India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy by Ramachandra Guha
The creation of linguistic states gave a fresh fillip to regional theatre. They now had a ‘captive’ audience, so to speak, thirty or forty million speakers of the language in which the plays were performed. New groups and movements took shape, working within the ambit of the linguistic state but with an eye open to the wider world.
Among these groups was Ninasam, established in 1949 by an areca nut farmer named K. V. Subanna in his native village in north Karnataka. Subanna studied at the University of Mysore, where he was inspired by his teacher, the poet Kuvempu (K. V. Puttappa), to combine a life of farming with that of artistic creation. On returning home to Heggodu, he first started a theatre group, followed, in time, by a newspaper, a publishing house, a film club, a drama school and a full-fledged repertory company.
Fifty years after it started, Ninasam is thriving, run now by Subanna’s son K. V. Akshara, himself a graduate of the National School of Drama and of Leeds University. Ninasam organizes ‘culture camps’ in which peasants and artisans interact with distinguished scholars from all over the world. But their main activity remains the theatre. Ninasam runs a full-fledged drama school, many of whose graduates then join their travelling repertory.
Every year, during the annual culture camp in Heggodu, three plays are premiered at an auditorium named for the Kannada writer and polymath Shivarama Karanth. The playsare all performed in the local language; one is usually an original Kannada play, the second a translation of a play written in another Indian language, the third a translation of a classic Western work. Thus, on successive days, the village audience might see plays by, for example, Girish Karnad, Mohan Rakesh and Anton Chekhov. These treats are not restricted to Heggodu; after being premiered there, the plays are thentaken by the Ninasam repertory to different towns and villages in the state.36
In an average year the repertory performs around 150 plays before audiences totalling some 300,000 people, the bulk of which are rural and small-town folk. And ‘so you found farmers who grew areca, rice and sugarcane in daytime turn themselves into connoisseurs of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière and Ibsen at night’.37
Another innovator who has successfully blended folk with classical forms is the director Habib Tanvir. A product of the radical Indian People’s Theatre Association of the 1940s, Tanvir later studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London before returning home to his native Chattisgarh. There he worked with local singers and actors to create a series of superb plays in which song and dance were used to satirize the petty corruptions of the village elite and the more brutal corruptions of the state. His repertory consisted chiefly of local actors, who spoke in the local dialect. Yet their skill allowed them to present their director’s ideas to audiences well beyond Chattisgarh itself.38
Subanna might be described as a ‘progressive’; Tanvir, as an ‘activist’. Neither explicitly aligned himself with a political party or movement. Other theatre groups have been more directly propagandist. They include the Jana Natya Mandali, which is closely identified with the Naxalite movement in Andhra Pradesh. The Mandali’s star performer is the folk singer Gaddar, a sometime engineering student from a Dalit home who has been active in left-wing politics for more than thirty years. In 1971 he composed a song about the rickshaw pullers of Hyderabad; since then, he has composed and sung many songs celebrating the stoicism of the poor or the savaging of their oppressors. These songs make offerings to the victims of police brutality, or contrast the hard labour of the peasant with the opulent lifestyle of the propertied class. In his songs, says Gaddar, ‘life is people, people’s suffering, [and] their tunes’. Often underground, sometimes in jail, detested by the police but revered by the peasantry, Gaddar is a near-legendary figure, and not just in Andhra Pradesh. When he gave a concert in Bangalore, for example, some 20,000 people attended.39
VII
The most sophisticated form of entertainment in modern India is classical music, this performed and heard in two major styles, the Hindustani and the Carnatic. Traditionally, classical music flourished in courts and temples, patronized by Maharajas and Nawabs. During British rule, the princes continued to maintain musicians in their courts, but secular patrons also began to emerge – these merchants and professionals based in cities such as Bombay, Madras and Calcutta.40
The musician whose career best embodies these larger shifts in social history is the singer M. S. Subbulakshmi. Born in 1916 in Madurai, into a family of temple musicians and courtesans, MS (as she came to be known) was taken by her musician mother to Madras to further her career. Her exquisite voice matched by a legendary beauty, she became a much sought-after figure in the musical circles of the city. In 1940 she married the entrepreneur T. Sadashivam, who managed her subsequent career with great skill. In the 1940s MS also acted in several films, most notably Meera, in which she played the part of the great medieval singer Mirabai.
While Subbulakshmi was rigorously trained in the classical style, and took pains to learn from the leading teachers of the time, she also worked on expanding her repertoire. Indeed, it was as a singer of bhajans (popular religious hymns) that she attracted the attention of Mahatma Gandhi. Another and perhaps even more influential admirer was Jawaharlal Nehru, who attended the premiere of Meera at Plaza Cinema in New Delhi and later named her the ‘Queen of Song’. An admirer as well as a close friend was C. Rajagopalachari, who served both as governor general of India and as chief minister of Madras.
While the endorsement of such prominent figures was helpful, Subbulakshmi’s claims to greatness were independent of them. She was are markable singer, with a very wide range and a dignified and gracious personality. Her many recordings of classical and folk compositions made her well known throughout India. She was herself very willing to sing for other than metropolitan and elite audiences, and to raise money for worthy causes. One scholar has listed as many as 244 charity concerts that MS gave between 1944 and 1987. The towns and causes are indicative of both her popularity and her concerns: in Jamshedpur to sing for a women’s group, in Bombay in memory of the Hindustani woman vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar, in Hassan for a hospital, in Madras for Little Sisters of the Poor (a Christian charity), in Jaffna for the Ramakrishna Mission (a Hindu social-service organization), in Trichy for workers of a public sector factory, in Tanjore for a tuberculosis sanatorium named after Mahatma Gandhi.41
If Subbulakshmi took classical music to all corners of India, the man who most effectively took Indian music overseas was the sitar player Ravi Shankar. He was born in 1920 in Benares, the younger brother of the famous dancer Uday Shankar. He joined his brother’s troupe as a boy, touring Europe with them before he was sent back to train under the musician Allauddin Khan. Allauddin was a legendary disciplinarian, and seven years with him made Ravi Shankar one of the two rising stars of his generation, the other being his guru’s son, the sarod player Ali Akbar Khan.
By the time of Independence Ravi Shankar was well established as a concert artist. He usually played solo, but with Ali Akbar Khan also popularized the duet, or jugalbandhi, a form previously unknown to classical instrumental music. Like M. S. Subbulakshmi, he did not restrict himself to the purely classical form. Thus Ravi Shankar created a ballet based on Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India, and also composed music for several films made by Satyajit Ray.
In 1956 Ravi Shankar went on the first of what were to become annual overseas tours. Of a concert he gave in New York in 1961, the city’s newspaper of record wrote that it ‘created a whole new aural landscape’, one ‘evocative of a musical mystique, rich in religion and philosophic traditions’. By now Ravi Shankar had begun playing with Western musicians – John Coltrane, Yehudi Menuhin, Andre Previn, and the like – and also recording discs with them. His fame dramatically increased after the Beatle George Harrison took lessons with him, and began to refer to him as his ‘guru’.
In 1967 Ravi Shankar shifted his base to California. He became a hippie icon, a regular presence at music festivals at Monterey and elsewhere, and pl
M. S. Subbulakshmi and Ravi Shankar were not necessarily the greatest musicians of their generation, but they became the best-known because they were great enough, because of their charming personalities, and because through their careers one could trace larger processes of social change. They were splendid ambassadors for their ancient art, helping it adjust to and indeed win acclaim in an impatient and often unforgiving world. They helped expand the audience and support base for their music, thus, in the long run, benefiting numerous performers who came after them.43
VIII
The form of entertainment most typical of urban-industrial society is, of course, spectator sport. All modern sports are played and watched in India, along with traditional games such as kho-kho and kabaddi. In terms of achievement, two sports stand out: billiards, in which India has produced several world champions, and field hockey, in which the Indian team was undefeated in the Olympic Games between 1928 and 1956, winning six gold medals in succession.
In terms of viewership, the two main sports are soccer and cricket. As in the West, soccer has been very popular among the working classes. The great industrial centres – Bombay, Delhi and Bangalore – all have active leagues, played between clubs several of which are sponsored by industrial houses. The game is also widely followed, and actively played, in Goa, Kerala and the Punjab.
The capital city of Indian soccer, however, is Calcutta. Here, sporting rivalry has gone hand-in-hand with political competition. There are three leading teams: Mohammedan Sporting, traditionally representing the Muslims; Mohun Bagan, founded and supported by the Bengali bhadralok or upper classes; and East Bengal, the club favoured by the more plebeian classes from the other side of the province. These and other teams play each other on the Calcutta Maidan, the vast expanse of turf that lies at the heart of the city.
From the 1930s to the early 1980s soccer was probably the most passionately discussed topic in Calcutta, even more so than politics or religion. The leading clubs each had thousands of followers, whose emotional investment in their team fully equalled that of European football fans. Violence during or after matches was not uncommon. However, after the 1982 World Cup popular interest in the sport began to wane. This was the first World Cup telecast live in India; alerted to the gap between their own local heroes and the great international stars, men in Calcutta began to turn away from their clubs. The slide has continued; twenty years later, soccer ranks a poor second to cricket among the sporting passions of Bengal.
As it does in the rest of India as well. Cricket is a game that privileges wrist-work rather than size or physical fitness; to be small and stocky is not always a disadvantage. Thus, Indians can compete with the best in the world. Its slow pace and interrupted structure of play also suits Indians, encouraging them to go in groups to matches, there to engage in chatter and banter among themselves and with the players.
In 1983 India won cricket’s World Cup. The victory coincided with the spread of satellite television, which took the game to small towns and working-class homes. Through the 1980s and beyond cricket steadily gained in popularity. Two Indians, Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar, broke world batting records, while Kapil Dev was for a time the bowler with most wickets in Test cricket. Thesocial base of the game deepened – more players were coming into the national team from smaller towns, and women particularly were taking to watching the game in large numbers.
By the turn of the century cricket was on a par with film in terms of popular appeal. Some cricketers were as wealthy and as well known as film stars. They were ubiquitous on television, either playing the game or advertising all manner of products from toothpaste to luxury cars.
Much of the sentiment that went into the sport was nationalistic. Two opponents were most disliked, even hated: the old colonial power, England, and the new subcontinental rival, Pakistan. Victory over one or the other guaranteed the players handsome cash prizes, a massive public reception and an audience with the prime minister.
In the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, the Kargil war and the Kashmir insurgency, cricket matches between India and Pakistan became far more intensely fought, not just by the players but equally in the minds of those who followed and supported them. The television audience for an India-Pakistan match was in the order of 300 million, for most of whom this was, as it were, war minus the shooting. A particularly ugly aspect of this rivalry was the spotlight it placed on Indian Muslims, who were accused by Hindu fundamentalists of secretly supporting Pakistan. When India defeated Pakistan in the World Cup of 2003, for example, the residents of Bangalore poured out into the streets, ‘bursting firecrackers, whooping, whistling, cheering aloud with the shouts of Bharat mataki jai [Glory to Mother India] renting the air’. In Ahmedabad, however, the victory celebration turned into a communal riot after revellers accused some Muslim students of celebrating the fall of an Indian wicket.44
The next year, cricket figured in a curious way in the general election. At the time of the campaign the Indian team was playing, and winning, in Pakistan, where one of its leading players was Mohammed Kaif, a Muslim from the state of Uttar Pradesh. Returning seventy-nine MPs to the Lok Sabha, UP held the key to the elections, but its large population of Muslims had rarely voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party. For a party trying to shed its Hindu chauvinist image, the cricketing victory came as a gift from the Gods. In his speeches in UP the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, praised the ‘splendid job done by one of your sons, Mohammed Kaif’. ‘God knows how big a person he [Kaif] would be in future,’ he predicted – before appealing to the Muslims in the audience to vote for his party. He urged the Muslims to trust the BJP, for, he claimed, ‘we are in a position to protect them’.
In the end, the Muslims did not vote for Mr Vajpayee’s party, which was duly turned out of office. But that the prime minister sought to canvass a cricketer to his cause was witness to the extraordinary importance accorded the game by India and Indians.45
IX
Crucial aids to these varied forms of entertainment have been the radio and, more recently, television. The first broadcasting companies started operating in India in the 1920s. These were soon subsumed by the state-owned All-India Radio (AIR), which for many decades enjoyed a monopoly over the medium. AIR commanded afar-flung network of stations that collectively serviced the whole of the subcontinent, with only the jungles and deserts and mountains excluded.
The state’s hopes for radio were expressed by a leading nationalist politician as ‘not only to give entertainments but to give such programmes as will give enlightenment and elevation of spirit to the villagers’.46 Most stations began broadcasting at dawn, with a hymn of invocation, ending at midnight with a weather report. The programmes interspersed music – classical, film and folk – with stories, plays, news bulletins and special shows for women, children and rural listeners. Education in health and farming methods was also provided. It was a very mixed brew, allowing listeners to pick and choose according to their tastes and needs.
In the year of Independence, 1947, the Indian radio industry manufactured a mere 3,000 sets. The number went up to 60,000 in 1951, and to 150,000 in 1956. By 1962 All-India Radio was broadcasting from over thirty stations with a combined output of about 100,000 hours annually. A decade later there were an estimated 15 million radio sets in operation;
For a decade after Independence the Union minister in charge of information and broadcasting was Dr B. V. Keskar, a scholar with a deep interest in classical Indian culture combined with a lofty disdain for its modern variants. In a speech in 1953 he noted that
Classical music has fallen on bad days and is on the point of extinction in North India. Classical music has lost touch with the masses, not due to the fault of the public, but because of historical circumstances. In the past, it was patronized by Princes and Sardars, but that support has almost ended. During the last 150 years we were under the British who would not understand and support Hindustani music . . . The main problem before musicians and All India Radio is to revive public contact with classical music. We must make them familiar with our traditional music, and make them more intimate with it.48
Already, from the late 1930s, All-India Radio had begun employing classical musicians on its staff. The artists were ranked in various grades according to their age, ability and experience. They were assigned to the station nearest their home and expected to advise on programming as well as give regular recitals. By the late 1950s as many as 10,000 musicians were on the state’s payroll. They were from both the Hindustani and Carnatic styles, and included some of the greatest artists then living, among them Ali Akbar Khan, Bismillah Khan, Mallikarjun Mansur and Emmani Shankar Sastri.