Analyzing South Asian Public Culture

Home , Abhijat Joshi, Anari, Bombay Boys, Deepa Mehta, Devika Rani, Dev Benegal

AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISMS: ANALYZING SOUTH ASIAN PUBLIC CULTURE

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

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.

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

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

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).

As Appadurai points out, this demographic heterogeneity does not preclude but

instead impels the nation-state to police its disaggregated population for standardized

articulations of allegiance. He argues that, “from the point of view of modern

1 While the subaltern studies collective has played a foundational role in offering this critique in trenchant terms, some critics remain more sanguine about the role of the bourgeois elite in constructing the postcolonial nation. Sunil Khilnani, for example, argues that, “the possibility that India could be united into a single political community was the wager of India’s modern, educated, urban elite, whose intellectual horizons were extended by . . . modern ideas and whose sphere of action was expanded by . . . modern agencies. It was a wager on an idea: the idea of India” (5). Salman Rushdie reminds us of the overwhelming skepticism that this “idea” had to confront: “Churchill said India wasn’t a nation, just an ‘abstraction.’ John Kenneth Galbraith, more affectionately, and more memorably, described it as ‘functioning anarchy’” (Step 164). Rushdie defends “the India-idea” as probably “the most innovative national philosophy to have emerged in the post-colonial period,” which “deserves to be celebrated” (ibid.).

nationalism, neighborhoods exist principally to incubate and reproduce compliant

national citizens – and not for the production of local subjects” (Modernity 190). With mass-mediated transnational “neighborhoods” proliferating across national borders,

Appadurai predicts that the conflict between the nation-state and recalcitrant local subjects who threaten its “normative charter” will lead to a “terminal crisis” for the former.2 In a provocative accompaniment to this prediction, the tidal wave of demands

for autonomy around the world is dismissed as not necessarily reflecting “a territorial

bottom line” (161). The global violence accompanying the demands of “deterritorialized

groups”, ranging from Sikhs, Tamils and Palestinians to French-Canadians, is ascribed to their inability “to think their way out of the imaginary of the nation-state” (166).

Before engaging with Appadurai’s formulation concerning deterritorialized

identities, I want to relate it to Ashis Nandy’s interestingly identification of this vision

transcending the “imaginary of the nation-state” in two key architects of the Indian

freedom movement. Quoting Rabindranath Tagore’s discovery of “how easily those who accepted the highest truths of civilization disowned them with impunity whenever questions of national self-interest were involved,” Nandy argues that both Tagore and

Monhandas Karamchand Gandhi dreamt of an Indian public realm whose self-definition would rise above national boundaries (Illegitimacy 82, 81).3 While there are important

2 Other contemporary critics have made similar prognostications. For instance, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also find that migration, ethnic conflicts that “effectively disrupt old aggregations based on national political lines” (37), and the demand for global citizenship will all contribute to the decline of the nation- state (336). In fairness to Appadurai, Hardt and Negri, they do not claim that the nation-state is as yet obsolete.

3 Nandy points out that Tagore “flouted the first canon of exclusivist nationalism by authoring the national anthems of two independent nation-states which are not always on the best of terms and one of which is the only Islamic state ever to have a national anthem written by a non-Muslim” (Illegitimacy 86). While one celebrates “the contemplation of the Earth Mother,” the other commemorates the ruler of the hearts of the

differences between the analytical vocabularies of Appadurai and Nandy, most noticeably

indicated by the latter’s trust in the category of morality to understand the politics of

nationalism, they share a skepticism about the ability of nationalist charters to realize the

interests of identity and emancipation.

This brings us to the critical ambivalence in the “genetic code of the nation”

(Bhabha, Nation 2), wherein the utopian affective impulse is deeply fused with dystopic

sectarianism. Further, even when a nationalist movement emerges as a socially warranted

response to oppressive regimes rather than, for example, from some rabid longing for an

ethnically sterilized haven, it too eventually takes the route of statist dissent-controlling

strategies to garner strength (Almond et al 504). What I find interesting is that, excluded

from the grand narratives, “ordinary” individuals playing out their idiosyncratic

interpretations of nationalism in everyday life replicate the same ambivalent interchange of communitarian and self-aggrandizing desires. The question is whether everyday life necessarily provides evidence for the decline of “the imaginary of the nation-state.”

Certainly the global traffic of individuals and families, employment and wealth, philanthropy and terrorism, sounds and images, and so on grows more intense every moment. Certainly Appadurai is correct in stating that identity groups increasingly

sustain their movements through transnational conduits of funding and sentiment. But in

what sense is an American Hindu, to take an example, who wires money to the

movement for resurrecting the Ayodhya temple “deterritorialized”? While her sense of

identity may be complicated, is she confused about the geographical boundaries of the

different territories to which she claims bonds of belonging? Even if we have this

people” (ibid.). In keeping with his historical perusal of the distinctive pluralism of Indian civilization, Nandy concludes that, “perhaps only in South Asia would they be chosen as national anthems” (ibid.).

discussion in the metaphorical rather than the literal realm, the admittedly unwieldy

alternative of “multiterritorialized” seems to better describe her condition of being. I

would neither understate the alienation that such a condition often engenders nor the

possibility that it could also engender affinitive pluralism, but the excess of monopatriotism is not self-evidently postnational; it does not necessarily portend the demise of the nation-state. More importantly, while the speculative investment in this decline is premised on the failure of the nation-state to nurture diversity, why would postnational institutions be more democratic in and of themselves? It is the activism of human agents that compels institutions to execute their functions justly and impartially.

Besides, the malfunction in the current system of nation-states should not distract us from noting its successes.

In the South Asian context, I concur with Francine R. Frankel’s succinct summarization of the conditions in India, where democracy “has neither ‘succeeded’ nor

‘failed,’” but “has done something more remarkable” (24). Without ignoring the inadequate fulfillment of the promise of the nation, she points out that, “in little more than fifty years since colonial rule, the introduction of individual freedoms, minority rights and universal suffrage have significantly transformed historically rigid hierarchical structures, social relations and cultural attitudes”(ibid.). If some of the blazing contestations of our times concern the relationship of democracy to the liberated human condition, the achievement of what Frankel describes is both salutary and worth investigating. Against Fundamentalisms advances such an inquiry by highlighting filmic texts that represent group conflicts deriving from the assertion of democratic rights but also share an imaginary investment in the peaceful negotiation of such conflicts.

Since the nation-states constitute the most significant institutional and ideological

force for disciplining identity movements and are the emblematic representatives of the

discriminatory structures against which such movements mobilize, it would be

disingenuous if not impossible to discuss one without reference to the other. So the

narrative analysis of films that forms much of the text of my dissertation is accompanied

by a political analysis of events that have caused ferment in the recent life of the South

Asian nation-states. As mentioned earlier, I am skeptical about the prognosticating aspect

of the thesis concerning the demise of the nation-state. But I also recognize that the

sociological bedrock of this thesis is analytically sound, that the restless ferment against the failures of democratic representation is indeed nourished by transnational energies and that it is also such energies that nourish many communitarian formations. In other

words, since neither the socio-political events discussed here nor the films representing

them are entirely explicable by reference to a single nation or identity, this dissertation

attempts to analyze them within a broader framework.

In this context, Shohat and Stam’s delineation of “a multicultural media studies”

is very valuable as it works against the grain of “segregating historical periods and

geographical regions” to “explore their interconnectedness” (6).4 Admittedly the selection of primary texts of Against Fundamentalisms is limited to those produced mostly in India

and within a half-decade of each other. But this does allow for a focused study of selected

developments in South Asia precisely at the turn of the 21st century, and, equally importantly, in keeping with the insights of Shohat and Stam’s project I try to scrutinize

4 The Shohat and Stam model is distinguishable from the one in which “the multiculturalist respect for respecting the other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority” (Zizek, “Multiculturalism” 44)

these developments in the context of a chronologically, geographically and culturally

broad network. For instance, in dealing with what have been variously called the

nationalist, the obscene and the apocalyptic nuclear gestures of 1998 through Anand

Patwardhan’s documentary War and Peace (2001), I connect the explosions fêted by jingoists to a half-century old rivalry of nations, contrast the enmity between many

Indians and Pakistanis to the cultural bonds acknowledged and even actively pursued by others, and find an affirmation of the contrasting sentiments in expressive productions spanning the erudite, the popular, and the quotidian realms. The last grouping speaks to a broader effort to recognize the intertextuality of media representations. Following on a commitment to interconnectedness, my dissertation deploys an interdisciplinary vocabulary to address transnational blockbusters, regional hits, documentaries and films self-consciously defying generic expectations in dialogue with each other, pointing to their shared socio-political references and networks of spectatorship.

Shohat and Stam, like Appadurai, find that, “in a transnational world typified by the global circulation of images and sounds,” media exist “close to very core of identity production” (7). And “multicultural media studies” consider group subjectivities in terms of “overlapping multiplicities of identity and affiliation” rather than “in isolation” (6).

Most importantly, this emphasis on an interconnectedness of identities transcending “the restrictive framework of the nation-state” remains alert to the dangers of suggesting that different “positionings are identical” (ibid.). A recognition of these dangers has led to a wide-ranging self-critique in postcolonial theory, wherein, for instance, the “self- subalternization” of diasporic intellectuals is now recognized as running the risk of

“robbing the terms of oppression of their critical and oppositional import, and thus

depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest and rightful demand” (Chow

13). A parallel critique has been leveled against the critics from settler societies whose claims of marginalization are now understood to “confer a seamless and undiscriminating postcoloniality on both white settler cultures and on those indigenous peoples displaced thorough their encounter with these cultures” (Gandhi 169). In the context of this dissertation, the above cautions impel an emphasis on the disparate degrees of authority among the different nations and cinemas of the subcontinent, and vigilance against the homogenization of distinct claims of difference.

Appadurai also alerts us to the falseness of labeling some identity categories politically legitimate, and others atavistic:

The matter is not so different as it may appear for such apparently natural labels as Jew, Arab, German, and Hindu, each of which involves people who choose these labels, others who are forced into them, and yet others who through their philological scholarship shore up the histories of these names or find them handy ways of tidying up messy problems of language and history, race and belief. (Modernity 163)

Appadurai would also agree that the constructivist understanding of identity does not negate the idea that identity claims can substantiate political claims. As Satya P. Mohanty argues, “whether we inherit an identity . . . or we actively choose one on the basis of our political predilections . . . our identities are ways of making sense of our experiences”

(43). For Mohanty, a “cognitive conception of experience” allows us “to see experience as source of both real knowledge and social mystification” that are “open to analysis on the basis of empirical information about our social situation and a theoretical account of our current social and political arrangements” (ibid.). I read the Appadurai and Mohanty notations to understand that, in respectfully evaluating the experience of identity through

its indexical representations in films, the work of demystification must be accompanied

by an attention to the specificities of location.

In general, Against Fundamentalisms draws attention to those representations in

millennial India5 that present images of communities that defy the nationalist rhetoric of

fundamentalist mandates, and construct a complex iconography of kinships informed by a

diversity of religious principles in contestation. Discussions of popular representations in

India often equate these representations with Bollywood. Following on Arjun Appadurai

and Carol Breckenridge’s conceptualization of “public culture,” I instead consider variously produced and distributed films as interventions in a shared domain. Public culture names that “space between domestic life and the projects of the nation-state – where different social groups … constitute their identities by their experience of mass- mediated forms in relation to the practices of everyday life” (Appadurai and

Breckenridge 4-5). In this sense, debates about the nature of personal and national identity have to be studied across the various sites that make up public culture. I recognize that documentaries, regional cinemas, newspaper reports, television accounts and Internet postings share epistemological and discursive space with Bollywood blockbusters, and my dissertation draws on various elements of this space to discuss

South Asian public culture.

While finding the concept of public culture innovatively valuable, I continue to find the category of “popular cinema” useful as well, especially insofar as it refers to a category of pleasure with expansive currency. My continued usage of this category is also

5 Since end-time eschatologies generally do not play the same role in India as in the predominantly Abrahamic regions of the world, millenarianism is here used to refer to the cultural and material conditions at the turn of the 21st century rather than to the promise of a godly reign.

a response to the long-standing denigration of commercial Indian cinema as ideologically

regressive and aesthetically unsophisticated. Among the intellectuals in India,

Chidananda Das Gupta provides the classic example of this elitist tendency whereby popular cinema consistently falls short of the realist standards that Satyajit Ray exemplified. Relating this elitist tendency to developmentalist ideology, M. Madhava

Prasad underlines its impact on film historiography: “The prevalence of this ideology has

meant that serious writing on Indian cinema was for a long time restricted to a

consideration of the works of masters like Ray, Ghatak, and others” (14-15). While “the

prestige of Indian cinema, at home and abroad, was enhanced by such writings, especially

by the influential western admirers of Ray,” Prasad accuses the writer privileging “those

realist/artistic products which correspond to a certain conception of true cinema” of “a

failure “to situate this cinema in the Indian film historical context, a tendency that was

encouraged by the perception that that context served, if at all, only as a backdrop of

mediocrity against which the auteurs shone even brighter” (ibid.). It is Nandy who

provides the most significant class-based analysis of the tendency described above. To

begin with, there is the intriguing linkage of Ray’s “acquired liminality” as “non-

popular” auteur to a specific kind of “cultural marginality”, whereby the filmmaker

“started life as a person who had a poor acquaintance with Bengali literature and Indian

music and none whatsoever with Indian village life, later so closely identified in world

cinema with his films” (“Invitation” 156). Understood in this way, Ray’s “self-conscious

attempts to defy the established conventions” of popular cinema can be seen as a

“defensive maneuver” (155), also ascribable to many of his bourgeois celebrators.

Further, Nandy portrays popular cinema “as the slum’s point of view of Indian politics

and society” that “wittingly or unwittingly, taps the fears, anxieties and felt pressures of deculturation latent among those who are living in the peripheries on the edge of survival” (Secret 2, Savage 58).

Of course the class investments in popular films are varied and complex, and the

social concerns to which they correspond have to be identified on a case-by-case basis.

Rustom Bharucha points to Sooraj Barjatya’s 1994 blockbuster Hum Aaape Hain Kaun as an example of the popular film in which “wealth is the given, pre-ordained condition”

(169), and one could continue to add to a list of such films interminably. For instance, a more recent incarnation of the Barjatya film, Karan Johar’s 2001 multistarrer Kabhi

Khushi Kabhi Ghum has also enjoyed overwhelming success at the box office.

Nevertheless I diverge from Bharucha’s explanation of “the display of wealth” as merely

naturalizing “the generic, North Indian, upper caste, upper class, extended family” (ibid.),

because it fails to account for how popular films reflect the aspirations and anxieties of a

diverse constituency. In her analysis of the Barjatya film, Lalitha Gopalan points out that

“the opening credit sequence has both leads, Madhuri Dixit and Salman Khan, looking

straight at us and singing ‘Hum aapke hain kaun?’/ ‘Who am I to you?’” (3). She argues

that this sequence is “asking us to reflect on our relationship to cinema” by drawing “us

into a triangular economy of desire, making us an integral part of the love story” (ibid.).

In contrast to Gopalan, who recognizes that “films read our desires back to us, both

regressive and Utopian” (15), Bharucha disavows all spectatorial complicity. A complete

failure to read the popular film on its “own terms” is the predictable consequence of this

repudiation of cinephiliac engagement. Such disengagement also screens off the

possibility of contestatory receptions that cannot be captured by the progressive vs.

regressive binary.6

Even insofar as the desire for class ascendancy to which the aforementioned

Barjatya and Johar films appeal can be understood in terms of commodification, it is

disingenuous to suggest that the affirmation of capital forecloses affective utopias or that

the latter are necessarily a manifestation of Hindu fundamentalism. Their appreciation of

affect is another common factor in the work of Appadurai and Nandy, but the latter is

strongly castigated by Bharucha for undermining secularism by ascribing an aberrant

secular imaginary to popular cinema wherein religiosity is constantly affirmed rather than

disavowed. Bharucha’s chagrin is probably provoked by how it is Nandy’s perspective

that has become more acceptable since the eighties and popular cinema is increasingly

read as constructing “the nation as a ‘secular’ multi-cultural entity” in opposition to

rather than in harmony with “the divisive challenge from the Hindu right” (Rajadhyaksha

689).

The impact of this development on the terrain of film studies is not insignificant,

and as Ravi S. Vasudevan points out, “the distinctive feature of the emerging academic

and professional institutionalization of film study in India is the prominence now given to

the popular-commercial cinema, so long denied legitimacy as an object of study”

6 To illustrate, consider Gayatri Gopinath’s attention to the “elaborate dance sequence where the cross- dressed woman and Dixit engage in a teasing, sexualized exchange that parodies the trappings of middle- class Hindi family arrangements (that is, heterosexuality, domesticity, and motherhood)” (“Queering” 286). Gopinath argues that, “the incursion of female homoerotic desire into this ultra-conventional Hindu marriage plot – both suggested and contained by the scene between Dixit and her cross-dressed partner – threatens the presumed seamlessness of both familial and nationalist narratives by calling into question the functionality and imperviousness of heterosexual bonds” (287). In other words, the fact that queer South Asian subjects find “a repository of queer desiring relations” in the Barjatya film does not imply that the film aggressively campaigns against the perceived illegitimacy of these relations among other publics. But it is important not to ignore that diverse receptions indicate a contestation concerning “family values” rather than an authentication of some inflexible family ideal.

(Making 1). In the American academy, this change is reflected both in the gradual expansion of the curricula to include popular Indian films and in the enlargement of the scholarly archive on these films. Here, recent transformations in the political landscape also play a role in attracting attention to the culture of the subcontinent. But is, as

Christopher Pinney argues, “high cultural disparagement” only a ghost now, invoked to

“frame the subsequent discovery of cultural value in popular culture in a positive manner” or to ally theorists “with what they claim are culturally disavowed (hence desirable) media and artifacts” (3)? If so, this is no enervated haunting as attested at many a conference panel on Indian cinema. In fact, the obligation to render a critique of commercially successful texts in oppositional terms remains a recurrent rhetorical ploy for academic performance. In my own case, the presentation of selected materials from this dissertation has often attracted the question of whether or not the films I discuss and celebrate are representative.7 While the heterogeneous plenitude of the subcontinent’s film production renders the goal of selecting representative texts quite uncertainly defined, I stand with critics like Gopalan, Nandy and Vasudevan in insisting on its valuable and variable cultural function. Of course this dissertation focuses on representations that complicate fundamentalist projects in their diversity, but it makes no claims about exhausting the multiplicities of meaning even with a select array of films.

The aspiration is to “hear” some of the popular commentaries on contemporary crises of identity in a disaggregated “zone of contestation” that Appadurai and Breckenridge have called public culture.

7 Also, I find Gopalan’s observations on academic conferences quite resonant: “One finds a polite interest in Indian cinema – alternative or popular – but little enthusiasm. The same small clutch of listeners migrate from one international panel to another – Russian, Italian, Chinese, Indian, Iranian – with hordes of American film scholars crowding into auditoriums for papers on the latest Hollywood blockbuster” (15).

It is in this vein that my dissertation engages with the popular at various sites of production. Following on the general trend in current scholarship on Indian cinema to

“avoid complicity with a hierarchical outlook on aesthetic sensibility and cultural consumption” (Vasudevan, Making 3), and the specific “multicultural media studies” model proposed by Shohat and Stam, I discuss a range of documentaries, so-called art films and commercial releases in their thematic and occasionally stylistic connections to each other. Unlike Bharucha, instead of positing activist documentaries and popular films as existing in separate ideological spheres, I analyze them as narratives of dissent in a shared space of public culture. The object here is not to erase the differences of genres and markets or to naysay the premise that the commercial form does engender sensationalist idioms, eschewing which can be a considerably significant stylistic and ideological choice for non-commercial filmmakers. But insofar as the distinguishing thread that I follow in mapping texts produced at the turn of the 21st century is that of fundamentalisms, it is important to locate these in a “zone of contestation” and this includes popular films as much as any others. Considering a variety of texts also allows us to place various forces against fundamentalisms in relationship to each other more effectively.

In an effort to deconstruct majoritarian fundamentalism in its own terrain, I begin, in the next chapter, by analyzing the legacy of a twelfth-century mysticism that offers a strong challenge to the Hindu Right’s deployment of iconography to articulate homogenized practices of gender. Specifically, this chapter focuses on the iconoclastic religious practices suggested by the 12th century Bhakti poet Mahadevi Akka whose compositions show the typical mystic amalgamation of erotic and religious expression to

defy iniquitous gender mandates. The legacy of this grafting is discussed through the

ethnopoeic documentary Scribbles on Akka (2000), wherein the contemporary women interviewed and filmed by Madhusree Dutta perform diverse rather than homogenous

“kinships” with the religious icon. Together, the “real” and “imagined” women in Dutta’s film help us appreciate the possibilities of opposing sexist doxa in the terrain of religion itself.

The third chapter focuses on films that contest the inscriptions of sexual mandates grounded in the discourse of religion and tradition. As in the discussion in the previous chapter, here too I find contestatory engagements wherein alternative traditions are found to have historical sanctity. This reclaiming of historical antecedents is absolutely necessary in refusing the exclusions vociferously demanded by contemporary narratives of the Hindu Right. This chapter has as its backdrop a range of historical (Same-Sex Love

in India) and autobiographical (Yaraana, Facing the Mirror) materials that have same-sex relationships as their themes, but zooms in on nineties’ filmic productions (Fire, Bombay

Boys, Split Wide Open) that allow us to infer audience support for a politics of representation that rejoices in the foregrounding of sexualities formerly marginalized on the screens. My analysis here also pays attention to some of the innumerable web postings on the topic especially because films like Fire have impelled a vigorous

discussion about queer identity and Indian traditions on the Internet and it is important to

recognize how the Internet now allows diasporic communities to enthusiastically and

constantly engage with their domestic counterparts in the construction of public opinion.

The next two chapters shift the center of attention to fundamentalisms that manifest territorial agendas in association with violence. The films discussed in the fourth chapter

spotlight political movements that have impelled tensions between the nation-states in the

South Asian region. In fact, the cross-border pollination of violence we find here reverberates with Appadurai’s discussion of both the transnational aspect of the violence through which some identity groups assert themselves and the necessity for utopian contestations to counter this violence through transnational coalitions. Specifically, it is

Anand Patwardhan’s documentary War and Peace that underlines how it is precisely in cross-border engagements that the prospect for peace resides. The analysis of Vidhu

Vinod Chopra’s Mission Kashmir (2000), Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se (1998) and Santosh

Sivan’s The Terrorist (1996), films referencing primarily Kashmiri, North Eastern and

Tamil terrorisms respectively, spotlights how this set of blockbusters and art-house films also defies parochial pitching to underline the South Asian “family” relationship and to demystify government rhetoric on different sides of the border. Switching between the scrutiny of the metaphorical South Asian family and the individual family represented differently in different films throughout the chapter, we focus at the end on the implications of the extra-textual life of the female terrorist Dhanu referenced in Ratnam and Sivan’s films. If the second and third chapters highlight how religious inscriptions effect women’s domestic lives, the discussion about Dhanu and the female protagonists representing her draws attention to how the experience of brutal violations by state institutionary can actually eviscerate effected women’s domestic aspirations.

One of the critical backdrops for the chapter described above is the dispute between the claim that the very media coverage of violent actions furthers the political ends of the violent actors and the claim that the media extends the official perspective on given actors and events. The first claim is supported by the developments in

technoscience whereby terrorists can use media technologies for communicating

meaning-making even as they choose from an array of weapons technologies to carry out their explosive missions. In this sense, as Jacques Derrida says, “no ‘territorial’ determination is pertinent any longer for locating the seat of new technologies of transmission and aggression” (Borradori 101). The second claim derives from the nation- state’s deployment of the same technologies to control dissenting populations. In this context, Nicholas Dirks has attacked the positive reception given to an earlier film in

Mani Ratnam’s terrorism trilogy (Roja, 1992) by saying that academics and intellectuals

have an obligation “to write against the mainstream justification” of the premise of the

popular film that peace with a dissenting community must be achieved within the

framework set by the nation-state (178). My analysis focuses on how the selected films

represent the dissenting and mainstream voices in a “zone of contestation,” underlining

that this imagining of the fixing of social fissures in a shared space is both vital and

complex, and challenging the assumptions of Dirks’ claim that the Ratnam film “is

retrograde seems virtually self-evident in the circles within which we write” (ibid.).

Finally, the examples of Anuj Joshi’s Garhwali film Meri Saun (2004) and Shobit

Basnet’s Nepali film Army (1998) focus on identity movements that are not constructed primarily on the basis of religious difference but are compelled predominantly by a sense of socio-economic marginalization. The fifth chapter also makes the argument for a more wide-ranging cross-cultural analysis of both films and audiences in the South Asian region. It is not just the stylistic and thematic intertextuality of the commercial cinemas in the region that necessitates a transnational analysis. In an important development, films

like Meri Saun and Army also challenge the dominance of Hindi programming even as they complicate exclusivist models of identity and nationalism.

Overall, the films discussed here tackle fundamentalisms as manifested in a range

of religious communities, with a variety of historical motivations and political visions.

Leonard Weinberg and Ami Pedahzur point out: “Generations of social scientists were

trained to believe that the economic development and social modernization of the ‘new

nations’ in Asia, Africa and the Middle East would inevitably be accompanied by a

decline in traditional religious belief and practice” (4). Thus, when religious movements

emerged against the expectation of increasing secularization “over the latter third of the

twentieth century,” this “came as a surprise to many observers” (ibid). Popular cinema,

on the other hand, actually takes the anxieties of its cultural consumers as seriously as their desires, and its engagements repeatedly defy the secular versus religious binary by representing identifying and disavowing religious subjectivities in conversation with each other. This is consistent with the assertion that, “through their very structures and operation and notwithstanding the particular subject matter being presented, media forms and practices advance and accord legitimacy to certain viewing positions, ideological principles and political and economic relations” (Slocum 23). But since viewers’ reception of media forms is shaped by their particular personal and political experiences, we can hypothesize this reception is always in excess of the producer’s intention. In other words, it is indeed possible that even the films I discuss here would stimulate some viewers to endorse or enact fundamentalist violence. Against Fundamentalisms has however remained focused on how the cinematic juxtaposition of claims of otherness and

difference can encourage the inclination to dialogue rather than the tendency towards

more partitions.

Consider that Sikh extremism in South Asia had reached its most virulent peak in

the eighties, and the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards had sparked a deplorable process of backlash against the community. Over

time, however, debate in the public sphere both brought the need to dissidentify with the

extremists home to the Sikh moderates and persuaded the majority community about the

legitimacy of grievance claims. Swampooran Singh Gulzar’s Maachis (1996) captured the cusp of this transition by representing youthful terrorists’ point of view and also drawing attention to the flawed absolutism of fundamentalist leaders. The film’s compassionate “appeal to order” had an urgency transcending the banal cliché. The fire of Sikh fundamentalism that threatened to engulf India just two decades ago presently appears to have burnt down to embers, and this shows that our hope that currently raging fundamentalisms will also wane has historical justification. In this context, it becomes important to support those representations in contemporary public culture that confront difficult questions about violent differences and offer visionary tales of living with claims of difference even after they have wrecked havoc on a polity or people.

CHAPTER 2 IN THE FOOTPRINTS OF A MYSTIC, MAHADEVI AKKA

Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of history. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus, he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.(Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262)

A horrifying surge of fundamentalist energies stimulated the demolition of Babri

Mosque in December 1992. Within a month, the Bombay Stock Exchange was bombed

and riots broke out in the city that had till that point been the byword in cosmopolitanism.

In the months preceding the mosque’s destruction, as the state abandoned a four-decades

long socialist policy and undertook economic liberalization, the people of Bombay

witnessed a thrilling economic boom and consumer revolution. Everything from the

number of television channels to the variety of detergents had catapulted into a world of

more, more and more. But the Babri Mosque-Bombay Stock Exchange violence made

mincemeat of the illusion that capital would necessarily re-infuse secular energy into the

modern nation-state, and discourage religious conflict. It is this that makes the work of

reexamining religious subjectivity critical as postcolonial nationalism enters the 21st century.

Partha Chatterjee has convincingly argued, “anticolonial nationalism creates its own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before it begins its political battle with the imperial power. It does this by dividing the world of social institutions and practices within two domains – the material and the spiritual” (6). The spiritual domain

20 21

bears “the ‘essential’ marks of cultural identity” and is deployed to bring a new

patriarchy into being, constructing an iconic family to reify national “tradition.” As it is

an ascendant Right rather than an anticolonial nationalism that has forcefully revisited the

spiritual to affect an exclusionary conferral of citizenship rights at the turn of the new

millennium, the progressive sections of civic society not only need to contest this

endeavor, but also take the contestation into the heart of the spiritual domain itself.

It is in this context that filmmaker Madhusree Dutta found out about the iconization

of the twelfth century mystic poet Mahadevi Akka. People in the South Indian state of

Karnataka had converted a garage into a temple at the crossroads of Udugani and

Tadugani villages, marking it as their icon’s birthplace. The industry marketing the Akka

brand was now retailing goods all the way to the United States. The phenomenon seemed

to encapsulate in a microcosm the larger lesson that post-liberalization consumerism was

providing fertile territory for populist fundamentalism. It seemed that, in a reflection of

our times, a revolutionary female mystic, her image and her vachanas that can be

understood as lyrical sayings in free verse, were being crudely marketed for profit.

Moreover, the increasing demand for Akka was completely compatible with the

fundamentalist drive to re-visit the past with the express purpose of making Hindutva

univocally dominant in the present, to find ancient Hindu icons and project them to the

general populace as revered historical antecedents and mandatory modern models. So

Dutta went to Karnataka to film the people who were exploiting the popularity of Akka

for profit. In an unforeseen development, as Dutta made Scribbles on Akka, she came to understand that the iconization of Akka could also amount to the empowerment of her predominantly female followers. Presenting her film at the Alliance de François in Delhi

22 in 2000, the filmmaker said about the religious women she interviewed: “It is not my way of knowing Akka, but I respect theirs.” In some sense, this chapter is about why we should respect the many ways of knowing Akka.

Whatever she may have been 800 years ago, Dutta’s film demonstrates that at the beginning of the twenty first century images of Akka are mobilized in a manifold fashion.

Interviews with many of the twentieth century female writers and artists who find inspiration for their voice in Akka’s story and her compositions, and who are engaged in secular conversations with Akka through their art, reveal Akka to be a feminist inspiration; interviews with the women who worship Akka at her temple, on the other hand, render Akka as a revered deity; interviews with women who manufacture commodities stamped with an image of Akka present her as a brand name. The footage of local dramatic companies melodramatically staging the Akka show, advertising it off bullock carts and circulating its video recordings, delivers Akka as a spectacle. The filmmaker further intersperses the extensive documentary footage with fictionalized representations of women who act out commonplace tasks and are played by Seema

Biswas. The assorted set of imagined women that Biswas enacts ranges from a suburban

Bombay commuter balancing her body and cutting vegetables for her family on a moving train to a woman marrying Christ by putting a wedding ring on herself in a gothic church.

As Akka’s vachanas play in the background, Biswas also acts out identifiable copies of filmic female characters that have presumably inspired Dutta herself. For what she calls

“a final journey on behalf of Akka on screen,” Dutta recruits the Manipuri theater artist and dancer Sabitri Heisnaam to “mark ascetisim within the map of assertion”

(www.upperstall.com). These fictional representations of Akka’s legacy among modern

women are enacted with a choreographed economy and intensity, which resonate with the

different vachanas or lyrical sayings in verse that give them a lyrical backdrop. A line from a popular song comes to mind: “What if god were one of us, just another stranger on the bus.” In other words, the women Dutta interviews, films and re-presents, metaphorically could be Akka herself, an Akka of our times rather than an ancient authority. I will show how the juxtaposition of several ways of walking in Akka’s footprints, including assuming her identity (by the actresses) and finding inspiration in it

(by the interviewees), effectively challenges the homogenizing rhetoric of both the Hindu fundamentalists and that segment of the liberal left which dismisses religion en masse.

By assembling images of what Dutta calls contemporary women “creating small places, making small transgressions, initiating minor revolts,” Scribbles on Akka appropriates the scopic regime, which grows more and more powerful at the turn of the millennium,1 to perform a feminist genealogy (www.upperstall.com). The images that the

Hindu Right disseminates have acquired an omnipresent visibility in the public sphere,

shaping the dialogues in the executive, the legislature, the pedagogical institutions, the

domestic arena and the media through the nineties. Generally unable to put out equally

insidious images, the overwhelmed leftist constituency sometimes falls back on a

1 Arjun Appadurai argues: “Through such effects as the telescoping of news into audio-visual bytes, through the tensions between the public places of cinema and the more exclusive spaces of video watching, through their tendency to be associated with glamour, cosmopolitanism, and the new, electronic media (whether associated with the news, politics, family life, or the spectacular entertainment) tend to interrogate, subvert and transform other contextual literacies . . . They allow scripts for possible lives to be imbricated with the glamour of film stars and fantastic film plots and yet also to be tied to the plausibility of news shows, documentaries, and other black-and-white forms of telemediation and printed text. Because of the sheer multiplicity of forms in which they appear (cinema, television, computers and telephones) and because of the rapid way in which they move through daily life routines, electronic media provide resources for self-imagininig as an everyday social project” (Modernity 3-4). It is to these transformations, their effect on political campaigns whether of a fundamentalist or a progressive nature, and the filmmakers’ consciousness about the impact of media in the current phase of globalization that I refer by way of the phrase, “the millennial scopic regime.”

sweeping denunciation of religion. Dutta’s film gives progressive politics another face. I

argue that it demonstrates the promise of digging into religion to find alternative images

by spotlighting an iconic Hindu mystic who was deeply religious and yet undermined

many of the conventional precepts of her faith. Rustom Bharucha characterizes such

strategies as “nativist advocacies of indigenous cultural traditions” and dismisses them as

anti-secularist (19). But insofar as the celebration here is not premised on a static concept

of authenticity but on a contestation with fundamentalist readings of historically

conditioned and contingent structures of faith, it is an analytical and ideological folly to

collapse it into a non-dialogic framework.

Religion is here revealed in its relationship to both social change and conservative

politics as Scribbles on Akka traces the far-reaching material effects of Akka’s performative utterance, “Not one, not two, not three or four, but through 8,400, 000 vaginas have I come” on diverse women’s lives. What they embody are the many possibilities of “copying” a figure simultaneously of the past and of the present. Their outpourings manage to emphasize the contingent, conservative and radical aspects of iconography all at once. In investigating the many fantasies that are mobilized by iconic

Akka, several questions are raised. Who is Akka? What do women think about Akka today? How does she affect their lives? Akka might have been iconoclastic, but aren’t many of the women who worship her image straight-jacketed within orthodoxy? Has

Akka been recuperated by patriarchal Brahmanism? Was she ever a revolutionary to begin with? Did she walk naked, really? Was she mad, or just a mystic? What is the relationship between mystic bodies and abjection? In its involvement with abjection, does female mysticism powerfully transcend its context or is it simply escapist?

Because the trans-historical scrutiny of women’s relationship to religion and

patriarchy helps us to appreciate the oppositional force of the feminist genealogy

performed by Scribbles on Akka, this chapter takes an extended excursion through

Virashaivist mysticism. Here, the question about “where and when women will become

agents in the internal transformation of religious groups” receives an answer (Sangari

3307), which is connected to both Vijaya Ramaswamy’s research on “divinity and

deviance” and the psychoanalytic commentary on mysticism. By placing Akka and her

vachanas in a historical context, we consider that her mystic interventions connote a

radical intervention with contingent but powerful reverberations. This consideration of

hagiography is eventually marshaled to appreciate the making of an icon synchronically,

wherein the feminist scholarship on visibility provides important insights.

Briefly, on the question of iconography

In general, my dissertation draws attention to those representations in millennial

India that present images of national communities that defy the normative kinships

mythified by fundamentalist mandates. Discussions of popular representations in India

sometimes equate these representations with a Bollywood, and pay inadequate attention

to the intersections between different forms of artistic expression. Following on Arjun

Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge’s conceptualization of public culture, I consider variously produced and distributed films as interventions in a shared domain. Later in the dissertation, I focus on Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s Mission Kashmir, which addresses the fundamentalism associated with the transgression of national borders and a jihadi subject.

This is a glitzy production, using mainly the Hindi language, involving expensive special

effects, featuring high-profile stars, and was simultaneously released in cinema halls all

across India. The length of the film, the presentation of the songs and dances, the

utilization of star-power, the archetypical character constructions, the melodramatic

narrative, and the elaborate action sequences fulfilled the conventional expectations of

the popular form. By contrast, the film on which this chapter focuses was shot

inexpensively, combines documentary footage with fictional frames, defies narrative

summarizing and wraps up in an hour. Hindi, English and Kannada are all extensively

deployed in this film, and it has been screened only in a few theatres. Admittedly, the

choices made by the two filmmakers reflect the fact that while one is pitching at

commercially mainstream consumption the other is not.

It is important, however, to note that the two films share a critical engagement with

the scopic context at the turn of the millennium, wherein the religious right is shrewdly

and methodically fortifying the iconography that serves its purposes. Both films are hyperconscious about contesting aspects of religious subjects’ life that fortify against fundamentalism. As I will show in the fourth chapter, Mission Kashmir deploys the iconography of the popular film to expose the linkage of patriarchal edicts to the bloodshed on the national borders, often prosaically documented as immutable. In this chapter, I will explore how Scribbles on Akka engages with the multi-dimensional aspect of religious iconography whereby it can offer a challenge to sexist dogma as well. Both films engage in a progressive mediation of iconography and the popular, and share extensive discursive interests. Even the selection of a non-blockbuster film form by Dutta

is accompanied with citations of blockbuster vocabulary. For instance, the performance

of song plays a seminal structural and thematic role in the film and Illyaraja who has box-

office hits to his credit composes its music.2

2 As Manjunath Pendakur writes, “Western (and Indian) critics often put down the inclusion of songs in the narratives of Indian cinema because an actor breaking into song suddenly ruptures the plot and brings a

While the binary separation of entertainment film and political film has by now

established such a record of injustices that I am wary of calling upon it to differentiate

Mission Kashmir from Scribbles on Akka, to characterize the latter as women’s cinema

remains a useful political and taxonomical strategy. Dutta is the executive director of

Majlis, an organization that has been involved in multi-cultural activism in Bombay since

1989.3 Her films have always challenged sexist ideology. Memories of Fear (1995) is a fictionalized assemblage of a chilling set of episodes of everyday sexual harassment – in the home, on the street, in the classroom, on the train. I Live in Behrampada (1993) is a documentary uncovering the class motivations underpinning the religious conflict

engulfing a Bombay slum, spotlighting both the vulnerability and strength of poor

Muslim women living in the shadow of sexist and religious prejudices. But Scribbles on

Akka is Dutta’s most ambitious film. It chooses a religious icon – Mahadevi Akka – as its

focus, and sets up the expectation that it will powerfully deconstruct this icon. Finally,

however, the relationship between the film and the icon remains one of respect. I do not

mean that the film ends up inclined on the side of idolatry. Rather, we are left with a

complex audio-visual essay on how iconography answers to history’s needs, mutating

over time, and serving as many different objects to many different subjects.

sense of artificiality to the “realism” that the film attempts to achieve” (121). His wide-ranging defense includes the inextricable linkage of film music and the social-cultural dimensions of Indian society. Constantly “moving” from one language to another, from the folk to the classical, from one country to another, from urban to rural spaces, from domestic to international influences, from secular to devotional contexts, and played at political rallies, even the extra-diegetic functions that film songs perform are significant. In this sense, Dutta’s choice of including song sequences to structure her documentary can be considered her homage to the commercial form.

3 As the website for this center for alternative culture and rights discourse indicates, its title is widely understood in Hindustani, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Arabic, Persian and other languages. This indicates its awareness of the global interconectedness of legal and media activisms. Further, the international funding of Dutta’s films and her involvement with the Import-Export project network, which includes filmmakers Philip Scheffner, Michael Woergoetter, Merle Kroeger and Dorothee Wenner, point to how “counter- publics” can derive sustenance from transnational collaborations.

For our purposes, the connections that Claire Johnston makes between myth,

stereotype, iconography and cinema are fruitful as a theoretical lens that relates the

elements of critique in the commercial and non-commercial productions we are

discussing. Mission Kashmir, for example, by way of the iconography of popular film, makes the mythic qualities of stereotypes such as that of the Muslim terrorist readily detachable, and implicitly critiques the ideological tradition associated with the construction of these stereotypes. Scribbles on Akka, is a mediation on religious iconography (which is as omnipresent as the iconography of the popular film in public culture) that enables us to deconstruct Hindu fundamentalist narratives concerning pious practice and history.

When Johnston gave out her revolutionary call for women’s cinema as counter- cinema three decades ago, she astutely pointed out that Hollywood iconography could actually serve to demystify the sexist ideology that informed it. She wrote: “Because iconography offers in some ways a greater resistance to the realist characterization, the

mythic qualities of certain stereotypes become far more readily detachable and can be

used as a short-hand for referring to an ideological tradition in order to provide a critique

of it” (24). Further, Johnston questioned the influence of cinema verite′ – “images of women talking to the camera about their experiences, with little or no intervention by the film-maker” (29) – on the women’s cinema of her time. She assessed that, “the ‘truth’ of our oppression cannot be ‘captured’ on celluloid with the ‘innocence’ of the camera: it has to be constructed/ manufactured” (ibid). While invoking Johnston here, I bear in mind Lalitha Gopalan’s warning to resist “the urge to write histories of world cinema into the American Hollywood omnibus” (182). There is also the danger of flattening the

trajectories of different experiments in world feminisms. But, just as Johnston’s

statements speak across time to feminist cinema in America, they speak across culture.

And as long as we remain respectful of context, we can find use for her prescience

without reducing all texts to footnotes in some hegemonic omnibus.

In Scribbles on Akka, in the style of cinema verite′, the filmmaker questions a wide

cross-section of women about their relationship to a religious icon. She asks them to trace

the history of the image of Akka, and to delineate the impact of this image on their lives.

These questions meet with passionate responses that ring with conviction but are also

quite heterogeneous. The documentary footage – “images of women talking to the

camera about their experiences” – is complemented with fictional segments. Here, the

image of Akka is dramatized in different settings and languages, constituting the

“intervention of the filmmaker,” and negating the “innocence” of the camera. Listening to

the “real” voices recount diverse claims on Akka, and watching the icon diversely

performed, we are left with what Johnston calls “a series of distortions within the very

structure of the narrative” (31). These distortions have their counterpart in the various

interruptions in the commercial cinema, a cinematic practice that Gopalan addresses at

length. In this chapter, however, I focus on the distortions by which an oppositional

“truth” is “manufactured/ constructed” in Scribbles on Akka.

Walking Naked: Virashaivism and iconoclasm

We have to rely on hagiographical sources for our knowledge of Mahadevi

Akka’s role in the Bhakti movement that defied Vedic Brahmanical mandates disallowing women and lower castes from participating in scripture-based rituals. Akka herself was from the merchant rather than the priestly class. Bhakti, literally meaning

loving devotion, is traced to Sanskrit literature by some scholars. It is pointed out, for instance, that Krishna advocated it in the ninth century text Bhagvata Purana: “If a man offered devotion, containing nine attributes – hearing, praising, the recollection of

Vishnu, attending His feet, honoring and lauding Him, servitude, friendship and self- surrender – to Vishnu, then I would consider this to be manifestedly the highest teaching that can be made concerning the illustrious one” (cited in Bailey 2). And in the

Bhagavad-Gita, it is said: “Those who take refuge in me, O Partha, even if they are born from a sinful womb, or as women, Vaisyas or Sudras; even they will reach the highest goal” (cited in Lorenzen 15). An eclectic range of rituals and practices characterizes the

Bhakti tradition, which influenced the performance of not just Hinduism but also Islam,

Christianity and other religions in India.4 But its basic ideological precept is an

unmediated relationship between grace and devotion, and this definitely represents

reform of the Vedic Brahmanism that denied women and the lower castes direct access to

salvation and scripture.

In its three main anthropomorphic forms, Bhakti is directed towards Vishnu,

Shiva and the Goddess. We are focusing on Shiva Bhakti, which is known as

Virashaivism. By the tenth century, in a significant socio-psychological transformation,

the secular poetry of love was grafted onto religion, and Virashaivism became popular as

a spiritual path in which the erotic is the chief mode. It is in this sense that we call

Virashaivites like Mahadevi Akka mystics. As Vijaya Ramaswamy points out, ‘love’ is at

the core of the intimate union with the divine to which mysticism aspires (Walking 6). In

composing mystic poetry, the Virashaivites defied the Brahmanical directive to worship

4 For example, see “Christ Ashram: A Hindu-Catholic Sect in Goa” by R. S. Newman.

in Sanskrit. Especially in Karnataka, these “makers of utterances” engendered a

“relocalized idiom” that eschewed high-cultural genres (Pollock 35). Their vachanas were composed in what we now understand as the vernacular languages, and which till this point had a “subliterary existence” in a context wherein “Sanskrit functioned as the sole medium for the production of literary and non-documentary political texts” (30).

Around 350 of the vachanas extant in Kannada are attributed to Akka. Many have survived in folk forms, and some have also been assimilated into classical music by now.

In this way, and by way of infusing the vachanas by metaphors that were uniquely her own, Mahadevi Akka was involved in the production of new language.

By taking off her clothes and walking naked, Akka enacted a further violation of social norms. For those that held that ascetic nakedness was a prerequisite to enlightenment, woman’s “inability” to surrender her clothing rendered enlightenment inaccessible to her. Manisha Sethi writes, “When nakedness becomes a mark of one’s detachment from wealth, power and desire, the female saints and ascetics, who are socially constrained to cover their bodies, find their voices silenced and their religious experience erased” (15). But Akka did walk naked and proved by example that woman too could achieve the ultimate spiritual power. In the end, as far as the assertions of the hagiographical sources are concerned, Akka’s soul indisputably merged with the Divine.

The bodily tribulations related to walking naked insofar as they correspond to the mortification of the flesh have been an important part of the mystic life of other religions as well.

For instance, in the tradition of imitatio Christi, medieval female mystic Julian of

Norwich wrote:

Some time earlier she had asked three gifts from God: (i) to understand his passion; (ii) to suffer physically while still a young woman of thirty; (iii) to have as God's gift three wounds. . . . I quite sincerely wanted to be ill to the point of dying . . . I wanted his pain to be my pain . . . I was not wanting a physical vision or revelation of God, but such compassion as a soul would naturally have for our Lord Jesus . . . Therefore I desired to suffer with him. (63-64)

In psychoanalytic theory, mystical experience is seen in terms of jouissance and the mortification of the flesh is related to abjection. Pointing to the connection between the abjection and the jouissance associated with mystical experience, Julia Kristeva points out, “Mystical Christendom turned this abjection of self into the ultimate proof of humility before God, witness Elizabeth of Hungary who ‘though a great princess, delighted in nothing so much as in abasing oneself” (Revolution, 233). Along the same lines, Jacques Lacan refers to the “acts of the kind attributed to a certain Angela de

Foligno, who joyfully lapped up the water in which she had just washed the feet of lepers” (Ethics, 188). Angela de Foligno also embraced the ideal of poverty and, while

the socially disruptive effect of walking naked exceeds that of a passionate embrace of

being-without-property, the motivation is the same in both cases: shedding worldly

attachments, forfeiting the self, and abjection. It is in this sense of surrendering and

abasing the self that Akka sang to her Chennamallikarjuna:

Make me go house from house

With arms stretched for alms.

If I beg, make them give me nothing.

If they give, make it fall to the ground.

If it falls, before I pick it up, make a dog take it. (cited in Ramanujan 132)

To return to understanding the radical import of the Bhakti doctrine, we have to remember that not only did Vedic Brahmanism adjudicate the unsuitability of the

spiritual path for women, it also emphasized that women threaten the spiritual quest.

Purandara Das, a medieval saint from Karantaka, wrote, “It takes but a minute to fathom

this enchantress as an enemy. / As beloved, she gives you pleasure and denies you eternal

salvation, / Destroys the sanctity of your life on earth and keeps you in bondage” (cited in

Walking Ramaswamy 14). Such proscriptions are, again, trans-cultural. For instance, in a Catholic treatise also dating from the medieval period, Richard Rolle warned, “Do not ever think about them, because even if a woman is good, the devil’s attack and his insinuations, the attraction of her beauty, and the weakness of your flesh can beguile your will beyond measure” (136). Gynophobic soteriological injunctions reserve particular contempt for the “monthly pollution.” Many Hindu women still consider it impious to enter the space of worship, whether this is a temple or a corner of the home in which the icons have been established, while they are menstruating. For the Virashaivites, however,

Linga, or the iconic representation of Shiva shaped like the male organ whose female worshippers are addressed as shiv sharanees, burns away all impurities and menstruating women can participate in all worship rituals.

Since god becomes lover and husband for the female Virashaivites, a high percentage of them were unmarried. As for Mahadevi Akka, historical sources do agree that, as an inter-title within Scribbles on Akka puts it, she abandoned “the world of domestic aspiration.” Sources like Harihara’s twelfth century text Rajadeva Ragale state that she married King Kausika, who was the ruler of the land, and then escaped him but

Chamarasa wrote in the fifteenth century, in Prabhulingaleele, that she never married.

There is disagreement about whether Mahadevi Akka embraced asceticism before or after

her marriage, and Dutta’s film refuses to dodge it. Had the film evaded the

inconsistencies in the tales of Akka, it would have contributed to the loneliness of female

voices by codifying an uncompromising radicalism in the name of a historical persona

whose historicity is as much a construct as a pre-existing essence. One of the poets who

belongs to the generation that, taking inspiration from Mahadevi Akka, started writing

prolifically in Karnataka in the eighties, calls the ascetic someone “who knew feminism

better than us.” But the film does not present this feminism with a purist eye. In the first

place, there is an inherent paradox in the fact that the female Virashaivites’ subversion of

the phallocentric symbolic order manifests itself in the worship of the Linga. As

Ramaswamy points out, “At no stage does a feminine symbol become the object of

worship” (Walking 163). Similarly, we have to face the possibility that even at the

worldly level Akka’s performed a contaminated radicalism. Maybe she did get married,

and A. K. Ramanujan calls this “the tainting fact” (111). Maybe she made other

compromises as well. This seems to, if anything, endear her to some devotees even more.

In interviewing Akka’s followers in the present, Dutta is able to show that the

“community of myth-consumers” that sees Akka as kin disrupts the universalizing

narratives of both normalization and subversion. The domesticities they inhabit are varied. The citing and challenging of gender norms by them is enacted in complex ways, so that agency is manifested both in those practices that are quotidian and those that are not. Some women articulate the desire to emulate Akka’s renunciation of heteronormative matrimony while some give voice to their perception of disjuncture between their lives and that of an Akka they love. Still others intimately take Akka to task for her escapism.

What becomes clear is that if there is data that contradicts the history an Akka

follower wants to recognize as history, or that would conflict with her willingness to

accept Akka as deity, she can find a way around it. In this vein, the accuracy of the claim

that Akka walked naked, with its suggestions of a powerful feminist iconoclasm, is

fiercely contested. Responding to, “I have heard she was married,” an elder devotee

offers a categorical, “No.” Refuting as well the assertion that Akka walked around naked,

she says, “No! God covers her body with hair, protects her dignity.” So this shiv sharanee for whom Akka is the village deity does not accept that Akka entered matrimony, which is the fate of ordinary women like her. Akka was extraordinary; she would never have agreed to marriage. On the other hand, the devotee cannot admit that Akka abandoned covering along with marriage. To imagine that Akka walked around naked, even to disrobe her in iconic representation remains unacceptable. Why would anyone worship a naked female deity? That would be unseemly. It is in one of her more famous vachanas played in the film that Akka says, “You fool, to the shameless girl, / wearing

Chennamallikarjuna’s glory, / where is the need for skirts and jewels?” Here Akka explicitly distances herself from the need for conventional female covering. So the devotee decides, “god covers her body with hair, protects her dignity.” Over-determined by the ideology of bodily shame, the devotee reconciles herself to the image of an Akka without clothes only by imagining a divine intervention that shielded Akka from shame.

But Scribbles on Akka also introduces us to a woman artist, Neelima Sheikh, who paints Akka without the covering of hair. She tells the filmmaker: “The first icon I painted was Akka, and she intermittently comes back.” At the same time, she starkly insists that her visualization has nothing to do with Akka: “It is my position in

postcolonial India through which I construct Akka. She does not really exist otherwise.”

But other interviewees claim that Akka does exist otherwise, that god did protect her

dignity by covering her with hair. The juxtaposition of these certitudes draws attention to

fact that the image of Akka gets fashioned to tailor individual needs. If Akka’s nakedness

alienates her from us, we cover her body with hair. Contrariwise, if our effort is to read

into her actions a resistance to the regime of shame, we insist on looking at Akka in her

nakedness. For Sheikh, the struggle is “to assemble wholeness…wholeness despite

mutilation.” It is conspicuous that this artist, even as she paints Akka’s breasts on a large

canvas propped in front of a window overlooking the city of Baroda in west India,

associates the uncovering of the body with mutilation. Insofar as the path that Akka took

is classified as deviant within the material continent of gender oppressive patriarchy, hers

is, metaphorically speaking, a mutilated body. At the same time, it is by uncovering her

body that the Virashaivite gains her mystic authority. So, deviant and authoritative at the

same time, Akka’s image acquires iconic status. The deviancy wins her feminist atheists’

kudos and the spiritual authority gets her a temple of her own. Amidst her many legacies,

among the many different women who “copy” her or “converse” with her, can we find

one who is, literally, naked? Has Akka engendered naked followers at all?

Walking naked remains an uncommon phenomenon. Watching the interviews of aesthetically, domestically and ascetically inclined women who revere the twelfth century shiv sharanee, it becomes important to consider the only prominent group of naked

Virashaivites in our times, the nanga sadhus or naked male ascetics. They belong to the

Naga Akhara Movement that was founded in the eighth century for the protection of

Hindu pilgrims. Like Akka, they worship Shiva and walk naked. However, an important

difference is that mystic men pursue their spiritual quest through devotional

transvestitism. Ramaswamy points out, “By the use of a mystical vocabulary which

turned God into ‘husband’, all men and women in the physical world become wives”

(Walking 20). So men have to transform themselves until, like Mahadevi Akka, they too

become brides of God. For instance, in the Islamic tradition, the Sufi mystic Bulleh

Shah’s kafis, or the Sufi equivalent of Bhakti vachanas, often show the love-intoxicated male devotee adopting the female persona to seek union with the Lord. Bulleh Shah identifies the Lord with his spiritual teacher Shah Inayat Qadiri, dresses himself as a woman, plaits his hair, and goes “in this guise to meet his Master” (Puri and Shangari

12). He rejoices, “Inayat will come to my nuptial couch;/ I am in great delight,” and he laments, “The bridegroom visits the homes of all others; what is the flaw that vitiates

Bullah” (cited in 13, 22).

In describing men who have similar experiences in Christianity, Lacan writes that they “are just as good as women” (Feminine, 147). He continues: “Despite, I won’t say

their phallus, despite what encumbers them on that score, they get the idea, they sense

that there must be jouissance that goes beyond. That is what we call a mystic” (ibid).

Here, the sacred is the ineffable associated with the female body. We cannot know it.

Pointing to the difference between the sacred and the scientific knowledges concerning jouissance, Julia Kristeva says that religious discourse can offer catharsis but it is not an elaboration in the psychoanalytic sense of “becoming aware” of the socio-economic causes of moral suffering and dissolving this symptom (Black, 24). So while the concept of feminine jouissance suggests the possibility of re-evaluating what it means to be a

male or female self in relation to other selves and the environment, it does not dissolve

the gender-oppressiveness of the self’s socio-economic context.

The erotically charged convulsions and writhing of the nanga sadhus suggest

transcendence, offering access to esoteric knowledge and power, and also appearing to

perform beyond the pleasure principle. A superficial analysis of the phenomenon of the

nanga sadhus can, however, misread the gender politics practiced by them. For instance,

it is presumably to these nanga sadhus that Slavoj Zizek refers when he writes:

Some Hindu priests allegedly can do impossible things with their penises: not only fully controlling erection with their will; not only knowing how to ejaculate inside instead of outside, so that, instead of being released and spilled out, lost outside, the energy of orgasm gets back into the body and thus contributes to a heightened spiritual energy; they are even able to suck small amounts of liquid like milk with their penises. The fascination of these cases resides in the fact that these priests seem to overcome the exceptional status of the penis, the way of its erection is independent of the subject’s will – in short, in their unique case, penis and phallus do coincide. (Fright 86)

It is on the basis of the Lacanian distinction between the phallus as the signifier of privileged male attributes and the penis as the misrecognized objet petit a, the relatively insignificant organ itself, that Zizek argues that the nanga sadhus overcome the exceptional status of the penis. But his reading falters in its conclusions about the mystic subjects for whom, after all, the penis remains the most spiritually powerful conduit- object for their entry into the ecstatic realm. Betraying an orientalist and masculinist false consciousness, Zizek seems to take at face value the sadhus’ contention that ejaculating inside so that the semen gets back into the body contributes to a heightened spiritual energy. Interestingly, if one agrees with the nanga sadhus that the energy of orgasm must be retained within the body for a heightened spiritual energy, one might heed corollary

sexist myths.5 For example, there is the belief that the flow of menstrual blood renders women unfit for enlightenment because it destroys countless orgasms. Or consider the an excerpt from the 17th century Yuktiprabodha:

Women, namely those beings who have the physical sign of the human female, do not attain moksha in that very life for their souls do not manifest that pure transformation which is called ‘a perfect being’ . . .. The biologically female is distinguished . . . by the fact that she has an impure body, as is evident by the flow of menstrual blood each month. (cited in Sethi 15).

In any case, the inscription of the phallic economy cannot be overstated here. In fact the

nanga sadhus form an exclusively male sect and negate the principle of gender equality

in the spiritual quest that Akka represents.

However, Zizek’s analysis of “desexualization” is useful in discussing the mysticism of both Akka and the nanga sadhus. He writes, “Lacan’s quip about awakening into reality as an escape from the Real encountered in the dream holds more than anywhere apropos of the sexual act itself,” and elaborates that, “we do not dream about fucking when we are not able to do it – rather, we fuck in order to escape and stifle the excess of the dream that would otherwise overwhelm us” (Fright 175). The mystics refuse to stifle the excess of the dream but let it overwhelm them. They renounce

“fucking” as an escape from the Real, accept the limitations of “real-life bodily union,” and seek mystical communion with the Absolute.

5 Anand Patwardhan, a filmmaker discussed at greater length later in the dissertation, captures how a belief in the desirability of conserving semen emboldens hyper-masculine and supremacist aggressivity at a bodybuilding competition sponsored by the Shiv Sena supporters. In his analysis of the bodybuilding footage in Patwardhan’s documentary Father, Son and Holy War (1994), Bharucha interestingly points out that the “illusions of brahamacharya (celibacy),” in this instance, are sustained by “models of masculinity [that] are neither native nor traditional, but embodied in internationally recognized hulks like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.” (151). Bharucha continues: “It is worth reflecting, therefore, that in addition to the colonial residue of masculinity in khaki shorts (the dominant sign of the RSS), the contemporary icons of ‘he-men’ endorsed by the Hindu Right are cast within the tradition of Rambo and the Terminator, whose fascist constructions have already entered the traditional figure of Sri Rama, among other icons” (ibid.).

Forming an eclectic minority in the spiritual domain today, the nanga sadhus enjoy a special status at the Maha Kumbha Mela or the great festival associated with a myth of genesis in which Shiva appears as a predominant hero. As the story goes, the gods and the demons had decided to churn the ocean, using a huge snake as a sort of transmission belt, in order to get its hidden treasures. But it was a deadly poison that they first trawled out and it was Shiva who preserved the gods by swallowing this. When they finally fished out the kumbha or the urn containing the nectar of immortality, the son of the rain god carried the urn to paradise. The four places on earth where he put down the urn when resting, became the four holy places where Hindus congregate to celebrate the

Maha Kumbha Mela alternately every twelve years. At this festival, not only do the

nanga sadhus head the religious procession, they are also the first to bathe in the holy

river, the ritual that marks the climax of the Mela.

It is this legend that Akka might have been referencing when she sang, “if one could/ draw the fangs of a snake/ and charm the snake to play, / it’s great to have snakes.”

Shiva could make “play” out of the snake, swallow the poison that it rendered up from the ocean, win the nectar of immortality for the gods, and produce proximity to paradise for the mortals. When Shiva is not represented as simply Linga, he is painted or sculpted with a snake around his throat. But this particular vachana is also important in addressing our disquiet that Akka’s subversion of the phallocentric symbolic order manifests itself in

the guise of the bride submitting herself to Shiva as husband. Ramaswamy says, “these

women who seem to reject the patriarchal structure at the worldly level continue to

operate within the framework of patriarchy at the spiritual level”(Walking, 163). But

insofar as the snake that is to be charmed is not just the object that Shiva plays with, but

also Shiva himself, it is suggested that the spiritual aspirant’s submission to Shiva is not

hapless. The mystic agent is conscious of wielding power over the lord. Commentators have made similar arguments about Christian medieval mystics as well. For instance,

Elizabeth Robertson has noted in her reading of Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Love that, while ostensibly the female mystic surrenders herself utterly, the female voice in the text is far from submissive and instead indicates the agency of a “subtle strategist” (161).

Even though the power wielded by the mystic is restricted by her social context, it holds out the promise of modifying the hierarchy of power. It is perhaps this promise that is articulated by Akka as the ability to draw the fangs of the snake and charm the snake to play, to mould the Linga to human desire.

If Akka’s use of the snake metaphor, by a metonymic process, suggests a challenge for the worldly authorities as well, we should note that her daring did not meet a warm reception from her peers. Even the other mystics of her time did not always sympathize with her search for salvation. When she walked among them at the Anubhava

Mantapa, many attacked her. Allama Prabhu questioned her treatment of King Kaushika:

“Is it true that you laid the blame/ and left him by shedding your dress/ and laying the body bare? / The error of your mind cannot be stilled” (cited in Divinity, Ramaswamy

41). A female Virashaivite Guddavve was even more caustic: “What use is it if the body/ is without covering? / It is the mind, / which should be without covering. / One who appears to be vrati [devout]/ but is really a vrata heena [devout of devotion]/ Let me not mix with such” (cited in 42). Both the abuses I quote here work by undermining the quality of Akka’s mind. The shedding of clothes, which signifies ascetic renunciation of worldly wealth, power and desire when performed by a male, is confronted with

antagonism when performed by a female. The inspirational power of Akka’s story, in

part, derives from the fact that she was able to deflect the social antagonism that greeted

her choices. The endurance of her iconic status in devotional streams complements the

stories about how her vachanas transformed opponents like Allama Prabhu, quoted

above, into admirers. Nevertheless, we cannot disregard that Allama Prabhu checks Akka

for “the error of your mind.” His words remind us that female mystics like Akka

remained vulnerable to the Law in spite of the iconoclastic promises of the Virashaivite

movement. If even some of Akka’s own sect could question her sanity, we can only

imagine the general toll exacted by the social debasement of female assertiveness. When

we are told that she finally merged her soul with the ultimate reality, this too appears as a

contingent statement of agency. Like other women whose language is in excess of their times, maybe Akka too committed suicide even as hagiographical sources declared that she merged her soul with the Absolute.

I have been trying to show that in considering Akka as a feminist icon, we encounter many ambiguities. Maybe she walked naked, and maybe she covered herself with her hair. Maybe her vachanas bespeak spiritual power, and maybe they reproduce phallocentric ideology. Maybe her mysticism signifies transcendental agency over her context, and maybe it suggests a vulnerable “un-belonging” in the symbolic order.

However, the ambiguities cannot dilute the ineffable force of her disaggregated story and her vachanas.

Admittedly, Akka’s spiritual idiom retains the Linga as the supreme symbol. If we are not persuaded about the iconoclastic quality of circumnavigating the conventional articulations of the father’s Name by taking god as lover, we might consider that this

phallic identification is the price of “the subject’s entrance into the universe of signs and creations” (Black, Kristeva 23). On the other hand, it is important to remember that

Dutta, presumably referring to the distinction between the religious and the secular perspectives on Akka, said of the emotion she had encountered among Akka’s devotees:

“It is not my way of knowing Akka, but I respect theirs.” Perhaps the materialist perspective cannot render a full account of the vachanas such as the one quoted below in which the subject merges into Nothingness or a union with the Absolute:

I do not say it is the Linga, I do not say it is oneness with the Linga.

I do not say it is the Merging, I do not say it is the Parting.

I do not say it has Happened; I do not say it is to Be.

I do not say it is I, I do not say it is You.

At the Linga Chennamallikaarjuna other than the Oneness with the cosmic Linga

The utterance is “Nothing, none whatsoever”!! 6

The erotically charged vachanas of Akka suggest transcendence, an access to esoteric knowledge and power, and also appear to perform beyond the pleasure principle. Kristeva would (as Ramaswamy does) ascribe a cathartic power to their “esoteric” aesthetic and the religious representations. But, for Kristeva, the following question would still remain:

“Under what conditions does this "esoterism," in displacing the boundaries of socially established signifying practices, correspond to socioeconomic change, and, ultimately, even to revolution” (Revolution, 16)? Her point is that it often remains “a blind alley, a

harmless bonus offered by a social order which uses this ‘esoterism’ to expand, become

6 This translation is obtained from “Selections from the discourse on Akka Mahadevi,” an online version of a contemporary “god woman” Vasanti mataaji’s presentation in California. The website where the essay is located also provides home study courses in scripture, and is illustrative of how “traditions” are disseminated via “new” transnational circuits in our age.

flexible, and thrive” (ibid). Mahadevi Akka, like some other female mystics from the

medieval period, has been canonized. She did displace the boundaries of socially established signifying practices, but no revolution followed. Instead the Brahmanical order expanded to assimilate her status as icon within itself.

Around one-third of the Virashaivite saints were women, and nearly three-fourths of these women were from the lower castes. By questioning the ideology of gender- associated pollution through which Vedic Brahmanism restrained women’s role in religion, Virashaivite voices did usher in notions of radical religious equality. Yet, when

the nanga sadhus march ahead naked at the Maha Kumbh Mela now, we cannot spot any women among them. The shakaracharyas, officiating in positions of religious authority, can wax eloquent about Mahadevi Akka and her Freudian deployment of the snake metaphor centuries before Freud, but cannot contemplate a female heir to their exalted positions. For that matter, of the hundreds of priestly ceremonies I have seen performed in India, not a single one was conducted by a woman. God women are proliferating and prospering in the wake of Hindu revivalism. But they do not offer a revivalist challenge to the Brahmin doxa reigning in our times. It is precisely such a challenge that Scribbles

on Akka offers even as it also brings home the lesson that a grand revolution is not the only achievement worth respecting. If it is about the great Akka, it is also about, as Dutta says, women “creating small places, making small transgressions, initiating small revolts.”

Madhusree Dutta: Performing a feminist genealogy

If I see the work of Dutta in terms of the call Claire Johnston gave for “women’s cinema as counter-cinema” three decades ago, I also find that Dutta's filmmaking establishes her credentials in terms of Diva Citizenship. This is a term coined by Lauren Berlant in the

context of the person who stages spectacle for subversive politics. Berlant describes the

Diva Citizen in the following way:

Flashing up and startling the public, she puts the dominant story into suspended animation; as though recording an estranging voice-over to a film we have all already seen, she renarrates the dominant history as one that the abjected people have once lived sotto voce, but no more; and she challenges her audience to identify with the enormous suffering she has narrated and the courage she has had to produce, calling on people to change the social and the institutional practices of citizenship to which they currently consent. (223)

Berlant links the performance of Diva Citizenship to personal testimony. In this sense, it is Akka and even her devotees like the podi-maker, whom I will describe shortly, who illustrate the diva form by “going public” with their intimate narrative. Insofar as the twelfth century mystic as well as the twentieth century working-class interviewee operate within the domain of Hindu patriarchy, we see them jostling with “institutional practices of citizenship” that overlap. Dutta brings these two voices together in the same text, and her “speaking in public” is of a different order. She performs what Michel Foucault has

called “rediscoveries,” which are described as “the effects of analogy or isomorphism

with current forms of knowledge that allow the perception of forgotten or obscured

figures” (134). Akka is the obscured figure; Scribbles on Akka is the discontinuous examination of descent, inserting into public discussion the trace-effects of this obscured figure’s utterances. In other words, Dutta performs a feminist genealogy.

What is the “dominant story” that needs to be put “into suspended animation” and

recorded over with “an estranging voice-over”? As the Indian state turned took an

intensified turn towards liberalizing in the nineties, it started implementing the structural

changes that the International Monetary Fund demanded. These changes, ranging from

reduction of agricultural subsidies to the legalization of the import of pornography,

brought on their wings an anxious array of debates about national tradition. The nineties

have also been over-determined by the reign of a Hindu-identified political party, which

gave the aforementioned debates a specific revisionist ambition: to prescribe the

construct of the Brahmanical family as historically mandated. The pre-colonial and

ancient lineage of this iconic family was cited as rendering self-evident its desirability for

(and identification with) the post-colonial nation, which was finally coming into its own

by removing the veil of secularism from its Hindu self. The entertainment industry, in the

wake of its own economic re-alignment, often reifies this iconic family in its relationship

to the nation. Thus is produced “the film that we have already seen.”

In contrast, Scribbles on Akka provides us with a representational occasion on which the family-as-nation metaphor is re-configured to trouble the mandate of the conservative sexist contract that is built into the deployment of the iconic family.

Genealogy, for the purposes of this chapter, enables the production of an iconoclastic kinship that has as its point of departure a woman who lived in the twelfth century but

whose vachanas continue to enjoy folk following even today, and have also become part of classical music. Dutta dedicates her film “to all the poets buried under sainthood.” This

dedication urges us to recognize that insofar as the iconoclastic kinship mobilized around

Akka has an origin or a center, this is contaminated. This center is only what Foucault

would call “an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures and heterogeneous layers” (82).

Not just because, as I have shown earlier in this chapter, our historical sources give us conflicting information about Akka, but also because in our specific, distinct and overlapping presents, we construct different meanings of Akka.

It is the Hindutva historians, who perform exhumations on our past so they can throw such light on it as would reinforce a fundamentalist agenda, who bury “the poets

under sainthood,” forcing upon them monolithic interpretations and ascribing to them

unified edicts. This endeavor leaves no room for acknowledging, faults, fissures and

heterogeneous layers. Instead, the grand Hindu narrative positions history as an unflawed

witness to a majestic linearity of the intents and purposes of poets and saints. Martin E.

Marty and R. Scott Appleby characterize such claims of the “absolute truth” as “the

intentionally scandalous” aspect of fundamentalism, wherein “fundamentalists oppose

‘historical consciousness’ and the relativism associated with it (818-819). Importantly, however, they are distinguishable from tradionalists per se as “they select carefully from among the plethora of doctrines, practices, and interpretations available in the tradition” to employ privileged traditional elements as ideological weapons for the construction of a pure group identity (825-826). The insistent continuity that the grand narrative posited by

the Hindutva historians displays makes the effort to resist the conservative sexist contract

seem both futile and misdirected. Dutta's film struggles with the fabric of this seeming

futility to “put the dominant story into suspended animation,” to foreground the eclectic

and iconoclastic aspects of religious practices, and to underline that even the history of

such practices is posthumously constructed and contestable. Various contradictory claims

of kinship jostle with each other as Dutta films her subjects, contradictions that are left

pointedly unresolved, “recording an estranging voice-over to a film we have already

seen.”

Standing against the backdrop of a massive Linga, there is the woman who claims

with shocking confidence that Akka was born in her family, that it says so in the puranas.

Further, she claims, “ I have read all the stories so I know everything.” She then

imperiously condenses all the stories into one smooth sentence: “Ascetic feelings came to

48 her so she refused to marry.” Other women interviewed at the same site, the crossroads of

Udugani and Tadugani villages that marks Akka’s birthplace, make less proprietary claims on her. Many of them are asked, “Can you be like her today?” While most interviewees shake their heads, one young woman hands over her child to her husband, remains alone in the frame, to answer: “At least I can try to write poetry like her.” Vijaya

Dabbe, who aspires to write like Akka too but who is filmed in her own study rather than against a temple, expands on Kannada women poets’ relationship with Akka:

It was in the eighties that Kannada women poets started writing prolifically. Their poetry shows that deep in their hearts, they have an image of Akka. They speak to her, question her. Mentally, we have been growing with her. Earlier her influence was confined to her work. Conversation with her and her vachanas began only when women started writing. Till then she was merely a wise vachana poet and contemporary of Basavanna. With us she became a mentor who knew all we wanted to know, who knew feminism better than us. That’s the kind of figure she came to be for us.

Another poet, also acknowledging that a deeply personal connection with Akka has inspired her, sketches a less monotone view of Akka: “If we study the context in which she existed, all that she went through, we appreciate her. As a child I was completely in awe of her. I felt she was right. But now I ask, ‘Akka, why this path? Why didn’t you stay on in this life, in this world?’”

Akka is literally translated to mean sister. In addressing the twelfth century mystic as Akka, all these different women are avowing a family connection with her. Mostly, this is in the sense that they feel their lives to be profoundly stirred by hers. Some write, some paint, some simply sing Akka’s vachanas, and others seek her blessings in a temple. Many, themselves inextricably mired in domesticity, regard Akka’s life with awe.

It is only in the exceptional case, like that of the woman that I first quote in the previous paragraph, that someone claims a family connection with Akka literally. The

juxtaposition of the secular and religious sites at which these disparate devotees are filmed highlights their diversity. Women who admire Akka’s spiritual power do not necessarily recognize her social rebellion, let alone follow the said path themselves. They might feel a special affection for Akka (who is, after all, the village deity, for many of them), but they offer her flowers, incense and obeisance much as they would to any of the

Hindu pantheon. On the other hand, women who do idolize their icon’s triumph over social restrictions do not necessarily appreciate her mystic bent. They ask, as one of the poets quoted above does, “Why didn’t you stay on this life, in this world?” In presenting both the spiritual and secular positions with equal respect, foregrounding that they occupy a shared epistemological space, Scribbles on Akka does not so much erase the

differences between them as put them in dialogue with each other. If the film had adopted a partisan stance on the community of women relating to Akka, it would have played straight into the hands of the Right, which never misses an opportunity to expose the inability of the intellectual class to appreciate religious values. Indeed, the charge has been apposite on too many occasions, and has left the progressive bloc sidelined in both government and civic domains through the nineties. But this marginalization has not been the worst effect of the contempt the Left has sometimes shown for religion.

When the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata were serialized on national television just before the satellite explosion, the Hindu nationalists immediately hijacked their

popularity by calling for a recreation of an epic ethos in the contemporary polity.

Meanwhile, as 200 million viewers across India tuned in to watch this Hindu

mythological, the Left was simply flummoxed by this sign of a resurgent Hindu identity.

It failed to mount an effective challenge to the discursive mechanisms by which the

Hindutva brigade energetically conflated religious mythology and national history, forged together a strong theocentric model of citizenship, and commandeered the nineties.

Because the progressive critics mostly read the mythologicals as reactionary and regressive, their audience constituency was alienated and surrendered to the Right. The

Left should have forcefully contested the cultural and political signification of the mythologicals, and consistently recognized that it was already contested. I will illustrate this with a brief discussion of a scene that vividly resonates with Scribbles on Akka: the

vastraharan or disrobing in the Mahabharata.

Duryodhana wins Draupadi in a game of dice, played between the eldest of the

Pandava (depicted as good) and the Kaurava (depicted as evil) brothers. Duryodhana is the Kaurava prince, and Draupadi has a polyandrous marriage with all the five Pandava brothers. The game is played in the court, and is symbolically supported by the king, the queen, the guru, the elders, the courtiers and the clan who witness it. In the tradition of lecherous villains to which Bollywood often pays homage, the Kauravas ask Draupadi to disrobe, and start pulling at her sari when she protests. But god Krishna himself intervenes, and the length of the sari becomes miraculously endless. No amount of

pulling will now make it unveil Draupadi’s body. Obviously the responses of many

interviewees in Scribbles on Akka resonate with this moment of divine intervention. As mentioned earlier, when they are asked if Akka walked naked, one protests: “No, god covers her body with hair, protects her dignity,” and another says: “Suddenly she grew a heap of hair.” My narrative summary does not do justice to the high melodrama and structural histrionics of the vastraharan episode, but I will emphasize that Draupadi’s sweating protests and trembling body are shot voyeuristically.

Now, in terms of a conventionally progressive reading, we can do naught but

despair that when this episode was telecast television viewership hit record-breaking

heights. Certainly, the mass-media spectacle bringing Draupadi within the limelight

engenders an abjected image of Hindu womanhood and conflates it with Indian

womanhood. But there is also the fact that the television version of the Mahabharata

places Draupadi squarely in the center of action. It is going to be her call for revenge that

will lead to the epic war. More importantly, not all viewers receive the text in vein with

Hindu nationalism. In this context, Purnima Mankekar’s ethnographic findings about the

Mahabharata viewers are extremely pertinent:

Nationalism attempts to create unified subject positions. But the semiotic excess surrounding the figure of Draupadi as she was disrobed in front of her family, the range of emotions and memories sparked by her predicament, enabled the Hindu viewers I describe here to confront and theorize their own vulnerabilities as women. I want to close by recalling Uma’s horror that sexual violence towards women is not a “modern” phenomenon but was inflicted on women even in what Hindu revivalists call “the glorious Hindu past.” Similarly, let us remember Sushmita’s eloquent description of the difference between idealizations of womanhood in orthodox Hindu ideology and what she called the “reality of women’s lives.” (256)

Even Mankekar, however, explicitly directs her address, her euphoria over discovering women constructing counternarratives, towards secular feminists. Madhusree Dutta, as invested as Mankekar in critiquing the rising Hindu chauvinism, resists explicitly narrowing her address.

The counterpart to the drama of the televised mythologicals in Scribbles on Akka is provided by a jatra (traveling folk theatre) performance. The camera follows the bullock cart going down a muddy village street. It carries blaring loudspeakers and a poster depicting Akka in the iconography of religious calendar art. Other processions, one with men dancing vigorously and another with women singing Akka’s vachanas, are

edited in next. And then we have images of the evening performance, in the dramatic

traditions of the Ramlilas that are still locally produced and enacted in various towns and

villages across India to celebrate the victory of Rama in Ramayana. As King Kausika pulls of Akka’s sari only to unveil her abundant (nylon) tresses, the camera closes-up on faces that are deeply involved in the spectacle they are watching, and moved to tears by it. In a shot that soon follows, we are not looking at the live performance anymore but at its video projection on a giant screen. Once again, it is a packed house. Before the sentiment becomes cloying, a disruptive note is struck. But it is not an authoritative secular voice-over that inserts the dissonance into the montage of popular religious feeling, but a devoted doyen. She shakes her head desolately and rues, “my mother, they have turned you into a puppet.” The dissonance emerges from within the religious community, a “distortion within the very structure of the narrative.” Undoubtedly there is the “intervention of the filmmaker,” but her choices divert the enervating confrontation of religious woman and secular feminist.

There are of course moments when Dutta’s statement, “it is not my way of respecting Akka, but I respect theirs,” finds a tense counterpoint in her film. But the tension is constructive and dialogic. For example, it is on an initially ironical note that we visit the premises of the Akka Mahadevi Society, which produces chutney and podi

(South Indian spice mixture) by traditional means, by hands, without machines, sending these products to America too. Here is an enterprise that markets women's traditional labor, deploys traditional labor-intensive technology, and yet imagines itself commemorating a woman whose inspirational value derives from her revolutionary spirit.

A puzzled voice from behind the camera says, “Akka turned her back on home and

palace but here in her name all of you…” After this voice fades away, the screen fills

with the bright colors and frenetic activity of this puzzling enterprise, and then the audience is rudely jolted out of the ironical distance into which it might have retreated

and which is now marked as patronizingly elitist. A podi maker, her narration interspersed with hearty laughter and poignant sobriety, rebukes us:

I wouldn’t have these problems if I could be like Akka. I wouldn’t have any worldly cares. But I got into it neck deep after tying this around my neck. [Here she gestures to her tali, or ornamental signifier of the married state that is worn around the neck.] If one thing is available, one thing isn’t. Only worries…no money. Now rice is 16 rupees. If I could leave it all like Akka, I could be at peace, just meditating. But if all the shivsharanees followed Akka’s example who would do all the chores?

Akka excites us and inspires us because, in the face of hostility and

marginalization, she won herself a space in the spiritual terrain that upper-caste men had

claimed as their exclusive privilege, and because, as Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai say,

“she radically transformed the institution of marriage by claiming to be married to God”

(63). But Scribbles on Akka is performing a genealogy rather than a hagiography. Its

dedication “to all the poets buried under sainthood” is a salutary reminder of the fact that this film neither makes a totalitarian argument for Akka’s iconoclasm, nor offers an easy classification of her followers into radical and reactionary categories. The progressivist historicity that relies on fixed points to name standards consistent with those distinguishing parasitic from legitimate use, and intention from accident is here resisted.

Precisely in this vein, I quote Foucault once more: “There is no single locus of great

Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellion and pure law of the revolutionary” (95-

96). Instead there is a heterogeneous community of women “creating small places, making small transgressions, initiating minor revolts.” And the podi maker’s dramatic challenge to Akka – “if all the shivsharanees followed Akka’s example who would do all

54 the chores?” – explosively speaks for triumphant survival in contexts where the tyranny of normative domesticity continues to operate a banal regime. The podi maker, like Akka and Dutta, also appears as Diva citizen, who as Berlant says, “stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have privilege.”

There is, however, a caveat to the transformation that the performative speech act effect in the public sphere. Berlant cautions:

The centrality of publicity to Diva Citizenship cannot be underestimated, for it tends to emerge in moments of such extraordinary political paralysis that acts of language can feel like explosives that shake the ground of collective existence. Yet in remaking the scene of public life into a spectacle of subjectivity, it can lead to a confusion of willful and memorable rhetorical performance with sustained social change itself. (223)

The sheer scale of the structural and cultural changes taking place in contemporary India does sometimes appear to affect a political paralysis. So when Dutta puts an anti- dominant genealogy on the screen or when the podi-maker publicly links inflation with inescapable domestic labor, their acts of language do feel like they will explode a new collective reality into being. However, despite the rhetorical power of Angela de

Folgnio’s utterances, it was another 400 years before monastic orders for women were set up within Christianity. Despite the foundational role that women like Fatimah and Rabi’a al-Adawiyya played in the development of the mystical aspects of Islam, it is mostly the male masters that have visibility in the Sufi circles today. And Akka’s utterances could not foreclose the Brahminical order from relapsing into traditional caste hierarchies. As

Vijaya Ramaswamy, whose name we can read as the research credits roll at the end of

Dutta’s film, points out, “whatever individual challenge women like Akka may have offered to discriminations present in the societal structure was structurally met through the regrouping of orthodox patriarchic forces which eventually incorporated within them

these extremely powerful but lonely dissenting voices” (Walking 192). Therefore, it would be foolhardy indeed to confuse “willful and memorable rhetorical performance with sustained social change itself.” But insofar as social change accrues through a decentered process, insofar as monastic orders for women were eventually set up within

Christianity, insofar as Sufism remains that rare Islamic movement in which women sometimes pray together with men and sometimes have the possibility of maturing into spiritual leaders, and insofar as modern women continue to find their voice through

Akka’s utterances, we can see how “lonely dissenting” women’s voices bear out a performative promise. Yielding up the craving for a single locus of great Refusal, we can appreciate both how the sensation of “going public” is wielded against injustice by the podi maker as much as it was by Akka herself, and how this sensational excess engenders a continuing change in the public sphere it invades.

In this spirit, Scribbles on Akka sets up figural affiliations between many divas – secular, spiritual, and on celluloid. Many of these are suggested in scenes that involve

Seema Biswas portraying an array of personae, each making one of a swarm of points in a feminist network. For example, she re-presents recognizable snapshots from both

Satyajit Ray’s Charulata (1964) which disrupted the hegemony of nationalist ideology

with an assertion of feminine desire, and Girish Kasarvalli’s Tai Saheb (1997) wherein the female protagonist is memorably filmed as reading a forbidden text after her feudal household fell asleep. As a shankaracharya genteelly compares the ascetic Akka to the

Phoolan Devi, the audience is reminded that Biswas also played the latter in Shekhar

Kapur's Bandit Queen (1994). The evocative link between different filmic characters’

confrontations with the insouciant sentencing authority of the patriarchal order in turn

challenges the attempts of the institutional machinery to wrest discursive and extra-

discursive control over the events in which a woman flouts convention.

Evocatively, it is the voice of a peasant that discusses the deployment of state

technology to institutionalize and incorporate within itself the work of Akka. Pointing to

the temple land, he says:

This was all forest. Raghavenra Rao the shanbag was from here. Among us was a Muslim Ghous Saab, who acquired the fort from him through a land deal. Finally the government had the idea of giving him nine acres near Shikaripura in exchange for this property. Then the government made this what it is today – this much I know. They have dug things up, statues of Akka, and so on. There is a statue in the village too. Also a shrine was built and a new statue installed by the government and the association.

The farmer is one of the few men interviewed in this film. In contrast to the

shakaracharya of the well-fed and saffron mien, he looks like Gandhi used to: thin, frail,

clad in a much-washed pale fabric, deeply wrinkled and tanned. It has been much

celebrated that a poor postcolonial nation was able to quickly achieve food self-

sufficiency despite its horrible overpopulation problem, but a sweeping land reform

program was never put in place, and the feudal order remains entrenched in many

villages. Through the nineties, the combination of the central government’s enforcement

of trade liberalization and its failure to provide compensatory relief mechanisms has

taken a heavy toll on the agricultural communities. Conditions of economic dislocation

often contribute to the crisis of identity that generates fundamentalist responses, but

paradoxically it was the rural demographic that played an important role in overthrowing the Hindu-identified administration in the 2004 election.7 But it is impossible to predict

7 Jigna Desai is one among many who has pointed out that, although BJP and its affiliates appear “ambivalent about globalization’s impact on India, they have been quite active in the liberalization of the Indian economy and [the] wooing of nonresident Indian investment” (184). But the spectacular failure of

what will happen if the current government does not address the needs of the masses who

live in the villages of India either.

Through the turn of the century, religion remained the central government’s main

electoral preoccupation. Whether it was the conflict with Pakistan or the controversy in

Ayodhya or the school curricula, it was to the “popular” demand of the devout Hindu that

the government ascribed its convoluted position on “setting right the wrongs of history.”

But it is a devout Hindu who, in the statement quoted above, by analogy, exposes the

deceptive nature of the grand Hindu quest. The Babri Masjid was destroyed to install a new statue and build a new shrine, and the mythmakers “dug things up” to provide their actions with legitimacy. They discovered that Muslim invaders had destroyed a temple at the site of the Babri Masjid and that, more wondrously, god Rama himself had been born at this site. What the peasant interviewee is pointing to, however, is that when the feudal and state mechanisms that machinate the construction of most shrines make their decisions, they do it in their own interests. When the state invokes god, or builds a shrine, it is slyly consolidating its authority rather than “giving the people what they want.” But the “people” that Biswas plays, like the anonymous woman whose journey across a crowded Bombay opens and closes the film, do not need another shrine. They do not need the state to give them their god.

Dutta does not film Biswas playing Akka herself. We see Akka's profile by way of both calender art and high art; we watch jatra actresses play Akka on the stage; we hear different voices sing and speak Akka's vachanas; we watch a young man enact

the “Shining India” advertising that formed the lynchpin of their 2004 election campaign indicates how many citizens came to see through the Hindutva version of splitting the material from the spiritual.

Akka's agony in modern dance. But Scribbles on Akka withholds a significant realist concession: nobody in it is Akka. And this cinematic choice helps achieve the feminist

genealogy that presupposes a continual displacement of Akka. So an amazingly disparate

cluster of women – upper class women and lower class women, painters and writers,

actors and musicians, housewives and professionals, women from rural and metropolitan

communities – experience and express kin-feelings for Akka on an equal basis. Dutta's

film becomes the performance of kinship without paying the cost of erasing difference.

This strategy is in marked contrast to that of the Right, which deploys iconography to

demand homogeneity across various regimes – of gender, religion, language, caste and

nation.

All these regimes deploy fear as a strategy of control whose gendered implications

Dutta scrutinized in an earlier film called Memories of Fear. In the first episode, a group of girls are traveling in a train. They are singing film songs, playing antakshri, teasing each other, speculating about their teacher’s love life. And then it is morning, one of them lift up the shutter, calls out for tea. And something shatters. A man standing on the platform grips the wrist of the girl calling for tea. On film, the moment feels stretched out, on and on, out-of-time. It is significant, and becomes etched in audience memory.

But the act of narration is also an act of determinedly manifest counter-memory. The everyday harassment that women face while using public transport does not fill the pages of blockbusters, of either the print or the cinematic variety. In fact the event that daily takes place in public space paradoxically has the aura of the secret. The most banal aspect of this secret is that the woman who experiences the assault feels silenced by it, browbeaten into feeling an indefinable shame in the female body that she inhabits. And it

takes an actively feminist gaze such as Dutta's to bring the secret into the public space in

a fuller sense, in the sense that the feminist image incites discussion of the event and,

most significantly for the subject who shares her story with the filmmaker, facilitates a

disengagement from the humiliated inhabiting of the female body. The work of

reclaiming one’s body in a celebratory way is of course not easily accomplished, not

merely by the act of testimony. Yet the testimonial, the speaking up and speaking out can

become the concerted moment in the journey towards self-avowal, to borrow Foucault’s

words, “effecting regroupings, furrowing across individuals themselves” (96). Akka’s

testimony is with us through her vachanas. Maybe not many women sing these as fearless ascetics, and instead hum them with quotidian restraint. But in “flashing up and startling the public,” one woman empowers another, “creating small places, making small transgressions, initiating minor revolts” together.

In Pakistan, a woman danseuse Sheema Kermani, who defies the national ban on dance that extends across television and stage, links the prevalence of violence against women in her society with the development of a cultural class that heavily polices morality on religious grounds. Her classical ballet “The Song of Mohenjodaro” illustrates somewhat like Dutta’s film that the South Asian heritage is far more diverse than the conservative leaders would have us believe. In Anand Patwardhan’s documentary War

and Peace and in which we see her performing at the Karachi peace conference, she

analyzes the growing violence around her: “Maybe it is because in the last fifty years

there has been a policy to keep people away from any kind of cultural or creative

expression. There is no auditorium or cultural complex even in such a big city. So people

have nowhere to go to express themselves.” As she gives her testimony, we seem images

of her cluttered city wherein even the passenger buses and the cartage haulers are overwritten with signs of people’s desire to express themselves. Kermani goes on to say that the state is afraid of female actors and dancers because when a woman stands up on stage, she can become a statement against society’s discriminatory norms. This statement can touch people, transform them, and it is the threat of this transformation that the proscriptions against activities condemned for being un-Islamic or for encouraging immorality among women seek to control.

Much as Dutta’s film reminds us of the feminist inheritance of Bhakti, Kermani underlines that the Sufi tradition recognizes both men and women as equals on the spiritual path, and women continue to be integrated with men in some Sufi circles even today. That the denouement of Deepa Mehta’s Fire is staged at the shrine of the Sufi saint

Hazrat Nizamuddin both gestures towards Sufism’s deference towards gender reform and points towards how strongly this egalitarian Islamic movement continues to find disciples even among the Hindus. Further, Hindi itself “was almost certainly first fashioned into a vehicle for vernacular literature” by Sufi poets (Pollock 31). And Nizamuddin’s disciple

Amir Khusro is credited with first songs composed in Urdu (Gupta 146). Today, Sufi- influenced artists like Nusrut Fateh Ali Khan and Junoon are both successful across

South Asian national borders and critical of the fundamentalist strains of religious practice. Clearly mystic music has a continuing record of enriching and reforming culture.

CHAPTER 3 THE POLITICS OF QUEER VISIBILITY IN BOLLYWOOD: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

“Is there really a gay Bombay?” “That’s like asking the question, does it rain in the monsoon.” (Exchange on the titular TV show in Dev Benegal’s Split Wide Open.)

In his introduction to Out Takes, an important collection of essays relating queer

theory to cinema, Ellis Hanson deconstructs the question, “How do I see myself if I am

invisible (6)?” Hanson offers his analysis in the context of the Hollywood cinematic tradition that has stereotyped queer sexuality as “inherently perverse and monstrous,” and the lesbian and gay theory that has sought to alienate spectators from the fetishism and voyeurism of this heterocentric cinema (2). But queer invisibility in Indian cinema has been of a far greater degree. Except for hijras, who are generally castrated males burlesquing female behavior (Nanda 544,546), historically there have been no explicitly homosexual characters in mainstream Indian cinema. As such, even “inherently perverse and monstrous” depictions of gay and lesbian lives have been non-existent. In the nineties, films such as Deepa Mehta’s Fire and Kaizad Gustad's Bombay Boys break through the barriers of conventional representation and make homosexual relationships explicitly visible. There are also what Thomas Waugh calls the new sexual marginality

films, such as Dev Benegal’s Split Wide Open, which self-consciously bring various

“deviant” modalities of sex and gender imbricated in the Indian society to the screens.

While these recent films have been braving the commercial waters with Bollywood audiences, gay and lesbian critics have been re-viewing the heterocentric cinematic archive with a queer gaze. And, in the Indian political arena, the movement for gay and

61 62

lesbian rights has been gaining momentum. It is in the context of these developments that

my chapter maps the trajectory of invisibility to visibility of queer identity in the

Bollywood terrain.

The first gay Indian newsletter Bombay Dost was launched in April 1990. Within a year, this magazine had “transformed into a movement,” and its office was flooded with letters. Conceptualized as a gay forum, it has provided a space of support and expression to lesbians too. Amita, for instance, recalls that the male readers of the newsletter

“obliged us by introducing their lesbian friends and sisters to us through the magazine”

(352). For the purposes of this chapter, it is significant that Bollywood continually crops

up in the pages of Bombay Dost. While some articles focus on the homophobic aspects of specific films, others nostalgically recount the authors’ experiences as spectators who read heteronormative films “against the grain.” The latest releases are scrutinized with a queer gaze, and there is speculative gossip about the personal lives of film personalities who are “allegedly” gay. When Fire was released in the Indian theatres in 1998, its content and contentious reception ensured that the discussion of Bollywood and alternative sexualities made it to the mainstream media as well. In the following year,

Penguin India brought out two pioneering anthologies, Ashwini Suthankar’s Facing the

Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India and Hoshang Merchant’s Yaraana: Gay Writing from

India. Combining autobiographical, journalistic, historical and fictional accounts of

homosexual subjectivity, these anthologies, like Bombay Dost, testify both to the

alienation that queer subjects experience in relation to mainstream representations and to the strategic identifications they perform with the Bollywood films from which they are excluded at a representative level.

I argue that the work of agents such as Mehta and Gustad marks an epistemic

break in the processes of production and consumption practiced in Bollywood’s market,

and I will place this break at the site of what they make available for our gaze. Till the

moment they step into the arena, of course we had available for our gaze the

homoeroticism encoded in Hindi cinema, of course it was possible for us to look at all the

images which threatened heteronormative coherence, and of course we could identify that

the construction of heterosexuality worked through and against the specter of

homosexuality. But the audiences that Bombay Dost, Facing the Mirror and Yaraana, for example, allow us to infer, the expression of alienation and desires by these marginalized audiences, support the politics of representation which brings me to celebrate the foregrounding of so far marginalized sexualities on the screen.

Lola Young has pointed out that although “authentic” or “real” black

“subjectivities only exist in the realms of mythology, outside of the confines of academia and abstract intellectual debates, anecdotal evidence suggests that many black people still crave positive images of themselves and are disappointed with white and black filmmakers who do not accommodate such ideas” (36-36). In a similar vein, I am building on the “evidence” which suggests that gay and lesbian audiences crave positive images of themselves on the Bollywood screens. In deconstructing this model of film criticism,

Hanson disparages its devolution “into movie-star interviews that let us know which actors are out of the closet, and brief film reviews that help us to locate ‘positive’ and

‘liberating’ images of gay people” (6). He welcomes the “promising backlash against this preoccupation with ‘positive images,’” and champions a critical perspective “beyond political agitation,” whose value “can be judged by the quality of the thinking it produces

and the quality of the art it inspires” (ibid.) This dissertation, however, does not consider

political agitation as a determining factor of value only in the “last instance.” The material reality, to take an illustrative example, is that movie stars refuse to step out of the closet, as much in Hollywood as in Bollywood, and images can have a politically liberating role in changing this reality.

To claim that Deepa Mehta’s film generated more public debate about queer identity than all the scholarly theorization put together is inadequate to the complexity of

the engagement between theory and activism, image-making and social reality. But it is

important to appreciate the value of oppositional representations such as Fire in which woman is both the subject and object of desire. Valorizing the dissident image, I do not find the quality of thought and the quality of art wanting in Vito Russo’s work. I would, in fact, argue the necessity of writing a Bollywood version of The Celluloid Closet, of

bringing to light lives hidden from history, of queering the history of our film industry.

Gustad and Mehta’s choices, and the interpolative framework – one that cites and

transgresses the formal heritage of Bollywood – in which they position themselves and

their texts, impel us to re-explore the iconographic condensation of images which flourish

in our cultural imaginary, to make the “annotated list of films that contain characters

whose behaviors might conceivably be called queer,” to make a typology of the

exclusions imposed on the visual vocabulary, and to find the filmmakers and

representations and readings and spectatorships out of the closet. Queer Bollywood

Studies practices research in these distinct directions.

I accept that increasing visibility does not represent the surcease of difficulties for all stigmatized lives. As Suthankar says, it’s asked: “In all this talk of breaking the

65 silence, what will happen to the women who walk hand-in-hand on the street? What about the women who live with each other quietly, without being interrogated by anyone”

(xvii-xviii)? But it’s also been said: “So many experiences feel like firsts, because all the women who have gone through them before have left no record behind” (xvii). What filmmakers like Mehta and Gustad do is leave a record behind, so that someone somewhere will not, to borrow the words of Flora B., walk “along the edge of a cliff without a map” (cited in Suthankar xvii). That the map is inscribed upon by signature images newly visible on Bollywood’s formula terrain, that the map is perched on a cliff, and that it yet becomes available in the mainstream theaters and achieves popular success is what I am celebrating in this chapter.

Queer Takes on “Straight” Screenings

When D.G. Phalke made what is generally accepted as the first Indian film Raja

Harishchandra in 1913, he couldn’t persuade any women to perform the female role. He ended up casting “a delicate-looking male” as Harischandra’s wife (Joshi 16). Imagining the complicity of the filmmakers and the audiences in the perpetuation of the “gender gag”, and marshalling the concept of camp, one can argue that the very beginnings of our cinema are non-heteronormative. This is, however, a quintessentially “post-theory” position. After all, for almost eight decades, the queer ramifications of Phalke’s mythological dramaturgy have not been addressed by film criticism. The cross-dressing found in Phalke’s films has been normalized as a continuation of “the traditional Indian stage practice of male actors performing the female parts” (Sklar 79), which is comparable to similar practices in Kabuki, Elizabethan and other dramaturgies. Similarly, various chartbusting songs have featured the macho protagonist cross-dressing in a sari or a skirt, but the intersection of these performances with a queer vector had not received

much critical attention till the nineties. One of the first accomplishments of queer theoretical contribution to the Bollywood scholarship has been to bring the relationship of queer desire and straight screens into the limelight.

R. Raj Rao, for instance, uses the star study model to re-interpret the superstar par excellence Amitabh Bachchan, whose reign dates back to the 70s and who continues to be a dominant presence in our popular culture. In a poll recently conducted by BBC

News on the internet, he was voted the greatest star of the millennium while Cary Grant stood third, Marilyn Monroe seventh, and Sir Lawrence Olivier tenth (Rao 300). This poll

result gives us, if nothing else, a measure of the superstar’s popularity in various parts of

the world. Rao systematically decodes the homoeroticism in the various songs that

Bachchan sang on-screen with his male co-stars. For instance, there is the song that

Bachchan and Shatrughan Sinha’s characters perform for each other in Ramesh Sippy’s

Dostana (1980): “If one asks us where we live/ we tell them/ we live in each other’s hearts. / That is the only address we have” (cited in Rao 302). Once it has been pointed out, the homeroticism is obvious. But since the discussion of the film has had insistently

heterosexist epistemelogical horizons for nearly two decades, even “obviousness” has a

powerful political force. Writers like Rao, Ashok Row Kavi and Gayatri Gopinath are not

so much identifying homosexual characters on Bollywood screens as pointing out how

alternative sexualities and desires are encoded in the straight narratives. Rao also makes

the important point that queer desires engendered “in the dark of the movie hall” are

neither an anomaly in Indian culture nor necessarily a sign of consciously gay identity.

He writes,

Take a look at the audience as the movie is showing (as I have frequently done), and you are likely to find men all over each other, clasping hands, putting arms

around shoulders and waists, even a leg on a leg. . . . After all, same sex closeness exists in every walk of Indian life, especially among the lower-middle classes: in bedrooms and public transport, on the street. . . . What conspires to give this a sexual connotation is that social mores in India do not permit men and women to be demonstrative until marriage, and even then never in public places. (303)

It is actually a commonplace among foreign travelers – traditionally in their writings and lately in the programs that air on, for instance, the Discovery Channel – to remark on the same-sex demonstrations of affection in India. But Rao is pointing out that the cultural acceptance of homosociality does not translate into an acceptance of alternative sexualities, which continue to exist outside the category of “normal.” So that it is also a commonplace for gay men to enter arranged marriages and lead “double lives.”

In the face of heteropatriarchy, we can look anew at the centrality of homosociality in our culture and make it a point of pride or locate queer images on our screen and celebrate them. Of course, the latter is the work of queer Bollywood studies, for the most part. When Dharmendra sits astride Bachchan’s shoulders, as their characters sing of a friendship beyond death, as they ride a 350 cc motorcycle in Sippy’s masala western Sholay (1975), the two macho superstars provide queer audiences with an

occasion to “see” a homosexual relationship. This moment of seeing, and the elaborate

fantasy structure it might engender or support, is of no insignificant import. However,

surely the more persuasively and dedicatedly we identify and list the homoerotic images

and themes that are an under-recognized part of our cinematic legacy, the more the

absolute absence of explicitly homosexual representations registers with us, disturbs us.

To speak of an absolute historical absence of homosexual representations in

Bollywood is to exaggerate, slightly. There is the “infamous” kiss that Hema Malini and

Parveen Babi, playing a Mughal princess and her maidservant, shared in Kamal Amrohi’s

epic masterpiece Razia Sultan (1983). There is the character of the hijra, who repeatedly

emerges to provide comic relief and occasionally turn villainous. There is the recurrent

“effeminate male,” who makes one of his many appearances in Sholay, as Bachchan and

Dharmendra’s sidekick in prison. In Ketan Mehta’s Holi (1983), in the setting of a boy’s school, there is an explicitly gay character, but he is bashed up and driven to suicide. In

Jabbar Patel’s Subah (1981), in the setting of a women’s reformatory, two characters are explicitly lesbian, but identified as pathological and punished. So all the contenders to our brief list of homosexual representations are marginal characters, either comic or pitiable or pathological.1 Off screen, the sexual lives of the many gay men and women in

Bollywood are a well-kept secret. When the media infringes on this secrecy, it is careful about doing this under the guise of speculation. Even this speculation is heavily policed.

For instance, Kavi reports that when pictures of Rekha (who was popularly paired with

Bachchan through the eighties) and her private secretary Farhah appeared in the film monthly Cine Blitz, supporting the gossip about a lesbian affair between them, the

magazine was sued for 60 million rupees (311). Around a decade after the incident, Kavi

himself was reportedly beaten up by Saif Ali Khan when the activist “suggested that the

song Saif sang with co-hero Akshay Kumar in the film Main Khiladi Tu Anari (‘We two, we are different’) revealed that they were doing more than just acting” (Rao 306).

1 Gopinath suggests that narratives which “explicitly name female same-sex desire as ‘lesbian’ may be less interesting than those moments within the narrative that represent female homsociality in the absence of ‘lesbians’” (“Queering” 289). Her privileging of implicit (over explicit) encodings derives from an investment in formulating a distinctive model of “a queer South Asian femininity, where gender conformity and indeed hyper-femininity do not necessarily imply heterosexuality” (289). I am indebted to Gopinath for her documentation of assorted representations of alternative sexuality in popular Hindi cinema, but remain uncomfortable with the impulse to set up a sweeping taxonomical category that is traceable to her investment in diasporic positionality as a superior site for critiquing essentialist concepts (“Local/Global” 150). Such an investment has to be of course studied in the context of those responses within the lesbian movement, wherein, Mehta was attacked for fabricating “the conflicts and bridgings and transformations in Indian society . . . for a Western audience” (Datta 22).

Waugh points out that Kumar, on the other hand, interviewed with Bombay Dost, acknowledged and welcomed his gay fans, and the magazine ran “a beef-cake pic of him in a towel alongside” (291). Further, while the film deflects “inappropriate” inferences at

the plot level, the choreography of the male-male dance duets that would be “absolutely

inconceivable within Hollywood culture since at least the early fifties male duets of Fred

Astaire and Gene Kelly . . . is a surrogate for courtship” (ibid.). Waugh persuasively

analyzes one sequence:

Akshay lifts Saif at the hips and carries him down the chorus line toward the camera; later the supine Saif, seen laterally, thrusts his groin upwardly toward the center of the frame, while Akshay, standing above him, is making similar pelvic thrusts toward the camera, so that the low angle perspective of the frame brings their thrusts together. . . . They literally can’t keep their hands off each other: Akshay puts his tie on Saif, slaps his ass, even seems to touch his groin. (291)

In her analysis of Satyen Bose’s Dosti (1964) and Mahesh Bhatt’s Tamanna (1997), Ruth

Vanita makes similar points, that while the films “hedge their bets” at the plot level, the songs have queer significations. Specifically, “since romantic tropes used in song or poetic speech are the primary signifiers of eroticism in cross-sex relationships, the use of the same tropes in same-sex relationships [between the male protagonists] eroticizes them too” (147).

Nonetheless, insofar as even Waugh and Vanita have to grant that the films they discuss diegetically deflect homosexual implications, we have to admit that while Indian cinema has undergone tremendous and tumultuous transformations through the twentieth century, and while audiences have identified with the icons of their day during every phase of transformation, our iconic heroes and heroines have remained insistently marked as heterosexual. In the absence of images reflecting their identity, gays and lesbians’ individual equations with heteronormative cinema and the cultural conventions encoded

in it have evolved in a complex and diverse manner. Until the development of a rigorous

ethnography of queer viewing, we can take some measure of this complexity and

diversity in the “evidence” that an autobiographical anthology such as Facing the Mirror makes available.

In Facing the Mirror, some narratives show women relating to female stars in

terms of desire and identification, while others show them identifying with male stars,

both iconic heroes and villains. Veronica, who titles her account “Hero,” provides

interesting and illuminating evidence. She traces the origin of her sexual orientation back

to her childhood. She liked to play with boys and wear jeans, and hated her long hair so

much that she just took scissors to it one day. When she was made to stand in a corner

all day as a punishment, Veronica says she did the following: “I kept sneaking off to the

mirror and admiring myself, flicking my hair back with my hand like a filmi hero (3).”

She also mentions acting scenes from movies and “playing goonda, a total villain” (4).

When Veronica first falls in love, it is with Sandra who reminds her of Zeenat Aman, the

film star who gained instant fame on appearing in the allegedly sexploitative movie

Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978). Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman provide the following reading of the film:

Aman, a former pin-up girl and advertising model, is presented as a sex object embodying the ‘modernity’ contemporary India has to come to terms with (resulting in censorship problems). In the process, the representation of what has been lost, ‘tradition,’ also becomes ‘corrupted,’ as can be seen from the glitzy temple architecture in the opening ‘bhajan’ (devotional story) … in which ejaculating symbols are inflated to gigantic dimensions. (439)

In other words, Aman’s character emblematizes the perceived onslaught of the

‘degenerative Western culture.” The moralistic binary of tradition and modernity is actually built into the surface of her face, the one side conventionally beautiful and

unmarred, the other scarred by fire. She shares several kisses with her male co-star Shashi

Kapoor, and these, specifically, raised a maelstrom. Here, Rao’s comments are again

illuminating: “Social mores in India do not permit men and women to be demonstrative

until marriage, and even then never in public places” (303). Rao can be called to task for the sweeping universalism of his statement, but it was clearly in relation to this sentiment that the depiction of sexuality in Satyam Shivam Sundaram became controversial.

The “innocence” that Veronica recalls of her childhood is befitting of the

“Puritanism” of a social context in which even heterosexual kisses acquire notoriety

when performed in public: “I never went beyond hugging and kissing in school. I

couldn’t even really imagine what could come beyond that” (8). Lack of cultural

knowledge about lesbian sex and relationships contributes incrementally to her

“innocence.” But the vocabulary of Bollywood – everything ranging from its

melodramatic lyrics to its rituals of wooing – helps Veronica fashion an alternative sexual

identity in contradistinction from the social imperative. Years later, it is in the film

magazine Stardust that Veronica finds a picture of her school sweetheart Sandra – “she

had won a beauty contest and was being crowned by a film star” (6). Interestingly, when

the teenaged Sandra is separated from Veronica, the proscription becomes the occasion

for transgression – Veronica’s first kiss and the discovery that another school friend

Shikha is “like her.” To provide Veronica with a farewell gift for Sandra, Shikha actually

steals from her own sister’s dowry!

Veronica is not alone in articulating appropriation of the heterosexual erotics encoded in films like Satyam Shivam Sundaram for living life in a homosexual space.

Many narrators in Facing the Mirror follow the general pattern available in Veronica’s

account to explain their first sexual experience or crush in terms of identification with the

male stars wooing the female icons. In “Buffaloes and Men’s Cologne,” Shikha also amalgamates the themes of Bollywood and sexual awakening: “I saw a Hindi movie that was playing nearby at least a dozen times so that I could enjoy the romantic songs and dialogues, imagining the nurse [who gave checkups to the family] as my lover” (29).

Shikha’s first sexual encounter is with a cousin, described in filmi terms: “She was very attractive, a better version of the actress Zeenat Aman “ (29). If it is the all-girls school that provides Veronica the homosocial site for expressing homosexual desire, Shikha finds a similar space within the family itself. One of the scenes depicting exchange of desire in Shikha’s narrative features a “famous” Radha-Krishna temple. Shikha and her cousin are walking past it after watching videos at a neighbor’s place when the latter asks, “Are you scared of the dark” (29)? Then she tightly grips Shikha’s hand, rendering

Shikha “ecstatic,” releasing Shikha’s hand only when the cousins draw near their parents.

So, as in the film Satyam Shivam Sundaram, “corruption” is placed at the sacred site of

“tradition” – the temple.

This placement connects with the larger project of inscribing queer sexualities in

the master narratives of the past, a project with which Fire was identified and thereafter

attacked. The epic master narratives are the quintessential signifiers of “Indianness” in

the imaginary of majoritarian fundamentalists. Those who perceive lesbianism, for

instance, as a symbol of Western debauchery, a degenerate “modernity” that two decades

ago was placed in the excessively heterosexualized body of Zeenat Aman, were enraged

by the fact that Mehta gave her characters names bearing epic sanctity and situated their

lesbian relationship squarely within the domain of patriarchal domesticity. The

mythological Radha and Sita are important agents in the unfolding of the lives of the

gods Krishna and Rama, around whom the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are structured. Both these goddesses are commonly perceived as epitomes of piety and heteronormativity. Their figuration within the domestic space, common in fiction and folklore, is associated with convention, conformity and the upholding of the patriarchal law.2 So, when we see Radha and Sita making love in Fire, we are witnessing the queering of the epic master narratives.

The Evidence of History

The filmmaker’s effort is complemented by the work of those intellectuals who

are also engaged in reconstruction projects contesting fundamentalist models of the

“ancient Indian heritage.” Shivananda Khan eloquently explains what drives queer

projects to engage with history:

As we, living towards the end of the twentieth century, fight for our rights to be either lesbian or gay, we need to reclaim our historical antecedents, to reconstruct our history, to reinvent the social and philosophical basis that preceded our historical times. If we are to reclaim our own invisible history…then we need to explore our temples, our religious sites, re-read our Sanskrit texts, truly explore out history with open eyes, to go out there and record our history. We must not leave it to the dominant intellectuals to construct our own history for us. (Cited in Shah 485)

This mobilization of “ancient” accounts to trouble and refuse the exclusions of the

dominant narratives is distinguishable from what Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby

call “the intentionally scandalous” fundamentalist drive to employ privileged traditional

2 Protesting this tendency, Rima Banerjee passionately writes: “Of course, the use of historical religious texts as yardsticks of contemporary women’s social positions is limited not only to discussions of Hinduism. The way a dominant interpretation of Koran is taken as a fixed and final commentary on the Muslim woman’s roles is equally disconcerting. To make a comparison with a Western example: does anyone seriously suggest that Western women are subjugated today because of the Bible’s image of Eve? Is the biblical text really the reason why women don’t receive equal pay for equal work, why they are victims of domestic violence, and why they are often deemed biologically fit only to be mothers, not workers” (20).

elements as ideological weapons for the construction of a pure identity group (825-826).

Queer historiography acknowledges the “presentism” of historical construction,

emphasizes the “faults, fissures and heterogeneous layers” in historical narratives, and

recognizes the multiplicity of queer identity claims. It has taken almost a century for the

recognition of homoeroticism on our cinema screens to be recognized and discussed in

public culture. The homoerotic content of literature and history has been similarly under-

recognized. This, in turn, allows an organization like the Shiv Sena to attack Fire as

“alien to Indian culture” (cited in Gopinath, “Local/Global” 150). While this position has

been strongly and effectively challenged, as long as the same–sex relationships in Indian

history remain obscured, such statements as quoted above will continue to claim

authority with impunity.

Exactly at the turn of this millennium, Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai have

brought out a groundbreaking anthology that brings the same-sex components of our

heritage center-stage. The editors’ stated agenda is clear, ambitious and worth quoting at

length:

We hope this book will help assure homerotically inclined Indians that large numbers of their ancestors throughout history and in all parts of the country shared their inclinations and were honored and successful members of society who contributed in major ways to thought, literature, and the general good. These people were not necessarily regarded as inferior in any way nor were they always ashamed of their loves or desires. In many cases they lived happy and fulfilling lives with those they loved. Labels like “abnormal,” “unnatural,” and “unhealthy” are of relatively very recent origin in India. . . . We hope that people who are not homerotically inclined will also profit from this book, by learning to acknowledge that some of their ancestors were so inclined, that their writings and and writings about them constitute an important part of our common Indian heritage as well as world heritage, and that such acknowledgement is crucial to building a more tolerant, better-informed, less conflict-ridden society that is accepting of all its members and encourages all to explore their full potential for life, love, and creativity. (xxiv)

The editors discuss same-sex relationships, sex changes, and the “undoing of gender” in

ancients texts like Bhagvad Gita, Mahabharata and Jataka stories. From the medieval

period, they cull out same-sex materials from both the Sanskritic and the Perso-Urdu

traditions. Their modern Indian selection – reflecting a range of fiction and non-fiction,

national and diasporic subjectivities – includes such gems as Gandhi’s statement placing

homosexual and heterosexual desire on the same plane (216), and a biography of the

revered 19th century mystic Shri Ramakrishna that draws attention to the sage’s intense emotional relations with young men (231). By the time one puts down Same-Sex Love in

India, the reader has been imparted a strong sense not only of the powerful non- heteronormative presence in our literature and history, but also of the rich mixture of religious, linguistic and cultural influences – Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, British,

Persian, Jain, Tamil and so on – that make up the mosaic of our national heritage. In the

conflict-ridden climate to which Vanita and Kidwai refer in their preface, their book lives up to the promise of providing a site encouraging “all to explore their full potential for life, love and creativity” (xxiv). Insofar as Vanita and Kidwai, unlike the Hindutva historians, are not constructing an insistently continuous grand narrative, they do not efface texts and contexts that reflect a discombobulation of the “full potential for life, love and creativity” from their account. For instance, some of the texts to which Vanita and Kidwai draw our attention do represent homosexuality as degenerate and unfulfilling, and others set it up in non-emancipatory contexts.

In an evocative passage from Zia ud Barani’s 14th century Sultanate history, we encounter a boy called Hasan whose gay relationship is ascribed to despotism rather than desire. According to Barani,

He [Hasan] often wanted to put a sword through the Sultan and kill him while he was doing the immoral act or publicly kissing him…. Publicly he offered his body to the Sultan like an immoral and shameless woman. But within himself he was seething with anger and choking on a desire for revenge at the way the Sultan forced himself upon him and took advantage of him. (Cited in Kidwai and Vanita133)

Here, a despot forces Hasan into a gay relationship, which leaves the defenseless boy with a sense of both dishonor and resentment. Hasan identifies his own powerlessness as womanly. Certainly this non-normative sexual encounter is not libratory and shows that

the category of class, here transhistorically applied to antiquity, disrupts democracy

within queer structures no less than in the heteronormative ones. However, accounts

filled with shame do not overwhelm those bursting with desire and self-affirmation in

Kidwai and Vanita’s anthology. Together, the many narratives help reclaim, as Khan says, “our own invisible history” (cited in Shah 485).

Also, as a significant footnote to the broader contestations of the present, Vanita and Kidwai’s anthology repeatedly addresses religious conflicts as they impinge on individual relationships. Fulfilling its promise of helping build a “less conflict-ridden society,” their book frequently quotes occasions on which the individual relationships rise above religious differences. In the following lines, for instance, Shaikh Mahmud bin

Muhammad Pir’s 1662 biographical Persian poem describes how the Sufi mystic Shaikh

Hussayn fell in love with the Brahmin boy Madho:

I know, insisted Hussayn, that my heart’s curse

Is a young infidel, who will raze the house of my faith to the ground.

With the graceful curls of his hair, this bare-chested idol

Has tied up my heart, hung it from the sacred thread on his shoulder.

(Cited in Kidwai and Vanita 146)

The Brahminical thread on Madho’s shoulder gives Hussayn warning against pursuing a

relationship that threatens both Madho and Hussayn with religious pollution. The warning is ignored, and “the house of faith” is arguably reconstituted to accommodate its two “infidels.”

Fire: To see and to desire

The very first sequence of Mehta’s film is shot in a field of yellow flowers that is the prototypical setting of innumerable chartbusters featuring singing and dancing to

represent heteronormative coherence and celebration. Here this setting is subversively

serving to mark a lacuna. “I cannot see,” says the child who will grow up to be Radha,

performing a wifely role in a middle-class Delhi neighborhood. Figuratively referencing

the toll that the epistemological proscriptions of the conventional family theater extract,

the child laments that she cannot see the ocean and the adult Radha’s life is shown

interspersed with the memory of the child’s frustration. However, the adult has become

adept at repressing the voicing of the desire and the frustration. Once Radha has accepted

and verbalized her desire for Sita, crying out, “I desire, I desire to live,” she sees the

ocean, the sight of which has eluded her since childhood. She now says, “ I can see it.”

Hanson analyzes an overlapping moment in Andy and Larry Wachowski’s Bound (1996), where Corky proclaims, “I can see again!” and underscores its implications “within a cinematic tradition where lesbianism has usually been coded as pathology, betrayal, invisibility” (2). Because lesbianism is missing from Radha’s “field of vision,” she is metaphorically unable to see the ocean in the heteronormative field of yellow flowers.

When she finds her desire mirrored in another subject, she can finally experience an epiphany of self-realization. Of course, within her socio-linguistic universe, the love that erotically charges her vision has no name.

The eroticisation of Radha’s relationship with her young sister-in-law Sita is framed by a shared confession of the desire to see the ocean. The visual cues marking their confessions are a terrace, a barrier that bounds them within the terrace, a sighting of marriage in full regalia and a dark night. In this scene, their passage of self-realization has begun. The object of their aspiration is indeterminate at this stage, but they already show a critical distance from the patriarchal privileging of matrimony and its pleasures.

From the terrace, they are looking out at an elaborate marriage celebration, and commenting that it will probably bear an unhappy fruit for the bride. Their gaze of desire, queer as it is, renders strange the paraphernalia and pomp of celebrations that have betrayed them.

The audience becomes conscious of this process – the steady disenchantment with heterosexual pleasures – by the second sequence of the movie itself. This is placed at the

Taj Mahal, a mogul monument visually synonymous with the “honeymoon” as it is depicted in popular representations. Every day, it is the romantic site of choice for thousands of conventional couples who proudly bring back photographs of themselves resplendent against the Taj Mahal. Here Sita spends some of her first hours with her husband, but she does not feel the joy and the pride that such photographs are supposed to signify. The “symbol of eternal love,” and eternity would conventionally be the right of reproductive love alone, the monument is experienced by Sita as just that – a monument, outdated and defunct in its rhetoric. Its controlled gardens and its corridors, its white marble and tourists, its arched and shadowed places of exit and entry, contiguously antipicipate the emotionally parched particularity of her life with her husband, ending it even as it begins. In addition, she overhears a glib guide recount how

the emperor Shah Jahan rewarded the creators of the architectural triumph by hacking off

their fingers so they would never recreate its splendor. One of the artists then went on to

drill a hole in the dome of the white wonder, so that the symbol of love would be flawed

forever. The guide’s tale casts a pall over the coming-to-being of Sita’s marriage, and

foreshadows the lesbian desire that will insist on making visible the tyrannical outlay

extracted by the splendorous heterosexist image bank.

When Sita returns from her honeymoon and poses for a family photograph, one of

the first homilies she receives from Ashok, her brother-in-law and Radha’s husband, is

that “ All good things must come to an end.” The multiple irony of his message, which

underscores that Sita’s marriage has already wilted, is beyond Ashok’s comprehension.

Responding to the homily, Sita’s first decision in her new house is to get rid of her sari, open her husband's closet, take possession of his clothes, lift her petticoat out of the way and then drop it as she pulls on his trousers.3 Later she will don the rest of the masculine ensemble as she woos Radha. For now, she is in her bra and in his trousers, twisting in front of the mirror to the sound of a Bollywood chartbuster, signaling the desires that heteronormative patriarchy can vehemently suffocate.

All the components of the scene – the dance, the music, the mirror and so on – discursively showcase the campy influence of Bollywood, wherein the typical film delves into a collective pool of exaggerated stock details to communicate the boy-meets-girl formula. This investment in stock thematic conventions, such as song-and-dance

3 Taking argument with Madhu Kishwar who “seems to suggest that putting on pants is a form of Western liberal feminism, in which feminist is equated with being (like) a man,” Jigna Desai suggests that Sita’s performance “conveys her desire to be the new heroine of the cinema in the postcolonial moment of economic liberalization, one that incorporates the figure of the traditional heroine and the vamp into the newly married middle-class woman, one who may wear either jeans or saris, the modern woman of India. Her performance and cross-dressing are queer and transgressive whether one reads as performing femininity or masculinity” (171).

sequences or bloody rituals of male bonding and rupture, aids and abets an appropriation

of the erotics encoded in heterocentric cinema for living life in the queer space. What we

find in the scene described above, however, is a dramatization of how the vocabulary of

Bollywood is appropriated to fashion alternative sexual identities. Consider Rao’s

identification of the homosociality in the Bachchan songs in films like Sholay and

Dostana. Bachchan’s performance lures the queer gaze, which engages in an oppositional reading of what is conventionally taken to be a recitation of heterosexual masculinity.

When Sita dances, the misrecognition that she shares with Rao is explicitly staged. This

is a character who has herself looked at the Bollywood spectacle with a queer gaze.

The queer appropriations we are discussing are necessarily heterogeneous as individual equations with cultural conventions of heteronormativity evolve to reflect differences between people who are different from other people. Hanson offers a useful description of what does cohere under the heterogeneity of the queer tag:

The very word queer invites an impassioned, even an angry resistance to normalization. It is a rejection of the compulsory heterosexual code of masculine men desiring feminine women, and it declares that the vast range of stigmatized sexualities and gender identifications, far from being marginal, are central to the construction of modern subjectivity. (4)

In Fire, Mehta foregrounds both "rejection of the compulsory heterosexual code" and a "range of stigmatized sexualities." In fact the queering of sexual identities extends to almost all the characters, and beyond the lesbian lovers. Connecting Fire to Ismat

Chugtai’s 1942 short story titled “The Quilt” and written in Urdu, Gopinath argues that both texts foreground the inadequacy of prescribed frameworks such as “homosexual” to express “the range and complexity of non-heteronormative sexual practices and allegiances as they emerge within sites of extreme heteronormativity” (“Local/Global”

154). I will discuss Ashok and Mundu as performing a non-heteronormativity that is

beyond prescribed frameworks.

The doctors have told Radha: “No eggs in the ovaries, madam.” So her husband

Ashok cannot play his part in the ‘eternal’ cycle of production: “production of babies who become men who produce more babies" (Merchant xv). His need to justify himself drives him to the path of spiritual salvation. His mentor is a swami with “testicles too large for his loin-cloth” and Ashok pays for an operation to have them drained. The homoerotic aspects of Ashok and the swami’s relationship are reinforced for us by the replication of Radha and Sita’s gestures towards each other in the interaction between

Ashok and the swami. For instance, just before Ashok learns about his wife’s 'infidelity,' we find him in a dark cave lit by several fires, listening to the chant of scriptures and massaging the swami’s feet. Earlier Sita has erotically massaged Radha’s feet. The foot massage, fetishistic as it is, was witnessed and condoned by Ashok who chose to see it as a dutiful serving of elders. The contract of silence binds Ashok’s sight as much as his sexuality. To use yet another phrase from Hanson, Radha and Sita’s “is a desire that the men in the film cannot see, though the women hide it in plain sight"(1). Of course, Ashok has a heterosexual identity. But, seen from a “perverse” angle, the same-sex closeness he shares with his swami reveals the ruptures in the normalizing code that glues upon him an identity without qualification.

A range of conflicting beliefs, needs and desires accompanies a "range of stigmatized sexualities and gender identifications". In this context, the figure of the domestic servant Mundu raises the debate on class differences and inequalities. While

“aberrations” from the normalizing code arguably characterize all the members of the

family, Mundu’s transgressions are the loneliest ones. When he cannot “pass” anymore,

he is quite defenseless. Eve Sedgwick has described passing as “a performance initiated

as much as the speech-acts of silence — not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues

particularly by fits and starts, in relation to the discourse that surrounds and differentially

constitutes it" (3). It has been argued that the gender-segregated Indian world facilitates

passing through the sakhi space wherein women can live and be together in relative

freedom (Suthankar xvii), and through an acceptance of yaraana whereby homosocial

male bonding can safely slip into a physical relationship as long as “the contract of silence” remains unbroken. The progress of Veronica’s relationships in the all-girls school and Shikha’s relationship with her cousin, for instance, is smoothed by the relative freedom of the sakhi space. Even Radha and Sita are able pursue their transgressive relationship – undetected for a while – within their patriarchal abode because they are sisters-in-law and, as such, accepted as sakhis. Similarly when Rao observes “men all over each other, clasping hands, putting arms around each other, clasping hands, putting arms around shoulders and waists, even leg on a leg” in public places (303), he is describing behavior that is socially legitimized by the concept of yaraana. But the servant, occupying the position of a parergon, has neither the privilege of intimate bonds within the family nor the leisure to pursue relationships outside the family. There is no one to share Mundu’s fantasies, and his desires are only furtively addressed. Without even the nebulous protections of domestic walls of his own, his surreptitiousness is more

vulnerable to exposure by accident. Once his desires are out in the open, Mundu is

expelled from the contracted shelter that he inhabits.

Whenever the family leaves Mundu alone to take care of the paralyzed elder

addressed as Bibiji, he replaces her devotional video with a pornographic movie and

masturbates. He is “outed” by Radha, who discovers him masturbating and professes

moral outrage. Mundu, in turn, will be instrumental in “outing” Radha. By the end of the

film, Ashok has turned both Mundu and Radha out of the household in which, tyrannical

dictates notwithstanding, they have lived for years with the warmth of familiarity and the

comfort of daily bread. As Mundu and Radha, instead of realizing they are natural allies,

turn each other in to the patriarchal authority, Fire disrupts the romantic vision of democracy in the queer community. Of course, the inimical chemistry between servant and mistress is partly the result of desire for Radha on Mundu’s part and the disgusted repulsion of this desire on the part of Radha. In a fantasy sequence that reflects Mundu’s alternative self-fashioning, the roles are reversed. Mundu now assumes the ascendant class position, and Radha jealously seeks to win him back from Sita.

It is significant that the fantasy sequence is constructed in a language shared with the popular mythological serial Ramayana, which Mundu is accustomed to replacing with pornographic films before masturbating. Like Sita’s specular dance, this sequence also acts as what Kim Mishasiw has described as camp-performativity, which “is a lure for the

gaze and is ensured as such by a collective agreement from one segment of the

voyeuristic classes and by a collective projection onto another" (162). The performative

under discussion “depends on a relatively stable ironic context – the formal wear depends

very much on a prior agreement as to form” (161). The “form” is provided by what we

can call a campy Ramayana, with its theatrical architectural elements, other aspects of

visual décor, costumes, jewelry, colors, and textures. We can call the tableau of Mundu’s

fantasy a camp-performative, showcasing the appropriation of the campy elements of a popular serial by a queer subject. Here, the play of knowing and not-knowing bears the signature of queer intention and in this way it is driven differently than in the “original” text. The feminized males and ultra-feminized females carry self-conscious traces of sexual ambiguity. In repetitively replacing the Ramayana videocassette with a pornographic one, the Mundu character does not convey the barrenness of the mythological. Instead his act highlights the multiple possibilities of voyeuristic identification with a text that is often ascribed a static and unambiguous signification.

It was especially the masturbating sequence and the use of names bearing epic sanctity in the context of a lesbian relationship that enraged the viewers who see epic master narratives such as Ramayana and Mahabharata as fixed and quintessential signifiers of ‘Indianness.’ In the reverential reading of conservatives, Radha and Sita are perfect epitomies of devoted and monogamous subservience to patriarchy. These epics and epic characters are, however, not one-dimensional. As a conservative interpretation of these epics prevails in conjunction with the enforcement of an oppressive and choice- denying "tradition," the assertion of queer difference has to insistently and dynamically

destabilize this interpretation, reconstructing traditionally set meanings. This is not “just”

a matter of academic debate. As a measure of the influence of the conservative lobby, we

should note all the flak Mehta received on her film’s release in India. In Singapore and

Kenya, pressure from the conservative Indian lobby actually succeeded in having the film

banned.

In India, in anticipation of the attacks, one of Mehta’s strategies for deflecting

censure was to rename the character Sita as Nita. On the Indian screens, whether we

watched the English or the Hindi version of the film, it was not Radha and Sita we saw

kissing each other, but Radha and Nita. Shabana Azmi, who plays Radha, was a Member of Parliament when Fire was released. In her defense of the film, she used the character names deployed in the Indian release. And now, like Mehta, she too became the object of widespread criticism. Rajeev Srinivasan wrote for Rediff On The Net where the film provoked an excited discussion: “When artists are, at best, irresponsible, possibly hypocritical, and, at worst, agent provocateurs, it is hard for the casual observer, even one who condemns censorship to support them unequivocally.” Thus, the strategy for deflecting censure became the occasion for drawing even heavier fire on Mehta’s film.

Ramesh N. Rao’s analysis of Azmi’s defense indicates what combination of artillery was brought to bear against Fire: “A member of the Rajya Sabha [the upper house of the

Indian Parliament], a well-known actress, a high-profile activist for women’s causes, and someone who lectures at Ivy League universities, Ms. Azmi, who also happens to be a

Muslim, has deliberately misled her readers and the Indian public about the political nature of the film.” First, both Srinivasan and Rao’s comments reveal what was common to a lot of the responses to Mehta’s film, recognition of its politically provocative or radical character. Second, Rao voices the misleading but aggressive presumption that what is radical in the film is “western” in origin, and I will discuss this position at greater length towards the end of this chapter. Finally, Rao explicitly sets up the Hindu-Muslim binary that provided the lens for filtering out the largely positive reception the film received. In fact, as Desai points out, Fire had a very successful two-weeks run in India –

“playing in theaters to full houses (80 to 100 percent full) – before fundamentalist Hindu protestors entered the fray (176). The film was reviewed widely even during the period in

86 which it was awaiting the Indian censor board’s approval; the board gave the film an adult certificate, but passed it without demanding any cuts; and more reviews accompanied its release. Of course some appraisals were less generous to the others, but we can safely say that the debate about the film became bitterly partisan only after the

Shiv Sena members infected it with actual violence.

A certain version of the name-changing strategy has been previously used in

Bollywood, where some Muslim actors and actresses adopt Hindu screen names at the cusp of success. Ravi Vasudevan observes:

In 1943, when Yusuf Khan was inducted as a male lead by Devika Rani at Bombay Talkies, his name was changed, as is well known, to Dilip Kumar. In the actor’s account, the change was quite incidental. But we have information about other Muslim actors and actresses who underwent name changes, such as Mahzbin, who became Meena Kumari, and Nawab, who became Nimmi; and, in 1950 a struggling actor, Hamid Ali Khan changed his name to Ajit on the advice of the director, K. Amarnath. I am sure that this short list is but the beginning of a much longer one, and an oral history might uncover something akin to a parallel universe of concealed identities. The transaction involved seems to have been purely symbolic. Evidence from the film periodicals suggests that the true identity of such actors was mostly well-known, and yet an abnegation of identity was undertaken in the development of the star personality. It is as if the screen, constituting an imaginary nation space, required the fulfillment of certain criteria before the actor/actresses could acquire a symbolic eligibility. (“Politics” 157)

A promising counter-narrative is made available by the fact that in the decade of the nineties the three Khans – Amir, Sharukh and Salman – ruled supreme. Still undisputable hits at the box office, the national idolization they enjoy belies the “abnegation of

[Muslim] identity” as an eligibility requirement for the “imaginary nation space” of the screen. In this context, Mehta’s choice of re-naming Radha appears regressive. And her compromise failed to meet its objective of warding off the kind of venom that Rao and

Srinivasan pour out in the statements quoted above.4 Adding fuel to these critics’ ire is

the fact that the alternative reading to which Mehta subjects the epic does not just re-read

Radha and Sita for us. She goes further and radically conjoins her queer interpretation of

Hindu mythology and rituals with Islam.

Here, I am referring to the last scene in the film. When Radha leaves repressively

patriarchal domesticity behind, her exercise of agency leads her to the Nizamuddin shrine. This narrative turn too met with a barrage of criticism from the Hindutva critics.

Pran Lal, in a discussion on the South Asian Journalists’ Association web forum, questioned the advocacy of “Hindu women fleeing the tyranny of Hinduism, and taking refuge in Islam” (cited in Rao, “Smoke”). He is of course echoing Bal Thackeray’s question: “Why is it that lesbianism is shown in a Hindu family” (cited in Gopinath 157), and his defensive reading glaringly misses the point that both Hindus and Muslims render their prayers at the shrine of Hazrat Nizammuddin, who was after all a Sufi mystic singing towards reforming Muslim religion just as his Bhakti coevals were pursuing

Hindu reforms. Over the centuries, both these religious reform movements have lost their radical impetus but their influence on popular culture remains strong. Also, the homoerotic and homosexual historical component of Sufi literature, which Kidwai and

Vanita trace back to the medieval period, is generally not recognized. Mehta’s work complements that of Kidwai and Vanita in making the point that queer desire is in our culture, our tradition and our history. In bringing this desire out from under the shroud of invisibility, these writers enable their audiences to say, “I can see it.”

4 In this instance, it appears that every compromise lead to the demand for more compromises. As Gopinath points out, Mehta was sarcastically asked to change her protagonists’ names to Shabana and Saira, wherein the latter are both “generic Muslim names” and specific references to the star of the film and “the wife of actor Dilip Kumar, who was vocal in his support of the film” (“Local/Global,” 157, 161).

Bombay Boys: In a campy metropolis

At their most powerful and disturbing level, Fire and Bombay Boys are both about stereotype bashing and about introducing into the Indian film archive images that are stunning in their newness. Both Mehta and Gustad share concerns about how identity formation is impacted by the pressures of culture and community, how the hegemonic institution of marriage enforces “the contract of silence”, how homophobia forces queer subjects to go “underground”, how Bollywood and its artifacts can address queer desire, how artists impact the making of history, and how they effect social change. However, while Fire is cast in a lyrical mode, Bombay Boys has an abrupt choreography that is partly a tribute to and partly a parody of the editing conventions of Bollywood. Camp- performativity is here not an intermittent but a constant imperative. To discuss this film, it is also useful to deploy the definition of camp that Susan Sontag provides: “It is not a natural mode of sensibility, if there be any such. Indeed the essence of camp is in its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And camp is esoteric – something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques [emphasis added]”

(274). Gustad’s three lead actors adopt mannerisms and accents –Australian, American and British – that are so “unnatural” and exaggerated that many a review damns their acting abilities. The film opens with their slapdash encounters with the inquisitive and opinionated Bombay airport officials. Then, “fast” dealing cabbies, after collecting separate fares, dump the three dupes into the backseat of one car, squishing them together, instantly turning them into a clique that must stick together to survive the

“welcome to Bombay.” This particular clique of three is made up of Indians without

Indian passports – Xerxes Mistry from London, Ricardo Fernandes from Australia, and

Krishna Sahni from New York.5 Their names respectively signal Zoroastrian, Christian and Hindu religions. All these “boys” have come to find Bombay and find themselves, and are confronted with an aggressive questioning of their neo-colonial agenda. The attack is along the lines of, "Who do they think they are, Christopher Columbus?" In their desperate forays into the interiors of a city that stuns them with shock after shock, they penetrate one clique after another, anxiously trying to crack its code before they are exposed or exterminated, and they reveal to us sites of eclectic and flamboyant theatricality. As Desai points out, here, “it is not Westernization that has sullied India” and “it is not the Western-residing protagonists who contaminate Indian values and traditions” (206). A “playground of capital, sex, alcohol, and violence,” this is nonetheless a “decidedly Indian city” that engagingly “corrupts” its Western visitors instead (ibid.). Reversing too the fundamentalist archetype of gay identity as a Western- inspired abomination, it is India that “frees” Xerxes to “become” gay.

Krishna, NYU film school graduate like Gustad himself, finds himself enmeshed in the web of Mastana, who is a caricature of real life characters whose excessiveness has inspired and often financed successive generations to make gangster films. One of

Bombay Boys’ financiers Bharat Shah was arrested in 2000 after telephone taps by the

Bombay Police caught him in conversations with the Pakistan-based mobster Chhota

Shakeel. In recent years, because of failure to comply with the underworld’s demands, the music recording industrialist Gulshan Kumar has been shot to death, actor-turned-

5 Bollywood repeatedly deploys a triangulated relationship between protagonists with different religious backgrounds to affirm the pluralism of the national imaginary. Most notably used in films like Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), we will “re-encounter” this strategy in the analysis of the opening sequence in Mission Kashmir. It should also be noted that this strategy usually works through male protagonists, and this signals a shift in subjectivity here insofar as it is “boys” that are the focus of attention in Bombay Boys while Fire focuses on “girls.”

producer Rakesh Roshan has barely survived a similar attack, and so on. As political

parties like the Shiv Sena have visibly muscled in on the turf of the criminal rings, by, for

instance, running their own extortion rackets, the intertwined economics of Bombay and

Bollywood have taken a grimmer turn. But the note Bombay Boys strikes is far from grim. The director and scriptwriter Gustad defends this facet of his film in an interview with Vatsala Kaul: “It’s a masala film. It has no pretensions about being anything else.

It’s not going to solve India’s problems.” So, instead of showing the liaison between

political parties, the underworld and Bollywood in its harsher aspect, Gustad structures

his film by playing up, to the loudest pitch and a pop beat, the performativity of the

victim and gangster roles. The character of Mastana can, in fact, be interpreted as homage

to the creepy dons who became, in many a blockbuster, the crowd-pullers and the

scopophilic magnets par excellence. Gustad’s film hardly does anything to reverse this

trend and advance a more ugly and repellent picture of the criminals who can hold

Bombay’s denizens to ransom at will. Instead, it gleefully takes the inchoate fetishism of

the many urban cliques in Bombay as both its subject matter and its ethos, eschewing

“the formal wear” of sociopolitical critique for that of an ultra-campy performative. This

choice is not without its political effects, and the self-conscious insertion of the gender

and sexual “excesses” of Bombay into the field of the visual effectively challenges many

of the images that the Right putatively projects, wrenching “ownership” of the metropolis

away from the fundamentalist imagery.

With Krishna and Mastana, we actually enter the sets of the Bollywood film that

forms one of the backdrops of Fire. Krishna, trained in a realist school, is the perfect

candidate for messing up the "boy, girl, villain, rape" sequence so that Mastana can sink

some of his black money into the chaotically shot Mumbai Banditos. But the spell of

Bollywood gradually entices Sahni too and he works to learn all its queer clichés. The beat-villain-to-get-girl sequence that Krishna shoots showcases the space of homoeroticism in Bombay's films. The real plot, it has been argued, is always between

two men, sometimes appearing in the guise of yaraana between two heroes and sometimes emerging as the battle between the hero and the villain. Hoshang Merchant contends that the female lead is there only to lessen the homosexual sting (xxiii).

Xerxes – “much too lovely to be straight, and much too scared to be gay" – introduces us to the band that is titled Bombay Boys within the movie. Music plays a significant role in the Gustad's film. It reflects both the MTV pastiche and the strange bilingualism of the movie that has been called a Hindi film in English. The Bombay

Boys inhabit an exclusively male space, even their visitors are never female, and they know all about "what's happening" in Bombay even as they rarely emerge from a stupor brought on by the combined intake of vodka, rum and whiskey. Hard liquor is an integral element of the campy ensemble we are discovering. The male model who picks up

Xerxes at a bar offers him Johny Walker out of hot-water bags as part of foreplay. The offer, comical, underscores the reality of leading double lives. Hot-water bags and tiptoeing into bedrooms are strategies of postponing confrontation.

Passing is preferable to coming out and less painful, yet this pain cannot be

overstated. Nayan Shah quotes a young student who wrote to the South Asian gay

newsletter about the experience of passing:

I'm an outsider, an outcast in my natural community, a hidden silenced nonperson. To participate in the life of my family, I bury my sexuality, my politics, my anger as deeply as possibly; I suspect there is a secret dread in my family that I might ultimately shame them horribly. (483)

It's in the context of such angst that we have to view the commitment and courage demonstrated by Mehta’s characters when they walk away from their husbands, their homes, their families and their familial roles. In any case, silence is a zone inhabited on sufferance, easily invaded and easily shattered (Suthankar xv). Kavi, the founder of the gay magazine Bombay Dost, says: “Playing the game of reconciliation and yet being

prepared for confrontation have been the watchwords of this community as the careful

managements of our family squabbles has shown” (cited in Merchant 23).

On the one hand, magazines like Bombay Dost underline the growing strengths of queer sub-culture, encouraging homosexuals to come out of the closet, increasing tolerance and acceptance. But Merchant points out that they also cause an increase in the display of physical or verbal abuse against gays (xiv). Bombay Boys presents both the positive and the retrogressive developments. It takes us cruising next to the ocean and at dawn. In its many delineation of the city’s beaches, Bombay cinema never showed its queer aspect before. It's Pesi, old and wanting, deserted at the gay bar – the gay bar is

another first on the Indian screen – by Xerxes who goes cruising in a cab. Soon after we

find Xerxes and his lover being beaten up by homophobic and pumped up young men

who ask them, "Didn't you read the sign outside? No dogs and fags allowed in." As the

savvy model flees from the scene, the police take away Xerxes. We are reminded that

according to Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code homosexual acts between men are

illegal. But the law does not technically have lesbianism in its purview, since the legal definition of intercourse requires penile penetration (Suthankar xiv). Gender, like class, disrupts democracy in the queer community.

Perhaps because Bombay Boys’ protagonists are male, perhaps because they are

"foreigners," perhaps because they are Anglophone, the film did not raise any

fundamentalist uproar. But Hindu fanatics were enraged enough by the contents of Fire to attack the theaters screening it. Many academic responses were also less than liberal.

Ranjani Saigal’s posting on South Asian women’s cinema web forum reads as follows:

I was extremely disgusted at the use of Ramayana inappropriately. To show someone masturbating in front of the Ramayana was to me an unnecessary insult to the religious feeling. More so the portrayal of the Hindu concept of limiting desires in such a negative light and ending with the asylum in the Sufi shrine was quite unnecessary. If anything Islam is more limiting of rights of women than is Hinduism.

Many other responses also reflected how Hinduism, by virtue of being the religion of the majority, becomes in the minds of some people equivalent to the sole arbitrating authority on what constitutes Indian religion and culture. When actor Dilip Kumar, whom I have previously discussed as having abnegated his Islamic name for the development of his star persona, spoke in defense of Fire, fundamentalist protesters stripped themselves in front of his house, arguing his disrespect and incomprehension of the Indian "tradition." As a child, this thespian experienced the violence of partition first-

hand; in Bollywood, he rose to the heights of superstardom – playing both Hindu and

Muslim characters with great panache; his contribution to the city of Bombay is

incontrovertible, whether as a successful Mayor or as a citizen par excellence. When

internecine violence raged through Bombay in 1993, “he mobilized the film community to help both Hindu and Muslim riot victims” (Sardar 65). Yet, the mob that surrounded

Kumar’s house called his patriotic credentials into question, and aggressively traced his defense of a film portraying Hinduism “in a bad light” back to his Muslim identity. They ensured that the challenge to the cultural hard-line would not pass as Hindu in origin.

Obviously the protesters subscribed to a monolithic construct of Hinduism that utterly disregards the diversity that characterizes the Hindu community. With its violent attacks, this homophobic and homogenizing band of men and women succeeded in keeping Fire off the theaters in Bombay and New Delhi for months while sudiences in

Calcutta proved to be more resilient. Interestingly, as Jacqueline Levitin points out,

“although Shiv Sena is anti-Muslim, some fundamentalist Muslim groups joined their

attack on the film by proclaiming a fatwah against actor Shabana Azmi for performing

Hindu rituals while acting” (283). The sheer erroneousness of the presumption of

uncontaminated identity on which the aforementioned protestors stake their absurd

demands is routinely evidenced in the everyday life of the nation. There is a long history

of filmmakers casting actors as Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Zoroastrian and Christian as

indiscriminately as rich and poor characters would be cast, and it is only in rare instances

wherein organized religion chooses to “make a noise” that the question of matching the

religion of actor to that of the character arises. In a more sentimental vein, the many

domestic or public congregations where different citizens celebrate their religious

festivals together also provide plenty of data defying fundamentalist versions of the

boundaries of pious performance.

But the risk of aggravating the “guardians of public morality” ensures that the public statements of filmmakers such as Mehta and Gustad are always guarded. Gustad, when questioned by Kaul on what his film says about sexual preferences, responded as follows: “I wanted to get my point across without knocking the person over the head with it, to slip it under the door in the middle of the night. It is all subtext.” And Gustad does not elaborate on the "subtext". Mehta has gone even further in some of her disclaimers

and has said to Suhasini Haidar: “I wish people would believe me when I say that Fire is not about lesbianism…. I've said it over and over again, and I should know since I made the film. Fire is not about lesbianism.” Such statements antagonized some members of

the scholarly and activist communities. For instance, Banerji wrote:

Mehta’s refusal to take a public stand in support of lesbians is insulting and demeaning when originally so much of the hype mentioned the same-sex relationship as the film’s core. After all, there is a difference between saying Fire is not a lesbian film (as Mehta has done) versus suggesting it is not only a lesbian film, and has multiple possibilities embedded in it. By making the former statement, Mehta has alienated precisely that segment of viewers which has been at the forefront of defending the substance of Fire on her behalf and protecting it from attacks by fundamentalists. (20)

However, if we consider the broad range of Gustad and Mehta’s statements to the press

and others,6 we can spot contradictions signaling that their intentions are not simple to

summarize. The point I want to extrapolate here is that no Indian filmmaker with even

an average-sized budget publicly identifies as gay. Filmmakers are closeted because

being identified as queer would, among other things, limit the creative freedom that they

enjoy. Passing protects them from witch-hunting so they distance themselves from the

queer in their art, particularly in Indian public forums.

In real life, it is difficult to survive the burns that arsonists and homophobes can inflict on one's person. Many Indian men who are found in Xerxes's position, publicly caught out as gay, are brutalized after being arrested. Many women are locked away in insane asylums. And of course there is the "basic" social reprisal: being thrown out of work. Accounts in Yaraana and Facing the Mirror provide testimony to some of these

6 For instance, Desai points to statements Mehta had made before her film was attacked by the Shiv Sena: “Lesbian relationship is part of the Indian heritage and the film brings into the public domain the hypocrisy and tyranny of the patriarchal family, the issue of women’s sexuality, and makes a strong statement about women-women relationships. . . . Lesbianism is part of our culture. Take Khajuraho, the Kamasutra, or even Konark, the evidence is all there” (cited in 186).

brutalities. Carole-Anne Tyler says coming out “involves no ‘real’ liberation or authentic

self-expression but instead is another identity-fiction, neither self-generated nor adequate

to the diversity, heterogeneity of the interests, desires and identifications of the subjects who take up its signature image” (237). In general, Tyler is correct to warn us against the assumption that coming out signifies some conclusively bona fide form of liberation or that its gesture of fixing an ideal self transcends oppressive systems of identity-formation.

She also wants to question the notion of “strategic essentialism” insofar as the latter is deployed to defend the self-conscious performance of identity politics. In the context of our present discussion, wherein if coming out is considered a political maneuver, it is a hazardous one, we find the deconstructive analysis inadequate to the local framework.

The response that met the screening of Fire, and the responses that meet coming out

within Fire and Bombay Boys, reflect that coming out can be the mark of an insistently dissimilar signature, the signing of which can literally burn the subjects in question.

Split Wide Open: Shadowy sexual economies

One of the generic categories Waugh sets up as he engages with the turbulent

representational terrain of 1990s Bollywood is the sexual marginality film. He notes that the two most notable subgenres within this category are “the action films where transgenders and more ‘recognizable’ gay men have emerged as charismatic film-stealing villains,” and “the melodramas with hijras as matriarchal heroines or supporting players”

(286). It is useful to think of films like Bombay Boys in a continuum of the sexual marginality film, and perhaps we can subcategorize them as metropolitan masalas. Here gender and sexual transgression is not associated with just a specific character type, but smorgasbord-like, spread across plot terrain. Additionally, the emplacement of the plot is markedly metropolitan and the high-speed editing simulates the pace of life in the

millennial metropolis. Like Bombay Boys, but even more expansively, Dev Benegal’ s

Split Wide Open is an exploration of “deviant” intimacies in the metropolis that is both

the economic and entertainment epicenter of India.

Arjun Appadurai has pointed out that cities like millennial Bombay “offer the

magic of wealth, celebrity, glamour, and power through their mass media. But they often

contain shadow economies that are difficult to measure in traditional terms” (“Spectral”

54). Benegal’s film is interested in mapping the traces of precisely the shadow economies

re-figuring Bombay under the combined blitz of media and migration, wherein labor

forges an array of kinships as the villages disappear. This disappearance has an

epistemological rather than an empirical basis. It is reflected in my dissertation too, as the

subjects I study are markedly urban denizens and non-urban spaces have only referential

status in their imaginaries. For the protagonist named KutPrice or KP, the paraphernalia in whose survival kit ranges from the nineteenth century relic Englishwomen’s Raj

Phrase Book to Avian bottles transported by French ships more than a century later, the

village in which he was born is literally “out of focus.” It is the city that he shoots with a

digital camera that is in close-up, and dramatic scenes of urban inequalities and desires

are edited with a speed that seeks to replicate the experience of the city’s movements in

the film.

As domesticity is reconstituted by people in the midst of immense urban upheavals,

it is a TV show sharing the film’s title and to which KutPrice supplies ‘feeds’ that

becomes the proleptic site for sharing secret kinships, for instance the secret of two girls

about to get married. Laila Rouass, a popular VJ, plays the diasporic anchor Nandita Das

who has come to India to “film everything.” This anchor even gets to do a Barbara

Walters with a domestic servant who has sex with both the husband and the wife who

employ him: “You cook for them; you serve them; then you have sex with both of them.”

This “labor” is of the economy that the phantasm of reproductive nationalist

heterosexuality dematerializes and threatens with dispossession at every moment, till, as

the servant reports, “His [the employer’s] father kicked me out, pointed a gun at me. . . .

Now the master thinks it’s all wrong.” Except, in this case, the dispossession is not permanent. This particular narrative segment ends with a “family portrait” in which the servant takes his proud place as a parent right beside his employers.

Then there is the young orphan girl, with whom KP shares the alienation of being a refugee from the village and calls Didi (or sister). While established actor Rahul Bose plays KP, Didi is played by Farida Hyder Mullah who was actually discovered on a

Bombay pavement by Split Wide Open’s assistant director. When she is picked up from

the pavement in the film, it is by a middle-aged man whose “American salary” allows

him the luxury of educating his daughter in America and also of occupying two residences in Bombay. As it is the fact that Mundu has no quarters in his own name that leaves the domestic servant in Fire vulnerable to the exposure of his unconventional

sexual practices, the fact that the multinational employee in Split Wide Open possesses multiple domiciles enables him to hide away his illegal relationships with minors. In a troubling sequence, Didi refuses to be rescued by KutPrice. She refuses rehabilitation at the site of Bombay’s pavements, and accepts the sexual contract at the site that she can cohabit with wealth, which is the predominant promise of millennial Bombay. While the child from the slums refuses to repudiate the rich male protector because it is not in her economic interest to do so, the daughter channels the repudiation itself into profit. The

Pervert Father expose wins the daughter Leela an anchor’s spot on “Split Wide Open.”

The diasporic character that is thus replaced now sets out to film the life of KutPrice, in

the form of a documentary rather than a satellite TV slice, exclaiming: “In India, the

reality is so much more interesting.” And KutPrice himself picks up the digital camera to

help Nandita navigate the crowded streets of Bombay. The film’s symbolic certification

for their joint enterprise provides an implicit critique of the truth claims of satellite TV,

which has been the mechanism for bringing deviant domesticities to light in the film.

One point of reference for this paradoxical maneuver is provided by the pleasures

of voyeurism and narcissistic identification aggregating for the Indian audiences in the

wake of transnational satellite production. The fantasies abundantly available on

millennial TV screens are engendering varied forms of family and sexuality. Mundu’s

association with the Ramayana (whose pre-satellite incarnation is still thriving through

video rentals and re-broadcasts on satellite channels) in Fire is an interesting fictional

portrayal of this engendering activity. The soaring TRPs of family soaps, at one point

numbering in the dozens for producer Ekta Kapoor alone, have great sociological

implications that ethnographers like Purnima Mankekar are exploring. While one

similarity between soaps like Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and the Split Wide Open show is that they both have to calculate a gamut of primetime dictates, the former has a recognizable nexus of fictional families at its center whereas the latter has to continually introduce “new” and “real” families. The only link between the characters who appear on

Nandita’s show is the practice of irregular domesticities in a metropolis overdetermined

by the impact of media and migration.

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The kinships and subjectivities that take shape in Split Wide Open complicate the libratory narrative of queer visibility. In Bombay Boys, despite their bombast, all of

Xerxes’s misadventures never devolve into tragedy. He is confronted with the flight of his musical muse, thrown into jail for “indecent” activities and thrown out of Bombay by the don. But all these setbacks are offset by the self-affirming scene in which he spreads his hands wide, bashfully smiles and acknowledges: “I am gay.” In Fire, there is no identical avowal of identity. In fact, Sita tells Radha, “There are no words in our language for this relationship.” Yet, by the time Radha embraces Sita in the climactic sequence, the two women have unambiguously shed the shackles of oppressive matrimony. They have left their husbands behind, and their new life – whose exact image is differed beyond the film – is going to be with each other. Gustad and Mehta’s protagonists choose unconventional lives, and are the happier for this choice. The queer lives that we glimpse in Split Wide Open cannot be similarly summarized.

Didi sanguinely relinquishes ownership of herself to a middle-aged man in exchange for a TV and Toblorones. A domestic servant cheerfully has sex with the married couple who employ him, and shares parenthood with his employees. We must also consider the widowed mother who is having an affair with her son-in-law. Many representational taboos are broken in the scene in which she sits at her desk in a bureaucratic office that has “government red-tape” stamped all over it, and receives a blow job from her son-in-law. All these are highly unconventional portrayals of the sexual and domestic fabric of the Indian city. To different degrees, it is against the sign of the normative that the representation of the unconventional acquires a political force in

Fire and Bombay Boys. But none of the domesticities brought to light on the sets of Split

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Wide Open are normative. While this is in part because the show’s mandate is to titillate,

what leaves us flabbergasted is that it is simultaneously registering that lives are indeed in a conundrum in Bombay today. From the slums to the luxurious high-rises, what

Appadurai calls the shadow economies traffic in commodities, people and images seamlessly. Thus, it is befitting that we see only the silhouettes of Nandita’s guests. I had ended the last section by discussing the political roles and material hazards of unconventional signatures, but this film challenges that discussion. Here, there is no pivot

for the moral imperative that forms the backbone for a political reading of the

unconventional. Instead, the film seems hinged on the same agenda as the TV anchor

who compellingly argues, “Surely the point is to know what’s happening in India today?”

Most reviews have focused on the film’s insight into the impact of globalization on the lives of the people on Bombay’s streets. The film’s website records that one newspaper maintained, “Split Wide Open focuses on the value changes in Mumbai after

the liberalization phase began in 1991,” while the Toronto International Film Festival

Catalogue explained, “The film examines the (often horrifying) moral conundrums rapid

social change engenders.” Certainly, an important explanation for why we find the images of India in Benegal’s film unusual is that these images represent a reality that is in an intense state of transformation. However, the caveat is that, as Waugh writes about queer Bollywood, “the popular cinema only obliquely and contradictorily registers the flux of socio-cultural shifts” (297). In other words, perhaps Split Wide Open’s representations of intimacy are not as irregular as they seem, but they definitely have a

hyper-present aspect that is “not directly and literally translatable as ethnographic data or social meaning” (ibid.). In any case, Benegal’s representational choices mark his film as

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belonging at the other extreme of the straitlaced epistemology that has long left queer

sexuality off the screens.

Directing visibility from the Borderlands

Indian critical discourses of the twentieth century have struggled to assert

identities distinct from that of their Western counterparts. This struggle has been waged

in the shadows of a colossal colonial heritage and the strong Western influences that

continue to shape the socio-cultural ethos of the Indian nation. Of course monolithic and

binary ‘Indian’ and ‘Western’ identities exhibit the problematics of myth-making as does

any unitary notion of ‘India.’ They are often employed for purposes of oppressive and

homogenizing condemnation of difference. In addition, they obfuscate the way in which

the very influences that destabilize self-identity can also invigorate it. These double

movements can be traced in several distinct arenas.

The first Indian feature film was inspired by the Life of Christ, which Phalke saw

in 1911. As Sumita S. Chakravarty says, Phalke was “motivated to make films after

seeing foreign efforts and thinking, ‘Could we, the sons of India, ever be able to see

Indian images on the screen’” (National 37)? Such historical facts can impart a great

“anxiety of influence.” Under this weight, Vijay Mishra misguidedly concludes: “Cinema in India began as a colonial business, and it has never been able to shed its colonial origins” (121). If we consider the history of lesbian self-assertion in India, the weight of the Western homosexual vocabulary impacts a substantial part of the prominent dialogue about lesbian lives in India. Even the continuing effort to find cultural equivalents for this vocabulary testifies to its inescapable centrality in the Indian debate. Equally inescapable is the measure in which the Western conversations and compositions have empowered Indian lesbian identities, which are fighting patriarchal oppression and

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silencing to voice themselves. In the general context of queer self-assertion, Waugh

astutely notes the following:

It would be absurd to dismiss the core of subaltern agency in the Hindophone audience’s traditional obsession for the aura of the foreign in Bollywood delineations of sexuality, in the Calcutta john’s demands for blow jobs inspired by smuggled porn mags, which the sex workers are said to call “English sex,” and in the craving by Indian Anglophone queers for diasporic and “foreign” knowledges, networks and bodies. (283)

Along the lines of the last point that Waugh makes above, Suthankar, who went to

America to study comparative literature, says she has “experienced the West with its bright lure of greater freedoms” (xxxiii). Her experiences lead Suthankar to bring out the

first anthology of its type, Facing the Mirror, documenting the testimonies and histories of a wide cross-section of self-identified Indian lesbians. Other voices in the volume echo her description of the “lure” that the West offers to the Indian lesbians. In the diasporic context, Sagri Dhairyam is one of the many who articulates an uneasiness with her acquisition of lesbian identity in relation to the West. She writes that inasmuch as her role as academic facilitated her transition to named lesbianism, it disquiets her because the developmental telos of her journey “from not-lesbian to lesbian is simultaneously an ironic journey from Indian and silent otherness to Western and articulated subjectivity”

(26). It is the characterization of silence that I have tried to refute in this chapter

Like Suthankar, the writer-director of Fire shuttles between India and the West.

Deepa Mehta was born and bred in India and went to college not far from the bustling

street which is the backdrop of her movie. It was after migrating to Canada that Mehta

actually began practicing filmmaking, and hers is the first film to explicitly foreground a

lesbian relationship in India. I have already discussed the protestors who attacked Fire as

“western.” But by the time Mehta started shooting Water, the opposition had become

104 more organized. Representing the life of Hindu widows, including one who is married and widowed at seven, this film is set in the 1930s. Mehta first tried to shoot it in

Varanasi, where destitute widows still crowd the streets, and the more fortunate ones pack the rehabilitation homes and the boarding houses. But the fundamentalist organizations used their influence across civic, state and judicial mediums to effectively stall work on the sets, which had to be finally shifted to Sri Lanka. As Jasmine Yuen-

Carrucan, a member of Mehta’s beleaguered crew, reported for the Bright Lights online journal, the RSS chief defended the actions of his Varanasi associates by once again invoking the Indian-Western binary:

Breaking up the sets was far too mild an act; the people involved with the film should have been beaten black and blue. They come with foreign money to make a film which shows India in poor light because that is what sells in the West. The West refuses to acknowledge our achievements in any sphere, but is only interested in our snake charmers and child brides. And people like Deepa Mehta pander to them.

Here the discursive focus shifts from whether certain images are inspired by the West to whether they pander to the tastes of the West. Either ways, an obsession with the West’s role in shaping Indian images leads directly to the advocacy of censorship. Although it is not incorrect that both snake charmers and child brides have been deployed to perpetuate unbalanced stereotypes about India, that they are a part of Indian reality compromises the case for erasing them from representations of India. Similarly, while everyone who visits

Varanasi can observe the plight of its Hindu widows for themselves, why should we censor its representation? Surely the impulse to recognize and then challenge iniquitous traditions is in the polity’s best interest. Most importantly, Mehta’s attackers refuse to recognize that her work has a wide Indian audience. As mentioned earlier, till the Shiv

Sena hijacked the discussion and the screenings of the film, it was running to full houses

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in most theaters. It is the reality of the film’s popularity that the fundamentalist protestors

would deny under the guise of Indian-Western binary.

Gustad and Benegal, the two other filmmakers I have discussed, have not faced

the kind of ire directed at Mehta. In her film, normative domesticity is portrayed through

a single family and specifically ruptured by lesbian sexuality. In contrast, neither Bombay

Boys nor Split Wide Open represent the normative, so their sexual politics are more easily squared up as performances on the fringes of society and their ideological threat is thus reduced. Perhaps sexually explicit representations are more easily acceptable from male filmmakers than from female ones, and gay male characters are considered less transgressive than lesbian ones. Confirming this thesis, Onir’s My Brother…Nikhil

(2005), which is also a bilingual film seamlessly switching between Hindi and English, and concerns the persecution of a Christian gay athlete in Goa, did not cause a furor either.7 Further, Mehta’s disaporic status probably renders her more vulnerable to attacks by jingoist cultural czars.

In any case, like Mehta, Gustad and Benegal are also metropolitan and

Anglophone. Gustad moved to Sydney when he was 16 and then, before enrolling into

NYU film school, traveled across the globe as a spot boy. In his interview with Kaul,

Gustad has said that, in order to make Bombay Boys, he “credit-carded himself up to his ears in England, America, France, India.” He released it at just two theaters, one each in

Bombay and Delhi. But the film attracted house-full audiences, defied the “small

English film” label to be dubbed in Hindi, and went to even B-centers and C-centers in

7 In Hindi popular cinema, incidental gay characters are becoming less rare and, in a more interesting development, it is homophobes rather than homosexuals who are being portrayed as objects of ridicule. We find the latter trend most noticeably in Nikhil Advani’s Kal Ho Na Ho (2003) and Indra Kumar’s Masti (2004), which were both commercially successful films.

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various parts of the country. Nandita Chowdhury has described Gustad as “a new breed

of filmmakers that speaks, thinks and dreams in English,” and Benegal belongs to the

same breed. However, Gustad himself describes Bombay Boys as an English film in

Hindi,8 and this is both a more complicated and more useful description of the filmmaking we are discussing. Gustad and Benegal are deeply concerned with representing the Bombay colloquial, signaling the variety of subcultures it inhabits, and self-consciously challenging the formulaic topographies that critics and politicians can actually share. These filmmakers foreground the possibilities of disrupting restraining economies.

Admittedly they direct visibility from the site of privilege. The inhabiting of cultural privilege by Anglophone elites is of course a legacy of both colonial discourse and nationalist development. But if we take the cultural privileges enjoyed by the postcolonial elite as axiomatic, the important issue becomes the investment that these elites make with the material advantages that have accrued to them through the historic processes of nation-building. Filmmakers like Mehta, Gustad and Benegal are able to bring the “me” and the “them,” the subjects with and without access to cartographic play, into creative tension as they shoot to make things happen for an audience from which

8 On the question of bilingualism, Salman Rushdie provides useful insights in his commentary on Indian writing in English: “It is true that most of these writers come from the educated classes of India; but in a country still bedeviled by high illiteracy levels, how could it be otherwise? . . . At any rate, there is not, need not be, should not be, an adversarial relationship between English language literature and the other literatures of India. In my own case, and I suspect in the case of every Indian writer in English, knowing and loving the Indian languages in which I was raised has remained of vital personal and artistic importance” (Step, 150, 152). I completely disagree with how Rushdie deploys the above insights to pronounce that Indian writing in English “is proving to be a more interesting body of work than most of what has been produced in the sixteen ‘official languages’ of India” (146). But his understanding that, “whatever language we write in, we drink from the same well” does speak to the necessity of considering films made in both English and the official Indian languages in an interconnected way (152).

107 occasionally springs up a man who says: “I am going to shoot you!” That an incensed spectator yelled this out at Mehta at the Trivandrum film festival does not negate the significance of the epistemological encounter between Fire and its audiences.

CHAPTER 4 VISIONARY TALES OF BORDERS AND ENEMIES

When I learned the lesson of love, My heart dreaded the sight of a mosque. I then entered the abode of the Lord, Where resound a thousand flutes. I was sick of reading Vedas and Qura’ns; My forehead was bruised by prostrations. God is not at Hindu shrines nor at Muslims’ Mecca. Whosoever found, found Him in light divine. Ever new, ever fresh is the spring of love! (Bulleh Shah cited in J. R. Puri and T. R. Shangari 67.)

In 1947, elation at the success of the freedom struggle that had swelled across

colonial India for a century was horrifically marred by a massive displacement of

approximately 14 million people who found themselves cast out of their homes by the

executive fiat of partition. As Hindus and Muslims tried to get to the “right” country,

towns and villages burnt, women were raped, thousands massacred, and blood–soaked

trains delivered fresh wounds on both sides of the India-Pakistan border. In these

circumstances, it was remarkable that in India “all sections of the actors in that

contentious scenario” arrived at “a fundamental agreement…namely, we/they are part of

the nation, the nation must accept us/them” (Sammadar 27). In delineating the process of rehabilitation and reconstruction that followed, Ritu Menon has characterized it as “a uniquely progressive and far-sighted response to a problem of crushing proportions”

(177). Ranabir Sammadar discusses this response in terms of “the expanding universe of the nation” (27). Both Menon and Sammadar are emphasizing that the mainstream model of citizenship in post-partition India, even as it registered difference in group-identities, was developed on an inclusivist basis. Constitutional provisions for religious, linguistic

108 109 and ethnic differentiation were imagined alongside a “common national identity.” In the following decades, the former have often met a meager fulfillment and the latter has shown itself susceptible to repeated and bloody splitting. In retrospect, the brutal violence of partition seems to have been an ominous portent of how the conflicts of interest among the people of South Asia would render displacement a definitional component of the narrative of the nation.

While uneven economic development, often a consequence of state policies, also contributes significantly to marginalization and displacement, the focus here is on the sociological scars of violent conflicts that have religious underpinnings. In the discussion that follows, we find that the operation of government and separatist forces, pitted against each other, exacerbates ethnic or religious minorities’ displacement to the margins of citizenship. The legacy of partition haunts this discussion because the colonial re- mapping of the South Asian region into clearly-cut nation-states is belied by the cross- border identifications that render the “common national identity” unstable, and embolden violent conflicts in Kashmir, Gujarat, Tamil Eelam and so on. The films analyzed here explore the aggression that seeks legitimization with reference to “border questions.”

In providing an iconic rendering of militant political movements that gnaw at contemporary Indian polity, we find in the films discussed a “productive disordering” of the kind Kevin Robins and Asu Aksoy identify in relation to the cinema in Turkey, where the struggle between religious moderates and extremists is proving as unrelenting as in

India. They acknowledge that, “it is possible to tell the story of how Turkish cinema culture has lived with the deep nation – how it has struggled to reflect the unity of the

Turkish nation”, but argue “that the story of cinema in Turkey can also be told – and can

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better be told – the other way around” (215). To tell the story in a “better” fashion,

Robins and Aksoy analyze Turkish cinema “in terms of the progressive disordering of the

ideal of the Kemalist nation, which may be regarded as an alternative to the shallow

illusion of national cultural integration and synthesis” (ibid.). With appropriate changes in nouns and adjectives, Robins and Aksoy’s formulations speak to Indian cinema culture as well. If “deep nation” describes the complex encounter of the ontological totality and

empirical heterogeneity of national expression, the concept allows us to revisit film history and read the purportedly idealized constructions of homogenizing Indianness as

ambivalent representations that simultaneously split off into narrativizations of plurality

both at the point of enunciation and reception. This chapter will be dealing specifically

with explicit representations of India’s internal differences, which by extension are

commentaries on India’s differences or otherwise with its neighbors.

Filmmaker Neil Jordan, who has explored similar themes along the British-Irish axis, echoes the ideological proclivity of many cultural critics in the academy today when he says that “the pretence to be self-enclosed and unconfused nation…to believe we could be at home in a single nation” is greatly dangerous (cited in Kearney 101). Jordan’s statement echoes both the general dismantling of the great Enlightenment narratives of the nation-state and the specific argument of the Subaltern Studies Group that has

challenged the supremacy of nationalism as totalizing and oppressive. This rethinking

leads to the spotlighting of hybridization, the polyphony of cultural nationalisms, and the

transnational contamination of both ideas and identities, and thus challenges the tyranny

of monolithic representations that often derive from the “common national identity.”

However, when this challenge takes material form as violence, a theoretical defense of

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cultural pluralism is faced with the work of historically understanding what motivates a

people to resort to bloodshed without defending the same. As Rajeev Bhargava argues,

“Theory cannot morally and unambiguously justify violence” (46).

One of the strategies for dealing with this dilemma can be to identify how the movement for autonomy from the nation-state characterized as insensitive to difference is itself afflicted by the inclination to totalize. For instance, on the one hand the Lanka

Tigers Tamil Eelam (LTTE) critiques the nation-state’s structural disenfranchisement of those constructed as “impure” through such technologies as those of language and land distribution. Perhaps it is because it gives voice to an ethnic minority whose religious and cultural differences with the Sinhalese population have been exacerbated by economic and political marginalization since Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) became a self-governing dominion of the Commonwealth of Nations in 1948 that the LTTE retains a broad support base among the Tamils despite deploying violent guerrilla tactics, including assassinations and bombings. On the other hand, members of the LTTE, in seeking territorial autonomy, an absolute break from the spatial body in which they are among many inhabitants, and themselves a hybrid entity, also echo the nation-state’s impulse towards insularity and themselves rely on a primordial understanding of language, ethnicity, religion, territory etc. to conceptualize their organization. They certainly defy the “profound desire for social solidarity” that Homi Bhabha, a prominent spokesperson for the “unhomely lives” reflected in gestures of “cultural dissensus and alterity,” finds eloquently expressed in the affirmation: “I am looking for the join…I want to join”

(Location, 18). Instead, the political events that provide the context for my discussion in

this chapter aggressively articulate a desire to “disjoin.”

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With reference to the relationship between political events and their representation, Roy Armes’s delineation of the major cinematic approaches to reality continues to be useful despite the passage of three decades in which the global media

environment has undergone numerous changes. Since we are not dealing with

experimental filmmaking which sets out to “question everyday reality and normal

assumptions of logic and sequence” (13), it is the first two categories listed by Armes that

are relevant here. In the first category, Armes places the works in which “the artist’s

prime concern is not to invent or to imagine, but to place people, objects, settings and

experiences as directly as possible in front of the camera and to make the audience see”

(10). The second category includes filmmakers who discard the ”direct link with reality” and fasten “instead on the film’s power to offer a resemblance or imitation of life” (ibid).

While the two categories generally correspond to documentary and fiction films, it needs to be stressed that the latter also remain invested in versions of verisimilitude. Like all classificatory systems, this one has its inadequacies, but it allows us a basic frame for

comparing the differing aesthetic motivations of the filmmakers discussed here.

Anand Patwardhan’s film War and Peace seeks to undermine the rationalization

of India’s nuclear weapons program as a response to the enmity of neighboring Pakistan

by contrasting the humane attestations of identity between the people of India and

Pakistan with the atavistically violent rhetoric of the nuclear ideologues in both countries.

While the juxtaposition of actual social actors is highly subjective, in the strictest sense

Patwardhan does not “stage” or “recreate” reality at any point. As Armes would say,

Patwardhan’s choices derive their validity “from the uniquely close link between the film image and the reality which it records” (12). This marks his aesthetic practices as

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significantly different from those of the other filmmakers discussed in this chapter. Vidhu

Vinod Chopra’s Mission Kashmir, Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se and Santosh Sivan’s The

Terrorist, all concerned with the interstices between territorial nationalisms and individual relationships, are “in a narrative film style which demands that a film-maker should use studio sets to represent his locations, should embody his characters by means of well-known actors and deal with stories that may be plausible but are certainly not true” (ibid). However, while Chopra, Ratnam and Sivan are comfortable with the cinematic strategies that delineate a “make-believe” world, their films are also making self-conscious political and social avowals, and display the indexical marks of “real” people, objects, settings and experiences to differing degrees. If India’s testing of nuclear devices in 1998 provides the kairos for War and Peace, the 1999 Kargil war between

India and Pakistan shapes the conception of Mission Kashmir. Chopra uses the occasion

of an international war to explore the deep internal divisions within India. These are

allegorized by way of a melodramatically conflicted family that struggles to maintain its

bonds in the face of the heterogeneous histories of its members. The utopian resolution of

political conflict is presented in individual and psychological terms. This is a strategy that

popular cinema conventionally relies upon to represent the social crisis amidst which it is

produced. Dil Se and The Terrorist adopt a similar strategy to frame the 1989 assassination of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi within the personalized narratives of their

female protagonists.

Some have attacked fiction films that stress the individual psychology of the

militant protagonist, who indexically stands in for the political movement that provides

context to the narrative, for glamorizing the terrorism that interjects anxiety and

114 disruption into the everyday life of the nation and others have accused the same films for fetishizing, distancing and romantically appropriating the “dreaded other” for “the transnational marketplace of substitutable imaginaries (“Fragmenting,” Chakravarty 235).

Similar criticisms have been leveled against Jordan, in whose work also we find the

“personal identity” themes that Robins and Aksoy have identified in contemporary

Turkish cinema. Martin Mcloone points out that some of Jordan’s films have been read as

“a validation of the worst aspects of Irish nationalism” (218). Instead of devaluing the strategy of individualizing a militant agenda as either glamorizing or distancing, I will read it as a “productive disordering” of the nationalist agenda.

In analyzing their narrative content, it is imperative to recognize that since the films discussed here reference events of critical significance to the nation state, they enter a conversation that is already mongrelized in the public sphere. Bhargava describes this space as “a common space, in principle accessible to all, which anyone may enter with views on the common good realized wholly or partially: a maidan, a coffee house, an exhibition hall, the paan shop on the road side, the sweet shop in the locality” (14-15).

The public sphere also includes “the discursive and representational space available in newspapers, magazines, journals, radio, television and now the internet” (14-15). If we bracket the popular as overlapping with the public sphere, what I seek to investigate is how War and Peace, Mission Kashmir, Dil Se and The Terrorist stand in relation to Colin

McCabe’s speculative assertion: “It may be that the opposition between the popular and the national will make the radical edge of politics” (99).

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War and Peace: Between Nuclear Neighbors

In early May 1998, India tested five nuclear devices at Pokhran in Rajasthan.

Across the border, within two weeks, Prime Minister Nawaj Sharif went on air, said, “I

am not the representative of a cowardly and submissive nation,” and exploded six nuclear devices (“World”). Pakistan’s response not only proved that the theory of deterrence was

without substance, but also signaled that we had stepped into a new age of border

conflicts. India and Pakistan already had the fourth and eighth largest armies in the world deploying their firepower less than one kilometer apart along the LOC (Krepton 3), but the nuclear explosions raised the stakes of their military contestation to an unprecedented level.

Anand Patwardhan’s War and Peace explores the links between the ideology of nuclear nationalism and the fundamentalist rhetoric of BJP, the party on whose watch both the 1998 nuclear tests in Rajasthan and the 2002 mass killings of Muslims in Gujarat were carried out, and which also looked well-poised to win the 2004 re-election when

Patwardhan’s film was released. The BJP government ascribed its reactionary positions on such issues as nuclear proliferation and the persecution of religious minorities to the popular demand of the devout Hindu. The wide-range of interviews, stage performances, street scenes, and political rallies filmed over three years and juxtaposed in War and

Peace over three hours effectively challenge the idea of consensus among the devout

Hindu, to show specific Hindus’ active demythification of their government’s rhetoric.

Patwardhan also traveled to Pakistan, Japan and the USA to make a stronger case

for the deceptiveness of the nuclear proponents. Then, he ran into trouble with the censor

board, which demanded 21 cuts. He reports being asked to delete all reference to the fact

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that Mahatama Gandhi was killed by a Hindu nationalist, all “unfriendly” analyses of the

2002 brutal mass murders and rapes in Gujarat, and “entire visuals and dialogues of all

political leaders, including President, Prime Minister & Ministers” (India and Pakistan”).

Wearing the hats of director, cameraperson, and editor, resisting the cuts, Patwardhan

took his case to the Bombay High Court, and won it. In 2002, his film won prizes at the

Earth Vision Film Festival, Mumbai International Film Festival, and Sydney International

Film Festival. More importantly, in 2003 it became available to what Rustom Bharucha

describes as “an informal distribution network by which Patwardhan’s films are screened

primarily on video in a range of secular forums, conducted by social action groups,

universities, NGOs, and unions” (141).

Equally significant was the positive reception War and Peace received in Pakistan

where it shared the Best Documentary prize with Michael Moore’s Bowling For

Columbine at the Third Karachi International Film Festival. The absurd contradictions in

the relationship between the two “enemy” countries are instanced in the fact that while

the Pakistani public consumes Indian films widely through video they have long

remained officially banned,1 which cost loss of revenue to the economies on both sides of

the border. Although the two governments’ efforts to control dissent are dissimilar in

degree, it should be noted that Patwardhan was struggling to get a visa to attend a film

festival in one country while the other was trying to censor his film. While the documentary footage in Patwardhan’s film and the reception it received in Pakistan

1 Recent reports on the lifting of the ban were accompanied by commentary about President Pervez Musharraf being a Bollywood fan, but quickly followed by retractions.

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counteracts the homogeneity of majoritarian chauvinism in the two countries, their

governments have a long history of communalized policies.

It is fitting then that War and Peace opens with a still image of the face of

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi who foresaw that the freedom that was instituted on the

foundation of religious difference would lead to an epoch of sectarianism. Patwardhan’s

voice is heard against this image: “Gandhiji was assassinated two years before I was

born. The grief of this moment never really went away, unconsciously transmitted trough

the love of parents and family. The child in me never stopped asking who could have done this to him.” At this point, the image is injected with movement, the camera zooms out and we realize that we are looking at newsreel footage of Gandhiji’s funeral.

Patwardhan’s narration continues: “That our family like Nathuram Godse were upper caste Hindus cured me of any narrow understanding of nation and any vestige of pride in the accident of birth. As the country convulsed in grief, organizations like the RSS were banned.” Godse who shot Gandhi dead was a member of the RSS, a BJP affiliate that has often discussed the nuclear bomb as a “Hindu bomb” and expressly demanded it since the

60s.2 At this point, there is a transition to the newsreels of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, showing the mushroom clouds, the deformed bodies, the burns, nurses and military personnel. Against this backdrop, the narration shifts into international gear, connecting

the events on the screen with the global arms industry. As Patwardhan cuts back to

Gandhiji’s funeral, his voice-over returns to events in India, connecting our nuclear tests

2 The RSS ( Rashtriya Swayemsevak Sangh) was founded in 1925 with the goal of combating the “cultural invasions” that threatened the identity of India as a Hindu nation. Following various political experiments, the RSS achieved success with the creation of the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) in 1980. After gaining strength as an Opposition Party over the next two decades, the BJP came to power at the Center in 1998 and continued to lead coalition governments till 2004.

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to the collapse of socialism and the revival of bigotry: “The ideology that killed Gandhiji

once more became legitimate. Nuclear Nationalism was in the air. The memory of one

who opposed the bomb on moral grounds alone had begun to fade.” And as Patwardhan

concludes the opening segment, the Gandhiji’s funeral pyre burns bright in close-up, and

then it too fades away.

The mosaic of interviews that follows the opening segment is quite didactically

edited. The celebratory responses to the nuclear tests appear aggressively macho or

murderous at worst and completely self-deluded at best. As a man in Bombay proclaims,

“India is the only country in the world that can conquer any country in the world, this we

proved to the rest of the world,” Patwardhan’s camera moves away from his interviewee.

Across the passing crowds, he finds and focuses on the Beggar woman who sits in a

street corner, squatting against a beetle-juice covered wall. When a Khetolai villager

poignantly mourns how insouciantly the government has poisoned the environment of a

people, the Bishnoi people who live near the test site, who worship Nature, in whose

temples the icons are the women who tied themselves to trees slotted for destruction, then

Patwardhan’s camera doesn’t move away from the speaker. At the editing table, he even

makes sure that his audience will meet this villager more than once. Patwardhan is not

only unapologetic, but also quite vocal about this strategy of treating his interviewees

differentially. He has said:

Quite often I cut out very fast on the people I don't like because then I just get the punch-line, the nasty bit that they've said and then I juxtapose it to something else. But, when it's a sympathetic person that I'm talking to, I tend to stay on that person for longer because that person has other dimensions from the immediate dimension of what is being said and that has a visual dimension - it's a way of saying that we don't want to leave you right now but we have to do something else. (“Interview”)

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And sometimes the personal dimension makes the filmmaker pause before moving on “to

do something else.”

When Patwardhan makes the rapid cut from proud male to destitute female mentioned above, the two subjects transcend their individual attributes (that are nonetheless distinctive and memorable) and connect to a broader conversation in which the self-proclaimed nationalists often adopted identifiably machismo-laden stances. As

Arundhati Roy points out:

“Explosions of self-esteem,” “Road to Resurgence and “A Moment of Pride,” these were headlines in the days following the nuclear tests. “We have proved that we are not eunuchs any more,” said Mr Thackeray of the Shiv Sena. . . . Reading the newspapers, it was hard to tell when people were referring to Viagra (which was competing for second place on the front pages) and when they were talking about the bomb – “We have superior strength and potency.” (That was our Minister of Defense after Pakistan completed its tests). (25-26)

As mentioned earlier, Prime Minister Nawaj Sharif said in a similar vein: “I am not the representative of a cowardly and submissive nation.” Thus the man whom we hear saying, “India is the only country in the world that can conquer any country in the world, this we proved to the rest of the world,” reflects a widespread macho posturing that was accompanied by the hurling of anti-nationalist and anti-Hindu charges against those who refused to acquiesce in the celebrations. That the bomb was described as Islamic in

Pakistan demonstrates the diabolical simplicity of invoking religious inscriptions to

validate authenticity of identity. T. N. Madan is one among many who have pointed out

that fundamentalist movements execute “a selective retrieval of tradition,” redefining it in

the light of contemporary contexts and only then giving “the call for a return to the

fundamentals of the faith” (315).

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The cut to the beggar woman gives a face to the population that pays the cost of

the defense budgets spiraling in the wake of religious chauvinism. While Abdul Kalam,

the Scientific Advisor to the Indian government during the phase that culminated in the

Pokhran tests and also called the father of India’s missile program, was rewarded for his

contribution to military research with nothing less than the Presidency itself, Roy points

out that, “however many garlands we heap on our scientists, however many medals we

pin to their chests, the truth is that it’s far easier to make a bomb than to educate four

million people” (50).3 Pervez Hoodbhoy, who researches nuclear phenomenology in

Pakistan, similarly points the baffling nature of seeking greatness through bombs when

the masses are drowning in a sea of poverty and “no hope exists for the abandoned

pavement dwellers of Indian cities, whose number runs into tens of millions, or for their

generations to come” (61). So the heartbreaking pan of a nameless woman and her

depressed surroundings implicitly casts the young man proclaiming, “India is the only

country in the world that can conquer any country in the world, this we proved to the rest

of the world” as hideously delusional. The abrupt cut away from him communicates beyond words that Patwardhan is unsympathetic to his bravado. When this filmmaker is simpatico with his interviewee, the process of separation is often stretched out and reluctant.

For instance, on a street in Pakistan, an interviewee speaks for peace between

India and Pakistan, and then diffidently asks whether Patwardhan is Hindu or Muslim.

For the second time in the film, the filmmaker acknowledges his Hindu identity. Then the

3 The statistics she lists are chilling: “We are a nation of nearly a billion people. In development terms we rank No 138 out of the 175 countries listed in the UNDP’s Human Development Index (even Ghana and Sri Lanka rank above us). More than 400 million of our people are illiterate and live in absolute poverty, more than 600 million lack even basic sanitation and more than 200 million have no safe drinking water” (36).

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interviewee, Ijaz, invites Patwardhan to tea in his home. As Patwardhan follows Ijaz

through the curtain, and sits down in a room now crowded with people, he is asked to put

the camera down and offered some apples along with the tea. He does place the camera

beside himself, but cannot bring himself to turn it off. So, as words of peace and wisdom

are exchanged, the camera jerkily tries to keep up with the “action.” The shaky images

reinforce the impression of Patwardhan’s utilitarian craftsmanship that establishes an

attack on the rise of religious fundamentalism as a primary target, and relegates other

concerns to a secondary status. When the interviewee invokes the Sufi mystic Bulleh

Shah who said, ““Take down the Mosque. Take down the Temple. Take down anything

that will fall. But please don’t demolish a single human heart, because that is where God

really resides,” Patwardhan fluently joins in the incantation. This scene makes the

historical point that the Pakistani and the Indian, the Muslim and the Hindu, share

language, music and mystical traditions. Equally, it functions as a microcosmic digest of

the “incipient epistemic community” that is forming on both sides of the border with the

artist-activists joining an increasing number of academics, bureaucrats and even military

personnel to establish channels of communication that will help correct the “deliberately

distorted image of adversaries” among people who were after all one “nation” just two

generations ago (Ganguly 14).

Emblematic of this process is the work of Pakistani bands like Junoon who have

released a pop version of the Bulleh Shah verse quoted above, and who are as popular in

India as in their home country. Artists like Nandita Das (of Fire fame) have collaborated with this band in a deliberate effort to counter the jaundiced fictions of hate groups. As

someone who sees her work in films in a continuum with her activism, and has first hand

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experience of how progressive cultural expression can encounter grim reactions from

fundamentalist groups, Das shares Patwardhan’s commitment to expanding people-to-

people contacts across the border. If Das has been attacked as being unpatriotic in India,

Junoon has sometimes been branded treasonous in Pakistan. In talking to Patwardhan, the

Junoon members, like Ijaz, quote the Sufi teaching: “Never be a traitor to the people.

After all, humans come first. National borders are man-made.” Then, Junoon performs

one of their chart toppers at the peace conference, which the filmmaker is also attending.

As they sing, “What is the capability of man, here today, gone tomorrow” in the

background, we watch a military parade with missile carriers and fighter jets et al. As

they appeal, “Why become mad yourself,” we watch the underground nuclear explosion ripping the earth apart. Once again, Patwardhan’s edits have layered the interviewee’s words with sharply directed irony although it is not targeted against the interviewee this time.

While a shared language facilitates the communicative process between the filmmaker and his Pakistani interviewees, this can become snagged by hurdles of mistrust. Unlike the interview with Ijaz mentioned above, Patwardhan’s conversation with a group of students at a girls’ school in Lahore proceeds unevenly. He describes the experience documented in the film:

To start with many girls spoke vehemently and eloquently in favor of Pakistan’s atom bomb. They obviously wanted to impress me, and Indian, with their Pakistani nationalism. As we got to chat with each other over the next few hours and they understood that I was a critic of the Indian bomb, they visibly relaxed and started criticizing Pakistani militarism. By the end, when I asked one girl why she had chosen the pro-bomb argument during the debate, she admitted that it was because the pro-bomb position would get her “more points” and enable her to win. I pointed out that this was exactly what our politicians do. She laughed embarrassedly and said: “I should not have done it, and politicians should not do it either.” Then she

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added with a shy smile: “Maphi chahati hoon (I ask for forgiveness).” (“India and Pakistan”)

For Patwardhan, the act of apologizing indicates both an acceptance of responsibility and

a coming to terms with the past. After all, the opening of War and Peace functions as an

acknowledgement of his accountability as an upper-caste Hindu.

One could question Patwardhan’s willingness to “embarrass” his interviewees

as elitist. In other words, his obsession with critiquing communalism leaves Patwardhan

open to the charge of being a propagandist in the tradition of John Grierson, who could

even say: “I look at the cinema as a pulpit” (quoted in Barnouw 85). But as John

Akomfrah recognizes in interviewing the filmmaker, this is rather a symptom of his

strong personal engagement with the subject: “We can always hear your voice in the

background, prodding people, cajoling them, seducing them most of the time, to confess

things they would otherwise not confess.” In initiating impassioned conversations in

which the participants on opposite sides of the camera sometimes directly object to each

other’s contentions, Patwardhan is not talking down to the subjects in his film. In fact, in

making interjections that respond to the particularity of each engagement, Patwardhan’s

filmmaking breaks the Griersonian mold, which Bill Nichols characterizes as one “in

which the corporeal I who speaks dissolves itself into a disembodied, depersonalized, institutional discourse of power and knowledge” (181). The heterogeneous range of the

documented encounters, including incidental and targeted, emerge from both a respect for

specificity and the self-critical understanding that even the seemingly definitive abstract

glosses over the immeasurable contingency of representation.

One could question the assumptions of authenticity and transparency embedded in

the interface between the filmmaker and the disparate testimonies that he records. On the

124 other hand, in the context of the footage of the Rodney King beating, the space shuttle

Challenger exploding and the effects of “smart bombs,” Nichols has argued that some documentary images sweep aside the doubts raised by Jean Baudrillard about “the reference principle of images” (189, 190). Such moments both affirm “the pain and loss suffered by the social actor” and acknowledge “the inadequacy of response channeled toward and through the representation itself” (190-191). They demand, “struggle within a larger interpretative arena, outside the frame, beyond the screen, in that anterior world whose future delineation remains up for grabs” (191).

Patwardhan’s films participate in the larger interpretative arena as many activist groups promoting communal harmony buy video copies and show them to one community after another. Trade unions, women’s organizations and civil liberties groups also find his films have campaign value. When War and Peace was released, the prospect of another five years of the fundamentalist BJP government at the Center was very real and his film had the political objective of impacting the ruling party “beyond the screen.”

Whether by reminding them that it was an upper-caste Hindu who killed Gandhi whose principles the nation-state had radically abandoned in pursuing a nuclear weapons program or by introducing them to the Hibakusho who have first-hand knowledge of how the nuclear bomb can devastate life or by showcasing the Pakistani interviewees who warmly welcome Indian visitors in the name of peace, Patwardhan was calling to the voters to see through the BJP’s chauvinistic rhetoric and elect it out of power. Even in the diaristic voiceover, any glimpses into his personal or intimate life are towards a patently political end. The scenes filmed in “The Enemy Country” have a particularly powerful impact in that they paint an alternative to the kind of interaction projected by jingoist

125 nationalists. The scene with Ijaz ends with Patwardhan saying from behind the camera, “I am very happy that I met you,” and Ijaz replying, “I am more happy than you that I met you.” Generally, as well, we cannot but feel Patwardhan’s pleasure in finding so many people who disrupt the Hindu or Muslim archetypes that hate-speech constructs and perpetuates. Also, through what Nichols has called a portrait-like framing of social actors, we register that Patwardhan is doing more than educating the audience about why they should not vote for the BJP. Images like that of Ijaz and the Khetolai villager referred to earlier reminded the sympathetic audience that defeating the BJP was a real possibility because there were so many others who were averse to its policies.

As the BJP and its associates distribute millions of canting audio and video cassettes to rally votes, counter-propaganda via media is not just a resourceful but indispensable stratagem. Patwardhan’s film has value for such a campaign, the need for which has become even more pressing as the BJP is now winning votes even across the caste spectrum as evidenced in the 2003 assembly elections wherein their systematic mobilization in the tribal belts paid off. In analyzing these developments and their dangers, Kancha Ilaiah points out that, “what is uppermost in the mind of some SC intelligentsia is that upward mobility in the spheres of economy and politics will be possible only when they join hands with Brahmins,” and that “all their arguments flow from a basic concern for the economic development of Dalits” (128). But he also argues that, the “Dalit intellectuals who are talking about a Dalit-Brahmin coalition do not theorize social relations from historical experience. They do not base their opinions on a transformative ideology or discuss the spiritual realm at all” (ibid.).

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Patwardhan’s film, however, is an inspiring indicator of the transformative counter-currents inhabiting a variety of Dalit social and performance spaces even in the midst of the dissemination of the BJP party line. For instance, consider his filming of a massive Dalit rally. As a preface to this segment, the voice-over describes how Dr

Ambedkar, whose photograph solemnly occupies the screen, led the conversions of millions of Dalits to Buddhism, which is without the iniquitous caste hierarchies that mar

Hinduism. Then he cuts to the movement leader Bhai Sangare delivering the following address:

The Buddha said that sorrow exits and we must acknowledge it. The root cause of why the sorrow exists can be altered. Marx said that too, but instead of sorrow he named it poverty. Karl Marx didn’t merely say that poverty exists. He named what causes that poverty. Our cultural baggage says – ask the old mother there – she’ll say, I’m paying for the sins of my previous life. That’s why I am poor. The Buddha said on what basis can you say there was sin in the past. The other day they exploded a bomb on May 11th, Buddha’s anniversary. The one who gave the world a message of peace, a nuclear blast on his birthday? Can you sing the praises of a nuclear test? Can we celebrate Hiroshima? …. Aren’t you ashamed? Why didn’t you do the blasts on Rama’s birthday? It’s your culture. All your gods are fully armed. Rama has an arrow and Shankar has a trident. Vishnu has a butcher’s knife. All have weapons. So when it’s the birthday of your armed ones, do your blast. Our Buddha is unarmed.

The success of the 1974 nuclear test was signaled by the code-phrase “The Buddha

Smiled,” and the 1998 tests were carried out on the day commemorating Buddha’s birth.

Sangare is responding to both this specific co-option of a pacifist icon by the Hindu nuclear ideologues and the general social and economic injustices perpetuated against

Dalits by upper-caste Hindus. As Sangare harshly indicts the majority community in his speech, intermittent cuts allow us to gage both the size of his audience and the strength of the connections he is forging with them. They appear to share a penetrating assessment of the self-serving and deceptive accounts of the dominant class that Ilaiah has clearly

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articulated: “We know for certain that the test-firing of nuclear bombs – the most

dangerous weapons that human society has so far produced – within two months of the

Hindutva forces coming to power is an expression of Hindutva’s historically established

behavior of using threats to control the other” (53).

However, it needs to be stressed that this work of counter-propaganda is

enormously challenging. For instance, if the censors had had their way even the record of

Sangare’s performance would have been deleted from Patwardhan’s film. Moreover, the movement for Dalit self-assertion is embattled in divergent impulses. The Dalit Panther

Party, founded in 1972, pulls the movement in a different direction than the teachings of

B.R. Ambedkar. This constitution-maker envisioned the Dalit dissidence from casteist and fundamentalist policies as leading to a cross-community alliance of the oppressed

under the umbrella of Buddhist identification. While Bhai Sangare seamlessly integrates

Marx and Buddha in his speech, the latter’s ethical and spiritual influence might wane if

the Panthers and the Tigers (the Shiv Sena’s emblem) continue to forge electoral alliances.

Now, Anand Patwardhan is just one of the many documentary filmmakers today who consider their art inseparable from activism. Their work is in different styles and, while it remains a powerful influence, the Griersonian mode has lost its monopoly. It is the desire to disturb the ruling paradigms and the struggle that this entails that we can identify as the common factor in the work of, for instance, Madhusree Dutta and

Patwardhan. The scene from War and Peace described now gives us a glimpse of the nature of this struggle, and also allows us to again appreciate how Patwardhan wields his voice and camera. This scene captures the peace activists’ arrival at Pokhran, the town

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nearest to the Indian test site. Patwardhan is rallying alongside the activists, and does not

pretend that he is a disinterested observer at the scene. The fact of his participation

renders the camerawork shaky, and audience vision sways back and forth, up and down,

as the local chapter of the RSS receives the activists who arrive with songs of peace with

slogans by accusing them of being Pakistan-supporters and anti-nationalists. As the

marchers are heckled and jostled, the camera captures the disconnection between the two

sets of citizenry, one of whose strategy of confrontation is musical and the other whose

line of attack is physically intimidating. With the songs and slogans making a harsh

symphony in the background, Patwardhan interviews the bystanders, some of whom

express an aversion to their local leaders’ refusal to allow them to take note of alternative

points of view. As unequivocal as Patwardhan’s own position on the nuclear tests is, he does not seek to block out the opposition in the fashion of organizations such as the RSS.

His strategy is to seek to become acquainted with and then logically de-legitimize the proponents of intensified arms programs.

Robert Gardner, whose Forest of Bliss emblematizes a filmmaking style that “is

really a search for ways to be there before something happens,” has argued that,

“nonfiction filmmakers with the interests that require them to follow rather than lead the

action need a sixth sense of what is about to happen just to get into something visually interesting” (178). While Patwardhan’s style is obviously far less patient with a world that manifests itself by chance, and while he is a more programmatic producer of meaning than Gardner for the most part, we can observe his “sixth sense” in operation as the scene described above comes to a close. The peace march ends as dusk falls, but

Patwardhan chooses to keep following it with his camera. The long distance framing of

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the tired activists disappearing into the horizon, in contrast to the shots of the crowds that

precede it, strikes a poignant note, which would suggest defeat but for the song of peace

that carries over on the soundtrack. This shot reinforces the effect of an earlier one of an activist’s feet, ascetic in appearance, moving forward very very tentatively. The struggle against aggressive fundamentalisms is a wearying one, but it has to be fought, and it has to go on.

The cost of a weakening of the progressive resolve can be devastating. Even many secular citizens horrified by the party’s role in the rampantly criminal destruction of the

Babri Mosque helped the BJP return to power in 1999 because they were satisfied that the economy was doing well and because they had been persuaded that the 1998 nuclear tests had won India both international security and status. This helped give the BJP activists and MLAs the confidence to brazenly orchestrate the massacre of approximately

2000 Muslims and the displacement of thousands more in Gujarat in 2002. As Rowena

Robinson and D. Parthasarthy point out, “the massacre and the attacks on property may be said to have taken the form of a pogrom against the Muslims of the state,” and this theory is substantiated by the reports about “the deliberate undermining of democratic institutions, and the direct complicity of the law enforcement agencies and the state” during the riots (306. 311). Poignantly, “such was the implicit faith of Muslims in the law, such their trust in democratic procedures that raped and assaulted women, tortured and almost naked, trudged to police stations in remote areas to file FIRs” before they sought medical assistance (310). But in the days following the massacre, members of the ruling party, including the Prime Minister, consistently underemphasized the scale of the violence, and their defiant repudiations were strengthened by the partisan state police’s

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illegitimate refusal to properly file many of the aforementioned FIRs. Documentaries

such as Rakesh Sharma’s Final Solution (2003) have since collected video testimonials

that along with reports of various inquiry commissions give the lie to the government’s

refusal to accept facts and responsibility. Nevertheless, in the following assembly

elections not only did the BJP government regain power in Gujarat, but it also unseated

Congress governments in three additional states. However disheartening these

developments might have been, we can take hope from the fact that, despite the

predictions of most psephologists, the BJP government at the center was finally defeated

in 2004. But the party’s historical penchant for mobilizing against the “enemy” with renewed force and a reinvented course whenever the democratic process forces its retreat suggests that a recuperating nativism is currently in search of new tactics for achieving a

Hindu nation. As Robert Eric Frykenberg has shown, in the past, “fear and desperation, inspired by Hindu extremism and militancy have spurred reactions” from religious or ethnic communities “who have been deemed as ‘non-Hindu’ or who have designated themselves as ‘non-Hindu’ (due to socioeconomic thralldom or ritual exclusion)” (603).

Majoritarian fundamentalism and the movements that are engendered in reaction perpetuate a vicious cycle of fundamentalisms.

Efforts to break this vicious cycle include the filmmaker’s journey across the border, which is part of a broader range of confidence-building initiatives that South

Asian civil society has been supporting with increasing urgency. These initiatives have the challenge of navigating sentimentally charged spaces. Hoodbhoy is one among many of political scientists who have pointed out: “The strong emotions generated by the nuclear issue have precluded a genuine debate – at the public level or within the higher

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echelons of government” (53). While it is difficult to pressurize the highest levels of national administrations to agree that the arms build-up should not escalate any further,

Patwardhan’s film participates in the creation of the debate that must happen now that

South Asia is “irreversibly nuclearized.” We must displace from the center stage the

nuclear hawks, both Indian and Pakistani, whose “quixotic belief that a ‘balance of terror’

is in the best interest of the both countries” has brought us to the brink of a potentially

catastrophic conflagration (ibid). Kashmir, however, represents a vital roadblock to the

processes of peaceful reconciliation. As Hoodbhoy argues, “it is that canonical truth that

peace can only come about if the cause of conflict is removed” (68). However, when

Indian and Pakistani armies mobilize across the Kashmiri border, peace in the region

seems a distant prospect.

Mission Kashmir: About fractured patrimonies

Vidhu Vinod Chopra started production on Mission Kashmir in July 1999. This

was just a few months after the Kargil war had broken out between India and Pakistan.

By the time the film was released in October 2000, TV cameras had taken audiences into

the domestic spaces of the soldiers whose funerals were turned into rituals of national

mourning. In earlier years, only the national telecaster Doordarshan would have brought

us the stories of soldiers, of their heroism and sacrifices, of medals won, and of destituted

families. These stories would have been slotted into the news bulletins and the

government broadcasts. The satellite explosion of the nineties ensured that the Kargil war

broke the earlier war coverage patterns. Hours and hours of news and human-interest feed

and talk show coverage on dozens of channels did more than debate the political moves

underlying the Kargil conflict. We could now fete new heroes as national heroes every

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week or every weekend. The TV crews would visit this city or that village across the

country, to enter the homes of martyred soldiers; we would meet their families; we would

be positioned to mournfully nod our heads in empathy for their loss. Meanwhile the

soldiers kept dying with almost monotonous regularity. The death toll was still mounting

when Mission Kashmir was released. In an interview with Patrick Biswas, Vidhu Vinod

Chopra admitted to deeply personal reasons for making the film: “Kashmir was my

childhood, it was my paradise. I have seen Kashmir when it was like heaven, when it was

literally paradise on this earth. I have also seen how it’s been ravaged through the years

and it’s torn my heart out.” He called Mission Kashmir a response to the agony of

Kashmir, a call for sanity and peace, and an offering to the spirit of Kashmiriyat. Mission

Kashmir,4 too, paralleling the interest of the satellite telecasts, takes us into the domestic

space of a soldier in Indian uniform.

This domesticity, however, is pointedly contaminated by the placement of the

other within it, the other whose military skills are deployed to damage those in Indian

uniform to the fullest possible extent. The family of the soldier Inayat Khan and his jihadi

son Altaf functions as a metaphor of the split national object, an object confronting the

horrifically contesting demands of nationalisms and the nation-state. One of my goals here is to investigate the political and psychological implications of the contaminated domesticity represented in Mission Kashmir. While not the object of this chapter, it should be noted that other productions such as the film adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s My

4 The film is jointly scripted by Chopra, Suketu Mehta, Abhijat Joshi and Vikram Chandra whose first novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain won the Commonwealth Writers Prize 1996. While the interior scenes and the climax were filmed at Film City in Bombay, much of Mission Kashmir was shot on location in Kashmir. It is reported that rocket-propelled grenades were fired at the Secretariat a short distance from the filming location and an actor playing an escaped militant was mistaken for a real one and almost gunned down (“Mission Kashmir”).

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Son the Fanatic and the television adaptation of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth also

investigate the subject of the jihadi by probing his familial background. The critical

difference is that unlike Kureishi and Smith’s novels, the Mission Kashmir narrative is

not invested in addressing the East-West axis of differentiation. In the narrative context

that Chopra sets up, the combating protagonists are both Muslim and Kashmiri by birth and identification so focus is on resolving “internal” differences. However, the deep- rooted anxieties invoked by the events in the film have a global resonance because the specter of renegade nationalisms destabilizing nation-states that Mission Kashmir evokes

is one that is frightening the entire modern world’s political community.

The opening sequence of the film presages both its violent, melodramatic and

allegorical profusion. By the same processes of iconographic condensation that for

example suggest to us that we are going to watch a film about New York when the

camera takes us across the waters to look at the statue of Liberty, the opening frame of

the film establishes Kashmir as its setting. We see here the rolling hills and the Dal Lake.

The picture-postcard nature of the frame reminds us why Kashmir used to be a prime

tourist attraction before “the troubles” started. There is also the archetypical shikara

floating across the gently lapping water, as effective a signifier of beauty and romance as

the Venetian gondola. Films like the 1964 classic Kashmir Ki Kali (or A Kashmiri

blossom) have immortalized love on the shikaras, which local people use to sell flowers

and vegetables. Precisely because the panoramic composition we see before us has

slipped into the status of a cliché, we are lulled into relaxing. It’s a familiar image we are

watching, not very challenging. It remains familiar for about ten seconds. Then the

shikara explodes, loudly. We can’t possibly miss the first explosion. Nevertheless the

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film cuts to show the exploding shikara again. The nineties have infected the cinema

screen, both in the general sense that the movies made in the last decade film militancy

with unprecedented regularity and in the particular sense that the picture-postcard frame

that has been the prototypical setting of Bollywood chartbusters is here violently

submitted to an explosion.

As the fires of communalism raged elsewhere, Gandhi said: “Hinduism and Islam

are put to test in Kashmir . . .. I hope and pray that in this subcontinent lost in darkness,

Kashmir proves to be a pillar of light” (cited in Bhati 9). Unfortunately, as India and

Pakistan have warred over control of the state, with both refusing to consider an

autonomous Kashmiri nation-state, the battle between Indian armed forces and

secessionists (including foreign mercenaries) has taken a grim toll on life in the region.

Approximately 300,000 Hindus were forced to flee their homes in 1989 alone, but in any

given year “the figure of Muslims killed is significantly higher than the number of

Kashmiri Pandits or other minorities targeted” (17, 20). As Avanti Bhati emotionally

concludes, “The scourge of terrorism and militancy is all encompassing. It does not

discriminate between the people of Kashmir on the basis of their caste, creed or religion.

The only silent sufferer in this anguished valley is the spirit that has guided it until now;

its Kashmiriyat” (20).

Three soldiers of the Border Security Force (BSF) race towards the pier to save the

lives of those who were presumably on the shikara. As they talk to each other, we realize

that one is a Kashmiri Muslim, another a Kashmiri Brahmin and yet another a Punjabi

Sikh. The Kashmiri Muslim Inayat Khan is the senior officer, and immediately set apart as heroic as the scene develops. He is the first to figure out that the pier is rigged with

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explosives just as the shikara was, and then in a running dive lifts to safety the fellow

soldier now immobilized by fear on the pier. We will later find out that the family of the

Brahmin soldier has had flee its ancestral home in Kashmir, and that the 1984 anti-Sikh

riots in New Delhi wiped out the Punjabi soldier’s family. The opening scene thus alludes

to the battle scars that all the different communities in India are carrying,5 but provides a

counterpoint to them via the song that plays in the background as the shikara explodes.

In fact, all the song sequences in the film function as dreamscapes, sometimes of utopian and sometimes of dystopian dimensions. Later songs condense the nostalgic

constructions of childhood and imaginary community with the promise of future paradise,

energizing the chosen activity of the present. Here the song is poignant, poetic and sets

out the ethos of the film. It gives us the very first words in the film: “Smoke, only smoke,

smoke everywhere.” As metaphor, “smoke” speaks to the contemporary condition of

Kashmir and it people. Smoke is so enveloping and suffocating. Sometimes you can find

the fire, put it out, and still the smoke surrounds you for a long time. Sometimes you just

have to run away, to leave your belongings to burn to ashes. Sometimes smoke can be the

fatal signal that death is not to be averted this time. Yet, to quote from the song, “ a

desperate longing for life/ is written on every corpse.” The film is a fiercely violent

meditation on what it takes to compromise and then salvage the jihadi’s “desperate

longing for life.” It is also a reminder that sometimes, as Jan E. M. Houben and Karel R.

Van Kooij point out, “violence is from the outset provided with a justification which, in

5 Here, we should note that the blindness that sometimes results from “the complacency of the high moral ground assumed by exponents of the Left-liberal position” has particular provenance with reference to Kashmir (Hoskote 8). Ranjit Hoskote points to “the prolonged Left-liberal refusal to recognize the predicament of the Kashmiri Pandits, whose travails were not only not accorded recognition, but were even dismissed as State-sponsored hallucinations,” and “large numbers of potentially liberal Hindus tipped over the fence into the arms of aggressive Hindutva” (8-9).

136 view of the perpetrators, disqualifies it as ‘violence’ in the full descriptive and

(negatively) evaluative sense of the term”(13). Violence is thus seen “as an instrument contributing to a revolution, and ultimately this revolution is to bring about a better social and political conditions” (ibid).

We first encounter Altaf as a child who loves to paint watercolor translations of the opening mise-en-scene – blue waters, rolling hills, and the shikara. While the film finds numerous ways to keep these creations circulating throughout its duration, the last time we actually watch Altaf painting is on the very day that his parents become

“collateral damage” in the battle between the Border Security Forces and a radical militant cadre. Inayat and his Hindu wife adopt Altaf, but when the latter discovers that it was Inayat’s bullets that took down his defenseless family he flees. Over the passage of years, Inayat and Neelima mourn their lost son while Altaf joins a training camp across the border. In the second half of the film, as the blurb puts it, “two brave men battle each other …and paradise burns.” By the time we next meet Altaf, his every sleeping moment is invaded with the smell of his parents’ burnt bodies and the sound of their dying screams and he is taking orders from Hilal Kohistani, a nomadic Islamic warrior who fought the Russians in Afghanistan and has a Koran-spouting ally who in shadowy profile bears amazing resemblance to Osama Bin Laden. Altaf’s disaggregated patrimony reflects how the carnage that has assaulted the panoramic vista gracing the film’s opening taps into fault lines that now run deep across the Kashmiri consciousness. He appears as what Ravi S. Vasudevan has called an emblematic character, who “in a way quite distinct from the realistic character and the typed character,” carries “a discourse that tends to

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critique hierarchical forms on the terrain of the state and insists on a different set of claims on it” (“Making,” 183).

The standard sets of claims are represented by the father figures who embody distinct regime possibilities in the name of Kashmiriyat. But, it can be argued that in a state inhabited by Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs, “the only plausible basis of identity for the Kashmir valley … are the Kashmiri language, the dress, the diet, the arts and architecture – in short, the lifestyle” (Oommen 175).6 Nevertheless, because the

region has a Muslim majority, Pakistan considers itself the legitimate guardian of its people and initiated a war to win it in the very first year after Indian and Pakistan became independent.7 On the other hand, even the appearance of considering autonomy for

Kashmir would endanger the 120 million Muslim inhabitants in the rest of the states.

Peter van der Veer quotes a VHP pamphlet that indicates how the Hindutva brigade

would respond to India’s “decapitation”: “History has witnessed vivisection [sic] of India

from time to time, with each division part of our motherland has gone away together with

a number of Hindu sacred places and gems of our culture” (666). Afghanistan, Burma,

Ceylon, Pakistan and Bangladesh are included in the “Greater India” that has been

allowed to break up. The pamphlet goes on to ominously warn against, “further division

[that] is being silently planned by foreign powers” would lead to “a situation like

Lebanon” in India (666). Skepticism about autonomy is also implied in academic

6 In this sense, the film is saturated with popularly recognizable signifiers of Kashmiriyat such as the theme song adapted from a Kashmiri folk lyric, the shikara, the hot kahwa (or a saffron and almond tea) being handed around in the film, the namdas (or Kashmiri rugs) lying on the floors of the domestic sets, the elaborately ruffle embroidered curtains and caftans, and so on.

7 If the Indian government alleges Pakistani involvement in the Kashmiri and Punjabi insurgencies, the Pakistanis allege that the Indian intelligence aids unrest in Sind and Baluchistan (Ganguly 19).

138 formulations like that of Sudipta Kaviraj who acridly argues against “the obligatory pretence that … each disgruntled group of people are a nation in waiting, and must break away from one erstwhile nation only to create another” (128). He characterizes the belief of any people, “in the face of history that their nation would not repeat the tragedies of others” in terms of “heroic unreasonableness” (ibid). The explosion that disintegrated the picture-postcard frame was a portent of how these warring claims would split up Altaf desires.

While Altaf’s disaggregated patrimony indicates how the family-as-nation metaphor is deeply troubled by contestatory invocations of Kashmiriyat, the film performs an even greater disruption of the domestic space. As if hell-bent on excess, it propels towards matricide, which is diegetically displaced onto one of Altaf’s nightmares.

This is a super-stylized sequence that plays off the peaceful dreamscapes found at the opening of the film and in his childhood sketches, but gives them a garish form. The blue colors of the Dal Lake are now filtered through fragile panes of glass. Veils of flimsy fabric replace the mountains and forests surrounding the famous waters. The architecture of the set creates a sense of brittle immanence that contrasts with the classically post-card character of the ideal opening scene. The explosion that shatters the peace of the Dal

Lake is given a counterpart in a gunshot. The agents of this shattering are no longer in army uniform, but dressed in ornamental costumes that are psuedo-regional. Ironically annotating the violence that will disrupt the sequence, a folk-derived song plays melodiously in the background. As Altaf and Sufi dance to this song on translucent pieces of glass, the camera moves around them in a disorienting way. Light, space and

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composition render their song and dance a passing performance, portending that the

dream of love is doomed to collapse into a nightmare.

We are seeing Altaf desperately defending his present self. The childhood lover

Sufi, on whose walls his watercolors hang after he stops painting them, assaults this identity-construct by wrenching religious sanctity away from his actions: “Islam does not

condone terrorism.” His love necessarily turns into hatred. He must destroy her in

retaliation. The logic of the nightmare dictates that it’s his childhood self that hands him

the gun to shoot her. The little boy and girl retreat into the sidelines, doing their two-step as the nightmare reaches its climax. Herein Sufi’s body transfigures into the body of

Neelima, Altaf’s surrogate Hindu mother. And as the camera hovers around her, we hear the sound of the water lapping against a shikara. Figuratively, the murdered mother’s body has contaminated the Dal Lake. Perhaps more than anyone else in the film, Neelima embodies the forces of good, the work of warding off violence. And though she is married to Inayat Khan, Altaf has never shown anything but love for her. Why does the fantasized scene stage the desire to kill her? If even Altaf and Neelima cannot maintain intimacy without marshalling murderous desires, how fragile is any social equilibrium?

To take heart, we might look to the protective function of fantasy, the fact that the phantasmal staging of matricide horrifies Altaf, and enables reparation with life forces.

This is manifested by his return into the fold of Inayat Khan’s family, which performs its critique of the nation-state without a disavowal of the same.

If the opening frame represents an idyllic Kashmir, and then explodes it, the closing sequences reverse this movement. An explosions galore leads to a dreamscape in which father, mother, lover and subject play on a field of green under snow-covered hills.

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Critics are skeptical about this closing image, which Philip Lutgendorf describes as “a

Field of Dreams where flawed fathers and straying sons are reunited in good, clean,

nationalistic family fun.” But can we forget that father has killed father? The mother is

dead; the son did not kill her; except the son did kill her in one of his nightmares. Doesn’t

a sense of dread persist, that yet another explosion, lurking just off-screen, imminently

threatens to destroy this dreamscape too?

Dil Se and The Terrorist: When women explode

In the summer of 1991, as Rajiv Gandhi’s campaign to return to the center as

Prime Minister accelerated, his victory in the forthcoming mid-term poll appeared

certain. On May 21, he arrived at the last of a series of public meetings he attended that

day at Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu. It was 10 pm, but a crowd with garlands and shawls immediately surrounded him. As it felicitated him, a young girl Kokila recited a poem in his honor. The scene appeared no different from that of a million other election rallies

that culminate in the establishing of central governments. Then, an explosion ripped

Rajiv Gandhi’s body to shreds. Next morning, the dailies reported that a member of the female unit of the LTTE had activated a body bomb as she raised herself from Rajiv

Gandhi’s feet to garland him. Photos of this suicide bomber’s severed head, with her bindi miraculously intact, made for grisly viewing on the front pages.

In this section, I will discuss two films, which were released in 1998, which reference the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, which have the female terrorist as protagonist, and which offer as dramatic resolution scenes of the explosion of the female terrorist acting as a human bomb. Dil Se is directed by Mani Ratnam and The Terrorist is

directed by Santosh Sivan. The critical decision that the filmmakers make is to not

141 structure their texts around the Prime Minister, the man whose childhood was spent at a house that is now a national monument and the site of an important history archive, whose parent and grandparent – no other than Prime Ministers Indira Gandhi and

Jawaharlal Nehru themselves – were figures intimately intertwined with the story of nation-building, and who during his tenure at the Center acquired the nickname

Computerji for his influential interest in the telecommunications industry that has transformed the national landscape in the decade following his assassination. In fact, while assassination plots play a central role in the narrative structure of the two films and mirror the real-life action of 1991 in various ways, the figure of the Prime Minister remains peripheral. Instead, it is the executor of the Sriperumbudur assassination that is the focus of exploration for both Ratnam and Sivan. An unambiguous object of this strategy is that audience identification is effected for the suicide bomber rather than for her victim. In the aftershock of May 21, public space was occupied with commemorating

Rajiv Gandhi – his life, his political beliefs, and his contributions to society were ceaselessly revisited. For understandable reasons, details about his assassin, named

Dhanu, were slower to disseminate. Quite apart from the fact that her actions were untenably vicious, he was famous and powerful while she was a shadowy foreigner from

Sri Lanka, whose biography remains sketchy to this date. Insofar as the protagonists in

Ratnam and Sivan’s films represent Dhanu, meditating on her motivations and marshalling audience sympathy for her, it can be argued that these filmmakers create the national space for mourning a subject that the nation-state categorically refused to mourn.

As discussed earlier, the opening scene in War and Peace is also configured for the purpose of mourning. The newsreel close-up of Mahatama Gandhi’s head on the funeral

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pyre is accompanied by the filmmaker’s statement of grief at the assassination that took

place two years before he was born: “The child in me never stopped asking who could

have done this to him.” The rest of the film is an extended lament for the fading away of the principles of non-violence. In Mission Kashmir, the statement of mourning appears

epigraphically, as Chopra dedicates his film to the children of Kashmir, many of whom

can no longer play in the cricket fields providing the backdrop for the film’s dreamscapes

without the fear of being blown up by a landmine. In addressing similar eruptions of

hatred in millennial India, both films ideologically revisit the “fundamental agreement”

that post-partition India had affirmed, “namely, we/they are part of the nation, the nation must accept us/them” (Sammadar 27). But while Patwardhan’s eulogy to non-violence

relies on a universally acclaimed icon for the peace movement, Chopra’s frame of

heroism encases supra-violent characters enacting aggression against a smorgasbord of

tortured screams, gun battles, bomb explosions et al. Insofar as commercial films like

Mission Kashmir and Dil Se invest their violent protagonists with melodramatically

harrowing histories to offer romantic justifications for their actions, there is a concern

that they validate or exoticize real-life phenomena that the films allegorize. In Dil Se and

The Terrorist, the fictional protagonists allegorize a suicide bomber who sent shockwaves of traumatic vulnerability rocketing through the Indian citizenry. While paying attention to the narrative strategies by which the audience is compelled to sympathize with this figure, I will also show how the films balance a humanist articulation of the terrorist’s motivations with a critique of terrorism.

But before discussing the films themselves, I want to draw attention to their

different relationships with Bollywood, whose emergence from the fringes of the

143 international arena has received much academic attention lately. Ratnam’s crossover success in the national market is more than a decade old. He first received nationwide attention with his 1992 film Roja, in which the female protagonist convinces the state to negotiate with the Kashmiri militants who have kidnapped her husband. In his 1995 film

Bombay, the Hindu hero and the Muslim heroine marry against the wishes of their orthodox families, and find a secular haven in the titular metropolis, only to see it shattered by the communal riots that allude to the post-Ayodhya turbulence in India’s economic capital. In continuity with his earlier practice, Ratnam, who is credited for the story on most of his films, had made these films in Tamil but an overwhelmingly positive response led to the release of Hindi dubs, which went on to score at the top-ten charts.

These box-office triumphs encouraged Ratnam to direct his first Hindi film, Dil Se.

Sivan has a long history of collaborating with Ratnam as cinematographer, and The

Terrorist marks his directorial debut. Like Ratnam, we can call him a Tamil filmmaker.

In an interview with Shobha Warrior, he says that (unlike Ratnam) he visualizes his project as offbeat, “a film without songs and dances” targeted “at an educated audience who look at cinema differently.” This audience was found not at the theaters in which Dil

Se was first screened but at the cable network in India and internationally at the festival network, where John Malcovitch personally promoted the film. If, as Nayan

Ramachandran and Raj Kajendra argue, South Indian production, despite its strong regional performance, belongs at the margins of Bollywood, how marginal to Bollywood should we consider a film like The Terrorist, which is self-consciously positioned as an alternative to conventionally popular cinema? On the one hand, undeniable distinctions in spectatorial address are tied to the differences in the production and distribution

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apparatus. For The Terrorist, Sivan sought neither blockbuster investments and stars nor a

nationwide theater release. On the other hand, it is possible to identify how its cinematic

stratagems overlap with the Bollywood hermeneutic of desire, romance and passionate

transgression. Obviously its thematic preoccupations are also somewhat similar to those

of various Bollywood films. We do not have to reductively conflate the work of Ratnam

and Sivan to see it in a continuum of citations.

Here Hamid Naficy’s analysis of the shared experience of marginal filmmakers is

interesting: “By and large, they operate independently, outside the studio system or the

mainstream film industries, using interstitial and collective modes of production that

critique those entities”(10). But Naficy warns against indiscriminately assuming

commonalities among them: “They are presumed to be more prone to the tensions of

marginality and difference. While they share these characteristics, the very existence of

the tensions and differences helps prevent accented filmmakers from becoming a

homogeneous group or a film movement” (ibid). While it is a debate for another occasion that the mainstream film industry is itself heterogeneous, we can certainly agree that what

Haficy calls the accented style stems principally from a liminal subjectivity, whether of

an aesthetic, linguistic, political, geographical, or financial nature.

Provisionally, Tamil filmmaking can be understood as accented or as occurring at

the margins of Bombay filmmaking insofar as fewer Tamil filmmakers are able to sell

their products nationally as successfully as Hindi filmmakers and Tamil films receive far less critical attention than Hindi films. Moreover, while Tamil films are regularly grouped with films made in Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu and other languages “under the rubric of regional film, Hindi production is supposed to supersede regional superiority

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and constitute the ‘national’ normative” (Sen 199). But this opposition does not speak to the stylistic and thematic continuities between the different cinemas or to the multifaceted processes by which “remakes” continually translate one film into another. Further, when

Ratnam claims his place among the Bombay audiences, this event signifies a shift of power that arguably reflects a broader shift in the politics and economy of the nation.

Bangalore, the capital of Tamil Nadu, now challenges Bombay’s long reign as

undisputedly the most economically vibrant hub in India. This brief excursion into the

issue of marginalization in terms of film studies affirms, admittedly in a narrowed

context, that the only static aspect of the “other” is that it is defined in terms of an oppositional relationship and that this a strategic tactic rather than an empirical reflection

of absolute difference. Obviously, when it is groups of people rather than films on behalf of which claims of difference are made, the degree of both their vulnerability and its consequences are substantively greater. Nevertheless, it is the case in both instances that the hierarchy of vulnerability is not invulnerable to change and transformation.

In terms of mainstream politics, “the elitist project of democracy in South Asia supports a homogeneous image of citizenry thereby relegating difference to the margins”

(Banerjee et al 15). In the context of the transgressions debated in this section, this elite core of democracy disallows any ideological valence attributed to the LTTE project, particularly when this is violently demonstrated. However, once the rhetoric and actions of a marginal population reach a fever pitch, the elites have to negotiate with the fringes and, theoretically, newer elites may be able to wrest power (ibid). A prolonged armed campaign can be effective in gaining the assertive minorities a spot at the bargaining table. It is no surprise then that, in the years following the assassination represented in Dil

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Se and The Terrorist, the LTTE’s political clout has grown as evidenced for example in

the Oslo talks between the government of Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers in December

2002. Even allowing that most accounts suggest that negotiations will not proceed smoothly, and peace will be achieved only through grueling compromises (William 279), the process of finding a middle ground will hopefully lead to peace in the region. But here I will be discussing representations of one woman’s transgressions, which reflect a disinterest in finding the middle ground. I will first analyze the film directed by Ratnam whose decision to make the North the setting of his film can have the effect, not necessarily unproductive, of repressing the references to the LTTE for some audiences.

For instance, in a Bollywood 101 offered by Film Comment, Jacob Levich concludes that

Dil Se is “unmistakably an allegory of the Indo-Pakistani conflict” (52).

In many ways Dil Se offers the familiar structure of the Bollywood romance, that

is man meets woman, man pursues woman, and man struggles before “winning” the

woman. However, while it is common to find this struggle originating in differences of

class and culture, here the critical obstacle that the romantic couple must overcome is

posed by their differing relationships with the nation itself. The male protagonist

Amarkanth Verma emblematizes that postcolonial citizen-subject whose sense of

entitlement is such that he confidently goes out of his way to well-intentionally interview

citizen-subjects who disavow their citizen status. As program assistant with All India

Radio, his investigation centers on the question: What do these people feel fifty years

after independence? Why, when they look normal, just like us, why do they then persist

in a revolutionary politics at odds with the celebrating nation and peoples? But the

epistemological disjuncture between him and his interviewees is such that he just cannot

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make them talk. They can indulge him, they can get angry with him, and they can beat

him up. But they just will not talk to him. Or so it seems to him to be the case. His key

informant as it turns out is Meghna the girl he falls in love with at first sight on a stormy

night, at a deserted railway station, as the wind lifts the black shawl off her and whisks it away. She will not talk to him. She will not even tell him her name till almost midway through a three hours long movie. How well does he come to know her, to understand her, to understand her motivations? Mani Ratnam’s coup lies in making this question relate to audience questions such as: How well did we come to know Dhanu, to understand her, to understand her motivations?

But the correlations between the fictional character of Meghna and the historical figure of Dhanu are not clearly spelt out. Certainly, neither the plot nor the settings make direct reference to the bomber from Sri Lanka. While the second half of the film settles down in Delhi, where Amar’s family has multi-generational roots, the first half is nomadically shot across Assam and Ladakh. While they recognize an array of Delhi monuments and neighborhoods because they have been extensively broadcast both by way of national parades and a variety of films,8 pan-Indian audiences are not as familiar

with the nuances of the Assam and Ladakh landscapes. But the lush-green vegetation of

the one and the high-altitude desert of the other, in combination with the use of regional

languages and costumes, make them recognizable. As Amar pursues Meghna’s blurred

trail from Assam to Ladakh, looses it to return to Delhi, only to find her turning up at his

doorstep, the film sets up densely layered cognitive relays between spaces liminally

8 For instance, both Connaught Place and Chandni Chowk make an appearance in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding as well.

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located on the map of India, wherein people feel marginalized by the majoritarian

governments that rule out of Delhi.

Because the interface between the one who is perpetually talking, perpetually

playful and the other who rarely smiles, rarely talks represents the grievances of the

ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities inhabiting the peripheral states in a general

way, Dil Se was variously interpreted as an allegory of the conflicts in Kashmir (as

Levich’s statement above suggests), the North-East and the Tamil Eelam. Irrespective of

where their attention was centered, most critics condemned Ratnam for his unfocussed

narrative. For instance, Samudra Gupta Kashyap points out that while Assamese

newspapers, unlike the national press, were able to appreciate gestures such as the casting

of regionally celebrated film personalities, they objected that Ratnam’s film did not

represent the militancy in the state with any precision or that it had gratuitously grafted

the LTTE narrative over the Assam rebels. Certainly a similar charge can be levied from

the other side, wherein the film fails to make any direct references to the Tamil struggle

in Sri Lanka. The bottom line is that Ratnam’s script is amenable to interpretations in a

variety of milieu, which have in common the conflict with the nation-state that is being

simultaneously executed in different parts of the subcontinent. For example, because the

actress playing Meghna is the daughter of a former Nepali Prime Minister, domestic and

diasporic Nepali audiences might receive the film in the context of the Maoist insurgency

raging in the Himalayan nation, and critics focused on the Assamese aspect of the

narrative might not pursue this line of thought.

Although the narrative of Dil Se is open-ended, the largest numbers of identifiable overlaps are with the historical trajectory of Dhanu. Meghna is raped by the soldiers of

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the Indian army, who attack her village and kill her people for their links with the

regional insurgency. Dhanu was gang-raped and members of the Indian Peace Keeping

Forces (IPKF) killed her brothers. In both cases, personal trauma compounds the

women’s loathing for the “colonial” exploiters who trample upon the language and

culture of their community. Both join militant organizations with well-organized camps

that meticulously train them in the use of artillery. Finally, of course, both carry the

apparatus beneath their dress that would blow up the Indian premiers along with

themselves. But the romantic framework in which Meghna is cast, and everything that

accompanies it, is the typically Bollywood augmentation of the actual. However

powerfully Dil Se may be invested in a critique of the nation-state’s betrayal of the rights

of marginalized citizens, it makes at least an as elaborate outlay on the sumptuous song

and dance sequences about one of which Chakravarty writes that “the movements

involving the protagonists are a mélange of Martha Graham and modern dance, jazz and

aerobics, fashion advertising, Latin American and Middle eastern hip and belly thrusts,

rock music video and the like” (“Fragmenting,” 234). But the very same sequence can

also be viewed in a less discombobulated fashion if we consider the symbolic portent of

the movements in combination with the lyrics, wherein the hybridity becomes indicative

of the challenges in the search for social harmony. Granted that Dil Se condenses this

search to the individual scale of a romantic couple, it performs something more than

sumptuous fetishization by eschewing a formulaic denouement for this couple. Even the

fetishization of “the disaffected Other” itself is not without progressive import when we consider that it breaks with the conventional fixation upon nationalist icons as objects of desire.

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Thomas E. Wartenberg has argued that narrative films that “mediate the conflict

between the romantic love that binds the unlikely partners and social norms that it violates…mobilize sympathy for the couple for purposes of critique,” because the “norms governing romantic attachments…reflect fundamental societal assumptions about the differential value of human beings” (3). In the dialogue between one who was raped by the soldiers of the Indian army and the other who idolizes this institution in which his father served, we have transformative possibilities as each voices the ideological declarations of their disparate positions. Crafted in a context in which the movements for autonomy reach a conversational stalemate with the nation-state, the image of Meghna and Amar defying their respective “parties” to acknowledge their attraction towards each other denotes a questioning of the normative dehumanization of Dhanu, which in 1991 provided a glaring contrast to the mainstream commemoration of Rajiv Gandhi. Even after Amar discovers that Meghna intends to blow up the Indian President at the Republic

Day parade, he refuses to give up on her.

In the scene in which Meghna and Amar’s disparate positions become explicit and articulated, the audience finds itself circling them dizzyingly, as if their oppositional perspectives can barely share space in the same frame. Ravi is questioning Meghna’s motivations much in the way in which Sufi had questioned Altaf’s in Mission Kashmir, characterizing her choices as self-deluded and destructive, asserting that the act of violence will do nothing to benefit the people on whose behalf she is carrying it out but would rather render them even more alien to the mainstream imaginary. By rejecting the value of national unity as a given, Meghna is challenging the very foundations of Amar’s right to question her actions. The scene here is not surreal as in Chopra’s film in which it

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is filmed as a nightmare sequence, and it is realistically set against the background of the

Red Fort in old Delhi where the President takes the salute of the armed forces at the

parade marking the establishment of the Indian Constitution on a cold January day. The

plot justification for the setting is that Meghna and her comrades are executing a dry run

of their assassination plot in a manner reminiscent of the actions of Dhanu’s coterie. As

in Mission Kashmir, however, the camera effects a destabilization of perspective

emphasizing the bewilderment to which the elite and the disenchanted citizen are

subjecting each other as they fling across accusations and self-justifications with the force

of sharp projectiles. Even though they grow to like each other as individuals, Meghna

and Amar are too committed to their opposing ideologies to survive together. While

Chopra’s militant protagonist converts to the politics of reconciliation, it is important to note that Ratnam’s female terrorist refuses to do the same.

At the end, while Amar is far from dissidentifying with the nation-state himself, he is unwilling to give Meghna up to its intelligence officers and soldiers. He has come to know her, come to know even that the name she has given him (and the audience) is a false name. But he has also come to know that it is not false insofar as the word Meghna denotes a little girl in Assamese. In the scene above she has told him what happened to her as a little girl when her village was burnt by the armed forces. She watched her sister

being raped and then her mouth could only let out a silent scream as she was raped as

well. By the time she grows up; she has learnt to kill; she has learnt to circulate across

India to kill; she has certainly learnt to only give a false name to the people that she meets

in India that identify as Indians. But, still, when she faces the prospect of physical

intimacy and moves forward to share a kiss with Amar, the memory of the sexual

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violation she experienced as a child has her returning to the condition of speechlessness

and repeating the silent scream. Sivan closes-up as her with mouth opens wide, the tendons of her neck stretched to desperately, and unsuccessfully, voice her trauma, and resist her helplessness. In the face of this testament, Amar begins to recognize that his logos-based arguments will not effect Meghna’s conversion to non-violence . While his

declaration, “I don't know anything except that I love you... from the heart,” is formulaic,

his actions are not. Failing to shake Meghna’s convictions, he embraces her explosive-

laced body and goes up in the explosion that comprises the closing shot of the film.

The actual explosion that killed Rajiv Gandhi is inflected into a bizarre moment

that is compelled into being in filmic time by Mani Ratnam. India is celebrating 50 years

of independence, but while this reality is accommodated and props the characters’

motivations, the script pronounces that India has already lost one Prime Minister to

assassins, a patently fake abstract of national history. And precisely because we notice

the anomalous conjuncture thus performed, we ask ourselves exactly why was Rajiv

Gandhi assassinated? In the scene in which Meghna first reveals her ambitions, police

officers foil Amar’s attempt to overcome her resolve. This is an interesting renarration of

the fact that a woman sub-inspector Anusuya Kumari had foiled Dhanu’s first attempt to

position herself around the VIP enclosure. Kumari’s misgivings defied the generally

acceptable conclusion that, “women’s utility as suicide bombers derives from their

general exclusion from the established ‘profile’ of such actors employed by many police

and security forces (e.g. young males), allowing them to better avoid scrutiny and reach

their targets” (Cunningham 97). But when she tried to prevent Dhanu from getting close

to Rajiv Gandhi a second time, he intervened saying, “Let everybody get a chance.” So

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Dhanu garlanded Rajiv, went down to touch his feet, and as he bent to lift her up an

explosion blew 16 people to death. Her guilt was undisputed.

But Dil Se reminds us, while a criminal investigation that charge-sheeted 26 men and women and sentenced the LTTE chief Prabhakaran to death in absentia, everyone who shared guilt for the May 21 episode was not brought to trial. There were the Indian

Peace Keeping soldiers who had killed Dhanu’s brothers in Jaffna; there were the men who had gang-raped her. More damningly, the Indian army itself had trained the LTTE, much before it went into Sri Lanka to hunt the Tamil Tigers and much before it was withdrawn from Sri Lanka when Rajiv Gandhi’s government fell. The Indian government’s role in Sri Lanka was at least suspect. Questions have been asked about exactly what were Rajiv Gandhi’s motivations in summoning Prabhakaran for talks at

Rashtprati Bhavan the very year in which he became Prime Minister. And later, why was he so keen on the deployment of Indian troops in Sri Lanka, a move that was accompanied by the imposition of curfew in Sri Lanka? His move was so unpopular that when he went over in 1987 for a state visit the Sri Lankan traditional honor guard saluted him with guns from which bullets had been removed for fear that he would be shot dead by the guard itself, a precaution that did not prevent one soldier from trying to bludgeon

Rajiv Gandhi with his bulletless rifle. Why did the Indian state under Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership pursue these militant policies? Among the disenchanted population, the rumors floated that India was interested in annexing Sri Lanka, or parts of Sri Lanka.

It is in this context that Dil Se’s displacement of the origins of the human bomb

from Sri Lanka to the North East is anything but arbitrary. In Assam, because of some of the distinctive historical, ethnic, religious and linguistic character of the population, some

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believe that the British should have rendered it an independent nation like India, Pakistan

and Myanmar rather than left it under the republican authority of a Hindu-dominated

nation. The subsequent decades of central investment in the state have left it vulnerable to

the militant groups that now regularly conduct assassinations, bomb explosions and

kidnappings for ransom despite a strong deployment of security forces. In Sikkim, the

present situation of unrest was foretold in the popular vote’s rejection of joining Sikkim

to the Indian Union, a decision that was only reversed nearly three decades later. If the

Pakistani intelligence agencies have been accused of fomenting terrorism in Assam,

Sikkim has provided occasion for tensions with China, which considered Sikkim’s

folding into the Indian state as an act of annexation on the watch of Prime Minister Indira

Gandhi.9 It was, however, Indira Gandhi’s policy-initiatives in Punjab, whose ties to the

Hindi heartland are physically, culturally and economically intensely strong, which

culminated in her assassination by Sikh bodyguards in 1984. This led to a period in which

Sikh members of the armed forces were tasked with proving their loyalty much as Inayat

Khan is asked to verify his in Mission Kashmir.

Harjot Oberoi had predicted that, “as long as Sikh fundamentalism embodies the resistance of a significant Sikh population to the Indian nation-state, it will remain a powerful discourse” (280). Operation Bluestar, whereby the army desecrated the Golden

Temple under Indira Gandhi’s orders, left emotional scars on the Sikh community that were substantively deepened by the anti-Sikh pogrom that followed her assassination. In addressing the question of why Punjab slid back into the mainstream as smoothly as it had slid out,” what “doused the fires, healed the wounds,” Manraj Grewal points out that

9 China’s official position was changed in 2003 when India recognized Tibet as integrated into China.

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“the Punjab police likes to take the lion’s share of the credit” and that “the systemic

decimation of militants was partly due to the brute force that the police used. But in the

end, howsoever jaded it may sound, it was the triumph of the people” (17). An active

resistance to the nation-state waned as disenchantment with absolute renderings of

Sikhism to which Oberoi draws our attention grew:

Sikh fundamentalists seek to inscribe their religious identity on all possible cultural resources: constitutions, dietary habits, and the environment of the body. The objective of all this is to leave no lacuna in definition. For Sikh fundamentalists it is ambiguity that breeds atheism, immorality, and denial of tradition. (273)

While the above characterization continues to be disputed especially among diasporic scholars, it is in robust company. For example, while emphasizing “the deep sense of injury” among Sikhs, Madan also argued:

Fundamentalism is like the double-edged dagger, a sacred symbol of the Sikh religious tradition. While it claims to remove with one edge the dross that has come to sully Sikhism, it simultaneously succeeds in cutting with the other edge the bonds of brotherhoods among the Sikhs themselves and between them and the Hindus. (617)

Consequent to Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the Congress co-opted the communal vote- banks by playing on fears of national disintegration and this contributed to the BJP’s

subsequent “all-out” effort to woo Hindu voters (Frykenberg 245). Here we pinpoint the

shameful fact that in the immediate aftermath of the Prime Minister’s death the

majority’s sympathy lay only with her and not with the persecuted and gruesomely killed

innocent Sikhs, most of whose assassins still remain at large. But even as the Sikh

disillusionment with “the alleged idealism of terrorist fundamentalists” grew (Madan

620), the concerted effort of many progressive agencies did eventually impact the

majoritarian conscience as well.

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This narrow listing of the nation-state and the insurgencies it battles above on

different fronts suggests both that the latter are the consequence of policy misadventures

of historical significance and that grievances mutate into militancy because they are not

addressed in a timely fashion. But what the listing also suggests is that hostile engagements can gradually draw back into peace, as illustrated by the example of Punjab.

When the mainstream of Indian civil society began to understand and address the claims

of injustice suffered by Sikhs, this perception influenced state policy as well. The

dialogic ambiance thus created has led to a Punjab that is mostly peaceful today, and

where the sporadic eruptions into violence no longer have the wide public support that

they enjoyed through the eighties. By humanizing their militant protagonists, Dil Se and

The Terrorist urge their audiences to understand rather than summarily dismiss the

motivations of the movements that the protagonists represent. Their humanist investment

may leave them exposed to the charge of a romantic obscuring of conflicts of interest, but

they undeniably offer emotionally powerful models of reconciliation.

Unlike Dil Se, however, Sivan’s film does not use a broad canvass or a

smorgasbord of geographical signifiers. While Dil Se is shot in the North (with the

exception of a song sequence shot in Kerala), The Terrorist is shot in Tamil Nadu and

Kerala in tropical settings that evoke the landscape in which the LTTE usually operates.

The audience meanders around disparate locations trying to identify Meghna’s purpose,

but Malli’s objective to destroy a “national politician” is revealed almost as soon as the

film opens. While Malli and her cohorts speak Tamil, the soldiers who attack and destroy

one of their camps speak Hindi, clearly referencing the IPKF invasion into territories

controlled by the LTTE. She journeys across water, in simulation of the passage that

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thousands of Tamil refugees make across the Palk Straits, to a village which is proximate

to the spot of an election rally similar to the one at which Rajiv Gandhi was blown up.

Here, she spends the rest of the week that forms the duration of the film. Whether the reviews located this village in Tamil Nadu or Jaffna, most of them were prefaced with the explanation that the film is inspired by Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.

The plot correspondence with the real-life events of 1991 includes details such as the LTTE’s commitment to maintaining a photographic archive of their activities. For instance, one of the reasons why the Special Investigation team was able to piece together the organization of the assassination and the role of the various accused was because the

LTTE had instructed Haribabu, a local photographer and sympathetic to their cause, to shoot the bomb blast. While Haribabu was killed, his camera was found intact at the site of the explosion. Later the video of the dry run conducted on another former Prime

Minister Virendra Pratap Singh was also found. And the training camp we see in The

Terrorist also has a predilection for extensively using both still and video documentation

to plan and execute its programs. While this practice has use-value for the militants, it

also forcefully makes the point that representational technology is characteristically non- aligned. The LTTE uses photographic evidence to arouse its cadres for the same reason that it was the decapitated photographs of Dhanu that made the trauma of May 21 more

“real” for the consumers of mainstream news media. While a general skepticism about media accounts forms a growing trend, what Roland Barthes termed the “reality effect” continues to have both narrative and traumatic impact. A corollary of this phenomenon is

that the entertainment film continues to enjoy greater latitude in “fictionalizing”

traumatic events.

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As in Dil Se, the inventive liberties in the The Terrorist are structured around the

matter of love. When Mehna’s village is attacked, she is raped and this forms a major

psychic impediment to her finding romantic fulfillment with Amar. When Malli’s group

is attacked, she conceals herself in the bushes with a wounded Tiger and sometime during

the long night of hiding they make love. By the morning, he is dead and the prospect of

romance that briefly appeared in her life is gone as well. In both cases, the protagonists’ sexual experiences appear in flashback, the cinematic window to the experience of trauma in the past. But while for Meghna the trauma of lost childhood renders her a militant, Malli’s distress is occasioned by the loss of a militant partner. She has lost collaborators in the past, but the loss of this one makes a distinct imprint as Malli finds out that she is pregnant.

In an interview with Shobha Warrior, Sivan has explained this particular coil in his plot by saying: “What came to my mind after the tragic event was what could have made her not do it, not press the button of death. Then I wondered, if she could offer something to the world as a woman, would she not have retreated? What can she offer the world which only she as a woman can”? So Santosh Sivan summons up nature imagery – nest, rain, and seed et al – to consider the effects of the procreative faculty that is the particular provenance of woman. He draws on natural lighting and environmental sounds to communicate his protagonist’s interior scene for the audience. Water, whether by way

of a monsoon torrent, a river or a shower, becomes a conduit to fragments of her past that

she must now square in order to reach a decision about an explosion that will also kill her

unborn child.

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Sivan’s articulation of the project of motherhood is an interesting counterpoint to

the gender determinations in the context of which Tamil women often join the LTTE as

human bombs. On the one hand, some argue that, “the use of women in support of war is part of the larger vision of the guerilla leadership to the lift Tamil women from the bonds of tradition” (cited in Cunningham 98). On the other hand, there is continuity between the

traditional and the militant female roles: “Female sacrifice for her family and particularly for her male children is seen as a generalized cultural norm that is usefully extended to female self-sacrifice for her community and family” (ibid.). Karla J. Cunningham points out that, “equating the sacrifice of the female bomber as an extension of motherhood, suicide bombings are an acceptable ‘offering’ for women who can never be mothers, a process that is reportedly encouraged by their families” (97). Generalized cultural norms proscribe raped women from marrying and bearing children, but expect them to nonetheless contribute to the project of motherhood even if this involves strategically refashioning the “monstrous” mother.

Of course Sivan’s protagonist is not raped but becomes pregnant as a consequence

of a consensual sexual encounter. The aged farmer Vasu in whose house Malli is

boarding under false pretences provides her with a figural family whose ethos challenges

that of the one wherein the ideology of motherhood demands the sacrifice of her life. His

philosophical excursions into the values of nurture are supported by the gentle care he

provides for his paralyzed wife, and it is he who first recognizes that Malli is showing

symptoms of pregnancy. While his influence definitely causes Malli to reconsider her

mission in terms of its impact on the unborn child within her, the ending of the film is

open-ended about whether or not she sacrifices her mission or her child. In the

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penultimate shot we see her palm lying open in close-up, with rose petals (from the

politician’s garland) falling upon the red button of death. Then darkness envelops the

screen, and this is the final shot whose blankness paradoxically has an immensely generative aspect of leaving the audience questioning: Did Malli become a human bomb or did she not? In the very first sequence, a masked assassin had insouciantly executed a

Tiger tied to a tree for failing to carry out his mission. When the executioner removes the mask splattered with her victim’s blood, the audience glimpses Malli for the first time.

So, in terms of the narrative logic of the film, we have to ask ourselves whether the insouciant killer can really be transformed by the prospect of motherhood and whether her commander will let her live after she reneges on her word and is thus branded a traitor. In any case, the blankness with which The Terrorist ends is quite similar to the

blankness that follows the explosion of the human bomb at the conclusion of Dil Se insofar as it is filled in with audiences debating the personal motivations of terrorists and the prospects for diffusing their attachment to violent strategies. Equally significantly, these films resuscitate from our memories the woman whose tragedy we did not mourn in the immediate aftermath of the 1991 assassination and insist that this act of mourning cannot be simply collapsed into a sanction for brutality.

Insofar as it is actually the experience of liminality that breeds the terrorist, disenfranchised women suffer a double marginalization. They are abused like other members of their community and then further brutalized as women. After analyzing the reports of various Human Rights observers in the conflict-ridden areas of Sri Lanka, where roughly half of the LTTE’s membership were females as of 2000, Paula Banerjee concludes: “It is apparent that in Sri Lanka rape has been used as an instrument to

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displace women and among those who are displaced many have been victims of rape”

(284). Further, she finds that “when instruments of state such as members of the armed

forces have perpetrated rape these people are hardly ever prosecuted” (ibid). Women

have also borne a disproportionate brunt of the Kashmiri conflict, even though they are

non-combatants therein. To add to the physical cost, women are psychologically saddled

with providing the form of domesticity even in the most inhospitable conditions.

Attending to data about Sri Lankan welfare centers, Joe William points to the continuing

trauma for the many internally displaced women who have had to become sole supporters

for their families without the support structures of their familiar environment. Just as the

partition portended the conflicts that would blight the South Asian region, it also gave us

advance warning that such clashes would feature gender-determined suffering without fail.

Of course, dissident insurgency is not always linkable to physical borders, but can

be a response to hierarchies of power whose iniquities seem sanctioned by the nation-

state. In Bandit Queen, which fictionalizes the life of Phoolan Devi, we have another key

figure in the genealogy of militant females in Indian cinema and history. Although the

vicious atrocities she suffered were along a caste rather than an ethnoreligious axis, she

was also gang-raped by members of the more powerful community before she took up

arms against them, to name two of the crudest intersections with the figure of Dhanu.

When Phoolan finally made a settlement with the Indian government and surrendered,

she was betrayed on many accounts. The most pertinent in terms of our discussion here

concerns the possibility of the militant female mothering a progeny into being. While she

was in the Gwalior jail, the doctors performed a hysterectomy on her on the pretext of

162 removing an ovarion cyst, saying that they did not want Phoolan Devi breeding more

Phoolan Devis. But her case has a silver lining. After the making of the film and her release from prison, Phoolan joined politics and actually won a seat in the lower house of the Parliament. This victory strongly signals that democracy can trump the militancy card over time, but this requires both a quasi-redemptive acceptance by the media and mainstream society, and the extension of privileges such as political power and financial aid to the dissenting community. Correspondingly, as fundamentalists exit the enclave, their separatist ardor can yield to the pragmatic, compromising strategies of the world or realpolitik (Appleby et al 666).

After showing that, “ in the nineteenth century it was widely believed that

‘excessive’ devotion (or ‘enthusiasm’ as it was then called) might lead to insanity,”

Michael Barkun writes that, “while we tend to smile patronizingly at such ideas today, imputations of fundamentalist violence are scarcely more sophisticated” (68). By considering such violence in its specific South Asian contexts, the films discussed here offer more sophisticated “imputations” even if they also make broader allegorical claims.

In conclusion, we must distinguish the cause of Kashmiriyat or the Tamil Eelam from the

Hindu or Sinhalese fundamentalisms when the latter initiate majoritarian breaches of power that provide the rhetoric of disaffected minorities with legitimacy. And insofar as fundamentalisms are a political phenomenon and the pluralization of both the polity and civil society is critical to diffusing them, the work of Patwardhan, Chopra, Ratnam and

Sivan takes steps in this direction by making the case for this pluralization of public culture.

CHAPTER 5 HIMALAYAN CONTESTATIONS: MERI SAUN AND ARMY

It is symptomatic of our postmodern era that we are embarrassed to say Something so raw and cringe-inducing as “We want democracy.” (Manjushree Thapa, Forget Kathmandu, 258)

As part of my investigation of South Asian popular culture, I have been seeking ways of discussing how this culture travels across the boundaries of the nation-states of the region. The Indian state of Uttranchal and the nation-state of Nepal share a porous border. People travel across it for both work and recreation; at times they get married across it; they commonly understand each other’s speech; and sometimes they even watch each other’s movies. But more frequently, these neighbors consume Hindi cinema, generally called Bollywood. Now, though there are many languages spoken in Nepal,

Nepali is the official language of communication. Nepal’s film releases are in Nepali and generally produced in Kathmandu. Similarly, while Garhwali is not the only language spoken in Uttrancchal, where Kumaon is the other major geographical region with its own language, the local film production is in Garhwali, with only one film Kumaoni having been released so far. Insofar as the local industries are forever struggling against the dominance of Bollywood in their markets, they imagine themselves in an unequal contest with the “power of the plains” that Delhi, Bombay and other metropolitan cities emblematize. The film industry’s sense of marginalization reflects a broader sense of disparity among the local population that often identifies itself as “hill people” even if not all of it literally lives in the hills.

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The comparative analysis of a Nepali film and a Garhwali film in this chapter is

concerned with the cinematic projection of a national ideal insofar as this projection is

structured around deep-rooted anxieties about “outside” forces. We can identify in both

Sovit Basnet’s Army and Anuj Joshi’s Meri Saun a desire to separate out a “local” identity, a desire overlapping with an aspiration to set up ethnocentric boundaries around the projected audience. The latter impulse reflects a particular reaction to the failure of

geographical borders to secure inhabitants from the cultural influence and the economic

might of “outsiders.” But, as Homi Bhabha has argued, “politics can only become

representative, a truly public discourse, through a splitting in the signification of the

subject of representation; through an ambivalence at the point of the enunciation of a

politics” (Location 24). In this case, what is imagined as lying outside the borders is not

without an acknowledged seductive or even generative power. And while the films champion Nepali and Garhwali identities and agendas, it is actually diverse ethnicities

that are embraced within their visual and ideological fields, which perform something

more than a simple community closure in their address.

In fact, the opening scene of Army is remarkably similar to the one in Mission

Kashmir, whereby it is a plurality of emblematic figures that is introduced as

representative of the national subject. The umbrella identity that they embody

paradoxically signals the contingency of the national. In considering Basnet’s film, it is

important to remember that, as Richard Burghart points out, “at the turn of the nineteenth

century each of [Nepal’s ethnic] groups was thought of as a country, and in [the Legal

Code of] 1854 as a species [jat]; now [in 1984] they are all registered in the census as

language groups” (cited in Gellner, David ix). Thus, it is ironically fitting that the status

165 of Nepali cinema as a national cinema is shored up by the fact that Nepali has the status of a national language. To emphasize, the most significant marker of Garhwali and

Nepali films’ claim to cultural nationalism is the very language of the films. Also, the fact that they share industrial, exhibition and consumption networks, and work within the same framework of policy controls renders both the Garhwali and Nepali cinemas national both to their respective regional and overseas audiences. Andrew Higson points out that it is important to challenge how only some “strands or traditions of cinema circulating within a particular nation-state are recognized as legitimate aspects of the national cinema” (63). Along these lines, in focusing on the cinema of Uttranchal, which is not mentioned at all in Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman’s prominent encyclopedia on Indian cinema, one is arguing that the plural “national cinemas” is a more useful analytical category. Obviously, this claim has minimal impact on the status of Nepali film industry, which automatically merits a national status because of its association with a nation-state. However, that both industries subsist in the shadow of

Bollywood allows one to address their concerns simultaneously. National cinemas do not necessarily have nationalist missions and earlier chapters in this dissertation have tackled films that are sensitive to the totalitarian possibilities of such missions. But perhaps the condition of marginality encourages an internalist tendency as manifested in the cases we are discussing. Higson is also willing to consider that, “the presence and popularity of

Hollywood films in Britain is in itself a means of ensuring a populist diversity within

British culture, a valuable means of broadening the British cultural repertoire” (70). On the other side of this argument stand the many claims about the cultural and economic erosion of local variety effected by Hollywood’s “imperialism.” So, in our context, do

166 practices of trans-border consumption have a generative or erosive impact or something more mixed?

Does Hindi cinema effect a democratization of culture? Critics like Madhu Raman

Acharya are concerned:

Even Nepal TV broadcasts Hindi Movies, Indian pop songs and numbers of Hindi serials, which support violence, revenge and erotic and obscene images quite unpalatable to the traditional norms of the Nepalese society, but wildly welcomed by the Nepalese youngsters. “Nepal Television’s two most popular programs are a Pakistani serial on Tuesadfy evening and Hindi film on Saturday afternoon,” wrote Suman Pradhan. (148)

While it is unfortunately outside of the scope of this dissertation to speak to the specificities of the interesting intersection of Nepali, Pakistani and Indian popular cultures, clearly Hindi cinema has a huge impact on the repertoire of receiving cultures, whether Garhwali or Nepali. In the theaters, Bollywood products regularly outsell and exceptions to this rule are rare. Garhwalis have to search back in their memories for a moment in the eighties when a local film outsold Manmohan Desai’s Mard (1985), the latest release from Bombay at that point. On the part of the small Garhwali film,

Vishweshwar Dutt Nuautiyal’s Ghar Jawain, this was indeed a remarkable feat as the film that it outsold starred the legendary superstar Amitabh Bachchan himself.

As I traveled through the west Nepali region, most of the teashops had tuned their

TVs to the satellite broadcast of Hindi films. At one of these teashops, a young Nepali salesman and Bollywood enthusiast told me about his own cinema: “We are born in a poor country, so we cannot see any good scenes in our films. Because they can’t invest money or, I don’t know why. That’s the problem. There are no good scenes.” When asked to clarify what kind of “good scenes” he would like to watch, he answered: “The films are only about Nepal. We want to see Switzerland or America or something.” In a

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similar vein, David Page and William Crawley, working with an extensive network of

research associates in South Asia, drawing on interviews, focus group discussions and district surveys, quote a young Nepali in Birgunj, which is near the Indian border:

“Nepali programs are so bland. Indian programs have real scenes. Houses are blown up, trains are exploded, planes blow up. Till now not a single plane has been blown up in a

Nepali program” (233). So, on the entertainment scale, Nepali films suffer in comparison to Bollywood because they do not have the budget to take their protagonists off to sing, shoot or dance in “exotic” foreign locales. Had the industry developed in the direction of defying the generic expectations set up by Bollywood, perhaps the viewers quoted above

would not have been quite as critical. But the ground reality is that Bollywood is

providing the benchmark not only for diversionary standards but also those of

verisimilitude.

Page and Crawley show that film and film-based programs have actually carried

Hindi language and Bombay film culture throughout South Asia, and created the

apprehension that the culture of Bollywood is actually swamping the experience of

difference. In combination with the economic and military power that the Indian

administration holds over the peoples of Garhwal and Kathmandu, Bollywood’s cultural

influence becomes even more threatening. And this threat is felt as much within India’s

borders as outside them. As the Garhwali filmmaker Joshi points out, often the new generation does not know “our” language very well and even the People’s Movement that campaigned for Uttranchal’s statehood raised its slogans in Hindi. However, it has also been argued that the popularity of these programs and images glamorizing consumer culture has reinvigorated conversations about identity and difference, and enabled

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subjugated groups to speak out against their linguistic, economic, religious or political

marginalization, especially in Nepal.

As far as the commerce of cinema is concerned, it is no accident that both the

Garhwali and Nepali film industries have only recently hosted prominent award ceremonies honoring the local talent. The 2004 awards hosted in Dehradun, Uttranchal’s

capital, additionally gave special mention to the artists from the region who had acquired

some sort of success in the dream world of Bombay, whether this was instanced in film

or television programming. Similarly the success of Nepali actress Monisha Koirala, who

stars in Dil Se, is considered both enviable and inspiring in the Kathmandu milieu.

Notwithstanding this aspect of envy, if we read the hosting of awards ceremonies as a

sign of a new buoyancy or self-assurance, we can make the case that the popularity of

Bollywood is reinvigorating local film industries in the new millennium. The increased

flow of capital and people through the nineties has also played a role in stimulating the

local entertainment landscapes.

The streets of Kathmandu overflow with Indian shopkeepers and tourists; Nepali

presence in India is estimated at more than 6 million; people from Uttranchal emigrate to

work in ever-larger numbers to the rest of India. This diasporic community’s desire for

native cultural products, both in terms of music and film, also has a role in fuelling the

regional industries. The screening of Nepali and Garhwali films in Delhi, for instance,

used to be an occasional phenomenon. Now, morning shows have become commercially

viable around the year. This, in turn, propels especially the businessmen in central Delhi

to invest more in the regional film industries wherein a comparatively low investment

ranging from a thousand to five thousand dollars can finance films whose byproducts are

169 then turned over to the diasporic consumers as much as to the native audiences. Of course these developments have to be appreciated in a balanced way. As one of Page and

Crawley’s informants argues, increasing access to consumption can devolve into “a kind of social equality at a banal level” (144). This charge would be especially apposite if it could be demonstrated that regional programming is preoccupied with churning out “bad copies.”

In Nepal, over two hundred years of the centralized dissemination of Nepali language and Hindu religion, with its attendant caste hierarchies, is being strongly challenged precisely when the rhetoric of democracy and development really spreads across the remoter areas in a period of intense modernization and globalization. In 1990, the People’s movement succeeded in forcing the world’s only officially Hindu state to change its constitution to recognize the differences in the identities of its peoples. But

Nepali remains the official language and Hindu remains inscribed into the constitution that now defines Nepal as a multiethnic, multilingual, democratic Hindu kingdom. After a decade of an economic boom, yet another people’s movement, a Maoist movement has plunged the country into armed conflict as it accuses the government of betraying the precepts of the new constitution by continuing to privilege the upper castes over other castes and non-Hindus. The development is somewhat similar to the ones addressed with reference to Mission Kashmir earlier, wherein a formerly idealized space is now engulfed in violent conflict. Nepal was known widely if simplistically as “a pre-political idyll, a

Himalayan Shangri-La good for trekking and mountaineering and budget mysticism” or as a “Hindu kingdom full of simple hill folk” (Thapa 3). In the narrative of the film that I will analyze shortly, Army, while it is not a communist-identified movement that

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threatens the national institutionary, this threat and its violent manifestations are

represented as treasonous and destructive.

In Uttranchal, the people’s movement also cited the concepts of democracy and

development in tandem with the idea of a distinct identity to demand state autonomy,

which in turn is supposed to bring a proportionate percentage of the fruits of

modernization into the region. David E. Gellner points out that people in Nepal

sympathized with this call for a separate state in the Himalayan part of India’s Uttar

Pradesh (27). This movement experienced its dark night on October 2, 1994 when busloads of 5000-8000 activists were trying to reach Delhi to express their demands to the Center. As the buses reached Muzzafarnagar half an hour after midnight, they were stopped by the police that tear-gassed and then opened fire against the activists.1 Women whose participation in the movement was unexpected in a region with marked gender divisions in both domestic and professional spheres and whose involvement was also used to validate the moral authority of the movement, were assaulted and raped. Anuj

Joshi’s film Meri Saun is loosely based on his own and others’ eyewitness accounts of

the Muzzafarnagar tragedy. Like Army, Joshi’s film disavows an armed insurgency

against the nation-state whose performance in delivering to the needs of the local people

is nonetheless sharply critiqued.

Sharing the cinematic vocabulary of Hindi films, both Army and Meri Saun deliver the expected mix of song, dance, ornately choreographed fight sequences, comic relief,

1 The immediate impetus for the protest derived from the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister’s declaration that “27 percent of all government jobs and educational places in the state” would be reserved for “low castes” (Moller 241). In a region with sparse educational and employment opportunities this dictate would have had a significant effect. But what we also find here is different disempowered groups struggling over the resources generated through the state

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general melodramatic spectacle and specific citing of standard types such as the

sacrificing mother and the villainous figure who crudely encapsulates the political

malaise which is the target of the films’ proselytizing. The first parts of both the films

concentrate on setting up the romantic attachments for the protagonists, and only after the

intermission do they explicitly zoom in on the urgent topical references related to the

politics of nationalism. Army belongs to the multi-star genre, while Meri Saun has a solo

lead. However, even in the latter, the central male protagonist is supported by emblematic

male characters whose oscillations around him allow the dialogue to sketch out the

nuances of the film’s position on language, identity and national history. In turn, Army’s multi-star environment nonetheless centers on the commanding officer of the cadre that will perform heroic feats in the film under his strategic and ideological leadership.

In both cases the corruption of the elite is held responsible for the betrayal of the nation- state rather than the state itself. As one character says in Meri Saun, “people misbehaved with me, not my country.” Interestingly, the army is represented as an honorable institution in both films. In the Nepali film, the protagonists sing, “I am the army of the country. May this country be my life, Bhakti and pride”! On an everyday basis, it is indeed the young army recruits spread thinly around the country that maintain order in the face of spiraling chaos on the roads and in the cities. While the social and economic grievances in which the Maoist insurgency originated are undeniable, ordinary citizens have not really benefited from the anarchic developments associated with it, and it is the army that maintains a tenuous defense against a complete collapse of institutional order. In Uttranchal, the army had provided a safe haven to the people recuperating from the savageries inflicted by policemen at Muzzafarnagar.

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This is not to negate the many injustices that the Army continues to inflict on people caught between the state and the Maoists. Manjushree Thapa concludes her “elegy for democracy” in Nepal with the narrative of “an old woman from a war-torn settlement in west Nepal” whose son and a daughter-in-law were shot dead by the security forces after some villagers reported that they were Maoists(258). Another son and a daughter left the village for fear of how similar reports would affect them. Thapa writes that this woman could not stop chanting: “My truth has been destroyed. My truth, my life have been destroyed. My truth has been destroyed” (ibid.).

But the films being discussed here target corrupt politicians and policemen rather than the Army. It is the leaders who are shown to conduct a self-interested translation of the constitutional mandate that guarantees equal rights to all communities in the nation, and the denigrated space of injustice they inhabit is shared with militant actors who take up arms in the quest for rights. In Army this “arming” is via the deployment of the

Trinetra missile threatening to blow up Kathmandu unless the demand for provincial autonomy is not met, while in Meri Saun it is the transfer of guns and explosives to revenge the Muzzafarnagar scandal that symbolizes the danger of rights movements turning violent. In both cases the suppliers of arms and ammunition are mysteriously framed as “outsiders” with local conduits who are discredited at the end as insurgent and destabilizing forces that far from furthering local interests will destroy both the ethos and everyday life of the people who are seduced by them. In Meri Saun, the refrain is that these forces seek to turn Dehradun into Kashmir. There are also references to

Afghanistan and the former USSR that characterize the effect of oppressed people taking up arms in the image of a beggar’s bowl. Both films seek to communicate that the one

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effect of violent protests is that national property is vandalized, and since national property is “our” property, our violence damages us.

Meri Saun opens with the young protagonist reading his schoolbook against the light of an oil lantern, and asking his mother, “Why do we not have electricity? Why do

we you have to trek such a long distance to fetch water?” Then, he promises, “Mother,

when I grow up, I will bring each convenience that the city has into our village.” Shots of

mountains, rivers and forests indexically reinforce the idea of indigenous identity as

rooted in peaceful rural traditions, and these shots are potently cut into sequences

foregrounding deliberations on injustice, thus clueing in the audience into the film’s

position on productive and acceptable means of seeking recourse from disadvantage.

Shots of mountains are especially abundant in the background and generally saturate the

visual field, again as a paradigmatic measure of how the films are conscious of

representing the concerns of “hill people.” The saturation is however markedly more

substantive in the Garhwali film perhaps because modernization in Nepal far outstrips

modernization in Uttranchal where much of the nationalist discourse is heavily

preoccupied with the preservation of forests and natural resources that “people from the

plains” are seen as engaging with exploitatively. It could also speak to Kathmandu’s

discursive distance form the remoter parts of Nepal, whereas the center of Garhwali film

production is Dehradun, which shares more ideological affinity with the “backward”

villages that depend upon it for representation. On the other hand, documentaries like

Pranay Limbu’s History for Winners (Itihaas Jitneharuka Laagi, 2003) and Kiran

Krishna Shrestha’s Bheda Ko Oon Jasto – In Search of a Song (2003) do speak to the

distance between the cities and villages of Nepal.

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Commonalities with the vocabulary of Bollywood abound in Joshi and Basnet’s

films. Consider the song sequence in Meri Saun that follows immediately after the scene

of the Muzzafarnagar scandal. The montage moves between the past and the present, the

topographical and the political, intercutting shots of the Ganges, the Yamuna, the terraced

fields with those showing the bodies of activists killed in the police firing, close-ups of

newspaper headlines reporting the spread of violence after Muzzafarnagar, the police

vans patrolling the curfew-ridden towns of Uttranchal, and the marches against the police

actions which are joined by women and school children in large numbers. The last is

especially significant because, as in Army, the university life of the protagonists is used

to give both intellectual gravity to their debates and to address the “youth of the nation.”

At the same time, the background song renders a melodious version of the visuals: the

mother has lost a son, the people have been raped, and the hills are burning. The montage

ends with the firing of a bullet followed by a still shot of the Himalayas that is then

slashed with red.

This tableau is not only reminiscent of the titular song sequence from Dil Se, it is also typical of the textual manifestations that Lalitha Gopalan describes as forming a cinema of interruptions. She first points out that, “the unrest in civil society marked by communal riots, police brutality, violent secessionist movements, and assaults against women and minorities [has] seeped into film narratives” (9). Then she connects the cinematic style that depicts this unrest to an aesthetic of interrupted pleasures and extra- diegetic fragments that nonetheless bear “a more or less systemic relationship to the narrative” (18). In the final analysis, the staging of “the most anxious impulses of our

175 psychic and social life” is intertwined with “hope for a better world’ and what Richard

Dyer calls “the enjoyment of unruly delight”(13, 29).

Just as the inferno-like narrative of Mission Kashmir concludes with a dreamscape,

Meri Saun too makes a transition from the disharmonious montage described above to peace, even if this shift into the embrace of peace takes some doing. The narrative puts the protagonist with whose blood-splattered face the song sequence began through “the test of fire.” He considers avenging his girlfriend’s honor and his young cousin’s death, and proving that he is not a coward. But the voices of his teachers and of the women in the film persuade him to abandon what within the film is called the typical macho assumption that man’s honor lies in aggressively seeking vengeance. We see the similarity with Mission Kashmir in that there too it is the voice of Altaf’s girlfriend that deconstructs the rhetoric of revenge. Here, images of Gandhi, the Himalayas, the Ganges and the Yamuna replace those of the Dal Lake to represent a certain purity of being, and their dominant moral authority is reinforced in the closing stages.

The bloodbath by way of which Army gratifies audience desires at one level has to be similarly redirected by the end. The correspondence between the titular missions here and in Mission Kashmir also bears mention. Mission Kashmir centered on the deployment of missiles that would take out key monuments in Srinagar and thereby create chaos in the entire valley. Of course Inayat Khan and Altaf foil this operation together in an action-packed climax. Mission Army involves the diffusing of the Trinetra missile with 1000 kilograms of explosive payload with which the insurgents are holding the administration of Kathmandu hostage. Perhaps it is an implicit criticism of the actual administration that in the film it refuses to surrender power and is prepared to see the

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capital destroyed instead. The army commando unit that provides the protagonists

succeeds in diffusing the missile in the last minute and time-honored tradition of

commercial cinema. In another time-honored tradition, we see a replay of the romantic

song-dance sequence featuring the commandos vacationing with female partners against

standardized arboreal settings before the credits role out. Meri Saun ends with a less

couple-centric song: “With torches the people of my village have started marching. / Now

we will win over the darkness, the people of my village.” But the characters that have

died before the bloodbath is over compromise all the happy-endings in Meri Saun, Army

and Mission Kashmir. Maybe the denouements are escapist, however this tendency does

not comprehensively whitewash “the unrest in civil society… [that has] seeped into film

narratives” (Gopalan 9).

Despite the fact that Meri Saun’s narrative had a mass appeal, the film was not

commercially successful at the Uttranchal box-office. Reviews were widely published in

both Hindi and English newspapers and magazines with local editions. Similarly, local

TV also gave substantive coverage to the film’s release. In an unusual development, some of the print media even reported about the film in their national editions. Still, after

the first few weeks, there were no crowds queuing up to buy tickets. The Garhwali film

industry makes most of its profit through cable telecasts and the sales of VCDs and music

cassettes, rather than at the theaters. Anuj Joshi’s film flopped even by these more modest

standards. In analyzing the reasons for the gap between critical success and box-office

failure, we find that nearly a decade after the seminal moment in the people’s movement

that won statehood for Uttranchal, the Muzzafarnagar episode remains a subject of

insistent conversation in the public sphere. Consequently, Meri Saun had to battle the tide

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of high expectations among the spectators who leveled two main charges against the film.

In an interesting move that draws attention to the filmmaker’s own sense of

accountability to the people of Uttrancchal, he uses direct address to answer these charges

in a preface to the VCD version of the film.

First, many spectators rejected the use of Hindi in the film. Joshi defends his

decision in the following way: “As far as the use of Hindi is concerned, it is justified

because the action of the film takes place in Dehradun and its neighboring area.” Indeed

Hindi is mostly heard when Dehradun’s DAV College is in the background, and

Garhwali is heard when the action moves to the village. The film relies on the dictates of

the narrative to move back and forth between the languages, and this imperative is

consonant with socio-cultural realities. Joshi continues to make a defense out of empirical

truisms: “The film is based on the Uttrakhand andolan, which really had Hindi as its

language. The slogans and the folk songs that we used during the movement were in

Hindi.” Joshi’s most interesting commentary is on the characters that represent the

segment of the local population that has settled outside the region and has gradually

adopted Hindi into its everyday practice. Joshi says: “Granted that they have forgotten the

Garhwali language, our society will not stop recognizing them as Garhwali or refuse to

accept that they are Garhwali.” He adds that, the “lead characters represent the younger

generation, which does not know our language well or wear traditional costumes.”

As a political movement, Garhwali nationalism has been anchored by a sense of

shared cultural identity, wherein a distinctive language, territory and general style of life

are emphasized. Joshi’s remarks point to the limitations of the purist imperative, which

functions well as “political currency” when negotiating for rights for the group but fails

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to recognize its “mixedness.” Everyday life, language and behavior have a mixed

genealogy. The fact of the matter is that, in the new state of Uttranchal, Hindi is the main

medium of education both in schools and colleges; it is the language used in government

offices, courts and internet cafés; Hindi music often blares as raucously as Garhwali

music in even the remoter villages. Hybridity in language use is compounded by the

presence of the Kumanoni language, whose speakers were as visible a part of the

Uttrakhand andolan as the Garhwalis. While internal distinctions appear inconsequential

in opposition to “plains people,” Uttranchal is not characterized by homogeneity of

“rituals, festivals, customs, standards of morality, ecology and even cattle” (Moller 251).

The irony of the language-based attack on Meri Saun is that if the Uttranchal film

industry acquired more commercial muscle, this would probably revitalize the indigenous

languages just as the spread of the music cassettes had done back in the eighties.

But the conflict over what constitutes appropriate cultural representation is not unique among Garhwalis. In her work on assertions of cultural difference by ethnic

minorities in Nepal, Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka finds a similar phenomenon: “Within the

ethnics groups themselves struggles occur over their material and symbolic resources”

(420). This often involves “defining the group’s boundaries and its rules for inclusion and exclusion,” but it can also occasion struggles “over defining a proper public image of a

given culture as well as over establishing who is in charge of defining and promoting a

specific image of an ethnic minority group” (ibid).

The struggle over the public image of a group can be linked to contestations over historical narratives. This brings us to the second tier of the condemnations hurled against

Meri Saun. On October 2, 1994, when the Muzzafarnagar police started teargassing the

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thousands of men and women who had traveled to Delhi to voice their appeal for state

autonomy, people ran to save themselves amidst a chaotic scene. As mentioned earlier,

women were assaulted and raped, but the turmoil of the moment was such that we have

not been able to cull a complete listing of these atrocities even to this date. For many of

the men and women on the buses, the trip to Delhi had taken them further from their

homes than they had ever been, so they were especially ill equipped to deal with the

mayhem that broke around them. In some instances, it took days for individuals to account for and/or reunite with their co-travelers. Everyone who was there has a distinct and intimate account to narrate. They experienced that night in different way: some hid in the fields; some were raped; others were beaten or shot; some spent the night worrying that their relatives had been killed; some were alone; others had the relative comfort of being in small groups. Of course, after the night was over, the survivors made different choices about how they would continue to serve the Uttrakhand andolan. So, while there is a commonly shared understanding of the seminal role of the Muzzafarnagar episode on the history of the state of Uttranchal, there is no singular unfolding that can give coverage to the stories of everyone who experienced it. Nonetheless, it is hardly perplexing that the discourse community of the Muzzafarnagar sufferers to which the filmmaker belongs had individually distinct expectations of his film’s narrative, which disappointed them.

In defending himself, Joshi argues that a film about a political movement cannot represent everything that occurred or everybody who participated. As the filmmaker makes subjective decisions about what constitutes the representative aspect of the

Uttrakhand andolan, the structural logic of his project precludes being able to satisfy everyone. Joshi has a Gandhian perspective on what comprises the distinguishing

180 characteristic of the movement he is representing. This is signaled both by the dedication to the martyrs of Muzzafarnagar with which his film ends: “We have fought so love can live in the world/ So the blood of man no man can drink,” and by his prefatory remarks:

“While people and movements such as those for Free Khalistan and Azaad Kashmir picked up arms to emphasize their demands, our community remained peaceful despite the atrocities conducted against us.”

In investigating South Asian culture, as we consider the representations of movements based on ethnic identity, and whether we take a primordialist or an instrumentalist view of their origins, we have to grant that these movements are only becoming more powerful in the new millennium. In a wider framework, such movements can also be defined in terms of caste, language, and paradigmatically by religion. South

Asia scholars connect the term ethnic group to an older term, “community” (sampradaya) that is opposed to communalism (sampradayikta). The concept of communalism, as

Gyanendra Pandey points out, “stands for the puerile and the primitive – all that colonialism, in its own reckoning was not…Like ‘tribalism’ in Africa, communalism in the colonialist perception served to designate a pathological condition” (9-10). As this

“pathological condition” impels ever-growing attention in contemporary political discourse, a certain strand of scholarship has shifted the responsibility for the above construction onto anthropological studies by foreign scholars, which are especially numerous in the case of Nepal. Prayag Lal Sharma argues that, “in the presentation of their ethnographic studies their main sympathy naturally goes to the ethnic and linguistic minorities on whom their studies are centered” (491). More damningly, he continues that,

“it is the anthropologists’ accepted method of research to look for differences in every

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aspect of culture and lifestyle that set their group apart from the rest,” and that this

method sharply sets off the ethnic group in question from the one that can be found living

not far away or not so exploitatively (ibid). Harka Gurung similarly points to the foreign

scholars’ “divisive habit of romanticizing the culture of minorities” (497).

In conclusion, I would agree with Radha Hegde who says, “We need to rethink

the ways in which we talk about culture. The fact is that much water has flown under the

bridge … everywhere in the world for us to conceptualize culture in theoretically sealed

ways” (226). Hindi language and cinema are no longer “alien” to many Nepalis and

Garhwalis. At the same time, for many ordinary people, “local language and traditions

have no particular value, and are, they often feel, a disadvantage in the highly

competitive scramble for employment and survival” (Gellner, David 20). Perhaps a

robust regional film industry will only develop in a complementary rather than competitive relationship to the one that is currently dominant. After all, the first film made in Nepali, featuring Nepali actors and setting, was made by the Bollywood filmmaker Hira Singh Khatri. Admittedly, the current power dynamic precludes a reverse communication from escalating any time soon. But stranger things have happened:

Bollywood has scored at the British top-ten charts. Kollywood and Dollywood might do the same at Bombay or Delhi one day.

CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION

Bhupen said: “We can’t deny the ubiquity of faith. If we write in such a way as to pre-judge such belief as in some way deluded or false, then are we not guilty of elitism, of imposing our world- view on the masses? Swatilekha was scornful: “Battle lines are being drawn up in India today,” she said, “Secular versus religious, the light versus the dark. Better you choose which side you are on.” (Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 551)

Salman Rushdie saw Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz as a ten-years-old in

Bombay and names it as his very first literary influence. The differences between a film

like The Wizard of Oz and the Bombay cinema are plain to him. Fleming’s film, Rushdie says, is characterized by an “almost complete secularism” and an “imaginative truth”.

The Bombay cinema, by contrast, is found lacking on both fronts: “Most Hindi movies were then and now what can only be called trashy” (Step 6). In attributing corniness,

tawdriness and vulgarity to Hindi cinema, Rushdie participates in a widespread discourse

whose developmental logic has typecast it as an escapist and regressive. Simultaneously,

Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses has been credited with deploying the “trashiest” film

industry for “one of the most evocative explorations and allegorical representations of the

postcolonial consciousness,” for legitimizing a “despised national-cultural form”

(Chakravarty 1). Significantly, this conferral of legitimacy often operates in the same

intellectual domain in which religiosity can be disdainfully collapsed into fundamentalist

expressions. But fundamentalisms come in many guises, and this dissertation attempts to

showcase popular representations that are alert to the different nuances of fundamentalist movements emblematized by them.

182 183

If one argument that Against Fundamentalisms makes is that studying

fundamentalisms in relation to specific identity groups simultaneously reveals offering

pluralistic resistance, the other is that the cultural form of commercial Hindi cinema

mediates postcolonial consciousness not with the non-imaginative naiveté alleged by

critics but with a humanist complexity, whereby character and narrative coding intricately

gestures to both the subjectivity of belonging and of not-belonging. Equally importantly, the films discussed here perform an address that is multi-vocal in that they literally speak to a variety of audiences whose native language is not Hindi and that they have a conversational relay with other film industries in the region. To emphasize, not only does

Hindi cinema reflect an inventively fluid discourse on the character of the nation as

home, it finds a home in a series of “imagined communities” that are not reined by the

geographical boundaries of the various nation-states in South Asia. In Nepal, for

example, we find a strong audience for Hindi films at the video stores, on television and

in the movies theaters, and Nepali filmmakers do not regard them as just a commercial

threat but also as a powerful source of ideas relating to both the style and substance of

local production. Films like Mission Kashmir cohabit with domestic counterparts like

Iqbal Kashmiri’s Musalman in Pakistani spectators’ homes. In considering a variety of

films, we find that at the turn of the new millennium, South Asian productions, whether

labeled as Bollywood or constructed and received in relation to Bollywood, do not simply

replicate nationalist agendas but foreground their plurality and contestatory

manifestations.

In fact the telling and poignant irony is that the very words with which Rushdie

concludes his analysis of The Wizard of Oz describe too the “imaginative truth” that he

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uncritically denies Hindi cinema: “We understand that the real secret of the ruby slippers

is not that ‘there’s no place like home,’ but rather that there is no such place as home;

except, of course, for the home we make, or the homes that are made for us, in Oz: which

is anywhere, and everywhere, except the place from which we began” (30). What is

Altaf’s home or Inayat’s or Meghna’s? Are Radha and Sita at home in their patriarchal

quarters? They make their own homes, and Akka finds a home at many different

addresses. This, the truth of “imaginary homelands” is also the truth of “imagined communities,” which does not negate the materiality of the social violence that the different characters discussed in the dissertation represent, but emphasizes the possibility that even the oppressed can construct homes for themselves in revisualized nations. By accentuating this possibility and that of characters emblematizing extreme ends of the social contract finding a home together, popular cinema becomes characterized as escapist.

On the other hand, when documentaries like Scribbles on Akka and War and

Peace showcase a similar possibility, that social fissures can be fixed, they are rarely

charged in the same way. Their formal divergence from the conventional stylization of

the commercial form often provides an obfuscating screen over thematic and ideological

similarities. Usually, such thinking remains caught up in the charges that Theodor W.

Adorno had leveled against the culture industry, that “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” (132). Yet, there are numerous

cases in which “the appeal to order” is neither “unquestioned,” nor “unanalyzed and

undialectically opposed” even in films that are self-avowedly manufactured for

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entertainment (133), because they do not unthinkingly duplicate an allegedly unified

nationalist agenda. As this dissertation shows, secure in their ability to communicate with

a vastly disaggregated audience, un-inclined to the instrumental hypothesis of the virile

nation-state despite citing it repeatedly, many commercial films 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” (Habermas 142), the commercial films discussed here are part of the same web of social negotiation in which “art” projects are enmeshed.

To conclude, as the staging of violence becomes a global spectacle, the politics of identity that fuel this spectacle force a reconstitution of the agendas of the nation-states. It is important to study how transnational circuits of production and reception effect this process, but “instead of debating whether the nation-state has been made obsolete by transnational media, it seems more pertinent to ask” how this media participates in “the reimagining of the national community” (Mankekar 345). My dissertation is written in this spirit, however future research might investigate how contemporary national imaginaries are being reconstituted by bringing a wider variety of subcontinental films into the limelight. Scholarship has only scratched the surface of the many cinemas of

South Asia.

APPENDIX A LIST OF PRIMARY FILM REFERENCES

Basnet, Sovit, dir. Army. Nepali. 145 minutes. 1998.

Benegal, Dev, dir. Split Wide Open. English/ Hindi. 100 minutes. 1999.

Chopra, Vidhu Vinod, dir. Mission Kashmir. Hindi. 160 minutes. 2000.

Dutta, Madhusree, dir. Scribbles on Akka. Kannada/ Hindi/ English. 60 minutes.

2000.

Gustad, Kaizad, dir. Bombay Boys. English/ Hindi. 105 minutes. 1998.

Joshi, Anuj, dir. Meri Saun. Garhwali/ Hindi.160 minutes. 2004.

Mehta, Deepa, dir. Fire. English. Hindi. 104 minutes. 1996.

Patwardhan, Anand, dir. War and Peace. Hindi. English. 148 minutes. 2001.

Ratnam, Mani, dir. Dil Se. Hindi. Tamil. Telugu. 163 minute. 1998.

Sivan, Santosh, dir. The Terrorist. Tamil. 95 minutes. 1999.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Renuka Bisht has received her BA, MA, and M.Phil. from the University of Delhi.

She also has a diploma in Film Appreciation from the Film and Television Institute of

India at Pune. After receiving her doctorate at the University of Florida, she hopes to use her learning to contribute to her country in a meaningful way.

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