imomus | Scenes from the life of flowers

I've been watching romantic Hindi musicals, retro ones from the 60s and 70s. I've been watching them for their breathtaking floral references -- sometimes it seems like flowers are the main characters -- but also listening to their arrangements, which I find admirable, and would like to learn from.

It's a style given to unison, solos, and turn-taking. Only one thing is foregrounded at any one time, but over the course of the song many elements come to the fore one by one, each with its own texture. A man's voice, a woman's voice, a sitar, a cimbalon, a flute, a string section, a rhythm, a synth. Here's a scene from "Ghar" (1978):

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When you listen to that (it sounds a bit like Ariel Pink, the way some things jump out of the mix "too loud"), you almost feel like you're recording the parts one by one. They aren't mixed down into sludge yet. Everything is distinct and fresh.

Of course, the actors aren't the ones singing. A playback singer -- in this case, Lata Mangeshkar (the female voice) and Kishore Kumar (the male) -- has laid down the song, and the actor only lipsyncs, pirhouetting in a landscape of flowers. I like the deep focus on male-and-female in these clips. Somehow, we never take male-and-female seriously enough in the West. We're embarrassed by it. We skirt around it, trouser it. We'd like everything to be male-and-male. Maybe it's because we trace our culture back to Christianity and ancient Greece. We think we've advanced "past" male-and-female, but it may well be that it's something we've really yet to discover, something still ahead of us.

Even the bit where Vinod Mehra blows cigarette smoke in Rekha's face is sort of cute. She doesn't seem to mind. And the dresses... Anyway, here's another one, it's from "Saathi", a melodrama made in 1968. Here a blind man falls in love with his guide. But the main characters in this clip are flowers, representing sexuality but also the beauty of the world the blind man can't see:

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I love the sinuous hummed melody (so catchy, despite the weird key change!), the rich colours, the surprisingly funky rhythm fills. Here's another, from an unidentified film featuring heaving branches of blossom and ethereal mountain views:

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The actress is dressed, herself, like a white flower. The strings cascade as her lover climbs the slopes to be with her. Later, they're on a boat and there's a moment similar to the cigarette-smoke moment we saw earlier: the man splashes water in her face, and instead of reacting in fury the woman smears it suggestively across her mouth. The play of capitulation and resistance is super-stylized.

Here's a clip set in an orchard heaving with apples:

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The point that human fertility is part of the natural cycle is screamingly obvious, but it's rare to see Western films in which people are treated like fruits and flowers. For some reason, this seems to be a thought more entertainingly entertained in India and Asia. It appears least of all in American and British films, and is particularly absent in our cinema since the 70s. We have become unfertile, or uninterested in fertility, it seems.

Here's a scene from "The Jewel Thief" (1967):

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This is from "Shagird" (1967):

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That's a bit more earthy and comic. There's a parallel made between the girl and a monkey in a tree. The actors hardly even bother to lipsync properly. The emphasis is on the over-emphatic dance moves -- and the flowers, of course.

Let's end with a song in English. This is from "Julia" (1975):

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"My heart is beating, keeps on repeating", sings Laxmi. "My love encloses a flood of roses... Spring is the season that drops the reason of love in our dreams."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

Somehow, we never take male-and-female seriously enough in the West. We're embarrassed by it.

I can see how this line fits into the Momus mythic reading of the West, but where's the evidence for it? Are Western pop songs any less about the male-and-female? Are Western movies any less relentlessly heterosexual? You may have a point about there being less emphasis on fertility. But even there I'm not so sure. There's a whole swathe of celebrity culture that is precisely about that - about marriages, proudly displayed celebrity baby bumps, celebrities shown with their babies and children, celebrities vilified for not being a good mother, etc.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

Do you really not get a sense, watching these clips, that Indian culture celebrates hetero-sensuality more successfully, more emphatically than we do? That there's no connection between the emphasis on fertility you note here and the difference between our birth rates (declining, on the whole) and theirs? Just what would they have to do to make the message clearer?

My feeling is that it's surprising a civilisation based on Plato and St Paul isn't even more anti-flesh and anti-hetero-fertility than it turned out to be. And I'd say that, as a rule of thumb, the more ancient the religion, the more attuned it is to agrarian rhythms -- the lives of plants and flowers, the festivals of sowing and reaping, and the proximity of these things to human fertility cycles.

Indian religions are much more ancient, and therefore much more attuned to these things.

From: (Anonymous)

That there's no connection between the emphasis on fertility you note here and the difference between our birth rates (declining, on the whole) and theirs?

No, not really. Fertility rates are about so many things. At the moment, poorer countries (like India) have higher fertility rates than richer, more capitalistically mature countries - there are no doubt reasons of economic interest at play here. And that trend would be the principal cause of higher fertility rates in India. (Even then, fertility rates can be manipulated by government decree, ie Chinese one-child law, or generous child allowances in France.)

From: (Anonymous)

My feeling is that it's surprising a civilisation based on Plato and St Paul isn't even more anti-flesh and anti-hetero-fertility than it turned out to be. And I'd say that, as a rule of thumb, the more ancient the religion, the more attuned it is to agrarian rhythms -- the lives of plants and flowers, the festivals of sowing and reaping, and the proximity of these things to human fertility cycles.

And yet the land of Shinto has the lowest birth rate in the world! And super-Catholic Ireland has the highest birth rate in Europe! I don't know about this theory, Momus!

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

Yeah, and Luxembourg has the world's highest GNP per capita!

This is where we get when you ask "where's the evidence" for a statement about our culture's embarrassment about hetero-fertility. Where can I find the figures for Gross National Embarrassment? Does the EU keep them on file? How about the State Department?

Basically, you have to live in a culture for most of your life and then get exposed to other cultures and see how they differ. That's the method, and it's inevitably impressionistic.

From: (Anonymous)

So we just have to accept your word for it then? Buck up, Momus, you can do better than that! Of course such things as a culture's embarrassment can't be scientifically quantified, but that doesn't mean you can't muster evidence or examples, otherwise all cultural discussion would come to an end. Is the West really more embarrassed about male/female relations than other cultures? I, for one, am not convinced. We live in a culture saturated in heterosexual imagery.

From: (Anonymous)

Although really, I don't know why I'm bothering to argue with you. Your blog is interesting and there are things on here I've read that have modified my feelings about some things. But I've never seen you budge one iota from any position following an exchange of views in the comments thread.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

It's just that example and counter-example can go on endlessly, and it's tediously empirical, and finally each example can really only speak for itself, and framings (the place where we decide to put the boundary on each example) count for a hell of a lot.

The films I've linked here are my "evidence", and I've added my own impressions, not just of the culture itself, but of what I feel are core differences from the culture I was raised in. I'm not really interested in the one-step-forward-two-back logic which then asks "Ah, but do you think someone raised in Scotland is the same as someone raised in Alabama?" or "Ah, but do you think someone raised in Kerala is the same as someone raised in Calcutta?"

Please think of this entry as poetry -- or poetry about poetry!

From: (Anonymous)

Well, from the exchange above, it was you that tried to link your idea of cultural embarrassment about hetero-fertility to relative fertility rates and that connection doesn't seem to hold true. You could still be on to something with your original idea but that wasn't the way to illustrate it.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

You can only say "that connection doesn't seem to hold true" if you can find an empirical measure of embarrassment, though, surely? Otherwise, I'd be wasting my time trying to "prove" any such thing (the conclusion both of us came to, as you can see).

From:

thomascott.livejournal.com

Super-catholic my arse, we discovered money in the late twentieth century and now we worship property and over-sized forms of vehicular transport.

From: (Anonymous)

Do you really not get a sense, watching these clips, that Indian culture celebrates hetero-sensuality more successfully, more emphatically than we do?

It's hard to generalise about India as it has so many different cultures, languages, religions etc. But I will say that when I spent time in Tamil Nadu there seemed to be a massive disjunct between the kind of hetero-sensual fantasy you see in Bollywood movies and what actually happened in communities, where there wasn't too much emphasis on 'hetero-sensuality' at all - where men and women were restricted to separate domains and didn't interact much, where men and women were both typically virgin on marriage (almost always an arranged marriage), where anything even faintly lascivious was frowned upon and the kind of carry-on you see in Bollywood movies would have led to total ostracisation... I guess these Bollywood pictures are kind of the return of the repressed...

From: (Anonymous)

Speaking of fertility, are you and Hisae planning on having any children yourselves?

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

No, we have rabbits instead.

From: (Anonymous)

'retro ones, from the 60s and 70s'

hello, nathan

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

Nathan Barley? A fine fellow, picked on in the British TV series for not sufficiently sublimating his sexuality.

Take his name, for example. Barley, as in "Barleycorn". An attack on him is an attack on pagan fertility symbols going thousands of years back into British mythology. Morbid, puritan Christian moralism cannot abide "Barleycorn" or the pulsing primitive fertility he represents.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

History of the John Barleycorn song here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn).

From:

count-vronsky.livejournal.com

John Barleycorn must die.

That is the best selection of Indian music I think I have ever heard. One problem with the genre is that there is just gobs of the stuff -- hard to find the signal from the noise sometimes. (I have the same problem with anime)

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

I think I prefer the haunting Analog Baroque stiltedness of the midi file (http://www.contemplator.com/midimusic/jbcorn.mid)!

From:

electricwitch.livejournal.com

But people aren't like flowers and fruits at all.

Unless they made a film where all the humans grow genitals all over their bodies and some species of human are hermaphrodites and bees toss us off while wearing sperm on their bodies.

And then we grew babies inside a tasy film outside our bodies and other animals had to eat the baby-fruits and poop out the babies somewhere else so a human could grow out of it.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

I think you just invented Matthew Barney!

From:

electricwitch.livejournal.com

Not enough bee-based masturbation.

From: (Anonymous)

how come indian chicks can be so pretty from the age of 15-25, but then you never see one that's even remotely attractive over 30?

From:

anglerfish96.livejournal.com

Jhumpa Lahiri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jhumpa_Lahiri) is 39 and renders that hypothesis oh so wrong.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

Actually, she's almost 41!

From:

anglerfish96.livejournal.com

I could never be a first-shift mathematician. :P

From: (Anonymous)

It's nice to see you expressing enthusiasm for filmi, and especially for the pictures from which they derive! I get the impression that when alot of academic types take an interest in this fantastic music, they'd like to forget about the films with which they are integrated.

It's also nice to see you avoiding the slight perjorative "bollywood".
good on you!

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

I hope one of those academic types has written a thesis about the use of zooms in these films! I like how there's suddenly a pull zoom onto the flowers, or the mountains! It's as if the zoom lens is a direct correlative of spiritual longing or -- more formalistically -- a sort of thematic italicization.

From:

ximster.livejournal.com

Thanks from not so much of an Indian music lover for so much pure bliss delivered in one post.

From:

lord-whimsy.livejournal.com

Tipitiwitchet. (http://www.languagehat.com/archives/002268.php)

From:

lord-whimsy.livejournal.com

Skip to 3:00. Lots of stylized antics and human foliage. You can make out how such old Hollywood musicals influenced Bollywood.

From:

pay-option07.livejournal.com

Found a great bog this spring up in Ravenshoe. Those little amphibians are deafening.
Is the chorus dialogue device, of everyone thinking aloud found in any Bollywood creations as well.

From: (Anonymous)

True, although this movie seems to reference Gay Paris, another place with a (gasp)female and male! I just wanted to mention that my cat sat up and watched the clip with the heroine in the white dress at the Himalayas, but she took off for this one. Coincidence? Evidence? Nick will tell us.

From:

lord-whimsy.livejournal.com

Well, it references Gay Hollywood even more, I think.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

I just wanted to mention that my cat sat up and watched the clip with the heroine in the white dress at the Himalayas, but she took off for this one. Coincidence? Evidence? Nick will tell us.

Your cat is "culturally discerning". You may tape a certificate to that effect to her dish.

From:

cap-scaleman.livejournal.com

From:

baronessvontito.livejournal.com

yo check the link. o saathi re, got to be my favorite bollywood track of all time from my favorite bollywood movie (muqaddar ka sikandar). nice post.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=nK95xpLAAGQ

From:

pay-option07.livejournal.com

Musicals are popular but they have the odd gem regular narrative. Cheeni Kum
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqBjoZD58Ls
Unfortunately the editing is unsophisticated.

From:

count-vronsky.livejournal.com

That's what I'm talking about! Good tune:)

From: (Anonymous)

The films probably use worn-out nature metaphors for sex because the repressive moral norms of the country (which also inhibit the use of birth control) prevent any actual sex from occurring. In these films, during RD Burman's great musical reign, there wasn't so much as a french kiss. That doesn't exactly seem like an exaltation of the male-female to me.

From:

desant012.livejournal.com

The positive emphasis on the male-female in Indian cinema is represented in this clip from "Indian Superman II". Notice who Superman has chosen to fight crime with: Spidergirl (apparently invented just for this movie). In the Anglosphere, male-male relationships are emphasised, inherited from the Judeo-Christian/Platonic tradition: see, the buddy cop genre. It would be nice to see one day the West overcoming their masculine/machine bias and embracing the natural rhythms of Gaia (http://www.turner.com/planet/characters/img/planeteers.gif).