Steve Dern? first landed up doing research in India in 1986 and then in 1991, to interview selected moviegoers in Varanasi and Dehradun for his doctoral dissertation on the impact of media on our culture. He returned to the latter 10 years later, to check out how liberalisation had transformed the city?s cultural landscape in the intervening years, and the resulting findings make for Globalization on the Ground. Arguing in lockstep with commentators who have been stressing post-liberalisation shortfalls in ?equitable growth,? he points out that whereas affluent Indians with high-paying jobs have become increasingly located in the global field, non-?lites still lagged behind in the consumption of both cosmopolitan goods and values.
Haunting this volume is the spectre of Arjun Appadurai, whose 1996 volume, Modernity at Large, offered the best of affirmations for those who celebrate the pleasures and agency associated with contemporary globalisation, foregrounding as it did the fast increasing numbers of people who routinely imagine living and working at places other than those of their birth. Thanks to references ranging across diasporas, whether by way of cricket, cinema and advertising consumption or by way of diverse demands for sovereignty, the book not only became the raison d??tre for many an academic conference panel, but also a primary source for quite a few dissertations.
In subsequent years, Appadurai?s thesis that increasing circulations of people would soon lead to the nation-state?s demise has received so many empirical and epistemic challenges that it?s now largely taken to be invalid, and unworthy of debate. But conference goers continue to ponder over the rest of his ?sayings,? including those about how electronic mass media and growing diasporas have broken the nation-states? monopoly over modernisation. Dern? is the latest to have taken up cudgels with Appadurai?s findings, specifically in the cultural terrain.
As resounding confirmation of how non-?lites have become marginalised even in our movies, Dern? correctly points out that ?lite lives rarely intersect with those of the poor these days, nor does the working class hero (aka Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s and 1980s) enjoy centre stage anymore. In fact he argues that most films since Hum Aapke Hain Kaun normalise a lifestyle replete with ?suit-and-ties, automobiles, business abroad, and honeymoons in Europe.?
But his chosen subtitle, ?Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class and Gender in India?, is somewhat misleading insofar as Dern? chooses to look at media-influenced transformations through an exclusively male lens, which seriously compromises his commentary on the impact of cultural globalisation (everything from growing access to Hollywood and American soaps to increasing incidence of jet-setting heroes in Bollywood) on the relationships between Indian men and women. Another factor undermining his findings is one that characterises dipstick surveys in general: having talked to just 32 men, Dern? comes up with one questionable generalisation after another. Let me list a few.
Consider the claim that ?Hindi film heroes always have deep voices, while heroines? voices are painfully high to Western ears.? This is problematic at so many levels, not the least for not having factored in the Sunidhi Chauhan phenomenon. Also consider, ?Today?s films portray excessively sexual, greedy women who are redeemed by being remade as consumers.? Really? This hardly seems an appropriate description for last year?s top five grossers, which were Om Shanti Om, Welcome, Partner, Chak De India and Taare Zameen Par.
And a final Dern? dictum worth mulling over while gnawing away on one?s nails: ?Most men rejected Hindi films? celebration of love marriages and of love as having priority over duties to the joint family.? One wonders what the men of Dehradun would have to say if they got to read what Dern? thinks of them, as incapable of responding to cosmopolitan cultural exposure with anything other than a hearty embrace of traditional binaries, claiming public spaces as masculine preserves while pushing women back into the domestic sphere with ever-more force.