Dancing in a Cultural Vacuum

“The human soul needs a fuller and a more richer culture than the one offered by Hollywood and Rock Music” – Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian Writer
Prelude: It was a sultry day in Silvassa[1], April, 2008. I and a few of my fellow students had come there for a research project and were staying in a hotel. After dinner, we noticed that the hotel had a built-in discotheque and that some youth were dancing there. We cautiously approached the security guard there and asked whether we can enter the dance areana. He said yes and so we entered. I could not resist my desire to join in the dancing. By the way, coming from ultra-conservative Tamil Nadu where only cinema actors are allowed to dance, I had developed a love for dancing (A friend of mine used to say that Iam the most aweful dancer she has ever seen but I don’t let these trivial things deter me from dancing in public whenever I get an opportunity totally insensitive to whatever spectacle that I might be subjecting the onlookers to). I realized to my pleasant surprise, that the dancing in the discotheque is not very different from the “grinds” that happens in IRMA. As my fellow students were not willing to shake a leg, I went to a corner of the dance floor and started dancing alone. A group of three guys dancing a small distance away, on seeing my lonely dance, out of spontaneous friendliness, pulled me into their dancing ring. We four guys happily danced till the discotheque wound up for the night. We went out and mutually introduced ourselves. They said they were all undergraduate students from a college in Mumbai. We said bye and I came to my hotel room wondering at this beautiful cultural medium of dance which enables complete strangers to engage with each other with a feeling of spontaneous love and joy. I came back to my hotel room with my faith in humanity fully reinforced. But somewhere deep within myself I felt that some pertinent questions related to this experience needs to be answered.
A simple definition of “Culture” can be taken as those set of values that in sum constitutes the guidelines for human existence and that which enables us to exist at a higher and a more subliminal level than that of animals. The French Structuralist Levi Strauss says that the birth of the incest taboo demarcates the state of animals from the cultured state of human beings. Culture need not connote only good things. For that matter, Sigmund Freud claims that the first man threw an insult instead of a stone at his opponent started the human civilization. Culture denotes the sum total of all human values and not only the refined formal expression of these values through the arts like music, dance, cinema, drama etc. Finally, culture is the medium through which people find a meaning for their lives.
But what exactly seems to be the state of culture in the last few decades all across the globe? Two broad cultural trends seem to be in a dialectical interchange. One is the traditional culture across all societies and the other is the west-inspired modernist culture which forms the cultural component of the globalization process. This cultural clash should not be understood as the interplay between traditional and modern cultures which has been the hallmark of all ages but as something which is qualitatively different from other ages because of the radical nature of the globalization process which has been happening for the last 30 years.
We’ll now examine both these trends one by one. The first trend represented by traditional culture has ceased to satisfy the cultural urges of the human population as a whole in this era because it is not in sync with the changed and changing nature of the “mode of production”. Here by the phrase “mode of production” is taken from the Marxist epistemological understanding and it means the ever-evolving force of technology and the way in which economic production is organized around it. The second modernist trend is one which is in sync with the changed mode of production and is best described by the Hollywood culture and its numerous clones around the world. We can see that a considerable number of Bollywood movies are inspired by the problems of the NRIs and the wannabe NRIs. If one only sees only this genre of bollywood movies, he cannot be faulted for coming to the comfortable conclusion that the whole of India is driven by only one aim - To go abroad for a better life. Another closely related genre of Indian films like Dil Chatta Hai' and ' Devdas' have another related problem. In these films, ostentation has become an end in itself and opulence exists in celebration of itself. The old kind of stories where a 'poor girl falls in love with a rich boy' kind of movies are passe. By and large, the poor are out of the world view of these films. These new breed of movies deal exclusively with the concerns of the ' Beautiful people ' - the noveau rich , the rich and the bored super rich.
There are two problems with this cultural clash between the traditional and modern western culture. One is that it can adopt certain uncomfortable and violent overtones. The beating up of young couples on Valentine’s Day by right wing groups is an example of this. This is being done by a feeling of aggrievement caused by the globalization process which has left the majority of the population outside its cultural calculus. The cultural capital of modernization defines what is being “Civilized” in the current era. Deprived of that cultural capital, in the search for self-esteem and dignity, the dispossessed sections direct their anger against what they wrongly perceive as the symbols which caused their deprived undignified state. For this purpose, they take on the cultural weapons offered by the revivalist, revanchist ideologies of the right-wing religious groups who base their worldview on the real or imaginary state of cultural wellbeing that existed like say the “Ram Rajya” in India etc. The second problem is that even the groups who may mange to get this cultural capital through their education, jobs etc may suffer from an “Identity Crisis” because in their attempt to straddle two cultures, their cultural moorings gets properly shaken. For example, I knew one upper middle class Mumbaikar youth who used to believe in both traditional Hindu values as well as pre-marital relationships and doesn’t seem to detect the faintest sign of dissonance between the two. And ultimately this leaves them searching for a meaning for their lives.
Ok, assuming that a section of society manages to smoothly effect the cultural leap from the traditional to the modern, then is the problem solved for them? Definitely not. Because the problem is much deeper and is to do with the very nature of capitalism. In capitalism characterized by commodity production for the market, a person is estranged and alienated from his true essence. Marx termed this phenomenon as alienation. Because of alienation, a person tries to find solace only in things which are external to him like a revivalist God, a new car, fancy house etc. Moreover, in capitalism, a thing becomes valuable only by virtue of its unavailability. Once it becomes available, it will become not-so-worthy and the individual will start yearning for something which is not available. The system consciously cultivates mythical images through the media like the “Contented Consumer”, the “Obedient worker”, the “Brilliant Investment Banker”, the “Happy Married Couple” etc while superbly hiding the exploitative capitalist and patriarchal relations that underlie each of these constructs.
Additional complications are being created which are leading to a lot of cultural confusion. I knew some cultural activists in Tamil Nadu who used to profess a militant fringe left political ideology. I had read in a newspaper that a couple of their women activists had barged into a cinema theatre showing pornography and had torn the screen because of their belief that pornography insults women. There were all a band of dedicated, selfless and idealistic set of people. Well, one day I had the opportunity to talk with a male activist of theirs, a poor chap who was doing the profession of an auto driver for a living. He was saying that they had no money even to print their political posters and so were writing them by hand day and night. Even if uneducated, he was inspiring. But when I asked him about the content of those posters it was disappointing. It was about North Indian Marwadis “exploiting” Tamil Nadu. If tiny underdeveloped Manipur talks of development neglect and hence exploitation by the Indian state, that has more than an element of truth. But I simply could not get how Tamil Nadu which by any standards will be one of the most developed states in India can be “exploited” by north Indians. The only plausible explanation for their stance is that, after the collapse of the USSR, their earlier noble and inclusivistic communist ideology has now degenerated into a parochial cultural Tamil nationalism and it is not derived from the material facts of inter-regional development and exploitation. This is the trend internationally also. In Sri Lanka, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) inspired by the great internationalist Che Guevara waged a militant struggle for a communist Srilanka in the 1980s. 40,000 of their selfless Sinhalese cadres gave their lives for the cause of an egalitarian Sri Lanka comprised of both Sinhalese and Tamils cohabiting with equal rights. But now the very same JVP has transmorphed into a mainstream political party with a virulent ultra-nationalist ideology rooted in Sinhala majoritarianism and its attendant anti-Tamil minority connotations.
So, to put it in a nutshell, the whole of humanity seems to be dancing in a cultural vacuum. Caught between the proverbial devil and the deep sea, humanity is left desperately searching for a meaning for life worth living. But nature abhors a vacuum and it will be surely filled. So, what exactly is the solution? This is easier asked than answered. A new culture needs to be evolved.
Firstly, a progressive culture cannot leave out the aspirations of the majority and so the elite-mass cultural gap has to be bridged. At a personal level, people should understand that being 'cultured ' does not mean acting 'sophisticated' and imagining themselves to be the snobbish member of an elitist stratum. Being cultured means being broad and inclusivist in mind, spirit and action. This will enable the elites to connect with the masses. As Gandhi says, even self-suffering can have a culturo-spiritual value. The elites should realize that to share in the sum-total of human suffering is also an act of personal spiritual and cultural upliftment. Hence the popular culture needs to be dovetailed with the subaltern culture.
Secondly the reality-fantasy cultural gap has to bridged. In an abstract sense, being cultured means having the aesthetic capability to appreciate beauty. But what is beauty? Beauty is truth even if it contains certain ugly aspects of reality. A culture which provides a beautiful make-believe fantasy world into which people can escape, be “Happy” and forget these aspects is neither progressive for society and will only create mindless zombies out of these individuals.
Thirdly, in a society that is mutually constituted by an exploitative set of relations, there cannot be a passive culture which is not related to these relationships. A progressive culture has to combat these exploitative relationships. A kind of culture is needed that helps mass movements of the dispossesed millions connect to the mainstream middle class and get the legitimacy that they richly deserve. These movements can assume a plethora of cultural forms like street theatre, community media etc and can be creatively derived from a mix of traditional and modern cultural forms and they can use the latest in Information and Communication Technologies.
Finally, the cultural problems have to be linked with the other systemic problems to do with the political economy and the efforts has to be a joint and sustained one. In this essay certain terms used have been used more to prove the analytical points raised than to stand the test of rigid academic scrutiny from the sociological or the anthropological point of view. Moreover a broad sweep of issues have been covered at the expense of some coherence. But the objective was more to provide some useful insights and ask some pertinent questions.
[1] The Capital of the Union Territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli, on the Gujarat-Maharashtra border