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The
relationship between politics, pedagogy and the classroom can only
be addressed by considering the experience of teaching and
learning within an institutional context. As a South-Asian
immigrant to the United States, my own education was formed in the
crucible of race, migration, Diaspora and memory – the
historical legacies of segregation and education, labour flows and
minority cultural formation within American public schools (i.e.
state schools). Growing up in the seventies and eighties in
America, I struggled to develop my own sense of multiple
belongings, even as I negotiated with the racist positioning of
Indians as a model minority (pitted against those “unruly”
minorities, Latino/as and Blacks). In many ways, I came to realise
that South-Asian culture was the least threatening form of
otherness for dominant whites in this country – paisley and Ravi
Shankar, bindis and mehndi, kurtas and naan:
in different ways, the authentically “Indian” as fetish and as
merchandise has been central to different strategies of racism in
America.
As I entered graduate school in the nineties, I understood quickly
that this fetishisation of things Indian or Oriental was in fact
an academic boom industry. From French feminism’s “Chinese
women” to the latest craze for Bollywood as site of the final
resistance to and/or complicity with globalisation, the academic
critique of the Oriental fetish has itself become a fetish. This
is where academic criticism eats itself, and, with all that masala
it’s bound to get indigestion.
It is in this context that I entered the “field” of
South-Asian studies. Over almost a decade of undergraduate college
teaching at the New School in New York City, I have offered
courses ranging from post-colonial approaches to Victorian
narrative to South-Asian cultural studies. This past semester I
taught a course I called ‘Bollywood’s Colonialism’, which
was a broad ranging engagement with the history, aesthetics,
politics, and cultural contexts of Hindi films, both back
“home” and in the Diaspora. The course itself came out of my
own long involvement with Hindi films, and was based on research I
had conducted on Bollywood film cultures in Bhopal. During my stay
in Bhopal (my birthplace), I was able to teach conversational
English to a group of young filmgoers, who in turn introduced me
to the teeming worlds of Hindi cinema in that otherwise sleepy
administrative town. These students, three women and two men all
in their early twenties, all middle class, upper caste urbanites,
taught me the many ways Hindi cinema pervades the lives of
(especially young) people in northern India. They taught me to
laugh in a way I was never able to before, to laugh at that moment
when you think the lights are going down at Rumba Talkies to
signal the start of the show, when really its just another power
cut. In so many ways, through all their “medical
transcription” courses, their correspondence MBA courses, and of
course their obsession to learn American English, they taught me
the meaning of what it means to struggle to “make it” in
today’s globalising India. And they taught me, as well, that
Hindu fundamentalism is not about waving the saffron flag, but
rather about the insidiousness of segregating a Hindu elite from a
Muslim underclass. These lessons learnt over the course of an
unforgettable year were the implicit backdrop for my course on
‘Bollywood’s Colonialism’ at the New School.
At this small, liberal arts college where I teach, our seminar
style classrooms never have more than 18 students. My Bollywood
class was full from the start. Many of the students had already
taken other courses with me, or had heard about me from friends,
so they knew what to expect: a lot of pretty difficult reading,
intense discussions, and a demanding schedule of student
presentations, and student-led classes. In a sense, my classroom
style is itself the culmination of a history of contesting the
dominant Eurocentric form of education, and, with the help of very
supportive and imaginative colleagues, moving toward a student-centred
and thoroughly politicised pedagogy.
My aims in this course were multiple, and perhaps a little epic:
to give my students the conceptual tools to situate Hindi films
within the political economy of globalisation; to understand the
pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial contexts of filmi aesthetics;
to understand Bollywood narrative conventions in relation to both
Hollywood and “Third Cinema”; and finally to come to terms
with the changing mode of address of Hindi cinema in its
relationship to (as the title to a new film puts it) “green card
fever” i.e. the South-Asian Diaspora. We read various articles
on Hindi film (in a massive course reader), and three books: Vijay
Mishra’s Temples of Desire (which, perhaps because of all
the knowledge it assumed, my students hated); Ania Loomba’s Colonialism/Postcolonialism
(which, despite its difficulty, was mostly very helpful); and The
Film Cultures Reader edited by Graeme Turner (which provided a
much needed comparative perspective). We saw over twenty films
from Deewar to Mryityudand, from Purab aur
Paschim to The Legend of Bhagat Singh.
The course was charged from the beginning, but for reasons that
had more to institutional and geo-political contexts than the
syllabus necessarily. This spring semester saw the US wage an
illegal and brutal war against an already ravaged Iraq, a war
which the president of our University, Bob Kerry (a former US
Senator and presidential candidate), not only supported but
actively campaigned for in the name of “liberating” the Iraqi
people. The many anti-war activists in my class were quick to draw
the connections between this new imperialism and a much older
colonial “white man’s burden,” which in the name of
humanising the “savages” enslaved and exterminated whole
populations. My students drew connections with what they were
learning about colonialism and post-colonialism in Hindi cinema
and the new “war on terrorism” by contextualising the on-going
attacks against immigrants, South-Asians, Arabs and Muslims in
this country with the historical position of the “minority” in
South Asia. With the help of theorists such as Gayatri Spivak,
Ania Loomba, Chandra Mohanty, and Ravi Vasudevan, we were able to
develop a form of film viewing that fore-grounded the relations of
power constituting Hindi film narrative, one that shifted the
question to developing specific solidarities with the subaltern
rather than a Western universalist “sympathy with the
oppressed.” Subaltern studies scholars such as Spivak and Dipesh
Chakravarty, post-colonial feminists such as Jacqui Alexander and
Mohanty, and many others, have waged a long-standing struggle
against different forms of essentialisms that have informed the
Western humanist tradition. From imperialism to the “white, male
gaze,” this scholarship has opened up new “lines of flight”
for film criticism, and has enabled film researchers to articulate
historical and culturally specific agendas that have furthered the
critique of Western humanism.
Of course, the racist equation of the “West” with the
“human” has only been reanimated and given new life after
9/11, especially in America. In the wake of those tragedies, the
creeping fascism of the US State finally stopped creeping and once
again suddenly sprang to monstrous life. The summary detentions of
thousands and thousands of Muslims and activists, the repression
of dissent in the public sphere, and the renewed commitment to a
global empire have charged the viewing of Bollywood in the West
like no other event could have.
In this sense, viewing the South-Asian “other” became for
these mostly white students an explicitly counter-hegemonic
activity, given the massive demonisation of this very other in the
mainstream media in the US. For the anti-war and anti-IMF
activists in the class, this kind of counter-hegemony presents
another fetishising lure – to turn the South-Asian subaltern
into either a subject to be saved (in terms of critique of
patriarchy, the figure of the abject sati is the archetype
here), or a subject of total revolt (for some people of colour in
my class, Raj Kumar Santoshi’s idealisation of Bhagat Singh
fighting British Imperialism provided this fetish). Part of the
pedagogical work as I saw it was to affirm all these
possibilities, and enable students to articulate for themselves
relationships of solidarity to Bollywood.
And that made people very uncomfortable. This sense of discomfort
is necessarily a pedagogical resource in a classroom that seeks to
“comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.” If what
dominant white supremacist, masculine and bourgeois subjectivity
narratives strive toward is a certain unification, linearity,
fixity, being, presence and reason, a pedagogy of crisis would try
to show the violent desires that found such narrative drives, it
would indeed seek to bring this entire edifice of subjectivity to
crisis by enabling non-dominant, non-unitary, multiplicitous
non-narrative viewing positions to proliferate in and through the
classroom. As the South-Asian instructor of the classroom this
meant refusing to claim the authentic nativist position, while
simultaneously not disavowing my identity. For my students, it
meant avoiding engaging with South-Asian culture through the
framework of the common objectification of the multicultural
“fetish.” In other words, developing an entirely new concept
and practice of viewing was necessary for the classroom. Not
surprisingly, the white men in the course resisted the most, often
seeking to claim for themselves the position of knowledge mastery.
Crucial in the contestation of this dominant position in the
course was the role of women and people of colour (white and
Jewish women, a Haitian American woman, a Black man, and an East
Asian woman), who sought to enunciate positions of viewing
“otherwise”: forms of pleasure beyond male scopophilia,
Eurocentrism, and the creeping fascism here in the US.
All this came to a head on what turned out to be the last class of
the semester. We were discussing the movie Mrityudand in
the context of a critique of both Western white feminism and the
dominance of Hollywood production and distribution practices. The
film narrates the story of women’s struggles against entrenched
patriarchy and caste domination in a North Indian village,
culminating in their cathartic revolt against their male
oppressors. Here white, middle class women and white, upper-class
men came together to assert that Bollywood was accessible to them
through the universality of male oppression and the global and
historical dominance of Hollywood. Others (notably the people of
colour and activists) in the class argued for the necessity of
maintaining historical and cultural specificity.
At this point, I must confess something: I lost my patience and
temper. After a very difficult semester, the kinds of questions
the students were fighting over seemed to me to miss one of the
most fundamental lessons of the course. In what was no doubt a
shrill tone, I asked this: Through which framework will we be able
to pose the most relevant question for what Bollywood does (not
means) to viewers in the West? What approach, what vision, what
theory will help us to see the social and historical relations of
power that make Bollywood what it is for the West? What I wanted
students to see is that it is not a question of what Bollywood
means, but rather of what it does, both in its local contexts, and
as an intervention in Western culture. In other words, through an
understanding of how Hindi films produce different, sometimes
divergent, sometimes mutually ramifying effects – through
narratives, images, music, affects, media convergences, public
cultures of film, and much more – we can understand anew who we
in the West think we are, and pose through a politicised ethics of
viewing what we would like to become.
These questions, no doubt, are complex: the dominance of
universalism vs. the continuing salience of the local and the
specific, and the need to become radically self-reflexive in our
practices of viewing film. Essentialisms abound on both sides of
this debate, and to my mind the pedagogical questions it raises
has to do with how one conceptualises and practices a form of
intervention that brings the stability of every conceivable
category of film culture to crisis. This epistemic and political
crisis is not one out of many but in fact a sign of the times. It
informs all classrooms in this country whether they be on
Bollywood or Introduction to Sociology. I must say that I look
back on this semester with thanks, thanks to my students who were
willing to embark on this voyage into crisis, and thanks to
Bollywood for helping me to come to a new clarity on what the
relationship between pedagogy and politics can and should be.
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