I write this blog with a sense of unrequited shame and impotent anger.
George Ade, an American humorist and playwright, once said: “In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of popular entertainment.” In India, television channels, without exception, wouldn’t think twice of showing worms mating if it would give them ratings. So, why should Imagine TV be an exception?
The biography of Sameer Nair, channel CEO, on the channel’s website claims: Imagine has carved an identity for itself with its unique, break-through reality programming and soul stirring dramas. Ramayan, Rakhi Ka Swayamvar, Bandini, Jyoti, Raaz Pichle Janam Ka, Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayega, Devi are some of the programs that have helped establish Imagine firmly in the market.
Nair can now proudly extend his biography to say that his channel’s programmes can also be credited with the death, character assassination or public humiliation of ordinary Indian citizens.
The reference is to the most obnoxious and inhuman of reality shows ever shown: Rakhi Ka Insaaf (RKI).
On November 11, Laxman Prasad, a 25-year-old from Jhansi in central India passed away. Apparently he had stopped eating following a bout of extreme depression. It was caused by his appearance, along with his wife he wedded earlier this year, on RKI, a sham reality show on human relationships. It is presented by the most disgusting television personality ever, who goes by the name of Rakhi Sawant. She has the authority to say anything, mostly the most foul, to the participants. That’s Imagine TV’s ode to liberalism, I suppose.
Reflecting on the marital discord between Prasad and his wife, Sawant called him names, including describing him as an ‘impotent’. After the show, Prasad went into depression which apparently caused his death.
His uncle told the media: “Ever since he was humiliated and called names by the anchor in the programme aired on October 23, he had become an object of rebuke. This had caused him mental agony and he stopped taking food. We had gone to the programme hoping that it would help resolve Laxman's marital problems with Anita, whom he had married on February 19 this year. However, instead of finding a solution, unfounded charges were levelled against us by Rakhi who also branded Laxman as impotent.”
A person whose own character is ever in question has the audacious power to question the character of the participant! (I may be accused of being a male chauvinist by those who feel if men can be characterless and abusive then women have an equal right to be so. So be it. If that is how they calculate gender equality then Rakhi Sawant is their emancipator!)
Earlier, a Muslim widow from Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh similarly fell foul in the show. Her son was in the custody of her sisters. On the show, Rakhi Sawant described the widow as characterless. A secret video showing the widow embracing a man was also shown. Since then the lady is missing from her home. If she is still alive, she would understand what Prasad went through.
Who murdered Prasad? Who is responsible for the video recording of the widow? Rakhi Sawant? No. She’s just a two-penny fiend in human shape – to borrow the phrase from Wodehouse -- who would have otherwise led a life of pathetic obscurity had not the greedy television industry raised her to this level for furthering their self interests in the name of socially uplifting entertainment. It is the television channel which is the culprit.
I have my faults, but when it comes to the programmes of Imagine TV, I draw the line. As a journalist I have seen worse, but this touches the nadir. I ensure that my daughter does not get to watch it at all. Living outside India, we initially thought that our daughter would get a peek into Indian culture if she watched Indian channels. Initially when it was new, we used to watch Imagine TV. Then it dawned in me that if people outside India watched its shows, they would not be incorrect in assuming that women in India are generally rascals, without character, vengeful, deceiving, lustful, cheating, diabolic. In sum: Dirty. And the men, unrivaled followers of de Sade.
Because that is how the women are characterized in Imagine TV’s shows. Take Jyoti, the lead in the eponymous serial. An educated girl with a supposedly independent mind, she comes across as a dumb muff, willing to suffer ignominies without a word. Or, the lead character in Bandini, who calls her husband ‘maalik’ (lord). (As if suffering oppression stoically is the Indian way to true womanhood! I don’t know what the women in the families of the channel bosses think of these shows.)
Or the other reality show in which dozens of Indian girls shamelessly parade in front of Rahul Mahajan, who has a record for using drugs and beating his wife (later, wives), for one of them to be worthy enough to be chosen as his wife. The woman who finally won, got to marry him but left him shortly complaining he used to beat and abuse her!
Indian or no Indian, I don’t want my daughter to draw inspiration from such characterisations. More importantly, I don’t want my daughter to get the impression that women in India are usually in possession of such a character as portrayed by Imagine TV. By showing women as eternally facing oppression, Imagine TV is only espousing the cause of the male chauvinist pig and certainly not that of emancipation of women. If Sameer Nair and company think otherwise they better see a shrink.
But now they should be staring at a prison sentence. Prasad’s death has raised, or lowered, the bar of civic sense. Thanks to them, we have long crossed the threshold of decency and decorum. We have now entered the arena of violence and mayhem in the name of family entertainment. It is as if Imagine TV has turned the clock back to Roman times when popular culture was epitomized by humans killing humans in a stadium. If Imagine TV is not restrained now, we will soon see live incest and orgies. We are a step away from being Caligulas.
Someone said there is no point burning dirty books; better make people not read them. I don’t prescribe to it in general, but in the case of Imagine TV I am certain it should meet a similar fate. In the name of reality shows, it is cheating ordinary people, it is guilty of breaching privacy of people (as in videotaping in the Saharanpur widow case), it is manipulating the baser instinct of people – voyeurism – it is building aspirations for a recidivist society.
But in the larger context, why blame Imagine TV? People do a lot of things for money, even picking it up with their mouths from a pile of shit. The blame lies in us, Indians. By watching such programmes we are bringing our repressive baser instincts into our family domains. The Sameer Nairs wouldn’t come up with such shows if they didn’t know us better. We get what we deserve. Shame on us.
Last year, Pallavi, a 32-year-old mother committed suicide after watching a reality show called Sach Ka Saamna. Early this year a young Mumbai girl committed suicide after not performing well in the Boogie-Woogie show.
There are many more Prasads and Pallavis in our families awaiting their fateful moments. I will ensure that my daughter leads a happy life with true knowledge of Indian culture certainly not learnt from the Indian television distortionists. The rest can go to hell if they volunteer to fall prey to the culture, nay, killer vultures of Indian general entertainment television.
Someone who read this piece tried to advise me to keep my cool and be a responsible writer. I thought, if Rakhi Sawant has the freedom to say what she wants, I have a similar freedom too. The only difference is, her words kill people and mine, I hope in vain, kills the show itself.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Friday, October 1, 2010
Is it Ram save the believers? Or save Ram from the believers?
The Indian judicial system is insane. The Ayodhya dispute judgment is proof enough. The judgment is a travesty of justice. It is a majority (2-1) judgment only because it technically conforms to the legal definition of a majority decision. Possibly, the dissent gives it the legitimacy it lacks.
I am told I can criticize judgments, but not question the motives of judges. Here, I am only questioning their beliefs. You will not be chastised for thinking the judges were overawed by the presence of Lord Ram as a petitioner. Deconstruct the two vocal judges; find a Hindu and a Muslim. Justice, go shag.
I am still not clear what the judges really wanted to say. The only point they agreed upon was to divide the disputed place among the three involved parties. Otherwise, they disagreed on everything else. Worse, their pronouncements were based on myth and hearsay couched as ‘belief’. Belief of the majority.
Let me take you through the charade.
1. Which structure existed before the Hindu lumpens installed some idols inside it in 1949?
The Hindu judge says: Disputed structure was always treated, considered and believed to be a mosque and practised by Mohammedans for worship accordingly.
Then why should the area on which that structure stood before it was demolished be given to the Hindus? The same Hindu judge says: …. the part of the land which is held by this Court to be the place of birth of Lord Rama according to the faith and belief of Hindus.
He accepts it was a Muslim structure, but still gives it to the Hindus. Why? Not because of evidence provided by the Archaeological Survey of India. But because of the belief of Hindus. Then what about the Muslim belief which the same judge also attests to? The Hindu judge went by the majority belief.
2. Who built the three-domed structure?
The Hindu judge says: The plaintiffs have failed to prove that the building in dispute was built by Babar or by Mir Baqi. In the absence of any otherwise pleadings and material it is difficult to hold as to when and by whom the disputed structure was constructed but this much is clear that the same was constructed before the visit of Joseph Tieffenthaler in Oudh area between 1766 to 1771.
The Muslim judge says: The disputed structure was constructed as mosque by or under orders of Babar. It is not proved by direct evidence that premises in dispute including constructed portion belonged to Babar or the person who constructed the mosque or under whose orders it was constructed.
Can you believe both judges looked at the same evidence to come to such conclusions! Why? Because one was Hindu, the other was Muslim.
3. Was a structure demolished to build the three-domed structure?
The Hindu judge says: The building in dispute was constructed after demolition of Non-Islamic religious structure, i.e., a Hindu temple.
The Muslim judge says: No temple was demolished for constructing the mosque. Mosque was constructed over the ruins of temples which were lying in utter ruins since a very long time before the construction of mosque and some material thereof was used in construction of the mosque.
The Muslim judge at least obliquely admits that the ruins over which the structure was built were of temples. But the Hindu judge believes for sure that any non-Islamic structure has to be a Hindu temple. Simple man, he.
4. What is the earliest evidence of the three-domed structure being used for prayers?
The Hindu judge: It is held that the muslims at least from 1860 and onwards have visited the inner courtyard in the premises in dispute and have offered Namaj there at. The last Namaj was offered on 16th December, 1949. It is held that building in question was not exclusively used by the members of muslim community. After 1856-57 outer courtyard exclusively used by Hindu and inner courtyard had been visited for the purpose of worship by the members of both the communities.
The Muslim judge: That much before 1855 Ram Chabutra and Seeta Rasoi had come into existence and Hindus were worshipping in the same. It was very very unique and absolutely unprecedented situation that in side the boundary wall and compound of the mosque Hindu religious places were there which were actually being worshipped along with offerings of Namaz by Muslims in the mosque.
A rare agreement that both Hindus and Muslims were worshipping in the same area in the mid-19th century, but that it were the Muslims who were solely worshipping inside the three-domed structure. The Hindu judge would have admitted, at least to himself, that the Hindus had never, never worshipped inside the three-domed structure. Which logically means that the Hindus violated all ethics by stealthily installing some Hindu idols inside the three-domed structure in 1949. Remember, this was just two years after India’s independence and the violent Partition which saw many Muslims from around Ayodhya migrate to Pakistan, leaving their homes and property to be usurped by the locals. The locals could have been Hindus.
5. Was there a Hindu idol inside the three-domed structure before 1949?
The Hindu judge: The idol in question kept under the Shikhar existed there prior to 6th December, 1992 but not from time immemorial and instead kept thereat in the night of 22nd/23rd December, 1949.
The Muslim judge: That for a very long time till the construction of the mosque it was treated/believed by Hindus that some where in a very large area of which premises in dispute is a very small part birth place of Lord Ram was situated, however, the belief did not relate to any specified small area within that bigger area specifically the premises in dispute.
The Muslim judge is more forthcoming on this issue.
6. When and how did the Hindus claim for the first time that their deity Ram was born at the site of the three-domed structure?
The Hindu judge: It is held that the place of birth, as believed and worshipped by Hindus, is the area covered under the central dome of the three domed structure, i.e., the disputed structure in the inner courtyard in the premises of dispute.
The Muslim judge: That after some time of construction of the mosque Hindus started identifying the premises in dispute as exact birth place of Lord Ram or a place wherein exact birth place was situated. That for some decades before 1949 Hindus started treating/believing the place beneath the Central dome of mosque (where at present make sift temple stands) to be exact birth place of Lord Ram.
The Muslim judge is more forthcoming on the issue than the Hindu judge who understands belief.
The above are but a sniff. Read the full text of the judgment for the fragrance. By the way, I don’t know if the Hindu deity called Ram is aware he has been dragged to court as well by his believers?
Here is the suit: O.O.S. No. 5 of 1989 (R.S.NO. 236/1989
Bhagwan Sri Rama Virajman & Ors. Vs. Sri Rajendra Singh & Ors.
Here is the explanation of the suit: The instant suit was filed on behalf of the deities and Sri Ram Janm Bhumi through the next friend, praying that the defendants be restrained not to interfere in the construction of the temple of plaintiff nos. 1 and 2 on the ground that the deities are perpetual minors and against them Limitation Laws do not run.
So, is Ram a god or a human?
Anyway, here is what the court has to say on Ram: This Court is of the view that place of birth that is Ram Janm Bhumi is a juristic person. The deity also attained the divinity like Agni, Vayu, Kedarnath. Asthan is personified as the spirit of divine worshipped as the birth place of Ram Lala or Lord Ram as a child. Spirit of divine ever remains present every where at all times for any one to invoke at any shape or form in accordance with his own aspirations and it can be shapeless and formless also.
I read and re-read this paragraph and even pinched myself because I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Was it part of a judgment or an RSS pamphlet?
One can go on and on taking potshots at the judgment which runs into thousands of pages. It is already getting boring and had it not been considered the most crucial judgment in India’s history – as a dumb tv journalist in India kept on telling his believers – it wouldn’t have been given a second glance even by a third-rate lawyer.
As of today, India is no longer a secular state. It is a Hindu nation exhibiting theocratic tendencies. Evidence need not assist the cause of justice. Spiritual belief, of the majority kind, is the quiet, safe, substitute. For all the cynicism, the judgment may actually help resolve the Ayodhya dispute. But even then, the fact will remain that the reconciliation was achieved on the basis of a judgment based on puerile, but politically safe, grounds. It makes us Hindus first, Indians next. It is a new politico-religious binary we have to get used to.
I have half a mind to meet a local criminal in Patna, the capital of Bihar, who, when I used to work there in the 1980s, decided to install a statue of a Hindu monkey god right in the middle of a busy street. In a few months, he erected a brick structure around the statue. A brief while later, he hired a priest to perform ‘puja’. Slowly but surely, the locals, who originally protested against the installation saying it was causing traffic jams, started visitng the place. And soon, it was called a temple. When I visited Patna a few years ago, I saw this criminal had now turned into a bearded man in saffron clothing and wooden sandals. One of his henchmen told me he had given up crime because the temple was paying him much more. I want to tell this fellow to encourage some locals to file a suit against him and his temple. The court will eventually side with him because it will believe in his belief in his god sitting on the middle of the street. So what if the evidence shows that the god is obstructing traffic?
In India anything can happen. Because Indians are foolish believers in a polity which does not want them but their majority status to serve its own ends. Left, Centre or Right. It’s the turn of the Right today. India Shining, those who killed a Gandhi and brought down a mosque once said. India Believing, they say now, mockingly. Ram serves all. Believe it.
I am told I can criticize judgments, but not question the motives of judges. Here, I am only questioning their beliefs. You will not be chastised for thinking the judges were overawed by the presence of Lord Ram as a petitioner. Deconstruct the two vocal judges; find a Hindu and a Muslim. Justice, go shag.
I am still not clear what the judges really wanted to say. The only point they agreed upon was to divide the disputed place among the three involved parties. Otherwise, they disagreed on everything else. Worse, their pronouncements were based on myth and hearsay couched as ‘belief’. Belief of the majority.
Let me take you through the charade.
1. Which structure existed before the Hindu lumpens installed some idols inside it in 1949?
The Hindu judge says: Disputed structure was always treated, considered and believed to be a mosque and practised by Mohammedans for worship accordingly.
Then why should the area on which that structure stood before it was demolished be given to the Hindus? The same Hindu judge says: …. the part of the land which is held by this Court to be the place of birth of Lord Rama according to the faith and belief of Hindus.
He accepts it was a Muslim structure, but still gives it to the Hindus. Why? Not because of evidence provided by the Archaeological Survey of India. But because of the belief of Hindus. Then what about the Muslim belief which the same judge also attests to? The Hindu judge went by the majority belief.
2. Who built the three-domed structure?
The Hindu judge says: The plaintiffs have failed to prove that the building in dispute was built by Babar or by Mir Baqi. In the absence of any otherwise pleadings and material it is difficult to hold as to when and by whom the disputed structure was constructed but this much is clear that the same was constructed before the visit of Joseph Tieffenthaler in Oudh area between 1766 to 1771.
The Muslim judge says: The disputed structure was constructed as mosque by or under orders of Babar. It is not proved by direct evidence that premises in dispute including constructed portion belonged to Babar or the person who constructed the mosque or under whose orders it was constructed.
Can you believe both judges looked at the same evidence to come to such conclusions! Why? Because one was Hindu, the other was Muslim.
3. Was a structure demolished to build the three-domed structure?
The Hindu judge says: The building in dispute was constructed after demolition of Non-Islamic religious structure, i.e., a Hindu temple.
The Muslim judge says: No temple was demolished for constructing the mosque. Mosque was constructed over the ruins of temples which were lying in utter ruins since a very long time before the construction of mosque and some material thereof was used in construction of the mosque.
The Muslim judge at least obliquely admits that the ruins over which the structure was built were of temples. But the Hindu judge believes for sure that any non-Islamic structure has to be a Hindu temple. Simple man, he.
4. What is the earliest evidence of the three-domed structure being used for prayers?
The Hindu judge: It is held that the muslims at least from 1860 and onwards have visited the inner courtyard in the premises in dispute and have offered Namaj there at. The last Namaj was offered on 16th December, 1949. It is held that building in question was not exclusively used by the members of muslim community. After 1856-57 outer courtyard exclusively used by Hindu and inner courtyard had been visited for the purpose of worship by the members of both the communities.
The Muslim judge: That much before 1855 Ram Chabutra and Seeta Rasoi had come into existence and Hindus were worshipping in the same. It was very very unique and absolutely unprecedented situation that in side the boundary wall and compound of the mosque Hindu religious places were there which were actually being worshipped along with offerings of Namaz by Muslims in the mosque.
A rare agreement that both Hindus and Muslims were worshipping in the same area in the mid-19th century, but that it were the Muslims who were solely worshipping inside the three-domed structure. The Hindu judge would have admitted, at least to himself, that the Hindus had never, never worshipped inside the three-domed structure. Which logically means that the Hindus violated all ethics by stealthily installing some Hindu idols inside the three-domed structure in 1949. Remember, this was just two years after India’s independence and the violent Partition which saw many Muslims from around Ayodhya migrate to Pakistan, leaving their homes and property to be usurped by the locals. The locals could have been Hindus.
5. Was there a Hindu idol inside the three-domed structure before 1949?
The Hindu judge: The idol in question kept under the Shikhar existed there prior to 6th December, 1992 but not from time immemorial and instead kept thereat in the night of 22nd/23rd December, 1949.
The Muslim judge: That for a very long time till the construction of the mosque it was treated/believed by Hindus that some where in a very large area of which premises in dispute is a very small part birth place of Lord Ram was situated, however, the belief did not relate to any specified small area within that bigger area specifically the premises in dispute.
The Muslim judge is more forthcoming on this issue.
6. When and how did the Hindus claim for the first time that their deity Ram was born at the site of the three-domed structure?
The Hindu judge: It is held that the place of birth, as believed and worshipped by Hindus, is the area covered under the central dome of the three domed structure, i.e., the disputed structure in the inner courtyard in the premises of dispute.
The Muslim judge: That after some time of construction of the mosque Hindus started identifying the premises in dispute as exact birth place of Lord Ram or a place wherein exact birth place was situated. That for some decades before 1949 Hindus started treating/believing the place beneath the Central dome of mosque (where at present make sift temple stands) to be exact birth place of Lord Ram.
The Muslim judge is more forthcoming on the issue than the Hindu judge who understands belief.
The above are but a sniff. Read the full text of the judgment for the fragrance. By the way, I don’t know if the Hindu deity called Ram is aware he has been dragged to court as well by his believers?
Here is the suit: O.O.S. No. 5 of 1989 (R.S.NO. 236/1989
Bhagwan Sri Rama Virajman & Ors. Vs. Sri Rajendra Singh & Ors.
Here is the explanation of the suit: The instant suit was filed on behalf of the deities and Sri Ram Janm Bhumi through the next friend, praying that the defendants be restrained not to interfere in the construction of the temple of plaintiff nos. 1 and 2 on the ground that the deities are perpetual minors and against them Limitation Laws do not run.
So, is Ram a god or a human?
Anyway, here is what the court has to say on Ram: This Court is of the view that place of birth that is Ram Janm Bhumi is a juristic person. The deity also attained the divinity like Agni, Vayu, Kedarnath. Asthan is personified as the spirit of divine worshipped as the birth place of Ram Lala or Lord Ram as a child. Spirit of divine ever remains present every where at all times for any one to invoke at any shape or form in accordance with his own aspirations and it can be shapeless and formless also.
I read and re-read this paragraph and even pinched myself because I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Was it part of a judgment or an RSS pamphlet?
One can go on and on taking potshots at the judgment which runs into thousands of pages. It is already getting boring and had it not been considered the most crucial judgment in India’s history – as a dumb tv journalist in India kept on telling his believers – it wouldn’t have been given a second glance even by a third-rate lawyer.
As of today, India is no longer a secular state. It is a Hindu nation exhibiting theocratic tendencies. Evidence need not assist the cause of justice. Spiritual belief, of the majority kind, is the quiet, safe, substitute. For all the cynicism, the judgment may actually help resolve the Ayodhya dispute. But even then, the fact will remain that the reconciliation was achieved on the basis of a judgment based on puerile, but politically safe, grounds. It makes us Hindus first, Indians next. It is a new politico-religious binary we have to get used to.
I have half a mind to meet a local criminal in Patna, the capital of Bihar, who, when I used to work there in the 1980s, decided to install a statue of a Hindu monkey god right in the middle of a busy street. In a few months, he erected a brick structure around the statue. A brief while later, he hired a priest to perform ‘puja’. Slowly but surely, the locals, who originally protested against the installation saying it was causing traffic jams, started visitng the place. And soon, it was called a temple. When I visited Patna a few years ago, I saw this criminal had now turned into a bearded man in saffron clothing and wooden sandals. One of his henchmen told me he had given up crime because the temple was paying him much more. I want to tell this fellow to encourage some locals to file a suit against him and his temple. The court will eventually side with him because it will believe in his belief in his god sitting on the middle of the street. So what if the evidence shows that the god is obstructing traffic?
In India anything can happen. Because Indians are foolish believers in a polity which does not want them but their majority status to serve its own ends. Left, Centre or Right. It’s the turn of the Right today. India Shining, those who killed a Gandhi and brought down a mosque once said. India Believing, they say now, mockingly. Ram serves all. Believe it.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
NRIs? Grow up. They are HTIs: Happen To be Indians
I was watching the latest Bollywood film released this week, ‘We Are Family’ at a theatre in Leicester. Something was nagging me. Something seemed out of place. The puzzle solved itself when the film ended with the scroll of acknowledgements.
The background score appeared in the top third of the scroll and quite low down appeared the names of the playback singers alongside the songs sequenced in the way they appear in the film.
It was a typical Hollywood scroll.
More to come. I did not see a single visual of India in the entire film. Part of it was shot in some Mumbai studio, but the outside scenes were entirely Australian. Sydney, to be precise. I didn’t see a single brown face other than the actors. And half the time they conversed in English. The Hindi they spoke you won’t hear anywhere in India. It’s typical NRI Hindi. I know because my daughter speaks the same way.
If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that it was a Hollywood film about an Indian family Down Under.
I think the globalisation of Bollywood since Dilwale Dulhaniyan Le Jayenge and Hum Aapke Hain Kaun – which introduced the non-resident Gujarati life-style to India – to Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna and Namaste London -- which swayed under the influence of western family values – to New York and Kites – which still had something of India lingering in them – is now complete with We Are Family.
Not just Bollywood, current films in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, even Oriya have begun to represent India in a non-Indian environment.
And why not? For instance, in my home town of Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh and the neighbouring city of Vijayawada, it is a fact that at least one member of each house lives abroad. The same is true, even if in varying degrees, for most states in India.
In the 1960s and 1970s, my paternal grandmother used to say it was a punishment visiting her children’s families in Delhi or Madras. There’s nothing in these cities, no culture, no ‘samskar’, no proper way of bringing up children, she would moan. But by the end of her life, she had travelled abroad more times than even some of her other sons and daughters! She could tell the difference between a burger and a ciabatta, told us that Universal is much better than the Vauhini Studio in Madras, didn’t like flying Air India and thought Des Pardes was the most un-Indian film she ever saw.
Her children who live abroad even today pay their annual visits to India, the men exchanging their loafers and jackets for the simple pant-and-shirt, the ladies digging out their sarees from the store rooms. They take their children on tours to Indian cities and temples in a faint attempt to pass on their Indianness to the next generation. But for the current generation – my cousins and their children -- Indianness ends with their names, that is, if ‘Subramanyam’ has not become ‘Mony’.
One of them wrote to me after seeing Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham: Guys like Amitabh Bachchan (who plays Shah Rukh Khan’s father) still exist in India? I asked the same chappie about We Are Family. He said: It’s cool. That’s how it is out here. Would you tell your children in a matter-of-fact manner that you had cancer, the Indian in me asked him. Why not? No point getting emotional about it. They’ll have to grow up one day and the best you can do is prepare them for the future. He said. Would an Indian mother, er, mom, agree to train another woman to take her place as shown in the film? The Indian in me wouldn’t let go. Where are you, cousin? A friend of mine brought home a step-dad for her children a month after the hubby died and they don’t have any problems. He intoned. I wanted to ask if anyone had cared to check how the children were adjusting. But I stopped myself.
We Are Family destroys many Indian assumptions, the foremost being you are an Indian wherever you are. Wrong. There is a clear disconnect between India and the Indian diaspora. India may continue to be delusional about Indians living abroad remaining Indian. Hardly. The concept of ‘pravasi bhartiya’ that the Pawars, Modis and Chandrababu Naidus institutionalised to promote the supposition that the Indian diaspora is the prime example of India shining is a charade.
Nine out of 10 Indians settled abroad did so because they hated the Indian system. Now they are Americans or Europeans and all the PIO cards India can print would not make them return ‘home’. They are married to their present, living cultures and they must be comfortable with it. If India wants to show them off as its brood, as a cap in its feather, let it. It doesn’t harm them. I have been away from India for nearly five years now and I am beginning to understand how the roots wither as generations expand. If Dev Patel, who played the protagonist kid in Slumdog Millionaire, prefers acting in Hollywood movies to Bollywood ones, no one can accuse him of being un-Indian.
There’s a video library in Leicester run by a Punjabi in his 50s who makes regular visits back home. He tells me that the VHS tapes and CDs of the pre-1990 Indian films are gathering dust because only the ‘buddhe log’ (old people) ask for them. The hot sellers are Indian films extensively shot abroad and show life-styles and cultures the youngsters can relate to. He thinks We Are Family is going to earn him much more than any other recent film.
What he says may be true for him, though I know that there is still a craze for the old B&Ws. Many families abroad send their children to Indian dance or music schools. They perform ‘puja’ during festivals, downloading the ‘vidhan’ (method of doing the puja) from the internet. The temples and gurdwaras get a regular stream of worshippers. But to interpret this as proof of them being Indian is a misnomer.
We Are Family sets the record straight. It reflects the current cultural moorings of a family in a setting far from Indian shores. It is coincidental that the said family happens to be of Indian origin. Remember, you don’t even know the surname of the family. You don’t see pictures of their parents and grand parents. You don’t know which part of India they come from and whether the cancer patient’s family in India had been informed. I don’t think you even see the ‘pundit’ who performs the marriage at the end of the film. You don’t see anyone, even the youngest child, weeping, save the patient herself. Emotions are kept to a minimum and you would find the relationships a bit cold by Indian standards. Not that there is dearth of either emotion or warmth. Only it is expressed in a way perhaps largely alien in India.
I can keep on dissecting the film, but the conclusion doesn’t change. We need to grow up. The USP of India lies within its own boundaries. Latching on to the diaspora doesn’t help. We have left it to Bollywood to reflect Indianness abroad. Ironic that it is a Bollywood film-maker who has latched on to the diaspora audience for his return on investment who drops the scales from our eyes.
The background score appeared in the top third of the scroll and quite low down appeared the names of the playback singers alongside the songs sequenced in the way they appear in the film.
It was a typical Hollywood scroll.
More to come. I did not see a single visual of India in the entire film. Part of it was shot in some Mumbai studio, but the outside scenes were entirely Australian. Sydney, to be precise. I didn’t see a single brown face other than the actors. And half the time they conversed in English. The Hindi they spoke you won’t hear anywhere in India. It’s typical NRI Hindi. I know because my daughter speaks the same way.
If I didn’t know better, I wouldn’t be blamed for thinking that it was a Hollywood film about an Indian family Down Under.
I think the globalisation of Bollywood since Dilwale Dulhaniyan Le Jayenge and Hum Aapke Hain Kaun – which introduced the non-resident Gujarati life-style to India – to Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham and Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna and Namaste London -- which swayed under the influence of western family values – to New York and Kites – which still had something of India lingering in them – is now complete with We Are Family.
Not just Bollywood, current films in Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, even Oriya have begun to represent India in a non-Indian environment.
And why not? For instance, in my home town of Machilipatnam in Andhra Pradesh and the neighbouring city of Vijayawada, it is a fact that at least one member of each house lives abroad. The same is true, even if in varying degrees, for most states in India.
In the 1960s and 1970s, my paternal grandmother used to say it was a punishment visiting her children’s families in Delhi or Madras. There’s nothing in these cities, no culture, no ‘samskar’, no proper way of bringing up children, she would moan. But by the end of her life, she had travelled abroad more times than even some of her other sons and daughters! She could tell the difference between a burger and a ciabatta, told us that Universal is much better than the Vauhini Studio in Madras, didn’t like flying Air India and thought Des Pardes was the most un-Indian film she ever saw.
Her children who live abroad even today pay their annual visits to India, the men exchanging their loafers and jackets for the simple pant-and-shirt, the ladies digging out their sarees from the store rooms. They take their children on tours to Indian cities and temples in a faint attempt to pass on their Indianness to the next generation. But for the current generation – my cousins and their children -- Indianness ends with their names, that is, if ‘Subramanyam’ has not become ‘Mony’.
One of them wrote to me after seeing Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham: Guys like Amitabh Bachchan (who plays Shah Rukh Khan’s father) still exist in India? I asked the same chappie about We Are Family. He said: It’s cool. That’s how it is out here. Would you tell your children in a matter-of-fact manner that you had cancer, the Indian in me asked him. Why not? No point getting emotional about it. They’ll have to grow up one day and the best you can do is prepare them for the future. He said. Would an Indian mother, er, mom, agree to train another woman to take her place as shown in the film? The Indian in me wouldn’t let go. Where are you, cousin? A friend of mine brought home a step-dad for her children a month after the hubby died and they don’t have any problems. He intoned. I wanted to ask if anyone had cared to check how the children were adjusting. But I stopped myself.
We Are Family destroys many Indian assumptions, the foremost being you are an Indian wherever you are. Wrong. There is a clear disconnect between India and the Indian diaspora. India may continue to be delusional about Indians living abroad remaining Indian. Hardly. The concept of ‘pravasi bhartiya’ that the Pawars, Modis and Chandrababu Naidus institutionalised to promote the supposition that the Indian diaspora is the prime example of India shining is a charade.
Nine out of 10 Indians settled abroad did so because they hated the Indian system. Now they are Americans or Europeans and all the PIO cards India can print would not make them return ‘home’. They are married to their present, living cultures and they must be comfortable with it. If India wants to show them off as its brood, as a cap in its feather, let it. It doesn’t harm them. I have been away from India for nearly five years now and I am beginning to understand how the roots wither as generations expand. If Dev Patel, who played the protagonist kid in Slumdog Millionaire, prefers acting in Hollywood movies to Bollywood ones, no one can accuse him of being un-Indian.
There’s a video library in Leicester run by a Punjabi in his 50s who makes regular visits back home. He tells me that the VHS tapes and CDs of the pre-1990 Indian films are gathering dust because only the ‘buddhe log’ (old people) ask for them. The hot sellers are Indian films extensively shot abroad and show life-styles and cultures the youngsters can relate to. He thinks We Are Family is going to earn him much more than any other recent film.
What he says may be true for him, though I know that there is still a craze for the old B&Ws. Many families abroad send their children to Indian dance or music schools. They perform ‘puja’ during festivals, downloading the ‘vidhan’ (method of doing the puja) from the internet. The temples and gurdwaras get a regular stream of worshippers. But to interpret this as proof of them being Indian is a misnomer.
We Are Family sets the record straight. It reflects the current cultural moorings of a family in a setting far from Indian shores. It is coincidental that the said family happens to be of Indian origin. Remember, you don’t even know the surname of the family. You don’t see pictures of their parents and grand parents. You don’t know which part of India they come from and whether the cancer patient’s family in India had been informed. I don’t think you even see the ‘pundit’ who performs the marriage at the end of the film. You don’t see anyone, even the youngest child, weeping, save the patient herself. Emotions are kept to a minimum and you would find the relationships a bit cold by Indian standards. Not that there is dearth of either emotion or warmth. Only it is expressed in a way perhaps largely alien in India.
I can keep on dissecting the film, but the conclusion doesn’t change. We need to grow up. The USP of India lies within its own boundaries. Latching on to the diaspora doesn’t help. We have left it to Bollywood to reflect Indianness abroad. Ironic that it is a Bollywood film-maker who has latched on to the diaspora audience for his return on investment who drops the scales from our eyes.
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Aarushi: Her killer's is a lesser crime than sleaze-starved Indian media's
This is with reference to an article by Mr. Manoj Mitta in The Times of India on August 8, 2010, headlined ‘Aarushi coverage reignites debate on media coverage’. This is the link to that article: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/Aarushi-coverage-reignites-debate-on-media-restraint/articleshow/6273245.cms
Dear Manoj Mitta,
How easy for you to say that in the Arushi murder investigation case, the ‘real’ culprit is the CBI?
Just as the person who gives a bribe is as much a culprit as the one asking for it, the media is a ‘real’ culprit too.
Take your own paper, TOI, for instance. Why didn’t you or any one else report the grounds on which the supreme court issued notices to TOI along with two others?
Was it self-preservation or self-censorship? I can understand the journalists today need to survive first in order to cry from the pulpit. But surely self-restraint could have been observed by TOI when reporting about the case in the first place?
What can I say about the journalistic sobriety and corporate responsibility of a paper as TOI which can do anything to earn a penny. Remember, how TOI once sold its own mast head as advertising space? For that matter, it was a tough experience opening the link to your article in the TOI as I had to negotiate links to marriage and advertisement sites popping up endlessly before I could read what you wrote on such a serious issue.
You should go through the TOI archives to see how precipitously anti-Arushi its coverage was from day one.
The larger issue is the media, in India, today is a self-server. Nothing else. Had Arushi belonged to a poor family living in a slum, the reputable TOI wouldn’t even have bothered to covered the original crime in the first place. This is true for each and every publication and broadcaster who claims to undergo a journalistic routine in this country.
The Supreme Court correctly described the media as ‘irresponsible press’. Only the court waited thus far to say it. We have heard of the Indian courts suo moto trying to restrain excesses of various kinds in the past. What happened to the courts in Arushi’s case? Weren’t the judges reading the papers? Or did they realise that the late Arushi’s reputation had been tarnished by the media only after her father went to the court?
When the Arushi story broke all those years ago, I had the opportunity to talk to most print and TV journalists covering the case. Initially the novices – the bite carriers – were sent out to do the story. The talk, in newsrooms and the Press club, essentially was around who among the girl and her parents was sleeping with whom. But once the big bosses realised the story’s potential, and their own scope for self-doodling in signed columns or on live television, they took over. Bereft as they are all, without exception, of common sense and without a modicum of shame, they spilt their guts out, trying to stereotype Arushi as nothing less than a hooker. They made out their parents to be nothing short of night-time Romeos and Juliets.
I will not condescend to even talk about what the NOIDA police or the CBI did, beneath contempt as they truly are. Or, for that matter, Renuka Chowdhry, the then minister who shed crocodile tears and thus gained media mileage of her own by brandishing the press as sensationalist. Did she even go to Arushi’s house even once? What with her being a woman, a wife, a mother and all? Pooh.
The bile comes up when I see and read so-called senior journalists sitting in arm chairs in air-conditioned cubicles talk of human rights and individual privacy and media ethics and what not when in fact they are nothing but insensitive lackeys of media profiteers.
Let Arushi rest in peace. As Indian journalists that is the least the lot can do for her after all that it has already done. And next time when any of you are called on to the stage to accept an award for courageous,distinguished, human or social journalism, try to run away as far as possible. If not, I know none of you wouldn’t, at least cover your face while accepting such awards.
I remember a journalist, a cut-throat one at that, who would go out to tarnish women complaining of rape. One day, his own niece was raped. And I saw him – this now helpless hack – in tears calling up fellow hacks in other papers to condemn the rape and importantly, not to mention the name of his niece as that would spoil her future. I don’t know how the fellow hacks responded to his please, but I, with a hand over my heart, can say I took the opportunity to tell him without mincing words that he was reaping what he himself had sown, notwithstanding all my sympathies for his niece.
I know that journalists won’t change. Until it happens to them. Not that I wish it. But I can’t stop Arushi’s family from wanting to. Or, those hundreds and thousands of nameless, faceless Indians who are daily victims of the mighty pen-pushers.
Manoj, don’t take it personally. I know you as one of the most honest and sensitive of journalists I have come across. But then, even God makes mistakes sometimes.
What about me when I was a journalist, you or anyone can ask. I quit the shit when I found myself a lone voice. I didn’t care for the money or the position. Not a society-changing act, but better than the rest, I believe.
Dear Manoj Mitta,
How easy for you to say that in the Arushi murder investigation case, the ‘real’ culprit is the CBI?
Just as the person who gives a bribe is as much a culprit as the one asking for it, the media is a ‘real’ culprit too.
Take your own paper, TOI, for instance. Why didn’t you or any one else report the grounds on which the supreme court issued notices to TOI along with two others?
Was it self-preservation or self-censorship? I can understand the journalists today need to survive first in order to cry from the pulpit. But surely self-restraint could have been observed by TOI when reporting about the case in the first place?
What can I say about the journalistic sobriety and corporate responsibility of a paper as TOI which can do anything to earn a penny. Remember, how TOI once sold its own mast head as advertising space? For that matter, it was a tough experience opening the link to your article in the TOI as I had to negotiate links to marriage and advertisement sites popping up endlessly before I could read what you wrote on such a serious issue.
You should go through the TOI archives to see how precipitously anti-Arushi its coverage was from day one.
The larger issue is the media, in India, today is a self-server. Nothing else. Had Arushi belonged to a poor family living in a slum, the reputable TOI wouldn’t even have bothered to covered the original crime in the first place. This is true for each and every publication and broadcaster who claims to undergo a journalistic routine in this country.
The Supreme Court correctly described the media as ‘irresponsible press’. Only the court waited thus far to say it. We have heard of the Indian courts suo moto trying to restrain excesses of various kinds in the past. What happened to the courts in Arushi’s case? Weren’t the judges reading the papers? Or did they realise that the late Arushi’s reputation had been tarnished by the media only after her father went to the court?
When the Arushi story broke all those years ago, I had the opportunity to talk to most print and TV journalists covering the case. Initially the novices – the bite carriers – were sent out to do the story. The talk, in newsrooms and the Press club, essentially was around who among the girl and her parents was sleeping with whom. But once the big bosses realised the story’s potential, and their own scope for self-doodling in signed columns or on live television, they took over. Bereft as they are all, without exception, of common sense and without a modicum of shame, they spilt their guts out, trying to stereotype Arushi as nothing less than a hooker. They made out their parents to be nothing short of night-time Romeos and Juliets.
I will not condescend to even talk about what the NOIDA police or the CBI did, beneath contempt as they truly are. Or, for that matter, Renuka Chowdhry, the then minister who shed crocodile tears and thus gained media mileage of her own by brandishing the press as sensationalist. Did she even go to Arushi’s house even once? What with her being a woman, a wife, a mother and all? Pooh.
The bile comes up when I see and read so-called senior journalists sitting in arm chairs in air-conditioned cubicles talk of human rights and individual privacy and media ethics and what not when in fact they are nothing but insensitive lackeys of media profiteers.
Let Arushi rest in peace. As Indian journalists that is the least the lot can do for her after all that it has already done. And next time when any of you are called on to the stage to accept an award for courageous,distinguished, human or social journalism, try to run away as far as possible. If not, I know none of you wouldn’t, at least cover your face while accepting such awards.
I remember a journalist, a cut-throat one at that, who would go out to tarnish women complaining of rape. One day, his own niece was raped. And I saw him – this now helpless hack – in tears calling up fellow hacks in other papers to condemn the rape and importantly, not to mention the name of his niece as that would spoil her future. I don’t know how the fellow hacks responded to his please, but I, with a hand over my heart, can say I took the opportunity to tell him without mincing words that he was reaping what he himself had sown, notwithstanding all my sympathies for his niece.
I know that journalists won’t change. Until it happens to them. Not that I wish it. But I can’t stop Arushi’s family from wanting to. Or, those hundreds and thousands of nameless, faceless Indians who are daily victims of the mighty pen-pushers.
Manoj, don’t take it personally. I know you as one of the most honest and sensitive of journalists I have come across. But then, even God makes mistakes sometimes.
What about me when I was a journalist, you or anyone can ask. I quit the shit when I found myself a lone voice. I didn’t care for the money or the position. Not a society-changing act, but better than the rest, I believe.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Indian Judiciary: Courting Mythology
If The Times of India on May 22 is to be believed, a judge of the Punjab and Haryana high court has quietly re-written India’s millennia-old history. And, but for a solitary piece in the TOI, India is yet to take note of it.
Justice Rajive Bhalla, according to TOI On May 22, “recently” observed that “Maharishi Valmiki was not a dacoit before turning into a sage and writing the Ramayana”. The learned judge had no concrete proof – either a birth certificate or an ancient police FIR – so he based his observation on a research by a Punjab University scholar. Why was no proof submitted before him? The judge reportedly said that “actual facts appear to be lost in the mists of antiquity”.
The TOI correspondent also says about the nature of research by the scholar which became the judge’s basis for his observation: “The judge stated the salient features of the research, saying that “from Vedic literature up to 9th century AD, there is no reference as such that Maharishi Valmiki led a life of a dacoit or highwayman.” It was also stated that in his own work ‘Ramayana’, Valmiki is called Bhagwan, Muni, Rishi and Maharishi and no reference of his highwaymanship is available there.”
How did Valmiki’s past become the current topic for judicial discourse? The TOI tells us: “Justice Bhalla was hearing an appeal by a national television channel, asking the court to quash an FIR filed against it in Jalandhar for airing a serial that raised a question about Valmiki being a dacoit before he turned into a sage.” Understandably, I think, the protest was filed a member of the Valmiki community.
Here are two interesting reactions posted at the end of the TOI report:
Phadnis, Mumbai: “Courts have no business to pass Judgments on such issues. This is not a matter of Law. Whether the belief about Valmiki is correct or not is another matter. Many parts of the Ramayana or Mahabharata are controversial. Are the Courts going to Rule on such matters?”
M. Pankaj, New Delhi: “A mythology mixes facts, fiction, reality and divinity all to express the author's ideals and views. It cannot be ascertained or adjudged one way or another. Indeed media should be responsible, but religious believers should also not be over sensitive or angry since it shows the lack of their inner-confidence in their own belief. Focus on the substance…not on the superficial or what others say ...”
Since when has mythology come to be questioned in courts? Anything can happen in India. Remember, how the proposed Sethusamudram Project – envisaging a navigable sea route around the Indian peninsula passing through the Sri Lankan strait – was mired in controversy with the rightist Bharatiya Janata Party and dumb Hindu fanatics moving the courts saying the project would destroy a bridge – Rama Setu – apparently built by monkeys to help Rama – the protagonist of the Hindu epic Ramayana – to cross over into Sri Lanka to free his wife, Sita, from the clutches of the villain-king, Ravana.
That was in 2007. The then Congress government had submitted an affidavit in the Supreme Court of India, with reports of the Archaeological Survey of India as appendices, that the existence of Rama was questionable and therefore not germane to the Sethusamudram Project. But imagine the power of the faithful! The government of India, foreseeing political oblivion if it did not bow before the protestors, subsequently withdrew that affidavit.
There are similarties in both cases:
1. In the Valmiki case, the defendants say they went by mythology while portraying Valmiki’s dacoit past. Justice Bhalla, despite his curt observation, leaves himself an escape valve by saying that “actual facts appear to be lost in the mists of antiquity”.
2. In the Sethusamudram case, the government says there is no “scientific” evidence of the fabled Ram Setu and yet withdraws its report. The Supreme Court order curtly asks for continuation of the Project in the interim, but orders that “the Ram Setu should not be touched”.
The similarity is that both the courts, despite their clear observations, seem hesitant to actually and directly challenge mythology and popular belief. What if?...the doubt lingers in their honourable minds.
These cases suggest that the mosaic of sanity covering the Indian judiciary, however thinly, is beginning to crack. This can only spell disaster for the country’s future for the following reasons:
1. The Indian judiciary’s sense of justice deems that heresay is no evidence. Now it becomes the judiciary’s responsibility whether mythology and belief fall under the category of heresay or not. If not, the above observations by the two courts are unjustified.
2. A judicial case is fought on the basis of facts. Facts, as I know them, are supposed to be tangible evidences which can be physically examined for verification. In the Valmiki case, the court ruling is based on a researcher’s evidence which contains no tangible proof other than claiming that there are no references of Valmiki’s dacoit past found in ancient Hindu/Indian literature. I do not know if the researcher has added a disclaimer that the literature she has gone through is all that exists and there is no possibility of other, yet unknown, literature existing. In short, there is no way of claiming that mere absence of the said reference in literature is clear, unequivocal proof that the reference never existed at all. There is a question of reasonable doubt here. So, is the researcher’s evidence an incontrovertible ‘fact’ in judicial terms? I think not. Similarly, in the Sethusamudram case, the court only asks the government not to disturb the Ram Setu, without giving any reasons. Does this mean that the court, as the case continues, thinks it will come across evidence that will prove the Hindus right and the Archaeological Survey of India wrong? The doubt lingers.
However, with the Indian courts not shying away from pronouncing on things mythological, I want ruling on the following:
It is generally believed – mind the word, ‘believed’ – that Valmiki belonged for the Kirata Bhil Adivasi, a tribal caste. It is this belief that brings together members of the caste and similar castes under the umbrella of the entire Valmiki community in India (and in Pakistan!)Now, there is another ‘belief’ that, as stated in Wikipedia, Valmiki re-incarnated himself as a Brahmin in the 15th century. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsidas)
The Wikipedia says: “Tulsidas is regarded as an incarnation of the great sage Valmiki. In Bhavishyottar Purana, Lord Shiva tells Parvati how Valmiki got a boon from Hanuman to sing the glories of Lord Rama in vernacular language in the Kali Yuga. This prophecy of Lord Shiva materialised on the Shraavan Shukla Saptami, Vikrami Samvat 1554 when Valmiki reincarnated as Tulsidas.
“Valmikistulasidasaha Kalou Devi Bhavishayati; Ramachanadrakathaametaam Bhashabhadhdhaan Karishyatihi. (Bhavishyottar Purana, Pratisarga Parva, 4.20).
“Nabhadas, a contemporary of Tulsidas and a great devotee, also describes Tulsidas as incarnation of Valmiki in his work Bhaktmaal. Even the Ramanandi sect (Tulsidas belonged to this sect) firmly believes that it was Valmiki himself who incarnated as Tulsidas in the Kali Yuga.”
If I believe all this to be true, then I will come to certain conclusions:
1. Valmiki should no longer be considered a tribal, but a Brahmin.
2. This means the Valmiki caste grouping falls under the Brahmin category.
3. This means the community now has all rights to all Brahmin rites.
4. This means the community can no longer avail of benefits the government offers to tribal communities in terms of reservation and other social benefits.
Now, suppose I move the courts to certify these conclusions on the basis of evidence available in Wikipedia, will I win my case? Going by the precedents, I should.
If not, do I have the right to move the courts, again, to nullify every social, cultural and political custom that exists in the geographical region called India and which is based on the tenets of Hinduism on the ground that Hinduism is not a religion, is a collection of beliefs and there is no evidence, especially written, of its history?
Won’t I be taken for a fool?
I rest my case.
Note: No disrespect to the Valmikis
Monday, May 17, 2010
Caste in India is the real outcast
This blog is in response to an article by distinguished journalist, Mr. A.J. Philip, in the newspaper he edits, The Herald of India. Here is the link to the original article: http://www.heraldofindia.com/article.php?id=489
Dear Mr. Philip,
Your reference to Bihar brings back lots of memories of my own stint as a journalist in that state. A senior colleague of mine, the late Arvind Das, used to call Bihar the centre of the universe, given the state's social complexities. While I appreciate your views on caste, and do abhor discrimination of any kind, I would like to point out a couple of things. Discrimination is as Darwinian as oppression. The evolution of a society is studied through the many cycles of catharsis that it has experienced. Our sociologists and historians have been trying for centuries to simply understand what is India and why is India different from any other society in the world. I have not found a decent answer yet in my many readings. I feel a society has to be seen in its living past and living present. Ignoring or denying any variable of that society and then attempting to study its evolution is a backfiring proposition. We may abhor cateism, we may deny we are casteists, but that does not make casteism go away. For the simple reason that our actions of the present have their moorings not only in our geneology but also in our cultural past. These actions define our identity, our location in society, whether we believe or not. Our society has evolved over thousands of years, its culture influenced by societies from across the seas at frequent intervals of history, now more so and at faster intervals because of the factor of globalisation. Some of the best Sikhs I know, professionals all in various countries abroad, came from Khalsa College. I know of two youngsters currently at an IIT who proudly say they are the alumni of the Brahman-Bhumihar Collegiate in Muzaffarpur. I know of many families with liberal values subscribing to caste-based matrimony publications. And so forth. Are these people casteist? I'd say yes. And any other answer conveys self-denial. More than ever before I today feel the need for a full-fledged caste census in India. For, never before has our society seen siesmic social and cultural changes as like now, what with India in the vortex of globalisation. There are many who predict a homogenous mass of peoples in a few generations' time. That would be the time of a society, truly classless and casteless. That would also be a time to forget where this society came from because for the citizens of that future society, their past would be an alien, long-forgotten, un-understandable phenomenon. In short, the legacy of this society of our times and our past will not remain even a memory. Why? Because nobody in our times cares to write a true account of it in the first place. I challenge any sociologist or historian to refute that their research of the Indian society is based on half or quarter knowledge considering the singular fact that never in our history has an accurate data of the caste composition been made available. Furthermore, histories and social texts are contructed realities and mediated by the ideologies of their authors. For example, I want to recall the controversy created when social and history theoreticians of the Left and Right fought over the origins of Ayodhya in the 1990s. Secondly, histories are written by conquerors, whether Hindu, Pashto, Iranian, Persian or Christian. And we have never had any clear interest in the subaltern and native histories except some works which in any case have never become mainstream reading material. For example, how many Indians even know what Kamban Ramayan is? See, even our so-called national epics have not escaped the scalpel of a divided society. So, when I say I am a a Vaidi ki Velanati Brahmin from Vemuru village in the coastal Andhra region of south India, am I speaking the truth? I have no way of verifying it. None of us Indians have. The point is, when we talk of caste even if to deny it, we have no historical or cultural basis to do so. That is why I support the caste census. Let us at least know what is that multi-cultural society we are a part of? We have already lived quite long in a social oblivion, basing our identities and ideologies developed out of socio-cultural castles built merely on belief. What we need is a new sociology of our not-so-new past.
Dear Mr. Philip,
Your reference to Bihar brings back lots of memories of my own stint as a journalist in that state. A senior colleague of mine, the late Arvind Das, used to call Bihar the centre of the universe, given the state's social complexities. While I appreciate your views on caste, and do abhor discrimination of any kind, I would like to point out a couple of things. Discrimination is as Darwinian as oppression. The evolution of a society is studied through the many cycles of catharsis that it has experienced. Our sociologists and historians have been trying for centuries to simply understand what is India and why is India different from any other society in the world. I have not found a decent answer yet in my many readings. I feel a society has to be seen in its living past and living present. Ignoring or denying any variable of that society and then attempting to study its evolution is a backfiring proposition. We may abhor cateism, we may deny we are casteists, but that does not make casteism go away. For the simple reason that our actions of the present have their moorings not only in our geneology but also in our cultural past. These actions define our identity, our location in society, whether we believe or not. Our society has evolved over thousands of years, its culture influenced by societies from across the seas at frequent intervals of history, now more so and at faster intervals because of the factor of globalisation. Some of the best Sikhs I know, professionals all in various countries abroad, came from Khalsa College. I know of two youngsters currently at an IIT who proudly say they are the alumni of the Brahman-Bhumihar Collegiate in Muzaffarpur. I know of many families with liberal values subscribing to caste-based matrimony publications. And so forth. Are these people casteist? I'd say yes. And any other answer conveys self-denial. More than ever before I today feel the need for a full-fledged caste census in India. For, never before has our society seen siesmic social and cultural changes as like now, what with India in the vortex of globalisation. There are many who predict a homogenous mass of peoples in a few generations' time. That would be the time of a society, truly classless and casteless. That would also be a time to forget where this society came from because for the citizens of that future society, their past would be an alien, long-forgotten, un-understandable phenomenon. In short, the legacy of this society of our times and our past will not remain even a memory. Why? Because nobody in our times cares to write a true account of it in the first place. I challenge any sociologist or historian to refute that their research of the Indian society is based on half or quarter knowledge considering the singular fact that never in our history has an accurate data of the caste composition been made available. Furthermore, histories and social texts are contructed realities and mediated by the ideologies of their authors. For example, I want to recall the controversy created when social and history theoreticians of the Left and Right fought over the origins of Ayodhya in the 1990s. Secondly, histories are written by conquerors, whether Hindu, Pashto, Iranian, Persian or Christian. And we have never had any clear interest in the subaltern and native histories except some works which in any case have never become mainstream reading material. For example, how many Indians even know what Kamban Ramayan is? See, even our so-called national epics have not escaped the scalpel of a divided society. So, when I say I am a a Vaidi ki Velanati Brahmin from Vemuru village in the coastal Andhra region of south India, am I speaking the truth? I have no way of verifying it. None of us Indians have. The point is, when we talk of caste even if to deny it, we have no historical or cultural basis to do so. That is why I support the caste census. Let us at least know what is that multi-cultural society we are a part of? We have already lived quite long in a social oblivion, basing our identities and ideologies developed out of socio-cultural castles built merely on belief. What we need is a new sociology of our not-so-new past.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Dear Swapan, BJP no different from Labour
All that can be said of Swapan Dasgupta is that he writes good English. What he writes about is bunkum -- I am sorry to say that -- if you read his front-page piece in The Pioneer on Sunday. He is all out criticising British PM Brown for trying to cobble up a government with the help of Liberal Democrats. It is going against the wishes of the people, he says, Cameron style. He lambasts Brown for readily agreeing to reform the British electoral process in return for Clegg's support. This is not done, this is not justice, this is not democracy, he laments. Perhaps he thinks Indian readers are idiots. That is why he has conveniently brushed under the carpet what the dead and beaten BJP is doing to somehow remain in circulation. For example, the BJP's attempts to come to power in whatever way in Jharkhand. Or, for that matter, the so-called alliance based on compromises including the BJP's own position on Aydodhya, to cobble up an alliance governmetn at the Centre. He flays Brown for trying to undo a 60-year-old electoral law just to appease the LibDems and without the backup of the electorate. For one, he again conveniently forgets how the BJP thrust upon unsuspecting Indians a 5000-year-old lie or fantasy about Ayodhya. For another, Brown in the same breath said there would be referendum. For yet another, if Dasgupta thinks a mere change of law cannot make the budget deficit of Britain go away, he should be told in equally clear terms that a dumb mound of earth in a place called Ayodhya cannot make India's poverty go away. He looks quite ill wearing the collar of a pedagogue. Best he returns to what he is -- a good journalist -- for which he has always been respected.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
IPL corruption: Sharjah it to save the culprits?
I was talking to my brother-in-law, Prasanna Ojha, in Mumbai early Sunday morning. He is a senior banker and avid cricket lover. We didn’t have time to talk things personal as the conversation was mostly around the IPL controversy. Put off by the dirt surrounding the League, Prasanna observed: I think the IPL won’t last long. It’s going the Sharjah way. It will be wound up, if only to protect the real culprits who’ve used the IPL to make and launder dirty money.
Gem of a thought. Original. I was surprised how our Indian media, agog over the IPL controversy, never thought of this angle. After all it is a thought and thoughts more than facts govern journalism, don’t they!
For 15 years everybody who was somebody in the Sharjah circuit made money. There are umpteen reports and investigations into match-fixing and player-buying. Careers of many cricketers were botched up as a result. As luck would have it, a timely bout of strained India-Pakistan relations was just the excuse the culprits needed to kill the golden goose that was Sharjah. Was any official, ever so minor, ever brought to book? No.
So, what’s stopping the real crooks behind IPL to do a Sharjah? Notwithstanding the fact that the franchisees would lose money or that companies and corporations which bought rights of television, logos, tickets, travel, accommodation, etc, would move courts for breach of contracts?
I feel there’s someone everyone’s trying to protect. And this someone is the chap who should be hanged for everything wrong with IPL. And this someone is known to all. The man who painstakingly won the epithet of ‘would-have-been-Prime-Minister’. The man who, it is said, is worth all smugglers put together in black money. The man who has the blood of thousands of farmers who committed suicide. The man who can stop off-loading of grain or other food stuff at Indian ports till such time that local prices shoot up. The man who controls a metropolis. The man who with support of a single-digit number of MPs can blackmail the government. Do I need to name him? Only morons would say yes.
The tax authorities were already on to the IPL dirt even before the present controversy arose. The Shashi Tharoor-Lalit Modi spat, intentional or not, only hastened the inevitable outcome that the IPL books would one day have to be checked. Lalit Modi has a lot to answer for, least for his so-called dictatorial attitude. He is what he is because of his ability to wheel and deal and not because of his short temper.
The question at hand is: Has Lalit Modi fallen out with his mentor, the man described above? On this tenuous answer hangs the future of IPL and a lot more. If yes, there’s going to be a catharsis. If not, let’s all look forward to IPL 2011.
In India where cricket is religion, cricket is politics too. Crass politics at that. Can the present Indian government dare to take a decisive decision on the IPL? A big, fat no. It is too busy in self-preservation. What if Sharad Pawar and the NCP break-away if they are to lose by any decisive government action? On such silly excuses is laid the future of this country! Shame!
But the opposition fares no better. Incidentally, have you heard the BJP cry foul about the corruption charges against IPL? Again, a big, fat no. Instead, the BJP cried hoarse about Tharoor who, in any case, was incidental to the real controversy surrounding IPL. Why?
Because, something the moronic parliamentarians could never do inside the august House – come together on a national issue – they have achieved it to hide the IPL dirt. The ruling Congress, opposition BJP and semi-conductor NCP are all involved with IPL. Rajiv Shukla, Arun Jaitley and of course the Pawar-Patel duo. Why politics, even cricket makes strange bedfellows. It is now left to cricket’s political have-nots, the Left parties, to cry about the real issue of corruption in IPL. But who cares for these guys? If they are honest about wanting to know the truth about IPL, it is only because they have not yet got the opportunity to be dishonest. They share no cake of the IPL pie. That’s all.
With politics in the hands of such corrupts and dimwits, IPL should be able to thrive. The BCCI, which perhaps is the most corrupt body in India, and to that matter the Indian government itself, do not have the balls to emulate the English cricket board. When the investment fraud of Texas billionaire Allen Stanford came to light, the English Cricket Board lost no time in severing all ties with his Stanford Cricket Series.
I have been keenly watching the fables and the fabulous passed off as IPL news in NDTV by Prannoy and his disciples. I studiously ignore Star for the simple reason that its main anchor still can’t sit or stand still and is devoid of basic broadcasting intelligence. Aajtak, on the other hand, continues to be refreshing, what with fresh and still freckled kids replacing professionals to dig out the IPL truth all by themselves with the help of non-exissting sources. (Maybe I really am acute scpetic to feel this way.)
The semi-retired and senile journalists, experts and politicians who make up a large part of the furniture in the NDTV studios continue to confuse the viewers mostly through calculated ignorance. In the last week, all their studio shows focussed only on IPL, just as their news fillers in the advertisement wheel. But at the end of the day, they didn’t amount to anything other than the information put out by agencies or the IPL culprits themselves on social networking sites. The one issue these forms of wood spoke at length was whether the government would go in for a JPC (joint parliamentary committee) to probe the IPL issue. Were they suggesting a way out for the culprits to go scot free, considering these very experts have in the past exposed the JPC for what it really is – the most legal form for hiding the dirt under the carpet? What was laughable was that these guys should be talking of a JPC when even politicians, like Abhishek Manu Singhvi of the Congress, were admitting on record that a JPC is ‘not binding on anyone at all’!
Of course, I must mention Barkha Dutt, whose unrivalled investigation brought her face to face with Pretty Zinta, part-owner of King’s Eleven from Punjab. She asks Zinta leading questions about the latter’s stake in the team and Zinta gives led answers to the effect that she is completely above board. And for some good reason, she also gives a clean chit to Shah Rukh Khan of Kolkata Knight Riders. Was Dutt fronting for Zinta’s real or contrived innocence? It is fair to give all parties in a controversy to have their say. But Dutt appeared desperate to get Zinta to say that she is innocent. Obviously, the ‘Padma’ journalist had done no homework. Otherwise the questions would have been direct and hitting. I think after frauds and sycophants, it will be the turn of the journalists to re-invent the Indian tradition of respecting elders or the powerful, as the case may be, by touching their feet or saying ‘Sir’ and ‘Madame’.
In the end, I doubt if the truth will come out at all. After all, the IPL culprits have the best possible defence batting for them: a cowardly government, a lame duck media, the partnership between the Congress and the BJP in the IPL and, of course, the Indian people who’d rather show the other cheek too, in the Gandhian way, if that would get them a chance to sit in a private box to watch cricket live from the stadium.
If there are any Indians who are exceptions to this ancient vestige of intellectual slavery, let them come out to ensure they are heard above the din of the silence of the lambs.
PS: We’ll have to wait for IPL 2011 to see if the foreign players will be keen to join the league after this scandal. As it is, many senior international players have retired despite auction selections, many top rankers from the 2008 auction have completed their three-year contracts, and very few known faces remain for being auctioned in 2011. Unless the organisers look at our neighbours, who failed to get in in 2010, to fill the slots.
Gem of a thought. Original. I was surprised how our Indian media, agog over the IPL controversy, never thought of this angle. After all it is a thought and thoughts more than facts govern journalism, don’t they!
For 15 years everybody who was somebody in the Sharjah circuit made money. There are umpteen reports and investigations into match-fixing and player-buying. Careers of many cricketers were botched up as a result. As luck would have it, a timely bout of strained India-Pakistan relations was just the excuse the culprits needed to kill the golden goose that was Sharjah. Was any official, ever so minor, ever brought to book? No.
So, what’s stopping the real crooks behind IPL to do a Sharjah? Notwithstanding the fact that the franchisees would lose money or that companies and corporations which bought rights of television, logos, tickets, travel, accommodation, etc, would move courts for breach of contracts?
I feel there’s someone everyone’s trying to protect. And this someone is the chap who should be hanged for everything wrong with IPL. And this someone is known to all. The man who painstakingly won the epithet of ‘would-have-been-Prime-Minister’. The man who, it is said, is worth all smugglers put together in black money. The man who has the blood of thousands of farmers who committed suicide. The man who can stop off-loading of grain or other food stuff at Indian ports till such time that local prices shoot up. The man who controls a metropolis. The man who with support of a single-digit number of MPs can blackmail the government. Do I need to name him? Only morons would say yes.
The tax authorities were already on to the IPL dirt even before the present controversy arose. The Shashi Tharoor-Lalit Modi spat, intentional or not, only hastened the inevitable outcome that the IPL books would one day have to be checked. Lalit Modi has a lot to answer for, least for his so-called dictatorial attitude. He is what he is because of his ability to wheel and deal and not because of his short temper.
The question at hand is: Has Lalit Modi fallen out with his mentor, the man described above? On this tenuous answer hangs the future of IPL and a lot more. If yes, there’s going to be a catharsis. If not, let’s all look forward to IPL 2011.
In India where cricket is religion, cricket is politics too. Crass politics at that. Can the present Indian government dare to take a decisive decision on the IPL? A big, fat no. It is too busy in self-preservation. What if Sharad Pawar and the NCP break-away if they are to lose by any decisive government action? On such silly excuses is laid the future of this country! Shame!
But the opposition fares no better. Incidentally, have you heard the BJP cry foul about the corruption charges against IPL? Again, a big, fat no. Instead, the BJP cried hoarse about Tharoor who, in any case, was incidental to the real controversy surrounding IPL. Why?
Because, something the moronic parliamentarians could never do inside the august House – come together on a national issue – they have achieved it to hide the IPL dirt. The ruling Congress, opposition BJP and semi-conductor NCP are all involved with IPL. Rajiv Shukla, Arun Jaitley and of course the Pawar-Patel duo. Why politics, even cricket makes strange bedfellows. It is now left to cricket’s political have-nots, the Left parties, to cry about the real issue of corruption in IPL. But who cares for these guys? If they are honest about wanting to know the truth about IPL, it is only because they have not yet got the opportunity to be dishonest. They share no cake of the IPL pie. That’s all.
With politics in the hands of such corrupts and dimwits, IPL should be able to thrive. The BCCI, which perhaps is the most corrupt body in India, and to that matter the Indian government itself, do not have the balls to emulate the English cricket board. When the investment fraud of Texas billionaire Allen Stanford came to light, the English Cricket Board lost no time in severing all ties with his Stanford Cricket Series.
I have been keenly watching the fables and the fabulous passed off as IPL news in NDTV by Prannoy and his disciples. I studiously ignore Star for the simple reason that its main anchor still can’t sit or stand still and is devoid of basic broadcasting intelligence. Aajtak, on the other hand, continues to be refreshing, what with fresh and still freckled kids replacing professionals to dig out the IPL truth all by themselves with the help of non-exissting sources. (Maybe I really am acute scpetic to feel this way.)
The semi-retired and senile journalists, experts and politicians who make up a large part of the furniture in the NDTV studios continue to confuse the viewers mostly through calculated ignorance. In the last week, all their studio shows focussed only on IPL, just as their news fillers in the advertisement wheel. But at the end of the day, they didn’t amount to anything other than the information put out by agencies or the IPL culprits themselves on social networking sites. The one issue these forms of wood spoke at length was whether the government would go in for a JPC (joint parliamentary committee) to probe the IPL issue. Were they suggesting a way out for the culprits to go scot free, considering these very experts have in the past exposed the JPC for what it really is – the most legal form for hiding the dirt under the carpet? What was laughable was that these guys should be talking of a JPC when even politicians, like Abhishek Manu Singhvi of the Congress, were admitting on record that a JPC is ‘not binding on anyone at all’!
Of course, I must mention Barkha Dutt, whose unrivalled investigation brought her face to face with Pretty Zinta, part-owner of King’s Eleven from Punjab. She asks Zinta leading questions about the latter’s stake in the team and Zinta gives led answers to the effect that she is completely above board. And for some good reason, she also gives a clean chit to Shah Rukh Khan of Kolkata Knight Riders. Was Dutt fronting for Zinta’s real or contrived innocence? It is fair to give all parties in a controversy to have their say. But Dutt appeared desperate to get Zinta to say that she is innocent. Obviously, the ‘Padma’ journalist had done no homework. Otherwise the questions would have been direct and hitting. I think after frauds and sycophants, it will be the turn of the journalists to re-invent the Indian tradition of respecting elders or the powerful, as the case may be, by touching their feet or saying ‘Sir’ and ‘Madame’.
In the end, I doubt if the truth will come out at all. After all, the IPL culprits have the best possible defence batting for them: a cowardly government, a lame duck media, the partnership between the Congress and the BJP in the IPL and, of course, the Indian people who’d rather show the other cheek too, in the Gandhian way, if that would get them a chance to sit in a private box to watch cricket live from the stadium.
If there are any Indians who are exceptions to this ancient vestige of intellectual slavery, let them come out to ensure they are heard above the din of the silence of the lambs.
PS: We’ll have to wait for IPL 2011 to see if the foreign players will be keen to join the league after this scandal. As it is, many senior international players have retired despite auction selections, many top rankers from the 2008 auction have completed their three-year contracts, and very few known faces remain for being auctioned in 2011. Unless the organisers look at our neighbours, who failed to get in in 2010, to fill the slots.
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
KANU SANYAL: MASTER OF A MIS-TREATED CONCEPT
“Kanu Sanyal is dead…one less headache for India.” A blogger, who should at best remain unnamed for his or her irreverence to history, wrote on the day the last surviving member of the naxalite trio of Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, died.
All the three died in penury. Majumdar in penury of thought, Sanyal in penury of conviction and Santhal in penury of action. That should sum up the exercise in gun-class communism in India, now in the throes of capitalism. Or,should it?
It was amusing to read the reviews, analyses and obituaries post-Sanyal’s death. It was as if Naksal Bari (that’s how it is still spelt in the local district gazette) was an error of youth fondly remembered in old age; much akin to the trespasses indulged during the college years and hilariously recalled in later reunions.
Some reviews treated Naksal Bari as merely a symbol of in-fighting between the extreme and moderate communist groups in Bengal. Some others, understandably academics, saw it as a logical successor to the Tebagha and Andhra movements of the 1940s. Some international floaters argued that it was the outcome of the vascillation of the Indian communists between the expansionist Chinese and the revisionist Russians (as the two called each other in the 1960s). But nobody saw it as a live symbol of what is still happening in India: the continuing stamping out of the poor by first the zamindars, then the forward castes and now, the capitalist middle class.
Within the communist system, the traditionalists – CPI and CPM – have always arrogated to themselves the right to rule the poor and nurture them as vote banks, copying the Congress, and saw the ‘naxalites’ as an aberration to be dealt with sternly if their interests – the poor – were interfered with. The late Jyoti Basu, who had no problem in forming Bengal’s first non-Congress coalition with a leader of a rightist Bangla Party as chief minister, equally had no problem in dealing death blows on the Majumdar-Sanyal-Santhal trio (a journalist even called them a ‘triad’, a term usually used to describe criminal gangs in China and Japan!). His funeral was mammoth in scale. I wonder if Sanyal’s family could find even four pall bearers.
A political party evolves its own checks and balances, even against the wishes of its leadership. And more often than not, it is always an extremist group from within which tempers the main party. The Congress, for example, has a brutal history of ordering the killings of Indian citizens, whether in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Bihar, Telangana or the North-East. It would have been more brutal but for its skirmish with the radical policies of Subhash Chandra Bose. The communists, perpetrators of the worst kind of oppression in West Bengal for decades, would have rivaled Pol Pot had they not encountered the ‘naxalite’ leaders in the 1960s; having violently suppressed the movement, the mainline communists could not have themselves nurtured extreme thoughts, if, for nothing, at least for public consumption.
We have seen our politicians shed morality as fast as the youth change their I-pods. We have seen the politicians shamelessly baiting the poor into further ignominy with their ‘India shining’ placards. We have seen the politicians turn themselves into an incestuous class blurring distinctions of ideologies and affiliations, the scent of middle class surpluses mentoring their politics.
They have a lot to learn from Naksal Bari.
Naksal Bari caught the attention of India because of the context in which it was orchestrated. The post-China war, Radio Peking’s open congratulations, and important of all, the ‘revolution’ taking place in a communist-run state. Out of this unique triangulation of contexts, hundreds of Naksal Baris have occurred in other regions in India, but never commanded such attention, prompting the movement’s proponents and opponents alike to increase the stakes. The organized gang represented by the communist-led state won the day; the unorganized ‘naxalites’, even today, trying to conserve energy to fight another day.
The ‘naxalites’, simply put, wanted to teach a powerful nexus a few lessons. The nexus was of the local ‘zamindar’ (biggest of landed gentry) naturally from a forward caste, local ‘daroga’ (sub-inspector), the local ‘sarpanch’ (head of the village) and the local money-lender. Between them they ruled the village on behalf of a similar nexus at the ‘taluk’ level, then the district level, then the state level, then the national level. The ruled were the small traders, small or landless peasants and labourers. Despite their mutual interdependence that an agricultural economy dictated, it was the sheer power wielded by the nexus that subjugated the latter as by natural right.
In 1987, when I was working for The Time of India in Bihar, I was invited by a team of CPI-ML (Liberation) to eyewitness the progress they made in emancipating the villagers from the tyranny of the nexus. I was taken by car, tempo and later on foot, in the middle of the night, to a village in Jehanabad district. It was like a Russian or Chinese commissar accompanying the media to a sanitized village. I heard the labourers say how happy they were because they were employed for at least 70 per cent of the year in contrast to a few weeks some years ago. I took some of the villagers out of the earshot of my ‘guides’. Did they get the minimum wage? No. The big farmer’s accountant took his cut, the money-lender took his interest on the labourer’s loan and finally, the local Liberation members forced a voluntary contribution to keep on helping them achieve their freedom. The women obviously were paid less then men. They told me of organized rapes of themselves or their daughters and daughters-in-law and of the futility in going to the police. The landless peasants, working as labourers, told me they were paid mostly in kind. The going rate of payment in kind had not changed sinced the 1950s in the Bengal-Bihar-Orissa regions: It a bojha (sheaf) for every 21 bojhas, for rabi harvesting; 4 kachi seers (local weight) of paddy during sowing time. In the ‘bojha’ system, the peasant can embrace as much of the standing crop a he or she can at one go: that’s his or hers to chaff the waste and eat. Even here, the farmer’s accountant ensured that the person with the shortest hands was allowed to take the ‘bojha’. My guides told me: “These things happen, but the important thing is they get the ‘bojhas’ in each and every season. We ensure this.” I tried to make them understand that the ‘bojha’ system in the region is as old as the caste system itself. It fell on deaf ears.
Are the ‘naxalites’ to blame for the constancy of payment or are they to be commended for ensuring even such payments are at least regular? In my own presence, the brother of the village’s richest farmer went by on a motorcycle. The peasants, as by custom, stood with their heads bowed even as my guides turned their heads away. As we were returning from the village, my guides led me to a tea shop. I gathered it was owned by the brother-in-law of the local sub-inspector. Apparently, my guides and the policeman were not only of the same caste, but the same ‘biradari’ (community) as well. So much for class-less consciousness. Strange but true, in the 1989 parliamentary elections, when I was touring the Bhojpur area – which was to return India’s first naxalite as a parliamentarian – I came across a couple of my former guides sitting in a brand new campaign jeep and smoking filtered cigarettes and wearing North Star keds.
The problem with ‘naxalism’ was and is the theoretical framework not matching the reality on the ground. What may have worked (?) in Russia or China after first forcing the different peoples to become one uniform mass with uniform thoughts, could not have worked in alien culture like India’s where all the parties – the oppressor, the oppressed and the reformer – shared the same diverse culture and could not exist outside it. “In communist Russia even the most minor of state officials is more powerful than the biggest minister,” the late Vinod Mishra, the Liberation leader of Bihar, once acknowledged to me when I went to meet him in Dhanbad after his late marriage even as his armed, underground outfit was falling apart around him after the Liberation’s decision to take part in parliamentary politics.
It is the socio-cultural dynamics and politics of India – the only Indian characteristic that ironically bridges the rich-poor gap in the country – that is least understood both by the ‘naxalites’ and the officialdom of the state. There are a few who realize that the manner of tackling ‘naxalism’ is not by treating it as a criminal matter to be dealt with by the police. But either they choose to remain silent or are silenced.
Throughout my tenure of five years in Bihar, I tried to follow and understand the ‘naxalite’ movement in the state which began when a lower caste school teacher, Jagdish Mahto, was beaten up by the goons of a forward caste candidate in the 1967 general elections in Ekwari village in Bhojpur district. The incident opened Mahto’s eyes to the oppression around him and Jagdish ‘Master’ was born, who did not shy away from organizing the opporessed into a force, trying to end their subjugation even through violence. For the ‘naxalites’ in retreat from Bengal, this was a God (?) send. His wife, Kamaleswari Devi, told me years after his death: “Yes, he became popular. I am proud of him. But the reality is, nothing has changed.” There are some sub-altern historians in Bihar who shy away from seeing ‘Master’ as a naxalite and instead compare him with what are called social brigans (a la Robin Hood) like Nakshatra Malakar, or the many Yadavs from the ‘diara (riverbank, swampy land) areas of Munger and Patna districts and Sasaram. Perhaps it serves their purpose in dishing out a simple social history of oppression without complicating it by introducing the element of ‘naxalism’.
By mid-1988, the Liberation group of CPI-ML was in the throes of a major argument over the continuance of underground armed struggle in Bihar. They were neither moving forward nor going backward. A revisionist group took things in its hand and started a campaign for the party to come overground. I was the only journalist to have written in detail about this exercise, correctly prophesying (on the basis of some truthful admissions from the concerned horses’ mouths) that the party would enter the political fray in 1989. There were many reactions to my article, one of them a sweet telephone call in my office from someone who introduced himself: “I am Kanu Sanyal, speaking. I am in Dhanbad. I read your report. Let us meet sometime.” The meeting happened after the 1989 elections and by then Vinod Mishra was barely three years away from appearing in public for the first time at a rally in Calcutta.
We talked for three or four hours, at a tea shop on Fraser Road in Patna. Sanyal had come to meet the son of a friend of his, a local journalist. Given the image I had of him as the original ‘naxalite’, I was disappointed by his low-key appearance. He was dressed in a white full shirt, blue trousers and Bata chappals and carrying a black plastic bag. He wouldn’t talk much about the Naksal Bari days, but had much to say about the futility of the entire movement in its current shape. India is too big a country to even be ruled, not to talk of staging a revolution, was the gist of his argument. He was promoting education as the only weapon to fight the factors causing oppression. “The world is changing fast. What we did in those days now looks to me as an affair of an affected youth. Guns are not the solution. Only when the poor are aware of their rights can they do something about it.” And on, he went. His utter dislike of the traditional communists was, of course, apparent as most of his analogies were situated in West Bengal or Tripura.
Did he mean to say that the concept of Indian ‘naxalism’ was a blunder, I asked him. He gave me a serious look. I still remember his words which are appearing in print for the first time here and I quote from a distant memory: “You cannot turn back on Naksal Bari. Or the off-shoots of that movement, however lumpenised they may be today. They have created a stir in the hearts of the poor who now realize that they have not been born to be slaves. In time, more and more of them will realize this. And then a change will come.”
Was Naksal Bari then a catalyst for future change? Don’t try to deconstruct the past, he waved a finger at me. As I shook hands with him, Sanyal gave me a toothy smile and patting my back said: “If you can read Bangla, look up a novel called Mahakaler Rather Ghora by Samaresh Babu. It is about my friend, Jangal Santhal, the action man. I was only an organizer and Charu was the ideas man, but Santhal…..”
All the three died in penury. Majumdar in penury of thought, Sanyal in penury of conviction and Santhal in penury of action. That should sum up the exercise in gun-class communism in India, now in the throes of capitalism. Or,should it?
It was amusing to read the reviews, analyses and obituaries post-Sanyal’s death. It was as if Naksal Bari (that’s how it is still spelt in the local district gazette) was an error of youth fondly remembered in old age; much akin to the trespasses indulged during the college years and hilariously recalled in later reunions.
Some reviews treated Naksal Bari as merely a symbol of in-fighting between the extreme and moderate communist groups in Bengal. Some others, understandably academics, saw it as a logical successor to the Tebagha and Andhra movements of the 1940s. Some international floaters argued that it was the outcome of the vascillation of the Indian communists between the expansionist Chinese and the revisionist Russians (as the two called each other in the 1960s). But nobody saw it as a live symbol of what is still happening in India: the continuing stamping out of the poor by first the zamindars, then the forward castes and now, the capitalist middle class.
Within the communist system, the traditionalists – CPI and CPM – have always arrogated to themselves the right to rule the poor and nurture them as vote banks, copying the Congress, and saw the ‘naxalites’ as an aberration to be dealt with sternly if their interests – the poor – were interfered with. The late Jyoti Basu, who had no problem in forming Bengal’s first non-Congress coalition with a leader of a rightist Bangla Party as chief minister, equally had no problem in dealing death blows on the Majumdar-Sanyal-Santhal trio (a journalist even called them a ‘triad’, a term usually used to describe criminal gangs in China and Japan!). His funeral was mammoth in scale. I wonder if Sanyal’s family could find even four pall bearers.
A political party evolves its own checks and balances, even against the wishes of its leadership. And more often than not, it is always an extremist group from within which tempers the main party. The Congress, for example, has a brutal history of ordering the killings of Indian citizens, whether in Punjab, Kashmir, Delhi, Bihar, Telangana or the North-East. It would have been more brutal but for its skirmish with the radical policies of Subhash Chandra Bose. The communists, perpetrators of the worst kind of oppression in West Bengal for decades, would have rivaled Pol Pot had they not encountered the ‘naxalite’ leaders in the 1960s; having violently suppressed the movement, the mainline communists could not have themselves nurtured extreme thoughts, if, for nothing, at least for public consumption.
We have seen our politicians shed morality as fast as the youth change their I-pods. We have seen the politicians shamelessly baiting the poor into further ignominy with their ‘India shining’ placards. We have seen the politicians turn themselves into an incestuous class blurring distinctions of ideologies and affiliations, the scent of middle class surpluses mentoring their politics.
They have a lot to learn from Naksal Bari.
Naksal Bari caught the attention of India because of the context in which it was orchestrated. The post-China war, Radio Peking’s open congratulations, and important of all, the ‘revolution’ taking place in a communist-run state. Out of this unique triangulation of contexts, hundreds of Naksal Baris have occurred in other regions in India, but never commanded such attention, prompting the movement’s proponents and opponents alike to increase the stakes. The organized gang represented by the communist-led state won the day; the unorganized ‘naxalites’, even today, trying to conserve energy to fight another day.
The ‘naxalites’, simply put, wanted to teach a powerful nexus a few lessons. The nexus was of the local ‘zamindar’ (biggest of landed gentry) naturally from a forward caste, local ‘daroga’ (sub-inspector), the local ‘sarpanch’ (head of the village) and the local money-lender. Between them they ruled the village on behalf of a similar nexus at the ‘taluk’ level, then the district level, then the state level, then the national level. The ruled were the small traders, small or landless peasants and labourers. Despite their mutual interdependence that an agricultural economy dictated, it was the sheer power wielded by the nexus that subjugated the latter as by natural right.
In 1987, when I was working for The Time of India in Bihar, I was invited by a team of CPI-ML (Liberation) to eyewitness the progress they made in emancipating the villagers from the tyranny of the nexus. I was taken by car, tempo and later on foot, in the middle of the night, to a village in Jehanabad district. It was like a Russian or Chinese commissar accompanying the media to a sanitized village. I heard the labourers say how happy they were because they were employed for at least 70 per cent of the year in contrast to a few weeks some years ago. I took some of the villagers out of the earshot of my ‘guides’. Did they get the minimum wage? No. The big farmer’s accountant took his cut, the money-lender took his interest on the labourer’s loan and finally, the local Liberation members forced a voluntary contribution to keep on helping them achieve their freedom. The women obviously were paid less then men. They told me of organized rapes of themselves or their daughters and daughters-in-law and of the futility in going to the police. The landless peasants, working as labourers, told me they were paid mostly in kind. The going rate of payment in kind had not changed sinced the 1950s in the Bengal-Bihar-Orissa regions: It a bojha (sheaf) for every 21 bojhas, for rabi harvesting; 4 kachi seers (local weight) of paddy during sowing time. In the ‘bojha’ system, the peasant can embrace as much of the standing crop a he or she can at one go: that’s his or hers to chaff the waste and eat. Even here, the farmer’s accountant ensured that the person with the shortest hands was allowed to take the ‘bojha’. My guides told me: “These things happen, but the important thing is they get the ‘bojhas’ in each and every season. We ensure this.” I tried to make them understand that the ‘bojha’ system in the region is as old as the caste system itself. It fell on deaf ears.
Are the ‘naxalites’ to blame for the constancy of payment or are they to be commended for ensuring even such payments are at least regular? In my own presence, the brother of the village’s richest farmer went by on a motorcycle. The peasants, as by custom, stood with their heads bowed even as my guides turned their heads away. As we were returning from the village, my guides led me to a tea shop. I gathered it was owned by the brother-in-law of the local sub-inspector. Apparently, my guides and the policeman were not only of the same caste, but the same ‘biradari’ (community) as well. So much for class-less consciousness. Strange but true, in the 1989 parliamentary elections, when I was touring the Bhojpur area – which was to return India’s first naxalite as a parliamentarian – I came across a couple of my former guides sitting in a brand new campaign jeep and smoking filtered cigarettes and wearing North Star keds.
The problem with ‘naxalism’ was and is the theoretical framework not matching the reality on the ground. What may have worked (?) in Russia or China after first forcing the different peoples to become one uniform mass with uniform thoughts, could not have worked in alien culture like India’s where all the parties – the oppressor, the oppressed and the reformer – shared the same diverse culture and could not exist outside it. “In communist Russia even the most minor of state officials is more powerful than the biggest minister,” the late Vinod Mishra, the Liberation leader of Bihar, once acknowledged to me when I went to meet him in Dhanbad after his late marriage even as his armed, underground outfit was falling apart around him after the Liberation’s decision to take part in parliamentary politics.
It is the socio-cultural dynamics and politics of India – the only Indian characteristic that ironically bridges the rich-poor gap in the country – that is least understood both by the ‘naxalites’ and the officialdom of the state. There are a few who realize that the manner of tackling ‘naxalism’ is not by treating it as a criminal matter to be dealt with by the police. But either they choose to remain silent or are silenced.
Throughout my tenure of five years in Bihar, I tried to follow and understand the ‘naxalite’ movement in the state which began when a lower caste school teacher, Jagdish Mahto, was beaten up by the goons of a forward caste candidate in the 1967 general elections in Ekwari village in Bhojpur district. The incident opened Mahto’s eyes to the oppression around him and Jagdish ‘Master’ was born, who did not shy away from organizing the opporessed into a force, trying to end their subjugation even through violence. For the ‘naxalites’ in retreat from Bengal, this was a God (?) send. His wife, Kamaleswari Devi, told me years after his death: “Yes, he became popular. I am proud of him. But the reality is, nothing has changed.” There are some sub-altern historians in Bihar who shy away from seeing ‘Master’ as a naxalite and instead compare him with what are called social brigans (a la Robin Hood) like Nakshatra Malakar, or the many Yadavs from the ‘diara (riverbank, swampy land) areas of Munger and Patna districts and Sasaram. Perhaps it serves their purpose in dishing out a simple social history of oppression without complicating it by introducing the element of ‘naxalism’.
By mid-1988, the Liberation group of CPI-ML was in the throes of a major argument over the continuance of underground armed struggle in Bihar. They were neither moving forward nor going backward. A revisionist group took things in its hand and started a campaign for the party to come overground. I was the only journalist to have written in detail about this exercise, correctly prophesying (on the basis of some truthful admissions from the concerned horses’ mouths) that the party would enter the political fray in 1989. There were many reactions to my article, one of them a sweet telephone call in my office from someone who introduced himself: “I am Kanu Sanyal, speaking. I am in Dhanbad. I read your report. Let us meet sometime.” The meeting happened after the 1989 elections and by then Vinod Mishra was barely three years away from appearing in public for the first time at a rally in Calcutta.
We talked for three or four hours, at a tea shop on Fraser Road in Patna. Sanyal had come to meet the son of a friend of his, a local journalist. Given the image I had of him as the original ‘naxalite’, I was disappointed by his low-key appearance. He was dressed in a white full shirt, blue trousers and Bata chappals and carrying a black plastic bag. He wouldn’t talk much about the Naksal Bari days, but had much to say about the futility of the entire movement in its current shape. India is too big a country to even be ruled, not to talk of staging a revolution, was the gist of his argument. He was promoting education as the only weapon to fight the factors causing oppression. “The world is changing fast. What we did in those days now looks to me as an affair of an affected youth. Guns are not the solution. Only when the poor are aware of their rights can they do something about it.” And on, he went. His utter dislike of the traditional communists was, of course, apparent as most of his analogies were situated in West Bengal or Tripura.
Did he mean to say that the concept of Indian ‘naxalism’ was a blunder, I asked him. He gave me a serious look. I still remember his words which are appearing in print for the first time here and I quote from a distant memory: “You cannot turn back on Naksal Bari. Or the off-shoots of that movement, however lumpenised they may be today. They have created a stir in the hearts of the poor who now realize that they have not been born to be slaves. In time, more and more of them will realize this. And then a change will come.”
Was Naksal Bari then a catalyst for future change? Don’t try to deconstruct the past, he waved a finger at me. As I shook hands with him, Sanyal gave me a toothy smile and patting my back said: “If you can read Bangla, look up a novel called Mahakaler Rather Ghora by Samaresh Babu. It is about my friend, Jangal Santhal, the action man. I was only an organizer and Charu was the ideas man, but Santhal…..”
MULAYAM SINGH YADAV: WRESTLING WITH WOMEN’S WORTH
“Vartmaan swaroop men mahila aarakshan vidheyak pass hua tho sansad men udyogpatiyon evam adhikariyon ki aisi-aisi ladkiyaan aa jayengi jinhe dekhkar ladke peeche se seeti bajayenge.”
(If the Women’s Reservation Bill is passed in its present form, then such daughters of industrialists and officials will enter Parliament who would invite catcalls and whistles from the boys.)
Thus spake Mulayam Singh Yadav, one of India’s senior, surviving socialist leaders and former defence minister of India and former chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh.
Yadav made this comment while unveiling the statue of India’s biggest socialist ever, the late Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, at the eponymous hospital in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
The statement reflects the level of thinking of this insolent male chauvinist who would use or throw women for his political ends without any compunction. He perhaps forgot in the heat of the moment that he himself has in the past encouraged daughters and wives of officers and industrialists and even Bollywood actresses, not to talk of his own daughter-in-law, to enter politics by giving tickets to them in parliamentary or assembly elections.
The statement is nothing new. His anti-women stance came to the fore even earlier too, when, on March 14, Yadav described the Women’s Reservation Bill as an “international conspiracy” to weaken democracy. How would that happen?
The IANS news agency reported: “He was of the view that 33 percent reservation for women in legislatures would finally make it a nearly all-women parliament…. ‘just imagine what would be the fate of this nation in the hands of inexperienced leadership, with both Pakistan and China sitting across our borders with their own nefarious designs’?”
“I am not opposed to reservation for women, but I am opposed to the bill in its present form,” he added, perhaps not to be seen as a misogynist. http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/politics/mulayam-fears-an-all-women-parliament_100334553.html
What is interesting is the venue – the unveiling of Dr. Lohia’s statue – Yadav used to vent his sexist bias. For his information, the web site of Dr. Lohia – whose ardent follower he claims to be – says this about the attitude of India’s pioneering socialist leader towards women:
“More than half of our population comprises women. Their condition is pathetic. Cooking food, breeding children and being a slave to her husband -this is woman's fate. A woman is not considered equal to a man, such is the blind belief sustained through the ages. The law has guaranteed equality to women, but that is only on paper. Equality has not been practiced. Hence jobs must be reserved for women in all walks of life. They must be freed from the tyranny of homework. The latent talent of women should be brought to the limelight. Society does not progress as long as women remain oppressed. Society must be rid of deep-rooted beliefs and old practices. Beginning with women in villages every woman should be given justice. Lohia strove for this cause. According to him the emancipation of women was the foundation of social revolution; without this there can be no prosperity.”http://www.drlohiacentenary.org/index_more.html
(If the Women’s Reservation Bill is passed in its present form, then such daughters of industrialists and officials will enter Parliament who would invite catcalls and whistles from the boys.)
Thus spake Mulayam Singh Yadav, one of India’s senior, surviving socialist leaders and former defence minister of India and former chief minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh.
Yadav made this comment while unveiling the statue of India’s biggest socialist ever, the late Dr. Rammanohar Lohia, at the eponymous hospital in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh.
The statement reflects the level of thinking of this insolent male chauvinist who would use or throw women for his political ends without any compunction. He perhaps forgot in the heat of the moment that he himself has in the past encouraged daughters and wives of officers and industrialists and even Bollywood actresses, not to talk of his own daughter-in-law, to enter politics by giving tickets to them in parliamentary or assembly elections.
The statement is nothing new. His anti-women stance came to the fore even earlier too, when, on March 14, Yadav described the Women’s Reservation Bill as an “international conspiracy” to weaken democracy. How would that happen?
The IANS news agency reported: “He was of the view that 33 percent reservation for women in legislatures would finally make it a nearly all-women parliament…. ‘just imagine what would be the fate of this nation in the hands of inexperienced leadership, with both Pakistan and China sitting across our borders with their own nefarious designs’?”
“I am not opposed to reservation for women, but I am opposed to the bill in its present form,” he added, perhaps not to be seen as a misogynist. http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/politics/mulayam-fears-an-all-women-parliament_100334553.html
What is interesting is the venue – the unveiling of Dr. Lohia’s statue – Yadav used to vent his sexist bias. For his information, the web site of Dr. Lohia – whose ardent follower he claims to be – says this about the attitude of India’s pioneering socialist leader towards women:
“More than half of our population comprises women. Their condition is pathetic. Cooking food, breeding children and being a slave to her husband -this is woman's fate. A woman is not considered equal to a man, such is the blind belief sustained through the ages. The law has guaranteed equality to women, but that is only on paper. Equality has not been practiced. Hence jobs must be reserved for women in all walks of life. They must be freed from the tyranny of homework. The latent talent of women should be brought to the limelight. Society does not progress as long as women remain oppressed. Society must be rid of deep-rooted beliefs and old practices. Beginning with women in villages every woman should be given justice. Lohia strove for this cause. According to him the emancipation of women was the foundation of social revolution; without this there can be no prosperity.”http://www.drlohiacentenary.org/index_more.html
Monday, February 15, 2010
Shah Rukh's Khan
I saw ‘My Name Is Khan’ on the second day of its release in Leicester, where I now reside. I wasn’t alone, but with my wife and daughter. It was the 1130pm show and the cinema hall was nearly full. I noticed lots of Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indian Muslims. The Leicester brigade of Ugandan Gujaratis and Singh Sahebs from both sides of the Punjab made up the rest.
The same evening, much of the Asian diaspora was watching the film in several cities in the UK, including Bristol, Manchester, London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bardford, etc. Unlike ever in the past, this film was released in each and every, repeat, each and every cinema house of the small and big towns in the UK. Same story in the US and a host of other countries, I gathered later.
My wife told me Shah Rukh Khan had acted very well. The best, she gushed. I generally don’t disagree with my wife, knowing well how much she adores him. But I said to myself, perhaps SRK himself was diffident about his acting, given the kind of publicity stunts he devised at least two months before the film’s release. My views of the devalued Indian broadcast media are well-known among my friends, but I must say these channels do rise to occasions, such as this, to delve into greater depths of pitiable marketing. The channels breathed, lived, ate, what not, SRK. And all of them were exclusive coverage. NDTV repeated the telecast of Barkha Dutt’s exclusive with SRK almost every hour on the eve of the film’s release. I pitied Raj Kapoor and Nargis and Dilip Kumar, even Keshto Mukherji, for never having lived in the age of global live communications. Who knows, Sri 420 would have been the national film of Burkina Faso or Mother India would have been translated into Swahili.
Lest my dislike for SRK become apparent, here are some random thoughts about the film which manufactured controversy (Chomsky listening?) and made a certain cartoonist-turned-petty-politician see red. It is my belief that all the unintended comments of SRK always had an intended target.
The credit goes to him for raking up the Hindu-Muslim controversy that preceded the film’s release. What the stupid chiefs of the various Senas did was to merely react, along predictable lines. But SRK is clever. He was not bothered about a pre-reaction in India alone. He wanted it wherever the Asian diaspora lives, particularly abroad. Remember, the first time anyone heard of the film was when there was a news report that SRK had been subjected to a body search at an airport in the US because his name was…well….Khan!
The first thought that came to my mind was about the war for superiority among religions. Religions cannot co-exist, because their differences are the very basis for their existence. By the same logic, followers of religions cannot co-exist either. But then we human beings are said to be different from animals because we can reason. And this reasoning has left us with certain rules that allow religionists co-exist if they follow certain rules. That’s when politics enters the fray. The father of the Indian Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar – who laid down some of these rules -- may have had his reasons to embrace Buddhism, but that very act was a political one, making it clear that Hinduism practised untouchability and, therefore, Buddhism was superior. This was less than a century ago. The Hinduism-Islam feud goes back centuries. So the case with Islam and Christianity, and so on.
In this backdrop, when the preamble of the Indian Constitution says that India is a ‘secular’ republic, it is only attesting the fact that people of this country practice several religions, and not necessarily that people of this country practice several religions peacefully. There is no peace in conflict. And if there were no conflict, there wouldn’t be so many religions in the first place.
Religious co-existence, to my mind, is a political act, crafted carefully to nurture certain assumptions that characterise a nation or a state. It is not a social tool. Just like poverty. Will you give away part of your wealth to a beggar of your own volition? No. You need to be taxed to take that money away from you to redistribute. Like female infanticide. You need laws to stop you from killing your girl child. Like caste. You need laws to make you co-exist with a person of another caste.
So is the case with religion. Ambedkar was one example. Yesudas is another. Shouldn’t the high priests of Guruvayoor be hanged in public because they have committed the same crime as those who bought the Babri Masjid down? Or, at the very least, shouldn’t they be banned from hearing songs in praise of Lord Krishna sung by Yesudas? Why was Yesudas, a Christian, allowed to sing Hindu songs in the first place? How dare Valmeeki, a lower caste, write the Ramayana? How could we tolerate an Austrian nun in Calcutta? Would there have been four battles of Panipat in all if Akbar had not married Jodha?
See, how complicated this damn talk about religion is? Luckily we have politics which saves us from ourselves and religions, which touts secularism in the face of fundamentalism, nation-building in the face of a violent, religious migration, reservation in the face of caste conflict. Politics is omni-potent. It gives birth to a conflict, it nurtures it, it destroys it. Politics itself is no constant, evolving over time. Like in the present, ‘My Name Is Khan’.
Two things go in his favour, clearly. Bollywood has now reached a stage where a Muslim character in a film need not be a lackey of a Hindu hero and keep proving his loyalty to his community and his country, in that order. Mr. Khan, to that extent, now shares the celluloid pedestal with Mr. Bharat insofar as cinematic reflection of Indian politics is concerned. To that extent, Mr. Khan is the ideal cenotaph for Tamas and Garam Hawa.
Secondly, Mr. Khan introspects about the ills of the misguided among his fellow religionists – perhaps the first of its kind in Indian cinema on Muslim identity – and that give him a place in the hall of flame inhabited by the Meerabais and Munnabhais.
I want to ask SRK why he made the film, other than to make more money. Did he have a political message to convey other than that has been conveying through television and Twitter throughout the pre-release period? Did he think the Indian Muslims would react to the film in the same manner as Muslims in other parts of the world? Perhaps the 9/11 backdrop was created to make the film contemporaneous to Muslims across the globe? I don’t know if SRK had a message to convey, because he has not said so other than mouthing secularist phrases as explanations.
Given the political campaign that preceded the film’s release, it has to have a message. But what? I tried watching the film seriously for clues. For instance, Khan’s failure to meet President Bush, Khan’s natural affinity for Afro-Americans, his (un)intentional travels through the southern states like Arizona and Georgia, his insistence on being called Khan even by his wife instead of by his first name, Rizvan, the absence of the ubiquitous mark on the forehead of every practising Muslim (as shown without fail in Indian films!). But most important of all, the character of Khan and his message, ‘I am Khan, but I am not a terrorist’, preferring to hide himself inside the body of an autistic person who with his mannerisms disarms any overt criticism of what Khan has to say.
In the end, is it a film to educate people about Asperger’s Syndrome (because the titles carry an explanation about it), or how religion can disharmonise relations between inter-religious couples, or about the western mistrust of the followers of Islam, or of the true Islam that preaches peace as much as any other religion? I know one thing. There’s nothing apolitical about it.
SRK should know. He owes the Indian television audiences at least that much for overwhelming us with his presence all these months. As the film ended, I didn’t know who stood tall. SRK or Khan?
Otherwise, it’s just another Bollywood film.
The same evening, much of the Asian diaspora was watching the film in several cities in the UK, including Bristol, Manchester, London, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bardford, etc. Unlike ever in the past, this film was released in each and every, repeat, each and every cinema house of the small and big towns in the UK. Same story in the US and a host of other countries, I gathered later.
My wife told me Shah Rukh Khan had acted very well. The best, she gushed. I generally don’t disagree with my wife, knowing well how much she adores him. But I said to myself, perhaps SRK himself was diffident about his acting, given the kind of publicity stunts he devised at least two months before the film’s release. My views of the devalued Indian broadcast media are well-known among my friends, but I must say these channels do rise to occasions, such as this, to delve into greater depths of pitiable marketing. The channels breathed, lived, ate, what not, SRK. And all of them were exclusive coverage. NDTV repeated the telecast of Barkha Dutt’s exclusive with SRK almost every hour on the eve of the film’s release. I pitied Raj Kapoor and Nargis and Dilip Kumar, even Keshto Mukherji, for never having lived in the age of global live communications. Who knows, Sri 420 would have been the national film of Burkina Faso or Mother India would have been translated into Swahili.
Lest my dislike for SRK become apparent, here are some random thoughts about the film which manufactured controversy (Chomsky listening?) and made a certain cartoonist-turned-petty-politician see red. It is my belief that all the unintended comments of SRK always had an intended target.
The credit goes to him for raking up the Hindu-Muslim controversy that preceded the film’s release. What the stupid chiefs of the various Senas did was to merely react, along predictable lines. But SRK is clever. He was not bothered about a pre-reaction in India alone. He wanted it wherever the Asian diaspora lives, particularly abroad. Remember, the first time anyone heard of the film was when there was a news report that SRK had been subjected to a body search at an airport in the US because his name was…well….Khan!
The first thought that came to my mind was about the war for superiority among religions. Religions cannot co-exist, because their differences are the very basis for their existence. By the same logic, followers of religions cannot co-exist either. But then we human beings are said to be different from animals because we can reason. And this reasoning has left us with certain rules that allow religionists co-exist if they follow certain rules. That’s when politics enters the fray. The father of the Indian Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar – who laid down some of these rules -- may have had his reasons to embrace Buddhism, but that very act was a political one, making it clear that Hinduism practised untouchability and, therefore, Buddhism was superior. This was less than a century ago. The Hinduism-Islam feud goes back centuries. So the case with Islam and Christianity, and so on.
In this backdrop, when the preamble of the Indian Constitution says that India is a ‘secular’ republic, it is only attesting the fact that people of this country practice several religions, and not necessarily that people of this country practice several religions peacefully. There is no peace in conflict. And if there were no conflict, there wouldn’t be so many religions in the first place.
Religious co-existence, to my mind, is a political act, crafted carefully to nurture certain assumptions that characterise a nation or a state. It is not a social tool. Just like poverty. Will you give away part of your wealth to a beggar of your own volition? No. You need to be taxed to take that money away from you to redistribute. Like female infanticide. You need laws to stop you from killing your girl child. Like caste. You need laws to make you co-exist with a person of another caste.
So is the case with religion. Ambedkar was one example. Yesudas is another. Shouldn’t the high priests of Guruvayoor be hanged in public because they have committed the same crime as those who bought the Babri Masjid down? Or, at the very least, shouldn’t they be banned from hearing songs in praise of Lord Krishna sung by Yesudas? Why was Yesudas, a Christian, allowed to sing Hindu songs in the first place? How dare Valmeeki, a lower caste, write the Ramayana? How could we tolerate an Austrian nun in Calcutta? Would there have been four battles of Panipat in all if Akbar had not married Jodha?
See, how complicated this damn talk about religion is? Luckily we have politics which saves us from ourselves and religions, which touts secularism in the face of fundamentalism, nation-building in the face of a violent, religious migration, reservation in the face of caste conflict. Politics is omni-potent. It gives birth to a conflict, it nurtures it, it destroys it. Politics itself is no constant, evolving over time. Like in the present, ‘My Name Is Khan’.
Two things go in his favour, clearly. Bollywood has now reached a stage where a Muslim character in a film need not be a lackey of a Hindu hero and keep proving his loyalty to his community and his country, in that order. Mr. Khan, to that extent, now shares the celluloid pedestal with Mr. Bharat insofar as cinematic reflection of Indian politics is concerned. To that extent, Mr. Khan is the ideal cenotaph for Tamas and Garam Hawa.
Secondly, Mr. Khan introspects about the ills of the misguided among his fellow religionists – perhaps the first of its kind in Indian cinema on Muslim identity – and that give him a place in the hall of flame inhabited by the Meerabais and Munnabhais.
I want to ask SRK why he made the film, other than to make more money. Did he have a political message to convey other than that has been conveying through television and Twitter throughout the pre-release period? Did he think the Indian Muslims would react to the film in the same manner as Muslims in other parts of the world? Perhaps the 9/11 backdrop was created to make the film contemporaneous to Muslims across the globe? I don’t know if SRK had a message to convey, because he has not said so other than mouthing secularist phrases as explanations.
Given the political campaign that preceded the film’s release, it has to have a message. But what? I tried watching the film seriously for clues. For instance, Khan’s failure to meet President Bush, Khan’s natural affinity for Afro-Americans, his (un)intentional travels through the southern states like Arizona and Georgia, his insistence on being called Khan even by his wife instead of by his first name, Rizvan, the absence of the ubiquitous mark on the forehead of every practising Muslim (as shown without fail in Indian films!). But most important of all, the character of Khan and his message, ‘I am Khan, but I am not a terrorist’, preferring to hide himself inside the body of an autistic person who with his mannerisms disarms any overt criticism of what Khan has to say.
In the end, is it a film to educate people about Asperger’s Syndrome (because the titles carry an explanation about it), or how religion can disharmonise relations between inter-religious couples, or about the western mistrust of the followers of Islam, or of the true Islam that preaches peace as much as any other religion? I know one thing. There’s nothing apolitical about it.
SRK should know. He owes the Indian television audiences at least that much for overwhelming us with his presence all these months. As the film ended, I didn’t know who stood tall. SRK or Khan?
Otherwise, it’s just another Bollywood film.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Keralites alone sex-starved? Not all Indians?
Communist muffs on a war path against sex is akin to Shiv Sena hoodlums running amok on Valentine’s day. Both are same sides – ideologically and politically -- of the same coin. But that is a different topic.
What is my concern is a person like Paul Zachariah’s description of the current Mallu polity as ‘sex-starved’. But when was Kerala sex-sated, ever? Or, for that matter, India?
Music director Vinu Thomas says in an interview: “When people elsewhere think of Kerala, they invariably speak about adult films. I tell you the real reason behind this. Ours is a small state, with limited income. The film industry too is weak, but highly talented. Adult movies are a periodic development based on the available resources and financial viability. Call it easy money making, assured returns or like that.”
The first adult rated Mallu film was Kalayan Rathriyil, directed by IV Sasi. The second adult film, Avalude Ravukal, is also directed by him. That was in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, came Sathrathil Oru Ratri, directed by Sankaran Nair. This film became extremely popular at that time and was shown in all the ‘adult’ movie halls of every major town and city in India. I saw this film in the Light House theatre in Hyderabad in 1978. Light House was considered a ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’ theatre by my parents, like all parents in the country. Anyway, coming to the point, during what is called the golden period of Mallu cinema – late 1970s to early 1990s – there were hardly any ‘dirty’ movies out of Kerala. But the phenomenon returned in the form of ‘Shakeela films’ after the turn of the century. The highs and lows of the adult film history run parallel to the fate of the film industry there: ‘dirty’ films being dished out whenever the mainstream cinema started making flops.
Sex has no political bedfellow. Sex sells. That’s all.
The issue today is not whether moral policing is good or bad. The issue is that today, sex is out of the closet, not just in the slums and chawls where it has always been in the open, but in the moralistic, casteist, orthodox, middle class Indian homes where the ‘first night’ meant, till recently, sex without frills or foreplay, a ritual to be completed with the lights out.
My daughter, aged a half over 7, is going to be taught sex education in her school next year. She is in the UK, but there are many schools in India where sex education is part of the curriculum. Thanks to the internet, today’s children know more about sex at their age than those of previous generations.
The main issue is, as Shyam Benegal once said, humans have an interest in different kinds of prurient pleasures and as individuals, they have to find a way to deal with it.
I remember meeting the late Vijay Anand in 2001 or 2002 when he censor board chief. At that time he was considering a request from the Kerala regional board of certification for screening pornographic films in select theatres in an attempt to 'save' mainstream cinema in the state. Anand was very much in its favour, and told me he preferred certifying adult films as ‘x-rated’ and allowing their legal screening in separate theatres than to use scissors (Of course, he exited soon after and was replaced by a BJP footnote called Arvind Trivedi whose idea of permissive sex on film never went beyond fleeting kisses.)
Anand realized that in several parts of the country, some producers shoot two versions of a film, one with openly sexual scenes and another that is more regular and acceptable to the censor board. Commonly in small cinemas in satellite towns across the country, theatre owners interpolate 'sexually explicit' scenes into films certified for public viewing, he told me. He even had figures with him of police raids on internet cafes allowing customers to log on to adult web sites. He wanted this sex-with-lights-off attitudes to end by not making sex a moral issue.
Is the subject of sex, then, about permissiveness or liberalism? One thing is sure: it certainly is not about calling all Mallus sex-starved.
What is my concern is a person like Paul Zachariah’s description of the current Mallu polity as ‘sex-starved’. But when was Kerala sex-sated, ever? Or, for that matter, India?
Music director Vinu Thomas says in an interview: “When people elsewhere think of Kerala, they invariably speak about adult films. I tell you the real reason behind this. Ours is a small state, with limited income. The film industry too is weak, but highly talented. Adult movies are a periodic development based on the available resources and financial viability. Call it easy money making, assured returns or like that.”
The first adult rated Mallu film was Kalayan Rathriyil, directed by IV Sasi. The second adult film, Avalude Ravukal, is also directed by him. That was in the 1960s. In the late 1970s, came Sathrathil Oru Ratri, directed by Sankaran Nair. This film became extremely popular at that time and was shown in all the ‘adult’ movie halls of every major town and city in India. I saw this film in the Light House theatre in Hyderabad in 1978. Light House was considered a ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’ theatre by my parents, like all parents in the country. Anyway, coming to the point, during what is called the golden period of Mallu cinema – late 1970s to early 1990s – there were hardly any ‘dirty’ movies out of Kerala. But the phenomenon returned in the form of ‘Shakeela films’ after the turn of the century. The highs and lows of the adult film history run parallel to the fate of the film industry there: ‘dirty’ films being dished out whenever the mainstream cinema started making flops.
Sex has no political bedfellow. Sex sells. That’s all.
The issue today is not whether moral policing is good or bad. The issue is that today, sex is out of the closet, not just in the slums and chawls where it has always been in the open, but in the moralistic, casteist, orthodox, middle class Indian homes where the ‘first night’ meant, till recently, sex without frills or foreplay, a ritual to be completed with the lights out.
My daughter, aged a half over 7, is going to be taught sex education in her school next year. She is in the UK, but there are many schools in India where sex education is part of the curriculum. Thanks to the internet, today’s children know more about sex at their age than those of previous generations.
The main issue is, as Shyam Benegal once said, humans have an interest in different kinds of prurient pleasures and as individuals, they have to find a way to deal with it.
I remember meeting the late Vijay Anand in 2001 or 2002 when he censor board chief. At that time he was considering a request from the Kerala regional board of certification for screening pornographic films in select theatres in an attempt to 'save' mainstream cinema in the state. Anand was very much in its favour, and told me he preferred certifying adult films as ‘x-rated’ and allowing their legal screening in separate theatres than to use scissors (Of course, he exited soon after and was replaced by a BJP footnote called Arvind Trivedi whose idea of permissive sex on film never went beyond fleeting kisses.)
Anand realized that in several parts of the country, some producers shoot two versions of a film, one with openly sexual scenes and another that is more regular and acceptable to the censor board. Commonly in small cinemas in satellite towns across the country, theatre owners interpolate 'sexually explicit' scenes into films certified for public viewing, he told me. He even had figures with him of police raids on internet cafes allowing customers to log on to adult web sites. He wanted this sex-with-lights-off attitudes to end by not making sex a moral issue.
Is the subject of sex, then, about permissiveness or liberalism? One thing is sure: it certainly is not about calling all Mallus sex-starved.
India a dream still, at 60
I was watching a white man's ode to India -- Slumdog Millionaire -- on, where else (?), channel 135 of Sky in the UK. And then I came across your piece. A brown man's ode to the original Slumdog.
Nehru was the Danny Boyle of his day. He discovered India, but ruled an imaginary India. He preferred the HIndu civil code instead of the uniform civil code; failed to uinderstand the need for a population policy; did not realise that a mixed-economy model also needed socio-economic infrastructure and building educational facilities in the rural areas; he was in a hurry to create states on a linguistic basis, not realising the impact of imposing Hindi as the official language everywhere; he was over-dependent on the public sector which encouraged bureaucratisation, institutionalised corruption and turned trade unionism into rowdyism.
Ambedkar, the gentleman you write about in the piece, said: “If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. An ideal society should be mobile and full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts.”
Sixty years later, it seems an ideal Indian society is tne one only imagined. Like Nehru's India or Boyle's Dharavi. Because the real India is cruel.
Around 350 million – as much India’s wealthy middle class, are illiterate. A similar number of people are below the poverty line. Half of them lack access to drinking water. Half the country’s billion-odd population lacks basic sanitation facilities. Half of India’s children cannot get basic nutrition. Nearly three-fourths of rural India cannot access timely medical facilities and effective medication. ... See More
The girl child continues to be a stigma. Caste inequalities hamper economic and social progress. Linguistic and regional divides boo the concept of India’s inherent strength; it’s so-called nity in diversity. Save the top institutions, education standards are falling as it stands reduced to a mere profit-making venture. Corruption stands tall as ever, as the high priest of development; religious extremism, the high priestess of culture.
Politics in India is all about unbridled freedom for pelf and power to dissent and destroy. The ends justify the means for politicians or police, thieves or armed revolutionaries. Diversity in India can now be explained as people straight-jacketed in vote banks of caste, community, religion, language or region. Indians are bereft of national idols or ideals.
Of course, India rises as one voice when Sachin Tendulkar falls to a wrong decision or Amitabh Bachchan is admitted to a hospital or an Indian student is man-handled in Australia. India also rises as one voice when a Kargil happens or a Mumbai explodes in terror. That's what our news channels show and that's what we, who have no time to see the real India save a couple of minutes to dish out an article on it, prefer to watch.
Indians do believe in a vague sense of oneness. They are as yet unclear what this oneness is, but for them the truth lies somewhere between Tendulkar’s bat and Siachen’s last military outpost, between novel scammer Harshad Mehta and nobel winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, between Do Bigha Zameen and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, between Tata’s |Jaguar and A. R. Rehman’s Jai Ho.
What awakens us Indians to reality is what comes off as reality in celluloid.
Nehru was the Danny Boyle of his day. He discovered India, but ruled an imaginary India. He preferred the HIndu civil code instead of the uniform civil code; failed to uinderstand the need for a population policy; did not realise that a mixed-economy model also needed socio-economic infrastructure and building educational facilities in the rural areas; he was in a hurry to create states on a linguistic basis, not realising the impact of imposing Hindi as the official language everywhere; he was over-dependent on the public sector which encouraged bureaucratisation, institutionalised corruption and turned trade unionism into rowdyism.
Ambedkar, the gentleman you write about in the piece, said: “If you ask me, my ideal would be the society based on liberty, equality and fraternity. An ideal society should be mobile and full of channels of conveying a change taking place in one part to other parts.”
Sixty years later, it seems an ideal Indian society is tne one only imagined. Like Nehru's India or Boyle's Dharavi. Because the real India is cruel.
Around 350 million – as much India’s wealthy middle class, are illiterate. A similar number of people are below the poverty line. Half of them lack access to drinking water. Half the country’s billion-odd population lacks basic sanitation facilities. Half of India’s children cannot get basic nutrition. Nearly three-fourths of rural India cannot access timely medical facilities and effective medication. ... See More
The girl child continues to be a stigma. Caste inequalities hamper economic and social progress. Linguistic and regional divides boo the concept of India’s inherent strength; it’s so-called nity in diversity. Save the top institutions, education standards are falling as it stands reduced to a mere profit-making venture. Corruption stands tall as ever, as the high priest of development; religious extremism, the high priestess of culture.
Politics in India is all about unbridled freedom for pelf and power to dissent and destroy. The ends justify the means for politicians or police, thieves or armed revolutionaries. Diversity in India can now be explained as people straight-jacketed in vote banks of caste, community, religion, language or region. Indians are bereft of national idols or ideals.
Of course, India rises as one voice when Sachin Tendulkar falls to a wrong decision or Amitabh Bachchan is admitted to a hospital or an Indian student is man-handled in Australia. India also rises as one voice when a Kargil happens or a Mumbai explodes in terror. That's what our news channels show and that's what we, who have no time to see the real India save a couple of minutes to dish out an article on it, prefer to watch.
Indians do believe in a vague sense of oneness. They are as yet unclear what this oneness is, but for them the truth lies somewhere between Tendulkar’s bat and Siachen’s last military outpost, between novel scammer Harshad Mehta and nobel winner Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, between Do Bigha Zameen and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, between Tata’s |Jaguar and A. R. Rehman’s Jai Ho.
What awakens us Indians to reality is what comes off as reality in celluloid.
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