Acid Rock, Mrinal Sen and The Seventies
Sharmadip (Toy) Basu The Bengali Marxist film-maker Mrinal Sen’s Kolkata Ekattor, or Calcutta ’71, is celebrated in the genealogy of Indian New Wave cinema as an exemplar of dialectical storytelling. Released in 1972, it comprises four discrete short stories by different authors. In, and through, these narratives, Sen’s directorial gaze seeks to render apparent the ‘lie of freedom’—a powerful ideological orientation vis-à-vis 1947 that grounded Marxist criticism in India at the time. And like artistic productions emanating from this ideology, Calcutta ’71 is a scathing class-critique of the Indian nation-state’s diseased underbelly, during its immediate pre-natal past, and in the first two decades of its post-natal being. For someone unfamiliar with this second installment of Sen’s famous Calcutta Trilogy, the pedigree of the film would make it appear an unlikely point of departure for an essay that seeks to pursue the subcultural life of Sixties’ American music in the city. But Calcutta ’71 helps me enframe a couple of my concerns. How are the class relations worked out in which American music is represented to be embedded in mid-seventies India by a Marxist-Realist filmmaker, who claims a high degree of correspondence between representation-of-reality and reality-of-representation for much of his oeuvre? In the process, can we also chart a certain new cultural-musical subjectivity animated by re-articulations of Sixties American music in the city during the 1970s? Positioning Rock Music in a Realist Narrative: Each of the four constituent stories that comprise Calcutta ‘71 is grounded in a different decade, sequentially, from 1930s onwards. Each story follows disparate denizens of the erstwhile imperial capital, caught in different stations in life. Nonetheless, voluntarily or by ascription, the characters are also subjects of that of much fraught category: the genteel bhadralok class Training its critical lens on subjects of this entropic category, Calcutta’71 begins with a depiction of the dehumanizing compulsions of urban poverty in colonial Calcutta of 1930s. The second story addresses the utter vacuity of this genteel moral apparatus against the backdrop of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Sited in a compartment of a 1950s Calcutta-bound suburban train, the third narrative concerns food-crisis and the ad-hoc violence unleashed on the under-classes by self-appointed protectors of bourgeois civility. And then, follows the closing movement of Calcutta ’71. Set against the backdrop of far-left political tumult, brutal state-repression, and abject living conditions in the city at the close of the Sixties—something that would putatively find its democratic resolution with the election of the Left Front coalition government to the state legislature in 1977—it is this last story that sets my reflections here. Here, one is made to confront the total disjunct of the urban elite—of the corrupt politicians that this class yielded—from the life-worlds of the people that they supposedly represented. To set the tone of this narrative at the very outset, Sen deploys a signal audio-visual maneuver. If the day-train headed towards Calcutta provided the spatial and sonic setting for the third story in the film, the fourth begins abruptly on the downstroke of electric guitars in unison, enveloped by a 4/4 backbeat being pumped out of a drum-set, and flashing strobe-lights against the night sky. Thus, at the drop of a single frame, the audience is yanked out of the local-train and its concatenated rhythm, out of the 1950s, and launched straight into Calcutta of 1971, into the sprawling gardens of an elite hotel. In terms of the city’s present-day spatial layout, the hotel could be located anywhere on Park Street and its adjoining areas: once the heart of colonial Calcutta’s ‘White Town,’ and now the preeminent site of postcolonial desire and colonial nostalgia. There, an evening party is underway. The sonic cue of drums and guitars on which the film’s final movement begins is sourced to a four-man Rock band, in situ. From a corner-stage on the lawns the band churns out a stirring up-tempo jam (composed by Ananda Shankar). Its sound invokes similitude with that of the San Francisco bands of the Sixties’ Haight-Ashbury milieu: the sound of Acid-Rock music; typified by bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, etc.; replete, with their characteristic improvisation techniques, mediated by modal Jazz and the influence of Raga music on the latter. Yet, it is striking that no one in the party pays the band any mind; there is no active audience for their music. The cynosure of all eyes, and ears, instead, is Mr. Bannerjee—the industrialist-politician who, we are informed, secured his upward mobility in the class and political ladder by black-marketing food-grains during World War II. In fact, the only time the presence of the band is acknowledged explicitly in the narrative is when Bannerjee, facing the band, claims to his acolyte the credit for having hired them. In the film, Bannerjee is the manifest embodiment of the ‘lie of freedom’ that Mrinal Sen sets out to unmask. He is representative of the anglophilic, postcolonial urban bourgeoisie—that, in Sen’s gaze, merely replaced the British at helm of political power in 1947, while the exploitative structure of the colonial state remained intact in its postcolonial guise. Comfortably sequestered from the blighted everyday life of the masses, the field of power that Bannerjee defines cannibalizes everything in its ambit. It renders human relationships hollow and evacuates all revolutionary potential from art. It is an ideology critique. Hypocrisy of the urbanity and other concomitant sins drip from almost every statement that Bannerjee and the other partiers utter. Their crudity gets gratingly heightened against Sen’s pivotal use of montages over events at the hotel. Apposing documentary-stills and moving-images of malnourished bodies, of political protest and State-violence, frames with only verbal text and communist iconography, these montages act as the mottled mirror of reality to the phantasmatic world that the party defines. Its worth noting though that each time such a montage takes off, and then returns to back to the party, it does so via the Rock band. The camera cuts to exclusive shots of the stage and tight close-ups of the
Homeric-Thersitic
Robert H. Bell “But after all, what is the whole subject matter of that revered poem the Iliad but ‘the broils of foolish kings and the foolish populace’?”—Desiderius Erasmus (The Praise of Folly) Human folly at Troy is rampant, starting with the Greek king and commander Agamemnon, who recklessly insults Achilles, refuses to apologize, and suddenly, inexplicably, decides to test the resolve of his army. Declaring the end of the siege, the king is flummoxed when his troops flock eagerly to their ships. The Greek cause appears lost. Suddenly steps forth a remarkable, puzzling figure: “Thersites of the endless speech,” who “knew within his head many words, but disorderly;/vain, and without decency, to quarrel with the princes/with any word he thought might be amusing to the Argives.” Who is Thersites? Not even Homer seems to know. The single orator in the Iliad unidentified by rank, patronymic, or place of origin, his name suggests “loud-mouth” and “courage,” in the sense of boldness, impudence. Reputedly the ugliest man at Troy, he surpasses his glowing, glowering peers for sheer repulsiveness. Since only one other Iliadic character is individuated by appearance and few ever described physically, the elaborate delineation of an apparently minor, fleeting figure is striking. The bard oddly highlights and seemingly undermines Thersites. Deformed and despised, Thersites seems utterly grotesque. Despite conspicuous disqualifications, reviled Thersites seizes the stage and delivers a sixteen-line speech to the entire assembly. Astonishingly, this scorned freak publicly upbraids Agamemnon for greed and lust: you’ve already claimed valuable bronze and the choicest women, “whom we Achaians/give to you first of all whenever we capture some stronghold/Or is it still more gold you will be wanting, that some son/of the Trojans, breakers of horses, brings as ransom out of Ilion.” All this ransom and booty are the spoils “that I, or some other Achaian, capture and bring in? / Is it some young woman to lie with in love and keep her/all to yourself apart from the others? It is not right for/you, their leader, to lead in sorrow the sons of the Achaians.” After excoriating Agamemnon, and flaunting the principles of rhetoric, Thersites assails his audience (“Achaian girls . . . women, not men”), repudiates their mission, and urges abandonment. Although Thersites’ rabble-rousing is unavailing, it provokes an immediate, decisive reaction from Odysseus, who abuses and scourges Thersites. Everyone laughs over him happily. Entertained and amused, the soldiers forget their incipient mutiny and return to ranks. So much, it seems, for Thersites, basest wretch at Troy. Humiliated, a pathetic, obnoxious creature, he disappears into oblivion. As is right and proper, according to Odysseus, and to most right-thinking people. Reading Homer in the nineteenth century, Prime Minister Gladstone found the speech “not a good one.” Because Thersites is so flamboyantly over the top, he is not always credited for being on the mark. Critics tend to agree with the soldiers and Odysseus. They have marked Thersites’ tendentious description, his physical ugliness and moral turpitude. Is Thersites a monstrosity by heroic standards? Martin argues that the speech of Thersites, “quite literally, ‘without meter,’” is “over-determined to look bad by a number of criteria,” including slurring his words. Evidently “just an entertainer,” he “deserves no respect.” Much like the Hephaestos sequence, another intervention by a disabled figure prompting mocking laughter, this episode is disconcerting, and fruitfully so. But ought we to dismiss Thersites so precipitately? Notwithstanding the soldiers’ contempt, the narrator’s malice, and the PM’s condescension, Thersites’ “words of revilement” are words of power provoking instant reaction from Odysseus. Thersites is no blithering madman or prating malcontent, and Agamemnon’s reckless conduct he himself eventually acknowledges as folly or madness, até. Impertinent yet pertinent, speaking truth to power, Thersites is seriously threatening. He says that Agamemnon “dishonoured Achilles, a man much better/than he is.” Thersites sarcastically echoes and ironically lauds Achilles: “there is no gall in Achilles’ heart, and he is forgiving.” Ha! “Otherwise,” he says to Agamemnon, “this were your last outrage.” Thersites locates (one might say) the Achilles heel of the antagonistic chiefs. Shrewdly, he recognizes the gravity of the king’s transgression, and intuits how close Agamemnon was to being killed by the infuriated Achilles. Laughed at, willing to “say any word he thought might be amusing,” Thersites is an unusual yet recognizable comic figure. Aristotle conceives comic types as “worse” than men are, meaning less admirable in appearance, character, and conduct. While “high mimetic” characters like Achilles live for an ideal (glory, say, or arête), “low mimetic” figures like Thersites are more fully embodied. Thersites’ physical freakishness exposes the sexual and appetitive motives of Agamemnon and Achilles, and for his pains is pummeled and harried. Aristotle’s brief remarks On Rhetoric, identifying three types of comic characters, bear upon Thersites. He is a buffoon, jesting to amuse others; he is an eiron, feigning ideals to mock Agamemnon; he is also an alazon or imposter, strutting and blustering to aggrandize himself. It’s possible to regard Thersites as comic relief or as a foil to set off the solemnity of the heroes and their epic mission. In this view, Thersites is a lightning rod, like those Shakespearean commentators who exist, observes William Empson pungently, “not at all to parody the heroes but to stop you from doing so: ‘If you want to laugh at this sort of thing laugh now and get it over.” Arguably, Thersites absorbs the destructive capability of purely derisive cynicism. To sustain a potent, viable heroic spirit, one might conclude, Homer inoculates his characters to resist more devastating, potentially fatal, strains of irony. Though tempting, this model fails to account for the extent of Thersites’ disruptive force. Like Shakespeare who develops Thersites into a major character in Troilus and Cressida, Homer conjures not a stock buffoon but a truth-teller, a wise fool. Certainly Thersites is foolish and reckless: “disorderly;/vain, and without decency,” he thwarts order, propriety, and decorum. Thersites presumes the fool’s remarkable license to speak harsh truths. However abusive and merciless, his invective is inventive
Narrativisationalities of Ribaldian Discourse
Dilip Simeon This is my Rifle and that is my Gun, This is for shooting and that is for fun. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text, Discourse for this life, and Text for the next. Ethnicity, Felicity, Moment of Poesis, Deploying Derrida, contrive halitosis. Deconstruct Narratives, re-inventing the Nation, Imagining India, maximise obfuscation. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text..etc Field Marshal editor, Subaltern mate, Retrieving the Body, what fun to relate. Self from the Occident, Other from East, Apply your Mind to know Beauty from Beast. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun..etc This is my Thesis and that my curricula, Voyaging westwards, remain perpendicular. Narrativize textuality of sexuality, Canonize Prurience of Orientality. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text..etc Archaeological Silences, scatalogical noise, Knowledge is Power, wear it with poise. Positing Subject, we wish to sublate, Delivering seminar, we sit and rotate. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Eros, Telos, Nemesis, Mimesis, Mug up my jargon for passing your thesis. Alas ! Alack ! the subversifying Mind, Earning hard currency, so hard to find. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Mentalitie and Problematique, Academic fashions need a boutique Matriarch, Patriarch, theme for research, Mantra and Tantra from ivory perch. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun..etc Subliminalities of subtextualities, Ponder pomposities of prolix verbosities. Problematising the hidden thematic, Metatextualising intellectuals Asiatic. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Locating, Migrating, mastering Said, Oriental professor wants to get —–. Multicultural interpenetration, Metropolitan colonial wants integration. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Ethnographics of phantasmagoria, Induce seances of mental euphoria. While translating the palimpsest tender, Oh how I long for the opposite gender. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Overinterpreting marxist constipation, Wallow in post-modern self flagellation. Transposing observer to popular stance, Overdetermining professorial romance. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun..etc Agenda of subtext needs corrigendum, Traversing terrain of ethnic pudendum. Verbs become nouns, with lightening velocity, Opaqueness of meaning, euphonic ferocity. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Excavating silences, admiring the skirt, Unearthing allegories of lexico-inert. Pluralisms of syncretistic exterior, Massaging advisors’ psychic interior. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Dissecting semiotics of peasant Tebhaga, Fieldworking students need munim dhaga. But how to explain to examiners’ team, The subtler uses of dhaga munim. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc Teasing long hidden truths if I may, Bribing chaprasis how can I say. Slog long enough, material will out, By which time victory will turn into rout. This is my Rifle and that is my Gun…etc Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency Turmoil underneath causing slight divergency. Inverting reality only goes to show, Faculty wanting History from below. This is my Discourse, and that is my Text…etc. Dilip Simeon is a labour historian, political activist and chairperson of the Aman Trust. He is the author of Revolution Highway (Penguin India, 2010). adminhumanitiesunderground.org
Courtesans in the Academia?
Basuli Deb The National Women’s Studies Association in the US selected “Outsider Feminisms” as one of the sub-themes for their annual conference at Denver, Colorado, in November 2010. The conference itself was themed “Difficult Dialogues II” in continuation with the previous year’s topic. Drawing on outsider feminisms as a mode of critique, this was an attempt to engage in difficult dialogues around the performative arts which have been the disenfranchised areas of feminist inquiry within the US academia. In this context, I often keep on wondering how such dispossession is intensified in the context of transnational encounters between US academic feminism and the figure of the woman artist from beyond the borders? So, I thought I’d revisit Muzaffar Ali’s film Umrao Jaan (1981), based on Mirza Muhammad Hadi Ruswa’s 1905 Urdu novel Umrao Jan Ada about the life of the nineteenth century dancer courtesan, Umrao Jaan and think through the issue. Is it possible for performative feminism to get an entry into feminist inquiry by way of US film studies? So, this is an attempt to think and if possible, reinvent the position and role of outsider feminisms (like performative feminisms) within the structures of the academia. The larger question is about internal disciplinary hierarchies and boundaries within social sciences and humanities and ultimately about the politics of the job market. First, using the film Umrao Jaan as our lens, I’d like to think about the relationship in which feminist performative art, especially those embedded in a non Euro-American tradition, stands with respect to Women’s Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies departments/programs in the US. Transnational feminism happens to be the current buzzword within feminist inquiry, and departments and programs look cutting edge and frankly fashionable when such an area of feminist inquiry is introduced. But how has transnational feminism, with its strong affiliations with the idea of crossing borders, incorporated the figure of the woman artist from beyond the Euro-American cultural tradition? What is transnational feminism’s response to women artists, such as Umrao Jaan, who inhabit the courts of the Muslim aristocracy in the nineteenth century British empire in India? How much interest does transnational feminism have in getting to know the lives of these women courtesans who were caught in the double bind of being highly valued as artists and defamed as prostitutes? Why such women, despite their tragic stories of abduction from their natal families and being sold into prostitution, not eligible for entry into feminist studies, while human trafficking is becoming an increasingly significant area of feminist analysis? To draw on Audre Lorde’s famous description of multiple social locations of disenfranchisement for women, Umrao Jaan is perhaps the “sister outsider” of feminist studies; the likes of her hardly enter feminist inquiry, and more so when she belongs not to the underclass of Europe or America, but to the margins of the Indian aristocracy. What other factors make it so hard for some one like Umrao to enter the realm of feminist inquiry in the US academia? It is true that performance itself remains largely an untheorized and neglected area within feminist scholarship. But Umrao, in her relationship with Nawab Sultan, also embodies romantic love between an aristocrat and a courtesan that has little hope for culminating into wedded bliss. “Under western eyes” Umrao Jaan could have been lumped with the motley crowd of “Third World women”, rendered faceless and homogenous by their victim status. But Chandra Mohanty has already dismantled the authority of such feminisms by exposing the underlying imperialist, and by extension racist, assumptions that mark them. Umrao Jaan could possibly have entered the domain of feminist inquiry as the woman artist, but her art speaks another language—incomprehensible to US academic feminism with its meager interest in cultural studies and art forms outside the Euro-American tradition. This is true even when positions in Women’s Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programs and departments are opened up in transnational feminism. Contemporary art forms from elsewhere can still make an entry into the rarefied world of academic feminism, but the likes of Umrao Jaan, with their classical traditions and aristocratic affiliations, rarely do. Umrao’s chosen dance form, the mujra, as we know, sprang during the Mughal period and was heavily patronized by India’s Muslim aristocracy. Mujra is a hybrid form that the pre-sixteenth century theatrical storytellers routinely performed in the courtyards of the Hindu temples space. In mujra, kathak intersect with the vocal musical forms of the thumri and the ghazal. The thumri is the musical form which has an intimate and material relationship of women for Lord Krishna. Pangs of loss or separation, so central to the internal dynamics of the workings of the genre of the ghazal, takes a more formal shape sometime in the sixth century. Umrao, who performs the mujra for the royalty and the aristocracy of India, represents an excess in the realm of feminist inquiry—the sister outsider, debarred from entry even into the domain of transnational feminism, with its strong affiliations with the elsewhere—beyond the borders of the familiar. She is not Phoolan Devi—the bandit queen of India—the beloved of transnational feminist inquiry into Bollywood—the lower caste woman, the outlaw of the postcolonial state, the sensational exception to the rule of Third World women’s victimhood that “Western feminism” loves. Her nuanced, median position becomes her undoing even in the highly slotted academic space as it used to be in her known world. But what if Umrao Jaan tries to enter the realm of critical inquiry via an analytic of the British Empire in India in the nineteenth century? It is in the context of the 1857 series of wars between the British and the natives of India and the British repression of resistance against foreign rule that we need to understand the figure of Umrao. The British, in their imperial interests to rule India, annexed large territories of the princely states by dethroning the native kings of the region, often by claiming that they were inefficient rulers because their