Soul bargain

While talking to a friend about Narayan Surve's death, I was interrupted by her sudden surprise -- I didn't know he died, she said!

While talking to a friend about Narayan Surve's death, I was interrupted by her sudden surprise -- "I didn't know he died," she said! It was in the paper, of course, but it was easy to miss. Days earlier, discussing Ravi Vaswani, a young person asked innocently, "Who's that?" Similar conversations occurred when Vijay Tendulkar and Habib Tanvir died. Sometimes, people didn't know who these cultural greats were, sometimes it hadn't taken up enough media space for them to notice.

As a young person, I was, as American film critic Pauline Kael described herself, a champion of trash. Not that I didn't love poetry, art cinema, classical music or the refined arts. But I chafed against the rigid, elitist classification that only certain types of work merited serious consideration and could be called 'culture'.

I felt irritated at the unimaginative orthodoxy in which all things popular were 'mass culture', which automatically meant crude and worthless. I was annoyed by the gooey, unquestioning herd mentality that allowed no criticism of Pink Floyd or Bob Dylan. I felt impatient at those who never looked outside the prescribed syllabus of supposedly good art and dismissed whatever was not in that syllabus.

I confess my protest was not dignified: making vomiting noises about great films, I have since come to love or loudly praising utterly ho-hum, unfunny films like Ramgarh ke Sholay as masterpieces of post-modern wit. My excuse must be that I was young.

But like many others, I was trying to find some way of understanding culture in a revitalized way that felt relevant to the world around me. We championed kitsch and popular culture not because we didn't understand art, but because we cared about it. It was a way of saying, that good art cannot be defined only by the form (folk-jazz fusion, 'realistic' cinema, street theatre), or the artist's identity (woman, tribal, so-and-so's nephew), nor from issues it takes up (communalism, gender, peace). Rather, each work must be evaluated in terms of its artistry and innovation, and its spirit, resonance, intellectual vitality, insight. We might find this in unexpected places, not in expected places.

Illustrations / Jishu Dev Malakar

Without this discussion (sans vomiting noises), we cannot hope for a rich independent contemporary culture.

The heart of the idea is: we must refine our judgement - not go by someone else's edict, ideology or marketing alone.

But I sadly find myself echoing Pauline Kael again, when years later she said: "When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture."

How else can the death of someone like Narayan Surve, who represented political passion, artistic excellence and a chronicle of the city's working class, merit a dutiful but perfunctory obit in the inside pages, while we exclaim at Salman Khan's parking problems and Vivek Oberoi's arranged marriage? Surve went from mill worker to beloved poet by writing about the life he saw around him in Bombay's working class heart -- not the list of treacly topics other people then thought worthy of poetry. We need the independent and intelligent values Surve or Vaswani, Tendulkar and Tanvir stood for -- along with other stuff we enjoy. Or can we not celebrate these values unless Aamir Khan endorses them with his discerning support?

Poetry, stories, music, art are special because they mirror our souls. Can we completely give away our judgment of what represents a part of ourselves to other people -- just because they are culturati in Delhi or glitterati in Bombay? It's one thing to sell one's soul, but to give it away like that doesn't seem like a great bargain.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, teacher and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. She runs Devi Pictures production company. Reach her at https://www.parodevi.com/

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