[Reader-list] A Face Towel in Allahabad, 1984

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear All,

Here is a text I was asked to write for Outlook magazine's, recent  
issue commemorating twenty five years since 1984. It's an interesting  
issue to look at for anyone who like me, came of age in the late 1980s.

best

Shuddha

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A Face Towel in Allahabad, 1984
Shuddhabrata Sengupta
(Published with the title, Actors Studio, in Outlook, Volume XLIX,  
No. 41, October 19, 2009)
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?262208

The late prime minister V.P. Singh’s memoir Manzilon se Zyaada Safar  
has an interesting episode pertaining to Amitabh Bachchan’s political  
baptism in Allahabad in 1984. The episode is not so much an event as  
it is an image. An image, which by its very opacity, by its  
presentation of a mask where we would normally expect to meet a face,  
continues to exercise a certain strange power.
V.P. Singh, who was at that time the president of the UP state  
Congress party, recalls seeing Bachchan (whom he did not know of, he  
says, as he did not watch films) for the first time with his face  
“...covered in a towel”. Ever since I have read this, I can no longer  
see Amitabh Bachchan, not even retrospectively, without his face- 
towel on.

Rajiv Gandhi and his close advisors had decided that fielding  
Bachchan in the Lok Sabha elections for the Allahabad seat was a  
winning proposition. Bachchan was a friend, an Allahabad lad who had  
a cathartic place on the national stage and a decisive influence on  
the hairstyles and angst of millions.

Bachchan came to see V.P. Singh to discuss the impending election,  
together with Arun Nehru, and covered his face with a towel, so as  
not to be recognised. The superstar’s incognito entry into political  
life, shielded by a towel, was the muted beginning of a new phase in  
the relationship between politics and images, which would see more  
masks, less faces. After all, the year was 1984. The peace that  
stunned us all in the aftermath of the November pogrom of Sikhs in  
Delhi and the industrial accident at Bhopal was a war. Truth was a  
lie. And what could a well-known face be if it were not to be a mask.

Whether disguised, or in the spotlight, political actors (not all of  
whom are ‘actor-politicians’) from that moment on in 1984, have been  
masked men and women. The greater their claims to our attention, the  
more crafty the fashioning of their enigmas. Some have masks made of  
electronic gauze that flicker to life on prime-time television when  
they are invoked by the babble of the charlatans also known as  
anchors. Others have statuesque masks of stone and bronze. Some are a  
grimace, others are a smile. Some masks are made up of seemingly rash  
words, others of carefully weighed silences.

It has nowadays become commonplace to call politicians mukhotas or  
masks that cover other more oblique, darker realities. The rancid  
darkness behind masks can bridge the opaque backroom deal with the  
visible spectacle and the performed massacre. The disturbing image of  
a crowd wearing almost life-like Narendra Modi masks invokes a  
dystopic vision of a cloned tyrant (waiting for a science-fiction  
film called the ‘Boys from Gujarat’) whose power lies not in his  
distance from those he rules over, but from the uncanny and intimate  
proximity that is leveraged by his sinister ability to brand the  
faces of the multitude with his own features, and by their desire to  
jettison their own particularities in order to gain his grimace. When  
the electorate dons the Modi mask, it can turn itself into a crowd  
that no longer has the capacity to ‘lose face’ at the disasters meted  
out in its name.

So, what exactly did Amitabh Bachchan, Big B, Big Boss, the erstwhile  
angry young man, a sometime corporation, now a poet of banal blogging  
and a robustly ageing piece of handsomely upholstered furniture in  
every television owner’s living space, contribute to the political  
life of our greasy republic?

What Bachchan brought to Indian politics was not necessarily charisma  
alone (and it isn’t only filmstars that generate charisma in any  
case). He did of course have a headstart in terms of a flawless  
performance of sincerity. A quality that has stood by him at his  
murkiest moments. As a politician, he never quite exhausted the  
finely tuned ‘sincerity quotient’ in his self-presentation, even as  
he orchestrated the careful mix between a performative ‘son of the  
soil’ modesty and a grandiose Bollywood baritone. It was the same  
alloy of intimate ease with the common man or woman and a  
simultaneously aloof hauteur that later marked Bachchan’s avuncular  
presence on television quiz shows. Seeing Bachchan the patriarch  
pump, cajole and console contestants with a teflon smoothness that  
makes even his hairpiece look ragged is to witness what might have  
made Bachchan the political meteor that he once was. Seeing Bachchan  
‘do’ Thackeray in films like Sarkar Raj is to watch him give even the  
darkest of political forces the gossamer shine of his careful blend  
of sincerity and cynicism.

In a recent blog post Bachchan writes, “Politics is a complicated  
world—a world where if you are unable to play the game, you remain a  
novice and a stranger eternally. I admire those who’ve  remained in  
it for long years. I admire the guile with which they steer their  
boats...those who pursue this line do so with utmost dedication,  
passion.”

One could of course read this statement as it is, and take it at face  
value, as an expression of genuine admiration on the part of a man  
who tried, failed and so applauds the successes of others, even while  
he makes a case for his own naive inability to play the game.

Or, one could read it against the grain, and consider it to be a  
report card given by a proud teacher to good students. Acharya  
Amitabh applauding the graduation of the masked princes who now rule  
us, who perform better on TV than they do on the streets, or in their  
offices, or even in the assembly. Bachchan was probably the pioneer  
who bridged the shadows of backroom cronyism with the spotlight of  
increasingly televised public life. Perhaps, like pioneers often are,  
he was occasionally clumsy and awkward while trying out the moves.  
But the deftness and dexterity of his true successors—and they now  
shine in every political party—suggests that what began in Allahabad  
in 1984 is today a full-blown revolution in the highly public  
performance of sincerity. The masks that these new pretenders wear  
empower them to give the right-sounding answers even to the wrong  
questions. They will rake in the billions. Inhein lock kiya jaye?


Shuddhabrata Sengupta
The Sarai Programme at CSDS
Raqs Media Collective
shuddha at sarai.net
www.sarai.net
www.raqsmediacollective.net