Warning: Generalizations Ahead.
Last Sunday I was at Dashashvamedha, the public space hub of the city, a large open bathing ghat minutes from one of the city’s major intersections. A ghat is a boat landing. Banaras’s are distinctive terraces of stone piers and descending steps going back in some cases to the 18th century. The crowd at Dashshvamedha is fed by equal streams of religious, commercial and sightseeing traffic to and from Ganga, to and from nearby Vishvanath, the most important temple in the city, and to and from a lively shopping avenue from the intersection to the ghat. Sacred and secular life flow effortlessly together. Dashashvamedha is urban Banaras’s Sunday park.
It was the day after the biggest religious holiday in Banaras, Mahashivaratri, when Parvati, a manifestation of the Great Goddess, makes a householder out of the wild ascetic Shiva, the deity whose residence in Kashi is central to its identity as a tirtha (sacred crossing-place), by marrying him. Lots of human couples also get married on Mahashivaratri, and the ceremony which may last till dawn. Many come the next day to get the blessing of Shitala, the cool goddess who guards against the evils of the warm season, which has just begun. Her pitha or seat is above the Dashashvamedha promenade where folks walk from ghat to ghat, and gather on weekends to look, eat, fly kites, get massages and haircuts, do yoga and generally chill.
A number of couples sat on the weathered, wooden platforms where ghattias sit in the early morning attending to the ritual needs of bathers and pilgrims, and where at night local devotees and visitors sit and watch the religious theater of aarati puja, an evening worship ritual for which Dashashvamedha is especially known.
At Sunday midday they were still in their wedding costumes. The slender young brides in their gem-encrusted, gold-embroidered red wedding saris were stunning. They sat on the wooden platforms and looked shyly, or perhaps shell-shockedly down, their pallus (the portion of a sari that drapes the head) pulled way down over their faces so no one, not even their husbands, could see them. (Other brides, perhaps older and seemingly better acquainted with their grooms, showed their faces and basked in the attention of onlookers). The husbands were wearing cream or white wedding suits embroidered with rhinestones and red or maroon accents, and elaborate wedding turbans. They looked like princes of Rajput, which is the idea.
Consider: These couples had been up all night performing their wedding vows and maintaining the sober, dignified demeanor that is the obligation of the wedding pair amidst the merrymaking and congratulations from people in both extended families and the guests around them. The brides would have fasted for much of the day of the ceremony. They are leaving, usually at a very young age, their birth families to be thrust abruptly into a new family where they must will be expected to submit to the unfamiliar authority of their mothers-in-law as well as their husbands. Some have left their villages for the first time.
This is a lot to do in 24 hours as well as days of ritual that lead up to the wedding. So, faces covered, they weren’t saying much, conspicuously tied by a yellow sash to their husbands, who were tied right back (and yes, she walks behind him when they move). Yellow is the renunciant color: marriage, the sash eloquently says, is both renunciation and attachment.
Many of these newlyweds sat as far apart as their new umbilical cord would allow, their bodies turned in opposite directions, the covered bride looking down, the husband often bored, absolutely nothing to say to each other. Many had first met this person to whom they were now so visibly joined only in the last 24 hours (or, if they had previously met, it was briefly and decorously in the presence of relatives). Their marriages have been arranged by their families as (usually) a caste match and often an astrological one for those who can afford to have their charts cast. Hindus take wedding and death rites extremely seriously even if they are otherwise more casually observant.
Here are effective strangers often with scant sexual experience, about to establish a permanent sexual relationship (fourth day--more ceremonial, lots of flowers, the yellow sash comes off) before they’ve developed any sort of emotional connection. Americans have sex without any emotional connection often enough. That they don't have to stay together afterward seems pretty reckless to Indians. Nor is emotional intimacy particularly the goal of Hindu marriage, the tenderness of wedding vows notwithstanding.
New couples may not even have their own sleeping quarters. If there are separate bedrooms to be had (this is largely an economic issue), the family may sort out sleeping arrangements by gender rather than marital pair. When the young couple wants to sleep together (there are only so many ritually possible days, not when the wife has her menses, for example, an impure that also precludes her from cooking or entering a temple—-sensible time off from domestic responsibilities), they take over the kitchen for the night. The point being that household arrangements for the new couple do not facilitate emotional intimacy, though many couples must achieve it.
(Reality check on the generalizations: A college-educated dual-career couple that lives in Delhi may have dated, may be setting up their own independent household, and may still have a traditional ceremony. There are plenty of variations in courtship and marriage in a society as big as this one—-I'm talking about traditional marriage, alive and well at every level of society.)
There’s a lot of writing about the consequences. Mothers (wives deprived of close emotional connections to their husbands) focus on the kids. The mother-son bond is especially strong, not least because the presentation of a son finally makes the new wife really part of her husband’s family by ensuring its male lineage. (So what son needs an emotional connection to a wife?) Preceding the sociologists and psychologists are the mithya—Sati, whose husband Shiva really doesn’t care about her till she’s dead (from throwing herself on her father’s sacrificial fire), Radha who pines eternally for Krishna, who never stays with her and flirts with other women. The Krishna-Radhu story is often interpreted by devotees as a story about the soul’s pining for the divine, a reading I whole-heartedly embrace while noticing other interesting things about it.
In Haridwar, one of the great pilgrim tirthas, I saw a family tree mounted next to family portraits in the corridor of a lovely hotel overlooking Ganga (cold and fast-moving near the foothills of the Himalayas), the family business. Hand-inked on parchment were the names of the patriarch and the matriarch and all the sons and their wives and all the sons they had produced and their wives and sons for several generations—-no daughters anywhere. In the chronology of ancestral lineage they don’t exist.
Indians believe that such arrangements create strong families and generational stability. Sudhir Kakar, a psychoanalyst who writes about Indian sexuality and considers the Oedipal conflict largely a Western trauma, argues that the traditional arrangements of the Hindu family create anger and disappointment in women and fear and dread in men.
By a very different cultural route, this sounds like a whole lot like diagnoses of heterosexual romantic life in the U.S.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
The Fog Comes on Little Cat Feet
(I wrote this several weeks ago but never got it up. I'm posting it now because winter is definitely on the minds of folks in the Northeast. Spring has now come to Banaras, a temperate interval before the furnace of summer.)
It’s cold in Uttar Pradesh, the state I’m in. Cold means 2 to 4 degrees Celsius which is 39 F or so. Hardly enough to yawn at in the States, here it closes the schools. That’s because no buildings have central heating, and space heaters are a luxury. With their concrete walls and stone floors, the schools can’t keep children warm so they’ve closed during this cold snap. There’s also thick white fog, a palpable, ghostly substance that makes everything outdoors mysterious and isolated from all intelligible context, seasonal but thicker and more tenacious than usual, I’m told. Caused by the southern-sweeping Arctic jetstream, it sits stubbornly on the ground day after day, fanning out in a way that keeps rail passegers stoically huddling with their baggage in unheated waiting rooms while it plays havoc with transportation in this part of India (I get no morning paper for days at a time), and creates connectivity chaos for phone and internet users.
Cold brings out the shawls and head wraps. Instead of coats many Banarasis wear woolen shawls, a light, portable toasty shield against the chill. The best are from Kashmir, especially prized for their silky nap and delicate tracings of floral embroidery, not only beautiful but astonishingly warm for their weight as I can personally attest. Also in demand are soft, thick Tibetan-made unbleached wool scarves from the Himalayas. Trash fires punctuate the thick, white fog that settles on the road like vaporous snowdrifts that make it difficult to see in front of traveling vehicles, indeed, to see traveling vehicles, and making the line drying of laundry a two, even three-day affair. Men squat around them in their unbleached tan or ivory shawls drinking tea, conversing, reading the newspaper, from early in the morning till about noon when the sun warms things up for a couple of hours.
There is something that fixes in memory the drape of shawls over the heads and shoulders and upper body of men, long kurtas beneath a silhouette like snow on mountains and seemingly as ancient. It’s the look of a way of life, a solution that has long served the needs and history of a culture. Women are draped in every season. Wrapped now in wool they scurry along before dawn to the river to perform morning bathing rituals. Standing in Ganga-ji they show little sign of the cold, though close up you see them shivering when they emerge to put on fresh saris, sweaters, and shawls. Of course there are Western style warm jackets but mostly for men. Shopping in a small local department store whose clientele is not-fancy middle class, I could hardly find anything warmer than corduroy for women.
Tradition, of course, could not anticipate the windstream of motorcycle-driving, though plenty of men driving wear only shawls. As the possessor of a largeish jacket bought precisely to defend me against the cold and wind of driving, I still wear a shawl over it to fit in better since women just don’t wear motorcycle jackets. Mostly they mostly ride side saddle behind the men, whose shoulders form at least a little barrier. (Draped in a shawl, salwar suit, warm socks over my sandaled feet and a bonnet sort of a little hat that is sold here, you can’t tell I’m a Westerner til you see my face, which can be useful for moving unmarked through crowds.)
Lacking heat in my flat, I’ve learned to cover up. My feet are always cold even with rugs bought to put a barrier between me and the chilly stone floor. Inside I wear long underwear, Indian salwar pants, the long housedress that is considered appropriate wear for women at home, a sweater or two, a blanket shawl tucked under one arm and thrown over the opposite shoulder to free a hand for doing things, and occasionally a stocking cap. My attire resembles that of Banarasi women generally, though more layers means more money. Bucket baths in the concrete unheated shower room are another matter, sort of thrilling in their extreme-adventure way. At night I tuck a hot water bottle under the covers, a lovely hand made cotton batting quilt of Indian pattern stuffed with black cotton, which is considered especially warm, that I bought for about 10 dollars from one of the large wooden wagons on which they are stacked for sale on the main street. Quilts are both for bedding and socializing since lots of folks sit on them instead of using couches.
In workplaces the space heaters tend to be trained on the highest status person around (that has sometimes been me) rather than the largest number of those present, one of the less than subtle ways that status is continually marked.
A definite cultural divide surrounds the use of curtains. For Westerners curtains are devices that permit us to go less than decently clothed inside our own houses by shielding any outside view. As far as I can tell, Banarasis with their extended families never go less than decently clothed inside. The point of curtains, therefore, is to hang on doors to keep out the cold in winter; in summer, the bugs (screens are a rarity), heat and dust. Hung inside at floor length they separate functions in the house, especially guest and family areas. A friend of mine rents rooms from an Indian family whose matriarch could not understand why she wanted window curtains, just as my friend could not fathom the aesthetic or functional merit of door curtains. “But WHY??” they expostulated in mutual incomprehension.
It’s cold in Uttar Pradesh, the state I’m in. Cold means 2 to 4 degrees Celsius which is 39 F or so. Hardly enough to yawn at in the States, here it closes the schools. That’s because no buildings have central heating, and space heaters are a luxury. With their concrete walls and stone floors, the schools can’t keep children warm so they’ve closed during this cold snap. There’s also thick white fog, a palpable, ghostly substance that makes everything outdoors mysterious and isolated from all intelligible context, seasonal but thicker and more tenacious than usual, I’m told. Caused by the southern-sweeping Arctic jetstream, it sits stubbornly on the ground day after day, fanning out in a way that keeps rail passegers stoically huddling with their baggage in unheated waiting rooms while it plays havoc with transportation in this part of India (I get no morning paper for days at a time), and creates connectivity chaos for phone and internet users.
Cold brings out the shawls and head wraps. Instead of coats many Banarasis wear woolen shawls, a light, portable toasty shield against the chill. The best are from Kashmir, especially prized for their silky nap and delicate tracings of floral embroidery, not only beautiful but astonishingly warm for their weight as I can personally attest. Also in demand are soft, thick Tibetan-made unbleached wool scarves from the Himalayas. Trash fires punctuate the thick, white fog that settles on the road like vaporous snowdrifts that make it difficult to see in front of traveling vehicles, indeed, to see traveling vehicles, and making the line drying of laundry a two, even three-day affair. Men squat around them in their unbleached tan or ivory shawls drinking tea, conversing, reading the newspaper, from early in the morning till about noon when the sun warms things up for a couple of hours.
There is something that fixes in memory the drape of shawls over the heads and shoulders and upper body of men, long kurtas beneath a silhouette like snow on mountains and seemingly as ancient. It’s the look of a way of life, a solution that has long served the needs and history of a culture. Women are draped in every season. Wrapped now in wool they scurry along before dawn to the river to perform morning bathing rituals. Standing in Ganga-ji they show little sign of the cold, though close up you see them shivering when they emerge to put on fresh saris, sweaters, and shawls. Of course there are Western style warm jackets but mostly for men. Shopping in a small local department store whose clientele is not-fancy middle class, I could hardly find anything warmer than corduroy for women.
Tradition, of course, could not anticipate the windstream of motorcycle-driving, though plenty of men driving wear only shawls. As the possessor of a largeish jacket bought precisely to defend me against the cold and wind of driving, I still wear a shawl over it to fit in better since women just don’t wear motorcycle jackets. Mostly they mostly ride side saddle behind the men, whose shoulders form at least a little barrier. (Draped in a shawl, salwar suit, warm socks over my sandaled feet and a bonnet sort of a little hat that is sold here, you can’t tell I’m a Westerner til you see my face, which can be useful for moving unmarked through crowds.)
Lacking heat in my flat, I’ve learned to cover up. My feet are always cold even with rugs bought to put a barrier between me and the chilly stone floor. Inside I wear long underwear, Indian salwar pants, the long housedress that is considered appropriate wear for women at home, a sweater or two, a blanket shawl tucked under one arm and thrown over the opposite shoulder to free a hand for doing things, and occasionally a stocking cap. My attire resembles that of Banarasi women generally, though more layers means more money. Bucket baths in the concrete unheated shower room are another matter, sort of thrilling in their extreme-adventure way. At night I tuck a hot water bottle under the covers, a lovely hand made cotton batting quilt of Indian pattern stuffed with black cotton, which is considered especially warm, that I bought for about 10 dollars from one of the large wooden wagons on which they are stacked for sale on the main street. Quilts are both for bedding and socializing since lots of folks sit on them instead of using couches.
In workplaces the space heaters tend to be trained on the highest status person around (that has sometimes been me) rather than the largest number of those present, one of the less than subtle ways that status is continually marked.
A definite cultural divide surrounds the use of curtains. For Westerners curtains are devices that permit us to go less than decently clothed inside our own houses by shielding any outside view. As far as I can tell, Banarasis with their extended families never go less than decently clothed inside. The point of curtains, therefore, is to hang on doors to keep out the cold in winter; in summer, the bugs (screens are a rarity), heat and dust. Hung inside at floor length they separate functions in the house, especially guest and family areas. A friend of mine rents rooms from an Indian family whose matriarch could not understand why she wanted window curtains, just as my friend could not fathom the aesthetic or functional merit of door curtains. “But WHY??” they expostulated in mutual incomprehension.
Friday, February 12, 2010
Their Game is Con....
I wondered when the New York Times would get around to the Shah Rukh Khan vs. Bal Thackeray dustup here, and I see it finally has. The details are accurate so far as I know them, but bloodless.
The basic facts: Shiv Shena, a regional nativist party in India whose constituency is the left-behind-in-India's-economic-miracle population of the western state of Maharashta, of which Mumbai is the capital. Mumbai is also the capital of Bollywood. Sena's one-issue platform is Maharashtra for the Maharashatrians (self-rule and preference for Marathis in Maharashtra and exclusion of Muslims) and its program is intimidation, public and physical. It's led by the past-his-prime bully Bal Thackeray. The party took a beating from Congress in recent state elections much to Congress's relief. Other spin-off and complicatedly allied and squabbling chauvinist parties (BJP, RSS, MNS, like everything in India, these groupings are labyrinthine), are engaged in an internecine struggle in anticipation of the upcoming elections.
Sena’s latest target is the huge film star Shah Rukh Khan who publicly regretted in a recent television interview that Pakistani cricket players had been passed over by Indian team owners in the recent player’s auction, presumably because of 26/11. (SRK, himself a cricket team co-owner, also didn't bid for any Pakistanis, worth keeping in mind.)
For that, Shiv Sena threatened to shut down SRK's newest film, a tear-jerker called My Name is Khan, about anti-Muslim prejudice in post-911 America. (In the film SRK is not only the lead character whose name--like Shah Rukh's own--is Khan, but also has Asperger's and goes on a journey across America--sounding more and more like Forrest Gump--see next graph.)
Shah Rukh is the biggest Bollywood star around, a Muslim, and a Mumbaiker. If there was a Bollywood Forrest Gump, he would be the star. SRK has more star power than Tom Hanks and more sex appeal—-I can’t even think of a Hollywood equivalent right now. Besides his films, he’s constantly in small-drama television commercials and gives frequent aw shucks interviews. Overexposure apparently holds few risks for him. Over 40, with a wife and two kids that he frequently mentions as the people whose good opinion matters most to him, he has a large-boned, boyishly mischievous face, a good big open smile, and just a hint of mature cragginess. He’s smooth and smart with a gift for coming across as affably honest and humorously self-deprecating.
For example, though he’s lived in Mumbai for years he doesn’t know Marathi, the regional language. Linguistic purity is an evergreen issue with Sena, which recently tried and failed to get a bill passed requiring Mumbai taxi drivers, mostly immigrants, to know Marathi. SRK smiles fetchingly and says it’s a point of embarrassment to him that he only knows a few Marathi phrases (which he displays), and he’s terrible with languages, but his kids know it! A domesticated, urbane, safe householder kind of sexy.
Not like Sachin Tendulkar, India’s (and the world's) enduring cricket great who stands for a kind of purity and innocence and self-discipline. There’s a guy who stays away from the limelight off the field but lacks Tiger Wood's arrogant aloofness. Tendulkar was Sena's first target in this latest campaign which started several months ago. Most recent Sena target was Rahul Gandhi, heir apparent to the fabled Nehru dynasty, about a week before the SRK brouhaha erupted.
SRK, Rahul and Tendalkur are all too big for Sena to make a dent in, and most of the country has sided with them against Sena. But the controversies keep SS in the headlines and aapparently prevents supporters form noticing the party isn’t doing squat to help the fervent base of folks to whom it markets its tediously predictable but fiery brand of identity politics.
SS threatened to use its shock troops to block the release of My Name is Khan--with violence. The cops took no chances and pre-emptively arrested Sena protesters with, one would not be rash to assume, little regard for their civil rights. On this very blog in August, I mentioned a controversy in which My Name is Khan was embroiled in a dispute over whether SRK had been profiled and detained by U.S. customs on a trip there. It was a badly managed publicity stunt, and he backed down quickly when INS categorically denied the allegations.
As the Times article says, the Shiv Sena name goes back to the army of General Shivaji. Shivaji was the iconic resistance fighter against the Mughal empire as it began to fall apart in the 17th century. He particularly went up against Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughal emperors, the legendary villain of the Mughal piece for Hindus. Aurangzeb was a strict Muslim who made a career of persecuting Hindus and razing temples, among them Vishwanath, the holiest site in Banaras for the entire last millennium, because, it is said, its citizens had given shelter to Shivaji. Vishvanath had been razed and rebuilt before, but Aurangzeb erected a mosque on the ruins, and the cosmopolitan and artistic glory that was Hindu Banaras never recovered its 17th century grandeur. Today’s Vishvanath, the Golden Temple built by the fabled Marathi Queen Ahalya Bai Holkar of Indore (this time in appreciation for the connection between Shivaji and Banaras), stands near by. It is smaller than the original temple but gorgeous, and the object of fervent devotion by locals and pilgrims.
Today’s cynical, bullying Sena does not practice the religious tolerance that the historical Shivaji was supposedly known for. Their major talent is generating chauvinist controversy, especially against Muslims. They are linguistic thought police who punish the famous for any reference to Bombay, Mumbai's colonial name, or for mild, obviously true statements to the effect that Mumbai belongs to every Indian as every place in India does.
The famous have been remarkably acqueiscent, rarely criticizing them publicly and groveling to their demands for apology for alleged insults to Maharashtrians. One of the more thoughtful views of all this is voiced in this long quote (I'm taking the liberty) from a Feb. 13 column by Dileep Padgaonkar, who writes thusly for the Times of India about what is specific to India, but an old, old story:
Taking on Sachinn Tendulkar, the national pride of India, was a tactical goof (his sin was saying he fights for all India on the cricket field), but perhaps not a strategic one. Same for Rahul Gandhi, who’s positioning himself to run for prime minister one of these days as a populist sort of moderate. He called their bluff (his sin was saying ‘Bombay’ in some speech or other that Sena was apoplectic about, and voicing, as everyone attacked by Sena does, the civic unassailability of multicultural multi-religious India) by going deep into Maharashti voting territory on a local train and pumping the flesh with crowds who received him with obvious and enthusiastic affection.
Tendulkar has an almost innocent virtue going for him, Rahul the rock star legacy of his name. What SRK has is his giant stardom. As an idealized family man, I don't think he's been associated with any sex scandals, but there’s a little streak of something there. Today’s paper has a story that after SRK passed through the imaging security at Heathrow recently, a couple of young women, presumably security workers handling the images, accosted him with prints from the machine showing the details of his anatomy, THAT part, under his clothes. He breezily autographed the prints and was quoted as saying that only somebody “not well endowed” had anything to fear from the machine.
This is interesting not only because of the rooster strut that makes an astounding invasion of privacy a concern for wimps, but because it's nekkid pictures (which we are titillatingly encouraged to imagine) without it's being your fault, just what a domesticated older male sexpot requires. You can't imagine Tom Hanks doing that.
With each of these incidents, the respectable papers crow that Sena is shooting itself in the foot. But in Sena politics, even if you lose you win, because each controversy grabs headlines that feed the sense of aggrievedness its followers feel. After Sena threatened to shut down the film, there were a flurry of television interviews with the director and SRK—-WOULD THEY WITHDRAW THE FILM AND DISAPPOINT SRK FANS???--which was released after all (are you surprised?). The tv reviews of this two hour and 40 minute monster are gushing. Based on the trailer snippets, I’m betting on the one negative review I heard that SRK toggles back and forth between between hyper and cute, and the plot is mawkish. The release day was yesterday, Shivratri, a major religious holiday on which Shiva gets married to his consort Parvati. Schools and shops are closed, followed by a long--Valentine's (big here)-- weekend. A lot of folks will be going to the movies.
The story has been all over local and national Indian television all the time (CNN and BBC have run small stories but are mostly not very interested) in both editorial content and ads. Not only Sena spends too much time on the non-substantive. The English language channels (a large number) have been chewing the whole thing and spitting it out for several days and make no pretense of objectivity. When interviewing Sena leaders, they loudly denounce them to their faces for their political divisiveness. But they interview them. The audience for the English language channels is a comparatively educated one that views Sena as corrupt, opportunistic thugs (as do most Indians who are paying any attention). But Sena has little to lose from the liberal enmity of television commentators.
SRK has tweeted about it (as we know from its constant broadcast on tv) taking an I'm-hurt-but-I’m-only-being-reasonable-and-a-patriot tone and lamenting that Shiv Sena is dividing the country (it isn’t, actually), and asserting in a high minded tone that his stardom is transient, his integrity non-negotiable, and his Indian identity unassailable. Thus he refuses to apologize (and the media is happy to side with one of their own and keep the story going.)
A few Mumbai theaters scheduled to release My Name is Khan closed down for a day to take the public temperature. No surprise, the 21 Mumbai theaters that stayed open to screen it were packed, and there was only token protest and a bit of scuffling here and there.
A resounding win-win for My Name is Khan AND Shiv Sena.
Popular culture is a good place for such issues to be raised and followed through, and Bollywood frolics are an arena of civil society where the public feels it has a stake in the fight and can participate in the discussion. More so, unfortunately, than in the official political arena, since Lok Sabha (Parliament) is widely thought to be corrupt and useless. Several of these incidents in a row probably help consolidate and reinforce the conviction all Indians are equal citizens. Given the considerable anti-Muslim sentiment currently washing around, that's to the good. And why not have the biggest film star, the biggest sports star, and the biggest political star on the side of the angels? A long overdue development that will make it safer for others to travel in their wake.
The basic facts: Shiv Shena, a regional nativist party in India whose constituency is the left-behind-in-India's-economic-miracle population of the western state of Maharashta, of which Mumbai is the capital. Mumbai is also the capital of Bollywood. Sena's one-issue platform is Maharashtra for the Maharashatrians (self-rule and preference for Marathis in Maharashtra and exclusion of Muslims) and its program is intimidation, public and physical. It's led by the past-his-prime bully Bal Thackeray. The party took a beating from Congress in recent state elections much to Congress's relief. Other spin-off and complicatedly allied and squabbling chauvinist parties (BJP, RSS, MNS, like everything in India, these groupings are labyrinthine), are engaged in an internecine struggle in anticipation of the upcoming elections.
Sena’s latest target is the huge film star Shah Rukh Khan who publicly regretted in a recent television interview that Pakistani cricket players had been passed over by Indian team owners in the recent player’s auction, presumably because of 26/11. (SRK, himself a cricket team co-owner, also didn't bid for any Pakistanis, worth keeping in mind.)
For that, Shiv Sena threatened to shut down SRK's newest film, a tear-jerker called My Name is Khan, about anti-Muslim prejudice in post-911 America. (In the film SRK is not only the lead character whose name--like Shah Rukh's own--is Khan, but also has Asperger's and goes on a journey across America--sounding more and more like Forrest Gump--see next graph.)
Shah Rukh is the biggest Bollywood star around, a Muslim, and a Mumbaiker. If there was a Bollywood Forrest Gump, he would be the star. SRK has more star power than Tom Hanks and more sex appeal—-I can’t even think of a Hollywood equivalent right now. Besides his films, he’s constantly in small-drama television commercials and gives frequent aw shucks interviews. Overexposure apparently holds few risks for him. Over 40, with a wife and two kids that he frequently mentions as the people whose good opinion matters most to him, he has a large-boned, boyishly mischievous face, a good big open smile, and just a hint of mature cragginess. He’s smooth and smart with a gift for coming across as affably honest and humorously self-deprecating.
For example, though he’s lived in Mumbai for years he doesn’t know Marathi, the regional language. Linguistic purity is an evergreen issue with Sena, which recently tried and failed to get a bill passed requiring Mumbai taxi drivers, mostly immigrants, to know Marathi. SRK smiles fetchingly and says it’s a point of embarrassment to him that he only knows a few Marathi phrases (which he displays), and he’s terrible with languages, but his kids know it! A domesticated, urbane, safe householder kind of sexy.
Not like Sachin Tendulkar, India’s (and the world's) enduring cricket great who stands for a kind of purity and innocence and self-discipline. There’s a guy who stays away from the limelight off the field but lacks Tiger Wood's arrogant aloofness. Tendulkar was Sena's first target in this latest campaign which started several months ago. Most recent Sena target was Rahul Gandhi, heir apparent to the fabled Nehru dynasty, about a week before the SRK brouhaha erupted.
SRK, Rahul and Tendalkur are all too big for Sena to make a dent in, and most of the country has sided with them against Sena. But the controversies keep SS in the headlines and aapparently prevents supporters form noticing the party isn’t doing squat to help the fervent base of folks to whom it markets its tediously predictable but fiery brand of identity politics.
SS threatened to use its shock troops to block the release of My Name is Khan--with violence. The cops took no chances and pre-emptively arrested Sena protesters with, one would not be rash to assume, little regard for their civil rights. On this very blog in August, I mentioned a controversy in which My Name is Khan was embroiled in a dispute over whether SRK had been profiled and detained by U.S. customs on a trip there. It was a badly managed publicity stunt, and he backed down quickly when INS categorically denied the allegations.
As the Times article says, the Shiv Sena name goes back to the army of General Shivaji. Shivaji was the iconic resistance fighter against the Mughal empire as it began to fall apart in the 17th century. He particularly went up against Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughal emperors, the legendary villain of the Mughal piece for Hindus. Aurangzeb was a strict Muslim who made a career of persecuting Hindus and razing temples, among them Vishwanath, the holiest site in Banaras for the entire last millennium, because, it is said, its citizens had given shelter to Shivaji. Vishvanath had been razed and rebuilt before, but Aurangzeb erected a mosque on the ruins, and the cosmopolitan and artistic glory that was Hindu Banaras never recovered its 17th century grandeur. Today’s Vishvanath, the Golden Temple built by the fabled Marathi Queen Ahalya Bai Holkar of Indore (this time in appreciation for the connection between Shivaji and Banaras), stands near by. It is smaller than the original temple but gorgeous, and the object of fervent devotion by locals and pilgrims.
Today’s cynical, bullying Sena does not practice the religious tolerance that the historical Shivaji was supposedly known for. Their major talent is generating chauvinist controversy, especially against Muslims. They are linguistic thought police who punish the famous for any reference to Bombay, Mumbai's colonial name, or for mild, obviously true statements to the effect that Mumbai belongs to every Indian as every place in India does.
The famous have been remarkably acqueiscent, rarely criticizing them publicly and groveling to their demands for apology for alleged insults to Maharashtrians. One of the more thoughtful views of all this is voiced in this long quote (I'm taking the liberty) from a Feb. 13 column by Dileep Padgaonkar, who writes thusly for the Times of India about what is specific to India, but an old, old story:
[SS has] been able to exploit to their advantage the anger, fear, frustration, resentment and pent-up aggression of middle-class and lower-middle class Maharashtrians who have failed to cope with the swift and sweeping changes in the polity and economy of the state.
Modernity has indeed evaded large sections of Maharashtrians especially as economic reforms opened up more opportunities hwich other communities, endowed with more pluck, drive and energy, were able to seize with greater felicity. They cornered jobs, started businesses, occupied urban spaces that were once the exclusive preserve of the locals and, not least, emerged as force to be reckoned with in politics. It is in this soil of insecurities that the Sena sowed its poisonous seeds.
In the outfit's reckoning, when people canot compete in the open market the only choice left to them iseither to sulk or to seek refuge in the politics of parochial identity. Such politics needs targets. Some 'other' has to be found who can be demonised, intimidated, terrorised and, should the need arise, also massacred. But this alone would not have been enough to succeed the way itdid. Another key element was needed to finess the strategy. The Thackerays systematically cultivated friends with money and muscle power: builders and corporate groups, film stars, the underworld and, not least, rival political parties. When the friends refused to fall in line, they resorted to their tactics of intimidation. The patriarch reckoned, correctly, that those engaged in making big money had the spine of an eel. And those busy playing seedy power games jettisoned their ideological claims if breaking bread with Sena furthered their ambitions.
This tells you why no harm has ever visited the Thackerays though they have flouted the law at will and mocked at the Constitution time and again. You cannot write them off unless the Indian state puts them on a tight leash. The political class ensures their electoral defeat and the government of the day addresses the real or contrived insecurities of Maharashtrians without the trappings of identity politics. This calls for courage. Rahul Gandhi and Shah Rukh Khan have demonstrated it.
Taking on Sachinn Tendulkar, the national pride of India, was a tactical goof (his sin was saying he fights for all India on the cricket field), but perhaps not a strategic one. Same for Rahul Gandhi, who’s positioning himself to run for prime minister one of these days as a populist sort of moderate. He called their bluff (his sin was saying ‘Bombay’ in some speech or other that Sena was apoplectic about, and voicing, as everyone attacked by Sena does, the civic unassailability of multicultural multi-religious India) by going deep into Maharashti voting territory on a local train and pumping the flesh with crowds who received him with obvious and enthusiastic affection.
Tendulkar has an almost innocent virtue going for him, Rahul the rock star legacy of his name. What SRK has is his giant stardom. As an idealized family man, I don't think he's been associated with any sex scandals, but there’s a little streak of something there. Today’s paper has a story that after SRK passed through the imaging security at Heathrow recently, a couple of young women, presumably security workers handling the images, accosted him with prints from the machine showing the details of his anatomy, THAT part, under his clothes. He breezily autographed the prints and was quoted as saying that only somebody “not well endowed” had anything to fear from the machine.
This is interesting not only because of the rooster strut that makes an astounding invasion of privacy a concern for wimps, but because it's nekkid pictures (which we are titillatingly encouraged to imagine) without it's being your fault, just what a domesticated older male sexpot requires. You can't imagine Tom Hanks doing that.
With each of these incidents, the respectable papers crow that Sena is shooting itself in the foot. But in Sena politics, even if you lose you win, because each controversy grabs headlines that feed the sense of aggrievedness its followers feel. After Sena threatened to shut down the film, there were a flurry of television interviews with the director and SRK—-WOULD THEY WITHDRAW THE FILM AND DISAPPOINT SRK FANS???--which was released after all (are you surprised?). The tv reviews of this two hour and 40 minute monster are gushing. Based on the trailer snippets, I’m betting on the one negative review I heard that SRK toggles back and forth between between hyper and cute, and the plot is mawkish. The release day was yesterday, Shivratri, a major religious holiday on which Shiva gets married to his consort Parvati. Schools and shops are closed, followed by a long--Valentine's (big here)-- weekend. A lot of folks will be going to the movies.
The story has been all over local and national Indian television all the time (CNN and BBC have run small stories but are mostly not very interested) in both editorial content and ads. Not only Sena spends too much time on the non-substantive. The English language channels (a large number) have been chewing the whole thing and spitting it out for several days and make no pretense of objectivity. When interviewing Sena leaders, they loudly denounce them to their faces for their political divisiveness. But they interview them. The audience for the English language channels is a comparatively educated one that views Sena as corrupt, opportunistic thugs (as do most Indians who are paying any attention). But Sena has little to lose from the liberal enmity of television commentators.
SRK has tweeted about it (as we know from its constant broadcast on tv) taking an I'm-hurt-but-I’m-only-being-reasonable-and-a-patriot tone and lamenting that Shiv Sena is dividing the country (it isn’t, actually), and asserting in a high minded tone that his stardom is transient, his integrity non-negotiable, and his Indian identity unassailable. Thus he refuses to apologize (and the media is happy to side with one of their own and keep the story going.)
A few Mumbai theaters scheduled to release My Name is Khan closed down for a day to take the public temperature. No surprise, the 21 Mumbai theaters that stayed open to screen it were packed, and there was only token protest and a bit of scuffling here and there.
A resounding win-win for My Name is Khan AND Shiv Sena.
Popular culture is a good place for such issues to be raised and followed through, and Bollywood frolics are an arena of civil society where the public feels it has a stake in the fight and can participate in the discussion. More so, unfortunately, than in the official political arena, since Lok Sabha (Parliament) is widely thought to be corrupt and useless. Several of these incidents in a row probably help consolidate and reinforce the conviction all Indians are equal citizens. Given the considerable anti-Muslim sentiment currently washing around, that's to the good. And why not have the biggest film star, the biggest sports star, and the biggest political star on the side of the angels? A long overdue development that will make it safer for others to travel in their wake.
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