The South Asian Neighbour and Her/His Stereotype Goes Global
Jorge Diego Sánchez usal.academia.edu
The South Asian Neighbour and Her/His Stereotype Goes Global
Ana Cristina Mendes, “Re-Orientalism is on TV: From Salman Rushdie’s The Aliens Show to The Kumars at No. 42,” in Lisa Lau and Ana Cristina Mendes (eds.), Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics: The Oriental Other Within. London and New York: Routledge, 91-104. Referring to postcolonial cultural production, Graham Huggan concludes that ‘the language of resistance is entangled, like it or not, in the language of commerce’ (Huggan 2001: 264). This chapter contends that Salman Rushdie’s work, being inextricably enmeshed in capitalist modes of cultural production, distribution, and exchange stands at the nexuses of representation and reconstruction, as well as of complicity and autonomy. This chapter draws connections between The Aliens Show, a situation comedy in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses about a group of creatures from outer space, and The Kumars at No. 42, a BBC minority-based sitcom. Both Saladin, the co-star of the grotesque TV programme in Rushdie’s novel who plays the role of Maxim Alien, and Sanjeev Kumar, the protagonist of The Kumars at No. 42, are relentless in their shared ambition of becoming media personalities in Britain. In their pursuit of fame, Saladin, an Indian immigrant to London, constantly changes his hairstyle and clothes, while Sanjeev, a Br-Asian living in Wembley, has his family bulldoze the back garden to erect a state-of-the-art TV studio so that he can host his very own chat show. The key issue in these characters’ attempted assimilation to mainstream discourse is that they are equally aware of the provisionality of their cultural self-construction. Both texts highlight continuities and disruptions: from The Aliens Show’s focus on the misrepresentation of Otherness on the part of the media, mirroring the blatant ethnic stereotyping of the period from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the interstitiality of The Kumars at No. 42 which came to characterize Br-Asian TV comedy as from the late 1990s and early 2000s. What is interesting to note here are the dilemmas that result from the negotiation of Orientalist representations. Such representational dilemmas are framed in the context of a globalized world where transnational cultural industries simultaneously foster an expanded space for minority-based authorship and self-fashioning, and betray the unfeasibility of unmediated and unframed literary, cinematic, or other type of cultural self-representation.

Hindi cinema has long been instrumental in defining the boundaries between the "self" and the "other," often by providing stereotypical representations of the other's different religious, linguistic or ethnic affiliations. It was often Pakistan that played the role of the other, especially in films dealing with international terrorism or war. However, certain recent films focus on the lives of everyday people and emphasize the possibility of redefining the India-Pakistan relationship by portraying cross-border friendship between everyday Indians and Pakistanis. In this article, I look at two such films, Bajrangi Bhaijaan (Khan, 2015) and Happy Bhag Jayegi (Aziz, 2016) and investigate whether these films provide a more nuanced portrayal of Pakistani characters than previous war or spy films. Throughout the paper I suggest that this is not the case and that these films, despite their wholesome message, employ a variety of stereotypes related to gender, religion, and nationality, which have been crucial in delineating the cultural boundaries of the Indian nation.

This paper addresses the challenges posed by the persistence of Orientalist imaging and stereotyping in contemporary cultural production. It proposes that new approaches and reading strategies are required to understand the complex role played by popular cultural forms as they become global commodities and sink roots in contexts that are unlike their points of origin. Therefore, there is a need to shift the focus of our attention from a simple and politically correct critique of Orientalism to a) the recognition of its ubiquity and b) the political possibilities opened up by cultural forms that are saturated with stereotypes. With specific reference to the Asia region, there is a noticeable lack of fit between the hegemonic intent as also economic interests of states and the locally specific meanings produced by traveling cultural commodities. Whereas we could speak of Hollywood film as the cultural front-end of USA’s hegemonic ambitions, it is difficult to sustain a similar claim with respect to any Asian cultural industry. It therefore implies that the earlier approaches critiquing globalization of cultural commodities may not suffice here and now. In the following pages I draw attention to a set of issues and questions that have to do with popular culture’s global circulation. I also propose that Asia is a location that underscores the need to move beyond late 20th century cultural theory.

‘Cinema is widely considered a microcosm of the social, political, economic, and cultural life of a nation. It is the contested site where meanings are negotiated, traditions made and remade, identities affirmed or rejected’ (Bhoopaty 2003: 505).Being the art form of greatest impact and most widespread audience films are strong agency for conceptual creation and catalyst of opinion formation. Bollywood claims to be the expression of Indian social background and mirror to the nature of entire subcontinent with it’s portrayal of Indian culture, society, classes or religion. Still Bollywood is obsessed with the idea of monoculturalism that is always biased towards Hindutva notion of Indianism, always manifested in the trajectory of Islamophobia and Dalit-Bahujan phobia. Bollywood makes this possible by creating character imagery of an ‘Adarsh Indian’- Ideal Indian - who is devoid of critical faculties, never complain about the state,preoccupied with the idea ‘India first..always’ and extreme rage against its ‘enemy’ mostly Muslims, Kashmiris, Dalits and North Easterners. This article attempts to examine how Bollywood forced monoculturalism over multiculturalism and analyse how popular culture stigmatized minorities.

Within popular culture in the West, stereotypical representations of 'race' still persist. This is particularly troubling when we find that it is racialized minorities themselves behind such representations. The aim of this article is to explore how the conditions of the cultural industries steer the work of minority cultural producers in directions that can undermine the radical potential of the counter-narratives of difference. The article begins with a discussion on the politics of representation where I argue for integrating a sociological approach into cultural studies of diasporic popular culture that pays closer attention to the process of symbol creation. The remainder of the article uses a study of a British South Asian theatre company to show how the increasingly commercialized cultures of production that characterize the sector had a troubling impact on the way a play exploring postcolonial feminisms was marketed, and presented to the public.

The Anglo-Indians of India are the racial hybrids of European and Indian stock who came into being through four centuries of European colonial contact with India. Malayalam cinema produced in the state of Kerala, albeit being the fourth largest film industry in India, by and large has always been ridden by dominant-caste favouritisms. Regrettably there is minimal representation of the Anglo-Indian community in Malayalam films and if they occupy the screen-space at all, misrepresentation, typecasting and a dogged discourse of estrangement characterises their portrayal. These films ideologically affirm all the denigrating Anglo-Indian stereotypes, slyly 'othering' this 'hybrid' community, ostracizing them as the 'romantic outsiders' of Kerala and typified as 'non-realistic' in their approach to life. Historicising the production and reception of Anglo-Indian delineations in Malayalam cinema from 1970s to 2018, this paper examines such films both as processes and products of the complex historical, cultural and nationalist policies of majoritarian isolationist politics. The paper explicates not just the politics of signification, but the politics of (mis)representation, which is how the Anglo-Indian community gets pigeonholed in the filmic narratives produced in Kerala. It foregrounds the need to destabilize and subvert the conservative and belittling attitude towards the Anglo-Indian community in Malayalam films. The paper thereby argues the need for a fair and inclusive perspective of the Anglo-Indians in the mainstream Malayalam cinemascape.