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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