Why We Should Be More Worried about Bollywood’s Racism than Coldplay’s Video

From glorifying sexism, colourism, and homophobia, to perpetuating rape culture, Bollywood's bigotry is well known. Some of our favourite films are deeply sexist and racist, and this is true even in the year 2016, with films like Kya Kool Hain Hum 3 and Mastizaade still being made.

However, these tend to create relatively little controversy when compared to things like Slumdog Millionaire and Coldplay's Hymn for the Weekend video, perhaps because we've been so used to Bollywood's bigotry that we seem to think that it is something that will continue to happen, and there really isn't any point in making a hue and cry about it.

Works of visual art from the West, on the other hand, are held to a higher standard, possibly because it may seem extremely unfair for a civilisation that oppressed others for centuries to misrepresent them even in the 21st century; possibly because they're seen as more 'advanced' than us, and therefore have greater responsibility, and possibly because it is more lucrative to talk about them than lowly Bollywood, where bigotry is so last season.

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Does the West's portrayal of probably the most complex and diverse society in the history of civilisation as an undifferentiated mass of Holi -playing, street-dancing, cracker-bursting people annoy me? It certainly does. But here's my problem – worrying about this because it misrepresents India more than the overdose of racism in Bollywood over the years, which actually perpetuates racism, is like saying that 'tarnishing the country's reputation abroad' is a bigger issue than the actual wrongs inside the country. (Are you listening, Anupam Kher?)

Bollywood's racism is, simultaneously, a product of and responsible for not only the obsession with fair skin that afflicts many of us, but also serious xenophobia and jingoism. Portrayal of non-Indians in our films as much less smart, more culturally and morally decadent, and generally inferior to Indians has been rampant for decades. Regardless of whether foreigners are present in the film or not, the sabse aage honge Hindustani mentality has afflicted Bollywood for a while now, and it often comes at the expense of people of other races and nationalities.

Take the iconic DDLJ for example. Raj, played by Shahrukh Khan, is clearly a man who, in colloquial terms, has 'been around.' He has been with several women, a lot of whom were non-Indians, but he understands that Simran's izzat is very valuable, because she is, after all, Indian, which automatically makes her more virtuous than women of other races and nationalities.

Not only this, the barrage of swear words he throws at those Swiss police officers who wanted to see Simran's passport (read: doing their job), in a weird mish-mash language that was supposed to be Spanish (a language not spoken in Switzerland), seemed downright offensive and racist.

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Scenes that involve racism are a dime a dozen in Bollywood, but it is worse when cultural chauvinism is the primary theme of a film. Take Pardes, as an example. The film rests upon the fact that India is head-over-heels better than the West, which was represented in this instance, by the USA. Kishorilal (Amrish Puri) is an NRI who wants his son to marry an Indian woman so that Indian values (read: better values) remain alive in his family.

His son, Rajiv (Apurva Agnihotri), is supposed to personify America and is shown to be a rude, immoral, elitist man, who attempts to rape Ganga (Mahima Chaudhary), a character that is supposed to personify India. Arjun (Shahrukh Khan), despite aiding and abetting Kishorilal and Rajiv for two-thirds of the film, is the protagonist, a good man, only because he has Indian values.

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It is not just a matter of making clearly racist films. If we object to cultural appropriation, then we should understand what it means. Cultural appropriation is when a privileged culture picks up elements from an oppressed one and and portrays them, often without context, as 'exotic,' which is supposed to make them look 'cool.'

If we really think about this sentence, we'd realise that nowhere does this include nationality or race, which means that it can apply just as well to most of Bollywood, a ridiculously overprivileged community that is extremely detached from the audience it is supposed to cater to. It regularly takes elements from minority cultures across the country like language, class struggle, music, and dance, packages them in a 'cool' way, sells it to the public, which may not have been exposed to the aforementioned minority cultures, and therefore, takes Bollywood's portrayal as truly representative of them.

Who's responsible for cultural misappropriation then?

Feature Image Source - YouTube