What is Alternative Cinema Alternative To?

Disenfranchised Community and Indian Cinema

Ashwin Kumar A P

Assistant Professor, Department of Studies and Research in English,

Tumkur University, Tumkur

Our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.

This, my friends, is the crux of our solitude.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Nobel Lecture, 8 December, 1982

Case 1: Hollywood: James Bond

Our precarious world is built on certain values viz., democracy, rationalism, individuality and

above all freedom. (Oh yes, laissez-faire trade, if you want to add another ingredient to the

soup bowl; of course). Forces which attempt to thwart these values exist both inside and

outside our world. They believe in values which are diametrically opposite to ours. The

greatest (and sexiest) men of our civilization have a calling: to re-establish the sanctity and

strength of our values. Sometimes the demons are outside: class conflict, Commies, Al

Qaeda, maverick gun runners, drug cartels and adulterers. And sometimes, they are inside:

bipolar schizophrenia, existential angst, childhood abuse, moral dilemma, fear of failure,

quest for the absolute and of course, Oedipus complex. A version of this mix will yield Pierce

Borsnan, another will yield Quentin Tarantino. Yet another will give you Ingmar Bergman

and then again Andrei Tarkovsky. Straightforward versions of this mix will give you first-

class contemporary American television – Homeland, One Tree Hill, Breaking Bad.

Case 2: Indian Cinema: Chandavalliya Thota

A community has lived for generations in this village. Our forefathers established our ways

of going about the world. Against wind and rain, death and decay, we have prevailed,

sticking to our ancient gods and rituals. Slowly, all this is breaking down. Farmers are against

each other, brother is against brother. Land is being fragmented, and as if to rub salt into the

wound, its yield has dwindled and the rains have deceived us yet again. The lure of the city

leaves the villages decrepit. Our elders are no more the trustworthy bastions of moral good

that they once used to be. Our individual desires overrun the ways of our community life.

Festivals and stories have all lost their charm. We no more have the resources to contain our

own conflicts, let alone to solve it. Invariably, the modern bureaucratic apparatus intervenes

with its blood-thirsty fingers and a nameless face. Our gods have deserted us and our rituals

sound hollow. Now, one version of this mix will give you Chandavalliya Thota. Another,

Mother India and Ma Bhoomi. Yet another: Pather Panchali and then again, Taayi Saheba.

Of course, keeping it simple will give you the finest of Indian television: Malgudi Days,

Mahabharat, Wagle Ki Duniya.

Introduction: The Predicament of Indian Cinema

What is the most striking feature of this contrastive pair? It seems like the deepest problems

that animate western cinema are that of individuals with beliefs and reasons guiding their

actions. They pursue rational goals and are guided by a stable vision of the world. Crisis

strikes when any one of these elements disintegrates: either the integrity of the person, the

constancy of the vision or the reasonability of their goals. On the contrary, the Indian story

seems to be narrating an antediluvian tale of a people stuck to its old customary ways of

going about their world. More important than the rationality of their pursuits and the presence

of a stable vision, the point seems to be one of a community and its space of settled actions.

No wonder then that Fredric Jameson saw in this the message that third world literatures (and

cinema, by extension) are national allegories (Jameson 1986). Jameson’s point would roughly

imply the following: while western art is defined by deep metaphysical quests of individuals,

non-western art is defined by the story of communities negotiating their incomplete entry into

modernity as a people. Much water has flowed under the bridge after Jameson’s comment.

He has been vindicated and chastised in turn by some leading intellectuals on both sides of

the racial and colonial divide. It may be inane to open that file all over again. But something

in Jameson’s point cut us fellow-postcolonials to the quick. With the privilege of hindsight,

we could ask if there was a deeper point, probably unbeknownst to the author himself lurking

in all that. Did the western critic sense a fundamental difference in the way art functioned in

two cultures but did not have a framework to articulate it adequately? I think that is indeed

the case. But to appreciate the difference, we need to go much deeper into the recesses of

western history and culture and reconstruct some fundamental issues therein.

In the abovementioned cases, I have deliberately desisted from keeping good cinema apart

from bad cinema and art-house cinema apart from commercial cinema. Some may also

question the scope of my coverage: ‘Indian cinema without Guru Dutt or Amitabh or

Adoor?’; ‘Western cinema without Hitchcock or Chaplin or Woody Allen?’ Yet others may

point to contradictory examples within each of these cinematic traditions. The point,

however, is not to show the different shades within Indian cinema or within Western cinema.

The point is to show a fundamental difference-type between Western art and Indian art using

the example of cinema. Some of my examples are really third-rate melodramatic kitsch: like

the Bond series on the Western side and Chandavalliya Thota on the Indian side. And some

are arguably the finest masterpieces of cinematic art: The Seventh Seal on the Western side

and Taayi Saheba on the Indian side. But all these aesthetic judgments are subject to severe

scrutiny, criticism and reversal; at any rate immaterial to the point of this paper. What

matters, however, is that, underlying all this is an essential predicament of modern Indian

experience which Indian cinema attempts to capture using tools and resources which are not

meant for this purpose. In the process, Indian cinema twists realism and realism twists Indian

cinema.

Modern Indian Art and the Problem of Representation:

With this backdrop, we are now prepared to raise our question: What is the relationship

between art which works through predominantly representational forms (novel, cinema and

so on) and an experience which is structured predominantly on reflective forms? The

examples I cited at the very beginning of this essay should make sense by now. The problem

with Chandavalliya Thota or Taayi Saheba is not that they are deviant varieties of the

normative western genre of cinema. The problem is that they are dealing with a community

which experiences a crisis in the ways of going about the world, which is intractable through

realist forms. The crisis does not entail contending narratives; individuals are not necessarily

the primary sites on which such a crisis unfolds; it is perfectly possible that individuals in

these communities have no realisation that such a crisis is haunting them; neither is it the case

that they are pawns in an elaborate conspiracy; there are no straightforward epistemic

contestations involved in this case (for example, the contest cannot be seen as one between

individualism and communitarianism, or between rationalists and intuitionists, the values at

stake are not of pragmatism versus idealism and so on) and above all there are no heroes and

villains in this our story.

This is almost like asking the filmmaker to shoot a movie without actors, characters,

storylines and plots. It is almost like inviting the movie makers to stand up, take a

microphone and lecture to an audience of moviegoers. This is the essential predicament of

Indian cinema. Indian cinema meets a culture which is disenfranchised and this story of

disenfranchisement is the very staple of Indian cinema. However, the nature of

disenfranchisement is such that realist / representational forms fail to bear witness to this

fundamental state of affairs. Mainstream cinema somehow tries to recast this intractable crisis

into standard mythopoetic forms by turning a blind eye to the demands of narrative realism:

good son cop versus bad son drug dealer, cruel husband versus submissive wife, corrupt

politician versus valiant officer, and greedy moneylender versus struggling farmer and so on.

It is important that all these irrealistic and mythopoetic forms employed by the Indian

mainstream cinema are attempts to capture the disenfranchisement of Indian communities

and their collective experience.1 It is equally important that alternative cinema in India is a

struggle to make sense of this disenfranchisement within the strictures of realistic narrative. It

is the mythopoesis of mainstream cinema that alternative cinema is up against. But, the

attempts of alternative cinema increasingly appear like trying to fit a square peg into a round

hole.

Contemporary India and Community Disenfranchisement

Standard postcolonial narratives talk about varieties of disenfranchisement suffered by Indian

communities. However, most of them tend to talk about this disenfranchisement in the

language and resources offered by liberal political theory. So, in talking about the effects of

colonisation we have narratives of disenfranchisement which talk about inadequate

representation in the political realm, the unequal distribution of wealth, the oppressive

regimes of Indian society and statecraft, hegemonic formations of particular caste groups and

religions, the slow eradication of the marginalised from the political concerns of emergent

India and so on. But differently from all this, is a form of disenfranchisement which has only

been fleetingly paid attention to. This is the disenfranchisement of the experiential concepts

of Indian communities. In contemporary India, the easiest and most intuitive way to bring this

predicament into relief is to reflect on the chasm that separates the concepts with which we

constitute our everyday experiences and the concepts with which we describe them.

Communities practice various forms of actions distinguishing between different kinds of

objects, people and places and the proper comportment of each to the other in this triad. In

this, the experience is constituted by using concepts like madi and mylige. But we describe it

by using concepts like discrimination and purity. Our social world is constituted by

obligations and dependencies of various kinds. In this, the experience is constituted by

concepts like dakshine and kaanike. But we describe it using concepts like corruption and

public service. We can develop this list endlessly. But the important point is that the first set

of concepts (the experience-constituting) is never used to describe our experience and the

second set of concepts (the experience-describing) is seldom part of the constitution of our

experience.2 In effect, we seem to be witnessing a peculiar situation where our common

experiences are themselves disenfranchised. This is a veritable loss of concepts which we

experience everyday but can only articulate through a series of proxies. The language of

rights, the language of oppression and hegemony are all such proxies for what is an even

fundamental disenfranchisement of communities: the loss of concepts.3

Indian cinema verily perceives this problem. However, it fails to constitute it into a genuine

experience.

Let me discuss a few examples to illustrate this point: In Ghatashraddha (1977), the viewer,

through the point of view of the protagonist, formulates an evaluative judgment of a small

town Brahmin community. The criticism in rough-and-ready form is that this community has

a wicked practice of ostracising young widows, especially if she has a child out of wedlock.

We know the standard social reform diatribe against such practices and we need not dwell on

that here. However, there is another important angle to the problem which has hardly been

discussed. The problem is this: is the criticism about a specific action of the community? Or

is it about the entire repertoire of actions which defines the community’s social world.4 The

difference would be this: is widow ostracisation a wrong action, a crime, which the

community does not have the resources to deal with (much like drug abuse is a crime which

contemporary society has no resources to deal with)? Or is it a symptom of a social ill that

defines the very existence of the community. That is, are these and such evils non-trivially

related to the continuation of the community? Does this community depend on the

perpetration of such acts for its survival (much like the exploitation of labour is non-trivially

necessary for the hegemony of the capitalist class)?

Here is the double bind that defines modern reformist responses to Indian cultural practices.

The former response (that of seeing widow ostracisation as a crime) under-determines the

criticism. It is inappropriate under normal conditions of reasonableness to indict a community

for a crime. The criticism can only be of an immoral action, and with even a basic

consideration of moral psychology, the criticism can only appear intelligible to members of

the community if and only if they share the same moral framework as the critic. As a

criticism of an immoral action, there is nothing revolutionary about the entire tale. After all,

human beings are capable of moral evaluation and here is one such instance. Note, however,

that this route precludes criticism of the entire repertoire of actions of a community.

The latter response (that of seeing widow-ostracisation as a systemic flaw and constituting

the sustenance of the community itself) over determines the criticism. If the entire community

is to be criticised not for a specific crime but for its ways of going about the world, then,

logically, the members of such a community would be opaque to such a critic. In fact it

would be quite a puzzlement in itself that a member coming from the same community would

even be able to form such a criticism of an entire repertoire of actions which would have

constituted him as an individual. It is possible to be a member of a community (that is, share

the same concept space with a community) and criticise specific actions within a community.

It is, however, impossible to be a member of a community (that is, share the concept space of

a community) and criticise the entire repertoire of actions of a community. That is, the

criticism can be formulated only when the practices of the community are re-described using

concepts which are at variance with the concepts which constituted the experience in the first

place. At the heart of the contemporary problem of social reform and social evaluation of

Indian culture is such a representational problem. The film Ghatashraddha resolves it by the

only means available: it inserts its dilemma into the protagonist himself.5

Another example is from the film Dweepa (2002). A couple fight out an entire night of a

raging reservoir which threatens to submerge their dwelling. If the reservoir rages beyond the

hazard limits, the family will sink despite its fate and hope. If that is not the case, the hopes

and fate of the family are immaterial in deciding their destiny. Either this is an indictment of

the developmental agenda of the modern state or it is a portrayal of the primeval conflict

between man and nature. The former description compromises on the complexity of the

cinematic narrative. The latter description compromises on the importance of the theme. At

any rate, this is not the same as Old Man and the Sea, Riders to the Sea or even And Quite

Flows the Don. In all these works, the battle is between a mute and merciless nature and the

indomitable human spirit which tries to tame it. The theme of conflict between man and

nature has a moral shape in the western experience. It does not have that shape in Indian

experience and without such a moral shape to the conflict the Indian experience is rendered

trivial.6

Lest the reader were to see this as a criticism of particular films, here is a point. It is not the

case that this or that Indian film fails to perform a particular representational function. The

point is much deeper: it is that modern Indian art works against the limits of representation

which does not accommodate the problem of Indian experiences and their

disenfranchisement. This results in a peculiar form of inarticulateness in modern artistic

works. To show the fundamental problematics7 of Indian culture, these narratives are forced

to adopt realist forms. However, adopting realist forms results in a distortion of these very

problematics. This problem of inarticulateness, for Jameson, appeared as one of a normative

expectation from art, as exemplified in the metaphysical quest of western art, and its distorted

variant: the non-western national allegory. But instead of making the western experience of

art into the normative pole, we could try and examine the difference between these two

experiences of art as constituting one axis of difference between Western and Indian cultures.

We could thus probably make better sense of Jameson’s insight. In order to do that, however,

we need a broad conceptual story which can locate western art in the backdrop of Western

culture.

Representational Art as a Paradigm

The entire history of western art can be seen as an attempt to bridge the representational gap.

In effect it amounts to the following position: there is a reality, anterior to human experience.

Human experience is the apperception of that reality through various conceptual forms.

However, given the very nature of ‘anteriority’, there is a residue, an excess, which gets left

out in the process of apperception. The result is that artistic representation is constantly

running behind the receding horizon of reality. In academic jargon this variety of running is

called realism.8

The critique of realism has tried to show how the realist demand is in fact abortive. How, for

example, it is impossible to bridge the representational gap and therefore one has to abandon

the realist project. How, for example, realism only touches the tip of the iceberg and that

there is a vast domain of reality which is lurking at a greater depth away from the typical

social and linguistic forms with which we try to grasp it. So, the story goes, if we need to

reach anywhere deeper than where conventional realist narratives reach, then we need forms

which try not to bridge the representational gap but probably try to break it altogether:

dreams, subconscious symbolism, parapraxes, myths, Joycean epiphanies and Marquezian

magic. And if you are talking cinema, then Godardean surrealism and Tarkovsky’s Christian

symbolism; Bergman’s forays into the depths of human intentions and Kieslowsky’s

unforgiving dissection of the myth of social choice. In all this point and counter point, the

nature of the artistic project has not changed. Art is representational and the task is to

somehow bridge the representational gap. If realism is not our best bet, then something else

is. If surrealism is not helping, then digital media and hyper-real technology-aided prosthetics

should help. If sublime art cannot do the deal then psychedelic rock must. However, the

powerful idea that art is representational remains and the critique of realism, if successful, has

to liquidate this representational character of art itself. The many moralising problems we

have with respect to art and the iconoclastic oppositions to it: about whether art should

change the world or record it dispassionately, whether an artist is the conscience of a race or a

free spirit beyond the limits of immediate history, and whether art is for beauty or art is for

higher aims; all emerge only within the force field of this representational gap.

Not many seem to have stopped to ask if there is another moral to this tale. What if the

problem is not about how to bridge the representational gap but about why is it that one

culture consistently and significantly views the task of art as that of bridging the

representational gap in the first place. Under what conditions does this story make sense?

My argument in what follows will be this: the idea of art as representation requires a

particular conception of experience. This conception is one which privileges the propositional

content of experience. One of the most important aspects of a culture is that it conserves the

continuity of experience for members of that culture across generations. Western culture

conserves experience by conserving the propositional content of experience. Put simply, in

the West, conserving experience is tantamount to conserving specific narratives about the

world. In common parlance we could call them worldviews.9 In preserving the propositional

content of experience (or the worldview) the focus invariably is on belief-states. That is, if an

experience has to make sense across generations and to individuals in each generation, one

has to have reasons to believe the particular worldview that that experience embodies. Failure

to believe in the worldview or failure of our reasons in securing a stable worldview will

necessarily appear as an epistemic crisis in such a culture.

This implies that western culture privileges belief as an aspect of conserving experience.

Beliefs can only be attributed to sentient beings (specifically, human individuals). This

implies that human beings can embody beliefs by demonstrating their belief in specific

propositions or worldviews. As belief-states can only be attributes of individual agents, the

focus on human individuals (and the entire mythology surrounding the individual: rights,

sovereignty, subjectivity) enter in. In a culture where the task of preserving the propositional

content of such experiences is salient, domains like art (along with politics, nation-states and

religions) take on a representational role. It is through these domains that the structures which

are necessary for passing on a common propositional content of experience are maintained.

That is, domains like art, irrespective of their content, also function as experience-conserving

entities. They do so by transmitting not only specific experiential truths about the world but

also by transmitting the meta-learning that art represents such truths about the world. The

suggestion is not that western readers and spectators are naïve-realists. That is, I do not mean

to suggest that they believe the story to be true. What I mean to suggest, however, is that, in

such a culture, the strength of a story is evaluated as a function of its believability. That is,

the most significant question about a representation is its verisimilitude. This is not merely an

aesthetic judgment about how realistic is a narrative. It is almost an epistemic judgment about

how valuable is the narrative.

One condition of emergence of realism, as argued in the preceding paragraph, is a culture

where experience is structured as propositional beliefs. As beliefs about the world are never

isolated facts or factoids but necessarily a network of reinforcing ideas, it is important that

some supra-individual structure has to ensure the resilience of such beliefs. No single

individual holds the full spectrum of facts that he or she holds with adequate reasons to

believe in them. Each theory (or fact, belief, proposition) is held in dependence with many

background theories (or facts, beliefs, propositions). This means that some higher order entity

is necessary to secure our beliefs in the full spectrum of facts and theories we hold. The

institutional practices of specific disciplines, professions, communities and vocations are such

higher order entities that secure the full spectrum of our beliefs. Of course, Marxist scholars

noticed this phenomenon. But they failed to appreciate fully the importance of this

observation. While Marxist scholars tried to unearth the untested background theories and the

institutions that secure our belief in such theories, they failed to understand that such an

institutional framework is a necessary condition for belief; and what is more, for any

meaningful action in our social world. What the Marxist failed to see, and what is most

crucial in this story is that realism depends on specific social institutions that reinforce it, in a

non-trivial way. Every time the institutional structures that define the worldview of a

generation enter a crisis, realism and realist assumptions enter a coterminous crisis too.10

In a culture where experience is preserved through propositional content, when particular

structures of experience break down, it is reflected not on the forms of life which bear these

structures; it is reflected necessarily as a crisis in understanding reality. An example should

help: when the Christian worldview started to disintegrate in the western world with the

advent of Darwinian and Newtonian theories, the crisis was experienced not primarily as an

attack on a form of life, that of Christianity, catholic or otherwise. It was experienced as a

crisis in our understanding of the world. It was essentially seen as a conflict between two

narratives; not necessarily as a conflict between two forms of going about the world

(Although, this latter form of conflict remains as a sub-dominant narrative). Now contrast this

with the arrival of modernity in India. It is primarily talked of, even to this day, as a conflict

between two life-styles or two ways of going about the world. Hardly has anybody posited

this conflict as a conflict between two contending narratives, or as a crisis in our

understanding of reality with the advent of the new narrative of modernity. Realism, as a

form (and by extension, western art as a persuasion) has traditionally been put to work in

order to understand the problem of experience expressed as a conflict between two

contending narratives.

Of course, there is nothing inherent in art (or politics, for that matter) to become necessarily

representational. After all, as Indians, we are privy to a very long and variegated tradition of

art which is not representational. It is that the dominant form of structuring experience in a

culture imprints its forms on aspects of that culture. Herein lies the Trojan horse of modern

Indian art, be it literature, cinema or any such representational art form.

Realism and Cultural Difference

The crisis of modern Indian culture is such that it cannot be articulated as a conflict between

two worldviews. Scholars may be hard pressed to find such contending worldviews when

modernity, Christianity or colonialism meets Indian culture. In effect, then, we may not even

know who or what are the bearers of this culture? With a culture which privileges the

propositional content of experience, one can assume that individuals and their belief states are

the carriers of cultural structures. But what about a culture where experience is preserved not

as propositional content but as action dispositions? Who or what would be the carriers of

such structures of experience? Scholars of Indian culture point to ritual for an answer. It is

ritual that preserves the structures of experience in India. We cannot enter the complex

domain of debates about how exactly does ritual do this within the confines of this paper.11

What we can do however is to show the difference between ritual and proposition for the

human individual who participates in both. Ritual is visible to an observer primarily as the

competence of an individual to perform specific actions; whereas a proposition is visible to

the observer primarily as a belief held by an individual about specific states-of-affairs in the

world.

How does the experience of Indian communities get represented in art? The question itself

seems to be paradoxical. The demand is that art represent the experiences of Indian

communities. But the claim is that as representational forms, art cannot represent the

experiences of Indian communities. Providing a prescriptive answer to this question is

impossible as such answers are part of the practice of art itself and cannot be predicted

beforehand. What however can be done is to see how modern Indian art has worked around

this problem. My suggestion would be look at the presence of non-representational aspects in

modern Indian art. All these days we have lamented the existence of the non-representational

aspects in modern realist art (song, ornament, melodrama, kitsch, formula story and so on),

and have been embarrassed at best in their presence. But the time may have come to look at

those elements in Indian art (Indian cinema especially) as forms working around the realist

bind.

Ritual Art as a Paradigm

Here I would like to propose the skeletal structure of an alternative understanding of art: art

not as representational but art as ritual. The precise demarcation of the two may not be

possible until such time that we develop a greater acquaintance with this contrast. However,

for starters, we can say that ritual art seems to occupy a different role and perform a different

function than art in the representational paradigm. A few thumbnail points about ritual: rituals

are in some sense of the term meta-actions. If action is our primary relationship to our

surrounding world (as Staal argues it to be) then ritual is our understanding12

of action. It is

‘ideal activity’. As such, ritual shears action of all extrinsic determinants like desires, threats,

circumstances and so on. An individual’s relationship to ritual is visible as competence. It has

no symbolic content (or, at least, the symbolic content does not exhaust the scope of the

ritual) and definitely no normative prescription. That is, outside of the ritual, there is no other

norm because of which a particular rule has to take a particular shape. Ritual, and this is the

most important aspect for us, also conserves the continuity of experience for members of a

culture. It conserves the continuity of experience not by conserving the propositional content

of experience but by conserving the continuity of action-dispositions of members in a culture.

Whereas representational forms work through belief-states, ritual forms work through action-

dispositions. These action-dispositions are the units through which experience is constituted.

The continuity of experience for members of such a culture is provided by handing down the

action dispositions in the form of ritual. Rituals, to take the analogy further, are syntactical

units. The experience of semantics, after all, is the experience of syntax. Similarly, the

experience of the world is primarily the experience of action.

My claim is the art in Indian culture has to be seen as continuous with ritual and not with

representation.13

If that is true, then, one can ask, ‘what is the role played by traditional forms

of art in constituting experience in Indian culture?’ and further ask about what is the battle

that a predominantly representational art like cinema is up against, in a culture like India. It is

important to remember that for the purposes of this paper, cinema does not represent a genre

as much as a form which has taken the imprint of a representational culture.

Conclusion:

I have tried to show that cinema and modern art forms in general, face a particular crisis

when it comes to articulating the disenfranchisement of Indian communities. This crisis

according to western critics has to do with the condition of third-world (and postcolonial)

cultures where the sociological conditions do not allow for the emergence of the individual in

all his/her metaphysical weight. However, I argue that the problem may lie elsewhere. It may

lie in the quandary of representational art itself. I therefore, treat representational art as a

paradigm and try to account for the conditions of its emergence and its intelligibility. I have

tried to show that a different conception of art is possible, art as ritual, and I have

consequently put forth a few tentative hypotheses about what such a paradigm would look

like. I also suggest that in India art is continuous with ritual and not with representation.

Regardless of how the cinema of the future might look like in India, for after all, that is not

the task of any theory of art, we need to ask what this new aesthetic will tell us. We are far

away from thinking about culture and how it structures experience. But going even

downstream, my attempt could be seen as an invitation to delineate a cultural theory of art in

general which tries to understand how exactly a culture configures domains like art. Rather

than begin with art as an autonomous domain, this approach begins with culture, specific

cultures, as experientially significant units, and tries to look at art as occupying a place within

that structure. If the preceding discussion is anything to go by, we can see how we relate to

our films differently. Equally, importantly, we could know how our films relate to us.

***

1 Contemporary scholarship on Indian cinema has developed very sophisticated arguments to

understand the mythopoesis of Indian cinema. In all these attempts, however, the emphasis is on

accounting for the manner in which a realist, representational form is deployed in Indian social and

political contexts. An early articulation of such a nexus between Indian cinema and politics is to be

found in (Prasad 1999). Important aspects of the connection between cinema and modern Indian

political culture can be seen in (Rajadhyaksha 2009; Prasad 1998 and Srinivas 2009).

2 I am indebted to Dr B Narahari Rao for introducing me to this distinction between object-

descriptive speech and object-constitutive speech. In Dr. Rao’s scheme, this distinction replaces

other dualist positions like perspectival dualism and object-dualism. Its chief merit being that it takes

human actions as the starting point for our knowledge.

3 Cora Diamond, the American moral philosopher, made a poignant case for the loss of concepts in

the western cultural life (Diamond 1988). Her attempt is to delineate among other things an answer

to the question ‘what kind of loss it is to lose concepts?’

4 I borrow this distinction between criticizing actions and criticizing the repertoire of action from

Elizabeth Thomas (forthcoming).

5 U R Ananthamurthy, the author of Ghatashraddha is said to have commented that in the original

story, the boy spits at the Agrahara just before leaving it finally and fully, thus dramatizing the

defection from one concept space to another (i.e., from the experience-constitutive to the

experience-descriptive, which here are mutually at variance). The film, however, shows the boy in a

moment of reflective dilemma. Although this says a lot about the visual and narrative restraint

exercised by the film maker, the real point for me is that such an ambivalent resolution is only to be

expected. It is an indication of the disjunction between the two concept spaces. It is a result of the

impossibility of formulating a critique of an entire repertoire of actions as a member who is formed

by that very repertoire.

6 Many scholars have worked on the theme of how the conflict between man and nature emerges as

a moral conflict in the western experience through the course of early modernity. It is a story which

encompasses the strands of early capitalism, maritime and industrial expansion and also the growth

of various modern technologies of self Dupr 1993; Collingwood 1976). A fine philosophical

statement about the relationship between value and nature across cultures and contexts is that of

(Bilgrami 2009). Cervantes’ celebrated work Don Quixote can be seen as an early parody of one such

modern technology of self: the adventures of machismo and anachronistic knight-errantry. Young

readers through the better part of the twentieth century were equally enchanted with another such

example by the self-styled philosopher Ayn Rand and her own tight-lipped and phlegmatic version of

a modern Quixote in her Fountainhead. The German filmmaker, Werner Herzog, immortalized such a

modern technology of self, together with its poignancy and irony, in his brilliant masterpiece

Fitzcarraldo (1982). In contrast, the theme of man and nature that occurs in folktales, legends and

myths of many Eurasian cultures lack such a moral dimension to the conflict between man and

nature.

7 By a problematic I mean the delineation of the emergence and constitution of a new set of

questions, frames and problems for political, cultural and intellectual investment.

8 The most ambitious book ever written on this topic still remains that of Eric Auerbach (Auerbach

2013). While Auerbach treats mimesis or the representation of reality as the defining horizon of

western art, my attempt here is to situate that horizon in relation to the culture that the West is.

9 S N Balagangadhara has shown the connection between worldview, religion and the western

culture. His claim about cultures as configuration of learning has informed my discussion about how

experiential continuity is conserved in the western culture. (Balagangadhara 1994)

10 Pope Francis in a recent interview in America: The National Catholic Review made a very

significant observation about the relationship between belief and the institution of the Church

(Casarella 2013). Although the point made by the Holy Father was in direct relation to Christian

dogma and Biblical hermeneutics, it can also be taken to mean how one of the most ancient

practices of interpretation and scholarly activity understands the importance of such institutional,

canonical and disciplinary practices in the constitution of truth. Shorn of its theological specifics, one

can easily see the underlying theoretical point I am trying to make about the relationship between

holding a belief and the institutional work that goes into it. I think this is by far an intellectually

sophisticated position compared to the Marxist and power-knowledge theorists of our own

generation and therefore deserves to be quoted in length:

“The image of the church I like is that of the holy, faithful people of God. This is the definition I often

use, and then there is that image from the Second Vatican Council’s ‘Dogmatic Constitution on the

Church’ No. 12). Belonging to a people has a strong theological value. In the history of salvation,

God has saved a people. There is no full identity without belonging to a people. No one is saved

alone, as an isolated individual, but God attracts us looking at the complex web of relationships that

take place in the human community. God enters into this dynamic, this participation in the web of

human relationships...“The people itself constitutes a subject. And the church is the people of God

on the journey through history, with joys and sorrows. Thinking with the church, therefore, is my

way of being a part of this people. And all the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters

of belief, and the people display this infallibilitas in credendo, this infallibility in believing, through a

supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together...We should not even think,

therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.”

11 For a highly sophisticated discussion about ritual and its role in Indian culture see (Staal 1979).

Staal sees in ritual a fundamental feature that has defined Indian religions and cultures. One aspect

of ritual is that there are no propositional aspects to ritualistic differences.

12 Understanding here does not refer to perceiving the meaning of linguistic propositions. It refers to

the more general competence of being able to make a distinction in a specific domain and act in the

light of that distinction; it refers to the skill of action.

13 In fact, this claim, mutatis mutandis, must also hold for Greek art, especially its epic and theatre

traditions. Not only were the Greek theatrical productions part of an elaborate ritual, they also

embodied the ritual principle in their structure. In our scheme of things, we are so used to treating

Greek art as representational devices that we completely circumvent the most outstanding feature

of that art: its heavily archetypal form. In fact, as representational devices Greek art would boil

down to just one or two lines of obscure human psychology: Know thyself and Revere the Gods. But

as ritual devices, they display a panoply of action states. To show the difference more starkly, the

question in Greek theatre is always “what is the right action?” and never “what is the subjective

precipitate of the world on our consciousness?” Needless to say, this latter question captures a

central feature of representational art. Although it is clearly beyond the scope of this paper, it may

be a possible direction of enquiry to examine what is the meaning of mimetic art in Aristotle.

Western criticism has consistently read this point as implying that art represents reality. But a

careful reading of the concept ‘mimesis’ should tell us that the primary semantic force of mimesis is

“the learning of an activity” and not “the activity of representing”. If this semantic distinction is valid,

then, what Aristotle suggests about art can be read in line with my suggestion about ritual art

because, after all, ritual is the quintessential mimetic activity.

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