2.4 (October 2002): 358-362
© 2002 National Communication Association

 
The South Asian Image

Manjunath Pendakur

Ananda Mitra. Through the Western Lens: Creating National Images in Film. New Delhi/Thousand Oaks/London: Sage Publications, 1999. 255 pages. Index and filmography. $39.95 (hardcover); $24.95 (paper).

Ananda Mitra’s book offers the simple thesis that there is a connection between racist or ideologically loaded films about South Asians and how white people in the West perceive and act towards South Asian people and their culture. He goes about proving this thesis by analyzing a few feature-length films, intended for mass markets, which have been made in Britain and USA over a 50-year period.

Mitra calls his analytical approach structuralism in the sense that he looks at the cinematic building blocks and their ideological underpinnings. Nearly a hundred pages of the book are spent on discussing his methodological approach and categorizing the films for his critique. While Mitra’s efforts to be rigorous are laudable, as a reader it is hard not to get impatient because the suspense about what he would say about the films often becomes unbearable. To make his case, Mitra draws examples from several films including Wee Willie Winkie, City of Joy, Gandhi, The Man Who Would be King, Heat and Dust, Passage to India, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Mississippi Masala, and Salam Bombay. The key argument is that such films have “together built up a cultural stock and images of specific people and places.” That cultural stock is essentially a product of the colonial gaze and contributes to a derogatory image of South Asians and their culture. Mitra then goes on to pit these selected films against Bhaji on the Beach and My Beautiful Launderette—both made in Britain—to argue that these films are different because they see the community of South Asians with all their myriad contradictions on their own merit. Those films also don’t marginalize the South Asians from the mainstream culture.

Mitra’s analytical approach leans heavily on the textual elements of the films that are seen on the screen. He states that he is unconcerned about how they got there, the director’s intentionality, market considerations, and the role of the distributor/financier, and so on. Occasionally, Mitra deviates from that stated position and quotes the film's director to reveal what she intended to convey in her films (85). Mitra also insists that what might have gone on behind the screen to make the particular movie is not important for analysis and goes further to state that “The Popular is often unconcerned about those details.” The fact of the matter is popular audiences are deeply interested in the lives of the stars and other glitterati, which is exploited by the gossip magazines and fanzines. They are filled with behind-the-scenes infotainment about film stars, production details, advertising and marketing information. In that sense Mitra privileges certain kinds of intertextuality that keep the analysis neat while avoiding others which might muddle his analysis.

Mitra assumes a lot about what the viewer would do with the textual elements in these films. While acknowledging that the texts may have multiple meanings and that people may bring their own “baggage” while experiencing these films, his analytical approach does not include a study of the audience. Both the South Asians and the white majority are assumed to read these films the way Mitra would read them.

Mitra’s readings of the selected films are quite interesting and often compelling. He systematically lays bare the ideological in these films and attempts to show that there is historic continuity in the representation of South Asia and its people in popular cinema as well as news. There is, however, much that is arguable in his analysis. For example, he states that, “Mira Nair establishes the black man as the source of tension in the story about the second-generation Indian [sic] as well. In a regression towards darker skin hues, movies like Mississippi Masala repeatedly produce the darker people as the source of all tension and opposition in the narratives.” One might read that tension as the obvious manifestation of racism in the South Asian community towards the African-Americans, a color-bias that they have brought with them all the way from the Indian subcontinent.

Lumping the films made by filmmakers of South Asian descent along with white Hollywood directors such as Huston or Joffe creates certain problems in the analysis. Films made by major producers who have access to the resources of the Hollywood majors come with certain stylistic and market imperatives as opposed to films made by a Mira Nair or a Hanif Khureshi who raised their production money from independent sources or Channel 4 in UK. Their motivations and goals in terms of what kind of story to tell and to whom would set them apart. Such nuances may have implications for how one would see those films as opposed to the films made by the Majors.

As the author is uninterested in how and why these films got made, he makes categorical statements that are not backed up by research. While explaining why certain films were shot in South Asia, Mitra states, “the motivating role of place demonstrates that Western films have often selected the South Asian part of the world either with a specific narrative purpose in mind, while at other times, that locale provides an adequately exotic backdrop to make a movie popular in the West.” There have been many instances in which Hollywood producers have flocked to South Asia to exploit what were called “frozen rupee funds.” In the 1960s, Nine Hours to Rama was made with such frozen funds. It was India’s official policy until 1991 to force the Hollywood Majors to spend a percentage of their profits from the Indian domestic market on various expenses within India including film production. While that policy has been abandoned because of liberalization, several films including Passage to India, Kim, and the television series, Jewel in the Crown, were all made in India partly with frozen rupees. Attenborough himself has told the adventurous story of his twenty-year search for finance to make the film, Gandhi. Until Prime Minister Indira Gandhi agreed to provide $8 million to fund the production in the early 1980s, all his efforts had failed. That may be a singularly important factor as to why the film ended up as a “great man” genre film and the British colonizers as saviors and promoters of secular democracies. These extra textual factors are important to tell the whole story about what, how, and why regarding the films set in South Asia but intended for the world market.

The book needed a good copy editor to clean up the text. The discussions about methodology pop up in just about every chapter and don’t seem to advance the cause. There are annoying errors. For instance, the name of the Indian and American duo, Merchant-Ivory Productions, is reversed. Sher Khan, the tiger in the Jungle Book, becomes Sher Shah on one page and returns to its original name on another. Professor Patricia Erens is identified as “he.” Spelling errors include misspelled names. Mitra, however, is a clear and forceful writer except when he slips into jargon. For instance, in his discussion of imaging the diasporic community in two films, we get the following incomprehensible paragraph. “Other movies such as My Beautiful Launderette and other textual images also do the same and ultimately these images have implications on the way in which the people are considered in the everyday life of the West. While the images are produced in the regime of representation, where specific connections are drawn between specific representations and subject positions, in the ideological field, similar connections are drawn in the regime of politics and society where the people need to constantly negotiate their existence around the dominant images that have, over time, been circulated in the West.”

In his analysis of City of Joy, Mitra points out that the film “establishes the image of India as a feudal country with well-defined structures of class, status and power. It is a little surprising then that the public sphere of the West is still obsessed with the caste/class system in India and the way in which it becomes palpable in the representation of the train.” If the author argued that there are lots of different kinds of stories to be told of India, I would have no problem. But the argument here appears to be about veracity of the film’s position on the structure of Indian society, which till today remains hierarchical and in many ways feudal. It is hard not to conclude that the author appears to be defensive about India’s class-based society. In a country that has nearly 400 million people below the poverty line, where some 170 million of them are called untouchables living in apartheid conditions, a thousand narratives of that dynamic could be turned into films.

With all these limitations, the book manages to open up a new territory for research, especially the part about how the South Asian community in the West is attempting to redefine itself by creating its own media discourses. Mitra correctly points out the emergence of fusion music and genres such as “Bhangra Rock” to which the second-generation South Asians are dancing these days and are made to feel proud of their transient culture. Mitra makes the sharp observation that the tensions between South Asians attempting to push themselves into the mainstream and the politics of exclusion in the West would actually provide the basis for the ultimate synthesis of the new description of the South Asian image. I wholeheartedly agree.

Manjunath Pendakur is professor of media studies at the University of Western Ontario.