Picture This: That Working Class Fan

My BL_Ink column from yesterday:

In the grainy darkness, the young man’s face is lit up only by an eerie green light — and by his memories of the video theatres in which he spent his childhood. A ticket was ₹10, and every night of the week had a genre allotted to it: Mondays were for action, Tuesdays for romance, Wednesdays might be horror. “You got to see new films, old films, and even very old films. But even watching films we had already seen was fun for us,” he chortles. “Before Rajinikanth could say his dialogue, we would say it for him.”

The young man is Sagairaj, he is a film buff and Rajinikanth fan, and a few minutes into Jagannathan Krishnan’s remarkable 2010 documentary Videokaaran (roughly translatable as Video-fellow, or Video-wallah), we learn that he grew up to run a video parlour himself.

But since the demolition of Mumbai’s Rahul Nagar Video in 2006, and the general crackdown on semi-legal video theatres like it, neither Sagai nor his friends watch movies much. “People here earn ₹10 a day, some earn ₹50. They’re not going to go to multiplexes!” He mentions a local single-screen cinema where tickets are ₹80. “How is a man like that going to take his family to the theatre? Film has been snatched out of his hands.”

For much of the 20th century, cinema was among the few pleasures that the poor man in India could afford. (And I say ‘man’ deliberately here, because women did not — could not — go to theatres anywhere near as much as men could and did.) The film industry — whether Tamil, Telugu or Hindi — needed the urban poor to watch its films. And the strongest connection between that audience and the industry were its stars.

Film scholar Sara Dickey, who worked on fan clubs in Tamil Nadu, has argued that the masculine hero in south India is always depicted as sharing “either the attributes or the desires of the urban poor”. Figures as far apart in time as MG Ramachandran, Sivaji Ganesan, Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan, who have successfully cultivated distinct images, reveal a remarkable degree of overlap in the characteristics for which they are praised by their fan club members: generosity, compassion, humility, “the heart of a child”, strength and virility and talent in the dramatic arts. Crucially, the star is believed to feel concern for his (lower-class) fans, to recognise their “deserving but less influential” status. As the famous Rajinikanth song in Basha goes, “I am the heart that feels, I am the friend of the poor. I will always be the friend of the poor.”

Sushma Veerappa’s When Shankar Nag Comes Asking (2012), another documentary that explores film fandom as a way to understand urban male working-class culture, offers glimpses of how this belief in the star’s “good nature” and welcoming behaviour is circulated by fans. Veerappa’s film focuses on auto drivers in Bangalore, and their particular adoration of the late director-actor Shankar Nag, who legendarily played an auto driver in the superhit film Auto Raja (1980). Among the central characters in Veerappa’s film is Ramanna, an autorickshaw driver who is also president of the auto drivers’ section of the Kannada Protection Front. A film buff who came to Bangalore with dreams of becoming an actor, Ramanna remembers that he once chased after Shankar Nag and his brother Anant’s car: “Anant Nag remained in the car, but Shankar Nag stepped out. A real gentleman.”

Rajinikanth too, famously played an auto driver in Basha, immortalised by the song Naan autokaaran(I’m an auto-wallah). Early in Videokaaran, we see a conversation between several young men dissolve into an only half-jokey competition between Amitabh fans and Rajinikanth fans. Rajini’s entry speeds up the movie, says Sagai; with Amitabh, it’s not like that, you have to wait for him to open his mouth, for the dialogue. But the real basis on which Rajini wins the argument is that there aren’t fan clubs for Amitabh like there are for Rajini. Rajini gives out ‘messages’ that his fans take seriously, like when he told autowallahs to always stop and give pregnant women a free ride. “Even those who don’t listen to their families, listen to Rajini.” You can see how the wheel of fandom turns full circle: it is Rajinikanth’s relationship with his fans, his perceived ability to influence their behaviour that makes them even more devoted fans.

What is striking about Sagairaj’s relationship with the stars is its quicksilver quality. One moment he is talking about Rajini being responsible for his interest in being a kriya yogi, a deep sense of spiritual connection that dates back to his troubled childhood: “As a child, I had problems with my family. Whenever I saw Rajinikanth movies, I got strength.” The next moment, he is describing how all the actors “enter into him” when he’s picked up by a cop and wants to pretend to be badly hurt so the cop will let him go. Here, the channelling of his heroes is purely instrumental.

In Sagairaj’s relationship with cinema, you see an intimacy that people usually only have with gods they truly believe in: they’re close enough to dismiss occasionally.

But the world upon which Videokaaran casts its brief but compelling light has largely disappeared. The god of cinema no longer needs the poor. So the poor have been robbed of cinema, and even of video theatres. Television is a poor return gift.

Published in the Hindu Business Line.

Post Facto -- Vernacular Claims: Malgudi, Modi and the Vox Populi

My most recent Post Facto column, for the Sunday Guardian:

	A still from Malgudi Days algudi Days had only to re-appear on YouTube for me to immediately surrender my afternoon to its warm, nostalgic embrace. The first episode of the 1987 TV series inaugurates the war between school ruffian Mani and posh new boy Rajam. Our unheroic hero, Swami, admires them both. Rajam, son of the town's police chief, comes to school in a spotless khaki uniform complete with matching cap, exuding a hauteur that many, including Swami, can only gaze upon in wonder. Clearly Rajam is the prince of this grubby schoolboy world, and his royal mien invites strong reactions. But what Mani objects to is not Rajam's clothes, car, high marks or light eyes – it is his language. "Saala Rajam ka bachcha. Apne aap ko Angrez samajhta hai," he says, glaring into the distance as the object of his hatred disembarks from his chauffeur-driven vehicle. Our Shankar has more marks than Rajam, says Mani, but he doesn't speak English "hang-tang karke", with "firangi nakhre". But this is a British colonial universe, and it is also quite clear that much of the weight of Swami's father's letter to the headmaster lies in its impeccable English. From Class I to Class VIII, I studied at a girls' school in Calcutta. It wasn't even a convent, but it was unremarkable to have teachers walk in and interrupt classroom conversations with the plummily-delivered injunction, "Girls, girls. No speaking in the vernacular." And this was an old-school school, which took language learning seriously. Bengali and Hindi were compulsory and you weren't let off for being — or pretending to be — unable to speak them, as you might in some fashionable schools today. In some ways, the vernacular is possibly worse off now than in Swami's times. Structures of power embed themselves in language. Consider the word "vernacular" itself. The dictionary starts with a neutral "the standard native language of country or locality", but moves on to "the vulgar tongue of the masses." And "native or indigenous (opposed to literary or learned)". By the time you reach the etymological origin: "from Latin vernaculus, 'domestic, native' (from verna, 'home-born slave')", you can literally see English sitting fatly on the "vernaculars", squashing them with its weight.
	uch airtime and newsprint has been recently devoted to what Prime Minister Modi's speechifying in Hindi will mean for our status as a world power. I'm not sure the world is that interested. But within India, Modi's choice of Hindi makes his speeches accessible to a much wider cross-section than Gujarati on one hand and English on the other might have done. A shift in Hindi's status — away from "vernacular" — is welcome. But the danger is that a language that feels so threatened by English might want to use this moment to flex its muscles — against other vernaculars? There are those waiting in the wings to renew that age-old controversial rashtrabhasha argument. And certainly, the reports congratulating the Congress's Mallikarjun Kharge for delivering his verbal set downs to the Treasury benches "in chaste Hindi despite being from the Southern state of Karnataka", or the AIADMK's V. Maitreyan for giving his fellow Rajya Sabha members "a pleasant surprise" by speaking in Hindi, would seem to suggest a political recognition that the linguistic ground is shifting. Also language, it seems to me, has implications far beyond realpolitik. Certain ways of thinking and feeling are embedded deep within language. Would Kharge have used those Kaurava-Pandava analogies if he were speaking in English? I doubt it. Would Modi have said "temple of democracy" in English? Anointing Parliament "lokatantra ka mandir", calling it "pavitr" (pure, connoting sacredness): these linguistic choices connect seamlessly to touching his forehead to the ground as he entered Parliament — idioms most Indians watching would recognize as religious respect. But even more than the implicit religiosity, I was struck by the register in which the Prime Minister chose to address the question of women. "Nayi sarkaar desh ke gareebon ko samarpit hai, desh ke koti-koti yuvakon ke liye samarpit hai, aur maan-sammaan ke liye tarasti hamari maa-behenon ke liye samarpit hai," said Modi. Sure, he could have said this in English, too. But try it: "The new government is dedicated to the country's poor, to the country's crores of youth, and to our mothers and sisters, aching for respect." Youth and the poor belong to "the country". Women are "our mothers and sisters". By casting women not as citizens, but in familial roles, Modi's words also implicitly transform his "hum" — "we" — into an audience of men. Women, meanwhile, are pushed into a position of "tarasna" — tarasna in Hindi is used mostly in a romantic context to indicate yearning, a kind of aching desire, sometimes the earth's desire for rain. An appeal tailored to a male citizenry, delivered in an idiom it understands — an act of communicative genius, or a depressing reminder of that Wittgensteinian thought: the limits of our language are the limits of our world? Swami and Friends was written in English. And yet, when Shankar Nag — a Kannada actor and director, active in Marathi theatre — made the Doordarshan television series, he did so in Hindi. Later, it was also telecast in Telugu. On YouTube, there is a version in Tamil, in which a real-life Swami would have spoken. Lakhs of people in India who remember Swami fondly today would not know him if Nag hadn't broken the English barrier. And yet, Narayan made those acute observations on the linguistic politics of English in English. Clearly, we can be sensitive to political nuance in any language — and tone-deaf in any, too. It just depends on whom we want to speak to.