Low brow, anti-elite Indipop is the hot new subject
Well, almost. The '90s academics is tangier and tastier than it's been for a long time, it reaches parts that it has not done in the past, deep into the Coca-Cola bottle and the mind of Channel V, to deconstruct the disco and analyse the ad, to explore footpath fiction and investigate cyberspace. "Pop" culture—Low Brow, street-talking and anti-elite—is now the subject of several serious studies.
The culture of 'the people' was never trendier, their music never more analytically potent, their icons never more profound. "Culture Studies" may be railed against by traditional academics like Alan Bloom who believe too much open-ness is in fact closing young minds, but the trendy new discipline is here and thriving. From "Hinglish" to "Indipop", Hindi cinema to Mills and Boon romances, "pop culture has been the 'in' thing for a long time now," says Giti Chandra, lecturer in English Literature at St Stephen's College.
Babli Moitra, lecturer at Ramjas College, Delhi University, is writing a doctorate on the newest language of modern urban North India—Hinglish. "I was interested in the legitimacy and currency that slogans like 'Humko Binnies Mangta!' or 'Bole Mere Lips, I love Uncle Chipps' gain because of the manner in which they are picked up by the mass media," Moitra says. "The spawning of a consumer society has led to the emergence of Indipop and Zee television and they provide an understanding of cultural change." When communities are mobile, as they are in India today, there is a pidginisation of language. Also, the new management culture of India Inc. means direct contact between managers and workers. Hinglish in Moitra's view is a reflection of both trends.
"But let's be clear," Moitra points out, "Hinglish is not English badly spoken. Instead, it is a self-confident choice by a post-colonial generation, by people who are often fluent in both languages and know when to substitute an English word with a Hindi one". Hinglish is also an elite language, according to Moitra, but a language which is accessible to places like Agra, Saharanpur and other mofussil towns. It is a repudiation of the older elite attachment to formal English with a different kind of elitism.
Shobhana Bhattacharya, lecturer at Jesus and Mary College, says pop culture is her 'passion'. "Popular culture has tremendous power to influence. Good old Doordarshan has been, in my view, responsible for more changes than centres of education." In the '80s, Bhattacharya received some outraged reactions about an article she wrote comparing lyricists Salim and Javed to Shakespeare. "But now, after there have been so many excellent articles on Hindi films, perhaps it would not be so shocking."
Sociologist Veena Das's article on the '70s mythological Jai Santoshi Ma or Meenakshi Mukherjee's writings on Sholay and Hum Apke Hain Kaun were important landmarks in treating Hindi cinema as a subject of scholarly enquiry. Yet historian Salim Kidwai, who has written on film for several years and is now working on a biography of Begum Akhtar, says we should be careful about what we dignify as Indian pop culture: "Let us see if HAHK or Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge stand the test of time before we start including them in Indian pop culture." Indian pop culture should not be something that is imposed from above but something that grows from below. The bhajan, the lohri or the ghazal are parts of Indian pop culture that are declining and are forms which historians of pop culture should investigate.
"Mother India, for instance, was made simultaneously in three different languages—Hindi, English and Tamil. The Hindi version we all know about, the Tamil version bombed but what happened to the English version? Lata Mangeshkar has removed the names of certain music composers and substituted them with her brother's name in a few latest cassettes—how was this allowed to happen? These are questions that Indian pop culture studies should address," says Kidwai. The pop craze in academia, which has probably been spurred by similar fashions in the West and also perhaps because conventional areas of study are becoming overcrowded, must find deeper Indian roots. "Our definition of pop culture cannot be the same as is used in the West," Kidwai points out.
WESTERN rock music is almost a standard text in several Ivy League campuses in the West. Sunil Dua, lecturer at Hindu College, has interviewed Ian Anderson of the rock group Jethro Tull and says that pop culture in India must be seen as a metropolitan phenomenon, one that is intimately linked with the market economy. "Matthew Arnold's notion that all culture was High Brow was overthrown by people like Andy Warhol who believed that the Low Brow was a cultured space. Today Madonna and Michael Jackson are often subjects of PhDs because pop stars are seen as texts that explain a certain mass culture," adds Dua.
Tull, on the other hand, without ever being as populist as Madonna, has a higher intellectual content. And the album Amused To Death by Roger Waters, ex-member of Pink Floyd, is not only a critique of late capitalism and of Marxism gone wrong but even of the record industry. "Today everything is worthy of study, rock music or even rock concerts." Even toilet graffiti? "Even toilet graffiti," says Dua, "if it provides clues on understanding mass culture."
Ravi Sundaram, a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, is working on the culture of the Internet. "The number of anonymous bulletin boards on the Internet from cities like Coimbatore are amazing, and they transform how people live their daily lives. The growth of software cities or enclaves of the city that are becoming detached from the old city because of their access to the Net is growing. "Cyber culture," Sundaram says, "is an important part of popular culture today, to an extent that people are not even aware. The entire cultural experience of a city is changing because of the access to the Internet. As an increasing number of people become consumers of electronic networks, the manner in which people perceive the world is being dramatically altered." Sundaram's work also looks at the manner in which new technologies have altered music and cinema. India's "cyber-public" occupies a distinct place in today's urban experience.
Radhika Chopra, lecturer at Delhi School of Economics, is doing post-doctoral research on Mills and Boon romances. She says that there is nothing like a single Indian pop culture. "Pop culture here is fragmented, there is no single mass culture. Yet pop culture addresses issues from a standpoint other than High Art and its stress is not on exclusion." Romantic pulp fiction is certainly widely popular in India, although restricted by language and access. "The readership of Mills and Boon romances is very high, speaking naturally of the English-reading urban class," Chopra says. "The readership cuts across age (the 14-40 age group is particularly M&B inclined), and even gender." One of Chopra's discoveries has been that men are often secret readers of Mills and Boons. Chopra began working on this aspect of popular fiction partly because of the strong woman-centred narrative and also because of her interest in how the genre has evolved. "From the aloof strong man of the '50s we now have the '90s 'speaking hero', the caring, sharing Fab Dad, which often influences what women now expect from their partners."
From footpath fiction to the language of advertising, the Academy is no longer comprised of snobby high-thinkers who turn up their noses at Chitrahaar. Research proposals on the violence on MTV or on Amitabh Bachchan are no longer infra dig. Today's "with it" professors recognise the importance and serious academic value of making the right choice, baby, aha!