The past few months has seen some global attention come India’s way through its creativity channels. The Booker Prize for Arvind Adiga for his debut novel White Tiger and the Golden Globe for A R Rahman for his music track for Slumdog Millionaire have meant a different kind of international exposure for India in the middle of violent events and financial scams.
While there seems to be a buzz building up about the importance of such foreign approval for domestic cultural products (and now the wait to see if Rahman will walk away with a first-ever Indian Oscar), there is an equally strong buzz about how creative pieces like White Tiger and Slumdog, in fact, purchase ratings and approval and awards abroad by swivelling the spotlight on the seamier side of the Indian reality; that this gore-and-grime realism is not the ‘real’ India and merely represents an opportunist re-orientation of poverty as pornography.
Of course, there are gradations and hierarchies within this too. While Adiga’s expose of the murkier aspects of the Indian boom-bubble is seen as shallow, amateurish and even as tasteless, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog is slotted as far more ‘authentic’ in its representation of the squalor and menace of Mumbai’s underbelly than the romanticism and exoticisation of the city in, say, Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay.
Such debates are not too original in the context of discussions on authentic representations of India. One section here has always been prickly about negative representations of India at home or abroad. From the time Mahatma Gandhi dismissed the Mayo document as a sanitary inspector’s report, we have had numerous instances in the media as well as in the public, of the demand for sanitised and airbrushed narratives on our ‘reality’.
Even Satyajit Ray got the stick for presenting Indian 'reality' in a manner not palatable to another part of India. French film maker Louis Malle and spiritual seeker Aghehananda Bharati saw their works being banned here. The ‘new wave’ film-makers were attacked as peddlers of poverty. Writers who so much as hinted that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” have been dismissed as merchants of doom. Indian missions and mission-heads abroad have been particularly severe on exhibitions by Indian photographers documenting Indian ‘reality’ and have almost always interfered and ordered such exhibitions packed up. The most bizarre of these was in 1991, when the Indian ambassador to Germany, A Madhavan personally proscribed a special exhibition of the works of the most important Indian press photographers. Even more weird was when, in 1988, the Indian Ambassador to Moscow T N Kaul, went after Sahaja, a short film conceptualised by dancer Chandralekha and directed by the leading Malayalam film maker Aravindan. The film was on conventions of female impersonation in Indian performing arts, of male dancers performing female roles. It had shots of Kelucharan Mahapatra, Vedantam Satyanarayana Sarma, Kodamalur Karunakaran Nair and such maestros. T N Kaul’s famous line was, “We don’t want these hijras to be shown here”.
The trouble, perhaps, is that most people mistake the genre called ‘realism’ for ‘reality’, whereas there need be no connection between the two. Realism, in fact, distances itself from reality and constructs the semblance of reality. However, it is a representation, not the thing itself. For example, a murder or a riot or a caste-abuse in a novel or a film cannot be mistaken for the actual thing. But we have let this narrative genre assume the overarching authenticity and power of reality itself. And an MGR or an Amitabh Bachchan vanquishing twenty thugs at once is received in audience minds as a real, factual event.
So how ‘authentic’ as reality are any of the popular Hindi or Tamizh films? I am facing a similar conundrum here in Toronto where I’ve been part of a week-long conference and festival on contemporary Indian dance. There is an identical problematic in the area of performing arts too. The Indian diaspora continues to hold on to the concept of Bharatanatyam or Odissi or Kathak as the real, authentic culture of India. They now have the resources and the clout to dictate back to India the terms on what constitutes ‘Indian Tradition’. Any attempt to rethink these art forms is seen as an attempt to meddle with it and dilute its ‘spiritual’ purity, which is construed as its primary cultural capital.
Any narrative, whether film or fiction, which parasites upon ‘real’ stories is certain to attract such hostile reception from one section. However, we also see that daily ‘news’ on TV has a more overpowering ‘affekt’ on people now than art. So much so that art feels compelled to plagiarise from ‘news’. Both White Tiger and Slumdog might garner further awards. But they will also have to pay a price for their representational folly of having pricked the bubble.
