“Fishing Nets Are for Stretching, Love Is for the Internet”: Technology, Life and film in Andhra Pradesh
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\Fishing nets are for stretching, love is for the internet": technology, life and film in Andhra Pradesh by Padma Chirumamilla A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in South and Southeast Asian Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Lawrence Cohen, Chair Professor Abigail T. De Kosnik Professor George L. Hart Spring 2012 \Fishing nets are for stretching, love is for the internet": technology, life and film in Andhra Pradesh Copyright 2012 by Padma Chirumamilla 1 Abstract \Fishing nets are for stretching, love is for the internet": technology, life and film in Andhra Pradesh by Padma Chirumamilla Master of Arts in South and Southeast Asian Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Lawrence Cohen, Chair This paper is an attempt to understand the way in which interactions with technology might play a constitutive role in the shaping of identity, and in the imagination of a future. I trace the history of the Kamma community of Andhra Pradesh through looking at the various technological interactions and adaptations that played a major role in their identification as a community{from things such as technological supports in agriculture to heavy investment in regional film industries to the current view of IT (information technology) work as desirable labor. In looking at this history, I wish to put forth the notion of a \technophilic habitus" as being a key marker of the oftentimes very specific and segemented populations that get to participate in the making of the IT dream and its reality in India. i To my parents for all the films, and all the love. ii Contents Contents ii 1 filmworlds and lifeworlds 1 1.1 work of the land, work on the mind. 3 1.2 of work, of dreams, and of their spaces . 10 2 habitus and technophilia 18 2.1 marking one's place in the world: technology and development . 18 2.2 computer dreams and computerized bodies: the technophilic imaginary in popular film . 21 Bibliography 26 iii Acknowledgments Professors Abigail de Kosnik and Lawrence Cohen were superbly helpful during the writing of this thesis, via inspirational conversation and heaping doses of kindness and understanding. Professor George Hart helped me get my early bearings within the department, and for that I am grateful. 1 Chapter 1 filmworlds and lifeworlds introduction: techno hero In the Telugu film Dhee...kotti chudu, the hero, Babloo, makes a novel attempt to reunite with his secretly-married wife, Pooja. Intimidated by her father, a violent crime lord, he makes no attempt to break her out of her house arrest, nor does he present the viewer with an image of unrepentant machismo as he goes to meet her father. Instead, the hero's father, a physically unimposing and slight man, convinces the crime lord to take his son up as an accountant so Babloo can update the operation's financial records. Setting up a room full of computers, the hero and a few of the crime lord's (mostly incompetent) lackeys proceed to magically streamline and clean up the irregularities in the operation's records. Nothing is shown in regards to how this streamlining is necessarily done|no shots of the hero over money-counting machines, or calculating stolen profits— but several scenes are spent showing how easily the hero interacts with the computers in the accounting room, as opposed to the more unskilled lackeys. The hero is ultimately successful in his pursuit to regain his wife, but it is always this mental skill|this cunning, this flexibility|that is shown as the key to his success, rather than physical brawn, or the ability to whip the sentiments of a crowd, as opposed to older variants of the popular hero in Telugu cinema.1 The question then, is what kind of environment|what kind of popular consciousness of what a skilled man should be capable of|allows for this kind of hero to exist? The fact that our hero, while lacking the skills necessary to physically enact his goals, resorts successfully to his invisible skills with computers|and is no less a hero for doing so speaks to a certain belief in the ability of technology to aid one in one's goal, to contribute to one's 1The archetype of the more physically present (and more physically violent) heroes are perhaps best embodied by actors like Chiranjeevi and Krishna. These heroes' presence on the screen depended to a great extent upon their embodiment of the threat (implied or otherwise) of physical harm to villainous characters. The hero in this film is explicitly shown to not possess the same degree of bodily presence or implied threat{ his danger comes precisely from the fact that his intelligence allows him to master technologies that lie outside the control of older, more well-trodden forms of control (such as shaking down delinquents) CHAPTER 1. FILMWORLDS AND LIFEWORLDS 2 heroic potential. This intertwining of technology and inner potential and capability in a scenario from popular film speaks to a larger cultural concern with the role of technology in one's life|and more importantly, to the role it played in determining one's future. The hero wins his love, but via his technological wizardry instead of his bodily presence. It has not always been so{as S.V Srinivas illustrates, the usually physically violent \feudal lord" kind of Telugu cinema was incredibly popular back in its time2|though its marks may now be seen in a somewhat different skin, as we shall see. What can explain the emergence of this particular form of heroism{one that is technologically-savvy, and whose power comes not from the explicit force of blood or land, but rather the deployment of a mystifying, inspirational force as embodied by the computer? Cinema has historically been the province of the dominant Kamma community of \rural capitalists," as Carol Upadhya terms them.3 Having benefitted immensely from both early 20th century colonial dam projects and the efforts of the Nehruvian-era \green revolution" in the 1960's and 1970's (itself a site of multiple meaning-production, as Akhil Gupta describes in his work Postcolonial Developments), these farmer-capitalists also proceeded to create a culturally distinct space for themselves through massive investments in the regional Telugu film industry. In S.V Srinivas' enlightening study of the Telugu film industry as a \peasant industry," he points out that the great majority of investment in Telugu cinema came from entrepreneurs of a very particular stripe|not the traditional trading communities like the banias (or in Andhra Pradesh's case, the Komatis), but rather from recently enriched rural farming communities, such as the Kammas and the Reddys, who were looking for investment vehicles for their newly acquired wealth.4 But what has this to do with our scenario above|with the on screen hero embracing and wielding his competence with a future-oriented technology as a viable, successful weapon against his enemies? The image gains a certain kind of sociocultural weight when one con- siders that a large plurality of IT workers in South India themselves hail from this particular class|a class that stands at the nexus of urban life and rural capital.5 This history|of consistent engagement with \futuristic" technologies such as the hybrid seeds of the green revolution and television and film and now, the work of the IT industry|created not only a certain kind of image, but produced certain associations of aspiration6 and respectabil- ity connected to work with high technology, as evidenced by the way in which IT workers perceive themselves and their community of fellow workers. It was not, then, magic,7 or simple chance that allowed South India|and more partic- ularly the Kamma community|to form a center around which the IT industry could build 2Srinivas, \Persistence of the Feudal: star and film form in post 1970s Telugu cinema." 3Upadhya, \Social and Cultural Strategies of Class Formation in Coastal Andhra Pradesh," 170-171. 4Srinivas, \Making of a Peasant Industry: Telugu cinema in the 1930s-1950s," 171. 5Biao, Global Body Shopping: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry, 30. 6For more on technological aspirations in non-elite communities{aspirations which are fostered by films that have a very particular history, as I have noted, see Joyojeet Pal, \The machine to aspire to: the computer in rural South India," First Monday. 7The constant sense of mysticism or surprise that pervades Western popular writing on information technology in popular culture, such as the Wired issue 12.02 \The New Face of the Silicon Age" or from CHAPTER 1. FILMWORLDS AND LIFEWORLDS 3 itself. Chandrababu Naidu the Kamma chief minister under whose direction the information technology industry became more tightly integrated with the character of Andhra Pradesh, and to the identity of the Kammas whom he most represented{was less an aberration and more the product of a consistent, and quite long-standing, communal interaction with forms of \futuristic" technology. If, as Anand Pandian contends,8 agricultural work on the land is a particular form of work on the self (and there is no reason to see that it might not be for the Kamma communities, who were instrumental in tying land to a particular imagining of identity in the Telugu language movement9), then the aspirational and \respectable" associations derived from IT{and the subsequent depictions that carry through to popular film–are not surprising or unusual, but rather a new form of an older, historically-grounded and perhaps culturally- specific association. It is this cultural imagining{this story of technology entwined with the way in which a community creates and delineates its own identity{that I wish to explore in this paper.