Let’s be talky talky! It’s a super cloudy overcast just plain BLECH day in Chicago which is a great time to cozy up and exercise our brain muscles.
Let’s talk pre-popular culture world, in India. Before there were movies, there were stories. The stories that make up the Ramayana and Mahabharata are found through out South Asia with various twists and turns although the essentials are the same. And it’s the twists and turns that make the difference, that give the message.
Ram gave up his throne and lived in the forest for years, then his wife was kidnapped, he rescued her, and returned home to his palace. The Pandavas lost their kingdom in a dice match and similarly went into exile for years. They fought a great battle with their cousins and won their kingdom back. These two basic stories, they are EVERYWHERE in South Asia. The point where (similar to the Trojan War stories in Europe), it is likely they are based on some actual historical event which had such large repercussions it was discussed through out the region.
But within those basic frameworks, you have so many different “messages” that can be told. The Ramayana is a simple one, it has 3 protagonists, but who is the “hero”? Is it Raavan, who was so devout and good and powerful that the Gods feared him? Is it Sita, magically born of the earth and defeating Evil through her virtue? Or is it Ram, obedient to authority and replicating that authority as a husband/older brother? There are oral traditions that set each of them in turn at the center. But the version that was widely printed and spread is the one that makes Ram the Be All End All.
In Europe, the birth of pop culture is usually set with Gutenberg and the printing press. That started an era of mass printing, books and newspapers and pamphlets and all kinds of things. It caused a revolution in every area of life as all of a sudden the masses were able to share knowledge. But that relies on literacy. India didn’t have literacy, still doesn’t in many places. Knowledge was spread in two different paths, the stories that were told among the workers, the travelers, the same kind of folks as have always created and shared stories to make sense of their life. And the Brahmin’s, the priestly class that painstakingly memorized word for word the exact ancient texts.
And then there’s the British (boooooo, British!). They came from the land of Gutenberg, to their mind the printed word can tell you everything about the classes AND the masses. So they talked to people and they tried to take all these many many divergent strands of meaning and turn it into one clear story. And then they printed that story and handed it back to the people and said “here you go! This is your country, all neatly done up in a book!”
Again, most people in India are not literate. So the folks with the power of education are the ones who are able to read that book, and then turn around and tell everyone else “this is what is, and I know it is true because I read it in a Book”. From knowledge and authority being trapped with the classes who had memorized Vedas, now it was trapped with classes who were able to read books.
Which brings me to movies. Movies are not the place to get Authoritative Knowledge, that’s in Books. But they are the place to spread common knowledge, the things “everyone knows”. It’s a return to the folk stories that spread and, occasionally, contradicted the “official” Vedas.
So here’s some things to think about:
What does it mean for the written language to relate to the oral tradition of films? Is it maybe a bad thing that now we have reviewers and wikipedia entries and the formality and stability of language defining a film as this or that, good or bad, hero or villain, instead of allowing for the flow of interpretation?
Expanding that, what does it mean to have an “authoritative” version of a film? The one that is, or isn’t, missing any reels, that has (or hasn’t) certain subtitles, being the same thing everyone sees?
Following this line of thinking, is it maybe in some ways a good thing that Indian films are becoming increasingly temporary art? Playing in theaters and then never available to be seen again, just relying on memories of them? Were they never intended to be set in stone, is it an art work that should exist in reality just for a time and then change and be reinterpreted, as folk tales used to be?
