Om Shanti Om: A tale of self-reflection from Bollywood[1]

--by Ratnakar Tripathy

Senior Research Fellow,

Asian Development Research Institute [ADRI]

Patna

Prefatory remarks

I would justify the selection of ‘Om Shanti Om [OSO]’ for interpretative analysis by claiming it to be one of the most daring and radical critiques of Bollywood cinema, as well as, its most unashamed and unequivocal vindication in recent times. The startling thing here is that such an inseparable medley of both critique and blatant adoration has come from within Bollywood itself. Hindi cinema has had on occasions reflected on itself with fulsome dedication in films like ‘Kagaz Ke Phool’, ‘Mera Naam Joker’ and more recently ‘Taal’ before a Bombay bred choreographer Farah Khan decided to give us her own wholesale take on the Mahabharata called Bollywood in OSO. The point here is not simply to gauge or assess the self-consciousness shown by a genre or a specific work but also to examine how it incorporates this self-consciousness in its narrative flow and whether its self-consciousness enables it to transform and transcend itself.

There have been in the past any number of films with patchy or passing references to the medium itself, and the elusive epithet ‘filmy’ has curiously emerged from the trade as one of those indispensable and yet ineffably polyvalent concepts. We keep rediscovering this slippery notion not simply in cinema halls but in the midst of everyday wide awake usage, even though being asked to precisely put your finger on it may seem to spell trouble. This term probably seeks to emphasize a certain genre specific stance and style shared by the eyes looking at the screen as well as the spectacle on the screen. Having survived several decades of critical neglect and despise, Hindi cinema now seems to speak in far bolder tones about its ‘filminess’ than before. Ironically, this has become possible at a point in time when Hindi cinema may be going through a sea change both in terms of its content and the technology, promising to become rather unrecognizable perhaps in the next decade or so. Even as I say this, I can sense Minerva’s owl make a timely traverse across the year 2008. This is broadly the historical backdrop for this article.

There is however also a theoretical context, which requires to be made explicit at the outset. First, I have to admit that the moment I find a genre, any genre, be it a self-referent village Nautanki in Bihar or an elegant ‘Eight and a Half’ by Fellini, that seems to reflect on its own being, my heart warms up and I lose my sense of proportion, both in terms of my distance from a given show and my urge to apply ruthless tools of analysis to it. Part of this oblivion and security may arise from the fact that when a certain self-reflectiveness is already in evidence, I don’t need to start from scratch as a critic. I feel secure in the realization that someone seems to be producing a cultural object not in the frenzied assembly line mode of manufacturing plastic buckets, and that there is a critical eye present on the stage or the screen, to begin with. Call it quality control if you like, but I prefer to call it self-respect or a natural and nurturing fondness for the given medium by its faithful members in all possible epochs and eras.

Another reason I delay or douse my critical responses almost perversely is that I wish to continue to enjoy, indeed enhance my enjoyment of spectacles and not turn into a critical-analytical food processor incapable of tasting its own morsels. I have no desire to turn into a critic-analyst who has risen above the petty matters of pleasure and pain into a state of numbed objectivity. I thus applaud the filmmaker for the unrestrained fun OSO brought me. And yet, lest fun and enjoyment begin to sound like porcine wallowing, I would like to rise above the muddy splashes of joy to make a more enduring and explicit sense of the film.

The second theoretical issue is related to my own methodological ambivalences in analyzing popular culture over the years. On the one hand, there were finely shaded theories of ideology and hegemony which tried to forcefit the elements of popular culture into a number of allegedly conforming moulds such as heterosexuality, family, patriarchy, community, caste, class and the nation state, not necessarily in that order. At times they seemed unfairly procrustean and reductionist, but at times they led to deep insights, a very mixed bag of results indeed! But even within the embrace of such approach, there is a need to distinguish between a tendency to see pervasive and immanent ideological hegemony in popular art, and one that claims to see the opposite everywhere it looks - rebellion and dissent through and through. A bit like the well-known gestalt illustration, the same figure can cause you to see an hourglass at one moment and human faces at the other, hopefully not both at the same time in a schizoid montage.

On the other hand, there are approaches that may be broadly described as psychoanalytic/psychological which see in popular culture a patient’s unrestrained outpourings as he lies on the analyst’s couch. In its worst moments, such approach seemed to equate the entirety of popular culture with the fantasies and anxieties of wholesale confessions made to a psychiatric counselor[2]. In its best moments of course, it led to insights unavailable elsewhere, especially when supported by other sources such as myths, fairy tales and literature. This is no place to try to resolve a fundamental theoretical issue but I must admit that over time I have often been disloyal to both these approaches in all their grandeur. The reason is I now try to ensure that my deeper loyalty to empirical reality remains uncompromised, in order to as they gallantly say, ‘save the phenomenon’. This makes me a theoretical opportunist with no sense of ontological commitment, and I must admit right away that I feel no shame in committing this grave philosophical sin. I suppose, in my incessant chase after a phantom, I only need to keep the quarry in sight without having to consult a compass to indicate direction. Settling the issue of the nature of reality or even the visual image with finality before beginning to figure out OSO doesn’t seem a prudent or pragmatic idea anyway.

Retelling the story of Bollywood by Bollywood

To get down to the main business of analyzing Om Shanti Om, here is my own retelling of the film. The film comes in two parts – in the first part, you start with a male protagonist who happens to be a second generation junior artist, the very dregs of the film industry in caste terms, if you like. He lives with what he calls a ‘filmy’ mother and spends a lot of time mouthing stale movie dialogues at home and among friends. His entire existence seems like a grandiosely miserable kitsch on 70 mm. But he is blessed with a singularly hyperactive imagination. He not only dreams of turning a superstar but goes and falls in love with none less than the reigning movie star of the day called Shanti. He stands in front of her hoardings, confessing his love in his gushy filmy language. And yet significantly, he is not a neurotic stalker. In fact he is self-conscious enough to break his confessional monologue in front of a gigantic hoarding of his dream girl by asking her - ‘kahin tum bore to nahin ho rahee ho…[I hope you are not getting bored]’ – the very anxiety of a true blood entertainer.

Soon, the pathetic junior artist begins to rise from a state of disdained insecthood to levels deserving the compassion, if not the empathy of the audience. And then he makes a sudden and spontaneous leap to hero-hood when he jumps into a blazing movie set to rescue Shanti, not unlike the legendary real life scene between Sunil Dutt and Nargis on the sets of ‘Mother India’. The life motto of this aspiring hero is very simple – ‘they say, if you really wish for something sufficiently strongly, the whole world gets together to ensure that you get it’. Never heard of any such faux proverb or quote before I saw OSO! This mantra anyway has nothing to do with the fiery motivational formulas spouted by a Deepak Chopra or an Abdul Kalam. It quite likely means that in order to fulfill your dreams all you need to do is to switch off reality, shut your eyes and put on your own ‘my favourite fantasies’ channel. And your resourceful neurons will provide a much better picture quality than the latest lasers! My guess is, the filmmaker’s injunction here is – ‘don’t despise your daydreams. Just drag some of them into your daylight life and see what happens!’

As against this, glamorous Shanti’s life seems steeped in the utterly sordid despite her starry status. Secretly married to a film producer, the villain of the piece, she is faced with both pregnancy and rejection by him. The hero Om happens on the scene of their final confrontation and ends up makings another heroic but unsuccessful intervention, trying to foil the villain’s attempt to murder Shanti. In the process, both the hero and the heroine get swallowed by the huge pyres created by the villain and die. The chapter of pure unmixed desiring thus ends up unfulfilled, which is why the need for propitiation of perturbed spirits and the title ‘Om Shanti Om’!

Before we move on to the next half of the story, let us make due note of the fact that the villain here is a film producer or more appropriately a financial wheeler-dealer and a behind the scenes man – the key authority figure in the Bollywood industry. As we shall see later, the villain soon shifts to Hollywood after the crime and starts producing films for the NRI audience – perhaps Farah Khan’s personal revenge against the breed. Another self-deprecatory slogan recurrently used by the director in the film is ‘happy endings’, indicating how the story teller of Bombay cinema has to hover above the common miseries of life such as boredom, disease and death, and invariably conclude a tale with happy endings. Tragic incidents thus may play the rhetorical role of assuring an audience that the storyteller’s job is not over yet and one must wait for the undoing of the tragedy. As the protagonist teasingly reminds the audience - ‘Picture abhi baki hai [the movie hasn’t ended yet!]’.

In the second half, we move from the early 1980s [the period of Hollywood’s Peter Proud [1975] and Bollywood’s Karz [1980] to the present. Now Om reborn is seen as the only child of a superstar from yesteryears. The second generation film hero in his new birth slowly realizes that he is just a lowly Om in another birth – a miserable junior artist reincarnated into a star – verily, a junior artist’s dream come true. The one visible link between the two births seems to be the occasional pyrophobic attacks, the only chink in the armoured self of a new Om. This episodic neurosis however slowly culminates in a blast of memories from the past birth. But before all that happens, we see him attain all the tinselly dreams of wealth a junior artist may nurse. These dreams include red satin dressing gowns, velvety sandals, servants holding glasses of juice for him, doing his bidding every step of the way as he moves around like a crashing tornado, with a brattish nonchalance of manners bordering on mindless brutality. But not to worry! You just wait and see. He will turn out to have a good heart hidden deep under layers of arrogance masking his innate innocence for a while!

In the meantime, Om’s mother is driven nearly crazy, unable as she is to get over the resemblance between her son and the new superstar. In a rare non-filmy scene we see the filmy mother dragging along the star’s limousine in the manner of a stalker, as he curses her for rousing his conscience and well, nudging memories of his modest birth out of dormancy. Once the reborn Om fills up the gaps in his memory as a full-blown reincarnate, and rather quickly comes to terms with his dark past, he goes back to his family and friends as a reformed man. He admits as much to his present father in the middle of a filmland roust when he wins a best actor’s award, the other contestants being real life Abhishek Bachchan and Akshay Kumar. In the meantime, he has already won the audience’s empathy, even though the storyteller doesn’t bother with the likely angst of having to square up a deprived childhood with the glittering wealth of the present. We now have in front of us a hero humbled by the losses of the past and ready to outgrow his infantile self. The story of two separate births turns out to be a mere tale in two parts.

Fully armed with the emotional wealth of an earlier life, the hero is now ready to face his life assignment as an eager adventurer – the obvious challenge being revenge against the villain on Shanti’s and Om’s behalf! To make that possible at all, the NRI villain promptly makes a comeback in Bollywood after decades and decides do a film with Om. In order to complete the circle of happy endings, the hero has to find a new Shanti of course, who may complement him and whose appearance may cause cracks in the villain’s sleek façade and flummox him into erratic behaviour. The idea is to wring evidences for a long-forgotten murder. Another Shanti, a lookalike [Deepika Padukone in a double role] and an aspiring actress is found. She is then made to stage a ghostly, phoenix like rebirth from the ashes. Face to face with an apparition, the incredulous villain goes against his rational instinct and makes a murderous attack all over again. The original guilt comes back swimming promptly to the surface. But even before Om is able to nab the perpetrator, a huge chandelier drops right on top of the villain. Om gets a brief glimpse of the haunting spirit of Shanti, who executes the crash from behind the scenes before waving a final goodbye on her way to redemption. Om is left behind with Shanti’s new avatar and a happy ending is obtained. Everything fits in neatly and it’s time to go home.

Oscillating between the fairy tale and the epic

Throughout the film I could not help feeling that I am watching a work where at every stage the author takes a step ahead and pauses, as if planning to preempt the audience’s expectations, and yet moves along the predicted course, stealing a teasing look at the audience in the meantime. In brief, the surprise is there are no surprises. If the surprise succeeds it is for a very common reason – faced with characters so self-highly conscious of themselves, we intuitively expect them to behave differently from the set Bollywood pattern. But they don’t. The filmmaker thus throughout ruthlessly mocks Bollywood and yet ends up making another quintessential Bollywood film. The phrase that occurs to me here is another Bollywoodism – ‘thoda hat ke’[somewhat different] – which is reminiscent of the kathavachak tradition in folk culture where every teller of the Ramayana story is invariably and willy nilly thoda hat ke. In the process, the film ends up confirming every cliché, every stereotype, and trope, traditionally used by Bollywood. But instead of feeling cheated, let us admit may be this is the effect the filmmaker wished to create, as she indeed did! And who knows, may be the audience sees in this ongoing scam of repetition and remakes, a reward rather than a swindle!

OSO is a difficult film to analyze for the same reasons that make it interesting. It is Bollywood at its self-conscious best and all the critical points you wish to make as an advocate of realistic daylight cinema are already made by the filmmaker within the text. Additionally, there are also some poignant comments on the power equations in the Bollywood hierarchy. There is thus little else you can add but vent your anger at someone who commits a crime in full awareness and with conviction, an unusual situation in Bollywood, where we critics like to point out the hopeless but also helpless stupidity of the filmmakers, allegedly incapable of anything better. The filmmakers in turn habitually blame the stupid audience of course which is where the buck stops. OSO has thus effectively swallowed, digested and spat decades of criticism and sarcasm faced by Hindi cinema from within India and the west. It is now immune to both the bilious sneering of the educated Indian as well as the uncomprehending mockery of Hollywood.

In brief, OSO seems to carry a conscious ideology that is visibly embedded in its story line, dialogues and visuals. I feel that the ideology is best summarized in the phrase ‘Darde Disco’, a startling phrase that seems to simultaneously carry a sense of self-pity and proud assertion. ‘Bollywood is cheap, crass, kitschy and gross, and we know it, but what to do, this is what the audience wants’, goes one line of argument. ‘This is the ‘ishtyle’ [style] in which we talk of our dreams, sorrows and experiences, and if you can’t stomach it, to hell with you, since the audiences love us, and that matters the most’, goes the other argument.

Before moving further, let us remember that the junior artist in OSO is also a diehard fan, a film fanatic and this sleight allows the filmmaker to place the audience-cum-junior artist squarely at the centre of the screen. In the second half when Shanti II turns up, she makes it clear that she is more a fan of the star than an aspiring actress. It would seem then that the filmmaker is clearly imposing on the audience the hero-heroine mantle, while the film producer gets painted as a villain in the ‘us against them’ mode.

With the democratization of the entertainment industry in the post-independence era, an auteur would obviously want to be freed from the enforced patronage of the Bollywood moneybags and connect directly with her film audience. But as students of the entertainment industry, we very well know that such mediations, however much you hate them, cannot be wished away. They are integral parts of the structure and the fabric. Ironically, when the entertainer was able to connect most directly with his audience, it was in pre-industrial and pre-democratic era and mostly under the hopefully benign gaze of a feudal patron. In which case, is the director of OSO trying to share with us one of her own daydreams, namely freedom from the Bollywood movers and shakers and a direct handshake with her audience? Is it a case of the storyteller hugging her audience to point fingers in unison at the producer-villain? Will the audience become willingly complicit to this scheme? These are questions seeking answers. One has to admit that a storyteller seeking autonomy from the financer – producer in our times has two potential pawns or weapons it can use – the crazy fan/audience, and the star he is crazy about. Indeed, the fan-star duo makes the most perfectly ‘involved’ consumer-commodity pair. People may love cars, shampoos and mixies, but they don’t worship them, the way a fan worships her idol. In fact the star icon are meta-products used to endorse and sell ‘earthly’ products like soaps and shampoos. Prima facie, their worthiness as weapons in a director’s hands seems fairly assured. The irony is the director-storyteller now ends up becoming a slave to the fan-star duo instead.

Before drawing any more conclusions, there is a moment of bad faith involved here which I wish to magnify and scrutinize. Lest we overlook it, we need to remember that in the maelstrom of the Bollywood industry, it is often difficult to pinpoint the storyteller with any precision. In case of Raj Kapoors and Gurudutts, we clearly knew who our storyteller was. I feel that when Farah Khan collapses the artist/audience/storyteller together in the manner of a folk form, she is indulging in grave self-deception. Let us not forget that in Bollywood it is stars that have fans and not film directors, and quite fittingly, Om in his new avatar in OSO has been shown flitting between film sets and planning the schedules/locations of the film to be financed by the villain producer. The question is – is this a case of an actor Shahrukh Khan doing the job of Farah Khan, a director well-known for her stern intolerance for any interference in her projects? If not, why is the director/auteur missing from Om’s new film project? Indeed, in the last scenes of OSO, when Farah Khan, the director arrives in person to attend the celebrations, there is no one waiting to receive her. She finds the stage abandoned and she has to go running after an auto to get back home. Through a brief and somewhat comic sequence she ensures to point out the powerlessness and redundance of the director vis a vis the star and the producer, as also her ability to laugh off her own plight. And this suppressed authorial hurt is what may provide OSO with some links to the agony of Mera Nam Joker and Kagaz Ke Phool. The creative person in the industry is hounded by the ringmaster of a metaphorical circus, as Raj Kapur would put it, or forced to create kagaz ke phool [paper flowers], rather than real ones, as Guru Dutt would put it. In the case of Farah Khan, this hurt is more than compensated by the ecstatic stampede of all the major Bollywood stars, the community of gods from today and yesteryears who bless the film with their presence. A bit like a gathering of all the sects under one ecumenical umbrella! Or a dragooning of all the star brats under the schoolmarmish gaze of a master choreographer! This is a point I will bring up again towards the end of the essay to draw its full significance.

To go back to the earlier themes of ‘Darde Disco’ and the ‘filmy’, it is not uncommon for an educated Indian to first enjoy a Hindi film thoroughly and then switch to a critical daylight mode only to analyze the film to bits of infantile incoherence. This ambivalence hides a fundamental truth of Bollywood that requires to be admitted. It is perhaps the same ambivalence that makes Javed Akhtar invent the phrase ‘Darde Disco’. I will term it the shame of the daydreamer - once the movie gets over and the hall lights are put on, an audience faces both – the loss of a snug dream and the shrinking of his own infantile self, which he must mask in a hurry. The adult exiting the cinema hall resents the child that walked into it three hours ago.

Indeed, if I must rise above my own ambivalence here, I should begin by pointing out that despite its utter self-consciousness, OSO is one more fairy tale in both its pejorative and non-pejorative senses produced by Bombay. Once I conjure up the image of an eight year old curled up with her grandmother and listening to fairy tales however, most of my infuriating shame over enjoyment of OSO seems to perish. That a grandmother chooses not to dwell on social reality stops bothering. Mind you, fairy tales are not only about projection and fulfillment of desire. According to Bruno Bettelheim[3] among others, an essential component of fairy tales are the obstacles, the fears, and the villains that come in the way of fulfillment, which must be conquered. In the process of arduous struggle, the fulfillment itself acquires a new adult meaning. In fact, there are fairy tales, such as some of Grimm’s that come so packed with overpowering horrors that fulfillment or victory may not even seem worthwhile to a lazy daydreamer. The need for horrific content may even be proportional to the prevalent social conditions, e.g. children in a war torn area may require a higher dosage of violence in stories to learn to contend with it. At any rate, if the grandparents of the world tell fairy tales to their grandchildren, it can’t be because they wish them turned into passive daydreamers. On their part, if the children did not relish the adventure and looked for fulfillment alone, they won’t need to hear fairy tales. They would go for lollipops instead. Fairy tales allow the listener to rehearse the harsh reality and also one’s selfhood in imagined scenarios, through both identification and individuation, through a ‘what happens if…’ kind of reasoning.

And yet, if OSO was entirely and literally the same thing as grandmother’s tales, there was no need for a paper like this. The fact that we may need the aid of fairy tales in adulthood is not altogether regrettable. But reluctance to admit the need and the over-elaborateness of adult fairy tales seem to indicate that we don’t club them entirely with the fairy tales of childhood. There are thus some glaring dissimilarities between the intimate fairy tale and the Bollywood genre – the technological and social contexts and scales are quite different, but let us try to go beyond such obvious divergences. The sense of grandeur that OSO tries to achieve through elaborate, heroic and public action are attempts, I feel, to give it the semblance of an epic or more accurately a faux epic. If one were not to insist on the canonical requirements or the literary fixtures of an epic or a Mahakavya, both the idea of the ‘filmy’ and the ‘heroic’ action would begin to make a new sense. Indeed, between the epic and the fairy tale lie a number of gray categories like Khandkavya, ballads and elaborate yarns of adventure that approximates the epic form. Perhaps the stringent requirements of an epic prescribed by our classical acharyas are only attempts to ensure that we in our unrestrained egotism don’t end up claiming cosmic significance for all our experiences.

It is possible to claim that in OSO as also in Bollywood generally, we are perhaps dealing with two extremes of reality, first, in its private fairy tale sense of intimate dreams, visions and desires on the one hand, and on the other, an epic cosmic stage, where human life as such becomes the target of reflection. This is a stage where the mundane social realities as we know them, do not figure except in broad brush strokes. And here again the phrase ‘Darde disco’ [pain caused by disco kitsch or pain seen as disco kitsch?] too would make sense as the yoking of private pain with the wide public arena of the dance floor. No wonder, Hindi cinema has to work hard to make space for social reality in its prosaic sense, and the drudge job has to be performed by the countless small screens of the TV soap, in a curious division of labour. OSO requires us to take a leap from the baby’s crib to a galactic stage, from fairy tale to epic proportions, as the workaday social reality gets lost in the creases of this gigantic fabric.

The magnification of the fairy tale into the epic spectacle however, is not an easy task, requiring tremendous narrative stretching and performative wizardry, which may explain the presence of the songs, the Nautanki-Tamasha element, and the comical distractions etc., which both threaten the structural integrity of the Bollywood narrative form and also lend it the stamp of uniqueness. Additionally, to contrast an OSO with global mythologies like Spiderman, Batman or Krish, OSO is not about a fight between the good and the evil in a mundane sense, but about what happens within the self, in arenas made of the hearts and the souls of the audience. OSO does not deal with evil declared as evil out there but with the evil that that spumes out of the strife between desires and their fulfillment or frustration. The chief binary concern of OSO in brief, is not goodness-badness but innocence-corruption. The difference between goodness and innocence lies in that you can try and become good, but you cannot try and attain innocence. Similarly, you may not be demonstrably bad, but your soul may carry a rot within. Let us say, goodness is a worthwhile heroic quality only when it is built over the foundations of innocence. In this sense, the idea of innocence is somewhat comparable to ‘internalized’ goodness as a driven form of goodness rather than conscious ethical policy.

Unfortunately, despite its literary or characterological appeal, the innocence-corruption binary does not translate easily into either modern public ethics or juridical discourse. And indeed, innocence in this sense can be a dangerous ethical/political category – you see clear glimpses of it in the Idi Amin of ‘The Last King of Scotland [2007]’ in its initial stages[4]. You get a brief glimpse of it in the menacing character that Shahrukh portrays in his new birth in OSO before he encounters his past. It also defines the inimitable political style and humour of a Laloo Yadav. You get the most fulsome view of it in the life of the most playful, the most amoral and yet the wisest Krishna, as a stealer of butter in infancy, as a wandering playboy in youth, and a statesman in adulthood. Brajbhasha and Awadhi are rife with poetry admiring the infant Krishna’s lies and thefts. Theft – limitless sexual license - ruthless cunning thus emerges as the distilled ethical essence of Krishna’s life, unless you have a notion of innocence to make him seem acceptable, indeed adorable, and ascribe godliness to him, auralizing his mundane actions into ‘leela’ [ludum, play] in the process.

It would thus seem that yoking of the snug intimacy of the fairy tale with the spectacular heroism of the epic is very likely Bollywood’s method of creating showbiz deities and gods of our times. And the ‘leelas’ of their lives connect with both our fairytale and epic imagination. Clearly, according to Bollywood, despite the risks involved, innocence stands as a greater value than goodness, and is even claimed as the true basis for natural rather than assumed or cultivated goodness. It is a quality that raises you above ordinary mortals.

Alternating between reverence and ridicule: the existential jugglery of OSO:

Through my reflections on OSO, I have thus far only extended the task that Farah Khan took up in the film – to trace the trajectory of the desires of a movie fanatic, an aspiring hero, and see what an individual does with the raw material of his desires and fantasies. Let us put down this chain of desire and fulfillment – you want to meet your movie idol? Alright, here she is, as her chunni gets stuck in your buttonhole in a stroke of destiny. You want to be a star? You get even better – you are reborn as the only child of a superstar. You want your idol to fall in love with you? You get an even better deal. Your idol comes to your embrace as your fan. What else do you want of life? But yes, in order to attain any of this you have to immolate yourself in the fire of love, and out of your ashes, a world of fulfillment is created.

Before we wind up the analysis of OSO however, there is a task that still remains only partly attended. We now need to again give due attention to two brief but crucial moments in the film, when Farah Khan places herself outside the main text to make a statement on Bollywood. In an early scene, Om and Farah khan are shown to be struggling over a jacket thrown by Rishi Kapoor to the audience. The scuffle is presumably over the legacy of the past[5]. The implications of this tug of war become apparent towards the end when Farah Khan turns up to join the celebrations on the stage, a major highlight of the film also discussed earlier, only to find there is no one waiting for her. Over time, Om is able to acquire the mantle of a star but the Farah Khan at the end of the tale is left grasping at wisps of nothingness. Her redundance and exclusion from the grand Bollywood show at the end of the film is made starkly apparent. She is seen rushing in and out in a common auto. No limousines for a lowly director, she seems to admit, as she leaves the stage in sullen haste.

The point is – is Farah Khan’s repeated presence comparable to the casual appearances made by Subhash Ghai, the maker of ‘Karz’ in his own films. Or is there more to it? We do have a choice here. We could declare these interventions insignificant and ignore them. I am of the opinion that even though Farah Khan leaves the implied humiliation and the neglect in the above scene altogether unarticulated, it is difficult to dismiss her last gesture of self-mockery. While these brief appearances of the storyteller take self-reflection to new heights, they are also quite disturbing.

Long ago, Gurudutt’s ‘Kagaz Ke Phool’ dwelled on the auteur’s soul agonies, stretching matters to the point of unashamed self-indulgence and self-pity, and Raj Kapur raised his creative conflicts and passion for women to epic levels. If one were to take a rather mean-minded and ‘dard e disco’ view of their grandstanding, both men seem to grieve over the loss of women ‘created’ by them, a bit like being abandoned by their Pygmalion. Farah Khan on the other hand, decides to mask her own auteurial plight, her ‘dard’ [creative agony] in a crass disco din instead of making an issue out of it. May be that is why the director ends up laughing off her own creative agony as an uncaring voyeur unto her own work, condemning her soul pain as a cacophonous ‘dard e disco’. May be it is simply a sign of changing times and changing rules of the industry. But the ambivalence reflected here is troubling – we here have a woman storyteller who shows enormous empathy and humanity in transforming the kitschy sentiments of Om into a near sublime epic, and then ends up jeering at her own auteurial efforts. Is this a reflection on the self-regard of a director in our times?

I am not sure that the above voyeur-empathizer conflict can be resolved easily. I am also not sure if you can revere and ridicule human angst in the same breath, especially when it happens to be your own. Or does this ambivalence reflect the auteur’s discomfort at releasing a genie out of the bottle – a star out of a junior artist? How can I tell! But I can imagine a long line of Bollywood directors crouching under the gigantic shadows of several generations of godly stars consecrated by them, and wondering – was it part of my original purpose? Like a conscientious craftsman, you first create an image, then like a priest you consecrate it into deityhood. But you are horrified to find that at the end of all the narrative rituals, the idol refuses to immerse – there is no visarjan. Instead a huge monster called the star emerges out of the submarine depths of public consciousness and occupies the stage till long after the show.

The auteur now seems to have an impressive lineup of adversaries – the old style producer-distributor, the new corporate honcho – and the star, which together turn the storyteller into a largely titular authority. Well, well, well! If this take on OSO sounds slippery, the following lines from the great Portuguese poet Pessoa would confirm that too hard a look at an author’s intentions lead you into a Babel-like eddy of ambiguities:

"Autopsychography"[6]

The poet is a faker. He
Fakes it so completely,
He even fakes he's suffering
The pain he's really feeling.

And those of us who read his writing
Fully feel while reading
Not that pain of his that's double,
But one completely fictional.

So on its tracks goes round and round,
To entertain the reason,
That wound-up little train
We call the heart of man.

— translated by Edwin Honig

Whatever the ‘real’ intent of the storyteller, it becomes apparent that OSO and perhaps Bollywood look at themselves with an opportunistic mix of reverence and ridicule, of adoration and contempt. Om [and his mother as well as his sidekick] reveres his kitschy dreams with much piety but doesn’t fail to ridicule them. The audience reveres the stars in the darkness of the cinema hall and identifies with them but may dismiss them with contempt in daylight. The director reverentially creates spectacles whose reality she then keeps questioning. The director also creates stars that begin to cast an eclipsing shadow on her own self-regard. Finally, the creative agony of the storyteller would seem to get drowned in the din of ‘Dard e disco’ as an ecstatic consummation of artistic satiety and a monumentally loud burp. This is an exact reversal of the desire-fulfillment sequence. It brings to me the image of a devotee face to face with divinity in a very unlikely state – guffawing at her idol’s deformities and insignificance into one audio channel, and mumbling respectful prayers in the other. Gurudutt’s reading of a similar situation was that the world is afflicted by inadequacies even as he brooded on his own. Raj Kapoor questioned the reality of the circus with vedantic profoundness despite his secularism and came to the conclusion that impenetrable avidya of maya is all we have, reflected in the song ‘Jeena yahan, marna yahan, iske siwa jana kahan! [We live here, we die here, there is nowhere else to go]. He was of course using show business as a metaphor for human life itself and vice versa. As for Farah Khan, she decides not to take herself seriously at all! Or if she does, she won’t let us know!

To put this chaotic assemblage of the ‘auteurial selfs’ into perspective, one needs to ask – how does it become existentially possible for popular culture to live with a cocktail ontology of reverence and ridicule? Let me try to throw some light on it at the risk of sounding split-headed myself. Popular culture in India entered a phase of secularization barely a century ago and the process still carries on. The secularization process should be seen however, not as a linear matter since it seems to consist of an undulating dialectical chain of sacralization – desacralization – re-sacralization – desacralization. If this sounds opaque, remind yourself of the innumerable Saraswati [or Durga or Ganpati etc. etc.] pujas where throngs of youth play item songs from movies to create forms of ecstasy quite unrelated to religion and yet part of religious proceedings. Remind yourself of a festive fair in temple in a small town where bar girls imported from Bombay gyrate in front of local brass, police officials, and common populace [except women perhaps] who devoutly ogle at the exposed women. Devout and near sacrilegious, such orgiastic behaviour seems to come together in some kind of Dard e disco - a sutra and a site where the sweet gentleness of love explodes into an orgiastic explosion of blood, mucous and bile.

The question of how popular culture deals with the binaries of phantasy-reality, worship-sacrilege and reverence-ridicule and how a person copes with life situations by juggling between them is an issue not to be settled in a hurry, e. g. in an essay on OSO. It requires analysis of many texts, forms, rituals, performances and events to even begin tackling a puzzle that the educated often solve by promptly declaring such cultural traits as vulgar and tasteless without looking at the internal structure of such ‘vulgarities’, making prompt judgments which insulate and protect us from the infuriating reality of popular culture[7]. It is as if the pedant in us names or adjective-ises an object and sits back smugly in the belief that we now have a good knowledge of the object.

Before moving on to the last segment of the essay, I feel the need to candidly reveal what I understand of why I enjoyed OSO a lot more than the usual run of Bollywood films. The reasons behind my liking ironically, seem related to what I also found disturbing. The roller-coaster ride between reverence-ridicule, and between heroism-averageness, I believe lends the film and its characters a peculiar charm. Om turns out to be a lovable character precisely because the immodesty and the enormity of his dreams make him very vulnerable. In the first half when he jumps into the fire to save Shanti, it is because he would do it for anyone. In fact Om is taken aback at his own impulsive feat, not having ready plans to see how it feels to commit a good act. In the second half his elaborate scheme to punish the villain is driven by a desire to come to terms with his own neurosis. Shanti, the star too sits in symmetry with Om – no wild dreams here, as all she wants is a marriage and a child. Most of all, one can detect a consistent rhythm of ascent and descent in a narrative where the protagonists alternately rise and fall in their greatness. To elaborate, OSO unlike the usual run of Bollywood avoids a linear, one way progression from a fairy tale to epic grandeur[8]. Time and again, it keeps returning to a modest fairy tale level attaining levels of intimacy with the audience commensurate with the fairy tale format as many other good Bollywood films do. In the same vein, when the director makes a modest bow before the audience, one is compelled to cheer a diffident little girl lost in the wilderness of show biz. I must admit that the filmmaker has found in me another accomplice and my critical remarks are mostly an afterthought.

Conclusion

I am now compelled to end this round of my discussion on OSO somewhat abruptly but heavy-heartedly for a number of reasons that seem pressing to me. First, I feel there is something like interpretive fatigue or satiety that persuades me to leave OSO aside, at least for the time being and move on to other self-reflective Bollywood texts mentioned at the outset. Second, I suddenly notice a hallucinatory visitation on the horizon, and wish to obviate the experience of seeing the cosmos in a single film text, somewhat like Yashoda’s epiphany when she looked into infant Krishna’s mouth. Third, I am aware I came dangerously close to pronouncing judgments on an author’s ‘real’ intent, a cardinal sin for an exegete. But this temptation is only as unforgivable as unstoppable. Last, the world outside the text beckons me to step out and take a long deep breath. Dwelling too long within a text can lead to claustrophobic sensation in a fickle exegete like me, unaccustomed as I am to unending hermeneutic gyrations of a believer within the confines of a ‘the’ book.

To leave epics and fairy tales aside and to conclude on a daylight note, isn’t it interesting that akin to the junior artist [an ‘extra’ in politically incorrect language] Om in OSO, a choreographer [dance master] has made the stalwarts of the movie industry dance to her tune and stampede for brief glimpses in front of the camera, in the manner of overeager junior artists? Hasn’t Farah khan told us a Bollywood tale never told before? Bollywood may be pullulating with all the star sons for sure, but we have of late had ‘fight masters’ and makeup men directing the tallest of Bollywood stars. It is now possible for us to wait for an inspired light boy for a kathavachak, who would descend from the catwalk to give us a new perspective on Bollywood, if not the next Bollywood epic. That the hierarchy within Bollywood is seen crumbling through OSO, does prove Farah Khan’s point – a daydream goes a long way and the troubled desires of an underdog’s infancy and youth may indeed find appeasement tomorrow. As in cinema, so in society! Insha Allah! Om Shanti Om!

---

[1] An earlier draft of this essay was read at a seminar ‘Bhojpuri and Other Cinemas’ at the Asian Development Research Institute [ADRI], Patna on 22 August, 2008. Originally planned as the last part of a monograph on the theme of self-reflection in Bollywood, as mirrored in the oeuvres of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, and Subhash Ghai, the paper in its present shape can be read on its own.

[2] Notably, in a therapeutic situation, the therapist is expected to react skeptically to a patient’s confessions and has to come to his own conclusions. Even a police interrogator is likely to turn suspicious when confessions come far too readily or voluntarily.

[3] Bettleheim, Bruno, 1976 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Knopf, New York

[4] I find it difficult to forget the mesmeric traction felt by the character of the young British medico falling hopelessly for the charms of Amin, and losing his ethical compass right till the end when he has to violently tear himself away.

[5] Subhash Ghai’s “Karz’ [1980] inspired OSO. Karz in turn is supposed to be inspired by Peter proud [1975]. The movie was remade into Tamil by Kamal Hassan in 1984 as ‘Enakkul Oruvan’ and in Kannada by ‘Ravichandran as Yugapurasha’. 2008 saw another rebirth of the tale in ‘Karzzz’, by Satish Kaushik.

[6] http://www.disquiet.com/thirteen.html

[7] As I write these lines on the penultimate day of Chhath, a sun festival in Bihar, the loudspeakers in the neighbourhood have switched from devotional songs to the usual ‘item’ numbers from Hindi films. At sundown, after thirty six hours of severe fasting, the populace can now feast on milk and rice and also bomb its ears with sexy numbers before going on a twenty four hour fast again. Cultural commentators continue to harp that these are modern distortions, a claim which I continue to refuse to believe. The so-called ‘modern distortions’ seem more like modern middle class wishfulness and ostrich like defensive behaviour to me.

[8] The outcome of such progression is very interesting-it seems to lead to a new sort of realism spawned by the Bollywood phantasy machine. I wonder if such organic realism may flourish in the coming years, enabling Bollywood to move beyond its present narrative crisis.

Ethnographizing traffic movement in India

Ratnakar Tripathy


'Negotiating' traffic in many parts of India [and I am sure elsewhere] is not just an idiomatic expression. You do very often end up in a mess of intricate negotiations that don't get you anywhere by way of fixed rules even if they let you reach your destination for the day.
I should know. I nearly crashed my bike into a cow goaded by the owner this morning. It is commoner for the cows and other domestic animals to occupy the central space on the thoroughfare, letting the traffic make their curving detours. This is the context for this 'traffic ethnography', which is really about movement in public spaces, one's and other's bodies, and ownership of spaces.
Much has been written about the chaos of Indian roads, both with indulgent humour and deep chagrin. But if you have to 'negotiate' the roads yourself, it is small help calling it chaotic and gnashing your teeth in road rage. You must learn the language of negotiation used on the roads. This language has dialects, varies from place to place and is tweaked by locals in villages, small towns, city roads, lanes, neighbourhoods and inner city mazeways. Here's an account of its vocabulary:
Honking on Indian roads in not noise! It's the presiding part of an unevenly visceral and multi-sensed language that includes eye contact, body language, acceleration, deceleration, lights, nods, and well filthy abuses under the breath. Honking itself has many registers ranging between a quick sharp squeak to persistent hectoring. Then of course, you have bikes fitted up with truck horns and there are also ones that sound like a train has come hurtling right behind your butt. There are honks that sound like a request and ones that intend to madden you into surrendering your space. This is a lexicon that keeps expanding like any other language.
As for the question of power, let me give you a few examples. There are roads with shops on the sides where the pedestrian is generally the king. This equanimous king doesn't react to the loudest of honks and moves gently like an overweight rhino. Especially if you are behind him! If he's in front of you, you can try eye contact and plead your way through. But there are also roads where a pedestrian gets a taste of his own medicine – these are roads you can't cross till a small traffic snag develops and you hurry across. In fact traffic snarls are not dysfunctional and play a vital role in the business of free movement. They check the accident rates on roads just like the zigzagging bicycles and absent-minded pedestrians. Allowed to speed at will, the majority of the Indian drivers may be seen as assassin + suicide by two to construct an ideal type.
A routine news item in Patna papers – 'Boy run over by a truck, roads and train tracks jammed by relatives and neighbours for five hours'. Then comes the senior police officer to argue, cajole and to promise cash compensation, never to be delivered. the crowd are suddenly reminded there is this thing called the Indian state you can go sulking to. But there is no branch of humanities looking at this aspect of our lives. I propose we start a department of Body Movement Studies, an inter-disciplinary field combining sociology, politics, ethology, socio-biology, cognitive psychology, kinetics and socio-linguistics and of course everything else. Any takers?
There are indeed city roads where the impersonal traffic rules have taken over completely and the Indian state enjoys full authority. But the majority of other spaces are constantly contested, negotiated and apportioned after tiresome rituals. As for the traffic cop, he's really a tired choreographer mimicking the passage of people, making encouraging signs towards people who are coming and making a shoving gesture towards those who are going. This makes for a very vibrant community life on the road. Does it sound sufficiently disgusting?
I get the feeling sometimes that being in public spaces of any kind in India including a lift, you have a choice between turning into a dumb bullock uncaring of other's bodies and movements, of being a frenzied predator cutting through the masses of human flesh, or a slimy fox, sidling through spaces with cunning and speed.
Life on the road in my country is thus like being in a huge overcrowded and transient temple fare. In this lemmings like stampede, you are on your own. The laws and the state come in only if you break someone's leg or have your own broken!
In brief, we write and rewrite our traffic rules every day of the year.
And well, erase it in the evening before finding our first 'eureka' axiom. Can you now please draw our learning curve?
Small populations will never understand why we are compelled to move the way we move.

Note- this is a highly limited ethnographic report based on my experience in the cities of Patna and Hyderabad. A reminder – India probably has the highest fatality rate for road mishaps in the world.

‘Slumdog Millionaire’: the day day after

This piece is not so much about ‘The Slumdog Millionaire’ as the numerous controversies that arose in India after the film was released. This by itself indicates that this piece aspires for a special place somewhere above the media din or attempts to clear the Augean stables or what I say must be seen as a privileged. Or does it any of that?

Let me crawl out of the brief tunnel of self-reflection and make my point anyway. The first comment on ‘Slumdog…’ I saw was written by a journalist before seeing the film. The word comment is not right. Incredibly, it was a long piece which started with a frank and I thought a daring declaration that the author is yet to see the film, but in the meantime, nevertheless …. I was left biting my nails in consternation.

In the following weeks I was unable to check if the prescient author wrote on Slumdog again after watching the film. My guess is probably not. The reason may be that everyone has now seen the film and the body of expert opinions on the matter have swelled to a noisy stampede. No one is listening to anyone anymore. People may be just looking at other’s opinions and placing their own in ever shifting alignments. The film is still doing extremely well in small town Bihar and our Chief Minister in Bihar, India, Niteesh Kumar rode on a cycle rickshaw to see the film at a cinema in the early weeks.

I propose that on issues like movies that rarely involve high levels of scientific precision or predictability, there should a be a system whereby we ‘experts’ write three analytical reviews of a film – one before seeing it to register all the effervescing expectations if any, another one which faithfully records our reactions during the viewing, and a last one that is formulated after much thinking and discussion, may be a few months after the owl of Minerva’s has already flown past. This makes for a complete hermeneutic life cycle for a text and the reader as well if he bothers to keep track. We will ignore the obsessives and addicts who would want to talk about Slumdog forever as well as the catatonics not sufficiently forthcoming.

As for me, I loved the film and was moved by it. Like a true Brahmin and a member of the middle class, the shit-bathed sequence seemed excessive to me in that I wanted to puke in the middle of what seemed an absorbing tale. May be this is the reaction the filmmaker sought - to show the cruelty of a life where tangible smellable shit seems more acceptable than its picture in paint box richness. Interestingly, I have managed to walk through foul smelling slums with more tolerance. May be it has to do with our theatrical cannons – according to our sage Bharata, live performances should not include organic/intimate matters such as eating and copulation. You will find family scenes in Hindi movies where a family settles over a large feast but no one seems to eat as the conversation flows. And no talking while chewing the food! Very unlike Hollywood movies where people are forever drinking coffee or munching sandwiches! Not to mention slobbery kissing over all variety of compliant lips made available by the production guys. I was forgetting – Salman Khan made farting fashionable in Hindi films for a whole year some time ago. All about Guajarati/wedding food!

To come back to the point, in the last few months I saw such a surfeit of comments on the film, my head is now bursting with controversy. Slumdog has gone out of my mind entirely. My experience of watching the film has completely faded. All that’s left is a bundle of woolly controversies. And now I don’t want to think of the film or talk about it. I don’t even have any good memories of it left. So when I write these lines it is with a sense of anger over the fatigue caused by the critical din. It is the irritation of a tired man sick of his own doxological effeteness. Is it a natural process whereby meanings dissipate over time or is it me?

All I know are these three or four stances which typify the whole range of critics. The stances are there but the movie is gone. Like in the ancient times, the text is gone, only the glosses are left. When the glosses go, just the brief quotes remain as surviving redactions. And finally the highly memorable footprints in the sand get wiped out. I am aware that my children may come back to Slumdog after a decade to remember a classic. But this is what critics have done to my martyred enjoyment of the film in the meantime. But the point is – I am one of them too.

I have written this piece to share a feeling of distaste and disquiet. I have now begun to wonder if cultural criticism may at times or rather too often lead to cultural exhaustion, a greedy scraping of cultural meanings from an essentially receding reality.

H’m, what was I trying to say really? Okay, here it is -

When a very pleasant film is made about India in soothing colours, the critics rush in to remind that parts of India are ugly too and that the filmmaker suffers from a reality deficit. On the other hand, if you focus on the harsher sides of India, everyone busily reminds you that Indian reality can be very quite pulchritudinous and that again the filmmaker has a warped sense of reality. In brief, just listen to what we say about ourselves and no further comments, please. Both your admiration and despise only confirm you are once again the ex-colonizer. You must have a balanced opinion of us and we’ll let you know as and when. The privilege of extreme views belongs solely to us. Oh, the ever slippery piety of repeatedly eternalized victimhood! Don’t I see enough of it in my own family-clan?

To wind up, let me dredge out the reasons why I liked the film from my long suppressed and muddied memory of the past few weeks. First, I liked the idea of a young boy telling his shitty life story to a torturer under duress. There was no other way the story would have been told. I find this very moving – the only time you get a chance to tell your tale is when it may save your life. There’s a touch of another Oscar rendering – ‘the Reader’, here, albeit in reverse. This is not a storyteller fondly remembering his past on a rainy evening with a finger of 100 Pipers on a Burma teak surface, if I may borrow an image from a widely viewed add for the scotch label in India. This story was retrieved from a black-shithole and carried to the Oscar stage. No big deal in itself and yet no excuse for snooty despise. That a lot of Oscar is crap does not go to prove that Slumdog is one too.

Second, the protagonist of the film finds all his quiz answers from the most painful moments of his life. Fates/furies in their most benign form compensate him for all the pain through a series of serendipitous coincidences. It is almost as if pain isn’t ever about nothing, is the anchored message. We know that that’s not true, and yet how many of us are able to bear pain better imagining a fat cheque in the next mail by way of repair. Even though endowed with a robust sense of reality as we are, we don’t exactly go rummaging through the mailbox next morning!

There were other reasons I liked the film, but I have forgotten most of them since I put on my argumentative airs hoping in all my vanity to put a debate to rest for myself and attain a state of interpretive repose.

Will these do for the time being?

May I suggest a certain ‘singularity’ here – sum of meanings of a film = sum of controversies it may create. Or even more strongly, that which is not objectionable is culturally insignificant. If this is culture I don’t know how to define politics. And there is in it an attempt to go at a tangent from the text in question towards other interpreters as the main text in running till the point of exhaustion and datedness. There are people who seriously argue for example that Boyle ‘encashed’ Indian poverty as the only way he knew to make money. To respond to such nonsense – our most famous folk playwright in Bihar, Bhikhari Thakur definitely did theatre as the only way to earn his livelihood although he was a barber by ‘birth’[caste] and training.

By meaning, I of course mean those intangible rays that scatter far and wide even if they never reach the soul. As meanings flow fast and thick past us, we are left grabbing ludicrously at any little fragment that makes sense or helps preserve self-respect in the interim.

There are these megalomanic moments when I feel mobbed by meanings I don’t want to shake hands with. And then there are moments too when I am begging for meaning on the streets, in the libraries, and among friends, asking for the semblance of a clue. Slumdog was good experience, I remember. I was neither begging nor turning away, and I came home with a heart full and heavy and a mind ready to think afresh. Does this sound a bit like religious conversion? Yes, but good art converts you n times - everytime you are ready for it.

Is all I remember about Slumdog now!

Difficulty as a fine art


The other day my friend Joe mentioned to me a curious experience with his academic peers. Having recently submitted an MPhil thesis on cricket at the English and Foreign Languages [EFL] University, Hyderabad, he showed a paper to his friends hoping for critical comments. The most outstandingly critical comment he got was this – ‘your writing is too simple. It requires no effort to understand’. This was followed by according to Joe, the disgustingly sage advice – ‘if you continue to write this way, you may damage your academic career. If people can understand you without any strain, they will not value your work.’
These comments reflect on the quality of the mind of the critic in more than one sense. I felt moved by a sense of utter innocence reflected in the plain admission here that abstruseness may be the most distinguishing trait of good academic [or theoretical] writing. I remembered my own graduation days when we struggled to inject as much academic argot as possible into our writings in order to be able to look down at the laity. This was done with unseemly hurry and exuberance and often made us sound like the new rich kid on the block. The problem was partly that of language – we were mastering high order concepts from a foreign language. English was not exactly our language of intimacy and yet we hoped to be on first name terms with its most refined words and concepts – a bit like paradropping over the Everest summit by way of preparing for a trek in the Himalayan foothills. But matters seemed to go deeper – there was a sense of lack of continuity between our inherited concepts and what was taught in the class. Of course, such intellectual breaches proved to be more of a challenge than a handicap over the years for the more fortunate students like me. Others continued to run franchises of foreign families of concepts.
In our promiscuous post-modernist times, a difficult writing often carries a heavy load of playfulness along with awe. It is no longer the unmixed awe associated with a stern Hegelian or a spare Wittgensteinian text with all the untranslated or untranslatable Germanisms etc. There is, these days, more commonly a sense of play to be seen in the author’s slippery text. ‘You can try but you cannot catch me in the midst of all the gelatinously mazy mass’ – it seems to say. The reader on her part continues the chase to get some feel of the shapes around her. In this the reader is often guided by the dim submarine glow of the author’s intent, enjoying and cherishing brief flashes of comprehension and mastery. And thus the hermeneutic game of reading and re-reading goes on in the absence of an arbitrator [except for the little matter of the grades]. But there is an anomaly here – even if a text is rarely allowed to take a permanent or stable position at the Olympian heights, an individual reader has full rights to place it on his own personal pedestal. It is a bit like having several gods to choose from but with an option to decide how devout you wish to be towards your particular god. And indeed, a devotee may choose to exhibit heights of monotheistic passion rare even in days of high monotheism.
In brief, even though we rarely unite in our reverence for the master-text, many of us continue to worship our chosen fragments with great fervour. Along with this fervour goes a sense of ‘sacral’ awe, and along with the sense of sacral awe goes a sense of difficulty and opaqueness. I remember how devoutly some of my friends uttered names like Foucault or Derrida while elucidating their quoted passages. Of course, it was very frustrating when the listener refused to be swayed, exposing his banality without shame! But at the same time, the aura associated with textual ‘difficulty’ seemed heavily endangered too.
This is no place for me to attempt a typology of either difficulties or ambiguities. But what the campus critics may have failed to include in their advice is the very practical matter of the rewards that come with the mastering of difficulty. I will never forget how angry and clueless I felt after my first viewing of Tarkovesky’s ‘Solaris’ – equally angry with myself and the filmmaker, not to mention Lem. When I saw the film a second time however, things fell into place through a split second revelation within ten minutes of the opening, and the rest was sheer pleasure.
The point then may be – did one get rewarded for all the wrestling with an author’s textual difficulties, or one has had to come back empty-handed? May be the campus critics forgot that there is nothing like ‘pure’ difficulty and that it means different things at different times to different people. It is indeed possible to lend a certain conceptual density or thickness to one’s writing – probably the closest thing to pure difficulty. But is that a mostly stylistic or a substantive issue? In my experience, despite a Sokal, it’s quite rare to make a living out of difficulty alone. You need to garnish it with substance. And yet the Sokal scandal continues to haunt us!
These days I find myself brooding on the many contexts and kinds of difficulties without getting anywhere. But every time I get angry with an author for being opaque and walk away, I wonder if I am a bit like the fox of the grapes story. While the fox stopped at the modest slander ‘the grapes are sour’, after several attempts I do begin to ask ‘do the grapes really exist’? And also the obvious question - am I a rare breed of foxes that has developed unnatural fondness for grapes of all things?
In sum, we as textual commentators of all hues seem to be in the business of creating difficulties as much as that of simplification. Like a see saw, when truths seem intolerably obvious we question them, and when mysteries seem unacceptably impenetrable, we try to simplify them.
Any opaqueness in this piece, incidentally, is unintended or let us say, I have not worked on it enough, according to Joe’s friends.

An appeal to a terrorist with conscience

The recent explosions in Bangalore, Surat and Ahmedabad have sent renewed shivers among the common citizens all over India, where we have a rich variety of ‘terrorists’. As usual, there has been a spate of articles and statements demanding stricter laws and better intelligence. And yet no one is willing to admit that if an individual/group seriously decides to kill people and is willing to pay the price, there is nothing much you or me or the state can do about it except after the event. All you can do is keep an eye on how kids are growing up in your neighbourhood over time. Call it community policing if you want. But this is not a counsel of despair!
Ironically, as the terrorists discover greater individual liberty and empowerment on behalf of the common citizen, it is often the common citizen that ends up becoming the target of these attacks and not the state – a zero sum game. Hitting out at the state via the common citizen is a very unethical but also a very circuitous idea. I reckon that in any terrorist group, half the members would be people with qualms, and the rest must be men and women who were anyway on their way to turning into suicides, serial killers, or child and wife beaters. It’s just that they find an excuse in a cause, and settle down to a humdrum career in violence. Many such people in India become cops and political leaders and succeed in sublimating their ferality to various extents.
The bombs e. g. in Surat were spread all over the place like garbage as if the bombers suffered a serious bout of moral reluctance on their way to work. I think it’s high time terrorists of all hues rethought their purpose – is the idea to hurt the state directly, or to hurt common people who will then turn and accuse the state of failing as protectors? If they are really earnest in their cause, why don’t they target government buildings emptied of people, or construction hubs and cinema halls after midnight? I think such acts would serve the cause better, although I remain strongly prejudiced in the favour of satyagraha. Significantly, even the meaning of 9/11 minus the 3,000 deaths changes radically!
The question is – does a terrorist want to kill people or win support among them? This appeal is clearly not directed at those egos that have a macho-er than thou problems with the super-macho state, or those caught in a deadlock who will anyway end up in a lover’s embrace with the big bro. But in case our terrorists want to win some support and sympathy among the citizenry, it may be a good idea to create spectacles where the citizen remains confined to the status of an onlooker/audience staring fascinatedly at their ideological fireworks, and not a target/victim. Lastly, I would recommend that before blowing up a huge building, a terrorist group should run up and down firing blanks at people to force them to leave. This much terror is still robust and anyway actually amounts to tender care.

Ratnakar Tripathy

reflections on item numbers in Hindi films

Since my friend Alice Samson from EFL University, Hyderabad, India suggests that i should write brief posts on blogs, and i respect her views, i will herewith comply.

for some time i have been wondering about the role played by the item in Hindi films. so here are some observations presented unsystematically before i put them down in a better structured piece.

first of all, the item seems a regressive developement in the Hindi film form in a non-pejorative sense. the item is perhaps a throwback to folk theatre, where the main performance would be interrupted by side shows that could be both desultory or highly attractive. to demystify this formal jugglery, these sideshows allowed the artists to change their costume and makeup, e g from that of a pretty princess to an unpretty hirsute demon, whic is not something you can do in haste. at any rate, they carried more enertainment content than the ad breaks on the TV channels these days. and the audience stuck on to their seats without seductive supplications from the long-legged VJ, unless nature called.

today's items may remind us of the vamps of the yesteryears, but this is false memory. item girls are rarely full-blooded 'characters' like our olden vamps, whether Nadira, Helen or Bindu. they seem to do their bit and move away from the stage...

...the point is, what is the 'bit' done by them for which an artist gets payed an entire temillion rupees these days? here is my response.

i have felt for some time that Hindi movies have traditionally been very uncomfortable with intimate but prosaic, everyday love scenes. they tend to confine sexual intimacy to song sequences picturized among flowers, bees, mountains, mist and rivers. the idea is to treat the universe as a dance floor and as Chidananda Dasgupta claims in 'The naked Mask' , to attain orgasm through a duet!

the item seems another attempt to fill up sexual spaces with crowds, riotous crowds such as in 'Beedi Jalaile' in 'Omkara', but also genteel corporate crowds as in Mallika Sherawat's dance in 'Corporate.'

i will now present a strong proposition - Hindi cinema [thus far] believes that if you have no right of entry into a love scene, it turns pornographic, and you are just a dirty voyeur. otherwise you are a normal healthy participant in an orgy of exposure and stripping, and your fawning and pawing are easily forgiven.

it will take me a while to recover from this ontological topsy-turvy, but i will be back with a longer piece even if i end up defying Alice's advice.

Jahaji Music

by Ratnakar Tripathy
I recently saw Jahaji Music, an excellent documentary film on the Caribbean by Bombay-based filmmaker Surabhi Sharma. The word Jahaji means fellow-travelers on ships that carried indentured labor to the Indies from India to work on sugar cane plantations owned by the British. This nearly two hour film takes you very close to the fervent musicality which the Caribbean is known for in both senses – the stereotypical and the profound. I walked into the theatre with incongruously cheery associations in my head. At some point in college, I had admired Bob Marley, which is a very sober and adult way of admitting a passing but intense phase of madness. Marley was for a long time stuck like an audio loop in my mind and well, in my body, for the way it made you want to dance in innocent and celebratory rather than insane or drugged ecstasy. I had always puzzled about the cultural associations that went with Marley without looking too deeply into them – the cannabis, the Rastafarian cult and its unlikely association with the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, and the even more unlikely and bizarre linkages with Judaism and queen Sheeba of all people. Even now this delightful broth of legends seems a good example of history written under the influence. Somewhat later I discovered Tosh, the original one, and heard his ‘Legalize it’ with a lot more detachment. I am reminded of it since I recently saw the slogan on the t-shirt of a Sherpa coolie in Gangtok with the tri-pinnate cannabis leaves.
Surabhi’s main focus in the film was the diasporic angle – the rather incredible journey and transformation of music between India and the Indies. It’s as if every indentured labour carried his own India all the way to the distant lands and reverse engineered it for his own purposes, before reinstalling it on a pedestal of faith. Surabhi’s film makes you wonder what crazy somersaults our memories can perform and how the mind is capable of incredibly intricate set design, changing completely alien spaces into home with some help from music, rituals and costumes.
Anyway, what I found or rather rediscovered through Surabhi’s film was how strongly and centrally music may matter to one’s identity. To those accustomed to the centrality of linguistic, caste or religious identity, there is something incredible about the central idea of film. Also, if I may point out, the Trinidadian Indians and Africans seem to posit their musical identity primarily for themselves, and the viewers seem to be incidental passersby. Throughout the film it seemed fairly clear that the Chutney or Rege defined identity primarily among the practitioners themselves rather than the outsider. There was an air of innocence about their music and dance in that its primary purpose seemed to be self-absorption among the performers rather than display. The raw sexuality that the film brings out is just that – pristine and raw sexuality with no patina of the pornographic, and the coy dissembling that often goes with it.
I also didn’t notice any anxiety among the performers over the image that the outsider may form of them. There was no purveying of the ‘look at our culture’ line at all. This is of course understandably a somewhat relative point as any performance is clearly aimed at display rather than purely private narcissistic viewing. The conclusion here may be that while choosing to posit our identity we also choose the dimensions so to say through which our identity is affirmed, and it is interesting to see that unlike some societies who choose religion, language or race, certain other societies choose music and dance. Why music seems as puzzling to me as the question why language or religion. I am sure dimensions such as religion, language and race do matter to the Caribbean but I get the impression that music and dance perhaps have a more decisive sway. Despite how things look from a few thousand miles, I am aware that what I say may not be true of the entire Caribbean society at all, but a smaller urban segment trying to rise above its misery with the help of music.
I am aware that smaller communities in Bihar, India have certain song forms such as chaita or biraha running in their veins. But I am not sure they are as music-dance mad as the Trinidadian. There is also the instance of the rather unique movie madness of the Telugus and the Tamils in India, which is as incomprehensible to those under its divine influence as the outsider, to those who live out this madness with great élan and poise, and those who see in it as an inscrutable puzzle. While rhythm seems to so central to the West Indian, I must admit, melodies matter to me a lot more. I have never forgotten a tale told by a friend who went to the US at a very young age. After being admitted in a campus residence, she quietly sat on her bed feeling crushed by a sense of utter loneliness. Suddenly she heard the strains of a Geeta Dutt song and followed the trails of the suspected hallucination, in the process making her first friend with a fellow Indian and perhaps laying the first mental foundations of a new home. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist would have us believe in his ‘Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007)’ that rhythms are neurologically more fundamental than melody but in melodically intense moments like these I am no longer sure. I somehow feel the Indian ear identifies more easily with the melody than the rhythms.
To conclude, I wonder if it’s possible to speak of ‘accents of identity’ wherein you have a wide range of features marked by traits like cuisine, smells, language, religion, melody, rhythm, terrain, physical appearance, costume where the needle of identity may find repose. Some pick on language and some others on music or cuisine. This would of course be a case of a harmless form of identity which seeks familiarity/commonality of some kind and in the process makes its preferences clear, whether for music or religion, to mention two examples. ‘Jahaji Music’ shows that the chutney singers often don’t speak Hindi and simply mug up the lyrics. There is thus no great passion for the language as such involved here. Superimposed on such preferences is of course the more politicized form of identity. A combination of the sensuous and the political [cerebral] can form a very tight and rather inescapable circle of identity. And then you have the questions of claimed identity and that which is placed like a mantle on you whether you like it or not!
Irrespective of all those unpleasant issues, the most beautiful part of the story here is one that involves an almost categorial definition of culture, rather rare in practice or theoretical discussions. We are informed that it is usually deadly dangerous to enter Trenchtown, Jamaica [where Bob Marley grew up] even during daytime. But once the scheduled musical event begins, the whole area turns into a glowing utopian haven of goodwill even in the dead of the night. I thought this contraposing of music and violence carries an implicit definition of culture - violence in, music out, music in, violence out. I have quite fallen for this variety of clarity after watching ‘Jahaji Music’. Remember, the Taliban in Afghanistan did not only whip its women for showing their faces, it also dynamited the ancient figures of Buddha in the Bamiyan caves.
I am aware that art and violence have no simple relationship, but it’s good to see them both declared antonyms even for a night of unalloyed pleasure.