Conclusion

This book commenced an investigation by pronouncing the validity of film-making as a social metaphor-model – a hypothesis that leads in Chapter 9 to the conclusion that SM’s multiple journeys into ‘darkness’ and ‘brightness’ reveal less about Indian and more about Western socio-cultural transformations. SM’s Mumbai presents us with transitions from multiple modernities to multiple realities in Schutzian terms, while also highlighting that these realities are always communicated by different constituencies (Valera and Harré 1996; Dean 2007). Through the multiple controversies connected to SM, different interest groups sought to negotiate their place on a globalised plateau. At all times we deal with ‘negotiation’ over the definition of events: cosmologies involve cultural constructs embedded in shared pasts but always in motion and reconstruction through intercultural contacts. Thus, pangosmiopoiesis or aesthetic globalisation (Urry 1995:145) acts as a metaphor that models the social world (reality) and generates more metaphors about society (good, bad, fair, unfair) – in other words, it is a phenomenological vehicle prompting understandings of ‘Self ’ and ‘Other’ in aesthetically reflective ways. SM proffers a textbook case of multiple articulations of cinematic text and context, in which perceptions of ‘beauty’ as the good life order the social world (kósmos) as a whole (‘pan’). Thus the argument that pangosmiopoiesis attends to surfaces should not lead us to confuse surface with superficiality, artistic formation or articulation of political resonance with artistic formalism. Conceptualisations of form-surface often contribute to understandings of alien cosmological registers in post-colonial zones, but they also guide cultural hybridisations. Although this problématique is not entirely dependent on Boyle’s film, SM as an event instigated mobilities of humans, ideas, travel and art that promoted cultural hybridisations. But when one considers perceptions of hybridity as ‘dirty mixing’ (of races-

as-cultures), hybridisation is not good in and of itself. Any party can reach such a conclusion, as theories and studies of tourist exchange suggest. In instances of cross-cultural contact such as those of SM’s media and tourism mobilities, we have serendipitous interpretations of socio-cultural phenomena, hence agential actions over pre-existing structures – of inequality, corruption or kindness (Archer 2000, 2003). Merton and Barber’s exploration of serendipity

as happy accidental discovery made them question ideas of ill-fortune and unexpected evil, which have great poignancy for those who place value on a predictable, rational universe (Merton and Barber 2004:150). The very presence of institutional organisation and bureaucracy in communal life aims to eliminate ill-fortune, ensuring that our social world is ordered in plausible, beautiful ways (McCreery 1995:160). In a book flagging serendipity as the basis of any justification of different fortunes and just deserts, SM’s virtual and real journeys can only be explored in relation to individual and collective perceptions of good and evil. Collective agency is based on teleological cosmologies resembling SM’s emphasis on what ‘is written’ in the cards – only the end is in fact determined by contingent social action. The telos of the events in Mumbai’s slumscapes is telling: Indian order is to be restored only when a foreign aesthetic import of pangosmiopoiesis (surely a dirty, effeminate version of what an Indian superpower should be), ironically represented by male Westernised artists such as Boyle and Rahman, is no more. SM’s text also communicates with globalisation contexts with a particular

orientation towards material and ideational circumstance in other ways (Bhaskar 1989:52). As is the case with most Western and hybrid Bollywood drama, cinematic heroes individualise collective social action and disseminate dispositif. In SM the woes of the main characters allow the spectator to view Boyle’s critical realist tale of violence as a domestic, Indian issue – an unfortunate turn of events, given that Mumbai has reportedly been target for various terrorist organisations, primarily separatist forces from Pakistan. Over the past few years there have been a series of attacks, including explosions in local trains in July 2006, and the unprecedented attacks of 26 November 2008 that coincided with SM’s imminent release. Gale (2008:9) observes that with global events such as 9/11 and 7/7 we might have reached the end of tourism as we know it. Additional evidence on environmental pollution across the world seconds his thesis, turning Mumbai’s cinematic dystopia of slum abandonment and segregation into an anti-tourist banner. But SM-induced tourism in the heart of Mumbai’s ‘poverty terrorland’ counters this: the film suggests that there is throbbing, mobile life amidst garbage. Exchanging the slow historical spectrum of post-Partition film-making for the new fast mobilities of cinematic celebrity and tourism also ameliorated its critical reception, but only for so long. SM’s lead artists’ cultural roots and situational roles in global digital and

industrial transformation cast them as accomplices of an ‘exploitative capitalist machine’ with little qualification over the specific context of ‘exploitation’. Travelling to India’s slum territories to collect ‘signs’ for art-work could easily be labelled an edu-tourist activity, a personal development portfolio of activities that allow the tourist to treat foreign cultures as ‘objects’ (Holdnak and Holland 1996). Beaufoy never figured in media reporting as a ‘nomad from affluence’ (Cohen 1973) or as an ‘alternative’ volunteer tourist (Wearing 2001) – an observation that suggests more careful evaluation of his travels to Mumbai as cinematic labour and lifestyle travel (Cohen 1996, 2003; S.A. Cohen 2011). Boyle and Coulson’s proactive volunteer activism was nevertheless attacked

for its interference with India’s ‘future’: the very children the nation-state excludes from its developmental horizon and, subsequently, as adolescents and adults labels ‘terrorists’. In SM’s interpretative horizons, young slum actors assumed the ideational role of future social investment in India’s global prestige and domestic heritage, despite their actual exclusion from society. To be nourished by a bunch of foreign artists could only be treated with resentment or contempt. This conflation of family reciprocity with exchange is symbolised in Rumina Ali’s exchange for fame and money. Debates around the rise of a ‘network society’ remind us that people are increasingly socially positioned in accordance with their place in media networks (Van Dijk 1999:78) – hence the discussion on cinematic children as property changing hands to accommodate different interests has real implications. Even critical artistic interventions such as those of SM activists reiterate the relocation of intimacy in the marketplace, flooding the public sphere with private concerns and rituals (Bauman 2003b). The politics of Indian nationalist heritage shed light on the management of

collective self-narration in commercial fields such as that of cinematic tourism – a combined field of media representations and global industrial investment in Indian economy and culture. Here the expression of indignation by radical proponents of the ‘cultural imperialist’ thesis finds surprising replication in defensive official policies of heritage. In a country steeped in rich history but affected by traumatic memories of colonisation, nationalism and forced migrations, yesteryear’s Ghandian urge to safeguard the nation’s inner spiritual realm against invasions of Western technocratic civilité are bound to reassert themselves in periods of tension (Chatterjee 1986, 1993). If one also considers how in media and tourist industries the convergence of economic and socio-cultural interests can be ‘crafted’ to secure interdependencies (Castells 1996:151-68) that reduce risk of failure and manage to ‘silence’ critical voices from without (Garnham 1990:160-2; Tzanelli 2010b:ch.1), then the attack upon SM’s enterprise necessitates re-evaluation. Technologies of governance connected to Indian officialdom may reinforce digital nationalism as a form of ‘soft power’ over diverse minorities (Nye 2004). Soft power finds an update in the ‘Shining India’ campaign, which borrows from post-Nehruvian technologisations of intercultural communication – also one of the aims of SM’s overall project. But the idea of ‘reaching out’ is not specifically Indian, as even the United States recruited Hollywood artists into its ‘soft’ arsenal as specimen of the ‘American way’ (Cronin 2013:111, 124). Bollywood or Bollywood-like representations and their unexpected cultural industrial products (internet slum tourism) can be selectively embroiled into a more official program of ‘brand nationalism’ prioritising Indian spiritual qualities (Volcic and Andrejevic 2011; Irimiás 2012). Here network technopoesis can revert to national technopoesis, reinventing fictional Jamals as the nation’s original tornadóroi for the benefit of the nation-state – a phenomenon no less evident in Nehru’s modernisation model through strategic and selective alliances with ‘the West’ (Parekh 1991). The ensuing dialogical conflict of ideas and practices favours a

sort of violent creation, as it produces for the subaltern something new (Hitchcock 1993; Tzanelli 2008b:72). We need to bear in mind that today the management of human and techno-

logical resources by national and transnational institutions, or tourist and artistic organisations, takes place under post-imperial conditions. New economic realities are defined mostly by de-territorialised power and judicial regimes that assert new orders, norms and ethical ‘truths’. Consequently, the penetration of human psyches ceases to be the job of an identifiable capitalist class or nation-state and becomes attached to bio-political managements of ‘fairness’ and humanitarian righteousness by corporations and post-industrial mergers (Hardt and Negri 2000). In this arrangement, leading artistic labour may operate under corporate management but still contribute to the ‘multitude’ (Hardt and Negri 2004) by producing utopian alternatives to a damaging social system, which then feed back into real social action. As Kumar (1991) has repeatedly suggested, the philosophical project of modernism is fundamentally utopian and recuperative of a social ethos that remains a work in progress even in postindustrial contexts. The technological tools such artistic communities mobilise might have played a key role in securing the new capitalist hegemonies but are now turned ‘into a weapon of liberation from these oppressive forces’ (Miller 2011:156; Yar 2014:34-7). Yet, suchNebengeschäfte (ancillary business) is deemed to replicate the (apparently amoral) logic of new knowledge economies (slum tourism) (Calabrese 2005). It is wilfully forgotten that, in the age of ‘Empire’, any moral reckoning with the subaltern passes through various agendas that cannot be harmonised even within a single nation-state (Lash and Urry 1987). One might argue that by cancelling charity projects one disrupts the healthy

function of public spheres that are based on artistic dialogics (Arendt 1990). It may be wrong to dismiss outright the economic or cultural role of Western celebrity activism or ethical consumerism ‘as models of fund and consciousnessraising that provide charities with such immense possibilities to garner support, and donors the opportunity to participate as members of a global community’ (Davis 2010:114). Just as common tourists, today charitable celebrities are invited to complement conventional gazing with performing (Perkins and Thorns 2001). Not only does this prompt one to examine art-work as a form of ‘moral labour’, it also begs a dispassionate investigation of the link between moral and monetary projects. Let us not forget that ‘human beings produce facts but they do so through collective labour orientated towards both material and ideational objects, which seeks to intervene in and accumulate knowledge of a natural world irreducible to this labour’ (Corrigan, 23 January 2014). Just like SM’s cinematic journeys, its industry’s artistic activism reflects the

‘generic processes’ through which ‘public spheres’ can emerge in imagining, empathising, vocalising and investing identities through narratives (Plummer 2003:81-3). Ateljevic (2008) proposes a rectification of subaltern silencing through a more careful consideration of ‘transmodernity’ as ‘the emerging socio-cultural, economic, political and philosophic shift’ in the cultural and

material development of a pluralised human history (Ghisi in Ateljevic 2008:280). Transmodernity recognises hope in human sociality and promises to replace colonialism’s antiquated world orders, which constantly masquerade cultures in terms of feminised victimhood or macho militarism. Above all, however, a new transmodern condition discards both the theological basis of the clash of civilisations (Huntington 2002) and the resentment of a world split between Jihad and McWorld (Barber 2003), acknowledging vulnerability as part of our shared humanity (Beck 1999, 2005; Dussel 1985, 1995; Cole 2005). Naturally, the realist conundrums of such global articulations – no less constrained by financial prerogatives and impositions (Sassen 2002a) – might contravene imaginative planning (for a better future for Mumbai’s slum-dwellers). Sen’s (1992, 1999) ‘capabilities model’ is put to a test when we are called to consider the ‘fundamental diversity of human beings’ as a universal value: one may account for several instances in our twentieth and twenty-first century global history in which structures of corporate control were generated as interconnected and multiple with the inscription of normality/abnormality, denying child/family/community knowledge and accepting instead the language and knowledge of experts (Silin 1995) – including those involved in regional administration and activism. But controversially, one may ask if the rights of a disenfranchised socio-cultural group should always override those of another residing more privileged geographical and social domains. Here the conception of ‘communicative entitlements’ needs broadening so as to include other forms of democratic participation that exceed ‘fair treatment’ exclusively designed (often by their abusers) for the poor or disadvantaged. Derrida’s phantasmology and Spivak’s ethics of subaltern silence merit

new consideration in such mobile Indian sites, in which the spiritual slow time of heritage and the fast mobilities of slum tourism collude behind a Weltanschauung that transcends divisions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture (Gellner 1983; Herzfeld 2005). Western takes on the ordinariness of culture as an agential force that activates an interface between the Marxist superstructure and individual or communal action may be a utopian model, but it is a useful model (Williams 1958, 1974, 1983 and 1999). And yet, if too defensive, even ‘culture’ can kill, humiliate and exclude – not just slum-children, poor families or ‘developing ethnicities’, but also first-class art. Do we wish to promote a utopian project based on harmful manipulations of ‘merit’ in the name of ‘equal’ progress?