The Secret Politics of our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema 1856495159, 9781856495158

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The Secret Politics of Our Desires Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema

edited by

Ashis Nandy

First published in 1998 in South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Myanmar) by Oxford University Press, India, and in the rest of the world by Zed Books Ltd., 7 Cynthia Street, London N1 9JF, UK, and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA. Distributed in the USA exclusively by St Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA.

© Ashis Nandy and individual contributors, 1998 The rights of the authors of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. ISBN 1 85649 515 9 Hb ISBN 1 85649 516 7 Pb

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data The secret politics of our desires: innocence, culpability and Indian popular cinema / edited by Ashis Nandy. 259 pp. 21.5 x 14.0 cm Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-85649-515-9 (hb),—ISBN 1-85649-516-7 (pb) 1. Motion pictures—India. 2. Motion pictures—Social Aspects—India 1. Nandy, Ashis. PN1993.5.I8S4 1997 791,43’0954—dc21 97-24677 CIP

Typeset by Wordgraphics, Kaikaji, New Delhi 110 019 Printed in India at Pauls Press, New Delhi 1 10 020 and published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 1 10 001

This book is dedicated to Chidananda Dasgupta, pioneer in reflective film criticism and one of the first to attempt serious social studies of films, and Iqbal Masud, who has made social and political criticism of films an important component of Indian public life.

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/secretpoliticsofOOashi

Contributors to The Secret Politics of Our Desires

ZIAUDDIN SARDAR is a philosopher of science, Islamicist and futurist.

He is the Associate Editor of Futures and the author of The Future of Muslim Civilisation (1987); Distorted Imagination: Lessons from the Rushdie Affair (1990); and Cyberfutures (1996). He is also the Editor of The Revenge of Athena (1987) and a co-author of Barbaric Others: A Manifesto on Western Racism (1993). RAJNI BAKSHI is a well-known journalist associated with alternative

movements, Gandhian initiatives and human rights activism in India. She is the author of Long Haul (1986). FAREEDUDDIN KAZMI teaches political science at the University of

Allahabad and is the author of Human Rights : Myth and Reality (1987). His forthcoming book is on the individual and rebellion in Hindi commercial cinema. AN.TALI MONTEIRO a sociologist of media, is head of the Audio-

Visual Unit of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Bombay. She is also a well-known documentary film-maker who has made award-winning documentary films. Her forthcoming book is State, Subject and the Text: The Construction of Meaning in Television. K. RAVI SRINIVAS is a systems analyst who writes on information

and communication, environment and development, and impact of biotechnology. He is the author of a Tamil monograph, India and the GA TT (1994). SUNDAR KAALI is a film critic and student of cultural studies who

occasionally writes in Deep Focus. He has earlier worked on theatre, festivals and rituals. He is presently working on community theatres in Tamilnadu. VINAY LAL teaches cultural history at the University of California

at Los Angeles. He is the author of South Asian C ultural Studies: A Bibliography (1996), numerous articles and papers in the broad area of cultural alternatives and post-colonial consciousness. ASHIS NANDY is a psychologist and political theorist who has worked

on alternatives and futures. Among his recent books are The Tao of Cricket (1989), The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and The Politics of Self (1994), and The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (1995).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is the offspring of a study by the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures, Delhi. The study was Shobha Raghuram’s idea and the book began to germinate in the course of an attempted dialogue between film theorists and political and social analysts organized at the Administrative Training Institute, Mysore, 16-18 August 1990, where the Institute’s gifted director, Chiranjiv Singh, was not merely an excellent host but a valuable participant. Among others participating in the dialogue were two pioneering film critics, Chidananda Dasgupta and Iqbal Masud, who over the years have provoked the editor and some of the contributors to this volume into thinking seriously about the politics and culture of films: in dedicating the book to them, the authors and the editor have merely paid back an old debt. The symposium at Mysore was co-sponsored by the Centre for Informal Education and Development, Bangalore, and by its excellent film journal Deep Focus. R. L. Kumar of CIEDS was centrally involved in the conceptualization of the symposium. One other important participant was T. G. Vaidyanathan who has inspired an entire generation of young scholars in serious studies of film and other forms of popular culture. On the whole, the symposium was a failure; it suggested that any dialogue between film theory and political and social analysis would need further ground-work, including a more serious recognition of popular films as sources of insight into politics and society and as a medium shaping the middle-class conceptions of politics and society. Though attempts to initiate such a dialogue began early—Dhirendra Narain’s Hindu Culture and Personality, published in the 1950s, partly used films—in those days they were never taken seriously. At one time such a dismissive attitude made little difference to either Indian politics or our understanding of it; today it does, for, in the meanwhile, Indian politics has changed

Acknowledgements • ix

and so has Indian cinema. Yet, while some writers on film have continued to embellish their work with amateurish political and social analysis, political and social analysts have rarely returned the compliment. Hence this book is unapologetic about its modest goal: to create a sharper awareness of popular films as a possible source for an alternative, non-formal frame of political and social analysis, based on categories acceptable to and popular with ordinary South Asians. It is part of a series the Committee for Cultural Choices and Global Futures plans to publish on some of the major forms of artistic self-expression in India. In conformity with the concerns of the series, the emphasis in this volume is not on film theory or on aesthetics of popular cinema; a number of books on the subject have been published recently and, we thought, another volume edited by someone with no technical knowledge of film theory or of the sociology of film would be pointless. This volume is organized around more personalized explorations of the extent to which films reflect, as well as shape, public life in societies where popular culture is not mass culture, but rather an arena of interaction and contestation among indigenous traditions of folk culture, the popular culture of the middle classes (as it has emerged from the society’s 150-year-long confrontation and dialogue with the West), and the massified sensitivities of South Asians, more comfortable with the global mass culture. We hope that the readers will find these explorations worthwhile. We are grateful to Ratnakar Tripathi, who participated in the project in its formative period, to Tridip Suhrud, who helped to coordinate it during its later phase. I would also like to acknowledge the intellectual help given to the venture by Patricia Uberoi and institutional support by Anmol Vellani and R. Sudarshan. We are grateful to the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies which helped us in various ways and to the Ford Foundation for a grant which allowed us to assemble the group which carried out the study. The free translations of some of the film songs used in the papers are mostly Nivedita Menon’s. T.N. Madan, too has lent a hand.

CONTENTS

ASHIS NANDY Introduction Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum's Eye View of Politics

ZIAUDDIN SARDAR Dilip Kumar made me do it

RAJNI BAKSHI Raj Kapoor: From Jis Desk Mein Ganga Behti Hai to Ram Teri Ganga Maili

FAREEDUDDIN KAZMI How angry is the Angry Young Man ? ‘Rebellion ’ in Conventional Hindi Films

ANJALI MONTEIRO Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self: The Spectator as Subject

K. RAVI SRINIVAS AND SUNDAR KAALI On Castes and Comedians: The language of power in recent Tamil Cinema

VINAY LAL The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film

Introduction: Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics ASHIS NANDY

M

ahmood Jamal’s charming documentary on Indian popular cinema, Peacock Screen, and the official report, Mass Media in India 1992, compiled by India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, both tell us that on an average day, India releases more than two-and-a-half feature films, pro¬ duced by the world’s largest film industry, and sees some 15 million people throng the country’s 13,002 cinema halts.1 As if this were not enough, these films are an important cultural pre¬ sence from Russia to North Africa and from the Caribbean to Fiji. Operating in a country with an average per capita income of about US$330 a year, one of the lowest in the world, this is no mean feat for an industry that few in India take seriously, except as a revenue earner. Even other Indian industrialists are dismissive towards the film producers; none of India’s more respected cham¬ bers of commerce would like to be caught with a film-maker among its office bearers. What does this immensely successful but slighted industrial product stand for, politically and culturally? Does it have anything to say about the fate of popular culture in societies transiting from older modes of cultural self-expression to a more impersonal, centrally controlled, mass culture? This book gives possible answers. The answers presume that the Indian commercial cinema* to be commercially viable, must try to span the host of cultural diversities and epochs the society lives with, and that effort has a logic of its own.

2 • Secret Politics of Our Desires The logic accepts that the product called Indian popular cinema has undergone change. It is very different today from the pioneering days of Dadasaheb Phalke or Phalkemuni, as Christopher Byrski affectionately calls him to underscore the continuity between classical Sanskrit plays and Bombay cinema.2 It is different even from the days of Bombay Talkies, New Theatres, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt. In the industry itself, I understand, thoughtful persons talk of the earlier years as an age of innocence. By which they mean, I presume, that the heritage has to be remembered and respected, not emulated. What has that loss of innocence entailed? That story cannot be told without involving one other actor of the kind Indian popular cinema has rarely handled comfortably and self-consciously: the politics of culture in India and, for that matter, the whole of South Asia. Once the role of that other politics is accepted, the right metaphor for the Indian popular cinema, alias conventional, commercial or Bombay cinema, turns out to be the urban slum. Ratnakar Tripathy, who first suggested the metaphor to me, seemed to hold that both cinema and the slum in India showed the same impassioned negotiation with everyday survival, com¬ bined with the same intense effort to forget that negotiation, the same mix of the comic and the tragic, spiced with elements borrowed indiscriminately from the classical and the folk, the East and the West. However, there is at least one other sense in which the metaphor of the slum seems apt: the popular cinema is the slum’s point of view of Indian politics and society and, for that matter, the world. There is in both of them the same stress on lower-middle-class sensibilities and on the informal, not-terriblytacit theories of politics and society the class uses and the same ability to shock the haute bourgeoisie with the directness, vigour and crudity of these theories. The slum here means exactly what architect and social activist Jai Sen means when he speaks of the ‘unintended city’—the city that was never a part of the formal ‘master plan’ but was always implicit in it.3 The official city cannot survive without its un¬ intended self, but it cannot own up to that self either. For that other city consists of a huge mass of technically and officially discarded ‘obsolete’ citizens who form the underground of a modern city. They provide the energy—literally the cheap labour—that propels both the engine of civic life in a Third World society and the ambitions of its modernizing elite.

Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum's Eye View of Politics • 3 The discarded, obsolete population that inhabits the unintended city is a constant embarrassment to the rest of their urbane brethren—in the way that the concerns and style of popular cinema are often an embarrassment to the devotees of art films and high culture.4 These discards show the same cussed unwilling¬ ness to bow out of history and the same obstinate ability to return and ‘illegitimately’ occupy a large space in the public domain, geographically and psychologically. Are inhabitants of the unintended city the passive objects or tools of history they are often made out to be? Are they only an urban proletariat waiting to be organized into a new political formation? Or are they the makers of their own destiny in ways that some chapters in this book chart, others vaguely hint at, and still others come close to admitting but never do? Is the apparent obsolescence of the unintended city merely a camouflage that hides a crucial repressed, disowned self of a modernizing society? Is the shock many ‘enlightened’ Indians claim to feel when facing the aesthetics of the slum, the shock of seeing one’s own face in a convex mirror, which distorts but does so in one specific way, according to the strict laws of optics? Before grappling with these strange questions, a word on the political and social contours of the slum. Nearly half of metro¬ politan India today lives in slums, as if anticipating a world in which, according to environmentalist Edward Goldsmith, more than half of humanity will live in slums in another two decades. There is nothing particularly strange about this; the slum is often the first visible marker of modernization in Third World society. In both Bombay and Calcutta, the slum-dwellers are in a clear majority; if their present rates and patterns of growth continue, both cities will become 80 per cent slum by the year 2010. How¬ ever, even in cities where they constitute a small minority, the slum-dwellers loom large on the urban consciousness as a dark, ominous, ill-understood, unmanageable presence. For the slum, whatever its socio-economic status, has now come close to the heart of India’s urban, middle-class consciousness. It now sets the tone of India’s political culture, even if as a negative utopia or dystopia. About 25 per cent of all Indians now live in urban settle¬ ments and they are directly exposed to the urban-industrial world and the media network that supports its cultural style, pan-Indian homogeneity and global connection. These Indians live with the standard nightmares of the middle classes the world over, of which

4 • Secret Politics of Our Desires the fear of the slum is one. Twenty-five per cent may not sound particularly impressive, but in absolute terms it is enormous. It amounts to more than 225 million people, larger than all except four countries in the world. It is larger than the population of each of the neigh¬ bouring countries of India, of which many Indians choose to live in mortal fear. Even if we take 175 million as a conservative estimate of the size of India’s urban middle class, it is three times the size of the population of Britain, which once ruled India, with an industrial base larger than Britain’s. With this size go greater skills in entering and coping with the modern institutions and a growing ability to influence the country’s mainstream culture of politics. Things could not be otherwise, given the definitions of state, nationalism, national security, secular statecraft, professional ex¬ pertise, civil society and development the country has opted for. The entire ideology of the Indian state is so formatted and custom¬ ized that it is bound to make more sense—and give political advantages—to those better acquainted with the urban-industrial world and modern economic and political institutions. The rest are supposed to either painstakingly train themselves to enter that world or cope with the ideology from the outside as best as they can. In a plebiscitary democracy threatening to become a psephocracy, numbers count; and though in the last six decades rural India has arrived politically, even the cause of rural India has now to be processed through the urban middle-class con¬ sciousness. Some of the most powerful public figures with inelastic support bases or vote banks have not exercised real power or controlled the course of political events because they have under¬ valued the middle-class culture of public life. They have managed, within a short time, to offend the intelligentsia and the bureau¬ cracy and to alienate the media, and in the process lose their legitimacy and political manoeuverability.5 This veto exercised by the public sensibilities of a minority has ensured the Indian middle class a disproportionate access to state power during the last twenty years and has pushed the culture of Indian politics in directions that would have been unthinkable earlier. The class now gives a sustainable base to the emerging mass culture of politics in the country and, to do so, has redrawn the map of the popular culture mainly created by the class itself in the pre-war years. Structurally, this sustainable base mostly

Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics • 5 consists of the more numerous lower-middle class, exposed to modern media, pan-Indian politics and the global market. It is the class that has closest links with the slum and lives with the fear of slipping into a slum or never getting out of it. The definition of the middle class used here is obviously more political-cultural than economic or social. It does not conform to the standard textbook definitions of the class. We are talking of a social stratum that lives with hopes of breaking into the upper echelons of society and provides a political base and the power of numbers to the upper-middle class, which in turn, unlike the upper-middle classes in some other societies, maintains continuities with the lower-middle class in political and cultural tastes. The Indian upper-middle class may have some of the economic features of an elite, but it has not tried to distance itself from the culture of the lower-middle class. Much of India’s upper-middle class is simply a lower-middle class with more money. More important, such a class is not big enough in size to influence the political process by itself; it has to carry the lower-middle class with it. This has not proved difficult. The lower-middle class is shot through with fears of demotion to the proletariat and lives with the anxieties associated with that fear and with the standard hopes and ambitions of the middle class. It cherishes its political-cultural links with the upper-middle class. It is willing to be led. One must read the political and cultural self-expression of the slum against the backdrop of this political-cultural closure. The language of the slum in India is the lower-middle-class reading of the culture of the haute bourgeoisie into which it breaks in fantasy, memories of a peasant or rural past serving as a pastoral ‘paradise’ from which it has been banished, fears about the urban-industrial jungle into which it feels it has already strayed, and anxieties about the ‘amoral’ frame of modern life into which it fears it might any day slip. It is a psychological existence at the margins of at least two utopias, one of them located—as with all utopias in the future and the other paradoxically in the past. Everything else—the reactive grandiloquence, the stylized idiom, the conventions and mannerisms of self-expression we see in Indian commercial cinema and increasingly in Indian politics follows from these mediations. The slum in India is not so much the en¬ forced abode of the industrial proletariat or tne urban poor, atomized and massified. It is an entity that territorializes the

6 • Secret Politics of Our Desires transition from the village to the city, from the East to the West, and from the popular-as-the-folk to the popular-as-the-massified. The slum is where the margins of lower-middle-class consciousness are finally defined. If there is a tacit overall political argument in this analysis, it is that the passions of, and the self-expressions identified with, the lower-middle class—for that matter, the middle class as a whole—now constitute the ideological locus of Indian politics. This social sector is now capable of sustaining large-scale, ambitious political and aesthetic initiatives that were beyond its capability only two decades ago. On the other hand, it has lost some of its earlier elan and creativity which came from being a minority experimenting with new ideas, forms of self-expression and modes of dissent the traditional elite could not risk exploring. If the middle class plays a role in Indian society and politics disproportionate to its size, so do popular films. These films, it is true, are seen by a wide cross-section of people, and their appeal is certainly not sectoral. But they are produced, conceived and executed within the middle-class culture, more specifically within the confines of the lowermiddle-ciass sensitivities we have discussed. In fact, they are threatening to turn both the folk and the classical into second-order presences (the way the immensely successful television serials on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata now influence the frame for interpreting the epics for a large number of Indians) and, today, even the global mass culture enters the subcontinent filtered through the same middle-class sensitivities epitomized by the commercial cinema. It is in this sense that the popular cinema represents the low-brow version of the values, ambitions and anxieties of Indians who are caught between two cultures, two lifestyles, and two visions of a desirable society.6

To return to our metaphor, the urban slum consists of people who are uprooted and partially decultured, people who have moved out of traditions and have been forced to loosen their caste and community ties. That does not mean that the slum has no access to cultural traditions. Often the resilience of cultures is seen in the most dramatic fashion in the urban slum. Two processes are central to an understanding of this resilience. First, the slum recreates the remembered village in a new guise and resurrects the old community ties in new forms. Even tradi¬ tional faiths, piety and kinship ties survive in slums, wearing dis¬ guises paradoxically supplied by their own massified versions.7 The slum may even have its version of classicism. It is not what classicism should be according to the classicists, but what classicism

Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics • 7 often is, when bowdlerized and converted into its popular version for easy digestion and saleability in a mass market. Second, the slum creates its own culture out of the experiences of the slum itself: out of the close encounters between the different time periods and diverse cultures telescoped into the slum; out of the impact of ‘strange’ communities, ethnicities and world-views on the individual; and out of interactions with the alien world of impersonal institutions that have begun to penetrate even the more sleepy South Asian communities. Both processes are conspicuous in the popular film—the remembered village and the compacted heterogeneity of strangerneighbours, with the former often providing a frame to cope with the latter. That is why the popular film ideally has to have everything—from the classical to the folk, from the sublime to the ridiculous, and from the terribly modern to the incorrigibly traditional, from the plots within plots that never get resolved to the cameo roles and stereotypical characters that never get developed^ Such films cannot usually have a clear-cut story line or a single sequence of events, as in, say, the dramatic, eventbased, popular films of Hollywood or even Hong Kong. An aver¬ age, ‘normal’, Bombay film has to be, to the extent possible, everything to everyone. It has to cut across the myriad ethnicities and lifestyles of India and even of the world that impinges on India. The popular film is low-brow, modernizing India in all its complexity, sophistry, naivete and vulgarity. Studying popular film is studying Indian modernity at its rawest, its crudities laid bare by the fate of traditions in contemporary life and arts. Above all, it is studying caricatures of ourselves—social and political analysts negotiating the country’s past and present—located not at the centre, studying others, as we like to see ourselves, but at the peripheries, standing as spectators and looking at others studying themselves and us. The popular cinema may be what the middle class, left to itself, might have done to itself and to India, but it is also the disowned self of modern India returning in a fantastic or monstrous form to haunt modern India. Does this mean that the popular film threatens India’s cultural elite by confronting them with the underside of their own dreams? Does it inadvertantly mock this elite’s vision of a desirable society by taking it seriously and standing it on its head? The answers to both these questions may well be ‘yes’. The politics of popular cinema is not a hermeneutic puzzle,

8 • Secret Politics of Our Desires nor is it enticingly tacit. It does not require sophisticated analytic schemes of the kind that an Indian postmodernist might cherish. It is often vulgarly blatant. But it is never trivial, not even when it is expressed in films that are trivial. Witness for instance the way the politician as a character has entered the popular cinema during the last decade as a khadi-wearing villain. As one boxoffice hit after another shows, the politician-as-villain today is not merely a counterpoint to the hero-as-the-anti-hero who repels many film analysts, disgusted with the surfeit of violence and sex in cinema, including at least three in this book. He is also the counterpoint to the less violent, more androgynous heroes who once represented for the Westernized Indians everything that was wrong with Mother India. The early model of the hero survives, but increasingly as a nostalgic moral presence in a world domi¬ nated by their new, street-smart, ultra-violent incarnations. In film after film, it is the politician-as-villain who pushes the innocent Devdas-like hero into a life of crime and violence, into his new incarnation as an anti-hero. In film after film, characters close to the earlier model of the hero are unable to cope with the new villains, who have entered the popular cinema and, presumably, Indian life. Elsewhere, I have tried to show how the same problem is sometimes posed in popular Indian cinema through what for such cinema is the evergreen device of a double.8 The hero who is non-violent and innocent, having a culturally rooted moral self and a sense of limits, is shown incapable of handling his problems, which have to be solved by his lookalike, an exteriorized pro¬ jection of his self who usually happens to be a ruthless, hyper¬ masculine industrialist of violence. The trajectory of Amitabh Bachchan’s life in almost every one of his popular films recapitulates the life of the Indian cinema— its movement from the days of Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand to that of Bachchan. It is not a coarse simplification to say that in a typical Bachchan film, the hero begins his life in the first reel as a Dilip Kumar or a Raj Kapoor—as, for that matter, any of the more innocent, ethical, visionary heroes of yesteryear—and ends up midway in the narrative as none other than Bachchan himself.9 The anti-hero, when he turns against the villain, also turns against the ‘passive’, ‘effeminate’, ineffective hero and, if I may add, against the popularly perceived cause of the decline and collapse of the imagined world of pastoral inno¬ cence and moral incorruptibility. To invoke the well-known

Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum's Eye View of Politics • 9 psycho-analytic formulation of an ego defence, he turns against a self that has become identified with failure and impotency. Perhaps this is not merely true of the life-cycle of the heroes Bachchan portrays in his more violent films, but also his real-life career in films. He has moved from playing the role of the quiet, well-behaved but effete hero, in films that were but minor successes, to his triumphant portrayals of angry, violent vigilantes functioning at the margins of the society. Ontogeny, as the bio¬ logists say, replicates phylogeny.10 In a parallel development, the villain has become more handsome, polished, erotically attractive, modern and in full control of himself. Villainy is his not-so-secret self; it is kept only formally a secret. The decline of politics in India and that of the moral status of the politician—living in a world of local toughs available on hire, trade-union gangsters, violent college elections, corrupt police, petty smugglers—were captured in Indian popular cinema long before they became the subjects of heated debate in the columns of newspapers and among political scientists. Fareeduddin Kazmi, who rejects the proposition that the popular cinema is a new opiate of the masses but comes close to it, should have noticed one crucial source of the appeal of the commercial cinema that his own chapter documents: while serious cinema in India has been talking about impersonal, larger, reified, institutional forces of evil in hushed, academic tones, the popular cinema had already made a clear diagnosis and concretized it in a communi¬ cable form.11 The glorification of vigilantism in cinema has come not simply because the politician-as-villain symbolizes the decline of politics and the subversion of the judiciary, the law-enforcing agencies and the state itself—the trust in them was never remarkably high among the wily Indians—but because the communities in South Asia have begun to come apart. The individual is being increas¬ ingly left stranded, with only his or her own tattered moral self, and the fantasies of a secret self represented by the vigilantism of the hero as the anti-hero-turned-superman. Like all politics, however, the politics of popular cinema, too, is the art of the possible. Despite the growing emphasis on individual evil and heroism, it cannot cater to only that sector of the society to which these themes appeal. It has to be, as I have said, all things to all people. It has to simultaneously reaffirm values that go against such individuation of good and evil. Perhaps

10 • Secret Politics of Our Desires here lies one of popular cinema’s durable ties with ‘eternal India’. Many years ago, A. L. Basham noticed in his A Cultural History of India the continuity between classical Sanskrit plays and contemporary films. And more recently Byrski has shown how such continuities are worked out in a specific context by comparing Kalidas’s Abhigyan Shakuntalam and Raj Kapoor’s Satyam, Shivam, SundaramP Such continuities may or may not exemplify the deployment of the traditional rasa theory (classical poetics governing Sanskritic poetry and theatre) in a modern cinematic context; they must, while bringing in elements of modernity in Indian concepts of good and evil, simultaneously rebel against such importation. Perhaps even the presence of all the nine prescribed rasas of classical poetics comes in as a technology of checks and counterchecks that contends against every excess. The ultimate remedy of a trendy ‘pathology’ within the popular cinema is not changes in fashion, of the kind available within a mass market, but the seeds of ‘self-destruction’ the trend or genre carries within itself. Thus, a decade of sweet romance and chocolate-pie heroes is followed by a decade of revenge-seeking, thin-lipped, homicidal heroes. They, too, in due course yield place to a new trend of, say, teenage romances featuring fresh actors and actresses or a new mythological mode defined by, say, brand new goddesses who seem fully attuned to the psychological demands of urban India.13 For after a particular level of awareness has been ‘mobi¬ lized’ for the box office by a particular genre, fatigue or boredom sets in and other levels have to be mobilized to sustain interest in the product. Often the balance is restored within the film itself. Sometimes violence is neutralized by comic interludes or by the inclusion of a more comic version of the violence. In Appu Raja, while a lifeand-death battle rages, one associate of the hero tickles into submission a member of the enemy gang. In Kishen Kanhaiya the villains, at the end of all the violence, seem to make fun of their own humiliation. In Don, while the hero and the villain fight their climactic battle towards the end, the hero—none other than the much-maligned retailer of violence, Bachchan—stops midway to ask permission from the villain to eat a pan before resuming the life-and-death struggle. In Naseeb, a climactic scene of violence is also the final choreography of a film that is a carnival—as if the audience were being reminded in a Brechtian manner that

Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum's Eye View of Politics • 11 the depicted violence is only a pretence. Likewise with sexuality. The heroine who is a cabaret dancer by profession is usually doubly submissive as a daughter-in-law and out-mothers her sisters-in-law when it comes to the younger generation of the joint family. To return to our defining metaphor for one last time: the slum may or may not be ugly, it may or may not symbolize absurdity, but it always has a story to tell about the state of the vitality, creativity and moral dynamism of the society that defines the relationship between the slum and suburbia. That story can take many forms. The slum can be read as the past of the suburbia or as an alternative to or decline from it. It can even be romanticized and invested with the vision of a desirable society or a lost utopia, as Sai Paranjape’s Katha, Saeed Mirza’s Raju Ban Gaya Gentle¬ man and the television serial Nukkad come so close to doing. That vision is often built on the slum’s capacity to recreate a community, sometimes even an entire village with its own distinctive lifestyle. Obviously, a mimic village is never quite like the original one, but the reconstruction can be an impressive cultural enterprise. It tells not so much the history of the slum as the past it tries to remember or pines for, its self-created myths of origin and visions of the future, its adaptive strategies, the politics of culture that shapes it while it desperately tries to incorporate aspects of alien cultures that could be more charitable to the surviving fragments of a community-based culture. The legitimacy of popular cinema in India is based on a similar set of equations. Such cinema is both a ‘romantic’ attempt to re¬ constitute an increasingly imaginary village, and a dialogue with the compacted heterogeneity of urban-industrial India. The attempt challenges the way the problem of cultural invasion through popular films has sometimes been posed by the social scientists and film critics. The local, the small-scale and the vernacular are not merely being supplanted by an urban, individualistic, aggressively Western, global mass culture leading to a more homogenized society; the former are also being repackaged or retooled into mass-compatible forms and made available to the first generation of the culturally uprooted inhabitants of the new world into which the uprooted are entering. That is why such threats to traditions have provoked so little resistance till now. A corollary of this repackaging is the strangely familiar world

12 • Secret Politics of Our Desires that the popular films conjure up for the shamelessly rustic and the blatantly cosmopolitan. This familiarity is built on a well-honed psychological technique: creating a lovable or at least tolerable strangeness by projecting predictable elements of a once-known world on to the strange and the distant. (Exactly in the manner in which Steven Spielberg’s high-tech Star Wars series turns out to be, on a less than close scrutiny, a repolished version of oldstyle westerns. The empire does strike back!) Without the famil¬ iarity, the strangeness would have been fearsome, perhaps even incapacitating. Once this projection is shared by the viewers and the strangeness is reinterpreted as part of ancient continuities, the strange—in this instance, the modern world—continues to arouse anxieties, but these anxieties do not become debilitating; they can be contained and channelled along more acceptable paths. Put differently, popular cinema creates a space for the global, the unitary and the homogenizing, but does so in terms of a prin¬ ciple of plurality grounded in traditions. As a result, the homo¬ genization such cinema promotes is not a unilinear movement from diversity to uniformity, but a multi-layered affair with the global mass culture which itself takes weird new forms as a result. Our story till now reaffirms the obvious—that all visions, fantasies and nightmares have their politics, and the popular in Indian cinema, even when it seems least political, is a major political statement. But the story also deals with the less obvious: it claims that popular cinema not merely shapes and is shaped by politics, it constitutes the language for a new form of politics. Formal social sciences have not yet thrown up analytic categories appropriate for the form, and normal politics cannot wait for the social sciences to do so. Consequently, there has emerged a different kind of continuity between such cinema and the culture of Indian politics. The former serves as a poor man’s political scientist working in tandem with the astrologer on the one hand, and the political activist on the other. Its focus is on the key concerns of some of the most articulate, vibrant and volatile sectors of the Indian electorate today. On this plane, such cinema can be seen as what some less articulate Indians might reveal of their political and social experiences to the psychoanalyst after putting the latter on the couch. Despite the charisma that ‘masses’ as an abstract entity have come to enjoy in the last hundred years or so, thanks to what Edward Shils calls the dispersal of the charisma previously

Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum's Eye View of Politics • 13 concentrated in the monarch or the ruling elite, the political idiom of the lower classes’, as opposed to their politics, continues to sound meaningless, dangerous or sick. In fact, most well-wishers of these classes like to serve as the latter’s mouthpieces in the belief that the they use the wrong language to interpret their predicament.14 Indian popular cinema suggests that the language, though sometimes garbled, is not insane, and sometimes can even be moving. For it is after all only a distorted history of our own desires, lived out by others who acknowledge them. That is why the most absurd moments of popular cinema often can be its most poignant. Such a language can survive as an exotica in an old society with relatively intact traditions and community ties, and as a marker of transitory times in a society where modern technology and media have become hegemonic. In neither case can it have any intrinsic legitimacy, aesthetic or social. In a society where traditions and community ties are relatively intact, popular culture of the kind the Bombay films typify is not really that popular after all; it has to compete with the predominant presence of a wide variety of folk culture. On the other hand, the 'magical’ powers of mass culture in a fully modernized society come from the breakdown of communities and the decline of traditions and from the substitutes for such communities and traditions ventured by the mass media with the help of modern technology. Until now, Indian popular cinema has refused to cede that magicality to mass media, though it is coming closer to doing so. Nor has it tried to be a typical mass media though in recent years it has borrowed heavily from the genre. This may be simply a long-winded way of returning to the proposition that in South Asia, and perhaps in much of Asia and Africa, mass culture and popular culture do not fully overlap. Elements of mass culture, disembedded from their global context, can become popular (e.g. denims and cola drinks). But that by itself means little; for these elements have to be processed through the local popular culture which provides, exactly for that purpose, an indigenously forged bicultural sieve. The Indian cinema not only does this processing on behalf of a vulnerable section of the Indian population, it also has a built-in plurality that tends to subvert mass culture even when seemingly adapting to it passively. This has another implication. If Indian popular cinema has to be seen as a struggle against the massified, it must also be seen

14 • Secret Politics of Our Desires as a battle over categories—between those that represent the global and the fully marketized, in tune with India's now almost fully institutionalized official ideology of the state, and those who by default represent the culturally self-confident but low-brow multiculturalism in which the country has invested an important part of its genius during the last hundred years or so, both as a means of survival in our times and as a technology of self-creation with an extended range of options. The popular in Indian cinema cannot be the classical—art cinema exists for that—or folk, of which there is as yet no dearth in India. The chapters in this book were generated in the course of a four-year-long study which, we hope, will lead to at least one more volume. In this collection the emphasis is on the larger politics of culture as it is epitomized in popular films. We have avoided here, to the extent possible, ‘proper’, weighty film criticism and analysis of the kind that is easily available in a number of recent books. The popular Indian film is no longer a step-child of contemporary social sciences. The first half of the book is organized around two long, highly personalized narratives that try to capture the crisis of Indian public life as reflected in the generational and stylistic changes in the contents and concerns of popular Indian films. In Chapter 1, Ziauddin Sardar captures, in an evocative essay on his own ambivalent affair with Indian cinema, not merely the political history of Indian cinema but also the cinematic history of Indian politics. He seems to suggest that Indian cinema has not been an inert mirror of society; in the popular understanding of the crisis of Indian public life, the changing nature of popular cinema has played an important role. Not only are the present crisis of Indian public life and the degeneration of the Indian state faithfully reflected in violent, anomic films, but there is a celebration in recent films of the narrowing of the cultural, political and moral range that gave earlier Indian films their humaneness and universal appeal. In Chapter 2, Rajni Bakshi has discovered in Raj Kapoor an unwitting political analyst who, even if by default and often against himself, diagnosed the nature of the crisis by charting the society’s road to decline and decay. There is more than a hint here that Kapoor even managed to recapitulate in his dissipative, sometimes blatantly self-destructive, personal life the story of that deterioration. Both chapters, woven around two charismatic, larger-than-life

Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics • 15 figures, tend to celebrate at places the innocence that began to be lost with the large-scale entry into Indian cinema of compo¬ nents from audio-visual media oriented to more massified societies. The ultimate symbol of this encroachment, Amitabh Bachchan, another charismatic star who dominated Indian cinema for nearly two decades, is the unacknowledged anti-hero for both Sardar and Bakshi. In Chapter 3, Fareeduddin Kazmi brings him—and the kind of cinema with which his name is inextricably linked— centrestage. Kazmi deals with some of the super-hits of the 1970s and 1980s and what they say about the changing political crisis in Indian politics and urban life, and the means available to ordinary citizens to intervene in that crisis. He argues that the intervention these super-hits endorse is a form of dissent in leash. It involves complete identification with a vigilante-superman of a hero who allows the audience to participate in vicarious violence against cleverly individuated crime-merchants, but never against the system that produces them. Contemporary popular cinema in India may represent both the self-confidence of India's new middle class and the new linkage that it has established with the massified aspects of the country’s public culture on the one hand, and global mass culture on the other. But in the process of consolidation of this self-confidence, there have also been some major losses. Kazmi traces some of the intellectual losses, especially the delegitimization of all insti¬ tutional approaches to the present crisis in Indian politics, to the changing nature of commercially successful cinema over the last two decades. The second half of the book turns a trifle more technical, the emphasis being on how an entertainment package, suspicious of all messages, itself becomes a carrier of messages that are effective by being seemingly ineffective. Anjali Monteiro’s chapter is included, not because we assume a perfect continuity between film and television in India, but because it focuses on the way the receiver of audio-visual messages reshapes them for his or her purposes. According to Monteiro, there is no passive reception but an active, if unselfconscious, attempt to cope with the messages, in ways that seem to constitute a form of cultural resistance. That the source of these messages is the official, government-owned state television explicitly beaming a statist-nationalist, developmental message, and the reci¬ pients are the standard, ‘mixed-up’ residents of urban slums, only

16 • Secret Politics of Our Desires indicates the complex fashion in which even the motivated message of a powerful medium can be broken down lmo digestible morsels. As popular films are even more explicitly shaped by audience demand and are even more dependent on the vagaries of popular mood, their resistance to homogenization can only be stronger. Ravi Srinivas and Sundar Kaali have written the only chapter on Tamil cinema, which has had an altogether different relation¬ ship with politics. (Tamil film-stars are popular not only by virtue of their cinematic appeal but also because of the close links they maintain with political parties and the chequered political career of the Tamil film industry itself, especially its long and complicated relationship with anti-Brahmin movements in South India.) Here the dominant idiom is not so much the ideology of the state as the language of transformative politics. Srinivas and Sundar deal with characters not as individuals but as representations of collecti¬ vities renegotiating their traditional and not-so-traditional social relationships. They show how the politics of this representation itself becomes a form of renegotiation that does not mechanically mirror the renegotiation going on in society but ‘processes’ it systematically for the viewer. The final chapter by Vinay Lai comes full circle by returning to the themes of dissent, culpability and renegotiation with cultural norms that structure this book, and especially to some of the questions raised by Sardar, Bakshi and Kazmi. Lai tries to capture the social and political appeal of Indian cinema by concentrating on one of its most durable features—the absence in it of any genuine outsider, either in the form of an alienated hero or in the form of a villain. Lnlike Sardar and Kazmi, Lai discovers a continuity between recent Hindi cinema and the age-old concerns of popular forms of self-expression in the culture, especially the narrative modes of Indian folk-tales. There is the implicit argu¬ ment here that, in the final analysis, the primary concern, even of films that have explicitly tried to break the conventions of earlier genres of popular cinema, turns out to be the re-establishment within the society of the ’outsider’—as only a camouflaged insider pushed to the margins of the society after being wronged by a conspiracy of the ungodly or fate. This book invites the reader to use it as a means of thinking about cinema and the politics of cultures in South Asia in less conventional ways, unencumbered by formal film theory and

Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye dew of Politics • 17 trendy hermeneutics ot the kind that, for reasons of academic correctness, sucks ad life from one of the most vigorous express¬ ions of the selfhood of the Indian caught between the old and the new, the inner and the outer, the local and the global. We hope that something of that vigour is reflected here.

NOTES 1.

Peacock Screen (London: BBC Channel 4, 1996), director Mahmood Jamal, script Firdous Ali; Mass Media in India: 1992 (New Delhi:

Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1993), pp. 157, 198. 2. M. Christopher Byrski, ‘Bombay Philum—the Kaliyugi Avatara of Sanskrit Drama5, Pushpanjali, November 1980, 4, pp. 111-18. 3. Jai P. Sen, ‘The Unintended City5, Seminar, April 1976, 200, pp. 33^10. 4. Strangely, the slum seems to be less of an embarrassment to the rural Indians. They perhaps know the slum better as a standard pathway for those who migrate from what has become for them the stifling primordiality of the village, to what has become for everyone the impersonal charm of urban anonymity. 5. This part of the story has been told in more detail in Ashis Nandy, ‘The Political Culture of the Indian State’, Daedalus, Fall 1989, 118(4). 6. Ashis Nandy, ‘An Intelligent Critic’s Guide to Indian Cinema5, in The Savage Freud and Other Essays in Possible and Retrievable Selves (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 7. One example are the new versions of faith available in packaged form in the modem sector for those anxious about their wavering faith within; for instance the Flindutva movement that has caught the imagination of a significant section of urban, semi-Westernized Hindus and, appro¬ priately enough, expatriate Hindus, has much less to do with Hinduism than with middle-class expectations from politics. 8. Nandy, ‘An Intelligent Critic’s Guide to Indian Cinema’. Two questions remain: Shall we now see a decline in the number of films with the theme of the double, given that the hero has begun to incorporate the double within himself? Or shall we see a revival of the double after a decent interval, given that the the idea of the double-in-the-hero has begun to go stale? 9. For the moment I am, of course, ignoring the parallel shift from heroes who start as criminals, to become law-abiding citizens, to heroes who start as innocent migrants lost in a heartless city and end up as criminalized vigilantes. 10. Two distinguished scholars, one an anthropologist and the other a philo¬ sopher and historian, have recently argued that the decline of the hero in Indian popular films faithfully mirrors the decline of Indian public life. See Akbar S. Ahmed. ‘Bombay Films: The Cinema as Metaphor

18

•

Secret Politics of Our Desires for Indian Society and Politics’, Modern Asian Studies, May 1992, 26(2), pp. 289-320; and Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Dilip Kumar Made Me Do It’, see

11. 12. 13. 14.

Chapter 2. While agreeing with the overall thrust of their argument, one must recognize the scope of the global crisis in public life and democratic politics precipitated by full-blown ‘modern rationality . The hero is what he is, not by choice, but because he cannot be otherwise in the world he lives in. That is the main difference between violence in these films and in those of, say, Hollywood. The changing life-cycle of the film hero is located within that rationality. As a well-known critic of Western modernity, Sardar, who shows little sympathy for the new ‘hard’, modern face of the hero in Indian films, should have appreciated this part of the story. The point I am trying to make is beautifully, though perhaps unwittingly, captured by Sardar himself. In his chapter, he recapitulates a moving episode from the film Mashaal, in which an elderly couple played by a famous hero and a heroine of earlier years, Dilip Kumar and Waheeda Rehman, are caught in a heartless megalopolis. The wife, injured and facing death, is carried by the morally upright, law-abiding husband in the dead of the night through the deserted streets of Bombay, where he tries to stop a passing car to take his wife to a hospital. But nobody stops while he screams in anguish, ‘Brother, stop the car’, and no one ever opens a window of the tall apartments lining the street. Dilip in bitter frustation throws a stone at one of the multi-storeyed buildings. No one responds to that desperate gesture either. Fareedudctin Kazmi, see Chapter 4. Byrski, ‘Bombay Philum—the Kaliyugi Avatara of Sanskrit Drama’. Veena Das, ‘Jai Santoshi Ma’, India International Centre Quarterly, 9(1), 1981. The rural and the traditional, it is true, are no longer dirty words, as they were in many of the major schools of nineteenth-century social knowledge, including the major dissenting visions. Environmental concerns and the growing discomfort with urban industrialism in recent decades have changed the intellectual culture in this respect. The wisdom of the peasant and the shaman is a trendy concern today. But this revaluation does not cover those who have one foot in the village and the other in the city. They seem neither authentically traditional nor genuinely modern, and are therefore a hybrid worse than both. Popular cinema originates from that liminal world; it is bound to arouse ambivalent feelings.

1 Dilip Kumar made me do it ZIAUDDIN SARDAR

I

I

n my twelfth year, I was burdened with two responsibilities: one was a chore, the other a pleasure. In the early sixties, the British Asian community was still in an embryonic stage. In Hackney, my part of East London, there was neither a halal meat shop nor a cinema showing Indian films. So every Saturday afternoon, I took a bus to Aldgate East to buy the weekly supply of halal meat. On Sundays, I took my mother to either the Cameo Theatre in Walthamstow or the Scala at Kings Cross to see ‘two films on one ticket’. The weekly visit to the cinema was a full-day affair. My mother would start her preparation for the ritual early in the morning. The latest issue of the Urdu weekly Mashriq (now defunct) would be scanned to discover the current offering at our regular theatres. Should we opt for the latest Dilip Kumar double bill at the Cameo or see Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa once again at the Scala? The decision was never an easy one, but the strategy followed by my mother was always the same. First, she would try and coax my father to join in the outing and take a lead in making the decision. This ploy seldom worked. Next, Mrs Mital and Mrs Hassan, from the Asian families of the neighbourhood, would be consulted. Intense discussion would follow on the merits of the offerings; minds and positions would change frequently before a consensus was reached. We would leave for the cinema at around twelve, my mother carrying a bag laden with sandwiches, stuffed parathas, drinks

20 • Secret Politics of Our Desires and a generous supply of tissues. Sometimes Mrs Mital, or Mrs Hassan, or both, would be in tow. The long wait for the bus, often in bitterly cold or relentlessly rainy conditions, would be rewarded by an equally long wait to get inside the cinema. I would queue for the tickets while my mother and our neighbours would look around eagerly for faces they could recognize. They had made numerous friends during these weekly excursions; friends whom they saw only at the cinema and chatted to only during the interval. I would always return from the ticket office to discover that my mother had bumped into a veritable horde of friends and that they all wanted to sit together. The logistics of finding the appropriate seating pattern in the midst of hundreds of similar networks with identical aspirations would have truly taxed the ability of a beachmaster at the Normandy landings. The performance started promptly at two o’clock and while my mother and her friends watched the films with rapt attention, most of the men in the audience would participate in each film, expostulating vociferously with hoots or hisses as circumstances demanded. During memorable dance sequences, notably those involving Helen, the popular supporting actress whose adaptation of the cabaret carried an ambivalent load, participants would hurl money at the screen. And like a throbbing tidal undertow to the film’s dialogue and music, breaking through the hubbub of the audience, would rise and fall, the inconsolable heart-wrenching gasps of sobbing women. In the midst of all this, I would inter¬ sperse my avid watching of the film with providing my mother, Mrs Mital and Mrs Hassan a generous supply of tissues to staunch their unending tears. We would leave the cinema somewhere after eight-thirty in the evening, exhausted, emotionally drained, but thoroughly entertained. Yet, all this was only the prelude; the day was far from over. On returning home, my mother would insist on telling the stories of both films to my father. His protests would have no effect on her—locking himself in the bathroom was ineffectual; stuffing his fingers in his ears brought no relief—she simply would not rest until she had related the narratives of the films down to the last detail. Then came the moment we all cherished. Once she had the narrative off her chest, my mother would move on to the songs. She would hum the lyrics to us, taking great pleasure in reiterating the poetic imagery of the songs. At this point, my father would forget that he was tired, that he loathed films, and would

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 21 sit up with rapt attention. ‘Wah, wah\ he would exclaim. ‘Repeat the first verse’. ‘Umm! The second verse does not do justice to the first’. This would go on for a while before my father would jump up in excitement and declare that the first verse would become the basis of our next mushaira. Now, it was a custom of my family to hold a mushaira (poetry recital) on the last Saturday of every month. These were late night, all-night affairs. My father would select the opening verse of a film song and the invited participants would have to justify their inclusion in the gathering by writing a full ghazal based on this opening verse. He would insist that everyone recite their ghazal in tar annum—that is, sing the ghazal as though it were a film song— although my father’s own tarannum left a lot to be desired. After dutifully preparing the meals for these occasions, my mother would sit up praising, criticizing and eventually, in an effortless but novel twist, performing her own ghazal. I remember being a full participant in these mushairas and writing a few ghazals myself. But Indian films not only set the literary agenda in our house. Through my mother’s constant reiteration of the film narratives, they also established our social and intellectual priorities. For us, Indian cinema was just that: Indian in a true multicultural sense. There were no divisions here between ‘Muslims’, ‘Hindus’, ‘Sikhs’, or ‘Pakistanis’ and ‘Indians’—all of us identified with the characters and found meaning in the narratives. The films testified to the fact that all were culturally and socially one. We saw them as a universal symbol of our subcontinental identity; a lifeline for the cultural survival of the Asian community. They brought a little bit of ‘home’, of what my parents had left behind in Pakistan, to us here in Britain and thus provided a sense of belonging not offered by British society. But more than that, they also conveyed the problems of the society we had left behind. Problems that my parents were convinced would not be repeated here, would have no place in the emerging Asian community of Britain. By her constant, undaunted retelling of film stories, my mother made the deep social and economic inequalities of subcontinental society— the inferior position of women, the conflict between tradition and modernity—topics of everyday discussion. On reflection, it seems to me now that she did more than bringing the film characters alive; my own consciousness was not so much dazzled by celluloid heroes and heroines, as it was stretched by the three-dimensional

22

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Secret Politics of Our Desires

cultural, social and intellectual ideas and issues they personified. Our house was a microcosm of the Asian community as a whole. Asian Britain was incorporated by the social institution of Indian cinema in which it had a double emotional investment. Firstly, as a prime cultural referent Indian films reflected the diversity and density of life ‘back home’ and provided a direct emotional link with the subcontinent. Secondly, it furnished a sub¬ conscious agenda for the future—problems to be avoided, social issues to be addressed, cultural goals to be sought, ideological possibilities to be explored—through the empowerment of being migrants in Britain. Indian films were thus much more than enter¬ tainment—they were a source of contemplation, as well as a reservoir of aesthetic and cultural values. They brought different elements of the community together and through this adhesive offered the prospect of rising above the dilemmas the subcontinent had not resolved.

II In my thirtieth year, I joined London Weekend Television (LWT) to work as a reporter on a pioneering programme for the Asian community. This was immediately after a new television network, Channel 4, had been established with a special mandate to serve the needs of minorities within the convention of British television. Prior to the emergence of Channel 4, the needs of the Asian audience were seen mainly in terms of remedial education. For well over a decade, BBC’s Nai Zindagi, Nai Jeewan pro-gramme treated the Asian audiences as infants suffering from serious educational impediments. LWT’s Eastern Eve, broadcast fortnightly on Channel 4, changed all that. The hour-long maga¬ zine programme became a trendsetter as a team of Asian reporters handled Asian stories and brought many Asian faces to the mainstream of British television. By far the most popular strand of the programme was the one dealing with Indian films. Apart from star interviews and a film quiz, this programme showed clips from the latest films, often accompanied by sardonic comments. I frequently found myself handling the film sections of the

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 23 programme. This involved both choosing the clips to be shown and writing the studio scripts that introduced, linked and com¬ mented on them. Both the new films that were coming our way and the response from Eastern Eye viewers convinced me that Indian films and their British Asian audience had changed profoundly. The film narrative, as the prime instance and instru¬ ment of contemplation and self-reflection, had evaporated. Film songs were no longer ghazah written by reputable poets, but meaningless words strung together to the beat of a disco number. The audience itself was not interested in the narrative but wanted only to see disco dances and fight scenes. Moreover, they were not willing to entertain any critical, particularly sardonic, com¬ ments either about the films or their stars—the viewers demanded total respect and awe. Films were no longer engendering mushairas in Asian households, as they had done in my youth; instead, stylized and patently absurd fight scenes were being enacted throughout the Asian community. Far from resisting their status as a commodity—as the earlier films had done by means of stylistic self-reference—the new films projected themselves solely as what they were: commercial vehicles for one-dimensional celluloid characters. The aesthetic experience that stressed contemplation had given way to mindless action. As an Eastern Eye reporter, I travelled throughout Britain hunting for stories, investigating criminals, exposing racism. I was thus able to visit countless Asian households across the country. In each Asian home the story was largely the same: whatever the condition of the house and the financial status of the occupant, the video player would be on and the parents would be huddled together with their children watching Indian movies. There would always be a pile of rented films next to the television. Three or four films a day would be the normal fare. Often I would enter a home to interview the parents and discover the children were fast-forwarding the video to savour the fight scenes or disco dances that they then played in slow motion. When they were not watching, they were enacting fight scenes, uttering incompre¬ hensibly aggressive dialogues, or swinging like their favourite hero or heroine. In the youth clubs I visited and social gatherings I attended, the accent was on emulating Amitabh Bachchan or one of the glamorous new heroines. Young men and women took great care in practising their dance routines, often rehearsing in front of the toilet mirror in preparation for launching themselves,

24

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Secret Politics of Our Desires

suitably clad, onto the hub of the social life of the new Asian British community. For these new consumers the source of pleasure in Indian movies was not in the identification of characters or situations, the language or the poetic imagery (if any), but solely the extent of the aggression shown by the hero and the manner and content of the violence he was able to dole out to the villains along with the style and spectacle of disco dances. These were not the Indian films of my childhood; and these audiences were certainly not the kind of movie goers with which I, my mother and her numerous friends shared the confines of the Walthamstow Cameo or King’s Cross Scala to watch Dilip Kumar or Guru Dutt unfold the contradictions and problems, injustices and social malaise, poetry and aesthetics, richness and diversity of Indian culture.

In my fifteenth year I saw Mughal-e-Azam. I remember it well: it was one of those rare occasions when my father accompanied us to the Walthamstow Cameo. But there are other reasons why the memory of my first exposure to Mughal-e-Azam is so vividly engrained in my mind. It was the only film to be shown on its own: every time it was screened, the ‘two films on one ticket’ philosophy went out of the window. It was a rare film in that it did not have the stock-in-trade of all Indian films: a comedian. No one laughed during its screening; indeed no one hissed, or hooted, or even moved, though everyone cried. We did not so much watch Mughal-e-Azam as immerse ourselves in it. But above all, I remember Mughai-e-Azam because it taught me the critical linguistic and visual appreciation of the ghazal—it was my object lesson in the meaning of poetry. Mughal-e-Azam was one of the five main texts of my youth, and its star, Dilip Kumar, was my guide and pathfinder. He was not just my ‘hero’: both his films, as well as the eclectic analysis of their narratives by my mother, would never have allowed an impressionable young man to accept Dilip Kumar simply as an object of adoration for unquestioning hero-worship. No. He was my guide through the complex world of human emotions- he

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 25 opened certain paths and invited me to journey through them, to examine and cross-examine what I discovered en route, to dissect and analyse what I encountered. Along with Mughal-e-Azam, Devdas and Ganga Jamuna were my other ‘Dilip Kumar texts’. But he could not be my hero for another reason: I was equally drawn towards Guru Dutt. Whereas Dilip Kumar took me to the edge of emotional intensity, Guru Dutt opened my eyes to the reality of the world. One Muslim, one Hindu, yet their different faiths impressed themselves upon me for the synthesis they made possible; what they expressed were discrete outlooks that were part of a necessary dialogue, one stretching the other, tempering the other, informing the other, each enriched, each part of a cultural synthesis, each at home in India, my India. Hence it became possible for me to deal with Britain. The Muslim and Hindu dimensions of India—the culture, the civilization, the people—fuse together in a seamless whole in K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam. The narrative concerns the love affair of the Mughal Prince Salim, played by Dilip Kumar, and the courtier Anarkali. Between the lovers stands Saiim’s father, the mighty Mughal emperor Akbar, his Hindu mother, the Queen Jodhabai, the scheming courtier, Bahar, who harbours the secret desire to become the Queen and is herself vying for Salim’s attentions, and the social conventions of Mughal India. For Salim, love is far above royal protocol and conventions; for Akbar and the Queen, social convention is everything, although Akbar is also plagued with his own ambiguous ideas of absolute justice. Anarkali knows that her love is pitting father against son and the outcome can only be tragic. Bahar is determined to usher in the tragedy. While allegedly based on a true historical incident, the film makes no attempt to be historically accurate. Indeed, its narrative is deli¬ berately couched in myth and metaphor to link the past with the present: the tragedy that was once played out in the court of Akbar is universal, it is unfolding in every Indian community. We are invited to read Mughal social conventions as the social institutions and class structure of modern-day India. Mughal-e-Azam is structured like a ghazal. Before the advent of the film, the Urdu ghazal was the main source of cultural expression and cultural entertainment in urban India, as depicted so charmingly in Kamal Amrohi’s Pakeezah. Essentially, the ghazal consists of love lyrics with fixed metrical form which can easily be rendered into music. While love is its prime theme, a

26 • Secret Politics of Our Desires ghazal need not be solely about love: a good ghazalwraps a great deal of philosophy, metaphysics, social comment and symbolism into its metaphors, similes and basic theme. Each couplet in a ghazal is capable of standing on its own, it may not even bear a direct subject relationship to the previous one, but the whole ghazal has a thematic unity and psychic continuity. The symbolic and metaphoric content of a ghazal makes it particularly amenable to visualization. The characters of Mughal-e-Azam do not just speak they refine communication, they distil it, they crystallize it into manyfaceted glittering gems, they make poetry of ordinary language. When Bahar asks Prince Salim to accompany her on some routine task she says: Eyes long to glimpse at you. Paths await your shadow!

When Salim discovers that Bahar has been spying on him and Anarkali, he summons her to his chambers. She enters the cham¬ ber to discover him standing by a candle: Salim:

What does a candle-flame know?

Bahar: Murmurs of the night and a few secrets. Salim:

For that reason every candle-flame is extinguished at break of day. You tried to know a secret; you too can be extinguished.

When the film is not encasing dialogue in symbolism and meta¬ phor, it simply erupts into verse. Salim’s declaration of love comes in the form of a poem to Anarkali. She replies in verse. The two lovers even arrange their meeting place via poetry. Determined to settle her differences with Anarkali, Bahar invites her to a poetic duel, which Bahar wins. The total immersion of Indian culture in Urdu poetry is truly brought home when Anarkali feels the need to consult an oracle. She closes her eyes and simply opens a Diwan (an anthology of poems) and reads the first verse that catches her eye! The film’s structure moves from narrative point to narrative point with the same poetic intensity. Each sequence is a synoptic expression of the theme, the whole story prefigured in each episode of its narrative unfolding. The opening sections of the film establish that we are being invited to a meditation on love and beauty, art and life. On his return from battle, Prince Salim sees a veiled statue and learns of the bold claims of the sculptor_

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 27 his art transcends life, it can subdue warriors, dethrone kings, make ordinary men give up life. Salim wants to see the sculpture but the courtiers prevent him, warning that the royal astrologer has cautioned that seeing the statue before the moon sets could spell disaster, and that the King has ordered the unveiling at dawn in his presence. Unable to contain his curiosity, Salim returns in the middle of the night. As he looks through the beaded curtain of pearls, he declares: "The sculptor’s claim is indeed justified. Only marble can endure the intensity of such infinite beauty. I am tempted to accept the divinity of ideals’. His faithful assistant and companion, Darjan, warns: ‘You will be accused of idolatry’. Salim quips: ‘But praised for my devotion to beauty’. As Salim walks away from the sculpture, we discover Bahar has been watching him violate the order of the king, and hear the following off-screen dialogue: Voice:

I could not complete the statue. You must stand in its place tomorrow.

Anarkali:

The Prince has seen me; he praised your art.

The following morning the statue is unveiled in front of Akbar the Great. Bahar suggests that the conventions of romantic litera¬ ture should be followed and the sculpture should be unveiled with an arrow. In accepting her suggestion the King comments that stories have a habit of turning into reality. Salim shoots the arrow; the sculpture is unveiled. Akbar exclaims: ‘Praise be to Allah! It seems an angel has descended from heaven and taken form in marble.’ Then the statue moves and bows: Anarkali:

I am no angel but a human being.

Akbar:

Then who forced you to become a statue?

Anarkali:

A wilful sculptor of your realm whose name no one knows.

Akbar:

His art is indeed praiseworthy. But why did you remain silent when the arrow was shot?

Anarkali:

I wanted to see how romantic fiction is transformed into reality.

And like reality the film is many-layered and complex. Not just the reality that Salim, Akbar and Anarkali are actual historic characters with legendary status, but the social reality of India where status, class and creed are a constant barrier to the realiza¬ tion of genuine love We know that, as the narrative unfolds, several arrows will be shot at Anarkali, not least by Salim himself; Salim will constantly challenge Akbar’s orders; and Akbar, not

28 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Salim, will be tempted to accept the divinity of ideals: his own power, Mughal social customs, and his awkward notion of ‘justice’. For Akbar, Anarkali will always be a statue, to be admired from a distance, framed, and if necessary destroyed. For Salim, she is not only the object of love but of total surrender. And before the narrative ends, Anarkali herself will not only live out the con¬ ventions of romantic literature but will actually establish them. As the narrative moves, each section rekindles the theme of the statue and the connection between life and art—just as a ghazal would repeat its symbolic idea. When Salim accuses Anarkali of ‘false love’ he recasts her in wax: ‘you are like a wax sculpture and as such have no genuine emotions’, he says. We discover that the sculptor had no real intention of making a statue: for him, Anarkali was living art; her love for Salim, he predicted, would unfold as a work of sublime art. When Akbar sends Salim to be executed, the sculptor accuses him of being a statue of granite and sings: He whose religion is royal splendour Is a man without creed; He whose heart is devoid of love Is formed of granite, not flesh!

Art and life are two sides of the same coin; art cannot be divorced from life. This intimate connection is emphasized in the film’s songs and dances. In the Indian cinema of the fifties, sixties and early seventies, song and dance are an integral part of the narrative. In Mughal-e-Azam, they are used both to make narra¬ tive points and to move the story forward. The intensity of these sequences is heightened by another major stylistic tour de force: the switch from black and white, in which the rest of the film is shot, to technicolor. In the film’s most famous song and dance sequence, Anarkali makes a number of important narrative points as colour bleeds into the screen: When one has loved why should one be afraid? I am only in love, I am not a thief. I shall tell the story of my love Let the world take my life...

Not only does Anarkali tell Salim, who has accused her of playing with his emotions, that her love is true but also that she is ready to sacrifice everything for her love. She also declares her defiance of Akbar, reveals her love for Salim to the Queen— indeed, makes a public pronouncement:

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 29 Our love cannot be concealed It is there for all to see

Akbar sees her reflection everywhere—in the chandeliers and glass decorations of the palace, multiplied thousands of times. As the song ends, the dance concludes, and Akbar in an uncontroll¬ able rage rises from his throne; off-camera we hear an almighty crash—the statue has finally shattered and a living individual, with all her emotions and aspirations, has emerged. In the film's other colour sequence, the song is used to sum up the narrative. Akbar has granted Anarkali one night with Salim on the condition that she drugs him before dawn and surrenders herself to be executed immediately. In their only and final night together, the lovers are entertained by Bahar, who is aware of the plan. She is taunting Anarkali but knows that in Anarkali’s defeat and final erasure, there is a much greater victory: How can heart pine less? How can love diminish? When the night is so drunken What shall dawn be like? The melodies are intoxicating Goblets brim with joy The joy that reigns here will be The romantic literature of tomorrow. Within this splendour why should Anyone give a thought to death?

The lovers are ecstatic in each other’s company; there is no dialogue between them. Indeed, on most occasions when Anarkali and Salim are together they look at each other in meditative silence. When, earlier in the film, Anarkali meets Salim, she passes by the famous Mughal musician Tansen engaged in his regular evening rehearsal. The lovers’ meditative silence is realized by the intervals in Tansen’s music. The duration of the intervals pro¬ duce tonal and auditory tension captured in the glances exchanged by the lovers. The purity of the musical notes resonates with the purity of Anarkali's and Salim’s love for each other. It is not just the connection between love and music that is being played here. Just as music conveys deep mystical meaning, so the ecstasy of love is realized, not in a physical but in a spiritual union. The notion that love is spiritual and not merely physical is crucial not just for an understanding of Mughal-e-Azam but of Indian culture itself. Mysticism is a central feature of both Islam and

30 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Hinduism. In their unconditional love of God, the mystics seek total annihilation of their Self in the Divine. Since both Islam and Hinduism see the physical and spiritual as an integrated whole, it is natural for Indian culture to postulate that true love, love worthy of serious consideration, must move from physical to spiritual realms: the lovers must unconditionally surrender them¬ selves to each other without concern for worldly consequences. Only by following in the footsteps of the mystics can lovers elevate their initial physical attraction to a new level of consciousness and spiritual union. This is the message of such classics of romantic literature as Laila Majnu, Heer Ranja, Shreen Farhad and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s popular Bengali novel Devdas, which was originally made into a film by P. C. Barua in 1935 and remade with Dilip Kumar in the lead in 1955. Devdas, the son of a wealthy landowner, falls in love with Parvati, the daughter of a poor man he has known since childhood. When Devdas is away studying in Calcutta, Parvati’s father arranges her marriage to an elderly man. Despite her love for Devdas, Parvati decides to suffer in silence and obey her father. When Devdas hears of this he is heart-broken and takes to drink. He is befriended by Chandra, a prostitute, who is totally devoted to him and is willing to give up everything to save him. Parvati too tries to save Devdas but without much success. The drink takes its toll, Devdas becomes ill and finally dies outside Parvati’s house. Devdas has been much criticized for presenting, in the words of Kishore Valicha, ’a love devoid of any sexual significance’.1 Such a comment totally misses the point. Devdas’ love for Parvati, as that of Salim for Anarkali, is unconditional. Parvati is not the object of love tor Devdas but is the subject of his complete surren¬ der. To see Devdas as a pessimist, self-pitying and self-destructive lover is to reduce him to a single dimension, a categorization that his complex character does not fit. He never says what he means, and his words always convey the opposite meaning of his true intentions. He is an idealist seeking the impossible: the release of his suffering which can only be achieved by raising his love for Parvati to a more sublime and spiritually unified state. His long and tortuous, apparently meaningless, train journey is, in fact, a metaphor for his personal quest for a spiritual union with Parvati’ a mystical journey at the end of which lies the total desolation of the Self. The climax of the film, the burning of Devdas’ body on

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 31 the funeral pyre, signifies the ultimate release from his suffering. For Devdas this is the only apotheosis of the irreconcilable chal¬ lenge of his love in the actual social and cultural environment. In this ending the audience finds a beginning, a challenge to reflection and action. The theme of Devdas is consciously reiterated by Guru Dutt in Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959)—Paper Flowers—to provide us with another complex reflection on impossibilities and the shadow world they create in modern India. The central character is Suresh, played by Guru Dutt, a film director engaged in making Devdas. So we have a film within a film whose narrative is told in flash¬ back, another film within a film, a film where ends precede begin¬ nings. The many-layered storytelling in Kaagaz Ke Phool is set amidst a comedy of manners, but the various levels of comedy are neither random nor gratuitous and are definitely not simple light relief—they are an essential dynamic driving the tragedy of human relations which is the heart of the film. The juxtaposition makes Kaagaz Ke Phool a discourse on film-making and fame as well as on tradition and modernity and the ineptness of both to generate human fulfilment in a contemporary setting. It is a bitter satire created through the rapid succession of incongruous moods. The narrative begins after we have been told the story. An old man limps into a film studio and the overlaid song reflects on the life that has brought this visibly poor wreck to his present condition: What have I gained from this world I am left with nothing but tears Once my path was strewn with flowers Now I can’t even hope for thorns Selfishness drives this world I have seen many who parted ways one by one... Spring is like a guest who stays just one night When the night ends happiness fades with the dawn All happiness lasts just a fleeting moment Everywhere there is a sense of unease...

But the opening lyrics turn out to be ironic since the tragedy of Kaagaz Ke Phool is the product of selflessness and the quest for selfless fulfilment. The old man remembers when he was a famous and successful film director. What he remembers is an incongruous figure, a thoughtful man m his prime, reflectively puffing on his

32 • Secret Politics of Our Desires pipe amidst the glitter and acclaim of a triumphant career, a man apart in the middle of all the adulation he receives, because his big house is as empty as is his life, despite his conspicuous achieve¬ ments. He has only a cupboard of old memories, symbolized by a child’s doll. In Delhi for the launch of his latest film, Suresh tries to visit his daughter Pammi. We learn that he is separated from his wife and, as the headmistress informs him, thus denied access to his child on her mother’s instructions. Suresh determines to challenge his ex-wife but cannot penetrate the indifference and heartless elegance of her exotic family: Sir B. B. Verma and his vapid wife are surrounded by their dogs and their playboy son Rocky. This elite menage of wealth and position is responsible for his sepa¬ ration first from his wife and then from his daughter. The pompous and opinionated. Sir B. B. explains that his home is dedicated to fine things, not vulgarity. The dirty world of film—dirty because it panders to the common populace—is a social shame to his honour and reputation, as his wife points out. Suresh’s name cannot even be mentioned in their polite society. The product of all their refinement is that they lavish inappropriate attention on a bunch of dogs, their daughter hides herself away and refuses to discuss her own daughter’s well-being with the husband she abandoned and the irrepressible Rocky lives a seemingly irres¬ ponsible lifestyle racing horses, drinking and womanizing. As he wanders aimlessly in the rain after leaving the Verma household, Suresh meets a beautiful young woman taking shelter under a tree. Decency is the subject of their witty word play: she is not the kind of girl who talks to strangers and doesn’t like films; he makes films but is not the kind of man who accosts young women. She is too poor to own a coat, and he leaves her his overcoat to keep her from the rain before rushing off to catch his train to Bombay and plunge back into the world of film. In Delhi we have seen everything Suresh wants and cannot have. In Bombay he is a lion who can have anything he desires to make his films. Even the most fashionable actress must succumb to his quest for authentic simplicity; even the studio houses must indulge his decisions. But nothing could be less appropriate to Suresh s quest than the dramatis personae arranged by the studio Into this farce walks Shanti, the poor girl from Delhi. Intent on returning the overcoat, she blunders onto the film set and by a chance mistake the wrong piece of film is printed and there on

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 33

celluloid is the image of innocence and simplicity Suresh has been seeking. In the most crass of conventions Shanti is to be propelled to stardom against her will. She is not an actress, she is Devdas’ Parvati, or, as Suresh calls her, simply Taro’. It is her absolute simplicity that attracts Suresh: she is a girl who knitted sweaters to support her way to matriculation. And it is his passion for ideas and quest for simplicity that attracts Shanti. And it is their mutual desire to express the ideas encapsulated in Devdas that allegedly strikes a bargain between them. From this point on the making of a film version of Devdas is the calm centre of a frenzied world that is reiterating the themes of Devdas. Shanti becomes a puppet: the movie moguls would package her as a star in gorgeous sari and permed hair; to please Suresh she will spend a night with her head wrapped in a towel to undo the perm and remain Suresh’s vision of Paro, the simple village woman who is the real India. The subtle play on public and private worlds that runs throughout Kaagaz Ke Phool paves the ground for the real tragedy of decency. Gossip published in a film magazine suggests a romance between Suresh and Shanti. His daughter’s classmates taunt Pammi with ‘the facts’ in print and she runs away from school to confront Shanti. A different kind of eternal triangle, one created by a vain and fashionable world in conflict with enduring principles, means that all three central character must suffer and lose. The celluloid image of Devdas is a great success but public fame is the springboard to personal suffering. For the sake of Pammi, Shanti goes back to village India to teach, leaving only a knitted sweater to join the doll in Suresh’s cupboard of memories. Suresh goes to court to reclaim his daughter and loses, and with his double loss begins a slide into self-destruction. Robbed of family and selfless love, his career evaporates, he degrades himself with drink and ends up a poor and destitute man, given a job and shelter by his former driver. Meanwhile public acclaim has brought Shanti back to the world of films to become a star and Pammi grows to womanhood and is to be married. On the eve of her wedding, chance brings Pammi to the garage where her father now lives and works. Suresh has rehabilitated himself in the midst of compassionate simplicity, but shame prevents him revealing his presence to the daughter who longs to make contact with her lost father. They are now part of different worlds, incommensurable worlds that cannot

34 • Secret Politics of Our Desires communicate. To earn money to buy a wedding present for his daughter, Suresh asks a drinking companion to get him a job as a film extra. This is the man who directed Devdas, the friend announces as prelude to a series of reflections on the fallen state of the once famous man. As an extra in a religious epic, Suresh must say the lines, ‘I am swearing peace (shanti), everlasting peace.’ As we see him bowed ready to say his lines, the actress walks into the shot: we see only her feet as she says, 'Father, only those who can find no other path come here. Have you lost your way?’ It is of course Shanti who asks the question to which Suresh can make no reply. Shanti alone recognizes Suresh. He is thrown off the set and, as a studio hand reclaims the shawl that envelops him, we see that he is wearing the sweater Shanti knitted, now torn and full of holes. Wordlessly he runs off and she pursues him, only to be caught in a crowd of adoring fans. And so we are back to the beginning of the film. Suresh wanders down from the lighting gantry to the floor of the studio and sits in the director’s chair. When the crew arrives he is still sitting there and is recognized at last in death. The studio manager arrives and pushes his way through the mourning crowd and announces: ‘Haven’t you seen a corpse before? Get rid of it.’ He marches off to the shout ol 'lights’ and on a dark screen as these points of light stare out THE END, the final re-edit appears, and we hear the closing theme: Fly away O thirsty bee You will find no honey in these raging torrents Where paper flowers bloom Visit not these gardens Your naive desires have found a sandy grave Your hopes are stranded on the shore What the world gives with one hand It wrests away with a hundred hands This game has been played since time immemorial I have seen people abandon me one by one I have seen how deep friendship lies I have seen people abandon me one by one What have I gained from this world I am left with nothing but. tears...

From the first to the last frame, Kaagaz Ke PhooJis a delicately crafted work of art. Its theme and juxtaposition are presented not just through the narrative, but also through songs. Despite

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 35 their different moods and settings, all the songs—just as in Mughal-e-Azam—comment on the film’s theme: even Shanti’s seemingly innocuous song of numbers to her village schoolchildren culminates with the two lonely numerals, one and nought, who find completeness as ten, being pulled apart by the envy and jealousy of the other numerals. The central characters are located in the world of the film business, both as the actual setting and as a metaphor—indeed, what better metaphor for the selfishness of the world of modern manners? When Rocky discusses the ‘tragedy of the year’, a winning race-horse shot after breaking its leg, we know that it is not just the vacuous conversation of a playboy, but the word-play of the only character in the film who seems to have everyone’s number. When he asks what use is a three-legged racehorse, Shanti, and everyone else, knows he is really speaking of Suresh. Rocky’s incongruous hunting trip to the village is, after all, a considerate and compassionate effort to reunite Shanti and Suresh, and as such the film’s episode of supreme irony. Is Kaagaz Ke Phool just another reflection on the absurd cruelties of fate, before which decent people are impotent sufferers? The evidence would seem to be overwhelming. But ultimately even its most poignant lyrics, those that counterpoint the film and express its theme, are also ironic. The action of the film has shown the way of the world. The world of film-making in which the action takes place has conjured the shadow world, the dream of Devdas and Paro, a dream that is preoccupied with a yearning for a simple, noble India, for an innocence that has been lost and which endures in suffering. Love, in Kaagaz Ke Phool, is the yearning of the lost and alone; love is also an understanding that looks beneath surface appearance, a joining and completeness. Is the unhappiness of Kaagaz Ke Phool then simply that Suresh and Shanti cannot, because of society’s conventions, be together? The film admits of another interpretation, that neither of the central characters knows how to cope with the channelling of selfless love into their lives as a positive force. Shanti’s song sums up their predicament: You are no longer yourself I am no longer myself Our restless hearts rush to meet each other As though we have never been apart

36 • Secret Politics of Our Desires You lost your way I lost my way Though we had walked in step for such a little while Time has inflicted great cruelty on us You are no longer yourself I am no longer myself I can think of no place to go now I would walk away but no path is open to me What do I seek? The answer escapes me. I cannot stop my heart from weaving a tapestry of dreams...

Both respond to society’s conventions with a decency the modern world clearly does not deserve. But as they gradually change places, Suresh sinking into the ignominy of the gutter while Shanti returns to the world of films, buys Suresh’s old home and has a cupboard filled with old memories of unfinished pieces of knitting, it is they as people who have clearly failed to keep hold of something vital. It is not just fate, it is not just the selfishness of the world that separates and destroys them, it is their own inability to keep hold of the very best in themselves. Both Shanti and Suresh do the right things—they base their actions on decency and propriety. Of their values and sacrifices the selfish world around them remains oblivious. In doing what is right, however, they both diminish themselves and give themselves up to selfpity and bitterness and thus they destroy themselves. They can make nothing of the completeness of their mutual understanding; they cannot surrender themselves to the best in themselves and make a progression to a higher level of peace. The paper flowers of the world interpose themselves. Kaagaz Ke Phooi is a film of contradictions, at its most pithy when it appears to be most flippant, and its strongest characters and villains are women. The web of fate is created by the irredeemably awful Veena, Suresh's estranged wife who is no one's puppet, especially not that of her bombastic father Sir B. B. Verma. She is a woman who glories in the power she possesses, the power of denial and deprivation—she deprives Suresh of a home, companionship, love (if they ever did love each other) and his daughter. Her reward is that the governor-general will attend her daughter’s wedding. The hand of fate is wielded by Pammi, Suresh’s daughter. Twice she interposes herself. First, as a child' claiming to undei stand everything, she confronts Shanti as the scheming woman who is keeping her parents apart, making it impossible for her to reunite them. But the child is as alone and

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 37

abandoned as either of the central characters, and as active in creating her own abandonment. On the eve of her marriage to an empty-headed socialite she again runs away to search for her father and naturally demands that Shanti tell her his whereabouts. As a child or a woman Pammi seems incapable of any selfreflection on what she is asking for or witnessing. The film’s most pertinent comments on human relationships and especially women come from Rocky, the comic relief, who alone of all the characters acts with compassion for others. Kaagaz Ke Phool contains all the hallmarks of a Guru Dutt film—

a passionate revulsion against social inequalities, a hatred of materialism, a longing for the realization of selfless love and an irrepressible idealism. The art form used both for criticism and examination of the theme in Kaagaz Ke Phool \s cinema; in Pyaasa (1957)—Thirsty—the same terrain is covered with poetry as the medium of discourse. The silent message of both films is essentially the same: art is an integral part of life not just as a source of reflection but also a medium of positive social change. Vijay (Guru Dutt), the protagonist of Pyaasa, is a poet in love with Meena, his former college classmate. But while Meena loves Vijay, she chooses to marry a rich man, Ghosh. Vijay is unable to get his poems published, because they are concerned with poverty, hunger and social inequalities, and is finding it difficult to make a living. He is eventually thrown out of the family house by his selfish brothers who sell his poems as wrapping paper. One day, while wandering aimlessly he hears a women reciting one of his poems. She turns out to be Gulab, a prostitute, who had rescued his manuscripts and fallen in love both with the poet and his poems. Gulab devotes herself to Vijay, who is so disgusted with the materialism and social inequalities he sees around him and frustrated with Meena’s actions, that he decides to commit suicide. But an act of kindness on his part leads to the death of a beggar wearing his jacket. The world assumes that Vijay is dead. Gulab eventually persuades Ghosh to publish his poems, which are an instant hit. Vijay’s talent as a poet is realized and his death anniversary is celebrated with great fanfare. When it is discovered that Vijay is alive, all those who had deserted him—his brothers, Ghosh, even Meena—suddenly gather around him and declare his greatness. But Vijay refuses to acknowledge his fame, declaring that he is not the same Vijay. He returns to Gulab and together

38 • Secret Politics of Our Desires they walk away, ‘far, far from this world’. There are, in fact, four ‘thirsty’ characters in Pyaasa. Vijay eventually rejects the materialistic world of Meena and accepts the world of Gulab, which only increases his thirst for social justice and equality. When Vijay asks Meena to explain her betrayal, she says ‘life is not just poetry and love, but also hunger’. She did not marry him because he could not support her financially. ‘So you sacrificed your love for money’, replies Vijay. He is appalled not just by the fact that money is so important for Meena but also at the growing consumerism, and attendant dehumani¬ zation, in India. When, in a drunken stupor, he visits a prostitute who is dancing for her customers, and hears her baby crying in the background, he feels not only pity for the woman but contempt for a society that has placed her there. He walks out of the den, falls in the street and sings what is undoubtedly the most powerful indictment of Indian society: These streets, these action houses of happiness These brown caravans of life Where are the caretakers of dignity? Where are those who take pride in India?

When he acquires fame, Vijay refuses to be seen as a commodity. T am not the Vijay that people are asking for’, he tells Meena when, following him desperately, she corners him in a library. ’ J ust what is your complaint?’ Meena asks, perplexed. Vijay replies: I have no complaint. I have no complaint against any human being. My complaint is with that society which takes away humanity from human beings, which for small gains turns brother against brother, friends into enemies. My complaint is with a culture that worships the dead and treads the living under its feet, where crying two tears over other people’s pain and sorrow are considered cowardice, where to meet someone in hiding is seen as a sign of weakness. I can never be happy in such a society.

We see Vijay walking away from Meena in a long shot where he is little more than a silhouette. A ghost of a wind forces books and paper from the library shelves to fly everywhere as if to say that all this learning does little more than sustain the inequalities in the society that Vijay rejects. Meena is materialism writ large. But all her wealth does not really satisfy her, her happiness is illusive. When Vijav meets her in the lift of Ghosh’s publishing empire, he imagines himself dancing cheek-to-cheek with her. The scene is deliberately

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 39

unrealistic. For Vijay, she is just as unattainable as the happiness she seeks through materialism. The door of the lift closes to indi¬ cate that Meena is in fact in a prison: a prison of her own making. You have never understood, Vijay tells her, that one’s own happiness is acquired only by maintaining the happiness of others. Meena has destroyed Vijay's happiness for money: she will always be thirsty. Gulab is just as thirsty as Meena and Vijay. She longs for dignity as much as for Vijay’s love. When she eludes a chasing policeman by accidently running into Vijay’s arms, and he saves her by saying that she is his wife, the expression of joy on her face signifies the momentary quenching of that thirst. He leaves her but she follows him to a rooftop. Her emotions and desires are expressed by a passing street singer: ‘Make me your own, hold me in your arms, satisfy my thirst...’ Unlike Meena, she understands Vijay’s quest and complaint: she is, after all, a victim of the society he despises. After Vijay’s presumed death, she takes his poems to Meena who, typically, asks: "What do you want for these poems?’. ‘Price?’, retorts Gulab. ‘Can one place a price on beauty and questions of dignity?’ The question is particularly ironic coming from a woman who sells herself for money. In the final sequences of the film, Gulab hears someone calling out to her in her dreams. She wakes up and rushes out to the door of her house: it is Vijay. T have come to tell you that I am going away, far away’. ‘You have come back only to tell me that?’ ‘I have come to take you with me’. Her face transforms with joy and the two lovers walk away together. But where is ‘far’? Towards death? A joint suicide pact? We know that Vijay has already tried suicide and it had failed. Perhaps the journey will take them far, as far as the location of the fourth silent character in the film: India, a new India. The emergence of a new India depends, to a large extent, on the successful resolution of the old conflict between tradition and modernity. In Guru Dutt’s films, modernity is always presented as rampant materialism that drowns the selfless love and innocence that is integral to tradition. No synthesis is possible between the two: the one devours the other. But we are being presented with a very specific form of modernity: westernization—Sir B. B. Verma and his family in Kaagaz Ke PhocA being the ultimate metaphor. When tradition and westernization come together,

40 • Secret Politics of Our Desires helplessness and impotence is the outcome. Dilip Kumar s Ganga Jamuna (1961) explores the helplessness engendered by the clash of tradition and westernization, not from the viewpoint of a sophisticated film director or a radical poet, but from the perspec¬ tive of a simple, uneducated peasant. Ganga Jamuna opens with a vision of village India and zooms in on one family, a widowed mother and her two sons, Ganga and Jamuna, destined to follow the diverging paths of the holy rivers of the land. The mother is an icon of mother India noble, devout, honest, sincere, but poor, hard-pressed and abused. The youngest son, Jamuna, is the hope of the family. His hope is, as an early scene in his school suggests, iconographic and national— a good education to become a virtuous and hardworking citizen, a leader of tomorrow. The mother works as a maid for the second wife of the village landlord. The wife of the landlord is the only person in the village impervious to the integrity of the mother. In the brief exchanges between the wife and the mother are encapsulated the problems of the relationship between wealth and poverty: the one uncomplaining and enduring, the other high¬ handed, abusive and oppressive. One such exchange takes place through a curtain when the mother brings water for the wife who has retired into her dressing-room to prepare to take her bath. Our point of vision is the mother, and the device clearly under¬ scores the remoteness of capricious power and of the reality the wielders of such power refuse to see. The landlord’s wife has a brother, whom we see being awakened from a drunken stupor by Ganga, the first unfortunate encounter of lives that are crossed and heavy with fatal impli¬ cations. The brother is a well-to-do hanger-on, in need of money to indulge the pleasures of the flesh. While his sister bathes he enters her room and takes her jewellery box. On the way to sell the glittering contents he throws the empty box onto a pile of dried dung chips where it is found by Ganga. The blame for the theft falls on the mother. The police search her home and find the empty box. She is imprisoned. The entire village, symbolized by the verbose, vacillating village clerk, knows this to be a gross injustice, the crime an impossibility for the suspected, alleged criminal but there is no one who can interfere with the workings of a remote and uninvolved system of ‘justice’, until the landlord himself arrives and agrees to post bail for the mother. She is released and goes home, but pierced by the shame and finally

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 41

overwhelmed by this travesty in the name of justice, she dies before the family altar. This short opening prelude is quick and deft. The parameters of the film are set, its issues, characters and dramatic dynamic all drawn in rich vignettes, even the love interest is not neglected. We have seen Ganga with Dhanno, the stormy argumentative relationship, while Jamuna has cast longing eyes upon Kamla, the landlord’s daughter, the epitome of the quiet submissive ideal beauty. The love interest, like the whole of this prelude, is no thumbnail sketch. It is a representative icon so emblematic as to be instantly recognizable and therefore to suggest permanence and timelessness. Time moves, visualized by the maturing of the harvest and the turning of the wheel of a bullock cart. Ganga and Jamuna are now young men. Ganga, as irrepressible and lively as ever, is now working earnestly to provide for his brother’s education. The dream of bettering the family’s condition, of development, endures consuming the ‘sweat and blood’ of the poor and is symbolized by the fountain pen Ganga has bought as a present for his brother who is off to the city to finish his education. As his brother leaves, Ganga promises that Jamuna can rely on his support as long as he lives: development will be driven by the efforts and aspirations of the poor who do not participate in the new horizons it opens. But for this idyll to succeed there must be peace, the peace of freedom from capricious oppression—and that is not the burden of Ganga Jamuna’s story. By now the landlord has died. Management of the estate is effectively in the hands of the witch’s dissolute brother, who acts as if it were his own—-the doubly rentier devoid of any sense of responsibility to a communal ethic. On his way to some debauched pleasure the brother hears Dhanno singing in the woods and is stirred by thoughts of casual indulgence. He pursues her intent on rape. Dhanno runs and screams, Ganga hears her cries, comes to her rescue and beats off the landlord. For this defiance there must be revenge. Ganga is framed for the crime of stealing grain, brought to court and sentenced to prison on bought, perjured testimony. In the face of a foreign system of ‘justice’ Ganga is rendered silent, submissive, shorn of his articulateness, made a mere pawn to be disposed of; no one speaks for him. This system of ‘justice’ is a tool of the wealthy, not a representation of the will of the people.

42 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Ganga’s concern is for his brother, whom he cannot support while in prison. He begs the village schoolteacher to provide for his brother and not to inform Jamuna of his troubles, not to drag him back into the world of village oppression from which he is escaping. We see Jamuna in a comfortable setting, working away among his books in his city lodgings. But this vision of golden opportunity cannot survive the abuses back home. The camera pans across Jamuna’s lodgings in the reverse direction to show them shorn of everything he has accumulated. Denied the support of his brother he has sold everything. The camera ends its movement on Jamuna picking up the last suitcase of his belongings ready to leave his lodgings, but the landlord takes even that to compensate for unpaid rent. Destitute, Jamuna takes to the streets. A crowd rushes by chasing a thief, who drops a pearl necklace in the scramble to escape. At the police station we see the necklace returned to its owner; the inspector informs the flighty, urbanite owner that it is the honesty and integrity of Jamuna that has secured the return of her property. Casual and careless she offers Jamuna a reward. When he replies that he has merely done his duty she pockets the money and walks off. In the city too, honesty is its own reward, it has no reciprocal financial obligations between rich and poor. Ganga is released from prison to be met by Dhanno, the only person who has stood by him in his ordeal. He learns that Jamuna has written to tell of his distress and ask why his brother has neglected him. Even the schoolteacher, who taught virtue and idealism, has let Ganga down. And still the landlord pursues Ganga, who takes to the hills with Dhanno, where they join up with a group ol outlaws. Made an outcast, Ganga leads the bandits on raids against the landlord, though his life of crime is not parti¬ cularly venal or successful. Back in the city the inexorable forces of a blind and unresponsive system of justice are marshalling the final indignity. Jamuna has been recruited into the police force and is assigned to his native village of Haripur to root out the nest of bandits. The train bringing Jamuna back is set upon by the bandits, but they are fought off by the police contingent. Back in the hills Ganga learns that Dhanno is pregnant and that his brother has returned as police inspector and resolves to give up the life of an outcast. But he descends from the hills for one last defiance of the corrupt order. He bursts in on the arranged marriage of

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 43

Kamla, taking place amongst a conspicuous display of wealth, insisting she will not be married against her will, without her consent. Ganga’s 'crimes’ represent a different kind of justice, an insurgency against all forms of oppression. But they compel Jamuna, whose virtue and aspiration have been coopted by an alien institution of ‘justice’, to pursue his brother and usher in the final denouement. Ganga surrenders himself to Jamuna against the pleas of Dhanno, who has no faith in the system of ‘justice’ that will victi¬ mize her and their unborn child. The bandits descend on the jail where Ganga is held to liberate him and in the shootout Dhanno is fatally wounded. Ganga makes off to the hills with the dying Dhanno. Blundering through the smoke of her funeral pyre comes the landlord, whom Ganga shoots. In his torment he then goes to the village and sets fire to the landlord’s house. In the midst of the Oames Jamuna confronts his brother and the duty laid upon him by his office as police inspector. He has sought to use his position to bring charges against the landlord for suborning the perjury that put Ganga in prison, but the system is inflexible, too slow-moving and inept to extricate the victims from the cycle of oppression that has enfolded them. Jamuna is compelled to shoot his brother in the back as he seeks to escape. The dying Ganga makes his way back to his village home, the place where we first saw him as a boy at the beginning of the film. In this simple unchanging setting he seeks the only atonement and ultimate justice available to the poor. Before the family altar he prays for forgiveness from god and dies where his mother died, as his mother died, broken by the abuses of a corrupt system. Ganga Jamuna is an emblematic tragedy that wields its sophisticated analysis deftly. It presents itself as a powerful, emotional human drama. Its potency as social document is that its characters are what they are; they are not made—artificially that is, by clumsy crafting—to represent and stand for the issues the film directly and indirectly alludes to. The characters are rounded and real; they speak in dialect, face and endure life in a specifically dramatized story that is real enough to be a common¬ place of real life. Ganga Jamuna is no formal celluloid tragedy. It is a film of cleverly drawn heroes. Ganga (Dilip Kumar) is the most captivating hero: the spirit, independence and eventually the defiance of the traditional order which, pushed to the limit, becomes a resistance to the established order, its iniquities,

44 • Secret Politics of Our Desires corruption and injustice. Jamuna is the aspiring hero whose tradi¬ tional virtues are co-opted and twisted into impossibly conflicting loyalties by the path laid out for progress, whose actual system is unable to resolve or immediately alleviate the competing claims for natural and legal redress of the world it has to deal with. Most interestingly of all it is a film of wonderfully drawn heroines. The mother is the victim of the traditional order, with the resilience and power to endure everything except the perverse assault upon her dignity. Kamla too is a heroic victim, the woman suppressed and sacrificed by the oppressive system of traditional wealth, the woman with advantage made into a chattel to be exchanged against her will and without her consent. Both charac¬ ters are in their different ways heroines, both in their different ways must be victims, because in the final analysis they are prepared to be submissive in the face of oppression. The true, consummate heroine, matching Ganga in a profound sense, stret¬ ching from the superlatives of the performance by Vaijayantimala to the barbs of their dialogue, is Dhanno. She is the possibility and potential of traditional woman as resistance and defiance, a theme as powerfully drawn as is Ganga’s. Dhanno is independent, she earns her own living by her own ‘sweat and blood’. She is spirited; all her exchanges with Ganga and everyone else mark her out as self-possessed, capable, in charge of her own life; and she is neither passive nor submissive. While events move others, she charts her own course, standing by Ganga, advising him, counselling him and sharing his fate by her own choice and decision. Witty, articulate, intelligent, with an independent motive for action, this is a heroine drawn directly from tradition—from the real meaning of traditional womanhood. Alongside Ganga there is always Dhanno and between them there is a genuine, enduring and meaningful partnership. A man who not only wins but appreciates Dhanno can only have scorn for the Brahmin who seeks to prevent their marriage by arguing that she is of a lower caste; such a man must make his last, most virulent, defiance of the established order by rescuing Kamla from her arranged marriage. The heroines stories, the women’s stories, are not sub¬ plots having attendant details—they are the story. Ganga has no doubts, he must defy the Brahmin and marry Dhanno. Jamuna throughout the film acquiesces to the established order that requires him to deny his love for Kamla and accept that their ideal match is impossible. Not even his education and participation

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 45 in development will resolve that dilemma. Ganga is triumphant in his tragedy because he sees clearly and acts to resist his oppression in partnership with Dhanno. Jainuna survives tragically enmeshed in submission to incommensurable worlds, irrecon¬ cilable aspirations. Nowhere is the contrast more clearly made than in their relations with women and the nature of the heroines they cherish; the one heroine they share, their mother, and the two contrasting loves of their lives. Ganga Jamuna is an indictment of corrupt tradition and complicit modernity; its challenge to the audience is explicit and lucid and centred on the question of women, for its human drama empowers women too as agents of cultural resistance and change. There are a number of common threads running through Ganga Jamuna, Pyaasa, Kaagaz Ke Phool, Dev das and Mughal-eAazam—the five main texts of my youth. All five texts are concerned, nay obsessed, in their individual way, with the idea of justice and the notion of unconditional love. All have a longing and respect for the integrity of tradition. But none of them presents tradition as though it were a utopian goal—indeed, all five texts see traditional values as something just as much prevented by traditional society in history as commodified and unframed by Westernized modernity. It is not romanticized, traditional utopias that these films seek or promote; rather they argue for a tradition based on the integrity of its own authentic idealism. Indeed, in Guru Dutt’s films there are only two options— suicide or return to traditional idealism. But even Guru Dutt’s idealism is a rounded, all-embracing idealism: it addresses women as well as men, it enables men to express feminine emotions and it seeks change in tradition as well as transformation in modernity. All five texts show women as strong characters. In Mughal-eAzam, the conflict is as much between Akbar and Salim as it is between Bahar and Anarkali: it is really the unwritten alliance between Akbar and Bahar that spells tragedy for Anarkali. In Devdas, Parvati is forced by social custom to acquiesce to her father’s wishes but is strong enough to visit Devdas in the middle of the night—something no stereotypical traditional woman would ever do! And Kaagaz Ke Phool, Pyaasa and Ganga Jamuna are awash with strong women making their own decisions for good or bad. The aesthetic of all five films is authentically Indian: taking its cue from classical tradition and folklore, representing India in

46 • Secret Politics of Our Desires all its diversity and multicultural layers, and seeking to influence, change and engage its audience purely on the basis of shared cultural assumptions. As works of art, these films effortlessly combine different forms—poetry, music, dance—into an integrated whole through the energetic use of consummate visual imagination and superbly literate dramatic structures. The richness of these classical texts of my childhood is in their use of metaphor: the images on the screen are creative devices, dense and multi-layered, constantly suggestive of connections and resonant with reference to wider cultural associations and ideas. Framing, composing, pacing, sound, rhythm, totalities, poetry, language are all used to transform the image, to lift it beyond the simple needs of narrative, to describe it differently, thus making the visual image in itself another layer of complex metaphor. The film-makers’ metaphors are the essence of their reliance upon their audience. The audience cannot be passive, they are not taken for granted, and only they can com¬ plete the allusions, implications, suggestions and challenge of the metaphor—only they have the key to interpretation of the complex communication this cinema offers. This appeal to the audience is the trademark of a self-confident, domestic and domesticated metier of cultural production: a genuine Indian cinema, of India, for India. It is an Indian cinema made of the rapport between, and the shared culture and affinities of the film¬ makers and their audience. The metaphors of this medium then become a self-reflective vehicle for a whole society, a challenge to think, to discuss, to differ and to agree, to interpret variously and most of all to see its own condition rounded and contex¬ tualized in creative, suggestive and imaginative ways through the film-maker’s selection, juxtaposition and perspective. The "meta¬ phors define the aesthetic and ideological possibilities and become the yardstick for cinematic ‘literacy’ and intelligibility. A sophisticated film creates a sophisticated audience. I grew up not just immersed in the metaphors of these texts, but thinking with them, they were part of my vocabulary, they were embedded in my imagination. My love of tradition of poetry and language; my distaste for social inequalities and concern for social justice; my devotion to unconditional, selfless love; my quest to rescue traditional idealism from ossified traditional societies; my determination to act against the helplessness and impotence generated by Westernized modernity, can all be traced back to

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 47 the impact that Dilip Kumar and Guru Dutt had on my imagination. Modernity, in the form of his urban education and co-option in an alienating system of middle-class justice, renders Jamuna totally passive. He is reduced to the expression of a single emotion: impotence. While Ganga is a complex character and capable, in his traditional simplicity, of a range of emotions and actions, Jamuna, the archetypical good urban-industrial man, is a one¬ dimensional cripple. Ganga Jamuna warns us about the imminent arrival of a one-dimensional Westernized, urban man. It is the only film that also offers a prototype of a possible solution: Ganga is cultural resistance writ large. He was to inspire me in both my intellectual and my practical endeavours.

IV In my thirty-first year, I found myself at the Rochdale General Hospital. I was working on a story about the exploitation of Asian doctors by the Health Service. I had discovered that the Asian doctors were overwhelmingly employed in junior positions, their qualifications regarded as inferior. They were mostly working in areas shunned by their white colleagues (infectious diseases, for example, had large numbers of Asian doctors). They were seldom promoted and were forced to work incredibly long hours. I was interviewing a doctor in his house near the hospital when he was called on his beeper. The interview had just started and the doctor asked if I could wait for his return. Without waiting for my answer, he instructed his wife and children to entertain me, and rushed off to the emergency. The children slipped a cassette in the video player and the entertainment began. It was Sholay{\915). I was appalled by what I saw. Here was the complex world of Indian culture filtered through a western lens and rendered totally incomprehensible. Here was the theme of the Seven Samurai, out of the regurgitation of The Magnificent Seven, spewed up as an Indian spaghetti-western. Columbus insisted that Westward is the East; Sholay set out to prove it. The narrative is linear enough.

48 • Secret Politics of Our Desires A feudal landlord, Thakur, and his village are threatened by a ruthless brigand, Gabbar. Thakur hires two devious but wellmeaning killers, Viru and Jay, to defend the village and avenge the killing of his family by Gabbar. Whereas in Ganga Jamuna, and in so many other films of the sixties, including the magnificent films of Mahboob, notably Mother India and Aan, the enemy was feudalism and its representatives, in Sholay feudalism is presented as a positive force for cultural development. The village with its landless peasants, ruled over by the feudal lord who, as the police inspector, now represents law and order, would be a happy place but for Gabbar and his band of cut-throats. The heroes themselves are now not motivated by anything as complex as unconditional love or a longing for social justice, but by simple greed, the lure of financial reward. And in Gabbar, the Indian film finds a new villain—so often played in earlier films by Pran. Pran was always redeemable; he was motivated by ordinary human emotions: greed, envy, lust, misguided loyalty. Often the villain's crime was little more than causing a misunderstanding between the hero and the heroine. In the final reel, the villain would see the error of his ways and repent or be brought to justice. But in Gabbar we are presented with motiveless, irredeemable evil. Gabbar kills for pleasure and is guided by nothing but the pure evil that is within him. To make the point, we see him shooting Thakur’s infant son: evil is both the end and the means for Gabbar. Sholay also represents a number of other departures from earlier films. In the film texts of my youth, and so many other films of that period, the religion of the characters is totally incidental: what matters is what they do and say. Sholay makes a conscious effort at representing Muslims, at portraying them, at enframing them. There are two Muslim characters in the film: one, Bhopali, is clearly a devious crook; the other, the blind Imam, is plainly a buffoon. In the cultural universe that is the India of Sholay, Muslims can exist only as criminals or impotent victims; no other role is conceivable for them. The women in Sholay are also ciphers. The sole function of Radha, Jay’s love interest, is to suffer her fate in silence. The only virtue of Basanti, Veeru’s lover, is that she talks too much: what else is a woman good for? In Ganga Jamuna, the rural simplicity of the villagers is presented as the bedrock of Indian society; in Sholay their innocence is mocked. When Veeru threatens to commit suicide, in a staged

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 49 attempt to persuade Basanti’s mother to agree to their marriage, the following dialogue takes place between two villagers: First villager: what is suicide? Second villager: when the white people die they call it suicide. First villager: why do white people die? First villager: what is good-bye? Second villager: when white people leave they say good-bye. First village: where do they go when they leave?

We are supposed to laugh at the exchange! The main theme of Sholay is revenge. Both Gabbar and Thakur, and later Viru, are driven by a pathological obsession with revenge. The escalating violence they mete out to each other becomes a function of their desire for revenge: each obsession feeding and potentiating the other. The outcome can only be blood and bodies. At the climax of the film we are presented with the absurd scenario of an armless Thakur,' defying gravity and all laws of balance and motion, jumping from hilltops, somer¬ saulting in the air and beating Gabbar into pulp! The two real stars of Sholay are Jay and Gabbar, played by Amitabh Bachchan and Amjad Khan respectively. Both are cold, calculating, emotionless individuals motivated only by self-interest and glorying in violence: two machines propelling the engines of progress and development. In Sholay; the best dialogue is given to Gabbar—and Amjad Khan savours it as though enjoying a particularly juicy morsel of food. The children with whom I watched the film knew Gabbar’s lines by heart: every time he appeared on the screen, they would repeat his dialogue and imitate his actions. Later, I discovered one of Gabbar’s outbursts, a pre¬ lude to brutal slaying, had become a catchphrase amongst Asian youth in the late seventies and early eighties: ‘Haramzade, goli kha’ (‘Eat the bullet, you bastard!’). The texts of film after film churned out by Indian studios in the late seventies and throughout the eighties were all about character, nothing about plot. The focus was on the individual and the only substantive motivation of the individual was revenge. Society dis¬ appeared into a nebulous background blur, social justice was replaced with implausible, ridiculous scenarios of avenging

50 • Secret Politics of Our Desires personal wrongs. The avenger pur excellence was Amitabh Bachchan. In film after film, he was lost, separated from his sibling, haunted only by his memories of Ma (frequently played by the unfortunate Waheeda Rahman), which prompted him to wreak violence upon those responsible and anyone else who got in his way. The ending was often reunion with the lost brother (usually Shashi Kapoor) or mother, and it involved sometimes the self-sacrifice of the evil father and always an explosion of meaningless, gory violence. The plots of numerous Amitabh Bachchan films are derivatives of Sholay. In Aaj ka Arjun, for example, the villagers are being terrorized by an evil feudal landlord, Thakur, who wants to acquire their land to build a brewery. Thakur is played by Amrish Puri, unfortunately straitjacketed in the role of identikit villain, from gleaming jackboots to vaguely military-looking outfits—the mould popularized by Amjad Khan. Thakur’s word is law; and his henchmen are sadistic cut-throats who take pleasure in brutalizing the villagers; the chief henchman even speaks like Amjad Khan. The villagers themselves are resigned to their fate: ‘God has made Thakur the owner of our fate’, one of them says, and it is a fate they will accept. The only person willing to fight for the rights of the villagers is Lakshmi, sister of the simple villager and devoted brother, Bhima. But Lakshmi is tricked into marriage bv Ajit, Thakur s son. When Lakshmi accidentally overhears the truth of father’s and son s collusion she must be killed, though not before she gives birth to a son, and thus the stage is set for Bhima to be transformed into a sophisticated urban fighting machine, to avenge the death of his sister and rescue the villagers. In a direct parallel from a scene in Sholay, Bhima persuades one of the villagers to cut off the arms of Thakur’s chief henchman. Thakur himself meets not just a single death: in a frenzy of violence he is killed again and again finally to be burnt alive by the villagers. The films ol Amitabh Bachchan brush aside all questions of morality and ethics and present revenge as a primeval value. The discourse is limited to issues of power and survival, violence is projected as a necessary instrument for achieving both. In certain films like Agneepath, violence is actually presented as a cleansing force. At the beginning of the film, we see a schoolmaster trying to obtain electricity connections for his village and teaching classical Indian virtues to his son, Vijay. But the village landlord sees progress as a threat to his domination and, with the help of

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 51 a city gangster, has the schoolmaster framed for being friendly with a prostitute. The villagers turn against the teacher, beat him to death and throw his wife and children out of the village. The scene is set once again for Vijay—who is left alone to carry the body of his father to the burning ghat—to grow up to be Amitabh Bachchan, prove the traditional Indian virtues to be outdated and avenge the wrongs done to his family. This Vijay grows up on the streets of Bombay to be a gangster. He is essentially a good person, more scoundrel than inveterate rogue, but acquires a reputation for being brutal and vengeful. His violent lifestyle has been forced upon him. When he goes to inform a police inspector about a plot to kill him, he tells his wife: ‘They say this is a city. But it is a city only in name. The law of the jungle applies here. ...Here every strong creature survives by killing the weak.’ Vijay’s mother, however, is appalled by her son’s behaviour. In one scene as he sits down to a meal his mother reminds him to wash his hands. When he obliges she retorts that the dirt on a gangster’s hands cannot be washed so easily. He takes her hands into his: Vijay: Ma! The sublime hands of a mother! What dirt did they have when they were pounded with bricks and stone? Ah? What dirt was there when a helpless mother’s dignity was attacked? You don’t know? I will tell you? That dirt was the dirt of weakness. The dirt of weakness cannot be washed with truth. It cannot be cleansed with your faith. This God of yours—it cannot be washed with it. It can only be cleansed with force. Mother: Well done my son! Your father used to say that it took centuries for men to shed their animal instincts. It took you only a few days to turn yourself into an animal.

However, at the end of the film, when Vijay lies dying at his mother’s feet after acting out scenes of unparalleled gory violence, brutally killing the feudal landlord and the city gangsters res¬ ponsible for his father’s death, and has himself been shot three times and badly burnt, the mother accepts the error of her argu¬ ment. She absolves his actions and shouts: ‘My son is not a gangster’. His violence was a necessity—not just for punishing the guilty but, more importantly, to purify and cleanse society. Impure and corrupt though it is, the existence of society has to be acknowledged sometimes. This acknowledgement often comes as hollow gestures towards poverty, empty slogans ol ‘socialism’ and ‘revolution’ and demands for justice. These re¬ presentations of poverty are not sharply observed social comment.

52 • Secret Politics of Our Desires nor a deep identification with the human dimensions of hardship, lack of opportunity, the struggle to survive; they are simple, shallow stereotypes, a plasterboard issue for picaresque set dres¬ sing. In Namak Haram, for example, we meet two bosom friends. Vikram (Amitabh Bachchan), is son of a rich industrialist; Chander (Rajesh Khanna) comes from a poor background. Vikram per¬ suades Chander to join the workforce of his factory to sabotage the union and replace the powerful union leader, B. P. Lai. Chander succeeds, but, after discovering the poverty and hardship of the workers, changes sides. We are asked to believe that Chander’s own poverty-stricken upbringing had no effect on him until he started living amongst poor workers. We are further asked to believe that Nisha, Vikram’s millionnairess love interest, has just as much experience of poverty as Chander! In one scene, the transformed Chander naively asks B. P. Lai: ‘Why all this poverty? Why are people suffering so much?’ Lai answers: ‘There are several causes, my son. But the main reason is that a few selected individuals want to buy everything—this land, this country, this earth—everything.’ Chander then expresses the hope that a revolution will soon change everything. But Lai dismisses the suggestion: Indians are a passive people, they don’t subscribe to revolutionary change! Rather, they would suffer and die. This is exactly what happens to the film’s main symbol of revolutionary change: Bindu, the workers’ poet, who sings of suffering and hardship, but himself offers only defeat and resignation and finally death. What the status quo ought to be is made quite clear in Namak Halaf—a belated follow-up to Namak Haram. Amitabh Bachchan is Arjun, an illiterate villager brought up by his uncle. Arjun is actually the son of Savitri—the very unfortunate Waheeda Rahman—who has abandoned him to the care of his landlord, and thus saves the feudal dynasty from perishing. Savitri's philosophy is simple: ‘We do what is written in our fates.’ Arjun grows up to become a porter at Savitri’s five-star hotel. Raj, who grows up to be Shashi Kapoor, is educated in London and returns to take over what is rightly his: the feudal legacy. Arjun’s motto is simple: all workers should be obedient and loyal' servants— this, in fact, is the import of the title. Raj’s motto is also simple: enjoy life while you can. Enter the evil ex-manager of the estate deteimined to take away Raj’s inheritance. Cue Arjun’s transformation into an urban, sophisticated fighter who restores

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 53 to Raj what was immemorially his, thus proving himself the true son of his mother! The key to suffering, injustice and therefore the quest for revenge in virtually all Bachchan dramas is ‘Ma’. For example, the sole driving force of the narrative of Trishul is the revenge that Vijay must exact from his father for betraying the love of his mother. R. K. Gupta rejects Shanti—the very, very unfortunate Waheeda Rahman—to marry the Boss’ daughter. Heartbroken, Shanti gives birth to Vijay and brings him up in noble poverty and resolute despair. Vijay grows up to be Amitabh Bachchan determined to avenge, legally or illegally, the wrongs done to his mother. Effortlessly Vijay transposes himself from rural demolition expert to urban property developer. In a single bound, he out¬ bids R. K. Gupta Industries for a prize piece of land, develops it overnight and goes on to be the perennial bane of every development project involving R. K. Gupta. If urban development actually happened at this pace, no one in India would need to live on the streets. If rags changed to riches so easily, the mothers of India would sit in the lap of luxury forever. While the idealized notion of ‘Ma’ is central to Amitabh Bachchan films, her own suffering and hardship are seldom examined in any detail. The Ma of these films is not ‘Mother India’ who endures and is adored, a potent symbol of womanhood as well as an individual who seeks the fulfilment of her own desires and aspirations. Here Ma becomes an empty vessel for an outpouring of cheap emotions, a vehicle for perpetual and misguided suffering, a hollow character whose existence is worked out through the desires and actions of the male characters: the son who must avenge the wrongs done to her and the husband or scoundrel who ruined her life. The motive of action ceases to be a function of women’s choice, as was in earlier Dilip Kumar and Guru Dutt films. The other women in these films have no function except to be sought by men and to dance and sing for their delectation. Their only aspiration is to be married, and once married to keep hold of their men. In Faraar, Raju’s sister is only there to be raped and killed so that Raju can begin his quest for revenge. After killing his sister’s rapist, he seeks refuge in the house of his former lover. She is only there to be dutiful—despite her love tor Raju—to her husband the police inspector out to catch Raju. In Arjun, Bhima’s educated sister is only there to prove that women

54 • Secret Politics of Our Desires cannot stand against a village tyrant: they can become easy victims of lust and, even with education, they cannot stand up to male violence. In Agneepath, the sole function of Vijay’s sister is to be kidnapped by the hero’s enemies. Even when, as a young boy, Vijay is left to carry the body of his father, the sister is conspicuous by her absence. The women of contemporary Indian films are less liberated, less articulate, less persons than their forebears a generation ago. The question of women has been resolved in today’s films by reinforcing the most bizarre aberrations of rigid traditionalism. In vapid films vapid women walk backwards into a cultural realm of oblivion; as social personalities they have become necessary set dressing and sources of temporary musical diversion. They are the belles dames to be rescued, not ingredients of the narrative. While mothers are idealized icons, and sisters are ciphers, fathers are the root of all evil. They seemed to have developed the habit of abandoning the mother without ever making an honest woman of her. In Trishul, R. K. Gupta impregnates Shanti, the hero’s mother, and then opts for a wealthy woman. In Namak Haram, Vikram’s industrialist father not only ruthlessly exploits the workers—‘the English have left us a great legacy’, he tells Vikram, ‘divide and rule: divide them on ethnic grounds, keep the workers divided—he is also the source of division between Vikram and his ever-so-loyal friend. Chander. In Suhaag, the hero s mother is not only called Durga after the powerful mother goddess, she is actually presented as a goddess of motherhood. Her husband, the gangster Vikram (Amjad Khan) refuses to acknowledge her as his wife after she gives birth to twins. The twins are separated: Amit (Amitabh Bachchan) is bought by a dissolute criminal and grows up to a life of crime; Kishen, the inevitable Sashi Kapoor, is brought up by the mother and becomes a police inspector. Not only are they unaware they are brothers; they have no idea the villain they jointly pursue is their father. When Kishen is blinded by Vikram, Amit assumes his role as a police inspector to continue the quest. Driven to desperate measures as the pursuit closes in, Vikram takes refuge in the home of the woman he has ruined. This reunion has only one possibility an it is hurriedly, if preposterously, brought into being: a woman stands by her man, no matter what he has done, what he has become, and she will defend him to the very last. But even such womanly selflessness is insufficient to redeem an evil father; only

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 55 his sons can move him. In the final fight scene, Vikram learns the identity of his two sons, the brothers discover the real meaning of the bond that has drawn them together and set them against the evil that shaped their lives. Brothers must stand together; fathers must get their come-uppance. The existence of sons instantly transforms Daddy and prompts his expiation of his numerous wrongs. Elsewhere, Daddy may take the bullet intended for his son; in Suhaag he becomes the donor in an organ transplant of superb ingenuity, he gives his eyes to the son he blinded! In prison uniform with two white patches where once his eyes have been, he takes leave of his sons, a better man. Plumbing the range of human relationships in contemporary Indian films has become immersion in complication with no hint of complexity and with the addition of emotional lobotomy. The family is a mystic entity, a primal bond that occasions the working of fate and whose links endure magically to outwit the worst that fate can throw at individuals. The family becomes a convention that is neither explored nor scrutinized but serves only to impel preposterous plot lines. The rationale of the family is simply to be; and what it is is a hackneyed version of the most prosaic kind of conventional dictum. By contrast, in Ganga Jamuna the tragedy of the brothers is moving because of the reality of the life they have shared, what they have given and received and invested in each other. In the genre of Amitabh Bachchan, the fellowship between individuals is really explained by the fact that un¬ beknownst to them they are brothers: it is not sufficient for them to be drawn together as human beings with shared experiences; their friendship arises from the fact that they are really brothers. Trite emotions follow the inevitable revelations of family connection; characters immediately fall into line with what convention deems such family ties should contain and imply. But the family has no real existence. All that really exists in the Amitabh Bachchan genre, the films of the late seventies and eighties, is the emotionless, angry young man out for revenge. Revenge is equated with justice and to this end any means can be justified. The formula for the plot is summed up in the opening of Faraar. In an attempt to save her honour, a young girl kills herself by jumping from a boat. Despite his efforts, her brother, Raju, a painter, cannot prove the guilt of the assailant, who is acquitted by the courts. Raju stands in front of the painting of his sister and swears: ‘I promise you Mita, I

56 • Secret Politics of Our Desires will avenge your blood. I will avenge, Mita. I want my right. I want justice. Justice.’ And how is this justice to be sought? In Suhaag, Amit provides the standard answer when he agrees to become the eyes of the blinded Inspector Kishen, who asks him to ensure that, while pursuing the villain, he stays within the law. Amit replies: I do not know what is and what is not against the law. I know only this: I cannot rest until I bring darkness into the life of the man who took the light out of your eyes.

When the moment of revenge finally arrives, it has to be played out with stylized brutality. Why? In Trishuf Vijay gives the conventional answer: ‘I am taking account of my mother’s tears.’ Every tear becomes a kick in the face! The kick is not just a flailing leg but also a sound blast. The stylized fight sequences in the Amitabh Bachchan genre of films are just as much a product of formula as the narratives themselves. There is the jump from the roof top; the mid-air, gravity-defying somersault; the punch that sounds like an explosion; the tish-tish karate chop. Since violence is the raison d'etre of the narrative of so many of these films, the fights appear as natural phenomena. The song and dance routines, however, are totally postmodern disjunctions. In the classical films of Dilip Kumar and Guru Dutt, songs and dance were not added extras. They were part of the poetry of the narrative. When, in Mughal-e-Azam, Anarkali sings of her plight in prison, she articulates her emotions in verse and sums up the narrative to that point. Furthermore, we have no problem in believing that it is Anarkali who is singing: after all she is a poet, and, as a courtesan, she sings for a living. And this is exactly what Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, did: he wrote and sang poetry in the Rangoon prison to which he was exiled by the British. In Pyaasa, the poet-hero, Vijay, sings his own poems which also elaborate the humanist and socialist message ot the him. When Ganga or Dhanno sing in Ganga Jamuna, they sing in the village dialect in which they speak. In Kaagaz Ke Phoof the film director hero, Suresh. does not sing at all: it would be against his character instead, we have the elaboration of his emotional state through the songs on the soundtrack. Again, Devdas does not sing: he is clearly too emotionally distraught’to do anything so daft. Another Dilip Kumar classic, Jogan, contains

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 57 numerous songs. But they are all bhajans (Hindu devotional songs), sung by the heroine who is a mystic; singing bhajans in temples is her vocation. Even the playback voices are matched to the actor and character. It was attention to such detail that made the total package work as art. In these classical films, songs have a narrative reason. The songs stretch the genre to make the final product, the film, a form of total communication, a work of art. It is the songs which often elaborate the resonance and implications of the emotional, intel¬ lectual and social import of the action. The juxtaposition, counter¬ point and seamless integration of songs that are superb poetry is the distinctive mark of a cinema that could only be Indian, of the formation and vibrance of a genre of authentic cultural expression. No cinema in the world has merged such discrete spheres of art, probably no other cinema could. But the effectiveness of this art form depends on the sensitivity, the artistic logic of the fusion; to work it can never stretch the audience’s sense of logic and appropriateness too far. If they sing and when they sing, the characters must be in character, just as the poetry must capture the character, mood and essence of the drama we are engaged in. Hardly surprising, then, that the songs themselves are pure poetry at its most effective: they were written by bona fide Urdu poets. Indeed, almost all the great Indian Urdu poets of recent times have written songs for films: Josh Malihabadi, Arzoo Lucknavi, and later Majaz, Kaifi Azmi, Khumar Barabankvi, Akhtarul Iman, Sahir Ludhianvi, Shakeel Badayum, Hasrat Jaipuri. Kaifi Azmi not only wrote the lyrics of Kaagaz Ke Phool but was also responsible for the film of the classical love story, Heer Ranjha, which is written entirely in rhyming couplets. Sahir Ludhianvi wrote the lyrics for Pyaasa and published an anthology of his film poems. Shakeel Badayuni wrote the lyrics for both Mughal-e-Azam and Ganga Jamuna, as well as published numerous anthologies of his poems. In the films of Amitabh Bachchan and those who have followed him, song and dance routines are just that, songs and dances. They owe their origins not to a distinctive art form, nor do they continue the tradition of another distinctively Indian art form, the cinema. They are derivative ditties of international pop music, slightly tempered to Indian tastes. They decorate in the most trivial way stories whose complicated, overlong working out they complicate further by abrupt interruption. They have little or no

58 • Secret Politics of Our Desires connection with the narratives, they take no account of charac¬ terization, and, above all, their lyrics are totally meaningless. There is something absurd afoot when, in Namak Halal,\ a supposedly simple, semi-literate villager walks into a five-star hotel and begins to sing a disco number, or a gangster (a standard Amitabh Bachchan character) in Pukar suddenly bursts into song and dance. It is giving the product specification of the production line of contemporary Indian cinema too much credit to say their use of song and dance was postmodern, before the concept was ever invented, and that it outclasses theatre of the absurd without ever seeking to know the genre even exists. Yet these are the categories they inevitably bring to mind. The increasingly absurd disjunctions of the increasingly elaborate song and dance sequences is the death-knell of the cinema as drama and only minimalist enter¬ tainment of the lowest common denominator. In earlier films, poems fitting the narratives were written first and a tune based on the lyrics was developed later. In the Amitabh Bachchan genre, the process is reversed. Tunes based on western pop music are produced first and then meaningless words are added to them later. For example, a song from the highly successful Trishuh Gaputchi, Gaputchi Gum Gum Kishi, Kishi, Cum Cum I wish we may stay together forever!

The title song of Namak Halal actually tries to wrench some meaning from the absurd situation in which it is sung: The elders say: stand on your foot And the time will be with you Walk with the wind And all songs will be yours.

The opening song of Giraftar, in which—Amitabh Bachchan appears in a very special role’ (namely a police inspector who beats everyone to pulp), is sung in a bizarre postmodern setting with the secondary hero doing stunts for a film: I will open the lock of fate I will become an actor with a name I need your prayers!

More recent songs do not even bother to use words. A recent hit disco number goes something like this: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, 8,9,10,11,12,13!

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 59 Needless to say, the song has absolutely no connection with the narrative of the films. It need not be so. Even numbers can make a song poignant, as Kaagaz Ke Phool so elegantly proved. When Shanti returns to her village and becomes a schoolteacher she enchants her class by turning a lesson on numbers into song—a familiar, dramatic, but acceptable device. For here the innocent little song becomes a reflection on the central tragedy of the film; it adds to the development of the narrative by demonstrating that, even in exile, Shanti has found no peace and is haunted by her unhappiness. That ‘poetry and refinement’, laments the film musician Naushad, who wrote the music for Mughal-e-Azam and Ganga Jamuna, ‘has gone out of the window’. Naushad continues: Songs are written in banal prose: ‘sit up, sit down, stand up, its raining: something happened, something didn’t.’ This is not poetry. Fitting lyrics to imported tunes is like saying ‘a coffin is ready, bring a corpse that fits its size.’ The films that we make today are Indian only in name. We do not find India in them. In them all the things are foreign to Indian culture... The music, the story, the dress are all foreign. Indianness is totally absent... where we stand today is only a place of despair and sadness.2

In my thirty-second year, I met Dilip Kumar—and found happiness again! A few weeks earlier, i had met Amitabh Bachchan. He had agreed to appear on Eastern Eye while in London for a concert tour. He arrived at the studio with a collection of his bodyguards and throughout his brief stay at the television studio, he remained aloof, talked little and smiled even less. He was dressed the way he always dresses in all of his films: no matter what film he is in, whatever character he portrays, he always ends up wearing the same set of sweaters, leather jackets and white suits. On this occasion he was in his white uniform. Most of the programme was handed over to him. He admired the 1500 portraits of him sent by Eastern Eye viewers and talked largely about where he has been, his accident and his role as the angry young man. ‘I like these roles’, he said, ‘there is something of me in them.’ And:

60 • Secret Politics of Our Desires ‘In these roles, the way they are written, the way they are performed, the viewers have found a release.’ He spent most of the interview answering banal questions from viewers about his height, weight, children, dogs, and the most embarrassing situations he had experienced.3 Amitabh Bachchan, it became clear to me, may be a star but he was not an actor. Certainly he is not the kind of actor who reflects on the genre he has created, or the phenomenon that is Amitabh Bachchan. In interview after interview, over the course of his meteoric career, he has pointedly declined to engage in any discussion or analysis of his films, their impact or effect. The profession of the actor is to be a vehicle, there is no law that states all actors must be self-reflective. But there is something ominous about the power of a popular culture that has become so singularly personified, and where that singular personification so exactly mirrors the lack of self-consciousness of the product. In the studios of Eastern Eye, he appeared exactly as he appears in all of his films: Amitabh Bachchan, a personality, aloof and emotionless, strangely cold and absent. In life, as in his films, he runs the whole gamut of his emotions from A(mitabh) to B(achchan), as Dorothy Parker would undoubtedly have said. I knew that on film Dilip Kumar could summon up an infinite reservoir of emotions, he could grab and hold one’s attention and feelings and release them at will, his presence forced one to look and listen not just with attention and admiration but also with a certain awe and reverence. But what was the celluloid hero of my childhood like in real life? Would he be cold and distant, withdrawn and reserved, conscious of his star status, like Amitabh Bachchan? Would he be like Devdas, introverted, inarticulate, incoherent? Would he be like the hero of Aan. debonair, dashing, demanding? I knew from my initial research that he was a literary man—indeed, when he first began acting in films in 1944 he was the secretary of the literary society of his college. I also knew that he had had a traumatic childhood. He grew up in a village not too far from the Khyber Pass where he had witnessed a great deal of violence and was once stranded, at the age of six. near Peshawar city square with three dead bodies. Were the’child¬ hood scars still visible in his personality? I feared_nay. expected my film hero to have feet of clay in real life! When I went to interview him for Eastern Eye, I found him

Dilip Kumar made me do it » 61 wandering in the lobby of the hotel. He was joking with the waiters and then became involved in deep conversation with a doorman. It was an animated conversation; he was repeating the sentences of the doorman with certain pleasure, savouring each word individually. The image of Ganga from Ganga Jamuna came to my mind: I detected the same innocence and verve. I waited for him to finish. After a while, I began to get annoyed at the fact that he kept both myself and the crew waiting while he finished his conversation with the doorman. Eventually he came over, greeted me, read my thought and put his hands around my shoulders: T too was impatient when I was your age,’ he said. And then he explained that the doorman spoke a unique Indian dialect. ‘You know all these provincial languages have got a beautiful flavour of their own and they reflect local cultures. I have a great weakness for these languages including Marathi and Punjabi.’ He had a Bihari gardener, he said. He always used to rebuke me, always affectionately; he and his wife wouldn’t speak anything else but their village dialect. Wouldn’t it be nice to do a film in this dialect, I thought.’ He did. It was Ganga Jamuna, in which he not only starred, but which he also wrote, produced, and partly directed (though formally the director remained the venerable Nitin Bose). Great actors are chameleons, assuming their characters as their very self. Extraordinary actors are something else again— something not even the miscellany of mythic creatures yet has a name for. That is something of the impression one gets from meeting Dilip Kumar. An encounter with him is a double bonus: two amazing, rounded and culturally refined personalities in one individual. There is Dilip Kumar the actor who, after a string of emotionally wrought roles in such films as Devdas, Mughal-eAzam and Jogan, found himself under emotional strain. You tend to become more and more grim, your responses become a little heavy and you keep on doing grim tragedies... People cave in under the influence of these assumed personalities, not only of the work they do on the screen but the hell of stardom.4

What kept him together was his real self: Yusuf Khan. When Dilip Kumar finished a day’s shooting he returned home to his true identity as Yusuf Khan: When you come back home and you lie down on the bed and the room is there and everything is still. You feel all of this. There is an element of unreality about cinema because, all of a sudden when the lights are

62 • Secret Politics of Our Desires on, the whole story vanishes. The palace has gone and so has the orchard or the rivers, the landscapes, the hardship and the resplendent moments of it. Likewise, an actor, when he comes back, he has to come back to himself-back to the fan and the cold air-conditioned room with the drone of the air-conditioning and you have got to go to sleep. You have to wipe everything off the mind, you’ve got to clean the slate, and face another day. I think the individual personal self is more important because that’s what you live with. When working one has to have a no-nonsense approach about the vital issue of your work because there is the work which has to be addressed—you have to address yourself to it and there is the personal personality which is the basic equipment with which you are playing so it should remain in good condition. One should not lose one’s own sense of tranquility.

But how does one ensure ‘personal tranquility’, a sense of ease with one’s self? The standard formula is to withdraw from society, to keep your private life private, to surround yourself with bodyguards and PR people who keep you away not just from admiring fans but also from society at large. But for Yusuf Khan serenity comes not from withdrawing himself from the public but by being involved: ‘You cannot be immune to your surroundings.’ Personal health and sanity is a function of your ‘awareness of the conditions around you’. This is why you have to get involved in social and civic phenomena of society around you because no actor, for that matter no citizen, can develop in a vacuum of his own. An actor has to participate in the lives of the people and the problems of the people who give him his currency.

Hence Yusuf Khan became one of the most popular Mayors of Bombay. I know nothing of Bombay. But the India of my childhood was^ a land of cultural pluralism where what mattered was not one s personal creed, but how one related to this rich diversity, what one contributed towards the evolution of multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual identities, and how one promoted har¬ mony and a sense of peace amongst different groups. Of course, there were always disputes and conflicts. But the source of these conflicts was never ethnic or religious but, as in Ganga Jamuna, a feudal heritage, or as in Mughai-e-Azam., a different set of principles, or as m Pyassa and so many other films, tradition and modernity. However, India, my India, was always above the banalities of religious chauvinism and ethnic arrogance. What I m thlS interview was the v°ice of the India of my childhood the India that I always kept in my mind’s eye:

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 63 The scene in India is very splendid. There are Hindus, there are Muslims, there are Christians, there are Sikhs, there are Buddhists, there are Parsees all living there. Then there are varied provincial cultures which are so individualistic and so distinct. It’s like the colours of a rainbow. That’s the essence of Indian culture. So one has got to be aware; and one has also to be aware of the shortcomings and own up to these shortcomings, not gloss over them. I think the responsibility of an actor in the presentday society is to cultivate a sense of awareness and try to stimulate himself and try to imbibe all that’s positive in these various cultures, various schools of thought.

I asked Dilip Kumar about the plight of Muslims in India. His face changed: there was agony there; there was frustration; there was some confusion too. I remembered a haunting scene from Andaz: the hero learns that the woman he loves has only been toying with him—his is the ’modern way’, she says; she is actually going to marry someone else. The camera moves slowly and settles on Dilip Kumar’s face: there, in that agonizing hold that seems to last forever, the entire contradiction of tradition and modernity, the misery of betrayal and the confusion of new secular values is worked out on his face. Yusuf Khan composes himself: Its necessary for the Muslim community to live, live in good conditions, develop good mental health, and be economically viable with the rest of the society, because if they are left from the mainstream of growth then they are bound to become a menace to society, and that’s why I am involved with Muslim education, economic development, Muslim community’s life, the same way as I am involved with the institutions of the Sikhs or with the Christians.

The extent of his involvement became quite evident during the 1993 Hindu-Muslim riots in Bombay. He mobilized the film community to help both Hindu and Muslim riot victims, he led missions inside the slums of Bombay to rescue besieged Muslims, who would otherwise surely have been butchered, and he transformed his house into a refuge for victims of riot. The rise of Hindu fundamentalism, the persecution of Muslims, the marginalization of other Indian minorities, the fissures and fragmentation in the Indian personality, the banishment of art and poetry, and the consequent decline of the Indian cinem—all are products of the evaporation of Indian culture, that culture which is portrayed so elegantly, so forcefully, so honestly in the early films of Dilip Kumar and Guru Dutt. But the Indian cinema is not just a product but also one of the main reasons for the fading of Indian culture. Cultural concerns, said Dilip Kumar, have been replaced in Indian films by action, ’a lot of ingenious ways

64 • Secret Politics of Our Desires of smuggling narcotics and killing of people , and an obsession with Western culture’. You can import textile machines, you can import know-how of various sorts, but you can’t import culture, you can’t import literature. That has to grow from the grass roots, from the soil itself. When Indian cinema ceases to be Indian, it is not just the movies that are ‘increasingly impoverished’. The masses in India have a limited range of diversions; ‘they don’t have football and soccer and rugby or other recreational sports like fishing, swimming, hiking, jogging: they either work or they go to the cinema’, and increasingly take their values from what they see on the screen. An improvised cinema has produced an improvised Indian society. In Shakti, Dilip Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan are brought together as father and son. Dilip Kumar plays Ashwini Kumar, a highly principled police inspector who, even when his only son Vijay is kidnapped by gangsters, refuses to compromise. The son, as usual, grows up to be the archetype, angry, emotionless, individualistic Amitabh Bachchan. He utters the standard Amitabh lines: T am afraid only of myself,' he tells Ruma, his future wife, after rescuing her from thugs. When he is ready to go and beat the main villain to pulp (Amrish Puri yet again) he declares: The justice I seek needs neither a witness nor any evidence, it needs neither a court nor any law... I make my own law.’ Again, returning from a mission of vengeance: ‘I have come into this world alone, I will live alone, I will die alone. Whatever I have to do, I will do it alone. The acting and the expression of emotions is left to Dilip Kumar, whose power and presence on the screen truly dwarfs Bachchan. Presciently, the film script utters my own conclusion on these two stars of the tv/o eras of Indian cinema. The difference is acknowledged by Ashwini Kumar’s wife, Sheetal (Rakhee), who compares the characters of father and son. She tells Vijay: 'Even if you die ten times and are reborn ten times, you will be unable to have your father’s qualities.’

In my thirty-eighth year, the Asian community of Britain acquired a new vo1Ce: the 24-hour Sunrise Rad10. For the first tTe ln

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 65 Britain, Sunrise provided a platform, a meeting place in the air, where different segments of the Asian community could discuss, in their own local languages and dialects, issues of common interest and comment on each others’ perceptions. Within months Sunrise acquired a huge following for its diet of film songs, chat, constant stream of congratulatory birthday and anniversary messages and news, sandwiched between a remarkable amalgam of gaudy advertisements, including an endless stream of plugs for the station itself: ‘Do you want to make more money? Increase your sales? Then advertise on Sunrise Radio.’ A daily dose of Sunrise Radio for a couple of weeks is enough to confirm the fact that the British Asian community is quite ignorant of its constituent parts. The Hindus have little knowledge of the Muslims; the Muslims know next to nothing about the Hindus. The ignorance separating the two communities begins with the ‘morning worship’. We have bhajans for the Hindus and quawwalis, heretical-cum-devotional songs, for the Muslims. Only an amoeba would assume that the two are the same and play a similar function for the two communities. The presenters, who include members of Sunrise’s management board, have problems in recognizing the diversity of the Asian community. The Hindu presenters can’t get themselves to say ‘salaam alekumi peace be upon you, the traditional Muslim greeting; the Muslim presenters just about manage a half-hearted ‘namaskaf. Both varieties then continue to address their audience as though they were a large, amorphous mass with a monolithic religious identity. During my childhood, the two communities came regularly together in the local cinema where they had an opportunity to socialize as well as learn from each other. Nowadays, British Hindus and Muslims have no real physical contact with each other, except perhaps in schools or their workplaces where they are deracinated by the nature of the British conventions they have to work through, leaving them no space to work with or work out the attendant issues of the diversity of their Asian identity. The perceptions of the two communities about each other are largely drawn from the Indian cinema which, as a melange of undigested and indigestible ingredients, itself harbours echoes of so many Western prejudices that fragment and misrepresent Asians to each other and themselves. The most popular programmes on Sunrise Radio are the phone-m programmes; and it is here that the fragmentation of the Asian community and what the modern

66 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Indian films have etched on its psyche becomes most evident. At best, the Hindu callers to the various phone-in programmes such as ‘Forum’ and ‘J K Show’ seem to see the Muslim as some sort of symbolic ‘other’ of the subcontinent: one needs to give them a nod or two in recognition, but nothing more is needed. The Sunrise voices of the Hindu community relate to Muslims just as the Flindu hero of Dee war, Vijay (Amitabh), relates to the presence of Islam in India: he keeps the numerological representation of Bismallah (in the name of God), 786, as a lucky charm round his neck, touching, playing with it now and again, to confirm its existence! Or as in Zanzeer, where the hero’s sidekick is a Muslim, the entire Muslim community is seen as an ‘also ran’: making an effort, but not really important or all that trustworthy, unlikely to get anywhere; in the end, it is the Hindu hero who is going to save the day. These, of course, are the better perceptions. Quite often the Muslims are cast in terms of the brainless, fanatical, blind ‘Imam Shahib’ of Shoiav ciphers with tendencies to emotional outbursts. The Muslims, on the other hand, always perceive the Hindus as dominant and dominating— when not conspiring, then simply out to get even for historic injustices, as does Amitabh Bachchan in so many of his films! This has been the perceptual pattern of discussions amongst Hindus and Muslims on Sunrise. A discussion on Kashmir, for example, has numerous Hindu callers insisting that Pakistan is a terrorist state and is responsible alone for the violence that Muslims are so prone to. The two communities talked totally past each other during a discussion on the sacking of the Babri Mosque. Suddenly ail of India seemed hell-bent on avenging the historic injustices done by Muslims; Muslim callers declared that Hindus would understand nothing less than the full might of the jihad. Even politically less sensitive subjects like birth control draw blood. Hindu callers describe Muslims as antiquated and intrinsically anti-birth control; the Muslims see the Hindus as bent on secularizing and demeaning their religion. Most ot the young male voices one hears on Sunrise, particularly during the late night phone-ins, resemble that of a hero who has rejected traditional morality and who. in his solitary loneliness, is standing up to the rest of the Asian world: I am what I am; if you don t like what I am, stuff you! I know how to fight back and will be happy to oblige. It is Vijay versus Thakur, and we know who always comes out on top. Even such Sunrise

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 67 programmes as ‘Mahfil’ and ‘Sada Bahar’, literary phone-ins which serve as back-handed compliments to Urdu poetry, are not free from the accusatory shouting bouts witnessed at the denouement of every Amitabh Bachchan film. One regular Hindu patron of ‘Mahfil’ upsets another regular by making less than complimentary comments about the Prophet Muhammad’s attitude to poetry—a great deal of abuse and mud-slinging follow. Tempers fray, passions are roused, but the reconciliation on the air is also as prompt and as phony as in the films. Offended and offending parties make up almost instantly and the air reverberates with a forgiveness that has no roots in a genuine rapprochement of minds. It is a sensibility for civility that can make do without any sensitivity to the actual issues that provoked the argument in the first place. As in cinema, so in real life, women serve a different function. For a large segment of traditional Asian women, Sunrise appears to be the only connection they have with the outside world. Women listeners phoning in to programmes like ‘Range-e-Hinna’ tend to talk about their own lives and problems. Each life thus narrated over the air echoes the basic themes of modern Indian cinema: the rants against the evil father/husband who in the end is always supported, the tragic break-up of families due to ‘misunderstanding’ or tradition or on account of certain (imagined?) nefarious doings on the part of a ‘villain’ (motherin-law, the other woman), the obsessive Ma who refuses to let go of her daughter/son, and, finally, the request for the song from that film which articulates it ali with the meaninglessness of its lyrics. ‘My mother is too possessive, she won’t give me my freedom.’ 'My mother is forcing me to marry a boy I haven’t met and I don’t know.’ ‘My mother-in-law has become a wall between me and my husband. She is tearing us apart.’ 'My husband has taken to drinking. He is ignoring me and my children.’ ‘We are celebrating our wedding anniversary. Can you play that song from...?’ Each life, it appears to me, an occasional eavesdropper on these chat-cum-family melodramas, is an Indian film par excellence! Sunrise Radio serves both as a personification of and an outlet for the internal anxieties that the Asian community feels at the loss of its sense of belonging. It echoes both the fragmentation of British Asians as well as their frustrations at not being able to relate to each other. Its language, perceptions, feuds, frivolities,

68 • Secret Politics of Our Desires gestures, as well as the personal narratives that are its common fare, appear to come straight out of the celluloid. Both the station itself and its patrons exist and act within the well-established formulae of contemporary Indian films. The formulaic nature of Hindi films has been a frequent cause for concern among many eminent Indian critics. In Our Films, Their Films, Satyajit Ray w'raps minimal analysis in a bored reflection on a genre he mercifully transcended. The Indian film with its standardized song and dance routines, romance, tears, guffaws, fights, chases and melodrama, he writes, is ‘directed mainly towards tapping latent responses in the audience.’ It does 'not call for the evolution of new symbols, but the pinpointing of familiar fragments of particular meaning in a particular context’.5 The Indian film critic Satish Bahadur, on the other hand, sees the formula only in terms of product specification: Largely a mixture of songs, dances, fights, suspense, and comedy, with hardly any kind of specialization. This omnivorous appeal is its greatest single feature. It goes from one extreme to another to entertain and appease its large composite audience; not wishing to give offence to any section, it is torn between a conservative pose and a modernist stance—it can neither turn its back on its patrons who belong to the more traditional ethos, nor put off the more modern who welcome change.6

Both seem to miss the essential point. Commercial, pedestrian and contrived it may all be, yet the formulaic movie is a new kind of Indian mythology, rooted inescapably in the more suffocating strands of traditionalism that have survived in India, and which, aided and abetted by Indian cinema, have become entrenched amongst British Asians. Indeed, one might go so far as to say it is the epitome and the very worst of stultified and ossified traditionalism made anew. For it is conformity with the brain extracted, it is convention without reason, minus the humanity, the emotional range and resonance of a living organism. It is mythology as abstract amoeba. The formula is the metaphysics of the social context in which these films exist. In the heyday of classical Dilip Kumar and Guru Dutt cinema, Indian films not securely placed in time were replete with references to contemporary issues; their themes anchored them and gave them cultural resonance. However, the new era of Indian film-making has warped time and space. The overly convoluted storylines, especially in the films of Amitabh Bachchan, describe a loop, a cyclical peregrination of fate that has reduced cultural

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 69 reference to a parody of a set of principles. The wheel of life, the cyclical ages of time become circular tales of a wrong committed and the centrifugal forces that propel the principal participants into a final denouement where that wrong is avenged. The wider world is a pastiche on which these dramas thrive but which impinges on them hardly at all It is deeply embedded in a conventional traditional symbolism that reverberates with stagedressed Hindu religious ideas rendered in their lowest common denominator. The cycle never changes, just as it is always Holi— the festival of colour-in Hindi movies. Just as deeply embedded in the metaphysic is the coded essence of modernity. The modern era of Indian film-making is redolent of modernity, full of the instrumentalism of power, embodying the traits of the modern world so completely in its one-dimensional characters that it has nothing to say about modern times. Its hero, the contemporary cinematographic hero, is an agent of personalized revenge, an icon of wish-fulfilment in a world of alienated ideas and ideals. This hero, whatever his origin, whatever his trajectory in endless potboiling stories, is equivocal, standing on the fringes of legality, a worldly-wise, streetwise likeable rogue, whose great charm is that he can make the laws of the street work to his individual ends. With vaults and leaps, and a smart kick in the face, he can break the cycle or wrong in each story. But his adversary is a single character, a person as personless as the hero himself. So the victory remains personal, an individual settling of scores. The cycle goes on, only the individuals caught up in the wheel change. Modernity rules and traditionalism endures the turning of the ages and neither has any self-reflection or comment on the other—what it is, what there is to say about the forces that define the ambit of existence. The only choice for individuals is to make their way as best they can, to endure the bludgeoning of fate by every bit of chicanery, representing thus the most cynical, most distorted view of both traditional morality and modern amorality. Such is the potency of this new symbolism of the emergent metaphysics of contemporary Indian cinema. It is a highly sophisticated message of moral despair, for it offers a cosmic impotence as the domain of human existence with only vicarious and gratuitous vengence as an individualistic release valve. There is nothing anyone can do about larger issues, for there is nothing anyone can do about anything—beyond kicking in the face the one villain you can see.

70 • Secret Politics of Our Desires The British Asians with their particular need to forge a new identity for themselves—an identity rooted in the traditions of India but at the same time totally contemporary and observably British—have been trapped by the formulaic mythology of modern Indian cinema. To be ‘Asian’ is to be, like Vijay/Amitabh, aggres¬ sively individualistic, or like the eternally suffering and obsessive ‘Ma’ with a suffocatingly idealized notion of a close-knit family/ community; to be modern is to dress in the latest fashion and grace the discos. The metaphysics of the Amitabh and postAmitabh films has been internalized by a whole generation of Asians who have known little of the subcontinent except what they have seen on the endlessly grinding and over-used video machines. Not surprisingly, their perceptions of themselves, other Asian communities, tradition, and issues of identity and culture are as anodyne as the Indian cinema today projects. These perceptions give them the identikit outlook to stand up for themselves—but no cogent idea of what to stand for or against. Impotence is a package deal that comes bearing the stamp of the territory and character of the savvy, worldly wise, somewhat jaded action man. It is his cosmic essence that, defying all the kicks and happenstances, and setting-things-to rights, colours each particular story. Before the forces that define existence he can do nothing, for there is nothing left to do about anything larger than one’s own self. In India, as Javed Akhtar, the writer of Sholay and other Amitabh Bachchan tilms, has observed, the Hindi commercial cinema serves as one of the strongest binding forces in the country; it has become the common language’ of the nation.7 In Britain, the Indian cinema has sown the seeds of discord and fissures within the Asian community and denied it the possibility of developing a common language of self-description and'the evolution ot new symbols and ideals that could serve as signposts towards shaping a new identity. It has trapped the British Asian consciousness within a cycle of formulaic conventions that serve as a substitute for genuine, dynamic tradition and ease the pain and frustrations of a loss of belonging. The cyclical retellings offer no possibility ot a new kind of becoming, a means towards a new vision of the past, present or future. A community that can only articulate the nature of its own perplexity through the formulas ol potboilmg melodrama, and hear it all said for them in meaningess lyrics of rent-a-tune songs, is a lobotomized community. It

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 71 has not only reduced its historic, cultural and personal identity to an absurdity, diminished its art and language, but also abandoned the pursuit of great ideas. Sunrise will find the same audience as benighted in a week or a year or a decade. The identification of the self with the Indian cinema works and makes money because, for a large segment of the Asian community, that’s all there is. The stream of hysteric advertisements on Sunrise Radio for Sun¬ rise-sponsored ‘extravaganza’ to see, hear, touch and meet ‘your favourite stars’, most notably Amitabh Bachchan—‘Shahenshah (“king of kings”) of the Indian film industry’, ‘the nobility of stoicism’, ‘the implacability against inexhaustible evil’—are based on an understanding of the allure of the only point of glamour, the dark sepulchre of the cinema, in otherwise humdrum lives. Like the films, on Sunrise Radio, as in the Asian community itself, the only development of the plot is increasing complexity of irrelevant detail as the pattern goes on replicating itself in ever more minute detail while everything stays the same.

VII In my fortieth year, my mother (Ma!), a devout Muslim, decided to throw a surprise party. Throughout my life, Ma’s best friends have always been Hindu, and for the last decade it has been Surita. Surita is not just her best friend but also her neighbour, which means that she has more rights than all of our distant, and not-so-distant, relatives put together. Nothing important happens in our family without Surita’s involvement. Even though there are a good twenty years between them, the two women are joined by some primordial umbilical cord: always together, always concerned about, and looking after, each other’s needs, always cooking special dishes for each other (the fatiha kheer and sweetmeats going from here, the alu puri and daturas coming the other way), always sewing joras (traditional suits) for each other and, not infrequently, standing up to the chauvinism of each other’s more than traditional husbands. The surprise was the arrival of Surita’s mother. This was Surita’s mother’s first visit to England—indeed, her very first excursion outside India. My mother had gathered the

72 • Secret Politics of Our Desires whole family to receive and welcome her. Surita’s mother (of indeterminate age past seventy) arrived and greeted my mother as though she were her daughter whom she had not seen for, decades but who had kept her well-informed and abreast of developments. After initial introductions and curtsies, the three women, ignoring the rest of the two families, started talking animatedly of times past, of Hindustan, of partition, of separation, migration and transformation. Feeling somewhat ignored, my father interrupted the conversation. ‘There will be plenty of time for all the reminiscences,’ he said ‘tell us what would you like to see? We must make full use of the time you will spend with us in London.’ Surita’s mother looked straight at my father. ‘Bhai,’ she replied reflectively, ‘I have come here to do only two things. I am with my two daughters and want to spend all my time in their company. Arid I want to see as many Pakistani dramas as it is possible to see during the short while I am in London.’ Then turning to my mother she asked: ‘what do you have in stock?’ Surita’s mother stayed six months with her ‘two daughters’. Virtually all that time, day and night, the three women confined themselves to Surita’s living-room. Curtains partially drawn, trays dripping sweatmeats and savouries overflowing on the coffee table, a never-ending supply of tea and paan (betel leaf) punctuated with sachets of shahi supari (mixture of betel nuts and aniseeds), they sat in front of the video watching thirteen-hour long dramas from Pakistan television. I asked Surita’s Ma what was it that she liked about these dramas. Without a moment’s thought she replied: zaban (language). Then she thought for a moment and added: and stories’. Both the language and contents of Pakistani television dramas—these are real dramas, not soap operas—echo the essence ot the classical films of Dilip Kumar and Guru Dutt. Socially relevant stories, often popping straight out of current affairs, are acted out with style, grace and a literary language that deliberately diffuses the boundary between dialogue and poetry. There are no songs, no dances, no obligatory fight scenes, no separation of brothers/friends during childhood, no inevitable growth into a mere fighting machine, no ever-present, possessive Ma, no formulas; just serious, humanistic explorations of contemporary social and political issues that challenge both the established oppressive mores and the alienating but fashionable modernity. Despite being the products of an allegedly ‘Islamic state’, these dramas have no sectarian religious content. Just as

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 73

in Ganga Jamuna and Pyaasa, what is important is not the religious persuasion of the characters but their internal contra¬ dictions and struggles against a socially and politically unjust world. In other words, Pakistani dramas are about the subcontinent and its struggle to shape contemporary identity. How the subcontinent is changing and not changing, what forces are propelling it towards shaping a new identity and what is holding it back, are powerfully explored in the big hit of the nineties, Chand Grahan (Lunar Eclipse). This fourteen-part stateof-the-nation play by Asghar Nadim Sayed, is about Pakistan; but much of what Chand Grahan has to say is equally applicable to India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Lai Hussain Shah, a Sindhi feudal landlord, loses his seat in the general election. The very peasants whose life he holds in his hands have refused to vote for him. ‘It is not food that the peasants want today,’ he tells his son, Jahanyar Shah, ‘but respect and dignity.’ The experience changes Shah ‘Sciene’ (as the Sindhi feudal lords are known) and he genuinely begins to look at and treat the peasants with esteem and decency. But in the realist world of Pakistani dramas, when characters learn from their mistakes they do not become instant beacons of goodness—as in Indian films—but struggle to transcend their weaknesses. Shah Sciene wants to change with time and win back the hearts of the peasants who till his land; but he also wants the feudal system to move forward unhindered. Jahanyar Shah, on the other hand, believes in the old method of coercion. ‘In this land, even a bird cannot flap her wings without our permission,’ he says repeatedly; how dare the peasants vote for the opposition: even ants sprouting wings, remain ants and can still be trampled under foot. Jahanyar goes on a mission of revenge and kills three peasants who insist that their votes are a matter for their conscience, not the right of the landlord or a commodity for sale. Shah Sciene is thus faced with two tasks: he has to save his son from the gallows as well as regain his parliamentary seat. But the electoral defeat has also reduced his power and influence; to accomplish both tasks he must rebuild his powerbase. In Shahyar Bano, his London-educated daughter, he sees a way back to parliament. Bano is in love with Nasir, son of the newspaper owner, Kamal Hasan. But Nasir’s father does not command the social status and political influence that Shah Sciene requires. ‘If

74 • Secret Politics of Our Desires you are caught in the rain,5 Shah Sciene tells Bano, you have to seek shelter. And if you can’t find anywhere to hide from the rain, you try and cover your head with your hands.’ An alliance with Babar, a high-ranking civil servant, would provide the kind of shelter that Shah Sciene needs. He thus forces Bano to marry Babar's son, Amjad. Babar himself is using his son as an invest¬ ment in the future. He needs political backing to realize his ambition to become an industrialist. But in today’s Pakistan, the alliance of feudalism and bureaucracy is not enough to ensure success: the old powerbrokers need the new image-maker—the press. Both Shah Sciene and Babar want to buy the backing of Kamal Hasan, and Kamal is only too willing to oblige. ‘News is not what happens,’ Kamal tells his son, Nasir, ‘news is what is made to happen.’ Nasir, only too aware of what is happening in the country, wants to report the truth, he wants to expose the corruption of high office and highlight the plight of the unemployed youth. Whereas Babar corrupts his idealist son Amjad, Nasir transforms his corrupt father, Kamal—even though Kamal continues to harbour the tendency of reverting back to appeasing the powerful. Both discover the power the press has to usher in genuine change. Shahyar Bano refuses to be a conventional, submissive wife and her marriage to Amjad ends in divorce. The alliance of Babar and Shah Sciene is broken and Babar seeks revenge by exposing the feudal landlord. Jahanyar, hiding in the jungle with a wellknown robber, kidnaps Babar. Shah Sciene tries to make a deal with the government and the police but without political clout he is easily outmanoeuvred. Jahanyar and his companion are shot. Running parallel to the main theme of a feudal landlord coping with change are a number of subplots. It is a common practice for the feudal landlords in the subcontinent to keep a second wife in the city. In Shah Sciene’s case it is Gulbahar, a former singer of ill-repute, who discovers that in today’s world, singing on television is a better route to respectability than marrying a feudal lord. There is the story of Amirun Nisa, a Bangladeshi housewife, who arrives in Pakistan looking for employment, but ends up being kidnapped and sold into prostitution. There is an expose of police corruption and an exploration of idealistic, unemployed youth to fight corruption and change Pakistan. Like most Pakistani television serials, Chand Grahan runs for an astounding twelve hours during which the characters are fleshed

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 75 out in the minutest detail. Both Shah Sciene and Jahanyar are complex figures coping, or refusing to cope, with change on their own terms. Like his father, Jahanyar has also married secretly; but he has married a peasant woman that his father refuses to accept. Shah Sciene wants peasants to be treated with respect and dignity but kept at arm’s length; Jahanyar wants to be with them and is perplexed by their disloyalty. It is only Babar, the highranking bureaucrat, who refuses to change. As a result of his feud with Shah Sciene he loses his job and along with it all the concessions and favours he has gained to establish his industry. He simply finds another, even more powerful, family for his son to marry into. ‘The truth is that now people like us can only survive like this. We need them; they need us,’ he tells his wife. In the end, Shah Sciene wins his parliamentary seat back and becomes a government minister. But who has won, and who has lost? Shah Sciene is not so sure. ‘You have won by sacrificing your son,’ Bano tells him. But Shah Sciene is concerned with genealogy: neither his son with Gulbahar or his grandson, the child of a peasant woman, can take his place. ‘You don’t understand,’ he explains. ‘I will give them all the respect and rights that are due to them. But they cannot take over the chair I am sitting on: the system will not accept it.’ Bano replies: ‘But the system is created by people like you.’ If you can change, the system can change too. And Shah Sciene goes though another change: he agrees to brush conventions aside and let Bano marry Nasir. Through a powerfully contemporary narrative acted with equal power and panache, Chand Grahan argues that, despite all the odds, gradual change is possible. Shah Sciene is no Thakur, the total personification of all evil, but the victim of a system that has been created by people like him. He is changing; but he cannot change instantaneously. ‘Why is it,’ Bano asks him at the beginning of the play, ‘that you recognize the rights of your peasant voters to choose, but you cannot give the same right to your daughter?’ By the end of the narrative, Shah Sciene is willing to recognize Bano’s rights too. But the viewers have also changed: by engaging with a play that refuses to compromise and offer easy solutions, they have learnt that it is possible to dent the system—viable change will come from guarded optimism, rather than angry and vengeful pessimism. The current problems are like the eclipse of

76 • Secret Politics of Our Desires the moon—they can be overcome to reveal the true face of the subcontinent. In Chand Grahan, both Bano and Gulbahar refuse to be passive victims. Pakistani dramas are full of fiercely independent women, like Gang a Jamuna's Dhunno, who frequently stand up to oppressive convention and are not afraid to struggle alone. While traditional, they are hardly dependent on their men; while modern, they are constantly questioning the accepted definitions of modernity and try to transcend them in order to discover a modernity that is rooted in their tradition. In Uroosa, for example, the wife of a famous lawyer, Anjum, refuses to be victimized by his sisters and his neglect. She divorces him—a situation unheard of in the Indian cinema. Divorced, Anjum not only brings up her daughter, Uroosa, but goes back to University for further edu¬ cation. After struggling through several episodes, Anjum herself becomes a lawyer. At the end of the play, it is her ex-husband who comes crawling back. In Tanhaiyan, Zahra, the elder daughter of a famous film producer who is killed in an accident, struggles alone to repossess the dream house of her father. She starts a business and, in the course of events, acquires a business partner as well as a lover, succeeding against all odds. But the goals of her efforts produce the same loneliness that she felt under the shadow of her father—the Tanhaiyan of the title. The dream house is as empty as the materialism which led her parents to neglect her. Even when the women are not the main focus of the story, they are portrayed as thinking individuals trying to stand up to both traditional and modern chauvinism. In Lakeerain, a complicated play about the Pathans of the North West Frontier, the young geologist, Mureed, is up against the combined might of the devious Mir Sahab, the village landlord, and Sait Jabbar, a city businessman. The main narrative is concerned with Mureed's efforts to excavate the mineral deposits in the village for the benetit of his villages and stop Mir and Jabbar laying their greedy hands on the hidden riches of the village. However, all the women in the play—Natasha, the educated daughter of Jabbar, Faryal, who has studied medicine and is the daughter of Karam Khan, Mir’s sidekick, and Nazo, the daughter of a blind villager—are shown fighting oppression in their own individual way. Nazo makes rugs and pots for her blind father to sell; she loves Mureed and finally gets her man. Natasha defies her father to marry according to her own wish.

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 77

and when her husband turns out to be a scoundrel, leaves him without hesitation. She supports Mir against her father’s partner and declares: ‘I respect you Uncle, but that does not mean I am here to obey you.’ Faryal fights to practise medicine and in the end achieves her goal. All this, despite the fact that they are confined not just within the four walls of their houses but also by a tradition they are trying to change. The world of Pakistani drama is not so much the world of Mother India but the subcontinent of wives, daughters and sisters, struggling, seeking, forging a new identity for themselves. Not surprisingly, many of the plays of Pakistani television are written by established women writers. The role of tradition in shaping a contemporary identity is a constant theme in Pakistani serials. In Khawaja and Son, a comedy of traditional manners in twelve episodes by Ata Ullah Qasmi, the place of tradition in Pakistani society is explored with loving detail. Khawaja Feroze, a widowed, retired teacher is the traditional father of nine daughters. The eldest daughter, Fazilat, has cracked under the pressure of bringing up her younger sisters and is in a psychiatric hospital. Six other daughters have been married and Khawaja now lives with the two youngest, Samina and Assiya, and his only son, Jawadad. The family live in the old part of Lahore with its labyrinthine alleys, closed courtyards, extended families; a part of the city where even the shoeshine man is more than a personal friend. Jawadad is a successful and well-known poet who works at a government publishing house. He dreams of marrying Yasmine, his college sweetheart, despite the fact that Yasmine’s rich, businessman father, A. W. Chaudhry, has already rejected his proposal. His daily agenda is full with the problems of the family: on a typical day he has to take his father to visit his hospitalized sister, find a job for the son of his sister Rabia, reconcile the differences between his sister Razia and her husband. As a respected poet, he is constantly in demand for mushairas, appears on TV, and is perpetually plagued by mediocre and aspiring poets seeking his literary favours. His boss, Professor Allah Ditta, who writes under the pen name of kUdas’ (the Sad One) and has illusions of being a poet, is jealous of his success and takes every opportunity to make his life difficult. He is also the subject of constant attentions from his neighbour, Nabila, a simple traditional girl who has problems pronouncing her r’s. Nabila loves Jawadad and, in her innocence, often asks him to explain the meaning of saucy verses.

78 • Secret Politics of Our Desires The main theme of Khawaja and Son is the relationship, within an extended family, between lather and son. Khawaja may be a traditional father but he is not a blind follower of tradition: he uses humour as his weapon both to demolish suffocating tradition and to keep isolating modernity at bay. For him tradition is based on unconditional love that not only binds his family but holds the community together. He does not want sacrifices; only that people relate to each other ‘with open heart’. He goes on a weekly round of visits to all his daughters and insists that his son spend some time in idle chit-chat with his sisters. Only by open and free flow of conversation can the dirt of suspicion be cleansed from the heart. And Khawaja and Jawadad talk not just as father and son but as life-long pals, as equals, as confidants. When Khawaja discovers that Jawadad has been seeing Yasmine, he tells his son, ‘I am not just your father but also your best friend. Don’t hide anything from me. I will complain. Right? That girl Yasmine is still in your mind.’ Jawadad changes the subject: ‘Oh please, listen to me: marry Samina.’ Khawaja laughs at his son’s manoeuvre. Jawadad then comes back with a verse: Jawadad: Abu, the duration of one’s journey determines the luggage one carries. Khawaja: Yes. Yes. Yes. I see. My son is about to receive a poetic revelation from the sky. Here, hold this pen. I will keep cups of tea flowing every five minutes. A ghazal should be ready in about twenty minutes. Jawadad: Abu, I am not talking about the poetry of love but the poetic justice of everyday life. Khawaja: And what is that? Jawadad. You know the marital problems of Razia. You have seen what has happened to Fazilat. Please do not give so much love to your daughters. They will always find their husbands wanting in this regard. Without that much love they will see their own houses as deserts, as hell. Khawaja. My own house is a paradise. A garden whose beauty is enhanced by the presence of my daughters who are like a flock of birds. What is a garden without birds? An oasis without water? Jawadad: I am not saying all this because I am tired of my sisters. No. .Sisters are like a cool shadow on a scorching day

Khawaja admits to making mistakes but he sees his unconditional love tor his children as a liberating force. For him tradition and reflection go hand in hand and both are bound by a warm humanity. Not surprisingly, he agrees both to marry Samina to

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 79

Jawadad’s friend Zahid—he knows that they love each other— and to try, yet again, to persuade Chaudhry to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to Jawadad. Jawadad represents the transformation of tradition within tradition. He is a traditional man without being suffocated by it; he is a modern man without being alienated by modernity. When his friend Zahid asks him to leave the problems of his sisters behind and go to America, he is appalled by the suggestion. His sisters, his father, are the source of his happiness. ‘I have been to America on poetry recitals,’ he says. ‘I have seen our expatriate Pakistanis; I have talked to them. Their entire life revolves around a few plastic credit cards in their pockets, which buy them worldly comforts but take away their happiness as the interest. Strapped in their seat belts, they drive their big cars on the highway—their entire life is spent unsuccessfully looking for the exit.’ Zahid’s own flirtation with modernity (he dresses like Amitabh Bachchan and goes out with girls) has not only alienated him from the girl he loves (Jawadad’s sister Samina) but also from his own mother. But Zahid is not an unthinking man, as is Shashi Kapoor in so many Indian films, returning home from the US or Europe, a woman on each arm, a guitar round his shoulder, whose liberation comes simply by learning to say ‘mummy darling’. Zahid con¬ stantly questions his own motives and seeks meaning in his life. The women too are just as reflective and assertive. Razia gives as good as she gets from her greedy husband Ludan. Nabila pursues her love interest with uncanny vigour, popping up at every opportune moment. Samina wants her future husband to live up to her expectations of decency. When Zahid's mother tells Samina that her beauty should not be hidden behind a veil, she snaps back: ‘True beauty is diminished by exhibition.’ Zahid’s mother has herself thought about tradition and modernity. After visiting Khawaja and his family, she tells Samina: ‘I like the old city very much. It looks like people here have been glued together by love. Where we live—those places are beautiful only to look at. But their beauty is like the beauty of a white man’s graveyard.’ Samina is troubled by this romantic view of tradition. ‘But the old city is brimming with its own problems’, she says. ‘Yes,’ Zahid’s mother replies, ‘I know they too have problems.’ Then she truncates the Urdu word for problems—masaial—to saial.’ and transforms its meaning. ‘But problems which permit human beings to retain their humanity are not problems but questions that beg viable answers.’

80 • Secret Politics of Our Desires While Khawaja and Jawadad present the liberating face of tradition, Chaudhry, who adds an ‘n’ to every word he utters and describes himself as 'a very modern and very liberal man , uses tradition to advance his materialistic goals. He tells Yasmine that tradition requires that she marry a man with similar financial standing as her father’s. It is a question of respect. What has Jawadad got, he asks Yasmine, answering the question himself; ‘an old house in Bhatti gate, a scooter he won in the lottery, and yes, that job as a deputy director. My secretary is paid more than him.’ When Yasmine replies that he is ‘one of our most popular and respected poets’, Chaudhry retorts, ‘Is that qualification to marry into wealth? Have you seen the matrimonial ads in the newspaper? They clearly and categorically state that poets need not apply as rejection often offends.’ Yasmine, who ‘moves in the fast lane’, is eventually forced to abandon her father and runs away to Canada. Without ducking difficult issues, Khawaja and Son explores the joys and problems of extended families with biting humour and a loving, embracing eye. Professor Udas adds a sentence to a govern¬ ment textbook, comparing himself to the classic poets Ghalib. Mir and Iqbal and consequently loses his job. Zahid abandons the quest of meaningless modernity and marries Samina. Khawaja fakes a heart attack and persuades Jawadad to look beyond Nabila’s simplicity. ‘Shall I tell you something straight from my heart’, he asks his son: ‘Never trust people like A. W. Chaudhry who have pulled their roots from the ground and covered their faces with the mud of pride. My son, Nabila is a good woman. These people have their roots very deep in the soil, very deep.’ Jawadad finally explains the meaning of that verse about the lovers’ consummation of their desire to Nabila. Tradition is often blamed for the individual's and society’s own failures. Indeed, in the subcontinent there is a tradition of blaming everyone and everything for one’s own weaknesses and short¬ comings. Anwar Masood s Aangan Tehra, written in a delicious Punjabized Urdu, explores both the notion of failure, as well as the tradition of putting the blame elsewhere. The play takes its title from the Urdu proverb, 1 Natch na Jane, aangan tehra\ Literally the proverb relates to dancers who cannot dance but blame the unevenness of the dance floor, or more specifically, the veranda or courtyard (aangan) where they would traditionally

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 81

dance. Mahboob Ahmad, the protagonist of the narrative, is a childless civil servant who has been unceremoniously retired before his time. Mahboob’s failure lies in his honesty and integrity. His wife Jahan Ara, a lovable but cynical woman, constantly chides him for being too honest by half. The couple have been saddled with Akbar, a homosexual classical dancer who ‘walks like an air hostess’ and is unable as well as unwilling to work as a dancer and has become their servant. Akbar has not been paid for three years and refuses to leave without his pay which, given the couple’s state of poverty, means that he is a permanent member of the family. The ideas of failure in a society that places success at a high premium are explored by a constant and aggressive wordplay between Akbar and Jahan Ara, much of it generated by Akbar’s domination of the kitchen, and an equally dynamic but gentler wordplay between Jahan Ara and Mahboob. Much of the wordplay, a constant feature of Pakistani television dramas, also serves as social and political comment. When Mahbood decides to stand for local council elections, Jahan Ara uses the occasion to highlight Mahboob’s past failures: ‘You can’t even sit (on a job), how are you going to stand for an election?’ When Akbar brings in the shopping, Jahan Ara demands: ‘Why can’t you buy fresh potatoes?’ ‘Because,’ Akbar replies, ‘they have all been exported to the Gulf.’ ‘Whatever for?’ Jahan Ara is perplexed. ‘So that we can import chips from Europe,’ Akbar flashes back. Whereas Mahboob is a failure, his Punjabi neighbour Chaudhry Dalat Ah Khan, who lives with his unmarried sister Sultana, is a successful landowner and businessman. Jahan Ara is impressed by Chaudhry’s success, even though she knows it to be the result of less than honest dealings. Chaudhry, wanting Mahboob to win the local council election so that as a councillor, Mahboob can award him new licences to expand his business, arranges for Mahboob to return uncontested. But Mahboob is not interested in a manoeuvred success that forces him to oblige Chaudhry with extra business. He tricks Chaudhry into becoming the Councillor. Unable to meet their bills, Mahboob and Jahan Ara decide to let part of the house. Along come a series of paying guests—a journalist, a poet, an actor, a policeman—all of whom have tried but ultimately failed in their vocations. The couple end up paying for their upkeep. The journalist blames the fall in readership of his paper for his failure. The poet’s excuse is that even though he

82 • Secret Politics of Our Desires always speaks the truth, no one listens to him. The actor blames his failure on the VCR. What is the point of education, creativity and hard work when they cannot guarantee material success? Jahan Ara wonders: T have an educated husband, a creative servant, even my paying guests are educated. But there are not even four annas in the house!’ Still, says Lahri, in real life an unsuccessful Pakistani comedian playing a failed Pakistani comedian seeking to recharge his batteries at the couple’s house, there is the compensation of the VCR. Whenever we feel too depressed by our own failures, we can just press the button and have ‘the Westerners dancing at our whim’. Aangan Tehra is a sharply observed, highly sophisticated play that pulls few punches. When the couple are forced to sell their furniture, we witness the gradual transformation of Jahan Ara as she begins to question her criteria for measuring success. But her transformation does not change her character, she simply learns to adjust to her declining level of poverty and the acidic word¬ play continues. In the penultimate twelfth episode, the writer, Asad Masood, script in hand walks onto the set and declares that he too has failed to develop his characters beyond familiar stereotypes. But the play has been very successful: ‘I am very popular,’ says Chaudhry. Nevertheless, the writer collects his characters, Akbar, Chaudhry and Sultana, and drives them off the set. In the final episode, we meet Mahboob and Jahan Ara twenty years on. They are visited by a young, failed burglar— failed because he got only a third in his BA finals: ‘one result produced the other ; and failed because he chooses a povertystricken house to rob. The couple treat him in exactly the same way as earlier they had treated all those failed ‘paying guests’ they entertained: with concern, dignity and a sharp tongue. The young thiel is forced to confront this failure: how can I go on putting the blame elsewhere for what is ultimately my own weakness? It is possible to describe Aangan Tehra as a postmodern narrative. It has all the familiar traits: wordplay, entertaining mixing of real and imaginary characters, a highly self-conscious intervention by the writer himself, ethnic and sexual plurality and ambiguity. But that would be to pigeon-hole Aangan Tehra into a current Western lad. Like its characters, Aangan Tehra has deeply traditional roots. Wordplay, ethnic plurality and other features of postmodernism have been a regular fare of Urdu

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 83

literature for decades, if not centuries. Indeed, these are the basic concerns of postmodern novels. As popularized by Salman Rushdie amongst others, ‘the experience of uprooting, disjuneture and metamorphosis’, have been a regular fare of Urdu novels since the partition of the subcontinent. Not surprisingly, Pakistani television dramas have followed suit. Issues of uprooting, disjuneture and identity have been tackled head-on in numerous plays, some of which have been brought together in long-running television series under a general theme. In the seventies, Coffee House explored the issues of rural displacement and questions of rural and urban identity. The eighties hit Airport explores the issues of migration and meta¬ morphosis in a series of one-hour plays of stunning brilliance. In one episode of Airport, a young Pakistani girl, who has been brought up in Virginia, USA, returns with her parents to Karachi. She left a traditional girl but now she returns as a modern woman: she is interested in pop music, English literature, kung fu fighting and has difficulty with her Urdu. She is immediately surrounded by her uncles and aunts, each with a son in tow, all wooing her to become their daughter-in-law. Horrified, intrigued and amused in turn, she decides to play along. She discovers that all the eligible bachelors she meets are willing to change themselves according to her wishes. Indeed, a few of them embark on a strict regime of education, music appreciation and judo to meet her requirements. Then, on a farm, she meets an agricultural scientist who not only rejects her advances, but refuses to change his identity. Modernity and tradition are not clothes, he tells her, that one can change by sleight of hand. You want me to become insane like the others? There are other ways of being modern which have nothing to do with pop music, literary fashion and stylized violence; the quest for that modernity begins here at the farm, in the village, in the rural enclaves of Pakistan. She invites him to go to America with her, he invites her to rediscover her true self. Eventually the girl begins a new metamorphosis; she marries the agricultural scientist and decides to change herself, as well as Pakistan. Migration does not always modernize those who migrate; neither are the choices between modernity and tradition straight¬ forward. In another episode of Airport, a young doctor returns to Pakistan after six years of medical training; she is horrified by the American lifestyle and has become even more determined to

84 • Secret Politics of Our Desires maintain her tradition. While in the US, she adopted an orphaned child of Pakistani expatriates; in Pakistan she is forced to confront her husband’s prejudices against child adoption. When forced to make a choice between keeping the husband or the child she takes the untraditional option and abandons the husband. The adopted son grows up to realize that he is an American citizen and is himself faced with the choice of migrating to the US and a secure heritage, abandoning the woman who brought him up, or staying with her and struggling in Pakistan. He chooses to abandon her in favour of the US. Another episode of Airport explores the effects of migration on those who are left behind. A young executive returns from the Gulf with a suitcase full of expensive gifts for relatives and friends. The airline loses his suitcase and he is unable to fulfil their expectations of his success abroad. Slowly, he realizes that his migration has transformed his family and friends: whereas before they related to him as he was, now they can only relate to him through their transformed expectations of his success. Even his wife is transformed; only he remains unchanged! Like the classic Indian cinema of Dilip Kumar and Guru Dutt., Pakistani drama is dominated by literary figures who not only understand the power of art and literature, but are actually using it to reshape society and develop a new identity for Pakistan. It is difficult to see Pakistani drama and not be engaged by it: it forces the viewers to think, question themselves and raise ques¬ tions about the meaning of modernity, about tradition and traditional identity, about change and changing—doing all this without sex and violence. It is not art for art’s sake; but art that seeks to transform and transcend society for its own sake. In Britain, Pakistani drama could become the entertainment balm that heals the wounds of suspicion and fragmentation.

VIII Today, it was not my birthday, just an ordinary Sunday. I started the day with that very British institution, the Sunday newspapers, reading some heavy thick pieces on the current hot topic: the relationship between social malaise and the cinema and television.

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 85

‘Is Hollywood causing the brutalization of America through its veneration of violence, ugliness and sexual venality?’ asks film critic Michael Medved.8 Is television violence leading a younger generation to become mindless criminals? Is unrestrained sexual indulgence and deviance, made normal by constant repetition in the cinema and on television, undermining traditional morality, denigrating everyone’s dignity, eroding established values and destroying the family as a viable institution and the bedrock of society? Is cinema, television or the VCR the cause, as the moral crusaders insist, or merely the mirror and messenger of our own shortcomings as the media establishment invariably asserts? Once again Dilip Kumar makes me do it. In the cultural debate with Western society, of which I am a part because I am a British citizen, I cannot stand aloof. My upbringing in the Walthamstow Cameo and King’s Cross Scala, as well as my formation through the BBC’s once legendary and now somewhat faded mandate to inform, educate and entertain, and my membership in the babyboom generation that expresses itself through Hollywood films and established the classics of pop culture—all impelled me to reflect on the issues, arguments and errant insanity and confusion of this vexed debate. The history of the Indian cinema in my experience and lifetime has something important to add to the debate about mass inter¬ national culture, the homogenizing globalization that is going on apace everywhere. When contemporary Indian films surrendered their Indianness they lost their potency as culture communi¬ cation—they made an entire culture inarticulate in the face of both its own tradition and modernity. The cultural formation of contem¬ porary Indian cinema prepares no one to be self-reflective, and without self-reflection and articulacy how can anyone think their v/ay through the despairing morass of the real issues of life? How can the Asians of the subcontinent be responsible citizens of the globe? Surely our subcontinental debates, problems, issues—our wrestling with tradition and modernity—must have something to offer to the international and global debates about values, decency and the politics of the future? Isn’t the cultural production of any society a window on its soul and what its cherished values have to offer, not just to itself but to the world at large? So what exactly is there to choose between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Amitabh Bachchan?9 Except that Amitabh is the standard-bearer of a new Indian metaphysic that hands control of the world to

86 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Arnold- ‘Hasta la vista baby!’ Ratatatat, and ‘Have a nice day’. I was not having a nice day. The strains of these thoughts were getting as complicated as the plot of an Amitabh potboiler and the detail as confused and hard to hold on to. Somewhere in this labyrinth of interconnections I was missing the hooks and foot¬ holds that would lead to some solid conclusions about an appro¬ priate active response. I was about ready to throw up my hands in despair when the doorbell rang. My friend Arun and his wife Indu arrived with a bottle of garlic pickle that Indu’s Auntie had sent from India. I met Arun during my days at London Weekend Television where he used to edit my Eastern Eye film reports. Since then Indu has been the best friend of my wife: they look a bit alike and behave as though they were twin sisters. We chatted for a while and then my wife suggested some entertainment; so we watched a couple of episodes of Dast, a Pakistani drama about rural tradition and identity and how rural Baluchistan is changing. ‘How refreshing’, Indu commented after the tape finished, ‘to see a film where the hero is not called Vijay and the villain in not Thakur’. Well that did it. Here we were ail Asians, citizens of Britain, Muslim and Hindu, two of us media professionals, all parents concerned about our children, the society in which they are growing up, the world in which they live and the future they will inherit. There was a lot more to say, much more to discuss. And we did. We did not reach any conclusive resolution. The subject, per¬ haps, requires more sustained and gradual work. But out of the complexity and morass of my morning’s reflections and impulses, some elements of clear thinking emerged during the night’s discussion. The worst of tradition and westernization are com¬ pelling, complicit helpmates, when they come together either in the East or in the West—in Asian culture or Western culture. The result is markedly similar: a message of despair and impotence that degrades society and human dignity; the means and expres¬ sion can be both similar and distinctly different, the result is ominously uniform. Pakistani television drama was an important starting point for a thoughtful discussion. It is something refreshing, something reso¬ nant and challenging, something distinctively Asian. It makes a nonsense of the hermetic containers into which the subcontinent has isolated itself, making cultural strangers of neighbours The divisive fissures in our subcontinental affiliations make us all

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 87

weaker before the onslaught of westernization, prevent us from offering mutual sustenance and support in the face of a global battle that centres on values and ideals. In the realm of values and ideals, Asians of the subcontinent, at home or in Britain, share a common history in which their diverse traditions matured together and which are their strongest bulwark for finding domestic answers to contemporary problems. Art cannot be divorced from life—the theme of Mughal-eAzam. I keep returning to the formative text of my adolescence. When art becomes the perpetual parody of pastiche as in contemporary Indian cinema, then something of our reality and potential is diminished. A sophisticated film creates a sophisticated audience. The audience that filled the Walthamstow Cameo and King’s Cross Scala did not cease to exist or simply evaporate into thin air. This audience did not lose its wits overnight but it did successively and progressively cease to be served by a popular cinema that was sophisticated and distinctly Indian. Popular culture has a responsibility to society and cultural evaluation. Contemporary Indian cinema is not the only culpable criminal, but it is guilty of denigrating the cultural excellence that its society can bring forth. It is less than it should be and we all are dim¬ inished by the failure of its imagination, indeed its determination to have no visible brain at all. In art, the reverse proposition is now real life—a mindless film cultivates a small-minded audience that loses touch with the high-water mark of its cultural heritage. Art mirrors life—the argument of Mughal-e-Azam. What else has art to work with? But our reflection, what we see in the mirror, is not without consequence, even when it is not the sole and singular cause of any decision we make. When what the metaphysics of art mirrors back to us is a cosmic condition of despair and impotence wrapped with sophistication in the mindlessness of diverting entertainment, then it is no innocent bystander. It is part of the problem calling out for change. The mechanics of popular entertainment are such that society cannot enforce such change, cannot legislate it, cannot vote with its feet effectively enough. The professionals hold the power in the media. If they fail to be responsible to the highest artistic traditions, society can only take what is given, however unsatisfying it may be. The route of mass escapism is not the only way Indian cinema could develop or make money. The vibrancy and content of Pakistani television dramas testifies to that, as does their growing

88 • Secret Politics of Our Desires shelf space in ‘paan and video' shops throughout Britain. Art holds up a mirror to life—the message of Mughal-e-Azam. Today’s Indian cinema does indeed provide a partial reflection of the problems of our existence, a reflection of what our history and modern experience have made us into. But art qualifies as art when the mirror is a self-reflective device that thinks and feels and engages its audience in a cultural communication to which it provides a critical edge, a purchase—the hooks and footholds for moving forward by qualitative improvement. Contemporary Indian cinema is only one symptom of how the societies of the subcontinent have lost their way in the modern world. Pakistani television plays seem to argue that popular entertainment can be one ingredient in helping to find our way out of the mess we have created for ourselves. The great film texts of my youth instilled in me the idea of unconditional love. India, my India, is still a fitting object for such feeling. British Asians of my generation and the generations after me have lost touch with my India, just as India too has diverged from us by seeking to become more like our Western domicile. But our identity can never deny that unconditional love for India, my own India, India of the multiplex—the multicultural, the multireligious world of many traditions living together with an open heart. ‘Only by open and free flow of conversation can the dirt of suspicion be cleansed from the heart,’ says the old traditional protagonist of Khawaja and Son. Only by the free flow ol cultural communication with an open heart can our minds be alerted to what we still share. This is how we can yet recover the creativity and cultural resistance we need to withstand the corrosive forces of dehumanizing and depersonalizing homogeni¬ zation on a global scale. Only in our modern predicament and traditional culture can we find the point of balance to change ourselves and the world in which we live. Mindful of both poles that move us, Asians have something unique to offer to today’s debates, the debates that fill my Sunday papers. So few British Asians or voices of the subcontinent are internationalist because ol this lailure to achieve our own multicultural point of mutual balance and communication. If we cannot make it work as a subcontinent that binds and roots so many different and intermked cultures and histones, how could we expect the rest of the world to be the plural and open setting we need to have our own identity m and be at home with wherever we live?

Dilip Kumar made me do it • 89

We talked quite late into the night. We did not agree about everything but we all felt better, felt positive, felt we had found some important and missing common ground through our discus¬ sion. As Indu was leaving she remarked that she hoped we would like the pickle, ‘and can I borrow the tape of the conclusion of that series?’ I fell asleep with a vision of the smiling faces of Dilip Kumar and Guru Dutt swimming into myiiead.

NOTES I am extremely grateful to Mahmood Jamal—friend, poet, television producer—for allowing access to Peacock Screen transcripts, discussing the role of poetry in Indian cinema and highlighting some of the anomalies in the programmes of Sunrise Radio. And special thanks to Merryl Wyn Davies—friend, writer, television producer, my strongest critic and now a devotee of Dilip Kumar films—without whose invaluable help this paper could not have been written. 1. Kishore Valicha, The Moving Image : A Study of Indian Cinema (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1988), p. 49. 2. Interview with Mahmood Jamal for Peacock Screen.; the four episodes of the series were broadcast on Channel 4 during December-January 1991. 3. The special edition of Eastern Eye on Amitabh Bachchan was broadcast on Channel 4 on 12 July 1983. 4. My interview with Dilip Kumar appeared in the last edition of the first series of Eastern Eye broadcast on Channel 4 on 23 August 1993. The sections broadcast focused on Dilip Kumar’s acting career and his films. All the quotations for this article are from that part of the interview which was recorded but not broadcast. 5. Satyajit Ray, ‘An Indian New Wave’, in Our Films, Their Films (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1976), p. 82. 6. Satish Bahadur, ‘The Context of Indian Film Culture’, in Film Appreciation Study Material, Series 2 (Pune: National Film Archive of India, 1978), quoted by Valicha, The Moving Image, p. 36. 7. Interviews with Jamal, Peacock Screen. 8. Michael Medved, Hollywood vs America (London: Harper Collins, 1993). Extracts from the book appeared in the Sunday Times on 7, 14, 21 and 28 February and 7 March 1993. 9. For an analysis of the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger see Ziauddin Sardar, ‘Total Recall: Aliens, Others and Amnesia in Postmodernism’, Futures, March 1991, 23(2), pp. 189-203; and ‘Terminator 2: Modernity, Postmodernity and Judgement Day’, Futures, June 1992, 25(5), pp. 493-506.

90 • Secret Politics of Our Desires

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

Devdas (1935)

Producer: New Theatres Director: P. C. Barua Story: Saratchandra Chatterji, Music: Timir Baran Main performers: K. L. Saigal, Jamuna, Rajkumari, P. C. Barua Aan (1952)

Producer: Mehboob Productions Director: Mehboob Khan Writer: Ali Raza Chaudary Camera: F. A. Irani Main Performers: Dilip Kumar, Nimmi, Premnath. Nadira Devdas (1955)

Producer: Bimal Roy Productions Director: Bimal Roy Story, Saratchandra Chatterji Music: S. D. Burman Main Performers: Dilip Kumar, Vyjayantimala, Suchitra Sen, Motilal Pyaasa (1957)

Producer and Director: Guru Dutt Music: S. D. Burman Lyrics: Sahir Ludhianvi Main Performers: Mala Sinha, Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rahman Playback singers: Mohammad Rafi, Geeta Dutt Mother India (1957)

Producer: Mehboob Productions Director: Mehboob Khan Music: Naushad Main Performers: Nargis, Sunil Dutt, Raaj Kumar, Rajendra Kumar

Dilip Kumar made me do it

•

91

Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959)

Producer: Guru Dutt Films Director: Guru Dutt Music: S. D. Burman Lyrics: Kaifi Azmi Playback singers: Mohammad Rafi, Geeta Dutt Main Performers: Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rahman, Rehman Mughal-c-Azam (1960)

Producer: Sterling Investment Corporation Director: K. Asif Music: Naushad Main Performers: Dilip Kumar, Madhubala, Prithviraj Kapur Gunga Jamuna (1961)

Producer: Citizen F, Director: Nitin Bose Music: Naushad Main Performers: Dilip Kumar, Vijayantimala, Nasir Khan, Azra Pakeezah (1971)

Producer and Director: Kamal Amrohi Music: Ghulam Mohammed Playback singers: Lata Mangeshkar and others Main Performers: Ashok Kumar, Meena Kumari, Raaj Kumar Sholay (1975)

Producer: G. P. Sippy Director: Ramesh Sippy Story and Screenplay: Salim-Javed Main Performers: Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra, Amjad Khan, Hema Malini, Jaya Bhaduri Main Azad Hoon (1989)

Director: Tinnu Anand Main Performers: Amitabh Bachchan, Shabana Azmi, Amrish Puri Aaj ka Arjun (1990)

Director: K. C. Bokadia Main Performers: Amitabh Bachchan, Jayaprada, Amrish Puri

2 Raj Kapoor: From Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai to Ram Teri Ganga Maili RAJNI BAKSHI

Hon to pe sachai rehti hai Jahan dil mein safai rehti hai Hum us desh ke wasi hain Jis desh mein Ganga behti hai

Words true and clear, Reflect a heart that’s pure. And the pristine Ganga flows down The ancient land we call our own.

T

he song filled the air around Allahabad’s Anand Bhavan. Multidirectional loudspeakers meant for electioneering sent the melody cascading across the sweeping driveway of the Bhavan, the ancestral mansion of the Nehrus. Taking time off from reporting on the Bahuguna-Bachchan parliamentary contest, I was at the second most important tourist site in the city, sangam—confluence of the rivers Ganga and Jamuna. Standing on a swell of meticulously manicured turf, the early twentieth-century stone-and-wood house seems tailor-made for national monument status. It is tempting to picture Motilal Nehru building with an eye on history. Mehman jo hamara hota hai woh jan se pyara hota hai Zyada ka nahin lalach humko Thode mein guzara hota hai

The soul We care Few are Content

that strays into our homes, not for much, our needs, with little are we.

Mukesh s voice, in gramaphonic immortality, was the only election¬ time intrusion into the routine museum atmosphere of Anand Bhavan. Later, after wandering through the house, I stood on an elegant mosaic porch. It was here, a sign said, that four decades earlier Indira Nehru had wed Feroze Gandhi. Six weeks earlier,

Raj Kapoor • 93

at almost the same proximity, hundreds of us had watched Rajiv Gandhi light the pyre of his bullet-riddled mother. While paramilitary forces had guarded the ‘VVIP’ gathering at the assassinated prime minister’s funeral, Sikhs were being attacked in the same city. In a virtually systematic pogrom, backed by Congress Party leaders nurtured by Indira herself, hundreds of Sikhs were pulled out of their homes and killed. For a flash, on that sunlit porch, time seemed to bridge one hopeful generation to our own violent, almost self-annihilating generation. How did we journey from the ideals that Nehru appeared to embody to their betrayal by his own direct descen¬ dants? The rest of the Anand Bhavan tour suddenly became unbearable; I headed towards the gate where the loudspeakers were still blaring the same song. Kuch log jo zada jante hain Insan ko kam pehchante hain Yeh Purab hai Purab wale Hai jan ki keemat jante hain

They who think they know a lot Know not what people are Precious to us is every life In this Eastern land afar

Was this ever true? Was there a humane gentleness and generosity inherent in us that, as a people, we squandered along the way? Or is this a romantic illusion fostered by poets like Shailendra? For days I had been following the election campaign with numerous patriotic songs from films as part of the background. The others had never registered as this one did. There was something in the combination of the confident verse and Anand Bhavan which induced a nostalgic melancholia. That feeling could not be shaken off by trying to recall ‘facts’ which would lend a sense of proportion to the perhaps bloated fear that we were plummeting to unprecedented levels of inhumanity. History would almost certainly ignore Shailendra and Raj Kapoor’s creation and treat it as only a ‘claim’. But then history has as little to say about why someone is moved by the song as it has to say about those who still visit the site of Gandhi’s crema¬ tion, as pilgrims. Perhaps Raj Kapoor, popularly known as ‘Comrade Awara’ in the erstwhile Soviet Union, had something more to say about this; after all, he earned his title from a culture which worshipped history. It is another matter that Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, ‘The Land where the Ganges Flows’, the film for which Shailendra wrote the lyrics I have quoted, was the only film by Raj Kapoor that Soviet bureaucrats decreed unfit for exhibition in their country. But that’s getting too far ahead in the story.

94

•

Secret Politics of Our Desires

Raj Kapoor—actor, director, producer, the ‘fabulous showman’ of Hindi cinema—was young and bursting with creative energies at the time when the Indian nation-state was born on 15 August 1947. In some ways the enterprise of Kapoor and the Indian ‘project’ ran parallel. The first decade of his work, intense and hopeful, culminated in Jis Desk Mein Ganga Behti Hai. Twentyfive years later, fatigued and jaded, he made another film using the same metaphor and called it Ram Teri Ganga Maili, ‘Ram, your Ganges is soiled/dirty’. During the same period, the new Indian nation had also journeyed from its Nehruvian ‘tryst with destiny’ to Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the growing politi¬ cal and social violence. Raj Kapoor was no ordinary fellow traveller in the social crit¬ icism his films represented. He did not only follow the fashiona¬ ble social and political theories of his time. His age also lived through the images he wove and the rhythms he set. What was the nature of this man’s journey from the pride and confidence of Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai to the despair of Ram Teri Ganga Maili ? Did the journey have anything to do with Kapoor’s own life storv? J The hissing steam of coal engines and jostling on the Delhi rail¬ way platform escaped the intent schoolboy’s attention. He was staring out of his third class compartment window at the tall, fair athletic man in khaki shorts and Pathani chappals. Prithviraj Kapoor himself! Young Khwaja was awestruck. He was on his way back to school in Aligarh after vacation. On reaching his school, he boasted to his classmates that the hero had material¬ ized before him in ‘flesh and blood’. It mattered little that none of them, including Khwaja Ahmed Abbas himself, had actually seen Prithviraj on screen or stage. They knew him from photo¬ graphs. He was among the first cinema stars} Some two decades later when Abbas saw Prithviraj’s play, The Pathan, with the actor in the title role, the effect was electrifying Abbas wrote: It was not just a p,ece of great acting...Prithvi had put into it the tenderest memories of his childhood, the flavour of all the tales and leeends of Pathan chivalry that he had ever heard, the patriotic and the Idealist’s passion to make of the play a vehicle for the theme of unity which was then of urgent significance to the people of our country.2

By this time Abbas had known Prithviraj for many years and

Raj Kapoor • 95 found in him a friend and kindred spirit. Prithviraj had not only an artist’s desire for perfection but ‘an idealist’s passion for humanity and justice in anything he did on the stage or screen’.3 The fateful decade of the 1940s was just beginning and Abbas was a reporter at the Bombay Chronicle, engrossed in both politics and films. In the background was a chubby schoolboy whose intense blue eyes and curiously grown-up half-smile missed Abbas’s notice at the time. For that matter, the boy did not attract anyone else’s notice either. No one outside his school cared when the legen¬ dary Prithviraj Kapoor’s son Ranbir Raj messed up the school’s Christmas play and, tripping over his robe, fell loudly across the stage during a solemn scene. Nobody even took notice of the boy’s comment that ‘everyone laughed, even Christ laughed... and I was happy that I made Christ laugh.’4 Meanwhile, young men like Khwaja A. Abbas were enthralled by the revolutionary films of V. Shantaram. Duniya na Mane challenged social norms; its heroine refuses to accept her forced marriage to an old man. Abbas developed a ‘compulsive fascina¬ tion for the stark realism of the film and its eloquent camera angles, the symbolic juxtaposition of shots which was like visual poetry with its telling metaphors...’ Abbas saw Duniya na Mane eighteen times and Shantaram’s next film Admi, 24 times. Then he wrote the screenplay of Admi and that of several other films. The rigour of the writer finally earned Abbas an assignment from his guru, Shantaram. Along with his friend and co-author V. P. Sathe, Abbas recreated for Shantaram the story of Dr Kotnis, the Indian doctor who worked as a social worker in China during World War II, who might otherwise have gone unnoticed and unsung. The script of Doctor Kotnis ki Amar Kahani took shape in much the same way that later, with Ranbir Raj, Abbas would create other vehicles of his self-expression. In 1943, Abbas had already been writing his weekly column, ‘Last Page’, for two years—a habit that he religiously followed till his death. He wrote the column even from his deathbed. His last will and testament was carried as the last ‘Last Page’, at the end of a record 46 years of uninterrupted publication. As a part of the ‘Last Page’ routine, Abbas would scour six newspapers and red-pencil ‘writable’ material. In February 1943, he caught a three-line news item, datelined Chungking, which

96 • Secret Politics of Our Desires announced the death of Dr Dwarkanath Kotnis in Yenan. He had gone there as part of the Congress medical team sent by Nehru. The next ‘Last Page’ took readers to Kotnis’ deathbed: Far away in the interior of China a man lay dying in the ghostly hour that precedes dawn in those hills of the North-West... By the side of death-bed sat, mute and grief stricken, a young Chinese woman—wife of the Indian doctor whom he had married in China. In her arms she held the infant son-the little symbol of Indo-Chinese unity...6

There followed a novel on the same subject, and a screenplay (jointly written with Sathe) which Shantaram faithfully filmed, playing Kotnis himself. The most urgent issue of the mid-forties was, of course, HinduMuslim relations. It was the central political and social concern of Abbas and his contemporaries. In an open letter to Mohammed Ali Jinnah in 1945, Abbas wrote: I was flattered to receive a letter from you—even if it was only a printed circular letter. You have asked me for my vote and again I am flattered. But I am afraid I cannot oblige you... Your election circular does not make it clear what position you take on the most vital issue of our national existence: FREEDOM... Do you stand for abolition of landlordism, nationalisation of key industries, rigorous control of capitalist enterprises? Are you for the workers and peasants in their struggle for justice...7

The world was at war. In Bengal, the ‘Great Famine’ was taking its toll. While the leaders of the Quit India movement stayed in jail, a younger generation of would-be revolutionaries and reform¬ ers were asking the kinds of questions Abbas had posed to Jinnah and were exploring new avenues of self-expression. The Indian People s Theatre (IPTA) was born at the time. Initially a com¬ bined effort of rich Parsi women, university professors and Marxist trade unionists, it was later informally affiliated to the CPI. Abbas was a founding member of the IPTA and directed its first film production, Dharti ke Lai (1946), which was a powerful account ol the Bengal famine. But films were only one medium. IPTA’s commitment, in its manifesto, to create a ‘defence of cul¬ ture against imperialism and fascism’ involved travelling with musical and theatre squads to spread its message, using ‘people’s speech and local folk modes of performance. The Bombay unit of IPTA became a unique confluence of people and talent. Balraj Sahni, Sombhu Mitra, Chetan Anand (an briefly even his brother Dev Anand) were leading IPTA activists who then went on to become famous actors and directors.

Raj Kapoor • 97

Among these was a tall young Urdu writer named Inder Raj Anand, who also wrote plays for Prithvi Theatres, and was a close friend of Abbas. Prithvi Theatres, started in 1944 as Prithviraj’s own enterprise, was in spirit close to IPTA. Apart from Inder Raj Anand, several actors and musicians worked both in the People's Theatre and in Prithvi. It was during the staging of Inder Raj Anand’s plays that a team of the future took shape—Shanker, Jaikishen, Abbas, Sathe and Ranbir Raj—the latter now in his early twenties, an experienced clapper-boy at New Theatres, minor actor in eight films and general assistant at Prithvi Theatres on a monthly salary of Rs 201. Bombay’s business hub was still called Flora Fountain, the police shooting that converted it to Hutatma Chowk (Martyrs’ Square) was still some years in the future. Marosa, a small cafe near Fountain, became the adda—roughly ‘chat-shop’—of Abbas, Sathe and Inder Raj. Sathe, an erudite Maharashtrian Brahmin, was relatively staid in contrast to the effusive and flamboyant Abbas. Abbas was a writer and publicist who had already devel¬ oped an intuitive grasp of what worked and could be made to work in the production and selling of films. They were all eight to ten years older than Raj and had watched him emerge, from behind the puppy-fat of his early years, as a dashing, handsome young man. Raj, though mostly busy earn¬ ing his pay as all-purpose factotum at Prithvi, was also part of the Marosa adda. He used to sit there listening to the ‘seniors’ fiercely discussing politics, their plans for IPTA projects, and the social-cultural agenda of the now inevitable ‘freedom’. He watched IPTA’s Dharti ke Lai open to full houses in Bombay and then flop, partly because communal riots broke out. As the hour of freedom approached, the violence only got worse. The sessions at Marosa and elsewhere were almost en¬ tirely taken up with arguments on the emerging inevitability of Partition. Abbas led the side that vehemently opposed the split and Balraj Sahni, a formal CPI member, would argue for the Muslims’ right to a homeland. Despite his political position, for Sahni and older men like Prithviraj, the pain of Partition was a deeply personal affair. They had grown up in that part of the land which was now being severed. They had devoted the last many years of their lives in working through theatre to prevent just this. Later, Balraj’s brother Bhisham Sahni was to record this anguish for future generations in his novel Tamas.

98 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Raj Kapoor had grown up in Bombay and Calcutta. The trauma of partition in Punjab was relatively distant for him. It was part of the backdrop. For he was now on the threshold of adulthood— restless, craving for a touch of intensity in his own existence and determined to be a creative artist. Those who gathered over endless cups of tea and chicken patties at Marosa knew that Raj was planning to direct his own films. Inder Raj was working on a story with him. ‘He wanted first and foremost to make a saleable film and yet a different film,’ Sathe recalled four decades later. So the film had many stars but its form was episodic. And it had the revo¬ lutionary facet of not having a villain, while there were three heroines opposite the hero.’ Six months before Independence day and Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ address, Raj performed a small puja with family and friends and began work on his first film Aag. The title Aag, ‘Fire’, itself had hair-raising associations in 1947. This was the time when much of north India was burning due to communal frenzy, and Gandhi was travelling in the villages of Bengal trying to put out the fire. The riots were still raging in 1948 when the film was released. Its central female character was a victim of Partition. It was unique for a film to incorporate so recent an event, yet the film was not about this contemporary tragedy. Aag was the fire of rebellion, of what it was to be young then and struggle against the authority of orthodoxy. It was about a man drawn by the infinite possibilities for creation in freedom, dogged by the eternal pam of love and longing, and torn by the trials and dilemmas of discovering true inner beauty. Aag grabbed attention in a very different way from Shantaram’s films on revolutionary social themes. Film critic Iqbal Masud was part of the young audience that felt Aag spoke for them. Educated, upper-class Muslim youth like Masud were much more directly affected by Partition; they had to decide in a matter ol weeks, sometimes even days, whether to stay in India or go to Pakistan. Yet for those who were physically removed from the violence of the north—Masud was in Madras— 1947 was not a cataclysmic year. ‘Young people were going about their lives, falling in love, being disappointed, being heartbroken... Politics did not dominate our lives.’ Raj understood this because he felt the same way himself. What he therefore put on celluloid reflected both his training as a professional entertainer and his

Raj Kapoor • 99

instinctive response to his lineage and environment. Contem¬ poraries like Masud, bureaucrat, intellectual and later a film critic, related personally to Raj’s self-expression and translated it into their analytical idiom: "Aag reflected the two streams of Hindi and Urdu literature. One was the strong romantic stream of sup¬ pressed sensuality and the other stream was progressive, wanting change. Aa^was a response to the bleak middle-class culture.’ In Raj’s own words, Aag was: ...the story of youth consumed by the desire for a brighter and more intense life. And all those who had flitted like shadows through my own life, giving something and taking something were in that film...8

While Raj made Aag, history had taken decisive turns. Inde¬ pendence from the British was a fact but Gandhi had been shot dead. That year, 1948, on Gandhi’s birthday, October 2, IPTA, Prithvi Theatres and other progressive artists organised, a peace procession from Azad Maidan to Shivaji Park, appealing for communal harmony. Raj was in the lead, as was Abbas. Over the next few years Abbas became a powerful inspirational figure in the life of Raj, who in that phase was diving cinema and breathing cinema’.9 Abbas influenced Raj more directly than his own youth¬ ful hero-worship of Prithviraj had shaped him. Raj was alive to the world around him but he was not preoccupied with politics and the shaping of history in the way that the Marxist Abbas and their other friends were. Abbas himself found the friendship grounded in a ‘strange combination’. ‘Raj Kapoor was a deeply religious person. Abbas was an agnostic and a rationalist. Raj Kapoor was a vague progressive, but mostly apolitical and inno¬ cent of ideology, while Abbas was a die-hard Marxist.’10 But Abbas, the ideological guide, and Raj, the faithful choreographer of dreams, had much to say and do together. At the height of his career in 1956 Raj said that Abbas and Nargis were his closest co-workers: ‘Both of them in their own way have taught me to speak with the voice of all rather than with my own voice.’11 Raj had started shooting Barsat’ a few days after that march for communal harmony in October 1948. Aag had been critically acclaimed and made profits but it was not a box-office hit. Now he set out to make a love story suspended in a frame where the rest of the world and life going on around its characters would be invisible. Little else, other than the joy and anguish of love existed. The clash was between true, sincere love and selfish, exploitative pursuit of love as pleasure. Barsat was written by

100 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Ramanand Sagar, who would much later stake his claim to fume as the man who brought the nation to a standstill with his tele¬ vision version of the Ramavana, beamed every Sunday morning for two years. From the opening sequence where 'Afera lal dupata malmal ka\ echoed across the hills of Mahabaleshwar, to the haunting melodies of blighted love, Bars at was romantic musical. It heralded the beginning of an era of musicals, many of the products of which continue to enrapture generations born much later. Raj and his charmed circle—a unique assemblage of reformers, romantics and dream-weavers—were now, thanks to his special magical way of hinging a whole film on music, to dominate Indian film music during the entire decade of the 1950s. My subject always suggested to me a particular kind of music style unerringly—that style would work out audio-visually right in the final unfolding of the film. There was a certain vigour and aggression called for in the style of music. It is very important to me that songs in my films have a meaning and rhyme—that something touches the heart at first hearing.12

Shanker-Jaikishan, a dyad consisting of two music directors, were the melody-makers who were perfectly poised to complement Raj’s role as a film-maker. Shanker, a £sMj-player from Hydera¬ bad and Jaikishan, a harmonium player from Ahmedabad, had been in the orchestra at Prithvi. After the success of Barsat, they continued as salaried employees of R. K. Films for two decades. They could direct music for others, so long as work for R. K. films had first priority. Often the two musicians worked through days and nights at a stretch with Raj—employer, friend, fellow musician—all of them drunk and riotously inventive. These were three other members of this musicial team who were aiso given a salary to stay ‘on call’. One of them was the singer Mukesh, whom Raj called his ‘soul’. When they first met Mukesh was already famous as the singer of ‘Dil jalta hai to jaine de and Raj was still being introduced as Prithviraj’s son. It was the kind of meeting where Raj said: ‘something clicks, every little jigsaw puzzle piece of life falls into its proper place and you have formed an instant association that is valid for a life-time.’13 From the title song of Aag ‘zinda hoon is tarhan ki game zindagi nahiii, ‘Alive am I, but numb to life itself’—till he died in 1973, Mukesh was Raj Kapoor’s singing voice. The other critical associate in the matter of music was Lata

Raj Kapoor *101

Mangeshkar, though she was never a part of the core. If Mukesh was Raj’s soul, Lata was his prerana (inspiration)—‘it was as if I had been waiting for her to enter to make Raj Kapoor and his music what it is today.’14 Two other members of the team were poets. Hasrat Jaipuri, a flamboyant, often glib romantic Urdu shaier from Jaipur, was working as a ticket conductor on the trams of Bombay when he began writing songs for films. Hasrat’s flowery verse and his worship of female beauty found an echo in Raj. Both were in love with the idea of being in love. Hasrat, a traditional perfor¬ ming poet, also found his ideal appreciative audience in Raj. At the end of the road, when he was the last survivor of this team, Hasrat was to quote a favourite poet of his, to describe Raj: Hazaron sal nargis apni benoori pe rod hai Badi mushkil se hota hai chaman mein deedavar paida For a thousand years unseen, the narcissus bemoans its fate It is not every day that a person is born with an eye for beauty

Hasrat wrote his share of long-remembered and still sung romantic songs. But it was another poet, a rare lyrical genius and the last member to join the team, who complemented Abbas’s role and brought into being, Comrade Awara: Tu zinda hai Tu zindagi ki jeet mein yakeen kar Agar kahin hai swarga to utarla zameen par Tu zinda hai You live! Have faith, life will triumph. If there is a heaven somewhere, Drag it down to earth You live!

In a time when ‘revolution’ and ‘socialism’ have become terms of ridicule, these verses are still sung to different tunes by countless political activists all over India. At a dharna, in processions on city streets and village squares, or just at the start of a meeting someone would begin the song, and there is always a chorus. But most of the people who love this verse do not know that it was written by the same poet who wrote ‘pyar hua ikarar hua hai and ‘mera jut a hai japani... ’ By 1990, Shailendra and most of his team-mates were dead. But their songs have survived. But even those who sing his songs

102 • Secret Politics of Our Desires do not often know who Shailendra was. Strangely, even the contemporaries who survive have little knowledge of the man, only snippets of information. He was a ‘sweet soul’, a good man, quiet, shy, reticent, ‘deeply rooted in his culture’. He was also the first of the heavy-drinking R. K. team to fall. As film lore has it, Raj heard Shailendra at a mushaira and asked him to write for R. K. films but Shailendra refused. His poems were not for sale. Born in Rawalpindi some two-and-ahalf decades before Partition, Shailendra had grown up in Mathura. Just before Independence he joined the railways as an apprentice. At the time Barsat was being made, Shailendra was working on railway engines and learning the ropes of trade unionism, which in turn led to an involvement in IPTA. Unlike Abbas, Shailendra did not leave behind diaries or an autobiography. There is a book of poems, copies of which are difficult to get even among those who knew him. But there remain scores of his popular songs, among which are numerous cele¬ brations of the ineffable beauty and romance of rain. There is the lilting effervescence of reciprocated love in Lpyar hua hai ikarar hua hai...' and love as an abiding inspiration in ‘turn jo hamare mit na hote, git ye mere git na hote..i Above all, there is his deep humanism in an otherwise cinematic view of politics. Raj often called him "comrade’; his other friends also thought him to be a "leftist’ or ‘socialist’. When Raj offered him a wad of notes and a standing invitation to write for him, Shailendra seemed ideologically hostile to the idea. But his wife was pregnant with their first child and Shailendra was broke. Eventually, financial compulsions prevailed. By the time he got in touch with Raj, there were only two songs of Barsat left undone and the job was his. The 1950s were optimistic, hopeful times. But hopeful for whom? This was not a question that Raj or most of his contem¬ poraries asked. All that mattered for him was that they were working in ...an age of optimism. The republic was new, the rulers were new to leadership. My cinema was born in an age of idealism. That is why the songs in my films have a pristine quality about them, the women have a freshly washed, innocent look.’15

The team that came together during the making of Barsat knew that Independence in itself did not solve many of the people’s problems, but the sense of a new beginning was heady. From this came their vigour and zeal. They were confident that they had

Raj Kapoor *103

things to say and exciting ways in which to say them. The socio¬ logists and film critics who now classify cinema into popular, commercial and art were still far down the road. What mattered to Raj and his friends was that cinema ‘reaches millions of people and if I can give them something to think about, to laugh about, I think I have done my work.’16 By late 1949, the dust was beginning to settle and the two new nations were set to get on with life. Abbas had just returned from a euphoric trip to China where he found that: ‘the Chinese people has revolutionized not only a vast country but the whole continent of revolutionary thought—they have revolutionized the very concept of revolution.’17 Yet back at home he was beginning to be tired of politics and ‘even disillusioned about “my long love affair”—Nehru’. He published a series in Blitz listing the progressive and socialist promises Nehru had made in the past but was now forgetting to implement. ‘What else was there to do? Write film stories, of course.’18 Abbas had a distant uncle who considered himself high born and believed that virtue and good deeds were hereditarily inculcated. Yet this man, a sessions judge, eventually found his own son hauled up in court on charges of theft. With this germ of an idea Abbas built a story about ‘heredity versus environment’. Then he and Sathe together converted it into a screenplay tailor-made for their friend Prithviraj and his son Raj. Raj grabbed the script and insisted on directing the film himself. By the time he and the rest of his team had had a go at it the story had grown into a multi-faced organism. It built on the unresolved guilt of the epic hero Ram in sending Sita to a life¬ long exile because of a baseless charge against her virtue and fidelity; it narrated the injustice done by a man who casts aside a virtuous woman on grounds of suspicion and a motivated alle¬ gation. When the modern-day Sita and her child are left to fend for themselves, poverty pushes the little boy to crime. While still a child, he finds out that in jail, bread, which he has to steal out¬ side, comes free. The father’s mansion, from which the son is exiled, is overly grandiose, as if to emphasize the personal flaws of the aristocratic, arrogant judge who could never acknowledge that poverty itself was the worst form of injustice. Why is poverty an injustice? The Awara or tramp seeks the answer outside the reach of the camera. On the screen is recorded only the spirit of the Awara, the little man whose inspiration came

104 • Secret Politics of Our Desires partly from Raj’s surroundings and partly from Charlie Chaplin. Raj had been a Chaplin fan since childhood. City Lights, Modern Times, Gold Rush and Limelight were some of his favourite films. Raj was drawn to Chaplin’s films because Chaplin was ...the hobo, the bum, the common man, I was not drawn to him so much because of his get-up, but because of the simplicity of the little man and his human emotions. How he enjoyed life, even though he was so poor. How he visualised richness... it is difficult to express in words. There was so much of Chaplin which affected me—the thought process behind all his beliefs...19

So Raj’s Awara, a homeless, unloved traveller on an uncharted, lonely path (sunsan dagar), sings songs of happiness. He is always hopeful, despite his circumstances. It was an entirely novel character in Hindi cinema. Though in retrospect Raj Kapoor sounded confident about the film, he was a nervous chainsmoker waiting outside the Metro theatre the night Awara was premiered in Bombay. Abbas has recorded that the audience walked out that night in glum silence. He quotes one financier-distributor telling Raj that Awara should teach him ‘not to dabble in progressive and purposeful stories.’20 The financier was wrong. Box offices all over the country gave a different verdict, one which remains unchanged to date: Awara came at a time when films were of a totally different nature. We still had remnants of British imperial dominance and we wanted a new social order. I tried to create a balance between entertainment and what I had to say to the people. Awara had everything. It had the theme of class distinction. It had the greatest juvenile romantic story wrapped in the poverty that the post-Independence era had inherited. It bloomed like a lotus in the mud and it went to the people as something they had never seen before. Could this ever happen to a young man in such circumstances? With a song on his lips and a flower he went through all the ordeals that socio-economic disruptions could bring about. The change that the people wanted, they saw in the spirit of the young man who was the vagabond, the AwaraA

Raj s self-assessment of Awara, three-and-a-half decades later, was also based on the travels he undertook following the phenomenal popularity of the film. Both Abbas and Raj were taken completely by surprise by the extent of the film’s popularity in the Soviet Union. Abbas wrote: From Moscow to Vladivostok, from the frozen ice-cap in the Arctic where a steel box containing the film was air-dropped along with oranges from the south, as a seventh of November surprise gift to the marooned group of scientists on a Polar expedition, to the ancient dusty lanes of Bokhara

Raj Kapoor *105 in the hot south, where Uzbek boys went about singing the original Hindustani songs, the film A war a (or Brodgaya, as the Russian dubbed version was called) swept the land like a prairie fire. Within a few months, all bands and orchestras in hotels and restaurants were playing the tunes from this film, Russian and Ukrainian and Georgian teenagers were singing the Awara songs in chorus,..22

Trying to find out the reasons for this popularity, Abbas went around asking people, in the towns and cities they visited, what they found so remarkable in Awara. ‘Have you seen the films we have been seeing for the last twenty years?’ replied a Russian student. The films had been packed with overt messages of ‘socia¬ list-realism’ and preoccupied with wars which had killed millions. ‘But don’t you see’, the student continued, ‘we went through it and now must we relive it in every book we read, in every film or play that we see? Instead of war we want to see love on the screen, we want to see carefree happiness, want someone to make us laugh. That is why we are crazy about Awara,’23 Indeed, the student was not wrong; Raj Kapoor had discovered a magical formula. His cinematic credo, stated and unstated, was: love is a great equalizer and the yearning for searing passionate romance is universal. This realization and its expression on the screen were to get inextricably linked with Nargis, his heroine in Awara: There was nothing that could stop them, nothing that could separate them. She was everything that life meant to him. Sometimes in life two people come together, nothing can separate them. This was it. The love, the quarrels, the tears, the fights, the reconciliations,' the oneness—they were like one soul.

It could be a dialogue out of an R. K. screenplay. But this is Neelam, a little-known actress who was a close friend of both Nargis and Raj, quoted in Bunny Reuben’s biography of Raj Kapoor.24 And here Neelam is reflecting Bombay’s film lore on its most talked about and well-remembered romance. Long after the relationship ended in bitterness, their friends and even distant observers balked at calling it a mere ‘affair’. Ordinary people had affairs; Raj and Nargis were celluloid deities whose sensual chemistry on the screen or outside transcended the merely mortal and the transient. Nargis was to Raj ‘no less than an angel’ and his sphurti (inspiration).25 Some of this had to do with the dignity and independence which seemed intrinsic to Nargis—on and off screen. She could flare up like any star and even use the foulest

106 • Secret Politics of Our Desires language. But it was not Raj alone who remembered her as essen¬ tially a ‘noble lady’. ‘She could be a source... to anybody. She could generate in a person a certain spiritual power, which would vitalize that person to work and to venture anything.’26 Nargis was the daughter of Jaddan Bai, a classical singer in a milieu where the term 4ganewalf carried the connotations of a courtesan. Nargis had struggled and worked hard for the profess¬ ional and social recognition she enjoyed by the early 1950s; but she also had qualities that the moderns would call ‘class’, qualities that Raj might have envied and aspired to. Raj, by contrast, came from landowning, conservative ancestors. His grandfather had been a tehsildap Prithviraj had become an actor in the face of strong opposition. Perhaps the cultivation of a conservative family code, amid the relative social freedoms of theatre and cinema was thus essential for Prithviraj and, later, for Raj, Perhaps this explains why in most of their R.K. films together, Nargis symbolizes virtue, inner beauty and idealism—an inspi¬ ration to a struggling Raj. Award's famous dream sequence, which constituted a landmark in Indian cinema, captures this relationship most graphically: The hero, named Raj, moves from a frightening nightmare, in which the criminal and violent elements in his environment threaten to overwhelm him, to a dream in which serenity and innocence seem to reign and Nargis descends from the clouds down a sweeping staircase and beckons him with a lilting song of adoration: ghar aya mera paradesi. pyas buji men akbiyan ki tu mere manka mod hai, in nainan ki joti hai../

My wandering beloved has come home, The thirst of my eyes is quenched. O jewel of my soul, light of these eyes of mine.

The delicate fairy-like figure of Nargis swings gently to the music, seemingly afloat in the mist—at the same time reassuring and tantalizing the dreamer, Raj.27 Raj, playing Raj the unemployed graduate, invites Nargis, the impoverished schoolteacher, to have a cup of tea with him. The roadside tea vendor or chaiwala refuses Raj credit. Making an elaborate pretence about having only a hundred-rupee note in his pocket, Raj asks his companion if she has the change. Silently, knowing and understanding, she pays for the tea. The awkward¬ ness fades into a moment of truth. Over those cups of tea the two confess their love for each other. Suddenly it rains and there

Raj Kapoor • 107 is one umbrella between them. Walking the empty streets under it, they sing joyar hooa ikarar hooa hai pyrar so phir kyon darata hai dil

Love in our hearts, love requited, why then thus fear of love?

Four years had passed since Awara. In between R. K. films had produced Aah, another love story by Inder Raj Anand, and Boot Polish, a rare account of orphan children on the streets* of Bombay, in which Raj made only a brief cameo appearance. Both films had done badly at the box office. Once again Abbas and Sathe went to work. Abbas had written a story about an idealistic small-town youth who comes to Bombay, his folded BA degree in his pocket, and gets lost in the decadence and corruption of the city. It could have been a grim and morbid film. But over those endless story-music-song sessions at the Cottage, in the back¬ yard of R. K. studios, where the whole team drank, argued and sang their way into each film, Shree 420 became both a serious political satire and a comedy. The Chaplinesque figure from A wara was re-used and further developed. A fast-moving storyline put together characters that represented a cross-section of the classes usually found in the big city—the unscrupulous, beady-eyed sheth in his towering mansion, just above a settlement of homeless pavement-dwellers waiting for hamara raj (jour rule’); the gentle, impoverished, middle-class schoolteacher of slum children; the large-hearted banana vendor, who adopts Raj as her son and whom he calls ‘Lady Dilwali KelewalP; and the viper-like femme fatale, who introduces the hero to the world of vice. To hold it all together Shailendra wrote the song which virtually became a national anthem : mera juta hai Japani ye patlun Inglistani sar pe lal topi Russi phir bhi ail hai Hindustani... My shoes are Japanese, Pantaloons, English are these on my head a red Russian hat. But my heart, it’s Indian for all that.

This is a song about a free spirit, wearing wornout Japanese shoes, oversized English pantaloons tied high at the waist, and red Russian headgear, but retaining an Indian heart. The song

108 • Secret Politics of Our Desires implicitly celebrates the ‘ordinary’ people whp can always rise to greatness and power whenever they so determine. The world is surprised and but the story is familiar, for the people have ruled before. When Raj arrives at the footpath basti below the rich man’s mansion and introduces himself as ‘Raj’, the otherwise reluctant hosts break into affectionate sarcasm: ‘are ye apna raj agaya’ (‘hey, our rule has come’)... ‘hume pata tha ek din hum bhooke nangon ka raj ayega’ (‘we knew that one day we the hungry and the naked would reign’). Later, as Raju in Jis Desh Mein Ganga BehtiHaj a variation on the same character would again proclaim the dawn of a new kind of raj (‘reign’/‘rule’). The politics of Shree 420 was probably the most cogent statement that Abbas and Raj Kapoor produced in the three decades their association lasted. They had a critique of the unful¬ filled promises of Independence but they were not entirely disenchanted then, nor did they believe that the independence itself could be false. Capitalism was a problem. And the depth of misdeed and greed was directly proportionate to the height and size of the mansion. The Mr 420 (named after the clause of Indian law pertaining to fraud) of Shree 420 is the corrupt, ruthless sheth of that grand mansion. His car’s number is 840. But with sufficient guts, guile and organization, Mr 420 and his cohorts can be outwitted. Their greed is also their Achilles’ heel. The character of the sheth, played by the same actor, reappears in Jagte Raho as a seemingly respectable businessman who actually prints counterfeit currency notes. Jagte Raho was written and directed by IPTA’s Shambhu Mitra. Here Raj is a bewildered, nameless vagabond lost in a heartless, hypocritical city. Late one night he wanders into a large, housing complex in search of water to drink. Mistaken for a thief he is hunted all night by the residents of the complex. In each of the homes where he seeks refuge a tale of deceit and deception and conflict unfolds. Hounded beyond endurance, he is finally embraced by a child who instinctively and unquestioningly accepts the dishevelled man s innocence. Bolstered by the child’s love and confidence, the vagabond follows the sound of a woman singing Jago mohan pyare, and walks out of the building unhindered. His pursuers are meanwhile busy grabbing the counterfeit notes Raj has rained on the courtyard of the building complex. Shailendra s Jago mohan pyare' begins as a devotional song.

Raj Kapoor • 109 an invocation of Lord Krishna, and then becomes a plea to people to awaken from their ignorance. It is a call to all life to awaken into a new age. The thirsty, tormented man follows the voice to the misty compound of a temple where a beautiful, freshly bathed woman is watering the plants as she sings. Nargis is once again both earthly and ethereal, invoking a pristine, angelic purity. The man bends low before this vision, holds out his cupped hands and as the woman pours water into them, his thirst is at long last quenched. This was the final shot of the film and also the last R. K. frame in which Nargis appeared. Over the next year the ‘inseparable’ pair broke-up. In March 1958, Nargis married Sunil Dutt and retired from acting. Raj Kapoor was to later say, Women have always meant a lot in my life, but Nargis meant more than anybody else. I used to always tell her, ‘Krishna is my wife, she is the mother of my children. I want you to be the mother of my films.’ And that’s precisely what she was.28

Did Nargis’ departure orphan the film-maker Raj? It certainly sent the man and his work into crisis. The golden fifties of Hindi cinema were also the 24-carat years of Raj’s own life. As the 1950s came to a close, not merely his own life but also the world of cinema and politics seemed to enter a new phase. The genesis of Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai can be traced to the days when Gandhi still lived at Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad. Among the hundreds of people who came to him offering to devote their life to the attainment of swaraj' self-rule and freedom, was a village schoolteacher called Shankar. Gandhi sent him back to his village saying that teaching was the highest form of work for swaraj. But after a year Shankar was back; he had given up teaching and had come to serve the Mahatma. Gandhi sent Shankar to work among the people of a tribe classified as criminal by the British administration. The determined Shankar set off with a blanket, a lantern and a jhola (cloth bag). For the next four years he lived with the tribe, ran a school and practised homeopathic medicine. Shankar Maharaj, as he then came to be known, realized that the poverty of these landless people drove them to crime. Through Gandhi, Shankar Maharaj arranged for some land to be allocated to the tribe, which then abandoned dacoity as a way of life. A Gujarati book by Kanhaiyalal Munshi, which recorded the work of Shankar Maharaj, came to the attention of Arjun Dev

110 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Rashk, an obscure film writer, who wrote a screenplay inspired by the book. At the same time Radhu Karmakar, the director of photography at R. K. Films, was looking for a screenplay; Raj had offered to let Karmakar direct the next R. K. production. Rashk’s screenplay sounded ideal: it had drama and action, and it was topical. These were the days when two famous Gandhians who had opted to stay out of power, Jayaprakash Narayan and Vinobha Bhave, were working to bring some of the most notorious dacoits of central India back into the fold of 'society’. If Raj was to play Shankar Maharaj, the details of the character were easily etched. He would be Raju, an endearing simpleton who used the language of music. The film opens with Raju singing, ‘Mera nam Raju gharana anam, behti hai Ganga wahan mera dham..i His family lineage is unknown, he lives anywhere along the Ganga, travelling and singing for the souls he befriends. The jhola, the blanket and lantern were details borrowed from Shankar Maharaj. But the whole of that bemused man, in awkwardly fitting clothes and carrying a drum, was quintessential^ Raj. The character reflected his credo: T am a traveller who comes but once. I dance and sing to fill your hearts with joy and then... I go away, knowing that you have had a hearty laugh.’29 The Raj of Awara and Shree 420 was adrift in the big city, uncertain of himself and the strength of his integrity under the pressures of decadence, corruption and temptation. Raju of Jis Desk Me was the same free spirit still rooted in his native reality, untroubled by any rationalist divide. The metaphor of the Ganga was central to two major films released in 1960. Both, Jis Desk Mein Ganga Behti Hai and Ganga Jamuna, had plots involving dacoits. The coincidence was no mystery, both films romanticized and celebrated the everyday culture of rural north India. Ganga Jamuna, directed by Nitin Bose, was mounted on a narrower, more familiar canvas. Its hero Ganga (Dilip Kumar) is victim of the zamindari system and when (orced to turn a desperado, becomes a Robin Hood. There is also a patriotic honest schoolteacher, preparing village children for great deeds in the new nation, and the beautiful village girl, Ganga’s devoted sweetheart. There is the villainous, rapacious zamindar, who causes havoc in Ganga’s life, and Jamuna, Ganga’s younger brother and an upright man who becomes a police officer and must eventually shoot the hero because farz (duty) comes before everything else.

Raj Kapoor *111 For all the backdrop of social injustice, the central focus of the film was on the emotional high points of Ganga and Jamuna’s relationship. As one of the first technicolor films, it also savoured the cinematic potential of picturesque rural setting—the multishaded sunrise, the deep blue ponds, the lush forests. Jis Desh Me, though shot in black and white, had a wider scope. It was not merely about the reform of dacoits nor a romantic tale in a rural setting. Between Rashk’s fascination for the life of Shankar Maharaj and contemporary dacoits, and the now wellpractised brainstorming sessions of the R. K. team, Jis Desh Me became another, more detailed unfolding of Raj's operatic style. The title was inspired by Mikhail Sholokhov’s Russian novel, And Quiet Flows the Don. It is not clear precisely whose idea this was—whether Rashk, Raj or Shailendra. But the title did set the stage for cinematic search for native strengths—cultural and moral—that predated and overshadowed modern nationalism, though Raj’s immediate motivations and mission were inextricably Nehruvian: It was the post-independence era. There were a lot of factors that influenced young minds, and they influenced me. Panditji said that he wanted every Indian in this country to do something for the nation, to build it up into the beautiful dream that he had. He was a visionary and I tried to follow him, to do my best, whatever I could, through films. Despite all the problems, despite all obstacles, you go ahead towards the horizon which you have seen. It is there in your eyes and in many other eyes, very many people want to reach that horizon—and if I can help them through my work, I think I have done something for humanity.30

But vShailendra’s theme song was about timeless dreams and hopes. It was tire voice of a Gandhian pilgrim with no narrow ‘project’, no short-term agenda. ‘Honton pe sachai rehti hai is Raju’s response to harassment and ridicule by members of the gang of dacoits, suspicious of an unknown visitor. Who is this visitor? ‘I’ll tell you who I am,’ Raju says and breaks into an irresistible rhythm on his drum. He plays the drum with a frenzied passion that sets all but his most committed antagonists dancing. And just when the whole community is swaying to his drumbeat, he stops. Lifting a small girl in his arms he begins his story: he is of the land of truthful souls and clear hearts, the desh (land) not rashtra (nation), where the Ganga flows. We are the people, he says, for whom a guest is more precious than our own lives. We do not hanker for the endless more, we are content with the sufficient. We are children of a

112 • Secret Politics of Our Desires soil that bears everything, makes us possible. People who know more often have trouble in understanding and appreciating human beings. This is the East where all life is precious and harmonious co-existence the highest value. We have learnt much from different peoples, welcomed strangers into our hearts and made them our own. For we have never selfishly grabbed, never worshipped base materiality.... for this is the land where the Ganga flows—jis desh mein Ganga behti hai\ Raju is accepted into the fold of the community of dacoits when he accidentally saves the life of the leader or sardar of the gang, becomes doubly indebted to him because Raju shares his food with him. When Raju has doubts about living among such people, the sardar’s beautiful, fast-talking daughter Kammo, already in love with Raju, assures him that this is a well-meaning community of people who take from the rich and give to the poor. Raju’s face lights up: ‘Are you people chochlists (socialists)?' he asks, ‘These chochlists are always talking about making the world equal, morning till night that is all they talk about... I will also work with you, I will help you to make the world equal.’ No sarcasm or parody was intended, says Karmakar, who directed the film. This was the common understanding about socialists, and that is how they presented it. Raju is chief protagonist, but in many ways the dramatic pivot of the story is Raka, the perfect foil for the exaggerated simpleton. The tall and proud Raka is etched in strong sensuous lines with a restrained machismo. His zeal and seriousness make dacoity virtually a dharma. Raka is also in love with the sardar’s temperamental daughter, Kammo. Since Raka is a preserver of the status quo, Raju s creed of brotherly love and gentle humanism rankles him. Raka sees dacoity as his fate—it has all the freedom essential for his dignity. He is first suspicious of Raju as a police informer who will some time or other abuse their trust. Later Raka is doubly resentful when Raju grows into the role of a reformer. Along with the rest of the community, Raka is confused by Raju’s non-violence. After witnessing a raid by the dacoits Raju is horrilied to lind that this throat-slitting brutality is also prevalent in the land where the Ganga flows. Fearful of violence, he informs the police about the next raid. Then he rushes to warn Raka and company not to go there because the police lie in wait with hundreds of guns. Following a confrontation with Raka, Raju and Kammo flee

Raj Kapoor • 113 the community. For days they run from village to village, with Raka always in pursuit, leaving a trail of death and destruction as he hunts them. ‘Our souls will not be able to carry the burden of this guilt,’ Raju tells Kammo, for he feels responsible for setting Raka on this path of violence. Finally, Raju and Kammo give themselves up to the police and Raju tries but fails to convince the superintendent of police that there is a peaceful way of dealing with Raka. As he lies awake agonizing through the night, Raju remembers a doha (couplet) of Kabir and in a flash he decides that the only way to save the community of dacoits is to convince them to surrender together, instead of waiting to be smoked out and killed one by one. Raju travels back into the ravines and tries to con¬ vince the community, but this time his argument hinges on the need for self-preservation, not a principled, abstract commitment to non-violence. Besides, ‘Things have changed,’ he says, ‘now there is a new kind of raj {rule).’ As opinion begins to tilt in favour of surrender, Raka shoots at Raju but instead kills a woman who rushes forward to protect Raju. The woman, an incarnation of the large-hearted banana vendor of Shree 420,\ has been like a mother to Raka. Her death reduces the ferocious robber to tears. Dispirited and outgunned, as the whole community turns on him, Raka concedes defeat. The entire community forms a caravan and moves out of the ravines and into the plains where a contingent of police waits to encircle them. In dramatic operatic style, Raju leads them, singing of a glorious return to a land of redemption. ‘Come let us return,’ he says, ‘the country waits with eager eyes and open arms. The straight and narrow path is always easy but only the courageous can stand again and continue after having fallen.’ On seeing the police cordon, Raka again picks up his gun and prepares for a shootout. Raju rushes to stand between the two sides and the women and children follow him. The confrontation is aborted. Raka lifts his gun to shoot Raju but Kammo shields him and Raka cannot bring himself to shoot. Sadly he puts aside his gun, accepting defeat with dignity. The essentially romantic vision of Raj Kapoor, however, was already being slowly displaced by new kinds of awareness. In Jis Desh Me itself, somewhere along the way desk (‘land’) has already

114

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Secret Politics of Our Desires

come to mean the state. The police superintendent who welcomes the erstwhile criminals ‘into the fold’ declares that they have all become ‘entitled to the sympathy of the law’. Some will have to go to prison, but the rest of the community could ride off in police trucks to a new life, rich with the promises of the Nehruvian dream. The times were certainly not innocent. Guru Dutt had made Pyaasa in 1957, a poetic denunciation of the hollowness and hypocrisy of materialism. Sahir Ludhianvi’s lyrics were more central to Pyaasa than Shailendra’s were to Jis Desh Me. With a grimmer view of life, Sahir was an even more earnest dreamer of the red dawn; his famous song ‘ Woh subha kabhi to ayegf (‘some time or other that dawn will have to come’) was written in 1958. There were fewer flights of optimistic fancy in him and, while Shailendra wrote 'Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hail he wrote Din he naz hai Hind par woh kahan hain’ (Where are those who are so proud of India?). The poet hero of Pyaasa sings the song while wandering through the city’s brothels where women are being converted into merchandise. Raj was not indifferent to these concerns but he was not tor¬ mented by them. First and foremost a ‘showman? as he described himself, his creed was clear: ‘I have always believed, and I say it again emphatically, that a showman and a politician run on the same platform... They sell dreams.’31 And he had faith in his wares. To him the dramatic ‘operatic’ potential of an idea was not sequestered from its social meaning or relevance; he was a craitsman always in search of attractive, saleable materials to work upon. The shooting ot Jis Desh Me had taken Raj to Calcutta where a part of the opening song ‘mera nam Raju’ was filmed, at the Dakshineshwar Temple on the banks of the Ganga. There, at Swami Ramakrishna Paramahans' math (monastery), Raj met a sadhu who told him the story of Totapuri Maharaj, a naked sadhu from Rishikesh who once came to meet Sri Ramakrishna. As Raj tells the story: me^ 8eo§raphical point where the Ganga is at its filthiest, and Totapuri Maharaj said. 'Ram, veh ten Ganga kitni maili hai'... Look.ng at htm steadily, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa replied 'Maharaj, this is but natural. As she flows down front Rishikesh to here, the Ganga does nothing but wash the sins of human beings’...32

Twenty-five years later Raj converted this idea into his last film

Raj Kapoor • 115 Ram Teri Ganga Maili. For the first time he wrote the story himself. The title was not a reference to Ram of Ramayana, Raj said, but to Ramakrishna Paramahansa. (Audiences, however, still read it as a call to Lord Ram.) The Ganga was polluted not merely because of the volume of garbage it now carried but also because of the volume of human evil it witnessed. Of course in Raj Kapoor’s film, Ganga was no longer just the river but a nubile blue-eyed girl: ‘Ganga the pure, Ganga the virgin, Ganga the Himalayan beauty, Ganga the faithful.33 Ram Teri Ganga Maili is the story of the girl’s journey down the course of the river, from its source at Gangotri in the Himalayas to Calcutta, and of descent from innocence and purity. The first Ganga film opens with a scene of a man bathing in the river at dawn, praying with his face to the sun and expressing gratitude to the gods for being born in the land where the Ganga flows. The second Ganga film begins with the launching of a prog¬ ramme to clean the river. (It was a coincidence that a few months before the film was released Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi launched a Clean Ganga programme amid much fanfare.) By now Raju of Jis Desh Me had passed into memory. The ageing Gandhian in the opening scene of Ram Teri Ganga Maili is beleaguered. Speaking at a function to launch a Clean Ganga campaign he condemns the misappropriation of public funds in such projects, but no one really listens. The identifiably Gandhian leader has been set up. At the very beginning the director wants to establish that honest, loyal and patriotic men have either died or are living in such dire straits that even the best among them are now vulnerable to the pressures to cut comers. The sad old man in khadi [hand-woven cotton] asks, as if to a void: ‘Can one not live truthfully anymore?’ While the days of honest Gandhians are out, those of men like Bhagwat Chaudhry, businessman turned politician who stops at nothing to attain his ends, have come. The moral code of the times is starkly stated by Chaudhry’s wealthy accomplice, Jiva Sahay: ‘Everything is justified in the politics of business.' These are not caricatures of traditional capitalists—the pot-bellied, beady-eyed sheths who populated Shree 420. Both Chaudhry and Sahay are slim, elegant, modern men who control the world in which lives the hero of the film, Narendra, Sahay’s son, who reads books by his namesake, the social reformer and religious leader Swami Vivekananda (born Narendranath) and rues that such great

116 • Secret Politics of Our Desires men are no longer available to guide the destinies of the country. Narendra is the cause of Ganga’s journey to Calcutta. On a college trip to the hills, he meets the rustic Ganga, fails in love and marries her in a village ceremony. In a replay of one of the most cliched plots of Hindi films, Narendra the pardesi (outsider) leaves his newly-wed wife behind to return to the city, with the promise that he will soon return to take her with him to Calcutta. Predictably, circumstances and the ungodly prevent him from keeping his promise. Meanwhile, Ganga has a child, and with the infant she sets out in search of the father. Inevitably, she is accosted by a pimp and confined in a brothel at the sacred city of Varanasi. One day she has to perform for none other than Bhagwat Chaudhry who comes as a customer. She dances in a pavilion on the banks of Ganga, and the quietly flowing, polluted river Ganga reflects the image of Ganga, imprisoned and abused. Chaudhry ‘buys’ Ganga and brings her to Calcutta—as a new exciting toy. He has a daughter of Ganga’s age whose marriage Chaudhry has arranged with the reluctant, depressed Narendra, who is convinced that Ganga is dead. After suitably time-consuming twists and turns in the plot, Ganga winds up performing a mujra at Narendra’s wedding. When he recog¬ nizes her, he refuses to go through with the planned marriage. At this point during the making of the film, the director found himself in a fix. The earliest draft of the script had been written by Sathe and Abbas. That version ends with Ganga’s death. According to them, it was the only possible ending, ‘the sort of classic ending which was perfect for the story and pleasing to the intellectual and aesthetic sense.’"4 And Raj agreed. Later, after Abbas dropped out of the project, the final screenplay, written by Sathe and others, retained this ending. As the film neared completion Raj invited the distributors, who had already bought the film, to a customary screening of the rushes. When the distributors heard of the proposed ending they were positively horrified . Recalls Reuben, who was the publicist for the film: ‘They were cut up that a girl who had suffered so much throughout the film should be cheated of eventual happiness, for God alone knew what reason:’35 Members of the Kapoor family and old faithfuls at R. K. Films joined the chorus and pleaded for Ganga’s life. Shashi Kapoor, the youngest of Prithviraj’s three sons and himself a distinguished actor, was among those who prevailed upon Raj not to give in to negativism and kill off Ganga.

Raj Kapoor • 117 ‘It was not just a love story’, Shashi said, ‘it was a social statement.’ The end was finally written by Raj himself, who set aside his own aesthetic convictions and conceded his financiers’ preference for distributing life and so Narendra revolts, takes Ganga’s hand and walks out with her from his family and the wedding. Bhagwat Chaudhry tries to shoot them but fails. The couple is last seen in a boat on the Ganga, sailing towards an ambiguous future. In the background rings the title song of the film, ‘Ram Teri Ganga Maili Ho Gayi\ which neatly reverses the contents of the earlier Ganga song, Hum us desh ke vasi hain jis desh mein Ganga behti hai..i The pride of living in the land of Gangads now only a nostalgic dream. The generation which joined Raj Kapoor’s audience from Bobby (1973), and saw his black-and-white films on television or video or on occasional re-runs at cinema halls, reacted to his early and later films in different ways. Most of them found a continuity in his skill in telling a story with catchy lyrics and unforgettable songs. Others were bewildered by his decline into a slick style, heavily dependent on frequent forays into voyeurism. Among these was that chunk of middle-class India that nurtured a deep nostalgia for the last phase of the black-and-white era of Hindi cinema and its music, some of the best of which came from Raj Kapoor’s films. Many of the creative film-makers of the black-and-white era, who continued to work through the 1980s, shared this nostalgia with a more personal sense of loss. Sathe would applaud Shantaram for capturing the essence of the problem. Shantaram had traced the ruin of Hindi cinema to the onset of the James Bond era and the entry of colour into Indian movies, both of which took place at the beginning of the 1960s. Radhu Karmakar agreed; ‘to a large extent colour destroyed’ the quality of cinema. Once colour entered Hindi cinema the romantic song shifted to lush gardens where heroes and heroines could prance among flowerbeds and change costumes from frame to frame. Scenicness now occupied much of the space previously occupied by form. ‘Colour took them [Hindi film-makers] outward, not inward,’ says Rauf Ahmed, editor of Filmfare. Raj himself fell for the same outwardness; he went to Europe to shoot a part of his first colour film. Sangam (1964) was a time-worn triangular love story, written

118 • Secret Politics of Our Desires by old friend Inder Raj Anand. It followed Jis Desh Me and again used the imagery of Ganga: Sangam is the confluence of Ganga, Jamuna and the mythical river Saraswati, at Allahabad. Sangam is an over-drawn story of two close friends in love with the same woman, with the usual twists of the Hindi commercial cinema that predictably forces the heroine to marry the man she does not love, The film has no real link to the symbolism or imagery of Ganga. Inder Raj’s name for the film was Gharonda, ‘nest’. Raj changed the title because, he said ‘ Gharonda is just a title, whereas Sangam-Sangam is a tradition.’36 However, despite this statement, the film had little to do with traditions; it was a crude compromise with Raj’s reading of what the audience now wanted. Certainly the story did not require a tour of famous sites in Europe. The idea struck Raj half-way through the making of the film—as something different to offer the box office. It worked like a charm. The box office paid back his investment many times over and a new trend was introduced. To date, most lavishly produced Hindi films have a song sequence suddenly and inexplicably located in Europe. Usually, the sequence bears little relationship to the rest of the story. After the release of Sangam, till 1970, Raj immersed himself in what he considered his magnum opus. The story, screenplay and dialogues of Mera Naam Joker were written entirely by Abbas. There had been an eight-year gap since Abbas last worked for R.K. Films, on Jagte Raho. The heavy leather-bound script which Abbas handed over to Raj was partly a biographical reflection of Abbas s understanding of Raj’s self-image as a performer. The way Raj converted the script to celluloid made the film auto¬ biographical. It was a four-hour-long self-indulgence and screened with two intermissions. Audiences had sat happily through Sangam, which also had two intermissions; but most viewers found Mera Nam Joker intolerably long. The film, to borrow film-land jargon, was a ‘colossal flop’. What went wrong? The question haunted Raj to the very end The first part, about a teenage schoolboy’s crush on his pretty teacher and the emerging personality of the clown, was critically acclaimed. It was deftly written and was cinematically sophisti¬ cated. Its theme was unusual for Hindi cinema; no one had made a lilm about a teenager’s love for an adult. The second part, about t e lowering of the joker, had a combination of beautiful human moments and a showman’s penchant for playing out the full

Raj Kapoor • 119 grandeur of the big top circus. But the self-pity underlying the whole film became pronounced towards the end of the second part and completely overwhelmed the last part. This third part, about the disheartened joker wandering the streets of Bombay as a disconsolate vagabond was doubly sad because of the inevitable comparison with his earlier incarnation. Was this how the freespirited awara had aged? This aged awara still wandered about, but with little hope of finding love. He now knew that money and power were not the only evils; fame and its attendant narcissism could corrupt even more. In the last part, the joker befriends a girl disguised as a street urchin and is then instrumental in her becoming a film star. It seemed particularly autobiographical: The actress goes through the director while portraying a character, acts it as if she is living it and when she sees herself, when it is projected to her, she falls in love: ‘I have done that? Oh, you are wonderful!’—and thereby she falls in love with the director, the maker of the image she loves. But actually she is in love with herself... Naturally there is a man involved and a woman involved, but there is nobody beyond oneself that you are in love with.37

The final part of Mera Naam Joker was garishly mounted, and suffered from lifelessness. The understanding that he may have tried to capture on celluloid never came through. It was buried under the excess baggage of showmanship. Jagte Raho had also done badly at the box office. Both films, Raj said, were therefore very close to his heart: ‘These were both beautiful films. They are the two films of mine where either something was not right with them or they were such fantastic films that people did not understand them...’38 In the late 1980s, an abridged version of Mera Naam Joker became a popular film on the video circuit. Raj’s sons found, after his death, that the film was the largest money-spinner among the films they inherited in their father’s estate. But in 1971, the collapse of Mera Naam Joker in the box office was a terrible blow to Raj’s ego—and his bank balance. Bunny Reuben, his long¬ standing publicity agent and later biographer, says that living with Raj in this phase became an ‘excruciating pain’: People began dreading sitting over a drink with Raj Kapoor in his cottage, or anywhere else for that matter. Now the alcohol no longer caused wings to sprout so that he could soar the empyrean with you. No, now the alcohol was used to release the devil hidden within which needed little or no encouragement to leap out and convert the man into monster. And

120 • Secret Politics of Our Desires the unfortunate person trapped with him over a drink would then have to bear the brunt of being heaped with filthy abuses, of his rantings and ravings and all the vicious hatreds festering within him.39

At one point during his depression Raj called Abbas to say that since Mera Naam Joker was their joint failure, they had to answer jointly the verdict of their audience. Thus Abbas was commissioned to commence work on a story that had to sell. It was a blank cheque with only one condition—the film had to star Rishi, Raj’s second son. Abbas again teamed up with Sathe and began to throw out ideas. Since the hero was Rishi, the character could not be any derivative of the tramp. Besides, as Reuben had pointed out in an open letter to Raj published in Star and Style in April 1971: The ‘little man’ has had his say. Over the past decade or so, the entire strata of India’s middle class, instead of being able to rise to a higher economic status, has been reduced to the penury of ‘the little man’ due to steady inflation, spiralling cost of living and growing corruption at all levels of social and national life in our country. We have all been reduced by bad government to the economic status of ‘little man’ and we do not want to be reminded of it in the movies we pay to see... Witness therefore the colossal box office success these days of purely escapist films.4(1

Given this backdrop, the Abbas-Sathe team pieced together a simple love story, a story of true love thwarted by family pre¬ judices and the class divide. The boy is rich and Hindu. The girl, Bobby, is from a working-class Christian family. Bobby’s father is loud, boisterous and crude and devoted to his only child. The hero s father is a stiff upper-lip aristocrat and wants to extend his financial empire by arranging an appropriate marriage for his son. But the class rivalry was only spice for a recipe that stressed breathless, obsessive juvenile love. Armed with memories of the Hollywood hit Love Story and countless Archie comics that sold the idea ‘sixteen is not so young anymore’, Raj flung himself desperately into the shooting of Bobby. And this time he succee¬ ded beyond all his expectations. Bobby; when it was released in 1973, was a tremendous success and more than made up for the financial failure of Mera Naam Joker. In retrospect, Bobby represented Raj Kapoor’s grand finale. After this he continued to make films, for he could not live without making films: ‘My films and I: To me it is the same as saying,^my beloved and I, or my life’s breath and I, or my purpose and I! 41 But the passion had gone out of the vocation.

Raj Kapoor • 121

In any case, by the mid-1970s film-making itself had become a different kind of enterprise in Bombay. About the same time that Bobby was released came another film called Zanjeer; starring an struggling, awkwardly tall, young actor, Amitabh Bachchan. The film was a harbinger of things to come in more ways than one. The entry of the ‘angry young man' was not merely a new trend in films; it portended a different kind of India where political events had by now begun to move at a faster pace. The watershed was June 1975, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a national emergency and suspended democratic processes. By this time the character of the hero and the nature of villainy had both begun to change radically in popular films. Gone now were the days of the earlier romantic heart-throbs—Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand. Even the days of Rajesh Khanna, who combined elements of all three stars and made a grand success of it, were over. The ultimate megastar had arrived on the Indian scene: by the early 1980s Amitabh Bachchan was acting in so many films and had become such a pervasive influence that India Today, by then India’s largest selling periodical, entitled its cover story on him ‘The One Man Industry’. Iqbal Masud, who has closely studied the decade-wise shifts in Hindi cinema, concludes that two films of the 1970s were water¬ sheds: Zanjeer, which introduced the scriptwriting team of Salim-Javed and the character of the angry young man, and Shoiay, an Indian version of the spaghetti western. In Zanjeer, the hero as a ruthless smuggler, capable of cold-blooded murder, was taken as a fact of everyday life. The anger and violence of the hero were read psychologically by many as a consequence of the hero’s childhood trauma, but the latent message of the movie was something else. It was anger at the failure of the system to deliver justice. Shoiay is the story of a police officer whose entire family has been killed by a sadistic dacoit. The officer, who is also the land¬ lord of his village, then hires two petty thugs to wreak vengeance on Gabbar wSingh, who murdered his family. Gabbar’s pungent one-liners in the film entered everyday conversation and stayed there. And the wide acceptance and popularity of the irredee¬ mable villain was obvious even in advertisements like ‘ Gabbar ki pasand (Gabbar’s choice)—which used a picture of Gabbar himself holding up a packet of a popular brand of biscuit, the first time in India a screen villain had been so used. I will not

122 • Secret Politics of Our Desires venture even to attempt to unravel the longevity and pervasiveness of a line like Lab tera kya hoga kaliya’ (‘What will happen to you, Kaliya?’) Eventually of course the thakur is denied the satisfaction of killing Gabbar himself, despite his vow to do so. The police arrive just in time to take Gabbar to jail, with promises to the thakur that this time justice will be done. Sholay was released in 1976, when the emergency was still in force and government-sponsored slogans, extolling discipline and respect for the law, were plastered everywhere. Censorship was strict. By the beginning of the 1980s even this had changed. The police in popular films were now either helpless spectators of crime or a party to it. The psychopathic, sleek villain now took many forms, the most recurrent of which was the khadi clad politician. Films like Aaj ka MLA showed how even a simple and honest man, once he entered power politics, degenerated into a criminal. The old world, including the political system that held it together, was collapsing. The only possible responses to this reality, shown in film after film, was either to become a ruthless killer and beat the ungodly at their own game or to destroy the evil in a single, self¬ destructive, cataclysmic act of violence. For instance, in Govind Nihalani’s film, Ardha Satya, a frustrated honest police officer strangles the mafia don who had tormented him. The nadir was reached in the Amitabh Bachchan film, Inquilab, in which an ordinary man rises to power through the manipulations of corrupt and criminal politicians who use him as a front. His final solution, on becoming chief minister, is to shoot the entire cabinet with a machine-gun. Gradually the difference between the hero and the villain became notional; both seemed to symbolize gross violence and revenge; both seemed perfectly comfortable with the increasingly violent Indian political scene. From Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 to the growing frequency of communal riots and caste conflicts, violence had become a part of the banality of everyday existence, at least in urban India. Earlier core concerns of the Indian polity, such as poverty, were already becoming non-issues in public life. In the twilight of his life, Raj looked around to find: ...so much corruption. You feel that the people are becoming more and more crude and vulgar. They seem to have no values. The basic strengths,

Raj Kapoor *123 truthfulness, loyalty, what we considered to be the gems of humanity, don’t exist at all. Basically there is something wrong with the whole system.42

But this simple awareness had already been anticipated by the contents and style of his work. Ram Ten Ganga Maili had already lost out as a timeless allegory—inspired by the mystic preceptor Ramakrishna Paramahansa—and re-emerged in public conscious¬ ness as a tale of contemporary decay. It is unlikely that Raj saw his descent into voyeurism and his own exploitation of sex as a symptom of the decay. In the mid¬ seventies he had made Satyam Shivam Sundaram, thematically akin to Aag, which was widely criticised for its brazen exploitation of sex; it did not do well at the box office. Unaffected by the criticisms, Raj also made a film on the injustices suffered by widows in orthodox Hindu households and made a case for widow re-marriage. Prem Rog, Raj said, was ...my return to purposeful films... womankind symbolises love, affection and warmth. They deserve to be respected and put on a pedestal. They have as much right to happiness as any man but, by and large, they are denied this right. My film is a fight for their right to Happiness. But its not just lecture-bazi. I’m an entertainer first and foremost.43

As an entertainer Raj knew that scenes with scantily clad women sold. Yet he seemed offended at being called a voyeur. In the case of Ram Teri Ganga Maili, Raj claimed that his inspiration came from the imagery of the beautiful Ganga, scantily clad, ‘as divine, as spiritual perfection’. He said, with a touch of bitterness: Fortunately, painters like Raja Ravi Verma and Kanu Desai painted scantily clad, nubile beauties as their vision of Ganga at a time when there wasn’t any holier-than thou-film journalists around to vilify them and sling mud at them. Like the rat-pack did when Raj Kapoor tried to present a similar vision on screen.44

Whatever crude salesmanship he may have used in Ram Teri Ganga Maili, Raj did effectively communicate his criticism of the emerging India. Towards the end of the film, there is a scene where the unscrupulous Bhagwat Chaudhry takes his friend Jiva Sahay to see his new possession, Ganga, who looks hardly sixteen; they find her breast-feeding her baby. The two men stand before her and gape with undisguised lust. Chaudhry shows her off like a prized possession and offers to share her with Sahay, as if she was part of the dowry he was giving to Sahay’s family. Raj never

124 • Secret Politics of Our Desires fully appreciated that scenes such as this conveyed more horror and despair than the depiction of direct violence and atrocities against women. His defence was ‘I don’t profess to be a moralist or a reformist, I am not a preacher or a philosopher or an intellectual. I am just a saying what I feel.’45 By thus disclaiming any role other than that of a film-maker, he thought he was absolving himself of all social responsibility. He used to say with a certain ferocity: Thank God 1 haven’t studied much, thank God I’m not literate, not bookish and haven’t read much,... I’m down to earth and I can feel for the other one, I can smile with him and share his pain and joy.46

But it was never quite that simple. Raj took much pleasure in spreading the impression that he read nothing more than Archie comics, a myth that Reuben’s biography perpetuates. But Raj read other things too, as Reuben himself admits in conversation. The anti-intellectual stance was born of Raj’s conviction that, as an entertainer, his job was to feel rather than intellectualize. His social criticism was basically a gut reaction to the flaws of the system. In this respect he was no different from many in his audiences v/ho did not like the drift of events around them, but could not quite pin-point why things had gone wrong and how they could be set right. Neither ques¬ tioned whether India’s tryst with destiny was itself wrongly conceptualized. Given his understanding of the crisis of India, Raj’s concept of intervention was his own: There is communalism and now there is so-called terrorism—everyone claiming his land. What land? Whose is it? Ours: There is so much we can do by making entertaining films, with these issues in the background. We can reach millions of people who today are ignorant about these things and create a consciousness and awareness.47

The life of a conscientious film-maker had become very difficult. As Raj saw it, there was now a complete absence of ground rules in film-making: ’Anyone and everyone can become a producer or a director without any qualifications.’ Performers had become taxis—they would go anywhere with anyone who paid them the fare. The old nexus between smuggler-financiers and film production had deepened; now the smugglers were themselves producing films. Since the pay and the perks were much higher, more and more ’taxis’, as Raj called performers, preferred to work with these producers. Even the zest for and

Raj Kapoor • 125

commitment to cinema as cinema had declined; film-making had become an assembly-line industry. Raj felt all were ‘stuck in quicksand’, sinking slowly but surely.’48 Time was running out; the regrets for missed opportunities were surprisingly many for so rich a life. The awareness that he was already a legend did not seem to lighten his burden: ‘I don’t think I have reached anywhere near what I wanted to be. My prayer is that Lord, don’t take me away when I have just started to play.’49 Far more hurtful was the sense of loneliness. The death of lyricist Shailendra in 1966, on Raj’s birthday, hit him especially badly. Shailendra, one of the last survivors of the original R. K. team, had produced a film of his own that year and had been let down by many friends and colleagues in that connection. The tension of being a producer and the associated financial problems, contem¬ poraries believe, proved too much for the gentle Shailendra. Alcohol also contributed. He was followed by Jaikishan and then Mukesh; both died very young. Raj, used to working in a closeknit team, was shattered. Abbas was around, but they had not formally worked together since Bobby. Between bouts of ill-health Abbas too persevered with The Last Page’ and the production and direction of his own films. By the time he died in 1987 Abbas had 71 books to his credit. Abbas lived for writing; Raj lived his life as if it were a film. Even his nostalgia used the language of film direction: It seemed as though my own shadow was watching me, seeing everything in terms of shots, with all the wipes, dissolves fade-ins, cuts—everything telescoped into a mass of unedited celluloid scripts, caught by the camera’s unblinking eye, in the tireless gaze of life’s arc lamps. Today each has gone his separate way after his own personal mirage... and I find myself standing again as it were on the threshold of a fresh phase of my life.''0

Abbas the writer had the last word by having his will and testament published as his last ‘Last Page’: ‘So, I take leave of ALL with a smile of understanding and LOVE. Love me if you can. That is the FATEH A that you may recite.’ The all-caps were uniquely Abbas. He is buried in Bombay with copies of the ’Last Page’. Raj, the performer, also had the last word by being centre stage at his last ‘show’. Doctors had ruled out his travelling to Delhi to receive the Dada Saheb Phalke award from the President of India. But Raj had wanted this award for too long and, though his asthmatic condition continued to worsen, he made it to the

126 • Secret Politics of Our Desires auditorium. There he gave his last living shot, for all of India’s TV audiences to see. Bloated and breathless, he struggled to get up from his seat when the time came for actually taking the award. The President of India walked down from the stage to shake Raj’s hands warmly and confer the award, just before the recipient passed out. He died exactly a month later, on 2, June 1988, after lying in near-coma at Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences. As he had requested, they took his body to R. K. Studios, ‘for it is possible that amidst the glitter of all the lights I may get up again and shout “Action: Action”.’51 Let us return to the beginning, to the election scene at Allahabad in 1984, where H. N. Bahuguna, the veteran political leader, was fighting a losing battle with Amitabh Bachchan, mega-film star and childhood friend of the new Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. At stake was the Lok Sabha seat of Allahabad. One evening, as I followed Bachchan to a few public meetings, we arrived at a school compound where the candidate was to speak from a stage erected on the roof of a single-storey building. As thousands stood and waited in semi-darkness, Bachchan's sta¬ tuesque frame looked even more towering under the powerful spotlights. As he began his speech, the famous deep timbre voice resounding from different corners of the compound, the jostling ceased. ‘ Duniyan bhar mein jahan bhi main gay a him aur logon ne mujhse pucha hai ki turn kahan ke rahnewale ho maine ek hi jawab diya hai—chora Ganga Kinare wala. ’ (‘Wherever I have

travelled in the world and people have asked me where I am irom, I have always replied—I’m a lad from the banks of the Ganga .) The translation in English is as flat as the wild cheering and delight of the audience was incomprehensible to someone unfamiliar with Bachchan’s hip-swinging rendition of the song, Khaike Pan Banaraswala' (in the film Don) from which he borrowed the line ‘chora Ganga kinare wala\ translated above. After that it did not matter what he said; the crowd cheered him anyway. Somewhere in the background was the silver-haired Teji Bachchan, whose lite-long friendship with Indira, the heir of Anand Bhavan, had put her son at the centre-stage of politics. Her husband, Harivanshrai Bachchan, was a famous romantic poet. K. A. Abbas, who gave Amitabh his first film role, was an

Raj Kapoor *127

admirer and friend of Harivanshrai. Bachchan’s election plank was that voters should support him in strengthening his recently orphaned friend Rajiv Gandhi’s hand. (The Congress (I) election symbol was also a hand raised in the gesture of blessing.) The actor admitted, in speech after speech, that he was a novice to politics. And this, in an atmosphere where the politician was perceived as degenerate criminal, could only invoke the imagery of an innocent, ordinary citizen fighting corrupt and cynical politicians. It also incidentally was perfectly consistent with the characters Bachchan had played in dozens of films. Rajiv Gandhi and Bachchan, as the youthful symbols of cleanliness in public life, were as much the natural heirs of Indira Gandhi as the galaxy of political leaders who cultivated urban toughs for private business and party interests, election ‘manage¬ ment’ and even for engineering communal or caste riots. Did Nehruvian politics lead directly and unavoidably to the creation of the de-politicized middle class that tacitly or actively supported both the violence and the rebellion against it? The question is beyond the scope of this book, but one one point in this connection will have to be made. Raj Kapoor’s generation responded to the collapse of the Nehruvian vision exactly as one would have expected it to. Some became active critics of Indira Gandhi who, they thought, had deviated from her father’s true path; many of them went to jail during the Emergency, Others became her loyal followers out of plain self-interest; still others almost deliberately cultivated a blind spot. Abbas was one of them. Following her assassination, he devoted four consecutive ‘Last Page’ columns to eulogies about Indira Gandhi and to support the ascent of Rajiv Gandhi to the throne. The massacre of the Sikhs, following the assassination, received one fleeting reference. There is no mention of its scale nor of those responsible. A third response was to acknowledge the political decay, but either remain indifferent or hedge bets by maintaining cordial relations with the rulers. Raj Kapoor belonged to this set. He may often have been casual about events around him, in later years, but he was not indifferent. But just as it had been easy to be thrilled with the Nehruvian dream when it sold well, it was now easy to slide into lethargy and hopelessness. Raj had never separated real life and reel life; for him they always were

128

•

Secret Politics of Our Desires

superimposed on one another. Now that the price for this forgetfulness had to be paid, the likes of Raj withdrew into themselves, into alcoholism and depression. The most telling example of this failure of self-reflexibility was to come, however, after Raj’s death. It came in the shape of a stone-faced Amitabh Bachchan standing beside Rajiv Gandhi’s coffin. Gandhi had been blown apart in an explosion triggered by a woman who had strapped the explosives to her body. Did this nihilistic act of vengeance, by a suicidal angry young woman, ever remind Bachchan of his own reel-life?

NOTES I am specially grateful to V.P. Sathe, Radhu Karmakar and Iqbal Masud; extensive conversations with them were essential to the substance of this chapter. I would also like to thank Bunny Reuben, Shashi Kapoor, Randhir Kapoor, Hasrat Jaipuri, Rauf Ahmed, Haroon Rashid and P. Sainath. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

K. A. Abbas, Mad, Mad, Mad World of Indian Films (Delhi, Hind Pocket Books, 1977), p.ll. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 13 From ‘Raj Kapoor’, a Films Division Documentary directed by Siddharth Kak. Abbas, Mad, Mad. Mad World of Indian Films, p. 29. K. A. Abbas, I am not an Island: An experiment in Autobiography (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), p. 259. Abbas, ‘Last Page’, Blitz, 30 June 1987. Bunny Reuben, Raj Kapoor The Fabulous Showman: An Intimate Biography (Bombay: National Film Development Corporation, 1988), p. 57.

15.

From 'Raj Kapoor’, Films Division Documentary. Ritu Nanda, Raj Kapoor (Bombay: R. K. Films and Studios, and Moscow: Iskusstvo Publishers, 1991), p. 88. Reuben; p. 116. Nanda, p. 102. Reuben, p. 113. Nanda, p. 98. Ibid., p. 118.

16. 17. 18. 19.

From Raj Kapoor , Films Division Documentary. Abbas, I am not an Island, p. 358. Ibid., p. 360. Nanda, p. 156.

20.

Abbas, I am not an Island\ p. 362.

11. 12. 13. 14.

Raj Kapoor • 129 21.

Nanda, p. 67.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

Abbas, / am not an Island\ p. 372. Ibid., p. 380. Reuben, p. 117. Nanda, pp. 50, 51. Ibid., p. 54.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

The R. K. team repeated the effect in an entirely different setting in Shree 420. Nanda, p. 55. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 74. Ibid., p. 106. Reuben, p. 301. Nanda, p. 37. Reuben, p. 325. Ibid. Ibid., p. 144. Ibid. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 198. Nanda, p. 136 Nanda, p. 146. Reuben., pp. 302-3. Ibid., p. 328. Nanda, p. 146. Raj Kapoor, Films Division Documentary. Nanda, p. 143. Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., p. 158. Ibid., p. 130. Ibid., p. 104.

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY Aag (1948) Producer-Director: Raj Kapoor Music: Ram Ganguly Lyrics: Behazad Lucknavi, Inder Raj Anand Dialogues: Inder Raj Anand Camera: V. N. Reddy Main Performers: Nargis, Kamini Kaushal, Nigar Sultana and Raj Kapoor

130 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Barsat (1949)

Producer-Director: Raj Kapoor Music: Shankar-Jaikishan Story: Ramanand Sagar Screenplay: Raj Kapoor and Ramanand Sagar Camera: Jal Mistry Main Performers: Nargis, Raj Kapoor, Premnath, Nimmi and K. N. Singh Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh and Mohd. Rafi Awara (1951)

Producer-Director: Raj Kapoor Music: Shankar-Jaikishan Lyrics: Shailendra and Hasrat laipuri Story: K. A. Abbas and V. P. Sathe Screenplay and Dialogues: K. A. Abbas Camera: Radhu Karmakar Dream sequence choreographer: Madam Simkie Main Performers: Prithviraj, Nargis, Raj Kapoor and K. N. Singh. Playback Singers: Lata, Mukesh, Mohd. Rafi, Shamshad Begum and Manna Dey Aah (1953) Producer: Raj Kapoor Director: Raja Nawathe Music: Shankar-Jaikishan Lyrics: Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri Story and Screenplay: Inder Raj Anand Camera: Jayant R. Pathare Main Performers: Nargis, Raj Kapoor, Vijaylaxmi, Pran and Mukesh. Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar and Mukesh Boot Polish (1954)

Producer: Raj Kapoor Director: Prakash Arora Music: Shankar-Jaikishan Lyrics: Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri and Deepak Story and Screenplay: Bhanu Pratap

Raj Kapoor • 131

Main Performers: Naaz, Ratan Kumar, David and Chand Burque Playback Singers: Asha Bhosle, Madhubala Jhaveri, Manna Dey, Talat Mahmood and Mohamed Rafi Shree 420 (1955)

Producer-Director: Raj Kapoor Music: Shankar-Jaikishan Lyrics: Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri Story: K. A. Abbas Screenplay: K. A. Abbas and V. P. Sathe Camera: Radhu Karmakar Main Performers: Nargis, Raj Kapoor, Nadira, Nemo and Lalita Pawar Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle, Manna Dey, Mohd. Rafi and Mukesh Jagte Raho (1956)

Producer: Raj Kapoor Directors: Shambhu Mitra ad Amit Moitra Music: Salil Choudhury Lyrics: Shailendra, Prem Dhawan Story and Screenplay: Shambhu Mitra and Amit Maitra Camera: Radhu Karmakar Main Performers: Pradeep Kumar, Sumitra Devi, Smriti Biswas, Pahari Sanyal, Motilal, Pran and Raj Kapoor. Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh, Asha Bhosle, Sandhya Mukherjee, Mohd. Rafi and Balbir. Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai (1961)

Producer: Raj Kapoor Director: Radhu Karmakar Music: Shankar-Jaikishan Lyrics: Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri Story and Screenplay: Arjun Dev Rashk Camera: Tara Dutt Main Performers: Raj Kapoor, Padmini, Pran and Lalita Pawar Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh, Manna Dey, Geeta Dutt, Asha Bhosle and Mahendra Kapoor.

132 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Sangarn (1964)

Producer, Editor and Director: Raj Kapoor Music: Shankar-Jaikishan Lyrics: Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri Story and Screenplay: Inder Raj Anand Main Performers: Raj Kapoor, Vyjayantimala, Rajendra Kumar and Lalita Pawar Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh, Mohd. Rafi and Mahendra Kapoor Mera JSaam Joker (1970)

Producer, Editor and Director: Raj Kapoor Music: Shankar-Jaikishan Lyrics: Late Shailendra, Hasrat Jaipuri, Neeraj, Prem Dhavan and Shaily Shailendra Story, Screenplay and Dialogues: K. A. Abbas Camera: Radhu Karmakar Main Performers: Raj Kapoor, Manoj Kumar, Simi, Rishi Kapoor, Dharmendra, Kseina Rabinkina, Rajendra Kumar, Padmini and Rajendra Nath Playback Singers: Mukesh, Asha Bhosle, Mohd. Rafi, Manna Dey and Master Nitin Bobby (1973)

Producer, Editor and Director: Raj Kapoor Music: Laxmikant Pyarelal Lyrics: Anand Bakshi, Indrajit Singh Tulsi and Vithalbhai Patel Story: K. A. Abbas Screenplay: K. A. Abbas and V. P. Sathe Camera: Radhu Karmakar Main Performers: Rishi Kapoor, Dimple Kapadia, Pran, Prem Nath and Durga Khote Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Manna Dey, Shailendra Singh and Chanchal Satyam Shira/n Sundaram (1978)

Producer, Editor and Director: Raj Kapoor Music: Laxmikant Pyarelal Lyrics: Narendra Sharma, Anand Bakshi and Vithalbhai Patel

Raj Kapoor • 133

Writer: Jainendra Jain Camera: Radhu Karmakar Main Performers: Shashi Kapoor, Zeenat Aman, Kanhaiyalal, A. K. Hangal and David Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Manna Dey, Bhupendra, Late Mukesh and Nitin Mukesh Prein Rog (1982)

Producer, Editor and Director: Raj Kapoor Music: Laxmikant Pyarelal Lyrics: Pandit Narendra Sharma, Santosh Anand, Ameer Qazalbash Story: Kamna Chandra Screenplay: Jainendra Jain Main Performers: Shammi Kapoor, Rishi Kapoor, Padmini Kolhapure, Nanda, Tanuja, Raza Murad and Kulbhushan Kharbanda Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Sudha Malhotra, Suresh Wadkar and Anwar Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985)

Producer: Randhir Kapoor Editor-Director and Writer: Raj Kapoor Music: Ravindra Jain Lyrics: Ravindra Jain, Hasrat Jaipuri and Ameer Qazalbash Screenplay: K. K. Singh, Jyoti Swaroop and V. P. Sathe Camera: Radhu Karmakar Main Performers: Rajiv Kapoor, Divya Rana, Saeed Jaffrey, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Raza Murad and Mandakini Playback Singers: Lata Mangeshkar, Suresh Wadkar

3 How angry is the Angry Young Man? Rebellion9 in Conventional Hindi Films

‘

FAREEDUDDIN KAZMI

H

indi commercial cinema is usually considered purely escapist fare—a view that has strengthened prejudices against the genre to the point where it has been neglected not only by the intellectuals, who deem it trivial, but also by serious film critics. Implicit in such a view is the belief that these films are not only kitsch, devoid of any aesthetic value, but that they are fully divorced from reality, existing in a fantasy land created by themselves. They are at best exotic products of another world, patronized by people of inferior intellectual capabilities. This condescension of elite critics and the resolute indifference of the academic community are slowly coming to an end. Many are realizing that in a country like India, where more than onethird live below the poverty line, where nearly half the population is non-literate, where private radios and TVs are a luxury, the cinema is the cheapest, most accessible and effective medium of mass communication and image building. Psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, folk-lorists, structural linguists, for long cocooned in their disciplinary orthodoxies, are now being forced to come out and take note of this ‘strange’ and curious medium. For it is becoming clear that, whether one likes it or not, a large part of the Indian consciousness is shaped through these films. Now that we are more secure in the consensus that the mainstream Hindi film is to Indian art what the urban marriage band is to Indian music,’ says Ashis Nandy, ‘perhaps

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 135

we can turn our attention to what society’s biggest and most influential mythmaker seeks to communicate about the problems of living in this corner of the globe.’1 Any serious study of popular cinema in India must first acknow¬ ledge its multi-dimensional structure. No mass medium is simply a sum total of all the actions it portrays or the messages it beams through these actions; it includes layers of meanings superimposed on one another, all of which contribute to its effect. In fact, some of the hidden messages may be more important than the overt ones, since such hidden messages often escape the controls of consciousness; they can less perceptibly sink into the spectator’s mind. This is consistent with the assumption made by some social scientists that some of the political and social trends of our times feed on irrational, often unconscious, motivations. The hidden messages frequently reinforce conventional, rigid, ‘pseudo-realistic’ attitudes, similar to the accepted ideas propagated by more ‘rational’ surface messages. Conversely, a number of repressed messages, which play a large role, manifest themselves on the surface in jests, suggestive situations and other similar devices. For instance, Satish Bahadur argues that songs and dances in Hindi films are generally used as substitutes for kissing and sexual intercourse.2 Such interactions reflect attempts to channelize audi¬ ence reaction in particular directions and ways, and for particular purposes. To understand these, it is important to understand the role and function of ideology. Ideology here is an ensemble of various representations which produce an appropriate consciousness. It signifies the way men and women live out their roles in class society—the values, ideas and images which tie them to their social functions and prevent them from a true knowledge of society as a whole. The ideology of a social formation not only reflects the economic processes of the society, but also, more significantly, of embedding this economic process in the psychological structures of the people who constitute the society. This way every social order produces in its members the structure it needs to achieve its main aims. This is made possible because ideology, by projecting itself as ‘lived experience’ and therefore ‘artless’, manages to ‘naturalize’ itself. This is where its seductive power lies. It makes everyone

136 • Secret Politics of Our Desires feel at home in his or her world by insisting, first and foremost, that that world is in fact the world, the world which is the natural order of things, is preordained by God and physical laws to be just the way it is. However, ideology does not descend upon the populace from some demonic politics. In the contemporary world, it is usually an impersonal system which produces reality for every subject of a culture. And it does this not so much by filling everyone’s minds with the objectives and values that make up the culture as by shaping the very forms of organization by which the subject constructs reality for himself or herself.3

From such a point of view, we can begin to see the specifically ideological functions of conventional cinema in India. All films are particular ways of seeing the world and, therefore, as I hope to show, have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the ideology of an age. In the cinema, audiences are in the first place assigned the role of spectators beneath the narrating authority of the film. Straining to totalize the world they inhabit, struggling to achieve a sense of personal unity, they submit will¬ ingly, even passionately, to the experience of cohesion which the film delivers to them in the beautiful composition and content of its images and in the exhilarating ‘logic’ of its tale. Inside the movie theatre there unrolls a spectacle in which human beings are the centre of attention, a narrative in which knowledge finally graces the enigmas of the plot and in which an ending, whether tragic or comic, is always attained. In a cinema, the viewers experience themselves as the totalizing agents of whatever appears before their eyes. Thus the machinery of cinema, in this case one that relies literally on intermittent motion and on the operations of labora¬ tories and chemicals, comes to take on the function of producing reality lor its spectators, a seamless, coherent reality both in image and story. This underwrites in each spectator the belief that life itself, no matter how fragmented it may appear, is finally coherent

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 137 and that his or her own position in it is fully accounted for. It shows that the world we live in is already a closed, destined universe. In the words of Umberto Eco, A perpetual labour quietly and surreptitiously adjusts human subjects to the machine of cinema and, through this machine, to a cinematized version of reality. While advertising itself as fully open to the open world, cinema is a highly delimited conventional emitter of messages about how things look and how they should be treated.4 At this point, a clarification. I do not subscribe to the musty concept of ideology which tends to see art merely as a reflection of dominant ideologies in a crude one-to-one correspondence between the ‘base’ and the ‘superstructure’. Such a concept is unable to explain why so many works of art actually challenge the ideological assumptions of their time. Nor is it sensitive to the concept of ‘unevenness’ Karl Marx talked about in the context of ‘unequal relationship of the development of material production to artistic production.’5 Building upon Leon Trotsky’s belief that ‘Art has a high degree of “autonomy”,’ I believe criticism should seek to explain a work of art in terms of the ideological structure of which it is a part, and which it transforms in art. In other words, it should search for the principle which both ties the work to ideology and distances it from it. In fact, this is the hallmark of a great work of art. Though held within ideology, it manages to distance itself from it to the point where, according to Althusser, it permits us to ‘feel’ and ‘perceive’ the ideology from which it springs. By doing this, it allows us to ‘see’ the nature of that ideology, and reveals to us its limits. In this way, art, as Pierre Macherey claimed, contributes to our deliverance from ideological illusion. Conventional Hindi films, unlike great works of art, become subservient to the dominant ideologies since they fail to distance themselves from such ideologies, and instead of challenging the ideological assumptions of their times, tend to reinforce and perpetuate them. In India, the mass media are primary techno¬ logies of ideology, with the Hindi conventional cinema standing in the forefront of them because of its remarkable ‘illusionistic’ guise and totalist framework and because of the enthusiasm with which it is received by the people. This can be shown in various ways and at different levels, though such an analysis is clearly beyond the purview of this

138 • Secret Politics of Our Desires chapter. What this chapter seeks to do is to focus on the myth of rebellion as projected in the most successful films of the last decade. The choice is not arbitrary. On 15 August 1975, a film called Sholay was released. Within a couple of shaky weeks, it set about resolutely to create a new film history. It became the first film in the entire history of Indian cinema to gross more than a crore in every single territory in which it was released in its initial run (normally calculated for the first eighteen months after release). Since Sholay; in the fifteen years between 1973 and 1987, twelve other films acquired what in trade circles is called the ‘Big C mark—a film which grosses more than a crore in at least one territory.6 Of these thirteen films, rebellion has been the recurrent theme in as many as ten. Not included in this list are films like Zanjeer, Dee war Men Awaz Suno, AajkiAwaz, Trishuletc., which though they failed to make the ‘Big C mark, nevertheless were superhits and had rebellion as their central theme. Precisely because of this, as anyone even remotely familiar with the world of Hindi films would know, for nearly two decades the "in’ phrases that became cliches in any discussion of such films were ‘angry young man’ and ‘anti¬ establishment films’. These films have had a phenomenal effect on the minds of millions of people who willingly received and greedily consumed their message. The success of the genre can be gauged in another way. Of the two superstars thrown up by the industry, Rajesh Khanna (who had dominated the scene before the entry of these films) remained at the top for between four and five years, in a career spanning 86 films.7 Khanna was the hero in three superhits, none of which could qualify for the "Big C’ category. On the other hand, Amitabh Bachchan, the actor who has been the most consistent and successful symbol of the genre we are discussing, has been at the top for more than fifteen years, and as many as nine of his films were "Big C’. It is obvious that any study of Hindi conventional films must come to terms with such pheno¬ menal success. But before doing that, we must locate the context in which Bachchan entered the Indian political and social scene. By the 1970s the euphoria of the post-independence era had evaporated. The contradictions of the capitalist development which India had opted for at the time of independence had sharpened and become evident. The consensual politics of the Congress Party

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 139 could no longer manage these contradictions, and had broken down. In fact, a majority of the states in the 1967 general elections had opted for non-Congress governments. The legitimacy of the different agencies of the state like the legislature, judiciary and administration was in a crisis. The marginalized had long been alienated from the official-legal machinery. The ruling class, living in a period of general capitalist decline in a backward society, did not have the ability to solve the fundamental problems of society. Its policies only aggravated the social crisis, sharpening class and other social conflicts, polarizing different classes and intensifying the economic and social misery of large sections of the masses, especially of the lower-middle classes. Unemployment and inflation were on the rise and the standard of living was falling. Urban processes in the major metropolises have already produced cities within cities. For instance, in Bombay nearly onethird of the population lived in slums or on pavements, with minimum civic amenities; they were displaced from their original social milieu, without being integrated into the city. Even this animal-like existence was not secure; their slums were treated as illegal occupation of urban space and they had to pay a fine every month.8 While they lived in constant fear of eviction from or demolition of their urban hutments, they could expect no support from the official-legal machinery. It is in this context that Amitabh Bachchan’s persona as an angry young man should be understood. Bachchan in his films is always one of the oppressed. In Dee war, he is a coolie in the dockyard who later on becomes a kingpin of the underworld. In Sholay, he is a petty crook, in Coolie, a coolie, in Adalat, a simple villager who is forced to flee from his village, in Kalia, a taxi driver, in Mard, a tangewala, in Naseeb, a waiter, in Amar Akbar Anthony, a bootlegger, in Namak Halal, a family servant, in Akhri Raasta, a small-time party worker, in Don, a village simpleton. In all these films the hero, though he belongs to a subordinate class, rises to equal his exploiters. His image is of one who can give justice to his class when the police cannot. He protects them from official tyrannies like the demolition of their hutments (consider the innumerable scenes where the demolition of slums is stopped by the hero in the nick of time) and he functions as a private adjudicator dispensing instant justice which the officiallegal system fails to deliver. His system of justice and his role as an underworld don are therefore projected as a means of

140 • Secret Politics of Our Desires redistributing power between the legally recognized city and the marginalized city. It is the articulation of the anguish of this marginalized sector that largely explains the phenomenon of Amitabh Bachchan. Significantly, except for Shoiay, almost all films in our list crossed the ‘Big C’ mark in the Bombay territory. And in Bombay, as anywhere else, it is basically this segment of the population which sees films repeatedly, literally again and again. The protagonist is not merely a subaltern; he is a much wronged and exploited person. He has suffered physically, emotionally and or psychologically. The members of his family have also suffered; even when they belong to the police, they are not spared. In Shoiay; the entire family of Baldev Singh, the police officer, is massacred; in Zanjeey Vijai’s parents are gunned down in front of his own eyes. In Deewar, Vijai’s father deserts the family, so they have to face immense problems merely to survive. Vijai has to live throughout his life with ‘Mera-bap chor hai' (My father is a thief) unjustly tattooed on his hand. In Amar Akbar Anthony, Coolie, Naseeb, Mard, a happy home is torn asunder and the family members separated. The mother either becomes deaf, dumb (as in Mard) or blind (as in Amar Akbar Anthony) or is reduced to a vegetable. In Muqaddar ka Sikander; Sikander is a poor orphan who is treated shabbily by society; in Andha Kanoon, the parents of the two protagonists (one of whom is a police officer) are murdered and their sister gang-raped and murdered in front of their own eyes. In Meri Awaz Suno, police officer Sushil Kumar’s pregnant wife is punched and kicked in front of him until she aborts and dies a terrifying death; in Mard' the hero’s parents are captured and imprisoned in a concentration camp and systematically tortured. In Pratighat, the female protagonist is publicly stripped and humiliated. The protagonists may belong to the oppressed classes, but they do not take things lying down. They are fully capable of making their oppressors bite the dust. All these conventional films project an aggressive, activist image of the individual, whether he be a silent, smouldering loner (Zanjeer; Deewar, Shoiay, Trishul) or a dancing, singing, comic hero (Amar Akbar Anthony, Laawaris, Naseeb, Sharabi, Namak Halal, Don, Mard) or a combination of the two (Muqaddar ka Sikander, Andha Kanoon, Shahenshati) or an ordinary next-door man/woman (Ek Duje ke Liye, Pratighat). The protagonists are always doers, achievers, always

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 141 on the move. They never sit or meditate, but fight their own battles or those of others. And the fight is never in vain. There is no hesitation either, no moments of self-doubt; they are quite clear about what they want and how to achieve it. The revolt in these films is not directed against the nature and structure of institutions fulfilling specific social roles according to the demands of a larger social system, but against the character disorders of the personnel manning these institutions, who actually are themselves victims of the system. The givens of the system are never brought under question; they are not even raised. In each and every film, the hero takes up a problem, either voluntarily or out of compulsion, and solves it successfully at the risk of his life. The protagonist may or may not be alive at the end of the film; it is not considered important. For what ensures viewer identification is the certainty that in the end the problem would be solved. None of the conventional films disappoints its audience on this score. Thus, in Zanjeer the hero takes on a gang of smugglers and drug traffickers and liquidates them; in ShoJay the dreaded dacoit Gabbar Singh and his gang is wiped out; in Muqaddar ka Sikandar,; Sikander spurns the love of Zohrabai, kills Dilawar and even sacrifices his own life to make his ‘memsahib’ happy; in Amar Akbar Anthony; the three heroes not only restore the original dismembered family but in the process do away with gangs of smugglers and urban hoodlums; in Andha Kanoon, the protagonists systematically kill the murderers, rapists and racketeers while exposing the inadequacy of the judicial process; in Meri Awaz Suno, the hero wipes out an entire crime syndicate including the cabinet ministers and police officers participating in it; in Ek Duje ke Liye, the young lovers sacrifice their lives but successfully fight irrational prejudices, linguistic and regional chauvinism; in Coolie, the hero, aided by the heavens, successfully fights against corrupt politicians, the local mafia and other racketeers; in Mard' he takes on the might of the British Empire and its compradors and vanquishes them; in Ram Teri Ganga Mail/' corrupt politicians and profiteers are made to bite the dust; in Namak Halal and Laawaris, the evil designs of the managers and other deceivers is exposed and defeated; in Pratighat the heroine takes on the powerful politician-policegoonda combine and liquidates it. Also, before the end is reached, the villains in these films are taunted, humiliated, battered and generally cut down to size.

142 • Secret Politics of Our Desires These sequences constitute the high points of the film and considerably add to their Tepeat vaiue i in Zanjeer; the sequence where Teja (the villain) is shown dining in a fashionable restaurant and Vijai, just released from prison, nonchalantly walks up to him and declares ‘Main aa gaya hun Teja (T have come Teja’). Before Teja can recover from the shock Vijai parks himself in front of him and says, ‘Buzdilon ki tarah main pichhe se hum]a nahin karta. Itni asani se nahin marenge. Chhe mahine tak bar pal tumhe mera khauf rahega* (T do not attack from the back like a coward. I will not kill you that easily. For six months, every single moment you will live in terror of me.’) When Teja, totally psyched by now, puts up a brave front and says, ‘Turn hamare sath a jao, yeh vada raha main tumhari zindagi bana dung a' (‘Come and join me and I promise to make your life a success’), Vijai in a cold, sinister tone declares, 'Aur main tumhari barbad kar dunga (‘And I shall ruin yours’) and walks away. Evidently, the sledgehammer impact of this sequence gives tremendous vicarious pleasure to the audience. Similarly the swimming pool sequence in Mard,, the house¬ breaking sequence in Coolie, the Ap kaa kya hoga janab-e-ali (‘What shall become of you my lord?’) song and dance sequence in Laawaris, the brilliant election sequence that goes with the song 'Hum a re balma beiman humen pa tan e aye hain’ (‘My dishonest beloved has come to seduce me’) in Pratighat, the court¬ room scene in Andha Kanoon, the 'Honi ko anhoni kar de' ("We can make the probable improbable’) sequence in Amar Akbar Anthony,, Vijai’s exchanges with Dawar and Sawant in Deewar, the scene where Gabbar is literally made to bite the dust in his encounter with Jai and Veeru on the festival of Holi, in Sholay— all these sequences seem to provide massive emotional satisfaction to the audience and are definitely the high points of these films. The villains depicted as powerful, invulnerable and privileged members ot society—when they are insulted, humiliated and brought down from the pedestal (on which they seem to be safely perched) to the level of the dominated, not only ensure viewer identification but also help to articulate the innermost desires and Gntasies of the audience. Such sequences not only emphasize the extraordinariness of the protagonists, but also re-inforce the image of the aggressive, activist individual. Implicitly, in seeking revenge, the heroes become like the villains they pursue. They become violent and ruthless; and they

How angry is the Angry Young Man? * 143 ignore or break the law with impunity. Actually, from the beginning, there is no clear moral distinction between the heroes and the villains, since the heroes are often underground characters, crooks, or petty thieves (as in Sholay, Muqaddar ka Sikandar and Laawaris). What these films do is to present the hero in a sympathetic light, and the villain as a personification of evil. The battle between the two becomes an end in itself and, finally, the scourge that was plaguing society, the one which had disturbed the original order, is removed. The hero surrenders or is caught by the ‘legal state’. These are the devices through which conventional films ensure viewer identification and successfully ‘interpellate’ the audience. The latent aim of the narrative is to neutralize, absorb or displace any potential of genuinely deviant, subversive activity and project a totally different concept of the individual. The pivot of this argument is the myth of the extraordinary individual. Overtly, the film hero is depicted as one embodying the fiercely independent Promethean vision of the person. He is strong, handsome, courageous, quick-witted—a man (and it is always a man) of exceptional abilities. He can take on not only several villains at a time, but even the whole of society. To make him so, a conscious disjunction is established between the hero and the others. The ‘ordinariness’ of the masses, their helplessness and impotency, ‘their non-entitied existence’ is emphasized to bring the extraordinariness of the protagonist into sharper relief. And yet the same hero is at every turn bogged down by fate. He is not the master of nature but is always at its mercy. He must invoke the gods to give him strength or the gods must intervene on his behalf in his fight against the adversary (Deewar, Amar Akbar Anthony, Mard, Coolie, Pratighat, Ram Teri Ganga Maili). Our ‘super-man’ is dominated by and subservient to nature (fate), God (religion), mother and country. The hero may conquer the villains and by killing them remove the scourge plaguing his society, but he does so only through a combination of divine benediction and his mother’s blessings. If the gods do not smile at him he is impotent; so he must keep on waiting for the gods to help him. What at one point seems social intervention and activism is at another fatalism and passivity. As revealing are the relationships between the different characters. The identity of the heroine collapses into that of the

144 • Secret Politics of Our Desires hero’s who merges his in that of his mother, who in turn merges her identity in her husband’s. The father, however, is usually quite insignificant, having only a very small role. In this merry-go-round, there is no full-bodied, independent individual. All are pliant, submissive, dependent; all smoothly and willingly fit into the social roles assigned to them. Thus, though overtly we have an aggre¬ ssive, activist, radical image of the individual, the hidden message is that the individual is unfree, dependent, malleable, dominated. He or she is a passive object, not an active subject. This neutralization of all potentially subversive and oppositional messages operates in yet another way—through the ‘de-classification’ of the protagonist. He may be a subaltern, but the focus is never on his social role or on the problems arising out of his socio-economic position in society. The narrative draws out the protagonist from his specific class position and presents him in such a way that he could belong to any class, even to the domi¬ nating classes. This is done by glamorizing his lifestyle so that even if he is a coolie, the life he leads could be the envy of even the privileged classes. He wears the best of clothes, moves around on macho motorbikes or exotic tongas, has beautiful girls falling all over him, lives in a comfortable house, never having to worry about his or his family’s daily bread, has a healthy family life and staunch friends willing to lay down their lives for him. The corrosive effects of poverty are never portrayed. The animal-like existence which the deprived lead is alien to our protagonist. The fact that the proletariat must work is suppressed; the fact that this work is alienating and deadening is ignored. It is precisely because of this that all these films depict living with danger and surviving through personal skills as an emblem of social indepen¬ dence. Hence the focus on action, adventure, romance and edgeof-the-seat excitement. It is a daydream response to the real problem of the nature of work in industrial capitalist society. It is a fantasy displacement that accounts for the ambiguity in these films: they recognize a working-class problem, but postulate only a defensive, apolitical, asocial, individualist escape. The message, from both the angry young man and the comic hero, is simple. The deprived should be content with whatever they have; armed with a smile and some personal combat skills, one can face all problems. Given the right kind of temperament lilc can a song, the moral of which, following the song sung by Amitabh Bachchan in Toofan, could be: ‘Don’t worry, be

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 145 happy.’ This is what comic heroes in films like Amar Akbar Anthony; Naseeb, Namak Halal\ Mard, Coolie and Laawaris are also waiting to say. One correlation of this message is the near-absence of any depiction of the protagonists in their place of work. Except for a couple of shots where the hero would be shown doing what he is supposed to do—being a coolie, a. tangewala or a lecturer—in the rest of the film it is hard to tell their profession. They could be anyone. The entire characterization locates the hero or the heroine in a non-productive, non-class position. This way their possible socially creative role is ignored, their specific class-related problems displaced by their isolated, individualized problems, and all social issues depoliticized. Marx suggested that human labour— in human practice, conceived of as a process in which humanity transforms the objective reality—is a process of self-creation. By diverting attention from the hero’s productive role, these films seem to foreclose any possibility of these heroes fully realizing their uniquely human attributes—self-creation, self-realization and freedom. The attitude to authority in these films follows a similar pattern— acknowledging a genuine problem but proposing an ambiguous solution. Central to the films is the battle against some injustice or oppression. It is this which propels the narrative forward, pro¬ vides the mainspring for the development of the plot, and interpellates the audience. Thus not only do the protagonists adopt a seemingly aggressive, oppositional stance towards the authorities, but the entire narrative is steeped in radical discourse and rebellious posturing. What is significant about the films of the 1970s and the 1980s is that the target of attack is not merely the villain but also the state and its institutions, especially the police and the judiciary. The dominant image that is sought to be projected is that the state and its institutions are weak, ineffective, and incapable of protecting its members and the goals and values of the society. Overtly, it is a scathing attack on the state and its institutions. The police are corrupt and toothless, the legislators self-seeking and unscrupulous, the judiciary blind and vulnerable to clever lawyers and moneyed litigants. The stance is so oppositional that these films are known as ‘anti-establishment’. Their super-heroes are matched by their super-villains, embodiments of all that is evil and authors of all that is wrong in society. They are privileged,

146 • Secret Politics of Our Desires powerful, and till the hero arrives, invincible. They hold the society to ransom and everyone is vulnerable to them. As someone says in Zanjeer; ‘In insaniyat ke dushmanon ko agar khatam na kiya gaya to har angan mein maut nachegi (‘If these enemies of humanity are not liquidated, there will be a dance of death in every courtyard of every house’). But the conventional institutions of law and order cannot bring them to book, because of the rules under which the police have to operate. Even if the criminals are arrested, there are enough loopholes in the judicial machinery to ensure their acquittal. This gives ample scope to the narrative to be highly critical of the police and the judiciary. The choicest invectives are hurled against them: ‘Court ke charon taraf kutton ki tarah daudte rahoge tabbhi insaf nahin milega’9 (‘Keep on running around the courts like dogs, even then you will not get justice’); ‘Kanoon aur police ke upar se mera vishvas bachpan se hi uth gaya tham (‘Ever since childhood I have lost faith in the police and the legal machinery’); 4Kanoon ki ankhon ko koi achhe doctor ko kyon nahin dikhate’1! (‘Why don’t you show the eyes of the law to a good doctor’); *Kanoon itna gandha hai ki main apne hath is me gandhe nahin karna chahta,u (‘The entire legal machinery is so dirty that I do not want to soil my hands by participating in it’). Thus, effective action is possible only by operating from outside the institutionalized framework of law and justice. In Zanjeer, Vijai, a police officer, is able to capture the villains and bust their vice dens only after he is thrown out of the police force. In Sholay; Baldev Singh, a police officer, takes his revenge and captures Gabbar, not with the help of his colleagues but by hiring two crooks, Jai and Veeru. In Andha Kanoon, thanks to the police force and the judiciary, the criminals roam about scot free while an innocent Jan Nisar is convicted for a murder which was never committed. Rajnikant, with the help of Jan Nisar, both of whom continuously make fun of the judiciary and the police, kill the villains. On the other hand, Rajnikant’s sister, a police officer, not only makes a fool of herself at every step but also fails to get the criminals convicted. In Deewar, the smuggler Sawant is killed by Vijai and not by Ravi, a police officer. In Men Awaz Suno the protagonist is a police officer, dismissed from his service despite all the sacrifices he has made while fighting the villains. It is only after he has been thrown out of the police force that he manages to kill the villains. He then packs their dead bodies into

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 147 a van, drives right into the courtroom, as an affront and a challenge to the judiciary, while from the background come the words ‘Is case ka faislaa ap ke hath on main hai’ (The verdict of this case is in your hands’), presumably in defiance of the verdict of the court. In films like Muqaddar ka Sikander, Coolie, Mard, Namak Halal, Laawaris, Naseeb, the war between the heroes and the villains is fought out in the open without the police or the judiciary coming anywhere in the picture. In Pratighat, Kali, after defying and holding to ransom the entire establishment and after killing a police officer in front of everyone, is ultimately liquidated by Laxmi Joshi, an ordinary college lecturer. The message: it is not in the courts that convictions are obtained but in the face-toface world of heroes and villains; the hero is the agent of immediate, self-sufficient justice. Not only are the police and the judiciary ineffective but the establishment itself is villainous. In the films of the 1980s, the stereotypical villain is not the smuggler or dacoit, but the politician acting in collusion with the police and the mafia. It is this combine of politicians, police and the mafia that is projected as the scourge of society against whom everyone is vulnerable (Pratighat, Aakhri Raasta, Ram Teri Ganga Maili, Meri Awaz Suno). This criminali¬ zation of politics is aptly summed up by the minister of Pratighat, when he candidly admits, Apne dande raj se mil raha hai paisa aur satta. ’(‘Our rule of might has ensured us money and power’) or when the goonda Kali rhetorically asks ‘Ek bhi neta ka nam batao jo ham are madad ke bagair chunav jita hd (Tell me the name of even one minister who has won an election without my help’). A fight against the villain then, in these films, is a fight against the establishment itself. In sum, these films construct a coherent version of social reality by playing out and grappling with social contradictions, either by defining them in such a way that their absence does not question the authenticity of the representation, or by redefining them within the film in such a way that they could be papered over. This explains the apparent dualism of the films. For instance, if the major contradiction of policing is conflict with various subaltern groups, at a time when such conflicts are becoming more ‘public’, the films must reproduce that contradiction in their fictional world. That is, the ‘deep structure' of the films must refract social reality to ensure that the public tensions structured within it do not

148 • Secret Politics of Our Desires threaten the apparent logic and coherence of the structure itself. The fictional world must construct, if not an ideal world of poli¬ cing, at least a world that can be, as Richard Dyer has argued in relation to Hollywood thrillers and westerns, experienced ideally. The need to interpellate the audience demands the incorpo¬ ration and projection of the perceived inadequacies, deficiencies and ills of the institutions of the state, to be reconciled and resolved in such a way that any radical structural attack on these institutions is absorbed and referenced out. The result is that these institutions, though under apparent attack, emerge stronger and more powerful than ever before. The main technique used for this purpose in conventional films is the centred biography of an isolated hero which throws him into an anomic social world where individual action is the only guarantee of effectivity. It is a world which works with a notion of individuality which is at once mythic and ideologically powerful in its implicit dismissal of collective aspirations and actions. Thus policing is projected not as an institution of social control, but exclusively as a set of face-toface relationships, of eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations. Whereas in some films individuality is sufficient indemnity against bureau¬ cratic rigidity, in others (for instance, in the multi-starrers) it is the group that subverts that bureaucracy by virtue of its humani¬ zing intra-relationships. Such groups in a mass society have been called by Theodor Adorno and Erik Horkheimer ‘synthetic’—‘they are planned from above as cushions between the anonymous collective and the individual.’13 Secondly, what is attacked in the stereotypes of the arrogant rich man, cruel landlord, police officer and the politician is not their social roles, but their personal traits—their ruthless arrogance or plain sadism. There is, in Theodor Adorno’s words, ‘a spurious personalization of objective issues’. For instance, a film about a cOiiupt politician shows him in a moment of crisis; and the content of the film is his inner and outer collapse. The impression created is taat all flaws in society grow out of his character disorder and he is deteated by the honesty, courage and warmth of those with whom the audience is supposed to identify. This not only divides society into black (out-groups) and white (in-groups), but also suggests that the solution of the problem lies in killing/reforming the person, not in interfering with the structures of society. The assumption is: if there is a change of heart, the politician will still deliver the goods; the rich industrialist will distribute benefits all

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 149 around; and the landlord will be liberal and generous in his dealings with his subjects. The moral is clear: the people must forever be dependent on and grateful to the masters for the mercies showered on them from time to time. This is what the radicalism of the hero and his revolution ultimately amount to. As Mani Kaul would say, The hero may be conducting a revolution but the sensuousness of the image is such that it conforms to ideas of loyalty and conformism. In the end, after making the revolution that he had set out to make the hero will still be supporting the order and justice of the existing system.

The overt criticism of the state and its institutions has another purpose—it is a safety valve. The pattern is simple: take the established value which you want to restore or develop; brutally expose its inadequacies, the injustices and violence it produces; and, then, at the end, save it by curing it of its blemishes. As if the aim were to inoculate the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one. To rebel against the inhumanity of the established order and its values, according to this way of thinking, is a common illness, natural and forgivable; one must not collide with it head on, but exorcize it like a possession. The patient is made to give a representation of his illness, he is made familiar with the appearance of his revolt, and this revolt disappears when the rancour of the audience is directed against ‘persons’ and away from the objective issues involved. As Roland Barthes in his inimitable style puts it, ‘admitting the accidental evil of a class-bound institution is the best way to conceal its collective evil. One immunizes the content of the collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil; one thus protects it against the risk of a generalised subversion.’14 It is significant that Hindi conventional films usually structure their discourse around a ‘law and order’ problem. Most of the films have at least one protagonist in the role of a police officer (.Zanjeer; Dee war, Andha Kanoon, Meri Awaz Suno, Amar Akbar Anthony, Pratighat, etc.). In those films in which the police are conspicuous by their absence, the hero himself functions as policeman, fighting the law breakers and restoring social order. The device employed is fairly straightforward. The ‘order’ of the society is first presented. Everything is right. Everyone is happy. This order is then destroyed by a group of individuals (villains). They do so not because of any ideological difference with the existing state, but because of certain character disorders they have.

150 • Secret Politics of Our Desires In film after film, the same images appear. The state is weak, ineffective; its police and law enforcement machinery are hope¬ lessly inadequate to check crime. There is a gang of villains having a powerful criminal organization who prey on society; small help¬ less people are the victims of the gang. The heroes are good people with exceptional abilities. When they are policemen, they are constantly frustrated in their struggle against the criminals. Since the state is ineffective, they move out of its wings and form an alternative state. They get into action only because they have been directly harmed. The futility of seeking redress through the institutions of the state turns them into ruthless avengers. In seek¬ ing revenge the heroes become much like the villains they are pursuing. They turn violent and ruthless, ignoring or breaking the law without a second thought. The scourge that was plaguing society, which had in the first place destroyed the original order, is destroyed. Order is restored. The hero now surrenders or is caught by the ‘legal state’. There is also a basic dualism in the films. On the one hand the police are projected as corrupt, inefficient, toothless, and the judi¬ cial system as tardy and bureaucratic. However, by defining and articulating the problem within the discourse of ‘law and order’, the films emphasize the primacy and indispensability of these institutions which they apparently attack. What exactly is the message here? It is not the institution of the police which is attacked, but the fact that some of its members are corrupt and have sold out. Similarly, the institution of the judiciary is not attacked but the fact that it has so many loopholes that criminals are rarely convicted while innocents are often made scapegoats. In other words, the conventional films advocate a system where retribution is swift and justice is instant. This is possible only in a centralized, authoritarian state structure, with more power in the hands of the police, a fetishization of duty and a total dedication, in fact an inhuman obsession, with law enforcement. In all these films the stage is set for an epic con¬ frontation between the private and the official, between love and ‘duty’. In this struggle duty always wins, and those people who have dedicated everything to their job are projected as the real heroes. For instance, in Men Awaz Suno, the hero Sushil Kumar is introduced at a function held to felicitate him as ‘ Yeh hain Sushil Kumar—bahadur, nidarpolice inspectof (‘This is Sushil Kumar—

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 151 a brave and fearless police inspector’). And Sushil Kumar predictably enough says ‘ Vardi ki izzat par kabhi anch nahin ane dunga’ (‘I shall see to it that the honour and dignity of the uniform is never compromised’). Deewar is dedicated ‘to those police officers who work for law by keeping it above personal interests’, and Rajiv Kumar the protagonist is honoured. In Pratighat, Karamvir the cop is, as his very name indicates, Harz aur imandari ki jiti jagti misaP (‘a living example of duty and honesty’). This is what police officers should be like: supermen, heroes who could be honoured and revered.15 Even the precincts of the police station are sacred; in Zanjeer when Sher Khan is about to sit down, Vijai, the police inspector, kicks the chair from under him and shouts, ‘Yeh police station hai, tumhare baap ka gharnahin’(This is a police station; not your father’s house’). In fact, the notions of law, duty, and uniform are turned into fetishes. The assumption is that, armed with absolute powers, the police would be in a position to wipe out the criminals, and solve all the problems to ensure law and order in society. By the same logic these films argue that the judicial process should do away with the long drawn out trials of the criminals, should supply ‘instant justice’, without insisting on evidence and witnesses. Ultimately, what is being attacked are the checks and balances of the liberal framework of society, and the limits imposed upon these institutions to restrain them from arbitrary functioning. It is as though by attacking liberal and democratic values, the ground is being prepared for an authoritarian police state. How can we account for the tremendous popularity, in the 1970s and 1980s, of films dealing with crime and law and order issues? One explanation is the vilification and criminalization of the abnormal, the deviant and the unusual. It encourages us, from the safety of our armchairs, to share vicariously in the experience of the deviant and watch as remorseless pressures to conform are brought to bear on them in the neatly constructed fictional world of the film. It is a fictional playing out of the limits of tolerance. Our fascination is not with crime but with the construction of a disruption, for if crime were presented in the abstract—devoid of personality, motivation and resolution—it would lose much of its popular appeal. In crime fiction, the audience is positioned in a narrative which explains the actions of its characters, and cons¬ tructs an outcome that we ‘expect’ from the unfolding of the tensions in the narrative. The murderer is caught, the dacoit killed.

152 • Secret Politics of Our Desires the smuggler and his vice den wiped out—never is villainy allowed to go unpunished. These general arguments are heightened by the specific context in which the crime films were viewed and produced in the political climate of the 1970s and the 1980s. As the tensions and contra¬ dictions of Indian politics increased and became more visible, they could not be contained within the consensual politics that was the hallmark of the Nehruvian era. The only alternative was crude populism. When even that failed, brutal repression and naked violence were unleashed during the Emergency of 1975. With the loss of legitimacy, the Indian state increasingly relied on its coercive might and on the lumpen elements of the kind that were mobilized by the tactics of Sanjay Gandhi; politics began to become criminalized. Simultaneously there was an increase in crimes against the marginalized and the dissenting. Within this surcharged atmosphere, the soft romantic films of the 1960s had little chance of success; to survive at the box office, conventional films engaged with the ideological tensions in society and incorporated its contradictions. Simultaneously grew the psychological need to identify the villain(s) responsible for the wrongs in the society. Since the structural defects of the system were too abstract and vague a target, there rose the need to have identifiable enemies. The conventional films provided its viewers with just that—smugglers, dacoits, goondas, corrupt politicians and policemen, terrorists and foreign conspirators. Having identified the enemies, they proceeded to define them exactly the way they were being defined in the dominant language of politics. Since these villains were the source of all problems, they had to be projected not only as the ‘ultimate bastards’ but also as channels of ultimate catharsis. The villain became a folksy devil represen¬ ting the decay of society. Themes of lawlessness, violence, vandalism, oppression, exploitation were all articulated around the villain. He became the centre of various strands of criticism aimed at strengthening the whole of society, a vehicle to call for the restoration of standards, discipline and consensus. As these assertions became a part of public ‘knowledge’ or commonsense , they also began to become the basis for a hard¬ ening of political attitudes and editorial statements on social problems, legitimizing authoritarian solutions to social problems which had been redefined as law and order issues. The argument had become self-fulfilling.

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 153 It is this ‘complex network’—combined with industrial troubles, political instability, the rise of the movement led by the late Jayaprakash Narayan—that underwrote the Indian state’s inability to rule through consent and the introduction of repressive laws like the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA), National Security Act (NSC), Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Pre¬ vention) Bill (TADA), the 59th Amendment to the Constitution, Hospitals and Other Institutions Bill, Trade Union Act and Industrial Disputes (Amendment) Act. Apart from the growing authoritarianism and the almost un¬ limited powers given to the police by the Terrorist and Disruptive (Prevention) Bill, there was a growth in private gangsterism and parallel government. Historically, the concept of parallel government represented a challenge to the established government with which it was necessarily in an adversarial position. Now, however, it became a parallel government supporting existing authority. It seems that the attempt was to source all problems to clear-cut villains (terrorists, extremists, anti-nationals, foreigners, etc.) and then let loose the entire state machinery to wipe them out. As if the goal was to justify all murders, massacres, sup¬ pression of rights, by taking recourse to one basic idea: the need to protect the country from disruptive and anti-national elements. For instance, there were photographs in the newspapers showing the Director General of Police, Punjab, handing over guns to boys barely out of their teens. The reported purpose of this highly publicized exercise was to make these youth an auxiliary force, capable of fighting terrorists. Similarly, during this period, the Andhra Pradesh government announced a plan to arm villagers against armed Naxalite guerrillas. The chief minister recommended that two guns be issued to the president and vice-president of each village protection committee. So keen was the government to see Naxalites killed that it was prepared to provide loans to those wanting to buy weapons. In Bihar, there were already private senas, or armies, tacitly approved by the state. In other words, citizens were being encouraged, sometimes with financial and other inducements, to take the law into their own hands. The state itself was now supporting vigilantism to fight its enemies. This became a recurrent theme in conventional films. The basic assumption of the films too was that if the ‘legal state’ was as strong as the ‘alternative’—read vigilante—groups, there would be no problem in society. Hence, once the heroes

154 • Secret Politics of Our Desires (vigilantes) restored the original order, they either surrendered or were caught by the legal state. The reason why the alternative groups could achieve what the legal state could not was because the former had a greater degree of manoeuvrability they did not have to conform to the various restrictions imposed on the legal state in terms of rules, regulations, laws, rights of the individuals, and public morality; they could ride roughshod over such minor irritants. Since the legal state, for obvious reasons, could not do so, it required the services of the vigilante groups to do its work. The state and the vigilantes, though legally and formally opposed to each other, actually needed and comple¬ mented one another. The political and cinematic discourses paralleled each other.

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

Ashis Nandy, ‘The Popular Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles,’ Indian International Centre Quarterly, 8(1), 1981, pp. 89-96. Satish Bahadur, in a lecture at the Film Appreciation Course conducted at the Film and Television Institute, Pune, June 1984. Traditionally, Marxist theories of ideology were centrally concerned with ‘determination’. Indeed, the preoccupation with the relationship between economic base and ideological superstructure led to the problems of reductionism in Marxist analysis of popular fiction. Changes in Marxist theories of ideology, initiated largely through the works of Louis Althusser, led to some crucial reformulations in this area. Althusser’s ‘structuralist’ reworking of Marxist theory stressed ideology not as a distortion, involving false consciousness, but as constituting the forms and representations through which persons ‘live’ in an imaginary relationship to their real conditions of existence. Althusser’s work, with its concept of ideology as determined only ‘in the last instance’ by the economic base, in conjunction with developments in semiology, refocused attention on the autonomy and materiality of the ideological and on articulation’, the relationships between parts within a structure rather than determination only. Umberto Eco, ‘Articulation of the Cinematic Code’, in Bill Nicholas, Movies and Methods (University of California Press, 1976), p. 590. See on this theme, Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London, Methuen, 1976), pp. 9-16. Showtime, May 1984 and Trade Guide, 1988. The films which crossed the bit C mark are: Shoiay (1975), Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), Muqaddar ka Sikandar (1978), Ek Duje ke Liya (1981), Laawaris (1981), Naseeb, Namak Halal (1982), Andha Kanoon, Coolie (1983), Sharabi

How angry is the Angry Young Man? • 155 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

(1984), Ram Teri Ganga Maili, Mard (1985), Pratighaat (1987). Until July 1985, Rajesh Khanna had acted in 86 films, Star and Style, July 1985. See M. S. S. Pandian, ‘Varadaraja Mudaliar: Counter-Obituary’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23 April 1988, pp. 830-1. Pratighat. Andha Kanoon. Andha Kanoon. Andha Kanoon. See on the subject Geoffrey Hurd, ‘The Television Presentation of the Police’, in T. Bennett et al. (eds), Popular Television and Film (BFI in association with Open University Press, 1985). Roland Barthes, Mythologies, transl. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1957). A similar kind of deification of the supercop phenomenon is also seen in real life, as is evident in the discourse of Indian politics. Consider the superstar police officers like Julio Ribeiro, Kiran Bedi, K. P. S. GifLat different points in time fighting the enemies of the Indian state.

/

156 • Secret Politics of Our Desires

FILMOGRAPHY Name of the Film

Year

Producer

Director

Zanjeer

1973

Prakash Mehra

Prakash Mehra

Dee war

1973

Gulshan Rai

Yash Chopra

Sholay

1975

G. P. Sippy

Ramesh Sippy

Andha Kanoon

1983

A. Purnachandra Rao

T. Rama Rao

Mcri A waz Suno

1981

G. A. Seshagiri Rao and

Rajendra Singh

G. Hanumantha Rao Aaj ki A waz

1984

B. R. Chopra

Ravi Chopra

Sharabi

1984

Prakash Mehra

Prakash Mehra

Inquilab

1984

N. Veeraswamy

T. Rama Rao

Trishul

1977

Yash Chopra

Yash Chopra

Karz

1981

Subhash Ghai

Subhash Ghai

Amar Akbar Anthony 1977

Manmohan Desai

Manmohan Desai

Muqaddar ka Sikander 1978

Prakash Mehra

Prakash Mehra

Laawaris

1981

Prakash Mehra

Prakash Mehra

Namak Halal

1982

Prakash Mehra

Prakash Mehra

Coolie

1983

Manmohan Desai

Manmohan Desai

Ram Teri Ganga Maili 1985

Raj Kapoor

Raj Kapoor

Mard

1985

Manmohan Desai

Manmohan Desai

Pralighat

1987

N. Chandra

N. Chandra

4 Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self: The Spectator as Subject

ANJALI MONTEIRO

T

he encounter between the discourse of the state, beamed by India’s official television, and communities of viewers occupying specific social and political spaces have thrown into relief new forms of negotiation of meanings and subjectivities.1 This chapter uses these forms to question the concepts of subjectivity in the development projects of the state and to offset them against the interpretative strategies that viewers apply to televisual discourse. The ‘ways of seeing’ that inform the export of televisual technology from the First to the Third World, as part of the package of development, is the starting point for this inquiry.2 What new ways of seeing does this technology entail? What forms of subjectivity does it assume? How do the ‘targets’ of this package constitute their identities in response to the developmental messages in television? The Politics of Development Communication In the writings of those who pushed for the expansion of the Indian broadcasting media network in the 1950s and 1960s, television and radio were considered key elements in the package of modernization that would propel the country from under¬ development to development. These new technologies were seen as a means of collapsing the stages in the evolutionary path

158 • Secret Politics of Our Desires towards development and as answers to a host of problems ranging from national integration to rural modernization.3 The discourse of development, that gave a central place to such communication technologies, had already emerged as a ‘historical construction’ in the post-World War II period, problematizing existing patterns of behaviour and cultures in the Third World and ‘originating a new domain of thought and experience’.4 The discourse, spreading from certain sites in the First and Third Worlds (international bodies, experts in universities, governments), created a set of issues (poverty, population explosion, malnutrition) to be classified and managed through scientific study and professional intervention.5 The space for this was created through a set of propositions that construed tradition/underdevelopment as the ‘natural’ antinomy of mod¬ ernity/development. Once ‘tradition’ was identified as the chief enemy, development strategies were geared to reinforce the legitimacy of a new set of discourses pertaining to the body, the family, the population, production techniques and the institutions of the state. In defining the Third World peasant as backward and lacking in the attributes necessary for development, moderni¬ zation theories marked out new areas of intervention for a range of development experts. Television was regarded as a potent vehicle for the trans¬ formation of indigenous subjectivities. It was expected to break down traditional values, disseminate technical skills, foster national integration and accelerate the growth of formal education.6 Paradoxically, the conception of communication as a linear causal chain, in which omnipotent media trigger behavioural effects in passive receivers, was exported to the Third World at a time when mainstream theory in the First World came to regard it as a naive and inadequate account of communication in their own societies. Only the construction of Third World societies as simple, homo¬ geneous and undifferentiated in the messianic language of development allowed the communication experts to adopt such a hypodermic model.7 During the late 1960s and through the 1970s, however, the discourse of development communication underwent a crisis. The results of the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) in India and a number of other experiments seemed to conclude that the hypodermic model had failed to deliver the goods 8 Moreover, all over the Third World, development had led to

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 159 i

increased production, but at a tremendous social cost: impoverish¬ ment, displacement and migration of large sections of the small peasantry and indigenous people, widening disparities between the rich and the poor, and growing unemployment. In both the First and Third Worlds, there were student revolts and peasant movements challenging the established order, often from a Marxist perspective. Along with these changes came a new strand in the development discourse—the neo-Marxist dependency theory, which construed ‘underdevelopment’ as a structural relationship of neo-colonial domination between the First and Third Worlds. The export of communication models, structures and programming to the Third World began to be seen as part of this relationship. The communication models of modernization theory were regarded as specific to societies ‘where individuality was pre¬ dominant over collectivism, competition was more determinant than cooperation, and economic efficiency and technological wisdom more important than cultural growth, social justice, and spiritual enhancement.’9 The dependency thesis problematizes the issue of development and the place of the media in it; it raises questions of ownership and control of the media in the context of international and national power relations. It also shows how these interests determine the nature and strategies of development, and the distribution of costs and benefits. In two respects, however, it tends to fit in with the dominant paradigm of media and moderni¬ zation. Firstly, it attributes to the media an awesome power, albeit destructive. Where the dominant paradigm sees the power of the media as liberating, the neo-Marxist approach sees it as exploita¬ tive. Secondly, while the capitalist underpinnings of ‘development’ are laid bare, the legitimacy of the concept itself is not funda¬ mentally questioned; the need for underdeveloped countries to develop, albeit following an alternative, socialist path, is taken for granted. Development communication, faced with its failure to live up to its promises and with criticisms from the left, has now taken new forms, adopted new strategies, while retaining its basic ways of seeing and acting.10 The resilience of the discourse is proved by its ability to assimilate critiques and alternatives such as kparticipation for liberation’, ‘basic needs’, and ‘integrated rural development’.11 The ‘new’ version should be understood in the context of the

160 • Secret Politics of Our Desires widespread legitimacy and the ‘naturalness that the discourse on development has achieved in the 40 years of its currency. The objectives of the modernization package (improved agriculture, family planning, national integration) have already become the norm, in so far as any departure from them is regarded as deviance. In such a situation, ‘participation , and self reliance become strategies for making more effective the reach and penetration of development. The liberal recipe of ‘a blend of traditional and modern systems’12 is prescribed for a context where the traditional has, by and large, already been subordinated to the market economy and the nation-state. Television in India The early 1980s were a turning point in the development of television in India. Prior to the 1980s, there was a consensus of experts and planners on development as the raison d'etre of the expansion of television; on direct or indirect state control of tele¬ vision production; on community television in the rural areas as the basis of dissemination; and on stress on educational and instructional programming, judiciously sprinkled with ‘wholesome’ entertainment and geared to a rural viewership. The consensus reflected the dominant national credo of the 1960s and the early 1970s: self reliance, ‘socialism’ and progress through technological revolution. This stage was also marked by limited viewership; the reach prior to the introduction of INSAT-IB in 1983 was 210 million (28 per cent of the population) and the viewership 30 million (4 per cent of the population).13 After SITE, there grew a dissonance between the stated objectives of television and the actual direction of television programming and dissemination, which started becoming more urban, middle-class and entertainment oriented. The introduction of colour television for the 1982 Asiad games, the liberalization of television imports during the period, and the installation of INSAT-IB marked a significant change in television policy. At the level of dissemination, the emphasis began to shift from community television to the proliferation of privately owned television sets. These changes appeared to be part of a more general redefi¬ nition of the national agenda. ‘India of the 21st century’ is now conceived of as a regional power in South Asia, a technologicallyadvanced and growth-oriented nation. There is a movement away

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 161 from the era of Nehruvian socialism towards a more laissez-faire model, where, paradoxically, the dismantling of licensing, import and other economic controls have begun to coexist with increasing state intervention in family and culture. The state now plays a more active role in the construction of new cultural and national identities through the television, state-sponsored occasions like the festivals of India, patronage of traditional art forms, and so on. The introduction of commercial sponsorship of serials in 1980 and of private software production in 1984 created a boom in entertainment programming; programme genres and private production units have proliferated.14 The old developmentalism, too, has been jettisoned in favour of its ‘commercial’ variant— the ‘marketing’ of development, involving changes in production patterns, modes of reception and programming. Singhal and Rogers’ work on the television soap opera Hum Log identifies the features of this currently dominant development discourse.15 Firstly, in this discourse people’s participation and decision¬ making are usually equated with consumer sovereignty: development is now sold through the market. The consumer has a choice of whether to buy it or not, and the selling agency is forced to tailor its strategies to ensure consumer satisfaction. Thus, for instance, the tremendous audience response to Hum Log and the viewers’ 'para-social’ involvement with the characters, some¬ times forcing the makers to alter the storyline, is read as a measure of audience participation. Secondly, the interests of commerce and development are seen to dovetail at three levels: common strategies and techniques, commercial sponsorship of development programmes and, most importantly, creating a culture conducive to the extension of the market. Thirdly, while the programmes devised are area-specific and are made by national agencies, international development organi¬ zations play a key role in disseminating approaches and models. Fourthly, the family appears to be the main target of develop¬ ment messages. There is an attempt to link programmes having a geopolitical dimension (for example, population control) to the welfare and liberation of the family (especially women). More generally, the changes in the values, norms and practices of the family that this discourse articulates are devised to lead to a greater integration of the family with the market economy and

162 • Secret Politics of Our Desires the state’s programmes of welfare. The state’s strategy of ‘going commercial’ with television has been regarded by many researchers as a dilution of its development goals.16 However, it is precisely this strategy that has made possible the entry of the state into the familial space, in the process redefining the viewers’ relationship to both the public and private spheres. The marketing approach used for development communication was also extended to the political arena when, for the first time in the 1984 General Elections, the Congress and, to a lesser extent, the other parties relied heavily on media campaigns designed by advertising agencies. The televisual presentation of politics in terms of human interest drama can be seen as an extension of the state’s entry into the family and the growing use of marketing strategies in television. The first portrayal in this genre that captured the popular imagination was the funeral of Indira Gandhi in 1985. For two days, families sat glued to their television sets, experiencing a sense of ‘being there’, of bearing witness to the making of history as members of the nation-as-family. In a situation where the state was facing a legitimation crisis, where the ruling party’s involve¬ ment in the post-assassination communal massacres could have seriously eroded its credibility, television concentrated on construc¬ ting the myth of the martyr and her courageous successor, and in the process attempting to resolve this crisis.17 The potential of television for the formation of a political consensus and legitima¬ tion, which had been an important factor in the decision to invest in a satellite television network, was reaffirmed.18 With the growth of cable television and multinational satellite networks in the recent period, Doordarshan has intensified its strategy of going commercial. The change in programming, with more time for feature lilms and entertainment serials, the increase in programming hours, the leasing out of the metro channel to private sponsors: all these are being seen as inevitable if Door¬ darshan is to survive the competition from its new challengers. At the same time, the State continues to drag its feet on pushing the Prasar Bharati Bill through Parliament, for it would involve setting up an independent broadcasting authority. This chapter seeks to problematize not merely the discourses of Doordarshan, but also ourselves’ as we constitute our subjec¬ tivities while engaging with these discourses. Though carried out in a working-class community, the study is as much about ‘us’, as

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 163 about ‘them’; for it explores strategies of forging a self that is regarded not as a given, but as a construction, formed in and through relations of power. It draws upon the Foucauldian concept of power, as constitutive of subjectivity and intrinsically related to knowledge, and sees the introduction of television as inextricably tied up with a modernization project that attempts to survey the resistances, beliefs and attitudes of ‘traditional’ viewers, in order to change these through programming aimed at creating a modern mindset and a pan-Indian identity. The focus is on the state’s exercise of pastoral power as it impinges on family norms and selfhood and redefines political institutions in the idiom of the patriarchal family.19 In the process it hopes to understand how viewers, situated in networks of power within the family and the neighbourhood, make sense of television, for it is in the terms of these immediate relations of power that viewers invoke television as a resource, reconstruct their identities and make sense of the larger order.20 Moreover, resistance to television discourses also tend to be exercised vis-h-vis the most proximate power. The concept of resistance not as a totalizing category (such as class struggle) but as localized practices, helps one to understand how viewers resist television while being drawn into its hegemonic discourses. This study uses the concepts of dividing practices and technologies of the self to interrogate the strategies spectators invoke to construct their identities in relation to these discourses.21

The Redefinition of the Familial Doordarshan’s entry into the family is marked by distinct consti¬ tutive practices and relations of power. This entry alters the relationship of the family to the larger society and culture, in addition to offering a new locus in relation to which identities and power equations can be redefined and reproduced. The very act of purchasing/owning a television becomes an act of self-definition on the part of the family, an assertion of its identity as a respectable middle-class, nuclear family. In the early 1980s, owning a television in Kamgar Nagar signified the membership of a small, privileged group, as there were few television sets in the community. It was a common practice for non-TV owners, particularly children, to watch important programmes such as popular Hindi films and Chayageet (a programme based on film songs) at their neighbour’s place. As

264 • Secret Politics of Our Desires time passed, in the latter part of the 1980s, the ownership of TV sets proliferated, and having people over to watch began to be seen as a nuisance. Moreover, as Kamgar Nagar grew, with more and more nonGoan migrants coming in, the complexion of the community changed from a small, predominantly Goan working-class neigh¬ bourhood where everybody knew everybody else, to a more anonymous, heterogeneous locality, with a turnover of tenants. With the changes in the neighbourhood and the proliferation of television, the meanings associated with the ownership of television changed. While earlier, the ownership of a TV set signified a position of economic power, today not owning a TV is a sign of deprivation, a source of shame. The major reason cited for buying a TV relates to this. A woman worker, a Maharashtrian Hindu in her late fifties, spoke of the compulsions that went into her family’s decision to buy a TV: My grandchildren would go to other people’s houses. Sometimes these people would say—why do you come here? And they would throw them out. The children would return home crying. I felt bad about it; I told my son, ‘somehow, we must get one. Even if there is no money, take a loan and get it.’ Now every evening, the children sit at home and watch.

Thus, television becomes a totemic marker of the familial space in three senses: it marks the family’s entry into the world of ‘haves’, it defines the family as one that need not subject itself to the humiliation of watching TV at the neighbours, and it is a magnet that keeps the family at home. There is a third, and perhaps more important sense in which television redraws the familial space. It sets norms in relation to which new sets of dividing practices and technologies of the self come into operation as individuals redefine themselves vis-a-vis the discourses of television. A comparison of people’s relationship to and perception of television, as opposed to cinema, would show the space that tele¬ vision has begun to occupy in the working-class family in Kamgar Nagar. Unlike watching a film, which involves deliberation and payment for one’s choice, the images of television stay eternally ready, like water or electricity, waiting to be consumed. Television appears as an essential commodity, a raw material to be used in moderation. As viewers perceive it, both under- and over¬ utilization have their disadvantages. What is paramount is the viewer’s discretion in consumption. Most viewers see themselves

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 165 as individuals who can exercise their personal discretion and rationally adopt appropriate viewing practices. The fact that, in most households, television remains on continuously from 7.30 p.m. onwards, does not change this feeling of freedom and choice vis-u-vis television. Moreover, television comes across as objective and representing reality, as opposed to cinema, which is seen as using techniques to sell itself, and hence, sensational, fantastic and far from every¬ day reality. People see television watching as a family event. By entering the home, television becomes subject to a different set of norms that do net apply to cinema. A retired Goan-Muslim driver, now a small shopkeeper, said: They should show programmes with a lesson, a moral... there is a difference between TV and theatre (the cinema). They should not show on TV what they show in the theatre. On TV they should show special programmes, because it is within the family, within the house. Everybody sits together and watches—parents and children. So the family should learn a good lesson from it. If they show anything at all, the family can be badly affected, it may cause them to go their separate ways, rather than bringing them together.

More than any other theme, it is the televisual discourse on the family that evokes the strongest response from adults, particularly women. Television serials are generally divided by viewers in Kamgar Nagar into four broad types: ‘storical’, detective, comedy and historical. The word ‘storical’ is a local coinage, first used to identify films having a clear storyline (usually dealing with romance, sentiments and the family, as opposed to ‘fighting’ films with emphasis on action); it now means television narratives with a family theme, spread over several episodes, the longer the better.22 Most viewers see such serials as a source of learning and reflection on family situations and relationships. Quite represen¬ tative would be the view of another retired driver, a Goan Catholic: We come to know what are the consequences of certain actions. We are poor; we have experienced both sadness and joy. So we can fee! sympathy for other people. Not like the rich—they don’t know what is suffering and they couldn’t care less what happens to others. Those who have experienced suffering—they will like storicals.

The ‘storical’, in portraying family reality, offers a bird’s eye view of families different from the viewers’ own, and thus, an opportunity to think about familial norms, as viewers seek to

166 • Secret Politics of Our Desires objectify and mould their selves.23 Television becomes, as it were, a panopticon in reverse, where watching others becomes the means for controlling oneself. For many adult viewers, the reality of the serial is the yardstick by which it is evaluated, some serials being dismissed as being unrealistic and some commanding a high degree of involvement. These expectations of ‘reality’ and ‘learning’, combined with the ubiquity of choice associated with the televisual image, give the medium a unique location within the familial space. In viewers’ accounts, television comes across both as a mirror and a window: a mirror that permits self-conscious reflection, a window that reveals new familial realities, in relation to which one redefines the family and one’s place in it. In comparison to cinema, where characters are larger than life and fantasy dominates, television invokes a reality that directly calls for an objectification of the self; it evokes the ‘need’ to look at oneself from the outside and the ‘desire’ to mould oneself to become what one is not. The following is from the transcript of an interview with an un¬ employed, Goan Catholic, thirty-year-old widow, with two children: When I see some programmes I feel I wish if I had done that. Tanuja, Rajani... programmes on social workers. I feel like being like that... I am not yet like that, but I got some feelings. No one is helpless.

The construction of subjectivity in the televisual discourse on the family takes place at several levels, involving gender- and agespecific constitutive strategies. In the main, viewers tend to construct themselves as members of a normal, middle-class family for whom television is a source of general knowledge, of access to preferred lifestyles, of insight into family dynamics and morality. The Middle-Class Family The concept of the ‘normal middle-class’ family is the product of dividing practices in the televisual discourse and viewer strategies. An important site of the concept is social awareness advertising,24 be it on family planning, immunization, status of women or health practices. The break-up of an advertisement spot on family p anning in Table 1 bears witness to these dividing practices. The advertisement is shot in cinema verite style, with long takes and clumsy zooms, as if the camera were capturing reality as it unfolds. The woman and her family too appear to be ‘real-life’ people

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 167 Table 5.1 Break-down of an Advertising Spot on Family Planning Visual

Audio

Establishing long shot of a

I went on my own to the

woman sitting on the floor of

hospital and told the doctor

her home, using a sewing

that I have two children and

machine. Her clothes and the

want to get myself operated. I

surroundings establish a North

don’t want any more children.

Indian, Muslim, working-class,

basti environment. The woman looks at the camera and speaks. Mid-long shot of the woman’s

And I want to educate these

husband, in home attire, sitting on the floor with his daughter

two children well...

(around 8 years old) on his lap, next to his son, a little older,who is reading a school book. While the son is busy, the daughter stares passively into space. ...educate them and make them

Close-up of school book, tilt up and zoom out to boy studying.

into big officers.

Mid-close-up, husband smiling.

My husband agrees with me on this.

Mid-long shot, woman working—bending and swabbing

After the operation I have no problems. 1 can work as before.

floor, carrying a bucket. Mid shot, woman looking at

You see, I’m happy and so is

camera and speaking, zoom out

my little family (laughs).’

Montage of husband, children,

(song) Our life a beautiful

woman, all laughing.

dream/Fill it with happiness/ Only two flowers in the garden/ Let the garden of life be filled with fragrance.

168 • Secret Politics of Our Desires and not actors; in fact, the adults have sheepish grins and giggle betraying their camera-consciousness. Thus, the viewer sees a real Muslim family, poor, yet respectable, aspiring to enter the middle class, with family planning and education providing the means to make it. This ‘ideal’ modern family is different from other poor, traditional Muslim families which are illiterate and fast-breeding. The dichotomy modern/developed versus traditional/developing lies at the heart of the divisions invoked and evoked by the advertisement. The viewers can, by and large, unambiguously identify with a modern, televisual ‘us that forms the norm against which the traditional ‘them’ can be evaluated as inferior and lacking in all progressive attributes. Schematically, this particular adver-tisement, and the bulk of social awareness advertising, is generated from the binary classifications shown in Table 5.2. The Muslim woman with her ‘operation’, her two children (one son, one daughter), her sewing machine, her husband who stays at home and teaches their children, has all the attributes to enable her to make the shift from ‘them’ to ‘us’. While on the screen we see a smiling woman and her family, two other images, not shown, form reference points—the ‘typical’ basti family with drunken father, overworked mother, too many children, too few resources and the ‘officer’ family—a life of ease and leisure, the kind of Table 5.2 Dividing Practices Associated With ‘Normal Middle-Class Family’ Us

Them

Modern

Traditional

Middle-class, aspiring to the middle class

Poor

Urban

Rural

Literate

Illiterate

Fertility-conscious

Fast-breeding

Rational

Superstitious

Healthy

Unhealthy

Tolerant towards women

Oppressive towards women

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 169 life shown in the product advertisements. The social awareness advertisements attempt to work either through identification with the norm, as represented by the Muslim woman, or through rejection of the abnormal: mothers-in-law who blame their daughters-in-law for the birth of female children, mothers who feed their sons more than their daughters, parents who marry off their daughter early, couples who have too many children, and so on. In both cases, the viewers bring to bear the dividing practices that differentiate the progressive ‘us’ from a backward ‘them’. A young Goan Catholic, wife of a welder who had two children, said with a touch of pride, ‘We Goans have fewer children. But these outsiders, these ghantis, what do they think? They keep having children.’ In a few cases, religious minorities are identified with ‘them’. As a 35-year-old Maha¬ rashtrian Hindu wife of a welder and mother of three children put it: Muslims don’t go in for operations. They should see such ads and follow them. If only we Hindus practise family planning and they don’t, their population will increase. The power will rest with them and this will destroy Hindu society. The government should put equal restrictions on all. They should pass stringent laws, cutting off rationing and employment if people have too many children.

The regime of truth that identifies population control with development as well as the contraceptive practices of individuals with the national good is taken by most viewers as self-evident. As an unemployed son of a foreman in the docks, a Goan Catholic in his twenties, said, ‘They should show such ads, so that our people get educated. Our population is increasing. That’s why there is unemployment and people don’t get enough food to eat.’ Most viewers ‘project’ and ‘relay’ these advertisements for ‘someone else out there’, for everyone seems to think that they themselves already have the relevant information. Amazingly, the dividing practices of the ‘receivers’ coincide with those of the ‘senders’. The strategies used by the media experts find an echo in the viewers, who identify with the normal middle-class television-owning ‘us’ versus ‘them’ who require to be brought into the ambit of family planning and other equally ‘modern’ practices. This relay of messages to a no-man's land seems to be the fate of all social awareness advertising, its efficacy being confined to its ability to effect ever-new relations of power rather than ‘triggering targeted transformation’.

170 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Resistance to family planning advertising takes place, not at the level of questioning the state’s pastoral power, but in terms of its immediate effects. The larger relationships of power are rarefied and refracted through the immediate modes of power, the ones that impinge on viewers’ lives. The most immediate and pervasive forms of power being the familial, viewers tend to resist any intervention that impinges on these forms of power. Family planning, with its connotations of sexuality, opens up a dangerous, taboo area, a topic on which there can be little or no dialogue between parents and children. A shipyard carpenter, Goan Hindu, thirty-seven and the father of four children says: I don’t like it. When the whole family is sitting together, they show everything, openly and in detail. Instead they should have a special programme, four or five times a month, late at night. Then parents can restrict their children [from seeing these programmes]. These days, our children have started repeating what they hear and we have to give them a pinch to keep them quiet. They know all the ads by heart. A third, person might say, ‘Look at their children, what all they are saying’.

Some viewers also fear the effect that such information may have on the morals of adolescents, particularly the information on methods of spacing children. A Mangalorean Catholic wife of a motorcycle taxi driver, forty-five and the mother of four, was explicit on this score: [Contraceptive] tablets are bad for health, they are dangerous. That thing they put inside causes cancer. It’s not for us, married women. It’s for those college girls who go around falling in love. Married women can have three children, then go straight for an operation—that’s best, no bother.

Even a social awareness advertisement on national integration can have latent sexual connotations, as the following discussion with a middle-aged Goan Muslim wife of a clerk and mother of five children, shows: Mrs. W: That programme where they run with torches... Those plavers... Q: Ah, Sunil Gavaskar... Mrs. W [lowering her voice, and glancing sideways at her brother-inlaw sitting nearby]: There is a girl there, she’s pretty, and when she runs, everything shakes [gesturing, indicating breasts]. It looks very bad. And children—this youngest one and the one before her, they come running to see [giggles]. Look... look, dudus\ [child’s word for reasts] They should not show such dirty things... [gesturing] bouncing up an own. Otherwise, it s okay. They should remove that shot, the

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 171 On the whole, the social awareness advertisements on television bring into play dividing practices that constitute the modern, middle-class family, at once individualizing and totalizing; the individual’s adoption of progressive practices gets equated with the collective good of the modern nation-state. Conversely, the problems confronting the nation are traced back to incorrect practices of individual families. However, there are points where this logic breaks down—these are moments when the most proximate power relations, the familial, are impinged upon. At such points, viewers would cease to constitute themselves primarily as modern citizens but, as responsible parents, would seek to mediate and filter their children’s viewing practices. Childhood and Parenthood The father comes home tired from work. The little daughter watches concerned. The mother asks the father if he wants tea or coffee. The father refuses. The child knows: Papa doesn’t want coffee or tea. He wants Rasna.25 The parents look on fondly. The little moppet lisps at the viewers, ‘I love you Rasna!’ This scenario, from the popular Rasna advertisement, represents several aspects of childhood and parenthood as cons¬ tructed by television and construed by viewers. There appears to be a change in the parameters governing the child-subject. The child must be ‘smart’ and ‘cute’. An object of adult survey and admiration, she/he must learn to perform a range of acts on demand. Adult recognition is tied up with this. The standards of performance are set by the Rasna girl, so much so that mothers would notice the little details that add up to being ‘smart’. The advertisements become an important resource in moulding children in this direction: We try things we see in the ads. Like Complan.26 Then when they see it on TV, they imitate it... ‘I am a Complan Boy... I am a Complan Girl’. They see that and drink it properly. TV has had a good effect on their eating.

Interestingly, the advertisements are seen by most viewers as providing learning material which make children smart, active and intelligent. The father of a two-year-old son, clerk in an office and a Goan Catholic, sees the educational potential of television as one of the main advantages of owning a set: The small fellow learns new words from TV, from the ads. When he

172 • Secret Politics of Our Desires hears the music, he knows what will come next... he understands the ‘signal’. Children become smart. The atmosphere at home changes with TV. Simply telling them things is of no use. They don’t learn that way. When they see the picture, it stays in their minds.

‘Smartness’ involves not only appropriate behaviour and linguistic skills, but also ‘general knowledge’ and problem solving, which television is seen to encourage. ‘Middle-class’ parents see them¬ selves as having to play an active role in interpreting televisual discourse for their children. ‘They ask questions, “what is this for, why does that happen, what is an earthquake, how do they send rockets up?”... they ask and come to know... we have to explain everything to them,’ says a Maharashtrian Hindu, skilled worker in Goa’s shipyard, about his two children. The parents’ construction of childhood and the place of television in it is a consequence of how they define their parental role. Modern, upwardly mobile, ‘middle-class’ parents see themselves as playing a crucial role in moulding the child, making parenting a self-conscious exercise. Monitoring the influence of television is regarded as part of this role. Disciplining the child becomes a matter not of physical control or coercion, but of encouraging the child to aim high and perform well. One Maharashtrian Hindu, another resident, a skilled shipyard worker with two young children, comments: We can’t force children to become anything nowadays. My son wants to become a policeman, with a jeep and a pistol. Since he saw Udaan. he wants to join the police. I encourage him. His ideas may change later. When he passes his SSC, we will see. We can’t force anything on them. It s no use forcing them to study. Fortunately, both my children stand first in class.

The middle-class family of televisual discourse redefines gender roles in relation to child-rearing. In the Rasna advertisement described earlier, the father-daughter relationship is one of familiarity. What makes the daughter ‘cute' is that, small as she is, she can play the little wife’, anticipating her father’s needs. The emphasis is on the father-daughter relationship, the wife being relegated to the background. The good father relinquishes his position as a distant patriarch and actively involves himself in disciplining and educating the child. Since the child’s performance in the outside world assumes prime importance, the father’s ‘superior’ knowledge and social skills qualify him for this task.

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 173 While the routine, tedious chores of childcare continue to remain the mother’s, the inculcation of smartness and discipline becomes the father’s responsibility. The construction of childhood and parenthood discussed thus far is the norm among younger, more educated parents. Linguistic and cultural identification with the discourses of television also play a role, the alienation of many Goan Catholic parents from television colouring their perception of its relevance in childrearing. For instance, a Goan Catholic wife of a toddy tapper and mother of four children feels that all television does is to increase the ‘light bill’. She cannot understand the language and is dependent on her children to interpret the messages for her. Given her indifference and hostility to TV, she cannot see it playing any positive role: Because of TV they don’t study. They learn to fall in love and all that from the examples they see. We have never shown our children anything bad. But on TV, they get to see all that stuff. When we see it, we feel shy, but they like it. They (TV) should show children... Nowadays, children get spoiled when they are young, they get ideas after seeing all those pictures.

In families with older, less educated parents, ideas and practices of parenting differ from those discussed earlier. In the Goan Catholic household where I lived, the regime of discipline in the household centred on correct behaviour before elders and conformity to rules, rather than performance and success. Children were expected to obey certain do’s and don’ts: they should be seen and not heard; they should not gossip, be idle or boisterous; they should not eavesdrop when adults converse, or retort if scolded by an adult; they should help in domestic chores; spend a fixed number of hours studying and attend catechism classes. Apart from these rules, the children were left to their own devices. They had their own world and interacted minimally with the adults. The adults made no conscious attempt to encourage ambition and performance in the children. For instance, showing off the children in front of visitors, by praising them or exhibiting their work (report cards, handicraft work) was never done. The children themselves never expressed any career ambitions or goals. On one occasion, my question to the youngest girl, aged ten, on what she wanted to become when she grew up, evoked a puzzled look and silence. This is very different from the ‘middle-class’ households, where parents would proudly talk about their children,

174 • Secret Politics of Our Desires and even eight-year-olds would know whether they wanted to become doctors or policemen. The control ol the television set in the household rested with the children, who switched it on and off when they liked, except during examination time, when their watching was curtailed. The adults would occasionally watch television and talk about the serials to each other or to the neighbours, but never to the children. Television and video entered this household a few months after I moved in. It brought about clear changes in the children’s conversation, giving them entry, as it were, into a new world peopled by television and film stars. It enabled them to reconstitute themselves as knowledgeable and ‘up-to-date’ indi¬ viduals. Also, given the familial context in which TV was watched, it provided opportunities for self-assertion. For the most part, the children would watch TV on their own, without any adults (except myself) present, and would talk back to the TV, particularly during the advertisements, which they would never miss. They would sing the jingles, guess the advertisement to follow, anticipate the punch lines, identify TV stars and make critical and funny re¬ marks. In a familial situation where children were discouraged from speaking before elders, TV opened up possibilities of voicing one’s opinion, displaying one's memory, knowledge and sense of humour. The children could define themselves as powerful with reterence to TV, capable of criticizing and interrupting the televisual flow. 1 he children’s fondness for advertisements and Chitrahar (Pr°gramme of film-song clips) could be because these progra¬ mmes, unlike serials, allowed for participation and game-playing, and did not demand continuous involvement in the narrative. As opposed to adult viewers, who tend to relate to TV in a referential way, using the yardsticks of naturalism/realism to evaluate serials, children appear to respond to TV in a metacritical. ludic fashion. Ihe cunosity and interest of these children in the world of TV and films has to be understood in the context of their complete alienation from learning in school, which, unlike video and TV, offers no opportunities for exercising their creativity and curiosity. For most working-class children, the world of formal learning is associated with lear, physical punishment, mechanical copying and rote memory. 1 here appeared to be a shared belief among many working-class adults of Kamgar Nagar that children have to be frightened oi beaten into studying. It was television and film that

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 175 offered the possibility of a different kind of knowledge. To them, the serial was a construct and they were interested in knowing the way it is put together. C: You know last time they showed [in the fails down and gets hurt—that's not real. happens—after she falls, they show the car in they quickly put tomato sauce on her to look her. Q: Who told you this? C: They were talking about it in school.

serial Fauji\ how that girl Actually, you know what between During that time, like blood. Then they show

The children’s involvement with the formal aspects of serials make them read violence and bloodshed on the screen quite differently from adults. Violence on the screen, be it a boxing match telecast live or a film, would be read in terms of its game-like elements: a fight as a game between opposing sides, with potential for anticipation, surprise and comedy. The fight scenes in Hindi films would generate much applause, cheering and laughter and such scenes are not regarded as having anything to do with reality: J (ten-year-old girl): How was yesterday’s 9 o’ clock programme? Was it nice? Was there ‘fighting’ in it? Q: No. No fighting. Why, do you like fighting? J: Yes Q: Like in He Maril J: And Spiderman. And Intezaar last time. I like to see fighting. Q: Why? [No answer] Do you like to see real fighting? J: No. Only in the pictures.

The models of childhood and parenthood as constructed by televisual discourse evoke strategies ranging from incorporation to negotiated acceptance to resistance, on the part of both parents and children. While some viewers of Kamgar Nagar look to television as a resource in their aspirations for self-improvement, others are indifferent, a few hostile. Ethnic background, gender and age mediate these relations of power between viewers and televisual discourse. In general, the Catholic community of Kamgar Nagar appears to be less receptive to the pastoral power of the state, there being perhaps a strong alternative structure (the church) for the reproduction and control of their moral life. The entry of television into the power relations within the family alters both its patterning and the resistance to it. ‘Modern’ parents invoke televisual models of ‘smartness’ and performance in disciplining and moulding their children. ‘Traditional’ parents, while indifferent to their children’s interpretation of televisual

176 • Secret Politics of Our Desires discourse, would rely on direct controls, such as the regulation of viewing time. In such homes, where the norm is that children be seen and not heard, children would use television (particularly advertisements) as a resource in their resistance, constructing themselves as active, critical and powerful. Gender-specific Dividing Practices Gender transcribed in biological terms betrays the dividing practices of a presiding male rationality. ‘Nature’ and ‘natural distinctions’ are invoked to construct distinct ‘male’ and ‘female’ identities. The specific forms of power and resistance that constitute these identities also reflect the discourses of the family and the state. Male power appears as the norm, extending to all spaces, public and private, yet not monolithic, having to contend with the dangers of female power and resistance. The construction of gender identities, in viewer and televisual discourses and the interface between the two, can be regarded as an attempt to contain these dangers, to reaffirm the male order by constituting gender on the basis of distinct sets of generic preferences, viewing practices, watching routines and uses of television. Within the family, the father/husband defines his gender identity through the televisual discourse in contradistinction to his wife, and vice-versa. In the process, husbands and wives define themselves as possessing distinct viewing preferences. These relate to the basic division made between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres, the woman being seen as situated firmly within the former, this in turn defining her interests and viewing patterns. In Kamgar Nagar, women employed outside the home are a minuscule minority. The immurement of women is, by and large, a marker of the family’s middle-class status; it is seen as allowing a woman to devote herself to her children’s upbringing and education, armed with ‘the ideology of progressive motherhood’.27 As an unmarried male technician puts it, ‘in the middle class, if a girl goes out to work, it is seen as being inferior, because... she is forced to go, but among the rich, it is not so; they go to work for time pass (killing time). A married woman who takes up employment out of interest’ (as opposed to ‘necessity’) is seen both as depriving men of a job, as well as neglecting her home. The conlinement of women within the ‘domestic’ or ‘private’ space, w'ith the entire responsibility of home-making and child-

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 111 rearing, has implications for television watching. Many women, particularly Hindu and Muslim migrants, experience television viewing as an escape from a claustrophobic domestic space. Given this situation, women are likely to be more receptive than men to television. The ‘knowledge’ that women are expected to acquire from it and which they themselves see as useful tends to be related to cooking, handicraft, health, childcare, and within-family behaviour. The main sources of ‘knowledge’ for women are the serials, the afternoon chat show and the advertisements, all ‘designed’ to make them better mothers and housewives. As opposed to this, men define ‘knowledge’ more in terms of the news and other related programmes. A middle-aged Maharashtrian Muslim ship¬ yard vessel master, seemed convinced about this part of the story: TV makes a man smart. One comes to know everything. I have travelled all over the country, to the south, the north. But not my son. He gets to see everything... information about all kinds of things... about factories, how things are made.

On the whole, women watch news far less and show far less interest in the ‘public’ sphere. The domestic routines and division of labour contribute to such gender-specificity. At the time of the study, TV would be switched on in many households either at 7.30 p.m. for the Marathi news) or around 8.00 p.m. (for the Marathi serial). Dinner would generally be eaten between 8.30 and 9.00 p.m. The 9 o’clock serial would be watched by the whole family. Since women are the ones who cook, serve food and clean up, they fit in these domestic duties with the news, to be free to watch the serials. For the men, the separation between work and leisure is clearer. Once they return home from work, they relax and watch television. Balancing domestic work with watching television often becomes an area of negotiation, particularly between mothers and children. As a middle-aged mother and wife of a motor-cycletaxi driver said: The children don’t do any work at home. They just sit and watch. So there’s more work for me... I don’t get to watch so much... I get so fed up. I have a great desire to watch... specially if there’s a match. I’m very interested in sports... I lie down on my sofa and watch all day, when there’s a cricket match [laughs] that day, there won’t be any curry for lunch.

There appear to be clear gender differences in preferences for

178 • Secret Politics of Our Desires genres, ‘storicals’ being popular among women and detective serials among men. Even when both men and women choose the latter as their favourite genre, the reasons given for the choice are different. The men identify with the sleuth and emphasize rational problem-solving. On the other hand, women tend to identify themselves with the victims or potential victims, who can get information from the detectives which will enable them to cope with the outside world. Such differences cut across genres. For instance, women’s more sensuous and intense involvement with family drama is reflected in their accounts of 'storicals’, which they retell with attention to the feelings of the characters and to the minutiae of dialogues and situations; men are more terse, compressing the narrative and drawing out moral lessons or underlying principles. The differences extend all the way to the perceptions of TV’s place in life. Men stress the utilitarian aspects of television viewing, evaluating the costs and benefits involved. A Goan Muslim clerk with five children says: TV is not so bad. TV is good. But it depends on how we use it. If we keep watching, that’s not good... I have heard—in America, one hour is worth one lakh rupees. But in our India, so many hours are just wasted. If we use our time, maybe our country will progress. We should face reality, not live in a make-believe world.

The wife of the clerk resents this attitude; her account stresses the pleasure she derives from TV, and the male inability to grasp this: TV is good. We work all day in the kitchen... inside the house all the time. When we watch TV, we feel good, as if we have gone out some¬ where. But he... he doesn’t understand. Men are outside the house all day. They can’t understand how we feel.

All this should not create the feeling that in Kamgar Nagar men and women define their identities clearly, with no blurring of roles, overlap or resistance to received norms. The contrasts I have talked about are set within networks of power and resistance; there is no one-to-one relationship between maleness and power. In many, perhaps most Goan Catholic families, house-bound women play a crucial role in family decisions regarding marriage ol children, management of family property, household finances, and so on. This exercise of power by the woman takes place within an overt patriarchal perspective. Mrs S is a Catholic housewife,

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 179 in her mid-forties, has three school-and college-going children. Her husband, a shipyard supervisor, is a quiet, retiring man. She regards herself as a capable, strong member of the family and says: He is soft, he gets upset soon... can’t do any rough, heavy work. I can manage all that, even slaughtering pigs. When the children were young, I used to slaughter pigs myself and make sausages for sale... we needed the money.

In the community, Mrs S is regarded as a clever and powerful woman. According to a neighbour, the family lost their youngest son a few years ago, when he fell out of a school bus and died on the spot. Mr S was completely broken and depressed for a long time. It was Mrs S who took the initiative and responsibility of pursuing the case in court, which she finally won. With all the authority she exercises, Mrs S’s perception of familial relationships stresses the power of the husband/father: Nobody respects a woman whose husband has left her. However bad the husband is, his presence makes her respectable. The children need a father to grow up properly. The father should be strict, and the children should fear him. The mother should instil this fear in them. Both fear and love. Sometimes, the mother might feel like speaking ill of the father, but she should never do that. Whatever her husband says or does, she should always be virtuous. If the husband is worthless, the wife can change him, but not the other way around.

In Mrs S’s scheme of things, a woman should be active, courageous and righteous; her strategic acceptance of ‘the fear of the father’ grants her the space to exercise her power both within and outside the family. The theme of the powerful woman in television programming, often derived from the filmic formula of an avenging goddess meting out justice, is an evocative theme for most women, perhaps providing a symbolic resolution to the conflicts within patriarchal structures. Many woman express approval of even bizarre forms of revenge, for instance the castration of offending males in the film Zakhmi Aurat (1988). The discourse on female ‘power’ is usually linked with the discourse on modernity, the ’modern woman’ being seen as liberated and capable. In a situation where gender inequalities are taken for granted, the pleasure evoked by the televisual discourse on the powerful woman must explain how televisual discourse constructs the relationship between gender and power, affirms culturally

180 • Secret Politics of Our Desires dominant gender identities, and situates them in the context of the modern state and its forms of ordering. These we shall discuss in the next section, with reference to two popular serials, Aavhan and Udaan. Flying Kites: Aavhan and Udaan The Marathi serial Aavhan was identified by viewers as a progressive serial, dealing with the issue of dowry and dowry deaths, a part of the campaign for women’s emancipation. Involve¬ ment in the serial was high; viewers discussed episodes, retold the story to others, predicted consequences and related the story to real life incidents of domestic violence and dowry deaths. The plot revolves around a powerful mother and a weak son under her influence. The father is a good man, untainted by the mother’s evil. The mother-son duo harasses daughters-in-law for dowry. The first daughter-in-law is dead when the story opens; she has been driven to suicide. The narrative starts with Veena, the second daughter-in-law, her harassment and torture at the hands of the mother and son, the casual attempts of the father to rescue her, and her eventual suicide. However, Uma, the third daughter-in-law, is made of sterner stuff. Together with the father and the newly formed Sobti Sanghatana (an organization for women’s equality), she teaches the mother and the son a lesson. In the end, the mother is destroyed and the son runs away. The narrative is constructed around the polarity of good and evil, the father and daughters-in-law representing the good, and the mother and son the evil. Evil is associated with greed, obses¬ sion with material accumulation and hypocrisy. The full-throated song of Veena, her love of nature, her affinity for the outdoors, stands in contrast to the claustrophobic space inhabited by the mother and the son, filled with images of gods and muted religious chanting. In the conflict between (free, honest) nature and (unfree, hypocritical) culture, the latter wins the first round. Trapped by the forces of evil within the confining space of the house, deprived of her energizing relationship with nature and music, Veena, the embodiment of good, takes her own life. At this point in the narrative the entry ol collective morality, in the form of an organi¬ zation for women’s emancipation called Sobti Sanghatana, helps Uma change the balance of power in the family and, presumably, t e community. It is eventually collective good that triumphs over

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 181 individual greed. Schematically, the polarities within the narrative are as follows:

Forces of Good

Forces of Evil

father, daughters-in-law

mother, son

unselfish/unworldly

greedy/worldly-wise

escape/freedom entrapment/bondage (full-throated song, affinity for (muted religious chanting, outdoors) affinity for indoors) relationship with nature (tending plants)

relationship with money (keeping accounts)

collective good

individual greed

The mother chooses to exercise power over her son. Her domi¬ nation of her son and her belittling of her husband is in sharp conflict with culturally accepted familial roles. The belief that power is man’s domain, his natural prerogative, remains beneath the discursive level. What becomes unnatural, a matter to be talked about, is the exercise of power by women. It is also accepted that some women wield power by proxy, by lying in wait to ensnare an unsuspecting male. Thus, Shree is a victim of his mother’s will to power. He is portrayed as essentially weak, liable to break down at crucial moments, and has to be bolstered by his mother. The construction of the narrative and the viewers’ implicit images of the mother-son relationship and the devouring mother make for a dominant reading of the mother as the source of evil and the son as merely her instrument. Throughout the narrative, direct male exercise of power goes unquestioned. The father arranges and decides matters related to the daughter’s marriage. Even Uma, the liberated karate expert, meekly acquiesces to her father’s demand that she marry and free him from his responsibility; she does not challenge the invisible, natural male order. In this context, it is necessary to make a distinction between female ‘power’ (domination) and female ‘strength’. The latter is permissible, within circumscribed bounds, so long as it does not challenge the natural male prerogative; the former is not. In Aavhan, evil female power is neutralized and destroyed when countered by female strength, with the backing of male power. Uma, the embodiment of

182 • Secret Politics of Our Desires righteous female strength is fully justified in her counterattack (her Aavhan): her main target is another woman. Even when she opposes her husband, she is only opposing the exercise of female power by proxy. The viewer feels one with her in her attack against evil unnatural female power, from a position of acceptance of the natural male order. This male order has a place for ‘women’s emancipation’ as well. Sobti Sanghatana is formed by a group of public-spirited young men to fight the oppression of women. They believe that in the cities, with education and economic independence, the status of women has improved. Women’s oppression is a problem of the villages where traditions reign and education is poor. Ultimately, oppression of women is attributed to lack of education. The modern, educated woman, epitomized by Uma, who opts for male rationality, is both emancipated and emancipatory. The serial constructs oppression and freedom in terms of the dichotomy between modernity and tradition and presents truth/ liberation as a moment beyond power. Tradition is equated with oppression and falsehood, fraught with power equations. Mod¬ ernity is egalitarian, emancipatory and represents truth. The young men and women of Sobti Sanghatana embody this truth beyond power. They are not implicated in the oppression of women, yet they understand the truth of the problem and are willing to struggle to overcome it, to change oppressive tradition into libera¬ ting modernity. While dowry has in reality become widespread only in recent times, the serial views it as a traditional practice which can be overcome through education and economic independence. Both education and wage-earning signify entry into the male space. Women s liberation from oppression is defined as a move¬ ment away from the feminine (equated with weakness, backward¬ ness, irrationality) towards the male rationality. The oppression of women is posed not as a political question, involving unequal power flows, but as a technological one, to be resolved through inputs such as education and employment opportunities. The markers of education and tradition, which define and divide women, do not hold good for men. All men, whether educated, illiterate, urban, rural, traditional or modern are, by their very gender, rational, except when tainted by female irrationality. In the portrayal of male/female roles within Sobti Sanghatana, it is the men who are more rational, advocating caution and good

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 183 sense, while the women and children resort to aggression and violence at times. Also implicit in the serial is the view that women are responsible for their own oppression, firstly because ‘women are women’s worst enemies’, fighting for control of the man within the household, and secondly because they are weak and uneducated. The men remain outside these equations of power and are capable of objectively analysing the problem of women’s oppression. Although they are not responsible for it, they are committed to resolve it. Also, women are fraught with contra¬ dictions and irrationality. But they can be devious and even devouring: they consume money, jewellery, property, other women. Men are monolithic, purposive, capable of analysing contradictions. The only man who is greedy and devious is so because he is under a woman’s thumb. Aavhan has captured the popular imagination. Given its construction, viewers can readily and unambiguously identify it with ‘good forces’ of women’s emancipation and against the ‘evil forces’ of dowry. At the same time, the serial reassures by reaffir¬ ming the dominant constructions of gender identity and power relations. This duality allows the viewer to feel progressive, modern and is self-righteous on women’s issues and, at the same time, does not threaten his/her gender identity and conception of power relations. The relationship between gender and power can be represented as follows: Good man

Bad man

Follows his natural rational path

Falls into a woman’s clutches. Forfeits his natural right to wield power

Good woman

Bad woman

Acts rationally, with the support of the male. Does not attempt to ensnare the male.

Deviously wields power through the male, always to oppress— usually other women

By the end of the narrative, Shree, used up by his mother, is reduced to a blubbering idiot. He can no longer be her instrument.

184 • Secret Politics of Our Desires She turns to her husband, appeals for his sympathy, but he avoids her. The last scene shows the mother and son haunted by the ghosts of the dead daughters-in-law. The mother sets herself on fire, by accident; Shree runs away. The last shot shows him running, stumbling down a long dark road, away from the camera, into the night. The woman is destroyed and the man, freed from her clutches, escapes. Man as a position is indestructible. Shree is saved because he is only an instrument of evil and not the source of it. Order and equilibrium are finally restored. Udaan (‘The Flight’) delineates two spaces: the feudal patriarchal joint family and the modern nuclear family.28 It repre¬ sents a flight from the shackles of the joint family to the freedom of the nuclear family. The narrative opens with a feudal family celebrating the birth of a grandson. The family has at its head a traditional patriarch and his scheming second wife, who subtly wields power over the patriarch, to marginalize her step-son and promote her own son. The elder (step-) son has his own family—a daughter, Kalyani, and the newborn son. The feudal family is presented as one where the individual has no say. Everything and everyone is subject to the law of the patriarch, which extends beyond the boundaries of the household to the oppressed tenants and servants. Kalyani’s father is a misfit within this order and is so marginalized that he has been sent away to attend to property matters on the occasion of the celebrations marking the birth of his son. Also, at the margin on this occasion are Kalyani, eclipsed by the birth of a brother, and Bua, the father’s sister, who lives out the stigmatized fate of a widow. The patriarch and his wife want Kalyani to be withdrawn Irom school and married, as all girls in the family have been. This is resisted by Kalyani’s father. Finally, he and his family have to leave the feudal household, all because he wants a better life for his daughter. The serial makes use of the cliched motif of a bird being released from a cage—Kalyani’s last act before the family leaves the house. The next episode presents the nuclear family, in sharp contrast to the feudal order it has escaped: the father working the barren land with his bare hands, the close, comradely relationship between father and daughter, the camaraderie of the rural poor, and their suffering at the hands of landlords, the mother’s accep¬ tance of her lot but also her embarrassment when her prosperous brother and sister-in-law come for a visit. Together the first two

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 185 episodes define the two spaces through a series of oppositions: Feudal family

Nuclear family

The oppressive law of the patriarch, manipulated by his wife.

The benevolent encouragement of the father, supported by his wife.

The parent-child relationship as one of blind obedience, the child’s interest subordinated to those of family prestige and duty.

The parent-child relationship as one of communication and active interaction, the father winning the child’s support, placing her interests as paramount.

False ideas of prestige and grandeur, sustained by the labour of others.

Living within one’s means, by one’s own sweat.

Oppression, of women, tenants and servants

Equality for women, and other marginal groups

Boys and girls as having distinct, preordained destinies

'Destiny’ as a product of one’s labour, regardless of gender.

Udaan constructs a nuclear family which fits in with viewers’ self-images and aspirations. The viewers identify the fatherdaughter relationship as its main thematic, a relationship that is ‘progressive’, yet reassuringly ‘traditional’ in terms of values like sacrifice and obedience. Kalyani’s struggle for success in a man’s world becomes all the more acceptable to viewers because it is motivated not by self-interest but by the desire to restore selfrespect and dignity to her father/family. The dominant formula identified by a majority of viewers was Bapka badla (revenge on behalf of father)—an outcome anticipated early in the serial. The narrative structure of the serial can be summarized as follows: 1. Kalyani’s family (the good guys) leaves the feudal fold (the bad guys). 2. Against all odds, they manage to make a living. 3. The bad guys strike, depriving them of land and house. 4. The good guys move to the city and continue the struggle against the bad guys in court. 5. The bad guys strike again, crippling Kalyani’s father.

186 • Secret Politics of Our Desires 6. Kalyani emerges as an avenging angel. She is successful in avenging her father’s humiliation. 7. Kalyani faces a moment of realization: to live with dignity one cannot remain ‘common’, one has to become ‘someone’. 8. Kalyani joins the police, overcoming all obstacles of gender during her training and after. 9. Kalyani is sent on a difficult mission. She has to leave this half-way because of threats to her father from the bad guys. 10. Now in a position of power, she cracks down on the bad guys. 11. The bad guys seek a compromise. Her father advises her not to use her power to fight merely personal battles. The decision about the land grabbed from them should be left to the court. She should use her power to fight against social injustice. Kalyani obeys her father. While throughout the narrative, viewers could identify with the struggle of Kalyani and her father against the feudal bad guys, the ending was seen as unsatisfactory, the main reason being that the narrative of family revenge and reconciliation was inconclusive. As a Maharashtrian blue-collar worker argued: They did not show a complete end. The revenge she had to take... that was not shown. I thought something more is going to happen. She holds him by the collar of his shirt, that’s all. The end means the whole family should have come to know ‘We have made a mistake’. They should have all started coming together agaih. Then we would have felt good about the end. But the complete end was not shown.

These feelings stem perhaps from generic expectations. For those viewers who regard JJdaan as a family saga, the movement away from the joint family at the beginning causes a disequilibrium. They expect restoration of the equilibrium through the return of the nuclear family to the fold, but this time on the former's terms as the marker of a new familial order that must replace the old one. To viewers, Udaan represents a demonstration of women’s power and competence, the ideal modern father-daughter relationship, and the liberation of women from the feudal order. The power relations and the construction of gender under this dispensation are noteworthy. Firstly, within the feudal family, the pattern is familiar. As in Aavhan, the evil woman (the stepmother) exercises power by proxy, through the patriarch. The apparently powerful patriarch, thus, is the victim of the machinations of his

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 187

wife and son, and can perhaps be exonerated. It is this evil power that engineers the attacks on the heroic nuclear family. In contrast, the women in the nuclear family (Kalyani and her mother) do not attempt to wield power over men. Kalyani, while apparently powerful, is an instrument of her father. He is responsible for making her what she is. Her courage and determination are but extensions of his own. When he is incapacitated, she reciprocates his encouragement and support, rising to the occasion and fighting for her interests. However, she can never be as good as him. Kalyani breaks down at decisive moments; only the inspiration and direction of her father pull her through. During her training, when faced with an apparently insurmountable task, she nearly gives up. The memory of her father training her to ride a bike spurs her to continue. At another point, when on a new assignment in a dacoit-infested area, she witnesses the police treating complainants callously. She summons the former and gives them a shrill dressing down, ending with ‘What do you people in position imagine us to be?’ In contrast, her father is always fully rational and in control of his emotions. He also has the ability to rise above petty self-interest. Masculinity is the norm against which both men and women are measured; Kalyani is extraordinary because she is ‘as good as a man’. This extraordinariness is set against the ordinariness of her neighbours, young girls who are interested only in clothes, jeweller}7, film magazines and catching a husband. They are merely objects of decoration, burdens to be disposed of by their parents at the earliest opportunity. In the opposition between the worlds of women and men, the former appears frivolous, decorative, tradition-bound, while the latter is concerned with serious matters, with work, struggle and social justice. Women’s work and contri¬ bution is seen as marginal and of little consequence. The ultimate recognition for Kalyani comes when her superior officer says of her: ‘She is one of our best men!’ Kalyanks fate has a twofold implication. Firstly, only the extraordinary woman can be as good as a man. To a man, being a man comes naturally; for a woman, it is an uphill struggle. Secondly, there is nothing in the ordinary world of women worthy of recognition. It is only by negating the triviality of her world that a woman can achieve the extraordinary. Even when she does so, Udaan suggests, she is always in danger of lapsing back into her emotional, feminine ways. Only the constant guidance and

188 • Secret Politics of Our Desires encouragement of a superior man helps her remain rational and rise above petty, personal interests. Kalyani’s Udaan reminds one not so much of the flight of a bird as of a kite being held on course by the invisible strings of the male order. The modern family’s relationship with the state in Udaan is in stark contrast to that of the feudal family, which is a law unto itself. The latter, in its self-interest, makes unscrupulous use of the modern institutions of the state—police, judiciary and political system; it does not obey the rules of the game. The nuclear family, though at times treated callously and unjustly by the police, judiciary and bureaucracy, continues to struggle for justice within the system. At the end of the serial, Kalyani’s father tells her not to take the law into her own hands, but let the courts decide on property matters. The ideal nuclear family accepts the state as the arbiter of justice and fights feudal aberrations, such as corruption and tardiness, from within the system. It does this by training its children to occupy positions of power, so that as good, responsible human beings, they can reform the system and make it more responsive to people’s needs. For, in the final analysis, there is nothing really wrong with the system: the problem lies in faulty implementation. In the father's attempt to make Kalyani a ‘man’ who plays the game according to the rules, one sees both the construction of a ‘subject’ with a conscience and free will, who is subject to the ‘Subject’.29 Not for Kalyani is the anarchic, individual rebellion of the angry young (wo)men of the Hindi cinema; her father ensures that the anger, revenge and love of family that motivated her to struggle f°r power is transformed into constructive, socially useful forms. The dual meaning of ‘flying kites’ marks out the boundaries of two kinds of femininity: the good/modern/strong female—a kite that is flown, the bad/traditional/powerful female—a bird of prey. The powerful traditional woman (the mother in Aavhan, the stepmother in Udaan) is involved in predation, procreation and self-preservation. She is committed to the clan, not to any larger force outside. The state enters her life only by default, for her world is a Darwinian ‘woman-eat-woman’ jungle where the only option is to eat or be eaten. The weak traditional woman (Veena in Aavhan, Bua in Udaan) is pitiable yet noble, an ideal quarry or the male read state intervention. Education, economic

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 189 independence and urbanization take her to the outside world and bring her within the ambit of the male/state order. In the process, her primordial female energy is channelized—tamed in the first case, tapped in the second. The transition from oppressive tradition to liberating modernity is represented, as already pointed out, by the movement from the joint family to the nuclear family. Issues that threaten this transition are the ‘women’s issues’: the domination of mothers over their sons and daughters-in-law; early marriages which make the newly-weds dependent on the extended family, the emphasis on the production of a male heir, leading to uncontrolled procreation; excessive dowry demands which place a burden on fathers of girls. For television, these are the indicators of the oppression of woman. Other issues, even when directly related to gender relations, such as domestic violence and women’s property rights, are clearly not parts of the same story. Dowry is projected as the most important women’s problem. It recurs in programming, serials, documentaries, social awareness advertisements and afternoon chat shows. Viewers recall the dramatic and the sensational: the hideously burnt dowry victim recounting her story, the Kanpur sisters dangling from the beams, the unfortunate Palghat sisters.30 All these real-life and fictional images interweave to construct a reality in which, for the average viewer, dowry, in its extreme life-threatening form, becomes a problem for ‘others’, somewhere else. ‘Distantiation’ goes beyond the treatment of individual problems. Television portrays women in extreme terms, remote from the viewer’s experience: women as pilots and prime ministers and as victims of dowry, sati and child marriage. The ‘positive’ images lend credence to the view that women have ‘progressed’ and can be ‘as good as men’; the ‘negative’ ones become the problems of backward, illiterate villagers (‘from Delhi, UP, that side’). By contrast, everyday experience appears normal, natural and unproblematic: ‘We do not treat our women like that!’ In depicting power relations within the family, men are generally absent, neutral or uninvolved. ‘Women are women’s worst enemies’ is a recurrent motif in television soap opera. Family dramas are often constructed around the mother-in-law/daughterin-law polarity. One is good, the other bad, the husband being manipulated by the bad one. Soap opera and everyday experience both reaffirm the belief that women oppress each other. As

190 • Secret Politics of Our Desires opposed to this, men referee the modes in which women interact, bestow legitimacy, and above all provide the unobtrusive, invisible perspective from which all stories unfold.

The Spectator and the ‘World’ Let us now turn to the subjectivity of the spectator who watches the world take shape on the small screen, with paradoxical feelings of power and powerlessness. The spectator is the product of a set of dividing practices, within and outside the family. For instance, the very act of purchasing a television puts the purchasers into a privileged class of those who can sit before their sets and witness events from all over the world, ‘as if one were there’. Having one’s own TV thus puts the viewer in a category of ‘one who knows’, and for whom this knowledge comes with ease. This knowledge also gives the viewer entry into a world of discourse, from which he/she would otherwise be excluded. A Goan Catholic shipyard plumber, who plans, to buy a TV, talks of his reasons for doing so: If you buy a TV, you have an idea of what’s happening. And in the company, your status improves, your knowledge increases. That’s why I want a TV. When Eduardo Faleiro speaks, they show it on TV. Other workers talk about it. If I have a TV, I too can join in.

This construction of the self as knowledgeable depends, for most workers in Kamgar Nagar, on the acquisition of a TV. TV has increased their interest in news; the reason given is that the visual dimension of television news makes it easier to ‘read’. Television news is also seen by most viewers as more credible than others because it gives viewers a sense of being witness to events as they happen. This ‘seeing for oneself guarantees the obiectivitv of news. Compared to newspaper accounts, where there could be different, conflicting versions, which are hence all suspect, the unambiguity of television news is seen as guaranteeing its credibility. A shipyard fitter said: Now previously, in the news [on radio and in the papers] they could lie. two died, then ten deaths were reported and vice-versa. And the reporters are all different, each adding his own brand of spice. But that doesn t happen on TV. You can see for yourself. They actually show what has happened.

Moreover, as it draws the viewer through a sequence of items which does not permit retroactive reading, TV news gives the

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 191 viewer a sense of having a detailed, up-to-date, easily accessible view of happenings all over the world. This view is facilitated by devices such as slow-motion replay. A shipyard fitter with three young children said: If something happens somewhere, we come to know exactly how it happened. For instance, if there is a plane crash, they show the tape of it—how the planes collided, how they broke into pieces, how the pieces fell. They show it again and again, from different sides, slowly, so that we can see with our own eyes exactly what happened.

The interest in the visually spectacular news, to the exclusion of all other, is evident from a practice some families, mostly Goan Catholic, follow. When the news begins, the volume is turned down, allowing for conversation and music. When some visual sequences catch the eye, they are speculated about, or commented on. If there is a spectacular visual sequence, like a calamity or a sports event, the volume is turned up, or the next news bulletin watched for details. ‘We can see it with our own eyes’ is also a statement of power. The spectator-subjects experience a greater sense of power than those who do not have TV sets. Television gives them the means to ‘recognize who’s who’, to experience a sense of ‘travelling all over the world’, to verify for themselves the truth, which unfolds instantaneously before their gaze. They contrast the cosy domesticity from within which they watch with the tragedies occurring before them, and consider themselves ‘better off’ and fortunate. Television transports the spectators out of the monotony of their everyday world, and at the same time reinforces faith in everyday normality and comfort. The spectator-subjects, on the one hand, constitute themselves as ‘knowledgeable’ compared to those who have no access to television and, on the other, as better off in relation to the objects of suffering they see on television. This brings us back to the issue of gender. The spectator-subject is male in a dual sense. I have already said that, given the routines of domestic work and the division of labour in the family, many women are unable to sit before the TV and watch the news. The demarcation of the public and the private, with the women being expected to take more interest in the latter, also influences women’s choice of programmes. There is a second sense in which the spectator-subject is male. The gaze of the spectator, with its elements of voyeurism and fascination with the spectacular, seems predominantly to be a

192 • Secret Politics of Our Desires characteristic of young men. The comment of an 18-year-old shipyard apprentice is typical: Whatever happens anywhere in the world, we get to see it on TV. For instance, some time back, three aeroplanes crashed. In the papers, they mentioned it, but didn’t show a picture. When they showed it on TV [laughs] it was like fun to watch it. Like in the movies.

In contrast, women usually express either sympathy or a mixture of sympathy and interest in the spectacle. Confronted by a tele¬ visual world of sudden calamities and suffering, women (and, to some extent, older men) often adopt the stance not of powerful spectators, but of helpless bystanders, who become aware of their own finitude. A Catholic housewife said: We saw ourselves—the Russian earthquake. What can happen in one second. Even if you are rich, you have everything, ultimately everything is in God’s hands. In one second, everything can change. So much suffering in this world—fighting and wars. When man gets angry, he forgets himself.

The spectator, however, does not stratify televisual discourse into ‘information’ and ‘entertainment’. The so-called ‘entertain¬ ment. programmes’ (the soap operas) are regarded as sources of information, which reveal what actually happens in homes, hospitals, police stations and courtrooms. Conversely, the news is seen as containing elements of entertainment—especially when the spectacular is shown. However, even an apparently matterof-fact account of the death of President Zia-ul-Haq of Pakistan could be constructed into a bizzare narrative that reads like a soap-opera plot, as the following account of a shipyard apprentice indicates: He had died much earlier, but they only announced it on the 8.30 news. He was completely burnt, his body, so they could recognize that it was him only from the teeth. It was a good thing for India that he died [pause] He... what is the name of that wife... Bhutto... Benazir Bhutto, She was his opponent. So Zia used his cunning to make her his wife. And the Assembly she had got together, he banned it... And within 90 days he was to declare elections. But there was a dictatorship there—he was also an army general. So he didn’t declare elections then... He waited till Benazir Bhutto was pregnant and in the ninth month... that's when he announced the elections. Because he knew she’s pregnant, she won’t be able to take part. But, in the meantime, there was this plane crash and he died. It ended there. From India’s point of view, it was good.

Television thus appears to many viewers as a window on the world that introduces them to a larger reality to which they previously had limited access; it turns them into spectators who

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 193 can see things ‘as they happen’, from a privileged, ringside position, seated comfortably in their homes. Given the relatively recent entry of television in their world, many viewers appear to luxuriate in this new-found access. As a result, when they constitute themselves as ‘better off’, in relation to the suffering millions they see on their screens, the stances adopted vary from empathetic involvement to voyeuristic fascination with spectacular suffering. The resulting identity includes feelings of both power and powerlessness: the power comes from knowledge, from redefining oneself as a seeing eye that uses television to survey the entire world; the powerlessness from the perception that one is merely a ‘speck of dust’ in this larger reality, unable to change the course of events, a mute witness. ‘Bad’ PoIiticians/‘Good’ State In Kamgar Nagar, there is a pervasive feeling of cynicism or indifference towards political processes and institutions. Politicians are regarded as opportunists whose ‘help' is contingent upon their capturing votes and who therefore become visible only before elections. But such political events are also seen as opportunities for negotiating with politicians, to obtain civic amenities for the area. They are the only occasions when people feel they have some power, a strategic advantage, which they could use to elicit a response from an otherwise unresponsive system. The power exercised by politicians and other government functionaries is regarded as corrupting. In fact, the word politics is synonymous with a breakdown of morality. The discrepancy between the barrage of positive images of the state on television and the cynicism with the functioning of the government is reconciled in various ways—through indifference, resistance, partial acceptance or acceptance. Indifference to the state and to politics in general, including its televisual portrayal, is the most common response, especially among women. Resistance is the second most popular response. It takes various forms. Some reject TV’s portrayal of the government as false, as in the following outburst of a retired dock worker: The government does nothing. Prices are increasing. They show how he [Rajiv Gandhi] goes here and there? What’s the use of that? It’s all lies. If the government were doing something, then why is there fighting and bloodshed? Why are there robberies? They don’t take any action. Truth

194 • Secret Politics of Our Desires has no value and corruption is a way of life. We have to just w$tch TV and keep our mouths shut.

Resistance also takes the form of accepting the reality of the televisual image, but interpreting it as proof of discrimination by the government against ‘our’ region and community. This feeling was pronounced among the Goan Catholics. One carpenter in the shipyard said: They help ghantis. We watch Rajiv Gandhi on TV, going here and there, helping ghantis. He doesn’t help us. These days, the mahars and chamars have become big people. And they crush us down. Prices are rising and my pay doesn’t last even for eight days.

Partial acceptance is more prevalent among the middle-class viewers, those with white-collar jobs and greater access to edu¬ cation and information other than through television. They take a ‘liberal’ point of view, which is interested in knowing what the government is doing, who’s who, and so on, all of which is seen as information useful for individual development, contributing to general knowledge and social skills. At the same time, there is a matter-of-fact acceptance that news on the TV is biased in favour of the regime. But this does not appear to arouse anger or anti¬ government feelings. Says an accounts clerk: Overall, it is difficult to come to a conclusion. We can’t say that the government is 100 per cent efficient. Government scandals can’t be ruled out. For example, Bofors... the newspapers and the opposition exposed the government. But at. the same time, one can’t say that the opposition is 100 per cent correct. We don’t really have a clear picture. Nothing can be proved.

Some viewers make sense of the contrast between the good state on the 1V and their experience of politics by drawing a line between the centre and the local governments, between those at the top who plan and those below who implement. Their dis¬ content is directed at the proximate centres of power. They regard the centre and the top leadership as good, honest and pro-people, and the local government and bureaucracy as corrupt, self-seeking and anti-people. Viewers express faith in a core elite that rises above petty interests and is committed to truth. At the time of the study, this core was personified by the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. News narratives that presented Rajiv Gandhi as a crusader against corruption and non-implementation were invoked in the construction of a centre of truth beyond power. Said a Goan Catholic wife ol a Port Trust engine driver:

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 195 When Rajiv Gandhi goes to different places, he finds out about people there. The government gives people many facilities. He goes to find out whether all this is really reaching people. Sometimes, those in between keep things for themselves, so he goes to investigate. If we read about this in the paper, we might think it’s not true. Because we can see it with our own eyes, we know it is the truth.

The imagery of the patriarchal family is frequently invoked when the viewers make sense of the larger configurations of power in terms of local power relations. In the relationship of the centre to the lower orders of the political hierarchy, power is seen to emanate naturally from a patriarchal centre. A middle-aged electrician said: The centre should be strong. It is the centre that gives power to others. The centre is like a father. The states are children. The children can’t teach the father what he should do. They must respect the father. Even if the opposition is in power in a state, the centre should not discriminate.

Ideas of politics and statecraft draw upon the familial in two other senses: governing the country is equated with running a family and dynastic rule is taken for granted. A Goan Muslim customs clearing agent said: With one month’s pay, we can’t run our own household. And the government has to run the whole country. It’s difficult, you are answerable to everybody. Rajiv Gandhi is good, he tries his best. But who listens? It’s his family business, he has to do it, and he does his best. He gives crores of rupees to the poor. But those in between finish it.

There are several strands in the image of Rajiv Gandhi as a source of benevolent power and as a ‘father’ of the nation. I have already mentioned the saviour/crusader myth. Added to that is the physical appeal of Rajiv Gandhi and his family and the ‘style’ that they represent. A young Kannadiga Hindu divorcee, daughter of a security guard, says: ‘Sonia Gandhi always goes with him. She looks nice. Her hair is so soft and silky. Actually, she is old, but because of her makeup and all she looks young.’ Rajiv Gandhi is regarded as an embodiment and representative of the nation’s pride, furthering the stature of India in the eyes of the world. According to a shipyard fitter, ‘Under his leadership, they (the Congress) have brought progress in the country by intro¬ ducing the latest, modern things. India is a world leader sending up satellites and all.’ The objections of opposition leaders to excessive coverage of the prime minister and the ruling party are seen as politically

196 • Secret Politics of Our Desires motivated ploys, Doordarshan’s definitions of newsworthiness being taken for granted as natural. Says another shipyard fitter: Since Rajiv Gandhi is the leader of the country, every day he does something of importance, which they show on TV. That’s the main news, so they are obliged to show it. The opposition parties keep complaining that Rajiv Gandhi is being shown on TV all the time. It’s not as if they show him deliberately.

The themes of a charismatic leader and a strong stable centre, in the context of the viewer’s general indifference/cynicism about politics and the local government, legitimize the idea of an objective, rational and effective power centre. While Prime Minister Gandhi is regarded as beyond the realm of politics, the opposition is seen as situated squarely within the political field, often causing unnecessary disruption and interference. If the state is a patriarchal family, dissent cannot but be disrespectful and disruptive and powered by vested interests. Says a Goan Catholic retired driver: They keep filling their own pockets. Only by criticizing the government they fill their stomachs. Why do they spend on paying people to shout and take part in demonstrations? Because when they come into power, they will recover their money.

The Consumption of Selfhood Recent Western work in cultural theory accords a centrality to consumption within post-industrial, post-modern societies, and looks at commodities as systems of signs that mark out identities and hierarchies.31 In the developed societies, consumers cultivate lifestyles to make possible statements about who they are. Current advertising campaigns on Doordarshan, particularly for upmarket textiles and cosmetic products, recognize and play on this quest for identity through consumption. The formal exterior of the Vimal man in a recent campaign is counterpoint of his capacity to be playful.32 His aura of distinction—built up through his exclusive clothes, the settings he presides over, his playful authority, the women he commands and whom he surprises through his penchant lor the unconventional—identify him as one of the new heroes of consumer culture [who] make lifestyle a life project and display their individuality and sense of style in the particularity of the assemblage of goods, clothes, practices, experiences, appearance and bodily dispositions they design together into a lifestyle.’33

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 197 How do viewers, living in contexts far removed from the lifestyles and identities projected by television, negotiate their selfhood while confronting the new structures of desire and consumption? In the Goan context, consumption has a place in the making of communal identities. Phrases such as ‘Goenkar sossegado \ ‘Goenkar horradd sum up the self-image of Catholic Goans.34 Today, these phrases are trotted out with a mixture of pride and regret; the community tends to feel that their hedonism and easy-going ways have contributed to their marginalization by outsiders and Goan Hindus. The following comments on the renegotiation of identity through food draw largely upon my experience of living with the Goan Catholics in Kamgar Nagar. In most Catholic homes in Kamgar Nagar, there persist the consumption rituals and patterns characteristic of a primaryproduction based economy. Many families, Hindus and Catholics, get a part or the whole of their requirements of rice, coconuts and seasonal fruit from their ancestral property, there being a symbiotic relationship with relatives looking after the property back home. The food habits and modes of preparing food have remained, by and large, traditional.33 The usual meal, both lunch and dinner, consists of rice, fish curry, fried fish and occasionally a vegetable prepared with coconut. The purchase of fish is an event in all Goan families, Hindu and Catholic. The price and quality of fish is a common topic of conversation. The local equivalent of the British exchange on the weather begins with the question ‘ Aiz nusteak kite nil (literally, ‘What’s for fish today?’). During important festivals, a pig is slaughtered by the members of a family to prepare traditional dishes such as sorpatel chouricos and roast pork.36 (Many Catholic families in Kamgar Nagar keep pigs and fowls for their own consumption and for sale). Celebrations (especially marriages and christenings) involve the preparation of elaborate sweets, such as doce de grao and bibinca,37 On such occasions, close women friends and relatives assemble to help in the preparations for the feast. The homes take on a festive air, as the women laugh, joke and chat with each other while they work. A traditional feast would include a pulao, pork, fish and chicken preparations, salad and sweetmeats. Carbonated drinks, beer and wine (occasionally whisky) would be served prior to the meal. For Goan Catholics, food products such as carbonated and alcoholic drinks and soup/ stock cubes, that are relatively new to the Indian market, can be

198 • Secret Politics of Our Desires ‘traditional’, for they were a part of upper-caste Catholic life during Portuguese rule and have entered lower-caste households during the last two decades. The emulation of the consumption patterns of the upper castes by the newly rich low castes involves little change in food habits, as there is little caste difference in cuisine among the Catholics. The recent exposure of the Catholic community of Kamgar Nagar to foreign cultures and to the televised advertisements of food products appears to have brought about little change in food and cooking habits. While advertising might have expanded the demand for products such as carbonated drinks, ice-cream, confectionery, chocolates, cosmetics and clothing, the brands consumed are generally not the ones advertised, but locally produced, cheap substitutes. The direct impact of advertising on consumption patterns in Kamgar Nagar is limited, given the relatively low levels of income and the persistence of customary modes of consump¬ tion. More significant is the acquaintance with lifestyles, fashions, new products and new identities that the televisual discourse makes possible. In this context, a word on the viewers’ perception of their class. Of those who could relate to a question asking them to place themselves in a matrix of four options (rich, middle-class, workingclass, poor) three-fourths saw themselves as middle-class, a fifth as working-class and a miniscule percentage as poor. The majority also seemed, by and large, satisfied with their economic status, which they felt was improving over time. This affected their view of television advertising and the growing market for consumer goods and durables. At the time of the study, in Kamgar Nagar there was no large department store, visually displaying com¬ modities for the consumer, of the kind one finds in towns. Nor was there much recourse to other media such as magazines. So television became the major source of information and exposure to new mass-produced commodities and enabled viewers to reconstitute themselves as consumer subjects in relation to a market that extended beyond the local. The advertising itself may or may not have persuaded people, but it provided the opportunity to them to reconstitute themselves and their life spaces. Even viewers who claim to be unaffected by or indifferent to advertising are torced today to define themselves with reference to it, and to cope with the changes it has induced within the family the workplace and the community. For instance, a few parents

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 199 complain of their children asking for things that they cannot afford. However, half the parents feel that advertisements are useful sources of learning for their children. They mention in this connection language skills, development of memory, good food habits and general ‘smartness’. Many of them, I have already said, encourage their children to identify with the Rasna girl, the Complan children, and other characters from the adver¬ tisements. Viewers may or may not like it, but advertising is a means of redefining the familial space and the redefinition is not always on the parents’ terms. Similarly, with changes in the workplace and the community, with the intensification of the drive to ‘keep up with the D'Souzas’, that families have to come to terms with. Television is more than a source of information about lifestyles and products. It is a totemic marker of entry into the ‘middleclass’ culture, where ownership of consumer durables is tied up with family pride and status in the community; this entry is regarded by some viewers as a necessary evil and by others as beneficial. According to a young Kannadiga Muslim wife of a construction worker: Nowadays, fights within the family, physical violence and all that has reduced. People are busy watching TV. The menfolk have improved... they are bothered about somehow raising the money to buy a TV. Everyone has a TV nowadays. So now, men spend less... previously they would just waste money.

The ‘traditional’ consumer durables that most families possess are a cupboard, a bed, a fan, a radio and (in Catholic families, where it is often given as part of the dowry) a sewing machine. It is only after the purchase of a television set that families generally invest in other durables—refrigerators, two-wheelers, mixers and VCRs. Two factors have quickened the access to the market of consumer durables: the proliferation of loan and instalment schemes at the workplace and in the market; and remittances from the Middle East into Catholic and Muslim families in Kamgar Nagar. Both, helped by the new marketing strategies, sell not merely products or a consumer culture, but the idea that one’s identity is tied to what one possesses and purchases. This can be gauged by the way adolescent girls talk about consumables shown on TV. A first-year college student, daughter of a small businessman and a Tamil Catholic, said:

200 • Secret Politics of Our Desires I feel like buying the things I see... fashionable clothes... those model girls... how they wear them and turn and walk... I like to watch... but I can’t do anything about it. I won’t be able to buy those things, but I imagine myself in them.

It is among adolescent girls of all communities that the place of advertising in self-transformation is most apparent. Awkward, caught in a difficult stage of life and, in many cases, restrained from going out, they see in the world of advertisements the chance of reaching a more complete, self-assured state through an acquired familiarity with commodities and lifestyles. Watching advertisements for this group comes close to work, the work of transforming oneself into a desirable object and an accomplished housewife. A 24-year-old Kannadiga divorcee, daughter of a security guard, said: If tomorrow I get married and go to my in-laws’ place, I will know how to make so many things. I watch the ads showing how they prepare various foods and carefully memorize them. I try out the recipes more than once, until I have perfected them. Things like sakharbhat [sweet rice] and uridwada [lentil puffs], I drop my work to watch such ads... One gets knowledge.

Such gender differences in the reception and use of adver¬ tisements could be due to the fact that adolescent girls tend to see themselves as malleable beings who have to take the shape desired by their husbands-to-be and in-laws. Their future status as wives and mothers forms the raison d'etre of their lives; and hence, their energies are invested in acquiring the requisite skills, disposition and appearance. For adolescent boys there is social sanction for concentrating on acquiring the skills needed to earn a living, they are taught to believe that if they possess the capacity to earn, they can be themselves. Resistance to advertising is diverse. The commonest form is to identify it with a vested interest to sell, which nullifies or qualifies its claims. Some see advertising as a means of selling an inferior product, which would otherwise not sell. Some of those who regard a vertisements as unreliable rate them as good entertainment, particularly young men who tend to look at advertisements critically, in terms of the techniques used. The following excerpt, r°m a discussion with a male youth group, shows this clearly: hL^dn should be seen- as just entertainment. And the techniques they a e used and all that... one should concentrate on that. The rest is immaterial.

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self *201 Z: Women watch ads more. Look at those saris, so beautiful, they say. Then there are disputes at home... Q: Do you like to watch ads? Chorus: Yes, we do! P: I like to watch ads, but not the way they want. Their expectation is to sell their goods, to increase demand. But I don’t think they’ll benefit from viewers like me. I watch them only for enjoyment... the music... I hum the songs (laughs) but not more than that.

These young men see themselves—unlike women and children who are mostly primordial, quintessential consumers, easily per¬ suaded by the advertisements—as being able to enjoy the TV advertisements without being fooled by them. They feel they can judge how and why others are swayed by advertisements. According to them the ideal advertisement is one that tells the ‘truth’, and most, if not all, advertisement falls short of this lofty standard. However, they acknowledge that, though advertisements might be ‘false’, they continue to be a major source of information about new products. For modern young men, this information is important in daily life; it marks out possible ways of shaping identities. The group in question was composed of Hindu youth, both Goan and Maharashtrian. To them advertising offers a mode by which they constitute their cultural identity: S: [a Shiv Sainik]: Through this [watching ads] they move far from our culture?8 Because most of the ads are in English, not in our languages, Konkani or Marathi. They are either in English or Hindi. There’s not a single ad related to our culture, [everyone talking at once] S: And their way of life, it’s high standard... P: Those are like ads from abroad. I have read somewhere that abroad they have competitions where they give prizes for the best ad. They make such ads for that purpose.

In relating to the alien lifestyle, as represented by motorcycle and carbonated drinks advertisements, this group invokes two oppositions: India vs. the West and middle class vs. the rich. This class distinction is invoked by others, too. Said a 38-year-old Maharashtrian with a clear touch of irony: ‘Ads are for rich people. Fair and Lovely (cream)... Cadbury... ice-cream... nobody advertises the things we poor people use—dal and rice. I’m against buying things on the basis of ads.’ This gap, between the desirable world of TV advertisements and the limited means of viewers, is a measure of the extent to which definitions of the good life drawn from advertising are accepted as the norm A.s a 45-year-old housewife and mother of

202 • Secret Politics of Our Desires a motorcycle-taxi driver put it: Can we get to eat all that we see? Our mouths water, and we have to just swallow the saliva and keep watching [laughs]. If even on one day we want to buy all those things, we’ll have to go hungry for the rest of the month. Sometimes I feel, why did we buy a colour TV... every thing looks real in colour, and we watch and get tempted. My little fellow, when he sees those ice-cream ads, he touches the TV, and tries to take the ice-cream out.

While viewers might laugh and joke about their distance from the good life that is being proposed by advertising, there is an element of despair as well. As a young widow, who occasionally works as a private nurse, said: When the ice-cream ads come, the children feel how delicious. They say, ‘Mummy buy it for us.’ I feel—if I can’t at this stage, when will I be able? Will I ever be able to buy them what they want?

The Spectator Subject

The wide array of identities and interpretative strategies that emerge from this study of a specific community cannot be subsumed under the theories of audience discussed at the outset. The Kamgar Nagar viewers do not construct themselves as the simple, traditional masses of the early theories of development communication; nor can televisual discourse be regarded as an instrument of disseminating the knowledge, attitudes and practices conducive to modernization. The ‘false consciousness’ formulations appear to be equally out of place, with their denial of agency and resistance to audiences, and their construction of the televisual discourse as monolithic and seamlessly oppressive. The ‘marketing’ development variant focuses narrowly on consumer choice and responses, disregarding the implications of this ‘choice for networks of power and ideological frameworks. The present study uses the concept of the ‘spectator-subject’, instead of concepts such as the Target audience' of the develop¬ ment discourse or the ‘sovereign consumer’ of the market or the falsely conscious masses’ of cultural dependency. All these concepts are based on two-dimensional models of power where A exercises power over B, observed by C, the objective researcher.This chapter seeks to show that another concept of power is possible and necessary. The idea of television as a discursive field, in relation to which viewers situate themselves to generate meanings and identities.

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 203

differs from the instrumental definition of the institution of television in the earlier formulations (for instance, intended message, targeted impact). The concept of the ‘spectator-subject’ emphasizes that television offers, for the first time, a technology of power which intimately binds the constitution of identity with the act of seeing. This technology gets enmeshed in the rhythms of everyday domesticity, emerging in viewers’ accounts variously as a window on the world, a mirror for self-reflection, a resource for self-improvement and an alien cultural imposition. The ‘spectator-subject’ is a product of the dividing practices and technologies of the self invoked by viewers as they interpret televisual discourse. The strategies of viewers range from resistance to negotiated acceptance to complete incorporation of the subject positions offered by televisual discourse. Both the resistance and the incorporation tend to be local and sectoral. For instance, a Goan Catholic viewer in Kamgar Nagar, while resisting being a subject in civic matters, might negotiate an acceptance of the familial identities offered through the television and fully incorporate the consumer identity. Likewise, a woman might relate to familial, consumer and ethnic identities, ignoring the discourses on citizenship and the state. This does not mean that ethnic, religious origin, gender and age determine the identities constituted; it means that these categories, enmeshed as they are in specific relations of power and cultural prescriptions, limit the range of interpretative and constitutive strategies available to a viewer. The concept of the ‘spectator-subject’ emphasizes the contra¬ dictions inherent in the act of identity constitution. The ‘subject’ is both a spectator who feels powerless and an agent who uses television as a resource. The two are not separate positions that a specific viewer might adopt, but inextricably linked. An unem¬ ployed Goan Catholic father, who feels helpless in a system where everything, including television, is controlled by ‘them’, constructs an ethnic identity, premised on the superiority of his culture and language, and a familial identity, based on the exercise of power over his wife and children. A child, who is subject to the discipline of home and school and silenced by his parental authorities, talks back to televisual advertisements, constituting him/herself as smart, active and humorous. A woman, feeling confined by the expecta¬ tions of a patriarchal culture, wields power in covert ways and is drawn into televisual and cinematic narratives of the avenging

204 • Secret Politics of Our Desires angel. In other words, resistance is an essential feature of the exercise of power, which emanates not from some monolithic source but is wielded at every level of the order. To some extent, every subject wields power and resists power.

NOTES The author wishes to thank K. P. Jayasankar for his numerous 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

suggestions. This chapter is based on a larger study of Kamgar Nagar made in 1988-9 as part of the author’s doctoral research, involving ten months of participant observation, and in-depth interviews with 88 respondents. The statistical data collected have not been reproduced here. Kamgar Nagar is the pseudonym of a heterogeneous, working-class, shanty town in the port town of Vasco da Gama, Goa. The residents are predominantly permanent blue-collar workers, who began occupying the area (a semi-barren, uninhabited plateau on the outskirts of the town) in the late 1960s. The population at the time of the study was estimated at 8-10,000, including local Goan families, those from other parts of Goa, and migrants from other states, mainly Maharashtra and Karnataka. A section of the migrants from Karnataka, belonging to the Scheduled Castes and the nomadic tribes, are scornfully called ghantis in Goa. They are unskilled casual workers and constitute the lowest rung of the working class. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: BBC and Penguin, 1972). See, for instance, Vikram Sarabhai, cited in Govt, of India, 1985, p. 21. Arturo Escobar, ‘Power and Visibility: The Invention and Management ol Development in the Third World’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis. University of California, Berkeley, 1987, p. 12. Escobar, pp. 94-5. Open University, Mass Communications in Crosscuitural Contexts: The Case of the Third World. Mass Communication and Society Unit 5. (Milton Keynes: Open University, 1977), p. 56. Some relevant early writings by lirst world experts were Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1958); E. M. Rogers, The Diffusion of Innovations (New York: Free Press Journal, 1962), W. Schramm, Mass Media and National Development (California' Stanford University Press. 1964); Lucian W. Pye (ed), Communications and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972). SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment), conducted in 1975-6, covering 2329 villages in six states has been by far the most ambitious experiment in development communication in India It involved the deployment of the NASA satellite for the period of a year to assess the v,ability of satellite-based television as an instrument of instruction and social change. The specific objectives of the programme

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 205

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

were, primarily, to contribute to family planning, improved agricultural practices and national integration, and, secondarily, to contribute to school and adult education, teacher training, to improve occupational skills, health and hygiene. The results of the SITE, as measured by research, are equivocal. While Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) studies regard the experiment as a qualified success, the Planning Commission study sees it as a failure. The diametrically opposed conclusions perhaps arise from differences in perspective and criteria. The moot point is that even those who would view it as a success realized that change through development communication was far from the linear, unproblematic postulation of modernization theory, that the 'gains’ w'ere mediated by a host of other conditions, including availability of infrastructural and extension services, caste, class and gender inequalities and so on. L. R. S. Beltran, ‘Alien Premises, Objects and Methods in Latin American Communication Research’, in E. M. Rogers (ed), Communication and Development: Critical Perspectives (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1976), pp. 15-42; see p. 23. Escobar, p. 112. For a discussion of alternative development communication paradigms, see S. R. Melkote, Communication for Development in the Third World (New Delhi: Sage, 1991). A. Singhal and E. M. Rogers, India’s Information Revolution (New Delhi: Sage, 1989), p. 22. Singhal and Rogers, p. 66. A. Mitra, ‘Television and popular culture in India: a study of the Mahabharat,’ unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Illinois, UrbanaChampaign, 1992. A. Singhal and E. M. Rogers, India’s Information Revolution (New Delhi: Sage, 1989). Hum Log, the first pro-development soap opera, was produced by ‘Maggi noodles’. The story of a lower-middle-class family, it attempted to influence familial values in the areas of family planning, status of women, family harmony and national integration. N. L, Chowla, ‘Business by the Box’, The Statesman, 24 November 1985, p. 9. H. Chari, ‘The Funeral of Indira Gandhi: A Cultural Interpretation of a Media Event’, mimeo article. Los Angeles: Annenberg School of Com¬ munications, December 1986. Mody, B. (1987), ‘Contextual Analysis of the Adoption of a Communi¬ cations Technology: The Case of Satellites in India’, Telematics and Informatics, 4(2), pp. 151-158. Michel Foucault, ‘Afterward: The Subject and Power’, in H. L. Dreyfus, and P. Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1986). Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). Foucault, ‘Afterword: The Subject and Power’, p. 208. ‘Storicals’ on Doordarshan are not strictly ‘soap operas’, with the

206

•

Secret Politics of Our Desires

exception of a few like Hum Log and Khandaan, for most of them have a limited run (generally thirteen episodes) in which to end their ‘story’ and hence, there is a strong movement towards a resolution at the end. As against this, soap operas are characterized by an ‘excessive plot structure’ and ‘lack of narrative progress.’ I. Ang, ‘Melodramatic Identifications: Television Fiction and Women’s Fantasy’, in M. E. Brown (ed), Television and Women's Culture (New Delhi: Sage, 1990), pp. 75-88; see pp. 81-82. 23. This ‘reality’ may not be ‘real’, in terms of being proximate to everyday experience. The presentation of fantasy situations that are read as ‘real’ is part of the process by which viewers are given an opportunity to take up subject positions which they might not be able to do in real life. See Ang, ‘Melodramatic Identifications’, pp. 83-4, for a discussion of the pleasures of fantasizing in terms of ‘the imaginary occupation of other subject positions’. 24. The social awareness advertisements on TV are short spots that appear in between prime-time programmes. They deal with information and attitudes relating to issues such as contraception, immunization, nutrition, ante-natal care, hygiene, status of women and the girl child, dowry and national integration. 25. ‘Rasna is a soft drink concentrate that acquired popularity partly 26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

through its TV advertisement campaign. Complan is a nutritional supplement beverage. The advertisement referred to has two children, who assert ‘I am a Complan Boy’ and ‘I am a Complan Girl’. S. Mascarenhas-Keyes, ‘International Migration, Reproduction and Economic Impact on Goa up to 1961’, in T. R. de Souza, (ed), Goa Through the Ages, (New Delhi: Concept, 1989), Vol. 2, pp. 242-64. This chapter discusses only the first thirteen episodes of Udaan, telecast in 1988, not the sequel, telecast a few years later. L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Books 1971) no 123-73. ’ h The Kanpur sisters committed suicide to spare their parents the burden of dowry. A similar case occurred in Palghat, Kerala, after the Kanpur incident. Nf Douglas and B. Ishenvood for instance, conceive of goods as an information system, providing visible markers of classification, ordering and exclusion. And M. Featherstone shows how advertisements and marketing strategies seek to create new associations and meanings far isplaced from the original use-values of commodities. M. Douglas and B. Isherwood The World of Goods (London: Allen Lane, 1979), p 6T Sage 1991)

32.

°ne’ C°nSamer Cul,Ure and Postmodernism (London:’

The advertising campaign, for Vimal textiles, consists of small narrative slices delineating the actions of the ‘Vimal man’, each with a title (for Suiting^’

'S

aSS1°n ’ *HlS Perfecti°n'), generally ending with ‘His

Official Television and unofficial fabrications of the self • 207 33. 34.

35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Post-Modernism, p. 86. ‘Sossegado’ literally means easy-going and acquiescent. Goenkar horrado, refers to the self-image of respectability that many Goan Catholics feel compelled to maintain, irrespective of their financial status. For instance, though my landlady had a mixer, she would use the grinding stone laboriously to grind the condiments for the coconut curry every day. Sorpatel is a dish made of the organs of the pig cooked in its own blood. ‘‘Chourico' is a spiced pork sausage. Doce de grao is a sweet made of gram flour and bibinca is a rich cake baked layer by layer. As is well known, Shiv Sena’s aggressive Hindu nationalist organization originated in Maharashtra with a sons-of-the-soil agenda. Over time, it has modified this agenda, to become more explicitly anti-Muslim, and has spread to other states. Lukes quoted in Stuart Hall, ‘The Rediscovery of “Ideology”’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies’, in M. Gurevitch, et al. (eds), Culture, Society, and the Media (London: Methuen, 1982), p. 64.

5 On Castes and Comedians: The language of power in recent Tamil cinema K. RAVI SRINIVAS and SUNDAR KAALI

P

opular cinema frustrates all search for realistic portrayals of the configurations of class, caste or gender in contem¬ porary Indian society. As a secondary modeling system with highly developed and conventionalized codes, popular Tamil cinema, too, has over the years evolved particular modes of representing these categories. One should not, therefore, be surprised to find a relatively small number of occupational cate¬ gories and castes represented in such films. These representations hardly ever correspond to actual social categories. In this respect, popular Tamil cinema is analogous to a game of chess with a limited number of actants and highly conventionalized rules. Consider, for instance, the genre of neo-nativism in Tamil film. As a genre that has dominated the scene for more than a decade now, it has evolved particular narrational strategies and modes of representation. Apart from the role played by the village com¬ munity, which functions as a collective actant in the sense in which Greimas uses it,1 there are others like that of the landlord, the serf, the barber, the washerman, the doctor, the teacher, and the militaryman that are regular features of the genre. The recurrence of these categories points to their positioning in popular Tamil film as crucial nodes of narrational and discursive significance. This leads us to examine their quality as actants rather than their characterological significance in psychological-realistic terms. The doctor, the teacher and the militaryman are mostly depicted as outsiders and intruders.2 But while the militaryman and the teacher are usually portrayed as benefactors and

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema • 209

liberators, the doctor is, in most cases, vicious and villainous. In contrast to these categories, however, the landlord, the serf, the barber and the washerman are total insiders.3 The landlord and the serf represent opposite poles of the village community and intra-community contradiction is signalled in their opposition. The teacher as an outsider signifies the coming of literacy/ education and hence is portrayed as a benefactor (see, for instance, Pudhia Varppuhal Annakkili, Rasave Unnai Nam hi, Kadalora-k-Kavidhaihal, Mundhanai Mudicchu, Onna Irukka-kKatthukkanum, Pudhu Nellu Pudhu Natthu, Uzhavan, Thirumadhi Palanicchamy and Pondatti Sonna Kettukkanum). The doctor, however, is always viewed with a bit of suspicion and from 16 Vayadhinile to Vaidhehi Kalyanam remains a complete outsider

capable of seducing women and polluting the community. In fact, in Vaidhehi Kalyanam an allopathic doctor is contrasted with a local doctor practising traditional medicine. The local doctor is a quack but nevertheless stands for justice and the interests of the community. The militaryman, on the contrary, is always benevolent, though an outsider. He signifies an intermediary or liminal presence, a link that articulates the village community and the wider society. He stands for the legitimate interests of the community but also assists in the transgression of its norms when they become ossified and oppressive. This pattern is well evident in Rasave Unnai Nambi, Pavunu Pavunudhan, Kozhi Koovudhu, DhavanTk-Kanavuhal and Kizhakke Pohum Rail. Note should be taken of the difference between the militaryman, who fights the liquor baron in Rasave Unnai Nambi, and his counterpart in Kizhakke Pohum Rail, who stands up against the community in helping the hero and the heroine in their radical act of transgressing caste norms. If the militaryman as an intermediary, linking the traditional and the modern, signifies deep-seated anxieties about martiaiity in contemporary Tamil society, in films like Vedham Pudhidhu, Enga Ooru Kavalkaran and Thevar Mahan, these anxieties find yet other complex modes of expression. In Enga Ooru Kavalkaran, the hero comes in a long line of kavalkarans (traditional policemen of the village) who are known for valour and uprightness. While the hero renounces the profession in favour of some soft alternative, circumstances, however, force him to take up arms against injustice and prove his valour.4 This is one film in which reference to caste names is explicit. The hero belongs to the

210 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Thevar community, which is traditionally a martial community in

Tamil Nadu. However, the father’s name, Veera Thevar, and the grandfather’s name, Pandimuni Thevar, point to the symbolic character of the hero’s descent. It should be noted that veeram in Tamil means valour whereas Pandimuni is the name of a fierce folk deity in southern Tamil Nadu. This immediately elevates the hero’s line of descent to a mythical plane and delimits the possibili¬ ties of extra-textual referentiality. In fact, the framed photographs of both the father and the grandfather, hanging on the walls of the hero’s house, portray men with huge moustaches and, thus, are at once iconic and symbolic. Other signifiers, like the traditional sword (arival) of the hero’s ancestors, which hangs on the wall and is used by him at critical moments in the film, also have the same kind of associations. The sword is invested with supernatural/magical power and is capable of destroying enemy weapons. The hero of Enga Ooru Kavalkaran, in his love for the heroine belonging to the Valiuvar caste, points to another facet of this martiality-related anxiety. The Valluvars, though a low-ranking caste in Tamil Nadu, are unique in that they are associated with a sort of intellectual activity like astrology, which is usually the domain of upper-caste specialists. The coming together of the heroine and the hero would, thus, signify an aspiration for simul¬ taneously reaffirming martiality and entry into the realm of learning and the learned.5 While the hero in Enga Ooru Kavalkaran initially renounces martiality and is forced to reaffirm it at the end of the film, the protagonists in Vedham Pudhidhu and Thevar Mahan represent very different positions in this regard. In Vedham Pudhidhu, the protagonist Balu-t-Thevar is a highly revered village headman. A kind-hearted man known for his generosity, he remains resolutely atheist. His son, educated in the city, falls in love with a Brahmin girl, the daughter of a Vedic scholar in his native village, and this causes a series of happenings leading to his death. The girl runs away from her folks on the eve of her marriage to another man and subsequently the father of the girl dies. Her younger brother is brought up in the Thevar household. Once in the household, he makes Balu-t-Thevar see things in a new light. At one point, Balu-t-Thevar even gives up his weapons, throws them into the river in an act of simultaneously renouncing martiality and his caste identity. The Brahmin girl returns to the village and, when

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema • 211 the whole village, which is against her stay there, urges her to leave, it is Balu-t-Thevar who stands up for her and is killed by an enraged community. In his violent death, however, the protagonist in Vedlam Pudhidhu affirms anti-martial values and a transgression of caste norms. Thevar Mahan, the recent blockbuster, brings to the fore this very same problem albeit in a quite different manner. At the beginning of the film, the hero Saktivel (played by Kamalhasan), the younger son of Periya Thevar (played by Sivaji Ganesan), returns to his native village after completing his studies in England. While Periya Thevar is an epitome of traditional authority, being a highly revered landlord in the village and headman of the village panchayat, Saktivel, by contrast, is portrayed as a modern young man with cosmopolitan sensibilities. He brings along with him a girlfriend, who hails from Andhra Pradesh and whom he wishes to marry. He has plans to start a chain of restaurants in the cities and initially has no intention of staying in his native place. His plans are, however, disrupted by certain happenings in the village on his arrival. He is caught up in a family feud, that between his father, and his uncle and his son, the villain. Subsequent develop¬ ments lead to the death of Periya Thevar and Saktivel is gradually transformed into being his father’s legitimate heir. The family feud intensifies and reaches a climax when the villain bombs the temple car during the annual festival. An enraged hero desperately pursues the villain and demands his submission to the rule of law and, when the latter refuses to submit and retaliates, has to kill him, after which he courts arrest. The film closes with the hero’s exhortation to the villagers to renounce martiality, and his elevation to the position of a demi-god who worked for the cause of peace. A mythical line of descent is constructed in the opening sequence of the film. The opening shot shows a photograph of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Pan to a photograph of Muthuramalinga Thevar. Dissolve. Periya Thevar surrounded by his grandchildren is shown in slow motion. The old man Periya Thevar makes a remark about his moustache. He says that his moustache still retains the traditional stiffness. If the moustache is understood as a sign of manliness and martiality (cf. the photographs in Enga Ooru Kavalkarari), then the mythical ancestry traced for the hero becomes highly significant. From the hero’s real father the line goes up to the caste hero-cum-political leader, Muthuramalinga

212 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Thevar,6 and then to Subhash Chandra Bose who signifies martial valour at the national and international levels.7 Though the reference to the Thevar community—in reality, a confederation of three different caste groups, the Kallar, the Maravar, and the Ahamudayar— is not unusual in popular Tamil film (see, for example, Man Vasanai, Pattikkada Pattanama and Enga Ooru Kavalkaran among others), Thevar Mahan, for the first time, claims to sing the praises of the genealogy of the caste. The main actor in the film, Kamalhasan, has repeatedly stated that this was an attempt to make a film on that particular community. But the representation of the genealogical formation assumes larger proportions in the film than he claims. This is why it appealed to a variety of audiences and turned out to be a great box-office success. A significant feature of this genealogical formation, the one that reaffirms and reproduces caste power, is generosity. This stems from the patron-client relationships that characterize many non-industrial societies.8 In any patron-client relationship, ...although the balance of benefits may heavily favour the patron, some reciprocity is involved, and it is this quality which ...distinguishes patronclient dyads from relationships of pure coercion or formal authority that also may link individuals of different status ...Typically, then, the patron operates in a context in which community norms and sanctions and the need for clients require at least a minimum of bargaining and reciprocity.9

Generosity, therefore, is an essential feature of any patron-client system because it is what makes the client obligated to his patron. Periya Thevar and his brother, and, in the succeeding generation, their sons are thus patrons contesting for local pre" eminence. I he 'generous' deeds performed by Sakthivel in alleviating the “misery1 of the village community (helping the flood-affected people, removing the fencing that blocks an important pathway, and marrying the poor girl) are nothing but acts aimed at gaining a dominant position in the village. The narrative, in depicting these acts of the hero as ‘heroic1 and “noble1, not only mystifies the nature of power but relegates the rest of the village community to positions of either villainy or subservient clientship. The narrational power generated in such a situation is, moreover, translated into real power at the level of stardom/ fandom. The narrational move to deify the hero thus effectively reduces the villagers to loyal subjects on the one hand, and aims

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema • 213 to subjectify the spectator on the other. The hero’s aide-cumcomedian repeats the slogan ‘the body for the earth and the life for the lord’ even at critical moments, as for instance when he loses his hand in a riot for the sake of the hero. This, incidentally, is a fan club slogan. On the occasion when the hero gives refuge to the villagers affected by the flood engineered by the villain, the nature of this act of munificence finds open expression. At one point, the hero feels terribly sad on witnessing the gruesome scenes of the floodaffected village and refuses to eat. In that instance, Periya Thevar, in a piece of advice, stresses the importance of the vitality and strength needed in order to be a ‘saviour’ of the community. This, in fact, clearly points to the nature of generosity that springs from patronage—unmistakeably the source of caste power and permeated by sinews of manhood. This element of generosity is expressed on a different plane in the relation between the hero and his wife. He marries her quite unexpectedly when her marriage to another man arranged by the hero himself is disrupted by the bridegroom absconding, fearing retaliation from the villain. The hero, in the act of marrying her (instead of his girlfriend), salvages not only the honour of the girl but also the interests of the community at large, jeopardized by the villain. This is one instance where the narrative reaffirms authority in terms of both caste and gender.10 In fact, caste relations are always mediated by gender and, as Vasanth and Kalpana Kannabiran argue, ‘a practical under¬ standing of caste that is ungendered’ is impossible: Gender within caste society is thus defined and structured in such a manner that the ‘manhood’ of the caste is defined both by the degree of control men exercise over women and the degree of passivity of the women of the caste. By the same argument, demonstrating control by humiliating women of another caste is a certain way of reducing the manhood of that caste.11

Gender is, thus, ‘defined by the capacity to aggress and appro¬ priate the other.’12 Exercising control over the female body, then, should be seen as signifying the affirmation of caste power on several levels. The female body as a bounded entity is, in this case, a sign of the entire group whose boundaries are to be guarded against threats from the outside.13 In Thevar Mahan, for instance, the hero is provoked when the villain’s men make certain snide remarks about

214 • Secret Politics of Our Desires his virility. In an attempt to prove his valour and thus demonstrate his manliness, the hero engages in a stickfight with the villain’s men. He, of course, defeats the opponent and the fight sequence flows into a song and dance sequence. The sequence starts with the hero singing about his valour and showing off his victory over the opponent. However, it gradually shifts to a display ol his manliness and sexual prowess in relation to his woman. But sometimes there is an element of ambiguity about the person being addressed. Whereas the hero initially engages in proving his manliness and valour by making chalk marks on the body of the villain using his fighting-stick, he now urges him to wear the kumkum/sandalpaste marks worn by women on their forehead. He also teases the villain by asking him to give up his man's clothing and wear a saree and flowers like a woman. However, the line T will smash your hip and you will sit veiled in shame’ is not at all explicit about the person being addressed. Even if it is assumed to be addressed to the villain and aimed at mocking his unmanliness (= womanliness), the image track shows a victorious hero carrying on with his girlfriend and no longer engaging in villain-baiting. The fighting-stick itself is put to a totally different use in the later part of the sequence. The manner in which it traverses the female bodyscape does not leave one in any doubt about its phallic character. This narrative continuity and the collision of the visual and aural planes clearly mark an encounter and close association between sexuality and violence and the gendered nature of caste power. The sequence confirms that caste power is phallic in character and springs from castrating the man of the other group on the one hand and organizing the sexuality of the woman of one’s own group on the other.14 That the genealogical tormation is reaffirmed and caste power reproduced in this fashion in Phevar Mahan is evidenced by other instances in the narrative. While the elder son of Periya Thevar has produced a male heir and is a drunkard incapable of saving the honour ol the family, there is hope that the hyper-virile hero will do so when his wife announces her pregnancy towards end of the film.15 This valorization of the genealogical formation, in fact, goes against the professed pacifism of the film. Though the hero decries martiality at the end alter killing the villain, and surrenders to the police, this in no way challenges caste authority, since the latter is predicated upon the genealogical formation. This is the

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema *215 single major difference between the professed pacifism of Vedham Pudhidhu and Thevar Mahan. While in the former the pacifism of the hero and his violent death are premised on and necessarily entail subversion and transgression of caste norms, the opposite happens in the case of the latter where they are affirmed rather than challenged. It should be noted that the narrative in Vedham Pudhidhu is not really concerned with the continuation of the descent. While there is a clear indication that the Brahmin boy is seen by Balu-t-Thevar as his surrogate son and the resemblance between his name, Sankaran and that of the son, Sankarapandi, necessarily points to their identities, the narrative shuns anchoring the continuity of the line of descent at the moment of closure. This is partly due to the fact that the identification itself entails a transgression of caste norms and renunciation of caste identity. The son’s death, if seen in this light, could signify a failure of an initial project of transgression in which the*caste identity still remains intact. The valorization of the second project of bringing in the Brahmin boy and girl to the Thevar household is, thus, not a narrational strategy aiming at an eventual resolution of the conflict in a family reunion, but rather a plot-trickery that precludes the possibility of such resolution. The pacifism of the Thevar Mahan hero, nevertheless, serves another purpose. In the act of courting arrest after killing the villain, the hero signifies a total submission of the traditional authority of the village community to state power.16 In the film, while the villagers are used to settle disputes in the panchayat and, in extreme cases, through violent means, the hero right from the beginning insists on state intervention in this regard. He repeatedly seeks the help of the police and on one occasion even brings in the district collector, who happens to be his classmate, and other government officials as arbiters to settle the temple dispute between his father and uncle. The narrative, then, should be seen to consolidate caste authority by channeling it through a system of patronage on the one hand and articulating the village community with the state by disarming it on the other.17 Unlike the Proppian hero who is initially in a state of conjunction with society and then undertakes his journey to accomplish heroic deeds in the outer world, the hero in Thevar Mahan is initially disjunct from the community and slowly makes his way through it to achieve conjunction.18 Rather than leaving the community for his heroic exploits, he, in fact, performs all his

216 • Secret Politics of Our Desires great deeds within it. He has to cross a whole series of boundaries (signified by the locked doors of the temple premises and the fencing set up by the villain) in the process. However, only the eventual slaying of the villain secures the final victory and the completion of his journey. The act of beheading the villain inaugurates a new phase in the life of both the hero and the community: the vicious aspect of the little community which still remains untamed (signified by the villain) is, thus, annihilated and the stage is now set for its arti-culation with the nation and its transformation into the ‘modern’. The climactic moment, which occurs in a desolate landscape housing the solitary temple of a village deity, in fact, has all the characteristics of a sacrificial rite effecting this passage. The hero’s use of the sword of the very deity that guides the frontiers of the village clearly points to the liminal character of the whole situation. While it is quite common in films belonging to the neo-nativist genre to close at such a point, the narrative in this case extends beyond it to show the regretful hero and his pacifist message. Carrying ‘the weapon infused with the sin of ages’ he walks (like a Christ on his way to crucifixion) to surrender to the police. This marks the decisive disarmament of the community and the hero’s journey is complete: from a separated outsider to a total insider in a perfect state of conjunction; from an intruder who needs to be resocialized to one who transforms the very community that socializes him. In direct contrast to Thevar Mahan, the film Chinna-kKavundai juxtaposes traditional authority and modern state authority and affirms the primacy of the former. This opposition, however, is not absolute. While both the hero and his uncle, the vdlam’ are shown to embody traditional authority, the latter signifies its decadent and vicious facets. Though the tension between the traditional authority of the village and modern authority of the state is resolved in Chinna-k-Kavundarm favour of the former, this is by no means the only option in popular Tamil film. In fact, in several films, traditional authority is challenged to a large extent and its deficiency exposed. That this authority is pervaded by relations of caste and class is a deplorable matter in many instances. In Chinna-t-Thayi, for example, when the entire village community takes the villain’s side and works against the heroine, it is the police inspector, as an outsider embodying state authority, who acts in her favour and saves her.

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema • 217 He, in fact, openly challenges the traditional authority of the village.19 In an attempt to resolve on a symbolic level the tension that exists between the lower and upper agrarian castes, popular Tamil film sometimes plays with seemingly real caste categories. In Attha Un KoyilUe, for instance, the upper-caste Nayakkars and the lowercaste Chakkilivars (leather workers) are placed in opposition. The heroine, a Nayakkar girl, falls in love with the low-caste hero who works for her family and is, for that reason, poisoned and killed by her own kin. In the next generation, however, an upper caste hero falls in love with a Chakkiliyar girl and, with the help of the hero in the earlier plot, eventually succeeds in marrying her. Caste supremacy claimed by agrarian landowning castes is symbolically challenged in two other important films, Cheran Pandian and Rakkayi Koyil. In Cheran Pandian, the ancestral house of the leading Kavundar family of the village is divided by a huge wall separating the households of the two sons of the deceased head of the family. Born of two different women, one belonging to the Kavundar community, a landowning upper caste, and the other a dalit woman, they represent two different value systems in terms of caste. While the Kavundar son is proud of his Kavundar heritage and refuses to grant the other any right or respect in family matters, the other son and his sister constantly affirm their common heritage and long to be accepted as part of the former’s kin. This, however, is not forthcoming, and the dalit son and his sister have to make enormous sacrifices before the family is reunited. In fact, the sister gets killed and in the final sequence the two brothers hold each other’s arms in supporting the dying sister’s body. This clearly suggests that it is not just a case of family reunion, but the resolution of the caste problem posed earlier by the film. At a climactic moment, the Kavundar son’s wife engages in vehement rhetoric, challenging her husband’s upper-caste pride, which changes his mind. The resolution of the problem, however, does not automatically entail a symbolic dissolution of caste boundaries. In fact, the mix up of the previous generation is nullified by depicting the dalit son and daughter as devoid of any progeny. Similarly, in Rakkayi Koyif the upper-caste pride of the heroine’s father, a leading Kavundar of the village, is challenged at a final moment in the narrative when his old mother reveals

218 • Secret Politics of Our Desires his hidden identity. While the Kavundar and the whole village have been set to punish the heroine and the hero (who belongs to a low-caste and works for the heroine’s father) by burning them alive for having loved each other, the Kavundar’s mother, enraged by these events, reveals the secret of his birth to a lowcaste woman and his Kavundar father. Stunned by the revelation, the Kavundar sets the lovers free. But unable to cope with the reality of his birth, he kills himself by the very same knife he used to cut the rope that tied the lovers. Let us now move on to consider the structure of comedy in popular Tamil film. A serious examination of the structure immediately reveals its caste overtones. Especially noteworthy is the dominant mode of comedy over the past several years which comprises two comedians, one of whom is in a dominant position and the other subservient (these are usually played by two wellknown comedians in Tamil cinema, Kavundamani and Senthil, though there are exceptions). The dominant one constantly bullies, exercises authority over, and is scornful towards the physical appearance and personality of the subservient one.20 The latter is clever at dodging this direct and indirect violence, and eventually succeeds in outwitting the former. Though this is nothing new in terms of structure and is well represented in a variety of comedy traditions, ranging from circus clowning to the Laurel and Hardy films,21 its caste implications are particularly strong in Tamil cinema and this adds a different dimension to the basic structure of comedy. In Ponnukkettha Purushan, for instance, Kavundamani and Senthil work in a cinema hall. Kavundamani is the projectionist while Senthil, a man of lowly origins, works as a counter clerk. Senthil flirts with a scavenger woman belonging to a low caste. Kavundamani, who is envious of this, discloses the matter to the girl’s relatives and tricks Senthil into marrying the girl. Kavunda¬ mani is averse not only to Senthil and his lover but also her kin-group as a whole. In fact, he often talks about them as a stinking lot, referring to their inferior caste status. After marriage, the in-laws ot Senthil (represented not just as a family but as an entire kin group) wish to watch a movie in the cinema hall in which he works. When Senthil asks the owner of the hall for a free show for them, Kavundamani opposes the idea, on the grounds that the whole hall would start to stink and no amount

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema *219 of cleaning agent would get rid of the smell. However, the owner does grant permission and during the show, the low-caste men smoke a lot and the women chew large quantities of betel leaves. In an unexpected comic development, the cigarette smoke coming out of the hall is mistaken for that of a fire and the villagers rush to the cinema to douse the fire. Drenched in a downpour of water, the low-caste men and women leave the hall. The whole episode of entering the cinema hall, watching the movie and later emerging from it drenched in water could be seen as signifying a process of purification.22 The references to scavenging and ‘stinking’ obviously point to such a reading. Another instance that anchors the caste connotations of the Kavundamani-Senthil comedy is the scene where Senthil wears sunglasses to imitate Kavundamani and the latter breaks them. Kavundamani, in fact, explicitly expresses caste hatred when he says, ‘What would be the value of my sunglasses if people like you started to wear them?’ However, keeping with the basic structure of the comedy, the bossiness of Kavundamani is reversed finally when he falls prey to the schemes of a deceitful woman, who pretends to be a rich girl from the city. At this point, we need to probe into the narrational and psychological mechanisms involved in the production of comic effect in order to arrive at a deeper understanding of the caste connotations of the Kavundamani-Senthil comedy in Tamil film. According to Unberto Eco, ...[the] comic effect is realized when: (i) there is the violation of a rule...; (ii) the violation is committed by someone with whom we do not sympathize because he is an ignoble, inferior, and repulsive (animal-like) character; (iii) therefore we feel superior to his misbehaviour and to his sorrow for having broken the rule; (iv) however in recognizing that the rule has been broken, we do not feel concerned; on the contrary we in some way welcome the violation; we are, so to speak, revenged by the comic character who has challenged the repressive power of the rule (which involves no risk to us, since we commit the violation only vicariously); (v) our pleasure is a mixed one because we enjoy not only the breaking of the rule but also the disgrace of an animal-like individual; (vi) at the same time we are neither concerned with the defence of the rule nor compelled towards compassion for such an inferior being.23

This animalization of the comedian that enables the spectator to derive sadistic pleasure from the comedy is, however, never complete: Aggression and superiority tend often to oscillate across and between

220 • Secret Politics of Our Desires the viewer and the characters, on the one hand, and the characters themselves, on the other. The viewer’s aggression, possibly amplified by the pressures of identification involved in the process of the comic, is articulated into the narrative of the film itself and into the pattern of relation between the characters involved.24

The narcissistic trait of the viewing subject which finds expression in his/her identification with the bossy comedian and the animalization of the ‘inferior’ comedian is often annihilated towards the end of the narrative when their positions are reversed. The comic moment, thus, serves temporarily to feed the ego and the subject’s narcissism, but is inherently unstable.25 The moment of identi¬ fication necessary to the comic process is unstable, too, to that extent. If the superiority of the ego over the other is to be attained, then the ego has to identify with the other first.’26 The oscillation produced in such a situation would, however, be ultimately contained by the narration itself, as any excess in this direction would lead to a disruption of the plot-space of the hero on the one hand, and a violation of the ego-space of the viewer on the other.27 Comedy, therefore, ‘represents a temporary suspension of the social structure, or rather it makes a little disturbance in which the particular structuring of society becomes less relevant than another,’28 An eventual restoration of order is a necessary precondition of this suspension of order and that is why Eco calls it ‘authorized transgression.'29 If this restoration of order and the re-stabilization of the subject are to be effectively resisted, a radically different discursive mode has to be employed. Tor the Law is not simply a matter of the ideological content of discourse, but of the orders of the articulation of meaning and sense themselves.’30 Such a radical problematization of the conventions of narration and spectator positioning is attempted by V. Sekar’s Onna Irukka-k-

Ka tth ukkan uin. While the caste character of the structure of the comedy is fairly pronounced in many Tamil films, it is usually confined to a sub-plot that runs parallel to the main plot. The comedians are commonly found to be the hero/heroine’s aides and are played by supporting actors/actresses.31 Although this sub-plot is by no means disjunctive from the main plot and, in most cases, shows it through compositional parallels and commonalities,32 the comedian very rarely turns out to be the protagonist. This is more so in the case ot Kavundamani—Senthil comedy with overtones of caste.

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema • 221 Onna Irukka-k-Katthukkanum subverts this basic narrative structure and the ideological assumptions on which it rests. The entire film is narrated in a comic mode and addresses the caste question quite daringly. The narrative is centered on the caste contradictions in a village. On the one side are the upper-caste landlord (who is also the president of the village panchayat) and his kin, the astrologer-Brahmin and other upper-caste people. On the other side are the dalits: the Vettiyan (the village servant in charge of cremating dead bodies who, in most parts of Tamil Nadu, belongs to the Paraiyar caste) and his kin, the leatherworkers (the Chakkiliyars), the washermen (the Vannars/Ehalis) and the barbers (Ambattars Navidhars). The latter live in a colony outside the village proper and are mostly illiterate. The landlord and other upper-caste men thrive on their illiteracy and poverty and the person who devises and suggests schemes for him is the Brahmin. A schoolteacher intervenes in this situation and serves as a harbinger of change. He makes the children of the dalit colony attend school and urges the educated unemployed among the dalits to start small businesses. He even brings television to the village and this helps to create an awareness among the oppressed. The landlord's attempts to stall the change fail and when the dalits start asserting themselves they are excommuni¬ cated at one point by the upper-castes. An infuriated landlord even sets fire to the colony and burns down the huts. The dalits are now caught between two extreme options: that of leaving the village to lead a free life elsewhere or submitting to the authority of the upper castes. The teacher disapproves of both these options and urges them to stay and fight for their rights. The dalits eventually decide to do so and in the meantime a considerable number of upper-caste people break with the landlord and his men and decide to conciliate the dalits. When an enraged group of villagers finally wants to punish the landlord for his deeds and demands an apology, he cannot reckon with the fact and kills himself by self-immolation. Unlike the usual template in which all contradictions, including that of caste, are resolved in the coming together of the hero and the heroine who embody polar oppositions, this film is a daring attempt at simultaneously making a break with conventional narrative strategies and openly discussing the dalit question." There is no hero/heroine of the usual sort in the film. In fact, the Vettiyan (played by Kavundamani), the barber (played by

222 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Senthil), the teacher and the landlord vie with each other for the position of protagonist. The two romantic relationships, one between the Vannar youth and the daughter of the landlord and the other between the Vannar girl and the Chakkiliyar boy, are reduced to marginal significance in the narrative. This, besides elevating the comedians to the status of protagonists, further serves the purpose of foregrounding the caste problematic that adheres in the structure of the comedy itself. The comic in the film, then, could be said to operate on a meta-meta-semiotic plane and effect a radical reordering of the dominant narrational and discursive modes.34 And in so doing, it decisively destabilizes the position of the spectating subject. When the plot-space of the hero is occupied by the outcaste/comedian in the film, it shatters the stability of the delicate logical constructs around which are organized the discursive hegemonies of caste society. That such an operation could be accomplished in the realm of popular film attests to its sensitivity, not only to the collective anxieties of the present, but also to the collective aspirations and dreams for a future.35

NOTES Parts of this chapter were presented in the seminar on ‘Thevar mahan and Caste Discourse in Tamil Film’ organized by the Madurai Research Circle in February 1993. The authors wish to thank J. Vasanthan, Samuel Sudanandha, Suresh Paul, A.R. Kumar, J. Kannan, K. Ravichandran, Seshadri Rajan and Film News Anandan for their kind help in the preparation of the chapter. 1.

2.

For an exemplification of the notion of collective actant, see Algirdas Julien Greimas, ‘Description and Narrativity: “The Piece of String”,’ New Literary History, 1989, 20(3), pp. 615-26; see pp. 615-16. For an interesting comparison of outsiders in Hollywood and Indian films, see J. Vasanthan, ‘Leave the Outsider Alone’, Filmfare, 1978, 27(20), pp. 45-7. He argues that the figure of the pure outsider in the Hollywood tradition cannot be realized in the Indian situation, still pervaded by kinship relations. Chakravarthy, while discussing Bharatiraja’s films, highlights the narrative significance of the ‘outsider’ in his films. According to him the village in Bharatiraja’s films is a self-contained universe and it is the coming of the outsider that brings about any change in it. Chakravarthy, ‘Bharatirajavin Cinema’, Ini, October 1986 pp 3-9 see p. 5.

3.

The names of the barber and washerman castes, which in reality are

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema • 223 low-ranking service castes, are explicitly mentioned; those of the agrarian dalits are never mentioned. Cf. the characterization of the Vietnam War veteran or the frustrated police officer in Hollywood films. Cf. the highly controversial film Ore Oru Gramatthile which openly attacks the reservation policies of the government and upholds the cause of the upper castes. The Brahmin protagonist of the film, a woman f AS officer, is forced to conceal her real identity and pretend to be a lowcaste woman on account of the ‘discriminative’ policies of the government. While in service, she proves herself to be a committed civil servant who works for the cause of the people and earns their goodwill. When her real identity is discovered later and she is tried in a court of law for the offence, the people come forward to support her and campaign for her reinstatement. Though she is eventually sentenced to imprisonment, she nevertheless emerges as a heroine in the eyes of the people. The film was released in 1987 amidst widespread protests and, subsequently, even managed to win a national award. It was later shown on Doordarshan’s national network, while John Abraham’s Agraharatthil Kazhudhai, a film that daringly exposes Brahminic orthodoxy and valorizes the subversion of caste norms, was, at the last moment, prevented from being shown. Initially associated with the Indian National Congress, Muthuramalinga Thevar (1908-63) left the movement along with Subhash Chandra Bose to form the Forward Bloc. It is interesting to note that the Forward Bloc in Tamil Nadu has always been a party with its base among the Thevars. Though Muthuramalinga Thevar claimed to be an ardent follower of Subhash Bose up to the last, he was known, in fact, as a leader of the Thevars. He is the most recent example of a caste hero being elevated to the position of a demi-god in Tamil Nadu. As the title of the film (‘Thevar’s Son’) itself suggests, the notion of succession permeates the entire text. There are, in fact, several layers to the notion in the film. While within the diegetic universe of the film the consolidation of a mythical line of descent serves the ideological purpose of affirming caste authority, on the extra-diegetic plane a similar operation is performed to articulate the screen and star images of Sivaji Ganesan and Kamalhasan and, thus, anchor the position of the latter as the legitimate heir to the former. It is interesting to note that this is accomplished while Prabhu, the real son of Sivaji Ganesan, is also a star in his own right. For an account of the problematic position of Kamalhasan in the star system of Tamil cinema and the Madras film industry, see Sundar, ‘Mysticism as Masquerade: Guna and the Politics of Religion and Madness’, Deep Focus, 1992, 4(2), pp. 11-20; see p. 20. This is, however, qualitatively different from the generosity leading to some sort of sacrifice which marks the narrative conjuncture where the basic contradictions that characterize many a popular film (urban/rural, literate/illiterate, low caste/high caste, lower class/upper class) are

224 • Secret Politics of Our Desires resolved. The latter is expressed variously as generosity between lovers, between close kin, between friends, and between the individual and the community. The generosity in Thevar Mahan is, on the contrary, expressed in terms of patron-client relations and is, thus, a source of 9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15. .

caste power. James C. Scott, ‘Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia’, The American Political Science Review; 1972, 66(1), pp. 91-113; see p. 93. Cf. similar acts of munificence performed by the heroes in Nayahan and Chinna-k-Kavundar. Both these films are pervaded by the element of patronage, and the hero’s generosity in marrying a girl of lowly origin is a significant factor in the constitution of the image of the patron. Vasanth Kannabiran and Kalpana Kannabiran, ‘Caste and Gender: Understanding Dynamics of Power and Violence’, Economic and Political Weekly; 14 September, 1991, pp. 2130-3; see p. 2131. Ibid., p. 2131. For a discussion of the continual exchange of meanings between the social body and the physical body, see Mary Dougias, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982). According to her, ‘the human body is always treated as an image of society and... there can be no natural way of considering the body that does not involve at the same time a social dimension.’ She suggests that ‘bodily control is an expression of social control’ and that ‘there is little prospect of successfully imposing bodily control without the corresponding social forms’ (ibid., pp. 70-1). Cf. the historical account of the disciplining ol the female body in Western societies by Michel Foucault, in The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). Another instance where the disciplining of the female body finds open expression is the scene in which the father and the son are eating together. The hero is quite embarrassed by the ‘improper’ manner in which his girlfriend is seated. He is quick to point out the ‘proper’ way, which she promptly follows. One should mention in this connection that the ‘modern’ girlfriend is portrayed as an erotic woman with a free-flowing body (her dress, hairdo and body movements combined with her disposition construct such an image), the traditional wife is restrained and at times frigid, with a well-contained and bounded body. We are indebted to T. Sivakumar for this observation. are 8ratetul to Ravikumar and T. Sivakumar for this observation. The particular manner in which the question of martiality and violence is posited in the narrative and resolved toward the end is, however, not t e last word in the life of the film. Like what happens to all texts when they circulate in society, people tend to ‘poach’ into the hegemonic semiotic field of the primary text and generate their own popular meanings and pleasures at the secondary and tertiary levels from this ilm also. See John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989). The case of a huge (40 feet) cut-out in Madurai

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema • 225 showing the image of the Thevar Mahan hero with the extra-large sword in his hand illustrates this point. The positioning of the cut-out was itself highly significant as it faced the giant statue of Muthuramalinga Thevar. During the anniversary celebrations of Muthuramalinga Thevar (Guru Puja), when objections were raised against the cut-out, the swordpart was removed and placed behind the structure denoting the concealment of the weapon. However, due to popular pressure the sword-part was restored to its place later. 18. Cf. Greimas, ‘Description and Narrativity’, p. 616. 19. This ambivalence in affirming either the traditional or the modern is discernible also in the case of marriage. The traditional notion of marriage as an institution to consolidate the interests of the kindred by strengthening the bonds through reciprocal exchange is also problematized in popular film. Preferential marriage to one’s cross cousin or maternal uncle is, thus, posited as the only option available for a woman in certain films and as impossible in others. In Pavunu Pavunudhan, Man Vasanai and En Rasavin Manasile, the latter is powerfully expressed. In both Pavunu Pavunudhan and Man Vasanai, marriage to the cousin/uncle remains a dream for the heroine up to the last and she is forced to remain single ail her life. In En Rasavin manasile the heroine’s forced marriage to her rustic, uneducated uncle ends in a tragedy. She dislikes the rough and tough hero right from the beginning and when it happens that she should marry him, she cannot, for a long time, reckon with the fact. She keeps a psychological distance from him all the time and a desperate hero ultimately forces her into the sexual act and she conceives. When at last she comes to realize her husband’s immense unexpressed love for her and changes her mind, it is too late and she is killed in an accident. Efforts made to arrange a marriage between her younger sister and the hero also fail as he comes to know of her love for another man, an educated youngster from the city. The film closes with the hero’s brave act of bringing the lovers together in marriage, amidst violent opposition. He gets killed in the process. 20. Comedy in the period beginning with the emergence of the neo-nativist genre in the late 1970s is largely characterized by mockery of the physical appearance of the comedian. Even though such comedy was, to some extent, existent in the earlier period also, the predominant mode was verbal comedy combined with exaggerated gesticulation. That the physical appearance of the comedian becomes highly significant in the later period could be attributed to certain developments in the late 1970s and 1980s with the emergence of the neo-nativist genre. This period saw the rise of not-so-goodlooking men as heroes and stars and is, thus, marked by a significant transformation in the discursive formations constituting the diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds of stars and heroes. The shift in the comedy mode could, then, be seen as an attempt to come to terms with this transformation and the reordering of the psychological mechanisms that underlie the popular imagination on which it is premised. The animalization of the ‘inferior’ comedian in Tamil film could, therefore, be read as an expression of certain cultural

226 • Secret Politics of Our Desires anxieties specific to the textual history of Tamil cinema, and, to that 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

extent, a self-reflexive endeavour. For a semiotic analysis of circus clowning, see Paul Bouissac, ‘Clown Performances as Metacultural Texts’, in Circus and Culture: A Semiotic Approach (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 151-75. Cf. Sivathamby’s characterization of the cinema hall as ‘the first performance centre in which all the Tamils sat under the same roof. The basis of the seating is not on the hierarchic position of the patron but essentially on his purchasing power.’ Karthigesu Sivathamby, The Tamil Film as a Medium of Political Communication (Madras: New Century Book House Private Ltd., 1981), p. 18. Umberto Eco, ‘Frames of Comic Freedom’, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Carnival! (Amsterdam: Mouton, 1984), pp. 1-9; see p. 2. Steve Neale, ‘Psychoanalysis and Comedy’, Screen, 1981, 22(2), pp. 29-44; see p. 32. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid. Ibid., p. 38. Mary Douglas, ‘Jokes’, in Implicit Meanings (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 90-114. p. 107. Eco, ‘Frames of Comic Freedom’, p. 6. Neale, ‘Psychoanalysis and Comedy’, p. 41. It should be noted in this connection that a separate comedy track distinct from the main plot is absent in Thevar Mahan. This diminishes the role of the comedy in the text and effectively marginalizes the comedian to occupy an obscure position among the loyal clients of the patron. The ideological underpinnings of this narrative strategy are obvious. See, for instance, the structural parallels between the main plot and the comedy sub-plot in Padahotti and Pattikkada Pattanama. In Sentamil Pattu, however, a single (but significant) trait of the hero’s character is echoed in the character of the comedian in the comedy track. A third type of structuring is found in Keladi Kanmani where, even though a distinct comedy sub-plot is non-existent, the comedian’s habit of dreaming is similarly an echo of the hallucinations experienced by the protagonist. Note how the film resists any consolidation of the genealogical formation. Senthil and his father often quarrel and exchange blows. On one occasion when the father tries to prevent the construction of the new school building in the dalit colony, Senthil beats him up and inflicts a severe head injury on him. Thevar Mahan, by contrast, plays down the possibilities of disagreement between father and son. The initial contrast or opposition between the modern son and the ‘traditional' father mellows as the narrative proceeds to make a legitimate heir—a powerful patron in the lather’s mould—out of the son. This consolidation of the genealogical formation is continually reinforced by the son’s fear and respect for his father.

The language of power in recent Tamil cinema • 227 34.

35.

It is this type of comedy that Eco celebrates (he calls it ‘humour’). For Eco, the ‘hyper-Bakhtinian ideology of carnival as actual liberation’ is, in fact, unacceptable. Eco, 'Frames’, p. 3. As an alternative to the transgressional theory which maintains that all comedy is basically subversive, he suggests that the only genuine form of humour is the one that ‘works in the interstices between narrative and discursive structures: the attempt of the hero to comply with the frame or to violate it is developed by the fabula, while the intervention of the author, who renders explicit the presupposed rule, belongs to the discursive activity and represents a metasemiotic series of statements about the cultural background of the fabula\ Eco, ‘Frames’, p. 8. Cf. the comedy of the formal deconstruction type suggested by John Ellis, quoted in Mick Eaton, ‘Laughter in the Dark’. Screen, 1981, 22(2), pp. 21-8; see p. 22. Or, to put it in Lotman’s terms, the comedian as protagonist in the film not only crosses the prohibition boundary of the plot-space like all normal heroes, but also violates the sub-plot by dismantling the conventional narrational mode, thus making a rupture in the ideological formation that sustains it. Jurij Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema, Trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1976), pp. 65-6. That the director of the film is, indeed, conscious of this operation is attested by his earlier work, Neengalum lierodhan, in which he attempts to lay bare the mechanisms of film-making and, thus, demystify the entire process. The film, naturally, evoked a lot of opposition from within the film industry.

6 The impossibility of the outsider in modern Hindi Film VINAY LAL

I

F

or a number of decades now, India has laid claim to the largest film industry in the world. To film connoisseurs and aesthetes, Indian cinema may be synonymous with the names of Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and a number of other directors whose films appear in film festivals,1 or are otherwise thought to bear marks both of an ‘Indian’ identity and of an adherence to aesthetic standards that make them comparable to the best films produced elsewhere in the world. However, this cinema, which owes a great deal to traditions of humanism and social realism, is dwarfed by the less highbrow films popular with the masses, and which play to packed houses in gigantic cinema halls throughout the length and breadth of India. These popular films, some of them immensely long, were once divided into two categories, ‘mythological' and ‘social',2 although at another level they all appear to belong to a genre more commonly associated with American cinema, the ‘musical’.3 The ‘mythological' has nearly vanished, for reasons that will become apparent in the course of this chapter; what remains is the film which is centered around problems of contemporary living, the loss of innocence, the triumph of ‘good’ over ‘evil’, the nature of politics, the demands of patriotism, and the onerous presence of the nation-state in modern life. One the one hand, a strong set of ‘family resemblances’ charac¬ terizes many ot these films: for instance, the family hardly ever

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 229

appears whole—if one parent of the hero is present, the other is long since dead, while just the reverse explains the family situation of the heroine; or the film will feature two brothers, often torn away from each other at birth or in early childhood, and unable to recognize each other in adulthood—and circumstances take them along different and violently conflicting trajectories in life.4 The revenge motif often dominates: the hero is bound to avenge the murder of his wife, or punish the beasts who have outraged the modesty of his sister, while the ‘villain’ cannot countenance his humiliation by the hero in a court of law or the public square. Or, just as often, the enormous chasm between the social standing of the hero and the heroine may prevent the union that they both so ardently desire, and that can only be achieved after an unmentionable tragedy is barely avoided.5 One could, in fact, speak quite easily (after Vladimir Propp) of a morphology of Hindi films: there is a limited cast of characters, and they exist in relation to each other in a prescribed number of social relations: all the elements combine to yield a certain number of well-defined plots.6 As the folk-tale allows variations within limits, so the cast of characters within the Hindi film stays within certain parameters. Thus the doctor, whose advent in the Hindi film serves as a barometer to the emergence of a middle-class sensibility increas¬ ingly torn from its moorings in indigenous systems of medicine and forms of treatment, is a mainstay of the Hindi film, but the psychiatrist is almost nowhere present.7 On the other hand, popular Hindi films are held together by certain conventions of narrative, story-telling, and ambience, among which two very pronounced ones are the stylized fight and song-and-dance sequences. Though these conventions may now be operative at a different lexical and semantic plane, as the prolonged fight in the recent film Gardish (‘Days of Dust’, 1991) suggests, where the narrative provides complex readings of the nature, stratification, authority, and masculinity in Indian society, certain characteristics have helped to maintain the identity of the Hindi film. The fist-fight—though the villain will grab a deadly implement at an opportune moment, for unlike the hero he is not sworn to sportsmanship—is masterminded by the ‘fightmaster, which alone highlights the importance of the fist-fight in the Hindi film. For a race of men whom the colonizers thought of as effete, unable to protect their own women, and who are constantly reminded of their physical incapacities by their failure to win

230 • Secret Politics of Our Desires medals at international sporting events, the fist-fight is an assertion by the Hindu male of his masculinity, and a demonstration of his ability to protect his womenfolk. The fist-fight does a whole lot of good: it assures the man of his physical prowess, which the heroine might bring into question with some deliberate remark; it puts the villain away; and it provides an assurance to the woman that her modesty will be honoured. Lately, with the emergence of the AK-47, which has become a mere extension of the long hand of evil, the fist-fight might have been expected to disappear altogether. On the contrary, it remains, because, when technology itself comes to the aid of violence, the fist must even more singularly mark an authentic masculinity. In Gardish, this point is ironically and thus forcefully established by having the anti-heroic hero (who is mistaken for the villain) appear in the fight dressed like a middle-class college boy on his way to the offices of a large business firm for his first interview, a book tucked underneath his arm. Now, in an adaptation of the convention of the fist-fight, the well-placed and powerfully delivered fist not only keeps the pretty girl out of harm’s way, it even does the work of the nation-state, as in the recent film Krantikshetra, where the Sikh college boy delivers a ‘Hindustani mukka' (Indian punch) to the terrorist who is an enemy of the nation.8 By far the most unique characteristic of the popular Hindi film is the song-and-dance sequence, which remains indispensable to many highbrow Hindi films as well, the obvious exception being the films of directors such as Shyam Benegal and Saeed Mirza, who have deliberately set themselves in opposition to the conven¬ tions of the Hindi film. In the old convention, either the hero or the heroine could break into song; but the song-and-dance sequence, which involves a principal singer taking to the floor against the backdrop of a large ensemble of women (and some¬ times men) decked in village or ethnic costumes, would take place largely in the fields, such as at harvest time, or in the wedding hall, or at the palatial residence of the international smuggler and local malia boss cloaked in the garb of respectability. The song served as a telescoped narrative, often signalling the flower¬ ing of romance or the separation of lovers, or as a vehicle for conveying existential dilemmas and the cruel power of fate, or it would provide the point of transition between two points in the plot. The song-and-dance retains all these features, but the narrative style and choreographic traditions in which it is

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 231

embedded point to the emergence of a new cultural politics, the advent of a middle-class consciousness notable for its aggrandizing spirit, the gradual erosion of the transcendent from everyday affairs, and most evidently a matrix of action and behaviour in which style acquires a life of its own, mechanistic movements predominate over more wayward and uncertain gestures, and machismo replaces the older and softer virtue of restraint. Whereas in the older song-and-dance sequence the women were likely to form themselves into circles, the choreography of the modern collective dance dictates that the field of movement be constituted into squares or other rigid geometric patterns; and where previously the erotic had an element in it of the coy and the tentative, today the erotic has in it elements of rank sexuality, brutish pride, and vulgarity. Naked feet adorned by anklets have been replaced with high leather boots dancing to the tunes of Indian rap, and the pelvic thrust suggests the hunger of a newlyunleashed sexuality, the vengeance of the flesh too long dominated by the language of the spirit. In the theatre of sexuality, as in other spheres of life, the Indian adventure with ‘globalization’ is on display. Nonetheless, the song-and-dance sequence remains an integral part of the Hindi film, and it retains, as it has in the past, strong links with other narrative elements of Hindi film. The continuity of certain narrative and aesthetic traditions, and the visible retention of what I have termed ‘family resemblances’, may help to explain the longevity of the popular Hindi film and its resounding success in India and among Indian communities in the diaspora. The long run enjoyed by popular Hindi cinema is usually described as an aspect of the films’ ‘escapist’ tendencies. In the conventional sociological view, poverty, drudgery, and a life of unrelenting labour are the lot of the Indian masses; the Hindi film offers relief from the tediousness of an impoverished life, just as it holds out the hope, however remote, of a glittering and resplendent future. As one critic, writing in a ‘serious’ film journal asked, ‘Is it [the cinema] not meant merely to provide a temporary and vicarious catharsis from the rigours of urban poverty?’9 If the poverty of the hero or the heroine underscores the grim reality of the slum, the obscenity of the other is a striking suggestion of the beyond. We least desire to see on the silver screen that which we encounter daily, and in the naive sociological view, though popular Hindi film may be born in the slum, it lives in the bellies of India’s urban spaces, and finds its orgasmic and

232 • Secret Politics of Our Desires ecstatic fulfilment in the pleasure domes of the rich. The argument about the inherent escapism of commercial cinema similarly seeks to account for the failure of the art cinema by its chosen formula: having seen enough poverty in their lives, can Indian audiences be expected to queue up for it and thus shatter those utopian expectations by which we all live? The Hindi film allows us to dream, and if we are free to dream, that is no small freedom. A more sophisticated explanation for the success of the commercial Hindi cinema, as I have suggested, would take into account the narrative conventions and aesthetic norms of popular films. It is even possible to extend this argument and view the Hindi film as the ‘Kaliyuga avatara of Sanskrit drama’, as a representation of the ancient Indian theatrical tradition for our times.10 Thus Satyam, Shiv am, Sundaram could be viewed as a modern rendering of the Shakuntala of Kalidasa, and in a more general way the Hindi film could be described as a cinematic enactment of the theory and structure of action sketched out in the NatyashastraP The more philosophical aspect of this argument would locate the Hindi film within what Ashis Nandy has described as the ‘language of continuity’, one of the languages ‘which often hidefs] the implicit native theories of oppression in many non-Western traditions’. Whereas the Western concept of continuity construes it ‘as only a special case of change’, in Indie traditions the language of continuity, which assumes that ‘all changes can be seen, discussed or analysed as aspects of deeper continuities’, occupies a predominant place.12 Change, in other words, is only a special case of continuity—and this is best exemplified in the Hindi film. It is unarguably clear that the Hindi film, whatever view one might hold about its narrative traditions, is deeply embedded in certain mythic structures which have defined the contours of Indian civilization. The doyen of commercial Hindi cinema, the late Manmohan Desai, claimed that all his films were inspired by the Mahabharata, and on occasion everything in the Hindi film, from the archetypal figure of the mother to the anti-heroic hero, appears to belong to the deep recesses of the Indian past. But I wish to advance, and in the rest of this chapter elaborate upon, another argument which it appears to me explains the underlying philosophical assumption of the Hindi film and suggests why the Hindi commercial cinema has such an enduring popularity among the masses. As I will endeavour to argue, the Hindi film almost

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 233

altogether denies, and certainly until very recently did wholly deny, the possibility of any significant ‘Other’, and in this respect it remains uniquely true to the genius of Indian civilization, of which the most characteristic specimens are undoubtedly the Puranas (epics). There has never been any true outsider in the commercial Hindi film, although as the demands of the Indian nation continue to supersede the ethos of Indian civilization, and the boundaries of inclusivity continue to shrink, the outsider will finally have found a place in Indian society. If and when the popular Hindi film shows a keen awareness of the outsider, and gives the notion of the ‘Other' an ontological sanctity, we shall have irreversible proof that in India, as in the underdeveloped West, the nation-state is enshrined in the hearts of women and men, and that the project of modernity has been, in this most resilient of civilizations, rendered complete.

It would be useful, in the first instance, to disembed my argument from the matrix in which it might reasonably but nonetheless mistakenly be placed. In the study of Indian society and culture, the Indological view has long prevailed.13 Certain tropes deter¬ mined the contours of colonial discourse on India: thus, in addition to the ‘crafty Brahmin’ and the ‘effeminate Hindu’, one could also speak of the ‘martial races’, the ‘valiant Rajput’, the ‘fanatic Muslim', the ‘scheming bania\ the ‘noble Pathan’, and of course the ‘Oriental Despot’. On the Indological view, India can more¬ over be encapsulated through certain categories or essences, among which can be numbered caste and the ‘village community’.14 Most significantly, the individual was said to be present nowhere in India, for Indian society was dominated by collectivities. As The Economist, then and now a respected journal of Tory opinion, put it in a dramatic fashion at the conclusion of the Swadeshi movement in Bengal, ‘Whatever may be the political atom in India, it is certainly not the individual of Western democratic theory, but the community of some sort.’15 A large constellation of ideas contributed to the shaping of this argument. Francois Bernier, and following him Thomas Munro, Karl Marx, and Sir

234 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Henry Sumner Maine, to mention only a few of the more notable individuals who so generously aided in securing a permanent home for error, somehow reached the conclusion that the idea of private property was entirely foreign to the Indian. Property was owned only in common, a rather retrograde thing. Large enough as India was, it had no room for the individual ownership of property, with one singular exception: the Oriental Despot, presiding at the top of the apex, had it within his power to deprive any person of his property, and the life and limb of each subject were at his disposal. The Oriental Despot, who took as his personal fiefdom an entire society congregated into communities, ‘divided'—as Maine put it—‘into a vast number of independent, self-acting, organized social groups—trading, manufacturing, cultivating'16— provided a telling example of the fact that the sole individual in India could only exist as a degraded form of the noble individual of the West. When the despot could command everything at will, and rule by whim, the individual, and much less the individual assertion of rights, were not matters for discussion. In the ‘communalist’ reading of Indian history, the notion of ‘communities’ was inherited from Indological discourse, and these communities were now said to be constituted principally on the basis of religious identity. If caste was the principal nodal point for the colonial sociology of the second half of the nineteenth century, religion in the form of a rigid differentiation between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs was to provide the main focus for colonial investigations of Indian society in the twentieth century. This should not obscure the fact that, in the colonial view, Hinduism remained the quintessential religion of India, for Hinduism’s metaphysics and religious practices were easily placed alongside the sociological view, whose components I have already sketched briefly, to form a holistic picture of India. As the Oriental Despot demanded complete submission, to the point where the individual was not a feasible entity, so Hinduism, at least in its pristine form, was associated with the teaching that the aim of one s life is absorption into the Absolute. How the advaita school of philosophy of Shankaracharaya came to be held as the philosophy of India is another story, but it suffices to note that, in the view of such Indological scholars as Max Mueller, the entire teachings of Indian philosophy were sought to be compressed in such formulas as tat tvam asi, ‘thus are that’, signifying the merger of the atman with the brahman, the individual soul with the

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 235

universal soul. Along with Buddhism, the pure form of Hinduism was viewed as advocating the extinction of the self, the loss of individual identity, the surrender to the Absolute. The ‘individual’ existed only to forget herself or himself. The political structures, religious beliefs, philosophical systems, caste system, and socio-economic patterns of living in India all appeared to militate against the idea of the individual. Drawing upon this foundation, the French anthropologist, Louis Dumont, was to provide a systematic analysis of Indian society, part of his endeavour being to show that in such a society the individual, and more particularly the outsider, cannot have a place. Distin¬ guishing between hierarchy and social stratification, Dumont sought to argue through a structural analysis of caste that hierarchy is the organizing principle of Indian society. Dumont viewed caste through the lens of religion: in the ‘purely structural universe’ that is India, it is the ‘whole which governs the parts’, and it is ‘religion which provides the view of the whole’, ‘ranking will thus be religious in nature’.17 Caste allotted everyone, ho\yever humble or great, a place in Indian society; its influence was inescapable, and its omnipresence was justly recognized. ‘A sect cannot survive on Indian soil if it denies caste’, wrote Dumont, ‘and it has long been recognized that Buddha himself, if he transcended caste, did not attack or reform it.’18 As Dumont was to recognize, he had to be able to account for another characteristic feature of Indian society, the yogi or world renouncer. In the figure of the yogi, Indian society appears to have an outsider, a significant ‘Other’, someone who cannot be consumed by caste. But in what respect is the renouncer really an outsider? His very act of renunciation is predicated on the existence of the caste system, and that seems to establish, at the very least, that caste reigns supreme, both as a lived reality and as an aspect of the mind. The effect of renunciation must, ironically, be to strengthen the caste system. Dumont further noted that the yogi is bound by rules; renunciation is not an unhampered freedom, and renunciation creates its own burdens and obligations. The renunciation of the world by a man who has already raised a family, and whose hair is now turning white, is a matter of convention, and he can expect to receive accolades because of the dutiful manner in which he has discharged his duties. When the renunciation of the world is undertaken in youth, not in the manner prescribed by the shastras, but because the yogi is

236 • Secret Politics of Our Desires possessed of profound spiritual insight, there too the action is blessed: in either case, we are not speaking of the outsider, the significant ‘other’ who cannot be accommodated, someone who cannot stand within the charmed circumference of the Lakshman rekha, the magical boundary wire that protects those inside. Such an outsider is not the exception to the rule; he is a seeming exception, and in India there is no escape. Going far beyond Dumont, we might even say: where the outsider is not banished, where the outsider exists to remind others of those values of transcendence of which we become oblivious owing to the impositions of daily life, there the outsider has become an insider. Such an outsider, far from being the significant ‘Other’, that other in whom we invest the evil that we recognize within us, is nothing but our true Self. As I have argued, the Indological view insists that Indian society is characterized and dominated by collectivities, the individual being particular to societies in the West. Where there is no individual, there can be no outsider, unless we all be outsiders in the metaphysical sense, biding our time on earth, living this life as though it were a sojourn from which we must return to an earlier point of origin. In Dumont’s version of the hard truth about India, caste is bound to dictate the life of every Indian, assigning him or her his/her place in that multitudinous society, and its influence is all the more pronounced precisely when it is sought to be denied. The political effects of such readings are there to be seen, in the history of colonialism as much as in the barbaric attempts by the West to impose yet another new international order; just as evident is the tyranny of the sociological method, which would make a complex civilization hostage to the categories of an impoverished social science discourse, and would seek to transmute the rich confusions of an ancient and pluralistic culture into a purportedly seamless and error-lree account bound by no strictures other than those routinely placed upon intellectuals in the academy. While seeking to dissociate myself entirely from the intellectual practices, ideology, and political repercussions of Indological discourse, I would nonetheless maintain that the popular Hindi film has never displayed, at least until very recently, any sense of the outsider or the significant ‘other’. The Hindi film has more than its lair share ol villains, and of these some are demonic, but for that reason all the more assimilable to rakshashas, the

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 237

creatures of mythology rather than of history. A preponderant number of the villains are of the run-of-the-mill variety, mere camp-followers, easily dispatched into a state of unconsciousness by the fighting skills' of the hero or other principal protagonist, and with no particular investment in the life of crime. They are of no consequence, a point that the Hindi film makes by almost invariably introducing, into what appears to be a bloody fight, a struggle unto death, a ludicrously comic element. One of the ‘bad men’ will be struck on the head with a saucepan, another will be diverted from the performance of his nefarious activities by some silly trick or other.19 On account of this, and for the more ponderous reason that no civilization is without its other, I wish to underscore significant in ‘the significant “Other”'. Who, then, might the significant ‘Other’ or outsider be? In pursuance of this query, we must take a particularly close look at the principal figure of antagonism in the Hindi film. In a film such as Deewar (‘The Wall,’ 1975) (about which I shall have a great deal more to say in due course), although Shashi Kapoor represents the forces of ‘law and order’, it is clearly Amitabh Bachchan, who takes to a life of crime and easy living, who elicits our sympathy. Amitabh could have been the significant ‘Other’, but the ethos of inclusivity upon which the film relies draws him into our moral universe. He may even begin his adult life by being an outsider, but even his attachment to the life of crime is tentative, as though the fruits of his actions are of little conse¬ quence to him. The ‘evil’ in him has no ontological life, and it is for this reason that, though he may be an outsider to his own kith and kin, and to the social institutions around him, his remoteness is never a complete hindrance to the formulation of human relationships. Through certain modes of cultural accommo¬ dation, not yet lost to a civilization reeling under the impact of modernity, a relentless materialism, and the vociferous demands of a nation-state that believes itself to be besieged by the forces of terror and instability, he is incorporated into the human com¬ munity.20 He is never truly the figure in whom evil resides, and he is never irredeemable, for that would render him an outsider, strange and alien, repository of an Otherness. Although my point could be furthered by arguing at a level of generality, I will draw mainly upon four films, and occasionally stray into other films. All four films—Deewar (1975), Shakti (1982) Khalnayak (1993), and Gardish (1993)—belong to the

238 • Secret Politics of Our Desires mainstream of commercial cinema. Deewar is recognized as the film that established Amitabh Bachchan as one of the most formi¬ dable stars in Indian film history, and in Shakti, Amitabh was paired with another stalwart of the film industry, Dilip Kumar. Deewar also has the distinction of inaugurating what is usually termed the ‘angry young man' phase of Hindi films, and in fact the film is usually seen as an instance of the celebration of the outsider, the very opposite of the argument which I shall posit.

In Deewar, the family of four (but not the ideal four of family planning programmes) is, at the outset, practically reduced to three. The father, who leads the workers of a mill on strike in quest for higher wages and better working conditions, is con¬ fronted with a cruel choice by a desperate and ruthless manage¬ ment. His wife and two young sons are taken hostage, and under duress he signs, in his capacity as representative of the workers, certain papers whereby the workers relinquish their demands, forsake their right to strike, and agree to work under conditions laid down by the management. Having saved the lives of his family members, he also betrays the trust reposed in him by the workers, and his life is made miserable by the town-dwellers. In utter shame, he flees the town, leaving the family to fend for itself and bear the people’s fury.21 One day, Vijay, the elder brother (played by Amitabh Bachchan) is accosted by a group of these towns¬ people, and when he returns home that day, bruised and beaten, his arm is shown to have been tattooed with the words, ‘Your lather is a thief’. These words are furrowed deeply not merely into his arm, but into his mind as well, and the constant memory of that burning insult never leaves Vijay. Hounded by their near and distant neighbours, the family leaves town, and like countless others they arrive in the city of dreams, to spend their days on the footpaths of Bombay. The mother finds work as a labourer, and giadually ’Vijay takes to shining shoes, for on two meagre salaries Ravi (played by Shashi Kapoor), Vijay’s younger brother, can be sent to school. Thus the two brothers take two different paths, a point highlighted by vijay’s adamant refusal to step inside

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 239 the temple, though Ravi, dutiful son that he is, cheerfully accompanies his mother there. Years have elapsed, and Vijay is now a labourer at the docks. A masterfully orchestrated fight with the local mafia, who consider it their right to extort protection money from every worker at the docks, earns Vijay a fearsome reputation, and another under¬ world don, played by Iftikhar, invites Vijay to join his business. Before long, Vijay is in possession of millions, and his mother and brother are now moved to a palatial mansion. Bombay must, after all, remain the city of hopes and dreams. But long before the two brothers had been set on different paths; as fate would have it, Vijay’s unemployed brother is commissioned into the police, and entrusted with the task of finding evidence that would implicate Iftikhar and his associates with smuggling and other illicit operations. Duty compels: brother is pitted against brother. Once Ravi learns that his own brother is leading a life of crime, the two cannot stay under one roof; Ravi leaves, taking their mother with him to his humble abode. The film winds its way to the foregone conclusion: a search warrant is issued in Vijay’s name, and a chase through the city streets leaves Vijay, wounded by a bullet from his brother’s revolver, dead—but not before he col¬ lapses into his mother’s arms, where he can at long last find the eternal sleep of those who know they are wanted. It is, as some would maintain, the return to the womb. It has been argued that ‘the Amitabh persona is the quint¬ essential outsider of the ghetto’, and the narrative I have offered would appear to corroborate that reading. K. Chandrasekhar, from whose article I have quoted, further argues that Amitabh, whether in Deewar, Shakti, or indeed almost any of his other films, ‘longs to belong, to find security, to be spared the turmoil of survival in the ruthless city; he hankers for his roots, he yearns to put the clock back to the epoch when all human society was pastoral.’ Vijay merely has ‘the lumpen desire to belong.'22 It could be argued against this that Amitabh is never completely shunned by others: in Iftikhar, the father figure is reincarnated and the family rendered whole,23 and in Parveen Babi, who makes her entry into the film as a night-club hostess (of loose morals), and makes her departure as a repentant woman fully cognizant of the glorious virtues of motherhood and wifedom, he finds a female companion who gives him that sympathetic hearing which others would deny him. But the restoration of the ‘natal’ family is aborted, for

240 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Iftikhar is taken under arrest,24 while Amitabh is prevented from starting his own family by the violent elimination ot Parveen Babi, whose repentance cannot obfuscate the fact that her attempt to tie the knot with Amitabh and thus acquire respectability consti¬ tutes a threat to the social order which alone can stipulate the rules under which marriages may take place. Iftikhar and Parveen Babi are, nonetheless, minor figures, and we must turn to the mother (played by, here and elsewhere, Nirupa Roy, who appears to have cornered the market for this role in Hindi films) as the pivotal axis around whom the plot and, particularly, my argument revolves. The figure of the mother, as perhaps every student of popular Hindi film is aware, is central to the commercial cinema. At a very general level, this is easily explained by the importance attached to fecundity in India from the days of antiquity, while it is also possible to argue that Indian civilization has always had a substratum of matriarchy, certainly antecedent to the patriarchy which is far more characteristic of Indian society today. From another view, no more important or poignant relationship exists in Indian society than that between mother and son,25 and the Hindi film best exemplifies the significance of this nexus. Chandrasekhar's argument, as it appears in his article "The Amitabh Persona', adopts this viewpoint; as he says, Amitabh’s films embody a ‘uterine world-view', and the fury of the Angry Young Man abates ‘the moment the umbilical cord is restored'. ‘In the Indian context,' he adds, ‘the sole irrepro¬ achable ideological thesis one can defend is love of the mother.’26 Vijay’s only desire in Deewar is to restore the state of original bliss that existed before he was parted from his mother, and towards the end of the film, as Vijay is bleeding to death, he states that his only desire is to enjoy, in the lap of his mother, that profound sleep ot contentment which he has missed since she left him. The Hindi film, then, enacts for the Indian male a double return to the source: seated in the dark chambers of the movie theatre, we all descend into the darkness of the womb, but for the Indian male that darkness is like a wellspring of light, and the womb that place where our sleep is always undisturbed and calm. A film such as Deewar, to extend the argument further, represents the regression of the male into a state of childhood, an attempt to reinstate the primacy of the umbilical stage. I want to argue, however, that the critical place of the mother in Deewar (and the Hindi film more generally) owes considerably

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 241 more to the fact that she is the force that prevents Vijay from becoming an outsider, a significant ‘Other’. As is quite transparent, both Vijay and Ravi vie for her affection and attention, and when the manner in which Vijay is making his living becomes known to her, and she seems determined to leave the mansion he had bought for her, his only defence is that he has done everything in her interest. (‘maine jo kuch hi kiya, tere liye kiya ’.) Indeed, it is to avenge her humiliation that he has purchased for her a skyscraper, which was built with the sweat of her labour.27 (Clearly, she belongs to him, much as the building belongs to him.) But this argument does not prevail, and it is even possible to interpret her resistance to his claims as resistance to the presumed fact of ownership; mother and Ravi leave. In what is perhaps the most famous scene of the film, Vijay arranges a rendezvous with Ravi, and attempts to persuade him that he should arrange to get himself transferred to another police station, as the mafia is hungry for his blood. Back and forth goes the argument; finally, being quite at the end of his patience, Vijay says: ‘I have a bungalow, a car, wealth, good clothes to wear. What do you have? What do you have besides a measly job, a uniform, a mere roof over your head?’ This is a dramatic moment, for by this time it has been established what is at stake; and thus Ravi can look Vijay squarely in the face, and say with immense pride: ‘Mother. I have mother.’ (4ma. mere pas ma hai. ’) The victory has been clinched, but only seemingly so. What attenuates the ‘victory’ is the peculiar fact that when Ravi speaks, he speaks not only as the brother of Vijay, and as the one whose abode their mother shares, but that in the voice of patriarchy, as the defender of the family and the social order, and as the reincarnated husband, with all the ‘rights’ that accrue to the husband. When the mother stands by Ravi, she is only reaffirming the extraordinary hold that the social order has over us, and helping to restore the family; she is not making a choice between her two sons, though in fact, as she admits at some point, she has always loved Vijay more than Ravi. In one respect, Ravi is quite incapable of having a human relationship, for he must bear the burden of the social institutions around him, as well as the anthropological burden of kinship: thus he never addresses Vijay as Vijay, but always as bhai (brother). Vijay’s relationship with his mother is not constrained by duty or form, and it is a sign of the strength of that relationship that he locates her at the centre

242 • Secret Politics of Our Desires of his moral universe. It is at the risk of being captured by Ravi that he attempts to visit his mother at the hospital; more tellingly, when her life is hanging in the balance, he takes the unthinkable step of going to the mandir and asking God, though scarcely in a voice of reverence, for her life. We recall that it is at the temple steps that the two brothers, in their adolescence, already seemed to be veering towards two different paths, and that Vijay seemed marked as the loner, as the outsider; but now, if it has not been established before, it becomes indubitably clear that he, too, must be drawn into the circle of inclusivity. Far from being a film about the outsider, Deewar is about the impossibility of being one. In the Hindi film, the end is where we start from, a point that is reinforced by Shakti a slightly later film. Here the police officer, Ashwini Kumar (played by Dilip Kumar) is the father of Vijay (played again by Amitabh Bachchan), and—as in most Hindi films—he is a man of strict moral code, bound beyond everything else to the performance of his duty, incapable of being corrupted. Ashwmi’s moral resolve and fierce combativity make him an altogether unpalatable figure for J.K. (Amrish Puri), a man who runs illicit liquor shops and a large smuggling business, and who now resolves upon kidnapping Vijay as the only way of breaking Ashwini’s will and having his principal associate released Irom jail. Vijay is taken hostage, and J.K. places a call to Ashwini, saying that he must have his answer in half an hour. Looking across at Vijay, J.K. says: ‘We shall find out soon how much your father loves you.’28 But Ashwini avers that he will not compromise his duty in order to save the life of his son: I know my son s life is in your hands at this time. You can kill him. Do what you want with him, but I won’t dishonour my obligations. Unknown to him, this message, as it comes across the machine, is heard by his son in captivity, who will for the rest ot his lile labour under the illusion that his life is of no meaning to his own father. Vijay little realizes that his father’s love for him and his duty as a police officer are not mutually exclusive, nor is he cognizant oi the fact that, in having prolonged the negotiation, Ashwini has gained the time he needed to have the phone call traced. Before Ashwini and his men can arrive at J.K.’s hideout, Vijay has given his captors the slip, and that day. as he is chased down narrow alleys, his life is saved by Narang iKulbhusban Kharbanda), who will himself become a mafia don one day and the employer of a grateful Vijay.

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 243 As in Deewar; the son in Shakti, Vijay, undoubtedly has the sense of being abandoned. Where in Deeivar the words, ‘Your father is a thief, were burnt into the son’s flesh, in Shakti the refrain of those words, ‘You can kill him’, leave an indelible impre¬ ssion on Vijay’s mind. If ever language, and an act of ‘misreading’, dictated the course of a man’s life, such is Vijay’s. As he returns from school one day, kicking a can lying on the street, we see him transformed—through a match cut—to a lanky young man, aimlessly adrift. The match cut signifies not merely the empty passage of time, but also the alteration of states of mind. Thus, through this match cut, we are confronted with the possibility that Vijay’s transformation into an outsider is now virtually complete. The conversation that then takes place between him and Roma (Smita Patil), a woman whose modesty he has prevented from being outraged by some goons with whom she was travelling on a train, appears to confirm this: Vijay: Won’t your folks at home be annoyed [at your being latej? Roma: If there were folks at home, they would have been—as it is, I live by myself. Vijay: You live alone? Aren’t you afraid? Roma: When I’m alone, then there is only me. And what is there to fear from oneself? Vijay: I’m only afraid of myself. Roma : Do you also live by yourself? Vijay: Well, one can be alone even while living with others.

If in the existential sense one recognizes oneself, and knows oneself, as an outsider, then that perhaps defines Vijay’s state. But no such claim about Vijay, in the ontological or even socio¬ logical sense, is advanced; and indeed from here the entire movement of the film will be to draw Vijay into the realm of the human community. As in Deewar; Vijay falls into a relationship with Roma, and if the relationship with Parveen Babi in Deewar was first abrogated with her death, in Shakti it will terminate with Vijay’s own death. The brutal fact that such relationships cannot be sanctified through the act of marriage because they are violative of the social codes instituted by sanctimonious patriarchs, by no means renders Vijay an outsider; rather, it is suggestive of the fact that his incorporation will have to take a different route. Those morphological elements which determined the structure of Deewar are present in Shakti as well, which means that the figure of the mother Sheetal (played by Rakhee) will be critical, except that in Shakti she cannot be an altogether

244 • Secret Politics of Our Desires successful source of mediation between her husband and her son. At one point, having been admonished by his father for leading the life of an idler and worse, Vijay quite sternly tells his mother: ‘I have no need for lectures.’ She replies, ‘Yes, you seem to need no one. Not even me.’ Whereupon he is quick to respond: ‘I need you very much.’ (‘mujhe tumari bahut jaroorat hai. ’) Here, and elsewhere, the son is no outsider to the mother, but nonetheless the relationship between mother and son is not entirely on the same footing as in Deewar; for a mechanical application of the formula will satisfy neither Vijay nor the viewer. It is his father with whom Vijay must settle his relationship if he is not to become the outsider that he appears to be, and accordingly the film moves towards that resolution. Ashwini has made J.K.’s life miserable, his illegal operations have been largely shut down, and J.K. must now flee the country, but before doing so he resolves upon terminating Ashwini’s life. The bullets intended for Ashwini find their target in his wife instead. That death, too, was necessary, for as the film has suggested all along, no rapprochement between father and son is possible as long as she is alive, not that she aimed at being a hindrance to the achievement of that objective—some matters can only be settled between fathers and sons. At this point, with the death of Sheetal, Vijay’s incorporation into the human community is complete, for father and son can now mourn together. That much Ashwini realizes: whatever his son may be, he is fully cognizant of the fact that Vijay feels that loss deeply, and Vijay too is brought to an awareness of the loss suffered by his father. This obviates the necessity for a more formal reconciliation, but the plot must move to its logical end. Now is not the time for contemplation, but for action, and this can signal nothing else but a violent end to the life, at the hands ot Vijay, of J.K., who it transpires is the same man who abducted him years ago. But Ashwini is a police officer, and duty reigns supreme so he chases Vijay across the length of the airport, and his reluctant bullet eventually finds its mark. There everything is revealed, and the 'misreading' is set straight; as Vijay dies in his father s lap, it is with the reassurance that his incorporation into the family fold., and into his father’s inner life, is now complete.

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 245

IV The Hindi film, I have been arguing, has almost no notion of the outsider or the significant ‘Other’. I will dare more, and venture to add that the Hindi film, until recently, has had little conception of the villain that we could take seriously. In the school of advaita, villainy can have no place, for when man commits an error or does some wrong, he does so from ignorance. We need not apply such a magnanimous reading to the Hindi film, but still it appears to me that the concept of the villain ought not to be taken for granted. At the lowest level, as I have already stated, we get ‘bad men’ en masse, but these nameless goons have no life of their own, leaving no impression whatsoever on the mind of the viewer. They can scarcely remind us of the dark side of the institutions of state or society, or even the dark side of ourselves. At a far more impressionable level, we have villains such as Samant and Dawad in Deewar, J.K. and Narang in Shakti, or Robert and Ajit in Yaadon Ki Barat. Their ‘villainy’, however, is easily put into question. Robert, an international smuggler who Hies out of India on private jets, is an altogether improbable figure; Ajit, along those lines, is quite comical, and indeed Ajit jokes, which have always been vastly popular in Delhi, have now become a staple of Indian parties in the diaspora. As villains, Robert, Ajit, and their ilk are rather unbelievable; and indeed it is in its depiction of villainy that the Hindi film, which in any case cannot be accommodated within some social realist framework, com¬ pletely abandons any pretensions to the real. More compelling, in this respect, are the likes of Dawad, Samant, J.K. and Narang, but they are curiously handicapped in their attempts to be fullblooded villains on account of being overshadowed by men such as Vijay. Nor can the Dawads of this world, who rule by decree and the gun, and are garbed in respectability, deceive us. They may tend to the violent extreme in their behavior, as with J.K. in Deewar; but they do not have the moral courage that we require of villains as well. They, too, must remain minor players on the stage, for they do not strike a chord of ambivalence within us. Vijay, for his part, though he is drawn into a life of crime, must always be redeemed, and his villainy as such is easily forgotten, which is why he—rather than the unambiguously moral figure, whether it be Ravi in Deewar; Ashwini in Shakti’ or Ram Sinha

246 • Secret Politics of Our Desires in Khainayak—remains the centre of attraction for the viewer. The outsider, then, continues to elude us. A recent film, Khainayak (The villain’), provides the most compelling evidence for my argument. The film opens with the shot of a mother, Aarti (played by Rakhee), pining for the return of her son, Balu (played by Sanjay Dutt) whose photograph she has placed amidst the pages of her Ramayana, and who became enmeshed in the world of crime more than six years before. An elderly man, a fellow villager, says in harsh yet imploring tones that she should forget him, for he will not return. What is the use, he asks, of keeping the picture of Ravana in the Ramayanal29 A son who has entered the world of crime cannot return from it; and what can one say of a son who has killed his own father thereby stealing her husband from her? When Balu, the son, has declared his mother dead as well, which he does while offering testimony before the court, has he not turned himself into a beast, into a veritable outsider to the human community? ‘A mean bastard who has transformed his living mother into a dead one,’ says the old man to Aarti, ‘Such a person should be forgotten.’ ‘But how can I forget,’ she implores him, ‘he is my son.’30 Thus, as the film establishes Balu as the outsider, the absolute ‘Other’, from the start, it works simultaneously to unravel that impression; and henceforth the film will move dialectically between the two positions. ‘Nayak nahi, khainayak hai tu’ (Lyou are not a hero, you are a villain’) The son of a poor but honest father, with few prospects in life to raise himself from the condition under which he is born and raised, and unable to find employment, Balu is easy prey for the evil genius, Roshi Mahanta, under whose influence he readily murders his own father. But, if there are laws of compensation at work in the universe, for every khainayak there must always be a nayak ( hero ) as well, and so he appears in the figure of the upright police officer, Ram Kumar Sinha (played by Jackie Shroff). Balu is caught at the site of the murder by Ram, and the court sentences him to twenty years in prison, but is there a jail that can hold Balu? A battle, at once physical, psychological, and verbal, ensues between Balu and Ram: just as Balu with overweening pride can characterize himself as a khainayak, Ram is unwilling to admit that there is ever any human being who cannot be persuaded to see the light of truth and reason. Balu, in

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 247 Ram’s view, is not a free agent; he is the pawn of foreign powers who are bent on destroying India. Your boss, Ram tells Balu, is a rakshas (‘demon’)—but the man who Ram describes as a rakshas, Balu is inclined to see as a guru. It is in the name of his guru, and in the name of his mother (now ‘resurrected’), that Balu swears to escape from prison. And so he does—to be hauled back into jail, eventually, as a convoluted consequence of the efforts of Ganga (played by Madhuri Dixit) Ram’s consort and a policewoman. Disguising herself as a nautch girl, a courtesan of sorts, Ganga is under the impression that she has won his confidence, although a later scene reveals that he has all along known her true identity. Though Balu lusts after Ganga, he does not violate her, a sure sign that the khalnayak who can take the life of his own father and ruthlessly gun down other political opponents of his guru, is nonetheless a nayak who keeps his conduct within certain parameters. Once her identity is known, she is purposefully retained as a hostage, as a guarantee to a safe passage. It is from this point onwards that the film takes an extraordinary, and from the point of view of my argument, a significant turn. Balu slowly becomes attracted to Ganga, little realizing that she is already committed to Ram, his inveterate foe. Ganga, on the other hand, while filled with revulsion at him, gradually comes to the realization that within him resides a good man, the sprinkling of ‘good Indian blood.’ As she puts it to him, ‘Within every khalnayak some nayak is hidden. Even Ravana had some of the virtues of a nayakl Ravana, we are reminded, is not the Satan of Indian tradition; Ravana is certainly not the ‘Other’ in whom we invest all evil. Balu is not so easily persuaded, and there is a certain pride with which he can assert his own villainy. ‘Man can become an animal’, he responds, ‘but do you know of an animal that can become a man? I’ve come too far along to get on the right path now.’ Balu’s claim to otherness, to being an outsider, is contradicted by his own admission that there is a ‘right path’, a path that he is not following. The woman who came into his life as his death has now become, as Balu imagines, his life. As he prepares to place the mangalsutra, the icon of wifely devotion, or (as in the feminist reading) the symbol of woman’s enslavement, around her neck, she makes it known that she belongs to someone else. Just then the police appear and surround Balu’s hideout, and Ganga, though

248 • Secret Politics of Our Desires seeking only to save Balu from certain death, unwittingly becomes the instrument of his escape. As she states in her defence, she saw him ‘turning into a man’, and was not prepared to see him killed by the police: what she finds wholly unacceptable is the supposition that Balu must be construed only as an outsider, the repository of irredeemable good, and that such outsiders are to be dealt with by the machinery of death. Violence, particularly when its end is extermination, can only subsist on the sign of the ‘Other’; and that violence which the state is on the verge of unleashing upon Balu, fed by the steam of vengeance, threatens to extinguish the flame of self-realization that Ganga, erstwhile the ocean of life, has lit within Balu. For this offence against the state, for the crime of having aided and abetted a criminal, and for the greater crime of having betrayed the oath and principles of her profession, she is taken into custody and put on trial. The legal quagmire in which Ganga has placed herself is the least of her difficulties, for the force of rumour and public opinion induces a greater trauma. The ‘whole world’ (sari junta) gossips about Ganga’s infidelity, for is it not possible that, during her ‘captivity’ under Balu, she entered into an amorous relationship with him? ‘Ram's Sita went to Ravana,’ says the public, and if the Ram Of the satya yuga (‘the age of truth’) could renounce his Sita at the word of a mere washerman, then why should not a common mortal like Ram Sinha sacrifice his now tainted beloved? Caught in Balu s love-nest, has not Ganga committed treachery against her country and compromised her colleagues in the police force? ‘Now the entire country,’ the newspapers report, is calling her a deshdrohi (an enemy of the country). Such is the stigma attached to her name, suggests one newspaper, that even Ram Sinha is unable to erase that mark against it, and like his namesake, the Ram who presided over the destinies of Bharat, he is thinking of sacrificing her: ‘The crux of the matter is that today’s Sita cohabited with Ravana and demeaned Ram.’31 Khalnayak, then, as I have been suggesting, must be viewed as performing an interpretation of the Ramayana. While I do not wish to pursue that line of argument much further, as it takes us tar beyond the parameters of this paper, it is critical to note that the film does not accept a conventional reading of the Ramayana story. The story of Sita’s banishment has always been a difficult moment, not only for the devotees of Ram, but for Indian civilization itself. If Ram could banish and outlaw his chaste wife

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 249 owing to the demands of a public inclined to think of Sita as having been defiled by her long captivity, what kind of example can he—the noble and just king, the devout husband, the very incarnation of the Gods—be said to have created for his subjects? Is not the effect of Ram’s banishment of Sita to render her into an outsider to civilized society, the ‘Other’ of his conscience? Must not standards of morality appear to be altogether shifting and arbitrary if Ram can place Sita outside the framework of an inclusive morality? As Ramachandra Gandhi has so poignantly observed in a recent work, the story of Sita’s banishment can, in fact, be located within a framework where Sita is not rendered into the ‘Other’. For their repeated violation of the ecological order, as when Ram takes the life of Marica, or when Ram shoots dead one of a pair of curlews engaged in love-play, Ram and Sita too must enact, by way of atonement and compensation, and by mutual consent, the pain of separation; and this story, when placed into the hands of patriarchs and chauvinists, becomes ‘distorted into the sexist banishment of Sita by Rama for suspected infidelity in Lanka.’32 If Sita can be recovered, if she is not the outsider that she appears to be, the recuperation of Ganga in Khalnayak might well be expected. Once Balu finds that he has been ‘spurned’ by her, that he cannot win her love, he returns to the path of villainy—but this return, as the film establishes, is only imaginary. His stated ambition, as Balu declares before his guru, Roshi Mahanta, the corrupter of youth and the sworn enemy of India, but a shadowy presence in the film, is ‘to become the world’s worst man’. Yet the nayak in him has triumphed over the khalnayak, his real self has established its lordship over his ignorant self, and he will eventually locate himself within an inclusionary polity, and render himself subject to the laws of the community. Thus, towards the end of the film, as Ganga is sentenced to seven years, imprisonment for aiding and abetting a dangerous criminal, and Balu appears to be ensconced as the new head of the empire of evil, he appears suddenly in court and reveals the truth. But, before an audience to whom the word of a notorious criminal is not worth much, what can he do to persuade them that the account he is about to render of Ganga’s captivity— an account that Ravana was prevented from giving to the citizens of Ayodhya—merits belief? Though he cannot swear by the Gita, the Bible, or the Quran, he is prepared to swear by his mother—

250 • Secret Politics of Our Desires for she is his book. The Sita that he has known, Balu tells the court, is pavitra, pure, and in every drop of her blood there is Ram. Seeking the penalty due to him, Balu pleads that this Sita must not be separated from her Ram. With an ending that one has come to expect of Hindi films, Ram and Sira are conjoined together, and Balu, having separated the ephemeral within him from that which is enduring, is drawn back into the arms of the human community.

Balu could not be rendered into the ‘Other’. In an extraordinarily suggestive and curious scene, Balu’s mother wanders into a church, with the expectation that she might find her son there. But he is nowhere to be seen; there is only the padre, and high up on the wall, a painting of Christ. ‘Whom are you looking for?’, enquires the Father, and she replies, ‘For my son.’ ‘What does he look like’, he asks, and she points most innocently to the painting of Christ: in the long hair and the somewhat unkempt beard, there is a keen resemblance. Man, said Emerson, is nothing but God in ruins. The happy ending of Khalnayak, and dozens of other films of recent years, should not obscure the fact that the Hindi film has come perilously close to an acceptance of the ‘Other’ or the outsider. The nation-state has always made heavy demands on its subjects, but now, as the spectre of terrorism—-by which is meant principally the secessionist movements in the Punjab, the NorthEast, and Kashmir—looms large, it demands an unflinching loyalty: if one is not with the nation, then one is against it. An unflinching commitment to the cultural and political integrity of the nation becomes the requirement of the day, and Khalnayak is indubitably an enactment of that loyalty. In the shot that opens the film, the national flag flutters in the wind; the camera then cuts to railway tracks and a running train; and finally the face of Rakhee, the mother of Balu, appears on the screen. The tricolor is the quintessential icon of the political unity of India, of the sanctity of its borders, while the figure of the mother points to the matriarchal roots of Indian civilization, and the sanctity of the idea of motherhood across India. The political and cultural unity of India is maintained through the railways, the life-line of

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 251 India, a demonstration of the transparency of borders within the country. As if to reinforce the political integrity of India’s borders, the closing shot of the film is again of the tricolor, and throughout the film, the national flag serves as a reminder of the duty we owe to the state, besides evoking in us the loyalty that we ordinarily reserve for our mother. In tandem with the thrust towards political unity for which the film stands, Khalnayak also makes a less obvious plea for the cultural and spiritual union of India. Speaking in terms of sect divisions, if Ram, as incarnation of Vishnu, stands for the vaishnavite strand of Indian culture, Ganga-—the consort of Shiva, otherwise known as Gangadhara, the upholder of the river Ganga—signifies shaivism. Thus the wedding of Ram and Ganga, which must perforce be inevitable, hints at nothing less than the cultural union of Hindu India. If we are to read Khalnayak as a cinematic plea for the preser¬ vation of India’s political and cultural unity, we are also invited, as it seems, to view the terrorist as the ‘Other’—the absolute repository of evil, the signification of unassimilability—and as the implacable foe of the nation. With the terrorist, the significant ‘Other’ appears to have finally arrived, and to have asserted its presence in the life of the Hindi film. However, as I have already suggested, this reading cannot be sustained, even though no more plausible construction of the ‘Other’ is possible in the Indian context today, unless it be the construction of the Muslim. In a film such as Krantikshetra, where the plot involves the takeover of a private college by a ‘dreaded terrorist’ (in the language of Doordarshan, the state-owned television) in an attempt to secure from jail the release of his convicted brother, the task of freeing the students from the clutches of the terrorists is entrusted to Major Khan. As the film suggests, the vision of India’s cultural unity has never excluded the Muslims, and Hindu-Muslim unity, through the naive figure of the ‘good Muslim’,33 is in fact critical to the preservation of the nation’s integrity. Moreover, even the terrorists appear as comical figures: one does not for a moment imagine that they will triumph, and the anxieties of hard-nosed functionaries of state, who are wont to think of India as especially victimized by supposedly ruthless terrorists, appear somewhat misplaced.34 So poignant an event as the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, engineered by a woman who had a bomb strapped to her body, and who went up to the prime minister to place a garland around his neck, is parodied in Krantikshetra: thus the

252 • Secret Politics of Our Desires amusement of a number of the kids consists in placing dynamitefilled garlands around the necks of figures of authority, and it is with this contraption that a number of the terrorists become the laughing stock of the audience. Those who are under the illusion of being honoured are in fact humbled, but that is a mode of rendering them subject to the human community. There is nothing comical, by way of contrast, about Roshi Mahanta in Khainayak, though he has a seductive style of speech, and a charming way of eliminating his rivals or unreliable sycophants. 'Hota haichalta hai, duniya hap says he while stabbing to death one of these bearers whose ineptitude leads to Balu’s arrest as he is about to flee, having shot his father.35 The corrupter of youth, the foe of the family, the nemesis of the nation, the personification of evil in every respect: Roshi is all this, the force behind Balu, and yet he remains a secondary figure. Unlike the traditional 'mafia boss or head of an international smuggling ring who takes an inordinate interest in women, and has his body pumped full of bullets while he is having his fill (somewhat like Samant in Deewar), Roshi displays no interest in women. He has the concentrated powers of attention that we would associate with a y°gi much as Ravana did, and it is with single-minded devotion that he pursues the path of evil. Roshi Mahanta, as I would submit, is not so much an evil man, for then we could legitimately speak of his demonization, of his status as the ‘Other’, as a demon. From the standpoint of Ram Kumar Sinha, the battle is never for his soul, for Roshi belongs truly in the realm of the mythological. By mythological I do not here mean a form which allows for cultural pluralism, but rather in the sense of being outside history. Roshi has neither history nor family; his ante¬ cedents remain entirely unknown. As a character, he impresses us not as the ‘Other’, but as the possibility of an ‘Other’, and that unfulfilled possibility is represented by Balu. Roshi points, I might add, to the contradictory reasons why the mythological has largely vanished as a genre of the Hindu film. The mythological, here understood as a form of cultural pluralism, as an open-ended form which shifts between the gods and humans, find itself oppressed by the cultural logic of the nation-state and nationalism; on the other hand, the element of the mythological has made its way into the mainstream Hindi film, and appears always as a reminder of the imperative to keep the circle of inclusion open. As I have thus far argued, the figure of the terrorist, with which

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film

•

253

the commercial Hindi film appears to have an increasing interest, has come dangerously close to providing us with a formulation of the ‘Other’. Still, that line of irreversibility has not been crossed, though that becomes a more real possibility with the increasing encroachment of modernity, and with the increasing assent to the idea of India as a nation-state among India’s modernizers. It is no surprise that, with the emergence over the last ten years of a large middle class in both India and Pakistan, for whom the trappings of a modernizing nation-state have a consummate attrac¬ tion, that rapprochment between the two countries has become treacherously difficult. Jingoism must have its enemies, and the day may not be far when in India, as in America, the yellow ribbons will fly from tree-tops and poles not merely to pray for the safe return of the boys back home, but to celebrate the complete decimation of the other. Already the colonial past has been subjected to some fervently nationalistic readings, as the wholly unsympathetic (but altogether minor) figure of the British general in 1942, A Love Story, so amply demonstrates. If he is the ‘Other’ there, he is still a figure belonging to the past and thus of little consequence, though that does not obviate the more pressing query as to whether he might not already be an iconic figure for an Otherness that henceforth will not be so distant. As the idea of India as a nation-state takes precedence, the idea of India as a civilization will become imperilled, and the cultural pluralism and accommodation of that civilization will most likely become, as they have already to some degree, the first victims of that nefarious development. The commercial Hindi film, a much ridiculed and maligned art form, has so far remained loyal to the imperatives of Indian civilization, and it remains to be seen whether it will become a hostage to the nation-state, and thus become a hospitable home to the idea of the ‘Other’.

NOTES 1.

2.

A number of other names could easily be added to this list, most eminently of those directors who occupy an indelible place in the history of Indian cinema, particularly Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, and—in a very different vein—Ritvvik Ghatak. Today commercial Hindi films are more likely to be divided into ‘action films’ and ‘romantic films’.

254 • Secret Politics of Our Desires 3

4.

5. 6.

7.

I use the word ‘musical’ advisedly, and in a rather colloquial way, for as a genre the American ‘musical’ has certain formal elements which are lacking in its Indian counterpart. The tale of two brothers at odds with each other found its classic statement in Deewar, discussed elsewhere in this chapter. Ashis Nandy has discussed doubles, and implicitly ‘family resemblances’, in popular Hindi films. See his ‘An Intelligent Critic’s Guide to Indian Cinema’, in the The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Earlier version in Deep Focus in 3 parts: December 1987, 1(1), pp. 68-72; June 1988, 1(2), pp. 53-60; and November 1988, 1(3), pp. 58-61. Two immensely popular films with this motif are Bobby and Maine Pyar Kiya. The obvious reference is to the classic study of Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (2nd rev. ed., 1968; reprint ed., Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1975). I do not, in invoking Propp, mean to convey my endorsement of the structuralist view, and indeed, in the following pages, I shall be taking exception to the most structuralist work in the anthropology of India, Homo Hierarchicus (see below, sec. ii). It is quite possible that mental illness is vastly under-reported or otherwise unaccounted for in Indian society. Even allowing for that, it nonetheless seems quite probable that the incidence of mental illness in India is not as high as it is in the West. The breakdown of the family, the loss of community, the atomistic life of the individual, and the stresses of modern, urban living have all been mentioned as likely reasons for both the high incidence of mental illnesses, and the greater number of visits to the psychiatrist, in countries such as the United States. It has also been argued that in India a stigma is attached to psychiatric treatment. While I cannot join the debate on these issues here, there seems to be a particularly noteworthy aspect to the figure of the doctor in Hindi film which has not yet been paid much attention. Despite the emergence of the medical profession, and the esteem in which the doctor is held by the lettered and the unlettered alike, every Indian remains his or her own doctor. For instance, though no study has been made of how many Indians practice homeopathy at home, often dispensing medicine to family and friends, the number is undoubtedly very large. The doctor can be a freindly figure, an adjunct to the family, and despite the fact that medical training today entails a great deal of specialization, the doctor in the Hindi film is never a remote figure, a picture of detached ‘expertise’. Unlike in the West, where expertise compels extraordinary respect, the Indian is almost never awed by expertise . The neighbourhood doctor is viewed in much the same way as the family tailor, or the milkman. But to the figure of the psychiatrist there must invariably be attached the notion of ‘expertise’, and the expertise is at an extremity that renders the psychiatrist into an unattractive figure. The tension between the doctor and the psychiatrist is the dialectic between the ‘soft’ and the ‘hard’, the folk

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 255

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

and the classical, which is mirrored through the narratives of the Hindi film itself. It is not insignificant, of course, that the ‘Hindustani mukka’ is aimed at the terrorist seeking to destroy India by a Sikh student, given the history of Sikh separatism. The Sikh, to prove his loyalty to the nation, must make amends and give the lie to his supposed infidelity; moreover, by transforming the Other into the terrorist, where a few years ago every Sikh was liable to be so named, the Other is not merely not confronted, but a false impression is sought to be created that the ‘Punjab problem’, as it used to be called, stands resolved. K. Chandrasekhar, ‘The Amitabh Persona: An Interpretation’, Deep Focus, November 1988, 1(3), p. 57. M. C. Byrski, ‘Bombay Philum—The Kaliyugi Avatara of Sanskrit Drama’, Pushpanjali 4 (November 1980), pp. 111-18. Ibid. pp. 117-18. Ashis Nandy, ‘Cultural Frames for Social Transformation: A Credo’, Alternatives, January 1987, 12(1), p. 118. For a detailed representation and critique of the Indological view, see Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990). The ethnographic record, by which I mean travelogues, official compilations of Indian castes and tribes, histories by scholaradministrator types, and the entire array of colonial record-keeping, tells the story of the Orientalist construction of India in massive and intricate detail. On the question of the effeminacy of the Hindu, the locus classicus is Robert Orme, ‘Effeminacy of the Inhabitants of Indostan’, in Historical Gragmens of the Mogul Empire, of the Mor at toes, and of the English Concerns in Indostan from the Year MDCLIX (London: W. Wingrave, 1785; reprinted, New Delhi: Associated Publishing House, 1974); likewise, on Oriental Despotism, see Alexander Dow, ‘A Dissertation on the Origin and Nature of Despotism in Hindostan:’, in The History of Hindostan, 3 vols. (London: S. Beckert & P. A. de Hondt, 1770; reprinted, Delhi: Today & Tomorrow’s Printers & Publishers, 1973), vol, 3. Many of the tropes found in writings on India are common to writings on other colonized societies as well; on the ‘lazy native’, for example, a compelling analysis is provided by Syed Hussein Alatas, The Myth of the Lazy Native (London: Frank Cass, 1975). Though his material is drawn from Malaysia under British rule, it could just as easily have come from British India. For a more detailed discussion of what I have elsewhere characterized as the ‘epistemological imperatives of the colonial state in British India’, the reader is referred to my unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, ‘Committees of inquiry and discourses of “law and order” in twentieth-century British India’ (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992), Vol 1, Chapter 1. The Economist (London), 27 February 1909, quoted in Bipan Chandra, Communalism in Modern India (Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1984), p. 26. Sir Henry Sumner Maine, Village Communities in the East and West, new ed. (London: John Murray, 1890), p. 57.

5 • Secret Politics of Our Desires Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati, rev. English edition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 43-4, 66. Dumont, ‘World Renunciation in Indian Religions’, Appendix B to Homo Hierarchicus, p. 269. This appendix originally appeared in Contributions to Indian Sociology A (1960), pp. 33-62. Thousands of instances of the ‘comic element’ in the fight could be furnished, and the reader who has some familiarity with the Hindi film will instantly recognize this narrative element, which appears in the most recent productions as well. In Krantikshetra of 1994, a terrorist takes over a private college. In the long-drawn-out fight that takes place at the very end, one episode involves two college boys spreading fevicol, a glue-like substance used to join together pieces of wood on the floor, with the consequence that one of the goons gets stuck to the ground, and is thus rendered a laughing stock rather than the dreaded terrorist’s henchman he is. The most notable example of this is Balu in Khalnayak, which is discussed in Section IV below. The character of the father, Anand Babu, suggests that the Hindi film, in a manner of speaking, does conceive of the possibility of the outsider, but only in its minor characters. Anand Babu becomes a vagrant, leading his life in trains, travelling aimlessly from one town to another, all this being suggested through one or two brief episodes. But in at least two respects he is not the outsider he seems to be. His fate remains unknown to his family; but his wife, in any case, lives on the assumption that he is very much alive: he has not become an outsider to her. She understands that if he ‘betrayed’ the workers, he did so only to save her life and that of their children, and no man can be said to have done evil if the action is performed under compulsion. He may have been disowned by the world, and even by one of his sons, but not by her. More compelling still is another episode. In a scene towards the end of the film, Ravi, Vijay s brother, who is now a policeman., is informed tnat a dead body has been found on a train, and it is suggested that the body be disposed of as ‘unclaimed’. A search through the dead man’s belongings reveals a photograph, and it transpires that he is none other than Anand Babu. As Ravi says, ‘Let no-one say that this corpse is unclaimed. I will claim it’. Even in death, Anand Babu cannot become an outsider. Chandrasekhar, ‘The Amitabh Persona’, pp. 54-5, Cf. Madhava Prasad, ‘Escape from Childhood: The Development of Hero in Popular Cinema’, Deep Focus, December 1987, 1(1), pp. 29-32. I am taking the least complicated view of this matter, for the reappearance of the father-figure is not critical to my own argument. But I should note here that Iftikhar, who places Vijay in charge of his business fortunes, making him the virtual inheritor of his vast business empire, is not the only father-figure, for in Ravi, the upholder of the social order, the custodian of law, and the protector of the family and

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34.

35.

•

257

its honour, the father is reborn. It is thus in two respects that the restoration of the family is rendered impossible: Iftikhar is eliminated, and Vijay and Ravi separate. See Sudhir Kakar, The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of Childhood and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978). Chandrasekhar, ‘The Amitabh Persona’, pp. 56-7. Vijay stops short of revealing this to his mother. ‘Abi pata chal jaiga ki tumara bap tumse kitni mohabbat karta hai.’ The reference to Balu as Ravana may appear to render him into the ‘Other’, but that would be on an exceedingly naive and uninformed reading of the Ramayana. Ravana is not unambiguously the villain, and as in many Indian tales of powerful kings who do evil, he displays such extraordinary qualities—for example, tapasya and devotion to Sita—as to leave the Gods impressed; moreover, there are many traditions of the Ramayana, and in some Ravana emerges as the hero. I have pursued my unconventional reading of Rama and Ravana in ‘A Few Heresies about the Ramayana’ (unpublished paper, 1987). When confronted by a man who reveals that his mother is alive, Balu’s response is, ‘I make any old woman my mother. I’m an orphan.’ ‘Saransh yah hai ki aaj ki Sita Ravana ke pas rahi or Ram ko badnamkiya.’ Ramchandra Gandhi, Sita :'s Kitchen: A Testimony of Faith and Inquiry (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1992), pp. 21, 51; see also Vinay Lai, ‘Advaita’s Waterloo’, review article on Sitas Kitchen, in Social Scientist, May-June 1993, 21(5-6), pp. 82-9; see pp. 87-8. Once the story of Sita’s banishment had become enshrined by patriarchs as the decisive interpretation, other readings of the story were rendered difficult. The late Professor A.K. Ramanujan, one of my teachers at the University of Chicago, once mentioned that in a certain version of the Ramayana, Sita is described as telling Ram, ‘In all other versions of the story I am banished, so how can it be otherwise in this version?’ See Paula Richman, ed., Many Ramayanas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). The ‘good Muslim’ is a difficult figure in the Hindi film, for his very goodness can be construed as a sign of Otherness, as a sign of the emptying out of his humanity. By way of analogy, one can think of the construction of woman as goddess, mother, and whore. But this will require an extended argument, which I cannot take up here. I have written on this elsewhere; see my ‘The Security Fantasies of the Indian Nation-State: Black Cat Commandoes, Gunmen, and Other Terrors’, forthcoming in a volume on ‘Security and Survival' being edited by Shiv Viswanathan. ‘It happens, everything goes, that’s the world.’ What is rather interesting is that Roshi is being shaved when this macabre scene of killing takes place. In the Hindi film, the boss who plays for high stakes, such as Roshi Mahanta, often appears at his worst while he is being shaved. In the film Gardish, to which I have referred before, the local workingclass leader (a figure comparable to Anand Babu in Deewar) is

258 • Secret Politics of Our Desires summoned before Bila Jilani, the fearsome goonda before whom the police tremble, and is summarily given orders to desist from standing for office. These orders are issued while Jilla is being shaved; and while Jilla will be shown in more frightening scenes, as when he burns this man alive, the scene where he is being shaved is chilling precisely because it is an omen of things to come, and the audience recognizes it as such. The iconic image of the goonda being shaved while he causes others to tremble (or worse) may owe something to the genre of the Western, although that should not preclude us from pursuing the barely concealed association between killing and cleansing.

FILMOGRAPHY: Yaadon Ki Baarat (‘Procession of Memories’, 1973) Producer and Director: Nasir Hussain Music: R. D. Burman Cast: Dharmendra, Zeenat Aman, Vijay Arora, Tariq, Ajit Dee war (‘The Wall’, 1975) Producer: Gulshan Rai Director: Yash Chopra Music: R. D. Burman Cast: Amitabh Bachchan, Sashi Kapoor, Nirupa Roy, Parveen Babi, Neetu Singh, Iftikhar Shakti (‘Strength’, 1982) Producer: Mushir Riyaz Director: Ramesh Sippy Music: R. D. Burman Script: Salim Javed Cast: Dilip Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan, Rakhee, Smita Patil, Amrish Puri, Kulbhushan Kharbanda Hukumat (‘Rule’, 1987) Producer: K. C. Sharma Director: Anil Sharma Music: Laxmikant Pyarelal Cast: Sadashiv Amrapurkar, Dharmendra, Rati Agnihotri

The impossibility of the outsider in the modern Hindi film • 259 Tezaab (‘Acid’ 1988) Producer: N. Chandra Director: N. Chandra Music: Laxmikant Pyarelal Cast: Anil Kapoor, Madhuri Dixit, Anupam Kher Gardish (‘Days of Dust’, 1993) Producer: R. Mohan Director: Priyadarshan Story: A. K. Lohitadas Lyrics: Javed Akhtar Dialogues: Suraj Sanim Music: R. D. Burman Cast: Jackie Shroff, Amrish Puri,

Asrani

Khalnayak (The Villain’, 1993) Producer and Director: Subhash Ghai Story: Subhash Ghai Dialogues: Saroj Khanna Music: Laxmikant Pyarelal Cast: Sanjay Dutt, Rakhee, Jackie Shroff, Madhuri Dixit, Paresh Rawal Krantikshetra (‘Field of Revolution’, 1994) Music: Nadeem-Shravan Lyrics: Sameer and Surendra Saathi

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