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The Westerner’s gaze of India in films has come a long way since Amrish Puri ate monkey brains in the banned Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom , with some celebrated portrayals in recent times.
Take Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (that was still accused of peddling poverty porn despite all the acclaim) and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi — two films that went on to win big during the Oscar season, for instance.
With very few foreign filmmakers and cinematographers successfully capturing the country with a credible insider lens, last Friday saw the release of two Indian films made by Indian filmmakers who consciously employed — and embraced — the westerner’s gaze.
Leena Yadav’s Parched and Prashant Nair’s Umrika used Oscar-winning Russell Carpenter and young Petra Korner, respectively, to shoot their films set in the Indian rural milieu and critics were quick to note that the camera’s gaze was distinctly western. The exotic India of colour and spice, approximated for the West.
Sure, the accents were questionable in one and the casting not quite right in the other (American actor Tony Revolori of The Grand Budapest Hotel plays an Indian villager) and the geography was left vague in both. But when have critics ever had problems with backdrops when the films have been made or shot by one of our own.
From Ashutosh Gowarikar’s microcosmic Champaner in Lagaan and Charanpur in Swades to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s palatial backdrops in Hum Dil De Chuke Hai Sanam , Devdas and Ram Leela to Karan Johar’s unreal approximations of colleges in India in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai to Student of the Year , Indian filmmakers have always flaunted their artistic licence to paint their canvas with broad strokes.
The backdrop only exists as an excuse to play out a broader, larger conflict that could happen anywhere in the country. Not because the production designers of these films didn’t have the details but because the conflicts in the film were not specific to those parts. The precedent was set decades ago. Sholay never felt the need to dwell on the dialectic or diegetic details of Ramgarh. Nor did filmmakers like Manmohan Desai ever really let the logic and reality of life get in the way of entertainment. Is this licence to blur and approximate available only to Indian filmmakers?
We often take things around us for granted. Which is why outsiders always end up with more interesting compositions and photographs.
If Hindi laced with Urdu dominated the Salim-Javed era, Hindi laced with Punjabi took over in the nineties and over the last decade, native filmmakers from the heartland of India (the likes of Anurag Kashyap, Tigmanshu Dhulia and Aanand L. Rai) brought to the big screen the authentic dialectic rootedness of the region their stories were set in, as a counter to the broad-strokes diegetic narrative.
While the flavour did pump freshness into the worlds they were creating, not all films made with that syntax worked compellingly. It was just another approach, a creative choice, to tell a story. The personal choice of a filmmaker to tell the story in a certain tone, language and sensibility; because cinema — like magic and good old-fashioned mythology — thrives on suspension of disbelief.
CHENNAI: 19/06/2009: Actor Kamal Hassan with the French Writer Jean Claude Carrierre at meeting held at Prasad Lab at Vadapalani in Chennai on Friday. Photo: S_S_Kumar
Which is why the lens of realism or rootedness or the everyday insider gaze isn’t always the best approach to tell a story. As French screenwriter and Bunuel collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière once told us during a screenwriting workshop in Chennai: “Fiction sometimes goes deeper into the truth than facts.”
Criticism too is still evolving around the world as much as filmmaking is. With lack of quality training in film criticism, many critics too, over the years, have borrowed Quentin Tarantino’s famous licence, “I didn’t go to film school. I went to films”, to analyse films in the context of other films they have watched and admired and thus, carry with them a sensibility bias inherited from the filmmakers they have liked and grown up with.
The gaze is always the creator’s choice. It’s an artistic decision that’s sometimes as technical as a choice of lens, composition or magnification.
In both Parched and Umrika , the gaze helps us see a world and issues we are familiar with but through the eyes of the Westerner. Not all filmmakers want to show us the mirror.
Sometimes, they just want to show you a picture they are carrying back with them to the West as a tourist. If we don’t like that picture (or choice of Instagram filter), we are probably as defensive (or superficial) about the issues as Right-wing trolls who turn belligerent over any criticism of the country by an outsider. Do THEY have the right to criticise US, or presume to show us who WE are?
Cinema — like magic and good old-fashioned mythology — thrives on suspension of disbelief. So, the gaze is always the creator's choice, an artistic decision.
We often take things around us for granted. Which is why outsiders always end up with more interesting compositions and photographs.
It is possible that, sometimes, our eyes are tired of the yellow autorickshaws and green — or red or yellow depending on which city you live in — buses we see everyday that we are unable to see the beauty of these bright colours through the eyes of a foreigner.
It’s possible that we turn a blind eye to the dirt, the poverty and the grime on our way to work everyday because it’s nothing new, while a Westerner is able to capture the beauty of the smile on a slum kid’s face out of sheer amazement.
It’s time we questioned our gaze at the world around us. Do we want to continue seeing it through the jaded lens of reality, dust and grime or the through the inspiring lens of hope, magic and smiles? Our choice of lens only indicates our preference of how we want to see the world.
Because there is no definitive ONLY way to look.
Maybe, film criticism too could, every now and then, do with a fresh gaze.
