In 2005, a television event marked a turning point in Indian public culture
In 2005, a television event marked a turning point in Indian public culture. A news channel claimed to have exposed the Bollywood casting couch in a sting operation, in its grainy, hidden camera footage of actor Shakti Kapoor telling the undercover reporter, “I want to kiss you. I want to make love to you.” Rajat Sharma, the channel’s head, all but licked his chop as he framed it with lurid commentary about Bollywood’s seamy sexual politics.
AAP leader Sandeep Kumar. PIC/AFP
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Is there sexual seaminess in Bollywood? Are leaves green? Did the sting operation expose this? Not really. The facts one could glean from diligent viewing were: a young woman reporter pretending to be a film aspirant pursued Shakti Kapoor for six months for help with getting work. It culminated in the telecast conversation where she kept saying, “will you help me?” Kapoor said he couldn’t really but could try. Meanwhile, did she want to have sex? If yes, great. If not, he needed to go. There is no clear offer of work for sex, nor did Kapoor make any physical overtures to the woman.
There was, though, ambiguous footage and over-heated, commentary about Shakti Kapoor’s “vehshani harkat” (lustful antics).
In other words, the sting was a kind of theatre. It played on people’s memory of Shakti Kapoor’s roles as a rapist-villain and used the reality of him, already a has-been, in no serious position of power to get people roles or wreak retribution. Moreover, it allowed some Bollywood people well-entrenched in the power structures of which the casting couch is a part, to spout morally superior dialogues.
In other words, while seeming to speak truth to power, it did not actually touch the power structures at all. No big producer or A-list personality whose corrupt sexual practices might be an open secret, was affected as a result of this supposed sting. Sex was used to imply sleaze, while glossing over power. Playing on middle-class anxieties, it gave them a false sense of being able to hold power accountable through a sense of moral superiority.
Is it any wonder then that scandal — more implication, less substantiation,vocal outrage, little change — is an increasingly convenient staple of public culture on television and on Twitter? Where individual moral purity and svacchata, rather than justice, ethics and social inequality become the central values discussed?
The discovery of sex tapes featuring AAP MLA Sandeep Kumar in an apparently consensual threesome, and his sacking, plays out the same story. Grandstanding about moral purity of party and party leader, replaces narratives of political accountability. Making a false demon of sex allows you to burn its effigy and then pretend you have walked through fire to prove your purity and hence, superiority.
So, it is too with the supposed scandal of Karan Johar perhaps paying Kamal R Khan to praise his film and trash Ajay Devgn’s. It provides opportunity to make shocked emoji faces about Bollywood corruption and even allows real (KRK) and self-perceived (Devgn) underdogs a feeling of power. But, it leaves untouched the extent to which showbiz and media are in a consensually corrupt bed together, so that publicity masquerades as exclusive news and critics are friends with filmmakers.
Scandal may be the smoke which never grows without fire. But, it can also be the smoke that obscures the fire.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at www.parodevipictures.com
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