A Window To Perceptive Journalism

Sikh Modelling Contests –
A Body of Argument

S P Singh

This Vaisakhi, the Sikhs, increasingly aware and worried about the younger generation's attitude towards the religion and much concerned about their outer identity symbol of the turban, celebrated the festival simultaneously as the International Turban Day. Just days earlier, in Delhi, models walked down the ramp and were feted not primarily because they were beautiful or had perfect attributes of the body but because they had all that but were also Sikhs, or at least sported all the outer symbols of the religion -- the hair, the turban, the untrimmed eyelashes, a perfectly tied turban and an impressively styled beard.

Casual readers may have missed the import of the photographs from the photographs emerging from International Turban Day contests or Sikh modelling events, since the Indian as well as the international media now routinely flash pictures embodying what they call the spirit of the perfect human body.  

Age is a phase in the development and eventual withering of a tissue, of plasma, of cells that form larger constructs which eventually form our body. Much has been written about why the human beings are in love with a particular stage of the development of the life tissue, which we have chosen to call 'youth'. The modelling contests and beauty shows which throw up Miss America, Miss India, Mr. USA or Miss Surinam are only an illustration of this almost affected affectation with the idea of a particular stage of the tissue's development being better than another. I have also come across somewhat apologetic Mrs. India or Mrs. Ludhiana contests which are basically consolation contests for those who are past the age where the camera lingered a wee bit more on the contours of the human body.  

It is interesting that the Sikhs, who everyday pray to the Almighty, for blessing them with the spirit to live in the ‘raza’ of the Akal Purakh, also have notions, or are celebrating notions, that one particular age is better than the other, that a certain form and shape of the human body is more beautiful than the other, that my strapping six feet brother with flawless near-Caucasian skin tone and beatific smile is a better sight to behold than my mother's or aunt's wrinkled face.  

I have long been watching that the human body has started to pre-empt all other measures of value in the West. Maybe this should have been foreseen, going by developments on the life expectancy front. At the time of the French Revolution in 1789, the average longevity span in France was 22, but a hundred years later, this had doubled to just under 45. Currently, French men live for 75 years and the women 83. And scientists tell us that those born after 2000 will fare better, and one girl out of two born in France will live to be a hundred.

The story elsewhere is no different. Four generations or more used to live in the space of a hundred years just a little while ago when the Sikh Gurus were solidifying a religion and a value system, the like of which this world had not heard of earlier. Compared to those times, we are practically not dying at all! This prolongation of life amounts to the invention of a new body, against need, against suffering and against time; against the world too — the world of nature, which was destiny.  

If the new longevity is a result of the advances of traditional medicine, beyond them lies the new 'industry of life', already capable of the production of human beings without intercourse, and on the brink of laboratory manufacture proper. I am not sure how the Sikh community, which is battling within itself about what stance to strike publicly on the issue of same-sex marriages (commitments?), will adopt on this one. Eugenics beckons at the future entrance to life, euthanasia as the normal exit from it. Social isolation can already count for more than physical decay in the decease of the elderly: 'the time is near when death will come from distance or disgust with a world that is no longer one's own — where life will no longer be what the body betrays, but what the spirit abandons, betraying the body'. Such parting with existence still remains passive. Ahead is 'active death, willed and chosen, as the last stage in the invention of a new kind of body' — the logical conclusion of 'the claim to life as property, as domain par excellence of individual choice and the exercise of free will'.  

In between entry and exit, meanwhile, the body-shops of maintenance, repair, transformation and perfection are proliferating, as expenditures on dietetics, health care, cosmetic surgery, embellishment soar. If the fabricated faces of Madonna or Mariah Carey are the new icons of beauty, and the pressure they express is felt at all levels of education and career, then soon a string of successful Sikh modeling contests will lead to similar pressures closer home, maybe even in the precincts of religious places we would internally assess who looks his best in a polka-printed turban? In public affairs, physical appearance becomes an even more essential condition of success, as the political class illustrates to satiety, more so in the United States. 

Freed from physical labours, protected from ancient maladies, enhanced by novel additives, extended to longer durations, the reinvented body detaches itself from traditional obligations and constraints, as a machine for pleasure that is an end to itself. With this change, marriage as once understood —‘an institution that had nothing to do with desire, pleasure, the couple, and everything to do with the child, the prolongation of the line and its patrimony’ — makes little sense, or threatens to make little sense.

An important part of the biological capital of each individual is spent when it reproduces itself. In the current choice not to reproduce, or do so only seldom, or parsimoniously, may be seen a preference for the prolongation of life. At the limit, a generation that lived forever would have no need to reproduce itself at all. The consequences of this thinning of the threads binding one generation to the next are likely to be drastic for those born into the new order. They arrive, separated not only from parents more and more absorbed in themselves, but from any of the forms of culture or relations with nature that once gave continuity of experience between the generations. Instead, they increasingly inhabit a virtual universe of digitalization, erasing the boundaries between the real and the simulacrum.

The majority of children between three and twelve, initially in the United States, and henceforward also in France and Europe, spend more time in front of a screen — television, computer, video-game, mobile phone — than with their parents, teachers or their friends: on average more than five hours a day, as against four with teachers, less than three with friends — and scarcely more than an hour with parents.

In these conditions, the transmission of customs and values that was once assured by the family, the school system, the army, the church or the party tends to shrivel to the passing on of one value only: money, as if in reparation for the abandonment of all the rest. Legacies get steadily larger, and investments in children — typically, privileged forms of education that will pay off in the labour market — continue to climb, even as the imaginative and moral distance between progenitors and their offspring grows.  

For many scholars, the culture of the body descends from the sixties, when the rebels of 1968 raised the demand for sexual freedom. 'Naturally, behind it, nothing, or very little was at stake; the only real liberation in this area is one that individuals achieve for themselves — collective political demonstrations are of small consequence for it'. Behind the banners and slogans, in fact, the deadening opposite of desire was on the march, the saturation and banalization of sex, with its generalized appropriation by the market. Alongside this flattening of the libidinal landscape, moreover, has gone the fading of all past forms of the transcendent. Longevity extinguishes belief in eternity. Not that a need for the sacred simply disappears. Religion, like nature, still has its appeal. But in this regime, genuine belief in either of them has all but vanished, and will not return. Instead, we have ersatz versions: techno raves rather than holy communion, not woods or wetlands but municipal parks.  

With the exhaustion of collective adventures, the deep weariness of the mind at the futile quest for the truth of History, of nature or of matter, only the narrative of the body, of its satisfactions and pleasures, and the search for new modes of sensibility, experience and emotion, still hold our attention.  

What is the upshot?  

The upshot of the entire arguments is — have we thought through all the implications of celebration of the youth, of the human shape, of the Sikh modelling contests, of the images that will beam eventually in gurdwaras after any Ayur Herbal Sikh Value-laden Turban Tying and Eyelashes-preservation Contest? Is the gurbani hymn being played in the background commensurate with the new value system of the ideal human form for a community that has a great persona as the epitome of values in a man called Baba Budhha Ji?

2 May 2007

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