| 
Keya Ganguly
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
|
|
Keya Ganguly's
father used to call his daughter "the leader of the opposition."
No matter what the topic of dinner table conversation in their Calcutta
home, Ganguly seemed to take an opposite view from that of her family
members.
It's possible that Ganguly inherited this disposition from her grandmother,
whom she calls "the most important influence in my life."
Although her grandmother was given in an arranged marriage at the
young age of 10, she was, nevertheless, a strong woman who encouraged
her granddaughter to pursue a Ph.D.
"Such a marriage sounds alarming by our standards," Ganguly
says, "but my grandmother was very forward-thinking. Ironically
in many Third World countries-including India-women are leaders.
In the U.S.-with its supposed superiority in women's rights-we're
still talking about if and when we'll have a woman president. The
contradiction in the Third World promotes outspoken women like me.
I'm not unique; I'm a type."
Ganguly-now an associate professor in the Department of Cultural
Studies and Comparative Literature-has engaged in all kinds of contradictions
as she has crossed continents and academic communities as a scholar
and teacher. In college, at Delhi University in India, she majored
in English. She earned her degree despite the fact that she had,
as she casually mentions, "often missed classes." She
graduated with honors-then was troubled to find that her degree
was not recognized in the U.S.
"There's this sense that non-Western universities are not equivalent
to those in the United States," she says. "But by virtually
any standard, many are tougher."
While still in her teens, Ganguly moved with her family to the United
States, where she earned another undergraduate degree, in journalism
and mass communication, at Philadelphia's Temple University. Knowing
early on she wanted to be an academic-"because I wanted to
find other world views," she says-she went on to complete a
Ph.D., in communications, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
When Ganguly came to the University of Minnesota, in 1997, she says,"few
were studying postcolonial culture and literature-it was then a
very new field. Today, everyone and their grandma is doing it, but
I bring the unique perspective of coming from a country that is
thousands of years old. The Silk Road [the 4,000-milelong network
between Europe and Asia] began in India. Transformational grammar
was first written by an Indian scholar, Panini, who was a Sanskrit
grammarian who lived sometime between the fourth and seventh centuries.
Yet this is a country about which we still know very little."
Literature and film
With a foot in both the U.S. and India, Ganguly set out to study
people who were, in many ways, like herself: Indian immigrants living
with the heritage and traditions of an ancient world as they broke
new ground in the United States. Her first book, States of Exception:
Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity, based on her dissertation,
was a case study of a middle-class diasporic Indian community in
the southern New Jersey suburbs.
It is the story of everyday life, of food and its attendant rituals,
of media consumed, of the everyday contradictions inherent in the
hybrid existences of 20 immigrant families caught between the lure
of American ideals and nostalgia for their former lives.
Having established herself as an ethnographer, Ganguly found herself
at an intellectual crossroads. With her training as a literary scholar,
she'd always aimed to work in comparative literature, she says.
"But I was something of a magpie in comparative literature's
nest-magpies are interlopers and don't really belong in the nests
they often inhabit. I wanted to find a way to link literature and
media to ethnographic theory and practice."
In turning her attention to film studies, Ganguly found an ideal
vehicle for her varied interests. She investigates how cinema creates
and reflects intricate social, historical, and cultural values-revealing,
in other words, "how people tell us about themselves."
Her film courses (she also teaches courses in comparative lit and
in cultural studies) aim to help students "read" a production
in its relationship to culture as well as to explore theoretical
models that have shaped thinking about the cinema.
Teaching 21st-century students how to read film, she maintains,
is an important way to engage them in thoughtful and productive
discussion.
"We can't assume people will have read the canon [of works
presumed to be great literature or philosophy]," she says.
"We can assume they've seen movies. Film makes it easier to
relate to the context of their own lives-we can use that connection
to teach conceptual thinking. This is what film study brings to
the table.
"This is not to say that Disney is the same as Proust,"
she emphasizes. "There is a hierarchy. But studying film can
help us understand how societies understand themselves. And they
can help us sort through questions like, How do we live in a world
of Rambo? How can we recognize the difference between Top Gun
and the Gulf War? This leads to plenty of critical thought
about social and cultural issues."
Ganguly's primary focus these days is on the avant garde and popular
cinema of South Asia, and especially the works of the Indian filmmaker
Satyajit Ray, whom she calls a "canonical director of postcolonial
film." Invariably ranked among the world's greatest 20th-century
filmmakers, Ray made films that expressed universal humanistic themes
even as they focused, more immediately, on the rise of the Indian
middle class, on consciousness and contradiction in the development
of feminine identity, and on the sense of alienation felt by large
sections of India's educated urban middle-class of India.
(Among Ray's most acclaimed films on these themes are Pather
Panchali [1955], Jalsaghar [The Music Room,
1958], and Charulata [1964].)
Ganguly describes Ray as a master storyteller whose works are as
literary as they are cinematic-films that are both deeply affecting
and visually powerful, and that also succeed as social and political
commentaries. She is writing a book specifically on his representations
of femininity, crisis, and modernity in West Bengal, the northeastern
Indian state whose villages and cities (including Calcutta) provide
the settings for most of Ray's films.
Ganguly's work brings new strengths to a department well-known for
its expertise in film criticism, history, and theory (as well as,
more recently, in film production). The department also is home
to the U's relatively new film/media studies major, an interdisciplinary
program that incorporates varied courses across the College of Liberal
Arts.
The case for humanities
Besides Ray, Ganguly has published work on subjects from Harlequin
romances to postcolonial literature to the philosopher Theodor Adorno.
All of her work is aimed at critiquing issues of identity and illuminating
what she calls "the sociology of culture." The ultimate
goal, she says, is to "bring these ideas into conversation,
as I do in my teaching. That's the reason I became an academic.
I want my students to ask questions, dig for information, discuss
and write about ideas intelligently. I want them to relate texts
to social situations. I want them to think."
Little, in her view, matters more to the University and to society
than teaching and learning in the humanities."Why should we
care what we are doing at the University?" she asks rhetorically.
"Some responses are framed in terms of whether the University
is going to be 'useful to business.' Yet we're here not only because
we make possible patents or medical breakthroughs or technical innovations,
but because knowledge is important in itself. The University's business
is, fundamentally, to teach young people how to think critically.
People outside the university must be persuaded of that.
"I will say this for sure as a scholar of culture and history,"
she adds: "No civilization has ever been able to declare its
greatness on the basis of science and technology alone. They've
all had great philosophy and great art. Culture matters. Creativity
and critical thinking matter. It's a matter of survival. As a society,
we must rethink our priorities, because we are at a crossroads politically
and in every other way."
That, of course, is where the work of Ganguly and other humanities
scholars comes in. "There's so much we need to know if we are
to prepare a critically astute citizenry," Ganguly says. "What
are the effects of media on young people? That surely is a fundamental
issue. We've barely begun to explore it."
Written by Mary Shafer
Reprinted with permission from the fall/winter 2005-06 edition of
Think,
a publication of the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative
Literature.
|
