The second day of the Annual Academic Conference, 2018 began on the 2nd of February, in good spirits, after a successful Inaugural Ceremony the previous day. The first keynote lecture was by Professor S Shankar, Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.
Professor Shankar’s talk revolved around the question of poverty in the postcolonial age, something the humanities has been unnaturally silent about. For Prof. Shankar, this silence is all the more surprising because the postcolonial age is marked significantly by the presence of poverty. In the course of his talk, Prof. Shankar also analysed Yash Chopra’s film Deewar, to look at how the discourse on poverty was portrayed in 1970s Indian popular culture.
Professor Shankar began by introducing his upcoming book titled Global Poverty and Representations of the Poor. He then talked about poverty as a subjugated knowledge – the theme the conference was modeled on – while also introducing to us the term ‘knowledges of subjugation’. In the words of Prof. Shankar, knowledge on poverty and the subjugated is perhaps produced by people who are privileged or ‘non-subjugated’. It is here that he believes the Humanities can assist us in understanding a difficult subject like poverty. It is important, Prof. Shankar asserted, for us to undertake a venture of this sort, because 12.7% to 35% of the world’s population is considered ‘poor’ according to World Bank statistics, depending on how one calculates. Throughout the lecture, Prof. Shankar used the word ‘poor’ in quotations, primarily to problematise the presumptions behind who is or is not ‘poor’. He wants to look at the idea of the ‘poor’ as more than just a category. The key questions that Prof. Shankar explored were:
- What stories do we tell about the poor?
- What kinds of responses do they elicit?
- How are the poor represented in cultural narratives?
- What stereotypes of the poor have broad currency?
Invoking Gavin Jones, Prof. Shankar reiterated that poverty has been neglected as a category of critical discourse. There is some amount of academic literature on poverty, yes, but cultural and popular narratives of the same must be addressed as well, because stories told have real force. Prof. Shankar also emphasised the need for a critical and investigative examination of the term ‘poor’. He believes that it is a socially and ideologically constructed term, rather than an empirically verifiable term. This however, does not mean one must look at poverty-determining methods and categories with disdain, because they have undoubtedly helped in bringing forth effective poverty alleviation measures.
Nevertheless, the difficulty in defining poverty in an absolute manner has been acknowledged by many thinkers, including Georg Simmel. For Simmel, what makes one poor is not a lack of means. A poor person is one who receives assistance because of the lack of this means. Introducing Simmel and basic notions of poverty thus, Prof. Shankar moved on to analyse poverty in Deewar.
Deewar, a film set in the tumultuous period of 1970s India, is an action melodrama of sorts, with the poor being portrayed as poor-revolutionaries. It is the story of two impoverished brothers, Vijay and Ravi, whose unionist father abandons his family, utterly humiliated in his village, after having succumbed to a corrupt businessman’s threats and ceasing his protest activities. The two brothers and their mother are forced to move to the slums of Bombay, and using the money Vijay and his mother earn, Ravi is sent to school. Vijay, aware of his father’s failure and victimised because of his misdeeds, grows up to be a prosperous smuggler, while Ravi becomes a police officer. Ravi is torn between love for his own brother and his duty as an upholder of justice; however, justice takes the upper hand towards the end, and Vijay dies in his mother’s arms, after confessing all his sins. There is also a storyline that explores the vastly different love lives of these brothers.
Prof. Shankar observed that the movie accurately portrays the failure of unionism in those times and the plight of the working class. It is filled with themes of hope and anxiety of the poor, while also showing the ferment within the working class and the occasional reactionary, angry young man. The trope of the ‘angry young man’, Prof. Shankar believes, is what elicited a huge response from the audience of those times, since most of them shared the same frustration and anger towards the then-existing political winds. The film also mourns the poor who do not have enough cultural capital to join the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie. Prof. Shankar traced the character of Vijay from the origins of his victimhood as an abandoned elder son of the family, the subsequent impoverishment in the slums of Mumbai and his journey towards becoming a powerful, mythic anti-hero. While the actions of Vijay as a smuggler cannot be termed moral in any sense, Prof Shankar believes that they had political undertones. The 1970s were characterised by a lot of countries creating barriers to trade and the high customs duties meant that smuggling was quite rampant, especially in a port-city like Mumbai. Here, Prof. Shankar dropped in a note about how the discourse on criminality has changed over the years – contrasting Deewar with the 1998 Ram Gopal Varma’s film Satya, wherein criminality is shown in a completely different light.
The weary disillusionment on Bachchan’s (Vijay) face and the grim depictions of the streets of Bombay reinforce the melodramatic narrative so common to Indian cinema. There is also a theme of nationalism running undercurrent, evidenced by the playing of ‘Saare Jahaan Se Achcha’ in a school assembly in the beginning of the film, which prompts the child Vijay to start working so his brother Ravi can be educated. Here Prof. Shankar quite hilariously dropped a comment on how any discussion on nationalism is never carried out without a mention of Benedict Anderson, and mentioned that he might as well have been the first to steer clear of Anderson in his talk.
Shankar then moved on to show how Deewar has succeeded in recovering the poor as a worthy historical subject. It returns subjectivity to Ravi and Vijay, signified by the fact that they both refuse any sort of help in the process of rising up to what they want to be. Deewar, thus, becomes a highly successful cultural narrative that establishes the agential knowledge of the poor. It can therefore be called a relatively, if not completely, reliable ‘knowledge of subjugation’.
And on that note, Prof. Shankar ended his talk and a Q/A session followed, in which questions of gender in 1970s Bollywood cinema and texts and novels as ‘symptoms’ of social condition were raised. This culminated in a fruitful and engaging discussion on the ‘difficult’ subject of poverty, giving the audience some food for thought, while the paper-presenters began to prepare themselves for the first panel of Day-2.
Report by Sruthi Ranjani
Article 19 