NAZI LITERATURES OF KERALA-A FICTION AFTER BOLANO

1.MUZHUPPILANGADU DAMODARAN `DANDICAT’

Born in 1947, he was awarded the matasree award in 1990. In addition to
writing the anthem for spiritual youth, he also has appeared in countless
television news hour debates. He produced poetry of the highest patriotic
spirit in a career spanning over 80 years. For his services to poetry he was
awarded the Dandicat award in 1991. However, his reputation has suffered after
an atempted suicide and self-imposed exile in Japan.

SERGEI GOPALAN THAMPI KIDANGOOR

Born in St.Petersberg to Malayali parents, Thampi pioneered the action poem
in Kerala and established the Sergei Centre for Action Poetry, Also a painter
in his spare time, Thampi mentored artists and poets at the Thampivilasom Aryan
hotel and Monastry in Kidangoor.

BIPASHA PARVEEN `ANANT’

nicknamed `Anant’ for the infinite nature of her repetitive verse, Parveen
brought a new Americanized sensibility to Malayalam fiction

GABRIEL KUNJUNNI `MARQUEZ’

Often called the Gabriel Garcia
Marquez of Kerala, Kunjunni was actively involved in revolutionary struggle to
stop ration shops and ration cards in Kerala. He called the practice
undignified and humiliating.

KADUVAYIL CHEKKUTTI MENON

Menon who hailed from Attingal, disavowed his royal ancestry to join the
Aryan legion of wandering minstrels. His poem `On top of Himalaya -A glimpse’
sold two million copies in Malayalam.

HERMANN RAVINDRAN `SOCRATES’

Ravindran galvanized the
novel-writing scene in Kerala with back to back novels that dealt with the bane
of feminism and identity politics

SCOTT RAMAN NAMPOOTHIRI

Scott Raman who won an ignoble
prize as a scientist for his work on elephant spiritual energy, won the
deshmath Puraskar in 2029

CONRAD THEKKEPPATTU ALBICELESTE

Conrad Thekkeppattu mastered the haiku in Malayalam and established the
Haiku Shala in Irinjalakkuda

JIJU JAMES JORDAN

Jiju James single handedly put the Malayalam flash fiction genre on a global
stage when he unfurled the saffron flag at the NY public library, before being
tasered in the nuts by an angry police woman who had phobia.

JEREMIAH SAHAYAM PURAKKAD

The Purakkad Sahayam school of
truth telling started 1001 Whatsapp groups for the promotion of patriotic
literature. he won the Plato prize from the Maltese government for his efforts.

MULLIGATAWNY MADHAV MENON

Madhav Menon published only one poem in his lifetime. It was immersed along
with his ashes. The poem in digital format was sent as part of the NASA mission
to Jupiter

PRAJNASEELAN PITTSBURG

Prajnaseelan studied Yoga at Princeton before being recruited by the
Guggenheim foundation to promote South Asian writing. he established the
repatriated poetry section at the Tulsi poetry library in Mayur Vihar near
Delhi

ANNIETTA NANDAN-FERRIER

Annietta was born in Indiana before migrating to Kollam with her parents in
2001. She made digital poetry accessible to millions through the development of
the revolutionary technology called portavos ohm. The system has since been
patented.

MOHAN SUNITA LINCOLN-PISHAROTY

Mohan Sunita wrote the first ever
Malayalam space drama which was staged in front of an audience that had
astronaut Niel Armstrong’s son in Kottayam in 1999.

KINDUNA YASH KURIEN

Kinduna migrated from Finland to
Kochi and opened the KYK bookstore near the high Court junction which has since
been accepted as the book store with the best racist literature by UNESCO.

SWATHI SREEKUMAR SWAIN

She specialized solely in epics and has recreated all the epics of the world
in all the languages of the world, a feat that has been recognized by the
Guinness Book of World Records in 2021.

SHANTA MATTELOS

Mattelos after graduating from MG university went to the Harvard on a
fulbright and afterwards started the `green earth and blue water’ movment in
Malayalam poetry.

MOHANDAS VISWAMBARAN-OLDBERG

Viswambaran has 197 novels, 12 short stories and 2 poems to his credit. An
encyclopaedia of Viswambaran studies has been commissioned by the Kendra
Sahitya Akademi in January 2006. It contains two lakh entries based on his
work.

ROBYJOLLY CHALAKKUDI

He invented the moolakartha metre in Malayalam and was instrumental in
making sculpture poetry popular in Malayalam. He started the one sculpture poem
in every house prasthanam, afterwhich the sales of plaster of paris soared. He
also curated the `Literature is a Goddess’ festival at Chalakkudi palace.

HITLERMON KANJIRAPPARA

Hitlermon was born in Haifa to Malayali parents. He started writing at the
age of one and a half years. The Kanjippara juvenilia has been archived by the
US library of congress

SADDAM KUNJU SOOCHIKKUZHI

Saddam was a graduate of the Shaikh Handle School at Oxford where he went on
a Rhodes scholarship, before starting the Malayalam section at the british
Library with a selection from Sanskrit

MIR RAJA KANNU MOSCOW

Raja Kannu established the
Department of Malayalam at the Nalanda University where he led the team of
investigators who found ancient pillars with Malayalam inscriptions, which he
then copied and published to best seller status.

SYED ZEY EL HAWA SOORYAPPEDIA

Hawa Sooryappedia collaborted with leading digital poets of Egypt to create
an Archives of the Ancient Aryan Fairos

POOKKUNJU BEEVI QATAR

Pookkunju Beevi married the scion
of the erstwhile royal family of Luxembourg. She read Manu at her coronation,
which was televised live by Allnet Tv in Kerala.

PRATHAP SETH `MITHAI’

Prathap came to be called `mithai’ for the mellifluousness of his verse. He
purposely shed his Kshatriya lineage and focussed on simpler aspects of life in
his poems.

N. MAYA WILCOX

Maya Wilcox wrote exclusively for
a spiritual crowd who were ready to wait eons for her stories which were
published in all the major Malayalam dailies.

SIVAN NAIYYER THOTTATHIL

He wrote the first serialized prayer in the history of Malayalam
periodicals, which was later published to great acclaim. The only author in
this list to have won awards from all the seven continents

PADMANABHAN NAIR MANHATTAN

His librettos in Malayalam were included as part of the world heritage
project of UNESCO

VASUDEV GAYATRI

He wrote the `memoir of a lamborghini monk’ which sold 5 million copies in
Calicut city alone. He writes critical essays in Malayalam from an underground
cellar in Antartica.

VANDE SIMHAN GETTYSBERG

Vande SImhan has commonly been
acknowledged as the greatest Malayalam poet of the 21st century. He has been
part of the Novel Prize selection committee for the year 2039.

 

THE BEJA HERITAGE OF INDIA : INTERCONNECTIONS IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

“The Beja language is spoken in the eastern part of the Sudan by some 1,100,000 Muslim people, according to the 1998 census. It belongs to the Cushitic family of the Afro-Asiatic genetic stock. It is the sole member of its northern branch, and is so different from other Cushitic languages in many respects and especially as regards to the lexicon, that the American linguist, Robert Hetzron (1980), thought it best to set it apart from Cushitic as an independent branch of Afro-Asiatic’’.

-Martin Vanhove, The Beja Language Today in Sudan

According to Vanhove, the idea put forward by Hetzron, an orientalist did not gain popularity and it was not taken up. So the  new classification of Cushitic as separate was not popular with other scholars of language and linguists. Ironically, another orientalist scholar and  linguist Didier Morin (2001)tried to connect the language of the  Beja and another branch of Cushitic, (Low-Land East Cushitic and in particular Afar and Saho). For Vanhove, these three languages-Beja, Afar, Saho- were sharing the same geographic area and were as a result related to each other.

The Beja language is closely linked to the lifeworld of its people. As a result the orientalist scholars have gone wrong in attributing wrong qualities to it. The link between Beja and the Prakrit language of ancient India is worth pursuing. Such a possibility is ignored by Euro-centric scholars. Such a project linking Beja and Prakrit can potentially enhance links in the global South.

Yemen and India had primordial contacts. The international superhit work by Enseng Ho titled `The Graves of Tarim’ looks at the diasporic migrations whose locus is Southern Yemen, and the region of Hadramawt. Pre-historic migration from Mediterranean areas to Malabar coast and other parts of India is an accepted fact. The work by NC Shyamalan, North Africa to North Malabar: An Ancestral Journey deals with this migration (the author NC Shyamalan also is the father of Hollywood film maker Manoj `Night’ Shyamalan who directed films such as `Sixth Sense’,`Unbreakable’,`Split’ `Glass’ etc. )

Prakrit was a language used in ancient India. It developed between 600 BC and 1000 AD. It was a language of `Middle India’ so to speak. (Later holy literature gave rise to new languages such as Marathi, Bengali, and Malayalam). Prakrit is what can be called a spectrum of dialects. Prakrit is related to Beja as a result of migrations. The society shaped its language. Language also shaped its society. Prakrit can be linked to Sanskrit as well as the Buddhist tradition. It was in use in various places in India such as Maharashtra, Magadha, Avanti etc. The Indian linguist and poet from Kerala VT Kumaran has suggested that the negation in certain Indian languages (`illai’) has Arabic antecedents and that certain Indian diacritical marks might have Semitic origins(VT Kumaran, Collected Essays). The South Indian languages borrowed loan words from Prakrit as well as Sanskrit. Bengali language is also closely linked to Prakrit and Sanskrit.

In the book `Tufhat-ul-Hind’, the grammarian Mirza Khan mentions Prakrit. When it comes to India, the social and people-to-people links are immensely more powerful than orientalist constructions around core linguistic principles. A considerable body of scholarship on Beja exists. But most of these studies unfortunately have not considered the similarities between the Beja and the Prakrit languages. The Beja-Prakrit connection has to be pursued in earnest.

Bhakti movement in Kerala

Poets, singers, and saints from Kerala are conspicuous by their absence from the pantheon of pan-Indian Bhakti. This has more to do with exigencies of national integration than with reality. The 16th-century poet from Malabar, Poonthanam Namboodiri is the poet who is often anthologized as part of Indian poetry, due to the distinctly recognizable hallmark of his Bhakti. Ezhuthachan, the preceptor of Malayalam literature and Cherusseri, a poet of immense lyrical and erotic felicity are often given the short shrift. This paper focuses on these three poets. 

According to PP Narayanan Nambudiri, there was no Bhakti Movement (similar to Northern India) worth speaking of in Kerala and it was rather a Bhakti cult that took root and proliferated in Kerala. Bilvamangalam Swamy wrote the ‘Srikrishna Karnamrtha’ and made the concept of Vishnu as Balakrishna or Unnikrishnan (infant Krishna) a feature of the popular Krishna cult in Kerala, with the Guruvayoor Temple as its center. (Nambudiri, 157) Thus a Bhakti Cult took root in Kerala. The origin of the ‘Bhakti Cult’, Nambudiri traces back to, Mother Goddess and Siva cults of the Indus Valley. The reason for the ‘Bhakti Cult’ of Kerala not being called a ‘movement’ could also be the use of the timid-sounding ‘prasthanam’ (movement) in Malayalam literary history, instead of a more robust word like the Hindi ‘andolan’ with its connotations of social change.

The Bhakti movement of Ramanuja, Nimbarka, Madhava, Ramananda, Vallabhacharya, Chaitanya, Nam Dev, Kabir, and Guru Nanak had very little impact on Kerala…. The problem of reconciliation between Hinduism and Islam also did not arise seriously in Kerala in that period. Contact with outside ceased to exist in the age of Chola imperialistic wars. A line of saints, between 13th c. and 17th c. propagated Krishna Cult. Whether it can be characterised as a Bhakti movement is doubtful. It had no political and social background. Most of these saints were devotees of Srikrishna of Guruvayur. The earliest of them were Bilvamangalam alias Krsna Lilasuka (1251-1350 CE). (Nambudiri, 160)

Bhakti first proliferated in Kerala in the form of folk songs. Songs preceded the development of dialects. In this manner, the folk songs on Bhakti preceded the evolution of Malayalam language. Many of the early folk songs were in praise of various deities. In the ‘pattuprasthanam’ or song movement in Malayalam, songs in praise of Rama and songs in praise of Krishna were the most popular.

Kulasekhara Alvar, the 8^th century Chera ruler and poet of Vaishnava bhakti, composed the ‘Mukundamala’ and ‘Perumal Tirumozhi’ which have been anthologized as part of the Vaishnavite Bhakti canon in the compendium called ‘Nalayira Divya Prabandham’ compiled by Nathamuni between 9^th and 10^th centuries. He is sometimes said to have been born in Kerala, yet the sources point otherwise, as Bharati Jagannathan says, ‘there is an attempt to place Kulasekhara Alvar based on the assumption that he was a crowned King of Kerala. However, our evidence does not permit this confidence as none of the above sites can be reliably placed in Kerala; they seem to be located around Madurai and Uraiyur.’ (Jagannathan, 139)

PP Narayanan Nambudiri says with reference to early Bhakti movement in Southern India that, ‘among the 62 Nayinars and 12 Alwars, Kerala produced only four, three Nayinars and one Alwar, namely Cheraman Perumal Nayinar, Viralminta Nayinar, Arivatta Nayinar, and Kulasekhara Alwar. People worshipped both in Siva and Vishnu temples. Division of brahmins into Saiva and Vaishnava was practically unheard of in Kerala.’ (Nambudiri, 159)

The 12^th century poet Cheeraman who wrote the ‘Ramacharitam’ is among the earliest to attempt literary composition in Malayalam, though it was heavily influenced by Tamil, and also by Sanskrit. Cheeraman is surmised by many to have been a king of the Venad ruling family, and by yet others to have been a commoner from a deprived background. In his work ‘Ramacharitam’, the poet tries to create dharmic awareness through Rama, an incarnation of Vishnu. A segment of Ramayana has been interpreted by Cheeraman supposedly ‘to enlighten those little folks on earth’ by the poet Cheeraman.‘To enlighten those little folks on earth,’ is perhaps Cheeraman’s most popular line and has come to serve as a motto for later writers in Malayalam. 

Ramacharitham: The First Blooming

‘Ramacharitam’ was written in the ‘pattu’ or song format. In fact, the first among the works in the ‘Pattu movement’ in Malayalam was Ramacharitham by Cheeraman. It is often considered the very first work of Malayalam Bhakti movement, which was preceded by the ‘Pattu’ Movement or the ‘pattuprasthana’. It was written in the 12th century, probably in northern Kerala and was based on Valmiki Ramayana and also the ‘Kamba Ramayana’. It only deals with the Yudha Kanda. 

The ‘Ramacharitam’ has 164 segments of 1814 stanzas composed in the ‘pattu’ format.  Though the major focus of the poem is on the valorous ‘Yudha Kanda’ of the Ramayana, Bhakti has also been given importance. Though the intention of the poet is not the propagation of Bhakti, it is beyond doubt that the poet has been influenced by Bhakti. This is a work that also illuminates the veera rasa. Alongside, the poet illustrates various dimensions of Bhakti. Cheeraman’s ‘Ramacharitam’ is an instance of the medieval model of Vaishnavite Bhakti being replicated all over India. Diverging from the source, in the coronation segment, a lengthy panegyric of Vishnu by the sage Narada has been added. The ‘Adityahridaya’ segment of ‘Ramacharitham’ is lengthier than in the original. Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu according to this work. Also can be found in this work is the lamentation of Ravana’s sister Mandodari on his death and also her praise of the incarnation that is Rama. 

Many instances in the poem vouch that the poet was a devotee of Vishnu. Many lines in the poem signify the Vaishnavite predilections of the poet. In the matters of Bhakti, Cheeraman was a precursor to Ezhuthachan. For positing Rama as an incarnation of Vishnu, the poet depended on the Kamba Ramayana. Even while stressing on Veera rasa, the poet also tries to boost Bhakti. ‘O lotus-eyed God,/reposing on the breasts of the flower-born Lakshmi/lovely in her luxuriant flower-decked hair/thous, the essence of serene wisdom,/rarest to be revealed.’ (Cheeraman, 125). The eyes of the Lord Vishnu reposing with his spouse Lakshmi are described anamorphically in the Lacanian sense. According to Žižek, there is an awry gaze that reveals different perspective which doesn’t coincide with the empty serene gaze. The infinitesimal torsion between these two gazes, separates us from psychosis. (Žižek, Looking Awry) The serenity derives from the gaze. He rests on Lakshmi, his spouse’s bosom. There are two kinds of mothers in Indian mythology, according to AK Ramanujan-the tooth mother and the breast mother. The sustainer of the worlds Lord Vishnu, rests on the breasts of his consort goddess Lakshmi.

The breasts are organs of fragility as well as subtlety. Like the male gonads, they occur in pairs and also produce life-sustaining fluid. ‘When Abhirami Bhattar gives us the striking image of the Devi’s breasts searing Shiva’s chest…we are reminded in one stroke that fragility is not without power, subtlety is not without strength.’ (Subramaniam, xxiv) (It has to be noted that it is the gaze that is gendered here and not the body as such).

The ‘Ramacharitam’ of Cheeraman is the first instance of an intense outpouring of literary devotionalism in Malayalam. The language used by Cheeraman is closer to Tamil. He also self-consciously includes a reference to the Tamil Vaishnava poet Nammalvar. ‘May I be blessed with the gift of genius/by Valmiki, the first of poets,/then Vyasa, the good Agastya, scholar in the Vedas,/and the sage who composed honey-sweet verses in Tamil.’ (Subramaniam, xxiv) The sage who composed the mellifluous lines is supposed to have been none other than Nammalvar himself. There existed a loosely held sense of a networked sociality of Bhakti that encompassed multiple voices and beings. A pan-Indian fraternity was being forged to form a ‘commonwealth of love’. (See Hawley, A Storm of Songs)

The book starts with verses praising Vishnu along with Ganapathi, Saraswathi, Siva, Parvathy, Lakshmi. The poet prays to Parameswara to grand him the boon to praise Mahavishnu who incarnated as Rama and defeated Ravana. There is a panegyric that is intense with Bhakti, during the instance where Vibhishana compels Rama to give Sita to Ravana.

Malayalam literary history is replete with ‘movements’ from the ‘pattu’ (song) movement to the bhakti movement. But John Hawley would argue that medieval bhakti was a network rather than a movement (though he might be mistaking the term ‘andolan’ for the English equivalent of ‘movement’). (Hawley, A Storm of Songs, 20)

It is interesting to note that the character of Ravana is given some importance in ‘Ramacharitam’ which essentially is the ‘history of Rama’. The bewailing Mandodari and other women of Ravana’s harem and Lanka are sympathetically presented, thus giving Ravana the aura of being a ‘prajavatsala’ (beloved by subjects) ruler. 

The ten heads appeared as peaks of Mount Meru,

Some of the women caressed one face on their laps,

Some others another face;

They bathed the heroic faces in a flood of tears.

Some fell across and fondled the faces again and again,

Embraced the body bewailing

And went on recounting one by one

His heroic deeds of yesteryears.

They stroked their bedecked breasts and faces,

Fell around him, their melting hearts ablaze,

Started recalling amidst wailing

How he conquered the fourteen worlds,

How in fierce fight the blood of enemy warriors

Adorned the victorious hero’s bosom.

O Lord of Lanka! You shattered enemies as the sun the darkness

You were the source of strength for all;

You were the tree of paradise to solicitous

Who is here to protect us and this orphaned land?

Why did you leave us in desolation?

How could you desert this grand city

And choose the city of the god of death?

Cursed to see your shattered body thus,

Not for a moment more do we wish to breathe on this earth.

Your wealth, palace, wives, worthy sons and army

All destroyed; retribution indeed;

The sages were so distressed.

“Renowned leader of the Rakshasas! Is it that

You marched off with your army to fight the god of death

Leaving your body here?” thus lamented 

The disconsolate ladies. Then came Madodari,

The exquisite beauty, and fell on his chest.

On that body, the embodiment of supreme masculine charm,

Deranged from grief, she fell;

Tears rolling down, screaming, she rolled on the dust,

Embraced his body and wailed,

Thought of her past life with him and wept.

Where have you gone O dauntless one, leaving here your body shattered

Leaving your loved ones, wealth, city, palace and friends,

Leaving all of us in the never-ending misery caused by war,

Where have you gone, O enemy of the gods? (Cheeraman, 128-130).

There are no forces of light and darkness engaged in combat here. There are no twin perspectives. There is only the one perspective and what eludes it, separated from itself by the parallax gap. The crux of ‘Ramacharitam’ is that the divine aura of Vishnu, the prime deity of Bhakti, encompasses all its protagonists and not just the Vishnu incarnate, Lord Rama. It imbues Ravana too. There is no dichotomous antagonism between good and evil. There is no neutral third ground, the big Other, from where Ravana is castigated. This non-duality was the inception of Bhakti, its birth-pangs. (Later poets won’t be so lachrymose at Ravana’s annihilation, Mandodari’s violation, etc.) This inchoateness of literary inception, together with historical circumstances, political exigencies of being Dravidian and the stagnant literary currents of linguistic evolution must have prevented Cheeraman from forging with any degree of coherence, a distinct literary character for Kerala in the early 12^th c. CE itself. That lot fell on another genius, Thunchathu Ezhuthachan. But the continuity had been set. 

Classicism and the origins of caste

The cultural ecosystem in southern India, has been at the forefront of heralding an Indic future, from APJ Abdul Kalam on the Veena to TM Krishna performing live at the beaches of Kerala and TN, the southern matrices of intermeshed artistic borrowings have helped create a superstructural buklwark. This is supposed to keep alive the notion of an unending, continuous tradition whose flame has to be preserved at any cost for sustenance of tolerant notions of the Upanisadic ‘Vasudaiva Kudumakom’ as well as some sort of Harappan humanism.

The concept of ‘invention of tradition’ as propounded by Eric Hobsbawm and articulated in the modern revivalist efforts to claim an ‘in order to have been’ future anterior temporal status for South Indian cultural (Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Kutiyattom, Carnatic music) , political (Tamil Cinema, Dravidian rhetoric), aesthetic (Akam-Puram classifications of Sangham literature) and linguistic forms (Malayalam as classical language) forms the locus of this study. How much of the de facto classical in modern south India, such as the classical status of Malayalam and its cultural ecosystem comprising Kathakali, Kutiyattom, Mohiniyattom etc, is classical at least in a Foucauldian sense, stamps of credibility from global arbiters such as UNESCO notwithstanding?

Humans as organic living forms have multiple existences, many of them are performative, so much so that a ‘performative turn’ is in the offing in theatre studies, just as biennale installations have gradually come to displace the conventional Ravi Varma painting from the gallery spacae. Martial art forms such as Kalarippayattu, shorn of their Buddhist loci of ‘attention as consciousness’ (Ganeri, 2018) are reduced to parlour tricks. Puritans of classicism and sticklers for taste find no harm in such appropriation.

The elite performing arts of Kerala are now coming into prominence with liberals of all stripes and persuasions taking up the cause of artistic freedom and sensibility. But Thiruvananthapuram or Chennai of 2020 is a far cry from the Paris of 1968. ‘Freedom’ is just a seven letter word, in performance and elsewhere. Its organic moorings are but fallacious. Just as Bhakti served the cause of revivalism during the theoretical turn in critical theory, despite protestations to the contrary arising from heralders of a renaissance, Classical ritual dance forms have come to represent the performative Indian tradition in the 21st century. The reification of older folk practices and popular forms and their calcification in certain theoretical regimes such as ‘rasa’, become fetishized in their very enunciation. Commentators such as Sunil P Ilayidom are minutely conscious of the constructed nature of India’s classical heritage, post-independence.

A formal aesthetic understanding of the classical in South India, as demanded by scholarly elicitations for rigor such as in the oeuvre of Sanskritists from Kunjunni Raja to C. Rajendran, constitute the blind spot in academic understanding of Durkheimian social facts. The Roger Casement-like figure exposed the brutalities of the early modern feudal paddy regime in Kerala and elsewhere in Southern India. Impalations were accepted as forms of punitive justice. The performative regime revealed the grotesquery of this feudal power. The past, and its cultural manifestations, cannot be retrieved without acknowledging that. The pre-modern penal regimes that exacted a horrible toll in terms of sexist retribution, spectacular humiliation and pain in the form of impalations, public pillorying etc are post factually invested with a certain romantic aura of aesthetic and cultural sensibility that serves to wash off the recrudescence of cyclical caste formations throughout the ages.

As that great contemporary inheritor of classical Keralan sensibilities, Arundhati Roy says in her book ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, ”normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence’ (Roy, 2017). The grotesquery of violence animates not just the Sanskritic pseudo dance forms such as Kathakali and Kutiyattom, but also the present day performance installations like Kalarippayattu. (The antedecents of Eastern and South East Asian martial art forms is fabulously traced back to a Malayali genealogical progenitor in many fallacious narratives, that strive to displace Buddhist-Shintoist narratives with a Vedic one. The same is applicable to Aryanisation of Ayurveda through the interpellation of the Vedic ascetic Agasthya, thus disinheriting subaltern medicinal knowledge of its originary locus.) In a profoundly Joycean sense, the past is a nightmare that Southern India is still trying to wake from.

TM Krishna, cultural hero of the liberal Malayali elite, is perhaps the most dangerous musician alive in the world. But the quest for justice and egalitarianism via the classical axiom, as explicated in the musical articulations of the likes of TM Krishna, though well-intentioned, poses the danger of foisting the tremendous baggage of another invented tradition, cleverly exploiting the untapped liberal bandwidth for praxis, which is submerged in contemporary thought and cultural theory. Cultural studies theory has to perform certain somersaults and contortions on its passage to Indian shores, from Stuart Hall’s racial cauldron of colonial appropriation, before arriving at the axiomatic Indic narrative-normal of TM Krishna. Hybridity of any form is anathema here. The value most stressed upon is the ‘neutrality’ of the performance. The occidental oblivion of its colonial past is mimicked by the caste orient’s systematic appropriation and annihilation of its subaltern folk cultural superstructure into mediatized classical in the form of Malayalam language, Sanskritic literary ethos and Brahmanical corporeal performative logic. Neutrality here is but another name for confirmation bias.

‘Kutiyatttom’ with its screeching sounds and suppressed eroticism and irreverent humour, with temporal caliberations belongs to the same ecosystem as ‘Theyyam’, the great performative folk ritual of northern Malabar. Though the ‘folkness’ of the folk is often harnessed in the service of social integration, this is conceptually framed to serve a subordinate role to the less egalitarian performative forms of Kathakali and Kutiyattom. William Dalrymple with characteristic pseudo aristocratic flippancy refers in feline terms to the ‘nine lives’ of the Theyyam performer. Theyyam is certainly an older and primordial performative form, whose genealogy can even be traced back to the Neolithic cave etchings of Edakkal caves in Wayanad district of Kerala. Life in its vital organicity is enunciated in myriad forms. The critical organicity, through which multiple perspectives are enunciated in performance is linearized in the hegemonic appropriation of the subaltern by the elite. The invention of the elite tradition is not a value neutral and harmless process, but one which often involves within its intricate meshes the subjugation and suppression of folk religiosities and identities. The flip between the ‘little’ and the ‘great’ (as classified by Robert Redfield) in the Indian context, inevitably stabilizes towards an axiomatic neutral position favouring the ‘great’. The very terminology is problematic here.

The southern caste elite wants to be Aryan and Jew at the same time (a bit like Brevik the Norwegian murderer who for all his antisemitic rants, was a votary for Israel). The desire to be modern while retaining the traditional ‘classical’ valences has a certain aspirational cachet for the elite. This is what is wrong with casteism and multigenesis. Received wisdom conceives monogenesis to be linear. But monogenesis exactly means the other way round. If you have the same source, then you invariably grow in independent, mutually exclusive ways. Semitic Monogenesis, of having a single source, is a very plural concept. Thus the genealogies of semitic kinship are not linear. Thus the classical did not grow into the modern, these are radically different trajectories. Classical is not the gold reserve: bullion for the currency of modernity. The ‘classical’ status of Malayalam as a language is the greatest hoax, based on which the charade of southern classical elitism is foisted.

clementine deliss/homemuseum.net

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Home Museum – a fantastic project, which creates counter narratives and undermines hegemonic archival practice and technology!
From Johanna Theile to Everyone: 05:43 PM
I love you idea I do somenting like also with me chilean students if you intrested in it me mail is jtheile@uchiel.cl
wong me mail is jtheile@uchile.cl
From Celma Costa to Everyone: 05:47 PM
There’s something I’m curious about, and hopefully we can discuss it here in the chat or with the panelists if it gets picked up. When speaking about art and embodiment, since we’re dealing with tangible, palpable bodies (and all the connotations, attitudes and reactions these bodies invoke), do we feel that certain bodies are “more welcome” in this decolonization work? Do we acknowledge how different bodies take space?
From Me to Everyone: 05:47 PM
aboutplacejournal.org/issues/civil-rights/future-past/chandramohan-sathyanathan/
From Anja Soldat to Everyone: 05:49 PM
mic
From Me to Everyone: 05:54 PM
in critical fabulation, metafiction and also in performance art, structuration becomes a major impediment, is there a way to render the structures of consciousness more palpable, like the oracular deities for instance, within the disenchanted space
From Rudi Hart to Everyone: 05:58 PM
Even before covid those with disabilities were still not as welcome in museums and galleries. Especially for those with special needs who can not cope or don not cope well with the visual and audio overload.
From Celma Costa to Everyone: 06:01 PM
I wanted to go back some of what Patricia shared about her practice and performance: the collection of old history books and their mutilation. Visually, I am certain this is quite shocking, captivating, and a great prompt for a much needed conversation. Still, I wonder, if this could also be seen as a repetition or a reproduction of the “colonial” methodology we want to challenge. This is what “they” did to “us”; so wouldn’t it be decolonial of us to do things differently? Perhaps to carve a new understanding, and space, for “history”?
From Anja Soldat to Everyone: 06:08 PM
thank you all, that was very insightful and inspiring
From Helene Vollgraaff to Everyone: 06:08 PM
Thank you everybody for your contributions. Much food for thought
From Danielle Hyde to Everyone: 06:09 PM
Miigwetch, thank you.
From Rudi Hart to Everyone: 06:09 PM
Thank you for such a good discussion
From Danielle Hyde to Everyone: 06:09 PM
Sorry to be off topic. Does anyone know if these sessions will be available to view later?

BREXIT AND CAA: INDIA AS PHANTOMLIMB OF THE COMMONWEALTH BY UMAR NIZARUDEEN

 

The timing of Brexit in the United Kingdom and the CAA in India is uncanny. Both have been perfectly choreographed to a summit in a unified crescendo. The phantom limb has been acting up. India, the erstwhile jewel in the crown experiences palpitations that resonate with the hearbeats of the imperial locus, even before the hasty Brexit was a twinkle in Boris Johnson’s eye. In 1957, there even existed a plan G to include other European nations within the fold of the Commonwealth. With the EU in decline following the Greek debacle etc, the Commonwealth is supposed to be on the ascendant.

With the collapse of Soviet Marxism, the only remaining activation of Indian imperial roots lie entangled with the imperial centre in London. (The local lore was that Indian comrades unfurled their umbrellas when it rained in the USSR). India continues not just as the servile-in-chief protagonist in the Commonwealth on Nations, but also draws feudal pride and prestige in the global arena of once having been at the heart of global European expansionism, and contributor to the imperial war chest as well as the imperial war efforts, including WWI and WWII. The partition of the imperial core from the maternal body of Europe, in the form of Brexit, can have far reaching repercussions and the citizenship amendment act (CAA) is just such an instance of the stigmata bleeding.

Stigmata, the figure of the bleeding Christ King is Christendom’s closest analogue to a tantric counterpart. The stigmata of partition are still alive in the Indian subcontinent. The mirror neurons of the empire have been set to salivate mode by Boris Johnson’s intemperate move to secede from the EU and to sever the United Kingdom’s already tenuous ties with Brussels bureaucracy. From cricket, to English language to Lutyens Delhi, the anglophone influence on contemporary India has been immense to be ignored, recent cynicism and distrust towards the latter category notwithstanding. A nostalgia for the non-aligned days (of NAM ) when the bipartisan politics of Nehru-Nasser-Tito wielded power incommensurate to their respective military muscle vis-à-vis Suez Canal nationalisation etc, prowls beyond the Romantic utopia of the erstwhile Soviet Russia (despite Putin’s heavyweight antics), and attempts to land on the shores of cool Brittania, to climb the stalactite cliffs of Dover, crawl across Trafalgar and get in bed with Queen Victoria, a necrophiliac act with negative outcomes. The emergence of the strong state has to be juxtaposed with the digital state, which also is a spectral entity. The ontological status of the state as a postcolonial circumstance espoused by the like of Frantz Fanon is under threat from resurgent imperialism, that peaked with the unprovoked invasion of Iraq in 2003. Neo-imperialism is so pervasive and molecular that an English royal with slightly darker skin tone has had to relinquish her rights to lead a free life.

English language and the linguistic antics that if affords the empire’s `perineum’ (as Ambarish Sattwik posits it) have been at the forefront of the emergence of India in the Information Technology (IT) and Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES). Thus the ties are still live yet raw, despite performing Southern gadflies like Shashi Tharoor venting caste frustration at the imperialists of Niall Ferguson’s ilk and prognosticating the demise of the UK with the Scottish referendum unleashing forces leading to implosion of Anglican Imperium.

The Scottish referendum has set off a series of sympathetic and para-sympathetic movements in Catalonia and elsewhere.  The centripetal forces of capital, religion, history, culture and politics have held the country together. The partition of 1947 remains a festering wound that exacerbates with the polemical rhetoric that follows the course of electoral exigencies. Thus, every election in South Asia leads to an exchange of vitriolic invective across the border, directed at the `enemy’. The role of the British Government in this enterprise of Divide et Imperia has been dubious at best.  The cancer of infinite partitions has been scattered across the globe, from North and South Koreas, Sudan, Indonesia, Balkans, Yemen, Ireland and Sri Lanka. The role of Imperial Britain has always been one of supporting secessionist tendencies in its erstwhile colonies. Even now, the royal crown will not be averse to performing a colonscopy for the benefit of the erstwhile feudatories. The CAA is an act in that direction of gaping and genuflection. It is ultimately a mimetic act of imperial mimicry and can only lead to boosting further the proclivity towards secessionist tendencies.

The sympathetic overtures of the oriental colon towards the imperial core have seldom been sympathetically perceived.

India’s entry into the global regime of Liberalisation-Globalisation -Privatisation (LPG) has divested it of whatever moral worth had been accrued during the freedom movement, Bhakti movement, Gandhism and Indic spiritualism. These gains have been frittered away for the sake of material affluence. The spiritual richness had for long contrasted rather too harshly with the abject material poverty. This has been sought to be reversed. The mimetic recursive partitions of the subcontinent and perpetuation of communal divisions will only serve to further imperial agendas, that have followed a deceptive trajectory of centripetal and centrifugal loops since August 15, 1947. The healing faultlines of the cracked sub continent are once again sought to be reopened, this time by an event such as Brexit, occurring at the erstwhile imperial centre. Despite resurgent hindutva’s attempts to forge ties with Pax Americanum, the umbilical ties with England are too primordial and constitutive to be just wished away. The relative success of the European secular state, collapse of religious monarchy in Nepal and the eviction of royals from the Narayanhity palace and the rise of Sino-US domination are factors that complicate matters.

 

The complex intermeshing of the forces of globalization and Western capital means that, the  exit of Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Balkan workers from the UK following its withdrawal from the EU, is not to be mirrored exactly in the categorisation of citizenship with religious bias. Here the notion of secular polity is at conflict with a religious state. The primordial religiosity of India, has never formed a compact with the Anglican church of England and it is frankly baffled by the secular nature of Brexit. But Brexit’s Indic iteration by default has to take religious colour. Therein lies the long reach of neo-imperialism as it once again throws its jabs and attempts to deliver a knockout punch.

`SUDANI FROM NIGERIA’: SENSITIZING CONCEPTS IN MAINSTREAM INDIAN CINEMA BY UMAR NIZARUDEEN

 

Soccer is a way of life, even more so in the southern Indian state of Kerala. Kerala is a 100% literate state in India that boasts of a high human development index, lower infant mortality rates and universal public health care. This amalgamation of high social indices together with mediocre economic and infrastructural growth has come to be called the `Kerala model of development’. Kerala, which came into existence as one of the constituent states of India, in 1956, democratically elected a communist government in 1957. Even before the formation of the state, the region boasted of a vibrant film industry and a thriving filmic ecosystem, which spoke the local tongue, called Malayalam.

Along with its cinema, communism and soccer-mania distinguish Kerala from other sister states in India, where cricket is the more popular sport. In Kerala (sometimes geographically referred to as Malabar), seven-a-side soccer is popular especially in the summer months, following the harvest when the fields become empty of crops. Many of the stars are from foreign nations, especially from Africa. They are invariably referred to as `Sudanis,’ irrespective of their country of origin. A large section of the state’s demographic work in the west Asian economies, from where they picked up this terminology and carried it back home. Thus, Africa came to be identified with Sudan in the popular Keralan imagination.

In 2018, a movie was released called `Sudani from Nigeria’ (Zakariya Muhammed/Malayalam/124mins), that starred local star Soubin Shahir along with the Nigerian actor, Samuel Abiola Robinson. Robinson starred as the titular Sudani from Nigeria, who plays for a local soccer club and is hurt in an accident. The struggles of Majeed, the manager of the club (played by Soubin Shahir) to help the `Sudani’ recover and return to his home in Nigeria form the rest of the narrative. Lots of domestic family melodrama is also appended to the narrative in order to cater to local filmgoing tastes. Parts of it are feelgood, in the way Indian movies usually are. The movie was released to critical and popular acclaim. It won the award for best feature film in Malayalam in India’s 66^th national film awards. In the Kerala state film awards, Soubin Shahir won the best actor accolade. It also garnered the awards for best screenplay and best debut film director.

Ironically, the producers of the movie (Shyju Khalid and Samir Tahir) had to face allegations of monetary breach of contract from Robinson. The premise of the movie itself was its anti-xenophobic stance. Thus it became a bit counterproductive that the actor who played the titular role was denied recognition as well as reward. The idea of the `sensitizing concept’ comes from sociology, where ethnographers often have their worldviews radically altered by their experiences in the field, as a result of which they enrich existing knowledge.

The problem with a film like `Sudani from Nigeria’ which proclaims itself as an anti-xenophobic film is the utter lack of such sensitizing concepts. It takes itself too lightly. The humungous issues of racist violence and xenophobia are not to be treated silently. The very title is a flippant take on Kerala idiosyncrasies. Africa and its epic narratives are subordinated to the service of humour and the market needs of a third-world developing economy as that of India. Thus the road to hell becomes paved with good intentions.

 

 

WHAT DO THEY KNOW OF KATHAKALI, WHO THEY ONLY KATHAKALI KNOWS?: MISTAKEN MODERNITIES IN KERALA by UMAR NIZARUDEEN

The cultural ecosystem in southern India, has been at the forefront of heralding an Indic future, from APJ Abdul Kalam on the Veena to TM Krishna performing live at the beaches of Kerala and TN, the southern matrices of intermeshed artistic borrowings have helped create a superstructural buklwark. This is supposed to keep alive the notion of an unending, continuous tradition whose flame has to be preserved at any cost for sustenance of tolerant notions of the Upanisadic `Vasudaiva Kudumakom’ as well as some sort of Harappan humanism. The concept of `invention of tradition’ as propounded by Eric Hobsbawm and articulated in the modern revivalist efforts to claim an `in order to have been’ future anterior temporal status for South Indian cultural (Bharatanatyam, Kathakali, Kutiyattom, Carnatic music) , political (Tamil Cinema, Dravidian rhetoric), aesthetic (Akam-Puram classifications of Sangham literature) and linguistic forms (Malayalam as classical language) forms the locus of this study. How much of the de facto classical in modern south India, such as the classical status of Malayalam and its cultural ecosystem comprising Kathakali, Kutiyattom, Mohiniyattom etc, is classical at least in a Foucauldian sense, stamps of credibility from global arbiters such as UNESCO notwithstanding?

Humans as organic living forms have multiple existences, many of them are performative, so much so that a `performative turn’ is in the offing in theatre studies, just as biennale installations have  gradually come to displace the conventional Ravi Varma painting from the gallery spacae. Martial art forms such as Kalarippayattu, shorn of their Buddhist loci of `attention as consciousness’ (Ganeri, 2018) are reduced to parlour tricks. Puritans of classicism and sticklers for taste find no harm in such appropriation.

The elite performing arts of Kerala are now coming into prominence with liberals of all stripes and  persuasions taking up the cause of artistic freedom and sensibility. But Thiruvananthapuram or Chennai of 2020 is a far cry from the Paris of 1968. `Freedom’ is just a seven letter word, in performance and elsewhere. Its organic moorings are but fallacious. Just as Bhakti served the cause of revivalism during the theoretical turn in critical theory, despite protestations to the contrary arising from heralders of a renaissance, Classical ritual dance forms have come to represent the performative Indian tradition in the 21<sup>st</sup> century. The reification of older folk practices and popular forms and their calcification in certain theoretical regimes such as `rasa’, become fetishized in their very enunciation. Commentators such as Sunil P Ilayidom are minutely conscious of the constructed nature of India’s classical heritage, post-independence.

A formal aesthetic understanding of the classical in South India, as demanded by scholarly elicitations for rigor such as in the oeuvre of Sanskritists from Kunjunni Raja to C.Rajendran, constitute the blind spot in academic understanding of Durkheimian social facts. The Roger Casement-like figure exposed the brutalities of the early modern feudal paddy regime in Kerala and elsewhere in Southern India. Impalations were accepted as  forms of punitive justice. The performative regime revealed the grotesquery of this feudal power. The past, and its cultural manifestations, cannot be retrieved without acknowledging that. The pre-modern penal regimes  that exacted a horrible toll in terms of sexist retribution, spectacular humiliation and pain in the form of impalations, public pillorying etc are post factually invested with a certain romantic aura of aesthetic and cultural sensibility that serves to wash off the recrudescence of cyclical caste formations throughout the ages. As that great contemporary inheritor of classical Keralan sensibilities, Arundhati Roy says in her book `The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’, “normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence’ (Roy, 2017). The grotesquery of violence animates not just the Sanskritic pseudo dance forms such as Kathakali and Kutiyattom, but also the present day performance installations like Kalarippayattu. (The antedecents of Eastern and South East Asian martial art forms is fabulously traced back to a Malayali genealogical progenitor in many fallacious narratives, that strive to displace Buddhist-Shintoist narratives with a Vedic one. The same is applicable to Aryanisation of Ayurveda through the interpellation of the Vedic ascetic Agasthya, thus disinheriting subaltern medicinal knowledge of its originary locus.) In a profoundly Joycean sense, the past is a nightmare that Southern India is still trying to wake from.

 

TM Krishna, cultural hero of the liberal Malayali elite, is perhaps the most dangerous musician alive in the world. But the quest for justice and egalitarianism via the classical axiom, as explicated in the musical articulations of the likes of TM Krishna, though well-intentioned, poses the danger of foisting the tremendous baggage of another invented tradition, cleverly exploiting the untapped liberal bandwidth for praxis, which is submerged in contemporary thought and cultural theory. Cultural studies theory has to perform certain somersaults and contortions on its passage to Indian shores, from Stuart Hall’s racial cauldron of colonial appropriation, before arriving at the axiomatic Indic narrative-normal of TM Krishna.  Hybridity of any form is anathema here. The value most stressed upon is the `neutrality’ of the performance. The occidental oblivion of its colonial past is mimicked by the caste orient’s systematic appropriation and annihilation of its subaltern folk cultural superstructure into mediatized classical in the form of Malayalam language, Sanskritic literary ethos and Brahmanical corporeal performative logic. Neutrality here is but another name for confirmation bias.

`Kutiyatttom’ with its screeching sounds and suppressed eroticism and irreverent humour, with temporal caliberations belongs to the same ecosystem as `Theyyam’, the great performative folk ritual of northern Malabar. Though the `folkness’ of the folk is often harnessed in the service of social integration, this is conceptually framed to serve a subordinate role to the less egalitarian performative forms of Kathakali and Kutiyattom. William Dalrymple with characteristic pseudo aristocratic flippancy refers in feline terms to the `nine lives’ of the Theyyam performer. Theyyam is certainly an older and primordial performative form, whose genealogy can even be traced back to the Neolithic cave etchings of Edakkal caves in Wayanad district of Kerala. Life in its vital organicity is enunciated in myriad forms. The critical organicity, through which multiple perspectives are enunciated in performance is linearized in the hegemonic appropriation of the subaltern by the elite. The invention of the elite tradition is not a value neutral and harmless process, but one which often involves within its intricate meshes the subjugation and suppression of folk religiosities and identities. The flip between the `little’ and the `great’ (as classified by Robert Redfield) in the Indian context, inevitably stabilizes towards an axiomatic neutral position favouring the `great’. The very terminology is problematic here.

The southern caste elite wants to be Aryan and Jew at the same time (a bit like Brevik the Norwegian murderer who for all his antisemitic rants, was a votary for Israel). The desire to be modern while retaining the traditional `classical’ valences has a certain aspirational cachet for the elite.  This is what is wrong with casteism and multigenesis. Received wisdom conceives monogenesis to be linear. But monogenesis exactly means the other way round. If you have the same source, then you invariably grow in independent, mutually exclusive ways. Semitic Monogenesis, of having a single source, is a very plural concept. Thus the genealogies of semitic kinship are not linear. Thus the classical did not grow into the modern, these are radically different trajectories. Classical is not the gold reserve; bullion for the currency of modernity. The `classical’ status of Malayalam as a language is the greatest hoax, based on which the charade of southern classical elitism is foisted.

 

YEAR OF THE SNUFF MOVIE

Snuff films: murder on camera for commercial gain. The world’s first conference devoted to the mythology of snuff took place at the University of Bournemouth on a weekend in November 2012, a clear indication of how attitudes have changed in the last two decades: the organizers and a number of the delegates had arrived in academia on the back of fan interests.

-Kerekes, David. ‘A Culture of Change’

Attitudes change. 2017 was a particularly bad year for Bollywood, by the admission of some of its own leading lights. When the first day collection of a movie came to just around five lakh rupees, the alleged reaction of filmmaker Karan Johar was, ‘how is that even possible?’ as he himself told the audience at Goa’s International Film Festival of India in November, 2017.

2017, a lackluster year for Bollywood also saw the rise of regressive quasi-puranic movies like ‘Rudramadevi’ and ‘Bahubali 2 – the Conclusion’. The mainstream Telugu film industry vies to be the most patriarchal in India (which is saying something), where an accomplished actress like Padmapriya can be slapped by a male filmmaker, and with impunity.

In the guise of moral edification, quasi-puranic movies have demonized indigenous and nomadic peoples. Lyricist and dialogue writer Madhan Karky literally invented a new ‘demon’ language ‘Kilikili’ for the Kalakeyas in the movie ‘Bahuballi’. The profusion of the letter ‘k’ belies the new idiom that these films try to articulate about a no holds barred racist India that is not even apologetic, but rather resolute, with every bit of its ‘touchable’ pride, about flinching away from stark reality of socio-economic disparities. The only real issue is that of H1-B visas.

The sattvik thrills of Puranic entertainment was supplemented in 2017 by the rise of the snuff movie. Each and every mob lynching was recorded by the perpetrators, confident in their righteousness and of their impunity. The logic was that greater the viral-circulation of the lynch-video, greater the humiliation of the victim. And videos did go viral-of a man being set on fire, a girl being abducted from a mud house, railway employees transporting cows getting beaten up till their eyeballs literally popped out of their sockets, of a turbaned man hit on the head with a hammer during a performance, of lovers in various desolate parks getting thrashed till they go went on their knees begging for ‘forgiveness’. All of them were watched millions of times, alone or in company, and often with glee, or anger, or pain and sorrow, amidst tears or laughter, and carefully stashed away in the archive of karma, to be retrieved at some later point and to be savored with pleasure. The scatological movie has meanwhile gone mainstream, in ‘Toilet-Ek Prem Katha’ but crucially without the humour that makes them palatable otherwise.

Like Ziauddin Sardar who says about the Islamic whipping of the adulterous after the implementation of the Hudood ordinance in Pakistan, that though he was revolted by the idea of it, he always had wanted to witness one, so does the snuff movie interpellate everyone into its sphere of violent spectatorship. Everyone wants to see it, at least indirectly, for indignation’s sake.

Whether one’s response is “when will I see it?” or “what have I just seen?,” viewing snuff is characterized by a looking forward that constantly evokes a looking back. The appropriate grammatical tense for snuff ‘s temporal tension, then, is the future perfect, or the present expectation of a future in which “I will have seen” something whose shocking, titillating, disgusting or disturbing impact may, in retrospect, turn out to have been transformative. This shock that I anticipate having already experienced means that the compelling persistence of the snuff film, its refusal to fade away despite lack of any evidence for its actual existence, must be addressed in terms of the temporal cadences of its affective reality rather than simply its evidentiary basis. The mythology of snuff thus stretches beyond catalogs of disturbing realism to its promise of affective entry into a backward-looking future of the viewing subject: what will I be once I become the person who has seen “it”?

-Kavka, Misha. ‘The Affective Reality of Snuff’

In India, the future perfect tense of ‘I will have seen’ is commingled with the future anterior, ‘in order to have been,’ where, you posit a glorious Aryan pastoralist past for yourself. Since you have given up on the future, attempts at changing the past have become the dominant narrative. The snuff movie has a dark history going all the way back to the Nazi-era Holocaust.

India doesn’t have a national cinema, and hence nationalism and the national anthem waft alongside cheesy popcorn aromas in cinema halls. The rise of the cow-snuff video makes up for such lacunae since the time when Phalke made a mythical movie about an honest king-‘Raja Harishchandra’. Cow-snuff movies reflect the logic of a new digital India, where formalization of the economy and muscular monetary discipline go alongside the slow demise of modern carceral discipline which has lost its way into the dreary desert sands of puranic anarchy. The caste-human with every bit of his ‘touchable pride’ gradually comes to replace that other great invention of Western enlightenment-the rational human. The carceral regime has been replaced by a different regime of visibility. What porn did for gender, snuff is supposed to do for race. And from Rodney King to Mohammed Afrazul, witness videos have altered in nature.

Rusche and Kirchheimer relate the different systems of punishment with the systems of production within which they operate: thus, in a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional labour force — and to constitute a body of ‘civil’ slaves in addition to those provided by war or trading; with feudalism, at a time when money and production were still at an early stage of development, we find a sudden increase in corporal punishments — the body being in most cases the only property accessible; the penitentiary (the Hopital General, the Spinhuis or the Rasphuis), forced labour and the prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. But the industrial system requires a free market in labour and, in the nineteenth century, the role of forced labour in the mechanisms of punishment diminishes accordingly and ‘corrective’ detention takes its place.

― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

The snuff filmmaker, with the phallic camera, is the new hero. He/she (sometimes just a child told to hold a camera) is an icon in the pantheon alongside Savarkar.

Neil Jackson outlines the emergence of the snuff filmmaker as a key icon within American realist horror texts of the 1970s and 1980s. Set apart from the now common motif of sex murderer/serial killer who ritually shoots murder as part of their activities, Jackson argues that the representation of the snuff “auteur” allows for a reflexive interrogation of the extremes (and limitations) of the phallocentric tendencies of the horror film.

-Jackson, Neil. ‘Shot, Cut and Slaughtered’

We are all fans of the snuff movie. We have all taken the snuff. We are all waiting for the sneeze.

Dionysian Masculinity as the Locus of Marxism in Kerala

The Kerala People’s Arts Club (KPAC) has been at the forefront of the propagation of Marxist ideals in Kerala since its inception. This has taken the form of polemical plays such as Thoppil Bhasi’s `Ningal Enne Communistaakki’ (You Made me into a Communist) which later invited the reposte `Ningal Aare Communistaakki’ (Whom did you make a Communist) from Civic Chandran. Centered around the industrial belt of Alappuzha, once called the `Venice of the East’ the KPAC has been instrumental in creating a popular upsurge in favour of the mainstream communist party in Kerala in the wake of the `Punnapra Vayalar’ revolt where the republican peasants fought off feudal landlords and religious henchmen. This would later become legendary lore, in such a way that actors such as Lalitha still attach the moniker KPAC to their names.

The subaltern masses of Central Travancore from where the KPAC originates had artforms such as `patayani’ which celebrated arboreal deities such as `chathan’, `marutha’, `isakki’, `chudalamadan’ etc. It is by demolishing these subaltern deites and invoking Brahminical Aryan deities that the much celebrated `Kerala model of enlightenment’ took shape. Sabarimala, an arboreal shrine is still in the eye of a storm.

The assembly of audience for such events as `patayani’ was transformed into a theatrical gathering and harnessed to the purpose of propagating Marxist-Leninist values of the KPAC. The primordial energies of a Saivaite Bhakti realm were tapped into inducing a `theatromania’ for the Dionysian God (Kulasekhara Alvar, an erstwhile ruler of Kerala, was one of the major figures of South Indian Bhakti tradition ). The theatre became thus the site not just of visibility, but also of transformation of the liturgical crowd. The individual was raised to the status of the `comrade’ through this liturgical process of the theatre.

The Dionysian hypermasculine realm thus established, became the a priori basis for the establishment of a modern, secular democratic communist regime in Kerala in 1956, under the leadership of EMS Namboodiripad. (The EMS Government was thrown out by the Centre’s use of Article 356, following statewide protests and violence orchestrated by the upper class feudal lords). Without this Dionysian upsurge, the powers of the erstwhile Brahminical forces would have been rendered obsolete. (These hypermasculine energies would later be tapped by the Malayalam film industry, which too had a studio system such as `Udaya’ surrounding business barons in the same  Central Travancore belt). The apocryphal tale of Parasurama throwing his axe and thus forming Kerala, found a place in history textbooks. History was much used as well as abused, unlike the Hindi heartland, where historical uncertainties and alternative trajectories were tolerated, Kerala History came to acquire the lapidary crafting of a blinkered academic edifice.

The theatre became a democratic arena where age-old prejudices were laid to rest. The gound work had already been laid by stalwarts like Sahodaran Ayyappan, who organized mixed dining for all castes, and a new generation emeged imbibing these nutrients of reform and enlightenment. Theatre thus attained an aura of ritual purity. In this arena of affect, historical injustices were overcome. Theatre emerged as a site of debate and this later passed onto open fora in the numerous film festivals in the state, which had to be wound up owing to the excessive contestations involved therein. Paradoxically, this liturgical sovereignity that was passed onto the now literate masses would prop up an elite  Brahminical establishment. Women were often part of the plays enacted as figures of revolution and rebellion, but were seldom included in the surging sphere of masculine jouissance surrounding the performance of the play itself. The sublatern classes were the main performers of `Patayani’. The topology of the caste edifice was transformed, but its deep structure was left intact.

The enlightenment in Kerala did not have an aesthetic locus. It was arid and linear sans visual and auditory coordinates. To this day the aesthetic realm in Kerala remains infertile in imagination despite the much hyped Biennale. Women and sublaterns were excluded from the liturgical threshold, which became a hypermasculine preserve. The ecosystem surrounding `Patayani’ (with female and Muslim valences) and its performative sensorial community were eradicated. The trancendental and earthly-immanent qualities of the politico-spiritual complex were channelised into the formation of ultra masculine revolutionary stereotypes. The Christian church with its confessional technologies remained inviolate. The KTM Theatre in Thrissur where the much hyped ITFoK (International Theatre Festival of Kerala) is held every year was named after KT Muhammed, a playwright with Marxist sympathies (Playgoers in their ignorance nowadays call it the Kartika Tirunal Memorial, after an old Travancore royal. Artists and theatre scholars from Kerala would visit IFTR conferences in Belgrade, Serbia of all places without any compunctions regarding Serbia’s recent genocidal past). Those who remained aloof were marked heretics. In the light of the later valorization of masculine hegemonic logic, this historical entanglement in the progressive space has to be critically examined.