Subarno Chattarji
The Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) and People of Indian Origin (PIO) have always exerted an ambivalent and powerful force in popular culture representations, particularly in Hindi films. Some of that ambivalence remains especially in discourses that stress ‘traditional Indian values’ and the NRIs having been ‘corrupted’ by the morally licentious West. With the liberalization of the Indian economy and the push and pull factors of globalization the moral rhetoric has been jettisoned in favour of assiduous wooing and reportage on the achievements and stature of NRIs and PIOs. India as a nation state now basks in the reflected glory of people who emigrated from its lands most often to seek better economic opportunities and quality of life. The welcome home message is perhaps best articulated in the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas initiated by the coalition government led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The BJP’s advocacy and celebration of NRI, PIO causes is representative of a resurgent nationalism coalescing with economic pragmatism; it is both a call for return to roots and for NRI investments in India.
I will look at representations of diasporic Indians in the UK and US in the Indian print media. The focus will be on two mainstream English language publications, The Times of India and India Today, which encapsulate the aspirations of the fabled Indian middle class and its projection of a globalized existence. I propose to examine various types of articles over a period of a year, beginning April 2003, dealing with Indian food, the IT revolution and Indian techies in the US, ‘reverse brain drain’, and the emergence of what India Today calls the ‘global Indian’. For convenience sake I divide my analysis into six sections: food, film and entertainment, politics, the brain drain syndrome, Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, and seamier aspects of the Indian immigrant community. These articles reveal contradictions between the surge towards a globalized economy in India (and the selling of Brand India) on the one hand and a land of poverty, illiteracy, and communal violence on the other. They tell us as much about contemporary India as they do about contemporary Indians in the UK and US.
In a Sunday Times of India feature Suhel Seth extols the virtues of Indian curry as a brand product that need to be packaged and marketed. Seth reverses the much hyped IT branding of India abroad. ‘India today has more than just software to its global acclaim. And food may well become India’s stirring USP only if we brand it right and do not let it go the way our Darjeeling Tea has gone, which many people in the West believe is from Sri Lanka or worse still, Kenya!’ (Sunday Times, 20.04.03). Seth’s makeover of India’s image abroad abounds in clichés - ‘India is about the soul’ - combined with pride that curry is ‘Britain’s favourite food.’ Indian curry and its potential brand equity are linked firmly to identity and nativist pride. ‘Soul Curry will be that brand which will not just globalise India but also give it the sheen it so desperately needs. It will equally prevent the ubiquitous Bangladeshis and Pakistanis from usurping our craft. It will allow us to create an Indian label which will travel far more than some silly piece of banking software.’ At one level this is a frivolous, tongue-in-cheek piece taking the mickey out of the IT revolution. Yet even the frivolity reveals interesting desires for placing India on the global map and asserting superiority over its neighbours. In its awareness of India’s desperate desire for a global sheen (available in other spheres such as India’s nuclear policy, its posturing toward regional and global power status) it articulates the fact that there isn’t a single Indian brand that has global recognition and perhaps hints at India’s puny share of world trade. ‘Soul Curry’ is the panacea for India’s low self-esteem and furthers regional hegemony. There is no analysis of why the ‘ubiquitous Bangladeshis and Pakistanis’ are in the UK ladling out curry in the first place and how curry contributes to the politics of multiculturalism without in any way addressing the complex economic and racial positioning of Asian immigrants. Seth also denies subcontinental crossovers in modes of cooking and food habits as if Indian cooking were generic and uniformly distinguishable from Pakistani and Bangladeshi foods. In this Seth contributes to a monochromatic picture of Indian food culture and ‘Soul Curry’ feeds into the racial stereotyping centred on the curry phenomenon in Britain. The empire after all will cook back through branded curries. Lakhubhai Pathak of Patak’s Pickles would certainly agree.
Although he never mentions it Seth’s brand revolution is based on the fact that India continues to export primary products such as tea to bolster its trade balance. In passing it is interesting to note that the Indian governments negotiations at the WTO are predicated on the primacy of its agricultural sector. Rashmee Z. Ahmed in an article ‘Europe tells Indian chilli: Never Say Dye’ (Times, Tuesday, 05.08.2003) deals with the negative publicity attendant on adulteration in chilli powder exported to EU countries by Indian firms. The powder was tested to find that it contained ‘Sudan red-1, a chemical colourant normally used in shoe polish, colouring solvents, oils, waxes, and petrol’. ‘Experts said that the adverse publicity for Indian spices and spice products could affect the recent proud boast that India now accounted for just under half of a global export market worth $1,500 million.’ The article is primarily concerned with the image of and fallout on India’s lucrative export market for a largely expatriate community. It makes no mention of a culture of adulteration that proliferates in India and one that is furthered by lack of stringent controls. When such checks are attempted, as in the Centre for Science and Environment report on pesticides in Coke and Pepsi, they are swiftly stymied and marginalised by larger transcorporate interests. Ahmed writes that the ‘Brussels decision has had an immediate impact on British companies supplying Indian spices to the UK’s huge Indian catering trade’. Suhel Seth’s ‘Soul Curry’ and its possibilities are based, in a moment of unconscious irony, on adulterated food products. Ahmed’s article is quite obviously not a feel good story and there were no follow-ups. Her piece is a rare one dealing with the downsides of a shining India basking in the glories of a globalized market. This is not to say that the Indian media never deals with negative stories - there are articles on seamier aspects of the Indian diaspora to which I refer later - but the dominant picture is one of achievement and self congratulation.
Anil Padmanabhan’s ‘Cup De Grace’ (India Today, October 13, 2003) returns to the world of ‘soul curry’ imagined by Seth in the form of tea bars in the US and UK. ‘During the shooting of Matrix Reloaded in Australia, actor Lawrence Fishburne wanted tea. T Salon, a tea room in Manhattan, flew down some cartons to the sets. Recently, T Salon played host to 850 "most powerful women" in the US. The main beverage was tea. In April Preeya Kalidas and Raza Jaffrey, stars of West End’s Bombay Dreams, walked in with their grunge, distressed designer jeans to the launch of Chai Bazaar, touted as London’s first tea bar, to sip tea in Indian khullars or the humble tea cups.’ The cultural referents deliberately span Australia, the US, and Britain and indicate an easy familiarity with global spheres linked together by tea. The khullar is rejuvenated as ethnic chic in the metropolitan centres of the west and Mumbai and Kolkata. The article is part of India Today’s ‘Business & Economy’ section which is appropriate given India’s considerable share of the global tea market. The piece is bolstered by statistics - ‘56% of American adults take the beverage on a regular basis’ - and emphasises the need for Indian entrepreneurs to push the product through ‘"sexy marketing"’. It is this latter emphasis that dominates the article rather than analytical insights into trade patterns in primary products and India’s continuing dependence on such trade or the retrofitting of tea into colonial paradigms of authentic chai bars. All that matters is recognition of the Indian connection in the west and niche marketing of an ‘oriental’ beverage. Globalization and its attendant virtues as extolled by the article ignore the current parlous state of the Indian tea industry and the particularities of insurgency in the North East, for instance, which have affected the industry’s output and efficiency.
Although Aishwarya Rai is not an immigrant Indian it is appropriate to begin with her because articles on her set off the contours of debates ranging around the global Indian in the world of film and entertainment. Designated by Julia Roberts as the most beautiful woman and voted the most attractive woman of 2003 in a hellomagazine.com poll, Rai was the subject of an editorial in India Today, ‘Bond with the Best: England quivers with excitement at the thought of another Virgin Queen’ (April 28, 2003, 4). The editorial was in response to an article in The Daily Mail ‘about the former Miss World becoming the first virgin Bond girl’. Quivering with indignation India Today stoutly defended one of India’s more recent exports, the beauty pageant industry that has rolled out numerous Miss Worlds and Universes over the past decade or so. ‘Living as it does in the protected environment of suburban homes with lace curtains that flutter in the afternoon sun, it does not believe the natives have evolved enough to have a sex life. It has also, quite clearly, not heard of cultural stereotyping. […] Weren’t they also the country where the Virgin Queen ruled for 45 years? Our royals have been known to be more robust.’ In its attempt to defend Rai and critique cultural stereotyping, the editorial practices some delicious reverse profiling of British and Indian royalty. There’s an element of the surreal and the comic in which the editorial trumpets a competitive sexual prowess amongst Indians and will not allow Rai to be slighted on account of her virginity. Why India Today thought it fit to editorially defend Rai is in itself a mystery to me. There is a curious insecurity and assertiveness at work here and Rai is merely a site for the expression of native pride, reverse racism, and insistence on global belonging. Just as soul curry and chai in khullars are indices of Indian success and acceptance in the marketplace, so too Rai is a product that must be duly acknowledged in that most marketable of products, the Bond girl in a Bond film.
In a film review section (India Today, July 28, 2003, 21) Rai is restored to her rightful place as Lalitha in Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, a diasporic take on Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. ‘Speaking about her lead cast, Chadha says, "Ash will be the perfect Lizzy Bennett. She is headstrong and says what she thinks."’ The slurs of virginity and Indian timidity are laid to rest as the Bennetts become Bakshis and Gurinder Chadha, an icon of British-Asian success, recognizes Rai’s worth. In a feature on Gurinder Chadha and Mira Nair (‘Austen Powers, India Today, October 6, 2003, 102-105) the value of Indo-British, Indo-American filmmakers is extolled. Both Chadha and Nair were shooting in ‘London, the capital of multicultural cool’. Chadha calls her film a ‘truly global’ one, ‘It has an international perspective because Indians have it.’ It is interesting to note the way in which Chadha is appropriated with pride by the Indian media and she knows how to play to it by highlighting their ‘international perspective’. The article displays a level of self-reflexivity by referring to the possibility of an Oscar for both women. ‘Chadha knows of the hopes of several million Indians who have decided to embrace her - they are happy to forget that she was born in Kenya and would dearly love her to knock off the British in her hyphenated identity. She knows she has a winner on her hands.’ The celebration of Chadha’s and Nair’s achievement within the matrix of ‘multicultural cool’ coexists with the desire to see ‘Indianness’ and Indian achievement in the works of expatriate filmmakers. In a very different context much the same has happened to V.S. Naipaul who is now embraced as a writer of Indian origin even though his Caribbean roots are vital to his early works, at least. While Chadha’s work is nuanced in her awareness of the fissures in multicultural Britain, media representation in India makes her an icon of an unproblematic ‘multicultural cool’. It highlights the interface between Bollywood and world cinema and the currency that Bollywood occupies within the Asian community in Britain.
The compliment was returned by Channel 4 television’s ‘Bollywood Star’, ‘the western world’s very first search for a Hindi film star from within the 22-million strong diaspora’ (Rashmee Z. Ahmed, ‘Hyphenated videshi emerges as Bollywood Star,’ Times, Sunday, January 18, 2004). The six who qualified will be in Mumbai to act in a Mahesh Bhatt film and embody ‘the hyphenated videshi trying to reclaim his popular heritage, i.e. Bollywood’. According to Richard McKerrow, Bollywood Star’s executive producer, the journey back to India will be one of ‘self discovery’. The return to roots saga is mediated in this instance through the agency of television and film and mass entertainment confers a type of ‘authenticity’ on those who participate in this programme. Films and filmmaking are mentioned here in terms of markets not in terms of exploration of troubled relations between the immigrant and her ‘home’ country, or the immigrant within alienating cultures. A culture of pastiche and kitsch is celebrated as the arrival of Indian culture on a global scale, e.g. the chhamma chhamma reference in Moulin Rouge. Although this particular article is somewhat tongue in cheek it participates in a wider need to generate success stories that validate the ‘home’ country through its valorisation of the diasporic ‘other’.
Anil Padmanabhan’s ‘Staging a Coup’ (India Today, September 1, 2003) falls into a similar pattern. He profiles the new generation of Indian-Americans who are making a mark on Broadway and the American theatre scene in general. This is seen as particularly significant after 9/11 when America ‘has begun to explore cultures other than its own’ (62). The shock of 9/11 can be ameliorated, it seems, through a reworking of the old clichés of the multicultural melting pot. While Indian-American playwrights are increasingly visible they feel the need to negotiate ‘the desi route’ or ‘the mainstream way’. As Geeta Citygirl Chopra, founder South Asian League of Artists in America (SALAAM) puts it, ‘We have to ensure that we do not ghettoise ourselves. We have to make the best of the opportunity and start writing universal themes.’ Chopra’s anxiety about ghettoisation is particularly valid within cultural contexts that tend to freeze the exotic other as ‘authentic’ and thereby remove those representations from the complex matrix of art, politics, and ideology.
However, the emphasis on ‘universal themes’ is troubling because it remains vague and implies at some level that the universal is American, a movement from the particularities of ethnic origin and identity to the generic status of Americanness. While the article highlights the achievements of lesser-known theatre persons such as Nilay Oza and Rohi Mirza it remains fixated on Bombay Dreams and Mira Nair’s upcoming stage adaptation of Monsoon Wedding. As Madhur Jaffrey puts it, ‘The success of Nair’s Monsoon Wedding and Gurinder Chadha’s Bend it Like Beckham proved that mainstream America is increasingly engaged by Indian-American culture.’ The justifiable pride in the achievements of diasporic Indians is combined here with an agenda of a bland, unproblematic multiculturalism, of art as a means of communication, of bridging gaps. ‘Not everyone can travel to India, so art becomes the medium for contact.’ The art itself and its strategies of establishing contact, communication, and a universal discourse is not analysed in the article. For instance, there is no indication of the ways in which Bombay Dreams reiterates cultural stereotypes and romanticizes India. What is prized here and elsewhere in the media discourse related to diasporic Indians is social visibility and commercial success; these are the touchstones for excellence and reflected pride and glory.