Thomas Crowley talks about Sanjay Rajoura and his style of comedy and interrogates the satire scene in India and abroad. Is it politically incorrect or is it maintaining the status quo?
“Right now, what’s happening in India is that every form of expression is being corrupted by the neoliberal upper-middle class and pseudo intellectuals. They feel it’s their birthright to make films, tell stories, and now do comedy.” So says Sanjay Rajoura, who was born in rural Uttar Pradesh, but spent much of his childhood in New Delhi, before embarking on a career in IT, which took him to Pune, Singapore and the US. He has given all that up to be a stand-up comedian.
His outburst comes towards the end of the documentary I am Offended, which serves as a primer on the history and present state of stand-up comedy in India. And his remark is a breath of fresh air in a film that has an overall tone of self-congratulation, despite the fact that it’s quite candid about Indian stand-up comedy’s flaws (over-reliance on corporate shows, lack of infrastructure) and its overall class composition (leaning towards upper-middle class). One of the comedians says, quite bluntly, that he sees stand-up as an act of resistance, but at the same time, he knows he’s a privileged person with plenty of cultural capital, so the stakes are not that high.
Rajoura has privilege, to be sure (remember that international resume), but his relatively humble background, and his decision to do his sets mostly in Hindi, rather than English, set him apart from the majority of comedians interviewed in I Am Offended. More than this, it is his sense of righteous anger that puts him in a different category, and allows him to function, whether intentionally or not, as the moral anchor of the documentary. (The director himself has said that his favorite part of the film is Rajoura’s railing against corporate excesses.)
The film dwells on the threat of censorship, pushed by right-wing forces, and in that way it is prescient given the recent All India Bakchod controversy. But Rajoura points to a different danger. He does not expand on his comment, but he seems to be questioning the complacency and ease with which a certain section of the upper-middle class has moved into the business of entertainment and literature. The most obvious representation of this phenomenon is someone like Chetan Bhagat, a graduate of both IIT and IIM, who left an investment banking career to write full time. Bhagat is only the most famous IITian-turned-writer; others include Harsh Snehanshu, Parul Mittal, and Anirban Mukherjee.
Rajoura himself fits this image to some degree, though he went to the Birla Institute of Technology, a small step down from IIT. But he is fascinating because he has turned against this world with such venom. He knows the underside of the tech world, and he knows about the part of the country that has been left behind by “India Shining.” He brings this knowledge – and the anger it produces – onto the stage. Rajoura’s blistering critique of a certain class of writers, film-makers and comedians is that they have erased the subversion and the vitality of various genres and replaced it with something anodyne and blandly aspirational.
The question of righteous anger, and its role in comedy, has been on my mind since I watched John Oliver’s withering condemnation of the pharmaceutical industry and its underhanded attempts to win the business of doctors. Oliver is the host of the American news satire show Last Week Tonight. Even more than his news-parody forebears, Jon Steward and Stephen Colbert, Oliver revels in being political. Each week, he gives one political issue the long-form treatment, devoting fifteen to twenty minutes to exploring the issue in ruthlessly satirical fashion. Often, his target is corporate excess – he has lampooned the sugar industry, the student loan industry, and the tobacco industry, among others – but he has also not spared the state, going after America’s drone attacks, it’s stockpiling of nuclear weapons, and its increasing militarization of the police.
His takedown of Big Pharma stuck with me because it came just a couple weeks after Obama’s visit to India. Modi’s pandering to Obama has already been much derided, but jokes about Modi’s expensive suit need to be paired with an analysis of why a deepening alliance with the U.S. is so detrimental to India. One of the reasons is America’s continuing attack on India’s patent regime, especially as it applies to pharmaceutical companies. The same companies that Oliver skewers are the ones pushing to replace cheap, generic drugs in India with their more expensive, branded counterparts.
Of course, this issue has been discussed in India, especially in the alternative media. But it was little mentioned in India’s growing “fake news” media. The whole genre of news satire is relatively new, and its introduction to India is even more recent, but the initial Indian offerings, at least in the English language, have often been less than edifying. Faking News, which is the second most popular English-language news parody site in the world (after The Onion), has little bite to it, making easy, superficial jokes that play on easy stereotypes (e.g. Rahul Gandhi is ineffective, Salman Khan is vapid and violent, politicians are corrupt). Barely Speaking with Arnub, an Arnab Goswami send-up, plays like a mash-up of two American shows: The Colbert Report, which features Stephen Colbert taking on the persona of a conservative blowhard, and Between Two Ferns, Zach Galifianakis’ online talk show, which relies on awkward humor and pointed barbs at guests. But “Arnub” lacks bite, even though he has been able to land interviews with Shah Rukh Khan and Arvind Kejriwal, both of whom, it must be said, were very good sports.
It is this context that makes Sanjay Rajoura so refreshing. But perhaps even more than Rajoura, it is satirical protest that shows the potential of the form in India. Humor has long been a weapon in the activist arsenal, and it has been used extensively to take on the Hindutva brigade. On Valentine’s Day in Delhi, a group celebrated “Shudh Desi Romance: Hindu Mahasabha Style,” descending on the Hindu Mahasabha headquarters to take them up on their threat of marrying off couples who were caught roaming around on this lovers’ holiday. The idea was to perform a satirical mass wedding, one which included inter-caste, inter-religious, same sex and many other marginalised couplings. The Delhi Police promptly detained the happy revelers, but the parodic ceremonies continued in the Parliament Street police station. While online humor is being trumpeted as the next big thing, perhaps the real future of satire is on the streets.
