{"id":4122,"date":"2007-01-19T09:35:18","date_gmt":"2007-01-19T14:35:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com?p=4122"},"modified":"2007-01-19T07:23:53","modified_gmt":"2007-01-19T12:23:53","slug":"indian_enough_f","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/2007\/01\/19\/indian_enough_f\/","title":{"rendered":"Indian Enough For You? Bollywood and the Oscars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following on Siddhartha’s discussion<\/a> of the “Desi Angle” question, there’s an insightful piece in the Indian Express<\/a> by Shubhra Gupta (thanks, SP) on a related question: is it possible that the only foreign films that have a chance at getting nominated for the Oscars are those that register as completely “other” to the West? This year, India’s official choice, Rang de Basanti<\/em>, didn’t make the top 10, while the Canadian-financed Deepa Mehta film Water<\/em>, did. (The final nominees will be announced next week.)<\/p>\n\n

But Paint It Yellow\/Saffron (that\u00c2\u2019s what its English-subtitled version [of Rang de Basanti<\/em>] is called . . . didn\u00c2\u2019t travel too far down the road to the Oscars for that exact same reason: confused, contemporary youth exist all over the world. To a foreign viewer, the film is not \u00c2\u2018Indian\u00c2\u2019 enough, not in the same way as, say, a Water is:<\/strong> it is also, and this is not a well-known fact, very strongly reminiscent of Canadian film Jesus Of Montreal, in which a group of actors\u00c2\u2019 lives change drastically as they put on a passion play.

\n\nIncarcerated widows in a pre-Independence Indian \u00c2\u2018ashram\u00c2\u2019. Oooh, that\u00c2\u2019s Indian.<\/strong> Where else would you find little girls and beautiful young women and old crones with tragic backstories and cruelly shaven heads? It\u00c2\u2019s another matter that even today, Vrindavan\u00c2\u2019s widows lead lives of quiet desperation. It\u00c2\u2019s also another matter that major portions of the film had to be shot in Sri Lanka, which masquerades as Varanasi. But Water has the backdrop of the British \u00c2\u2018raj\u00c2\u2019, the horror of child marriage and \u00c2\u2018sati\u00c2\u2019, and brutal oppression. Can\u00c2\u2019t get better, can it? (link<\/a>)<\/blockquote>\n\n

Gupta is right on many counts here. Rang de Basanti<\/em> does have urban, middle-class kids speaking liberal amounts of English (as well as a white girl, speaking Hindi). What she’s overlooking, of course, is that while Rang de Basanti<\/em> is a lot of fun, it just isn’t that<\/em> serious a film. It doesn’t have the sense of gravity or “prestige” that makes a film a plausible Oscar contender. A much better choice, by far, would have been Omkara<\/em> — which has the three A’s: it’s Arty, “Authentic” (though still legible to western audiences, via Othello<\/em>), and most importantly, Adult<\/em>. (I often feel that NRIs or ABDs should pick India’s official Oscar selections, since the Board that currently makes this selection clearly has no idea what it’s doing. Paheli<\/em>?)<\/p>\n\n

Still, I fear that the three Indian films that have reached the nomination phase over the years — Mother India<\/em>, Salaam, Bombay<\/em>, and Lagaan<\/em> — do all fit a pattern: they focus on desperate poverty. While this is undeniably an important (and continuing) part of Indian society, it’s sad that only the exotic, impoverished India of street urchins or rural desperation is likely to make an Oscar-worthy film.<\/p>\n\n

Someone might object: why should Indians care about the Oscars?<\/em> No Satyajit Ray film was ever nominated (though I must admit I don’t know how many of his films were officially submitted). And isn’t this is the same Academy that gave Best Picture to A Terrible Bore<\/s> A Beautiful Mind<\/em>? But, whether or not it’s justified, there always seems to be a great deal of interest in the Indian media about the Oscars — despite rampant evidence that Americans simply don’t get Indian cinema.<\/p>\n\n

Perhaps we should start our own awards? The Mutinies? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following on Siddhartha’s discussion of the “Desi Angle” question, there’s an insightful piece in the Indian Express by Shubhra Gupta (thanks, SP) on a related question: is it possible that the only foreign films that have a chance at getting … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4122"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sepiamutiny.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}