Mother India and the New Nations

For our Indian Cinema and Society Class, we’re watching what could be called an Indian epic in a cinematic form, Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957) – also one of India’s first movies in color! Set in an apocryphal northern Indian village during the late colonial period, the film featured the struggles of the single mother Radha against rural poverty and the seductions of the local moneylender Sukhi-lala. The three-hour film was such a phenomenal success such that, between 1957 and the early 1990s, the film was in continuous circulation in movie theatres throughout the country as well as in Africa, the former Soviet Union, and parts of the Middle East.

Gayatri, our instructor, has written a Penguin-published book on the movie, and the lectures on the movie has understandably spanned from Aristotelian narrative theories to Indian politics in the 1950s!

The non-linearity and multiplicity of its narrative as well as its reference to numerous Indian mythologies renders the movie a complexity that can only be justifiably treated by treating it as an allegory of the nation. Perhaps it’s not surprising that two of the main stars of the movie, Nargis and Sunil Dutt, were still beloved by the Indian people during their short but vibrant political careers.

What I am seeing in this movie too, however, is that it’s also an excellent parable of not only India in its early years of independence, but also of many other post-colonial nations in their formative years. Radha, in her early years of marriage, was not only brought into the financial difficulties of her husband’s mortgaged farmland, but also into the village’s entire system of moral economy that is evaluated through collective female honor. In a similar sense, India in its early years faced not only the turbulence of trying to achieve self-sufficiency, which has been slowed down before by the relentless pressure of producing agricultural commodities demanded by the British, but also the challenge of “honor” in asserting its national identity over a diverse matrix of autonomous cultures.

Ben Anderson’s idea of the nation as an “imagined community” is extremely relevant here, since the film itself is a way of reimagining the land as a feeding and caring mother who had gone through monumental difficulties to raise her children. In fact, there is a panoramic high-angle shot in which the farmers of Radha’s village stacked hay in the shape of an unpartitioned Indian subcontinent.

I haven’t seen this level of national re-imagination in Hollywood or even European movies, probably since the nation-state as a coterminous manifestation of a single ethnolinguistic identity is much more prevalent in the First World. Even mainstream Hollywood productions tend to portray either the “dominant” Anglophone society or the experience of immigrants and minorities, but rarely the interface of both, albeit with some notable exceptions.
On the other hand, plural communities such as India and Indonesia (and, much, much more discreetly, countries like China and Israel) have a much more obvious challenge of trying to accommodate their mosaic of divergent identities into a nation-state.

Mother India, therefore ,is a justifiably an epic of not only India in its entire complexity, but of many other post-colonial worlds as well.

Industrializations and Revolutions

"The Mahabharata and the Ramayana never knew of a revolution. Something new. And these [Javanese] farmers never knew that this Earth has witnessed so many revolutions. And their own ancestors has witnessed one, although their poets has never mentioned it: the Revolution of Arok, the opening of a new era, from the Javanese Hindu to the Hinduist Java..."

-A Mute's Soliloquy, Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Toer was arguably Indonesia's most prominent author who was nominated for a Nobel Prize shortly before died. His works, many of them written during his fourteen-year internment, are incredibly reflective of the Javanese identity and the invention of Indonesia as a nation-state. I stumbled upon PDFs of his work here in Pune while working on a Sanskrit epic - the Mahabharata - thousands of miles away and enabled by American universites, yet this Indian experience is only inches away from my feelings as an Indonesian, and as a (half) Javanese. And so, for the next couple of paragraphs, allow to generalize South and most of Southeast Asia as post-colonial nations.

If the Industrial Revolution and the two World Wars are what propelled the Western world and Japan into their current states of relative political and economic well-being, then I'd say that most if not all post-colonial nations have never experienced revolutions that propelled them into modernity. We were, for the lack of a better term, dragged into the vulnerability of post-colonial independence by the well-intended albeit idealistic evolutions of our Westernized indigenous elites in the middle of the 20th-century. Since then, my older Indonesian cousins, like so many upper-class Indians, are corporate professionals and IT executives capable of working easily with their counterparts in virtually every wired city in the world.

Yet we are still, for good and bad reasons, nations of servants.

The peasantry may have moved to the cities to work blue-collar jobs, or even abroad to find low-key employment as migrant workers. And in the process we have hailed them as heroes of development through their stream of remittances that keeps the engines of construction chugging in palces like Kerala and Central Java. Yet we never propelled them into the state of ideological and economic autonomy that is the middle class, because of, among others, we have never experienced a state of industrial revolution as much as a state of industrialization.

I'm not arguing for a forced overnight transformation through double-digit growth that, for instance, China is experiencing, but post-colonial nations would never achieve the state of well-being that they associate with the devloped world until we reach a tipping point during which the descendants of the colonial peasantry cease to be servants - a point at which politically-motivated religious and moral dogmas cease to numb the jarring disparity their developmental policies have maintained. Maybe that will inevitably be a painful moment of upheaval, but perhaps that is the only alternative to a permanent state of complacency.

Seeing First- and Third-World Exchange Rates

Converting prices in a foreign country to the currency back home is so intuitive for travelers such that I almost feel like a walking calculator in an Indian supermarket. What’s interesting for me is that I have two currencies to convert to: the Indonesian rupiah and the American dollar.

An above average commute to ACM from a suburban Pune neighborhood is about 60 rupees, which is about a dollar and twenty-five cents or fifteen thousand Indonesian rupiahs – easily a very small when amount compared to $ 4.50, which is the cost of commuting to downtown DC from a Maryland suburb. Nonetheless, 60 rupees, $ 12.5, or Rp. 15 000 would buy you a satisfying lunch in Pune or in Jakarta, whereas a Quiznos sandwich would be set you back six times that amount of money.

A biking trip to Konkan on the southern coast of Maharashtra is about 600 rupees a day, or $ 15, which is fantastically cheap for an upper-middle class American family, but I found myself thinking about whether I should spend that amount or hypothetically feed an Indonesian family of three for an entire day!

I found it so funny to see how American students, at least in the beginning, are so pleasantly surprised by how cheap things are, yet, for me, it’s actually a little bit more expensive than business as usual.

Maybe it’s time to see the global economies in a post-colonial light – a third world upper-middle class family would need to save every penny to afford a modest lifestyle in the U.S., yet a typical suburban American family would find themselves a significantly elevated economic status in India.

Where did this gap come from? Is it a morally justifiable disparity?