Reading between the lines

In a long interview with BBC Asian Network, AR Rahman admitted that he had not experienced bigotry earlier in his career, although he knew that it was nearly unheard of for a Tamil composer to become a success in Bollywood. He acknowledged a feeling of being embraced in Hindi language cinema, and on a pan-national level. He also admitted that things have changed: “The past eight years, maybe because the power shift has happened, people who are not creative now have the power to decide things. And it might have been a communal thing also, but not in my face. I hear Chinese whispers.”

Those who name prejudice as a fact, even indirectly, are usually shown that prejudice as an immediate, defensive reaction. Rahman’s vague and almost diffident expression has elicited a huge backlash from various quarters, all of whom deny the existence of such prejudice and some of whom accuse Rahman himself of hostility, or of just being over the hill.

Rahman’s comments openly acknowledge major changes that have occurred not just in Bollywood, but across industries and ecosystems in India, and arguably even on a more international level. The sectarian angle is what has everyone talking, but the point about how people who are “not creative” holding more decision-making power is equally interesting. It speaks to a shift in how culture and cultural production are valued — something that people in artistic fields, as well as allied ones such as the humanities and civilisational and environmental studies, have been experiencing or noticing.

The two points are interconnected: as authority remains unchecked, as true diversity is minimised in favour of monolithic identities and narratives, as the rights to think critically and to express dissent are disposed, the capacity to create and the spaces through which to disseminate art and ideas both shrink. Installing gatekeepers without creative vision is not merely some dull corporate decision. It is part of how culture is now produced. There is craft in this too, intelligent and deliberate, but it is fueled by something that is antithetical to the imagination.

In such a space, no one — not even a successful, globally-recognised phenomenon — can be faulted for backtracking, for suddenly toeing the line. Rahman is certainly not the first to be forced to prove his patriotism, to overexplain and to retract. He has posted well-curated apologies online in response to the backlash against his unfiltered earlier reflections.

In another part of the same interview, Rahman agreed with his interlocutor Haroon Rashid that Chhaavva, a film he had scored, was divisive. He went on to say: “People are smarter than that. Do you think people are going to be influenced by movies? There is something called internal conscience, which knows what the truth is and what manipulation is… I have great faith in humanity.”

Here is where Rahman takes self-preservation just a step too far, at least in my view. The faith he describes has, sadly, been proven misplaced far too often and on such collective scales for him — or indeed anyone — to ascribe to it without also becoming complicit in a landscape of endemic violence and the cycles of denial that perpetuate it.