The Diva & the Minister
Prasanta Chakravarty It is indeed remarkable when a chief minister of a state gets a by-line in a leading newspaper, even if that is ghost written to a considerable degree. But it is not really unusual, if the CM claims to be an artist, poet and creative writer who is forever reaching out to the masses through her art as with her political skills and rhetorical acumen. Mamata Banerjee has written a full blown account of her interactions with Suchitra Sen in the last few days of the actor’s life in a superb political public relations exercise in a Bengali daily. It tells us more about the chief minister herself than about Ms. Sen. It also once again tells us about the political leader’s relationship with the very nature of the culture that she peddles and how she seeks to leverage that aspect in the public domain. Beyond Bengal, such moves also suggest something very important in Indian politics right now: the relationship that the so called post-ideological popular platforms have with the cultural front. The relationship of politics with popular iconography and sentiment is a fascinating realm. W. J. T. Mitchell has argued that we need to reckon with images not just as inert objects but as animated beings that exert a certain force in this world. The “complex field of visual reciprocity,” he writes, “is not merely a by-product of social reality but actively constitutive of it. Vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the sign, or to discourse. Pictures want equal rights with language, not to be turned into language.” In our country, the mobilization, and whipping up, of moral-nationalist ideals in the middle and lower middle classes has always been by working through popular schemes, festivals and other cultural fronts. We all know how the left has often used such cults of the popular for political ends. The nationalists, of course, thrive on belief systems of the popular. It is in this context that what Ms.Sen might represent in the Bengali psyche is heaven sent to the popular mass leadership, and the chief minister can ill afford let it go without re-fashioning it politically. It is a trend we have seen in recent times which will not go away in a hurry: to mobilize iconography around exemplary deaths. What does Ms. Sen represent, or what is being promoted as something she might represent, that makes it so significant? Two apparently divergent images jostle for primacy. On the one hand, here is someone who is sure of herself and her charms; is haughty, distant, capricious, humorous and deeply aware of her worth and esteem. It is an image of a surefooted worldly wise diva who made herself a recluse by choice, for her own needs. On the other hand, we also notice a seemingly contrary image of a god-fearing person in a spiritual quest—who decided, upon catachresis and eventual diksha, to eschew ‘greed’ and maintain an economy of minimalism and ‘poverty’ in her lifestyle—so we are told. In this mode she is no more a sexual being of flesh and blood to be coveted, or one who is desirous of material needs herself. Here is the grihi who is also capable of renunciation. And so here is a cocktail which is absolutely electrifying, begging to be successfully channelled by the mass leader and media houses to the people. And no one understands the power of this amorphous image better than the current Bengal chief minister. Seeing Is Believing The first thing that a populist leader likes to fathom is the religious and cultural aspirations of the hoi polloi, to gauge and work out methods in order to handle and whip up the potentials of lay spirituality. In this framework, it is extremely important to stress the psychological subtleties and interiority of the mass. And to simultaneously have a strong sense of the provincial and the everyday—sociologically speaking. Not ideology and theory, but a study of the practices and lifestyles of popular icons and figures needs to be done first and morphed into the aspirations of a people. It is therefore important, if a popular icon is be venerated and memorialized effectively , that the rituals and motifs about her be carefully collected, nurtured and crafted: from gossip, anecdotes, snippets, rumours, and of course, to make sure that there is a constant circulation of certain iconic moments from the diva or the saints’ works and life—the very basis of the aura—a rich amorphousness of her mystical iconicity. It might be misleading to argue for metaphors and imageries for social reality but if we can create a network of images around a particular icon, built by the media and the powers that be, and then locate these networks in the social experience of a population, it may reveal to us what politicos most deeply care about themselves and hope to justify to others through certain other lives and events. But a caveat is in order here: even as we try to understand these manoeuvres, we have to see them as insiders functioning within a baroque modern formulation and not merely critique the phenomenon from ideological, juridical or historicist points of view. That mode is impatient and a short cut. Elaborating on the word icon Saba Mahmood has reminded us that it refers not simply to an image but to a cluster of meanings that might suggest a persona, an authoritative presence, or even a shared imagination. In this view, the power of an icon lies in its capacity to allow an individual (or a community) to find him- or herself in a structure that has bearing on how one conducts oneself in this world. The term icon, she tells us, therefore pertains not just to images but to a form of relationality that binds the subject to an object or an imaginary. This is a communitarian definition of an icon that fits well with the popular-nationalist