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
Form, Sensation, Emotion
[HUG interviews Santanu Das in the wake of his talk on D. H. Lawrence’s poetry in Delhi University on February 9, 2012] HUG: If I may take your reflections on Lawrence this week in DU as a platform to probe a little more on the current state of affairs in European Modernism scholarship (although Lawrence may not fit in with Modernism wholly), the first thing that comes to my mind is about the very idea of poetry itself. When you say that you look for pleasure in poetry, what exactly do you mean? Santanu: By ‘pleasure in poetry’, I meant at a fundamental level enjoyment of poetry i.e. the formal pleasure afforded by verse, or pleasure afforded by poetic form. Since poetry, more than the novel or the short story, is dependent on patterns of sound (rhythm, meter, rhyme etc), the sensuous pleasure at the immediate, bodily level is often intense. Increasingly, we are addressing and trying to theorise not just the technical aspects of verse – what often goes under the name of prosody – but the role of the human sensorium in the enjoyment of verse. Note that the New Critics were keenly aware of this, though they perhaps did not theorise it: an excellent example of this is The Music of What Happens by Helen Vendler who remains one of the most important and pleasurable critical voices. A more theoretical approach is developed recently by Susan Stewart in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. The ‘pleasure’ in poetry, with its proximity to the body, can be articulated through various theoretical models: the two that immediately come to my mind are ‘jouissance’ (Barthes) and ‘semiotic’ (Kristeva). However I think that such ‘theory’, if applied, has to be nuanced, and if possible woven into the texture of the writing: see Maud Ellmann’s The Poetics of Impersonality on modernist poetics which to me is one of the most brilliant examples of that combination of close reading, theoretical astuteness and just pleasurable, playful writing. A more recent work, very different but still acutely pleasurable, is Angela Leighton’s On Form, which may be considered as part of the swell of interest in what is now being called ‘new aestheticism’. HUG: There is a lovely, understated manner, in which you were trying to read Lawrence neither as a realist nor as a mystic. That brings us to a speculative domain that can be touched and felt at the same time. Is it just about Lawrence’s poetry or would you say that poetry and literature in general is about that kind of speculative materiality? Santanu: I’m sorry but I don’t think I wholly understand the question; and being old-fashioned (!), I’m slightly reluctant to make statements about poetry or literature in general. You’re absolutely right when you say that Lawrence is neither a realist nor a mystic: as I was trying to say, there is a wonderful play in his poetry between a perceptual delicacy and a performative excess. In fact Lawrence’s poetry, like much of Lawrence himself, flatly refuses to fit into any kind of theoretical model; that’s one of the main reasons I find him so fascinating. HUG: This brings me to this thing about this reaction against post-structuralist abstraction, historicism and discourse analysis too. You say a great deal about emotions, make sharp points about form but you also fundamentally think kinaesthetically. How is subjectivity related to matter? Santanu: I think I suggested that it is Lawrence who often thinks in terms of motion and energy, as if kinaesthesia is central to the birth of the poetic object in his consciousness (critics have often noted the influences of Heraclitus and Nietzsche, but I think this is not solely the reason). And yes, I’m very interested in emotions. Most of my work has circled, in one way or the other, around human emotions, often in times of crisis. As I said, what Lawrence wants to touch after all is not just the body – as often with Keats and Owen – but human feeling: ‘Tenderness’ was his initial title for Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When you say about ‘subjectivity (being) related to matter’, yes, I think you were responding to the phenomenological underpinnings of the paper, that our consciousness is not just a subjective shiver but usually consciousness of the world – I was partly reacting against the excesses of some stands within post-structuralism on one hand and the over-density of some new historicist works. I was trying to highlight the acuity of Lawrence’s phenomenological thinking, while paying close attention to literary form and historical context, as when I discuss the startling passage from Lawrence’s ‘Insouicance’. HUG: On a related point: phenomenological everydayness may have a rough, often an antagonistic relationship to history. But some people that you cite in order to buttress the point on Lawrence’s sense of the tactile—say, Sartre or Merleau Ponty or Lefort, are deep historicists too? Santanu: Yes, there is often an assumed antagonism between the two but the challenge is to historicise the everyday. Think of a novel about the everyday or a day, such as Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway or Joyce’s Ulysses, and how absolutely enmeshed the ‘day’ is in the history, whether that of post-war London or semi-colonial Dublin. One of my main aims in Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature was to unravel the everyday in the trenches through the sensuous, and show how historical factors impact on the contingent. As you know, at the moment there is a big interest within modernism in the everyday, and the phenomenological is increasingly brought in dialogue with the historical – think of a work like Sara Danius’s The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception and Aesthetics. I think that Michael Levenson is also very interested in the phenomenological and the perceptual, and how the historical contexts of modernity bring about a shift in perception, or create ‘the shock of the new’. HUG: What is your sense of transgression in poetry? If we do not
Success, Publishing & Indian Comics
Bharath Murthy This piece is a presentation of my views on the comics medium in India, and some of my ideas for the growth of the form. These ideas are the result of the last few years spent trying to understand the medium. My background is in painting, (I studied painting in college) and I want to create as well as publish comics successfully to the end of my life. These views come from this commitment to the form. I also studied film making, and strangely enough, I had an opportunity to make a feature length documentary film in Japan about its vast self-published comics (doujinshi) culture. I learnt about the manga industry and found out why it is the the most successful comics industry in the world. I met many manga authors, publishers, printers, readers and realized how little westerners and Asians like us know about Japanese manga. Before making this film, I also sniffed around a little bit into the Indian comics scene, having received a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts, Bengaluru, to study Indian comics. I wrote a 5000 word essay about Indian comics which was published in Marg magazine in 2009. The same year, I also started an independent comics magazine called COMIX.INDIA (www.comixindia.com). What follows is a ‘fact finding report’, and the ‘recommendations’ of this report on how we can have fun, make money and generally enjoy creating and consuming comics in India. Why black & white is better than colour for comics printing: Colour printing began during the late 19th century, but picked up only by the 1930s. Colour comic strips appeared in American Sunday supplements pretty much the same time as comic strips themselves. The newspaper form gave birth to the modern comic strip as we know it. By the 1930s, 32 page comic books appeared in American news stands in 4-colour printing. This is the format of American comic book that continues to this day. From the website http://www.dereksantos.com/comicpage/pregold.html : In 1933, after seeing the Ledger syndicate publish a small amount of their Sunday comics on 7 by 9 inch plates, an idea hit upon two printer employees. Sales manager Harry L. Wildenberg and saleman Max. C. Gaines, employees of Eastern Color Printing Company in New York, saw the plates and figured two of these plates could fit on a tabloid page and produce a 7 1/2 by 10 inch book when folded. Gathering 32 pages of newspaper reprints including Mutt and Jeff, Joe Palooka, and Reg’lar Fellas, they created Funnies on Parade. This was the first comic produced in a format similiar to modern comics. Looking to test their product, they published 10,000 copies to be given out as premiums by Proctor and Gamble. Impressed by this success, Gaines convinced Eastern Color that he could sell thousands of these to big advertisers like Kinney Shoe Stores, Canada Dry, and Wheatena to be used as premiums and radio giveaways. Because of this, Eastern followed by printing Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics and later Century of Comics, both containing Sunday newspaper reprints. M. C. Gaines was able to sell these in quantities of 100,000 to 250,000 copies. Century of Comics was the 2nd comic book and the first 100 page comic. One fact is significant here. The first comic books were reprints of Sunday strips that first appeared in the low quality newspaper format, where they met with initial success. The first monthly comic magazines were anthologies and appeared in 1934. They all had 4-colour printing. In 1935, National Allied Publications, later renamed DC Comics, was the first publisher to print original material in the 32 page monthly comic format. It was in this format that superhero characters came to be in 1938, beginning with Superman. From then, till now, 2009, 71 years later, the format has been the same. 4-colour printing has become synonymous with superheroes and with the comic book form itself. In India, colour printing got associated with comics by following the American example. It gave rise to the notion that comics MUST BE in colour, and the idea that Indian comic readers will not buy comics unless they are in colour. These notions are common among Indian comics publishers. However, we’ve had our fair share of successful b&w comics and 2-colour comics (way cheaper than full 4-colour printing). For example, Mayukh Choudhury, Narayan Debnath, Toms from Kottayam, Diamond comics magazine (all Pran comics in b&w), the comics in the now extinct ‘Target’ magazine, and countless other short comics in magazines. The model for comics production in India is the American DC/Marvel Comics model. This involves an assembly line setup, with employees working on a monthly salary or per project. In other words, a factory. This style of production is suited for large volumes. Artists are paid average salaries (unless their reputations precede them) and monthly colour comics are produced for news stands. But colour poses a problem here. If high quality colour comics are to be produced, the cost shoots up too much. Colouring takes the longest time to do in the production process. As a result, the narratives have to be short, so that they can be coloured on time. 32 pages a month, at high quality, is a very tough target to achieve. At low quality, it is easier, but doing colour and doing low quality is not such a great idea. Price Comparison of comics: Comic no. of pages Price in Rs. Quality of color printing Raj Comics (India) 96 40 low Tinkle Double Digest (India) 94 75 low-medium Virgin Comics (India) 32 30 high One volume of ‘Sandman'(DC Comics, America) 258 782 high Tintin comic (Europe) 62 380 very high One volume of ‘Buddha'(Black &White comic, Japan) 429 295 -n.a.- From this simple comparison, it is clear that colour comics are expensive to produce and buy, and the higher the production quality, the lesser the number of pages offered, restricting narrative length. The best value for money is provided by
Beware the Swiss Bearing Sausages?
Prasanta Chakravarty In a 2007 art summer school held in Irsee, southern Germany, the English artist Clive Head and the Anglo-Cypriot writer and art theorist Michael Paraskos held a joint class. Head and Paraskos had previously taught together at the University of Hull, but had both left academic teaching in 2000, and partly gone their separate ways. The reunion in Irsee resulted in their publishing a small pamphlet, The Aphorisms of Irsee, in which they set out a series of seventy-five aphoristic sayings on the nature of art. These assume importance with respect to what HUG is trying to do, but it also demonstrates how risky and dangerous a programmatic venture on art can get and how HUG distinguishes itself from the stubborn reactionary elements ingrained in this kind of a manifesto that develops around the movement of New Aestheticism at this point in different ways. It is remarkable that the aphorisms highlight a return to a certain materialist romance. There is clarion call to return to the specific and the definite—against dogma. It is apparent in the way the two of them begin their series of aphorisms; right from the very first one, a thread develops. This is a welcome move—asking us to think outside of the ethical, linguistic, discursive or purely subjective possibilities in appreciating art objects and creations. This immediacy and directness in art probably propels the duo to reject learnedness (‘Scholarship is the enemy of romance’—No. 34 or ‘Three artists make a movement. Four make an art school—No.59). But this very anti-intellectual stance is also a problem, to which I’ll return in a bit. There is an attempt to amplify the ambit of language and make art sharper with perception and emphasise its extraordinary possibilities. This is surely a reaction to semiotic and other forms of abstraction (‘To call art a language shows the paucity of the language with which we discuss art.’—No. 41). Quite early on, both Head and Paraskos articulate a call to create forms of the impossible—heavens or anti-heavens. ‘Anti-heavens’ is an excellent idea and that gets quite an interesting shape through the notion of ‘slowing down’ (No.2), except for the fact slowing down means a mundane coffee binge! Is this a paucity of imagination, or a deliberate pointing towards the ordinary, placid and the average? Is this a counter move against over-reaching? It is terrific to see a celebration of curiosity and astonishment and a thorough, well-deserved dressing down of pettiness (‘Art should astonish its viewer, but most art is too mean-spirited to do this’—No. 15). HUG is particularly invested in everyday wonders and mutinies. And the aphorisms surely make a case for the sensuous, but again whether a return to sensuous merely points to towards forms of nature-philosophie is a thing to take stock of (‘Central heating has destroyed English art. It has removed the artist from feeling the real world—No. 61). What is real here? And how does matter work in such a real world? The real issue with New Aestheticism is that it hankers for a believable space that can be ordered. This is a dangerous reaction to things that might spill over, against the radical utopian possibilities of art. Hence, little wonder that the most disturbing aspect of the manifesto is that art is subservient to politics. There is nothing new in this kind of retrograde move. In fact, telling examples of how art ought to be safe and sanitised gets shape in No. 51 and No. 52: (Sometimes even the artist should realise it is too cold to go for a swim /One should live for one’s art, but there is no need to die for it). There is an extraordinary vituperation against photography and performance (also against literature, at a remove): Photography is too real—too material and reproductive. This is really a bad and un-nuanced understanding of materiality involved in the art of photography. And the chief charge against performative art is that it is an exercise in movement and dynamism: (Performance is not art: it moves too much and so adds to the flux. Art is always a moment of longed-for stasis—No. 38). The idea of stasis can generate freedom and anarchy, but in this case it seems to argue for collected tranquillity. But the amazing call for the national, the quasi-religious and the personal-salvific are the most reactionary elements in this new aesthetic world. How does Germany and England get placed against the Swiss? It is a certain deeply conservative idea of nationality that gets transferred to the idea of communion (No. 48) and transubstantiation (No.39). Such religiosity means naturopathy, therapeutics and is sharply moral (Bad art demeans nature and, because of this, bad art is immoral—No 55)! Politics or charting everyday conflicts in art would seem to the New Aesthete to be wallowing in acts of guilt and suffering. Pain has to be alleviated, not dissected. This is again an extraordinarily narrow and unhelpful binary—between pain and panacea, between trying to understand the vicissitudes of life and their mitigation through art. Since art has a moral aim, it should not try to be ironical. At best it can be playful, Head and Paraskos affirm. Notice how humour in art has to hide anger, not highlight it (No. 73) and terror is de-historicized completely, beyond human comprehension (No. 35). It is good to see some new moves in literary criticism at the beginning of this century. And manifestoes often clarify certain things at the basic level. But aphorisms also mean dogmatism of a different kind. They set the terms for repeatability. Art and art-practice becomes a project. One gets into the business of institutionalizing and ordering chaos. ———————————————– The Aphorisms of Irsee ( originally published in print form by the Orage Press, London in 2007.) 1. Art is always definitive, but never dogmatic. 2. Artists should slow down and experience the world. A quiet cup of coffee is often the best starting point for art. 3. All artists create heavens. The heaven of God; or, the anti-heaven of the Devil; or,