Kaadalan and the Politics of Resignification 10. See the articles on Ray by Geeta Kapur, 'Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: The Example of Satyajit Ra/ (pp. 17-49), andAshish Rajadhyaksha, Satyajit Ray, Ray's Films, and Ray-movie' (pp. 7-16), in Journal of Arts and Ideas, Nos. 23-24, January 1993. 11. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Indiana Univ. Press, ^ Bloomington, 1986, p. 170. 12. The 'folk' emerges in nationalist modernism, however, processed through an upper caste, urban aesthetic. 13. See Metz, "The Impersonal Enunciation'. 14. See Tejaswini Niranjana, 'Cinema, Femininity and the Economy of Consumption', Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XXVI, No. 43,1991. 15. In this scene, Vasant, who is part of a delegation that has gone to invite the Governor to participate in a college-day function, is wearing dress trousers and shirt, and a tie. 16. Taking issue with our use of the Mandal interpretive frame, Venkatesh Chakravarthy argues that since Shankar is the director of Gentleman, which preceded Kaadalan and is an explicitly anti-Mandal film, there is not much difference between the ideological horizons of Mani Ratnam's films and Shankar's. We hope that our analysis of the politics of resignification in Kaadalan has been able to make a case for this difference. To read the film solely in terms of the auteur's intention and ideological predispositions may severely limit our understanding of what we have called the 'effects' or 'work' of Kaadalan. 17. See Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, 'Empire, Nation and Literary Text', in Tejaswini Niranjana, P. Sudhir and Vivek Dhareshwar (eds.). Interrogating Modernity: Culture and Colonialism in India, Seagull Books, Calcutta, 1993. Also the unpublished research of Srividya Natarajan, Department of English, University of Hyderabad. 18. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 219. The question of politicizing disiden-tification, raised so sharply by Judith Butler, is an important one in contemporary India. The dominant assumption is that political mobilization requires identification with a political signifier. That may well be so. We need to problematize this requirement, and not only in the case where disidentification has set in. Take, for example, the recent 'Addressing Gandhi' exhibition organized by SAHMAT to commemorate Gandhi's birth anniversary. The intent obviously was to mobilize secular forces under the political signifier 'Gandhi: the father of the nation'. The address, paintings, drawings etc., on a postcard by artists, typically carried a message of shame and guilt (we are not worthy of you); of betrayal (we have betrayed your heritage); of helplessness (if only you were here); nostalgia for history (yours was the time), dearly the address to the father had the function of shoring up the name of the father by repentant and helpless children. A politics of piety, in short. In this attempt to remobilize a political signifier, to seek identification with it, to rearticulate it as law, there were not many critical engagements with what this political signifier means today. There certainly was no attempt to comment on the disidentification expressed for example by the Bahujan Samaj Party vis-a-vis this political signifier. The point of our questioning is not to say that we need to identify with the BSP in order to understand their disidentification with Gandhi, but to ask: what is the nature of this politics of piety which is unwilling to understand and interrogate the attempt by the BSP to and reposition and resignify 'Gandhi'? We have been saying that an intense resignification is underway in our politics and culture. The BSP is clearly engaged in such a politics of resignification. Apart from their attempt to distantiate 'Gandhi', they recently attempted to mobilize 'Periyar' in Uttar Pradesh. Whether we wish to approve of this or not or identify with it or not, it is not difficult to recognize the audacity and creativity of an act that tries to resignify 'Periyar' (anti-Gandhi, anti-brahmin, even anti-Hindi, self-respector) in the political milieu of Uttar Pradesh. A cultural politics, such as 'Addressing Gandhi', that ignores this in favour of a politics of piety, that refuses to engage with this process of resignification, clearly positions itself in a certain way, as the inheritor of a certain strand of 'tradition' as well as politics. There is without doubt a larger political allegory here, which we hope to explore elsewhere. Journal of Arts & Ideas