, 1 April, http://www.thehindu. com/2001/04/01/stories/1301061q.htm/ (accessed 11 June 2013). Emma Dawson Varughese (2013) Reading New India: Post-Millennial Indian Fiction in English, London: Bloomsbury. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ india/ Dalit- Goddess-English- temple-in- UPsBanka-village/articleshow/6819990.cms (accessed 26 June 2014). Pavithra Narayanan (2012) What Are You Reading? The World Market and Indian Literary Production, New Delhi: Routledge, p. 42. ‘Indiaspeak: English is our 2nd language’, The Times of India, 14 March 2010, http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Indiaspeak-English-is-our-2nd-language/ articleshow/5680962.cms (accessed June 2014). S. Anand (2011) ‘Lighting out for the territory: The arduous journey of modern Dalit literature’, Caravan Magazine, 1 February, http://caravan magazine.in/sites/default/ files/imagecache/lightbox_full_image/113-1364_img.jpg (accessed 15 June 2013). The notion that a community’s self-representation is more ‘authentic’ is, however, a questionable one, although not one that I wish to address here. For case studies of the politics of postcolonial publishing, see Caroline Davis (2005) ‘The politics of postcolonial publishing: Oxford University Press’s Three Crowns series 1962–1976’, Book History, 8(1): 227–244. On publishing in India in the colonial period, see Amit Kumar Gupta (2008) ‘Commentary on India’s soft power and diaspora’, International Journal on World Peace, 25(3): 61–68; and Swapan Chakravorty (ed.) (2008) Moveable Type: Book History in India, New Delhi: Permanent Black. Narayanan, What are You Reading?, p. 95. Graham Huggan (2001) The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, London: Routledge. Pramod K. Nayar (2013) ‘Watery friction: River Narmada, celebrity and new grammars of protest’, Celebrity Studies, 4(3): 292–310. See Gupta, ‘Commentary on India’s soft power and diaspora’; Jacques E. C. Hymans (2009) ‘India’s soft power and vulnerability’, India Review, 8(3): 234–265; Anjali Gera Roy (2012) The Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad, New Delhi: Sage.

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ESSAYS IN CELEBRITY CULTURE See Christa Knellwolf (2002) ‘The exotic frontier of the imperial imagination’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 26(3): 10–30. See Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (eds) (1998) Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, London: Routledge. Narayanan, What Are You Reading?, p. 149. Ibid. Ibid. Joe Moran (2000) Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America, London: Pluto, p. 4. See India Today’s visual account at http://indiatoday.intoday.in/gallery/intellect-andfashion-blend-at-jaipur-literary-festival/1/6374.html/ (accessed 12 June 2013). Wenche Ommundsen (2009) ‘Literary festivals and cultural consumption’, Australian Literary Studies, 24(1), p. 33. See Douglas Bruster (2005) Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See John Frow (2004) ‘Signature and brand’, in Jim Collins (ed.), High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 56–74; James B. Twitchell (2004) Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College, Inc., and Museum World, New York: Simon and Schuster. The Narmada movement was a protest campaign against the building of a massive dam project across the River Narmada in central India. As a result of this series of small dams, thousands of villages were submerged and people displaced. The humanitarian crisis and ecological costs eventually caused the World Bank to pull out of the project. It has been argued that since then the Narmada movement has become a celebrity, and a symbol of the fight against the state’s skewed developmental policies (see Nayar, ‘Watery friction’). Pramod K. Nayar (2009) Seeing Stars: Society, Spectacle and Celebrity Culture, New Delhi: Sage. That such moves have a clear effect on readership is borne out by a news item in The Hindu: with the exposure of the USA’s snooping programme in the week of 3 June–10 June 2013, the sales of George Orwell’s 1984 went up (‘1984 sales go up’, The Hindu, 13 June 2013, http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-international/1984-salesgo-up/article4808711.ece, accessed June 2014). Mole, ‘Hypertrophic Celebrity.’

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Chapter 8 WATERY FRICTION: THE RIVER NARMADA, CELEBRITY, AND NEW GRAMMARS OF PROTEST The River Narmada, India’s fifth-largest, traverses three of India’s northwestern states: Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, running to a total of roughly 1312 kilometres. In the 1970s, the Indian government proposed to build a series of dams along the river: 30 large dams, 135 medium dams and 3000 small dams. These were to provide, according to the government, potable water for almost 40 million people, irrigation for over six million hectares of land and hydroelectric power for the entire region. The largest of these dams, the Sardar Sarovar Project (or SSP), in the state of Gujarat alone, it was claimed, would irrigate almost 1.8 million hectares of land in Gujarat, and an additional 73,000 hectares in the mostly arid neighbouring state of Rajasthan. In 1985, the World Bank agreed to finance the SSP to the tune of approximately $450 million (Morse and Berger 1992, p. 2). SSP has been the subject of agitation, controversy and bitter scientific– environmental, as well as state, battles since 1985. When complete, it will submerge roughly 87,000 acres of land, including agricultural land, forests, river beds and wastelands (Kothari and Ram 1994). Government estimates say at least 250,000 people will be displaced due to the dam; protestors put the figure closer to half a million. After sustained protests, the World Bank appointed an independent commission to look into the issues around Narmada, and the commission recommended that the bank withdraw from the project. World Bank funding consequently stopped in 1992. In 2000, however, the Supreme Court of India ruled in favour of the dam. During subsequent hearings of interlocutory petitions, the court also ordered the states to ensure that all ‘relief and rehabilitation measures have to be provided to the oustees in letter and spirit of the [Narmada Tribunal] Award and decisions of this Court’ (Order of 17 April 2006, Narmada Bachao Andolan vs Union of India).1 The major anti-dam campaigners – Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy and Baba Amte – have become celebrities themselves, whilst Bollywood celebrities like Aamir

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Khan have extended support for the Narmada Bachao Andolan (the Save Narmada Campaign). Films such as Ali Kazimi’s (1994) Narmada: a valley rises, Anand Patwardhan’s (1995) My Narmada diary have received critical acclaim, and inspired a greater interest in the valley’s problems. ‘Narmada’ has become a shorthand term that informs development debates in India today. The specificity of the river and its topoi rapidly fold into discourses that interrogate state policy, development, economics, humanrights agendas and environmental concerns in late-twentieth-century India. ‘Narmada’ functions as celebrity space rather than as event, a celebrity process (of resistance, occupation) rather than as an individual. Its function is almost entirely due to its iconicity, coalescing around multiple discourses and providing an instantly recognisable, culturally legible and iterable sign for several other similar processes of protest. This essay seeks to unravel the discourses that contribute to the making of the Narmada as a cultural icon. Its iconicity, the essay demonstrates, is forged in the crucible of heavily mediated protest, and the friction between different discourses (of globalisation, local cultures, ethnic identity and development, among others). As an icon, Narmada is a celebrity in terms of the symbolic valence attached to its iterable grammar of protest. ‘Narmada’, I propose, has acquired cultural value as an icon of protest. It now serves as a term that gathers into itself the very idea and process of protest. My use of the term ‘iterable’ signifies, therefore, the convenient compression into the icon, ‘Narmada’, of an entire process – ‘protest’ – even if the protests are triggered by widely different events or causes, such as nuclearisation, government indifference to a crisis or uneven development. ‘Narmada’ as sign generates, in other words, a grammar of protest, whether this grammar is of ecological ethnicity, emaciated bodies, mythification and romanticisation of the land, environmentalism or corporate greed. The grammar of protest around the river constructs Narmada as a national popular (and eventually a global) icon and therefore a readily recognisable, sign. As an icon, Narmada possesses more cultural legibility and iterability than perhaps any other – Gandhi excepted – in post-Independence India. It is this cultural legibility and iterability, I believe, that constitutes its celebrityhood. The river is now an icon because it reorganises a social imaginary. I am working with Celia Lury’s (2012, p. 254) notion of an icon here: ‘Narmada’, as a result of the cultural legibility systems engendered by and within the media, becomes the source for the elaboration of ‘the social imaginary or ground of abstraction as the possible field from which relations of similitude might be inferred’. These relations of similitude are made possible due to Narmada’s iconicity and grammar of protests that influence later protests. Narmada’s status as a cultural icon stems from the complicated, frictioning discourses around the river and the dam. I use the term ‘icon’ here as delinked

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from its religious connotation, but to signify something with a significant symbolic cultural impact,2 although we do see interesting overlaps in the secular and the religious in much of the rhetoric around the river.3 Photographs such as those from the Holocaust, like those of Narmada that I examine below, not only become symbols for the ‘unimaginable’ but also structure our perceptions and receptivity to new atrocities, suggests Brink (2000, p. 135–36). The Narmada-style protests, as we can think of them, have formed a template for protests decades later. We can therefore see Narmada’s iconicity as iterable in new contexts of protests. As a result of the protests and the very nature of the discourses in these protests, Narmada has become, I propose, an iterable event beyond space and time, transcending the immediate contexts and concerns. The river is a celebrity, where the river, to borrow David Marshall’s phrase, ‘represents something other than itself ’ as the ‘material reality of the celebrity sign […] disappear[s] into a cultural formation of meaning’ (Marshall 1997, p. 56–57, emphasis in original). That is, Narmada’s celebrity status as cultural icon is evidenced in its continued relevance to the cultural formations that give meaning to protests and critiques in entirely new domains – whether this be the recent September 2012 protests against the Kudankulam nuclear plant in the state of Tamil Nadu in southern India, or the arrival of Walmart, around which debates and agitations have occurred since the early 2000s. Narmada’s iconicity has come to generate a whole new grammar of protest, having become a part of India’s collective cultural memory and the popular imagination. (‘It [Narmada] became a debate that captured the popular imagination,’ as Arundhati Roy, Booker Prize winner and anti-dam protestor put it in her 1999 essay The greater common good.4) Celebrity studies tells us that the meaning of an icon, or star, is not only a story of the cultivation of a persona but also of the discursive and ideological context within which the persona develops (Turner 2004, p. 7). While in the case of persons, the publicity industries and the fashionable, charismatic, powerful celeb-body collaborate in the making of this persona, in the case of Narmada, clearly, the river has little by way of agency in promoting or presenting itself as a persona. There is no ‘face’ of the social and civil rebellion that is the anti-dam protests. The face with enormous affective purchase, like that of a celebrity, is (of) the river itself, its features amplified by its crude signage, deified in quasi-religious or religious iconography, the circulating images of emaciated, suffering and resisting bodies around the river, and the friction these generate when they grind against the state’s power.5 But mostly it is the space of the river and the figure of occupation and resistance that has iconic cultural legibility today. Being deified (‘Goddess Narmada’) and anthropomorphised (‘Mother Narmada’) certainly causes Narmada to be treated as a person, and apostrophes (addressed to the imaginary or absent

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‘person’, Narmada) in the form of prayers or songs – some of which I reference in this essay – contribute significantly to the river becoming a celebrity. But Narmada-as-icon introduces a certain semantic and taxonomic consistency (due to the protests around it) across contexts (development, state power, dams, nuclear power, modernity, globalisation), events (other dams in India, refugees and displacement) and places (all over India). It is now a social-civil asset, appropriated by any and every protest campaign. Narmada’s iconicity is firmly situated within a transmedial context. As in the case of celebrityhood, which is closely aligned, as I have argued elsewhere, with public culture and public awareness (Nayar 2009, p. 4), Narmada circulates within the domain of public and civil discourse as a readily recognisable icon. So pervasive is the semiotic universe of protest around the river that the word ‘Narmada’ has a currency matched by few protests or resistance movements in contemporary Indian classrooms (something I can vouch for as an academic), public discussions and conversations within civil society. It must also be stated that Narmada’s early stature stemmed from its fame as a space of protest but becomes a celebrity – to invoke Leo Braudy’s (1986) distinction – with the ceaseless mediation of the protests unfolding around Narmada on television screens, in newspaper coverage, in documentaries and civil society’s protest events across India, what I am terming its cultural legibility and iterability. ‘Narmada’ is a celebrity process of protests and of occupation. Narmada’s iconicity is constructed within two major intersecting discourses: environmentalism and social justice. The first constructs Narmada as Nature, while the second focuses on human lives and their cultures around the river. Together, these discourses construct Narmada as a social-natural landscape. The river is at once subject, materially, to human interventions and market forces, as well as to aesthetic-cultural conventions. Water, air and land are connected intimately with the human life forms and their attendant religious, agricultural and cultural practices in the environmentalist and social-justice discourses so that they become more or less seamless. These two discourses may be discerned in the myths, the visual archive of traumatised bodies, icons and rituals around Narmada and the anti-dam protests.

‘Myths’ of a River, Icons of Protest The celebrity, argues Marshall, is ‘simultaneously a construction of the dominant culture and a construction of the subordinate audiences of the culture’, providing ‘a bridge of meaning between the powerless and the powerful’ (Marshall 1997, p. 48–49, although, one might add, it needn’t necessarily be that the audiences are entirely powerless). Narmada emerges as a celebritised icon precisely in the clash and coalescing of meanings and myths produced

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by, (i) the Indian state, including its legal system, and (ii) the subordinated, dam-displaced people and their protests. Protestors accuse the state of generating a myth of development, while the state refutes it by claiming that there is empirical evidence of prosperity accruing from dams (as demonstrated by the interviews with the project officials in Pendharkar’s 2002 film, My Narmada travels). The first great myth – of development and modernity – around rivers and dams was inaugurated when Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, termed the dams ‘the temples of modern India’ in his speech at the opening of the Nangal Canal, 8 July 1954. This myth is primarily the one the Indian state has adopted, and may be read as the meaning generated by the dominant, or official, culture around Narmada. Since Nehru, these secular temples – mapping the secular-nationalist on to the mystical-religious – have entered the vocabulary of the nation. Indeed, as Rajagopal points out, river-development schemes inaugurated by Nehru in the late 1950s were woven into narratives of nationalism (Rajagopal 2004, p. 10–11). As a result of this inaugural myth, the Indian Supreme Court’s judgements were seen by many as pro-development and anti-traditionalist. Several reiterations of this development myth are cited in Roy’s (1999) essay. Protestors were appalled at what they saw as the court’s myth-sustaining ruling, and Arundhati Roy’s vocal criticism of the judgement instantly attracted further court action (and she was sent to prison for a day for contempt of court in 2002). Later, as we shall see, the rhetoric of political disobedience calls into question precisely this development myth that has permeated, in the protestors’ view, the legal, political, fiduciary and civil discourses around the Narmada. Countering, and thus generating friction, the dominant or state culture’s interpretation of the dam as beneficial is the subordinated culture’s – the displaced’s – meaning-making around the Narmada. This counter-meaning treats the dam as evil, horrific and unjust, and involves a whole new set of myths. As part of their protests, the dwellers on the bank of the river generate the second major myth around the Narmada: that of the river as mother-goddess, once again bestowing a quasi-mystical and even religious iconicity to the river. Anand Patwardhan’s film My Narmada diary shows local cultures disappearing by focusing on the drowning of a religious icon.6 One frame shows a submerged temple, with just the pinnacle visible (Part 3 of the film), signifying the destruction of local icons and symbols, and one of the villagers says, in a quiet voice, ‘[B]ut it [the temple] is still there, so we hoist a flag over it.’ Visuals of Mata Narmada (‘Mother Narmada’) convert the river into a mythic figure. She is a mother-goddess in Patwardhan’s film, and in Pendharkar’s My Narmada travels and in photographs of the protest.

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Figure 1. Anti-dam protestor standing submerged in water, in the backdrop is a representation of ‘Goddess Narmada’.

Such a visual as this [Figure 1, from http://www.narmada.org/images.html] inscribes Narmada into an ancient Hindu tradition with two prominent cartographic rhetorics, the index locorum and the index nominum. The first, index locorum, is the indexing of places, and the second, the index nominum, is the indexing of names. The visual rhetoric names Narmada as a goddess and locates divinity in a place. The visual immediately confers a cultural legibility – Narmada as a goddess fits perfectly in with a Hinduised tradition (which of course renders it problematic in terms of the Dalits [‘outcasts’] within Hinduism, and other religious identities in post-independence India). It instantiates an entire ground of abstraction (religion, belief) even as it intervenes in this ground. By making explicit comparisons and constructing similitudes, the icon of river, worship and river-worship – Narmada in the above visual is all this – a topos constructs and enacts relations of land, people, faith and icon. A third myth that adds to the river’s celebrity is the nature–humanity link that is ascribed a quasi-mystical value in Arundhati Roy’s (1999) rhetoric: They [big dams] represent the severing of the link, not just the link – the understanding – between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

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In her celebrated essay, Roy offers Narmada as an icon of planetary consciousness, and mythicises a perfect harmony between humans and nature. Later, she appropriates a different myth – the river as a human lover – to speak of the connection between humans and the topoi of Narmada. Anthropomorphising the rivers (her example is of the Bargi Dam in Madhya Pradesh state), Roy writes of how the waters released without warning by the dam wash away crops and small gardens on which poor farmers depend. Roy (1999) writes, ‘Suddenly they can’t trust their river anymore. It’s like a loved one who has developed symptoms of psychosis. Anyone who has loved a river can tell you that the loss of a river is a terrible, aching thing.’ Protestors echo Roy in their statement of this ‘connection’ of humans and nature: When the Narmada would swell we would know rains were coming – the river and the rain were related. Now everything depends on the dam and the dam gates. The upper dams have affected the system of nature. Earlier we would know the four months when the monsoon would be here. In the third and fourth months, on full moon days, the river would swell. During the rains the river would behave just like a nala. […] Now because of the dam nothing is predictable, because the water is not flowing anymore and it depends on water released from the upper dams (cited in Routledge 2003, p. 249–250) A song written and sung by the protestors emphatically links the riverscape with human lives, declaring ‘this nature is/gives my/me life’ as can be seen and heard in Franny Armstrong’s (2002) film Drowned out. Another protestor says in the film, ‘[T]his forest is ours. This land is ours. Narmada is ours.’ This echoes the theme song constructed around Narmada’s topoi: Whose are the forests and the land? Ours, they are ours. Whose the wood, the fuel? Ours, they are ours. Whose the flowers and the grass? Ours, they are ours. Whose the cow, the cattle? Ours, they are ours. Whose are the bamboo groves? Ours, they are ours.

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Another displaced person, first acknowledging the drowning of houses, also focuses on the loss to nature – ‘[H]ere is such good forest, so much grass, and food and water for us’ – clearly attributing to nature the chances of a good life. In Pendharkar’s (2002) My Narmada travels, once again, the displaced point to the loss of forests – and complain that before the dam, they lived comfortably off the land. This, the third myth around the Narmada, produces a discourse of ‘ecological ethnicity’ (Parajuli 1996) that foregrounds the ancient and intimate links between land, river and people. The emphasis on local cultures, festivals and modes of agriculture foregrounds both nature and culture, and Narmada’s cultural legibility for its readers, as in this passage from Roy (1999): Instead of a forest from which they gathered everything they needed – food, fuel, fodder, rope, gum, tobacco, tooth powder, medicinal herbs, housing material – they earn between 10 and 20 rupees a day with which to feed and keep their families. Instead of a river, they have a hand pump. In their old villages, they had no money, but they were insured. If the rains failed, they had the forests to turn to. The river to fish in. Their livestock was their fixed deposit. Without all this, they’re a heartbeat away from destitution. This discourse of ecological ethnicity also posits the tribal as possessor of knowledge. It produces a dichotomy, as Roy does here, between local, practical and collective knowledge and the globalising, capitalist ‘modern’ knowledge (symbolised here in Roy’s prose in the handpump and, through the words ‘fixed deposit’, in banks). Roy’s underscoring of the immediacy of tribal experience as the source of authentic knowledge in fact proposes a bounded culture, limited, self-limiting and localised in the valley. The references to antiquarian agricultural pursuits – Roy explicitly references the gatherer stage of human revolution here in the above passage – serve as a fusion of past and present, where the past is valorised. Such a mythmaking as Roy’s clearly positions ‘local knowledge […] as a panacea for sustainability’, as Anja Nygren (1999, p. 268) terms it in her study of local knowledge discourses. The second and third myths might be seen as constituting the popular because they contest the appropriation of Narmada and the dam as modern, in that the river is seen as ancient and local, while the dam is seen as embodying the ‘culture of the powerful’ (Stuart Hall, cited in Marshall 1997, p. 45). The poster for the Narmada movement (Figure 2, from http://www.narmada. org/images.html) invites this interpretation when it calls upon us to ‘celebrate people’s history’.

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Figure 2. Poster of the anti-dam campaign.

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This is Narmada as Modern India, Narmada as Mother Nature and Narmada as Goddess, where the iconicity lies in its cultural legibility as mother, goddess and nation. But myths alone do not constitute celebratisation, and Narmada has generated its own rituals of protest, stereotypes and, following Lury (2012), social imaginary.

Rituals, Cultural Stereotypes and Protest Besides these various myths of the Narmada that are appropriated into the discourses of protest, using and representing the river-text as both nature and culture, are the rituals and stereotypes that have captured the protest imaginary of the nation as a whole. If connotation relies on a mass of intertextual detail (Marshall 1997, p. 58), we see in the protestors’ rhetoric scientific reports, newspaper coverage, human-interest personal stories and emotional social drama, much of it captured in Patkar’s and Roy’s rhetoric. In 2002 the protestors, led by Medha Patkar (one of the most visible faces of the Narmada movement), stood submerged in water to draw attention to their imminent condition should the Sardar Sarovar dam be built to its full height. See the visual records of this protest at http://www.narmada.org/ images/satyagraha2002/index.html. A decade later, the news reports carried a horrific visual. Protestors at Khandwa in the state of Madhya Pradesh submerged themselves in water in what they called ‘Jal Satyagraha’ or ‘water protest’. The published photograph showed the protestors being carried off, after 17 days of protest, their soles cracked and skins peeling off their bones (‘A cry from the sole’, 13 September 2012, http://www.thehindu.com/todayspaper/tp-national/a-cry-from-the-sole/article3891189.ece). NDTV news channel’s website described the protestors thus: ‘[T]heir bodies shrivelled, covered with rashes and with their skin peeling’.7 We see embodied in the visual a new grammar of protest emerging from anti-dam protests around the Narmada being appropriated elsewhere, circulating independent of contexts, and Narmada’s resultant conversion into a social-civil asset. Indeed, in September 2012 this unique form of protest was adopted by those objecting to the Kudankulam nuclear project, thus suggesting the dissemination of an entire grammar of protest originating in the events in the Narmada Valley. A significant point about the grammar of these protests developed out of the Narmada and the Khandwa visuals engages us here: one or two faces stare at the camera and what we perceive is the extent and numbers of several others, deep into the visual field of the photographs. Narmada’s iconicity, it would seem, lies in the iterability of its lexicon and not just its grammar. During the 1990 protests, Gandhian protestor Baba Amte tied the hands of the protestors before they embarked on the march so that none of them would

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be tempted to strike back should they be beaten down by the police in the course of their protests (cited in Gadgil and Guha 2009, p. 386). Recalling the anti-colonial struggle of Mahatma Gandhi that foregrounded non-violence – a sign with the highest cultural legibility and iterability, and one that gave the incipient nation then and later post-independence India an additional grammar of protest – the ‘ritual’ of binding hands and self-sacrifice is now part of the Narmada protest imaginary, just as the water protest is. Persistent rituals of this sort also rely upon stereotypes, and the Narmada protests are no different here. The most enduring cultural stereotype around the dam and the river has been that of an indifferent modernity represented in the characters of the Indian state, the SSP and the World Bank and their representatives. Seizing upon the state’s callous treatment of both nature and local cultures, and its rejection of all local knowledge, the stereotype of the Narmada as tribal/ aboriginal extends the myth of the human–nature harmony (a myth not entirely without foundation, one hastens to add). It generates a discourse of ecological ethnicity around tribal life, an ethnicity about to be destroyed by the ‘modernising’ Indian state. Once again, conflating the Narmada topoi as both Nature and Culture, we see in the antagonistic stereotyping – ecological ethnicity versus indifferent modernity – an important component of the cultural iconicity of the river. Much of the ritualising and stereotyping engages, as noted above, with both Nature and Culture, although the antagonistic stereotyping – in order to generate the required buzz around displacement and the human costs of big dams – shifts the focus marginally towards tribal culture and underscores its ecological ethnicity. By focusing on the hegemonic modernity of the dam constructed by Hall’s ‘culture of the powerful’ – which in Patkar’s rhetoric now includes the law – the protest rhetoric also makes the global–local friction, at the level of the river and tribal cultures, a productive site of disobedience (Patkar 1999). When the state has, under the principle of eminent domain, full right to resources, the state is expected to act in favour of the most disadvantaged communities and use the resources in such a way that the common good would be really achieved, of course, within the value frame work [sic] of equality and justice. […] [Instead] the state is using its power, its laws, ways and means, its police force, a physical brutal force, to take away the resources. […] That is like a privatized state, which is privatized by those small elite sections, and this is being done more and more and more brutally and crudely, in the new context of globalization and liberalization.8

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Patkar’s rhetoric of ‘political disobedience’ (Harcourt 2012) singles out political concepts (equality, justice), entities (the state, communities), apparatuses of power (the law) and contexts (local people, globalisation, liberalisation), and combines the discourse of environmentalism and that of social justice – or of Nature and Culture, in other words. This is the ‘friction’ (to use Anna Tsing’s term) where local interests and concerns come up against global forces and the state and bleeds (Tsing 2007). ‘Friction’ here is the contest and confluence of discourses around the Narmada. When Patkar, Roy and the campaigners provide the buzz of humanitarian and ecological disaster, their discourse rubs up against the state’s discourse of development (echoed by business houses), generating the friction – which we must note implies always a co-presence – that makes the icon. Narmada is at the intersection and interconnection of these (stereotyped) forces. Shifting from civil to political disobedience makes the Narmada protests a political project because, as Patkar’s and Roy’s rhetoric demonstrates, the actions of those displaced by the dam ‘resists the very way in which […] [the people] are governed. It rejects the idea of honoring or expressing the “highest respect for law”. It refuses to willingly accept the sanctions meted out by the legal and political system’ (Harcourt 2012, p. 34).9 The dam now comes to mean the tyranny of the state machinery and capital, all embedded within an indifferent modernity that rejects local values and beliefs. Narmada’s cultural legibility might be tracked to precisely this: the dam represents a larger crisis of Indian politics and polity, and thus moves beyond the immediate spatial and geographical and setting. The Narmada also becomes a celebrity topos because of the number and type of people displaced (‘PAPs’, or ‘project-affected people’, as these displaced are called) due to its waters. In this discourse of social justice, protestors elide the ecological effects of the dam to focus on the quantity and quality of human suffering. Therefore, Narmada also acquires a celebrity status – or notoriety – as the cause of human suffering. This discourse of social justice was inaugurated, historically, in the 1978 report of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal. The tribunal’s report was one of the first to define the ‘oustee’, the person displaced by the dam: An ‘oustee’ shall mean any person who since at least one year prior to the date of publication of the notification under Section 4 of the Act, has been ordinarily residing or cultivating land or carrying on any trade, occupation, or calling or working for gain in the area likely to be submerged permanently or temporarily.10

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Using this as a starting point, activists began speaking less of the river than the ‘communities of suffering’ (Pérouse de Montclos’ (2005) term for the discursive construction of refugees) produced by the river: ensuring that a whole segment of the human species was now identified as the ‘Narmada displaced’. The discourse gathered strength through World Bank reports. In 1980, the bank’s general resettlement policy declared that ‘upon resettlement, displaced persons should regain at least their previous standard of living’ (Berger 1993, p. 40). It later also issued directives (Nos. 4.20 and 4.30) that set out parameters for the resettlement of indigenous people (Narula 2008, p. 357). Using the people and the idea of justice as a factor another anti-dam activist, Baba Amte, wrote in his booklet Narmada bachhao (Save the Narmada), ‘Today the Narmada valley has become the arena for a new imagination and creativity, for a society in which there must be sufficiency for all before there is superfluity for some’.11 And Narmada’s celeb campaigner, Arundhati Roy, would state: [R]esettling 200,000 people in order to take (or pretend to take) drinking water to forty million – there’s something very wrong with the scale of operations here. This is Fascist maths. It strangles stories. Bludgeons details. And manages to blind perfectly reasonable people with its spurious, shining vision.12 The human cost of the dam has been very well documented. Again, Roy: In several resettlement sites, people have been dumped in rows of corrugated tin sheds which are furnaces in summer and fridges in winter. Some of them are located in dry river beds which, during the monsoon, turn into fast-flowing drifts. I’ve been to some of these ‘sites’. I’ve seen film footage of others: shivering children, perched like birds on the edges of charpais, while swirling waters enter their tin homes. Frightened, fevered eyes watch pots and pans carried through the doorway by the current, floating out into the flooded fields, thin fathers swimming after them to retrieve what they can. When the waters recede they leave ruin. Malaria, diarrhoea, sick cattle stranded in the slush. The ancient teak beams dismantled from their previous homes, carefully stacked away like postponed dreams, now spongy, rotten and unusable. Forty households were moved from Manibeli to a resettlement site in Maharashtra. In the first year, thirty-eight children died … 13

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Critics of the dam foreground the habitations, lives and cultural practices of the people around the river. Here is an instance of this component of the cultural discourse on Narmada: The link between nature and society is central to the religious belief of the adivasis of the hills. […] For Bhilalas, affecting nature’s cycle is intrinsic to a cosmology that imbues all natural phenomena with spiritual life, so that the hills, trees, stones and crops actively intervene in people’s daily life. The conjunction of the natural, spiritual and social worlds can be seen in the collective performance of the most important Bhilala ritual – indal pooja (the worship of the union of the rain and earth which brings forth grain). […] The gayana, creation myth sung during indal, links the origin of the world to the river Narmada. Adivasis refer to the river as Narmada mata (mother) … (Baviskar 1995, p. 90–91, emphasis in original) These moments, like the visuals of submerged and damaged bodies, are spectacles of suffering that acquire iconic status. Writing about magicianillusionist David Blaine’s spectacles, Anita Biressi (2004) speaks of his traumatised body as spectacle. The bystanders and witnesses to these bodies transform the suffering body into spectacle, for having suffered, endured, survived or been threatened. The theatre of protest acquires, through the camera’s visualisation of traumatised bodies in Narmada, the status of a theatre of extraordinary bodies. The suffering Adivasi, exoticised for this suffering, is made a spectacle of on screen and in print-media visuals. It is their tribe’s or community’s suffering that marks them, and especially their bodies, as readily identified bodies. The danger written into the visual narrative in these cases contributes to the celebritisation of suffering bodies, which then quickly enters the grammar of protest. Patwardhan’s film consistently focuses on the interdependences and connections between tribal peoples and the ecology of the river. The film also tells us how, as a result of the dam construction, tree-felling and deforestation has proceeded at a rapid pace.14 Adivasis, the victims say, are held responsible for this. As one tribal points out in Part 2 of the film, before the dam there were no roads into the forests and so nobody felled the trees. The tribals had no trucks to take the timber away. But now, with the roads for the dam, more vehicles come in and the trees are cut by contractors and taken away. So Patwardhan first shows how landscape is social (created, modified) within human projects and ‘natural’ (outside of human control and intervention), and second, shows how species – in this immediate example, trees – are connected to markets, the economy and cultural attention. Patwardhan thus points to the stereotype of

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an exploitative culture – capitalism, science and technology, the state – that damages the Nature that the tribals have always lived with/in. While admittedly a romantic-idealist view of the Adivasi–Nature linkage, the film draws attention to the ecocide that ‘development’ of this kind entails. The SSP, says the voiceover, ‘force[s] forest-dependant Adivasis into leaving their lands’. The film also shows local cultures disappearing. In Part 2, the film focuses on the World Bank visit to India. Mr Preston of the World Bank refuses to meet Patkar and sends word that any message she or the NBA might have might be sent to him. Patkar informs the tribals accompanying her that Mr Preston has no time for them because he is at a fashion show. By constructing this dichotomy of cultures, Patwardhan’s film institutes a politics of First-World capitalism versus Third-World dissent of the poor. Similarly, Patwardhan shows (in Part 4) how it is only the Gujarat business class and politicians who support the dam, because it would directly profit Gujarat with irrigation possibilities, help agri-business and industry. The Gujarat government therefore has labelled Narmada and the project ‘the lifeline of Gujarat’.15 The documentary also points to the inadequacy of binaries such as forests versus farms, development versus primitive culture, and nature conservation versus human livelihood, because it is impossible to distinguish these binaries in the Adivasi way of life in the ecosystem of the Narmada. Pendharkar, for instance, opens with a reference to the tribes of the Narmada as an ‘untouched people’, thus exoticising them through a distancing in time, even as the development project violently pulls them into global recognition. By referring to them as ‘untouched people’, Pendharkar also bestows upon them a certain vulnerability, and therefore constructs them as the subordinated cultures that battle the dominant one of capitalism and development. Her rhetoric also illustrates the point made above via Marshall (1997), that the celebrity emerges as a bridge between the subordinated and dominant cultures. Clearly, then, we see the two meanings – the dam as beneficial, generated by/from the dominant culture of the state, and the dam as evil, generated by the ‘subordinated’ cultures of the displaced – converge around Narmada. The Adivasis, as is clear from the protests, recognise these binaries, but do not consider them as part of their everyday life on the banks of the river, choosing to retain them as the rhetoric of leaders or politicians. In other words, none of the above supposedly universal environmental or development binaries and concepts have any local purchase. The Adivasi life as documented by these narratives also blurs the gap between ‘domesticated’ and ‘wild’, where the practices of farming, food-gathering and animal-rearing constantly move between the two (administrative) categories. Foraging continues as always, and there is also some domestication and agriculture: ‘jungle, farm, fodder’, as

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one villager tells Pendharkar. Thus we need to see the Narmada ecological ethnicity as natureculture where the discourses of nature and culture do not introduce an artificial split between ‘domesticated’ and ‘wild’. The human– non-human interactions produce a social landscape. Narmada’s ecology becomes a celebrity in part because, as Turner would say about celebrities in general, it serves as a ‘location for the interrogation and elaboration of cultural identity’ (Turner 2004, p. 24). If Patkar foregrounds the cultural difference between Mr Preston and the displaced, Patwardhan’s film uses the Adivasi way of life as a starting point to question the culture of big dams. The NBA’s initial stand was ‘rehabilitation before construction’, but eventually veered towards ‘no construction’. When the discourse divides between social justice and the environment, Narmada is seen as an instance where the dam’s construction has been unfair to both, while supposedly serving the cause of select people (the farmers who are to gain water resources once the dams are complete). Thus when Gail Omvedt16 critiqued Roy’s essay for ignoring the Dalit farmers who needed water and proposed that the dam be regulated in a decentralised manner, Ashish Kothari quickly shifted focus to the environmental consequences: EVEN IF A LARGE DAM CAN BE MADE TO WORK, AS MS. OMVEDT SAYS, IN A ‘DECENTRALISED’ MANNER AS FAR AS ITS SOCIAL AND POLITICAL FUNCTIONING GOES, THERE IS NO WAY IT CAN BE ENVIRONMENTALLY DECENTRALISED. It inevitably means a large-scale disruption of the river system, with inevitable large-scale impacts upstream, downstream, and at the river mouth. [emphasis in original]17 What we see here is the ‘integrating function’ of the celebrity river, bringing together NGOs, celebrity authors, government officials, students and nonresident Indians like Pendharkar to argue over its meaning and role. The integrating function of the sign may be traced to Narmada’s frictional discourses that then invest the river as the ‘face’ of multiple aspirations, ambitions, feuds and ideologies. An icon, says Bishnupriya Ghosh (2010, p. 337) in her reading of anti-Coca-Cola protests in Kerala, India, ‘activates a distinctive semiotic economy that lends itself to forging social bonds – to unifying a popular through signification’. Narmada-as-icon becomes, then, the vanguard of a national popular through its transmedial presence (evidenced by the large numbers of metropolitan students who joined the protests across India), cultural legibility and iterability. Even subaltern cultural productions such as the visuals from the Narmada protests now acquire a greater iterability, and therein lies Narmada’s iconicity. In its iterability, it intervenes in the social

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imaginary, producing similitudes and generating inferences (about state policy, for instance) and inducing continuity in movement, which, according to Lury (2012, p. 256–57), is what constitutes a brand as a brand). So Narmada merges into Khandwa merges into Kundankulam. At the centre of this set of changing relations and dynamics of people and the state, people of this region and people of that region, India and the world, is an icon generating a chain of inferences. A world of protest, anger and resistance, to paraphrase Lury, is being brought into the world. One further point. The Narmada grammar of protest did not generate a ‘face’ of a revolution. Although, as noted earlier, Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy are the most visible faces of the protests, I would argue that it is the river itself that acquires the iterability and recognisability as icon. Here it might be productive to treat the Narmada protests as being less about the ‘face’ of a revolution (as Gandhi was for India’s anticolonial struggle or Nelson Mandela for the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa) than the space of a struggle. I turn here to Mitchell’s (2012, p. 9) reading of the Occupy campaigns. Mitchell proposes that the Occupy campaigns lacked a ‘definite form or figure other than the dialectical poles of the mass and the individual, the assembled crowd and the lone, anonymous figure of resistance’. Despite Patkar and Roy, it is the space of the Narmada that attracts attention. The Narmada protests were also about occupation – of traditional dwellings and land – in the face of imminent state eviction, arrests and submergence. This is the translation of the space of the river as the space of resistance: the river is ‘occupied’, in one sense. Anonymous individuals and the masses of protestors perform, in Mitchell’s terms, an ‘occupatio’, ‘taking the initiative in a space where one knows in advance that there will be resistance and counterarguments’ (Mitchell 2012, p. 10). The submerged bodies in the pictures and the map of India constitute a remarkable sign of ‘occupy’ as well as evidence the ‘watery friction’ of my title. Water occupies homes, lands and lives. By submerging themselves, voluntarily, in the waters of the Narmada, the anonymous resisters assist in their own drowning and thus resist the state’s displacement or forced drowning.

Conclusion: Chronotope and Celebrity The seamless folding of the discourses of environmentalism and social justice, of nature and culture within the popular myths, and of protest rhetoric and state stereotyping converts Narmada into a chronotope that then becomes a celebrity icon, ironically transcending time and space.18 A chronotope, in Bakhtinian (1982, p. 84) terms, is a narrative strategy in literary writing where ‘time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and

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history’. It links people, a community, with places and events, fuses their past, present and future, which Bakhtin (1982, p. 85) terms ‘the simultaneous existence in literature of phenomena taken from widely separate periods of time’, even as it localises these events in terms of spatiality. In the case of the Narmada protests, if on the one hand these discourses perform the ecological ethnicity of the area, on the other they seek to move beyond the river’s immediate topoi, and thus produce the ‘Narmada chronotope’. It is in this metamorphosis that Narmada finally becomes fully celebratised. Narmada has been globalised. And this globalisation is double-edged. On the one hand it embodied, until such time as the World Bank was involved, the ways in which local resources, people and topoi became the object of global attention, exploitation and engagement. On the other, Narmada was transformed into a cultural media icon that stood for similar exploitative ‘globalisations’ of the local. Just as, in the case of a brand, the logo or sign is eventually separated from its origins, and even from the original product, Narmada is mediated into a brand that has, since the late 1990s, stopped being about the object (Narmada), events (dam construction) and place (the valley) and instead now serves as an ‘effect’: of the origin-ary protests and contexts but useable to denote globalisation.19 It moves away from the local (the Narmada valley), through its insertion into heavily mediated discourses against globalisation, and becomes a free-floating signifier to be appropriated by any social-civil protest against globalisation in contemporary India. Patkar in Patwardhan’s film makes this globalising move when she says that Manibeli (one of the first villages to be submerged) and its protests are not solitary: that, wherever in the world there are poor and oppressed people, and ‘right-thinking’ people, these protests will resonate. The battle against the SSP, says Patkar crucially, should not be restricted to the Adivasis alone. Thus Narmada makes the transition from a local problem into a national and global concern. Its ecological ethnicity becomes the starting point for an affective cosmopolitanism and transnational solidarity. The anti-dam protests have been projected as ‘symbolic of a global struggle for social and environmental justice’, and the NBA as a ‘symbol of hope for people’s movements all over the world that are fighting for just, equitable, and participatory development’, as the group Friends of River Narmada put it.20 The noted environmental historian Mahesh Rangarajan declared that ‘the NBA put the issues of displacement on the agenda in India and at the global level’ (quoted in Narula 2008, p. 368, emphasis added) and that, despite the dam being eventually finished, the entire campaign has ‘put the costs of the development agenda under the microscope’ in a manner that ‘will continue to have a major impact on public culture’ (quoted in Narula 2008,

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p. 368). Globally it has garnered international media attention for some time, including an invitation to Patkar to testify at a US Congressional hearing, and the Right Livelihood Award from the Swedish Right Livelihood Foundation. In the United States, 27 transnational NGOs organised a Stop Sardar Sarovar campaign. Full-page adverts about the SSP appeared in the New York Times (21 September 1992), the Financial Times (21 September 1992) and The Washington Post (21 September 1992). Patkar was also a part of the deliberations of World Commission on Dams. Patkar’s discourse of skewed globalisation has another aspect that brings a different iconicity to Narmada. Narmada’s moral stories also frequently invoke the immoral nature of development policies that initiate humanitarian crises such as the loss of livelihood, dwellings and community links, or what I referenced earlier as the cultural legibility and iterability of Narmada in the context of critiques of development. It is possible, I suggest, to make a case for Narmada becoming an icon for scandal. Scandals, as we know in the case of celebrities, thrive in the mass media because they deal with the moral values, anxieties or fantasies of the people as a whole (Bird 2003, p. 32). When Patkar, Roy and others propose the global value of the Narmada protests, they project the scandal of Third-World development as a larger thematic that must concern people in all parts of the world. They appeal to a ‘global imagination’ – a ‘collective way of seeing, understanding and feeling […] via an ongoing process of symbolic construction of the real and the possible in image and narrative’ (Orgad 2012, p. 3) – of similar scandals and disasters, and thus forge a link with the rest of the planet. Narmada’s iconicity, whose origins in the friction of discourses, it might be assumed, are now public knowledge, is carefully emplotted within the media representations in what can be called the ‘marketization of humanitarian practice’ (Chouliaraki 2013, p. 6). Focusing on scandalous policies, Narmada’s grammar of protest appeals to more than just development experts: it appeals to the global humanitarian regimes. Expanding and extending beyond its immediate spatial and temporal dimensions, Narmada’s iconicity is less about being an event than a scandalous, affect-ridden process. The river functions as a chronotope where time (ancient, or the time of the tribals’ forefathers, and the present, or the present-day threat of the dam) and space (of the hills, river and the under-construction dam) merge into a continuum. It also becomes a chronotope in another, more fascinating way: the villagers stand submerged in the river, determined to drown – Jal Samarpan (‘sacrifice by drowning’) – in their beloved river rather than shift. The submerged protest marks an interesting addition to the discourse on the idea of a ‘return to nature’. During the course of a discussion with Pendharkar regarding the value of this protest, one volunteer, Arundhati, recalls similar sacrifices made by volunteers during the Indian freedom struggle. The appeal

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to history and traditions of dissent and protest once again construct Narmada as a chronotope. Arundhati in fact states that, but for those early sacrifices, the present dissent would not have been possible. Pendharkar speaks in ecologicalethnic terms of the adivasis’ ‘age-old way of life’. Another resident of a soonto-be-submerged village speaks to Pendharkar of 12 generations of his family that lived on the same piece of land. This celebritised chronotope has a particular purchase in the present. The social movement around the Narmada demonstrates how the hegemony of the development programme can be rattled (although not yet fully unsettled, since the Supreme Court of India in 2000 ruled in favour of the dam at its original full height). Taking recourse to ancient connections, natureculture tropes and concepts, the chronotope disrupts the linear narrative that runs from primitivism to development. The chronotope also marks the interactions of the local with the global: the local environment campaign taking on a project funded for a time with global finance represented by the World Bank. This is the ‘friction’ of my title: the engagement of ecological ethnicity with globalised movements, of local interests with global concerns but also of multiple time frames, ancient and contemporary. We see this friction in, for instance, the World Bank’s independent review, which recommended that the bank stop funding the dam. This is what the review says: We think the Sardar Sarovar Projects as they stand are flawed, that resettlement and rehabilitation of all those displaced by the Projects is not possible under prevailing circumstances, and that environmental impacts of the Projects have not been properly considered or adequately addressed. Moreover we believe that the Bank shares responsibility with the borrower for the situation that has developed. […] We have decided that it would be irresponsible for us to patch together a series of recommendations on implementation when the flaws in the Projects are as obvious as they seem to us. As a result, we think that the wisest course would be for the Bank to step back from the Projects and consider them afresh. (Morse and Berger 1992, p. 8) People and the land are both the key pivots for the bank’s eventual pull-out from the project. As a chronotope, Narmada enables different ways of speaking, different worldviews and ideologies, very often in productive friction with each other. It is a chronotope for the movement of plot, history, time and state policy. It unifies time and space, and protest. The riverscape embodies, to adapt Bakhtin on the chronotope, places ‘where time and space intersect and fuse’ and where, as noted earlier, locality is temporal and time is localised. The

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Narmada chronotope reinstates the antiquity of tribal life (especially, as noted earlier, when writers like Arundhati Roy valorise the ‘primitive’ gatherer mode of sustenance of the tribals), the omniscient river, the flows of contemporary global capital and state power, and embodies these in folkloric songs and protest rhetoric. Thus geographic features often remind people of ancient moral stories and truths, and much of the discourse around Narmada consciously links people, time, topography and events from the past and drags them into the present. A celebrity ought to, if Graeme Turner is to be believed, interrogate and elaborate cultural identities. This is what Narmada achieves in its iconicity. Pro-dam advocates see the dam as iconic of a developing, modern India, and anti-dam protestors see it as anti-people and as a symbol of India’s growing selfish, capitalist and corporatised development, its indifferent modernity. By merging discourses, time frames and the local with the global, Narmada is celebratised. This globalisation of both capitalist modernity (in the state’s vision for/of the SSP) and protest (in the anti-dam voices) seems to approximate to the new turn to critical thought itself, driven by the crisis of global warming, towards universalising differential experiences of ecological threat and disaster that Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012) speaks of. Narmada instantiates, I suggest, such a turn. As a shorthand term for the friction of state discourses, environmentalism and humanitarian disaster, Narmada’s grammar of protests has impacted, like any celebrity (Nayar 2009, p. 29), the cultural economy in Indian civil society, generating furious debates about the state’s role, corporate greed and civil responsibilities. Its influence on latter-day protests remains to be studied, even as its iconicity has only intensified its valence with each reiteration. This is Narmada’s story.

Notes 1 2 3

Available from: http://www.ielrc.org/content/c0604.pdf. I am adapting the idea of a secular icon from Vicky Goldberg, via Cornelia Brink (2000). This is Goldberg’s (in Brink 2000, p. 136–137) definition of a secular icon: I take secular icons to be representations that inspire some degree of awe – perhaps mixed with dread, compassion, or aspiration – and that stand for an epoch or a system of beliefs. Although photographs easily acquire symbolic significance, they are not merely symbolic, they do not merely allude to something outside themselves … for photographs intensely and specifically represent their subjects. But the images I think of as icons almost instantly acquired symbolic overtones and larger frames of reference that endowed them with national or even worldwide significance. They concentrate the hopes and fears of millions

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4 5

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http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html. Michael Taussig (2012, p. 75–76) writing about Occupy signage argues that it is in the ‘hand-madeness of the signs, their artisanal crudity, art before the age of mechanical and digital reproduction’ that produces its ‘talismanic function, an incantatory drive’. Available on YouTube.com at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = Rexfjg0xGek&feature = player_embedded. See http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/jal-satyagraha-govt-agrees-to-protestersdemand-will-lower-water-level-in-dam-265484 (Accessed 5 October 2012). Interview by Venu Govindu with Medha Patkar, in Domkhedi, India Aug. 7, 1999, The Face of the Narmada; Available from: http://www.indiatogether.org/interviews/ iview-mpatkar.htm. Roy’s statements about the Indian judiciary after her token imprisonment in 2002 calls attention to the inadequacy, the belligerence and lack of introspection among the judges. See http://www.narmada.org/sc.contempt/aroy.stmt.mar7.2002.html (Accessed 27 October 2012). Clause XI, sub-clause 1(2), Report of the Narmada Water Disputes Tribunal, 1978, Available from: http:// www.sardarsarovardam.org/ assets/ SitepagesDocument/ SPD_ _ Userid2_20100402_104848.pdf (Accessed 5 October 2012). http://mss.niya.org/people/baba8_amte.php (Accessed 13 September 2012). http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html. http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html. The Gujarat government claims that ‘most of them [the forests to be submerged] are degraded forest’ – available from: http://www.sardarsarovardam.org/Client/answer. aspx (Accessed 13 November 2012). http:// webcache.googleusercontent.com/ search?q=cache:tlObdnVcKa8J:www. sardarsarovardam.org/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=in (Accessed 13 November 2012). http://www.narmada.org/debates/gail/gail.open.letter.html. See ‘An Open Letter to Gail Omvedt’s “Open Letter to Arundhati Roy” ’, 11 August 1999, emphasis in original; Available from: http://www.narmada.org/debates/gail/ ashish.response.html. Mikhail Bakhtin (1982, p. 84) defined the chronotope thus: We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The special meaning it has in relativity theory is not important for our purposes; we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). We understand the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature; we will not deal with the chronotope in other areas of culture. In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.

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I see the chronotope as the effect of discourse – literary or non-literary (what Bakhtin terms ‘other areas of culture’ in the above passage). My sense of the chronotope is therefore of a set of narrative modes where the account of a place fuses time, history and the topography in powerful tropes whereby any focus on spatial arrangements would automatically direct attention to temporality (such as history) and attention to the movement of time would involve recognising spatial locations. Lury (2012) writes that the brand ‘makes available for appropriation aspects of experience of product use as if they were effects of the brand’. Frow therefore proposes that the brand is divisible from the product. In this same way, Narmada protests do not any more have any original connection with the locale, object or event of the protests. Instead, Narmada is an effect that seems to circulate independent of the historical object. http://www.narmada.org/about-us.html.

References Armstrong, F., 2002. Drowned Out. Film. Bakhtin, M. M., 1982, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baviskar, A., 1995. In the Belly of the River. Delhi: Oxford. Berger, T. R., 1993. The World Bank’s independent review of India’s Sardar Sarovar Projects. American University International Law Review, 9 (1), 33–48. Bird, S.E., 2003. The Audience in Everyday Life: Living in a Media World. London and New York: Routledge. Biressi, A., 2004. Above the below: body trauma as spectacle in social/media space. Journal for Cultural Research, 8 (3), 335–52. Braudy, L., 1986. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York, NY: Oxford. Brink, C., 2000. Secular icons: looking at photographs from Nazi concentration camps. History & Memory, 12 (1), 135–50. Chakrabarty, D., 2012. Postcolonial studies and the challenge of climate change. New Literary History, 43, 1–18. Chouliaraki, L., 2013. The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Cambridge: Polity. De Montclos, M. A. P., 2005, Diasporas, Remittances and Africa South of the Sahara: A Strategic Assessment. ISS Monograph 112. Available from: http:// www.queensu.ca/ samp/ migrationresources/ Documents/ Montclos_ diasporas.pdf [Accessed 8 September 2013]. Frow, J., 2002, Signature and Brand. In: J. Collins, ed. High-Pop: Making Culture into Public Entertainment. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 56–74. Gadgil, M. and Guha, R., 2009. Ecological conflicts and the environmental movement in India. In: M. Rangarajan, ed. Environmental Issues in India: A Reader. New Delhi: Pearson, 385–428. Ghosh, B., 2010. Looking through Coca-Cola: global icons and the popular. Public Culture, 22 (2), 333–68. Harcourt, B. E., 2012. Political disobedience. Critical inquiry, 39 (1), 33–55. Kothari, A. and Ram, R. N., 1994. Environmental Impacts of the Sardar Sarovar Project. New Delhi: Kalpavriksh. Available from: http://www.narmada.org/ENV/index.html [Accessed: 16 September 2012].

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Lury, C., 2012. Bringing the world into the world: the material semiotics of contemporary culture. Distinktion, 13 (3), 247–60. Marshall, P. D., 1997. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota UP. Mitchell, W. J. T., 2012. Image, space, revolution: the arts of occupation. Critical inquiry, 39 (1), 8–32. Morse, B. and Berger, T., 1992. Sardar Sarovar: Report of the Independent Review. Ottawa: Resources Futures International. My narmada diary. 1995. Film. Directed by Anand Patwardhan and Simantini Dhuru. India: Patwardhan Films. Narula, S., 2008. The story of Narmada Bachao Andolan: human rights in the global economy and the struggle against the World Bank. New York University public law and legal theory working papers. Paper 106. Available from: http://lsr.nellco.org/nyu_plltwp/106 [Accessed: 16 September 2012]. Narmada: A valley rises. 1994. Film. Directed by: Ali Kazimi. Canada: Peripheral Visions Film & Video. Nayar, P. K., 2009. Seeing Stars: Spectacle, Society, Celebrity Culture. New Delhi: SAGE. Nygren, A., 1999. Local Knowledge in the Environment–Development Discourse: From dichotomies to situated knowledges. Critique of Anthropology, 19 (3), 267–288. Orgad, S., 2012. Media Representation and the Global Imagination. Cambridge: Polity. Parajuli, P., 1996. Ecological ethnicity in the making: developmentalist hegemonies and emergent identities in India. Identities, 3 (1–2), 15–59. Patkar, M., 1999. Interview by Venu Govindu, in The Face of the Narmada, 7 August. Available from: http://www.indiatogether.org/interviews/iview-mpatkar.htm. [Accessed 8 September 2013]. Pendharkar, L., 2002. My Narmada Travels. Available from: http://vimeo.com/4986595. [Accessed 8 September 2013]. Rajagopal, B., 2004. Limits of Law in Counter-Hegemonic Globalization: The Indian Supreme Court and the Narmada Valley Struggle. New Delhi: Working Paper Series, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Routledge, P., 2003. Voices of the dammed: discursive resistance amidst erasure in the Narmada Valley, India. Political Geography, 22, 243–70. Roy, A., 1999. The greater common good. Available from: http://www.narmada.org/gcg/ gcg.html.[Accessed 8 September 2013]. Taussig, M., 2012. I’m so angry i made a sign. Critical Inquiry, 39 (1), 56–88. Tsing, A. L., 2007. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Turner, G., 2004. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage.

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Chapter 9 MOBILITY AND INSURGENT CELEBRITYHOOD: THE CASE OF ARUNDHATI ROY Che adorns tee-shirts, coffee-mugs, stationery, caps and any number of material objects, most of which have little to do with the avowedly left-oriented social reformer and revolutionary. “Regimes of value,” as John Frow reminds us (2002), organise the aesthetic space in which an icon is circulated: so Che’s visage circulates simultaneously among dissident teenagers, grunge dressing and high-end fashion products just as his Motorcycle Diaries does. “Insurgent celebrityhood” is my term for the inextricable link of mobility with dissidence, a mobility that then, within the regimes of value of contemporary popular and public culture enables the mobilisation of protest, sentiments and political activism. The sense of mobility is of course embedded in the very word “insurgence,” from “insurgere,” meaning “to rise up in revolt.” Starting off her career as a scriptwriter for films, receiving critical acclaim and literary celebritydom for The God of Small Things (1997), and finally a substantial mass popularity among activists stemming from her association with the Narmada Bachao Andolan, Roy has demonstrated a kind of celebrity that is rare in India. For a literary figure to metamorphose into a cultural commentator is fairly easy—in recent times we have seen the best-selling author Chetan Bhagat do this. For an academic to be involved in public debates is also common enough (Amartya Sen, Ramachandra Guha, Ashis Nandy, Romila Thapar, Shiv Vishvanathan, Kancha Ilaiah).1 Her early activist writing included a clinical-yet-poetic dissection of Shekar Kapur’s biopic, Bandit Queen, on the Indian woman bandit, Phoolan Devi (Roy’s review essay, “The Great Indian Rape Trick” appeared in two parts in 1994 in the now-defunct periodical Sunday, well before the release of her novel). In this early piece, Roy made an explicitly feminist reading of the film, arguing that it rendered the protagonist only as a rape-victim but, most importantly, ignored the caste and land-ownership angle which Mala Sen’s biography (which Shekar Kapur adapted) highlighted, and neutralised the rebel-woman. The debate provoked

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by Roy’s defence of the woman bandit (see, notably, Sen 1995) gave the world the first glimpse of what Roy clearly does: it discerns, and it divides readers. What Roy has however achieved is cross-genre celebrityhood with economics, politics, sociocultural processes and practices and literature, all being domains in which she has made her presence and contributions. In this essay, I propose that Arundhati Roy, Indian novelist, polemicist and activist, demonstrates an insurgent celebrityhood whose primary process I take to be mobility. Central to Roy’s celebrityhood is an unparalleled and admirable series of mobilities. By “mobility” I intend the facility, fluency, felicity and frequency of entering into multiple domains of public life, from the political to the cultural. Roy’s mobility is across genres, geopolitical and cultural borders and political concerns. While this mobility generates her insurgent celebritydom globally, it also enables a mobilisation, founded on her participation in the precariat public sphere writ globally. By “precariat public sphere” I mean (i) that public sphere made up of the “precarious lives” (Judith Butler’s now-renowned construction, 2004) Roy spoke for, (ii) a public sphere made of the bourgeois but whose concerns and politics lay with these classes and (iii) a public sphere constituted by a sense of precarity that haunts the vast majority of Indians. This precariat public sphere might be seen in the visual and verbal representations of protests against Kundamkulam nuclear projects, the Narmada dam, tribal rights campaigns in Kerala, among others, all sharing, as has been argued (Nayar 2013), a common grammar. This essay instantiates the belief that new forms of political protests demand and generate new rhetorical, generic and discursive modes, and that Arundhati Roy’s success and effect as a polemicist drawing upon literary tropes and political communications strategies ensures her celebritydom across domains. The essay demonstrates, further, that in Roy’s case the literary and political are not separate domains: her brilliance has been to harness the two in terms of discursive shifts and rhetorical devices. In 2002 a commentator in The Hindu summarised Roy’s public persona when he wrote: “instinctively she understands how all politics is a form of theatre and her very stature speaks eloquently of a David and Goliath battle” (Reddy 2002). An academic essay puts it this way: “there is no ideological break between the novel [The God of Small Things] and Roy’s subsequent writings” (Baneth-Nouailhetas 95). The comments presciently point to the theatrical spectacle, the rhetorical flourishes and the drama she brings through her prose to the public appeals, and the public appearance with which she vivifies her prose.

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Generic Mobility When in 1997 Roy’s The God of Small Things won the Booker Prize, it immediately acquired a visibility and inserted itself into an unverifiable but palpable regime of value: Indian cultural and national identity writ globally. Nineteen ninety-seven was also the 50th year of India’s independence. Besides Roy, two of India’s beauty queens, Aishwarya Rai and Sushmita Sen, won international beauty contests and would go on to become Bollywood stars. Roy became integral to a celebratory “50 years of Independent India.” The novel itself with its linguistic and formal experimentation acquired opprobrium and fan-following among the small percentile of readers of English-language fiction. Roy has not published a novel since this one to date (she releases her second in June 2017, two decades after The God of Small Things). The novel’s success was, indisputably, within the elite Englishspeaking classes. But it also acquired academic respectability with MPhil and PhD dissertations, critical anthologies, essays and conference papers appearing across English and Comparative Literature Departments in India. One of the first indications of the times to come may have appeared early— the discussions around Roy’s portrayal of caste and gender oppression in the work of fiction. The academic and intellectual discussion was, expectedly, divided on her allegiance to conservative (or worse, neo-con) ideologies and her radicalism. This effectively laid, I propose, the grounds for Roy’s generic mobility. Roy’s ability to move across genres, and experiment with them, is an instance of “generic engineering” (I borrow Joseph Slaughter’s term, 2007, suggesting the alteration, hybridization and adaption of genres for one’s own political purpose—for instance the use of comic books to speak of serious topics such as the Holocaust or Human Rights). Appropriating the languages of political polemics but casting it within the rhetoric of sentiment—she feels for her nation, the rivers, the oppressed—that marks the personal essay, Roy engineers the very genre of the political essay. Personalising her approach to political issues as she transforms the engagement with ideas of constitutionality, democracy or nationalism, as I shall demonstrate, renders her work an excellent instance of the postcolonial appropriation—and abrogation—of the English language itself. The tag of elitism, given that she wrote her novel in English, might have become the proverbial millstone and immoveable anchor for Roy, tethering her to the identity of being just another bright English novelist from India, taken up by the West. Roy’s first essays, also in English, were signs that she would not stay elitist, even if the language of writing was at once poetic (elite again), polemical and highly reflective, all at once. “The Great Indian

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Rape Trick” (1994, before her novel) “The End of Imagination” (1998), “The Greater Common Good” (1999), “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” (2001) and other essays from her early phase, against India’s nuclearization program, Big Dams and development policies enabled Roy to undertake a migration: from being the creator of perhaps-radical literary figures and fictions to a commentator with anti-establishment (i.e., anti-state and anti-corporate) views. Retaining the register of English polemics—one can sense George Orwell, Salman Rushdie but also Alan Badiou in her early work—Roy proceeded to align herself firmly with concerns of the underdog. I propose that generic mobility in Roy denaturalized her as a writer of English fiction. In the midst of debates about the “authenticity” of Indian writing in English (Chandra 2000; Sunder Rajan 2001), Roy quietly slipped into the role of “voice of the oppressed,” that oft-used and well-recognized academic phrase. Roy’s work did not at any point lapse into colloquialisms or take recourse to idiomatic expressions from rural India and folklore, even as she borrows yuppie slang, political languages of citizenship and rights freely and scatters her prose with interesting turns of highly visual phrase (“I could see little children with littler goats scuttling across the landscape like motorized peanuts,” “The Greater Common Good”). She stayed with English, but what she achieved in the course of her generic mobility was shift the regime of value in which her high-English prose would be read and evaluated: a regime of value that locates her within the tradition of dissident writing, political commentary and social polemics. What shall we do then, those of us who are still alive? Burned and blind and bald and ill, carrying the cancerous carcases of our children in our arms, where shall we go? What shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we breathe? (Roy, “The End of Imagination,”) The alliterative prose of Roy is an unusual choice of language, surely, but one that readily fits into the affective public sphere. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic … They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land, and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich … Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. (Roy, “The Greater Common Good”) Merging the language of economics, politics, rights with yuppie/youth slang and idiomatic expressions Roy here makes the larger point about the ineffectual nature of Big Dams.

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I would go so far as to propose that Roy’s prose and generic innovations— polemics in precise, poetic prose—that would have otherwise rung hollow and inauthentic in terms of its connections with the oppressed and disenfranchised social classes the prose was supposed to represent, implicitly suggests that the real conditions on the ground were essentially untranslatable into a “proper” idiom. In other words, Roy performed an act of “generic engineering” by making it possible to situate, or embed, the local voices of resistance—the Narmada displaced—within a global grammar of rights, responsibilities and accountability. The search for a wide-ranging idiom of Human Rights has been on for some time. Upendar Baxi asks: How far do these [the narrative voices of the oppressed] translate the variegated adopted/imposed/borrowed grammars of international human rights as expressive of the pain, sorrow, and suffering of constantly disenfranchised humans? How may one translate the vernacular languages of human violation, abuse, and suffering into the inclusive/ commodious normative languages of contemporary human rights? To what extent may contemporary human rights languages advance the task of constructing languages of our shared political and social responsiveness and responsibility to redress human abuse, violation and violence? (xxv–xxvi) Roy, situating herself on the side of the precariat public sphere, finds the answers to Baxi’s questions in her choice of language and rhetoric. Conscious of the metropolitan and elite readers of her English prose, Roy constructed cultural texts that were equal parts emotion, political logic, interrogatives and subjective expressions. Roy altered the language of protest the English-reading public of India had become familiar with, thanks to the writings of P. Sainath, Harsh Mander and Kancha Ilaiah by demonstrating how multiple rhetorics could serve the purpose of raising consciousness. Where Kancha Ilaiah relies heavily on Ambedkarite political thought, Sainath on economics and Harsh Mander on civil action, Roy merges all of them in her intergeneric prose. Retaining the elitism of English, Roy managed to reposition herself within the precariat public sphere. Aligned more with the subaltern public sphere with a distinct emphasis on the precarity of lives lived in the shadow of displacement, starvation, unemployment and even massacres, the precariat public sphere that Roy hopes to stand for partakes of the languages of protest adapted from the bourgeois public sphere but fitted into the affective language of the subalterns.2 This style of Roy’s generic engineering is the response to Baxi’s questions: the

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language of political rights, of citizenship and universal human rights might need to be infused with the language of affect and silences of the precariat public sphere. There is no one language of human rights: testimonies, Truth Commissions, Amnesty Reports, newspaper coverage and exposés such as from Abu Ghraib are mixed and matched in the kind of generic engineering that Roy indulges in. The grammar of human rights and the grammar of protests were appropriated by Roy and recast within languages of fervent appeal, subjective responses and cultural questions about citizenship and rights. I propose that the shift toward the precariat public sphere attained through her slippery, complex and poetic registers, gave Roy a cultural legibility and legitimacy that was far more than just an extension of her literary legibility. Starting with fictional characters like Velutha and Ammu of The God of Small Things, Roy went on to assimilate such numerous nameless but real lower castes and women, direct and indirect victims of globalisation, development and state indifference, into her grammar. With the use of such nameless, faceless figures disenfranchised by historical processes (for instance, the Narmada dam), Roy gives them a space of representation, a certain cultural legibility. Indeed, it could be said that the defacement achieved by the project is precisely what constitutes its “face,” exemplified by the saddened or withered visages often seen in photographs of the displaced. Roy manages to yoke together the more innovative and high-cultural dimensions of the English polemical tradition with a subjective and, shall we say folkloric, grassroots embeddedness. Her English makes her mobility into global visibility easier. Her frequently subjective tone situates her in sharp dissonance with the so-called “rational public sphere” (if we accept the Habermasian construction, that is) but within the folkloric schema of local protests. Finally, her language of political citizenship and rights appropriates globally recognised languages of, say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Mobility Roy’s career moves from her cosmopolitan domain to the vernacular—by which I really mean her association with the precariat—where she deploys her cosmopolitan cultural capital (English, political idea(s) of citizenship) in order to furnish her vernacularisation. Then, of course, she takes the vernacular to the cosmopolitan stage again, when she speaks in the United States, gives interviews to the UK’s Guardian (2014) and other such global cultural spaces. But what makes Roy’s work exceptional is the harnessing of cosmopolitanism and transnationalism to the vernacular and the local.

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In “Listening to the Grasshoppers” (2008) she aligns the genocide of Armenians (1915), Rwanda (1999) and others with the massacre of 2000-plus Muslims in post-Godhra Gujarat (2002). Roy uses the word lebensraum (“living space”), Nazi Germany’s key concept which argued that vast European lands need to be annexed to create adequate living space for Germans, in this essay. Later, she notes how survivors of genocides, whether Armenians or Muslims, live in ghettos and camps built on garbage heaps. Roy takes an extraordinarily discriminatory, even violent, concept that eventually climaxed in Nazi Germany’s pursuit of empire and extermination, to point out on-the-ground condition in, say Gujarat, India, of refugees and survivors. It is almost as though the Nazi concept offers Roy the exact register and idiom in which to speak of the conditions in post-riots Gujarat and the anti-minoritarianism of Indian democracy itself. But she also uses the term to caution us: an idea of living space that concretized first as “mere” discrimination culminated in genocide. When writing about Seattle’s anti-WTO protests and American imperialism (“People vs. Empire,” 2004), Roy once again uses global events to address Indian concerns. She starts with American imperialism and its use of the “public” (Roy notes that “government” and “the people” are merged in the actions of the United States) and then shoehorns in the point that, in India, there is no ideological difference between the Congress Party and the right-wing, pro-Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In her analysis, therefore, Roy develops a cosmopolitanism that addresses the vernacular condition in the idiom of an international problem (Empire) and solution (civil-civic resistance). By vernacularizing social protests such as Seattle and by appropriating the languages of global protests, Roy swiftly aligns herself simultaneously with both. Critiquing the 27-floor home, “Antilla,” of the billionaire Mukesh Ambani, Roy links capitalism, civil liberties campaigns and wars in the First World. She also notes with distress the sources of funding of activist campaigns and NGOs, whether in India, South Africa or in the First World, often lie in Ford, Coca-Cola and Lehman brothers. Roy acknowledges, however, that “another language has appeared on US streets and campuses” thanks to “Occupy” (“Capitalism: A Ghost Story,” 2012). When commenting on the horrific Khairlanji killings of Dalits (2006), Roy aligns the dead and unrepresented victims with the survivor-heroine Malala Yousufzai (“Indiass Shame,” 2014). In her controversial Introduction to a new edition of BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (2014), Roy incessantly draws connections between American racism, India’s caste-based discrimination and the transnationalisation of the latter. Roy notes that caste exists among upwardly mobile Indian immigrants in the First World as well. Here, in particular, Roy effectively brings together her literary portraits of caste-based discrimination,

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globalisation and the changing social order in Kerala state, south India, in The God of Small Things with the national and global issues around discrimination in general. I return here briefly to my earlier argument (Nayar 2013) about Roy’s finessing of local concerns with larger, global protest projects. Akin to what a critic has described as “Roy’s aesthetics of the small and minute in her novel and contemporary events [that are] therefore political” (Baneth-Nouailhetas 97), Roy’s emphasis in “The Greater Common Good,” on local farming techniques, local farmers’ expertise and local knowledge is central to the way she globalizes Narmada and herself. I argued then that Roy constructs a dichotomy between local, practical and collective knowledge and the globalising, capitalist “modern” knowledge. Roy, I now propose, demonstrates a remarkable rhetorical and political cosmopolitanisation of the vernacular and vice versa. If cosmopolitanism is at once a response born of “shared judgments about particular cases” (Appiah 223) it is also a “reflective distance from one’s original or primary cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and contexts, and a belief in universal Humanity” (Anderson 63). But, Lauren Goodlad points out, cosmopolitanism grows out of new transnational movements of goods and people, industrialisation and geopolitics (400–1). Note how Roy’s work demonstrates these aspects of cosmopolitanism, even as she clings tenaciously to root causes and local mobilisations. The focus, clearly, is a global precariat public sphere. When asked to speak about “how to confront Empire” at the World Social Forum in 2003, Roy says: “[i] n many countries, Empire has sprouted other subsidiary heads, some dangerous byproducts—nationalism, religious bigotry, fascism and, of course, terrorism. All these march arm in arm with the project of corporate globalisation” (“Confronting Empire”). Her immediate example of such a corporate globalisation is, interestingly, India, and how it sells its “water, electricity, oil, coal, steel, health, education, and telecommunication” (“Confronting Empire,” 2003). In another essay, she does the reverse, fitting herself into an entirely different context of oppression and thus embedding herself in a cosmopolitan history of the precariat public sphere. While apologising for criticising the United States despite not being an American, Roy concludes the apologia with: “[m]ay I clarify that I speak as a subject of the U.S. empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticise her king” (“The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky,” 2003). Roy’s rhetoric finesses America’s most shameful history—slavery—with neo-colonialism (Empire) and globalisation. Separating herself from the United States and yet inserting herself into a global precariat public sphere, Roy performs a mobility across geopolitical borders but also histories, forms of

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oppression and social groups. An emerging (emergent?) global subaltern class consisting of migrants, low-wage workers, refugees and dispossessed whose lives are subject to the neo-colonial norms and operations of work, labour and capital makes up this global precariat public sphere Roy draws attention to—and this is the tragic result of Empire.3 Roy’s technique has been, right from the early essays, to never abandon the local for the global and thus embodies what has been variously termed “vernacular cosmopolitanism” (Werbner 2006) and “territorialized cosmopolitanism” (Johannsen 2008). Roy’s celebrityhood, I argue, stems from this constant mobility across geopolitical borders and various subaltern groups in different parts of the world. The only constant in this process of mobility is her attention to the precarious lives—an attention instantiated in her rhetoric of empathy, civil society engagements and protests while adopting symbols, actions and processes from the larger world of “resistance.” Inventorying, as Roy is prone to do in her writings, merely serves to provide a multisite location for her mobility and consequent rhetoric of protest and resistance.

Mobility and Mobilisation A significant, and perhaps expected, consequence of the above two mobilities for Roy has been the kind of mobilisation around her. Her participation in the precariat public sphere through activism and the rhetoric she deploys has generated an interest, fan base and followers among university students, journalists, international and national activists, polemicists and the disempowered. Roy’s “insurgent celebrityhood,” in other words, is not only about her own mobilities, but also about mobilization of insurgents (I use the term, not as a pejorative but to signify those whose views, antagonistic to that of the state, causes them to launch campaigns and activist programs, not all of which are armed struggles.)4 In the first key essay, “The End of Imagination,” she threatened to secede from the state of India. She underwent a much-publicised one-day imprisonment for contempt of court. Such generic innovations with emotion, rhetoric and opinion in Roy’s speeches and writings have combined with definitive symbolic gestures such as the above might suggest style over substance.5 I propose that Roy’s initial stardom as a literary figure folds, or shades, into a staractivist for the Narmada and against globalisation. This fits in with the late twentieth century’s use of fame in political culture (Street 2003, 2004). I see Roy’s mobility across genres and geopolitical/cultural borders as a performance that furthers a political project. In this reading, I adapt John Street’s idea of “celebrity performance.” Street outlines it as follows:

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[I]n focusing on the style in which politics is presented, we need to go beyond mere description of the gestures and images. We need to assess them, to think about them as performances and to apply critical language appropriate to this … To see politics as coterminous with popular culture is not to assume that it is diminished … The point is to use this approach to discover the appropriate critical language with which to analyse it. (Street “The Celebrity Politician” 97) Street’s arguments about performance gesture clearly at a different order and style of political performance and diplomacy. Roy, I suggest, makes use of her stardom in one domain and performs in another—it is notable that 18 years have passed, at the time of writing, and she has not published another literary piece, which seems to gesture at this shift of domains. This is not to take away from the efficacy of the style in the ways in which it contributes to her political work. The affective prose, the subjective tone, the polemical outbursts, the citation of world events are performances, adapted from the field she specialised in—film script writing, literary fictions—that Roy choreographs and stylizes her appearances in order to express her solidarity with and mobilisation of the precariat public sphere of the world. As theatre, it works effectively, and if Street is correct in his argument, a new form of public and political diplomacy/activism is now emerging with the likes of Roy. Cutting across popular culture and elite political commentaries, embeddedness in grassroots lives and futures, this performance by Roy is the centrepiece of a new political idiom. “Mobilization” here is a mix of fan-following and political grouping, and Roy’s audiences and fellow-activists ranging from Noam Chomsky to NYU students to Adivasis in the Narmada basin, seems to suggest that her generic engineering and performance of mobilities does generate a political effect. Given the fact that Roy’s focus seems to be the world’s subalterns, it is logical that no one style can fit the requirements of mobilisation. To be an insurgent celebrity then, in Roy’s case, is to be able to fit into multiple forms of insurgent prose (I call it “dissident writing,” for two reasons: the generic engineering Roy undertakes that refuses to be categorized easily and is thus dissident within writing conventions, and the writing itself as dissident within public culture resisting the state and the corporate worlds) and insurgent populations. Without her mobilities that effect this “fit” her mobilisations are unthinkable. I align Roy’s mobility-driven mobilisations as a mode of political resistance that Bernard Harcourt has termed “political disobedience” (2012). Harcourt defines this form of political disobedience as:

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political disobedience … resists the very way in which we are governed. It rejects the idea of honoring or expressing the “highest respect for law.” It refuses to willingly accept the sanctions meted out by the legal and political system. It challenges the conventional way that political governance takes place, that laws are enforced. It turns its back on the political institutions and actors who govern us all. It resists the structure of partisan politics, the traditional demand for policy reforms, the call for party identification, and, beyond that, the very ideologies that have dominated the postwar period. (34) I propose that by possessing and “occupying” multisite political spaces, as Roy does with her mobilities, she is able to ensure that the state in all cases, whether the USA’s crony capitalism or India’s corporatized democracy, with adequate support from the judiciary and the political parties, is to blame for the injustice to the precariat. That is, Roy generates a political disobedience whose primary target remains the state and its apparatuses, across the world. Just as the “Occupy” campaign, located in one city, one street, focused on how Wall Street as the “enemy” of “all people” and “the environment” (visuals of the campaign in Taussig 60), Roy’s rhetoric encompasses the world. Rather than focus on, say, India’s state-organized development plans (of which the Narmada is the best known), Roy builds common cause with victims of the older institution of American slavery, of contemporary global neo-cons, and numerous such cross-border, transnational issues and peoples. Political disobedience of the sort Roy participates in is possible, I argue, only because of the mobility regime she inhabits. The state, in Roy’s mobilisation of political disobedience and insurgency, is always to blame. That since Roy’s first essays the multiplication of platforms for the dissemination of opinions and commentaries have emerged in the form of online forums, blogging and transmedia journals and columns ensures that polemical essays and opinions generate online activism. Roy’s work, which now appears in numerous caches of online content and archives, is a part of the global shift to online dissident writings and polemics, where, as Gillian Whitlock (2007) has argued, dissident bloggers become stars and the online circulation of their texts serve as “soft weapons” in the cause of radical movements. Roy’s own rhetorical, geopolitical and cultural mobilities ensure audiences across the world and different social layers. Refusing to be reified into a mere polemicist or novelist, Roy ensures that her mobility is grounded in the new style of contemporary politics and the discourses that make up the precariat public sphere, anywhere in the world. Her insurgent celebrityhood is founded on mobilities, whether in rhetoric or political concerns. As an icon or brand, Arundhati Roy can now circulate in the world’s insurgent conglomerations

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independent of her celebrated novel and even her Indianness. The mobilities documented above make her a participant in multiple sites of protest so that her concerns lie beyond territorial borders, in a global precariat public sphere, well in keeping with the politics demanded of us in the age of globalisation.

Notes 1

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I have elsewhere argued that Indian Writing in English, as a genre, has become a celebrity partly because of the public engagements of the authors, and for various other reasons (Nayar 2014). Commentators like Nancy Fraser have pointed to the inadequacy of Habermasian theory of rational dialogue as the cornerstone of the public sphere. Sentiment and affect have increasingly come in for attention from those who see “public feelings” as central to the way societies and cultures, and even nations, see and talk about themselves (Berlant 2004, 2011; Cvetkovich 2012). Empire here is used in the Hardt-Negri (2000) sense. This Empire is decentered, rhizomatic and near-ghostly and embodies the present stage of capitalism Roy’s outspoken sympathies for the Maoist (communism-inspired insurgents advocating armed struggle against the state) has often resulted in awkward situations. For instance, in one talk she unambiguously vouchsafed support for the armed resistance of the Maoists – just after they had gunned down women and children in a village (see http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/I-didnt-term-Maoists-as-Gandhians-withguns-Arundhati-Roy/articleshow/6005215.cms). Douglas Kellner had argued that this dominance of style over substance is the key problem with celebrity diplomacy (2010).

References Anderson, Amanda. The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Reading.” Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture. Ed. Vinay Dharwadkar. New York: Routledge, 2001: 199–227. Baneth-Nouailhetas, Emilienne. “Committed Writing, Committed Writer?” Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy. Eds. Ranjan Ghosh and Antonia Navarro-Tejero. New York and London: Routledge, 2009: 93–104. Baxi, Upendar. The Future of Human Rights. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Berlant, Lauren. Ed. Compassion. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. ———.Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Chandra, Vikram. “The Cult of Authenticity.” Boston Review, Feb. 1, 2000. 42–49. ———.“Arty Goddesses.” The Hindu (n.d.). Web. 1 April 2001. Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Fraser, Nancy. “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy.” Social Text 25–26 (1992): 56–80.

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Frow, John. “Signature and Brand.” High-Pop: Making Culture into Popular Entertainment. Ed. Jim Collins. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002: 27–61. Goodlad, Lauren. “Cosmopolitanism’s Actually Existing Beyond: Toward a Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic.” Victorian Literature and Culture 38 (2010): 399–411. Harcourt, Bernard E. “Political Disobedience.” Critical Inquiry 39.1 (2012): 33–55. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Johannsen, Emily. “Imagining the Global and the Rural: Rural Cosmopolitanism in Sharon Butala’s The Garden of Eden and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.” Postcolonial Text 4.3 (2008). Kellner, Douglas. “Celebrity Diplomacy, Spectacle and Barack Obama.” Celebrity Studies 1.1 (2010): 121–23. Nayar, Pramod K. States of Sentiment: Exploring the Cultures of Emotions. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan, 2012. Nayar, Pramod K. “Watery Friction: The River Narmada, Celebrity and New Grammars of Protest.” Celebrity Studies 4.3 (2013): 292–310. ———.“Indian Writing in English as Celebrity.” Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market. Eds. Om Prakash Dwivedi and Lisa Lau. London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014: 32–47. Reddy, K. Ganapathi. “Arundhati Roy.” The Hindu. 2 April 2017. Web. April 9, 2002.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New Delhi: IndiaInk, 1997. ———.“The End of Imagination.” Frontline August 1–14, 1998. ———.“The Greater Common Good.” Frontline 22 May–4 June 1999. ———.“The Algebra of Infinite Justice.” The Guardian 29 Sept. 2001. ———.“Confronting Empire.” Outlook India 30 Jan. 2003. ———.“The Loneliness of Noam Chomsky.” Outlook India 02 Sept. 2003. ———.““People vs. Empire.” In These Times 7 Dec. 2004. ———.“Listening to the Grasshoppers.” Countercurrents 26 Jan. 2008. ———.“Capitalism: A Ghost Story.” Outlook India 26 Mar. 2012. ———.“India’s Shame.” Prospect Magazine 13 Nov. 2014. ———.“The Doctor and the Saint.” Introduction to BR Ambedkar. Annihilation of Caste. Ed. S. Anand. New Delhi: Navayana, 2014: 17–179. ———.Interview with Andrew Anthony. The Guardian. 23 Nov. 2014. Sen, Mala. “Right of Reply: “Bandit Queen” Gives It to You Straight.” The Independent 2 Mar. 1995. Web. 2 April 2017.

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Slaughter, Joseph R. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Street, John. “The Celebrity Politician: Political Style and Popular Culture.” The Media and the Restyling of Politics. Eds. John Corner and D. Pels London: Sage, 2003: 85–98. ———.“Celebrity Politicians: Popular Culture and Political Representation.” British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 6.4 (2004): 435–52. Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari. “Writing in English in India, Again.” The Hindu Feb. 18, 2001.

———.“Dealing with Anxieties—II.” The Hindu Feb. 25, 2001. Taussig, Michael. “I’m So Angry I Made a Sign.” Critical Inquiry 39.1 (2012): 56–88. Werbner, Pnina. “Understanding Vernacular Cosmopolitanism.” Anthropology News 47.5 (2006): 7–11. Whitlock, Gillian. Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2007.

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Chapter 10 DESECRATION AND THE POLITICS OF ‘IMAGE POLLUTION’: AMBEDKAR STATUES AND THE ‘SCULPTURAL ENCOUNTER’ IN INDIA Indian newspapers periodically report the desecration of statues of Dr B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956), the man who drafted the constitution of India.1 Ambedkar, born in the middle-Indian state of Maharashtra, acquired a PhD and a DSc in Economics from Columbia and the London School of Economics, besides being invited to the bar at Grey’s Inn (London). He returned to India from the USA and UK in the 1920s and started practising in the Bombay High Court. Increasingly involved with India’s freedom struggle, Ambedkar foregrounded the special requirements of the ‘oppressed classes’ as the ‘untouchable’ castes were called. By the late 1920s, Ambedkar had launched campaigns for the education of these communities, their political rights and against the social ostracisation and exploitation they experienced. Writing, speaking and campaigning tirelessly, often in the face of truculent upper-caste animosity – including the antagonism from Mahatma Gandhi – Ambedkar entered the legislature as a member, successfully arguing the case for these communities. He also wrote seminal tracts – of which Annihilation of Caste (1936) is the best known – on the ‘untouchable’ castes, Indian polity and social reform. After Independence, Ambedkar was a member of the Indian Parliament, the country’s first Law Minister and Chairman of the Drafting Committee for the new Constitution. B. R. Ambedkar was responsible for political rights being made available to the historically oppressed castes, the so-called ‘untouchables’ in post-Independence India, and is generally now treated as the single most important figure in modern India in the campaign for emancipation of the oppressed classes. His statues now dot the Indian landscape, even as he serves as the icon of ‘Dalit’ (the term now used to describe the historically oppressed communities) consciousness, political campaigns and assertion. Ambedkar is now, therefore, a significant constituent of the visual culture of India’s new modernity (Freitag 2001). Within

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this visual culture, contemporary representations of Ambedkar depict him as a statesman, a boddhisatva (one who is ready to acquire nirvana), a figure of authority, and is now clearly in the pantheon of Indian leaders (Beltz 2015) even approximating to a ‘mythicisation’ by the Dalits (Ganguly 2002). Reports of a garland of shoes being placed around the neck of Ambedkar statues, defacement and occasionally even breaking off of parts of the statues are reported in newspapers. Such a desecration of the Ambedkar statues, this essay argues, is a mode of once again rendering the Dalit, historically outside the social and civil, if not of the political fold, an outcast.

Sacralising Ambedkar Statues, especially of Gandhi, have dotted the Indian public spaces for decades now. Local leaders are also honoured in the form of busts and statues in parks, squares and such spaces. On the occasion of the personage’s birthday and death anniversary, politicians and community leaders garland the statue. It is a standing joke in India that the rest of the year, the birds alone pay attention to these statues. The statue is the material manifestation of a group identity in contemporary India, and a marker of the claim to recognition and rights. I concede, with Tony Bennett, that these memorials and markers of group identity should not be seen as agents of social change themselves but as rhetorical strategies representing specific social interests (1992, cited in Brook). The statues are a part of the public discourses around the theme of recognition claims. Reading the rhetoric of Ambedkar statues, three observations may be made. First, these statues are a part of tense ‘honour systems’. Ambedkar is both a national and a community hero (adapting the work of Annie Coombes 2011). His nationally recognised iconic status is traceable to his role as the chief draughtsman of the Constitution of India – the Ambedkar statues usually depict him with the book of the Constitution in one hand – as the Chairman of the Constituent Assembly. His status as a community hero is the result of his endless work on the part of the historically marginalised Dalits. Work done on his iconic – some would say talismanic status – among Dalits suggests that he embodies all the potential of this community (Beltz 2015). Second, as embodiments of public history, the Ambedkar statues force us, as Coombes suggests, to engage with the past in different ways: for example, in India, this engagement would be the dramatic historical tensions between Gandhi and Ambedkar. That Ambedkar statues now equal or perhaps even outnumber Gandhi’s suggests a swerve in public history in this process of monumentalisation. Public history as embodied in statues – and there has been no dearth of controversy around monumentalisation, especially in the

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case of Mayawati, the Dalit Chief Minister of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh – marks the stresses and strains of honour systems. For a very long time, various public spaces and facilities – airports, roads, parks, buildings, bridges – have been named after Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi (three generations), and of course M. K. [Mahatma] Gandhi (no relation). Ambedkar’s presence in this statuepantheon represents the clash of honour systems, where the traditionally and historically marginalised acquires public space, public visibility and respect through this monumentalisation. The national honour system for freedom fighters and the Gandhi family, as also, of course, the pre-eminent Mahatma, has had to contend with the subaltern honour systems, if one could term it that, in the form of Ambedkar as the hero of the Dalit populations across India. In Rajesh Komath’s words, ‘making themselves visible in the village culturalscape is the primary motive in erecting Dalit imagery at the entrance of their ghettos, apart from laying claim to public spaces’ (2017, unpaginated). Aligned with the above argument of the new embodiments of public histories, I suggest that the arrival and dissemination of Ambedkar statues is a key element in the creation of what Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji propose, adapting Appadurai and Breckenridge, as the rise of ‘new public modernities’ (2015).2 These modernities ‘emphasise cultural registers such as the circulation of images, the political roles of visuality’, alongside symbolic actions and emancipatory art (3). These modernities and their visual-verbal registers are constructed around themes of inequality, disadvantaged people, fundamental freedom, resistance and protests (4). It is a public modernity built around contestation, fragmentation and dissensus. The statues, at the heart of the new public modernity, are troublingly public, with public programmes and public adulation that generate social movements and kickstart protest campaigns in India today. Desecration, then, is the resistance to the new public modernity. Third, that the Ambedkar statue always, inevitably, carries a book is itself a whole new register of iconicity. Dalits have been historically denied access to education, and it is through affirmative action that they have managed to be a part of schools, colleges and educational institutions. Further, Ambedkar’s statue honours the book in what is clearly an appropriation of a different symbolic code because reading and learning are, in the Hindu caste system, associated with the upper, Brahmin castes. Thus, the Ambedkar icon is itself iconoclastic, symbolically overturning the centuries-old upper-caste stranglehold and controlling prestige economy around learning. Other commentators have proposed that ‘The pointed finger of Ambedkar symbolically conveys the meaning of lecturing, or teaching – teaching the nation as it were’ (Komath 2017).

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It is in this context of different, often competing, honour systems that there has been a national-level appropriation, by various political parties, of Ambedkar. The desecration of Ambedkar statues need to be seen in this light, where the national appropriation of Ambedkar into the pantheon has been contested in the iconoclastic defacing of his statues by unidentified miscreants. Fourth, the Ambedkar statues are at once the symbol and body of the nowdead famous man. It moves Ambedkar beyond the temporality of mortals (Verdrey 1999). Verdrey writes: Statues are dead people cast in bronze or carved in stone. They symbolise a specific famous person while in a sense also being the body of that person. By arresting the process of that person’s bodily decay, a statue alters the temporality associated with the person, bringing him into the realm of the timeless or the sacred, like an icon. For this reason, desecrating a statue partakes of the larger history of iconoclasm. (5, emphasis in original) Ambedkar, in this reading, is an atemporal presence in the form of his statues. The iconicity of an Ambedkar is precisely due to this atemporality. His continued relevance and centrality to Dalit and subaltern consciousness means that the atemporality of his work and teaching – for ‘all time’, so to speak – is embodied in the timelessness of the statues. The sacralisation of Ambedkar is to do with the iterative nature of his statues, his quotes and the Constitution of India. Statues, we are told, the ‘bronzed human beings who both stabilise the landscape and temporally freeze particular values in it’ (Verdrey 6). It is not then enough to see these statues as bronze embodiments of a dead person, but rather as a brand whose value circulates independent of its origin accounts or mortality. The Ambedkar statue is held in place by the politics of appropriation – ruling parties wishing to claim his legacy – and the politics of emancipation and resistance by the historically oppressed. The statue represents a new, radical onto-theology of national identity in India, one defined not by the Gandhi family or M. K. Gandhi, but by a subaltern. I further propose that the dead Ambedkar reanimates contemporary politics, enlivens it. Note, for instance, the attempts of the present government to claim Ambedkar’s radical legacy for itself. In many ways, then, Ambedkar, as presence and as statue, resacralizes the Indian political order itself with and by his legacy: that demands paying attention to a class of human persons who were never regarded as persons in the Indian caste and social hierarchy. The Ambedkar statues scattered across India are, of course, immobile and still. Yet, their ‘ceaseless stillness’ (Gesty) performs a ‘passive resistance’. David

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Gesty proposes a ‘sculptural encounter’ between active viewers and passive, immobile statues. Gesty argues: Our encounter with statues is always an encounter with other bodies that share our space, wait for us, and defiantly remain unresponsive. Consequently, a different way of characterising the discourse of the statue is to see it as a history of its acts of passive resistance to the motile viewer or artist’s attempts to assert control. (8) I suggest that the Ambedkar statue’s passive resistance, and immobility, becomes symbolic of a subaltern’s resistance to the appropriative moves made by various political parties in contemporary India. Gesty writes: ‘the refusal to move or to respond can be a powerful act that exposes the dispensation of power and the ethics of those who wield it’ (11). It is this sculptural encounter with the critical passivity and stillness that, I suggest, provokes the desacralising moves.

Desecration and Its Profane Aesthetics A parody of honouring is often enacted here – garlanding is a marker of honour, welcome – with a garland of footwear placed around the statue. In other cases, paint is thrown on the statue, or sections chipped off. Desecration here can be read as an instance of ‘profane semiotics’ (Koskella 2014). Here profane semiotics is one that does not follow an orthodox methodology. It moves beyond the immediate text into other forms of communication as well. The profane semiotics of statue desecration takes the process of honouring, by garlanding, and refigures it as a sign of humiliation. Read in conjunction with the violence against Dalits across India, the desecrated statue is at once akin to and distinct from the broken and humiliated human bodies of the Dalits. Desecration is the response to the irrevocable, immobile resistance of the Dalits to continuing exploitation and caste-based discrimination. The Ambedkar statue, as noted, represents the living body of Ambedkarite ideology and thought. The rootedness of the statue, and the ideology, in the contemporary socio-political scenario, invites, unfortunately, this vandalism precisely because it does not participate in the mobility regime of political exigencies. The history of the sculptural encounter, Gesty notes, is marked by the history of such reactions to the stillness. In what follows I outline a series of frames within which the profane aesthetics of this desecration may be read.

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Desecration and its symbolic economy Desecration, argues Eric Rasmusen, may be evaluated in terms of its symbolic economy: ‘Just as a car is produced from steel, labour, and energy, a symbol is created from the time and emotional commitment of the venerators. Just as fewer cars will be produced if a tax is imposed on car companies, so fewer symbols will be produced if desecration is allowed’ (1998, p. 254). In contemporary India, as more and more vocal campaigns about the need to erase caste differences arise, the lack of action against the perpetrators of such acts, who are largely unidentified, are ways of ensuring that more statues of the community hero are not set up. In other words, desecration might be read as an attempt to foreclose the chances of greater public histories, of an entirely different nature, being built around Ambedkar. Rasmusen notes that more important than symbol creation is symbol maintenance. That is, ‘If costs must be incurred beyond the cost of creating the symbol to maintain its effectiveness, then in the long run the legality of desecration will lead to the elimination of the symbol’s power as it gradually depreciates’ (). Symbols are produced goods, he suggests, and so we can read the statues as goods produced at the intersection of various economies: the prestige economy now being instituted where the Dalits in India assert their Dalit identity with considerable pride; the cultural economy where contemporary discourses and visual fields have expanded to include subaltern figures like Ambedkar (thereby moving beyond Gandhi); the financial economy of the price of statues, the purchase of land around it, etc. (The Indian government recently effected the purchase of the house Ambedkar lived in when in London). Hamilton and Ashton writing about memory cultures in Australia argue that ‘they [memorials] reveal much about the changing nature of memorial practices in contemporary society in that they bear witness to the power of identity politics; to the claims of recognition by and for groups on the basis of ethnicity and race’ (cited in Brook 2006). Desecration, in such a context, denies the demand for community-, ethnicity- and caste-based recognition when the memorial – the Ambedkar statue – is defaced. Even as Ambedkar statues embody an alternate memorial culture around the community hero, the desecration instantiates the attempt to deny such a memorialising. Desecration as counter-spectacle and political culture jamming Desecration may be seen as an attempt at a counter-spectacle, as Cormac McCarthy terms it in The Road (2006), of trying to wind things down. I extend the term counter-spectacle to suggest also the coming into being of a different

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order of the shadow archive. Allan Sekula refers to the historical reservoir of images that enables us to make sense of any, even a contemporary, image. He refers to this historical reservoir of images as a ‘shadow archive’. In India, the shadow archive has traditionally belonged to the Mahatma Gandhi statues, the Nehru-Indira Gandhi names and such. Ambedkar’s statues constitute a major aberration in the visual economy because we now read the Ambedkar statues to the background of the upper-caste shadow archive. That is, the dominance of the shadow archive is severely affected by the increasing numbers of Ambedkar statues, and desecration may then be seen as an attempt to stem this multiplication in order to retain the singularity and dominance of the shadow archive. This attempt at a counter-spectacle is an instance of culture jamming, but driven, I suggest, by political aspirations at thwarting radical movements. Culture jamming is usually associated with attempts at rebranding and advocating non-commercial cultures and products. It is aimed at drawing attention to contradictions and enabling the reassigning of values to the brand/object. But defacement and desecration, as is done to statues, is a form of political culture jamming. These efforts seek to reduce Ambedkar’s stature and statue to a comic and grotesque figure, albeit in bronze or metal. Desecration in this particular case galvanises a cognitive dissonance between how Ambedkar is traditionally depicted – always in a suit and carrying a copy of the Constitution – and the present with the humiliating garland of footwear around his neck. Political culture jamming here is an attempt to reinscribe the community and national hero and, by extension, the ideology he represents even today, into a grotesque figure of fun, ridicule and mockery. The attempted reassignation of value in the symbolic realm consigns the suave, impeccably dressed public figure – and I use the term to refer to both the statue and the man the statue embodies – of Ambedkar to the shabby, dirty carnivalesque figure in the town square. The alteration through addition of footwear and such inappropriate objects alters form and content of the statue. The viewer is forced to reinterpret the statue’s meaning: shifted from hero to caricature. The desecration, then, is an act of mass communication in a context where the parties seeking to politically restore status quo to the Dalits at the bottom of the socio-political spectrum cannot do so directly and therefore take recourse to symbolic forms such as culture jamming. As a form of mass communication it lacks the subtlety of culture jamming because desecration is a part of the democratic forms of protest in India (all political parties do this). Further, the desecration adds things and details that are well-known symbols of humiliation – footwear hurling at politicians is a common phenomenon in India – so that the viewers do not experience any confusion: the Dalit hero has been humiliated. Using the celebratory and honorific symbol of the garland, but modifying it by making

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it a garland of footwear – leather, in the Hindu caste system, was worked by so-called ‘lower castes’, so the choice of footwear itself implies the suited Ambedkar remains a leather-worker of the lower castes – the vandals do not leave scope for any ambiguity. Also, a common connotation – footwear as impure, dirty – is appropriated into the statue’s narrative and converted in order to transgress or add meanings – a hallmark of street art, Philipps (2015), the Constitution, the suit, the formal and dignified appearance of Ambedkar and the garland of footwear – generates the dehumanised, desacralised Ambedkar. Political culture jamming here which does not have access to Dalit ‘texts’ directly here targets their best-known brand-icon: the Ambedkar statue. (It may be useful to ponder over the question whether the defacement and desecration marks a movement from iconography – describing images and gives meanings to the objects and scenes represented in a photograph/work of art – to iconology, an intuitive interpretation of the intrinsic meaning based on comparing different pictures, in Erwin Panofsky’s famous distinction.) Image pollution, revanchism and the affrontier Characteristic of the desecration of Ambedkar statues is not its ruination but its defacement. There is no attempt to destroy the statue or its iconic features (the Constitution in the hand, the raised finger exhorting Dalits to ‘educate, organise, agitate’, the suit, etc.). The point is, the vandals do not wish to render the statue unrecognisable, for that would defeat the purpose. Retaining the most recognisable features yet de-forming them – this is the requirement. Defacement is ‘image pollution’ (Schölzel, cited in Philipps 2015), it tarnishes, deforms but does not destroy. This descriptor is apposite for the desecratory processes because it recalls the taboos around caste system. Lower castes were deemed pollutants and contagions. To even have the shadow of a Dalit fall upon one was to be polluted. Given this dimension of the caste system, the desecration via image pollution of Ambedkar’s statues invites several interpretations. Michael Taussig has argued that defacement embodies the social power of sacrilege. It unmasks the sacred, and exposes the falseness of a thing. In the process, it re-enchants the space of representation through the power of negation. I suggest that, in the case of Ambedkar, the defacement-asdesecration has an additional dimension. In the otherwise exclusionary pantheon of faces in public discourses – Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi – Ambedkar is a new face. Scott Brook, working via Taussig, argues that

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Defacement, like recognition, is a theory that attempts to think the circulation of symbolic violence as generative of sociality yet, unlike recognition, it does this for a sociality that has no normative conclusions and in which power lies in knowing how to ‘work’ the public secret, rather than morally justified positions in discourse. (143) I propose that the placement of Ambedkar’s face within the pantheon – and we now see government offices in India carrying at least one photograph of Ambedkar, alongside the regulars – is a defacement of a hegemonic visual narrative, one that showcased only a handful of people. Thus, in instituting him as a face within this pantheon, public culture in India, both official and vernacular, has effected a defacement: revealing the one-sided nature of historical representation in its valorisation of the select few before Ambedkar. In effect, then, Ambedkar’s iconography defaces the hegemonic visual field. The image pollution by vandals, then, may be read as an attempt to deface the very icon that was responsible for defacing hierarchic visual fields. That is, Ambedkar as a pollutant – and the caste-based rhetoric of pollution is being called into play quite intentionally here – of the caste-based visual field is defaced – polluted – as a counterattack in an effort to preserve the hegemony. The image that defaces, is defaced. To desecrate or profane the Ambedkar statue is to question the pure/impure distinction as well, founded on sectional interests. As Robbie Duschinsky (2010), following Durkheim and Bourdieu, argues: ‘the pure may appear to symbolise the order and benevolence of society, and the impure its anguish and disequilibrium’ (123). Thus, in the case of India, the impure lower-caste are seen as pollutants, and now their resurgence under Ambedkar constitute, as commentators have noted, a clear reconfiguration of Indian political spaces. Ambedkar symbolises a sustained interrogation of the caste-identities founded on this very premise of purity (the upper-castes as ‘pure’), and his statue is a reminder of this historical interrogation of artificial constructions of the pure/impure binary. To profane the statue of the man who questioned the foundations of the sacred/profane binary, as these acts suggest, may then be read as an instance of social revanchism and attempted reversal of public histories. Profane semiotics in the form of the garland of footwear approximates to what Mark McKinney’s terms the ‘affrontier’. The affrontier is a ‘the frontier, or the limit, beyond which a cartoon or a comic is perceived or treated as an affront to the nation, its symbols and its essential components, including the army, the government and religion’ (2008, p. 176–77). The buried pun in the term further ignites the semiotics of humiliation and desecration. When the vandals step on to the pedestal, rostrum, frame of the Ambedkar statue, they

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cross the border – the frontier – between distant veneration and trespassing, especially since, as noted, the statue is perceived and treated as both a statue and a person. This is an affront to Ambedkar, and the Dalit community at large. The vandals reconstitute themselves as viewers through this affrontier. The affrontier is a fault line because it separates the marginalised Dalit community from the upper-castes. The statue is an attempt to incorporate the Dalit icon into a national pantheon of heroes, to move Ambedkar from community hero to national hero. This movement, itself treated as an affront to India’s caste hierarchy, is what is violated in the affrontier. Ambedkar is not approached as a hero, but as an object to be vandalised. The affront offered by the vandals, in a space that is marked out as a space of community worship, veneration and respect, as a local memorial, is therefore an attempt to push Ambedkar back behind the frontier, relegate him to the ghetto as a Dalit icon, and not a national one. The affrontier in this case does not refer to the physical or geographical limits of the nation but to the demarcating and discriminatory (upper-caste) delineation of spaces previously closed off to the so-called ‘untouchable’ communities in India. That is, the arrival of immobile Ambedkar statues in public spaces is an affront to the historical practices of exclusion, founded on caste, from those very spaces. Desecration is an affront to this emancipatory affront by the Dalits. The sculptural encounter, as I have examined, is one where an attempt is being made to relegate the Dalit icon into a ghetto, to thwart symbolically the motility of the statue into the pantheon of national gods, and the motility of the Dalits into the ranks of the social hierarchies. Desecrating the celebrity here, once read through the profane semiotics with its counter-spectacle, image pollution and the affrontier, is therefore more than just a vandalising act in contemporary India. It is a heinous act of mass communication that targets the subaltern’s and the dispossessed’s claim to recognition and dignity.

Notes 1

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https:// www.thehindu.com/ news/ national/ ambedkar- statues- damaged- in- up/ article23402859.ece; https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/varanasi/ambedkar-statuedamaged/articleshow/63826083.cms. Accessed 8 November 2018. Appadurai and Breckenridge in ‘Public Modernity in India’ (1995) view India’s modernity through the lens of public culture. They propose that public culture and its modernity encompass arenas that have emerged to articulate the space between domestic life and the projects of the nation-state. It is contestatory, as national culture seeks to co-opt local and folk culture and different cultural registers battle for visibility. This zone of contestation, they argue, is at the heart of public modernity in India.

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References Appadurai, A. and Breckenridge, C., 1995. Public modernity in India. In: C. A. Breckenridge, ed. Consuming modernity: public culture in a South Asian world. U of Minnesota Press. 1–17 Beltz, J., 2015. The making of a new icon: B.R. Ambedkar’s visual hagiography. South Asian studies, 31 (2), 254–265. Brook, S., 2006. Touring the Phantom agent: recognition, defacement and the Vietnamese Australian war memorial. Journal of intercultural studies, 27 (1–2), 133–149. Coombes, A. E., 2011. Monumental histories: commemorating Mau Mau with the Statue of Dedan Kimathi. African studies, 70 (2), 202–223. Duschinsky, R., 2010. Rethinking the Profane. International journal of interdisciplinary social sciences, 5 (3), 119–126. Freitag, S., 2001. Visions of the nation: theorizing the nexus between creation, consumption and participation in the public sphere. In: R. Dwyer and C. Pinney, eds. Pleasure and the nation: the history, politics and consumption of public culture in India. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 35–75. Ganguly, D., 2002. History’s implosions: a Benjaminian reading of Ambedkar. Journal of narrative theory, 32 (3), 326–347. Gesty, D. J., 2014. Acts of stillness: statues, performativity, and passive resistance. Criticism, 56 (1), 1–20. Komath, R., 2017. Ambedkar will teach the nation from his statues. Economic and political weekly, 52 (25–26). Koskella, H., 2014. “Capture every moment” – the profane semiotics of surveillance advertisements. Social semiotics, 24 (3), 324–344. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. 2006. London: Picador, 2008. McKinney, M., 2008. The Frontier and the Affrontier: French-Language Algerian comics. European comic art, 1 (2), 175–199. Mehta, B. and Mukherji, P., 2015. Introduction. In: B. Mehta and P. Mukherji, eds. Postcolonial comics: texts, events, identities. New York: Routledge, 1–26. Philipps, A., 2015. Defining visual street art: in contrast to political stencils. Visual anthropology, 28 (1), 51–66. Rasmusen, E., 1998. The economics of desecration: flag burning and related activities. Journal of legal studies, 27 (2), 245–269. Sekula, A., 1999. Reading the archive: photography between labor and capital. In: J. Evans and S. Hall, eds. Visual culture. London: Sage-The Open University, 181–192. Verdrey, K., 1999. The political lives of dead bodies: reburial and postsocialist change. New York: Columbia UP.

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Chapter 11 AUTHORS, SELF-FASHIONING AND ONLINE CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN THE AGE OF HINDU CELEVISION Introduction Ashok Banker, Amish Tripathi and Devdutt Pattanaik are Indian authors who have mined the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and, overall, Hindu mythology to produce a series of novels, adaptations and commentaries. They rank among the highest selling authors in India today, with translations into multiple languages. This chapter takes as its case studies the websites of the three authors (Banker n.d.b; Pattanaik n.d.a; Tripathi 2018b). It seeks to unpack the ideologies encoded through a close reading of their strategies of impressionmanagement and self-representations vis-à-vis their repackaged Hindu cultural productions. To this end, it unravels the discursive strands within their representations. That religion is integral to any definition we might make of the public sphere today is now a given (e.g., Campbell and Golan 2011). This public sphere is at once offline and online with a constant interplay between the two, and social media in particular contributing in significant ways to its very making. The making and dissemination of online religious content, memberships and exchanges are central to the discussions of religion in the digital age, and frame the arguments stated later in the chapter. As commentators often note, the circulation of texts and images online does not imply a religious public as much as a public that discusses the legitimacy and competing forms of religious belief and practices (Fader and Gottlieb 2015, 776). Further, online Hinduism and its representations or cultural texts cannot be separated from the spectacular, hypervisible Hinduism in contemporary India. For purposes of this chapter, I use the term public sphere to signify the demos of democratic India, constituted occasionally by rational debate but also through the consumption of texts and discourses, as Novetzke argues (2016). The public sphere, with the numerous discourses contesting for space, is made of competing legitimacies – for

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instance, of secularism and right-wing (both Hindu and Muslim) belief systems – and their chosen forms of representations. I propose that online self-representations and presentations of these authors intersect with an increasingly Hindu-hegemonic visual and cultural field in today’s India, and contribute to it as well. Further, because these authors also function as cultural commentators through their blogs, public appearances and journalism, their online work must be located in a trans-medial context of speeches, fiction-writing, public engagements, fan cultures and exchanges by these authors. My first argument is that these three authors embark on a project of selffashioning through a careful engagement with a Hindu ancestry and tradition. Second, this self-fashioning is linked to, and manifests as, their literary location within scriptural-mythological narrative even as they adapt these older narratives for their purposes, and thus constitute a part of Hindu cultural production today. Finally, I argue that the three authors appropriate and leverage existing conditions in which spectacular, hyper-visible Hinduism is writ across the cultural landscape. The result is: each author is able to generate a celevision in the self-representation.

Ancestral Self-Fashioning The significance of this self-fashioning in contemporary India is in terms of its contribution to the making of a specific public sphere. While the works of these authors are constituted by and constitutive of the public sphere and of reading publics, their online self-representations calls for a more nuanced manner of studying the contours of this public sphere. The Internet itself has been described as a public sphere (Papacharissi 2002). However, we now know that the digital world is always already linked to the offline or material spaces, and they mutually influence, impact and even determine each other. This means the writings around Hinduism by these authors, based on textual appropriations, and their self-representations are part of a continuum marked by the revival of Hinduism in the form of Hindutva (the ideological position espoused by Hindu right-wing parties that argues for the supremacy and superiority of an alleged non-diversified Hindu way of life, and seeks to impose Hinduism as the national identity for India, and sociocultural-political expression of this belief). The larger point, for purposes of this chapter, is online or digital Hinduism as manifest in these web presences and self-presentations. Authors reworking Hindu epics and mythologies undertake a specific form of self-fashioning, one that, adapting Vokes (2008), I term “ancestral selffashioning”. Vokes (2008, 347), examining photographs of individuals dying

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of AIDS in Africa, describes the photographic albums as “victim’s life history … better understood as an act of self-making, one that is specifically oriented toward this idea of how that person might ‘continue to live on’ after his death”. Vokes’ emphasis is, of course, on the victim’s intended continuity of life in association with the survivors by documenting, in a move akin to what Hirsch (1992–93) termed postmemory, familial linkages and ancestry via memory objects and artifacts. I appropriate the term to describe the self-fashioning of a group of authors whose self-fashioning is clearly aligned, in terms of their selfrepresentation, with ancestry – a term I take to mean not just family lineage but also cultural and religion-based identitarian genealogies. Amish Tripathi, or Amish as he signs his name on the books’ covers, in his first step toward this ancestral self-fashioning, positions his name and photograph on a backdrop that resembles an ancient scroll (Tripathi 2018b). The yellow-brown scroll has religious – Hindu – symbolism and the mantra Om Nama Shivaya is inscribed throughout. Amish’s own name and photograph occur in the midst of this set of inscriptions. The contemporary font of Amish contrasts sharply with the Sanskrit letters of the chant, and Amish in a suit poses in the backdrop of ancient symbolism. Further, halfway down the homepage (Tripathi 2018b), there are endorsements from persons who are perceived by many as authorities on Hinduism – a fact that additionally connects Amish to Hindu ancestry: “Archetypal and stirring … Amish’s books unfold the deepest recesses of the soul” – Deepak Chopra; “India’s First Literary Popstar” – Shekhar Kapur. Amish, we are told, “worked for 14 years in the financial services industry before turning to full-time writing”, and is a graduate of the prestigious Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. Devdutt Pattanaik adopts a different strategy. His website (Pattanaik n.d.a) opens on a photograph of Pattanaik himself, with some words of selfdescription scrolling across, of which one (as of date) is Mythologist. The opening page lists his newest essays. On the left is an image of a woman holding a lamp, apparently symbolic of praying. The woman is clearly marked, with the bindi (forehead mark), as a Hindu woman. It also tells us that he is “trained in medicine” and has worked in the “healthcare and pharma industries before he focused on his passion full time” (http:// devdutt.com/about). Ashok Banker is described on his opening page as “India’s epic storyteller”. Two features of Amish’s self-presentation stand out. First, Amish as a name and author, it suggests, is located on and in a palimpsest of older texts. Second, his contemporaneity seems to draw upon for sustenance and identity, on older names and chants. Thus, contemporary words, as Amish writes them, are the parole of the much older langue embodied in the chants and symbolisms. Pattanaik’s self-description as a mythologist rather than an author, or novelist or storyteller, presents him in a unique style (I do not recall anybody

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in contemporary India who has styled himself/herself this way): of a man connected to his past and cultural heritage. His work, we are informed, is on “the relevance of mythology in modern times” (a phrase that occurs quite a few times on the website, Pattanaik n.d.b). Pattanaik presents himself as a man who links past and present and, more importantly, demonstrates how the past – mythology – is relevant in domains such as “management, governance and leadership” (Pattanaik n.d.b). His specialization is, as the website suggests, lectures to corporates on “Leadership topics based on Indian way (adapted to audience need)” (Pattanaik n.d.c). The word epic which immediately recalls the Hindu texts Ramayana and Mahabharata enables Banker to present himself as not only one who tells epic stories, but one whose stories ought to resonate for those readers who know their epics. Epic is the link between Ashok Banker in contemporary India and the ancient world of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. All three authors locate contemporaneity in their narrative and cultural genealogies: Hindu symbolism, Hindu prayers, Hindu myths and Hindu narrative modes. Vokes (2008, 349–350) has argued that: … the family portrait shot also contributed to these effects [a new regime of seeing and new forms of personhood], by further casting this newly contrived individual in a particular way: as the outcome of a specified nuclear family, itself the product of a broader, and peculiarly linear, family history. I propose that a similar set of effects is generated by these authors in the process of their self-fashioning. First, ancestral self-fashioning generates a regime of seeing and receiving the authors as linked to, descended from and drawing upon older genealogies, texts and traditions. The works of these authors are self-conscious adaptations and retellings of earlier, authorized by Hindu institutions, textual – both oral and printed – traditions, a significant point in terms of the cultural (re)production of Hinduism online to which I shall return for a different reason later. Second, and related to the first, the ancestral self-fashioning positions the author – Banker, Pattanaik and Amish – as the product of a specific family history: a larger Hindu family history that is not restricted to a bloodline (Banker incidentally identifies himself as “Born and brought up in a multi-racial, multicultural Christian family in India” in his longer bio-note on his website, see Banker n.d.a). That is, the author here does not restrict or define his identity in terms of a biological family line but rather a cultural genealogy of the larger Hindu family where the textual inscriptions – their writings – are to be read as reiterations of the family line. The anastomosing line is not between individuals or individual families but diachronic in

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terms of inheritances. The insistence on the textual traditions – mythology, stories, epics – in the three authors’ self-fashioning might then be read as Miller (1995) interpreted the line (as linum, linen, implying textual weaves) in Ariadne’s Thread: Storylines as a textual line (of composition), a weave and a lineage. It is therefore clear that all three authors explicitly situate themselves within Hindu textual traditions. However, they do not remain entrenched within this. The contemporary nature of their identities has to be emphasized. The bio-note that says Amish has a finance and management background or that Devdutt trained in medicine imply their this-worldliness, so to speak. Thus, it is their unique ability to merge (temper?) their heritage and cultural affiliations with the contemporary disciplines, fields and professions – from pharma and from finance – that add to their aura. They occupy more than one field. They come with different trainings and skill sets, and cannot be reduced, therefore, to the mere fact of birth in a Hindu family or Indian setting. That is, their interest in mythology or Hindu heritage may be read as proceeding from a multifaceted, highly skilled intellect rather than from blind belief. Bringing different trainings and skills to the task of rendering Hinduism into readable stories is different from doing so just out of belief.

Cultural Production of Hinduism, Online When these authors present themselves as located within a tradition of scholarship and writing, they adapt these older narratives for their purposes. First, the authors and their texts are “multimarketable” (Murray, cited in Ponzanesi 2014, 110), taking recourse to multiple modes of validating their cultural claims and their cultural products. Thus, blogging and tweeting enables the authors to connect to their readers. Amish wishes his readers via his tweet and his website on festive occasions (e.g., “This #RamNavami may lord Ram bless you with happiness, strength and success”, Tripathi 2018c). A community of readers is addressed through the multiple forms of communication and exchange facilitated by social media. The forging of this community has, in some cases, an interesting dimension: readers and fans are asked to design a book cover for Amish’s forthcoming (at the time of writing) book. The readers are encouraged to write to the authors, respond to them and interact with them (“Amish loves to interact with his readers”, says his website, Tripathi 2018c). Thus, readers are co-opted, however nominally, into the making of the book and the author-aura: it is the production of a cultural text that includes the novel or book, the community of readers and fans around the book and the persona of the author. Cultural production, therefore, works at the level of participatory authorship and co-creative networks around the texts, which are themselves, as we know in the case of the epics, believed to have had multiple

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authors and editors. It is therefore possible to see these cultural texts – author websites – as sites of cultural production that adapts older traditions of textual productions. The presentations of these authors also imply a country of readers waiting for these kinds of adaptations. In the case of Amish, we are repeatedly told of the phenomenal sales of his books, and numbers are scattered about in the commentaries, interview sound-bites and web-info, all suggesting that the contemporary reader has embraced him in a big way. We are also, finally, introduced to the multimodal dissemination of his work: the first ever YouTube trailer created for a book, “movie-like big-budget trailers” in theaters, a music album, among other “innovative” (the term used by the voiceover in the video on Amish’s website, Tripathi 2018d) marketing strategies. Bollywood stars such as Amitabh Bachchan, Kajol and Akshay Kumar appear in clips endorsing the books. We see a similar rhetoric of grand success in the case of Banker too. Second, in terms of reception, the cultural texts around epics, mythologies and storytellers as represented on the author websites offer a different role for the authors. Novetzke (2013, 138) proposes an “anamnetic authorship” in the case of Indian-Hindu saint-poets like Namdev, where later poets added their own compositions, verse and performances (since these songs were sung in public) in his name. Various later compositions, then, accrued to the signature of “Namdev” (Novetzke 2013, 138–39). More importantly, an authorship “collapsed, articulated and differentiated in ways that appear purposeful and collectively enacted” enabled the making of a “public memory” of Namdev (Novetzke 2013, 139). Novetzke (2008, xii–xiii) argues that such efforts on the part of authors are indicative of the desires of an audience for a specific textual history. If all memory is social, as theorists of memory have argued, then a text that appropriates earlier memories encoded in their texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata generates a specific public around these connected (past-present) memories. Thus, the author-websites are spaces where authorship is located within the cultural genealogies but in the process also generate, through their appeals to and interactions with the audience as mediators for social and cultural memories around folk, legend and other such older texts in the tradition. Third, Hinduism is (re)produced online through these authors’ websites when the older stories are repurposed in the marketing brochures, images and book notices. More importantly, the (re)productions of iconic images on these websites must be seen as integral to the marketing of specific models of Hindu gods, legends and heroes. The emphasis on muscled gods in the case of both Rama and Shiva, in calendar art and other mass-circulated image forms as has been argued (Jain

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2007; Lutgendorf 2003), on the cover images of Amish’s books is a particular model of Hindu divinity visible after the late 1980s. The gods are clearly defined in martial terms, sporting bodies that are toned and fit. Kajri Jain in fact proposes that the Ayodhya campaign of the late 1980s1 would not have been possible without the “lean, active, hungry, fighting, and laboring” of the Bollywood superstar of that time: Amitabh Bachchan (Jain 2007, 340). Jain’s argument refracts depictions of Hindu gods of that age via a Bollywoodization of the male body, where all heroes – gods and humans – sport a specific look and physique. This argument retains considerable purchase even today, with the six-pack male Bollywood star becoming the standard of male appeal. The continuity from the 1980s may therefore be seen in both – the contemporary male star body and the representations on the author websites under consideration here. Fourth, the websites and their cultural production are examples of contemporary (postcolonial) India’s adaptation of its historical, mythological and religious pasts into the digital age of global business and capital. But preceding all this is the success story. Adaptation, as Hutcheon (2006) defines it, is both process and product. It is an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works, a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging and an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work (Hutcheon 2006, 8, emphasis in original). What online self-representations and marketing rhetoric of these authors work to achieve is precisely these three. The works are clearly, from their very title and synopsis as presented on the authors’ websites, situated in a well-known tradition: the “Shiva Trilogy” and the “Ram Chandra Series” (Amish); “Shivaji”, “Maurya”, The Mahabharata Series and The Ramayana Series (Banker); My Gita, Sita (Pattanaik). Then, these are made relevant and appealing to the contemporary right away, suggesting a creative interpretation (or applicability) of the textual tradition. This is particularly true in the case of Devdutt Pattanaik whose book titles advertised on the website are “The Talent Sutra”, “The Leadership Sutra”, “The Success Sutra”. The titles themselves indicate the appropriation of older texts and argumentative, philosophical and political systems (sutras in Sanskrit are collections of aphorisms or rules). The adaptation of religious figures and legends for the purpose of success in the (neoliberal) corporate world as the larger goal of Pattanaik is very clear from the slides and links on his website (Pattanaik n.d.a) to his talks, corporate guru role, advice books and columns. The tagline on the website reads: “I help leverage the power of myth in business, management, and life”. Effective transcoding, therefore, of myths, says Pattanaik, is what he does. Here the story is not being shifted into another medium (book to film), but from one context to another, so that the context changes the story’s interpretation

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(Hutcheon 2006, 7–8). Thus, Pattanaik is describing a transcoding where the cultural information – or culture as information – is being transcribed from one code language (religion, belief systems, faith, mythologies) into another (business). This transcoding, as Crewe (1997) has demonstrated in the case of Haraway’s work on cultures of science, ensures that Pattanaik’s cultural production (of myths and stories) is presented, implicitly, as narrowing the gap between the culture of religion and the culture of everyday business and politics. The process of transcoding enables Pattanaik to position himself within Hinduism but distancing himself from Hindutva. He claims that Hindutva is one version of Hinduism, and currently the dominant one. He then goes on to claim: Hindutva follows a linear Western template just like Marxism, secularism, and liberalism, ideologies it holds in deepest contempt. This means, both see themselves as objective and scientific and seek the truth, and are disturbed by ideas such as existence of multiple myths that are true for some but not all. Both find the present imperfect and problematic. Both yearn for solutions and seek perfection through human intervention in one lifetime. Thus, both use words like mission, destination and revolution. Both display messianic certainty and a sense of urgency. Both harbour a saviour complex! While Marxism, secularism and liberalism seek to save the world by reforming what they see as an unfair past, Hindutva seeks to save the world by reclaiming what it sees as Hinduism’s glorious past destroyed by Muslims and Christians and now, Marxistssecular-liberal forces that it bundles into one group. Both are combative, constantly seeking and finding villains to annihilate and establish their righteous heroism. Both despise alternate points of view. Neither likes diversity and seeks to contain it within a larger single homogenous discourse, like nationalism, or human rights. Both are embedded in anger, and seek justice. One can argue that Hindutva marks the semitisation of Hinduism, for linear thought is the hallmark of Abrahamic mythology, while Hinduism is rooted in cyclical structures. (Pattanaik 2016a) When read alongside his attempt to relocate Hindu mythology within the safer domain of (neoliberal) business and corporations, recasting them in the language of success, wealth and leadership, Pattanaik’s cultural production of Hinduism has smoothly segued into the new world order, as he seeks to maintain a careful distance from the much-criticized Hindutva. That Pattanaik also speaks of subjects that are taboo to Hindutva – such as lesbianism – on his website (Pattanaik 2017) is also a matter of interest, and indicative of

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his attempts to avoid the label right-wing Hindu. Pattanaik is also careful to present himself as critical of hegemonic discourses, moral policing and any kind of fundamentalism. In a 2016 piece archived on his website (https:// devdutt.com/articles/modern-mythmaking/from-macaulay-to-frawley-fromdoniger-to-elst-why-do-many-indians-need-white-saviours.html), referring to the controversy around Wendy Doniger’s book on Hinduism, Pattanaik has several things to say. He first notes: In order to appreciate the writings of Donger or Pollock, it is important to remind ourselves that they are highly successful American professors in American universities and this has as much to do with their ability as scholars as it has to do with their shrewd ability to negotiate successfully through the worldview of American education … they need to indulge the America’s saviour complex if they need a share of the shrinking funding … their writings are at pains to constantly point how privileged Hindus have been “othering” the Dalits, Muslims and women, using Sanskrit, Ramayana, Mimamsa, Dharmashastras, and Manusmriti. (Pattanaik 2016b) “All this activism”, he notes, “in the guise of academia causes the Hindutva lobby to bristle” (Pattanaik 2016b). Pattanaik then turns to those American scholars who have written more favorably about Hinduism. He says: If we attribute strategy to the works of Doniger and Pollock, the same needs to be done to the works of Elst and Frawley. Both are catering to a vast latent need of privileged Hindus to feel good about themselves. … After having been at the receiving end of Orientalist and Marxist criticism since the 19th century, privileged Hindus have not developed requisite skills in the field of humanities to launch a worth while defense. (Pattanaik 2016b) He then concludes by stating that we have to shake off this obsession with Euro-American academia: The Hindutva obsession (raga, in Sanskrit) for Elst and Frawley, and the revulsion (dwesha, in Sanskrit) for Doniger and Pollock, is mirrored by the liberal-secular obsession with Doniger and Pollock and their revulsion for Elst and Frawley. In doing so, these White Knights have transplanted Euro-American valorisation of intellectual combat into Indian soil, seeking one truth (scientific objectivity) over multiple truths

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(anekantavada of Jainism, for example). Thus we find in India the EuroAmerican Left’s war against religion, and the Euro-American Right’s Crusade against Muslims. … If we have to truly be decolonised, and truly swadeshi, be it the MK Gandhi or the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh variety, we have to overcome our inferiority complexes, and without succumbing to chauvinism, realise that we Indians, with all our shortcomings, do not really need Europeans and Americans to tell us what Hinduism, Sanskrit or Vedas were, are, or should be. (Pattanaik 2016b) Pattanaik calls for dialogue, conversation and not simply argument: “We have bought into the fantasy that being an ‘argumentative Indian’ in a spirit of rancor is a marker of scholarship” (Pattanaik 2016b). This effective rejection of both fundamentalist and academic debate enables Pattanaik to convey the sense of one who is taking neither a left liberal nor a Hindutva position. Both Pattanaik and Amish primarily speak of mythology. For instance, in a video on Amish’s site, “The Journey of the Shiva Trilogy” (Tripathi 2018e), the voiceover refers to our ancestors, while the still images in the video depict the Hindu god Shiva’s muscular arms. There are questions enunciated in the voiceover such as “what if their [the gods’] life is their message?”. The blurring of myth and religion serves the purpose well here, for it locates these authors in the gray area, as storytellers and chroniclers but not necessarily Hindu writers. Ashok Banker concludes his longer bio-note (Banker n.d.a) with the statement “… he determined that he would grow up without such biases and prejudices against any religion, community or nationality and would never espouse any one faith or group all his life”. He thus distances himself from his vast oeuvre of Hinduism-driven texts. More importantly, Banker ensures he has espoused the right causes. His website (Banker n.d.a) says: He is a home-maker, feminist, animal lover, and actively supports the marginalised, QUILTBAG, neurodiverse, disabled, and #ownvoices. Born and brought up in a multi-racial, multicultural Christian family in India, he does not follow a religion nor does he identify with any one culture or community. (For example: He is not a Hindu and does not celebrate or observe Hindu practices, rituals, customs or festivals.) His view on God (any god) is DGAF. His politics are left of left liberal, somewhere between anarchy and communism; he identifies most closely with the intellectual views of Arundhati Roy. He believes Black Lives Matter. He does not tolerate or accept social injustice, hierarchical structures, binary gendering, ‘Othering’, or systemic and endemic biases such as racism, sexism, misogyny, bigotry, patriarchy, and casteism.

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On Amish’s website self-introduction (Tripathi 2018f), we are told about Amish: “Amish’s unique combination of crackling story-telling, religious symbolism and profound philosophies has made him an overnight publishing phenomenon, with spiritual guru Deepak Chopra hailing Amish’s books as ‘archetypal and stirring’ ”. Explicitly referring to his religious symbolism, supplemented by Deepak Chopra (the US-based spiritual guru of Indian origin,) description, the bionote, however, positions Amish as not just a Hindu novelist but a philosophical one. The author, we are told, subscribes to philosophies, in the plural, suggesting a more eclectic and variegated foundation, and not just a Hindu one. Deepak Chopra’s labeling of Amish as “archetypal” (www. authoramish. com/homepage/) is more complicated given its three foundational meanings. It suggests a purity of person/persona that chimes easily with the Hindutva agenda of and insistence on purity. Then, it also suggests a standard or template that others may follow or emulate. Third, in Jungian terms, it suggests a universality. Whether this is meant to suggest that the Hinduism-inspired Amish is a prototype/standard author whose concerns and themes are universal is a moot point, but if it were so indeed, the meanings one takes away from “archetype”, then Chopra is implying a certain universality to Hinduism itself. In his 2 March 2017 Telegraph essay, “A Patriotic Manifesto” (The modern Indian: Amish 2017), linked from his website, Amish declares that true patriotism is “love towards all who live here”. Yet again, although he employs terminology from Hinduism – swadharma (purpose and action in accordance with one’s own nature) and rajdharma (duty toward the land/ others) – Amish is careful to not speak of religious identities and instead focuses on “all who live here”. Similarly, Amish is careful to not insist on a monolithic Hinduism either. In an interview linked from his website (Dixit and Padmar 2016), he states “there are hundreds of versions of Mahabharata, Ramayana, and all other scriptures, and they are all different. We have to believe which version brings us peace, just like how I chose the version of mythology that suits me for my stories”. Amish’s statement brings to mind the furor over A. K. Ramanujan’s essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” which was withdrawn from the Delhi University syllabi due to protests by Hindutva groups in 2011 (Vijetha 2016). The insistence on plurality and multiple interpretations is welcome, of course, in Amish’s statement. Cumulatively, these instances from the online cultural productions of Hinduism-driven texts offer us several insights. There is indisputably a major revival of cultural productions around Hindu texts, myths and stories. The leveraging of this for larger discursive purposes – such as the insistence on speaking of true patriotism (Amish) or corporate strategies (Pattanaik) or

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tolerance (Banker) – suggests that any outright endorsement of Hindu fundamentalisms is kept out of the visible persona of the authors.

Authors in the Age of Hindu Celevision Having noted the self-fashioning of authors and their cultural production of Hinduism online, I now turn to the making of celebrity Hindu authors in the age of “celevision”. Kavka (2016, 297) uses the term “celevision” to describe a media context that enables “seeing celebrity through a range of platforms, channels and interlinked delivery mechanisms”, and elaborates: Celevision, then, articulates the multiplication of screens on which celebrity can appear, as well as the sociotechnological interconnection of spaces in which these screens function. At the same time, celevision is an outgrowth of the transformations to television itself, both to its technology and its culture. Celevision thus names the everyday circulation of celebrity through the extensions of television culture as supported by the spread of screen technologies. (Kavka 2016, 297) Kavka is pointing to the convergence of media technologies that ensure the connection of spaces – from newspapers on the web to author websites – in which the author appears. The appearance of these authors on YouTube (linked from their websites) is arguably the first major move toward celebrification in the age of new media. YouTube itself hosts channels like RajshriKids (Rajshri Kids 2009) which carries numerous stories in animation form from the Ramayana, Mahabharata, Panchatantra and others (it also carries Christmas stories, and the famous AkbarBirbal tales). Apps that enable one to listen to prayers are also increasingly available (e.g., the BalVihar app). These apps, channels and online resources should be seen as part of the socio- technological contexts in which authors such as Banker and Pattanaik flourish. Nanda has argued in The God Market (2009) that there is an increasing Hindu religiosity in India in the face of globalization. If globalization is driven, as Manuel Castells (1996–1998) has argued, by Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), then the responses to globalization make use of the same ICTs. This means, the interconnection of spaces – from the temples to the markets to the screens – is to be seen as facilitating technologies of religiosity. Banker and others are responding not merely to the arrival of new technologies for the transmission of their work but to a transformation of public culture itself, with doses of religion, spiritual advice and myths and stories drawn from scriptural traditions (what I am calling technologies of

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religiosity). The celevision experience of Banker’s website or Amish’s interview with Smriti Irani, a minister in the Indian government, on YouTube (linked from his website, Tripathi 2018a) might then be read as the distribution of televisual content about Hinduism across multiple sites and screens. The authors, therefore, only leverage existing conditions in which Hinduism is across screens and sites, to generate a celevision. As Kavka (2016, 302) puts it, “the figure and role of the star that sustains and is sustained by the dispersed television apparatus”. If we see celevision as an apparatus that carries Hinduism across screens, sites and peoples, then what unites the screens is also the star author. The star author, such as Amish, in representations of muscular deities such as Rama or Hanuman, is appropriating and participating in what I have termed at the beginning of this chapter, spectacular and hypervisible Hinduism, especially after the election of Narendra Modi as prime minister in 2014. With more cut-outs, posters and processions during Hindu festivals, arches on the roads and temple rituals with amplified music than ever before, Hinduism is a spectacle, a public event. My use of the term hypervisible signifies the unavoidable persistence of Hindu icons in all public spaces, the frequent debates around secularism versus Hinduism and a Hindu India, and the insertion/assertion of Hindu motifs – whether in the form of scriptural texts or songs in schools, yoga or dress codes. Freitag (2003, 389) has argued that acts of seeing become acts of knowing as consumers and viewers impute new meanings to familiar messages. Civil society’s informal activities – as opposed to the state’s – writes Freitag, especially in the realm of popular visual culture, often challenge the actions of the nation-state. Earlier in this same essay, Freitag (2003, 371) argues that traditional art or performance is fine-tuned to accommodate the new. If we think of the visual field of statues, cut-outs, arches and processions that constitute contemporary spectacular Hinduism, we see how, contra Freitag, it supplements the present state’s ideology. Digital Hinduism embodied in author websites, blogs and tweets is therefore part of this Hindu celevision and popular visual culture rather than a distinct entity or process. The authors revive the textual traditions and repurpose the older tales in the form of adaptation and storytelling to appeal to the new. Marshall (2006, 637–38), writing about celebrity culture, has argued that “there has been an explosion of presenting one’s self online in the most public way”. My point is, the public way in contemporary India is one associated most closely with a Hindu idiom, and representational regimes across media reenact and repurpose this idiom – which is what we see Banker, Pattanaik and Amish doing. The author in the age of Hindu celevision is at once a means of cultural capital and a marketable commodity, as Moran (2000, 6) argued about

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star authors in America. Moran (2000, 8), following Barthes, refers to the “complicated relationship between cultural authority and celebrity visibility in the representation of famous authors”. When Pattanaik’s blog and online selfrepresentations, like Amish’s journalism, serve the purpose of cultural commentary – from patriotism to lesbian art – then the celebrity status is assured, and the author may be said to have arrived. Writing books around Hindu texts and then using them as launchpads for cultural commentary, tweeting greets on Hindu festival days and lecturing on Hinduism-based recipes for professional wealth and success lend Banker, Amish and Pattanaik both the cultural authority and celebrity visibility. The former comes from their drawing upon Hinduism, the latter comes from the insistence of cultural production, both online and offline.

Conclusion Chris Rojek (2001, 58) has argued that “post-God celebrity is now one of the mainstays of organizing recognition and belonging in a secular society”. But what is also fascinating is the celebrity status of those authors who organize this recognition and do so by returning to ancient religious texts. What Banker, Pattanaik and Amish achieve is a celebrity status that stems from being glossily packaged conduits and mediating devices for these ancient texts and stories. Many of these stories are already well known to Hindu audiences, but the repackaging of popular and populist tales into epic generates a form of the national popular. Such a national popular – and one must qualify the national as exclusionary, because here it is a Hindu popular that takes on the role and status of/as an Indian one – builds on a celebrity connection and identification with both the author and the epic characters being repackaged. A commonplace and routine devotion to the latter can serve to produce the fandom for the first. If religion provides coherence and direction, then Banker, Pattanaik and Amish instrumentalize such a coherence, and in the process direct the audience toward their own works. It would be interesting and challenging to explore the charisma around these authors. I forward, by way of a conclusion but also as a possible future course of study, a brief point. The charisma of these authors, demonstrated at the crowded book launches and a fan following of common readers and Bollywood superstars, relies upon the mediated self-representation as well as the charisma-effect of working with gods, demons and mythic heroes. That is, Banker, Amish and others generate their charisma through an investment in and drawing upon the ready mimetic capital available in India’s god tales and the now-dominant god market. Mimetic capital refers to “a stockpile of

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representations, a set of images and image-making devices that are accumulated, ‘banked’, as it were, in books, archives, collections, cultural storehouses, until such time as these representations are called upon to generate new representations”, as Stephen Greenblatt puts it in Marvelous Possessions (1991, 6, emphasis in original). Mimetic capital can be banked upon because of a very specific feature of celebrity culture: iterability. In this case, the author becomes the instrument of this iterability wherein a recognizable god-figure is being re-presented. To phrase it differently: Banker, Pattanaik and Amish participate in the faith economy even as they re-represent the set of images and stories that is at the core of this economy – its mimetic capital – within the celebrity economies of television, book production and fandom.

Note 1

This refers to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s nationwide campaign to muster support to (re)build a temple in Ayodhya, at the place where they believe that Rama was born, and where a mosque built by the Mughal Emperor Babar stood till 1992, when the partyled masses destroyed it.

References Banker, A. K., n.d.a. Welcome to Ashok’s World. Available at www.ashokkbanker.com/, accessed 11 July 2018. ———.n.d.b. About. Available at www.ashokkbanker.com/home/about/, accessed 11 July 2018. Campbell, H. and Golan, O., 2011. Creating Digital Enclaves: Negotiation of the Internet among Bounded Religious Communities. Media, Culture, & Society 33(5), 709–24. Castells, M., 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell. ———.1997. The Power of Identity. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. II. Cambridge: Blackwell. ———.1998. End of Millennium. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. III. Cambridge: Blackwell. Crewe, J, 1997. Transcoding the World: Donna Haraway’s Postmodernism. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 22(4), 891–905. Dixit, M. and Padmar, D., 2016. Past in the present. The Hindu, [online] 20 December. Available at www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-metroplus/Past-in-thepresent/article16908700.ece, accessed 11 July 2018. Fader, A. and Gottlieb, O., 2015. Occupy Judaism: Religion, Digital Media, and the Public. Anthropological Quarterly 88(3), 759–93. Freitag, S., 2003. The Realm of the Visual: Agency and Modern Civil Society, In: Ramaswamy, S., ed. Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India. New Delhi: SAGE, 365–97.

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Greenblatt, S., 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hirsch, M., 1992–93. Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory. Discourse 15(2), 3–29. Hutcheon, L., 2006. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge. Jain, K., 2007. Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Kavka, M., 2016. Celevision: Mobilizations of the Television Screen. In: Marshall, P. and Redmond, S., eds. A Companion to Celebrity. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 295–315. Lutgendorf, P. A., 2003. Evolving a Monkey: Hanuman, Poster Art, and Postcolonial Anxiety. In: Ramaswamy, S., ed. Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India. New Delhi; London: Sage, 71–112. Marshall, P. D., 2006. New Media – New Self: The Changing Power of Celebrity. In: David Marshall, P. D., ed. The Celebrity Culture Reader. New York: Routledge, 634–44. Miller, J. H., 1995. Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines. New Haven: Yale University Press. Moran, J., 2000. Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. London: Pluto. Nanda, M., 2009. The God Market: How Globalization is Making India More Hindu. London: Random House. Novetzke, C. L., 2008. History, Bhakti and Public Memory: Namdev in Religious and Secular Traditions. Ranikhet: Permanent Black. ———.2013. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. New York: Columbia University Press. ———.2016. The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India. New York: Columbia University Press. Papacharissi, Z., 2002. The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere. New Media & Society 9(4), 1–24. Pattanaik, D., n.d.a. Devdutt Pattanaik. Available at http://devdutt.com/, accessed 11 July 2018. ———.n.d.b. Bio. Available at http://devdutt.com/about, accessed 11 July 2018. ———.n.d.c. Speaker. Available at http://devdutt.com/speaking, accessed 11 July 2018. ———.2016a. The Impact of Abrahamic Mythology. Available at https:// devdutt.com/articles/applied-mythology/society/the-impact-of-abrahamic-mythology.html, accessed 11 July 2018. ———.2016b. From Macaulay to Frawley, from Doniger to Elst: Why do Many Indians Need White saviours? Available at https://devdutt.com/articles/modern-mythmaking/frommacaulay-to-frawley-from-doniger-to-elst-why-do-many-indians-need-white-saviours. html, accessed 11 July 2018. ———.2017. How to Spot a Lesbian in Sacred Indian Art. Available at https://devdutt.com/ articles/applied-mythology/queer/how-to-spot-a-lesbian-in-sacred-indian-art.html, accessed 11 July 2018. Ponzanesi, S., 2014. The Postcolonial Cultural Industry: Icons, Markets, Mythologies. London: Palgrave-Macmillan. Rajshri Kids, 2009. Rajshri Kids. Available at www.youtube.com/user/RajshriKids, accessed 11 July 2018. Rojek, C., 2001. Celebrity. London: Reaktion. The modern Indian: Amish, 2017. A Patriotic Manifesto. The Telegraph, [online] 2 March. Available at www.telegraphindia.com/1170302/jsp/opinion/story_138412.jsp, accessed 11 July 2018.

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INDEX adaptation 67–69, 160, 162–63, 169 affect 3, 4, 5, 8, 24, 30, 51–62 affective sociality (and affinity) 28–29, 47 affective attunement 58–60, 61, 72 affrontier 152–54 agnogenesis 51–62 Ahluwalia, Kiranjit 8, 18–20, 21–25, 28–30 alethic populism 59–60, 62 Ambedkar, B. R. 135, 145–55 Amish (Amish Tripathi) 157–71 antiquity and antecedents 34, 39–42. See also authenticity artifactuality 79–80 authenticity 39–42, 48, 55, 56, 58, 94–97, 134. See also antiquity and antecedents authors 157–71 autobiology 85–86. See also pathologized body avenging women (in Bollywood) 16–17, 22 Azharuddin, Muhammad 75, 76, 77, 78, 79 Azhar 75–79 Bachchan, Amitabh 35, 36, 89, 162, 163 Balan, Vidya 17, 18 Bandit Queen 18, 19, 21, 22, 23–24, 29, 131. See also Devi, Phoolan Banker, Ashok 10, 95, 157, 159–60, 162, 163, 166, 168–69, 170, 172 Bawandar 18, 25, 26, 27, 29 Berlant, Lauren 4, 76, 142 Bhanot, Neerja 9, 78–79 Biopics 3, 5, 9, 52, 53, 60, 62, 67, 75–80 Biosociality 4, 9, 84, 86–90 Bollywood

cancer (Bollywood memoirs) 83–90 cele-meme 15–31 celebrity ecology (of victims) 18–21 celebrity supernova 4–5 celevision 157–71 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 127 Chandra, Vikram 95, 134 charisma 5, 8, 51–61, 89, 170 Chopra, Priyanka 42 chronotope (and celebrity) 123–27 co-authored (life narrative) 71–72 conservation 2, 6, 39, 58, 121 cosmopolitanism 9, 42–44, 124, 136–39. See also vernacular cosmopolitanism counter-spectacle 150–54 dam 107–27. See also Narmada Das, Nandita 18, 19, 24 desecration 1, 6, 10, 145–54 Devi, Bhanwari 8, 18–20, 25, 26, 28, 30 Devi, Phoolan 18, 19, 21, 22, 23–24, 29, 131. See also Bandit Queen Dhoni, M. S. 9, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80. See also Dhoni: The Untold Story Dhoni: The Untold Story 9, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80 Dixit, Madhuri 17 Dutt, Sanjay 8, 52–62 Dyer, Richard 1, 39, 84 ecological ethnicity 108, 114, 117, 122, 124, 126 enchantment 51, 52, 56, 61–62 exoticism 95, 97–98, 99, 100, 103, 120, 121

176

176

INDEX

family (in biopics) 75, 79 family pictures 68–70 generic mobility 9, 132, 133–36 Ghosh, Bishnupriya 16, 122 Greenblatt, Stephen 52, 80, 171 Gulaab Gang 17 heteropathic empathy 27–31 Hirsch, Marianne 68–70 humanitarianism (celebrity) 7, 8, 33, 45–47, 55 icons and iconicity cultural 9, 108, 118, 120, 122–24, 127 of enhancement 3 global 37, 47 moral 8, 27–31 of protest 9, 107, 110–16, 118, 127 secular 28, 127 ignorance 8, 58, 60. See also agnogenesis image pollution 152–54 Indian Writing in English 93–106 insurgent celebrityhood 6, 9, 131–42 interart 9, 67–70 ironic subject (of celebrity autobiography) 9, 70–72 Jefferess, David 34, 41 Johar, Karan 8, 52, 60, 67, 68–72 Kahaani 27 Kapoor, Rishi 6, 67–72 Khan, Aamir 35, 52, 107 Khan, Salman 8, 35, 52–54, 55–58 Khan, Shah Rukh 8, 35, 43, 70, 98 Khan, Soha Ali 9, 67–68, 70 Koirala, Manisha 9, 83–89 Lal, Jessica 8, 17–18, 20, 26–31 lifewriting (celebrity) 67–91 Lit.Fests 101–2 Littler, Jo 40–41 local stars and the global 42–48 Lury, Celia 30, 108 M.S. Dhoni 75, 79 Main Aur Charles 75, 78

Manjhi 75, 76–77, 78, 79 Marshall, David 2, 3 marvelous 76, 171 mimetic capital 8, 52–57 mobility and mobilisation 139–42 Mukherjee, Rani 17, 18 Narmada 107–27 national identity (biopic) 76–79 national symbolic 77–79. See also Berlant Neerja 9, 75, 77–78, 79 No One Killed Jessica 17, 18, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30. See also Lal, Jessica Notable Subject 75–79 pathologized body 84–86. See also autobiology Pattanaik, Devdutt 10, 157, 159–60, 163–71 Patwardhan, Anand 108, 111, 120–23 political culture jamming 149–51 portrait (family) 68–70 post-truth relations 51–61 prizes (literary) 97–99 profane aesthetics 149–54 Provoked 18, 21–22, 24, 29–30 publics 2–3 intimate publics 4–5 reading publics 158 Rai [Bachchan], Aishwarya 18, 36, 39, 40–42, 45, 47, 133 Rajput, Sushant Singh 8–9 Ray, Lisa 9, 83–90 Redmond, Sean 1, 3 reproachable victim 20, 21–25. See also victim rituals 102, 110 media 4 protest 116–23 Rojek, Chris 1, 4, 29, 53, 54–55, 69, 170 Roy, Arundhati 131–44 sacralisation 146–49 self-fashioning (celebrity authors) 158–61, 168 sensuous fidelity 8, 52–57

17

INDEX

177

Taussig, Michael 53, 141 Tendulkar, Sachin 9, 65, 75–79, 80, 98 therapeutic victim 25–27. See also victim Turner, Graeme 2, 109, 122, 127

family 16 moral 125 vernacular cosmopolitanism 6, 9, 33–39, 44, 136–39. See also cosmopolitanism

values (in celebrification) cultural 3, 4, 5, 7, 103, 148, 151

witness 20, 26, 29–30, 47, 78, 120, 150