Living in a K world

For the last few days the media has set up camp outside Mumbai’s Lilavati Hospital where Amitabh Bachchan has been recovering from a mi...

For the last few days the media has set up camp outside Mumbai’s Lilavati Hospital where Amitabh Bachchan has been recovering from a minor or major ailment depending on where you get your news. We have seen images of a tense Jaya Bachchan, an anxious Shweta and heard Abhishek’s view that his father should slow down on the work front. For a few days before that we have been hearing all about the weddings in the Khan family. We have been privy to Sanjay and Feroz Khan’s views on their childrens’ nuptials, seen visuals of the grooms, their mothers, sisters, cousins and in-laws and of course we know all about who is related to whom and how.

The same week, we have seen a simmering dispute blow up into a fiery confrontation between two cousins over the leadership of a political party. We know that Uddhav is the son and Raj the nephew of the Shiv Sena leader, Bal Thackeray. We have seen pictures of their wives and have some inkling of how they have influenced their husbands; and we recall a certain controversial sister-in-law who has had a role to play in the evolution of the crisis. Meanwhile Monica Bedi, starlet-moll, has been receiving expressions of support from her father and her brother and a visit from an uncle who once critical has turned sympathetic.

Is more evidence required to prove that families are in vogue? From the Gandhis and the Kapoors, the only two clans that were known all over the country at one time, today we have a whole plethora of names. There are the Bachchans, the Ambanis, the Abdullahs, the Thackerays, the Khans (Salim), the Khans (Feroz/Sanjay), the Roshans, the Gujrals: families that are well known for being families.

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It is an odd phenomenon, demonstrating democratic and anti-democratic tendencies at the same time. It is democratic in the sense that where at one time only royalty and later, perhaps, a few wealthy industrialist families could claim our awe and fascinated attention, today so many more people, from various walks of life jostle for that privilege. It is also democratic in reflecting a more rounded picture of success. At one time success was rewarded as an individual achievement. Spouses, children and parents were not part of the happy picture. Today not only are they perceived as strong contributing factors to individual success but also invited to share the limelight.

The flip side is that the whole business of celebrity worship that elevates a few above the rest is a way of subverting the democratic process. Celebrity families are even more dangerous because they legitimise and even make glamorous the idea of nepotism. When Indira Gandhi anointed Sanjay and later Rajiv, as her successor, there was widespread criticism. Today dynastic succession, in every field, is a fact of life and nobody’s complaining.

But perhaps the more appalling fallout of the rise of the celebrity family is how it gives the world around us the soft focus edges of an Ekta Kapoor serial or a Karan Johar film. Consider the sort of figures and themes that form the basis of the cult of the celebrity family. There is usually a strong, dominating father figure handing over his mantle to a son, a supportive mother, a virile son cast as the hope for the future, devoted daughters-in-law. Sometimes we see brotherly love and traitorous relatives waiting in the wings. We are invited to identify with these people and we do because they are presented to us as archetypes. We are invited to take our cues from them on how to dress and what to eat which we do because we have grown to trust them. We are also invited to be witness to the many personal events that take place in the lives of these families: births, deaths, accidents, weddings, festivals and so on. We cry and laugh with them as if these events are taking place in our own lives.

In effect we treat celebrity families as we do those on our favourite soaps. But the fact is that though the narratives underlying the cult of celebrity families may be universal and enduring, they are also trite and reflect none of the complexity and variety of our modern life. There is no place in this world for stories of divorce, deformity, professional women, intellectual discovery. Only rarely does a contemporary story like a sex change surface as it did in the case of the recent Mafatlal scandal. For the rest it is the cloying sentimentality of the soap that we are surrounded by. We are living in a K world and time will tell what the effects of that can be.