Analyzing South Asian Public Culture
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AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISMS: ANALYZING SOUTH ASIAN PUBLIC CULTURE By RENUKA BISHT A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2006 Copyright 2006 by Renuka Bisht This document is dedicated to my parents: Satya and Dhirendra Bisht ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to begin by thanking all the friends that have facilitated my survival during the long haul of the Ph. D. Especially, I would like to thank Rebecca Dettorre who has provided me a home away from home in Gainesville, Sangeeta Mediratta who has graciously taken my calls at all times of the day and Franklin Cason for always stopping by when I needed support. In the academic universe, Professor Maureen Turim has been an incredibly supportive dissertation director. And while all the lessons I have learnt from her may not be reflected in the text of my dissertation, they have been wide-ranging and life- changing. My committee members, Professors Swapna Banerjee, Scott Nygren and Malini Johar Schueller have also provided extensive intellectual support. I need to put in a special note of gratitude to Professor Nygren for introducing me to digital video, which I will hopefully channel into my professional future. In the academic space of Delhi, I am indebted to many teachers but want to mention some by name here: Professors Manju Jain, Malashri Lal, Badri Raina, Harish Trivedi. Their distinct ideological, methodological and humanitarian approaches have been powerful in ways that have stood the test of time. To my family too I have to acknowledge an enormous debt: my loving parents, my wise brother Ajay, my wonderful sister-in-law Shalini and my little nephew Aadi who have made the decision to return to India both exciting and straightforward. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iv ABSTRACT...................................................................................................................... vii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1 2 IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF A MYSTIC, MAHADEVI AKKA................................20 Briefly, on the question of iconography .....................................................................25 Walking Naked: Virashaivism and Iconoclasm .........................................................29 Madhusree Dutta: Performing a feminist genealogy..................................................44 3 THE POLITICS OF QUEER VISIBILITY IN BOLLYWOOD: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS ...............................................................................................................61 Queer Takes on “Straight” Screenings .......................................................................65 The Evidence of History.............................................................................................73 Fire: To see and to desire............................................................................................77 Bombay Boys: In a campy metropolis........................................................................88 Split Wide Open: Shadowy sexual economies ...........................................................96 Directing visibility from the Borderlands.................................................................102 4 VISIONARY TALES OF BORDERS AND ENEMIES .........................................108 War and Peace: Between Nuclear Neighbors...........................................................115 Mission Kashmir: About fractured patrimonies .......................................................131 Dil Se and The Terrorist: When women explode .....................................................140 5 HIMALAYAN CONTESTATIONS: MERI SAUN AND ARMY...........................163 6 CONCLUSION.........................................................................................................182 APPENDIX A LIST OF PRIMARY FILM REFERENCES............................................................186 LIST OF REFERENCES.................................................................................................187 v BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...........................................................................................201 vi Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISMS: ANALYZING SOUTH ASIAN PUBLIC CULTURE By Renuka Bisht May 2006 Chair: Maureen Turim Major Department: English Theodor W. Adorno, suspicious of the culture industry, had charged: “No homeland can survive being processed by the films which celebrate it, and which thereby turn the unique character on which it survives into an interchangeable sameness.” But this dissertation shows that many commercial films, secure in their ability to communicate with a vastly disaggregated audience, un-inclined to the instrumental hypothesis of the virile nation-state despite quoting it repeatedly, confidently engage with contradictory epistemologies wherein nationalisms and traditions are in a continual process of translation and production. Further, insofar as this compound consciousness is a characteristic of the concept of the popular per se, and insofar as this concept intersects with that of the public sphere, wherein power is parleyed “through the medium of public discussion among private individuals,” commercial films are here discussed as part of the same web of social negotiation in which “art” projects are enmeshed. vii In this vein, this dissertation relies on formulations of public culture to engage with the contestations of identity at various sites of South Asian film production at the turn of the 21st century. It deploys an interdisciplinary vocabulary to analyze a variety of subcontinental fundamentalisms, including sexual, religious and ethnic ones through their representations in selected texts. Fundamentalisms are premised on differences, and since the future of our collective lives depends on how ethically we comprehend and how competently we respond to claims of differences, Against Fundamentalisms advances such a project by highlighting filmic texts that represent group conflicts deriving from the assertion of democratic rights but urge a peace-oriented negotiation of such conflicts. viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The impact of media on the constitution of modern subjectivity, whether considered a debilitating or an enabling phenomenon, is unarguably a pervasive trend that will only gain potency through our lifetime. This trend is linked to a movement of peoples, ideas and even wealth, whose speed and volume characterize globalization in the century into which we have lately arrived. Arjun Appadurai has called attention to the powerful effect of media and migration on “the work of imagination,” which he identifies “as a constitutive feature of modern agency, neither purely emancipatory nor entirely disciplined,” and elementally marked by plurality (Modernity 3,5). This dissertation attends to how film texts imaginatively construct contemporary South Asian subjects and represent how the “plurality of imagined worlds” produces social conflicts, negotiating which we can call another constitutive feature of modern agency. Politically, the conflicts that produce maximum anxiety in the subcontinent today are those based on religious differences, whose extreme articulations are understood as fundamentalist. Close analysis of the filmic representations of the clashes deriving from fundamentalisms reveals, first, that the contaminations of ideas, languages, and institutions naysay the premise of pure group identity that forms the basis of political demands in varied domains, including those of gender, sexuality and nationhood. This is the literal effect of the processes of global intermingling that are both historically complex and long-standing. Secondly, even if protesting groups make claims at odds with contaminated states of being, this is a structurally explicable rather than irrational phenomenon. My dissertation is premised on 1 2 the understanding that the future of our collective lives rests on how ethically we comprehend and how competently we respond to claims of difference. In trying to understand how claims of difference provides a basis for feelings of either belonging or alienation, it is important to identify how these claims relate to the idea of nation. In 1882, Ernest Renan identified the nation as a “spiritual principle” that is “summarized . in the present by a tangible fact, namely, consent, the clearly expressed desire to continue a common life” (19), and in 1983 Ernest Gellner wrote that, when “one is unjustly treated and can identify other victims as being of the same nation as him, nationalism is born” (112). More recent discussants are apt to question narratives homogenously ascribing consent to all citizens. Whether by way of critiquing the disproportionate accretion of power with national elites1 or by way of emphasizing the suppression of divergent voices by national apparatuses, contemporary criticism also stresses that isomorphic constructions of citizenry defy the actuality of the contemporary world. Consider Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s salutary reminder that “virtually all countries and regions are multicultural in a purely descriptive sense” (5).