The enlightened public in India is well-briefed about the advent of populist right-wing regimes in the present conjuncture of world politics. Here I wish to write about the popular rather than the populist, and this too in the field of arts. Literature and the media – culture in short – which is taking the urban and rurban India by storm.
This spurt of popular culture has as its vanguard the youth and the student population. In what follows, I delineate three manifestations of this upsurge: the Bollywood movie Pathaan, the protest over the banning and more-or-less openly defiant watching of BBC documentary ‘India and the Modi Question’ and, finally, the captivating ambience of an Urdu literary festival, Jashn-e-Rekhta, which I attended in Delhi late last year.
Each of these three events is a big poster of cultural dissent and defiance. The movie Pathaan neatly sidesteps the by-now jaded and repetitive narratives of communalism and nationalism in our country. Firstly, the protagonist Shahrukh Khan is an orphan, ambidextrously neither Hindu nor Muslim, who has bestowed upon himself the title ‘Pathaan’ for his valorous deed of rescuing Pashtun villagers. Neither the geographically unspecified territory nor the religion of this character is significant for the movie, rather the moniker ‘Pathaan’ symbolises his neutral ethnicity in relation to India and Pakistan. Then there are ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ on either side of the Indo-Pak border and – to heighten the semiotically fuzzy transcendent and global provenance of the film’s message – it is humanity, the people at large, who are saved in the movie’s denouement. The unprecedented box-office killings that this film made are a reminder of the audience fatigue of a belaboured and imposed narrative of nationalism and its replacement by riveting and spectacular entertainment. A breath of fresh air!
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The students’ defiant viewing of the BBC documentary not only signals a protest against censorship and denial of citizens’ freedom, it is a slap on the face of those who would forcibly wish to rub the youths’ noses to the grindstone of the establishment. The audio-visual media – the documentary, movies like Pathaan and statements in support of freedom of expression by big stars like Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan – are clear signals of a cultural rebellion and revival in the country. It is not for nothing that a nervous Indian prime minister, in a representative meeting of his party cadres, cautioned his party men to keep their hands off films.
The audience at Jashn-e-Rekhta. Photo: Twitter/@JashneRekhta
The vernacular revolution (and here I treat the English language of the BBC documentary as an Indian vernacular) was powerfully signalled to me at the Jashn-e-Rekhta festival. There was a shoulder-to-shoulder milling around of a crowd of Muslim and non-Muslim youth. They jointly savoured Urdu recitations and speeches. What was remarkable was that eating joints had relatively much less patrons than booksellers selling Urdu books, that too in Devanagari script. When one considers the by-now well-known repressive moves by the state authorities to brow-beat and stigmatise the Muslim minority, the festival was nothing short of a spectacle of cultural resistance.
The excited and enthusiastic watchers of a blockbuster movie like Pathaan, the ‘clandestine’ viewers of the BBC documentary, and the connoisseurs at Jashn-e-Rekhta are, according to the self-appointed gatekeepers of Hindutva, aided and abetted by the powers that be, the ‘deviants’ who need to be regimented and brought to book. For me, on the other hand, they are a timely reminder in India of those Iranian revolutionaries for whom Michel Foucault wrote damningly against state power. For these purveyors of the new visual media and events, our protesting youth and their comrades-in-arm, the so-called incarcerated ‘urban Naxals’, there is this message from Foucault: “to be respectful when something singular arises; to be intransigent when power offends against the universal”.
The new protests arise against a backdrop so presciently etched by Rabindranath Tagore when he wrote that a country is not merely mrinmaya (territorial or geographical); it is chinmaya (ideational or of consciousness).
Ravindra K. Jain retired as professor of sociology, Jawaharlal Nehru University.