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The Village and

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 T h e aourney to the Y a s t as a
Journey into the Self
The Remembered Village and
the Poisoned City

'It is not binding o n us to undertake the journey'

Manohar W a k o d e

T
he nineteenth century in Europe was an age ofarrogance.
The values ofthe Enlightenment had seeped into popular
consciousness and qualities earlier associated with the
divine had come to be associated with secular human intervention
in nature, culture and society-thanks to a dramatic g o w t h in the
capacity to intervene. Complete knowledge, omnipresence and
total power now seemed within human grasp. The Victorian social
style, with its distinctive touch of interpersonal withdrawal and
phlegmatic, if slightly diffident, Puritanism was built on
understatement and innuendo. It became a good cover for the
arrogance, though it never fully hid it.'
With arrogance came ornate psychological defences that jus-
tified new forms of dominance; these forms began to look like

' I am, of course, following Carl Jung, generalizing the idea of the Victorian
era from a historical phase in Britain to a cultural-psychological state in Europe.
C.G. Jung, 'Sigmund Freud in His Historical Setting', in Frank Cioffi (ed.),
Freud: Modern judgement (London: Macrnillan, 1973), pp. 49-56; see esp.
pp. 49-50.
 An Ambcgtlowjoz~m~y
to the Clj/ Thejoumg/ to the P a ~a~
t a/otlmg/ h t o the S e p 3
natural by-products of Europe's new self-confidence. Thus, Eur- victory over time and space. When you conquered and dominated
opean imperialism, already the main political-economic means of distant lands and shaped their futures, you transcended your own
intervention in the world, became less obsessed with outright temporal and spatial limits. You not only crossed borders outside,
plunder and the need to Christianize the savage world; it began to you crossed them ~ i t h i nStrange
.~ spaces, in the form of distant
develop subtler, more secular, social-evolutionary theories to bols- lands, were converted into familiar time (that is, into earlier hist-
ter its claim to a civilizing mission. The occupation of distant lands orical phases of Europe); and other people's unruly visions of the
and dominance over strangers now imposed more onerous respon- future were tamed to conform to Europe's own domesticated
sibilities on the conquerors. They had to see themselves as part of visions. The sun that faithfully never set over the British Empire
an inevitable, historical movement towards a future defined by also marked the triumph of human will over the limitations
European progressive thinkers. These thinkers were eager to pre- imposed by the predictability of everyday life in Britain itself. This
side over the fate of millions in the non-western world by alter- was another form of victory over elements of Europe's discarded
ing diverse ideas of a desirable society. T o survive, these ideas had selves, another form of self-construction and, above all, another
to now fit standardized European visions of a good society, whe- form of death-denial that supplanted the existing non-secular
ther conformist or dissenting2 modes of ensuring symbolic immorality.
History, as a discipline and form of consciousness, came handy Such radical cultural changes required new symbols around
in this exercise. It flattened the pasts of all societies, so that they which the new myths of the modern West could accumulate. T h e
began to look like so many edited versions of European paganism nineteenth century therefore saw the emergence and institutional
and/or feudalism. The triumph of the idea of history in the south- consolidation of a number of major symbols of conquest over
ern world-over other forms of construction or invocation of the space and time. Two of these quickly captured the popular imagin-
past-was ultimately a European triumph. This conquest was not ation: the museum and the railways. In the museum one journeyed
merely over the selves of other societies, but often over Europe's through time to view the unfolding phases of history and culture,
own earlier selves that had stealthily survived into the present, usually through the eyes of one's society, nation or state. In the
either in Europe or in analogous or parallel forms within other railway train one experienced a journey that connected the near
cultures. Europe truly became Europe as we know it today only and the distant, the known and the safely transient unknown, the
after it foregrounded the experiences of colonialism and a crypto- neighbour and the stranger. The train redefined the concepts of
Hegelian idea of history within its self-definition. It also then en- a border and a frontier; it captured long-term diachronic changes
sured that these became parts of the self-definitions of all defeated in a series of snapshot-like changes in landscape and transient hu-
civilizations. man encounters. Even the European fine arts began to show the
These changes led to others. Within the colonial worldview, the influence of this new perspective on n a t ~ r e . ~
victory of history and the theory of progress signalled human
' Howard Stein (ed.), L)evelopmental Time, CulturalSpace: Studies in Psycho-
For a recent analysis from a different point of view, see David Newsome, geography (Norman: University of Oklahama, 1987), p. 193.
The Kctorian World I-'icture: I'erceptions and Introspections in an Age of Change Christopher Pinney notes that in the practice and theory of Western tra-
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). vel, 'as the world entered the modern period, travel became increasingly
4 to the Cig
An Amb&-uuu~journey Thejournq to the Pa~ta~ajournq iizto the S e y 5
At first sight, the museum symbolized the conquest of time and acquire an exalted, sacred status; exploitation and violence, for ins-
the railway that of space. However, both spilt over their represent- tance, begin to be institutionalized in the name of history rather
ational boundaries. The museum grew to symbolize not merely than faith.
mastery over past times and past cultures at home, but also over Once introduced on a large scale, the railways did not merely
the diverse pasts and cultures of distant lands. It also became the symbolize the conquest of space, as we tend to think. Symbolical-
record of a journey. It rearranged all cultures in a hierarchical, evo- ly, that conquest had been achieved much earlier, and perhaps
lutionary order. As you walked through a museum, you paradoxi- better, by the great circumnavigators of the globe. The British and
cally walked towards your own culture; only Others had to walk French empires had already been established and they consolidated
away from theirs. T h e train came to symbolize not merely geogra- that symbolic achievement before the railways came to criss-cross
phical mobility, but integration and progress, reaching out from the world. The railways altered the way the Victorians thought.
the centre to the borders of a society. Both allowed one to travel When children in the last century spoke of the Trans-Siberian
through vast expanses of time and space, but always left open the Railway, the Orient Express, the Frontier Mail or the Great Indian
option of a quick, safe return. Peninsular Railway, they did not think so much of destinations as
Between them, the train and the museum defined an era. They of the experience of travel. Even the American wagon trains repre-
were not the greatest technical innovations of their times, but they sented a life style more than territoriality. They invoked the im-
summed up the psychological profile and the core concerns of the agery of the railway compartment as a moving sanctuary. From
age. Railways and museums captured, for popular imagination in within the confines of what Wolfgang Sachs calls a 'republic on
the Victorian age, something of the dominant spirit of global wheels', the carriers of civilization were offered a stylized view of
awareness. the shifting landscape, including the dangerous, exotic natives,
Both railways and museums indexed the domestication of time. 'half-savage half-child', and strange flora and fauna passing safely
They were the technological counterparts of epistemic changes in by at a distance. They marked the transition from the traveller as
the means of acquiring and legitimating social knowledge in the a tired, thirsty, and often-unexpected guest, pilgrim or explorer to
Victorian world. The prototypical discipline of knowledge in this the traveller as a spectator and a consumer. T h e traveller now
era was history (the way that in this century it has been economics travelled not because he felt obliged to open up an unknown world
and may, in the coming century, be informatics). History tames to civilization and progress, but because he had the time and the
time in a manner that myths, legends and epics do not. In a massi- money to vicariously participate in that kind of e f f ~ r t . ~
fied society, it gives certitudes about the past, and, thus, a secular
sense of continuity previously ensured only by faith. Once the Railways opened up, therefore-to borrow Wolfgang Sachs' expression-
the possibiliry of consuming landscapes. In such consumption, 'one need not
historical vision entrenches itself as dominant. 'historical truths'
drink the landscape [or the exotic cultures] in great draughts, but here and there
as well with the little sips of an epicure abiding in leisure.' Der Motor-Tourist,
systematized and rule-bound.' Christopher Pinney, 'Future Travel: Anthropo- 1929 (9), p. 8; cited in Wolfgang Sachs, For the Love ofthe Automobile: Looking
logy and Cultural Distance in an Age of Virtual Reality; or, A Past Seen From Back into the History of Our Desires (Berkeley: University of California, 19921,
a Possible Future.' Visual Anthropology Review, Spring 1992, 8(1), pp. 38-55. p. 153.
6 A n Ambiguous/ourng/ to the Clj, Th~/oumg/to the Past as a/ourng/ thto thp SeCf 7
The museum was important because, having travelled to distant new self-confidence of Victorian science, for those itching to em-
lands and encountered the strange and the exotic, you felt duty- bark on spatial and temporal journeys pioneered by seers, mystics
bound to bring back artefacts that made it ~ossibleto transfer and and artists on the one hand and by circumnavigators of the world
bequeath memories of the journey to impersonal institutions and on the other?The answer lies in the intellectual style of two of the
unknown fellow citizens. These memories had to be shared not so greatest critical minds of Victorian times. Freud's time-travel was
much with one's grandchildren as with those whom one's nation- a journey to the past that allowed one to re-enter the present with
state defined as compatriots. Museums sorted out these memories. the trophy of a conquered savage or primitive self. Marx's psycho-
They made the strange esoteric, but not confounding. They made geography was a journey to the savage world that allowed one to
even the past of strangers accessible, transparent and packaged. return with the trophy of conquered futures that promised to
That past could be safely brought back to civilization for archiving remain forever obedient to European social-evolutionist utopias.
and decent cataloguing. Ahistorical primitives could now make If Freud's double was the colonial anthropologist, Marx's was the
sense to civilization. Their oddities and incomprehensibilities, colonial police. By stretching one's imagination, crime fiction can
even their peculiar non-linear concepts of their own past, were be seen as the popular culture that epitomizes Freud's moral vision
ironed out by the scientific stare of the curator. Indeed our (where the individual, either as a gifted criminal or as master
geographical journey was thus made more memorable as part of sleuth, reigns supreme, and where the removal or correction of
a larger cultural-historical odyssey. the faulty individual becomes the route to the reinstatement of
There is another way of summing up the cultural-psychological a healthy society or community). Likewise, the popular idea of
impact of the metaphors of museums and trains. The former science fiction seems to sum up the Marxist vision of a predeter-
shaped the public imagination of history. History became for the mined future waiting to be scientifically identified and actualized.
moderns an authoritative museum, passing final judgements, and In that future, the ultimate hero is not just any human protagonist
a substitute for medieval cathedrals. The psychological and mythic but the impersonal forces of technology and history, both liberated
underside of history now became a certain sense of order and a from 'misuse' by the ungodly.
theme of return. The train, on the other hand, shaped the It is with these vicissitudes of the metaphor of iourney that I
Promethean imagery of a hard-earned victory of technology over shall be concerned here. I shall treat the vicissitudes not as an
the overwhelming odds posed by nature and human nature. experience that is uniquely Indian, even when they have their
moorings in tradition, but as an artefact of Europe's age of arrog-
ance in the tropics and as a register of'the changing mythography
of South Asian creativity during the last hundred years. It will be
'W3 my argument that, during the period, certain core concerns and
If space and time were both seemingly mastered by the end of the anxieties of Indian civilization have come to be reflected in the
nineteenth century-or, if you like, the technology required for journey from the village to the city, and from the city to the village.
such mastery was felt to have been worked out-what now was left Travel through space and time, the known and the unknown and,
for the adventurous? What now remained for those fired by the ultimately, the self and the not-self, get subsumed under these two
8 An A m b ~ p o u s ] o u m qto the Ctj, T h e j o u m q to the P a t ar a j o u m q tizto the S e y 9
humble forms of journey. As we shall see below, even the great such journeys are probably more difficult in recent centuries.
Partition violence in north India, which killed millions during The Jit Singh Uberoi claims that, even in pre-
1946-8, has become intertwined with the idea of the journey colonial times, there already was a qualitative difference between
between the village and the city. the ideas of journey in Guru Nanak and Guru Gobind Singh. A
journey to the latter meant saddling horses and packing food; to
the former, a journey was a matter of closing one's eyes. True, even
Guru Gobind Singh's terrestrial journey can be remembered in
many ways, but the subjective and the objective in such retellings
The journey as a trope for growth, learning, the unfolding of per- have already become less fluid. They flow into each other less
sonal or collective experience, and for life itself, has been a favourite easily.
of philosophers, scholars and mystics in South Asia for centuries. In both incarnations, the use of the metaphor of journey to
There have even been celebrated journeys into madness and out theorize about growth, life, or radical long-cycle changes entails
of it, journeys in self-exploration and self-realization, even journeys some cognitive manoeuvres. First, the remembrance of life as a
into another world-into heaven, hell and the nether world.6 journey is heavily dependent on the possible or available meanings
Only, in South Asia, heaven and hell, sanity and insanity, the self of life. At the end of the life, the journey through life might look
and the other, more often than not spill into each other. Journeys like a long, futile chase or a self-fulfilling struggle to actualize
to the strange or the unknown, therefore, usually end up as private specific values. Either way, life, thus recaptured, can be an
voyages to other, less accessible parts of the self. Arjuna in the epic intervention in the present. Likewise, a journey through madness
Mahabharata visits the heavens, Bhima enters the nether world, may mean one thing to a mystic or an artist and another to a
Nachiketa in the Kathopanishad visits hell, and all of them profit teenage student who shows dissociative reactions to the problems
from their experiences. Heavens and hells, gods and demons, ani- of living. A journey in South Asia need not have a history-, in the
mals and trees are not outside the human social world or alien in- sense in which we look at history, but it can constitute part of
trusions into that world. You can go to heaven and come back, psychoanalyst's case history, which grants human subjectivity a
host or fight a god or demon with impunity, speak to a tree or special status. Everything said, while for Victorian England a
birds in the course of a single day, and resume your normal social journey might have been primarily the frame through which
life the next morning.' others could be seen,8 for South Asians it has been mainly the
frame through which the self can be confronted.
'With the decline of the epic in the contemporary Wesc. the metaphor has
been ~ i c k e dup and reworked by ~ o p u l a culture.
r The most memorable uses of
the idea of journey have been made not by the mystics or philosophers in the State of Health of the Gods and Goddesses in South Asia', Lecture at the
West, but by the likes of Charles C h a ~ l i nthe
, Hollywood Westerns, and futur- samkriti shivira organized by Ninasam, Heggodu. Karnataka, 8-15 October
istic movies like the Star Wars series. 1995; and published as 'Facing Extermination', in Manushi, arch-April
'For a feel of the texture of divinity within which such oscillations between 1997 (991, pp. 5-19.
the sacred and the profane take place, see Ashis Nandy, 'A Report on the Present Pinney, 'Future Travel', p. 47.
10 q Ctp
An A m b & u o w j o u ~ ~to~ the
Second, all journeys in the imagination can be summarized or self.9 Some of the epic's climactic moments are informed by the
collapsed into moments of imagination. Ernest Becker has cal- of the journey and it ends with one, the mdhdprdsthdn,
culated the number of chickens, sheep and cows an average human becomes the final moral comment on the main protagonists,
being consumes in an average lifetime. Given that he is talking of their lives and deeds. It is not easy to use the metaphor in India
living beings, the figures look formidable, even forbidding, more without drifting into the frame ofsome version of the Mahabharata.
so because he is not preaching vegetarianism, but trying to capture I shall be concerned here with one particular, apparently
the principle of a journey by flattening it into a moment of time. territorial, journey-the one that uses the opposition between the
If the diachronic can be compressed into the synchronic in the village and the city, especially the changing myth of the city, as its
imagination, the reverse should also be possible. Many momentary nodal point. In the twentieth century Indians-for that matter, all
experiences can be re-imagined as parts of a longer journey. As we South Asians-have been obsessed with the mythic journey between
shall see later, the violence during the creation of India and Pakis- the village and the city and have used it to organize important
tan in 1946-8 has now become, in the South Asian imagination, aspects of their public consciousness. T h e journey is mainly from
part of a journey towards a modern nation-state. The idea of such the village to the city, though it sometimes ends with a tragic
a journey can become an effort to explain away instances of enor- attempt to return from the city to the village. South Asians have
mous, unnecessary human suffering as necessary sacrifices for a known this journey for centuries. Pilgrimages were always from
larger cause. the mundane village to the city of God and then back to the vil-
lage. People knew such journeys were hazardous, but they undertook
them all the same. The ones who completed the pilgrimage and
9 returned home had a special status in the community. But so
The journey as a pregnant metaphor is most conspicuous in South had those who fell on the way. A pilgrimage was a play with the
Asia in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, two epics organized boundaries of the self. Even the inability to complete the journey
around the idea of exile. T h e exiles in these epics are also great had heroic dimensions.
voyages. These voyages redefine both the life that has gone on This journey to the city acquired a different meaning once, in
before and the life that might be lived after the journey has been the early nineteenth century, a new kind of city emerged in the
completed. Travel, the Victorians used to say, broadened the region. The new city, usually a presidency town, was a centre of
mind, but it can also be a play with the past and the future of the the colonial political economy; it reduced the importance of cities
self. like Varanasi or Ajmer, which were mainly places of pilgrimage,
O f the two epics, the Ramayana is more loved, but the Maha- and of cities like Cochin or Calicut, which were centres of trade
bharata is the one that underpins the Indian consciousness. It and offered their own versions of cosmopolitanism. The new city
serves as a mythography of the Indian self and, at the same time, 9 ~least
t one psychoanalyst has explored the possibility of using the Maha-
as a record of the disowned selves within the culture-the not- bharata as a theoretical frame for psychoanalytic therapy. Bijoyketu Bose,
selves and anti-selves that contribute to the final definition of the Achche Bharate (Calcutta: Bijoyketu Bose, 1989).
12 An Ambzgt/our/ournq/ to the Crj, The/ounq to the Part as a/ournq, Iizta the Sef 13

enlarged the scope for a radical and legitimate rejection of the the village into a summation of the feared, untamed fragments of
village as that part of one's selfwhich had out-lived its utility. The one's self, scattered carelessly across a strange landscape.
journey to the city now meant an acceptance of the new city of the This re-imagined village cannot take care of itself; it is the sub-
mind, which was to be founded on the ruins of an earlier self. altern that cannot speak. All initiatives in the village, including
remedies for social discrimination and institutionalized violence,
must originate in the city. They can only be executed in the village.
This presumption informs not merely the standard models of
What made the colonial metropolis the pivotal fantasy and development, but even the revolutionary rhetoric concocted for
counterpoint to the village? The answer lies not in the 'truth' of the sake of the oppressed-by superbly read, well-motivated,
the city-its demography, social institutions, civic amenities and urbane radicals, selflessly trying to occupy the moral high ground
job opportunities-but in its 'virtual reality' and mythic status. on behalf of the larger forces of history. The colonial city is now
The structural explanations floating around the academic world us, the non-village. It is now the new self, identified with history,
for decades are only the necessary but insufficient clues to the progress, becoming.
political psychology of the city. Obviously, the anonymity and As the flip side of the same story, the village of the imagination
atomization in a city are doubly seductive in a society scarred by has become a serene, pastoral paradise. It has become the depository
socio-economic schisms and cultural hierarchies. A Dalit, landless, of traditional wisdom and spirituality, and of the harmony of
agricultural worker or a rural artisan seeking escape from the daily nature, intact community life and environmental sagacity-perhaps
grind and violence of a caste society has reasons to value the even a statement of Gandhian austerity, limits to want, and anti-
impersonal melting pot of a metropolitan city. He is ever willing consumerism. The village, too, is no longer a village in itself; it is
to d e k the pastoralist's or the environmentalist's negative vision a counterpoint to the city. India lives in its villages-social reformers
of the city. Because to lose oneself in the city is to widen one's and political activists love to say, usually as a glib, ideological ploy.
freedom in a way not possible by migrating to another village, That statement has acquired a deeper meaning today. The village
however distant from home. The colonial city made a place for symbolizes control over self; the city reeks of self-indulgence and
itself in the Indian's fantasy life by promising that freedom in place the absence of self-restraint. Beyond the temptations and glitter of
of caste-specific vocations, ascribed status, and the crosscutting the city lies the utopia of an idyllic, integrated, defragmented self,
obligations of the jajmani system. not tyrannized by the demands of atomized individualism. It is the
Less accessible to public awareness is the way many Indians have utopia of the village as a self, controlling the self-that-is-the-city.
come to own up the colonial city as the self, the village as the other. The fear of the absence of self-restraint is actually the suspicion
The addictive charm of cities like Calcutta and Bombay lies in this that one's control over one's self might have already partly collapsed.
play of the self. The village-as-the-other allows itself to be studied, The two co-ordinates-the infantilized village and the village
measured, corrected, engineered. For even at its best, the village as a geriatric responsibility-are not orthogonal, either in everyday
is uncivil by virtue of being closer to nature and the natural. At its life or in social theory. The former is the axis of the permissible
worst, the village is a symbol of India's fearsome diversity and un- way of looking at the world. The latter is the permissible way of
knowability. Colonial ethnography in Asia and Africa has turned dissenting, a luxury that those who can retreat from it into the
 m the SPY
TheJoumey to the Pn~ta, nJou~neyi 15
world of a sweltering urban hothouse can sometimes af- a cover for the anguish of the urban, middle-class, upper-caste
ford. youth facing dispossession, meaninglessness and inner exile. Even
this image of the village encroaches upon larger areas of pub- the Dalits have increasingly brought to the city what is primarily
lic awareness, it also begins to control the language of public life. a movement to restore justice and equity in the village.10 Such
Even those who do not live with such polarized images of the contradictions are the very stuff of myths and they have helped
village and the city begin to use them as co-ordinates of their poli- make the myth of the journey to and from the city an organizing
tical idiom. Many public figures know that without invoking the principle of the contemporary culture of Indian politics.
first image of the infantilized village, waiting to pass its develop-
mental milestones, they cannot hope to make sense even in their
rural constituencies, where three-fourth of all Indians still live. But
they also know that to participate now in national politics and pass
the tacit censorship of the modern media, they have to make sense The obverse of the entry of the city as the locus of Indian con-
to the remaining one-fourth too. Hence, sometimes the strange sciousness is an erosion of the ability to imagine the village. By this
spectacle of rural politicians in a predominantly rural society I mean creative imagining-of the kind that invokes the fantasy
speaking of rural India as if they were from the cities. There is no of the 'archetypal', 'remembered' but nevertheless living Indian
escape from travelling to the village from the city any more. Argu- village-in those staying in villages and in others who have little
ably, this is the most important cultural change that has taken or no connection with rural India. The erosion is not total; there
place in the region in recent decades. are individuals whose works disprove the thesis of a decline. But,
as a collectivity, creative Indians now have poorer access to the
village of the imagination and the bonding that it once forged
between individual creativity and its wider reception. The rest of
T3 this section spells out this proposition.
Hence also the great contradictions associated with the imagina- ' O Daya Pawar puts it movingly from the point of view of the Dalit ~ o u r h
tion of the city in South Asia. Gandhi's savage critique of the rail- when he speaks of Bombay in his autobiography: 'They say rhat Krishna tore
ways as an agent of colonialism and his simultaneous use of railway Jarasandha in cwo pieces and threw them in opposite directions. In the same way
journeys as a form ofcreative politics is only one such contradiction in this city we are torn in cwo opposite directions. As I seek a place to merely
rest my heart at the end of a hard day, all I have to come back to is a wretched
that centres around the idea of the journey. Likewise, the Naxalites, hell rhat this city can offer.' Q u o t e d in Vidyut Bhagwar, 'Bombay in Dalit Lite-
as committed Maoists, began with a theory ofsurrounding and de- rature', Sujata Patel and Alice Thorner (eds), Bornbay: h f o ~ a iofCz~lture
r (Rom-
feating the city as the symbol of impersonal, institutionalized ex- bay: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 113-25; see p. 114. Bhagwar goes o n
ploitation and immorality, but quickly converted their movement to add, 'For the Dalit in the city, the new situation takes a tragic form. His flight
from the culture of feudalism and face-to-face repression in the village offers him
into a journey of self-discovery from the city to the village. The
both the reality as well as the illusion of becoming a member of a free universe.
mix of idealism, innocence and sadomasochism in the movement But he soon realises rhat once again he remains an unnoticed, expendable stone
made the rediscovery of the village and the global commons only at the base of the edifice of modernity. . . .', p. 11 5.
16 A n Amb&vmur /oumg/ to the C2y Thefoumg/ to thePart r t ~ajourmy
. &to tht Sty 17
I begin with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1861-19481, caste, sect and language. That imagination was waiting to be re-
who is for many the ultimate exponent of the cultural principles claimed. When Gandhi reclaimed the village within him, he could
enshrined in the Indian village. Gandhi took India's freedom easily slip into the role of a larger-than-life Indian village head-
movement to thevillage. H e thought of the village as the basic unit man. He had been only apparently an outsider."
of Indian civilization; and he envisioned the future of India
around that of the village. Today, all major criticisms ofvillage life
as an anachronism, and the village as a change-resisting depot of
popular superstitions, have as their locus a fear of Gandhi's vision If Gandhi's village is Indian public life's first village, Satyajit Ray's
of the future of India. It is the fear of a future that might be shaped village is the cinema's first Indian village. Ray's debut film, Pather
in an open society by those whose minds we can no longer read. Panchali, many claim, is the greatest film ever made on village
Yet few know that the first time Gandhi came into direct, India. More than one critic has claimed that, for the world of ci-
real-life contact with villages was when he reworked his political nema today, the Indian village is Ray's village.
framework in his middle years. He was born in an urban family Surprisingly, Ray's first genuine encounter with a village took
at Porbandar, a western Indian city, and was the son of a dewan place when he started shooting Pather Panchali: 'Until then I had
or chief minister of a small princely state. He had his education no direct experience ofwhat one meant when using the expression
in a city, at the ultra-tlite Rajkumar College of Rajkot, and quali- village life . . . we slowly developed an idea of the life described in
fied for the Bar at London. He then worked in South Africa, where the novel . . . Consequently, I had to depend on the descriptions
also he lived in cities, mainly at Durban. O n his return to India in the original novel. The book, however, was an encyclopaedia of
he began to operate from the cities. It was only on the advice of village life. However, I also knew that I could not depend only on
his proclaimed guru Gopalkrishna Gokhale, the well-known public it; that there were many things that I would have to discover my-
figure and freedom fighter, that Gandhi began to seriously explore self.'12
rural India. That was in his late forties. The impact of the experi- Ray was born in a distinguished family settled in Calcutta for
ence on him was deep, as though philosophically he had been pre- at least three generations. The family did have an estate in East
paring himself for it for years. After a while, it began to look as if Bengal (now Bangladesh) but, by the time he grew up, they had
he came from a village, as though he had lived in and fought for no access to that land. One gets a flavour ofhis family environment
villages all his life. from some of its contributions to Bengal's social and cultural life:
How did a finished product of the city begin to speak and even one of Ray's uncles introduced cricket in Bengal, another introduced
look like a villager?Was there latent in Gandhi a retrievable imagi- detective fiction in Bengali literature by translating the Sherlock
nation of the village which he could revive when he physically en-
''This retrievable imagination of the village is not the same as the timeless,
countered the village? The answer may well be that the village was k l l y autonomous, idyllic village that some social scientists constructed, follow-
never dead within him. Its survival within him was ensured ing European travellers, colonial administrators and missionaries. See Ronald
through the rituals, folklore, epics, legends and myths to which he Inden, Imagining India (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
l 2 Satyajit Ray, Apur Panchali (Calcutta: Ananda, 19951, pp. 68-9.
was exposed through the traditions of his family, peer-group,
18 A n Amb~gtlousjotlrnqto the Cip The/otlmq to the P't a,ajuurnq into the S+ 19
Holmes stories. Ray's father, Sukumar Ray, arguably Bengal's Where did Satyajit Ray, then, get his village? Why did his im-
most famous children's writer, ran a printing press and ~ublished agination of the village captivate his contemporaries, given his
a well-known magazine for children. It was a family known for its shallow acquaintance with it? Did the details of village life in the
urbane cosmopolitanism and modern accomplishments. Naturally original novel ensure the authenticity of Panther Panchali, as Ray
Ray was, and saw himself as, urban. He also had his early education claimed? O r was it the poor exposure to village life of his audience?
in a quasi-Edwardian, Bite public school, from within the walls of Given that Pather Panchali moved even those who knew village
which the Indian village must have looked very distant indeed. life first-hand, in this case, too, one is pushed to surmise that the
The closest he came to a personal encounter with a village was imagination of the village was not dead-either in Ray or in his
when he sometimes visited villages during his student days at audience. It was there within him and in his immediate environs
Visva-Bharati in Shantiniketan. Ray's relationship with the lifesryle and, once he dipped into it, he could dredge up its formidable
of ordinary Bengalis can be gauged from his life-long practice of riches.
eating Bengali food with fork and knife, even the staple of rice
and fish curry. In his early life, despite being partly educated in
Shantiniketan, Ray had not heard much Indian music except
Rabindra~an~eet. He was brought up primarily on a diet of The village of the mind shapes the city of the mind, too. The
western classical music. Though he had studied Bengali as part of novelist R.K. Narayan locates most of his stories in a small, im-
his course work, he had no self-confidence in handling the language. aginary town called Malgudi. By now, all English-speaking Indians
Upon graduation, when he took up a job in an advertisement and large parts of the Anglophone world know the town and its
agency, the firm was naturally British. human-scale adventures and rhythm of life. By now, Malgudi is
It was then that publisher Dilip Gupta of Signet Press invited English literature's first Indian small town. It is such a living real-
Ray to illustrate an abridged, children's version of Bibhutibhushan ity that one is sometimes surprised that maps do not show it; it is
Bandopadhyay's famous Bengali novel, Pather Panchali. The writer more real than many real-life Indian towns. Like Sherlock Holmes's
Sunil Gangopadhyay recounts how Gupta, shocked by the unsure Baker Street home in London, Malgudi deserves at least a gazet-
Bengali of Sukumar Ray's son, gifted him Tarashankar Bandopa- teer and a street directory.
dhyay's novel, Kavi.13 Whether Ray read Kavi or not, his work for The Malgudi stories supply clues to the imagery of the village
the illustrated version of Pather Panchali, published under the title that empowers the creativity of Gandhi and Ray. For, in these sto-
Aam Antir Bhepu, changed his life. The book sparked his interest ries about a town, the village is a constant shadowy intruder. The
in Bengali literature and alerted him to the cinematic possibilities village shapes the author's narrative of the town. Things happening
of Panther Panchali. Gangopadhyay adds that, if one compares the at Malgudi cannot happen and characters at Malgudi cannot be
film script with the original novel, one finds that Ray's Pather what they are unless one imagines the surrounding villages teles-
Panchali is actually the children's version of the novel. mped into the town; many life stories in the town, in turn, branch
l 3 Sunil Gangopadhyay, 'Priya Lekhak Satyajit Ray', in Shyamalkanti Das
out into these villages. These looming, omnipresent villages and
(ed.), Lekhak Satyajir Ray (Calcurra: Shivrani, 19931, pp. 17-20. the loveable absurdities their encroachment produces-defying a
20 An Amb&ourjauraey to the City
sophisticated, urbane author who lives in a city and has, therefore, ~fGandhi's village is the first Indian village of politics and Ray's
chosen to write about urban life-give the Malgudi stories that that of the cinema, M.N. Srinivas' is the first Indian village of the
lively, ambivalent link with their author and their wit and irony. social sciences. His famous texts have shaped the sociological
The imagination of the village even links one to the city different- imagination of the village for at least two generations of social
ly. For a city can also be mirrored in its antonym." scientists. In what U.R. Anantha Murthy calls Srinivas' greatest
Perhaps the cultural logic of an Indian city demands the pres- work, The Remembered Ellage, the author for once archly reveals
ence of the village. Not merely sleepy Malgudi, but some of the the nature of his own emotional bonds with the village. Anantha
more anguished metropolitan slums in literature, too, are infect- Murthy's choice will nor make sense to many academics, perhaps
ed or infiltrated by the village. As a result, the slum is left forever not even to Srinivas. For The Remembered Village, by the canons
trying to re-invoke a remembered village under different guises. of the social sciences, is marred by tragic, empirical imperfections.
Sometimes this happens through the selective settlement of people Srinivas' data were burnt by mistake by an over-enthusiastic pack
(so that the slum becomes a ghetto ofmigrants from one particular ofradicals at a California think tank. Most social scientists consider
caste, region, or language group) or through the way the slum the book scarred by that tragedy.
mobilizes collective passions to configure its community life in an Anantha Murthy however is a writer, more at peace with
atomizing, steam-rolling metropolis (as in a primordial riot). Even human subjectivity. He cannot but admit the power ofthe imagery
Bombay commercial cinema and TV serials, so dependent upon The Remembered Village invokes. Put heartlessly, to him Srinivas
the appeal of deliberately unrealistic, glamorized slums, invoke might have even been fortunate that his data got burnt and left
unashamedly the village c ~ m m u n i t y .The
' ~ imagery of the slum him with only his memories. Surprisingly, some ethnographers
in a serial like Saeed Mirza's Nukkadis a key to its romance. What seem to agree with Anantha Murthy.
looks like a slum turns out to be, on closer scrutiny, a village that What is important is . . . t h a t most. . . think rhat Srinivas has succeed-
has survived the seductive glitter of the city. As an escape from the ed in evoking the totality of village life in his account of it, that he has
oppressive village, the slum captures, within the heartlessness of been able to vividly capture the human element and convey the 'feel' of
the city, the reinvented 'compassionate' village.16 Rarnpura to the reader. This is in contrast to his earlier major works in
which we encounter no human beings, only customs and rules of social
l 4 T h e reverse also is true; the village also can be defined by its antonym. intercourse, only status structures and role occupants. . . . Chic Nakane
Many environmental and alternative technology movements in India work with suggestively compares The Remembered Village to a high-quality paint-
concepts of the village that bear an inverse relationship with the urban-industrial ing which, she writes, reveals more of the essence of a scene than does
pathologies to which the Indian city is heir. a photograph, by dramatising certain elements in it. Sol Tax's tribute to
l 5 Cf. R.A. Obudho and G.O. Aduwo, 'The Rural Bias of Kenya's Urban-
Remembered Ellage. . . as an ethnographic work which is also a work of
isation', in J.B. Ojwang and J.N.K. Muganlbi (eds), The S.M. Otieno Case:
art is echoed by most of the reviewers.
Death and Brrrial in Modern Keilya (Nairobi: Nairobi University Press, 1989),
pp. 65-75. - . Some readers will, perhaps, say that Rernemberea' KlLage belongs
"Ashis Nandy, 'Introduction: T h e Popular Cinema as the Slum's Eye View
more with the novels of Srinivas's famous friend, R.K. Narayan. It has
of Indian Politics', in Ashis Nandy (ed.), The Serret Politirj of Our Dejirej: Inno- the emphasis on character and on the scenic in everyday life, the
renre, Ctrlpabiliry and Popular Cinema (London: Zed Books and Delhi: Oxford m
' e delectable sense of humour as in Narayan's well-loved novels and
University Press, 1998), pp. 1-18. stories about life in Malgudi. And did not Srinivas tell us in his Social
 An Amb&uow / 0 2 4 ? 7 ? ~ to the Cij/ T h ~ j o u r ~to t n j o u m q iizto t h S~e y
z qthe P a ~a~ 23
22
change in M&rn India thar the sociologist who chooses to study his differences in education, modern health care, and population
own is rather like the novelist?" g o w t h . Policy-makers mark out 'backward areas' where new
factories can be established or dams built as therapeutic measures.
Are these remarks an admission that Srinivas, by crossing the
Entrepreneurs think of producing a village in the heart of Delhi,
barriers between literature and the social sciences, has only enriched
at Pragati Maidan or Hauz Khas, where the rich and the mighty
the latter? O r are they a homage to the creativity that, when
may go and see rural India at weekends.19 But the village is no
forcibly distanced from hard empiricism, reaches paradoxically a
longer a living presence in mainstream Indian intellectual life. In
higher order of empiricism?
the various visions of the future floating around in the region there
This is the imagination of the village that has become a casualty
is much that is worthwhile, but not the vivacity of an imagined
of our times. T h e late Girilal lain, for many years Editor of The
village. T h e village is quickly becoming a place where strangers
Times ofIndia, used to grumble, 'I don't want to go back to a vil-
live, where sati and untouchability are practised, where ethnic and
lage. Keep your Gandhi to yourself. You are from a city; you can
religious riots have been taking place for centuries, and where,
speak for the village. I was brought up in a village. . . . My ideal
unless the civilized intervene, the inhabitants continue to pursue
India doesn't have a single village.' In that abhorrence, the village
the sports of homicide and robbery.
still had a place as a dystopia. O n the other hand Sam Pitroda-
Some may claim that that is another imagining of the village at
for some years an icon and a mascot of modern, scientized India-
play. But that imagining, unlike earlier ones, does not lead to
is also from a village, belongs to an artisan caste, and once had
any great creative effort. Nor does it resonate to the village of the
close links with rural life. Indeed, he first used a telephone when
mind in millions of others. Today, no film producer will finance
he was twenty-one. Yet in his calculation of a future India there
a project like PatherPanchali-in this respect, nothing has changed
is neither hate nor love for the village. T h e village does not exist
since 1955 when Ray made his film-but, worse, no promising
emotionally for him any more; he has cauterized it out of his self.
young filmmaker will choose to film something like Pather Panchali
In his algorithm of a creative society, villages are only statistics.
or, like Ray, pawn his wife's jewellery to d o so. It is an open
O n e can d o something for or to a village; a village cannot d o any-
question whether that change has enriched or impoverished India's
thing for one or even itself.I8
public culture.
For a new generation of Indians, the village has increasingly
become a demographic or statistical datum. Indian economists
calculate national income and rural India's contribution to it;
Indian sociologists and demographers know all about urban-rural
O n e last word on the subject. Is the ability to reconnect to the
l7 T . N . Madan, Pdthway.~:Approaches to the Study of Society in India (New shared village of the imagination only a matter of creative self-
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 46, 48. excavation? O r does it subsume the idea of mythic journey that
I n Sam l'itroda, 'Dc\,elopmcnr, Democracy, and the Village Telephone'.

f Hiiruard Buiincir Reuiiui, November-December 1993, pp. 66-79 This is in

'"Ernma Tarlo, '7'he Discovery and Recovery of "The Village" in Delhi:
I many ways a moving papcr, which however also makes ir absolurely clear thc
I .
Journey from the village ro the city is for [he likes of Pitroda, culturally and
Khas 1 9 8 6 9 4 ' , I'dper presented at rhe 13rh European Conference of
I Modern Asian Studics in Toulouse, 31 Augubt-3 Seprember 1994.
:i p ~ y c h o l o ~ i c a lal ~one-way
, journey.
i
i
24 A n Amblgtotlr/ourng, to the Cij, The/otlmg, to the Pdrt ar a/otlmg, Into the S e y 25
some cannot but undertake, and others can but will not? True, are often the exact reverse of the inner contradictions and tensions
during the last hundred years, the village has been for the urban of the village, which triggered the fateful journey to the city in the
Indian the destination of an epic journey of mind from which first place. If the journey to the city was once an escape from op-
many have returned richer, deepened, and whole. But it is also true pressive sectarian and community ties, the demands of ascribed
that, for others, the same journey has been a traumatic descent into status, and the denial of individuality, the attempts to escape from
a nether world ofthe self that corrodes physically and e r n ~ t i o n a l l y . ~ ~ the city are also often powered by dreams of an idyllic community
In either case, it becomes the obverse of the tragic journey from and escape from hyper-competitive, atomized individualism.
the village to the city that has been the standard marker of the hero The Indian city has re-emerged in public consciousness not as
in Indian popular literature and cinema. a new home, from within the boundaries of which one has the pri-
India may live mainly in its villages, as the Gandhians insist, but vilege of surveying the ruins of one's other abandoned homes. It
it is no peasant society. Traditionally, the city has had a distinct has re-emerged as the location of a homelessness forever trying to
and identifiable relationship with the village and that dyadic bond reconcile non-communitarian individualism and associated forms
has been an important theme in classical plays, such as those of of freedom with communitarian responsibilities, freely or involunt-
Bhasa, and in epics such as Mahabharata. This mutuality broke arily borne. Apparently, the city of the mind does not fear
down with the entry of the colonial political economy in the homelessness; it even celebrates homelessness. However, that mere-
nineteenth century, and since then the great Indian mythmakers ly camouflages the fear of a homelessness which can be cured only
have been trying to reconfigure it in new terms. Sometimes that by a home outside home. Literature and serious cinema handle
reconfiguration has been sought in a civic life that recapitulates the this issue as an inner conflict that defines a crisis of personal ident-
village, sometimes in a village reconceived by the city. But the ity. Popular cinema sees it as a playful oscillation between the pri-
search has always been there-as an epic search for another vision vate and the public, the familial and neighbourly, the rustic and
of a desirable society and of a future that will not be entirely the urban.21The mother who is not the real mother but is more
disjointed from the past. than one, the friend who becomes a brother and dies to prove the
point, the self-destructive street urchin in love with a millionaire's
daughter-in popular cinema, these are not merely anxiety-binding
technologies of the self. They supply the cartography of a home
The decline in the imagined village has altered the meaning of away from home in a culture where homelessness, despair and the
the journey between the village and the city in South Asia. It has p ~ y c h o l oof~ the
~ outsider are all relatively new states of mind.
become a journey from a disowned self to a self that cannot be
fully owned up. The inner contradictions and tensions of the city- *'See, for instance, the T V series by Ranjani Mazumdar and Shikha Jhin-
as-the-self, which trigger the painful journey back to the village, gan, The Power of the Image: The Tapori as Street Rebel (New Delhi: BITV,
1998). Also, ~ s h i Nandy,
s 'An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema', The
2 0 A brilliant 'take' on this journey is the short story by Premendra Mitra, Savage Freud and Other Essays in Possible and Retrievable Selves (New D e b :
'Discovering T e l e n a ~ o t a ' Trs.
, Rina and Pritish Nandy, in Premendra Mitra, Oxford University Press, and I'rinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995),
Snake and Other Stories (Calcutra: Seagull, 1990), pp. 1-10. W e shall return to PP. 195-236; and 'Introduction: T h e I'opular Cinema as [he Slum's Eye View
that journey in the third secrion of rhis book. of Indian Politics'.
26 AII fotlr~tyto the Czq
Ambtpotl~ The/otlmp~to the P a t as a/oumq/ into the Sep 27
The slum and the street urchin defy the '~redatoryidentity' of the The unease sharpens in what is arguably the only non-commercial
city-as Arjun Appadurai might identify the process-to para- film Kapoor produced, Jagte Raho (1956). Written and directed
doxically navigate the city more efficiently, perhaps even creat- by Shambu Mitra and Amit Maitra, two theatre persons with no
i~ely.~~ link with Bombay's commercial cinema, the film re-chronicles the
Serious Indian literature has never been comfortable with this tragicomic journey from the village to the city in Shri 420 with a
oscillation. Such negotiation with the city has all the elements of different ending. The hero of Jagte Raho never gets the chance to
the lowbrow and the maudlin and uses too narrow a range of develop the street smartness of the earlier heroes to survive the rav-
psychological shades. But perhaps for that very reason, popular ci- ages of everyday urban guerrilla warfare; he must depend more on
nema has turned it into an over-used, proforma ~ l i c h tThus,
. ~ ~ the his instincts for survival. This unequal battle makes the humour
film persona of actor-director Raj Kapoor, one of those who pre- in Jagte Raho more bitter; it is mostly barbed sarcasm against the
sided over India's mythic world in the 1950s was basically built hypocrisy and corruption of the sophisticated urban rich. Indeed,
around an ambivalent celebration of the city as street culture.24 the only time the hero feels at home in the city is when he finds
In Awara (1951) and Shri 420 (1955), two immensely popular himself among labourers in a slum, singing an evocative folk song
films that frame his work for most viewers, Kapoor is the ultimate identified with eastern Indian villages.
street person, celebrating Bombay the way Woody Allen pays his Jagte Raho is set in Calcutta. In it Kapoor, the heart-throb of
reluctant, nervous homage to New York. Yet even in these films, millions, deglamorizes himself to play the role of a villager who,
the hero, while living by his wits off the street, turns the streets of in search of drinking water, trespasses into a multistoreyed apart-
Bombay into a friendly village neighbourhood. As a loveable ment building. There he witnesses the inner hollowness of civic
cheat, pitted against more menacing well-bred sharks, Kapoor has life, while being pursued as a thief. At the end, when cornered, he
moral and aesthetic unease with the city but, unlike Allen, that confronts his pursuers and manages even to embarrass them. As
unease derives from outside the frame of civic values and the ur- he walks out of the heartless building, he finds at last a person-
ban personality. Raj Kapoor's Bombay, like R.K. Narayan's Mal- a young woman, played by the famous star Nargis in a one-scene
gudi, is also a tribute to a remembered village.25 appearance-willing to give him some water. Wearing the tradi-
tional Bengali sari, at the gate of an incongruous, old-style mansion
22 For an elegant statement along these lines, see Mira Nair's Salaam Bom- with lush green trees, she gives water to the thirsty hero. The
bay (Bombay: 1988). message is clearer in the Bengali version of the film, where the
23 For a more detailed discussion of the genre, see Ashis Nandv. 'The Popular
Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles', India International Centre Quarterly,
hero's dialect identifies him not only as a villager but as a refugee
9(1), 1981. from East Bengal, avictim of the massiveviolence that accompanied
24 O n the city as street culture, see the brief, suggestive essay by Arjun the creation of independent India. He is in the city by default and
Appadurai, 'Street Culture', India Mugazine, December 1987, 8, pp. 12-2 1.
"This also indirectly but powerfully emerges from Rajni Bakshi, 'Raj
Kapoor: From Jis Deshme Ganga Behti Hai to Ram Teri Gunga Maili', in Ashis 19981, pp. 92-133. The journey from the first to the second film in the title of
Nandy (ed.), The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Popu- Bakshi's paper can be read also as a perceived movement from the purity of the
lar Cinema (Idondon: Zed Books, and New Delhi: Oxford University Press. ~astoralxivilizationalvalues to the impurity of the urban-industrial values.
28 An Ambtgtour/ouw to the Cip The/oume)l to the Pht as a/oumq/ into the S e y 29
under duress. Home has to have a touch of the pastoral, even when ~t is true that at least one other character in the Mahabharata
a poisoned village has caused the homelessness. Home is 'natural' has sometimes been an index of the cultural status of the journey
womanly nurture in a rediscovered village. to the modern city-namely Krishna. Numerous influential re-in-
Few seem to love the city in its own terms in India, even among terpretations of Krishna's life and teachings during the last hundr-
those who would prefer to lose their identity among its anonymous ed years bear witness to this. However, Krishna is less relevant to
masses and seem eager to extol that loss. our story because his break with his pastoral past is complete in
most Mahabharatas and even the memory of that past does not
play any role in his life as a king in an imperial city. Karna, though
9 entirely urban, is dogged by his ambivalence towards the city;
it does not often look to him adequately civic. The journey to
The mythic frame within which these oscillations fit is best re-
the city is never complete for him. Naturally, he has served as a
flected in the character of Karna in the ~ a h a b h a r a t a . 'Though
~
projective test for Indians caught in the same ambivalence towards
Karna as the hero of the Mahabharata was not entirely unknown
the village, as a home and as a prototype of Indian civilization.
in pre-modern times, during the last century the character has
Both Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones have identified Karna as
been a particularly sensitive index of changes in Indian definitions
a classic hero, part of a long series beginning from antiquity and
of the ideal self, mediating between the village and the city. The
including Sargon, Moses, Oedipus, Cyrus, Perseus, Romulus,
journey of Karna is a remarkable testimony to the way a living
Paris and Heracle~.'~At least three elements in Karna's life conform
myth in an epic culture-as against myths in cultures that have
to the paradigmatic life of the hero, according to Freud and Otto
epics-can act as an alternative record of the shifting psychological
Rank: his mysterious birth, his first journey through water in a
contours of a culture. Indeed, during the last two decades, I have
basket, and his humble foster parents who do not know the secret
had to return more than once to the trajectory of Karna's life
ofhis divine and royal origins.29There are also similarities between
to trace the course of India's ambivalent relationship with the
Karna and Freud's Moses who, unlike the Biblical Moses, is a
urban-industrial vision."
scion of the Egyptian aristocracy and leads the enslaved Israelis
2"n a fascinating paper, M.K. Raghavendra argues that there has been no to freedom, in a mythic unfolding of the oedipal drama. In
new myth in Indian popular cinema, which by its own conventions must avoid Karna's case, the situation is reversed; he fights his own brothers,
a linear, historical narrative. As a result, such cinema cannot but be grounded
- in not knowing who he really is. However, it is an indicator of the
the myths of India's ancient epics. While there is an important element of truth
here, one reason for the scarcity of new myths in Indian popular cinema could
be the pliability and built-in diversity of the myths in Indian epics. They absorb, 2 8 S i g m ~ n dFreud, Moses and Monotheism, trs. Katherine Jones (London:
interpret, and reconfigure new experiences, particularly new anxieties and Hogarrh, 1940), p. 17.
29 Ibid., Otto Rank, TheMyth ofthe Birth ofthe Hero, trs. Philip Freund (New
fantasies, within the old myths. The myths do not become linear or historically
York: Alfred Knopf, 1959). Karna was born through his mother's ear. For a clas-
tinged thereby, but history and time acquire different meanings in cinema. M.K.
sical dsrchoanalytic study of the rich meanings associated with birth through the
Raghavendra, 'Time and the Popular Film', Deep Focus, 1992,4(1), pp. 10-18.
w s Ernest Jones, 'The Madonna's Conception through the Ear: A Contri-
27 Ashis Nandy, Alternative Sciences: Creativity and Authenticity in Two
bution the Relation between Aesthetics and Religion', Psycho-Myth, PJJJC~O-
Indian Scientists, 2nd edition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995),
Parr I; and 'An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema'.
H ~ T~ : Y in Applied
S Psychoanalysis (New York: Hillstone, 1974).
30 An ~mb@u~-/oumey to tht Clj/ Th6/ot/mq to thr Pat a a/our~zqinto t h Sf&'
~ 31
vibrant presence of the mythic in India that whereas Freud's the death of Pandu, Kunti becomes the p a r d i a n of all five.
Moses is a marginal presence in contemporary Jewish consciousness, panduPsblind brother Dhritarashtra, father of a hundred sons
the various modern incarnations of Karna have carved out a place known as the Kauravas, becomes the new king of Hastina~ur.
for themselves in contemporary India. Indeed, the traditional and Karna grows up to become a gifted warrior, known for his brav-
modern Karnas coexist in reasonable amity in the Indian imaginaty. ery, self-destructive generosity and truthfulness. However, he also
Karna might meet the classical criteria of the hero the world has other qualities that make him the most controversial character
over, but he has won wide acceptability in India as the hero of of the Mahabharata. These are revealed as he journeys through his
Mahabharata only during the last hundred years. In the better life. From his early years he is subjected to the barbs and contempt
known and more popular Mahabharatas, Krishna, Arjuna, of many as a lowborn nurturing inappropriate princely ambitions.
Yudhisthira and, less frequently, Bhima have contested for that H e is particularly sensitive to such jibes. His first serious encounter
status. All these contestants have less-well-kept secrets of birth that with the Pandavas, the five legitimate children of Kunti, takes
should qualify them as heroes in textbooks of psychoanalysis. The place in his youth. Once, when the Pandavas and the Kauravas are
new preference for Karna cannot be explained away as only a being trained in armed conflict by their guru, Karna impulsively
'natural' cultural move towards the universal model for a mythic challenges them to compete with him. Neither the guru nor his
hero. disciples pick up the challenge; competing with princes is also a
princely privilege. As it happens, Karna has already befriended
Duryodhana, the eldest among the Kauravas, who see the Pandavas
as rivals. Duryodhana now shrewdly makes Karna the king of
"43 Anga. But birth still stands in Karna's way. His foster father, Adhi-
Karna's journey in Vyasa's Mahabharata begins with his natural ratha, comes to bless him before the competition and this reveals
mother Kunti, a princess, getting a boon that allows her to have his humble origins. Karna is ridiculed and driven away.
a child by any god she wishes, provided she goes through a specific Karna's next encounter with the Pandavas ends in even great-
set of prayerslrituals. She first invokes, while still unmarried, the er bitterness. Princess Draupadi decides to marry the winner in an
sun god. But when, as a result, she conceives and gives birth to a archery competition. Karna wants to compete; so does Kunti's
son, she fears a scandal and stealthily puts the child in an ornate third son Arjuna, sired by Indra, king of the gods. Once again
casket and floats it on the Ashva river, from where it finally floats Karna is humiliated; Draupadi refuses to marry a charioteer's
down the more sacred Jamuna and Ganga. A humble, childless son even if he wins. Karna now turns even more hostile to the
charioteer, Adhiratha, and his wife, Radha, discover the baby. Pmdavas and becomes even more defensively loyal to Duryodhana.
They bring him up as their son. Kunti later marries Pandu, the The Kauravas try to dispossess the Pandavas of their share of
sickly prince of Hastinapur. A sage has cursed Pandu to die if sex- the kingdom in various ways. After defeating the Pandavas in a
ually aroused. So he allows his two wives to use Kunti's boon to dishonest game of dice, they exile the Pandavas from Hastinapur
have children by the gods. As a result, the two queens become the for thirteen years. When the Pandavas return from their exile,
mothers of five sons, the Pandavas. When Madri commits suicide Dur'Yodhu~.again refuses to share the kingdom with them. The
32 to the C
An Amb@zou~.journq ity Theyoamq to the P a ~as
t a/oumq into the Se&" 33
doting father, ~hritarashtra,fails to check his sons. A battle be- living legend, wrote a letter to his friend, the famous poet
comes inevitable. Rabindranath Tagore (1 861-1 941). Bose was the first scientist in
Karna naturally decides to fight for the Kauravas. However, on India who self-consciously tried to pattern a culturally rooted
the eve of the battle, Lord Krishna goes to Karna's camp, reveals identity for Indian scientists and, when he wrote to Tagore,
to him the secret of his birth, and requests him to fight for the Tgore was already a public figure from a family that had played
Pandavas. H e offers Karna, technically the eldest Pandava, the a leading role in the modernization of India. In his letter Bose
kingdom of Hastinapur in the event of victory, the unconditional pleaded with his friend to write on the life and the fate of Karna.
loyalty of his five younger brothers, and the hand of Draupadi in Base felt that Karna was the real hero of the Mahabharata and
marriage. (Though Arjuna had won the archery competition and deserved revaluation.
the right to wed Draupadi, due to a careless comment by Kunti O f uncertain birth, insecure, defiant, and unwilling to adjust to
she is now married to all the five Pandavas.) Karna turns down the his ascribed status as the son of a humble charioteer, Karna seemed
offer. H e says that even if he is made king of Hastinapur, he will to symbolize the predicament of the self-made person in a society
have to give away the kingdom to Duryodhana and that would not not fully receptive to individualism and competitiveness. Bose
be fair to Yudhisthira. Kunti now goes to meet Karna and asks for- wanted Tagore to grant Karna the justice that was denied him in
giveness for abandoning him. She begs him to change sides and life. Tagore accepted the challenge and wrote a verse play, Kama-
spare the lives of her children. At this point even the sun god ap- Kunti-Samvad, a reconstruction of Karna's last encounter with his
pears and tells Karna to obey his mother for his own good. How- mother K ~ n t i The. ~ ~play captures the anguish behind Karna's
ever, Karna is already an orphan psychologically; he refuses to free-floating violence and arrogance and his response to his
betray a loyal friend who had made him a king and a kshatriya, illegitimate birth and the trauma of maternal rejection. In the play
a status his own mother denied him. However, Karna promises K a n a knows he is on the losing side but tells his mother that he
not to touch any of his brothers except Arjuna. H e consoles Kunti cannot, on those gounds, abandon the losing side. Karna's death
that, at the end of the war, she will have her five sons intact, with in the battle of Kurukshetra has thus an element ofself-destruction.
or without Karna. In the war the inevitable happens. Karna dies He can escape his fate but refuses.
battling Arjuna. However, Arjuna has to flout the codes of war- The rivalry between Karna and Arjuna has many layers. A
fare at the instigation of Krishna, serving as his charioteer, to kill pantheistic world reflects the eternal, natural conflict and rivalry
Karna. Only then do the Pandavas come to know Karna's true bemeen Indra, the king of the gods, whose personal weapon is
identity and sadly and guiltily perform his last rites. thunder, and Surya, the sun god. O n this plane the battle between
Karna and Arjuna is a clash between two cosmic forces. At another
p l a e , Karna's is an infinitely sad story of a person fighting a
society insensitive to his desperate attempts to break out of ascribed
Status,to seek sanction for competitive individualism and personal

Exactly, a hundred years ago, in 1898, the famous ~hysicistturned 30 Rabindranath Tagore, 'Karna-Kunti Sarnvad', Rachanauali (Calcutta:

plant physiologist Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858-1937), already a Government of West Bengal, 1999), "01. 3, pp. 145-50.
34 An Ambzguo~/r ~ the Crj/
/ O Z ~ + I Ito

and his rage at the failure to do so.jl It is the story acceptance by their mother. In this now-stereotyped story of two
o f a charioteer's son who becomes a great warrior, keeps the com- brothers who take to the city in different ways, one grows up to
pany of kings, and hankers for upper-caste status, not knowing become a police officer, the other a criminal. The criminality is
that by birth he has a right to that status. Bitterness pushes him &own to be a response to injustice and feelings of rejection; the
to the margins of ethics. Bose identifies with Karna's anguish. His anger against an unjust society finds voice in asocial violence. The
plea to the most respected Indian writer of his generation is a plea police officer acts like the hand of destiny, backed by the mother's
to legitimize the first modern Indian in India's epic culture. mord convictions and her identification with him. When, at the
Seeking acceptance for Karna must have meant for Bose seeking end, the police officer shoots his brother in the course of his duty,
acceptance for his values. the hero dies in his mother's arms, completing the tragic journey
In the hundred years since Bose wrote his letter, Karna has of a wronged, discarded child who grows up to become a street-
reappeared on and off to haunt India's urban middle class. Attempts smart, urban warrior, negotiating life mainly through the techno-
to reinterpret him as a wronged hero, victimized by an unjust logy of violence. Deewar's hero is the prototypical urban man, but
society, obdurately hostile to the norms of equity, have recurred. somewhere along the way he has fought for and lost his mother's
Novels like Shivaji Sawant's Mrityunjaya and plays like Buddhadev acceptance. That acceptance comes posthumously and hardly
Bose's Pratbama Partba have contributed to the effort. In theatre, absolves the modern metropolis of its moral culpability.
Karna's chequered career during the last hundred years has ended Mani Ratnam's Dal-pati (1994), which retells the story of
with Peter Brooke's Mahabharata, in which he is the hero. In Karna, never seriously deviates from the conventions of ~ o p u l a r
cinema, Shyam Benegal's Kalyug locates Karna in the ruthless cinema and the stylization that goes with them. However, it anti-
world ofcorporate rivalry, facing an unjust fate, a meaningless clan cipates the director's later films, especially, the taut, thriller-like
war, and conventional morality.32 In all these incarnations, Karna narrative he weaves around an epic journey to a strange city that
is explicitly a double of Arjuna, whom Karna partly dislodges as becomes a nightmare and yet, at the same time, expands and en-
the hero of Mahabharata. riches the self. In all, 'enemies' turn out to be bound by deeper ties
Popular culture has returned to the myth less selfconsciously to the self and women mediate between apparently incompatible
but with more vigour. Kunti, Karna, and Arjuna cast their shadows psychologid worlds through a form of maternity that deepens
on a number of characters and plots in the commercial cinema. conjugality.AU are recurrent themes in popular creative imagination
One of the better-known efforts in the genre, Deewar (1974),is and no amount of erudite film criticism is likely to dent Mani
identified in public memory with the emergence of a hero whom R a m ' s popularity or wean him off the cocktail of the classical,
some critics have described as the first urban-industrial man in the fok, and the slum-tinged urbanity in which he specializes.33
Indian popular cinema. In this film the rivalry between two Dal-pati begins in an idyllic village where a teenaged mother
delivers an illegitimate son. The next scene shows the mother sob-
brothers takes many forms but finally centres on recognition and
b i n g m d ~ n n i n gafier a goods train speeding towards the city; she
'Ashis Nandy, Alternatiue Sciences: Creativity and Authenticig in %lo
33Nady, 'Introduction: The Popular Cinema as the Slum's Eye View of
Indian Scientists (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Indian PoIitiu'.
32 Nandy, 'An Intelligent Critic's Guide to Indian Cinema'.
36 An Ambiguous/oz/mq to t h Criy
~
has abandoned her child in a pack of hay in the train. As in most Regular viewers of Indian popular cinema will not be surprised
films in India, the journey takes a dramatic, if ~redictable, that, the course of events, Arjuna's father finds out that
course-the pack falls from the train while it is crossing a bridge his wife is also the mother of the disreputable, violence-pone
and the child floats down the river to a town where a poor, low- prince ofthe slum. In an epic culture, predictability is an inalienable
caste woman picks him up and names him Suraj (the Sun). The part of popular drama and the director has already strewn plenty
motif of the train, whistling through dark tunnels while rushing of clues about the story he is telling. The father now goes to meet
towards the city, the journey over a river in a basket of hay, and Suraj to request him to give up Devraj and rejoin the family. Suraj
the discovery of the child by a poor Shudra woman-these are all rehses,vowing that he will 'live and die with Devraj', but promises
perfectly congruent with the themes Freud and Rank consider to spare Arjuna. Suraj also begs his father not to reveal his identity
pivotal to the life of a mythic hero. Only, the fantasies centring on to his mother. 'I was a scandal for her; the one who has reared me
the birth of the hero get intertwined in this instance with themes is my real mother', he says. T o keep his promise he now goes to
of a humbler but anguished, angry rebirth. The child grows up to the officer's bungalow and, to Arjuna's amazement, requests him
become the warlord ofan urban slum. He knows his own past and to leave the city. At this point, once again predictably, chaotic viol-
is sensitive about his status as a person of unknown origins; the ence breaks out: the rival gang of the politician Devraj has ditched
history of maternal rejection haunts him at every moment. His shoots Devraj, and Suraj kills the politician. However, his mother
violence and rejection of social norms are shown to be natural pro- also comes to know the truth at last. She has pined for her lost
ducts of his personal history. child all her life; the discovery ofSuraj and the divide between him
We next see Devraj, a local don, befriending Suraj and appointing and the family nearly leads to her breakdown. But she recovers her
hinl the dal-pati or leader of his gang, even though Suraj has kill- wits quickly enough to have an emotional reunion with her lost
ed one of the gang. T h e friendship with Devraj earns Suraj the child.
enmity of a criminal politician from whom Devraj has broken DaL-patiis arguably the final, triumphant incarnation of Karna
away. for our times. He is no longer a tragic figure who wins mythic
The mystery of his birth continues to hound Suraj. When he immortality by defying fate, almost as a compensation for what he
falls in love, Devraj tries to arrange a marriage with the consent of misses out in life. This time even his mother goes to live with him,
the girl's father. The father refuses to marry his daughter to a per- in preference to Arjuna, presumably to expiate for the past.34
son of unknown birth. At this point a commissioner, Arjuna, is Karna has won his final battle.
posted in the city. H e is accompanied by his parents. Soft-spoken The associations which the personality of Karna has picked up
and urbane, firm and incorruptible, Arjuna is keen to establish the since the late nineteenth century are not simple variations on the
authority of law. However, he meets little success. People come
1s the myth i w l f undergoing some long-term changes. in response to
to respect him as honest and well-meaning but remain loyal to
changes in public consciousness? Dal-pati has been followed by another, even
Devraj and Suraj and the alternative, street-based, justice system more mediocre film, &ran Arjun, in which awronged mother unleashes against
they have founded. T o complicate matters, Arjuna's mother spots herOP~rr~~rs-led by the bad father, an exploitarive village landlord-her two
Suraj's former girlfriend, comes to like her, and arranges her S0nS9 K a n a and Arjuna. They are no longer rivals but mutually complementar~
marriage with Arjuna. instruments of their mother's wrath.
age-old myth of the hero. Karna and Arjuna have become two shudra foster mother, Radha, lamenting the death of one who had
faces of modern urbanity. T h e total acceptance of Karna by his lived and died as her son. In life, Karna might have spurned the
mother in Dal-pati suggests that they might have become, more kingdom of Hastinapur for the sake of his foster parents; in death,
directly, each other's double. Mani Ratnam could have, following Kunti wins. In the lament of the Shudras, though, there is intimation
popular cinematic conventions, used the same actor to play both of Towards the end of the play a possessed Shudra
the roles. Perhaps the split between the village and city, and the woman in a frenzied, almost violent dance, signals resistance and
movement from one to the other, are now acquiring other overtones. a l a n g u ~ eof dissent not accessible to those who see the mystery
Rajnikant, the popular star playing Suraj, is dark, direct, and ofKarna'~birth as the first marker ofhis self. The dance anticipates
speaks rustic Bhojpuri when young and the language of the the violence that becomes overt in some of the popular cinematic
Bombay slum when older. H e seems a natural counterpoint to the versions of Karna's life.
chocolate-pie hero, h i n d Swamy who, as Arjun, is fair, urbane, Kanhailal's Karna is an exception, for it bypasses Karna's charac-
speaks chaste Hindi, and is identifiably Brahminic. Arjuna looks ter as a clue to his tragedy. His Karna walks out of the pages of the
and behaves like a son of his parents and the husband of his wife; Mahabharata to seek power and legitimacy for the rustic, the non-
Suraj looks and behaves like a misfit in polite society. The contrast canonical and the lowborn in a secular city. Otherwise, not only
hints at possibilities that Bose and Tagore might not have thought are Karna's virtues fairly constant over his various literary or cine-
of in 1898. matic incarnations, but also his fatal flaws of character. Even those
Heisham Kanhailal's play Kama further develops the social who have revalued his defiance of ascriptive status and his cele-
overtones the epic hero is now acquiring. Using the classical bration of competitive achievement and fierce individualism have
Manipuri dance form as an integral, stylized medium of theatre, not much to say about his arrogance and narcissism. T h e recent
the play choreographs the identity of Karna into a prism and a readings have not changed Karna's traits, only their evaluation.
projection of the inner tensions of modern cosmopolitanism in They assume that the source of Karna's tragedy is not any fatal flaw
India. For the first time, the locus of tragedy is not in the of character, but the fatal flaw of a society unable to live with his
personality of Karna or in the cosmic order-in the eternal, fated, tough, competitive individualism and drive for achievement.
natural hostility between Indra and Surya-but in the humiliation However, there is an aspect of Karna that the older readings
of his foster parents and the community that reared him in an sense but cannot articulate, and the new readings-in awe of the
unjust, unequal social order. The play begins with Karna's last once-devalued traits that now rule the world-cannot even
battle and death at Kurukshetra. A perplexed, shocked Arjuna acknowledge: Karna's failure to link his private battle against
learns the secret of Karna's birth from a shrewd, somewhat wily injustice and fate to any larger struggle for justice and masteryover
Krishna and sees the body of Karna become a new battleground fire. Only Kanhailal unwittingly recognizes this when he casts
between those wanting to give Karna an 'appropriate' royal funeral Karna in a just war a& his death.
and the low-caste community that had known him as a part of Perhaps the older readings of Karna are not as unjust as Bose
itself till then. Above all, the body becomes a battleground between had thought. They do read Karna, cramped by what Wilhelm
a triumphant, arrogant, queenly Kunti, who has rejected Karna in Reich might have diagnosed as his fatal character armour, as in-
life but wants to possess him in death, and his rustic, humble, ~ b l ofeextricating the record of his suffering from his personal
interests or memories of personal slights.'i I t was as if Karna Arjuna, rllougl~forced to play huml,le roles (;I dance teacher, fol-
sot~ghtto e\tahlish 2 narcissistic monopolv on his experience o f instvnce. ciuring the great exile), has not. VC'llcn Kasnu ~ ~ l i ~ lrhe ics
victimization and to turn it into a source of grudge against the de\,atating p r o ~ x ~ s i r i oto n his mother-that she will have to be
world. N o means, however low, are unacceptable ro this othe~wise satixfeci with five sons because she can either have Arjuna or
majestic, generous person, LO protect the self-indulgence that ac- llim-it is o n l ~partly
, a homage to jealousy and hatred. For Karna
-
comp'~niesthdt monopoly. H e shows no awareness that his suffering docs riot tot;llly clisoutl his newly discovered relationships; he pro-
can become a shareable tragedy only when it transcends the speci- m i s e ~not to kill hi5 other brothers. His knowledge of his self has
ficity of a case and stands witness for all other o f similar expanded. Inciccci, that knowledge ccr-arnpshim as a warrior when
suffering He cannot admit that a victim's experiellce acquires mo- he fights Al-iu~laa t K ~ ~ r i ~ k s h eArjuna
t r : ~ . does nor Iinoksi who Karna
ral grandeur and a higher level ofauthenticity only when he or she is; he has n o s Y r n p ; ~ h y
f o r the lonelJ, ivar.rior-,simultaneously bat-
is willitlg to represenr the victimization of others caught in similar tling his arch enemy, his brothel.. and his own self.
hinges o f fate.'" 111 his new incarnations, too, the journey o f K ; ~ r n a is the journey
Karna's final posthumous t r i ~ i n l ~therefore-his
h, journey from of the wronged, discarded child who goca on to b e c o n ~ ea shrewd
the city of the past to the city o f t h e future, adorned by values asso- ~ ~ r b aivarrior
n ~ l e g o r ~ a t i nlife
g n ~ ; ~ i n l through
y violence. 'The
ciated with the urban-industrial vision-is unlikely to be a secure paradigmatic urban man, more at home in the metropolitan slum
one. Handicapped by the absence of any basic trust in his social than in palaces o r fields, hides behind his arrogance and certitudes
world, his identificarion with the arrogant, powerful king Duryo- his inner battles with the menlory o f a rcjccting mother who stands
dhana reflects not only fraternal loyalty but also a Faustian compact. for continuity, comnluniry and nature. ?'he legitimacy of the city
Yet, paradoxically, Karna's vision remains wider than Arjuna's, is incomplete, given that primordial rejection.
thr victorious p r i r l ~ ewho fighrs or1 rhc side o f virtue. Karna has
scen life botrom upwards: he has seen the city as an outsider.

" F o r intrancc, this uw;lreness implicitly colours Irawati Karve, 'Karna'.

Yiigcintri: 711e E',d qf'nn E p ~ (Bomh:ly: h I'opular I'rakashan, 1969), pp. 167-
88.' I ' l ~ o ~ r grhc
h concept c~fzh.lr.~crcl. armour is Rcich's, a scnsirivc use o f i1 ill
rhc C ~ S Cof J ~ l ~ ~ r cl hl ai ri a c ~ c ri \ in 1:rncsr Beckcr, ' T h e Pawn Broker: A Scudy
in li,l\ic I)s!~cholos~,', it) Aritzun. A I'ost-l.'rrzid~atiI'errpectiue on t l ~ Nulure
r
of'jlTri,i (Nc\v York: Fycc I1rc\s. 1'169). pp. 73-100.
"I I .Im hcrc speaking nor merely of individuals bur also of communities and
c~llrurcs.111our- Limes, t l ~ inability
c of thc Israeli state a n d sections o f the ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ l j
sucic[y anti [IlL, xol-[h ,imCrlcan Jewish Jiaspora to generalize rhe experience of
rhc I . ~ I I ( , ~ > C .h~,loc.lnsr
LI~ ofrlle I O L i O c \ one of rhe greatest tragedies in recent ten-
,Ilric\, i.; :llso ;I narcic\i.;ric failure. Hyn rrclgic turn ofevents, thelewish h ~ [ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
ic inc~-c,l\inglyh c c o m i ~ , gfor somc part5 of the world or24 a Jewish ho!ocaust
and IcSh01..1 \hnlc.d srrnbol f o ~ the . rnjllions of other victims of exterminalory
I I I ~ I C I I ~ I I C S of violrnie.