Vignettes of Violence
There are some tales of violence that seem highly atypical, unrepresentative, and even bizarre, and are often forgotten as entertaining snippets. But at times they contain more than a grain of truth, reflecting reality at angles rarely seen. Here are some samples from the Naxal movement of Bihar:
I
Theatre of Violence
Those acquainted with Indian politics must be aware of the Naxalite movement – the movement of the landless peasantry and autochthonous tribes that stretches all the way from Bengal to the state of Andhra Pradesh. Divided into many factions, the Naxal groups freely use violent methods to deal with local landlords as well as the different arms of the government. In fact they run what have come to be known as parallel governments in large swathes of northern and peninsular India, ensuring some justice and fairness for those whom the Indian state has persistently overlooked. The irony is depending on your fancy you call them marginal or mainstream depending on your take on overall Indian reality.
Rashtriya Sahara [Patna, 21 November], a Hindi daily reports that eighteen members of a Naxal group were recently apprehended in Nalanda, Bihar while performing the play ‘Sultana Daku [bandit]’. Sultana, a bandit often deified by insurgents has been a legend in the rural north as a sort of Robinhood figure. The report goes on to mention that being based on the life of a bandit, the play naturally called for liberal use of firearms as props. The dialogues and action also both required much violent rhetoric and bravado, altogether a rich spectacle, drawing a sizeable audience for the performers. Life as usual so far!
But the local police got wise to the theatrical pretense when informed that the entire cast of the performers [18 in number] was made of Naxal activists. On top of it, it was found that the actors were flaunting not toy but real guns, and doing so with a gusto that bordered on foolhardy exhibitionism. It was soon discovered however that the crew was not foolhardy after all – they wanted to terrorize the local populace with a show of arms but without being overt about it. A good Naxal, one must understand, is supposed to solicit popular support and it does not behoove him to shove guns in the face of likely constituents. But if you can let them know in the gentlest possible way, nothing like it!
Whatever the argument, when the police ambushed the show, they were surprised to find no resistance and the entire crew was handcuffed without a single shot being fired. The explanation came later – it seems the eighteen armed Naxals mistook the police to be fellow actors. Apparently, folk plays traditionally have highly flexible scripts and improvisations are freely made on the spot to suit the audience’s moods! And a folk artist worth his salt is expected to flow along with the improvisations rather than resist them.
According to the police official interviewed such shows had of late become common in the region – the entire purpose of these events was to ‘terrorize the public’ through entertainment. Well, to make a hairsplitting distinction, to terrorize the enemy, and to impress the supporters! A bit like the Indian state flaunting its weapons as part of the Republic day parades in Delhi? One wonders.
II
I have often wondered how secret[ive] organizations of any kind, whether Al Qaeda, MI 15, or our own home-grown Naxal groups conducted their recruitment – whether the recruiter approached the likely candidate, or the candidate found his way to a recruiter. Both the approaches seemed fraught with the most poignant danger – a bit like the anthropological first encounter between tribes.
Sanjeev K Jha, a correspondent with the Times of India however found himself a witness to an elaborate recruitment ceremony of the Naxals in the Munger region of Bihar. According to him he saw posters and wall writings advertising ‘wanted young men and women to spill blood in the fight for justice’ all over the Haveli-Kharagpur area of Munger [The Times of India, May 19, 2007, Patna-Ranchi edition]. The candidates were lured with ‘a stipend of Rs 3000 per month, free arms and ammunition and training in guerilla warfare’, in the words of the journalist.
The journalist was led by local villagers to the nearby Dharhara Hills, where he met candidates as they descended from the hill top after their interviews got over. According to the candidates, questions were asked on all aspects of life, including their villages, education, likes and dislikes, and even hobbies. The journalist found himself talking among others to a young woman who was sexually assaulted by her in laws after her husband died in a road accident, and a young man whose father was killed by the landlords and falsely implicated in cases that put him in the prison for two years. This was clearly a job for the traumatized and the tormented with their own personal scores to settle. They seemed to have all the makings of loyal members of the club rather than paid operatives – the two broad types of recruits with a gray area in between.
When the journalists attempted to climb the hill, he was stopped by gun-toting guards who told him enough is enough. The local police clearly in the denial mode shook their heads in disbelief and claimed that this is not how Maoists [Naxals] recruited their cadre.
Clearly, an operation or activity becomes covert by definition if you refuse to see it, register it, or deny its significance. Also, even as the common folk are fully aware of the goings on around them, it takes experts special ‘intelligence’ to laboriously glean and infer their findings – in Kashmir, in Iraq, and also Munger!
Monday, November 26, 2007
Friday, November 9, 2007
SULKING RELIGIOUSLY
Ratnakar Tripathy
Rarely does a faith allow its adherents to indulge in doubt or openly voice their skepticism. On rare occasions the church may allow the faithful to withdraw from society and battle their demons in the solitude of the monastic crypt. But the Bhakti tradition in Hinduism allows a Hindu to go on a sulk against a God. This sulk could be a passing whim against a deity who did not help a student pass an exam. But it could take the shape of a major episode bordering on sacrilege. According to a recent report in The Indian express [ May 5, 2006, Pune edition, Page 5] the inhabitants of Gethasalu in Tamilnadu decided to shut down the temple of Jadiasamy when the well-known bandit Veerappan carried out a massacre in their village on October 8 1993. When Veerappan was killed on October 18 in 2004, the temple was reopened and god Jadiasamy again restored to his former status. This was indeed a big sulk lasting more than a decade. We do not know if the village deity Jadiasamy has been large-hearted enough to forgive the villagers, but the villagers have definitely condoned their god as if nothing had ever happened. There is of course no way to find out if this misdemeanor still rankles in the heart of the god and it should be taken that everyone has started afresh on a clean slate with no karma accumulated.
To sustain blind faith in the shapeless and formless almighty is a tough task emotionally. There is a constant fear of internal wavering and then there is the challenge of convincing others of being rock steady in one’s belief. The only consolation is the din of those innumerable rituals and ceremonial prayers that suppress the doubts murmuring in the heads and the hearts of the believer. And thus the long gaps in faith remain undetected and thankfully unpunished.
Whether religious or non-religious, sulking is a very intimate act. First of all one only sulks in order to cause either hurt or irritation in the victim. For example you don’t sulk against a green grocer who has shortchanged you. Instead you either argue or just blow up. Sulking is often directed towards someone superior such as parents. I heard the unforgettable example of a private secretary to a top manager going into a sulk when he did not notice a smart haircut. Sulking scenes are a constant feature in Hindi films. You see religious sulk when a character rings a dangling bell outside the temple and goes straight to the god delivering a long monologue in a plaintively angry mood. The marble face of the good may seem impassive to you, but the hero or his mother as the case may be have had their say. These sulkers leave only when they see a chastened look on the face of the idol. Filmy heroines tighten their nooses on the hero through their sulking when they say – ‘I am not talking to you’. Often the hero has to sing a song in all kinds of deserts and mountains before the heroin rewards him with a smile.
The most intense emotion in a large household is neither hate nor love but the sulking. It seems to radiate in invisible waves traveling through neuronal circuitries and spilling out of brains till the entire house fills up with a strange choking haze. Husbands, mother in laws, brother in laws refuse to meet each other’s eyes. When asked if something’s the matter they tend to mumble monosyllables alleging that ‘nothing’s the mater except your imagination is working over time.’ In brief denial of sulking is its greatest strength.
But sulking can be a double-edged weapon. In a religious context it comes very close to sacrilege as in the case of the victims of Veerappan. By way of fathoming the sentiments of those villagers, did they intend to declare their god impotent or did they doubt the very bona fides of the deity? Did the villagers feel cheated by a god who did not come to their aid when in need, or was the god blamed for sitting impassively in his abode when his men were being butchered? This is an emotional quicksand that is difficult to fathom. We don’t quite know if it’s this way or that. Most likely it’s just a messy combination of all these sentiments.
It would then seem that sulking can reveal depths of faith rarely seen in the fickle minds of human beings. A devotee goes into a sulk only when he can feel god in his guts, in all its realness. But it also reveals the sacrilegious temptations of a believer whose expectations must be met by a god if he continues to care for his followers. Interestingly, when the residents of Gethasalu stopped worshipping their deity, they did not altogether banish him or shut his shop, nor did they declare theologically that his existence is herewith discontinued. They just decided to teach him a hard lesson when he seemed to deserve it, the same way they decided to embrace him all over again after a decade when Veerappan was eliminated by the STF.
Ratnakar Tripathy
Rarely does a faith allow its adherents to indulge in doubt or openly voice their skepticism. On rare occasions the church may allow the faithful to withdraw from society and battle their demons in the solitude of the monastic crypt. But the Bhakti tradition in Hinduism allows a Hindu to go on a sulk against a God. This sulk could be a passing whim against a deity who did not help a student pass an exam. But it could take the shape of a major episode bordering on sacrilege. According to a recent report in The Indian express [ May 5, 2006, Pune edition, Page 5] the inhabitants of Gethasalu in Tamilnadu decided to shut down the temple of Jadiasamy when the well-known bandit Veerappan carried out a massacre in their village on October 8 1993. When Veerappan was killed on October 18 in 2004, the temple was reopened and god Jadiasamy again restored to his former status. This was indeed a big sulk lasting more than a decade. We do not know if the village deity Jadiasamy has been large-hearted enough to forgive the villagers, but the villagers have definitely condoned their god as if nothing had ever happened. There is of course no way to find out if this misdemeanor still rankles in the heart of the god and it should be taken that everyone has started afresh on a clean slate with no karma accumulated.
To sustain blind faith in the shapeless and formless almighty is a tough task emotionally. There is a constant fear of internal wavering and then there is the challenge of convincing others of being rock steady in one’s belief. The only consolation is the din of those innumerable rituals and ceremonial prayers that suppress the doubts murmuring in the heads and the hearts of the believer. And thus the long gaps in faith remain undetected and thankfully unpunished.
Whether religious or non-religious, sulking is a very intimate act. First of all one only sulks in order to cause either hurt or irritation in the victim. For example you don’t sulk against a green grocer who has shortchanged you. Instead you either argue or just blow up. Sulking is often directed towards someone superior such as parents. I heard the unforgettable example of a private secretary to a top manager going into a sulk when he did not notice a smart haircut. Sulking scenes are a constant feature in Hindi films. You see religious sulk when a character rings a dangling bell outside the temple and goes straight to the god delivering a long monologue in a plaintively angry mood. The marble face of the good may seem impassive to you, but the hero or his mother as the case may be have had their say. These sulkers leave only when they see a chastened look on the face of the idol. Filmy heroines tighten their nooses on the hero through their sulking when they say – ‘I am not talking to you’. Often the hero has to sing a song in all kinds of deserts and mountains before the heroin rewards him with a smile.
The most intense emotion in a large household is neither hate nor love but the sulking. It seems to radiate in invisible waves traveling through neuronal circuitries and spilling out of brains till the entire house fills up with a strange choking haze. Husbands, mother in laws, brother in laws refuse to meet each other’s eyes. When asked if something’s the matter they tend to mumble monosyllables alleging that ‘nothing’s the mater except your imagination is working over time.’ In brief denial of sulking is its greatest strength.
But sulking can be a double-edged weapon. In a religious context it comes very close to sacrilege as in the case of the victims of Veerappan. By way of fathoming the sentiments of those villagers, did they intend to declare their god impotent or did they doubt the very bona fides of the deity? Did the villagers feel cheated by a god who did not come to their aid when in need, or was the god blamed for sitting impassively in his abode when his men were being butchered? This is an emotional quicksand that is difficult to fathom. We don’t quite know if it’s this way or that. Most likely it’s just a messy combination of all these sentiments.
It would then seem that sulking can reveal depths of faith rarely seen in the fickle minds of human beings. A devotee goes into a sulk only when he can feel god in his guts, in all its realness. But it also reveals the sacrilegious temptations of a believer whose expectations must be met by a god if he continues to care for his followers. Interestingly, when the residents of Gethasalu stopped worshipping their deity, they did not altogether banish him or shut his shop, nor did they declare theologically that his existence is herewith discontinued. They just decided to teach him a hard lesson when he seemed to deserve it, the same way they decided to embrace him all over again after a decade when Veerappan was eliminated by the STF.
Bhojpuri Cinema:
Looking closely at a private moment
Ratnakar Tripathy
Having made a number of broader points in the earlier post on Bhojpuri cinema, I will take a break from a likely avalanche of generalizations. However, I will revisit the theoretical issues in another post if only to modify or fine-tune them. Now let us get down to some specifics for the time being!
To begin with – why study cinema? For many of us, the answer is justifiably obvious. It makes for such a huge chunk of our lives in terms of overall influence if not the time spent. Furthermore, studying cinema can yield significant social insights – some of them confirm what empirical sociology says, and some of them modify insights gained therefrom. There is another variety of insights too which either throw light on relatively unseen areas of life or play a counter-intuitive role vis a vis lay experience or professional surveys. This is not to make a ‘superstrong’ claim that insights gained through cinema are unobtainable from workaday experience. I only claim that such insights can seem sharper and are more ‘conveniently’ derived from elements such as cinema, TV, and music!
I must admit that I find cinema studies at its boring worst when it plays a confirmatory role in telling us what we already know. Apart from the boredom, I also object to the theoretical extremes such analyses are prone to. They often take naïve reflectionism [cinema reflects society etc.] for granted. This path also seems nettled with philosophical difficulties of a wide variety. The most bothersome and obvious among them perhaps is the pragmatic question I have had to face – if cinema tells us only what society and history overtly tell us anyway, why waste our time. Intellectual excitement after all often lies in being modified or contradicted rather than in tame confirmations.
Having said that, let me underline and illustrate what I mean by insights, and also why I consider the study of entertainment to be especially rewarding. In order to do that I need to discuss a Bhojpuri film ‘Kanyadan’[2006] in some detail. My purpose here is after all to ‘specifize’ rather than generalize.
The film opens stormily with the offering [dan] of a newborn girl to the river Ganga as you blink and wonder if this is some secret exotic ritual that your own culture managed to keep from you. Soon, as the tiny body plops in the water you can’t miss the devastating irony. You then enter the outwardly sedate lives of a middle-aged couple just as their nth daughter is being born. With a lump in the throat, you soon realize that the husband has been throwing all his daughters away while the poor mother thought she gave birth to a series of stillborns. Perhaps after prolonged denial the dying mother turns wise if only too late, accusing her husband of being a ‘rakshasa’[demon].
Normally the husband would respond with the usual blame – ‘you are as good as sterile if you can’t bear a son’, but we already know that and thus no great need to discuss the film further. However, the conversation takes a very unusual turn. The husband, made apologetic perhaps by a dying wife tries to defend his deeds and you are suddenly privy to an intimate and vital secret. This is what he says:
‘I am not a demon. If I do not want a daughter, it is because of a trauma. Long ago when I was younger, I saw my brother in law come to my father and hurled my sister at his feet like a rag doll. His reason for it – my father did not side with him in local politics. My father even removed his pagree and placed it at my brother in law’s feet, but he won’t relent. It made me believe forever that with a girl in the family anyone can trample on my honour at will.’
The above lines make a potent mix of an emotional confession and a moral argument. The most interesting thing however is they are spoken in utter privacy. It is not often you are allowed to walk into the bedroom [birth-rooms, which are highly exclusive spaces] of a village Thakur and then walk further down the narrow lane of private emotions with him. Once having overheard these lines of course we are free to interpret them. [in the story the saved girl child grows up to justify her existence somewhat in the King Lear mode]. So let us.
First, it would seem that the very idea of a girl child makes the Thakur feel insecure to the core. And that our Thakur will go to any length, even murder to cure himself of such insecurity. This raises a number of questions – why doesn’t the prospect of a son make the Thakur insecure? Have we already reached the rock bottom of patriarchal prejudices? May be. May be not.
We can now claw away the veil from the face of a ‘trauma’ and look at it for it really is. Thakur’s ‘spiel’ would have been convincing if along the way he also admitted that while his father lost his pagree, the real and primary loss was his sister’s who was dragged in public and deposited at her father’s feet. In fact, our Thakur seems to have borrowed his trauma from his sister and declared it his own. It is after all his claim to trauma that makes him human rather than a rakshasa.
Before you shed another drop of tear for the man, be warned that you deal with a brother who has expropriated his sister’s suffering to retain his wife’s [and the audience’s] sympathy. In the process, he has reduced his sister to an instrument of humiliation. He actually seems to be in partnership with a villain who chooses to hit where it hurts most - dragging his wife to her father, using her as a weapon. Among the assembly of men, the woman then becomes both a festering wound [of the supposed victim] and the weapon [of the perpetrator] that caused it. One more way for a living throbbing human life to reach the levels of opaque symbolhood!
The irony is – the living throbbing woman never gets a chance to tell her story. Of course, the film does the next best thing by saving the Thakur’s last daughter and letting us watch her grow into a heroic figure proving her worthiness in the King Lear fashion. The greater irony however is – we actually do not even know how the father of the humiliated woman felt, or the mother, or anyone else for that matter. Wait! Would our Thakur now seem to have a near monopoly over female suffering. How very heroic!
Actually, how very banal! He is probably just another male with grand visions of persecution. The only difference is unlike men who will never get to confide their secret sufferings, this one is able to address a cinema hall filled with audience [lucky for social researchers like us!]. Others will simply carry on with their version of Kanyadan by the river, or opt for amniocentesis before taking due action.
The above interpretation is by no means complete if ever there was such a thing. But it does allow us to get a preview of all the stories that get unearthed in the premises of private clinics all over India – little pieces of baby bones that horrify, puzzle and sadden us leaving us with the question ‘why’, after all the condemning is done.
Is this the end of my interpretive efforts? For the time being, yes. I have this fear of developing the ‘special’ eyes of an expert who sees the macrocosm within the macrocosm, who may begin to see the whole world in ‘Kanyadan’, and even get progressively convinced that those who haven’t seen the film miss Reality altogether. I have just parodied what I like to call hermeneutic delusion, a neurosis of both faith and ratiocination. Another version of the same may be – ‘Kanyadan is whispering to me certain secrets that I am able to share only with great effort.’ Of course, others may believe that the interpreter is just spewing what is fairly well known or obvious even if it’s made to seem rather unknowable.
However, I have an immense hermeneutic appetite. I do need to carry on a life of interpretation. The solution may be - I should continue to watch other films and other media and see if there are linkages that allow me to interpret further. I could also stop and listen to others interpret Kanyadan. Going round and round within ‘Kanyadan’ can get tiresome! I thus decide to renounce my hermeneutic greed and declare myself full for the time being.
PS: since this piece has turned out fairly lengthy I will post my discussion piece on the issues of esthetic ‘taste’ and ‘moral goodness’ some time next week. For those who will not forgive a teller of incomplete tales, the male character [Thakur] in Kanyadan grows old to admit his mistakes and makes piece with his devoted daughter and perhaps the rest of womanhood as the film ends.
Looking closely at a private moment
Ratnakar Tripathy
Having made a number of broader points in the earlier post on Bhojpuri cinema, I will take a break from a likely avalanche of generalizations. However, I will revisit the theoretical issues in another post if only to modify or fine-tune them. Now let us get down to some specifics for the time being!
To begin with – why study cinema? For many of us, the answer is justifiably obvious. It makes for such a huge chunk of our lives in terms of overall influence if not the time spent. Furthermore, studying cinema can yield significant social insights – some of them confirm what empirical sociology says, and some of them modify insights gained therefrom. There is another variety of insights too which either throw light on relatively unseen areas of life or play a counter-intuitive role vis a vis lay experience or professional surveys. This is not to make a ‘superstrong’ claim that insights gained through cinema are unobtainable from workaday experience. I only claim that such insights can seem sharper and are more ‘conveniently’ derived from elements such as cinema, TV, and music!
I must admit that I find cinema studies at its boring worst when it plays a confirmatory role in telling us what we already know. Apart from the boredom, I also object to the theoretical extremes such analyses are prone to. They often take naïve reflectionism [cinema reflects society etc.] for granted. This path also seems nettled with philosophical difficulties of a wide variety. The most bothersome and obvious among them perhaps is the pragmatic question I have had to face – if cinema tells us only what society and history overtly tell us anyway, why waste our time. Intellectual excitement after all often lies in being modified or contradicted rather than in tame confirmations.
Having said that, let me underline and illustrate what I mean by insights, and also why I consider the study of entertainment to be especially rewarding. In order to do that I need to discuss a Bhojpuri film ‘Kanyadan’[2006] in some detail. My purpose here is after all to ‘specifize’ rather than generalize.
The film opens stormily with the offering [dan] of a newborn girl to the river Ganga as you blink and wonder if this is some secret exotic ritual that your own culture managed to keep from you. Soon, as the tiny body plops in the water you can’t miss the devastating irony. You then enter the outwardly sedate lives of a middle-aged couple just as their nth daughter is being born. With a lump in the throat, you soon realize that the husband has been throwing all his daughters away while the poor mother thought she gave birth to a series of stillborns. Perhaps after prolonged denial the dying mother turns wise if only too late, accusing her husband of being a ‘rakshasa’[demon].
Normally the husband would respond with the usual blame – ‘you are as good as sterile if you can’t bear a son’, but we already know that and thus no great need to discuss the film further. However, the conversation takes a very unusual turn. The husband, made apologetic perhaps by a dying wife tries to defend his deeds and you are suddenly privy to an intimate and vital secret. This is what he says:
‘I am not a demon. If I do not want a daughter, it is because of a trauma. Long ago when I was younger, I saw my brother in law come to my father and hurled my sister at his feet like a rag doll. His reason for it – my father did not side with him in local politics. My father even removed his pagree and placed it at my brother in law’s feet, but he won’t relent. It made me believe forever that with a girl in the family anyone can trample on my honour at will.’
The above lines make a potent mix of an emotional confession and a moral argument. The most interesting thing however is they are spoken in utter privacy. It is not often you are allowed to walk into the bedroom [birth-rooms, which are highly exclusive spaces] of a village Thakur and then walk further down the narrow lane of private emotions with him. Once having overheard these lines of course we are free to interpret them. [in the story the saved girl child grows up to justify her existence somewhat in the King Lear mode]. So let us.
First, it would seem that the very idea of a girl child makes the Thakur feel insecure to the core. And that our Thakur will go to any length, even murder to cure himself of such insecurity. This raises a number of questions – why doesn’t the prospect of a son make the Thakur insecure? Have we already reached the rock bottom of patriarchal prejudices? May be. May be not.
We can now claw away the veil from the face of a ‘trauma’ and look at it for it really is. Thakur’s ‘spiel’ would have been convincing if along the way he also admitted that while his father lost his pagree, the real and primary loss was his sister’s who was dragged in public and deposited at her father’s feet. In fact, our Thakur seems to have borrowed his trauma from his sister and declared it his own. It is after all his claim to trauma that makes him human rather than a rakshasa.
Before you shed another drop of tear for the man, be warned that you deal with a brother who has expropriated his sister’s suffering to retain his wife’s [and the audience’s] sympathy. In the process, he has reduced his sister to an instrument of humiliation. He actually seems to be in partnership with a villain who chooses to hit where it hurts most - dragging his wife to her father, using her as a weapon. Among the assembly of men, the woman then becomes both a festering wound [of the supposed victim] and the weapon [of the perpetrator] that caused it. One more way for a living throbbing human life to reach the levels of opaque symbolhood!
The irony is – the living throbbing woman never gets a chance to tell her story. Of course, the film does the next best thing by saving the Thakur’s last daughter and letting us watch her grow into a heroic figure proving her worthiness in the King Lear fashion. The greater irony however is – we actually do not even know how the father of the humiliated woman felt, or the mother, or anyone else for that matter. Wait! Would our Thakur now seem to have a near monopoly over female suffering. How very heroic!
Actually, how very banal! He is probably just another male with grand visions of persecution. The only difference is unlike men who will never get to confide their secret sufferings, this one is able to address a cinema hall filled with audience [lucky for social researchers like us!]. Others will simply carry on with their version of Kanyadan by the river, or opt for amniocentesis before taking due action.
The above interpretation is by no means complete if ever there was such a thing. But it does allow us to get a preview of all the stories that get unearthed in the premises of private clinics all over India – little pieces of baby bones that horrify, puzzle and sadden us leaving us with the question ‘why’, after all the condemning is done.
Is this the end of my interpretive efforts? For the time being, yes. I have this fear of developing the ‘special’ eyes of an expert who sees the macrocosm within the macrocosm, who may begin to see the whole world in ‘Kanyadan’, and even get progressively convinced that those who haven’t seen the film miss Reality altogether. I have just parodied what I like to call hermeneutic delusion, a neurosis of both faith and ratiocination. Another version of the same may be – ‘Kanyadan is whispering to me certain secrets that I am able to share only with great effort.’ Of course, others may believe that the interpreter is just spewing what is fairly well known or obvious even if it’s made to seem rather unknowable.
However, I have an immense hermeneutic appetite. I do need to carry on a life of interpretation. The solution may be - I should continue to watch other films and other media and see if there are linkages that allow me to interpret further. I could also stop and listen to others interpret Kanyadan. Going round and round within ‘Kanyadan’ can get tiresome! I thus decide to renounce my hermeneutic greed and declare myself full for the time being.
PS: since this piece has turned out fairly lengthy I will post my discussion piece on the issues of esthetic ‘taste’ and ‘moral goodness’ some time next week. For those who will not forgive a teller of incomplete tales, the male character [Thakur] in Kanyadan grows old to admit his mistakes and makes piece with his devoted daughter and perhaps the rest of womanhood as the film ends.
A Dose of History by the Hospital Bed: A Dream
By Ratnakar Tripathy
14th July 14, 2006! TV news tells me that the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in Mumbai visiting the victims of the recent commuter train blasts and will spend time at their bedside in a hospital in Mumbai. After eating a modest pizza meal I dozed off over my beanbag for no more than three minutes and saw a dream that seemed to last over forty five minutes, standard length for a high school period.
Manmohan Singh approached the wounded commuter and said ‘I am sorry, my fault’!
Commuter – why are YOU sorry? I was a victim of terrorism.
MS – that’s true. But we are the ones who created the terrorists.
Commuter – that can’t be true. You are trying to kill them or at least calm them down.
MS – we are trying to kill them now. But we created them through much hard work in the last 60 years.
Commuter – last sixty years? I thought you were busy studying and teaching and then advising the government. I know your life story.
MS – you don’t get the point. I didn’t create them personally. My forbears did.
Commuter – how?
MS – Let us say our nation builders wanted to make sure that Kashmir remained with them even though they did not know if Kashmiris wanted them.
Commuter – yes, because Kashmir would have gone to Pakistan. Anyway, what did the Kashmiris want?
MS – that is where the problem started. We knew we wanted Kashmir. Pakistan knew it wanted Kashmir just as badly. But Kashmir did not know what it wanted. May be it wanted to be on its own.
Commuter – then why didn’t we let them be? Why didn’t we hold a plebiscite?
MS – because we were sure they wanted to be with us.
Commuter – in which case the plebiscite was a good idea anyway.
MS – you see our great leader Nehru was a displaced Kashmiri. And you know how displaced people feel about their motherland. I hear you are a Gujrati diamond merchant. You know how the NRI [US, Canada, UK based Indians] Gujratis feel about India?
Commuter – yes, they are more Indian than us is how they feel.
MS – then there was the little question of precedent. What if all other parts of India decide to say goodbye to the main country?
Commuter – did they?
MS – they might have.
Commuter – did they?
MS – they might have. And then we had all this poetry about the beauty of Kashmir…and it made it difficult to believe that the paradise of Kashmir, the greatest summer getaway could go to any one else.
Commuter - you mean Kashmir belongs more to the rest of India than the Kashmiris themselves.
MS – yes, remember all those Shammi Kapur songs. They bonded us inseparably to the valley.
Commuter – you must be joking!
MS – No I just underlined the sentiment that hangs like a mist over the valley.
Commuter – But if I don’t want to live with you how will live with me?
MS – if I REALLY want to live with you I will make sure you live with me.
Commuter – is this your view of nationhood or marriage?
MS – Nationhood! You see people occupying the land tend to develop proprietary feelings and can often come in the way of great ideas. Just like your dam oustees in Gujarat!
Commuter – isn’t that very human?
MS – it may be human but it’s not political. A state has to be strong.
Commuter – I thought terrorism is weakening us.
MS – that’s an illusion. You remember the story from Mahabharata when Bhima came face to face with a demon that grew bigger and bigger as he got angrier?
Commuter – yes.
MS – similarly the Indian state grows bigger after every terrorist attack. You remember we were a soft state at some point. We formed our muscles through external and internal wars. Pakistan’s hate inflates us in stature and strength.
Commuter – so the state grows stronger when there is more bloodshed and crime?
MS – isn’t that obvious? If there was no crime, the state would wither.
Commuter – I am developing respect for all those underworld guys who harass me on the phone. If you believe all this, why do you apologize?
MS – you sound like an ingrate. I apologize not because we made a mistake. But because you are unlucky! You were there.
Commuter [yells] – I thought you apologized for having created terrorists.
MS – I said it to you in private. Now you are violating the sanctity of the personal.
Commuter [becalmed] – you said you created terrorism to make the state stronger. Why do I get hit in the process?
MS – that’s collateral damage that goes with every cause good or bad.
Commuter – I understand um.um…collateral damage. But why me and not someone else?
MS – you were there.
Commuter – in which case I don’t understand collateral damage.
MS – can I move on to the next patient?
Commuter – no, you answer a few questions before you budge.
MS – like?
Commuter – you said you created terrorists, and now you are busy killing them. Why?
MS – eternal question with no answer. Let’s say God did not have to create the devil but he did. Why?
Commuter – this is an evil analogy, Mr. Singh.
MS – it’s not. Don’t forget, I wasn’t around when they were creating terrorists. But I am here when it’s time to eliminate them and ensure a safer life for you. I am the good guy, remember. I am in a hurry now.
Commuter – No, before you move on, how did your predecessors create terrorists?
MS – you really don’t know! It’s an eternal game. When people are aggrieved, you make sure to divide them. The British did it to us. Israelis did it to Palestine. Who created Hamas? We did it in Kashmir, Punjab, and Northeast. When they start killing each other you intervene with guns to protect them from each other. And then you drive them into a common battleground where you can shoot them down together. See how smart Gandhi was? He refused to get drawn into a battle and provide the British guns a target.
Commuter – so how does all this end?
MS – what end? Life must carry on.
Commuter – you mean the spirit and the resilience of Mumbai. Mumbai carries on!
MS – precisely!
Commuter – then why come all the way to see me?
MS – because I want you to understand that I am not part of the doing but the undoing.
Commuter – then why don’t you rid us of Kashmir and all the violence?
MS – we should have done it long ago. But now it’s too late.
Commuter – when it should have been done, no one did it it. And now it can’t be done! What logic is this?
MS – this is how the state thinks. And by the way, the state always adds up to more than all of us.
Commuter – the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts, I know.
MS – yes, as individuals we are dispensable. Even collectively we amount to less than the state.
Commuter – I must be sick. I am thinking of a state without citizens. Is that possible?
MS – you walk out of this hospital you are ready for a masters in political science. The state is immortal. People come and go.
Commuter – wait, I am not gone yet. Who do I blame for my plight?
MS – you can blame India and Pakistan.
Commuter – you forget that I was in a train far away from Rawalpindi and Delhi. I was hit by terrorists
MS – No, you were not hit by terrorists. you were there, that’s all. Don’t tell me you are paranoid enough to believe that all the plotters and planners across the border and in Mumbai saw you as a worthy target.
Commuter – I don’t. But I refuse to become a ‘collateral’.
MS – every citizen is a potential ‘collateral’ – the very first asset the state is willing to sacrifice. That’s an inherent risk unless you want to become a homeless gypsy.
Commuter – and go where?
MS – a typical gypsy question that occurs on starry roofless nights.
Commuter - why tell me such a long tale when you don’t even have a word of sympathy for me?
MS – because you need to know history. As an ex-teacher I know you will never read it. And about the only time you will hear of it is when you lie wounded in a hospital bed.
The commuter moaned with physical agony and teleological despair as the TV cameras flashed and woke me up.
By Ratnakar Tripathy
14th July 14, 2006! TV news tells me that the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is in Mumbai visiting the victims of the recent commuter train blasts and will spend time at their bedside in a hospital in Mumbai. After eating a modest pizza meal I dozed off over my beanbag for no more than three minutes and saw a dream that seemed to last over forty five minutes, standard length for a high school period.
Manmohan Singh approached the wounded commuter and said ‘I am sorry, my fault’!
Commuter – why are YOU sorry? I was a victim of terrorism.
MS – that’s true. But we are the ones who created the terrorists.
Commuter – that can’t be true. You are trying to kill them or at least calm them down.
MS – we are trying to kill them now. But we created them through much hard work in the last 60 years.
Commuter – last sixty years? I thought you were busy studying and teaching and then advising the government. I know your life story.
MS – you don’t get the point. I didn’t create them personally. My forbears did.
Commuter – how?
MS – Let us say our nation builders wanted to make sure that Kashmir remained with them even though they did not know if Kashmiris wanted them.
Commuter – yes, because Kashmir would have gone to Pakistan. Anyway, what did the Kashmiris want?
MS – that is where the problem started. We knew we wanted Kashmir. Pakistan knew it wanted Kashmir just as badly. But Kashmir did not know what it wanted. May be it wanted to be on its own.
Commuter – then why didn’t we let them be? Why didn’t we hold a plebiscite?
MS – because we were sure they wanted to be with us.
Commuter – in which case the plebiscite was a good idea anyway.
MS – you see our great leader Nehru was a displaced Kashmiri. And you know how displaced people feel about their motherland. I hear you are a Gujrati diamond merchant. You know how the NRI [US, Canada, UK based Indians] Gujratis feel about India?
Commuter – yes, they are more Indian than us is how they feel.
MS – then there was the little question of precedent. What if all other parts of India decide to say goodbye to the main country?
Commuter – did they?
MS – they might have.
Commuter – did they?
MS – they might have. And then we had all this poetry about the beauty of Kashmir…and it made it difficult to believe that the paradise of Kashmir, the greatest summer getaway could go to any one else.
Commuter - you mean Kashmir belongs more to the rest of India than the Kashmiris themselves.
MS – yes, remember all those Shammi Kapur songs. They bonded us inseparably to the valley.
Commuter – you must be joking!
MS – No I just underlined the sentiment that hangs like a mist over the valley.
Commuter – But if I don’t want to live with you how will live with me?
MS – if I REALLY want to live with you I will make sure you live with me.
Commuter – is this your view of nationhood or marriage?
MS – Nationhood! You see people occupying the land tend to develop proprietary feelings and can often come in the way of great ideas. Just like your dam oustees in Gujarat!
Commuter – isn’t that very human?
MS – it may be human but it’s not political. A state has to be strong.
Commuter – I thought terrorism is weakening us.
MS – that’s an illusion. You remember the story from Mahabharata when Bhima came face to face with a demon that grew bigger and bigger as he got angrier?
Commuter – yes.
MS – similarly the Indian state grows bigger after every terrorist attack. You remember we were a soft state at some point. We formed our muscles through external and internal wars. Pakistan’s hate inflates us in stature and strength.
Commuter – so the state grows stronger when there is more bloodshed and crime?
MS – isn’t that obvious? If there was no crime, the state would wither.
Commuter – I am developing respect for all those underworld guys who harass me on the phone. If you believe all this, why do you apologize?
MS – you sound like an ingrate. I apologize not because we made a mistake. But because you are unlucky! You were there.
Commuter [yells] – I thought you apologized for having created terrorists.
MS – I said it to you in private. Now you are violating the sanctity of the personal.
Commuter [becalmed] – you said you created terrorism to make the state stronger. Why do I get hit in the process?
MS – that’s collateral damage that goes with every cause good or bad.
Commuter – I understand um.um…collateral damage. But why me and not someone else?
MS – you were there.
Commuter – in which case I don’t understand collateral damage.
MS – can I move on to the next patient?
Commuter – no, you answer a few questions before you budge.
MS – like?
Commuter – you said you created terrorists, and now you are busy killing them. Why?
MS – eternal question with no answer. Let’s say God did not have to create the devil but he did. Why?
Commuter – this is an evil analogy, Mr. Singh.
MS – it’s not. Don’t forget, I wasn’t around when they were creating terrorists. But I am here when it’s time to eliminate them and ensure a safer life for you. I am the good guy, remember. I am in a hurry now.
Commuter – No, before you move on, how did your predecessors create terrorists?
MS – you really don’t know! It’s an eternal game. When people are aggrieved, you make sure to divide them. The British did it to us. Israelis did it to Palestine. Who created Hamas? We did it in Kashmir, Punjab, and Northeast. When they start killing each other you intervene with guns to protect them from each other. And then you drive them into a common battleground where you can shoot them down together. See how smart Gandhi was? He refused to get drawn into a battle and provide the British guns a target.
Commuter – so how does all this end?
MS – what end? Life must carry on.
Commuter – you mean the spirit and the resilience of Mumbai. Mumbai carries on!
MS – precisely!
Commuter – then why come all the way to see me?
MS – because I want you to understand that I am not part of the doing but the undoing.
Commuter – then why don’t you rid us of Kashmir and all the violence?
MS – we should have done it long ago. But now it’s too late.
Commuter – when it should have been done, no one did it it. And now it can’t be done! What logic is this?
MS – this is how the state thinks. And by the way, the state always adds up to more than all of us.
Commuter – the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts, I know.
MS – yes, as individuals we are dispensable. Even collectively we amount to less than the state.
Commuter – I must be sick. I am thinking of a state without citizens. Is that possible?
MS – you walk out of this hospital you are ready for a masters in political science. The state is immortal. People come and go.
Commuter – wait, I am not gone yet. Who do I blame for my plight?
MS – you can blame India and Pakistan.
Commuter – you forget that I was in a train far away from Rawalpindi and Delhi. I was hit by terrorists
MS – No, you were not hit by terrorists. you were there, that’s all. Don’t tell me you are paranoid enough to believe that all the plotters and planners across the border and in Mumbai saw you as a worthy target.
Commuter – I don’t. But I refuse to become a ‘collateral’.
MS – every citizen is a potential ‘collateral’ – the very first asset the state is willing to sacrifice. That’s an inherent risk unless you want to become a homeless gypsy.
Commuter – and go where?
MS – a typical gypsy question that occurs on starry roofless nights.
Commuter - why tell me such a long tale when you don’t even have a word of sympathy for me?
MS – because you need to know history. As an ex-teacher I know you will never read it. And about the only time you will hear of it is when you lie wounded in a hospital bed.
The commuter moaned with physical agony and teleological despair as the TV cameras flashed and woke me up.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
How the Bawdy Matters: Tradition and Now
…and How the Bawdy Weighs on the Mind
-- Ratnakar Tripathy
One would assume or expect that when the bawdy, the obscene or the risqué manage to find a place in popular culture, they would be accompanied by a sense of shame or sheepish defensiveness. One would also associate these with characters somewhat unsublime if not outright comical, villainous or roguish. But popular and high cultures offer us interesting exceptions that deserve looking into. I wish to discuss a few instances from Indian culture that bridge the popular-high culture hiatus. The first one is culled from ‘Ramlala Nahchhoo’, a text by Tulsidas who is better known as the author of Ramcharitmanas, the 16th century epic and the master text behind most of Ram worship in today’s India.
The second instance is drawn from a lay song form called gali [literally meaning abuse or swear words] that is part of the traditional repertoire of marriage songs in rural and small town Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. This form is now widely known as Ladies Sangeet [music], a telling creolized phrase, in its tame urban form. In cities like Delhi, we have semi-professional Ladies Sangeet groups of women who lend a touch of humour to the tense solemnities of marriage. A number of Hindi films use Ladies Sangeet as accompaniments for marriage visuals combining rich wedding colours with the sound of folk music to create a sense of fun.
Both the instances have an interesting feature in common – they both belong to the tradition of ceremonial galis [abuses] not to be mixed up with swearing on the streets. While the first one centres on a Hindu God, the second one concerns ordinary mortals. But they both pose the bawdy as a sign of cultural refinement. The claim here is not simply that they show a great level of tolerance or acceptance of the obscene. If anything they seem to test the refinement and the maturity of the target of humour. The test is simple – if the target reacts with anger, he is a boor. If he reacts with restraint but remains unamused nevertheless, well, nothing seriously wrong with the man but he probably lacks sangfroid. But if he is genuinely amused and seems to enjoy the innuendos, you have a man of adequate refinement in front of you. It is easier to imagine the nature of the license or the right enjoyed by the perpetrator of the humour once when face to face with the jokes. Thus more of interpretation later…
Ramlala Nahachhu unlike the great epic of Ramcharitmanas revolves around the intimate ceremony of nail-pairing. It is thus part of the cleansing and cosmetic rituals that both the bride and the groom must go through. In the devotional tradition of India, one sees the Gods go through a roller coaster of deification and humanization somewhat in the manner of Greek gods, alternating between unquestioned omnipotence and workaday vulnerabilities of ordinary humans. In this instance we meet the great God Ram in a very human avatar.
Very briefly, the comment Ram receives from the singing women in Ramlala Nahchhu goes as follows:
‘Whereas Ram is dark-complexioned, Laxman [his brother] is fair,
Is Ram Dashrath’s [father of Ram and Laxman] own son, and Laxman someone else’s!’
Tulsidas goes on to describe the occasion as a joyous one, where Ram and his companions had a whale of a time, thanks largely to the rich abuses they had to hear from the women. Our sensibility would lead us to imagine Ram and his entourage to be great stoics, who managed to pull through an ordeal with a straight face. But this is not the intent of the poet. He is quite unambiguous and elaborate in describing the fun had by everyone. Perhaps I need to translate the innuendo contained in the song into street language to make my own contention clear. The song clearly speculates if Ram’s mother had a child from an extra-marital liaison, and that Laxman and by extension perhaps even Ram was a bastard child! The import of these words cannot be missed. How do we now regard Tulsidas as the greatest proponent of Ram-worship, and Ram as the revered god of the millions in India? According to the modern sensibility of today what has happened in the song is not just a grave insult but in fact a serious act of sacrilege. The vigilante groups, the so-called defenders of tradition in today’s India have conveniently ignored several such moments in similar texts and authors often seen as objects of worship by the masses. This is the aspect of tradition that scares them to death!
The opportunity to be the butt of a barrage of abuses in weddings is available to lesser mortals as well. The gali songs are mostly sung when the groom’s party sits together for meals at the girl’s residence. Galis get hurled at the groom’s father, uncles, elders of all sorts and names are clearly spelled out. Women from the girl’s family put in some prior research into the matter. They carefully take down names of the clan members and close relatives. The abusing women especially choose the most dignified men as targets. The improvised songs very openly accuse the men of being involved in illicit liaisons in their own families and the community. Even the women involved get named. At times it all borders dangerously on incest and the groom’s party begin to make unhappy noises, refusing to continue with the meal. This rarely deters the women though. They simply change their gear. Galis are taken as integral to the wedding feasts. I wish to give at least one example to indicate the unsubtleness of these galis that come in the form of loud chanting.
‘X [name] seems so straight and proper during daytime
But is rarely found at home in the night,
In case you don’t believe us,
Ask Y [woman l], ask Z [woman II], or ask anyone in the village.’
The women target all age groups – young men as well as eighty year old men who grin away merrily at every barb received. As the meal gets over the women seem to complete what resembles a complex electrical circuitry more than a circle of human relationships – the groom’s family begins to look like a long chain of illicit bonds. Given the wild randomness of the attacks, once in a while the singing women hit upon a family secret, and a wave of embarrassment runs through the entire assembly. This hilarity comes to end abruptly with the meal of course, and the stiff formality of wedding ceremonies take over.
Of late the educated and urbanized youth have begun to play the spoilsport in the gali sessions. They often react with uncontrolled anger at the shower of abuses. The singing women have become more wary and find it difficult to let go. A strange incomprehensible moralism seems to restrain them. While the older men seem to enjoy every bit of the game, the younger lot feels offended on behalf of their elders. This creates a curious imbalance between the different generations. To be fair to the young men, the innuendos contained in the songs can often openly question their parentage, in the manner of Lord Ram. While the indulgent god Ram is said to have grinned with pleasure at the jokes, the young mortals clearly find the digs unbearable.
Looking closely at the two above examples, it is easy to see that there are two elements at work – there is a very acute sense of context, as clearly, the men involved will not be amused by abuses hurled by anyone or anywhere. The wedding feasts provide a closed context where such ribaldries are permitted. Second, it is the singing women who enjoy a certain license, or even the right to abuse, and no one else.
As pointed out earlier, Hindu gods and goddesses go through both their divine and mortal moments. Besides, given the convention of the devotional stream [Bhakti movement] in Hinduism, Tulsidas is able to wind up his opus Ramcharitmanas with the following lines:
‘Lord, may I become as fond of you,
As lascivious men are of women,
And covetous men of wealth.’
Clearly, the poetic license derived here is premised on the poet’s claim to intimacy with god, an intimacy that excludes the rights of others to object. Otherwise, any culture unexposed to this devotional [Bhakti] style would be very disturbed at the obscene juxtaposition of godliness and drooling lust.
Again in Vidyapati [14th-15th centuries], a poet over-arching the classical and the popular, you witness the following sentiment in one of his best known songs:
‘Sweetheart [God] is my own man,
And I am his girl’
Any culture that strains to keep homosexuality out of its ken will find these lines disturbing and deeply repulsive. A more tolerant person would probably see a bizarre joke in this style of devotion. But in either case the poet would have failed in making his metaphorical intent clear. And well, the audience would have failed too to see in this pornography, the sweet voice of the sacred.
Once again we may pause and wonder how some of the vigilante groups in India who muscle into exhibitions and meetings to tear down paintings and beat up the artists respond to these instances. The reference here is to the recent incident in the Baroda Art School, where a gang of righteous goons [an oxymoron] broke into an in-department exhibition to penalize students, some of whom had naturally decided to depict their wildest possible takes on traditional godly iconography. The context in this case was non-public, a college exam that required exhibiting of the works. Admittedly though the nature of the license in question here was different – it was artistic rather than religious in nature, or so one would assume.
Over time, one has noticed that just like the communal riots in India, vigilante attacks only appear to be spontaneous, and are often preceded by elaborate planning. But for the sake of a rational debate one has to presume that the objectors had ‘genuine’ grievances. It is in any case important to see what the ethical or theological premises of such grievances are. Given the above discussion on the bawdy and the sacrilegious, it should be apparent that these premises are certainly not based on any known continued tradition/s. In that case what are the premises based on? Perhaps on the shifty moraine of middle class morality, placed in a sort of an ethical limbo with no firm basis! The interesting part of the story is of course how these attacks expose the bad faith of the urban middle class that reacts with distaste to artistic license, a mentality that would like to wish away new interpretations of old iconography, and is perhaps secretly pleased at the violent attacks. It would also be interesting to uncover the kitschy esthetic that is embedded in these attacks.
It is not difficult to see that such mentality is also unable to distinguish its esthetic impulse from its ethical beliefs and assumptions. But it needs to be admitted that the vigilante gangs are sort of ‘martyrs’ or advance guards for a middle class which has a slippery owning/disowning relationship with them. Such slipperiness and bad faith allows a line of reasoning according to which the exhibiting artist is held responsible for inviting attacks. Doesn’t it remind you of women being blamed by the police in India for the violence perpetrated on them for their skimpy clothing?
To continue further with the same theme, I was disturbed to see a similar vigilante mentality in a TV news channel in the month of August this year. The occasion was Janmashthami, the birth anniversary of Lord Krishna. The news story involved a riotous mujra [courtesan’s dance over the song ‘Bidi Jalaile’] performance by bar girls especially imported from Bombay by a temple in a Kanpur suburb. The news commentator was agitated and outraged that ‘obscene’ dancing should go hand in hand with piety. In the manner of a surrealist juxtaposition of the unlikely? No, quite that neutrally. While the screen played the visuals in a loop, the commentator’s verbal diarrhea could be best summarized through the expletive –‘oh my god is this possible’. Those familiar with popular and high culture in India are well aware that this is not just possible, but routine. The dance of devdasis in temples or the use of erotic mujra dance to console fasting devotees have never been exceptions. At any rate, despite his lifelong battles with the forces of evil, lord Krishna was never known to be good boy. A thief, and a liar in childhood, he grew up to be a playboy with at least 16000 girl friends, a number authenticated by numerous texts. The Krishna image with its wonderful celebration of infancy, childhood and youth and even sagely adulthood [in Bhagvadgita] has never been cowed by the stern gaze of petty morality. And yet the TV reporter hysterically persuaded the audience to feel offended. Thankfully, there was no response and no action taken by a vigilante group. The question is – are we going to take popular vulgarity so much to heart as to demand censorship? Just because it offends our esthetic sensibility, the premises of which are dubious at best? I had to come to the cruel conclusion that the potential vigilante musclemen would gain much heart from an instance like this. Also, one wonders how the reporter would premise his outrage.
The last story I wish to tell does indeed lead to the indictment of tradition or let us say a tradition in India. Less than two years ago, a number of news channels broke a story from the city of Meerut, now almost a suburb of Delhi on ‘Operation Majnu’[sic]. It seems that a lady police officer in the town was disturbed by the sight of unmarried couples who made secret rendezvous in the city parks. The officer in question invited the media on a hunt – she made a sudden swoop on the parks and physically attacked unresisting young couples, who often hid their faces from the camera, not wanting to be recognized by their townsmen being their chief concern. Notably, the Meerut region has in the last few years seen numerous killings and maiming of couples by the community panchayats [elders]. It is easy to see that for the police officer in question the very sight of a boy and girl sitting together amounts to pornography. She only had to shut her eyes to see them kissing and even undressing to make love. This hallucinatory version of pornography fits well into a tradition where the scariest nightmares are made of inter-caste marriage. Let us not forget that even in this case tradition had an accomplice in the shape of a state instrument – the police. It is not uncommon however for wandering lumpens to harass couples in public places in India. Predictably, the police blames the couples for inviting trouble. That the sight of a boy and a girl with discreet distance between them can seem disturbingly lurid in a public place, much more lurid than the climactic moments in an X-rated film seen in private, doesn’t help us the least in defining the bawdy or the pornographic. It only goes to show the power of human imagination.
To wind up, let us focus on a cliché image from various corners of India – a queue of women bent devoutly over the lingam [phallus] strewn with flower petals, to perform their worship. Watching them from a distance you register the simultaneously intimate and public nature of the genuflection. Isn’t it amazing that those accustomed to such a blatant display of sexuality albeit symbolic, in their everyday lives, should bother to break into an art gallery to attack far less public displays? What is their sense of context and their understanding of license? As members and neighbours of the different Hindu traditions in India, we have some awareness of how ludicrous or puzzling some of our practices are. At times we even jump out of our skins and smile in wonder at our own ‘exotic’ beliefs. There are those among us who are unselfconsciously immersed in picturesque forms of faith and spiritual practices. There are also those like me who are both insiders and outsiders, alternating between different moods and ways of seeing. But it seems strange that the small vigilante groups and large social segments whom they represent should want to disinherit themselves of large chunks of our living traditions through elaborate cultural surgery.
It is not difficult to put our finger on the social origins of such groups of defenders of tradition. Many of us in India will only look sideways and find relatives and friends whose spirit drove the lumpen vigilante into the exhibition hall at Baroda. But in terms of broader historical origins do they come from the past as some kind of archaic steamrolling monsters? I am afraid not, as their hubris and lack of nostalgia doesn’t connect them at any specifiable point with our traditions. In fact if one goes out to find support for their claim to be ‘defenders of tradition’ with some rigor, one returns completely empty-handed. One discovers instead that a petty ephemeral morality of the day seems to be masquerading as the ‘eternal tradition’. And yet, in public discourse one tends to get bullied by anyone who gets up to speak for tradition, no questions asked[1].
To continue, are these ‘defenders of tradition’ being bred in the dark alleys of our present which is witnessing a social churning and mobility of immense proportions, throwing up cultural mutants of all sorts? Perhaps, but they seem to lack the floridity of yet another cultural synthesis. Don’t forget that our tradition is lively enough to continue to throw up new gods – goddess Santoshi Mata was after all synthesized in the 1970s with some help from Bombay cinema. I am left wondering if along with our rich and open-ended political democracy we are also nurturing an inchoate uniformitarian industrial-corporate man of the future, who comes visiting to warn us of the days to come. Strangely enough then, our modern democracy itself would often seem to carry the germs of the undemocratic in its skeins. If so, why make a routine of blaming the past unthinkingly?
As a student of philosophy I mostly stick to the business of asking questions, and shall not exceed my brief. But I am indeed reminded here of a theatrical situation [try game theory] where a number of entities – characters, individuals, communities, societies, traditions or religions start a process of reciprocal mimesis, trying to be as much like each other as possible. I wonder where it all leads eventually by way of logical culmination – possibly to a situation where everyone is alike, all the objects look the same, except they all have different labels and names. For once I feel I can define pornography categorially – this is it in its ultimate sense – a pornography of the human soul!
[1] With some sense of urgency we need to register the burden of bad faith that much of secularist ideologies carry in India. On the one hand we busily jettison elements of tradition as ‘useless’, and on the other go running after fundamentalists who find ‘uses’ for them, branding them as hijackers of tradition. In a sense like the dog in the manger we want both – not to touch the traditions ourselves, and not allow others to come grabbing at them. Such privilege is too much to ask for.
…and How the Bawdy Weighs on the Mind
-- Ratnakar Tripathy
One would assume or expect that when the bawdy, the obscene or the risqué manage to find a place in popular culture, they would be accompanied by a sense of shame or sheepish defensiveness. One would also associate these with characters somewhat unsublime if not outright comical, villainous or roguish. But popular and high cultures offer us interesting exceptions that deserve looking into. I wish to discuss a few instances from Indian culture that bridge the popular-high culture hiatus. The first one is culled from ‘Ramlala Nahchhoo’, a text by Tulsidas who is better known as the author of Ramcharitmanas, the 16th century epic and the master text behind most of Ram worship in today’s India.
The second instance is drawn from a lay song form called gali [literally meaning abuse or swear words] that is part of the traditional repertoire of marriage songs in rural and small town Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. This form is now widely known as Ladies Sangeet [music], a telling creolized phrase, in its tame urban form. In cities like Delhi, we have semi-professional Ladies Sangeet groups of women who lend a touch of humour to the tense solemnities of marriage. A number of Hindi films use Ladies Sangeet as accompaniments for marriage visuals combining rich wedding colours with the sound of folk music to create a sense of fun.
Both the instances have an interesting feature in common – they both belong to the tradition of ceremonial galis [abuses] not to be mixed up with swearing on the streets. While the first one centres on a Hindu God, the second one concerns ordinary mortals. But they both pose the bawdy as a sign of cultural refinement. The claim here is not simply that they show a great level of tolerance or acceptance of the obscene. If anything they seem to test the refinement and the maturity of the target of humour. The test is simple – if the target reacts with anger, he is a boor. If he reacts with restraint but remains unamused nevertheless, well, nothing seriously wrong with the man but he probably lacks sangfroid. But if he is genuinely amused and seems to enjoy the innuendos, you have a man of adequate refinement in front of you. It is easier to imagine the nature of the license or the right enjoyed by the perpetrator of the humour once when face to face with the jokes. Thus more of interpretation later…
Ramlala Nahachhu unlike the great epic of Ramcharitmanas revolves around the intimate ceremony of nail-pairing. It is thus part of the cleansing and cosmetic rituals that both the bride and the groom must go through. In the devotional tradition of India, one sees the Gods go through a roller coaster of deification and humanization somewhat in the manner of Greek gods, alternating between unquestioned omnipotence and workaday vulnerabilities of ordinary humans. In this instance we meet the great God Ram in a very human avatar.
Very briefly, the comment Ram receives from the singing women in Ramlala Nahchhu goes as follows:
‘Whereas Ram is dark-complexioned, Laxman [his brother] is fair,
Is Ram Dashrath’s [father of Ram and Laxman] own son, and Laxman someone else’s!’
Tulsidas goes on to describe the occasion as a joyous one, where Ram and his companions had a whale of a time, thanks largely to the rich abuses they had to hear from the women. Our sensibility would lead us to imagine Ram and his entourage to be great stoics, who managed to pull through an ordeal with a straight face. But this is not the intent of the poet. He is quite unambiguous and elaborate in describing the fun had by everyone. Perhaps I need to translate the innuendo contained in the song into street language to make my own contention clear. The song clearly speculates if Ram’s mother had a child from an extra-marital liaison, and that Laxman and by extension perhaps even Ram was a bastard child! The import of these words cannot be missed. How do we now regard Tulsidas as the greatest proponent of Ram-worship, and Ram as the revered god of the millions in India? According to the modern sensibility of today what has happened in the song is not just a grave insult but in fact a serious act of sacrilege. The vigilante groups, the so-called defenders of tradition in today’s India have conveniently ignored several such moments in similar texts and authors often seen as objects of worship by the masses. This is the aspect of tradition that scares them to death!
The opportunity to be the butt of a barrage of abuses in weddings is available to lesser mortals as well. The gali songs are mostly sung when the groom’s party sits together for meals at the girl’s residence. Galis get hurled at the groom’s father, uncles, elders of all sorts and names are clearly spelled out. Women from the girl’s family put in some prior research into the matter. They carefully take down names of the clan members and close relatives. The abusing women especially choose the most dignified men as targets. The improvised songs very openly accuse the men of being involved in illicit liaisons in their own families and the community. Even the women involved get named. At times it all borders dangerously on incest and the groom’s party begin to make unhappy noises, refusing to continue with the meal. This rarely deters the women though. They simply change their gear. Galis are taken as integral to the wedding feasts. I wish to give at least one example to indicate the unsubtleness of these galis that come in the form of loud chanting.
‘X [name] seems so straight and proper during daytime
But is rarely found at home in the night,
In case you don’t believe us,
Ask Y [woman l], ask Z [woman II], or ask anyone in the village.’
The women target all age groups – young men as well as eighty year old men who grin away merrily at every barb received. As the meal gets over the women seem to complete what resembles a complex electrical circuitry more than a circle of human relationships – the groom’s family begins to look like a long chain of illicit bonds. Given the wild randomness of the attacks, once in a while the singing women hit upon a family secret, and a wave of embarrassment runs through the entire assembly. This hilarity comes to end abruptly with the meal of course, and the stiff formality of wedding ceremonies take over.
Of late the educated and urbanized youth have begun to play the spoilsport in the gali sessions. They often react with uncontrolled anger at the shower of abuses. The singing women have become more wary and find it difficult to let go. A strange incomprehensible moralism seems to restrain them. While the older men seem to enjoy every bit of the game, the younger lot feels offended on behalf of their elders. This creates a curious imbalance between the different generations. To be fair to the young men, the innuendos contained in the songs can often openly question their parentage, in the manner of Lord Ram. While the indulgent god Ram is said to have grinned with pleasure at the jokes, the young mortals clearly find the digs unbearable.
Looking closely at the two above examples, it is easy to see that there are two elements at work – there is a very acute sense of context, as clearly, the men involved will not be amused by abuses hurled by anyone or anywhere. The wedding feasts provide a closed context where such ribaldries are permitted. Second, it is the singing women who enjoy a certain license, or even the right to abuse, and no one else.
As pointed out earlier, Hindu gods and goddesses go through both their divine and mortal moments. Besides, given the convention of the devotional stream [Bhakti movement] in Hinduism, Tulsidas is able to wind up his opus Ramcharitmanas with the following lines:
‘Lord, may I become as fond of you,
As lascivious men are of women,
And covetous men of wealth.’
Clearly, the poetic license derived here is premised on the poet’s claim to intimacy with god, an intimacy that excludes the rights of others to object. Otherwise, any culture unexposed to this devotional [Bhakti] style would be very disturbed at the obscene juxtaposition of godliness and drooling lust.
Again in Vidyapati [14th-15th centuries], a poet over-arching the classical and the popular, you witness the following sentiment in one of his best known songs:
‘Sweetheart [God] is my own man,
And I am his girl’
Any culture that strains to keep homosexuality out of its ken will find these lines disturbing and deeply repulsive. A more tolerant person would probably see a bizarre joke in this style of devotion. But in either case the poet would have failed in making his metaphorical intent clear. And well, the audience would have failed too to see in this pornography, the sweet voice of the sacred.
Once again we may pause and wonder how some of the vigilante groups in India who muscle into exhibitions and meetings to tear down paintings and beat up the artists respond to these instances. The reference here is to the recent incident in the Baroda Art School, where a gang of righteous goons [an oxymoron] broke into an in-department exhibition to penalize students, some of whom had naturally decided to depict their wildest possible takes on traditional godly iconography. The context in this case was non-public, a college exam that required exhibiting of the works. Admittedly though the nature of the license in question here was different – it was artistic rather than religious in nature, or so one would assume.
Over time, one has noticed that just like the communal riots in India, vigilante attacks only appear to be spontaneous, and are often preceded by elaborate planning. But for the sake of a rational debate one has to presume that the objectors had ‘genuine’ grievances. It is in any case important to see what the ethical or theological premises of such grievances are. Given the above discussion on the bawdy and the sacrilegious, it should be apparent that these premises are certainly not based on any known continued tradition/s. In that case what are the premises based on? Perhaps on the shifty moraine of middle class morality, placed in a sort of an ethical limbo with no firm basis! The interesting part of the story is of course how these attacks expose the bad faith of the urban middle class that reacts with distaste to artistic license, a mentality that would like to wish away new interpretations of old iconography, and is perhaps secretly pleased at the violent attacks. It would also be interesting to uncover the kitschy esthetic that is embedded in these attacks.
It is not difficult to see that such mentality is also unable to distinguish its esthetic impulse from its ethical beliefs and assumptions. But it needs to be admitted that the vigilante gangs are sort of ‘martyrs’ or advance guards for a middle class which has a slippery owning/disowning relationship with them. Such slipperiness and bad faith allows a line of reasoning according to which the exhibiting artist is held responsible for inviting attacks. Doesn’t it remind you of women being blamed by the police in India for the violence perpetrated on them for their skimpy clothing?
To continue further with the same theme, I was disturbed to see a similar vigilante mentality in a TV news channel in the month of August this year. The occasion was Janmashthami, the birth anniversary of Lord Krishna. The news story involved a riotous mujra [courtesan’s dance over the song ‘Bidi Jalaile’] performance by bar girls especially imported from Bombay by a temple in a Kanpur suburb. The news commentator was agitated and outraged that ‘obscene’ dancing should go hand in hand with piety. In the manner of a surrealist juxtaposition of the unlikely? No, quite that neutrally. While the screen played the visuals in a loop, the commentator’s verbal diarrhea could be best summarized through the expletive –‘oh my god is this possible’. Those familiar with popular and high culture in India are well aware that this is not just possible, but routine. The dance of devdasis in temples or the use of erotic mujra dance to console fasting devotees have never been exceptions. At any rate, despite his lifelong battles with the forces of evil, lord Krishna was never known to be good boy. A thief, and a liar in childhood, he grew up to be a playboy with at least 16000 girl friends, a number authenticated by numerous texts. The Krishna image with its wonderful celebration of infancy, childhood and youth and even sagely adulthood [in Bhagvadgita] has never been cowed by the stern gaze of petty morality. And yet the TV reporter hysterically persuaded the audience to feel offended. Thankfully, there was no response and no action taken by a vigilante group. The question is – are we going to take popular vulgarity so much to heart as to demand censorship? Just because it offends our esthetic sensibility, the premises of which are dubious at best? I had to come to the cruel conclusion that the potential vigilante musclemen would gain much heart from an instance like this. Also, one wonders how the reporter would premise his outrage.
The last story I wish to tell does indeed lead to the indictment of tradition or let us say a tradition in India. Less than two years ago, a number of news channels broke a story from the city of Meerut, now almost a suburb of Delhi on ‘Operation Majnu’[sic]. It seems that a lady police officer in the town was disturbed by the sight of unmarried couples who made secret rendezvous in the city parks. The officer in question invited the media on a hunt – she made a sudden swoop on the parks and physically attacked unresisting young couples, who often hid their faces from the camera, not wanting to be recognized by their townsmen being their chief concern. Notably, the Meerut region has in the last few years seen numerous killings and maiming of couples by the community panchayats [elders]. It is easy to see that for the police officer in question the very sight of a boy and girl sitting together amounts to pornography. She only had to shut her eyes to see them kissing and even undressing to make love. This hallucinatory version of pornography fits well into a tradition where the scariest nightmares are made of inter-caste marriage. Let us not forget that even in this case tradition had an accomplice in the shape of a state instrument – the police. It is not uncommon however for wandering lumpens to harass couples in public places in India. Predictably, the police blames the couples for inviting trouble. That the sight of a boy and a girl with discreet distance between them can seem disturbingly lurid in a public place, much more lurid than the climactic moments in an X-rated film seen in private, doesn’t help us the least in defining the bawdy or the pornographic. It only goes to show the power of human imagination.
To wind up, let us focus on a cliché image from various corners of India – a queue of women bent devoutly over the lingam [phallus] strewn with flower petals, to perform their worship. Watching them from a distance you register the simultaneously intimate and public nature of the genuflection. Isn’t it amazing that those accustomed to such a blatant display of sexuality albeit symbolic, in their everyday lives, should bother to break into an art gallery to attack far less public displays? What is their sense of context and their understanding of license? As members and neighbours of the different Hindu traditions in India, we have some awareness of how ludicrous or puzzling some of our practices are. At times we even jump out of our skins and smile in wonder at our own ‘exotic’ beliefs. There are those among us who are unselfconsciously immersed in picturesque forms of faith and spiritual practices. There are also those like me who are both insiders and outsiders, alternating between different moods and ways of seeing. But it seems strange that the small vigilante groups and large social segments whom they represent should want to disinherit themselves of large chunks of our living traditions through elaborate cultural surgery.
It is not difficult to put our finger on the social origins of such groups of defenders of tradition. Many of us in India will only look sideways and find relatives and friends whose spirit drove the lumpen vigilante into the exhibition hall at Baroda. But in terms of broader historical origins do they come from the past as some kind of archaic steamrolling monsters? I am afraid not, as their hubris and lack of nostalgia doesn’t connect them at any specifiable point with our traditions. In fact if one goes out to find support for their claim to be ‘defenders of tradition’ with some rigor, one returns completely empty-handed. One discovers instead that a petty ephemeral morality of the day seems to be masquerading as the ‘eternal tradition’. And yet, in public discourse one tends to get bullied by anyone who gets up to speak for tradition, no questions asked[1].
To continue, are these ‘defenders of tradition’ being bred in the dark alleys of our present which is witnessing a social churning and mobility of immense proportions, throwing up cultural mutants of all sorts? Perhaps, but they seem to lack the floridity of yet another cultural synthesis. Don’t forget that our tradition is lively enough to continue to throw up new gods – goddess Santoshi Mata was after all synthesized in the 1970s with some help from Bombay cinema. I am left wondering if along with our rich and open-ended political democracy we are also nurturing an inchoate uniformitarian industrial-corporate man of the future, who comes visiting to warn us of the days to come. Strangely enough then, our modern democracy itself would often seem to carry the germs of the undemocratic in its skeins. If so, why make a routine of blaming the past unthinkingly?
As a student of philosophy I mostly stick to the business of asking questions, and shall not exceed my brief. But I am indeed reminded here of a theatrical situation [try game theory] where a number of entities – characters, individuals, communities, societies, traditions or religions start a process of reciprocal mimesis, trying to be as much like each other as possible. I wonder where it all leads eventually by way of logical culmination – possibly to a situation where everyone is alike, all the objects look the same, except they all have different labels and names. For once I feel I can define pornography categorially – this is it in its ultimate sense – a pornography of the human soul!
[1] With some sense of urgency we need to register the burden of bad faith that much of secularist ideologies carry in India. On the one hand we busily jettison elements of tradition as ‘useless’, and on the other go running after fundamentalists who find ‘uses’ for them, branding them as hijackers of tradition. In a sense like the dog in the manger we want both – not to touch the traditions ourselves, and not allow others to come grabbing at them. Such privilege is too much to ask for.
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