2069 – The Disciple (2020 movie)

timespace coordinates: India 21st century

“The Disciple is a 2020 Indian Marathi-language drama film written, directed and edited by Chaitanya Tamhane.^[2] It stars Aditya Modak, Arun Dravid, Sumitra Bhave, Deepika Bhide Bhagwat, and Kiran Yadnyopavit. Alfonso Cuarón serves as an executive producer.^[3] It was entered into the main competition section at the 77th Venice International Film Festival, becoming the first Indian film since Monsoon Wedding (2001) to compete at the festival.

Sharad Nerulkar has devoted his life to becoming an Indian classical music vocalist, diligently following the traditions and discipline of old masters, his guru, and his father. But as years go by, Sharad starts to wonder whether it’s really possible to achieve the excellence he’s striving for.” (wiki)

There is a lot of reasons one might watch this movie – it offers a good break from the usual – self-absorbed Euroamerican world (this has become a leitmotif of my recent posts it seems). It is important and telling that the Western world has become united against Russia aggression and the war in Ukraine, or that there is somehow a rush to switch off from fossil fuel dependency (in view of Europe’s and especially Germany’s dependency on Russian gas (as well as oil and coal). There is the new specter of economic nationalism as a result of general dissatisfaction with globalism inequalities and ill effects. Both India and China has abstained from the unanimous condemnation of Russia and this poses several problems. I don’t want to get into that but to keep an eye and mind open to large parts that are excluded from our daily reality in the West (speaking now and writing from Berlin, Germany). There is always a lot of ‘missing’ – coverage of people living and existing elsewhere. How does one relate to such non-existing – still rarely represented realities and places?

What Disciple offers is a small sample of another world – and a contemporary world, that is neither idealized nor exoticized. The movie is a slow burner, it is slow cinema (which I do not indulge in very often) at its best. It is a series of tableaus or concerts of classical Hindustani music (i will not go into detail since I do not want to make blunders nor pretend knowledge in this area). I have had previous contact with Indian music tradition via friends and mediators. There is today a translational and International scope of this Hindustani that was made familiar by instrumentalists such as Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan since the 1960s in the West. Following the growing Indian diaspora, it has achieved recognition everywhere and patrons as well as students from outside the range of its original classical origins.

I like the frankness of this movie – it is really an amazing piece of cinema (not just because it has been nominated for prizes). It presents some incredible encounters with both disciple-master relations and with current striving for skill & perfection, of austerity and a whole range of expert knowledge. I enjoyed the sense of dedication, of intense givingness on the side of the disciple. One is exercising on and on with consummate dedication. From archival precious materials of tapes or highly specialized traditions and even masters who refuse recordings and who show us a very different facette, an anti-spectacular form of performativity. Maai – the legendary singer mentioned is a representative of Khyal tradition – (ख़याल) that is a major form of Hindustani classical music in the Indian subcontinent.

With The Disciple one can say that one enters for a short while a different world of sound – and improvisation. There is a lot of hard lessons there for us and for the eponymous disciple. A lot of the time it is not even clear why such sacrifice is included in his practice. I liked the presence of the online – and also of the whole analog tape collector mania. There is also a fine sense of irony when actor Aditya Modak encounters one such famous collector-expert that somehow smashes all his idols and provokes in him a rare show of violence. I also like the time passage and how time is measured in this movie.

imdb

2067 – THE BUDDHA AND I: INDIAN INFLUENCE ON ISLAMIC AND EUROPEAN THOUGHT / History of Philosophy without any gaps (series of podcasts)

Here’s an incredibly – well invaluable resource (for me as a non-professional interested in philosophy and its twists & turns) that I recently discovered. It is a collaboration of researchers from two institutions: King’s College London and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich.

I suggest starting with the episodes on the Indian influence on Islamic and European thought as an introduction to this entire section and I will detail below why I think one should start here at the end rather than at the beginning. Even if one does not have any interests in philosophy or any prior knowledge in the Western tradition of philosophical thought – from this eps one can at least gather how stunted this reception of Indian philosophy was (and partially still is) in the West.

For good or for worse (Theofil Simenschy, M Eliade) Romanian intelligentsia has shown along the years a certain appetite for Indian philosophy, so there is a lot of various translations – even pulp and trashy ones, adapted versions and pocket versions. All this is proof of a widespread interest in extra European philosophical traditions and a diversified pop cultural exchange btw India & Romania. At the same time one should not profess any innocence in regards to this Indophilia, and regard with a certain suspicion all claims about a Romanian-Indian continuum, especially in view of the usual right-wing nativist or aryanist tendencies. That said, before 1989 and after as well, so-called anti-sectarian perspectives where banishes, a position maintained by the majority Romanian orthodox church. This is a tendency to discredit evert hing associated with Indian practices or yogic knowledge. Gurus or anything close to New Age religions is regarded as potentially harmful or condemned as ‘perversions’. Not saying there are no exceptions to the rule, yet suffice to say, nodaways in Romania (as elsewhere) – there is a thoroughly hyper-commercialized mindfulness industry catering to the needsof those afflicted by generalized burnout under capitalism. I consider quite fruitful thw para-academic come & go tracing such pop cultural influences and there’s much interest in exploring weird deviations & non orthodox practices. My bes example is Bogdan Lyphkhanu – poet friend and also a consummate collector and investigator of such spiritual Romanian- Indian (and also Spiritualist, Taoist, Tantric, Occult, including unclassifiable etc) hybrids.

For various reasons, I abstain from discussing Islamicate – Indian philosophy relations. Many Islamic authors, since the very beginning, have drawn parallels btw Sufi Islamic mystical traditions and Indian philosophical schools. Importantly, many Western impressions on Indian philosophy are much indebted to previous Persian or Arab translations (listen to this podcast).

I am ignoring this at the moment to focus on the plethora of sometimes very specialized knowledge and updates commentaries on Indian (or specifically Buddhist/Jainist sources here), sources relevant to the current debates animating much of today’s mind philosophy (mind body dualism/hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism/pancosmism, eliminativism etc).

These podcasts are definite proof that we have moved away from the various misinterpretations. A that seem in retrospect quite rudimentary, completely biased and misinformed, never able to grasp the diversity of Indian philosophical schools or engage with the conclusions of their main representatives (their historical debates, the diversity of their examples, multiplicity of perspectives, a rich and evolving conceptual vocabulary and most of all their sheer diversity). The Western reception is biased from the beginning. No matter where it hails from, we get the sense we’re being served an impoverished and caricatural version of it. Beyond the mind philosophy relevance discussed above – there is also a new interest for the idealist resources of Indian philosophy as today’s idealist philosophy gathers pace or even with those attempts to seek out a bridge between the continental and the analytic Western philosophy. There are countless other aspects including those offering a new appreciation of Indian epistemology (in the Buddhist philosophy) and so on.

With the possible exception of Gottfried W. Leibniz, almost all mentioned in this podcast (Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, etc) show a combination of either uncritical admiration or outright disdain for Indian philosophy (particularly its cosmology or cosmogony as in the example with the elephant sitting on top of the turtle). If they were very attentive in their analysis of ultimate questions about experience, perception, truth and limits of knowledge, or avidly debating current scientific worldviews, western philosophers were less careful about other traditions, throwing around careless generalizations. Sadly they almos constantly ignore actually existing ‘Indian philosophy’, and make their statements based on hearsay or by taking Indian philosophy as a unified stock, a single corpus, a monolithic non differentiated block. One should first recognize if possible these initial widespread positions held by practitioners of Western philosophy, so that one can appreciate its further refinement or even complete revision of what we thought we knew about Indian philosophy.

That being said – this is just just an entry point, so pls consider listening the whole section from 43 Buddhist and Jains (or earlier) to 62 Kit Patrick. Each eps has short and up-to-date Bibliography on the subjects being discussed for those interested.

listen here:

THE BUDDHA AND I: INDIAN INFLUENCE ON ISLAMIC AND EUROPEAN THOUGHT