On

FILMS

I'm grateful for Modernism, Stanley Kubrick, Scorsese, the Coens, P.T. Anderson, Darren Aronofsy, Charlie Kaufman, but over the revolutions, I'm glad we have Nolan, Fincher and Jason Reitman.


CULTURE

From Mangalore to Mumbai, Indians have had to hear the
propagandist slogans crying for Indian culture, against the dissolute
Western influences that have defiled 'culture' .‘Protecting Indian
culture’, ‘erosion of our culture’, ‘our cultural heritage’, are
phrases we hear much bandied about. Bangalore shuttered down its malls, pubs, shops, movie houses and recently, the last of the hotels, with an 11pm deadline- in the name of safe-guarding our precious culture- to the effect that any of the thousands of people who work at night, in this Metropolitan city, have no place to go for a bite. In Mumbai, people were threatened away from theaters because some extremists did not want a movie screened.

So, what is this fearsome entity, ‘Indian culture’? Before we get to
Indian culture, let’s try to define culture. Culture is defined by the
dictionary as the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns,
arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and
thought. Simply put, culture is how we live and what we do in the
course of this living. It is not a static entity. It is not even a
glorifiable entity, like it would seem from the throwing around of the
word by the culture-conscious. Like the poet said, it is simply, an
accumulation of things left behind. When the Mughals came to India,
they left an indelible mark on the traditions and practices in the
parts of the country that they ruled. Thus Indian culture before the
Mughals, is different from the Indian culture after the Mughals.
Similarly, the British, the Portuguese, Christian missionaries, all
left their mark. On a simpler scale, changing patterns of monsoons,
scientific methods of farming, the printing press, newer instruments,
electricity, and a million other little factors changed our culture,
because they changed our practices and the way we live. Culture is
ever-changing, like a river that drops stuff and picks up new stuff on
its way to the sea.

So, what is Indian culture? The question, in itself, is wrong. One
would have to ask, ‘what was the dominant culture of x village at a point of time, y. It would be difficult to quantify the culture of a huge geographic area, like a state or a country. Practices could differ even within families. Thus it would be grossly wrong to say, 'this is the culture of this state, and we are safe-guarding it’. Indian culture is not wearing dhotis or not dancing. They may have been one of a million factors of the culture of a small geographic area at a particular time. The culture of a country or even a state is too vast an entity to try to define or control. Culture is not static. It is ever-changing and efforts to harness it at any point are hugely misguided and can only be futile.

I'm not saying it's just us Indians struggling under heavy delusions,
either. The great shadow on the cultured white race, was of course, the holocaust. The dead millions from Sierra Leone to Bukavu were not global disasters because cultured white folk were not involved. Even humoring the dominant discourse, the Milgram experiment proves for me that the holocaust was not the last display of distopia .