There are cultural dangers
When one thinks of Hindi films, Nargis, Madhubala, Rekha, Smita Patil and Madhuri, are the stuff of legend, folklore and gossip. Rajini sporting a touch of saffron and Kamal a shade of pink. In that sense, Sridevi and Amitabh Bachchan provided the latitude and longitude of Bollywood.There are often other factors beyond politics. It was not the so-called mystery of her death that intrigued me, but her sense of mystique. In fact, all three anchors of democracy have lost their power or imagination. The third model is film, which provides many of the myths and oppositions that a culture must resolve.
In the popular idiom to say “it is not cricket”, is to metaphorically say one is violating the rules of the game. (Photo: Asian Age/File) The other day a friend asked whether the language and grammar of culture were changing.. In fact, sadly, Kamal and Rajini confirm the break between cinema and real life. Even the search for urban models has come to a standstill. Our present lot is too transient; they lack the stuff of archetype. But their very performance breaks the link between the real and reel politic. Wholesale refillable Lighter Manufacturers The rest had gravitas but Sridevi conveyed the lighter side of the celebration of desire, oozing a sense of invitation but stopping short of seduction, being the hoarding, the poster on the wall and the girl next door. This is why the death of Sridevi, in what was turned by the media into a filmy ending, signalled not just the passing away of a legendary star, but the end of an era. The introductions smelt like a brigade film. The first was cricket, which provided rules of fair play and the exemplars of sportsmanship. There is TV, which has stolen the idea of everydayness from film. Today’s actresses look like fashion models on loan to the film industry. Science provides a generalised model of truth, objectivity, fairness and the need for rituals of experiment to verify facts. One does not have legends today like Mother India and Gabbar Singh. For them film and politics were blends, each resonated the other. At the most it is science fiction, the caricature of a narrative. Film seems to have lost the script of politics or even a feel for it. Sridevi was larger than life and yet so life like. In fact, the death of Sridevi raises many of these questions. Rama Rao or MGR in that position. Yet both offer hope without content, one almost feels that they have been given poor scripts and are stuttering over their lines. Today culture has dullness because our myths have faded. She conveyed a desire for life, going beyond any consumer dream, linking the dreams of the North and South in a way few dared.
There is a missingness of myth in cinema and daily life. Of these three forces, the decline of film as an imagination is what worries one more.Yet they belong to a period that is over. Actors Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan during a meeting in Chennai. They dominated it, defined it and finally transcended it to become a part of folklore, even providing the metaphors for everyday conversations.I was thinking of all this the day Sridevi died.Cricketed is a moneyed enterprise, science has lost its sense of playfulness and has become an extension of industry, and Bollywood has lost its sense of mythmaking. Sadly, today many of these myths do not dominate Bollywood. Modernity has no real myth beyond consumerism.But there is a more tragic problem.It is not just that Bollywood and its variations no longer anchor the stuff of myth, the problem is compounded by the fact that the relation between film and politics, the reciprocity is broken. She embodied more than anyone else a sense of playfulness, a chutzpah, a zest for life. One would never see Jayalalithaa, N. Technology is still not a creative science of myth. Both emphasise a need, a desire for a different definition of the political. A society without myths and modern myths that film produces is able to both hybridise tradition and modernity and make a more pluralistic transition between tradition and modernity. They appear transient. The male characters appear like imitations of the past. If one thinks of Bollywood, one thinks of the opposition between public and private, the rule of law and family loyalty, the contest between urban and rural. We felt that if Sridevi could do that in film, we could perform that in real life. I was watching Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan announce the arrival of their new parties. They are not period pieces but fragments of history. He suggested that three tropes or events anchored the phenomenon of democracy in India. We are trying to survive with fragments of that myth. They are mythical creatures in a way the contemporary stars cannot be. Both seem to be caught in the grid of left and right. The new aspirational India does not have narratives beyond idiot patriotism and a dismal idea of development. They are not the stuff of characters when a great self, an iconic image emerges but a string of selfies, each forgotten and replaced before the next release.Rajini talked of spirituality and Kamal about a new politics. Old people thrive on it and cinema has become more occasional. It is as if nationalist India from 1947 to the beginning of this century had myths in cricket, film and science, but Modiesque India, by messing around with myths, has distorted them. But history has changed.Science provides a generalised model of truth, objectivity, fairness and the need for rituals of experiment to verify facts.
There are cultural dangers here that we must understand. The cricketer not only embodied style and competence, s/he represented the idea of a rule game, of a normative system.She was the last of the legends with Rekha playing an Indian Garbo in retreat. One hopes the real experiments in film will recreate the unconscious such that democracy becomes less coercive and more inventive. Today what haunts domesticity is TV. As a result of the weakening of these three models, democracy itself has become rigid, electoral and empty. Yet one could never dismiss her as lightheaded or lighthearted. People realised that her funeral was also an act of mourning for an age.T.The second of our great models is science. No Amitabh struts on the stage reciting dialogues.
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