Documenting culture: prejudices and possibilities Can documentation re-ignite struggle instead of merely recording what has passed? by Rustom Bharucha From a distanced perspective, the world of documentation would seem to connote death -- the death of the imagination, the death of engagement, the death of creative involvement in the dynamics of any struggle. Undeniably, this prejudice has deepened with the professionalization of social services in the NGO sector, where documentation is inextricably linked with the cut-and-paste mechanics of accumulating newspaper clippings, a mere ancillary to research. Almost devoid of its own raison d'etre, documentation would seem to be dependent on other more vital realities -- a movement, a struggle, a political controversy. `After the fact' as it were, the categories and classifications constituting the jargon of documentation show no signs of abating, even as a critical perspective on the crisis of its sustainability remains elusive. Undeniably, this is an articulation of prejudice, which some die-hard activists in the documentation of people's movements would have no difficulty in refuting. After all, documentation is not a given, any more than the information surrounding people's movements can be said to exist in a pristine state. Information may need to be generated in the absence of any cognizance of a marginalized group of people. In this sense, documentation becomes crucial to the very making of facts and history; it is not merely a compilation of the lies constituting the dubious truths represented in newspapers. Far from feeding the dominant hegemony, it can offer an alternative view of the world.
Already, at this very idealistic point in time in the mid-'50s, when the Nehruvian projection of the nation-state was at its height, there were signs of panic. In between fervent invocations to our seemingly eternal tradition and a robust energy celebrating new creative experiments in post-independence India, there were paranoid outbursts such as: `In such-and-such village a particular folk form is nearly extinct. There is one living practitioner of this form, and he or she is almost on the point of dying. So why can't someone document this form before it dies?' In such scenarios, documentation becomes a kind of rescue mission, a heroic act of holding on to the past, with no real concern for that poor survivor who could be one's last link with a particular tradition.
For that matter NGOs have prioritized documentation for their own survival. After all, in that annual board meeting where the renewal of support for any venture is determined, it is not the `target groups' themselves who are addressed as such, but their representation in specially designed reports and brochures. It is no secret that there are individuals in the NGO circuit who have mastered the art of writing grant proposals and evaluations by strategizing the statistics and data derived from documentation centres. The documentation has to be `written up' in order to be effective. This rhetoric is what foundations need in order to justify any grant. Sadly, this prioritization of documentation by professional donors and funding agencies has been internalized by activists and NGO workers, who are increasingly adjusting the politics of their own agendas to the whims and suggestions of funding agencies. No follow-up, no grant. Continuing to focus on the documentation of the performing arts, I will now attempt to balance my critique with an acknowledgment of some of the creative possibilities of documentation. I would acknowledge, for instance, that documentation can serve as a kind of corrective to fantasy. Let me share a story in this regard. Some years ago I was in the process of reflecting on the mythical figure of Balgandharva, the legendary female impersonator in Marathi sangeet natak. I was curious to understand the cult surrounding the construction of his femininity. Balgandharva, as we know, was a role model for middle-class women (and men) in his time; he pioneered some major trends in fashion and was iconized as a paragon of beauty and civility. I was interested in analysing how this valorization of femininity could be nurtured in a social context that is so emphatically martial, if not masculinist. Needless to say, my thinking on this subject was fed by recent feminist historiography, and by different theories relating to the politics of gender and sexuality. Can I deny that a certain fantasy of Balgandharva began to emerge in my mind through these inputs? Imagine my excitement, therefore, when I learned that I could see my fantasy in action in a full-length documentation of Balgandharva in a `live' performance of Sadhvi Meerabai in a well-preserved film. What I saw in the film, however, had nothing to do with my fantasy, which was dashed to pieces. The seemingly erotic aura of my fantasy-object was undermined by his very domestic, ordered decorum; indeed, clad in his georgette sari with an embroidered border, Balgandharva resembled one of my Parsee aunts, very respectable, almost bland, except when he would sing magically after a professional clearing of his throat. What I did learn from the documentation, however, was the incredible hold of patriarchy over the casting of the entire representation. And significantly, this did not come from Balgandharva but from the only woman represented in the production -- a low-caste dancing girl (an early prototype of the cabaret artiste), who was almost shoved on to the stage. After rendering some extremely awkward movements, she was forcibly made to exit, while Balgandharva glided from the wings to centre-stage revealing that age-old prejudice in the history of world theatre: `men can play women more effectively than women themselves.' From this documentation, therefore, my fantasy was at one level checked, but it was also problematized through the marginal perspective of the dancing girl whom I had not taken into account. After all when we research the world of Balgandharva, or for that matter any film star, do we really think of the extras? This documentation compelled me to re-inscribe the value of the oblique angle in studying performance, and in considering the subaltern dimensions of any performance, which are more often than not absented in archival records. Let me offer yet another instance from my theatre research of how the act of documenting a play can assume a political dimension. I draw here on my experience in documenting some of the non-verbal plays of the Manipuri director H Kanhailal -- Pebet and Memoirs of Africa. The first play dramatizes the effects of cultural colonization on indigenous cultures. In this animal fable, a Cat, who is disguised as a Vaishnavite monk, abducts the children of Mother Pebet, a mythical bird. In the course of his indoctrination, he compels the children to stone their own mother with the Sanskrit maxim -- "Janani Janmabhumishya swargadapi gariyasi" [Mother and motherland are greater than heaven]. The irony of these words is heightened in the predominantly non-verbal text of the entire play, which is structured for the most part around two words -- `pebet' and `te tu'. My challenge in documenting this text was not merely to prepare a written text out of a non-verbal performance text; the more critical task was to participate in the resurrection of the play from the ashes of its memories as it were. Here I found myself playing the role of a catalyst, as I encouraged Kanhailal and his wife Sabitri to reconstruct the play after an absence of almost 20 years, with a very different cast and a somewhat altered political situation. In Manipur, I found that the very site of documentation compelled me to assume an active role as a writer. The professional demands of the job required a negotiation of existing resources and conditions of work. Not only did I and my photographer colleague Amit Bararia have to get involved in finding an appropriate space for the documentation, we also had to record the productions late at night when it was possible to photograph the plays without voltage fluctuations by stealing electric current from the main line. While I wouldn't want to make this sound unduly subversive, it should be remembered that curfew descends on the streets of Imphal after dusk when the militia are omnipresent. Documenting an ostensibly innocent anti-state play in the thick of the night gave the entire activity a different immediacy and sense of involvement. Moving on to the documentation of cultural movements, I will call attention now to the extraordinary power of the fragment. Very often in reconstructing a moment from a movement that has already passed, all that exists are fragments -- sometimes not even the date or the place of a particular event, but the memory of a particular struggle, a slogan or song. The task for any researcher is to give each fragment its due respect, while seeking valid linkages with other fragments without attempting to synthesize a falsely complete picture. Let me give an example. While researching the Indian Peoples' Theatre Association (IPTA), I came across this very brief description of a performance in an all-India Kisan Sabha conference in Bezwada, Andhra Pradesh. In a report, I learned that an anti-imperialist skit was performed in this conference where the character of Hitler was caricatured by rich peasant-stooges echoing his words; later in the skit, Mussolini and Tojo apparently cried on the shoulders of this farcical fascist. In yet another fragment, culled from another source, I learned that the dancer Usha Dutta performed the `Hunger Dance' in the same forum, her performance evoking painful memories of the Bengal famine to which the spectators responded emotionally by donating money. Finally, in what was a totally unprecedented discovery, I encountered Sunil Janah's invaluable photographic documentation of this particular Kisan Sabha conference. In one solitary image, where there was no evidence of the Hitler performance or the `Hunger Dance', there was nonetheless an incredible intensity in the collective gaze of a mass of spectators. With an almost visceral effect, the conference in Bezwada suddenly came alive for me, the memories of the earlier documents colliding in my mind to create a sensation of that particular moment. I am not saying that I was able to grasp the complexities of that historical moment, but I was able to understand its dynamics a little more concretely, and inwardly. There is something about the evidence that you receive from a photograph that you cannot quite get through words. And yet, we know that images can be doctored, distorted, sensationalized. Increasingly, photographs are being used by activist organizations not merely to record the significant moments in any movement, but as a means of disseminating the movement in the media. Indeed, photographic documentation has become increasingly inseparable from reportage, if not public relations. Sometimes the photographs of any movement in national newspapers can seem to be thoroughly counter-productive in so far as they tend to iconize particular personalities rather than to focus on the ground realities of struggle. Therefore, one can encounter the image of Arundhati Roy, for instance, being sprinkled with flower petals at the start of the Rally for the Valley, which has an unavoidable focus on celebrity that totally misrepresents the larger contradictions and tensions of that particular rally. On the other hand, there can be a much less widely disseminated image that can hit you when you least expect it. I am reminded here of a recent encounter with a wall poster in Calcutta where my eye fell on a woman's face being crushed by what seemed to be a policeman's boot -- a documentation of the brutality to which activists were subjected in the recent WTO fracas in Seattle. I found this image extraordinarily powerful in so far as it compelled me to address the content of the poster, which was brought out by an anti-imperialist forum in West Bengal. Apart from the suddenness of the encounter, I was struck by the ways in which an image can travel and get re-contextualized in other locations. We need to ask, therefore, not just how documentation works, but where is it likely to be disseminated beyond the confines of archives and documentation centres? For whom is it intended in the first place? Can documentation assume a new lease of life? Can it re-ignite struggle, instead of merely recording what has passed, feeding in the process a defunct politics of nostalgia? What is the inflammatory potential of documentation? Here I am reminded of a powerful scene from the most volatile genres of documentation-the documentary film. In Narmada Diary, for instance, we see the NBA supporters gate-crash the hallowed office of the Minister of Environment and browbeat him into total confusion, if not idiocy. The man does not know `upstream' from `downstream.' This documentation is so relentless in its merciless exposure of the minister's incompetence that one is compelled to question the seeming omnipotence of the State. Similar reportage of this incident in a newspaper or even an activist report would not be able to capture the sheer chaos of that moment -- a chaos that takes us beyond the struggle in Narmada to the actual clash of different political cultures in India, at once established and emergent. Sadly, documentation in academic and NGO circles tends to sanitize all elements of chaos in the recording of any struggle. But does that mean that there is no room for reflection in documentation that goes beyond a mere paraphrase of facts, a compiling of statistics? Perhaps the critical reflexivity in any documentation can be achieved so long as there is no surrender to the amnesia and arrogance of `expertise'. It may also be necessary to secrete an element of rage in whatever is being recorded with seeming equanimity and detachment. In this regard, the greatest obscenity in the documentation of communalism today could be its uncanny resemblance to weather reports. In such a display of detached omniscience -- all the facts in place, no prejudice in sight -- there is the obscenity of indifference. A genuine researcher of grass-root cultural realities cannot afford to be sanguine about his or her task. He or she is always on guard, slightly ill at ease with the very mechanisms of control that have been derived through particular skills. The point is not to display a particular set of skills, but to subject them relentlessly to critical scrutiny, even while exploiting them in risky situations. In this regard, I remember seeing a photograph by Satish Sharma on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. In this very ordinary black-and-white print, I saw the debris of a home that had been savagely attacked and reduced to rubble. `Look more carefully,' Satish prodded my seeming detachment. And then I saw in the rubble the mangled remains of a human body, almost indistinguishable from the bricks and stone -- not framed in wide-angle lens, not highlighted in any way, just there to be seen as evidence of a particular moment of madness and violence. `Why
did you take this photograph?' I remember asking Satish. Without pausing,
he responded curtly: `Because I was angry.' The documentation of
any form of violence, I would submit, is not about the erasure or
sensationalization of violence, but about its capacity to subvert our conditioned
complacency, which could be the greatest violence of our times.
This is a slightly modified version of an intervention made in the conference-workshop on documentation `Meeting New & Old Challenges', organized in Pune in February 2000 by Akshara (Mumbai), Jagori/Sangat (New Delhi), and Sanhita (Calcutta). Rustom Bharucha is an independent writer, theatre director and cultural worker based in Calcutta whose books include In the Name of the Secular and The Question of Faith. |
The
genesis of my prejudice relating to `documentation as death' needs
to be contextualized within the seemingly rarefied world of `culture',
and more specifically, theatre practice, which would seem to resist
any attempt to document its ceaseless mortality. Within the quasi-academic
world of the visual and performing arts, where there is as yet no reliable
database for the wealth of our traditional, folk, and ritual performances
across language and region, I first got to thinking about `documentation
as death' on reading some of the interventions in the First Drama
Seminar that was held in New Delhi in the mid-'50s. Incidentally,
the proceedings of this historic event were meticulously recorded, transcribed,
and even printed, but they have yet to be published or disseminated beyond
the handful of scholars who are aware of its existence. This would
include some of the officers of the Sangeet Natak Akademi itself.
Today
there is a similar paranoia affecting documentation in cultural circles
though it functions in significantly different circumstances. If
earlier there was at least a genuine concern for `dying' forms, today the
investment in documentation is more opportunistic. Increasingly, it is
linked to the exposure of one's work beyond the boundaries of its context.
It is not uncommon, therefore, to hear some upwardly mobile artists complaining:
`When we go abroad, we have nothing to show. We don't know how to
represent our work.' This is very true. Without documentation
-- and a professional video recording of a production or an exhibition
would be a priority these days -- there can be almost no possibility of
receiving due recognition in the world of funding agencies, international
festivals, seminars, and conferences.