Journal of Indian Cinema

Author: A

  • Dalits and Victimhood in Indian Film

    Dalits and Victimhood in Indian Film

    Art cinema in India began as a movement partly in order to intervene in social injustices by propagating the right attitudes among the public, although popular cinema had also done it much earlier. Dalits and caste discrimination have frequently been the subjects in Indian cinema from Achhut Kanya (1936) to Sairat (2016) and the general consensus about these films is positive, that they are courageous attempts to deal with a burning issue that has stubbornly refused to be resolved, and will probably continue to resist resolution for a long time to come. Still, it would be useful to look at the representation of Dalits in Indian film as it could tell us something about dominant perspectives on social victimhood in India that could well stretch beyond film, perhaps into every aspect of culture.

    If one were to consider international films dealing with social conflict and victimhood, one could place them under several political categories like Colonialism (Battle of Algiers), Fascism (The Great Dictator), Capitalism (Wall Street, Erin Brockovich), Stalinism (Man of Marble), Maoism (To Live), Patriarchy (The Life of Oharu), the films coming usually from countries (or set in countries) where the particular form of political oppression is pertinent. An aspect common to the above films is that while they all deal with victims they try to present well-rounded pictures of the situations they engage with.  Much of The Great Dictator is taken up with life before the spectre of Fascism gains ground, with the barber’s dealings in the ghetto. They pursue mimesis in that they try to base their political discourses on social observation and the victimhood of the protagonists by forces without is only an aspect in their lives, although an extremely important one. This gives them a degree of complexity that might have been elusive if bare victimhood was all the films were about.

    When we come to Indian cinema we find victimhood treated differently and this is true of the portrayal of Dalits as well. The tendency is to show the Dalit victim as belonging to a monolithic category transacting only with those outside. A common issue here is that of the forbidden inter-caste romance in which one of the lovers is Dalit. There are a series of films which work by this formula which, when analysed, yields the sense that ‘Dalithood’ gains significance only in relation to caste society. One does not, for instance, find romances between two Dalits from different strata which might also have been opposed. Films about Dalits appear to proceed from social preconceptions rather than unbiased observation and this is apparently because Indian cinema has not favoured mimesis.

    Mimesis is a critical and philosophical term pertinent to the arts that carries a wide range of meanings – including imitation, representation, mimicry of life, and the presentation of the self. To paraphrase the general understanding of the notion, art was considered to be an imitation of the world that also allowed for individual expression, i.e.: the subjectivity of the creator of the work of art was accorded a due place. Cinema, because it begins as an imprint of reality is ideally placed to pursue mimesis and the earliest films (by the Lumière brothers) were recordings of events – like workers coming out of factory and train coming into station. A little later, a magician named George Meliès understood that since what was projected on the screen was taken to be reality by the spectator, cinema could also promote illusion or the imagined. This then became a way of introducing subjectivity into film and that is what cinema has broadly been – a recording of reality with subjectivity as a constituent element.

    In India, however, film took a different route when the first films by DG Phalke were neither documentaries nor fantasies but mythological films. Phalke insisted that his films based on themes from mythology were ‘realistic’ because they were bringing known ‘truths’ to life. Even when Indian cinema moved out of the genre of the mythological film it continued to purvey familiar truths from the epics and puranas, though most of them were nominally set in contemporary times. Unlike films from world cinema that pursue mimesis (including fantasy films where inner reality often becomes the subject) Indian popular cinema has been preoccupied with transcendental truths not reliant on empirical knowledge but on traditional wisdom and beliefs. If films follow mimesis, complexity and ambiguity become virtues – since the world itself is complex – and their interpretation by critics becomes pertinent. Indian films, because they purvey truths that precede experience, rarely permit/provoke interpretation. This is not true only of popular cinema but also of art cinema where the truths from social texts replace puranic truisms or truths pronounced by tradition. As an instance, working class solidarity and the deceitfulness of the powerful would be ‘truths’ preferred by Marxist filmmakers.

    Why Indian cinema takes this separate path can only be speculated about but one recollects a popular maxim heard within India from the school level onwards – that ‘knowledge is within us.’ The question to be put here is what kind of knowledge this might be, since it cannot pertain to agriculture or industry; the answer that presents itself is that it is received knowledge handed down and /or realized by our traditional wise people. To all appearances this would be ‘Brahminical’ knowledge since the Brahmins were custodians of the theoretical propositions underlying most Indian beliefs.

    To all appearances the portrayal of Dalits has been ‘theory down’, victimhood made the essence of Dalit life.  This is evidently a view from above since a Dalit would be aware of more aspects of his/her experience – while someone from above would only take note of what his or her own class has inflicted upon the Dalit. Most films about Dalits has come from upper-caste filmmakers and one could cite a series of films where Dalit /Adivasi portrayals are patently unconvincing: Devika Rani in Achhut Kanya, Shabana Azmi in Ankur, Smita Patil in Aakrosh, Nutan in Sujata; still, there is more to it than unconvincing character portrayals.

    Nagraj Manjule’s Fandry (2013) is much more convincing because Manjule is himself a Dalit but there is an aspect to Fandry that merits specific comment here. This has to do with the portrayal of the family’s vocation which is pig catching or breeding and the members are shown to be unable to go about it effectively. For instance, when their task is the capture of a pig, they throw stones at it, which only drives it out of reach. The argument offered here is that when people are tied to a vocation they would develop some expertise in it and the film is portraying the Dalits thus because of its disdain for the vocation itself. A Lithuanian film Miracle (2017) seen in recent film festivals (like GIFF) deals with pig farming without fixing such a disrespectful gaze upon it and my proposition here is that the gaze in Fandry is ‘Brahminical’ – since it would be a Brahminical view that Dalit vocations are ignoble. It would seem therefore that Brahminical ideology is all-pervasive – ‘ideology’ used here in Engels’ sense of ‘false-consciousness’, i.e. the motives in the representation once historically engendered now seem autonomous .

    Pushing the argument further one could propose that the tendency of Indian cinema to see the Dalit experience only in terms of its relationship to caste society stems from Brahminical ideology. Dalit communities (like all other communities) would have conflicts of their own and also be rich in interpersonal relationships within, but this is not given expression to. A comparison here would be the African-American experience in Hollywood films where people from within the community are shown to transact with each other. Where African-Americans are shown to wield some power (as in gangster films) Dalits are consistently shown to be powerless. One supposes that a Dalit activist as in Court (2014), performing in an urban centre, would find political patronage, which the film does not allow; its apparently Brahminical viewpoint is that unrelieved victimhood is the essential condition of the Dalit.

    It is difficult to recollect an Indian film in which diversity within Dalit communities is acknowledged, so monolithic are they seen to be because of the gaze being consistently from the top. Such essentialization – although it may be the product of a ‘liberal’ outlook – is consistent with Brahminism itself, which proceeded by essentializing the jatis as varna categories and placing them within a hierarchy. The varna system was the result of classifying and hierarchizing various vocations – but it can be argued that any kind of vocation would be better placed than that of ‘victim’ since the latter category is not even allowed to take pride in its work, the skills it has developed doing whatever it has been doing.

    It is in this context that mimesis becomes a necessary way of portraying social conditions since it relies on observation and experience rather than apriori ‘truths’. Eschewing mimesis in order to be ‘politically correct’ and taking acceptable positions may be a safe alternative for filmmakers today but in such a course can also be detected a ‘hegemonic’ Brahminical perspective – that places preconceptions over empirically derived knowledge. A ‘hegemonic power’ is one that defines the rules of the game and Brahminism has apparently defined the rules for Indian cinema in its portrayal of the Dalit experience.

     

    See also:

    https://filmcriticscircle.com/journal/dalit-identity/

  • Tumbbad — Coherence and Visual Appeal

    Tumbbad — Coherence and Visual Appeal

    Tumbbad is certainly an unusual film, an atmospheric fantasy thriller that makes one sit up and take notice although most of its success is in its art department. It has been described as ‘horror’ but is perhaps closer to a fairy tale for adults, revolving around invented myths. There have been other films from the genre in world cinema and one would be the Russian fairy-tale horror classic Viy (1967), based on a Gogol story. There are three people credited with directing Tumbbad: a debutante Rahi Anil Barve who has, earlier, made a visually striking if rather gruesome short film Manjha, Anand Gandhi, the creative director, who made the unusual Ship of Theseus (2012) and a co-director Adesh Prasad. Ship of Theseus tried to deal with philosophical issues and, while its success here was doubtful, it was nonetheless visually impressive. Tumbbad’s striking visual qualities perhaps owe most to Anand Gandhi.

    Tumbbad begins with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi decrying greed, a strange ploy for a film intending to send a shiver down the spectator’s spine; but it is focused on a legend about a deity Hastar who was the firstborn of the Earth Goddess but abandoned when he turned out evil and greedy, cursed with being denied all forms of worship. This secret is with a Brahmin family in western India when the story begins, in the village of Tumbbad in 1918, the protagonist still a boy. The beginning is mysterious because there is a monstrously deformed great-grandmother cared for by the mother and we are not told much except that she is somehow connected to the secret. Also brought in is the motif of rice being ground into flour, and it is only later that we come to learn of its significance.

    In the second part of the film, which takes place 15 years later, the protagonist Vinayak (Sohum Shah) is grown up and wealthy. His wealth is associated with his occasional trips to Tumbbad, from where he returns mysteriously laden with gold coins, which allow him to live a life of wantonness. If this second part is associated with British rule the third part takes place after Independence, although one is not quite sure how this political segmenting of a horror fairy-tale contributes to the project.

    Tumbbad is exquisitely crafted in terms of ambience but we wish it had been more coherent. The problem, I believe is that it mixes genres arbitrarily – without being aware of it. Consider first the primary story meant to be like something out of a Panchatantra tale, with its cautionary moral about human greed. A story with a moral (i.e. a fable) does not conceal information because its primary aim is to deliver its message unhindered. Also, the message is rendered through the principal character being subject to experiences, usually salutary. My proposition here is that a fable does not lend itself to suspense or surprise, where something normally revealed upfront is deliberately withheld. It is the same with a fairy tale or a legend where counsel with regard to everyday life is offered – Viy, for instance, is about tests of courage that a young man is required to undergo in a haunted house.

    This will give the reader some sense of how inappropriate it is for a legend about a god being structured in such a way that key information required to comprehend it is revealed only at the end. A ghost or a monster is a different proposition because, unlike a god, it is a local entity that inhabits or haunts a location and can be discovered by an outsider. Also, in horror stories that rely on suspense or surprise the protagonist discovers something he or she did not know about initially. But in Tumbbad Vinayak has known everything – since his family is custodian of the secret; so why is there surprise here at all, since there need to be characters in the story to who something comes as a ‘surprise’? This is a problem I elaborated upon while writing about Andhadhun – that character subjectivity is the key to suspense. There needs to be a knowledge gap between characters, the protagonist having less knowledge than someone else; a story cannot be related through the omniscient camera eye if it tries for suspense. It cannot suddenly spring something as a surprise if the protagonist has already known about it. Drishyam is another film that errs in this way, by ‘cheating’, as it were.

    To a legend about a god told (inappropriately) in the manner of a horror story about a monster and including the surprise element, the directors add a third component, which is colonialism and India’s independence. In an interview the director explains that the three moments – 1918, 1933 and 1948 – represent ‘feudalism’, ‘colonialism’ and ‘capitalism’, making out that the film is allegorical. Its inspiration may be Guillermo Del Torro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), which tries to blend fairy tale with a story set in Franco’s Spain. I am not a great fan of Pan’s Labyrinth and it is not relevant here but my argument is that something as ancient as a ‘god’ cannot be affected by political changes in a country, since a ‘god’, by definition, has a presence that is eternal. Moreover, if Hastar is only ‘political allegory’, how can his presence also infuse the spectator with a visceral emotion like horror or disgust?

    As already acknowledged Tumbbad is visually rich but as theorists (Frederic Jameson) have argued, visual richness is worth little if it is not bolstered by narrative, since only narration gives meaning to the cinematic image.

  • Andhadhun: Suspense and Character Subjectivity

    Andhadhun: Suspense and Character Subjectivity

    Among the various characteristics of Hindi popular cinema noted by film scholars and theorists, one that is of importance is that it is indifferent to the attractions of suspense and surprise and that it favours the familiar rather than novelty. How things will happen is more important than what will happen (1), which will be familiar. This comes to the fore in Andhadhun, one of the best Indian films of 2018. Indian films, ever since DG Phalke, borrowed from the theatre and, rather than be realistic in the documentary/Lumiere sense, tried to make ‘real’ traditional belief, which was seen to transcend sensual perception (2). Phalke insisted that his mythological films were ‘realistic’ in the sense that they were bringing known ‘truths’ alive.

    Sriram Raghavan, one of the more inventive film directors in Bollywood is, judging from his films, also a cinephile who knows world cinema well and he does not hesitate to drawn inspiration from it, although he always has something to add. His last offering Andhadhun owes in a small way to a short film L’accordeur (2010) from France, which runs to less than 15 minutes. Using motifs from international films is not an easy task since each film has to be Indianized, which does not mean only adapting to a different milieu, but also using a different grammar. In L’accordeur (‘The Piano Tuner’) a piano tuner who makes himself temporarily blind to sensitize himself to sounds, is witness to a murder; the perpetrators are clients who believe he is blind and conceal nothing from his gaze. In Andhadhun, Raghavan uses the same motif as the basis of his film and it is a difficult device to adapt to Indian cinema.

    Indian films hardly succeed as suspense thrillers, and the reason is that most stories are related using the [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]omniscient eye[/highlight]. Fiction films of the world use three elements that combine to produce ‘cinema’ – objective reality, authorial subjectivity, which is in the nature of distortions to demarcate the real from the director’s subjective take on it, i.e.: the exercising of his or her powers of expression. Lastly, there is the notion of character subjectivity and this is the element needed to be used in abundance to create suspense. Suspense depends on knowledge of events being held by some and not by others. The spectator is in the position of someone from whom elements of information are withheld and the viewpoint of the film corresponds to that of a person with partial knowledge. If one studies Hitchcock’s film Rear Window (1954), for instance, the camera takes the protagonist’s viewpoint; it is what he cannot see of what is going on in another apartment that creates the suspense.

    Indian films are all-seeing – in that they try to show all happenings ‘as they are’ – rather than as perceived by the filmmaker (authorial subjectivity) or by characters in the story (character subjectivity); to my only Adoor Gopalakrishnan in Anantaram (1987) has ever used [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]character subjectivity as an element[/highlight], although this was not to create suspense but to understand what imprints itself upon a person in his or her life. There have been good thrillers like Nihalani’s Aakrosh (1980) and Dhrishyam (2015) in which the truth is revealed at the end through a flashback, but this is simply the concealing of facts; our viewpoint is not restricted to that of a chosen character or characters. In Rear Window, it should be noted, what is underway is being speculated upon even as it is happening in the opposite apartment; it is not sprung to the spectator as something not suspected.

    Why Indian films are omniscient in perspective is not easy to explain but my view is that it lies in the notion of transcendental truths in which people have more faith than in the evidence of the senses, judged to be ephemeral; this is perhaps why most films have eternal messages to relate, usually from the epics or traditional wisdom. To illustrate, the notion that one’s parents are to be worshipped is not ‘subjective truth’ from an author; it is believed to be eternally valid. Even art cinema has ‘eternal messages’ to relate, although these could be from social texts (like those written by Marx) instead of tradition and the epics – messages like the dishonesty of the powerful and working class solidarity.

    Coming to Andhadhun, the film is based on the protagonist, also a pianist pretending to be blind, getting only a partial view of what has transpired but having to act on it. If Sriram Raghavan had developed the idea into a suspense film, he would have been true to it – i.e.: the central dilemma would have been how the protagonist would have reported seeing a corpse in an apartment and still carry on his pretence at being blind, assuming that has its own benefits. When I commenced to view the film I was quite excited by how it might proceed since there is another partial witness who also has evidence about who came and who left the apartment, and when. Would the protagonist and this woman make contact, I wondered, and how would two partial views of an event, neither witness was certain of, be stitched together to constitute a comprehensive truth they might not suspect? As it stood, the film might even have gone the way of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), where a photographer takes a picture casually in a park and, when he develops it, finds a corpse his eyes had not seen.

    But then, Andhadhun is a Bollywood film made for a public unaccustomed to the [highlight background=”#f79126″ color=”#ffffff”]notion of subjective viewpoints[/highlight] rather than messages. What Raghavan does is to turn the film into a comedy – no doubt successful on its own terms. He introduces another motif, a shadowy group stealing body parts for huge sums of money. Rather than being a suspense thriller Andhadhun becomes what Hollywood might have termed ‘screwball comedy’ – a genre more compatible with Bollywood than the suspense thriller.

     

    Notes/References

    1. Rosie Thomas, Indian Cinema: Pleasures and Popularity, Screen, 26 (3-4), 1985, p 130.
    2. A parallel between Phalke’s exercises in film and what Ravi Varma did in the medium of oil painting has been suggested since both of them attempted a recreation of the mythical past to reclaim it as a nationalist proposition. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology, Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 14-15, 1987, p 61.
  • The Politics of the Selfie

    The Politics of the Selfie

    The selfie has become an integral part of living today but it can be regarded as a development of the amateur family photograph brought up to date by new technology. Still, alongside technological advances are social changes and a selfie means something quite different from what family pictures once meant.

    Technological advances replace and/or supplement existing human capabilities. The crane mimics and enhances the capacity of the hands to grasp and lift while the computer mimics aspects of the human mind. The camera replaces the human memory by retaining in physical form the visual experience of a moment. The earliest photographs were usually taken to mark important occasions and many of them were of people who exercised power, historical markers since even personal pictures of important people are public records. As photography became open to amateurs, people less important began to take pictures. Early Indian portraits use backdrops or try to paint over the photographic image to produce class or caste archetypes instead of individuals, e.g. Zamindar or Matriarch. As ‘commoners’ began to take pictures they used it to mark events in family history, but the events in family memory were tied up with larger history. When ‘private space’ is denoted, it implies a ‘public space’ elsewhere to which it relates, and public space is permeated by historical time.

    The modern nation, as Benedict Anderson proposed (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism), was made possible only by the arrival of the print medium, namely the novel and the newspaper. A ‘nation’ as it is understood in the modern world is not identical to a ‘country’ which merely needs to have its boundaries defined and a state ruling it but depends on a public collectively imagining themselves as constituting a community. The novel and the newspaper are essential to nationhood because they create a sense of historical time through which the imagined community is moving. In India the sense of nationhood was evidenced first in the colonial cities – especially Calcutta then the seat of British power – where printing presses first appeared.

    Indian nationalism then gained ground in other cities where people could have access to novels and newspapers, both in Indian languages and English. If one attributes ‘nationalist’ feelings to heroes like Tipu or Shivaji today retrospectively, it would be inaccurate since the sense of a national community could only gain ground through the print medium, which reached people across the geographic divide and make them simultaneously feel kinship with each other. It follows from this that nationalism initially affected only the educated classes who could read the newspaper and the novel. It may also be surmised that the sense of belonging to a national community can hardly be uniform among the public. To regard only its geographic distribution, it will likely fade far away from the mainstream; those living in isolated pockets like adivasis and tribals, or those in the far corners will feel less of it.

    Everyone having a vote evidently does not make all Indians participate equally in nationhood. Immanuel Wallerstein proposed that there were three effective ways in which nationhood could be inculcated in a wide public: public education through state-owned schools, compulsory military service and public functions. It may be imagined from the fact that none of the above three have prevalence/ significance in India that a strong sense of nationhood is felt by only a relatively small section of the public. If it is those who have had some education who, by and large, still remain nationhood’s prime movers, from their viewpoint it may be surmised that family pasts will be recollected as strands in national history: “That was the year in which the Quit India Movement began” or “We moved house when the anti-Hindi agitation under Lal Bahadur Shastri was under way.” My own feelings at the debacle of the Sino-Indian War (when I was eight years old) are still vivid in my memory, the sense of national betrayal widely shared. Personal or family narrative as a constituent part of national history would not have been possible without the newspaper or the novel, which together made the association – although mainstream cinema also linked personal stories to national history. Personal histories were themselves documented in people’s lives by photographs.

    The selfie’s most obvious cultural precursor was the personal or family photograph. An aspect noted about the family photograph was that its visual quality did not matter. What was important was who took it, on what occasion and when; what people felt about the pictures was much more important than what they ‘meant’ individually. It was equally important that the pictures were shown to other people who could use them to picture events they were not present at, thus situating themselves within a social continuum of some sort. Social context is not often detected in them but it is covertly present in personal or family photographs. Wedding pictures (later supplanted by the video) are records of social gatherings, and implicit connections with wider events are inevitably made by those to whom they are shown. Visitors looking at pictures were a ritual that most people went through in the homes of their acquaintances.

    If there is a fundamental political change the internet made, it lies in obscuring the grand narrative of history. Where the central historical events of the 20th Century (WWI & II, the rise and fall of Communism, colonial wars and former colonies becoming independent, etc.) are easy to name, it is difficult to do likewise with this century and the presence of the internet makes the task more confusing. In India, history was carried forward by a relatively small number of newspapers and writers, and citizens located themselves in national life through their reportage and opinions. The social media and ‘fake news’ has compounded the effect of the internet; current history no longer exists as fact.

    Communication through social networking websites differs from email in important ways. Email replicates letter writing in being considered communication – thoughts are generally fully articulated as they are in letters, and the attachment – a document or a picture – is like something enclosed with the letter. Communication on Facebook is different and imitates an actual conversation; people can say unconsidered things without much thought, retract them subsequently as they do in conversation. A thoughtless insult or swear word is difficult to imagine in a letter but natural on Facebook. Verbal conversation is not communication in the way a letter is, and where a letter might reflect upon life, conversation is integral to it. Social networking, though it can be used for considered communication like email, is hence more a substitute for living physically in the world, and a selfie like a person’s presence. Unlike a photograph, which is a record, a selfie does not replace personal memory.

    The social network, tweets and selfies are vehicles for activism of all kinds and often the bearers of strong nationalist sentiments, and here we have a seeming contradiction. Nationhood depends upon the sense of a shared past and, hence, personal memory tied to a common past, but social networking and selfies are largely tied to immediate impulses. Politicians use social networking in a big way and put out selfies. The apparent purpose is to keep their constituencies in a state of political excitement and influence sentiments. But if tweets and posts on Facebook awaken nationalist sentiments, how is the sense of nationhood created by the newspaper and the novel different from the nationalist sentiments awakened by a tweet, or a selfie with a political leader who commands a large following?

    The nation as created by the print medium enabled people across a wide geographical territory to experience historical time together, thus imagining themselves a community, and created nationalism based on inclusion rather than exclusion – because it nurtured kinships rather than antagonisms. This is substantiated by the general goodwill Indians felt even towards the departing British, despite the latter’s horrendous doings in India. The nationalism fostered by Facebook, the tweet and the selfie is apparently of a different order. It would take more investigation to establish this but the stimuli to which tweet/selfie nationalism responds are similar to technologically mediated sporting events that also awaken fierce loyalties and antagonisms, explained as ‘ritual participation’ by media pundits.

    An individual’s desire for cultural identity can be a possible motivation for being a sports fan and just as sports fans actively ritualize their sports consumption activities to acquire and maintain cultural identities, so do ‘political fans’ through emblems and rallies. The way television and social media generate political enthusiasm it is not different from the way the telecasting of an IPL match generates sporting excitement. Sporting rivalries are violent and football fan violence often leads to deaths, as with political rivalries. Political players are also conducting themselves as gladiators might, and bets are placed on elections. The ‘players’ in the ‘arena’ are conscious of the spectators whose hopes they represent. Defections are like the transfer of sporting stars from one club to another. Most importantly, ‘ideology’ in political contests today is increasingly like sport slogans repeated time and again to announce affinity with one group or another; the paucity of debate among ‘ideologies’ substantiates it. The difference may be that in sport mobilising a fan following depends upon performance and is secondary to it, while in the political arena mobilising a fan following is performance.

    The question that one must evidently put at the conclusion of this article pertains to the relationship between social networking and what is happening in politics, which is a contest over the nation. My proposition here is that the ‘sporting’ excitement generated in the political arena would not have been possible without the immediacy, the sense of living only in the present provided by social media platforms. Where being a ‘citizen’ meant locating oneself in the continuum of national history, being nationalistic (rather than a ‘citizen’) means becoming a fan of a political group; there is no evidence that one group is more ‘for the nation’ than another – although each group imagines the nation differently. Since the nation is a community nurtured over generations of history and depends on the sense of nationhood gradually permeating every part of the public, the current technology mediated excitement over conflicting approaches to the Indian nation trivializes it and throws doubt on its stability as a cherished notion.