Why Indian middle class is proud of Slumdog Millionaire, not Coldplay video
When I first arrived in England as a student in 1998, a young Irishman walked up to me at the university bar. In an international university, the most common icebreaker is: "So, where you from?" When I said "India", the Irishman said: "Is it true that in India people still wear robes?" I decided to reply with lines from a British band, Blur. It was from a song called "Stereotypes", and the chorus went: "Stereotypes/ There must be more to life". The Irishman and I became friends for life.
Seventeen years later, it turns out that I was in denial. Indian men do wear robes. Holy Indian men wear saffron robes. Another British band, Coldplay, released their new video, "Hymn for the Weekend", this month, and it begins with Indian men in robes. Stereotypes... that's all there is to life! The single topped the India iTunes chart, and set of a rather cute furore on social media.
Funny though how one more pretty love song, released to coincide with the capitalist machine that Valentine's Day has become, managed to generate "controversy" about how India should be portrayed. The white Westerner has always been fascinated by colourful spiritual India. The story continues in the new Coldplay video.
But what to the outsider's eyes is the real India is also a manipulated image, a consciously manufactured and altered duplicity. The colourful taxi in the video, for example, is actually an artwork curated by a Pakistani artist for an exhibition. It's "real", but as much as a toy cab is real.
At one level, we have the obviousness of reaction to a new culture. India is obviously different from Western cultures. And anyone coming from "there" is bound to be struck by the same differences, over and over again. Sound. Colour. Beauty in poverty. The stark contrasts - the slum under the jet plane's wings, the turbaned farmer with a laptop.
There are so many bits and pieces to notice and photograph in India, it does come off as easy, especially when you notice and highlight the same things over and over again. For the Indian viewer, it's a case of plain visual fatigue. Watching the video, my eyes tended to glaze over. I also realised that there are so many clichéd images of India that I remembered those images just because there were not there in the clip. No camels. No elephants. No Rajasthan. No sitar strings. No Dharavi. Not too much incense. Actually I don't remember. Was there incense? See, one just doesn't notice. That's the problem with tourist brochures.
That it's possible to use very Indian images but in new ways can be seen in the early advertisements for MTV India. MTV produced some very lively spots that used hyper Indian imagery but managed to cut through the cliché and be all the more cool for it.
There was one that featured an Indian man getting his ears cleaned by the roadside from a traditional Indian ear-cleaner. The cleaner keeps digging into the offending ear, until he finally pulls out an MTV logo. Simple yet clever. The image stays with you. Job done. More recently brands like Chumbak are playing up Indian cool and have turned it into a lucrative business, putting Indian phrases like "Risky Whisky" on boxer shorts.
In the response to the Coldplay video on social media, what has come to the fore are the anxieties of our middle class. The debate has come to be about the self-image of this Westernised middle class, and how this self-image is offended by a certain portrayal of India by the west. The Indian middle class has always hankered for and craved approval from the west. When they do get it, it's sometimes like a backhanded compliment, and leaves them even more exercised and bewildered. It happened with Slumdog Millionaire. The middle class was proud of the Oscar wins. Why? Then they grumbled: But they only showed an India of slums and poverty. White man came and played up Dharavi excreta. They forgot that the book on which the film was based, was written by an Indian who went to school in Allahabad.
We, as a people, tend often to feel wronged and slighted. Yes, the Coldplay video is riddled with cliché, but Hindi cinema and serials are noisy festivals of stereotyping. In our cinema, anyone who doesn't look like the fair strapping Punjabi hero, the prototype of male good looks, is up for stereotyping. For instance, Bollywood's biggest grosser of all time, 3 Idiots, features a horrible cliché of a south Indian student who speaks Hindi in a "Madrasi" accent. No one complained. In fact, everyone laughed heartily at the accent.
Let me end with a personal story of betrayal by a firangi pop star who discovered herself in India. At the time I arrived in England, quoting lines from Blur songs, I was also a big fan of the Canadian songstress, Alanis Morissette. Her album of spunky angsty ditties, Jagged Little Pill, had turned all of us into instant feminists. Addressing a former lover with a new girlfriend, she screams, "Does she go down on you in a theatre?" Alanis became a star. She became famous. She was in search of larger meaning. Guess what. She came to India and found herself. That September when I arrived in England, her new song was playing on every radio station; it went: "Thank you India, thank you innocence". I felt let down as only an 18-year-old can. Alanis had found herself in India but lost her most loyal Indian fan.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)