An Interview with Prof N Manu Chakravarthy

Prof N Manu Chakravarthy is professor of English at the NMKRV College for Women in Bangalore. Author of two books in Kannada, Bharatiya Streevaada and Bahumukha, his other work is Conversations and Cultural Reflections. He has written over 70 articles and regularly writes for leading Newspapers and Journals. He writes for the Deep Focus, a film quarterly.

Some of my first classes in cultural studies were with N Manu Chakravarthy, and the charisma remains. Sitting at the canteen table, gulping the aroma of masala dosa and coffee, this interview/chat happened. Manu is a scholar who holds some remarkable positions, so this interview had to exploit the opportunity fully, in fact films was one last thing we forced ourselves into. Questions are from all over the place and for those who can make the connection (of socio-political issues on films), I am sure, this will be something of value.

How would you respond to the recent moves (return of popular…etc) towards mainstream/popular/Commercial Cinema?

Let me talk in general, not confining to a set of representative films. I believe that there is indeed something valuable in mainstream cinema, and in order to highlight that aspect, one must critically examine a dominant part of it to sort out the valuable from the worthless. It is necessary to extricate the valuable element from the dominant vulgar element. Such an effort is necessary to expose the manipulations of "Professional/ academic film Critics" that for reasons of personal advancement glorify crass mainstream cinema from a repulsive apolitical position using a kind of high-breed theoretical jargon that at no level escapes being derivative and imitative in the modes of analysis it works out. Let me explain, Western theoretical models by themselves do not help one to come to terms with the complex, multiple realities of the Indian society. While the use of any theoretical model to explain a text is welcome, the tendency to use Derrida, Foucault or Lacan without rooting them in the Indian social experience is not only unproductive philosophically, but also tends to become, paradoxically, politically reactionary and obscure. Far worse than this is that it unleashes an argument that utterly fails to comprehend the economic and determine the politics and aesthetics of mainstream cinema. The difference between mainstream cinema made up to the late 70s and early 80s and those made after the 80s are great and cannot be lumped together.

What do you think constitutes the Mainstream Cinema in India?

Mainstream Cinema in India has constituted only certain stereotypes that the middle class believes in and advocates forcefully. All the themes Indian mainstream cinema makes use of - from domestic conflicts to social problems to political tensions – find a comfortable resolution most appealing to the middle class, which believes that easy resolutions settle historical interests. The moral vacuity of the mainstream cinema Indian cinema clearly reflects the inability of the Indian middle class to work out alternatives to profound historical struggles that can never be ended by easy sentimental solutions. The domestic framework for the middle class individual is a very important private space from and out of which the entry into the public realm is made. There is no meaning to a public self if there are no domestic resources to fall back upon. This is one of the reasons why the Indian middle class is rather paranoid about anything that threatens to dissolve this entity called the family. If tensions emerge within its framework they must be settled without much fuss even if certain fundamental questions, especially in relation to the rights of the woman as a daughter or wife or daughter-in-law, remain unanswered. Only the non-mainstream films and a few mainstream ones have been able to resist the powerful expectations of the middle class.

Coming to the question of how women are represented in mainstream and non-mainstream films, do you see a difference? For example, in your critique of M S Sathyu’s Galige, the points you make about feminist sentimentalism are extrememly interesting. And you are all praise for Kasarvalli for Thayi Saheba and Ghatashraddha. Could you tell us more on the particular kind of balance you insist upon and the things you are constantly warning us about?

Let me talk of the representation of women in mainstream cinema first. The films that are characterized as ‘social films’ are essentially concerned with the turmoil individuals and family goes through, whether it is a financial crisis or an emotional crises brought about by an errant son or a drunkard of a husband or a very modern daughter-in-law who creates deep fissures in the family, or a step-mother who ill-treats her step-children. A final succumbing to the middle class notion of domestic integrity is predominant. Recent examples of this are to be seen in our recent glossy enterprises like Hum Aapke Hain Koun and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. The span of decades between a film like Swami and HAHK and DDLJ is but a period of consolidation of the Indian middle class as regards the family and the its virtues in a manner that completely ignores the basic questions raised by the women in her feminist consciousness. Indian mainstream cinema in its representation of the family has marginalized the emerging consciousness of the woman seeking her empowerment. It adopts a politics of silence and also creates a constant dialectic between the domestic world, as the microcosm and the society at large, which is the macrocosm. The shubham that unfailingly appears in the very last frame is successful because the audience for all the misery and suffering depicted throughout the film gets a cathartic effect and feels purged.

My critique of Galige has been for its reactionary nationalism, historical reductionism and sentimental feminism. In Galige two individuals on the run- the girl running away from her middle-class moorings and the boy from his historical antecedents. The boy, a terrorist, a fugitive has lost his conviction and has become neurotic, even paranoid. The girl gets pregnant and does not want to bring into this world a fatherless child. Consequently it is the woman’s ‘force’ on the man that makes him surrender to the police, for she wants the father of her yet unborn child to be very much alive when the little one is about to make an entry into this world. But she herself knows that the police cannot be trusted the encounters are proof of that. In that sense she too is the accomplice of the state. And all for the glory of her motherhood. This is what I call the sentimental and the myopic feminist vision of the film. The film was seen by many as the triumph of feminism. In fact, it is the surrender of the woman. Where is the guarantee that these forces, the machinery of the state, will return the man, which is what she is fighting for, or at least seems to be fighting for?

It is not for the simplistic reason that Thayi Saheba deals, centrality with the existential reality of a female character that the film can be characterized as one with a feminist perspective. On the contrary, it is because of the mode of narration, the positioning of the female protagonist, that one will have to refer to the film’s feminist perspective. The feminist aesthetics foregrounds the internal world of the woman instead of ‘observing’ her as a passive subject. Instead of locating her as a passive product of history, a mute victim of historical forces and processes, it restitutes her as an ‘active agent’ who can move forces of history in her own way without being totally dominated by them. The plot of Thayi Saheba is linear and chronological and does not display complex patterns and heavy details. Girish ensures that the simple but profound thematic concerns do not become dependent on cerebral techniques that quite often tend to draw attention to themselves rather then what they intend to communicate.

A preoccupation with nationalism is another feature of mainstream cinema. How do you see the handling of a vision of national integrity in films? Recent films have ranged from the four Bhagat Singhs and films like Roja and Bombay.

Films of recent times have displayed a kind of chauvinism that was absent in the films made in the early decades with the same theme. Simple nationalism or patriotism cannot be posited as absolute values, they are closely associated with political questions raised by several communities. A consumerist consciousness is certainly behind the idea of a strong nation. The contempt with which the 'others'- all those who either do not contribute to the 'progress and development’ of the state or are not subservient to its 'will' (like tribals, environmentalists, non-technocrats, dalits, to name a few of them) – are dismissed. This only underlines the power of the establishment and those who are part of its politics. The enemy of the nation-state is, in fact, one who challenges the paradigm of the nation-state as it is shaped mostly by the west. The film industry in India has become a huge commercial enterprise that it cannot afford to go against the ruling consciousness of our globalised / globalising society which determines every aspect of our life. The economics of the industry determines the orientation of the films and shapes their ideological positions.

The social relevance of a work of art is a question (as I would see it) that has cropped almost all over again, with theory. I don't want to see this as an actual distraction in our discussion, and here it is.

I don’t think there has been a work of art ever that could be called socially irrelevant. The category of socially relevant, if people should use it, is of dubious kind. My second sentence therefore comes before my first. There is no ‘socially relevant genre’. The term is vague and ambiguous, so I have problems with it. It perhaps comes from an ideological position that is a narrow, myopic and leftist position. For e.g. Lenin, claimed he learnt much about Russian peasantry through Tolstoy, Gorky. And these writers may appear bourgeois. Lucaks makes a choice as a leftist, for the revolution should have preferred Emily Zuoly, Balzac who is pro-aristocracy. Lucaks as a literary critic says that he is in fact helped by the conservative ideas/position to formulate his ideas. Social relevance cannot be determined, judged, or understood through strict, narrow ideological positions. A text has complex dimensions that cannot be unraveled through singular, ideological positions that only privilege themselves. Conrad’s text, Heart of Darkness for that matter was deemed racist by Achebe. But is that all Conrad has to offer? Racist elements, yes. But they are not the only central experience of the text. The problem of Theory and political positions of the kind are that theory seems to extend at one level a method of the social sciences as anthropology or and sociologists. These are singular. The advantage of post structuralism and deconstruction are important, i.e. no single ideological position is approved and meaning is deferred. It ultimately becomes reductionist and a very unimaginative application of theory to talk of social relevance. Even feminist and Marxist can afford to be reductionist with the text and with itself. How do you decide relevance? Spirit of the age…is it then a search for universally relevant positions?

Theory seems to create a universal category of relevance as far as what it upholds. It questions universals otherwise, that which are not part of its own base. This is dichotomous. Experienced realities are ignored and they are very important as far as human consciousness is concerned. Human experience is negated and we know there is ‘experience’. The problem with Theory even as I acknowledge its work is that it ignores experiential values that continue to trouble individuals. Human suffering for example, it poses itself as if the individual is against the social. The individual cannot be against the social; it is a binary that I do not accept. ….as if individuals are not part of the social, and the pain, suffering, confusion are all to be ignored! The Lewisian position is what the activist theory should be aware of. At any level you can dismiss the individuals as bourgeois and talk only of oppression.

You have criticized U R Ananthamurthy as much as you have been with him. How do you see his work? Some scholars would brand him revivalist, and most people are always wondering what it is that URA is saying. What do you think has been the reason for this, does it have to be read as the complexity of thought itself? We are doing a course on Samskara at CIEFL this semester.

U R Ananthamurthy’s fiction is different from his ideological positions; I would certainly not read his fiction and ideological works as an extension of each other. The problem with his fictional works is he has never taken up the “socially relevant” or “politically correct”. His short stories or novels do not reveal a single ideology. In that sense he is a non- ideological creative writer. Samskara can be read as modernist, anti-brahminical, and as interrogation of tradition and modernity, similar are Bharatipura and Awasthe. The radical, progressive are able to get it, while the conservative, status-qouist, reactionary, traditional and brahminical can find it too. URA is attacked for a kind of dualism; people who expect singular ideological, either on behalf of traditional, mythical or modern-secular positions …will get disturbed. I argue in one of my pieces on URA that URA is interested in contradictions, ironies and paradoxes of his phases…there is no endorsement of any social/political position. In fact many argue that his is a very masculine voice, but I would call that argument to be a simplistic application of feminism. Suryana Kudure, for example, its ambivalent position is an interrogation of junctures of history and ideological problems, it yields a certain open-endedness. I do not think it as a postmodern endeavor. In the context of the social, no single position can be validated. URA is interested in looking at individual existence, coming to terms with ironies etc., each position will start off an antithesis, in most cases the thesis itself was endangered, e.g.…primitivism attacking the notion of enlightenment. Ambivalence leaves space open for creative writers. Deconstructionist and poststructuralist positions take away centrality; they take away from singular propositions, yes. But that they only open up only single spaces from the texts, and serve your own theoretical positions. This is the paradox of theory that it is privileges itself. Talking of Derrida, you may destroy the deferral itself. This is a Paradox, an amusing contradiction, I would call it.

For all the complexity of his fictional works, his ideological positions are fairly straightforward. In an opposition to modernity, he takes a socialist and Gandhian position and does not (this is my problem) take up radical takes on say, the nationstate. The problem is, he therefore remains conservative and as a radical indigenous. The failure and success of the nationstate do not articulated. The further contradiction that the State cannot resist the west, but resists the indigenous. It just does not fully confront a right for self-determination. Radical ambivalence is not matched by his ideological writing. He chooses a soft option in ideological conservationism and pro-establishment. I wish there was an element of anarchism (classical sense of the term as used by Bakhtin and Proudhan) in his ideology.

How do you relate to some of the scholars of today. For e.g., the Subaltern Studies Group or Ashis Nandy

My problems with Nandy are that his is quite a simplistic evaluation of modernity/modern civilization. Perhaps to gain or give an edge to his argument, he reduces the magnitude of modernity mainly because he focuses on modern science, technology, social sciences- this is not entirely wrong, but for the conceptual categories he uses -tools come from modern and but he is not prepared to alternate through tradition. This is the dilemma between tradition and modernity. Secular intellectual critique is rooted in the modern ethos. At places where he is critiquing secularism, he appears to sound like the BJP or VHP. His is a methodological problem. Knowing him for nearly a decade now, it is just not easy to dismiss him, in fact he has inspired several of us. He's at crossroads and that explains the dilemma of third world intellectuals. The problem is lack of inwardness and intimacy with the Indian past. Why, he does not realize that the Indian tradition is not only vaidic or brahmanic, there is a Buddhist, nastika, Jaina etc. Shaped by bureaucratic and the eurocentric, categories get brahmanical, because of a lack of inwardness with other Indian traditions which leads to a reductionist approach.

The Subaltern studies volumes do not see subalterns beyond the modern. For them it is a subaltern of a certain kind. As Leftist Marxist, they cannot look at the primitive, who are not visible to the modern eye. Many subalterns who do not come into the modern framework, who do not become part of the modern phenomenon or modern social order and are part of primitive.… peasants, artisans etc are not looked at. It is Eurocentric in this sense, I see as a certain post-industrial revolution consciousness. For them many subalterns are not social or historical enough, in other words, the subaltern is not subaltern enough.

Another hot topic is Secularism, I know your takes to be different from what many in the field have to say. Hence this question. Sorry for deviating.

The notion that secularism is western concept is ridiculous, both the declared secularism and those who attack them as pseudo secularists are wrong and irrelevant to our social experience Having read philosophical texts (Sanskrit), I can say that the Indian context consists deep religiosity and the secular. They go together. In the Brahmasutras, the uttaramimasa begins by stating the first sutra, Atataubrahmajignyasa, which means, here after or herein begins the enquiry or epistemology of Brahman. The Purvamimamsa (Badarayana’s) states, Atataudharmajignyasa, dharma as not moral or ritual but as kriya- ‘work’ (Jaimini). Jignyasa means epistemology. It does not situate or locate God. It is this religiosity that the BJP/RSS/VHP induce from individual to social levels; it is blasphemy to call this religiosity. It does not locate God in history but in consciousness. It is today made religious and is interpreted as communal. …and religious consciousness itself has a bad name. In opposition to them if you are relating yourself as secular, your position too becomes pseudo. No religious/ideological proposition is free from problems. For e.g, Islam. Zeuddin Sardar (author of Islamic Futures) who claims himself a believer in Islam/Quran, argues, that the meaning of Islam has not been understood both by practitioners and others. Zeuddin Sardar’s great struggle in that book is to argue and show that the deep Islamic religious experience is religious, secular and modern at the same time. The mischief (the book argues) is Western populism, media and Islamic militants. Such an extension can be extended to Hinduism and Christianity too. Other scholars like Moulana Waheeduddin Khan or Muhammed Arkoun are against Capitalism and fundamentalism. In that sense I am not secularist or religious.

Published in CIEFL Film Club Newsletter February 2003