"Sliced Pi" - INDIA CURRENTS (California - February 2013)

Based on a novel written by a French Canadian and directed by a Taiwanese American, it is a story about the fantastical pairing of a French-named Indian boy and a Bengal tiger with a British moniker, lost at sea upon the sinking of their ship – a Japanese vessel headed for North America. This Indian child’s ability to commune with animals occurs in international terrain rather than being confined to Rudyard Kipling’s colonial wilderness. Is Life of Pi simply Jungle Book for the globalization era? Scrutinizing the Oscar nods of this and past years, in their connection to India and multiculturalism, helps pick up the crumbs on the trail to cinema’s globalization.

The filmic adaptation of Yann Martel’s 2001 novel, chosen out of a slew of books by South Asians that are unlikely to make the leap to screen, generated award buzz almost immediately upon its release, not least because of its director. In recent years, Ang Lee’s name has become a fixture with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. On February 24, 2013, Life of Pi will vie for 11 Academy Awards, including Lee’s nomination in the category of Best Director.

The Taiwan-born filmmaker has proven himself to be a cultural broker, whose offerings seem to push the boundaries of what mainstream American audiences watch. It is also not the first time that Lee has had a film that involves a tiger, symbolic or otherwise, in the Oscar contest. In 2001, Lee’s Chinese period piece Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon took the prize for Best Foreign Language Film. However, it was to be an American story about a love affair between two Caucasian cowboys which would win the transnational Asian American an Oscar for Best Director in 2006. Controversially, despite Lee’s win, Brokeback Mountain lost out in the Best Picture race to Crash. That film was directed by Paul Haggis, a white Canadian who also wrote the screenplay which deals with racial fault lines and intersections in Los Angeles.

The irony that the two films, both about minorities, should contend against one another is telling. Even as Lee, an ethnic minority, won for his representation of sexual minorities, the award for direction arguably allowed the conservative Academy to allay contention while still appearing to be mindful of diversity, both by honouring Lee and Crash but not Brokeback Mountain directly. At the same time the controversy still eschews the possibility that minorities can be both queer and of colour. Such issues of diversity in film, or the lack thereof, are further compounded by the current moment of globalization wherein commerce and technology blur international boundaries as quickly as the cuts between locations in movies.

Nonetheless, though awards like the Oscars, to some extent, measure the growing diversity of what Americans watch, a more critical eye needs to be turned to how diversity is being recognized and to what end. Note that while Life of Pi has 11 nominations this year, not one of them is for the South Asian actors. Similarly, in 2009, Slumdog Millionaire which gathered eight of the ten awards it was up for saw none of those prizes go to its actors, for the simple reason that the film had no acting nominees. The pattern of exclusion extends to Lee’s other tiger: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon had additionally been nominated for Best Film, which it did not win. None of its actors received nominations, either.

The previously mentioned Asian-themed pictures have had Academy recognition of the musicians who contributed to their soundtracks, it should be said. Of the South Asian-centric films, A. R. Rahman famously won two Oscars for the music of Slumdog Millionaire and this year Bombay Jayashri has been nominated for the song “Pi’s Lullaby.” Yet, it almost goes without saying that in an award show about the movies, the absence of nominations for actors is extremely conspicuous. Historically, it is true for Best Picture nominees that they tend to collect cast nominations in their sweep. It is striking, therefore, that it has been not the actors but the non-South Asian directors, who have garnered Oscar attention alongside their India-based films - Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire victory a case in point.

In the meantime, most of the South Asian creative labour associated with these high profile Oscar films has been relegated to a supporting role. Well known Indian actor Anupam Kher, who plays a doctor in Silver Linings Playbook, up for eight Oscars this year, had this to say to the Indian press upon the Academy’s announcement: “As an Indian actor, I feel rewarded for my 30 years of contribution to cinema.” It appears to be immaterial to Kher that none of the nominations were for him personally. Although Kher may be pleased that a Hollywood film he is in has been so well received, it would seem to pale in comparison to his own decades-long legacy. That legacy, belonging primarily as it does to Indian cinema which is still the largest dream factory in the world, celebrates its centenary this year.

But such “provincial” heritage pales in comparison to the juggernaut of expansive globalization. Life of Pi is not the only 2013 Oscar contender with an Indian association. Lincoln, with one more nomination than Lee’s movie, was bankrolled by Reliance-DreamWorks, an Indian-allied multinational corporation. So also, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon may have won in the Foreign Language category, but the Chinese feature was partially American funded. Like Boyle, Lee and Martel’s ability to purvey regional stories to a global audience, makes that quality an ideal one for the kind of cultural consumption that now matches a borderless marketplace with free-moving capital. Unlike Mowgli, the story of Pi and his cat is set adrift from India, if ever it came from there in the first place...

The print version of this article can be seen here.

"When Hendrix Met Shankar" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (Goa - 26 January 2013)

In Psychedelic White (2007), his book about trance music and its primarily white consumers in Goa at the turn of the 21^st century, Arun Saldanha first considers the 1950s subcultures through which young Anglo Americans expressed their sense of alienation from mainstream society in the post-war years. It was through the cooptation of black American music and culture, Saldanha opines, that white youth initiated a “hippie rebellion,” but in effect continued to be disengaged from black people. This paradox is further highlighted when Saldanha points to how Jimi Hendrix, “a messianic hero of psychedelic living and a Negro in Native American, Indian, and Gypsy garb” was all that white hipsters aspired to be. However, as a “Negro hipster” playing to largely white audiences, as at the 1969 Woodstock festival, Saldanha notes that to blacks, “Hendrix and his psychedelic rock [were still] white...” Even with the inclusion of black culture or musicians, the countercultural stance of the hippies and rock music did not become any “less white,” Saldanha rightly argues. 

Similarly, in the Summer of Love, at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival at which Hendrix performed two years before Woodstock, archival video reveals an awestruck, mostly white crowd taking in a virtuosic performance by another musician whose hands flew up and down the sitar like it was an electric guitar. At this very same musical event at which Hendrix famously set his guitar on fire, Ravi Shankar was introduced to the United States. If Hendrix was the black rocker who served as the epitome of racially-charged hipster cool to disenfranchised white American youth, then Shankar the fast-fingered Eastern string-slayer represented the exotic otherness that drew so many on the hippie trail to Goa with its alleged promise of a prelapsarian life in the sixties. 

 And while both Shankar and Hendrix marked rock music’s whiteness through their otherness, they also spoke to and of its margins. “[T]o his continual embarrassment,” Saldanha indicates, Hendrix’s audiences were generally white. This, only because so little is said of whom else did listen to his music, even if they protested its whiteness. But at Monterey, Hendrix was Shankar’s audience, and Shankar was reportedly horrified that a musician would set fire to his own instrument. It was a moment in which the two stringed-instrument players shone so bright and so closely to one another that they contrapuntally darkened the universe of rock music. Playing as they did at different times at the Monterey festival, Hendrix and Shankar were still in concert. Their performances bore witness not just to one another’s difference, but also that of the constitutive forms of music, cultural legacies, and “other” audiences that make rock music more than the anthemic rhythm of a narrowly-defined generation. Shankar’s passing away in California in December last, not too far away from that spot in Monterey where he and Hendrix played for the world, brings the music back to its first note even as the refrain echoes on. Rock on, Ravi Shankar.

This article can be seen in its original appearance here.

"When the Curtain Falls" - THE GOAN: Goa Vision 2020 (Goa - 29 December 2012)

I’ve just returned from watching Sandals on the Doorstep, the 25^th anniversary production of Goa’s longest-lived English theatre group, The Mustard Seed Art Company (TMSAC). It is true that I was amongst a small audience at Kala Academy on this December evening. Indeed, while full houses have never been a hallmark of TMSAC’s history, it is arguable that this is not necessarily the group’s aim or indicative of its ongoing popularity. The Seeds have built a durable fan base and for several years have drawn initiates from successive generations of playgoers and even the progeny of former cast members. In short, TMSAC have created a self-sustaining community. Doubtless, the group’s longevity is remarkable, and bespeaks a legacy in the limited but noteworthy arena of Goan theatre in a language other than Konkanni or Marathi. This, particularly because of the Seeds’ staging of original material that focuses primarily on contemporary Goa. In coincidence with their anniversary, TMSAC have released Frescoes in the Womb, a collection of plays by their director and playwright Isabel Santa Rita Vás. While no discussion of Goan theatre in English would be complete without acknowledging TMSAC, what I pay attention to here is the purpose and futurity of the art form itself. Despite its limitations of scope, I wish to demonstrate that theatre in English reflects “Goanity” not only as a body of knowledge, but also as discourse. What I consider here is the ambit of English theatre beyond the stage and how this labour takes on a future life once the curtain falls.

It would be too simplistic to suggest that Goan theatre in English is unviable because of a language barrier. Not only does performance allow for non-linguistic communication within the realm of the spoken word, but English as it is spoken and used performatively in Goa bears its own cultural resonance. In much the same way that Brazilian Portuguese differs from the European variety, forms of Indian English vary from and have even influenced British English, as is evidenced by the worldwide usage of words like “pyjama” and “shampoo.” That oft-maligned term “Konglish” comes to mind in the context of Goan language hybridity, but rather than thinking of this as a bastardized form of English, what if it was instead thought of as an archive of cultural adaptation? In a region known historically for transience because of colonialism, tourism, as well as emigration and return, how has language been affected by the many entrances and exits of worldwide actors? The implication for theatrical performance, then, is not only to potentially mirror linguistic modalities, but also the kinds of code-switching that occur in a multilingual locale. A play performed in multiple languages, for instance, would not be experimental but allude to how people in Goa negotiate the differences between and within home and public spheres. Each may require specific language competencies, but even communication in dialects of the same language itself, revealing negotiations of class, caste, religious, generational, gendered, and regional differences. Thus, theatre in English can self-reflexively “speak” to and about audience diversity in Goa. 

Because theatre has played a role traditionally as a barometer of social and political change and also impacted such transformation, what this necessitates is the study of performance itself. The burgeoning academic discipline of Performance Studies calls for a multifarious approach to the analysis of theatricality, incorporating literary and cultural studies, theories of the performing arts, and the social sciences, among others. What particularities are attendant to the Goan case in this regard? Tellingly, in the fifty years since its decolonization, Goa has no disciplinary field dedicated to the study of its own art and culture. Plays do not need a theatre-going audience alone, for theatre is not only watched – it continues to have an afterlife once the curtain falls. Theatre is read, reviewed, and reacted to, making these processes encores of the dramatic. In pondering the future of Goan theatre in English, the stakes are less in issues of its expansiveness than they are in how taste can be expanded to reposition the Goan as informed arbiter of his and her own culture.

For the print version of this piece, please visit here.

"Empire Shaken, Not Stirred" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (Goa - 24 November 2012)

In a short film that played during the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, Queen Elizabeth II performs her real life role as symbolic leader of the United Kingdom alongside the fictional character James Bond. Transferring from the filmic to a live performance, these two British icons appear to leap out of a plane, allowing the Queen to make a dramatic appearance at a global event hosted by her nation. Falling from the sky like bombs, not only did the performance act as an advertisement for Skyfall (2012), but it also assisted in the Windsors’ ongoing attempt to rebrand. After last year’s Royal Wedding, the Queen’s Jubilee this year has continued to give the archaic institution of monarchy purpose in the postcolonial era. Like her namesake Elizabeth I who presided over a country about to turn into a kingdom at the dawn of colonization, England’s current monarch watched as nations, several among them that once made up her family’s empire, marched past in democratic fashion. And, yet, even as the Queen continues to perform a vestigial role, her persistent masquerade is emblematic of both a history of conquest and ongoing formations of empire.   

At the risk of giving away the plot of Skyfall, I turn to a brief analysis of the film which serves as an allegory of neoliberal empire. Where for the Olympics, Daniel Craig played 007 to the real life monarch, in the movie he is James Bond again to Judi Dench’s M. That Dench has herself played a British monarch – Queen Elizabeth I, no less, in Shakespeare in Love (1998) – strengthens the case that can be made for seeing her role in the movie as that of a hegemon. She is M: Monarch and Matriarch. At the crux of the film is the competition between two agents, Bond and Silva, whose brotherly rivalry stems from their fraught relationship with M, who stands in for mother and mother country. Intertwining with the oedipal relationship with M and the queer association between the two agents is their own symbolic representation of national and colonial histories. If Silva, played by Spanish actor Javier Bardem, is to be seen as an agent of Iberian origin whose country was bested at the colonial game by the British, then Bond - who in Ian Fleming’s novels is described as being Scottish and Swiss - occupies an ambivalent position in relation to the English nation. He is of it, but not quite: semi-autonomous and, when suitable, neutral. In other words, the perfect agent for hire. 

Fleming’s own involvement in World War II intelligence in the colonial Caribbean influenced his crafting of Bond as a “thug in a Saville Row suit.” Where the terrain of diplomacy might have been clearer in the colonial era, the same cannot be said in a time of neoliberalism where it is not the homeland that requires protection but corporate interests. At “Skyfall,” Bond’s family estate in Scotland to which he has brought M for safekeeping, it is not home and hearth or even nation that is being protected. “I never liked the place anyway,” Bond reveals of the erstwhile domain as the weakened M draws close to her end. It is, instead, only the veneer of tradition that the film reveals to be in necessity of defence, for that which it allows a mantle for – profit, war, and expansionism – is what is truly king. 

Find the original appearance of this piece here.