India at the O(scars)

India is the land of snake charmers and shamans, it is the land where poverty dwells and sells. These Western preconceptions about the relatively nascent south-east Asian nation have surpassed the stature of a cliche. In other news, Bollywood, the Hindi film industry and India’s most effective soft power, was once labelled as the 'trashiest film industry' by the Westerners. (Stadtler)

This paper is not a scathing remark on the Westerners per se, it is a general critique of one of their most celebrated institutions, the Academy Awards. Specifically, this paper deals with the portrayal of India in the films that get nominated at the Oscars.  

Let us begin from the fifties. Indian films like Mehboob Khan’s Mother India and Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and the ensuing Apu trilogy piqued the interest of the West. The former got an Oscar nomination, and etched its name in the annals of film history to be the first Indian film to be nominated in the Best Foreign Film category at the Oscars. The latter’s director received a Lifetime Achievement Award forty years later, almost on his deathbed. 

Why these two films? Because these two unabashedly show the more rural, darker and poorer side of India. And considering their time-frame, these films seem realistic. India in the 1950s was indeed a poor nation and the Apu trilogy deals with the India of the past, albeit rewinding only a decade or so. With their tragic plots, these films have all the ingredients of pleasing the West. People in tatters, the typical anti-capitalistic plebeian caricature and the like. Such paradigms are usually ascribed to the far-left, accusing it of romanticising poverty. More hilarious is the fact that such left-leaning, seemingly socialist films capitalise on the pathos of poverty.

This pathos, this tragedy of the poor is India’s unique selling proposition at the Oscars. It is genre-agnostic. A period sports film like Lagaan has various aspects to laud, the music being one. But the overarching theme of the poor Indians versus the rapacious British is possibly what draws the film to Western eyes.

“If you want to market Hindi cinema to the West, you have to give the West what it wants to see, and generally that is maharajas or poverty. They don't understand Indian girls in miniskirts. You can quote a Hindi film..but the whole picture won't work”.

Prof. Rachel Dwyer’s pithy observation (The Guardian Friday Review) says it all. On having a quick recap of Bollywood films being accepted at the Oscars, one can safely say that the Western and global audience still feels that India, as an entirety, is still battling the odds of 1947. Such presuppositions fare better with politicians. But this politics is what attracts the West to India. Progress of any kind, is either unseen or indigestible. The successful Indian businessman of Guru is not as interesting to the Academy as a boy covered in faeces. 

Pardon the abhorrent comparison but the movie being referred to here is the critically acclaimed and Oscar bedecked Danny Boyle film, Slumdog Millionaire. True, it showcases India’s reality of having a majority of the poor and helpless, but it does not do justice to, say, the lakhs of successful or endearing businesspeople or civil servants working day and night to make the country stand better globally. Things become more unfair and embarrassing because the film is for Western and global audience, by a Western director but describing the conditions of life of an exoticised oriental India. The Westerners did the same pornographic distortions to the Kamasutra, one of India’s most liberal texts on sex and sexuality.

This is the kind of cinema India does not choose but has to ingest due to the prestige of the awards a film centred around it has received. This critique does not discount the heart-warming fact that Slumdog Millionaire helped fetch Oscars to Indians like A. R. Rahman and Gulzar for their genius contributions to the music and sound of the film. This instance brings one to think that India indeed has so much more talent, culture and unparalleled diversity to offer, rather than merely begging for alms on the silver screen.

The thesis of this paper is not drafted at the behest of a jingoistic, over-nationalistic soul. It is a treatise on the treatment these awards offer to the racial and regional minorities globally. While the Academy has often been called out for its White supremacy, it has been actively working on its stance on diversity. Fresh guidelines on diversity requirements for a film come out every year, issuing all kind words of inclusivity. But does the Academy do justice to the minorities? Or does it merely don a sobbing mannequin of cosmopolitan world culture? The answer is left to the reader’s judgement. 

Works Cited

Stadtler, Florian. “Cultural Connections: ‘Lagaan’ and Its Audience Responses.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 3, 2005, pp. 517–524. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3993842. Accessed 31 Oct. 2020.

J Winter, 'Bombay breakout', The Guardian Friday Review, 12 December 2003, p 11.