World movies with a dash of India

“The building took up all your timeNow dwell upon its ruin...”From The Collected Vanities of Bachchoo

My friends Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta have both produced monumental films this year both of which Indian audiences will soon have the opportunity to see. This column is not by way of previewing the films. I’ve been invited this week to speak to a German University audience on the advance that Indian film has made through the process of globalisation. I haven’t read anything about the subject and don’t think very much has been said about it, though I am certain that if I enter words which allude to some nuance of the topic on an Internet search engine, pages from scholars or savants who got there before me will tumble out. So I’m not going to refer to Google, but will make it up as I go along.
Mira’s current film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, sees her confronting the question of Muslim loyalties and the culture of the West. The film is the book version of Mohsin Hamid’s novel which grew out of the events of 9/11 and the presence of a diaspora of South Asians in America who have absorbed and lived within the cultures of its cities. As I said, no reviewing but I will recommend, in laudatory terms, seeing it. Twice!
The earlier very famous film, which dealt with the American aftermath of 9/11, and the issue of Islamist terrorism and the view of Muslims in America was Shah Rukh Khan’s My Name is Khan. It was a Bollywood film which felt as though it was straining every fibre to get away from Bollywood and to be international in its drama and themes. But the inherent genetic codes of Bollywood were inescapable. Though a lot of the dialogue was, authentically or inauthentically, American English, the pathos rather than pathology of the main character, the endeavour as in some Indian fable of the peasant wanting to petition the king, came clearly through.
Don’t mean that negatively. It’s what mainstream Indian films before Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Gurinder Chadha and several others continue to do. My Name is Khan pushed the limits and does represent something of a change — but in the end the hour struck 12 and the coach was a pumpkin again.
Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children is, of course, the film version of Salman Rushdie’s universally acclaimed book. Again, this not being a review, I shall say nothing about its virtues or otherwise. Its preoccupation isn’t an interaction of South Asians with the West, but rather a way of looking at recent Indian history through a prism of Western values and assumptions. It may be argued that Salman’s “magic realism” and his fictional inventiveness owe much more to The Arabian Nights or to the Katha Sagars of Sanskrit or Prakrit than to Tristram Shandy or The Tin Drum. If it was so argued, I would certainly argue back: The manners and mannerisms of Salman’s work may owe something to the orient, but the assumptions and tradition from which the work arises are very Western and even opposed to codes of oriental belief. It would perhaps be labouring the point to refer to the fatal controversies over the conception, writing, publishing, distribution and banning of The Satanic Verses. But having mentioned that (Your Honour), I rest my case.
Both Mira and Deepa have lost nothing of their connection to India, though nothing in their work acknowledges a connection to Indian cinema, its history, evolution or clichés.
Mira has, long before Slumdog Millionaire, explored the underside of Mumbai and Deepa has dealt with, among other themes, the gentle lesbianism in lower middle-class India in Fire and the plight of widows in Water.
There are other diasporic filmmakers such as Ashok Amritraj and M. Night Shyamalan who in the main have worked for the most part within the themes of the West. Both of them have made films in the territories of modern American myths — M. Night in the dimension of psychiatric thrillers and Ashok in the huge dynamic myths of the technological man — as in his recent film Ghost Rider 2.
A very different sort of diasporic filmmaker has now come into view. Chayan Sarkar was educated and grew up in eastern Australia. His debut film, The Sleeping Warrior, has been chosen to compete for the Golden Pegasus Award at the Peloponnesian International Film Festival 2012 in Corinthia and will premiere there on December 4. It has a curious and unique story, which attempts to bring together the mythological Hindu idea of Shakti and the land myths of Australian aboriginal culture.
The success of Sarkar’s attempt is not theological as it sheds no particular historical or pre-historical light on the evolution of compatible beliefs. The success of the combination is political. The story progresses to a dramatic turning point where the belief in and marriage of ancient traditions lead very real characters into a web of Australian politics and the land rights of the original inhabitants of the
continent.
Sarkar has woven the idea of the modern Australian’s quest for spirituality into a political concern with which the Indian audience, acquainted with the tragic and unresolved issue of the land rights of tribals, can identify with. The film will, I suppose, be classified as “art” and may find it difficult to get a commercial theatrical release in India though it’s bound to make its way, with actors well-known to that audience, in Australia.
I am not sure I understand or can get enthusiastic about the amalgamation of myths, but I am sure that the land rights of the poor and deprived need artistic and political exposure. They should inherit, as was famously said, the earth.