My neighbour is considered a good man. He gifts clothes and food to the poor. He prefers white. His house is white. Car and scooter too. Last week, he brought home a white cockatoo in a white cage. Someone said the cage was small. So yesterday he changed the small white cage for a long, coffin-shaped cage, also white. The cockatoo sleeps most of the time.
When awake, it eats fruit and grain, and drinks water from a white dish. It does not make any noise. Sometimes the cockatoo spreads its wings, as if in memory of a flight. When I go past the cockatoo, I see it is becoming fat. I play with the idea of opening the cage. But if caught in the act, I would get into trouble. Freedom is a fraught idea on all sides.
India is getting fat, too. Last quarter, the GDP grew at 8.4 percent, one of the fastest rates in the world. Financial experts like Ruchir Sharma say India is a bull market and will stay one for long. A few days ago, Sharma wrote: “For a country that has long disappointed both optimists and pessimists, the bar of expectations is now very high.”
The same week, in an indication of where the country is going, the government announced the clearance of three semiconductor manufacturing projects worth Rs 1.3 lakh crore. The finance ministry says the economic growth is driven by the manufacturing sector, which is a very good sign. Infrastructure development is at a furious clip, too. In a recent interview, Russian President Vladimir Putin said India ranked just behind the US, China and Japan in terms of economic growth.
And yet, all the good news in wealth and growth seems to come at a price. The price of the imagination. As in China, nationalist capitalism is set to grow exponentially at the expense of imagination, or free speech. If the popularity of Narendra Modi is any indication, India is electing to get rich at the expense of free speech, which is substantively a middle-class obsession. The very poor and the very rich are the same: they are always looking for money.
This is why I find the biggest media merger ever in India—between Reliance Industries and Walt Disney-Viacom18, worth about $8.5 billion—a paradox. It shows India is hitting the stride. But entertainment and the arts in general are, unlike other sectors, based on free speech—the stuff of a free imagination. The new joint venture is estimated to have a 40 percent share of TV viewership and over half of digital. It would have about 75 crore viewers. Advertising costs could go up 25 percent.
All good. But what are the chances of coming up with, say, a true-blooded political drama like House of Cards, Designated Survivor, or Borgen? In the first, a US president is portrayed as an amoral power-monger. In the second, the White House is bombed. In Borgen, a female head of state is shown as manipulative as her male rivals.
The truly great entrepreneur that Mukesh Ambani is, he is not likely to be happy with content that is critical of the present dispensation. It is not essential that one must be critical of, say, the Modi government to generate cutting-edge entertainment.
But the fear that the industry exhibits when it comes to individualistically dealing with politics or history, or caste and gender, is already resulting in less-than-mediocre fare in Bollywood and on OTT. Indeed, which writer here does not suffer from a fear that someone somewhere is watching him/her? Who wants to see more patriotic kitsch? A giant merger like Reliance-Disney makes true sense only if the content creation is licensed by an unfettered imagination.
The West sees the arts as a no-holds-barred area. A function of the arts is to dramatise a simulation of reality so well done that the dramatics justify themselves as the objective. Art as an end in itself.
What, for instance, are the chances of a great documentary series that is at least passingly critical of pro-Hindu politics or history? Patriots would naturally ask: why should there be a critical reading of the right-wing version? Well, because great works are possible only if contrarian views are permitted. Of course, we don't absolutely need to do so. But a merger of this sort seems both exaggerated and ironic if the radical imagination so integral to content creation is not encouraged.
Since 2014, in the face of hardening state and sectarian sensitivities of both Left and Right persuasions, Bollywood and OTT platforms’ dread of truth and dare has resulted in a glut of patriotic and mythical movie-making whose essence is boredom. Producers and directors are wary of anything that may have a negative reference to India of the present or the past. They end up saying nothing. It doesn’t have to be this way.
I mentioned House of Cards, a political drama that bares the seamy side of power at the very top. If a writer attempted a similar work in the Indian context, it would be seen as insulting the prime minister. Boycotts and cancellation would come into play.
But it is not just a political drama. In general, great art is inseparable from a certain unflinching look at the complex nature of reality. Often, it is about going against the grain of things. It is not about passing judgement. It is about the poetics of insight and understanding. It is making the tragic and horrific look beautiful.
The West has somehow persevered in this exercise despite a very materialistic ideology. A civilisational talent at drawing a line between reality and art. We, on the contrary, are moving toward a blurring of the line—between myth and history, reality and art, cage and comfort. As I said, the cockatoo next door has a fancy cage. In captivity, the bird can live up to 70 years. That’s a long time not to fly.
(Views are personal)
C P Surendran
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)