Partha Sarathi Mandal
PhD Research Scholar,
Raiganj University,
India
Abstract
Badshah
in his "Genda Phool'' hasn't been able to become an adventurer in soul
making much like Bob Dylan in "Chimes of Freedom" or Abbasuddin Ahmed
in "Amay Bhasaili Re" as unlike these two legendary heart-touching
songs which are at their best in portraying the various agathokakological
entities of human life or in their earnest attempt to find out a
metaphysical/philosophical understanding of our lives or in their upliftment of
vasudhaiva kutumbakam("the world is one family") principle or in their
projection of humanitarian equilibrium or in their thoughtful critical insights
for the equal distribution of resources to the marginalized and proletarian
working class people who belong to the boundary level of a power structure,
Badshah's "Genda Phool'' virulently only projects erotic opprobrium, toxic
masculinity and gender injustice. Amidst innumerable video adaptations, memes
which are getting viral on social media of Indian rapper Badshah's "Genda
Phool" which itself is a plagiarized content as the boastful rapper stole
lyrics from an old Bengali folk song called "Boroloker Bitilo"
without owing any credit to its original writer Kahar who belongs to "have
nots" category (Marx in Wen 74).
Keywords: Adventurer, Soul,
Toxic, Proletarian, Agathokakological
"Genda Phool'' often fetishises or let's say it does
also overemphasize the part over the totality; in case of the song a particular
part of Jacqueline Fernandez's body is highlighted/zoomed violating the
biological, anatomical, natural spontaneity of the totality of one breast or
single breast and the funnel through which the pornographic vision or gaze is
filtered is pure fetishistic schopophilia or the celebration of male gaze or
what is called the veneration of male chauvinism. Badshah's machismo gets sadistic
pleasures in lifting/installing profoundly lalochezia to the topoi of the song.
This song is characterized as a species of masturbatory exhibitionism, an
offensiveness further associated with the self-fashioning gestures of the petty
bourgeoisie (Najarian 20). Is there any wonder that the rurban lyrics used by
Badshah should be so autotelic, so autoerotic, so fetishistic and so stuck? The
song centres around "phallogocentrism" (Derrida's term for the
masculine power at the origin of the Law). The self-aggrandizing Tik Tok video
makers, YouTube contents creators or the most viewed vloggers are
sharing/uploading the various forms and adaptations of Badshah's "Genda
Phool'' just for the sake of entertainment at a very cheap rate but during this
period of global pandemic Corona, social isolation and quarantine my
intellectual/ontological aristocracy is emblematically scrolling the smells of
gender injustice, re-representation of stereotypical muliebrity, phallocentric
monopoly, Centre/Periphery, Master/Slave dichotomy or the 21st century version
of a She-tragedy in these very artistically/aesthetically poor adaptations or
in Badshah's "Genda Phool'' itself.
This song is not a mouthpiece of Dalit, Adivasi or Minority
women as the orbit of the song revolves around the lifestyle, flamboyance or
the exaggerated larger-than-life imago of a rich daddy's princess who has a
long and chubby hair. Is the song suitable for those marginalized women who
belong to "[n]on hegemonic groups or classes." (Gramsci xiv). In
"Can the Subaltern Speak" (1985) Spivak (1942) highlighted the
subaltern existence of women and to Spivak subaltern women are doubly oppressed
in colonial/postcolonial situation: "...the subaltern has no history and
cannot speak, the female as female is more deeply in shadow." (271) The
sexy butterfly tattoo on Jacqueline Fernandez's waist carries figuratively a
political significance with it as it virulently/strategically unfolds the
producer's hidden/camouflaged agenda, i.e. the commercialization of woman's
body which is repeatedly/incessantly concocted in this song in the way of
zooming the naked belly or the thumka of the projected women characters. Much
like Honey Singh's controversial misogynistic "Blue Eyes", "Love
Dose", "Choot" or Mamta Sharma and Wajid Ali's duet
"Fevicol Se" Badshah, Jacqueline Fernandez and Payal Dev starrer
"Genda Phool'' which has already been viewed over 180 million times on
YouTube in the last 3 weeks juxtaposes two antithetical principles,i.e.
boastful machismo and submissive effeminized existence of women in a
patriarchal power structure where phallus is in the centre and women,
marginalized/peripheralized voices are pushed at the periphery level. The
defenestrated existence of women in rigid, authoritarian and dictatorial ambience
of India's age-old surveiling patriarchal ethos has again been postulated in
this song: "khelta nahi cricket cricket/ par teri le loon vicket
vicket". These dangerously phallocentric lines triumphantly encashing male
ego as used as lyrics in this song celebrate women as sex objects or rather
baby producing machines I would like to say where "vicket" is a
metaphor for male genital organ, i.e. phallus and these lines tell about the
satisfaction of the carnal desires of the hero boy which will come only in
physical mating with the "Genda Phool'' girl. Jacqueline Fernandez is not
obviously ticking the boxes correctly of a RSS backed Good Mother concept as
she is not portrayed as sanskari in this song; she will be tagged as a Bad
Mother/ "Other" by a number of hypocrites who will be obviously
having nocturnal emission when the skyrocketed confidence of their erect
phallus will get its sadistic pleasures at the thumka, frenzied butt or the
sizzling body of the lady character as presented in this song but these people
with double tongues on the other hand will also start destructive gossiping
about to and fro or ifs and buts of such an iconic actress like Jacqueline
Fernandez only because she is woman as in the same way the staunch supporters
of patriarchy backed by Fundamentalists and age-old watchdogs of phallocentric
monopoly tag Sunny Leone as a Bad Mother, i e. the loopholes of the Mother
India mythology as a bourgeois ideological construct (Morton 40).
Unlike my international crush Jennifer Lopez's radical
feminist "Ain't Your Mama" which is at its best in its portrayal of
such a powerful woman character who tried to break/devastate the sparagmos of a
woman's identity by patriarchy; she does throw a challenge to the shackles of
patriarchal oppression while my adolescent crush Jacqueline Fernandez's
melodramatic "Genda Phool'' only churns out machismo or the submissive
existence of women in patriarchy or women as objects of sex.The
"dissociation of sensibility" cataloged by Badshah's imagery in
"Genda Phool'' traces the dissociation of individual senses from each
other in the absence of any intellectual Aufhebung into a logos. (Jay 88) Kudos
to the presence of Bakhtinian carnivalesque elements in "Genda Phool'' or
I would like to say this song also perambulates its precise and pointed
adherence to heteroglossia (mixture of different voices and various cultural
traditions) bacause Badshah, Jacqueline Fernandez and Payal Dev as projected in
this video song belong not to a homogeneous cultural or socioeconomic background,
their cultural identity is heterogeneous in nature. There are no transcendental
signifiers in this song and like the iconic scene in Satyajit Ray's
"Pather Panchali" (1955) where Durga and Apu crouch amid fields of
towering kash grass watching a train rumble past towards the city there is no
portrayal/projection of Kantian sublime, the wonderful domestic picturesque or
the mesmerizing natural descriptions as the song called "Genda Phool''
primarily centres around breeding fantasies, feverish overidentification or
ambitious projects jutted out from the stereotypical representation of a rich
daddy's princess who is already always I guess charging the darkest fantasies
or the wildest dreams of men since the publication of the song on YouTube.
Economic utilitarianism reduces qualitative differences to quantitative
difference and an abstract mathematical mind is at work in number crunching
Badshah's treatment of various parts of the body of the female character
presented in this song so numerically arranged in order and precisely
calculated. Badshah owes his Rousseauistic camaraderie/brotherhood to Honey
Singh as both these misogynistic rappers/singers in their songs present women
as objects of sex; their music videos are the greatest triumph of toxic masculinity
and male hubris. The objective corelatives are so strongly manifested in this
song and the female character as played by Jacqueline Fernandez is a person
with synaesthesia in the sense that whenever Badshah is casting a lusty eye at
her sizzling and attractive body which itself is the production of a sense
impression and as a result Jacqueline is feeling shy and is looking back at
Badshah with a stimulated body language which is indicating that she is also
desperate/hungry for love making with him.
Badshah is suffering from a Bloomian Anxiety of Influence in
the sense that if he fails to stereotypically represent the cartography of the
women's body used for men's carnal satisfaction and for penetration or
anchoring "...in the bay where all men ride," (Shakespeare) he will
be tagged as "Other" by his macho predecessors or by his contemporary
misogynistic rappers who have again and again projected women as objects of
men's sexual desires in their hits in order to worship toxic masculinity and
male ego. "Body teri makkhan jaise" is an intertextual reference(
Harold Bloom's insistence on Intertextuality) to "Main to tanduri main to
tanduri murgi hoon yaar/Gatkale saiyan alcohol se oh yea" from
"Fevicol Se" song. Amidst Shashi Tharoor's "Exasperating Farrago
of Distortions" tweet (@ShashiTharoor) or when Brexit is short for
"British exit" which would predictably flush catastrophic dysfunction
to the financial fluidity of the global economy creating a very adverse
situation for jobless youths or when the primetime political debates on
national media have become a high decibel tu tu main main ("I am no less
than you") or when consumerism operating in postmodern capitalism is
mercilessly killing innocence and is creating dry burnt out cinders or when the
pandemic Covid-19 is ruthlessly ravaging the world bracketing us in quarantine
and social isolation then my Apollonian veracity in order to be intellectually
impregnated by the Dionysian elements in Badshah's "Genda Phool'' reminded
me of Head of the Department of English of Raiganj University Military
Historian Professor Dr. Pinaki Roy's 2016 thoughtful insights on Tennyson's
"The Lotus-Eaters" at CBPBU where the erudite scholar harvested my
young brain by his critical explorations where he opined that in patriarchy
whether a girl is beautiful or not always matters and "Genda Phool"
which is also emblematic of "compulsory heterosexuality" (a term
Butler borrowed from Adrienne Rich); this song is sandwiched between toxic
masculinity and re-representation of women's body as objects of men's libidinal
energy.
Works Cited
“Badshah – Genda Phool.” YouTube, uploaded by Sony Music India. 26 Mar 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD4Z8dlZPd8. Accessed 23 April 2020.
“Bob Dylan – Chimes of Freedom.” YouTube,
uploaded by Jefferson Davis. 13 Dec 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhGjx7T95lQ. Accessed 23 April 2020.
“Amay
bhashaili re amay dubaili re by Abbasuddin Ahmed.” YouTube, uploaded by Kotha O Sur. 14 Jul 2015, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ToiD5REw8s. Accessed on 23 April 2020.
“Blue Eyes Full Video Song Yo Yo Honey Singh.” YouTube, uploaded by T-Series. 8 Nov 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbyHNASFi6U. Accessed on 23 April 2020.
“Exclusive: LOVE DOSE Full Video Song.” YouTube, uploaded by T-Series. 4 Oct 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvngY4unjn4. Accessed on 23 April 2020.
“Choot V1 Yo Yo Honey Singh.” YouTube,
uploaded by Ap Gaming. 12 Sep 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itVTm5n96Dw. Accessed on 23 April 2020.
“Fevicol Se Full Video Song Dabangg 2 (Official).” YouTube, uploaded by T-Series. 9 Jan 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=zE7Pwgl6sLA. Accessed on 23 April 2020.
“Jennifer Lopez – Ain’t Your Mama.” YouTube,
uploaded by Jennifer Lopez. 6 May 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgmx7z49OEk. Accessed on 23 April 2020.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
edited by Nelson and Larry Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1985, pp.
271-313.
Acknowledgement
I express my
extreme gratitude and heartfelt thankfulness to my inspiration globally
recognised Professor Dr. Saunak Samajdar ( Head of the Department of English,
Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University) and Military Historian Professor Dr.
Pinaki Roy (Head of the Department of English, Raiganj University) for their
unconditional love and motivation which tirelessly enlighten the path of my
literary veracity.