The Bull on the Hill: A Meditation on AjayKumar’s Photograph

This picture was taken by one of my 9th standard students, Ajaykumar, during

one of his explorations with the cameras over a week sometime in July of 2012. Its an image that struck me from the very first time I saw it, the slight blurring (whether intended or not) giving the whole photograph, for me, a surrealistic feel which opens it to interpretive possibility. As part of my approach to participatory film and photography, I’d have students, teachers, parents, and NGO personnel who I worked with explain what they saw in the photographs. It's a guiding question that came up all the time for me in the field: What do you see?

Ajaykumar told me why he took the photograph while a group of us walked towards the Bannerghatta forest, which separates Kadajakasandra and its neighboring villages from Bangalore. In fact, it takes about double the time to reach Kadajakasandra from Bangalore (about almost two hours) because one has to circle around the forest to reach. Ajay was explaining how drastically the area had changed over the past 100 years. How previously it had been completely covered by forest, no farmland, nothing else. It was a time that he himself could not remember, but a story he had been told by his grandfather. The narrative, as with all narratives, continuously morphed between “fact” and “myth”

Ajay:  See  that  village  there?  Arjun:  That’s  Gottigehalli?  Ajay:  No  (pointing)  that’s  Sonnardoddi.  (Again  pointing)  that  is  Gottigehalli.  And  that’s  where  I  took  the  bull’s  photo.  Arjun:  There?  Ajay:  Yes  there.  Anekal,  Jenkal  hill.  [anekal  is  elephant  rock  and  jenkal  is  bee  rock]    Arjun:  Anekal?    

Ajay:  Jenkal  hill  means  there  are  a  lot  of  bees  there…I  don’t  know  whether  this  is  true  or  false,  many  years  ago,  there  was  water  here  it  seems.  You  see  that  hill  over  there?  It  seems  a  deer  had  jumped  from  there  to  here.  I  don’t  know  whether  that’s  true  or  false.  

When Ajay raised the possibility of a deer jumping some five kilometers, his classmates could not help but ridicule him for believing in such an inconceivable idea.

But beyond its mythological character, Ajay’s words were a powerful reminder that change and awareness of change was not a new thing, but has always been a constitutive part of life for those living in villages just as for those living in urban centers; a fact that has, in much of the traditional ethnographic literature on India, or at least village India, been under-acknowledged in the drive to find an “authentic” and/or “primordial” India instantiated in the village –passed down from an earlier colonialist logic and reinforced in the Gandhian imaginary of India’s essence residing in its villages. Its worth noting, however, that even the early ethnographies of village India have hinted at village change even as they were ‘bound’ by the unfortunate logics of early structural-functionalism (Mines and Yazgi, 2010); in, for example, A. Aiyappan’s (1965) Social Revolution in a Kerala Village. Ajay also reminds us that theorizations regarding “radical change” – supposedly the hallmark of the globalization moment – need to be properly qualified: after all, what constitutes more radical change than the drastic ecological changes Ajay describes? What I think is more relevant theoretically is how change looks in the contemporary moment in villages like Kadajakasandra.

Ajay continued on to explain the photograph in one, almost dismissive sentence, “The cattle had come to the forest to graze. I clicked the picture while taking them back home”. It's a simple explanation grounded in the realities of his everyday life in the village, the daily work of tending to his family’s cattle. And yet, the “everyday” when seen through the camera’s lens, becomes ever more dynamic, open to expansive possibilities.

When I, along with my research assistant Sripriya, asked the teachers what they thought about the photograph, we got an array of explanations. Nagraj Sir, the students’ social science teacher, and a former MA in Sociology, explains, “The one I liked the most is the bull on the rock. It impacts such deep thoughts that a whole story can be written about it. It suggests drought, the green is all gone, as if the cow is looking for grass.” Two of the other teachers in the school, Murali Sir and Reddy Sir, overhear and chime in, “It seems as if it is orphaned. It has no one to look after it…” and then Murali Sir remarks, “Dharani Mandala Madhyadolage… it is about the cow and the tiger… the cow will have given its word to the tiger that ‘I shall feed milk to my calf and come, then you can eat me’. The picture suggests the cow saying to the tiger ‘I have come now eat me’.”

Murali Sir is referencing the Kannada folk story, Punyakoti and its first line “Dharani Mandala Madhyadolage”, which literally translates to “in the region at the center of the earth”. When I read and re-read this first line of the story I cannot help but think that there could not be any better metaphor for the village as the global center; obviating the fact that rural people, just like most everyone else, see themselves at the center of their own story.

The students also see the Punyakoti story in the photograph, a story that is one of the oldest in Karnataka, passed down in the Janapada tradition of Kannadiga storytelling. “Jana” means “People or tribe” and “Pada” is a kind of short verse joined together. The term is also a short hand for a kind of early “folk culture” associated with the Kannada language. My students are eager to retell the story to me,

one which they all know well, and so they do collectively as we pass through the Bannerghatta forest, three of them shouting over one another to re-construct the tale.

Boy  1:  There  is  a  cow,  and  there  is  a  cowherd  who  looks  after  the  cattle.  He  would  be  taking  the  cattle  from  all  houses.  There  is  a  cow  called  ‘Punyakoti’,  it  wanders  off  somewhere.    [he  says  ‘tappiskotade’  in  Kannada  which  literally  translates  into  ‘escapes’  but  contextually,  wanders  off  sounds  better]    Boy  2:  It  wanders  off  and  a  tiger  comes  its  way.    Boy  3:  Some  boy:  it  doesn’t  wander  off…    Boy  4:  it  does  wander  off  after  all  the  other  cattle  go…  ask  anyone  you  want!”      

Finally, after a bit more argument, Nagesh tells the story to its completion:  There  was  a  forest,  there  was  a  person  called  ‘Golla’,  who  is  a  cowherd.  He  takes  the  cattle  to  the  forest  to  graze.  When  the  cattle  were  grazing,  he  takes  a  bath  in  the  river,  and  sits  below  a  mango  tree  playing  his  flute.  When  all  the  cattle  will  be  grazing,  this  one  cow  wanders  off  alone.  It  meets  a  tiger.  The  tiger  says:  I  have  got  food  today,  I  shall  eat  you.  When  the  tiger  says  this,  the  cow  replies:  I  have  a  calf  back  home,  I  shall  go  feed  it  milk  and  come  back,  then  you  can  eat  me.  The  tiger  asks  how  it  can  trust  that  the  cow  will  come  back.  The  cow  says:  Truth  is  my  father,  my  mother,  Truth  is  my  family,  if  I  don’t  follow  the  path  of  Truth,  will  God  approve  of  me?  The  tiger  agrees  to  let  it  go.  When  the  tiger  agrees  the  cow  goes  to  its  calf.  It  says  to  the  calf:  today  I  shall  die,  drink  the  milk  and  be  good…  it  tells  the  calf  to  be  friendly  to  all  the  other  cows…  yes  be  friendly  to  others,  it  says  to  the  calf  and  goes.  When  the  cow  [returns  to  the  tiger],  the  tiger  says  that  if  it  eats  the  cow  now  God  will  not  approve  of  it  and  it  [the  tiger]  instead  kills  itself.  

 Of course, the story is beautiful, a rumination on the nature of Truth, meaning

of life and morality that lends itself to an infinite amount of interpretation. When I heard the story for the first time, I was overly happy with myself, a

kind of ethnographic hubris taking over. This was it, I’d arrived at the heart of the “Camera Kannadiga” (borrowing from and, perhaps, gently satirizing Pinney’s Camera Indica) i.e. an authentic cultural way of seeing. And, in another time, it might have been enough to end here, the next step being to interpret the story in relation to what it said about Kannadiga culture, or, if one did not want to go that far, at least in relation to a South Karnataka regional culture; a kind of ontological excavation of the nature of “being” Kannadiga through the image that could be considered “thick”, in the traditional Geertzian sense.

But when I re-listened to the recordings of our dialogues again, later, in the quiet of my room, I heard something different, a throw away comment by Ajay overwhelmed by the children’s excitement to tell me the story: “O ya,” he says, “it was shown on Chintu TV.”

Hearing his words was a kind of “puncture” to my neat, linear, and powerfully felt narrative construction; one in which I may have felt for an instance that I was possibly seeing through someone else’s eyes. This was always a fallacy, the kind of cultural depth I was seeking merely one of many ontologically-“flat” perspectives, competing equally with Chintu TV, my own surrealist perspectives, and many many others. It was a reminder that the value of the ethnographic is never in the pursuit of some kind of complete or deeper knowledge, but in the ability to gain insights through dialoguing with others, of which the filmic is but one potential facilitator.

Chintu TV is a Kannada-language children’s network owned by the Sun TV Network that was launched in Bangalore in 2009, and shows a number of different cartoon shows, one of which is Little Krishna, a 3D computer-animated show about

the Hindu-god Krishna as a child and on which the story of Punyakoti was re-told; other shows include Kannada-dubbed versions of Dora the Explorer, Jackie Chan Adventures, Spongebob Squarepants, Men in Black, and Kung Fu Panda.

What struck me most profoundly was that students, like Ajay, were, in some cases, no longer learning stories like Punyakoti from their families or Kannada language texts, but were learning about these stories through there consumption of television programs instead. Ajay’s (digital) photograph and the story of Punyakoti is necessarily re-mediated and re-valued within the village’s distinctive televisual culture, one facilitated by the digital as infravalue and which produce the unexpected value migrations I am interested in. Graeber (2014) conceives of an infravalue as a value that sits on the “interior” of other values, informing how one goes about pursuing value within certain fields, and in this case digital technologies function as an infravalue, facilitating and constraining the migration of values based on their unique material traits. But “the digital” or “digitality” cannot and is not a singular entity and instead represents a whole array of infrastructures that can integrate binary code – bits consisting of 0s and 1s – whether they be computer, mobile, television, online, photo, or video technologies (Horst and Miller, 2012). It's the sheer “quantity of heterogenized things that are thereby produced” and the concomitant proliferation of culture that Ajay’s statement illustrates so strikingly (Horst and Miller, 2012, 4). In this particular example, I’ve used “the digital” to flag the transmission of digital signals to television sets in homes in Kadajakasandra, many of which have satellite dishes1 as well as to flag the types of digital technologies necessary to create 3D computer animated TV shows like Little Krishna.

What seems to be unique about the digital as an infravalue is its affect on time-space, characterized by disparate temporalities, multiscalar connections, and ever-changing subjectivities, highlighted in the example just given in the side-by-side consumption of Dora the Explorer and Little Krishna, which index hyper-disparate temporalities and spatial circulations facilitated by these digital infrastructures. This overlapping set of spatiotemporal relations are very different than previous televisual cultures in India, which were markedly “national”, best exemplified by the dominance of Doordarshan, a nationally controlled TV network (Rajagopal, 2001)– an analog to digital transition which Chakravarty (2010) highlights in her work on television broadcasts of Kathak dance, a “traditional” form of north Indian dance. For her, the analog-to-digital transition signals the growing globality and transnationality of television programming. She writes,

with the introduction of transnational satellites, there was a marked change in national television programming. The number of channels that became newly available offered viewers, for the first time, the ability to choose between various television programs. This, in turn, created a huge shift in cultural production that relied more on advertising and marketing budgets than on spreading national consensus (2010, 144). A number of intersecting values are bundled and migrate through these

television programs – here the story of Punyakoti, a Kannada folk story, is now Hinduized and associated with Krishna and his youth. Importantly, the Punyakoti story is not, in Nagesh’s initial telling at all associated with Krishna and in some cases it has been linked historically to the Jataka tales, a voluminous body of literature associated with Buddhism rather than Hinduism.

                                                                                                               1  Note:  Like  the  United  States,  India  has  chosen  to  go  digital,  replacing  all  analogue  systems  with  digital  ones  by  March  2015.  

However, these regional and religious values are bundled to, of course, facilitate consumption, advertisers paying for and therefore playing a key role in determining what is being shown on these Kannada language channels to youth. In some sense, then, it is through a focus on consumption and value that one begins to see the fallacy of simplistic global-local dichotomies as well as the patterns by which values migrate: if, one the one hand, digitally-enabled networks of power stretch globally, on the other, digital commodity production incorporates regionally-specific values and re-mediates these cultural markers of belonging towards consumption.