the burden of authenticity

[another draft from two years ago]

from an article, apparently written by aruna roy, i'd originally found on the mkss website (but doesn't seem to be available there now, but can now be read here) on how the struggle for right to information started:

To understand the reason why the demand for minimum wages and the subsequent demand for access to records came about, it is important to try and understand the geographical as well as the socio-political setup of the area where the MKSS works. Rajasthan being a desert area, the people are faced more often than not with a drought. During the time that the rains fail, the only choices that people have to earn a living is to either migrate or work at the famine relief work sites. A famine relief site is basically the work sites that are opened up by the government to provide employment for the people. This could be building a road, digging a well, or desilting ponds/lakes etc.

when the people face drought, frequently, what is the state supposed to do? build irrigation infrastructure for storing and distributing water? no. also set up schools and training centres so that they can learn other ways of earning a livelihood? no. when drought occurs frequently, the state shouldn't tell itself that drought shall occur frequently, it shouldn't gear itself up to deal with it on a long term basis and not wake up every year to drought and draw up plans every year. the article describes how the struggle took root:

A famine relief site is basically the work sites that are opened up by the government to provide employment for the people. This could be building a road, digging a well, or desilting ponds/lakes etc. In most of these work sites it is seen that women are there in larger numbers than men. Men tend to migrate in search of livelihoods and the women are left behind to tend the family. 

It was seen initially that the laborers at the famine relief sites were not paid their full minimum wage. When they demanded to be paid minimum wages on public works, they were refused on the grounds that "they did not work."

a state that doesn't care how frequently drought occurs and definitely doesn't bother to take any tangible efforts to find permanent solutions to the problem- should one expect that its ad hoc solutions would spell sincerity? but our problem is not merely a state that doesn't bother how frequently drought occurs, but also a civil society that seems to tell people not to think beyond droughts, or worse, drought relief. the article goes on:

When the laborers questioned the authorities, they were told that the proof for the fact that they did not work lay in the records. The records in question were "measurement books" which were filled by the Junior Engineer. The laborers then demanded to see the records. At this point of time they were told very clearly and in no uncertain terms by the administrators that they could not see the records, because according to the Official Secrets Act (1923), a colonial legacy, all these records were state secrets and could not be opened up to the public. This infuriated the laborers who then said "till we get access to those records, we will always be told that we don't work and the administration can never be challenged on that account. If we are to prove that what they say is not true we need to get those records!" 

It was at this point of time that the movement for the "right to information" began.

the struggle had died, actually, by that point of time. you accept drought (and the government's indifference to it), frequently. you accept continued neglect of education and training. you've been reduced to the state of an underpaid coolie of someone who owes his very existence to you (i mean the so-called government servant, of course). you've already given up most of your rights over your life: now you want information on how the state is running your life? reminds me of satyajit ray's sadgati which was based on a short story by munshi premchand. a summary of the story from here:

An untouchable Dukhi (an out-caste, played by Om Puri) approaches the village Brahmin to request him to set an auspicious date for his daughter's upcoming wedding according to the Hindu astrology. The Brahmin promises to perform the task in exchange of Dukhi slaving over household chores in return.

Already ailing and weak due to a recent fever, Dukhi agrees and begins with cleaning the Brahman's house and stable. When he is asked to chop a huge block of wood, Dukhi’s anger increases with each blow. Working in scorching sun, hungry and malnourished, then he dies. The corpse lies close to the road used by the Brahmins to go to the village well. The untouchables shun it for fear of police investigation. What can be done with the corpse of an untouchable that no one will touch?

Late in the evening, when no one looking, Brahmin ties a noose around its ankle, slides it out of the city limits and sprinkles holy water on the spot on the road to cleanse it of the untouchable’s touch.

you accept the brahmin's right to decide how your life should be run. you let him exploit you, in return, for stealing from you the right to decide how your life should be run. what's your complaint?

if there was any hope expressed anywhere on the mkss site that leakage or corruption would one day be totally stopped, or even substantially reduced, i didn't notice it. if there were some insights offered on more substantial issues, on how structural inequalities like unequal access to natural resources like land, water (determined by birth, or caste) or to public services like education, health etc (determined again by caste, and class), or how inequalities in power and wealth which result from other inequalities, could be overcome, i didn't notice them.

the message that you get is: the struggle would be permanent, but not the solutions. the struggle would run for  generations, but never look for relief beyond this season. also, never look beyond the same problems and the same solutions.

gopal guru says: Authenticity in some sense could be defined in terms of the affirmation of the ordinary (life).

in that sense, the low caste individual is always expected to be more authentic. the burden of authenticity, of never looking beyond the same (ordinary) problems and the same (ordinary) solutions, requires him to never look beyond manual labour, never expect anything beyond the karma of drought and deprivation, never rise above patronage. in other words, never live beyond caste.

caste, aruna roy, seems to say in more than one article, is an issue..but, you know, it isn't such a big issue. she is also being authentic, but in the gandhian sense which values simplicity, moral consistency and intellectual embodiment in Indian tradition. the key term being 'indian tradition'.  

The angry young man wasn't an outcaste

a revised version of an old post was published at the round table india:

'I am not a believer in the caste system' says Amitabh Bachchan. This is not the first time that he has repudiated caste. He had spoken out against the caste census earlier when he said his caste was 'Indian'. It is another matter that the Kayasthas aren't willing to let go of him.

Has the 'angry young man' mellowed down? Wasn't he the rebel who consistently fought against injustice and exploitation from his earliest films? One could be accused of conflating the two, his screen persona and his real life personality, and trying to make the latter, reality, to stand up for the former, fiction. But this article tries to argue that there isn't much difference between the angry young man of a few decades ago and the seemingly mellow old man, the real Bachchan of now. Both stand for a conservative social order, for caste.

The mistake that we make when we speak of the 'angry young man' as an underdog, is the same as the one the planning commission makes when it seeks to find marginalization only below the ever inaccurate poverty line. In most senses except one, poverty, the angry young man wasn't an underdog.

please read the rest here. 

good taste, 'bad woman'

she'd congratulate folks who wished to give her an award on exhibiting such good taste .when a big studio owner tried to bully her into going down on her knees and begging for compassion and forgiveness for appearing a few minutes late on the sets.. she did what some future chief ministers would never dream of doing..she walked out of the sets and the film and the studio. and built her own studio and made her own films and bullied her own ex-'heroes'. and also wrote stories in which saases and bahus were best pals.

-----------------------------------------------------------
a 5 year old draft written in bhanumathi's memory.

reddy charitra

from here:

 One Karunakar Reddy from Anantapur district filed the petition in the SHRC, demanding that the commission order film director Ram Gopal Varma to remove certain scenes from the film which allegedly project the Reddy community of Anantapur district in a poor manner.

Accepting the petition, the interim Chairman Justice K Peda Peri Reddy adjourned hearing on the petition for Monday.

reminds me of the rajput indignation over 'jodhaa akbar' that i'd talked about in this post. and of some recent reddy charitra i'd discussed in this post. would mr.reddy have been satisfied if all the reddies in the film were portrayed just as the madigas, boyas, erukulas and others in the film were? as nameless, mindless, amoral killing hordes? i don't think so.

mr.tharoor's high perch

soumitro das nails it:

If you ask a Bollywood filmmaker whether this is actually what he is defending, he will be surprised. He believes that the values he is defending in his film are universal — love, family, country, religion... The word ‘caste’ would never cross his mind. Then how do we say that Bollywood films defend caste society?

The arranged marriage or marriage with parental sanction is an institution that supports, that takes the load of caste society through absolute parental authority when it comes to marriage or any other kind of relationship with the opposite sex. This parental authority is taken for granted in Bollywood films. There is no need to even explain it. The world of Bollywood cinema is so cleansed of caste and religion that one is almost tempted to believe that one is dealing with a bunch of ultra-liberals for whom caste and religion do not define the human personality. But the real reason for this absence is that women must not make the wrong sexual choice that could lead to the collapse of society as we know it. So, the world of Bollywood cinema is shown to be a ‘natural’ world, where upper caste Punjabi men are linked up with upper caste Punjabi women without the problematic obstacle of caste ever coming in the way of their union. Whereas, in reality, especially for the middle-class, caste is an overriding factor in marriage in particular and sexual relations in general.

didn't expect the hindustan times to carry an article which contains such plain talk. and here's shashi tharoor, minister in the government of india, unveiling bollywood power:

That’s soft power, and its particular strength is that it has nothing to do with government propaganda. The movies of Bollywood, which is bringing its glitzy entertainment far beyond the Indian diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom , offer another example. A Senegalese friend told me of his illiterate mother who takes a bus to Dakar every month to watch a Bollywood film – she doesn’t understand the Hindi dialogue and can’t read the French subtitles, but she can still catch the spirit of the films and understand the story, and people like her look at India with stars in their eyes as a result. An Indian diplomat in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only publicly displayed portraits as big as those of then-President Hafez al-Assad were of the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan.

Indian art, classical music and dance have the same effect. So does the work of Indian fashion designers, now striding across the world’s runways. Indian cuisine, spreading around the world, raises Indian culture higher in people's reckoning; the way to foreigners’ hearts is through their palates. In England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined.

When a bhangra beat is infused into a Western pop record or an Indian choreographer invents a fusion of kathak and ballet; when Indian women sweep the Miss World and Miss Universe contests, or when “Monsoon Wedding” wows the critics and “Lagaan” claims an Oscar nomination; when Indian writers win the Booker or Pulitzer Prizes, India’s soft power is enhanced.

one'd think das and tharoor put their heads together, collaborated, to produce two contradictory versions of the same story.

i'd like to sit in mr.tharoor's enchanting armchair and watch india turn into a bollywood movie, starring miss worlds and miss universes, and wowing critics like mr.das and claiming an oscar nomination or two. wish manoj majhi could sit in mr.tharoor's chair too.

old wine in a modern bottle

upper caste boy can't marry lower caste girl, so he drowns himself in drink. people say that isn't rational. and they usually refer to the boy's actions or reactions. and this modern day take on that story says the same thing: the boy is weak. modern is to avoid discussing irrational constraints on girls and boys?

new trishankus

shahrukh khan's detention has been a great jolt for india's brahminized classes, as i said in this post. this is all quite ironic considering how hard the shahrukh-karan johar duo have been, since the mid-nineties, trying to bring normalcy to indian cinema, seeking acceptance from the west. check the photographs. look at how the extras, who looked so poor, dark, indian in the first photograph blossomed into such svelte, light skinned, normal people in the second. until a decade or so ago, it wasn't indian or foreign models who played the roles of extras (or junior artistes) in hindi movies. now normalcy has become such a rage that lighter skinned actors have moved from the song sequences to even lead roles in many movies. and shahrukh himself has become the icon of normalcy.

normal is fair, normal is successful, normal is healthy. normal is also the west. i had watched a part of a movie (kismat konnection) recently in which a young architect sacrifices everything he has to build a community center as part of a new mall. it's a disturbing film- no, not because it offers some new, profound insights into indian society. it's disturbing because it plucks indian society, or parts of it, out of india and plants it in the west. the community that the architect intends to save in the film consists of indians and others who are mostly light skinned people. let me try to restate all that in one sentence: the filmmaker rejects one community and saves another community. which means what? the filmmaker doesn't like community? or he likes community?

like cutting india out of shree 420 and raju ban gaya gentleman. the film conveys the message than an indian community is impossible. if shree 420 held out the possibility of such a community, raju ban gaya gentleman outlined the difficulties in building that community, kismat konnection drops the idea altogether.

khalid mohammed says, in his review titled raju ban gaya canadian:

Right off, it has to be admitted that director Aziz Mirza’s Kismat Konnection avoids vulgarity and viciousness. It’s about little people who are as chaste as the morning’s toothpaste. They want decent jobs, protect senior citizens in their community centre, dream about featuring on the cover of Time magazine (Newsweek won’t be pleased). And above all, they are absolute Business Shark-a-haris. No mean-`n’-meaty tactics for them.

he could be talking about the brahminized classes who make, distribute and watch hindi films. or how they'd like to think of themselves. no vulgarity or viciousness. chaste and shakahari. work hard in decent jobs, and save enough to protect senior citizens (if they've not been shakahari enough and saved something). smart enough to aim for global recognition.

an indian community is impossible, so let's take it outside india. let's create our own geography, free of viciousness and vulgarity. a community that's chaste and upholds shakahari ideals. that works hard and preserves its traditions.

look at these other reviews of the film: [the telegraph], [times of india], [dna] and [rediff]. notice how most of the reviews don't notice the change in location? yes, the brahminized media too has internalised these normal, extra-geographic ideas of india. as liberalization etc has let loose more people from the brahminized classes upon an unsuspecting world, and as we hear more of the globalized indian, have they given up the idea of an indian nation?

let's go back to the movie- in the last scene the young architect, in a community meeting, tries to convince businessmen financing the proposed mall of the need for a community center. the meeting held in a large hall evokes very strange feelings- most of the community members doing the talking are indians, while a large section of the audience, the other members of the community, mostly white or black, are all silent. exactly like india before mandal and the rise of the bsp.

the brahminized classes don't like an audience that talks back. the pen, the mike, and now the camera are things that they hate sharing or giving up. like the hindi the architect and other interlocutors in the scene i described use, their language too isn't for sharing with any audience- if it can't be sanskrit, it has to be highly sanskritized forms of hindi and other indian laguages, or english.

the scene is a throwback to the nehruvian liberal discourse running through shree 420 with a major twist, of course. the audience in that movie too doesn't talk much. they listen and dance- the main character does most of the talking, singing and preaching. the mostly listening audience could be a part of the community the nehruvian liberal envisaged. now, he doesn't like the cacophony they create in parliament.

this distaste is also reflected in the cinema of the brahminized classes- they seem to dislike the unchaste others so much that they don't even wish to see them as a market. so they have mostly moved their product to cleaner, more meritorious spaces in the multiplexes. the more chaste among them wish to protect themselves even further: they want to move their homes, sometimes, into their own trishankus within unchaste india.

what the indian filmmaker tries to see in the west is a reflection of how he sees himself. the wealth, success, merit of the west- that's what he likes and that's what he thinks he shares with the west. and as long as the west doesn't talk back, community with those normal people is a fine idea.

'kanTi chooputO champEstaa'

which translates, literally, to something like: 'i'll kill you with my eyesight'. that's a line from a popular movie of the faction genre, a class of movies unique to telugu cinema (which should actually be called krishna-godavari delta cinema, because the great majority of the filmmakers etc are from that sub-region of kosta or coastal andhra).

the faction genre is dedicated to revelling in the gory, exaggerated, fictionalized accounts of the heroic lives of the eminently dislikeable paalegallu (cousins, in more ways than one, of poligars in tamil nadu and palegars in karnataka), or factionists as they're called, of rayalaseema. the song i'd linked to in this post takes a more realistic look at the misdeeds of the factionists.

what made me think of those movies now? random surfing yesterday led me to this post (the comments, actually). no, i was not interested in all the 'this-regional-cinema-is-better-than-that' line of discussion. what i was interested in was what was glossed over (and is glossed over elsewhere, in more serious fora too) : why are the films made in telugu classified as telugu cinema at all? or why are films made in tamil called tamil cinema or films made in malayalam called malayalam cinema or films made in bengali called bengali cinema etc?

the faction genre isn't actually unique to the erroneously classified telugu cinema- the line i quoted was from the remake of an original tamil movie (one of those movies which glorify the lives of rural gounder-thevar-naicker-etc tyrants). telugu cinema is essentially the handiwork of kammas, reddies and brahmins with significant contributions from rajus, kapus (some sub-castes) and velamas. mostly brahminized intermediate castes. all of them together make up not more than 20% of the state's population. what we call telugu cinema is a product of their kanTichoopu, or vision or nazariya. and there's definitely nothing pan-telugu about it. i've talked about whose nazariya is reflected in hindi cinema in this post- who speaks through so-called tamil, bengali, malayalam etc cinema?

i bet they all kill everyone else with their kanTichoopu.

clash of meritocracies

google shahrukh khan and you get over 3 million search results. tom cruise and brad pitt will get you 29 million and 25 million search results respectively. is shahrukh khan only 1/9th or 1/8th as popular as those hollywood stars? he needs to climb higher to get the americans' attention- unlike what some actors and others from the mumbai film industry seem to think:

But when it comes to Shah Rukh, it doesn't take more than 20 seconds to figure out who he is. Any search engine on the Internet will give more information on him than Hollywood stars Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt and despite that if it took them two hours to figure out..

shahrukh himself found the detention a 'little embarassing' (in his own words). it meant 'disrespect'. how could anyone so rich, successful and famous be treated as any another khan?

the reaction- how could the americans be so dumb as to detain a celebrity, downplays the fact that khan was detained because he was a khan, muslim, indian, south asian, asian, brown....different. this contradiction seems to escape the media and khan's friends in the industry and khan himself. didn't he say that it was his name which aroused suspicion, initially?

celebrity is also merit. the brahminized classes, once in a while, reward those not born to merit with celebrity if they find them meritorious enough. or if they accept or do not challenge the brahminized worldview much. people like dr.abdul kalam or m.s. subbulakshmi or shahrukh khan. it's a strategy that works beautifully- the world sees a hindu nation lionizing a muslim president and thinks: the hindu is so broadminded. and the hindu can go on pushing his narrow agenda of merit.

what is merit? one simple answer: merit is the hindu's modern shorthand for purity.

the media found much irony in the fact that khan was making a film, my name is khan, which tells the story of a man who is detained by the american police because they find his behaviour suspicious. and why is his behaviour suspicious? because he suffers from a developmental disorder called asperger's syndrome. this website dedicated to the film says:

Asperger’s Syndrome is a neurobiological disorder on the autistic spectrum. People with Asperger’s are often very intelligent but have deficiencies in social skills (for example, they may not pick up nonverbal cues, or establish eye contact), tend to take every comment literally, and are highly sensitive to sounds, smells or colors. Relationships, especially romantic ones, can be extremely challenging.

so, in the movie too khan isn't arrested, chiefly, because he's khan, muslim, indian, south asian, asian, brown... he's arrested because he suffers from a neurobiological disorder.

doesn't that sound similar to this argument: students who can't make it to the so-called best institutions in india suffer from poverty, not caste.

truth is so much simpler than the fictions the brahminized classes feed themselves- karan johar (while conceiving his movie) doesn't think the idea that a khan could be arrested for, simply, being a khan is believable (though reality had told him otherwise even during shooting of the movie when one of the muslim actors in the movie had to be sent back home). so he feeds himself a fiction that that could happen only if someone was not normal, and in the twisted sense that he understands the disorder, that someone who suffers from asperger's syndrome is not a normal human being..... the reaction of khan's pals in the industry (when faced with the reality of khan's detention) is the outcome of a variant of the same fiction they've fed themselves- that successful, famous people are normal. how could normal people be detained?

who's normal? those who are born to merit. or those who display to the satisfaction of those who are born to merit that they possess merit (like shahrukh khan etc). but that doesn't seem to be the way the americans understand merit or normalcy. merit for them these days is something that the khans, muslims, indians, south asians, asian, brown people do not possess. and normal people are those who have the right to measure every one else's merit. which can only mean people born in america or western europe.

this is a great jolt for india's brahminized classes who desperately wish to be measured as normal by the west.

while the americans seem to publicly acknowledge that they don't see any merit in khan-ness, india's elite would never do that. the brahminized classes of india would publicly admit only poverty, as they measure it (i.e., in purely rupee terms), and certain physical impediments to leading, in their view, a normal life as the only markers of difference. people who suffer from those disadvantages have a legitimate claim to our sympathy. others are whiners. look at shah rukh khan himself- hasn't he become so rich and successful? so when they make films, their distrust of khan-ness, of otherness, would always be camouflaged in asperger's syndrome.

those without caste

So it was with villains. You could name the moll Lily or Rosy, you could name the henchman Robert, but where would your villain come from? It is no accident that many powerful villains have had no Indian caste identity at all. We do know where Gabbar Singh came from – we even know that his father’s name was Hari Singh – but we have no idea where Dr Dang (Karma, 1986, dr Subhash Ghai) came from or Shakaal (Shaan, 1980, dr Ramesh Sippy) or Loin (Kalicharan, 1976, dr Subhash Ghai) or Mogambo (Mr India, 1987, dr Shekhar Kapur) for that matter. They were villains who were free-floating signifiers. Dr Dang could be Chinese if you wanted him to be Chinese. He could be South-east Asian or even from a tribal belt in India. It did not matter because he could not be located and so could not become an insult to any community. Henchmen were also given ur-names: Jagga, Raaka, Kaalia, Saamba.

jerry pinto on minorities and bollywood. but do we really know where gabbar singh came from?

who is lucky?

i'd been working on this post for a while, or rather it has been working on me and therefore i couldn't finish any of the other posts i'd started on. (and also couldn't attend to any of the few comments on older posts. my apologies). i've decided i will publish at least a part of it so that i can push it aside for some time. i cut out portions of it, added some parts, edited, added- so i don't think it reads smoothly. should try to do a better job next time.
-----------------------------

I see the country as a pressure cooker of unrealized dreams and ambitions. On one hand there is a class that has made great progress and earned a lot of money. It flaunts its new found wealth all the time. On the other hand, there is stark poverty. It is not easy for a common man, and particularly a poor person, to break through the innumerable barriers and achieve success. Of course there are some people who manage to succeed despite these barriers; they do so by being honest, enterprising and hardworking. But there are also people who want to do things in a quick way. They are also aware that many super rich and super successful people haven't reached the top playing by the rules. The rush to get rich and have a glamorous life has an awful effect on our society.

lucky pulls on a disguise when he takes off his turban. to look normal, like banerjee. but he is a cheat, like all others around him- like the girlfriend, her sister and her husband, his only friend, his brothers, his fathers and their women etc., all of them wear disguises, in a manner of speaking, but they aren't as successful as lucky in hiding that fact from you. other people in the the film, especially those he cheats and steals from, are only silly, foolish, and pompous. they aren't cheats- some of them succeed by being honest, enterprising and hardworking. we're not told how those people managed to overcome the innumerable barriers. and how some of the super successful didn't play by the rules. does it mean most of the successful played by the rules and were honest, enterprising and hardworking?

banerjee says the character is based on research, stories from his own life etc., but check on the news reports on bunty ('super thief') and you realize lucky is largely based on him. but also, as banerji says, lucky isn't bunty. we aren't sure who lucky is, while bunty is devinder/davinder singh/sharma/gupta. lucky is a sikh of an unidentifiable caste, bunty is hindu, upper caste. bunty didn't go to a government school, lucky, according to banerji, probably did. bunty was a compulsive womaniser, lucky sticks to one girl. bunty had a girlfriend who looked better than aishwarya rai, lucky isn't so lucky. one review says lucky isn't flamboyant enough- one news story says, bunty lived only in five star hotels. lucky doesn't understand what a pan card is, bunty has a passport from nepal. as you keep adding up these little differences, you begin to realize lucky resembles nadeem more than bunty.

bunty probably belonged to a family like the khoslas or the banerjees. banerjee disowns bunty by turning him into lucky, someone who grew up in a world populated almost entirely by cheats. someone like lucky, banerjee seems to say, could only come from a family that didn't value enterprise (education?), hard work, honesty. lucky isn't the black sheep in a particular family, the whole family has to be composed of black sheep. and the family itself could only be from a class composed entirely of black sheep.

who is lucky? banerjee has been compared with hrishikesh mukherjee, another film-maker who was interested in the middle class. khosla in khosla ka ghosla has been described as middle class in too many reviews. is lucky middle class? is he middle class in the sense khosla is? or more importantly, is his family middle class in the sense khosla's family is?

khosla has probably worked in a university, or as a babu or in a bank. he has savings. and kids who have been to good schools and college and can think of careers outside india with confidence. that's normal. what does lucky's father do?

Then came Lucky’s father. A cooler manufacturer from Rajouri Garden - putting his three sons through government school and maintaining a mistress in the house at the same time. Tough face, tougher hands. Dark, calloused hands that have shoveled knee deep snow in Kazakistan on a fake work permit, or wound miles of copper wire on industrial generators, or driven a beat up Bajaj Chetak eighty kilometers daily to and from the job, and had beaten a long suffering wife into silent submission. A hard, lined face, still holding on to the virility and strength of a passionate man. But giving in to the growing failure, frustration and futility of a life deadened by wrong choices.

(i actually know someone who fits the first part of the description almost perfectly- a cooler maker, who's worked in shah's iran and afghanistan- on large plants and ships in storms and other rough places and has calloused hands. and something was wrong with his papers so he came back to india. but the rest of the description is way off the mark).

one can see lucky's father isn't middle class in the sense khosla is. khosla is an educated man, lucky's father definitely isn't so. khosla has probably worked as a babu, at a desk, all through his life. lucky's father has done mostly manual and semi-skilled work all through his life. khosla doesn't like being drawn into his son's scheme to outwit the landgrabber, lucky's father doesn't think much of two-timing his wife. khosla, the director makes sure we realize, has pooled his savings from honest, hard work, while we don't know if lucky's father has been as prudent, or as honest (he worked on a fake work permit). khosla doesn't beat his wife or children into submission, lucky's father does. khosla's children probably went to decent schools, lucky and his brothers are sent to a government school. lucky's ties to his family are weak, khosla's son displays great filial loyalty by giving up a successful career abroad to salvage his father's dream.

one'd think, because lucky is such a cheat his family probably had something to do with it. it was probably a family without a sense of values, banerjee is probably trying to rationalize. when banerjee talks of khosla, he thinks of families, of values, of lifestyles. and lucky's father spells failure, frustration and futility.

if lucky's father was somehow responsible for lucky, in banerjee's view, his father was also somehow responsible for him and so on, following the same logic. lucky, as i said earlier, could only be from a class composed entirely of black sheep. and what essentially separates lucky's father from khosla is the nature of work and associated values they've each inherited and passed on- manual labour and shudrahood, in case of the former, and education and skilled ('knowledge') work in case of the latter.

how did banerjee work on lucky's father's character? i think it's safe to assume he worked backwards from growing failure, frustration and futility of a life deadened by wrong choices to hard, lined face, still holding on to the virility and strength of a passionate man to had beaten a long suffering wife into silent submission to driven a beat up Bajaj Chetak eighty kilometers daily to and from the job or dark, calloused hands that have shoveled knee deep snow in Kazakistan on a fake work permit, or wound miles of copper wire on industrial generators to maintaining a mistress in the house at the same time to putting his three sons through government school. and when he added all that up together, what did he end up with? a cooler manufacturer from Rajouri Garden.

if banerjee had started with an educated man, like khosla, with a background of skilled work as a babu or in a bank (because by most accounts, i repeat, it seems very likely that bunty belonged to such a family)- would he be thinking of failure, frustration and futility?

why didn't banerjee believe that'd be believable? let's try and answer that question with another question- why wasn't khosla in khosla ka ghosla someone like lucky's father? imagine lucky's father in khosla ka ghosla with dark, calloused hands that have shoveled knee deep snow in Kazakistan on a fake work permit, or wound miles of copper wire on industrial generators, or driven a beat up Bajaj Chetak eighty kilometers daily to and from the job. and if he still made enough money to buy a plot of land that is grabbed by a land shark, would banerjee find that believable? yes, i think he would. you expect those kind of ignorant barbarians* to make wrong choices. to indulge in wife-beating, mistress-maintaining, sending-children-to-government schools. but who'd believe that those barbarians would be capable of outsmarting the shark, in the end? that requires knowledge and skills- something that khosla's son has and lucky doesn't. something that dr.handa, with a brother-in-law in america, has and lucky doesn't.

the values, or lack of them, that banerjee attributes to khosla and lucky's father, respectively: banerjee seems to imply that they inherit them. just as they inherit knowledge, or the lack of it. and the kind of work each does. therefore, it's my view that banerjee didn't work backwards, while working on lucky's father's character, but most probably started with a cooler manufacturer from Rajouri Garden.

* in one scene, jats are referred to as barbarians (in the subtitles). lucky probably comes from a rung lower, and less aggressive than the jats.

a complaint

read this on phalanx a few days ago (via space bar). agree with many things the article says but why does everything boil down to liberalization, globalization and privatization? there was no othering earlier?

the 'unintended' audience

a commenter, here, says:

this was interesting because i have always read in film studies texts that the characters that amitabh played were emphatically caste-less.

i've no answer to that. perhaps, those wiser men and women do not consider the issues i touched upon in that post of any significance. but consider this: why would an indian make a chinese film? he could make a film in chinese but would that be a chinese film? one needs to look at the who aspect of popular cinema in india to understand why the angry young man was an upper caste hindu. who makes the films, who distributes them, who pays to watch them?

i'll deal with the question of 'who makes them' in a later post, hopefully, but the other two questions are simpler to answer. there are around 2.5 lakh villages in india without electricity- indian films are not made for audiences in those villages. that means for nearly 35% of india: no power, no cinema. cinemas, or theatres, in india number around 12000. around 40% of them are in the states of andhra pradesh and tamil nadu. and a majority of cinemas, across india, are in the metros, 40 cities with over a million population each, and in a couple of thousand towns with around a lakh population each. how many of the 12,000 theatres are we left with now to distribute across the 6 lakh villages (make that 3.5 lakh villages, because as i mentioned earlier, 2.5 lakh villages do not have access to electricity) of india?. not many. so, most of them are distrbuted among villages in more prosperous regions of the country, those with access to irrigation and a history of successful commercial farming. upper caste dominated villages, in other words.

in his essay Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum's Eye View of Politics, ashis nandy offers the urban slum as a metaphor for popular cinema in india. he dubs the slum the 'unintended city'. most of india's mostly rural, marginalized lower castes are an 'unintended audience' for indian cinema. it has been so since amitabh's angry younger days. cinemas in india in 1980 numbered around 10,000-11,000. in 1990, around 12,000 (ashis nandy puts the figure at an optimistic 13,000) and now number 12,000. looking at those figures, you could say, there has been little growth. is that true?

indian film industry in particular, and entertainment industry in general, have been one of the fastest growing sectors of the indian economy. revenues have tripled in the last ten years and are expected to continue to grow at a rate of 17% a year. how did all this growth in revenues happen without a concomitant growth in distribution outlets? oh, the number of distribution outlets did grow, but not in the villages. definitely not in the villages that didn't have any cinemas when amitabh's films were first screened in the 70s and the 80s. growth happened in those areas where indian cinema's intended audiences always lived- in metros, cities, and towns. and in the prosperous villages i referred to earlier. around 20,000 new multiplex screens have sprung across urban india in the last ten years. that's nearly double the number of single screen cinemas in the country. and none of this growth happened in the villages with the unintended audiences.

oh yes, lower caste india does watch indian films but they're not the market, from the film-maker's perspective. not in the 70s, not now. their access to popular cinema is mostly through channels which are, to put it bluntly, not so legal. temporary theatres, video theatres, cable and regular cinemas in the many backward and lawless regions of the country that do not report their full revenues to either the producer, or the government. they were the unintended audience of the 70s, though film-makers of those times were less aware of that fact. they're definitely the unintended audience now.

the angry young man wasn't an outcaste

the angry young man wasn't an outcaste. not even in the film 'lawaris' in which he turns out to be the son of thakur ranvir singh, a rajput. and he wasn't a nobody, a person without caste, an outsider (as one critic points out) in any of his films. he was a rajput, brahmin, vaishya, baidya, kayasth, khatri, bhumihar...and only once a jat, but never a yadav (even in these ugly mandalized times when even yadav characters, albeit of a negative kind, are making their way into films ). he was a muslim in a couple of films, but you could sense that he was from a 'good family' even when he was a coolie. of the kind that indulged in shayari and other genteel obsessions. or of the kind that headed whole clans. check this random list of his films (and the characters he played in them):

saat hindustani- anwar ali (upper caste muslim)
parwana- kumar sen (baidya/kayasth)
anand- dr.bhaskar k. bannerjee (brahmin)
raaste ka patthar- jai shankar rai (bhumihar)
zanjeer- vijay khanna (khatri)
kasauti- amitabh sharma (brahmin)
benaam- amit srivastav (kayasth)
majboor- ravi khanna (khatri)
deewaaar- vijay verma (rajput)
chupke chupke- professor sukumar sinha (bhumihar/kayasth)
do anjaane- amit roy/naresh dutt (kayasth)
adalat- dharma / thakur dharam chand (rajput)
trishul- vijay kumar gupta (vaishya)
jurmana- inder saxena (kayasth)
suhaag- amit kapoor (khatri)
dostana- vijay varma (rajput)
barsaat ki ek raat- abhijeet rai (bhumihar)
lawaris- heera (rajput)
namak halaal- arjun singh (jat)
khuddar- govind srivastav (kayasth)
bemisal- dr.sudhir roy/adhir roy (kayasth)
desh premee- master dinanath/raju (maratha/brahmin)
mahaan- amit / rana ranveer (rajput)
sharaabi- vicky kapoor (khatri)
kabhi kabhie- amitabh malhotra (khatri)
silsila- amit malhotra (khatri)
akayla- vijay verma (rajput).

i think i got most of the castes right. those were mostly characters from films made before 1990. you'll notice that some of the films had characters with names/surnames that might seem ambiguous, but if you recall the films (featuring the characters) you'll learn from hints dropped in the films that there can be no ambiguity about the savarna lineage of the characters. the 70s, 80s represented a conservative era, while today's films make no bones about who their heroes are:

suryavansham- thakur bhanu pratap singh (rajput)
kabhi khushi kabhie gham- yashvardhan raichand (khatri)
baghban- raj malhotra (khatri)
aks- manu varma (rajput)
aankhen- vijay singh rajput (rajput)
armaan- dr.siddhath sinha (bhumihar/kayasth)
aetbaar- dr.ranveer malhotra (khatri)
baabul- balraj kapoor (khatri).

a surname that says 'rajput', need not indicate a rajput, usually. but i think, in these instances, the filmmakers wanted to make doubly sure that you understood that the character wasn't from any dubious background. this is the age of the sms, so the snshul can't be hinted at. it has to be mblazoned.

so what was the angry young man angry about, anyway? there wasn't much to complain about in the seventies, from his perspective. mandal wasn't even constituted until the late seventies, and nobody even looked back at its report until the late eighties.

anil dharker has an answer:

With the films that followed, Amitabh Bachchan began establishing a definitive screen persona — ``Deewar," ``Namak Haram," ``Trishul," ``Muqaddar ka Sikandar," ``Namak Halal," ``Coolie"... in all of them, yes he was the Angry Young Man, but what was important was what he was angry about. Social injustice, the disparities between rich and poor, the struggle for survival through poverty... these weren't exactly new themes for Hindi cinema, but in the smouldering face of Amitabh Bachchan, they found the ultimate expression. For the vast majority of cinema audiences — the poor, the unemployed, the illiterate — he became the hero.

he became the hero because he fought against injustice, inequality and poverty? in my view, what he essentially fought against, if you look closely, was his poverty which he saw as unjust and unexpected. wasn't poverty and powerlessness the lot of the lower castes? shouldn't they bear the brunt of shortages and drought and hunger? the angry young man was angry because he'd to stand next to the lower caste scum in seemingly endless queues for everything: right from rations to cinema tickets. wasn't prime minister after prime minister, chief minister after chief minister, parliamentarian after parliamentarian, legislator after legislator, babu after babu, contractor after contractor, permitholder after permitholder, licenseholder after licenseholder, a rajput or vaishya or brahmin or baidya or kayasth or khatri or bhumihar..? hadn't the british transferred the reins to them? didn't the transfer mean a return to the old, old order?

vinay lal analyses:

Chandrasekhar’s argument, as it appears in his article "The Amitabh Persona", adopts this viewpoint; as he says, Amitabh’s films embody a "uterine world-view", and the fury of the Angry Young Man abates "the moment the umbilical cord is restored." "In the Indian context," he adds, "the sole irreproachable ideological thesis one can defend is love of the mother." Vijay’s only desire in Deewar is to restore the state of original bliss that existed before he was parted from his mother, and towards the end of the film, as Vijay is bleeding to death, he states that his only desire is to enjoy, in the lap of his mother, that profound sleep of contentment which he has missed since she left him. The Hindi film, then, enacts for the Indian male a double return to the source: seated in the dark chambers of the movie theatre, we all descend into the darkness of the womb, but for the Indian male that darkness is like a wellspring of light, and the womb that place where our sleep is always undisturbed and calm. A film such as Deewar, to extend the argument further, represents the regression of the male into a state of childhood, an attempt to reinstate the primacy of the umbilical stage.

an attempt to reinstate the primacy of the umbilical stage. the stage when the upper caste hindu was more equal than others, when he was served, first, without question and he decided who was served next. when he was served even if the whole village went without food. when everyone stepped aside if he stepped onto the road, and everyone waited on him and he didn't have to wait for anybody. he was angry because he was almost losing caste: in the films, he'd to work in quarries, coal mines, building sites, docks, railway platforms, and all other kinds of unclean places among all kinds of unclean people. for god's sake, he wasn't like them! and, according to this article, javed akhtar feels amitabh was the right person to play the character because he wasn't like them:

It has been suggested that even when Bachchan was playing proletarian characters he always walked "with the posture of an aristocrat." What is often most thrilling about his confrontations with authority is not so much his physical courage as his easy assumption of equality: this guy never feels outclassed. "You see a certain grace about that character," suggests Akhtar. "So many other actors have tried to ape Amitabh, but they've failed. Because they don't have the sophistication and the tehzeeb [culture] that he grew up with. As an actor, Amitabh's anger was never ugly. Other actors mix anger with arrogance. Amitabh's anger was mixed with hurt and tears . . . But I'm afraid that in later pictures even Amitabh developed that arrogance."

easy assumption of equality..was never outclassed..had sophistication and tehzeeb..anger mixed with hurt... the angry young man came from the same social background as amitabh. so it was easy for amitabh to play the character, he'd the sophistication and the tehzeeb, thanks to his background. he could never be outclassed because he came from a rung above the caste that miners, dockworkers and coolies usually came from. and his anger was mixed with hurt and tears because the kind of shortages, poverty and injustice...the rejection that usually came the lower caste folks/workers way was something that neither amitabh, the actor who knocked on producers' doors with a letter of recommendation from the prime minister, nor vijay verma, dockworker from an upper caste background, expected from (the film industry, in amitabh the actor's case, or) life in general. definitely not in an india in which the rajputs, brahmins, vaishyas, baidyas, kayasths, khatris, bhumihars had gained independence.

going back to vinay lal, this excerpt from his essay ' The Impossibility of the Outsider in the Modern Hindi Film', concludes:

We recall that it is at the temple steps that the two brothers, in their adolescence, already seemed to be veering towards two different paths, and that Vijay seemed marked as the loner, as the outsider; but now, if it has not been established before, it becomes indubitably clear that he, too, must be drawn into the circle of inclusivity. Far from being a film about the outsider, Deewar is about the impossibility of being one.

the angry young man wanted to go back to his womb, to be reconnected to the cord that served him, automatically. doesn't he seem like a hindutvavadi?