Muzaffar Ali, the sensitive film-maker of classics like Umrao Jaan, argues that Hollywood has become a universal brand leader because it has used the cinematic idiom to project a vision of the world in sync with its own priorities. ‘They have made hundreds of films to ensure the Holocaust is never repeated in history,’ Muzaffar says. ‘But what have we done for the even larger holocaust of 1857 or the largest immigration in human history following the partition of India in 1947?’ Indian cinema, he notes, is ‘stuck between a highly personalized and subjective art form and an extremely crude and mindless commercial enterprise’.23 The contradiction between ‘art’ cinema and commercial films or between entertainment and good cinema should not need to exist in the first place. It is because ‘mainstream’ cinema produces, in the name of entertainment, so many films that are unoriginal, derivative and mediocre that the annual film festival officially organized in India in Goa is such a lacklustre affair. It creates hardly any ripple in the annual cinematic calendar. Cannes and BAFTA and the Oscars rule the roost, while the film industry which produces the largest number of films in the world remains happily reconciled to play second fiddle.
Pan Nalin, a perceptive commentator, who is also a film-maker, has deep reservations about the very name ‘Bollywood’. ‘It’s like calling Narayana Murthy Nill Mates. The sad part is that the industry seems proud to be branded as Bollywood.’ ‘Indian cinema,’ Nalin says, ‘needs to do much more than that to be global. If India has mythology bigger than mangas, sagas bigger than Star Wars, legends larger than Lord of the Rings, then why do we look to the west for imitation?’ As against the rampant imitation in Bollywood, he asks the valid counter-question: ‘Does anyone know of any Indian story or film being remade in Hollywood?’ The truth, he points out, is emphatically the opposite. ‘Hundreds of Bollywood movies are a direct imitation of Hollywood movies. Movies with song and dance are a part of our existence. But why do they fail to become universal?… If the Italians invented neo-realism in cinema, the Germans expressionism, the French new wave, then what did we invent? Bollywood?’ Palin concludes, ‘Indian cinema will be global only if it takes root in Indian soil and then grows like a banyan tree sprouting roots in other countries. Ages ago our stories were universal. If not, a child in Indonesia would not be watching Ramayana today. Our stories were timeless. If not, Tibetans would not be reciting [the] Tantras.’24
Mainstream cinema is not the only example of how our popular culture, too, is distorted by the lack of originality and self-respect that is the consequence of colonialism. Every morning when I pick up Indian newspapers in English I see foreign cartoon strips and wonder why no one ever asks why they need to be there. Not because there is anything wrong about them per se, but because their characters and situations and humour are so alien to our own. Calvin and Hobbes, Ginger Meggs, Bringing up Father, Dilbert, Peanuts, The Wizard of Id—all of them understandably popular in their own country but incongruous in mine. Even I, who am a part of the privileged English-as-the-first-language minority, cannot often understand their humour. Yet newspapers carry them without a moment’s introspection. For the English-speaking elite in India, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Marathi or Malayalam comic strips will not do, even in translation. It is a strange situation, and I cannot help thinking what it would be like if leading newspapers in America or England carried, day after day, Chacha Chaudhary or Feluda comic strips.
After the many ‘oscillations’ we have discussed earlier, Indian paintings appear to be finally getting their value on the international stage; galleries in the metropolitan cities are proliferating, as are art collectors. From a paltry turnover of Rs 5 crore in 1997, the art market is today estimated at over Rs 1000 crore and, except for the dip due to the recession of 2009, is set to continue to grow at 35 per cent annually. The first real breakthrough came in 2002, when Masanari Fukuoka, the biggest collector of Indian art in Japan, bought Tyeb Mehta’s work ‘Celebration’ for $317,500 at a Christie’s auction in New York. In 2005, at Christie’s again, it was another work of Mehta’s—‘Mahisasura’—that demolished the million-dollar barrier, selling for an unheard amount of over $1.5 million. Since then, works by several Indian artists—Amrita Sher-Gil, Souza, Gaitonde, M.F. Husain, Rameshwar Broota, S.H. Raza, Atul Dodiya, Subodh Gupta, to name just a few—have fetched high prices in the international art market.
But while all this is for the good, and has been cause for much euphoria, it is sobering to bear in mind that of the Asian nations, it is China and not India that is ruling the global art market. In 2008, eleven of the world’s twenty top-selling artists were Chinese; one artist, Zhang Xiaogang, who specializes in large canvasses of faces seemingly taken from family photographs during the Cultural Revolution, alone had auction sales totalling $56 million in 2007.25 According to the Art Price Index, in 2007, Chinese artists accounted for more than one-third of the 100 most expensive artists worldwide, claiming prices that rivalled top western artists, including Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. Not surprisingly, both the Guggenheim Museum of New York and the Georges Pompidou Centre of Paris were considering opening branches in China.
The comparison with China is apt because, like India, it too is a continent-sized nation and has a cultural lineage as old. If Chinese artists, in spite of the setback of the Cultural Revolution, are selling at far higher prices, is the euphoria in India about the new international recognition of Indian art justified? It is true that sales at such prices are unprecedented, and worthy of celebration, but should not our hyperbolic reaction be indexed to parallel developments in art elsewhere? The recent successes should also provoke an assessment of the state of our hardware: do we have enough galleries and are they of internationally acceptable professional standards? And what is the state of our art scholarship? Do we have enough curators who have the professional training to ensure high standards and discover creativity? According to one estimate, in spite of the recent art boom, there are only about 500 serious collectors in a country where the very rich (who can easily afford to buy our best art and provide much-needed patronage) easily number, at the very least, more than twenty million. As has been noted earlier, the country’s biggest and most prestigious gallery—the NGMA—gets no more than 30,000 visitors per year, including foreign tourists. Is contemporary art an isolated oasis, sealed off from wider public knowledge and appreciation, provoking interest only for the hefty amount some artist gets at an auction abroad?
If we are honest, the answers to these questions should be cause for genuine concern. This is all the more so because much of what passes for contemporary art—abstract art in particular—is plain imitation of western trends. One development, especially, that of installation art, frankly borders very often on gimmickry, and is an embarrassing attempt to copy western trends of ‘found art’, popularized, among others, by the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968). Duchamp’s installation of a common urinal, which he titled ‘Fountain’, was selected in 2004 by 500 renowned artists and historians in the west as ‘the most influential art work of the 20th century’. The elevation of common urinals may be comprehensible as part of a certain artistic evolution, but there is no need for Indians to be part of it. Besides, installation art, embedded in our own cultural context, has a living tradition in the decorations for Indian festivals, marriages and a host of other celebrations that are part of the ebb and flow of everyday life. My suspicion, though—and several leading artists I have spoken to seem to agree—is that most artists experimenting with installations are merely copying western idiom and themes, and are encouraged by western galleries and curators, and their hangers-on in India, to do just that.
One important reason why such developments go largely unquestioned is that there is hardly any scholarly evaluation of our own artistic principles, or discussion of what our aesthetic yardsticks should be. It is disturbing that even today the curriculum of our art colleges is hopelessly outdated; they rely disproportionately on western studio techniques and continue to make the invidious distincti
on between art and craft that is so completely a western construct. As per Indian aesthetics, a work of art is to be judged by its quality, and not categorized by its origins. A painter making a Madhubani painting on the walls of a village home in Bihar is as much an artist as a ‘sophisticated’ city-bred painter. When such distinctions are made mindlessly, there is the real danger of the vibrant and ancient folk art of India being de-contextualized, wrenched away from its natural environment and promoted only as some rustic curiosity. Should this happen, a great tradition will lose its organic sustenance, and curl up and die.
But the real tragedy is that there is no serious discussion on any subject relating to art and culture in the media. Most newspapers and magazines have no space for the learned review; or perhaps they don’t have such space because there are very few learned reviewers. Much of the new activity we see on the art scene is thus like a hothouse plant, not without energy, but poorer for the absence of a lively and serious space for critical appraisal. The contrast with the west is stark. Their reviewers may have voted a common urinal as the most influential work of art in the twentieth century, but the business of critiques is taken very seriously. Reviewers enjoy both power and respect and command bulky sections in almost any serious publication with a mass readership. In India, some leading newspapers—with pan-Indian readership in English—have done away with space for art and book reviews. It is a barren landscape, where informed discussion and debate on developments in the field of art and culture is almost nonexistent. Indians may be argumentative in other matters, but in art and aesthetics there is a general intellectual inertness that can only be described as uncultured.
The purpose here is to identify a malaise, and not to tarnish the few honourable exceptions to the norm. Unless we take stock of the fact that a civilization that structured itself—from the time of the Vedas and the Upanishads—on dialogue, enquiry and interrogation is today bereft of such a spirit in the vital area of creativity, we may grow in terms of our economic statistics but will remain stunted in civilizational terms. Why is it that the capital of a country with an ancient and rich history of the creative arts does not have—with the exception of two insignificant lanes named after Tansen and Kaifi Azmi—any roads or squares or gardens named after poets, musicians, painters and philosophers? The city of London is dotted with blue plaques commemorating homes where its scholars, artists and intellectuals lived. In Delhi, until recently, even the haveli of its greatest Urdu poet, Mirza Ghalib, was occupied by a kabadiwallah, and was recently rented out for a wedding reception. For a civilization that put such a high premium on aesthetics, why is it that in 2008, at the famous Hampi festival of classical music and dance, the organizers brought in Bollywood performers, arguing that the audience would hardly respond to anything else, and made thermocol reproductions in garish colours of the monuments as stage backdrops?
There is something terribly wrong in all of this, and while genuine creative achievements deserve praise, we need to honestly reassess the art scene in its totality. Too often, our threshold for this is too low. Our responses are still conditioned by the colonial experience, and often ignorant of the antiquity, distinctiveness and sophistication of our artistic traditions, we are happy to celebrate even the mediocre. Can India’s artistic endeavours find their own equilibrium again? Can our artists pursue the goal of harmony and beauty and rhythm and proportion in sync with our philosophy and world view, without reacting unduly—the great bane of post-colonial elites—to the slightest criticism or praise from the west? Will they realize that they are the inheritors of one of the world’s most ancient and evolved civilizations—a civilization that once set the standard for excellence—and that therefore it is a sin for them to be imitative or derivative, or to neglect what is their own in the blind pursuit of what is not? This is the challenge of the future, the unfinished revolution still waiting to happen, and it will become all the more difficult to achieve in an era of aggressive globalization.
6
The Empire at Your Threshold
On a recent July morning I visited the Tower of London. I wanted to see the Kohinoor, the diamond that once added lustre to the Mughal court in India. In the museum you have to step on to a conveyor belt that propels you slowly past the array of gold and diamonds and rubies and sapphires of the crown jewels. And amongst these, resplendent in the centre of the crown made for the Queen Mother in 1937, was the Kohinoor. It seemed curiously small, almost as if it could not match up to its own legend, but I was told that the original stone had been deliberately pared down to enhance its dazzle and lustre. At the end of the display, occupying a panel by itself on a velvet cushion with gold boundaries and tassels, was the Imperial Crown of India, 1911, studded with rubies and sapphires, and encrusted with diamonds, with a huge deep green emerald at its centre and a diamond orb on the top.
The Kohinoor was not the only priceless stone that came to Britain from India. In 1701, Thomas Pitt, while governor of Madras, helped himself to a diamond weighing over 410 carats from the Golconda mines of the Mughal emperor. Christened the Pitt Diamond, it was valued even then at £125,000; Pitt later sold it to the Prince Regent of France, who made it a part of the French crown. Robert Clive was notorious too for converting his enormous loot from India into diamonds for safe passage to England. Through such jewels carried safely home, and other more institutional means which involved destroying local industries, looting local raw material and dumping British goods made with the same material back for sale in the colony, British per capita income increased in the period from 1747 to 1947 by 347 per cent. In the same period, India’s grew by a mere 14 per cent.
The Empire was useful to the rulers in other ways too. Two-thirds of Clive’s troops in the decisive battle of Plassey, which he won, were Indian. About a century later, during the revolt of 1857, more than 80 per cent of the casualties in the successful British takeover of Delhi were Indian. In the First World War, a million Indians served overseas for the Empire, and 60,000 of them gave their lives for it, their names carved in stone at the India Gate memorial in New Delhi as compensation. Two and a half million Indians fought for the British in the Second World War, in conditions where an Indian soldier was paid a salary of Rs 18 and a British soldier Rs 75.
After 1947, the traffic of wealth and resources did not end. Along with the Kohinoor and the enormous wealth that helped to fund the Empire, the Empire was at the threshold of the United Kingdom in other ways. The blue London County Council plaque at 45, Berkeley Square proclaims simply: CLIVE OF INDIA, SOLDIER AND ADMINISTRATOR, LIVED HERE (1725–1774). Nothing particularly distinguishes the four-storey brownstone from the others around it. A similar looking house down the road belongs—so another plaque informs us—to George Canning (1770–1830), another stalwart of British rule in India. Round the corner, in the same square, considered now to be the most expensive commercial property in the world, are the offices of Air India. Opposite Clive’s home, beyond the stately chestnut trees and the lovely garden framed by the square, is a posh Indian restaurant, Benares. And not far away are the offices of Britain’s most wealthy person, Lakshmi Mittal, an Indian.
A sign in the window of Air India’s offices in London proclaims: ‘Come, India is Calling’. It was an invitation Clive hadn’t waited for; he had presumed it long before it was actually made! But Clive could hardly have imagined that less than three hundred years after he safely transported his diamonds to London, Indians would constitute the single largest ethnic minority in that city, numbering close to 200,000, and owning 10,000 businesses with a turnover touching $15 billion annually. He had gone to conquer India, to subjugate and loot the Indians in their own land. The thought that one consequence of his success would be that so many Indians would make his country their permanent home could never have crossed his mind. According to a survey released by Manchester University, Indian-dominant Leicester and Birmingham will have minority white populations by 2019 and 2024 respectively. As per the 2001 British census, Indians alre
ady account for 26 per cent of the population of Leicester. Apart from Indians, an entire range of ethnic minorities, representing different parts of the once invincible Pax Britannica, have become a permanent feature of the British landscape. London alone has 115,000 Bangladeshis, 108,000 Jamaicans, 91,000 Nigerians and 81,000 Pakistanis. There are, in addition, sizeable numbers of people of Ugandan, Kenyan and Zimbabwean origin. By some calculations, the ‘brown wash’ over Britain will deepen and widen in the years to come, since at least in the case of two important minorities—the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis—the birth rate is dramatically above the national average. White British mothers have a birth rate of 1.7; the corresponding rate for Bangladeshis is 3.9 and for Pakistanis 4.7. Without doubt the Empire has firmly returned to Great Britain, making it—along with its Chinese, Cypriot, Irish, Arabic and, more recently, Polish and East European immigrants—one of the most unique living laboratories in the world to observe the interplay and interaction of diverse cultures and identities.
Becoming Indian: The Unfinished Revolution of Culture and Identity Page 21
