Tram-Traveller
Utpal Kumar Basu (translated by HUG) Some of the days my office would start early. Used to sit with work pretty much in the morning. By noon I would usually take a tram-car back home. Often I used to detect the wan, unwell but steadfast Samar Sen returning home too. He’s also a morning worker. I would spot a dank rexine bag that he carried along. Must be the papers of the Frontier magazine? Proofs, manuscripts, reams of letters? What else might he be carrying? Are there no poems—one or two surely? A scribbled draft, some acolyte seeking wisdom?—my imagination knew no bounds. Because Samar Sen is a poet. Though for the past 40 years he had not written any poetry. His interest in literature had thinned, but flowed underneath. A streak. He had chosen the genre of the political commentator to write and reflect. And his English prose style is vintage. Ah—a classical romantic—am I confusing tendencies? It won’t be an exaggeration to say that his Frontier was nurtured mostly by a readership that was not Bengali. I used to often encounter a walking myth in that second class tram-car. Those were times when it was not difficult to summon awe. My day would go well. When he counted the change while buying tickets—the many ashoka-stambhs, portraits of national leaders, an India robust and bustling with agricultural and industrial wealth—ah, how each of those coins would dance and dazzle. Every single one of those icons the poet had tirelessly pulled down, scorned, ridiculed all these years. I almost began to contemplate and hope fervently, that those coins would slip quietly through his fingers. But they didn’t—how surprising! Samarbabu lives in a rented place in South Calcutta. Last monsoon his ground floor apartment was awash—with water and flotsam. Since then he has gone upstairs, at the behest of the kind landlord. He has, don’t we know, refused all governmental aid, apartments and houses with no hesitancy. In his later life, sundry biochemical medicines would be his sole, faithful mates. Perhaps he didn’t have the wherewithal or didn’t opt for a costly treatment. It is an intractable pride that only a revolutionary can summon. Someone who engineered history and was a part of it. Not an academic. Not an activist. Had Samarbabu bowed down his head a little, smiled a wee bit—there would have been no dearth of garlands for him. Had he not raised that wan finger of his and cursed passionately, logically and incessantly–the many ills that irk and bother our social fabric—surely his finger would have exhibited some diamond-studded ring by now. But all he wanted, my poet, was to “Suffuse my dreams with the fragrance of the mahua-flower.” Utpal Kumar Basu is one of the leading poets of Bengal. adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Fair’s Unfair
Anisha Datta Against the backdrop of a globalized capitalist economy and postcolonial modernity, contemporary Indian metropolises are sites of prolific production and consumption. Since the mid-1980s an intensified and highly visible consumer culture has emerged in urban spaces and there has been an unprecedented proliferation of media and mediated images in everyday life. Advertisements are the symbols of India’s globalized and deregulated economy and its main consumers are the upwardly mobile middle class. India has a huge middle-class population of approximately 250–350 million with growing purchasing power, reflected by the remarkable increase in purchase of consumer durables in the last decade. Recently, the global real-estate consulting group Knight Frank ranked India fifth in the list of 30 emerging retail markets. In this essay, I will undertake a feminist and postcolonial deconstruction of one of the ‘Fair & Lovely’ face cream advertisements in order to unpack how this particular advertisement appeals to a set of dominant gender and aesthetic prejudices by seducing the careerist and consumerist desires of educated young Indian women. [2] (For a video version of the ad–please visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yET6dTSYsSA ) Baudrillardian Moments At the outset, I would like to point out two classic Baudrillardian moments that I experienced while I was surfing the website (www.agencyfaqs.com) from where I accessed this advertisement. The ‘agencyfaqs’ website aptly reflects how production and consumption intersect with and reconstitute each other in the new media of the World Wide Web, and that too on a global scale. It is a website where the advertising agencies are advertising their products, primarily targeting potential client corporations; and at the same time it is a site for pure entertainment and leisure for a casual Internet surfer. And in the role of a casual surfer I chanced upon this website and this particular advertisement. Secondly, this website represents the extreme ephemeral and episodic nature of form that characterizes the postmodern world. The site uploads any new ad’s audio/visual form, which they call the streaming version, as well as the still image-frames which are termed the storyboard. But the streaming version can be accessed only in the first few days, when the new ad is being beamed over the television channels and hence still ‘live’. After which it is withdrawn from the website, and then one can only find the storyboard version of the same advertisement – which by now has been reduced to the status of ‘file picture’. This reflects the transient existence of any mass-circulated sign today, be it fashion, news item or advertisement. Its only recently that one discovers the adverstisement on sites like youtube for another kind of consumption. The Narrative Unpacked The narrative of the advertisement revolves around an educated young woman with a passion for cricket, the most popular sport in India, who aspires to be a TV cricket commentator. The advertisement also depicts the hyperreal journey of an ‘ordinary’ young woman from an unknown city neighbourhood to the globalized information highways of satellite television and ‘live’ cricket matches. The story of Indian cricket, which begins with the first mention of a cricket match played by British sailors in Cambay in 1721, is a story of its gradual indigenization. Since India’s victory in the World Cup Cricket tournament in England in 1983, cricket has emerged as a huge corporate business in India in terms of match sponsorship, product endorsement by cricket players and the revenue generated through telecast rights and advertisements shown during telecast cricket matches. [3] As we know, cricket in India is popularly portrayed in chaste terms, as being a social unifier cutting across class and regional boundaries, a civilizing agent and a national cultural bond striving to overcome religious, caste and language divisions. Since the mid-1980s, there was a significant change in the nature of cricket consumption with the spread of viewership through television, which has taken cricket out of its urban confines to the villages and small towns. During the last World Cup Cricket tournament in February 2003, 79.9 million Indians tuned into live cricket telecasts, of which 36.5 million – that is close to 50 per cent – were female viewers. [4] In the words of cricket historian Ramachandra Guha, cricket has become a vehicle for the playing out of nationalist feeling. [5] India’s success in the game can also be viewed as the reappropriation of cricket by a former British colony, a typical phenomenon of the ‘Empire striking back’. The indigenous adoption of cricket also reflects certain ideas of self-cultivation, manliness and self-worth. The game became a mirror through which a (middle class) [6] Indian identity assessed itself. However, it is to be noted that even today, cricket commentary in India is overwhelmingly a male domain, as is the case with all other televised sports. Therefore, the aspiration of the girl in the advertisement indicates a definite breaking of new ground, a detraditionalizing move, as she wants to make a foray into a traditionally male occupation. Commentators have always been men and often these days one finds images of former (male) cricketers wielding the microphone on TV instead of the willow and the ball. Thus the advertisement projects a hyperreal world in which gendered occupational barriers have apparently withered away, courtesy of commodity consumption. Let us now look into the initial images in some detail: the woman is walking into an expansive cricket field dressed in a three-piece suit, salwar kurta, which is a typical dress of young working women in urban India. The shot of the woman walking into the huge field in the image is quite significant, as it can be read as the allegorical representation of the woman’s entry into the juggernaut world of a high-profile career and conspicuous consumption. Moving on to a later images in frame five, she is seen to be practising mock commentary while watching a cricket match on the TV. Keeping in mind the present status of cricket in India, the advertisement simulates the fusion of commerce and leisure/entertainment by representing the woman watching cricket on TV, commentating and
London Stopped & Searched
Saroj Giri The black youth, together with the ‘feral scum’ of other colours, has always been stopped and searched, detained. But what happens when he stops and searches, detains the city? Clarence Road in Hackney, on Monday night ( August 8 ) saw mass participation in looting in the presence/participation of large sections of the community from Pembury estate. Perhaps unlike in other areas, here the looting looked less like ‘criminality pure and simple’ and more like people breaking into a shop and quietly, with a tacit understated mutual understanding, walking away with what they needed for free from the store – looting as the expression of some kind of a general will. At least two hundred people were present and participating. With wheelie bins smouldering in the road and police helicopters droning overhead, a group of black women holding hands burst into Bob Marley’s ‘Rastaman chant’ as a car went up in flames. For a moment I thought it was Marley’s ‘Looting and Burning Tonight’ but it wasn’t. Complete with this fitting music, the disorder seemed orderly, particularly considering the hundreds of people collectively participating in it without any violence to each other. At one moment someone climbs up a lamp-post and tries to pull down the CCTV camera – the crowd below obviously cheers and applauds. Large sections of ‘responsible’ society, including its progressive sections, feel violated by this mass looting, illegality and, some would say, immorality. And yet the underclass seemed to establish and assert themselves precisely in and through their worthlessness and illegality. The ‘cheap thrill’ element of looting petty consumer items was there. And yet there was something else going on too. Hence even though some of those in it did feel moral compunctions about looting as something immoral, they would still go along with the overall spirit and ‘idea’ behind it. Indeed, in some cases, people went ahead with the collective wisdom of looting and arson even when it posed a danger to them and their property. Was it irrationality, or acting politically? Consider this: “A middle aged Iraqi political refugee clutched to his chest his valuable personal documents that he’d salvaged, and worried that the car burning in the street might ignite his flat just above, but was torn by sympathy for the youth, who were up against the very same forces who’d turned his own country into a killing ground” (http://www.revcom.us/a/242/AWTWNS_london_burning-en.html). This only means that the looting and arson was on the whole, and through associations not so obvious, somehow placed on the side of those fighting power and the repressive machinery. The main thrust of it was subversive and anti-authoritarian even if far from being formally anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and so on. It is to suppress this that those in power have whipped up so much hypocritical affect to invoke so-called moral values and responsibility to denounce it as mere looting and criminality. This approach criminalizes the ongoing protests/looting, treating them as a problem of crime in general and the breakdown of parenting in particular. The other so-called left or progressive approach is no better. Apparently opposed to the first one, it views the protests/looting as a by-product of poverty, unemployment, cuts and so forth – it says, let us look at the context. Both approaches however deny the protests/looting their specificity. Let us take the ‘context’ argument. While cuts and unemployment do provide the context, the angry youths seem to be castigating ‘public order’ and ‘society’ in more fundamental ways than is warranted by such economic hardships. There is an excess in these actions which refuses to be reduced to some prior set of explanatory factors. It stands out, reconfiguring things in new ways. For contrast, take the student protests last year. Very militant and sometimes violent too – and yet they had a clear demand and could be referred back to specific government policies, so that the dominant fabric of society as such was not their target. They represented particular organizations and the agents were identifiable as students and so on. Not this one though. This time it is more like an anonymous ‘rabble’ attacking no identifiable body and no demands have been put forth – nothing and no one, in short, for the powers-that-be to engage with. The so-called community leaders (calling for an end to the protests/riots) themselves appear so out of touch with this ‘rabble’, thereby completing the picture. Far from making demands and seeking upward mobility, there is instead a rejection of society, a conscious violation of public order. And nobody saw this ‘intifada of the underclass’ coming, even if everybody knew the ‘context’ – of poverty and marginalisation. Like proletarian shock troopers appearing from the forgotten inner recess of society, they seem to castigate and violate ‘our way of life’ and social norms. Here are those at the bottom of society no longer wanting to suffer or undergo the regimentation and socialization and discipline (what Cameron calls ‘learning to take responsibility’) in order to go up in life, become decent citizens and so on. Many of them refuse to be integrated and assimilated – while this often means that they then get hired/used to do the dirty criminal work for those in power (Fanon’s ‘lumpen proletariat’), the consequences are not always so grim. For there is also an unmistakable political tendency here going back to the Black Panthers (well, you had the British Black Panthers too) of refusing to get assimilated in/by mainstream society – part of what the Panthers called ‘self-determination’. These political ideas circulate in various forms, often very incoherently, in the black community, in popular memory, as a line in hip hop lyrics, a random quote from Malcolm X (‘by any means necessary’) – often as thought, an ‘unconscious’ response or deeply ingrained leaning, a propensity. To say that the protests and riots are mere objective effects of a bad socio-economic context is to take away the thought, the politics or subjective leaning suffusing them. In being arraigned against capital and
“You Have Seen Nothing in Hiroshima, Nothing”: Evidence & Cinematic Image
T.P. Sabitha Alain Resnais’ film, Hiroshima mon amour (1957), makes an audacious claim when the Japanese man makes this remark repeatedly to his French lover when she claims to have “seen” Hiroshima: “Tu n’a rien vu á Hiroshima, rien.” This denial is the possibility of the text of narration that cannot be done with the image. When the camera ‘sees’ something, it cannot be ‘nothing’ that it sees. The image can only assert, not functionally serve as a denial or negation. What is negated is the truth of her claim that she has “seen” Hiroshima: the hospitals and the museum. When she says this, the camera takes on a documenting role, moving through the corridors of the hospital and ‘recording’, almost without a witnessing agent, the exhibited objects at the museum – stones, human skin, human hair, as well as the ‘recreated’ performances of the Hiroshima bombing, the actors apparently on fire, their skin peeling off, the enacted deaths. We see the ‘documented’ people at the hospital often startled by the camera; they look directly at it, thus the cinematic image is made in the convention of the documentary film, moving through spaces and creating a cartography of the ‘real’ that she claims to have seen. However, the man denies that what she has seen is the ‘real’. What she sees is not testimonially adjudicated as Hiroshima, hence we can perhaps think that Hiroshima exceeds this, it is not containable in representation. The representation does not attest to the reality of Hiroshima, with the text of narration breaking down and negating the ‘reality’ of what is shown. What we see here, through these images, is not Hiroshima. Compare for a moment, Renè Magritte’s painting “This is not a pipe”, with the image of a pipe and the text that denies that it is a pipe. On the one hand, it is quite obvious that it is not a pipe, but the picture of a pipe. On the other it is a radical pictorial statement (since the writing in cursive hand is within the picture) about the limits of attestation or the impossibility of re-presenting the ‘real’, about the inherent fictionality of pictorial art, and perhaps too, on the function of art which is not to re-“present” anything outside of itself. This is what Michel Foucault writes about the scrawled text “This is not a pipe” within the painting: “Yet perhaps the sentence refers precisely to the disproportionate, floating, ideal pipe – simple notion or fantasy of a pipe. Then we should have to read, ‘Do not look overhead for a true pipe. That is a pipe dream. It is the drawing within the painting, firmly and rigourously outlined, that must be accepted as a manifested truth’” (This is not a Pipe. Pp. 16-17.) Resnais does something similar here, while showing us images of Hiroshima, the narration denies that it is Hiroshima that we are seeing. Hiroshima here signifies an absence that the cinematic image cannot show us, a manifestation outside of itself. It can, though, show us Hiroshima from his point of view, Hiroshima as his recollection-image. However, the Hiroshima that must exist vis-à-vis that which is not Hiroshima, is not shown in the film. That is perhaps the ideal, the ideational Hiroshima that cannot be actualised, through what Gilles Deleuze calls the “false piety” of the image of “actualitè”, the documenting image that bears a certain reverence for the evidence of the “real” (Cinema 2, Pp. 122). But Hiroshima as an experienced event in time is never shown in the film. The question “if this is not Hiroshima, then what/when/where is Hiroshima?” is never answered. The only fictionalising of the Hiroshima bombing is what she and the camera see in the hospitals and museums, the re-creation, the re-collection, the re-gathering perhaps, of the event. The fiction of documentary is also seen in the reference to the “Peace Film” to act in which the French woman has come to Hiroshima. Marguerite Duras’s script says of the Peace Film: “It is not necessarily a ridiculous film; merely an enlightening one” (HMA, 39). We never see that “Peace Film” within Hiroshima mon amour. All we see are sets being dismantled and carried away and she removing her makeup. The sets and the makeup emphasise the ‘falseness’ of the documentary film, its fictiveness. The referential and signifying linkage between image and text is broken when, just as we are shown images of the Hiroshima that she has seen, he negates it and we are told we have seen nothing of Hiroshima. Is there a possibility of thinking that nomination (‘Hiroshima’) is impossible as an effect of the visual? The two protagonists too, significantly, are not named in the film, until the end when they call each other by the names of cities/sites of a sight that is not attested to in the film. Can the image attest to/ name anything by itself? The ‘real’ in the documentary is ascribed as the ‘real’ by a certain usage of technique or visual grammar. Resnais seems to deny what Carl Plantinga calls “Asserted Veridical Representation” while discussing the ‘documenting’ status of the documentary film. (“What a Documentary Is, After All”). Resnais denies this assertion, the ability of the image to nominate what it shows, and instead fictionalises her recollection-image, a powerful sequence of the ‘false’, her story that is actualised in this fiction film. The Hiroshima that she has seen and he denies as being Hiroshima, is partly the fiction of Hiroshima through documentary images and hyper-real museums; Resnais inserts some newsreel footages into the images of what she has “seen” in Hiroshima that, fast-edited, almost work as a parodic pastiche. However this ‘false’ Hiroshima is acknowledged as capable of affective power when she says: “The reconstructions have been made as authentically as possible. The films have been made as authentically as possible. The illusion, it’s quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry”. The fiction of the ‘authentic’, the ‘actual’, is