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.

Amitava Kumar on Reading, and Graduate School

This is a post born of exasperation and hope. Only one semester in, the rhythm of the graduate school seminar has settled, and it chugs forward on its well-worn tracks. The sheer intellectual excitement of opening a new syllabus, my eyes rapidly scanning for the texts I know I will enjoy, the smell of an open book, all haven't gone away. It's too soon for that. But occasionally a sense of futility sets in, especially the realization that reading is a mechanical, solitary act, carried out inside a mind that is never stable and never dependable. At what point will I lose it, will the jumbled letters no longer make words, sentences, and of course soundbites for my professional advancement? The historian has much in common with the accountant - poring over minuscule ephemera and producing reports that few read and of those, many ignore. But it's not the monotony or the self-consciousness about social importance that gets to me. It's the discussions. Young, full of facts and ideas, the graduate student spews out an endless stream of jabs, asides, musings, mumblings - his or her favourite thing, slicing and dicing the book lying passively on the desk. "Well I think that Subaltern Studies has gone too far this or the other way..." "So and so essentialises and totalises..." "Not contingent enough..." "Why doesn't this book start fifty years earlier or end twenty years later..." "Where are the voices of the women (men, if about women)..." Reading back over my blog, this poisonous habit of self-importance seems to have taken me over as well.

Let me pause. I am not saying that honest, robust critique should be banished from the academy. The spectre of scholarly fraud and/or misuse is always at the door, so we must keep it tightly shut. But we have also lost a sense of humility and wonder toward the academic text. The graduate student reads an article or book with violence in mind. Like a nosy badger smelling blood, we are trained to burrow for the "holes" in the argument and eviscerate everything in our path. It is little wonder so many grow up to be nasty, vindictive academics sneaking in cowardly jabs in footnotes and pompously battling over the molehill.

In a wonderful recent piece in Tehelka, Amitava Kumar asks us to rethink how we read the literary text. It's also a great blueprint for the nascent academic. He says, too many readers wish to be pundits, who "nurse a secret ambition to be described as someone who has read everything." Graduate students will surely recognize themselves. Also, underneath the ostensible spirit of impartial critique hides a deadness of thought: this "kind of reader will always try to sound knowledgeable, moral, balanced, and always, very reasonable."
Academic writers are as guilty of this sin as fiction writers: "I like that writer who doesn’t address the world from a position of Olympian superiority. It is even better when a piece of writing reveals how its writer’s admittedly partial or flawed vision offers special insight into the world. A reader who reciprocates in the same spirit, reading with empathy or hurt or imagination, produces what may well be a new text."
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main43.asp?filename=Ne300110essay2_the_reader.asp
The best discussions I've had in the classroom have been the free ones, when mouths run off from the script, when the student earnestly tries to engage the text, to see if it makes sense or strikes a chord, even to passionately denounce it (from a position of vulnerability, of course). Reading is work, but it is also productive and a joy. It need not lead to a great additive insight or building block for a field examination or paper. What is important is that some idea from the page has been turned over in the mind, has occupied if only a few minutes of one's day. This process requires above all the qualities of humility, openness and patience.

The rewards of an academic life are perhaps small, but none is more exhilarating than the discovery of previously unsuspected complexities. If this discovery makes academic life so antithetical to practical life, or what is nowadays interestingly called "the real world," it also renders academics themselves impatient. We're eager to broadcast our jadedness. This one's "over" Foucault, this one's "had enough" of this or that historiographical turn. The greatest violence we can do is hasty categorisation and the filing away of ideas. It's a surefire road to a closing mind, but even more importantly, to an unhappy mind.

The Self-Importance of Self-Criticism

Perhaps because of the Great Recession, or as an inevitable consequence of globalisation's long-term restructuring of every aspect of our lives (when, as Marx once put it, "all that is solid melts into air"), it has become fashionable to suggest that the university system in the United States is due for a fundamental re-structuring. Most of the animus seems to be directed at humanities education as increasingly "useless" and "irrelevant" in an economic climate where tenured faculty positions are fast disappearing. On the external side, the argument (put forth with some force a few years ago by Thomas Friedman) that the U.S. lags behind Asia in scientific education is a valid policy concern. But it is the internal criticism that has been gathering steam: by this I mean academics turning an introspective, self-critical look on their profession and its limitations for the future.

The most high-profile shot across the bow was fired by Columbia professor Mark C. Taylor in his recent New York Times op-ed entitled (provocatively enough) "End the University as We Know It."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/opinion/27taylor.html

To those of us thinking about an academic career, some of his arguments are all too familiar. He correctly notes the oversupply of underpaid, debt-ridden graduate students vying for jobs that do not exist. His attacks of the tenure system and increasing specialisation (which means that young scholars produce, in Taylor's view, obscure books that do not sell) are entering dodgy territory. His solutions, especially his thematic interdisciplinary re-organisation of educational institutions around problem areas like "Water" are in the domain of the fantastic. Though Taylor gets points for creativity, his proposed system would eliminate the opportunity to specialise in a particular discipline that lies at the very basis of interdisciplinarity. A scholar not properly and rigorously trained in history and anthropology can have little to add to a colleague in the mathematics or physical sciences. If everyone is a bit of a poet and a bit of a biologist, they end up being nothing much at all.

It would be easy to take the route of defending humanities education by pointing to the intrinsic worth of "developing the mind," or stressing the transferrability of "critical thinking" skills to the business or policy domain. But this would be a cop-out precisely because it entails a complete surrender to the argument that humanities are useless, by making them either a "Chicken soup for the soul" that cannot be taken seriously in an environment of difficult budget choices, or admitting that the only way a humanities major can be useful is by taking a job in government or business.
Taylor and other critics have named the problem: the humanities do not engage with the wider social world. But the pressure to change should not only be on universities. Why not demand that policymakers, businessmen and NGOs pay greater attention to those obscure books that do not sell? Would not our foreign policy, for instance, be different if people in Washington read less popular histories and simplified security reports and engaged instead with serious in-depth studies of the people of a region (like the Middle East or South Asia)? But the process of translation is tricky. The world of academic writing requires a sense of open-endedness and refusal to prescribe, while the world of policy calls for immediate action. There is a window for dialogue, but historians and anthropologists must be left alone to do their job as observers of our complex world, not transformed into task-oriented bureaucrats.

To return to the crisis of academia, in an even more introspective critique known to many students currently applying to graduate school, Prof. William Pannapacker writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education with some categorical advice: "Just Don't Go."

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009013001c.htm

This is an impassioned plea that is much easier to accept because it is written to help save thousands of unfortunate souls from a life of misery. Once again, much of what Pannapacker says is absolutely spot-on, particularly his astute observation that many students who go to graduate school do so because of esoteric concerns like their "special interest" and "love" for a subject, their refusal to venture out into the real world, their need for validation, their romanticism of scholarly life, and the limits to their skills. His assessment of the declining number of secure jobs and the massive competition that results (thousands of applicants for one position amounting to nothing more than a lottery) is sobering and realistic. His solution is far simpler than Taylor's: unless you have an independent source of income or reliable connection, don't get a PhD.

The problem with all these criticisms is their exaggerated self-importance. Pannapacker is doing precisely what he accuses his naive graduate students of doing: making an emotional argument based on idealistic, insider notions about what academia is. Teaching at a university is simply a job like any other. Garbagemen, foresters, baristas, taxi drivers and call centre operators do not go around on the Internet posting long-winded diatribes about the state of their profession. Those of us who are going into academia certainly need to be, and are being, made aware of the enormous financial and lifestyle risks of such a choice. But we should understand that there are many jobs that are far worse and far less economically secure in a service-based economy. Farmers, manufacturers or people without college degrees in the United States are in an arguably worse position, not to mention everyone in the developing world trying to scrape a living for their families by diversification, immigration and other means. The trials and tribulations of an unemployed PhD. are painful but not catastrophic. Taylor and Pannapacker grew up in an age when academics enjoyed a comparatively more important social position, and their expectations for the profession (as well as their assumptions of students' expectations) reflect this. The future generation of academics already knows better.

Five Life-Changing Undergraduate Readings

As I rapidly approach the end of my undergraduate education, I look back at what I've accomplished academically in four years at Berkeley and I am tempted to conclude that it's all been rather mundane: semester followed by semester in an indistinguishable haze of half-completed readings, "winged" finals and papers, and beer-soaked celebrations.

There were, however, moments of genuine clarity and learning, when my perspective on the world shifted and I could suddenly think in a new way about a certain subject. I've thought of five assigned readings from my classes so far that have been able to accomplish this, in however small a measure. I do not include the many fascinating books and articles I've read for research or outside interest inspired by my studies, which would be far too many.


1) Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s. Ed. Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen. Trans. Carol A. Flath (New York: New Press, 1995). Read for Letters & Science 40: The Soviet Experience, Prof. Irina Paperno (Spring 2006).
This collection of diaries is a remarkable insight into the minds of ordinary Soviet citizens living during the years of Stalin's Terror. What is most surprising about these fragments of memory is how much the official ideologies of the state were a living force in people's daily lives. The most shocking example is that of Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, a student who earnestly tries to become the "new man" and struggles through some unsuccessful attempts at getting a girl. In his clumsy yet charming words the glorious visions of Stalinist propaganda meet the banal facets of everyday life.


2) Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 1999). Read for History 114B: Modern South Asia, Prof. Eugene Irschick (Fall 2007).
Indian women have been traditionally conceptualised by the West either as hopelessly sensuous and sexual or as repressed and traditional, in a perverse dichotomy borne of a heady brew of Orientalist, colonial, patriarchal and other nasty discourses. Puri's work is based on actual interviews with contemporary women, talking about their sexual lives and the challenges they face, from pleasing their husbands to understanding what it means to be an "Indian" woman in the 21st century.


3) Violent Environments. Ed. Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts (Cornell University Press, 2001). Selections read for ESPM 168: Political Ecology, Prof. Nancy Peluso (Spring 2008).
This collection of essays takes on dominant assumptions of environmentalist thinking, by debunking the idea of natural scarcity as a driver of conflict and challenging the violence of capitalist enclosures and conservation measures. Perhaps the most interesting piece is by James McCarthy, who does something completely unique in academia: applies the analytical tools of political ecology, normally used to defend local resource control by Third World indigenous peoples against big bad Western environmentalists, to the First World case of the Wise Use movement in North America.


4) Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Political Life (Knopf, 2007). Read for Public Policy 103: Wealth & Poverty, Prof. Robert Reich (Spring 2008).
The main reason why this book makes the list is that having Reich as a Professor is one of the small yet incredibly rewarding perks of being a Berkeley student. What he says is not particularly original or controversial, but he has been able to express in clear language some basic truths of our age: that the economy has undergone a fundamental shift in the last thirty years so that I am now a "symbolic analyst," that corporations have no morality, and that we all have choices to make as consumers and citizens. The fact that I was taking Reich's class in the year of Obama's election and the beginning of the economic crisis makes it that much more of a timely and unforgettable read.


5) Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press, 2005). Read for History 280U: Histories of the British Empire, Profs. Thomas Metcalf and James Vernon (Fall 2008).
Since I only read the first chapter, I hesitated to include it on this list. But Cooper touches on what is perhaps the most important concern animating my current scholarly interests: the tension between resisting the modernity of colonialism and the fact that colonised people often appealed to "Western" or "Enlightenment" notions of rights, citizenship and justice to make claims. Cooper uses the example of West Africa under French rule, but similar arguments have been made by Indian historians like Sumit Sarkar who have been very inspirational to me outside of my undergraduate curriculum.