Cinema plays a powerful role in implicating the way in which an audience begins to think about the 'reality' that each film supposedly depicts. Ananda Mitra investigates the representation of Indians in Western films and locates this analysis within the context of the larger issue of the manner in which Indian immigrants are viewed in the West today. Mitra covers a large spectrum of films made over several decades and critiques the issue by identifying and analysing how those narrative and textual strategies uses to propagate an image of Indians that are common to these films. Mitra's approach and analysis is that of an academic. He is not as hard-hitting and scathing as an Indian journalist would have been in reacting to how Indians have been portrayed from the gaze of Western colonial perspectives.
The process of producing a film, points out Mitra, requires constant choices - that of locations, stars, specific story plots, the actual angle from which a particular scene is to be shot, and the final editing of the film into the narrative that is presented to the viewer. The Hollywood tradition (and also the tradition of most narrative films) has been to make these choices invisible to the viewer. The camera becomes unselfconscious and almost transparent and non-existent. For the viewer, what happens on the screen is unquestionable and the only way in which the particular event could have been captured. Thus, the creative aspects that the filmmaker has to struggle with are critical, and the wrong choices could often result in a failure to say the most effective story. It is this a crisis of representation because every shot opens up the possibility of multiple angles and that 'crisis' needs to be resolved before a shot is planned or an edit performed. Mitra talks of four crises in the chapter "The Emergent Image" - crisis of geography, crisis of religion, crisis of tradition and crisis of colonialism and post-colonialism.
One repetitive crisis that needs to be continuously resolved within the film text is that of geography. The first aspect is about films making self-conscious decisions about the way in which a place is represented. These decisions attempt to produce the place around specific textual units by placing these in well-defined narrative structures. In representing the place around the notion of the jungle a specific image of the place emerges where a set of dichotomies are wrestled with, and ultimately a specific set of images become the predominant ones. In "The Jungle Book" the forests are depicted in vivid colour and the beauty of the unspoiled jungles are represented in great detail. Similarly, the landscapes captured by the camera in "The Man Who Would be King" paint a grand picture of the mountains, the glaciers and the rugged panorama of the virgin terrain of the north-western part of the subcontinent. A choice is made to show the grandeur as compared to the other ways in which the jungle could have been imaged. This, argues Ananda Mitra, is not a natural process but one where the crisis of representation is resolved in a motivated way.
The inherent confusion about what to select appears in films like "Around the World in 80 Days" And "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" where the dichotomies between the jungle as hostile on the one hand, and friendly and beautiful on the other, is resolved by selecting the formidable quality of jungle as the site for strange and cruel practices with people being oppressed, tortured and killed. The contradiction appears in "The Jungle Book" too, where on one hand the jungle vistas initially paint the calm surroundings; however, that myth is shattered when the many monkeys pluck Mowgli off from Balu's belly, just as the beautiful stream, in "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" leads them to the Indian man and his village which has been devastated by the oppression of the evil spirit and his goons. Likewise, the gorges and streams that look beautiful at the onset becomes the nemesis of Callahan in "The Man Who Would be King" and the evil spirit of the temple of doom. All these films have internal contradictions and even though attempts are made to produce a unified image that is often subverted by the way in which the text shifts its representations.
Another image of the jungle is reconstructed in the representation of the urban landscape of Calcutta (now, Kolkata) and Bombay (now, Mumbai). The metaphor, in the concrete jungles with their thugs and criminals, becomes the chosen way of showing urban space in films like "City of Joy" and "Salaam Bombay!" The seamier underbelly of the cities are shown without dwelling at al on the other ways in which the city could have been shown. In the depiction of the bridge in "City of Joy", there is a hint of the other side of the city, but that is quickly abandoned to keep the text rooted in the derelict images of a rotting metropolitan sprawl. Mitra says there is little use of images of Calcutta that show its history embodied in such structures as the high-rise buildings of central Calcutta or the parts of Calcutta that could represent the life of the majority 'middle-class' Calcuttans who are not rickshawpullers or petty thugs. In the representation of the train and the station in most movies, there is a tension over the way the exotic needs to be produced as the 'natural description' of the space. Therefore, the bazaars in the films are filled with snake-charmers and scorpion-eaters who become the materials for circuses and sideshows as evident in the conversation between the young Shirley Temple and the native when she asks 'Is this where circuses come from' and the native whole-heartedly agrees with the young girl.
The other geographical crisis appears in the contradictions between the movies and within the movies as the space is brought on to the celluloid. In spite of the tendency to show jungles and forests, the way this is done varies across movies, exposing the confusion over describing the space that is known as South Asia. While all attempt to produce the place as urban or rural jungles there is a distinction between the way this jungle is manifest. In "Around the World in 80 Days", the jungle is sinister; in "The Jungle Book" it is exotic and beautiful initially, but is later hostile when Mowgli is chased by the tiger and the snake. The mystery of the Marabar caves too become juxtaposed with the panoramic shots of Kashmir in "A Passage to India" just as in "Heat and Dust" the space is segregated between the organised location of the civil lines situated against the rustic and primitive spaces occupied by the natives of India.
All these contradictions across movies and within movies too are pointers toward the struggle which is only a manifestation of the unanswered ideological questions about what becomes the natural and normal about the geography of South Asia. A classic instance of this contradiction is the way in which the late night serenity of Bombay in "Bombay Talkie" is placed against the violence of the streets in "Salaam Bombay!" The internal contradictions detract from a project of producing the monolithic image of the South Asian space and the confusion leaves open the gaps and the seams that the narratives often try to conceal. No single image emerges that is free of contradictions. These gaps are invisible until it is possible to consider these texts together and look at their similarities and differences and the ways in which they attempt to produce a 'natural' image, but fail to do so because of the fundamental contradictions that the texts attempt to smooth over. A superficial analysis of the content, argues Mitra, does not always capture these contradictions because they remain at the deeper level of the narratives. Hence, the author feels, these contradictions need to be pointed out to expose the way in which a dominant ideological system has attempted to produce a unified image.
There is another aspect in the confusion over representation where the struggle over representing the space is not necessarily won, and is constantly contested. In trying to be seamless, the films not only fail by inadvertently exposing the divergent ways of showing the place, but also by ignoring the alternative ways of doing it as well. Mitra uses the phrase "incomplete signifier" to refer to the way in which particular representations are not developed but are left incomplete or inconsequential to the narrative when they could easily be used as alternative ways of representing the place. In the opening sequence of "City of Joy" the audience is first introduced to the metropolis that is the destination of the farmer from the state of Bihar. The long shot captures the skyline of the city that is dominated by a gigantic bridge. This bridge could have become a signifier of a technologically developed metropolitan area with those attributes of a city that are common across the globe. This significance is not developed and the movie quickly moves to the grime and filth of the city. The alternative representations are excluded and an ideologically charged view of the city produced. What is completely left out of the text becomes a commentary on the representational crisis.
The crisis over religion too attempts to naturalise the representation of both the place and the people. Religion is used as a monolithic entity in order to paint a picture that uses it as the focal point around which several everyday practices are naturalised. Difference is produced by juxtaposing the religious practices of South Asia with the natural beliefs of the Western protagonists. The 'foreign' aspect of religion is manifest in several ways. In "Gunga Din", "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and "Around the World in 80 Days", the religious practices are produced as a cause of paranoia and fear. The narratives firstly produce the religion of the East as pagan and primitive and secondly, it needs to place the Western protagonists in a position from which they can not only observe the religious practices but are also compelled to provide an escape route for the viewers so that the ultimate act of violence is averted by the intervention of the Whites. So, on one hand, the strange practices have to be the natural ones for the geographic region while on the other they need to be produced as deviant to maintain the logic of the deep structure of the narrative.
Religion becomes a centre of deviance and oppression in South Asia. This deviance is obtained from the non-Christian and pagan nature of the popular religion of the place. This is the crisis, Mitra contends, that needs to be resolved. This is often achieved by the use of the image of the saviour or messiah who will not only point the fallacies of the local religion, but also deliver the natives from the darkness of pagan practices to the enlightenment of the non-pagan Christian practices. These acts of deliverances are not necessarily represented in clear theological terms of a missionary text but are used as deep structures for the narrative. The dichotomy between the saviour and the saved plays a repetitive role. In "City of Joy", the underlying crisis of religion is resolved by the assistance of the doctor who not only saves the people from the oppression of the slumlords, but also provides them with a spiritual leadership where the practices and beliefs associated with the local religion are supplanted by a Western and primarily Christian perspective of self-determination and salvation.
While the narrative about the temple of doom and the one on the city of joy produce a negative effect of the local religion, "The Razor's Edge" does the opposite. Here, the rituals connected with the religion are still different and 'foreign' to the Western audience. Yet, these play a different role in the structure of the narrative - instead of being connected with primitiveness and negativity, these rituals become ones that attract the Western protagonist to the place and provide the person with a 'new' way of looking at everyday life. Similarly, in Gandhi, the representation of religion is less hegemonic and no specific dominant meanings emerge. The sequence of the Indian wedding stands on its own rights and Gandhi explains to the Western reporter, and also the Western viewers, the significance of each aspect of the wedding ritual. Mitra thinks it is necessary to place these texts next to the ones where the pagan religion is produced as negative and in need of cleansing. The narratives do not remain as seamless as they would like to be, and the question of religion is problematised by the presence of alternative images that call into question the monolith of the pagan practices of South Asia. The crisis is never resolved since the narratives move in varied directions and cannot necessarily cope with the inter-textual inconsistency.
After geography and religion, obviously, comes tradition. The age and antiquity of the place is represented in several films and while the representational strategies vary, they all point towards the same issue. The crisis of tradition is represented by connecting or articulating history with what would appear exotic and primitive particularly to the West. Representational strategies recursively bring back ancient traditions and religious rituals which have connections with a turbulent history of the place. In "Heat and Dust", the British doctor condemns the primitive medical practices of the Indian midwives who practice uncivilised and insanitary means of abortion. In "City of Joy", the doctor from Dallas also represents the modern medication that attempts to cure the ailments of the rickshawpuller whose traditional beliefs would doom him to certain death. Although the film begins with the failure of Western tradition of medicine. The superiority of this modern medical practice in the structure of the narrative is re-established at the end, suggesting that in the resolution of the conflict the primitive and the traditional loses to the modern.
Maintaining the necessary inferiority of the South Asian traditional practices, "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" plays on a primary everyday ritual - eating and food habits. In an outlandish representation of tradition and pagan religion, the dinner fare of Indians is shown to be such despicable items such as live insects, monkey brains and snakes. This representation not only captures the exoticness of the eating habits of traditional South Asians, but also establishes the uncivilised and primitiveness of these habits that become loathsome to the film's Western protagonists.
[This review is based on excerpts from the chapter "The Emergent Image" which is the most "representational" of the book]
Review: India through the Western Lens
