An alumnus of IIT Kanpur (2003), Prof. Akshaya Kumar is an Assistant Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT Indore. He did his Ph.D. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Glasgow, UK. His research Interests involve Bhojpuri cinema and the nuances of Media Studies. From being a Materials and Metallurgical Engineering undergraduate at IITK to being a researcher in the field of Bhojpuri Cinema, we take a look at his scholarly journey and his transition to Humanities in the article.
1.What was that turning point during your engineering degree that motivated you to pursue research in films as a full time career?
I entered IIT Kanpur just like most of the undergraduates who crack JEE, after years of struggle with themselves and with expectations around them. Then, you enter a new system, expect great things from a great institution, and meet people from very different backgrounds. In that sense, my journey was very similar to anyone else.
However, shortly afterwards, you begin to see disappointments emerge. At least I did. It takes you a while to realize that you are not the only one. It takes more than two years to realize that many of us are in the same boat. The fact that you cannot cope, it is not giving you the kind of pleasure that education has given you all throughout your life, and it’s not what you thought it would be – these are all the emotions you struggle with privately. They are the ones that you accumulate and work with for a long time while behaving as if everything is perfectly fine.
I was in the same boat. After a while, you realize a majority of us are in this boat. We are disappointed not getting what we came here for and so on. Maybe we need to find a different route and work something out eventually.
To put it simplistically, it becomes a journey of two halves. The first half is this reconciliation and realization, going from a personal disappointment to building public solidarity around it. Also, overcoming the fact that others think you are not good enough to be here. Over a period of time, the metric of peer evaluation expand, and your peers learn to respect you for attributes outside the common perception. It does take a while for hard-wired and competitive batchmates to appreciate you outside your academic performance. Then in the following half, things begin to take a different shape.
I isolated myself towards the second half of the third year because I was really in the thick of things. You guys are perhaps unaware of Galaxy and how politically intense IIT Kanpur used to be in terms of student activity. I was deeply involved in all those things. While disappointment in academics was taking shape, it’s not that one was sulking and sitting in a corner. The rejects of the system eventually get together to realize that they are in unquestionable majority, and there is a resounding legitimacy to their collective disappointments. Of course, you are also in the thick of various activities, you are enjoying it, but at the same time, you are thinking about what a different future could look like. In the second half of my stay there, I began to prefer more solitude, and worked on aspects of my personality that needed refinement. That’s when films crept into my system, and interesting ideas began to ferment.
2. What was your journey of film exploration and appreciation like? Did you first start appreciating films from an academic perspective through courses or via some club you had joined, like films or dramatics club, that gave you a bend in your trajectory?
I think it was called SFS back then. It was a Student Film Society that I was associated with from the first year itself. But I didn’t come from a background where I had any exposure to international cinema. I still remember watching Godfather for the first time in the auditorium and wondering what the hell it was all about! If you don’t have a background in appreciating or understanding cinema, it is not common sense, and it takes a while to appreciate it.
I think the real breakthrough happened with the Internet. I joined in ’99. It’s the year the Internet really broke through in India. Around 2001, the bandwidth we had in IIT Kanpur was probably quite exceptional in the whole country. And films weren’t my singular pursuit. I remember my seniors who had built a collection and hosted exciting FTP servers. Communities were built around shades of film appreciation. In the beginning, of course, it is more about “Oh, this guy really likes this film,” so let me catch up; but when I watched that film, I mostly didn’t understand what was going on. There are some such films that you begin with. You watch a movie, and you say no, this simply didn’t click with me, so you go on the Internet and try to read about it. It doesn’t begin academically, but when you take a deeper interest in something. Mostly, the first few films don’t lead to a major breakthrough, one must ease into the process. Still, maybe with one of those films, it clicks when you read about it! You can suddenly see what you couldn’t see over those two and a half or three hours. You suddenly view it in a different light, and that’s magnificent – you wake up to the power of cinema.
I think it began just like that. The SFS film screenings were very not helpful to me. What turned things around was more of a private activity, where you sit in front of a desktop and watch films non-stop for long hours, and some of those films seem magical, and then you discuss them with your friends. The academic side of the interest comes from very private motivations. I don’t think we had a community around discussing and appreciating films. It was just the fact that there was so much material available to you through the Internet that you could learn; also including petty stuff, such as downloading subtitles. We didn’t speak English very fluently, so most of us didn’t understand Hollywood films easily. Subtitles were a big deal, once I found them! These were things we never even knew had existed. By now, I think it’s all elementary Internet awareness. Back then, it took me an entire day to figure out the best video player to run subtitles with the film, adjust the time-lag in subtitles and change font-colors etc. A lot of these things were learned privately. These may be petty issues, but they made the route to international cinema accessible.
3. Alumni across various fields boast of the impact that the education at IITK had on their professional lives, which helped them grow and succeed eventually. What role, if any, has IITK’s technical education played in shaping your understanding of humanities and your research career so far?
I would be lying if I said that a lot of my technical or otherwise learning came from the Academic Area. I think most of it came from outside the academic area. I think that becomes obvious to you as an IITK student in the first and a half years. It does however make a difference as to which department in IITK you went to at what point in time. Remember, we are talking about ’99, the time of the IT boom. So anyone from the Electrical or CSE would have a totally different experience. They would learn technical skills that would be instantly useful in their lives, or at least their careers.
For the remaining departments, there was a sense of doom on the core learning aspects, to a great extent. There was a feeling that we were doing something incommensurate with the times – perhaps even irrelevant. My department was Materials and Metallurgical Engineering. A particular aspect of that core learning was relevant to steel-making. Still, one struggled to find much excitement about the relevance of steel-making, the industry, and where one could fit in there. In that sense, we all felt that we were doing something that was not so desirable, and this added to the alienation. So, hardcore technical education isn’t something I took much interest in. Neither did most of my batchmates, as far as I remember.
Of course, a huge proportion of the learning came from outside the arena of technical education. The thing that affected me the most was that some batchmate you met in the first year, who may have seemed rather ordinary, really turned a corner around the third year. People had grown so much as individuals. Exceptional talent exists on IIT campuses, which was especially on display in Galaxy, where people did miracles. Sometimes just witnessing those miracles felt special. Realizing what and how much you can do, and how little your struggles in the academic area matter was very significant. Towards the end of the program, you see people going places, so some of that magnificent talent one witnessed was realized straightaway. But in my case, just finding my feet took six years.
I passed out in 2003, and my Humanities journey began in 2009. So there was a long gap during which I worked at a steel plant and then in the Software industry; also, I traveled a lot across the country. The shift to Humanities was not something I had in any corner of my mind when I left IITK.
4. Being from a technical background, did you ever feel overwhelmed when you started out to occupy the same stage as those already having a BA and MA degree, which is a strong foundation in the field of humanities?
In 2009, I joined JNU for a Master’s in Arts and Aesthetics. Most of my batchmates there and the students one met across Delhi had done at least three years of a BA program. It’s not like you won’t feel the weight of those extra years. People had read so many core texts, they knew how to build and present an argument, and they knew how to read copious amounts of text. As engineering students, we are used to solving problems. We are not used to reading and extracting value from reading texts. That itself takes time. Although I had built a reading habit over the interim six years, the gap in core habits and skills still hit me hard. It was overwhelming, and I was as troubled as anyone else would be. Then it’s another matter how you work things out – whether you read more, or concentrate on some key focus areas. You know your disadvantages, so you need to learn how quickly you can extract value while competing with those around you. Of course, I had been through the rigors of the education system, as anyone joining the IITs would. So I was aware that I had the skills and ability to make sense of ideas, as long as I participated in the grind.
5. Your thesis at Glasgow university explored the explosive growth of Bhojpuri cinema alongside the vernacularisation of north Indian media. We would love to understand the development of your fascination towards Bhojpuri cinema and the thought that went behind choosing this topic for your thesis.
I have received many interesting comments on my thesis-work through the research career. But one of the first things you realize after entering academia is that the “Quality of your topic does not determine the quality of your research.” You can write a brilliant thesis on sleaze, about pornography, about anything, and just because the thesis is about sleaze, it does not become a bad thesis. To deliver a good thesis, you need to do solid research work, which is fundamentally about analytical insights, not merely describing the material. Even though this is a plain fact, it takes time to reconcile with it. I began my doctoral research in 2012, but my interest in the subject began during my Masters at JNU. There was a Seminar course with six students in that class. The idea of the course was to develop a mini-dissertation around any subject of your choice; for me, that’s where it started. Generally during MA programs, the design is teaching heavy; you don’t get time to think about further research. The suggestion about researching Bhojpuri cinema came from a classmate. I was not very convinced about it till I came across the book by Avijit Ghosh, published in 2010; that’s where I began to make sense of the complexities criss-crossing within the subject.
Bhojpuri films have been around since the 1960s, but what we now identify as Bhojpuri cinema, a particularly recent variant, emerged in 2003. The way to this period of Bhojpuri cinema goes via the explosion in the popularity of Bhojpuri music, which started in the 1980s with the coming of audio cassettes. Among various other vernacular forms, Bhojpuri song cassettes and later music videos became very popular and led to the emergence of numerous singer-performers out of which came the crop of film actors. Key to these transitions are the overlap between music and film industry, the coming of the multiplexes, the slow decline of single-screen theatres where Bhojpuri films started to make a grand appearance, and the working class people who came from the Bhojpuri speaking region to cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Nashik, Ludhiana. There is a lot that can be said here about urban reconfiguration, the suburban vs. urban conflict and labor migration from northern and eastern India towards western and peninsular Indian. But the foremost issue with Bhojpuri popular culture has been the gender question. So, when you go to any theatre playing Bhojpuri films, there is no female presence anywhere. Among other aspects, one of the core issues in my research has been the history of all-male working-class audiences engaged in the scandalous exhibition of female bodies.
But at the same time, I also observed that many people watching these films are there just to relax and unwind with the cheapest mode of public entertainment available. They may just go to sleep in the film theatre. It is, after all, a leisure palace available in the heart of the city with affordable entry tickets. So, the interest in all these aspects of cinema’s intersection with leisure, infrastructure, desire, migration, labor and gender began in 2011 at JNU, and then I carried it forward to Glasgow as my Ph.D. research.
6. We have learnt that any form of research is carried out in quest for some knowledge or truth. Looking at the engaging topics of your research papers, we would love to understand first: What makes a particular topic of your research interesting to you, what is your vision associated with your choice of topics in your work? Also, How did your academic research help in your understanding of society?
In academia, some of this gets done automatically because you are often working on multiple papers together. Also, you put some of the papers on hold, when you feel you don’t have the momentum or enough substance at the moment. So, the most recent paper that I published, on caste in a Marathi film, Sairat, took me five years and was rejected multiple times. So a lot goes into the process of academic publishing, revisions in particular, which itself is a long drawn process. A core understanding of society comes prior to this, primarily from reading, teaching, learning from your peers, learning from your seniors; the understanding of the truth that you seek happens more organically than what a research paper can show you. Research papers are fundamentally about your core expertise and training. But there are times when one experiments with new areas, ongoing debates or different styles. Academic publishing, however, has its own complexities which make the experimentation more arduous and perhaps even unrewarding. “It’s just bureaucratic, complex, and often petty, like everything else in life.”
The aspects of society you want to wrestle with emerge more organically, not just in academic dialogue, but in conversations with peers, students and during informal chatter around conferences. When you find a productive solidarity with other scholars, that’s when you know you may be ready to work towards an argument. For example, I’ve written a paper on Satyamev Jayate, a series which a friend of mine really loved and I absolutely hated for some reasons. Our debate spurred me on to work out an academic critique, which I thoroughly enjoyed writing of course. So, it takes a lot of time to organize and structure your thought process in such a way that is worthy of academic scrutiny.
7. In modern times, research is often perceived as an instrumental thing. In this existing climate of instrumental/ ’tangible product’ based research, how do you envision the importance of humanities research in engineering schools?
Engineering/STEM and Humanities research works in somewhat contrasting ways. Natural sciences tend to have a strong recency bias and therefore create a vertical pile of publications, in which only the top-portion, which has been or can be instrumentalized more easily, matters. The Humanities are spread a lot more horizontally, and can appear dated and irrelevant to students trained in such a modality. But more importantly, the instrumentalizing part comes from the ranking systems in which institutions, personnel, labs and departments are all entangled in a vertical system. In this system, students position themselves by selling one institutes’ rank to another for higher studies. Often in this transaction across technical institutes, the role of Humanities and research is a non-issue; Humanities are instrumentalized just for the sake of diversity. What Humanities otherwise brings to the table is an environment different from this process. Also, what the undergrads are often taught are hardly topics of much research consequence; very often, it’s about basic blocks of critical Humanities thought. Research is something that comes into the picture only if you want it, with personal and sustained motivations. STEM tends to be a lot more collaborative, hierarchical and centered around power relations. There is a lot of hierarchy in Humanities, too; one needs to understand that research has always been tied to power. Institutions are themselves manifestations of power, but global ranking systems create more transactional networks. So if somebody is doing good research outside the elite quarters of the academy, and is seen as a valuable addition to the brand value, they are often bought even across continents. This is how academic transactions work, regardless of Humanities or STEM. Therefore, the question is how technical institutes can continue to avail of competitive global rankings and the deeply hierarchical systems of institutional power, while also allowing the Humanities’ critical thinking to flourish beyond mere embellishments. The two can’t easily go together, and that is why those teachers in the Humanities who try to offer critiques of power are often seen as soft alternatives to hard “realities”. Personally, I think there are no limits to what the students can learn from both Humanities and STEM, or to how they reconcile otherwise irreconcilable approaches, but I’m not hopeful about whether institutes themselves are capable of being sensitive to those critiques, let alone inserting them into program/curriculum design.
8. With the introduction of National Education Policy in 2020, we are expecting an increased emphasis on a multidisciplinary approach in imparting education in India, wherein students will be encouraged to study subjects from different disciplines simultaneously thus removing the existing rigid separation between them. What in your view, will be the impact of such kind of education on future technocrats that our colleges shall produce?
I think there’s a strawman thesis being projected to sell us false dawns and horizons. Interdisciplinarity is nothing new or pathbreaking. What students are sold every few years is a shifted goalpost of disciplinary promiscuity. But interdisciplinarity works only when academic trajectories are designed to support it downstream from undergraduate education. In 2009, I did my Master’s in Arts and Aesthetics at JNU, which was an amalgamation of 3 disciplinary streams, and a lot of students were left terribly confused and lost by the end of the program. Almost two-third of them would have preferred a conventional Master’s program, because those who didn’t want to pursue a PhD immediately didn’t understand where else the learned skills may be applicable. I don’t think there is any rigid separation between disciplines anyway, and it is unlikely that the new guidelines, proposals and vision documents will fundamentally change anything.
9. If you were given a time machine to travel to your first year of IITK, what insight would you like to share with your younger self ?
If you’re as disappointed with your IIT education as I was in the very first year, you have the conventional option of managing somehow or the nuclear option to leave. The problem is not leaving as such, but the paucity of realistic alternatives available to someone fully committed to a career in sciences or technology. In light of that, I would only advise to make the most of being a legitimate participant of the privileges that make IITs special. The fact is, like in Test cricket when you come to the international stage for the first time, the first thought that crosses your mind is whether I even belong here. All you need is to convince yourself of that, set aside the prior expectations, and make the most of what you have. In some way, you know you’ll benefit from being where you are, but you don’t know if you’re allowing yourself the best chance to extract those benefits. That is what you need to learn from your peers and seniors. The only thing I would suggest to my younger self is that you’ll be fine, don’t worry too much about it. Shed that anxiety, don’t try to map the future; it will figure itself out. This is precisely the track I began treading in the last quarter of my stay.
Interviewed by : Aditya Raghav Trivedi, Ananya Gupta
