HVK Archives: Fringe culture and/or mainstream
Fringe culture and/or mainstream - The Sunday Observer
B N Uniyal
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December 13-19, 1998
Title: Fringe culture and/or mainstream
Author: B N Uniyal
Publication: The Sunday Observer
Date: December 13-19, 1998
What is the issue at stake in this controversy over this lesbo film?
Freedom of expression? No. If it were, they would have felt outraged
when Satanic Verses was banned or when the Godse team was told to fold
up the curtains. Hindu heritage? No. Burning books, torching theatres
and issuing threats is not the Hindu way of dealing with dissent. That
is Islamising Hinduism, a momentarily exciting but an eventually futile
endeavour.
What is the issue at stake, then? At stake is India itself the social,
cultural and political future of India. The future not of a Hindu or a
Muslim India but of India as a whole, that is, the future of all that
India has been through its history and all that it still is. If this
sounds alarmist, it is simply because we have become blind to our
national realities from watching too much television and deaf to the
cries of our people from too much exposure to ear-splitting pop music.
The cries are muted but the rage is fierce. People everywhere are deeply
disturbed by the relentless onslaught of sex, smut, nudity, violence,
filth and foulness being constantly propelled into their bedrooms front
numerous satellite channels. Many may be relishing the salacious scenes
on their TV screens but they are, at the same time, concerned and
anxious about what all this will do to their children. The anger against
this cultural assault is growing and is bound to burst in a torrent
sooner or later.
What is worse is that this cultural onslaught is fast Americanising
Indian society and polity. Few people here have an idea of how rotten
beneath its affluence the American society is, how deep and how
widespread this rot is, or how this rot set in, in the first place.
The rot set in when the American academic Left, finding itself without
any meaningful social and economic causes to champion in the face of the
continuous post-war economic boom. turned itself to fight for the rights
of various fringe cultures.
Overnight, the academics were joined by fashion models. celluloid
celebrities, contra-culture writers and, eventually, by a new crop of
ambitious politicians keen to please them all because they made
newspaper headlines and figured prime time on TV channels.
Then, slowly but steadily, numerous university faculties of philosophy,
social science, films, journalism, and plastic and performing, arts
began churning out a new generation of champions of the rights of
bisexuals, homosexuals, lesbians, transvestites, prostitutes, pederasts,
pornographers, drug-addicts, drug-peddlers, pop art, pop music, pop
science, pop psychology, pop anthropology, and what not.
All in the name of multi-culturism, value-neutralism and
anti-judgementalism. All to create a new democratic, secular society in
the image of America! Today, it is this generation which constitutes the
American power elite, the American establishment. The majority of
Americans feel tormented but helpless against the rule of this minority
elite of fringe culturists.
This is what is now happening in India too. An opulent, hedonist, vocal
and influential minority which derives its ideas and inspiration from
this America is forcing its fringe culture on the mainstream majority in
the name of art. How far that should be allowed to go is the issue.
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