“Poverty, filth, traffic!”, “Gandhi, poverty, over-populated”, “Poverty, slums, filthy” and repeat…
Aforementioned are the responses of different Americans on asking them what are the first 3 things that come to their mind when they think about India (Source: A YouTube video). There was a second question asked to them that why do those 3 things pop up in their mind about India. According to my observation, around 30-40% of the respondents credited their image of India to its sorry portrayal in Hollywood movies.
There are an ample number of movies in Hollywood which either have their entire backdrop based on China or have used various Chinese locations for shooting their scenes. This number most obviously exceeds the number of Hollywood movies that have an Indian backdrop or depict some scenes of India.
It is not the aforementioned disparity which disappoints me because it is entirely the prerogative of the story writer to set the background of his/her movie in a particular country or that of the director’s to do the shooting in any specific country. But the fact which actually disgruntles me is that, despite showing fewer scenes of India as compared to that of China, the focus is always on portraying the squalor, the filth and the slums of India. And China, on the other hand, while having more number of depictions, is almost always shown in its grandeur and richness. This happens when, in reality, the number of people living under poverty in China catches up with that of India.
My grievances are certainly not concerned with China and I am not alluding to any sort of competence between India and China in Hollywood but it was all to explain the kind of prejudiced behavior that India experiences in Hollywood.
We can come across a plethora of examples where India has been blazoned as what actually is only one out of a thousand aspects of it. A significant point to notice in most India-based movies is how, according to them, India has strangely been on a developmental, cultural and even infrastructural moratorium since the last 70 years or so! Dhoti-clad villains and veiled girls have dominated the portrayed Indian riff-raff right from the 1950s to present day.
A Steven Spielberg directed movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Doom, facetiously shows ‘monkey brains’ as part of a North-Indian feast! What! Let me be very clear that this amazes me or every other Indian as much as it does to any foreigner.
Even in the movie The Avengers, Kolkata was delineated as a city hit by blight and plagued by poverty and squalor. Ironically, the scenes of ‘Kolkata’ were shot in Mexico! Again, what a farce!
A rather recent example is of the movie Million Dollar Arm where a floundering American sports agent lands his feet in New Delhi to unearth some buried Indian sporting treasures to give a leverage to his otherwise capsizing company. Again, he’s shown stuck in a chaotic traffic condition on a road where he grumbles about the continuous honking and irrational driving. Why didn’t they show a scene or two of him moving out of New Delhi’s magnificent airport like they always do in other movies?
Amazingly, there also have been some utopian renditions of India in galactic Hollywood movies like Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol where Mumbai is sketched as a highly modish city with unimaginably tall skyscrapers, aesthetic roads and enviable levels of sanitation. No beggars or snake-charmers are shown in ‘their’ Mumbai.
Pith is that in India (probably only in India), an imposing Hi-Tech mall may exist beside a dilapidated slum area; a BMW, a Nano and a bullock-cart may line up horizontally at a traffic light. Yes, such disparities do co-exist. It would be great justice if Hollywood places the ante on reality and renders the depiction of India by encompassing all its hues within a single scene because no matter how complex and preposterous it might seem but this is how India is.
Hon’ble Prime Minister Narendra Modi hadn’t quoted it wrong when he said, “India no longer plays with snakes, nowadays it plays with mouse.”
