Viewpoint: Is India's outrage over Coldplay justified? By Sandip Roy

Kolkata Published duration 1 February 2016

image copyright Getty Images image caption Chris Martin starts out as a normal wide-eyed white tourist

In 1492 Christopher Columbus was looking for India. In 2016 Christopher Martin aka Chris Martin discovered it.

Coldplay's music video Hymn for the Weekend featuring Beyoncé has made landfall and it seems to have broken the Indian internet.

It is the great Western discovery of Incredible India all over again. Age cannot wither her nor Coldplay stale her infinite variety.

Every cliché has found its way into the video except perhaps the Taj Mahal. There are peacocks and Bharatanatyam dancers, yellow and black taxis, saffron-clad holy men, their robes in slow-mo full flow.

In director Ben Mor's vision it is as if a locust swarm of candy-coloured M&Ms is splattered all over India.

"When you take a closer look at India, surrealism and psychedelia immediately come to mind, at least to mine," says Mr Mor

No wonder the taxi has psychedelic interiors. The temple seems to be made out of marshmallow. The boats are candy-striped as they head out into a firework sunset.

Cultural appropriation?

But it's still not colour saturation enough for the good people of India who play Holi all day long, dousing each other in great joyous rainbow showers.

Chris Martin starts out as a normal wide-eyed white tourist, the sort that sticks his head out of a taxi-cab to inhale the wonders of India.

By the end he's soaked in the colour a little too literally, as if a children's sit-and-draw competition trampled all over him.

First-world citizens are often transformed by their "India experience". Some find spirituality. Some find drugs. Some find the Marabar caves . Chris Martin finds Technicolor and he becomes in the end, if not a person of colour, at least a more colourful person.

Pump up the colour saturation. This is eat, pray, love in the age of Instagram.

Many Indians have not been amused. Et tu, Coldplay?

Hybrid Hues writes : "Coldplay, y'all are British. India was under British occupation less than 70 years ago. So that makes the idea of you talking about "feeling drunk and high" over the felicitations of our children a million times worse. Respect our space in re-establishing our identity and the nation's healing process."

And Beyonce, how could you go down the path of cultural appropriation?

In the video she turns into a Bollywood queen, doing her thing against an eye-popping wall of flowers.

image copyright Getty Images image caption 'Pump up the colour saturation. This is eat, pray, love in the age of Instagram'

image copyright AFP image caption Indians in the video seem to play Holi all day long, dousing each other in great joyous rainbow showers

Actually, given that Bollywood likes its heroines fair and lovely (and the fairer the better), Beyoncé as a Bollywood queen is unintentionally a cheeky bit of subversive casting across the colourline.

But the wall of multi-coloured flowers makes the whole spectacle look more like a colour-blindness test than colour-blind casting.

Sensory onslaught

Anyway, is Beyoncé as Bollywood diva as much cultural appropriation as Madonna doing the same? These notions are contextual, hardly cast in stone.

Thus Chinese artist Ai Weiwei closing his eyes and lying face down on a rocky beach in Lesbos is a tribute to a drowned Syrian toddler rather than cultural exploitation because it is Ai doing it. A Manhattan artist might not have got away with it.

Coldplay's video is all very Indo-chic and ethno-cool but the Twitterati doth protest too much about cultural appropriation.

If Coldplay can be accused of anything, it's being a little too swept away by India's sensory onslaught.

Their India is trapped in a tourist-friendly time-warp of hand puppets and simple happy natives. There's not a mobile phone in sight. But give them some credit, there's not a snake charmer in sight either. This is more a wide-eyed valentine to India than an exercise in stereotyping.

Cultural appropriation is when Madonna wears a bindi (a bright dot of red colour applied in the centre of the forehead) because it's cool but an Indian aunty with a bindi is still a "dothead" - slang for a South Asian person - somewhere.

Cultural appropriation is when some company puts Hindu Gods on slippers and toilet seats because they are bright and colourful, more Disney than divine.

And as this article points out , "cultural appropriation is when Bollywood's own Helen dances before a man in blackface in Intaquam and Priyanka Chopra plays Manipuri boxer Mary Kom . Or Bollywood composers are not even conscious that they are "appropriating" the songs of others.

image copyright Getty Images

Of course, Bollywood's insensitivity toward depicting other cultures and races should not be a free pass for Coldplay to do the same.

Yes, in the video India is a brightly coloured palette once again for Westerners to get their mojo back, its urchins are happy "slumdogs" prancing around a rich singing millionaire.

But, at least Martin is not playing the Western saviour who comes to India to lift the poor natives out of their leprous darkness like Patrick Swayze in The City of Joy.

Nor does he chant Sanskrit verses the way Iggy Azalea channels Southern black hip-hop, despite being white and Australian.

'Western gaze'

The larger problem the entire furore reveals is not just how thin-skinned we can be, prone to screaming cultural appropriation at the drop of a Selena Gomez bindi but how susceptible we still remain to the power of the Western gaze.

Indians still care too much about how we are reflected in the West's golden eye.

When an editorial in the New York Times or The Economist critiques the prime minister Indians go apoplectic as they huff "Who cares?" The same Indians are over the moon when those same publications say anything laudatory about the same prime minister.

Our anxiety about how the world sees us makes us ultra sensitive to a video like this.

Some, like Bollywood actress Sonam Kapoor, who has a blink-and-you-missed it cameo scattering flowers, tweets: "A story to tell my grandkids! I was in a Coldplay video! Woo hoo! #biggestfan."

At the other extreme people rail angrily about cultural appropriation and Orientalism.

Both are overreactions.

But really, someone please tell all those tourists getting ready to come to India from drab bed-sit apartments in grey European towns after watching the video, that we don't play Holi all year round. We are too busy listening to Coldplay.

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