9/8/2004 » Film, Literature

Blogger Priya Lal recently wrote about the ill-defined standards of the Oscars’ foreign film category:

At this year's Academy Awards, there was no Indian film among the wide array of contenders vying for the "Best Foreign Film" prize. Why?... none of them was Indian enough... Indian movies have to uphold some kind of traditional South Asian essence and meet some ill-defined standard of cultural "authenticity"...

[W]esterners, now in the form of art-house filmgoers, expect the increasingly sophisticated and eminently modern filmmaking techniques and sensibilities (of Indians, Arabs, Africans, East Asians, etc. to ultimately convey subject matter that fulfills certain still-pervasive Orientalist fantasies of an imagined, exotic, and premodern Other.

The preference for the ancient was also true at UC Berkeley, where in the South Asia department you couldn’t spit without hitting an expert in Freudian interpretation of mythology, but where there were no classes available on modern India. And it’s been true for ages in literature, where there’s been little mass market to date for novels about second-gen desi subjects. Second-gen writers like Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali have largely been re-telling their parents’ tales. It’s interesting as a topic but repetitive as an entire oeuvre, made even worse by book covers which all feature nubile brown women with mehndi hands and first-gen authors who willingly swan with incense and sarod music at book readings.

In contrast, one of the great freedoms of the UK market is the ability to tell a second-gen tale and have it sell; Meera Syal, though better known for Bombay Dreams, wrote an excellent, chatty second-gen novel called Life Is Not All Ha Ha Hee Hee. Of course, the first thing successful British Asians want to do is branch out into the 10x larger U.S. market. There’s plenty of precedent in second-gen works by Asian-Americans, more Better Luck Tomorrow than The Joy Luck Club, more Lowbright than Ming the Merciless, but they’ve not been mass market.

The exoticism line is porous, of course, and desis draw from their culture’s most intense palettes regularly. Peacocks and payals are gorgeous when judiciously applied, and any desi could be forgiven for admiring a royal, nose-ringed nariz evocative of Mughal miniature. It gets annoying mainly when lit and film treats culture as a tourist backdrop, a Potemkin village with the thinnest faciæ of stereotype, when desi actors are told their look is not ‘Indian enough,’ when directors ask for the Peter Sellers / Gunga Din caricature of a desi accent rather than the real one, like Apu on The Simpsons and the dad’s accent in Harold and Kumar. That’s just insulting.

The great irony is that the most ‘authentic’ desis, those raised in India, are often bored with their own palettes and lack of cultural diversity. They’re simultaneously impervious to charges of selling out and, with the cosmopolitan ones, more interested in outmarrying than desis raised in the U.S. It’s the grass-is-greener effect: in London, you can sell burgers as Authentically American! while in the U.S., wine proclaims itself D.O. status. (Granted that nobody sells Tasty English food! per se.)

Can’t we all just get along? Can’t we all just agree to consign mehndi to weddings, mangos to dinner plates and the words exotic and spicy to the seventh circle of hell?