Popular Talk
The following is an extract from an interview conducted by Ashish Mitter and Akaash Pathare with Dr. Bishwaroop Sen who delivered a talk in school on popular culture in India. He is also the author of the book, ‘Of the People’

Q. Tell us a bit about yourself.
A. I grew up in Kolkata and studied in La Martiniere College, and then at St. Xavier’s. After that, I moved onto JNU and completed my Phd, from the University of Illinois. I taught for a short time at the State University of New York and moved on to take up various jobs in the private sector as well as in non-profit organisations. I now teach at the University of Oregon.
Q. Have you ever thought of coming back to India?
A. Yes, I have thought about it, but then, 99.5% of the Indians in the United States don’t come back. I suppose the reason for this lies in the fact that life there is easier and more comfortable. Moreover, there are more career opportunities in the US. One of the reasons I haven’t returned to India could be because I’m not brave enough to do so; it’s difficult to uproot yourself from a comfortable life.
Q. In your talk, you spoke about sport as a part of popular culture. How would you explain the dominance of cricket in India?
A. I think to understand just why cricket is so popular in India today, one has to look at the past. Cricket as a sport became popular in the mid-19th century in England, where public schools consciously chose cricket as the game they would use to help create an English upper class.
Cricket quickly became a game for the elite, and by 1880, football had become the most popular game in England, primarily because, unlike a game of cricket which lasted for four days, a game of football was over in hours.
When cricket arrived in India, it arrived as the game of the elite and was initially taken up by princes and westernized Indians striving to be seen as part of the British elite. As a result, not only was cricket a game for the elite, it became a sign of elitism. The burgeoning middle class took up cricket with great gusto in an attempt to differentiate itself from the lower classes.
After 1947, cricket (which was still a white man’s game), served as an index by which we judged our progress as a nation as compared to the developed western countries, namely the UK. Hence, Indian cricket received great support. After liberalization in 1991, when private investment was allowed in sport, money poured into cricket, and this sealed cricket’s status as India’s most popular sport.
Q. What has resulted in the decline of hockey and soccer in India?
A. The main reason for the decline of hockey and soccer is ignorance. Gandhiji, when approached to support the cause of Indian hockey, asked what hockey was. Sadly, many people share Gandhiji’s ignorance in the field of hockey. The reason for this lies in the fact that, primarily, hockey has been a game played by the minorities – Anglo-Indians in the 20s, Muslims in the 30s, Sikhs in the 60s, and tribals now. Hockey has never had the support of the majority community and hence the sport has suffered from gross under-funding. Soccer, on the other hand, remained popular in three states only, namely, West Bengal, Goa and Kerala. Here the sport was fundamentally linked with a strong sense of regional identity. For a Bengali,

Mohun Bagan was as much a part of his daily life as Rabindra Sangeet or rosogullas. To many other Indians, this cultural affinity with the sport seemed absurd. Between 1947 and 1991, these sports survived on state patronage, but with liberalization in 1991 and the introduction of a capitalist system, funding to hockey and soccer dried up, basically, because they didn’t possess the all-India appeal that cricket did.
Q. Moving away from sport, we come to another aspect of popular culture in India – films. Why do you think the song-dance routine is so popular in Indian cinema?
A. Many people, both in India as well as in the West, think that Indian films are silly and that the songs in them are sillier. I don’t agree with them. Indian films are more popular than American ones, and songs have been an integral part of Indian cinema for years. Anything which is so crucial to an art form cannot be called escapism or silliness. Madhav Prasad, in his book, Ideology of the Hindi Film, shows how most Indian movies are a tussle between feudal, patriarchal value systems and modern, capitalist value systems. There is a constant conflict between individualism and family values. Since the basic plot of most Hindi movies is the same, the song and dance sequences allow the directors to introduce something new, something which has not been seen or even heard of in India. A perfect example of this is the 1964 Raj Kapoor movie, Sangam, in which Kapoor expresses his desire to go to a cabaret and is persuaded not to go by Vijayanthimala, when she decides to do a cabaret show of her own. Such a bold step was unheard of in Indian cinema, where kissing was very much taboo. And so it was introduced through the medium of a song. All in all, I feel songs are a vital part of cinema.

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