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Consumption, Waste, and Interpretation in South Asia
Organizer & Chair: Parama Roy, University of California, Davis
Discussant: Manali Desai, University of Reading
Histories of consumption, non-consumption, and waste, while widely studied in western European and north American contexts, have been relatively neglected in the South Asian context. Except in the notable case of anthropologies of caste, for which questions of consumption, avoidance, and pollution are central, such matters have not received sufficient or systematic historical, ethnographic, and ethico-religious attention. This panel, which focuses on these questions with respect to the Mutiny of 1857, Gandhian practices of avoidance/abstinence, and contemporary popular culture, seeks to redress this neglect to some degree. Parama Roy’s paper, on Anglo-Indian experiences of consumption, dearth, and pollution during the Mutiny, suggests that a caste-based language of permissible and prohibited forms of consumption tied beleaguered Anglo-Indians to mutinous Indians in a strange form of alimentary kinship. Sandhya Shetty’s essay focuses on a later and more indirect moment of anti-colonial critique. She asserts that Gandhian dietetics and therapeutics were founded on a profound critique of the excesses of modern consumption; his experimental modes of healing, nursing, and enduring illness were therefore based on an ethics of abstinence that tested the logical and ethical limits of such purportedly self-evident goods as “health” and even life itself. Lalitha Gopalan’s gloss on consumption, commodity, and waste locates us in the domain of the popular Hindi cinema (often denominated as trash in high cultural definitions of the subcontinent). Focusing on the concluding, supplementary moments of Ketan Mehta’s 2005 film on the Mutiny of 1857, she meditates on the curious status of the found footage and other archival detritus in the film–detritus that helps us rethink the links between archive, official history, and popular culture.
Alimentary Tracts: Food, Flesh, and Filth in the Mutiny of 1857
Parama Roy, University of California, Davis
This paper, which focuses on the Anglo-Indian experience of the so-called Mutiny of 1857-58, underscores the degree to which colonial politics was a visceral politics, whose traumas were experienced in the mouth and in which the stomach served as a kind of somatic political unconscious where the phantasmagoria of colonialism came to be embodied. The proximate cause of mutiny has typically been understood to be the introduction of greased cartridges for the new Enfield rifles; these, combined with rumours of contaminated food supplies and a mysterious circulation of chapatis that apparently served as a signal to mobilization, have generally served as the mise-en-scene of the events of 1857-58. Most typically, these details have been read in terms of a clash of civilizations that finds its most expressive form in the institution of caste, the most striking and non-negotiable sign of a Hindu/Indian difference from that of the subcontinent’s colonial rulers. And yet, Anglo-Indian Mutiny texts provide both an extraordinarily literal sense of the shock of bodily encounter and a highly charged metaphorics of bodily contamination and dissolution that is remarkably similar to indigenous idioms of caste purity and pollution; this paper examines certain insistent somatic tropes as metaphorical indices of widely shared cultural fantasies and panics about rule and rebellion, purity and pollution. What this reading suggests is that the event generated an enormous gestural repertoire of intimacy and pollution that encompassed both Anglo-Indians and Indians, and that their dietary and sexual permissions and prohibitions were braided together rather than disjunct. Far from serving as a sign of absolute difference, caste furnished Anglo-Indians with a model for social emulation and a grammar of intimacy and distance.
The Quack Whom We Know: Illness and Nursing in Gandhi
Sandhya Shetty, University of New Hampshire
A sharp critique of medicine can be traced in Gandhi’s oeuvre. This paper will argue that this critique is directly linked to Gandhi’s zest for ethical self-cultivation. Also an integral part of this program of self-cultivation is Gandhi’s famous dietetic asceticism, which includes fasting. Linked aspects of his ethical self-fashioning, diet and medicine can be understood as practices that provide occasions for countering or at least minimizing the natural oral-alimentary violence of life or existence. Gandhi posited his special brand of dietetics as conventional therapeutics’ great other, and his insistent attempt to realign therapeutic strategies with ethical principles such as vegetarianism can be viewed most clearly in his narration of his self-treatment as well as his nursing of various family members in the teeth of lay and expert medical opposition. My paper will read several episodes of nursing in My Experiments With Truth in order to elaborate how the semiotic of illness is scrambled by, what Gandhi himself identified as, his “quack” treatments. I will also attempt to contextualize this dietetic quackery within certain Indic traditions that position medicine in opposition to ethical and religious principles bearing on excessive processes of consumption. In his opposition to consumption and thus to conventional therapeutics, Gandhi we shall see stands apart philosophically from both western allopathic and Indian ayurvedic medicine, primarily on the basis of his startling indifference to “life” itself.
Looking at Leftovers: History Lessons and More
Lalitha Gopalan, Georgetown University
A cursory glance at recent Indian popular films reveals a minor tend in historical films or simply stated, films preoccupied with projections of the past. Among these retro-jections, British colonial occupation dominates the trend with films centered on rebels and revolutionary conditions, the various films on Bhagat Singh, Lagaan /The Tax (2001), and The Rising: Mangal Pandey (2005) are emblematic cases. However, forays into the distant past also obtain in Asoka and the more recent past in Hazaaron Kwaishein Aisi/ A Thousand Dreams (2005) and Parineeta (2005). Although these different evocations of the past, often advertised as expensive costume dramas, have been box office successes, we cannot read them solely as nostalgic yearnings of a lost past but also as re-staging of traumatic events that bear on our conceptions of nation, citizen, and cinema. This paper explores the representations and narrations of the past as ways of reckoning with filmic writings of history.
In this regard this paper explores the use of archival and found footage in Ketan Mehta’s Mangal Pandey (2005) as a way of understanding how popular films appropriate archival footage and surprisingly offer us novel ways of understanding historiography. The closing segment of the film, I argue, interrogates the cinematic representation of the past by drawing intimate links between film and proto-cinematic arts that flourished in the late 19th century. As the film draws to a close, we are drawn into a reflective mood on the relationship between archival footage and popular cinema and the intimate links between official narrative of the past and popular film narratives.