Behala Art Festival - Pictures and Installations

 

Apius Bengalis Indiae: Mimicry, Man and a Colonized Imaginary

Sukumar Roy's 'Tanshgoru' - sourced from kolkata-online.com

It was with great foresight that Lord Macaulay had decided to introduce English education in India with the express purpose of creating an intermediary class of people who would be Indian in blood but British “in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect”. The foundations of an imperishable empire of the mind that were laid then, continue to remain solidly functional in the existing culture-scape of India where we continue to display our indelible association with ancestral primates through irresistible exhibitions of aping. 

Consider for example the nomenclature and self-projection of two ongoing real estate projects near Kolkata at present. One of them is called London City, a luxury residential hub coming up in Newtown, Rajarhat and the other one, Elita Garden Vista, proudly advertises itself as “New York in New Town” and invites consumers to “Own a home with a 6.8 acre Central Park”. The website of the latter categorically claims: “Come and stay in 6.8 acre elevated central park and experience the magic of living in New York at New Town.” As opposed to the postcolonial need to provincialize the West, the West continues to function as a fetishistic superobject in our imaginary and operates as a transcendental signifier of luxury and opulence that the comprador bourgeoisie of the so-called Third World has embraced as its summum bonum. No wonder then that the latest monument to adorn the Kolkata skyscape is a clock tower built in imitation of the Big Ben in London, with further plans of building a Kolkata Eye, in accordance with the famous London Eye. For a city that still prides itself on the magnificence of two architectural hallmarks from the days of the Raj - the Howrah Bridge and the Victoria Memorial - such additions are hardly out of place. And any attempt to suggest that equally magnificent towers and edifices can be located in various parts of Asia (Hongkong, Tokyo, Manila, Bukittinggi to name a few) or that a new structure, if it is to be built, may well be an original one rather than an imitation, might well prove to be an exercise in futility as we Indians in general, and Bengalis in particular, have a remarkable fascination for imitation, especially if the object of adoration has its origin in the West. Therefore, we think of modernization by way of London, improved hill-tourism by way of Switzerland and international film festival in Goa by way of Cannes. Despite the vaunted claims of nationalism, the West thus continues lord over our imaginary and consciousness and Macaulay’s vision of an imperishable empire remains all too strong as the aspirations of the upwardly mobile Indian insistently mirror the West, whatever the extent of distortion. 

The extent of such mimicry becomes visible again when we take into account the establishment of schools such as the New York Public School. Why should a school set up in Saltlake, a satellite township adjacent to Kolkata in West Bengal, invoke New York? In fact names such as New York, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Boston or Washington, for many Indians, have a kind of totemic significance which is capable of uplifting anything from a school to a toilet tissue to celestial heights. No wonder then that if you google “oxford school in India”, thousands of links would throng your screen, directing you to schools from Thiruvananthapuram to Delhi, all bearing the magical name of ‘Oxford’ and the attendant glories of English/European epistemology we Indians have been salivating after for centuries. And all this in the land of Nalanda, Somapura, Vikramsila and such other outstanding centres of learning in ancient India which attracted students and travellers and scholars from all of Asia. Nowadays, Sameer becomes Sam, Parminder becomes Pam and Janardan becomes Jonny as the country continues to spawn call-centre driven Yankee wannabes who embody a gender neutral fusion of Tulsi Virani and the Kardashian sisters.

Unfortunately, in the middle of such a mindless melange we fail to notice that our billionaires have learnt nothing from the philanthropical examples of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, we have not been able to ensure mass literacy and pervasive public access to education as in the West, our scholars are more interested in API scores and departmental politics than innovation, unlike their western counterparts, our companies do not fund research institutes as they do in the West, our corporates are very rarely concerned about social responsibility, which is more extensive in the west, we are indifferent to both hygiene and sanitation, unlike what happens in the west......and the list goes on. Nationalist movements had sought to secure the agency of modernization from the colonial rulers while retaining cultural difference. What we have achieved is rather a retention of differences that discredit us while engaging in superficial imitations that bear the legacy of colonial hangover and cumulatively contribute to the growth of a manikin generation which wants to flaunt the latest western superbrands, swoons over Justin Bieber or Hannah Montana, speaks vernaculars with a fake accent and cocks its nose at Abol Tabol and Thakurmar Jhuli. 

Sukumar Roy’s ‘Tanshgoru’ and whatever gods and sacred structures it held in awe are preparing to swamp us with a vengeance. Get your supply of Miracurall if you can! SOTYI SOTYI KAMRE DEBE VACCINE TA NA PELE...

The Download List: Our Private Longings

There was a time when self-respecting Bengalis—and from what I read this was a pretty universally prevalent hobby—religiously collected stamps. My friends collected stamps in large leather bound black catalogues. But they were all inconsequential, stamps printed by the millions and sent by the thousands, knived off of letters from relatives abroad. I tried for a while myself, but forgot my catalogue in a taxi one evening and that was that.

There is direct correlation between the rarity of the object collected and the prestige of the collector. Aristocrats collected books for generations over centuries. What came of this hobby are the impressive hordes of printed marvel. Some of these have ended up in university and government libraries, some have been dismantled and dispelled with such carelessness that they have ended up with me. Such objects of desire are also circulated through theft, from robbing galleries off their Goyas to robbing school libraries off their John Updikes (like Charlie Mortdecai from Mortdecai or Dean Corso from Ninth Gate). I have bought a few books from roadside bookstalls—a hardbound biography of Yeats among them—that formerly belonged to the St Xavier’s library, and I have no intention of returning them.

Private collections had long been the milieu of the financially upward. For most, archiving is an elitist act, coupled with an academic rigor, imbued in personal or secondhand nostalgia. It is also in many ways ‘preservatist’, historicist, and ‘sanctuarist’. Sometimes the impersonal translates into the personal in the process of archiving, through the time and effort invested in the collection of objects (or thoughts, or words… Arcades Project, anyone?). Photographs, documents, letters, relics, curios, virtually anything. Tattoos are archival too, in that sense. They are our mobile archives of memories, our archives of vernacular history. 

But as regimented, institutionalized disciplines fragment and break loose of their professional bondages, things start to become more interesting, heartening, deep (if risking vagueness, paradoxically), and beautifully diverse. Let’s draw a parallel between what I just said about collecting and the Internet today. Once, only institutions and the ultra-rich had video or audio libraries. Today, when all content is uncoupled from their makers and are floating freely, digitally reproduced and innumerable, waiting to be grabbed out of thin air and materialized in a very Djinn-Rushdie fashion, we are all collectors and archivists. We download terabytes of information from the Internet, sometimes legally, sometimes not so. They in turn circulate, and multiply. I do not have one friend who does not have all the ten seasons of F.R.I.E.N.D.S somewhere in their hard drive, or HIMYM, or Game of Thrones, or all the albums of Pink Floyd or Nirvana. A hoarding disorder coupled with external hard drives. Susan Sontag has said about her library that it is her “archive of longings”; for the verbally-apathetic, it is the download list and the hard drive. Also, digital content, infallible though they are not, aren’t generally given to alteration or variation. Like a print of cinema of the same cut is always the same across the globe, so is all other digital content, resting in a cyber reservoir or in a personal computer. 

But pleasantries apart, things are getting more and more serious each day. There is not much to argue about the illegality of downloading video or audio material from pirated sources free of cost (although some things remain to be said about this), but the matter becomes grave when it comes to something as crucial as education. There is much hullabaloo about this, the democratic act of theft, and the Corporates and governments are doing all they can to crack down on this to preserve, safeguard their financial interests. But as they grow more and more strict, so does the public grow more and more skeptical about the ethics of it all. Recently, with the crackdown on online repositories of e-books like Library Genesis, academics have finally raised their voice in spite of their vested interests in the safeguarding of copyright laws and distribution of content (find the article here). Arguments have been made for the sanctity of knowledge, the democratic necessity of access to information, and against the greed of the few against the need of the many. We are forced to consider that, for once, maybe theft is the noble commitment. And after all, what is a criminal act – bombing innocents or downloading books? Are the corporates right to own knowledge? Is ownership their prerogative? Or does the true right to knowledge and information belong to the masses? 

The judgment, hypocrite lecteur, must be yours.

                                                                                                                                     - Souraj Dutta