The popular reception and media construction of Modi has canonized him to be a Messianic figure often betraying the history of communalism as an unimportant anecdote. Who is the real Modi? Is there reality left in the world of images? Soumabrata Chatterjee explores the mythical significance that has come to be associated with the Modi figure …
Recently, a Facebook page carried a post which compared photos of politicians before and after their ascension to power. Despite the clever photoshop wizardry, the post couldn’t obscure the fact that the photos were edited. The photos might be fake but that does not limit their power of signification. Instead, it pointed out a curious paradox at the heart of the issue of representation. One of the photos depicted the before/after transformation of our respected Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi. While it wasn’t true to its original intent of being funny it made me wonder about the curious transformations that the Modi image has gone through in the last decade.
So… who is the real Modi? Is it the Modi before or after he became the Prime Minister? Is it the Modi before the Gujarat riots or after it? Too many questions… not many answers. However, we need to problematise it further. Not solve it by any means. If I can misquote a historian, it’s better to have a “rich ambiguity” rather than a “false clarity”.
In this article I argue that there is no real Modi after all. There is a person, yes. There is no denying that. But there are different interpretations of him floating around in the spaces we inhabit. There is no possible way to take an ahistorical stand and separate the whites from the blacks. What we can do is take a moment and interrogate every one of these images, contextualise them and maybe then we can proceed to trace certain changes over the years. It might be of interest to the reader why I keep referring to Modi as this persona, which is constructed via mass media and not address him as this person who is alive and kicking. This is not supposed to be Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Yes, I know he exists in reality. What I am trying to suggest here is that Modi exists for us through his messages via radio, TV, computer and his personifications (by variant social scientists and historians) in various history books which are themselves contradictory. He does not come to us unmediated.
Jean Baudrillard once claimed that “the cinema and TV are America’s reality.” What he meant by this deliciously crude statement is that the American society often depends on televisual representations for its sense of what ‘reality’ is. Reality is not just what happens immediately to me. It is also by association to who I really am, what are my ideas, and what are my feelings. In a way, we feel Indian by association. India cannot be seen or touched. It is just a geographical space delimited by certain international boundaries. Similarly, the feeling of being an Indian is often not voluntary. When we watch ‘Sarfarosh’, or cheer for India in a cricket match against Pakistan, the feeling of nationalism is often constructed via mass media. It isn’t just about staying in India. Pockets of Indians living in other countries often feel this surge of being a ‘true’ citizen of their native land. It is a feeling of ‘togetherness’ which is ignited and kept alive through everything we read and see. Similarly, whatever we read or see helps us understanding our ‘reality’. Whatever we read or see are thus copies of the ‘real’. While Plato asserted that there are two kinds of copy — a faithful one (which does not misrepresent reality) and a distorted copy (which misrepresents reality),Baudrillard asserts that there is no reality after all. His infamous statement that the “Gulf war did not take place” referred to the idea that the war was mediated in such a manner through the media that we never really witnessed the ‘real’ Gulf war. Moving on, he asserted that in the postmodern, capitalist world there is so much information that the very basis of meaning has ‘imploded’. While we can argue with him regarding the existence of a real world, his views on simulation are paramount to my article.
Basically, he means that we live in a world of simulation which has caused reality and fiction to coalesce, thereby making it impossible to distinguish one from the other. The demarcation between reality and image explodes and we are left with a destruction of meaning. Simulation is the central concept of Baudrillard regarding his conception of history. So there are various stages through which the destruction of meaning has come forth. Firstly, the sacramental order witnessed a sign which was quite faithful to the real. Secondly, there was the ‘counterfeit’ period from renaissance to the industrial revolution where signs distorted reality. Thirdly, ‘production’ which pertained to the industrial age where signs disguise the absence of a basic reality. And fourth, the age of pure simulation where there has been a total breakdown of the relation between sign and reality and thus hyperreal (more than real) … It is where the ‘real’ produced by the model is more believable than the original real.
I am not trying to indicate that there can’t be any outside referent. There can be some knowledge of the real which can provide us the ground for taking politico-theoretical action against the world of images which stifle us. What I am trying to suggest is that there has been a conscious sacralisation of Modi which has resulted in his image of being secular, progressive, true to Indian roots and heritage and ultimately Messianic. The ‘Acche din’ campaigns portrayed Modi as this ‘persona’ who is supposed to rise above partisan politics, take the reins of the country by his hand and lead the people to a utopian Elysium. It is quite curious that references to the Gujarat riots have died down and his position as the Prime Minister has somewhat purged his. He is not the same Modi who was the Chief Minister of Gujarat when it happened. I am not interested in trying to prove his crimes or try to disprove it. I am rather interested in this image which has been carefully constructed by his body of ministers.
To prove that this phenomenon is not just another conspiracy story cooked up in my mind let’s take a look at Shahid Amin’s essay on the canonisation of ‘Mahatma’. In one of his essays, the brilliant historian and cultural theorist traces the ideological development of the Mahatma image. He quotes Nirad C. Chaudhuri to the effect that in India, it is the masses who “make a god of a great man, collectively and unconsciously, and succeed in giving to his memory a permanence which nothing else, neither ideas nor personality, can give.” The sacralisation of Mahatma started happening during the Champaran Satyagraha of 1917 where he was supposed to create a political consciousness among the peasants so that they could stand up against the sahibs. There were elaborate myths regarding the Mahatma in the following years. An official of the U.P. police reported to his superiors in January 1921 as follows: “No one seems to know quite who or what he is, but it is an accepted fact that what he orders must be done. He is a Mahatma or Sadhu, a Pandit, a Brahman who lives in Allahabad, even a deota. One man says that he is a merchant who sells cloth at three annas a yard … It is a curious instance of the power of a name.”
While the nationalists disregarded the fact that the villagers could be political actors in their own right after being called to action through the voice and persona of the Mahatma, Shahid Amin asserts that even the simplest vocal traditions are reoriented by the masses according to their own benefits. It isn’t like the masses were only influenced by the socially elite followers of Gandhi or the virgin power of the Mahatma. It is a process of mutual co-optation. The elite followers of Gandhi were supposed to control the mob fantasy regarding the Mahatma and channelise to prompt social action. But often as it happens, politics is hardly separable from religiosity. Amin writes, “The sight and sound of uncouth peasants invading the train carrying Gandhi, rending the sky with cries of jai and demanding darshan … could be annoying and unnerving.” There was an unabashed idolatry involved regarding the Mahatma which somehow became synonymous with the word Swaraj. It was Gandhi’s Swaraj… However, Amin writes that the “masses did not invent a personage who was not there.” However, Gandhi the real person and Mahatma his persona or image was mostly on contradictory terms. A human assumed the stature of a Mahatma. There were prejudices associated along with him. An instance: “Sikander Sahu of village Mahuawa said on February 15 that he would believe in Mahatmaji when the boiling –pan in his karkhanasplit in two. The boiling pan slit in two in the middle.” Mauni Baba Ramanugraha Das of village Benuatikur blasted Gandhiji and received the divine punishment of his body starting to stink. Such were the prejudices … Even Gandhi’s notions of self-purity prescribed that one should abstain from ganja- smoking, drinking and whoring. That got translated into a ban on meat and fish. So the masses reinterpreted the principles and the Mahatma according to their set of beliefs.
Narendra Modi’s refurnished image has erased the memory of the Gujarat riots. We share in this cultural amnesia. However, we are not mere receptors. The ‘Acche din’ campaign underlines our latent desire of inhabiting a better future. It is not just about constructing a better world for us but somehow this liberatory imagination is also apocalyptic. We have constructed the Mahatma of our generation out of the ashes of Gujarat riots. We have given it a face, a person. Modi is the modern Messiah; he is the bhumiputra(son of the soil) who can quote Star Warsand yet remain close to his roots. He is that mixture of tradition and modernity which we have always desired since colonial times. It wasn’t just a case of his meteoric rise to power as it was our country preparing the grounds of a false secularity over a maimed history of communalism.
Credits for the featured image: REUTERS.
