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NEWS YOU CAN USE Editor: N. P. Chekkutty Media Focus |
T.K.Ramachandran Media,
Ideology and If somebody imagines that he has a hundred talers [gold coins], if this concept is not for him an arbitrary, subjective one, if he believes in it, then these hundred imagined talers have for him the same value as a hundred real ones. For instance, he will incur debts on the strength of his imagination, his imagination will work, in the same way as all humanity has incurred debts on its gods. Karl Marx, Doctoral Dissertation, 1840-41. When the news of EMS’s death reached us, ironically enough the Doordarshan was beaming the "rites of power" of the fascist junta from the Parliament House. The master political strategist seemed to have turned even his death, with uncanny perspicacity, into a political statement. It was as if he had said with his characteristic, slightly cantankerous, inflexibility, "What! The BJP ruling India, only over my dead body!" The death of EMS moved me to an unusual degree and for days together, I was haunted by an inexplicable sense of loss, inexplicable because for my generation which had its political nurturing from Mao-tse Tung and Charu Majumdar, EMS was never a hero. I have pondered over this puzzle for long, and now I realise that what we had witnessed was not merely the death of an individual, but the passing of a dream. Historians, at least those who are close to the Left, are fond of calling EMS the father of modern Kerala. In terms of empirical historiography, there are enough facts to justify this appellative: he was in the forefront of the reform movements, the first chief minister of Kerala, one of the first Communist leaders to come to power through the parliamentary process, the helmsman who steered Kerala into a pioneering position as regards social, economic and educational reforms, the astute architect of coalition-politics, the indefatigable polemicist ... the list is indeed a long one. Yet in a very real sense the appellative is a misnomer, because the Kerala we live in, with its corrupt politicians, sex scams and communal flare-ups, is hardly the country that EMS had dreamed of. I am using the name of EMS in a purely symbolic manner to denote the whole range of figures, Communists, Socialists, Liberals, religious reformers, and, most importantly, the masses, ordinary peasants and workers, who had fought heroically innumerable battles, suffered untold indignities, and willingly sacrificed their lives to create an egalitarian and secular Kerala. Viewed from this point, EMS appears to have been the father of an as yet "unborn" Kerala, a Kerala that was destined to remain an unfulfilled promise, "a null quantity like a foreign postage-stamp twice cancelled, unusable and not worth a collector’s attention," to borrow the felicitous metaphor of E. P. Thompson. That this dream is being "interred with his bones," became palpably clear when one of his trusted lieutenants, an "intellectual giant" in his own right, came up with a peach of an obituary. His cleverly worded piece could well serve as a perfect exemplar of what Sanskrit rhetoricians call nindasthuthi (left-handed compliment); certainly this apparthik, at least, has ensured that he will not be faulted for any "right deviation." Even after the fall of the Soviet Union and the eclipse of Communism, the Communists of Kerala had maintained a brave front and busied themselves with "human chains" and "human walls" to convince the world that "All is well out here in Kerala." Yet the organisational and theoretical crises that have developed within the Left in the post-EMS phase, the woeful poverty of theory that is becoming manifest and its astonishing failure to take any kind of concerted action in the face of the fascist threat which is growing ominously, Kerala, the once proud bastion of progressive thought and secular mores, has come to wear a vulnerable look. It was still the early years of our Secular Republic when Nehru decided to put his foot down and remonstrate on hearing that Babu Rajendra Prasad, the then President, was planning to go to Banares and ceremoniously wash the feet of a thousand and odd Brahmin priests. Yet, not long ago, the press in Kerala had featured the photograph of a veteran Marxist leader sitting with folded hands in front of a matt chief, that too one who is not particularly well known for his other-worldliness or spirituality. And not so much as a squeal of protest was to be heard from any quarter. This is perhaps a measure of the distance Kerala has travelled from the progressive ideals that had dominated its public life in the sixties and the seventies. Indeed, gone are the days when spontaneous protests that he encountered, had forced a Sankaracharya who had come to Kerala with a gomata in tow, for a padayatra to propagate his virulent and fanatical brand of anti-cow slaughter message, to cancel the programme. The Eclipse of Reason: Historical Contexts Think now T. S. Eliot, Gerontion, 1920. The roots of the modernisation process in Kerala lie embedded in the anti-colonial and anti-feudal struggles that had taken shape in the early decades of the 20th century and the long tradition of reform movements that had provided both inspiration and impetus to these struggles. The struggles against colonial domination, feudal privilege, casteist oppression and female servitude that arose in every part of Kerala during these years of turbulence engendered a veritable Renaissance in our socio-cultural life. Central to the emergence of this new ethos was the constitution of what Jurgen Habermas has termed "the public sphere," a realm of social life wherein "public opinion" is allowed to take shape through a democratic process of free discussion and public debate. However, unlike in the Western societies described by Habermas, the public sphere in Kerala had arisen not under the control of the bourgeoisie, but of the toiling masses. And this in turn had prepared the ground for the unquestioned hegemony of the Left and progressive forces in the cultural life of Kerala right upto the seventies. But already, by the end of the fifties, there had emerged an ultra-conservative backlash, which was slowly but steadily undermining this hegemony. Because of its eclectic ideological composition, and the protean nature of its manifestations, the backlash phenomenon defies easy definitions. Nevertheless, in general it can be seen to be characterised by its pronounced anti-progressive, anti-left stances, its unabashed idealisation of the feudal past, its belligerent apolitical posturing, its unconcealed male chauvinist and sexist bias, its pathological dread of people’s movements and its strident revivalist rhetoric. Emerging rather shamefacedly from the shadows of the infamous vimochanasamaram, the backlash ideology was hardly coherent, or homogenous. But cleverly using the endless schisms within the ranks of the Left and the lacunae in its programmes, by the eighties the backlash ideologues have achieved a certain degree of theoretical sophistication and a great measure of respectability. The most important consequence of this phenomenon has been the shrinkage of the public sphere and the drastic abridgement of its democratic character. This is well attested not only by the growth of communal and casteist organisations in the past one decade or so, but the apparent ease with which elitist and obscurantist slogans are being mouthed even by the intelligentsia, something quite unthinkable in the sixties or the seventies. The manner in which even blatantly authoritarian measures are being accepted passively, and sometimes even welcomed by the middle class of Kerala, makes one wonder about the progressive credentials of "God’s own country." The authoritarian and communal mindset that is being carefully nurtured by the innumerable front organisations of the Hindutva forces ranging from the balagokulams to the temple protection outfits, and the failure of working class organisations in facing up to this new challenge, inevitably bring to mind the images of Germany and Italy in the years immediately preceding the rise of Fascism so trenchantly portrayed by Wilhelm Reich (Listen Little Man, Mass Psychology of Fascism) and Poulantzas (Fascism and Dictatorship). The mighty wave of religiosity and superstition that is sweeping over contemporary Kerala, is, in the last analysis, the latest avatar of the backlash that has received a new fillip from Hindutva fascism that has become particularly strident after the Babri Masjid demolition. Medusa’s Gaze: The Media and the Backlash Right from its inception in the late-fifties and early-sixties, the media has been an important base of the backlash ideology. Therefore, it is not accidental that the sixties, which saw the emergence of the backlash also, witnessed the constitution of a full-fledged culture industry with its twin capitals in Kottayam and Kodambakkam. Because the dominance of the Left in the cultural scene was near total, the nascent culture industry was careful to avoid any headlong confrontation with it; so much so that it concentrated solely on the apolitical and the sentimental. Indeed this apolitical stance was to have grave ramifications at a later stage, but in this phase when the pulp fiction and the popular cinema were carefully concealing their true ideological bias behind the veneer of apolitical neutrality or consigning it to the cartoon strip or the humour page, the Left failed to gauge its dangerous potential. It is interesting to note that it is only by the eighties that the Left initiated any concerted effort at a critique of pulp literature and popular cinema. But by that time they had been transformed completely both in terms of their mass appeal and their ideological content and the backlash had become a formidable presence in the cultural life of Kerala. The reasons for the failure of the Left in combating the emergent culture industry were manifold and complex. In the first place, hamstrung as it was by the assumption that it was still completing the New Democratic Revolution, it could not come to grips with the capitalist reality that was slowly unfolding in Kerala. Again, because Western Marxist Theory was always regarded with suspicion by our theoreticians, they could hardly resort to concepts like "reification" (Lukacs) or "Culture Industry"(Adorno). And the theoretical weapons honed in the anti-colonial, anti-feudal struggle that they had in their armory were ill-suited for the new task. In a sense, the Left had remained blind to the subtle ideological transformations that were occurring at a frenetic pace, and this effectively prevented it from evolving a cultural policy capable of counter-acting the pernicious effects of the backlash ideology. The split in the CPI in the sixties and the bitter polemics that ensued had a profound impact upon the popular and democratic cultural traditions of Kerala. The eclipse of the once-powerful theatre movement and the decline of popular Left journals like Janayugam and Navajeevan that came in the wake of the split, signalled the tragic sundering between popular art and the pulp. In turn, these lent credibility to the elitist professions of literary modernism. Again in the aftermath of the split, most of the "cultural figures" who were associated with the undivided CP chose to remain with the CPI, though the bulk of the cadres had moved over to the newly-formed CPI (M). The fact that many of them were active in the nascent film industry that was emerging in Kodambakkam did not improve matters, and many were permanently branded as "revisionists." The mood of the times is well attested by an article that appeared in that period, accusing Thoppil Bhasi, the well-known Malayalam playwright, of harboring petite bourgeoisie tendencies. Of course, the CPI (M) tried to float its own organisations, like the Deshabhimani Theatres, in the cultural front. Yet even with its enormous mass base, it could not prop these up for long. Moreover the split in the sixties was merely the beginning of a long period of intense theoretical and organisational turmoil within the Left. Plagued as they were by theoretical crisis and internal dissension, the Left leadership was hardly in a position to develop a cogent cultural policy. The advent of literary modernism in the late-sixties and early-seventies was another factor that has deeply influenced the cultural life of Kerala. No doubt, right from its inception, the modernist movement in Malayalam was a highly contradictory and ideologically ambivalent phenomenon. Thanks to the variegated and often conflicting influences that shaped it, it was never homogenous or monolithic and always remained a nebulous, inchoate entity. In political terms, it was always in danger of splitting up into a radical Left wing, which pinned its hopes on an armed revolution and a conservative stratum, which was toying with aestheticism and mysticism. At no point did it acquire a wide readership or a secure mass base. Yet its elitist and formalist aesthetics has had a lasting impact on our culture. Its penchant for the obscure and the abstract has made literature and art the preserve of an elite and destroyed its democratic character. The anti-realist bias of modernism and its fascination for strange plots and bizarre modes of presentation led it into the blind alley of sterile formalism either of the Kavalam or the G. Sankara Pillai variety. This in turn spelt the doom of theatre as a popular art form, and the disenchanted masses were easily co-opted by the nascent film industry as captive audience. It is worth while to remember that right unto the seventies, Malayalam cinema had remained confined to those rare birds that appeared on festive occasions like Onam, Vishu, and Christmas. But in the late-seventies and early-eighties, we find the film industry in Kerala coming of age with new air-conditioned cinema houses in the metropolitan areas, B-grade and C-grade theatres in the suburbs and villages, a well-organised distribution net-work, a definitive star system and a body of sure-success formulas. The radical and the revolutionary "new wave" movies became effectively marginalised as uchappadangal (noon-show-only movies). Louis Althusser’s conceptualisation of the Ideological State Apparatus, and Roland Barthes’s incisive inquiries into the semiological implications of discourse will be of immense use to us in understanding the manner in which backlash ideology has managed to establish its dominance over the cultural life of Kerala. It would give us insight into the structuration of ideology at the macro level and its mechanics of generating consent. A detailed structural understanding of the various sites of the Ideological State Apparatus like education, religion, and the family is essential for any conceptualisation of the power of ideology and the manner in which it gets articulated within a particular historical matrix. For the fundamental question of ideology is, "How does the ruling class rule when it rules", as Goran Therborn has aptly put it. Further it should also be possible to map out the modes of capital accumulation in culture industry and its essential links with the so-called "Kerala Model." Only such an inquiry would enable us to understand the ontological features of our cultural life and its real socio-economic context, that is, the tragic dialectics of under-development. At this juncture, Adorno’s account of how the tardy growth of "productive forces," paradoxically led to the enrichment of cultural life in eighteenth-century Vienna, is illuminating. The expansion of the intellectual productive forces in Vienna under the German yoke, when it could find no real expression in the actual productive process, led to investments in purely abstract realms like music, mathematics, and chess and opened the way for the music of Beethoven and Bach, advances in number theory and trigonometry, and the once-popular "Vienna Opening". The very contradictions which are characteristic of the "Kerala Model", like a high percentage of unemployment coexisting with advances in education, or social indices indicative of high-quality life found in juxtaposition with extremely low rate of economic/ industrial growth. The possibilities offered by such an inquiry are indeed fascinating, but such a "genetically determined account," as Lukacs calls it, is not the focus of this paper where the stress is on the subjective rather than the objective dimensions of ideology. It is true that under the capitalist dispensation, ideology operates very much like the gaze of Medusa: the look of the Gorgon kills and all that is living, be it art or beauty, that comes under the gaze is petrified into rock and sand. All human rights are finally reduced to the irresponsible right to buy and sell, all hallowed relations are commodified and subsumed by the laws of the market-place. Yet, in a sense, ideology is also Calypso-like in its operation, the kiss of the enchantress not merely transforms reality, making bull frogs and ogres appear as charming princes, it too affects the perceivers, literally turning them into beasts. Unlike all hitherto known modes of production, capitalism requires massive mobilisation of men and women for its gargantuan projects. Therefore it is not accidental that under capitalism, ideological reconstitution of subjectivity has become crucial. And in late-capitalism the role played by the media in constructing and fracturing identities as well as in constituting subjects, has come to acquire a centrality that is, at once astonishing and awesome. The Political Unconscious: Media and Ideology You know the people I mean. Girls who subliminally model themselves on kid-show presenters, full of faulty Melody and Joy. Men, whose manners show newscaster interference, soap stains and film smears. Or the cretinised, those who talk on buses and streets as if TV were real, who call up networks with strange questions, stranger demands. If you lose your laugh, you can get a false one. If you lose your mind, you can buy a false one. Martin Amis, Money, 1984. The capitalist era has rightly been called the Age of Ideology, because its philosophic commitment to Humanism with emphasis on the individual made Man the principal motor of historical change. Moreover the growth of scientific rationality considerably reduced the power of religious rituals and myths on human life. This retreat of the sacral profoundly affected notions regarding human agency and accountability for the regimen of ritual had largely been unconscious and unrecognised. The new emphasis on choice, "the leap of faith," as Kirkegaard calls it, made man appear more and more as the ultimate arbiter of his destiny and thereby, that of his world. Indeed this new "being," endowed with "freewill," the "thinking reed" of Pascal, was perhaps no less fictitious than that perennial battle ground where the forces of good and evil were forever in combat -- the "Everyman" of mediaeval Christianity, or the creature eternally caught in the toils of karma of Hinduism. Nevertheless by abridging the dominion of the natural and the supernatural, bourgeoisie humanism unconsciously brought to the fore the fraught questions of subject formation and paved the ground for the development of an ontology of social being. In place of the creature impelled by instincts and ties of kinship, the plaything of chance and necessity, what we encounter in the Age of Reason, is Man urged on by passionately held (though no less illusory) creeds and ideals. Therefore it is not surprising that Althusser has suggested his own conception of man as "an ideological being," as against the Aristotelian concept of the zoon politicon. Most of the theoretical work on ideology, whether Marxist or Weberian, has focussed upon the macro aspects of the complex nexus between ideology and class or between ideology and power. Here the work of Antonio Gramsci, who has sought to study cultural manifestations and the mechanics of its dissemination, is of immense value. Starting from the dictum that "All men are philosophers," Gramsci maintains that the ideological field should properly be conceived not as homogenous monolith, but as a discrete continuum, a fortress consisting of central structures as well as ramparts. Therefore when we study ideology it is not enough that we concentrate upon the well-honed theories of the ideologues, or the utterances of the watchdogs of the establishment. The entire gamut ranging from the works of philosophers to the half-formed and ill-articulated notions that are embedded in popular culture have per force to be scrutinised. Cultural artifacts, commonsense notions, grand mother’s tales, popular sayings, comic strips, quirks of fashion, turns of phrase, eating habits -- the list is interminable -- are all potent carriers of ideology and a dialectician can ignore them only at his peril. That is why ideology is ubiquitous in our age and perhaps why it often escapes detection. Under late-capitalism, the sway of ideology has become far more pervasive and oppressive than ever before. The institution of the entertainment industry as a money spinner, the startling growth of the electronic media, and the huge strides made in the realm of technology, have transformed the everyday life of the modern man in such a radical manner that ideology is now able to penetrate even the most private spheres of life. The reign of the visual is so total that even the darkest recesses of the psyche is not exempt from its dominion. The strain of pessimism that colours the later work of Althusser, perhaps the most astute critic of ideology in modern times, has to be understood in this context. Post-modern theorists like Baudrillard have even suggested that new conceptual tools have to be developed to fully comprehend the emergent "Society of spectacle." The impact that these developments have made on subject formation is indeed incalculable. Looks, mannerisms, laughter, thoughts, mind, all have become branded commodities available in the supermarket. It is as if Herbert Marcuse’s gloomiest predictions regarding the appearance of "one-dimensional men" have been fulfilled with a vengeance. One significant feature of the dominance of the visual in contemporary culture is the increasing dependence of ideology on unconscious and semi-conscious psychic processes. Marxist as well as feminist critics of the media have in recent times attempted to chart the complex ways in which the media mimics psychic mechanisms. The suggestion that cinema has to be seen as "a pleasure machine"(Constance Penley), Laura Mulvey’s incisive analysis of the "male gaze" in cinema employing Freudian categories, and the repressive unconscious lurking behind the tight-knit sequences in Hitchcock films that is uncovered by the studies of Bellour, Bergstrom, et al., are all path-breaking works in this direction. These works demonstrate the subtle ways in which "tropes of desire" are implicated in the operation of ideology. Fredric Jameson’s conceptualisation of the "political unconscious" -- the master code that girds all narratives in class societies -- provides us with an incisive theoretical tool to unravel the labyrinthine pathways of desire and repression in modern cultures. When we attempt to study the ideological impact of the transformations in the nature and function of the media upon the ultra-conservative backlash, we are bound to come up against a vexing paradox. Outwardly the Kerala society remains progressive and urbane, the organisational structures of the Left are largely intact, and in spite of the vigorous and violent campaign unleashed by the Sangh Parivar, their strength, in electoral terms, is miniscule. But the moment we turn to the cultural realm, the picture becomes totally different: The print media is replete with the jargon of spirituality, the visuals, whether in the little screen or the big screen, are surcharged with feudal nostalgia and revivalist rhetoric, godmen/ women are sprouting everywhere, superstitions of every hue from astrology to black magic are spreading like a wild fire. It is as if the political unconscious of contemporary Kerala is full to the brim with retrogressive ideas and images and the modern Malayalee is leading a strange dual life. One has only to make a comparative study of the nature and content of the public functions in our major cities in the past and in the present, to gauge the true magnitude of this shift. It is in the seventies that a regular column detailing the "engagements," came to be instituted in major Malayalam dailies. The engagement column in Malayala Manorama of October, 1973, had in all 54 entries. Of this only roughly 18% were entries related to religious programmes. Of the other entries, 10 were related to political meetings; 11, cultural; 7, TU; 7, social; 3, governmental; 3, sports and games and 3, miscellaneous. The corresponding figures for October, 1975, by which time the column had become firmly established, are as follows: total entries: 193; religious: 36; political: 9; cultural:39; TU:12; social:60; governmental:20; sports and games:6; miscellaneous:11. Now let us take a look at the column after 20years. The figures for October, 1995 are: total entries: 368; religious: 148; political: 38; cultural: 47; TU: 8; social: 60; governmental: 23; sports and games: 3; miscellaneous: 36 (it is interesting to note that of these 36 entries, 28 were meetings of the Alcoholic Anonymous). Quite a number of programmes listed as social or cultural, were meetings organised by cultural or social outfits floated by religious bodies. The great majority of the entries under religion relate to meetings organised by the Sangh Parivar. These figures are pointers to the mighty wave of religiosity and superstition that is sweeping Kerala. Equally disquieting is the steep decline in political (10.4%), and TU(2.2%) activities. Another interesting piece of evidence that I happened to examine was a calendar brought out by a trade union of university employees. Indeed it turned out to be a curious cultural artifact. For instance, I discovered that almost all days were blessed with religious significance of one sort or the other and in this too, the "Hindu" monopoly was total: out of a total of 327 entries on "special days," 267 were days significant for the Hindus; the Christians were far behind with 31entries to their credit and the Muslims, with just 9. There were only 23 entries which had no religious significance. It is worth speculating about the possible conclusions that historians of the future would arrive at if they were to reconstruct the social life of Kerala in the 1990’s from these calendar entries. Truly we seem to be living in the "dark ages!" The penchant for Sanskritisation evinced by the Malayalee intellectual has to be seen as the end product of the "jargon of spirituality" that got established in the heydays of modernism. At the time of its appearance in the seventies, the jargon had remained a closely guarded preserve of a literary elite, but by the nineties, we find the emergence of a set of journalists who are avid practitioners of the jargon. Now it is to be encountered at every turn in the print media -- in reports, in editorial comments, in book reviews, in film appreciation, in literary criticism. It seems to have become so well entrenched in the collective psyche that "facts," "veracity",etc., have become largely irrelevant to the votaries of the jargon. For instance, let us take a quick look at a bizarre piece that appeared in a leading Malayalam daily in January, 1998. The staff reporter tells us in so many words about an auspicious marriage, the only snag is that the bride and bridegroom are not humans but trees: In the sacred grove of the ascetic Agasthya, at Thrikkulathur, a pipal tree is receiving initiation(upanayanam), according to the Shodasha prescriptions. It will be followed by samavarthanam and marriage. A neem tree (Ariveppu) is to be the bride.(Mathrubhumi, 15 January, ’98) We are informed that according to the scriptures, the base of the pipal tree is occupied by Brahma, the centre by Vishnu, and the top by Shiva. The ceremonies being performed are expected to augment its sacredness. Further, we are treated to a detailed biographical sketch of the bridegroom and an account of his hoary lineage. What is striking about these accounts is the absolute lack of irony or self-reflexivity. With a faith that teeters on the verge of naivete, it blithely ushers the readers into a mythscape. This aspect of the jargon is particularly in evidence when the subject under discussion is a temple festival. It may be the appearance of the celestial lights at Sabarimala or the observance of pongala at Attukal. The narrative gets totally usurped by the jargon and we are transported to a level of sublimity, wherein any demand for accuracy of description or facticity would tantamount to profanation. We are treated to a detailed reiteration of ritual practices, with mantras accompanying them in each case, interspersed with knowledgeable comments on their profound spiritual significance. The jargon, which disdainfully rejects the earthy and the commonplace, literally revels in the esoteric and the erudite. Thus the pongala offering becomes an act of "self-surrender," the hot noonday sun and the blazing hearth, "a test by fire." What is really important at this historical juncture is the recognition of the true nature of the ultra-conservative backlash and its pernicious potential. At stake is our freedom of speech and expression. Indeed we are now passing through a very dark phase in our history. The fascists are on the threshold of political power. Their goons are out to stifle every voice of dissent, their lackeys have penetrated every important centre of learning, and even the armed forces are getting systematically communalised. Given all this, one may very well ask, "Why should the fascists fear an open word from a simple man?" But, as Bertolt Brecht has put it, But their Third Reich
recalls [GO TOP]
K. Satchidanandan The Censor Within Am I as free a writer today as I was in the sixties or the seventies, the decades when two aesthetic/conceptual revolutions had transformed my writing alongwith those of my contemporaries in Malayalam? The question may appear ironic, for it was in the sixties that we were virulently attacked by the guardians of orthodox sensibility who tried to tell us and our readers that our writing was absurd, rootless, fashionable, obscene; that poetry should be written in metre, and fiction should not aspire to cross the sacred realm of social realism; that there are inviolable laws and rules for writing. In the seventies when we showed signs of change and even the solipsists among us began to be concerned with what was happening around us, the same critics said that we were extremists, our writing was destructive, partisan, insular.... In both the phases, the ‘progressives’ and the ‘conservatives’ had joined hands in the onslaught against the avant-garde. Yet those attacks sharpened our writing, we created a new readership with a different sensibility which sustained us and made our opponents even more envious and uneasy. But to be attacked by vultures is more fortunate than to be slowly eaten away by worms, as Antonio Gramsci would testify to this destiny of the modern Prometheus. During times like the Emergency, we the writers who placed freedom of expression above everything else, were writing fearlessly against censorship and the curtailment of basic freedoms knowing fully well that we may be interrogated, arrested and punished without trial or explanation. But then the enemy was visible, they were there in the Parliament in white or on the streets in khaki uniforms. We were under surveillance; many of us were interrogated and at least one arrested in Kerala for having written a poem against the Emergency. What has happened in between? The enemy has become more and more invisible. They are within the civil society, in the crowd assembled in the courtyard of a temple or mosque or church, among the people listening to the vile exhortations of the leader of a communal outfit, in the man walking quietly along the road, in your neighbour, why, in your own kin living under the same roof: may be Arjuna’s tragic dilemma in the battlefield sounds more relevant here than the Promethean irony envisaged by the ltalian thinker. But even Arjuna was privileged enough to see the foe arrayed against him and his brothers in the battlefront even if they included his kith and kin. We are not so privileged. We do not know from where the attack will begin, and the fair rules and niceties of those ancient battles are no more available to us today. I remember how I was startled into self-consciousness long ago when, having seen my letter to the editor in Mathrubhoomi weekly arguing that the questions of Shari-at should be dealt with democratically through education among Muslims and awareness campaigns, particularly among Muslim women thus permitting the demand for a common civil code to come from within the minority communities, three Jama-ate-Islami activists came to my home and congratulated me; they had thought I was supporting Shari-at, having simply missed all the subtleties of my public plea. Fortunately so far no RSS activist has congratulated me on my poems on the saint-poets of India though their newspaper was happy when I contradicted Paul Zachariah on his confusion between the spiritual and the communal. But a critic like R. Narendra Prasad, clearly sympathetic to the Hindutva and Savarna ideologies, was quick to identify my rediscovery of the liberal and radical traditions of the Bhakti-Sufi movements with the Hindu revivalist world view! In both the cases the strategy is one of assimilation than opposition, and assimilation, I am fully aware, is more potent than opposition since it sends a simultaenous message to the Hindu revivalists and to the Muslim fundamentalists. My play Gandhi based on the last days of the Mahatma, published in part by India Today (Malayalam), and in full as a book by Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad, illustrated another instance of misreading when a BJP advocate stated that it is abusive of Gandhi, while the whole play is a defence of Gandhi’s stand vis-a-vis communalism and his uncompromising opposition to the RSS brand of Hindutva politics. The play presents Gandhi as a tragic hero in his last solitary months in 1947-48 when leaders including Nehru seemed to have abandoned him and when even sections of people began to suspect his motives, owing to fundamentalist propaganda. While writing the play, I wanted to be honest and sure about my facts while I did not want it to generate a riot. I kept the draft for quite some time waiting for the atmosphere in Kerala to cool down and mature so that the play is received as what it is. Twenty years ago, I would not have had to do this: people were more sober and communalism had not made such inroads into Kerala’s public life. I have at times wondered how a film like Aravindan’s Kanchanaseeta would have been received had it been produced today. This is perhaps true about quite a few other works of art. The danger today is not only the threat of a potential riot: even critics would accuse you of being deliberately provocative, or trying to create a ‘sensation’ if you simply speak the truth. I have heard several important writers from Bangladesh accusing Tasleema Nasreen of ‘cheap sensationalism’ and condemning Lajja on aesthetic grounds. 1 fear there is a mixing up here. This also happened in Kerala when Antony’s Kristhuvinte Aram Thirumurivu (The Sixth Stigma of Christ) was being attacked by the Orthodox church. What was important at that time was to defend the writer’s freedom of expression; instead some critics began to discuss the aesthetic limitations of the play with academic comparisons of the drama with Kazantzakis’s The Last Temptation of Christ which was its acknowledged source. In both the cases the critics might have been true from a "pure" aesthetic point of view, if at all something like that exists; but those discussions only helped divert public attention from the crucial issue of the writer’s freedom. This happened recently even with M.F. Hussain whose nude drawing of Saraswati had attracted violence from the self-appointed defenders of Hindutva. Instead of condemning the violence outright, several artists took it as an opportunity to come down heavily on the ‘populism’ of Hussain’s art. What happened with the film Fire was no different: those who defended the artist’s freedom were dubbed advocates of lesbianism -- which in itself need not be condemned, thus obliquely justifying the self-righteous moralism and the vulgar vandalism of the aggressive Sivsainiks. Another incident was the withdrawal of the promise of grants to the Marathi Sahitya Sammelan by the Maharashtra Government on the grounds that writers used the platform to make a veiled criticism of the rulers’ ideology. I wanted to know whether the Indian writers’ community could be of any help to the organisers of the Sammelan and telephoned some well-known Marathi writers. Instead of condemning the government action they began nit-picking on the details of the organisation of the Sammelan. They did not consider the venture worth defending, forgetting that the issue was actually larger -- of the government’s attitude to the autonomy of literature, to freedom of opinion and to the taxpayers’ money that it considered it’s own private wealth. Even the majority party’s intervention in organisations of repute like the Indian Council for Historical Research, Indian Council for Philsophical Research and the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies has not received adequate response from intellectuals, even of broadly leftist pursuasions. This is even more worrisome. Fascists of all hues have always tried to make use of culture and cultural organisations to their own end: but today those who try to protest are isolated, ridiculed and false allegations are brought against them. This becomes particularly frightning in a state like Kerala with its vital traditions of resistance and struggle. The fate of the ‘Mavoor struggle’ that seems to be dying down due to lack of proper support, of the ‘Ice cream parlour case’ in Kozhikode taken up by Ajitha and some friends who are now under threat to their own lives, of the issue of the tribal land in Wayanad (where a ‘left’ government has taken a blatantly anti-tribal stand), that has failed to win the support of the majority of writers and thinkers for fear of isolation from the manistream left : these are all examples of the terror of sequestration and the pangs of solitude to which the champions of resistance are being condemned to in Kerala these days. Today I have to think twice before 1 employ a myth, bring in a Puranic character, interpret a legend from the Upanishad or Bible or Qur-an: any of these can lead to a riot or may encourage some communal force or the other to make claims on me. A society where a writer has to calculate the risk before putting his thoughts and emotions to pen for fear that it might provoke a riot, where the voice of conscience is constantly suppressed for fear of isolation and violence, is an oppressive society that can any time take a fascist turn. I fear Kerala is not far from the realisation of this horrible possibility that would mark the end of all its reformist traditions and liberal aspirations. Another threat to the writer today comes from the commercialisation of language. Contemporary culture industry embraces not only literature but also music, dance, painting and sculpture besides mass communication through a tentacular network of publishing houses, periodicals, radio, television and the record and cassette industries. The final commodities not only reproduce art and literature and manipulate information, but affect the very definition, structure and content of culture and control tastes, attitudes and world-views. Pulp fiction, crime thrillers, television soap operas, formula films, spectator sports, and several forms of pop music not only sell images and ideologies but make people ‘live’ them. Truth is no more a pious abstraction, it can be manufactured here and now and sold in retail through culture-shops. Just as Baudillard speaks of savages who are indebted to ethnology for still being savages, it could be said that we are discoveries and creations of the media even as we have begun to identify ourselves more and more with the images they manufacture. Hegemonic cultural activity is a calculated exercise of power meant to shape the will of the people in ways which favour the dominant groups. It brings into operation a whole micro-physics of power that works invisibly, producing a cultural consensus that destroys popular autonomy and heterogeneity. But it also produces a diametrically opposite, avant-garde art. Adorno, Brecht and Benjamin were right in upholding modern avant-garde art against the philistine mass culture that became the bedrock of fascim. Their position, I hold to be extremely relevant now to our own national situation where a macabre cultural equation is being worked out between the neo-colonial and revivalist forces. The exercise of power in institutions of culture is seldom direct and visible. It is so subtle that it even appears as a kind of freedom. Consider the communication network: it is wrong to think that reality comes first and then there is communication. Reality, for man, is constructed and transformed by communication that always conceals an attitude in its tone, form or style. A reader who gets addicted to a newspaper, a form of fiction or a programme on the radio or television tends to forget that its world-view is only one of the many ways of interpreting reality. In systems like ours, the public involved in communication is continuously being extended, but ownership and control of the means of communication are being narrowed through the establishment of monopolies. Expansion does not necessarily mean growth; it is easier to devise a quick-selling synthetic culture than to struggle for a genuinely new and liberating one. A close look at our popular fiction,
film or television will show how they fill the silence of
the people with articulations of the dominant groups.
They colonise our consciousness through their
manufactured images and invisible weltanschauungs.
There is little sharing of knowledge or experience here;
the packaging of experience -- its surface gloss and
external fascination In such an atmosphere, writing also is inevitably drawn into the market in various ways. The writer is forced to be loud, to evade suggestive or complex articulations of reality, to simplify experience, to attend to the prevailing tastes of the majority corrupted by other media as well as pulp literature, to have his/her products hyped so that it gets national or international attention. In short, writing tends to become a kind of advertisement in the age of advertisement where the loudest bidder carries the day. The consciousness that he/she is using the same dishonest language that is being used for commercial or political propaganda for his/her poetry or fiction makes the writer feel guilty, just as in the age of Hitler and Goebbels genuine German writers found it difficult to speak the truth for every word carried the memory of untruth and the stench of the gaschambers. I find today that my own poetry, especially when I have to speak of intimate experiences, is becoming but a stammer, an attempt to converse doomed at the very outset to failure. The death of language is the greatest threat to the freedom of expression and both communal and commercial forces seem to be conspiring to throttle the honest Word. When writing and art degenerate into an arm of state diplomacy, a blood-thirsty revivalism or a greedy consumer industry, one is compelled either to withdraw or to convert one’s art into a form of rebellion, as pure, glistening and challenging as a pinch of salt raised against a monstrous empire. [GO TOP]
Mihir Bhattacharya Whose Cinema is it Anyway? The experience of seeing Bombay in Calcutta in 1996 was mildly unsettling. Waves of the media agitation had by then reached the placid backwaters of my city and public opinion was being stirred into taking political notice of the film, and also some film buffs were going to town over its stunning visuals, so one felt that there might be something more to the viewing than a mere ritual trip to the latest chat-site. The annoyance was therefore directed largely against oneself, at having been had once again by the media hype, and being compelled to sit through the entire length of this wretched melange of melody and mayhem. Later on, having read some of the more serious comments on the film, one realized the nature of the cinematic, that is institutional, gamble that had generated some of the filmic, that is textual, devices in the narrative; one also understood the nature of the nexus that exists between the entertainment industry and the political bosses. The state apparatus of censorship had interfered only mildly with the version presented to it; far more important was the mandate of the local political mafia in Mumbai. Once the don of the largest network of Hindu hoodlums had certified it as a damned good film, the distributors could safely ignore the minority’s parochial objections. The film’s foray into a representation of communal riots is a commercial and political gamble; it pushes against the limits of the representable in the same way that the recent spate of disaster movies had done. The problems become largely technical, because both the sponsors of the film and the political bosses realise the advantage of foregrounding the dangerous signs of the times. Valuable publicity for the mafia, huge box-office for the sponsors, large gains for the state exchequer. The riots become an input -- just like train disasters and floods and earthquakes -- which does not contradict the bitty logic of the narrative ensemble, and feeds the assumed desire for melodrama. The specular demands are met on a grand scale: large bodies of men milling round with lethal weapons and lots of blood and fire and violent running and shrieking. It beats the previous records of crowd management. The song-and-dance routines are superbly executed. And though the hero had as much expression on his face as a curried potato, the heroine was dumb but sexy. What more can you demand ? The business of cinema is a business of collective desire. Its freedom therefore is more a matter of commercial politics than state intervention. If we want to explore the relative freedom or unfreedom of the moving image, we have to look into the configuration of the textual strategies as they respond to the politics of desire. Noises are made from time to time about the importance of cinema and television in national life. Ministers proudly proclaim India’s leading position in film-making as well as the reach and variety of Doordarshan. Those who are out of power attack the government for neglect of these media. The left is worried about the centralised political control of television and unbridled vulgarity of commercial cinema. The communalist right froth at the loss of traditional values. Articles are written by academics and journalists about damaging consequences of addiction to the idiot box. Distinguished citizens, artists and intellectuals express concern over sex and violence on the screen. One would think that all the important people are agreed on the enormous social significance of the institutions of the moving image. There are two sides to this consensus. One is that the moving image has an impact on consciousness and consequently on opinions and behaviour. The second is that these institutions, therefore, should have a national mission, lofty or utilitarian or enlightening, according to choice. This linked understanding is the source of a good many of the public pronouncements made regarding the visual media. The debate over Bombay neatly illustrates this. But behind the public position -- and many of these are surely honest beliefs -- there is the widespread cultural reception of cinema (and television ) as mere entertainment, not to be taken seriously. A deep cleft is assumed to exist between the world of serious concerns and the sphere of desire and pleasure; and it causes no surprise that a distinguished member of the urban elite -- doctor, bureaucrat, politician, professor, technocrat, journalist -- has a sufficient degree of split in his/ her personality so as to engage in serious professional work with the full deployment of all mental capabilities and then switch over to a diet of undemanding entertainment in hours of relaxation. The commercial masala films and Doordarshan programmes have one of their social roots in this phenomenon. The case of the urban elite may raise eyebrows a little, because they alone maintain the thin veneer of ‘modernity’ in today’s India -- parliamentary politics, English medium instruction, newspapers, magazines, novels, amateur theatre, western music, discussion groups, social work, gender and environmental consciousness, fashion, love-marriage, gadgets, cuisine, foreign travel and so on. One would have thought that this social category would be more inclined towards realist and experimental cinema and relatively sophisticated fiction and non-fiction on television . But the regressive pull of the traditional mindset is so strong and the forms of pre-modern entertainment are so comprehensively adapted for technological media, with support flooding in from the western post-modern regime of images, that the modern Indian is not yet in a position to discriminate between the modern and the pre-modern or to realise the dangerous portents of proto-fascism in the operation of both the global entertainment market and state institutions. If the masala movie and its melodramatic off-shoots on television stand for anything in civil society, it is the ideological apparatus of unreason. A comparative study of devotion to cults, pilgrimages, gurus, astrology and palmistry, the ostentatious money-spinning splurge of both Hindu and Muslim festivities and rampant consumerism fed by the global apparatus of advertisement, will drive home the point that the adapted joys of social celebration often have an undercurrent of terror. Let us consider for one moment this cult of joy on the screen. The female dancer has been transported from the traditional Indian entertainment into its scheme of things by commercial cinema. Earlier she used to be the vamp, combining the slots of gangster moll and cabaret dancer; these days the heroine herself must bring together the impossible polarities of public culture and private virtue. Given the proto-realist conventions of the masala films, the woman’s subjectivity is split several ways in single biographical order -- shameless whore and modest virgin, modern girl and traditional bride, village belle and bazaar entertainer -- without any pretext of consistency or causal development. The construction of a single character thus parallels the construction of the whole text: a basket of discourses which must provide melodrama, moralising, song, dance, villainy, eroticism, fights, rape, chase, heroism, filial piety, religiosity, patriotism and so on in a single narrative format. Given the exigencies of this disjointed narrative, the female dancer’s smile invites the violence and privileges it. Significantly, in all big- budget masala films, the song-dance sequences and the fights are separately directed by specialists and then thrust head and shoulders into the main story-line. The dancer in Bombay is an example. The pleasure of watching a female dancer in a commercial film is thus consequent upon the foregrounding that is an inseparable part of the stop-go-stop narrative. We are invited to shift our attention from the story-line to the spectacle whenever such a set piece occurs. The narrative stops moving when the dancer comes into the frame. Alone, or in company with a symmetrically got-up chorus, she cavorts across the screen in an overt invitation to consume her commoditised image. Pressed into a costume which transforms her into a bundle of prescribed anatomical bumps, flinging her limbs about to the command of a patriarchal camera, strenuously fixing her steps to the rhythm of orgasmic music, she maintains a smile on her face throughout what can only be described as a testing ordeal. The pleasure she invites the viewer to is thus implicated in a double degradation: that of the performer and of the spectator. The exchange of meaning between metropolis and region is mediated through the existence of an elite which is prepared to wear the mantle of modernity made up of shallow devices. Integration into the global codes of dress, drinks, snacks, (not meals, though), entertainment and information parallels and facilitates the opening up of the economy to the penetration of TNCs. Popular cinema, with the soaps and serials, apes the conspicuous consumption which is supposed to mark the lifestyle of the west. There is a convergence here of semi-feudal values with those of post-modernism. Spectacle is all. Desire is the constitutive principle of text-making. Realism and reason go by the board. As pre-modern and pre-realist narratives dominate the screen, post-realist and post-modern values come charging into the weak areas left open by the moral economy of semi-feudalism. Commercials and music videos fit beautifully into the representational universe of Indian commerce in entertainment. Reality itself is problematised; reason placed in jeopardy. But the journey into realism does not negate the pleasure we expect from spectacle and narration. A fairly common notion is that realism is a grim spoilsport forever trying to deny the exigencies of desire. There is some ground for supporting the west which held that the periodical move towards censorship was due to moralism. There have been schools of thought and opinions which have made intermittent attempts at cultural policing. Normally these are transient phenomena or solitary interventions, and strong cultural practices have nearly always been able to overcome puritanical objections to particular kinds of pleasure. Plato’s charges against poetry or the puritanical attack on English drama of the Renaissance look paltry and irrelevant today, whatever be their philosophical or historical significance. But the distrust of pleasure, and its larger premise, the fear of freedom, have had an important bearing on the moral economy of the western societies, resulting in censorship, harassment and persecution , the most notorious instance being the Roman Catholic institution of the Index, which was abolished as recently as 1966. However, the Roman Catholic world-view permitted a good deal of colour and pageantry and pomp, and tolerated secular festivities as long as the church was given its due. It was the austere outlook of Protestant puritanism which sought to regulate the entirety of human life -- private and public alike -- on the premise of the eternal and unredeemable guilt of mankind. Pleasure is sinful; life is an uncertain wait for Christ’s promise of salvation. This brand of puritanism was a transitional ingredient in the formation of the bourgeois mind, and a necessary prelude to the secularisation of European culture. God is then a remote and unknowable reference point, and man is left free to decide his own destiny. A secular outlook, a belief in practical reason, an urge to understand the world in material terms -- all this developed in tandem with major economic transformation of feudal societies. The puritan ethos might have been grim, but it went some way towards organising the world on more practical lines, and preparing the European mind for more sophisticated pleasures of realism. The long line of realist fiction and drama, with the notion of secular universe and a scientific causality, and with ordinary human beings occupying the centre stage, indicated the firm line of advance that early cinema could usefully pursue. In a sense, Pather Panchali demonstrated for Indian cinema the possibilities of utilising the legacy of realist narrative already present in many Indian languages. Satyajit Ray’s lead, followed by his contemporaries and younger directors, showed that a break from the pre-realist mode was both feasible and welcome. Commercial cinema has continued its pre-realist habits, going through several mutations in its long life, and from available evidence, including Bombay, there is little prospect at the moment that the masala industry in Hindi or Tamil or Telugu will learn anything from either Indian or foreign realist models. A great deal of technical gadgetry has come in, sophisticated camera work and editing are the order of the day, the money-spinning lavishness of production is now legendary, but the language of narration and the world-view which it assumes remain obscurantist and regressive to the core. The market finds that a travesty of traditional popular entertainment--the Jatra, the Nautanki, the Tamasha, and so on, will sell once in a while; the fact that nine out of ten masala films flop appears to be no deterrent to the industry. And, television carries the torch with blithe unconcern. Meanwhile, the tyranny of one kind of pleasure drives out the possibility of different ways of organising a part of our national culture. Considering the Indian penchant for spectacle, of which the moving image has become a part, the backwardness of mainstream Indian cinema and of television becomes a leading factor in the construction of the regressive mind. What I have tried to put together is an Indian perspective on the possibilities of freedom in the construction of the moving image. Normally, freedom is viewed against institutional constraints, which are supposed to generate oblique or negotiated or oppositional textual practice. In Indian cinema, it has seldom been the case that the state apparatus has interfered in realist or experimental efforts in the media. This may very well be the consequence of the marginal existence of serious cinema, compared to the vast quantity of commercial productions. And, it must be acknowledged that our film-makers have not quite risked their careers or their producers’ investments in bold avant-garde experiments. The constraints happen to be inbred shackles on creativity. Commercial cinema has seldom chosen to overcome its fear of freedom. One does not see any change in the foreseeable future. The cinema as social practice in India is still implicated in pre-modern and pre-realist values, as a result of which private investment seldom steps out of line. If freedom of cultural practice is viewed positively rather than negatively, Indian cinema in general has a long way to go before it catches up with its own pioneers. [GO TOP]
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