03 Mar 2009 |
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Adebowale Oriku During the heyday of colonialism, India was favoured as the Jewel in the Crown of the imperial Queen Victoria. Among the countries of the empire populated by people who were not predominantly ‘white’ like Australia and Canada, India was the flagship, the supergalley, among the flotilla of British colonial vessels. Which was why it wasn’t easy for the British to let go when crunch time came. The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott captures for me the tumultuous relationship between India and England in the dying days of the Empire. Richard Attenborough’s biopic of Ghandi is also a powerful depiction of what really happened in the days before India got its independence. Since independence the relationship between India and Britain has been rather equable - there has never been any lightning-size flashpoints between the two countries. They seem to have come to an accommodation that the embers of ancient passions should be left to die quietly. Today, Britain is home to millions of people the Old-India extraction - India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - doctors, civil servants, shopkeepers and, of course, writers. Salman Rushdie is the preeminent writer from the Indian subcontinent who exemplifies how subliminally Anglicized some of the Indians living in the United Kingdom have become. In spite of his recent attempt to become fully cosmopolitan, to live out what he writes in his fictive eclectica, Rushdie had gone to live in New York and had written that awful yawn of a novel (Fury) about the city, but he is still far more ‘English’ in more ways than he would like to admit. Only last year he was rewarded with a knighthood. I’d rather not mention the curmudgeonly VS Naipaul who sees his ancestral India as one huge putrid donnybrook. Unlike Rushdie who still goes out of his way to contribute somewhat constructively (and sometimes not so constructively) to issues concerning the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie doesn’t think Paul Scott’s novels about the last days of the British Raj are as great as some critics – mostly British – would like to believe. He believes Scott’s set of novels on India inadvertently burnishes racial blinkers and endorses old colonial attitudes. A year after Rushdie published his Midnight’s Children, the film Ghandi was released by the British director/actor Richard Attenborough. Again Rushdie had dismissed the film as ‘much-Oscared movie Ghandi,’ he tutted the effort was only a needless ‘saintmaking’ of an exotic Eastern figure. Rushdie does not like Ghandi and what he considers his ‘sloganized’ nonviolence method of dealing with the English colonizers as cheap. Which brings me to the word Orientalism. From the latter half of the last century, Orientalism is perhaps the most bandied word in university classes, alongside phrases like literary studies, cultural studies, postmodernism and other buzzwords of slick scholarliness. Orientalism was once a rarely-used word, more amenable to sunnier and more colourful interpretations before the Palestinian/American scholar, the late Edward Said, made it pregnant with racial and cultural leeriness, made it more off-colour and suspect. Before, the way such a western author as the voluptuary Richard Burton depicted the West as a place of romance and adventure, of belly-dancers, houris, harems, closet homosexuals, spices and curry, was the standard image of the Orient the eyes of the West. But in his 1977 book, Orientalism, Said argues that the East in the eyes of the West is also dirty, decadent, underdeveloped and in decline, and that any romantic views expressed by a western person about the East is often mere condescension, if not overt deprecation. In the 1970s and 80s, Edward Said’s Orientalism was the inclinational text among scholars in most of the middle-east, bar Israel, and the Orientalist current of thought also had some impact in the south East Asia, in both Pakistan and India. Before he died in 2003 Said, who spent most of his adult life in America, was reviled by the establishment figures in the country and by reactionary university lecturers. Although it was likely that the Islamic hijackers would have listened more to the rantings of Osama bin Laden than read Said’s book, he was even blamed for ‘911’ by some of the more poisonous and bitchy among American wingnuts. This is not as perverse as it might look, as today every sort of slight or even comment, or acts that are not all in the least exceptionable are shoehorned under the sin of Orientalism. Although he would not allow himself to be tagged an Orientalist, Salman Rushdie’s responses and positions have been tinged with indignations against perceived Orientalism (as shown above). But in certain ways, Rushdie represents the paradox of Orientalism - recall the fatwa placed on his head by Iran’s Ayatollah, and how bonfires were made of the novel The Satanic Verses, a book in which the Islamic prophet Mohammed is made out as more lushly human than Muslims would allow. A zealous defender of the East, a fortiori of the Middle East, would not write what Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses. Although the Ayatollah said Rushdie deserved the fatwa because he had Islamic roots, one wonders how deeper and sourer the feelings would have been if it was an indigenous Englishman who wrote The Satanic Verses. Of course he would not have been given any quarter either. The Danish cartoonists who drew Mohammed with a booby-trapped turban were not Muslims nor were their ancestors even Muslims, but they would easily have been killed by irate Islamists like the Dutch filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered in Amsterdam by a screwy mullah. Beyond Islam - the seminal religion of the Orient - cultural interpretation and mere attitudes of Western people have called up sometimes ridiculous extreme reaction. A couple of years ago, an Indian film star participated in Britain’s Big Brother zoo-TV programme. A half-literate young British young woman had been seen to be bullying and passing rather not-quite-racist slurs on the Indian woman. Most people rightly condemned the young Englishwoman’s lack of grace, but in India this had given certain people another opportunity to burn the British flag, to march on the streets and shout Death to the West. Sometimes you have to wonder whether the East have even forgiven the West for imposing themselves on them as ‘Masters.’ When the film Slumdog Millionaire came out, the promotional noise was too impelling that I had to take time out to go and watch it in the cinema. While watching, I realised that the film drew on a lot on pictorial lyricism. The story is enjoyable all right, a rom-com of sorts, but between the start and the last roll of the camera when boy finally clinches girl - hey, Indians don’t kiss, or do they? - there is plenty to excite as well as repel. I would not even begin to rehearse the storyline as a film review is not my intention here. Not since I read the series of naturalistic novels by Emile Zola depicting the Great Unwashed of the late 19th century France have my senses been assaulted with so much grunginess in the existence of certain classes of humans. Slumdog lays out the filthy linen of Indian poverty right there in front of everyone. Goodness! The oozy bleakness of life in the slums. The commingling of the economically noiseless and the socially noisome. The unsmiling subsistence in the muck, a true example of humans living in sty. And the broadbrush shittiness spread over everything in the shanties of Mumbai where the film is mainly set. There is a scene when the little urchin main-character drops into a pit latrine and quickly crabs his way out in order to meet a film star who has paid a rare visit to the slum. To watch a child covered up even in ersatz excrement on big screen was all but disquieting. It reminded me the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen saying, “Zola descends into the sewer to bathe himself…” Slumdog is dirty realism at its best. The film ends rather hopefully and I really do feel called upon to repeat the word ‘feelgood.’ Apart from the fact that the word has almost been overused for the film, somehow it still suggests itself. But really I think the film is rather grittily feel-full than feelgood. And a lot of people in India are not happy about this. The country has been enjoying a reputation recently, as a newly-arrived economic power, growing in massive leaps. From the Dharavi slum where the film is set to the pages of newspapers there were strong condemnations of depiction of the Indian poor. We are not Slumdogs, the slumdwellers protested. And the Indian broadsheets brahmins were beside themselves too. The problem is, the brains behind the film are not Indians. As a matter of fact they are English: from the director Danny Boyle to the screenwriter Simon Beaufoy. And in the hot huff of their anger, Indians who do no like the way their country is presented often forget that a thinly-spun goldpot story written by an Indian - Q&A by Vikas Swarup - provided the matrix for the film. But of course, there is filmic jazzing-up and vivification of Swarup’s novel, anyone who’d been to India and its slums might even say the filmmakers do not offer the full picture. And they really can’t – it’s only a film. What they have done is to bring out in bold relief the nitty-gritty, open up clothed tumour, the bald reality of the people on the ground, in the morass. I know there are a lot more positive things happening in the Dharavi slum than kids bathing in shit, or sinister hustlers, or underaged girls force-ripened into prostitution, the more dispassionate among Indians have taken the film for what it is, a fair representation of the poor of their country. It is no longer news that Slumdog carted away a lot of Oscar statuettes - Best Film and Best Director among others. And something had happened. Just about the time the film was garnering awards in the US, the currents of opinions in India had almost come full circle. News channels broadcast the glory that had come to Bollywood and India with the Oscar wins, and in the Dharavi slum, scores of people gathered round a box TV - now becoming extinct in the West - to watch little boys and girls who lived in the slum who had been used in the film by Director Boyle. Although there are still some minor fits of pique here and there about the film, India seems to have accepted Slumdog as its own, a curious instance of success corralling a multitude as kin. Even then in last Saturday’s Guardian, Salman Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai, ripped into the film as being ‘ridiculous,’ an improbable rags-to-riches fantasy. This is no more than should be expected from Rushdie, keeping a diced bit of his heart in India and the whole of his cerebral head in the West. This sort of choppiness typifies the relational tide flowing between Britain and its former colonies. A couple of years ago Bollywood, Mumbai’s film industry, came round to England to celebrate its accomplishments, with its biggies like Amitabh Bachchan being part of the parade of stars. Just like her Nigerian counterpart there is nothing an Indian author would like more than to be recognised in Britain and even win British Prizes. And every Bollywood actor would also like attain the tinselly heights of Hollywood - which, on the probability scale, is even more likely to happen than any Nollywood artist, some of whom I have also heard pining for Hollywood, to see himself driven past the tantalizing mountainside nonalogue spelling HOLLYWOOD. I have taken the Slumdog story as a metaphor for the relationship between Britain - or even the wider West, especially the United States - and countries that may be called ‘developing,’ especially those that were outposts of old imperial nations like France and England. Is it Love/Hate? Possibly. Love/Love. Often, but usually understated. Or is it more of Love/Envy? I have some Nigerian friends and acquaintances who would never see things in a balanced way whenever they are analysing how they stand in relation to Britain. I had a chat with a 65 year old Nigerian man recently. He spoke of the United Kingdom and its people with so much unbidden bile and animus that I could only wonder why he had chosen to live in the country for all of 45 years. If he does not look the picture of ozonic health, I may just as well say he hates the very air he breaths in this country. So far as he is concerned Britain is responsible for every woe and ill Nigeria is experiencing today, even the illness of President Yar Adua. When I asked him why he did not just pick up his things and leave the country he detests so much, he said he was not thinking of giving up his pension for now. No, this has nothing to do with dotage. A friend of mine in his late thirties always bores me with how Nigeria is now becoming a better place to live in, how he believes Britain is as corrupt as Nigeria, if not more, how there is a grand conspiracy in the West to broadcast bad news about Nigeria and Africa as a whole. I asked whether he wanted the British press to stop broadcasting the murderous excesses of Mugabe, for instance – well, he answered in the affirmative, Western journalists should just ignore Mugabe and go pitching after good news from Africa. He believed Ghana’s successful polling should be repeated on BBC for as many days as possible. Call it Afrocentricism or Africanism, this is the worst parody of Orientalist thinking, this lack of mature, crystalline and cool-headed argument when discussing a country battered by its genealogy of bad leaders vis-à-vis the old colonial ruler. Although this behaviour is so infantile that it does not really bear rationalizing, one may try to understand it from the angle of Jungian ‘inferiority complex’ – or shall we say Slumdog Complex? Black folks slumming their lives out in whited council flats. And how easy it is to prick the chauvinistic balloon of these overseas-trapped Nigeria-lovers. The friend who thinks so badly of the United Kingdom has been living in the country for some fifteen years or so, and according to him he should have gone back to his beloved Nigeria, but he is looking into the possibility of finding a white - qua white - British businessman he could sell some investment ideas to, who may be willing to accompany him to Nigeria as business-partner. Talk about waiting for godot and gorging on your vomit while doing that.
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