The Seminar Mode of Production: A Critique

Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production...Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. (Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter Two: "The Metaphysics of Political Economy")

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. (Karl Marx, 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy)

Introduction

I begin with my favorite lines from Marx's corpus of writings in order to set the tone for my argument here. This argument concerns what I call the "seminar mode of production," which, I believe, ought to be seen as a set of economic and social relations that are associated with particular forms of consciousness in our world today. This mode of production may be observed primarily in universities and research centers, but its influence is not merely confined to these peripheries of modern society. Indeed, insofar as a university degree is widely considered a necessity by middle and upper classes worldwide, the influence of the university, and by extension, of the seminar mode of production, may be seen everywhere. This mode of production, therefore, along with the social relations of production associated with it, is the object of critique in this post.

So what exactly is the "seminar mode of production"? It is the sum of the productive forces and social relations that exist between administrators, donors/funders, professors and students in the contemporary world, whose perpetuation depends, in the final analysis, on performing erudition in the physical setting of a seminar room. This definition needs to be parsed a bit. Note three key elements here, each of which will be elaborated upon subsequently.

1. The seminar functions as the crucial setting in which erudition is expected to be performed by students and professors alike. Secondary performances of erudition (by-products?) such as published articles, edited volumes and books, reviewed by peers, are also derived from the same productive relations established within the university. Performance, however, does not necessarily imply feigning erudition since it is quite possible that some performances are genuinely good.

2. The seminar is nestled in the framework of the university, which has increasingly being seen in the postwar era as a knowledge factory to be managed and run by professional administrators. As I shall explain below, this is a fairly recent development in the institutional history of the university, characterized as it is by medieval norms and rituals even today. In other words, what we are witnessing nowadays is the fruition of a post-WWII process of incorporating academia into the larger social relations established under the capitalist mode of production, albeit in a somewhat peculiar way.

3. The production of "knowledge" in seminars across the modern university system occurs parallel to the formation of particular kinds of consciousness among students and professors. These forms of consciousness, as I shall argue, are essentially apolitical, despite appearances to the contrary, and geared to the preservation of bourgeois society and its interests. Moreover, these forms of consciousness (note the plural!) may be associated with distinct socio-cultural processes, most notably (a) co-option into existing power structures of some claiming to represent the subordinated classes, (b) a stable supply of skilled workers for the labor force, whose intrinsically petty bourgeois nature favors preserving the status quo above all else, and (c) the rise of a global neo-brahminical elitism that values higher education degrees as markers of social distinction despite the irony of "subalterns" acting strategically as objects of research.

The Performance of Erudition

By erudition, I mean literally e(x)-rudis or the Latin root for the expulsion of rudeness in personal manners, primarily by the acquisition of what is commonly known as “polish.” In the seminar room, “polish” is typically demonstrated by a combination of everyday strategies: dropping names of famous individuals both alive and dead, references to fashionable theories and tools to suggest a deep familiarity with these, and/or appeals to the rhetoric of science (hypotheses, data, sampling, testing, etc). Jointly or severally, these strategies are used regularly by students and professors across seminar rooms to demonstrate proof of erudition to other participants gathered therein. Taken together, they constitute a collective performance of erudition in the seminar setting.

This collective performance, in fact, lies at the heart of the seminar mode of production. Indeed, the success or failure of productive forces may be judged on the basis of these performances. This holds true not only for students who are graded on their performances, but also for professors, who are evaluated by universities on the basis of their performances of erudition. These evaluations of performance create distinctions of note between students (an “A” student is regarded as different from a “C” student) and professors (a full professor is viewed differently from a junior faculty member). The distinctions created thus are not restricted to classroom settings because students with higher grades end up being hired in better-paid jobs or attending better graduate schools. Likewise, professors promoted to higher ranks of the pecking order enjoy substantive social and material privileges not enjoyed by those below them. Socio-cultural distinctions thus reinforce and are reinforced by material ones.

Of course, performances are not only oral. Performances in written form, such as papers, reports and the like, are just as vital in demonstrating erudition in the seminar setting. In written as well as oral performances of erudition, it is not always possible to distinguish between “genuine” and “fake” though it is possible to separate better from worse performances according to established criteria. Occasionally, I have found it possible to expose a student or faculty presenter (yes, this is true!) at a seminar who has referred to, say, Foucault without actually reading the primary texts. But in most cases, it is exceedingly difficult to tell whether someone quoting Foucault has actually read the relevant texts or has simply faked erudition by reading a few pages of summary online. Faking erudition in this manner is anything but uncommon in seminars. Students do it routinely at both undergraduate and graduate levels. But what is less known is that faculty members do it only slightly less frequently, albeit in more sophisticated or “polished” ways. Usually, professors do so by using the rhetoric of science to cloak their research findings, or by claiming authority based on their privileged access to a particular text or context. Both rhetorical strategies are persuasive enough for most audiences, and erudition can be performed easily under such circumstances.

The emphasis on performance has an obvious casualty: learning. There is no guarantee that the dialogues between student and teacher or between peers lead to a genuine understanding of the topic at hand in a seminar setting. In most cases, the objects of performance are discarded much like fancy dresses as soon as the student (or professor) exits the seminar room. A peer who took a graduate seminar with me in African Politics, therefore, found it easy to make a number of carefully-orchestrated statements on North Atlantic racism hampering serious scholarship on politics and society in Africa. Yet the same student told me outside the classroom on the very same day that she considered Africa as a continent to be “beyond repair” because she deemed its inhabitants to be too corrupt and lazy in general. One can come up with dozens of similar examples after even the slightest acquaintance with the performance-based regime of the seminar room. What is noteworthy is this: whether the student has actually internalized or imbibed what is read and discussed is not deemed as relevant as performing erudition, whether authentic or fake. This, as I shall argue next, is only to be expected in the knowledge factory or the higher education industry, the common names for learning and scholarship regimes in the contemporary world.

The Knowledge Factory

The knowledge factory is, in many ways, akin to a sausage factory. A delivery line of sausage-like products are produced periodically in fixed quantities under clearly-defined quality criteria. These sausage-like students are then absorbed into the capitalist economy based on pre-existing job descriptions and selection criteria. It is a wonderful system, of course, devised in the United States over the post-WWII era to meet the growing demand for goods and services by an expanding “affluent society.” By the early Sixties, the rudiments of the current system were in place. College graduates began to be churned out in large numbers by the assembly line of the knowledge factory. As demand for commodities grew over the past fifty years, the demand for skilled labor rose correspondingly, and the university system came to be streamlined to meet these labor demands. Of course, as the demand for college students grew, so too did the demand for teachers. Accordingly, the number of graduate programs and doctoral degrees rose exponentially over the postwar era. Since quality control of sausages and students is vital to the success of a capitalist economy, the descendants of Puritans sought to “professionalize” various disciplines, generally by making gratuitous use of the rhetoric of science, which is, of course, the religion of our secular age. And thus it came to pass that administrators, managers, and clerks came to find a comfortable home in the university.

The potted history I have just described may be regarded as a brief account of the absorption of academia into the capitalist economy. It seeks to explain why economists, for instance, have come to acquire so much prestige in the corporate sector. Or why economics has become a default standard for the other social sciences, which have striven fruitlessly to “mathematize” or quantify their research despite their actual results being closer to those of astrologers and numerologists than to those of real scientists. Or why those in the natural sciences have focused their energies on devising technologies of different sorts that are socially and ecologically wasteful instead of producing ecologically-sustainable technologies that serve communities and preserve natural resources. The transformation is hard to appreciate today because one is tempted to believe that it was always so. But it wasn’t. That is exactly why it is important to understand the socio-historical changes over the past two generations, alongside an appreciation of the underlying material basis of these changes.

However, the transformation is a peculiar one, certainly not identical to that occurring outside the academic groves. Being a medieval institution, the university could never have undergone an easy transition to modernity. It was elitist, even aristocratic, in its very substance, not merely in the paraphernalia of scepters, robes, gowns and caps. The very structure of academia has always been true to its feudal origins that sought to make numerous marks of distinction within the professoriate as well as the student body. The feudal order also sought to keep out, in the words of a former adviser, the “riff-raff.” To participate in the modern world without becoming an anachronism did indeed seem to be a great challenge to Western universities in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. No less an authority than Adam Smith suggested that lecturers at Edinburgh ought to be financed by their students instead of being funded publicly, ostensibly to weed out outdated and unfashionable subjects not demanded by the student body. One can imagine how the protectionist racket that is academia must have reacted to Smith’s maverick suggestion. Those were difficult times for the aristocrats in Western European universities (though not in the securely racist, aristocratic milieu of New England universities at the time). By the early 19^th century, however, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie had kissed and made up, a union symbolized definitively by the Great Reform Act of 1832. The compromise ironically involved inventing new forms of snobbery that could be blended imaginatively with older forms. British and French universities ended up creating a new class of pseudo-aristocrats at home and in the colonies abroad. In Victorian Britain, one could certainly buy one’s way to becoming a peer or a civil servant in the East, but universities provided the surest and most secure means to climb up the social ladder and thus, to perform “erudition” in its etymological sense of expelling rudeness.

Those neat pseudo-aristocratic arrangements were nonetheless rend asunder by the two world wars. In WWI, for instance, it is estimated that roughly a third of Oxford’s graduates departed the earthly realm without encashing their privileges of education. Furthermore, the geopolitical shift across the Atlantic had effectively ended the heyday of the traditional Western European university. Oxford and Cambridge were merely vestiges of the Old World in the new scheme of things. Still, Neo-Gothic spires and gargoyles continued to provide solace to cultural conservatives and snobs in the United States. Medieval markers of privilege could be conveniently accommodated within the knowledge factory in order to keep alive the pretense of a continuous Western tradition. Consequently, status and prestige are still determined by medieval norms and rituals even in an overwhelmingly capitalist world. Tenure, that great aristocratic vestige, thus continues to sit uneasily with the modern capitalist dictum of hire-and-fire. And minorities, women, and the subordinated classes of society continue to be poorly represented in universities. In retrospect, none of this is actually paradoxical: modernity depends fundamentally on the strategic use of traditional idioms and icons, and capitalism too needs institutions that transform wealth into status and power. The social relations appropriate to the seminar mode of production are thus somewhat different from the idealized Marxian abstraction of capitalism. The social relations corresponding to the seminar mode accommodate the pre-modern within the modern, the feudal within the capitalist, and the aristocratic within the bourgeois. This is because the university produces not only sausage-like students, but also cultural capital that enhances status and power. The knowledge factory is, in this sense, also a producer of aristocratic badges that awards considerable privileges to their wearers.

Forms of Consciousness and the Social Dynamics in Bourgeois Society

If the university today were merely a knowledge factory in which workers and their apprentices performed erudition, it might have been a fairly innocuous affair. In fact, it is not. The production of “knowledge” in the seminar mode gives rise to particular forms of consciousness among students and professors that are fundamentally apolitical, despite appearances to the contrary, to the extent that they seek to preserve bourgeois society and interests, that is, the status quo. There are three forms of consciousness that deserve to be highlighted. Firstly, there is the worldview of the privileged minority or the “creamy layer” as middle-class Indians call these determined seekers of upward social mobility. In this worldview, education is an input in the production of erudition, literally the expulsion of rudeness, which provides new avenues for employment, wealth, power and status. First-generation college-goers feature in this group as do racial minorities in the United States. What is most interesting is that these minority seekers of privilege actually believe the dominant elite mythology of sophistication, at least outwardly, and act as if it were true. The logic here is pragmatic: the status quo is certain to remain, so it’s best to make peace with the powers-that-be and grab a piece of the power-status-wealth pie.

Secondly, there is the weltanschauung of the plain-vanilla petty bourgeois students, who arguably are the most numerous on any university campus. For these types, education is a “given,” since their parents and grandparents most likely partook of it en route to careers as professionals in the service sector of the economy. These are the men and women who, in due course, comprise the core of the capitalist workforce in any country. Like all young people, petty bourgeois students too are attracted to pop radicalism, usually expressed in the form of peace marches, tree-hugging, anti-war protests, and so on. These are low-risk declarations of their moderately radical temperaments. More intrepid adventurers, of course, choose to volunteer at soup kitchens and churches or even to travel abroad as Peace Corps volunteers. Learning a foreign language, usually a European one, or studying abroad for a semester in a suitably exotic location are fairly common for this type of student. It is not so much that the petty bourgeois types lack a sense of adventure or genuine intellectual interests, but that their worldview is fundamentally limited by an everyday conservatism inherited from their parents and by their own mediocrity that makes every course and every assignment challenging. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge sounds quaint; radical politics seems outrageously risky; public service can be no more than an occasional hobby. In the final analysis, therefore, courses end up being about grades more than intellectual interests, education ends up being a mere cog in the wheel that preserves (or slightly enhances) social status and privilege, and the route from the seminar room leads firmly to the corporate desks of our modern-day Bob Cratchits and Bartlebys.

Finally, there is the oddest of the three forms of consciousness produced and sustained by the modern university system, the neo-brahmnical. It enjoys the greatest prestige because it is the preserve of those who “beat the system.” Professors and students alike share this neo-brahminical consciousness, mainly because the better, brighter students appear to mimic their teachers in the most sincere manner. In this milieu where the feudal/aristocratic is blended smoothly with the modern/capitalist, higher education is recognized principally as a means of acquiring cultural capital, not as an input in the production of erudition. Often, this recognition is linked to the privileged backgrounds of students, who consider themselves to be high-status creatures already, albeit in search of the right kinds of gloss. These kinds of gloss are material, verbal and rhetorical. In material terms, gloss takes the form of the latest and most fashionable gadgetry, cosmetics and clothing, preferably from brands such as Apple, Sephora and Neiman Marcus. In verbal terms, it means an accent that is free from plebeian sounds, pronunciation that is free from colloquial influences, and diction that is free from grammatical errors. In rhetorical terms, it means posturing as champions of the downtrodden and oppressed; forcefully employing the language of rights to side with causes such as genocide in Darfur, sweatshops in Asia, and animal rights; acquiring a vocabulary that readily references academic terms such as “subaltern,” “indigenous peoples,” “deconstruction,” and “social construct.” Dressing and owning certain articles, speaking in a certain way, and using a well-defined set of jargon words are, therefore, the surest means of asserting one’s superiority over others in this “game.” The social relations of production pertinent to the seminar mode entail precisely such markers of sociocultural distinction that definitively define high and low in the university system. These Bourdieusian distinctions exist in the student body on every campus, but interestingly enough, similar markers of differences are to be found among the professoriate too (comparing the average senior and junior professors around you should drive home the point forcefully!). This status game is neo-brahminical since cultural rather than economic capital is its basic currency though the game as a whole is supported by the capitalist economy (thus the prefix “neo-”). The cynical and ironic uses of the underprivileged and their legitimate needs are, of course, intrinsic to the neo-brahminical status game, which is, in its highest form, an elite competition to establish oneself as a supreme do-gooder without actually doing any good. In other words, a form of politics that is actually anti-politics insofar as claiming, without authorization or authenticity, to speak for the subaltern ultimately neglects, even mocks, any attempt by subalterns to speak and act as meaningful agents of social change.

It is not difficult to appreciate that these three forms of consciousness associated with privileged minorities, the petty bourgeoisie and the neo-brahmins are linked to three distinct sociocultural processes in the North Atlantic world. The privileged minority consciousness leads to a gradual co-option into existing power structures of those claiming to represent traditionally-subordinated groups on the basis of their ascriptive identities. The petty bourgeois worldview leads to a steady supply of skilled workers into the capitalist workforce due to the limited talents and ambitions of this population. Lastly, the neo-brahminical consciousness leads to higher education continuing to be a means of gaining cultural capital, status and prestige through the strategic use of high-minded rhetoric concerning the oppressed and the suffering, and the subsidization of traditional privileges by the capitalist economy.

Each of these three social processes, it must be understood, buttresses and reinforces the other. The co-option of privileged minorities into power structures supports the status quo, whether in the capitalist economy or in the university system, by preventing radical pressures from below to rise to a boil. The steady supply of petty bourgeois workers into the service sector is the engine of growth and/or stability in the capitalist economy, which thereby makes it possible to write off the costs of co-opting privileged minorities and supporting the neo-brahminical status game. And the neo-brahminical emphasis on cultural rather than economic capital legitimizes the entire capitalist system by invoking an imaginary, unbroken elite tradition of Western civilization. There is thus a neat complementarity to these three seemingly distinct forms of consciousness and social processes that owe their origins to the seminar mode of production.

Conclusion

In a functionalist vein, one might be tempted to argue that the seminar mode of production nourishes a social system that is stable, self-regulating, and internally coherent. Such a perspective, however, neglects the considerable imperfections in the social relations of production established within the knowledge factory itself and its relationship to the wider capitalist system. Within the university system, one ought to acknowledge the presence of a limited set of dissenters and heretics who do not toe the line defined by the authorities. Their everyday conduct is transgressive in subtle and not-so-subtle ways though open confrontation is hardly a prudent option for either students or professors. These transgressors may choose to use the grading system subversively to reward genuine learning rather than mere performance; to enable students to partake of the sheer joy of reading poetry, understanding how the past illuminates the present, or making scientific discoveries rather than to preoccupy themselves with jobs or jargon; and, to avail of the advantages of experiential learning to silently challenge received wisdom, and perhaps even the seminar mode itself. In sum, we are not in The Matrix, and it is quite possible for teachers and students to be subversive/ transgressive in covert and less overt ways. Whether they do so or not, in fact, thus becomes a matter of individual choice that we should not wish away via a structurally over-determined explanation.

Just as there are crevices for dissent, subversion and transgression within the knowledge factory, so too are there contradictions in the relationship between the knowledge factory and the capitalist economy. The overproduction of doctoral students relative to available jobs in the humanities and social sciences is one symptom of these contradictions. Another symptom is the growing joblessness of college graduates in depressed economic conditions. Yet the most obvious symptom of the uneasy place of the seminar mode of production in the capitalist economy is the commonplace notion that universities are ivory towers that promote outdated or other-worldly thinking ill-suited to the needs of contemporary capitalism. This is a rather amusing notion when one considers the tortured history of a medieval institution trying to reform itself in the modern world. After all, the modern university or knowledge factory owes its existence to private and public capital, and in turn, keeps the wheels of the capitalist economy moving by releasing a steady supply of inputs for productive activities.

The contradictory, awkward relationship between the knowledge factory and the capitalist economy also point to a larger malaise within contemporary capitalism itself. This has, of course, been revealed most dramatically over the past couple of years in the form of a protracted economic depression worldwide. The causes of this depression are essentially structural, as the likes of Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and David Harvey point out repeatedly. The hyper-speculation that generated super-profits to sustain and expand the financial sector does not correspond to any actual productive activities or production that is measurable in terms of GDP or GNP. Anyone familiar with the economic history of the North Atlantic world over the past three decades is familiar with the astonishingly low levels of national income growth and the structural need for “bubbles” of speculation to temporarily forget the structural crisis at hand. The collusion between the knowledge factory and the global financial sector has been well-documented and justly criticized in recent months. But it isn’t stated often enough that particular theories and models emanating from the quiet groves of academia were, in fact, responsible for the unseemly rush to collude with the financial sector, and subsequently, to bring about the worst economic crisis in the postwar era. The delicate underbelly of the golden goose has now been gently slit open. It is only a matter of time before the creature, gasping for breath at the moment, dies and the golden eggs of the capitalist economy cease to be laid. Whenever that auspicious hour arrives, we shall see the end of the unholy nexus between financial speculators and their economics-trained numerologists/astrologers. In the short run, there is thus much to be hopeful: on the horizon is a wholesale renegotiation of the social relations of production in the capitalist economy as well as in the knowledge factory. How exactly these future developments will affect the seminar mode of production is anyone’s guess, but I, for one, am confident that snobs, prudes, and wannabe feudal lords will not vanish into thin air like the hard-earned salaries of so many capitalist workers. The medieval past thus seeps into the post-modern future in insidious ways long after it has outlived its usefulness.

Has One-Day Cricket Suddenly Become Meaningless?

To answer the question briefly, the answer is "yes." But this is so not because of some apparent deficiencies in the ODI format or because the players and the viewing public suddenly find it boring. The truth is that one-day cricket has seen its stock plummet since the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007 because cricket's administrators have now identified a new cash-cow to replace the older one. From 1975 to 2007, one-day cricket happened to be the biggest money-spinner in the sport, and administrators basically maxed out on ODIs during this period. Subcontinental teams profited the most: between 1996 and 2006, South Asian teams routinely played an incredible 40-50 ODIs each year. Millions of dollars, especially in television rights, became the norm for international cricket, especially in the subcontinent.

All that, however, changed after India won the inaugural edition of the T20 World Cup in South Africa. Lalit Modi, who had earlier ridiculed the T20 concept, now became its top cheerleader with his IPL concept. Whereas the 2007 World Cup had raised USD 239 million, the latest edition of the IPL in 2009 raked in a whopping USD 2.16 billion, or nearly ten times the value of the leading ODI tournament in the world. With the likelihood of more IPL-like tournaments in England, Australia, and South Africa, economic logic dictates that the lucrative T20 format supplant the older ODIs as the leading money-spinner in the game. ODIs will, therefore, be scrapped altogether or replaced by a format that embeds the virtues of T20 cricket in the traditional structure of Tests (each team playing two innings of 20-25 overs each).

The logic of lucre certainly makes sense. But what is interesting is that no one is putting matters quite so bluntly. Commentators and players try to be diplomatic when they offer circuitous explanations for why one-dayers no longer excite. We are told that the middle overs of ODIs are "slow"; that many ODIs are one-sided affairs rather than close contests; that the toss can give an unfair advantage to one team in many countries. But curiously, no one complained about these apparent deficiencies for 32 long years between 1975 and 2007. To my mind, it's time to call a spade a spade rather than a bloody shovel. It's time people were honest about why T20 is winning out over one-dayers. Let's admit that it's got to do with moolah alone, and nothing else. The general public merely follows the latest fashion statement in the cricket industry, so simply generating media hype brings in millions nowadays. That's precisely where Lalit Modi & Co. come in. When the bania rules and sport becomes cheap entertainment, one can be assured that inferior products will be "chosen" by idiot consumers in the limited market of goods made available to them.

Why is Dravid back in the ODI team?

I have no idea why Rahul Dravid has returned to the ODI team for the Sri Lanka series and the Champions Trophy. The man last played for India two years ago, and was dropped by the then selectors who did not see him in their plans for the 2011 World Cup. No one doubted either his ability or his record then and now. But Dravid’s return comes on the back of some appallingly poor batting by some of the young guns against well-directed short-pitched bowling in England during the World T20 competition. But if Suresh Raina (still in the squad) and Rohit Sharma (finally dumped) cannot play fast, rising balls directed at their bodies, then shouldn’t they be sent to work in the nets against bowling machines as well as the likes of Ishant and Zaheer? And if it’s possible to recall Dravid, why not consider the younger and equally competent VVS Laxman? Or better still, some of the younger players who can actually play the short ball well, say, Virat Kohli or Manish Pandey?

The decision to recall discarded players past their best-by date suggests muddled thinking. Dravid will definitely not play in the 2011 World Cup, so he should not be considered for a one-off series just because it’s in South Africa. If only past records in South Africa are to be considered at the time of selection, why not also consider Sourav Ganguly next time? After all, his ODI record in that country is better than most of his countrymen. Or for that matter, why not consider the current chairman of selectors, Krishnamachari Srikkanth? He played the short stuff rather well: remember him cutting Michael Holding and pulling Andy Roberts in the 1983 World Cup final? Might he not be able to tackle Dale Steyn, Mitchell Johnson and others with equal aplomb, albeit in his mid-fifties?

Thoughts on the Current Crisis in the Hindu Right

For starters, let's be clear: there isn't a general crisis, ideological or factional, in the Hindu Right. We're talking, therefore, about a crisis in the principal parliamentary party of the Hindu Right, the BJP. I want to put forward three theses on the crisis within the BJP.

First, although it is being suggested by many media commentators that the BJP is fallen prey to factional squabbles, there is no clear evidence for this. The "secular" media in India, on account of its right-liberal tendencies nowadays, imagines a deep-seated ideological and factional divide separating moderates and hardliners in the BJP. For the past decade, Vajpayee and Advani have been the representative faces of these two imagined factions. Post-election dissidents such as Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh, and Arun Shourie have been labeled "Vajpayee's men" whereas Rajnath Singh, Sushma Swaraj, and Arun Jaitley have been implicitly assumed to be Advani's chelas. These remarks actually have deep roots that go back nearly two decades to a theoretical statement by the political scientist Amrita Basu that the BJP is a Janus-faced creature that attempts simultaneously to woo hardcore right-wingers as well as more moderate right-liberals. The main problem with this view is that the two imagined factions have never acted as factions or undercut each other's power within the party. Advani and Vajpayee, apart from being personal friends for decades, share much in common, including their early political training and formative experiences. If any substantial ideological or personality differences existed, how could they have coexisted so happily for so long? Vajpayee may not have led the Ramjanmabhoomi movement alongside Advani, but, contrary to opinion in certain quarters, he most certainly backed it fully. The movement even won him the prime ministership in 1996 and 1999. As such, while there may be different shades of right-wing opinion (softer and harder Hindutva, if you please), we cannot conclude that the BJP is divided along factional or ideological lines that mirror differences between Advani and Vajpayee.

Second, the crisis within the BJP today derives, above all, from its top-heavy, highly centralized party structure. This problem is peculiar to the BJP and does not apply to the decentralized units of the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal and other constituents of the Hindu Right. However, the problem is actually rather commonplace, historically speaking, in Indian politics. It afflicts every Indian party with the exception of the Congress, which remains, relatively speaking, the only properly national party in the country, whose local and provincial units conduct their everyday activities relatively independently of the CWC (party discipline is, therefore, a permanent problem in the Congress compared to its rivals). In the typical Indian political party, either a single leader or a bunch of charismatic characters dominates the show, and the rank and file at the provincial and local levels must simply accept this "monarchical" or "oligarchic" state of affairs. But when the winds of change blow at the top, party workers suffer from a certain inertia that lingers from the past, for which reason conflict between the "high" and the "low" is virtually built into these centralized party structures. In the BJP today, the old Jan Sangh order is yielding place to a new regime dominated by technocrats and petty bourgeois types. Neither party workers nor traditionally right-wing voters appreciate this change of guard. They signed up mainly because they sympathized with the Ramjanmabhoomi movement or Narenda Modi's pogroms. The party is presently in the throes of a life-threatening crisis because its primary social bases, as revealed by a close reading of its 2009 election manifesto, the petty bourgeoisie and the big bourgeoisie that dominate the metropolitan cities, are electorally insignificant and impotent. In other words, the BJP cannot win elections in its current avatar, as the past couple of years have shown. The RSS has stepped in to resolve the current crisis because it believes, rightly, that party workers must be appeased if the BJP is to have any meaningful political future. The likes of Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh are the Sangh's best bets, of course, since they represent old-fashioned Hindutva in the minds of party workers. In contrast, the likes of Arun Shourie and Arun Jaitley, urban professionals with no mass base, must be made to operate in the background. While this patchwork solution calms nerves within the party for the moment, it cannot, however, wish away the fundamental structural opposition between the party's top leadership and its base.

Third, since the crisis within the BJP is primarily structural rather than ideological or factional, the publication of Jaswant Singh's book on Jinnah or Yashwant Sinha's dissenting views are quite simply besides the point. Jaswant and Yashwant were always fringe figures in the party whose restricted support bases in Darjeeling and Hazaribagh rendered them insignificant to the ebb and flow of party politics at the all-India level. In short, they are dispensable. Furthermore, although much is being made of pro-Jinnah statements by Advani and Jaswant in the recent past, there is not much new here actually. Staunch RSS ideologues have noted in the past that Jinnah was a secular man, and was compelled, by the pseudo-secularism of Gandhi and Nehru, to abandon the mainstream anti-colonial movement during the Khilafat Movement. According to the RSS, when Jinnah emerged after his self-imposed exile, he had no option but to take up the two-nation theory in order to oppose the pseudo-secularists in the Congress. In this manner, the Muslim League and the Hindu Mahasabha made common cause against the Muslim-appeasing, Hindu-baiting Congress, most spectacularly in the 1946 elections in undivided Bengal. Jinnah's speech on 11 August 1947 has come in for much praise recently in the saffron camp, but most commentators fail to mention that, by this time, the two-nation theory had already become a reality. The Sangh Parivar is effectively suggesting that Jinnah was a truly secular Pakistani just as they are truly secular Indians (unlike the Congress and the Left). They are NOT suggesting that the Congress should have accepted the 1946 Atlee Cabinet Mission's proposal of a three-tiered confederation to replace the Raj, and therefore, the Hindu Right is NOT offering a revisionist history of independence and partition but simply maintaining their old line that Hindus and Muslims in South Asia ought to "live together separately." It is not surprising that Vallabhai Patel has been the Right's traditional hero because his historical views on the subject most closely mirror their own. Had Jaswant thought through this logic clearly, he would not have been unceremoniously kicked out by his party. As it turns out, he's neither a secularist nor a pseuo-secularist, just a confused man.

What are we to conclude from all of this? Is the crisis in the BJP a happy sign that communalism is a thing of the past? Sadly, I think not. The current crisis will blow over eventually. Either the party will reform its structures and develop a mass base, as it had hoped over two decades ago, or what is more likely, it will split into two saffron parties, one committed to old-style Hindutva with chariots and tridents and the other devoted to right-wing economic policies and technocracy moderated by a calm belief that appeased minorities ought to be put in their place. The latter appeals greatly to the India Shining public in India and abroad. But it cannot hope to win power at the all-India level unless it allies with similar-sized regional parties such as the Akali Dal, the Ahom Gana Parishad, and the AIADMK. The most likely situation is that it will become the millennium edition of the old Swatantra party, albeit with a communal flavor. It would be erroneous, however, to believe that the BJP's decline in electoral politics means the end of communalism in India. A useful analogy is the decline of the parliamentary Left for similar reasons, and its supercession by more extreme-left groups. There's every reason to infer that right-wing extremism and intolerance in contemporary India is on the rise in much the same fashion. The formation of senas to impinge on the rights of minorities, women, and homosexuals suggests that communal sentiments are growing in Indian society today. Economic liberalization since 1991 has, in fact, given a new lease of life to communal elements in Hindu society, who not only have the support of the urban petty bourgeoisie but are also increasingly winning the favor of Sanskritizing, upwardly-mobile lower-caste and tribal groups. Gone are the days when "votes and violence" won the day. As the state has withered away in a neoliberal age and previously subordinated castes have come into their own, civil society in India, dominated as it is by brahmins and banias, has moved steadily towards the Right. Communalism has thus redefined itself amidst the shifting class and caste dynamics of neoliberal India. The Hindu Right remains stronger today in India than ever before, and the right-wing challenge cannot be written off as trivial simply due to the BJP's failure to win elections. The saffron wave that once focused its energies on winning state power is now happy to simply spread its tentacles over every inch of Indian society, especially as it seeks to "Hinduize" tribals, lower-caste groups, and religious minorities. This new strategy is entirely consistent with the logic of fascism, which appealed so much to men such as Savarkar and Golwalkar, which seeks to create an internally-homogenous organic community underwritten by an expanding urban bourgeoisie and a secular creed. For the Hindu liberal as for the Indian Muslim or Christian, who are most threatened by these social tendencies, it is, to paraphrase the political scientist Paul Brass, not that India is steadily approximating a chaotic, intolerant mess, but it is already such a mess. Of course, one must swim against the tide of hate and intolerance around us, but it's best to be clear-eyed about the choppy waters in which we swim today.

The Renouncer as Hero in Indian Cinema

This post ought to begin with an apology to friends who have noted the absence of film-related posts thus far despite film, cricket and politics forming my trinity of interests on this blog. I offer no excuses except that recent political events have detained me more than I had anticipated. This post, however, seeks to correct that anomalous state of affairs...

I am interested in exploring here a rather interesting character in Indian cinema, the renouncer-hero, the male protagonist who finds himself at odds with his milieu and revolts against society in dramatic fashion. The renouncer-hero is neither rare in Indian film history nor someone we can confine to a particular generation of films. He has existed in every generation of films, from the silent era through the turbulent decades of the anti-colonial struggle and the social upheavals of postcolonial India to the present decade. Yet the renouncer-hero has curiously escaped the attention of those writing on Indian cinema, or indeed, on Indian social history. This post seeks to fill that lacuna by probing into the socio-political and psychological dimensions of this enigmatic character, and highlighting his significance in South Asian political culture over the last century or so. Since the subject is vast, I shall focus on what I consider the three most outstanding examples of the renouncer-hero in three distinct historical moments in Indian cinema (Devdas, Pyaasa, and Gulaal), and refer et passim to many others.

Devdas: The Timeless Tragic

Devdas (1917), written by the Bengali novelist Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya, made a huge splash among its urban Calcutta readership in the 1920s, but its author could never have known that it would end up as one of greatest films of the pre-independence era. There was a silent film bearing the novel's name in 1928, but its limited scope for dialogue meant that audiences were expected to be already familiar with the basic plot and characters. Seven years later, most of the subcontinent was exposed to Sarat Babu's novel via popular cinema: the dynamic and controversial filmmaker Promatesh Chandra Barua made simultaneous Bengali and Hindi versions of Devdas, casting the debonair actor-cum-singer Kundan Lal Saigal in the lead role. Because these early cinematic adaptations closely follow the novel, my interpretation of these films may also be taken to be an interpretation of the novel itself, and by extension, of the socio-cultural circumstances that gave rise to both the films and the novel.

Devdas is the tragic story of a scion of a wealthy landed family in late-19th-century rural Bengal. The young Devdas is sent, like so many young men of his time, to study in Calcutta, the capital of British India and among the leading centers of Western learning and culture in the East. Being in Calcutta exposes him to modern/urban/Western ways of life even as it severs his ties from his childhood companion Paro. After thirteen years, when the time arrives for Devdas to return to his family mansion in the countryside, it is clear that he has changed irrevocably from his childhood days. Not only he is a young man now, he is also a modern Anglicized Calcutta gentleman who has only the faintest connection with his feudal background. His only emotional connection to his rural childhood is Paro, who despite her family's low social status and merchant-caste origins, harbors a forbidden love for her old playmate. Devdas imagines himself to be a modern man, ostensibly since his education in Calcutta has made him think so. On his return, he embarks on a torrid romantic affair with Paro, completely oblivious to the traditional norms of the caste-conscious society into which he has been born. For the novelist and the early filmmakers, Paro is merely the temptress whereas it is Devdas who succumbs to her rustic charms, so much at odds, he feels admiringly, from the ways of the city.

His love for Paro places Devdas in a double dilemma. Firstly, he is in love with this rustic beauty, an idealization of the country by the city, yet he himself is undeniably a member of the new modern/urban class of Indians, living entirely at odds with the countryside and tradition. Secondly, although he imagines himself to be a modern man, free from the shackles of traditional society, he is tied inextricably to his feudal background and its traditional caste basis. These personal-cum-social dilemmas are unresolvable for men such as Devdas. They are condemned to live, in Matthew Arnold's words in Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse, "wandering between two worlds, the one dead, the other powerless to be born." Their modern, urban Western education and lifestyle cannot be reconciled to the traditional, caste-ridden society of their birth. A distinctly Indian modernity cannot be expressed by Devdas and his peers, who are trapped between two unceasingly hostile worlds of modernity and tradition. In the end, Devdas must capitulate before the forces of traditional society: he cannot marry Paro due to her low social/caste status.

To escape this life-denying world of tradition, Devdas renounces his hereditary privileges and seeks refuge in the modern and urban realm of Calcutta. But, the author and filmmaker ask, does such a refuge exist at all? As Paro is married off by her parents to a rich widower, Devdas takes to drinking heavily in the company of his friend Chunnilal, under whose influence he is drawn slowly into the arms of a courtesan named Chandramukhi. For Sarat Babu, the courtesan typifies the urban woman, worldly-wise yet bereft of morals, caring yet incapable of feminine virtue as demanded by traditional society. Bengali literature of this period routinely inserted the courtesan into popular narratives because such women were frequent companions of upper-caste/class men in the city. Yet Devdas cannot become one of these absentee landlords revelling in the degeneracy of the city. His alcoholism is a desperate attempt to escape from the real to the imaginary and from the actual to the desired. He can neither settle down with his beloved Paro in the countryside nor can he live like Chunnilal who has made his peace with the urban world of courtesans like Chandramukhi.

Torn between the country and the city, between the traditional and the modern, and between Paro and Chandramukhi, Devdas endures a hellish existence, against which he revolts with the aid of alcohol. He has renounced his aristocratic privileges already, and there is no question of returning to the very people who made him give up Paro. Yet he has also renounced the modernity of the city, whose offerings are morally unacceptable to him. His alcoholism permits him to revolt dramatically against his past and present, that is, against both the traditional and the modern. Devdas is not your everyday hero, but a tragic one whose revolt against society is destined to end in physical death. Although he differs from the typical film hero, Devdas is most certainly a hero for film audiences, whose anxieties and dilemmas he plays out in extreme form. In a certain sense, Devdas could be an exaggerated version of just anyone in the audience, grappling each day to make sense of the contradictory impulses of tradition and modernity in Indian society. Whereas others experiencing similar pressures might compromise with their circumstances, Devdas does not. Therein lies his heroism. He pushes the contradictions of his social circumstances to their logical conclusion, that is, to his death.

Devdas is the classic renouncer-hero. His tragic story carries a powerful critique of the society that drives him to his death. Sarat Babu's critique is an unmistakably modern one. Although tragic tropes are common in pre-modern Indian literature, most notably in epic poetry, tragedy as a literary genre is conspicuous by its absence before the late 19th century. Ironically, Devdas itself marks the finest expression of a fledgling Indian modernity, germinating in a colonized society and adapting a European literary genre to a distinctly Indian/Bengali social context. The distinction between literature and film blurs in Devdas. So too does the distinction between fiction and reality. Audiences in the '20s and '30s were certainly not the only ones to connect the film's storyline to their own circumstances. Remakes starring Dilip Kumar in 1955, Shahrukh Khan in 2002, and Abhay Deol in 2009 serve to suggest that Sarat Babu's social critique retains its power over audiences nearly a century after it was written. During this lengthy lifespan, Assamese, Tamil, Telegu, and Bengali versions have ensured an all-India appeal. For every generation and in every region of the country, therefore, Devdas typifies the renouncer as hero, an outstanding figure whose uncompromising revolt against society resonates strongly with moviegoers who recognize their inability to emulate their tragic hero.

Pyaasa: The Thirst for Freedom

Pyaasa (1957) is widely regarded among the finest films ever made. The director, producer and lead actor in the film, Guru Dutt has been retrospectively labeled the Indian Orson Welles, though this label fails to do justice to his genius. Pyaasa was arguably his best film, and it did remarkably well at the box office. It is the story of a struggling poet Vijay, whose name ironically means "triumph" or "victory." Vijay thirsts for freedom in a society that finds no value in his poetry. His own brothers dump reams of his Urdu poetry into the recycle bin. Despite being a brilliant student in college, he now wanders unemployed in the streets of Bombay, futilely seeking patrons for his poems. Vijay is not just sad. He is bitter about the world and its ways. His persona appeals to those many moviegoers who thought that India's formal independence from colonial rule in 1947 has not translated into freedom for ordinary men and women. Like them, Vijay is dissatisfied by the world around him, one that venerates money and power rather than art and integrity.

Pyaasa bears more than a passing resemblance to Devdas. Indeed, Guru Dutt reached his intellectual maturity in Calcutta, where the social critique laid out in Devdas sought to express itself politically as a radical alternative to the nationalist politics led by the Congress. Moreover, two years before the release of Pyaasa, Dilip Kumar had starred in a popular remake of Devdas. Initially, Dilip Kumar was supposed to play the protagonist's part in Pyaasa too. In terms of the structure of the plot itself, of course, the resemblance is strongest. Like Devdas, Vijay too is compelled by society to give up his lady love (Meena). Vijay and Meena were lovers during their college days, but Meena chose to marry a rich owner of a publishing business (Ghosh) instead of a struggling poet. It is not so much Meena he blames for her decision, but a society in which status and money mean everything. Again, like Devdas, Vijay too is forced to live a life of penury and humiliation on the streets of Bombay, struggling to make ends meet and seeking solace in alcohol. Nonetheless, Vijay is defiant in defense of his poetry and his way of life, however much at odds they may be with his millieu. Once again, like Devdas, Vijay meets a man (Abdul Sattar) who is well-versed with the cruel ways of the city and agrees to help the struggling protagonist selflessly. Sattar is a funny man, who laughs at the world when it mocks him. Much like Devdas' Chunnilal, Sattar is someone whom Vijay can never become because he can never accept the vulgar, materialistic world for what it is. Lastly, like Devdas, Vijay befriends a prostitute (Gulabo), who falls in love first with his poetry and then with him. Gulabo's love, like Chandramukhi's, is characterized as pure of heart, quite unlike that of Meena, for whom material comforts and high status matter more.

And yet, Guru Dutt differentiates Pyaasa from Devdas in the film's latter half. Unlike Devdas, Vijay does not self-destruct in his rage against society. By a strange quirk of fate, Vijay attempts unsuccessfully to save a beggar on the rail tracks but loses his coat in the process. The dead beggar in Vijay’s coat is taken by everyone to be Vijay, who is, however, alive and recovering in hospital. Gulabo, determined to publish her dead lover's poems, approaches the publisher Ghosh, who is only too eager to make a quick buck. The poems are hugely popular, and everyone in Bombay, including Vijay's greedy brothers, seems keen to claim the "dead" poet as their own. Yet when they learn that Vijay is, in fact, alive, Ghosh and his brothers disown him as an impostor and banish him to a mental asylum. The scenes that follow raise the crescendo of action progressively. First, Vijay, finding himself among lunatics, wonders whether those outside the asylum might be more insane than those inside. Then, his friend Abdul Sattar finds him in the asylum and rescues him. Together, they visit a public function where his poetry is being commemorated, and declares himself alive. Soon after this declaration, his brothers and a rival publisher flock to his side, looking to claim him and encash his fame and popularity. Vijay is sickened by such hypocrisy and crass materialism around him, and dramatically declares that he is not the famous poet they seek. Accompanied by Gulabo, he walks off in the final scene stating his intention to renounce the world as he finds it and begin a new life far, far away from it.

Unlike Devdas, Pyaasa is not a tragedy. Nor is Vijay a tragic hero in the Devdas mould. Unlike Devdas, Vijay does not have to self-destruct in the climax as the logical conclusion of the personal and social contradictions he faces. Vijay is clear-sighted enough to avoid Devdas' mental contradictions and failings. He is aware, like Devdas, that he cannot make peace with society, but as a poet and an intellectual, he is aware of possibilities beyond the mundane world into which he has been born. As such, Pyaasa brings the renouncer-hero to the fore far more sharply than in Devdas. At the beginning of the film, we are informed that Vijay has already renounced the financial security sought by the petty bourgeoisie in favor of the vagaries of intellectual and literary life. At the end of the film, we watch awestruck as Vijay dramatically renounces the crass materialistic world of the modern postcolonial city (Bombay) and walks away with Gulabo into the unknown. Vijay is, therefore, the quintessential renouncer-hero who, unable to find peace within society, walks away from it in search of a better life.

Why is Vijay able to revolt against society and then walk away with dignity whereas Devdas must self-destruct to complete his revolt against society? I am tempted to conjecture that, in Pyaasa, Guru Dutt comes close to Albert Camus' conception of "revolt" as an essentially human impulse within us all that finds its ultimate expression in art and literature. Perhaps a poet's revolt against society encompasses within itself possibilities that are not open to ordinary mortals such as Devdas. Perhaps, too, a poet is not beleaguered by the kinds of social and personal contradictions that Devdas faced. The pyaas or "thirst" for freedom and enlightenment enables the poet/artist/intellectual to rise above social circumstances that may lead others to self-destruction or violence. Unfortunately though, Guru Dutt's own life followed Devdas' more than Vijay's. Six years after Pyaasa, he committed suicide after suffering from acute depression, following an extra-marital affair with co-star Waheeda Rehman that effectively terminated his marriage to actress-singer Geeta Dutt. In retrospect, it may be fair to say that Pyaasa represents Guru Dutt's optimism that poetry or art can offer some a sanctuary that shields them from "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" and from society at large, yet we also know that self-destructive tendencies are always at hand and we may succumb to the contradictions inherent in our selves and society. In a social-historical sense, formal freedom from colonialism may explain the cautious optimism of Guru Dutt's generation of filmmakers, but their personal and social lives convinced them that genuine freedom may be nigh unachievable. The colorful package of freedom, therefore, may be sadly a mere counterfeit.

Did the rest of Guru Dutt's generation sympathize with his damning assessment of postcolonial Indian society? Certainly, the evidence for the Sixties and Seventies seems strong. Guide (1965) remains a landmark in Indian cinema because the protagonist, following R.K. Narayan's novel, goes so far as to assume the traditional saffron robes of the ascetic renouncer in the climactic scene. Zanjeer (1973) represents another landmark in the cinematic career of the renouncer-hero since its angry young protagonist violently turns his own self-destructive tendencies against identifiable villains in society. Postcolonial frustrations in the Seventies could no longer be contained as before. There was a marked increase in cinematic violence perpetrated by the (leftist?) protagonist against politicians, businessmen, and/or criminals. The lines between good and evil were blurred as the renouncer-hero, best personified by Amitabh Bachchan, frequently resorted to violence to cleanse society of the villains who were oppressing ordinary people. By the Eighties and Nineties, however, the hero was no longer a renouncer: despite mimicking the violent methods of the renouncer-hero of the Seventies, the new hero fully intended to wallow in middle-class comforts, preferably by romancing a rich man's daughter. The radical tradition of the renouncer-hero, therefore, seemed to be dying a natural death as popular cinema began to be dictated increasingly by middle-class priorities or by the very society that Devdas and Pyaasa sought to criticize.

Gulaal: The Color of Revolt

Inured as we had become to life without the renouncer-hero for two decades or so, it became a truism that an age of "entertainment" is upon us, and therefore, meaningful cinema, both inspired by and inspiring art, became a relic of the past. Some film critics even told us unabashedly that the masses only want sex, violence, and raucous humor. These shockingly elitist remarks neglected to mention, however, that Indian cinema over the last decade has moved into mulitplexes, and the so-called masses have been shut out of the theaters. In neoliberal India, particularly post-2000, the top quarter of the population, calling themselves the "middle classes" (middle of what exactly?), is the primary consumer of Indian cinema at home and abroad. Much tasteless, nonsensical fare caters to their palates though the blame is conveniently shifted to "the masses" without the slightest shame. Yet there occasionally comes along a film that makes us sit up and think. Anurag Kashyap's Gulaal (2009) is certainly one of them. The director of a postmodern remake of Devdas, Kashyap has singlehandedly revived the career of the renouncer-hero in the new century.

Gulaal is the tragic tale of Dileep, a postgraduate student of law in Rajasthan, who struggles to make sense of society and politics around him, and ultimately, fails miserably. Dileep, along with a young female lecturer Anuja, is physically harassed and humiliated by goons at his university, and seeks help from Dukey Bana, a local strongman and Rajput separatist leader. Although he wins the battle against the bullies in his university, the naive Dileep now unwittingly enters the dark world of postcolonial politics. Meanwhile, Anuja and he become friends, though theirs is a platonic friendship. Soon, however, Dileep ends up as Dukey's candidate for the university general secretary's post, where he is pitted against the beautiful and ambitious Kiran. The novice Dileep's chances of winning are deemed slim, but bribery and ballot-rigging lead him to victory. Kiran then starts seducing Dileep, and they soon move in together. As love blossoms, Dukey uses Dileep's position to siphon off university funds to finance his party's drive for a separate Rajputana state. When Dileep finds out and confronts Dukey, he is told off. Around the same time, Kiran gets pregnant, blames Dileep for not taking precautions, and leaves him promptly. She soon replaces Dileep as general secretary as part of Dukey's machinations. Frustrated with politics and love, Dileep starts losing his sanity. He first spits venom on Anuja, which forces her to leave his side despite her best intentions. Then, he kills Dukey, who, in his dying moments, reveals that Kiran had merely used Dileep to get to him. Finally, Dileep confronts Kiran, who readily admits to using him for political gain. Distraught, Dileep nearly shoots Kiran, but decides against it in the end. He is, however, shot himself by goons loyal to Kiran's brother Karan. As the injured Dileep walks back to his house, a rousing rendition of Sahir Ludhianvi's masterly composition in Pyaasa, Yeh Duniya Agar Mil Bhi Jaaye To Kya Hai ("What does it matter even if one can master the world?") plays in the background. Dileep dies at the end of the final scene after failing to make sense of the cynical milieu into which he was thrust.

There are, of course, numerous parallels between Gulaal and the two films discussed earlier. Like Devdas and Vijay, Dileep struggles to make sense of the world, particularly its brazen pursuit of power and profit above all else. Like Devdas and Vijay, Dileep, too, is unable to find happiness in love. Neither can he find satisfaction in his platonic friendship with Anuja. Like Devdas and Guru Dutt, Dileep becomes so exceedingly disillusioned by events in his life that death seems to be the only way to renounce the harsh realities of life. Like them, too, Dileep struggles futilely to manage the contradictions in his life: his love for Kiran and his personal ambitions. More generally, we must acknowledge the director Anurag Kashyap's debt to Guru Dutt's Pyaasa, expressed in the storyline as well as in the dramatic song at the climax. Additionally, we must appreciate the fact that Kashyap has directed a popular remake of Devdas titled Dev-D (2009), whose lead actor Abhay Deol believes that the contemporary, postmodern feel of the film should not obscure its close reading of Sarat Babu's novel. As such, it is no coincidence that Gulaal bears some striking similarities to Devdas and Pyaasa.

But there are also some interesting points of departure in Gulaal. Although Dileep is drawn into postcolonial politics in ways that remind us of how Devdas and Guru Dutt were drawn into their social milieus, the postcolonial world is much darker than its predecessors. The film's title Gulaal, or the red powder sprinkled during the spring festival of Holi, suggests a bloody celebration of power. At the same time, however, Gulaal also connotes the color of revolt. But both the power-play and the revolt in Kashyap's film are more violent, more cynical, and ultimately darker than what the makers of Devdas and Pyaasa could have ever imagined. The iconization of violence throughout the film stands sharply apart from films prior to Zanjeer. The popular acceptance of violence since Zanjeer is reflected in the filmmaker's treatment of the theme. In real as well as reel life in postcolonial India, therefore, one finds the progressive deterioration of civic and political order, so much so that violence is now regarded as inseparable from both power and revolt.

There is, however, something still more disturbing in Kashyap's film in comparison with those discussed earlier. Dileep is far more deeply complicit in the structures of power than either Devdas or Vijay or Guru Dutt. He is a weak character like Devdas, but he is also ambitious and seeks power as a means to avenge his humiliation by the goons in his university. He, like Devdas, lacks the means to revolt via art or poetry, which may offer us solace amidst the vagaries of life. Yet, despite his ambition and his complicity in the power play of his times, Dileep is much more naive than either Devdas or Vijay, those weary travelers whose revolt against society stemmed from their extensive experience of its flaws and failings. Can one be both naive and complicit in power play then? Yes, thinks the filmmaker, who suggests that it may not be possible any longer in postcolonial India to avoid being shaped by "the system," as it were, or to be complicit in its machinations and blind to its flaws. The only freedom or revolt possible under such circumstances is via death, one's own and of others who run the show. Here we have a latent message of nihilism, rather similar to the one presented by suicide bombers claiming to be fighting for a better world. It is hard not to be disturbed by this discovery, mainly because it suggests that there might be a moral-political justification for violent revolt against the status quo of our times, and that without systemic change, the best option can only be death. Furthermore, Kashyap seems to be telling his audiences that they are naive yet complicit in maintaining the status quo, and that the few Dileeps among us are heroes precisely because they have the courage to violently throw off their yokes and renounce the world-as-it-is. In other words, the filmmaker is challenging his audiences to reject and renounce the world-as-it-is, which he portrays as corrupt, ignoble, and incapable of reform. Gulaal is, therefore, nothing short of a clarion call for revolt.

Conclusion: The Politics, Aesthetics, and Metaphysics of Man in Revolt

The cinematic history of the renouncer-hero in India unsurprisingly parallels the socio-political history of the country. In Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyaya's Devdas, especially its pre-independence adaptations, the protagonist grappled between the contradictory forces of tradition and modernity, each of which promised as much as threatened him. Standing between a dying world and one yet unborn, Devdas could not articulate a distinctly Indian modernity that could have helped him escape his tragic fate. Yet there was hope because, although the author, filmmaker, and the reading/viewing public may have empathized with Devdas' struggle to reconcile tradition and modernity, they knew that art, particularly cinema, offered a way to escape the tragic hero's predicament. What they thought could be articulated explicitly in films such as Pyaasa, which recognized the crude, cynical core of society but also offered art (poetry) as a way to revolt against it. Art could thus be more than merely escapism. It could be the setting for modern man to revolt against the society that so oppressed him. In 1957, Guru Dutt ostensibly felt that optimism with respect to his own art. But in seven years' time, he himself had gone the way of Devdas, disgusted by his personal life as well as his social milieu. In the same year, 1964, Nehru died too, formally ending the fledgling nation's age of innocence.

The end of the Nehruvian era inaugurated an age of revolt against society in reel and real life during the Sixties and Seventies. The optimism that had characterized the first decade after independence seemed a distant memory for filmmakers and audiences alike. The next two decades, characterized by Naxalism and culminating in Mrs. Gandhi's assumption of dictatorial powers, represents the heyday of the renouncer-hero. From Guide to Zanjeer, the biggest names in Bombay films played the renouncer-hero's role. Amitabh Bachchan's "angry young man" antics, in particular, filled his fans with the hope that some leftwing populist might bring radical reform to politics and society and thus fulfill the wishes of the demos. The hopes of these young populists were dashed on the hard rocks of real politik, at which Mrs. Gandhi and her cronies specialized. For someone like Anurag Kashyap, who came of age in the late 1970s, cynicism regarding politics and meaningful social change must have seemed almost natural. Kashyap's Gulaal indicts us all as irreparably complicit in sustaining a vile system, and challenges us to take up the gauntlet thrown by his protagonist Dileep. For those sympathetic to the filmmaker’s nihilistic call, reform is no longer an option: postcolonial history appears to be little more than a chronicle of steadily-accumulating oppression, the response to which can only be a violent destruction of both self and society.

Beyond twentieth-century Indian history, however, the renouncer-hero in Indian cinema has much to say to us. He cannot be hemmed in by the coordinates of time and space, that is, by history and geography. His appeal is timeless for he speaks to the deepest anxieties and most imponderable existential dilemmas of modern life. At this point, I am reminded of Albert Camus’ The Rebel, appropriately sub-titled “a study of man in revolt.” Camus traces the modern history of revolt from the French Revolution to the mid-20^th century, describing at each historical moment the social and psychological dimensions of those who revolted against society. More importantly, he makes a vital distinction between “rebellion” and “revolt.” Both emanate from the same metaphysical wellspring within human beings, but the former seeks to remove all imperfections from society, usually via violent schemes in search of utopian outcomes, whereas the latter gives voice to man’s capacity to creatively express dissent, articulate resistance against tyranny, and imagine possibilities that may exist beyond the realm of the ordinary, especially via art. There is good reason to believe that we, in India and elsewhere, have blurred this all-important distinction between rebellion and revolt, largely due to the disheartening trajectory of modern history. And by doing so, we are in danger of succumbing to nihilism in both art and politics.

The problem is hardly a peculiarly Indian one. It is a global problem that enshrines violence against the established order above all. It refuses to accept the compromises that political and social life demand in all times and places. It strives for a perfect society, from which all defects are obliterated, and which only millenarianism or theodicy can seemingly install. It is not difficult to see that the aesthetics of rebellion being described here are distinctly modern rather than postmodern. The millenarian option is nothing but the one favored by leftist radicals in France, Russia, and China. The option of theodicy, which was raised by that most sober and pragmatic theorist of modern politics Max Weber, is the one favored on the center-right, whether in the form of the Ayatollahs’ rule in Iran or as the rise of “Obamamania” in the United States. The roots of the problem lie not so much in this or that ideology, but in the modern progressive philosophy of history that endeavors to “correct” every social and metaphysical contradiction in human lives in due course.

I should clarify here that I do not oppose, in a blanket sense, either utopian schemes or violence as a means to an end. Utopias can be articulated and attained in practical forms, but only as long as they emerge beyond the minds of disaffected elites and take root in the popular realm. As an example of these practical utopias with a mass basis, consider the medieval bhakti movements across the Indian subcontinent, which sought a more just social order without a violent French-style revolution. Similarly, a principled defense of violence is also possible, but only as long as it is well-targeted and self-limiting. Here, I offer pre-Reformation Europe as an example of a society in which wars were commonplace yet casualties extremely low and treaties many, unlike in the modern world, where Clausewitzian “total war” has moved from theory to reality.

In sum, we may ask, in the manner of Lenin, what must be done? I am afraid I can do no more than offer some tentative solutions here. First, I think revolt in Camus’ sense of expressing oneself against the status quo through art is a worthy endeavor. From Sarat Babu to Anurag Kashyap, one finds recognition of this thesis in the form of the renouncer-hero of Indian cinema. Second, the nihilistic glorification of violence in art and society ought to be restrained. Sadly, this is a task easier said than done since the roots of nihilism are more metaphysical than socio-historical and metaphysical consensus is a seemingly impossible goal. But here again, I think the aesthetics of popular cinema offers the best way to converse with and challenge the metaphysics underlying nihilism. Third, artistic and intellectual endeavors ought to step beyond the academic groves, and help bridge the widening gulf between elite and popular classes in modern society. Again, this is a task easier said than done, but once more, cinema offers possibilities than neither fine art nor literature can. Fourth, there is an urgent need to seek a moderate politics, one that rejects the status quo and seeks social change without making unreasonable demands upon one’s fellow citizens. Here, I think one must venture beyond cinema for a way out of the current rut in which we find ourselves. The solution will come, if at all, from ordinary citizens getting together to mobilize for particular ends, to employ the instruments of democracy (mass media, civil disobedience, social audits, etc) to strengthen popular control over governmental agencies, and to remain eternally vigilant in defense of freedoms fought for and won. For, no matter how much we may sympathize with the predicament and fate of the renouncer-hero, we cannot be him since we must affirm life and liberty within the imperfect realm of society itself. In the final analysis, Devdas, Vijay and Dileep should be seen as elements of a cautionary tale that has retained its popular appeal across generations, one whose lessons we would do well to heed today…