Brokering culture

The controversy over the shooting of Deepa Mehta's "Water" has brought into focus two issues: marketing hype that brings a wide audience to films of mediocre artistic excellence and the trampling of fundamental rights by politically motivated factions. VISA RAVINDRAN maintains that all social change must be culture sensitive without affecting a person's freedom of expression.

"Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hands with a grip that kills it."

Rabindranath Tagore: Fireflies.

"Intolerance is the 'Do Not Touch' sign on something that cannot bear touching. We do not mind having our hair ruffled, but we will not tolerate any familiarity with the toupee that covers our baldness."

Eric Hoffer: The Passionate State Of Mind.

"We ought not to extract pernicious honey from poison-blossoms of misrepresentation and mendacious halftruths, to pamper the coarse appetite of bigotry and selflove."

S. T. Coleridge: Aids To Reflection.

INCREASINGLY we seem to be inhabiting a cultural space whose leitmotif is confrontation. The controversy over the shooting of "Water", the demonstrations against the Pope's visit and Valentine's Day, the protest and calumny against Dilip Kumar accepting an award from Pakistan, the violent reception of Deepa Mehta's earlier film, "Fire", the vandalism that greeted Hussain's nude Saraswathi and the latest addition to the list, Calcutta Customs detaining copies of Time magazine allegedly containing material "derogatory and defamatory" to the Father of the Nation in an interview with Gopal Godse (brother of Nathuram Godse) where it quotes him as saying that Gandhiji was "a hypocrite and his non-violence theory bogus", are all ethno- political responses to socio-cultural phenomena. A further divulsion is created by the ethnocentric belief that one's own group is superior and the defining point for all others, clashing with the xenocentrist perspective that products or ideas of one's society are inferior to those that originate elsewhere and therefore constantly looks outward for approval. When protest takes to the streets and the flames of controversy fuel violence, debate becomes difficult and dissent ossifies into inflexible stands.

Deepa Mehta's films are at best mediocre from the point of view of artistic excellence. Controversy wins for them a wider audience than they deserve. This is not to say that they have no value. "Fire" portrayed very well the claustrophobia of women's lives in suburban India and the lesbianism it offered as one option was only that - one option available to neglected wives if they were so inclined. "Earth" had mixed reviews and I would not like to comment on it because I have not seen it. "Water", from what we have been led to believe, is about widows taking to prostitution and focuses attention on a long-neglected segment of the female population. It is the location of the story by the banks of the holiest Indian river and the fact that the three women are Hindus that seem to have brought the ire of the Establishment upon it. But to call it the conflict between fundamentalism and the forces of reform/social justice etc. is to turn a blind eye to the self-conscious intentionality of these films. Focussing light on the dark corners of Indian society with a background of tourist India added for good measure to capture Western audiences - Varanasi, the Ganga and sexy widows with some torrid scenes thrown in can be as effective an attraction as Lajpat Nagar Sitas and Radhas expending pentup sexual energy between their repressed selves, not forgetting the totally unnecessary antics of the manservant watching the blue film in the presence of the sick old lady he is supposed to be looking after. As Shashi Deshpande remarks in an article about the relationship between reader and writer, consciously shaping one's writing for a reader "is to show a lack of faith in the reader. Such a thing may make marketing sense, but it makes no literary sense." This can be extended to films and other art equally. She also adds that globalisation has meant only waiting for approval from the West, it has not been a two-way connection, "a flow both ways". Some years ago when some of us met under an impressive banyan tree to talk to Peter Brooks and Jean-Claude Carri re - director and script-writer respectively of the nine-hour "Mahabharata" with an international cast performed in French at Avignon, and later compressed into a five-hour film that was privately shown in India during the Festival of France, Sadanand Menon accused Peter Brooks of exploiting India, of "prettyfying" it with bamboo blinds and brass lamps. The majority of us present there felt that was not the case, but I am often reminded of that scathing comment which is true of films like Deepa Mehta's: indifferent art carried on the shoulders of exotic India, laced with the titillation of the hitherto forbidden or repressed, providing currently fashionable themes. Prema Karanth's Kannada feature film, "Phaniyamma" sensitively portrayed the position of a child widow who never experienced marriage, but who, with the non-event, loses both childhood and meaningful adult existence. "The Widows of Brindavan" by Pankaj Butalia is an excellent documentary that is a graphic portrayal of the poverty and deprivation that mark the lives of these unfortunate women shunned by their families, forced to sing bhajans for eight hours a day in order to get the rice and dhal given as payment. Santwana Bardoloi's award-winning Assamese feature film "Adajya", deals with the lives of three Brahmin widows in a feudal set-up where patriarchy rules the roost. It does so with understanding and lyrical beauty but does not compromise the truth. None of these films, however, has had the exposure they deserve, since they were neither buoyed up by controversy nor carried up to dizzy heights of marketing hype and they have been confined to the film festival and private-viewing circuit (except, perhaps, for "Phaniyamma"). That is the fate of what is called "parallel cinema".

Whatever the level of artistic merit in Deepa Mehta's films, however, one cannot condone the violence that the political groups have unleashed or the motivated support that some non-BJP governments have extended. Her detractors question her bona-fides and her supporters see in the U.P. government's action a failure to protect the fundamental right of a citizen to freedom of expression. Amol Palekar has objected to this "precensorship" as extraconstitutional adding that the Censor Board is there to make the necessary changes once the film is completed. Mr. O. Rajagopal, Minister of State for Law, countered that in BBC's Question Time, by saying that in a democracy people's perceptions must be respected even if they are erroneous in emotionally- charged contexts involving culture and tradition, and that government's first responsibility is to diffuse a potentially explosive situation. One is back to walking the tightrope between freedom and responsibility.

A UNESCO report on the cultural dimension of development addresses the matter of traditions and beliefs being influenced by other cultures on the world scale recognising the fact that "the great challenges of society overlap into the cultural domain, transforming its previous configuration and redefining its limits." It also recognises the importance of beliefs that constitute the pivot of a people's cultural experience and how traditions and customs "reflect the continuity of society, its ways of dealing with the critical moments of life, and the distinction between normality and what is forbidden". Social change, therefore, cannot be successful if it is not culture- sensitive, but having said that one also wonders whether the self-styled guardians of culture in the first mentioned instances are truly defending their culture or exercising their political clout with some official support. The question also arises whether Exotic-India-presenters, whether on print or celluloid, are exploiting the Indian mystique in the guise of unveiling the seamier side of Indian society purportedly in the name of social justice. So to some extent these concerns stop the recent events from being seen purely as a straight fight between fundamentalism and the forces of change.

I have just returned from a visit to Vivekananda House in Chennai, metamorphosed by the sincere and visionary zeal of the truly spiritual, into a serene monument to the vibrant and inclusive spirituality of the colourful monk who represented India abroad in the most positive manner. In its mutations - from Ice House to Widows' Home to fitting monument to the fiery national pride of Vivekananda - it combines all the elements of our present contentions, and becomes for me, a powerful metaphor for what could be. If fundamentalists would loosen their choking grip and the reinterpreters of tradition would do so with sensitivity they could "look at the ocean, not the wave" and the pregnant quiet of the room where the Wandering Monk spent nine days would still the endless roar of controversy.

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