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Entertainment
Icon of the middle class
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Priya Tendulkar used her cachet as actor, talk-show host and writer in socially constructive ways, observes RANJIT HOSKOTE in this tribute.
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PRIYA TENDULKAR, who passed away last week in Bombay at the age of 48, had long been a member of that pantheon of contemporary folk heroes and heroines, who reach out from the marquee of the arts, entertainment, sports or politics, to touch the lives of common people. In Tendulkar's case, this ascension to popular icon status was rendered easier, perhaps, because she had come to be identified with the roles she played in a series of television serials aired from the mid-1980s onwards. Despite the fact that she had appeared in such major film productions as Shyam Benegal's "Ankur," through the preceding decade, Tendulkar will always be enshrined in the popular imagination as Rajani, the housewife-turned-consumer rights activist.
To the urban middle class which had begun to develop during the 1980s, and which gave the televisual medium its core viewership in that early boom period, Tendulkar embodied its most cherished aspirations, its most urgent needs. She spoke up for consumers cheated of their rights by shopkeepers, greengrocers and petty municipal bureaucrats; she represented the goddess-from-the-machine who would set the world right, mobilising a crowd of small investors, bus and train commuters, housewives and students into civic action. But Tendulkar also departed from the conservatism that was still strongly characteristic of the Indian middle class of that pre-satellite TV, pre-Internet period: she upheld the cause of women oppressed by the patriarchy at home and at work. This imparted a radical edge to what might otherwise have been a classic bourgeois crusade on behalf of that Trishanku class which is not rich enough to rule by might, yet not poor enough to qualify for charity. Through the 1990s, Tendulkar's identity as an icon of the middle class was reinforced (and as her audience developed global aspirations and tastes, she too assumed a more glamorous identity as a talk-show host), but she lost none of her critical edge. Commentators have written of the ``X-ray gaze of her topaz eyes." She continued to ask the politicians and bureaucrats who were her guests on TV the most uncompromising questions. Occasionally, a guest rattled by her line of investigation would storm off the sets. Nor did Tendulkar's aura remain confined to that magic moment beneath the arc lights; as the daughter of the celebrated dramatist Vijay Tendulkar, she was at home in the world of intellectual exploration and public debate, even controversy. She used her cachet as actor, talk-show host and writer in socially constructive ways, breaking through the barrier separating the world of entertainment from the real world. She lent her support, in the public sphere, to such causes as women's empowerment and consumers' rights.
Tendulkar's courageous attitude as a critical liberal was in evidence most recently when, even as she was battling against cancer, she wrote an article for a daily newspaper after a widely reported outrage. On the eve of Independence Day, a tribal girl was raped by a drunkard on a local train in Bombay, in full view of five male commuters; reflecting on this horror, Tendulkar recalled how, when she was much younger, she herself had very nearly been raped on a local train. Crucially, she noted, while two urchins had come to her assistance, middle-class commuters had either been indifferent, or shown disapproval of her, the near-victim.
It is ironic, and even tragic, that Tendulkar's self-image — that of the celebrity as socially conscious agent of change — has become the exception rather than the rule, in the present epoch of rampant consumerism and narcissistic self-cultivation. The suffering consumers, oppressed women and disempowered citizens, on whose behalf she always spoke, still need voices to convey their struggle. For they cannot be heard over the slick music of conspicuous consumption, the beauty industry's advertising and the privatisation-friendly state, a music that tries to persuade us that our social and political institutions are immeasurably better than they were in the depressed, quasi-socialist 1980s. But they are not; as Priya Tendulkar would always remind us, they are rotten in different ways, and require the continuous reformative pressure of criticism.
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