Capital infections - uneasy notes on Dabba Cartel

Dear reader,

Of course, there shall be spoilers. Be warned.

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After having written about Mumbai’s lure and lust when it comes to wealth, toward the end of Maximum City, Suketu Mehta writes about a Jain couple, who give up all their possessions and take diksha. I have always thought about the unspoken assumption in that choice of ending — that renunciation of material pleasures is a noble thing, a ‘better’ thing, a morally superior thing to do. Till not too long ago, whether it was a monk or a mantri, rejection of material wealth and simple living stood for public virtue. There are tamil songs that denounce the greed for ‘ponn and poovayar’, ‘wealth and women’ (of course, the audience for this moral science class is men), and I am sure in every language and religion, there is finger wagging at excessive wealth and greed. Then, something changed.

We now have a guru who dresses in designer Ikat. Whenever anyone speaks now about Gandhi thaatha’s austerity, someone feels compelled to point out — do you know the cost of maintaining his minimal lifestyle? During the cricketing scandal of many years ago, someone told me that Saurav Ganguly cannot be corrupt because he is a prince. Simple Sudha is a meme.

A simplistic narrative of what happened goes like this — once upon a time, we had a clear understanding of what is greed and what is renunciation, what is virtuous and what is a vice. Then, there came what I call advanced capitalism. Given, every time I have to explain what that is for there is always someone saying, hey, but capitalism has existed before too, what’s so different now, I found an explanation by Ted Chiang articulating it quite clearly, so I am going to borrow his words: “Just to be clear, when I refer to capitalism, I’m not talking about the exchange of goods or services for prices determined by a market, which is a property of many economic systems. When I refer to capitalism, I’m talking about a specific relationship between capital and labor, in which private individuals who have money are able to profit off the effort of others. So, in the context of this discussion, whenever I criticize capitalism, I’m not criticizing the idea of selling things; I’m criticizing the idea that people who have lots of money get to wield power over people who actually work. And, more specifically, I’m criticizing the ever-growing concentration of wealth among an ever-smaller number of people, which may or may not be an intrinsic property of capitalism but which absolutely characterizes capitalism as it is practiced today.” Even though everyone recognises that there is an ever-growing concentration of wealth among a smaller number of people, if advanced capitalism is a game, then the goal is to be one among those smaller number of people. Anyone who does not follow that objective is deemed suspicious.

What then happens to our moral compass, the clear definitions of yesterday? I want to call this the capital infection of the moral compass; it causes a fever that is disorienting, questions of morality make us all hot and bothered, and slowly, it is just easier to use capital as the arbiter of morality. Therefore, a guru in designer Ikat is more trustworthy than a barefoot swami. For a billionaire mother-in-law of an ex-head of state, simplicity is an aesthetic choice, like preferring cotton bedsheets that are 1000 thread-count, not a moral one. Cricket with its never ending jamboree, as B’s ma said recently, is more profession than passion.

In Dabba Cartel, what was intriguing are these digressions into how capital infects the feminist moral universe. It is a very neoliberal universe; there isn’t for instance, a Domestic Workers’ Union that Nimisha Sajayan’s character is part of, or a small scale entrepreneur collective that helps out Shalini Pandey’s delivery service. Given the State or community has no role to play in improving people’s lives under a neoliberal imagination, each woman has to fight for what she wants alone, and at the first glance, it is as if all the women in Dabba Cartel seek different things, money is what unites them, as that alone paves the way for their liberation.

Nimisha Sajayan’s character seeks a better life for herself and her child, and money lets her get that. Jyothika’s character seeks money as a way to succeed in her business and regain her sense of self. Anjali Anand’s character wants to love freely, and goto a place that lets her do that, and needs money to emigrate. These are clear, therefore uninteresting from our analysis’ point of view.

When it comes to the character played by Shabana Azmi, you pause, and you look again. Her character is the one most folks I spoke to had difficulty accepting — why would she take the second bag? It is such an idiotic thing to do - to put at risk all those things you have given your life for. For, what she seeks is an end in itself; she seeks the thrill of working, being important, earning, and having a life outside of the domestic sphere. It is just that the life she has known involves being a drug boss. If her character had worked as the principal of a music school or as a pulmonologist, that’s what she would have wanted to do. She wants to continue, she decides to take the second bag, not because of the lure of more money, but she is enchanted by something more subtle — the idea of being someone in her own terms.

And now, look at the character who elicits your sympathy and gets the prize for being good. The character who chooses to renounce, who chooses to walk away from the pots of money is Shabana Azmi’s daughter-in-law, Shalini Pandey character. The series portrays her as a the ‘good one’, quite in line with the older imagination of one who renounces is one who is virtuous. The fact that she is made to hold the gun in the end is to tell us that this vessel of virtue is what is what gets corrupted - that’s the moral price to pay for greed. In contrast to Shabana Azmi’s character, this d-i-l character seems more virtuous, but therein lies the rub. She wants money so that her husband can go to Germany and take her and her child along. She is not interested in the dabba business — it is a means to an end, and that end is a conventional family structure with a dodgy husband and uncertain future. And somewhere, this confusing moral universe where a woman seeking self-actualisation is deemed to be morally corrupt and one seeking patriarchal family bliss is seen as virtuous made me pause — where is the rub?