Media and Utopia: History, Imagination and Technology 1138962643, 9781138962644

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
List of plates
Notes on contributors
Introduction
PART I Archive and imagination
1 The cinematic soteriology of Bollywood
2 Fetish power unbound: a small history of 'woman' in Chinese cinema
3 Civil contract of photography in India
PART II Genealogy
4 Tracking utopias: technology, labour and secularism in Bombay cinema (1930s-1940s)
5 National becoming, regional variation and everyday moments: the Film Enquiry Committee, Uttar Pradesh and the student cinema-goer
6 Museum as metaphor: the politics of an imagined Ahmedabad
PART III Nostalgia
7 The labour of self-making: youth service workers and postsocialist urban development in Kolkata
8 Nostalgia and the mediatic imagination in Tito's Yugoslavia
9 Past futures of old media: Gulammohammed Sheikh's Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home
10 Sonic ruptures: music, mobility and the media
PART IV Newness
11 Media and imagination: Ramananda Chatterjee and his journals in three languages
12 Radical intervention in dystopian media ecologies
13 Posthuman amusements: gaming and virtuality
PART V Word and the world
14 Populist publics: print capitalism and crowd violence beyond liberal frameworks
PART VI Political theology
15 On innocence: blasphemy, pan-Islam and the uneven mediation of utopia

Citation preview

Media and Utopia

Edited by Arvind Rajagopal and Anupama Rao

CRITICAL INTERVENTIONS IN THEORY AND PRAXIS

Media and Utopia History, imagination and technology Edited by Arvind Rajagopal and Anupama Rao

www.routledge.com A Routledge India Original

9781138962644_Full Cover.indd 1

3/31/2016 6:46:38 AM

Media and Utopia Collective political projects have become ephemeral and are subject to radical forms of erasure through co-optation, division, redefinition, or intimidation in present times. Media and Utopia responds to the resulting crisis of the social by investigating the links between mediation and political imagination. This volume addresses those utopian spaces historically constituted through media and analyses the conditions that made them possible. Individual chapters deal with non-Western histories of technopolitics through distinctive perspectives on how to conceive the relationship between social form, everyday life, and utopian possibility, and by examining a range of media formats and genres – from print, sound, and film to new media. With contributions from major scholars in the field, this book will be of interest to researchers and scholars of media studies, culture studies, sociology, modern South Asian history, and politics. Arvind Rajagopal is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication, and an affiliate faculty in the Department of Sociology, and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. His book Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (2001) won the Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize, and his edited volume The Indian Public Sphere appeared in 2009. His recent essays have been on the political culture of post-independence India. He is currently writing about the history of publicity. Anupama Rao is Associate Professor of History, Barnard College, Columbia University. She has research and teaching interests in the history of anti-colonialism; gender and sexuality studies; caste and race; historical anthropology, social theory, and colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism. Her book The Caste Question (2009) theorises caste subalternity, with specific focus on the role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers). She is currently working on a book on the political thought of B. R. Ambedkar as well as a project titled Dalit Bombay, which explores the relationship between caste, political culture, and everyday life in colonial and postcolonial Bombay.

Critical Interventions in Theory and Praxis Series Editor: Prafulla C. Kar, Director, Centre for Contemporary Theory, Vadodara, Gujarat, India

The volumes published in the Series are devoted to current interventions in theory and its application. Issues addressed engage with questions like the place of the human sciences in the age of technology; cultural studies and their implications for literature; the interface between science and philosophy; the teleology of Theory as a new topos; environmental and ethical issues in education; relations between globalised knowledge and indigenous sources of inquiry; identity debates in democracies and other forms of governance in both east and west; the role of media in relation to epistemies of violence; and reflections on the destiny of humankind. This, however, is not exhaustive, and the Series welcomes creative interventions on similar lines. Books in this series Democratic Culture Historical and philosophical essays Edited by Akeel Bilgrami Reconsidering Social Identification Race, gender, class and caste Edited by Abdul R. Jan Mohamed The Virtual Transformation of the Public Sphere Knowledge, politics, identity Edited by Gaurav Desai

Media and Utopia history, imagination and technology

edited by Arvind Rajagopal and Anupama Rao

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Arvind Rajagopal and Anupama Rao The right of Arvind Rajagopal and Anupama Rao to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-96264-4 (hbk) Typeset in Goudy by Apex CoVantage, LLC

In memory of Bala Kailasam, the utopian media pioneer who died a tragic and untimely death in 2014

Contents ❂ List of figures List of plates Notes on contributors Introduction ARVIND RAJAGOPAL

xi xiii xiv 1

PART I

Archive and imagination 1

The cinematic soteriology of Bollywood ARJUN APPADURAI

2

Fetish power unbound: a small history of ‘woman’ in Chinese cinema REY CHOW

3

Civil contract of photography in India CHRISTOPHER PINNEY

17 19

34

56

PART II

Genealogy 4

Tracking utopias: technology, labour and secularism in Bombay cinema (1930s–1940s) DEBASHREE MUKHERJEE

79 81

viii

5

6

 Contents

National becoming, regional variation and everyday moments: the Film Enquiry Committee, Uttar Pradesh and the student cinema-goer SUZANNE L. SCHULZ Museum as metaphor: the politics of an imagined Ahmedabad POOJA THOMAS

103

133

PART III

Nostalgia

149

7

The labour of self-making: youth service workers and postsocialist urban development in Kolkata SAIKAT MAITRA

151

8

Nostalgia and the mediatic imagination in Tito’s Yugoslavia GABIKA BOCKAJ

171

9

Past futures of old media: Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home KARIN ZITZEWITZ

189

10

Sonic ruptures: music, mobility and the media SHIKHA JHINGAN

209

PART IV

Newness

235

11

Media and imagination: Ramananda Chatterjee and his journals in three languages KALYAN CHATTERJEE

12

Radical intervention in dystopian media ecologies 253 ANINDYA SEKHAR PURAKAYASTHA AND SASWAT SAMAY DAS

13

Posthuman amusements: gaming and virtuality B. S. BINI

237

270

Contents

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ix

PART V

Word and the world 14

Populist publics: print capitalism and crowd violence beyond liberal frameworks FRANCIS CODY

287 289

PART VI

Political theology 15

On innocence: blasphemy, pan-Islam and the uneven mediation of utopia ON BARAK

317 319

Figures ❂ 3.1 A Svetambara Jain guru visits a village home and uses the Vastu app on his smartphone 3.2 Allah Ditta of Gujranwala wounded in leg by bomb from aeroplane 3.3 Exhibit T: scene showing unarmed crowd face to face with the military at Dhaki Nalbundi in Kissa Khani Bazar (now known as Shahidi Bazar) before the second firing 3.4 Exhibit X: Chamanlal shot dead while following the funeral procession of S. Gunga Singh’s children on 31 May 1930 3.5 Lathi charge in action 3.6 Three volunteers lying unconscious in Bulsar Congress Hospital 3.7 Sitaram, a village ghorla (medium) incarnated as Chamunda Ma in Madhya Pradesh 3.8 Retinal scans collected during Aadhaar enrolment in Madhya Pradesh 5.1 The National Herald reports on the Film Enquiry’s visits to Lucknow 5.2 ‘Is Your Cinema Really Necessary?’ Debates over the construction of new cinemas 5.3 Pro-concessions students arrested 5.4 Long-time manager of the Mayfair Cinema, C. V. Advani 7.1 Inside the South City Mall 7.2 Brand staff in front of the cosmetic section of a retail outlet in South City Mall 10.1 Salma Agha is introduced to Indian audiences 10.2 An advertisement hailing the success of Nikaah 10.3 She sings to conquer

57 62

65 67 68 69 70 73 110 113 119 120 158 162 226 227 229

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Figures

14.1 Image of the DMK leader M. K. Stalin printed on the front windshield of an autorickshaw in Chennai 15.1 Title woodcut from Thomas More’s novel Utopia, 1516

307 322

Plates ❂ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Kisan Kanya (dir. Gunjal, prod. Imperial Film Company, 1938), advertisement in filmindia magazine, December 1937, back cover Apni Nagariya or Mud (dir. M. B. Gidwani, prod. Hindustan Cinetone, 1940), song booklet cover Jhumke (dir. J. K. Nanda, prod. Chitra Pictures, 1946), song booklet cover Kaavad, home-installed Returning Home Kaavad, home-installed, closed view Niharika from Google Earth Kaavad, home-installed, from the other side Ark

Contributors ❂ Arjun Appadurai is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, USA. His most recent book is Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance (2015). On Barak is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern & African History at Tel Aviv University, specializing in the social and cultural history of science and technology in non-Western settings. His most recent book is On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (2013). B. S. Bini is an academic fellow at Balvant Parekh Centre for General Semantics and Other Human Sciences, Vadodara, Gujarat India, Managing Editor of the Journal of Contemporary Thought and Editor of Anekaant: A Journal of Polysemic Thought. Her articles, poems and reviews have appeared in journals and anthologies. Gabika Bockaj is a doctoral candidate at the Institute for European Ethnology, Humboldt University in Berlin and International Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Theory, Vadodara, India. Her research is about the cultural flows between India and Yugoslavia in the context of the Non-Aligned Movement. Kalyan Chatterjee is Professor and Deputy Director of the Amity School of Communication, Amity University, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India. He worked as a journalist for 22 years before he made the switch to teaching. Rey Chow is Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature and the current Director of the Program in Literature at Duke University, USA.

Contributors

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xv

Among her recent publications is the monograph Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (2014). Chow’s writings on literature, film, critical theory, and cultural politics have appeared in more than 10 languages. Francis Cody is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, and the author of the Edward Sapir Prize–winning book, The Light of Knowledge: Literacy Activism and the Politics of Writing in South India (2013). Saswat Samay Das is Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. His present research explores political theory after Gilles Deleuze. Shikha Jhingan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She is a founder member of Media-storm, an independent women’s film-making collective formed in Delhi in 1986. Her research focuses on performance, practices and circulation of the female voice in Hindi film songs. Saikat Maitra is currently Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for Modern Indian Studies at the Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany. His doctoral dissertation explores how current regimes of neo-liberal development in Kolkata have transformed the affective and social lifeworlds of the urban poor in the last two decades. Debashree Mukherjee is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, USA, and Associate Editor of BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. Her dissertation, ‘Bombay Modern’, investigates the consolidation of the Bombay film industry in the 1930s and 1940s by tracking the entanglements of material practice and cinematic modernity. Christopher Pinney is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture at University College London, UK. His most recent book (together with the photographer Suresh Punjabi) is Artisan Camera: Studio Photography from Central India (2013).

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Contributors

Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Kazi Nazrul University, West Bengal, India. He is currently working on postcolonial readings of radical political theology and penology after Derrida. Suzanne L. Schulz is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, and visiting scholar at Mardin Artuklu University, Turkey. She holds an MA in Asian Cultures and Languages and a PhD in Film and Media Studies. Pooja Thomas is Assistant Professor at MICA Ahmedabad, India. She earned her PhD from IIT Gandhinagar, India. Her doctoral work explores the uses of heritage in the production of Ahmedabad’s symbolic geography. Karin Zitzewitz teaches art history at Michigan State University, USA, where she has also curated exhibitions of contemporary South Asian art for the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum. She is the author of The Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (2014).

Introduction Arvind Rajagopal

❂

T

his volume grew out of a conference seeking to explore the broad theme of global futures and the visions of justice and modes of collectivity that underwrite them. The conference was conceived in the wake of popular movements that suddenly became prominent – such as the Arab Spring, Occupy (Wall Street), and recently, the #StandWithJNU and the anticorruption campaigns in India. Over the short term, the outcome of each of these campaigns is uncertain to say the least. The failure of the Arab Spring is perhaps the most dramatic, in contrast to the euphoria that greeted it. But in each of these campaigns, the technologically mediated character of the events was constantly remarked upon, as was the idealistic, if not utopian, spirit animating them. ‘Media’ and ‘Utopia’ thus appeared as descriptive terms deserving analysis for gaining critical purchase on these events. While the media were both ubiquitous and constantly invoked in these movements, a strange naiveté attended the issue of mediation, noticed only to be applauded – was popular mobilization not to be welcomed, after all? High levels of optimism showed in these contexts, against the odds we might say, and represented unanticipated forms of political collectivity that nevertheless could only harbour good news and did not warrant critique. The spread of electronic media was finally bringing enlightenment to the rest of the world, or so it seemed from much of the news coverage in the West, registering with the masses before their governments noticed it. Was it possible that both old and new forms of social and political power were emboldened in the uncritical enthusiasm towards the spectacle of popular unity? Was there not an importation of radical and insurgent political aesthetic forms of crowds in public places but without sufficient acknowledgement of the challenges posed by them?

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Today, the large-scale utopian projects of the past are widely questioned; meanwhile, social and political debates are crisis-driven rather than shaped by longer-term visions. But utopias continue to emerge. Witness the many expressions of hope and struggle, individual and collective, at times lacking what movements are reckoned by: leaders, blueprints, manifestos, and cadre. Their performative and material practices of communication, and modes of mediation, more broadly, are increasingly prominent and increasingly difficult to separate from the aspirations expressed. As grand utopian narratives fragment, attention to their forms of mediation may help to clarify the different kinds of futures being imagined today. Media may not determine our situation, contra Friedrich Kittler, but they may help to illuminate it. 

Utopia? The conclusion of the Cold War era led to triumphal predictions about the end of history. In fact, the moment marked an end to mass utopias, that is, to the widespread belief in collective emancipation fostered by technologies of the modern state. To reflect on utopia as both artefact and genre is one way to understand how conceptions of utopia and history has changed. Utopian thought shaped horizons of expectation, even as it enabled new modes of collectivity. We might think here of writings by Enlightenment philosophers of the 18th century, utopian socialism of the 19th century, anarchism, anticolonialism, anticasteism, communism, Negritude, and radical Islam, as well as the reorganization of social life in the Gandhian ashram, the commune and the kibbutz. Indeed as modern conceptions of time became open ended, secular and homogeneous, new folds arose within it harbouring the sense of further possibilities discrepant with and transcending the present. Modernity generated critique, but it spurred the growth of utopias too; if critique sought to overturn power, utopias imagined themselves as beyond power’s reach. Utopias may be naïve, but they continue to emerge, and, given scholarly preoccupation with the high politics of the state, have been like the poetry of modernity, a neglected genre in an era when the idea of progress became prosaic. As practices and technologies of abstraction and mediation proliferated with nation building, they generated their opposite: the sense of an unmediated relation to the benefits of

Introduction 

3

modernity, and of alternative forms of belonging. If these practices together helped conceive utopian programs of inclusion across social differences, they also entailed containment, foreclosing questions that did not fit into a given evolutionary framework predicated on ideas of a secularized world available to historical explanation. When historical explanation itself doesn’t have a narrative anymore – and this is arguably the case after the Cold War, when nation-building is out of fashion and some kind of empire seems to be back, but without its earlier claims about the rights of its subjects, utopia may be all we have for the moment. 

Media? ‘Media’ in the past half-century or so have suddenly come into view as a new object demanding analysis while confounding received disciplinary divisions. The term bridges categories of subject and object, as well as material and symbolic domains. Long assumed to be inherently modernizing, media invite mystification and hence must provoke theoretical caution, even as they require historicization. As Reinhart Koselleck has observed, concepts emerge within and in response to specific polemics arising in history. Thomas More’s Utopia (lit., no place) was published in the early modern era, following the discovery of America and the mapping of the globe. Utopia thus emerged as a concept when print culture was nascent, imagined just as the world became finite and cognizable.1 In colonial and postcolonial societies, in India and elsewhere, print and visual media have had a more complex existence. Attempts to sequester religion from the political sphere are persistently challenged by the emergence of new publics, unexpectedly animated by new mediatizations of religious symbols and imagery, which become politically salient. Media, as material support, communicational surface or conduit, an entity that is ‘here and now’ thus always points to a beyond and an afterwards. There are reasonable grounds, therefore, to regard ‘utopia’ and ‘media’ as companion terms.

Media events, or the event of media The Cold War sparked an enormous interest in communications media as representing modern technology, across both eastern and western blocs. They were understood as tools of a regime or as aiding

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 Arvind Rajagopal

capitalist markets, but in either case as subservient to political programmes. Today, the media continue to be assimilated to one or other side of moribund Cold War polemics, whether market versus state or freedom versus control. But if modernity’s advocates regarded media as allies, it is as agents and sites of critical events that media are more prominent now. We can in turn use the ‘event’ as a means of illuminating historical time and to investigate the folds within it, whether the fall of the Bastille, the use of animal fat in cartridge grease as with the Indian Mutiny or the self-immolation of a Tunisian street vendor, popularly referenced as the start of the Arab Spring. Media’s potential as a tool of political visibility is thus related to the ability of technological mediation to create a layer of virtuality where one or other events recur and provide social actors the sense of an unmediated relationship to the motives that inspire them. We can therefore have rebellions that no experts foresee, uprisings without leaders and political protests without a manifesto. Today, in addition to workers and students, a range of new entities such as the multitude, the precariat, debt, and the environment have emerged as political actors in their own right. Yet utopian aspirations coexist with intensifying and more farreaching networks of control over everyday life. ‘Medium’ was a term that connoted the realm of spirits; ‘media’ today looms large over the terrestrial world. While being commonplace, the term is also incessantly invoked; all manner of powers are attributed to it.2 Media influence political agenda and cultural fashions, and they shape the outcome of many endeavours, consigning some initiatives to failure and ensure the success of others. As such, current usage indeed harks back to the word’s older referent, of invisible powers invoked to make sense of the world, potent agents whose distinction lies in their refusal of sociality, alongside their unrelenting intrusiveness in human affairs. The coming into visibility of ‘media’ as a discursive object is hard to ascertain when we now re-tell history itself as a sequence of media developments. ‘Transportation and communication’, the older taxonomy, designated the means of moving things and people. The terminology was governmental and presumed society as its object of attention. The growth of propaganda during wartime led to distinguishing communication as a specific process with a content, information, that was then mathematized in the Shannon-Weaver model. Transportation and communication indicated infrastructure, that is, the physical apparatuses enabling a society to function. Thus the

Introduction 

5

agency that supervised roads, railways and canals also oversaw services such as those of the post and telegraph system. Built into this understanding was the sense of interconnections across society that the state both facilitated and represented. The state stood for and acted on behalf of the entity presumed and formed by these interconnections. With the growth of government propaganda during wartime, this taxonomy was revised to address what the infrastructure supported or conveyed, specifically, communication as the process and information as the content. Assumptions of a sovereign viewpoint where the form of the various contents would be intelligible, and where any differences were contained, are built into the idea of infrastructure. ‘Media’ and ‘Utopia’ are somewhat like successor terms to state and ideology, but, shorn of their repressive, historically negative connotations, offer themselves instead as neutral categories, unmarked by prevailing regimes of power and domination. ‘Media and Utopia’ could be seen as placeholders for terms such as ‘state’ or ‘ideology’ in a context where the state has retreated, and sovereignty has become obscure or even inoperative. The media, as ever-present technologies conveying senses of and responses to the world, both authoritatively and otherwise, offer both intimacy with subjective desires and a refusal to be obedient to them. They are capable of being law-like in their persuasive force, and formidable in their mobilizing potential, decreeing commandments and rules, accruing and retaining immense audiences without any overt coercion, certifying what is worth knowing about the world and omitting what no one needs to know – a veritable fantasy of governmental power, disarming opposition because it surely is the opponents’ own desires that are mirrored back to them in the media, rendering critique pointless because that’s just another point of view, and there is room for all points of view. Modern sovereignty was conceived in absolutist terms, it is worth recalling, as an answer to interreligious civil war that seemed to have no solution other than to combine the powers of church and crown. Religious difference was redefined (by Hobbes, for example) as private and as a matter of opinion, rather than collectively held belief (the Latin opinari from which the word ‘opinion’ derives, includes both ‘think’ and ‘believe’ among its meanings). The amendation to the Hobbesian social contract was to constitute private property as a restraint on state absolutism (as argued for instance by Locke in his Second Treatise on Government), but the ability of the state to certify knowledge and

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ratify reason remained as the mark of its sovereign status. This is most clearly visible in a limit condition such as a state of emergency; even liberal constitutions accord emergency powers to the head of state. What constitutes an emergency cannot be subject to review; any functioning legal order requires a sovereign authority.3 The expansion and proliferation of means of communication and the resulting multiplication of the sites of publicity present an obvious problem. These newer media, based on increasingly mobile and fast technologies, challenge the prevailing knowledge protocols of the state, with the latter’s procedures and tempo of fact-finding and deliberative reasoning. Media are systems that have often been treated as vanishing mediators instrumental for the purposes they were designed for and yet are growing at a rate and on a scale such that they can no longer be ignored. In attempts to understand their work, what we often find is an intensification of naming, that is, the name of ‘media’ being invoked over and again, only deepening thereby the obscurity of their effects, and conferring on what are often the most advanced products of science and technology the most magical and fetishistic aspect. Today we might argue for media as a class of commodities, relationships of projection and transference are socially sanctioned; media fetishism far from being subconscious might even be a source of pride. To return to Utopia – another word whose proliferation over the past several decades, and perhaps increasingly more recently – is something that was not foreseen. In the 18th century, for Enlightenment philosophes, battling against absolutist despotism, the future that they were fighting for was a real future, one that united all of humankind and that would be achieved, although the philosophes were not necessarily sure how and when. And as the belief in universal progress seized governments in Europe and elsewhere and an intensely this-worldly fervour shaped the energies of men and women of affairs, ‘utopia’ was a derided term. Thomas Babington Macaulay, for example, is said to have remarked that he would rather have an acre in Middlesex than a principality in Utopia. Nearly a century later, Lenin distinguished between socialism utopian and scientific, the former being dreamy and impractical, whereas the latter was liable to achieve its aims. Science provided the rhetoric of command, but in the meantime categories of space and time were themselves undergoing a historical shift. In traditional conceptions of time, while the distant past may be idealized as a lost utopia, chronology dominates history, which is largely a series of events. Modernity reverses this relation. As Kant famously

Introduction 

7

observed, history was previously but a chronological series, but now chronology is subservient to history. Anthropocentrism is the prelude to today’s age of the anthropocene. We understand the passage of time less in terms of familiar knowledge and experience; rather, it is imbued with growing expectations about the future.4 As the routines of everyday life come to be increasingly mediated through images and narratives derived from afar, future orientation becomes susceptible to mythic forms of imagination that are, however, seldom perceived as such. The 20th century witnessed utopian myths of collective emancipation and mass prosperity shared across eastern and western blocs. Today those older collective utopias have far less weight, and calls for revolutionary change tend to ring hollow. Instead we have a reliance on liberal procedure and a demurral or refusal with respect to projects of mass upliftment. But in the absence of given collective utopias promoted by the world’s superpowers, we witness a proliferation of utopias, both of escape and of reconstruction, to use Lewis Mumford’s distinction. The issue is to sensitize us to their existence and to formulate adequate means of analysing and responding to them. There are many remarkable things about the century of mass utopias to ponder over, as we rush headlong into a time when such a general optimism about universal progress is hard to resurrect, or even to imagine as having been widely entertained as a possibility. But its combination of intense idealism and intense practicality is perhaps its most remarkable feature, to the point where philosophical thinking – inquiry into the conditions and implications of thinking in one way rather than another – was rigidly policed, or regarded as frivolous. If the 20th century embraced the idea of a mass utopia, what is most striking for us today when we look back at the period is the lack of awareness of utopia as a category, from our perspective. And this is because utopia was, for all of its political entailments, internally an apolitical space. Was this not a highlight of the Cold War era? Capitalism and communism, worldviews that were products of the enlightenment, could each imagine no possibility of political coexistence beyond an armed truce and had to conclude with the victory of one over the other. Not only did these 20th-century utopias combine intense idealism and intense practicality, they conceived and enacted social organization on an unprecedented level of inclusiveness, while reducing political participation to highly structured enactments, whether as electoral behaviour or as the actions of party cadre. The obverse of mass social upliftment was an extensive depoliticization,

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where the ruling party or the capitalist state largely monopolized the terms of public discourse and reduced political action to the observance of given rules. The challenge at this time, I suggest, is to remediate utopias in ways that can address the political impasse of our time.

Local itineraries of global imaginaries Chalapathi Rau, who edited Jawaharlal Nehru’s newspaper The National Herald for many years and served as his informal press adviser, wrote in a 1973 essay titled ‘Our Utopias’: ‘Where are the political theorists in this country where most thinking is left to the political parties? . . . There is too much practice and too little of theory . . .’ Without ideas that reality could be measured against, ‘[t]he real becomes the unreal and the unreal becomes the real, till even the planners do not know what they are planning for, and every Plan becomes a Utopia, sustained by statistics.’5 Rau vividly captures the modern contrast, intensely felt in developing nations, between the obsessive focus on futures and the abstract and even arbitrary connection this focus often bore to lived reality. The majority of the chapters in this volume focus on India, though the chapters by On Barak, Gabika Bockaj and Rey Chow pull us Westwards and Eastwards outside this geopolitical space, and in so doing force us to confront the political convergences and the key specificities of the Indian public sphere. India is distinguished not only by its being the world’s largest democracy, but also for its being among the largest single-country contributors to the world’s intelligentsia. As such, the contrast between the fervour of its revolutionary claims and the modesty of real revolutionary achievements in 20thcentury Indian history is remarkable. The contrast becomes more vivid in B. R. Ambedkar’s well-known observation that while India had gained political democracy, it lacked a social democracy. This divide between political citizenship and inherited social inequality has been at the heart of contentious claims regarding political rights, social recognition and economic redistribution since India’s independence. The debates over these claims are usually read within a national context, but the centrality of media’s ‘soft power’ to key political transitions (anticolonialism, state developmentalism, liberalization) is also part of a global process. We know that at the outset of the Cold War – and in the context of America’s emergence as a global imperial power supplanting the British – India was a prize that both the United States

Introduction 

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and the USSR sought to win to their side. India enjoyed the prestige of its recent and successful independence movement. India also had more poor people than any other country, and in it, the United States saw a test case for proving capitalism’s superiority to communism, which prevailed in neighbouring China. Nehru’s policy of nonalignment and national sovereignty meant that the superpowers had to tread lightly, however. In this context, communication like science and technology appeared neutral. Three factors are worthy of note. First, in an era when political ideology was contentious, the idea of technology appeared to be above the battle. Second, media technologies were a privileged object of transfer both for donor and recipient countries, since they not only fulfilled the demand for infrastructure but also had the potential to be popular. Third and most important of all, the Cold War period during which these exchanges were conducted was a period when media gained a new kind of importance, as a tool that could both propagate and deflect conflict. Though markedly different from the regulatory regime of the colonial state, which had normalized the use of emergency powers for policing censorship political speech in general, media and communication technologies have been consistently perceived as means of control and emancipation both. As such, they have been not only objects of transfer but also sites of transference where unresolved issues are projected and even worked out.6 Accordingly, the chapters in this volume attend to historical context and are alert to the enchantments of technology. They acknowledge the (partial) autonomy of media technologies and their immense efficacy without rendering media deterministic, or transhistorical. From sound and the film image, religious polemic to literary narrative, and old to new media, the chapters demonstrate the interplay of technological constraint with sociopolitical context. Utopia is a category that we can use to track the work of imagination across these contexts, acknowledging the aspirations evoked by technological mediation and the unexpected outcomes they produce.

I Archive and imagination Media criticism as inaugurated by critical theorists such as those of the Frankfurt School practised a kind of immanent criticism, analysing media form and content in relation to existing reality as the

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theorists perceived it. Transcendental criticism did not seem feasible in an era when political alternatives to capitalism were nowhere on the horizon. Acknowledging the world audiences perceive, however, requires negotiating reality as it is both lived and imagined, and thinking through the range of temporal orders at work. The chapters in this part do this by exploring archives of media forms and inquiring into the different ways in which economy and imagination may be linked. In his insightful chapter, Arjun Appadurai argues that Hindi cinema provided a visual and narrative vocabulary to help its audiences navigate their political and economic subjugation in ways that a sociological account could not anticipate. In his analysis, power achieves its effects through ‘force, virtue and stratagem’, in ‘a post-politics of image, mediation and violence, a sort of urban situationist politics’, instead of the more familiar sanctioned mediating channels of political parties and market exchange. Appadurai argues that the cinematic image allows a kind of realist inhabitation whereby viewers can conceive of narratives modified to their personal circumstances and hence make an otherwise more harsh reality endurable. Hindi cinema, far from producing illusory comfort, is a mediating link between the more abstract collective entities of nation and community and the quotidian, in this argument. Rather than shielding reality, however, they add new dimensions to the world and open up possibilities that can lead to change, Appadurai suggests. Rey Chow focuses on a potential site of utopian image making in Chinese cinema that is at first glance thoroughly patriarchal, namely the figure of the woman. She observes how in contemporary Chinese cinema the figure of the woman has become far more important than it previously used to be, as a means of pivoting between precommunist and communist histories. Young and photogenic actresses make images of poverty and oppression much more cinematically interesting, she points out, and help film-makers narrate historical transitions that might otherwise be harder to communicate. While she stops far short of endorsing the ways in which women are portrayed, she poses the question of the fetish power of woman in cinema and asks if critical theoretical approaches can account for revalorization of both the commodity and the libidinal status of the fetish in an increasingly mediatized era. Christopher Pinney takes up the influential work of Ariela Azoulay regarding battles over photography in the 19th and 20th centuries, as a vector of popular struggle that cannot be contained within the

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logic of the state. Arguing that Azoulay’s model of the civil contract of photography offers a ‘linear, utopian arrow’, Pinney focuses on those smaller, faster technologies that undermine the ‘tripod regime’ and the political structures it supported, through new forms of selfspectatorship (and surveillance). Whereas state power subjects citizens to surveillance, those aspiring for citizenship rights subjectivate themselves through available technologies and demand to be seen and to be granted the rights accompanying such visibility. Pinney’s focus is thus on the anxieties aroused through the rapid spread of cell phone videography and the resulting proliferation of centres of publicity. Prophetic and utopian conceptions of visual technology persist, Pinney argues, but alongside them are a myriad of new disciplinary uses to which the camera is put.

II Genealogy The chapters in this part demonstrate different approaches to elucidating the kinds of social difference embedded within the image as representation, whether through overt regulation, informal censorship or patterns of cultural reification. Debashree Mukherjee assembles a textual archive on some of Manto’s now unavailable films from the late-colonial period to show how the cinema during this time projected a utopia of communal harmony despite being assailed by increasing Hindu–Muslim tensions. Several interesting features characterized the cinema during this period, among them the fact that Progressive writers working in Urdu were among the most successful screenwriters, and these were often the least emphatic nationalists at a time when nationalism was commanding more of the public sphere. The film industry itself was increasingly polarized along communal lines, but besides Manto’s reports on this development, most (which is to say Hindu) accounts describe the period as one of secular harmony. Mukherjee contrasts the realities disavowed by Hindus in the film industry and nationalist utopias sidelined by Urdu writers as a formative tension underlying the cinema industry prior to 1947. Suzanne L. Schulz analyses the influential 1951 Film Enquiry Committee Report and demonstrates that some members of the government repeatedly raised the idea of a film body that would regulate the industry, only to allow it to be scuttled each time. A national film

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regulatory institution, a utopian construct, would help to make a uniform national cinema space, where rules would be rationalized, and that would be the aim of the board. However, it was regional rather than national identity that ended up being advanced, Schulz observes. Pooja Thomas focuses on a local museum’s imagination of Ahmedabad as conveyed through the merchant guilds and the vision of urban life that these guilds carried, noting the extent to which such a focus allows for evading a more complex and conflictual history.

III Nostalgia Nostalgia for bygone and irretrievable histories might sometimes be united by political form, such as, for example, the nostalgia for nowlapsed multi-religious, secularist or socialist projects. In addition, this part explores expressions of nostalgia and precarity that have yet to find an appropriate form to render them widely intelligible or to make them a springboard for intervention. The part concludes with a meditation on the power of voice as a form that supports a virtualized longing for social figures that were once stigmatized, but now appear redeemed. Bockaj shows us how nostalgia for Yugoslavian Communism is not only best expressed in the cinema, but that Yugoslavian Communism itself was in part projected and lived through the cinema, notably for Tito himself. Utopic production through the media had a political character, and in the afterlife of communism, Bockaj suggests, mediated nostalgia can be political too. Drawing on ethnographic work as an assistant in a shopping mall, Saikat Maitra reflects on the predicament of postsocialist labour in West Bengal. The defeat of the CPM by Trinamool Congress has dramatized the limited options available to workers in a market-led regime. Young workers enlist in service sector jobs that may be poorly paid but are alluring in terms of the comforts they promise. With the breakdown of unionization, however, the contrast between what these occupations offer and what they deliver becomes nearly incommunicable, Maitra suggests, because workers have no terms to comprehend their common condition except in terms of impermissible desires. Karin Zitzewitz’s chapter provides an insightful discussion of the art of Gulammohammed Sheikh from the Baroda School of Art. She draws our attention to the utopia Sheikh constitutes drawing on select figures from different segments of the past, with an unembarrassed

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idealization of pre-modern selves. In Sheikh’s work, we glimpse a new media sensibility taking shape through old media and in a strongly humanist vein rather than in the antihumanist register that much new media art operates. Shikha Jhingan, in the only chapter addressed to sound, argues that the spread of cassette technology led to an erosion of boundaries between India, Pakistan and Bangladesh when singers who had been popular before independence became prominent a quarter of a century later as cassettes became common. The fact that the singers in question were largely from the profession of courtesans and thus scarce in the prevailing public culture did nothing to stem the tide of adulation; on the contrary it may have deepened the nostalgia for the lost utopia these voices summoned.

IV Newness Across diverse linguistic fields and media audiences, writers and political actors forge different kinds of meanings. If with social media, some of these actors might be citizen journalists, others might be anonymous and experimenting with identities that may be difficult to express openly. This part begins on a historical note. Kalyan Chatterjee reads Ramananda Chatterjee, the pioneering Calcutta journalist, across the latter’s Bengali, English and Hindi writings and observes how although he was a staunch nationalist, an expansive internationalist vision underpinned the kinds of cultural and political arguments he made in his influential prose. Purkayastha and Das point to the burgeoning struggles in civil society that express what they understand as an opposition between modernity and democracy, and delineate the work of the media in this process. B. S. Bini surveys online gamers to uncover a surprising array of both utopic and dystopic energies coursing through the circuits and argues that they add depth to the possibilities for thought and action that are too often slighted.

V Word and the world Liberal theories of politics presume a universalist utopia open to all identities, but, Francis Cody points out, they rely on a further presumption. Minorities retain an embodied character and do not

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transcend their specific status, unlike those who are dominant. The latter can abstract themselves from their particularity and exemplify universalism whereas minorities persistently fail to do so. The fault, however, is in the theory and not in minorities themselves. Liberal universalism lacks all specification; political majorities can therefore exnominate themselves and populate their utopia to full capacity, while easily quelling any dissent they might arouse. Perhaps that was the plan all along. But its insufficiency becomes obvious when politics is treated less as a dispensation or an order, and more as a right asserted by people who all turn out to be minorities of one kind or another. Cody forefronts this long-standing problem of political theory and argues that at its root is an insensitivity to the reflexive interaction between political actors and the goals they pursue, multiply mediated through print, oratory, public spaces, and political events such as populist mobilization and collective violence. Received theories tend to freeze particular assumptions about modes of mediation and the styles of representation appropriate to them. With few exceptions, these theories share a distrust of the crowd as a political actor, while valorizing print as enabling rational communication. Drawing on detailed examples from the insurgent politics of caste-based democracy in Tamil Nadu, Cody argues that theories of mediation may already be embedded in the formation of crowds, which then respond to and transform the political visions of their representatives. It is by exploring such open-ended populist dynamics that we can arrive at nonreductive understandings of contemporary politics and the varying futures they strive for, Cody argues.

VI Political theology Political Islam may well be the most contentious utopia of our time. Some of its supporters might view the phenomenon as a counter to post-Cold War capitalism, even if their ultimate outcome is unclear. Even if large sections have turned into paramilitary assemblages, Islamic religious authority formerly vested in clerics and received traditions has an increasingly spontaneous character, rather than being the work of conspirators. The spread of media and the growth of unsupervised information producers lead to more heterodox expressions of faith that the old guard routinely denounces. Meanwhile the

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apparent obsession with violence and self-destruction can be reread as affirming the political will to transcend an instrumental capitalist logic which appears to offer no escape, or so Faisal Devji has argued, for example.7 In a rich historical analysis, On Barak discusses the YouTube video ‘Innocence of the Muslims’ and its explosive reception. Acknowledging the democratization of blasphemy with media and technological development, Barak suggests that Islam’s mimicry of missionary Christian motifs in its attempt to modernize itself paradoxically left the religion more vulnerable to blasphemy. The legal personality of the joint stock company as an instrument for obviating blame and reducing liability took shape in part due to the need to accommodate heathen actors within a cognizable juridical frame. An unanticipated outcome of such a development is that a corporation like Google can decline to intervene without incurring any legal liability even as violence plainly follows the spread of its incendiary YouTube clips. There is a political analogue that history teaches us as well, Barak suggests. If pan-Islamism grew in response to the crisis of the Ottoman Empire, today the memory of the Ottoman Empire as a means of containing disparate expressions and modes of being haunts political Islam, he argues. This might be seen as a submedial formation of political theology arising from the secular combination of communication technology and corporate form. Thus Barak points to the fictive secular status of the corporate personality, whose sacralizing power is newly visible today. Utopic projects today would need to challenge the depoliticization of technology while acknowledging their postsecular status as projects that establish collectivities that transcend rather than exclude their religious basis.

❁ Notes 1 In this connection, see On Barak’s chapter in this volume. 2 For a recent volume exploring how the spirit domain and questions of religiosity more broadly are implicated in technology, see Stolow (2012). 3 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, tr. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 1. 4 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, tr. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 3.

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5 Meanwhile Hindi films insulated people from reality, Rau concluded. M. Chalapathi Rau, ‘Our Utopias’, Mainstream, no. 11, Annual Number 1973, pp. 21 and 22. 6 For a discussion of the idea of America in media studies, please see Arvind Rajagopal, ‘Putting America in Its Place’, Public Culture, vol. 25, no. 3, 2013, pp. 387–99. 7 Faisal Devji, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. The future as Cultural Fact. Essays on the Global Condition. New York and London: Verso, 2013. Devji, Faisal. The Terrorist in Search of Humanity: Militant Islam and Global Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Koselleck, Reinhart. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Tr. Keith Tribe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Rajagopal, Arvind. ‘Putting America in Its Place’, Public Culture, vol. 25, no. 3, 2013, pp. 387–399. Rau, M. Chalapathi. ‘Our Utopias’, Mainstream, no. 11, Annual Number 1973. Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Tr. George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Stolow, Jeremy, ed. Deus in Machina: Religion, Technology, and the Things in Between. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

Part I Archive and imagination ❂

1 The cinematic soteriology of Bollywood1 Arjun Appadurai

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R

eligious life in large Indian cities operates in many ways. Among these are the proliferation of places of worship, small and large; the growth of new religious movements; emerging relations between political parties and religious groups; old and new tensions among religious communities and factions; and various forms of religious spectacle, performance and celebration. These phenomena might be described as religious in a straightforward sense. Cinematic life in Mumbai is also religious in another sense, and this has to do with what we might call Cinematic Soteriology. By this I mean that Bollywood films represent the city as a site in which salvation takes particular embodied and embedded forms. The cinematic version of the problem of salvation is also tied up with the cinematic representation of the problems of evil, injustice and corruption in urban life. Thus salvation in Bollywood cinema can be seen as redemption from forms of darkness and injustice that are both urban and cinematic in form. There is nothing new in the observation that popular Hindi films offer their own visions of justice, prosperity and virtue and have done so since the very early mythological films of the first decades of the 20th century. What is less familiar is the possibility that popular cinema offers a specific visual and narrative vocabulary in which viewers can experience the logics of salvation in urban life. This chapter will seek to demonstrate that there is value in this reading of the religiosity of cinematic life in urban India, even, or especially, when their topics seem evidently secular. The population of Mumbai now runs over 15 million, especially if you take the rapidly developing areas to the north and east of the city.

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It is the capital of Maharashtra and home to one of the world’s biggest film industries, the world’s most long-lasting urban fascist movement (the Shiv Sena), the headquarters of the Western Command of the Indian Navy, and the biggest textile manufacturing centre until the early 1980s when this textile universe was destroyed by anti-union forces, political thuggery, new textile technologies, and the early phases of globalization and liberalization. Half of the population of this city live in slums and at least 25 per cent live in extreme poverty. The city is multi-ethnic and multilingual, and even the 40-year history of linguistic xenophobia pushed by the Shiv Sena has not destroyed the life of other languages and cultural imaginaries in Mumbai. Mumbai is also home to a vast slum population and to Dharavi, a slum of over one million inhabitants, which is currently fighting to resist efforts to transform it into an upper-middle-class residential and business enclave and drive out its poor population, which supplies goods and services from rag-picking to leather products for high-end brands in the West. Many business and political leaders would like Mumbai to become like Shanghai, a dangerous fantasy that is a way to move the city towards financial apartheid and anti-poor social cleansing. The battle for Mumbai’s future is a battle of dreams. And this battle of dreams is what is going on in many other global megacities in the global south, such as Manila, Lagos, Mexico City, Rio, Cairo, and Bangkok. But each field of dreams, and thus every battle over these dreams, has its specificities, just as Tolstoy once said of unhappy families. This chapter is a journey through some of these dreams and an interpretation of the stakes in this battlefield. Cinematic ideas about urban salvation take their place in this battlefield of dreams. For Mumbai’s urban poor, life is a constant roulette. The recent hit film Slumdog Millionaire (2008) captures this fact persuasively by using the trope and venue of the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire game to capture this reality. But for most people who live in slums, especially for those who live in highly vulnerable housing, the founding dream is the dream of secure housing. Millions of Mumbai’s citizens live in shacks, hovels and other temporary structures, frequently tightly woven together in slums; but others live in different spaces, ranging from aqueducts and tunnels to pavements, railway platforms and garbage dumps. Their homes are vulnerable to the weather, to the police, to the municipal authorities, to natural and man-made disasters, to criminal slumlords, and, above all, to the constant compromise of dignity when family life is lived virtually in public. Mumbai’s

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strongest civil society organizations, some of which I have worked with, are devoted to the struggle for what is called ‘secure tenure’ for the urban poor and spend a great deal of energy in changing urban policy, law and politics in favour of providing secure housing for the urban poor. At the moment, perhaps one out of every 1,000 underhoused families in Mumbai has succeeded in getting access to housing for the poor with proper legal entitlements and minimum infrastructure. The line is long and to stay in the queue requires enormous patience and a capability to convert dreaming and hoping into a form of daily politics. There is also the ostensibly different and dissonant dream that is produced by Bollywood, Mumbai’s own dream factory, about which much has been written. The dreamwork of Hollywood is closely connected to the dreamwork of crime in Mumbai, and this space is also connected to a special sort of globality.2 Film and crime are tied up in Mumbai even more deeply than they were in the golden age of Hollywood and in the tradition that runs from George Raft to Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando in the United States. Because the Mumbai film industry still runs substantially on financing that comes from the second economy, which produces unaccounted or ‘black money’, film is one of the known laundries for Mumbai’s criminal underworld, and, in addition, it is always vulnerable to the world of blackmail, extortion and long-distance criminalization. For at least two decades now, everyone in Mumbai has known that the city’s criminal underworld is intimately linked with film financing and with the subculture of thugs, molls and cheap glamour that lies just beneath the surface of Mumbai’s film studios, deal-makers, actors, and distributors. No one exemplifies this plebeian fantasy more than the dreaded Dawood Ibrahim, the famed boss of the D-Company, which has itself been the model for a whole wave of Mumbai crime movies of varying degrees of ‘noirness’ ranging from Nayakan (1987) to Chandni Bar (2001) and from Vaastav (2001) to Company (2002). Many of the films produced in Mumbai which are in the gritty realist mode, as opposed to soft-focus movies about youth, love, global travels, and middle-class romance, are interesting because they embody the fantasy of a world without politics and politicians. These movies imagine a world in which policemen, criminals and heroes form a triangle in which the only real villains are politicians. This is no surprise in an industry that hates the way that its revenues are taxed by the state, its stars and financiers harassed by the Income Tax department and

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its morality under the steady gaze of the Board of Film Censors.3 For Mumbai’s poor and working-class politicians, what these noir films do is to provide a running critique of the criminalization of politics and the politics of criminalization whose grounding fantasy is a fantasy of participation, wealth, justice, and heroism untainted by any form of politics. This is the dreamwork of Bollywood: it is a drama of a Bombay cleansed of official politics in which power, love, fame, and wealth circulate through force, virtue and stratagem but not through elections, representation and political parties. This is not a politics of escape as various derivations of Frankfurt School criticism may suggest. It is rather a fantasy of a post-politics of image, mediation and violence, a sort of urban situationist politics. There is now a rich archive of Bollywood films in which the life of the urban poor is a central motif, and the slum setting of a 1950s Bollywood classic like Awaara (starring Raj Kapoor) seems virtually pastoral in comparison to the latest slum romance, Slumdog Millionaire, or a host of recent Mumbai noir films in which slums are the scenes of hyperviolence, criminality and sexualized romance. The dreamworlds of these films and the dreamworlds of the urban poor are linked by the recurrent themes of corrupt developers, greedy politicians and, frequently, the drama of housing, which is also a drama of the streets, since the two are hardly separable in Mumbai’s slums. In one crucial scene in Slumdog Millionaire, for example, the two brothers who are the centre of the plot meet in an unfinished high floor of a skyscraper under construction and look down at the ocean of slums beneath them, and one of them remarks that the tall buildings they see have grown right in the heart of the slums in which the boys grew up. In another of the Mumbai noir films, a corrupt developer builds weak structures which lead to building collapses and massive injury and death followed by brutal reprisals and retribution. The nexus of developers, policemen, politicians, and thugs is ever visible in a series of noir films about Mumbai. And we can see in these films that the Bollywood urban dreamscape is not narrowly escapist. It is a populist commentary on a city where people are made and unmade by virtue of houses built and destroyed – mansions for the rich, hovels for the poor – and an ongoing preoccupation with the water’s edge in which freedom, air, light, and love are to be found. True, these are not political films, and they are certainly not part of an organized critique of Mumbai’s housing nightmares. But they are not mere fantasies either. They are a form of cinematic realism in which

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Mumbai’s poor can insert self-narratives and add movement, plot and character to their own dreams about new, secure and sustainable habitation. Indeed, housing is a major site where the dreamwork of Bollywood and the housing dreams of the urban poor come together. If salvation can be seen as defined by secure housing for Mumbai’s poorest – a roof over one’s head – then it is possible to read a major strand of Bollywood film, from its very beginnings, as tied up not just with urbanity but with salvation. This point needs some elaboration. The most obvious way in which housing comes up in the Hindi films of the past decade or so is in the depictions of corrupt construction magnates and their ties to equally corrupt politicians, policemen and full-time criminal mafias. These portrayals, particularly prominent in the Mumbai crime films of the past two decades, are of the evil forces that define low-quality housing, corruption and the unavailability of housing for the masses. They are usually fat, cowardly and venal. On the other hand, some of the most cherished Bollywood characters are slum heroes, street vagabonds, hustlers, and Robin Hood figures, living either in one-room hutments, chawls, or in true street-based slums. This tradition goes back to the great Raj Kapoor figure in Awaara, in which Raj Kapoor combined the Chaplin tramp with the Mumbai slum flâneur. It recurs time and again in a variety of figures, ranging from the loveable Robin Hood types (such as Sanjay Dutt in the beginning of Vaastav to Hrithik Roshan in the recent remake of Agneepath (2012) as well as a score of Amitabh Bachchan characters who are slum-bred angry young men. This contrast, between evil housing magnates and the slum-bred ‘angry young men’, is one element of the pantheon of the housing cosmology of Mumbai cinema. But the housing dreamscape of Bollywood is by no means this simple. In fact, the variety of ways in which the semantics of the word ghar in Hindi are played out by Bollywood reveals the richness of the relationship between hearth, home, family, and native soil in the Bollywood lexicon. The word ‘ghar’ has all these meanings in Hindi, and the cinematic world takes full advantage of this range. To begin with, the term ‘ghar’ is always closely connected to the idea of the family, which is both the mise en scène and the primary moral value which underlays the terrain of Hindi cinema. In some instances, in explicit lines of dialogue, the idea of the house (makaan) and the home (ghar) are explicitly contrasted, with a superior value placed on the home, because of its indexical relationship to the family. The home, as the mise en scène of the family, is rarely a site of

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personal privacy. Rather, it is the primary terrain in which the social is born, challenged, redressed and restored. Family relations are invariably domestic relations, and domestic relations always revolve around marriage, motherhood and, above all, the relationship between mothers and sons. In Hindi cinema, it is impossible to separate the house, the domestic world and the world of primary values and valuation. While the importance of the family and kinship in Hindi cinema has been frequently remarked, it has not been clearly linked with the spatial forms of domesticity, of which the house is the most important. Both the poor and the rich are defined by their domestic spaces (hovels, huts, streets, palaces, mansions, and the like). But because Mumbai is itself haunted by the spectrality of housing,4 especially for the poor and working classes, domesticity can itself become spectral, ephemeral, haunted, and transient. The spectrality of housing is not just an artefact of shortage, inequality and exclusion. It is also a product of the multivalent mediatic presence of housing as a site of intimacy, domesticity and wellbeing as represented in Bollywood cinema. The lack of housing is also experienced by Mumbai’s poor as an absence of well-being in a manner which goes beyond mere lack. It is a lack made more real because of its spectral presence in cinema and its absence in material fact. This is not a matter of causality, in one direction or the other, but rather of a felt absence, whose fullness Mumbai cinema deepens and intensifies. This is a good point at which to recall that some of the most important makers of post-World War II Bombay cinema were from Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and other parts of Islamicized North India and were deeply marked by the events and mythographies of Partition. The Kapoor family, which dominated Bollywood from the days of the patriarch Prithviraj Kapoor to the present-day generation of Karisma, Kareena and Ranbir Kapoor, and has its roots in today’s Pakistani Punjab but also further back in Peshawar, is perhaps the best example of the lasting effects of the Partition on Hindi cinema. Saadat Hasan Manto and Kaifi Azmi are only two of the better-known names that brought the experience of loss, division and a torn homeland to the lyrics and dialogue of post-war Hindi cinema. Indeed, the emotional associations of home and family are never far from the meanings of the nation, soil and roots in Hindi cinema, with remarkable continuity from Indian independence in 1947 to today. Thus, though there were some interesting films about Partition

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in the first three decades after 1947, the most popular and powerful on this theme have been produced since 1990 and have revolved around the politics of borders, cross-border romance, terrorism, spying, and politics across every mile of the Indo-Pakistan border, from Kashmir to the Rann of Kutch. The film in this genre which deserves a closer look, though, was made in 1973 and was a major bridge between ‘new’ or ‘alternative’ cinema and commercial cinema, and was also a major transition film between the socio-national films of the 1950s and 1960s (such as Mother India (1957) and Naya Daur (1957)) and the borders-and-terrorism films made after the 1990s. This is a film called Garm Hawa (1973), which captures the vital links between house, home, soil, nation, and family, as very few other Hindi films have done. Garm Hawa is set in Agra and tells the story of several generations of a large Muslim family. It is centred on the problem of Muslim communities in India after independence and the struggle to find economic and social dignity in a Hindu-dominated world. The core of the story concerns two Muslim brothers who own and run a leather business in Agra. One of them flees to Pakistan but leaves his brother in grave trouble in Agra because the family home, which was in his name, now becomes ‘evacuee property’ and his brother now loses the family property. This in turn makes it difficult for him to find proper marriage alliances for his daughters, while also shrinking his sense of a proper location in his own city. At the end of the film, this brother too chooses to leave India for Pakistan, but en route to Pakistan he encounters a political demonstration on behalf of India’s poor and joins their struggle. The implication is that he decides to stay, join the movement and commit himself to the struggle for equality and inclusion in India. This brief summary does not do justice to the brilliant way in which the film weaves together themes of nation, city, home, and identity in post-Partition India. Above all, it makes the connection between house, home, property, and nation inescapable, especially for the Muslim middle classes that chose to stay on in independent India. Garm Hawa was based on a story written by Ismat Chughtai, perhaps the most respected 20th-century feminist writer in Urdu, who also elected to stay on in the new India. Her original story was considerably altered by Kaifi Azmi, a major Urdu poet who was part of the generation that helped to bring Islamic poetic traditions to the scripts and lyrics of Indian cinema in the 1950s and 1960s.

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In the 1990s and in the new millennium, the theme of borders, Partition, family, love, and separation have been exploited in numerous Bollywood films, most recently by the hugely popular Veer Zaara (with Shahrukh Khan, Rani Mukherjee and Preity Zinta), as well as by numerous potboilers about Kashmir, terrorism and armed conflict between India and Pakistan. All these films make the link between home, house, territory, and identity. What Garm Hawa shows most clearly is that the link between family, housing, domestic property, and national identity is a grounding narrative about eschatology and soteriology in contemporary India, linked together in the discourse surrounding the primary value of the ghar. Other sorts of films take the idea of ghar in different directions and emphasize different elements of its semantic range: sometimes it is domesticity, sometimes it is kinship and marriage, sometimes it is property and security, sometimes it is identity and territory. But it is never mere shelter. In this sense, the cinematic dreams of property and housing that concern me most are about a deeper sense of the meanings of urban survival than they appear to be at first sight. They are about space and salvation, in so far as the idea of the house in this cinematic tradition knits together a series of values, which range from kinship and affinity to shelter and identity. At first glance, Mumbai might seem far from the experience and memory of Partition. But the Partition is woven deeply into the cultural imaginary of Mumbai and of Bollywood. Mumbai faces the Arabian Sea, and many of Pakistan’s most important leaders, including Mohammed Ali Jinnah, had deep roots in Mumbai. The Sindhi community in Mumbai links Mumbai’s commercial world directly to roots in many different parts of Sindh, including Karachi, and in the recent attacks by armed Pakistani militants on many hotels and other locations in Mumbai in 2008, these memories were violently reawakened. What is more, the geography of Hindu–Muslim neighbourhoods is often explicitly linked to the divide between India and Pakistan, with borders, invasions and attacks within the city during the periodic riots between Hindus and Muslims seen as the boundaries of Partitionand contemporary politics. Hindi films reflect, restore and reinterpret Partition both explicitly and implicitly in the cinematic geography of Mumbai, in no small part because many key Bollywood actors, directors and producers were direct products of the division of Northern India by the borders between India and Pakistan in 1947, as we shall continue to observe in the next part of this chapter.

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There is a second major way in which Bollywood cinema provides a deep vocabulary about faith, transcendence and salvation, and this is through a topic that is as fundamental to Hindi cinema as the related themes of family, kinship and home, the topic of love (Hindi: Pyaar, Mohabbat; Urdu: Ishq). The number of songs, stories and dialogue moments devoted in one or other way to love is probably only a little less than the number of movies produced by Bollywood since its beginnings. And the topos of love has changed over the decades to include the love of gods and goddesses, the love of mothers and children for each other, the love of siblings, the love of nation, and, most recently, youthful love and love in the Indian diaspora. Through all these changes, love in Bollywood cinema is unimaginable without the important device of song sequences, which are often part of dance sequences, either sequences focused on real or would-be lovers, or what are now called ‘item numbers’, lavish production numbers with the central feature of an erotic and sexually charged song and dance by the heroine or a supplementary starlet. In addition to their well-known diegetic function, the song sequences in Hindi films have always contributed a dream element to film narratives, through which they condense, connect and render plausible sequences that would otherwise seem ridiculously unrealistic or implausible. The song sequences are the main equivalent to what we may call the ‘visible unconscious’ of Hindi films, for they often involve fantasy and prohibited desire, as well as settings, relationships and outcomes which would be otherwise impossible to develop logically. It is through its role in linking song lyrics with spoken dialogue that the Urdu language has been a key ingredient in the popularity and specificity of the Bollywood formula for most of its history. The scriptwriters and lyricists for Hindi films, especially after 1945, were most often chosen from a small group of serious (if minor) poets from the small towns of North India, who had made their way to Bombay in search of work and fortune after the war. Their names include Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Hazrat Jaipuri, and then a later generation, often duos, such as the famous duo of Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar. Even when non-Muslim writers began to become scriptwriters and lyricists in Hindi cinema, Urdu always remained the dominant language of cinema in India. An interesting example of the links between Hindu poets, the Partition and Urdu classical poetry is the debt of the poet and film lyricist Gulzar, who was born into a

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Sikh family in what became Pakistan and moved to India at Partition. Among his most memorable projects was a film series about the last of the great Urdu poets of the Mughal period, Mirza Ghalib, in the context of which Gulzar said that he owed his poetic genius to Ghalib. The importance of the Urdu language in shaping the songs, scripts and dialogue in Hindi films has been thoughtfully analysed by Rachel Dwyer in her masterful study of religion and Indian cinema,5 in which she devotes an important chapter to what she calls ‘the Islamicate film’. Dwyer’s discussion of various Muslim elements that shaped everything from songs, stories, costumes, and historiographies in the history of Hindi cinema is the best discussion of this kind and offers an important insight for my own analysis of the soteriology of Hindi film. Dwyer notes, as some others have done, the importance of the Indo-Islamic poetic couplet form called the ghazal, for the song sequences of Hindi films, and notes as well the ways in which the Indic form of the ghazal draws on Sufi devotional logics, which blur the lines between earthly romantic love and the love of men for the divine. Erotic, mystical and intensely personal, the ghazal form is the major link between Hindi film culture and the poetic tradition of the Persian-Islamic world before the British. The ghazal form, and Urdu poetic traditions in general, lend to Hindi song sequences and to Hindi film scripts the sort of depth, allusive richness and cultural gravity that is hard to imagine in any other mechanically reproduced art form in the world. As regards poetic love, what the Sufi element in particular and the Urdu romantic poetry tradition in general contribute to the ethos of love in Hindi cinema is to bring something of the transcendence of the mystical love that unites God and devotee in Sufi Islam to all manner of everyday romantic and everyday love in Hindi cinema. This is the reason why romantic love is almost invariably tied up with suffering, loss, sacrifice, and self-abnegation in many Hindi films. To some extent these links exist in other lyric traditions, such as those of early modern Europe, but nowhere are they as highly developed as in the Sufi world and, by extension, in the romantic songs and narratives of the Hindi cinema. The element that lends to even the most simple and superficial Hindi film plots of youth and romance something of the grandeur of the love of men for their God is their lyric infrastructure, which is essentially tied to the Sufi element in ghazal. This transcendent coloration – whereby human love and attachment to the divine become one and the same – can be seen in numerous

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films, notably the great films that depict love, war and kingship in the Mughal period, starting with the great Mughal-E-Azam (1960) and most recently revived in Ashutosh Gowariker’s blockbuster Jodhaa Akbar (2008). But this epic quality also comes into the most humdrum film plots due to the suturing power of the romantic song sequences, which always carry the weighty metaphorical and emotional power of the Urdu language and the Sufi ghazal. In this sense, songs in Hindi films are more than a diegetic element. More important, they bring the transcendent element into everyday human romantic bonds, and they do so in the vocabulary of longing, loss and sacrifice. Looked at in this manner the transcendent element in songs and dialogue about love in all its forms – pyaar, mohabbat and ishq – also makes its way back to the domestic sphere, to the love of siblings for one another, of sons for their mothers, of parents for their children, and of husbands and wives for each other. In this way, the transcendent element in the romantic love motif of Hindi films comes back full circle to the ways in which house, home and family are tied together in the discourse of the ghar. In short, both love and domesticity in Hindi cinema – arguably its thematic and narrative pillars – cannot be read outside the deeper preoccupation with those things that we normally take to be signs of the religious in our everyday lives – the dream-like, the unattainable, the ineffable, the transcendent, and the Real. These two themes are the foundation of what I call the soteriology of Bollywood cinema. However, Mumbai’s dreaming takes many forms other than the cinematic one. One form, which I have already mentioned, pertains to the dream of secure tenure for the four to seven million people in Mumbai who live in temporary, illegal, unsafe, or undocumented housing. The short form word ‘slum’ does not capture the huge range of informal housing forms, whose only common element is that they are not fully documented claims to property and are thus, to one or another degree, insecure. There is a worldwide movement for secure tenure for the urban poor, and several powerful pro-poor community-based organizations in Mumbai are active members of this worldwide movement, about which I have written extensively elsewhere. Dreaming in this context is deeply political and politicized since it involves negotiations with the police, with municipal authorities, with slumlords, with developers and with planners, along with constant fraction with the propertied middle and upper classes of the city. Currently in the extraordinary micro-city called Dharavi, in the heart of the extended

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metropolis of Mumbai, about a million citizens are engaged in a huge battle with the state, with global developers, and with local urban planners about real estate which they have developed on marshland by infilling it with garbage. This land, which is valued roughly on a par with Manhattan real estate, is being claimed by the state for highend development with promises of compensation at prices that are a fraction of the market value, with even vaguer promises of relocation and resettlement in unknown places on the edge of the urban sprawl. This dislocation would destroy a whole host of Dharavi industries ranging from tanning and leather goods production, to food production businesses, recycling enterprises, potters, carpenters, and a host of other small business operators who provide a major contribution to Mumbai’s economy. In addition, Dharavi, which most members of the middle class regard as a cesspool of sewage, poverty, crime, and immorality, is in reality home to over a hundred highly organized ethnic, occupational, religious, and linguistic groups who have worked out a complex and durable network of ways to cooperate and cohabit a region of the city where infrastructure and municipal services are of very poor quality. The struggle to resist high-end development in Dharavi has required members of these intricately divided communities to negotiate about their distinct histories of settlement and rights to space with each other and, in the process, has produced an unprecedentedly new level of shared political cooperation among them. This political negotiation is also a negotiation of dreams, including dreams of the restitution of historical wrongs of many kinds. One example of such dreams is to be found in the Koli community of Dharavi, which regards itself as ‘aboriginal’ to the area and as thus different in its relation to their space from other groups who have migrated to Dharavi within the past century or so. As with other large cities in the world, it is not only slumdwellers and film-makers who create and contest dreams in and of the city. Planners and politicians are deeply involved with dreams, and, in their cases, the problem of utopia enters the picture. The Shiv Sena, India’s longest standing xenophobic and neo-fascist movement, has been part of Mumbai’s politics for almost half a century.6 It is notorious for its negative attitude to all non-Maharashtrians, its special viciousness towards Muslims and Pakistan and its violent street politics in favour of its project of Maharashtra for Maharashtrians. It also works through an elaborate strategy of neighbourhood-based patronage and service-delivery methods, which operate on the thin

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line between gang politics and civic pride. Its power and influence has waxed and waned in Mumbai, but it never disappears as a force in the politics of the city, the state and even the nation. The Shiv Sena retails many dreams of Mumbai, but for our purposes the most interesting is its long-standing effort to create a ‘sundar Mumbai’ or beautiful Mumbai, with a stress on bodily discipline, campaigns against public urination and defecation and a strange idea of green urbanism. These campaigns and their images and discourses remind us also of the Sena’s efforts to cleanse Mumbai of ‘ethnic dirt’ especially of its Muslim populations. In effect the clean Mumbai campaigns play with the subtext of a cleansed Mumbai, free of Muslims, Biharis, Bangladeshis, Tamils, Malayalees, and other forms of urban dirt. Yet this is not a rural or pastoral dream since the Sena has an ambivalent relationship with the politics of rural Maharashtra. The Sena’s dreamworld is also an urban dreamworld, where an army of mostly male Marathi-speaking youth leads the march to an urban paradise of jobs, homes, goods, and services monopolized by the Marathi-speaking working and lower white-collar classes. This dream is linked to its original in the movement for a separate Marathispeaking state, which was created in 1956, but it is really about a fantasy city of Marathi-speakers, purified of Muslim terrorists, Bangladeshi ragpickers, Bihari labourers, taxi-drivers from Uttar Pradesh, coconut-sellers from Kerala, clerks from Tamil Nadu, and business elites from Punjab, Sind and especially Gujarat. Since the Sena is notoriously corrupt and its leadership, with its core in the family of the late Bal Thackeray, is deeply involved with quasi-criminal interests and corrupt money schemes of every type, the Sena dream of a postcosmopolitan Marathi-speaking city is in fact part of a complicated negotiation with other forms of dreamwork in Mumbai, about the best ways to balance official and unofficial politics, police power and organized crime power, neighbourhood deals against city-wide interests and the interests of the city against those of the state and the country. This brings us to the most explicitly utopian of Mumbai’s complex dreamworks, the dreams of planners, designers and architects, who, at different times, have sought to solve Mumbai’s immense problems through monumental solutions. Among these solutions, some old and some new, are the creation of an entire portion of South Mumbai, the so-called Back Bay, by reclaiming land from the sea; the ongoing effort to demolish slums, which grow back as quickly as they are torn down; the effort to build flyovers (now more than 60) to create

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arteries above the poverty and density of the city; the plans to build sea-links between coastal parts of Mumbai that are now linked only by land; and, most of all, the largely failed effort to create a twin city, called New Bombay, which shows how hard it is to enact large-scale utopian design projects in the face of Mumbai’s political, economic and ecological realities. These designs have in common the qualities that James Scott identified in his book Seeing Like a State,7 and like many state-sponsored dreams, they express the deep desire for a zerobudget start, a fresh slate, a history-free zone which can be remade at will, a planners paradise where people obey the rules created by new structures, roads and infrastructure. In reality Mumbai always swamps its planners with the realities of its poverty, crowds, commercial hustle, and functional chaos, all of which are realities fed by other voices, other dreams. Mumbai’s battlefield of dreams is no mere museum of fantasies, no mere archive of escape and no empty superstructure imposed on the urban Real. It is part and parcel of Mumbai’s deep politics, which is composed of the incomplete tensions between full-blown dreams and their opposition, of lived experiences that are informed and saturated by these conflicting dreams. In this sense, we cannot isolate dreams, fantasies, plans, and projects from one another. They are all part of the politics of the imagination, which provides the fuel and traction for Mumbai’s lived complexities. All these different dreams would like to write Mumbai anew, but it is in the negotiation between these dreams that Mumbai’s Real is produced; this Real is all the more resistant to every one of these dreams because it always falsifies parts of all of them and justifies other parts. It is this realpolitik of dreaming that we need to unpack if we wish to understand how Mumbai constantly survives its own nightmares. The soteriology of Bollywood cinema, as I have argued in this chapter, is not understandable as any sort of escape in this cultural and political milieu. The ideas about salvation that Hindi cinema expresses – in such spheres as housing, love and justice – are part of Mumbai’s battlefield of dreams. In this context, we would do well to recall that religion, throughout human history, has not been simply a way for human beings to escape the Real. It has also, always, been a way to measure the shortcomings of the everyday, the mortal, the earthly, and the visible. This need may or may not be addressed for Indian filmgoers by their organized religious practices, which have largely been captured by one or other sort of contemporary politics.

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So it is that Hindi language films, whether we like it or not, remain for many viewers the primary signature of the possibility of salvation.

❁ Notes 1 An earlier version of this chapter was previously published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 35, no. 3, 2015. © Duke University Press. Reproduced with permission. I owe thanks to Arvind Rajagopal and Peter van der Veer for helpful comments on an earlier draft. I am also grateful to comments from the audience at the Allahabad Conference of the Forum on Cultural Theory, which is the context for this volume. 2 Ranjani Mazumdar, Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (New York: Vintage, 2004). 3 Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2012). 4 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 3, 2000, pp. 627–51. 5 Rachel Dwyer, Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 6 Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 7 James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. ‘Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai’, Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 3, 2000, pp. 627–51. Dwyer, Rachel. Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Ganti, Tejaswini. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2012. Hansen, Thomas Blom. Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Mazumdar, Ranjani. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Mehta, Suketu. Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. New York: Vintage, 2004. Scott, James C. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

2 Fetish power unbound A small history of ‘woman’ in Chinese cinema1 Rey Chow

❂

T

he use of the word ‘woman’ in this chapter is singular by intention. As will become clear, my interest in the question of woman has to do with her representational status in film; such a status is not independent of women’s empirical social existence, but it cannot be reduced to it either. By ‘woman’, what I seek to describe is a kind of representational positioning characteristic of modern and contemporary cultural politics – one may call it a sign, a placeholder or a form of particularism – a positioning that may, at certain historical junctures, be associated with actual women but which can also be claimed by other identities, other occupants. 

Woman as commodity and fetish: some observations about Chinese cinema Although it was produced over three-quarters of a century ago, Wu Yonggang’s 吳永剛 The Goddess (神女, 1934) remains one of the most memorable portrayals of woman in Chinese film history. This is often attributed to its sociologically notable theme of prostitution. As the film historian Paul Clark has noted, this film ‘was perhaps the first in world cinema to examine prostitution directly and without moralistic overtones as an occupation in which women tried to make a living’.2 The film tells the story of a young woman who is raising her son as a single parent by working as a prostitute. Owing to a series of unforeseen circumstances, she is forced to have sex with a villain, who then

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becomes her pimp and keeps extorting money from her for his gambling addiction. She wants to give her son a proper education, only to see him dismissed from his school on account of her profession, the subject of malicious gossip among the other parents. She attempts to move with the boy to a different place, only to discover that her hardearned savings have been stolen by her pimp. As she confronts this nasty persecutor in rage, she kills him by accident and is sentenced to twelve years in prison. The sympathetic headmaster of her son’s school pays her a visit and promises to raise the boy properly. As she wants her son’s future to be untainted by her reputation, she asks the headmaster to tell him she is dead.3 Much as the sociological connotations of prostitution are incontrovertible, The Goddess at the same time exceeds the strictly empirical in its controlled use of the specifics of film language, a use I have highlighted in a previous analysis as a consciously styled minimalism. I have also suggested that the role of the prostitute, so remarkably played by the actress Ruan Lingyu 阮玲玉,4 conjures both Marx’s and Freud’s senses of the term ‘fetish’, which the theorists adopted from European anthropological accounts of non-European cultural practices.5 The purpose of this chapter is to elaborate the significance of the latter perspective, so as to demonstrate how the question of woman in Chinese cinema partakes of a larger modern theoretical discourse about femininity and mediatized visuality. In his famous analysis of commodity fetishism at the beginning of Capital, Marx provides the influential conceptual framework for thinking about capital’s inhumane appropriation of human labour. Although their contribution is essential to the production of commodities, Marx writes, workers are typically alienated from their own labour by being denied the profits derived from the sales of such commodities, which go instead to enrich capitalists. Marx cautions that the attractive, seemingly spontaneous appearances of commodities are a kind of deceptive surface that belies the reality of the workers’ alienated condition. By invoking fetishism, Marx aims to bring attention to this exploitative state of affairs. The fetish in Marxist analysis, in other words, has the status of a cover-up, of something that necessitates exposure. The figure of the prostitute complicates Marx’s analysis by foregrounding the dimension of (hetero) sexuality. On the one hand, the prostitute’s alienated situation is unmistakable: even as she provides the labour and markets herself as the kind of goods demanded by

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society, she is condemned to living her life in shame, on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. If the commodity stands for the alienation of human labour in industrialized society, the prostitute, by being at once the commodity and the worker, is arguably the paradigmatic case of a commodity-fetish in human form. On the other hand, the prostitute needs to be sexually attractive in order to do her work: this means that a further dimension, sexuality, must be added to the classic Marxist equation of commodity and fetish. Turning to Freud, we notice that sexuality has been theorized in relation to fetishism, but in a manner distinct from Marx’s emphases. Rather than linking the fetish to commodification, an economic process that conceals class exploitation, Freud sees the fetish as an artificial repository of sexual desires that a so-called civilized society cannot afford to admit to be its own, and must divert elsewhere. In the Freudian sense, fetishism is thus much less a morally suspect facade (as it is for Marx and Marxist analysis in general) than it is a psychic survival tactic. Comprised as it is of the twin mechanisms of disavowal and displacement of impermissible wishes, Freudian fetishism is a productive form of libidinal perversion and often a key to aesthetic innovation. Along these lines, it is possible to understand why the figure of the prostitute so aroused the romantic imagination of modern avant-garde thinkers such as Walter Benjamin. Combining the insights of both Marx and Freud, Benjamin saw the prostitute as the allegory of a type of transgression that is at once class-based and libidinally charged. A lower-class pretty woman making a living by selling herself as goods: for upper-middle-class heterosexual men in the age of Freud and Benjamin, this formula seemed to carry an irresistible erotic appeal.6 Often captured in the medium of film, the fetishistic connotations of these class-bound, psychic-aesthetic transactions are amply evident as well in The Goddess. Director Wu astutely grasped the fact that although the prostitute figure is considered despicable by her society, her very embodiment of forbidden desires is exactly what holds fascination for modern spectators. Thus, even as the film narrative develops in such a way as to tell how unfortunate and miserable the woman’s life is, the film’s camera work takes pains to show her to be a physically attractive object (even when impoverished and distraught), replete with seductive smiles, fashionable hairdos and make-up, shapely arms and legs (as revealed by her qipaos), and charming gestures of smoking and holding cigarettes.7 As a composite cinematic signifier, the

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prostitute conjures the sensual pleasure, rather than simply the moral deplorability, occasioned by commodity fetishism. The Goddess is, of course, only one of a considerable number of films from the 1930s that have women as their foci,8 but the spotlight it gives to a prostitute amplifies in a unique manner the epistemic contradiction that accompanies the status of woman in film. This is the contradiction, perhaps more peculiar to the media involving visuality, of presenting socially debased subject matters or characters in a cultural form whose effects tend to be spectacular and glamorous. To put this in the languages of both Marx and Freud, the problem of filmic representation of woman is the problem of portraying the wretchedness of modern life (such as human trafficking) in a medium in which females, even when they personify disease, vulnerability, oppression, maternal self-sacrifice, or political resistance, must look like marketable commodities.9 As Kristine Harris puts it in the case of The Goddess: On the one hand, Ruan [Lingyu] was a mother herself, and had attained public acclaim by playing tragic, suffering women in films . . . This element of Ruan’s star persona translated into The Goddess well, generating sympathy for this solitary woman striving to maintain maternal virtue. On the other hand, the image of actresses was highly commodified, and at this peak period of her career, pictures of Ruan adorned advertisements for perfume, soap and other consumer products. These images played into the popular notion that female movie stars, like prostitutes, were merchandise for public display and consumption – making Ruan seem even more plausible in the role of the goddess.10

Not surprisingly, in the fictional works produced in the mid-20th century in the People’s Republic of China, during the height of communist orthodoxy, woman as such did not occupy a privileged representational place, which went instead to the lower classes such as peasants, workers and soldiers. A number of feminist literary and film critics have pointed out how, in socialist Chinese cinema, the tendency was to downplay the gendered or sexualized specifics of women’s agency so that differences and tensions between women and men became consistently invisible, or were at least made negligible, under a genderless collectivity.11 Shuqin Cui describes it as follows: A conventional pattern of [socialist] film narrative unfolds in the following manner: a conflict between the proletariat and corrupt overlords

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arises, and an idealized character arrives to champion the cause of the poor and prevail against the rich. If the relationship between the hero and his working-class followers appears to reach an impasse, a background power, either the Communist Party’s current policy or a political event, will issue a solution to the crisis, ensuring that the hero triumphs and the cause of the proletariat advances.12

Even as recently as the late 1970s and early 1980s, when films featured well-known, good-looking actresses such as Liu Xiaoqing 劉 曉慶, Joan Chen 陳沖, Pan Hong 潘虹, and Lü Liping 呂麗萍, the representational focus was often much less on femininity as such than on the constructive roles women could play in their historical and political milieux. Although this kind of deployment of women characters, whereby they are narratologically subordinated to other social relations, is nowadays considered outmoded, it nevertheless stands as an interesting instance of the artistic attempt, in a non-capitalist regime, at resolving the epistemic contradiction embedded in the fetishistic status of woman I just described, a contradiction that has stemmed, arguably, from the logic of exchange and substitution characteristic of capitalism. Following the Marxist critique of commodity fetishism, then, Chinese Communist artistic practices specialized in what may be called de-fetishizing. Whereas fetishism typically converts something or someone into an object (such as a commodity) whose mystical appeal lies in its mute natural appearance and lack of volition, communist films, in accordance with the direction laid down by early Maoist film classics such as White-Haired Girl (白毛女, 1950) and The Red Detachment of Women (紅色娘子軍, 1961), tended instead to depict women as determined subjects with wills and voices – even as the latter were redirected and reincorporated into the social and communal fabric. Instead of spectacle and splendour (which depend on a commercial discursive network of multiple media for their impact),13 these films offered collectively purposeful narratives of class struggle and social revolution, wherein the individual woman (or man) could not be objectified into an independent or self-sufficient ontological entity. If anything was being fetishized, it was the (self-generative potency and permanence of the) Chinese Communist Party itself. Outside the Chinese mainland during the parallel period (the two to three decades after the Second World War), Chinese film-making took a decidedly different direction. Although extensive in-depth research is only beginning to be undertaken on the films produced

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39

in major centres such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, it is possible to advance the general point that many of these films, regardless of their genres, tended to continue – and intensify – the fetishization of woman that was clearly already an emergent strategy in the mainland Chinese films of the silent period. In the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, there were abundant film productions from studios such as Guolian 國聯 and Central 中影 in Taiwan, together with Dianmao 電懋, Cathay 國泰, Shaw Brothers 邵氏兄弟, and Golden Harvest 嘉禾, as well as the leftist Fenghuang 鳳凰 and Changcheng 長城, in Hong Kong, all of which produced mainly Mandarin films. There were also smaller companies such as Kong Ngee 光藝, Ling Kwong 嶺光, Hing Fat 興發, Kin Sing 堅城, and numerous others in Hong Kong which produced Cantonese films. These film productions were part of a diversifying commercial media establishment that also included dime novels, radio, television, daily newspapers with their movie news sections, entertainment periodicals, tabloids, and picture calendars, all of which collaborated in the systemic objectification of woman. Outside mainland China, in other words, the highly visible sign of woman in the Chinese film industry was part and parcel of the processes of modernization and urbanization. As many examples under the rubric ‘modern/urban costume film’ (時裝片) indicate, such modernization and urbanization were often thematized as narrative content: many Mandarin and Cantonese films of this period told stories about urban middle- and lower-middle classes, typically embroiled in conflicts of family, romance, professional life, youth, and crime. But modernization and urbanization were, of course, also forces structural to the rapidly expanding and intersecting mediatized circuits.14 In this instance, rather than efforts at de-fetishizing woman, as seen in the People’s Republic, there was an exponential acceleration of such fetishization both on- and off-screen. Accordingly, this was a period that saw a large number of immaculate-looking actresses, many of whom became household icons in Taiwan and Hong Kong, with a visibility that extended well beyond the silver screen. In the decades since, the stylish physical presences of Li Lihua 李麗華, Bai Yan 白燕, Hong Xiannü 紅線女, Fang Yanfen 芳艷芬, Mei Qi 梅綺, Zi Luolian 紫蘿蓮, Le Di 樂蒂, Lin Dai 林黛, You Min 尤敏, Ge Lan 葛蘭, Ye Feng 葉楓, Lin Cui 林翠, Ling Bo 淩波, Li Jing 李菁, Jiang Qing 江 青, Hu Yanni 胡燕妮, He Lili 何琍琍, Qin Ping 秦萍, Zheng Peipei 鄭 佩佩, Fang Ying 方盈, Tang Baoyun 唐寳雲, Zhang Meiyao 張美瑤, Wang Mochou 王莫愁, Zhen Zhen 甄珍, Jia Ling 嘉玲, Nan Hong

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南紅, Lin Feng 林鳳, Bai Luming 白露明, Jiang Xue 江雪, Ding Ying 丁瑩, Chen Baozhu 陳寳珠, Xiao Fangfang 蕭芳芳, Feng Baobao 馮 寶寶, Miao Jinfeng 苗金鳳, Lin Qingxia 林青霞, Hu Yinmeng 胡茵 夢, Hu Huizhong 胡慧中, Mei Yanfang 梅艷芳, and their contemporaries have remained the stuff of local myths and legends, and nostalgic trips. We see something of the epochal impact of these actresses in a film such as Wong Kar-wai’s 王家衛 In the Mood for Love (花樣年 華, 2000), in which he sought to recreate the aura – the look – of the 1960s woman movie star through the female protagonist’s hairstyle, make-up, dress code, and bodily gestures and movements. In the mid-1980s, when the world-famous fifth-generation directors of the People’s Republic such as Chen Kaige 陳凱歌 and Zhang Yimou 張藝謀 undertook to radicalize Chinese film-making by breaking off from the melodramatic, plot-driven conventions of their predecessors, woman became once again a prominent (if controversial) figure of representation. The two directors’ approaches, as I have argued elsewhere, are quite different.15 Beginning with Yellow Earth (黃土地, 1984), all of Chen’s films up to Life on a String (邊 走邊唱, 1991) featured critiques of communist indoctrination and efforts to reflect on the foundations of Chinese culture. Whereas potentially subversive, subaltern figures such as illiterate peasants, mute children, male social outcasts, or inhospitable landscapes often appear in Chen’s stories, women seldom do, and when they do, they are typically sacrificed (the most famous being Cuiqiao in Yellow Earth). By casting women in this non-existent or vanishing position (whereby they ultimately become invisible on-screen), Chen may be seen, I believe, to have assigned to them the utopian significance of what is beyond this world (and what is still to come). In keeping with Chen’s philosophical and literary leanings, woman as such seems to represent a kind of difference that can only be evoked but never directly or concretely shown. Since the making of Farewell My Concubine (霸王別姬, 1993), however, Chen has clearly abandoned this non-profitable view towards femininity. His adaptation to a commercially viable approach is borne out in later, large-budget works such as Temptress Moon (風月, 1996), The Assassin (荊軻刺秦王, 1999), The Promise (無極, 2005), and Forever Enthralled (aka Mei Lanfang 梅蘭芳, 2008). Zhang, by contrast, has consistently adopted a pragmatic – and popular – method. In his earlier films such as Red Sorghum (紅高粱, 1987), Judou (菊豆, 1990), Raise the Red Lantern (大紅燈籠高高掛,

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1991), The Story of Qiuju (秋菊打官司, 1992), and Shanghai Triad (搖啊搖, 搖到外婆橋, 1995), woman – as performed by Gong Li 鞏 俐 and others – is without exception the site of a cinematic exhibitionism. In Zhang’s hands, women’s stories, including in particular the physical abuses and misfortunes they suffer, are a means of putting on display both the glorious and barbarous aspects of Chinese culture. Unlike the early Chen, Zhang does not idealize woman to the point of making her invisible and incorporeal; instead, he specializes in instrumentalizing her as a central stage prop. In the sumptuous visual and corporeal qualities of the young woman – young being a prerequisite here – Zhang has found an attention-grabbing way of telling – and selling – Chinese stories to the entire world. Zhang’s success, to put it somewhat differently, consists in his rediscovery and reanimation of the conventions of fetishism that had been evident in early Chinese film-making and fully developed in the Taiwan and Hong Kong films of the post-war years, but which were temporarily suspended and censured under communist orthodoxy. Indeed, as in the case of The Goddess, what Zhang reinforces is a cinematic style that capitalizes exactly on the epistemic contradiction (and capitalist substitution logic) I mentioned, whereby material deprivation and social oppression are typically dramatized on-screen with breathtakingly adorable female faces and bodies, as well as with opulent colours, costumes, architectural layouts, and screen designs. Above all, by interweaving the focalization on feminine suffering with the advanced technologies of cinematography and film editing, Zhang has reignited the place of woman in mainland film-making with an insuppressible power of objectification, in full responsiveness to the libidinal tendencies of a postmodern, corporatist globalism with its preference for glitzy, flawless packaging. Under his direction, in blockbuster films such as Hero (英雄, 2002), House of the Flying Daggers (十面埋伏, 2004) and The Curse of the Golden Flower (滿城盡戴 黃金甲, 2006), actresses such as Maggie Cheung Man-yuk 張曼玉, Zhang Ziyi 章子怡 and Gong Li have literally become screen goddesses, embodying the profane (commoditizing) as well as religious connotations of the Chinese term shennü 神女 (‘goddess’). Together with their contemporaries such as Carina Lau Kar-ling 劉嘉玲, Faye Wong 王菲, Kelly Chan Wai-lum 陳慧琳, Sammi Cheng Sau-man 鄭秀文, Michelle Yeoh 楊紫瓊, Michele Reis 李嘉欣, Shu Qi 舒琪, Zhou Xun 周迅, Zhao Wei 趙薇, Tang Wei 湯唯, Li Bingbing 李冰 冰, Fan Bingbing 范冰冰, and others, these screen goddesses have

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brought the fetishized status of ‘Chinese woman’ to a new threshold of ostentation in the realms of Asian and international media.16 At this juncture, it would seem that the conventional Marxist critique of commodity fetishism needs to be put aside to make way for a kind of cultural analysis that is more attuned to the multivalent cathexes (including critical and scholarly cathexes) resulting from the commodification and fetishization of woman in cinema. Is this really so? As a way to explore this point, let me place Chinese cinema in relation to the theoretical context of the feminist controversy over woman and visuality. 

Anglophone feminist film theory and the moral high ground of particularism In film theory, one of the ground-breaking events is the critique, made collectively in the 1970s and 1980s by feminists of the AngloAmerican world, of the conventional modes of objectifying woman in cinema. In the decades since, few scholars who write in English on the question of woman in cinema have been able to bypass this critique. Those who study women and gender politics in the relatively new subfield of Chinese cinema are no exception: whether or not authors explicitly acknowledge the influence of anglophone feminist film theory, they fully partake of a generally sceptical attitude toward filmic representations of women, especially those by male directors.17 The British critic Laura Mulvey’s work remains a landmark in this regard. In her renowned essay of 1975, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Mulvey asks us to think about the cinematic image as the result of a particular kind of storytelling, one that, as she argues, is marked by (hetero) sexual difference.18 Rather than treating it as an unproblematic presence, Mulvey deconstructs the cinematic image by making explicit in it a hidden narrative. To the part of the narrative that, while remaining invisible, determines how specific images should be looked at, Mulvey gives the name ‘gaze’. To the differential between the gaze and the image, Mulvey gives the name ‘patriarchy’ so that in the case of classic Hollywood melodrama at least, it is, she writes, masculinist scopophilia that motivates and empowers the act of gazing, while women are cast as passive, fetishized objects, as mere pretty images to be looked at. By thus retracing, restoring and bringing to light the cultural imprints inscribed by (hetero) sexual

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difference, Mulvey succeeds in prying the filmic image open and away from its hitherto reified status and reinserts in it the drama of the ongoing struggles between men and women, the drama of ideological assumptions and gendered coercions.19 In its distrust of the spontaneous-looking cinematic image as a deceptive object – a kind of distrust that reminds us of Marx’s critique of the spontaneous-looking commodity – and in its attempt to forge a politics that would prevent the woman spectator from completely collapsing, at her peril, into the cinematic image of femininity as produced by men, was the feminist film theory pioneered by Mulvey iconophobic? I tend to think so, but it is crucial to add that this iconophobia was theoretically and institutionally productive.20 It was precisely its negating or de-fetishizing intention, manifested in the charge that the spontaneous-looking cinematic image is somehow distorting or silencing a certain reality existing behind it, that supplied the momentum with which the study of film and women has since then spread from film studies to feminist/gender studies, and to the studies of so-called global media in social science as well as humanities programmes across the university. By discrediting the male gaze and de-fetishizing its image of women, feminist film theory inaugurated the institutional dissemination of film studies and film-related cultural studies in the Anglo-American world with something akin to what Michel Foucault calls the repressive hypothesis, by which the conceptualization of what is deemed repressed (such as sex or, in this context, woman) is, paradoxically but systemically, reinforced by the multiplication and proliferation of discourses about it.21 Because it was underwritten with the force of the repressive hypothesis, the paradigm shift from a focus on the (positivity of the) image to a focus on narrative and ideology has consequences that go considerably beyond the study of film. In the decades since Mulvey’s essay was first published,22 film and cultural critics have been extending the implications of her work (often in simplified terms) by making the problematization of (the naturalness of) the film image their first and foremost task. Rather than the image itself, film analysis has become increasingly a matter of identifying and querying the narrative and ideological processes that have gone into the image’s making. Bill Nichols describes this shift in critical attitudes succinctly: ‘The visual’, he writes, ‘is no longer a means of verifying the certainty of facts pertaining to an objective, external world and truths about this world conveyed linguistically. The visual now constitutes the terrain

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of subjective experience as the locus of knowledge, and power.’23 Whereas Mulvey and other feminist critics went on to refine feminist modes of interrogating patriarchy, other critics would complicate that differential – and ever-widening chasm – between gaze and image by introducing issues of class, race, ethnicity, nation, and sexual preference. Think, for instance, of the popular move, often made by but not limited to scholars of Chinese film, of attacking Western and orientalist (mis)representations – that is, repressions – of so-called Chinese or other ethnic ‘reality’. Concurrently, critics also theorize the ambiguities inherent in various forms of spectatorship and, by implication, in various modes of seeing/watching. As every group of spectators comes to the filmic image with its own set of demands, interrogations and political agendas, one can no longer speak of the image as such but must become willing to subject the image to processes of re-viewing, re-narrativizing, and re-assembling. This is perhaps the reason there are so many publications on the practice and reception of film in different cultures. At the same time, in this culturally pluralized way of approaching the filmic image, one cannot help but feel that a certain predictability has set in, and that despite the potentially limitless, indeed inexhaustible, local differences or specificities arrayed, the theoretical gestures adopted by different cultural groups vis-à-vis the cinematic image often follow the same kind of critical prerogative. Again borrowing from Nichols, we may describe this critical prerogative as follows: The rise of distinct cultures to a condition of visibility accompanies a radical shift away from democratic ideals of universalism (equality under the law for all regardless of gender, color, sexual orientation and so on) toward a particularism that insists on equality precisely in relation to differences of gender, color, sexual orientation and the like.24

The legitimization of woman as a category of film investigation therefore needs to be seen in perspective, as stemming from this cross-cultural history of the shifting attitudes toward the ontological self-sufficiency of the visual image. Once the image’s naturalness is contested and decoded, and once the ideology ‘behind’ the image is brought (back) into the picture, as it were, scholars inevitably arrive at a situation in which the kind of particularism mentioned by Nichols seems, by default, the most acceptable approach to film culture. In many respects, it is exactly this historic ascendancy of particularism

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that has shaped the wide-ranging studies of Chinese cinema springing up in the anglophone world within the past couple of decades. Such insistence on particularism has also, if I may add to Nichols’s insight, taken on the strategic value of a moral high ground, accompanied by various forms of correction exercises. Accordingly, not only has it become necessary to give attention to woman but even the use of the word ‘woman’ in the singular has rapidly become suspect. For – or so goes the logic of particularism – aren’t there always further particulars to any given particulars? Aren’t there different groups of women in the world, and shouldn’t ‘woman’ be pluralized as ‘women’? And yet, no sooner is ‘women’ asserted than it becomes necessary to realize that the plural form of any particular identity, too, tends over time to turn into an exclusionary unit barring other others from admission. What about gay men and lesbians, transgendered folks, social outcasts, ethnic minorities, children, disabled people, environmentally endangered communities and species, and so on?25 Again, readers will recognize that the boundlessness, or madness, of this inclusionist pluralism (in the form of incessantly multiplying particularisms) is exactly one in which the studies of Chinese cinemas have been developing also.26 

Fetish power unbound Historically speaking, when anglophone feminist film theory alerted us to the fetishized – that is, object-like and mystically empowered – status of women on-screen, its iconophobia shared important affinities with the moral charges accompanying the political activism of the 1960s and 1970s in the West. Among other things, this was a political activism that idealized alternative political regimes such as Mao Zedong’s 毛澤東 China and demanded an end to Western imperialism and military occupation, and the granting of civil rights to disenfranchised populations. And yet, precisely also because, like so many of the mass demonstrations so self-consciously staged during that period, feminist film theory was deriving its energy from a certain repressive hypothesis, it was, despite its own moral claims and intentions, delivering another type of message. This was the message that the politics of gender and sexuality (together with the politics of race, class, ethnicity, and other emergent particularisms) was itself none other than the politics of media spectacles. Nancy Armstrong,

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referring to the general cultural ambience of the industrial West in the 1960s, writes: [T]he sixties saw an important shift in the theater of political activism from the plane of physical action and conflicts that we persist in designating as real to the plane of discourse, representation, and performance, where conflicts determine how we imagine our relation to the real.27

Indeed, the determination with which feminist critics sought to subvert the widespread representations of women suggests that, notwithstanding feminist film theory’s de-fetishizing logic, the politics of the fetishized image was rapidly assuming centre stage: the mechanically and eventually electronically generated simulacrum – on what Armstrong calls ‘the plane of discourse, representation, and performance’ – was henceforth going to be the actual, ubiquitous political battleground and arena of competition. In retrospect, it seems fair to say that feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s was confronted from the outset with a contradictory set of tasks. On the one hand, feminist film theory had to dislodge the cinematic image (or the visual field) as it was produced on the unequal basis of the phallocentric gaze; on the other hand, it had to reappropriate – that is, refill and recharge – the cinematic image (or the visual field) with an alternative set of gazes, histories and purposes. As it tried to negate the agency of one group of image-makers, such theory must at the same time engage in a conversion and substitution process, turning the agency it repudiated over to another group of people, women, who had been previously denied it. If the cinematic image, like Marx’s commodity, was a false representation of women, it was nonetheless by actively seizing rather than abandoning the space of this false representation – by assuming the right to own, manage and direct the visual field; by making woman the predominant commodified image in a transformed public consciousness – that feminist film theory could fulfil its political obligation of emancipating women.28 Once it set this process in motion, however, feminist film theory (and feminism in general) must face up to the fact that other plaintiffs (other women, other races and other excluded or misrepresented social groups) could similarly come forward, as women once did, to stake their particularist claims on the image. In order to stay competitive in its claim to discursive legitimacy, feminist particularism, despite its beginnings as a project to de-fetishize, could not, over time, avoid participating substantially in the business of fetishizing.29

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This is the point at which a rethinking of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism is in order. Its conventional reception notwithstanding, Marx’s analysis, in fact, teaches us something quite remarkable: namely, that it is precisely as a mysterious, veiled, spectral, and deceptive object that the commodity achieves its greatest power. Against the grain of the obvious, iconophobic renunciation of fetishism that is normally taken to be the gist of Marx’s argument, we can therefore venture a different kind of reading. What Marx is describing, we can argue, is nothing short of the reversal, as human society progresses through late capitalism, of a traditional semiotic hierarchy. This is a reversal by which what is hitherto presumed to be a mere image and representation, secondary and inferior to the authentic something (reality, history, body), steadily overtakes society with the force of repetition and contagion. Rather than simply denouncing the commodity on moral grounds, the legacy of Marx’s observations lies in his grasp of a future in which the logic and potency of the commodity – precisely in the form of repeatable, contagious simulacra – will usurp the significance of the original that is human labour. In this future, it follows, even the most precious truths about humans, such as their bodies, their life histories, their multiple identities, and their survival as a species in the ecosphere, will need to strive for legitimacy as commodities and as fetishes. In this light, the endeavour, characteristic of but not unique to feminist particularism, to ensure that one is properly imaged, mirrored and represented (on the screen as well as off) may be understood anew as a (cultural-politically) fetishistic practice in an ever-expanding visual field. Notably also, the fetish of woman and its various simulacra, in the form of the belief in the struggle for group identity, history, agency, solidarity, and so forth, are no longer confined to the realm of gender politics but reproduced widely across the disciplines, in which the rebuke of incorrect images often goes hand in hand with the massive generation and circulation of more and more images, be those images about classes, races, nations, religions, or persons of different sexual orientations. As China entered an era of economic and social prosperity in the 1990s and beyond, Chinese media representations of woman, now often amalgamating the influences of Hong Kong, Taiwan and Hollywood, as well as the People’s Republic, seem to have returned to an embrace of fetish power with a vengeance.30 While their onscreen roles may still feature them as oppressed victims of patriarchal

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abuse, poverty, disease, or other social malaise, contemporary female film stars such as those mentioned earlier, some of whom began their careers in beauty contests, have been cannibalizing attention not only as actresses in film alone. Increasingly, they are mega-queens of the highly lucrative and professionalized domain of advertising, in which they can be paid millions of dollars for their ‘work’ – that is, for allowing themselves to be used as images – to promote everything from shampoo and skincare products to luxury jewellery, household appliances, weight-loss programmes, and high-end real estate. How should we understand this process of fetish power becoming unbound, advancing from the world of film to the realm of commercial multimedia, a process in which the much-coveted role and status of an actress is precisely that of being the impeccable image, being the commodity in human form, on display in public, from shopping malls to gigantic wallscreens on skyscrapers? This medially migratory dimension of fetishized femininity – of woman becoming not only high-tech simulacra but also elite conduits of finance capital – should be made part of any future discussion of woman and Chinese film and media studies. Such a discussion will likely need to come to terms with this basic question: do our conventional deconstructions of phallocentric, orientalist, and/or heterosexist gazes still suffice as viable modes of critical intervention?

❁ Notes 1 This chapter is a revised and expanded version of the essay published in Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and essay, ‘ “Woman”, Fetish, Particularism: Articulating Chinese Cinema with a Cross-Cultural Problematic’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, vol. 1, no. 3, 2007, pp. 209–21, and in its current form, it is reprinted from what was published in the Oxford volume on Chinese cinemas, ed. Rojas and Chow. The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 490–506. 2 Paul Clark, ‘Chinese Cinema Enters the 1990s’, in William A. Joseph, ed., China Briefing, 1992 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), p. 126. 3 For a sensitive reading that provides much relevant historical information on the ideological issues structuring both the film’s production and reception, see Kristine Harris, ‘The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai’, in Chris Berry, ed., Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes (London: British Film Institute, 2003), pp. 111–19. 4 For a study of the actress’s life and works, see Richard J. Meyer, Ruan Ling-yu: The Goddess of Shanghai (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005).

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5 Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 23–26. For Marx and Freud on fetishism, see the chapter ‘Commodities’ in Book 1, Part 1 of Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, revised and amplified by Ernest Untermann (New York: Modern Library, 1906), pp. 41–96; Sigmund Freud, ‘Fetishism’, in James Strachey trans. and ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth, 1961), pp. 152–57; and Sigmund Freud, ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process’ (1938–40), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23 (London: Hogarth, 1964), pp. 275–78; also the part ‘Unsuitable Substitutes for the Sexual Object – Fetishism’ (1905) in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7 (London: Hogarth, 1953), pp. 153–55. For a study of the genealogies and problems of fetishism, see Emily Apter and William Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 6 On such a woman he once encountered in a public park, Benjamin bestows a sense of aura by giving her the mythic and generic name Ariadne; see, for instance, Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 54. 7 These fetishized details of glamorized femininity are consciously recreated and amplified in the Hong Kong film Centre Stage/Actress (aka Ruan Lingyu 阮玲玉, 1992), directed by Stanley Kwan 關錦鵬. 8 Other notable examples from the 1930s include films such as Small Toys (小 玩意, 1933), The Queen of Sports (體育皇后, 1934) and The Big Road (大路, 1934), all directed by Sun Yu 孫瑜, together with New Woman (新女性, 1935), directed by Cai Chusheng 蔡楚生. For a historical study of the films of this period, see Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement 1932–1937 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002). For more specific discussions of the rise of a star culture in Shanghai in the 1930s and of how women characters, including the ones played by female stars such as Ai Xia 艾霞, Hu Die 胡蝶 and Ruan Lingyu, were used by male directors to forge an intellectually leftist politics, see Pang, Building a New China in Cinema, pp. 113–35 and pp. 141–64. For an account of the relations between gender relations and film representation in Chinese cinema up to the late 1940s, see Shuqin Cui, Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003), pp. 3–29; especially pp. 15–18, for discussions of The Goddess. 9 For a copiously researched cultural history of the relations between mainland China’s urban modernity and early cinema, see Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Ying Zhu, Chinese Cinema during the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), pp. 175–209, for an informative account of mainland Chinese cinema’s first entertainment

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 Rey Chow wave and institutional restructuring during the mid-1920s to the early 1930s. For a study of the (commercially) mediatized evolution of a particular kind of female figure during the silent cinema period, see Weihong Bao, ‘From Pearl White to White Rose Woo: Tracing the Vernacular Body of Nüxia in Chinese Silent Cinema, 1927–1931’, Camera Obscura, vol. 60, 2005, pp. 193–231. Harris, ‘The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai’, p. 115; my emphasis. See also Pang, Building a New China in Cinema, pp. 155–58, for descriptions of the popular uses of female stars such as Hu Die to promote consumer products such as cigarettes and cosmetics. Yue Meng 孟悦 and Jinhua Dai 戴錦華, Fuchu lishi dibiao 浮出歷史地表 [Surfacing onto the Horizon of History] (Zhengzhou: Henan Renmin Chubanshe, 1989); Meng Yue, ‘Female Images and National Myth’, in Tani E. Barlow, ed., Gender Politics in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 118–36. Cui, Women through the Lens, p. 52. There were also multiple media (such as radio, film, posters, ballet, musical compositions, comic books, and so forth) operating during the orthodox socialist era of the 1950s to 1970s in China, but the ideological effects such media produced were quite distinct from those of the commercial media in Taiwan and Hong Kong. For an informative discussion, see, for instance, Ping-kwan Leung, ‘Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong’, in Poshek Fu and David Desser, ed., The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 227–51. Rey Chow, Primitive Passions, pp. 44–48. Faye Wong and Kelly Chan Wai-lum are singers by profession, but they have also appeared in some films. As an alternative, some critics have turned their attention instead to women directors, their films and their perspectives on women. See, for instance, Chris Berry, eds, Special Issue on Chinese Women Directors, Camera Obscura, vol. 18, 1988; and Le Lu 魯勒, Shanshan Xi 奚姗姗, Zhenqin Zhang 張震欽, eds, Caozong yinmu de nüxing: Zhongguo nüdaoyan 操縱銀幕的女性———中國女導演 [Women in Control of the Silver Screen: China’s Female Directors] (Changchun: Beifang funü ertong chubanshe, 1989). Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 14–26. Mulvey was not alone in her effort to theorize narrativity in relation to film. Among her fellow travellers were male scholars such as Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Stephen Heath, and Paul Willemen, who were each doing substantive work with film narrative during the same period, but Mulvey was the one who raised the issue of sexual politics. For an account that places Mulvey’s essay in its historical context of the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s, when the British intellectual left

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21 22

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encountered the burgeoning of feminist theory, see Maggie Humm, Feminism and Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Many criticisms of Mulvey’s polemic piece, including feminist criticisms of the 1980s, centre on her point about the need to destroy pleasure and, as a counterargument, attempt to recuperate the positive value of pleasure especially for women spectators. My argument here is quite different in that it is about the intellectually and institutionally generative – that is, reproducible – nature of Mulvey’s original negative move of de-fetishizing. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978). Mulvey herself, too, has, with historical hindsight, critiqued the binarism of her earlier polemical argument and revised her observations. See Laura Mulvey, ‘Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative, and Historical Experience’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 159–76. Bill Nichols, ‘Film Theory and the Revolt against Master Narratives’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, ed., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 42. Bill Nichols, ‘Film Theory and the Revolt against Master Narratives’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, ed., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 40; my emphasis. For an instructive critique of the ambitions, trajectories and impasses characteristic of identity discourse formations in the post-Civil Rights North American academy, see Robyn Wiegman, Object Lessons (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Apart from books, articles and book chapters on women and gender, for instance, there is a growing number of studies devoted to same-sex relationships. For some notable examples, see Helen Hok-sze Leung, ‘Queerscapes in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema’, Positions, vol. 9, no. 2, 2001, pp. 423–47; Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003); Song Hwee Lim, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). For discussions of ethnicity/ethnic minorities in Chinese films, see Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), pp. 169–94; Shu-mei Shih, Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). There is also an increasingly elaborate subdivision of Chinese cinema into mainland Chinese, Taiwan and Hong Kong cinemas, as well as the subdivision into Mandarin, Cantonese, Chaoyu, Xiayu films. Chinese-language periodicals such as Dianying shuangzhoukan 電影雙週刊 [Film bi-weekly supplement], 中外文學 [Chung-Wai Literary Monthly], Dangdai dianying 當代電影 [Contemporary cinema], Dianying yishu 電影藝術 [Film art], Dianying xinshang 電影欣賞 [Film appreciation journal], and

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 Rey Chow Dianying xinshang xuekan 電影欣賞學刊 [Film appreciation academic journal] serve as useful sources for some these ongoing trends. Nancy Armstrong, ‘Who’s Afraid of the Cultural Turn?’, Differences, vol. 12, no. 1, 2001, p. 42; my emphasis. The controversy over heterosexual pornography, which participated in the origins of film and its fetishization of female bodies for commodified ends, is the paradigmatic instance of the challenge that the politics of representation continues to pose to feminist theory. For an astute analysis, see Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989). A symptom of this (inevitable) fetishizing is that some seem to have taken an alarmist or defensive stance about feminism in recent years. See, for instance, Lynne Segal, Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism (London: Virago, 1987); and Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age (New York: Routledge, 1991); Susan Gubar, Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Estelle B. Freedman, No Turning Back? The History of Feminism and the Future of Women (New York: Ballantine, 2002). For related interest, see the discussion of the return in mainland China of the Miss China Pageant in 2002 – the first since 1949 – and its political ramifications in William Callahan, Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–4.

Bibliography Apter, Emily and William Pietz. Fetishism as Cultural Discourse. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Armstrong, Nancy. ‘Who’s Afraid of the Cultural Turn?’, Differences, vol. 12, no. 1, 2001. Bao, Weihong. ‘From Pearl White to White Rose Woo: Tracing the Vernacular Body of Nüxia in Chinese Silent Cinema, 1927–1931’, Camera Obscura, vol. 60, 2005. Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Tr. Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2006. Berry, Chris, eds. ‘Special Issue on Chinese Women Directors’, Camera Obscura, vol. 18, 1988. Berry, Chris and Mary Farquhar. China on Screen: Cinema and Nation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Callahan, William A. Cultural Governance and Resistance in Pacific Asia. New York: Routledge, 2006. Cheung, Esther M.K. and Chu Yiu-wai, eds. Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Clark, Paul. ‘Chinese Cinema Enters the 1990s’, in China Briefing, 1992, ed. William A. Joseph. Boulder: Westview Press, 1993. Cui, Shuqin. Women through the Lens: Gender and Nation in a Century of Chinese Cinema. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003. Erens, Patricia Brett. ‘The Film Work of Ann Hui’, in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction, Tr. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Freedman, Estelle B. No Turning Back? The History of Feminism and the Future of Women. New York: Ballantine, 2002. Freud, Sigmund. ‘Fetishism’ (1927), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, Tr. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. ———. ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Defensive Process (1938–40)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23, Tr. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1964. ———. ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 7, Tr. and ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953. Fu, Poshek. Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Gubar, Susan. Critical Condition: Feminism at the Turn of the Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Harris, Kristine. ‘The Goddess: Fallen Woman of Shanghai’, in Chinese Films in Focus: 25 New Takes, ed. Chris Berry. London: British Film Institute, 2003. Ho, Elaine Yee Lin. ‘Women on the Edges of Hong Kong Modernity: The Films of Ann Hui’, in Spaces of Their Own: Women’s Public Sphere in Transnational China, ed. Mayfair Mei Hui Yang. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Humm, Maggie. Feminism and Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Leung, Helen Hok-sze. ‘Queerscapes in Contemporary Hong Kong Cinema’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique, vol. 9, no. 2, 2001. Leung, Ping-kwan. ‘Urban Cinema and the Cultural Identity of Hong Kong’, in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, ed. Poshek Fu and David Desser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lim, Song Hwee. Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006. Looser, Devoney and Kaplan, E. Ann, eds. Generations: Academic Feminisms in Dialogue. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Lu, Le 魯勒, Shanshan Xi 奚姗姗, Zhenqin Zhang 張震欽, eds. Caozong yinmu de nüxing: Zhongguo nüdaoyan 操縱銀幕的女性———中國女導演 [Women in

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Control of the Silver Screen: China’s Female Directors]. Changchun: Beifang funü ertong chubanshe, 1989. Luo, Feng 洛楓. Shengshi bianyuan: Xianggang dianying de xingbie, teji yu jiuqi zhengzhi 盛世邊緣—香港電影的性別、特技與九七政治 [City on the Edge of Time: Gender, Special Effects, and Handover Politics in Hong Kong Cinema]. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 2002. Martin, Fran. Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003. Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels, Tr. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, revised and amplified by Ernest Untermann. New York: Modern Library, 1906. Meng, Yue. ‘Female Images and National Myth’, in Gender Politics in Modern China, ed. Tani E. Barlow. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Meng, Yue 孟悦 and Jinhua Dai 戴錦華. Fuchu lishi dibiao 浮出歷史地表 [Surfacing onto the Horizon of History]. Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chuubanshe, 1989. Meyer, Richard J. Ruan Ling-yu: The Goddess of Shanghai. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. Modleski, Tania. Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age. New York: Routledge, 1991. Mulvey, Laura. ‘Changes: Thoughts on Myth, Narrative, and Historical Experience’, in Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. ———. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Nichols, Bill. ‘Film Theory and the Revolt against Master Narratives’, in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams. London: Arnold, 2000. Pang, Laikwan. Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-wing Cinema Movement 1932–1937. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Segal, Lynne. Is the Future Female? Troubled Thoughts on Contemporary Feminism. London: Virago, 1987. ———. Why Feminism? Gender, Psychology, Politics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Shih, Shu-mei. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006. Teo, Stephen. Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Dimensions. London: British Film Institute, 1997. Wang, Lingzhen. ‘The Female Cinematic Imaginary: History, Subjectivity, and Xiaoying Ma’s Gone Is the One Who Held Me Dearest in the World’, Chung Wai Literary Monthly, vol. 34, no. 11, 2006. Wiegman, Robyn. Object Lessons. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012.

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Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. Yau, Ching. Filming Margins: Tang Shu Shuen, A Forgotten Hong Kong Woman Film Director. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004. Yu, Muyun 余慕雲. Xianggang dianying shihua 香港電影史話 [A Historical Account of Hong Kong Cinema], vols. 1–5. Hong Kong: Ciwenhua tang, 1996, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001. Zhang, Zhen. An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema, 1896– 1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Zhu, Ying. Chinese Cinema during the Era of Reform: The Ingenuity of the System. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.

3 Civil contract of photography in India1 Christopher Pinney

❂

I

t is a cliché of a certain kind of social constructivism that media incarnate as both utopia and dystopia and that this volatility limits what we are able to say about media as opposed to the discursive contexts that appear to determine its utopian or dystopian identity. Consider in this light the following contrasting responses to the connectedness that mobile phones permit (we will come to the camera very soon). One occurred on the afternoon of Sharad Purnima, the full moon during the month of Ashvin, on 29 October 2012. The phone belonged to my friend Atit and there was a message from his Jain guru urging him to recite 324 navkars (complicated Jain mantras) at one thirty that coming morning. The bulk short message service (SMS) immediately connected a large community of believers in aspirational and devotional behaviour. A few weeks later this guru would visit Atit’s home and diagnose the vastu (spatial auspiciousness) of his father’s puja rom with a smart phone application. Media again seemed to offer a utopian promise (see Figure 3.1). A contrasting dystopian response came from the Bhandarez panchayat in Dausa district, Rajasthan, and was reported in the national press on November 2012. The panchayat had unanimously voted in favour of prohibiting village girls from using mobiles, following the recent elopement of a village girl. The sarpanch, Durgalal, was quoted by DNA India as saying that ‘girls should be prohibited from using personal mobile phones and also scarves which helps in hiding identity.’2 These two examples incarnate mobile phones in two very different forms – one positive and one negative – and provide grist for the anthropologist or historian who might delight in this apparent

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Figure 3.1: A Svetambara Jain guru visits a village home and uses the Vastu app on his smartphone, November 2012. Source:

Photograph by Christopher Pinney, November 2012.

falsification of Friedrich Kittler’s claim that ‘media determine our situation’.3 The anthropologist and historian imagine that they are able to claim that it is culture and/ or history that are the determinants: it is our situations that define media, they might well claim. While having no desire to support the strong version of the Kittler thesis (recall his deterministic and delicious claim that doing media history is akin to trying to ‘know higher mathematics by hearsay’4) my intention in this chapter is to explore material that I hope will move us beyond those default anthropological and historical settings for which media is simply, as Bruno Latour might say, a secondary screen for the social.5 I hope to show, in an echo of Arvind Rajagopal’s qualification of Kittler, that media do indeed illuminate our situation. Specifically, I hope to show how one media practice – photography – has been incarnated as utopia and then dystopia (or in the Derridean rubric of the pharmakon, cure and poison) and reconcile this very difference with what is in part a media logic and not simply cultural or historical inscription. Here I revisit my long-term interest in photographic practice in India in light of Ariella Azoulay’s important 2008 book, The Civil

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Contract of Photography. Born, as she says, from her fury about the Israeli defence force’s actions during the second Palestinian intifada, the book presents a general theory of a photographic citizenry available to the oppressed, one that resonates in many ways with the uses of photographic evidence as a mode of political mobilization by Indian nationalists. Azoulay stresses photography’s radical impact – the manner in which it provided a new way of ‘regarding the visible’ and the manner in which its visual regime ‘departs from the disciplinarian gaze or the pattern of communicating pre-recognized images [and that] includes the aspect of a new beginning [whose] ends are unpredictable’.6 I want to think through this unpredictability in the context of India from the middle of the 19th-century ‘tripod regime’7 through to the present. In the final parts of the chapter, I consider recent controversies about violations of privacy, via multimedia messaging service (MMS) scandals in North India, in which photography plays the role of an intruder in which ‘every participant not only contemplates what can be seen but is also herself, exposed and visible’, as Azoulay puts it.8 But first we need to consider a much earlier history and confront some of Azoulay’s assumptions. These include the foundational claim that everyone by virtue of their birth post-1789 and the establishment of liberty, equality and fraternity, and their birth post-1839 (the date of the announcement of both Louis Daguerre’s and Fox Talbot’s rather different photographic techniques) are ipso facto party to photography’s civil contract. This immediately provokes questions about the possible EuroAmerican-centricity of Azoulay’s narrative: How does this historical legacy resonate in a colonial context? When Azoulay suggests that ‘Palestinians became citizens of the citizenry of photography long before there was any possibility of their becoming citizens in the ordinary meaning of the word’, should we take this as a prompt to think about similarities between oppressed Palestinians and colonized Indians, or should we be struck by a disjuncture?9 This might take the form of a focusing on the different infrastructure of expectation rationalized historically or culturally. Historically this might engage the attenuated presence of the French Revolution as a foundational moment of political possibility in the context of colonized India (although one might also want to insist on an equal attenuation in an Israeli context). Rather than focusing on the French Revolution, we might find ourselves confronting the very different legacies of the

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Bhagavad Gita,10 utilitarianism, variant liberalisms,11 or the legacy of the Italian Risorgimento. Culturally (for want of a better word) one might point to India, in a parallel critical movement, as a location of a primal Homo hierarchicus as opposed to the historically contingent fiction of Homo aequalis.12 That opposition, proposed by Louis Dumont, was of course founded precisely on the absence in India of that egalitarian ideology that for Azoulay is foundational and in some – possibly mysterious – manner, capable of making demands on everyone. One of the many features of Azoulay’s approach that I find attractive and productive is her stress on the subversive and unpredictable potential of photography. She develops an alternative to once hegemonic Foucauldian approaches to photography that stressed photographic practice’s subservience to power. John Tagg has been the most vocal exponent of such an approach, arguing that photography as such has no identity, being simply the epiphenomenal reflection of the power that informs it. It is in this context that Tagg asks whether power should ever be afraid of photography.13 Tagg’s answer is no, whereas Azoulay’s is yes. A Taggian would doubtless emphasize the carceral dimensions of photographic practice in 19th-century India. Azoulay’s approach would incline us to find Indians who became photographic citizens long before they became citizens in the ordinary sense of the term. A Taggian approach would stress that, first and foremost, ordinary Indians became colonized subjects through the agency of photography. Maurice Vidal Portman, the eccentric and cantankerous ‘officer in charge of the Andamanese’, would be an ideal actor in such a Taggian narrative. My intention here is to explore the productivity of an Azoulayean approach to photography in India, but we need to also concede that there is much early practice that conscripts the camera as a tool through which power can ‘drain into the social body’.14 In 1896, almost two decades after taking his first appointment in the Andamans, Portman would publish a paper titled ‘Photography for Anthropologists’, which is notable for its archaic coloniality. Portman’s language is littered with demands for clarity: native bodies must be stark naked, and all ‘aesthetics’ are to be avoided. Portman’s photographic practice exemplifies an austere colonial sensibility that continually insisted on a separation between photographer and photographic subject. Logistically, ‘native servants and savages’ could be entrusted with the ‘mere manual work of cleaning’,15 but expensive equipment had to be protected: ‘Lock up all apparatus from savages

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and others.’16 At a formal visual level Portman abstracts and extracts Indian bodies according to rigid rules: if subjects are not to be photographed against his checkered-flag version of the Lamprey grid, ‘a dull grey or drab background, being unobtrusive, is the best’. If foliage is the only option, ‘it should be as much out of focus as possible’. If a fire can be arranged, then the ‘smoke of a damp leaf fire makes a good background, and is of use in blotting out foliage, &c., which are not required in the photograph’.17 Here we see a colonial photographic practice seemingly untroubled by what Azoulay calls the civil contract. We might also counter Azoulay with the observation that certain aspects of the Indian civil contract of photography seemed to reinforce hierarchy. The Raja of Dhar’s 1850s daguerreotype (gifted to ‘Captain Jenkins [of the] Indian Navy to be presented . . . to the Honorable Court of Directors of the Honourable East India Company’) is one example of early photography’s high cost and its early adoption within court contexts as another magical mimetic technique of the kind that cultic authority has always sought to control.18 The Indian elite’s seduction by photography cannot be overstated, but the invocation of the Benjaminian ‘cultic’ serves also as a prompt to consider a set of counter-practices, what Roland Barthes referred to as the ‘disturbance’ caused by photography,19 a democratizing principle within photography that is much easier to reconcile with Azoulay’s position. These counter-practices would include the changing ‘demographic’ of photography. Photography’s economies of scale made portraiture and self-representation available to entirely new classes of subjects. Further, we can detect an egalitarianism, an ‘aesthetics of the same’, which often provoked anxieties through its disruption of accepted social precedence and hierarchy. Photography facilitated new kinds of juxtaposition and a seriality that allowed the world to be seen in new ways.20 Furthermore, when we conceptualize photography as an emergent technology, one that is becoming ever-more mobile and compact, we can also start to engage a narrative that resonates much more directly with Azoulay’s. To compress a complex Indian history of over half a century, we might say that whereas the archetypal location of photography in the mid-19th century was the foothills of the Himalayas, in the 1920s and the 1930s it was the street. In the mid-19th century a ‘colonial habitus’ cemented photographic apparatus with a particular world view. Samuel Bourne, for instance, photographing in North

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India in the 1860s, required up to 30 coolies and the cooperation of numerous government agencies and colonial corporate interests to arrange transport and accommodation for his photographic expeditions.21 However, as photographic technology became increasingly miniaturized and increasingly mobile, especially in the early 20th century, its habitus changed. It was no longer dependent on the kinds of official support or financial investment that were so central to earlier photographers such as Bourne. A mobile photographic technology was more easily able to document chaotic public spaces in which colonial hegemony appeared increasingly fragile and in which we can see Indians claiming photographic citizenry. Amritsar became a central site in the struggle over photography’s political potential after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919. Photography’s ‘civil contract’ was mobilized a few days later when the Bombay-based photographer Narayan Vinayak Virkar travelled to the site of the massacre and photographed the aftermath. In a series of haunting images, survivors point to bullet holes in a wall against which many protestors had died. Two images similar to these were subsequently published in the Indian National Congress’s Punjab Inquiry report in 1920, one with the caption ‘Western walls in Jalleanwala [sic] Bagh showing holes caused by bullets even six inches deep’.22 Other photographs showing survivors’ injuries were featured prominently in the report. An image of a seated young boy whose left arm had been amputated near the shoulder is captioned ‘Sardari Lala of Gujrunwala wounded in arm by bomb from aeroplane’ (see Figure 3.2).23 The report also reproduced a series of images of public flogging at Gujrunwala, which had preceded the massacre and had featured in Amritsar and Our Duty to India, published in London by the recently deported newspaper editor B. G. Horniman in the same year. Horniman opened his account with a reference to the ‘Congo atrocities’24 with which the Amritsar images may well have resonated in British public conscience, not least as a result of Arthur Conan Doyle’s championing of E. D. Morel’s and Roger Casement’s campaign in his 1909 The Crime of the Congo. Horniman then notes that ‘floggings took place in public, and photographic records of these disgusting incidents are in existence, showing that the victims were stripped naked to the knees, and tied to telegraph poles or triangles’.25 These Jallianwala Bagh images also resonate with another of Azoulay’s important observations concerning the ‘ownership’ of images. Virkar’s images, reproduced anonymously in the Congress

Figure 3.2: Allah Ditta of Gujranwala wounded in leg by bomb from aeroplane. Source:

Reproduced as plate 14 in Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the Punjab Sub-Committee of the Indian National Congress (Bombay: K. Santanam, 1920).

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Report, emphasize content (the ‘crime’) rather than authorial creation or possession. Thus refracted (I quote), ‘The only way of exercising . . . ownership is to share it with the public as a substitute for the photograph’s owner.’ The photograph comes to perform a service for the public, who becomes its ‘true’ owner.26 It is in this sense that photographic images ‘can at most be entrusted to someone for a certain time’. They serve as ‘deposit[s] temporarily given over to whomever has it for safekeeping’.27 This strikes me as an idea of great importance: the history of photographic practice in India is fractured by this transition from the commoditization of photography as commercial practice (both Indian-run portrait studios and Felice Beato’s commercially merchandized images of the 1857 insurrection) to a different kind of public-making photography with dispersed ownership. Here we see how images became centrally important agents in the constitution of new publics. John Lucaites and Robert Hariman observed that ‘public life is a way of seeing’,28 and we could add to that the idea that public life is also the imaginative resource of a repertoire of images that mark out the borders of political possibility. ‘The modern citizen’, Azoulay writes, ‘has renounced the exclusive right to his or her image in favor of an economy of images’,29 a political economy, we might add, and one with surprisingly Habermasian capabilities. This expanding image bank constitutes an ethical public and provides the possibility of (as Giorgio Agamben says) ‘thinking a politics freed from the form of the state’.30 This was clearly demonstrated in 1922 when an American cinematographer named A. L. Varges documented a clash between Sikh Akalis and the Indian Police.31 An official report described how Varges had photographed an Akali protest procession en route for the Guru-ka-Bagh. Four waves of protestors attempted to access a disputed piece of land and were beaten back by lathi-wielding police, while all this was being filmed and photographed by Varges. ‘Eventually twenty-three of the Akalis were taken off on stretchers, the remaining two, who were more obstinate, were treated more roughly by the Police. . . . Meanwhile the cinematograph operator and other photographers and Press representatives were all busy’, an official report noted.32 The governor in council proclaimed that he did ‘not feel happy about the activities of the cinema operator and the possible ill-effect of these films in fostering anti-British feeling in the United States’, and he then instructed the Home Department to ascertain whether there was any way of stopping Varges from shooting more film, identifying his whereabouts and making clear to

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him the necessity of ‘exercis[ing] caution that none are exhibited which are likely to cause misunderstanding’.33 It is clear that at this moment a profound anxiety is at large, an anxiety that marks the deep and destabilizing realization that the control of photography as a technical practice had now slipped from the hand of the state. Photography’s indexical authority, which earlier colonial figures had extolled, had been desirable to the extent that it was an authority that the state could own. The Varges incident dramatizes two features on which Azoulay dwells: first, the changing technical base of photography was becoming, as Walter Benjamin put it, ‘smaller and faster’. The changing technomaterial conditions of photography make possible the fact that, to quote Azoulay, Even where . . . prohibitions pass into law, the ability to enforce them universally is difficult, due to the logic of the technology – its operational facility can be in anyone’s hands – and the global travel networks that make it possible to smuggle the camera into areas that are off-limits.34

Second, we also see signs in this incident (and Virkar’s earlier work) that a shared set of convictions about photography’s indexicality are emerging that unite the colonial state and nationalist commentators. It is implicitly understood that photographic evidence inhabits a different semiotic zone to other visual evidence and will populate a particular and privileged register in an increasingly bitter political contestation. This contestation saw both nationalists and the colonial state conscripting photographs of atrocity as part of their political projects. We will discuss further nationalist mobilizations of the camera shortly, but here we should briefly note the existence of an album in the British Library (ex-India Office) of ‘Views of scenes connected with the unrest and massacre at Amritsar’, which attempts to situate Brigadier Reginald Dyer’s extreme behaviour in the context of a series of earlier assaults against Europeans. In a similar manner the colonial state produced an album in the wake of the Chauri Chaura killings in 1922 with a preface by J. E. Goudge, the publicity commissioner, which used photographs of the atrocity to warn of the ‘dangers of exciting the latent ferocity of mobs of ignorant villagers’.35 The evidential potential of photography to act in support of nationalist politics is equally explicitly foregrounded in the Indian National

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Congress report of the Peshawar Enquiry Committee of 1930. The report focused on events on 22–23 April 1930, when, following the arrest of nine activists (associated with Khan Abdul Gaffar Khan, the so-called Frontier Gandhi), a crowd attacked three armoured vehicles, resulting in a police firing in which about 20 protestors were killed.36 Photographs were used in the Congress investigation to determine whether the crowd had been peaceful and unarmed, and whether ‘in the situation that had arisen . . . firing by armoured cars and troops was justified’.37 The report reproduced several photographs as ‘exhibits’, and concluded that ‘a very strong proof of the crowd being unarmed’ was to be found in the fact of two platoons initially refusing to fire on the crowd and the ‘equally striking proof’ provided by the photographs ‘showing the unarmed crowd facing the armoured cars’ (see Figure 3.3). Some witness testimony also mobilized the photographs as support of their own eyewitnessing. Witness no. 62 testified that ‘the

Figure 3.3: Exhibit T: scene showing unarmed crowd face to face with the military at Dhaki Nalbundi in Kissa Khani Bazar (now known as Shahidi Bazar) before the second firing. Source:

From V. J. Patel et al., Report (with Evidence) of the Peshawar Enquiry Committee Appointed by the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress (Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal, 1930), n.p.

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state of things at the place of occurrence was the same as appearing in the photographs. People who appear as standing in the photographs had nothing with them; sticks, axes, or any weapons in their hands.’38 Similarly, Hakim Abdul Jalil, witness no. 55, reported that the state of affairs presented in the two photographs is exactly as I saw on the spot. . . . This is a correct and precisely accurate photograph of the spot. . . . In the photos none of the crowd appears to possess a stick, a lathi or an axe and in fact they did not have any such weapons.39

The exhibits, which are compiled in over 50 pages at the end of the report, mix proclamations with Congress bulletins, lists of the dead and wounded with photographs that document and preserve protest and suffering as shared public and contractual dimensions of what Azoulay terms ‘photographic citizenry’. Exhibit T reproduces a photograph showing the ‘unarmed crowd face to face with the military’ before the second firing. Exhibit W reads: ‘List of the Martyrs and wounded of Peshawar who on 23 April 1930, became the victims of the bullets, the machineguns and atrocities of the tyrannical Bolton regime.’ Exhibit X shows a group of mourners crowding around the body of Chamanlal, who was ‘shot dead while following the funeral procession of S. Gunga Singh’s children’ (see Figure 3.4). At the edges of the frame faces squeeze into the collaborative space of photography. If the frame declares the limits of the camera’s ‘room’, the desire to be ‘in camera’ becomes – under the terms of this new technics – an explicit declaration of photography’s shared and public space, its ex-camera. The in camera of legal exclusion and occlusion within photography becomes the guarantee of visibility. The bodies that strain to be photographed inside the camera understand that this is the precondition for visibility outside. This last image recalls Pierre-Louis Pierson’s The Imperial Prince (ca. 1859), which serves, for Azoulay, as something akin to the primal scene of photography’s collaborative and ethically incorporative idiom. The photograph makes visible the ‘noise’ of the studio environment, in this case the borders of the background against which the horse-mounted imperial prince is posed, with the figures of Napoleon III seen on the right (together with a dog) and an assistant on the left. For Azoulay this image, which so remarkably foregrounds the ‘ritual of photography . . . itself’, illustrates the manner in which ‘photography’s form of political relations are not organized around a sovereign power’.40 Azoulay’s argument foregrounds the nature of photography as the trace of an event, as an index, but also as a performance:

Figure 3.4: Exhibit X: Chamanlal shot dead while following the funeral procession of S. Gunga Singh’s children on 31 May 1930. Source:

From V. J. Patel et al., Report (with Evidence) of the Peshawar Enquiry Committee Appointed by the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress (Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal, 1930), n.p.

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Napoleon wanted a photograph of his son, and ‘in order to obtain it, his son had to go to the photographer’s studio’, and so his father accompanied him and put in place the contingencies of this particular ‘photographic situation’ with its attendant ‘dynamic field of power relations’.41 This dynamic field involves a complex and paradoxical set of relationships among the sitter, the photographer, the sovereign, and the assistant. The child is perhaps the most obviously subordinate, and ‘yet he is the center of the event’. Inversely, the sovereign’s image is ‘pilfered’ by a camera that is unable to simply reflect the intentionality of the photographer, for ‘the photograph escapes the authority of anyone who might claim to be its author, refuting anyone’s claim to sovereignty’.42 Nationalists would further engage the camera in June 1930 in relation to the ‘Black Regime’ at Dharasana, a flashpoint during Gandhi’s salt campaign. The Gujarat Provincial Congress Committee’s report makes clear that the British attempted to keep photographers as far away as possible from scenes of violent action.43 Consequently, there are many photographs taken at some distance with captions such as ‘Lathi charge in action’ (see Figure 3.5) and ‘Police seen dragging

Figure 3.5: Lathi charge in action. Source:

Plate from V. J. Patel et al. Report (with Evidence) of the Peshawar Enquiry Committee Appointed by the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress (Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal, 1930).

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Figure 3.6: Three volunteers lying unconscious in Bulsar Congress Hospital. Source:

From V. J. Patel et al., Report (with Evidence) of the Peshawar Enquiry Committee Appointed by the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress (Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal, 1930).

a wounded soldier’. The most visually compelling photographs are those such as ‘Three volunteers lying unconscious in Bulsar Congress Hospital’, which were taken in Congress-controlled spaces where the camera could be wielded without restriction (see Figure 3.6). In 1945 one V. S. Jhaveri would self-publish a large photographic book, Flames of ’42, which presented what in his foreword he described as ‘eloquent pictures’ of the struggles of that year. Photographs with captions such as ‘Gas and more gas’, ‘Three hours of tears’ and ‘Orderly crowds: disorderly police’ were prefaced with testimonials by leading Congress figures such as Rajendra Prasad (who thought the photos ‘will prove useful’) and J. B. Kripalani (who wrote that ‘the pictures collected are significant: they give some idea of what happened’).44 Central to my argument is a critique of the assumption (made by Tagg) that photography is (if I may lapse into a Latourian means of expressing this) merely a ‘screen’ on to which more powerful primary ideologies are projected. This vision of photography as a mere reflection of discourse and power could hardly be less appropriate to the history I have telegraphed in this chapter. The logic (or perhaps better, propensity,) that I have been describing here is not the logic of the

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state. Tagg focused on photographic practices that demonstrated ‘not the power of the camera, but the power of apparatuses of the local state which deploy it and guarantee the authority of the images it constructs to stand as evidence or register a truth’.45 The examples from Amritsar and Peshawar are difficult to reconcile with such a stance, pointing instead to the camera’s role in constructing a photographic citizenry. Here we see another aspect of photography’s ‘disturbance’, the extent to which, in certain circumstances, it is ‘feared by power’.46 The idea of ‘eloquent pictures’ and photographs, which, as J. B. Kripalani said, ‘give some idea of what happened’, came to mind when in 2004 I took a video camera for the first time to the village in Madhya Pradesh, where I have been researching intermittently since 1982. I found myself forced to film several Dalit ghorlas, or mediums, as they thrashed with the presence of various goddesses. It turned out that they, too, saw in the camera the opportunity to make a political claim, a photographic demand to be taken seriously. The intense enfleshed aesthetics of Chamar shamanism are mobilized in claims that it is they who make the presence of the gods more manifest and that, consequently, it is they who have a more legitimate claim to speak for Hindu practice in this local setting (see Figure 3.7). Dhanna thrashes with

Figure 3.7: Sitaram, a village ghorla (medium) incarnated as Chamunda Ma in Madhya Pradesh. Source:

Photograph by Christopher Pinney, 2011.

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Shitala, Ambaram thrashes with Chamunda and Mangilal thrashes with Kali Ma. The ghorla thrashes – teeth chattering and body swaying, holding a bowl of burning coals and a sword – and enfleshes the printed chromolithographic images in front of which this performance occurs. The more articulate shamans point to the image of the goddess that they have made and the political lesson of this abundance of manifestation. ‘In every direction, as you know’, Ambaram points out, ‘Kalkaji comes, there’s Mangubhai; Shitala comes – there’s Dhanna. They are in our samaj. And here [gesturing to his own house] Chamunda comes. That’s also in our samaj.’47 Here Ambaram conjures the aesthetics of manifestation and superabundance and invokes an empirical method of adjudicating these contesting claims. However, these claims are hotly contested. Higher castes strongly disparage Chamar patterns of hereditary mediumship, imputing that this is a form of traditional castework, and refer to ghorlas as the halis of specific deities. A hali is a ploughman, a bonded labourer tied to a higher-status employing household on whom the hali is economically dependent. The imputation here is that ghorlas have entered self-interested economic relationships with those above them, unlike higher-caste mediums (more commonly female), who are liable to thrash unpredictably. Just as one can order a hali to plough a field, ghorlas – if they are remunerated – will thrash to order. In this conflict ghorlas seemed to readily grasp the potential of the camera as the source of supporting evidence that the gods truly were with them. In the village higher castes denied their shamanistic citizenship, but the camera offered a subjunctive validation of their claims. The camera, as Azoulay says, ‘recognizes them as part of the citizenry of photography’.48 If Ambaram and Mangilal saw increased filmic visibility as a way of mobilizing a civil contract from which they felt excluded, the ubiquitous anxiety about the revelatory possibilities of mobile phone cameras in contemporary India tells a very different story. While mobiles with cameras in India are increasingly used by most people to capture darshanic encounters, this benign everyday usage is overshadowed by the sinister phantasm of the MMS scandal. In India the inside is made public in the sense of being made visible and subject to surveillance, and this convulsed interiority also becomes the ground through which a new kind of public is constituted, although it is largely figured as a public gone bad through a betrayal of photography’s civil contract. A powerful moral panic is sustained in the national media about mobile cameras’ introversion of the space between the public and

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private. In this new dangerous space the mobile’s ability to steal images is allied to its ability to disseminate those images through MMS. All those forms and practices that are granted a utopian potential in Azoulay’s account are here incarnated dystopically as agents of crisis. The compactness of the camera allows its penetration into the illicit sphere of the private, and its networked capability permits the diffusion of what it steals from the private to a new – seemingly corrupted – public. This moral panic operates at three levels: first, news media bombard their consumers with stories about simple intrusion (images secretly shot in girl students’ hostels) and contractual violations (stripteases performed ‘privately’ by girlfriends whose partners distribute them to a wider public). Second, there is a vibrant commentary within commercial cinema that picks up recent scandals as narrative devices that allow the vicarious re-enactment of salacious episodes under the guise of moral condemnation. Third (and this is a minor theme), there is a self-critical media discourse about the ethics of complicity in reporting this avalanche of scandals and reproducing as documents its accompanying visual evidence. William Mazzarella’s wonderful discussion of the ‘rurally imagined transparency machine’ produced by the March 2001 Tehelka exposé of Defence Ministry corruption in the then Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government through the use of hidden video cameras, which were then posted on the Internet, alerts us to the fact that there are positive dimensions to the new photographic technics of hypervisibility.49 A cameraman reported overhearing villagers saying that a new device had been invented in which ‘[sab ka] brastachaar nanga ho jaata hai . . . a kind of x-ray machine which exposed naked anyone’s corruption the moment they came in front of it’,50 and that this was the reason the prime minister had not been seen in public for several days. We might add to this productive incarnation of surveillance the recent use by protestors in Indian-administered Kashmir of camcorders as an alternative to guns. Danish Shervani was viciously beaten by Indian troops in early 2008, a beating captured by several co-protestors, who were ready to capture ‘fleeting and secret images’. ‘Abuses by the security forces were recorded and posted on the Internet’, a press report noted. ‘The clips speak for themselves.’51 But machines that reveal all have, for the most part, produced different and much more widespread anxieties in contemporary India. ‘Voyeur Alert!’ and ‘The Death of Privacy’ headlines in the Times of India in 2005, describing the placing of spy cams in a girls’ hostel in Pune, are typical of hundreds of similar such stories that have flooded

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the Indian press in recent years.52 This anxiety is so pronounced that it has already been monumentalized in at least four films, Mahesh Bhatt’s 2005 sensationalist Kalyug, Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s 2007 Ami, Iyasin Ar Madhubala, whose English title is The Voyeur,53 Anurag Kashyap’s huge 2009 hit Dev. D, and Dibaker Banerjee’s brilliant Love, Sex aur Dhoka (2010). The Tehelka X-ray and the sordid aspects of MMS-ography return us to the dichotomy with which we started. I’ve tried to suggest that across the period from roughly 1840 to 1940 we can trace something akin to a ‘media logic’. The colonial ‘tripod regime’ was destabilized by smaller and faster apparatus. This was the same (protean) photography that over time turned (depending on your position in the system) from a cure to a poison, or vice versa. The tripod regime produced regime-friendly images; citizen cameras roaming the street generated the citizenry of photography. But to further complicate matters let us also consider the astonishing enthusiasm for the Aadhaar, or the Unique Identification Scheme, currently being trialled in various states, including Madhya Pradesh. (I was able to get myself enrolled, temporarily, in November 2012 and experience the procedure first-hand). This system will eventually attach a 12-digit number to a facial photograph, retinal scans and finger- and thumbprints of every Indian citizen (see Figure 3.8). Once

Figure 3.8: Retinal scans collected during Aadhaar enrolment in Madhya Pradesh. Source:

Photograph by Christopher Pinney, 2012.

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‘all residents are enrolled’, it will impossible to activate a cell phone SIM card, open a bank account or travel in any reserved category on the railways without this 12-digit number. And yet every Indian I know who is not a cynical academic warmly embraces this impending event. Their self-willed interpellation into the state promises a freedom through visibility. As one low-paid labourer (in whom I had hoped to find evidence of subaltern resistance) told me, once he has his number he will be able to travel the whole length of India without rok-tok (obstacles, or obstructions). So how might we understand the current ambivalence of smaller and faster cameras (both poison and cure, citizen-controlled and agents of a new tripod regime?) without resorting to those default anthropological settings from which I earlier pledged to protect you? In the contrast between MMS-ography and Aadhaar, we seem to reach the limit point of Azoulay’s utopianism. Smaller and faster apparatuses seem to generate not a contractual utopia but (in the case of MMS-ography) its opposite: a contract-free dystopic exploitation of the private facilitated by new digital platforms and the protection of anonymity. Conversely, the (perhaps surprising) enthusiasm for Aadhaar by those who see in it the utopian possibility of finally achieving a citizenship of proper entitlement and free passage expresses a desire for a new form of contract between citizen and state. Recall that the sarpanch of Bhandarez vilage, the village in Rajasthan that had banned girls from using mobile phones, was quoted as saying that ‘girls should be prohibited from using personal mobile phones and also scarves which helps in hiding identity.’ This is an intriguing conjunction: a dual anxiety about the transmissive potential of telecommunications and an anxiety about scarves, which, by concealing the face, permit the free passage of bodies that would otherwise be knowable and hence potentially constrained within their proper location. The scarf and the phone are incarnated here as technics of disguise that allow free movement under the surveillance of the tripod regime. If MMS-ography anxiety is in large part grounded in the anonymizing and disseminatory potential of its digital platform, Aadhaar offers its precise inversion: a de-anonymization through elaborate biometrics that attach a body in all its unique particularity to a number. One route to understanding this particularization, this willing embrace of the necessity of making oneself visible to the state, lies in the persistent

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discourses around state blindness that have emerged in recent anticorruption agitations. Citizen-produced imagery associated with the Anna Hazare movement, which morphed into the Aam Aadmi Party, repeatedly conjured an image of a state blind to the injustices suffered by its citizens. Manmohan Singh was depicted as Dhritrashtra, the blind king from the Mahabharata, and as head of an andhi sarkar (blind government). Indeed the common slogan was that Anna was not andhi (blind – there is a grammatical contortion here to make the slogan rhyme) but was Gandhi. In the light of this we might see in the enthusiasm for Aadhaar a symmetrical and profoundly dialectical opposition to MMS-ography’s economy of sight. In choosing to see only the benefits of Aadhaar, rather than its potentially huge disciplinary capability, Indians might be understood to be seeking the rectification of an imbalance in the distribution of the visible in ways that would not surprise Jacques Rancière. Azoulay’s model offers a linear utopian arrow. It starts with the two not quite coincident dates 1789 and 1839 and proceeds via smaller and faster apparatuses toward increasing citizen power. I hope I have made clear that her model illuminates a good deal of 19th- and 20thcentury struggles over photography in India. But in the 21st century that arrow changes direction. Its trajectory starts to describe a loop (a fusion of a helix with a Mobius loop). In the 21st century, citizens demand the right to be seen, and they also insist on their photographic and citizenly interpellation by a new tripod regime as the way out of their current crisis.

❁ Notes 1 I’m very grateful to Prafulla Kar and Arvind Rajagopal for the invitation to deliver this as a talk at the Forum on Contemporary Theory Conference at Allahabad in December 2012 and to them and other participants for their critiques. Audiences at King’s College London and the Delhi Photo Festival also helped clarify issues. 2 ‘Raj Panchayat Bans Mobiles for Girls’, DNA India, 2 November 2012. 3 Kittler, Gramophone, xxxix. 4 I draw here on Kittler’s translators’ summary in the preface. See ibid., xiv. 5 ‘Objects count for nothing; they are just there to be used as the white screen on to which society projects its cinema.’ Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 53.

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6 Azoulay, Civil Contract, 96. 7 The term is from Rabih Mroué, ‘The Pixelated Revolution’, presentation at Haus der Kultueren der Welt, Berlin, 31 May 2012. 8 Azoulay, Civil Contract, 96. 9 Ibid., 131. 10 See Kapila and Devji, Political Thought in Action. 11 See Bayly, Recovering Liberties. 12 See Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. 13 See Tagg, ‘Currency of Photography’. 14 Ibid., 35. 15 Portman, ‘Photography for Anthropologists’, 85. 16 Ibid., 86. 17 Ibid., 85. 18 The daguerreotype is illustrated in Pinney, Coming of Photography in India, 31, fig. 18. 19 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 12–13. 20 See Pinney, Coming of Photography, for an elaboration of these themes. 21 Ibid., 22–31. 22 Indian National Congress, Congress Punjab Inquiry, vol. 1, caption to plate, n.p. 23 Ibid. 24 Horniman, Amritsar, 7. 25 Ibid., 155. 26 Azoulay, Civil Contract, 100. 27 Ibid., 103. 28 Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed. 29 Azoulay, Civil Contract, 124. 30 Agamben, Homo Sacer, 109, quoted in Azoulay, Civil Contract, 88. 31 Varges worked for International News, a Hearst organization that specialized in filming colonial wars and political struggle. He had previously made films in Macedonia and Mesopotamia (National Archives of India [NAI], New Delhi, Home Political 1922, 949:25) and would subsequently film the Italian incursion in Abyssinia (1935) and the Spanish Civil War. 32 NAI, Home Political 1922, 949:2. 33 Handwritten note, 18 September 1922, ibid. 34 Azoulay, Civil Contract, 112. 35 Reproduced in Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory. 36 Patel et al., Report, 2–3. 37 Ibid., 24–25. 38 Ibid., 11. 39 Ibid., 24–25. 40 Azoulay, Civil Contract, 110. 41 Ibid., 112. 42 Ibid.

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43 Evidence of Jagjiwan Hemchand Modi: ‘The officer then dispensed with Press reporters and a photographer and came back to us. He showered gross abuses on us and ordered horses to run over us.’ Gujarat Provincial Congress Committee, The Black Regime, 101. 44 Jhaveri, Fires of ’42, n.p. 45 Tagg, Burden of Representation, 64. 46 Tagg suggests that, on the contrary, ‘realism’ within which we might locate certain photographic practices is more likely ‘a channel through which power drains into the social body’. Ibid., 174. 47 Ambaram, personal communication with the author, March 2010, Bhatisuda, Madhya Pradesh. 48 Azoulay, Civil Contract, 166. 49 Mazzarella, ‘Internet X-Ray’, 489. 50 Sab ka brastachaar nanga ho jaata hai translates as ‘All corruption is made naked.’ 51 Economist, 11 October 2008, 81. 52 See Abhay Vaidya, ‘Voyeur Alert: How to Spooke the Gooks’, Times of India, 13 January 2005, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/989003.cms, and Jug Suraiya and Vikas Singh, ‘The Death of Privacy’, Times of India, 15 January 2005, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/991395.cms. 53 Nikhat Kazmi describes the film as ‘delv[ing] into the current ogre of spycams and surveillance that leaves no room for individual privacy’. Nikhat Kazmi, ‘Indian Art Film Stalwarts Make a Mark at IFFI’, Times of India, 30 November 2007, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2583375.cms.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Tr. Daniel HellerRoazen, Stanford, CA. Stanford University Press, 1998. Amin, Shahid. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone, 2008. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bayly, C. A. Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Dumont, Louis. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Gujarat Provincial Congress Committee. The Black Regime at Dharasana (A Brief Survey of the ‘Dharasana Raid’). Ahmedabad: Gujarat Provincial Congress Committee, 1930. Hariman, Robert, and John Lucaites. No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

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Horniman, B. G. Amritsar and Our Duty to India. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1920. Indian National Congress. The Congress Punjab Inquiry, 1919–1920. 2 vols. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1994. Jhaveri, V. S. Fires of ’42. Bombay: published by the author, 1945. Kapila, Shruti, and Faisal Devji, eds. Political Thought in Action: The Bhagavad Gita and Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Tr. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Tr. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Mazzarella, William. ‘Internet X-Ray: E-Governance, Transparency, and the Politics of Immediation in India’. Public Culture, vol. 18, no. 3 (2006): 473–506. Patel, Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai, et al. Report (with Evidence) of the Peshawar Enquiry Committee: Appointed by the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress. Allahabad: Allahabad Law Journal Press, 1930. Pinney, Christopher. The Coming of Photography in India. London: British Library, 2008. Portman, M. V. ‘Photography for Anthropologists’. Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 25 (1896): 75–87. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988. ———. ‘The Currency of Photography’, in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin, 110–41. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1982.

Part II Genealogy ❂

4 Tracking utopias Technology, labour and secularism in Bombay cinema (1930s–1940s) Debashree Mukherjee1

❂

I

n the decades immediately preceding independence, Bombay city witnessed immense political upheavals in the form of the Second World War, an intensified urgency in the final phase of the Indian freedom movement and the growing spectre of communalism. The late-colonial city elicited multifarious and paradoxical responses to urban modernity. Technology, science, a dynamic public sphere, and notions of civic equality made for dreams of individual and collective progress. At the same time, the imbrication of technological modernity with industrial capitalism proved treacherous, and these decades saw mass labour unrest due to poor working conditions and growing proletarian solidarity. While Gandhian nationalists tried to articulate a counter-modern essence for the nation, Bombay was able to accommodate a diversity of visions of modernity. Influenced by American and European cultures via films, books or physical travel, and witness to years of British society, young Bombayites struggled to forge their own meanings of the modern – a new, localized modern. Time and again, through the body of cinema in the city, we are confronted by individual and community struggles between the local and the global, the old and the new. These cinematic contestations, frequently articulated in utopian terms, provide a much-needed lens for re-viewing Bombay’s multiple modernities. Admittedly, the utopian impulse in popular cinema is a long-standing episteme, recurring with regularity across time and geographical location. Nevertheless, its arenas of negotiation, its concerns and priorities are always

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historically and contextually nuanced. Therefore, this chapter looks for utopian logics across multiple sites not only in on-screen textual concerns and plot conflicts, but also in off-screen circuits of creative labour, industrial motivations and commercial concerns. Through such a method – by tracking utopias across cinema’s proliferating spaces – I hope to present a dense, embedded and heterogeneous account of pre-independence Bombay cinema. The period under discussion, the 1930s–1940s, was perhaps the most self-consciously utopian conjuncture in the history of Indian cinema. The interwar years saw film practitioners seize upon cinema as the technology of the future, a technology with emancipatory possibilities. Leftist intellectuals of the Progressive Writers’ Movement and the Indian People’s Theatre Association sought to bring about social change through film screenplays and lyrics. Entrepreneur-producers like Himansu Rai, J. B. H. Wadia and Chandulal Shah used cinema to suggest diverse future realities such as political independence, inter-caste marriage and gender equality. Images of radicalized industrial workers and peasants, of college-educated ‘modern girls’ and love marriages, of inter-caste solidarity and active citizenship started to proliferate in cinema halls and on film posters. To track some of these utopian visions, I follow the career trajectory of Sa’adat Hasan Manto, a prolific film writer during the last decades of colonial occupation. Manto, though not a utopic thinker in his independent, literary writings, crafted commercial film fictions that often had strong programmatic, future-oriented and optimistic logics. Between 1937 and 1948, Manto worked as a scenarist and dialogue writer for studios as diverse as Ardeshir Irani’s Imperial Film Company and Sashadhar Mukherjee’s Filmistan, a cross section that spanned the traditional to the self-consciously modern, the bazaar to the bhadralok. Manto’s personal, literary and political approach to these films also varied as his industrial status changed from the clerical scribe to the specialist screenwriter. This means that we must view these films not as idiosyncratic works of a unified subject but rather as emblems of contemporaneous trends in genre, thematics and social discourse. Manto’s Bombay films span a crucial 10 years in the history of South Asia, but to turn to them for a consistent creative vision would be a mistake. Film-making is an intrinsically collaborative craft, and the 1930s’ salaried film

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writer was only one voice within a chorus of varying agentive power. Therefore, rather than adopt a biographical-authorial approach, I privilege contexts of cultural production in my effort to track the specific configuration of utopian logics in Manto’s Bombay films. I will look at three of Manto’s films, Kisan Kanya (dir. Gunjal, 1938), Apni Nagariya (dir. M. B. Gidwani, 1940) and Jhumke (dir. J. K. Nanda, 1946), to analyse some prevailing modes and genres of utopian thought in Bombay cinema. The attempt will be to approach the terrain of anxieties and promises that make up a historical conjuncture by using these films as points of entry into larger debates. In this chapter I examine both the text and context, the filmic object and the catalyzing forces of its production, to argue that Bombay cinema imagined utopias in disparate modes and to varying ends. We will look at films whose production is governed by technological utopianism; film writers compelled to paint socialist utopias on the silver screen; audiences that had the collective power to write themselves into films as unlikely utopian protagonists; and prescriptive messages of utopian communities untouched by religious animosity. I hope to present cinema not as a reflective mirror to society but as an active historical agent, constantly attempting to remake fractured realities. 

Note on method How does one write about films one cannot watch? In all 2,126 Hindustani talkie films were made in Bombay between 1931 and 1950.2 Of these approximately 110 films are listed in the digital catalogue of the National Film Archives of India (NFAI). In other words, less than 5 per cent of the Bombay film industry’s output from two decades is available to us for research and scholarship. Not a single film from Manto’s Bombay filmography is known to be extant today. Thus, I mobilize a wide spectrum of materials for this chapter including newspaper reviews, advertisements, autobiographies, short stories, interviews, fanzines, and trade journals to look at the varied meanings unleashed by the film event in ever-widening spheres of publicity. Crucial in this selection of evidentiary sources is the song booklet, a publicity document that carried miniaturized versions of the film poster on the cover, cast and crew credits, the film’s synopsis, and the lyrics of the songs.

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Always already the future: technological utopias It was the colour of the Apple that tempted Adam – and with colour the history of Man began. Imperial Makes New History with KisanKanya. 1st Colour Talkie of India.3

Kisan Kanya, produced by Imperial Film Company (1938)4 is commonly acknowledged to be India’s first indigenously produced colour film. The song booklet for the film offers us a vital glimpse into the producers’ understanding of its historical significance, especially in the foreword by Imperial boss, Seth Ardeshir Irani. Irani starts by reminding his readers of how the introduction of sound in Indian pictures was considered a ‘crazy’, risky idea at the time. The Talkies were even disparagingly called ‘Noisies’ in the initial days of technological scepticism. However, The silent picture is buried completely down in forgotten earth. The talking picture did this. . . . And now what next? A year or so ago it would have been difficult to answer this question. Today, I give you what you have all silently waited for from long generations – Colour. . . . I give you Kisan Kanya as India’s first all-process-coloured picture in Cinecolor. You now have it from me by right – the right of long association you have had with me through all the stages of development of what must be to you a national industry of no small advantages and what has been to me my humble life-work.5

Tracking the multiple circuits around the film object provides access to the rich resonances latent in ‘peripheral’ material such as this foreword. The song booklet functioned as a discursive realm used by producers to engineer specific reception contexts. It is interesting how Ardeshir Irani, a contemporary insider-practitioner, was able to use it to consciously historicize the technological changes taking place in the Indian film industry. This historicization was wrought within a discourse of progress, ‘stages of development’ and a mythology of firsts. Irani imagines cinema as an incipient technology which ‘always-already’ carried its future possibilities within it. Thus he is able to claim that from its moment of emergence, the moving picture promised its audiences sound and colour. Spectators also, apparently, intuited this promise and ‘silently waited from long generations’.

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This logic of technological determinism is firmly of a piece with utopian understandings of emergence and teleological fulfilment. It is a similar ontological certainty that is mobilized today to suggest that 3-D, digital imaging and virtual realities were all simply waiting to happen. In his discussion of the transition to sound in Hollywood cinema, Donald Crafton cites an advertisement that is uncannily close to Ardeshir Irani’s claims about Kisan Kanya: ‘Sound Pictures – The product of the telephone. . . . Yesterday’s dream is today’s fact. And tomorrow? Here is an art now in the early stages of its development which is revolutionizing the field of motion picture entertainment.’6 Crafton goes on to observe that popular discourse about talkie films ‘recast it as an industrial revolution, something new, yet determined by what had gone before’.7 Just like the telephone presaged the emergence of the talkie film, so did the talkie film contain within it the promise of colour. Kisan Kanya, for Ardeshir Irani, was a triumphant realization of this seemingly natural progression, significant because he was the first to seize the incipient potential and present it to a waiting public (Plate 1). Nevertheless, the Bombay film industry took several years to wholly make the switch to colour films. It took as long as 1953 for the next wave of colour films to be commercially released. Two films were made in colour that year: Mehboob Khan’s Aan and Sohrab Modi’s Jhansi ki Rani. Despite this, it was only in the 1960s that colour films became the norm. In this light, Ardeshir Irani’s attempts to write a grand history of the present for Kisan Kanya take on a new dimension. What is the significance of this writing? The Bombay film industry, in the 1930s, was caught in a vortex of change. At least since 1931, the film industries of Calcutta, Madras, Lahore, and Bombay were competing to win the talkie race. Bombay, with its adoption of the widely understood Hindustani as the main language of film dialogue and lyrics, appeared to have won this race by the time Kisan Kanya (1938) was released. Concomitant with the shift to talkie films was the consolidation of capital-intensive film studios with large in-house, salaried workforces, such as Bombay Talkies Ltd, Ranjit Movietone and Sagar Film Company. These studios sought to make the shift from the bazaar model of film production to modern capitalist strategies such as joint stock ventures, horizontal integration and rationalized workflows. But older forms coexisted with newer ones. Even as the film industry strived to remake itself as

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a more socially ‘respectable’ and modern form, its material practices and cultural workers embodied all the tensions of Bombay’s multiple modernities. The popular press was full of concerns about the moral virtue of Bombay’s actresses, while citizens’ committees questioned cinema’s representations of crime and lust (see Majumdar 2009). By aligning the colour film with the rhetoric of scientific progress, Irani hoped to leap forward into an imagined future, wherein cinema would inhabit the realm of technology rather than the messiness of culture. His address was to the burgeoning middle class, whose stakes in technological modernity and modernizing markets were perfectly compatible with the film industry’s own aspirations for an ideal middle-class public. Much like the popular discursive apparatus around the talkie film in the United States, the all-process-coloured picture in Cinecolor also ‘embodied a middle-class ideology: electrical entertainment is Progress made consumable’.8 Another key feature of Irani’s foreword is the characterization of the film industry as a ‘national industry’. Film practitioners of the time often tapped into prevailing nationalist and anticolonial sentiments. For the majority of the urban middle class, desiring freedom from colonial rule seemed synonymous with desiring a modern nation state with all its trappings. Such a new India was ostensibly possible through entrepreneurship and big industry. The key emerging indigenous industries of the time, like steel, iron and cement, were each perceived as crucial foundation stones towards a self-reliant and wealth-producing country. Ardeshir Irani was a prominent leader of the Bombay film industry and had just been elected president of the newly instituted Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association (IMPPA). Needless to say, Irani and other captains of the film industry understood the urgency of positioning cinema as an important indigenous industry. Significantly, on 19 December 1938, the Indian Motion Picture Congress invited members of the National Planning Committee to tea. Everyone present was aware of the significance of the timing – 1939 would mark 25 years of the Indian film industry. The main agenda of the meeting was to discuss the ‘role the films would play in the industrialization of the country’.9 It was pointed out that the Indian film industry ‘ranked 8th in importance as a key industry’, that more than 17 crore rupees had been invested in the film industry and about 40,000 people were currently employed in various capacities.

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Kisan Kanya was therefore envisioned at a moment when considerable power was being mobilized to alter the film industry’s reputation and stakes in the national mainstream. Irani’s optimistic assumption that the film industry was viewed as ‘a national industry of no small advantages’ rested on the hope that middle-class, educated viewers looked upon the film industry as a productive, swadeshi industry capable of generating revenue for the nation while representing its dreams and travails on the big screen.10 Irani tried to privilege his film as a definitive break with Indian cinema’s past as a harbinger of the future. However, the specific historical conjuncture examined in this chapter reveals itself variously as a time of continuity, ambiguity and change rather than as a clearly contained stage in the history of cinema. We can further understand the political stakes of Irani’s project by turning to the manner in which similar logics of ‘forecast’ are being mobilized today to understand the digital revolution. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck, the film historian Philip Rosen suggests that the forecast, or rational extrapolation, is one of the progenitors of modern historicity. In its assumption of an irrevocable linear temporality already in operation, the disavowal of hybridity through the forecast characterizes a mode of historicity underlying a certain theorization of the digital. On this level, what is disavowed is temporal complexity and historical overlap.11

Irani was responsible for what is considered the subcontinent’s first talkie film in 1931, having produced and directed Alam Ara. This fact lent his subsequent technological experiments a credibility that was hard to compete with. And yet, Kisan Kanya did not result in a deafening clamour for colour amongst the silently waiting audiences, nor did it lead to a competitive scramble amongst producers and exhibitors to invest in new raw stock, laboratories and projection systems. The Second World War disrupted many a plan, and the free travel of goods and peoples across continents became restricted. Difficult as it was to import black-and-white raw stock, it seemed adventurous to invest in expensive colour technology.12 And thereby hangs a tale. The transition to colour was gradual and the colour film was contemporaneous with other formats. However, Irani’s experiment with colour had to be framed within the optimistic terms of an obvious future. The film industry, perhaps more than any other, is

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fundamentally premised on the terrain of speculation. Labour, capital, talent, logic, and output – none of these variables can guarantee profit in any combination or permutation. Irani’s experiment with colour was a huge gamble, but one that was taking place in a financially hopeful pre-war industry. The utopian faith in technology, thus, must also be seen within the broader optimistic logics of the late-colonial imagination of the local film entrepreneur-merchant. The rather ‘bullish’ attitude of this historical figure, in terms of market forecasting, paid off during the boom in production and spectatorship of the war years when the gross income of the film industry ‘went from about Rs. 4 crores in 1940–41 to about Rs. 13 crores in 1945–46’.13 Kisan Kanya did not usher in the age of colour cinema, but in national cinema histories it has become a definitive signpost of progress, a ‘watershed’ moment routinely celebrated in popular commemorations of originary events such as the centenary of Indian cinema. If the logic of the forecast and scientific determinism is a key component of technological utopianism, then it becomes imperative for film historians to parse through available layers of popular discourse and apprehend the multiple agendas at play. The framework of technological inevitability de-historicizes moments of flux. Thus, the articulation of an industrial utopia is most appropriate for bypassing some of the main tensions of the 1930s and 1940s – between old and new film formats, models of financing, the varied demographic of film workers, and the contradiction between the mass spectatorial base that the film industry had versus the bourgeois audience it sought. 

Mazdoor heroes and Memsahib heroines: classless utopias Apni Nagariya, written by Manto, participated in a spate of workingclass films of the 1940s that centrally raised questions about class struggle and the inequities of industrial capitalism. The representation of class conflict through the romance plot was hardly an invention of 1940s Bombay cinema; being a recurring trope in literature, theatre and films from the subcontinent and abroad. However, there is a particular activist zeal and programmatic impulse in the films from the 1940s that is worthy of attention. In this part I will discuss strains of utopian socialist thought evidenced in Apni Nagariya and

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place them within the contexts of the Progressive Writers’ Movement and the changing social landscape during the war years. If the song booklet is any indication, Apni Nagariya is clearly about ‘Capital versus Labour’ (Plate 2).14 However, class struggle is dialectically played out via an improbable love story which points to a utopian vision of social justice. Seth Ramdas is the tyrannical owner of a brick factory, and his college-educated daughter, Sushila, is the embodiment of wealth and modern sophistication. During a plague epidemic, an honest worker, Prithvi, nurses Sushila back to health and falls in love with her in the process. But once the haze of illness clears, Sushila rejects the attentions of her scruffy employee. Disgusted by workers’ agitations at the factory, Sushila plays the rich shrew to perfection and shuts down production. When she finally learns about Prithvi’s selfless devotion for her, it is almost too late. The workers are starving and the union is raring for a fight. Sushila now has to win back the affections of Prithvi and settle the factory strife. Dramatically, the song booklet asks, ‘The fire within her was rising. . . . Did Sushila find her Utopia?’15 How did the figure of the urban wage-worker become a romantic film hero? The conflict of class and caste interests was a staple of popular literature and film in modern South Asia. Be it Devdas’s tragic inability to defy economic hierarchies and claim Paro (Devdas, dir. P. C. Barua, 1935), or Pratap’s impossible love for the Dalit Kasturi in Achhut Kanya (dir. Franz Osten, 1936), films often plotted their romance narratives around societal barriers to marriage. But many of these films ended in tragedy; with film-makers ultimately resigned to the inequities of society and content to simply critique them. The upper-caste, upper-class role was generally reserved for the hero, while the heroine performed the destitute, orphaned or Dalit character who was a helpless victim to hoary tradition. Why, then, would producers and writers reverse the romantic dynamic with a mazdoor hero? The history of working-class struggle in the Bombay region through the 1920s and 1930s is well documented.16 Massive strikes in Bombay’s textile sector expressed rage against capitalist extraction and demonstrated worker solidarity. Politically independent newspapers regularly covered stories about labour conditions, millworkers’ wages and union activities. Social reformers wrote reports on the abysmal living conditions of the urban working classes. The ‘mazdoor’ had become a symbol of subaltern agency

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and revolutionary potential. The contemporary romantic valorization of the urban worker can be seen in these lyrics from the song ‘Mazdoor’ in Apni Nagariya: Mazdoor, mazdoor (2) Jeevan hai tera pyaara (2) Mazdoor mazdoor Jag naiyya khevanhaara Mazdoor mazdoor Dhan mehnat karke kamaayen Sone ke mahal banaayen Aasha hai yeh hamaara Mazdoor mazdoor Dhanvaan kamaaye daulat Din raat kare tu mehnat Hai sar pe bojh karaara Mazdoor mazdoor Duniya to sukh se soye Tu dhoop mein eenth dhhoye Anyay ye jag hai saara Mazdoor mazdoor

Worker, worker Yours is an honorable life Worker, worker The oarsman of the world Worker, worker Work hard to make your wealth Build castles of gold This is our hope Worker, worker The rich amass riches You toil day and night You carry a heavy load on your head Worker, worker The world sleeps in peace You carry bricks in the searing sun This world is an unjust place Worker, worker17

Could it be that the film industry had turned socialist? Manto echoes this question in a sketch of the composer Rafiq Ghaznavi: I landed at Hindustan Movietone owned by Seth Nanoobhai Desai, who had set up and bankrupted many film companies in his time. . . . I had liked the story for a movie called Keechad [later renamed Apni Nagariya] . . . because it was based on socialist ideas. I never understood why the Seth, every inch a dirty capitalist, had taken a shine to it.18

Intoxicated by the ‘brave air of socialism’ many young intellectuals of the period saw literature as a means to critique existing social hierarchies, expose economic injustice and serve the nationalist cause.19 These young men and women perceived themselves as radically different from previous generations in their sense of individualism, and their sense of connectedness with the world around them. This notion of the engaged self compelled them to action, and literature was their weapon of choice. Sajjad Zaheer, one of the founders of the All India Progressive Writers’ Association, said in retrospect,

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Writing was probably the only avenue left open to us. Most of the members of our small group wanted to become writers. What else could they do? We were incapable of manual labour. We had not learnt any craft and our minds revolted against serving the imperialist Government. What other field was left?20

Unarguably, one of the most dynamic cultural movements of modern India, the Progressive Writers’ Movement was launched in 1936 with a view to bring together writers who shared a desire for change in society as well as in literature. For a time, Manto was firmly a part of this group. Writers like Krishan Chandar, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Kaifi Azmi, Jan Nisar Akhtar, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ali Sardar Jafri, Majaz, Shahid Latif, Ismat Chughtai, and Manto were dedicated to not only writing a new social and linguistic idiom through literature but also engaging with cinema in serious ways. It is significant that most of these left-oriented writers decided to live and work in Bombay. Some, like Ali Sardar Jafri, ‘were in Bombay because of its being the headquarters of the Communist Party of India’, but most others were drawn by the film industry.21 While contemporary Hindi litterateurs took on the burden of creating a form – the Hindi novel – that would best represent the nation and its values, the Progressives embraced the short story form and distanced themselves from grand visions of nationhood and citizenship.22 Such an argument could well explain why the Progressives took to film writing with such gusto, minus the qualms felt by their Hindi peers. The literary and linguistic experiments of the Progressives matched the industry’s need for an accessible and respectable form of film dialogue. It is against the backdrop of these cultural forces that one should read a film like Apni Nagariya. At the same time, it is crucial to also ask whether the popularity of the working-class hero was solely a result of Progressive writers’ participation in commercial cinema. The utopian cinema of the time did not reflect reality as much as promise an impossible resolution of contemporary, highly visible class contradictions. The figure of the heroine provides a second clue to understanding this situation. The heroine, in Apni Nagariya, takes the shape of ‘Sushila, Miss Sushila to you, young, lovely, and carefree, a modern, high-society heart-throb . . . the 20th-century daughter of Seth Ramdas, just returned home from college!’23 The exclamation mark that ends this statement is not simply a dramatic flourish but indicates a contemporary excitement about the modern, educated, cosmopolitan woman, a ‘20th-century daughter’ of

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capitalist excess. The song booklet positions Sushila as the pivot of the conflict between the rich and the poor, prejudice and honest virtue. She negotiates the tricky terrain between the outright evil camp of her moneyed father and the good team of the workers. She also allows the film to make an affective investment in the idea of money. The synopsis spends several words describing Prithvi’s enchantment with money: first when he falls in love with a wealthy heiress, and second, when he wants to acquire wealth to win her over. The ‘high-society’ woman evokes the romance of wealth and luxury, the ‘castles of gold’ that could be attractive if they were in the possession of the good and virtuous. In Apni Nagariya, the modern woman and her wealth are acceptable when aligned with the values of the honest working class. Heroes in films like President (dir. Nitin Bose, 1937), Hamrahi (dir. Bimal Roy, 1944) or Mazdoor (dir. Nitin Bose, 1945) are either educated, unemployed youth, or are forced to take up lowly positions in factories. All of them pursue the ‘Sushila’ prototype, symbolically chasing the promise of modernity itself. The heroines are projected as desirable women, freely traversing the city and empowered by the promise of wealth, their complete validation resting on a crucial ‘change of heart’ and not on a change of circumstance. This, then, is the crux of the matter. Our new working-class heroes are not reformists, nor do they attempt to radically destroy private property. Rather, they seek to make productive alliances with capital in order to spearhead industry and employment along humane parameters. The utopian dream of an economy which celebrated private enterprise at the same time as it incorporated the monetarily marginalized into the national mainstream was only possible in this in-between historical moment, when ‘India’ was on the cusp of independence. That dream quickly dissipated, despite the euphoria of the early Nehruvian socialism, and cinema moved from the utopic to the dystopic, from optimism to poetic pessimism, with the varied social critiques seen in the films of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand in the 1950s. The genre of the love story or romance, as Rita Felski suggests, is ‘a form often considered to be regressive and anachronistic but whose nostalgic yearning for an indeterminate “elsewhere” is a foundational trope within the modern itself’.24 Written into the film scripts of the 1940s are desires for change, change tempered by the Indian subcontinent’s particular struggles with received ideals of economic modernity and social justice.

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Upendranath Ashk ponders a related issue in his observation that Shashadhar Mukherjee’s formula films [at Filmistan] and the films of his imitators had one factor in common: the hero would invariably be an illiterate, unemployed or delinquent youth. The heroine would be educated or wealthy and would fall hopelessly in love with our socially unworthy hero.25

Ashk does not question producers’ politics but turns his gaze at audiences instead: ‘Cinema halls were always crowded during the war years, filled up mainly by soldiers, uneducated workers and artisans.’26 Going for a show of Taqdeer (Mehboob Khan, 1943) in Delhi, Ashk remembers being startled upon seeing that elite balcony seats were occupied by the lower classes. He notes that the ‘white-collar crowd shifted to halls like Odeon and Plaza [in Delhi]’.27 Ashk’s Delhi could as easily be Bombay, with its cash-rich publics as well as its geographically segregated theatres. His observation implicitly suggests that given the changing audience demographic, producers sought to attract a new class of viewers by creating romantic protagonists they could identify with. The Second World War changed audience demographics drastically. The wartime twilight economy of bootlegging and black marketeering increased production in certain sectors, and a large population of soldiers, waiting for war to erupt in India, created a new cinematic audience armed with ready cash. The Handbook of the Indian Film Industry (1949) says that ‘The demand for motion picture entertainment increased several fold from the Armed Forces as well as from the general public.’ Some of the reasons given for increased theatre attendance were ‘general inflation, better employment, migration of the younger generation to the towns and cities . . .’.28 Several factors worked simultaneously to create a noticeable focus on working-class issues in the 1940s. The war created many economic opportunities in the port city. At the same time, the increasing wealth of the local industrial elite was becoming highly visible. The consolidation of the Communist Party of India in Bombay, a culture of worker protests and global discussions of economic imperialism changed the atmosphere of the city and impacted filmic content. Ashk’s partial impressions allow us to imaginatively approach such thematic foci through the prism of spectatorship. But the imagined sphere of spectators was a fractured and heterogeneous one. Just as the balconies were filled with workers and soldiers, so were there ‘other’ theatres

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like Odeon and Plaza. Just as there was the desire for social equality so were there counter-utopian drives that imagined a neatly bracketed and visibly classed society. 

‘Hindu camera! Muslim microphone!’: secular utopias A 1946 film, Jhumke (Plate 3), based on a short story by Manto, peripherally touches upon a major emotive point with contemporaneous subcontinental audiences – communalism. Several films of the 1940s, like Padosi (dir. V. Shantaram, 1941) or Hum Ek hain (dir. P. L. Santoshi, 1946), were completely premised on the theme of Hindu– Muslim unity. In a plot reminiscent of Manto’s ‘Kali Shalwar’, Jhumke follows the tale of a couple estranged by a misunderstanding over a pair of earrings, or jhumke. Charanji is a humble tongawala. His wife, Sundri, asks him to buy her a pair of earrings, but two years elapse before Charanji is able to save enough money. The day he brings home his gift, he sees his wife in the embrace of another man who has brought her a beautiful pair of jhumke. Needless to say, this visual tableau is misleading – Sundri was actually trying to fend off the other man’s advances. But Charanji is inconsolable and turns Sundri out of their home. He brings up their daughter as a single parent and strives to give her a decent education. When the young college girl falls in love, her boyfriend gifts her a pair of earrings, painfully reminding Charanji of his own past. While this primary plot was much criticized in the contemporary film press, it is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss it in detail. Rather, we will look at a sub-plot which contained a different reference to contemporary concerns, a reference that was not lost on reviewers or audiences. When Charanji, a Hindu tongawala decides to raise his daughter as a single parent, he is aided by Jamal Khan, a Muslim tongawala. Based on available publicity material, the friendship between the two presumably becomes a key plot point in the second half of the film. Celebrity film reviewer Baburao Patel pointed out, ‘This situation is forged to suggest the Hindu–Muslim friendship.’29 This casual observation indicates that communal harmony had become a recurrent theme in films of the period, so much so that it had become a cliché. Just a year earlier, Manto had written Filmistan’s first feature film, Chal Chal re Naujawan (1945), which

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featured a single song reference to secularism. This song touched a raw nerve with the same editor of filmindia, who commented at the time: ‘That Hindu–Muslim unity song broadcasts only common sentiment which has now become very cheap on the screen, having been heard so many times before in different pictures.’30 This ‘cheap’ trick, this didactic invocation of Hindu–Muslim solidarity, comprises our third and final study of the 1940s utopian cinematic prescriptions. Barely a year away from the violence and mass displacement of the Partition, the subcontinent was in the grip of communal fever. In Bombay itself, there were daily incidents of stone throwing, acid throwing, stabbing, assault, and mistaken killings which intensified towards the end of year.31 Certain sections of the Bombay film industry added their voice to the growing pleas for sanity, driven by a variety of reasons. In 1942, speaking at an industry meeting, the actor-director Mazhar Khan stressed the important role cinema could play in issues of national importance. He said: I tell you, we film people have the right to boast of our achievements. And I refuse to be modest. I dare say Padosi, in which I had the good fortune to work, has done more for Hindu-Muslim unity than several conferences and hundreds of articles of our Azads, Nehrus and Gandhis.32

Surely, Khan’s perception of the transformative power of the cinema was not totally misplaced. A medium that was able to reach out to seven lakh people every day, across a varied demographic base, would definitely create ripples of effect.33 But Mazhar Khan’s harangue stemmed more from an aggrieved sense of injustice than an agenda for activism. Gandhi’s notorious distaste for the cinema prevented Congress politicians and other powerful elite from acknowledging the movie business as a ‘national industry of no small advantage’. Political recognition would not only benefit the industry’s public image, but would yield direct economic advantages. For example, on the eve of the Second World War, the stepmotherly treatment meted out to the film industry was discussed at the Third Madras Provincial Film Conference. According to Mr Narayanan, the president of the conference, new unfair taxes were being levied on a film industry already burdened by wartime restrictions on raw stock imports and taxes. This treatment was keenly felt by film industries across provinces in forms such as a new tax on bills and hoardings, special rates charged by the Railways for film parcels and the higher rates for electricity

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charged from film companies. Narayanan further claimed that other major industries were charged less for these same facilities and often even got wartime concessions.34 Crucially, the film industry itself was susceptible to the powerful currents of the times. The 1940s saw increased attempts to polarize the industry along communal lines. In an article written in 1942, journalist and scriptwriter K. A. Abbas described various moves being made by Hindu and Muslim factions to consolidate their position in the industry. He himself was ‘invited to join a group of Hindu directors and technicians, formed with the avowed object of counteracting the communalist activities of certain Muslim directors and technicians’.35 On the other hand, stories were circulating that the Muslim director of a studio (that is owned by two partners – one Hindu and one Muslim) actually delivered a speech to a gathering of his Muslim colleagues in the studio, and told them, in eloquent terms reminiscent of a Muslim League meeting that soon they hoped to rid the studio of all non-Muslims including the Hindu partner.36

Abbas then attempts a joke: ‘I won’t be surprised if we do reach the ridiculous stage where we would be telling one another, “This is a Hindu Camera”, “That is a Muslim Microphone”!’37 Going by these accounts, the film studio had become a site for serious communal contestations. By August 1945, Baburao Patel was saying, ‘Communalism seems to have come into the Indian film industry, steadily though surreptitiously, and it looks as though we shall soon have two hostile camps facing each other’.38 The fact that an industry that enabled many fluid negotiations of identity welcomed workers from myriad backgrounds and projected itself as a secular work sphere should be vulnerable to the divisive politics of religion is a well-guarded secret. Manto is almost alone in his documentation of the increasing impact of communal frenzy on Bombay Talkies, which pushed him to leave the city he so identified with. Manto’s reminiscences of the period are among the rare instances when an industry insider has acknowledged communal tensions within the studio. Around 1946–47, Bombay Talkies was taken over by Savak Vacha and Ashok Kumar, who had left Filmistan. Manto writes about how the new senior staff at the studio was dominated by Muslims, which created a great deal of resentment among the Hindu staff. Vacha began to receive anonymous letters that threatened everything from

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murder to the destruction of the studio. . . . I advised them [Vacha and Ashok Kumar] to do away with my services because the Hindus thought that it was I who was responsible for so many Muslims getting into Bombay Talkies. They told me I was out of my mind.39

In sharp contrast to this account is Ram Tipnis’s narrative. In 2008 I interviewed Ram Tipnis, the chief make-up artiste at Filmistan Ltd and Rajkamal Studios in the 1940s. Here are some excerpts from that conversation: DM:

This was a time of great political turmoil and communal tension. Independence and Partition were looming. Did this atmosphere affect life at the studios? RT: At the time, ’42–45, I was at Rajkamal. There was nothing of the sort. DM: Manto writes about Bombay Talkies being threatened with arson, around ’46–47, because of the large numbers of Muslims who were employed . . . RT: No no no. There was nothing like that. Dekho, film industry ek aisi industry hai jahaan na koi Hindu na Muslim. Sab artistes aur workers hain. [Trans. See, the film industry is a place where there is no distinction between Hindu and Muslim. All are artistes and workers.]

Rather than try to ascertain which of the two narratives, Manto’s or Tipnis’s, is more ‘true’, it serves us better to reflect on the meaning of the enduring legend of the secularism of Bombay’s film industry. Even post the 1993 communal riots, film practitioners asserted that all the violence and hatred was happening somewhere else. Surekha, a dubbing artiste, articulated in 2005: Even when the riots took place in 1993, I remember work going on as usual. Industry mein aadhey Hindu hain or aadhey musalmaan. There’s no communal prejudice at all. Even after ’93 no one stumbled, because we all knew that the whole thing was orchestrated by politicians. Individuals in the Industry may have certain strong views or may be aligned with a particular political party, but it never affects our work.40

In some ways, the utopian harmonious societies promised on the film screen spilled out of the screen into a mythology of Bombay and its film industry. This Bombay is not a real place but an imagined elsewhere. Just as fictional characters routinely overcame their religious differences to build a new nation together, the Bombay film industry continues to turn a blind eye to everyday religious tensions in the

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workplace. These tensions definitely exist, but perhaps the constant reiteration of the myth makes it a tenuous reality? After all, utopias are not just idyllic visions of the future but are crucial to what we expect of the present. Through the three films discussed here, and the contexts of their production, one observes a range of modes through which the promise of utopia was being mobilized in late-colonial Bombay. Viewing these films through the framework of utopianism allows us to approach a conflicted terrain of interests and desires. Some parallel histories come into view. The logic of technological ‘forecasting’ reduces the complex configuration of industrial anxiety, audience engineering, studio competition, and media overlap into a story of triumphant emergence. At the same time, a focus on the romantic invocation of a classless society in Apni Nagariya firmly pushes the Progressives’ activism and the war economy in 1940s Bombay cinema to the foreground. Finally, the didactic insistence on Hindu–Muslim unity in Jhumke speaks to one of the most stubborn nightmares of South Asia. Communal violence in this region has historically been a very real trauma, and popular cinema, in its brief life, has repeatedly tried to address this trauma indirectly. I hope to have demonstrated some of the ways in which the simple, ‘naïve’, happily resolved tales of the late-colonial Bombay film industry negotiated the complex realities of the day. Gilane Tawadros has said that the modernity project tried to speak universally from ‘the privileged bastion of Western metropolises’, but expanded into a vernacular modernity that ‘emerged vociferously [and] responded with an equally emphatic insistence on national and local specificities that were nonetheless in constant dialogue with an international consciousness’.41 By examining both on-screen as well as off-screen rhetoric, I have tried to argue for a historically grounded analysis of utopian visions of modernity as they subtly shift and merge and remake themselves through time.

❁ Notes 1 For their valuable comments on a draft version of this article, I would like to thank Ranjani Mazumdar, Arvind Rajagopal and Kartik Nair. Many thanks also to the American Institute of Indian Studies for enabling research in the National Film Archives of India, Pune.

Tracking utopias  99 2 Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1980). 3 Ardeshir Irani, ‘Foreword’, in Kisan Kanya song booklet (Bombay: Imperial Film Company, 1938). 4 1937 is the year of release followed by most filmographies, including the Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. I will follow the date of release as mentioned in the film’s print advertisements which state that Kisan Kanya had its ‘world premiere’ at the Majestic Cinema, Bombay on 8 January 1938. 5 Ardeshir Irani, Kisan Kanya song booklet (1938). 6 Donald Crafton, ‘Mindshare: Telephone and Radio Compete for the Talkies’, in John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, eds., Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital (Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2004), p. 142. 7 Ibid, p. 152 8 Crafton, ‘Mindshare’, p. 153. 9 Reported in filmindia, February 1939, p. 24. 10 Irani is careful to point out that Kisan Kanya was indeed a swadeshi product. This was the first time that every stage of the colour process was carried out in India, from processing to printing. Earlier attempts at colour included Sairandhri (V. Shantaram, 1933) which was shot on black-and-white negative but printed in Germany using a colour print process. 11 Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 316–17. 12 In an article titled ‘History of Film Industry in India’, Mr I. K. Menon, secretary of the Motion Picture Society of India, confirms: ‘The impact of this global war was felt by the industry after 1941. . . . There was dearth of materials due to lack of imports of raw materials and equipments from foreign countries and the progress of the industry was hampered’ (Menon and Chandavarkar, Handbook of the Indian Film Industry, xxiii). 13 I. K. Menon and S. G. Chandavarkar, Handbook of the Indian Film Industry (Bombay: Motion Picture Society of India, 1949), p. xxiii; A lot rested on Kisan Kanya’s success, but according to Manto, Irani’s gamble did not pay off as spectacularly as was hoped, and this might be one reason why Imperial Film Company had to fold later that year (see Manto, ‘Meri Shadi’). 14 Apni Nagariya song booklet (Bombay: Hindustan Cinetone, 1940). Unnumbered pages. 15 Apni Nagariya song booklet, 1940. 16 See for example: Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Ghanshyam Shah, Social Movements in India: A Review of the Literature (Thousand Oaks, CA; New Delhi; London: Sage, 2004). 17 Lyrics by Pandit Indra and Dr Safdar ‘Aah’. Translations mine.

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18 Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Bitter Fruit, ed. and tr. Khalid Hasan (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 475. 19 Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, I Am Not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography (New Delhi, Kanpur: Vikas Publishing House, 1977), p. 97. 20 Quoted in Shabana Mahmud, ‘Angaare and the Founding of the Progressive Writers’ Association’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 1996, pp. 447–67. 21 K. A. Abbas, I Am Not an Island, 1977, p. 227. 22 See Aamir Mufti, ‘A Greater Story-writer than God: Genre, Gender and Minority in Late Colonial India’, in Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan ed. Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender and Violence. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal & Permanent Black, 2000. 23 Apni Nagariya song booklet, 1940. 24 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 30–31). 25 Upendranath Ashk, Filmi Duniya Ki Jhalkiyan, Vol. 1 (Allahabad: Neelam Prakashak, 1979), p. 37. Translations mine. 26 Ashk, Filmi Duniya Ki Jhalkiyan, Vol. 1, 1979, p. 37. 27 Ibid. 28 Menon and Chandavarkar, Handbook of the Indian Film Industry, p. xxiii. 29 filmindia, September 1946, p. 72. 30 filmindia, January 1945, p. 41. 31 Home Dept. Pol [I]: F. 5/3/1947. 32 Quoted in filmindia, May 1942, p. 60. 33 Panna Shah, Indian Film, 1950, p. 106. 34 See filmindia, February 1939, p. 23. 35 filmindia, February 1940, p. 31. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 filmindia, August 1945, p. 13. 39 Manto, Bitter Fruit, 2008, p. 500. 40 Surekha Prasad, Personal Interview, conducted in Bombay, 4 February 2005. 41 Gilane Tawadros, ‘The Revolution Stripped Bare’, in Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes, 50th Venice Biennale (London: Institute of International Visual Arts in collaboration with the Forum for African Arts and the Prince Claus Fund, 2003), p. 17.

References Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad. I Am Not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography. New Delhi, Kanpur: Vikas Publishing House, 1977. Apni Nagariya song booklet. Bombay: Hindustan Cinetone, 1940. Ashk, Upendranath. Filmi Duniya Ki Jhalkiyan, Vol. 1. Allahabad: Neelam Prakashak, 1979.

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Barnouw, Eric and S. Krishnaswamy. Indian Film. New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1980. Bombay Chronicle Newspaper, ed. B. G. Horniman. Bombay: Sir Pherozeshah M. Mehta. Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Crafton, Donald. ‘Mindshare: Telephone and Radio Compete for the Talkies’, in Allegories of Communication: Intermedial Concerns from Cinema to the Digital, ed. John Fullerton and Jan Olsson, 141–156. Bloomington: Indian University Press, 2004. filmindia, ed. Baburao Patel. Bombay: Film India Publications. ‘Mr. A Narayanan Hits Out!’, February 1939, p. 23. ‘Film Industry as the 8th Key Industry’, February 1939, p. 24. ‘Communalists, Keep Out!’, February 1942, pp. 31–33. ‘Mazhar Khan Hits Our National Leaders’, May 1942, pp. 59–60. ‘Mountain in Labour Yields a Mouse!’, January 1945, pp. 39–42. ‘Jhumke Slanders Our Collegians’, September 1946, p. 72. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1995. Home Department, Political (I), File 5/3/1947, National Archives of India. Irani, Ardeshir. ‘Foreword’, in Kisan Kanya song booklet. Bombay: Imperial Film Company, 1938). Mahmud, Shabana. ‘Angaare and the Founding of the Progressive Writers’ Association’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 1996, pp. 447–67. Majumdar, Neepa. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only! Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–1950s. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009. Manto, Sa’adat Hasan. ‘Meri Shadi’, in Manto Ki Kahaniyan, ed. Narendra Mohan, 32–44. New Delhi: Kitab Ghar, 2004. Manto, Sa’adat Hasan. Bitter Fruit, ed. and tr. Khalid Hasan. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008. Menon, I. K. and S. G. Chandavarkar. Handbook of the Indian Film Industry. Bombay: Motion Picture Society of India, 1949. Mufti, Aamir. ‘A Greater Story-writer than God: Genre, Gender and Minority in Late Colonial India’, in Subaltern Studies XI: Community, Gender and Violence, ed. Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal & Permanent Black, 2000. Prasad, Surekha. Personal Interview, conducted in Bombay, 4 February 2005. Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Shah, Ghanshyam. Social Movements in India: A Review of the Literature. Thousand Oaks, CA; New Delhi; London: Sage, 2004. Shah, Panna. The Indian Film. Bombay: Motion Picture Society of India, 1950.

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Tawadros, Gilane. ‘The Revolution Stripped Bare’, in Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes, ed. Gilane Tawadros and Sarah Campbell. 50th Venice Biennale. London: Institute of International Visual Arts in collaboration with the Forum for African Arts and the Prince Claus Fund, 2003. Tipnis, Ram, Personal Interview, conducted in Bombay, 18 August 2008.

5 National becoming, regional variation and everyday moments The Film Enquiry Committee, Uttar Pradesh and the student cinema-goer Suzanne L. Schulz

❂ In the net of every wave, exist A hundred gaping mouths of crocodiles: See what the rain drop goes through, Before it becomes a pearl —Ghalib, quoted in the Film Enquiry Committee Report1 Each state claims to produce a space wherein something is accomplished–a space, even, where something is brought to perfection. —Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space2

For those who have studied the relationship between Indian cinema and the state, the 1951 Film Enquiry Committee Report, a 300-page compendium of opinions, statistics and recommendations about the present and future of Indian cinema, has been an indispensable resource on the Indian cinema during the postindependence era.3 The report outlines important debates between the Indian film industry and branches of the government and highlights the informal economics and haphazard organization of the Indian film industry in the post-war era. While the Film Enquiry Committee Report offers a complex picture of postindependence production, distribution and exhibition, its commentators have tended to focus on its final recommendations for national institutions for cinema, sidelining both the step-by-step process of the Film Enquiry, which included 19 months of testimony and data collection, as well as regional differences of opinion throughout the Film Enquiry regarding how best to regulate Indian national cinema.

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In contrast, scholarly approaches towards the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC), a comprehensive survey carried out 20 years before the Film Enquiry, serve as useful templates for examining the negotiations of the Film Enquiry Committee beyond its published report. The stated purpose of the 1927–28 ICC was to examine ‘censorship exercised over cinematograph films in India’, and, additionally, to consider ‘the possibility of encouraging the production and exhibition of Indian films’.4 The guiding purpose of the Film Enquiry Committee, on the other hand, was to lead the Indian film industry out of the difficulties of production, distribution and exhibition and towards its full potential as a source of state revenue and an instrument of national culture. Though the ICC and the Film Enquiry diverged in aim, they exhibited several resemblances. They both contained written and oral questions, collected data in cities across India and administered surveys in two categories, one dealing with the film industry, the other with social aspects of cinema.5 However, the rich detail present in the four volumes of the ICC is not available in the Film Enquiry Committee Report as many of its oral testimonies were offered in camera.6 As a result, while the ICC provides a rich and accessible archive of the practices of production, exhibition and distribution in the silent era that have richly supplemented scholarship on local film cultures in the presidency cities of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, the Film Enquiry Committee offers for the postindependence era no such resource.7 Perhaps owing to the lack of testimonies of the type provided by the ICC, studies of Indian cinema focusing on the postindependence era have neglected regional and local perspectives on cinema regulation in favour of generalized statements on the postcolonial state’s attitude towards cinema as an industry and art. Robin Jeffrey, for example, argues that most postcolonial government regulators of film and media have operated via ‘authoritarian control inherited from British rule combined with Gandhian asceticism and fears about India’s inflammable social fabric’.8 Jeffrey provides as examples the first three Congress party–affiliated Information and Broadcasting ministers in postindependence India. This view obscures the variations within cinema regulation regionally but also within the Congress party itself.9 While the postcolonial Indian state did not put Indian film on par with other arts (literature, visual arts, music, theatre, dance) or other industries, central government–sponsored committees and working groups offered an array of visions for how to regulate cinema to create an all-India space for film production, distribution and exhibition.

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Crucial to this vision was centralized regulation and a national film body. While the ICC had debated central censorship and the possibility of a single entity to oversee the film industry, the report of the Film Enquiry Committee Report provided detailed recommendations for institutions like Film Council of India and a Production Code Administration similar to that of Hollywood. Later, the Working Group on National Film Policy (1980) would recommend a central government–run Chalchitra Akademi meant to elevate cinema to a state-patronized art, as had the Sangeet Natak Akademi for music, theatre and dance, and the Sahitya Akademi for literature. In all cases, a national film body was meant to eliminate the problem of too many conflicting authorities and laws, which resided at the levels of the regional and the local. The Film Enquiry Committee Report, in the part labelled ‘The Film under the Law’, stated: There has been practically a unanimous complaint by the witnesses from the industry that their film business is reduced almost to a state of asphyxia by the stranglehold of numerous laws, rules, and regulations by multitudinous authorities from petty but hectoring officials of the police or local boards to Ministries at the Centre.10

This tangle of laws and authorities was again noted in the Working Group report 30 years later, when it suggested that the film industry ‘had been reduced almost to a state of asphyxia by a stranglehold of numerous laws, rules and regulations by a multitude of authorities with no single authority to coordinate or superintend them’.11 Discussing this ongoing fixation with a national film body, a ‘Film Council That Never Was’, Madhav Prasad notes that from the 1950s to the 1970s ‘supporters of the idea emphasized [the film council’s] regulatory function, [while] detractors (who were in the majority) emphasized the potential for arbitrary state control. Every time the debate over the council gathered momentum, moves to scuttle the proposal would ensue.’12 Ultimately, the proposed Film Council as a government entity was rejected, as it was perpetually seen as too homogenizing. Examined in light of the ICC and the Working Group, I suggest that the Film Enquiry Committee approached cinema primarily through its regulatory frameworks rather than through serious thought about the form or content of films. I argue that the imagined unitary national space for Indian film to be coordinated and supported

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by a central Film Council represented a utopian project for cinema, one in which audiences would be disciplined and the market for films uniform. I address this smoothing of national space by examining the Film Enquiry Committee’s excursions in the United Provinces/Uttar Pradesh (UP).13 In drawing attention to the regional workings of the Enquiry, I recuperate a key portion of what the Enquiry Committee referred to disparagingly as ‘regional variation in practice’ by analysing the state’s response to urban film culture in UP. As the state government negotiated with the Enquiry Committee, it asserted regional difference through a claim to knowledge of everyday cinema-going. What neither the Film Enquiry Committee nor state government representatives from UP acknowledged, however, was that within a framework of discipline and control, cinemagoers had their own subjectivities and political sensibilities. It is important to note here that nationalist mobilization in UP during the independence era demonstrated how cinema and theatre were objects of censure and control for the colonial government as well as for reform movements.14 As such, UP became a key site for demobilization after independence; public protests in which nationalist leaders had only recently started participating were suddenly seen in a negative light.15 Thus, this chapter is also an attempt to chart continuities of cinema regulation and audience contestation of cinema across the colonial and postcolonial divide.16 

Two utopias Between 1949 and 1951, the Film Enquiry Committee, comprised of six appointed members, surveyed all major sectors of the film industry, gathering information from each and every region of India.17 Despite travelling to 10 cities over the course of 19 months, the committee’s efforts to collect up-to-date facts and figures were repeatedly frustrated since these ‘were not readily available, being scattered and often submerged in official backwaters and or concealed in trade channels’.18 This theme of intractable peripheral regions within the national cinema space also applied to the state’s ability to administer laws related to cinema. Within the region, daily life was for the Film Enquiry Committee either an object of statistical collection or of pedagogical intervention; a regulatory utopia for Indian cinema sought to transcend it.

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We may productively view the Film Enquiry Committee’s endeavour as a ‘production of space’, a concept developed by Henri Lefebvre to explain how space is socially produced and how such production is affected by spatial perceptions, spatial practices and social relations.19 Reading the Film Enquiry against the grain and in relation to other contemporary sources, we may also discern a second utopia for cinema: one that Lefebvre views as ‘everyday moments’, those moments that emerge fleetingly in daily activities of individuals or groups. Using Lefebvre’s formulation of ‘production of space’, we can say that the Film Enquiry Committee, a state-appointed group of bureaucrats, film-makers and a scholar, was operating within a ‘blueprint model’ of utopianism.20 While the Enquiry Committee wanted neither a nationalized industry nor a completely unregulated industry, it emphasized that the film industry ought to be organized as one so as to benefit ‘the community and the industry’ and that the ‘individualism which the latter has enjoyed hitherto must be surrendered to the collective principle in substantial measure and that the collective principle should not be based on a regional concept but on an allIndia basis’.21 While the committee sought opinions in various cities, it most often sought the advice of experts and aimed in its recommendations for greater efficiency in finance and organization. The limitation of this ‘blueprint model’ was ironically pointed out by the UP state government itself as it sought, unsuccessfully, to assert its need for regional difference in film regulation by narrating its greater proximity to cinema-going in daily life. Lefebvre writes of the repetitive nature of modern life, one that is increasingly bureaucratized by the state, permeated by commodities and alienated from nature. Within this framework the everyday becomes a space of monotony and repetition. In the final volume of his four-part work De l’État, Lefebvre discusses the centralization of the state, asking, ‘How can the centralized State subject millions and sometimes hundreds of millions of people to the management (gestion) and to the statist homogeneity (homogéneéité étatiques) of their private business and their everyday life?’22 Within this framework of an all-homogenizing state, however, Lefebvre finds the seeds of a radical potentiality. He suggested that the state’s permeation into the everyday ‘raises the possibility of a revolt of the lived against abstractions, of the everyday against economicism, of the social and civil society against high growth and its requirements maintained by the state’.23 In this context, Lefebvre writes of the redemptive power of

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ordinary ‘moments’ which appear as utopian potentiality: ‘born of the everyday and within the everyday’.24 Michael Gardiner suggests that Lefebvrean moments link everyday life and its ‘immanent transcendence’: For Lefebvre, moments are flashes of perception into the range of historical possibilities that are embedded in the totality of being, but which cannot be disentangled from the activities of everyday life. Not unlike [Ernst] Bloch’s novum, they are manifestations of what could be termed immanent transcendence, or perhaps everyday utopianism . . . Put differently, moments are themselves partial totalities that reflect and refract larger wholes; they constitute a crucial point of linkage between the immediacy and particularity that inheres in the fine grain of everyday life, and the broader sweep of sociohistorical change. By temporarily disrupting the relatively unreflective and ‘distracted’ state that generally marks our being-in-the-everyday, Lefebvrean moments bring to consciousness the rich and manifold possibilities that are presented to us at given historical conjunctures.25

When the government-sponsored Film Enquiry Committee devised ideal regulation for Indian cinema, it had to contend with the unruly practices of the everyday. Thus, the Film Enquiry Committee Report expressed a range of anxieties. One often repeated concern emerged from discussions on cinema’s ‘vulnerable’ young audiences, especially those not fully educated or acquainted with the fictional worlds of Indian and foreign films. These audience imaginaries in many ways reflect the distinctive categories that had emerged during the ICC in the colonial era, when audiences were posed in a dichotomy between the educated and uneducated, often reflected in social topography of particular theatres and neighbourhoods and of which the student was in a somewhat ambiguous category.26 A preoccupation with potential detriment to youth and student cinema viewers was a common feature of official discussions of the time.27 For example, The Film Seminar Report (1955) suggested that film’s ‘influence is more pronounced on adolescent minds. The students and youths who go to see movies are very much influenced by them’.28 The Enquiry Committee, taking a slightly different tack, stated, We have heard the evidence of psychologists who said they were convinced that even if impressionable youngsters . . . imitate the favourite poses of popular stars, they would not be persuaded to change their

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commonly accepted notions and attitudes of right and wrong . . . even with years of regular cinema-going.29

The associated correspondence from the UP state government mentions students as potentially vulnerable to the sexually suggestive content of films and film posters, a practice of local film cultures, which should be duly standardized. 

Regional variation in UP As might be expected given its political importance as a centre of nationalist mobilization and provincial government formation, the UP state government played an important role during the enquiry. From the moment the membership of the Film Enquiry Committee was announced, the UP government suggested the committee be expanded to include representatives from the state. Although UP at the time had ‘almost no production sector to speak of’, it had a regional censor board and a robust Cinema Exhibitors’ Association.30 The government of UP argued that adding members from UP would ‘enhance the representative character of the committee and make it better fitted for dealing with the needs and conditions which are peculiarly local’.31 As a result, the only member of the committee not from a major filmproducing state was from UP: Dr R. P. Tripathi, a Mughal historian and head of the History Department at Allahabad University, also a member of the UP Cinema Advisory Committee. Tripathy had previously offered his opinion, unsolicited, on the future of Indian cinema and the historical film to the ICC in Allahabad in March 1928.32 When the committee came twice to UP during the 19 months of its tenure – to Allahabad in April 1950 and to Lucknow in August of the same year – Tripathi presided over the Film Enquiry Committee’s sessions. In both cities, the committee met with local intelligentsia and public figures that had strong relationships to the region. In Allahabad, the committee solicited views from the writer Upendranath Ashk and the poet Firaq Gorakhpuri (Raghupati Sahai). Local papers reported that Firaq criticized the quality of story writing in the film industry and ‘pleaded strongly for the entry of more educated people into the film industry. Firaq felt that the quality of films has been greatly handicapped by the [small] number of educated people engaged in the stories, settings and production of films’.33

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In Lucknow, several prominent members of the Lucknow community offered ‘oral evidence’. Among these were A. K. Halder, former principal of Lucknow’s Government School of Arts and Crafts; Dwijendra Nath Sanyal, Bengali actor; Mrs. Savitra Arora, social worker and teacher at the Mahila Vidyalaya; and the most spotlighted guest Begam Aizaz Rasul, prominent politician and then member of the UP Cinema Advisory Committee. Rasul presented views on representations of women in films, love scenes, the unhygienic conditions of cinema halls, and the production of films depicting village life for rural Indians (Figure 5.1). She also commented on the conditions of local film suspensions, saying, ‘With regard to the working of the Cinema

Figure 5.1: The National Herald reports on the Film Enquiry’s visits to Lucknow. Source:

Screen Misrepresenting Educated Women: Begum Aizaz Rasool’s Evidence before Film Enquiry’, The National Herald, 14 August 1950.

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Advisory Committee in U.P. . . . until somebody lodged a complaint against a particular film the committee did not take action.’34 At the time, the UP government had the reputation for capricious film decertification, what the Journal of the Film Industry called its ‘vagaries in censorship and banning pictures’.35 UP’s reputation as a province prone to local bans was firmly entrenched by the time of the enquiry. For example, Charu Gupta notes that in addition to ‘obscene’ literature and plays, which were subject to critique in UP, ‘in the early twentieth century the cinema too was condemned. Many films passed by the Bombay Censor Board were declared “uncertified” in UP. Films like Strange Interlude [1932] and Passion were banned on charges of “obscenity”.’36 In the era of the Film Enquiry, just before the Enquiry Committee came to Lucknow and Allahabad, the UP state government, most likely concerned with both the large influx of refugees and the relatively large and influential Muslim population, had suspended the exhibition of the Partition-themed Lahore (M. L. Anand, 1949) on 27 July 1949.37 Soon after, the UP Cinema Advisory Committee screened the film and suggested the ban be withdrawn.38 In a second instance, in 1950, the New Theatres’ film Manzoor (Subhod Mitra, 1949) was decertified in UP after ‘already being certified as suitable for public exhibition both by the Bengal and Bombay Board of Film Censors’.39 Even the government of India was uncomfortable with the frequency of suspensions in UP, suggesting in its correspondence, ‘It is not clear in what respects the State Government of Uttar Pradesh consider the film [Manzoor] as unsuitable for public exhibition.’40 Correspondence between the Film Enquiry Committee and members of the UP state government yields a particularly interesting perspective on regional variation in censorship practice. UP responded to critiques of its actions by saying, ‘Cases may conceivably arise when a particular film is likely to create a breach of the peace in a particular locality or city on account of its local colour.’41 While the Indian film industry and the Film Enquiry Committee saw centralization of censorship as a streamlining of the process of film regulation, the UP government viewed it as a wedge driven between itself and the local public. Even before the waves of the Enquiry Committee’s arrival began to ripple in local Lucknow newspapers, several controversial issues related to public space had begun to inhabit the editorial pages of local newspapers. In the late 1940s, newspaper articles began to appear describing Lucknow as a ‘City of Ruins’, ‘Hawker’s Paradise’

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and ‘Changing Lucknow’.42 One article compared the present state of Lucknow to its condition in the 1930s, when its streets were reminiscent of ‘scenery in the Hollywood studios’.43 The fiction writer Atia Hosain described the atmosphere of postindependence Lucknow as one of ‘ill-digested modernity’.44 Newspaper articles complained of half-built buildings, a chaotic and malodorous street life and unfamiliar styles of dress and comportment. In part due to an influx of refugees, the population of Lucknow had doubled within the three years preceding the enquiry. According to estimates, the citywide unemployment rate was at 20 per cent.45 To combat the growth of the informal sector, an anti-hawking drive had begun in the commercial district of Hazratganj, an initiative complicated by the fact that many of the hawkers were said to be refugees.46 The city was beset with increased traffic, tensions between long-time residents and refugees and an intensified monitoring of these new uses of public space.47 Following colonial procedure, the postindependence district magistrate had banned ‘loudspeakers, [and] megaphones’ to prevent ‘provocative announcements . . . on public roads and in public places in Lucknow which were likely to cause disturbances to public peace’.48 He had also prohibited ‘meetings and the carrying of lathis and arms . . . owing to the existence of strained communal relations’.49 In order to assuage the population glut – the population of Lucknow had ‘jumped from two lakhs to six lakhs’ within ten years – the local government arranged for expanded housing facilities. The municipal government acquired five miles of land around Lucknow in 1948.50 Housing for Sindhi refugees was specifically offered on the road between Lucknow and Kanpur, and the new housing scheme optimistically billed itself as climatically similar to Sindh.51 Cinema halls followed suit and began to serve migrant communities. For example, Mayfair Cinema held meetings of the Sindhi Association starting in 1948.52 But cinema halls also became sites of contention following independence. Local newspapers reported that in the late 1940s, ‘truly awe-inspiring queues of would-be patrons’ gathered outside Lucknow cinema halls.53 In addition to tactics like banning public gatherings, the state responded to the strains on the city’s resources by officially withholding the evening supply of electricity to cinema halls between June 1948 and August 1950. In addition, the use of scarce building materials for the construction of new cinema halls was a point of

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Figure 5.2: ‘Is Your Cinema Really Necessary?’ Debates over the construction of new cinemas. Source:

National Herald, 15 January 1947.

dispute. Though several new halls were built during the period, it was in defiance to the recommended building ban on new cinema halls, which had begun in UP in 1948 (Figure 5.2). Correspondence between the UP government and the Enquiry provides a glimpse into this atmosphere as the state encountered the growing population of refugees. Given the scarce housing situation, while the Cinema Enquiry Committee recommended that more cinemas be constructed, the UP government wrote: The problem with building more cinema halls is that there is a shortage of building supplies and the public wouldn’t respond well if building supplies were channeled for the purpose of cinema construction when people don’t even have a place to stay . . . The public feeling has, moreover, become increasingly sensitive to the construction of such palatial luxury construction when the more [important] requirements of accommodating our growing urban population are not any near [sic] the solution and when the ordinary citizen is so much haunted with the problem of finding a suitable accommodation.54

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Here the undersecretary to the UP chief minister refers to ‘our urban population’, including himself among those wracked with difficulties. It is also noteworthy that the public response he aims to anticipate and pre-emptively represent is that of a bitter, ‘spontaneous public criticism’, a form of public expression incongruous with the postindependence political climate. In this turbulent time, UP officials used local cinema-going to contest the view that regional variation in film decertification and cinema hall construction was merely a matter of too much red tape. The UP government claimed knowledge of the local and promoted its importance as a state with a large population and influential exhibition market. In its correspondence with a central film committee that attempted to use national culture as the justification for standardizing cinema regulation, the UP state government responded by likening ‘regimentation’ by the central government to ‘the autocratic Moghul regime’.55 In all its responses, the UP government suggested an ideal scenario in which regional difference would be accommodated through representational censorship and exhibition regulation. As a result, UP diverged from the central government slightly, but ultimately supported its efforts to produce a national space. In the following two examples – one from the correspondence between the UP state government and the central government during the Enquiry, the other based on local newspapers and industry trade journals during the time of the Enquiry – students and film posters figure prominently in our two utopias: the production of space and everyday ‘moments’. 

The film enquiry committee and the student Several government officials had a certain degree of familiarity with cinema-going in UP. For example, the Entertainment and Betting tax commissioner was responsible for overseeing the inspection and tax collection for all the halls in the state. The district magistrates assigned licenses to cinema halls, negotiated with cinema managers and owners, monitored electricity usage at halls, and arbitrated complaints about the local police.56 In responses from the UP state government to the central government during the course of the enquiry, members of the state government produced a uniform space for

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cinema cast in the guise of a closer understanding of cinema-going and everyday life due to greater proximities to halls and audiences. Here, it is important to note that the Film Enquiry Committee did not just collect statistics; they were also actively provided by individuals in specific localities. The UP Entertainment and Betting tax commissioner, U. S. Gupta, mentioned specifically in the Film Enquiry Committee Report, was highly involved in putting together UP’s information for the committee. He participated in the public forum in Lucknow, provided statistics to the central government and offered a lengthy personal response to the committee’s survey, ‘The Film and Its Public’. In an unpublished response to ‘The Film and Its Public’, Gupta provides an example of the UP government’s claims to familiarity with the local cinema-going habits of students. He points out that his responses were based on ‘experience derived from day to day visits to various cinemas all over the province’. 57 In one portion, he writes of his experience walking to work: Only today, while passing along Hazratganj, I saw a large board advertising ‘The Swiss Girl’. I do not know what kind of play it is but the advertisement showed a grown-up girl with two full-blooded men, one on either side, kissing her on the cheeks. To my mind, the thing was atrociously indecent. Naturally, groups of young men, university students to all appearance, were loitering round it. It would be surprising if a young man, slightly neurasthenic as most young men are today, who has feasted his eyes on such a picture and given rein to his imagination did not feel an inclination to misbehave towards the first girl he comes across. It would be equally surprising if a hypernervous and slightly hysterical girl – most girls studying in the degree colleges answer to this description – who has surreptitiously swallowed this picture with her eyes did not feel the urge to run off the track at the first provocation. Such incidents are becoming common and we cannot afford to be complacent about them. Lewd gestures, observations whose obscenity is thinly, if at all, veiled, tilting one’s bicycle against a passing girl student so as to cause a minor accident placing her in an embarrassing physical contact with her ‘assailant’ – these are some of the tactics most commonly employed. . . . Some steps should, and I think could, be taken about this at an early date.58

Here, Gupta’s pathologizing description of students passing through Hazratganj – young neurasthenic men and young hypernervous hysterical women – suggests a move to rid the neighbourhood of obscene

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posters so that disciplining the student body would be rendered unnecessary.59 Given that this response was written for a central committee, we can clearly say that Gupta sought to demonstrate his familiarity with the area as a major thoroughfare for male and female students travelling to and from university in order to substantiate his larger point that regulation of cinema posters ought to have been included in the Enquiry. Gupta’s statement reflects discomfort over mixed-sex student audiences in the early independence era. By the late 1940s and early 1950s, cinema halls were no longer primarily homosocial spaces. In Lucknow, by the 1940s, male and female university students were among the main consumers of films in Lucknow’s centrally located cinema halls.60 The potential effects of the posters described by U. S. Gupta were further reinforced in a comment from the Lucknow district magistrate, A. D. Pandit, who said, These posters and pictures, which are sometimes a gross misrepresentation of the film itself, are put up in street walls and in show-windows and carried in procession. Even when not clearly obscene, they are objectionably suggestive and are bound to have an undesirable effect on persons, especially those of impressionable ages.61

Both Gupta and Pandit suggested that it is not young people that need to be reformed, but that posters must be removed from the city streets; thus they directed their statements towards creating a well-regulated public space within UP. In Gupta’s view, the sexual volatility of Lucknow’s students in the new situation of mixed-sex proximity – the young woman who may ‘surreptitiously swallow [the film poster] with her eyes’ – posited the street poster as a problem-inwaiting, which was in keeping with Pandit’s suggestion of advertising’s potential to permeate the city beyond the cinema hall.62 The Enquiry Committee concurred with the social psychological perspective that years of cinema-going would not alter the basic moral framework of young people.63 While Gupta’s and Pandit’s views differed from those of the Enquiry Committee, they did not contradict the Enquiry Committee’s calls for more regulation and control. As opposed to the UP government, the Film Enquiry Committee’s perspective on young audiences did not support the notion of an ‘instant reaction’ to films, but both branches of the state were concerned with proper control – in the case of the Film Enquiry Committee, this meant better education for the young viewers; and in the case of the UP

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state government, this meant controlling what students see in the first place. Despite their claims to familiarity with the street and the feelings of students, the commissioner’s and district magistrate’s hands were tied in the matter of dealing adequately with the public display of film posters; they said that actions could ‘only be taken by the . . . Central Government, and we are therefore unable to take any action’.64 In their efforts to display familiarity with the students of Lucknow, these officials framed the problem in terms of the central government’s lack of assistance in managing the regulation of film posters in contrast to their own familiarity with students’ routes and behaviours due to their proximity to life in the city. While correspondence associated with the Film Enquiry provides glimpses of the transactions between lower-level officials with cinema audiences, as well as the impact that refugees had in the city, ultimately this correspondence tells us more about the state government’s concerns vis-à-vis the central government than it does about the daily life of Lucknow and Allahabad in the late 1940s. Though the state government deployed the trope of the everyday, the state government’s contribution towards the project of the Film Enquiry served mostly to strengthen the Indian state’s production of a national space. 

Everyday utopias of Indian cinema I return to the figure of the student to suggest, by way of Lefebvre’s ‘philosophy of moments’,65 a possible reading of an everyday utopia of Indian cinema. While representatives of the UP state government acknowledged the potential for unpredictable audience reactions, they did not mention student violence at halls. As a population known to loiter inside and outside the halls, students had a strong presence at cinema halls and a reputation for disrupting cinema exhibition in UP. From the 1920s through the 1940s, and particularly during the Quit India agitations in 1942, Lucknow and Allahabad had been centres of student political activity. Students participated in the planning and administration of university activities; many students became involved in the trade union movement and other leftist political groups; and by the late 1930s, many were involved in labour struggles or in the ‘Gandhian constructive programmes’.66 By 1942,

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following the arrests of the Congress party leaders and the pre-emptive closure of Lucknow University, students of Lucknow participated in the Quit India Movement and ‘came out in demonstrations and hartals’.67 The entire city observed a partial hartal, and all markets were closed. An ambulance was stoned on Station Road and ARP public shelter boards were removed near Charbagh; students raided Hewett Road and Sunderbag post offices. The city magistrate issued an order against collecting ‘stones, missiles or brickbats’ and from ‘circulating alarmist or false reports and statements’.68 Kanyakubja College and Lucknow University were closed. Students of Lucknow University launched an agitation for the reopening of the university, and the women’s Isabel Thoburn College (IT College) cancelled regular classes. Students took part in processions and anticipated arrest.69 In an interview, former IT College student Mohini Manglik recalls that both male and female students crossed the Gomti River on the ‘monkey bridge’ near Lucknow University, but that female students were directed to go back to avoid arrest.70 Authorities in Lucknow ‘anticipated agitation and acted against the protestors swiftly and aggressively’, and police opened fire on students on the bridge; though no one died, several students were injured and many arrested. The events of the 1942 Quit India Movement in Lucknow loomed particularly large in the memories of the students throughout the 1940s.71 While during earlier periods, students had been ‘largely drawn from the privileged classes’,72 after independence and coinciding with the increase of student attendance and the opening of new universities, the student body was considerably larger and less organized. This transition offers a partial explanation for reports of random student vandalism and violence.73 In several instances throughout the period, students disrupted cinema exhibition, at times with no stated reason, and at others, to object to ticket prices or to protest against particular films.74 In one such incident, students picketed halls in Lucknow demanding concessional rates for admission. The Journal of the Film Industry called the Lucknow students’ demands ‘unjustifiable’ and their actions at halls ‘misguided’, suggesting that films, like other commodities, were articles of daily use and students had no right to demand them for free: ‘Like other people, students require clothing, footwear, etc. but it would be ridiculous if they ask for concessional rates for these articles of daily use.’75 The protest eventually led to 232 arrests and to the temporary closure of Lucknow University.76 The Lucknow

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Figure 5.3: Pro-concessions students arrested. Source:

‘32 Students Taken into Custody: Sequel to Agitation for Cinema Concessions’, National Herald, 1 November 1946, Friday.

Exhibitors’ Association arbitrated the matter and reached the compromise that student concessions would be allowed after a film’s first week, a partial victory for the picketing students (Figure 5.3).77 In another incident two years later, a group of students requested the manager of Mayfair Cinema in Lucknow’s Hazratganj to cancel the screening of the 20th Century Fox film The Iron Curtain (Wellman, 1948).78 Here, we can recall Entertainment Tax Commissioner Gupta’s approach towards male and female engagement with cinema to note that the Lucknow Students’ Federation and the Lucknow Girls ‘Students’ Federation arranged this protest, with support from the Lucknow District Trade Union Council. The protestors dubbed the film ‘war-mongering propaganda’.79 When their requests went unmet, the students met for a second time with the management of Mayfair Cinema. After the manager of the Mayfair refused to honour the students’ request to stop the screening, ‘the students staged

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Figure 5.4: Long-time manager of the Mayfair Cinema, C. V. Advani. Source:

Photo courtesy of Ram Advani. Taken in the early 1970s.

a demonstration and tore off the posters advertising the film.’80 As a consequence, the manager postponed the screening for two days and reduced it to a one-day event (Figure 5.4).81 If the project of the Film Enquiry was to create what Lefebvre called a ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’,82 then we might look upon student actions at cinema halls as examples of Lefebvre’s ‘moments’ – when utopia was concretized using the materials and activities of everyday life. These events, part of the rhythms and textures of students’ lives, were occasions when the neighbourhood cinema hall became linked for students to larger issues like entitlements within a market economy and the power of anti-Soviet ideology in postcolonial Indian society. The students’ critique was ‘not situated outside the everyday, but . . . articulated with it by uniting with critique in order to introduce into it what is lacking to its richness’.83 It is important to note that the students did not critique the institution of cinema itself, but, rather, demanded a place within it. Here we are reminded of a classic story of Lefebvrean ‘moments’: when Lefebvre was himself a student walking through the Pyrenees

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and saw a ‘church cross with a circle surrounding it’ and discovered that ‘They had crucified the sun!’84 This story illustrates the everyday quality of the ‘moments’: they are situated in familiar spaces and times. Here we may draw an analogy between young Lefebvre and the Lucknow students who protested Iron Curtain. Just as the sun juxtaposed with the cross became for Lefebvre a ‘symbol of division, humiliation, failure and hopelessness’ and not the ‘cross of Christ wreathed in solar glory’85 only as he walked along a familiar route near his home in the countryside, so too the film poster for Iron Curtain, a mark of capitalism’s permeation into the everyday rhythms and routines of the city, underwent a critical transformation as the students passed by their local cinema hall. We can read here the tearing down of the film poster as an encounter between the students and the poster’s visibility within the city; the film’s screening was later cut short, but the poster disappeared from the street immediately. Though we cannot be sure how the students experienced this ‘moment’, we can speculate that the shredded film poster acquired a meaning for the students quite separate from the demoralizing effects predicted by the UP state government. 

Conclusion How did members of the film industry and the Indian government use the Film Enquiry to imagine a more coherent, secure and viable national space? While the Film Enquiry Committee of 1949–51 sought to focus on cinema as a part of national culture and industry, the UP state government construed the regimentation of a central government determined to create a national space for Indian cinema as ‘fraught with dangers’.86 Since Lucknow and UP were not major production areas (despite the smattering of production concerns in the silent and early eras of sound cinema), the anxiety over cinema expressed during the Film Enquiry was not in producing proper content, but in containing the negative effects of films produced elsewhere, in a different locality. UP government officials argued that they could predict the local sentiments in the state, but ultimately called for central policy that would provide room for ‘regional variations’. Ultimately, the UP government contributed to the Film Enquiry Committee’s ‘production of space’. The stories presented by the state government to the Film Enquiry Committee allowed such anxieties caused by the growing cinema

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audience to be redirected. Recalling U. S. Gupta’s walk through Hazratganj, within his regional contribution to a ‘blueprint’ model of utopia, he could only ‘imagine’ the Lucknow public through a work of fantasy: a young man manipulated by a film poster encountering an ‘oversensitive’ woman. The category of the picketing male and female students did not figure into his imaginings. In the case of the postindependence Indian Film Enquiry Committee, even though the government claimed to have exhaustively researched the cinema audience, the cinema audience remained largely unknown.

❁ Notes 1 Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (S. K. Patil, Chair), 1951 (New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1951), p. 17. 2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), p. 281. 3 Important work on the Film Enquiry Committee Report includes M. Madhava Prasad, ‘The State in/of Cinema’, in Partha Chatterjee, ed., Wages of Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 130; Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘Introduction’, in Ravi S. Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 6; Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003, p. 33. 4 Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927–1928 (Madras and Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch and Superintendent, Government Press, Madras, 1928), p. xii. 5 The Enquiry Committee called these questionnaires ‘The Film Industry’ and ‘The Film and the Public’ while the ICC called them ‘Film Industry in India’ and ‘Social Aspects and Control’. The language here is telling, shifting from ‘social’ and ‘control’ to ‘public’. 6 Barnouw and Krishnaswamy attribute the great number of in camera testimonies to the prevalence of ‘black payments’ in the film industry. Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 143. 7 For Bombay: Priya Jaikumar, Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006); Kaushik Bhaumik, ‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936’, DPhil Thesis, Oxford University, 2001. Manishita Dass, ‘The Crowd outside the Lettered City: Imagining the Mass Audience in 1920s India’, Cinema Journal, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, pp. 77–98. For Calcutta: ibid. For Madras: Stephen P.

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Hughes, Is There Anyone Out There? Exhibition and the Formation of Silent Film Audience in South India (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996). Robin Jeffrey, ‘The Mahatma Didn’t Like the Movies and Why It Matters: Indian Broadcasting Policy, 1920s–1990s’, in The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in Media History, ed. Arvind Rajagopal, Themes in Indian Politics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 180. For example, Nandini Gooptu outlines how the Congress Socialist Party’s views in diverged from those of the ‘rightist’ Congress and Gandhi. Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 338–39. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (S. K. Patil, Chair), 1951, 17. Report of the Working Group on National Film Policy, ed. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (Government of India, May 1980), p. 5. The phrase reappeared, with slight variations and no reference to the Film Enquiry Committee Report, in the middle of a 1984 Showtime article about the relationship between the film industry and the government: ‘The film business has been reduced to a state of asphyxia by the strangle-hold of numerous laws, rules and taxes imposed by a multitude of authorities, with no single authority to coordinate and superintend them’, Showtime, May 1984, p. 45. Prasad, ‘The State in/of Cinema’, pp. 131–32. Henceforth, I will refer to the state as ‘Uttar Pradesh’. After the establishment of the Constitution of India in January 1950 (during the period of the Enquiry), the area called ‘The United Provinces’ became the State of ‘Uttar Pradesh’ (UP). Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Kathryn Hansen, Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India. For an important essay on the discourses of demobilization, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India’, Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 1, 2007, pp. 35–37. Here I view regulation and contestation as traceable categories across the divides of the colonial and postcolonial administrations as are ‘nationalism, developmentalism, and public sphere formation’; on the latter, see Arvind Rajagopal, ‘Introduction: The Public Sphere in India, Structure and Transformation’, in Arvind Rajagopal, ed., The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in Media History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 10–11. Often referred to as the Patil Committee, the Film Enquiry Committee was chaired by S. K. Patil, Congress leader from Maharasthra, former Mayor of Bombay and member of the Constituent Assembly. The other members were M. Satyanarayana (member of the Constituent Assembly); V. Shantaram (of Rajkamal Kalamandir Ltd, Bombay), B. N. Sircar (of New Theatres, Ltd, Calcutta), Dr R. P. Tripathi (head of the History Department, Allahabad

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University), and V. Shankar (ICS representing Information and Broadcasting Ministry). S. Gopalan was the committee’s secretary. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (S. K. Patil, Chair), 1951, p. 2. Lefebvre, The Production of Space. For an application of this concept in this context of India, see Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), especially Chapter 1. Michael Gardiner, ‘Everyday Utopianism: Lefebvre and his Critics’, Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 2, 2010, p. 245. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (S. K. Patil, Chair), 1951, p. 186. At the time of writing, volume IV of De l’État has yet to be translated into English; these summaries come from Stuart Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 221. Ibid. See also Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory (2002), p. 119. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, Volume 2 (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 351. Ravi Sundaram offers a provocative discussion of Lefebvre’s ‘moments’ in which he argues that a ‘radical everydayness’ is manifest in the media urbanism of 1990s Delhi, though it lacks the ‘redemptive urge’ of critical avant-garde traditions in 1920s Berlin or Paris. See Ravi Sundaram, ‘Re-visiting “Everyday Life”: The Experience of Delhi’s Media Urbanism’, in Comparing Cities: The Middle East and South Asia, ed. Kamran Asdar Ali and Marina Rieker (New York: Oxford University[0] Press,2010), p. 137. Gardiner, ‘Everyday Utopianism: Lefebvre and His Critics’, p. 243. On students in the cinema halls of the late-colonial period, see Dass, ‘The Crowd outside the Lettered City: Imagining the Mass Audience in 1920s India’; Bhaumik, ‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936’, pp. 27, 78 and 141. A preoccupation with potential harm to young viewers has featured in cinema regulation in many contexts. For an exemplary work on this topic, see Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925 (London: Routledge, 1988). R. M. Ray, Film Seminar Report, 1955 (New Delhi: Sangeet Natak Akademi, 1956). Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (S. K. Patil, Chair), 1951, p. 44. ‘File 98B, GAD, 1949–1951, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, “Film Inquiry” ’. UP Labour Department, 18/5/51. Ibid. 9/11/49, p. 10. ‘Indian Cinematograph Committee Evidence 1927–1928, Volume IV – Witnesses Not Orally Examined, Memoranda from Provincial Governments and Miscellaneous Papers’ (Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927–1928). ‘Film Enquiry Committee’, The Leader, 24 April 1950.

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34 ‘Screen Misrepresenting Educated Women: Begum Aizaz Rasool’s Evidence Before Film Enquiry’, The National Herald, 14 August 1950. 35 This phrase comes from ‘Censorship’, Journal of the Film Industry, vol. 8, no. 6, February 1948. 36 Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India, p. 103. 37 The film was supported by reviews by K. A. Abbas and by an anonymous review in filmindia. However, Kavita Daiya notes that the film was banned in Pakistan; Kavita Daiya, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Poscolonial India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008). 38 ‘One More Vagary’, Journal of the Film Industry, vol. 10, no. 1, September 1949, p. 11. 39 Manzoor was one of a number of ‘double versions’ produced by Calcutta’s New Theatres. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy point out that between ‘1948 and 1955 New Theatres produced a number of double versions that succeeded in Bengali but not in their Hindi versions’, Barnouw and Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, p. 187. 40 ‘File 98B, GAD, 1949–1951, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, “Film Inquiry” ’. 17/5/51. 41 UP State Archives, GAD, File 7, (40) 1948. 42 These characterizations of Lucknow appeared, respectively, in ‘Is Lucknow to Become a City of Ruins?’, The National Herald, 1 January 1947, p. 4; ‘Lucknow City – Hawkers’ Paradise, New Menace in Hazrat Ganj’, The National Herald, 5 March 1948, p. 3; Brij Nath Srivastava, ‘Changing Lucknow’, Pioneer, 10 August 1948, p. 6. 43 ‘Alas For Lucknow’, The National Herald, 5 June 1950, p. 4. 44 Attia Hosain writes: Tattered settlements for refugees had erupted on once open spaces. Ugly buildings had spring up, conceived by ill-digested modernity and the hasty needs of a growing city . . . the Mall with new shops and restaurants and cinemas, pavement booths as in a bazaar cluttered with tawdry signs, old buildings with neglected frontages, the church with a new annexe to its school where children no longer sang ‘God Save the King’, the Government House flagstaff carrying the tricolor, the quiet deep-shadowed trees lining the road . . . Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (New York: Penguin Group, 1961, 1992), p. 270. 45 Baljit Singh, A Report on Unemployment in the City of Lucknow (Lucknow: Dept. of Economics and Sociology, Lucknow University, 1955). 46 ‘Lucknow City – Hawkers’ Paradise, New Menace in Hazrat Ganj’, p. 3. 47 In his article reflecting on the inflections of the ‘public’ in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, Sudipta Kaviraj suggests that hawking in middle-class neighbourhoods of Calcutta can be viewed as a fourth phase in the

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development of a hybrid public. I would likewise suggest that a preponderance of street vendors in Hazratganj was a new, postindependence form of public space. Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta’, Public Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 1997, pp. 83–113. ‘City Ban on Use of Loud Speakers’, National Herald, 18 March 1950, p. 3. ‘Meetings and Processions Banned in City’, The National Herald, 30 March 1950, p. 1. ‘Greater Lucknow Plan: Govt to Acquire Land All Round City’, The National Herald, 25 January 1948, p. 3. ‘Good News for Sindhis’, The National Herald, 29 January 1948, p. 6. Meetings for the association were regularly listed in the Pioneer and National Herald in the late 1940s. Our Special Investigator, ‘Is Your Cinema Really Necessary?’, National Herald, 15 January 1947. ‘File 98B, GAD, 1949–1951, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, “Film Inquiry”’. 28/8/51. Ibid. 7/22/51. For example, one article details how the manager of Lucknow’s Prabhat Talkies implored District Magistrate Pandit to rebuke the ‘Kotwali authorities’ for negligence after the manager was ‘maltreated’ by the hall’s ex-coproprietor for refusing to hand over keys and the deed, ‘Cinema Managers Complaint’, Pioneer, 13 September 1948, p. 2. ‘File 98B, GAD, 1949–1951, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, “Film Inquiry”’, 9/11/49, p. 21. ‘Letter to the U.P. State Government’. Ibid., p. 39. It is likely that the ‘two full-blooded men’ are Laurel and Hardy and that Gupta is speaking of The Swiss Miss (1938). Gupta uses the term ‘neurasthenic’, popular with late 19th-century psychologists and sociologists in Europe and America and suggesting excessive cerebral activity combined with a lack of physical activity. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (United States of America: Basic Books, 1990). For discussions of neurasthenia in the early 20th century, see Janet Staiger, Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); and Lynne Kirby, ‘Male Hysteria and Early Cinema’, Camera Obscura. I thank Arvind Rajagopal for directing me to Rabinbach’s work. In Qurratulain Hyder’s partially autobiographical novel River of Fire, she speaks of the bicycle in 1940s Lucknow as ‘the preferred mode of transport for modern college women in Lucknow’ and as ‘the symbol of female emancipation there’; she also states that ‘Hostel rules were strict, junior girls could go to Hazrat Ganj only with seniors as chaperones. The city was out of bounds and “dating” was unknown.’ Despite these proscriptions, cinema

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presented an opportunity for male and female students to interact. Hyder later writes: I remember there was an English or American movie called It’s Love I’m After [1937] – we went to see it at the Plaza in Hazrat Ganj. Boys at the University used to give new year titles to the girls and that year Champa Baji was given the title: ‘It’s Love I’m After’. Qurratulain Hyder, River of Fire (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), pp. 215, 84. 61 ‘File 98B, GAD, 1949–1951, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, “Film Inquiry”’. 30/7/1951. 62 The UP government representatives, despite the cinema hall’s long-time status as a homosocial space, did not explicitly mention same-sex attraction. For a short piece that narrates same-sex sexuality at the cinema hall, see Pande Bechan Sharma and Ruth Vanita, Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 63 Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (S. K. Patil, Chair), 1951, p. 44. 64 ‘File 98B, GAD, 1949–1951, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, “Film Inquiry”’. 9/11/49, p. 10. 65 Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, Volume 2. 66 Lisa Mitchell, ‘“To Stop Train Pull Chain”: Writing Histories of Contemporary Political Practice’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 48, 2011. 67 Joseph S. Meisel, ‘University Representation in India’, Parliamentary History, vol. 30, no. Supplement s1, October 2011, p. 100. 68 Gyanendra Pandey, ‘The Revolt of August 1942 in Eastern UP and Bihar’, in Gyanendra Pandey, ed., The Indian Nation in 1942 (Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1988), p. 147. 69 ‘Police Open Fire on Violent Mobs in Many Towns: Cawnpore Post Offices Looted; Lawless Lucknow Students’, The Times of India, 12 August 1942, p. 3; Nina David and Amrita Dass, Constance Prem Nath Dass: An Extraordinary History, 1886–1971 (New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing India, 2012), pp. 91–93; Amaresh Misra, Lucknow: Fire of Grace, The Story of Its Renaissance, Revolution and the Aftermath (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1998). 70 Mohini Manglik (nee Advani) is the daughter of the late C. V. Advani, longtime manager of Mayfair Cinema in Hazratganj. ‘Interview with Suzanne Schulz’, Lucknow, 25 August 2010. 71 Correspondent, ‘Turbulent Crowds Clash with police at Poona, Ahmedabad & Lucknow’, The Times of India, 11 August 1942, p. 3. 72 Suneet Chopra, ‘Political Consciousness of the Student Movement in India’, Social Scientist, vol. 6, no. 10, May 1978, pp. 53–68; Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1926–34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978); Philip G. Altbach,

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‘The Transformation of the Indian Student Movement’ Asian Survey, vol. 6, no. 8, August 1966, pp. 448–60. Chopra, ‘Political Consciousness of the Student Movement in India’. See ‘Students Set Fire to a Theatre in Kanpur’, Journal of the Film Industry, vol. 10, vo. 3, November 1949, p. 13. This incident involved an altercation between students and the management of the hall. ‘Students’ Agitation for Concessions’, Journal of the Film Industry, vol. 7, no. 6, February 1947, pp. 4–5; ‘No Student Concession’, National Herald, 22 February 1947, p. 3. ‘Lathi Charge on Lucknow Students: More than 200 Taken into Custody on Friday, Mass Demonstration before Council House, Unhappy Sequel to Dispute over Cinema Concessions’, The Pioneer, 2 November 1946, Saturday, p. 1; ‘Lucknow Varsity Ordered to Be Closed: Authorities’ Failure to Maintain Discipline, Govt. Considering Stoppage of Grant, Students Warned: No Inconvenience to Public Will Be Tolerated’, The Pioneer, 4 November 1946, Monday, p. 1. ‘Lucknow Cinemas Reopen, Settlement Reached with Students, Closure of University’, The National Herald, 4 November 1946, Monday, p. 3. The Iron Curtain was based on the true story of a Russian embassy worker who defected to Canada after exposing a spy ring. For discussions of protests against the film in Bombay and Colombo, see ‘Bolshevism through Films’, filmindia, vol. 14, no. 11, November 1948, p. 7. When the film was released in the United States on 12 May 1948, supporters and defenders of the film clashed at the Roxy Theatre in Manhattan. The film was also released in ‘Great Britain, Mexico, Central and South America, and parts of Scandinavia, but Not in France or Italy’; see Daniel J. Leab, ‘“The Iron Curtain” (1948): Hollywood’s First Cold War Movie’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no. 2, 1988: pp. 174–75. ‘The Iron Curtain at Mayfair’, The National Herald, 11 January 1949, p. 3. ‘Iron Curtain’, The National Herald, 14 January 1949, p. 3. Ibid. Lefebvre, cited in Gardiner, ‘Everyday Utopianism: Lefebvre and His Critics’, pp. 238–39. Ibid., p. 245. Lefebvre, cited in Elden, Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible, pp. 170–71. Ibid., p. 171. ‘File 98B, GAD, 1949–1951, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, “Film Inquiry”’, 7/22/51.

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Barnouw, Erik and S. Krishnaswamy. Indian Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Bhaumik, Kaushik. ‘The Emergence of the Bombay Film Industry, 1913–1936’, unpublished dissertation, Oxford University, 2001. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India’, Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 1, 2007, pp. 35–57. Chopra, Suneet. ‘Political Consciousness of the Student Movement in India’, Social Scientist, vol. 6, no. 10, May 1978, pp. 53–68. Correspondent. ‘Turbulent Crowds Clash with Police at Poona, Ahmedabad & Lucknow’, The Times of India, 11 August 1942. Daiya, Kavita. Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Poscolonial India. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. Dass, Manishita. ‘The Crowd outside the Lettered City: Imagining the Mass Audience in 1920s India’, Cinema Journal, vol. 48, no. 4, 2009, pp. 77–98. David, Nina and Amrita Dass. Constance Prem Nath Dass: An Extraordinary History, 1886–1971. New Delhi: Bloomsbury Publishing India, 2012. Elden, Stuart.Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. New York: Continuum, 2004. filmindia, ‘Bolshevism through Films’, vol. 14, no. 11, November 1948, pp. 1–7. Gardiner, Michael. ‘Everyday Utopianism: Lefebvre and His Critics’, Cultural Studies vol. 18, no. 2, 2010, pp. 228–54. Gooptu, Nandini. The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Goswami, Manu. Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010. Government of India. Indian Cinematograph Committee Evidence 1927–1928, Volume IV – Witnesses Not Orally Examined, Memoranda from Provincial Governments and Miscellaneous Papers. Calcutta: Government of India Central Publications Branch, 1927–1928. Gupta, Charu. Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Hansen, Kathryn. Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Hosain, Attia. Sunlight on a Broken Column. New York: Penguin Group, 1961, 1992. Hughes, Stephen P. ‘Is There Anyone Out There? Exhibition and the Formation of Silent Film Audience in South India’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1996. Hyder, Qurratulain. River of Fire. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998. Jaikumar, Priya. Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Jeffrey, Robin. ‘The Mahatma Didn’t Like the Movies and Why It Matters: Indian Broadcasting Policy, 1920s–1990s’, in The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in

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Media History, ed. Arvind Rajagopal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Journal of the Film Industry, ‘Students’ Agitation for Concessions’, vol. 7, no. 6, February 1947, pp. 4–5. Journal of the Film Industry, ‘Censorship’, vol. 8, no. 6, February 1948, pp. 11–12. Journal of the Film Industry, ‘One More Vagary’, 10, no. 1, September 1949, p. 11. Kaviraj, Sudipta. ‘Filth and the Public Sphere: Concepts and Practices about Space in Calcutta’, Public Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 1997, pp. 83–113. Kirby, Lynn. ‘Male Hysteria and Early Cinema’, Camera Obscura, vol. 6, no. 17, May 1988, pp. 112–32. Kuhn, Annette. Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909–1925. London: Routledge, 1988. The Leader, ‘File 98B, GAD, 1949–1951, Uttar Pradesh State Archives, “Film Inquiry” ’. The Leader, ‘Film Enquiry Committee’, 24 April 1950. Leab, Daniel J. ‘“The Iron Curtain” (1948): Hollywood’s First Cold War Movie’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 8, no. 2, 1988. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of the Everyday, Volume 2. New York: Verso, 2002. ———. The Production of Space. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991. Manglik, Mohini and Ram Advani. ‘Interview with Suzanne Schulz’, Lucknow, 25 August 2010. Meisel, Joseph S. University Representation in India’, Parliamentary History, vol. 30, Issue Supplement s1, October 2011, pp. 85–113. Misra, Amaresh. Lucknow: Fire of Grace, The Story of Its Renaissance, Revolution and the Aftermath. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 1998. Mitchell, Lisa. ‘“To Stop Train Pull Chain”: Writing Histories of Contemporary Political Practice’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 48, 2011. Our Special Investigator. ‘Is Your Cinema Really Necessary?’, The National Herald, 15 January 1947. The National Herald, ‘Alas for Lucknow’, 5 June , p. 4. The National Herald, ‘Lucknow Cinemas Reopen, Settlement Reached with Students, Closure of University’, 4 November 1946, Monday. The National Herald, ‘32 Students Taken into Custody: Sequel to Agitation for Cinema Concessions’, 1 November 1946, Friday. The National Herald, ‘Is Lucknow to Become a City of Ruins?’, 1 January 1947, p. 4. The National Herald, ‘No Student Concession’, 22 February 1947, p. 3. The National Herald, ‘Good News for Sindhis’, 29 February 1948, p. 6. The National Herald, ‘Greater Lucknow Plan: Govt to Acquire Land All Round City’, 25 January 1948, p. 3. The National Herald, ‘“Lucknow City – Hawkers” Paradise, New Menace in Hazrat Ganj’, 5 March 1948, p. 3.

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The National Herald, ‘Iron Curtain’, 14 January 1949. The National Herald, ‘City Ban on Use of Loud Speakers’, 18 September 1950, p. 3. The National Herald, ‘‘Meetings and Processions Banned in City’’, The National Herald, 30 30 March 30, 1950, p. 1. The National Herald ‘Screen Misrepresenting Educated Women: Begum Aizaz Rasool’s Evidence Before Film Enquiry’, 14 August 1950. Pandey, Gyanendra, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1926–34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978. ———. ‘The Revolt of August 1942 in Eastern UP and Bihar’, in The Indian Nation in 1942, ed. Gyanendra Pandey, Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, 1988. The Pioneer, ‘Lathi Charge on Lucknow Students: More than 200 Taken into Custody on Friday, Mass Demonstration before Council House, Unhappy Sequel to Dispute over Cinema Concessions’, 2 November 1946. The Pioneer, ‘“Lucknow Varsity Ordered to Be Closed: Authorities” Failure to Maintain Discipline, Govt. Considering Stoppage of Grant, Students Warned: No Inconvenience to Public Will be Tolerated’, 4 November 1946, Monday. Pioneer, ‘Cinema Managers Complaint’, 13 September 1948, p. 2. Prasad, M. Madhava, ‘The State in/of Cinema’, in Wages of Freedom, ed. Partha Chatterjee. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Rabinbach, Anson, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. ‘The “Bollywoodization” of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003. Rajagopal, Arvind. ‘Introduction: The Public Sphere in India, Structure and Transformation’, in The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in Media History, ed. Arvind Rajagopal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 1–28. Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (S. K. Patil, Chair), 1951. New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1951. Report of the Indian Cinematograph Committee 1927–1928. Madras and Calcutta: Government of India Central Publication Branch and Superintendent, Government Press, Madras, 1928. Report of the Working Group on National Film Policy. Ministry of Information and Broadcasting: Government of India, May 1980. Sangeet Natak Akademi and R. M. Ray. Film Seminar Report, 1955. New Delhi, 1956. Sharma, Pande Bechan and Ruth Vanita. Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Singh, Baljit. A Report on Unemployment in the City of Lucknow. Lucknow: Department of Economics and Sociology, Lucknow University, 1955. Srivastava, Brij Nath. ‘Changing Lucknow’, Pioneer, 10 August 1948, p. 6. Staiger, Janet. Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

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Sundaram, Ravi. ‘Re-visiting “Everyday Life”: The Experience of Delhi’s Media Urbanism’, in Comparing Cities: The Middle East and South Asia, ed. Kamran Asdar Ali. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Vasudevan, Ravi S. ‘Introduction’, in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi S. Vasudevan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. The Times of India. ‘Police Open Fire on Violent Mobs in Many Towns: Cawnpore Post Offices Looted; Lawless Lucknow Students’, 12 August 1942.

6 Museum as metaphor The politics of an imagined Ahmedabad Pooja Thomas

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n 1951, when Jawaharlal Nehru invited Le Corbusier to India to design Chandigarh, Ahmedabad’s erstwhile mayor Chinubhai Chimanbhai commissioned Le Corbusier with the design of a museum and a cultural centre, later named Sanskar Kendra, in the city of Ahmedabad, Gujarat. The museum at Sanskar Kendra was envisioned as part of an extended cultural project at Ahmedabad. The cultural project never saw the light of day. In the end the built museum differed from Corbusier’s vision of unlimited growth in the original plan in which gallery branches were to accommodate the possibility of the museum’s expansion.1 Despite these disappointments, to persist with the Nehru–Chimanbhai comparison, what remains interesting is that the effort invested in the social and cultural capital of the city came from the elite business quarters of the city and not from an institutional figure of democratic authority. At this moment in history however, Narendra Modi, the former chief minister of Gujarat, seems to preoccupy political imagination for his self-proclaimed role in Gujarat’s ‘development’ with the city of Ahmedabad as the face of such development.2 In local, national and global political spaces, Modi has promoted the rationale of such entrepreneurial governance by linking it to the intersections between good governance, capital accumulation and Hindu identity in Gujarat. The natural culmination as well as the authorship of these processes is inscribed on to the person of Modi. Such personhood is fashioned out of simultaneous invocations to humble beginnings,3 and thereby his ‘historic’ as well as ‘democratic’ rise to power; to finding political and regional lineage

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in Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel,4 another ‘able’ administrator; and to the ‘success’ that seems to be Gujarat under his political leadership. Therefore, it is not surprising that in recent years an increased consciousness around the representation of Gujarat and thereby Ahmedabad, its most visible city, centres on the city’s as well as the region’s projection of itself as an important node in the network of global capital.5 The most discussed and visible circulation of images of Ahmedabad as the face of Gujarat plays itself out in the promotion of the Vibrant Gujarat Summits.6 The Gujarat government organized business summits to showcase investment opportunities in the region and to allow dialogue between the government, Gujarat-based companies and global investors. As many scholars such as Renu Desai have shown, the Vibrant Gujarat discourse produced an idea of the city7 as well as the region where ‘culture and commerce, trade and tradition, and enterprise and entertainment go hand-in hand’8 and legitimized the Gujarat government both nationally and globally. The 2002 violence in the wake of the riots in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, under the aegis of Modi’s leadership had severely affected Gujarat’s standing as a business destination.9 However, the perceived success of the summits as well as Modi’s claim to having created the ‘Gujarat model of development’ now produces an eerie logic by which the good city of Ahmedabad needed to be exorcised of Muslim habitation. In this context, Muslimness is constructed as a deterrent to economic progress, encompassing disease, social and economic backwardness and a tendency towards violence and aggression accompanied by religious zeal. Development (a word that one frequently encounters in the city) in Ahmedabad is understood as counter to the threat that such Muslimness invokes.10 What compels popular consensus to such an idea of Ahmedabad? What are the broader narratives by which the image of the city is sustained even as the violence that accompanied the birthing of such an idea is so successfully legitimized? To understand the ways in which consensus to a particular mode of envisioning Ahmedabad is brought about, tracking the history of ‘producing’ Ahmedabad is crucial. Such a history goes beyond a crude conception of city-engineering, a narrative that ironically reinstates the centrality of Modi’s vision of Ahmedabad and Gujarat. Such a history will, instead, attempt to read the idea of Ahmedabad as constituted by broader and larger contexts of the city and the region.

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In an attempt to move towards such historiography, this chapter shall turn to that moment in 2000 (before the 2002 riots) when Vastu Shilp, the architectural firm of Balkrishna Doshi,11 once intern at Le Corbusier’s office in Paris, completed the restoration of Sanskar Kendra. Despite Chinubhai Chimanbhai’s ambitions in the 1950s, Sanskar Kendra had fallen prey to encroachment and neglect over the years. Vastu Shilp Foundation had initiated a proposal submitted to the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation to allow the restoration and revitalization of Sanskar Kendra so as to reposition it as the heart of the city’s civic space. Sanskar Kendra was to be put to ‘new use’, as a medium for the representation of the living city. City museum at Sanskar Kendra is an attempt to restore the architectural heritage; to nurture traditional values; and to conserve the cultural ethos of the city of Ahmedabad . . . Not remaining a mere collection of objects, the City Museum is conceived as a cultural node of a living heritage.12

This chapter shall use the space of the restored museum at Sanskar Kendra as a point of departure to understand the various narratives that feed into the contemporary representation of the city. The city museum is a powerful medium of civic aspiration and identity because Sanskar Kendra draws on some powerful tropes of identity and authority current in popular nostalgia. The fragility of Sanskar Kendra’s utopic production of itself as Ahmedabad is an interesting parallel to the tenuous representation of Ahmedabad as an important node in the network of global capital. On the one hand, the museum attempts to ‘restore’ the reputation of the city of Ahmedabad. As discussed earlier, the contemporary remaking of Ahmedabad is also an exercise in the restoration of reputation, albeit one that is marked by the conscious erasure of the events of 2002. In Sanskar Kendra, the poetics of restoration of reputation is drawn from the city’s pasts. On the other hand, as museum, Sanskar Kendra not only houses the very contemporary impulse to conservation;13 a glance at the elite constitution of its consulting body would indicate that it also invokes the role that ‘place-makers’ such as Chimanbhai seem to have played in the imagination of the city, especially as it expanded across the river beyond its inner walled core. This particular turn towards place-making in Ahmedabad is of crucial importance to this chapter.

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Re-membering Ahmedabad: uses of the past To re-member is to reconstitute through the act of memory.14 The invocation to memory also presumes its ownership and defines the limits of the community it appeals to. I will attempt to use the museum’s design choices to understand a particular kind of re-membering of Ahmedabad, one that draws on mythic fragments of the past, appeals to collective memory and props itself up on the idea of history as authenticity, an idea that stems from the contradictions of colonial modernity. To dwell on this question of history as authenticity, even at the cost of distraction, is important here because the curatorial intent in representing the history of Ahmedabad at Sanskar Kendra draws on the ideological force of history as fact. Rita Kothari and Sarvar Sherrychand in ‘Un-disciplined History’15 discuss the reception of Alexander Forbes’ Ras Mala16 among Gujarati intelligentsia and observe that Ras Mala was understood as ‘history’, even though Forbes in his Preface to Ras Mala disclaimed it as unscientific and ‘wholly popular’. This ‘native’ conception of history was clearly born of the need to authenticate one’s history and identity in colonial terms.17 Indeed, as Kothari and Sherrychand observe, Ras Mala seemed to warrant for Gujarat a place in the annals of modernity. For instance, Nanalal clearly refers to the Ras Mala as ‘Itihasgranth’. He sees Dalpatram as Forbes’ ‘Itihasguru’ (history teacher) and believes that by joining in the historical enterprise, Dalpatram (and through him, Gujarat) stepped into modernity.

The yearning to step into the modern by authenticating indigenous history within colonial terms continues into the postcolonial as the space of Sanskar Kendra may be said to illustrate. Indeed, if Chimanbhai’s invitation to Le Corbusier to build in Ahmedabad is set against the history of the city that Gandhi chose as the site from which to practice indigeneity as political subversion, one would see the imposition of a European vision of ‘modern’ architectural form on Ahmedabad’s landscape as historical irony. While Partha Chatterjee qualified the Chandigarh experiment as an exercise in introducing the urban or the ‘modern’ in the absence of a model of urbanity in the Indian imagination, in the case of Ahmedabad, Chimanbhai’s invitation to Le Corbusier visually asserts and represents the influence and partnership of Gujarati business community in global networks.

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On the other hand, the contemporary politics of naming has implicated the museum in yet another ironical representation of the city. The city museum at Sanskar Kendra is named Karnavati city museum. The web site of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation refers to it as Karnavati city museum and the plaque outside the building surprises the visitor with the indisputability of the name, even as, on the streets, it is referred to as ‘museum’ or Sanskar Kendra. In fact, Yatin Pandya, the architect at Vastu Shilp, in his documentation of the site restoration refers to it simply as ‘City museum, Sanskar Kendra’.18 Asawal or Karnavati is the name of the trading centre close to which Ahmad Shah may have established Ahmedabad. Hindu right wing interpretation has insisted that Karnavati is Ahmedabad, especially since Karnavati, changed from Asaval by Raja Karnadev of Patan according to Ratnamanirao Jote’s account, would give to Ahmedabad a Hindu story of origins instead of a city birthed during Muslim rule.19 However, not many tourist web sites on Ahmedabad or tourist information available in public domain refer to the museum as Karnavati, and the general token ‘Sanskar Kendra’ seems to have persisted in public memory. While this serves as an illustration of the divorce between collective memory and official interpretation, what this also indicates is that the project of restoring Sanskar Kendra is in itself fraught with the politics of conflicting, contending and sometimes, subversive interests. To unravel20 the Ahmedabad in Sanskar Kendra is to critically interrogate the intended experience of the museum and read the documentation on the restoration process against its grain. The documentation of the restoration process of Sanskar Kendra attempts to make Vastu Shilp’s curatorial ambitions transparent. Such transparency is connoted by the exposed lighting tracks and conduits in the city museum. There seems to be an acknowledgement of the political relationship between light and the experience of the real. To obscure the source of illumination that encourages a certain kind of experience or a particular kind of perspective subjects the curatorial intent to falsification. Nevertheless, in the experience of walking through ‘the winding streets of the old city’ recreated in the display layout, the visitor is encouraged to participate in a restorative process that attempts to give back to the city its pasts.21 The services in the form of lighting tracks and conduits are exposed and expressed as add-ons, maintaining the honesty and purity of inserts without confusing with original volumes and elements. On the

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other hand, the display layout and implied movement recreates the experiences of winding streets of Ahmedabad through its sequential movement, gradual unfolding of space, varying scales, axis and framed vignettes; as a spatial reminder and prelude to the context it represents.22

Therefore, while it would seem as if the design choices have drawn attention to the substitutive nature of this space, and consciously declared the curatorial intent of conservation (‘honesty and purity of inserts’), the simulation of an older way of life calls into question the ideological premise of its representation of Ahmedabad. For instance, on entering the museum, the imagined context of Ahmedabad is immediately established. A display unit of a variety of utensils, large wooden facades and wooden brackets with detailed carving invoke the space of the pol, or residential precincts inhabited by caste members that date back to the Gujarat Sultanate, the disintegrating traces of which are still to be found in the central and older part of the city.23 The very essence of the city is thus located in a past way of life, and its geographical/spatial equivalence is found in the old city of Ahmedabad. The museum brochure is curiously unconscious of this conflict – this friction between the idea of the contemporary city and the ideal city of old that drives the syntax of its ambitions. The write-up on folk arts and crafts display is a case in point. ‘Characteristically, a city of entrepreneurs and hardworking people, Ahmedabad is home to many artisans. Traditional block prints, kinkhab, mushru cloth are the hallmarks of the city.’24 The divorce between industry and art notwithstanding, the assertion that artisans are still to be found in Ahmedabad is linked to the statement that the traditional crafts include (in the present tense) block prints, kinkhab and mushru cloth. The two observations, apparently unrelated, in fact perform a crucial role in creating a network of covert meaning. Therefore, even though the active production of traditional crafts and textiles belongs to the past (a reality that is symbolized by the sealed-off glass enclosure that displays specimens of kinkhab and mushru to attest to what the text does not admit) it would seem as if kinkhab and mushru define Ahmedabad’s contemporary craft culture. The next few sentences reveal even as they conceal the reality of Ahmedabad’s folk and craft arts. Paldi area is famous for embroidery, Kubernagar, Wadaj and Maninagar are known for patchwork. Jamalpur has blockprinting work while

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Rangeela pol abounds with bandhni. Madhupura is famous for footwear. Lately plaster idols of Ganesh are being made in huge numbers at Gulbai Tekra.25

For, not only is there no reference to where one may find kinkhab and mushru, or to where these artisans may be found, the reader is confronted with a new list, that of embroidery, patchwork, bandhni, footwear, and Ganesha idols, that suddenly converts the display text to a page in a tourism brochure. Interestingly, the geography of memory and sentiment yields to the contours of an Ahmedabad in the present; the opening note struck in the pols and puras of the Ahmedabad of the Sultanate period give way to the expanded city, spilling over beyond the precincts of the old walled city to the newer western parts, and the areas adjoining the industrial belts. These slippages, the gaps in the text, reveal very different histories of Ahmedabad. They admit to the city’s experience of refugee colonies post the 1947 Partition (Kubernagar); of the city’s negotiation with Sindhis, outsiders to the city and with some history of business acumen (Wadaj); of its ‘troubled’ relationship with its Muslim population, the areas that are most densely populated by them (Jamalpur) as signifier of backwardness, the Other of the more ‘civilized’ and ‘developed’ parts of the city; of Muslim artisans, lower caste and immigrant Rajasthani communities engaged in making Ganesha idols, another marker of yet another anxious relationship with a number of Maharashtrians settled in the city, the trace of which takes one back to the Mahagujarat movement in the 1950s. While it is important to document/collect the evidence of traditions of art and handicraft as it once existed in the past, the city museum at Sanskar Kendra fails to archive the new forms of relationship such craft bears in a different and present age. Anita Ranjan in an evocative essay aptly titled ‘The Legend of Sabarmati’s Hand Block-printed Textiles’ in Suchitra Balasubramanyam and Sharmila Sagara’s Ahmedabad 600: Portraits of a City charts the variety and history of block making and block printing traditions.26 Her narrative is strung with the consciousness of the decline of these arts in the age of mechanical reproduction. Hanif Rangrez, a master-craftsman belonging to the community of Neelgar, or traditional indigo-dyers of Rajashthan, is the sole practitioner of roghan printing in Astodia . . . Today Hanifbhai’s business relies on festival orders for chaniyacholi . . . The use of roghan-printed

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fabrics during Id celebrations has long been replaced by synthetic fabrics and screen printed textiles.

She also points out the need for the revival for such arts and the many ways design development could contribute. The block-printing tradition of Ahmedabad has faced severe competition from the mills and the mechanized printing industry here. Between 1953 and 1957, the number of hand-block printers had fallen from 8,000 to 2,500, and half of these were women . . . The Black and White or Patri Collection developed by Archana Shah illustrates how a dormant printing technique can be brought alive through imagination and design.

If the museum falters in archiving the living city, for whom is the utopic Ahmedabad of old intended? Who is the implied visitor? For if it is those who live in the city, the syntax of the display text reveals that Sanskar Kendra holds true to the museum’s origins – as a form of public instruction – for the ‘ill-informed’ citizens of Ahmedabad. Built as if to remain aloof from both the street and the river, both symbols of a moving, expanding city, what is ironical is that the restoration of Sanskar Kendra was meant to stimulate a cultural and social ‘restoration’ of Ahmedabad. But with little awareness of Sanskar Kendra’s new ‘designs’, the real city walker’s indifference may unravel the rhetoric of conservation/restoration. Or perhaps, the utopic fixities of the Ahmedabad produced in Sanskar Kendra is meant for a different kind of consumption, one that the business acumen of its makers recognize as essential to the growth of the city. The tourist – the veritable sign for the one who is positioned outside of the ‘local’ – is crucially and economically important to the manufacture of the local. The manufacture of Ahmedabad at Sanskar Kendra is implicated in a larger network of meaning that capitalizes on the consensus to the idea that the Good City and Good Business go together. In many histories of Ahmedabad and Gujarat, particularly those produced under British colonial administration, the good of the city is intimately linked to its business ethos. Such narratives often turn to the figure of the Nagarsheth in whom the link between good city and good business is particularly exemplified. In The Shaping of Modern Gujarat, Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth27 point out that the Nagarsheth was the head of the guild of merchants, also the city council, or the mahajan, in large cities like Ahmedabad, Surat

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and Baroda. The mahajan regulated business life, social and cultural life; settled trade disputes and negotiated with their government in matters of trade. In Maganlal Vakhatchand’s history of Ahmedabad, the Nagarsheth and the mahajan are represented as symbols of social cohesion and harmony.28 Even in later histories, the sentimentalization of the figure of the merchant is evident. M. S. Commissariat recounts from a pledge of gratitude that merchants of the city of Ahmedabad signed in favour of Sheth Khushalchand who, as Nagarsheth, saved the city from being plundered by the Marathas at his own monetary expense. He does so to substantiate his story of the centrality of the institution to the city’s good fortune. However, as Yagnik and Sheth point out, the mahajans were not entirely open to membership from all castes. Therefore, contrary to the easy claim that mahajans cut across caste and community lines,29 it is truer that the mahajan strictly regulated the admission of new members to the guild, reflecting its own caste and class biases. Nevertheless, the idea of the Nagarsheth as representative of local resourcefulness, of native agency, has lingered in popular imagination. As powerful patron and financier to Mughal courts, it is the figure of the merchant that occupies the space of alternate local authority, in dialogue with the power of the Mughal emperors and, later, British administration. The academic attention accorded to the phenomenon, as it were, may be glimpsed in M. S. Commissariat’s Studies in the History of Gujarat.30 Commissariat obsessively tracks the life and career of Shantidas Jawahari in Jain religious texts, histories and various farmans issued during Mughal rule. Commissariat literally pursued some of these farmans to retrieve them from, in some cases, familial and private collections. While Makarand Mehta contextualizes the institution of the Nagarsheth especially with reference to Shantidas Zaveri within a Jain religo-business ethic, and as the inherited evolved form of the relationship between Jain monks and Mughal authority,31 what is curious is that despite the fact that the institution is no longer in existence, the myth of the Nagarsheth persists in the contemporary imagination of Ahmedabad. Historical practice, especially in the tradition inherited by colonial anthropology, and its circulation in ideological apparatuses produced the indispensability of the Nagarsheth to the history of the region. As Riho Isaka has pointed out, Gujarati narratives of regional history and identity were written by intellectual elites such as Maganlal Vakhatchand and Edalji Dosabhai, who reproduced, even as they

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negotiated, British knowledge of Gujarati society, particularly that of Ahmedabad city.32 Vakhatchand and Dosabhai’s histories of Ahmedabad and Gujarat respectively were studied across schools in Gujarat after the Gujarat Vernacular Society in its quest to promote Gujarati language, history and culture, recommended them as appropriate for ‘local’ instruction. The idea of the mahajan and the institution of the Nagarsheth as symbols of prosperity and social harmony as well as characteristic of the business ethos of Ahmedabad thus persisted in generations of history-reading. Siddharth Raychaudhuri’s work on the role of indigenous elites in negotiating and appropriating colonial policy measures to intervene in city morphology offers a direct critique to the sentimental and romanticized construction of the intellectual business elites of the city.33 Raychaudhuri narrates that while the initial years of colonial intervention in the city’s morphology accompanied by town planning were conducted by the colonial government through the instrument of the municipality, increased public dissatisfaction and protests saw the municipality being taken over by a new set of elites headed by Vallabhbhai Patel. Raychaudhuri argues that a new system of signification drawn up by the newly constituted municipality envisioned growth in the area around Gujarat Vidyapeeth and Gujarat College, on the western side of the river, as the new area of importance. The political leadership centred on Vallabhbhai Patel thus attempted to establish a new social and cultural order with the Gujarat Vidyapeeth as its institutional basis. Popular consensus to the utopia of the good city ‘protected’ by good business and the representation of such entrepreneurial agency as local action and elite forms of signification feed into contemporary image production of Ahmedabad. The next part will attempt to understand the idea of Ahmedabad’s centrality to global markets and as the gateway to Gujarat region’s development as engendered by these narratives. 

Vibrant Ahmedabad The Vibrant Gujarat campaigns have been the centre of much political and academic debate. The scholarly response to the campaigns is best represented by Renu Desai’s34 analysis of city-imagineering in Ahmedabad. Desai interrogates the Vibrant Gujarat events to

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recognize a reinvention and projection of Ahmedabad as the gateway of investment to Gujarat. Coupled with her questioning of elite civic institutional attempts to rehabilitate Ahmedabad’s image in the wake of 2002 riots, she contextualizes the summit campaigns and other public events such as the Gujarat Institute of Housing and Estate Developers (GIHED) property show within a politics of forgetting, erasure and denial. Undeniably, such politics sweeps over the violent histories of Gujarat, especially as it played itself out on the streets of Ahmedabad and forgets and erases narratives of poverty, deprivation and displacement in its urge to re-member Ahmedabad and thereby Gujarat as good for business. In the rhetorical display of its treasures, showcasing its strengths as the Vibrant Gujarat Summit media events and web site insistently and repetitively do, Ahmedabad became the site for turning investment into a high-profile spectacle and the face of Gujarat.35 The Vibrant Gujarat Summit has been perceived as successful in marketing itself as a global business event. The five summits since 2003 have brought in a promised $920 billion, but a state department analysis of the investments at the Vibrant Gujarat summits suggests a 25 per cent conversion of promised investments as opposed to the 60 per cent conversion rate claimed by Narendra Modi, the then chief minister of Gujarat.36 The gap in the claims made, the misrepresentation of an image by which Narendra Modi, self-fashioned Nagarsheth, builds his city of good fortune and secures his political mileage, cannot be entirely overlooked. To understand the centrality of Ahmedabad in the development discourse for Gujarat region, David Harvey’s seminal essay ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, may be useful here.37 Harvey draws attention to the shift in urban governance, from practices focused on providing services, facilities and benefits to fostering local employment and economic development. Harvey terms this shift as a shift from managerial to entrepreneurial. Harvey examines the trend in the sociopolitical climate of economic uncertainty and political instability, and notes that even the most resolute of municipal socialists would find themselves drawn into the ‘capitalist game’, given the prevalence of inter-urban competition for investment. Even though recent summits shifted venue to Gandhinagar, given the twin-city development paradigm espoused by the political establishment in Gujarat, Gandhinagar is symbolically often co-opted within

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Ahmedabad. In fact, given that the earlier summits used Ahmedabad as a signifier of the region’s ‘urbanity’, showcasing the Sabarmati River Front Project and the Bus Rapid Transport System (BRTS) as signs of its global readiness, as it were, Ahmedabad, as Renu Desai argues, is indispensable to Gujarat’s argument for good business. In 2013, the seeming shift in the summits’ focus draws attention to the way the region has displaced the nation, marking the stirrings of, in Harvey’s sense, an inter-state competition for global resources. The Vibrant Gujarat 2013 Summit is going to be transformational and revolutionary – both in its coverage and scale. It will provide a platform for various states of India and other countries to cooperate and explore attractive business opportunities.38

Envisioned as an important node in the network of global capital, as a ‘global business hub’, the Vibrant Gujarat events imagine for the city and region a utopia of autonomy and power, a narrative that uncannily reminds one of the Nagarsheth configured as localized authority, in opposition to power at the centre, or even, of Chimanbhai building ‘modernity’ in Ahmedabad. My examination of the representation of Ahmedabad in Sanskar Kendra, one that is predicated on its pasts but, paradoxically, promises a new future, has revealed the gaps and fissures in its construction. Metaphor for the contemporary imagination of and in Ahmedabad, the representational space of the museum may be reread for the elisions that feed into the making of the city. Such an image of the city capitalizes on the value of its exchange within networks of consumption. Such forms of city-making forget the history of a city evolving and expanding under various economic and political developments to locate its spatial ethos in an idealized walled city. They use the past and its institutions to tell a story of social cohesion and harmony. For instance, various mythic narratives of Ahmedabad and of the region codified into historical practice articulate the idea of entrepreneurship as ‘local’ action and ‘native’ resistance protecting the interests of the city/community. Thus, the spectacle of Ahmedabad, both in the museum and the summits, draws on consensus to the idea that the good city and good business go together. If the Ahmedabad at Sanskar Kendra dissolves under scrutiny, it may also be seen that the idea of Gujarat, premised on a misrepresentation, is vulnerable to its own grandeur.

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❁ Notes 1 See Deborah Gans and Le Corbusier, The Le Corbusier Guide (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), p. 212. 2 At the time of writing this, Narendra Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat. The 2014 Lok Sabha elections resulted in a majority victory for Modi, Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate, with huge margins. The ‘Gujarat model of development’ has been the bulwark of Modi’s and the BJP’s claim to the throne in the 2014 elections. Gujarat was projected as the promise of what Modi could deliver in the future. During his election campaigns Modi elaborated on his model of economic development for India, a model that is overwhelmingly burdened by a massive urbanization programme. Thus, the creation of a 100 smart cities, modernization of transport, investment in agrarian technology, as well as investment in tourism, trade and technology, would generate Brand India for ‘terrorism divides but tourism unites’. See http://www.livemint.com/Politics/5d1CPjoXiWstq RkcYhdPVN/Narendra-Modi-targets-Congress-for-not-naming-RahulGandhi-a.html. Several commentators and economic analysts have called Modi’s bluff about Gujarat’s model of development, critiquing it on account of its exaggerated claims as well as its espousal of extreme neo-liberal policies that would harm the country’s economic interests. 3 Modi often narrates his origins in a poor family, as someone who sold tea for a living, to emphasize his personal ability to transform situations of adversity. The role of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindu right-wing organization, in his educational and social upbringing does not find concrete mention in any of these narratives. 4 An influential leader from Gujarat of the Indian National Congress who played a prominent role in India’s struggle for independence, Vallabhbhai Patel, was known for his administrative and leadership skills. Recently, Modi embarked on a project to build the tallest statue in the world of Vallabhbhai Patel with iron collected from the villages of India. 5 Many urban scholars (e.g. Knox, Lash and Urry, Hall and Hubbard, Fainstein, Harvey) have pointed to the processes by which the economic fortunes of cities are linked to global economic trends. They have observed the ways in which despite the placelessness of the economics of globalization, the salience of territorial politics seems to have been heightened as is evident from forms of urban restructuring and entrepreneurial governance. 6 See Renu Desai, ‘Entrepreneurial Urbanism in the Time of Hindutva: CityImagineering, Place Marketing and Citizenship in Ahmedabad’, in Urbanizing Citizenship, Contested Spaces in Indian Cities, ed. Renu Desai and Romola Sanyal (New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd, 2012), pp. 31–57.

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7 The venue shifted to Gandhinagar, the ‘official capital’ of Gujarat in later years. However, many of the events that both promote the summits and also serve as tourist attractions during the period of the summits are held in Ahmedabad. 8 Gujarat Government web site at http://www.vibrantgujarat.com/past-event. html#14 as quoted in Renu Desai, ‘The Globalizing City in the Time of Hindutva: The Politics of Urban Development and Citizenship in Ahmedabad, India’, Unpublished dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2010, p. 73. 9 Often characterized as a riot-prone city, communal conflict has engulfed Ahmedabad since the early years of the 20th century. While many of them occurred in tandem with nationwide disturbances during the freedom struggle, several were also locally based and politically motivated. The worst of these was in 2002 and is often characterized as a state-sponsored pogrom that left thousands dead and several thousands homeless. 10 See Arvind Rajagopal, ‘Special Political Zone: Urban Planning, Spatial Segregation and the Infrastructure of Violence in Ahmedabad’, South Asian History and Culture, vol. 1, no. 4, 2010, pp. 529–56. 11 Balkrishna Doshi’s office Vastu-Shilp has a long history of association with the city’s many building and infrastructure/cultural projects. See Ravi Kalia, Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004) for a detailed discussion of Doshi’s role in the transformation of Ahmedabad’s architectural landscape. 12 Yatin Pandya, ‘Insite Story’, 2009, Retrieved 24 June 2012 http://www. insiteindia.in/pdf/2009/june/insite%20story.pdf. 13 From the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) web site, ‘As a driving force of cultural diversity, living heritage is very fragile. In recent years, it has received international recognition and its safeguarding has become one of the priorities of international cooperation thanks to UNESCO’s leading role in the adoption of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage.’ 24 June 2012 http://portal. unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php -URL_ID=34325&URL_DO=DO_ TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html. 14 Toni Morrison coins the term ‘re-membrance’ to understand ways of coming to terms with racial trauma. For her, the word embraces the re-constitution of a body traumatized by violence and the politics of the contemporary need to remember an African slave history in America. I use the term because it carries with it the sense of trauma that the construction of Ahmedabad at Sanskar Kendra denies and to connote the use of memory especially in relation to its implied definition of community. 15 See pages 71–72, Sarvar Sherrychand and Rita Kothari, ‘Undisciplined History’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, vol. 7, no. 1, 2003, pp. 69–87. 16 Ras Mala is the collaborative documentation of Gujarat’s history and folk literature by Alexander Kinloch Forbes and Kavi Dalpatram. 17 Sumit Sarkar, ‘The Many Worlds of Indian History’ in Writing Social History (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 6.

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18 Pandya, Insite. 19 In May 1990, a resolution to rename Ahmedabad as Karnavati was passed by the AMC and forwarded to Gujarat government. The state sent the proposal to the centre, but no action was taken. When Congress came back to power in the AMC, it revoked the resolution. (TOI, ‘Ahmedabad to Turn 600, No Celebrations’, Ashish Vashi, 6 August 2009) 20 The word ‘unravel’ has particular significance with reference to one of the legends of the founding of the city. It is said that Manek Baba had magical powers and would unravel by night the walls that Ahmed Shah built by day. 21 I use the plural form here primarily because Sanskar Kendra collects artefacts of several periods in Ahmedabad’s history that provide testimony to its strengths. Therefore, Sanskar Kendra does not only dwell on Gandhi or on the city’s repute as a centre for textile manufacture. Sanskar Kendra does not depict a singular past. In fact, the design layout encourages a compound perspective into several moments in Ahmedabad’s history. 22 Pandya, ‘Insite Story’. June 2009. 23 A number of projects, some promoted by city elites as heritage hotels and others sanctioned by the AMC, see heritage value in the pols. AMC’s heritage cell is currently working on a number of restoration projects in the pols of Ahmedabad. 24 Sanskar Kendra Information Booklet. 25 Ibid. 26 Suchitra Sheth and Sharmila Sagara, eds. Ahmedabad 600: Portraits of a City (Ahmedabad: Marg, 2011), p. 117. 27 Achyut Yagnik and Suchitra Sheth, The Shaping of Modern Gujarat (New Delhi: Penguin, 2005). 28 Maganlal Vakhatchand, Amadavadno Itihas, 1851 (Ahmedabad: Gujarat Vidya Sabha, 2008). 29 See page 93, Makarand Mehta, Indian merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective (Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1991). 30 M. S Commissariat, Studies in the History of Gujarat (Ahmedabad: Saraswati Pustak Bhandar, not dated). 31 See page 98, Mehta, Indian Merchants… 32 Riho Isaka, ‘Gujarati Intellectuals and History writing in the Colonial Period’, Economic and Political Weekly, 30 November 2002, vol. XXXVII, no. 48. 33 Siddharth Raychaudhuri, ‘Colonialism, Indigenous Elites and the Transformation of Cities in the Non-Western World: Ahmedabad (Western India), 1890–1947’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, 2001, pp. 677–726. 34 Renu Desai, ‘Entrepreneurial Urbanism in the Time of Hindutva: CityImagineering, Place Marketing and Citizenship in Ahmedabad’, Urbanizing Citizenship, Contested Spaces in Indian Cities (Sage Publications Ltd, 2012). 35 See http://www.vibrantgujarat.com/. 36 Vinod K. Jose, ‘The Emperor Uncrowned: The Rise of Narendra Modi’, Caravan: A Journal of Politics and Culture, 1 March 2012.

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37 David Harvey, ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, vol. 71, no. 1, 1989, pp. 3–17. 38 ‘The Global Business Hub’, Vibrant Gujarat 2013 web site, Retrieved 25 June 2012 http://www.vibrantgujarat.com/.

Bibliography Commissariat, M. S. Studies in the History of Gujarat. Ahmedabad: Saraswati Pustak Bhandar. Desai, Renu. ‘The Globalizing City in the Time of Hindutva: The Politics of Urban Development and Citizenship in Ahmedabad, India’, unpublished dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2010. Desai, Renu and Romola Sanyal. Urbanizing Citizenship, Contested Spaces in Indian Cities. New Delhi: Sage Publications Ltd, 2012. Fainstein, Susan S. and Scott Campbell. Readings in Urban Theory, 2nd ed. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. Gans, Deborah and Le Corbusier. The Le Corbusier Guide. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006. Harvey, David. ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, vol. 71, no. 1, 1989, pp. 3–17. Isaka, Riho. ‘Gujarati Intellectuals and History Writing in the Colonial Period’, Economic and Political Weekly, 30 November 2002: vol XXXVII, no. 48. Kalia, Ravi. Gandhinagar: Building National Identity in Postcolonial India. University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Mehta, Makarand. Indian Merchants and Entrepreneurs in Historical Perspective. Delhi: Academic Foundation, 1991. Rajagopal, Arvind. ‘Special Political Zone: Urban Planning, Spatial Segregation and the Infrastructure of Violence in Ahmedabad’, South Asian History and Culture, vol. 1, no. 4, 2010, pp. 529–56. Raychaudhuri, Siddharth. ‘Colonialism, Indigenous Elites and the Transformation of Cities in the Non-Western World: Ahmedabad (Western India), 1890–1947’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 35, 2001, pp. 677–726. Sarkar, Sumit. Writing Social History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sherrychand, Sarvar and Rita Kothari. ‘Undisciplined History’, Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, vol. 7, no. 1, 2003, pp. 69–87. Sheth Suchitra and Sharmila Sagara, eds. Ahmedabad 600: Portraits of a City. Ahmedabad: Marg, 2011. Vakhatchand, Maganlal. Amadavadno Itihas, 1851. Ahmedabad: Gujarat Vidya Sabha, 2008. Yagnik, Achyut and Suchitra Sheth. The Shaping of Modern Gujarat. New Delhi: Penguin, 2005.

Part III Nostalgia ❂

7 The labour of self-making Youth service workers and postsocialist urban development in Kolkata1 Saikat Maitra

❂ 

Urban make-over

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ow does Kolkata, whose cherished cultural self-representations include a plethora of images of the young Marxist radical, militant trade union protests or the thousand and one marches against capitalist conspiracies, respond today to the explosion of gated communities, shopping malls, exclusive cafes, or themed restaurants spatially stabilizing the feel of global consumerist lifestyles? The seductive proximity of these lifestyles pulsate through the city, partially displacing what John Hutnyk (1996) called the ‘rumor [sic] of poverty’, characterizing Kolkata for most of the 20th century, by a new ‘rumour of good life’. IT capital, real-estate development or the surfeit of branded commodities available in upscale shopping malls like South City or City Centre is expected to materialize the privileged signs of this good life. This new rumour surges through the ‘nervous system’ of the urbanscape touching and transforming the political, cultural and social terrains of Kolkata. Perhaps it would not be incorrect to read the defeat of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – CPI(M)-led Left Front government which had ruled Kolkata (and the state of West Bengal) from 1977 to 2011 – as symptomatic of broader currents of change affecting multiple registers of city life: the cultural, the visual, the aesthetic, and the political (Biswas 2010, Basu & Majumder 2013).2 To try and make sense of these new ways of conceiving the city has necessitated

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inquiring glances at both the immediate past and the coming future. Reflecting on the three decades of Left Front rule, the film theorist Moinak Biswas (2010) has suggested how this period saw the evolution of a complex urban public culture in Kolkata, made possible through a combination of socialist rhetoric recognizing the rights of marginalized classes and the complete cultural hegemony of the Bengali nationalist bourgeoisie or Bhadraloks. The ubiquitous presence of the CPI(M) party cadres enforced this public culture in the quotidian affairs of social life in Kolkata. This public culture was apotheosized by an enormous army of party cadres, affiliates, trade union representatives, or sympathizers as approximating a socialist utopia of sorts that could potentially safeguard, and mediate between the competing interests of the Chotolok (the working poor) and the Bhadralok. This public culture was the urbanized extension of what the political scientist Dwaipayan Bhattacharya terms as the ‘Party-Society’ – a web of moral values, cultural ethos and political compulsions that was organized by the CPI(M) and which, in turn, legitimated its rule (Bhattacharyya 2009). While this legitimating principle had been crucial to the CPI(M)’s long electoral dominance, the heavily mediatized milieu of Kolkata coupled with rising middle-class aspirations creating diverse consumerist tastes, and urban lifestyles from the early 2000s began disrupting the former consensus between Bhadralok sensibilities and socialist political imperatives (Biswas 2010, 201).3 With the dissipation of the long socialist imaginary of the city, another very different idea of the city began to be formed – one marked by global lifestyle preferences, middle-class affluence and entrepreneurial aspirations of realizing the good life of consumer capitalism in the immediate present. A concrete realization of this desire for being in touch with the global can be seen in the surfeit of large gated communities in the city with a whole range of facilities like shopping malls, schools, private clubs, and so on (Chatterjee 2004, Roy 2003). Fuelled by a speculative real estate capital eager to cash in on the penchant for the ‘global’, these exclusive residential spaces are little utopias for realizing privatized fantasies of shopping, leisure and consumption while bracketing out the noisy messiness of the city. Is it then a narrative of consumerist utopia(s) replacing the socialist one? However, such hopes of finally breaking free of Kolkata’s stereotypical images of third world poverty still rub uneasily against spiralling inequality, squalor and urban chaos. Moreover, the grittiness of the outside city cannot be effectively contained

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by erecting ever-more complex systems of security, and surveillance, but has to be admitted in the form of a large underclass workforce required to enable the smooth functioning of the privatized zones of consumption, and global living. In this chapter I explore how contemporary urban service labour plays a contradictory role through their assimilation within the growing circuits of Kolkata’s consumer economy. On the one hand, the supply of an abundant and cheap labour force is critical for animating and sustaining the ‘rumour of good life’ in spaces like shopping malls, cafe chains, multi-cuisine restaurants, fashion boutiques, or multinational fast-food outlets. Yet, at the same time, labour carries within itself the constant reminder about how fragile and limited are the fantasies of creating the global good life in Kolkata. Critical to sustaining the image of consumerist utopias as a realizable form of perfection, labour nonetheless acts to disrupt this ideal of perfection, inducing disorder, anxiety and violence of the externalized city. However, these disruptions should not be taken to mean a collective refusal for workers to be included in the emerging fantasy of consumerism or their desire to revert to the socialist utopia of the past. As I would suggest later through my ethnographic details, individuated aspiration of being included in the corporate promises of social mobility, affluence and consumerism remain powerful motivating factors for many of the workers in spite of the often desperate socio-economic pressures that come to bear on them. As much as the consumers they serve, service employees too would like to take part in the utopia they are ostensibly constructing – yet it fails them repeatedly in developing any real material traction on this utopia. Suspended between two very different paradigms of social betterment – a socialist and a consumerist one – workers grope for an as-yet-unclear utopia they might appropriate for themselves. Individually disposable, service workers en masse are the foot soldiers of a rapidly expanding consumerist economy in the city (Gooptu 2009). Their labour is directed not at the production of material commodities but rather at the creation of ‘immaterial’ cultural, and aesthetic content of the products they sell or the spaces in which they work (Hardt & Negri 2001, 2005). Utilizing their communicational skills, bodily comportments, social habits, voice inflections, or affectionate smiles, workers in these zones of consumption are expected to arouse and transmit the affective pleasures of shopping, and consumption in customers (Hardt & Negri 2005, 108). Management

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and discipline of work crucially depend on constant modulation and capture of the employee’s affective potentiality as a ‘substrate of the body’s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect’ (Clough 2007, 2; Deleuze & Guattari 1987). After Franco Berardi (2009), we can talk of a ‘soul’ at work here, where the workers plug into their affective capacities to produce connections, affinities, relations, and intimacies with the prospective consumer. The young employees thus stand as mediating units connecting Kolkata’s urban consumers with valorized images of the mall or the cafe as genuine purveyors of the authentically global. The value of work in the affective mode lies in the ability to create an image of specific commodities or spaces as imminently sought after. That is to say, labour primarily subtends, enhances and magnifies not the usefulness of a commodity, service or mode of consumption but its unique image as free floating and universally desirable (Gorz 2010). These images ultimately create the real value of the product or service or space of consumption (Beller 2006). However, what happens when the disjuncture between the everyday life-experiences of these workers and the ‘dream world’ of consumption they are supposed to incite fail to produce the requisite images? What happens when the affective labourer is unsure of the proper cultural or aesthetic qualities to evoke in order to be valorized? What new kinds of cultural forms of dwelling in the city are thereby made possible in the gaps and fissures between the normative ideals of affective labour and the labourer’s own subjective calibrations of such ideals? These questions are fundamental to deciphering current capitalist growth in Indian urban spaces and the types of labouring subjects which are being created in the wake of this growth. My interest in unpacking the concept of affective labour lies in trying to think how this form of labour, expected to give a concrete image to the utopian notions of consumerism, disrupts that image through the creation of alternative images of life in the city. Here, I narrate the complex penetration of affective labour in a city where the development of consumerism and its validation as a properly utopian category remains at best a tendentious and partial one. This chapter is primarily based on ethnographic insights on service/ retail work gleaned over 12 months of my employment as an entrylevel shop floor salesperson, also known as customer sales attendant (CSA), at a large food-based retail chain outlet in one of Kolkata’s biggest shopping malls – the South City Mall. This retail outlet, for which

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I will use the pseudonym of Globofood,4 employs mostly a young workforce of about 400 men and women in their early twenties, in line with the company’s corporate profile of ‘mak[ing] fine living, affordable’ for the young global Indian. The ethnographic vignettes I write about are drawn from daily work experiences as a CSA in Globfood along with interviews, focus group discussions and informal conversations with colleagues, management personnel and customers. 

A precarious present The primacy of youth workers is not exclusive to Globofood, but is a generalized condition of organized retail work today. One personnel manager pointed out that the rapid expansion of retail corporations could only happen by tapping into the ‘dynamism of the youth’. During certain hours of the day, and in late evenings, one can see these workers, both young men and women, rushing in before opening hours at South City. Or later on during the commute home; many still clad in their black trousers, and the white/blue/green uniform shirts, getting down in the more working-class neighbourhoods of the city like Garia or Moulal – a very mixed population adept at speaking some smattering of English, able to smile at the customers with a mix of spontaneity and servility, along with some keyboard skills, and most importantly, cultivating the ‘habit of developing no durable habits at all’ (Virno 1996, 13.4). If after Paolo Virno we try to decipher a ‘degree zero’ or ‘neutral kernel’ of thought or feeling structuring this workforce, we will probably discover the primacy of ‘opportunism, fear, and cynicism’ as critical states of mind inducing constant mobility, flexibility and adaptability (1996, 13.4). It would be interesting to compare the situation of the contemporary urban workforce in Kolkata with an emergent post-industrial working class in the west which the British sociologist Guy Standing (2011) designates as the ‘precariat’. For Standing, the precariat is composed of young workers who find themselves increasingly in a social milieu of abandonment, economic uncertainties and social instabilities. Excluded out of the Fordist safety nets of state welfarism and secured job contracts, the precariat drifts in and out of dead-end jobs, contingent labour contracts and periodic unemployment (Standing 2011). Such a comparison while suggesting similarities between low-end service workforce in both the post-industrial West and postcolonial

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contexts like Kolkata in terms of diminishing employment guarantees, flexible job requirements or low wages would still raise questions about the historical differences in the perception of precariousness. This is because the absence of state welfare and lack of access to secured wage labour have been the fundamental constants of city life in Kolkata for a vast majority of its population. The 1947 migration of refugees, the food riots of the 1960s, the 1971 Bangladesh war, and again the flow of refugees, the long decades of 1970s and 1980s attended by endemic industrial lockouts, job-loss and the ubiquitous presence of the social type shikkhito bekar or educated unemployed are just some of the causes of a variegated sense of urban precariousness in the city. Javed, working as a contractual employee in a large multinational bank’s credit card department in Kolkata, succinctly summed up the persistence of a precarious life that seems to continue as a tedious refrain from one generation to the next. My father was a daily labourer in Kolkata’s dock-yard, working himself to death, and still not quite able to provide two square meals for the family. I have a BA degree, and run around from one end of the city to the other every day, and just like my father I too am unable to provide two meals for the family. At least my father had some respite once he came home from work. For me the cell phone means that I am always on call, always ready to dash off to convince a prospective client.

I would like to suggest here that it might be more useful to think of precariousness in the context of Kolkata not so much as abandonment by the state or lack of guaranteed access to wage labour like in the Fordist economy. Rather, precariousness resides in the progressive entrapment of an ever greater number of youth workers like Javed into the circuits of an aggressively expanding corporate capital in Indian cities. This inclusion constantly stokes the aspirations of young employees of one day being able to embrace the lifestyles and forms of consumption that seem tantalizingly close. Yet, those promises keep getting deferred, creating cycles of frustration, anxiety or even rage. Nevertheless, aspirations are powerful motivators to go on trying where ‘something feels like something’ in the constant whirring of potential opportunities, possible employment openings or chances for making some quick money (Stewart 2007). But there are also fears of losing jobs, of not being able to make a life for oneself, or the endless anxieties about surviving on a salary which demands so much in terms

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of bodily exhaustion and emotional distress. They create an everyday feeling of groundlessness unless one manages to remain attuned to the rapid flux of city life: a relentless feedback loop between opportunism, fear and cynicism. Precariousness then resides in an emergent and aggravated sense of groundlessness for urban service workers by dint of their integration within the expanding circuits of corporate capital in Indian cities. Brian Massumi (2002, 8) characterizes the tense of this living as ‘future-past’ – an uneasy present suspended between the ‘pure past of the sudden and uncontrollable contingency’ of jobloss, dead-end work, poverty, ‘and the uncertain future of its recurrence’. After working for a few months as a ‘team member’, that is as a floor-level worker in one of the largest cafe chains in the city, Binu expresses the recurrent feeling of groundlessness well. She uses the Bengali word ashonkha, or dread, to describe her everyday experience of work. Success or failure in my job does not depend on making the perfect cup of coffee, for everything is made by machines. It is not about any skill at all. Rather, survival in the job depends on keeping everyone happy – from the supervisors to the customers. One false move, and all the hard work I have done to get here do not count.



The house of air, and light Before store opening hours at Globofood, I often linger in the South City Mall. On the main lobby of the mall, shards of intense blue-yellow lights of the giant video screen refract from the sheen of granite floors. Shop windows transport onlookers to a distance far beyond their mental horizons – perfumes, sunglasses, crystals, fashion accessories – creating a seductive array of commodities and branded identities. The senses are instantaneously hard-wired to the dizzy cascade of images – shimmering radiance of the escalator rails, granite surfaces, giant plate glass windows – this place as Pierre Bachelard puts it – is a house of air, and light (Bachelard 1994) (Figure 7.1). Its rhythm smooth, unstriated and glistening, the South City Mall, however, is criss-crossed by other rhythms, other movements. I cross the staff entry gates tucked away from the main mall entrance, and the hot, stale air of the storage sections overwhelms me. Pools of stagnant water, walls yellowed with urine from the time when there were no toilet facilities for the low-end staff and the persistent smell of

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Figure 7.1: Inside the South City Mall. Source:

Courtesy of the author.

rotting vegetables create dense knots of feelings of entrapment just outside the sliding doors of the main mall. ‘It gets better with time’, Narayanda, the security guard, assures me. His hours of duty stretch for 36 hours, three times a week amidst the heat, and the stench. ‘But you notice the smell only for an hour or so’, he smiles. However, he also recounts how his whole body seems to be permeated by this stench when he gets off work. ‘No matter how many times I take a bath, the smell seems to stick to me.’ It is beginning to be late afternoon, and already workers are streaming out of the mall for lunch – the blue shirts of Globofood, the striped shirts of Shoppers Stop. They mill around the food stalls outside the South City Mall driving hard bargains to get some freebies – something extra for the regular customers. The salesgirls from Revlon or Garnier stand out with their bright suits, and even brighter makeups, trying desperately to avoid the mud stains or splashes of watery curries. ‘Only one pair of suit, and it has to last for a year’, someone explains. Even minor damages to the uniform can result in instant job loss. ‘The employee must bear responsibility for the maintenance of the uniform’, the work manual states unambiguously.

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‘Just like the days, workers from the Usha Factory used to come out during the recesses’, my colleague Akhil, who grew up in a nearby slum, reminiscences looking at the workers pouring out of South City Mall. But not quite as cellphones zip out of the uniform pockets – Samsungs, Nokias or Chinese-made replicas like the ‘Blue-Berry’ handset which more or less is indistinguishable from the standard Blackberry device. Everybody is knowledgeable about brands, remembers the model numbers and the applications each model comes with. Dates are fixed quickly; everything must be coordinated at a rush, and time is at a premium. The quiet by-lane looping around the brackish waters of the Bikramgarh Lake, just behind the South City Mall, is a favoured destination, a little respite from the rhythms of work. And the uniforms – no longer the drabness of sweaty, machine-floor khakis which have given way to skinny, fitted drainpipes, sharp skirts and pointed faux Italian shoes. The South City Mall itself is part of a super expensive gated community, five 32-storey apartment buildings with a fancy school, a pharmacy and the mall shaped like the proud prow of a ship. It is adjacent to Poddar Nagar in southern Kolkata, having one of the oldest settlements or colonies (as they are locally known) of refugees from former East Pakistan who came over after India’s Partition in 1947. Many of the older residents from the refugee families remember working for the Usha Factory (the factory Akhil was referring to), which used to manufacture electrical appliances before it shut down in the early 2000s, citing labour disputes. Soon, the workshop sheds and the staff quarters started getting demolished to make way for the South City Mall and apartments. Some of the former workers from Poddar Nagar still remember the chants of Inquilab Zindabad (Long Live the Revolution) by trade union activists or the violent demonstrations before the factory gates when the factory owners first ceased manufacturing operations, and then sold the land to the property developers of South City. Well, these days there are not many opportunities for shouting ‘Long Live the Revolution’ in Globofood or anywhere else in South City Mall. The mall management as well as the retail organization in South City has taken a decision not to encourage any kind of unionization or other activities that are ‘unprofessional’. Instead of Inquilab Zindabad, the typical refrain heard at the customer service desk at Globofood is ‘No issue, sir/no issue, madam’, meaning in the peculiarly inflected Indian English that none of the customers’ requests pose a problem that the Globofood employee cannot solve. ‘Service with a

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smile’, that old adage gets repeated so many times in the employee training programmes that Shanto, who also works at the service desk, jokes that Globofood should perform plastic surgery on its employees to keep them smiling permanently. Shanto should know the importance of maintaining a ‘pleasant profile’ as the Globofood training manual recommends. A few months before I began working for Globofood, he nearly lost his job after an altercation with a customer who demanded a refund on an article of clothing without the valid sales receipt. As per Globofood rules refunds without receipts are not allowed under any circumstances. Infuriated, the customer lodged a complaint about Shanto’s ‘abusive behaviour’, and ‘indifference to the customer’s needs’. He was subsequently forced to apologize to the customer by the floor supervisors, and the complaint damaged his service record permanently. What for Shanto remains, as the bitterest memory of the entire episode, was the apathy of his co-workers at the service desk during his predicament. All that they could do was to come up with lame jokes about how his name Shanto (meaning the peaceful one) should be turned to Ashanto (i.e. the troublemaker). Though bitter about it, the actions of his colleagues did not completely take him by surprise. Shanto was honest enough to admit that he too would have kept quiet if he saw someone else in Globofood get into a similar situation. Reminding me that once his father had been one of the union leaders organizing the workers’ agitation against the Usha Factory management which finally led to its closure, he commented: For my father, there was a sense that workers needed to stick with each other. If one [of the workers] started to come under pressure [from the managers], the others would stick up for him. Not so much now, as everyone in Globofood dreams of being a manager, and owning cars, flats.

Shanto’s comments, I believe, open up critical questions about the scope or possibility of any kind of coalitional politics of resistance or mobilization by workers in a space like Globofood. Perhaps as Shanto implied, workers in Globofood are already far too conditioned by the individuating aspects of service work and the constant exhortations to ‘dream big’, to really care for anyone who is seen to be slipping down the corporate sinkhole. It might be true that Shanto’s colleagues have already bought into the allure of career success stories. These stories, endlessly repeated by the management, have a regular theme of how X, Y or Z started as a lowly CSA, and eventually became a general

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manager by dint of being obedient, loyal and never rocking the corporate boat. Maybe, Shanto’s recollections about his father’s acts of agency and resistance compensate for deepening anxieties about his career prospects at Globofood. Finally, it might also be true that for most of the workers at an organization like Globofood the correct idioms of collective resistance are no longer transparent in the absence of recognizable forms of labour mobilization like trade unions. The absence of unionization in places like Globofood, I would suggest, points to a more pervasive crisis in Kolkata’s recent labour history. In her study of jute millworkers (once the most well organized amongst the industrial sector) in and around Kolkata, Nandini Gooptu (2007) points out how the systemic reversals suffered by trade union politics in addressing the interests of the working classes since the 1990s have crucially led to two related developments in labour organization and overt forms of labour resistance in Kolkata. First, the tactical thrust of resistance has essentially shifted from overt confrontations with the management through trade union politics. Gooptu suggests that there is a rising perception amongst workers that a corrupt assemblage of political party leaders, management personnel and trade union representatives has virtually snuffed out any hopes of redress for aggrieved workers through large-scale coalitional politics (2007, 1927). Second, what has replaced this former faith in trade unionism as being able to articulate the workers’ rights is a network of patronage, where the individual worker expects benefits from her immediate superiors by being attentive to their interests rather than to the interests of her co-workers (Gooptu 2007, 1925). Disillusionment with the everyday functioning of the government, the major political parties and especially union activities in Kolkata has led to a systemic culture of what Shanto in Globofood described as paiye debar rajniti, which is a popular Bengali designation of politics (especially in the past decades of the CPI(M)’s rule) as an art of currying favour with one’s patrons/superiors in order to survive (Gooptu 2007, 1926). My co-workers at Globofood repeatedly reminded me that survival, and failure, critically hinge on keeping the immediate supervisors and managers in good humour. Several of them drew the example of Shanto. They pointed out that he was wrong to confront the customer, and should have tried to dissimulate his feelings. Everyone agreed that the ability to never betray one’s true feelings especially those of anger, frustration, anxiety, or rage is absolutely crucial for surviving in the retail sector.

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If dissimulation is critical to surviving in organized retail institutions like Globofood, it is also valorized in employment training programmes as a key component of sales strategies. I can go on about the magical charms of dissimulation as the brand staff – the girls working for Maybelline, Chambor, Clinique – go into a frenzy putting on blue eyeliners, polyester suits and high heels that will magically transform them from bodies impressed by the sweat and strains of working-class lives to alluring bodies that share, at least vicariously, the charm of the French cosmetics or Italian perfumes they sell. Sometimes, though, the ugly feelings of rage or anger are not too easy to hide in the morning rush. The brand lady from ITC is enraged, and I can hear her screaming invectives to her colleague for finishing the month’s supply of hair spray within the first three weeks; if there is a personnel audit they will be reported for not being appropriately made-up. ‘What language’, the supervisor Sohini exclaims, ‘and they act so civil on the floor. Can’t ever leave their slums behind.’ The stakes are rather high though, for surveys suggest that there is a 30-second lag before a new customer entering the store decides which kiosk they will visit first, whether Maybelline or Clinique, 30 seconds of indecision where the right mix of eyeliner, a nice smile, and a well-pressed suit makes the difference between a hit and a miss (Figure 7.2).

Figure 7.2: Brand staff in front of the cosmetic section of a retail outlet in South City Mall. Source:

Courtesy of the author.

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My friend Aslam too participates in this dissimulation by strutting along the pavement in front of South City Mall in his furry costume as part of a cellphone publicity campaign. He makes about 2,000 rupees (about $50) per month after 10-hour days with no weekly breaks, and can be fired any minute. As he reminds me, for him the present employment is still an improvement on being out of work and having to wait in a one-room tenement home, endlessly smoking biris to pass the time. He is the comic icon of a corporation that presents itself as youthful, dynamic and interactive. He is worried though about constantly sweating under the blazing sun, turning the artificial fur all stiff and brittle: ‘If something happens to the costume I am in deep shit.’ Woven within the ordered rhythm of the mall are other traces of history, life-worlds of men like Aslam and textures of survival in the city, which are not quite in sync but nevertheless densely juxtaposed to each other. Placeness for South City is thus constantly composed by coming into friction with a multitude of rhythms of living, variegated forms of bodies and textures of inhabiting that circulate around, and through it. How do we begin to visualize these complex rhythms around South City in particular but coursing through Kolkata in a much more general sense – as a (post) colonial mimicry eking out a route to an ‘alternate modernity’ (Chatterjee 1993; Taylor 2001)? Or as the intersecting point between the emergent patterns of the primarily middle-class ‘public of development’, and what Sudipta Kaviraj (1997, 108) has termed as the ‘pablik’ – a vernacularized, proletarian appropriation of the Indian urban spaces as a radical consequence of democratization? I would like to suggest here that the juxtaposition of disparate rhythms of life under the current rubric of development in the city needs to be thought in terms different from the narrative of the lack/lag – capitalist expansion in the post-colony somehow fated to be a second-order reproduction of the authentic stuff or a selective absorption of the same. Rather, I would like to conceptualize this assemblage of rhythms as a symptom of the crisis in establishing the norm for Kolkata’s urban public culture. This crisis can also attain the feel of a low-level noise, a throbbing presence that has already become a constant vector within the complexities of hard bargains and desperate failures at the lowest rungs of an ever-more predatory capitalist system. Low wages, loss of jobs, cheap food, short of money – the life-world of the workers that I am trying to make a sense of is precarious, life always hanging in balance. But there is also the frantic pull to start feeling like having a

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good life under capitalism, to have fleeting proximities to its elusive promises – forever deferred, to make a sense of the self as productive members of an economic order, just to somehow find the resources to keep on going. What matters here is the sense of what Lauren Berlant regards as the ‘aspirational normativity’ of contemporary capital – ‘as an evolving, and incoherent cluster of hegemonic promises’ that manages to mobilize affective attachments, and invites access to it in multifarious ways as a momentary escape from the pressing grip of crisis (Berlant 2007, 278). In the next part, I want to explore how these attachments constitute the worker’s subjectivity in various public and private domains. 

Work/play No one wants to be assigned to the Home/Work/Play (HWP) section in Globofood. It kind of sucks, has a bad reputation to it, always feels like one is banished. But that’s not quite true either; it is a great place for the slackers who are adept at regaling everyone with longwinded stories, and are basically good for nothing else really. The supervisor Rupadi does caution us from time to time, saying slacking and joking is not the way to have a proper corporate career, and this gives a bad reputation to the section. But then at 5,000 rupees per month (less than $100) it is not much of a corporate job in any case. There are frequent complaints about how the CSAs in the HWP have no idea of what they are selling or they don’t care. And it creates all kinds of ugly scenes, like when a woman came in with a frying pan with the Globofood receipt still crisp and new. Inside the pan was stuck a huge pile of charred noodles with bits and pieces of carrots, eggs and other vegetables: all burnt and stuck to the pan. It seems that the problem started with what she came to buy, and what the attendant explained to her. It was all Somnath the CSA’s fault. He is a character, 6 feet 2 inches tall, and impossibly thin. He has this persistent anxiety that somehow he is failing in his job. He rushes out to meet the customers, taking them under his care even when they don’t really need the attention nor are particularly comfortable at being chaperoned around. Sometimes he gets the product features completely jumbled up, more due to his haste than anything else, like it happened with the charred chow mein customer who had apparently wanted to buy a

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non-stick frying pan. Somnath had directed the woman to the anodized frying pan, insisting that this is what she needs as she could fry anything with just a few drops of oil. Now, anodized wares require regular amounts of oil to cook, but they are sturdier and last a lifetime. Somnath should have known all these, and it just shows the HWP in poor light, a concerned Rupadi told me afterwards. There are already long lists of complaints about Somnath pending with the Human Resources (HR) manager, and Rupadi will probably not report this last incident. Problem is Somnath is also married and had his second kid a month back. It will be harsh to give the HR people too many opportunities to fire him. I have been to his crumbling tworoom apartment in Moulali in central Kolkata. I lost count of just how many people were at home: his widowed mother, his gang of brothers loafing around, then the wife, and the two babies, and emaciated sisters who in their late-teens already looked completely exhausted with their waiting to get married once the dowry could be arranged. The fierce heat of sunlight soon makes it impossible to do an interview with Somnath in his room, and we move to the corner store that his father rented many years back after migrating from Bihar. Usually it is closed during the afternoons, but Somnath, and his mother, are proud to take me inside, and we chat for an hour or so over cups of tea. He seems so much more at ease here in the store in his checked lungi, and out of the black trouser, blue shirt uniform of Globofood with the name tag Somnath Shaw – CSA hanging around his neck. Relaxed, and surrounded in his small store by so many of the products that they sell in Globofood as well – shampoos, soaps, biscuits – many of them from the same multinational brands too. But these products in the store do not make him awkward; he has a familiarity and an everyday intimacy within the store and its contents that he never seems to share with objects while at Globofood. I wonder what changed – his role from being a harassed employee to being in charge of the family, or being in his own store or because he shares a different attachment to the objects piled up all around him. The mother actually does most of the talking. She finds the idea of someone like me from the United States coming to work on shopping mall workers like her son absolutely fascinating. ‘Somnath is a good boy’, she intones in a Bangla that is still thickly accented, the best amongst her several children who did go on to finish his bachelors, but then it was bad luck that he could not get an office job. But Globofood is almost like a proper office job, she quickly corrects herself.

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If only they increased his salary a bit; it is so embarrassing when her relatives in Kolkata ask her about her son’s salary. The whole family still remembers the incredible excitement when Somnath first went to the Globofood job interview wearing a tie. No one in the family had ever worn one, and it needed a friend to help tie it. ‘He looked so cute, and important’, the mother remembered fondly. ‘You know how relatives, and neighbors are’, she goes on, ‘always envious now that Somnath goes for his work in his polished shoes, and crisp uniform.’ She apparently has told everyone that Somnath is earning 15,000 rupees per month instead of the 5,000 he actually makes as his basic salary. Problem is even if she did tell people that her son only makes 5,000, no one would believe her and would think they are deliberately telling lies or are too stingy or something; it seems you can’t really win one way or the other. ‘Say it is 15,000, and immediately the relations are envious, and who knows what they are thinking . . . tell the truth of 5,000, and then no one believes you, and thinks you are trying to lower the salary so that no one will ask for a loan if things are tight.’ 

Weeping in the corner A pressing intimacy with objects fills in much of the workday for Globofood employees. Sometimes that intimacy can spiral into a sense of disquiet as in Somnath’s case. For many others it means a routine memorizing of brand names, article codes, price lists, relative merits of products, and inventories. There are, however, other ways of forming relations with things, where they lose their abstractions of article codes or prices to create special attachments – to the eyes, the hands, the ears, even to the entire body. Someone can’t stop cleaning the overpriced crystal vases, though there is not a speck of dust on them; another one luxuriates in the smell of perfumed oils whenever there is a break; a third loves going through the stacks of plastic toys – a sensual addiction of objects even though the attachments are merely tangential, fleeting ones. A sense of respite, even play, takes shape through sensorial investments on material objects, even if only to put off the shaky groundlessness looming in the next instant. Nadia Seremetakis (1994) reminds us of a different route to thinking about globalization and the sensorial attachment it excites through objects that appear or disappear from popular circulation, leaving

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behind traces of unpredictable feelings, and desires. Objects make possible the organization of publics through the feelings they invoke, and the impress of material cultures they leave behind on the bodily senses. But the senses are also fluid; attachments can give way to boredom. I can clearly make out those who have, in the words of the HR manager, ‘started to vegetate’. Employees like Suraj, Naved, Nupur – all listlessly going through the objects, forgetting to stack them in the proper order – a vicious disenchantment that is too personal to be hidden from the public gaze. Objects can also take on other surges too, where the passivity of salesmanship can give way to active appropriation, even if illicit, as in the frequent instances of shrinkage or theft of goods from the store by the workers. Sandip confides to me the various ways in which goods or objects can be ferried out of the shop floor or in certain cases brought into it. Strips of cash folded and bunched under the armpits, small flat tubes tucked just underneath the belt loops around the waist, pouches of creams hidden around the collar region. A minor rush of agency, but ‘[a]gency can be strange, twisted, caught up in things, passive, or exhausted’ (Stewart 2007, 86), and it can go horribly wrong. Mr. Alam, the chief security officer at Globofood, calls me to his room one busy Sunday evening. Someone has been accused of pilferage, and Mr. Alam wants me to witness the process of interrogation just so that I know how efficient he can be at this. I know Subimal, the accused, slightly, and I am too embarrassed to look him in the eye. A cursory search reveals nothing, and he is ordered to strip. A sachet of whitening cream is tucked in his underpants between the thighs. His naked body starts shaking convulsively, too overcome to answer why he did this. I find him after closing hours in the back office still weeping – a tightly bunched body hidden in the darkness behind the staff toilets. 

Concluding remarks For my conclusion, I will like to think through what Subimal’s humiliated body denotes in terms of an emergent urban labour in the contemporary period development in Kolkata. For Subimal, the charge of pilferage and the consequent strip search mark a terminal point in his attempts to integrate himself with the service economy. His

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situation is of course not the only possibility imaginable for the workers employed in Globofood or in other organized retail spaces. Most of these workers would go on in their daily routines oblivious of what happened to one of their colleagues. Some of them would also go on to attain higher ranks in the organization. But Subimal’s predicament still stands as a looming possibility where the aspirations of finding a foothold in the urban corporate culture go horribly wrong. For others, the turn of events may not be so dramatic or tragic. A sudden management decision to let go of a few employees or a drop in the profit margin or failure to meet the sales target can also mean the end of the aspirations which so many of these young men and women are clinging to. Sometimes it is not even very clear what exactly are those aspirations. Usually they are hazy and inchoate fantasies to climb up the corporate ladder, to somehow one day be able to swap positions where they can come to the mall as customers instead of always being held up in a situation where they are expected to serve. Sometimes these aspirations can even be about creating a new possibility for themselves, inventing a new life in the city that would otherwise not be possible given their economic backgrounds. It is, however, this very incoherency of desires which also makes them that much more powerful, that much more attractive. ‘It is a question of just one lucky break’, as Rintu, a salesperson working for a multinational cellular phone company at South City Mall, puts it. Four years after I first heard her mention this, she still awaits that ‘lucky break’. Unable to define what exact trajectories they would like to follow or if there is any definite trajectory available for them, most of these young workers like Rintu can only deflect the dread of an uncertain future by somehow holding on to the possibility of finding a toehold in the consumerist utopias they know so well. Intimately connected to the commodity cultures that define global middle-class lifestyles, and effectively working as the conduits through which these lifestyles are being introduced to a city like Kolkata, they do not know exactly how to respond to this gap between the promises of development and their actualization. While aware of the exploitative nature of their work and the ways in which service work leaves them precarious, and vulnerable, there is no definite idiom in which to respond to it. This present lack of a political language of resistance or worker agency is a peculiar irony of Kolkata’s consumerist utopias and the work culture they have managed to initiate.

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❁ Notes 1 I have greatly benefitted from comments and suggestions received at conferences in Centre for Studies in Social Sciences (CSSSC) (Kolkata) and Princeton University. Research for this project was made possible by a fieldwork grant received from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and a Named Continuing Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. 2 Kolkata is the administrative capital and commercial hub of the Indian state of West Bengal. 3 It is interesting to note here that the CPI(M)-led Left Front government’s electoral defeat has been attributed in part due to the aggressive neo-liberal reforms initiated by it from the early 2000s. The reform programmes initiated a host of liberalized trade, economic and industrial policies as well as emphasized the need for private corporate capital to tide over the economic stagnation in both the industrial and agricultural sectors. The new economic policies of the Left Front government come up against a fury of popular protests when the government decided to acquire and convert agricultural land in Singur and Nandigram (both in rural West Bengal) around 2006–2007. The massive state violence unleashed on protesting peasants in Singur, and especially Nandigram, led to a pervasive disenchantment with the CPI(M)’s long-standing image as being pro-poor and sympathetic to the interests of the socially marginalized. 4 Due to contractual obligations, I am unable to use the actual name of the retail corporation.

Bibliography Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, Tr. M. Jolas. New York: Orion Press, 1994. Basu, Subho and Auritro Majumder. ‘Dilemmas of Parliamentary Communism: The Rise, and Fall of the Left in West Bengal’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2013, pp. 167–200. Beller, Jonathan. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy, and the Society of the Spectacle. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006. Berardi, Franco. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2009. Berlant, Lauren. ‘Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse, and Rosetta’, Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 2, 2007, pp. 273–301. Bhattacharyya, Dwaipayan. ‘Of Control, and Factions: The Changing “PartySociety” in Rural West Bengal’, Economic, and Political Weekly, vol. XLIV, no. 9, 2009, pp. 59–69. Biswas, Moinak. ‘Changing Scenes’, Sarai Reader 08. (Fear, 2010), pp. 196–205.

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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘Adda, Calcutta: Dwelling in Modernity’, Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999, pp. 109–45. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought, and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Clough, Patricia Ticineto. ‘Introduction’, in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean O’Malley Halleyeds, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 1–33. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism, and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Gooptu, Nandini. ‘Economic Liberalisation, Work, and Democracy: Industrial Decline, and Urban Politics in Kolkata’, Economic, and Political Weekly, vol. XLII, no. 21, 2007, pp. 1922–1933. Gooptu, Nandini. ‘Neoliberal Subjectivity, Enterprise Culture, and New Workplaces: Organised Retail, and Shopping Malls in India’, Economic, and Political Weekly, vol. XLIV, no. 22, 2009, 45–54. Gorz, André. The Immaterial: Knowledge, Value, and Capital. London: Seagull Books, 2010. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2005. Hutnyk, John. The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity, and the Poverty of Representation. London: Zed Books, 1996. Kaviraj, Sudipta. ‘Filth, and the Public Sphere: Concepts, and Practices about Space in Calcutta’, Public Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 1997, pp. 83–113. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Roy, Ananya. City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender, and the Politics of Poverty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Seremetakis, Nadia C. The Senses Still: Perception, and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. Standing, Guy. The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. London: Bloomsbury Press, 2011. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Taylor, Charles. ‘Two Theories of Modernity’, in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 172–96. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Virno, Paolo, ‘The Ambivalence of Disenchantment’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, 13–32. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

8 Nostalgia and the mediatic imagination in Tito’s Yugoslavia Gabika Bockaj

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T

his chapter grew out of a set of questions upon which I stumbled in my larger research on the phenomenon of nostalgia in postsocialist Eastern Europe and, in particular, Yugoslavia. No other country in the Eastern Bloc witnessed such massive mourning after the death of a communist leader, as did Yugoslavia after the death of Josip Broz Tito. Even 20 years after the fall of communism and 30 years after his death, the range of social and cultural projects inspired by Tito gives me pause.1 What could explain such a persistent and epidemic feeling of what came to be called ‘Tito-stalgia’ and ‘Yugonostalgia’ (often interchangeable) in the former Yugoslavia? Intellectuals and cultural critics today debate such questions as: Was Yugoslavia the victim of a utopian ideology? Was Tito a soft or a brutal dictator? Was he holding it all together? While some observers2 have warned of the threat of a conservative communist backlash and have dismissed nostalgia as a backward, romantic and immature sentiment, others have noted how nostalgia is being exploited cynically for commercial gains.3 We can see in nostalgia a salvaging of the utopian sensibility, and this is the most important legacy of Tito in Yugoslavia’s (not-so-) recent dissolution. After the world has witnessed and experienced utopias turned into dystopias – totalitarian communism, the Soviet gulags, the Holocaust – utopias have acquired a bad reputation, and as a result, utopian thought scares many of us. This suspicion about nostalgia that is a part of the Marxist tradition4 may be due to a misunderstanding of the relationship between nostalgia and utopia. A deeper understanding of nostalgia for Tito in contemporary

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Yugoslavia can also provide the basis for a better general understanding of how nostalgia can be one expression of a politics of hope. My central argument in this chapter is that nostalgia – as a social sensibility – itself has a mediatic function, and this in two senses. First, and most literally, nostalgia mediates between past, present and future by processes of selection, amplification and representation. By its nature, it offers a gloss on experience, especially on experiences of loss, longing and possibility. Second, nostalgia is mediatic in that it can only work through some sort of mediated archive of memories, official histories and everyday negotiations over what is most vivid and salient about history, experience and transition. These two mediatic functions take on a special force in the countries of ex-Yugoslavia because politics and cinema under Tito’s rule were themselves sites of mutual mediation and representation. This latter historical specificity is the key to the special nature of nostalgic mediation in this region. 

Brief history of Yugoslavia Yugoslavia is a historical fact, a memory and, in some ways, a political ruin. It fell apart in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the wake of rule by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, the leader of the Yugoslavian nation from the end of the Second World War until his death in 1980. The first phase of this 35-year period, from 1950 to 1960, was dominated by the Cold War, the battle over the Suez Canal, the split between the Soviet Union and China, and the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) starting in 1955, when Tito, Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, and Nkrumah (among others) tried to create the vision of a coalition of newly independent nations which were not clients of either the United States or the Soviet Union.5 Starting in the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s and 1990s, this extraordinary political alignment of newly decolonized nations, with Yugoslavia as its iconic European space and Tito as its iconic European leader, fell apart, and it appears now as a relic of the 1950s and 1960s, an obsolete vision of international progressive solidarities against big power hegemony, and a ruined dream of independent postcolonial nationalisms, which today only evokes feelings of nostalgia. As far as the Yugoslav part of this ruined political vision is concerned, it was accompanied by another abandoned project, which also today lies in near-ruins: Tito’s cinematic world. During his

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lifetime, Tito was an avid film-lover and film-watcher. The story of Tito’s love of films has been brilliantly told in the recent awardwinning documentary film Cinema Komunisto,6 which centres on the man, Leka Konstatinovic, who served as Tito’s personal film projectionist, who showed Tito and his wife, Jovanka, a film every night for 32 years! The film is also an elegy to a magical period of Yugoslavian cinematic glory,7 in which socialist ideals, economic development and a global internationalist vision came together under Tito. He personally took a major hand in developing a Yugoslav film industry, in personally picking the kinds of films (homemade and international) that were viewed by the Yugoslav public during his life as president, and which constituted a major referent for those memories, practices and feelings of what later came to be called Tito-stalgia or Yugo-nostalgia. This phenomenon of nostalgia has counterparts in the rest of the communist-dominated parts of Eastern Europe (such as East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and elsewhere) so that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many people, ordinary and elite, came to experience a deep feeling of loss about their socialist past in the face of the new forces of Westernization, marketization and globalization. However, while some scholars are already announcing the end of nostalgia in other East European countries that were similarly marked by the sharp fall in the standard of living after the transition and where sentiments of nationalism have replaced feelings of nostalgia, nostalgia for Yugoslavia, more than 20 years after the break up of Yugoslavia, still has a distinctive hold on the imagination of the people of this region. It seems likely that cinema is a vital link between past and present in the life of Yugo-nostalgia. The large, productive and influential Yugoslav film industry, nurtured and promoted by Tito, also today lies in ruins, sometimes literal ruins, as in the case of the major film studio he established in Belgrade, The Avala Film Studios. Today, this studio is like a ghost town, full of abandoned movie sets, rotting costumes, old film footage, and more than a hundred people who are hanging out around the sets, drinking, talking and who are still receiving a monthly salary from the state, although nothing has been produced by Avala in more than a decade.8 Created in 1945 by cinema-obsessed Tito, this film studio has produced the largest number of so-called partisan movies in Yugoslavia, which were watched and enjoyed massively in the time of Yugoslav nation-building.

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Another important cinema event of ex-Yugoslavia was the film festival of Pula. This oldest of film festivals in Europe, held in the city of Pula that lies in the Istrian peninsula of present-day Croatia, was first inaugurated as an international film festival in 1953. The festival was attended by numerous local and international reporters and filmmakers, including such celebrities as Orson Welles, Sophia Loren, Sam Peckinpah, Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, and Yul Brynner, and last but not least by Marshal Josip Broz Tito, who became a patron of the festival in 1955 and regularly appeared at the festival until his last visit in 1979, one year before his death. Tito was personally involved in choosing the actor Richard Burton, who would portray him as a young partisan officer, in a seminal film about the partisan struggle against the German occupation during the Second World War, The Battle of Sutjeska.9 Two kinds of ruin, one cinematic and the other political, are powered by shared experiences in Yugoslavia, both past and present. In one sense, NAM was never more than a mediatic apparatus, composed of conferences, speeches, state visits by the key leaders to one another’s countries, and exchanges of gifts and diplomacy, cinema and news, stars and icons. It was not a matter of hard power or military collaborations. In this sense it was a deeply mediated production, communicated in large part through films, documentaries and newspapers, a truly imagined international community,10 whose major icons were Nehru, Nasser, Tito, and a few others, each an icon in his own country and all seeking to be global icons of non-aligned internationalism, socialist development and non-hegemonic collaboration.11 This political film imaginary also fell into ruins as soon as its major stars died, for it had no real institutions to bequeath to its successors, other than the fantasies of its main leaders. Just as Tito’s political fantasy was fundamentally mediatic and cinematic so was his vision for Yugoslav cinema likewise fundamentally political. He was a great fan of what came to be called Partisan Cinema, and there is little doubt that the films he promoted for public viewing in Yugoslavia were primarily pedagogic, moralistic and propagandistic, saturated by themes of loyalty to the nation, the virtues of good over evil and the beauty of social cooperation and proletarian virtue. Because his own control over the Yugoslavian film industry was so personal and detailed, it is no surprise that the industry fell into ruins after his death and is today being gradually reassembled by various groups of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Slovenian, and

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Macedonian film-makers and promoters, often working across borders or in the larger diaspora after 1990 to Northern Europe and the United States. Tito’s cinematic interests (indeed his obsession with cinema) and his interest in a starring international role through the NAM were the machineries through which many Yugoslav lives were framed and narrativized. Progressive politics, the stories of the partisan struggle against the Nazis, the power of the Yugoslavian working classes, and the prospects of a Yugoslav-driven vision of a socialist Europe were all part of the romance of Yugoslav nationalism that formed the environment of many Yugoslav artists and intellectuals, as well as common people, in the 1960s, 1970s and even into the 1980s. The rise of nostalgia immediately after 1989 is usually, and rightly, seen as a product of broken promises and disappointments with the transition to capitalist democracy. But why nostalgia (especially nostalgia for Tito) now, more than 20 years after the ‘transition’, among members of the new generations who had no direct experience of living with socialism? Why do they feel compelled to salvage the vanishing past, to salvage archives and places before they are destroyed or disappeared? Why does Tito still inspire? To start answering these questions, we need to take a detour into tracing a rough genealogy of the concept of nostalgia and then look at work on nostalgia in the context of Eastern Europe, but in particular in Yugoslavia. 

The idea of nostalgia ‘Nostalgia’ was a term coined by a medical student, Johannes Hofer, in his dissertation at the University of Basel in 1688. Greek in origin and composed of nostos (return to a native land) and algos (suffering, grief), nostalgia signified a psychological disorder expressing a desire to return to one’s native land. Hofer’s case studies dealt with predominantly young people and those of age to travel (students, servants or soldiers) who were staying in foreign lands and foreign customs for extended period of time. Hofer emphasizes in his study that the only cure for nostalgia is the return to one’s home. Nostalgia in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries has lost its medical connotations and has become more of a literary trope. Also, there has been a marked discursive shift from nostalgia as a physical condition to nostalgia as a psychological mood. Today, nostalgia has resurfaced,

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especially in the study of places undergoing big social changes and transformations, but also generally in the postmodernist literature.12 In a similar vein, Kathleen Stewart13 suggests that in complex and fragmented contemporary societies, nostalgia ‘rises to importance as a cultural practice, as culture becomes more and more diffuse, more and more a “structure of feeling”’. Nostalgia went from being a curable physical disorder in the 17th and 18th centuries to being an incurable condition of the spirit later in 20th century or what is commonly called the culture of late capitalism. What explains this change is a shift in sensibility from the spatial to the temporal. Today, nostalgia is simply no longer a yearning to return home, but to another time. And time is irreversible. As culture has turned into a jumble of signs,14 nostalgia embodies the wish to bring order, direction and orientation to the lives of our subjects. Nostalgia helps reconstitute their lives in narrative form, as a story designed to reassemble a broken history and bring continuity to life as a new and meaningful whole.15 This function of nostalgia cannot be divorced from its mediatic function, which is one of framing, salience and representation of one order of experience by another. 

Nostalgia in the politics of Eastern Europe The discussion of the theme of nostalgia seems especially lively in the anthropological study of the post-Soviet world, notably as regards Central and Eastern Europe, of which Yugoslavia was a part. Many Western scholars of this region, as well as regional intellectuals and local actors, share an unwillingness to give up on the promises of the socialist dream in spite of their many criticisms and disappointments with socialist ideologies and regimes. This may account for both the complexities of local discourses of the nostalgia in this region as well as the preoccupation of anthropologists and other scholars working on this region. In other words, the ex-Soviet world is probably distinctive in its ambivalence about the recent past, shared both by scholars and by ordinary people, possibly because socialist aspirations, propaganda and popular discourse were always profoundly preoccupied with how best to appropriate the past in any vision of the future. In her book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed,16 Slavenka Drakulić, a Croatian émigré writer and journalist, presently living in Sweden, reports how she read an account about life in

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Bucharest immediately after the overthrow of Ceausescu government in Romania in December 1989. The newspaper story was about an older man, a worker, who ate his first banana in this period and told the reporter that he ate the whole banana together with the skin, because he did not know he had to peel it. Drakulic speculates that the banana tasted good to him, even though it must have been bitter and tough. ‘It was not a banana that he was eating, but the promise, the hope of the future.’17 The promise and the hope of the future was documented widely among anthropologists and public intellectuals working on Eastern Europe just before and shortly after the transition. Authors coming from other disciplinary locations such as the Russian émigré and literary critic Svetlana Boym18 and the novelist Milan Kundera19 have come to represent ethnographic authority for anthropologists of Eastern Europe. The phenomenon of nostalgia as it emerges, directly or indirectly, in many of these regionally varied interpretations is not so much about the past ‘as it was’, as it is an effort to reclaim the sensation of certain possibilities that seemed more available in the past than they do in the postsocialist present. Many nostalgic discourses and practices in this region can be one means to gain access to local archives of hope, which relies on the mediation of memory, as I will try to show from the examples I discuss next. One of the earliest and most astute observers of nostalgia in the field of anthropology Gerald Creed20 asks whether the support for the Socialist Party from Bulgarian villagers in postsocialist Zamfirovo is a legacy of the past or something created under the pressures of transition. He goes out of his way to not call this phenomenon nostalgia due to its Western stereotypes of conservatism. The germ of the idea that not every contemporary socialist sentiment is conservative and reactionary is already present in his earlier work. So one could infer from his analysis in 1999 that in the context of the breakdown of state-controlled markets, of social guarantees of employment and security and of collective institutions for welfare and well-being, nostalgia is a space in which ordinary people were able to explore and debate what is of most value to them as the world around them begins to dissolve and fragment. Another useful way to embark on such a nuanced exploration of nostalgia in the postsocialist world is a distinction made by Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia, about socialist art,

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architecture and culture. Boym makes a distinction between what she calls ‘reflective nostalgia’ and ‘restorative nostalgia’: Restorative nostalgia evokes the national past and future; reflective nostalgia is more about individual and cultural memory. The two may overlap in their frames of reference, but they do not coincide in their narratives and plots of identity. In other words, they can use the same triggers of memory and symbols, the same Proustian madelaine pastry, but tell different stories about it. [. . .] If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.21

This contrast between reflective and restorative nostalgias is the key to Boym’s analysis, which points to the fact that reflective nostalgias provide new energy and vitality for a multitude of potentialities, which are not part of a teleological sequence, which run from past to present to future. Here, Boym draws on Henri Bergson to capture the active potentialities of reflective nostalgia: Through such longing these [reflective] nostalgics discover that the past is not merely that which doesn’t exist anymore, but, to quote Henri Bergson, the past ‘might act and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which it borrows the vitality.’ The past is not made in the image of the present or seen as foreboding of some present disaster; rather, the past opens up a multitude of potentialities, nonteleological possibilities of historic development.22

Another example comes from the work of Daphne Berdahl,23 who offers a close reading of the German film Goodbye, Lenin!, which was written by Bernd Lichtenberg, directed by Wolfgang Becker (both West German-born) and released worldwide in 2003. This film tells the story of an East German family during the spectacular events of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Christiane Kerner, mother of two adult children, Alex and Ariane, suffers a stroke upon witnessing Stasi-police brutality and her own son during the pro-democracy demonstrations in October 1989, just before the Wende (change of the system with the fall of the wall). Unconscious and in coma, she

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misses the tumultuous events of the Wende and is not aware of the new Germany when she wakes up eight months later. Doctors, concerned that any slight stress would prove fatal to Christiane, warn her children to avoid anything that would upset her. Alex decides to recreate the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for his mother, in what is rather a modest apartment in East Berlin, where she is recovering. New furniture is replaced with old that has been abandoned on the streets. Everyone who visits Christiane is required to wear old and drab East German clothing. Alex resorts to the damp outside their apartment to find any remnants of the previous time, such as jars of pickles, in which he then stuffs new Holland Pickles, in order to satisfy any of his mother’s cravings. There are, however, things that do not escape his mother’s attention, like an unveiling of the gigantic Coca-Cola poster on the neighbouring building for instance. Alex turns to his friend Denis, an aspiring TV broadcaster, with whom they create fake TV news and programmes for his mother to watch and receive any explanation of the surrounding events she might witness. As Alex’s charade continues, he realizes that ‘the GDR I was creating for my mother, was more like the GDR I would have wished’. Berdahl’s analysis of this film allows her to make a more general argument about the politics of nostalgia in the postsocialist world. She shows that nostalgia is part of broader politics of memory in which the past is used as a canvas to explore the ongoing dilemmas and traumas of life during the transition as well as to explore the challenges of all available models for the future. Nostalgia in this cultural setting is always multi-sided and ambivalent, but is never a simple wish to restore the past. Rather, it is an exploration of the past as an archive of utopias, which can be resources for imagining new futures. The fact that nostalgia is simultaneously characterized by longing as well as by ironic detachment shows that it is not a simple restorationist impulse. Rather, it is a complex cultural sentiment which allows a critically mediated relationship to history and encourages some degree of detachment from the forceful and even traumatic effects of the dominant narratives of the present. The reception of the film, and its largely positive effect on both East and West Germans, is testimony to the active work of remembering and loss in a postsocialist world with its own dilemmas and disappointments. The work of the film-maker may be taken also as an effort to mine the visual archive of the socialist period to produce the effects and symptoms of nostalgia. Alex’s inventive efforts

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to surround his mother with a simulacrum of a living East Germany, a fiction produced by his love for her, is itself full of the ambiguities of his own reservations about the postsocialist present. Last, but not least, his mother’s own story is a story of her own efforts to recall and reclaim a version of the socialist past that remains compelling in spite of the changes that she sees in her few moments of lucidity after her accident. At every level, nostalgia is a quest, a struggle, a project, which is defined less by its results than by its aspirations for a better world. Svetlana Boym, whom I have referred to already, is one of the key voices in the ‘nostalgia’ debate in this part of the world, and acknowledges the vast differences between the USSR and Eastern and Central Europe, but talks about a common feature in them, that of ‘counter-memory’ (Foucault) that ‘laid a foundation of democratic resistance and arguably was a prototype of a public sphere that already had emerged under the Communist regime’.24 This regional discourse about alternative visions of past, present and future was transmitted to the wider world through unofficial networks, that is friends and family, often ‘through half words, jokes and doublespeak’.25 While nostalgia is frequently to be seen in narratives, fiction and popular myths about prior periods or places, it is also to be found in everyday discourses of the home, the workplace and the market. It is thus inherently a discourse of the public sphere that mediates the sentiments of loss in everyday life to the more articulate and visible products and projects of art, politics and the media. Seen this way, nostalgic discourses and practices are one means to gain access to local archives of hope and local utopias. Mitja Velikonja’s repertoire of how nostalgia plays out in the everyday is interesting to look at here. In a newly independent Slovenia, Velikonja is having a cup of coffee in the cafe named Amerika. The coffee comes with the sugar pack on which there was an image portrait of Josip Broz Tito. There are sometimes small altars with statues of Tito, decorated by unknown passers-by, and flea markets full of Tito and Yugoslav memorabilia and trivia, lighters, magnets, badges, and books about him. One sees young people wearing T-shirts with Tito’s image, attending concerts of neo-Yugorock bands, such as ‘Zaklonisce prepeva’ (Shelter singing), or Rock Partyzani from Slovenia, who mix socialist, partisan, anti-capitalist, and anti-global elements in their music, lyrics and live performances. There are also public events such as exhibitions in which the socialist period is not simply criticized

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but in fact celebrated. One example is a 2009 historical exhibition in Belgrade, entitled ‘Efekat Tito’ (The Tito Effect). The socialist period is also actively present in the street culture of the postsocialist urban landscape and in the spaces in which art meets popular culture as in the alternative music scene. In Skopje he saw a beggar woman wearing a large Broz portrait on her chest, and in Bosnia when someone calls you ‘Tito’ it means you are special to them. On his death or birth anniversary people conduct pilgrimages to his birthplace or other significant residences that he held during his lifetime. Velikonja points out that in many of these nostalgic practices we can see that people miss the times of socialism, but do not want to return to them: ‘They prefer their past and maybe even flirt with its idea of return, mostly because they are absolutely sure they cannot return.’26 Thus nostalgia, according to him, is not only about past realities, but is really more about past dreams, past visions and past expectations. It is an implicit critique of what is wrong now. Velikonja’s view is directly echoed by Zala Volcic,27 who says that Yugo-nostalgia is less a longing for a real past than ‘a kind of longing for desires and fantasies that were once possible’. However, scholars like Volcic are in fact much more suspicious of nostalgia than Velikonja. Taking up the medical metaphors used by authors like Boym and Stewart about nostalgia, Volcic argues that it can also serve as a vehicle of xenophobia, anger, fear, hatred, and anxiety. Here Volcic also agrees with Jameson28 about the inauthenticity of nostalgia and argues that nostalgia turns real history into entertainment, spectacle and cultural fantasy. Volcic takes a critical position on the celebratory, entertaining and commercial aspects of Yugonostalgia and stresses its character as an industry, which distorts the complexities of history. In her analysis of how nostalgia is enlisted in the postsocialist commercial rehabilitation of Tito, she is much less optimistic than Velikonja, partly because Tito originally signified the opposition to all things commercial and capitalist and his memory is now being co-opted by the consumerist marketing revolution. In a phenomenon like Yugoslav rock and roll, Volcic sees little which resists the Balkan stereotype of the ‘rebel soul’ as wild, untamed, hedonistic, and irrational, and thus it reproduces the existing stereotypes of southern Slavs as dangerous and exotic others. In short, Volcic belongs to the side of those scholars of postsocialist nostalgia who regard it in the end as a device through which capitalism distorts the past in order to commodify it. There are of course older members of the post-Soviet generation, who

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miss the security and stability of the Soviet order, but none of them bemoan the loss of its repressive leaders and restrictive features. It is not easy on the basis of the available evidence to present a clear picture of similarities and differences in the practices of nostalgia across this region. For example, in Yugoslavia, where the direct repressive force of the Soviet apparatus was less directly felt there is more evidence of a genuine feeling of reverence for key socialist leader, namely Tito. In Poland, Ukraine and Russia, the post-Soviet quest for the good life has a more marked religious dimension, whether expressed in terms of the restored importance of the Catholic Church (Poland), the new Pentecostal movement in the Ukraine or the vigorous revival of Orthodox beliefs in Russia. Across the region, youth are more actively engaged with Western forms of music, clothing and style, and entrepreneurs have adopted similar discourses about free markets and their virtues. More problematically, there is a general increase in ethno-national movements and discourses in virtually every country in the region, the most notable case being that of the republics of ex-Yugoslavia. Also, perhaps most strikingly the discourses and practices of nostalgia seem most active among those (typically younger people) who had the least direct experience of the life in the Soviet period. This last consideration reminds us that nostalgia is not a simple response to historical experience and can be a method for handling complex historical transitions, both for actors and for analysts. If we realize therefore that nostalgia is not so much longing for a lost time as longing for a time when hope was an everyday practice, it is then easier to place the nostalgia for Tito in Yugoslavia in a wider comparative framework. What Tito’s joint engagement with cinema and the NAM created for ordinary Yugoslav citizens was a mediatic milieu in which the possibility of alternative futures was available both in politics and in cinema. Tito was the central figure of both forms of drama, and in this sense what Tito-stalgia embodies is a longing for a time when hope was a space both of entertainment and of political aspiration. This example suggests a bridge between nostalgia as a feeling and nostalgia as a method, the subject of my concluding part. 

Nostalgia as method The most powerful aspect of Velikonja’s analysis of the cultural nostalgia of the postsocialist societies is that at its very bottom, its source is hope. It is a critique of the utopianism of the past in the name of

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hope for a future, which is better than the present. His analysis is in an active dialogue with thinkers like Dominic Boyer,29 Svetlana Boym30 and Ernst Bloch.31 Velikonja’s primary insight, developed in his study on Titostalgia,32 is that people do not mourn for the real past, but for their past wishes, perspectives and old glory: ‘They miss past dreams, not real life in the past.’33 Velikonja particularly supports Ernst Bloch’s idea about the utopian aspect of nostalgia, which represents ‘that vital, active, creative, imaginative and hence political capacity in nostalgia’.34 In his fascinating book on Fijian knowledge systems under the stress of colonial rule, Hirokazu Miyazaki35 draws on the pioneering work of Ernest Bloch and Walter Benjamin to argue that ‘hope is a method’. By this he means that in its relationship to the past, hope is characterized by a profound openness to the ‘not yet’, to the possibility of the new which is radically open to disappointment, and is in this regard not at all the same as confidence. Hope thrives on the remembrance and repetition of previous moments of hope, and thus is able to respond to every moment as containing the possibility of newness, of radical change. By analogy with Miyazaki, I would argue that nostalgia too may be used as a method, in the sense that nostalgia is a practice through which those who experience and enact nostalgia also achieve a critical relationship between memory, anticipation and the experiences of failure and disappointment. This critical relationship is intimately connected to the mediatic nature of nostalgia in some political settings, such as the countries of ex-Yugoslavia. Regarded this way, nostalgia in societies like those of postsocialist Europe often expresses political and ethical aspirations in the discourse of nostalgia. In this chapter, I have tried to show that such nostalgia is not primarily restorative or romantic in its spirit. It is a sensibility, as with Ernest Bloch’s view of hope, which retains an active relationship to the possibility of the ‘not yet’, the emergent and the new in social life. Thus the comparative study of nostalgic forms and practices has something important to offer to the study of the possible futures, especially because it is also about the very act of striving, desiring, hoping, and reaching for something other than what currently seems to be dominant state of affairs. Such striving thrives on nostalgia as a mediatic archive of possibilities, rather than of bygone events or institutions as such. Let me return to my initial argument, which was sparked by Tito’s special interest in cinema. What people in today’s ex-Yugoslavia recall

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about Tito is not the details of his policy or accomplishments, but his willingness to dream, to hope and to imagine a journey which was neither Soviet nor Western. This willingness was the link between his vision of Non-Alignment and his attraction to cinema as a site of memory and possibility. Nostalgia for Tito today is not backwardlooking. It is the site of a moment when dreaming and hoping was possible, and it is also the site of the wish to make it possible again. At least in the case of Yugoslavia, Tito created a moment of national exhilaration in which cinematic mediation, internationalism and a global role for Yugoslavia became both imaginable and graphic. In Tito’s lifetime, Yugoslavia mediated between the West and the Soviet Union, and was the most powerful new nation in Eastern Europe to do be able to claim this role. Tito’s fascination with cinema gave him the resources to imagine Yugoslavia as the pivot of a global order – the NAM – which had no actual bureaucratic or legal reality. It was no less or no more real than the cinematic image. As Yugoslavia fell apart after Tito’s death, what people in this region missed about Tito was his willingness to dream in a modern idiom, a cinematic idiom. This willingness created a moment in which Yugoslavia was a major player in the imagined and mediatic world of the NAM. It is this moment – and its structure of feeling – that many Yugoslav citizens miss today.

❁ Notes 1 It is noteworthy that there are numerous initiatives and projects, from radio programmes and theme parks to web sites dedicated to Tito, created by youth who were not particularly marked by the socialist experience in the former Yugoslavia. 2 The literature that flowers immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall is dominated by policy-oriented analysts from US think tanks, political scientists with broad commitments to modernization and democratization processes, many of whom brought to the study of Eastern Europe models and data from the transitions to democracy in Latin America. For this trend of analysis of transition, not framed from area studies, but from universalizing assumptions and large-scale comparisons about development from authoritarianism/Communism to democracy, see Philippe C. Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, ‘The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?’, Slavic Review, vol. 53, no. 1, 1994, pp. 173–85; Rudolf Tokes, ‘“Transitology”: Global Dreams and PostCommunist Realities’, Central Europe Review, vol. 2, no. 10, 2000.

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3 The anthropological literature on postsocialist Eastern Europe exhibits a strong concern about nostalgia (see Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille, PostCommunist Nostalgia (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010) ) and tries to provide a corrective to the analysis of the advocates of these various transition theories, in which they not only stress differences in experience inside the space which emerged from socialism, but also question their premises about developmental stages (from socialism to capitalism) and the assumption that one can (or should) break completely with the past, as neo-liberal economist Jeffrey Sachs has promoted. Instead there is talk about the instability and uncertainty of the ‘transition’ period, which points to the chasm between the expectations of the West and what actually happened on the ground. For the view that nostalgia is a marker of democratic failure is being challenged, see Daphne Berdahl, Matti Bunzl and Martha Lampland, Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000); Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999); Katherine Verdery, What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next?(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 4 Frederic Jameson, ‘Nostalgia for the Present’, in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989, pp. 279–96. 5 For a general outline and the history of Yugoslav involvement with the NAM, see Alvin Rubinstein, Yugoslavia and the Nonaligned World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). 6 Cinema Komunisto, directed by Mila Turajlic (2011). 7 For a fine overview and history of Yugoslav Cinema in the context of internationalist politics, see Daniel J. Goulding, Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). 8 See Cinema Komunisto. 9 It is important to note here that, for instance, the Pula International Film Festival had a special subsection on Indian Cinema, which took place in late fifties and early sixties. Those were also the years in which Tito served as a patron of the festival. This speaks to the strong influence of the NAM imaginary. 10 It is documented that there was what was called The Third World Cinema Committee, which was very active in the sixties and which then consolidated in the seventies, and that there was a plan for strengthening international collaboration among the NAM countries. 11 Gupta offers other evidence of NAM being a diffuse link in binding the international imagined community. Here I suggest that it was a primarily mediatic world: The News Agency Pool, permanent executive committee that plans the summits held every three years, a UN caucus group, International Center for Public Enterprises in Yugoslavia, etc. Akhil Gupta, ‘The Song of the

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Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 1, 1992, pp. 63–79. L. Hutcheon, ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern’, in R. Vervliet and A. Estor, eds, Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 189–207. Kathleen Stewart, ‘Nostalgia-A Polemic’, Cultural Anthropology, vol.3, no.3, 1988, pp. 227–41. Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). K. Stewart, ‘Nostalgia-A Polemic’. Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, 1992). Ibid., p. 14. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [Kniha smíchu a zapomnění], tr. Aaron Asher (London: Faber & Faber, 1996). Gerald Creed, Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998). Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, pp. 49–50. Ibid., p. 50. Daphne Berdahl, On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany, ed. Matti Bunzl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Boym, The Future of Nostalgia; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 61. Mitja Velikonja, ‘Lost in Transition Nostalgia for Socialism in Post-Socialist Countries’, East European Politics & Societies, vol. 23, no. 4, 2009, p. 546. Z. Volcic, ‘Yugo-nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the former Yugoslavia’, Critical Studies of Media Communication, vol. 24, no. 1, 2007, pp. 21–38. Jameson, ‘Nostalgia for the Present’, pp. 279–96. Dominic Boyer, ‘Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany’, Public Culture, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 361–81. Boym, The Future of Nostalgia. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, tr. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). M. Velikonja, Titostalgia: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz (Ljubljana, Slovenia: Mirovni Inštitut, 2008). Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 128. Hirokazu Miyazaki, The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

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Bibliography Berdahl, Daphne. On the Social Life of Postsocialism: Memory, Consumption, Germany. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Berdahl, Daphne, Matti Bunzl and Martha Lampland. Altering States: Ethnographies of Transition in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope. Tr. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. Boyer, Dominic ‘Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany’, Public Culture, vol. 18, no. 2, 2006, pp. 361–81. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Burawoy, Michael and Katherine Verdery. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999. Creed, Gerald. Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. Drakulić, Slavenka. How We Survived Communism & Even Laughed. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Goulding, Daniel J. Liberated Cinema: The Yugoslav Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Gupta, Akhil. ‘The Song of the Nonaligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism’, Cultural Anthropology, vol 7, no.1, 1992, pp. 63–79. Hutcheon, L. ‘Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern’, in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, ed. R. Vervliet and A. Estor. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000, pp. 189–207. Ivy, Marilyn. Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasm, Japan. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1995. Jameson, Frederic. ‘Nostalgia for the Present’, in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [Kniha smíchu a zapomnění], Tr. Aaron Asher. London: Faber & Faber, 1996. Miyazaki, Hirokazu. The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Rubinstein, Alvin. Yugoslavia and the Nonaligned World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. Schmitter, Philippe C. and Terry Lynn Karl. ‘The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go?’, Slavic Review, vol. 53, no.1, 1994, pp. 173–85. Stewart, Kathleen. ‘Nostalgia: A Polemic’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 3, no. 3, 1 August 1988, pp. 227–41.

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Todorova, Maria and Zsuzsa Gille. Post-Communist Nostalgia. New York: Berghahn Books, 2012. Tokes, Rudolf. ‘“Transitology”: Global Dreams and Post-Communist Realities’, Central Europe Review, vol. 2, no. 10, 2000. http://www.ce-review.org/00/10/ tokes10.html Velikonja, Mitja. ‘Lost in Transition Nostalgia for Socialism in Post-Socialist Countries’, East European Politics & Societies, vol. 23, no. 4, 1 November 2009. Velikonja, Mitja. Titostalgia: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz. Ljubljana, Slovenia: Mirovni Inštitut, 2008. Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Volcic, Z. ‘Yugo-Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia’, Critical Studies of Media Communication, vol. 24, no. 1, 2007, pp. 21–38. Yurchak, Alexei. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.

9 Past futures of old media Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home Karin Zitzewitz

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ver the past decade, Gulammohammed Sheikh has experimented simultaneously with new media and old forms of visual storytelling. In a deliberate extension of his career-long exploration of narrative, autobiography and place-making, Sheikh’s new works directly cite his earlier paintings and return to an archive of art historical references accumulated by the artist over decades. But they also articulate aspects of his thinking about temporality and cultural history in new, politically provocative ways. The shift in Sheikh’s work, or perhaps just the new sharpness with which he enunciates his vision of culture, can be traced to the changes in political discourse and social life in his home state of Gujarat since the devastating riots of 2002. This decade marked the national ascendency of Narendra Modi, who led the Gujarat government during deadly pogroms that targeted Muslim neighborhoods, businesses and politicians across the state, including where Sheikh lives in Baroda (Vadodara), for several months of 2002. Sheikh and his family were forced to flee during the riots, as other intellectuals marked as Muslim had their lives threatened and homes destroyed. The years after the riots saw the temporary closure and then near-desolation of the department of Art History in the Faculty of Fine arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University, of which Sheikh was a formative force for nearly three decades, in acts recently likened by Ajay Sinha to the Nazi-driven closure of the Bauhaus.1 And then, as Kavita Singh has noted, it saw a rising chorus of apologists for such actions in the name of economic growth,

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as ‘Vibrant Gujarat’ became vaunted as the site for the triumphant unfolding of India’s historical potential.2 In this context, Sheikh’s long-standing set of preoccupations with the histories of art and modernity, and their interpenetration with processes of secularization and identity formation, took on new urgency and new political meanings. But while his works can and should be read as political speech, they confine themselves to the expressive register and social space of art. They do so without apology and with some contempt for the hard terms of prevailing political discourse. Indeed, by their very complexity and referential character, Sheikh’s works demand more time and more erudition than are usually afforded either political discourse or contemporary art by their audiences. Among his recent works, perhaps the most uncompromisingly subtle and also the most compelling for analysis is his large-scale installation Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home (2007). Like a series of smaller works made after 2002, Kaavad, Home, adopts the form of the wooden shrine, what is usually a portable, hand-held object with panels that can be moved to uncover an image of a deity. This version is eight feet tall and can be walked into, constructed from panels that are a mixture of digital prints and paintings. The work is absorbing, rewarding viewers with masses of detail and broad historical reference. Some paintings are based on Sheikh’s autobiographical works from the 1970s and 1980s, exuberant, worldly investigations into the role that religiosity plays in experience. But most depend upon an archive of images and historical figures that exemplify pre-modern and pre-secular modes of representation and being in the world. One quarter of the work presents an imagined sangat (assembly) of ‘seekers and skeptics’ (Plate 4). This is an allusion to Benodebehari Mukherjee’s canonical Medieval Hindi Saints (1946–47), which imagined a gathering of the great historical figures of bhakti (devotional) tradition. Yet Sheikh’s invocation of the assembly departs significantly from the optimistic cultural nationalism of that earlier work. Much of the work of Kaavad, Home was made possible by Sheikh’s enthusiastic embrace of digital media, including both digital photography and collage. With these techniques, he renews the formal rigor of his critique of representational painting, which he developed beginning in 1969. His works in the 1970s and 1980s, made before the advent of digital technology, experimented with modes of representation adapted from pre-Renaissance European, Mughal and Persian painting. They included ‘quotations’, to use his term, from

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reproductions of works from those periods, copied in oil paint in his own hand. The painted panels of Kaavad, Home use that technique, although Sheikh’s critique of authorship is extended significantly by his collaboration with multiple painting assistants. Other panels make use of Photoshop in collages created directly from reproductions of historical works. In these digital ink-jet prints, Sheikh sutures painting to photography in imaginative ways. This chapter focuses on these two aspects of Sheikh’s work – its critique of secularization and its use of digital media – in order to argue that Kaavad, Home provides a crucial opening from which to observe how the artist’s long-standing engagement with the history of representation is based upon a sophisticated critique of historicist temporality. This becomes clear when Sheikh’s Kaavad, Home is considered as a form of utopian discourse. In its carefully assembled archive of historical precedents, the work constructs a counterfactual world history in which the secular is absent. Presenting the past as a profound resource and space of play, it asks us to re-imagine temporality in the absence of the certainties of a progressive historicity now contaminated by the betrayals of India’s present. Through its critical use of known artistic forms and authoritative historical precedents, Sheikh’s work imagines alternative futures for the past and, therefore, provides a utopian alternative to the present. 

Methods of viewing Sheikh’s Kaavad, Home In the catalog for Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home, Gulammohammed Sheikh describes the sort of viewing required for his work by telling an autobiographical fable. He reminds the reader that in the early 1960s, when he began to establish himself as an artist, ‘the visual image was supreme’.3 The experience of viewing art was supposed to be a matter of visual sensation; the goal was to look ‘at art with wide open eyes and bec[o]me ecstatic’. A founding member of Group 1890, a shortterm but seminal collective dominated by the charismatic artist J. Swaminathan, Sheikh was in the early 1960s a proponent of what began to be called the ‘numinous image’, an image of intrinsic power. Content, and the alternative viewing strategies it demanded, was considered ‘external’, he recalls, ‘and a kind of burden’. When Sheikh traveled to England to study at the Royal College of Art, he was already teaching the history of art – both a Western

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art survey and more specialized courses in Indian painting – at the Faculty of Fine Arts, where he had trained in painting. An unusually mature student, he was perhaps more independent than most at the Royal College, spending his time in museums rather than developing close relationships to teachers. He returned to India in 1967, traveling overland through Italy, Iran and Afghanistan, seeing a great deal of art, both in museums and at historical sites. When telling this part of the story, he sometimes focuses on the paintings he saw in Italy, but in the catalog interview he skips to his next visit to the frescoes of Ajanta.4 Art historical knowledge enhanced his experience of viewing these historical works, he argues, rather than distracting from ‘the visual magic’. He recounts that the first painting he made in response to this shift in his approach to content is Returning Home from a Long Absence (Plate 5, 1969–73).5 In the center of the painting is a dargah (Sufi shrine), surrounded by a dense, walled-in neighborhood. Above and below the townscape are quotations from other images: one, the depiction of the Prophet Mohammad on Buraq, taken from a Persian painting, and the other, a photograph of Sheikh’s mother. Angels, taken from a Mughal painting, float out of the dargah’s back door and up towards the Prophet. When compared to his later works, this is a fairly simple composition, comprehensible as a single image. But because the quotations retain many markers of their original styles, the painting also privileges the kind of context, whether art historical or biographical, that Sheikh had previously dismissed as burdensome. This painting is the earliest work Sheikh typically includes in discussions of his artistic development. A slice of its center is reproduced as one of the panels of Kaavad, Home. Together with a section of Speaking Street (1981), an early exploration of narrative, it forms one outside wall of the shrine when it is closed (Plate 6). Both of these early paintings are visually stunning, either in their original form or as represented as part of Kaavad, Home. But they also encourage a referential form of viewing in which the visual experience of the painting is accompanied by the impulse to decode. Sheikh’s works reward attempts to pull his compositions apart and consider the meaning of each element. To those familiar with Sheikh’s work, these two panels refer viewers primarily to their own memories of seeing the oils painted decades before, either in their original form or in reproduction. Overall, the experience of viewing approximates ‘reading’, calling upon language as well as visual sensation.

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In Kaavad, Home, this referential form of viewing is put into motion, as it were. Walking between panels, the viewer constructs an idiosyncratic order for images, depending upon the point of entry. Images take on new meanings as parts of series, when a painting like Whose World?, which presents a Mercator map projection with highlights on the outline of the global south, is viewed alongside the mixture of digital technology and self-citation of Niharika from Google Earth (Plate 7). The latter painting reconfigures Sheikh’s past representations of his home, called Niharika, and workplace in the Faculty of Fine Arts, and places those images on top of a painted facsimile of the satellite photograph of his neighborhood. If the viewer continues walking around the shrine in either direction, then she is presented with pre-modern maps. The central panels of the open cube are based on the 13th-century Ebstorf mappamundi, in which the world is encompassed by – and therefore also oriented by – the body of Christ. One version of that image, surrounded by an angel-filled sky, is flanked by two paintings based on Indic-style maps. Those images use multiple-point perspective to represent the experience of walking in a walled city, rather than the bird’s-eye view of the Ebstorf map. On either side of the second mappamundi, whose circular form is this time surrounded by stylized clouds, are figures from various religious and literary traditions. Those include the Taoist immortal Shoriken, the Prophet Elias (Elijah) and the love-struck epic hero Majnun, who is shown in exile from Dwarka, an important pilgrimage site for devotees of Krishna. Kaavad, Home’s orientation toward the body, in its scale and as it engages with the viewer’s movement, works in tandem with its invitation to decode. This is crucial to the effect of the last set of external panels, which is the work’s first invocation of the form of the sangat (Plates 4, 8). A set of lushly painted life-size figures sit facing the entrance to the center of the shrine. The quoted images retain the palette and much of the style of their originals, subtly marking how the gathering requires a movement across art historical contexts. Many of the figures are immediately recognizable as representatives of ascetic sects, their nakedness and poverty marking them as renunciants and seekers. Among the most familiar of the figures is Mohandas K. Gandhi, although the image Sheikh uses, by the painter Abanindranath Tagore, is less familiar than most. Another figure of symbolic weight is the sweeper, whose image is quoted from a

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17th-century Mughal painting, but whose work and social position, Sheikh claims, have remained basically the same.6 Gandhi and the sweeper are pictured on the inner sides of the gateway. Just as in Sheikh’s monumental work addressing communal violence, City for Sale (1981–84), the life-sized scale of the painted figures forces the viewer to imagine herself as part of the group and to measure her complicity in the social body they imply. Whereas the earlier painting deliberately refers to an existing political community, the city of Baroda (Vadodara), the Kaavad, Home sangat can only be imagined. Its figures are collected from across hundreds of years and dispersed geographical regions. And the painting leaves open the question of what kind of community might be constituted by their assembly. The shrine itself is empty. In place of a divine image is space, with three digital collages forming the walls and ceiling around it. Each digitally assembled image uses a pre-modern representational strategy: the speaking tree, the ark as a site of assembly (Plate 9) and a map-like form. Each of these images has a resonant counterpart in at least one of the painted external panels of Kaavad, Home. These digital works also promote a decoding impulse in viewers. Indeed, when compared to the paintings, they provide more information to the viewer about their sources. The quotations Sheikh takes from reproductions printed in art historical studies or sold as postcards are placed in entirely new representational contexts, but they retain details that are lost when they are repainted. For instance, the cracks in the surface of a fresco by Fra Angelico remain in the quotation of Christ’s mourners that appears at the base of Sheikh’s Speaking Tree. Such referential details are also, if differently, crucial to the effect of the photographed cityscapes that ring the ceiling of the inner chamber, on a print dominated by a beautiful, angel-filled sky. Sheikh describes Kaavad, Home as ‘basically a three-dimensional painting’. In addition to the mobile habits of viewing that Sheikh has cultivated in his viewers for decades – a familiarity with narrative strategies based in multiple entry-points and complex compositions – the work also elicits habits of viewing more familiar to installation. Scaled to the human body, Kaavad, Home encourages a kind of selfconsciousness about the bodily nature of art viewing. But unlike almost all installation art, Kaavad, Home is committed to the image and to thinking through the politics of representation and its relationship to the production of meaning. In that respect, it is a direct outgrowth of Sheikh’s long-standing set of concerns with the history of painting and the capacity of painting to spur historical thinking.

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Secularization, art history and uchronia Gulammohammed Sheikh taught the history of art at the Faculty of Fine Arts for two decades before taking up the position of Professor of Painting in the same institution in 1983, replacing his mentor K. G. Subramanyan. As he made that transition, Sheikh published two art historical essays in the just-founded Journal of Arts and Ideas. These writings, both clearly based on slide lectures, articulate the relationship between his critical approach to art history and his practice as a painter. Sheikh marshals art historical resources to argue against postRenaissance modes of viewing and in favor of what he calls ‘mobile vision’, which is the embodied mode of apprehending a painting encouraged by Kaavad, Home. He also connects these modes of viewing to different ideas about artistic subjectivity. Sheikh begins by critiquing the Renaissance innovation of singlepoint perspective and the emergence of a scientific approach to nature.7 Writing about Velasquez’s Las Meninas, Sheikh connects single-point perspective to the particular form of artistic subjectivity associated with representational painting.8 He writes, ‘the shadow of the artist hovered over every illusionistic picture like a ghost’, over-determining the meaning of the painting and foreclosing the creative and critical engagement of the viewer.9 By contrast, preRenaissance European paintings and Persian and Mughal paintings encourage the eye to travel through pictorial space, allowing the viewer room for interpretation. Both articles describe aspects of ‘mobile vision’ by reading examples of non-post-Renaissance art and then likening them to work closer to the experience of Sheikh’s Indian audience: in one, he discusses Benodebehari Mukherjee’s Medieval Hindi Saints, and in the other, he turns to Pithoro painting, a ‘primitive’ wall-painting practice connected to rituals of spirit possession. These cases, a modernist take on the ‘medieval’ period and a ‘primitive’ pictorial practice documented by his artist colleague Jyoti Bhatt, serve as examples of a different subjective relationship to art, one that rejects the emphasis on rationality found in postRenaissance painting.10 In the intervening decades between these statements and Kaavad, Home, Sheikh’s critique of post-Renaissance art changes focus away from the emergence of modern artistic subjectivity and toward the development of a secular category of art. This shift is smaller than it might seem. The reading of post-Renaissance art history Sheikh

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adopts hinges upon the emergence of anthropocentrism and links the development of particular conventions of vision and representation to a newly secular world order. As John Berger writes, paraphrasing Erwin Panofsky’s own adaptation of Martin Heidegger’s ‘Age of the World Picture’, The convention of perspective, which is unique to European art and which was first established in the early Renaissance, centers everything on the eye of the beholder. It is like a beam from a lighthouse – only instead of light travelling outwards, appearances travel in. The conventions called those appearances reality. Perspective makes the single eye the center of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God.

This passage is from Berger’s influential critical introduction to art history, Ways of Seeing, which Sheikh cites in his 1983 articles. In the 1980s the non-secularity of Sheikh’s historical alternatives to postRenaissance art may not have been the prime objective of his argument. But the archive he assembled proved to be a crucial resource as he later crafted his secular critique of the historical process of secularization. Sheikh’s art historical writings should be read alongside his artist statements from around that time, which describe his investment in the idea of visual autobiography. As he said in an interview with fellow painter Gieve Patel, he was on a ‘journey from art to life’, rather than the opposite. ‘By painting’, he said in 1985, ‘[I] learned how to look at life through art, [so I] know that art was used as a catalyst to create concepts for living.’11 Central to that project, he consistently claimed, was the need to come to terms with anachronism. In his bestknown statement of this problem, he writes, ‘Living in India means living simultaneously in several times and cultures. One often walks into “medieval” situations and runs into “primitive” people. The past exists as a living entity alongside the present, each illuminating and sustaining the other’.12 The question for him in the 1970s and 1980s was how to develop modes of representation that could at once capture this experience of anachronism and critique the historical processes that produced it. In the period that followed, as he endured the ever-increasing communalization of social life, the question became quite different. In the catalog for Kaavad, Home, he describes it as how ‘to retrieve the sense of the spiritual from organized religious practice and to transpose it to the realm of the secular’.13

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In thinking through the category of ‘the spiritual’, Sheikh has worked primarily with the figure of Kabir (1440–1518), the so-called ‘weaver saint’ whose anti-dogmatic poetry emphasizes the direct experience of the divine. Discussing Kabir’s appeal, Sheikh quotes, ‘tera sain tujh mein hai, jag sake to jag [or] your preceptor is within you[,] awake to see him.’14 The ‘non-sectarian’ form of the sacred that Kabir’s poetry offers is an attractive rejoinder to a public discourse in which religion appears largely in its dogmatic forms. Those dogmatic forms of religion, Sheikh argues, are a product of the processes of secularization that hardened the borders of religious communities and the boundaries of religious thought. Kabir’s poetry, by contrast, allows Sheikh to articulate the proximity of aesthetic and religious experience, the sense of ‘ecstatic empathy’, to adopt his startling phrase, at the core of both.15 In groups of gouaches on paper that he showed in Delhi in 1998, and in large-format oils shown in 2001, Sheikh developed many of the images that he used in Kaavad, Home. Two of the most important of these are directly related to Kabir’s thought and to the intellectual tradition that surrounds him as a thinker. The first is appropriation. As is true for all of the major bhakti poets, ever since Kabir’s poems began to be repeated and sung, in the 15th century, contemporary poets would join their poems to his tradition simply by inserting the phrase kahat Kabir (Kabir says). Sheikh’s invocations of the weaver saint similarly extend the tradition of thought that carries Kabir’s name. The second crucial move Sheikh made in these works is to begin to bring together sets of figures in a move that eventually turned into the sangat in Kaavad, Home. In 2001, he painted Across Divides, a large triptych that imagines a gathering of wanderers from across religious traditions – the same set whose figures appear in the later work. ‘I like to bring them together in dialogue’, he said, noting that even if it is not known if Kabir and Mirabai, another important bhakti saint, knew each other, in our lives we do connect them. We have construed our own history. This is the history that we have to excavate from the debris that has crushed us all: the form of history that separates things, makes us choose, one or the other.16

Sheikh imagines this dialogue as a jugalbandi, which in Hindustani classical music is a performance in which two soloists of equal standing play a duet.

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This passage allows us to consider how the sangat, as a form, might be understood as an exercise in utopian thinking. It is instructive to compare these panels of Kaavad, Home to their most important precedent, Medieval Hindi Saints. Sheikh wrote about the mural as part of his work co-curating Mukherjee’s retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. He worked on that project between 2004 and 2007, just when he began to experiment with the form of the portable shrine. Mukherjee’s massive fresco, which is probably his best-known work, was made in the foyer of Hindi Bhavan at Vishvabharati University in Santiniketan just before Indian Independence and Partition, from 1946 to 1947. Sheikh reads the work as a ‘visionary dream of a historic India on which to project its future’, in which major figures of the bhakti tradition are gathered together amongst followers pursuing everyday tasks. The saints are shown without the identifying marks used in popular visual culture, in which symbols fix the identities of individual figures. Mukherjee’s mural, Sheikh writes, ‘project[s] the saints as silent revolutionaries rising from within the populace and introducing them as harbingers of change’. These figures address the ‘emergent, modern citizenry of an independent nation. The spiritual thus gets vested in the “secular” cultural practices of arts and literature’.17 Sheikh highlights how the saints’ followers make up the landscape – the assembled figures fill the nation-space, both metaphorically, as the body politic, and literally, as their bodies make up the land itself. Only Varanasi, the holy city associated with the saint Tulsidas, is represented by its characteristic architecture. Like Mukherjee’s mural, Sheikh’s sangat imagines dialogues between saints and mystics. Sheikh uses the same terms – a placement of the spiritual within the secular field of art – to describe Mukherjee’s work as he did for his own. But unlike Medieval Hindi Saints, the figures to which Sheikh refers come from across the world, across belief systems and across a huge expanse of pre-modern time. Further, their assembly does not constitute a landscape nor does it occur in any particular nation-space. Indeed, Sheikh’s use of the sangat form does not seem to be prompted here by the imagination of an alternative space. What is at stake instead is the construction of an alternative time, another kind of ‘visionary dream . . . on which to project [a] future’. In other words, it resembles what Reinhart Koselleck calls uchronia. In his essay on ‘The Temporalization of Utopia’, Koselleck writes about the late 18th-century emergence of a new form of utopian

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writing that takes place in the future.18 He attributes this first to the newly complete geographical knowledge – the emergence of a historical moment in which all of ‘the utopian spaces had been surpassed by experience’ – and second to secularization, which he describes as the loss of an imaginative investment in ‘the divine world beyond’. During the so-called Age of Enlightenment, he notes, the future became the most rewarding site of exploration in texts like the 1770 novel The Year 2440 by French author Louis-Sébastien Mercier. By the 1918 moment in which constitutional law expert Carl Schmitt wrote Die Buribunken, the second utopian text Koselleck discusses, such faith in progress remained, but had become ripe for satire. The first book is what Koselleck calls a ‘naïve utopia of the future’, in which the author imagines a world in which all citizens are writers, whose writings are a testament to the collective moral perfectibility that provides continuity to secular history. The second, a ‘negative utopia’, is the inverse of the first. Schmitt’s text is a parody of the belief in progress as well as the idea that human beings could ‘execute and master history’.19 The apparent reversal of Mercier by Schmitt is only made possible by the ideas about temporality and history that are shared by both texts. Koselleck argues that the future is available to both utopian thinkers as a result of Enlightenment-derived understandings of history, in which human mastery and historical continuity are emphasized even as the understanding of human nature is newly seen as historically contingent rather than God-given. For Sheikh, however, the progressive historicity that underlies such utopias of the future is untenable. It is first belied by the multiplicity of his experience of historical time, which he first expressed in his 1980s artist statements. But further, the future had been rendered pernicious by the results of the faith in progress that characterized India’s early postcolonial state. Sheikh expresses a sense of betrayal by the outcome of Nehruvian dreams of a secular, socialist and industrialized India. Just as post-Enlightenment thinkers could no longer look to unexplored spaces on the earth, Sheikh cannot look to the future as unoccupied territory. The past provides more fertile ground for thinking through alternatives to the present. As he writes, the pre-modern context from which he assembles his set of seekers and skeptics is a deep reservoir of historical possibility, which he imagines as an era when ‘there was no one religion, or one system or one belief or one idea, but multiple systems, multiple beliefs, multiple religions, and multiple ideas’.20

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In his 1980s artists’ statements, Sheikh used the term ‘multiplicity’ to describe the temporality of his present moment. But in the intervening years, that sense of an everyday anachronism, and the flexibility it both demanded and made possible, seems to have eroded. Now, Sheikh can only find multiplicity in a constructed past. His uchronia is built out of imaginative acts of equivalence-making, whose ground is an archaic past defined negatively as non-modern. Sheikh finds figures from various times and places for whom the absence of secularity allows for a fluid approach to the ethical life. That fluidity is, again, negatively defined, recognizable by its incommensurability with a contemporary moment in which both religious practice and democratic politics are built upon appeals to bounded identities. The only modern figure allowed in the assembly, Gandhi, represents a critique of such ideas about identity. The fierce debate about the ultimate relationship of Gandhi’s political practices to democracy shows how uneasily his techniques of political engagement sit alongside the forms of citizenship that have been put into practice by the Indian state. His invocation of Gandhi, and particularly of Abanindranath Tagore’s portrait of him, is similar to his reference to Mukherjee’s Medieval Hindi Saints. Both gestures allow Sheikh to assert the connections between his work and an authoritative genealogy of Indian modernism in which questions of indigeneity, aesthetics and the relationship between religion and political identity are central. But the multicivilizational, multireligious assembly that Sheikh imagines, as well as its temporal separation from the present, contrasts sharply with the largely Hindu, continuous civilizational imagination at the heart of the earlier artists’ aesthetic nationalism.21 Just as a utopia of the future has become foreclosed after the disintegration of state-led high modernism, the distinctly national cultural past that was so ripe for the imaginative thinking of Indian modernists in the first half of the 20th century is no longer as available to Sheikh at the beginning of the 21st. The fluidity of bhakti tradition, which appeared to Mukherjee as a resource for the Indian nation, has solidified as a by-product of historical process of religious identity formation that are themselves the signal result of the evolving relationship between religion and politics in India. In response, and as critique, Sheikh imagines a past in which such processes have not yet begun, and recasts that past as a resource for thinking through a future in which the fluidity of identity and practice can be acknowledged and championed.

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Digital collage and utopian space The painted version of Sheikh’s sangat, which should be considered an uchronia of the past, is devoid of markers of place. But the digital print Ark, hung in the center of Kaavad, Home, places that assembly within recognizable geographical spaces of Gujarat. Ark may be the most densely referential of all of the images included in Kaavad, Home, beginning with the titular boat, which is based on a c.1765–75 painting by Nainsukh (1705–78). A digital image of the hull of Nainsukh’s boat floats in the tempestuous body of water of Sheikh’s design that provides the ground for Ark. Inside the boat is a calm lake ringed by the modern architecture of a typical Indian city, which Sheikh identifies as Baroda. Images of Kabir and Gandhi sit on either end of the boat, overlooking the group of saints and skeptics whose smaller figures have been placed facing one another in the middle of the grayblue water of the lake. Images of the Mughal sweeper figure and contemporary artist Bhupen Khakhar (1934–2003), shown painting at his easel, are also in the lake, though they stand off to either side. Finally, above this scene floats a narrow ellipse-shaped collage of photographs of overbuilt urban landscape, which Sheikh writes is his hometown of Surendranagar. The richest among these references is the drawing by Nainsukh, which was published in B. N. Goswamy’s landmark volume on the painter.22 Goswamy describes the drawing as an illustration of a folk tale in which a ruler consults a holy man for the recipe for an aphrodisiacal potion even as his city is in peril. The boat careens in the current, weighed down by people, for the city’s entire population and army accompanies the man. Massive numbers, including elephants, horses and even a mountain, are contained by the boat. In the distance is a great fire; perhaps they are fleeing disaster. These actions are witnessed by two nobles sitting on the bow and stern; one is likely a portrait of Nainsukh’s patron, Balwant Singh. Reading the texts, which remained undeciphered by previous commentators, Goswamy reports that these men are musing on the misplaced priorities of the central figure. Goswamy argues that Nainsukh refers here to a genre of folk tales that warn against destruction and folly, although the specific target of his allegory is unknown. It is intriguing that Sheikh decided to replace the interior of the boat, a peopled landscape that constitutes a kingdom, with Baroda’s

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Sursagar, a large lake or talav (tank/reservoir) in the middle of the city. The lake was fortified with stone walls in the 18th century, making it suitable for ritual, practical and leisure purposes, and it is now in the center of the city, ringed by residences and small temples. In 2002, just after the quelling of devastating ‘riots’ that included the targeting of Muslim politicians and public figures, a 111-foot statue of the Hindu god Shiva was erected in the middle of the pond.23 Sponsored by the Vadodara Municipal Corporation and in the works since 1995, the statue was championed by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Its rituals were managed, up until recently, by the MLA for the adjacent Raopura legislative district, Yogesh Patel.24 Art historian Kajri Jain has documented the building of several such Shiva statues across India, among other similar ‘big statues’ of deities, and explored their potent efficacy as a visual practice. She finds that very few such statues are placed in the middle of Indian cities, as with the Sursagar Shiva. It is much more common for ‘big statues’ to be placed on the outskirts, serving as new roadside attractions made possible by the increase in automotive travel.25 But the Sursagar Shiva is typical insofar as it is spectacularly large, dwarfing every surrounding building by several stories. It has become a new sort of monument in a city dominated by less overtly religious spaces of leisure and tourism, including the large park and palace associated with the rulers of the erstwhile princely state and the highly contested and politicized space of the university.26 While such statues have their own particular effects, they should also be seen alongside other acts of resignification common to Indian cities, including the destruction and/or discovery of religious sites and practices of renaming.27 Thomas Blom Hansen has written extensively about these signifying practices as undertaken by the Shiv Sena in Bombay/Mumbai, including the renaming of the city itself.28 Using the category of utopia, he recently described how similar fights over the spaces of the Maharashtrian city of Aurangabad have gone beyond the symbolic practices and discourses of history familiar from the Mumbai case to include the present-day implementation of a 1970 master plan that disproportionately targets Muslim areas of the city for demolition and rebuilding.29 In the wider context of these spatial practices, Sheikh’s placement of the sangat inside the Baroda Sursagar is deeply meaningful. It transforms his uchronian vision of a past untrammeled by the solidified, politicized form of religiosity that motivates projects like the monumental

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Shiva into a properly spatial utopian imagination, an alternative past and future for Sheikh’s home city. The photographs he uses of the lake’s relatively humble skyline are dotted with structures built across various periods since the 18th century, including several temples. Inside the lake, he places the sangat figures at a careful approximation of human scale. The photographic images, including those from reproductions of paintings, allow him to construct a recognizable place within the allegorical picture form that he borrows from Nainsukh. This technique allows him to imagine an alternative to a present-day Baroda dominated by Hindu majoritarian politics. In its place, Sheikh imagines a space of religious multiplicity, seeking and skepticism. One final point of interest about this version of the sangat is the inclusion of Sheikh’s close friend and fellow artist Bhupen Khakhar. Khakhar, who passed away in 2003, was one of the most inventive and iconoclastic of India’s contemporary artists. As I have written about elsewhere, he inspired extraordinary levels of devotion in the Indian art world.30 Even when he was alive, and certainly after his death, he held the status of artist-as-truth-teller, a secular and contemporary combination of the seeker and skeptic figures that Sheikh finds in pre-secular world history.31 As Sheikh notes in the catalog, Khakhar had long been interested in devotional cults and their visual cultures. He tells how, when Khakhar fell in love with a Radhaswami follower, he attended the group’s satsangs, but, as Sheikh writes, ‘I do not know how much he remained in and how much he watched from outside’.32 Khakhar must have needed some distance to paint such practices, Sheikh suggests, and at times his paintings included in-jokes that marked the artist’s ironic distance. But Khakhar’s attitude toward Hindu devotional practices was fluid and ambivalent, exhibiting just the kind of flexibility that Sheikh sees lacking in an age of religious dogmatism. 

Complexity and art as political speech Sheikh’s work quite earnestly champions the civilizational flexibility that is demonstrated by Khakhar through irony and humor. The strategies both artists adopted are appropriate to a political context in which invocations of the religious past are very likely to be considered provocative. The risks faced by Sheikh are no doubt more acute because of his Muslim name, as well as his invocations of India’s

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Muslim past. Both have made him a perennial target for hardline Hindutva activists emboldened by the success of their attacks against the artist M. F. Husain for his modernist takes on the Hindu goddess and, earlier, on the secularist arts organization Sahmat.33 Sheikh has asserted his continued right to referentiality very simply by continuing to make references to past forms of art central to his practice. In doing so, Sheikh’s work knowingly extends India’s tradition of political speech within modernism, in which references to a carefully selected archive of pre-modern/pre-colonial Indian art were central to the production of a sense of a political, as well as artistic future. Indeed, even as Sheikh claims the strategies and images of Abanindranath Tagore and Benodebehari Mukherjee as his own, he also implicitly critiques the limits of their archive. In place of a national pre-modern, Sheikh’s offers a fascinatingly global sense of an art historical and cultural past, an image archive unified more by habits of thought – seeking, skepticism – than by ideas of citizenship. Sheikh began to compile his archive of references back in the mid-1960s, but he has deepened and extended it in the decades since. In so doing, he adds a significant critique of Indian modernism to the critique of art historical modernity, which he, like Abanindranath and Benodebehari, plants firmly in the West. This critique is a product of Sheikh’s lifetime of learning, based mainly in art historical and cultural research. Kaavad, Home exhibits the sort of voracious appetite for knowledge that becomes the core of a person’s character. Sheikh held up such learning as a value during the crisis following the attack by Hindutva activists on the Faculty of Fine Arts in 2007, the same year he made Kaavad, Home. At the time, a Vishwa Hindu Parishad activist drew support from local Christian leaders to accuse a young art student of offenses to religious sentiments. In the days following the attack, Sheikh argued that what is at stake in such events is nothing less than the role that culture – meaning, in his terms, the so-called high culture of art, literature, etc. – might play in human life.34 To him, the Hindutva attack was characterized by the kind of bad faith that would be basically impossible to sustain in a public based in a richer sense of selfhood. In the idea of the self that Sheikh grounds in the pre-modern past, subjectivities are complex and the boundaries of identities are fuzzy. Sheikh’s vision of cultural multiplicity contains a reconfirmed commitment to complexity, defined in art historical, cultural, religious, and temporal terms. In his work, complexity has an absolute aesthetic

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value, but I would like to suggest that complexity can also be seen as Sheikh’s principal political strategy. Or, perhaps it is clearer to say that complexity is the strategic mode by which Sheikh questions the discursive basis for political speech. For Sheikh’s main claim is that the cultural flexibility found in a pre-secular historical moment can provide a counterpoint to the fixed identities mobilized by modern politics.

❁ Notes 1 Ajay Sinha, ‘Art History and the Indian Bazaar, Review of Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Calendar Art by Kajri Jain’, Art History, vol. 31, no. 5, 2008, p. 809. 2 Kavita Singh, catalog essay in Gulammohammed Sheikh: City, Kaavad and Other Works (exhibition catalog) (New Delhi: Rabindra Bhavan and Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011), p. 6. 3 Gulammohammed Sheikh, Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home (exhibition catalog) (New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2008), p. 2. 4 Interview with Gulammohammed Sheikh, Vadodara, 2009. 5 For more on Sheikh’s paintings of the 1970s and 1980s, see Karin Zitzewitz, Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India (London: Hurst & Co Publishers, 2013). 6 Kaavad, Home, 11. Bishandas, The Hermitage of Sheikh Phul, ca. 1620, color on paper. Bharat Kala Bhavan, Varanasi. Reproduced in the Huntington Archive, Ohio State University, Retrieved 25 September 2013, http://huntington.wmc. ohio-state.edu/public/index.cfm?fuseaction=showThisDetail&ObjectID=3 0029117&detail=small. 7 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (London: Zone Books, 1996); Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1977), pp. 115–54. 8 Gulammohammed Sheikh, ‘Mobile Vision: Some Synoptic Comments’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, vol. 4, October–December 1983, pp. 43–52. Though he published this piece just after Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things became available in English translation, Sheikh writes that he had not read that work before writing his own account of Las Meninas. 9 Gulammohammed Sheikh, ‘Viewer’s View: Looking at Pictures’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, vol. 3, April–June 1983, p. 5. 10 Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 11 Gieve Patel, ‘My Journey Has Been from Art to Life’, Express Magazine (8 September 1985). Baroda Archives, Scrapbook 1973–1989.

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12 Gulammohammed Sheikh, artist statement, Place for People (exhibition catalog), Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay, 9–15 November 1981 and Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi, 21 November–3 December 1981. Collection of Vivan Sundaram. 13 Sheikh, Kaavad, Home, p. 8. 14 ‘Gulammohammed Sheikh in conversation with Kavita Singh’, in Gulammohammed Sheikh: Palimpsest (exhibition catalog), Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi and Sakshi Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2001, p. 5. 15 Sheikh, Kaavad, Home, 4. 16 Sheikh, Palimpsest, p. 14. 17 Gulammohammed Sheikh, ‘Ruminating on “Life of the Medieval Saints” by Benodebehari Mukherjee’, in Gulammohammed Sheikh and R. Siva Kumar, eds., Benodebehari Mukherjee (1904–1980) Centenary Retrospective (New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery and National Gallery of Modern Art, 2007), p. 37. 18 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘The Temporalization of Utopia’, in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, tr. Todd Samuel Presner and Others (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 84–99. 19 Koselleck, ‘The Temporalization of Utopia’, 93. 20 Sheikh, Palimpsest, 5. 21 On Abanindranath Tagore’s notion of the Hindu canon, see Tapati GuhaThakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 22 B. N. Goswamy, Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2011 [1997]), pp. 234–35. 23 Human Rights Watch, ‘“We Have No Orders to Save You”: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat’, April 2002, Retrieved 26 June 2009, http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2002/india/and People’s Union for Democratic Rights Report, ‘“Maaro! Kaapo! Baalo!”: State, Society, and Communalism in Gujarat’, Delhi, May 2002, Retrieved 26 June 2009 http://www.pudr.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task= cat_view&gid=58&Itemid=63. 24 Tushar Tere, ‘Netas Kept out of Sursagar Shivratri Celebrations’, Times of India, 27 February 2011, Retrieved 28 October 2013 http://articles.timesofindia. indiatimes.com/2011–02–27/vadodara/28637984_1_puja-celebrationsshiva-idol-sursagar-lake. 25 Kajri Jain, ‘Sacred Exhibition Value and Territorial Spectacle: Post-Reform India’s Automotive-Iconic-Cement Assemblages’, paper delivered at the South Asia Center, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Thursday, 15 November 2012. 26 See Karin Zitzewitz, Art of Secularism, for a longer discussion of the communalization of M. S. University, Baroda. 27 This literature is huge and wide-ranging, beginning with the discussions of ‘disputed structures’ leading up to the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992. See Sarvepalli Gopal, ed., Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhumi Issue (Delhi: Viking, 1991).

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28 Thomas Blom Hansen, Urban Violence in India: Identity Politics, ‘Mumbai’, and the Postcolonial City (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001). 29 Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘The City as Utopian Space’, paper delivered at the 42nd Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 20 October 2013. 30 See Zitzewitz, The Art of Secularism. 31 My argument borrows these categories from Michel Foucault’s ‘Le courage de la vérité: l’ascète, le révolutionnaire, et l’artiste’, Esprit, vol. 12, 2008, pp. 51–60. 32 Sheikh, Kaavad, Home, p. 4. 33 Sumathi Ramaswamy, ed., Barefoot Across the Nation: M. F. Husain and the Idea of India (London: Routledge, 2010), and Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman, eds., The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989 (Chicago: Smart Art Museum/University of Chicago Press, 2013). 34 Sandhya Bordewekar, ‘“The Art Community Must Act Now – before It Is Too Late” (interview with Gulammohammed Sheikh)’, Art News Magazine of India, vol. 12, no. 3, Autumn 2007, pp. 69–70.

Bilbliography Asad, Talal, et al. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Bordewekar, Sandhya. ‘“The art community must act now – before it is too late” (Interview with Gulammohammed Sheikh)’, Art News Magazine of India, vol. 12, no. 3, Autumn 2007, pp. 69–70. Foucault, Michel. ‘Le courage de la vérité: l’ascète, le révolutionnaire, et l’artiste’, Esprit, vol. 12, 2008, pp. 51–60. Gopal, Sarvepalli, ed. Anatomy of a Confrontation: The Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhumi Issue. Delhi: Viking, 1991. Goswamy, B. N. Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill State. New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2011 [1997]. Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Hansen, Thomas Blom. ‘The City as Utopian Space’, paper delivered at the 42nd Annual Conference on South Asia, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 20 October, 2013. ———. Urban Violence in India: Identity Politics, ‘Mumbai’, and the Postcolonial City. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001. Heidegger, Martin. ‘The Age of the World Picture’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper, 1977, pp. 115–54. Human Rights Watch. ‘“We Have No Orders to Save You”: State Participation and Complicity in Communal Violence in Gujarat’, April 2002, Retrieved 26 June 2009 http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2002/india/. Jain, Kajri. ‘Sacred Exhibition Value and Territorial Spectacle: Post-Reform India’s Automotive-Iconic-Cement Assemblages’, paper delivered at the South Asia

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Center, Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington, Thursday 15 November 2012. Koselleck, Reinhart. ‘The Temporalization of Utopia’, in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, tr. Todd Samuel Presner and Others. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002, 84–99. Moss, Jessica and Ram Rahman, eds. The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India Since 1989. Chicago: Smart Art Museum/University of Chicago Press, 2013. Panofsky, Erwin. Perspective as Symbolic Form. London: Zone Books, 1996. Patel, Gieve, ‘My Journey Has Been from Art to Life’, Express Magazine (8 September 1985). Baroda Archives, Scrapbook 1973–1989. People’s Union for Democratic Rights Report. ‘“Maaro! Kaapo! Baalo!”: State, Society, and Communalism in Gujarat’, Delhi, May 2002, Retrieved 26 June 2009 http://www.pudr.org/index.php?option=com_docman&task=cat_view& gid=58&Itemid=63. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, ed. Barefoot across the Nation: M. F. Husain and the Idea of India. London: Routledge, 2010. Sheikh, Gulammohammed, artist statement. Place for People (exhibition catalogue), Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay, 9–15 November 1981 and Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi, 21 November–3 December, 1981. Collection of Vivan Sundaram. Sheikh, Gulammohammed. Kaavad: Travelling Shrine: Home (exhibition catalog). New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2008, p. 2. Sheikh, Gulammohammed. ‘Mobile Vision: Some Synoptic Comments’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, vol. 4 (October–December 1983), pp. 43–52. Sheikh, Gulammohammed. ‘Ruminating on “Life of the Medieval Saints” by Benodebehari Mukherjee’, in Benodebehari Mukherjee (1904–1980) Centenary Retrospective, ed. Gulammohammed Sheikh and R. Siva Kumar. New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery and National Gallery of Modern Art, 2007, 37. Sheikh, Gulammohammed. ‘Viewer’s View: Looking at Pictures’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, vol. 3 (April–June 1983), p. 5. Sheikh, Gulammohammed in conversation with Kavita Singh, in Gulammohammed Sheikh: Palimpsest (exhibition catalog), Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi and Sakshi Art Gallery, Mumbai, 2001, p. 5. Sinha, Ajay. ‘Art History and the Indian Bazaar, Review of Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Calendar Art by Kajri Jain’, Art History, vol. 31, no. 5, 2008, p. 809. Singh, Kavita, catalog essay in Gulammohammed Sheikh: City, Kaavad and Other Works (exhibition catalog). New Delhi: Rabindra Bhavan and Vadehra Art Gallery, 2011. Tere, Tushar. ‘Netas Kept out of Sursagar Shivratri Celebrations’, Times of India, 27 February 2011, Retrieved 28 October 2013 http://articles.timesofindia. indiatimes.com/2011–02–27/vadodara/28637984_1_puja-celebrationsshiva-idol-sursagar-lake. Zitzewitz, Karin. Art of Secularism: The Cultural Politics of Modernist Art in Contemporary India. London: Hurst & Co Publishers, 2014.

10 Sonic ruptures Music, mobility and the media Shikha Jhingan

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T

he earliest musical voice recorded in India was that of a courtesan. When Fred Gaisberg came to India for his first recording expedition in 1902, he found amongst the baijis and ‘nautch girls’ a ready pool of talented singers who agreed to sing for his machines (Michael Kinnear, 1994). It was this expedition that made Gauhar Jaan India’s first singing star. To inscribe her identity on the sonic format, Gauhar Jaan would end her songs by announcing, ‘My name is Gauhar Jaan.’ With quick sales and an expanding gramophone market, Gauhar Jaan’s voice was no longer confined to the salons of Calcutta. Nor were her listeners only the rich patrons of Calcutta or the rajas of small estates like Darbhanga and Rampur. Gauhar Jaan’s style of rendering the thumri became a template for female musical performance and paved the way for many professional women singers to get their voices inscribed through mechanical reproduction. It was the material object of the gramophone disc that expanded the aural domain, setting in motion an imaginary landscape of female mobility and affective states. If Gauhar Jaan became a voice of the gramophone in the first decade of the 20th century, it was Noor Jehan who became the queen of melody in the cinema of the 1940s. Noor Jehan’s career as a performer of live shows, theatre, cinema, and the gramophone was marked by mobility and travel. She left Lahore for Calcutta in the early 1930s to work as a child artist for both cinema and the theatre. Noor Jehan continued to work from both Calcutta and Lahore, ultimately making her big move to the Bombay film industry in the 1940s. At the time of India’s partition in 1947, Noor Jehan broke

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many hearts by her decision to return to Lahore, choosing to be in Pakistan than in India. This chapter is an attempt to read sonic journeys that link women singers from South Asia with technologies of sound reproduction, cinema and mobile imaginations. What singers like Gauhar Jaan had in common with Noor Jehan was a life of mobility, mediation and cosmopolitanism. In a sensational visit to India in 1982, Noor Jehan sang in a public event in Bombay. This live performance was marked by a sensate body, replete with facial expressions and bodily gestures of a mehfil singer. But what lay behind the materiality of these gestures was the materiality of the media. The arrival of music publishing companies like Polydor, followed by the proliferation of cassette technology in the 1980s, led to the emergence of the ghazal as a dominant genre rekindling in its wake fluid cultural borrowings and auditory habits. It is no coincidence that Runa Laila, Salma Agha, Nazia Hassan, and Reshma were some of the other singers from Bangladesh and Pakistan who made a significant aural presence in South Asia in the early 1980s. Are media then enabling technologies that mobilize practitioners of music to make itinerant journeys and form affective alliances with new audiences? Are media themselves surfaces on which these journeys are effected? By drawing upon media archaeology, I revisit the mediated landscape from the mid-1970s to the 1980s to suggest that by forming dense cultural networks with women singers across national boundaries, the film industry created new socialities of musical performance that carried with them memories of the pre-Partition era. 

Aural awakening: women and the gramophone era The early history of music recordings in India shows how women artists emerging from the kotha tradition used this technology to their advantage in marketing their music in the larger domain of reception. The semi-classical forms of music like geet, ghazal, thumri, hori, kajri, and chaiti performed by the courtesans formed the bulk of the recordings made between 1902 and 1908. Amlan Das Gupta has insightfully suggested that women artists used the neutral space of recordings to recast their musical identities (2005, 469). The gramophone records brought into circulation the disembodied voice of the female singer, a voice that evoked fascination and enchantment. Urban theatre companies in

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cities like Calcutta, Bombay and some other cities of Maharashtra also recruited women from the kothas to perform the role of actors and singers from the 1920s. Along with theatre, the gramophone industry and cinema became major sites for courtesans to expand their networks in the 20th century, making fluid the boundaries between music, technology and sexuality. Several courtesans, in search of new sources of income, shared their repertoire with the film industry, in exchange for signing lucrative contracts with gramophone and film companies (Yatindra Mishra, 2009). This demonstrates the close networks between gramophone companies and the film industry with the expansion of the music market. In his work on the Tawaifs of the early 20th century, Saleem Kidwai has suggested that the term gaanewali was picked up by singing ladies to free themselves of the moralistic value-laden connotations of the word tawaif (2004). ‘The singing ladies’, according to Kidwai, had to reinvent themselves and forge a new identity that would help them gain entry into new networks of performance. For example, biographical accounts of Jaddan Bai’s life are marked by mobility and a constant search for new materialities of performance. Jaddan Bai, a well-known courtesan of Allahabad, first moved to Benares and then to Calcutta. It was in Calcutta that she was introduced to the world of theatre, cinema as well as the gramophone. As T.J.S George writes: Music it became suddenly clear to her, was not just a matter of nawabi courts and big city nautch houses. There was a whole world that could be won on the wings of music alone. Saigal had begun to cast his spell and the world of cinema was agog with excitement over the arrival of sound . . . she was in a position to explore such possibilities because her life in Calcutta had brought her in direct contact with the rich and the famous. Taking advantage of one of them, she migrated to the other end of India, Lahore, in 1931. There she joined the Player and Photophone Company, a leading maker of gramophone records. She became an accredited singer in the company’s rolls. (2007, 26)

With several gramophone records in her name, Jaddan Bai was enterprising enough to first sing for gramophone records before launching her own film company, Sangeet Movitone (Sarah Niazi, 2011). It was in the city of Bombay that Jaddan Bai plunged into the world of cinema, taking on the role of a producer, director and a music composer.

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The arrival of sound technologies like the telephone, the phonograph and the radio in the early 20th century dramatically changed the way sound was perceived, paving the way for an ‘aural awakening’ (Frank Biocca, 1990). Rather than remaining confined to the middle-class and elite listenership within the space of the ‘private’, several accounts point towards the gramophone’s aural presence in tea shops, parks and streets, making the public domain as a sensate space offering a diverse soundscape. Here is how Gangu Bai Hangal, a Hindustani classical vocalist, recounts her growing-up years in Dharwad, a small town of Karnataka, in the 1920s: I was born in a musical family. My early tradition was karnataki. My mother and mother’s mother and all of them sang karnataki. I was born in Dharwar. . . . Although there was karnataki going on at home, whenever I went out, I would hear the gramophone in a chai shop or other shops or people’s houses. It was loud enough to be heard in the streets. All the music was Hindustani: Hirabai, Sunderbai, Abdul Karim Khan, Narayan Rao Vyas, many were there, many names . . . Zohrabai Agrawali . . . I heard all of them. I listened and listened and used to hum before the song came on. That is how my mother understood my attraction to Hindustani music.1

It was this encounter with the mechanical sounds of Hindustani music that finally made the family move to Hubli, where they could find a teacher of Hindustani music for Hangal. Noticing her daughter’s inclination towards Hindustani music, Gangubai Hangal’s mother gave up singing Carnatic music, so that her daughter would be able to focus on one style. The strong presence of Hindustani records in Dharwad played a crucial role in enabling Hangal’s mother make an important decision regarding her daughter’s musical career. She sensed the growing popularity of Hindustani music amongst a new class of listeners. A decade later, Gangu Bai was invited by HMV to come to Bombay and cut her own records, which became a regular feature in her musical life. Music has been seen as inherently mobile, as recordings themselves have an ability to move as objects (Connell and Gibson, 2003, 45). In the South Asian context, it is important to note the intertwining of sound technologies with the emergence of new socialities and practices that in turn had a profound impact on the production and reproduction of music.

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Cinema and music: the question of the female voice The coming of sound cinema provided professional singing women like Jaddan Bai further expansion of their opportunities. At the same time, music also came to be seen as an extraordinary modernizing force enabling respectable middle-class women to learn and perform in the public domain (Janaki Bakhle, 2005, 225). Bakhle suggests that in order to open out the cultural space for women, cultural nationalists like D. V Paluskar drew upon bhakti nationalism as a major force field for change. This meant that all ‘disreputable’ linkages with the kotha had to be purged and strict codes of respectability had to be maintained. Through her insightful work on Carnatic music, Amanda Weidman has shown the privileging of sweetness in women’s voices as a marker of aesthetic value (2006). Lakshmi Subramanian has suggested how a ‘particular set of meanings came to be inscribed on a certain kind of voice that dominated the auditory habit in the late 19th and early 20th century’ (2005, 1562). The discourse around the female voice, according to Subramanian, privileged the innocent, sublime and evanescent quality of the female voice. By the 1930s, the need for educated girls from ‘respectable’ homes to perform in cinema was articulated by the representatives of the film industry. The film actress/singer, like the tawaif, straddled the domains of celebrity culture as well as that of disrepute, positioned as they were to be women of ‘easy virtue’ (Behroze and Thomas 1991, 109). The earliest female actors who joined the industry from ‘respectable’ background were Durga Khote and Devika Rani. The film industry was constantly looking for women who could act as well as sing, but recruiting women from ‘respectable’ homes was an uphill task.2 There is an account, for example, by Dhondutai Kulkarni, a classical singer from the Brahmin community, who was approached by Prabhat studios in 1934 to join their company as a singer/actor in Kolhapur, but Kulkarni was not allowed by her father to perform for films (Cinema in India, 1992, 31). In 1947, Kulkarni got an opportunity to sing for Jai Malhar, a Marathi film to fill in for Shamabai, who died during the recording of its songs. In Kulkarni’s own account, this wasn’t easy. ‘They would tell me that I hit the perfect notes, but faltered on some of the words whenever they had something to do with love and courtship. What could I do? I was so embarrassed by some

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of the lyrics’ (ibid). Kulkarni’s reference to her discomfort with the erotic charge of the lyrics reveals not only her anxieties in getting associated with a ‘lowbrow’ form, but also her felt need to distance herself from the narrative voice (of the nayika) as presented in the lyrics. The songs performed and sung by women in popular Hindi cinema from the 1930s to the 1960s, with overwhelmingly romantic associations, were drawn from musical and literary performance genres like the thumri, dadra, kajri, jhoola, chaiti, biraha, and ghazal. The collapsing of the voice of the narrator/nayika within the song text and its performer/singer in cinema has powerful resonances with the contextual and cultural space of thumri (and its allied forms) that was so intimately associated with the culture of the courtesans. It has been suggested that to perform in public for a wider audience, women musicians modified the lyrics of thumri texts in order to better negotiate with the real-life audience as much as with the audience within the text (Lalita du Perron, 2002; Lakshmi Subramanian 2005). In cinema on the other hand, as illustrated by Dhondhutai Kulkarni, women singers were hardly in a position to effect these negotiations. Since sound and picture were recorded simultaneously with a bulky camera and an immobile microphone, the songs were shot with few variations in camera angles. However, with changes in technology, introduced at different stages, varying from studio to studio, the quality of song recordings improved marginally. The recording of a song along with its in camera shoot took place in makeshift studios; the placement of the microphone and the camera’s own mechanical noise were important factors that contributed to the singers being forced to adopt an open-throated and loud style of singing. This vocal style underwent a change with the arrival of more sophisticated microphones. It has also been suggested that it was K. L Saigal who first introduced the crooning style of singing in film songs.3 This crooning style marked a radical shift from the style of singing followed by women artists in other social and spatial settings. In the following part, I highlight the material, technological and industrial practices of cinema – mainly the arrival of playback technology and sophisticated microphones that enabled women singers from middle-class families to enter the Bombay film industry. It was the arrival of playback technology in 1935 which dramatically changed the performance, practices and discourses around the film song. Playback had far-reaching consequences on the cinema of the 1940s, enabling a wider circulation of films, film songs and stars.

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No longer bound by the positioning of the camera, the singers were able to sing with ease in close proximity to the musicians and the microphone.4 With these trends it was a matter of time before the technology moved towards its logical end, bringing about a complete separation between singing and acting. As songs became more complex in their melodic content, composers preferred to work with artists who were trained singers. The separation of the aural from the visual, effected through the playback system, allowed female playback singers to distance themselves from the lyrical import of the songs. I suggest that the shifts in the performance of the voice engendered through new technologies had far-reaching consequences for the affective dimensions of film music, enabling women in the diegetic context to relay their emotional and personal selves through the reworked codes of femininity. The introduction of sensitive microphones and playback technology enabled the singers to adopt a more emotive and smoother style of singing. The microphone also narrowed the physical range of the performer, ‘serving as a kind of ballast for the singer’, limiting her body movements (Weidman, 2006, 126). Raghunath Seth makes a sharp distinction between the mehfil-like or theatrical style of singing amongst the first generation of singers to a less husky and more soothing style suited to the microphone that emerged amongst the later singers (1980, 55). According to Alison Arnold, the latter style involved clear and natural enunciation of lyrics and subtle embellishments and inflections in vocal performance. Kajjan, Bibbo, Khurshid, Zohrabai Ambalewali, and Amirbai Karnataki were known for their open-throated style of vocal performance while Kanan Devi, Uma Devi, Snehprabha, Shamshad Begum, Rajkumari, Suraiya, and Noor Jehan are considered to be representative of the more melodious, nuanced and expressive style of singing. By the early 1940s, singers like Shamshad Begum, Zohrabai Ambalewali, and Amirbai Karnataki had established themselves as playback singers while Noor Jehan, Khursheed and Suraiya continued to straddle the world of singing and acting until Khurshid and Noor Jehan moved to Pakistan in 1947. With her wide vocal range and an effortless style, Noor Jehan was often called the ‘queen of melody’. Known for her unsurpassed vocal expression, she became one of the biggest singing stars of the 1940s. Many biographical pieces have also referred to her as being a role model for Lata Mangeshkar. There has been intense speculation that had Noor Jehan not left for Pakistan, Lata Mangeshkar

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may not have achieved the kind of hegemonic status that she did. In the limited number of songs that are accessible, Noor Jehan stands out for her powerful on-screen performance that draws attention to the emotional power of the lyrics as well as the musicality of the song. This rare combination distinguished her from her predecessors. Noor Jehan’s cinematic roles presented her as a modern, vulnerable woman. In most of the songs we see her directly facing the camera, engaging as it were a live community of listeners. In this direct mode of address, the voice of the singer remains locked to her body. It is only in the interlude sections of the song that the camera reveals other characters or objects, thus expanding the visual field. This locking of the voice and the actor’s body in the visual field can be seen with other singer-actors as well like K. L Saigal, Suraiya, Khursheed, and Kanan Bala.5 What made Noor Jehan stand apart from the other singers was the embodied nature of her performance. She retained the mehfil style of singing in which the live presence of the singer was underscored by heightened emotionality, corporeality, clear enunciation of lyrics, and the projection of an intense investment in performance. As Ashraf Azaiz writes, ‘In addition to possessing a formidable voice, Noor Jehan translated vocalization into overt action. The key to Noor Jehan’s approach to the song was movement’ (2003, 10). Noor Jehan represented a style that symbolized an intense involvement of the actor/singer in rendering the melodic as well as the expressive quality of the song. For instance, in ‘Jawan Hai Mohabbat’ and ‘Awaaz De Hahan Hai’ from Anmol Ghadi (1946), Noor Jehan deployed an embodied style of performance; the mouth, lips, throat, the neck area, and the entire torso of the actor/singer were mobilized to match the embellished style of singing in front of the camera. As noted by Indu Bishnoi, ‘When Noor Jehan sang her entire body was involved. She fluttered her eye lashes, and embellished her tans with come hither looks, coy smiles and gestures’ (1993, 49–50). This projection of corporeality can also be traced from off-screen discourses around her star persona. One of the stories circulating about Noor Jehan was her insistence on having hot spicy pickles and ice-cold water just before recordings to bring out sharpness in her voice. The new set of playback singers who entered the industry in Bombay around the time of India’s independence is considered to be the true representatives of the ‘golden period’ of the playback era. Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammad Rafi, Geeta Dutt, Mukesh, Manna Dey,

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Kishore Kumar, and Asha Bhonsle were soon absorbed into the industry to fill the void left by K. L Saigal, Noor Jehan and Khursheed. By the end of 1949, with the release of Mahal, Andaz and Barsaat Lata Mangeshkar had occupied centre stage. Lata’s rise coincided with the slow eclipse of heavier or ‘rustic’ female voices.6 As Raghunath Seth writes, ‘With Lata Mangeshkar the new era of women’s voices began’ (1980, 55). This also marked the beginning of the era of aural stardom (Neepa Majumdar, 2009).7 By tracking film magazines and industry discourses, I would like to signpost three important elements that formed the bedrock of constructing Lata Mangeshkar’s star persona as an aural star. More importantly, these elements underscore the importance of the playback system and related practices of sound reproduction in fashioning the discursive shifts in the sonic and cultural production of the female voice in Hindi film songs. The first element that gave Lata a unique vocal identity was the microphone’s role in the projection of Lata’s voice: This can be culled from an oft-repeated reference that her voice was almost inaudible without a microphone. Due to the ‘thin’ quality of her voice, Lata had been turned down by several producers in her early days of struggle (Filmfare 3 January 1958, 43). Magazines often described her as a shy girl who was magically transformed into a confident singer, the moment she went before the microphone. This quality in her singing was considered to be most suitable for mechanical reproduction, but more importantly, it set her apart from her predecessors who began their careers by singing for live mehfils or theatre and were used to a bolder projection of the voice. The microphone thus played a crucial role in constructing Lata’s persona as a ‘respectable middle-class girl’. Second, Lata was able to fashion a natural style of singing through the technique of unobtrusive breathing. Journalistic discourses on Lata often highlighted her uncanny ability to control her breathing while singing – a quality that gave her an edge over other playback singers. This made her singing sound effortless, enabling her to foreground the emotional aspect of the lyrics without losing self-control. What Lata brought into film songs was a voice that had delicacy and a capacity to express emotion.8 More importantly, the discursive formation around her voice couched her singing with a sense of ‘aphysicality’, a practice of singing without involving the body. I would like to argue that since the voice prefigured the visual enactment of the song on-screen, this new emerging nuanced style of singing in turn led to

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more subtle expressions from the actors for miming the songs onscreen, indicating a mimetic interaction through flows and counterflows in their performance. This can be distinguished from the more laboured style of singing as represented by singers like Khursheed and Noor Jehan, symbolizing an intense involvement of the actor/singer in rendering the melodic quality of the song.9 The issues related to language in the Bombay film song criss-cross with the socialities of music in the larger public domain. In his work on music, image and text, Roland Barthes has suggested that the grain of the voice, producing both music and language, signifies the body. According to Roland Barthes, ‘The “grain” is not the timbre of the voice but denotes the space of the encounter between language and a voice’ (1977, 181). In analysing the discourses and practices around the female voice for cinema, the concept of the grain of the voice can help us understand the distinctions that Bombay cinema created between the voice of the professional singers who sang for cinema from the 1930s to the late 1940s and an ideal singing voice for the heroine that began to emerge around the time of India’s independence. The moral and class identities of singers got intimately connected with the acoustical properties of their voices. In the biographical discourses around Lata, stories about her struggle and hard work were tinted with moral overtones. The repeated references to her soft and thin voice cast her in the mould of a ‘respectable’ singer who would be unable to please her listeners in a live mehfil. In this construction, Lata could acquire a material voice only through the microphone. The anecdotes about Lata’s efforts in learning Urdu much after she entered the industry helped her in creating a persona that was not only willing to mould herself to the demands of the industry, but was also ready to take on any challenge in order to excel in her art. More importantly, it helped her to forge an identity that distanced her from her predecessors – professional women singers from the kotha, many of them Muslim, who were not only proficient in performing the ghazal, but were also known to have a keen interest in the nuances of Urdu poetry. The third important element in constructing Lata as an ideal playback singer for the heroine is related to the vocal range of her voice. Journalists writing on Lata in the early part of her career had noted the influence of Noor Jehan on her singing, with some even calling it an imitation (Filmfare, 1976, 18). Lata acknowledged her fascination for Noor Jehan but denied that she had ever tried to imitate her

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style.10 Those defending Lata were however quick to point out that in her early days she was forced to sing songs that had been composed to suit Noor Jehan’s range. By raising the pitch of her voice, Lata presented herself as an antidote to the ‘open-throated’ style of singing. While film music was looked down upon by critics and music aficionados, Lata herself was referred to as an ‘angel’ and her voice described as ethereal or spiritual. As Gangadhar Gadgil noted: But Lata’s voice which really belongs to the temple or the ashram, has been in the service of film music for the full twenty-five years now. Film music is inevitably attuned to the requirements of the box office; and box office seems to require that film music should have catchy rhythms, swinging, sugary tunes, polyphonous and loud orchestral accompaniment and an abundance of sentimentality (Illustrated Weekly of India, 1967 a: 36)

In these references, the tonal inflections, the grain of the voice and the projection of a natural style of vocal performance that Lata produced set her apart from the singers of the pre-independence era.11 This was crucial for her in creating an identity as distinct from the earlier singers known for their mehfil style of singing. The leading female playback singer of Bombay cinema was thus able to shake off the spectre of the courtesan through the grain of her voice. 

Cassette technology and female mobility It has been argued that cassette technology brought an end to the hegemony of film music in Northern India, enabling the appearance of heterogeneous genres and alternative styles (Manuel, 1993). In his insightful study, Manuel has tracked the emergence of regional folk music and genres like the pop ghazal, qawwali and bhajans as a result of the proliferation of cassette technology that led to the decline of film music in the overall music market (63). Drawing on media archaeology, I would like to unravel the media cultures of the 1980s through an alternative lens – by mapping new routes that acknowledge materiality of practices and affective alliances between singers and listeners. According to Jussi Parikka, media archaeology is a way to analyse the regimes of memory and creative practices in media cultures – both theoretical and artistic. Media archaeology sees

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media cultures as sedimented and layered, a fold of time and materiality where the past might be suddenly discovered anew, and the new technologies grow obsolete increasingly fast. (2013, 3)

My interest is in focusing on the post-emergency period to excavate sonic events of that were animated not only by the arrival of cassettes but also the burgeoning of transnational cultural movements that were partly a result of the proliferation of cassettes as sonic/musical objects. These archaeological interventions help in drawing linkages between discourse and practice, locating both practitioners and fans in a dynamic relationship. The domination of playback system in Indian popular music overlaps with the monopoly of the Gramophone Company of India and a hegemonic control of a few playback singers on film music. Further, the playback era also coincides with the domination of film music over all other genres of popular music in India.12 This was no less undergirded by the overwhelming broadcast of film songs on the commercial channels of All India Radio. Countdown shows like the ‘Geetmala’ became popular on Vividh Bharati. The sponsored programmes introduced on Vividh Bharti introduced listeners to film songs of newly released films, prompting them to watch the film in exhibition theatres or buy its long play (LP) records. These close networks between cinema, the radio and the Gramophone Company of India received a jolt in the 1970s. The arrival of Polydor can be seen as the beginning of the end of HMV’s monopoly on the Indian music industry. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the decade of the seventies is marked by two notably popular albums brought out by Polydor that in my opinion changed the auditory projection of the female voice in the Indian subcontinent. The stage for these transformations, one must add, had been set by Asha Bhonsle in her creative partnership with R. D Burman. Through the deployment of a distinct vocal style – unusual shifts in scale, use of obtrusive breathing sounds, yodelling, whispering, and laughing – Asha became the voice of the Westernized woman through songs like ‘Dum Maro Dum’, from Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971) and ‘Monica O’ My Darling’, from Caravan (1971). In 1974, Polydor introduced the voice of Preeti Sagar in a sultry whispering tone in ‘My Heart Is Beating’, a number from the film Julie, creating ripples amongst the youth, taking forward what R. D Burman had already done through Asha Bhonsle’s voice. Incidentally, Julie was a remake of Chattakari

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(1974), a Malayalam film which had a similar English number sung by Usha Uthup. At the end of the 1970s came Qurbani (1980), produced and directed by Feroze Khan, which introduced Nazia Hassan to Indian listeners. The film’s music composed by Kalyanji Anandji was released by Polydor. ‘Laila O’ Laila’, a crooning number performed by Zeenat Aman in the film, became an instant hit. Breaking the conventions of the film industry, Feroze Khan included in the film another solo number performed by Zeenat Aman that was composed by Biddu. Aware of the growing popularity of Western music in India, Khan travelled to the UK to personally approach Biddu for a song.13 The composer put across two conditions. He did not want to work with any of the playback singers from ‘back home’. And he insisted on recording in London. Khan introduced Biddu to Nazia Hassan, a Pakistani teenager from Karachi whom he had met at a party in London. According to Biddu, I took my guitar and asked her (Nazia) to sing anything and I would accompany her. She sang a verse and chorus of Dance Little Lady dance. It was one of my songs. This girl was smart. Her voice did not have the piercing sharpness of most Asian singers. The pleasantness of her voice was around C3 . . . warm, expressive and nubile. It wasn’t a great voice. But it was different, and it was this that made the difference between using her and someone from the old school in India. (2010, 210)

Nazia sailed through the audition though she did not have a ‘great voice’ nor the ‘piercing sharpness’ of most Asian singers. Her voice scored because it was different. For the listeners, what made Nazia’s voice stand apart in ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ was the way it was blended into the layers of music: hence, its embeddedness rather than its standalone status. Deploying 24 tracks for the song, Biddu backed Nazia’s nasal voice with an echo effect. The voice was denied the frontality that was an important marker for the playback singer. The lyrics in ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ remained incidental, and it was only the hook line of the song that had recall value. ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ needs to be seen as a major rupture in making the voice of a female Pakistani-born singer available in a Hindi film. Nazia Hassan became a teenage sensation amongst the youth in the entire subcontinent, frequently travelling to India. Soon Nazia came out with Disco Diwane, a private album for HMV that made disco

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music popular amongst the youth.14 The popularity of transnational music had broken through the disciplining regimes of the nation and ushered in a new era of the female voice. The influence of disco music and British club/dance music enabled the embodied presence of a female crooner in popular Bombay cinema. The exposure of the Indian middle class to Western pop music due to the expansion of the Indian bourgeoisie created conditions for the increasing presence of rock and disco style of music in film songs (Manuel, 1993, 145). As songs like ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ were climbing on popularity charts, another major transformation was taking place in the soundscape of the Indian subcontinent. The arrival of cassette technology was creating a new hunger for music with the market getting flooded with cheaply produced music in diverse genres like bhajans, ghazals, film songs as well as folk music and regional music. For the critics, songs like ‘Aap Jaisa Koi’ were clear markers for the decline in film music. But what they were expressing was also a discomfort with the mass proliferation of cassettes.15 The emergence of new listening publics having access to ‘cheaper’ devices for the consumption of music led to an articulation of deep anxieties as the voice of the female singer was no longer available in the exclusive private acoustic domain of the music critic. The 1980s have often been referred to as a decade when the grip and authority of the centre over the country’s several constituents steadily weakened.16 Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam write: ‘The lifting of the emergency, following electoral defeat of the ruling congress Party, led to a veritable explosion of long awaited democratic aspirations’ (2007, 6). A parallel can be drawn during this period with the state’s relationship to mass media technologies. According to Ashish Rajadhyaksha, it was in the mid-1970s that cheaply manufactured electronic goods produced in Japan posed a serious challenge to earlier definitions of geographically controlled distribution systems (1990). The emergency, a last-ditch attempt to respond to these challenges, failed in its objective to protect the national market. In the post-emergency period, according to Rajadhyaksha, there had been a continuous effort on the part of the state and the national bourgeoisie to reconcile itself to the shift: to find new ways by which they could still control the inflow of goods and outflow of capital, or at least ensure that these exchanges don’t jeopardize their own existence (ibid.).17 According to Manuel, it was due to Pakistan’s relaxed import restrictions and higher percentage of guest workers

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that cassettes appeared to have spread earlier in that country than in India (1993, 95). The huge presence of cassettes of Pakistani singers across the border points towards the activation of routes of pirate networks. In an article on the music of the 1980s, Salil Tripathi wrote about the death of melody. For a nation with a 5,000 year old musical heritage, it was remarkable that in the last decade it merely reflected trends from abroad. India was echoing Pakistan – the ghazal came through Mehdi Hasan and Ghulam Ali, pop was born with Nazia Hasan, and cult songs were revived by Hasan Jahangir. (India Today, 1990, 118)

What Tripathi was referring to was a notable presence of several Pakistani singers who had been invited in the early 1980s to sing at various concert platforms, the film industry in Bombay and music recording companies. I would like to signpost the interstices between cinema, music industry and public culture to unravel sonic events that broke the hegemony of leading playback stars and the template of formal vocal performance. My contention is that movement of people of South Asia to the Gulf countries and the United Kingdom, as well as the portability of musical objects such as cassettes played a crucial role in animating unofficial networks and nodes of cultural practices that brought film music under a larger rubric of cultural practice. I particularly focus on the cartographic journeys undertaken by female singers in the 1980s that enabled an unprecedented transformation in the performance and the acoustical properties of the female voice. This undoubtedly had strong implications for the discursive formation around the female voice, leading to the recovery of some lost sonic identities. 

Sonic ruptures: the return of the courtesan It was in 1982 that Noor Jahan, in a sensational visit to India, sang in a public event in Bombay, sending a wave of nostalgia as reported by all leading magazines.18 In a surprise performance, Noor Jehan sang ‘Awaz De Kahan Hai’, a song she had performed for the film

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Anmol Ghadi (1946) both as an actor as well as a singer. Unlike Lata Mangeshkar who performed on stage in a sombre manner, avoiding eye contact with the audience, Noor Jehan performed with elaborate facial and hand gestures, bringing back to life a more mehfil style of vocal performance.19 This was followed by a rendition of ‘Mujhse Pehli Si Mohabbat Mere Mehboob Na Maang’, a ghazal penned by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, a much-admired and respected poet in the region of South Asia. By performing these two numbers on a Bombay stage, Noor Jehan revived the memory of the dense networks that linked cinema and popular music with Progressive Writers’ Movement. Animated by the proliferation of cassette technology, this network was not limited to the spatial boundaries of India but was undergirded by the expansive notion of the subcontinent. By stretching out her hands towards her listeners, Noor Jehan brought to life memories of an embodied nature of vocal performance – a hallmark not only of the pre-Partition era when actor-singers followed a direct mode of address to the spectator/camera, but also the courtesan who performed in a live mehfil. Interestingly, Noor Jehan’s visit to India was not an isolated event. Almost a year before Noor Jehan’s visit, Filmfare had brought out a biographical piece on the star singer that reported how keen she was to visit India (16 April 1981). There had been a considerable amount of interest in singers from across the border since the mid-1970s, as indicated by Runa Laila’s visit to India and the broadcast of her performance by Bombay Doordarshan. Similarly in 1978, EMI had released Film Hits of Melody Queen Noor Jehan, (ECLP 5595) while Mehndi Hassan was given the K. L Saigal Shehenshah award in 1979. Malika Pukhraj, another popular singer from Pakistan, gave her first public performance in India in 1981. In his critical work on the preservation of aural artefacts, Jonathan Sterne challenged the notion that recording destroys sounds’ ephemeral qualities (2009, 57). He writes: The fantasy that we can commune with the voices of the dead, that what is recorded today can be preserved for ever, is just that, a fantasy. Sound recording is an extension of ephemerality, not its undoing. The same could be said of any form of recording whether we are talking of ancient turn tables, dusty account files in a file cabinet, tape backups of university’s main frame or the CD-R I burned yesterday. Most records available today are waiting to be lost records.

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My contention is that the audio cassette player with the rewind and forward button, a powerful symbol of creative intervention, fashioned a demand for live contact with singers from across the border. The availability of this sonic material of diverse tonalities brought to the surface the idea of loss, of forgetting and retrieving. This retrieval could only be partial, within the larger structure of loss, translating auditory nostalgia from individual to collective forms of listening. It is therefore no coincidence that a series of concerts titled as Mortal Men: Immortal Music were organized in the early 1980s, allowing fans to come and hear singers like Rajkumari, G. M Durrani, Surendra, Zohrabai Ambalewali, and Shamshad Begum. Noor Jehan’s performance in Bombay was also part of one such concert. In 1982, the same year that Noor Jehan visited India, film and trade magazines started announcing the release of Talaq, Talaq, Talaq/ Nikkah, in which B. R Chopra offered the lead role to Salma Agha, an artist from Pakistan.20 This is how Salma Agha is introduced to Indian audiences in a full page pull-out: Strange stories happen sometimes. Take Salma Agha. Her grandmother was an actress. She worked in just one Hindi film and then left and went away to Pakistan. Her mother came to films. She became an actress too, worked in one film and went away. Now strangely enough it’s Salma’s turn. Salma, beautifully talented (her mentor B.R Chopra says she has it in abundance) makes her debut in Nikaah. She is not going to make the same mistake her mother and grandmother made. She is here to make a career. [Salma is a singer too.] (Screen, 24 September 1982, 24)21

The advertisement was clearly meant to place Salma Agha in a larger framework of cultural history and musical practice (Figure 10.1). What needs to be noted is that Salma Agha’s grandmother, Anwari Bai, was a well-known courtesan of the 1930s and had worked in the Lahore film industry. According to Sadat Hasan Manto, Anwari had a brief affair with Rafiq Ghaznavi, a well-known lyricist and music composer who had close links with the courtesans of Lahore and Amritsar, and brought some of the repertoire of the courtesans into Bombay film music (1998, 38). Salma Agha’s mother Zareena acted in Shahjahan (1946) with K. L Saigal as a lead actor. By making references to Agha’s grandmother and mother who were both actor-singers, the advertisement was trying to evoke the memory of the pre-playback era when

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Figure 10.1: Salma Agha is introduced to Indian audiences. Source:

Screen, 24 September 1982, 24.

boundaries between singing and acting, composing and writing and performing for the cinema, the gramophone or a private mehfil were hardly well marked out. According to the anecdotal information available about the making of Nikaah, Salma Agha met B. R. Chopra at a wedding in London where she lived with her family. On learning that Chopra

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was looking for an actor to perform a role in Muslim social, she came to Bombay and bagged Nilofer’s role in the film. Interestingly, Salma Agha sang all the female songs of Nikaah and was honoured with the Filmfare award for the best playback singer for the solo number ‘Dil Ke Arman’. One of the stories behind the making of the song suggests that Ravi, the composer of Nikaah, was extremely displeased with Salma Agha’s singing abilities and threatened to replace her with Asha Bhonsle at one point of time. Ravi had to give as many as 18 tunes for ‘Dil Ke Arman’ to finally come upon a tune that Agha could do justice to (Pankaj Rag 2006, 506). The limitation in Agha’s voice according to Ravi was related to her inability to sing at the upper ranges of the scale. Despite the circulation of these off-screen discourses, ‘Dil Ke Arman’ became one of the most popular songs of that year and is also known to have been favourite with the alms seekers on Bombay’s local trains (Figure 10.2). According to Shanty Mohan, a fan writing to the editor of Filmfare, Agha’s voice brought back memories of Shamshad Begum, a well-known playback singer of the 1940s. In a sharp response, Ashraf Aziz insisted that Agha’s voice was close to that

Figure 10.2: An advertisement hailing the success of Nikaah. Source:

Author.

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of Noor Jehan. In another letter to the editor, an admirer welcoming Salma Agha’s performance wrote: Apart from her beauty and talent she (Salma Agha) has a melodious voice which is reminiscent of the singers of the forties and fifties. With all her talent and beauty will Salma be able to reach the top in this strange world of films filled with jealousy, rivalry and monopoly. We cine goers are getting bored with old faces and stale voices. (Filmfare, 19 November 1983)

It was also in 1982 that Reshma, a popular singer of the subcontinent, visited Bombay and performed in several private concerts. Undoubtedly, it was the cassette technology that had enabled the circulation of Reshma’s voice in India much before her visit in 1982. It has been acknowledged that Raj Kapoor was so moved by her rendition of ‘Akhiyan Nu Rehen De’, a Punjabi song that he had heard on a pirated cassette, that he decided to include a reworked version of the song in Lata Mangeshkar’s voice in Bobby (1973). In a way similar to Noor Jehan and Salma Agha, Reshma received a lot of attention in film magazines. A journalist described Reshma’s visit to Bombay with the following spatial metaphors: Reshma, the mysterious voice was recently seen and heard in Bombay. A high reverberating pitch which could echo in the rugged Karakoram, carrying the rhythm and the lilt of a jingling gypsy ‘kabila’ that is the voice of the famous gypsy singer from Pakistan. The pathos filled voice was discovered by the director of the transcription service of Radio Pakistan when Reshma was singing years back at the tomb of Qalandar Shah in front of a spell bound gathering. (Filmfare, 1 October 1982)

More significantly, the magazines focused on the affective registers of Reshma’s voice in a given spatial setting for a select audience. I particularly draw attention to the publication of prominent photographs under the heading ‘She Came to Conquer’ that gave readers a detailed account of her performance at a private concert in Screen (Figure 10.3). This is how one of the captions of these photographs that were spread over almost an entire page reads: It was one woman, one voice and a sea of feelings that night – as Reshma the well known singer from Pakistan sang one song after another till the early hours of the morning winning hearts, touching hearts, meeting friends, making friends. . . . The occasion, a party hosted in her honour by Mr. Dilip Kumar and Saira Banu at their palatial home in

Figure 10.3: She sings to conquer. Source:

Screen, 24 September 1982, 16.

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Pali Hill. In the picture, Dilip Kumar gets eloquent as he introduces Reshma to a select gathering. In the next picture, Reshma sings straight to the heart. In the background is Mrs. Shamshad Begum, Saira Banu’s grandmother, who was a good singer in her time. (Screen, 24 September 1982, 16)

What is important to note is the foregrounding of new modes of listenership in a private mehfil. This re-creation of older networks of sociality was enabled and shaped by the materiality of cassettes as objects of mass circulation. The photographs reveal the mehfil as an intimate space where the gestures of the singers and listeners both reveal an embodied engagement of the senses. Further, by mentioning the name of Shamshad Begum, also known as Chamiya, a wellknown courtesan of her time, the magazine was evoking the sense experience of an earlier era when professional singing women could move through diverse media platforms that allowed them to forge new identities.22 This new formation of auditory sociality allowed non-state institutions, private individuals, music aficionados to invite women singers from Pakistan. This in turn points towards the refashioning of discourses around the female voice, undergirded by far more flexible notions of belonging and un-belonging. The cassette technology threw up many disorderly challenges to key institutional media practices. On the one hand, cassettes allowed local and regional music to proliferate. But it also enabled an outward expansion of music cultures enabling diverse cultural experiences. More importantly, it brought to life the relationship that a singer-actor had to her own voice, a live corporeal performance. The domain of playback singing shrunk to some extent, making way for newer listening experiences and diverse vocal tonalities. Given this trajectory, it is not surprising that from the 1980s, female singers with deeper, heavier, huskier, grainier voices could make their way into Hindi film songs. Moreover, this cultural interaction involved the emergence of the Bombay film music industry as a key player in generating social and institutional conditions in which musical performance could give shape to an expansive notion of listenership. What cassette technology brought to the surface was a new mode of cultural citizenship in which women singers undertook travel to come in proximity with audiences across national boundaries. This in turn not only questioned the crustiness of the two-nation policy but also offered a contestation to playback technologies that had led to the erosion of the embodied voice of the courtesan in the public domain.

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❁ Notes 1 Cited in C. S Lakshmi, Interview with Gangu Bai Hangal, The Singer and the Song, Delhi: Kali for Women, 2000, p. 13. 2 For insightful discussions on the discourses around respectability and female stardom in the cinema of the 1930s and the 1940s, see Neepa Majumdar (2009), Debashree Mukherjee (2009) and Sarah Niazi (2011). 3 One of the stories is that Saigal had a very bad throat, and to prevent his voice from cracking he started singing in a softer tone to usher in the crooning style. But it is also suggested that Saigal and the composers of New Theatres must have been exposed to the crooning style of singing in America to be influenced by it. 4 This created conditions for the presence of bigger orchestras and introduction of chordal harmony. 5 The locking of the actor-singer body with the voice played a decisive role in creating star discourses around actor-singers like Noor Jehan and K. L Saigal. The actor-singer’s body was yoked to the camera in a direct address to the spectator. Later, with the stabilization of the playback system, the visual field became more expansive, allowing the sonic voice to create an affective alliance between the performer on-screen and other members of the narrative community framed as on-screen listeners. 6 One of the singers who had to quit the industry after 1947 was Zohrabai Ambalewali. As she recounts, ‘I quit singing because I was no longer asked to sing the heroine’s songs and after singing for the leading stars for so many years I was not willing to become a chorus girl.’ As quoted in Madhuri, 7 February 1972, 21. 7 Lata’s income, the taxes she paid, as well the purchase of her first car soon became a significant part of industry lore. 8 The constant reference to ‘delicacy’ in Lata’s vocal style also needs to be seen in the context of the arrival of sensitive microphones. For instance, Harish Bhimani writes, ‘. . . delicacy in rendering of musical notes is the soul of melody. If the first note hits the microphone with full force it sounds harsh. Anil Biswas taught Lata how to “fade in” every line while rendering a song, so it glides unobtrusively, and then when the line ends, how to fade out with equal grace’ (Bhimani, 1995, 135). 9 In Lata’s own words, in comparison to classical music, the voice in film music ‘has to be trained to do a lot of things with ease and grace and a compelling appeal’. As quoted in Illustrated Weekly of India 1967, 37. 10 In an interview, Lata acknowledged that she had picked up the pronunciation of Urdu words like beqaraar or paighaam by listening to Noor Jehan’s songs carefully. Cinema Vision, 1983, 45. 11 In an article in The Illustrated Weekly, A. S. Raman wrote, ‘It is for the Gods that she sings’, and ‘Whatever Lata is today is in my opinion the result of penance, not of perseverance’ (Illustrated Weekly of India, 1967 b).

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12 Indian audiences could also enjoy song sequences of Hindi films on Doordarshan, a state-sponsored television channel, by watching weekly programs like Chitrahaar and Chaayageet. 13 Another film whose tracks were published by Polydor was Julie (1975), which introduced an English-language song for the first time in a Hindi film. ‘My Heart Is Beating’ was sung by Preeti Sagar and became enormously popular. Incidentally, Julie was a remake of Chattakari (1974), a Malayalam film which had an English number sung by Usha Uthup in a similar song situation. 14 Once again it was Biddu who composed Disco Deewane, a pop album with Nazia and her brother Zoheb in 1981 which became a massive hit. Both Nazia and her husband made several trips to India to promote the album in much-publicized events. 15 As G. N. Joshi commented, ‘The population in general prefer to enjoy music of reasonably good quality, recorded and reproduced through the cassettes. They neither understand nor much care for the finer qualities in recording and reproduction’ (1996, 156). 16 See Prabhu Chawla in India Today, January 1990. 17 See Rajadhyaksha, ‘Beaming Messages to the Nation’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 19, November, 1990, pp. 33–52. 18 As Nalin Shah wrote in Screen, ‘No sooner Nur Jehan set foot on the Indian soil than millions of lovers were caught in a frenzy which showed how much they loved and remembered her glorious past which she had left behind.’ 19 See YouTube video that presents a recording of the performance, http://www. youtube.com/watch?v=DBquAKSsVo8. 20 Due to a raging of a controversy regarding the title Talaq, talaq, talaq, the film was released as Nikaah. 21 At the time of submission of the manuscript, Screen was out of print and every attempt was made to secure copyright permission for the images used in this article. 22 According to Saleem Kidwai, one of the strategies adopted by the tawaifs was to ensure their daughters’ entry into the film industry as actors rather than singers (ibid.). For example, Shamshad Begum (Chamiya) initiated her daughter Naseem Bano into the industry as a singing star in the 1940s. Later, Naseem focused on a career in acting, with other artists singing for her as playback. Similarly, Jaddan Bai, a well-known courtesan with several gramophone records in her name, got her daughter Nargis trained in everything else ‘except music’.

Bibliography Arnold, Alison. Hindi Filmi Git: On the History of Indian Popular Music. Original dissertation (PhD). University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1991. Aziz, Ashraf. Light of the Universe: Essays on Hindustani Film Music. Three Essays Collective, 2003.

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Bakhle, Janaki. Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of Indian Classical Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Barthes, Roland. Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press, 1977. Battalgia, D. ‘On Practical Nostalgia: Self Prospecting among Urban Torbianders’, in Rhetorics of Self Makin, ed. D. Battaglia. London: University of California Press, 1995. Biddu. Made in India: Adventures of a Lifetime. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2010. Biocca, Frank. ‘Media and Perceptual Shifts’, Journal of Popular Music, vol. 24, no. 2, 1990, pp. 1–15. Bishnoi, Indu. ‘Portrait of a Melody Queen’, Cinema Vision II, vol. 2, 1993, pp. 48–50. Connell, John and Gibson, Chris. Sound Tracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London: Routledge, 2003. Das Gupta, Amlan. ‘Women and Music: The Case of North India’, in Women of India: Colonial and Post Colonial Periods, ed. Bharti Ray, 454–84. New Delhi: Sage, 2005. George, T. J. S. The Life and Times of Nargis. Chennai: East West Books, 2007. Kidwai, Saleem. (2004). The Singing Ladies Find a Voice. Seminar, 540, http:// www.india-seminar.com/semsearch.htm. Kinnear, Michael. The Gramophone Company’s First Indian Recordings: 1899–1908. Bombay: Bombay Popular Prakashan, 1994. Kulkarni, Dhondutai. (1992) The Sweet Sound of Music: Noted classical vocalist, Dhondhutai Kulkarni, recalls her tryst with film music. Interview by N. Devidayal in Cinema of India June, pp. 29–32. Lakshmi, C. S. Interview with Gangu Bai Hangal, The Singer and the Song, Delhi: Kali for Women, 2000, pp. 11–40. Majumdar Neepa. Wanted Cultured Ladies Only: Female Stardom and Cinema in India, 1930s–1950s. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. Manṭo, Sadat, Hasan. Stars from Another Sky: The Bombay Film World in the 1940s. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1998. Manuel, Peter. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Menon, Nivedita and Aditya Nigam. Power and Contestation: India since 1989. London: Orient and Longman, 2007. Mishra, Yatindra. ‘The Bai and the Dawn of Hindi Film Music (1925–1945)’, Translated by Anamika and Madhu B. Joshi, The Book Review, vol. XXXIII, no. 2, 2009, pp. 46–47. Niazi, Sarah Rahman. (2011). Cinema and the Reinvention of the Self: Women Performers in the Bombay Film Industry 1925–47. MPhil Dissertation, Department of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. Parikka, J. What Is Media Archaeology. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Perron, Du Lalita. ‘Thumri: A Discussion of the Female Voice of Hindustani Music’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 36, no. 1, 2002, pp. 173–93. Rag, Pankaj. Dhunon ki Yatra. New Delhi: Rajkamal, 2006.

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Rajadhyaksha, Ashish, ‘Beaming Messages to the Nation’, The Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 19, 1990, pp. 33–52. Seth, Raghunath. ‘The Sound of Magic’, Cinema Vision, vol. 1, no. 4, 1980, pp. 51–55. Sterne, Jonathan. ‘The Preservation Paradox in Digital Audio’, in Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practice, eds. Karin Bijsterveld and Jose Van Dijck. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009, pp. 55–65. Subramanian Lakshmi. ‘The Voice in Colonial and Post Colonial India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 40, no. 15, pp. 1561–62. Tacchi, Jo. ‘Nostalgia and Radio Sound’, in Auditory Culture Reader, eds. Michael Bull and Les Back. Oxford: Berg, 2003, pp. 281–95. Weidman, Amanda. Singing the Classical Voicing the Modern: The Post Colonial Politics of Music in South India. Calcutta: Seagull, 2006.

Part IV Newness ❂

11 Media and imagination Ramananda Chatterjee and his journals in three languages Kalyan Chatterjee

❂

I

f one agrees that popular imagination plays an important role in the enterprise of nation-building, then the importance of mass media in it has to be recognized. The mass media were instrumental in the creation of the mass mind and the public sphere. This happened equally in the West as in colonies created by empire builders. This is exemplified as much in the creation of the idea of Britain among its people through its empire and the creation of corresponding national imaginations in the colonies. Nowhere is this brought out in sharper relief than in the case of India and Britain. This chapter focuses on the role of the media in the creation of national imagination through the example of Ramananda Chatterjee, who published three journals in three languages – Bengali, English and Hindi – to reach different but overlapping publics. Clearly, they were aimed at establishing multi-levels of identity, Bengali, Indian and Asian, at the international level for Indians settled in various parts of the world by force or through choice. The chapter attempts to show that the three journals are representative of the Indian media of the first half of the 20th century that created a public sphere in which an Indian national consciousness – social, political, cultural, and historical – was sought to be built. This in turn is pitted against the consciousness of the empire builders of Britain, who justified the British presence in Asia, Africa and other parts of the world as a civilising mission. The creation of this public sphere made it possible for Indians to present an alternative future or utopia for themselves rather than being forced to fit into the ‘civilizing mission’ of Britain.

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Regardless of the meaning of the word ‘utopia’, it is a construct of the mind as is the concept of ‘nation’. Because of their connection with communication of ideas, both have a close link with the mass media. One of the characteristic features of the mass media is that it not just helps build common imagination among a large group of people but does so with an element of simultaneity. Without going into the argument about whether Indians had a unified consciousness of their identity as nation from before their encounter with the West, it cannot be disputed that the mass media of the 19th and 20th centuries did play an important role in building the idea of India. Many nationalist leaders ran newspapers and journals, no doubt with the aim of influencing the educated public who also, it would not be wrong to deduce, happened to be the elite, though in absolute terms their number was huge. While there were a number of journals that can be cited in support of this argument, most of them were predominantly political in nature and many were mouthpieces of prominent leaders. I have chosen an independent editor and journalist who tried to shape the Indian mind in all respects, political, social, scientific, and cultural, because it will give a clearer overall picture rather than focusing only the political aspect of nation-building. The example that I quote is that of Ramananda Chatterjee, an outstanding journalist and editor of the first half of the 20th century whose journals can be said to have given expression to the concept of the Indian nation. A study of the man and his journals offers a deep insight into the creation of an all-embracing concept of the Indian nation in which multiple levels of identity are included – a perfect representation of the concept of unity in diversity, acknowledged the world over as a concept characteristic of India. Ramananda published journals in three languages – Prabasi (Bengali), The Modern Review (English) and Vishal Bharat (Hindi) – giving a glimpse of the linguistic variety of India. However, before going on to the concept of the Indian nation, it is necessary to have clarity on the idea of utopia and to come to some kind of a conclusion about whether the ideas and concepts put forward by the journals in question and their editor could be described as utopia-building. The second conceptual question is one about the meaning of the term ‘nation’, and whether it applies to the developments that took place in the Indian subcontinent over roughly the past 150 to 175 years. Was the concept of nation a novelty, essentially Western, introduced into India mainly through the British, or would

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India have emerged as a nation in any case, earlier than it did but for the interruption by foreign rule? First, I will deal with the meaning of the term ‘utopia’. Thomas More, the man credited with coining the term, described it as the good place that was no place. Some scholars associate utopian ideas with authoritarianism and repression in which there is no place for dissent (Karl Popper). Other scholars, however, disagree and call utopia-building an example of social dreaming – the dreams and nightmares that concern the ways in which groups of people arrange their lives.1 Agreeing with this second meaning of utopia, I posit that vision that was being projected by Ramananda Chatterjee, and his journals certainly fall under the category of social dreaming and therefore aimed at creating a utopia in the sense of a democratic Indian nation free from the clutches of foreign rule. Ramananda was certainly not suggesting the setting up of an immaculate political system with a perfect constitution and faultless government. He simply expressed the view that British rule in India had stultified Indian minds. Unless Indians got rid of British fetters, they could never expect to develop the confidence to express themselves in accordance with their wishes and their ‘genius’ would forever remain suppressed. Indians, therefore, had to strike out for self-rule. But they could not rest content with self-rule alone. They also had to strengthen themselves in culture, science and technology, and in all fields of human endeavour. British rule was therefore held as a dystopia. The man and his journals were, thus, clearly part of utopia-building. Ramananda belonged to that category of Indians who built the idea of India, but the utopia built by him was somewhat removed from Western models, an alternative to them. Till such alternatives emerged, most groups dissatisfied with British rule paradoxically wanted to establish the new Indian nation on the Western model, the one with whose rule they were unhappy. It may not be a coincidence that the national movement in India largely remained confined to drawing rooms and caught momentum only after the alternative concept emerged. It is my argument that it was the nationalist media that gave currency to this somewhat unconventional vision of the Indian nation that formed the backbone of the idea of India and that there was no better example of this than the journals of Ramananda. To return to India of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though there were many Indian admirers of Western civilization, a number of people, including some Britons, were conscious that autocratic British

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rule was not good for India and could have explosive consequences. Petitions were therefore made to the authorities urging greater Indian involvement in the governance of India. But these ‘prayers’ were mostly couched in polite language since those who made them were painfully aware of the ‘Lion’s claws’ and the absence of mass support for them within India. Chances of mounting a successful armed uprising were bleak as Indians had been disarmed after the 1857 uprising. Such then were the circumstances prevailing in India when Ramananda Chatterjee began his journey to utopia. He launched a journal in English called The Modern Review from the city of Allahabad in Northern India in the year 1907. At that time Allahabad, it must be recalled, was the capital of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, the province which was the principal scene of action of the 1857 uprising. In 1907, he had just crossed the 41st year of his life and was a school principal with principles. Six years ago he had started, also from Allahabad, a journal in the Bengali language called Prabasi, which had the twin aim of not just reviving the Bengali identity among migrant Bengalis who had settled down outside Bengal, but also inculcating in them, at the same time, a pan-Indian and universal culture. That Ramananda was not just confining himself to the Bengali language and therefore to Bengalis became clear when he started The Modern Review to reach a wider audience that included the British authorities and English-knowing Indians in India and in other parts of the British Empire as well as to an international audience. He did not stop at that, and the last journal he started was the Hindilanguage monthly called Vishal Bharat, aimed at not only reaching a non-English-speaking audience but to develop a language that could serve as a pan-Indian language alternative to English. The outlook of this journal, like his previous two journals, was pan-Indian and the language Hindustani (with a mix of Urdu) rather than the official Sanskritised Hindi of postindependence times. Vishal Bharat, however, came a full two decades after The Modern Review – perhaps a reflection of the spread of nationalism. The journals in three languages were not identical, though underlying them was a single idea – the creation of a national spirit among Indians. It must be mentioned here that Ramananda attended sessions of the Indian National Congress beginning with its second session, well before he started his journals, which testifies to his nationalistic spirit. A glance at the articles (that included an article

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on the then little-known Ajanta caves as well as science and agriculture) that appeared in the first issue of Prabasi shows that, if anything, it was aimed at widening the horizon of Bengali readers while at the same time reinforcing their identity as Bengalis. In his journals Ramananda outlined a utopia that was based on multilayered identity that radiated outwards to universality. He thus turned into a source of strength the very factors held by the British as the main weakness of India which they felt could never aspire to nationhood. While the British justified their empire in India as their burden to turn what to them appeared to be a dystopia into their version of utopia, Ramananda found India’s utopia in that dystopia. 

Biography Before going into greater details about the way that he did it, it would be in order to give a brief background of this rather extraordinary man who ran these journals. Ramananda was born on 28 May 1865 in the mofussil town of Bankura in western Bengal, where he received his early education.2 This was perhaps the most repressive period in British rule in India, less than a decade of the 1857 uprising. Bankura, famous for its terracotta figurines, is about 150 km northwest of Kolkata (then Calcutta), and well within the cultural and political orbit of what was then considered the second city of the British Empire. Ramananda received his early school education in his hometown. Though he belonged to an orthodox Brahmin family, early in life he came under the influence of the reformist Brahmo Samaj while still at school. The Brahmos, who preached a universalist doctrine, were among the first social reformers and also the first in the subcontinent to conjure up a rudimentary concept of India. Three influences were to play an important role in Ramananda’s life as an editor and purveyor of the idea of Indian nationalism and universalism: the first was that of the Brahmo Samaj, founded by Raja Rammohun Roy some 50 years before Ramananda converted to it; the second that of Romesh Chunder Dutt, among the first few Indians who made it to the elite Indian Civil Service and third (and most important) the world-renowned Indian poet, educationist and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore. Ramananda came into contact with Dutt while he was still at school and picked up from him an analytical bent of mind and a deep respect for facts and figures. Tagore,

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however, remained the most enduring influence upon Ramananda, and his novels, poems and essays were copiously published in all the three journals right from the day they were started till Tagore’s death in 1940. After finishing school, Ramananda moved to Calcutta for higher education, and it was here that he came in touch with many of the leading lights of the newly born Indian nationalist movement. A Brahmo now, he found in the city opportunities to work for social reform and journalism. He had also been bitten by the bug of patriotism, though not of the aggressive type. His first venture as the editor of an independent magazine, a stint that lasted for about four years, gave him invaluable experience of running a magazine as well as the opportunity to build up a network of contributing authors who would stand him in good stead in his later ventures. The magazine was the Bengali-language Dasi that was started in 1892 by Ramananda to secure a permanent source of funds for a home started by some Brahmo youth for victims of human trafficking. We see Ramananda establishing himself both as a journalist and as a social reformer, each role complementing the other. 

Turning point The turning point in Ramananda’s life came in 1895 when he found a higher paying job as the principal of a school in Allahabad. By this time it had become abundantly clear that Ramananda possessed an independent mind. But he felt that he could not express himself without fear or favour unless he himself was both owner and editor of a journal rather than work under a proprietor. Ramananda created his own opportunity as soon as he gained economic stability and started the Bengali journal called Prabasi in 1901, beginning a career in independent journalism that lasted till his death in 1943. He mailed about 250 copies of the first edition of the magazine, which later occupied a pride of place among upper- and middle-class educated Bengalis.3 In 1907, he started The Modern Review to reach out to a wider audience both within the country and outside it. The journal brought him international renown and sufficient standing and influence to be invited in 1926 by the League of Nations to visit their headquarters in Geneva to watch them in action. Some 20 years later came the last enterprise of Ramananda when he started Vishal Bharat. The first

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point that needs to be noted is that this is perhaps the first instance of a single publisher appealing to multiple audiences – the audiences that formed the opinion building layer of the Indian nation. The second notable point is that in all the three journals a regular column was devoted to people who were residing outside native homes. Thus Prabasi carried the column called ‘Banger Bahire Bangali’ (Bengalis outside Bengal) while in the English journal it was ‘Indians Abroad’ and in the Hindi journal ‘Pravasi Bharatiya’ (Indians not resident in India). The columns in the English and Hindi journals covered the story of Indians settled in such faraway places as East Africa, South Africa, the West Indies, and Fiji. It is clear from this that Ramananda’s canvas was not a provincial one and he was trying to build an Indian identity that transcended nations. In fact he extended it to Indian civilisation and culture that that had spread beyond the shores of India in ancient and medieval times. It is difficult to place Ramananda in the conventional mould of nationalists who were active in 19th-century Europe or even Indians both before him and after him. According to a schema developed by E. J. Hobsbawm, this was the time when the second phase of the development of the concept of nationalism that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and which saw the birth of the concept of the self-determination for the creation of new nations. This was also the phase during which ethnicity and language and a so-called common history and culture of a people were considered to be the main ingredients of a nation. Judged by these criteria, India’s British rulers pointed out, it could never become a nation to which self-rule could be granted, and they were therefore constrained to continue with their own rule. But a clue to the way Ramananda’s mind worked on the concept of India’s identity can be found in the title of his Hindi magazine Vishal Bharat, which can be translated as Greater India. This essentially was a school of thought that focused on the wide area in Asia and the Pacific in which Indian culture spread for many centuries without the use of physical force in sharp contrast with the aggression accompanying the expansion of British or other European empires in ancient and modern times. The emphasis was on universalistic harmony rather than a narrow aggressive nationalism. But before moving on to his concepts of nationalism and internationalism, in other words his utopia, I would like to briefly dwell on the contents of the three magazines. Though the readers of the three journals were different sets of people, they carried certain content

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in common concerning history, science, economics, finance, military affairs, the fine arts, culture and extensive comments on the political and social situation of the day by Ramananda himself for the English and Bengali magazines and by Banarsidas Chaturvedi for the Hindi one. So the three journals carried articles that can be called all-India or even international in tone and tenor. But at the same time they carried audience-specific sections. Vishal Bharat, for example, devoted a great deal of space to the development of Hindi language and literature. The three journals were by no means identical translations of each other; they had independent content, though some features and articles were translated and carried by all three. Prabasi and Vishal Bharat provided platforms for up-and-coming literary figures in Bengali and Hindi respectively. Rabindranath Tagore’s Gora, a novel that explored the encounter between India and the West, for example, was first published in the Prabasi. An English translation of the novel made by a close British associate, William Winstanley Pearson, appeared later in The Modern Review. Novels, essays and poetry by Tagore and a number of other literary figures and their translations appeared in all the three journals. A universal message was carried in the multiple channels of a diversity of languages that promoted the growth of diversity at the same time. Thus, while Vishal Bharat carried Hindi translations of Bengali stories, it also offered itself as a platform for lively debates on popular literature in Hindi in addition to encouraging budding writers in that language. One more interesting feature of the magazines was that they provided special emphasis to those who straddled multiple identities, particularly those who had left home and settled elsewhere either voluntarily or through compulsion. The journals also offered platforms for sharing of literature through translations. It was through such translations in The Modern Review that Tagore’s works came to be universally known and appreciated. Perhaps it set off the chain of events that eventually led to the award of the Nobel Prize for literature to him in 1913. 

World view To return to Ramananda’s world view, he put it down in clear terms in a letter4 that he wrote in 1907 to William T. Stead, the famed pacifist editor of the London-based Review of Reviews, on the principles and

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ideals on which the latter had decided to base his journal. Ramananda agreed with Stead about the need for establishing international brotherhood on the basis of justice and national freedom. But so far as India was concerned the way to internationalism lay through the path of nationalism and national freedom. Ramananda vigorously pursued the path that he outlined in his letter to Stead. Ramananda, however, was more impressed by internationalism. Though he was speaking in the first decade of the 20th century when nationalism was in fashion, he firmly believed that the international life of thought and action would touch every aspect of human life like religion, science, art, and education and was the only way of ennobling and intensifying civilisation. Nations would have to renounce violence to achieve this ideal. But as far as India was concerned, it was not capable of any militancy in the first place and therefore had nothing to renounce. The question of exercising its choice would arise only when it became free. He was certain that ‘we have all the essentials for the making of a nation’. Among the essentials he mentioned, some were negative – that India had been ‘taxed as one’ by the British for over 150 years. Thereafter Indians could hardly remain blind to their unity in other respects. They had one home, Ramananda asserted, though he did not specify the geographical extent of this home – an indication of his lack of interest in territorial concepts of nation-states. Another uniting factor in his opinion was the common economic circumstances that they faced. But this was a negative factor as well. A positive factor chosen by Ramananda to underline India’s unity as a nation was common language. One language (presumably Hindi or Hindustani) ‘and that not English’ could carry a person from one end of the country to the other – a rejection of the British notion that but for their rule India would fall apart torn by mutual antagonisms. Ramananda admitted that no single religion united India but unlike the British did not consider this to be a serious drawback. He felt that Indians had enough common sense to deal with differences on this account which were exacerbated by the British. In any case, religious divisions had been exacerbated under British rule. He was convinced that India belonged to a single ‘great civilisation . . . we have everything that should be stimulating to national pride, great literature, great history, great architecture (and) great systems of thought. . . . We believe that as in the past, so also in the future, the Indian peoples have a great part to play in the Evolution of Humanity’.

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And he pledged his journals to the achievement of these ideals of the Indian nation. His concept of the nation transcended the Western concept of the nation. The brand of nationalism that he supported was merely a means of attaining internationalism. We hold that there is a great international life of thought and action, of whose glory Humanity as yet has caught but faint glimpses. To this life belong religion, science, art, education, the ennobling and intensifying of civilization and the progressively wise and just use of all the material resources of the earth in the service of all men. . . . Without INDIA the world must remain forever infinitely poorer [as far as the evolution of humanity was concerned].

Humanity included both men and women who must be equal to men since they are human beings. It is remarkable that he also included the right of animals to protection. He wanted the elimination of all privileges from society and the establishment of equality of opportunity for all. Many years later at a literary meet of migrant Bengalis at Allahabad, Ramananda spelt out the concept of multiple identities of people.5 The essence of the idea of India, he said, consisted of the acceptance of multiple identities that found expression in mutual tolerance among multiple faiths and several civilisations. Humanity, to Ramananda, was a wider and more important value than nationalism. The next level of identity that he mentioned was that of belonging to Asia, a continent whose special feature was that all the major religions of the world were born there. Being a major source of spirituality, Asians did not allow themselves to be overpowered by the attractions and comforts of the material outer world – they paid much greater attention to the inner spiritual world. The next inner shell of identity was the Indian identity. Ramananda pointed to the great diversity of peoples, religions and civilisations in India and said that the unique contribution of India was that here these diverse people had discovered the trick of living side by side in harmony despite occasional clashes and conflicts. The innermost shell of being a Bengali (we must remember he was addressing Bengalis outside Bengal) was contained within the other outer shells. This was the essence of Indian civilisation, a concept that had been achieved in no other nation of the world. This concept of a nation as a multilayered combination of multiple identities was the direct opposite of the idea of

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a nation-state characterized by uniformity and exclusion that had emerged in the West. This somewhat universalist view of the nation came in reaction to the exclusivist European view popularized in the interwar years. But Ramananda’s view of India as a nation-state was the ‘Indian’ answer to the European and British view that ‘the absence of a proper nationstate and proper nationalist sentiments were major lacunae in Indian society and indices of its backwardness’. This counter was led by none other than Rabindranath Tagore, who influenced Ramananda immensely throughout most of his journalistic life. But would it be fair to say that Ramananda was a subset of Tagore? There is no clear black-and-white answer to this question. But an analogy might help us to understand the relationship. Perhaps it can be fairly said that he was as much a subset of Tagore as Nehru was of Gandhi. Though Nehru was a great admirer of Gandhi and was even anointed as his heir, he walked a path after independence that deviated quite radically from the one suggested by the Mahatma. Ramananda was born four years after Tagore and became a Brahmo much before he met him. No influence of Tagore there. In fact as far as marrying commercial success with ideals was concerned, Ramananda was way ahead not only of Tagore but of many others. Though Ramananda suffered losses early in his career, his journals did become profitable, though he never sought profit at the expense of ideals. Again, Ramananda was a successful media person. Besides, Ramananda had a prestige that was independent of his association with Tagore, and this can be gauged from the number of prominent Indians including Lala Lajpat Rai, Bipin Chandra Pal, Subhash Chandra Bose, and even Jawaharlal Nehru who chose to write in The Modern Review. Unlike Tagore, he was an active social reformer and lent his name to a number of movements, mostly social but some political. 

Dissenter among dissenters Ramananda belonged to what Ashis Nandy has called the group of ‘dissenters among dissenters’ who regarded nationalism as a by-product of the western nation-state system and of the forces of homogenization let loose by the western world

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view.6 To them, a homogenized universalism or one world, itself a product of the uprootedness and deculturation brought about by British colonialism in India, could not provide an alternative to nationalism. Their alternative was a distinctive civilizational concept of universalism embedded in the tolerance encoded in various traditional ways of life in a highly diverse, plural society.

The leader of this group of dissenters was Tagore ‘whose reservations about nationalism led him to take up a public position against it, and who built his resistance on India’s cultural heritage and plural ways of life’. Tagore articulated this idea of the Indian identity on the eve of a journey to Java, a land which was known for its Indian culture. In his address, Tagore7 said that it was necessary for Indians to visit places like Java, where the Indian way of thinking had spread centuries ago, to know what exactly it was that India stood for. The mark of civilisations, he said, was their high self-esteem which could only happen when they broke out of the narrow bounds of self-consciousness. In recent times, he said, the self-esteem of Indians had reached an all-time low as they were constantly reminded of their helplessness, fed on history that related only their humiliation at the hands of conquerors. They could therefore hardly pick up the courage to throw off the foreign yoke. The truth, said Tagore quoting Indian tradition, could be known only to him who recognized the universal in himself and himself in the universal. This applied to nations as well. Those who worked for self-interest alone would go down the path of destruction while only those who contributed their mite to the advancement of human civilisation would find their place in the universe. Most importantly, India did not keep this message a jealously guarded secret but passed it on to the world not by the use of force but by sacrifice, pain and friendship. By and large this was the model of the Indian nation that pervaded the three journals run by Ramananda. 

Ramananda and utopia Utopias are born out of discontent with the now.8 Mention has already been made of the ‘now’ in which Ramananda Chatterjee lived and reacted to. It was foreign rule in which the press was subjected to tight controls. Ramananda himself was issued warnings on several occasions and even convicted and fined once for publishing a book

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(India in Bondage: Her Right to Be Free, written by American Unitarian Jabez T. Sunderland). But if utopias are born out of discontent, they also help create a new space for exploration of alternatives as Ramananda and the ideas that were propagated in his journals bring out. He was critical of British rule on a number of counts, but the chief among them he outlined in a series of articles published in Prabasi 1928, titled ‘The necessity of Swaraj and India’s Fitness for Selfrule’.9 British rulers could take credit for their rule in India when even after 150 years they had been unable to rid it of widespread poverty, lack of education, diseases, and epidemics and had even opposed social reforms. But he was convinced that even if the British gave good rule, he would still prefer self-rule because dependence on others was degrading. But the future that Ramananda had in mind was not one where India would achieve perfection, nor did he provide a blueprint. His ‘future’ was a condition that would allow men and nations to fulfil their respective aspirations and contribute to the development of humanity as a whole. Mistakes were possible even under self-rule, and Indians too were entitled to learn from their share of mistakes. He envisaged a plural but self-ruling India, whether as a dominion in the British Empire or completely independent. 

Conclusion India achieved complete independence a little more than four years after Ramananda’s death. Where, it may be asked, has the country reached after 67 years of self-rule when measured against the yardstick of set by Ramananda? With respect to many of the drawbacks pointed out by him on the social, economic, political, and cultural fronts in his editorial notes, India has made considerable progress. Literacy has grown more than six times from 12 per cent in 1947 to 75 per cent, life expectancy has more than doubled, infant mortality dramatically lowered, and economic conditions vastly improved. But with respect to the achievement of internationalism through nationalism, India seems to have moved away from his ideal. He firmly believed in and popularized Tagore’s ideas of Greater India, which eventually found expression in the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).10 The

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message of love and peace which Tagore had enunciated and which was broadcast by Ramananda Chatterjee as the true identity of India, and which Mahatma Gandhi had hoped would be passed on to the West as well, lies forgotten under the onslaught of real politick. Non-alignment is seen today as the product of the Cold War rather than as a demand for an alternative world order based on morals, not power. This alternative was expressed by both Mahatma Gandhi and Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru well before the Cold War.11 Mahatma Gandhi wanted the former colonies to conquer the West, including their former colonizers, through ‘love and truth’, not through vengeance. Ramananda Chatterjee too favoured a moral order. Nehru wanted the dismantling of walls built by imperialism in Asia and a revival of times of shared culture. India too seems to have given up its moral stand, joining the school that believes that might is right.

❁ Notes 1 Lucy Sargisson, ‘The Curious Relationship between Politics and Utopia’, in Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, eds., Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming(Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 26–29. 2 Shanta Devi, Bharat-Muktisadhak Ramananda Chattopadhyay O Ardhashatabdir Bangla (Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing, 2005). This is a biography in Bengali of Ramananda Chatterjee written by his elder daughter, first published in 1950 and republished recently. There are three other biographies of Ramananda Chatterjee that I have consulted – by Jogesh Chandra Bagal published by Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, by the Press Institute of India on the occasion of his birth centenary and by Nemai Sadhan Bose for Publications Division – besides various biographical notes that appeared soon after his death and on his birth centenary in The Modern Review. 3 ‘Vividha Prasanga’ (editorial notes), Prabasi, Chaitra, 1340 B.S. (March, 1934), p. 875. 4 Ramananda Chatterjee, ‘How to Help’, The Modern Review, November 1907, as cited in Ramananda Chatterjee Birth Centenary Commemoration Volume (Calcutta: Press Institute of India, 1979), pp. 61–68. 5 Prabasi, Falgun 1330 B.S. (February, 1924) pp. 585–86. 6 Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. x–xi. 7 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Brihattar Bharat’, Prabasi, vol. Sravan 1338, July, 1931, pp. 583–87.

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8 Lucy Sargisson, ‘The Curious Relationship between Politics and Utopia’. 9 Ramananda Chatterjee, ‘The Necessity of Swaraj and India’s Fitness for SelfRule’, Prabasi, vol. Vaishakh 1335, April–May, May–June & June–July, 1928, pp. 96–105, 279–85, 459–65. 10 Wiswa Warnapala, ‘Bandung Conference of 1955 and the resurgence of Asia and Africa’, Daily News, Colombo, 21 April 2005. Warnapala was the Deputy Foreign Minister of Sri Lanka at that time, Retrieved 15 March 2015 http:// www.dailynews.lk/2005/04/21/fea01.htm. 11 Mahatma Gandhi addressed the Asian Relations Conference on 2 April 1947 while Pandit Nehru addressed it on March 24, http://icwadelhi.info/ asianrelationsconference/images/stories/mahatmagandhi.pdf (web site), Retrieved 15 March 2015 http://icwadelhi.info/asianrelationsconference/ images/stories/jawaharlalnehru.pdf (web site).

Bibliography Bagal, Jogeshchandra, 1371 B. S. ‘Ramananda Chattopadhyaya’. Kolkata: (Bengali) Bangiya Sahitya Parishat, 1965. Bose, Nemai Sadhan. ‘Builders of Modern India – Ramananda Chatterjee’. New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1974. Chaturvedi, Banarasidas. Sansmaran. Kashi: (Hindi), Bharatiya Jnanpith, 1952. Dasgupta, Subrata. ‘Awakening: The Story of the Bengal Renaissance’. Noida: Random House India, 2011. Durham, Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas M. Kellner, Blackwell Publishing, UK, 2006. Dutt, R. C. The Economic History of India. Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 1959 (First published 1901). Dutta, Bhabatosh, 1393 B. S. ‘Chithipatra Rabindranath Tagore’ Vol 12, (Bengali) Visvabharati, Shantiniketan, 1986. Gandhi, Rajmohan. A Tale of Two Revolts: India 1857 and The American Civil War. New Delhi: Penguin-Viking, 2009. Hobsbawm, E. J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Canto, 1992. Jaffrelot, Christophe, ed. India since 1950: Society, Politics, Economy and Culture. New Delhi: Yatra Books, 2012. The Modern Review. Moylan, Tom and Baccolini, Raffaella, eds. Bern: Peter Land, 2007. Mukherjee, Meenakshi. An Indian for All Seasons: The Many Lives of R. C. Dutt. New Delhi: Penguin, 2009. Nandy, Ashis. The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the Politics of Self. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Nandy, Ashis. Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. Prabasi. ‘Ramananda Chatterjee Birth Centenary Commemorative Volume’, Press Institute of India, New Delhi, 1979. ‘Ramananda Chattopadhyay Dinpanji 1890’, 1393 B. S. Calcutta: Papyrus, 1986. Santa Devi. Bharat Muktisadhak Ramananda Chattopadhyaya O Ordhosatabdir Bangla.(Bengali), Kolkata: Deys Publishing, 2005. Tagore, Rabindranath. Nationalism. London: Macmillan, 1921.Vishal Bharat.

12 Radical intervention in dystopian media ecologies Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Saswat Samay Das

❂ Subjectification wasn’t for Foucault a theoretical return to the subject but a political search for another way of life, a new style. That’s not something you do in your head . . . where and how are new subjectivities being produced? What can we look for in present day communities?1 The novelty of the coming politics is that it will no longer be a struggle for the conquest or control of the state, but a struggle between the state and the non-state (humanity), an insurmountable disjunction between whatever singularity and the state organization.2

Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are New Age hacktivists and whistle-blowers who can single-handedly challenge the hegemony of global corporate superpowers through their cyber-satyagraha or digital exposition. They epitomize the new radical subjectivity of current times that can restore faith in the emergence of a novel constitutive agency of resistance. The present excursus seeks to unpack the constitutive praxis of such neo-anarchism or micropolitical dissidence that can unleash massive global after-effects, and it attempts to do that first by engaging with theoretical axioms that sustain the possibility of new radical politics of dissent. Subsequently, we would conclude by critically evaluating these theoretic trajectories so that a concrete road map of radical activism (which is emboldened by new media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogosphere, WikiLeaks, etc.) can unfold. In other words, we attempt to explore and evaluate here the micro-political or molecular modes of contemporary

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media-sustained new social movements. Throughout the world new political spaces and idioms are unfolding, and this chapter is a theoretic as well as empirical engagement with these new political and emancipatory imaginaries. One common feature of all these movements is that they are all media promoted and they bank a lot on the dispersal or disseminative power of the new media like the 24×7 news channels and the social networking sites. New media and the social movements have virtually become co-substantial today and in the process of empowering and promoting the new social movements, media today have redefined their own role and mission. In other words, the new media have generated a new agency of the multitude, and drawing upon the theoretic premises of Deleuze, Foucault and Antonio Negri, we have attempted an understanding of this new subjectivity that pioneers new social movements in the present conjuncture. Televised and social networkised images of the Jasmine Revolution or the Arab Spring, the riveting sound bytes of protest banners in the Occupy movement, the triumph of the Aam Aadmi Party of Indian Against Corruption led by Arvind Kejriwal, the March of Pro-abortion protesters in the wake of the death of an Indian woman in Ireland, the violent uprising of the Palestinians in Gaza, and recently the Shahbag movement in Bangladesh – all these mediacirculated images have one commonality – they have a compelling impact of social mobilization and political justice, an impact circulating throughout the world through social networking sites, television and other forms of media, digitized as well as print. This is what we call the emergent mediascape, or the synopticon of ‘media-topia’ that has the power to ignite a revolution, a movement or a mass opinion behind a cause. It is because of the wide reach of the media that the piercing image of the self-immolated Tunisian protester or the torturous assault of the Egyptian police on a woman protester in Cairo has the potential to generate a new resisting multitude of quasi-universal Potenza. Julian Assange was given political asylum in the Ecuador embassy, but the mediatized image of Assange defiantly carrying on his daunting task of raging a hactivist battle against the most powerful military superpower of the world have cross-borderal impact to inspire the genesis of a re-radicalized global subjectivity. Snowden, Assange, The Standing Men in Turkey, Bradley Manning, Arvind Kejriwal, Arundhati Roy, Binayak Sen, Irom Sharmila Chanu, Aruna Roy, Anna Hazare, Malala Yousafzai – how would we characterize them?

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Revolutionaries? Reformists? New social movement activists? Are they the new proletariat or the multitude that Negri and Hardt theorized in their seminal work, Empire? This chapter offers to analyse a study of new social movements (NSM) happening around the world to explore the possibilities of the new subjectivities. Throughout the world (India is no exception) NSMs are being mobilized on issues like special economic zones (SEZ), forceful eviction of people for developmental projects, tribal rights, globalization, women’s lib, queer movements, ethnicity, anti-ecocide movements, etc. None of these movements have an overarching, totalitarian face, but they do have a global span and the media have contributed in turning them into global universal issues. The articulation of such worldwide movements through media has restored emancipatory/utopian hopes, and this chapter would critically assess this ethico-political conjuncture and redemptive futurality through the epistemic tools provided by various anarcho-emancipatory theorists. In what follows we would engage with different ideas of new anarcho-ethical politics that culminated in the emergence of contemporary resistance and subjectivities – something that gets further empowerment through mediatized intervention and digital hactivism. 

Constituent power of the new immanent subjectivity The constituent power of media and the emerging subject of the social activists or the hactivists like Assange or the journalists of Cobrapost.com, etc. are redefining the world today. We no longer talk now of grand revolutions, but revolutions are taking place in different ways. Few could have thought of a new political space beyond the realm of centre-right and -left even a few months back in India, and similarly few could have thought of a revolution like the Arab uprisings in the Middle East, but the success of the Jasmine Revolution and the accomplishment of the Aam Aadmi Party in India recently are now a part of history and all the mobilization against gender crimes, 2G scam, Coalgate scam, Jol Satyagraha against nuclear power plant in Kudankulam, the Posco movement in Orissa, etc. in India in the recent past have gained support and popularity through media. The Anna Hazare movement in India could not have achieved what it

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achieved without consistent media support, and this bodes well for the future as the age of NSMs has arrived when we witness new modes of agency and dissent that have symbiotic relations with the media. In the subsequent parts we would largely draw upon Richard J. F. Day who in his much acclaimed book Gramsci Is Dead articulated the possibility of the emergence of such non-hegemonic modes of subjectivities in the coming communities of futural imaginaries. The new social movements are characterized by right-based, issue-based and identity-based collectivities, and such configurations are deepened and consolidated by the new media. In other words, we have arrived at the age of NSMs aided and promoted by media where the media emerge as weapons for change and revolution. Day’s central thesis in his book was to dislodge the hegemony of totalized or statist models of subjectivity which is ‘Oedipalized’ or identitarian in favour of a ‘nomadic subjectivity’ or subjectivity of becoming. The Italian workerist or autonomist interpretation of Marxism and the anarcho-dissident idea of radicality of the Situationist International, Day rightly says, have inspired Antonio Negri to postulate the Spinozian ontology of the constituent power of the new immanent subject which would be counter-hegemonic. Drawing on the coordinates of postanarchist/ poststructuralist and post-Marxist theories of Deleuze, Hakim Bey and Negri, Day intends to promote the notion of an anrcho-non-hegemonic multitude as the new singular nomadic subject whose singularity forms a community without affirming an identity, where the group members co-belong without any closed representational rigidities. Such nomadic, non-hegemonic ethico-political collectivity is based on affinity and not on identity. The politics of affinity is not about abandoning identification as such, and the goal is not to build one community (the Hegelian absolutist and ideal Sittlichkeit) but to build many linked communities or rhizomic structures of dissent.3 The praxis of groundless solidarity suggests infinite responsibility for the Other; in other words the futural constellations of dissidence today strives to offer an alternative politics of non-hegemonic collectivities which is not predicated on any regimented meta-narrative. The Latin American radical group Zapatistas and their revolutionary disruption of the unitary logic of corporate capital; their implementation of an independent media; their hactivism and their model of anarchist economics or participatory economics (parecon), where the community members participate collectively in framing the budget of their own choice without being coerced by the policies of

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forceful globalization, etc. are examples of such neo-subjectivities. Post-Marxist and anarchist theory of radical democracy has shifted our attention from a millenarian proletarian revolution to the actually existing NSMs and the citizens who compose those movements. These non-statist, non-overarching movements are to be taken seriously for radical social change. Day refers to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between the radicle and radical forms of rhizomatic organization in the following way: Rhizomatic systems are acentred . . . finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other . . . such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency.4

Rhizomes are commonly associated with affinity-based, micro-political modes of social change. Such structural change based on the logic of affinity is less utopian than either reform or totalitarian revolution. Such theoretic orientations are aimed at building new spaces or places, in other words, topias of subjectivities. These spaces can be found in dis-utopias or atopias that are being created alongside at a greater rate than the neo-liberal utopia of the free-flowing capital. From such atopias or dis-utopias new autonomous zones of dissident subjectivities are emerging today, and the Negrian hypothesis of the multitude entails such an ensemble of acting minorities, none of which, however, aspires to transform itself into a majority; it develops power that refuses to become government.5 Day refers here to Negri who in fact suggest a ‘lateral polycentric concept of anti-capitalist alliances in diversity, connecting a plurality of agencies in a circulation of struggles’.6 Various NSMs taking place today in different corners of the globe, we argue, can be viewed in the light of the earlier discussion, and in the subsequent parts we would engage with the implementation of these theoretic axioms through different movements projected and foregrounded by the media. 

Electronic civil disobedience/neo-satyagraha Hactivism, Day reminds us, is becoming an increasingly important form of direct action,7 and we also have a new phenomenon called Electronic Civil Disobedience that can challenge the military and

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economic might of the existing superpower or for that matter any power. What is needed through these new grids of resistances are the interventions on the field of constituted power on behalf of marginalized individuals and groups. Revolutionary entities such as Reclaim the Streets (RTS) of the mid-1990s and the detournement mechanism of the Situationist International ideology, Day would say, have ultimately culminated into today’s Occupy movement and other alternative modes of living and antagonistic ensembles of social collectivities with contours of futural manifestos. The meaning and value of prefiguration of such alternatives are consciously discussed and widely accepted by contemporary radical activists. Movements that seek to achieve a world united by solidarity and mutual aid have to be guided by new ideas of affinity-based struggle and mediatized projection if it seeks a decentralized, stateless, non-authoritarian society. So the objective, Day says, is to generate alternative cultures and societies – alternative subjectivities and ways of being – within the currently hegemonic order. Anti-globalisation treaty protests in Seattle, anarchism and corporate mass media, anarcho-multitude, or the new global proletariat, etc. signify ‘the practice of solidarity across all axes of oppression’. There is no single enemy, and anarcho-resistance to the new global order and activism exists only in relation to established and emerging communities. The concept of the temporary autonomous zone (TAZ) is another radical way of bringing people together in novel collectivities, and this is exactly what is replicated in today’s dissident gatherings around the world. Such TAZs can be created in the form of momentarily reclaimed streets, summit convergences, occupying a zone for protest, blocking environmental destruction, etc., and such forms of independent collectivities can hold promise of more permanent modes of association that not only prefigure alternatives but actually constitute them. Day refers to the Latin American assembleas populares (popular or neighbourhood assemblies), the Zapatista style Encuentro (a coalition independent media centres (IMCs)), or the Italian model of Comitati di quartiere (neighbourhood councils) or workerist groups, etc. which are all examples of TAZ.8 What is indicated by all these alternative activist models, Day believes, is ‘a theoretical auto- da-fe’ (or the end of theory for the sake of theory or non-praxis oriented theory). In the light of the earlier discussion we can conclude again that today’s activism sustained by the media is right-based or issue-based micropolitical activities ‘enthused by Affinity/right based groups’, and the

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new media have enabled these movements to mobilize mass support. What it means to work via micro-politics is ‘a politics of minority rather than majority, of affinity rather than hegemony’, a politics that remains political despite its rejection of the fundamental assumption of neo-liberal and post-Marxist theories of social change. In the subsequent part we would substantiate such alternative modes of non-hegemonist politics through new theoretic taxonomies such as postanarchism and autonomist Marxism, modes which have a global impact because of media projection. 

Autonomist theory and the Deleuzian Smith as a new anarcho-non-hegemonic subject Richard J. F. Day strongly believes that as the complement of both the (post)-Marxist neo-liberal citizen and the postanarchist nomad, the figure of the smith, as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari and as exemplified in the NSMs, offers the greatest potential for community-based, radical social change in the 21st century. Giorgio Agamben characterizes the coming community as the one which begins to break with the Hegelian legacy of state-based concept of group identity. That is possible only through the ‘modalities of groundless solidarity of infinite responsibilities’. This concept of groundless solidarity suggests seeing one’s own privilege and oppression as the central axis of struggle.9 Today’s NSMs are ‘dispersed micropolitical activities’, and its capillary nature and microstructures induced an activist-oriented struggle for micro-level changes in the politics of everyday life and individual changes. Instead of being confined to small parameters, the NSMs have large-scale ‘irradiation effects’ across all segments of society. Instead of indoctrinating a hegemonic notion of the political, the NSMs are not attempting change in all axes of the social but on selective and limited axes of the social. As an alternative, Day offers a brand of postanarchist subjectivity based on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the smith – a subject that is neither free-floating nor irredeemably attached to any particular moral imperative. We argue that Julian Assange, Arvind Kejriwal and the protagonists of the Arab Spring or the Shahbag movements are such Deleuzean smiths. What then are the elements out of which a non-hegemonic poststructuralist politics spearheaded by the smith

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might be constructed? Today autonomous communities and individuals have been coerced/seduced into statist relationships into living a life based on relations of power as domination. Drawing on these notions of anarchist community-based non-power politics, the subsequent part would engage with Deleuzean ideas of anarchist subjectivity and resistance. 

Resisting war machine and molecular revolution What the new social movements are asking for is a radical redefinition of power and politics. The Aam Aadmi Party in India has recently opened up a new space in Indian politics with their non-power concept of power, and here we attempt a theoretic understanding of their redefinition (through Deleuze) of state power and anarchism to subvert all forms of absolutist power of the state and the power junta. For Deleuze and Guattari the forceful integration of humanity in the global capitalist order is generally evaded by the resisting war machine or the anarchic subjectivity which attempts to refute all statist endeavours. Deleuze would say that the state form does not emerge or evolve, but it exists always as an immemorial Urstaat10 which tends to capture the tamed humanity as a captive war machine or subservient subjectivity. This mode or trope of warding off the state form involves ‘indigenous/anarcha-feminist values of community’, care and mutual respect.11 Subjects who are willing to trade away their autonomy for the promise of security are in fact strengthening the hegemonic logic of the state. State apparatuses of division undermine the positivities of community solidarity and thereby facilitate capture-exploitation. We argue that in the Indian case this is exactly what the Aam Aadmi Party has been trying to say, and their pro-people stance testifies their aversion to state power. Here Day reminds us that Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of state power converges with Foucault’s notion of the apparatus or dispositif. Deleuze’s concept of becoming minor holds immense significance in this context. The minor or the principle of minority appears as the dynamic or intensive principle of change in Deleuze and Guattari’s work,12 where change is explicitly oriented to avoid becoming the major. It is in fact defined in such a way as to associate it inseparably with non-hegemonic practices. This is the space, Day says, of Guattari’s ‘molecular revolution’ and Foucault’s micro-politics, a particularly postsructuralist politics of affinity that

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has been picked up by theorists to explore the possibility of turning this micro-politics as a mode of community politics. But how can we organize ourselves to minimize domination and exploitation particularly in a world increasingly colonized by neo-liberal globalization and the societies of control? Autonomist Marxists and postanarchist theorists venture to offer an answer to this question. Hardt and Negri have theorized radical struggle by using the concept of the constituent power of the multitude. Understanding the multitude of course requires an understanding of what it was working against – empire, or the neo-liberal world order, which Hardt and Negri analyse using concepts drawn from the poststructuralist theory and from what some have begun to call the autonomist school of communication.13 Like the state and the war machine, Hardt and Negri see empire and multitude locked in a symbiotic struggle, taking place not only in the shop floor but in everyday life and in the ubiquitous network of electronic communication. Perhaps the greatest strength of empire is its use of autonomist theory to adapt modern Marxist and anarchist categories to an emerging postmodern social condition.14 Autonomist theory relies on the power of the multitude to undermine the very systems of state control. The examples that can be cited here are legions, from the adroit manipulation of image hunting television news outlets by early Greenpeace activists, to the use of email and weblink activists of all hues, most commonly evoked in the Zapatista’s so-called net war, etc. So the autonomists would argue that general intellect not only enslaves us but also offers the tools of our liberation. Capitalism, they claim, is once again producing its own gravediggers, but this time they are going to use keyboards of the media or the hactivists rather than shovels. The constituent power of the multitude is nothing but the new name of for what anarchists call social revolution.15 The multitude is, on the one hand, theorized as a multiplicity in the Deluzian sense that is as a non-identitarian formation of subjects in perpetual motion sailing the enormous sea of capitalist globalization in a perpetual nomadism.16 In this formulation the multitude appears as a creative constellation of powerful singularities17 that is something unknowable, untotalisable, ungraspable. Hardt and Negri declare that only the multitude through its practical experimentation will offer the models and determine when and how the possible becomes real.18 This spirit of nomadism and multitude is reflected in contemporary manifestation of cyber dissidence and other forms of radicalism. In what follows, we would address such new forms of dissidence.

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Cyber dissidence and the Information Messiah The furore over Ecuador’s political asylum to Julian Assange has reawakened the debate over Assange’s identity as a cyber-terrorist or an Information Messiah. His hactivism has virtually become a folklore of new subjectivity that can embarrass the mighty US neoempire. In recent times, the Occupy Wall Street movement (OWS) and the Jasmine Revolution in the wake of the Arab Spring have generated a new re-radicalized imaginary of resistance politics, and closer home in India, the Team Anna anti-corruption brigade coupled with multiple political society movements across India have induced the hope for new optics of dissidence and structural changes. Although the unitary hegemonic logic of global capital has virtually ruled out any emancipatory dream of a just and egalitarian society, the OWS phenomena has perhaps renewed some belligerence against the ideology of neo-capital. Given the upsurge of alternative political parallax views across the globe, what should be the pressing preoccupations of social scientists and media researchers? Should we aspire for the quest of renascent utopian political coordinates that would address the geopolitical praxis with renewed zest and greater efficacy? The recent Euro-zone crisis in the aftermath of global financial meltdown has exposed the futility of mindless marketization, and the post-9/11 scenario has witnessed the emergence of worldwide dissent against the monstrous visage of Pax Americana and global militarization. American military brutalities in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan have once again brought in issues of governmentality, bio-politics and repressive control. Such military expansionism necessitates a re-radicalization of dissent. The WikiLeaks exposés and the trial of Julian Assange betray the ugly facade of what Derrida called Western lyco-politics or politics of subjugation and usurpation. The WikiLeaks phenomena and the Arab Spring have proved that the media and social networking sites can emerge as new potential domain of dissidence. Perhaps a new multitude of global fraternity premised on universal solidarity and collective ethics may emerge to assert quasi-transcendental meta-narratives of hope and dissent which would constitute the kernel of a new radical subjectivity. We may find the articulation of such subjectivities in the transcript of Julian Assange’s address to the UN on human rights:

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I speak to you today as a free man, because despite having been detained for 659 days without charge, I am free in the most basic and important sense. I am free to speak my mind. This freedom exists because the nation of Ecuador has granted me political asylum and other nations have rallied to support its decision.19



Purging/critiquing/redirecting the NSMs The detention of Assange in the Ecuador embassy demonstrates that the war continues, the suppression of dissidence persists and the colonization of the lifeworld continues unabated, but such coercive measures are being met with dissent too. However, the euphoria over media-induced images of sporadic protests and gatherings is to be combined with constant analysis of its political effectiveness and honesty of approach. While we gloat over a huge TV screen image in the Tahrir Square or a rally in the Wall Street, mere euphoria would not suffice. It has to be accentuated with effective political direction and theoretic critique. Some critical opinions have already surfaced which requires rectification. Whereas the OWS claims to be the 99 per cent, yet the movement practices the age-old privileges of class and race blindness. Similar to most white liberal movements, the OWS is hardly inclusive of the people of colour. Although the spirit is radical and the intent is revolutionary, the movement itself suffers from a lack of critical understanding on how race and class intersect. In reality, 99 per cent of people do not form a class in themselves. In their postmodernist hues, when political movements decry ideologies, refuse to take sides on political issues and pretend to distance themselves from power struggles, they smack of redundancy at best, and hypocrisy, at worst. When the educated youths refuse to acknowledge their race and class prerogatives and claim that their movements let everyone have equal voice, it speaks of the gravely misplaced understanding of how freedom of speech is interlaced with entitlements. If the Occupy movement has not attracted majority of black and Latino people into its fold, it is a sad reflection of how the movement has failed to address the needs of the most oppressed while boasting of representing them. These allegations are true for other NSWs taking place in India and other regions too. In what follows we address the necessity of inclusiveness in NSMs.

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Seeking wider audience People of colour, caste and minority creeds are disproportionately incarcerated, disenfranchised and unemployed in the United States and in other countries. There is still a class society in place. And yet, ‘class’ as a realistically oppressive concept is seldom discussed in the parlance of NSMs. Without any necessary critiques of the class society, majority of white/upper class or caste liberals almost never understand their hidden privileges. They unequivocally endorse similar newspapers, television channels and textbooks that are inherently biased against class and race analysis. A separation of economy from politics of the day is naive and reactionary. Critics, while praising the Aam Aadmi Party in India, have also questioned their lack of specified economic ideology. Merely opposing a bunch of corporate houses in the Wall Street or New Delhi without disrupting the political climate is a hopeless distraction. Calling for arms may or may not be a suitable alternative to political misrule, but to clearly disavow any use of violence while calling for revolution is a utopian approach. Very interestingly enough, almost all the major metros of India in a span of past two or three years have seen huge rallies of civil protests against the political establishment. The death of Rizwanur in Kolkata, Matoo case, Jessica Lal case, and the recent rape of Damini in a Delhi bus drew the attention of Delhiwallahs, and similarly, Mumbaikars were busy showing solidarity with dead soldiers in the terrorist attack and were protesting against the alleged indifference of the government towards victims of India’s 26/11. Those symbolisms of protests were used with more and more candles burning. Chennai and Banglore saw similar surge of social mobilization mostly driven by non-governmental organizations (NGOs). What do these movements mean for a nation suffering from a lack of proper yardstick to measure the exact number of people below an equally obfuscated poverty line? A nation that makes to headline for its farmer suicide and earns kudos in world cinema for its spectacle of enlightened poverty, enlightened because it tells the world ‘all isn’t well’. Poverty here works as an aesthetic capital, and India keeps on shining in its symmetrical search for more and more sterling feats of market-induced development. The subsequent segment seeks to offer a possible way out.

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Repoliticizing the subaltern subjectivity: civil society and political society The previous part addressed the alignment of civil society protests with real political agency or re-radicalized anarchic agenda, and we argue that Partha Chatterjee’s concept of the division between civil society and political society is highly relevant here and in this context too media can and do play a crucial role. Keeping aside the prioritization of the civil society, Chatterjee envisions the future of Indian postcolonial democracy in the domain of political society and not in the spheres of civil society as the latter is embedded in the logic of global capital. Chatterjee would link civil society with corporate capital while associating political society with non-corporate capital. Political society as defined by Chatterjee can be viewed as the Deleuzian war machine which could not be subsumed under capital and it constitutes the new dissident subaltern subjectivity. Chatterjeee has studied the NSMs in India in the light of his theorization of political society which constantly negotiates and fights with the technologies of governance. Subaltern studies began with Ranajit Guha’s essay ‘Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency’, and then it gradually moved till Spivak brought that phenomenal rupture with issues of gender and the muted subjectivity that completely whittle out the subalternist claim to represent the most beleaguered voice. In fact the term ‘subaltern’ is etymologically linked up with peasants. So it was all an effort on Chakraborty, Guha and Chatterjee’s part to establish another dimension of history-telling from bellow. They were collectively inspired by Gramsci and they opposed the Marxian class logic and they agreed with the Marxian interpretation of history as being essentially bourgeois. But in a postcolonial context, Partha Chatterjee and the subaltern studies at large maintain the original fundamental point to break away from the Western mode of historiography with a deconstructionist approach to rewrite and represent subdued, muffled narratives of history. Everyday struggle, something that Chatterjee theorized in political society, comes close to this intension to question the incomplete project of modernity. Modernity failed to reflect upon politics that take place in the margin. The failure of nation is also attributed to the failure of modernity which has seen politics within the dialectic of nation-sate and the civil society. Chatterjee draws two lines between colonial-civil society-modernity and

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postcolonial-political society-democracy. Chatterjee believes that the institutional forms of this emergent political society are still unclear.20 For Chatterjee, in the context of the latest phase of the globalization of capital, we may well be witnessing an emerging opposition between modernity and democracy, that is between civil society and political society.21 Nation has not failed; what has failed is civil society to contain the anger of the marginal and to render nation paying heed to the concerns of those marginalized. This was not democracy as civil society just satisfied itself in achieving their demands and nation continued enjoying the support of civil society. A large section of the state’s population which Chatterjee defines as political society, therefore, has to make their democratic rights before the government. So the futural dissident agency is to be forged from this domain of the subaltern political society which incorporates real ground issues of politics. Interestingly, the new media are catering slowly to the subaltern need; eviction and governmental apathy to the political society are becoming important media events now. Recent coverages of Noida eviction, the Singur and Nandigram cases and the Maruti agitation in the recent past in India are cases where the media did cover the legitimate demands of the political society. So the media are also consolidating the dissident imaginary of subaltern politics, and they are perhaps reformulating themselves in response to contemporary conditions. Such a participation of media and the subaltern section of society in reformulating the politics of the future is extremely important and the concluding part of this chapter would borrow a futural redemptive road map from Slavoj Zizek’s exhortations for the futural agenda of dissent. 

Actual politics and future of resistance The media today can empower the individual and groups, and therefore in the coming media-topia, we can easily migrate from statebased identarian politics to molecular forms of politics which can consistently question the status quo; however, such micro-politics or group-based activism has to be truly political and inclusive. Slavoj Zizek has made valuable observations on the right course of action that NSMs like OWS should take so that a new emancipatory imaginary can materialize and media too are saved from being appropriated by the market and so that social movements too can be rescued from being mere simulacrum. We would conclude this chapter with Zizek’s

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observation which we believe would be helpful in any formation of coming communities or dystopias of alternative life: There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The twentiethcentury alternatives obviously did not work. . . . The solution is not ‘Main Street, not Wall Street’, but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. . . . We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols. They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahatma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go . . . They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers; we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. . . . So is the change really possible? . . . On the other hand, in the domain of social and economic relations, we are bombarded all the time by a You cannot . . . engage in collective political acts (which necessarily end in totalitarian terror), or cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), or isolate yourself from the global market, and so on. When austerity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be done. Maybe, the time has come to turn around these coordinates of what is possible and what is impossible; maybe, we cannot become immortal, but we can have more solidarity and healthcare?22

Zizek’s words are proving to be prophetic as the world is witnessing rising tides of resistance in Egypt followed by Turkey, Brazil and in other parts of the third world like Bangladesh and India. The coordinates of impossibility are looking possible in the coming dis-utopia of change, and media play a vital role in ushering in that change.

❁ Notes 1 Giles Deleuze, Negotiations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 106. 2 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 85.

268  Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha and Saswat Samay Das 3 Ibid. 4 Giles Deluze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 17. 5 Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (London and Toronto: Pluto Press, 2005). 6 Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, tr. M. Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 68. 7 Tim Jordan, Activism! Direct Action, Hactivism and the Future of Society (London: Reaktion Books, 2002). 8 Day, Gramsci Is Dead. 9 Ibid. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateus, p. 427. 11 Day, Gramsci Is Dead. 12 Ibid., p. 68. 13 Brophy Enda and Mark Cote, ‘Le Vita Dei Manifestanti Infami’ in DeriveApprodi, No. 25, 2003. 14 Day, Gramsci Is Dead. 15 Ibid. 16 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 60–61. 17 Ibid., p. 61. 18 Ibid., p. 411. 19 Julian Assange, Wikileaks, 27 September 2012. 20 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004). 21 Ibid. 22 Slavoj Zizek, ‘Actual Politics’, Theory & Event, vol. 14, no. 4, 2011.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Borphy, Enda and Mark Cote. ‘Le Vita Dei Manifestanti Infami’, Derive Approdi, no. 25, 2003. Chatterjee, Partha. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004. Cote, Mark. ‘The Italian Foucault: Subjectivity, Valorisation, Autonomia’, Politics and Culture, no. 3, 2003. Day, Richard J. F. Gramsci Is Dead, Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2005. Deleuze, Giles. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Deleuze, Giles and F. Guattari. A Thousand Plateus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

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Foucault, Michel. ‘Gouvernment des Vivants’, Lecture delivered in January 30 at College de France, 1980. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Jordan, Tim. Activism! Direct Action, Hactivism and the Future of Society. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. Negri, Antonio. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Tr. M. Boscagli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Transcript of Julian Assange’s Address to the UN, Retrieved 27 September 2012 https://wikileaks.org/Transcript-of-Julian-Assange.html. Zizek, Slavoj. ‘Actual Politics’, Theory & Event, vol. 14, no. 4, 2011.

13 Posthuman amusements Gaming and virtuality B. S. Bini

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ames in the cyberspace, featuring myriad occasions of virtual human interaction and competition, steer the gamers into utopic and dystopic spaces and contexts constructed and mediated by technology. Keeping in mind the alarming prognostications that several theorists, Marshall McLuhan, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Donna Haraway, to name a few, have expressed about the transformative power of technology on individuals and culture, one may wonder if gaming does a plastic surgery to sensibilities and perspectives.1 Through face-to-face interactions and online interviews with gamers, I have tried to gather and analyse perspectives on whether playing simulation and role-playing games bring about changes in their attitudes, ideologies and subjectivities in actual social life. Gamers usually prefer to keep their identity confidential; identity of the avatars (on-screen persona) may not correspond to the identity of the gamer. So, it was not possible to do an ethnographic and genderbased profiling of the gamers; this is a methodological limitation of this study. The age, sex, location (asl) query is not appreciated by gamers who prefer anonymity. The interviews with gamers were conducted in chats within the games. I did not disclose to some of the gamers that I am interviewing them for research. In this chapter, I have used many sites2 comprising games themed sexual violence, war, alien attacks, homicide, rape, suicide, butchering, dissection, post-mortem, surgery, martyrdom, torture, hunting, and haunting. I treat games as emplotted within thematic frameworks depending on the narrative and the actions in the game. For studying the games I registered as a member, entered the gamescape of other players and became an accomplice

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or a voyeur of activities taking place. However, gamers I met through Facebook wherein the games do not have content based on crime, sex and violence were not overtly insistent on anonymity.3 Games are constructed as polytexts with meandering, interlinking, rhizoid visual narratives that are hyperrepresentational. They accommodate multilayered spectacular scenarios, actions and events that have complex historicity, standpoints, digressions, and new modalities of subjectivity. Through simulation and role-playing games, the gamer enters a fuzzy ambience, a multidimensional ephemeral domain as a digital persona whose destiny is decided by the mastery of the gamer and the conventions and vagaries of the game. Games have a dynamic spatiality; during the game, the gamer is led through a sprawling psychological geography created by multimedia design and deployment of visual architecture that blur the boundaries between landscapes, mindscapes, dreamscapes, and delusions. The construction of vibrant virtual environments and concerted semiotics of image, music and sound effects intensify the seduction of games. Simulation without a referent is typical to some game scenarios, and one encounters constant tensions and negotiations between the tangible and the virtual domains of experience. For some, adventure-themed games compensate for the lack of excitements in ‘real’ life, and often the real and virtual are indistinguishable. In my interviews, according to some, violent games made them aggressive in ‘real’ scenarios, and for many other respondents, violence in games subdued their urge for violence in ‘real’ life. Some experienced no tangible correspondence between the virtual and real in gaming, and some felt total immersion. This phenomenon explains the indeterminate semantic implication of the experience ‘real’ with reference to games. The semiotics of games is an assortment of technologically created simulation, human–machine interfaces, spectacle, network of connections, and speculations. Games, pornography, sci-fi films, etc. proclaim the triumph of hyperrealism accentuated by rampant consumer culture. Hyperrealism compensates for or replaces the blandness of presumed ‘reality’ with entertaining, satisfying and proliferating spectacles. Whether this is to be celebrated or lamented is debatable. The obsession with entertainment results in compartmentalization, locking in individuals in small disconnected private universes of delights. Even if one accesses the cyberspace through a public Internet cafe or from a portable device while s/he is physically present in the company of other people, the feeling of being in a private

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sphere lingers. Games offer a cornucopia of exciting circumstances and vicarious participation in events that titillate and seduce gamers into repeated indulgence in gaming. Games sometimes simulate the everyday occurrences of life, soaking the monotonous familiarity of actions and events in flamboyant fantasy. Games assert the inexorableness of uncertainty that renders laws, regulations and ethics as exceptions. Cyber-ethics and netiquette often do not conform to socially accepted norms of appropriate behaviour. In permissive game spaces, social taboos are deconstructed. Simulation and role-playing games have diegetic and extra-diegetic possibilities and mimetic potential. As in films, role-playing games have characters, dialogues, action, and a non-linear plot that evolves in different levels of the game. The gamer or the screen persona becomes a character playing a key role in determining the course of action within the game zone. Factors like sound effects, music, popups, scores, and the like are part of the extra-diegetic aspect of the game. Experiences in the game could be more vivid and intense than lived experience. Game industry is one of the most lucrative commercial possibilities in the capitalist economy. The widespread passion for gaming indicates the massive commercial success attained by commoditizing everything by packaging them as accessible and consumable spectacles. Games that go into newer and better versions with an inbuilt blueprint of improvement are symptomatic of a consumer culture subordinated to the logic of constantly emerging novel trends and their impermanence. Gaming may be looked at as a nomadic experience with the gamer moving in virtual spaces like a flâneur. Benjamin’s flâneur4 and the nomad5 in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari carry with them the burden of utopias and dystopias, indicating spaces of ideality and no-place, empty space and menacing spatio-temporalities. Simulation and role-playing games endow the flâneur with the dual status of a commodity and a consumer. Certain games insert a player into narrative spaces and time as a character who is to some extent capable of authoring one’s actions and destiny. I have incorporated in the chapter segments from interviews with players of violent, sadomasochist and eschatological games. There are games that provide vicarious experiences of rape, murder, suicide, and hunting without the fear of failure, non-accomplishment, punishment, or death. Playing such games necessitates identifying with the criminal’s mind which plans the act,

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executes it, fools the investigators and judges, and escapes scot free, if s/he is proficient enough in the game. Sub-plots of guilt, redemption, surrender to police, confession to a priest, etc. are embedded in some games for those who crave for such hues of experience. The answer to the question whether coming out of the game zone means exiting the gamer-self is subjective. Different degrees of identification and dissociation with one’s game avatars might be possible. In violence- and sex-themed games, the bodies of digital personae are fragmented; body parts are focused or zoomed, highlighting zones of the body that are perceived to be vulnerable or erotic. Wounds and blood look shockingly repulsive and gruesome in close-up projections. Sound effects and three-dimensional graphics generate hyperreal excitement from the virtual act which perhaps excels the feel of committing murder, rape, and suicide or the thrill of hunting. One accomplishment, that is managing to virtually commit suicide, kill or rape another digital persona, or hunt (in the guise of a hunter, a carnivorous animal, a bird of prey, or a predator), does not mean the adventure is over. The game can be repeated, with a new set of choices, victims and plots. During chat sessions with players from game sites,6 I asked questions such as Why do you play games? What do the games do to you? How much time do you spend playing games? Do you get immersed in the game space and forget the world outside it? Does this game substitute for a lack in ‘real’ life? The act of playing a game for understanding it was not addictive for me, but in the course of research I met people in game zones who spend many hours in the game. For playing games, the gamer has to create an avatar and a screen name for login. In multiplayer games, one gamer can enter as an avatar into the game theme chosen by another gamer who also appears as an avatar. All screen names are password protected. One can choose the victims and customize them (gender, race, eye, skin and hair colour, clothes, accessories. body types, voice, etc.). Avatars that gamers choose can be human, animal, bird, beast, alien, genetically modified creature, monster, machine, a weapon for mass destruction, or a disembodied spirit that plays as a ‘voice’, depending on the theme of the game and the way the gamer wants to represent oneself. The digital personae in game zones do not give away any clue to the identity of the gamer. ‘Unisex’ avatars seem to be the order of the day. Once a gamer enters the game zone of another, there are options to be a witness, competitor or an ‘accomplice’. An emoticons-enabled chat window can be

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activated in multiplayer games. These statements/ segments of chats with players of violent games call for further analysis of the utopic/ dystopic possibilities of games:7 1. One person with a screen name, Jailbird (Male, from Brazil living in Alabama), whom I met and interacted with in a murder simulation game stated: ‘I game many rounds 4 fun. shooting, stabbing, cutting the throat – do it (in) so many ways.’ On another occasion, the same screen name: ‘I luv 2 hear m scream. The cartoon woman beg all da time. If I do wot I do here out der, they send me 2 jail. Cops sen me 2 shrinks n drug me.’ 2. Lillian from the same game: (name changed on request, she uses a screen name, tippybitch, aged 46, teaches in a school in New York) I think every victim is my ex. That’s how I shut up those voices urging me to grab a gun and shoot the b******. 3. A screen name, Lineapole (a college student from Melbourne), said: ‘I play rape games with my roomies. We name each girl after those bitches in college. Professors not exempted☺’ 4. The person with the screen name Pauline (a Parisian artist, lesbian) plays a suicide simulation game obsessively; sometimes Pauline spends full nights in the suicide game zone. The suicide game showcases many options for suicide. While informing the gamer about the merits of each method, the site warns about pain, possibilities of failure and aftermaths including permanent disability. I entered as a spectator in Pauline’s game zone in which her avatar tried out several methods of killing herself. In the chat she responded to my emoticon indicating fear thus: Doing it so many times and failing, you will find the perfect way. It can be painless and quick, you know. Don’t let these a****** frighten you with their dumbest risk factor pop-ups. 5. Alembian is the screen name of a man from Ireland who uses a funky avatar in a game themed space battle with aliens. He is my Facebook friend and knew that I was interviewing him for my research. He confessed in a message: My mom was mean. She didn’t let me play games growing up. Now she’s gone, I play. Gaming gives me a chance to just let go, blow somebody up and fight those meddlesome aliens

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interfering from another dimension. For me it is escapism and getting even. When I play, I remember that mother is now in another dimension. 6. Mooncalf plays a sex-themed game and gave me permission to use the name of his avatar in the study saying that I would not be able to invent a pseudonym that so aptly describes his disorientation. He, ‘an American closet gay’, knew that I am conducting a research work on games. Mooncalf describes himself a ‘gay at heart’ but is married and has a daughter. It is through the game that gives him space for ‘feeling real male love, warm and nice’ that he is able to ‘overcome the frustration of having to be straight’. He experiments endlessly with alternative sexual proclivities and possibilities during ‘hot afternoons away from family and friends’. 

Entry into utopia and dystopia: the nuanced spatio-temporality of gaming The utopias of our liquid times are not dreams of reaching a permanent destination; utopia is a constant pursuit of ephemeral aspirations and elusive trends that keep changing. This utopia, according to Bauman, does not give meaning to life – lived or fantasized. Such a utopia of our times banishes the question of life’s meaning altogether.8 Dystopia is not a mere doppelganger; it is a utopia gone awry. Nandy’s statement ‘Our hells may be paved with our utopias, but our heavens are signposted with dead and living dystopias’ tells a disturbing fact about the connections and overlaps of utopias and dystopias.9 The most utopic or dystopic possibility in gaming is that of ‘becoming the posthuman’ or experiencing absolute non-alienation with machines or technological gadgets used for playing. A gadget becomes a technological second self or an extension. In the identification with the posthuman, ‘there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology or human goals’.10 Games act as mediums for the organic gamer to interact and blend with the non-organic machine, turning us into desiring machines seeking gratification.

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The technologically mediated identities of gamers subvert structured categories of race, gender and ethnicity. Gaming creates cyborgs by connecting organic bodies through informational pathways to devices functioning as extensions. A cyborg, according to Haraway, ‘is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction’.11 The cyborg portents the becoming of the posthuman whose materiality may be looked at as the original prosthesis extendable or replaceable by other prostheses. The original prosthesis, the human self of the gadget-user, can be expressed with intelligent machines without a glitch in gaming wherein the mind–machine–action–information barriers collapse. According to Baudrillard, there is no alienation while consuming high technology: ‘New technology, new machines, new images, interactive screens, do not alienate me at all. With me they form an integrated circuit.’12 Utopias usually offer a peep into a better future and condemn the present. Baudrillard reminds us of the presentness of utopias ever on the verge of going awry: Utopia does not write itself into the future. It is always, from right now, what the order of the day is missing. Utopia is not the dialectic of the possible and the impossible. It is not what overcomes contradictions dialectically, it transgresses them in their own terms.13

Dystopias, on the contrary, situate us in a bleak and harrowing ‘reality’ that is so familiar and intensely tangible. Though dystopia comes in the guise of a horrifying future, it implores us to diagnose and treat its lurking symptoms in the immediate present. Utopias and dystopias of today are, perhaps, of the same stuff: histories and portends of the present. Gaming is an intense experience of being wired to a vertigo of connections, and indolence of networked selves. The gamer is driven by a will to mastery. Technological utopias, including games, insinuate ambitions of divinity, immortality and omnipotence. Through sci-fi games, players surmount the boundaries of space and time through themes like voyage across the space, entry into heaven or hell and timetravelling.14 Virilio interprets ‘immediacy, simultaneity, instantaneity and ubiquity’ as parameters of divinity that make it possible to ‘escape the historic conditions of humanity’.15 That could be one of the reasons why the temporality of the games, even while alluding to past and future, is entangled with the presentness of our lives.

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Utopic and dystopic aspirations of superhuman power play out in game scenarios through themes of warfare involving sophisticated and highly destructive weaponry, genetic engineering that modifies the digital persona so that s/he becomes capable of extraordinary feats, prosthetic extension of mind and body with high-tech attachable organs that grant the digital persona formidable abilities, and artificial intelligence. In many games, the digital persona is able to perform superhuman or subhuman feats by metamorphosing into animal, monster or a machine. Game spaces give rise to megalomania and narcissism. We see technology as a way of exercising control on the world. But in a curious reversal, ‘With technology, the world controls us.’16 Gamers, while immersed in gaming, may perceive themselves as active agents with tangible decisive powers. According to Baudrillard, gaming is escapism par excellence as it insulates one from ‘the brutalizing effects of rationality, normative socialization, and universal conditioning happening in the domain of the social’.17 Gaming offers a challenge to entropy and mortality. Another utopia that many games evoke is of democracy. The rules of the game give us a right to equality which the laws in society cannot offer. Wealth and status quo do not influence one’s life and progress in the domain of games. The dystopic game scenarios construct a sense of future time wherein the conditions of life are worse due to violence, oppression or terror. Situations of a terrifying future are created using themes like crime, monsters, aliens, death, and afterlife. The dystopia created by games has allusions to apocalyptic, hellish futures interweaving themes of crimes such as espionage and online bank robbery requiring highly technological skills, immortality, debauchery, and genetic mutation resulting in the evolution of corrupted subhuman or superhuman species. Such degenerations, understood as progress, heroism and perfection, construct dystopias in game spaces. Dystopias in games have begun to resemble familiar societies more and more, or, one wonders, whether it is the other way a round. Dystopias evoke lived experiences or familiar social scenarios. Dystopia is a universe given away to entropy; it seems to be more of a possibility than utopia. The gamer is a techno-traveller who temporarily escapes from the social and enters a utopia or dystopia, whose signs haunt the present. What constitutes the ‘real’ or what is understood as ‘real’ is a plethora of appearances. While immersed in the virtual, human beings become their schizophrenic, schizo-functional gadgets.

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Explaining the heterotopia and hyperreal: the virtuality and commoditization in games I call the domain of the game heterotopic because of the rupture between the actual physical space the gamer occupies and the virtual experiential space s/he is encompassed in. In other words, the gamer accessing a game from any space – home or a cybercafe – occupies that space and is simultaneously transported to the virtual space of the game. S/he functions in multiple spaces at the same time. The obsessive lure of the games and the tendency to dwell in the heterotopias they construct point to a pertinent ambivalence of the digital age – the blurring of distinctions between the ‘real’ and the virtual or, more importantly, preferring the virtual over the ‘real’. The ‘real’ is perceived as lacklustre, so spending time in ‘real’ spaces with ‘real’ people may not be as exciting, as intense as being in the virtual where one has endless choices, where people are action-packed avatars. One respondent asked me: ‘If you have access to a tremendous experience, what is the “real” life for?’ The metamorphosis of the human gamer into unusual forms of being or the gamer’s infusion into another identity – of human, machine, vehicle, animal, alien, or ghost – in gamescapes during the act of playing is replete with metaphors of alterations and fracturing of significations. Simulation gaming mediated by computer and Internet constructs multilayered fields of mental and physical activities that function as a random assemblage. The heterotopic space of the game turns the gamer to one of the assemblages in the mechanism of gaming. A confluence of ‘assemblages’ takes place on the plateaus in gamescapes; a plateau could be ‘any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome’.18 The spreading out of gaming culture and the gamers’ movement in game spaces can be compared to the expansion of a rhizome. Rhizomatic movement in game spaces involves ceaseless and continuing connections. These connections are semiotic links and organizations of power. Guattari’s notion of such connections as that which ‘does not imply any notion of bond, passage, or anastomosis between its components’; it is rather ‘an assemblage of possible fields, of virtual as much as constituted elements’19 ominously suits the game scenario.

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While gaming, one may walk into or welcome delusions willingly. The player does not know and does not wish to know where between these extremes of absolute psychotic immersion and total distancing from the virtual universe of the games s/he is located. There are narratives in games with linear, step-by-step action and others with many subtexts, maze-like entry and exit points and plots developing in rhizomatic mode. Linear games take the gamer towards a finality within the narrative structure, to victory or loss, in contexts such as defeating a monster, reaching a treasure, finding a way out of a maze, and the like. However complicated the path is, the end is predetermined. Despite all possibilities of detour, the gamer has to arrive at a solution, a goal. The games with a rhizome-like growth of narratives do not have a smooth walk-through with a ready map and clues to interpretation. Gaming has phases of fascination and repulsion, moments of disappearance and rebirth – gamers get addicted, grow tired of games and look for new ones; an old game’s upgraded version may seduce its former enthusiasts once again. This inbuilt pattern in games – of obsolescence, rapid aging, withering, and reappearance as a new, better or transformed version – indicates how well do games fit into our fluid, consumerist culture flourishing on the aggressive formulae of self-propagating change and constant modifications of the commodity. 

Plastic surgery of sensibilities: portents of gaming Games may take us to therapeutic utopias of sheer leisure and refreshing mental diversions. Games, like any other component of technological advancement, have lurking menaces masked by apparent benefits. Their viral spread on the Internet and ubiquitous reach across the world make the boons or hazards of games global phenomena. Technology used in gamescapes gives spurious notions of invincibility and being miracle makers to human beings. For Virilio, an accident is an inverted miracle.20 In his Politics of the Very Worst, he emphatically writes: Today, new technologies such as the Internet are a result of the communication revolution; they cause immaterial accidents that are infinitely less observed. . . . All technical objects brought about accidents

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that were specific, local and situated in time and space. As for us, we have created the possibility of an accident that is not particular, but general, and this through the interactivity, the networks and the globalization brought about by the communication revolution. So there is an accident brewing that would occur everywhere at the same time.21

The game sites are repositories of consumer goods making the maximum profit from the intimate and primal urges of human mind. Games offer false impressions of clout, success, achievement, expertise, and team effort. This part of the chapter is based on the popular perception about the merits and demerits of games. I have woven into the argument several statements from the chats I had with gamers. The respondents used many epithets and descriptions to discuss what they feel or get from gaming. Most of them were oblivious and unconcerned about what games do to them. To highlight a few: a hobby; a pastime with therapeutic effects; liberating; de-stressing; exciting; an escape from boredom; access to a world of extreme action and adventures that do not put one in danger; constructing a sense of community, yet no demands for commitments or answerability; moments of freedom from the boring, mundane aspects of everyday life; chance to get involved in mental activity that has lasting positive impact; unconstrained possibility of vicarious experience of murder, rape or robbery with impunity; a way to control the ‘negative’ impulses in real life by finding an outlet for them in the virtual; chances of making escapades to the peripheries of existence including experimenting with the ‘drugged’ ‘queer’ and the ‘insane’ hues of experience. I interacted with a number of respondents who argued for the use value of games: in their view, games give more staying power to the brain; one becomes more alert, vigilant and open to newness; some games offer virtual training in assertiveness, even aggressiveness, which is the mantra for corporate or business success. ‘Gaming is communication without any content, so no worries about being misunderstood’ – someone who replaced his passion for chatting with group gaming messaged. Most of the games bank on the fluid community of netizens whose technophilia, scopophilia and hunger for instant bliss and fulfilment always keep the demand for games high. Games do perform a ‘plastic surgery’ of sensibilities, to use an expression from Baudrillard, indicating the durable yet merely cosmetic changes

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that games bring in our ways of thinking. The changes that technology brings into individual sensibilities are a mix of boons and banes. According to Nicholas Carr, Given our brain’s plasticity, we know that our online habits continue to reverberate in the working of our synapses when we are not online. We can assume that the neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming and multitasking are expanding and strengthening while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration are weakening and eroding.22

Gaming may develop some cognitive skills while hampering many other mental faculties. A masterful gamer will have to be a good multitasker. Certain organizations and corporations use simulation-social games and role-play games to reinforce team spirit and cooperation. There are corporative games claiming to make the employees smarter, swifter and more confident and aggressive. The observation of Nicholas Carr is applicable to the bunch of promises of deftness and positive attitude the simulation and role-playing games offer: The Net is making us smarter . . . only if we define intelligence by the Net’s own standards. If we take a broader and more traditional way of intelligence- if we think of the depth of our thought rather than just its speed-we have to come to a different and considerably darker conclusion.23

Work-time addiction to gaming has become a serious problem faced by many organizations. Simulation and role-playing games have many detractors who argue that they are addictive and an obsessive form of escapism for those who cannot bear the stark realness of life. Donna Haraway also has a bleak vision of the tempting hallucination cyberspace that marks the end of political debate and action: ‘Cyberspace seems to be the consensual hallucination of too much complexity, too much articulation. . . . In virtual space, the virtue of articulation, the power to produce connection threatens to overwhelm and finally engulf all possibility to change the world.’24 Sometimes hyper-action in the realm of the virtual may often lead to inaction in ‘real’ life. When I invited responses about the widespread view that games themed sexual violence may promote similar behaviour in gamers and result in the validation of rape myth and misogynist attitudes, I received mixed response. Some respondents confessed that had they not been playing violent games,

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their yearning for sadistic and masochist experiences would have propelled them into committing rape or murder. Repeatedly playing rape-themed games, screen name ‘Tremor’ observes, ‘satiates me so much that I don’t feel tempted to do (it)’. The lure of impunity draws people more towards crime-themed games than actual situations in society. A respondent, with a screen name ‘Longfellow’, claiming to have watched the Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal more than 30 times, addicted to Mortal Combat and Mafia Wars, said: ‘In virtual you can get away with anything. If you play well, you become eel-like, slippery when the police tries to arrest you.’ The visual narratives of some games represent women, men, animals, and deprived social groups in exaggerated and stereotypical ways, encouraging ideals such as machismo – violent male and sexually willing, timid women. Glamorization of sexual violence and representing everything including murder, rape and other forms of violence in a comic or ludicrous way is not uncommon in games. There are games that perpetuate gender stereotypes. Yet, some other games have the formula of subversion of gender identity embedded in them because of the anonymity permitted in the domain of most games. In other words, gamers’ gender becomes one with that of the screen persona s/he chooses on the game zone. One can play with and deconstruct the imposed structures of subjectivity. Game sites offer possibilities to conceal one’s actual gender and assume a virtual gendered identity. Donna Haraway’s conceptualization of the cyborg is indicative of the playing down of gender leading to the realization of a utopian dream of a post-gender future. According to Haraway, the cyborg, an unfettered self, is ‘a polymorphous perversity’.25 In concurrence with technology, the cyborg constitutes gender, identity and sexuality of its liking. This is a complex political and ideological process. The implications and massive force of this transformative process often go unnoticed because of its subtle, clandestine strategies and modus operandi. The cyborg is ‘the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism’.26 Gaming is a ubiquitous, ever-accessible experience for a gamer who carries a number of games on handy gadgets and gizmos. The effect of gaming on society is difficult to gauge due to the incommensurable abundance of games and gamers and the unquantifiable nature of social impacts and implications of games.

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❁ Notes 1 In the chapter, I have transposed Baudrillard’s take on plastic surgery of the body to the realm of sensibilities and perspectives. The use of plastic surgery is more cosmetic than therapeutic. Plastic surgery metaphorically implies a change that is lasting, yet not vital. See Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil (New York: Verso, 1993), p. 49. 2 The games available on http://www.y8.com, http://www.mofunzone.com, http://666games.net/, http://www.htfgames.com/, http://www.giantbomb.com/ rape/3015–2992/games/, http://secondlife.com/, http://gamelist.bbgsite.com/, http://www.box10.com/, and similar games were part of this study. 3 Majority of the gamers I met through Facebook were located in the United States. I noticed that in Malaysia, France and Latin America gaming is popular. Facebook collaborates with Zynga.com which has games based on themes like farming, running a cafe, travel, and adventure. 4 Walter Benjamin, through his analysis of the poetry of Baudelaire, made the concept of flâneur a subject of academic interest. The references to the experience and politics of a flâneur are found in Walter Benjamin’s texts The Arcades Project, and The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. 5 See Nomadology and A Thousand Plateaus for references to the concept of a ‘nomad’. 6 http://www.y8.com, http://www.mofunzone.com, http://666games.net/, http:// www.htfgames.com/, http://www.giantbomb.com/rape/3015–2992/games/, http://secondlife.com/, http://gamelist.bbgsite.com/, http://www.box10.com/, http://www.addictinggames.com/, http://www.scarywebgames.com/. 7 I have cut and pasted verbatim statements from chats. Some syntax corrections are indicated in the brackets. I have altered most of the screen names for anonymity of the gamer. The interviews were mostly conducted in the form of casual interactions. 8 Zygmunt Bauman, Culture in a Liquid Modern World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), p. 30. 9 Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness compiled in A Very Popular Exile, p. 5. 10 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, p. 3. 11 ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81. 12 Jean Baudrillard, Xerox and Infinity (Paris: Touchepas, 1988), p. 4.

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13 Jean Baudrillard, Utopia Deferred: Writings from Utopie (1967–1978) (New York: Semiotext(e), 2006), p. 62. 14 Doom 3, Aliens vs Predators, Tron 3, Beyond Good and Evil, Blade Runner and Bishock and Mass Effect are popular sci-fi games; http://www. silvergames.com/ has some games based on time travel; Singularity, Time shift, Day of the tentacle, Time commando, etc. are some of the time travel games. 15 Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 74. 16 Baudrillard and Guillaume, Radical Alterity (New York: Semiotext(e), 2008), p. 145. 17 Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil, p. 67. 18 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 24. 19 Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 35. 20 Paul Virilio, Politics of the Very Worst: An Interview by Philippe Petit (New York: Semiotext(e), 1999), p. 90. 21 Ibid., 91. 22 Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 141. 23 Ibid. 24 Donna Haraway, The Haraway Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 107. 25 Haraway, Simians Cyborgs and Women, p. 151. Interestingly, there is a popular sex-themed role-playing game by the name Polymorphous Perversity. 26 Ibid.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. The Ecstasy of Communication. New York: Semiotext(e), 1988. ———. Fatal Strategies. New York: Semiotext(e), 1990. ———. Impossible Exchange. New York: Verso, 2001. ———. The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact. London: Berg, 2005. ———. The Perfect Crime. New York: Verso, 1996. ———. Seduction. Montreal, Canada: New World Perspectives, 1979. ———. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———. Symbolic Exchange and Death. Tr. Iain Hamilton Grant. Los Angeles: Sage, 2007. ———. The Transparency of Evil. New York: Verso, 1993. ———. Utopia Deferred: Writings from Utopie (1967–1978). Tr. Stuart Kendall. New York: Semiotext(e), 2006. ———. The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. ———. Xerox and Infinity. Tr. Agitac. Paris: Touchepas, 1988.

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Baudrillard, Jean and Marc Guillaume. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Los Angeles: Sage, 2010. Baudrillard, Jean and Marc Guillaume. Impossible Exchange. Tr. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2001. Baudrillard, Jean and Marc Guillaume. Radical Alterity. Tr. Ames Hodges, New York: Semiotext(e), 2008. Bauman, Zygmunt. Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project, Rolf Tiedemann, ed., Tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ———. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael Jennings. Tr. Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, and Harry Zohn, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Tr. Richard Nice. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977. ———. The Logic of Practice. Tr. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. Bruns, Gerald, L. On Ceasing to Be Human. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Tr. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Tr. Brian Massumi Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Dovey, Jon and Helen W. Kennedy. Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006. Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Giddings, Seth and Martin Lister, Ed. The New Media and Technocultures Reader. London: Routledge, 2011. Gordin, Michael D., Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash. Utopia/ Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Guattari, Felix. Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Tr. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Haraway, Donna. The Haraway Reader. London: Routledge, 2004. ———. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Howard, Rheingold. Virtual Reality. London: Mandarin, 1991. Nandy, Ashis. A Very Popular Exile, New Delhi: OUP, 2007. Noble, Richard, Ed. Utopias: Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery and Cambridge, MIT Press, 2009.

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Segal, Howard. Utopias: A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Sutton, Damian, Susan Brind and Ray McKenzie, Ed. The State of the Real: Aesthetic in the Digital Age. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Virilio, Paul. Politics of the Very Worst: An Interview by Philippe Petit. Tr. Michael Cavaliere, ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999. ———. The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject. Tr. Julie Rose, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010. Wiesing, Lambert. Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory. Tr. Nils F. Schott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. Wolmark, Jenny. Ed. Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cybserspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999. Zizek, Slavoj. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Occasional Papers). Washington: University of Washington Press, 2000. ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New Delhi: Navayana, 1989.

Part V Word and the world ❂

14 Populist publics Print capitalism and crowd violence beyond liberal frameworks1 Francis Cody

❂

I

t has become clear for some time now that liberal theories of the public sphere are both utopian and disembodied. They engage adequately neither with the spatiality of discourse circulation despite the metaphor of a sphere that has grounded English translations of öffentlichkeit, nor with the materiality of the body in the production of a mass-mediated subject of politics. Of those authors writing on the public sphere, Michael Warner argues most persuasively that what he terms the ‘utopias of self-abstraction’ animating liberal understandings of democratic publicity are not merely contingent; rather they lie at the very core of a minoritizing logic of exclusion.2 This distinctively modern form of power has relied on an ideology that privileges silent, replicable, private acts of reading, enabling the unrestricted circulation of texts among strangers. Indeterminacy of address in this vision of democracy is misrecognized as universality, and everyone who cannot imagine themselves as unmarked by race, gender, or sexuality – those who are excessively embodied, as it where – is relegated to inhabit particular identities. In the liberal model, according to Warner, only unmarked publics can transpose their agency to the generality of the state through the logic of self-abstraction.3 By means of this analysis, he argues against the default liberalism in earlier descriptions of subaltern counterpublics, like Nancy Fraser’s, in so far as minoritized groups appear in these accounts to work through a disembodied rational deliberation that resembles the very dominant publics they are contesting.4

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I would like to begin by noting that the powers of self-abstraction and minoritization proper to liberalism seem to have already set the terms of North American debates on the public sphere. The primacy of liberal orientations lurks also within Warner’s own analysis. In his essay on the mass public and the mass subject he argues that the major political movements of the late 20th century ‘presuppose the bourgeois public sphere as background’ within which concerns with personal identity are politicized.5 Liberal assumptions about the public sphere are elaborated in his later, insightful work on counterpublics inasmuch as the subaltern appears, in his words, ‘as an almost inverted image’ of the dominant male, white, bourgeois public premised on self-abstraction.6 What thinkers like Habermas, Fraser and Warner have accomplished with their analyses of the ideology that allows some people to speak for humanity in general where indeterminacy of address intersects with a politics of disembodiment is important in so far as it represents an immanent critique of liberalism. But the liberal model has already overdetermined our understanding of alternatives. And it can do so precisely by creating the appearance of ‘almost inverted images’ of itself through the figure of excessively embodied others. The conundrum is familiar from orientalist discourse: whether theorizing counterpublics or other dominant spheres of publicity, we are stuck with either failed aspirations to replication of the classical model or an alterity that is defined in largely predetermined ways. This problem is an effect of liberalism’s relative hegemony in the very field of publicity these scholars are both describing and addressing. So what would critical theories of the embodied public sphere that need not assume the hegemony of liberalism look like? What materials might one think through to develop such a framework? The beginnings of an answer to these questions can be found in strains of political thought that insist on thinking democracy from a context where those who enjoy the self-image of occupying the socially unmarked anonymity of abstract citizenship form a demographic minority. In India, this is a minority that tends to be upper-caste Hindu and wields substantial influence in administration, certain media, prestigious segments of the academy, and other bureaucratic institutions. This is a political subject, however, that does not control all significant elements of state power. The liberal minorities of India are increasingly challenged by a set of social classes often more at home in vernacular languages than they are in English, more involved in setting the terms of political debate and more likely to win elections.7 The sheer

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economic might of non-liberal ‘new middle classes’ has only added to their political importance, while political mobilization around community and collective identity beyond the middle classes continues to deepen a political society that defines itself against received narratives of civil society.8 Liberalism, here, is not the default position of the bourgeoisie as a socio-economic class in the Marxian sense, but rather the ideological domain most closely associated with an older paternalist state elite that now finds itself railing against sectors of a state apparatus that they do not fully control. Whereas political science tends to focus on formalized parties and state institutions as the primary media of mass agency, I believe that a continued dialogue between political theory and research on commercialized mass media is required to understand how the unifying capacity of capitalist mass mediation, noticed long ago by Benedict Anderson, always has buried within it the seeds of new forms of political contention and cultural fragmentation.9 The anticolonial nationalist utopias of yesteryear have given birth to a different set of aspirations, made perhaps most evident in the resurgence and reshaping of Hindu nationalism. Arvind Rajagopal’s work on the rise of Hindutva politics and its entanglement with television gives a striking example of how the emergence of a state-run national mass medium facilitated the most potent challenge to the secular state yet in India.10 But the potentials of mass-mediated populism in South Asia and elsewhere are not exhausted by majoritarian revenge stories. Similar appropriations of the commodity image and its media infrastructure, many of them utopian in their own right, lie at the heart of a range of other political struggles including feminism, regional nationalisms, Dalit mobilization, and most recently in the anticorruption movement. Let me be clear, at the outset, that my argument is not that we need a theory of print capitalism, politics and the public sphere that is more in tune with some empirical reality we might call postcolonial publicity. I am rather pleading for theory that takes from logics of democracy and mass mediation that are commonly thought of in terms of deviation, failed replication or even crisis from a liberal normative perspective, and brings these closer to the centre of our understanding of what democracy is in the age of deep mediatization. Populist mobilization in India provides an important perspective from which to think the role of a deeply embodied publicity in forming democratic politics. To the degree that politics can project a compelling mass-mediated

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representation of ‘the people’, it produces a different form of collective self-abstraction from that of the unmarked citizen. To be sure, the manner in which liberalism works by insisting on a distinction between an unmarked self-regulating public and its heterogeneous others cannot be completely sidelined in this pursuit. The problem of overdetermination that I outlined earlier refracts in a politically efficacious manner, even when not hegemonic, and it continues to raise a number of important questions.11 There are two key distinctions in classical theories of the public sphere that act as policing mechanisms that I seek to revisit in an effort to understand both how they are deployed and how theory might move beyond them. In some earlier work I have done on newspaper circulation and language, I have questioned the sharp distinction that is often assumed between ‘face-to-face’ social ties of kin and community (contexts where interlocutors already know each other) and what is oftentimes called the ‘stranger sociability of modernity’ that arises with the conjuncture of print-mediated discourse and new modes of imagining public life enabled by capitalist production. Recall that a public, in the classical theory, is a relation among strangers that forges is own legitimacy through the medium of common discourse, without having to refer to a transcendent form of sovereignty from without, and this element of agency is precisely what is so attractive about publics for democratic politics. I have argued that this is an assumption about the centrality of strangerhood to modern political agency that must be interrogated to account for the primacy of intimate ties of kinship and embodied communication that presupposes shared, personal knowledge in the production of publicity and political discourse. Here, I focus on a second, related distinction that is perhaps more latent in the academic literature but often quite explicit in the daily press. This concerns a distinction between reading publics and crowds – also associated with physical collectivities of people particularly prone to the passions and violence more than reason. Crowd-like behaviour has been associated with face-to-face gatherings, embodied affect, and also with the dangers of new technologies. Consider, for example, cinema’s purported capacity to work directly on the senses, thereby escaping rational intellection, a topic powerfully explored in William Mazzarella’s book on logics of censorship in India and Mariam Hansen’s work on early film in the United States.12 In liberal discourse, crowds, or ‘mobs’ as they are oftentimes referred to in the press,

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stand as the opposite of the reading public made up of concerned but unmarked disembodied rational citizens. By turning to the politics of Tamil media, I seek to come to theoretical terms with a world of democratic politics in which physical force and a very embodied publicity are deeply intertwined with the printed word. What Habermas once dismissed as ‘pressure from the street’ animates the mass-mediated public sphere of journalism and readership in ways that disturb both his model and other immanent critiques of liberalism. In this specific sense, I share Mazzarella’s aim to focus on the ‘mutual imbrication of the categories Habermas wants to separate’ in addition to his focus on the very act of separation as a key strategy of liberal ideology.13 I will, however, have more to say about crowds as political actors in their own right as they are self-consciously remediated through mass publicity, and not primarily as figures of liberal thought. The critique of the figure of the crowd within liberalism has raised a number of important questions for how we might rethink the place of mass effect, representation and collective action in democratic strategy beyond liberalism, without assuming a sharp distinction between readers and crowds. Whereas much fine scholarship on publics in India starts with what is commonly thought of as the most affectively saturated medium of cinema, I start with that classical medium of ‘rational’ public formation: the newspaper. 

Landscapes of the Tamil press A cursory examination of the recent history of newspaper circulation in India is enough to cast doubt on the teleology undergirding arguments prematurely heralding the death of print and the growing irrelevance of regional languages in a globalizing world dominated by the English language. In fact, India has been undergoing a rather dramatic ‘newspaper revolution’, a tremendous explosion in regional language newspaper reading and production since the mid-1970s. Between 1976 and 1996 the total circulation of daily newspapers in India increased from 9.3 million to 40.2 million.14 The rapid expansion of the daily press only increased in the 2000s. Now, at a time when our global media environment is transforming rapidly through the proliferation of digital technologies, readership of printed newspapers in the vernacular languages of India continues to soar. Between 2005 and 2009 the number of daily newspapers in India increased by

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44 per cent, and during this period India overtook China to become the leader in paid-for daily circulation, with 110 million copies sold every day.15 Newspapers in India have not yet suffered as a result of the rapid growth of Internet journalism or cable television news, as they have elsewhere, even as they are increasingly moving online. Once the domain of an educational elite, newspaper reading of some sort or another has become an everyday habit for a range of people across a wide swathe of the country. Among the more industrialized states with a high literacy rate by Indian standards, the southern state of Tamil Nadu has been one of the leaders in this rapid change in media consumption habits. According to the National Readership Survey, for example, the Tamil language daily Dinathanthi was the most widely read paper in all of India in the year 2000. In many respects, Dinathanthi’s rise to prominence over the second half of the 20th century is emblematic of the sort of historical changes described in Robin Jeffrey’s important book. Started in 1942 by a Nadar, English-trained lawyer by the name of S. P. Adithan, this paper is credited with being the first to spread a newspaper reading habit among the working classes, both urban and rural. In this manner, Dinathanthi was able to massify the newspaper over the course of the mid-20th century, reshape the Tamil language itself, and to bring the daily to the centre of everyday politics in this turbulent era. At the time of its launching, this paper was Tamil nationalist, and Adithan himself formed his own political party to demand a separate Tamil homeland that would stretch across the Palk Straits from Southern India to Northern Sri Lanka before eventually joining the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) party. Perhaps even more so than the Hindi press, which has received more scholarly attention, the Tamil mass press has been integrated into the system of regional party politics from the beginning of its mass appeal.16 Dinathanthi is not alone in this field. Dinamalar, to take another important example, was started in 1951 by a Brahmin industrialist named T. V. Ramasubbaiyar as part of a demand to merge the Tamilspeaking region of southern Travancore with what was then Madras State, helping to form what we now know as the state of Tamil Nadu. Dinamalar has more recently helped to expand the newspaper reading habit among the new middle classes of Tamil Nadu. It has often acted as the most vocal media critic of state-level governments, in accordance with general middle-class antipathies towards the welfare state, and has at times been sympathetic to Hindu nationalist causes. The

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paper now publishes the most widely viewed Tamil language web site in the world. The last major paper I will mention here is Dinakaran, which was bought by Kalanidhi Maran’s Sun Media group in 2006, and has risen from a small paper, once considered to be a DMK party rag, to become a major player in its own right. The newspaper is now a commercial success, a major part of one of Asia’s most profitable media companies and an important force in Tamil politics beyond the DMK party. Although the Hindi language press has seen the most dramatic growth in recent times, the desire of major English language dailies such as The Hindu and the Times of India to open Tamil language editions stands as a testament to the fact that industry insiders see room for continued growth in this regional daily press market. For the moment, I want to emphasize not only the size of the Tamil newspaper reading public, but also the diversity of transmission patterns, journalistic styles and perspectives among papers. The major papers are not only associated with particular social classes, with some still closely tied to the working-class world of the street and others successfully projecting a more middle-class domesticity; they have done so by cultivating different regimes of circulation. Dinathanthi developed a distinctive mode of transmission by becoming the iconic paper associated with reading aloud and discussing politics at teashops and barbershops. Its headlines are formatted and written for this purpose of reading aloud, building on older orientations to the recitation of texts in common spaces. This paper continues to be associated with working-class masculinity precisely because of its spatial politics of circulation around teashops and barbershops more than its main news content. Dinamalar, on the other hand, recognized earlier than other Tamil language dailies that the future of the vernacular press in India is closely tied the rise of the new middle classes in major metros and in second- and third-tier cities. By cultivating a readership that includes women and younger generations through its special weekly supplements, this paper has come to be associated not only with domestic space, and hence home subscription, but also with a readership that has greater spending power in general. Dinamalar can now claim that about 80 per cent of its sales are through subscription to homes, following the business model already established by English-language papers. While its competitor Dinathanthi can still claim the highest advertising prices, because they have the largest readership, the latter paper has nevertheless tried to rebrand itself, by launching its own television channel and

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by including a Tamil version of the Economic Times within its broadsheet in an effort to represent itself as product that is consumed across class barriers. Indian anticolonial nationalism, Tamil Nadu’s strong nonBrahmin movement and subsequent ethnolinguistic mobilization provided the political context in which newspapers began as means of disseminating political ideology; but once daily print started to prove its economic value as a commodity, the pulls of selling copy have reflected a massified politics fused to caste- and class-based consumption habits. Ideology has often taken a back seat to marketdriven reason. The once radically anticolonial paper, Swadesamithran, found it difficult to sustain itself in and massify in the postindependence era, in part because it had failed to appeal to an increasingly selfconscious non-Brahmin community. Market pressures have oftentimes conditioned the political stances papers have been willing to take. Adithan, the first editor of Dinathanthi, is said to have sent his workers to collect scrap paper to be recycled during the Second World War just so he could disseminate the news among the working classes of southern Tamil Nadu about the political rise of the Tamil nationalist non-Brahmin movement. But the paper is now commonly perceived to make itself close to whichever political party is in power for fear that criticism will invite reprisal. Dinamalar, while more often aligning with J. Jayalalithaa and her All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) than with its bitter enemy, the DMK, nevertheless remains the most critical paper among the majors, while supporting a broadly neo-liberal economic agenda. And the policy at the once DMK party-run Dinakaran is, in the words Maran used when instructing its chief editor, ‘Just don’t be an anti-DMK paper!’ Each newspaper has taken up a particular niche in the political ecology of the state, and each newspaper has, in its own way, tried to develop its brand in other media. Papers are now increasingly interested in Internet-based video dissemination in addition to cable television channels, and they remain a highly visible part of public culture across the state, from the smallest village, to homes in mid-sized cities, and on to the streets of Chennai. Tamil dailies have the capacity to make and break political careers, and they quite frequently provoke those involved as cadre members in party politics to take to the streets themselves in defence of their leaders. It is to these phenomena of crowd violence and party politics and their imbrication with print capitalism that we now turn.

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Crowd violence and the printed word The politics of 20th-century mass mobilization in India has proven to be an important vantage point from which to consider the production of publicity from the perspective of those who are not privileged enough to inhabit the disembodied voice of reason. Scholars of subaltern studies, for example, have long emphasized the degree to which Indian nationalism had to articulate its demands through a language of kinship, insurrection and mass effect because the very category of ‘public opinion’ was limited to whites and elites in the colonial world.17 More recent research has examined how mobilization around language in South India brought new segments of society into the fold of politics for the first time through fiery oratory, poetry and mass spectacle.18 Work on Dalit emancipation explores the paradoxes of entering into the field of political recognition through tropes of victimhood, violence and embodiment.19 These studies have, for the most part, emphasized the democratizing role of what is sometimes called the ‘plebianization’ of politics, even as they show new forms of domination that are produced through this democratization. Another line of scholarship has focused on the darker side of massification and tendencies toward majoritarian violence.20 Although none of these books is framed as a study of media per se, taken as a whole, this body of research nevertheless helps us understand the increasingly tense interface between technologies and circulatory regimes of mass mediation, allowing what might have once been considered local events to take on large-scale significance and national politics to be localized through actions on the street.21 Recent political theory compliments aspects of this research when arguing that the questions raised by mass effect for our understanding of democracy can shed light on the production of political subjectivity more broadly. It is in this context that interest among theorists and social scientists has revived in the work of earlier thinkers of the crowd, like Elias Canetti and Gabriel de Tarde. What many of these early studies of crowds have in common is a sense that the forms of mass mediation characteristic of industrial society have intersected with modes of collective social life that do not correspond to the coolly cultivated stranger sociability attributed to reading publics. Mass society has not been able to transcend the fact of embodiment, as it were, and where bodies and mass mediation meet, there

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is danger. So, for example, Tarde defines a public as ‘a group of men who do not come in contact with each other – they are all scattered across a territory reading the same newspaper – and in this bond lie their simultaneous conviction – without seeing the others’.22 So far, we have an early iteration of common sense about the literate public sphere and imagined community. He opposes reading publics to the crowd (la foule) which ‘has something animal about it’ because it is produced by physical contact. Then, he allows for an interesting possibility: ‘Admittedly, it often happens, that an overexcited public produces fanatical crowds. . . . In a sense a public could also be defined as a potential crowd. But this fall from public to crowd, though extremely dangerous, is fairly rare.’23 The intersection of mass media with physical groups of people is hazardous because the forms of petty violence that are characteristic of communal life and attributed to the crowd can be amplified, massified and directed from above. In essence, Tarde is anticipating the politics of mass embodiment proper to totalitarianism.24 Indeed, crowds have often been derided in so far as they are signs of less than democratic regimes of political legitimacy precisely because they lack the self-regulating agentive capacities of reading publics. That media, along with rumours, act as triggers or as a broadly enabling condition of mass political action in the streets is a fairly wellknown story. Particular media productions are frequently thought to provoke crowd responses, often through politics of outrage that is commonly viewed as being manipulated by unscrupulous politicians. The use of crowd violence in response to media productions by the Hindu right has been well documented and has become a rather systematized part of this movement’s political tactics. I will return to questions of political agency later, but here I would like to emphasize the extent to which the physical structure of media outlets and the bodies of journalists are increasingly acting as the targets of crowd violence. It is not only cinemas but also newspaper offices that are subject to crowd violence. These events are furthermore remediated and massified through the press and television, making the distinction between trigger and target more complicated than it might appear to be at the outset. Attacks on media outlets become media events in their own right, creating a feedback loop of sorts. Journalists and editors are often aware that the news they run might provoke reactions on the street. And the attackers themselves are quite aware that they are performing before an audience, both on the street where action is

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unfolding, and in teashops on other streets, and on to people’s living rooms as they read the paper or watch cable television. I would therefore like to return to some of the questions raised by crowd theorists and their more recent interpreters in light of these phenomena in an effort to rethink the public sphere through an incorporation of crowd violence within the sphere of mediation. It is in this context that we can then read the studies of mass politics I have mentioned earlier with a new focus on issues of mass mediation and the forms of political reflexivity that are at play when performing for a mediated public. Where crowd violence is so deeply connected with the politics of the daily press, how might we begin to think differently about the capacity of print capitalism to condition crowd actions, and vice versa? How might crowds and readers coexist in a more structured relationship based on mutual recognition? Allow me to share three events that might help us to explore these questions.

Event one In May 2007, the daily paper Dinakaran printed the results of a survey they had conducted in association with the Nielsen Corporation asking who was the ‘likely political heir’ to replace then chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu, M. Karunanidhi, as the head of his DMK party when he was no longer able to lead. The poll was titled ‘Makkal Manasu’ (The People’s Hearts), indicating that this was not simply an objective question about likely succession, but about whom the people would support. Karunanidhi was already 82 years old at the time, and it was assumed by all that one of his sons would take over the party leadership. The paper, Dinakaran, which was closely tied to the DMK – and, in fact, used to be considered a party paper – published the results of their poll showing the younger M. K. Stalin, former mayor of Chennai, leading in public opinion by a large margin, with 70 per cent of respondents indicating he should be the next party leader. His elder brother M. K. Azhagiri, who is based in the southern city of Madurai and widely known more for his dealings in pirate videos and violent crime than for his political acumen, received only 2 per cent of the votes. Another 2 per cent supported their half-sister Kanimozhi, and the rest remained undecided.25 On the day the poll was published, a group of protesters led by the mayor of Madurai began a series of street protests by burning copies of the newspaper and blocking traffic in front the of the Dinakaran office. Some had already begun to throw stones at the office building

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when a group of Azhagiri loyalists, led by the infamous muscleman and gangster ‘Attack Pandi’ pulled up in a sport utility vehicle (SUV). They attacked the office with stones, metal and wooden clubs, and they threw 20 crudely made petroleum bombs. The office exploded in a raging fire, killing two computer engineers and one security guard. By all accounts, the Madurai police simply stood by watching while the violence was unfolding. Two hundred people were initially charged in the protests, 25 people were eventually arrested for rioting and 2 were specifically arrested for the death of the 3 workers. Eventually, trials ended in 2009 with the acquittal of all the accused, when every one of the witnesses turned hostile, presumably responding to threats from Attack Pandi’s men.26 This attack was to have wider significance, illustrating what Stanley Tambiah terms the ‘transvaluation’ of a relatively local event of violence as it gets taken up in the media ecology.27 In order to understand the stakes involved, it is important to know that the Dinakaran newspaper had recently been purchased by Kalanidhi Maran, owner of the Sun Media Network, Asia’s most profitable media company. The paper was being rebranded, even though it retained its old name. Kalanidhi Maran is also the great-nephew of Karunanidhi himself, as well as being the brother of Dayanidhi Maran, who was union minister for Communications and Information Technology in Delhi as a result of the DMK’s strength in the 2004 elections. That a rift between the Maran family and the Karunanidhi family, including Azhagiri, had been brewing for some months was well known. But the survey and the violent reprisals that ensued seemed to have sparked a starker breakdown of party discipline as factions that once operated behind doors now led to open attacks in newspapers and deaths on the streets of Madurai. Within a few days, Dayanidhi Maran was asked to step down from his post as union minister. Dayanidhi was replaced as telecom minister by A. Raja, who would eventually become a primary suspect in the 2G-spectrum scam, a massive case of corruption that ended up tainting the DMK’s national image. Meanwhile, under Kalanidhi Maran’s ownership, the price of a single issue of Dinakaran fell from three rupees to one and the paper crept up to become the second-most widely read daily in Tamil in 2006. After the publicity provided by the Madurai attack, the paper had loosened its connections to the Karunanidhi family, and by 2010 it had surpassed its rival in sales to become one of the most widely read papers in India, even though Dinathanthi retains a higher total readership. It now

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appears that, as minister, Dayanidhi is also alleged to have supplied his brother Kalanidhi with over 300 free high-speed cable phone connections. If the allegation holds true, the Sun Media Network that owned Dinakaran was partially subsidized by the state through this transfer that enabled Sun to broadcast around Asia in government lines. Dayanidhi Maran was officially charged with corruption in October 2013 by the Central Bureau of Investigation for the phone line transfers. Even though he was still offered a DMK seat in the 2014 elections, Mr. Maran lost the election, but the Dinakaran paper continues to prosper.

Event two The next story I would like to share appears similar to the one stated earlier, and it is also about the public image of an important political leader. But it concerns social actors who are very differently situated in the field of caste politics. In January 2008, only a few months after the Madurai attack, party cadres of the Dalit Viduthalai Ciruthaigal Katchi (VCK, or Liberation Panther Party) attacked the offices of the third-largest Tamil newspaper, Dinamalar, on Mount Road in Chennai. They did so in response to an article critical of their leader, among the most important Dalit politicians in South India, Thol. Thirumavalavan. Around 20 men attacked the office, throwing glass bottles and wooden logs. Two security guards suffered injuries to the head, and there was substantial property damage at the entrance to the office. A senior VCK party official appears to have warned the heavily fortified office ahead of time that they should expect street protests because of the article they had run, but Dinamalar only appealed for police protection after the attack. Two party activists were arrested.28 The full import of this event can only be understood if we take into account that the Dinamalar paper is owned and run by a Brahmin family, and they have frequently criticized Dalit political leaders among other minority groups.29 The problem of being associated with excessive violence is one that has followed the VCK from the time they developed as a party from the Dalit Panthers movement. As Hugo Gorringe shows in his research on the movement, under Thol. Thirumavalavan’s leadership Dalit politics has often felt the need to respond to caste domination through displays of force, but the party is also very aware that it is subject to upper-caste stereotypes about Dalits when it shows physical force on the streets.30 The show of strength in responding to the newspaper article is an extension of this into the mass-mediated world, and I would argue that the activists who took part in the attack were

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acutely aware of this problem when wagering that it was worth the risks of being stereotyped in this fashion. The Dinamalar paper, of course, played its role and made much of the attack in its pages to further criticize Dalit politics in a sort of circulation of images of violence caused, in a sense, by the very paper itself. Later that year, they would go on to publish the Danish cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohammad, originally published in Jyllands-Posten, leading to similar display of popular anger at their office in the city of Salem. As in the first attack where Azhagiri had to signal his strength to a Madurai DMK public at the expense of his less-than-stellar national image, here, VCK activists had to protect the image of their leader knowing that their own image might be further defamed through uppercaste media coverage of the event. The paper editors also know they were playing a risky game. As one former editor at Dinamalar, who now works for another paper, put it, the Dinamalar family likes to walk right on the Lakshman Rekha, knowing that there might well be consequences but never explicitly intending to provoke violence. There is always a plausible deniability. One of the current editors candidly told me that they take possible repercussions, legal or otherwise, into account when running critical articles and that economic recompense is also sometimes at stake when running a potentially inflammatory article.31

Event three Finally, in early 2012, the offices of the biweekly journal Nakkeeran were attacked by members and supporters of the AIADMK party after it ran an article claiming that their leader J. Jayalalithaa, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, ate beef.32 As soon as the story hit the stands, a group of AIADMK workers rushed to the Nakkeeran office on Jhani Jahan Khan Road in Chennai, causing significant damage after assaulting the security guard. The police, like the Madurai event and unlike the VCK attack described earlier, appeared to have been present but not to have interfered. Not only was the newspaper office subject to damage, any and all stands carrying that week’s edition were subject to attacks across the city. The editor of Nakkeeran, R. R. Gopal, then appeared in the papers the following day, demanding police protection from the AIADMK crowds who were after him and who had also attacked newsstands selling the article. Presenting quoted speech, coupled with a caricatured image, the journal printed, ‘I am a beef eating mami’, using a term for ‘aunty’ from the Brahmin dialect of Tamil. The article claimed that she used

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to serve and eat beef with the former cinema superstar and wildly popular chief minister for 10 years (1977–87) M. G. Ramachandran (MGR), who was also the founder of the AIADMK party. Jayalalithaa is indeed a Brahmin who was rumoured at the time of the article to be increasingly under the influence of Brahmin and Hindu nationalist advisors, chief among them Cho. Ramaswamy who publishes the conservative rival satirical weekly Thuglak. She had also recently kicked her long-time friend and confidante, Sasikala, out of her house in the Poes Garden neighbourhood in Chennai, lending further credence to public impressions that she was being advised by a new circle, the ‘Mylapore Mafia’ (referring to the Brahmin neighbourhood in South Chennai), who were not sympathetic to the Dravidian nationalist politics her party was established by MGR to pursue.33 Jayalalithaa, the leader of a state where the non-Brahmin movement was very strong, and where it continues to be a hegemonic field within which all political actors must contend, was subject to a cheeky poke in the form of a mock defence of her ‘non-Brahmin’ gastropolitics. This was, once again, a self-conscious choice taken by the editor, knowing that there were likely to be violent repercussions. In 1997, Jayalalithaa had already slapped a civil lawsuit against Gopal for printing what he claimed to be secret letters that she had sent to MGR. The court ordered Gopal never to print defamatory material about Jayalalithaa again without giving her a chance to respond on the pages of Nakkeeran. Because he had defied this prior order, Gopal and his associate editor, A. Kamaraj, eventually had to apologize in public for the article about beef-eating. The editor, popularly known as ‘Nakkeeran Gopal’, had in fact already been arrested and jailed before, most notably because of his relations to Veerappan, the forest brigand who he would interview on videotape without aiding police in their search. This weekly, unlike the dailies I have so far described, really does live on such provocations more than its reporting of standard news items. 

Instrumentality and mediation in popular politics A commonplace mode of explaining events like the ones I have just recounted goes as follows: There is a competition over power within or between populist parties among political elites, like members of

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the extended families competing over power in the DMK party. These political elites then enlist the services of so-called ‘rowdy elements’, the ‘double of the modern citizen’, to perform a spectacular display of brute force because these political leaders cannot secure legitimacy through the normal public sphere.34 There is a crisis in Indian democracy, we often hear, associated with what is commonly termed the ‘lumpenization’ of political life. What is obvious to most people, but oftentimes obscured in English-language discourse of the liberal minority, is that such political elites and the crowds that represent their power and interests on the streets are almost inevitably non-Brahmin men or, in the case of Jayalalithaa, a woman. The normal public sphere is one that is, in fact, inhabited by the upper-caste English-speaking citizen, former masters of the Indian state. Such a citizenry that experiences themselves as unmarked, although sometimes keenly feeling their minority status in demographic terms, nevertheless consumes this news on television and in the English-language newspapers while marvelling at how the impoverished among their fellow Indians can be so easily fooled into action by their leaders. This is a story of, to use Habermas’s term, a feudal or ‘refeudalized’ form of publicity where power represents itself before the people who lie under its sovereignty.35 In this narrative, both the crowds and the media that animate them into action are seen largely in terms of instrumental representation serving another purpose. The positive dialectic of mass mediation as an experience of collective agency through self-abstraction, characteristic of the public sphere when it is free from coercion and not directed from above, is entirely lacking here. This narrative is often coupled with the assumption that the crowds involved in displays of force would not have even read the article concerned, and that they are acting on behalf of someone else’s interests. There is something to the spectacular nature of these events that lends credence to such interpretations. But I think they are based on faulty assumptions about readership and political knowledge. These commonplace narratives are ultimately unable to explain how this sort of mediated drama over representation works to produce real political effect. The question of popular action is thereby reduced to a deviation from democratic norms. Several political theorists have tried to help us out of the liberal discourse on crowds and other plebeian forms of political life

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through a more serious consideration of the role of the popular in modern democracies. In India, we often turn to Partha Chatterjee, who proposes a ‘politics of governed’, where political action articulates aspirations among those who are excluded from participating in the main organs of civil society or the public sphere because their modes of social action and communication have no place there.36 Subjects are shaped by the strategies of a governmentality that takes an instrumental approach to populations, and they participate in a political society through idioms of community and kinship, not the abstract principles of national citizenship. One of the difficulties with this formulation is a certain ambiguity about whether ‘the governed’ and their corresponding ‘political society’ is a demographic category referring to types of people or whether this is rather a modality of political action.37 This problem is cleared up, however, in Ernesto Laclau’s formulation of populism as a widely shared social logic where he argues that the libidinal excess of crowds in populist movements can help illuminate the workings of any form of democratic mass politics to the degree that any mass political movement operates through modes of rhetoric and semiotic indeterminacy that are often pejoratively attributed to populism.38 Populist reason, in Laclau’s account, amounts to the political as such in so far as it breaks with fantasies of total revolution whereby society is completely reconciled to itself, on one hand, and with forms of developmentalism that reduce politics to administration, on the other hand. ‘The people’ are indeed necessary for non-liberal democracies, and for liberal ones as well, if we are to move beyond the individualist act of voting as the primary sign of political decision-making. But neither political theorist has seriously considered the role of mass mediation and remediation of the people and communities, apart from apparatuses of the state. This is a problem with political theories that tend to abstract the question of politics from that of technologies of representation and media of contestation. Indeed, one of the great virtues of Habermas and Anderson was to consider the centrality of print text circulation to the formation of mass political subjects. Laclau and Chatterjee have missed the constitutive role of print capitalism or other media in shaping a world that nevertheless looks quite different from the one painted by our theorists of the public sphere and imagined community.

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Elementary forms of political knowledge While I cannot, at the moment, propose a more general theory to account for interactions among crowds, publics and the state, I nevertheless think that it is time to bring these theoretical traditions into a thicker dialogue and to rethink the public sphere from an illiberal perspective. This would be one that assumes the libidinal, corporeal and poetic ties of kin and community as a starting point in politics, not as a set of constrains on rational critical debate. Nor should our theory resort to a sort of ‘inverted image’ of an already hypostasized vision of the normal reading public. This means revisiting the centrality of unmarked stranger sociability in accounts of political modernity or, more specifically, what we mean by stranger sociability and what it has to do with democracy. What I have been interested in focusing on in this chapter, for example, is the very ideological border that is maintained between the empty stranger/citizen of the public sphere and the marked, embodied subject. The latter is a subject of democratic politics that may well have captured important elements of state power through the forms of scaling up or down enabled by mass mediation, but not through the forms of self-abstraction that have been commonly associated with public sphere formation. The deified politicians, their families and their crowds ultimately win democratic elections, in large part through a politics of mediatization and selfabstraction. But this is a form of self-abstraction that nevertheless coalesces around the leaders and the people as embodiments of the abstract principles of popular sovereignty. It is abstract in so far as the very concept of popular sovereignty is, of necessity, a rather openended field of contestation. This is a political process that furthermore throws into question the simple binary set-up by the theory of representation whereby a democracy works in so far as a representative transparently represents the will of those she or he would represent. Such a theory misses completely the reciprocity involved in the constitution of mass-mediated political subjects. Nor can it account for the possibility of a will to be represented. Mediation is a two-way process, in which ‘the represented depends on the very representative for the constitution of his or her identity’.39 Or, in the words of VCK leader Thol. Thirumavalavan, ‘We must both mold the movement according to the people and mobilise the people behind the movement’.40 There is a deep sense in which ‘the people’ don’t exist as such without the movement, and it

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is for this reason that liberal theory is unable to explain how workingclass South Indians come to be so invested in these political leaders and how they are being represented in the press. The photograph reproduced below, an image of Stalin printed on the windshield of an auto-rickshaw, gives just an indication of the forms of public intimacy mediating the relationship between leaders and their followers (see Figure 14.1). Crowd violence is often orchestrated, to be sure, as I think it was in the final attack on Dinakaran in Madurai. But the

Figure 14.1: Image of the DMK leader M. K. Stalin printed on the front windshield of an autorickshaw in Chennai. Source:

Photograph by the author.

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attribution of a complete lack of agency is at the root of common metaphors like ‘puppets’ or Tarde’s image of the ‘animal’ and can only be based on the logical inverse of liberal democracy such the people simply obey the will of the leader. The broader project here is really about how to characterize the forms of self-abstraction and embodiment that animate illiberal democratic politics that are overdetermined on one end by classical liberalism and on the other end by the discourses on totalitarianism or fascism. The key point I would like to bring to the centre of a theory of democracy and publicity is about the forms of political reflexivity about mediated representation that are generated through processes of attending to media as constitutive of people-making. Here I am not only talking about the forms of reflexivity discussed by Warner, of strangers acting in concert through textual circulation in secular time, but I am also arguing that being an actor in such a non-bourgeois public is about performing displays of passionate participation before an interested and oftentimes intimate audience, face to face or mass-mediated; and one can easily lead to the other, stretching the normative limits of citizenship and throwing them into question. The participants in the drama, we might call it, all display an awareness of the power of representation and mass mediation; not as a universalization of disembodied voice, but seen more as a mass mediated and deeply embodied battleground organized along community sensibilities that may be cross-cutting. There is an acute awareness on the part of all participants and those they represent – editors, journalists, political leaders, and those who represent their power on the street – of the fact that these bodies on the street will be further mediatized and recontextualized in the course of mass uptake. In this sense, I am drawing on Judith Butler’s recent attention to the vulnerability and dispossession of bodies in forms of public protest that depend on the mass uptake of others.41 What I must add or emphasize, however, is that bodies taking to the street are already oriented as such to the fact of mass mediation as a constitutive part of their very action on the street. Awareness of this fact, that bodies are always-already mediated, as it were, has become part of a public common sense. I would argue the political leaders of parties like the DMK and AIADMK, also the Shiv Sena, pioneered this media expertise as an elementary aspect of political knowledge over the late 20th century. The most recent examples of such political expertise at play in populist mediations have come from the anticorruption movement, and especially Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi

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Party. All of these formations can be justifiably criticized for their majoritarian tendencies, and they should be; but there is much to learn from the forms of mobilization they have developed in an age where the public relations industry seems to have defined the very meaning of publicity in much of the world. 

Normativity, empirics, theory It is difficult to draw a normative theory out of the observations and arguments I have offered about limits of liberal utopias and the profoundly mediated quality of crowd action. To the extent that political theory’s engagement with questions of mass democracy has been framed by a set of norms broadly derived from liberal thought, it has frequently served to render unfamiliar worlds of mediatized politics as immature and lacking in universal norms.42 The ethical normativity of political thought is consistently transposed in this fashion into the empirical realm of norm and historical deviation.43 On the media studies side of the narrative I am engaging with here, there has been a related and consistent bifurcation of intellectual labour characterized by a tendency to focus on concrete technologies in the high theory emanating from Euro-American centres, on one hand, and empirical studies of the global South relegated to ‘discrepant histories of use, interesting for their variety but illuminating nothing essential in all the range of their forms’, on the other hand.44 The objectcentred path taken by many in media studies does not appear as the most relevant option for many of us committed to thinking about contemporary Indian politics through the lens of mass mediation. There is, furthermore, no question of grasping the empirical phenomenon of popular mobilization, in India or elsewhere, in itself, shorn of all theoretical presupposition. I fear that the search for an ‘ethnopolitical’ imagination in the raw will inevitably be conditioned by orientalist inversions of established metropolitan theory. That said, there is no reason to restrict our understanding of politics to a tradition solely derived from Greco-Roman conceptions of the polis. Powerful insights into questions of politics, justice and ethics can certainly be derived from ethnographic and historical analyses, coupled with a careful reading of Indian language texts, both ancient and modern.45 But the search for an overly coherent vernacular model of politics would likely suffer from problems of ahistoricity that obscure the very

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real contest between conceptions of the political that is taking place, and all too readily ignore the globalized forms of mass mediation that lie at the centre of contemporary political action. A translation of liberal universalist orientations to politics in the press is possible and even desirable from the perspective of some in the Tamil world, for example, rendering the linguistic dimensions of India’s ‘split’ publicity more complicated than they might have once appeared.46 Rather than building an airtight model, I think it makes more sense to think in terms vernacular idioms that engage with a range of traditions and intertexts: where republican notions of popular sovereignty and subaltern critiques of caste, mediated by numerical imaginations of community, might easily be grafted on to discourses on just kingship, which are themselves by now irrevocably linked to the question of economic development. Such a politics continues to be experienced and understood by most in the form of newspaper articles and cable news programmes that bleed almost seamlessly into images of leaders on posters and painted city walls, and on to street action and speeches blasted over loudspeakers that saturate the sensorium. And so, we must foreground aspects of reflexive mediation and embodied action in popular politics that liberalism had all along sought to contain or marginalize. These foci entail not so much an adjustment of liberal theory as a rethinking of democracy in the age of deep mediatization altogether. If such a move requires a loosening of normative ideals, such that we retain a commitment to popular sovereignty without holding on to the utopic dimensions of self-abstraction specific to liberal universalism, we must search anew for a language of massification that does not presume a world of disembodied strangers. In such a world of large-scale intimacy, where politics was perhaps never disenchanted, attention to these forms of reflexivity about embodied publicity in the making of modern politics has the advantage, at the very least, of keeping the question of dissent over the very terms of participation in democracy at the centre of our theory.

❁ Notes 1 An earlier version of this essay was previously published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, vol. 35, no. 2, 2015. © Duke University Press. Reproduced with permission.

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2 Michael Warner, ‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject’, in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 377–401, and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). 3 Habermas is cognizant of domination but sees this utopian quality as bourgeois ideology’s positive potential: If ideologies are not only manifestations of the socially necessary consciousness in its essential falsity, if there is an aspect to them that can lay a claim to truth inasmuch as it transcends the status quo in utopian fashion . . . then ideology exists at all only form this period on. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 88. 4 This criticism is overstated in so far as Fraser argues that participation is not simply a matter of being able to state propositional contents that are neutral with respect to form of expression. Rather. . . . participation means being able to speak ‘in one’s own voice’, thereby simultaneously constructing and expressing one’s cultural identity through idiom and style.

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Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Social Text, no. 25/26, 1990, pp. 68–69. Warner, ‘Mass Public’, p. 399. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, p. 109. See Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), and Yogendra Yadav, ‘Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge’, in Francie Frankel, R. Z. Hasan, and Rajiv Bhargav, eds., Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 120–45. See Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), Leela Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an era of Economic Reform (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), and Leela Fernandes and Patrick Heller, ‘Hegemonic Aspirations: New Middle Class politics and India’s Democracy in Comparative Perspective’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4, 2006, pp. 495–522. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). See also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), for a classic formulation of these issues, and Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu public in Colonial India (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005), and Francesca

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Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), on the role of print in shaping communal fractures. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Some form of liberalism remains an aspiration for many, and the lens of liberal publicity plays a role in animating the ‘split’ nature of the public sphere in India, organized along broadly linguistic grounds. See Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 151–211. Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), Mazzarella, William, Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Mazzarella, Censorium, p. 224n5. Robin Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution, Capitalism, Politics, and the Indian Language Press, 1977–99 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 1. ‘The Future of News: Back to the Coffee House’, The Economist, 7 July 2011. See Taberez Ahmed Neyazi, ‘Cultural Imperialism or Vernacular Modernity? Hindi Newspapers in a Globalizing India’, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 32, no. 6, 2010, pp. 907–24, Sevanti Ninan, Headlines from the Heartland: Reinventing the Hindi Public Sphere (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), Ursula Rao, News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), Per Ståhlberg, Lucknow Daily: How a Hindi Newspaper Constructs Society (Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, 2002), and compare with Anup Kumar, The Making of a Small State: Populist Social Mobilisation and the Hindi Press in the Uttarakhand Movement (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2011). Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) and Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India’, Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 1, 2007, pp. 35–57. Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), and Narendra Subramanian, Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999). Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). See Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), and Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), all of which examine the performativity of crowd violence in shaping the terms of majoritarian politics.

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21 In fact, our growing collective awareness of the degree to which mass politics and crowd action have been dependent on commercial mass mediation, long before the Internet or cellphones, allows us to interpret earlier movements in new light. Consider, for example, Gandhi’s march that initiated the Salt Satyagraha in 1930. This event of walking from the Sabarmati Ashram to the seaside in Dandi to make salt in defiance of the British monopoly certainly took on the significance it had because of how it was covered by journalists. Like other infrastructures of modern communication that Gandhi decried, most notably the railway, he was in a sense radically dependent on mass media for the politics of satyagraha. 22 Gabriel de Tarde, ‘The Public and the Crowd’, in Terry N. Clark, ed., Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 278. 23 Tarde, ‘The Public and the Crowd’, pp. 281–82. 24 Claude Lefort, ‘The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism’, in David Thompson, ed., The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism(Cambridge, MA: 1986), pp. 292–306 is another important reference point here. 25 ‘3 Killed in Dinakaran Attack’, Times of India, 9 May 2007. 26 ‘All Acquitted in Dinakaran Attack Case’, The Hindu, 10 December 2009. 27 Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, Leveling Crowds. 28 Asian Age, 11 January 2008, and Freedom of the Press/Media – Report for 2008, Compiled by Indian Social Institute, New Delhi. 29 I should note that most of the staff and reporters are not necessarily Brahmins. 30 Hugo Gorringe, ‘“Banal Violence?” The Everyday Underpinnings of Collective Violence’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 13, no. 2, 2006. pp. 237–60; and Hugo Gorringe, Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and Democratization in Tamil Nadu (New Delhi: Sage, 2005). 31 This second attack was similar to the 2008 attack on the Andhra Jyothi newspaper office by Madiga Reservation Porata Samithi activists, eventually leading to an application of the ST and SC Atrocities Act against the editor and two reporters because of their responses to the attack. 32 Nakkeeran is named after a famous eighth-century poet who is said to have had confrontations with Lord Shiva himself. 33 ‘AIADMK Activists Attack Nakkheeran Office’, The Hindu, 18 January 2012. 34 See Vivek Dhareshwar and R. Srivastavan. ‘Rowdy Sheeters: An Essay on Subalternity and Politics’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds., Subaltern Studies IX (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 201–31. 35 See Habermas, Structural Transformation. 36 See Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed. 37 Nivedita Menon, in her introduction to Empire and Nation, urges us to read Chatterjee against the grain of his own tendency to assign political society to

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40

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an empirical group and to treat it instead as a mode of claim-making. I write in sympathy with this move. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005). Laclau, On Populist Reason, p. 158. See also Susan Buck-Morss who makes a similar observation when she notes that ‘the logical trick in this argument is that the collective of the “people” that supposedly constitutes the democratic sovereignty does not exist until that sovereignty is constituted’. Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 9. Quoted in Hugo Gorringe, ‘Party Political Panthers: Hegemonic Tamil Politics and the Dalit Challenge’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2011, http://samaj.revues.org/ Judith Butler, ‘Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street’, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2011, http://eipcp. net/transversal/ 1011/butler/en Work on modern social imaginaries too often reads as a just-so story about European modernity’s self-understanding that can resist any number of empirical criticisms or theoretical critiques, even when such narratives admit that there might well be ‘alternative modernities’. See Partha Chatterjee, Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 1–25. Arvind Rajagopal, ‘Putting America in Its Place’, Public Culture, vol. 25, no. 3, 2013, p. 390. Important works in South India include not only the Thirukkural, especially verses on araciyal (politics) and the Purunanuru on kingship, both in Tamil, but also the late medieval and early modern needhi texts in Telugu analysed in Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 175–210. All of these would be in some respects incommensurable with liberal, left and republican theory, but were brought into contact with such theories early in the 20th century by intellectuals of the anticolonial, anticaste and Dravidian nationalist movements. Such an effort is exemplified in the Chennai-based national English newspaper The Hindu’s decision to launch a Tamil language daily in 2013.

Bibliography Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bate, Bernard. Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

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Butler, Judith. ‘Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street’, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2011, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en Chakrabarty, Dipesh. ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India’, Public Culture, vol. 19, no. 1, 2007, pp. 35–57. Chatterjee, Partha. Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. ———. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. ———. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Dhareshwar, Vivek and R. Srivastavan. ‘“Rowdy Sheeters”: An Essay on Subalternity and Politics’, in Subaltern Studies IX, ed. Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, 201–31. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Fernandes, Leela. India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an era of Economic Reform. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Fernandes, Leela and Patrick Heller. ‘Hegemonic Aspirations: New Middle Class Politics and India’s Democracy in Comparative Perspective’, Critical Asian Studies, vol. 38, no. 4, 2006, pp. 495–522. Fraser, Nancy. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, Social Text, no. 25/26, 1990, pp. 56–80. Gorringe, Hugo. ‘“Banal Violence”? The Everyday Underpinnings of Collective Violence’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 13, no. 2, 2006. pp. 237–60. ———. ‘Party Political Panthers: Hegemonic Tamil Politics and the Dalit Challenge’, South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2011, http://samaj. revues.org/ ———. Untouchable Citizens: Dalit Movements and Democratization in Tamil Nadu. New Delhi: Sage, 2005. Gupta, Charu. Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Hansen, Thomas Blom. Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Jaffrelot, Christophe. India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India. Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003. Jeffrey, Robin. India’s Newspaper Revolution, Capitalism, Politics, and the Indian Language Press, 1977–99. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. Kumar, Anup. The Making of a Small State: Populist Social Mobilisation and the Hindi Press in the Uttarakhand Movement. Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2011. Laclau, Ernesto. On Populist Reason. London: Verso, 2005.

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Lefort, Claude. ‘The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism’, in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, ed. David Thompson, 292–306. Cambridge, MA: 1986. Mazzarella, William. Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Menon, Nivedita. ‘Introduction’, in Empire and Nation: Selected Essays, ed. Partha Chatterjee. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Mitchell, Lisa. Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Neyazi, Taberez Ahmed. ‘Cultural Imperialism or Vernacular Modernity? Hindi Newspapers in a Globalizing India’, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 32, no. 6, 2010, pp. 907–24. Ninan, Sevanti. Headlines from the Heartland: Reinventing the Hindi Public Sphere. New Delhi: Sage, 2007. Orsini, Francesca. The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002. Rajagopal, Arvind. Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. ‘Putting America in Its Place’, Public Culture, vol. 25, no. 3, 2013, pp. 387–99. Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Rao, Ursula. News as Culture: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leadership Traditions. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Rao, Velcheru Narayana, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. ‘Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 43, no. 1, 2009, pp. 175–210. Ståhlberg, Per. Lucknow Daily: How a Hindi Newspaper Constructs Society. Stockholm: Stockholm Studies in Social Anthropology, 2002. Subramanian, Narendra. Ethnicity and Populist Mobilization: Political Parties, Citizens and Democracy in South India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Tambiah, Stanley Jeyaraja. Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Tarde, Gabriel. ‘The Public and the Crowd’, in Gabriel Tarde on Communication and Social Influence: Selected Papers, 277–94. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Warner, Michael. ‘The Mass Public and the Mass Subject’ in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun, 377–401. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. ———. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2002. Yadav, Yogendra. ‘Understanding the Second Democratic Upsurge’, in Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy, ed. Francie Frankel, R. Z. Hasan, and Rajiv Bhargav, 120–45. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Part VI Political theology ❂

15 On innocence Blasphemy, pan-Islam and the uneven mediation of utopia On Barak

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A

year into forming Egypt’s first democratically elected government, Islamists had lost power and much of their legitimacy after failing to carry out an inclusive civic agenda. Together with ad hoc mistakes and miscalculations, their short term in office was characterized by a vulnerability that repeatedly derailed attempts at governing according to international standards and securing human rights such as minority rights, freedom of religion and freedom of speech and expression.1 This vulnerability had much to do with their agendas and with the pressures exerted on Islamist representatives in office by opponents and allies within the pious camp and by the Egyptian ‘deep state’. It also had much to do with how human rights are configured in a postcolonial setting. In this chapter, I suggest that despite the fact that they are typically couched against one another, human rights and key horizons and sensibilities of contemporary Islamism should not be viewed as incompatible spheres, but rather as homologues, and as significant others. It is their commensurability, not radical alterity – the fact that they share common perspectives and histories – that accounts for the great friction they periodically produce. To flesh out some of their multiple historical and current linkages, I focus on the making and impact of Innocence of the Muslims, an anti-Islamic video depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bloodthirsty barbarian and womanizer, which triggered a wave of protests within Egypt and quickly also across the Islamic world in September

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2012. Like in the two previous instances of such outbursts – the 2005 Danish cartoons controversy and the 1989 Salman Rushdie affair – Islamist objections to blasphemy were contrasted with the video makers’ right for free speech. Seen as a third instalment of a trilogy, Innocence allows us to consider the media evolution animating this series – from the novel, through the newspaper, to online film – without reducing the apparent democratization of blasphemy to a particular medium. On this continuum blasphemy moved from high-brow to ever-more lowbrow media, from text to image, from the durable to the ephemeral and virtual. The process democratized blasphemy by easing its citation, reproduction and retrofitting. It also moved it from the classic media of print capitalism, associated with the rise and synchronization of the nation-state, to the new media of long-distance politics. The launching of this series of periodic eruptions in 1989 paralleled the seeming victory of the liberal political model and free market economy and the closure of competing utopian economies.2 With the collapse of communism, aided by Islamic militancy in Afghanistan, Islam assumed the role of the most visible critique of the Western liberal project and its horizons of global citizenship. Yet unlike the Satanic Verses or the Danish cartoons, both easily traceable to a recognizable author or publication, Innocence was very hard to trace back to a source. It was, rather, a fruit of various platforms that produced, circulated and (re)appropriated it – many of which were corporations; indeed, to a great extent Innocence was a symptom of the limited responsibility, transnationality and impersonality of these corporations. This background informs the kind of freedom of speech transnational corporations proliferated and defended against Muslim objection – a right increasingly predicated on the notion of ‘the marketplace of ideas’ and the transformations that the imaginary sphere of the market underwent, from exchange under laissez-faire capitalism to competition under neoliberalism.3 Human rights were compellingly defined by Samuel Moyn as ‘the last utopia’, the only aspirational horizon that remained intact amidst the rubble of grander 20th-century schemes for improving the human condition and building a just and prosperous society.4 Even though the flow of utopian thinking has not dried up, as demonstrated later by the clash of this utopia with the utopian visions entertained by Islamists, the secularist and Western-centred perspective that allows

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marking a certain utopia as ‘last’ by enshrining it in formal institutions and international arrangements is not a target for criticism in what follows, but a starting point. It is this blind spot, the denial of recognition to other utopias, as well as blindness to the dystopic aspects of human rights, that this article aims to explicate. The blind spots of the last utopia can be traced back to the first one. Thomas More’s Utopia emerged out of experiments with the new media technology of print, and in a world remapped after the discoveries of the Americas and the sea route to India around Africa. ‘Utopia’, in both the literal meaning of ‘no place’ and as an aspiration for a better world, was thinkable only in a world which was at once suddenly fully knowable and radically alien. The scholarly literature on Utopia suggests also another context for the writing and reading of More’s book – that of humanist parlour tricks, counterfactual speculations and visual illusions following the move to perspective in Renaissance painting.5 Revealing a reality that was not directly available to visual perception, this shift opened up new terrains also for political imagination. Perspective and anamorphosis introduced a multiplicity of subject positions into a single scene. The 1518 Basel edition of Utopia included a map drawn by Ambrosius Holbein wherein the island of Utopia can also be seen as a human skull. But the island and the skull, a ship and a row of teeth, were mutually incommensurable and the observer had to ignore one in order to perceive the other. Adopting a utopian perspective necessarily entailed blinding oneself to the conventional viewpoint and vice versa (Figure 15.1). The crevice in the mediation of the first utopia informs utopian thinking generally. As Gordin, Tilley and Prakash point out, Despite the name, dystopia is not simply the opposite of utopia. A true opposite of utopia would be a society that is either completely unplanned or is planned to be deliberately terrifying and awful. Dystopia, typically invoked, is neither of these things; rather, it is a utopia that has gone wrong, or a utopia that functions only for a particular segment of society.

The result, they continue, is ‘something of a puzzle, almost mathematical in nature: the opposite of dystopia seems to be utopia, but the converse does not hold’.6 In both its mediatized, extraterritorial and aspirational dimensions utopian thinking necessarily involves producing and ignoring the

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Figure 15.1: Title woodcut from Thomas More’s novel Utopia, 1516.

skulls, which in turn constantly force themselves into the observer’s field of perception. What follows examines an instance of such intrusion, which for a moment allows considering the utopian and dystopian together. To capture this fleeting convergence, I offer two kinds of account of the Innocence affair. The first will situate the video in the context of post-Mubarak politics in Egypt and within the global media infrastructures that informed it. The second, diachronic account, will

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sketch with broad strokes the longue durée contribution of unique features in Ottoman legal and political development, and inter- and trans-imperial interactions and legacies, to complicating prevailing explanations of Muslim protest. 

Part one: blasphemy Instrumental politics of insult One of the only channels open for the post-revolutionary entry of Islamists into instrumental politics was also one of the avenues most ill-suited to accommodate it – the Egyptian legal system. During 2012, this bastion of the old regime was unable to stem a flood of ‘defamation of religions’ (izdira’ al-adyan) charges promoted by Islamists and increasingly directed against Copts. Article 98 (‫)و‬, on which most of the charges were based, was added to the Egyptian penal code after the 1981 massacre of 81 Copts in an attempt to curb Islamist extremism. Perhaps this is why, 30 years later, it resonated with the lowest common denominator of two distinct groups of Islamists which now appropriated it: the Muslim Brothers and salafis. After Mubarak’s 2011 ouster, salafis organized in order to compete with the Brotherhood over the pious vote, managing to form the second-largest bloc in parliament after the Brotherhood’s. Identifying the Brotherhood as their immediate opponent, salafis and Brothers regularly clashed on internal affairs (such as the right of women and Copts to serve in public office) and external ones (such as the proper attitude to Israel or to Shiite Iran). Under Mubarak, confessional tensions, steeply on the rise during the regime’s past decade,7 were routinely quelled (and simultaneously perpetuated) extrajudicially: After a clash between Muslims – often salafis, who in recent years occupied the forefront of anti-Coptic action – and Copts, state security would resort to the mediation of prominent religious figures and institutions (the Coptic Pope and Church, leading Islamic clergymen and al-Azhar), who would orchestrate a forced customary reconciliation (sulhah) between what in the process was reproduced as the rival religious communities. Charges against actual perpetrators of verbal or physical violence were seldom pressed. The post-Mubarak era has seen an even steeper rise of sectarian attacks, from 45 in 2010 to 70 in 2011, to 112 in 2012.8 But with

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little public trust in the security services and even less cooperation on the part of these Islamophobic apparatuses with Egypt’s new rulers, together with violent attacks, Islamists have increasingly channelled their energies towards the legal system, a venue that offered a two-in-one transaction: attacking Copts and simultaneously forcing a reluctant institution to stick to its own formal protocols regarding blasphemy. Legal and unsanctioned violence regularly reinforced one another, broadening Weberian understandings of the state’s monopoly on violence. Blasphemy cases were characterized by heavy salafi attendance in the courtroom and by threats to the effect that ‘a thousand people will die’ if the accused are not found guilty.9 The increased use of blasphemy was also informed by struggles around drafting Egypt’s post-revolutionary constitution, waged mostly on the proper coding of interfaces of religion and the state. As we shall see later, blasphemy has a long history as a key tool for making claims about the proper overlap of these spheres. Under Islamist government, more than two dozen blasphemy cases have gone to trial, and nearly all defendants have been found guilty. At least 13 of them have received prison sentences.10 The dramatic increase in scope entailed several shifts in kind. Like in 19th-century England, the expansion of blasphemy charges in Egypt was symptomatic of struggles around the character of the judiciary and the establishment of new kinds of politics. And like in that earlier context, in Egypt too the process transformed such offences into ‘class crimes of language’,11 introducing a new class bias. Under the former regime, blasphemy charges were rare. They were mostly pressed by Muslims against other Muslims12 and directed against prominent figures: writers and intellectuals, film directors and movie stars. Most of them were held in courts in the capital and often ended in acquittals due to top-quality legal representation for the defendants. By contrast, during 2012 more and more regular citizens found themselves faced with such charges, which became a common way to settle disputes in the workplace, classroom or in social media. Rather than against their co-religionists, now Muslims were using this instrument increasingly also against Copts. Such charges were often pressed in small towns and rural areas in Upper Egypt and across the delta, the location of the Muslim Brotherhood’s grass roots infrastructure, where currents of Islamic thought closer to salafi religious interpretations prevail,13 and where conviction rates were 100 per cent.14

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A typical incident and one of the most prominent cases to arrive to court just before the Innocence of the Muslims outrage was the case of a Christian teacher Bishoy Kamel from Sohag in central Egypt. On July 2012 Kamel was arrested and tried after local salafis spread copies of texts from a Facebook account bearing his name and photo, where materials insulting the Prophet Muhammad were posted. There are different versions as to the authorship of the insulting materials. According to one, the page did not belong to Kamel. According to another, it did belong to him but was ‘hacked’, and according to a third version, insulting materials were posted by Facebook friends of Kamel yet never by him personally.15 Kamel was sentenced to six years in prison after a heated trial that was interrupted twice by salafi riots inside and outside the courtroom. The harsh sentence was meted out even though Kamel claimed to have alerted the police before being arrested and to have posted a message on his personal page denying any connection to the insulting account. Prosecutors never tried to prove that he had administered the insulting page, and a report filed by Egypt’s Interior Ministry claimed it was impossible to determine the page’s owner. Personally connecting Kamel to the insulting page was not a real concern even to the salafi lawyers involved in the case, who said there was a ‘systematic campaign’ among Egypt’s Christians to insult Islam, strongly implying that Kamel was paying for communal offences rather than necessarily a specific individual one. Salafis directed attention to the infrastructures and media, the social networks that created and held Coptic communities together across space, rather than to the particular individuals behind them. Article 98 (‫ )و‬of the Egyptian penal code, on which the charges against Kamel were based, stipulates that defamation of religion is punishable when occurring ‘verbally, in writing, or by any other means’. Recent blasphemy convictions increasingly rely on this latter part of the article, which enables formalizing the off-the-record collective punishment tactics of the Mubarak period.

Innocence of the Muslims Along with its proliferation, blasphemy underwent dispersal and routinization. It migrated from the spectacular to the quotidian, from Cairo to provincial towns and villages and from the human to the mediatic and infrastructural (moving from authorship to hosting and from actively insulting to providing a platform or infrastructure to insult). These processes did not banalize blasphemy or make its manifestations

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any less contentious. On the contrary, as Innocence of the Muslims demonstrated, it was complete disconnection from a recognizable author that amplified blasphemy into a communal matter and helped push it beyond the nation-state and its regulation. As long as there was someone to blame, a recognizable host for the insulting materials if not an actual author, a regular member of the public if not a prominent figure, blasphemy could be managed in the court system. But a few weeks after the Kamel affair, insult came completely out of the blue. Short excerpts from a 14-minute trailer, supposedly for a longer film titled Innocence of the Muslims, were uploaded to YouTube in early June. They were retrieved by salafi television host Khalid Abdallah in early September. A two-and-a-half-minute selection of the English language excerpt mentioned earlier was retrofitted with Arabic dubbing and broadcast over the Saudi-funded Egyptian satellite al-Nas TV channel, one of a number of salafi media outlets promoted by the Mubarak regime as a counterweight to the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood.16 The video gave salafis multiple reasons to take offence and action. Beyond the insulting depiction of the Prophet, it starts with a scene depicting a salafi mob massacring Copts with the sanction of the Egyptian police. The ensuing pseudo-historical account of the warlike agenda of Islam’s founding figure is couched in the trailer as a background to these attacks. Salafi Members of Parliament and figures associated with the salafi-led ‘Islamist Bloc’, such as Muhammad al-Zawahiri from the radical group al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (and younger brother of Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s leader), organized the first mass demonstrations against the film in front of the US embassy in Cairo, demanding that the film be taken out of circulation. Thus outflanked, President Muhammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were pressed to join the fray and publically call for banning the film. In several important respects, the Islamist mobilization against Innocence of the Muslims was a continuation and intensification of previous blasphemy and anti-Coptic campaigns, where the Muslim Brothers found themselves cornered by salafis into contradictions with their public proclamations and promises to non-Islamist Egyptians and to the international community. Elected with a very small majority and in tandem with the meteoric emergence of the salafi bloc, President Morsi was left with very little leverage for manoeuvrability. Given the little cooperation and credit he received from

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secular liberals, the resistance of the Egyptian ‘deep’ or ‘wide’ state17 including the army and other security branches to his policies and appointments,18 and given the fact that salafis focused their energies on activism with a religious flavour, Morsi found himself without allies to carry out an inclusive agenda and compelled to shadow more radical and militant allies. In other respects, however, Innocence of the Muslims constituted a new phenomenon, different from previous blasphemies. Along with its insulting contents and disturbing images, several of the trailer’s technical features made it into a particularly poignant provocation, turning it into a platform upon which its makers, but also viewers (and even non-viewers who only heard about it), could load various meanings and agendas. The video was created by Mark Basseley Youssef, an Egyptian Copt living in Los Angeles and a felon convicted for using multiple aliases in a bank fraud (it remains legally unclear if he was formally the video’s director or only the chairman of the production company, a limited corporation). Youssef, who is connected in various ways to radical Coptic and other pastors and organizations, used various pseudonyms and identities (including the Coptic name ‘Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’ and the identity of an expat Israeli Jew, ‘Sam Basil’) during the video’s making and aftermath in ways that suggestively allowed connecting the project to various agendas while disrupting the possibility of tying it firmly to any specific one, and to any actual person, for that matter. Another amplificatory effect was attained by the fact that while the 14-minute video was presented as a trailer for a full-length movie, and while various efforts were made to create this impression (including uploading Innocence of the Muslims 74 Min to YouTube, which was just the trailer repeated several times, or renting and advertising a Los Angeles theatre for a closed screening that apparently never took place), a longer version most likely does not exist.19 Whatever insult was packed into 14 minutes (or into 2½ in the Arabic version) was dwarfed by the offence emanating from that unseen potentiality. Loosely edited as a series of scenes from 21st-century Egypt and 7th-century Arabia, saturated with Christian missionary polemic and connected only by their intended offence, the video also offered easy citationality and proliferation. During the video’s production, the crucial fact that the final product will deal with Islam and its prophet was not shared with the actors, who were told they are part of an erotic action film in a desert setting, and the script was changed

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in the post-production stage with the anti-Islamic meanings added using overdubbing. Clearly, the logics of the limited corporation, the movie and entertainment industries, video-sharing technologies, marketing, and the porn industry were combined to create multiple degrees of removal in terms of culpability and maximal effect in terms of insult. Faced with riots spreading quickly and broadly, YouTube and Google (which owns the video-sharing web site) eventually blocked access to the film in Egypt and in other Arab and Islamic countries. But despite repeated requests, even from the White House, they refused to remove the film from their servers altogether, as the protestors kept demanding, claiming that the film is ‘anti-Islamic’, yet not ‘anti-Muslim’. In Google’s book, attacking a religion but not targeting actual living people does not amount to hate speech, the only qualification of the protection of free speech.20 As I make clear later, this understanding – based on a distinction between a symbolic or metaphysical sphere that religious figures occupy and an actual human secular domain – is incommensurable with the Muslim intimacy with Muhammad, who is seen as an actual historical figure, even a family member of his followers today. In fact, Muslims took even greater offence from Google’s paternalistic approach, which allowed the film to keep hurting Muhammad’s reputation, and from the disconnect that runs in the face of their efforts to think of him not as symbol – a blasphemous proposition in and of itself – but as a figure whose corporeal absence makes him more, rather than less, vulnerable to offence. The film’s partial blocking amplified the misconception shared by many Muslim and non-Muslim viewers ‘that this is a major Hollywood project and not a poorly thrown-together video’. Marium Mohiuddin of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, which advises Hollywood producers on how to portray Muslims, suggested that ‘[the rioters were] used to government-sanctioned entertainment, so they think that this has been sanctioned by the U.S. government’.21 In this sense, Google and YouTube promoted the impression created by the trailer’s makers that a full-length feature film indeed exists. In fact, most global protest happened several days after access to the video was partially restricted, supposedly by Muslims who did not get a chance to watch it. The corporations’ servers thus not only charted the irregular map of the global distribution of free speech but also amplified the offence this norm protected.

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The uneven contour of technological globalization and the incommensurability built into its operational logics was demonstrated also in Libya, which was the second setting to witness riots in the wake of the video. Events in this country had a longer afterlife in Western media than they did in the Middle East, mainly as a result of a controversy about the role the video played in the assassination of the US ambassador to the country, a dispute amplified during the US presidential elections of 2012. The disagreement was on whether the video spontaneously triggered such an intense emotional and violent response, or it acted merely as an excuse for a premeditated terror attack, one aimed at revenging the drone assassination of Abu Yahya al-Libbi, a Libyan national and an al-Qaeda leader killed several weeks beforehand in Afghanistan. Like Google’s free speech policy, this controversy is revealing in several respects. The dispute exposes a genuine Western dismay at the intensity of Muslim hurt caused by a cheaply and quickly produced video. The search for an alternative explanation suggests an implicit recognition that more is at stake than different thresholds of hurt and tolerance, yet any meaningful critique is successfully screened by plotting the options ‘terror attack’ and ‘spontaneous rage’ as a clear case of ‘either/or’, dismissing the more plausible possibility that the crowd was composed of people with various agendas. There is more here than the expectation of a unicausal explanation. What made the video such an appropriate pretext/context for the revenge of the drone assassination – be it premeditated or spontaneous – was the fact that it shared several important characteristics with the drone, and with US war strategy in promoting regime change in Libya and elsewhere. Far from being an analogy between two distinct spheres, drone warfare intensifies the already tight link between cinema and weaponry.22 The first mass-produced unmanned plane was conceived on a movie set and designed by World War I pilotturned-Hollywood actor Reginald Denny in 1940.23 Drone designers have been regularly inspired by films, whereas gaming and cinematic technologies often found their way into drones.24 Drones, which can be airborne for days, offer platforms for various kinds of surveillance and attack from above. As a result of their multitasking and extended flight capacities, they are collectively operated by multiple specialist remote shift-workers, ‘cubical warriors’ who replace the glorious fighter pilots of not so long ago. This scheme distributes the agency of operating these aircrafts among

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many individuals in ways that obfuscate the ethical and legal responsibility of each operator. To this we may add the fact that they operate extrajudicially, even when targeting US citizens. As indicated earlier, Innocence of the Muslims also shares this logic, both technically and legally. In its convoluted and fragmented production and postproduction process, it was handled by many entities with different agendas and expertise and with overlapping, and often mutually cancelling, accountability. A similar move from specific ‘personality’ to more nebulous categories increasingly characterizes not only the operation protocols but also the targets of drone warfare under the Obama administration. If under Bush targeted killings focused on ‘personality’ strikes against named, allegedly high-value terrorist leaders, under Obama, the programme expanded to include far more ‘profile’ or so-called ‘signature’ strikes based on a ‘pattern of life’ analysis, targeting ‘groups of men who bear certain signatures, or defining characteristics associated with terrorist activity, but whose identities aren’t known’.25 These signatures are determined in faraway theatres by operators watching drone video-feed, interpreting the roles of actors on the ground like spectators in a B-movie that lacks sophisticated characters or the possibility of a plot twist. Drone warfare was part of a military strategy implemented in Libya, which sought to avoid American casualties at all costs, thus minimizing the political price of war and its visibility at home. Promoting regime change by attacks from the air and by arming local militias to the teeth – outsourcing war to private, native, under age, and non-human proxies – was the reason the mob in Benghazi was armed with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and missile launchers to begin with. (Some of these weapons originated in Gadhafi’s vast arsenals, which were taken over by militias during the fighting because no organized ground force was deployed to secure them.) The origins of this strategy can be found in the ways early-modern colonizing corporations like the East India Company conducted their business overseas. The Indian uprising of 1857, the first notable instance where this approach to warfare backfired, was also an example of the inability of its designers to understand violence as anything but religious fanaticism. The delinking of weapon and operator animated the RPG attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and characterized the drone attack, which offered one possible pretext for it, or the video,

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which offered another. Situating Innocence in this context likens it to these weapons, which are similarly hard to trace back to a single culpable source. Similarly, the film troubles conventional notions of authorship, agency and responsibility. The legal and technical protocols of its making (the limited responsibility, overdubbing in English and then in Arabic, pseudonyms, the intricate holding structure of international corporations such as Google and YouTube on whose servers it was uploaded) place it at once within and beyond the parameters of any nation-state, at once the responsibility of many and none. Academic media theorists are not the only ones drawing attention to the connection of media and warfare. On the first anniversary of the Benghazi attacks, the Jihadist group ‘Islamic Emirate of Libya’ posted an online picture of a missile and asked subscribers to its Facebook page to vote for one of three targets at which to fire it (including foreign embassies and Libyan military and political centres).26 Merging the terror of a potential attack, the logics of reality television, participatory representational politics, and limited responsibility the group situated the 2012 Benghazi attack in the very media ecology that gave rise to Innocence of the Muslims. In several important respects, Innocence was the product of a particular media ecology and a specific post-revolutionary historical moment, and in this sense the protests against it were an outcome of the contingent convergence of a range of factors. There are, however, several deeper historical legacies that informed the range of possibilities for mobilization against the video. If earlier we examined both the violence and blindness inherent to corporate models of limited responsibility, features integral also in current media infrastructures, we now turn to look at the long and fraught career of Western corporations in the Middle East, and at alternative modes of togetherness created around them in this part of the world. To attend to these aspects, the next part offers a longer history of what in the last third of the 19th century came to be called ‘pan-Islam’, focusing mainly on this constitutive moment – the half century between the 1870s and 1920s, which bridges the colonial and postcolonial periods in the region. It was in these decades that pan-Islamic togetherness was formalized around the changing institution of the Ottoman caliphate, an institution dissolved in 1924. Its absence, I suggest, still haunts our present. To sketch the contours of this spectre, we must attend to the caliphal body politic just as it perished.

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Part two: futures past A shadow international In 1533 Hans Holbein the Younger, younger brother to Ambrosius and friend to Thomas More, perfected the family’s anamorphic skull trompe l’oeil in The Ambassadors – according to Stephen Greenblatt, the emblematic example of utopianism in painting.27 The picture depicted two French diplomats leaning against a table covered with an Ottoman carpet. On the table, the key instruments that bring the world to focus according to the liberal arts are scattered. But the skull disrupts this assured perspective, as well as the frontal perspective of the observer, creating a non-place and the impossibility of reconciling these two standpoints. For our purpose, The Ambassadors helps carry the incongruity of European utopian acuity into geopolitics, demonstrating its hidden, Ottoman side. The diplomats, after all, have arrived at London to broker a new political alliance against the Habsburgs, a pact that would join England and France, the two minor imperial players, with the Ottoman Sultan, Süleyman the Magnificent, whose army had just stopped at the gates of Vienna. The sultan’s support was part of a policy of keeping Christendom divided by promoting separatist movements in Europe against the Pope and by challenging the Habsburg ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, who claimed to lead a unified Christian continent.28 In tandem with his conquests and meddling in Christendom, Süleyman brought under Ottoman control Mecca, Medina, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Baghdad, which together with Cairo, conquered by his predecessor, constituted the main Islamic cities and previous seats of the Islamic caliphate. Based on these takeovers he claimed for himself and his descendants the title of Caliph, or deputy to the Prophet Muhammad, basing the new caliphate in Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), making claims to the heritage of the Roman Empire in the East.29 While the title of Caliph had been evoked by Muslim rulers before, Süleyman transformed the caliphate into a universal institution. First, the adoption of the title and the new meaning of the institution it referenced were informed by the fact that until this moment, Sunni Muslims were a numerical minority in an Ottoman Empire most of

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whose population was Christian. Changes in the composition of the Ottoman populace corresponded to changes in the relations with European powers. Consider the ‘capitulations’, the conferrals of privilege to European rulers with respect to Christians living, crossing, proselytizing, or trading in Ottoman lands. The first capitulation was granted by the Mamluk Sultan to France in 1500. It was modelled on earlier contracts entered into by the Byzantine Empire. When the Ottomans captured Cairo in 1517 – a conquest on which they based their claim for the transfer of the caliphate from the Mamluks – they also took over the obligations of the previous caliph to foreign rulers. The next Ottoman capitulation, to France, sealed the Franco-Ottoman alliance depicted by Holbein by providing the French monarch with a valid reason to align himself with a non-Christian: the protection of Christians living in Ottoman lands, Christian pilgrims, merchants, and later missionaries, and the Christian holy places. From 1604 onwards, religion became an increasingly important part of capitulation agreements.30 In the same way that the Ottomans allowed European monarchs to exert influence beyond their borders, they started claiming similar privileges themselves, beginning to create a new infrastructure for centralized trans-regional religion. While there were hardly any Muslims living in Christian lands to prompt reciprocal relations with Europe,31 there were many Muslims living in non-Ottoman territories in need of protection from European encroachment. Süleyman’s universal caliphate could be expressed in an active policy of defending the pilgrimage routes to Islam’s holy cities, and in lending support to Muslim countries against European aggression in the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, Indonesia, Africa, and the Eurasian steppes.32 The universal caliphate also helped justify conquering territories of competing Muslim dynasts deemed oppressive or heretic.33 Imperial sovereignty depended on the power to selectively grant and actively engage in non-reciprocal long-distance religious influence. Exempting non-Muslim communities and traders from Islamic law and creating enclaves where European legal systems could work extraterritorially, the capitulations were indispensable enablers of the emergence of joint-stock enterprises in Europe. Such limited responsibility corporations allowed Europeans who did not enjoy the support of their Crown for overseas commerce (like the English, as opposed to the Portuguese) to share the risk of trade, and enabled them to raise more funds as needed. Yet in order to work overseas, these new

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structures needed counterparts at their ports of call. The capitulations offered the necessary framework of procedures, documentation protocols and dispute-resolution flora, which enabled the shift to impersonal trade.34 While similar joint-venture formulae were developed in the Ottoman world (the Islamic mudaraba has even been found to be the inspiration for the European commenda, the legal arrangement that preceded the joint-stock corporation),35 none of these partnerships were considered legal entities, and individual rather than corporate liability remained the underlying principle in all arrangements covered by Islamic law.36 The capitulations allowed European corporations to monopolize foreign trade as the sole representatives of their home governments, commercially as well as diplomatically. By the 17th century, it was common practice for stockholders to recommend their country’s ambassador to the sultan’s court.37 Gradually, these legal enclaves were appended to what in the process became ever-more cohesive minority groups defined by their religion and connected to European Christian monarchs.38 This resulted in the gradual shift of the lion’s share of imperial trade from Muslim to Christian merchants during the 18th century.39 Overseas trade – whose long-term and uncertain returns were the initial impetus for incorporation in the 16th and 17th centuries – gradually increased the importance of impersonal property relations in Europe. In turn, the division of ownership and liability into transferable shares facilitated the shift from merchant- to industrialcapitalism, keeping this legal arrangement alive until the 19th century, at which point the corporation took over significantly larger portions of the Western economy, allowing it to shed or minimize its nonEuropean support systems and scaffoldings. But all the while, abroad, where legal personalities were non grata, these growing flows of corporate capital promoted religious difference, as capitulatory enclaves and the accompanying identity politics steadily expanded with the expansion of foreign trade. In other words, the increasing impersonality of the modern corporation in Europe was translated into growing confessionalization in the Ottoman Empire. The Janus face of the corporation included a colonial scar line separating, and binding together, the market and anti-market, the secular and religious, the individual and communal. Finally, the split career of impersonal trade connected it in Europe’s peripheries to state violence, be it diplomatic or military, keeping these aspects at bay in the continent itself.

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During this career of the modern corporation, the global balance of power shifted significantly. By the 19th century, Britain and France (the key beneficiaries of capitulatory favour) had become the major imperial powers of the day. These nations had broadened their repertories of contention with the Ottoman Empire, relying heavily on influencing its internal affairs through supporting Ottoman Christian minority groups, to which they were connected via capitulatory arrangements. The next significant rearticulation of the universal caliphate – an institution forged during the peak of Ottoman expansion and might – happened in this context of imperial contraction and European religious intervention. In the 16th century, prior to the appearance of the category ‘minority’ (a notion based on a group’s percentage of a general ‘population’ of otherwise equal and countable members),40 analogies between Muslims and Christians living outside the abode of their religion were inconceivable. By the 19th century, however, Muslims and Christians were put on the same par, making minorities a thinkable notion. Such formal mutuality was the context, and in turn a product, of a series of Ottoman reforms culminating in a 1856 decree that formally established equality in education, governmental appointments and taxation among all subjects, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. This was an intensification of the capitulations, but also a means to defeat them and recruit Christians to a nascent Ottoman nationalism. A new notion of synchronic togetherness gradually replaced a differential formula whose hierarchies were no longer sustainable. During the second half of the 19th century, the Ottomans started playing the game of extraterritorial interference in accordance with European ideologies of legitimate sovereignty,41 and sometimes even with European sanction: In 1857, for example, the British solicited a proclamation from the Ottoman sultan to quell the Sepoy uprising,42 thus acknowledging his authority vis-à-vis the insurgents. In 1876 Sultan Abdülhamit assumed and reenergized the depleted mantle of khalifa in order to intervene in the affairs of his European opponents via Muslim minorities in territories such as British India, where the Mughal Empire had been dissolved in 1857. Unlike in the 16th century, now there were many Muslims living in Christian-dominated lands (British India had possibly the world’s largest Muslim population), creating ample possibilities for reciprocity. This involved restructuring imaginaries of the universal in accordance with the newly paradigmatic model of the nation-state, to which the

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much-reduced Ottoman Empire now tried to fit – with a new legitimating ideology of Ottoman nationalism and a way to respond in kind to European interference. The 1870s thus mark a key turning point in which the previously universal caliphate was reborn international – a configuration that characterized it till its formal demise in 1924, and even more so in its wake. Indeed, the empire’s desolation evaporated the administrative and territorial aspects of the caliphate, releasing the spectre of this institution for all kinds of appropriation. The first to do so were the British governors of Egypt, especially Lord Kitchener, who during the First World War dreaded the possibility that the sultan would declare jihad and incite Indian Muslims against Britain. He pre-empted this scenario by pledging to the Arab rulers of Mecca British support for Arabian independence based on restoring the caliphate to its birthplace in the Arabian Peninsula.43 Taking up the cause of the caliphate in 1919, after the Ottoman defeat, was an apt agenda also for the colonized leaders of national movements attempting to influence the new post-war international order, and it is no wonder that Indian Muslims – the main objects of the caliphate as an international scheme under Sultan Abdülhamit – decided to evoke it. As Faisal Devji put it, the Khilafat Movement, which Gandhi came to lead, was ‘the first example of Indian nationalism’s claim to speak and indeed act within the arena of international politics’,44 a powerful statement afforded by pan-Islam about the shape of the international sphere itself, a sphere non-Muslims too could join, shape and lead. While the Indian Khilafat Movement was dissolved in 1924, in the Middle East the struggle was just beginning. In 1926, two separate conferences were convened in Cairo and Mecca to settle the question of the caliphate, with the monarchs of Egypt and Saudi Arabia competing for the title.45 Five years later, Jerusalem joined the fray. While the location of the caliphate remained to be settled (the main contenders being these three cities, which Süleyman brought together in the 16th century),46 the institution continued to be modelled on existing international frameworks. For example, ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri, the most prominent Egyptian and Arab legal thinker of the 20th century, explicitly modelled it on the League of Nations, proposing an Islamic inflection thereof, beginning in his 1926 doctoral dissertation, Le califat, son évolution vers une société des nations orientale.47 Strongly anchored in the nation-state, during the 20th century

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pan-Islamic visions came to be modelled on various international schemes, from the League of Nations and the UN to communism. Yet in the post-Ottoman era, much of the efficacy of the caliphate should be attributed to its absence, which allows it to play the role of an ethical horizon, one that haunts the existing international sphere as an internal critique.48 What protestors against Innocence of the Muslims challenged was the very order that replaced the caliphate. Their main targets, in Egypt, Libya and soon thereafter in Yemen, India, Pakistan, and Lebanon, were foreign embassies and consulate buildings. Embassies represent not only a particular state in another state, but also the nodes forming together ‘the international sphere’. Deliberately or not, what came under cumulative attack was the existing international order representing the system of nation-states outside their borders. At the same time, this network of embassies defined the protests as pan-Islamic and transnational by constituting a system that was attacked from an outside. Storming embassy walls to plant Islamic flags, as they did in Cairo, or attacking them with RPGs as they did in Benghazi, Islamists of different stripes were brought together in challenging emblems of the existing international order. These attacks on embassy buildings and ambassadors indicate how much the foundations underpinning Holbein’s The Ambassadors have been altered. As we have seen, in the 16th century Süleyman’s nonreciprocal caliphate relied on, complemented and enabled European formulae of international relations and trade. From the 19th century onwards, however, when the caliphate started mirroring and modelling itself after the European world order, it lost its complementary nature and emerged as a competitor to the liberal international order. If in the painting the skull on the floor was contrasted with the stability of the Ottoman fabric and the apparatuses of liberal perspective it supported so seamlessly, it is exactly this mainstay, against which the diplomats leant, that has now become the locus in which the utopia/ dystopia rupture is inscribed. This shift may be traced to the growing affinity of pan-Islamic visions and Western international frameworks, so much so that they cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Such intimacy has significant ramifications exactly when existing international institutions fail to regulate democratically the spheres beyond the nation-state, which are supposedly under their control. It is no coincidence that blasphemy repeatedly generates such failures, and also, that it provides a ready tool for negotiating them.

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Struggles about the shape of the caliphate in fact gave birth to the modern politics of blasphemy that culminated in the Innocence affair. This latest eruption can be connected to the first series of defamation accusations in postcolonial Egypt. In 1926, legal action inside the al-Azhar community was taken against ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, who was accused of heresy and stripped of his position as qadi and from any official role in the university, after the 1925 publication of his al-Islam wa-usul al-hukm, a book dismissing the need for a caliph in a modern society.49 A few months later, the same conservative ‘ulema took literary scholar Taha Hussein to court on similar charges of heresy for claiming in a book of his own that the Koran and several figures therein cannot be seen as historically truthful.50 Doubting the historicity of key Qur’anic figures, Hussein was rightly understood to launch an attack similar to ‘Abd al-Raziq’s, targeting agendas and sensibilities forged under the sign of the caliphate and, indeed, the institution itself. This will be further demonstrated in what follows, where I discuss the role of the caliphate in the emergence of a new conception of Islam and Islamic personas as historically based religion and figures. While the ‘Abd al-Raziq affair was confined to a religious institution, Hussein was a state employee, a professor at Cairo University. Heresy charges against him were thus based on his infringement of Islam as the religion of the state (din al-dawla), a position it had formally received three years earlier in Article 149 of Egypt’s first, postrevolutionary constitution of 1923, allowing ‘ulema to resort to the court system. During the closing decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, developments in this legal system and other kinds of state intrusion increasingly subsumed religion within various apparatuses of the interventionist modern state.51 Article 149 continued this project, as did other articles, like 153, which allowed the king to appoint religious functionaries, control religious endowments, etc.52 But this process had a reverse aspect: it allowed translating and infusing claims about proper religiosity and religious dissent into legal discourses and institutions. In postcolonial Egypt, the road to thinking and articulating such a thing as ‘political Islam’ was formally opened in the same constitution that also protected freedom of opinion, and which Hussein cited as his defence.53 In tandem with state encroachment, political Islam was informed by the post-caliphate vacuum and explicitly contrasted to the public stance taken by ‘Abd al-Raziq against the need to revive this

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institution.54 Al-islam din wa dawla (Islam is religion and state), the rallying cry of the group most associated with this project, the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928, captures this nexus: Islam was at once conceived as aligned with the nation-state and as a sphere that extends beyond it, towards the defunct horizon of the caliphate. In the second half of the 1920s, right after the formal abolition of the caliphate, religious defamation, national ‘political Islam’, liberal rights, and international pan-Islam were wired to trigger one another.

Narcissisms of declining difference The late 19th- and early 20th-century growing resemblance of panIslamic and European visions of transnational togetherness was not confined to international diplomacy and high politics. A similar convergence characterized other aspects of pan-Islam, which likewise demonstrated how such processes resulted in increased, rather than lessened, tensions. Islamic modernizers like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani – the chief propagandist for the new transnational Islam and a reformer who despite some qualms regarding the Ottoman dynasty ultimately came to see the advantage of the Ottoman caliphate55 – shared with Protestant and Catholic modernizers of the day the challenge of industrialization. From the late 1870s, Christian reformers sought to make Christianity compatible with the findings of modern science and social theory by returning to Christian Orthodoxy. Like these modernizers, Muslim reformers relied heavily on printed pamphlets, periodicals and publications and on modern dissemination technologies. Also like their Christian contemporaries, they advocated a return to the founding figures, ‘the salaf’ – hence the name of the movement, ‘the salafiyyah’ – and to their texts, the Qur’an and Hadith. Much like the Leben-Jesu-Forschung, the late 19th-century quest for the historical Jesus in the Protestant West, Islamic modernizers developed a new interest in the historical Muhammad. And again, rather than a case of unproblematic cultural borrowing, this was an instance where growing mutual acquaintance and similarity between Muslims and Christians spelled mounting tensions. For example, the publication of works such as the 1861 Life of Mahomet, written by colonial official and caliphate specialist William Muir, energized the search for the historical Muhammad as a corrective to the orientalist stress on the themes of satanic influence and polygamy in the Prophet’s biography.56 Christians and ‘Muhammadans’ – as Muslims were called by colonial experts who understood Islam with

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models borrowed from their own faith – were painfully made commensurable. The scholarly agendas of men like Muir, combining the biography of the Prophet and the legitimacy of his deputy, the caliph, were far from being coincidental or non-political. Islamic corrective writing and historicizing was an intervention in this political debate. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a wave of antimissionary activism swept over Egypt. These Islamist and nationalist organizations closely imitated the methods of those they opposed: in 1927, for example, Jami’at al-Shubban al-Muslimin, commonly known in English translation as the Young Men’s Muslim Association (YMMA), modelled itself on the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). One of its members, Hassan al-Banna, founded the Muslim Brotherhood a year later, making opposition to the Christian mission an important agenda for the Brotherhood, while simultaneously copying and perfecting its opponents’ strategies.57 Christian missionaries, on their part, viewed these developments – the foundation of groups like the YMMA and heresy allegations against intellectuals – with alarm. In 1926, British ecumenical activist Basil Mathews, Literature Secretary in the World’s Alliance of YMCA, titled a book-length account of his work in Egypt and the Middle East at the moment of the caliphate’s demise Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations.58 In the same year, his American colleagues in Egypt responded to the ‘Abd al-Raziq and Hussein incidents with a memorandum on religious liberty, which they presented to the British high commissioner, raising the question: ‘Does not such procedure on the part of the Government indicate its trend and purpose to prevent the freedom and liberty to the individual and the community that the Constitution provides?’59 But Muslim intellectuals and activists of different stripes – including targets of heresy allegations themselves, like Taha Hussein – did not look kindly at the missionary support or at its deployment of the language of rights (even if they themselves frequently evoked the Freedom of Opinion principle). As another member of ‘Abd al-Raziq and Hussein’s circle Muhammad Husain Haykal put it in a 1935 biography of the Prophet Muhammad, ‘Christian missionaries continue their attacks against Islam and Muhammad . . . In this they are encouraged and supported by the western colonialist powers in the name of freedom of opinion.’60 While such prophetic biographies have deep roots in Islamicate writing, we have seen that their modern reappearance should also be regarded as a counter-genre, a corrective

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to missionary orientalism. Haykal even took it a step further, when he argued that the correction of orientalist mistakes should not be limited to writing alone.61 Indeed, the language of anti-mission allowed forging a consensus between Egyptian nationalists, Muslim modernizers (including the Muslim Brotherhood) and conservative ‘ulama, who otherwise had little in common. As with the Muslim Brothers and salafis of 2012, this alliance too was post-revolutionary (succeeding the 1919 anticolonial uprising and 1922 nominal independence). Haykal’s anti-imperialist accent (evoking the spectre of capitulatory power, which animated the European mission for centuries) thus revealed one political dimension of this consensus. Another such dimension was associated with the centrality of the figure of the Prophet, one associated with a new, demystified Islam. Offering a tool to ward off missionary criticism with a taste of its own medicine, the new Islam offered a basis for attracting Arab Christians to partake in a new ideology of Arab and Egyptian nationalisms based on a shared culture, history and linguistic sensibilities.62 Downplaying the miraculous aspects of the Prophet’s biography, limiting the religion’s claim to wonder only to the immutable language of the Qur’an and stressing regard for the Prophet Muhammad as a model of identification and emulation rather than worship and devotion presented a common denominator that united Christian and Muslim Arabs. In Egypt, this pact was sealed under the double sign of anti-imperialism and anti-mission, in dramatic moments of Coptic–Muslim solidarity such as the country’s 1919 revolution against the British and in the support of the Christian members of the drafting committee of the 1923 constitution for Article 149 stipulating that Islam is the religion of the state. Copts had also proven themselves worthy of inclusion in the Egyptian nation by resisting the role of pawns controlled by European powers, and by proving resilient to missionary, mainly American Protestant, proselytizing, which had little appeal to the members of the Coptic Orthodox Church. But the language of rights used by missionaries apropos charges of religious defamation, a dialect with an army and an empire, as it were, proved far more potent and more resilient than their religious proselytizing. Beginning in the 1970s and rapidly during the past decade, this language, accompanied by the growing visibility of US Coptic diaspora activism, disrupts the Muslim–Coptic pact. The more Copts’ connection to the American empire and to pan-Christianity is brought to the fore, the more their status as Egyptian citizens is jeopardized. The

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pursuit of communal and minority rights by Copts inside and outside Egypt (emanating from very real and frequent discrimination) likewise threatens this pact.63 Innocence of the Muslims has been a case in point. First, its attack against the Prophet revealed not only intimate familiarity with Islamic and missionary themes, but also the disturbing affinity of Muhammad and Jesus. It is unclear if the makers of video were directly influenced by cinematic depictions of Jesus, and particularly by Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), but this controversial blockbuster is a constant, if ambivalent, source of reference and possibly also influence in the Coptic movie-making scene.64 Indirect connections between The Passion and Innocence include the fact that the maker of the latter is a professed devotee of Zakaria Botros Henein, a radical Coptic cleric who converted to Christianity another movie-maker now in the process of creating a film about Muhammad, modelled after Gibson’s depiction of Christ.65 And as commented by several observers of Innocence, the actor portraying the Prophet is an oafish Jesus-figure of sorts. Second, the video, created by radical Coptic activists in the United States, attacked not only the Prophet, but also the foundations for national unity, the aforementioned consensus about his biography (a unity enshrined also in Article 98 (‫ )و‬mentioned earlier, which equates attacking it to defamation of religion). Indeed, one of the calls by protesters against the film was for the ‘expulsion of diaspora Copts from Egypt’.66 The paradox it captures is that of the interface between the porous nature of both state and global regulation on the one hand, and on the other hand the growing difficulty of disentangling local Coptic Christians from missionaries and from diaspora Copts abroad. If the figure and biography of Muhammad afforded a foundation for national unity in Egypt, the roots of the historical Muhammad in the growing affinity with the model of the historical Jesus and its antimissionary background are only one part of a complex story. Ottoman inter-imperial and Islamic inter-confessional tensions provide another part. The rearticulation of the caliphate as an international framework in the time of Ottoman territorial shrinking saw the creation of new schemes to unite a religious community devoid of territorial continuity and powerful sovereignty. Exactly as the political and spatial fabric was beginning to come apart at the seams, it was being shot through with new connectors – steamer lines, railways, submarine telegraphs, and news agencies, which helped hold the reconfigured

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caliphate buoyant. For the first time, the Islamic ummah could gather itself not as a political entity in real space but intermittently and virtually via media, or via what was called ‘communication’ at the time. These technologies included intercontinental infrastructures linking South Asia and Europe via the Ottoman Empire, as well as internal systems, like the Hijaz Railway connecting Damascus and Medina, a modern fulfilment of the traditional caliphal duty to facilitate and secure pilgrimage routes. The campaign of re-conceiving the Prophet Muhammad bears the marks of these unruly technologies. In the age of steam, and particularly after the 1869 inauguration of the Suez Canal, the pilgrimage to Mecca was transformed from a precept previously only the very affluent could realize to a democratized mass ritual. During the last third of the century, Mecca was swollen by middle- and even lowerclass pilgrims who crossed oceans and lands ever-more quickly and cheaply, if not necessarily safely. As Nile Green has shown in Bombay Islam, and as Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim also demonstrates, steamers might have made pilgrimages affordable, but this was made possible only by selling the oldest and most dangerous ships for the hajj trade. Crossing the Indian Ocean on board these leaking coal-burning bathtubs required resorting to all sorts of ‘supernatural insurance’ and aid. The accumulated spiritual debt was repaid onshore in the form of grave visiting and a host of similarly ‘superstitious’ practices.67 And thus, just as ecumenical Islamic togetherness was materializing in unprecedented volume and rapidity, its religious character was becoming disturbingly heterogeneous. Notions and advocates of, on the one hand, sufi popular religiosity and syncretism and, on the other hand, salafi Islamic reform (including the Wahhabi ideology in Arabia and that of the Indian Tariqah-i Muhammadiyah)68 were travelling along the same channels. Moreover, these lines transmitted also other epidemics, such as cholera, whose vectors merged with the accelerated circulation of competing ideas about the Prophet. This nexus was becoming a source of concern for Islamic reformers whose unease mirrored the anxieties of colonial quarantine officials faced with the ‘twin infection’ of radical pan-Islamic ideas and epidemic disease.69 The development of the historical Muhammad was meant as an antidote to sufi ‘superstitious’ metaphysical Islam. The fact that illicit religiosity was carried to Arabia mostly by Indian and Indonesian pilgrims strengthened those strands in the salafiyyah that racialized the movement’s call to return to the Islam of the seventh

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century, stressing the Arabic origins of both Islam and its prophet and the need to defend religion against racial impurities and corruption. Writing prophetic biographies devoid of miracles and promoting Muhammad as a model of identification rather than worship, an actual person rather than religious symbol, allow Muslims to develop a relation of similitude and intimate attachment vis-à-vis the Prophet, and explain much of the personal offence reportedly felt by protesters.70 It is this Muhammad that Muslims in 2012 inherited from the early 20th century, and which they rallied to protect against Christian offence and technological reproduction. Just as in the 21st century the wild mediatic circulation of offensive images of the Prophet stirred heated responses, so was the case with the technologies of an earlier wave of globalization. The Ottoman caliphate was ridden with such internal contradictions and competing visions of Islam, animated by the very infrastructures that held the caliphate together. As long as it existed, the caliphate regulated this sphere in various legal ways and also by offering the key target for such attacks, for example on the part of Islamic reformers who conflated an anti-sufi and anti-caliphal stance.71 Its disappearance as a viable political arena left the technological sphere associated with the caliphate at once intact and unregulated. 

Conclusion Many of the factors that contributed to the global firestorm around Innocence of the Muslims could be traced back to the medium specificity of the video’s production and dissemination, and to dynamics of a particular moment in Egyptian post-revolutionary history. But beyond contingency, the episode demonstrated the inherent inadequacy of both national and existing international institutions and discourses to regulate fairly a global sphere dominated by supranational corporations, weaponry and media. It also fleshed out the dispersed notions of personhood and liability shared by global channels for the flow of violence, capital and information. The Innocence affair demonstrated how the effects of these flows were unevenly distributed, manifesting as the utopia of human rights on one side of the equation and as offence to an entire religious community on the other. If freedom of expression is indeed informed by prevalent economic forms and hegemonic institutions for conducting business and

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the modes of competition they promote (‘the marketplace of ideas’), then one has to take into account the different global histories and the diverse current roles of the dominant corporate actors. As we have seen, transnational corporations find (and create) religious communities, rather than rights-bearing individuals, at the different ends of the various flows they put in motion. In the 19th century, the erratic appearance of the modern supranational Islamic community and the norms and sensibilities binding its members together started mirroring the development of a liberal international order. These homologues were never stable. As differences between pan-Islamic and Western visions of internationalism, between Christians and Muslims, or Muhammad and Jesus narrowed, the remaining fault lines were sharpened and fraught with increasing weight. Examining them jointly revealed also the concealment mechanisms that disguise this intimacy and their political ramifications. The aspirational horizons of the liberal world order are indeed predicated on making the dystopian dimensions of these aspirations invisible to anybody but their direct recipients, and on making inaudible the critique these recipients sound.

❁ Notes 1 Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, ‘Joint Press Release by 20 Rights Organizations: One Year into Mohamed Morsi’s Term: Manifold Abuses and the Systematic Undermining of the Rule of Law’, Retrieved 27 June 2013 http://eipr.org/en/pressrelease/2013/06/27/1752. 2 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 3 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79, ed. Michel Senellart. Tr. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke England; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 4 Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010). 5 J. B. Trapp, ‘Thomas More and the Visual Arts’, in Essays on the Renaissance and the Classical Tradition (London: Variorum, 1990), pp. 27–54. 6 Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, ‘Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time’, in Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, eds., Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 1–2.

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7 Sectarian Violence in Egypt (Al-’unf al-t?a’ifi fi-Misr), Retrieved 19 January 2014 https://sectarianviolence.crowdmap.com/; Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, ‘EIPR Issues Analytic Study of Sectarian Violence over Last Two Years . . . 53 Incidents in 17 Governorates: 14 Cases of Collective Retribution; 17 Clashes Escalate to Sectarian Violence; 7 Attacks on Churches’, 15 April 2010, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://eipr.org/en/pressrelease/ 2010/04/15/791. 8 Mariz Tadros, ‘Copts under Mursi: Defiance in the Face of Denial’, Middle East Report, No. 268 (Fall, 2013), Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://www. merip.org/mer/mer267/copts-under-mursi. 9 Ibid. This protocol was not invented by Islamists: the entire architecture of Egyptian politics is informed by a very partial overlap between power and formal judicial or parliamentary oversight. 10 Ben Hubbard and Mayy El Sheikh, ‘Islamists Press Blasphemy Cases in a New Egypt’, New York Times, 18 June 2013, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/world/middleeast/islamists-pressblasphemy-cases-in-a-new-egypt.html. 11 Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in NineteenthCentury England (Chicago, 1998). Discussed in Talal Asad, ‘Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism’, in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith P. Butler, and Saba Mahmood, eds., Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 20–64. 12 Kamal Ghabri’el, ‘Accusations of Contempt for the Religions (Tuhamat Izdira’ al-’Adyan)’, Al-Hiwar al-Mutamaddin, 7 October 2007, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=111364. 13 Ashraf El-Sharif, ‘What Path Will Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Choose?’, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 23 September 2013, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://carnegieendowment.org/2013/09/23/what-pathwill-egypt-s-muslim-brotherhood-choose/gnx6. 14 Isshak Ibrahim, ‘H?isar al-Tafkir: Qadaya Izdira’ al-Adyan Khilal ‘Amayn min al-Thawra’, Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, August, 2013, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://eipr.org/sites/default/files/pressreleases/pdf/hsr_ltfkyr.pdf. 15 Kevin Collier, ‘Egypt Arrests Another Facebook User for blasphemy’, The Daily Dot, 2 August 2012, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://www.dailydot. com/news/egypt-muhammad-arrest-facebook/; Hubbard and El Sheikh, ibid. 16 Mohamed El-Sayed, ‘Screens to Heaven’, Al-Ahram Weekly Online, Issue No. 988, 4–10 March, 2010, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://weekly.ahram.org. eg/2010/988/feature.htm. 17 Nathan J. Brown, ‘Egypt’s Wide State Reassembles Itself’, Foreign Policy, Wednesday, 17 July 2013, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://mideastafrica. foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/07/17/egypt_s_wide_state_reassembles_itself. 18 Esam Al-Amin, ‘The Grand Scam: Spinning Egypt’s Military Coup: Exposing the Hypocrisy of El Baradei and His Liberal Elites’, CounterPunch, 19–21 July 2013, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/07/ 19/the-grand-scam-spinning-egypts-military-coup/.

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19 Paul Bond, ‘Does Innocence of Muslims Actually Exist?’, Hollywood Reporter, vol. 28, September 2012, p. 16. 20 YouTube Policy Center, ‘Hate Speech’, n.d., Retrieved 31 January 2014 https:// support.google.com/youtube/answer/2801939?hl=en&ref_topic=2803176. 21 Bond, ibid. 22 Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception. Tr. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989). 23 A few years later, an army photographer sent to Denny’s drone factory to portray women contributing to the war effort ‘discovered’ Norma Jeane Dougherty, one of the workers, who subsequently dyed her hair platinum blonde and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. P. W. Singer, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), pp. 49–50. 24 Ibid., pp. 42–94. 25 International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic at Stanford Law School and Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, Living under Drones: Death, Injury, and Trauma to Civilians from US Drone Practices in Pakistan (2012), Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://www.livingunderdrones.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/10/Stanford-NYU-Living-Under-Drones.pdf. 26 Chris Stephen, ‘Libyan Jihadist Group Asks Supporters to Vote for Missile Target on Facebook’, The Guardian, 11 September 2013, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/libyan-jihadist-missiletarget-facebook. 27 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 17–27. 28 Ottoman support of the French and the Protestant princes in their fight for independence contributed to the rise of national monarchies in Europe and the establishment of Protestantism in Germany. Halil İnalcık, ‘State, Sovereignty and Law during the Reign of Süleyman’, in Halil İnalcık and Cemal Kafadar, eds., Süleymân the Second and His Time (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1993), p. 68; Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art between East and West (New York: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 50. 29 İnalcık, ‘State, Sovereignty’, p. 68. 30 Halil İnalcik, ‘An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire: Volume I: 1300–1600’, in Halil İnalcik and Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 193–94. 31 The capitulations did grant similar advantages to ‘Ottoman traders in foreign ports’. However, the majority of those who utilized these advantages were nonMuslim Ottoman subjects. Karen Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 98. 32 İnalcık, ‘State, Sovereignty’, p. 69. 33 Before launching a campaign against the Safavids, for example, Süleyman obtained a fatwa claiming that it was the Caliph’s obligation to restore true Shari’a in Iran; ibid.

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34 Timur Kuran, The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), Chapter 12. 35 Murat Çizakça, A Comparative Evolution of Business Partnerships: The Islamic World and Europe, with Specific Reference to the Ottoman Archives (Leiden, New York and Koln: E. J. Brill, 1996), Chapter 2. 36 Bruce Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1600–1750 (New York and London: New York University Press, 1988), p. 52. 37 Bruce Masters, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 69. 38 See Barkey, pp. 240–41. Historians have recently insisted that the capitulations did not create social or legal islands completely insulated from the environment within which they operated. See Maurits H. Van Den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System: Qadis, Consuls and Beratlis in the 18th Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2005), pp. 303–04. 39 Kuran, pp. 189–209. 40 Saba Mahmood, ‘Religious Freedom, the Minority Question, and Geopolitics in the Middle East’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 54, no. 2, April 2012, pp. 418–46; Talal Asad, ‘Fear and the Ruptured State: Reflections on Egypt after Mubarak’, Social Research, vol. 79, no. 2, Summer 2012, pp. 271–98. 41 Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998). 42 Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 6. 43 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, 20th anniversary edition (New York: Holt Paperbacks, 2009 [1989]), Chapter 10. 44 Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation of Violence (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 73. 45 M. Naeem Qureshi, Pan-Islam in British Indian Politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–1924 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), p. 400. 46 Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 70–71. 47 Ahmad Sanhuri ʻAbd al-Razzaq, Le califat, son évolution vers une société des nations orientale (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1926). 48 See Devji, Landscapes, 84–86; Salman Sayyid, ‘The Islamist Impasse’, in Frederic Volpi, ed., Political Islam: A Critical Reader (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 129–30. 49 Abdullah Saeed and Hassan Saeed, Freedom of Religion, Apostasy and Islam (Hants: Ashgate Publishing, 2004), p. 105. 50 Taha Hussein, Min Ba’id, sixth edition (Beirut: Dar al-’Ilm li-l-malayyin, 1977), pp. 243–49. 51 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), Chapter 7.

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52 Abdeslam M. Maghraoui, Liberalism without Democracy: Nationhood and Citizenship in Egypt, 1922–1936 (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2006), pp. 61–63. 53 Hussein, pp. 243–44, p. 249. 54 Nazih Ayubi, Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World (London & New York, Routledge, 1991), pp. 63–64, 201–02; Gudrun Kramer, ‘Islamist Notions of Democracy’, Middle East Report vol. 23 (July/August, 1993), Retrieved 29 January 2014 http://www.merip.org/mer/mer183/islamist-notions-democracy. 55 Nikki R. Keddie, Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn ‘al-Afghānī’: A Political Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). 56 Annemarie Schimmel, And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 5–6. 57 Heather J. Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), Chapter 4. 58 Basil Joseph Mathews, Young Islam on Trek: A Study in the Clash of Civilizations (New York: Friendship Press, 1926). 59 Charles R. Watson, memorandum [on religious liberty], n.d. [1926], and C. C. Adams to Watson, Cairo, 3 December 1925, as quoted in Sharkey, p. 102. 60 MuhammadHusayn Haykal, The Life of Muhammad, revised edition (Selangor, Malaysia: Islamic Book Trust, 2008 [1976]), p. xlv. 61 Ibid. 62 E. Dawn, ‘The Origins of Arab Nationalism’, in R. Khalidi et al., eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 3–30. 63 See Saba Mahmood, ‘Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?’, in Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith P. Butler, and Saba Mahmood, eds., Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 64–100. 64 Angie Heo, ‘Memory Exposed: The Technics of Relics and the Cinematic Life of Coptic Christianity’, Material Religion, vol. 10, no. 4, April 2014, pp. 50–74. 65 Gihan Shahine, ‘Explaining the Passion’, Al-Ahram Weekly Online Issue No. 686, 15–21 April, 2004, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://weekly.ahram.org. eg/2004/686/eg8.htm. 66 Paul Sedra, ‘Activism in the Coptic Diaspora: A Brief Introduction’, Jadaliyya, 13 September 2012, Retrieved 19 January 2014 http://www.jadaliyya. com/pages/index/7336/activism-in-the-coptic-diaspora_a-brief-introduction. 67 Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 68 Harlan O. Pearson, Islamic Reform and Revival in Nineteenth-Century India (New Delhi: YODA Press, 2008). 69 Michael Christopher Low, ‘Empire of the Hajj: Pilgrims, Plagues, and PanIslam under British Surveillance, 1865–1926’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 40, no. 2, May 2008, pp. 269–90.

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70 Mahmood, ‘Religious Reason and Secular Affect’, p. 76. 71 Firebrand ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Zahrawi, a member of Rida’s circle, was a pioneer of this sort of critique. Ottoman authorities dealt with accusations of heresy against him by ordering his interrogation and deportation. Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Sufis and Anti-Sufis: The Defense, Rethinking and Rejection of Sufism in the Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 2013 [1999]), pp. 102–3.

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Plate 1 Kisan Kanya (dir. Gunjal, prod. Imperial Film Company, 1938), advertisement in filmindia magazine, December 1937, back cover Source: Image courtesy of Dr Sushila Rani Patel

Plate 2 Apni Nagariya or Mud (dir. M. B. Gidwani, prod. Hindustan Cinetone, 1940), song booklet cover Source: Image courtesy of the British Film Institute

Plate 3 Jhumke (dir. J. K. Nanda, prod. Chitra Pictures, 1946), song booklet cover Source: Image courtesy of the National Film Archive of India

Plate 4 Kaavad, home-installed Source: Courtesy of Gulammohammed Sheikh

Plate 5 Returning Home Source: Courtesy of Gulammohammed Sheikh

Plate 6 Kaavad, home-installed, closed view Source: Courtesy of Gulammohammed Sheikh

Plate 7 Niharika from Google Earth Source: Courtesy of Gulammohammed Sheikh

Plate 8 Kaavad, home-installed, from the other side Source: Courtesy of Gulammohammed Sheikh

Plate 9 Ark Source: Courtesy of Gulammohammed Sheikh