The Curse of Gandhism: A Review of Prakash Jha's "Aarakshan"

I've just returned from seeing Prakash Jha's already-controversial film Aarakshan (Reservation) at the Regal Cinema in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Built by the British in the early 1930s, it is a magnificent, cavernous space complete with a wide balcony, round arches on the side walls, and pictures of old film stars in the lobby. Surprisingly, it's also fairly clean and well kept. All in all, it reminds me once again of how fake, gaudy and soulless the multiplex "experience" can be, especially in India, and how little of the old culture of film-going remains with us.

But I digress. As far as the content of the film goes, this was also a surprise. The pre-release controversy had made it seem like Aarakshan was a bold, reactionary attempt to criticise reservations - hence why it was banned in UP by Mayawati's government. In fact, as the Times of India review notes, very little of the film even references or discusses the issue of reservations in any sustained or serious way. It's more of an incidental device to move the plot forward to the real confrontation: between Amitabh Bachchan's heroic, inspirational ex-principal of a private college who offers free classes to the community and villain Manoj Bajpai's commercial education scheme. True, Bachchan's character does resign from his post at the college over his support for reservations, and there is a fierce conflict in the first half involving Saif Ali Khan's Dalit professor and a high-caste student played by Prateek Babbar. But they come together in the end to help Bachchan defeat the for-profit coaching classes, backed by corrupt politicians and the police. The film's climactic scene is a showdown, as bulldozers approach the gate of Bachchan's compound, between the good guys (students and volunteers of all castes) and lathi-wielding policemen.

By pure coincidence, I caught a bit of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi on TV last night, a film I have not seen in years and certainly not since I began doing a PhD. in Indian history. The moving scene depicting the Dharasana Satyagraha, in which row after row of peaceful marchers are mercilessly clubbed by police, shows just how ideologically and cinematically powerful the imagery of Gandhism continues to be. In effect, Prakash Jha has resolved his plot by using the classic set-up of Gandhian struggle: non-cooperating, non-violent do-gooders versus the mighty apparatus of the state. It comes as no surprise, though it still manages to be an emotional moment drawing cheers from the audience, when the bulldozers' drivers are convinced by Bachchan's appeal and cross over to join the students in solidarity. What does this say about Jha's view of politics, and its appeal?

This has been a hot topic for discussion since last summer's hit Raajneeti, which depicted the political process and very nearly all its participants as fundamentally violent and corrupt. A perceptive essay in the current issue of The Caravan about Jha's career basically makes the point that his characters have become "bereft of a moral core". They do not ask themselves questions about the "ethical consequences" of their actions. In some cases, as in Gangajaal (2003), the film "dangerously leaves the task of public accountability to the individual conscience of one man". It should become apparent from my description that, with Aarakshan, Jha can be absolved of the charge of not creating idealistic or ethically concerned characters anymore. Bachchan's principal is a model of uprightness, honesty and fairness; when the fight over reservations erupts on the grounds of his college, he steps in to reprimand both sides and dutifully carries on the fight to improve children's lives and test scores through tireless work and self-sacrifice. Here, however, Jha's tendency to offer solutions in the form of the virtuous actions of one individual reveals itself. Though an entire community comes together to help with the free classes, and a mass protest including both upper and lower castes ends up facing the villains at the end, in the end the success of the enterprise rests on one man's shoulders. The method of grassroots voluntarism being idealised here is also extra-institutional, and leaves no room for contemplating the reform of existing institutions like the private college. Only after Bachchan is on the outside can he score his great moral victory and then be appointed back to his old post. The crooked politicians are not voted out or held judicially accountable but publicly shamed.

The appeal of this worldview is not only nostalgic but deeply connected to the ongoing debate about corruption. The self-anointed Gandhian activist Anna Hazare has been mobilising the middle classes by fasting in support of the passage of the sweeping anti-corruption Lokpal Bill. Critics of Hazare's approach have pointed to the absolutist nature of the demands, which move beyond and even seek to de-legitimise the political process. A remarkable and profound interview in Tehelka with civil society activist Aruna Roy makes the point that any attempt to change the mechanism or culture of governance in a democracy must go through the painful but necessary process of soliciting opinions from stakeholders, debating drafts of bills, compromising, and, at the end, living with the end result even if it may not be ideal: "Democracy is a dialectic and you can’t afford to lose it. And no matter how imperfect it is and how much we struggle to refine it, unless we want to opt for a dictatorship, even a benign one, it is the only viable political system we have." She tells this story to illustrate the dangers of Hazare's bottom-line approach: "Let me give you a very small example from a meeting in Tilonia in Rajasthan. Every 15 August and 26 January the gram panchayat there has meetings and invites me to speak. Once there was this big talk in the air that “Constitution koh badalna hain”. I asked the 3,000-strong crowd, how many of you have seen the Constitution? About six hands went up. Then I asked, how many of you have touched it, about four went up. Then I asked, how many of you have read it and two went up. So then I said, if a political party is telling you the Constitution of India is anti the people of India and we must amend it, and all of you are saying, yes, yes, it’s bad, change it, are you acting out of reason or ignorance?"

The "curse of Gandhism" I am referring to is not so much the substantive nature of Gandhian political thought, but the enduring appeal of the form. In Hazare's case, as it has become very clear by now, the high-profile fasting and the other theatrical aspects of his movement conceal a contestable political programme (pushing for oversight by building a new bureaucracy) while claiming to be outside and indeed even hostile to politics. Prakash Jha's recent films, along with Rang de Basanti (2006), invoke the social-patriotic conscience of mainstream Hindi cinema (largely absent since the 1950s, the decade of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy). These are films about big issues, daring to ask about how to save the country (Aarakshan's tagline: "India v. India"). The answers they provide, however, are troubling in different ways. Rang de Basanti was an extreme case; its protagonists, apathetic students inspired to love their country by making a documentary about Bhagat Singh, take action by assassinating a corrupt politician. In Aarakshan, the solution is mild and basically unobjectionable by comparison. But by not saying anything about the political process, or offering any hope about building institutions other than the Bachchan character's selfless volunteerism, the film offers a bleak assessment of the prospects of Indian democracy. We never get to hear a full argument about the politics of reservations, or understand what place they have in India's democratic system. All we know by the end is that we must "be the change we wish to see in the world", so to speak. In 2011, that's no longer enough.

Textures of Print: Matrimonials

A quick scan of the classifieds section of the Sunday edition of the Hindustan Times throws up a dizzying proliferation of caste-based advertisements. There are Agarwals, Rajputs, Khatris, Yadavs and SC/STs; but there are also regionally-based distinctions – Bengalis, Punjabis, NRIs; and occupational and other categories – defence only, handicapped/disabled. There is, in other words, no single logic according to which a certain ad will be placed under one heading or another. Which characteristic wins out? It all varies and depends.
Furthermore, ads grouped under a caste heading do not necessarily imply restrictions. The “caste no bar” disclaimer recurs with remarkable frequency, particularly in the case of NRIs or Indians working abroad. Some even specifically seek “intercast alliances.” In other cases, it is occupational requirements that are most stringent: “from only AISs Officers, well placed professionals & business family.” Disquietingly, “fair” is the most common descriptor of physical features for both girls and boys, along with the usual professions of attractiveness, slimness and smartness. Caste is one piece of a complex and shifting puzzle of factors that families desirous to secure a match must put together while conceiving a successful advertisement.

The most astonishing category of all is the existence of a separate heading, “cosmopolitan.” This is a step beyond merely proclaiming “caste no bar” within a caste-based ad. The potential brides or grooms advertised may themselves be of mixed background, or choose not to reveal their caste. One ad proclaims the family is simply “broadminded.” Another does reveal the caste background of the girl: the father is Punjabi Aggarwal and the mother is Keralite Nair. She herself works as an assistant professor in Delhi and is an “independent minded person with broad outlook” seeking the same. The ad goes on to explicitly reject “horoscope matching believers” and “dowry seekers.” This family’s views, in other words, represent the kind of progressive politics that wishes to do away with caste restrictions and the whole cultural baggage of signification under which marriages in contemporary India are undertaken. But such a programme is restricted within its own tiny special section; it cannot colonise the rest of the matrimonials page. “Cosmopolitan” is not the blurring and mixing of identities – it has, in fact, become just another micro-identity and niche within the larger system of caste-based recognition.

This system, taken as a whole, is itself quite dynamic and evolving. Perhaps the real cosmopolitan project lies in the changing boundaries and contents of the ads. New categories are established and become acceptable, new openings and restrictions emerge. This week, the government is considering changes to the 1955 Marriage Act to make divorce easier for Hindus and Sikhs. Specialised matrimonial services for second marriages are already in business, advertising colourfully on the right side of the page.

On Mayawati II: The Axis of Caste

A few months ago, just after returning from India, I wrote that "Mayawati,while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster." But also, that "it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain."
I would like to revise some of these thoughts in light of a recent talk on the BSP in 2009 I heard at Harvard given by Christophe Jaffrelot, research fellow at Sciences Po in Paris.

Jaffrelot's most remarkable claim, in addressing why and how the rise of the BSP (especially as a governing party in U.P.) had been "emancipatory," was that it changed the way people thought about caste itself. He also gave Mayawati high marks, with all the necessary qualifiers and caveats, for enforcing laws aimed at preventing crimes against Dalits and attempting to extend reservations into the private sector. But it was the psychological, or rather psycho-social, aspects of her rule that have had the greatest effect. Voter mobilisation of different caste groups by the BSP has resulted, according to Jaffrelot, in Dalits no longer viewing themselves as parts of a vertical hierarchy (and thus subject to Sanskritisation), but as horizontally competing interest groups fighting for spoils. Dalits can now be "proud of who they are," and the presence of one of their own at the top makes all the difference.

One particularly biting challenge to Jaffrelot's view came from a questioner who insisted that the BSP was not "good for U.P.," and that the selective targeting of villages for development under the Ambedkar Village Scheme contrasts unfavourably with the more inclusive approach in states like Tamil Nadu, which as a result perform better in terms of human development indices for lower castes. There was also an "internal critique" by another (sympathetic) questioner about the infamous statues. What this shows, critically, is that for all the sophisticated approach of charts, graphs, and poli-sci bonhomie of Jaffrelot's presentation, the debate at the end of the day is a more visceral, and indeed a political rather than scholarly, one. The sense of deep ambivalence about low-caste governance that I captured in my slipshod June post holds up to scrutiny. This is partly to be explained by an historical conjuncture: the poorest and most backward states in India, Bihar and U.P., are also the most caste-ridden and prone to aggressive Dalit assertion. But their very backwardness begins to reflect badly on the Dalit politicians who rule them, as progress is understandably slow.

Jaffrelot softened some of my earlier truisms. Criticising Dalits in Lucknow as hopelessly corrupt stooges has a whiff of the old attacks on "Reconstruction rule" in the post-Civil War U.S. South. The emancipation of a category of people subjected to systematic oppression for centuries may have to proceed on a bumpy road. And while it is, no doubt, incredibly venal, having giant expensive statues of Ambedkar and other lower-caste leaders in the centre of Lucknow is a kind of symbolic righting of history. But the challenge of good governance, issued nowadays more as a political weapon against Mayawati, still remains. If Jaffrelot is to be believed, Mayawati has made the lives of many Dalits slightly better. For the BSP to succeed, as a Dalit party or otherwise, it must strive to reverse those damning indices (in education, health care, etc.), and quite literally keep the lights on in U.P. Mayawati as a revolutionary figure has been written into the history books. But, if the experience of the CPI(M) in West Bengal is any indication, that is never enough.

Netaji and the Naxalities: Violence, Politics and History

A few days ago, I was sitting on a bench in a small park behind the Jama Masjid in Delhi on a beautiful afternoon. I was talking to a young man named Mohammed Khan, a schoolteacher from the town of Jhansi in U.P. I looked up at a martial statue in the middle of the park and asked him who the figure was. Subhas Chandra Bose, came the reply. I asked my new friend what he thought of him. He nodded energetically, "Very great man." "You are a Muslim," I said, "and he is a Bengali Hindu." It didn't matter one bit. Netaji was a great man to all Indians because he fought for his country.

This conversation reminded me of another talk I had with a friend in Berkeley, who astutely complained that the problem he had with the Subaltern School historians, many of them Bengali bhadralok (I assume he was speaking of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty et.al.), was their romanticization and glorification of violence. This meant they were prone to expressing at least some degree of affection toward the ongoing Maoist Naxalite rebellion in West Bengal, Orissa and Chattisgarh, but also admired that far more mainstream revolutionary, Subhas Chandra Bose (conveniently ignoring his alliance with the Axis and his un-democratic aspirations for India). In one sense, Netaji and the Naxalites are far apart on any spectrum, whether political, ideological or even from the standpoint of Bengali history. The Naxalites are leading a peasant revolt that seeks to destroy that stratum of middle-class life and culture so carefully built up by the bhadralok over the last two hundred years. They are even fiercely against the Communist government of West Bengal, who they accuse of readily capitulating to bourgeois interests (the Nandigram massacre of two years ago represents only the most visible and shocking aspect of the growing divide between peasants and the CPI(M) elite in Calcutta). Bose, while not entirely de-coupled from a kind of authoritarian socialist philosophy by his Axis alliance (a marriage of convenience), represents something totally different: he was the last vessel into which the bhadralok placed their hopes and dreams, the final attempt to rescue the leadership of the nationalist movement from its westward drift to Gandhian ashrams in Gujarat and Nehru's parliamentarianism in New Delhi. Bose, an educated, cosmopolitan, and charismatic leader, shares with the low-class Naxalite agitators only the principle of an ethics of organised violence as the solution to a political claim.
Indeed, Bose is often viewed as Gandhi's counterpart, the other side of the conventional wisdom that India's freedom was won by non-violence. He is also the alternate examplar to emerge from the freedom movement. A recent obituary in the Economist of the Tamil Tiger leader, V. Prabhakaran, tellingly noted that his hero was "not Gandhi but Subhas Chandra Bose."

While having these thoughts, I happened to be reading Ramachandra Guha's collection of essays, The Last Liberal. Guha is one of the most (and few) popular historians in India, and he has undergone something of a transformation in his scholarly career. He made his name by writing a detailed sociological analysis of Chipko, the famed environmental protest movement in the Himalayas. This great book, hitting all the right notes in the "history from below" category, gave way to an increasing focus on individuals and a shift to politics Guha himself describes as "liberal." Aside from withering criticism of Marxist academics and the Communist political establishment in Calcutta, Guha calls himself as a Nehruvian and tries to establish the Congress leadership of newly independent India as the "Founding Fathers" of a democratic, secular and liberal country. This is all well and good, but it raises the most interesting questions when considering the relationship of the historian to social protest and resistance.

For one thing, as Guha points out, historians often confuse their scholarly methodology with their political beliefs. Someone who works on peasant rebellions in Bengal is quite likely to be sympathetic to the Naxalites, while someone who condemns the Indian Left is more likely to view history not as struggle and resistance but as other kinds of narratives, most notably a modernising and democratising trajectory that views violence and "identity politics" as obstacles to be overcome. For the Subalternists and those who Guha quite uncharitably calls "so-called feminists," it's hard to be ideological allies with bands of terrorists who have repeatedly expressed their desire to do away with intellectuals altogether. For those Subalternists working in well-funded academic establishments in the United States, the contradiction is even more glaring. On the other hand, it's hard to be a convincing critic of caste and patriarchy while reflexively reacting against any form of political organisation of the oppressed classes. Guha may have activist clearance on the environmental front, but he dismisses Dalit parties and the "so-called feminists" all too easily.

This brings us to the Indian election of 2009. The defeat handed to the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in U.P. by the Congress was seen by many Western-oriented, modernising observers as a defeat of the "politics of caste" by the benign and rational considerations of economic development. Mayawati, while easily hailed by leftist historians as a hero (a Dalit woman in charge of India's most populous state), is considered by urban liberals to be a corrupt gangster. Lalu Prasad, formerly chief minister of Bihar and railway minister, is a garish thug, who presided over the most backward and violent of all Indian states. The greatest difficulty lies here for the historian: as well-meaning and anti-caste as one can be, there is simply no way to justify or even excuse the rise of a man like Lalu in Indian politics. No amount of caste oppression can adequately explain the arrogance and venality of such a figure. On the other hand, it's nearly impossible to take on caste without a radical challenge to the establishment - which may involve the rise of Mayawatis and Lalus in the bargain. Dismissing them as "identity politics" isn't very useful when caste or regional identity in India cannot simply be made to go away by being wished away, or not thought of at all.

The historian of India today has few options. One can always be a card-carrying communalist, writing textbooks about Muslim invasions and finding a safe home in the arms of the BJP. One can be a righteous leftist going on about protest and resistance while the backyard burns from Naxalite murders and bombs. Or, one can try and walk the middle path, conscious that most historians are middle-class people working in that bastion of middle-class respectability: the university. If, however, one decides to forge this happy compromise and label oneself as "liberal," more questions are raised about what gets left out in such a definition, and whether there is any serious message to the contemporary world of politics left to offer.