Water off a bald head

Water off a bald head
Amrita Shah

Hats off to Shabana Azmi for stealing victory from the jaws of defeat. While the rest of the world has been busy decrying the death of liberalism in the opposition to Water, the actress-cum-activist has been posing for photographs swathed in elegant silks, bags, folders and cellphone in hand. A woman member of parliament, an attractive proponent of womens' rights with her head shaven completely bald. I cannot recall a more potent symbol of woman's emancipation in recent years. And to think that that head was shaven to portray a destitute widow - a victim of oppression!

Shabana's bald head is just one of the symbols to have played a part in the emotionally charged controversy over the film. Take Deepa Mehta, the film's Canada-based director, for instance. An Asian in the West is hardly a token of power. To many of her countrymen she is a pathbreaker, someone who has carved out a space in a competitive world. Yet, in the eyes of furious Indian protesters she is virtually a demon, the all-powerful conduit through which India's warts will appear magnified for all the world to see.

True or false, the trajectory of Water reveals just how influential and conflicting perceptions can be. The Daily Mail in Britain recently ran a story about two Indian boys who felt ridiculed when a photographer asked them to say `chapati' instead of `cheese' or whatever else photographers customarily say to bring a smile to the faces of their subjects. What's wrong with chapati? Well, the father of the boys, a grocery owner who contemplated reporting the concerned photographer to the Commission For Racial Equality, found it humiliating.

Amit Roy of The Telegraph who, following the report conducted a straw poll among his friends on chapati-making, offered another explanation for why `chapati' had become a dirty word among Indo-Brits. "For second-generation Indian women in Britain", he writes, "the chapati like the sari has become a symbol of the oppression under which their mothers have laboured. They are going to be damned if they are going to sit at home and make hot chapatis for violent husbands who return late at night after having spent the evening with the mistress."

All this fuss over a chapati! And yet, as society progresses, such upsets are going to become far more frequent. And what will make them complicated and difficult to predict is the dissonance in society. The difference between the elite and the emerging middle class is one such dissonance. A sociologist at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences once described to me the difficulty some of her male students had in accepting the concept of sharing housework in the context of gender equality. "They felt they had progressed up the social ladder", she said, "and I was asking them to go back to the kitchen." Similar contradictions would probably emerge in other areas. Vegetarianism for instance. While trends change to make animal rights and a non-meat diet more fashionable among the Western and Westernised elite, among the middle class one finds, particularly among the younger generation in strictly vegetarian communities, a trend towards non-vegetarianism as an indicator of `progress' and a breaking away fromold fashioned taboos.

The conflict in mindsets is even more apparent in other areas. Take the plastic bag for example - a symbol of pollution for those environmentally conscious but for the grocer and bhajiwala a plus to draw consumers. Every society has such gradations and odd contradictions as a result of differences in perceptions. We in India with so many languages, religions, class and regional differences though have always had more than our share.

The Hindi film managed to cross over boundaries and create a pan-Indian draw to some extent. But otherwise addressing these disparate mindsets was made simpler perhaps by the segmentation in the media. But what happens when the divisions begin to coalesce? Not just within the country but across borders?Much of the initial India-based content on the Net was developed with an eye on the non-resident Indian market. It is tempting to assume that to some degree the profusion of Indian language names on the Net for sites and portals - Samachar.com, Bawarchi.com, Sharekhan.com, Hungama.com -- was intended to tap into nostalgia or be an in-joke between desis. One doesn't find too much irreverence in media products focused solely at the Indian market. It is not the thing itself but the context. Shabana's bald head all over again. The world is shrinking. Our films are now seen across the world.

The Net is even more inclusive. Will the need to reach across so many myriad differences in cultural and other perceptions provoke new thinking on terminology and symbolism? Why the world, in many ways we are so very different even from our countrymen across the seas. Will there be chapatis flying all over the place or will we find something that transcends those differences? And if we do what will it be? It is important to know, for symbols, as we know, can be powerful things.