RACE, TONGUE AND BODIES IN CINEMA OF THE FANTASTIC
Invented languages either take off from existing languages or depart from them entirely in order to highlight the ‘Otherness’ of its speakers. At the face of it, they transcend linguistic division, ethnicity, location, nations and boundaries. But languages do not exist in vacuum. Thus, much like ‘real’ languages, invented languages too draw from political categories. This is because language is closely intertwined with racial performativity, and nowhere is this better exemplified than in filmic explorations of speculative fiction.
(DISCLAIMER: Spoilers ahead)
Over the past 7 years, Game of Thrones has introduced us to a unique drama of the fantastic populated by the Starks, the Lannisters, the Targaryens, dragons, white-walkers, and a whole new horizon on onscreen nudity. Alongside, it has also introduced us to the nomadic Dothrakis. Modelled on the Mongols and Native American tribes, the Dothrakis are portrayed as a rapacious bunch who thrive on loots and conquests, and communicate in their own language. David Peterson, the linguist instrumental to its creation, intended for Dothraki the language to reflect the belligerence of the warrior race and provoke visceral responses in the listener. On set, the actors are given their lines in Dothraki, while English translations on the side communicate meaning and by extension, cue the performers into the scenes. This long-winded process of artifice has helped establish the language as credible in the popular imagination over time. Dothraki has thus become a legitimate tongue for many and follows its own trajectory of evolution through digital fan-clubs.
Forwarding its narrative around hypothetical, fantasy scenarios, speculative fiction often deals with the ‘Other’, where constructed languages offer a significant means of establishing an alternative universe on screen. They are often used to portray people- and thus a race- of a new world. Typically, the language helps mark the alterity of the people constitutive of the race in question. It also helps distinguish the intelligence of the alien race, ultimately aggrandizing one race over another. The vocal inflections or physical gait of the members of the ‘subservient’ race implicitly become markers of a certain ‘primitivism’ and, in most cases, the reason they are outdone in the narrative. In his essay Don’t Make my Black Face Blue, John G. Russell discusses the atavism, buffoonery and hypersexuality commonly portrayed by characters in America’s cinema of the fantastic. These characteristics are meant to mark their bearers as peculiar, he points out, and are also reminiscent of the racial stereotypes associated with the African-American community in the United States. He discusses the Na’vi people in Avatar (2009) in particular, calling out the use of non-white actors’ bodies to bring the strong, blue-skinned species to life on screen through the use of motion-capture technology. In being masked as aliens, the black actors, Russell argues, are racially coded on screen. They are denied direct visual representation while simultaneously having their physiognomic features exploited for a persuasive depiction of the Na’vi tribe. The colour of the ‘other’ has changed, but the template of ‘otherness’ remains rooted in contemporary racial representation.
This underlying tension reflects on the language the Na’vi’s use. When the Na’vi’s speak, their language appears in cursive flourish in the subtitles, implying the sort of linguistic belatedness calligraphic penmanship suggests. This complicates questions around racism where the cinematic avatars, in simultaneously inhabiting and displacing the black body on screen, become a reel surface on which existing racial tropes are projected. In the absence of a real, referential counterpart, invented languages serve to cushion actual prejudice by tantalizing the viewer outside the immediate text to a fictional linguistic system.
Like the Na’vi’s, members of the fictional tribe Kalakeyas in the recent blockbuster Baahubali: The Beginning (2015) speak in their native tongue, Kiliki. Members of the Kalakeya tribe are portrayed as dark-skinned and brutal. Seemingly an innocuous characterization of an entirely fictional tribe, this implicit association of dark skin and savagery clearly draws from colorist prejudices in South Asia. A loaded signifier of identity and value, fair skin is associated with the higher caste in popular consciousness, while dark skin is seen as a marker of the lower castes, and is relegated to the realm of the abject. The specific context of whiteness in Baahubali is evident in the positive portrayal of the fair-skinned upper-caste royals, who ultimately win over the dark-skinned Kalakeya, the latter’s collective demise attributed to their lack of sophisticated machinery and clever strategizing on the battlefield. This civilizational deficiency, alongside their dark skin and rotting teeth, helps establish the Kalakeya as a race caught in a primitive state, justifying their extermination.
Kiliki, the language spoken by the Kalakeyas, plays an interesting role in this context. Constructed from scratch, it is used in the film to establish the aggressive villainy of its speakers. Built around the frequent use of click consonants, Kiliki consists of ‘primal sounds’ meant to ‘incite fear’ in the viewer. In an interview, Madhan Karky, the formulator of Kiliki, describes the guttural language as having meant to be phonetically provocative to fit the popular imagination of a blood-thirsty tribe. However, care was taken to not use a familiar tongue in order to avoid hurting sentiments, he adds. Notwithstanding though, Kiliki’s kinship with Dravidian languages is unmistakable. In a country where the South is regularly marginalized for its otherness in skin tone and tongue, one wonders about the implications of this analogy.
Taking a stab at speculative fiction, Bollywood’s PK (2014), a satirical dramedy, narrates the story of an extra-terrestrial creature who lands on earth. PK is a likable alien, whose infant-like innocence is marked by the absence of a spoken language, with touch used as the only means of communication. This ‘oddity’, of preferring touch to tongue, symbolizes its ‘Otherness’. Soon though, after finding itself in the company of a sex worker who speaks a mix of Hindi and Bhojpuri, PK absorbs her vocabulary through prolonged physical contact and abandons its own touch-oriented mode of communication. It consequently takes this newfound lingo to its native planet and seemingly dethrones the lexicon of contact by establishing Hindi-Bhojpuri as the master language. This is a significant shift, marking what is implied to be an obvious ascendancy of a ‘natural’ language on an alien territory.
The growing aural ubiquity of Bhojpuri (or Bhojpuri-tinged Hindi) in Bollywood- thanks to films like Gangs of Wasseypur (2012)– provides an interesting backdrop to this shift. By exoticizing the Bihari native, otherwise derided and discriminated against in Mumbai and other parts of India, Bhojpuri is appropriated as a trendy deviation from normative Hindi. It is also telling that PK’s Hindi-based tongue comes to denote linguistic domination on its home planet. In many ways, this mirrors the hegemony of the language in the pan-Indian context.
Removed from the purpose of practical communication in the real world, invented languages in speculative fiction are complete only within the scope of the fiction. Kiliki and PK’s touch-based communication system point to the phantom of a larger linguistic order outside of the text which viewers can decipher (and further learn) through discussions on fan-fiction platforms. In each of the cases discussed in this essay, the body emerges as central to the dissemination of language, and thus marks itself political. The hard consonants in Kiliki (as in Dothraki) create a formidable staccato effect that aligns with the image of an all-male tribe of carnivorous warmongers. The people of the Na’vi race speak an unfamiliar tongue, wear dreadlocks and are enacted by predominantly non-white bodies- all of which culminate into a cohesive picture of racialized performance on and off the screen. PK poses a bit of a linguistic puzzle, where the difference in the mode of communication itself marks the alien language deviant in its utter simplicity. PK’s assimilation of the Bhojpuri language also denotes a shift in power, where he replaces his own knowledge system with another.
Language is a significant element in the matrix constitutive of body and ethnicity. Unsurprisingly therefore, its invented counterparts also submit to existing racial tropes. As the body, its kinship with other bodies, and the language it speaks collide with each other, cinema finds an opportunity to conjure a lexicon – whether through deviation or invention- and uses it to create an alternative (yet not too distant) linguistic universe on screen.
*Cover image ‘EEE=MC2’ by Shailesh BR
Najrin Islam is an independent researcher. She is currently also the Programme Officer at the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), India. She graduated with a Master of Arts degree from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), India. A theatre actor and playwright, she takes active interest in Cinema, Theatre and Performance Studies. She presented her most recent research paper on Post-Colonial Mutations in Shakespearean Texts: Questions of Linguistic Specificity and Universality at the International biennale conference, ‘Shakespeare, Traffics, Tropics’ organised by the Asian Shakespeare Association (ASA) at the University of Philippines (UP), Diliman in May, 2018.
PICTURING A NEW SCREEN VOCABULARY
As an art form cinema often comes the closest to mirroring how humans think; how memories are shaped and retrieved, imagination unleashed. Much of this has to do with the fact that the moving image engages directly with space and time. Space enters through the visual elements used to narrate a story. it may be argued that it is these visual elements which make a film truly cinematic. But apart from the moving image, stories are also told through the film’s posters. What role do they play in the cinematic component of films?
(DISCLAIMER: SPOILERS AHEAD)
What makes a film truly cinematic?
Is it a good screenplay, a great cast?
Is it how well a director extracts performances?
Is it about content, or form?
It may be argued that as an art form cinema comes the closest to mirroring how humans think; how memories are shaped and retrieved, imagination unleashed. Much of this has to do with the fact that the moving image engages directly with space and time. It incorporates temporality in its framework primarily through editing – by compressing and foreshortening a story and telling it in real time. Space enters through the visuals, the composition of settings, faces, objects, etc. to narrate a story. Perhaps it is this visual element that makes a film truly cinematic. Apart from the moving picture stories are also told through still images taken in the course of the filming and posters, which offer the public their first glimpse of the film. Movie posters perform the challenging task of conveying the crux of the film through a single image. Through this essay I will look at this exchange between posters and the films they represent through three films – Court (2014), S Durga (2017) and Newton (2017) .
The artistic coup of Chaitanya Tamhane’s film Court , is the fact that the protagonist, the sanitation worker around whom the narrative revolves, never appears. He is dead – sans voice and language – while everybody else is busy speaking on his behalf. This absence is central to the plot, both thematically and aesthetically. In his poster design Nishikant Palande captures this lack through the manhole. Not only is the manhole a reminder of the death of the protagonist in the sewer but also of the hole in which those raising their voice against injustice in the film find themselves. The void in the poster is thus the visual rendition of the chasm in the film’s moral universe created by the dearth of the character around whom the court case – and the film – revolves.
The minimalism of the poster replicates the visual style of the film, deliberately devoid of theatricality. Coupled with the preposterous situations of the plot the use of naturalist visual language, lends the film an air of absurdity. The variety of languages (Marathi, Hindi, Gujarati, English) used is a testament to Mumbai’s multiculturalism but also a reminder that some characters are altogether without language. When the voiceless do speak, they are silenced. Be it the arrest of the protesting singer, or the otherwise well meaning judge slapping a child who has finally raised his voice, dissenting voices find themselves abruptly suppressed at various junctures of the film.
A similar visual sophistication defines the narrative style and poster design of Sanal K. Sasidharan’s S Durga. The film oscillates between violent self flagellating devotion to the goddess and the very real threat of physical violence to the character who shares her name with the deity. The cinematographic composition of the film is often claustrophobic, especially when depicting the cramped insides of the vehicle in which the protagonists find themselves trapped. But the wide open spaces outside are not without a sense of looming terror either. Tantalising hints of the hope of escape are thrown in with the so-near-yet-too-far trains seen speeding across the landscape every now and then. The visual atmosphere prompts paranoia and the viewer is left unsure if the protagonist is at greater risk inside the van or outside. In the twisted moral universe of the film the goons alternate between saviour and sexually threatening. In this noirish universe the protagonists are bereft of choice and stuck in an infinite loop of escape and entrapment. This quagmire reflects amply in the poster design.
Half human half bestial, the masked man in the poster in the middle points to the moral complexity of the film. Perhaps it is significant that in the film when the characters do don masks the more ‘human’ characters – the woman and her husband – end up completely camouflaging their human features. The features of the feral goons, on the other hand, show through. The piece de resistance of Dileep Daz’s poster designs for S Durga however is a second poster. This depicts a circular maze with the half man half beast at its center. It is a succinct visual synopsis of the film. The maze stands in for the confounding journey of the protagonists, an infinite loop with no escape. At the core of the human condition, the poster highlights, is the indomitable beast within.
For a film about resistance Amit Masurkar’s Newton has a somewhat staid visual design. It is a film that chooses to play by the rulebook and prefers to unfurl its narrative through the characters and screenplay rather than innovative mise en scene. But the lack of visual storytelling is somewhat compensated by the poster design by Two Design, which offers a stunning summation of the film’s themes. In the first poster, a number of fingers are seen pointing towards the image of the protagonist, Newton. These could be interpreted simultaneously as the fingers of the voters whose rights he defends, but could also stand in for the use of state machinery or literally, the guns that point towards Newton in a pivotal scene in the film. The fingers also depict the literal finger pointing at the character of an honest man trying to do his duty. In this they are reminiscent of Satyajit Ray’s poster for Ganashatru (Enemy of the People), a film thematically resonant with Newton. The second poster is a stunning piece of Gond art. A visual echo of the Joker card from a deck of playing cards it draws from a scene in the film in which Newton picks a card that seemingly defines his destiny. The poster also doubles up as a mirror image – mirrors in traditional iconography often standing for symbols of vanity (think Narcissus). The all too serious character of Newton, whose original sin (alluded to with the worm in the apple) is perhaps vanity, is seen standing in the upper section of the poster with his voting machine. In the lower section he is a jester, the fool his arrogance about being honest and upright initially led him to be.
My purpose here is not to suggest that the visual design of the three films and their posters discussed are symptomatic of a specific trend in contemporary Indian cinema. Their selection for this discussion was in fact due to their deviation from dominant styles rather than an illustration of prevailing modes. What could have influenced the fresh visual vocabulary they adopt? The answer to this cannot just be the infusion of young blood in an industry that is usually averse to throwing off time honored traditions and formal techniques.. After all though Court is a relatively young director’s debut film, Newton is a sophomore effort and S Durga just one film from a fairly prolific director’s repertoire. Perhaps the liberty taken with the visual design has instead to do with the financial model enabling these films.
Rejected by the National Film Development Corporation (NFDC), Court was supported by the prestigious Hubert Bals Fund and Vivek Gomber, an independent film producer and an actor in the film. S Durga was produced by independent film producers Aruna Mathew and Shaji Mathewand was promoted by the Kerala State Film Development Corporation Ltd. Similarly Newton was produced by the independent film company Drishyam Films. The indie financial model is usually hinged on the idea of the auteur director, which often allows filmmakers considerable aesthetic autonomy. The visual language employed by the three films discussed, it may be argued, is a result of this freedom.
It need of course be pointed out that Court, S Durga and Newton and their inventive visual aesthetic constitutes only a tiny (even if important) sliver of the number of films churned out by the various regional and mainstream film industries in India. It remains therefore to be seen if their visual choices influence a more concrete trend. But one remains hopeful in light of upcoming films by visually discerning filmmakers such as Payal Kapadia, Gurvinder Singh and Amit Dutta.
*Cover image courtesy www.latimesblogs.latimes.com
Divya Sachar is a filmmaker, writer and photographer.
BEYOND DELICIOUS: TALKING WITH FOOD
Our experiences are often food mediated memories. Menus, food blogs, art, may all be seen as attempts at translating this collective recollection, making apparent the language food offers to help remember things. Taken together these endeavours sew a network of communication and understanding, a linguistic web of feelings, remembrance and taste.
My parents met discussing food.
Library cupboards filled with recipe books collected over three generations were not enough to keep them from buying more. Shelves spillled over. At home, food defined moods. Growing up – holidays, celebrations, time with family, friends – were all associated with food. Once in a small restaurant in the German countryside my father had requested the chef for the recipe of a pfifferlinge mushroom soup he had loved. The chef had refused. Not to be deterred, my father made a list of the ingredients he suspected went into the dish and sent it to the chef, asking if he had missed anything. The chef sent it back with a short tick, indicating all to be in order.
Or so the story went.
Breaking down food was a regular ritual. As a kid I remember sitting in restaurants and decoding dishes we liked. We made notes on napkins so we could try recreating the dishes later, at home. I still cook some of these gems, often from memory. But disremembering plays a role in what I remember too. The best liver paté my mother ever made involved her mistakenly using Hennessy XO instead of cooking brandy.
Earlier last month, soon after Anthony Bourdain’s death, I returned to one of his essays I had once enjoyed. In it he spoke about his father, the food he introduced the young Bourdain to, the person he helped him become. Age had simplified his taste, Bourdain wrote. Over time what he looked for in food was emotion, happiness. It made me think about the way I cook, sometimes with the aid of recipe books but often from memories – others and mine. Perhaps this has to do with growing up looking at food through my parents and grandparents’ adventures at tables. Maybe it has also to do with Bourdain, and how he taught a lot of us to see food.
My favourite dishes at restaurants are often those that are inspired by recipes collected from aunts and grandmothers. I always wonder about the stories and memories around these. At the Bombay Canteen, which I frequent, every dish has a story to it. During an afternoon conversation with Chef Thomas Zacharias, he tells me about his grandmother. Having developed an interest in food while cooking with her as a young boy, the memories from her kitchen easily find their way into the menu Zacharias created for the restaurant. The menu changes every two months, he tells me, but the favourites stay put. A number of them come from his grandmother’s kitchen. He remembers eating green tapioca chutney as an afternoon snack in Kerala. It’s now the main feature of the restaurant’s bestseller – the Kejriwal Toast (of Bombay fame). Ammini’s Duck Currywas a regular when he returned home after months. (Sometimes he even had it for breakfast!) Having lost his grandmother a year before the restaurant was launched Zacharias regrets that she hadn’t had a chance to see what he is doing today. But, through her food, he likes to think, he has kept her memories alive.
Over the past few years a number of online initiatives have similarly taken up the task of preserving food memories. There are now numerous digital journals that reference recipes that run in the family. But only some of these present food as entwined with familial memories. The Goya Journal is one such. Founded by Anisha Rachel Oommen and Aysha Tanya, it was started with the intention of forwarding and encouraging conversations around food. A series of articles in their online journal, #1000Kitchens, taps into recipes that carry special meanings for families. Tales that travel around the world with incredible experiences and stories to learn from, are laced with the making of heirloom recipes such as ‘Ceylon Curry for Sunday Lunch’. The journal revives memories and recipes from kitchens across seasons even while it explores the relationship food has with the varied socio-economic fabric of India.
As a language food allows us the medium to grapple both with the macro and the micro, the public and the private. Even as I think about the wide variety of people the Goya Journal engages with, the disparate kitchens it travels into, I am reminded of the intimate experiences food mediates. I think of Zacharias’ grandmother and the strength food often offers for negotiating loss. It has been a while since I first saw Reena Saini Kallat’s autobiographical work, ‘Walls of the Womb’, but perhaps because it too deals with the memory of food it comes back to me in a flash.
Based on the memory of her mother, who passed away when the artist was very young, Kallat often recollects how difficult the work had been to formulate. The final installation centres around her mother’s recipe book, displayed in a showcase, twelve red dyed sarees surround it. On closer inspection, the raised white bandhini patterns on the sarees turn out to be inscriptions in Braille. They translate Kallat͛’s mother͛s recipes to a sensory memory. Kallat has referred to this work as an after-presence, where images, taste, touch sounds and smells have an after-life. They exist even after being experienced, but are illegible, just like the dotted patterns of Braille on the sarees.
Experientially, the work is a reminder of how we remember a person through food related artefacts. It highlights how all our experiences are often food mediated memories. The creation of menus, food blogs, art, may all be seen as attempts at translating this collective recollection, making apparent the language food offers to remember things.
* Cover image: Reena Saini Kallat, ‘Walls of the Womb’, 2007, recipe book details, image courtesy artist
Veeranganakumari Solanki is an independent curator and art-writer. Her curatorial experience has involved research, curating and co-curating exhibitions, writing for art publications and journals on emerging Indian, Asian and international artists and art practices; in India and internationally. Her interest lies in the manner in which interdisciplinary forms merge with art to create dialogues that travel from public spaces into private ones. She has contributed papers and articles to several international art journals and publications including Flash Art, Culture360, TAKE, Kolaj and several others. She has lectured on curating and art practices, and conducted workshops internationally at institutes such as the Siddhartha Art Foundation, Kathmandu; the Asian Contemporary Art Conference, Taipei; Icastica, Arezzo; Academia di Belle Arte, Florence.
READ MY FACE
Over 3 billion users exchange over 60 billion messages everyday. More than 90% of them use emojis. Emoji users outweigh the 1.5 billion English language speakers but, unlike Klingon or Na’vi, is yet to be declared a ‘language’. Gradually though it has come to be powerful symbol of change. Emoji’s emotional nuance adds humor and personality, breaking the monotony of text and often mitigating uncomfortable exchanges. In a multilingual country like India they also serve the role of a visual binder. Bridging linguistic barriers nationally and internationally emojis constitute what is undoubtedly the fastest spreading ‘language’ ever.
In the year 2018, the 3 billion users across Facebook and Whatsapp exchanged over 60 billion messages a day according to the Global Digital Report 2018. 90 percent of these users use emojis. Emoji users outweigh the 1.5 billion English language speakers. In 2015 Oxford Dictionarydeclared the “Face with tears of Joy” emoji the Word of the Year. Although its symbols (currently about 2823), almost surpass the diction of invented languages like Klingon (2850 words) and Na’vi (1000 words), it remains to be labelled a language like them.
Can a face (no matter how expressive) constitute a language?
Some would say they don’t. Despite their ubiquity emojis do not qualify as a language since there is no core grammar for its ‘speakers’ to follow. Each user makes up the language as they go along, strings of combinations are invented to convey individual messages. Emojis exchanged within specific sets of people often come to acquire their own meaning based on the context, environment and group in which it is used, a far cry from the meanings ascribed by its creators. This customizable nature of emojis permits constant improvisations to the extent that it serves almost like an encrypted language within closed circles. Different groups use the same emojis to express different emotions. Among other things this allows those in the know to keep information from those outside the circle. Secrecy fuels innovation fostering a linguistic culture similar to coded communication. The question to ask therefore is not if emoji is “a” language, but in fact whether emojis are a group of “numerous” secret personalized languages.
The most common use of emoji based secret languages is in sexting.
Misinterpretations allow a different strand of invention. Symbols like the poo emoji have been constantly reinvented as representations for poop, ice-cream to a Hershey kiss chocolate.
What the poo emoji really denotes is Kin no Unko or The Golden Poop; unko in Japanese having a similar resonance as the pronunciation for the Japanese word for luck. Consequently, the emoji, to everyone’s surprise, signifies good luck.Despite the scope for interpretational error, emojis are increasingly being used for branding and public relations strategies to garner attention and increase popularity. Twentieth Century Fox’s promotion campaign for Deadpool, a superhero-action-romance film, involved an innovative, emoji-inspired billboard.
Besides offering inventive ways of conveying humour however, the open ended, indicative nature of the language offers fertile ways of bypassing censorship. When the #MeToomovement took over social media encouraging women to show solidarity against sexual harassment the Chinese government blocked the hashtag and censored the campaign. To circumvent this initial censorship women in China used emojis. Using the phrase “rice bunny” (米兔), – pronounced as “mi tu” – the women devised a crafty means of raising their voice
Not all campaigns employing emojis are however transgressive. In the year 2015, fast-food giant McDonald’s came out with a brand campaign celebrating their catchphrase ‘Good Times’. The promotion material used emojis to highlight how a bad day stuck in traffic can become ‘good’ by visiting McDonald’s.In Bristol graffiti artists subverted this original campaign and made a point about the ill-effects of fast food culture by painting an additional emoji at the end of the original ‘Good Times’ emoji trail
While the above example might highlight the possibility of witty political protests via emojis the scope for misrepresentations and repercussions remain. In 2015 a Facebook post by Osiris Aristy, a seventeen-year old American teenager, showed a gun emoji directed at a police officer. Though immediately interpreted as threatening the message, Aristy pointed out, was meant to indicate police violence against the black community. The misinterpretation gave rise to a social media movement- #DisarmTheiPhone– led by the activist group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence. The movement grew big, eventually forcing Apple to change the design of the gun emoji from a metal gun to a green toy-shaped squirt gun in 2016. Other vendors followed suit, modifying their gun emojis to various versions of a water pistol gun.
The emoji, therefore, has proven to be a powerful symbol of change, irrespective of how it is interpreted. The pictorial symbols provide elements of relatability, personal connection, visual appeal and softening of expression. While there are plenty of emojis for a smile- ranging from a grinning face, a face with tears of joy, a smiling face with smiling eyes, a grinning squinting face, a grinning face with big eyes, to a beaming face with smiling eyes etc.- most people do not know the difference between them. Still, adding any of the above to a message with a serious tone lightens up the mood. Emoji’s emotional nuance, adds humor and personality, breaking the monotony of text, mitigating uncomfortable, awkward or strained situations. In a multilingual country like India emojis also serve often as a visual binder. Their widespread use in branding and marketing in the Indian market-space is thus unsurprising. The bridging of linguistic barriers nationally and internationally is the reason for the emoji being the fastest spreading “language” ever.
It is no surprise then that this spread percolated into the language I have myself used, ever since I was initiated into the world of smartphones. Despite my familiarity with it however, I was surprised to find the parallel significations of symbols I use daily during my research for this essay. As I thought back on the many emoji based messages I have sent out in light of my new discoveries I suspect my face looked rather like ‘The Scream’.
Except maybe rounder, more yellow.
*Cover collage by artist. Images used include ‘The Scream’, Edvard Munch, 1893. Others sourced from https://aboveaverage.com/the-emoji-scream/
Sukanya Garg is an artist and writer based in New Delhi. She has a Master’s degree in Public Policy from Duke University, USA. She has been involved in research, planning and execution of gallery exhibitions and external projects in collaboration with curators and has been archiving and writing about selected artists and practitioners. Her writing has been published in the Indian Contemporary Art Journal magazine (Volume 16, 2016); at Aspinhouse, Kochi-Muziris Biennale, 2016; the India Art Fair 2017, New Delhi; and as part of several catalogues. As an artist, she has honed her skills under senior artist Shobha Broota and has showcased in multiple exhibitions across India and abroad. Prior to joining the arts, she was working in the fields of international development and policy research with multilateral organizations and think tanks such as The World Bank and the International Labor Organization.
MANGO LANGUAGE
Indian English has opened up a fresh new window in the country’s comedy scene. While building an entire act in English could alienate a large audience incorporating the colloquial gusto of Indian English into the set has proved surprisingly inclusive.
“And he knew, of course, that except for his English clothes there was nothing English in his life.”
Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable
That the grammatical rules and structural format of the Queen’s language aren’t reverentially followed in India is a given. ‘Indian English,’ quite like other variants of the language in former British colonies, is a valid language in its own right. It is a language of convenience, typically a mix of English with a local language. Its accessibility is evident in its easy adoption not just by urban India but across Indian films and television.
In his 2010 film Phas Gaye Re Obama, Subhash Kapoor introduced us to the ‘Mango People.’ A throwback to a catchy label flagged by Imtiaz Ali’s Love Aaj Kal ‘Mango People’ is a literal, but lol worthy, translation of the Hindi expression Aam aadmi, or the common man. The language of the Mango People is a unique Mango Language, exemplified by the scene above. Distinctive from what is understood to be ‘correct’ English, this variant is resolutely a language by itself. Sure, it is a reminder of the widespread use of English in India (and the Indian Subcontinent), a colonial residue. But it is also a far cry from the colonial dream.
As the official language of the country, English is used extensively in India. Like most multilinguals English speakers in India speak in multiple languages simultaneously. As a result Indian English is entirely customizable,
every speaker has their own unique vocabularyand adds their distinct quirk to the language while using it. Sentences are regularly splattered with a variety of words and phrases from various vernacular languages. Combination words, a portmanteau of say English and Hindi, or Tamil, or Bengali, or Gujarati is common. These instances of ‘corruption’ are often hilarious but simultaneously an act of claiming a language arguably not our ‘own.’ It is this sense of ownership which results in jugaading new words.
Adaptations not only mark the inventiveness of the speaker, but also reflect their socio-cultural and regional backgrounds. Recent videos featuring comedians mimicking the antics of ‘South Delhi Girls’ for instance have left the millennial crowd in splits because of the anglicized Hindi pronunciations. Mallika Dua’s role as Tinder Aunty in the All India Bakchod videos on mobile phone apps is a case in point of how the peculiarities and rhythm of Indian English are being used by standup comedians to hilarious effect. Channel [V] viewers during the 2000s will remember Lola Kutty. Actor and TV personality, Anuradha Menon’s on-screen impersonation of a stereotypical Malayali lady, through her alter ego, Lola Kutty made most of the heavily accented Malayali English to maximize the humor in the segment.
It may be argued that Indian English has opened a fresh new window in the Indian comedy scene. While building an entire act in English could alienate a large audience incorporating the colloquial gusto of Indian English into the set has proved surprisingly inclusive. By using a language regularly employed on the streets comedians have been able to gain larger audiences in smaller cities in India. Touring stand-up comedy shows that now cover cities with predominantly vernacular speaking audiences certainly owe a part of their success to the language in which they are performed- Indian English in that sense is definitely a “people’s language.”
To appreciate Indian English, one need only be attentive to its singularities. The region it is spoken in, the socio-cultural context against which it is set defines its ever changing attributes. And then there are the various nuances of dialect and diction. By allowing speakers to adapt to these particularities Indian English has provided a thread of commonality and broken language bound barriers. It has thus emerged as a marker of contemporary Indian culture. With the spilling over of this evolution of Indian English into art and media, we witness how inventiveness in very simple form has the potential to influence culture. Comparisons between the Mango Language and ‘English’ are redundant. Where one was handed down, the other is a marker of the collective spirit to adjust, remodel, and move ahead- or simply put, a “baaju hat, jaane de!”kind of resilience.
ABout the Author
Kadamboor Neeraj Raveendran is pursuing his Bachelor’s degree in Visual Art (Painting) from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda. His interest in Art History and Aesthetics allows him to explore and express delicately layered narratives through his work. Neeraj maintains a blog where he writes about what he sees around him, and about his interactions with people. He is always up for a good conversation on culture, society, and history. If you can’t find him either in an intense critical debate about contemporary culture, or painting or typing away in the studio just follow the cats.
BY WAY OF EXTRACTION
Language often becomes the scaffolding on which a work of art can grow. The scaffold emerges out of the interaction between the work and the writer. This active event of perception is akin to the process of extraction.
Knowing-Seeing
What do we see when we see?
What do we read when we read?
The answer may seem obvious- we see images, we read texts. But even these mundane acts- seeing, reading- appear not so simple on reconsideration. Perception, art theory’s ‘much maligned monster’, rises time and again in our engagement with art. Fair then that we start by rousing it, this time not to be reified but to be undone.
The philosopher who said ‘I think, therefore I am’- Rene Descartes– wielded doubt as his provocation for knowledge. Mere sensory knowledge of this world could not be a source of certain knowledge, he said. Our senses are fleeting, transitory, ever-changing, how can it be trusted?
“I see a tree, but can I be certain that what I see is a tree?”
Much of semiotic analyses in visual culture follow this line of enquiry, making the sign dispensable vis-à-vis the signified and all presence representational. Approached thus everything seen stands in for something else, often negating the little value we attribute to what we actually see. Imagine if you saw a pipe and thought only of ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ / ‘This is not a pipe’ (courtesy the other Rene). Not only would this trap your perception in this particular signification but also thwart the opportunity to see the pipe as you would see it. The pipe- in not being a pipe but being a signifier of something else – becomes a purely conceptual entity and remains untouched by your senses.
What if we were to consider another approach to perception instead?
Consider, “I see a tree. I am certain that I see a tree. But how is it that I am seeing this tree?”
Seen this way, a tree emerges as a tree in the moment that we perceive it.
The materialist philosophical school of Charvakas propose a theory of knowledge which grasps the world through perceptual evidence. Far from clouding our experiences with doubt, they suggest, our senses help accumulate much of our knowledge. Unless a Charvaka perceives the tree with her own senses- sight, touch, smell etc.- she will not take as truth anything known about the tree. This position brings to mind the character of Bauji (played by Sanjay Mishra) in Rajat Kapoor’s Aankhon Dekhi (2013). In the film Bauji is shown to have suddenly decided to only trust his five senses to judge the truth about the world around him. This sets him off on a journey of radical self-discovery, unravelling the reality he inhabits. Refusing to accept mediated knowledge and adamant about testing the veracity of all things, events and experiences himself Bauji refuses to believe in the existence of anything unless proved by his senses.
This pivotal role of the senses, however, poses a strange conundrum: If the senses constitute our knowledge of the world what power can the word command, whether written or spoken?
Is the word stable?
Is language an indubitable mass, that can withstand time and space?
The Upanishadic traditions revered the word. Here the spoken word- Vak- and the heard word- Shruti- were both considered indisputably the true utterances of wisdom. But one often wonders if what is said is coincident with what is heard. ‘So I have heard’ is often an alibi for the word- one that ascertains the word not as spoken but as heard. This inherent uncertainty of the word is illustrated particularly well by the “Do you hear Yanny or Laurel?” debate circulating on the internet.
Much like the spoken word what we write is rather unstable.
Is it possible to hope that you will read the same thing that I write?Much like the spoken word what we write is rather unstable.
And yet, we get each other (or think we do) if we pay attention. Language performs, whether by assisting understanding or misunderstanding. A hit or a miss. So, we read what we make and we make what we read- as mutual authors and mutual readers.
If language is so performative, so is writing about art. At the very outset it takes up the precarious task of synchronising the unstable word with the work of art. In the process such writing destabilises, re-purposes, speculates, sometimes representing, sometimes extending the work of art. Language often becomes the scaffolding on which the work of art can grow. This scaffold emerges out of the interaction between the work and the writer/worker. This active event of perception is akin to the process of extraction.
Seeing as Extraction
Extraction, akin to the process of distillation, sorts out particular elements from a mess of a mass. Like extracting silver out of its alloy, calcium out of rock, the right shade for a border from the local matching centre, milk from grated coconut. Extraction is an inevitable- yet unnoticed- aspect of perception.
We spot familiar names more easily than others, we single out the shape of a loved one in an instant in a crowd, we see familiar patterns in unfamiliar images. Our affinities silently guide us in our ways.
So also with our particular experiences of places, images, encounters and stories.
Our mechanisms of sensing are, thus, decisively directed and cannot afford innocence. They are instead active and deeply implicated tools through which the world comes to us in the way we see it. In other words, we can extract many worlds from the one world that we live in.
So too with a work of art.
This extraction is not merely an interpretation, it is a method of creation. It is constitutive of the world and all the things in it. The realisation that we have just made what we think we saw or read destabilises all our comfortable structures of experience. Everything seen or read or heard (or not) becomes implicated with specific agency. By way of this knowing- seeing, what I read also becomes deeply attuned and affected with what I know and do not know. Seen thus reading ceases to be passive. Instead it becomes deeply active.
These ways of extraction latch on to our points of encounter with the world- with art- taking these points forward in time and space. Much like embroidery. Puncturing into a blank surface decidedly, pulling our string of thought through it towards the next stitch.
When one embroiders, one is doing two things at the same time- abstracting and concreting- knowing the larger scheme and taking a minor concrete step in it. But, consider embroidery without design- a free-hand embroidery- where the stitch is not dictated by but dictates the design instead. What if reading were like sewing such an embroidery patch – as if a blind author was braille texting his words into paper with thread, and a blind reader, running her fingers over the words?
In his book Corpus Jean Luc Nancy describes writing and reading as impossible without the touch.
‘the page itself is a touching (of my hand while it writes, and your hands while they hold the book). This touch is infinitely directed, deferred […] In the end, here and now, your own gaze touches the same traces of characters as mine, and you read me and I write you. Somewhere, this takes place’
The text becomes volatile, alive and present when touched, when felt and when made – like a plaster cast or like flowing water. The same text- I read, forward back, backward forward, inside out, top down, sitting, standing, crawling or merely glancing as a passer-by.
The text as a waterfall.
The text as ocean waves.
The text as a river.
The text as a drop.I never step into the same text twice.
About the Author
Srajana Kaikini is a writer, researcher, curator pursuing her Doctoral degree at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal. She was part of de Appel’s Curatorial Programme 2012-13, Amsterdam and recipient of the FICA Research Fellowship 2013-14. She holds a Masters in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and has a graduate degree in Architecture. She has been writing and curating projects since 2013 and is currently collections curator at the K K Hebbar Gallery and Arts Centre. Latest curatorial works include Mukhaputa (2017) and Vectors of Kinship (2016) at 11th Shanghai Biennale. Latest publications have appeared in The Deleuze Studies : India Special Issue 2017 and Kunstlicht Special Issue : Translation as Method 2016. Her doctoral thesis interrogates the philosophy of curatorial practice with a focus on ontology. Her intellectual probes include philosophy of art, curatorial studies, kinship and relations and philosophy of language and image, cinema and space.
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