28 DIASPORIC FILM MAKING

1.0 INTRODUCTION

The Indian Diaspora worldwide has only in the last quarter of the twentieth Century started making films that image their lives in the diasporic locations and also re-image their old homeland India. So film making by diasporic Indians is a fairly recent activity as compared to literature written by diasporic Indians but given its wider reach, the cinematic medium has in this short time reached out to a very large audience and has achieved global visibility and garnered awards as well.

What are also noteworthy are the locations from where this cinema is emanating, as well as the diasporic origins of the film makers themselves. Most of these films are from diasporic locations such as the U.K., USA and Canada. The film makers themselves also belong mainly to the first generation postcolonial professional diasporas about which you have studied in the other modules of this course. Even when one of the very well-known diasporic film makers from the U.K. is a double diasporic from Kenya, GurinderChadha, her ancestors are not from the indentured labour group taken to this erstwhile East African colony of Britain, but from the entrepreneurial Indian diaspora there which had followed in the wake of the indentured labour diaspora. What could be the reasons why the older colonial indentured diaspora has not made films though it has written acclaimed literature? My reference here is to V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel Prize winning writer from the West Indies, whose ancestors were taken to this distant British imperial outpost as indentured labour. Maybe the answers to these questions I have raised will come to you as we move further into this subject.

Although a late cultural manifestation of the Indian diaspora, films made by Diasporic Indians around the globe today are studied at the cross roads of several disciplines – postcolonialism, feminism, diaspora, transnationalism and queer studies. Several academics in India and in the West have written scholarly articles and books on this cultural production (Desai, 2004; Jain 2009; Sohat and Stam, 2003; Gopinath 2005).

2.0 DIASPORIC INDIAN FILM MAKERS IN THE U.K.

The earliest examples of films made by Indian diasporics come to us from the U.K. Given the long history of the Indian diaspora in Britain this is not a surprising development.

The Indian Diaspora in Britain dates back to the 18th centurywhen the East India Company brought back Indian scholars, lascars and workers to Britain.Over 70,000 Indians lived in Britain by the beginning of the 20th century. After decolonization in 1947, many more Indians migrated to the U.K. to fill in the gaps left in the labour market due to the fatalities suffered by British youth in World War II. Britain in the late 1940s and early 1950s also invited professional Indians such as doctors, nurses and teachers to take up jobs in the newly envisioned welfare state. Labelled ‘Asians’ or ‘South Asians’ today, persons of Indian sub-continental origins form 4% of the British population. These include descendants of the early immigrants (the first wave), the early 20th century migrants (the second wave) and the post-war immigrants (the third wave). The third wave can be further sub-categorised into labour and professional(Visram, 1986 and 2002). By the 1960s there was resentment among white Britons, especially of the working classes against the ‘Blackening of Britain’. This gave rise toovert racism fanned by right wing extremist leaders such as Enoch Powell and his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham in April 1968. These developments politicised the black British youth who embraced a Black identity. Not so the Asians (i.e. Indians/Pakistanis and Bangladeshis) who remained the more passive recipients of white racism. However some Asian youth became sensitized to political and cultural resistance against racism and embraced the general ‘black’ identity (Hayward, 1997). Yet it was Black British culture, especially music, which impacted strongly upon mainstream British society and Asian culture did not develop its distinct identity until the 1980s and 1990s with Bhangra Rap and Hip Hop (Huq 2006).

Given this historical and sociocultural context, it is not surprising that Asian cinema in Britain was rooted in the Black politics of the 1960s. Like the Black film makers, Asian film makers too felt the need to challenge racism and assert their distinct identity and present new images of British society. Asian film makers began to emerge in the 1970s and their films depicted identity confusion and challenged racism. The first feature film foregrounding Asians in Britain was produced by the British Film Institute and co-written by Peter Smith and DilipHiro –A Private Enterprise (1975). It was about a university graduate who wants to start a business in Birmingham and charts his travails and triumphs. It was directed by Peter Smith, so it cannot technically be counted as a diasporic Indian film though it was based on the Indian diasporaand depicted identity confusion and challenged racism. YugeshWalia and Ruhul Amin (from Bangladesh) in the 1980s produced and directed films for British Television. Another important British Asian film maker, HanifKureshi, though from Pakistan, needs to be included here not only because in Britain the diaspora from the Indian subcontinent is treated in a holistic manner and includes Pakistan and Bangladesh but because his films, especially My Beautiful Launderette (1985), also deals with an older generation of characters who lived in pre-partition India and are nostalgic not about postcolonial Pakistan but about Bombay which was their home before they had migrated to the U.K. There are also films such as Chicken Tikka Masala (2005) directed by Haramge Singh Kaliraiand Shooton Sight (2008) directed by Jag Mundhra who had also directed the acclaimed Provoked (2006), a biopic on the Asian woman who had been convicted and then freed after a heated national campaign, mainly by women’s groups, for the crime of having burnt to death her abusive and violent husband. Kalirai’s film is about closet homosexuality and coming out while Mundhra’sShoot on Sight is about a Muslim police officer Ali at Scotland Yard who has to hunt down the Muslim suspects of the 7 July 2005 London Underground bombings. In spite of himself being married to an English woman and having two children with her, Ali is disturbed by this assignment as it soon involves the shooting down of an innocent Muslim youth. This incident in the film was based on real life shoot to kill orders the London Metropolitan Police were given for this assignment of hunting down the perpetrators of the 7 July bombings and had led to the shooting down of a Brazilian on 21 July 2005 who had been mistaken for one of the terrorists. This film thus is also about ethnic profiling and its tragic consequences. You will recall that another film we have discussed in the module on Bollywood on the Diaspora, My Name is Khan (2010) also takes up the subject of ethnic profiling and its injustice, this time in USA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre in New York.

Some other Asian Diaspora film makers have also made films with strong anti-racist and feminist messages. One of them is PratibhaParmar’sSari Red (1988) which is a short docudrama film based on a real life incident of the attack and killing of a young British Asian woman in which the red colour of the sari, becomes a metaphor for sensuality and fertility on the one hand and violence, death and destruction on the other. GurinderChadha has provided the background narration for this film in which the futility of racist attacks on women who are victims of patriarchy inside their homes and racism outside is well highlighted. GurinderChadha is in her own right the most globally visible and commercially successful of all the British Asian film makers.

2.1 GurinderChadha: Narratives of Identity, Race and Sexuality

GurinderChadha the British Asian Film maker best known for her internationally successful blockbuster film, Bend It Like Beckham (2002), is a double diasporic as her trajectory to the U.K. has been via the East African diaspora in Kenya.

With the funding of multicultural arts by Britain in the 1980s, Asian film makers began to explore multicultural Britain and more mainstream themes. GurinderChadha’sfirst feature film Bhaji on the Beach (1993) wasabout a group of Asian women on a day trip to Blackpool. Interwoven into the cinematic narrative are themes of identity confusion and assertion of sexuality among the young women and loneliness, alienation and fantasy among the older women. This is a ‘Road Movie’ where for each woman, the trip to Blackpool is a voyage of self-discovery. It is one of Chadha’s more ideologically informed cinematic texts. The film was scripted by the Asian writer MeeraSayal. The daytrip is organised and led by a feminist group leader Simi who also speaks in overtly feminist terms about the ‘double yoke of racism and sexism’. However her flock, the women she takes on this expedition,are not too receptive of her ideology nor do they even seem to understand her. Jigna Desai thinks that this is in keeping with Chadha’s agenda of making ‘populist’ rather than ‘avantgarde’ films (2004:138). This film also recalls the Asian-Black synergy of the 1960s and 70s in its depiction of Asian-Caribbean relationships through the character of Hashida who is pregnant by her Afro-Caribbean boyfriend Oliver. This relationship enables Chadha to bring in the fact that many Asians instead of displaying racial solidarity with the Black Britons, distance themselves from them in a manifestation of twisted colour superiority – Brown being seen as better than Black.

The female body and its subjection to patriarchy is also made evident not only in Hashida’s apprehensions about her pregnancy, not just because she is unmarried but also because the father of the baby is black, but is also present in the abusive and violent marriage of Ginder and Ranjit. Ginder’s right to her own body and her son is negated by patriarchy and she is pursued all the way to Blackpool by her husband’s brothers who want her to return to the marital fold. Then there is Asha the ageing newsagent who allows herself a fleeting fantasy romance with a courtly Englishman Ambrose, with Orientalist notions, before she is brought back to earth and returns to her gendered and ethnic enclosures.

Bend it Like Beckham (2002) is so far Chadha’s most globally successful films which even launched the career of one of Hollywood’s current icons, Keira Knightly, in her role as Juliet (Jules) Paxton. In the film however it’s Jasminder(Jess) Bhamra played by ParminderNagra, who is the main protagonist as she battles patriarchal expectations at home and racism on the football field. The global success of this film have lead critics to ask whether Asian films are now moving more towards the mainstream by working into their discourses elements which would appeal to a wider (white?) audience (Korte and Sternberg 2004). Both Jess and Jules have to deal with different forms of female stereotypes at their homes. The Bhamras want their daughter to go to university and study – a typical Indian middle class mindset whose aspirations for their daughters now include higher education as this is more and more the requirement of the marriage market. Football is anathema to them as it is not feminine and also in the words of Mrs. Bhamra immodest as the girls have to wear shorts and thus display their legs. For Mr. Bhamra, Jess being part of a multi-racial football team brings back nightmarish memories of how he was racially discriminated against as a cricketer in colonial Kenya. He is afraid his daughter would have to face the same kind of racism and which she does. However, the Irish coach of the girl’s football team seems to offer a rather pat answer to Jess when she brings up the issue of racism by saying that he knows all about it too as he is Irish. Chadha as an Asian in Britain should know better than comparing national level discrimination as with the Irish in Britain, with actual racism based on the colour of one’s skin which is what Mr. Bhamra and Jess have to deal with.

In the context of the body of the woman, there is Mrs. Paxton and her desire to have her daughter’s body conform to societal expectations of curves as she flashes before Jules’ disinterested eyes padded bras. She herself is portrayed as a female stereotype who knows little or nothing of football and her husband has to demonstrate the finer points of the game using salt and pepper pots and sauce bottles on their breakfast table. Even Mrs. Bhamra is presented in a stereotypical mode as the typical Indian mother who wants her daughter to learn how to make round chappatis and Indian dishes. Neither woman has any depth or realistic characteristics and one wonders if this is how one reaches out to a mainstream audience? There are other kinds of political correctness available in the film though. This is in the area of homosexuality even though female sexuality does not get the same sensitive treatment. So Jess’s sister Pinky is presented in rather crude terms as getting her sexual desires fulfilled in the backseat of a parked car, while the closet gay friend of Jess, Tony, is handled more delicately and is shown in only a positive light. As this is such a popular film you might have already seen it, but do watch it again to see if you come to grips with these subtexts of racism and feminism.

In Bride and Prejudice (2004) also shot in Hindi as BalleBalle Amritsarto LA(2004) is in the tradition of postcolonial writers/film makers re-writing colonial canonical texts in this case Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. What postcolonial writers and film makers do is appropriate and re-write these canonical texts from the point of view of the racial other. This thus challenges and resists the stereotypes and racist discourse available in these texts. This film is also the most Bollywoodish of Chadha’s oeuvre. AishwaryaRai, the Bollywood star and Miss World played the role of LalitaBakshi in this film. Lalita is Elizabeth Bennet and Darcy is played by a New Zealand actor Martin Henderson. The music in this film is Bollywood mixed with Hollywood musicals. While Lalita is Indian there is a strong Indian diasporic representation in the friends of Darcy, who represent the best and worst of this community. Lalita sets out not only to tame Darcy but also challenges the prejudices of the Indian diaspora. However not all of Austen translates successfully into the BollywoodisedChadha film as noted by several critics such as Resnick (2005). In my opinion, the moral universe of Austen which makes the shenanigans of Mrs. Bennet and some of her daughters understandable are merely translated into Bolllywood conservatism on all things to do with sex and sexuality. Bride and Prejudice did not do very good business either in India or in the West. It was neither a good diasporic film nor a good Bollywood film. It is a Bollywood Hybrid film to coin a term. It takes elements of Bollywood and tries to merge them with those of mainstream Western films, either Hollywood or British. So you have a Sound of Music (1965) kind of ambience among the Bakshi sisters who sing and dance in weird anglicized, old fashioned nightgowns, reminiscent of the nightdresses of the Trapp family children as they sing ‘These are a few of my favourite things…’ with their governess played by Julie Andrews. If this film did not work for the Indian audience it could be because while Chadha’s generation in the U.K. and my generation in India had both read Austen at school and watched with awe Sound of Music in grand single film cinema theatres, the current generation both in the U.K. and in India, is unlikely to have had either experience unless they were students of English Literature. As for the international audience,Chadha’s choice of Bollywood mainstream dance choreographer Saroj Khan and Music Director Anu Malik might have been more than a cross over audience can accept. So the ethos is a kind of strange mix of Bollywood and British.

After this film,Chadha has made several films including It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010), which has the theme of the Indian mother anxious to get her daughter married too. It’s a rather strange film with zombie like dead characters floating through it as they seek redemption -moksha. The Bollywood actor ShabanaAzmi who has done several cross-over films plays the serial killer mother who finishes off those suitors who reject her plump daughter, with a killer curry. The film meanders through a slim plot and fails to hold the viewer. See if you can locate this film and watch it even though it borders on the farcical; you might want to see what you can make of it.

3.0 DIASPORIC INDIAN FILM MAKERS IN THE USA

The USA, the home of Hollywood is yet another location from where diasporic Indians have been making films from the 1980s onwards. Interestingly many of them like M.Night Shyamalan make mainstream films exclusively for Hollywood, rather than cinematic texts that narrate the lives of diasporics in that country or films that attempt to re-image India. Shyamalan is a writer, director and producer who is known for making hit films based on supernatural and sci-fi themes, which he has made his forte. A film maker whosecareer graph is like that of most other diasporic film makers from India is Mira Nair, who is today better known for films like The Namesake(2006) which is based on the novel by the diasporic writer JhumpaLahiri, rather than for her films set centrally in India like Salaam Bombay (1988). Nair has also made mainstream Hollywood films like Vanity Fair (2004), albeit with an Indian flair. We shall look at her films in greater detail in a later section of this module as she is one of the best known of diasporic Indian film makers in the USA today. Like the diasporic film makers from the U.K. the ones from the USA too focus on issues of identity and racism as well as on generation gaps between the first and second generation diasporics in the USA. Here we have film makers like PiyushDinkerPandya who made films like American Desi (2001), Anurag Mehta with films like American Chai(2001) and Viral Lakhia with Namaste (2002). These films are about the identity crisis experienced by second generation and 1.5 generation (born in India, but brought up in the new homeland) and the manner in which they ultimately resolve these crises and accept both their Indian and American selves in a composite/hybrid construct.

With the exception of Mira Nair and of course Night Shyamalan who have really succeeded with their albeit very different films, most of the otherdiasporic Indian film makers have not been able to go beyond their first films which remain their only films. Obvious problems with financial backing, distribution and marketing for the small film maker compounded by their ethnicity would make it very difficult for them to continue making more films. The American cultural space still lacks the critical discourse available to Asian and Black film makers in Britain and which makes it more possible for them to sustain their film making activities.

This is the problem in spite of the fact that for many of these second and 1.5 generation diasporic film makers it was not Bollywood which was their inspiration but Hollywood. Most of them grew up in the 1970s and 80s rejecting the long, song and dance laden Hindi films which had yet to acquire the tag of Bollywood. This is not true though of the first generation of diasporic film makers like Mira Nair who grew up on a fare of Hindi films and whose works are as we shall see in many ways informed by this cinema.

This raises the question of course as to why some of these diasporic film makers succeed while others slip into oblivion. The critic Jigna Desai is of the opinion that the international reputations of the successful film makers like Meera Nair, GurinderChadha and Deepa Mehta (the Indo-Canadian whose films we have still to consider) were made on their Monsoon Wedding, Bend it Like Beckham and Bollywood/Hollywood. All three films according to Desai deal with the issue of women, female bodies and female agency. Hence they appealed to audiences and critics. While one does agree with Desai that these films did concern themselves with women’s issues, it’s not really true that having a feminist agenda is going to get your next film funding. In fact it might prove to be counterproductive as mainstream Hollywood production house is usually as patriarchal and misogynist as your average Bollywood financier who tends to keep away from such subjects as they presume they don’t ‘sell’, i.e. translate into sale of tickets. Why don’t you watch these films and try to come to your own conclusions? If these films have succeeded they could have had certain crossover appeal which fetched them commercial success and box office hit status.

3.1 Meera Nair’s Oeuvre: Diasporic and Mainstream Appeal

Mira Nair began her feature film career with Salaam Bombay which she made in 1988 with the scriptwriter SooniTaraporewala, who has since then collaborated with her on most of her films. Nair’s depiction of street children in this film came into conflict with Indian notions of how the country and its society should be projected to the world. This is still the case even in the second decade of the twenty first century.

Her next important film was Mississippi Masala(1991)– a serious cinematic text which attempted to deal with the expulsion of the Indian diaspora from Uganda during the rule of the dictator Idi Amin and their subsequent resettlement in the American South. So racism is at the heart of this film. The racism practiced against the Indian diaspora by Idi Amin and the racist reactions to/of the resettled family in the USA. It must have not been easy to make this film even though it was funded by a big Hollywood studio. To succeed even as a crossover film it needed actors well-known to mainstream American film goers. Nair’s trump card here was Denzel Washington, the Black American actor who played the role of Demetrius. This got her the funding for the film, even though her other actors were the diasporicRoshan Seth and the Bollywood Sharmila Tagore along with the first time actor SaritaChaudhary who played their daughter Meena. The film got modest returns even though it won some international awards for Nair and Taraporewala who was again her script writer. This was a film with a strong agenda about the bodies of women and how patriarchy and nations try to control them. First of all there is Tagore’s character Kinnu, who as the Indian diasporic woman in Uganda has a very close African friend who actually helps them to leave that country. Seth’s character Jay who is her husband is jealous of this man and even suspects that his daughter might be not his child but have been fathered by this man. Even as they are leaving Uganda, Kinnu is snatched out of the bus taking them to the airport and looked upon lasciviously by the Black soldiers, who covet the body of the Indian woman, which as famously said by Amin in one of his broadcasts, was denied to African men (even by marriage) although Indians had lived in Uganda for more than 70 years. In the new homeland of the USA, the Indian female body is once again desired by a black man, this time it being Demetrius who falls in love with Kinnu’s daughter Meena, who returns his love. Their relationship upsets both the families but they find a way to be together. Thus, in the second diaspora, Kinnu’s daughter if not Kinnu is able to assert the ownership of her own body.

Monsoon Wedding (2001) was set mainly in India and is about a diasporic family coming to India to wed their son to an Indian girl. This was a hugely popular and truly crossover film made in the ‘Nuptial genre’ already made popular by films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding and My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997), which won for Nair huge popularity in addition to the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival. Mainstream audiences loved this film and American women wanted Monsoon Wedding themed weddings and made these demands to their wedding planners. Underneath the gloss and fluff of the great Punjabi wedding, however were family feuds, a lower caste romance and child abuse. In this film we find the usual themes of Nair’s films – centrestagingof the peripherals, focussing on individuals and groups marginalised by race, gender, age, caste or economic status, the imaging/re-imaging India and the diaspora, as well as issue of identity confusion and re-construction. This is a film which you must watch and try to identify for yourself these themes and issues.

The Namesake (2006) based on the novel of the same name by JhumpaLahiri was yet another commercial and critical success for Nair. Mira Nair’s film focusses on the relationship between Ashok and AshimaGanguli. The film shows them moving from the initial awkwardness of relationship in an arranged marriage to the affection and comfort of an old but not jaded marriage. The growth of Ashima from a dependent young wife to an independent woman at the time of her husband’s sudden death, is also foregrounded in the film. In the film the relationship of Gogol and Maxine his American girlfriend is also shown as more closely linked to her family than it is in the book. This makes Gogol’s identity construction more inclined towards the American self than it is in the book.Nair’s film does not just focus on marginal figures in Western society but problematises issues of margins and centre. ‘I want to question what the outside is and who defines it’ says Nair (womenandtalent.com/49/perspectives-of-filmmaker-mira-nair/).

Nair has a definite and interesting film making style which is evident in most of her films. She uses Retro graphics and cinematicintertextuality. Her films have a dynamic soundtrack and hybrid music – traditional Indian wedding/folk songs, Jazz, Indian film music. To create the proper images she often uses Mood Lighting and Cinematic Metaphors such as the bridges metaphor in The Namesake. Do look for these techniques when you watch her films.

4.0 INDIAN DIASPORA FILMS IN THE CANADIAN SPACE

The Indo-Canadian film making scene is in a very robust mode. Apart from the globally visible Deepa Mehta with her Elements Trilogy and Bollywood/Hollywood there are many others who have directed, produced, scripted and acted in films made by Indian diasporics in Canada and/or have been part of television series and also directed and scripted for Canadian TV channels. These are artistes such as R. Paul Dhillon, a filmmaker, actor, director and script writer. There is also AgamDarshi who has made a successful career in TV and co-founded the Vancouver International South Asian Film Festival (VISAFF). NishaGanatra the openly Lesbian film maker from Vancouver has made films like ChutneyPopcorn and Cosmopolitan on the issue of Indian diasporic parental denial of their children’s alternate sexuality as a result of which these people have to lead double lives and cannot declare their sexuality openly. These films are also in the mode of diasporic films on identity construction and generation gap issues between the first and subsequent generations of diasporic Canadians.

In 2014 the Government of Canada signed an Indo-Canada Audio-Visual Co-Production Agreement with the Indian Government which offers exciting opportunities for Indian and Canadian film producers and other stakeholders to collaborate on various aspects of film making (Read more at:http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/42250994.cms?utm_source=contentofinter est&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst). Even before this pact came into being there were several collaborative films between Indo-Canadians and Bollywood filmmakers. One such example is Akshay Kumar’s Speedy Singh as it was called in Hindi and Breakaway which was the name of the English language version – both made in 2011. Richie Mehta’s Amal (2007) on the life of a rickshaw driver in Mumbai won him many international awards. In the lead role of Amal, was the RupinderNagra and there was also the Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah in the role of the Indian billionaire who is in search of an honest man. VikramDhillon the producer, director and actor has made Punjabi films like JiKarda (2013) and Pinky MogeWali (2012). These films made by Indo-Canadian film makers in India about Indians are in the mode of re-imaging the nation films. In addition to producing Tamil films (Panchatanthiram, 2002), Roger (Rajat) Nair has also produced Hollywood films like TheWidowmaker (2002). Srinivas Krishna (Masala, 1991), EishaMarjara (Desperately Seeking Helen, 1998) are two more Diasporic film makers from India. The latter is about searching for the old Hindi film dancer Helen as well as about the Air India plane crash tragedy in 1985 which killed members of Marjara’s family. Indo-Canadian film makers are located mainly in Vancouver and Toronto (the two main film making cities in Canada) and are in a very active and dynamic mode. They make Hindi films, they collaborate with Bollywood, they also make films in English and collaborate with Hollywood. Additionally those of Sikh-Punjabi origins also make Punjabi films in India as well as in Canada. This does set them apart from Indian origin film makers in other diasporic locations, who do not always find it possible to proceed beyond their first films. Deepa Mehta belongs to this milieu of Indian origin film makers.

4.1 Deepa Mehta: Imaging and Re-Imaging the Nation:

Mehta was born in 1950 and grew up in India. She migrated as a student to Canada where she has lived ever since. Her film making career which began in the 1970s, gained momentum in the 1990s and apart from her controversial and globally known Elements Trilogy – Fire(1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005), includes films like Sam and Me(1991)

• , Bollywood/Hollywood (2002), Heaven on Earth(2008)andMidnight’s Children(2012). This is not an exhaustive list of her films.

As noted by Sridhar Rajeswaran, Mehta has problematized each and every issue that she takes up, including the titles of her films. In order to fully comprehend her films, especially the trilogy one needs to look at both the “context of production [which] stands for Deepa Mehta’s insights from her specific location and also insight from her specific location as a voice of gender. Such a location as is evident is not without its problems” (Rajeswaran, 2014:274-76). To start with Earth 1947, to give the film its full title, we have very complex metaphors that begin presenting themselves from the very title shots. Here the cracked earth, has boundaries drawn across symbolizing the imminent cracking/partitioning of India. Based on BapsiSidhwa’s novel The Ice Candy Man (1988), re-titled Cracking India (1991) for its American edition, the film sets out to re-image India, from the location which is Canada and a time that is the end of the 20th century, through the eyes of two women, one the film maker Mehta and the other the novelist Sidhwa. There are also two female characters at the heart of both the fictional and filmic narratives – the young Ayah (nanny) and her ward, the little girl on the cusp of puberty, Lenny. In the novel these are subaltern characters, a powerless Hindu woman in a land which was about to become a new Muslim country and a polio stricken Lenny from the marginal, minority community of the Parsis. The narrative revolves around them and is told from the point of view of Lenny. Other important female characters are Lenny’s mother and her Godmother. Yet this is not exactly how Mehta’s narrative comes across. Here the narrative is more masculine and it’s the Ice Candy Man Dilawar and his rival suitor for the Ayah’s attentions, Hassan the massaeur who almost run away with the narrative. Surrounded by these two and other men in the novel, the Ayah called Shanta is the reigning queen bee in Lahore’s beautiful parks and gardens laid out by the Mughals. In the film she lacks this agency and becomes the object of the combined love and lust of this group of men. Finally won over by Hassan, she becomes the object of Dilawar’s vendetta. Just as this group is cracking open so is India. The cinematography of the flames that engulf the beautiful city of Lahore is symbolic of the destruction of the syncretic culture of the subcontinent.

In Fire the focus is more domestic and the time frame is postcolonial India of the 1980s. Here the fire is the one lit in the bodies of women by a society that is in denial of female sexuality. The two women in this movie are Radha the older woman whose husband has unilaterally embraced celibacy as a mark of devotion to his guru. Sita is the wife of the younger brother of Radha’s husband. This man although married to Sita has a Chinese-Indian girlfriend. Neglected by their men, the two women gradually turn to one another, first for companionship and then for emotional support and finally physical satisfaction. When discovered one evening by Radha’s husband Ashok, the husband’s male ego is hurt to the extent that when during the argument Radha’s sari catches fire he does nothing to help her. Radha douses the flames herself, an intertextual echo of Sita of Ramayana but with a twist. Sita had to go through an Agni Pariksha, trial by fire, to prove her chastity to her husband Ram and yet was unable to satisfy patriarchal society’s demand for proof of her innocence and had to be banished to the forest. In this film it’sRadha who denies Ashok the satisfaction of this agnipariksha and leaves the house with Sita to seek happiness outside the bounds of patriarchal oppressions and enclosures. This film had created a furor in India as it was felt that good Hindu women did not practice these deviant sexual acts. Cinema houses showing this film were attacked but Indian women had flocked to see this film in shows which had been declared women’s only, to protect them from the salacious attentions of the male audience. The cinematic metaphors in this film revolved around the lesbian metaphors of flowing waters and the cinematography was mainly dark and domestic as a metaphor for the enclosures these women had to dwell in.

Water had the roughest reception in India. After having been given initial permission to film in the city of Varanasi, Mehta was driven away by protests from Right Wing activists who felt that this film on the lives of widows set in India of the 1930s, presented a ‘bad’ image of India to the world. This had traumatized Mehta who had returned to Canada to recover and had in the interim made a comedy Bollywood/Hollywood to soothe her jangled nerves. Water was ultimately made in Sri Lanka. In this film the nascent nation of India is metaphorically birthed across the bodies of de-sexed widows who are nevertheless sexually exploited by respectable and powerful men. Water when finally made even though not in an Indian locale was still concerned with Mehta’s central trope of re-imaging the nation. As noted by Sridhar Rajeswaran, “The nation is central to Deepa Mehta’s cinema and the making of it. It is imagined in diverse ways and located in geographies, and along axes which constellate into epiphanic moments which flicker, to reveal hidden secrets it contours are drawn from the knowledge inferred from diverse fields” (2014: 301). The ancient Hindu practice of the shunning of widows as inauspicious continues in India today even though Mehta’s film itself is set in the Nationalist India of the 1930s. What is evident here is the juxtaposition of ancient patriarchal oppression and exploitation of the weakest sections within the female population– widows and even more so child-widows – and the birthing of a new modern India represented by the young follower of Gandhi, Narayan. Interestingly Narayan is another name for the Hindu god Vishnu, the creator of this world. His falling in love with Kalyani, one of the widows in the widow ashram, through the agency of the child-widow Chuiya, is emblematic of Gandhi’s efforts to draw the downtrodden and weak into the ambit of his nation building efforts. Narayan’s futile battle against patriarchal forces and entrenched religious practices on behalf of Kalyani, almost succeed till she realizes that, she who had been used by the chief widow of the ashram as a prostitute, had once been sent to pleasure Narayan’s father. The translucent blue green waters of the river Ganga which form the backdrop of this tale, become the last refuge of Kalyani as she walks into the Ganga. The river considered holy by the Hindus and which is supposed to absolve those who bathe in it of all sins then becomes the vehicle over which the little Chuiya is ferried across in a boat to the mansion of the very man, who was indirectly responsible for Kalayni’s death as his new sex toy. A disgusted Narayan flees his father’s mansion to join his mentor Gandhi who is going to pass through Varanasi on a train, even as another widow Shakuntala, scoops up the little Chuiya and runs with her to the railway station to hand over this abused child into the care of Narayan and thus save her from a lifetime of prostitution. Gandhi’s new nation may thus have provided a new trajectory for that little female body’s future. Watch this film and see what you make of it.

In fact watch all these three films in the Elements Trilogy one after the other, note the central trope of nation building andthe tracing of national boundaries and social mores across the bodies of women. Also note the use of cinematic metaphors and techniques, for instance the use of different colours, different types of shots – long, medium, close ups and see how they contribute to the narrative of the film. Do not neglect watching Mehta’s other films too and see how she has continued with her major concerns in these films too. In the context of diasporic tropes you will find Sam and Me, Bollywood/Hollywood and Heaven on Earth of particular relevance as they concern themselves with identity construction and generational conflicts in the Canadian context.

5.0 CONCLUSION:

This module is a very brief introduction to Diasporic film making by Indians settled in different parts of the world. These films have caught the imagination of the world and presented India to a global audience. The geographical and the temporal distance evident in these films make them at one level objective and at another level problematic. The distance from the object narrated be it the nation or individuals lends a certain objectivity to the exercise. However the distance may also lead to distortions and stereotyping. There is also the factor of the Indian reaction to these films. The globally resurgent India resents any attempts to display negative aspects of its existence, no matter how real and immediate they might be. The diasporic film maker has to thus walk the tight rope between the two poles of global audiences and Indian sensitivities. Some film makers as we have seen have almost fallen off the tight rope but most have clambered back on it and presented their films to audiences around the world, including those in India. The films made by diasporic Indians provide global audiences yet another peek into the complex conundrum that is India. It should be remembered also that beginning with the 1990s Bollywood’s own crossover films are also presenting the new global India to the world. This has not been lost on the diasporic film makers as we see many of them including Chadha and Mehta, paying their tribute to the power and reach of Bollywood in their own films like Bride and Prejudice and Bollywood/Hollywood.