The Aesthetics of the Festival
We celebrate festivals. Actually we celebrate the experience and mood of a festival. Celebrating itself is an art, a primitive and joyous form. Besides, festivals are where we gather as a community—real or virtual. In short, festivals unite us through nurturing of certain rituals and art forms. I have just now used two phrases: ritual and art-form—but can these two words be brought together so easily? Ritual surely has a strong plinth over which our living as and within communities thrive; but it also has a strong ‘real’ and ‘diurnal’ dimension of religiosity, which resists abstraction. Rituals bind communities by means of highlighting collective participation in and through certain rites, initiations, addresses and customary practices. Rituals help us immerse vertically in living. On the other hand art-form is a secular expression, which is beholden to the idea of aesthetics. Art forms could be autonomous or creations of individual artists which connoisseurs of art are then able to appreciate and judge. The questions of form takes us to a certain mode of abstraction, although created art is very much concrete and in front of us. When we ‘participate’ in festivals, do we work at the secular or the religious domain, especially if the festival concerned has a strong religious connotation? If the marker of a festival is strongly aesthetic and experiential, can such creations and receptions be called ‘cultural’ and be made part of our modern existence or is all experiential immersion necessarily is a matter of faith and submission that brings it within the purview of the religious? The Bengali film Mahalaya, directed by Soumik Sen, recently running in the theatres, provides us an occasion to think about such questions afresh. Here is a day that inaugurates the festival of Durga Puja by marking the initiation and commencement of devipaksha. But that day gathers special significance in the collective Bengali psyche since 1931 owing to a special program of chandipath (a form of chanting recited from the scriptural verses of Sri Sri Chandi or Durga Saptashati ) laced with a string of songs aired by All India Radio. The sequence narrates and dramatizes the story of Durga’s annihilating the mahishasura and thereby allegorizing the victory of the benevolent forces over the evil. To the secular listener the whole thing is an act of superb experience of narrative art, with a hint of melodrama, worked out through certain musical and narrativizing techniques. For instance, I have just used the notion of allegorical enactment in order to describe what happens each year in every Bengali household as the voice of Birendra Krishna Bhadra wafts across our habitus,inaugurating the grand festival. Bhadra’s tone, enunciation and consistency then assumes a bardic status which is still secular and cultural. Our inner experience is ignited and collectivized through art every year, it can be argued. The film dramatizes this event by reminding us of an interruption in this ‘tradition’ in 1976, when the ‘address proper’ and fulcrum of the ritual, the stotraptath/chandipath, was ‘performed’ for once by the favourite matinee idol of Bengal, Uttam Kumar. The ‘experiment’ by AIR pushed during the time of Emergency was a total washout, an abortive venture. By means of highlighting this break and its catastrophic failure, the film wishes to highlight a particular mode of tradition. This form of recreating tradition stands firmly against the politicization of religion that the far-right peddles. In fact, such a modality of highlighting a consensual Bengali collectivity tries to create a ‘timeless’ middle path. I will argue that this mode is being systematically resuscitated in the Bengali mainstream cultural artifacts, art and literature, films and theatre in the post-liberalization decades. This mode wishes to keep away from both politics (left and right) and also from the ‘play’ in aesthetics by means of consecrating art and turning it ritualistic, auretic and communitarian. The question of a seemingly cultural experience turns complicated when we also notice certain other makers simultaneously playing, which have arguably converted this modern and technologically mediated experience of the AIR event into a diurnal ritual of timelessness. The film firmly affirms this second view—that tradition (in this case the immersion in bhava and bhakti) may have been a constructed category but sometimes it does turn timeless, universal and gets entrenched within the collective psyche of a people. The film highlights, by means of affirming Bhadra’s voice and Pankaj Kumar’s Mullick’s authoritative presence, a certain investment in collective practice even prior to the creation of the cultural artifact/ritual text. Mullick’s deep engagement with ritualistic exercises, enacted through rigorous collective rehearsals and AIR itself being invested in ritual practice prior to the airing of the programme are key elements in stressing the need to value and nurture this mode of diurnal-cooperative living. To arrive at the correct tempo or techniques of orchestration are not going to even produce such ethereal melody, let alone reach the ‘inner ear’ of the believer. That aspect of musicality shall remain unexamined and mysterious. This is what the film highlights–the excess that flows underneath. The film also marks the recurrence and repeatability of time. The ecclesiastical year is always marked by recurrence. It does so by suggesting to the viewers that such festivals do not operate independently of a certain consecration of time. Such events occur and perpetuate in its own time and in proper time. Time is not autonomous anymore. It is fulfilled. This is how finite beings connect to eternity, the film tries to tell us. Eventually, the errant ‘artists’, who relied on their individual talents and organizational capacity fail and are brought back into the fold of a mitigating tradition. No one is belittled (RSS is roundly critiqued but not Vivekananda). Everybody realizes with due humility the value and gravitas of that mysterious topos of the inexplicable that joins past with the present, the traditional with the contemporaneous, the aesthetic with the religious. A consensus is reached. The innovators like the singer Hemanta Mukherjee (Hemant Kumar) are taken to task initially–as brash, selfish and
A Realist Metaphysical Turn in ‘Roma’
Siddhant Mohan It was one drunk night of November. I came back from Ayodhya and had finished a piece of reporting over the upcoming radical set up in Ayodhya which would demand for Ram Temple, yet again, to gather the political momentum in three states of north India. Soon I switched on to the YouTube app on my iPhone and began watching trailer of the movie “Roma (2018)”. The trailer, which lasted for about two minutes, made me sober up a little and I vowed to watch the film in its entirety. The film, as we know, of course has since then become somewhat of a cult across the globe. What might be the reasons? The culture of Mexican filmmaking and other art forms largely reflect the socio-political situation in and around that part of the world. Much of the creative development in the mainstream culture industry in Mexico used to deal with nudity, drugs, alcohol and so on for a long time in a merely representative sort of a way. This reflected in other creative media too. But soon came a new wave of Mexican cinema in 1970’s and 80’s when the movies started receiving global recognition. It led to the new wave of Mexican cinema, leading up to the contemporary ones, which still draws a great deal of enthusiasm from cinephiles outside of that nation. I am of course talking about moderate mainstream stuff: mostly owing to the works of the likes of Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón who took the lead in Mexican filmmaking and blended their typical style with the Hollywood production techniques. Iñárritu made ‘Amores Perros’ as the new century started but soon made films like ’21 Grams’ starring Sean Penn and then arrived ‘Babel’. The films were critically acclaimed and received a lot of attention of film lovers too. This trend was on for a while with several low budget films made until 2014 when Iñárritu made “Birdman”. That film won the Academy Award. And surprisingly, Iñárritu also helped Leonardo Dicaprio win his first Academy Award of 2015 with ‘The Revenant’. Same goes for Guillermo Del Toro, who produced several films of Iñárritu, and went on to direct a few films on the sci-fi theme. That included a fair bit of work in animations as well. In 2018, Del Toro won Academy Award for his film ‘The Shape of Water’. The point I have been trying to make is that the new wave of global Mexican cinema pulled out several mythical and fictional plots and reached out to bigger audience. This approach draws from a fund of a far older Latin American archetypal imagination, then being globalized via films. The formula clicked. In the same trajectory arrives Alfonso Cuarón. He followed the same trend of low-budget Mexican filmmaking initially and grabbed the Academy Award for ‘Gravity’. But this is where Cuarón decides to deviate from the mythical and strange fictional imagination, and goes back to his roots, his early life, his ghetto in Mexico. This is an interesting reversal. He takes a steep turn backwards as it were, and goes on to produce and direct the film we are trying to discuss here: ‘Roma’. The film has has made an immediate impact. Is the world ready for a turn with such films? ‘Roma’, basically a locality in Mexico, is one autobiographical piece about Cuarón himself: on how his family survived through socio-political turmoils of 70s after Cuarón’s father left the family and went on to live with another woman. Cleo, an Indian housemaid in the same family steers the events around her, as it were. The character of Cleo, portrayed Yalitza Aparicio, a rookie actor, is one hell of a silent woman who does not utter a single word of complaint or remorse as she goes on through ordeals. When Cleo conceives a baby with her first and apparently only boyfriend, she and her employer comes to an a tacit agreement that women will always be alone. The story-line runs on a very linear manner, involving the very family in the backdrop of the Mexican society which got affected with the political turmoil, increased interference of US government and a slow and uneven paced settlements owing to developmental agendas and forms of neo-colonialism. Cuarón has portrayed history in a very deft manner, paying attention to every detail possible. Shots of Aeroplanes flying in the backgrounds every now and then remind us of the then political scenario; Mr. Antonio—the one who fell in love with another woman—parks his expensive car with such care so as to avoid any scratch-marks. This is deeply suggestive of an emerging class. And then the historical student-police clash is shown where police fires upon several protesting students killing many of them instantly. All these gets enmeshed within the plot-line. The plan to make this film in black &white is also a clever ploy. Cuarón takes a plausible risk, using simple shots. He has himself operated the camera, refusing to use zooms. Rather he fixes every shot. He does use longer trolley shots, pans too, but he fixes the camera by trying to make the story focus primarily over Cleo. This persolazizes history. This is clearly a moment of subjectivizing history in a new manner even as we deal with an apparently realist theme. ‘Roma’ is full of long takes and some are truly memorable. One can point out two such shots. In one, Cleo goes into the surgery-room after doctors fail to hear the child’s heartbeat inside her. In a single long take, Cuarón portrays the stillbirth of Cleo’s child: doctors giving CPR to the dead baby, passing the child on to Cleo for the final adieu, takes it back to prepare the baby from cremation and in fact, prepares the baby for its last journey by inserting cotton into its mouth, wraps it in a cloth while Cleo and the audience keeps on crying. And second one is when Cleo tries to save
Poetry Written By The Javelin
Prasanta Chakravarty ________ What the poet produces is akin to the javelin thrower’s act—a bit of the soil from the entrails of the earth, which hides concealed spots of blood. Ephemera it is; mere unearthed bits of soil. All around us are strewn these passing tableaux of shining ephemera, if we are able to touch their myriad forms, feels Monika Kumar, who is one of the leading contemporary poets writing in Hindi. Her maiden book is titled आशचर्यवत\ (Ascharyavat—Wondrous. Denotes both the state of wonderment itself/time that causes a state or wonder or the ability to feel wondrous. Just published from Vani Prakashan. Perhaps we could start from the middle, or stay in the middle, as Kumar does, in one of her finely wrought poems: बीच से शुरू करते हैं (Let us Begin at the Middle).To be attuned to the many miracles that are continually happening around us, perhaps we need to appreciate the role of the ongoing process of living itself—which means the capacity to remain in res medias and appreciate the staying power of things and relationships that bind us. The middle is neither the zone of hastened invasion nor that of an end which often engenders boredom and shrillness. मुझे तुम बीच का कौर खिलाना, न पहले जिसे तुम भूख के मारे निगल जाते हो न आख़िरी जिसे कहते हुए तुम बिरक्त हो जाते हो मुझे बीच का निवाला खिलाना, जिसे तुम बेध्यानी में बमौज खाते हो Easy marveling at the trivial and the ordinary comes with a sudden realization of this sense of बेध्यानी में बमौज(unselfconscious gaiety)throughout the collection. And we, the readers, acquiesce willfully to this magnetic pull—brought on par with the seeds and the flowers, the fruits and the animals. In fact, the animals that arrive in, and quicken, her poems are often the ones that populate our diurnal existence—ants, lizards, squirrels and rabbits. Do we pay enough attention to our feral neighbours? If we did we would know that— # अभी हम खड़े है उस बिंदु पर जहाँ हम चाहते हैं यह घर चींटों से मुक्त हो जाये और चींटे करते हैं कल्पनाएँ दुनिया की हर चीज़ काश बताशा हो जाये # छिपकलियाँ एकांत के पार्षद की तरह घर में रहतीं और मैं व्याकुलता की बन्दी की तरह # गिलहरियों को अलबत्ता मेरी बातों में कोई रूचि नहीं उन्हें दिलचस्पी है सिर्फ रोटी के टुकड़ों में जो स्कुल के बच्चे अपने डब्बे से गिरा देते हैं # यह नरम- नरम जो बचा हैं खरगोश में उस मासूमियत का शेष है जो कछुए के साथ दौड़ लगाने की स्पर्धा में थक कर नींद बन गयी In each of these sections Kumar deftly changes the viewpoint from the human to the non-human and the world immediately turns upside down and kaleidoscopic. And then she brings us crashing down to the comic situation where we are seen wallowing and indulging in our exaggerated sense of self-hood. In a similar vein there are some exquisitely refined and intimate portraits of the botanical—flowers, seeds and fruits—which cocoon our daily lives even as we are mostly oblivious to them. The wondrous comes to us in many forms; and the world that Monika Kumar opens up for us, the unexpected turns that her lines take, are startling indeed. The local habitations and surroundings turn strikingly vivid. And it is here that she gives us a chance to delve deeper, and vertically, some more: she often begins to take a flight in many of her poems, where the revelation begins to take a truly astonishing shape, and yet often the process then stops short of traversing the whole trajectory of such a flight. This happens, one suspects, owing paradoxically to her deep investment in the local and the communal, though we know that she is an avid reader of poetry from all parts of the world. It is this investment in the common and the earthy—school students and chowkidars, bus conductors, local sportspersons, the housewife, the sweetmeat shop, the petulant lovers in the locality—that keeps her grounded in the intermediate space of living. She is alive to the equity of life. But it is this same investment in the local that sometimes thwarts her from relating such wondrous everyday situations to two crucial dimensions of living itself. One: the inscape or the coutours of our inner worlds—a constant journey that happens within. The other: locating all shining objects and relationships with the cosmological and the astral. Those who are able to take cognizance of the wondrous around us have this special ability to string together a thread between the inner and the outer so that all dualism of existence evaporates. Sometimes Kumar does take a momentous leap and is able to make this vertical connection. The results are truly magical. One such poem is titled बूढ़ा और बच्चा उर्फ़ दादा और पोता(The Elderly and the Child, alias Grandfather and Grandson) Ostensibly the poem is a commentary on three generations—the elderly, the young adult and the child. But more than that, it is blessed with a remarkable realization that the elderly and the child are threaded together in a deeper relationship of wondrous existence that befuddles the adult world. The elderly reaches that state of childlike naiveté after a lifetime of journeying. विलम्ब बूढ़े लोगों का गुण है उनके भीतर स्पंदन है पर चेहरे स्थिर और विलम्बित है उनके चेहरे के सामने समाज अपने बदलाव पटकता है …बूढ़े लोग शांत चेहरों से युद्ध लड़ते है लहभग सभी विवादों और दुखों का अंत वे जानते है The elderly know the final results of all arguments and sorrows. Therefore they realize events intuitively and merely smile about such events—living in hope and curiosity about already known facts. In its his own way, the child naturally tries to sense all that is magical and true within his newly found world and finds the elderly to be the most conducive fellow traveler on that common journey. Thus, the grandfather and the grandchild form the secret, preternatural couple.
Inside and Outside of Time (अधूरी बातें )
Adhoori Baten (Click for the Full Essay in Hindi). HUG talks to Shubha, with reference to her reflective essay अधूरी बातें, on Time and Memory. _______________ HUG: Though your reflections in this composition flow from one thread to another, all sections, including the digressions, are woven into a tapestry. This is a weaving that I have often observed in your prose pieces. Here, I would like to talk about a seaming with Time. Time can be a prisoner, shackled and bound, but it also reserves the potential to be free, since its one end is always open and free—एक छोर खुला रहता है. Following this assertion, right at the outset, you hail time as limitless, unbounded (असीम), but then also as changing and transformative (सतत परिवर्तनशील). The first seems to indicate a geological, cosmological time, while the second leads to an identifying and measuring of time (शिनाख्त), and also its structuring (सांचे में ढालना) that eventually brings it to a visibility (पुनर्रचना, दृश्यमान)that is closer to historical time. How can the two things happen simultaneously? Shubha: See, what you call historical time, lived time, is often not enumerated and visibilized. Think of our freedom movement. How much do we know of the hardships, humiliations and inner fights? Much is still shrouded, since what we get are vignettes. All true yes, and yet only vignettes. The knowledge system through which we filter that time period is refracted via a methodologically subjective and perhaps even Western ways. With other methods, some of them doggedly indigenous, the same can be said. Often history misses the power of time—the zeitgeist-युगीन सच्चाई, which it bypasses. This part is complicated. A slice of time has at least two or more sides to it—पक्ष और विपक्ष. Can we measure its wholeness? Are humans equal to such a task? Appreciating time is at best, a divided and fractured possibility and in that sense, time remains open-ended and limitless. And yet we must keep measuring and keeping track of the predicament that time commands. Say, women’s history in a certain time period: her voice, tone, anxieties, force, her sharp criticality and her collective thought and action, these we can keep track of. Movements of resistance are often overlaid upon glaring elisions. How are we to capture that time, a time that precludes and forestalls? Here we are attempting to splice open duration in order to make it enumerable. This second effort cannot avoid histories. HUG: In this context of identification and structuring of time and also with reference to the question of labour, you also refer to trade unions. Shubha: Well, the trade unions have often debated and fought for a certain kind of time: the time of labour. They have often argued for a stipulated period of time for the worker, say 8 to 10 hours and so on. This is the time without, the measurable, quantifiable time within which questions of labour law and so forth are invoked. These are significant watersheds. But there is another kind of contiguity between labour and time. The relationships within the working class, the leisure time, its sense of beauty, the wage earners’ expressions which are also part of a certain time. What about the worker’s children, for instance? Or his health concerns? The feelings and anxieties that he has about his community members? The wholeness of it I mean-परिघटना. One must connect with existence and all existing tribulations. See, the trade union leader functioning within the late liberal climate has turned modern and smart, but is he sensitive and alive to the full social and cultural ambit of the wage earner? I sometimes wonder whether the unions ever were truly alive to human relationships emerging within a certain time-frame? How can one even think of total transformation of the social order without attending to the identification of such time on the part of the unions and such platforms? This has been the story of my life actually, this particular point that you are raising and I can go on and on. HUG:Right. You seem to take us away from individual memory and also from the ossified, repeatable orders and rituals of the collective. But this successful forging of a relationship between subjective individual recollection and communal memory seems to be the order of the day, is it not? We see this in the forging of quick identities around language, organized religion, nation, family and closed ties of loyalty. And all these remain shrouded and penetrated through relentless, conspicuous consumption creating a happy, addled, obedient and genuflecting world. How is one able to even conceive social time or social memory in such a climate? Shubha: I do not see social time distinct from the individual. That kind of decoupling is a mistake. One has always tried to understand and act the conflict, कश्मकश, enacted within the various forces in the social milieu. All kinds of navjagran, rebirth and renaissance dissolve the force of this conflict. These paper over power and the travails of the individual by talking merely about the individual! I mean, what have we done to the fabric of living? We have a mass of enlightened social beings but each one is feudal through and through. This is the primary diktat of the class system in our nation. There is no notion of humanity, and we use that word in lazy, daily recall. That kind of memorialization can only be ossified, alienating each one of us not into melancholy, but into happiness and more bubbling happiness. And thus, we turn more secretive and malignant by deploying memory, without actually visibilizing the hidden facets of time. We are not able to bring together the individual within the social at all, and the latter have remained an epiphenomenon. What might structural change mean unless we attend deeply to relationships? No one even records time and we shout from rooftops about transforming it? It is in this context that I have tried to think about the selection of