To see or not to see

Education can be a training in how to see the world in all its complicatedness. But it can also be a training in how not to see

I love a double meaning. Like a fortune cookie, it contains within, a truth about power. Take the word ‘oversight’. It can mean mistake—something overlooked. Or more pedantically, the business of overseeing something. The two meanings tangoed hard last week when the Oversight Committee of Delhi University decided to remove Mahashweta Devi’s “Draupadi” (about the custodial gang rape of a Santhali woman accused of being a Naxalite) as well as books by the Dalit writers Bama and Sukirtharani.

 When questioned about this clear anti-Bahujan bias, the OC Chairperson MK Pandit said, “I don’t believe in casteism. I don’t look at Indians as belonging to different castes.” As Shakespeare almost said, to see or not to see caste, that is the question. What kind of privilege does it take to imagine that the world will conform to your vision of it—yaniki what you see is what we get? Could there be an answer in those dropped texts, about reality as seen by un-privileged people? To see the world as per your beliefs, you have to erase inconvenient realities from sight—and avoid caste census of course. As Abhishek Annica’s (follow on Instagram) poem Census goes: I do not want to live/ on the margins all the time/ the men who draw maps/know how to use an eraser.

Education can be a training in how to see the world in all its complicatedness. But it can also be a training in how not to see.

So, no surprise that Rolling Stone India magazine’s cover about Tamil ‘crossover’ musicians featured Dhee (who is Brahmin) and Shan Vincent Paul on the heels of the hits Enjoy Enjaami and Neeye Oli, while casually leaving out rapper Arivu (who is Bahujan), who is writer and performer on the songs. But yes, shock, because as filmmaker Rajesh Rajamani wrote in a column, Enjoy Enjaami’s “soul and depth without doubt comes from Arivu’s presence in it”, drawing on the story of his grandmother’s journey from Sri Lanka as plantation labour, as well as the Bahujan musical tradition of oppari.

Rolling Stone scrambled to put Arivu on its ‘digital cover’ (when I grow up I want a job in PR and Legal also known as Luxury and Bullshit). But read the article and you can see that it fails to integrate him assertively alongside his musical companions, emphasising his politics as if they are somehow apart from rather than a part of art. 

And what counts as crossover? Is it only crossing over into the West? Are there not infinite, exciting border crossings waiting to happen within? Of Dhee towards Arivu, of Arivu towards a different audience? When we privilege stories of only one type of crossing, which borders do we choose not to see? I was reminded of an earlier cover: “Ranveer’s Hip-Hop Dream” featuring a heavily-styled Ranveer Singh, while actual hip-hoppers stood behind him, looking regular, monochromatic, named in small print, as if the dream he saw is more real than the reality they made, which therefore remains marginalised.

When I studied English Literature at Delhi University, the syllabus was steeped in the colonial past. I am grateful to my teachers, who taught me to see its limitations, so that it would not limit how I saw the world. It’s time those who record the culture, learned to see past the syllabus, no?

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com

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