Sexuality and Power

The strategies of social control that seek to control aspects of female sexuality and gender identity through a notion of normality are strategies that are produced and identifiable within the transformative narrative of an independent nation-state. However, these normalizing discourses and disciplinary strategies are challenged by women who internalize, reproduce, and challenge these strategies of social control.. The discourse of sexuality fashions individuals into genders and creates divisions to enforce order. Any sort of a resistance or transgression is contained by fashioning the transgressors through an act of normalization. The complexity of the power-relations of the discourse of sexuality lies in the way power establishes itself in terms of the subversion, which it produces. The narrative of sexuality affirms itself as a political act when it reinforces the power of the periphery to subvert the power of the center. Repression is not monolithic, and that sexual norms and public life are closely interrelated. The shame that keeps women under a male system of control results in creating the tension between power and subversion. The code of Shame, which the patriarchal discourse produces as the code of normalization, controls the transgressive code of Shamelessness. However it is not the power of patriarchy by itself that successfully controls ‘Shameless’ women, but rather it is the discourse of female sexuality which by virtue of its submission to honor as the code of normalization that permits the existence of the power of patriarchy. Moreover power of patriarchy can exist only in relation to subversion because the Shame a woman feels pertains not only to her sense of honor but also to the family honor which in turn includes the honor and thereby the Shame of the male members.The nation-state can produce hegemonic narratives of sexuality and reinforce normalizing and regulating codes of sexuality through state sponsored sex education materials. The complexity of the power-relations of the discourse of sexuality lies in the way power establishes itself in terms of the subversion, which it produces.

Playing With History and Fiction

The interpretative imagination is ignored by the traditional historicists. The interpretative imagination cannot be free from the capacity to ‘construct’ or ‘make’ history. The literary text and the historical text are products of the interpretative imagination. Words are vested with meaning to decipher worlds. But meaning is arbitrary. In attempting to interpret the past, the historian lives within it (the past) and outside it. But in both positions, communication between the past and the historian remains mobilized. However, the coherence present in the historian’s discourse does not equal or reflect the coherence of the past. Language in the historian’s discourse ‘gives’ coherence to the past and in no way mirrors that coherence.But the arbitrary nature of language makes it difficult to mirror the past. It is through language that the imagination‘re’- constructs the past. The real of the past cannot be reduced to a single monolith. So historical writing does not or cannot refer to the actual reality of the past because history mediates through language. Language plays a major role in the articulation of social practices. Society is a product of ideology and situated in culture which is akin to the literary text in its endless play of signs and difference in meaning.

History is a linguistic construct couched and reconstructed within the socio-cultural codes. Similarly a literary text is a cultural and social product whose efforts to see the past are conditioned by linguistic limits. History in the postmodern world is problematized and its truth and objectivity are called into question. The arbitrary relationship between words and worlds and the inevitability of cultural relativism problematize the capacity of history to mirror reality. Further, history becomes mere distortion when it employs metaphors to describe events since metaphors describe the relative quality of an event.

Literature as a text is only one variant among other social practices involved in the production of meaning. The cultural nature of language makes it impossible for meaning to be contained within the structures of the text. Literature is an active agent in the construction of a culture’s reality as well as in the participation of its historical processes. Literature is in itself an ideological product of the culture and shaped by it. Literature constructs a culture’s reality by using a language that reflects the moral, political and social concerns of that culture. Meaning is conferred upon a historical ‘event’ by the linguistic energy enforced by the author. The possibility/availability of multiple interpretations to a single historical event attests to the arbitrary nature of language.
Metaphorical description of events in the literary text as in the history text is induced by personal prejudices as well as the socio-cultural and political ideology of the present. The “truth” of the past can be proved in history only by relying upon linguistic evidences of the present. Metaphorical descriptions allow the either/or premise upon which the history and the literary texts pursue the truth.

The language of the people of the partition sounds different in our context. We, at the present moment experience communal riots which are only a consequence of the partition. The partition of the past could be called the cause of a communal riot of the present but the reverse does not hold. A communal riot today can help illuminate the impact of the partition. Hence the partition cannot be lived; it can only be reconstructed through a vocabulary that exerts pressure on the interpretative imagination, a vocabulary that is alien to the present since the past is a foreign country and a country of the mind.    

From Illusions to Impressions: The Urban-Rural Schism

The schism existing between the rural and the urban is chiefly ideology. Ideology is employed here not in the sense of contrived distortions foisted upon an innocent rural populace by a corrupt and cynical urban group. On the contrary, the ideology the city perpetuates through the medium of the films is consciously assimilated by the rural psyche in its search for the materialization of economic and social aspirations.The city as space for living is only a carrier of ideology and not its creator. The ideological schism of the urban-rural division speaks itself out in the mode the city urbanizes the rural psyche through the import of Indian cinema. The Cinema is an opiate of the rural people which the city uses to make the rural relegate the oppressive social order.The cinema is one among other “ideological state apparatuses” which endeavor to circulate and mobilize the urban-rural encounter. The cinema serves to represent and reproduce dominant myths and beliefs to induce the psyche to inculcate consent. This mobilization of consent is a major reason that accounts for the circular movement from the rural to the urban and back to the rural. The Indian cinema becomes the effective pulse of imagination for the poorest Indian men and women.The rural individual faces subjectivity when his/her psyche is convinced of the pervasive ideology of the urban. In the gap formed by the rural-urban division, one can locate the unconscious psyche of the rural masses subject to impression formation.

The rural psyche mobilizes itself into the city in the faith of economic betterment as they witness it materializing on the silver screen. With the discovery of their concretized dreams and desires in the film, the rural psyche translates the clean image of the hero of the tinsel world unto its entry into the political sphere. But when the hero is identified as part of the establishment the adulation in the rural psyche temporarily fades until the return of the hero as the crusader of evil on the silver screen. So it is a subjectivity that the rural psyche is conscious of because the impression formation of the actor as hero does not alter. It is only when the hero is cast against the established institution that the psyche loses its thrill of the city. So subjectivity is consciously lived by the rural psyche in its awareness of the ideology created by the state apparatuses. Moreover, with the entry of the hero from the tinsel into the political, the rural masses meet with the conflict of illusion and reality with their first impressions dominating their perception. But when the rural psyche experiences an inner conflict with the urban it foregrounds the creators of ideology in the city. Therefore urbanized ideology does not shape rural constituents into a forced subjectivity.

Urumi: Review

 

A lot of hype is made of the movie urumi. Any work of art till seen cannot be analyzed/criticized in the true sense.

But still I wonder what made the artists behind it work on it. Nehru in his" Discovery of India" says " A foreign conquest with all its evils, has one advantage. It widens the mental horizon of the people and compels men to look out of their shells. They realize the world is much bigger and a more variegated place than they had imagined". One of the latest biographers on Vasco da gama states that The Portuguese explorer has been sucked into treacherous controversy even after 500 years. Now, recalling Salman Rushdie's provocative Portuguese portrayal in "The moor's last sigh", is Urumi too a form of resistance of  a colonial burden? Are we resisting still by portraying what we believe disturbed the sub continent/sub condiment. And is it because reality was otherwise, that the sense of revenge so pervades the script? Are the makers driven only by their quest of artistic vision or are they just the archetypes of the colonized burden of a memory? Perhaps the smell of pepper corns was less tantalizing than the need to resist and Vasco who sought the pepper still is a power to resist through fantasy if not in the real. A urumi as the masters say is a lethal weapon taught last to the martial artist because it is equally dangerous to the wielder.