Sikh Formations, 2014 Vol. 10, No. 2, 173–186, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2014.957997
EDITORIAL SIKHI(SM) Word and image within literary and
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spectator cultures Between 19 and 21 October in the Fall 2012, Hofstra University and the Sardarni Kuljit Kaur Bindra Chair in Sikh Studies held a conference on the literary and visual cultures within, or pertaining to, Sikh traditions titled Sikhi(sm), Literature and Film. The conference was designed to chart a new territory by exploring the esthetic and expressive traditions within Sikhi(sm). Proposals were welcomed from both literature and film scholars. The area of literature was defined broadly to include the following: romance (kissa), ballad (of war/strife, var), lyric (revelation), hagiography and biography (Janamsakhis), didactic and devotional (revelation, commentarial), revival and reform (political, nationalist, moral/didactic tracts), fiction and short story, poetry and new poetry, prose, drama and play. Visual Cultures were similarly broadly defined. Proposals were welcomed from within the areas of: Cinema/Film (Bollywood, Hollywood, Lollywood and Independent productions, Internet websites, YouTube, Vimeo, Music video-Rap, Bhangra), TV (terrestrial and satellite stations), Comic (Amar Chitra Katha, Sikhtoons), Fine Arts (miniature paintings, court paintings, modern art, photography, contemporary art), Commercial Art (calendar art, lithographs), Fashion and Advertising (e.g. Sonny Caberwal, Vikram Chatwal, Waris Ahluwalia), Museum Exhibitions (V&A, Rubin Museum, Smithsonian, and so on), Architecture (monumental, temple and residential). The conference attracted a diverse group and produced stimulating presentations and papers. The original keynote address slated for the literature section of the conference was fittingly replaced by a section marking the tragic massacre of Sikhs at the Oak Creek Gurdwara in Wisconsin which occurred three months before the conference. A different keynote reflecting on the violence of the Oak Creek Tragedy became not only appropriate but also urgent and timely. Dr Nikhil Pal Singh (NYU) agreed to do the keynote for the literature half of the conference – (author of the award-winning Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy).1 Dr Singh’s presentation was titled: Remainders of White Supremacy: Reflections on Oak Creek. To form a panel for reflection and discussion, two respondents were organized: Dr Arvind Mandair (University of Michigan) and Dr Ann Burlein (Hofsra University). The mood was somber, but the papers and respondent’s comments on religion, race and violence were incisive. The keynote for the film half of the conference was Safina Uberoi, a multi-awardwinning Indian-Australian filmmaker. Her presentation was titled: The Guru’s Portal: A Door to Documentary Truth, which mainly focused on her My Mother India (2001) and Who © 2014 Taylor & Francis
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Do You Think You Are? Meera Syal (2004). This fascinating talk was followed by a screening of Dr Harjant Singh Gill’s film: Roots of Love (2004). Discussion was moderated by Dr Geetanjali Chanda (Yale University) with the Safina Uberoi interviewing Harjant Singh Gill. The conference, being split into two major subject areas, was structured by five panels. Literary Genres had two and Visual Cultures had three panels. The five panels were: (1) narrative and history, (2) diaspora and politics, (3) Dastar and fine arts, (4) film, cinema and internet, (5) Internet and music. Closing reflections were offered by Puninder Singh Jaitla (University of Michigan) and Dr Amritjit Singh (Ohio State University). A full listing of the paper titles and abstracts, presenters and their bios can be found at the Hofstra University’s Sikhs Studies website.
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1. Introduction to a selection of the conference papers Hofstra University and the Sardarni Kuljit Kaur Bindra Chair in Sikh Studies wanted to build on the success of the last conference on The Hermeneutics of Sikh Music and Word, by further exploring the esthetic dimension to Sikhi(sm). In the previous conference, the Word’s relation to Music was examined. In this conference, the focus on the affective and esthetic was continued by exploring the Word’s relation to Literature and Film.
2. Literature (word), some broad reflections I think the whole movement to see religion as literature is a way of diffusing its radical content. It’s actually a way of evading certain rather unpleasant realities that it insists on confronting us with. One of the things that happened in the 19th century was that culture – literary and other kinds of culture – tried to stand in for religion, and there was a lot of talk about religion as poetry and religion as myth. That was an attempt to shy away from some of the more uncomfortable challenges of religion when taken rather more seriously. (Terry Eagleton) The rise of the novel, humanism, the individual subject and an increasingly rational, technical, and visual culture cannot be thought of as isolated movements within modernity. Literary and filmic representations are therefore tied to wider processes and powers. This conference aimed to explore some of the implications of Eagleton’s observation about the ambivalence that scriptures and other related works face within the vortex of a scientific humanizing culture: is gurbani the Word of God, or merely the words of some particular men? That this is still a hotly contested issue (even beyond the polarized and facile Dawkins vs. Creationist debate) reveals the inherently problematic nature of how we conceive language and literature. Can there be today such a thing as revealed speech? How would one today speak of revelation? Is all speech merely ‘human’? What of post-humanism? Language, literature, and image raise very complex issues. For instance, is it the case, that ‘we’ have moved from ‘god’ to ‘man’ to ‘art’, as Annie Dillard argues: ‘Literature as a whole has moved from contemplating cosmology – Dante – for the sake of God to analyzing society – George Eliot – for the sake of man, to abstracting pattern
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itself – Nabokov – for the sake of art’ (1982, 47). Dillard notes that fiction within the last century has therefore moved ‘from depth to surface, from rondure to planes, from world to scheme, from observation to imagination, from story to theory, from society to individual, from emotion to mind’ (1982, 47), and one could add from a master narrative (religious, cultural, national) to everyone’s ‘cockeyed’ view. But Dillard seems to miss one of the most important shifts altogether, namely the shift from word to image, from page to screen. This point will be further discussed below. Poets, painters, and saints the world over have insisted that they have received the words, narratives, images in vision rather than consciously creating them. Who and what are the muses of today? Who is the author of language? If we have moved to the surface of everyone’s individual scheming consciousness, then can multiplicity of perspectives avoid insipid relativism? And how do these movements that collectively depict a paradigm shift affect literature? If storytelling is a means to humanize time by transforming the impersonal passing of fragmented, even haphazard, moments into a sensible structure, a plot, a mythos (out of which story and history arise), then it is little wonder that some, like J. R. Tolkien, argue that the central features of story are fantasy, escape, consolation, and recovery. Literature is not something that we would want to wish away as a prison house of language, as Kearney argues summarizing Tolkien’s view: The fundamental motivation for all narrative art is to open up a ‘secondary world’ or ‘sub-creation’ which discloses the truths and realities normally occluded by the primary world of ordinary perception and opinion … narrative affords us privileged insight into the secret workings and potencies of this world. (2002, 158, fn. 5) If language is not merely a temporary respite from the march of time, attempting the ‘Great Escape from Death’ (Tolkien), or merely a ‘machine for the suppression of time’ (Levi Strauss), but actually a way to gain insight into our existential being and becoming, then literature has to be reflected upon as a depth at the very root of our ontological constitution. How have Sikhs conceived literature, language, communication? How is gurbani to be understood? Is it merely poetry? Gurbani is not merely oneself as Word but, as we pondered at the Hofstra 2010 conference, oneself as musical Word. Is not all language, in its most refined and or rudimentary expression, music, tone, rhythm, viz., a singing? Is music a language? Or is music the deconstructive force to any and all narrative hermeneutic? Is this countervailing tension not the essence of human existence? If literature is tied to the rise of the human subject that qualifies the individuating ego, what about the role of the non-ego, or the post-human that often revitalizes if not revolutionizes literature through ‘mystic’, ‘saintly’ or ‘inspired’ speech that comes when the ego is struck dumb and silent? While the Sikh self requires story to be complete, it also requires poetic music, meditation, and prayer to un-story itself to recover speech that can tell anew. In my Animal Sublime article (Bhogal 2012b), I argue that beyond the silence of the language of things or the body language (of the animal), and the language of the (human) mind’s imagination, lies a third language that integrates animal silence with human speech in revelation (Bhogal 2012b). This is literature against itself, or otherwise stated, literature as (contemplative) music, the raag–shabad
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dialectic. For a visual parallel compare facing or stepping into the mirror. And because the ‘Real’ cannot be captured either by word or image, then any image can mirror the unrepresentable ‘Real’ – that is, any image can become an ‘omoioma’ – ‘an imitation of celestial things in things of this world’ (Kristeva 1987, 269), and upon noticing the resemblance the amorous soul falls in love – but this requires a deep rather than surface perception. Interestingly, memory is most powerfully invoked by music and image, less so by word. Is it the case that the word becomes the medium for conscious life and image for unconscious life, and therefore cinema is a mode of the unconscious rather than the conscious? Jonathan Beller has his own (Marxist) reasons for arguing image’s relation to the unconscious (see Section 3). This seems to go beyond authorial intention (stressed by romantic idealists and existentialists), the linguistic workings of the plot (stressed by structuralists), the reader’s response (stressed by poststructuralists), as well as the corresponding reference to the objective world (stressed by materialists and realists) – though none of these can be ignored once gurbani is taken as literature. That is to say, if the Word (shabad, gurbani) is inseparable from language, then how to – if it does at all – resist or escape the effects of power produced by sociopolitical forces and their varied discursive practices and formations? Therefore, what is involved in treating things as literature and image in our culture? This is also related to the point of intertextuality: A poem has meaning in relation to the tradition that makes it possible (Kearney 2002, 35). Also, the sociopolitical and religious critique in Guru Granth Sahib (GGS) brings out that inherent openness or flexibility of literature inasmuch as it can house two completely opposing functions: as an ideological instrument of social control or the very place from which ideology is critically questioned and exposed. Otherwise stated, this is the transformation of language into law or into love – two sides of the same coin of justice. To understand the hidden traces that both word and image carry within, one has to engage critical theories that operate through a hermeneutics of suspicion and affirmation. Such theories detect the warping influence of class, race, and gender struggles (Marxism, Race Theory, Feminism) and affirm the voice of the oppressed that uncovers the force of individual and collective desire and fear and affirms the resistance against their corporate homogenization and capture (Psychoanalysis) – that deny granting truth to any human invented binary to include/exclude, and affirms the necessity to theorize the complexity of ambiguity, interdependence, and novelty (Deconstruction), that is critical of power and empire and affirms the voice of those subjugated (Post- and Decolonial theory), and that critically analyzes the normativity of the heterosexual matrix and affirms the right of difference (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender studies), etc. If literature is both complicity and convention as well as resistance and disruption, then Literature and Film can be conventionalizing forces and/or disruptive and renewing forces. If gurbani is literature, what kind of force is it? That is to say, is ‘literature’ or gurbani a special kind of ‘sacred’ language that produces conformity or is it a ‘special, transformative use’ of ordinary language that disrupts and renews? If there are no such phenomena as divine languages, then how does any language become divine or transcendent? Unlike the elite, hierarchical exclusivity of the Vedas, gurbani is egalitarian and inclusive. What is it, then, that we recognize (if we do) as the ‘sacredness’ or ‘divinity’ in speech – when it is always made in the languages we speak?
EDITORIAL
3.
Film (image) and the cinematic mode of production
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A work of art [film] is a tractor ploughing over the audience’s psyche (Sergei Eisenstein) If literature presents us with difficult questions, we should not expect anything different with the image. How are we to understand the intensely rapid transition from cultures of reading to a culture of spectatorship – from the literary Word to the cinematic Image, from pre-modernity to (post)modernity – which entails not only the linguistic, but cultural, pictorial or intervisual turns? To handle these shifts, there has been what could be called a ‘neurological’ turn in the humanities that necessitates a re-definition of the human being, as Bernard Stiegler calls it, as a ‘technical becoming’ (1998). Cognition and attention within this frame are not limited to the personal and go beyond the individual to psychic and social ‘capacities’ that are historically and so technically trained and constituted (see Stiegler 2010). This will be important to grasp for the foregoing discussion. For various reasons, the papers published in this issue of Sikh Formations have all come from the second and visual part of the conference. Given that all of these involve the visual, it is worth theorizing a little about contemporary notions of the visual. One of the most stark and illuminating is that of Beller’s (2006b) Cinematic Mode of Production. Rather than tying literature to music, shabad to rag, today’s context has become utterly transformed by what Nicholas Mirzoeff calls the ‘intervisual’ – ‘the simultaneous display and interaction of a variety of modes of visuality’ (2002, 3). He goes on to argue that the ‘hypervisuality of everyday life in a digitized global culture’ (4) creates a ‘media environment’ that becomes an ‘operating arena for a new visual subjectivity’ (10) – producing the mantra that challenges Descartes’ cogito ergo sum: ‘I am seen and I see that I am seen’ (10) – and this seeing forms my being – normatively. Here, the image reigns supreme – not the Word. The ‘pictorial turn’ has become ‘cinematic’ even taking into account the ‘digital divide’ that separates those who have access to computers from those who do not. What is gurbani to the new generations who are learning to see through a digital gaze via hi-tech and mobile screens of vision? How is the ‘literature’ of a musical word affected when reconfigured through digitization? Is gurbani still gurbani within the decontextualized cyberspace of the internet? Can there be darshan in that (non) context? Where is the gurdwara or sangat for the GGS online? When we consider that visuality (through its mode of re-presentation) splits body from mind, perception from experience, the contrast becomes stark, especially if we realize that music, being non-representational and affective, unites body with mind, perception with experience. What are the long-term consequences of the hegemony of the image over the word? As Neil Postman (2005) argued in the 1980s, before the advent of the television, politicians were recognizable by the content of their ideas and not by their faces. Now, after the epistemic shift from reading to seeing, the public recognize only their faces and often do not know their ideas. In such a public relations-world, actors like Ronald Reagan make perfect sense as ‘heads’ of state. And that is just one reason how the cinema became the major machine for constructing ‘normative
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orders’ of cultural and political discourse: one need only compare the thoroughly negative representations of Muslims in Hollywood (as Jack Shaheen has archived) with the equally debasing Hindu representations of Sikhs in Bollywood – as the writers here analyze. Though Benedict Anderson’s print-based nationalism has gone digital and cinematic, the power of image and film as propagandistic forces for nation-building or consumption of ‘goods’ does not need to be rehearsed here – despite films to the contrary like Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers (1966). As Balsamo (1992, 1996) argued in the 1990s, ‘cosmetic surgery literally transforms the material body into a [visual] sign of culture’ (1992, 209–210) – who and what is not being cinematically re-produced? The blind – who are fast becoming repositories of ‘ancient’ and fading epistemologies. Building upon Deobard’s (1967) Society of the Spectacle – where ‘the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world’ – Jonathan Beller argues that what we have to contend with now is not the social construction of the visual, but the visual construction of the social. In other words seeing has become capitalized through a ‘cinematic mode of production’ (CMP). Looking itself becomes a labor serving capital; the rise of the image has led to the capitalization of ‘attentional biopower’ – where hypervisuality of the commodity has transformed seeing into labor through an ‘attention theory of value’ – which updates Marx’s labor theory of value. Crogan and Kinsley (2012) detail a number of key observations of this shift to an attention-based economy – where the biopolitical and capitalist ‘commodification, regulation and subjectivation’ of attention – largely over-determined by the visual – ‘requires that we explicitly conceptualize the relation between bodies, cognition, economy and culture’ (2). Attention is ‘commodified, quantified and trained’ firstly by recalling Simon’s (1971, 40) formula: ‘a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention’; the more information explodes in quantity, the less quality time we have to attend to it – resulting in superficialization, trivialization and atrophication of our cognitive capacities; as knowledge tends toward information, information tends toward instagram, marking the relative displacement of word by image, reading by seeing, character by caricature. This re-training of attention makes it lose its difference and depth, and is habituated by the capitalist commodification and consumption metrics of quantity of clicks per hour, quantity of views, screen-time, ads per show, per viewing, per minute, with increasing visual dramatics of flashing, changing colors, ending with marketing tailored by Big Data. Such aggressive marketing, to seize one’s attention by the ‘cinematization’ of commodities, makes how one attends irrelevant. Crogan and Kinsley note, ‘attention is rendered equal to time’ (2012, 6). Labor time is becoming attention time. Secondly, within the attention economy, labor becomes ‘immaterial labor’ and does so through the creative power of language – viz., how language ‘produces the informational and cultural consent of the commodity’ (Lazzarato 1996, 132). This linguistic reading is challenged by Jonathan Beller’s argument of how attention is captured and formed by ‘screen media’ of the image; as we have seen for Beller, the means of production is at its core a ‘cinematization’, making language a subset of the cinematic and cybernetic Image. Beller thus also traces the ‘cinematization of social relations’ via an increasing subordination of word to images, reading to seeing – making the cinema the ‘deterritorialized factory’ of our times. That is, a work/leisure space where ‘we make and remake
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the world and ourselves along with it’ (2002, 64). He argues: ‘not only are consciousness and cinema mutually overdetermined by the constraints of capitalist production, but that they increasingly function on a continuum … ’ (2006b, 14). This ‘social logic’ of the cinema continues and exacerbates the well-studied commodification and alienation of Marxist theory. Beller notes, ‘The commodified object tends toward image, money tends toward film and capital tends toward cinema. People are slotted in accordingly as value-producing media for the new visual economy – as if living in accord with preordained scripts or programs’ (2006b, 28).
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4.
The cinematic unconscious
The cinematic unconscious is best captured by Natasha Raheja’s paper analyzing the viral YouTube video of the Warriors of Goja. If people are plotting out a visual ‘script’ already imagined – by the CMP – then cinema was never a technique of the imagination, but as Beller astutely observes with a key reversal, that actually, … the Imaginary is a technique of cinema, or rather, of mediation generally. Such a reversal de-ontologizes the unconscious and further suggests that the unconscious is cinema’s product; its functions, which is to say, its existence as such, emerge out of a dynamic relation to technology/capital (technology being understood here as sedimented, alienated species being). (2002, 64) Thus rather than seeing cinema emerge out of the unconscious – typically ‘cut to the measure of male desire’, Beller is arguing that actually, ‘the unconscious emerges out of cinema (male desire is cut to the measure of cinema)’ (2002, 69). Regarding Raheja’s focus, which goes beyond the cinematic Bollywood to the cybernetic YouTube, Beller sees a continuity of the visual here: ‘The more an image is watched, the more value accrues to it. This is a cybernetic model but here cinematized vision is the key pathway of a cybernetic capitalism and the image is the key interface’ (2002, 64). How do the spectacle of prime time TV and the cybernetic amplification of the TV ‘event’ into another YouTube ‘viral phenomenon’ create a visual scape that produces these subjects and their entire presentation? And what is the unconscious that appears through these events – the legacy of police brutality, systematic violence, systemic oppression, public humiliation, Bollywood denigrating caricatures of scapegoating, etc. as Geetanjali Chanda and Anjali Roy detail.
5.
Exploitation: identity as media image
Because leisure time is also classed as labor time in the attention economy, the labor of the eye is often called ‘playbor’. Yet, this playbor intensifies the exploitation rendered by capital: the alienation of one’s ‘species being’: simply put, social relations are more than ever constructed visually and exploited at the level of that objectified image.
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The stereotype’s relation to spectacle is not hard to make – especially within the context of Us vs. (the evil) Them. This ‘increasing cinematicity of the world’ thus needs to be understood clearly: cinema is a technology, ‘a social machine for engineering the socius’ where our sight is becoming ‘televisual’ and where individuals ‘see everything as if it were already an image’, which converts ‘people into spectacle’ (Beller 2002, 71– 72). Recall Dillard’s comments above about the shift from depth to surface. Beller concurs: ‘The depthlessness and ostensible immateriality of others accelerates the rapidity with which others can be liquidated and their subjective potential profitably taken’ (2002, 72). Others also lament this shift from ‘deep-attention’ to ‘hyper-attention’ (Hayles 2007) that reflects a ‘generational divide in cognitive modes’, or in the grammar of Carr (2010) from a linear mind of higher capacities to one of repetitive tasks that require minimal attention. One does not need to be reminded that this visual decontextualized flatness or depthlessness is fatal. Recall, with the increasing overlap between (corporate) media, state, and nation, how the mediatic and cinematic construction of the Sikh/ Muslim as Terrorist manages to socially engineer a deadly fabrication as fact, ‘deep frozen as image … drained of all subjective content’ (Beller 2002, 73), which can be applied by the police or the army or by the public – and not only by (deluded/mistaken) white supremacists in America, like Wade Michael Page who killed Sikhs in the (horrifically pathetic and cowardly) mode of countless and tiresome Schwarzenegger ‘hero’ film2. Mercer makes an important observation related to this contemporary scene as the state becomes a security surveillance apparatus that creates a new ‘scenario in which the longstanding metaphor of minority “invisibility” has given way to a new and wholly unanticipated predicament of “hypervisibility”’ (in Mirzoeff 2002, 162). The progressiveness of local communities regarding the visual appearance of minorities pales into insignificance at the level of national TV-Media discourse – which is still inherently biased. As John Fiske argues that the new surveillance is far from neutral: ‘Surveillance technology enhances the construction of whiteness as the space from which the other is viewed’ (Mirzoeff 2002, 298). With regard to Sikhs (and Muslims and less so Christians, Buddhists, and Jains) in India, they are cinematically constructed from the perspective of Hindu-ness (in its secular and religious forms), where the repetition of the public’s looking increases normatively fashioned values, prejudices, and attitudes. Crogan and Kinsley (2012) argue that the literature on the attention economy questions and redefines ‘the relation between interiority and exteriority, minds and media, economics and culture’ (16). It is argued that attention is not really individual, but socially fabricated; we are subjects under subjectivation, where modes of individuation create consumer subjects. How, if it is at all possible, to resist this cinematic subjectivation? We have to begin, clearly, by ‘paying attention to attention’ (18) to forge different relations between media, economy, technology, and self. As Beller is at pains to note, this is especially urgent when we consider that the digital age, ‘is strictly correlative to the unprecedented impoverishment and oppression of the majority of the world’s population and the exhaustion of its natural resources’ (in Crogan and Kinsley 2012, 19).
EDITORIAL
6.
Overview of papers
With the above overview of Beller’s thesis, and the outline of the ‘visual turn’, the reader now has a frame to read the following papers (especially the first three). The frame should easily generate new questions about the power of the visual in an attention-based economy.
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6.1.
Geetanjali Chanda
Given the pivotal, momentous and intensely violent events of Partition (1947) and Operation Bluestar against the Sikhs (1984), one would expect literature and film to explore these areas. But what we find is the elision of the Sikh story or its horrendous misrepresentation. These misrepresentations and elisions not only run across centerperiphery and sociopolitical relations, but across gender and within traditions and their families. Dr Chanda explores this gender elision along both literary and cinematic fronts by critically reviewing Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence (1998) and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s Borders and Boundaries (2007), as well as the independent films ‘Khamosh Paani’ (2003) and ‘Amu’ (2005). One of her key aims is to ‘provide a gendered and woman-centered reading’ to explore ‘the impact of films as a vehicle of a gendered view-point and identity formation that could serve as alternate historical documentation’. Resonating much with Beller, Chanda extends Benedict Anderson’s thesis beyond print to other media ‘especially films’ as the ‘bedrock’ of ‘identitycreation’, citing Akbar Ahmad that art and life no longer imitate each other but have merged, concluding that ‘we look at these films as a gauge of a moral universe constructed within them’. Noting that films have shifted recently (from the ‘view from below’, through the ghetto and slums, toward the boundaries of the nation against the (imagined/real) threat of terrorism), Chanda discusses the two key events of 1947 and 1984 with care and nuance, although she limits the violence to the realm of the communal. She critically reflects on the broadened range of the work film does with regard to nation-building and the nationalization of identities, and asks questions about the reliability and nature of film when it is plied to the work of ‘documenting’ major historical events. How can we escape the realm of interpretation? Beller would perhaps add that this is to live in a world already passed, as film is no longer the interpreter of reality, or key events, but the maker of reality – the question is who has access to manufacture the socius? Yes, men still do, but which men (of which class) seems as significant a question to raise as the acknowledgment that women and men experience history differently. Nevertheless, a gendered reading of Partition undoubtedly reveals different stories and raises different questions. For example, Chanda is right to point out that films like ‘Amu’ (2005) do become important ‘documents’ that provide publically accessible alternative accounts that mainstream discourse attempts to ignore. Whilst acknowledging their shortcomings, veracity, historical accuracy, political fairness, and so on, Chanda writes: the films themselves do crucial work in recovering and revealing a minority and gendered perspective on violence – and in this case – against Sikhs and Sikh
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women in particular. Based as they are on specific historical events they become invaluable documentation that record a continuing circle of communal and gendered violence that is often suppressed by the state and/or religious institutions (cited in this issue).
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6.2.
Anjali Gera Roy
Standard stereotypes of Sikhs within Hindi cinema, for example the ‘uncouth rustic’ that ‘provides comic relief’, have long been institutionalized, but Roy notes how since the 1990s, filmmakers have had to re-write the script of their movies in partial respect of the growing economic and political power of the (Sikh) diaspora. In exploring this shift, Roy argues that the partial inclusion is actually illusory because it is still demeaning to Sikhs themselves – even though Bollywood stars may don the turban to allow the Sikh to become somewhat culturally chic. Through her analysis, Roy shows that this partial inclusion is merely an exoticization that continues to displace the Sikh subject in the narrative of the Indian nation. Roy notes the transformative force of (diaspora) capitalism illustrates Beller’s theory, where economic power is visual power, though more could have been said about exactly how the equation works to transform the social realm where stereotypes operate, whether in India or in the diaspora. Roy writes, ‘sustained engagements with Hindi cinema’s negotiation with ethnic difference are missing in existing studies’, and notes a similar ‘absence or stereotyping’ in both Hollywood and Hindi cinema where ‘ethnicity has been repressed by the national desire for assimilation and the erasure of ethnic difference presented as a preamble to citizenship’. In order for the nation’s Hindi-Hindu master narrative to gain and maintain public allegiance, Roy argues that ‘as de-ethnicization is considered the precondition to entry into secular modernity, the modern Indian citizen-subject can be produced only through a disavowal of ethnicity’. Roy argues that the well-established stereotypes of Sikhs as hardy cultivators that hail from a ‘martial race’ have been recently renegotiated given ‘the rising power of the Sikh diaspora, the transnational mobilization of Sikh identity and the increased visibility of Sikhs in eminent positions’ – leading to the strategic exploitation of the success of the Panjabi Cool of Bhangra music. Nevertheless, Roy contends that this has not broken the stereotype, but merely reversed it from negative to positive to give the illusion of progress: as Sikhs are still captured as ‘martyrs’ or ‘clowns’ dancing to the tune of the Indian nation’s master narrative.
6.3.
Natasha Raheja
It seems to me that Natasha Raheja picks up from where Dr Roy ends, by exploring the visual power-turned social phenomenon of a viral YouTube video titled Warriors of Goja that was part of a talent show produced by a major Indian satellite network – with 1.6 million hits. Raheja uses the phenomenon that generated over 2000 comments, to analyze the constructions of Sikh masculinity ‘and their range of reception both within and outside of the Sikh community’. Raheja places such visual performances within ‘larger inquiries on the circulation of Sikh religious images in transnational,
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EDITORIAL
global media networks’, and it would be fruitful to consider a possible theoretical reframing like that of the recent work involving the visual turn. Raheja’s paper begins to theorize at the level of the image as circulating commodity in her ‘reading of the mutilated Sikh male body’, and wonders ‘whether, and to what extent, the viral Warriors of Goja can be situated within a broader transnational visual economy of maimed Sikh male bodies, namely of martyr figures’. Raheja seeks to read the virality of the Warriors of Goja as inspiring a certain vitality by facilitating (reflective and affective) circulation within the transnational community. Following Butler, Raheja questions how the performance of gender may in fact delimit actors into a ‘sticky’ objecthood and thus obscure the subject as an agent. Like Beller then, Raheja notes the alienating force of a ‘process of commercial objectification, in which problematic cultural anxieties and expectations around virility and patriotism were being played out on Sikh male bodies, all under the auspices of entertainment and talent’. Yet, unlike Beller – at least within my all too brief overview – Raheja rejects this two-dimensional and singular theoretical reading that flattens agents into ‘passive, empty objects’, and moves to a more ambiguous and complex hermeneutic of the Warriors of Goja. Following Angela Zito, Raheja reads the body not only as a sign but also as a site; that it is not only commercial interests but also cultural legacy at play in the construction of Sikh maleness (despite an inconsequential misreading of a verse from the GGS). Employing also the insights of Michael Nijhawan and Brian Axel – who point out that the martial narrative and its images form a central component of Sikh visual culture, Raheja’s paper agrees that the warrior imago reveals itself to be a potent multilayered hermeneutic. Raheja thus makes Beller’s point by quoting Axel: ‘the figure of the martyr, then, may be seen as a critical point of mediation linking processes of subject formation and terror together with changing political possibilities and new technologies of communication’. Overlooking her interesting discussion on pain and agency, Raheja concludes her analysis via an illuminating observation: How in the face of a lack of any official memorialization of, for example, the state sanctioned massacre against Sikhs in 1984, might these spectacular displays of violence be read as acts of commemoration of a long history of violence against Sikhs in South Asia and the diaspora? (cited in this issue) Raheja’s insightful paper does indeed detail the ‘ways in which the maimed Sikh male body is an image commodity with a history of transnational circulation’. Watching the viral video again after reading Raheja, I now read the (still illuminating) observation of Beller differently: that we are embedded in screens within screens, enframed and repressed by their economically and politically instrumental framing, that society verges on the cusp of a terrifying vision, that ‘in the world of paying attention, humanity has become its own ghost’ (2006a).
6.4.
Francesca Cassio
In the first of two performative papers, Dr Cassio’s focus is gurbani kirtan, though here not rendered by men, but by female singers. Continuing the gender analysis of Dr Chanda, Cassio locates these female singers within a centuries-long professional
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tradition dominated by men. Basing her analysis on ethnographic work, Cassio charts the transformation of the public space over the decades, analyzing how the various media (TV and Radio, but also social networks and websites) have played a key role in the promotion of female performers. Her analysis reveals that across ‘each decade’, radical shifts have occurred in ‘the strategies of production and perception’ of gurbani kirtan. Cassio reads the rise of female singers in consort with new media as a possible liberation. Beller might argue that it re-inscribes a form of traditional normalization via the force of the CMP. That is to say, rather than reading gender merely biologically as agentdriven, one needs to ask how the visual technologies manufacture and replicate male and female roles and subjects in their visual commodification and circulation. The visual, especially framed by YouTube, seems to demand a Butlerian reading of gender as cultural praxis in its viral performative affectivity. Yet, given the paucity of such work charting an untold history of twentieth century female singers up to current times is nevertheless valuable, especially as each of the three decades Cassio details shows a concomitant shift in ‘strategies of production and perception’ – from traditional oral modes of sitting by your teacher to decontextualized online e-learning. Indeed, one of the most interesting insights Cassio uncovers is the possibility of recalling a specifically female style in the performance of gurbani kirtan.
6.5.
Gunjeet Aurora
Gunjeet Aurora’s paper brings into focus an underrepresented and rarely analyzed topic: Punjabi Theatre. Her paper charts the preliminary history of its beginnings and developments and differences within various social spaces both rural and urban – noting a clear distinction: while theater is still thriving in rural centers and small towns, it is not in the urban centers where audiences have shifted to movie theaters. Aurora offers a detailed and richly descriptive account of the founding figures in the evolution of Panjabi theater along the lines of four themes: the social (I. C. Nanda), the psychological (Balwant Gargi), the political (Gursharan Singh), and the performative (Kewal Dhaliwal and Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry). Reflecting on all the papers in light of Beller’s thesis, it seems to me then we have three counter genres to cinema, and its visually seductive images: literature, theater, and music. An urgent question to pursue then is how can they maintain their own integrity and not be subsumed by the Goliath of today’s CMP? If the Word is going to set a challenge to the Image and its cinematicization (i.e. objectification, commodification, reification, virtualization, capitalization, hyper-hetero-sexualization) of the self, other and world, then its seems it would have to be a musical Word that does it. Otherwise, deconstructive mutant ‘imagologies’ have to be devised to virally infect the polished mediabacked PR of corporate, national, and international neo-liberal capital. We have to tell our stories for the eye as much as sing for ear. Eisenstein was right all those years ago: the cinematic image is indeed, a ‘tractor [of the empire of global modernity] ploughing over the audience’s psyche’. But what of Eagleton’s unplowed fields of religion – which should not be displaced by reading its volatile force as ‘literature’, ‘poetry’, and ‘myth’. Perhaps we need to face more squarely and honestly religion’s ‘uncomfortable challenge’.
EDITORIAL
Notes 1 2
For reflections on that horrific incident, see Bhogal (2012a) as well as Volume 8, Issue 3 (2012) and Volume 9, Issue 2 (2013) of this journal for articles dedicated to understanding that event. See Sikh Formations volume for special issue on this tragedy as well as my article, ‘Oak Creek Tragedy: The Denial of a Culture of Oppression’. Sophia.
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References Balsamo, Anne. 1992. “On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and the Technological Production of the Gendered Body.” Camera Obscura 10 (1 28): 206–237. Balsamo, Anne. 1996. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham: Duke University Press. Beller, Jonathan. 2002. “Kino-I, Kino World: Notes on the Cinematic Mode of Production.” In The Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2nd ed., 60–85. London: Routledge. Beller, Jonathan. 2006a. “Paying Attention.” Cabinet 24. Accessed March 8, 2014. http:// www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/beller.php Beller, Jonathan. 2006b. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Towards a Political Economy of the Society of the Spectacle. Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College/University Press of New England. Bhogal, Balbinder Singh. 2012a. “Oak Creek Killings: The Denial of a Culture of Oppression.” SOPHIA: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics. Sophia 51 (3): 335–339. Bhogal, Balbinder Singh. 2012b. “The Animal Sublime: Rethinking the Sikh Mystical Body.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 80 (4): 856–908. Carr, Nicholas. 2010. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton. Crogan, P., and S. Kinsley. 2012. “Paying Attention: Towards a Critique of the Attention Economy.” Culture Machine 13: 2–29. Debord, Guy. 1967. La société du spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel. Dillard, Annie. 1982. Living by Fiction. New York: Harper Perennial. Hayles, N. K. 2007. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.” Profession 13: 187–199. Kearney, Richard. 2002. On Stories. London: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1987. Tales of Love. Translated by Loen S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lazzarato, M. 1996. “Immaterial Labour.” Translated by P. Colilli and E. Emory. In Radical Thought in Italy, edited by P. Virno and M. Hardt, 132–146. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. [1998] 2002. The Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge. Postman, Neil. [1985] 2005. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin Books. Simon, H. A. 1971. “Designing Organizations for an Information – Rich World.” In Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, edited by M. Greenberger, 37–72. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
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Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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Balbinder Singh Bhogal Hofstra University balbinder.bhogal@hofstra.edu
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To cite this article: Balbinder Singh Bhogal (2014) SIKHI(SM), Sikh Formations: Religion, Culture, Theory, 10:2, 173-186, DOI: 10.1080/17448727.2014.957997 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2014.957997
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