By Sangeeth Sebastian
A thriving democracy and a nuclear deal (which many still
struggle to figure out what it actually means) are probably not the only things
that connect India and the U.S.
The country perhaps is also on the cusp of an anti-authoritarian and
taboo-busting cultural wave that characterised American society in the early
1960s known as the counterculture era.
The recent conservative outrage over comedy collective AIB’s
(All India Backchod, a portmanteau name which loosely translates as senseless fucker)
stage show in Mumbai is eerily similar to the kind of hostile backlash some of
America’s avant-garde stand-up comedians like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin faced
in the sixties for daring the society’s uptight attitude towards sex and
language. Regarded as the pioneers of “insult comedy” a genre which the
comedians of AIB too specialises in, both Bruce and his disciple Carlin, had
frequent run-ins with the law due to their potty-mouthed satire and gestures
that took aim at American society’s hypocrisy and hang-ups about sex, morality
and religion.
In fact, Bruce was busted for his private routines so
frequently that he came to be known as the “arrest-prone” comedian. All his
arrests were on charges of using obscene words and indecent material during his
shows.
Bruce was first arrested for saying “cocksucker” on stage
(Ranveer Singh beware) at a Jazz workshop in San Francisco in the early
sixties, though subsequently acquitted, he ran into trouble again a number of
times, finally receiving a conviction for his word crimes in New York in 1964.
Like the right-wing Brahman Ekta Sanstha which took offence at the AIB show and
lodged an official complaint against the entire performers including Bollywood
stars Singh, Karan Johar and Arjun Kapoor, the right-wing protest against Bruce
& Co in the U.S.
was led by the Roman Catholic Church.
In Mumbai too the Catholic groups swung into action with
some of its members filing official complaints against the AIB show after
finding, rather hypocritically, certain jokes pertaining to molester priests more
offensive than the acts of Joseph Jeyapaul, a fugitive Catholic priest, currently cooling his heels in Tihar jail and
battling extradition to stand trial in the U.S. for allegedly molesting a child.
The way some of AIB’s performers got blacklisted by restaurants
and clubs soon after the controversy was also similar to how some American night
clubs stopped booking Bruce for future gigs due to fear of reprisals.
But what sets apart American countercultural icons from
their Indian imitators, at least overtly, is their response towards authoritarian and right-wing bullying. Despite mounting
legal and financial woes, Bruce remained defiant till his end. He showed the
courage to stand by his convictions when the envelope pushed back. Being a
comedy collective and living in an interconnected age of social media, it would
have been easier for the organisers of AIB to stay defiant and fight for the
freedom of expression like the way Bruce did.
The fact that people who liked AIB’s video page outnumbered
those who disliked it by ten times to one indicated the kind of popularity the
show enjoyed among its supporters. However, by promptly deleting the videos
instead of leveraging the phenomenal interest it generated among its eight
million-odd viewers, the organisers of AIB has lost a golden opportunity to
advance the cause of freedom of expression in the country further.
