In the Mardaani 3 film, the villains are Amma which means ‘Mother’ and her son. The female cop pits herself against the identity of The Mother, the poor woman.
Or does she?
There is a curious mirroring between The Mother and the female cop (The Law). Amma criticises the law by saying it serves the rich, not the poor girls. The female cop criticises the law for serving the rich and not the poor girls. Amma uses a certain strategy with her son to infiltrate the law. The female cop copies her strategy to infilitrate Amma’s criminal network.
The female cop also uses the body of Amma as a weapon, as the solution to resolving all of the issues in the case. She exploits the mother son bond and the figure of the poor woman Mother. In the movie, there is also the invocation of the Mother figure of power for the female cop as a puppet show is depicted in which Durga The Mother Queen, the Mother goddess fights against her enemies.
At the same time that the movie is hostile to the poor Mother and depicts her as a criminal that exploits poor girls, the film is trying to reclaim her body and position for the law. It is copying the poor mother as the source of real legitimacy. This is because the film is going against the traditional culture of India which is to celebrate the poor mother as the source of legitimacy and authority. Ask me, I am named after it, the son that weds Mother India in the movie of the name with the poor Mother in it. There is this false face of benevolence to the law because the female cop is supposedly trying to help the poor girl, she is supposedly good.
But the law is not good. It is trying to destroy the power and the legitimacy of the poor Mother. It is trying to destroy the Mother/Son bond of protection and love in the movie. While no one is justifying child trafficking or any of the villainous aspects of the villains in the movie, it is worthwhile noting how they attempt to demonise the poor Mother. Amma is supposed to be attacking and killing poor girls, which is actually what the female cop is doing because she kills and silences Amma in the movie by shooting her in the throat, suppressing and marginalising the voice of the poor Mother. She does the same to the son that loves the poor Mother. Amma is supposed to be exploiting the bodies of poor girls, but who else does this? It is the female cop by exploiting Amma’s body as a weapon.
The law is falsely benevolent and it is corrupt. The fact is that the female cop acts for and with the rich and powerful Father of the rich girl. Against the poor Mother.
Coming from a society that worships The Mother, where the duty is to be the son and lover of The Mother, I have written before about how the traditional Indian film has protested against the sexual repression of the West and its law which is based on an Asian Mother phobia. This phobia of the Asian mother reveals that The Mother is the Other to Western law, which is misogynistic and fears maternal or feminine authority. https://cafedissensus.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/there-is-no-bad-mother-beta-and-the-indian-mother-law-against-the-wests-asian-mother-phobia/
More and more, as I watch current films and watch current movies, I am learning just how far this misogyny and phobia of the mother goes in Western culture, or its unconscious legal culture. I am currently reading the Skandar the Unicorn books. The author worked in the law. Guess who is the villain in the first two books (I have only just begun the second one)? It is The Mother.
I watched ‘Polite Society’ the other day. Aside from the usual racism in these films about British Asian people – i.e. the British Asian man can never get married in these films because ‘there is something wrong with him’, guess who was the villain? It was The Mother. And the film spent all of its time making the mother/son bond loathsome as well through the eyes of the spoilt and Westernised British Asian female in it that seemed to hate the culture of the older generation.
Today I watched ‘Mardaani 3’, a cop film. Guess who was the villain? You guessed it. The character that was named ‘Amma’, or The Mother. And guess what? The Asian man in the film was also a villain because of the maternal relationship between himself and The Mother.
Mardaani 3 is worth analysing. The Mother comes from a poor family and has a Haryanvi dialect accent which suggests the rural. While no one is saying that she is a good character, because she is a child trafficker, the point is how the law in the form of the film’s heroine finishes her. She is shot in the throat. And then, when she can’t answer back, and the law has silenced the voice of this poor woman, the heroine of the film gives a big monologue. Same with the son. He comes from the poor. And he is also silenced when he is finished. The whole point of these films is to silence the poor Mother and the son that loves her and protects her.
Why am I talking about Indian films alongside British Asian films and British Literature? Because India was colonised and Western law was forced on us. This misogyny comes from the West. However, there are still sons that come from poor mothers. I am one of them. We will not accept this misogyny because we have sworn to protect our mothers. I represent the Indian national movement. I was named after the son that married Mother India. Against the hatred of The Mother and this legal culture, we stand for dharma, the organic law of India. I have modelled myself on my mother, the poor, foreign woman. The poor Indian woman. I am her voice. Even when the whole of this Western culture and its law is against us, wants to silence us. Because as I have written before, the dharma is the Mother-Law. We will never stop worshipping The Mother. Just like The Dark Mother stood as a symbol of Revolution against the Imperialists, so we still stand. We are the rivals of the oppressions and injustices of the Western law, its marginalisations and suppressions. Jai Maa Kaali!
S: I woke up again from another nightmare in the supermarket, the supermarketisation of art and culture, the meanness of the philistines in this world. And as I lay in bed thinking over things, this is what came into my head. There is this line in this movie ‘Gadar’ (Rebellion/Mutiny/Revolt) that I think about over and over again.
A: The film goer. Which is?
S: Let me tell you the story of this film. It is based on a true story. A Sikh man fell in love with a Muslim woman. He married her and had children with her. The partition separated them. Her parents broke up the marriage. He committed suicide.
A: He kills himself?
S: In real life. In the movie, he does not kill himself. He wins her back.
A: So, tell me this line that you obsessively return to.
S: The scene in the film is that the two lovers are going to be separated. They have only just fallen in love. They are talking. He is suffering from the pain of separation already. And he says to her, ‘No matter how merciless this life is, you still have to live it.’
A: This is the line that you think about? There is no elegance or poetry to it.
S: Is it not the whole message of the film? The whole point of the film? In the film, he is to live. Whereas in this brutal and merciless world, he is made to die through its hostility to love and diversity, to an interfaith marriage, to the embrace of difference, to harmony and unity across cultures. In the film he is given his happiness.
A: You love the fairy tale even knowing the reality.
S: You live for your ideals. The ideals of India are the embrace of difference. The actor in the film, Sunny Deol, he is me. I have modelled myself upon the hero of Punjab.
A: It is easier said than done to live through despair.
S: When you are the hero, your duty is to live. In this spiritual war, it is our duty to not only survive but to prosper. Even when you dream of death, you make plans to live. Because we are love. And we keep love alive in this mean and cheap world.
A: You that has nightmares every night, you that has separated yourself from every community, you preach love and life?
S: To stomach injustice is to become unjust. To live with those that cheapen life is not life. To live with those that devalue love, that is not life. It takes courage to separate yourself from communities for the ideals of love and life. I have that courage. I can stand all alone in this world. I have lived through profound despair. And despite everything, still I laugh. I make a life. I love. I was born to be a hero. It is what I am named after, this Sikh hero Sunil Dutt that married a Muslim woman and saved her life, just like in the film Gadar. She is Mother India and I was raised to protect her honour. The story of Gadar is the story of my life. Why? Because I am Punjab. I am India. And this film that we are talking about? It is the most watched film in modern Indian history. All of India loves me. Because I am India. I am Punjab. I am The Tiger. I am love.
A beautiful day apparent, and it being my day off, Alfonso and I had arranged a programme of events for the day. I met him at his house first thing in the beautiful sunshine and we walked through the park reflecting on life and everything.
Our first stop was a mission of charity. We were going to see our friend in the hospital through the park. Alfonso had bought a comb at his request and we had picked it up from the chemist’s in the corner. I had begun joking around there and suggested to the cashiers that he was starting up his hair stylist business which had aroused a few smirks and then some conversation from the old lady that was sitting there waiting for her medicines. The visit in the hospital had not gone very smoothly but then our mutual friend was not very well and was having a bad day. We had told him that we would see him next week at the close of about half an hour.
We walked again back through the park and again to Alfonso’s house where he made himself some coffee and tea while I gulped down some water. The first stop was a woman’s brass band that was playing in Holy Sepulchre church in Holborn Viaduct. We then set out for a poster exhibition which was about politics, democracy and resistance in the Eastern bloc at Europe House. Alfonso was older than me and had lived through the events in the late eighties and nineties so he was teaching me about them while I made some comments about the aesthetics, intentions and meanings of the posters.
We decided to walk to St James’s park which was in the vicinity afterwards and ended up in the Institute of Contemporary Arts which had a 1K challenge to promote Puma trainers. We realised that we could pick up some free running T-shirts if we collected a few stamps so we did so.
Having gone through a day of medicine, music, art, politics and sport, we then settled back down into Alfonso’s house after buying much reduced price chocolate in the form of Easter eggs and then watched the film ‘The King’, which was a creepy thriller about Christianity and its interaction with the military minded and violence.
According to Alfonso, the film was about revenge. Alfonso asked me how it contrasted with the film I had watched recently, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, ‘The Master of the Field’.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘the difference can be encapsulated in one cinematic moment. The hero is rescuing his sister who has been gang raped. He kills everyone. We have a scene where he disappears from the camera. Then he rises. His head is brought up to a whirling circular firework behind him. We focus on his face. It is the face of his revenge. Why the firework? In the film, they talk about the energy that is required to have revenge. The hero says that not all have this energy. He is the firework. The revenge is within him. It is a whirling circle of energy. Whereas in The King, the anti-hero is silent and evil, seemingly low in all energy except for sexual energy, low-key and understated, in the Hindi film the hero is full of energy. In fact, the actor Ranveer Singh is known for his energy. In fact, he is Punjabi and we are known for our energy. The whirling firework becomes a halo around his head. It represents the energy of the Sikhs, because he is a Sikh in the film and in real life. He is a hero, a guru. The energy is full of light and power, it is dazzling. It is the splendour of Punjab. The firework is fire. Fire which will burn the world. Fire which is full of the sparks that will ignite this world. That is the difference between ‘The King’ and ‘The Master of the Field’. It is a difference in power. The Punjabi is powerful. The Tiger is powerful. We have endless energy which illuminates and burns this world, this energy of revenge. And remember the last thing. The energy is the law: it is the wheel of the dharma. It is the beauty of law.’
S: He is back with a bang, my screen idol, Sunny Deol. The Punjabi actor that is me and I am him.
A: He acts. You live.
S: Whatever he is off screen, on the screen he is the ideal of Punjab. He is The Tiger. He is The Voice. He is Anger. And he is Justice.
A: So, I take it you watched Border 2?
S: In this film is the philosophy of the Punjabi. That the warrior is first and foremost a lover. He fights because he is full of love. And the army? It works because of love. Each man is a brother. He is full of love for his brother.
A: This film glorifies war.
S: Does it? It shows the sacrifices that you have to make for war. It shows why you have to protect the people. Because of love. There are those that would rule the world with this oppression. There has to be a man to fight them. The hero. Counting on others to do the right thing always leads to the wrong results.
A: What is the most striking moment of this film?
S: There are many. When the dead man calls on the power of The Mother to fight the enemy. Durga, the Invincible, The Mother Queen. The one I think of the most is when the enemies taunt my hero Sunny Deol. They have killed his only son who was also in the Indian army. They tell him that they will kill him just like they butchered his child. Sunny Deol is silent. He seems defeated. Then we hear the roar of The Tiger. Sunny Deol explodes. He tells them that he will kill them. He tells them that the martyr inspires courage and not fear.
A: You think about this?
S: Does it surprise you? Is it not strange? Instead of fearing death, the hero charges towards it. Instead of saving himself, he saves the world. When he thinks of the dead soldier, he thinks about revenge for the dead soldier. That is the mark of the hero. That is why I am Sunny Deol. Because I run into the face of danger. Because the martyr does not fill me with fear but with courage.
A: You are in love with death.
S: In this death there is glory. We come from the honour culture. The highest honour is that of the warrior, the one that fights to protect Mother Earth and The People.
A: Instead of controlling and managing your anger, you venerate it. You worship revenge.
S: I worship The Dark Mother. She was filled with bloodlust for her enemies. She was uncontrollable. She wiped off sin from the face of the world. We come from the revenge culture. We are Punjabi. Touch one of us and there will be hell to pay. In the film, they say that if they kill thousands of Indians, then we will run away because we are cowards. They give them the answer. If you kill our men all of India will come for payback.
I was writing to A. It was always a letter to A. A. was the best of my friends. I was telling them what The Tiger had done today.
It began in the morning with shaving after a week. Then, after a hearty and healthy breakfast, I rushed down to the British Museum for the Samurai exhibition. The space was spectacular. The weaponry, the costumes, the video along a massive wall. The mission was to show that the warrior culture is also an artistic and cultural endeavour. There were splendid Japanese woodblocks and even video games concerning the heroic exploits of the warriors and the ruling class.
This decadent culture looks to the time of the Samurai as an inspiration. A society with honour and with bravery that makes the corruption of the present pale into the insignificance that it is. And where do the Samurai come from? It is not Japan. They come from India and Buddhism. The Samurai are the brothers of India.
I rushed through the Hawaii exhibition afterwards. It was marred by a concentration on the relationships between that country and Great Britain. However, there were some glorious costumes on display, feather necklaces and feather cloaks radiant with the beauty of colour. The grimacing statuettes were splendid in their own way, truly characterful representations of humanoid figures.
The Oxfam bookshop next to the British Museum followed. I am saving a visit there tomorrow at lunchtime to pick up what I spotted if it is still there – fate will decide.
The Outernet was the next distraction before I wolfed down a reduced price M & S gala pork pie for lunch in about ten minutes. I watched a number of videos:
Biophilia by Sebastien Labrunie – about the Mother Tree.
Superradiance by Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter – About embodiment in the planet
Pools by Maggie West and Scott Pagano – about water absorbing into sand in brilliant colours
Cacophony of Stillness by Jesse Woolston – the expression of natural phenomena in new and challenging ways
Transcendence by Robert Newman – geometry and the depths of the natural world
I played on the Roland piano. There were some really accomplished pianists that played before me and after me. I played something very simple and got one of the accomplished guys to film me. It will go up on my Instagram soon, maybe tomorrow morning.
A jaunt in Liberty next. I have never been there before. The textiles and fabrics were amazing. They reminded me of when I would go into the Indian shops with my mum around Green street and she would buy the Indian fabrics to make her own clothes. I will definitely at some point in my life go there and get a shirt made in one of the fabric designs.
Next stop, Tate Britain. First it was the Lee Miller exhibition. I had watched the film first and this was what was informing my viewings of the photographs. I liked her modelling photographs much more than her photographs as a photographer. There was some video footage of her posing as a statue which drives a poet mad and also her messing around stroking a phallic piece of sculpture and laughing about it, so the exhibition veered into a type of pornography, an impression that was reinforced by the number of nudes of her that were being exhibited. I had studied this period of photography before and it reminded me of my many years of research.
I was somewhat envious of her life. The great difference between being a glamorous woman and being an average man (albeit a handsome one that was a genius and a god). I had never had and never would have the opportunities that she had for love or for a life of high society. She had hung around Picasso and Man Ray, the latter when she was not even famous. The life that I had wanted had never come – being friends or even lovers with artists and writers. She’d had it all.
Desultory walk through the Turner and Constable exhibition looking at the differences between them and their rivalry. I’ve never liked either of them. However, it can’t be denied that they had some spectacular and striking pieces. As I was walking through the gallery, I had the same thought that I always have in these places. The people there will never talk to you. You can’t find any friends or lovers there, any fellow lovers of art. What a degraded time that we live in.
On the way home, I shopped in Tesco and got some reduced price Black Cherry conserve, two whole jars of it. I also had a call with a friend in a country that is going through atrocities and upheaval at the moment.
At home, it was chicken curry and rice followed by hot chocolate cake and custard. Then a phone call with the one that is mine before I watched the Hindi film Dhurandhar that has raked in so much money at the worldwide box office. It was an Indian version of Hamlet where the hero goes into the enemy’s country in the name of justice and revenge. It was a tightly constructed film. Where do I sit on the controversy? India claims that the Pakistani state creates terrorists that attack India. Who knows the truth of these matters? I don’t have the information or the intelligence. Like me, the average person does not. Are Indian people, film makers and the state falsely claiming that the Pakistani state is covertly fighting them? Is this racism? The state is all about racism. That is the precondition for the modern day state, us and them. It is the state that is disgusting and corrupt. Any state. I am an anarchist. I stand for real freedom. I stand for love rather than hate. I watch the film. I don’t let the fiction influence my understanding. All states are corrupt and predicated on hate and terrorism and violence.
Finally, a long shower and then, as always, the writing to A. We are companions of the night.
In this song, there is complete understanding. The understanding of a woman. The story is that there is a man who is upset with her. And she understands that he is upset with her because he loves her.
He does not look at her.
He does not think about her.
She passes by him. He does not stop her.
He complains about her.
She even says that he hates her.
But yet, she still believes in his loyalty. She believes that they are not separated. That he complains is that he loves her.
“Ruthna” implies a temporary emotional withdrawal often intended to prompt reconciliation; “to sulk” and “to pout” capture the behavioral aspect, while “to be offended” or “to take offense” capture the feeling. (Ibid.)
So, in the song, she understands that he complains because he loves her. And she loves him too. The complaint is evidence of their love. It brings them together instead of breaking them apart.
Obsessively, I listened to this song. In it was the mystery of love. Of an Indian man’s love. I have not watched the film. However, the form of the song is important. It is a qawwali. This was originally a song form in Sufi Islam designed to be hypnotic and to inspire religious ecstasy and love. Hindi films use the form to convey earthly love. The divinity of love is being expressed in ‘Shikayat’ (Complaint).
How different, I thought, the Hindi film is from life. The understanding of this song, does it happen in real life? Real life is full of misunderstanding and confusion. As we know it, real life is full of misguided assumptions, tangle and confusion, mind games that meander and go nowhere.
The song has inspired me to watch the film. Perhaps in the film, there is the reconciliation of the lovers. A happy love story for a change. Instead of another witnessing of the death of love. And the death of the lover. Who is reviled for being in love.
I’ve been watching Hindi films since I was a child. It is how I learnt to speak Hindi (my language at home – my mother tongue – is Punjabi, not Hindi). Hindi speakers have many words for love. Not like English speakers. Here are some – Ishq, Aashiqi, Mohabbat, Pyaar, Prem, Lagan, Chaahat… There’s probably more. Hindi is a rich language.
Here are some more metaphorical ones, which touch on some of the ways that love is experienced and conceptualised in Indian culture:
Ibaadat – Worship. When you love someone, you love them like a god or a goddess. They are important, powerful, masterful over you. They rule over your heart. They take the place of a god or a goddess, commanding all your loyalty and faith. You trust them without question. You hope everything from them.
Aetbaar – Belief. When you trust them with your heart. You can rely on them without question. They are the one person in the whole world that you can count on the most to stay with you through thick and thin. You expect everything from them, total commitment.
Wafaa – They hold your loyalty. You will never stray from them. The trust and the bond between you is unshakeable.
Behosh/Mere hosh udhgayee – Unconscious/My senses have flown – How love is experienced. Your mind goes on a holiday when you see them, think about them, are around them. They command all your attention. You can’t focus on anything else.
Amaanat – They say that your lover (usually a woman) is your ‘amaanat’ (‘thing or property committed to the trust and care of a person or group of persons’ – https://rekhtadictionary.com/meaning-of-amaanat?lang=hi ) A red flag for Western feminists, but indicates the possessiveness that a lover will have over their sweetheart – and even in English, you still say to someone ‘You are mine’ or ‘You are my girlfriend’.
Here are some terms of endearment which further indicate what love means in Indian culture:
Jaanu/Janaam/Jaaneman – ‘My Life’. Love is for life. Your lover is your life. They are everything for you and they are for you forever, like your own life. They are precious like your life.
Mitwa/Yaar – ‘Friend’. Indian culture does not make a distinction between friendship and love between a man and a woman in this term. Which perhaps indicates the truth – that your lover is your best friend.
Humraaz – Someone who has the same secrets as you – you share your secrets with them. You trust them. They are the only ones you can share your most personal thoughts with.
Humnava/Humsafar – Someone who is a fellow traveller through life’s journey with you (the ‘ride or die’ chick). You are committed to the same journey. You have the same mission in life.
Humdum – Someone who has the same life force/breath (‘dum’) as you, your soulmate, someone who is the other part of yourself. The sense of connection, of seeing yourself in them.
Humdard – Someone who shares the same pain as you, because you are so connected. What you feel, they feel. They are the mirrors of you and you are the mirror of them (love’s mirror).
Huzoor – Master – they rule over you because you love them. And you accept their sovereignty over you.
Deewana – Crazy one – because you go crazy in love for someone.
See more terms of endearment from the Hindi movies here:
Abstract: Women are seen as bodies, not minds. As such, they are seen as suitable for bodily performance in a patriarchal society rather than for composing music which is perceived as a non-bodily and abstract form of representation. This division between body and mind underpins the division between the private and the public sphere. Keywords: Music, Feminism, Patriarchy, Body, Mind, Secret Superstar, Public, Private
Knowledge of the history of women’s musical practices is aided by a concept which I call ‘musical patriarchy’. The division of musical work into a largely male public sphere and a largely female private sphere is a trait of Western music history and also of many musical cultures from all around the world. Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15.
I was listening to some songs by Vidya Vox, the famous YouTuber recently. I had downloaded them for free off of her website. Vidya sings in a combination of Hindi and English, as well as other languages. She does cover versions of songs and mash-ups. I grew curious about the singer and her music, so I put her name into a search engine. It turned out that the music behind Vidya’s songs comes from her white husband. Here was yet another female singer that didn’t produce her own music and that traded on her Indian ethnicity and sex to entice audiences while relying on a masculine, Western sound and mind.
Racial dimensions aside for the time being, the question was, why were there so few famous female music producers both in India and the West? Personal experience, as usual, prompted the question. One of my amateur pursuits is singing and song-writing. I also compose the music for my songs and make the music myself. Although my musical education in England was peculiarly lamentable, I went ahead and learned how to do everything myself. Is my music perfect? Of course not. It doesn’t have a professional sound and even my singing is just recorded on the computer using the free and in-built software. However, the point is, that I can sit down and compose my own music and, if I had enough free time and money, I could produce my own tracks to a good standard. I could even lay down tracks for the melodies and sounds that I can invent in my head but am currently unable to represent in concrete musical form due to my lack of ability and skill in playing music. Why can’t more women do the same thing successfully?
One could gather various ideas to answer the question. I have put the quote at the top of this piece to show one possible interpretation. The argument is that women’s music is regarded as private, rather than public. It is men’s music that is regarded as public. However, what I want to argue in this short piece is that women are not admitted to the masculine sphere of music because it is a form of representation that is regarded as abstract, invisible and bodiless, qualities associated with men and not women. It is my contention that in a patriarchal society, women are regarded as incapable of mastering the abstract discipline of music and of transcending their bodily form to enter into the realms of thought and meaning. This is why there are so few famous female musical composers and why the ones that do exist are not rewarded and recognized for their efforts. https://www.billboard.com/…/female-music-producers-industry…
I want to start, as I often do, with a Hindi film which I watched. I am talking about the huge international success which was recently released, Secret Superstar (2017). I will not go into the story too much, nor criticise the type of feminism which was portrayed in the film. Instead, I will concentrate on the relationship between femininity, the body and music in the film. There is a young girl in the film that becomes famous on YouTube for singing in burqa which covers her whole body, including her face. The burqa makes her “bodiless” and as invisible as it is possible to be without advanced technology. At this stage of her career, the girl is capable of composing her own music and songs. She doesn’t need any man to guide her voice. She is both singer and songwriter, player and composer. However, the girl doesn’t want to be bodiless and invisible, because that would mean that she remains anonymous. She wants to be known. This desire to be recognised as a person, as a singer, to enter the public stage and leave behind the private sphere of the domestic, leads the girl to a famous male composer. It also leads her to abandon the role of music composer, a being that is invisible and bodiless because he, and it is usually a he, usually stays behind the scenes. She then becomes the voice for the male music composer’s music and finds success. The girl is therefore led into the patriarchal music establishment and away from composing her own music because of her desire to become a body with a recognisable face, to be seen as a woman with a woman’s body. She leaves the realm of abstraction, invisibility and thought to become a performing body, the face of music rather than its “soul”. Such is the brand of “feminism” in Secret Superstar: a female’s desire can only be to perform as a body, to become a voice. She cannot become one with abstract thought, invisibility and the abstract and non-bodily representation of music.
In fact, if you watch Secret Superstar closely enough, you will find that the girl rebels against all forms of abstract thought. Her rebellion is chiefly conducted against her father, who is an engineer and relies on the abstract disciplines of maths. She also rebels against her education in maths and science. The young girl supports her uneducated mother over her educated father and leaves education to do so, running away from school secretly. She even effects a separation between her uneducated mother and her educated father (in the film’s defence, he is depicted as an abusive father and husband). Clearly, the girl does not wish to remain within the realm of thought. She wants blissful ignorance and to be seen as nothing more than a body, to be accepted in the realm of the body.
My speculation is that Secret Superstar reflects the existing reality of music in a patriarchal society; that there is a gendered play between the bodily performance of voice and the abstract and non-bodily performance of music. To enter onto the public stage in musical performance, the rules dictate that women have to be seen as bodies, not as minds. It is men that are celebrated as being of the mind and having rational “souls”. It is men that can give birth to music, which is, of course, related to maths (look up Pythagoras and his ideas about maths and music if you don’t believe me). Thus we have an explanation of why there are so few successful music composers in both India and the West. I have argued at length about the relationship between the body and non-bodily abstraction and their relationship to the private and public spheres throughout my writing and I believe it informs most aspects of the society that we live in. The body is therefore supremely important as a site from which to make the resistance against the forms that constrain us and the female body is, I think, the supreme form which can fight against the forces of concealment, invisibility, pretended abstraction and universality. There is a further speculation: that the music that we all listen to and enjoy is founded in a masculine mind set and worldview. The very nature of our listening and auditory enjoyment is founded in patriarchy and its conditions. Films like Secret Superstar can reveal exactly what the nature of that patriarchal sound is and how it operates, if only we watch carefully and learn. One thing is clear: such a sound hates synaesthesia since it separates listening and sight, music and the body.
The Failure of Diversity: The First Indian Superhero Out of Love in Marvel’s ‘Eternals’
I was standing in a noisy, barely contained line of schoolboys outside a classroom, indulging in my usual habit of stand up comedy. It was the mid-90s. My routine consisted of an imaginary scenario where the top heroines of the time pestered me with phone calls and visits at my house. Suddenly, a teacher, a bespectacled white woman with a nasal voice, figuratively pulled me by the collar into a classroom where the sixth form girls – the only female students – were vegetating. The teacher asked the several white girls if they would ever go out with me on a date. Politely, looking down at the short ethnic minority man wearing his older brother’s cast off blazer, the girls declined.
The point of this bizarre ritual was to humiliate me, the ethnic minority man, to show that we were unworthy of romantic love. It was meant to destroy my confidence in myself. But the performance did not work. It failed. Even at the time, I knew that I had got the reaction from the girls because they were white. Everyone knew that white women thought we were undesirable. What do I mean by ‘we’? We call ourselves British Asians in England if we hail ethnically from the subcontinent. A brief quote about a male, British Asian character from Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth in 2000 shows that the Western presumption is that we are not attractive:
Pulchritude – beauty where you would least suspect it, hidden in a word that looked like it should signify a belch or a skin infection. Beauty in a tall brown young man who should have been indistinguishable to Joyce from those she regularly bought milk and bread from, gave her accounts to for inspection, or passed her chequebook to from behind the thick glass of a bank till. (1)
British films like Bend it Like Beckham extend these conceptions when they represent sexual freedom and desire for British Asian woman as a release from coupling with British Asian men. America is hardly innocent of these characterisations. In The Big Bang Theory, the Indian Raj is the only one that cannot get a girlfriend, much to the amusement of the audience it would appear, who could not get enough of this running joke. In light of such racist, unspoken assumptions, the bizarre ritual that I was subjected to should not be seen as an isolated incident. As I will argue, it informs the representation of us on the screen. Ethnic minorities that have historically come from the subcontinent. Even when lip service is being paid to ideals of ‘diversity’, used as a tactic of selling movie tickets.
Kingo: The First Indian Superhero and Western ‘Diversity’
The Indian character in the Marvel Eternals team is Kingo (Kumail Nanjiani). This is a historical role, the first superhero from South Asia on a Western screen. In an interview, Nanjiani spoke of the grave responsibility of portraying Kingo in a representative way that accorded with ideals of diversity:
The responsibility is a real thing, because there haven’t been other South Asian superheroes in the MCU, or any other Hollywood mainstream movie for that matter… I can’t represent every South Asian person in the world, because we’re all completely different, right? So while there is that responsibility, I want to do a good job. (2)
Eternals itself has been marketed as a positive ‘diversity’ film. Salma Hayek (Ajak) says, “the Eternals film is a “huge” step forward for diversity and inclusivity in the film industry”, sentiments echoed by Gemma Chan (Sersi). (3) This marketing tactic has indeed influenced audience reactions. Oliver Jones of the Observersays that “one of the most impressive aspects of the Eternals is how the culturally representative team’s identities play into the theme and story in powerful and essential ways”. (4)
However, for all the talk, Kingo carries the racist, Western association of undesirability and failure at love. That is, Kingo is a failure in Western diversity, a continuous failure which is always represented, tragically enough, as a success. A short reflection on how Kingo is related to the other Eternals reveals that Kingo loves no one. Kingo is loved by no one. He is an Indian man completely out of love in all its variants, romantic and non-romantic.
Everyone else in the team of Eternals either loves a team mate, is loved by a team mate, or has a partner, as in the famous gay pairing between Phastos and his partner that showcases homosexual couples for the first time in a Marvel movie. Except, that is, for Kingo. Sersi and Ikaris love each other and have even been married at one point. Makkari and Druig are falling in love. Sprite secretly loves Ikaris. Thena (Angelina Jolie) is in a relationship of love and protection with Gilgamesh. Even Ajak, who appears to be solitary and celibate, has been described as a beacon of love by writer Chloé Zao, who comments, that the role called for “a woman with the heart the size of the ocean” and represents a powerful, maternal love. (5)
So this is Western ‘diversity’. Even when we are portrayed as superheroes, we are unattractive, out of society, unable to form not only romantic relationships, but other loving relationships. In fact, as we see when his film posters are shown, Kingo conceals his immortality by reproducing asexually in his Hindi film avatars where he is his own grandfather, father and self. He is like some virus outside of normal sexual reproduction. Ironically, one poster is for a Hindi film (‘Bollywood’) entitled ‘Yuva Prem’ (Young Love), where Kingo plays a romantic lead. It is only in another non-Western cinema and space of imagination that he can be recognised as a lover.
In contrast to Kingo (and the other ethnic minority men in the movie), the white man is constantly loved romantically by women. The main character, Sersi, only falls in love with white men. There is not only a love triangle between Sersi and two white men, but also a love triangle between Sersi, Sprite and Ikaris for the white man. The white man is repetitively, irresistibly desirable, the Indian man is supposedly not. Not only this, but in the ending of the movie, the white man’s love is the ultimate saviour of all humanity, in a reworking of the trope of the white saviour. Ikaris fails to stop Sersi’s plan to rescue humans which he believes is counter to the mission of the Eternals because he still has feelings for her. To add insult to the negative and racist depiction of an Indian man and white love supremacy, Sersi and Ikaris have an Indian wedding, attired in Indian costume. Emphasising the point that, even on the Indian’s own terrain, the white man is the victor in love.
Kingo is not absolutely, entirely excluded from the domain of love. In fact, he is the only one that can see the secret love that Sprite has for the white man, Ikaris. He is relegated to just looking at the field of love and not being a part of it. Like a sexually frustrated viewer who seeks solace in pornography, Kingo can only look at the love of others as an outsider. Also, Kingo dreams of being in the position of the desirable white man. While Ikaris steals Kingo’s sexual and romantic identity by having an Indian wedding, Kingo can only unsuccessfully play at being the desirable Ikaris on film. Thus, Kingo is introduced via the ‘Bollywood’ song sequence, for a film called “Shandaar Daastan-e-Ikarus” (The Splendid Story of Ikaris). Predictably enough, the dance performance is strained and comical.
Conclusion
The bizarre ritual that was played out in my youth, ‘proving’ my undesirability as a South Asian is a mainstay in British and American media, although it has received little critical attention. Because it is such a solidified set of implicit assumptions. When we were finally able to be seen as superheroes on a Western screen, all the old prejudices were added to our representation. The worst thing is that all of the female directors, authors and screenwriters that I have cited above all have something in common. Those that cast us as undesirable are mixed race or ethnic minority women themselves. Perhaps showing that racism against the self by such women is tactfully exploited by the Western system of representation.
Yet, Marvel has taken over the world and is celebrated for being ‘diverse’. So this is what diversity means in the modern world? In fact, Western ‘diversity’ is a continual and embarrassing failure of real representation and real inclusion. The on-screen portrayals of us in the West and their bizarre, racist rituals have always and will always fail in my eyes. Because I do not hate myself. I have been given love and status as a loving being in this world. At home, my nickname is ‘Sonu’ (‘handsome’).
1 Zadie Smith, White Teeth (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000), 273
diary of a lone man 