Dr Swaswati Borkataki
High art and industrially produced consumer art bear the stigmata of capitalism; both contain elements of change. Both are torn halves of an integral freedom, to which, however, they do not add up – T Adorno, in a letter to Walter Benjamin, March 3, 1936.
I have been reading about the culture industry lately, particularly analysing it in light of the current debasement of everything that emerges within the vast framework known as the media, or more accurately, the media industry, which reflects the broader concepts of what can be termed popular culture. (Popular culture, by means of a rough definition, may be summed as ideas, music, and practices consumed by a majority of the populace at a given period of time).
In one of his seminal works – The Parlour on the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in 19th-century Calcutta, Sumanta Banerjee writes about two socio-economic groups in 19th-century Calcutta – one, the Elite, comprising absentee landlords, the rentier class, and the English-educated emerging middle class that devised its own form of ‘culture’, unique in taste and distinct in terms of literature, music, and fine arts, while the second group he talks about comprises the ‘lower classes’ – migrants immigrating from other parts of the subcontinent to Calcutta, essentially in search of work. Banerjee uses ‘folk’ or popular culture to describe the culture of the ‘lower orders’, though it is quite problematic to use the two interchangeably.
‘Folk’ seems to be a wider, more comprehensive term – ‘folk’ would imply more than being contained to the tastes of a particular class. Banerjee later uses the term ‘mass entertainment’ or ‘mass culture’ to describe art forms served through the modern commercial media industry. Both ‘cultures’, he says, have always lived in juxtaposition, rarely interacting.
This leads us to the idea of ‘pop’ – a convenient acronym for popular culture. Adorno says that pop is essentially standardized content that appears to be different but is ultimately the same repetitive, formulaic substance. Pop works because it relies on repetition and relatability, creating a sense of familiarity; as Adorno states, pop is popular because it becomes familiar and, therefore, preferred.
Pop also thrives on the idea of connectedness; the ‘vulgar’ elements of popular culture that survived in 19th-century Bengal, despite facing disdain from elite ‘reformism’, demonstrate that these tendencies flourish because they are connected to and rooted in the everyday experiences of people from the so-called “lower orders.” This supposed ‘vulgarity’ is now characteristic of the popular and media industries in India today.
Movie making has hit an all-time low. It feels like we have suddenly been teleported to that horrible era of 1990s Bollywood movies; that was a stark deterioration from the late 1970s and early 1980s, where movies like Party, Albert Pinto ko gussa kyun aatahain, Paar, Gharonda, Ek din Achanak, New Delhi Times, and so many others showed the world that Indians can actually make sensible movies. Who could forget the array of brilliant works by Satyajit Ray, Basu Chatterjee, Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and Mrinal Sen – cinema that actually reflected the realities of society? Today, mindless action, misogyny, and regressive chauvinism dominate our entertainment landscape. Today, mindless action, misogyny, and regressive chauvinism have reached their peak.
Today’s culture industry is replete with content inducing minimal intellectual engagement, effectively turning audiences into passive consumers who crave repetition rather than reflection. Hypermasculinity is being celebrated like it was in the 1990s. People have started enjoying watching extremely feeble female characters, who are heavily dependent on their men to protect their honour. I heard a dialogue in a superhit Bollywood flick that hit the silver screen sometime back and created a spectacle – “Hum Mard Hain. Paida hone se marne tak, hamara kartavya hain ladna.” And that’s it. That is just enough to rake in a few hundred crores.
But media also includes so much more than movies alone. News channels have become more entertaining than cinema itself. Recently, I was astonished to observe a seasoned journalist from a well-respected national channel donning a pair of shooting glasses and wielding a firearm, seemingly targeting an unknown object or location, and presenting a nothing short image of that of a movie star! Newsroom debates have become staged farces, where the same handpicked representatives from across party lines engage in ferocious, theatrical battles of words, deceiving the public – only to later switch allegiance to the very parties they had most vehemently criticized.
Overall, the shift from hyper-masculine, misogynistic, and regressive cinema to the theatrical farce of newsroom debates represents not just an artistic decline but also a deeper reflection of the contradictions within modernity. Instead of advancing integral liberation, today’s media landscape risks reducing culture to a spectacle that ‘entertains’ and excites the ‘consumer’, without enlightening, mirroring the deterioration of the very essence of what can be called culture.
(The writer is a post-doctoral research fellow and freelance writer.)