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Interviews | Professor Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University interviewed by Smruti Koppikar

Professor Arjun Appadurai, Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University interviewed by Smruti Koppikar

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published Published on Feb 22, 2012   modified Modified on Feb 22, 2012

Professor Arjun Appadurai is a Mumbaikar at heart; coming to the city is an annual pilgrimage for this internationa­lly renowned cultural theorist and anthropologist. Appadurai, 62, who studied in Mumbai’s Elphinstone College, is currently Goddard Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He has been consultant and advisor to a wide range of public and private foundations such as The Smithsonian. In his seminal work Disjuncture and Difference in Global Cultural Economy, Appadurai argues that the world has become a single system with a range of complex subsystems. Appadurai proposed five main ‘scapes’ of global culture: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, techno­scapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes. During his six-week, seven-city trip this year, he looked closely at how the corruption slur has overtaken the India story and also, partly in relation to this, how the mediascape has exploded. Excerpts from an interview with Smruti Koppikar, an edited version of which appeared in print:

You spent time last year watching the Anna Hazare movement. How do you read it and contextualise it, now?

It’s not a minor movement. It’s clear that the movement, when it erupted, was tapping into some long-standing and deep-seated feelings of some Indians about corruption which crossed party, caste and class lines. A national chord was struck, both by the theme as well as by Anna Hazare’s articulation of that theme. Since then we have seen struggles in and about the movement, most recently in Parliament in the debates about the Lokpal Bill, which show that the issue of the movement are now front-and-centre of the national agenda, and this cannot be rolled back. But partly due to his health and partly due to differences in his key supporters, I see a kind of drift.

We have now two stories going: one is the Anna Hazare story which is now gradually fading, because we all agree that Hazare is not of the stature of Gandhi; though he might adopt some of that style and sensibilities it’s without that level of charisma and credibility. The other is that the issue is now top of the national agenda, the theme in now in Parliament, and that cannot be rolled back.

Has the political establishment had become so insensitive that it took such a movement to raise the pitch to this level, for the corruption story to be centre-stage?

The Anna Hazare movement had a great deal to do with corruption becoming centre-stage. Politicians of all stripes now believe that people cannot be quickly distracted from the issue and that corruption is not your business-as-usual thing. What’s interesting is that something that was so woven into the Indian fabric, something people had become so inured to, crossed some threshold and became unacceptable.

Corruption is not new. Concern about corruption is not new. Why should there be sudden mobilization, and it become a central issue on national agenda. I am not sure Anna Hazare’s articulation is enough to understand that; many other factors need to be taken into account. But for historians, sociologists, cultural theoreticians look for the answer to ‘Why now?’, not just ‘Why?’

So, why now?

I offer two answers. One is the theory of tipping point that’s gaining ground in economics, politics and culture: where certain things build up and there comes a point at which even a straw tips the balance. It’s a quantitative thing; the number of zeros attached to corruption sums is now so large that it’s no longer absorbable in popular imagination. I went to seven cities, each place has stories that rival the other, almost as if each was setting the national record in setting the scale of corruption, the runaway nature of big deals and auctioning off of government resources to private people is so big that people can longer accept them as part of their reality.

The other answer is sociological and qualitative, there’s a felt gap, bigger than ever before, between the aspirations of a very large number of Indian middle class and a stagnation/stasis of leadership—gap between economic aspiration and political leadership. That gap is being articulated in the language of corruption. It’s because growth is so massive for the top 30-40 per cent that they no longer tolerate small interests siphoning off large amounts of wealth. The small-scale daily corruption is not something people became so fed up with suddenly; it’s the richest malai of the economic system being siphoned off by these big-big illegal deals.

There are caste, and definitely class, dimensions to the anti-corruption movement

This is not a movement from below. The bottom 40 or 50 per cent doesn’t seem to be the most articulate. It seems to be the middle-class, people who are already educated, employed, have a perch in the growth machine who are in this movement. That also fits with the social sciences theory of rising expectations, that people revolt when things are improving, not when things at their bottom because that’s when they become hopeless. Protestors in smaller towns and metros have education, some access to jobs or business but not fast enough; they were hardly the truly dispossessed or the rural miserable or slum proletariat.

That does not take away from the legitimacy of the movement itself.

Not at all. If you take a long view of Indian history, it was always a small group that saw led movements, not people from below. We have never had a great revolt from below; it’s a great research subject for sociologists and historians India has never had the equivalent of French or Russian or English or Chinese revolution. Even our independence movement wasn’t a massive shake-up in social order. Part of the reason is that our largest disenfranchised populations have never been able to mobilize, for whatever reasons, and it was always the small but progressive visionary—Congress, Gandhi or JP or Vinoba Bhave and others—who led.

So, the fact that the anti-corruption movement is not an ‘everyone’s movement’ is not the problem. The question is what the fight is about: is it to change the architecture of the bus or is it to get better and front seats in the bus? If urban and semi-urban, middle and upper-middle classes are fighting only to get growth for themselves and are ready to push others off that bus, it’ll be a selfish fight. But if it’s relatively inclusive, then it’s as good as any other progressive movement. On that, I would say jury is out because it’s a movement driven by people whose broader social vision we know little about—we don’t know if the anti-corruption movement has room for Dalits, poor farmers, Muslims or is it about the fast-growing middle class alone.

One area of criticism of the anti-corruption movement, of Anna Hazare or Baba Ramdev, has been the religious, more specifically Hindu-right, overtones.

I think all large-scale, middle-class movements in India are to some extent tinged with pro-Hindu overtones, especially in the period after the destruction of the Babri Masjid. In the case of the Anna Hazare movement, this is more pronounced because of the direct Gandhian sources of his main strategies and style. But I don’t think this is a major worry.

Would you say the anti-corruption movement has, or will, change fundamental aspect of Indian society?

That’s hard to say. I certainly feel it’s a wake-up call to politicians, Parliament, all parties and coalition, its also a wake-up call to the business world and those who are trying to buy vast pieces of this growth economy outside of the taxation. But a social revolution? I don’t see it on the agenda. I don’t see that this movement will lead to more inclusive public agenda and better society for all. I would be cautious about saying that the movement has brought about an irreversible social revolution. There’s been revolution in what the middle-class will accept from its elected leaders, politicians and business elites, they are blowing the whistles, but it’s much less clear how they will treat a revolution below them.

You have watched the Indian media for a long time. Your theory on ‘scapes’ includes mediascape. How do you view its awesome power to drive popular movements, such as the Hazare movement?

There’s no doubt that political mobilization in this country has been media-friendly and supported by the media. It’s hard to imagine any movement minus the media. There are two parts to this answer. One is it’s good news that Indian media aligned itself with transparency, accountability and putting brakes on the black economy. But then anti-corruption is a great issue to align with because who’s for corruption anyway? It’s an incontestably good thing to be in favour of; every media can jump on that bandwagon. So for the media to support this movement is not heroic. Who’s the opponent here? It’s the patently bad guys and therefore it’s no-lose operation. So the media shouldn’t congratulate itself just yet; it would be more worthy of congratulation if the whole national media took it upon themselves to say hammer Narendra Modi’s record on minorities, other massive compromises of human rights and son on. Then I would say let’s bid for the Nobels and the Pulitzers. Is the Indian media really ready to take risk with what’s not politically safe and what their readers/viewers may not approve?

At Tata Institute of Social Sciences here, you presented a complex paper titled “Dreams and Reality in Mumbai Mediascape” where you wove in many worlds that the city is known for—capital, underworld, Bollywood, glamour element in police force. Please distil the key points.

I was looking into life of Bollywood which is central to life in Bombay, as Bombay is central to Bollywood. The popular view is that Bollywood is about dreams and outside that is city’s reality. What I am trying to show is all major social forces—whether Bollywood, BMC, government, NGOs, political parties, planners/architects—all have dreams and they try to put them into practice. For film industry, it’s through their films. For architects/planners, it’s through what’s built and so on. The broader urban life of Mumbai can be seen as a battle between dreams, battle between competing dreams; not between dreams and reality.

Secondly, what each dream encounters is the partial realization of others’ dreams, so my dream will encounter the partial realization of your dream, so if I am a planner I realize my dream through the partial realization of the builders dream and that way it multiplies on and on, and that’s what the dream-and-reality struggle all about.

In this you have business, glamour, entertainment mixed with corruption, criminality and police. Some reality becomes entertainment as in the Sanjay Dutt story. Corruption has its stars and glamour, glamour of large numbers, villainy, adventure, outlaw. It’s not a simple flat story, it’s like a film melodrama; it’s a modern epic, today’s Ramayana and Mahabharata, where money comes together with family, power and ethics. There’s virtue and vice, family and kinship, suffering and sacrifice.

These stories are about the Indian pre-occupation with the good and evil, something that the entertainment industry thrives on. And now the news media does too. In such stories, the masala factor is very high, it’s not like RTI or Jean Dreze’s issue with unemployment, considered boring and dry stuff meant for policy wonks and the poor.

Give us an example.

I studied the era from 1992 when there was so much cross-mediation, a double helix. Two parallels happened: criminalisation of Bollywood and cinemascaping of crime. Bharat Shah, Gulshan Kumar, Nadeem, Sanjay Dutt, police officers, encounters, crime link to Muslims and further to the underworld, the ISI and Pakistan. You get entertainment as crime as glamour as news. The Sanjay Dutt story epitomized it all, straddling so many parts of the media.

So media genres get mixed up

Yes, the double helix was also when the underworld financed films but also indulged in extortion; and Bollywood films showed extortion even as newspapers reported it.

The Indian news media has exploded but you see a problem. Why?

There are some very deep issues here. On the face of it, you could say that democratically this is a very good thing because media is the guardian of the society and so on. To that extent, this rampant growth in channels, forms, genres and reach is to be commended. What’s troubling is in this process, all boundaries are now blurred; where does news stop and entertainment begin, where the two stop and advertising begins. There’s tv from all over the world with enormous cross-breeding of languages, stories, actors and genres. That blurring is less comforting when seen from the independence angle of the media. But there’s also a ton of good investigative work happening in the news media.

So what or where exactly is the problem?

The problem is this: only a tiny part of this very large media bandwidth is devoted to a critical public sphere, where people assess news, policies and ethics. That’s hard to find, not impossible. I was watching a channel called Lok Sabha, good issues and healthy debates, no silly advertisements. It’s not I gather a popular channel but how could it be popular given the choices there are? Of all things, there are now 24x7 business channels; I mean who’s watching business 24x7 but there they are. Therefore, where this exploding media is in what we call critical aspects of a democracy—public sphere, debates, analysis—is not clear. The large part of this large bandwidth is taken up with commerce or entertainment or both. And, that cannot be good news, because it caters largely to the amusement needs of the top 40 per cent or so of the Indian society.

You see the theme of deep class divisions running through the media too.

The system is catering to the top and the bottom say 50 per cent being left out is the problem. It’s like the growth engine surging ahead with front few compartments; what are you going to do with the back compartments? I see here that the engine and front few are now almost separate from the back; all this talk of 8 and 9 per cent growth is in the “front”, it has nothing to do with the back end. The question then is: what’s the media doing or not doing with the many back compartments.

I don’t say everything in the media should be about the back-end and development and all that, but there should be the capacity to think about these issues, and not devote 90 per cent attention to transient issues of entertainment, glamour, commerce or politics in superficial way. So, my worry is the media explosion is not going to advance the capacity of the fortunate to give critical thought to those less fortunate. If someone says, that’s not an issue in a democracy, that’s different but it’s not right.

India’s growth story is also India’s urbanization story. How do you assess India’s urbanism when you see that the bottom rung in rural areas is more likely to end up as urban poor too, and they are not part of the media-delivered reality?

The rapid urbanization is clearly almost number one development of this century, not just in India. I would say soon 60-70 per cent of the world will be in cities, 60 to 70 per cent of that population will be in large cities, and in this 60 to 70 per cent the inequality is going to be sharp. The writing is on the wall: you are looking at more cities, huge cities and unequal cities. It’s a recipe for a very scary world.

Secondly, India’s thinking on urbanization is enormously slow and retarded, urban policy was almost non-existent, going back to the Nehruvian era when the emphasis of planning and development was in the rural areas. Indian cities grew almost by accident. It’s only with the national urban renewal mission last few years that there’s some attention, but it’s very young, very small, very under-funded; so it’s way behind the urbanization phenomenon. It’s struggling with problems of enormous proportions—demographics, migration, infrastructure, jobs.

So India is developing a very large urban under-class which is vital to the wealth machine which is also over-whelmingly an urban machine. The engine is largely not in villages any more; it’s in the cities where an urban-driven wealth production which now sits cheek-by-jowl with a miserable and disenfranchised urban poor class. You cannot have all these government offices, corporate offices and military bases without this vast under-class but this class has poor housing and sanitation and is subject to huge travel distances. This is non-sustainable. India needs to find ways to create massive sustainable social contract between the wealthy and the poor, in the urban context, after learning from the failures of the largely failed social contracts of the rural areas. What is India’s social vision of an urban society with democratic commitments and a very specific set of traditions?

The comparison between the India and China growth story put India ahead thanks to its democratic tradition. How do you see this playing out as the two economies grow?

The scale of growth and urbanization is vast in both countries, in fact China exceeds India. But China has a different set of instruments and risks. At the moment, China appears to be managing its urbanism better only because it’s a command society; if the lid blows off it’s all over. People have very limited rights. If something goes wrong, China is in trouble, there are huge potential problems of social disorder. India doesn’t have to worry about this; it has small disturbances all the time. India is a relatively speaking democratic society with right to vote. But we have to think of ways in which this urban explosion does not create a chasm between the poor as voters and their lives as human beings. Otherwise, cities will not be sustainable, they will collapse or implode.

You are working on a sociological-anthropological understanding of the global financial crisis. Tell us something about it.

This is a whole topic in itself. It’s recent research and it’s not quite ready to be spoken about yet because my own research is basically part of other research that’s coming out of sociology, anthropology, culture—but not economics. This is because we all believe that we must say something from these perspectives about the causes and sources—historical, institutional, cultural and moral—of the global financial meltdown that’s now threatening much of the world’s economy. It has damaged the US, Europe, and many other countries except those not deeply in the global net like India to some extent.

This work is essentially about three questions: one, what are these new instruments (such as hedge funds, derivatives) of economic and social contracts; two, what do they presuppose in terms of legality, regulation, and social tolerance for their existence; and three the relationship between risk-takers and risk-bearers in this new setting.

We are seeing a dramatic split between those who take risk and those who bear it. In the old idea of entrepreneurship, if you take a risk and fail, you fail; if your profit, you profit. In the new order, it’s like you profit but the loss goes to hundreds of investors, those at the bottom, unconnected to your risk-taking. The loss is socialized. In a sense, we are facing an unacceptable kind of social contract underlining this economy, and we are studying how and why this came to be, why did so many people who should have known better allow this to happen, and how to modify them and governable so that the next round of such a global financial crisis is preventable, because it’s not only economic; it has social and cultural implications and reverberations too.
 

Outlook, 27 February, 2012, http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?279926


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