Between Rowdies and Rasikas
Between Rowdies and Rasikas
Rethinking Fan Activity in Indian Film Culture
Let us begin by examining two recent moments of fan activity surrounding Indian cinema. On October 8, 2005, A. R. Rahman, the renowned film music director, performed in Bangalore as part of a worldwide tour. The entire concert was managed by fans who volunteered their services for everything from ticket sales to stage construction to crowd management. As part of their effort to gain recognition as the “official” Rahman fan club, they also decided to present Rahman with a gift—a montage, composed of thumbnail images of all his album covers, which formed the contours of his face. Faced with the prospect of buying expensive software, these fans (who run a design company called 3xus.com) went on to develop their own software. After many sleepless nights of painstaking coding, they finally got to meet Rahman and present the gift. A few days later, they learned that Rahman liked the gift and had displayed it in his studio in Chennai. This story of fan activity went largely unreported in mainstream media.
Little more than a month later, Amitabh Bachchan, the enduring superstar of Hindi cinema, was hospitalized and had to undergo surgery. Not only did media outlets cover every detail of Bachchan’s hospital stay and subsequent recovery, but many instances of “fan devotion” were also recorded. Citing several examples of fans organizing prayer sessions in cities worldwide, Chopra writes, “fans routinely gather outside Mr. Bachchan’s home in suburban Mumbai for a darshan, or sighting, but that is the least of it: some have sent him paintings of him done in blood, presumably their own” (Chopra 2006: 1).
It is perhaps not surprising that mainstream media coverage of Bollywood ignores fan activity except when it seems obsessive or pathological—“paintings in blood” certainly makes more sensational copy when compared with a group of highly educated, technically skilled fans who discuss Rahman’s music on an Internet newsgroup. Indeed, when one raises the question of fan activity surrounding cinema, the standard response, among academics and film journalists/critics, is to point to Tamil and Telugu film cultures where fan associations devoted to former stars like M. G. Ramachandran and N. T. Rama Rao have played pivotal roles in these stars’ political careers. As the editor of Filmfare explained, “you’ll find crowds outside Bachchan or Shahrukh Khan’s house. But never that level of passion as you’d find in the south. There is no organized fan activity around Bollywood. No one asks Shahrukh to float a political party or threatens to commit suicide just because his film flops!”1
In this paper, I argue against framing fan activity in Indian film culture in terms of devotional excess or in relation to political mobilization in south India. I suggest we shift our attention away from the cinema hall and heroes like Amitabh Bachchan to the realm of film music and the figure of the music director. This move will force us to take into account how cinema, as an object, is constituted in fundamental ways through convergence with other media. In other words, developing fan activity surrounding film music as an entry point entails rethinking the history of cinema’s publicness as a history of cinema’s intersections with various “new” media (radio, TV, Internet, and mobile phone), and thereby adds to the mapping of different cinematic spaces that projects such as “Publics and Practices in the History of the Present” (www.sarai-net) have initiated.2 Such a reconceptualization of cinema’s publicness will also help us steer away from treating fan activity as epiphenomena of formal politics and transitions in the political sphere proper. This is necessary not only to chart the way fan activity operates in relation to Bollywood but also to acknowledge and begin accounting for fan activity in south India that may have no connections whatsoever to political parties and electoral campaigns. Following this, I argue for a reassessment of the figure of the fan and the need to dismantle the binary of fan-as-rowdy versus fan-as-rasika and, instead, locate the “fan” along a more expansive continuum of participatory culture.3 I conclude the essay by situating this paper in relation to academic calls for fan studies to “go global,” and posit that it is just as critical, if not more, for studies of media globalization to focus on fan activity. In fact, examining fan communities that cohere around film culture in India might make valuable contributions to our understanding of the emergence of Bollywood as a global culture industry.
Music Directors and Fan Identification:
The Case of A. R. Rahman
Among other elements that distinguish a popular Indian film from, say, a Hollywood film, the one that is cited most often is the presence of at least five or six songs with seemingly no direct connection to the narrative. Songs, often choreographed into elaborate dance sequences, have been an integral part of popular Indian cinema ever since sound was introduced. As Majumdar further explains, “film songs and song sequences have their own circuit of distribution, both official, or industrial, and unofficial […] they permeate the aural environment of India’s public spaces, from markets and festivals to long-distance buses and trains” (Majumdar 2001: 161). The commercial value of film music has also meant that music directors have occupied a key role in the industry from the very beginning.4
Music directors have been central to developments and transformations in practically every aspect of the process—lyrics, expansion of orchestras and introduction of instruments from around the world, singing styles (the transition from actor-singers to playback singers), and, from the perspective of producers, responding to and shaping audience tastes (Arnold 1991). In fact, from the early 1940s, producers have been giving prominence to music directors. Film songs became a central component of prerelease publicity of films, and advertising began emphasizing the music director. Arnold points to a practice that continues to this day: major producers began to select commercially successful music directors to work on their new productions (1991: 206). Having their names displayed prominently on posters, billboards, and gramophone record sleeves, and radio shows such as the nationally popular Binaca Geet Mala (on Radio Ceylon), led to the construction of what Majumdar terms “aural stardom” (2001).5 Over the years, songs came to be associated with music directors (and playback singers) just as much as with actors/actresses lip-synching on the screen.
A. R. Rahman started his musical career as an ad-jingles composer and emerged as a music director in the 1990s—first in Tamil cinema and post-1995 in the Bombay-based Hindi film industry. While translations of his work for Tamil-language films such as Roja (1992, dir. Mani Ratnam) and Bombay (1995, dir. Mani Ratnam) were highly successful nationwide, it is with Rangeela (1995, dir. Ramgopal Varma) that Rahman made his mark as a “national” music director. Rahman’s nonfilm projects have also been highly successful—for instance, his 1997 album Vande Mataram, released to coincide with the fiftieth year of Indian independence, sold millions of copies worldwide.
There are at least two things to keep in mind that set Rahman apart from other important music directors. First, projects such as Vande Mataram (1997) that involved Rahman in music videos, promotions via MTV, Channel [V], and other music shows on satellite television established him as the first music director in India to have a strong visual presence in addition to the aural stardom conventionally associated with music directors. In fact, Rahman figures prominently in posters advertising “Bollywood tours” worldwide—his performativity, in other words, extends beyond recorded sound.
Second, his rise coincided with the Bombay film industry attracting mainstream attention in transnational arenas, in main part due to the Indian diaspora’s close ties to cinema. This led not only to an expanded audience and fan base but also to visibility generated in “world music” circles (Talvin Singh’s music from the Asian Dub Foundation in London, for example) and to composing music for international projects such as Bombay Dreams (2002) and the stage version of Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2006). The multiple boundaries that Rahman (and his music) traverses—linguistic (Tamil-Hindi-English), religious (Hindu converted to Islam), regional/national, diasporic, and global—are strongly reflected in the online fan community.
The Rahman fan community is an online newsgroup that was formed on January 1, 1999, and today involves nearly eight thousand five hundred members from twenty-six different countries (arrfans.com). This is a space that brings together, for instance, fourth-generation Tamil-Malaysians, second-generation Indian-Americans, Indians in Gulf countries like Dubai, middle-class youth in urban India, and a growing number of non-Indian fans.6 Embedded as citizens in disparate ways, each fan brings her/his own linguistic/regional background, experiences of varying racial/ethnic politics, religious affiliations, and different registers of knowledge and affiliation with India and “Indian” culture to bear on her/his engagement with Rahman’s music (and Indian cinema in general).
The primary activity that defines this group is a detailed discussion of Rahman’s music. This involves translating and evaluating lyrics, the use of different instruments and musical arrangement, songs’ place in the film narrative, song picturization (and choreography), playback singers, and so on. Like other fan communities around the world, Rahman fans also monitor print publications, radio and television shows, and different websites for news and trivia about their star. The community includes people who work with Rahman on a professional basis, who have played a key role in getting this fan community recognized as Rahman’s official fan club. Over the last two years, fans based in different cities around the world have begun meeting off-line to extend discussions conducted online, to help organize Rahman concerts, and, in some cases, to form informal bands and perform Rahman songs.
Enabled by the Internet, constituted by individuals from different parts of the world, driven by an interest in film music that reaches across the world, the Rahman fan collective clearly is formed at the junction of many border-crossing dialogues. It is important, therefore, to also note how interactions are influenced by broader technological, economic, and political changes. For instance, the last decade has witnessed the film and music industry, new media companies, and the Indian state engaging in attempts to curb “nonlegal” media practices that include sharing of films and film music. Relying on stereotypical notions of “rowdy” fans who operate in the shadowy bylanes of cities like Bangalore and Kuala Lumpur, media organizations and nation-states tend to view fans’ appropriation of music as deviant acts and rely on a “prohibitionist approach that seeks to protect intellectual property at all costs” (Ford 2006: 3; Liang 2005).7 Treating spaces like the Rahman fan community as online extensions of neighborhood stores that sell mp3 collections for a fraction of the cost of a CD tells us little about how fans broker consensus on what constitutes “legal” sharing and appropriation of Rahman’s music. Examining the many discussions Rahman fans have had on intellectual property, CD pricing mechanisms, availability of Rahman’s music in different parts of the world, legality of sharing background music from films for which Rahman has composed the score, monitoring ftp sites that circulate Rahman’s music, etc., is crucial if we are to understand how online fan communities have emerged as a crucial node in a larger realm of “porous legality” (Liang 2005) that defines Indian cinema’s circulation around the world.
What I wish to suggest here is that, over the years, the Rahman fan community has emerged as a “zone of engagement” (Tsing 2005) where individuals, media technologies and institutions, and broader cultural and political forces participate in the construction, contestation, and negotiation of Indian cinema’s place in a transnational cultural sphere. However, before we examine the formation and social dynamics of such zones, we need to rethink our understanding of fan activity surrounding Indian film culture. It is this problematic that the rest of the chapter will tackle.
Beyond the Cinema Hall: Reconceptualizing Publicness and the Fan
Sivathamby provided what is perhaps the earliest articulation of cinema and the public sphere in India. He argued that “the cinema hall was the first performance centre in which all Tamils sat under the same roof. The basis of the seating is not on the hierarchic position of the patron but essentially on his purchasing power. If he cannot afford paying the higher rate, he has either to keep away from the performance or be with all and sundry” (1981: 18). As Srinivas notes, this “formulation can be read as pointing to the democratic possibilities of cinema” (forthcoming: 20). While there was a certain mode of policing this “democratic” space (e.g., seating codes, from the “gandhi class” all the way up to “dress circle”), this does “permit us to conceive of the cinema hall as a kind of public institution that had no precedence in India” (Srinivas forthcoming: 20).
Following this early formulation, scholars have approached the problematic of cinema’s publicness by focusing on a range of filmic and extra-filmic sites with varied theoretical lenses: (1) Indian cinema as a “site of ideological production […] as the (re)production of the state form” (Prasad 1998: 9), (2) Indian popular films as social history (Virdi 2003), (3) in terms of spectatorship and democracy (Rajadhyaksha 2000), (4) in terms of censorship (Mehta 2001; Vasudev 1978), and (5) in terms of stardom (Majumdar 2001). While these studies grapple with the idea of how cinema relates in complex ways to the civic and the political, fan practices have not been the focus of systematic research. The two notable exceptions here are Srinivas’s pioneering work on fan associations in Andhra Pradesh (2003) and Dickey’s work in Tamilnadu (1993).
Dickey locates fan activity at the intersection of the formal realm of politics and civil social activity (conducting charity work, organizing blood donation campaigns, and performing other “social services”). Building on scholarship on Tamil cinema that has examined the relationship between the construction of stardom and the politics of mobilization (Pandian 1992), Dickey provides a very useful ethnographic account of this aspect of fan activity in Tamilnadu. She does, however, ignore the possibility of fan activity that might not necessarily be “public” in the sense of there being a neighborhood fan association that meets at street corners, at tea shops, or outside cinema halls. Indeed, her analysis circumscribes fan activity in Tamilnadu as that defined by working-class (often lower-caste) male youth in visible, public spaces.
In his pathbreaking work on the Telugu film industry, and viewing practices in the state of Andhra Pradesh more broadly, Srinivas complicates Dickey’s analysis and theorizes fan activity as being structured by a dialectic of devotion and defiance (2000), as a struggle between fan expectations and the industry’s careful management of the star persona to derive maximum mileage from fan activity. Focusing on one major star, Chiranjeevi, Srinivas situates the formation of fan clubs in Andhra Pradesh in relation to a broader history of subaltern struggles (dalit/untouchable movements, for instance) and forces us to consider fan practices as a domain of political activity that does not fit within classical liberal accounts of citizenship and political representation, but one that has clear links to a politics of mobilization around linguistic/regional identity (Srinivas 2000).
While he has written that we also need to understand the political nature of fan associations beyond their “linkages with the politics of linguistic/identity nationalism,” he maintains that fan activity is political mainly because it “develops around the notion of spectatorial rights.” He writes,
The cinema exists because of my presence and for me. Further, the “I” at the cinema is always a member of a collective: we make the film happen. Anyone who has watched a Chiranjeevi or Rajnikanth film knows exactly what I am talking about. Not only do these stars address spectators in rather direct ways (including by looking at the camera) but seem to perform according to “our” demands. (2003: n.p.; original emphasis)
Even as he exhorts us to examine the various “webs of public transactions” involving cinema, and to rethink what constitutes the “political” beyond the narrow sense of the term, Srinivas’s analyses remain bound by one particular, highly visible mode of fan activity and the film industry’s perception and management of such activity. He goes on to say that “much work needs to be done across the spectrum of activities and organizations that fade into the cinema hall at one end and the political party at the other” (2003: n.p.).
In the light of Indian cinema’s flows worldwide, the question of who comprises the “we” in the cinema hall and what “our” demands might be complicates the notion of “spectatorial rights” (Rajadhyaksha 2000). For it would be difficult to maintain that a third-generation Tamil Malaysian fan of Rajnikanth is positioned as a spectator in precisely the same way as a fan in Tamilnadu or, for that matter, Japanese fans who watch subtitled prints. The notion of spectatorial rights also does not help us explain the kind of activity that fans of A. R. Rahman are involved in, as we saw earlier. While opening up an important line of inquiry, Srinivas’s analysis needs to be extended in at least two directions.
The first question we need to address is, Are the two poles of the spectrum—the cinema hall and the political party—useful analytic categories to begin with? If we were to consider film music, a component of films that circulates in the public realm much before and long after the film itself does, we would be forced to consider the radio, the television, the Internet, and cell phone networks as sites constitutive of the publicness of cinema as much as the cinema hall itself, if not more.
Consider the story of Rameshwar Prasad Bharnwal, a resident of Jhumri Tilaiya in the state of Bihar, who has mailed nearly three lakh (300,000) request cards to radio stations for nearly two decades, and at least ten cards a day to Binaca Geet Mala when the show was broadcast on Radio Ceylon (Krishnan 1991). Bharnwal, a member of a radio listener’s club that discussed films, film songs, and requests to be mailed, recalls sending nearly one hundred requests for popular songs of the time. Shows such as Binaca Geet Mala, Chitrahaar and Showtheme (on state-regulated Doordarshan), Videocon Flashback (on [V]), and movie zones (on sites like IndiaFM.com) are all key nodes in a mediated public culture shaped not necessarily in the cinema hall, by the screen. I propose that a focus on fan activities that emerge at the intersection of film and “new” media opens up the possibility of rewriting the history of Indian cinema’s publicness as a history of media convergence, and as a history of fan activity that does not necessarily “fade into the cinema hall at one end and the political party at the other” (Srinivas 2003: n.p.).
The second question concerns the image of the fan that we derive from a focus on the space of the cinema hall and its surroundings, or fan associations of stars like Rajnikanth and Chiranjeevi: obsessive, male, working-class, and rowdy. The “excessive” behavior that marks viewers in the front benches of cinema halls, what Liang (2005: 371) calls the “protocols of collective behavior”—whistling and commenting loudly, throwing flowers, coins, or ribbons when the star first appears on the screen, singing along and dancing in the aisles, etc.—is routinely cited as what distinguishes fans from the rest of the audience. Further, the publicness of fan associations’ activities—celebrating a star’s birthday or one hundred days of a film, organizing special prerelease functions, adorning street corners with giant cutouts of the star, decorating theaters where the film has had a successful run, etc.—and press coverage of such activities have further served to both marginalize and circumscribe fan activity as undesirable, vulgar, and at times dangerous. As Srinivas, drawing on Dhareshwar and Srivatsan’s analysis of rowdy-sheeters, writes,
The fan is a rowdy not only because he breaks the law in the course of his assertion or his association with criminalized politics—the fan becomes a rowdy by overstepping the line which demarcates the legitimate, “constructive,” permissible excess, and the illegitimate […] as far as the “citizen” is concerned, the fan is a blind hero-worshipper (devoid of reason) and a villain. The rowdy/fan is an agent of politics which is de-legitimized. (2000: 314)
Fans, in other words, are imperfect citizens in aesthetic, socio-cultural, and political terms. Middle-class constructions of norms of excess are, without doubt, designed in part to maintain hierarchies of cultural production and taste. I would further argue that the fan-as-rowdy is constructed in semantic and social opposition to the idea of the fan-as-rasika—rowdy fans of the actor Rajnikanth as opposed to rasikas (connoisseurs) of the renowned Carnatic musician M. S. Subbulakshmi, for instance.
Where, then, do we position film music fans, like the members of the radio club in Jhumri Tilaiya, who wrote hundreds of letters to Ameen Sayani, the famous anchor of Binaca Geet Mala, expressing their admiration of singers like Talat Mahmood and Geeta Dutt? In what terms do we describe the desires and attachments of thousands of “respectable” English-speaking middle- and upper-middle-class men and women who constitute the primary readership for magazines like Filmfare? How do we account for shows on Channel [V] or MTV-India that were designed to tap into urban youth’s “obsession” with Hindi cinema? And finally, how do we make sense of online life-worlds of fans in diverse locations worldwide who design websites devoted to film stars, maintain blogs, write detailed reviews, create ways and means to share music, and come together as online and offline communities on the basis of shared attachments to film culture?
I argue, therefore, that we need to move away from meanings derived out of experiences based in the cinema hall and/or linkages to political parties, and place the “fan” along a more expansive continuum of participatory culture (Abercrombie & Longhurst 1998). Yes, there are rowdies and rasikas. However, denying the existence of several other sites and modes of participation, and continuing to relegate fan activity to the fringes of a transnational public culture shaped so strongly by cinema, will not only sustain cultural hierarchies but will also mean turning a blind eye to the many important ways in which cultural and political identities are being shaped in “new” media spaces today. Let me clarify right away that I am not advocating an exhaustive mapping of different modes and levels of intensity in being a “fan”—that would be both impossible and theoretically pointless. I propose that we treat the “fan” less as a subject-position taken up by individuals in different locations, and more as a dynamic construct that is industrial, textual, and social. In other words, I am suggesting that we begin to examine how the “fan” (and fan activity) operates within a certain circuit of cultural production, in this case, the convergence between film and “new” media in the Indian context. How do media producers who develop “interactive” content for new media understand “fans,” and how is this understanding translated into practice? In what ways do “new media” texts invite and structure fan activity? What does an examination of an A. R. Rahman fan community tell us about the many new and complex relationships among cinema, new media technologies, and social lives?
This shift towards examining the “fan” as a construct that is not eternal and essential but, rather, as shaped equally by industry practices, textual properties of film-based content that flow across multiple media, and social interactions in identifiable fan communities is vital if we are to appreciate and understand the centrality of spaces of participatory culture such as the Rahman fan community to the larger problematic of the emergence of “Bollywood” as a global culture industry.
Conclusion: Fan Studies Meet Global Media Studies
I began this chapter by introducing a fan community that has cohered around a film music director, A. R. Rahman. Building on a brief description of the formation and activities of the Rahman fan community, I have argued that a focus on fan activity surrounding film music will help us rethink the history of cinema’s publicness as a history of media convergence, and also to stop considering fan activity solely in relation to political mobilization. By focusing attention on fan activity, I also seek to add to studies that have pushed film scholarship beyond formalist concerns with the text and opened up other entry points into understanding our experience with cinema (Hughes 2003; Liang 2005).8 Following Stephen Hughes, I would even suggest that once fan activity is “taken as a necessary part of film history, we must rethink how we construct Indian cinema as an object of study” (2003: n.p.). In this concluding section, I wish to situate this chapter in relation to calls for fan studies to “go global,” and what it means to focus on Bollywood now.
Scholarly literature on fan activity has emerged primarily from Anglo-American contexts and experiences. This literature has moved from talking about fans as infringers/poachers (Jenkins 1992) to analyzing how fans today operate as lead users, surplus audiences, grassroots intermediaries, the “long tail,” performers, content generators, and even future talent for media companies (Jenkins 2006). As Jenkins argues in his recent work, fan participation has become an integral component of contemporary media culture, and both academics and industry professionals are interested more in terms of models of participation (2006: 246). Given how media flows from other parts of the world have influenced Anglo-American media texts, industries, and audience expectations over the past decade, it is not surprising that scholars who study fan activity are calling for fan studies to “go global,” to begin to include accounts of fan activity in “non-Western” locations. Further, given “Western” media’s current fascination with Bollywood, and the gradual development of Bollywood as a legitimate area of inquiry in academic locations in countries like the United Kingdom and United States, extending fan studies into a new and fascinating realm of non-Western popular culture would certainly seem timely. But I would argue that fan studies “go global” with great caution lest the faulty assumption that “non-Western” media are still tethered to the boundaries of their respective nation-states be reinforced. As several scholars and commentators have pointed out, simply because a circuit of media flow does not include countries like the United States or the United Kingdom does not make it less global.
To begin with, radio shows like Binaca Geet Mala, videocassettes of film songs that circulated throughout South Asia, the Middle East, and many countries in Africa, satellite TV channels that beam Indian films and filmbased programming around the world, and, now, Internet portals dedicated to Indian cinema are all evidence that, historically, the cultural geography of fan activity surrounding Indian cinema has always been global. Fan communities that cohere around various aspects of Indian cinema also tell us that we need to think beyond the “national” as the most important scale of imagination and identity construction (Curtin 2003). Over the last decade, it has become clear that the creation of Bollywood properties—films, music, apparel, web portals, mobile games, etc.—is an enterprise that takes place in many locations around the world, and involves people with affiliations and stakes that criss-cross varied regional, national, and diasporic boundaries. Bollywood, in other words, cannot be understood in terms of a “national” cinema industry limited to the boundaries of the Indian nation-state or restricted in its imagination by rigid definitions of “Indianness.” By continuing to limit Bollywood to notions of “Indianness,” we risk neglecting attachments that do not follow lines of ethnicity or nationality. We need to recognize that a focus on transnational fan communities (Rahman fans, for example) will help us better understand how media circulate and get hinged to varied aspirations around the world, and, crucially, how Bollywood, from a “non-Western” location, has begun claiming the status of a “global” culture industry.
NOTES
1. Personal interview with Shashi Baliga (Editor, Filmfare), November 14, 2005. Also see http://kollywood.allindiansite.com/g/60ta.html.
2. Http://www.sarai.net/aboutus/projects/old&new.htm.
3. The term “rasika,” derived from an aesthetic theory (rasa) of performance, connotes a highly developed sense of appreciation of various art forms. “Rasika” can be roughly translated as “connoisseur.” The term is most commonly associated with religious devotion, and classical music and dance forms.
4. Film music records account for 61 percent of the ten billion-rupee music industry in India. See http://www.contentsutra.com/blog/_archives/2005/5/12/810890.html.
5. Majumdar argues that “it is necessary […] to theorize an aural conception of stardom to account for the dual pleasures and recognitions in song sequences, a concept of stardom in which even the absence of glamour and the invisibility of playback singers can be regarded as defining features of their star personas” (2001: 171).
6. The moderator of the group informed me that over the last two years, over 50 percent of new subscribers have been non-Indians.
7. See, for example, http://in.rediff.com/movies/2005/apr/04ficci.htm.
8. Also see http://www.sarai.net for an overview of projects that map transformations in media and urban life in India.