| November 20, 2008 | Thursday | Ziqa'ad 21, 2008 |
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A world beyond Bhadbhada
SADDA Mian, scion of the erstwhile royal family of Bhopal, had believed that the Bhadbhada lake, which decorated the city’s perimeter, was the world’s biggest water reservoir until one day movie actor Dilip Kumar impishly escorted him to Bombay’s Marine Drive.
“He gazed and gazed at the Arabian Sea, hands on hips, his stout Pathan heart leaping with excitement inside the loosely buttoned sherwani,” the actor recalled to me years later. After a deafening long pause Sadda Mian gathered his wits. Then he muttered almost inaudibly: “Kya haqeeqat hai Bhadbhadey ki!” (Does the Bhadbhada stand a chance?)
Modern transport and television had raised hopes of disabusing man of the Sadda Mian syndrome, commonly known as frog-in-the-well worldview. Live images of an earthling landing on the moon, even though TV had not arrived in much of South Asia yet, did shake many a conceited believer from their stupor. Fortunately the days of the Inquisition were over though there were feeble protests at a mere man’s travesty of revered creationist beliefs. The mullahs rubbed their eyes with disbelief and insisted that no human was authorised or even equipped to perform the feat. But soon they stopped grumbling.
The spectacle of Nadia Comaneci’s score of perfect 10s at the 1976 Olympics put a lump in our collective throat just as Bob Beamon’s ‘jump to eternity’ in Mexico stretched the scope of human possibilities beyond reasonable belief. The only athlete we had heard of in India till then was Milkha Singh. However, technology could only do that much and no more.
The quest for the spectacular lay dormant within us but it would require an open mind and willingness to seek it. Mirza Ghalib wrote 150 years ago:
Hasad se dil agar afsurdaa hai, garme tamaasha ho
To chashm-i-tang shaayad kasrat-i-nazaara se wa ho
(Should you need an antidote to everyday ennui
Open your eyes to the mountains, the forest glades, the sea)
Closed minds conjure disastrous images. I wouldn’t be surprised if my Pakistani cousins thought Hindus had horns and canines before Atal Behari Vajpayee arrived in Karachi with a pack of Indian journalists in 1978. It took ridiculously long for a few Pakistanis I know to accept that Hindus were genial people. Indian cricket fans were similarly disabused of their well-honed prejudices when Lahore’s cabbies, food vendors and hotel receptionists feted them lavishly.
I took a young daughter of an English friend last week to a performance by the famous Russian mime artists Valeri and Gleb. Given the history of Britain’s Russo-phobia, it could almost have amounted to taking James Bond to watch a KGB rival perform on stage where an inflection of the iris could be construed as insidious enemy action. The first question my guest asked was why there were so many Russians in the auditorium and therefore in Delhi. Happily her subtly ingrained, almost imperceptible, caution about Russians waned as soon as the mime stars came on stage. Their wicked humour could match each twitch of Mr Bean’s facial muscles.
The entrancing opening scene with two figures clad only in tight-fitting black body stockings was eerily androgynous. I, for one, had not seen someone stretching his or her mouth from the chin to the temple and from ear to ear, literally, with such terrific ease. A risqué interpretation of Adam and Eve flirting in the Garden of Eden had my guest in splits. Moreover, unlike anything in London, the show was free. And yet the auditorium was largely empty. Part of the explanation lay in the fact that India’s middle classes have become couch potatoes. While television had its potential to inform and entertain and to transport it patrons to the far corners of the world, it’s been largely subverted to become something of a money-spinning inanity. Indians partake of it copiously.
With so much religion and socially regressive themes belted out ad nauseum on almost every channel, it is not difficult to understand that Indians are becoming lulled into accepting mediocrity as their best bet. How else could we explain the news: “Millions of housewives are in depression and it has nothing to do with cost cutting, inflation or the state of the husband’s bank balance but the ongoing TV industry strike that has robbed them of their daily entertainment watching saas bahu serials.”
The report masked a confession: “The serial killer means that they are now forced to watch reruns which could be a permanent punishment since the TRP’s of earlier episodes are actually higher than the latest ones.” It seems the Federation of Western India Cine Workers, which plays a pivotal role in helping craft the daily tripe, has gone on strike, demanding better wages and working conditions. Faced with a gathering economic recession, the Association of Motion Picture & TV Programme Producers didn’t look interested. Whatever the outcome, millions of viewers are already trapped in the addictive Bhadbhada they dug for themselves.
In far away Chennai, some of the country’s best exponents of visual arts and music were putting their heads together to figure out the mess. N. Murali, managing director of India’s liberal newspaper The Hindu, called the meeting. The worried maestros included Carnatic singer Neyveli Santhanagopalan, santoor maestro Pandit Shivkumar Sharma, violinist R.K. Shriramkumar, film-maker Mani Kaul and Kalakshetra dance school director Leela Samson.
It was Murli who posed the problem: “Does serious art, whether music, dance, cinema or theatre, have to compromise on quality to reach out, to become popular? Does the dissemination of art also inevitably trigger a downslide in standards? Or is it possible to share the best without attrition in quality?”
The answer of course was implicit in the quality of middle classes India’s newfound prosperity has thrown up. But there is the other side of the argument. Why wouldn’t, say, Leela Samson, a veteran dancer-turned-guru of classical Odissi and Bharat Natyam, visit a performance by Valeri and Gleb? She could be certain of learning a thing or two of Bhaav and Mudra — key elements in Indian dance that deal with expressing a theme or a feeling silently — from the mime artists? Why don’t we see our musicians in the front rows of concerts staged by the amazingly talented international artistes we keep having over from all parts of the world, from Japan to Central Asia and Europe and beyond? Why must we continue to wallow in our cultural Bhadbhada?
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
