FRONTIER IDENTITY CONFUSION Debaprasad Bandyopadhyay had an oppertunity to attend a seminar in the distant village of Tejgarh in Gujarat. It was organized by Bhasha, a Gujarat- based organization devoted to the language and literature of so- called tribals. There we met a so- called tribal group who speaks Rathova language, a language that shares. the features of probably some variation of Hindi, Marathi and Gujarathi and as expected they are inhabiting in the neighbouring states of Gujarat, Maharastra and Madhyapradesh Dr G_N Davy, whose brain- child is Bhasha, introduced us to the community in a manner that is worth-remembering. Dr Davy asked in Hindi to some young Rathoas, who were, as mejaban ‘host’, at that time receiving us as mehaman ‘guest’, “Are you Rathoa’’? They boldly answered positively, Dr Davy asked them, “are you Gujarati''? After little hesitation they also answered, “'Yes."" The next question was, “Are you Indian’? They were rather hesitant to answer such @ question. Dr Davy gave some hints, “Do you not celebrate, when India wins in cricket”? They then joyfully nodded their heads affirmatively. Dr Davy continued his speech on the different layers of identities and individual role- playing This incident makes me remember the question often asked by Nehru in, public gatherings, ‘Who is your Bharatmata"'? Panditji seldom found the answer from the public except from a dath who identified [: the last October 2000, I Bharatmata with the dharti (soil) Nehru then elaborated the concept of Bharatmata to them. Later on, in the pages of “Discovery of India’, Nehru described the impact of his eleboration in this way, “Bharat mata, Mother India, was essentially these millions of people...., you are in a manner yourselves Bharatmata, and as this idea slowly soaked into their brains, their eyes would light up as if they had made a great discovery.” The concept of Bharatmata, thus is not an a priori concept, but a historical a prioti that is to be indoctrinated persuasively so that that could be soaked into the brains of the sub-altern who themselves do not know the semantics of either Sub- altern or bharatmata Now a days, the concept of Bharat is not totally required to be transmitted in the way of Nehru as cricket has got the iconic status for Indian identity. This is the cricket-nationalism that has already diffused in the Indian market, thanks to the auspicious sponsorship by the multinationals. It is played in the blind lanes sponsored by the multinational cold-drink companies and it is advertised as ‘para cricket” or “gali cricket’, One may easily notice the accommodation of Indian language in these two compound words, And at the end of last Cricket World Cup, dJagmohan Dalmia declared the future goal of International cricket board ; globalization of cricket. Though, it is well known that cricket is played by very few November 18-24, 2001 countries in the world, it’ is keeping pace with the motto of globalization that refers to the economic control the majority by the minority. Cricket is part of the recently released bilingual film, ‘Lagan’ Though the context of the story of Lagan is the late colonial period in India, the making of the film in the context of globalization raised many questions related to Indian nationalism. The village cricket- team of Lagan is a result of careful thinking. The cricket tearm incorporates Muslim, Sikh, (socalled) harijan and handicapped person following the footsteps of Nehruvian India project. There is other side of the story also : the game, which was totally foreign to the villagers, interpreted, appropriated and codified the game according to their “reality’’. They appointed a bowler, who is habituated to drive his cattle by constantly rolling his hand ; the man who was habituated with catching cocks in his poultry, was appointed as bowler, fielder ete. this type of matching of something foreign with something indigenous triggers the birth of a synthetic space, where the rules of dominators are re-interpreted, codfied and approximated not as mere mimicry. “Our” imagi- nation is revealed in (sub) sabotaging the privileged by incorporating our own techniques, that may seem “‘tidiculous’” in the white gaze. What is surprising in the Zagan is the appropriated recurrence of two scenes of Kiss Abhijanana Sakuntalam, Bhuban was trying to rescue deer from the white- hunter just like thé young saints over ownNovember 18-24, 2001 of the old play, who tried to vesist Dusmanta the king hunter of deer in the peaceful ‘tapovana’ (space for Hindu meditation). And then Dusmanta rescued Sakuntala from the wasp-attack, Here Bhuvan and his team-mates rescued Elizabeth from the wasp. Bhuvan is at a time rescuer Dusmanta and not deer-hunter Dusmanta. Bhuvan is the rescuer of the Hindu tapovan called India, where everyone lives happily with the Hindu-Bharativa equation, if not disturbed by the outsiders. (This Hindw- construction of Lagan is a crucial issue). The point is here that “return of the classical’ in the nation statist Bollywood film What is noticeable here is that the national identity is imagined from the perspective of not only *ricket but also depending on the other traditional modules like language, race, religion or ethnicity in connection with print! electronic capitalism. Let us concentrate on the language-issue here. We are told by the pioneers of Indian Soctolinguists that we were least bothered about our language-identities in imaging nationality until Britishers decided fo run the Indian administration in vernaculars from 1837. Indian linguistic nation states are going to be born from then on and we have seen that Vidarbha, Mumbai, Sourastra, Baroda and Gujarat ; Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh are playing state-level Ranji Trophy Cricket Matches. These teams like Vidarbha, Mumbai, Sourstra, Baroda, Hyderabad has nothing to do with much acclaimed geopolitical boundaries of linguistic states but almost all of them bear the legacy of old royal or princely states, FRONTIER the kings of which were cricket- enthusiasts and all the so-called linguistic states in India are always multilingual states as opposed. to Euiro-centric monolingual states. Peculiarly enough, the so-called Sanskrit dramas contained in at least four to five languages, One or two things are to be noted here : (a) there was no communication problem among the characters of the play ; (b) there was, no communication problem to the consumer of the play ; (c) the language-names that indicated place-names, ultimately turned out as namés of sociolects (socially stratified languages) The immediate question arises that on the basis of which modules the demands of nation states are shaped. The answer is not easy as in different times and spaces differeent affliations are formed to give birth to nation states. In Bundelkhand, one man fighting for Bundeli language showed their affiliation with Sanskrit poet Vyasdeva and Hoockey-player Dhaynchand. In the Jalpaiguri district of WB an old propagator of Kamtapuri language showed their affinities with Sanskrit to prove their classical heritage compared to dominant Bangla. All these demands are of course generating in the local intellectual space and not in the sub-altern spaces. Sub-alterns are least bothered about such identities until cricket and mediators can penetrate their inner domain. Reader may notice, in this discourse, the constant swinging from language to the game of cricket. If Wittgenstein is to be believed, language is also a game in a sense that, in the act of speaking, speaker A deploys language as an instrument to converse with the speaker B and vise versa. If the speaker A demands “‘language’” and dominant speaker B does not want to provide it, we have language war instead of language game. The war was introduced by those who also introduced and enumerated linguistic states by erasing fuzziness of ‘our’ boundaries Without making any provision of such language-demand within the purview of Game Theory, | am rather depending on the neologism “language war’ to depict the present proliferation of linguistic-state demands, though I know that war is also a game cither in the sense of Ramanuja’ lila or in the sense of Baudtillard’s simulations as war is also a simulacrum of the game or vise versa. Take for an instance from the report of the Statesman alter the 1999 World Cup match between India and Pakistan “Fans fight on and off the Field’ The Statesman news service reported by connecting it with the then Indo-Pakistan battle at Karail (9 June 1999), ‘For many the cricket match in Manchester ‘was a second battle front against India, after Kashmit where India and Pakistan soldiers have been waging almost daily gun battles Escalating tensions in the disputed Kashmir region made the traditional cricket rivalry between Pakistan and India even more heated’, Mohammad Rafiq. secretary, Pakistan Cricket Board had spoken for the people of Pakistan, “We know this is just a game..;. but for the Pakistani People we feel this game is like a war and our players are our ‘once8 soldiers and they should not let us down.” Quite contrary to this report ‘Alex Balfour, in 8 June 99 Cricinfo, wrote in the heading of his article : “India wins the ‘War? That never was”. Accroding to him, ‘Bored with writing and re- writing the sorry tale of England's exit, certain sections of the British press built this game up as a war by proxy, and those that didn't hoped it might at least produce some fireworks and guarantee them a front page trail... But the non-partisan elements of the crowd far outnumbered the Indian and Pakistani supporters and if they had come to see an explosive encounter they would have left disappointed ‘A few modest rockets notwithstanding, the game was firework free.... (emphasis added) So also John Houlihan reports in the Cricinfo (9 June 1999) “Sound But No Fury at Old Trafford”. He wrote, “Despite a billing which predicted that World War Il would be visited on Manchester, the crowd were certainly partisan but never riotous and one Asian journalist who works on a Northern community magazine described the pre-game hype as “ludicrous” and a tabloid style attempt to whip up hysteria and hatred that has simply never actually existed between English Asian fans.” We quoting these contradictory reports as we have also found such contradictions when we, as a part of our ISI (Kolkata) funded project, went to Maynaguri, Santal Paragana, Uttaranchal, Darjeeling, Bundelkhand and Chattisgarh, Majority of the people of these places did not know their are FRONTIER language war and only certain portion of the local intellectuals or mediators were, like that of British Press, executing and pursuing proxy language war by imposing certain kind of language demand. | am repeating and paraphrasing the discourse of John Houlihan that language war related to nation statist demand has simply never actually existed in the pre-colonial India. The British administration built this game up as a war by introducing the statist paradigm depending on the print capitalist imagination. The plurilingual ethos of the indigenous people and their ignorance about the language-identity were tried to be erased by the mediators. The motto of decentralization, which has now come as a backlash to Globalization, does not provide anything similar to Gandhian “Hind Swaraj” but follows the aspitation of the consumer society and developmental paradigm as taught by the First World manufacturer of consents and in this way these demands are accommodated in the new paradigm of globalization. It is almost like fore-grounding something which is not at all noticeable, Before 1992, we were least bothered about the religious identities of Kapil and Azhar, but in 1993, we had seen the banner in the cricket ground that claimed “Kapil-Azhar are brothers.”” Before the introduction of the linguistic states, who really thought of such things? ‘As expected from the print capitalist imagination, the sound and fury of linguistic states largely depends on the paper-work of parliamentary politics and paper is now substituted by the decoding November 18-24, 2001 flow of, what Deluze and Guttari called as “Electric language” that is devoid of the signifying chains of language. In this situation, sub-altern can speak by maintaining their plurilingualism of selves, however does not wish to participate in the discourse of language war in the paper-space or in the cyberspace of electric language. In this symposium, what bothers us the ontological question of identity. Hritwik Roshan is known from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. But, what's about Rittik Ghatak? He does not have such Indian-market identity. We know Roshan, but who is Ghatak? In the over- determined hybrid space of globalization, how one is able to search one’s identity and be able to ascribe one’s strategic selthood in connection with one’s mother- tongue or any other module are the problematic questions which, we hope, will be, answered here. This symposium is like Ranji Trophy Mathches for national supremacy in cricket, playing within the national arena, If it is even an international test match on the Indian pitches, we would not, it is a matter of regret, have the opportunity to witness modern masters like Sir Don Bradman, Sir Richard Hadley or Chappel Brothers who had never performed on Indian soil. And the Indian test match-player, who. has excelled on Indian soil and does not have the opportunity to perform in overseas test matches, feels ignored. Unelss he is incorporated in the English-cricket self, it is very difficult for him to be recognized, It was the same Old Trafford ground, where Neville Cardas, witnessing Vijay Merchant’s excellent batting, commented, ‘'Merchant is inNovember 18-24, 2001 method the Indian's good European, He would be easily England's opening batsman’ Before commenting like this, Cardas differentiated between Indian and Western type of Cricket-playing = “nearly all of them at sometimes or other enchanted us with a stroke not possible in the rational and prosaic range of occidental science.” Cardas’s enunciation clearly shows. the supposed differences between Oriental and Occidental science according to whiteman’s gaze. This gaze also selects Indian's good European Our National symposium has such constraints of difference — constraints of global as well as reciprocal discourse reception but we can try our best to search our identities, strategic selfhood and crises in our own forum. Lastly, | want to cite an incident described by John Houlihan in his match report fone lone supporter wrapped in an Indian flag and a Pakistan sun hat, summed it (ie., the supposed Indo-Pak cricket-battle) perfectly when he declared, “This was not war, this was a game of cricket”. And so it was and thankfully, a memorable and mainly peaceful one al that. Everything is a game or lila afterall. So, 1 will end my presentation with the Ramlila of Ramgarh. Anuradha Kapur reported in 1978 that Ravana embraced Rama and Rama peacefully accepted that regard in an affectionate manner after the lila, However, after Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri_ Masjid incident, it is observed by Kapur, Bharucha and others that an angry Ram was proselytized in which his gentle image was destroyed. Is it also a part of the game or lila ? 009 T bree Chri pion liber publ inl of h dea Alth