Youth, Sartorial Style, and Cultural Signification in Contemporary Kerala
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APARNA NANDAKUMAR Youth, Sartorial Style, and Cultural Signification in Contemporary Kerala 1. Introduction The history of the cultural study of 'youth' as a discursively formed category is intertwined with the history of British Cultural Studies. The Birmingham Centre's deployment of concepts like 'counter-school culture,' 'subculture,' and 'style' gave rise to a redefinition of youth as agents of resistance and social transformation, in opposition to earlier sociological and psychological studies that analysed youth as vulnerable to social evils. Later, the valorisation of youth subcultures as sites of pure resistance was problematised by cultural theorists such as Angela McRobbie. In postcolonial societies like India, attempts at studying youth as a cultural category also have to grapple with the peculiar relationship between youth, modernity, and colonialism. In such a context, I would like to examine how 'youth' functions as a signifier in contemporary times, a signifier that is constantly reinvented, reinvested with new meanings, and re-deployed in new contexts of political self-formation. For this purpose, I focus on two recent developments in the sphere of popular culture in Kerala1 that show the ways in which youth participate in cultural meaning-making through the appropriation of existing sartorial trends for new purposes. In the first instance, I analyse a recent music video, "Native Bapa" (dir. Muhsin Parari, 2012), produced and circulated by the self-defined music movement Mappila Lahala on social media websites and online media-sharing platforms. I look at how this video, with its fusion of hip-hop and the colloquial Mappila Malayalam dialect as well as its appropriation of traditional Mappila attire and accessories, imagines a new mode of figuring/signifying youth – one that is cosmopolitan in outlook, yet rooted in the social and political culture of the region. In the second instance, I examine how young people refashion the traditional sartorial code of shirt and mundu associated with hegemonic masculinity in Kerala, as a result of the popularisation of this style in the popular Malayalam film Premam (dir. Alphonse Puthren, 2015). I choose these two instances from a range of creative youth cultural practices in the region, mostly expressed through digital platforms, since both exemplify spectacular ways of resignifying existing sartorial conventions. Discussing these two cases, I try to tease out the ways in which youth redefines itself in the contemporary moment, the cultural resonances they draw on, and their continuing engagement with the public sphere. Central to the analyses in this paper are the engagements of young people with sartorial styles in an attempt to refashion themselves in relation to established notions 1 Kerala is a state in southern India, bordered by Tamil Nadu on the east and south, Karnataka on the north, and the Arabian sea on the west. The dominant language in this region is Malayalam and the demonym for its inhabitants is 'Malayali' or, less frequently, 'Keralite.' Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 31.3 (Winter 2020): 187-203. Anglistik, Jahrgang 31 (2020), Ausgabe 3 © 2020 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 188 APARNA NANDAKUMAR of both tradition and modernity. Style, according to Dick Hebdige (1979), has always been a prominent mode through which youth subcultures have expressed their identities. Hebdige studies youth subcultural styles as symbolic means of articulating their difference from and dissent to the dominant culture. Hebdige sees style as "intentional communication" (1979, 100): the obviously fabricated nature of the codes of subcultural style reveals the fabricated nature of all societal norms and codes which were hitherto considered obvious or natural. Hebdige also examines the multiple functions of style: as "bricolage" (1979, 102), by appropriating certain symbols and placing them in very different positions within the same symbolic order to erase or subvert their original meanings; "in revolt" (1979, 106), whereby mundane or profane objects are recovered and used as fashion accessories; as "homology" (1979, 113), a thoroughly ordered way of signifying chaos in which the objects chosen or adapted for signifying subcultural style are chosen precisely because they are "intrinsically or in their adapted forms homologous with the focal concerns, activities, group structure and collective self-image of the subculture" (1979, 114), and as a "signifying practice" (1979, 117) or a process by which an individual does not try to master language (or signs) but rather examines how language works to undo him/her. The culture industry played a great role in shaping sartorial trends, and itself borrowed liberally from youth cultural styles. Thomas Frank, in a study of the Winter Journals American business economy of the 1960s, argues that consumer capitalism in the form of advertising has contributed to the very formation of the American counterculture by encouraging consumers, especially the youth, to engage in various leisure activities, Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) even those that might be considered rebellious (Frank 1997). In his study of the counterculture, Christopher Gair agrees with Frank's analysis by arguing that for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution […] countercultural calls to expand individual and communal horizons replicate the demands of a successful American consumer capitalist economy – that is, the perpetual generation of new desires, and a refusal to stick with outmoded goods or ideologies. (2007, 7) However, Gair also argues that corporate culture did not always have control over how subcultural groups receive and interpret signifiers which the former has appropriated from the latter. Though he does not subscribe to the myth of a 'pure' or 'innocent' counterculture that is always already in opposition to consumer capitalism, he acknowledges that bourgeois society perceives youth subcultures and countercultures as a real threat to the establishment (Gair 2007, 4-5). Drawing on these observations, I focus on the process of cultural resignification through sartorial style and the rise of a bourgeois 'moral panic' around such youthful practices in the two instances studied in this paper. The existing studies on youth can be divided into two broad trajectories: sociological or ethnographic studies concerned with the empirical study of young people, mostly in terms of their social roles and relationships, and cultural studies of youth as a discursively shaped category, through self-presentations and representations of youth, through analyses of the various cultural meanings and attributes associated with the concept of youth. This second trajectory can be traced back to the early studies on youth subcultures, resistance, style, and cultural production by the Centre for Anglistik, Jahrgang 31 (2020), Ausgabe 3 © 2020 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) YOUTH, SARTORIAL STYLE, AND CULTURAL SIGNIFICATION IN CONTEMPORARY KERALA 189 Contemporary Cultural Studies, Birmingham, dating from the mid-1960s onwards, and therefore to the very early days of (British) Cultural Studies itself. Thus, the cultural study of youth can be seen as intertwined with the development of Cultural Studies as an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary space of enquiry, and its evolving theoretical frameworks, methods, and objects. The cultural study of youth as a discursive category is therefore highly relevant for an appraisal of Cultural Studies itself. Studies on youth subcultural identity and practices in India have been few and have often tended to focus on urban life in metropolitan centres. For instance, Vamsee Juluri (2002) examines the process by which Indian music television audiences construct a sense of generational, national, and global identity and Arun Saldanha (2002) analyses youth culture among the upper class in Bangalore, with a focus on the reception of Western pop music, as an instance of how modernity is experienced and produced in the postcolonial world. Studies of youth behaviour in rural contexts, on the other hand, have tended to be more sociological or anthropological in scope. Examples include Leena Abraham's (2002) study of romantic and sexual relationships among lower middle-class and working-class (also lower caste) students in a metropolitan college in Maharashtra; Martyn Rogers's (2008) examination of caste and gender relations in a mostly Hindu government-run college campus in Tamil Nadu; Filippo and Caroline Osella's study (1998) of caste-inflected masculinities in male friendship groups in Kerala; and Craig Jeffrey's investigation (2010) of how unemployment affects young men's relationship to time and space in northern India. Even Ritty Lukose's (2010) insightful analysis of the myriad, differential ways in which young people evolve their selves in relation to their consumption practices is less concerned with how globalisation and consumer capitalism contribute to the rise of a new discursive figure of youth. The two instances of cultural re-signification that I study in this paper rise from the small towns of Kerala, and exemplify the different ways in which youth engage with the symbols and codes propagated by the cultural industry – the first one as an oppositional countercultural movement with a clear ideological agenda, and the second one as a more diffuse expression of popular enthusiasm that eludes easy ideological explanations.