Very good article on understanding Thackrey-Bachchan conflict in a socilological context

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A city has always been a site for competing metaphors. Novelists and journalists in their writings have captured this drama. Gunter Grass and Dominic Lapierre did it for Calcutta, one pronouncing it a crematorium of death and the other labelling it a ‘City of Joy.’ In a similar manner, Mumbai too has become a pretext for competing claims and narratives. Only this time, the text is not a novel by Suketu Mehta or Salman Rushdie, it is a populist drama enacted in the open, with the media as storytellers. The impetus is Raj Thackeray’s attack on Amitabh Bachchan. In this essay, one is not interested in them as individuals. One is encountering them as persona, ritual enactments of competing visions of the city.
The first model embodies an idea of the homogenous city, where like reproduces like, as in a dull utopia. To the homogeneity, one adds a territoriality where the city surrounds itself with a cordon sanitaire. It seeks a ghettoisation of the populace, ensuring that nothing new, nothing different can enter. It is a populist ritual of pollution control where the stranger as the migrant, the refugee, or the poor is banned. It is a sanitisation of the rhetoric of nativism, security and populism. It is dystopian vision presented as a guarantee of safety as dullness.
Raj Thackeray is an embodiment of this domain. The only difference between his uncle and him is that Bal Thackeray appears to believe in it while Raj sees it as a legacy, a political real estate he must expand and exploit. This is more instrumental, more desperate, more cynical, more fascist. In Bollywood terms, it is a script for a B-grade movie with C-grade stars. The political trailer would be more worthwhile than the movie itself, moving between the redundancy of boredom and violence.
Counterposing this at the popular, populist, folk and mass media levels is the vision of Amitabh Bachchan. I am not interested in Bachchan and his personal forays into politics. I am interested in the Bachchan of folklore, the man and his sense of the city. The image of Bachchan evokes the alternative politics of the city as plural, diverse, violent, mobile, hardheaded, hardhearted, sentimental and creative.
Mumbai inspires and invites the migrant and the stranger but no one will deny it is a hard city. But as Bachchan and others show repeatedly, it is not the hardness of granite or of the heart, it is a demand for toughness, for survival, an initiation rite that demands that you survive the city. It is not the hardness of closure, denial, and refusal. It is a generous city which thinks dogs in the manger are not genuinely city-bred.
Raj Thackeray presents the vision of the nukkad strongman in a designer kurta offering safety in return for a policing contract. It is a Hobbesian world which offers city life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, short and brutish’ if one does not accept their vision. It is a ghettoised imagination. The sadness is that the Shiv Sena has the same traumatic emptiness of McCarthyism. Put it on television, expose it on media as a documentary, and it seems hollow. No bit actor is less convincing that Raj Thackeray. In fact, some of his followers carry on as if they could enact his part better.
Bollywood shows that this is a notion of the city in corsets. Bollywood needs the genetics of difference. In fact, in many ways its original, the Bombay Talkies, embodied Hindu-Muslim unity before and after Partition. Bollywood is a salute to every outsider, migrant, stranger who seeks to come home to the city. It is a parallel vision that the Shiv Sena finds threatening and which it tries to control.
Happily myths don’t succumb as easily to the petty politician. Shiv Sena is in Mumbai but is hardly representative of it. Bollywood is in Mumbai but celebrates both the city and India. It is local, national, global and cosmopolitan. The battle at the level of myth is uneven even if the Sena digs hard into local legend and folklore.
Thackeray and Bachchan have become inadvertently competing models of the city. The first is ghettoised, farcical, threatening, and the second is generous, thoughtful, realistic and yet celebratory about the possibilities of the city. Thackeray threatens democracy through populism; the other expands democracy as script and drama even if it is a bumbling one.
One must be grateful it is an open drama being consumed by millions across the country. This binary model of the city raises a futuristic either/or. It raises the question of how a society responds to scarcity or relative deprivation. It is not the poor who create this idiot politics but a middle class seeing its part of the cake shrink. Thackeray’s is a politics of jealousy, envy playing to the politics of scarcity. It plays the idea of the sons of the soil to show it has no sense of the soil called the city. It is the idiom of security battling the metaphors of sustainability.
Democracy is a world of hard choices, even cruel ones. It also allows bit players a chance at the big time. The beauty is democracy does not eliminate either set of players. It puts them in a public arena asking the spectator to make choices. Democracy realises a city of spectators is also a city of critics and actors. Mumbai has set the melodrama and is asking India to decide. Raj Thackeray or Amitabh Bachchan as ‘Bombay meri jaan’?

Tu kaun hai, tera naam kya, Seeta bhi yehaan badnaam hui...

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Sharam kee baath
by Kroora Shigamani on Jan 03, 2008 02:28 PM Hide replies

Agar ek naari aadhi raath mein hotel ke bahar Jashn aur jalwa manakar ghoomein tho koyi bee bharatiya purrush ko nasha chad jaatha hy. Yeh tho bahut sharam kee baath hy kee apne sabhyatha, samskruthi aur parampara ka apmaan ho raha hy bharatiya sthree kee vajeh se

Disturbed as I was with the event on New year's Eve, I was unsure whether I should dedicate a post to it. Thanks to Mr. Kroora and Rediff, that, as I have already highlighted, regularly spurns out the best of our Indian muck - for inspiring me to write.

Those of you who still haven't seen through the sham: This is the story...

Millenia back, man correlated his humping with the perplexing appearance of a small person, in the form of an infant, from the womb of the object of his temporary affections. Once the epiphany dawned, so did the cognizance of another distressing fact: since the coupling was free (and i assume, ferocious) between changing partners, the proof of fatherhood could never be established - except for a chance resemblance. This distressed the man since the establishment of control on a future generation gave him the sudden window to perpetuation and eventually - eternity. Lineages could be built; kingdoms could be established; histories could be written.

The first step in the systematic assertion of the father was the establishment of the virtue of the female as sacred and inviolable. The emergence of this strain of thought was best captured in the birth of Semitic religions: where the focus shifted from the Mother Goddess of fertility to an old frothing patriarch whose idea of love was to throw the souls of those who displeased him into an eternal agony and whose idea of a perfect life for his sons was their constant obsequious and humble reverence towards him. Lucifer, the proud, was created as a symbol of the evil of opposition to this diktat.

But perhaps the piece-de-resistance was the idea that females were the root to all the sufferings of the world today: and hence the story of Genesis and Eve and the apple.

With the expulsion of Eve in the story, a new morality was born. A morality where the only role subscribed to a woman was the bearer of the sons who would till the land, mind the sheep and conquer the lands for their father.

Since the shell of rationale - sacrosanctness of female virtue - holding the entire structure was thinner than a butterfly's wing, the new order had to preempt cracks that might lay bare the absurdity of it all. For this the weapon they employed was the basest known to man - violence. Morality was unquestionable and the price of transgression was horrible death - stoning, torture, burning at the stakes.

The other weapon was the denial of knowledge, and hence the faculty to reason, to women. Women were told that the greatest joy they can have, and the only function they can serve, is motherhood. That and the joy of getting up before dawn, cleaning the entire house, preparing meals three times a day, being the bouncing board for her husband's anger, wit and, of course, lust. The cult of pati parmeshwara started; the evidence of women's subjugation to her man was irrefutably established through the Genesis story; women were controlled and shepherded behind zenanas to save them from their own treachery and opening legs where they shouldn't.

It is interesting to note that to give the facade a credible bolster, the very idea of sex was propagated as intrinsically disgusting and sinful and had to be borne only for the function it served - producing children. In fact, in the case of Mother Mary, the ridiculous idea of her virginity despite conception was generated to maintain the veneer of purity, as described by the keepers of faith. So great was our Mother that she did not spread her legs apart even for Joseph!

Compare this to wild "promiscuity" of the early Gods of Greek, Roman and Hindu mythology: which would you be rather, my man? The wild God who had good, fulsome and perfectly consensual sex or the hubby who doesn't get it even for the noble cause of a divine birth?

But while this dogma was strictly imposed on the females, the channel of prostitution provided a secret vent for the men. In fact, the very keepers of virtue - the priests, monks, nuns and holy men - is replete with sexual excesses that would put Sade to shame - bestiality and week-long orgies in the seminaries in the Dark Ages, pedophilia in Islamic madrasas in 16th century and raping sadhus and seers.

Like the pauper bearded Taliban - denied of opportunity of knowledge, resources and, ultimately, choice - the females in our society have become the very keepers of morality that exploits and subjugates them: this is the biggest irony of it all.

(The history has been based on numerous readings and inspired by the Russell school of thought.)

The idea that morality is inherently good has brought us to the point - in fact, we have been hovering here since millenia - that, as Mr. Shigamani points out - the threat to paramparaa comes from the two ladies walking up to their cars in "revealing" clothes (where does the revelation end?: in Taliban kingdoms, men have been known to shag at the exposed ankles of women!) and not the 70-80 gentlemen who pawed, groped and ripped them apart for 15 minutes.

Mr. Shigamani might seem to have taken this to extreme, but it's actually a mere extrapolation of the reasoning that holds our "moral fibre" together. If anything, his ability to construe a reasoning to an end is intact.

For me, it's not very far from the strident jingoism we hear:

"East or West, India is the Best!"

"Chak De India!"

"Sabse aage hain Hindustani!"

and, of course, "The Great Indian Culture!"

(Have you noticed that most these cliches come from people who have never travelled a lot? And, by travel, I mean travel. The pseudo-Indianness of creating a cocoon of like brown faces, never venturing beyond the comfort zones of your ethnic (even, Indian, is a very vast term) identity is - mere displacement).

They reflect a smug confidence in the fact that whatever we do, wherever we are and the principles that guide us are inherently and unquestionably best.

The incident was not a reflection on the evils of(as the elders would spit it out) modernity - that is a separate post in itself- but a manifestation of the festering feudal mindset that refuses to embrace the modernity that advocates a baseline equality, respect for the dignity and space of the other and, the end of chauvinism.

Not many of us want to question, leave alone unlearn what we learnt as a kid.

If you can make the journey, fine. Otherwise, it does not matter - there are many like you there out with the danda to shut the blasphemous mouths of the few us standing our ground and opposing the juggernaut of your moral rath.