Media representations and intellectual responses to the controversy around a line in the title track of movie Aaja Nachle have been short-sighted and narrow-minded. The haste with which the Media hushed up the matter and precluded the possible and necessary discussion was partly due to its inability to differentiate this particular dispute from the generalized atmosphere of intolerance ever since Hindutva turned main stream in Indian politics. Media chose to consider the matter closed as soon as the filmmakers apologized and offered to remove the objected stanza and the UP government lifted the ban on the movie. None of the notorious faults of Media - sensationalism, superficiality, preference to profit over ethics, unprofessionalism etc - seem to have influenced the Media's unanimous abortive act of silencing. It is also surprising that none of the TV channels used the opportunity to show the much hyped re-appearance of Madhuri Dixit ad nauseam - the way it exploited the controversies involving Rakhi Sawant or Shilpa Shetty for prurient ends. None of the mainstream English dailies deemed it worth publishing an editorial or analytical essay on this matter. No other usual arguments we are accustomed to hear and read whenever claims are made about the hurt feelings, sentiments or sensibilities of a section or a community appeared either on TV or in news papers. None defended the freedom of artistic expression of the lyricist nor did anybody denounce the objected lines. Apologies rendered by the individuals responsible for the line or by the censor board are also vague to say the least, yet further questioning is not allowed in the media. The apologies simply said that they did not mean to hurt anybody and if anybody's feelings were hurt they would apologize for 'it.' It appears as though they were apologizing for somebody else getting hurt and not because they were in anyway responsible for that. It is an absurd gesture of apologizing for somebody else's actions or feelings. It is not a simple case of a clueless fumbling of the responsible persons in the face of an unexpected crisis. They were apologizing for their lines being objected not because they agree that they were objectionable. The inability or unwillingness to address the agitators as Dalits or Dalit organizations is noteworthy. Even when Dalit organizations could succeed in making their objections heard and responded to, they could not be spoken to in their specificity. The Dalits were, once again, reduced to a faceless "anybody." Anyway, everybody including Mayawati appeared to be in a hurry to silence the matter.
What is surprising in this is the complete lack of interest on everybody's part in the content and meaning of the disputed lines, except, of course, agitating Dalit organizations. Not even the Mayawati's government and a handful of state governments that followed her example said anything about the meaning of the disputed lines of the lyric. It is not that the meaning or depiction of a disputed artwork is important to understand the conflict; quite the contrary is true in most of the cases. The lyric says that there was anarchy because even a person of cobbler-caste origin was claiming that he was from goldsmith-caste. Insult is obvious enough. You don't have to be a mochi to see the indecency or at least bad taste in this attempted native humor. We all have seen how TV channels thoughtlessly showed the paintings by Chandra Mohan and earlier M.F. Hussein and how such presentation of "facts" or "causes" actually strengthened the case of the Hindutva goons rather than exposing them. Inexplicably, in this case, Media behaved differently. Ironically enough, both Mayawati and the other state governments that banned the film echoed what the lyric- though in a different register- said: it was a question of 'order,' they were banning the movie, the state governments claimed, to prevent 'law and order' problem. Perhaps, Mayawati government was sensible or shrewd enough to say only this much to avoid legal complications or prevent moviemaker to move the court. But nothing should have stopped Media from analyzing this dispute. Usual assertions like: 'I don't like that particular writer's or painter's work but I defend his or her right to write or paint' were simply not heard in this dispute. On the contrary, what happened was: I don't know nor I want to know what wrong I have done but I apologize for it. It is not just because a business of millions was at stake. One way of reading the quickness and thoughtlessness with which apologies were offered was to see it as a result of correct appreciation of the intolerant atmosphere in which if the grievance-claims are allowed to be baseless, so be apologies to them. We argue that our public sphere does not have to be seen as a jungle raj yet and in fact we have a very promising antidote in the form of lower-caste assertion. The culture of subjectivization, privatization and fragmentation of sensibilities could that renders the need for public debate, objective verification and contestation unnecessary could be defeated by a new cultural revolution whose seeds could be found in the aborted discussion on the lines of film song in a commercial movie.
First, we need to de-contextualize the controversy and then re-contextualize it. The immediate precedents to the controversy around Aaaja Nachle, the repeated attacks and persecution of Tasleema Nasrin and Hindutva's attacks on various forms of free speech and expression are neither similar nor connected to the objection Dalit organizations raised against a line in this song. While the other cases of purported wounded feelings were claims based on religion, Dalits' objection is self-evidently secular and in fact, anti-religious. What Piyush Misra wrote is well within the framework of Hinduism and actually it mildly, humorously mentions what Gita and other sacred texts insist on much more blatantly. In protesting the lyric, Dalits are fighting against the dogmas of both religion and caste. It should have been seen as a great opportunity for enlightenment but was suppressed by media and intelligentsia as an embarrassment.
This may raise the objection that giving enough or excessive importance to the Dalit objection, however justified it may be, only adds to the list of alarmingly proliferating claims of hurt sensibilities and thus constitute a danger to free thought and expression. It is our contention that the opposite is true and that this controversy opens up a new potential and possibility for permanently silencing some of the most successful techniques of Hindutva and greatly enriches our unfinished project of enlightenment. One of them is the seemingly invincible strategy of Hindutva (and other communalist) propaganda and attention-grabbing through a collapse of fields. They expose a secluded sphere like art-world with its protected codes and values of acceptability to the public gaze and force a public comment building on thus generated shock among the public. Whenever they argue against an artwork (avant-garde art or some passages from a novel) they are bound to win the sympathy of the people. Governments are not only accepting such arguments but also making such claims themselves- Narendra Modi and Buddhadeb being recent examples. How to fight such (non)argument? Definitely not by counter-arguments alone!
Imagine a situation where Dalits agitating against public celebration of Rama on the grounds that the killer of Shambuka can't be venerable or opposing any act of veneration of gita because it humiliates the "lower" castes. Such a situation would surely increase tensions and conflicts. But it seems to us that our society needs to painstakingly go through the whole process of reestablishing the principle of co-existence of multiple, incompatible and conflicting beliefs- including their expression. It is only in this way the all too frequently forgotten fact that we are all legally bound by the constitution and not by any other texts, however sacred believers may deem them to be and should a conflict arise the constitution must have the final say.
Similar counter-move could be discerned in the lower-caste assertion against the communal claims about the past injustices. It is only with Dalits talking about the injustices they suffered, the Hindutva would be forced to shun another of its standard technique of collapsing the past and present. If media unilaterally and unanimously did not suppress the debate on the disputed song it would have started a veritable cultural revolution in our public sphere. It would have encouraged Dalits and other victims of Hinduism to point many more insults and exclusions naturalized in our language, symbols, traditions and even our ideals. It would have forced the entire public discourse to unlearn most of itself and rebuild a new public language. This might at first glance appear like a recipe for multiplication of violence rather than a way to mitigate the "competing intolerances." But, is there any better alternative to defeat the potential formation of a Hindutva majority, which alone could perpetrate genocides and probably unleash a nuclear war.
Given the near inevitable Lower-Caste march to political power across many parts of the country, we require a viable and sensible cultural counter-part to such a political change. This alone could allow us confront the unavoidable aporia of lower-caste capture of political power and emerge from it with least damage and sacrifices: a sad truth of our default democracy is an inverted political culture where stable access to rights is available only to those who enjoy them as privileges or in a limited way, by virtue of being unavailable to or outside of the infrastructural or bio-political reach of the state. Not placing or developing a cultural apparatus to symbolically enact the already-started transfer, transformation and take-over of political power is left with only one means to convince itself and others of its empowerment: violence. It is here we could sense two dangers of most potent kind. A new gulf between powers is emerging instead of a separation of powers between the political and cultural, with the attending mutual suspicion. With the cultural and representational realms refusing to come out of their self-righteous solipsism and newly empowering sections suspecting the cultural and representational spheres as something to be defeated or neglected rather than won over, this mutual distrust may lead to a reciprocal impoverishment resulting in comflicting infirmities of a powerless culture and cultureless power. One desirable solution to this impending crisis is the emergence of a plethora of alternatives and a corresponding revamp of our cultural and representational sphere. But what is being attempted by the timed out but not yet abdicated or dethroned cultural forces is suicidal. They are evermore frantically holding fast to their old ways. It could safeguard its decencies only by purging itself of some of the inhuman suppressions it is based on. The death warrant to dialogue is to refuse to listen to the hitherto silenced suffering and grievances in the initial phase of their assertion of empowerment. Those not tasted the fruits of dialogue and argument may not continue to valorize the communicative rationality even after assuming the power. Second danger is the over use of a peripheral form of power, media, to ethno-centric propaganda. It is going to backfire in unpredictable ways. Power is not just functional or rather it has cultural functions too. If the only option for the lower castes to assert themselves in the representational and cultural fields is to translate everything into the prevailing dominant code, it surely fails for the simple reason that self-negation can't be a workable mode of assertion. Media utterly failed to see all of it if it bothered to reflect on what kinds of changes are necessary in the wake of ongoing restructuring the political power. Instead, the Media Dalitized the caste, communalized the idea of Dalit, ignored or suppressed a budding cultural criticism, viewed it as a problem and not as a potential solution, privatized and subjectivized the very issue of dignity. It did not occur to any channel or news paper to ask the filmmakers or intellectuals what they thought about the controversial stanza. Much deeper malady that made all of these omissions or diversions possible was the dominant and Left-sponsored conception of the communal. It typically sees both religion and caste as essentially similar. To be sure, they have identical features but not functions are potentials. Religion and caste could both turn fascist. But, Hindu religion alone could be mobilized to establish a fascist system in India, as Nehru clearly saw it. So far the most recalcitrant hurdle to Hindutva has been the so-called casteist forces in India. To be sure, both forms of social bonding- caste and religion- are essentially irrational and therefore similar. But, only religion could forge a majority in our polity while caste is inherently immune from that danger.
The reality of caste is to be honestly recognized, acknowledged and squarely confronted rather than continuing with hypocritical denial or na�vely believing in 'disappearing' the caste by not seeing it. We further argue that we should blunt the deadly force of caste by trivializing it through overuse. However, it is likely that the media and film industry would draw the wrong conclusion from this controversy with its spill-over effects on the whole of public discourse: avoiding any mention of caste at all. This only helps support or fail to critique the perpetuation of caste based oppression, atrocities, discrimination and exclusion. What is needed is a sensitization towards caste not the sanitization of it from popular culture. Confronting an issue involves the risk of erring by and in handling it. Unwillingness to take the risk of talking about caste and also being open to criticism and correction is surely cowardice at best and arrogance at worst. Unless the cultural and intellectual corollary to the process of 'the mochis coming to power' is systematically organized, the reversals in the political field are not going to mark much civilizational advance.
So far, the attitude towards Dalit expression on the part of the state, media and intelligentsia is one of what we call, a "stigmatizing concession." If at all the dominant cultural and political forces are willing to accept or allow something to what Dalits want or do, they do it by naming and framing it in a demeaning way. We have seen the sleight of hand by which rights of Dalits were degraded as acts and policies of charity through the mediating term of Welfare even before much comprehensive attack on all forms of welfare began with the Liberalization. Similarly, when Dalits (shamefully, only Dalits) object to an insult it is reduced to a concession in the face of threats of violence. Here is a curious reversal: the very act of conceding is simultaneously a degradation of the same. Allowing and granting a state of affairs is deprived here the dignity of becoming reality and acquire naturality but permanently locked up in the framework of an oddity or a compulsion.
In this case, listening to Dalit organizations effectively reduced to appeasing a claimed hurt of a perceived insult. With these double disclaimers, the possibility of opposing an act of insult without being hurt is criminally lost. You can oppose an act of public insult without being hurt because you believe that there is certain decorum to public discourse. Not many actions and expressions are worthy of our emotional responses. We deem them beneath our dignity to feel insulted by them but still we must oppose them. Nearly every atheist outraged when Babri Masjid was brought down and argues for restoring it not because her religious sentiments were hurt. We do so not on the grounds of our wounded feelings or sentiments but to sustain the decency of the public sphere. Getting hurt at somebody's gestures still constitutes certain granting of seriousness to their acts or words. Not all of them deserve this dignity yet we can and must oppose when they vitiate the public domain. This crucial distinction is necessary to de-psychologize the grievances and put them back to the scrutiny of public reason through dialogic procedure. This is why Dalits and the Left should take up the critique of the scandalous lines in this film song this issue as part of larger cultural agenda. Otherwise, it would look odd that in a country where an atrocity against Dalits is perpetrated every 18 minutes and 3 Dalit women are raped every day, writing an article on a deleted line in a film song!
What is surprising in this is the complete lack of interest on everybody's part in the content and meaning of the disputed lines, except, of course, agitating Dalit organizations. Not even the Mayawati's government and a handful of state governments that followed her example said anything about the meaning of the disputed lines of the lyric. It is not that the meaning or depiction of a disputed artwork is important to understand the conflict; quite the contrary is true in most of the cases. The lyric says that there was anarchy because even a person of cobbler-caste origin was claiming that he was from goldsmith-caste. Insult is obvious enough. You don't have to be a mochi to see the indecency or at least bad taste in this attempted native humor. We all have seen how TV channels thoughtlessly showed the paintings by Chandra Mohan and earlier M.F. Hussein and how such presentation of "facts" or "causes" actually strengthened the case of the Hindutva goons rather than exposing them. Inexplicably, in this case, Media behaved differently. Ironically enough, both Mayawati and the other state governments that banned the film echoed what the lyric- though in a different register- said: it was a question of 'order,' they were banning the movie, the state governments claimed, to prevent 'law and order' problem. Perhaps, Mayawati government was sensible or shrewd enough to say only this much to avoid legal complications or prevent moviemaker to move the court. But nothing should have stopped Media from analyzing this dispute. Usual assertions like: 'I don't like that particular writer's or painter's work but I defend his or her right to write or paint' were simply not heard in this dispute. On the contrary, what happened was: I don't know nor I want to know what wrong I have done but I apologize for it. It is not just because a business of millions was at stake. One way of reading the quickness and thoughtlessness with which apologies were offered was to see it as a result of correct appreciation of the intolerant atmosphere in which if the grievance-claims are allowed to be baseless, so be apologies to them. We argue that our public sphere does not have to be seen as a jungle raj yet and in fact we have a very promising antidote in the form of lower-caste assertion. The culture of subjectivization, privatization and fragmentation of sensibilities could that renders the need for public debate, objective verification and contestation unnecessary could be defeated by a new cultural revolution whose seeds could be found in the aborted discussion on the lines of film song in a commercial movie.
First, we need to de-contextualize the controversy and then re-contextualize it. The immediate precedents to the controversy around Aaaja Nachle, the repeated attacks and persecution of Tasleema Nasrin and Hindutva's attacks on various forms of free speech and expression are neither similar nor connected to the objection Dalit organizations raised against a line in this song. While the other cases of purported wounded feelings were claims based on religion, Dalits' objection is self-evidently secular and in fact, anti-religious. What Piyush Misra wrote is well within the framework of Hinduism and actually it mildly, humorously mentions what Gita and other sacred texts insist on much more blatantly. In protesting the lyric, Dalits are fighting against the dogmas of both religion and caste. It should have been seen as a great opportunity for enlightenment but was suppressed by media and intelligentsia as an embarrassment.
This may raise the objection that giving enough or excessive importance to the Dalit objection, however justified it may be, only adds to the list of alarmingly proliferating claims of hurt sensibilities and thus constitute a danger to free thought and expression. It is our contention that the opposite is true and that this controversy opens up a new potential and possibility for permanently silencing some of the most successful techniques of Hindutva and greatly enriches our unfinished project of enlightenment. One of them is the seemingly invincible strategy of Hindutva (and other communalist) propaganda and attention-grabbing through a collapse of fields. They expose a secluded sphere like art-world with its protected codes and values of acceptability to the public gaze and force a public comment building on thus generated shock among the public. Whenever they argue against an artwork (avant-garde art or some passages from a novel) they are bound to win the sympathy of the people. Governments are not only accepting such arguments but also making such claims themselves- Narendra Modi and Buddhadeb being recent examples. How to fight such (non)argument? Definitely not by counter-arguments alone!
Imagine a situation where Dalits agitating against public celebration of Rama on the grounds that the killer of Shambuka can't be venerable or opposing any act of veneration of gita because it humiliates the "lower" castes. Such a situation would surely increase tensions and conflicts. But it seems to us that our society needs to painstakingly go through the whole process of reestablishing the principle of co-existence of multiple, incompatible and conflicting beliefs- including their expression. It is only in this way the all too frequently forgotten fact that we are all legally bound by the constitution and not by any other texts, however sacred believers may deem them to be and should a conflict arise the constitution must have the final say.
Similar counter-move could be discerned in the lower-caste assertion against the communal claims about the past injustices. It is only with Dalits talking about the injustices they suffered, the Hindutva would be forced to shun another of its standard technique of collapsing the past and present. If media unilaterally and unanimously did not suppress the debate on the disputed song it would have started a veritable cultural revolution in our public sphere. It would have encouraged Dalits and other victims of Hinduism to point many more insults and exclusions naturalized in our language, symbols, traditions and even our ideals. It would have forced the entire public discourse to unlearn most of itself and rebuild a new public language. This might at first glance appear like a recipe for multiplication of violence rather than a way to mitigate the "competing intolerances." But, is there any better alternative to defeat the potential formation of a Hindutva majority, which alone could perpetrate genocides and probably unleash a nuclear war.
Given the near inevitable Lower-Caste march to political power across many parts of the country, we require a viable and sensible cultural counter-part to such a political change. This alone could allow us confront the unavoidable aporia of lower-caste capture of political power and emerge from it with least damage and sacrifices: a sad truth of our default democracy is an inverted political culture where stable access to rights is available only to those who enjoy them as privileges or in a limited way, by virtue of being unavailable to or outside of the infrastructural or bio-political reach of the state. Not placing or developing a cultural apparatus to symbolically enact the already-started transfer, transformation and take-over of political power is left with only one means to convince itself and others of its empowerment: violence. It is here we could sense two dangers of most potent kind. A new gulf between powers is emerging instead of a separation of powers between the political and cultural, with the attending mutual suspicion. With the cultural and representational realms refusing to come out of their self-righteous solipsism and newly empowering sections suspecting the cultural and representational spheres as something to be defeated or neglected rather than won over, this mutual distrust may lead to a reciprocal impoverishment resulting in comflicting infirmities of a powerless culture and cultureless power. One desirable solution to this impending crisis is the emergence of a plethora of alternatives and a corresponding revamp of our cultural and representational sphere. But what is being attempted by the timed out but not yet abdicated or dethroned cultural forces is suicidal. They are evermore frantically holding fast to their old ways. It could safeguard its decencies only by purging itself of some of the inhuman suppressions it is based on. The death warrant to dialogue is to refuse to listen to the hitherto silenced suffering and grievances in the initial phase of their assertion of empowerment. Those not tasted the fruits of dialogue and argument may not continue to valorize the communicative rationality even after assuming the power. Second danger is the over use of a peripheral form of power, media, to ethno-centric propaganda. It is going to backfire in unpredictable ways. Power is not just functional or rather it has cultural functions too. If the only option for the lower castes to assert themselves in the representational and cultural fields is to translate everything into the prevailing dominant code, it surely fails for the simple reason that self-negation can't be a workable mode of assertion. Media utterly failed to see all of it if it bothered to reflect on what kinds of changes are necessary in the wake of ongoing restructuring the political power. Instead, the Media Dalitized the caste, communalized the idea of Dalit, ignored or suppressed a budding cultural criticism, viewed it as a problem and not as a potential solution, privatized and subjectivized the very issue of dignity. It did not occur to any channel or news paper to ask the filmmakers or intellectuals what they thought about the controversial stanza. Much deeper malady that made all of these omissions or diversions possible was the dominant and Left-sponsored conception of the communal. It typically sees both religion and caste as essentially similar. To be sure, they have identical features but not functions are potentials. Religion and caste could both turn fascist. But, Hindu religion alone could be mobilized to establish a fascist system in India, as Nehru clearly saw it. So far the most recalcitrant hurdle to Hindutva has been the so-called casteist forces in India. To be sure, both forms of social bonding- caste and religion- are essentially irrational and therefore similar. But, only religion could forge a majority in our polity while caste is inherently immune from that danger.
The reality of caste is to be honestly recognized, acknowledged and squarely confronted rather than continuing with hypocritical denial or na�vely believing in 'disappearing' the caste by not seeing it. We further argue that we should blunt the deadly force of caste by trivializing it through overuse. However, it is likely that the media and film industry would draw the wrong conclusion from this controversy with its spill-over effects on the whole of public discourse: avoiding any mention of caste at all. This only helps support or fail to critique the perpetuation of caste based oppression, atrocities, discrimination and exclusion. What is needed is a sensitization towards caste not the sanitization of it from popular culture. Confronting an issue involves the risk of erring by and in handling it. Unwillingness to take the risk of talking about caste and also being open to criticism and correction is surely cowardice at best and arrogance at worst. Unless the cultural and intellectual corollary to the process of 'the mochis coming to power' is systematically organized, the reversals in the political field are not going to mark much civilizational advance.
So far, the attitude towards Dalit expression on the part of the state, media and intelligentsia is one of what we call, a "stigmatizing concession." If at all the dominant cultural and political forces are willing to accept or allow something to what Dalits want or do, they do it by naming and framing it in a demeaning way. We have seen the sleight of hand by which rights of Dalits were degraded as acts and policies of charity through the mediating term of Welfare even before much comprehensive attack on all forms of welfare began with the Liberalization. Similarly, when Dalits (shamefully, only Dalits) object to an insult it is reduced to a concession in the face of threats of violence. Here is a curious reversal: the very act of conceding is simultaneously a degradation of the same. Allowing and granting a state of affairs is deprived here the dignity of becoming reality and acquire naturality but permanently locked up in the framework of an oddity or a compulsion.
In this case, listening to Dalit organizations effectively reduced to appeasing a claimed hurt of a perceived insult. With these double disclaimers, the possibility of opposing an act of insult without being hurt is criminally lost. You can oppose an act of public insult without being hurt because you believe that there is certain decorum to public discourse. Not many actions and expressions are worthy of our emotional responses. We deem them beneath our dignity to feel insulted by them but still we must oppose them. Nearly every atheist outraged when Babri Masjid was brought down and argues for restoring it not because her religious sentiments were hurt. We do so not on the grounds of our wounded feelings or sentiments but to sustain the decency of the public sphere. Getting hurt at somebody's gestures still constitutes certain granting of seriousness to their acts or words. Not all of them deserve this dignity yet we can and must oppose when they vitiate the public domain. This crucial distinction is necessary to de-psychologize the grievances and put them back to the scrutiny of public reason through dialogic procedure. This is why Dalits and the Left should take up the critique of the scandalous lines in this film song this issue as part of larger cultural agenda. Otherwise, it would look odd that in a country where an atrocity against Dalits is perpetrated every 18 minutes and 3 Dalit women are raped every day, writing an article on a deleted line in a film song!
ChittiBabu Padavala
Nageswara Rao Thamanam
