The shrinking mindscape

As both creators and consumers of language and literature we must, like Scheherazade in ‘The Arabian Nights’, keep on telling our tales within tales

If television is the great mirror reflecting the preoccupations of a nation, then the fare dished out over the last 366 days should give rise to a profound despair. It revealed dwindling attention spans, venial obsessions, an inward gaze and, most disturbing of all, a shrinking mindscape.

Audience ratings indicated that the innumerable family dramas pouring out of the Family Dabba were the most popular. Yet all of them -- vapid reflections, several times removed, of Sooraj Barjatya’s mid-nineties box office hit Hum Aapke Hain Kaun -- dangerously blurred the distinction between the real and the made-up. Correct me if I am wrong, but Indian families are not generally the lavishly mounted, elaborately bejewelled, constantly marrying, conspicuously spending entities that are being conjured up in soap after soap. Yet it would seem that they speak for all of us, that they are us.

It is us out there caught in the maelstrom of family politics, spending all our time in obsessively marrying sons and upbraiding bahus; hatching family plots and beating our breasts when things go wrong. It is us, secretly scheming against uncles and aunts and cousins and deoranis and jethanis, even while bowing heads, folding hands, touching feet, in short following all the courtesies that traditional etiquette demands.

The dialogue, such as it is, comes from an age that seems to be immured to all the changes that have happened the world over. Even the token nod to such universally accepted values as rights and equality is dispensed with, as women swear that the param dharm of a wife is to serve her husband in a saat janam ka rishta and where poor Lala Lahori Rai has to settle not one, but seven daughters, some of whom actually have minds of their own. This is not just a synthetic dystopia, but a profoundly amoral universe, one that is lightyears away from the world in which ordinary Indians live and breathe and have their being.

The contrast was driven home the other day when, while flipping channels, one went straight from the impossibly titled Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi with its grotesquely hennaed hands and blinding gold jewellery to Sai Paranjape’s Katha, a breezy romance set in a Bombay chawl with pretty Deepti Naval being wooed by both Naseeruddin Shah and Farooq Shaikh. It wasn’t a profound film, Katha, but it came as a reminder that at one point of time it was possible for the makers and viewers of entertainment to empathise with the lives of those who didn’t live in enormous mansions and dance like Daler Mehendi at marriages, people who drank tea in glass tumblers and relished hot sabudhana vadas and bought tarkari at the local market.

Some time ago Saeed Mirza was asked why he did not think of a sequel for his popular TV serial Nukkad (street corner), with its streetside settings, its multiplicity of characters and sharp, sassy dialogue. His reply was unambiguous: ‘‘Now, one wants to forget Nukkad. It’s like a bad dream. I don’t think nukkads exist in the country today, or if they do, they exist at a hard, parochial level.’’

The disappearance of space on the nukkad is perhaps inevitable given the increasing homogenisation of the cultural terrain. The family excesses on national television just symbolise the general cultural vacuum. They reflect values that the advertiser presumably believes all mortals must aspire for. As media watchers have pointed out, television invariably chooses programmes that attract the largest conceivable audience of spenders.

But there is more that needs to be explained. We have, it seems, as consumers of popular entertainment, been subjected to a scissor-like manoeuvre that has left us quite bereft of a meaningful engagement with real life. We are, therefore, deprived of a genuine, integrated and living popular culture. On the one hand, we are faced with the McDonaldisation of a spurious globalisation process, on the other, to the Bajrang Dalisation of a parochial political process.

Consequently, many a film maker, artist, writer, poet, and even journalist, has either voluntarily conceded space or has been coerced into doing so. It is self-censorship, in a fashion, and of all the forms of censorship known to human society this is the most effective and pernicious because it is driven, not at the instructions of a government functionary, but by one’s own writ.

Last year began with the attack on Deepa Mehta’s Water and ended with one on M.F. Husain’s Gaja Gamini. That Indian culture and society are much the worse for this is to state the obvious, not so much because audiences did not get to see these films but because creativity itself was under siege. This stilling of tongues, capping of pens and camera lenses has, in turn, enormous consequences for society at large because, ultimately, every film, TV sequence, canvas, or newspaper is a document of our times and helps forge a collective identity out of multiple and multilayered experiences.

Given this, there can be no retreat, there can be no giving in to a power elite who, through manipulating the levers of money, information and education, decide how and what we write, see and think.

The scene of contestation is here. And the time is now because last year’s words belong to last year’s language and next year’s words await another voice. It is as Nissim Ezekiel wrote so very long ago, ‘‘Confiscate my passport Lord/I don’t want to go abroad/Let me find my song/Where I belong’’.

As both creators and consumers of language and literature we must, like Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights, keep on telling our tales within tales, tales that remain unfinished at dawn so that they can go on and on. The author A.S. Byatt once put it so well when she wrote that we are all like Scheherazade under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives with beginnings, middles and ends. By telling our stories we survive to live another day.

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