Author: Aravindan Neelakandan
Publication: Swarajyamag.com
Date: January 9, 2016
URL:   http://swarajyamag.com/culture/how-the-cultural-illiteracy-of-old-media-hurts-india-jallikattu-a-case-in-point

India has been paying a huge price for the continuing cultural illiteracy in the old power centers of Indian media and academia. Jallikattu is just a recent example.

When celebrity editors of old media tweeted that allowing Jallikattu means allowing ritual torture and slaying of the bulls, they revealed more than their ignorance of Southern cultural practices. They showed how the barons of old media viewed Indian culture through the lens of Western categories. The slaying of bulls is of course from Spanish bull fights. Ritual torture is a stereotyped component of almost all colonial narratives when it comes to Asiatic rituals. For many who are culturally, illiterate Indians either worship or torture animals and Jallikattu is a ritualized semi-civilized form of Spanish bull-fight!

This is a symptom of a malaise that runs deep.

Indian intellectuals and media have always relied on western categories and trends in western thinking to judge Indian phenomena. Mind you, they judge – hardly any attempt is made to understand most local phenomena.

https://twitter.com/ShekharGupta/status/685357689312919553

Within the academia if the West comes out with structuralism Indian universities will also churn out PhDs with structuralist analysis of Indian society, its myths, religion, and literature. When the West came up with post-modernism, many here went berserk with the post-modernist deconstruction of Indian literature and society. Thus most (but not all) academics and petty intellectuals who know Derrida and apply him in Indian context remain blissfully ignorant of their own tradition of Bhartrhari’s Sphota theory of language.

The old and as yet dominant Indian media follows in the footsteps of the Indian academia. Instead of relying on the ‘lived in’ Indic-experiences of their own childhood and that of fellow-Indians, they choose to shunt themselves between the ivory towers and power corridors of Lutyens’ Delhi. They open their eyes only for the West and pass judgement on their people. This gives immense power for the Western academia, media houses and political think-tanks over the discourse that takes shape in India.

It is not an accident that Jeffrey Kripal who employs a holistic Jungian framework to study the alleged paranormal experiences of Mark Twain employs an outdated, reductionist Freudian framework to study Sri Ramakrishna Paramahansa. Perhaps he is sure that neither Indian academia nor media shall have the ability to question him!

Initially such control over the academia and media was applied by the Soviet Union and then, ironically after the demise of USSR in 1991, the center of gravity shifted to the US. A strange combination of India’s Soviet groomed Marxist scholarship entered into a stranger alliance with the Western Indologists. This is in a way ideologically understandable. The roots of today’s Indology lie in colonialism.

The study of the past controls the present and can affect, to a large extent, the future. The idea of India as retarded Aryans, finds expression in the claims of culturally advanced Indians suffering in alienation and loneliness among the non-understanding Indian masses. Starting from Nehru to present day Marxist old media barons we find them wearing this jacket of alienation from their own people. They are the brown-skinned sahibs who carry on their heads the burden of white man, passed on to them at that famed stroke of midnight hour when India redeemed its pledge.

Since then we have been trained to discover India through Western frameworks and models, but we are divorced from the experience of India that is within each one of us and permeates our entire existence. The old media establishment can thus technically pass for cognitive dissonance filled schizophrenics. For them, Jallikattu becomes ‘ritual torture’, because many of the cultural and academic elite, who have never seen a Jallikattu for themselves, deem it so. It does not matter that Jallikattu involves no torture. It does not matter that Jallikattu bulls are part of the ecological web that sustains livestock diversity.
 
Meanwhile, it is ironical that the RSS ‘knicker-wallahs’ whom the SLOBs (secular-liberal outrage brigade) and the old media love to hate-brand as ‘Hindi-chauvinists’ were the ones who empathized with Tamils when Jallikattu was banned. It appears they are more pluralist and more post-modern than all those pontificating faces of old media celebrities.