Creating Contact Zones Via Stand-Up Comedy and Defamiliarising the Construct of ‘India’: A Study of Vir Das’s For India

When a stand-up comedian from India performs for a diverse audience, including representatives of both the East and the West, he facilitates a contact zone (Pratt, Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 33–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469 , 1991). Vir Das is a well-known and popular comic from India who often seems to create and occupy such spheres. In his show For India, images that are deeply embedded in India are stripped off of their cultural contexts and are translated in terms of sentiments and concepts that are universally accessible. They are then allowed to float into this zone to interact with the other side of the world. This defamiliarisation process, as suggested by Victor Shklovsky (Art as technique. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/modules/fulllist/first/en122/lecturelist-2015-16-2/shklovsky.pdf , 1917), breaks automated perceptions for the Indian as well as the Western audience. For the Indians, humour comes about when familiar objects and images are dismantled and reconstructed in new contexts, while for the West (taken here as representing the Occident in its status of power), the joke is discovered when their concept of the Orient, which Said points out to be a continuous and consistent network of images, is broken down. This contact zone works as a middle ground, which the Indian audience arrives at when they are made to step away from their place of belonging. The Western audience is pushed into this zone when the translation forces them to step away from their hegemonic construct of the Orient. Defamiliarisation facilitates a contact zone where the East and the West mingle in a cycle of learning and unlearning. This chapter will then attempt to demonstrate how the polarisation of the East and the West, which has its roots in misconstrued knowledge that each embeds in the epistemic network of the other, the lack of middle grounds or middle men, and the formidable nature of Orientalist discourse, is suspended by the stand-up comic through defamiliarisation and of course, through humour.