Last week witnessed three epic struggles across India, each ready to shape the future. The first was the battle for Assam, where Himanta Biswa Sarma created a struggle between intermediate tribes. Suddenly, one was unsure of the future of some tribes—whether they, along with some forests, would disappear.
This, along with the battle for Bengal, also raised the issue of the exact nature of citizenship as a concept and a mode of being. One suddenly felt that various bureaucracies were arbitrarily seeking to define away the content of citizenship. The Bengal battle had its own idiosyncrasies, including offering the democratic choice of three hard hands—Mamata Banerjee, CPI(M) and BJP. One wondered whether, ironically, Indian democracy was turning to martinets wholesale.
The third battle sparked a different kind of interest. The rise of a new party that challenged and trumped both the DMK and the AIADMK created a huge wave of interest. I must confess I watched most of the elections with foreign friends of mine. They brought to it a different set of questions that went beyond the political economy of struggle, to the semiotics of Joseph Vijay’s politics.
Nothing could withhold the overall impact of Vijay’s campaign which, according to a friend, went so far as to add a new dimension to the imagination of Indian society. Vijay has to be understood in terms of the symbolic dimension he provides. His cinema is his current politics. Therefore, he has to be understood cinematically to comprehend the impact he is having.
One must, first of all, emphasise that Vijay is very different from traditional Chennai politicians. Those like M K Stalin and E V Ramasamy emerged from an ideological fixity. On the other hand, politicians like Rajinikanth came across as public events—everything Rajini did, from lighting a cigarette to crossing his legs, was not a patentable act of body politics.
My friends differentiated several aspects of Vijay’s politics. They first indicated what they jokingly called Vijay’s ‘bearable lightness of being’. They said there was a certain ease to the 51-year-old—an ease evoked with his physical style.
One friend claimed that Vijay’s dance was central to his philosophy. It evoked tentativeness—a sense of experimentation and of laughter. There was always something open to it. Vijay’s narratives, like his dance, were open-ended, not ideologically determined. In a way, dance determined his political style. His free movements evoked what my friends called the ‘quantum element’ in DMK’s politics. They emphasised that the answers to political questions were no longer predictable. Vijay evoked plot after counterplot to counter the ideological rigidity of the two established parties.
One has to look at desire, not interest, to understand Vijay. His is not a hard rubric of action, but a series of tentative experiments. In his persona, desire, communication, consumption, ambition and competence all get together to create a series of sub-plots. The emphasis is on the individual, no longer on ideological norms.
Yet, this does not mean Vijay is eccentric. His sense of the normative is very old-fashioned. In Thalaivaa and other movies, his characters’ respect for the mother almost amounts to worship. His sense of the father and traditions is meticulous. In that sense, Vijay is deeply normative without being ideological. He wants to battle inequality and incompetence, but he wants to do it through a new set of intuitive experiments.
In that sense, Vijay’s movies evoke the future rather than the past. His scripts are not settled. And that tentativeness encompasses the dreams of a new generation. Vijay can be a political leader, executive, forest ranger, or even on the wrong side of the law. Yet, in all this, he would bring a sense of normative competence.
One must emphasise another aspect: Vijay’s sense of the peer group. It is the peer group with a sense of ambition and idiosyncrasy that brings out the laughter in Vijay’s politics. Humour and friendship often go together in Vijay’s films.
This brings us to the fundamental question of violence. Vijay’s violence does not have the dismal character or brutal power of earlier heroes. His somewhat light-hearted violence either becomes a choreography of bodily acts or a kind of collective calisthenics. His fights are more dances of resistance, a way of saying no to the dominant group, a way of defying without emphasising brutality. Many of my friends saw Vijay as choreographer of lightness, which gives him a way of transforming the rigidity of formality and ideological dualism.
One must emphasise that only a semiotic understanding of Vijay will lead to such a revelation. In that sense, Vijay is not only new—he seeks to invent a new world where politics goes beyond ideology, desire and consumerism, to a sense of professional competence that determines the logic of politics. His personal, idiosyncratic, experimental and playful style will not allow scripts to be regimented with the ideologies of formal politics. He sees a plethora of solutions in the indices of decision-making. There is a touch of anarchy and pluralism to all this, too. But this is precisely what’s required to break the deep freeze of Tamil Nadu’s dualism.
I am emphasising all this because Vijay’s victory seems to have surprised pollsters. But he always indicated the semiotics of change. The logic of how desire anticipates politics, of how freedom needs to go beyond ideology to democratise it. The new generation realises that mere elections and ideology do not constitute politics. They are other outer husks to it, too. One needs new visions, new dreams, new wishes, new desires. Vijay’s movies provide a surplus of this.
It is this Vijay that the spectator as a citizen has understood and grasped. It was not just a choice of individuals. It was a choice of visions. Vijay’s vision gives the new generation a deeper sense of freedom—a certain openness, a certain tentativeness.
In this sense, politics in Chennai is turning more futuristic. Rather than the standard party cadres, the answer today comes from networks, peer groups, friends and professionals who need a more vignetted geography to assemble Vijay’s politics. One must finally add that no government can put on hold dreams—desires, even from the unconscious, have ways of emerging.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
