| Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
By K Hariharan
Being fair is not unfair after all.
After
nearly two decades of making films in India I have begun
to question a very fundamental issue. “Do we see on
the screen what the camera saw on the location?” Imagine
a typical song sequence in a Hindi film. “Ori Chori,
Dil Se Nikhli, Baat Mori, Maine Pyar Tumhise hai kiya!”
goes the song, which native Bhuvan sings to Gouri, a
dusky village maiden, as it echoes across the cricket
maidan into the imperial bedroom of love-lorn Rachel,
whose heart is in turn betrothed to Bhuvan. Set in the
colonial past of 1837, Oscar nominee Lagaan narrates
the enchanting fable of a noble sacrifice made by an
Englishwoman for the sake of helping out a young native
Indian win his battle against her evil brother and the
colonial forces. How did the film crew picture a colonial
as a protagonist? And how did the viewer make that happen?
Inadvertently Lagaan had made a giant departure and
proved that the Indian viewers had taken a quantum leap!
Being fair was not unfair after all!
It has taken more than 50 years of independent Indian
cinema to finally accept that the white-skinned people
are not all “villains”! Thus far, the white “Englishman”
on the Indian screen had to be a smuggler, a spy or
a narcotics dealer, while the white woman gyrated on
the cabaret floor entrapping the poor brown native male.
Often in revolt the valiant native hero showed off his
“English” ability briefly on the screen only to prove
that it is no big deal to speak the white man’s lingo!
While that is enough for the average Indian “rasika”
to award the hero a TOEFL certificate, Indian scholars
have always seen this “cinematic” racial/ ethnic prejudice
as a typical post-colonial reaction by a nation subjugated
to the dictates of the British Empire for three centuries.
Is it so simple as that? I am sure Nobel laureate V.
Naipaul would get a fit if he ever met these post-colonial
scholars, but then Naipaul and his works do not seem
to make the colonial issue more easy to understand.
However matrimonial ads in Indian newspapers always
express desire for a fair, slim and homely woman as
a bride for tall handsome men with good incomes. Schools
insist that students better learn their English well
if they hope to succeed in life and buy a flat in the
multi-storied city. And the common Indian, be it in
the villages or the city, is still enamored by the “seductive”
charms of the white skinned people and their entourage
of industrial consumer products. And in the back of
their mind they all know that this “seduction” is a
dangerous game!
How do we explain this schizoid attitude? Why does the
Indian have one rule for his political reality and another
for his social reality? Why does he harbor so much hatred
for the white man on the one hand, while expressing
immense fascination for the English-speaking multi-national
American world on the other? Let’s travel to a small
village deep inside south India. The arc light from
the projection room spits out promo modules selling
Dupont fertilizers, Ford tractors, Dove toilet soaps
and Pantene shampoo sachets to a motley group of villagers
assembled to see an MGR film in a temporary cinema tent
somewhere in remote Tamil Nadu. The models and the zany
locales endorsing the products are totally alien to
the humid and arid landscape outside inhabited by shiny
silk-smooth jet black complexioned “natives.” And as
expected, ironically though, the tractors and fertilizers
stand cheek by jowl along with the cows and ploughs
while young maidens rub their faces hard with Dove and
Pantene beauty soaps and shampoos at the old village
pond in an attempt to look at least a little like the
fair sexy sirens who endorsed the magical multinational
products on the silver screen.
Who is real and who is unreal? To me the young dark
maiden rubbing her face with a white Dove soap sees
herself existing in the image of the vivacious model
not as some escapist fantasy, but as the object of her
own desire. She is the character and she is her own
author. She is the director of the “image” that actually
endorses her desire in the name of Pantene and Dove.
Thanks to the plastic interplay of light and color on
the silver screen, she has managed to condemn her jet-black
complexion into a kind of exile that is unimaginable
in any other part of the world, hitherto colonized.
My mind goes back here 120 years ago when the first
movie camera, which filmed The Arrival of the Train,
also doubled up as the projector for the same exposed
film in a theatre just like an audiocassette recorder
plays back the very same sound, which it recorded. The
transport/ transmission mechanism was the same after
all. And so the Tamil village maiden simply manages
to turn the projector a full 180 degrees, transform
it into a cinematographic apparatus and film herself
as the sole purpose for which the script for the film
on Dove and Pantene was conceived. She watches the soap
suds foam rich all over her nude body, oblivious of
the scorching sun, the half-dried pond and the thorny
bush that guards her thin cotton towel.
Apart from the above original technological
oddity, central to the definition of an Indian movie
experience is the elaborate series of codes that operate
to lock the viewer into the experience of an individual
in exile. The camera, the lens and the entire technological
apparatus are the vestiges of a “realistic” and brutal
colonial legacy, which comes to confront a highly medieval
indigenous metaphorical narrative.
Back at the temporary cinema tent the Tamil film is
called Padagotti or “The Boatman.” The great icon MGR
plays the role of a good hero in the role of a boatman.
He was also the chief minister of the state “in reality.”
But the ultra-fair looking MGR was no boatman and so
he had no option but to dress himself up in a way that
resembled and made him “look like” a boatman. Few boatmen
resembled him and yet he was not an impossibility! Why
not? And this is where the racial/ ethnic dimension
of Indian cinema takes a unique position.
The situation is indeed peculiar to post-colonial India,
because one actually has fair looking specimens of the
Caucasian variety in abundance all over north India
and in some small proportion even in the southern landscape.
So to be fair looking was not an unusual phenomenon
after all! One has to travel through Punjab, Kashmir
or Rajasthan to see enough men and women, who if dressed
appropriately, would look like Europeans. Conversely
those who have seen George Cukor’s Bhowani Junction
or Arne Sucksdorff’s Flute and the Arrow would notice
that American actors play the entire list of Indian
characters.
Come to think of it, with our actors, we could actually
compete with the white man’s cinema and all their accompanying
standards of beauty. Come to think of it the Indian
is more Caucasoid than even the British or the American.
Come to think of it the Tamil maiden lathering herself
at the pond was not too far from the desire that her
imagined authorship managed to bestow on her. Just compare
this situation with post-colonial Nigeria or Burma!
Well, that’s another topic.
And yet our post-colonial experience has made us a bigger
slave of our own complex fantasies and phobias. The
average Indian has actually exiled oneself into a mindset
of the “inferior,” symbolized here by the racial notion
of a dark skin tone. I know I am on very delicate grounds
as I tread on such a complex issue. One factor that
partially proves my argument is the enormous sales recorded
by cosmetics companies selling such obviously racist
products as “Fair and Lovely” and a plethora of talcum
powders to a nation where the urge for a fair skin is
quite a common phenomenon. Then there is the blatant
favoring of Asian models at all the beauty pageant contests
held all over the “developed” world in order to induce
thousands of young aspiring Asian girls into reinforcing
the developed world’s standards of beauty and notions
of poise, grace and charm. With such a severe self-bias
I am prompted to ask, “Can Indian cinema express anything
indigenous? Can the images of Indian cinema speak for
Indians? Are Indian movies constantly playing surrogate
expressionists of a white global Americanized dream?”
The answers to these questions will bound
On the other hand for the entire post-colonial world,
be it the far-eastern islands, the West Indies or the
African colonies, Indian cinema and its mythical images
are the only symbols of anti-colonial expression. Intuitively,
the Indian mainstream filmmaker is the only true symbolic
activist of a post-colonial language and culture setting
into motion a narrative that liquidates the very “lack”
that Indians are supposed to be suffering from. By refusing
to adhere to the tenets of European realism, Indian
cinema and their filmmakers are able to put forth a
platform, however fragile, from where all kinds of emotional
expressions can strike roots.
I would like to conclude here by looking at another
dimension. What about those filmmakers who have made
a niche market for themselves with stories of “whites”
in “their” colonial landscape? Ismail Merchant and James
Ivory with their films like Shakespearewallah,Heat and
Dust, Guru, Cotton Mary and their latest Mystic Masseur;
David Lean of Passage to India; Richard Attenborough
with Gandhi; Steven Spielberg with his Temple of Doom;
Roland Joffe and his City of Joy and other films like
The Man who would be King, Gunga Din and Elephant Boy.
Then there are the few “parallel” Indian filmmakers
who ventured into this dangerous arena: Girish Karnad
with his Godhuli, Pradeep Kishen with Massey Sahib and
Betty’s Children, Shyam Benegal and his Junoon and Singitam
Rao with Little John. The films made by western filmmakers
have met with all kinds of response, but undoubtedly
all the films made by Indian filmmakers were unmitigated
disasters both commercial and artistic. Fools rush where
angels fear to tread could be the most appropriate axiom
here. It was not for any other reason that mainstream
Indian filmmakers avoided this concept like the plague
until the entry of Ashutosh Gowariker’s Lagaan.
Lagaan’s success is now history, but one has to enquire
what motivated the rest to make their films with “white”
actors/ characters playing leading roles in the narrative
unlike the rest of Indian cinema, which was content
in having white characters as archetypical villains.
More often than not, the whites were played by actors
from the Anglo-Indian community. Strangely all the “parallel”
films mentioned above, barring the pathetic Little John,
had only white females as the central characters. The
white women were all vehicles of critiquing the “Indian
system,” almost playing the director’s alter egos.
The women were all very adamantly disciplined, unable
to understand the natives’ strange ways of deliberating
their time and apportioning personal space. If this
feeling was expressed by a white male it would have
been considered arrogant and villainous, but said by
a woman it gets subsumed under the guise of a larger
stereotype of women being generally “spontaneous, irrational
and inconsistent.” And in the words of Tessa Perkins
“What the stereotype does is to identify this feature
of the women’s situation, place a negative evaluation
on it, and then establish it as an innate female characteristic,
thus inverting it’s status so that it becomes a cause
rather an effect. It is these features of stereotypes
which explain why stereotypes appear to be false — indeed
are false.” (From Ideology and Cultural Production,
ed. Michael Barrett) I would like to place the same
argument, only this time replacing the female stereotype
under patriarchal authority by the weird native under
the colonial gaze. We now realize that the native has
already been effeminized in the first place and then
to top it these filmmakers have used white females as
a double critic of the very system that they are themselves
subjugated to. Who is criticizing whom? On the other
hand in the works of the western filmmakers like Spielberg
or Joffe, the brown native is naturally weird and sometimes
capable of throwing up some spiritual solutions to their
larger problems of stress and angst without needing
to grow a tuft or sing songs in praise of Lord Krishna!
Their films seem to make an earnest plea to the western
viewers to keep their eyes and ears open for such flashes
of genius and hopefully they might able to bring about
a Close Encounter of the Third Kind and find solution
to inter-galactic problems. Any reasonably intelligent
person will puke on listening to this stupidity for
only the most moronic American will ever believe that
there is real danger lurking in the starry space when
the terrorist is seated next door!
But that is “Orientalism” for the entire world to consume!
But what takes the cake is the bizarre struggle that
M/s Merchant and Ivory seem to be battling in trying
to locate their anguished stories of the white being
left behind in their old colony, which is now an independently
fierce and free native land. Their concerns about the
old colonials are so baffling that I am sure even the
Smiths and Joneses back home would find quite embarrassing.
They are anxiously concerned about what a small Shakespeare
company (Jeffrey Kendall and group in Shakespearewallah)
would do in a small town of North India now that the
British have packed their bags and gone. Or what does
a white woman (Greta Scachi in Cotton Mary) do when
she is unable to breast-feed her child in independent
India? As if during the British Raj she would have managed
to lactate listening to “God save the Queen” every morning
at the parade! M/s Merchant and Ivory’s films resemble
a small antique shop displaying old colonial cars, rosewood
bedposts, long cotton gowns and unfiltered cigarette
cases. The shooting style is like that of an old-fashioned
group photographer who is interested in just focusing
and being realistically all- inclusive. Everything should
be recorded.
In his latest film Mystic Masseur based on Naipaul’s
novel Merchant’s recording machine has reached its apogee,
a celestial point farthest from earth, totally senile
and naive. Gone is the cynicism of Naipaul, the unique
history of the West Indians and all the different ways
that modern cinema is capable of reaching its viewers.
Watching the opening shot of the train arriving at the
station meaninglessly negates all the fascination of
the Lumiere Brothers who cranked a steam engine coming
to a halt at Lyons a full 107 years ago! Ismail Merchant,
the native from Bombay has finally finished constructing
himself in the eyes of his colonial master. His viewfinder
has turned back on him a full 180 degrees.
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End Of Article.....
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