In the Name of the Secular: Cultural Practice and Activism in India Today 0195642228, 9780195642223

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In the Name of the Secular

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In the Name of the Secular Contemporary Cultural Activism in India

Rustom Bharucha

DELHI

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS CALCUTIA CHENNAI MUMBAI 1998

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Oxford University Pren, Great C'4mui1Jn Str«t, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Cape Town

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Chennai Dar es Salaam

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Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Kane.hi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mumbai Maia> City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronro and aoci41a in

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© Oxford University Press 1998

ISBN 0 19 564222 8

Typeser by Prinr Line, New Delhi 110048 Prinred in India ar Saurabh .Prinr 0 Paclc, Noida and published byManzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110001

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If we could learn to look instead of gawking We'd sec the horror in the heart of the farce. If only we could act instead of talking, We would not always end up on our arse... Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world stood up and stopped the scoundrel, The beast that bore him is in heat again. Benoit Brecht The &sistibk Rise ofArturo Ui

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Contents .

Acknowledgements

IX

1 Mapping the 'Secular'

1

2 In the Name of the Secular .

Variables of Secularism .. II The Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA)

I

iii The Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT)

.IV

The Third Seetor Movement in Brazil v The Making of Secular Culrure

13 15 26 52 74 99

3 On the Border of Fascism: The Manufucrure of Consent in Roja 4 Dismantling Men: The Crisis of Male Identity in Father, Son, .and Holy War

115

5 No More Utopias? Re-mapping. the Present

161

Bibliography

185

Index

194

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Acknowledgements his book on the struggle for .secularism has ~erged in the aftermath of the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya on 6 December, 1992. My first acknowledgement would be to those unnamed activists who have sustained this struggle with enormous courage in the face of unprecedented violence and intimidation. I trust that the inevitable gaps and omissions in my narrative will be situated within the larger search for a more vibrant secularism that lies beyond the boundaries of this book. My narrative is just one intervention in a diversity of voices and positions. Volatile in its emergent dynamics, secularism is a subject on which there are considerable differences. I am grateful in this regard ~ have received critically empath~tic readings of my manuscript by ~ Bapat, and Sadanand Menon who has been an unfailing point o( reference through all my doubts and tensions as a writer. I am also indebted to the Economic and Political Wttk&-, in which many of the essays in this book received their first articulations. More than a journal, EPW is a forum, a space in which it is still possible to speak out against the new conformities of our times. My respect for Krishna Raj, the most sdf-cffacing of editors, is deeper than I can express in words. Additional support for my writing has come from the editors Rasheed Araeen and Jean Fisher of Third Text, and Anita Roy of Oxford University Press, who has nurtured the publishing process of this book with painstaking care and subtle humour. My exposure to activism has been made possible through organizations like Pipal Tree and the South-North Network Cultures and Oevdopment, which catalysed my reading of 'citizenship' and 'civil society' in the Indian context, by facilitating a truly inspirational encounterwith the 'Third Sector' movement in Brazil. The Indian National Social Action Forum (INSAF) and Vikas Adhyayan Kendra have also

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Acknowkdgmimts

broadened my awareness of secular activism in India. More intimately, the co-editors of Communalism Combat, Teesta Setalvad and Javed Anand, have alerted me to many dimensions of cultural action at local levels, primarily in relation to the mohal/a committees and the citizens' initiatives that have emerged in Mumbai after the riots. In the arena of theatre activism, I remember Safdar Hashmi, who 'has been a living presence for me in the wtiting of this book. Though I did not know him personally, I have been struck by the energy of his secular politics, so compellingly valid within the compromises of our times. In a less overtly activist mode, I wish to acknowledge the inner lessons of the 'political unconscious' that I have derived from my workshops at the Ninasam Theatre Institute, which have resur&ced in this book at critical moments. Among the many individuals who have contributed to the research of this book, I would like to thank Malini Bhattacharya for her rigorous reading of the Indian People's Theatre Association; Dhruba Gupta and Ananda Lal for their useful references to Tagore; Rubem Cesar Fernandes for his insightful perspective on popular movements in Brazil; Paneer Selvan and Gagan Makar for their close viewings of R.oja and Hum Aapkt Hain Koun .. ! respectively; Satish Sharma for initiating me into the politics of photography and the street art of chor blWIJlr; and above all, Rajeev and Tani Bhargava, Chandralekha, Anuradha Kapur, and ·Neeladri Bhattacharya for many intense exchanges around secularism that have helped me to articulate my position. I am grateful to Ashim Kumar Das, who has transcribed the numerous drafts and rewtites of this manuscript onto the computer. Finally, I acknowl.edge the warmth and generosity that I have received from all my friends. Through their dialogue and humour, they have made me aware that a secular culture begins with relationships and the capacity to share across differences.

A few sections in the tide essay of this book first appeared in the Economic and Political Wttkly, Vol. XXIX, Nos. 45 and 46, November 5-12, 1994. Earlier versions of'On the Border of Fascism: The Manufacture of Consent in R.oja' and 'bismanding Men: The Crisis of Male Identity in Father, Son, and Holy War' were also published in EPW on 4 June, 1994, and 1 July, 1995, resp~ctively. The latter was also reprinted in Third Text, Vol. 33, Winter 1995-96. The inspiration for 'No More Utopias? Re-mapping the Present' came from Erika

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Munk, who had invited me to contribute an essay on theatrical utopias for the special issue of Theater magazine (Vol. 26, Nos. 1-2), published &om the Yale School of Dra.r'ni. Aspects of my research on secularism have appeared in an interview entitled 'Re-inventing the Secular Imaginary', Humanscape, April 1996. In the Diamond Jublice Conference of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, on 'people-centred devdopment' held between 1-4 November, 1996, I presented a paper entitled 'Towards a Secular Cultural Movement: Critical Hypotheses, Strategies and Models'. I am grateful to these forums for linking different sectors of activism in India today. RUSTOM BHARUCHA Calcutta April 1997

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1 Mapping the 'Secular'

here arc many possible beginnings to this narrative on secularism-the demolition of the Bahri Masjid, the fiftieth anniversary of India's independence, the assassination of Mahanna Gandhi, among other critical events. I choose to begin, however, with something more intimate that is related to the actual location of my writing: the street outside my house. Dharamtala (now renamed Lenin Sarani), notorious for its traffic jams and snarls, noise and pollution, has inspired the writing of this book by persistently interrupting my attempts to formulate secular culture and action in India today. One of the busiest streets running through the heart of Calcutta, a thoroughfare for all processions and demonstrations culminating in the Shahid Minar around the corner, Dharamtala is also the multircligious site of the. Tipoo Sultan Masjid, the Sacred Heart Church, and numerous shrines nestling in its nooks and corners. Complementing their sacred aura is the loud entertainment provided by cinema halls, the repositories of the nation's deepest fantasies. With such a conglomeration of activities, my street represents a robust affirmation of secular culture in which the sacred and the profane, the traditional and the contemporary, share a common space. As I acknowledge the lessons derived from my street, I am alened to those larger sites of resistance in the public sphere, which refuse to be communalizcd, drawing on a living faith in the ordinariness of everyday life. Certainly, one needs this faith in ordinariness in order to confront

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2 • In the Name ofSecular what must be the most contentious, maligned and vulnerable category of our rimes: the 'secular'. Abused and attaeked by the forces of the Hindu Right, secularism received its most ignominious blow with the demolition of the Bahri Masjid on 6 December 1992. This act has been prodigiously documented by historians and others, and I have linle to add at the moment, except to say that it has made me underscand the depths of violence and degradation contained in the word mleccha (barbarian). We cannot undo this act, nor should we erase it from our minds, but we need to counter it through an affirmation of a renewed secularism. At one levd, this can be done concretely by resisting communal attacks through an increased awareness of their pseudo-secular disguises and devious modes of legitimation. Secularism, however, should not be equated with anti-communalism. This is the surest way of allowing one's dissent to be determined by communal categories. Opposition to communalism, I would suggest, can be strengthened through ~ L process of relentless critical introspection and sdf-analysis, whereby · one's dissent can be contextualized within the legacy of what has been received 'in the name of the secular'. In a.fftrming a renewed secularism, therefore, one has to accept the discomfort of confronting one's deepest assumptions as to what secularism means in the first place. The amnesia of ' being secular', without feding any obligation to define its guiding principles and limits, is an ontology that we can no longer afford. What concerns me in this book is not the political ideology of secularism as practised (or circumvented} by the State. This docs not mean that the ongoing debates on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC), the negotiation of personal laws, the politics of reservation, and the expediency of coalition governments curring across political parries, do not impinge on my own perspectives of the secular.. However, I should stress that the more immediate· preoccupations with the administration and legalities of sccularis~ in the realpolitik lie outside my expertise as a cultural critic and worker. I have chosen instead to intersect, and occasionally deflect, the aniculations on the politics of se~ !s~oois of r!oeiefyl_.,Irliar:woddi whciie/~ r ii; *8e!rr(ibici1i1100);~and whaiCi·sedtfbsars-, amL·~lh '.lliist, rlot~ ID1Cllploit ~~'~ 'ioctions1 olira!Wyi rocu:wim~·IJO• llliiimugiiiei ,·~q,e aa~ fat;ikna~i:W fki.cHs.'.tC>6.ku!Ki8tbnoet;(;HiclciJ9h)'1riwkl coiiffaot1 ch~

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by •the: '~es~0f '1b~rttit\4Wt~en1;> it' li~ :ilso- ~eit r~~ ~tt ·in' the m01!1t-talliW:theoric~ df~vohition lmtt liberati\'.>n:~tlt' tliis ·coo te"Jttt;-Kahtl\2 llaia.l\r-dhottg rch~ ~adl!'l's1 · ·pattitultrly~ IBrahhiihl' Bani:yt· ·:ind,rNttV' 14shtttriya- inreM0¢roialff' l>tj \karn: trow i to,listen :;ind.; ttv!'C'ad ;wft:it·iWe ha\lt-:tb atty'i ;Ap~toly;; ttl' tttY;inind; he·lle nectsisaiy,~ilsli of its intrinsic cultural superiority? · :J:Jw.-,.;1 At times, the dialogue can he stimulated by the sharci:I experience of a common enemy, such as the manifestations of Hilidutvi.lh ~ miaiSm~·+ism rtha:sedminW-y oppbjedrll:pn~inK~ of:.&IW hahUjaris.> i:lnd:fcmirustsi ). iGd,iffer~t,.rnpclcs. pf,$~V~. cv,l~~. ;lC~ipn ~9.gtiinst:idople' s.Thea~.A&sopiation. OPJ'A)•;,.IJoimded ~in· :I 93i6.1arul,194lli respcctiv.ely, 1hae.brganizations

can be said to constitute a 'natioml1· c::ultutal movement,•along With ~rr~roups1anG .>U$0ciations ·lilriC!the Anti..Famst ,w riters'•and A.rtiSts' ~QD (founded ill' L94~) 1·Fricods of the Soviet lJnto!l;ithe Kisan &lbha;. ih1t18tudcnl'$: iFedC:ratioo.. tmde unions,·wori:ien'S: organimtions (such: ·a$1the tMahilai .AtmaraksAa:Samiti :in 1Bengal), ahti-famittc relief clmniit111tes;and:grasS•roott1, anti1fascist GD!niral squads..iT..mcr, these Ol'galliialians..Qllff tforWm formrd what :~ ..assumed 1toi·bei.ai people'... danolitatic ; [ll()~l'Ul~' undC1? tbc raegis•o6 the undividcdiCOmrnmisa Ba.tfy. :of!lnc!lia, (Q';Pl)• ·.· : :1 •· .. r:. ,j: , ·\;·· : :.:· .:: J1 :1: .•,. j ·,.., ·>: .. • 1•Mrttini! Bhitttadi~j,the,mon• meticulous histerijm·of1thcil..c& cul ...; tural'¥1CM;JI!t.nt-'in lndi~ ·bas100l'll0lci:fy;.allc,d aaimtioilito cUhuhil squads a00 ,other ~Medi Lcftr.orionted iiua\rcatiorui,, JWhidi; had.:criitcd. lxforo.,t he I.P'fA.was1furtned1iri:.;Bombay1osi :25:Majt,r194l; ~Th~ ' the deailsidf1her~ri:sdarch.dpaimtlatitig siass••oot:adnmil acihtism'.ih, lbcari00sAi.ke,ChimgciDgtin"E11srllengal .(which bad ~ ·hombed b'Y; thh.J~esc mMay. ,,i,942), :we ltaui «if~u~di.fun¢oning· a5 i>a>f'le:,, dimu:ilieiaanial;iwbo1w.cDUldiipiClfo1m>m1* Tillagesril.rMd\ 'ari

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with sectarianism, he was, in cssc;nce1,opposed to any force tJiat des,Wy&i· the'passibililieii'bf•1crcaciVe"unlry·. ' ":'" ·:· ' .·:· '·'"'c::.''" , 1: 111 · n 11 , r. 1 :. 111 the 'iif(ri\ifives·8f~ tc:igue li~nst' F~cism "atrd tw!if·lilt\:f'ttie· PWA; ' m~rc&'te;' 'oric confronts''the· immediacy·bffo6aFciilHira1;,ftlfef..' V'entiori$ Oitalysed' thrdugh'an 'a.Wayen:ess tht'iiiierlt:ri:loli:ll difu~h~jdi'i~.' of f.isi:ls:m:1t= *buJCf '$CCtit c\fiiiem '(\ls J'\viU ·eJll'b'O't'aie1lti li;tb:ier de~ in 1ch~ptiei-·3)'/ tltai~it· is ~i'er 'hl!l\liirt~ lrakcis'nt ~or t~ni \!! ifrres·cititsldt' Jn~'s ·gM~h'i\~:lfbb'un'dir7es} "t~ ffie' tltlt0.r:a-·fuci\lemeti i ·~FHYC: 'tl94m; Piit'll:!i'J~a JMtisroliii.riv.;er~ .t~cni:lc'Ssty ·Crinj11 have yet to be analyzed in the larger context of iu politics of representation in the Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi versioru of chc film. One should not forget that it is one of the very few Tamil films dubbed into Hindi that has been an unqualified success in the box office, a fact chat has conuibuced decisively to iu national image and appeal. MGR's films, in contrast, have remained a predominandy regional phenomenon, whose nuances cannot be separated &om the minuciac of Tamil language, culture, and policies, which ofrcn assumed an cxplicidy anci-Hindi/North Indian rhecoric. Only in rccenc years, in whac could be described as the posc-Raj11 wave of nacionalist films, do we find other Tamil super-hits like b1dhiy11n (starring Kamal Hasan), which has also been dubbed into Hindi as H iNiustllni. Within chc narrative of &fa, chcre are bilingual possibilities insofar as it brings togcchcr twO totally different cultural and political contcxtS, which 'in normal circumstances' would be linguistically separaced. Mani Ramam, however, settles for r:nonolingual acccssibiliry, by making Liaquac (from Kashmir) speak to Rishi Kumar (from Tarnilnadu) in Tamil: chis is rationalized on the grounds that Liaquat had once studied in Coimbatore in T amilnadu. This logic works in che Tamil version of the film, but in "the Hindi version, it is Rishi Kumar who speaks to Liaquat in Hindi, which radically alters the dynamics of language in relation to the 'cultural identities' of the speakers. There is a third dimension of language that remains relatively unaltered in all chc versions of che film: che smarrering of English chac is used effortlessly

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On the Border ofFascism • 139 by Rishi Kumar, and even echoed by Roja. From the sweet banalities of 'I

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love you', to the more arcane description ofRishi Kumar's job as a 'ayptologist', &ja reveals its openness to 'westernization', which is part of its projection of'dcvclopmcnt' in modem India. In this regard, Tcjaswini Niranjana (1994b, I994c) has argued that the 'pro-western' orientation of Rojas protagonists almost constitutes an 'anti-Muslim' prejudice. (For an alternative reading of the rdational dynamics of the 'pro-western' and the 'anti-Muslim', in the differing contexts of Nchruvian and contemporary nationalisms, sec Patnaik 1994.) Tcjaswini Niranjana (1994b) makes a provocative., if problematic equation between Rishi Kumar and the upper-caste, anti-Mandalicc agitators, some of whom were prepared to die in their fight against reservations on a caste basis. In this reading. 'secularism' becomes the dominant sign linking Rishi Kum~'s nationalist protest against Islamic fundamentalism, and the anti-Mandalitc's anger against the privileging of caste over merit in the critical issues of employment, admission into universities, and other government benefits. My problem with this rcading is that too many contradictory variables arc being conflated or undermined. Fim of all, .there is a problem in unifying 'secularism' through two diverse targets of attack-Muslim fundamentalists and low-caste Hind11&-who function within totally different social and religious constituencies. Niranjana's eq1,1ations becomes increasingly problematic as the image o( the anci-Mandalitc is superimposed on the image of Rishi Kumar, while· their rdario!ls to their respective contexts (one mediated through cinema, the other enacted in real life) arc blurred. I would tend to agree .with Patnaik (1994) that Niranjan~'s 'idealistic cquatio~' conflate 'an imaginary prciccss with a real process', though · not without dismantling some far too readily assumed causalities. · · · While Roja is obviously referring to the kidnapping of Rubaiya Sayeed, the daughter of the former H ome Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayccd, it appears that Mani Ramam himself was inspired to make Roja after the oil cxccutiNc, D . Doraiswamy, was kidnapped by 'terrorists' and ·later rdcascd. Instead of focusing on how the State protects its own officials, what is needed is a more critical view of how kidnappin!,\$ have been legitimized by the State to justify the ubiquitous presence of the army in Kashmir.

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4 Dismantling Men:The Crisis of Male Identity in Father, Son, and Holy War ftcr examining a phenomenon like Roja, it becomes necessary to provide an alternative in cinematic practice to the contentious ssuc of what constitutes a secular culture in India. Populist film practitioners with 'serious' intentions like Mani Ratnam arc among the more inventive and liberal figures in an increasingly communalized cultural sphere. The more blatantly commercial film directors, however, with no illusions of being 'serious' beyond making money, have ~pitu­ lated to the nexus of power and capital controlled by communal politicians and the most notorious smugglers and criminals of the underworld. Bollywood, as is well known, is sustained through 'black money'. Undeterred by···the new competition from the video boom and the steady spate of super-hit box office failures, the producers of · Bollywood continue to reign supreme, relying on a vast distribution network that cannot be matched by films in the parallel and alternative sectors of Indian cine.ma. Yet, independent film-makers like Anand Patwardhan have persisted over the years in documenting contemporary social and political realities in India that the government has been compelled to honour through awards and citations, even if it resists screening Patwardhan's films on the Doordarshan national network. These documentaries arc somewhat too direct in their reportage of violence and social injustice to qualify for the manufacture of consent, which is so hospitably accommodated on television every night. Defying this absence of visibility, which he

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DismantlingMm • 141 continues to fight through legal battles, Patwardhan has opted for an informal distribution network by which his films arc screened primarily on video in a range of secular forums, conducted by social action groups, universities, NGOs, and unions. While some of these locations have been attacked by representatives of the Hindu Right, this has not stopped the films from receiving an increasingly wide circulation. What matters here is not so much the number of people who sec the films, but the discussions that invariably follow the screenings, at times initiated by Patwardhan himself. What has emerged in this dialogic process is a deeper critical perspective on secular cultural action at different levels of political engagement. In this analysis of his documentary Father, Son, and Holy War (hereafter FSHW), I will attempt to open up a dialogue on the film through its unprecedented viewing of communal violence in rdation to masculinity. Indeed, within the patriarchal structure of contemporary cultural practice in India, it is rare to encounter a film like FSHW that compels one to confront the dubious privilege of being a man in Indian society. What began as a documentary, on the Hindu Right and its legacy of communal and fundamentalist violence, became, in Parwardhan's words, a reflection on the 'crisis in male identity' . To what extent the film succeeds in dismantling its own implication in this crisis remains to be seen. What cannot be denied, however, is that it docs offer very strong evidence of patriarchy, and the beginnings of a critique against masculinity, perhaps the first of its kind in Indian . ctncma. Indeed, if one agrees with the general premise that 'Most men do not know they have a gender' (Polan 1988), because it is the norm which can afford to be invisible and unproblcmatizcd, Patwardhan's documentary has the potential to shatter such complacency, particularly among its male spectators. Speaking for myself, the film docs provoke reflexivity (even though it is not reflexive in itself) by representing the diverse ways in which masculinity has been and is being shaped through patriarchal structures in contemporary India. Though Patwardhan maintains a discreet silence on alternative masculinities (and male sexualities), his film nonetheless suggests, through the sheer debasement ofpatriarchy that it represents so relentlessly. the necessity of envisioning other ways of being a man. The emphasis of my discussion is on masculinity rather than patriarchy, though it is obvious that the terms arc deeply embedded in each other's discourses. It would be one thing to say that FSHW is against

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142 • In tht Name ofStcular patriarchy-that would, indeed, be a loaded truism given the predominance in P~twardhan's film of the systems, values, and beliefs created and regulated by men, for the benefit of men. But to read it as a critique against masculinity, as I choose to, is a more contradictory and provocative proposition, not least because this critique is subsumed by-almost secreted in-the larger representation of patriarchy. There is also the problem of prioritizing terms within the existing categories of secular discourse. Most Indian men in professional disciplines, even those involved in feminist-bashing at covert levels (see Gtipt.a._1995), would have no problems with articulating positions against patriarchy. At an academic level, patriarchy has become very respectable. But these very men would possibly find it a little more difficult, if not embarrassing, to acknowledge that they arc against masculinity, because the unavoidable inference in such a position would suggest an undermining of their manliood itself. 'Man', 'masculinity', 'manhood': the terms are not that clear. Do you become a man or arc you born one? Arc men necessarily masculine? Indeed, some men may reject their masculinity on ideological and/or sexual grounds. And yet, there are many false assumptions here-it is often assumed that homosexuals, for cxarnplc,'are 'not men', that they arc 'feminine'. Yct homosexual cultures, however dispersed and diffused, are often marked by strong masculine codes. It is possible to say that 'highly masculine men may be highly effeminate. But at the same time, not a bit feminine' (Sedgwick 1995: 16). So, does such masculinity become a style, a representation, a role, a manner, a subterfuge, a masquerade of manhood? There are no easy answers. At this point:particularly in India, where the relationship of sexualities (male or female) to gender is almost totally silenced (or perhaps, not considered to be an .issue worth discussing)-wc have no other choice but to accept that 'the relationship of masculinity to other nouns like male, man, manhood, manliness arid virility is far from _obvious' (Middleton 1992: 12). We can begin, perhaps, byrcgardingtheessentializedcategory of purusa.tva (masculinity) as applying tp Indian men in general with deep suspicion. If masculinity needs to be defined, however provisionally, it.is necessary not to accept it as given, a natural attribute of men, but to sec it as a social and political construct that develops in specific ways at particular points in time. Though it expresses itself through particular body-behaviours, it is not intrinsically or unconditionally a biological phenomenon. The fact is that 'when something is about masculinity,

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DismantlingMm • 143 it isn'c always "abouc men",' as Sedgwick (1995: 12- 13) puts ic, adding provocativdy thac as a woman, she coo is both a 'producer' and a 1 'performer' ofmasculinities. Without encering the complexities of aligning masculinity to different constructions of women, Pacwardhan subsumes his critique within the larger hegemonic norms on the subject, insofar as he assumes an equation between masculinity and assumcdly heterosexual men. Masculinity, however, is not a fixed entity, even though it is often projected through rigid, identifiable signs. One must be prepared to accept more fluidity in what would seem like ari unquestionably 'hard' phenomenon. There is, as R W .' Conndl (1987) rightly emphasizes, no 'one primary determinant' for masculinity, no 'first cause' like 'original sin', though the separation of the male child from the mother is often regarded by psychoanalysts as providing the condition for a nascent masculinity shaped by the codes of an external, authoritarian, non-maternal world ruled by men (sec Kakar l 982a ). Instead ofseeking such causes for a master narrative on masculinity, it would be more accurate to acknowledge a plurality of masculinities, shaped by different historical processes and institutions. And yet, interestingly, even Connell who advocates such a perspective, feels the need to set up a 'hierarchy' of masculinities within a 'hegemonic masculinity' (ibid.: 110). This would suggest tha.t for all the differentiations in masculinity, there are at cera:ain points in time-not just in the process of a man's life but at part:icular junctures in history-consolidations of power that produce a construction of 'what it mc;ans to be a man' in very specific ways, which is then propagandized at mass levels through popular consent. It is this hegemonic masculinity thac is, to a large extenc, the subject of FSHW within the specific political atmosphere and organization of the Hindu Righc in contemporary India, particularly in the aftermath of 6 December, 1992. While the narrative of che film works within this time-frame, including certain events preceding, yet foreshadowing the crisis in Ayodhya, the discourse of FSHW concentrates. on the patriarchal rhetoric of communalism an_d fundamencalism while dispersing in different directions co illuminace the crisis of male identity, which (understandably) the film docs not anempc co resolve.

'Them ' and 'Us' Structured in two one-hour segments, ironically entitled Agnipariksha (or 'test of fire' from the Ramayana) and Hero Pharmacy (a tonguein-cheek reference co a sex clinic), Pacwardhan's documentary encom-

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144 • In tht Name ofSecular passes a wide range of locations: the events following Roop Kanwar' s murder at the sati site ofDcorala, Rajasthan in 1987; communal tensions in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, also in 1987; the International Puthrakameshti Yagna (the ritual for the birth of sons) in Cochin, Kerala, 1992; the aftermath of the Bahri Masjid crisis leading to the devastating riots in Mumbai, 1993. Indeed, the film opens with the burning embers of these riots, accompanied by the voices of men-disembodied, desultory, casually inhuman-which are punctuated with sharp demarcations of 'them' and 'us'. The terror of these dichotomies lies in their shifting uses which merely reinforce the same deadly scenario of 'ochering'. On the one hand, there is sdf-rcassurance as a voice reveals that 'there is fear only for the Muslims' (by implication, 'we're not afraid, there's no threat to us'). Another voice glibly asserts, They do it, we do it too'. In a more sinister mode, there is an admission: 'A list was prepared. They knew the names.' ('They'? Unnamed Hindu leaders in compliciry with the arsonists.) Through all the terror, there is an almost perverse attention to detail-the low-caste Hindus did the looting, while members of high sociery bought the loot. Patwardhan's camera focuses on what was not looted-burned-out bales of cloth lying in front of emptied shops owned by Muslims. The deliberate violence is undercut through the men's nonchalance: 'Remember Jagjit Singh's song-'If people are afraid, why go out of the house'?' Another man puts it more bluntly: 'How do I feel? I'm having fun'. Maza ata hai ('It's fun'}: Patwardhan compels one to listen to what is normally sanitized or deleted as irrelevant in academic discourses on communal violence. The dehumanization of the men is heightened through one of the most terrifying shots in the entire film (for which, I believe, Patwardhan had to fight with the Censor Board in order to justify its selection and duration): an almost surreal sight of a charred corpse lying on the street, hardened through rigor mortis, one leg stretched upwards, the body corroding like a piece of metal, past which pedestrians walk, as if it were a piece of garbage. The sheer horror of the image lies not in its grotesque physicaliry, but in Patwardhan's ability to make us confront the banalization of violence. His nonvoyeuristic use of the camera, in this respect, is exemplary. Apart from the opening sequence, the entire narrative of FSHW can be read around the polarities of them and us. It is not sufficient for the enemy to be branded within the construction of a single Other. That Other needs to be linked to several 'others'. Note, ~or example. the progression of the followlng statements, which arc made spon-

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DismantlingMtn • 145 taneously by members in a belligerent crowd: 'Let Rao and V.P. Singh become Muslims' ; 'Let Rao wear a sari'; 'Wearing saris is a paap (sin)'. To begin with, the former Prime Ministers Rao and V.P. Singh (who supponed the policy of reservations in the larger struggle for social justice) are marked on the 'other' side as secular politicians. But it is not enough for them to be branded as secular. They also have to be Muslims. Even that is not enough, so out comes the insult from a sullen teenager: 'Let him wear a sari' (and thereby, by implication, become either a woman or a hijra). One way or the other, this sign of femininity is a paap. The insults can go no further. 'Woman' is consistently marked as the source of vice and threat in communal discourse. In the Deorala site, for instance, we encounter Rajput male resistance to the proponents ofsecularism: 'They are strongly against us [and aim) to destroy our culture.' This critique of secular men, however, is merely a pretext to include their wives-lascivious women activists who need a 'male companion for their morning walk', with at least two more companions for lunch and bedtime respectively. Having indulged in this fancasy, the voice then conveniently equates 'them· with a inscrutable foreign hand, which is predictabl)' involved in the destruction of 'our' sanskriti (culture). At times, the patriarchal biases against women in communal rhetoric can be disguised through seeming approbation. As Shambhu Maharaj, the extremist Hindu leader from Gujarat, endorses the Shiv Sena in a rally, there is at one level, a dissolving of differences between them (the Marathis) and us (the Gujaratis). But in the process, he reinforces the 'Muslim menace' that brings the two communities together. Shifting his focus to the women in the rally, he reaffirms one of the most deep-seated prejudices against Muslims: their alleged hyper-fenility. 'Their population is growing', Sambhu Maharaj warns the women, 'while ours is shrinking'. Blessing the women co have eight sons, who in turn will have eight more sons, he envisions a 'creeper-like' growth of the entire 'dynasty', contributing co the strength of the 'Hindu nation'. The bottom line of his communal spiel is specifically womantargeted: 'I request you not to practise birth-control.' From where does this prejudice emanate? It is to Patwardhan's credit that he never fixes the cause of the communal problem by blaming the Hindus alone for it. On the contrary, he makes us confront the other side by interviewing a Muslim leader in Ahmedabad, who for all his apparent anti-communal zeal, is derisive of the notion of equality for women. Falling back on the crudest biological argument, he asserts:

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146 • Jn the Name ofSecular 'They're no match for us in physical strength'. Immediately after this interview, we hear a Muslim woman in a meeting organized by the Lawyer's Collective stating the problem bluntly: 'The men use Islam to put us down'. The 'us' here has shifted from Muslim to Muslim women to women in general, a new grouping of solidarity which has emerged through oppression. Through all these juxtapositionsHindu/Muslim, fertility/infertility, strength/weakness, equality/inequality-Patwardhan sets us thinking about the problems underlying communalism, where in the final analysis, it is the legitimization of violence against women by men, regardless of community or party affiliation, which lies at the root of 'holy wars'. When women are not specifically invoked in the categories of'them' and 'us', the metaphor · that dominates the political discourse in the film concerns the potency of men. It is first introduced by a fanatical VHP religious leader who rails against the secular mechanisms of the Indian parliament: 'They wanted to make us impotent'. Later in the film, he refers to the politicians as hijras, reversing the threat of impotency into an abuse. Extending this phallocentric discourse in an even more strident register, the inflammatory orator of the BJP, Sadhvi Rithambara, titillates the predominantly male audience by playing on the patriarchal norms of izzat (honour) and revenge. Targeting the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, she rails: 'Why do you need arms? To kill a eunuch, why waste a bullet? We're Hindu, India is ours'. It is through such rhetoric that ' impotent secularism' is set against 'potent Hinduism'. I should add at this point that Sadhvi Rithambara is probably one of the most potent figures in the Hindu Right, who has adopted an almost hyper-masculinist rhetoric in her vilification of the Muslims and battle-cries for the primordial rights of the Hindus (see extracts of her formidable rhetoric in Kakar 1996: 219-30). Tellingly, the masculinity of her discourse has been enhanced through her persona as a sadhvi (literally, a 'chaste woman'), whose very 'self-abnegation' and 'desirelessncss' enable her to play with the rhetoric of 'desire and male impotency/sexuality', producing in the process a 'volatile intersection between male sexuality and militant political agency' (Sangari 1993: 878). Purusharth (valour, energy), according to Ritharnbara, can be reclaimed by Hindu men not only by protecting their women against Muslim marauders, but more explicitly, by implementing'!, three-point programme of reform: voting BJP, reclaiming Ram Janmabhumi (Sri

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DismantlingMm • 147 Ram's birthplace inAyodhya), and killing Muslims (if necessary through 'outright genocide') (ibid.). While inserting Sadhvi Rithambara all too briefly within the larger pantheon of Hindu sadhu-mahants (rdigious mendicants), Pacwardhan does not discriminate her specific use of the masculinist rhetoric of Hindutva. This would need a more detailed analysis which would have to include Rithambara's individuated and implicitly transgressive critique of the dominant male hierarchy of the sadhu-mahants, even as she reaffirms their patriarchy. In her intervention, we have an altogether unprecedented example of how masculinity can be extended rather than subverted through the neutering of a ' female' presence, that is at once not a woman and not quite a man. By failing to elaborate on this ambivalent, yet visceral presence within the larger context of the communalization of women, both within the ranks of Hindutva and outside, Pacwardhan elides a long overdue critique of increasing concern to secular feminists, who refuse to universalize 'womanhood' in their opposition to fundamentalist oppression. Patwardhan, in contrast, would seem to fall implicitly into the trap of idealizing 'women~. whom he fails to differentiate sufficiently on historical and ideological grounds. In Rithambara's brief presence, nonetheless, the politics of sexuality is reiterated within the categories of Hindutva.The play on impotence as both . a threat being imposed on the forces of the Hindu Right ('they want to make us impotent') and as an innate weakness of the secularists themselves ('they are impotent'), is more emphatically explored in a later sequence in the film that celebrates potency. In one of the most p rovocative cuts in the entire film, an aphrodisiac seller's sales-pitch rhapsodizing the semen 'shooting like an arrow from a bow' is juxtaposed with the icon of an arrow glistening in the night sky of a Shiv Sena rally. Such is the shock of the visual that there is no need to spell out the layering of sexuality, potency, and militancy in this construction of masculinity. A seemingly harmless, though obscene male image, the residue of indigenous sexual folklore claiming allegiance to the god Hanuman, provides the counterpoint to a modernist, masculinist, fiercely Hindu communal ethos. In contrast, there arc secular contexts in FSHW where the rhetoric of them and us is circumvented through reflexivity. The first sdf-criticaI use of 'we' in the film is voiced by the religious-secular crusader Swami Agnivesh, who has the courage to implicate himself and his community within the larger construction of Hindu male supremacy. 'We are

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148 • In the Name ofSecular guilty', he acknowledges to a rural audience in Rajasthan, reminding them of the sanctification of the binh of the male child, and the breaking ofpots that signify the ignominy ofa girl's binh. Problcmarizing the epic poet Tulsidas in the most down-to-canh of colloquial idioms, he reminds his listeners that while it may not be possible to ddctc passages from the Ramayana like 'Drums, untouchables, animals, and women are fit for beating', we can ensure that 'they arc no longer pan of our faith'. This critically empathetic reading of the Ramayana (as opposed to the blatantly patriarchal opportunism of Ramanand Sagar, for whom the agnipariksha became a sensational gimmick on television) opens up the question of responsibility in interpreting ttadiuon. At another level of secular intervention, we listen to a stirring speech towards the end of the film, made by a secular woman activist on a street who exhorts people to 'remember their neighbours' during communal riots. Her discourse cuts across the specificities of religion-indeed, it transcends the issue of religion-by calling attention to the larger context of human rights and civil initiatives, which should bind us together as citizens, regardless of our differences. And yet, even in this deeply-felt position, there is an unconscious reiteration of them and us: 'If the lower castes, Muslims, aboriginal people, the oppressed were all united, we could outnumber them'. This is not the answer, to my mind, in combatting communalism. The issue is not numbers, but the possibility of reaching out to diverse sections ofsociety (including the non-communal upper caste Hindus), without creating new exclusivities and intolerances in building sectors of resistance against communalism.

Icons of Masculinity Even within the strictures of them and us, FSHW presents a dispersed field of colliding discourses, some of which are linked while others function more or less autonomously, in their own space and time. There arc at least two ways of viewing this dispersal. At a theoretical level, Patwardhan's film would seem to reflect what Peter Middleton describes in his theory of masculinity: 0

Is it a discourse, a power structure, a psychic enticy, a history, an ideology, an identicy, a behaviour, a value system, an aesthetic? Or is it all these and also their mutual scpara1ion, the magnetic force of repulsion which keeps them apart? ... Masculinicy is a centrifugal dispersal of what arc main-

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DismantlingMm • 149 tained as discrete fields of psychic and social structure. (Middleton 1992: 152)

At a more grass-root political level, however, which is where Patwardhan makes his films and desires them to be viewed, the dispersal of materials and contexts in FSHW docs prove to be problematic insofar as the links between them are sometimes either too readily assumed or diffused through an insufficiently worked out argument in the language of . cinema. By far the most riveting section in the entire film is an extended sequence from Hero Pharmacy, narrativizing icons of masculinity. These are at. once dispersed, yet driven by an inner momentum and energy, not evident in the rest of the film. Herc one encounters cinematic risks that challenge the norms of 'political correctness' that generally tc~d to inhibit Patwardhan's cinematography. Definitely, this is a sequence in which the film-maker's own masculinity is placed on trial, as the narrative reveals the most blatant sexism and repressed sexuality underlying the rhetoric of'man talk' (mardon wali baai}. Though Patwardhan docs not acknowledge the construction of lµs own gender and sexuality in the process of interviewing the men in this sequence, what can be read through the masquerade of masculinities on display is a deeply entrenched malaise, which could account partially for the perversities that characterize communal and fundamentalist violence. The sequence largely concentrates on the celebration of Shiv Jayantf in Maharashtra. It begins fervently enough with a picture of Shiva;~ the militant saint-hero of the Shiv Sena, cutting his fipger over. ·~ lingam to ensure the sanctity of India as a Hindu nation. The ,Y~ry' next image, however, comes as a jolt, as it focuses on a mobile statue' of the actress Mandakini from Raj Kapoor's R4m Teri Ganga '!Jaili 1 ('Rama, your Ganga is polluted'). This mechanized 'Man~~··. ~~: seen pouring water over her scantily-clad body with a Iota (p~~):.l~f same gesture is repeated relentlessly in a pornographic co~~i!1!11P»/ 1 pro~ucing a form of violent titillation-mo~e specificaltx: a,_,Yf~I~~~'. 1nfl1ctcd on the body of woman, through a s1mulacrullli ,ot the actress Mandakini, who was herself 'created' by that master O.f~.~¥11~1.'.rip)e~;~ tification, Raj Kapoor. It is unfonunate that the origins ci'ftlie'lvianda.klni 1 image arc not explored by Patwardhan, because hc.S·~JJ.4·'~at!~;bi~ii compelled in that case to provide a critique not onIY..',Cl(th~ S~i~: S,e.~~ (in whose celebration of Shivaji, Mandakini is b~ip_k ·.d~ififC:l)~' :~~t. the coercive role of commercial cinema in pro44cing)con~ '.tfiat~Havc

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150 • In tht Namt ofSecular the potential to be appropriated by communal, anti-woman organiza. uons. What is Mandakini doing in a celebration of Shivaji? The question is anticipated by one of the ardent male supponers in the crowd, who in his attempt to answer it goes through the most circuitous rhetoric to reveal an intensely embarrassed sexual repression, covered up with male bravado. This is the kind of verbal evidence that reveals what it docs not aniculate. But from his convoluted rhetoric, one learns that Mandakini is there to somehow retrieve the honour that was abused when Shivaji's chachi (aunt) was abducted by the Muslims, while she was bathing in the river Godavari. This happened before Shivaji's binh, but as the man emphasizes, even today, 'our wives and daughters' cannot be spared the lascivious attention of the ubiquitous enemy. At this critical point in the narrative, when one is awaiting some kind of link between history and the icon of Mandakini, the man shifts gear and makes a joke about how the goddess Bhavani will need to provide her male followers with more than a ta/war (sword). Given the weapons uneanhed during the Mumbai riots, she will have to arm the men with AK-47 rifles. The seeming triviality of this 'man talk' nonetheless reveals the unconscious nexus of a mythic notion of honour, the lure of modern weaponry, and the targeting of a woman's body as the imagined site of protection and unacknowledged gratification of male heterosexual desire. How the need to commemorate the besmirched honour 'Of Shivaji' s chachi is translated into the visual icon of M3J1dakini, is left inarticulate, precisely because of the sexual filter that the men vicariously enjoy, yet arc unable to confront. From Mandakini, the camera surveys other statues: 'a Brabmin god', for instance, who mechanically doles out spoonfuls of holy water to the crowds, while a sequinned mirror ball glitters in the background, the kind of decoration one associates with bars and nightclubs, the underground sites of masculinity. Following this blend of glitz and religiosity, one encounters a grisly mobile statue of the 'man-lion' incarnation of the god Vishnu, Narasimha, tearing out the entrails of his victim, where once again we confront a single, mechanized gesture, repeated over and over again, sadistically and monomaniacally. What Patwardhan succeeds in illuminating in the next sequence, depicting an amateur body-building competition (also part of the Shivaji celebration), is an almost uncanny continuity between the mobile statues represented earlier and the bodies of men. It is one of the sharpest

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Dismantling Mm • 1S1 illustrations I have ever seen of the containment chat characterizes masculinity in body-building competitions. Much has been written on the element of 'strain' in representing the accentuation of muscle in such displays of the body, with the concomitant image of bodies 'ill at ease with themselves' (see Dyer 1992 and Middleton 1992: 32). The grimaces, postures, and fixed grins of the amateur body-builders in FSHW, acquire an almost parodic dimension, as it becomes very obvious that their bodies are not 'built' to the international criteria upheld by the competition judges. What is chilling, however, about the exhibition of these bodies is their repressive mould, wherein a single posture or gesture is set up and then sustained or repeated mechanically with the body pivoting on a single axis like a frozen mobile. The visual congruence of 'body building' and 'mobile statues', produces a shared narrative of sexual repression that is sublimated through the virtues of preserving semen. Patwardhan uses the voice-overs of the body-builders to counterpoint their images, where through deadpan deliveries, the men reveal their differentiation from 'other men', who are made 'slaves of the flesh' by allowing their life force, essence, semen to 'fall'. What is implicitly upheld in such defences of healthy masculinity is the mythology of virya (sexual energy, semen) being transmitted upwards through the spinal chord to the brain, in its subtle form known as ojas (Kakar 1990: 19). The illusions of brahmacharya (celibacy) are unconsciously perpetrated in this framework, where, ironically, the models of masculinity are neither native nor traditional, but embodied in internationally recognized hulks like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. It is worth reflecting, therefore, that in addition to the colonial residue of masculinity in khaki shoqs (the dominant sign of the RSS), the contemporary icons of' he-men' endorsed by the Hindu Right are cast within the tradition of Rambo and the Terminator, whose fascist constructions have already entered the traditional figure of Sri Rama, among other icons. Tuning closely into the subtext ofwhat is being said (and suppressed), Patwardhan concretizes the sexual undercurrents of the men's voices through a series of blatantly macho images, beginning with the Indian Rambo, Sunny Deol (of whom it is said, Jaan hai, build hai'), lurid posters of Aag hi Aag, Julia ('an obsessive story of voilent [sic) love'); Bombay B'4st ('the most violent film against violence'). Through the onslaught of these images, in which the violence of machismo is highlighted, we hear anonymous men's voices, once again wallowing in the most debased kind of 'man talk': 'When we see rape in cinema,

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152 • In tht Name ofStcular it is fun, but in real life with partnership, it could be different (so long as we don't know the girl)'. The English word 'partnership' punctuates the Hindi with a predatory resonance, evoking the male bonding that underlies the increasing prevalence of gang-rape in India, which is legitimized through collective male complicity {with 'partnership', or otherwise). Culminating the ghasdy narrative voiced by the unseen men is the subterfuge of masturbation, which becomes a substitute for violence rather than a means of countering sexual repression: 'In the cinema (during the hot scenes), one feels like climbing on to the screen... your hand gets to work'. In this 'man talk', replete with matter-of-&.ct obscenity, we come closest to a representation of men acknowledging their sexuality without being able to confront it. From this juncture in the film, Patwardhan makes yet another inspired cut into a seemingly different site of masculinity: wrcsding matches on satellite television. In a conceptual leap of considerable political significance, the narrative $hifts from local contexts of violence inspired by international models of masculinity to global representations of violence feeding the male fantasies of the Third World. From shots of pistols, rifles, toys, the figure of He-man, the sequence focuses on the WWF wrestling star, Hit-man, whose violent and obviously rigged fight on television is being watched avidly by a group of spcctatorsIndian boys in the process of becoming men. What makes these images of macho men so culturally aberrant is not merely their distance from the local traditions of kushti (wrestling), but their fabrication of a hyper-masculine aggressive behaviour, the comic-book masculinity of figures like Superman and Batman (but with far smaller IQs). What is celebrated through wrestling on television is an essentially dumb, inanicUlate, oafish, idiotic masculinity. A post-modern response to these figures would advocate irony in our perception of their performance, but in the absence of adequately contextualized, transcultural codes of seeing. these wrestling stars become models of masculinity to millions of spectators, particularly boys from 'other cultures'. With devastating maner-of-&ctncss, Patwardhan shows the consolidation of partriarchy at this early stage in the boys' fantasies. In the absence of parents and sisters, they assen their nascent manhood with discomforting clarity: 'Only boys wrestle', 'boys arc heroes', 'we don't play with girls because they wear saris' (a disturbing echo of the earlier comment about Narasimha Rao). Most sullen of all comments comes from a boy who says, 'We don't play with girls, because girls are girls and boys arc boys': an extremely calculated opinion in which

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DismantlingMm • 153 the polarities of patriarchy arc set. As we sec these boys pummel and hit each other, in a total ab$cnce of camaraderie, we arc compelled to ask whether they arc enacting their inner fantasies or merely displaying their already existing knowledge of' a world where adults kill one another' (Middleton 1992: 91-2). To what extent is the class determination of the boys depicted in FSHW a criterion for assessing violence? Patwardhan provides some rare footage of the wrestling star Macho Man's visit to Bombay, where he is practically mobbed by rich kids in a promotion campaign sponsored by Kwaliry ice-cream. In the next sequence of the film, we sec young boys of the Shiv Sena demonstrating a different kind of rowdy behaviour on the strccL Though Bal Thackeray's 'young blood' may have no direct access to the consumer benefits of Macho Man's followers, they arc nonetheless part of the same process of globalization, whose power lies in the fact that it can market icons (and derivations) of Macho Man (and his kin) in the most diverse ways, and in the most unlikely quarters. In addition to these globalizing mechanisms, however, the traditional and indigenous norms of being a man in India arc affirmed at almost every level of social interaction from the aphrodisiac seller's promotion of viriliry on the street to the education of a male child at home to his eventual consolidation of patriarchy through marriage. Hctcrosexist, supremacist, and hierarchical, these norms of being a man in India arc reinforced through international images of viriliry. What is, perhaps, less evident is the confusion, inadequacy, and impotence among men, which seems to be increasing in almost direct proportion to their declining self-image in an increasingly competitive world dominated by masculine icons which arc, at once, alluring, yet unrealizable.

Men's Silmces If Patwardhan does not reveal the inner crises of masculiniry in India, this can be directly related to the fact that it is very rare for men to acknowledge these states of bankruptcy. The failure to be a man deepens through the self-imposed limits of male expressiviry, as Jonathan Rutherford has elaborated in his study of 'men's silences'. It is time to move beyond the 'narrow' and 'morally prescriptive' description ofthis predicament (Rutherford 1992: ix). In India, however, we have yet to open these silences at very basic levels. In the absence of social and political movements like 'men against sexism', which have themselves proved to be infuriatingly 'pictistic' and self-agonizing despite (or perhaps,

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154 • In the Name ofSecular

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because of) their imaginc9, feminist orientations (Somerville 1989), the marginal male constituencies in India, concerned with issues of gender, have yet to dismantle the constructions of their own male identities. And in this regard, Patwardhan is no exception. What we see in his film are the manifestations of patriarchal violence, the bravado and rhetoric of men, but they remain external: they are recorded and insened in a secular critique of communalism with no reflexivity whatsoever by the perceiving subject. By failing to acknowledge its own complicity in its critique of other men, FSHW becomes, at one level, like most representations of masculinity by men, a 'facesaving exercise' (Middleton 1992: 7). It can be argued that an excessive focus on reflexivity is indulgent especially when dealing with a crisis as politically immediate and complex as communalism. But one cannot rule out the possibility of deepening one's perception of other people's behaviour and relationships through the deconstruction of one's own identity. By dismantling one's masculinity, a secular discourse can be strengthened without being implicitly de-sexualized or regulated within the constraints of an uninterrogatcd gender construction. It is in this context that there are inner tensions and confusions to be probed, to my mind, in the seemingly devoted silence of a young Shiv Sainik listening to Bal Thackeray with reverence, or a man masturbating mentally to the figure of Mandakini while endorsing male honour- inner worlds that would undeniably complicate fixed notions and identifications of male gender, sexuality, and politics. To represent these worlds through men talking and not just indulging in 'man talk', one would need to catch the men off-guard and not just through .anonymous subterfuge. (How Patwardhan actually gets men to talk, without acknowledging their identities or his own, would definitely be a film worth reflecting on. But first, it would have to be made.) Whenever Patwardhan shows men, it is invariably en masse in public forums; the more intimate encounters in tea shops, bus stops, bars, akhadas (gymnasiums) arc not pan of his landscape. And not once do we see these men with their women-mothers, wives, daughters-in their own homes. Apart from placing men in more private, less confrontational situations, it would be useful to see the male votaries of the Hindu Right reveal their more vulnerable aspects. This might seem like an overly idealized gesture of compassion on my pan, but what concerns me is the strengthening of one's critique of communalism through the incorporation of its fissures and uncertainties. It would seem expedient

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DismantlingMm • 155 not to esscntialize the masculinity of the Hindu Right, but to sec its configurations in rdation to the pressures, tensions, capiculacions, and threats, co which men respond differently, despite chc larger hegemonic thrust of the movement. Essencializing 'communalists' is the surest way of playing into a scenario marked by 'chc enemy'. What is needed is an analysis of why and how particular stares of insecurity among men arc transformed into hatred for an entire community or religious group. The male aggression of the Shiv Sena, for instance, as Gt!rard HcuiC has analyzed in depth, is built upon the frustrations and humiliations of unemployment, which are manipulated through different languages of aspiration, struggle, power, and the liquidation of'thc enemy' (HcuiC 1992: 2254-55, 2258-59). Despite the unquestionable vileness of chis construction of'thc enemy', there is also an unacknowledged impotency among the Shiv Sainiks, which Heuzl! unearths in one of his many celling incervic:ws: 'They sec themselves being "hacked up, smashed to bits, flattened, crushed, shattered, torn open, cast on the rubbish heap, eaten away, having chc blood sucked our'. They speak of"being winded", of a "lost life... of forbidden possibilities, obstructed ways, frustrations and of a lassitude without a name" ' (ibid.). If these vulnerabilities (case in the language of violence) arc not echoed in any way in Patwardhan's film, where the upholders of the Hindu Right arc almost consistently malevolent, this needs to be viewed not merely as chc film-maker's silence, bur as part of the larger silencing of male vulnerabilities in Hindutva. Men's silences, I would argue further, cue across party, community, and religion, even though they are repressed in different ways for different reasons. While Patwardhan makes an issue of che fact that Hindu communal men arc not essentially different from their Muslim counterparts, he implicitly differentiates secular men from communal men, without differentiating secular men from each other. And here, one docs encounter the central tension of his crisis in male identity, insofar as he is prepared to acknowledge it without implicating himself (or his secular brethren) in it.

Redefining the Human The non-reflexive limitations of Patwardhan's perspective on men is evident in his mode of film-making, which is driven by political necessities rather than by introspection. His priority is in exposing facts not sharing an experience. While facing an almost unbearable amount of suffering, Patwardhan's camera-frontal, direct, immobile--remains

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156 • In the Name ofSeculAr seemingly untouched by pain. In his scrupulous rejection of any admission of vulnerability or doubt on his part, one only assume that Patwardhan is fully in control not only of his subject matter, but of his fcdings as well. Like a real 'man', he controls the chaos around him through the shaping of an argument, while remaining consistently civil in allowing both the victims and the perpetrators of violence to explain their point of view, ensuring their provisional trust through anonymity. Despite all his attempts to dismantle masculine myths and delusions in the film, Patwardhan's male identity remains intact. In this context, he fails to explore other ways of being a man, mediated, for example, through constructions of femininity. FSHW could have been enriched,· to my mind, conceptually and politically, if it had incorporated Mahatma Gandhi's radical reversal of'thc colonial culture's ordering of sexual identities, by which manliness (purusatva) is superior to womanliness (naritva) which in turn is superior to femininity in man (klibatva)' (Nandy 1988b: 7-8). As Ashis Nandy points out, Gandhi has a least two counter-modds: one, in which 'manliness and womanliness arc equal, but the ability to transcend the man-woman dichotomy is superior to both', and another, in which femininity is superior to masculinity, which in turn is better than the ·- 'failure of masculinity' (ibid., 52-3). While Nandy's categories arc esscntializcd, operating at the level of principle rather than historical difference, he does offer possible alternative masculinities, which Patwardhan does not:'lnstead of entering the profound ambivalence of androgynous concepts like ardhanarishwara (god as half-mu and halfwoman), or of the traces of femininity that arc to be found in the ' irreducible tendency towards bisexuality in men',2 Patwardhan scnles for a less gender-specific alternative in positing the human as a site for re-building civil society. The 'human' is the constant counterpoint in FSHW to the violent constructions of :'Ilasculinity. At times, it is merely glimpsed through ordinary sights, such as a girl looking out of a balcony, smiling and laughing, as she watches a secular procession on her street. In a slum, we see the backs of two children going to school, connoting a sttangdy tender image of'the routine of everyday which continues through the violence. Amidst the debris of communal devastation, a cat washes its face nonchalantly. Patwardhan tends to gloss over these details, almost as.if he were embarrassed by them. He is more at home with cryptic, maner-of-fu.ct images, such as an OM sticker on a policeman's vehicle, or more chillingly, a computerized sign-HAPPY JOURNEY-

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Dimulnt/ingMm • 157 which gleams automatically, in an overcrowded railway station, where everything has fallen apan, not least the lives ofpeople destroyed through riots and arbitrary violence. It is in rcc.ording histories of pain that Parwardhan reveals his deepest commitments. In a slum destroyed in a Shiv Sena pogrom, we hear the voice of a woman questioning the legitimacy of violence with an excruciating simplicity: 'What wrong have we done? What crimes arc we being punished for? We haven't lived here for just a day, but for forty years. Where are we to go?' Without making an issue of it, Parwardhan follows this agonized voice with an unobtrusive shot of Muslim men praying in an alley. The image docs not attempt to make an overly didactic statement; it is simply reminding us of the critical truth that when. people lose everything in life, they fall back on prayer. It may not be a solution, but it provides a temporary respite from the violence and uncertainties of everyday life. It is to Parwardhan's credit that he is open to the enigmas of faith, including the fundamentalist variety. He makes a genuine attempt to probe not just the mechanisms of intolerance, but the faith animating the perception of such mechanisms, by which they arc transfigured into divine signs by believers. Such is the case with the cook, Godavari, whose interview in the film reveals an almost fanatical state of grace, which is also intensely human. Not only docs she believe that God's rays burned the murdered sati Roop Kanwar, she actually sees photographic evidence of this divine intervention, denying the obvious fact that the rwo photographs have been pasted together to create the fiction of a 'miracle'. 'How can God be photographed?' the interviewer asks her. To which she responds, with an almost trance-like serenity: 'Gods can be photographed. They live in trees. Sec the God in the photo, and sec the burning pyre... If you could not sec God, how could you believe that she was burned by God's rays?' The concrete literalism of this defence marks fundamentalist discourse in other contexts as well, and yet, as believed by Godavari, it is extremely difficult to condemn it outright. Shaped as her belief is by the patriarchal construction of the pativrata (foe whom a husband is God, even if he beats her), can we deny Godavari a'quasi-autonomous' subjectivity that animates her inner world? Or is this subjectivity a patriarchal construction in its own right? 3 In what state of illusion is Godavari living, one could ask, when it is equally possible for another working class woman interviewed in the film to see through the economic foundations and patriarchal

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158 • In the Name ofSecular engineering of sati, with down-to-earth, subaltern common sense? Why is Godavari different? The question compels one to unearth the different ways in which patriarchy is rejected and/or internalised (as in the case of Godavari) in a seemingly non-negotiable, yet enigmatic subjectivity. In juxtaposing Godavari's faith with the subaltern woman's struggle for self-reliance and independence, Pacwardhan uses his skills as a director to delineate the larger contradictions of a situation through opposing positions. Later in the film, he complements diverse histories of pain, by interrupting the narrative of a Muslim woman (a social worker who had been raped by the communal murderers of her husband) and that of a Hindu mill-worker, whose two children are killed in the cross-fire of a riot. It is not just the juxtaposition of Muslim and Hindu that makes the narratives affecting. Indeed, this kind of strategy in the hands of a less sensitive director than Pacwardhan could easily degenerate into a specious kind of democracy, where a false attempt is made at objectifying the losses and atrocities on both sides. Wisely, Pacwardhan docs not attempt to draw comprehensive lessons from these narratives. He simply allows their subjects to speak in a context of trust, thereby revealing that vital quality which has distinguished his contribution to documentary film-making in India: the capacity to elicit and record personal testaments of oppression, injustice, and violence by ordinary citizens, struggling to retain their faith in humanity. Such a testament is provided by one Sayed Ismail Sayed Wajid, an ordinary slum-dweller, who is seen with his family and community in the closing sequence of the film, re-building the destroyed home of his Hindu neighbour. This is just one of the many examples in the entire film of what must be affirmed as grass-root secular action. More so than in his earlier films, Patwardhan counters the increasingly widespread prejudice, particularly rampant among the supporters of indigenism and nativism in intellectual circles, chat secularism continues to be a western, foreign, conceptually bankrupt importation in India. In FSHW, the secular activists may not be using the official discourse of dharmanirapeksata(the separation of religion from State), but through their gestures, choices, resistances, and coalitions, they arc actively preparing the ground for an emergent secularism in India, rooted in the realities of everyday life. On a personal note, I was struck repeatedly throughout the film by the expressivity of the secular workers, not so much in their street performances or processions, but in the exchanges ofsolidarity so evident, for example, among the women of the Lawyer's Collective social action

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Dismantling Men • 159 group. Just the simple action of sharing a glass of water or of singing together, while dwelling on their life-experiences, provided glimpses into the emotional substratum of the women's movement in India. One wishes· here that Patwardhan would linger on these inner stares of emotion with a more fluid sense of fantasy. A secular politics can only be strengthened, rather than diffused, through the incorporation of these seemingly ordinary exchanges and sentiments in everyday life. Such is the subtlety of the representations of women's interactions, that it becomes almost redundant for Patwardhan ro end the film with the icon of a mother-goddess, who has been viewed earlier in the film as a nurruring, non-violent, non-hierarchical figure, preceding the ascendancy of the phallus and the emergence of patriarchy. In the absence of an experiential context for this figure, however, the icon merely rotates in a void, perhaps resonant to those feminists funiliar with her, but somewhat abstracted and unreal to viewers at large. It would have been more appropriate, to my mind, if the film had ended on the image of water flowing in the neigbourhood where Sayed Ismail Sayed Wajid is re-building his neighbour's home. This is not because the sequence radiates the obvious message of 'communal harmony', but because the speaker himselfexudes an altogether rare male sensitivity, which is almost overwhelming in its gentle, understated, human dignity. If we have to seek alternatives in order to 'break the cycle of violence', we can find them in such living examples of civil initiatives among citizens. It is by reaching out to each other in a constantly renewed gesture of trust and love that humanity can be redefined. The mothergoddess in FSHW is merely a utopian point of reference, a politically correct insenion, but she is not part of a lived or imagined rdationship. To imagine the future, as Patwardhan urges us, we need to begin not with the exhumed symbols of the past nor with the globalized icons of the present, but with emergent, human relationships, cutting across class, community, and religion. For this to materialize, however, men will have to begin to dismantle their masculinities by questioning their power in relation to the instabilities of gender and sexuality, which may yet enable them to confront some of their illusions about being secular. Notes I.

N ot all productions of the 'masculine woman' (m11rdJZn1). however, are necessarily conuolled by women. As Ania Loomba ( 1990) has daborated perceptively in her analysis of government propaganda on state-conuolled television net-

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160 • In the Name ofSecular works in India, the anti-imperialist figure of the Rani of Jhansi, for example, commemorated for her militant role in the 1857 upri&ing, has been appropriated in a nationalist narrative: We sec the Rani stripping her womanly weaknesses along with her jewelled bracdcu, and donning militant masculinity by picking up a sword and plunging it into a sheath at her waist. She is next seen on her horse, riding in seductive slow motion over a rolling landscape to the words of a film song which urges the young mm of the nation to martyr thcmsdvcs for ics cause. Then a low-pirched male voice recites lines of a popular poem celebrating the Rani's ability to fight 'like a man'. (l.oomba 1990: 2.

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167) For a provocative examination of both the beneficent and negative aspecu

of ardhanarishw1ZTa---tlie 'yearning for wholeness' and the 'rensions and disequilibriums between female and malc'-rcad Wendy Doniger O'Flahc:ny 1980: 310-34, in which she emphasizes the primary maleness of the androgyne in Indian mythology. Ardhll1Ulrishwara, she reminds us, is always regarded as a form of Shiva, not a form of Shiva and Parvati; the literal meaning of his name is 'The Lord (ishwara) who is half (ardha) a woman (ruin)'. On b.isocuality,sce Sudhir Kakar's pertinent comments in the Indian context on the 'mergcnce' of the boy-child with his mother in Shamans, Mysticr, and Docwrr (1982b: 161 ) . From Sudesh Vaid and Kumkum Sangari's deeply researched study (1991), ir would seem chat 'it is not only explanations of belief in widow immolation as "sati" which are ideological but the beliefitJelf' (my italics, WS-14). Caregorically denying the 'autonomous origin' of belief, which is inextricable from 'the social processes which generate it', the authors nonetheless qualify that 'once articulated in rituals and institurions, belief acquires a relative autonomy of the sort that oth'cr ideological furmarions have' (ibid.). It is this 'rdarive autonomy', I believe, that needs ro be opened through the trajectories of subjectivity and desire.

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5 No More Utopias? Re-mapping the Present rom the microanalytic perspectives on secularism situated within che narratives of Roja and Father, Son, and Holy War, it would be useful to return to che broader framework of secular cultural practice a'n d activism as articulated earlier in che book. My purpose here is not to provide a neat blueprint of the future of secularism, but to question how this very future is in the process of being dreamed, strategizcd, and betrayed. I am compdled to reflect, therefore, on che idea of utopia as it is invoked in the secular struggle, either through references to Gandhi or to che emergent coalitions of resistance in subaltern culture. More critically, I am concerned with the manuf.i.ccure of utopias in popular and mass culture, whose constructions of happiness and social togetherness can be read in collusion with the convergence of global capitalism and the rise of the Hindu Right. Nonethdess, despite the increasing dominance of these master narratives ofour times, there are small but significant shifu in the unwritten agendas of change. What I want to do here is not to recapitulate the narratives in this book in order to abstract a core of secularist principles-this would be both unreal and f.i.lsdy reassuring, and would undermine the very real risks and uncertainties of the secular struggle, as it is lived and fought, in parliament, in the courts, in academia, and on the streets. For me, secularism remains a search, at once related to the politics of the self, and to the emergence of a non-sectarian culture based on a respect for differences at multiple levds. Within

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162 • In the Name ofSecular this search, I would like to juxtapose some of the possibilities and illusions in dreaming other finures, and the politics that goes into constructing at least some of these fictional utopias.

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I begin with Gandhi not because he has the answers, but because he had the courage to envision the impossible in the hardest of circumstances. At a time when he could acknowledge that 'no one listens to me anymore... I am crying in the wilderness', he could also sustain the 'disintegrating' struggle of independence through a vision of another . society: In this structUrc composed of innume~ble villages, there will be an evcrwidening, never-ascending circle. Life will not be a pyramid with the apex sustained by the bottom. But it will be an oceanic circle whose centre will be the individual. ..The outermost circumference will not wield power to crush the inner circle but will give strength to all within and derive its own strength ·from it. (Gandhi 1970: 236)

Following this description of an ideal independence, Gandhi adds: I may be taunted with the retort that this is all Utopian and, therefore, not worth a single thought. If Euclid's point, though incapable of being oown by human agency, has an imperishable value, my picture bas its own for mankind to live... We must have a proper picture of what we want, before we can have something approaching it. (ibid.: 236-7)

This is typical of Gandhi's ability to anticipate the cynicism of his critics-in this case, anti-utopian rationalists, who had their own visions of an independent India, more often than not, a supremely manageable, equitable, statist utopia. Where Gandhi differs is in the reflexivity of bis discourse. If he posits an ideal, he acknowledges it, and in the process brings it down to earth by inscribing the difficulties in realizing it. His utopia is one way of sustaining struggle. Significantly, Gandhi justified his utopia through metaphors derived from geometry. Euclid is frequently invoked in his writings, as in his endorsement of a 'stateless society' which 'does not exist anywhere in the world', but which needs to be posited rather like mathematical principles that cannot be proved definitively (Gandhi 1978, vol. 84: 80-1). The danger arises when Gandhi's utopic metaphors have specific religious connotations, when the ' ideal society', for example, is named 'Ramarajya'. Here again, Gandhi anticipates the secularist argument by situating 'Ramarajya' in 'political,' 'economic' and 'moral' contexts,

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No Mort Utopias?• 163 so that it becomes a worldly category in its own right, specifically related to issues ofcapital and military power. 'My concept ofRamarajya,' . as Gandhi specifies, 'excludes replacement of the British army by a national army of occupation. A country that is governed by even its national army can never be morally &cc' (ibid.: vol. 85: 266-7). In other contexts, Gandhi defends Ramarajya at a rhetorical level as a 'convenient and expressive phrase' communicable to millions of Hindus (Gandhi 1987: 212). Unf.Ulingly conscious of the religious background of his audience, Gandhi stressed that he would substitute Khudai Raj for Ramarajya ifhe were addressing a' predominantly Muslim audience' and the 'Kingdom of God on earth' for a 'Christian audience' (ibid.). This is not to say (as I had emphasized earlier regarding interreligious cultural activism) that Gandhi had adopted a predominantly utilitarian approach to the communicative strategies of religion. As a believer, he had a genuine respect for the emotional resonances of specific vocabularies in relation to panicular traditions of faith. One is reminded in this respect of the more self-conscious secularist sensitivity that Rabindranath Tagore revealed in his refusal to set to music the nationalist lyric of Bantk Mataram in its entirety. In deference to a widely held belief that the stanza invoking the goddess Durga 'might wound Moslem susceptibilities', and in response to his own faith in 'monotheistic ideals', the poet had composed the first stanza alone in the version that we know it today, which he believed had 'an inspiring significance of its own', which could not 'offend any sect or community' (Mukhopadhyay 1994: 111). This vigilance in respecting the religious sentiments of different communities, is all the more stirring given the communalization of contemporary political culture where it has become almost impossible to negotiate religious differences or to translate metaphors in intrareligious/intra-cultural contexts. While the controversy surrounding Bande Mataram has subsided, Ramarajya today is no longer a metaphor, but (at least, in some of its dominant usages), a fundamentalist utopia. Unlike Gandhi, communal factions in India today are attempting to literalize metaphors with violent consequences. A utopia in the name of Rama could well be achieved through the annihilation of other communities. One man's utopia could be the source of another's liquidation. History is being repeated as dystopias are proving to be more transculturally resilient than utopias. At a meeting of South Asian writers in Kathmandu, organized in 1994 by the South-Nonh Network Cultures and Development, the

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164 • In th~ Nam~ of&cular Pakistani writer lntizar Husain made a stanling and intensely vulnerable admission. He revealed that he had never known that Ayodhya 'really' existed in the map of the world till the de.molition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. For him, Ayodhya had always been a metaphor, a very precious site in the landscape of his imagination. Now he had no other option but to deal with the dislocation in his imagination as he re-mapped his world as a poet. It seems to me that there are uncertainties in the peculiar situation of writers like Husain (and his colleagues across religions and cultures) that have yet to be adequately inscribed in the theoretical clarion calls for 'cognitive inapping' in a post-modern world Qameson 1991: 417-8). The trauma of a shattered, imagined utopia could well be more devastating than the disappearance of utopias in general.

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'A realized Utopia can be another name for terror,' as Ashis Nandy cautions in his reflection on Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias (1992). And yet, one cannot stop believing in utopias because they are potentially dangerous. Perhaps, it would be best to think of utopias-in-process, whose assumptions of perfection can be submitted to a ceaseless, critical scrutiny. The challenge here would be to admit, if necessary, that one's particular utopia is flawed and worth rejecting, instead of positing 'a "purer" and "truer" version of the same utopia allegedly unavailable to its earlier misguided partisans'(ibid.: 6). This kind of 'schizoid legitimation', as Nandy puts it, is what perpetuates the tyranny of failed utopias. Equally dangerous is the mindless embrace of other utopias from different contexts, which could lead to a euphoric legitimation of an alien system. Indeed, an affirmation of utopias without critical reflexiviry could lead to an impasse in which one could be trapped within the ivory-tower of one's illusions. Perhaps, we are better off, as Nandy suggests, 'with negatively defi~ed utopias than with positively defined ones. A utopia which rejects technicism or the idea of mastery over nature is often a more serious affair than a utopia which recommends a specific technoeconomicor ecological solution' (ibid.: 13). Solution: the ultimate hubris of utopias. One can only suspect the mystique surrounding this word, particularly in the so-called Third World where the alleged solutions of development have resulted in the dissolution of community, ecology, and social relationships. Nandy correctly stresses that a 'third-world utopia' '(which would seem to be a contradiction in terms) must begin with the issue of 'man-made

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No Mort Utopias?• 165 suffering'-the realities of 'poverty, exploitation, indignity and sclfcontempt' out of which the Third World has been constructed as ' a political and economic category' (ibid.: 21). In order to imagine utopias specific to these Third World conditions, one needs to identify both the 'points of intervention in an increasingly complex [and disparate] social and economic structure', as well as 'the agents and bearers of social transformation' (Levitas 1993: 258). What is needed are not 'better maps of the future', as Ruth Levitas puts it succinctly, but more 'adequate maps of the present', which can activate the desire for a more humane and socially responsive world. The search for an unnamed utopia, therefore, needs to be subsumed in precisely this task of figuring out an adequate map of the present-not the post-modern maps that are only too available through the surfeit of theoretical production from 'developed' societies, but the as-yet-unrealized maps of post-colonial societies like India, where the process of modernization (forget post-modernization) is at once incomplete and almost painfully contradictory in its arbitrary and coercive modes of dissemination. At this point, one should caution against demonizing modernity in one's construction of Third World utopias. Ironically, this attitude merely reiterates, if not extends the myths of First World utopias, which have been built around figures like the Noble Savage and the Cannibal, living in propertylcss, communitarian, and ecologically friendly environments. Reminding us of how ignorance has been constructed in the shaping of western utopias, which have been created through the mental appropriation of'ideas, data and experience' of non-western . societies, Ziauddin Sardar emphasizes: 'The fact that the Utopian perception of the Noble Savage reduces him to a cipher is not the concern of the western seekers of self-identity and loss of innocence. What humanity and cultural identity is actually lost, what abominable crimes are perpetrated in the realisation of such idealised pictures, and what is actually happening to non-western cultures today is then left totally out of the discussion' (Sardar 1992: 54). However, the point that Sardar fails to make is that it is equally dangerous for Third World critics of First World utopias to rhapsodize about the imagined benefits of pre-colonial, indigenous cultures, because this valorization of a pre-modern state of wholeness could disguise the inequalities and violence underlying patriarchal structures of community. Sarai Sarkar emphasizes precisely this point in his exposure of the 'culture trap' in the critique of development rhetoricizcd (and

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166 • In the Name ofSecular occasionally practised) by a range of activists and NGOs in India. Without invoking the construction of utopia in specific terms, these anti-development activists have tended to romanticize the 'perennial' values of traditional cultures, as well as to draw untenable parallels berween cultural and ecological diversities (Sarkar 1995: 1849). . Artempting to puncture the illusion of ecological wisdom in traditional communities, Sarkar indicates many instances in. the history of ancient civilizations in which man-related ecological degradation has resulted through blatant acts of deforestation, soil erosion, over-irrigation, over-grazing (ibid.: 1848). These acts could be regarded as aberrations within the larger tenets of eco-feminism, which is not without its own mystifications of femininity, nunure, and nature. Sarkar is on stronger political ground when he emphasizes how the myth of 'diversities' can sometimes be used by the most conservative politicians and theologians to justify the economic imbalances berween the Nonh and the South, so that the vested interests of religious groups (even of a fundamentalist variety) can sometimes be justified on the grounds of protecting 'human rights' and 'cultural identity' (ibid.: 1847). In such critiques, one encounters affinities with the 'politics of diversity' (Sangari 1995) outlined earlier in the book, in which caste discrimination, economic exploitation, and the oppression of women are legitimized by the State and other patriarchal forces in the guise of respecting the plurality of religious communities. The problem with Sarkar's critique of the 'culture trap', however, is that it is itself entrapped within the paradigms of a 'one world' culture. As much as he attempts to dissociate 'our sense' of one world from the projections of the GATT, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the transnational corporations (TNCs) (Sarkar 1995: 1851 ), he does not really confront how this other oneness can be realized at a global level. It is all very well to say that 'the great majorities of all the peoples of the South want to catch up on what the Nonh has achieved' (ibid.: 1849)-in some ways, this is a refreshing rebuttal ofthe enforced primitivization to which traditional communities are subjected by metropolitan activists in search of their own roots. The question, however, remains: .What are the mechanisms and procedures by which this 'catching up with the Nonh' can be facilitated? Who determines these agencies of change but the megastructures of global capitalist enterprise? Eliding these questions, Sarkar regresses ultimately into the most hollow universal premise that 'the peoples of the world' are 'so many

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No Mort Utopias?• 167 variants of the same human species' not just biologically but at the level of their 'psyches and unconsciouses [sic]' (ibid.: 1851). 'They dream similar dreams. Also their cultures arc largely similar'('Wc' dream similar dreams? 'Our' cultures arc largely similar?). The massively uninterrogatcd premises in this reductive logic are not 'almost universal', as Sarkar imagines. Rather, they arc based on an csscntialized notion of the pre-bonding of peoples 'even before they had contacts with each other' (ibid.). To relate this hypothesis of assumed similarities in power-ridden and differentiated institutions like marriage, family, and belief in a G'od, to the cultural slogan 'we arc one mankind', reveals an extreme simplification of cultural togetherness that is almost more dangerous to my mind than the mindless valorization of difference itself. If there is a truth to be found in this dilemma of culture and development, it must surely lie in between the extremities of polarized positions. Eschewing the 'middle path' of equanimity, its negotiation must take place within the uncertainties and doubts of our times, in 'a world without alternatives', as Rajni Kothari (1993) puts it bluntly. That this 'crisis of vision' and the 'decline of engagement with Utopias' should be voiced by one of the most ardent rhetoricians of 'alter~atives' in civil society and the non-party democratic political process, is a chastening reminder of where we arc in our search for (or rejection of) utopias. In his usual matter-of-fact way, Kothari provides a valuable grid of the 'erosion of alternatives' at three levels: 'the sudden disappearance of alternative fulcrums of power and visions' from socialist and Third World sectors, against 'the western imperial capitalist model'; 'the displacement of the State by the Market'; and 'the erosion of countercultures worldwide', notably grass-root movements, which Kothari has on many occasions critiqued for their sectarianism and absence of coalition alliances with th~ larger democratic political process (Kothari 1993: 1100). Levelling his criticism against all movements relating to peace, the environment, feminism, alternative futures, and human rights, which have in different ways been co-opted by the 'marketisation of dissent' (ibid.: 1105-6), Kothari polemicizes his despair so relentlessly that one is left literally with no alternative but his critique of alternatives. In a later essay, which is more hopeful despite the absence of any 'truly integrated vision that can steer humanity to a coherent future', Kothari acknowledges that it is the very 'inadequacy' of prevailing ideological models (marxist, liberal-democratic, Gandhian) that should intensify

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168 • In the Name ofSecular the process of struggle, so that 'out of the myriad chumings of the same human enterprise a relevant future can take shape' (Kothari 1994: 1594). It is through these 'churnings', I would suggest, that utopia can be most realistically invoked, without any illusions of its imminence.

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From these somewhat programmatic reflections on utopia, I would now like to focus on specific constructions of utopia as determined by the mass media and popular culture, which arc among the most powerful sites today for the propagation of 'alternative' futures. Inevitably, the negotiation of capital in such sites becomes almost mandatory within the larger context of globalization and economic liberalization to which the very possibiliry (or destruction) of such futures is linked. While socialist utopias have received a jolting, though not necessarily permanent setback, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, it is capitalist utopias that reign supreme. There can be no greater site of these utopias than the ubiquitous television, which has invaded the domestic sphere in an astonishingly swift passage of time. Invasion, I stress, not importation or development or innovation: the phenomenon has been too swiftly engineered, monitored, and legislated to be described in more euphemistic terms. Now, in villages, which continue to be denied the basic necessities of life, it is possible to see Star TV, MTV, Zee TV, cable TV, blue movies, and Doordarshan. It should be remembered that this onslaught of images from First World economies has been packed into a very short span of time, with no preparation whatsoever in our infantile television culture. Utopia has landed on us, and we have no choice but to accept it as an unavoidable component of the liberalization of the economy being propagated by the government under the dictates of the World Bank, the IMF, and the expansionist marketing strategies of Rupen Murdoch. The most deceptive form of this utopia on television exists, I would say, in the wide array of consumerist items that are displayed on commercials, accompanied by foreign life-styles, that are totally alien to millions of viewers. This inaccessible, yet visually immediate world of commodities, is possibly the most cruel utopia that could be inflicted on a people, whose poveny has increased in almost direct proponion to the seduction of capital engineered by the media and its corporate allies. Significantly, this marketing of the nation's deepest fantasies has also affected the imaginaries of commercial cinema, to which I would like to turn now in order to inspect its commodification of desires.

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No More Utopias?• 169 If I had to choose one narrative that could exemplify a definitive construction of utopia in India today, it would have to be linked to one of the greatest super-hits in the last hundred years of Hindi cinema, Sooraj Barjatya's all-India family entertainment HumAapke Hain Koun..! I have analysed the film at length elsewhere (Bharucha 1995), but for the purpose of this discussion, I would say that it presents an unequivocally emphatic construction of happiness which almost annihilates whatever one has come to intcrnalh:e and appreciate as variety in Hindi cinema, through stock conventions like subplots, suspense, violence, melodrama, and histrionic revelations. Hum Aapke Hain Koun. ..! (hereafter HAHK) settles for monochromatic entertainment with a vengeance, its treatment of a wedding (the archetypal event of the film) serving as both an inspiration and a pretext for a non-stop rollcrcoastcr of laughter and songs, fun and games, toys and cricket, with one of the most gastronomic displays of food in the history of world cinema, which is fctishizcd with a power that I have yet to witness in any form of advertising. W calth is the given, pre-ordained condition of this world, its extravagance punctuated with naturalistic details of the contemporary Indian market, supplemented with discreet references to global capital (the family business is in the process of expanding through multinational collaboration). But this display of wealth merely naturalizes the generic, North Indian, upper caste, upper class, extended family, around which the film revolves. Their collective beneficence is highlighted through the inclusion of one token Muslim friend (the only 'minority'), who is, of course, an honorary member of the family. As for the working class and the poor, who have almost' always been featured, however problematically, in the earlier masterpieces of Hindi cinema by veteran directors like Mchboob, Raj Kapoor, and Manmohan Desai, HAHK docs have its share of servants, but it totally excludes the poor. Tellingly, the most charismatic servant character is upwardly mobile and learning to speak English; he compcres cricket matches, and at one point, even recites a few lines extolling the virtues of Pandit Nehru. In· short, all whcr exist and arc worth addressing in HAHK arc subsumed in the narrative of capital, which coexists harmoniously with an authentically modern Hindu culture. It would be an exaggeration, perhaps, in this regard, to claim-that HAHK is about the Hindu Right, but it is definitely a film that could not have been possible without a deep internalization of the Hindu Right in popular and mass culture. What can be read against the grain of the film, therefore, through the

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170 • In the Name ofSecular cloying innocence of its narrative, is the ease with which the market has been embraced by the community, with an appropriate dose of Hindu religiosity to keep the family together, and very discrectlywithout making an issue of it-to keep the others out. Of course, if they wish to enter this narrative, they will always be welcomed (in all probability, with a cup of chai, which is served relentlessly throughout the film)-and, in the process, they will be absorbed. Clawtrophobic,homogcnizcd,monocultural, and totalizing arc some of the words to describe this master narrative of our times, which reasserts not jwt the possibility, but the visceral, immediate presence of utopia in contemporary India. (Almost to prove this point, HAHK must be the first film in the history of Indian cinema for which the distributors have arranged for lights to be framed around the film screen, so that they can sparkle during the hit songs.) The director's allegiance to capital in the form of a sure-hit box office success, is displayed at a particularly critical point in the history of Bollywood, where the problem is not merely economic but to do with the increasingly repetitive and uninventive narratives of commercial cinema. One should also add that this affirmation of capital is cast in a narrative dtat plays on some of the deepest needs of people, drawing on illwions of security, well-being, and upward mobility, which can partially account for the irresistible appeal of the film in what mwt surely be the most violent and turbulent moment in our post-independence history. To understand the issue of needs in the broader frame\vork of entertainment, it is wcful to recall Richard Dyer's illuminating reflections on 'Entertainment and Utopia', in which he analyses the paradox by which the world of entertainment responds to needs that are real, while 'defining and delimiting what constitutes the legitimate needs of people in society' (Dyer 1993: 278). On the one hand, the avatars of entertainment can posit 'utopian solutions' ('abundance', 'energy', ' intensity', 'transparency', and 'community') in response to the very real tensions of everyday life ('scarcity', 'exhawtion', 'dreariness', 'manipulation', and 'regimentation'). In the process, however, these manufacturers of a 'better life' exclude many vital needs for the transformation of society and the actualization of social jwticc-for example, the need to respect women outside patriarchal norms (not jwt within well-adjwted family structures), or the need for oppressed communities to develop alliances across caste differences (without the enlightened patronage of the ruling class). Unfortunately, as Dyer points out, the only needs addressed in the world of entertainment arc those which

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No More Utopias?• 171 capitalism acknowledges and promises to meet, so that in the final analysis, 'entertainment provides alternatives to capitalism which will be provided by capitalism' (ibid., 279). In the absence of sufficiently powerful counter-narratives to phenomena like HAHK, one has to acknowledge the disconcening reality that Sooraj Barjatya's all-India family cntcnainmcnt constitutes a secular imaginary in its own right, without, of course, its claiming to be secular. In a more politically explicit mode, not just through Barjatya's celebration of the 'good life' but ofnationalism itself, narratives like Mani Ratnarn's Roja (as I have examined earlier), and more recently, Bombay, have been hailed as definitive secularist narratives in their defence of the State and as a plea for communal harmony 'respectively. While there can be counter-readings to these dominant views (as I have attempted to present my own critique of Roja). one cannot underestimate the power of a cultural hegemony built through an intricate layering ofconsent, covering almost all sections of society, with expatriate and global endorsements as well. (One should bear in mind that Hum AApkt Hain Koun ..!, Roja and Bombay, among other hits and super-hits, have a global distribution network, extending to expatriate Indian communities in Britain, Canada, the United States, as well as a wide range of audiences in Africa and the Gulf countries. The video circuit of these.films and the broadcast of their hit songs on satellite and national television networks have also contributed to their global outreach, at levels which could challenge the distribution of Hollywood blockbusters.) The real problem, however, docs not concern the mere distribution of these films, but ·the ways in which they arc read and endorsed (consciously or unconsciously) as secular by their neo-liberal critics, supponcrs, sceptics; and fans. What is needed, in my view, is to work against the grain of these films politically, in order to dismantle their seemingly 'secular' imaginaries, which are, in actuality; soft~Hindutva ones couched, disguised, and dissi.t'iulatcd in secularist terms. Only then is it possible to embark upon the very real struggle to redefine the uncertainties of secularism in post-Ayodhya India, without succumbing to the euphoria of a predetermined secularism that has, in actuality, been communaliz.cd by the State and its accomplices.

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In shifting the agenda from ut9pian narratives in popular culture to the representation of cultural activism in the mass media, one can

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172 • In the Namt ofStcular open up other dreams of the future within the narrative of capital. The illusion promoted by the moguls ofthe media, seemingly committed to alternative futures, is that ordinary people can come to the rescue of the State if only it were in a position to listen to people's dreams of a better life. Sometimes these dreams arc accommodated within particular forums provided by the media, ostensibly open to the public at large, who are encouraged to re-invent the furure for themselves and the world. One such forum was provided by India's most slick and widely distributed news magazine India Today, when it solicited alternative proposals from its readers in response to the demolition of the Bahri Masjid in Ayodhya. While this venture was meant to provide a space in which people could express themselves, instead of allowing themselves to be silenced as 'mute witnesses' to 'another corrl.munal carnage', the more conceptual task- at least for some of the contributors-involved nothing less demanding than a re-imagining of the nation from the rubble of its history, so evident in the debris of the Bahri Masjid. Operating with the premise that political solutions to the disputed site are not likely to yield creative or long-lasting results, the editorial team of India Today declared with the most consummate rhetoric of its profession, which invariably succeeds in encapsulating national predicaments into succinct sentences: The question is no longer whether India can wake up from a nightmare but whether India can dream at all.' In what must be one of the most elegant post-Ayodhya publications, in which the responses to India Today's proposal have been collated, Yth Bhumi! Tht Siknt Majority on How to Savt Ayodhya (from which I draw my information) could be described as a compendium of people's utopias. lricorporatjng meditations and poems, architectural designs and blueprints for dream institutions, retrievals of symbols and signs across religions and cultures, the utopias are, at one level, determined by the mandir/masjid divide, their possible synthesis and dialogic affinities. Thus, we have designs for 'two· chabootras (platforms): one for Ram, one for Rahim' (ibid.: 12); 'black granite columns commemorat(ing] the good deeds done by Muslims for Hindus, and white marble columns, [representing] the acts of Hindus for their Muslim brethren'(t 3). More suggestively, in an ecological frame, we arc offered 'the Madhumaltivine embracing the khajurtree', symbolizing the creative union ofHinduism and Islam respectively (27). Sometimes, religion itself is universalized through archetypes like the undying 'banyan tree',

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No Mort Utopias? • 173 symbolizing the 'sacred earth' (29), or six pillars forming an architectural duster, representing six religions of India, each pillar constructed from the rubble of the Bahri Masjid (34). Tellingly, it is children who reject the mediation of religion altogether in their dreams of a more humane future: 'I don't want a mandir or masjid. I want peace,' says Gulabi, a child &om Jaipur (3). Yet another comment is more explicit: 'I want an open ground where I can play. Mandir, Masjid frighten me' (49). This view is echoed by another child, who reasons that, 'If a temple is built only Hindus will use it. If a mosque is built only Muslims will use it. If a hospital is made, everyone will use it' (21). A more chastened adult response, drawing on the memories of Partition, insists that neither should the mosque be re-built, nor a temple built: the site should be transformed into a sculptured landscape with niches for individuals to sit and meditate, so that the entire space should 'symbolise, besides resolve, the nation's penance for the shame it failed to prevent' (24). Through domes, household shrines, friendship arches, and rosaries, the visualization of utopia overwhelms the capaciry of the designers to articulate (or question) its possibilities through words. Nonetheless, within these visual dream-sites, there is a social consciousness at work, incorporating civic services through institutions like women's centres, orphanages, old people's homes, veterinary hospitals, and Ayurvedic dispensaries (19). Perhaps, the most down-to-earth proposal comes from an economist working for the government: 'Do you ask the religion of the man who carves your temple or mosque, or the one who grows your food or sdls it to you? Do you question whether the fingers that wove your saris, clothes or made your shoes belong to a Hindu or Muslim? The commerce of getting on in life brings us all together. It is the only faith that will count' (57). One needs to return at this point to Ashis Nandy's statement that a'realized utopia can be another name for terror'. Perhaps even unrealized utopias can contain the seeds of terror, depending on one's politics and location in a panicular class and caste struggle. In this regard, there is an extraordinarily thin line between a communitarian dreamworld, and a regimented paradise. Ashrams and other ~periments in communal living have not always been beneficent to their inmates. When one posits a 'communiry centre which functions as a sacred space' (19), therefore, one needs to ask: For whom is the sacred a necessary component of community living? How does one imaginary of the sacred, drawing on particular cultural sources, exclude other

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174 • In the Name ofSecular imaginaries from different sources? How do communitarian utopias negotiate the choiccs--and perhaps, the dissenting opinions-£ its practitioners? Or docs one already have to belong to a utopia in order to accept its premises in blissful silence? From another critical perspective, in confronting the proposition offered by the economic advisor to the government, who makes 'commerce' the bottom-line for all disputes between religions, one needs to ask: Who is making the decisions of this seemingly harmonious commerce? Can one honestly say that it is bringing people together? Faith in commerce, I would say, cxistS for those who control it, and who arc in a position to participate in its laws of supply and demand, profit and loss. For those who arc at the receiving end, and most of all, for those who arc disgruntled because they arc not receiving tn11ugh despite their efforts, the result, more often than not, is the transference of this resentment into the c-0mmunalization of other communities, who arc held responsible for the setbacks. In shon, faith in commerce can be no guarantee that communal tensions will not be stirred by the discontcntS emerging from its practice. . From this example, one can turn more problematically to the inscription of capital in India Today's utopic agenda, without which Yeh Bhumi! could not have happened. Without undermining its sheer expenise, one is nonetheless compelled to question the discrimination between 'public service' (which is how India Today rcprcscntS its involvement in the Yeh Bhumi! publication) and 'public relations'. I would not recommend undue cynicism here, so long as the public relations of an ostensibly worthy project reaches the .public, and not just a coterie of privileged clients and foundations soliciting 'human interest' projectS. What matters is the outreach and dialogic potential of the messages on communal harmony. The scale of India Todajs distribution network $hould not be underestimated, nor its ground-breaking success in translating into Indian languages for several, quasi-autonomous regional units of the magazine. One should remember, however, that translation in the mass media may have little to do with the dissemination of information, and still less to do with the democratization of dissent. If we take the example of Rupert Murdoch, through whose endeavours regional Indian languages (or at least, the 'big ones') are how being privileged through satellite television, the linguistic stakes are entirely connected with capturing new markets, and not with any altruistic (or 'radical') concern to counter the hegemony of the English language.

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No More UtopiaJ? • 175 Despite its laudable efforts to promote communal harmony, India Today's endeavour cannot be separated from business. A pragmatic approach would be to accept this contradiction as pan of a new way of organizing alternative views on a wide, though not necessarily mass scale. The real issue concerns the participation of the individuals in the so-called public forum initiated by the magazine. Did the participants of this forum have any say in the tepresentation or alteration not only of their views but of others' as well? It would not appear so: 'The entries chosen for the publication will be decided by an eminent pand of editors. No correspondence will be entertained on the subject'. This rules out the possibility of talking back not just to the editor, but to the other participants as well. It also pre-empts the interruptive potential of building a movement across differences. And yet, the rhetoric of a people's democracy prevails: Whether you arc a student, housewife, farmer, worker or a professional, you must also find a way to express yourself. While sharing your concern you could also become part of a growing forum. This is necessary so that a .fledgling movnnmt for alternatives gains its own mommrum and finds its own talinnan. (my italics, ibid.: 3).

This rhetoric, combining the languages of social therapy, democracy, and magic (the movement has to find its 'own 'talisman'), is ultimately cast in the profoundest of illusions. No 'farmer' or 'worker' is likely to read Yeh Bhum~ because it is obviously a gift presentation, the kind that corporations spend enormous amounts of money on every year to honour their clients. Tellingly, for a publication that erases all the names of its contributors, as well as its date of publication-utopias are invariably timeless, though not neces5arily nameless-it does not exclude (in all probability, for 'technical reasons') the discreet, yet prominent acknowledgement at the back of the book that it has been 'produced by India Today as public service'. This service I would submit, has nothing do with the Gandhian notion of sevtr, it is a marketing strategy that is ultimately selling itself through the guise of a forum and movement that do not really exist. While the potential of public service gestures such as this should not.be summarily denied, they have to be catalysed beyond the frame of any one organization. For a secular cultural movement to ignite in India today at a national level, one needs the support of the media, but only so long as its moguls arc prepared to enter into a critical dialogue with activists in the secular front, who ~ay have their own subversive views of using the media for the propagation ofthe movement.

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176 • In tk Name ofSecular Having exposed some of the illusions of mainstream cultural activism, one is in a better position now to face the enormous task that lies ahead for grass-root cultural activists and workers in reinventing more textured and differentiated imaginaries of secularism that are both communicable to diverse audiences, and critical of received notions of the secular. Anti-communalism, as I have emphasized earlier, so apparent in committed publications like Communalism Combat and many other pamphlets, newsletters, signatures drives and inquiries into riots and communal atrocities, cannot provide the only foundation for building a secular cultural movement in India. This type of secular vigilance needs to be supplemented with actions and gestures that celebrate communal solidarity, cutting across differences of class, caste, gender, and profession. It is an illusion in this context to regard 'performativity' and 'culture' as the prerogatives of artists alone. Some of the most potent creative interventions in the worst affected areas of com.munal violence have been made by local people, whose desire for peace has occasionally triggered idioms of protest that are unprecedented both in their invention and pertinence to local realities. Taking a cue from these idioms, secular activists have devised new modes of mobilization. Driven by a utopian belief that riots can be overcome through affirmations of love and neighbourhood, there have been a spate of peace initiatives following the Mumbai riots, including 1narches, prayer meetings, human chains, the organization of people's helplines, free medical and legal aid centres, food relief camps, relay hunger strikes, blood donation drives, and later, through the organization of different mohalla committees, neighbourhood activities including health camps, study classes, picnics, carrom and volleyball tournaments, even Cricket for Peace. Whether the initiatives have involved 'Run for Peace. and Unity' or the 'Pyaar Baant-te Chaw (Spread love) Cycle Rally', it is difficult not to be moved by the valiant cheer of these ventures in the aftermath of one of the worst communal riots in postindependence India. Yet there can be no room for euphoria in commemorating these secular initiatives. & always, in any cultural intervention, there are appropriations at work, which can occasionally assume sinister proportions. We learn, for instance, of a politician, known for his role in instigating the anti-Sikh riots in New Delhi, leading a peace march in the capital in protest against the demolition of the Bahri Masjid. The irony that one can endorse communal violence at one moment, and condemn it at another, reveals only too vividly how devious an

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No More Utopias? • 1n anti-communal cultural intervention can be within a masquerade of secularist fervour. And yet, one cannot allow such distortions to undermine the peace initiatives by concerned citizens and activists. This could only result in a perpetuation of violence and fear, in the absence of any faith in the viable resistance to communalism, however small in scale, and provisional in effect. In searching for viable, people-oriented forums for secular cultural action, one resource could be festivals, which for all their religio-cultural rootedness, are nonetheless capable of being shared across communities. Puja committees, particularly in cities like Calcutta, have often choreographed their events, including the design of the puja pandals, around secular themes. At times, this has resulted in a glorification of trivia, such as Jurassic Park (which has also been the subject of jatra performances in rural and mofussil areas). But, more seriously, the celebration of pujas can also call attention to social problems, n.atural disasters and emergencies. More work is needed by secular activists in sustaining dialogues with puja committees on how the sensitivities of particular neighbourhoods can be extended to affirm a broader social consciousness. Unfortunately, with the growing commodification of puja festivities, there is also an increasing desensitization to the ways in which an act of worship can be humanized through more concrete gestures of charity and social engagement. A particularly sharp secular intervention in this area was made in August 1993, by Asghar Ali Engineer's organization Eltta-Samiti in collaboration with the Sandra East Community Centre (BECC) on the occasion of Raksha Bandhan, when Hindu women tic ralthis on the wrists of their brothers and other male relatives, thereby seeking a symbolic form ofprotection. Transcending both the specifically Hindu context of this ceremonial gesture and its patriarchal associations, the tying of the ralthi in the Eltta-BECC cultural event crossed all barriers of gender and religion, as Muslims tied ralthis to Hindus, men tied ralthis to women, women to other women, and men to men. The theme of inter-community amity was an extension of the experiments that BECC had made with Raksha Bandhan in earlier years, involving street children and policemen (Punwani 1993). Not all festivals need to be celebrated for their religious associations alone. Secular activists need to pay far greater attention to the socialization and the mingling of commercial activities and entertainment that constitutes the world of the mela. Along with performances by mountebanks, acrobats, and sundry exhibitionists, there is surely space within

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178 • In tht NaTM ofSecular the mda grounds for some secular proselytizing in a humorous mode on the virtues of living together. Occasionally, the very concept of the mda has been totally secularized, as in Calcutta's legendary Boi Mel.a, in all probability the largest public book fair in the world, which has become an important part of the city's calendar of social events, along with the pujas and festivals. An argument could also be made for inventing specifically secular festivals around historial events and forgotten heroes, which could be related to site-specific locations in public spaces and slums. There are also survivors of all kinds of atrocities ranging from the Partition to the most recent communally motivated pogroms, who need to be remembered through public ceremonies. Survival could become the new motif for subaltern celebration, serving as a rallying point for the oppressed across community and caste. In the attempt to activize secular consciousness, it is necessary to retrieve history at local and everyday levels, instead of invoking 'communal harmony' through Bhakti and other religio-cultural sources. It is not that the mediation of religion as a pluralist cultural discourse cannot enhance principles of toleration and social solidarity. But the danger lies in sentimentalizing or using these resources opportunistically, at the expense of the very real struggles of everyday life that are also part of a people's culture. One also needs to extend the concept of 'people's culture' beyond the strictures of earlier marxist categories adopted by the ideologues of the IPTA to include more improvizatory and autonomous affirmations of cultural identity in the domain of civil society. If one were to examine culture not merdy through texts and artefacts, but in terms of behavioural parcerns and bondings, we could, for instance, begin to take the informal meetings and solidarities of people in everyday life more seriously as subjects worthy of critical anennon. Commuter culture, for instance, is a largely unexplored area of secularity in the public domain. Suburban trains connecting Calcutta to the hinterland are known for their clubs, specializing in interests as varied as theatre, poetry, philosophy, and cards. There is also a totally undocumented diversity of performances in public locations, ranging from the improvizations of vendors and musicians to highly individualized impersonators and mimic-men, 'living newspapers' who have become landmarks in the cultural landscapes of particular cities. Indeed, it could be argued that there is no country in the world where the public space is more animated by the energies of people than in India-an animation, one should qualify, that borders on a total dis-

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No More Uto/ias? • 179 regard for civic norms. Our civil society ~ be profoundly uncivil, yet interactive and differentiated at levels which should not be underestimated for their vibrancy and resilience. And yet, I would reiterate that there can be no room for euphoria beca~ this public space itself has become a battleground for communal sectarian identities. Ni:w territorialities are being assened in neighbourhoods and slums, where diverse communities have lived together for generations,. There are new intimidation tactics by which minorities are being compelled to conceal or feel defensive about their identities. Family names are being subject to interrogation. A bindi or the colour green can take on specifically communal associations. When the Shiv Sena made a seemingly absurd issue over the painting of the Andheri railway station green, it was left to secular activists like the moderate Bohra reformer Asghar Ali Engineer to protest against th.is equation of green= Pakistan=lslam. The more one is able to contest these fixed associations of religion, culture, and community, the more one may be in a position to contest communalism at ground levels. It cannot be stressed enough that the banle against communalism is not 'out there' in the seemingly remote confines of the parliament and the couns; it is being fought on the streets, and perhaps, at vety subterranean levels, within the narrow domestic walls of our homes. Within an everyday critical life-practice, communalism can be countered in the most minute of exchanges-a racist slur in a passing remark on anothe• community; an overly emotional response to the representation of communal harmony in a popular film that acrually reinfor~ conservative stereotypes of religious community; the tenuous borderline between gossip and rumour; perhaps, even a joke that succeeds in maligning a community through the filter of fun. It is at these levels that com.munalism remains to be contested even after the riots have effectively d ied down. The residue of communalism persists even after a semblance of normalcy returns to an affiicted neighbourhood, when people can begin to live together without fearing the sudden transformation of their own neighbours into assailants. Anti-communal activism, therefore, needs to enter the hearts and minds of people, where fears and misgivings need to be assuaged through new rituals of trust and togetherness. Such rituals have on occasion been initiated through the most seemingly casual of interventions by_activists, who are tuned into the dynamics of particular processes of secularization. I would like to offe.r here two examples of sheer creativity in countering communalism through the •

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180 • In tht Na11U ofSecular emergent idioms of cultural activism. In one such gesture, the Mumbai-based activist Charul Joshi found an ideal way of countering, or more precisely counter-pointing, the Shiv Sena appropriation of Ganesh Chaturthi in his neighbourhood, which is now marked by the widespread use of saffron headbands by the Sainik participants. Without making any attempt to displace this deeply cnucnchcd code, Joshi simply distributed multi-coloured headbands to the youth in his neighbourhood, who responded positivdy as much to the style of this headgear as they did to its 'rainbow' secular politics. One could argue that chis is a very small intervention, but I think the very lightness of the idiom is what appeals. All too often secular activists tend co burden their agendas with heavy and sdf-rightcous slogans and songs, which are both dogmatic and predictable. The multicoloured head-band has an clement of humour, a much-needed counter to the solemnity not only of fundamentalists but of die-hard secularists as well. Sometimes the very self-consciousness that goes into creating politically correct images results in their leaden sameness. The element of risk, which need not always be couched in apprehensions of fear, is undermined in favour of an illusory aura of reconciliation. In actuality, a cultural intervention that is tuned to the context it is addressing, and most of all, to the people who embody this context, can afford to risk an dcmcnt of play. The second extraordinary demonstration of secular creativity was made by Waqar Khan, a me111ber of the mohalla committee in Dharavi, who through 'his owrr initiative came up with one of the most disarming visual symbols of secularism: a photograph of four young boys dressed as priests of four different religions-Hinduism, Islam, Sikhism, and Christianity-with the colours of the national flag in the background, and with a slogan at the bottom: Hum Sab Ek Hain ('We arc all one'). At an ideological level, ir could be argued that the image is problematic insofar as it designates community through religion, apart from subtly reinforcing patriarchy through the attention given to boys at the expense of the girl-child. And yet, at an experiential level, one would have to acknowledge that the image 'works'. It transcends its sterotypes through its totally honest and uninhibited use of local resources and expertise. After Waqar Khan had arranged for a studio photograph of his dreamimagc, he converted it· into a sticker for mass distribution, with an initial print-run of fifteen thousand. So popular was the image with local communities in Dharavi, who constitute a mini-India, with almost all religions and languages repre-

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No Morr Utopias? • 181 scnted in its environs that the slogan 'We are all one' adorned the entrances ~o the Ganapati mandals in Dharavi during Ganesotsav (Barve 1996). Hypothetically, one could argue that if a metropolitan artist had consciously used the technique· of kitsch to create a similar image of communal harmony for mass distribution, the exercise might simply have been contrived, not least because the artist would not have been connected· to the modes of production that link subaltern art to the lives of working class peoples. If Waqar Khan's image 'works', it is not merely because it is a winning image in the language of advertising; more crucially, it is a necessary image that links the urgency of a particular problem to the expression of a specific, highly individualized, yet socially committed imaginary. And yet-as always a cautionary note interrupts this description of utopian gestures-Waqar Khan's image has also proved to be very popular with the police force, who are planning to .print several thousand copies. Indeed, a laminated photograph of the image adorns the office of the Mumbai Police Commissioner R.0. Tyagi, compelling one to ask whether the initiatives of citizens in mohalla committees are genuinely decommunalizing the practice of the police, or whether they are being appropriated instead, as part of the police force's desperate need to improve its image. Is it sufficient to imagine a change of heart in the police? The critics of mohalla committees would probably say 'no'. But perhaps, a more sceptical, yet critically open response would be that a change of heart needs to be tested through an alternative modus oprrandi, in which the guardians of the law can assume their responsibilities in civil society with a renewed respect for its citizens.

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Having outlined the resistance to communalism at micro levels, I should also emphasize the need for dialogue through larger structures of communication at macro levels. New interventionist strategies by marginalized communities are needed in order to open a dialogue within the imagined homogeneity of specific cultural groups, whose cohesion is more often than not hegemonized through upper caste patriarchies. In order to mobilize cultural dialogues across ccimmunities as well, workers may need to resist the existing slots that have been made available by the government through the Zonal Cultural Centres and other bureaucratic agencies, whereby the defunct, yet tenacious model of 'unity in diversity' is legitimized (sec Bharucha 1992). In order to conceive of and practise alternative models of cultural diversity,

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182 • In the Name ofSecular a new sensitivity towards differences is needed, which can transcend the hicrarchization and tacit indifference to other cultures that underlie political spectacles of national integration. If we have to meet through differences, instead of assuming a unity that docs not really exist, we will have to prioritize the translation of cultures, so that the temptation to fix utopia in a particular centre geographically, linguistically, philosophically-can be circumvented through an alternative intracultural practice. The need to link cultural differences across different locations has also to be contextualized within the larger imbalance of information and cultural stimuli with which we arc being bombarded by the global media. It is wonh reflecting that while our exposure to the 'news of the world ' has escalated at proportions that would make the Chomskian notion of 'brainwashing under freedom' seem almost anachronistic, our knowledge of local cultures in the neighbouring states, or within our own, continues to border on ignorance, if not outright indifference. After all, who cares about what is going on in a neighbouring tribal or dalit settlement, or in the distant borders of Arunachal Pradesh? This callousness has contributed insidiously to the infcriorization of 'other' cultures, which in turn has enhanced the spectre ofcommunalism, by which entire communities have been 'othered' through ignorane< or through the false consciousness of majoritarian cultures that arc imagined to be culturally superior to their less determined counterpans. To counter this breakdown in our cultural ecology, we will have to continue nourishing cultural resources at local lcvds, but we may also need to extend and link these resources through creative dialogues and interactions, mediated by NGOs, voluntary associations and social action groups across regional and linguistic boundaries. It would be exceptionally foolish, if not self-congratulatory to assume that 'our' regional cultural identity alone will be str~ng enough to resist the transnationalization ofglobal communication, in whose seemingly liberal networks India tends to exist, if at all, in the context of disasters, riots, corruption, plague, and the occasional miracle. An active intra-cultural consciousness and practice could be the most resilient means of restoring our self-respect through a more balanced and equitable exchange of local cultures. Only then can we begin to translate our differences beyond sectarian loyalties and affiliations to a more dynamic practice of self-sufficiency, rooted in dialogue and a shared ecology.

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No Mor~ Utopias?• 183 To end this book on a more personal note, I would like to reflect on rwo experiences which have compelled me to confront where I am, not just historically, but imaginatively, in re-thinking an adequate map· of the present. T~e .first rdates to a screening of Charlie Chaplin films, · which I had wanted a group of young actors to sec, not least because no anist in the world, to my mind, has been able to transcend historical and cultural differences more palpably than this visionary tramp. And yet, we tend to abstract his universality through all kinds of theories, without realizing the suffering in which it is grounded. Outing one of the sequences in the film-a hilarious shot of Chaplin exiting from the front door of a house, which miraculously stands, while the rest of the house falls apan-1 noticed that one of the dalit actors was unable to laugh. He had just retutned from his own village which had been devastated in the floods. His house and belongings had been destroyed. I found myself alened to the reality-the 'dystopic' condition-of this actor. At the same time, I was compelled to question how Chaplin had been able to create and generate so much laughter and hope out ~f_ ~~ger and homdessness. In the silent gaze of the actor, I realised that Chaplin's utopic vision is resilient not because it posits a painless future but because it has emerged out of the most oppressive realities of the present- notably, poverty and fascism-that are likely to outlive another millenium of cinema, through the everrenewed disguises of capital and racism. The second experience was more ordinary. It took place in a village following a blackout during the dress rehearsal of a production, when I was compelled to realize that there would be no power for the show. As I stepped outside the theatre into the late evening of the countryside, I saw what I had taken for granted-the absolute darkness that spread for miles and miles around me stretching into the wilderness. In this darkness, I confronted an obvious question: Why should there be light in the theatre? This is not to say that one should consciously seek no light in the theatre-this would be a denial of modernity and a hypocritical regression to a false simplicity. But the theatre, I realized, like any other form of secular culture, wherever it is located, has to live in some kind of measure with the necessities of its environment: therein lies its ecology. If we exploit more than we need, or if we demand what is not there, or if we envision what is not necessary, we can only succeed in making out dystopias permanent. It is on this thought that I would like co end, not seeking another world, but learning to cope with this one, with all its fragility and

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184 • In the Name ofSecular violence, pushing the barriers of difference and opening mysdf to as many questions as possible, while learning to trust a provisional, fluctuating centre within myself, which I call u~opia.

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