Cultural citizenship in Indian popular cinema

Part 1

Indian films, with all their limitations and outright idiocies, represent part of the hope for India’s future. In a country that is still 50 percent illiterate, films represent the prime vehicle for the transmission of popular culture and values.

- Sashi Tharoor

Globalization is both a historical phenomenon and a way of making sense of the world. This is to say that it has both an ontological and epistemological dimension, and that they are vitally interconnected. The worldwide spread of multinational capital, the trans -nationalization of economies, the stupendous developments in communication technologies, the fall of the Soviet Union among others, have contributed to the rise of this historical phenomenon. The problematic of understanding this new phenomenon has given rise to a new state of mind, a new style of thinking that constitutes an important consequence of globalization.

The complex and multifaceted relationship between the global and the local is most powerfully represented in cinema. Indian cinema is, of course, no exception. It foregrounds issues of cultural modernity, ethnicity, secularism, cosmopolitanism, belonging and the diverse ways in which nationhood is re -imagined. Cinema emerged in India, as in most other Asian countries, as a consequence of the complex dynamics of globalism and localism. Therefore, we need to situate cinema at the interface between the global and the local in order to understand its true significance. One of the defining features of contemporary society is the increasingly convoluted interplay between the global and the local.

Clearly, this process has been in operation for centuries, but the velocity and intensity of it has risen sharply in the past five decades. This interaction has brought about remarkable transformations in the spaces of politics, economics, culture as newer forms of capital largely originating in the West began to imprint their local visibilities and inflect in unanticipated ways historically determined practices. How symbolic forms and modalities of association with Western capitalism are transformed, localized and legitimized in most countries throughout the world in relation to their historical narratives and changing life worlds is at the heart of the discourse of what is referred to as ‘glocalism.’ And this discourse is vitally interconnected with cinema as is clearly demonstrated in Indian cinema.

A productive way of understanding the dialectic between the global and the local is through an examination of the production of newer localities. When we interrogate the intersecting narratives of the global and the local, what we are seeking to do is to focus on the production of the local and its ever- changing contours in response to the imperatives of the global. As Rob Wilson and I have pointed out, the local is never static; its boundaries both temporal and spatial, are subject to ceaseless change. It is characterized by a web of power plays, agonistic contestation of interests, pluralized histories, struggle over many-sided signs, and asymmetrical exchanges.

The local is constantly transforming and reinventing itself as it seeks to move beyond itself and engage the trans-local. What is interesting about cinema is that it foregrounds and gives form to these complicated processes in compellingly interesting ways. Indian cinema furnishes us with ample and cogent examples that are illustrative of this trend. The well-known American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, is surely right when he underlines the need in social re-description for a continual dialectical tracking between the most local of local details and the most global of global structures in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view.

Deleuze and Guattari focus on this phenomenon when they refer to the notion of de -territorialization, where the production of the local is inflected by the nexus of activities occurring elsewhere. What is interesting about cinema is that it makes available a semiotic space for the articulation of the global imaginary and its formation within the phenomenology of the local. A study of Indian filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Adoor Gopalakrishnan (artistic) Ramesh Sippy , Manmohan Desai and Yash Chopra (popular) will make this apparent.

What this interplay between the local and the global has succeeded in doing is to re-focus on the question of nationhood and citizenship. It is indeed, true that in an age of multi-national corporation hegemony, the nation-state is under siege. At the same time the growth of sub-national movements have had the effect of undermining the nation-state. However, the nation-state and the concomitant idea of nationhood possess greater resilience than we give them credit. They still continue to be categorically privileged and valorized. Hence when discussing the issue of globality in cinema in India, the questions of nationhood and citizenship invite closer attention.

The term citizenship has begun to make a powerful presence in social re-description in recent times, directing our attention to issues of state, nation, human rights, identity and belonging etc. Bryan S. turner remarks, ‘citizenship may be defined as a set of practices (juridical, political, economic, and cultural) which define a person as a competent member of society and which as a consequence shape the flow of resources to persons and social groups.’. This definition calls attention to the idea of practice with the intention of sidestepping state and juridical definitions of citizenship that privilege rights and obligations.

The word ‘practices’ serves to point up the social constructions of citizenship and that it changes over time as it responds to newer social circumstances. This is a good starting point, but we need to move further. Etienne Balibar said that, properly speaking, the citizen is neither the individual nor the collective, just as he is neither a exclusively public being or private being5. He or she occupies an intermediate space. To my mind, it is important to regard citizenship as an ideal-typical construct in the Weberian sense; that is to say, it is heuristically useful as an idealized construct.

The space inhabited by citizenship is conflictual and open-ended. This has the advantage of allowing us to bring in diverse social discourses into the discussion. It is also important to bear in mind the fact that while diverse discourses reflect citizenship, citizenship in turn re-inflect these discourses.

The term cultural citizenship, as I employ the term, point to the cultural production of citizenship. It overlaps with national citizenship, but they are not identical. In my judgment, national citizenship is inscribed by a centrifugal impulse, while cultural citizenship is animated by a centripetal desire; what I mean by this is that national citizenship, while focusing on the nation as a unit also tends to count citizens in individualistic and atomistic terms. Cultural citizenship, on the other hand, tends to place far more emphasis on shared understandings and imaginaries . Cinema, especially in a country like India, is crucially linked with this process.

After all cinema was the first institution that allowed Indians to participate in as a national public irrespective of caste and other social differences. Culture is the site in which people make, unmake and re-make meaning in their everyday life. Hence information, knowledge, ideas, concepts, symbols get produced and reproduced in interesting ways. The state and the powers of consumerism loom large in these interactions.

Consumer society

As the consumer society and modes of commoditization extend their tentacles further and further, consumption patterns and identity formations become more and more significant. These have a vital bearing on the production of modern cultural citizenship. Indian popular cinema presents us with a wonderful locus in which the production of cultural citizenship and its variation over time can be usefully mapped.

How does cinema produce cultural citizenship? This is indeed a process that is complex and many-sided. Cinema does not merely reflect social reality; it shapes and even constructs it. The old mimetic reflectionistic model of understanding the interrelationship between cinema and society has been jettisoned in favor of a more intervensionist model in which the film participates in re-inflecting social reality. Films discursively transform the social reality that they deal with through the resources of the cinema, codes and conventions, and the desires of the filmmakers.

This process is given stability. What filmmakers seek to do is to trans-code the social life into cinematic images and narratives. What this means is that cinema participates in the promotion of a transfer from one discursive domain to another. Consequently, films have to be understood as modes of signification through which social reality gets constructed. When examining the relationship between cinema and the production of cultural citizenship, these facts need to be recognized.

Christian Metz talked about the importance of the cinematic apparatus that includes the physical, psychological as well as social dimensions6. The cinematic apparatus plays a significant role in the production of cultural citizenship. The question of spectator identity is closely linked to the production of cultural citizenship. One has only to recount some of the behavioral patterns exhibited by Indian film audiences to recognize how intimately they identify themselves with the film text. Clapping, joining in the singing, commenting on scenes, throwing coins at the screen etc. are diverse ways in which this spectator identification is manifested.

Relationship

In order to understand the relationship between cinema and cultural citizenship, we might usefully invoke the concept of ‘field’ formulated by Pierre Bourdieu. His concept of cultural production should be understood as an attempt at social contextualization. This urges us to take into cognizance cultural production themselves whether they be novels, films, or paintings, but also the creators of these objects in terms of their desires and strategies; these are based on their habitus, both personal and collective.

This concept stresses the importance of taking into consideration what Bourdieu calls the structure of the field. In other words, we need to pay attention, in the case of cinema, to exhibitors, critics, publicists, financiers, academics, government official etc. it is they who shape the cultural products. All these involve the circulation of power. Bourdieu’s concept of cultural production and the field call attention to the web of social conditions related to the production, circulation and consumption of work of cinema within an economy of power.

When we seek to explore the complex modalities through which cinema produces cultural citizenship, the concept of the field of cultural production, as enunciated by Bourdieu, can prove to be of great heuristic value. Just to take one example, the role played by popular film magazines such as Filmfare and Screen, as well as newspaper supplements devoted to cinema, and the impact that a serious journal like the Economic and Political Weekly has had on the educated bilingual audiences in shaping public opinion exemplify this point.

Plurality of forces

The production of cultural citizenship in Indian popular cinema depends on the play of a plurality of forces. Here, I wish to focus on a few of them. The state has been a vital force in shaping the trajectories of growth of Indian popular cinema from the very beginning. However, we also need to recognize the fact that the role of the state in the growth of Indian cinema is highly ambivalent. Through its various agencies of administration, such as finance corporations, censor boards, taxation systems, film festivals as well as though its alliances with the film industry, the state has played, and continues to play, a very significant role in India cinema.

The state, of course, occupies an ambivalent space in India, and much controversy surrounds its operations. The state is, on the one hand, a unifier of the nation, a guarantor of security for the people, promoter of economic growth, overseer of modernization. On the other hand, the state has been accused of promoting a majoritarian hegemony, riding roughshod over minorities, promoting bureaucratic centralism, perpetuating violence etc.

The contradictions and ambivalences associated with the Indian state find expression in Indian cinema. Some scholars have argued that the state plays a significant role in the shaping of the very forms of Indian popular cinema, for example, Madhava Prasad has argued that Indian cinema is an institution that is a part of the struggle within India over the form of the state. According to this line of thinking, Indian cinema is about the imagining of the tensions over that form and the effort to mold the form itself.

Indian cinema, from its very inception, was an appendage of capitalist modernity, and hence the role of industry in the production of cultural citizenship becomes important. The organization of the production, exhibition, consumption of films is vitally connected to the functioning of the film industry. The role of the state and the role of the industry are connected in important ways. Hence in our effort to understand the ways in which popular cinema in India produces cultural citizenship, we need to examine the ways in which the state and industry operate. Another area that deserves close study is the influence of popular cinema in the public sphere. From the very beginning, Indian cinema became a part of the public sphere. Phalke’s ‘Raja Harishchandra’ demonstrated his desire to make cinema a constitutive element in the Swadeshi movement. Early filmmakers were quick to deal with public issues such as social injustice, casteism, individual desire versus social convention within a romantic narrative discourse.

For example, as far back as 1936 a film like Achut Kanya (The Untouchable Girl) sought to explore the salient of social issues that had been highlighted by leaders like Gandhi and Nehru. Achut Kanya examines the love relationship between a Brahmin boy and an untouchable girl. As caste and religious barriers stand as impediments they cannot unite. The Brahmin boy is forced to marry a girl he does not love and similarly the girl is forced into marrying a boy she dislikes. They happen to meet at a village fair; the husband of the girl, overwhelmed with jealousy misconstrues this meeting and attacks his wife’s former boyfriend. They fight on a level crossing, as the train charges down the track. The girl desperately tries to separate the two men and is run-over and is killed. The filmmaker through this tragedy focuses on the problem of untouchability. As in more social dramas with an overt social message, the narrative discourse unfolds within a framework of melodrama.

Interconnection

The interconnection between cinema and public sphere took even a more decisive turn when cinema became entangled with Indian politics. This is clearly indicated in the DMK politics in Madras. The rise of DMK, which has played so significant a role in Tamil-nadu politics cannot be understood in its true complexity in isolation from Tamil cinema. A film like Parasakti, with its open hostility to the Congress party and the hegemony of the Brahmin caste, illustrates this trend. Films such as Parasakti, Velaikari,

And Oor Iravau made direct interventions into the politics of Tamilnadu. The well-known politicians C N Annadurai and M Karunanidhi were originally scriptwriters who later became important figures in the political landscape and were instrumental in bringing about a very close alliance between politics and cinema. In many of these films that made their way into the political arena the display of party symbols and sardonic deployment of names of party leaders in dialogue and song were common. In certain films such as Panam and Tangaratnam the fictional narrative was interwoven with documentary footage that focussed on party meetings. Therefore, when we seek to examine how Indian popular cinema constructs cultural subjects, we need to keep in mind this inter-animation of politics and cinema.

Scrutiny

Another area that deserves scrutiny is the role of fan clubs in shaping the cinematic discourse of India. There are many fan clubs scattered through out India devoted to the propagation of the names of famous actors and actresses. Sometimes, these fan clubs are not confined to Indian actors and actresses only. For example, in certain parts of South India thee are fan clubs devoted to the well known Hong Kong film maker Jackie Chan. What these fan clubs do is not only to construct popular discourses surrounding the names of well known actors and actresses but also to fashion images of them in a way that the actors and the actresses themselves are compelled to emulate.

To phrase it differently there is a vital interplay between the actual protagonists of the fan clubs and the discourse created by the fan clubs. These then are some aspects that we need to focus on when we explore the dynamics of the production of cultural subjects through Indian popular cinema. There are of course many other aspects that invite our attention but unfortunately due to limitation of space, I cannot deal with them in a short essay of this nature.

What I wish to do next, is to examine some key moments in the historical evolution of Indian cinema to understand the way in which the image of cultural citizenship has changed over time. Once again, due to limitation of space, I cannot possibly deal with all the moments that deserve our attention. Hence, I wish to focus on a few of the nodal points of growth that merit consideration. First, the very inception of Indian cinema provides us with valuable information concerning the production of cultural subjects.

Importation

Cinema in India, as with most other cinemas in Asia, is an importation from the west. However, before long this newly imported art of cinematography succeeded in sinking roots in the local soil and the consciousness of the people and emerging as an indigenous form of mass entertainment. D. G Phalke is generally regarded as a father of Indian cinema.

He was a talented filmmaker who was also deeply interested in the Swadeshi movement. For example, commenting on his films Raja Harischandra made the following remark. “ In 1910, I happened to see the film The Life of Christ in the America-India picture palace in Bombay………that day also marked the foundation in India of an industry………….while the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes I was mentally visualizing the gods Sri Krishna, Sri Ramachandra, Gokul, and Ayodhya.

I was gripped by a strange spell. I bought another ticket and saw the film again. This time I felt my imagination taking shape on the screen. Could this really happen? Could we, the sons of India ever be able to see Indian images on the screen?” Phalke later went on to make the following statement. “During this period, I was constantly preoccupied with the analysis of every film which I saw and in considering whether I could make them here. There was no doubt what so ever about the utility of the profession and its importance as an industry…………

This was the period of the Swadeshi movement and there was profuse talking and lecturing on the subject. For me personally this led to the resignation of my comfortable government job and taking to an independent profession. I took this opportunity to explain my ideas to my friends and the leaders of the Swadeshi movement.” It is evident, therefore, that from the beginning Indian cinema had a vital link with the Swadeshi movement.

Shakuntala

Let me illustrate this with another example. The story of Shakuntala, which originally formed a part of the Mahabharata and later made into an outstanding poetic drama has repeatedly appeared in the Indian cinema. Two filmmakers, Suchet Singh who was trained abroad in filmmaking and S.N. Patankar who was much more interested in imbuing it with the spirit of the Swadeshi movement made two films in the early twenties based on the Shakuntala. While Suchet Singh’s films fared very badly, Patankar’s films emerged as a triumphant success. Historians of cinema attribute the success of Patankar’s work to its linkage with the Swadeshi movement.

What is interesting about the cultural citizenship projected by these early films, both silent and talkies, is the complex way in which tradition and modernity were combined infusing a sense of self- confidence. This was clearly reflected in the statement of Phalke that I cited earlier. There was a constant movement between the past and the present that infused the cultural citizenship with flexibility. During this period not only were divinities such as Rama, Sita, Krishna, Siva, Parvati, Savitri etc were at the center of filmic narrative but also historical personages such as Ashoka, Akbar, Shivaji, Jehangir, Kabir, Mirabai, Chanakya, Jhansikirani, Vikramaditya were also at the center of filmic narrative.

Golden age

The 1950’s are generally regarded as the golden age of Indian popular cinema. This was the age in which film directors such as Bimal Roy, Raj Kapur, Guru Dutt made their memorable films. Most of these film directors, who were influenced by the Indian People’s Theatre Association, went on to make films that dealt with social issues.

Bimal Roy’s Sujata, Raj Kapoor’s Shri 420 (Mr.420) and Gurudath’s Pyaasa (Thirst) are examples of this. This was a period in filmmaking in which Jawaharlal Nehru’s influence was clearly visible. Nehru was interested in fashioning India into a modern stage in which science, technology, social justice, rule of law, democratic values were privileged over superstition, atavism and feudalism.

The films made in this period were heavily influenced by this mode of thinking and hence the cultural subjecthood was one that conformed to the vision of Nehru. In this vision the state was of paramount importance. Sunil Khilnani remarks, “the true historical success of Nehru’s rule lay not in a dissemination of democratic idealism but in its establishment of the state at the core of India’s society. The state was enlarged, its ambitions inflated and it was transformed from a distant alien object into one that aspired to infiltrate the everyday life of the Indians, proclaiming itself responsible for everything they could desire; jobs, ration cards, education places, security, cultural recognition.”.

He makes the point that the state etched itself into the national imaginary in a way that was to have a lasting effect. However, as commentators like Partha, Chatterji have pointed out this very establishment of the state as a supreme institution had the undesirable consequences of disrupting the sense of community11. When we examine carefully, reading against the grain of the filmic text, of works of cinema produced during this period we begin to discern this tension. The image of the cultural citizen that was produced by these films bore the imprint of this tension. He or she was a modern subject caught in the contrary pulls unleashed by modernity itself.

Indian Penal Code

Let us for example, consider a film like Raj Kapoor’s Shri 420. This film derives its title from section 420 of the Indian Penal Code under which felons of various type are prosecuted. Raju, a young man arrives in the sprawling city of Bombay with the hope of procuring wealth and good life. He is a graduate with a B.A degree and a medal for honesty; he is determined to work hard, establish his worth and make his mark. But before long, these fond illusions are brutally shattered.

He is authoritatively, told by a beggar in the streets that there is no place for honest people in the city. Raju starts off badly; he pawns his medal at the pawnbroker’s shop; but the money that he gets in return is snatched by a gang of pickpockets and he is nearly manhandled for trespassing.

While he is at the pawnbroker’s shop, he chances to meet Vidya. This meeting is to have important consequences for him. He finds employment and falls in love with Vidya, a school teacher. Things look very bright for a while. However, Raju gets entangled in the evil and the corrupt ways of the city. One day, while delivering laundry to the Taj Mahal Hotel he happens to meet the notorious Maya Devi.

This starts him on the road to gambling. He becomes a successful gambler. One day, Raju brings Vidya a beautiful saree and takes her along with him to the Taj Mahal Hotel to introduce her to his newly found friends.

To be continued