COMMUNITY STEREOTYPING IN BOLLYWOOD / PUBLISHED IN THE HINDU BUSINESSLINE

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:

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/tp-others/tp-blink/wherefore-art-thou-madrasis/article8397741.ece

Photo captions: Stills/posters from (1) Kapoor & Sons (2) Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (3) Chennai Express

Photographs courtesy:

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapoor_%26_Sons

(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ek_Main_Aur_Ekk_Tu

(3) Disney UTV

REVIEW 347: KATTI BATTI

Release date:	September 18, 2015
Director:	Nikhil Advani
Cast: Language:	Imran Khan, Kangna Ranaut, Vivan Bhathena Hindi

Among the many ways one might react to Katti Batti, there are these two options:

(a) laugh till you cry at the sheer nothingness of it all; or

(b) be bored to tears.

I read a report this morning that Aamir Khan wept after he watched this film starring Kangna Ranaut and his nephew Imran Khan. Now I think I know why.

Katti Batti is director Nikhil Advani’s second fiasco in eight days. He helmed last week’s Hero, which feels National Award-worthy in comparison with this latest disaster. It’s hard to explain the story to you, since the script seems unsure of what it wants to be: a youthful romance about the challenges that the 21^st century throws up or a romcom with a tragic twist or a love triangle or (in passing) a he-said-she-said-style relationship saga or all the above. I’m going with all the above = a boring mish-mash of too many things that add up to naught.

One of the film’s ambitions is painfully obvious: it wants to be considered cool. It has no philosophy or ideology via which to achieve that goal, so instead, when the leads – Payal Malhotra (Kangna) and Madhav Kabra a.k.a Maddy (Imran) – start living together, characters repeat the term “live-in relationship” more than once, in case we don’t get how ‘modern’ they are; someone reads 50 Shades of Grey to a woman on her deathbed; Maddy works for an architecture firm with funky illustrations on its bathroom walls; and the said firm is populated with sundry cardboard cut-outs for characters including a raucous south Indian boss called Ramalingam, an elderly Mrs D’silva who says “my child” as Bollywood Christians always do and a Punjabi client called Ahuja who is as loud as Bollywood Punjabis always are.

The biggest claim to coolth is laid when Maddy relates his dukhbhari kahani to his buddy Roger.

At one point, Roger cuts in to say: Chalo (come).

Maddy asks: Kahaan (where)?

Roger replies gravely: Ek aisi jagah jahaan sab tumhari baatein samjhenge (To a place where everyone will understand you).

Ooh.

Cut to a Sufi Music Festival at what seems like a heritage location. Deep. So very deep.

At the fest, Roger performs with his band which he calls (I need you to sit down and hold on to something while you read the next bit) FOSLA = Frustrated One-Sided Lovers Association. Not even an original, I’ve since learnt. But so cool, na?

About that hard-to-explain story… Middle-class, earnest Maddy and wealthy, bohemian Payal meet at architecture school. Pricey Payal watches in amusement as he makes an ass of himself over her before the entire college…because, you know, that’s what Hindi film heroines do. He wants love, she’s wants “timepass” – now there’s a cinematic gender role reversal that should have been explored, but it goes nowhere, lost in a surfeit of pretty frames and gimmicky editing. They fall in love, they shack up for five years, they break up, then he tries to get her back. The non-linear narrative resorts to multiple flashbacks that fail to camouflage the film’s emptiness.

Katti Batti is not merely superficial though. It comes across as being full of itself, clearly convinced that it is emotional, profound and often funny when in truth it is pretentious, pompous, manipulative, stretched beyond endurance and boring.

The trailer created an impression that this is a film about a girl and a boy with Kangna’s meatier, more interesting character stealing the show the way Kareena’s Geet did though she and Shahid Kapoor got equal screen time in Jab We Met. False. Katti Batti is about a boy. It is primarily devoted to Maddy’s effort to get back with Payal. She is missing from much of the action. And the story is told from his point of view, with Imran’s drab Maddy virtually monopolising the screen and Kangna’s Payal – the potentially more exciting character – a supporting player.

Having relegated this fine actress to the sidelines, Katti Batti then rubs chilli in our wounds by giving her more hairstyles than she has lines to speak. Imran is sincere and likeable, but he has his limitations and needs a good director to draw out the best of him. Unfortunately, Nikhil is no Abbas Tyrewala, but he does give us a silly airport chase scene which falls flat in comparison with the silly-yet-hilarious climax of Abbas’ Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na that launched Imran.

Even Shankar Ehsaan Loy’s pleasantly peppy songs Lip to lip and the cheekily titled Jaago Mohan pyaare (cheeky, since it shares its name with the devastatingly melancholy song featuring Raj Kapoor and Nargis in Jaagte Raho) are wasted here. The latter is played at screaming volume for some reason. Perhaps to distract us from the pointlessness of the proceedings?

Doesn’t work. You see, Katti Batti is an irredeemable, unsalvageable mess.

Rating (out of five): ½

CBFC Rating (India):	U/A
Running time:	140 minutes

Poster courtesy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katti_Batti