Orientalism 101
The problem with Orientalism is that you get into it and discover that even the things you liked (because they were your own, or just because they were so bad) actually have connections to those across the dividing line. When you watch the above clip from a film by Fritz Lang called “Das Indische Grabmal” you are liable to think that before Bollywood borrowed everything else from the West it also got its inspiration for bad dance sequences from them. We learned to be Indian from Western cinema. Every colonial cliche adorns the walls of our imagination. (Not true, I hope someone is saying. Partly because Indian cinema is older than Lang. But also because I’ve been presenting a faulty principle. Because if what I’m saying is true, then those who came of age in the eighties learned to love their country from “Gandhi” and learned to love, period, from “Jewel in the Crown.” And that can’t possibly be right, right?)
Thanks, Linta Varghese, for the clip.
Well, in Bengal at least for a long time we’ve had song-and-dance melodramas known as jatras, and I’ve always thought they were one of the influences upon Bengali musical melodrama. And the West certainly did not invent the bai-jees.
Comment by Sajia Kabir — December 10, 2006 @ 9:06 pm
I think we were already into the jingoism thing before Gandhi came out. We learned to love gandhi and ravi shankar after gandhi came out.
I’m pretty sure that there were lots of monologuing in indian film, the obligatory slow turn from the scene towards the camera, that odd, soviet poster style tilting of the head towards the light.
Ever heard those overarching statements about how indians invented plastic surgery and everything else before western society? I’d like to know where we got that from, cause I can only recall the germans claims that Shakespeare was german.
Comment by anangbhai — December 10, 2006 @ 11:26 pm