[Urbanstudy] Text Posting 2

Wed May 24 14:49:47 IST 2006

Dear all,
  this is SURBHI TIWARI Sarai Student Stipend 2006 Awardee. The title of my research work is 'The Corrupt Son of the Erupting City : Kolkata in Law and Lovely Matters like Relationship.'  Here, to remind you once again, I attempt to thematically explore the dispute on child-parent rights as a conversation mapped by the city and as it exists through reference in a legal case text.

  My current posting deals with the production of images of old age in one form of popular culture(cinema). This posting serves as a preface to my analysis of a legal text,which will be the subject of my next posting. My proposition is how will the law deal with the cultural contradictions, ambiguities that are generated by the readings of these movies.
  Looking forward to comments and suggestions,
  Thanking you,
  Surbhi.
  ________________________________________________________
                     Cultural Ageing:  An (Anti)preface to a Petition 

  Last time I left you with the promise to return with a study of the process of cultural imaging of old age/people as manufactured in the urban space of the city. I find it important, in the scope of my project, because conversation is the creator of this normative subject ( the aged) as much as this subject is the determining factor of a particular piece of dialogue and an infinite number of contexts and also -ala Foucault-in the process gets determined or constituted. Through the interplay of these two subject positions ( where the object also assumes an agency or subjectivity and is subject in relation to something or somebody), how the third one gets defined (the city), is my primary enquiry. George H. Mead sums this quite beautifully when he says that the display of social symbols such as gestures, language and role playing are crucial in the process of producing identities. But before one delves deep into a theoretical analysis, lets look at some of the images we
 have had of old age and anticipate their structures as formations when considered in relation to the city. 

  I begin with, 36, Chowringhee Lane, a film by Aparna Sen; the protogprotagonist Anglo Indian young-old woman who is a school teacher. Certain key facets of this character:

   She stays alone in her small home.   
   Constant companion - her brother Eddie who stays in an old age home, in the same city, Calcutta, and her cat.   
   Niece and nephew who were close to her have migrated to Canada, misses her niece. However, resists the nieces offer to come and stay with her family because afraid she will not be able to adjust to a new milieu (or knows that once there, she will not be needed, the offer is just an offer.)   
   Spinster, the fiancé died in the war.   
   Unhappy with her work due to the new changes brought about in the school.   
   Desires a little company, preferably of younger people.   
   The young companions arrive and departs at the opportune moment; loneliness returns.

  If we analyze the collection of these images we notice the following value-images: loneliness, lack of  proper or desired companionship, loss of loved ones, fear of being unwanted. Now, if we pause for a minute and try to question the validity of these images what do we encounter? These images do not go against the popular notion of old age as experienced in the modern urban spaces. The presence of old age homes, old people on the verge of retirement or trying to grapple with changes are stark realities of the city. And the naturalness with which they are accepted by city dwellers can be quite threatening (only?) for the aged population. Thus what we encounter is that an internalized normal image is potentially threatening. Which means that the production of an image and the reception of this image (can) belong to different sites. Though stereotypes are taken as simple images but our analysis makes us notice that neither the production or the consumption of an image is
 simple- it is a multidimensional complex structure.

    However, all this about a seemingly natural potrayal of old age but what happens when a not so natural characterization is meted out of old age. For this we will have to move to our second story.

  This second story is from,  Ek  Mutho Chabi (A Fistful of Tales), a movie which is a collection of six short stories. All these stories have the city (Kolkata) as their back ground and the protagonists are respectively from different economic groups, age groups and sex. And consequently it is a tale of their different hopes and failures. Old individuals feature in three out of the six stories; in two they have principal roles to play.

   The first story is named  Birthday Sens Toys Pvt Ltd, directed by Arghyakamal Mitra. I chose this story because, as I said before, for me it represents a different/un-popular portrayal of an old man. This old man is a toy tycoon, widowed, and handicap. He is chiefly shown as playing with his remote controlled toy cars while sitting in the wheel chair and viewed as a pitiful being due to his so many shortcomings. However he has one more shortcoming which will change all opinions. Every year on his birthday he wants a special gift and the task of getting this gift lies on the shoulder of one of his employee. The gift consists of arranging a couple who would be paid to copulate and allow a video recording of the same. And this video recorded movie is his gift, a gift which he will use till his next birthday.

  Well the story is smart in as much as it first utilizes the first set of images of old age- handicap(helplessness), lonely (dependent on others). However this man is a richie rich and how through his financial power and authority he succeeds in getting things which one would suppose he had no need of or ,well, no desire of and in the process wreck other peoples life. Here is a potentially threatening old man who simply can not be ignored and neither is his presence inconsequential. He has an agency, an agency produced through his consumption and manipulating and using young people.

  I will use another story from the same series to show how murder gets naturalized in the case of old people. The story named, Tapan Babu(director Indranil Roychowdhury) shows a failed doctor who survives solely due to the patronage received from a old city woman. He visits this really old and lonely woman regularly in the evening and after which he spends time with her maid, who is a beautiful tribal woman. One day the old lady asks him to bring out a box from her cupboard, the box consists a old diamond set. The doctor gets greedy and hatches a plan by which he replaces the original with a look alike and also murders the old woman. After her death, which is proved natural, the old ladys lawyer summons the doctor and tells him that in her Will the lady left the diamond set for him. The doctor looks as if he is hit by a lightening.

  The story bears similarity with our first example (36, Chowringhee Lane), here too we have a old lonely woman, whose children have moved away. She too enjoys the company of a young  man (the young doctor, for whom she dresses up as well!) which again turns fatal to the extent of death (like 36 Chow
 where the old lady dies a emotional death). But the real trick where the image becomes differentiated or split from within is when it is seen that she is killed through an overdose of the usual medication she takes. That which could have generated a legal controversy suffers a setback since death in old age has its projection far more anticipated than a young woman dying. The deatheven a murder is thus normalized through the recognition of the time course of an individual. Death in this case is seen as part of the life course, no suspicion is cast. Law is thus nearly helpless in such a situation. Only when we wanted law to deliver, deliver to the vulnerable old (wo) men, to
 take a skeptical look at the life-course; de-naturalise death on account of old age it does just the contrary.

   So, we have arrived at law finally looking towards the ageing, drifting (wo)man.  It is helpless, we have found, in the face of the cultural images of the body which are different at the sites of production and reception.

    But how can we aim at reconciling the two?

  In Mahanagar, director Satyajit Ray, where the protagonists are a young middle class married couple and the city. The narrative of the old people is had through the presence of the father and mother of the young man. The father is a retired school teacher who loves doing crosswords and participates in newspaper crossword competition. Consequently suffers from bad eyesight and when asks the son for a pair of glasses the son nags about it to his wife because it is all due to trying to solve the crosswords and thus a  waste. The son Subrata is a bank accountant who finds it difficult to make both the ends meet. At a hint from him, which she first resents, wife Arati agrees to take a job. The father-in-law is shocked, to say the least. He resents the idea of woman going out to work, and represents an obstacle in the young couples path. Nevertheless the bahu takes the job, the father stops talking to the son.

  There is another scene where the crisis and the relationship between the son and father (parent and child) is quite well crafted. When the old man asks his wife for money the old woman refuses him, she argues that resources are very little and how hard their son is working, they should not become a burden. What follows is a complex humane soliloquy by the old man. Where he asks, does not the son have some duty towards them, and though he feels sorry for the son he envies him too.  Furthermore, in one of the last scenes the old man falls from a staircase, and while the bahu nurses him, he confesses that this is the karma of his bad deeds, as he went around bad mouthing his son for not looking after him, even though that was not really the case.

  We have here the complaint of negligence as well as the self negation of the same. How does a legal case deal with this contradictoriness? How to establish the truth of contradictory assertions made by the complainant- father and the defending son? Weve reached full circle and established a connection with the first posting where such questions were posed. The cultural value-images of old age, warmed by the presence of the city, simply does not aid the law in getting one correct answer through a simple image. 

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