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Bharatanatyam as an Object
of Majoritarian Cultural Nationalism
BY SADANAND MENON ON 09/07/2016
What
is true nationalism? What is pseudo-nationalism? What is anti-national?
What is patriotism? Is the shouting of nationalist slogans important to
prove one’s patriotism? Why is Bharat Mata ki Jai so important to the
right wing? Why does the law of sedition continue to exist on the
statute book of an independent country? Who should the sedition law be
used against? Why is cultural freedom important to a nation? What sort
of India do we want? What sort of Indians do we want to be? What sort of
country do we want to leave behind for future generations? These
questions all involve one of the most fundamental ideas of India—the
nationalism we inherited at birth. It is also one of the most hotly
contested ideas of the twenty-first century.
In On Nationalism, Sadanand
Menon, Romila Thapar and A.G. Noorani – some of India’s finest
thinkers and writers – provide calm, measured insights into the origins,
nature, practice and future of Indian nationalism. Excerpted below are
sections from Menon’s essay, ‘From National Culture to Cultural
Nationalism’.
Ideas
of cultural nationalism emerged hand in hand with late
nineteenth-century ideas of nationhood itself. Nationalist leaders like
Tilak worked on constructing the idea of a glorious and ancient Indian
past, heavily inflected with Hindu symbology, as a strategy to fight the
imperialist. This was one of the ways in which the national movement
hoped to forge a common Indian identity based on a glorious past
(composed in equal parts of myth, legend and select incorporations of
historical facts). The idea of the past that the national struggle
sought to create in its early days was one of a pre-historic India of
mythic origins that was divine, pure, monolithic and untainted by any
polluting ‘external’ influence. This itself was a myth, for the
subcontinent has been host to an unending procession of cultures and
claimants who have tromped through it over at least three millennia. Yet
the attempt was to make culture the sole base for the formation of the
independent nation. Inevitably, because of the majoritarian Hindu
population and the national leadership that represented them, this
notion of the past that was more or less upper caste and Hindu became
conflated and interchangeable with the idea of the new emerging nation
in the minds of most of those involved in the independence movement. In
some cases, this was deliberate, in others it was inadvertent. The
prototype of how cultural nationalism came to be constructed here can be
divided into a few distinct phases.
The
first phase is what would be best described as incipient nationalism.
It begins with the early impulse to shape the country’s cultural
identity by reforming Hinduism itself. English educated,
upper-class/caste Indians of the period begin to take to heart the
critique as well as construction of Hindu society by ‘well-meaning’
Western scholars. Customs considered ‘barbaric’ like child marriages,
the practice of sati, the isolation of widows, the dedication of women
to temples as ‘devadasis’, caste discrimination are all seen as
retrograde and deplorable. Reformists like Raja Ram Mohan Roy emerge in
the early part of the nineteenth century to campaign actively against
such ‘evils’ and set the house in order. The setting up of the Brahmo
Samaj is clearly an early step in articulating a self-conscious new
nationalism. It gets further articulated by more aggressive reformers
later in the century like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar and Jyotiba Phule.
Swami Dayanand Saraswati sets up the Arya Samaj, which simultaneously
calls for reform within the Hindu religion and builds defences against
erosion by other religions through elaborate rituals of purity and
restitution. The frenzied ‘ghar wapsi’ of today is not all that original
an idea. Here the Vedas are considered to be the foundation of Indian
nationalism. Hindu tradition is invoked for claiming cultural autonomy,
for critiquing certain social practices, as well as for providing
cultural foundations for assertive nationalism. Mohinder Singh, in
‘Crisis & Critique: Diagnosis of the Present in
Nationalist Discourse in Hindi, 1870–1908’, has made the point that
‘nationalism absorbs traditions superficially; in truth it remains
nationalism’s suppressed other’.
As
A. G. Noorani points out in his essay on the origins of Bharat Mata, a
more militant version of nationalism is provided in 1882 by the
publication of the novel Anandamath by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. This
was to soon assume the proportion of a manifesto for Hindu nationalism,
as Bankim plays with all the tropes of exclusive nationalism— protecting
his nation from any external defilement. His idealized nation is
Anandamath. The deity he worships is an already militarized,
ready-for-battle Krishna who will lead his chosen ones to victory. And,
of course, ‘Vande Mataram’ is the battle cry around which he rouses the
hordes. It is pertinent here to evoke Sudipta Kaviraj’s masterly study,
The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay and the
Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India, where he suggests how
Bankim works around the fantasy of war against ‘outsiders’, which
included the British and the Muslims. He thus provides a powerful
imagery for a future nationalism, which was influential enough to be
celebrated in theatre and cinema over the next seventy years. And ‘Vande
Mataram’ itself (coupled with ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’) emerged as the new
talisman with which to measure not only one’s patriotism but one’s very
nationality. The sheer ecstasy and rapture into which Hindutva hacks
went when A. R. Rahman performed in a virtuoso track of ‘Vande Mataram’
nearly a decade ago was never repeated for any of his other works.
In
1905, coinciding with the partition of Bengal, Abanindranath Tagore
paints an image of ‘Banga Mata’ (Mother Bengal). This was soon to be
recast as ‘Bharat Mata’ (Mother India), which marked one of the earliest
attempts, building on those by Bankim, to cast the nation in the shape
of a benevolent mother. This was still a benign image in the gentle wash
style of the Bengal School, where the image is soft and radiant and
holds promise of bounty, prosperity and benevolence. Subsequently, as
the struggle for independence intensified, so did this image of the
benevolent mother become increasingly ferocious, a cross between a Durga
and a Kali, riding a tiger and fully armed. Bharat Mata took on a
distinctly militant identity that was used to mobilize the Hindu flock,
irrespective of political persuasion.
It
must be said here that ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ is not an attribute of
patriotism, but of deep patriarchy. Extreme mother-love is a camouflage
for extreme misogyny. Over the past few years in India, the nature of
the violence inflicted on women during rapes, riots and caste
retributions is of an order seldom witnessed before in any part of the
world, except perhaps, in Bosnia during the civil war, or in the Congo,
or in Sri Lanka during the final moments of the pogrom against the
civilian Tamil population there. From the barbarity of the jawans of the
Assam Rifles on Manorama Devi, to incessant mass rapes by soldiers
in Kashmir, to the graphic and horrific brutalities (that were
videotaped) on even pregnant women in Gujarat in 2002, to the Nirbhaya
case in Delhi, there is no evidence to prove that devotion towards an
abstract ‘Bharat Mata’ translates into even a semblance of affection or
respect for real flesh and-blood women. Indeed, here it is only
literally the flesh and blood that seems to matter. Add to this the kind
of vile trolling and rank verbal and mental abuse that independent
women activists/writers who stand up for rights and against
bullying—like, say, Kavita Krishnan, Teesta Setalvad, Arundhati Roy,
Shabnam Hashmi, Shehla Rashid, Rana Ayyub and others—are attacked with
indicates a level of morbidity and sexual repression that should be
unsustainable in a democracy. Cultural nationalism can truly be said to
have arrived when this confusion about one’s identity and sexuality
produces a permanent pathology of inadequacy, about which Austrian
psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich has so insightfully written in The Mass
Psychology of Fascism (1993). For Reich, cultural nationalism is the
basic emotional attitude of the suppressed man. He sees the
‘authoritarian family’ as the base of the middle classes, which is held
together with the help of religious fears and rampant mysticism, infused
in turn by sexual guilt embedded in their emotions. Religion, thus,
leads to negation of sexual desire. Sexual disability results
in lowering of self-confidence.
This
is often compensated by the ‘brutalization of sexuality’. The good
doctor was analysing Germany of the 1930s; he might as well have been
putting contemporary India on the couch.
The
quest for a coherent ‘national culture’ during the various phases of a
national movement creates many aberrations that last well into the
post-colonial state. That extraordinary philosopher of anti-colonialism,
Frantz Fanon, has made abundantly clear that, ‘A national culture under
colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought
in systematic fashion.’ Yet, he warns against the pitfalls of such
national consciousness which, he says, ‘instead of being the
all-embracing crystallisation of the innermost hopes of the whole
people, instead of being the immediate and most obvious result of the
mobilization of the people, will be in any case only an empty shell, a
crude and fragile travesty of what it might have been’. It sets up many a
mock battle internally which later goes on to become a vehicle for
mutant forms of cultural nationalism. Often, the agency for this is the
idea of the ‘moral nation’.
The
national movement sets up its legitimacy vis-à-vis the colonial
apparatus as a morally superior idea that is jettisoning all its old
ambiguities and reinventing itself. Such an image is, primarily, a
moral construction, which admits no ‘pollutant’.
Take
the case of Bharatanatyam and how it was adapted in the late
1920s/early 1930s from its earlier version as Sadirattam or Dasiattam,
performed by the socially ostracized community of devadasis (belonging
to the Isai Vellalar caste). It was one of those elements of culture
that was aggressively appropriated and transformed to fit an imagined,
idealized Hindu upper caste cultural identity. When the original dance
form that unabashedly portrayed eroticism and conveyed sensuality
(shringara) transited to the upper class/caste Brahmin community in
cosmopolitan Madras, it also resulted in a bowdlerizing and sanitizing
of the form.
Often
we find that dance forms originating in subaltern classes or
non-dominant communities present a trajectory of upward mobility during
specific phases of nation-building, during which these forms are
fumigated, deodorized, gentrified and de-eroticized. During such
clinical de-sexualization and domestication of the forms as they cross
class/caste boundaries we also find a distinct transformation
in body-usage, as the erotic charge is sublimated within false
religiosity.
In
the case of Bharatanatyam, this led to the rather swift conversion of
the dance form into a platform for entirely mythologised and socially
sanctified content, almost transforming it into a vehicle
for proselytisation. A distinctly Brahminical content for the dance
gained currency as the project for restructuring collective memory was
initiated at the height of the national movement. While myth and memory
conventionally serve to preserve identity and provoke bonding through
the evocation of a shared cultural heritage, these can also be used as
political weapons to impose a hegemonic memorial narrative that seeks to
privilege a narrow vision of specific historical events.
Bharatanatyam
is one among a few cultural objects today, like the Ganesh Utsav or
Raksha Bandhan or the thickening sindoor that women across communities
display or freshly minted greetings like ‘Jai Shri Krishna’ or the
bhajan sandhyas which are being deployed on the side of majoritarian
cultural nationalism.