Hindi Cinema and Half-Forgotten Dialects - Pinney and Nandy Interview

8/12/2019 Hindi Cinema and Half-Forgotten Dialects - Pinney and Nandy Interview

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A N INTERVIEW WITH A SH IS N A N D YCHRISTOPHER PINNEY

India as a culture area will be nowhere, I think, inthe world of know ledge, the science s and arts, if itdoes not first defy the European monopoly of thescientific method established in modern times.1These words a re by the anthropologist J.P.S.Uberoi,but they can also be used to adumbrate one of the

starting points from which the cu ltural critic and histo-rian Ashis Nandy has set about investigating the "vestigaldialects" that have remained beneath the mimicry w ithwhich In dia responded to the W est. In certain idioms ofpopular culture, Nandy ha s recovered what m ightinother contextsbe termed a Ginzburgian subalternsubconscious with which to attack the simplicities ofcolonialism . He is searching for "an ethically sensitiveand culturally rooted alternative socialknowledge"andbelieves that this is "already partly available outside themodern social sciences [among] those who have beenthe 'subjects,' consumers or experimentees of thesesciences" (1983:xvii). Nandywho might be carica-tured as a neo-Gandhian 2is intent on recovering athird space from which an assault can be made on theWest and the West's slavish imitators who have beenlargely responsible for the current state of the world:

It has becom e more and more apparent that geno-cides, ecodisasters and ethnocides are but the un-derside of corrupt sciences and psychopathic tech-nologies wedded to new secular hierarchies, w hichhave reduced major civilizations to the status of aset of empty rituals. The ancient forces of humangreed and violence...have merely found a newlegitimacy in anthropocentric doctrines of secularsalvation, in the ideologies of progress, normalityand hyper-masculinity, and in theories of cumula-tive growth of science and technology (1983:x).

This quote comes from his most significant andbest known book, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Re-covery of Self under Colonialism (1983), which hasestablished Nandy as a leading theorist of co lonialismas it impacted upon both quotidian and remarkableIndians.A seminal idea proposed in The Intimate Enem ywhich has subsequently com e rather to define N an dy 's(frequently mis-represented) public political stanceconcerns the disjunctions imposed by colonialism whichhave returned to haunt contemporary India. The pen-etration of the West has created a class of mim ic m en,"mode rnists, whose attempts to identify with the colo-n i a l agg resso r s has p roduced . . .pa the t i c cop iesof...Western man in the subcontinent" (1983:74) andNandy places his hopes with a different class of Indianswho are "neither pre-mode rn, nor anti-modern but onlynon-mo dern" (ibid). Itishere that Nand y'sessentialismceases to look merely "strategic" as h e seeks to ontologizehis preferred brand of wisdom ("perfect we akne ss") inthe depths of the Indian tradition. He concludes TheIntimate Enemy with the observation that in somecultures (i.e., India), "ancient wisdom" is also "aneverday truism."

"The nineteenth-century dream of one world hasre-emerged," he continues, but "this time as a night-mare" (1991:x). Cruder forms of racism on whichcolonialism was dependent are on the retreat, but forNandy there is a second, more insidious, form ofcolonization w hich must now be confronted. This is atechno-rational vision of the world (a "secular hierar-chy") whose internalization by nationalists was a pre-requisite for liberation ,3but whichisnow in permam entconflict with a more enduring order which Nandy iscontent to call "tradition." "The West is now every-where, within the W est and o utside; in structures and in

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minds"(1991:xi) and Nand y's concernhasbeen to both sentiments of the editorial pages of the national dailiestrace how this came to be and also to discover thoseareas of daily life in which In dians hav e sought to resistthis ongoing colonization. One of these areas of dailylife with which Nandy has recently become increas-ingly concerned is popular Indian cinema, in some ofwhich, he argues, can be found "vestigial traces of adialect which eve ryone had half-forgotten." This phrasecomes from aremarkable Gandhi M emorial Lecture,delivered in 1987, "The Discreet Charms ofIndianTerrorism," in which he traces the events surroundingtwo hijackings of Indian A irline jets by Sikh m ilitantsin 1984. Fo r Nand y, the interior of a hijacked aircraft isa kindoflaboratory inwhich his suppositions aboutmo rality and po litics can be tested. W hat he findsisthatin this claustrophob ic space, external identities quicklystart tobreak do wn. There is no Hobbesian jungle:instead a co-operative pattern of behavior informed bya sense of com mo n h umani ty s tar ts to emerge(1990a:35). Following the hijacking, events unfoldedwithin "the limits imposed byanother moral order"(1990a:37).This moral order was quite different from that ofthe state, and quite different also from that of Nandysother detestation, the middle class, although he some-times singles out what he terms thehaute bourgeoisie.A significant element inthe articulation of this newmorality was the meeting ground afforded by popularHindi film music. A young hijacker sang "melancholysongs of separation and love from Hindi films" and thepassengers asked him to sing more (1987:32). Nandydetects he re a sub-strata of popu lar culture with dialogicpossibilities:

.. .the mau dlin and com ic aspects of the air piracy,the aspec ts m ost likely to jar on the sensitivities ofthe urbane Indianhaute bourgeoisie,were exactlythe ones that helpedtoestablish the links among thethree parties involved (1987:38 )4At this time of crisis, in which everyonewasstaking their lives, learned techno-rationalist codeswere jettisoned and "real convictions about the natureof the interpersonal world" and "deepest private theo-ries" w ere tested. And , Nandy co ncludes, they were notfound wanting. He finds it enormo usly significant that

to which people appeal, but the sentiments to be foundin commercial Hindi movies.5This suggests that suchmovies are something much more complex and rel-evant than "half-digested global mass culture" andNandy proposes that:

in trying to cater to the lowest comm on deno min a-to r of popular taste, thepopular mov ies in thesubcontinent have unwittingly established an intri-cate relationship with some of thedeepbutmarginalised sources of Indian culture (1990a:38).This is an interpetation which Nan dy him self con-cedes may appear "roma ntic or mystifying" (1990a:36).

Like muchofhis wo rk from the Intimate Enemy on-wards, itcan be charged with being essentialist andhighly romanticized (and whenI interviewed him hewas notably less willing to mak e such claims for Hindifilm), but it isalso anargum ent that I have foundenormously seductive, a typically perceptive and in-triguing insight from a remarkable mind.

As w e sat in the gard en of the Ce ntre for the Studyof Developing Societies in Delh i,61 asked first aboutone of Ashis Nandy's current projects, an edited vol-ume of essays on film in India.AN : Originally, the idea was to interface film theore-ticians with political and social analysts but that mis-fired. The environm ent [during the preceeding confer-enceinMy sore] did n't trigger an interesting enoughdialogue and in retrospect I cam e to the conclusion thatthe problem was not so much with political and socialanalysts who want to get on w ith the jo b b ut with filmtheory which formany has becom e a more esotericspecialised genre. [...] I have reconstituted the bookprimarily as anattempt tolook into the politics andsociology ofpopular films, in some cases throughhighly personalized narratives.C P : How do you see this approach tofilm fittinginmore generally with thetheoretical thrust of yourwork? I see a Ginzburgian attachment to popularatsuchtimesoftestingtruthitisnotthestatis tbourgeois culture which you describe somewhere asa vestigal

Chris topher P inney isaLecturer in South Asian A nthropologyat the School of Oriental and African StudiesUniversity ofLondon. He is currently completing a historical andethnographic study of popular Hinduchromolithographs. u

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dialect through which local discourses become ap-parent.AN : My primary concern is with the unique concernwhich p revailsinIndiathe clash between popular andmass culture. In the West popular culture and massculture are one. That's the way that they have beentraditionally viewed during the last several decades.The implicit assumptionisthat popular cultureismass-culturebecause these societies are primarily urbanand primarily massified. In other kinds of society,popular culture can be seen in terms of three aspects:

First, popular culture as folk culture which is nei-ther dead nor marg inalized. Seventy-five percent ofIndians are still in rural areas where folk culture ispopular culture. Grandmother's remedies might be amarginal or vestigal form in the W est, surviving in theinterstices of Western life because modern medicinedominates life. Here, modern medicine does not domi-nate life, even in urban areas; according to availableestimates, eighty-five percent also use some form oftraditional medicine. So the popular is not dead ormarginalized it is the dominant system.

Secon dly, there is the popular culture of the Indianmiddle classes, which has grown out of the last 150years of encounter with the West. This is often verycarefully developed by some very gifted individualslooking for new modes of articulating their concerns.

7For instance, the novel came to India in the middle ofthe ninteenth century, mainly through the English lan-guag e; I doubt if many Indians think of it as a foreignmedium todayit has been totally integrated. Simi-larly, other forms of visualarts,the cinema for instance,borrow elements from Indian folk traditions, Indianclassicism, Western folk traditions, Western classi-cism, in order to grapple with certain kinds of polar-itytradition, modernity, etc.

Bec ause this form of popular culture is an adaptivegenre it also has very distinctive styles of adaptation indifferent parts of IndiaBengali, Marathi, Hindi andTamil films are all identifiably different, though thatdifference has been diminishing during the last twodecad es. They are products of distinct regional cultureswhich have experienced modernity in different ways.The regional films hav e developed forms w hich incor-porate the new expe rience of these cultures in ways thefolk cannot always dothe folk just doesn't have theresilience to do it, nor the elasticity. Th is is the dom ainof popular culture as opposed to the domain of folkculture. This is popular culture proper.

Thirdly, there is popular culture as m ass culture inthe genuine statistical sense and like all forms of massculture itisexportable and is fully universal. It doe sn 'tmatter whether you buy MacDonald's hamburgers inTokyo or in Delhi.C P : Except here it's made of lamb.AN : I'm told that they 're going to ma ke it from buffalomeat here; Ma cDonald'siscomingtoIndiain style. Theaim in mass culture is always to rep roduce the originalstandardized product. The lamb or the buffalo-meathamburgers will also be made to resemble beef ham-burgers. Coca-Cola is the same whether you buy it inRio de Janeiro or H elsinki.C P : But doesn 't everyone drink Coca-Cola in a differ-ent way?AN : They do, but they have to drink Coca-Co la indifferentways.Itisa tamed p lurality and there are limitsto suchplurality.India for a while tried to produce localvariants of Coca-Cola, Campa-Cola and other suchstuff. One producer tried a touch of almond, thenanother had success with cardamom. But they did notlast. The point I'm trying to mak e is that mas s-cultureusually do esn 't brook many differences; it has its owndistinctive style and sticks to it. It can b e ca tholic, bu tit always moves toward standardization because it isoriented to atomized individuals, not to communities.When the airline Pan Am experimented with Indiancuisine as its vegetarian option, it did so not only inIndia but all over the world.

To return to our main concern, I locate Indiancom me rcial films in a matrix defined by the popu lar, thefolk, the classical and the mass-culture. It is a thirddimensional space between the folk and the classical,and the popular and the mass. And when we say thatthere is hom ogenization in these films, it is becau se themass element becomes dominant. In this respect thereis a difference between the films of the 1980s and thefilms of the 1950s or 1960s; Raj Ka poo rand Guru D uttare typically "popular." Earlier you could easily distin-guish between a Bombay style, a Madras style and aBengal style. Even that is becoming difficult today,though there is still a north Indian and south Indianstyle.

Today Bombay cinema has become hegemonic.There is no longer a regional cinem a left. H indi cinem ahas become Indian cinema and the rest are now its

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. Something similar is happening inpolitical culture. In a dem ocratic order, certain of voice, language andstyles of articulation

a natural presence, however local. And did have such presence until the late 1960s and. Indian political culture, too, has increas- todominance bysmaller

ofsociety w hich previously d ominated the inareas w hich were m arked outasist dom ains.

P : You recently said that Hindi film asks the right

N : I meant that with every issue these films haveled, imp licity or explicitly, they have consistently

tosurviveatthe box-office. Their of core myths andcultural concernsare

inways that are more acceptable toare most concerned with. Takeinstanc eamov ie like Am itabh B achchan' sDeewaarasa remake ofMother India.9

of this genre is that there are two one anupright police officer, theothera

inresponse tothe injusticeshe orhishas suffered. This is an old story which has been

a moral struggleone bro ther seeking revenge and theifwe lookhe story, it 's also o bviou s that this isabattle over thee mo ral brother gets the mother; the immoral

P : So what is theconnection with the dominant

: It is turned into an argum ent between the brothersainst that of the criminal. They discusss within a framework of whom the motherdors e. The treatment of the movie is in terms

moral choices have to be endorsed by the primordialauthority of the mother, not by the imperso nal authorityof the state and civil society.C P : Deewaar would be an exampleofthe lost andfound genre. W hy are these so popular in Hindi film?AN : The brothers are actually the same persona d elib-erately divided and then put back to getheragain.That ' sthe inner logic of the film. T he crucial strategic d eviceis that of doub ling. Now here else in the w orld w ill youfind such an enormous fascination with doubling. ThePrisoner ofZenda, which has two or three versions inEnglish, hasinIndia not less than twenty direct ver-sions, probably more than thirty. Andifwe take intoaccount other kinds of dou bling two bro thers gettingseparated at birth, by acc ident, in a storm , etc. they areeven more num erous. Doubling is a means of handlingpsychological q ualities which one is forced to negotiateand with which one is uncomfortable. You exteriorizethe qualities and turn them in to socio logical factors, sothat the qualities wh ich are inside you can be projectedoutwards as another person with whom you apparentlycome to terms sociologically, not psychologically.C P : Sudhir Kakar would explain that interms oftraditional Indian family values, thesplit from themother, etc. Would you give it a much more historicalexplanation in terms of colonial mimicry, and so on?AN : Yes and no. There 's a contradiction betweentradition and m odernity so that the modern brother getsa traditional village girl as his lover, and the traditionalbrother,afarm hand in som e ob scure village, gets anultra-modern woman doctor and these two kinds ofliaison establish a new relation ship betw een the old andthe new, tradition and m odern ity, the East and the W est.Later in the film, when the two brothers come to eachoth er's rescue (the traditional brothe r rescues the mod-ern brother, or vice-versa), a new relationship is estab-lished between the two sets.C P : But it does always seem to be that the traditionaloverpowers themodern, rather than theother wayround.AN : Not always.If the parents are objecting totheheroine 's m arriage on caste ground s, then usually it isshown that the young couple triumph over caste norm s.

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Traditionisgiven a special place wh en it seems to standagainst the anom ie and norm lessness of the city-slick,street-smart brother who is also modern. In that case,the traditional b rother com es to the rescue to establisha dialogue that lets him have the last word. Traditionalvirtues triumph. The innocence of the villagetheinnocence of the child.

[Elsewhere, Nandy writes of the "ultra-modern,arrogant, super-competent, western-educated profes-sional {who} has to ultimately turn to histwinarustic...to defeat the hardhearted smuggler or black-marketeer, who in turnisa negative model of m odernityand a negative m ix of the east and west" (1992 :70-71)].C P : You re suggesting that the resolutionisnot somucha conservative trium phing of traditional order asthe triumph of innocence and local discourse.AN : Yes, of course. It's only recently that people havebegun to take some serious interest inthese m ovies.Previouslyastandard criticism by those who dismissedthem was that they w ere conservative. But they are notconservative. They h ave, even if by default, their ownconceptionoflimits, and the films can be seen as anexploration of these limitslimits ofmodernity,oftradition, of mothering, limits of evil and tolerance.Itwas this mod el which began to dissolve to some extentin the late 1970s with the entry ofmass-cultureinwhich the violence is more realistic, more gory.

[This particular notion of "innoc ence"isdevelopedin The Intimate Enemy where Nandy writes about an"'authen tic innocen ce, which finally defeated colonial-ism, however much the modern mind might to like togive the credit to world historical forces, internal con-tradictions of capitalism andtothe po litical horse-senseor 'voluntary self-liquidation' of the rulers" (I9 91:x ii-xiii). For more on N and y' s argument on the contrastingapproachesof"art" and "com mercial" cinema to thevictims ofIndian m odernity, see 1992:49, whereheargues that "com mercial cinema romanticizesand,givenhalf a chance, vulgarizes the problems of the survivalsector butitnever rejects as childish or p rimitive thecategories or the worldview s of those trying to survivethe processes ofvictimization let loose by ...mo derninstitutions."]

C P : Can that local discourse hold up in the face ofZTVT0

A N : It will be placed under greater pressure, but it willcom e back just as it is com ing back in the West. It willtake time for people to develop the kind of scepticismwhich in theWest people have already developedtowards television. Doordarshan makes people scepti-cal because they have made a mess of their ham -handedpropaganda, but in India there's no scepticism ofthemedia as such. For instance, the BBC is trusted muchmore in India than it is in England . O n the w hole the reis no genuine scepticism of the media. This will takemore time. People must sense the threat that the localand thevernac ular face from a universalized totalmedium for there to be a space for both.C P : What would your response betoa future historianof film who, ten years hence, argued thattwosingularlyimportant factors explain what has happened in H indifilm of he1990s.Firstly, thattheaudience has changedand that increasingly films have been directed at theurban single male migrant in searchofsex, violenceand the remembrance of his absent family. Secondly,the rise of Hindutva, which has createda complicitybetween popular Hindi film and contemporary popularchauvinist politics? Would this convince you?A N : I would beconvinced onboth points. If byHindutvayou mean the ideology of the state which goeswithHindutva,frankly i t's no different from the ideol-ogy of state whichhascome to dominate Indian con ser-vative liberal and leftist thoug ht a stand ardized theoryof the state which w as very popu lar in India un til the late1980s. TheHindutva view is totally "statist"totallyconvinced thatahomogenou s national culture is neces-sary to ensure that the state does not collapse, totallyconvinced that the culture has to be hard-boiled, hard-eyed, real-po litik based , fully secular . It is in this sensethat theideology of Hindutva is paralleled by theideology of thestatewhich the Hindifilmhas propogatedover the last forty to fifty years, or mayb e even longerfrom the 1930s onwards. But then, this has been thedom inant messag e in Indian pu blic life for a long tim e,that we have everything in our civilisation bu t a properstate.The stateisessentialized and it is assumed that themore centralized the state the better becau se you c annottrust the localsatrapsand notables who are even mo re

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than the centralized lead-be ,and that all these con cepts of village

ion propagated by parts of the freedom mo ve-ispast. This them e has been part

e politics of the extreme left to those of theright, there has been almost no dissent on thisHindutva mo vem ent is a by-product of this

But Indian cinema is one of the few places wheree the film world does notis a Mu slim, who is a Hindu.Mother India

avery H indu film only if we forget that itw asaitandaMu slim im mortalized its

isto deny thata

[Just recently, Nan dy has furtherstressed Hindutva's Hindutva

in itsveins a deep hostilityitsunofficial Eu oropea n parentage" ( 1994).]

P : This suggests q uite a profound contradiction: yo uthat on the one hand Hindi film is a vehicle local voices but that it's a lso

for pro-state statements. I'm thinkingin ofyour Discreet Charms of the Indian

lecture in which you argue that throughfilm a medium for non-modern

N : W ell, yes, there is alatent m essage. Even theisstylizedin one film, Don,11when Am itabh

stops and says "hold on, let met paan and then resum es fighting. Even withinporary realistic violence there is something play-l ab out it, clues are continually given to the audien ce is not serious. Naseeb12 would bea

Let m e make an autobiographical statement. I cameofmy interest in m iddle-classand po litics. I see a lot of the problem s in Indian

politics arising from middle-class attempts to preventthe hoi polloi from getting their due unde r d em ocraticpolitics. Demographically and electorally, the middleclass is a small minority in Indiafor that matter in thewholeofSouth A siaand it can only legitimizeitsdisproportionate power through ideology, an ideologythat allows the middle-class to believe that itstandsbetween the barbarians outside the city walls and thecitizenry inside. The ideology functions in another w ay.It allows you to take out of politics sector after sectorand hand them over to expertsfrom develop me nt andplanning to diplomacyon the grounds that the ordi-nary politics deman ded by ordinary peo ple cannot workand the sector must be handed overtoprofessionals, allnaturally draw n from the middle-class. Th ere is a wide-spread belief in the Indian bourgeoisie that ordinaryIndians are not fit to be full citizens of a modern nationstate because they don't understand what modernity isand the middle-class m ust becom e the new vanguardfor the ma sses. The state has been beautifully retooledfor this particular purpose; itkeeps inche ck the fullpolitical consequences of the democratic process.

A critique of nationalism is, therefore, also a cri-tique ofthe Indian m iddle-class which h as lostitsconfidence and is feeling marg inalized. They find anycritique deeply disturbin g. Fo r instance , that article youmention, "The Discreet Charm ofIndian Terrorism,"the kind of attacks I faced over that I was accusedof"romanticizing" terrorism; som e askedme,"whataboutthe human rights of passeng ers"; others said, "you aresupporting separatism."C P : The argument ab out specialism suggests a para-dox in your own engagement with Hindi film. There'salwaysa danger that you are then going to turn thispopular myth into a domain of experts.A N :Yes,tha t's right, and am afraid of itactually myquestions to the Hindi film are simply political ones.

[SubsequentlyIwas struck by an interesting con-tradiction in Na ndy 'sown methodology which, throughits conscious myth-making attempts to remove himfrom one forum ofcultural criticism (conventionalacademic debate), and establishes him asa differentkind of inviolable expert (a shaman). In The IntimateEnemy he writes thata"purely professional critiq ue"(by social scientists) w ill notdo ;rather it will have to b e

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fought "the way one fights myths: by building orresurrecting mo re convincing myths " (1983:xviii). Par-allel tothis,Nandy states inalater collection of essa ys:"I shall not grudge it if som e enterprising review er findsunconv incing history in the followingpages,as long ashe finds in them convincing myths"(198O:vii).]C P : How should people be approaching film? I wasstruck when recentlyreadingDissanayake and Sahai 'sSholay which is m ethodologically excellent how dif-ficult it is to produce really exciting analysis throughaudience response. Do you think in the future you m aydo an ethnography of film-viewing?Ivebeen struck bythefact that often you ve alluded to your viewing ofthese films on video rather than in the cinema yourexperience of film is in this privatized context?AN : Yes, itis .But a few of my students have taken aninterest inthis.And if I had thought of it earlier, I wouldhave encouraged a study of audience responses toKhalNayak.Films,howeve r, are not only for viewing; the filmindustry, what the stars do in public, film music theyall have a cultural presence. For instance, I've alsotaken an interest in the uses of astrology in the filmindustry. Astrology is used me chanically in traditionalIndiafor a daughter's marriage, choosing the rightmom ent forapuja,the time of a journey, but elseweherein the modern sector its presence is enormous espe-cially in the stock mark et, and am ong politicians, sportsstars and film stars.C P : But beyond the timing of themuhurat13how doesit affect the timing of anything? Everyone is jugglingtheir dates on an entirely pragmatic basis.AN : The astrologer may say that the film must havefourteen or eleven letters, beca use it is the lucky nu m-ber, or that the name must start with a "K" because anearlier film starting with a "K" was greatly successful.Then there are the heroes and the heroines, the luckyones and the unlucky ones. The producers take theirastrological charts and consult the astrologers aboutthat too. But despite this I do not see any great contra-diction between pragmatics and astrology. Film-m ak-ing in India is a terribly uncertain profession. Likepolitics. Even the most rational choice cannot guaran-tee you success. So you need to justify your rational

choices. Mrs Gandhi was a hardboiled, highly calcula-tive politician, butshe alsovisited the necessary templesto ensure success.C P : Do you see this as a defiance, a positive strategy,a vestigial trace ?AN : I see it as a strategy for survival. And a s a rationaladaptation to one's environment.C P : Throughout your work there is a parallelismbetween the non-modern and the post-modern. uThis reminds me of Arjun Appadurai's recent com-ments on the parallels between non-m odern magicalrealisms and post-modern varieties [ the forms ofmagical realism' are many...the traditions in whichthey have been produced and enjoyed are m ultiple... it

is not just a modern privilege to have blurred the linebetween fantasy, history and satire (Appadurai1991:474)].AN : Yes, I think that this is a search foran attempt torediscoveralternatives which in the West have beenpushed to the margins and are alm ost non-existent andhave to be recovered or recreated through novels orthrough postmodernist theory or som e other attempt totranscend contemporary tim es. W hereas he re [in SouthAsia] these options are present, right at the cen ter, oftenamong a majority; they are not marginalized. T he rangeof choices is wider. This is a complex and diversecivilizationand this owes much to traditional textsand forms of awareness and even forms of self-mockingwit. There is a beautiful exa mp le Ana ntha M urthy [theKannada novelist] gave me once. In the KannadaRamayana, as in other Ramayanas, there is a dialoguebetween Sita and Rama. Ram a doesn 't wanttotake Sitawith him to the forest when he went into exile becau seshe would face discomfort and hardship. In everyRam ayana there is this argume nt, but its contents varyIn the Kannada Ram ayana also, Sita says to Ram a thatit's her duty to be with him, and that she won't evenenjoy the comforts of the palace without him, so itdoe sn't ma ke any difference if she 's in the forest withhim, but at the end she adds, "B esides all this, in everyother Ramayana, Sita goes to the forest with her hus-band, so how can you stop me from g oing " It's anelegantly self-reflexive Brechtian com me nt and Indiandiversity includes that, too. This diversity and local

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are notdead. Many people have isthe central them e of Hindi mov -

or instance Hero HiralaP is basically just a

P : There is lots of exciting w ork coming outo/Publicb ut it seems to be privileging the urban and the16 That becomes problem-then everyone just does studies ofhoardings and no one w ants to look at differento/matkas(earthenware pots)inobscure villages.

N : Yes , an ethnog raphy of film v iewing could tran-ofthese problems so that one could seelm mea ns at different levels.Iwould b e most

P : You once wrote that you are more interested inadialogue with the person in the street ratherh other academics.

N: Well , I 'm not makingapopulist argument. I mI

it out. I think that in every societytheis

theoverlap can be very little or it ca nbeense. The Un ited States and France at the mom entpha se w here the overlap is almo st total. If you

or less end. In these countries there are not many notacademics. But

acouple of decades ago. thelikes ofLewis Mum ford, andtheh intellectual scene was dominated by Sartre. But

at this point oftime, forsome reason,theinished , instead of increasing. There arehum an rights ac tivists, social activists, and politi-o are doing fantastic work at the groundI have been involved on and off,rom w hom hav e learned m ore than from academ-o appro ach their problems as if it was a matter ofitive puzz le-solving. It was to that difference that

ics in India should kno w which way their intellec-

M ayb e in the future the Indian academ e will incor-ore intellectuals. Meanwhile,itseems to m e

that many scholars don't have enough imagination andsense of survival. After all, the academ ic ga me can beplayed byIndian scholars inAm erican universitiesmuch better than by established scholars in India be-cause of easy access toother facilities. Y et Indianscholars pathetically try toreplicate what isdoneinuniversities in the United States. They are in no po sitionto compete in, say, a conven tional study of thehermeneutics ofNaseebw ith the right kind of referen c-ing to Jameson or Hall, or Derrida or Lacan.C P : So what should they be doing?AN : I'm not saying that they should ditch the Westernacademe entirely, but they would be much better offtrying to enrich their work by look ing aroun d them andlistening to the intellectual debates going on intheirown society and other Southern so cieties. Fo r instancethey might do anethnography of say, Naseeb, or aparticular genreof films in comparison with the cur-rently popular Pakistani television series. They willprobably learn more and beable to saymore. Butbecause of their infatuation with Western scholarshipthey have n othing to share w ith the Pakistanis nex t dooror with the Bang ladeshis. Th ere are fantastic compari-sons to be made with cinema in Egypt, Algeria, HongKon g, etc. The re is no attempt to explore experiences.Most academics like to make books out of books, noteven books out of booksandlife. I would very modestlyplead that there is a place for b oth in Indian intellectuallife. But, I mostly see only a pathetic attempt to mimic.In reaction, there is in my wo rks probab ly an overdoneorstudied u nderestimation of W estern academic works.C P :You don't then see it as strategic m imicry to survivein an international academic market? In The IntimateEnemy (1983:107-8) you refered to Illich saccount ofhow Aztec priests w ere thrown to the dogs because theyhad said that if what the Spanish priests said ab out theirgods beingdead, then they too would rather bedead.You hypothesized that a group of Brahm an priests in thesame circumstances would have embraced Christian-ity, written elegant praises totheir rulers and theirgods, while all the while their Hindu beliefs remainedunshaken. Isn't this part o f that process?AN: No, I'm afraid it's not that.

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Nandy dedicated a recent volume (1987) to "thosewho dare to defy the given models of defiance," and asI left this garden in Delhi I was struck by the the pow erof his own noble brand of essentialism. Subsequently,in theTimes of India(27.4.94), Nandy w rote the follow-ing comm entary on Mahatma Gandhi thatwaspregnantwith parallels to his own work, and gave m e a sense ofthe 'everydayness' within which Nandy himself haschosen to operate:He stands for the unheroic [.. .and] represented theordinary, 'superstitious' sceptical, tradition-bound,wily Ind ian ... W hatever touch of heroism we seein the Gandhian political style is built paradoxi-cally on the assumption of that unheroic everyday-ness Anti-Gandhianism springs from the aware-ness that while we can elect our leaders every fiveyears, we cannot elect our people...Nandy concludes that "We are stuck with theIndians as they are. And most westernized and semi-westernized,Indians,including the votaries ofHindutva,resent that" Ma ny readers may hav e reservations aboutthis putative perpetuity, but they may also come tovalue the wisdom of those vestigial dialects that lie atthe heart of some pe oples ' everyday heroism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTMy principle gratitude is to Ashis N andy w ho sawand commented on this text. I am also indebted toRachel Dwyer and an anonymous reviewer for VARwhose perceptive and challenging com ments w ill per-haps be addressed on another occasion.

NOTES1. Uberoi (1984:9).2. Though note that he has declared that he is no t aGandhian (1990b:16).F or some sense of his criticisms,and also of Nandy's affinity, see "From Outside theImperium: Gandhi's Cultural Critique of the West" inNandy (1987). The tenacity of the 'neo-Gandhain"labelisunde rstand able in the light of many ofhispublicstatements and indeed some of the conversation re-ported here.3. Fo r a very recent elabo ration of this, specifically inrelation to Rabindranath Tagore's later work, seeT heIllegitimacy of Nationalism 1994).4 It is interesting to note in this context Na ndy 's

disparagement of Salman Rushdie, whom he concedeshasin his fictionuniquely captured the eleme nts ofthe new urban Indian popular culture, but who se soc ialand political writings are "terribly like what someonelike Jawaha rlal Nehru would have said ab out the publicrealm today if he were recalled in a seance by anenterprising m edium " (1990b: 16).5. Elsewhe re he suggests a broader realm of the"vulgate" which acts "as acultural 'unde rgrou nd' ra therthanasa legitimate form of popular culture" (1992:45).This would include bat-tala[popularBeng ali publish-ing],calendar art and the bow-tie w earing w aiter in thecheap back -s t r ee t r es t au ran t who has beensimultaneosuly attracting and intimidating the first-generation immigrant to the city since the last ce ntury "(1992:45).6. 17th Novem ber 1993.7 Here Nandy acknowledge s the productivity of whathe elsewhere calls a "bicultural...technique of survivalthat has now become a character trait" (1993:43), asembodied in figures like Satyajit Ray. At other times(and later in this conve rsation), such hybridity is ca sti-gated for empty mim icryw hat he calls "the pathologyof cultural mimicry that colonialism endorsed" (ibid).8. Directed by Yash Chopra in 1975.9. Directed by Mehbboob Khan in 1957.10. A Hindi satellite channel broadcast by RupertMurdoch's Star TV11. Directed by Chandra Barot, 1978.12. Directed by Manm ohan Desai, 1981.13. An auspicious period during which impo rtant anduncertain work can be inaugarated.14.SeeB habh a's (1994:25 Iff) u seof this to understandmore fluid, hybrid, conexts than Nandy has in mind.15. Directed by Ketan Mehta, 1988.16. A reflection, I believe, of the contributors, rathe rthan the editors (Carol Breckenridge and ArjunAppadurai).

REFERENCESAppadurai, Arjun1991 Afterword. InA.Appadurai,F.J. Korom & M . A.

Mills eds.) Gender Genre and Power in SouthAsian Expressive Traditions. Philadelphia:Univeristy of Penns ylvania Press, pp.46 7-476 .

Bhabha, Homi1994 C onclusion. inThe L ocation of Culture.London:

Routledge. pp.236-256.

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Nandy, Ashis1980A ttheEdge of Psychology: EssaysinPolitics andCulture.Delhi: Oxford U niversity Press.1983 The Intimate E nemy: Loss and Recovery of SelfUnder Colonialism.Delhi:O xford U niversityPress.1987 Traditions, T yranny and Utopias: Essays in thePoliticsofAwareness. Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress.1990a The Discreet Charms of Indian Terrorism. InThe JournalofComm onwealth and ComparativePolitics,M arch 1990, pp.25-43.Reprinted inTh eSavage Freud and Other Essays on Possible andRetrievable Selves.Delhi: Oxford UniversityPress,1995.1990b Satyajit Ra y' s Secret Guide to Exquisite Mur-ders: Creativity, Social Criticism, and the Parti-tioning of theSelf. East-West Film Journal (4)2:14-37 Rep rinted inThe Savage Freud and OtherEssays o n Possible and Retrievable Selves. Delhi:Oxford University Press, 1995.

1992 An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cin em a InK.S. Singh (ed.) Visual Anthropology and India.Calcutta: Anthropological Survey ofIndiaandSeagullBooks,pp.43-76. Reprinted inThe SavageFreud and Other Essays on Possible and Retriev-able Selves. Delhi: Oxford University Pres s, 1995.1993 How "Indian" is Ra y?. Cinemaya vol.20: 40-4 5.1994 The Fear ofGandhi: Nathuram Godse and hisSuccessors. InThe Times of India, 27.4.94.1994 The Illegitimacy of Nationalism. Delh i: Oxford

University Press.Uberoi, J.P.S.1984 The Other Mind of Europe: Goethe as a Scientist.Delhi: Oxford U niversity P ress.

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Hindi Cinema and Half-Forgotten Dialects - Pinney and Nandy Interview

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