The Importance of Being Big B
Ahmer Nadeem Anwer Doesn’t have a point of view, Knows not where he’s going to, Isn’t he a bit like you and me? Nowhere Man, please listen – You don’t know what you’re missin’ Nowhere Man, the world is at your command! – Lennon-McCartney In terms of the provenance, propinquity and social ethics of some of his current public engagements, Amitabh Bachchan seems to exude all the moral dubiety of an invisible man – a ‘Nowhere Man’. It isn’t as though the actor can’t act with decent personal-social ethics. To cite just one example close to home, family sources have told me that when K. A. Abbas (who introduced the star in Saat Hindustani) lay fighting for his life near the end, Bachchan just quietly underwrote the medical bills – sans fanfare or publicity glitz. In this he showed himself more caring, magnanimous and decent than some others who owed Abbas way more. Nor, surely, could that be a one-off good deed; there must be others in that line. Still, he does come across of late as a figure swathed in paradoxes, shadows and contradictions that may seem just a shade disturbing, perhaps even a little sinister. Bachchan’s trajectory down the years, but especially his recent flirtations with far-Right sectarian elements in the polity – outfits that would, if they could, have silenced an Abbas in every imaginable sense and meaning –, give unsettling pause for thought. Recent developments show for example how complete and thoroughgoing is the matinee idol’s problematic enmeshment in brand promotion for the state of Gujarattoday. The Entertainment Daily ofJune 4, 2010 carried a report noting that the Bollywood superstar, having already shot some of the sequences at the Gir forest and in the Junagarh region, had now visited the historic Somnath temple. Overtly of course it’s all very pleasantly accoutred as part of an ad-campaign style shoot purporting to do no more than promote tourism in the state, yet the overdetermined symbolism of Somnath as a prime early destination of Bachchan’s hard sell ‘campaign’ in Modi’s state cannot be lost on anyone. It was from this very spot after all that almost exactly two decades ago L. K. Advani’s fateful and infamous Rath Yatra had been set rolling, leaving in its wake a long and harrowing trail of devastation and internecine societal divisions – a symbolic journey whose conceptual (and praxeological) end point was the razing of the Babri mosque on December 6, 1992. For even the most complete technical/judicial let off for powerful persons widely believed to be mired in the run up to the occurrence could not hope to convincingly establish for everyone that this traumatic and politically convulsive modern demolition of a place of worship was the work of hands wholly and solely divine. Fast forward to June 2010. While the overall ambience of the latest promotional venture involving Amitabh’s visit to Somnath has all along been imagically packaged as conspicuously “touristy” (“During a shooting sequence, Bachchan was seen wearing a traditional red kurta, while taking pictures of the temple’s architecture”), sightseeing pleasures are clearly not unmixed with hardnosed business considerations in the case: ANI reported that as part of his drive to promote Gujarat tourism, the star would also produce a film under the banner of his production company, Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Limited (ABCL). And, as if to seal the multilevel pact in straight bucks, the Bachchan starrer Paa suddenly became tax free in Gujarat in the wake of the actor’s visit. Thus a loaded mix brewed of various quid pro quo arrangements and semiotically surcharged signifier plays of mutual interest and benefit underpin what symbolically, and at bottom, is after all an ideological alliance (advertising, when fully imbricated with politics is more accurately known as “propaganda”). So even though Bachchan would be unlikely to broadcast too loudly the underlying politics of the deal, and may even prefer to keep it as a quietly unspoken subtext of the relationship, this doubleness of the liaison, its simultaneous status as both business and ideological politics, is no doubt what seals the pact. In the event, the rhapsodic slogan for Bachchan’s campaign may be all very touching and edifying, yet the poetical aroma of the slogan itself – “Khushboo Gujarat Ki” – might strike the unconverted as a tad too ersatz and meretricious, all things considered, to be entirely in good taste. Some might wonder whether it’s not perhaps even positively malodorous – what’s the smell of burning human flesh really like, you might ask, if you’re not wholly carried away by the photo-op effulgence and lyric rapture of the ‘show’! So how does the once clean-cut and sober-countenanced son of a Gandhian nationalist poet and one-time English professor who translated Omar Khayyam, who received the Soviet Land Nehru award and had originally named his first son Inquilab (after the revolutionary slogan ‘inquilab zindabad’, vive la révolution) – how does this man, having come from where he did, get so thoroughly sucked up into the cynical and seamy side of political contacts-building and (to adapt Scott Fitzgerald) the “business go(o)nnections” game – to the point where he today can set aside every sobering compunction in the selection of friends and foes, and causes to promote? The man first called “Inquilab” eventually became “Amitabh”, which translates as the light that would never go off. No? “O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there!” It might perhaps be too quixotic at this late turn in the plot, to expect a serious change of course, far less a complete turnabout by the megastar on those far-reaching but deeply questionable choices, or to now essay a major recharting of the trajectory. Perhaps it’s already too late. Still, it’s worth pondering just how much impactual power such a hyper-charismatic public personality wields in a society ever more consummately shaped by mass culture and its deities, and what might be the effect of an Amitabh Bachchan deciding to put his weight behind a more healing societal politics. If