Wherefore
Art Thou, ‘Madrasis’?
The non-caricatured
portrayal of Punjabis and Tamil Nadu in Kapoor
& Sons is unusual in a Bollywood otherwise ridden by community
stereotypes if not exclusions
By
Anna MM Vetticad
Imagine a
Hindi film revolving around a Punjabi family, with not a Bhangra in sight.
Imagine a Hindi film set in Tamil Nadu, with not an “aiyyaiyo” or an oily-haired, clownish ‘Madrasi’ prancing around in
the vicinity.
Actually,
imagine a Hindi film set in Tamil Nadu where a song and dance is not made about
the setting, but it just happens to be what it is because — believe it or not!
— Tamil Nadu is in India.
If you
have watched Shakun Batra’s Kapoor & Sons (Since 1921),
you need not strain your imagination because all these elements — rare though
they are in Bollywood — converge on this one canvas. The film has received
glowing reviews, audience acclaim and excellent opening collections. Hopefully,
its success will be a message to the rest of the film industry, that viewers
are open to an unexaggerated depiction of the multi-cultural Indian reality
served in an intelligently entertaining package.
There are
two issues at hand here: first, the stereotyping of certain communities on
screen; second, exclusion.
Though
Punjabis have for decades dominated the Mumbai-based Hindi film industry a.k.a. Bollywood, the community has
been inexorably caricatured by Hindi cinema, with Sikhs getting the worst of
it. A foreign viewer of this fare is likely to assume that all Punjabis are
loud, boisterous, unsophisticated, prone to dancing the Bhangra at the drop of
a hat and punctuating their speech with the exclamatory “balle balle”.
“What’s
wrong with the Bhangra and balle balle?”
is the most common response to this criticism. Answer: nothing wrong at all.
But a stereotype is a stereotype even if it is not negative, because it ignores
the heterogeneity inherent in all communities. When perpetuated long enough, it
can also be annoyingly reductive to those at the receiving end, even when
accompanied by goodwill.
Unfortunately,
most of us do not see this until we are at that receiving end.
A Malayali
friend once told me of how he called out, “Oye
Sardarji, ki haal hai? Balle balle!”
when he passed a Sikh gentleman on a Thiruvananthapuram street. “They are jolly
people, you know,” he said with evident warmth. All I could think of though was
that he sees Sikhs as “they”, not one among “us”; and how irritating it has
been for me, as a Malayali born and brought up in Delhi, to constantly hear
stupid questions from seemingly educated people. “Are you a Madrasi?” …
“Aishwarya Rai is so fair, how can she be south Indian?” … “You said you are a
south Indian so what do you mean by saying you are not a Madrasi?” … And from
the slightly well-informed lot who are aware that south India is not a single
state, this: “Are you a Malayalam?”
Again,
there is nothing wrong with being from ‘Madras’ (except that I am not) or being
dark-skinned. Just as there is nothing wrong with being brilliant at
mathematics, but is it not silly for a white American to assume that all Indian
kids are great at maths? A stereotype is a stereotype, however positive it may
be.
Sadly,
most of Bollywood remains disinterested in portraying multi-culturalism
realistically although it is the Indian reality. Sixteen years into the 21st
century, the inclusion of a non-Hindu, non-north Indian or non-Maharashtrian
character in a mainstream, commercial film is usually engineered with a pointed
purpose.
Muslims?
Explanation: secularism or lately, terrorism.
Parsis,
Gujaratis? Explanation: comic relief.
Sikhs?
Explanation: secularism and/or comic relief.
Four years
back, when Shakun Batra named the leading lady of his first film, Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (EMAET) Riana Braganza, he recalls being
asked by several industry folk, “Why does the heroine need to be Goan
Catholic?” Reason: his script did not typecast her as a quasi-foreign, skimpily
dressed, sexually available cabaret dancer, secretary or gangster’s moll who
could barely speak English, which is how most Christian women were once
portrayed by Hindi cinema.
Bollywood
dropped Christian characters in the 1990s, when it became socially acceptable
to dress Hindu heroines in small outfits, get them to dance sexily and make
them sexually active before marriage. It is not the Christian stereotype that
has disappeared from Hindi cinema (that would
have been a cause for celebration); what has disappeared is the community
itself. It goes without saying then that EMAET’s atypical Riana seemed pointless to
Bollywood in 2012.
Some
critics slammed Chennai Express (2013) for
caricaturing south Indians. Me? I was relieved to see it. If it was OTT, it was
equitably so with all its characters; it did not revive the nauseating
‘Madrasi’ cartoon from an earlier era, exemplified by Mehmood in Padosan (1968); and it did not laugh at anyone, it laughed with. Besides, it got north
India to watch a supposedly Hindi film replete with Tamil dialogues — without
subtitles!
In any
case, clichés can only be born of repeated, repetitive portrayals. With south
Indians, the problem now is exclusion. Like Dalits, people of the Northeast and
Christians, southerners too have now virtually disappeared from mainstream
Bollywood films. It is hard to decide which is worse: absence or a trite
presence?
It is only
fair to state here that Bollywood is not the only Indian film industry guilty
of such crimes. Discussing the misrepresentation of north Indians by south
Indian cinema, for instance, would require more space than is available here.
Try convincing a ‘Madrasi’ filmmaker of that though.
(This article
was first published in The Hindu Businessline on March 26, 2016)
Original link:
Photo captions: Stills/posters from (1) Kapoor & Sons (2) Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (3) Chennai Express
Photographs courtesy:
(3) Disney UTV
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