Fear of the ‘ Other Urban’ Mumbai, Migration and Xenophobia in the
Representational Politics of Kannada Films:
–H.A. Anil Kumar
Mumbai is ‘popularly’ known as a metropolitan ‘city-of-migrants’,
like, say, London. In the recent book ” Maximum City”*1*-about
Mumbai—there is a prediction that within another five years the
overall population of a continent like Australia would be less than
the population of the capital of one of the several States of a
country in another continent. The name of the city is Mumbai. The
population and its variety were represented as anything not less than
bewildering within Kannada films that have depicted Bombay/Mumbai.
There is an outright refusal to ‘depict’ the population as a ‘specific
entity’ within its filmy frames. On the other hand, arguably, Hindi
films or Bollywood films confirm this specific entity of Mumbai, by
and large.
For the same reason, no film in Kannada is wholly located, narrated
and set within Mumbai. The second half of the Kannada ” AK47″ is
totally narrated from within Mumbai, unlike Ramgopal Varma’s Hindi
“Satya” which occurs totally in Mumbai. The population of Mumbai and
its linguistic variety indicating a permanent linguistic (and hence)
cultural diversification is something that is an integral part of
being ‘urban’ and ‘ threatening’ to the otherwise homogenized
construct of Kannada through its films. If Mumbai stands for Romans,
the Kannada films act as the Gauls—the former has never been able to
encroach the psyche of the process of Kannada film making, despite its
overwhelming power, authority and populace in the art of film making
under the banner of ‘Bollywood films’. The sum total of the history of
the so called regional films in all Indian languages is monumentally
varied compared to what is projected as Indian movies (mainly in and
as Hindi and Tamil movies, in African countries, Europe, US, Malaysia,
Japan among other countries).
It is already two years since the book ‘Maximum City’ has been
published and if one keeps in mind the time gap between writing and
publishing for an Indian writer–writing in English–that five year
estimation plan must be long over by now. Suketu wrote it while
script-writing the film on terrorism by Vidhu Vinodh Chopra. He was
taken by the city, and though he was born and brought up in India, he
writes about Mumbai as an insider-turned outsider-revisiting a place
of nostalgia that was never to be!
This Mumbai is considered as a ‘city-of -travel’ rather than a
‘city-of-migration’–in the history of Kannada films as well as in the
book ” Maximum City”. While in reality, it might be the other way
round. Kannada heroes always visit Mumbai only to ‘move out of it’ at
the end! It is a city that houses the villainous other-half of the
protagonist (Raja Kumar in “Dari Tapped Magi”), literally defaces and
pinches off the pleasure of childhood for another hero (Vishnuvardhan
in ” Saahasa Simha”), avails with friends who turn out to be
terrorists and jeopardize the institution of family and nation, at the
same; and let the lead character fight his own, fictious battle, in
order to come out of the trouble and come out of Mumbai (Shivraj Kumar
in ” AK 47″). Generally speaking, the true urban (or/and Mumbai) has a
specific identifiable geography, map, signs and signposts and they are
the identifiable ‘sites’ that Kannada filmic representation in general
(and not domestic life) ‘understand’ and ‘accept’ as urban. And that
is:
(1) Definitely not Mumbai and
(2) Is compulsorily Bangalore!
It is only the Indian cities and towns that behave so in Kannada
filmic representation. It also means that there is ‘only’ urban but
‘no’ foreign in Kannada films. Varanasi is not urban but pious,
Calcutta is almost absent, Delhi is meant only for song sequences (ex:
‘ Hosa Belaku’), the occasional Kerala is eroticism re-presented in
the form of heavenly divinity (Sudeep’s “My Autograph”). The rest of
the world outside Indian, in the films produced after 90s are
fairlylands that refuse to have specific addresses, like say, Vienna,
New York and those gold clad cities in the Chandamaama
fairytale-mythological-magazines, so much in vogue till the 80s in
Karnataka, as it happened in other States of southern part of India.
Interestingly all/almost all spots within Karnataka are all locations
identified as being within ‘Karnataka’ in its filmic representation.
The Government subsidy policy availed to those films purely shot
‘within Karnataka’ might have led them to culturally define all places
within the State as the same and specific. Rumale Chennabasappa, a
very relevant visual landscape artist of Karnataka was assigned by the
Karnataka government to paint landscapes of various relevant spots
‘around’ river Cauvery. What lies behind such an administrative
strategy could be re-read as an ambition and claim for authorship of a
river the flows between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu (mainly). But much
political discourse, administrative debate and linguistic arguments
have been ‘affiliated’ to a river which is culturally depicted in both
verbal and literal media in Kannada filmic representation as a river
belonging solely to Karnataka! (In Puttanna Kanagal’s ” Sharapanjara”,
for instance, the birth place of Cauvery—Bhaagamandala—is shown before
a pleasant and sensuous depiction of a narrative song that, in one of
its line, calls the river as “Kannada Kulanaari” (‘ the true woman of
Kannada’). The representational authorities, in the form of
scriptwriters, directors, cameramen etc., might or might not have
consciously specified the politics of representation but nevertheless
form a cultural agency responsible for what they actually evoke. Such
an angle would facilitate a possible reading/experience of Kannada
films in the light of migration and urbanization.
The governing agency democratizes and appropriates all spaces of
filmic representation within the State, thus discarding any/all
hegemonic order that the other socio-political programs hold within
various geographic locations of Karnataka. For instance, the generally
termed ‘backward areas’ and the ‘privileged areas’ loose their
pre-fixes and mutual differences are fictiously erased, while being
represented as spaces within the State, owing to certain
administrative rules, like the subsidies available for shooting
Kannada films ‘within’ Karnataka (Sondur in ‘ Maanasa Sarovara’ and
Coorg in ‘Sharapanjara’). Thus the administrative hierarchies are
erased by the representational apparatus only when the latter function
within the premise of ironies of a governing agency.
This doesn’t happen while shooting a particular language film in
an-’other urban’, city, outside the language’s State. The concessions
and consideration by the government as against the lure of private
studios like Ramojirao Studios in Hyderabad is almost absent, as far
as shooting is concerned beyond certain indifferent administrative
policies. I am not pointing out towards the politics of NFDC. The
relation between a specific kind of cultural perceptions and as to how
certain policies–private and administrative–control the habits of
representation within Kannada films, is a matter of curious
introspection.
However, for a rural, folksy character-role in Kannada films,
Bangalore is there to win and loose but is never threatening like,
say, Mumbai. In fact the Gandhinagar-wallas within Bangalore–within
whose hotel room most scripts are written, trans-literated legally or
otherwise, ‘adapted’ and activities that seem like scripting occur—do
fail to achieve two things:
(a) To avail a specific character to Bangalore (as urban or anything else) and
(b) Grasp it as a real place, in existence.
Shankarnag’s film “Nodi Swamy Naavirodhe Heege” and Nagathihalli’s ”
Vataara” tele-serial located Bangalore/urban as an abstract of lower
middle class families, enclosing a close-up cluster of rented houses
within narrow valleys. In a way Bangalore in Kannada films, face the
problem of loosing a specific urban-characterization that did exist
for it in the 70s and is no more.
Those who are familiar with them and are themselves in their forties,
now and those who thought they knew Bangalore from past three decades
are loosing (a) a specified Bangalore and are also loosing (b) a
specific identity of/in Kannada film itself. While the geography is
becoming metropolitan, the specific addresses, gestures, etc., given
by a small township that would make one feel that it is ‘our’ city—is
fast fading off. It is like being shifted from a walk in IISc campus
to a walk on M.G.Road. It is not a walk between two streets of the
city at the same time. A walk between the two streets is also a walk
between three decades and between a city-with-belongingness and one
without. The Kannada films, that they used to be and were
untranslatable to even the neighboring languages, earlier, without
loosing certain regional, local specifications, have acquired a
certain detachment to this regional-specification and behave as if
they can belong to anywhere and everywhere in the major cities of
Indian. Blame it on the city that has grown out of its myth that
foresaw that “if the city grows beyond the four towers in four
corners, destruction strikes “.*2*
S.L.Byrappa’s novel “Jalapaatha” (waterfall) and the film that
followed, in black and white, called ” Doorada Betta”–both treat a
city like Mumbai and Bangalore as a place to return back only
temporarily *3* and as a city that doesn’t hold values of any
nostalgia, respectively. Byrappa’s characters arrive from Mumbai to
lead a rural life in his own village and return back to the city, by
the end of the novel after being disillusioned by the romance with a
Nehruvian rural-ideology. In “Doorada Betta”, the blacksmith couple
returns back to the village after their miss-adventures in the only
urban of Kannada films–Bangalore.
The protagonist who arrives from the urban to the un-urban space due
to an emotional, duty boundedness goes nowhere when he is compelled to
quit the structure of joint family within the un-urban which was
actually a space that he so lovingly embraced after rejecting the
urban. Where do people go when they start journeying in the reverse
order of the contemporary migration? (In film ” Bangaarada Manushya”).
Byrappa’s character is very practical, and becomes practical due to
the reason of being located within the institution of family, thus
returning back to Mumbai after being disillusioned from the short
romance with the romanticism of Nehruvian ruralism. The plot and the
relation between the individual, the institutions of governance—the
family, urban and rural—are all in specific agreement with each other,
for the decision to return back is also a decision to adhere to the
rule game of the governance and development. The space that these
characters trod is still within the defined premise of the governance.
The age of individual, representational anarchy as against the set
notion of being good citizen, abiding by the rule of the
governance—strangely—falls within the oeuvre of police-films initially
enacted by actor Devraj and later taken over by the dialogue king Sai
Kumar. Foucault’s suggestions about prison, hospital as domestically
ambiguous spaces, but within the governance as against those jungles
and villages of the medieval ages are the spaces seriously challenged,
negotiated and negated by the police Devraj and Sai Kumar. It was said
that they would hardly change their representational police uniform
worn by them too regularly, for shooting (see: films like ‘ Police
Story’, ‘Laaticharge’, ‘Golibaar’ etc.,) The catch here is
interesting. Name any word that goes with real police actions, there
would be a film by that name in Kannada; and all of them would have a
Kannada equivalent phrase or word in Kannada newspapers but refuted by
Kannada films at the cost of their English equivalents.
However, as if to compensate this, the main character of ” Mayor
Mutthanna” is thrown out of the village as a thief/someone who takes
the blame of theft onto himself, only to return back to his village as
an achiever, being elected as a Mayor. His achievement within the
urban is of more relevance than his sincerity in the village, for the
village community that finally accepts him as not only one of them,
but the one who was ‘elsewhere’ (urban) and came back after achieving
something there. This visual-representational-endorsement is also an
attempt to contemporized myths. Doesn’t this remind one of the famous
Chandaamaama stories of princes going beyond sapthasamudra (seven
seas), winning over the demon (urban beings) and return back with the
pride/princess?
Why do they all return back to villages from the city, no matter what
the city holds for them, in Kannada cultural expression in general and
films in particular, though with exceptions? The side effect of
studying Kannada films speaks a lot about the ill effects of
migration, speaks about the cities that always behave as the ‘other’
cities. When the whole thematic setting is within the urban (as most
Kannada television serials are, for that is what is favored by the
viewers—both rural and urban) they go back to the rural that doesn’t
have a specific ‘address’ (in John Berger’s sense of specific address
to the landscape). The classic example for this is the famous song ”
Biligiri Rangayya”, enacted by Kalpana in Puttana Kanagal’s
“Sharapanjara”, wherein the office party goes on the top of the
Biligiri mountain which, otherwise, has/d a religious affinity to it.
Kannadigas are bad migrators and the effect is seen in the threat that
they see while perceiving foreign locations within their own nation in
their representations, specifically in visual representations. Hence
there are no dialogues in foreign locations as far as Kannada films
are concerned (exception like Kannada film “America, America”, but who
would place it within the psyche of that typical Kannada film
tradition. In a way “America, America” would fit into any Indian
language, I suppose).
(II)
Why did Kannada films view Christians as villains, is it different
from seeing the satan amongst Christians, why do they always come to
Karnataka/Bangalore always from the north western part of the country,
i.e., the then Bombay; and why are the Muslims subject to a different
kind of perception than the Christians in Kannada filmic
representation? If Christians come from Mumbai-like cities, Muslims
exist within the Kannada filmy villages and townships. Thus the
historicity of the existence of Muslims in Kannada films is
pre-existent while the Christians come a bit later, as outsiders, as
threats and only as piecemeal characters, to fall in love with
(always) the Hindu hero (Mary in Raj Kumar’s “Shravana Banthu”
justifies this within which Mary would have been a Hindu girl in her
purvajanma (previous life) killed along with her hero, only to be
reborn as Mary which implies her biological, genetically connectivity
to Hinduism. It both discards and endorses the concept of rebirth,
paradoxically. Rebirth endorses the continuity of love of the girl
though the same rebirth has modified her religiosity which is by birth
and not by choice. This, like a physical migration is a genetic and
mythical migration when Mary is re-identified as an ex-Hindu girl, it
is an attempt by the script to solve the problem of religious Diaspora
a la twentieth century phenomena of political migration into something
more urban: from village to Bangalore, from Bangalore to Mumbai.
Migration into something more and other urban does not occur beyond
Mumbai, into say, New York, London and the like in Kannada mobile
visual representations.
Thus has been the case and fate of a select minority (Christians and
Muslims and not Jains, Parsis and Buddhist are altogether non-existent
entities) in Kannada films! Thus Muslims ‘are’ an integral part of
Kannada films, while the Christians are those who are waiting in a
specific geography of Mumbai and are somehow responsible for the
corruption of the separated (and hence villainous) brother of the hero
, is defaced as a child and pushed into begging on one of the Mumbai
beach who is retraced by chance by his very father and grows up and
goes back to Mumbai to take revenge on the villains. This which also
implies a sort of revenge upon a geographic location—Mumbai, in
Vishnuvardhan’s magnum opus film ” Saahasa Simha” meaning the
adventurous lion.*4*
The’ other urban’ (Mumbai) in Kannada films serves the very face of
the leading character ‘faceless’, to be carried/hidden as a trophy
throughout the narrative. The rest of the narrative film,
metaphorically speaking, is to save the lead character’s face only
symbolically, though it is impossible to do so in reality within the
film. Hence the face given as a visual and projected in the psyche of
the audience is two different aspects. In a film that has a double
role for an actor, usually the negative role is depicted as someone
and something other than the actor—a personification of the ills of
urban. The triple role in ” Shankar Guru” is a classic case. The
father figure is always running away from the authority and is
inevitable separated from the structure of family: his wife and he
don’t know each other’s whereabouts. A comical son sings a couple of
songs that includes the famous number in half-English ” Love me or
hate me” in order to evoke the humour in/among/amidst the Kashmir area
which in reality had not turned into such a politically disturbed
space. The other son is aptly a spy, who takes the audience into the
mystery laid beyond the layer of the scenic beauty of Kashmir, thus
mystifying the ‘other urban’.
Arguably a Muslim is always treated to meet up with the notion of what
is popular in Kannada psyche as a praanamitra (a friend for life ex:
Thoogudeepa Srinivas in “Jvaalamukhi”, who despite being an
anti-social helps the hero-journalist towards a private investigation,
sending the message that friendship—one of the main aspect of the
institution of family becomes more important than one’s skepticism
about the institution of official law. This is in order to serve the
law itself, ultimately. Thus the endorsement of the notion of
brotherhood so much that the Muslims are popularly known for, amongst
Hindus is legitimized through such characteristic depiction of the
minority/other by the majority/us. He, the Muslim, in Kannada films,
is someone who has the eligibility to become a friend who implies that
right now he is neither a friend nor a foe. Owing to the global
political developments, around the phenomena of September 11, the
Kannada films as a sociological/creative construct, plays safe with
elements that it cannot comprehend with or is not affected by *5*.
Interestingly, most Kannada filmy protagonists are Hindus. When they
want to enter the premise of the anti-socials, they wear the
appearance of Christians speaking Kannada in an accent that the makers
of Kannada films presume it to be the way Christians usually speak
Kannada. But when the character wants to escape the authority for what
he/she presumes to be a mistaken outlawness on the part of the main
character, he/she takes the disguise of a Muslim as in ” Guri” (the
song sequence “Alla Alla neene ella”-meaning ‘Alla you are everything
and there is nothing beyond you’ by Raj Kumar). This spills the
essence of such a deceptive appearance into real life as well.
However, a general survey of such depiction and insights through
specific examples within Kannada filmic representation might serve
contradictory, problematising the methodology to study
representational politics in Kannada films that is yet
un-institutionalized.
The Islamic-Arab friend availed as a deceptive-mask for the hero, to
camouflage his self, from the authority. The audience, however, would
know it very well, beyond that mask meant only for the villains as
against the audience, thus being on the side of the hero, rather than
the authoritarian representational device. In fact the hero/director
is the authority of representational device in Kannada films. Hence
there is hardly any Kannada film wherein the audience doesn’t endorse
the position taken by the lead character. In other words, the
representation of the ‘other’ urban (Mumbai-like) or the refusal to do
so, to be more specific, is due to its (Mumbai’s) refusal to endorse
the position taken by the hero of Kannada films.
Interestingly along with the Christians with French beard, the
Muslims exist always with a specific dress code. Christians and
Muslims are segregated from other marginal/minorities within the
State/National discourse through the deceptive roles they serve. This
is one kind of ‘metaphoric dressing’ that is availed to them through
representation in Kannada culture, through films. And the two
religions are also availed with a specific ‘dress code’ within such
depictions, that double segregates the Muslim-Christians from the
actual Muslim-Christians, in actuality. The question and blame of
exoticisation of what is Indian in Satyajit Ray’s ” Appu” trilogy is
exactly the problematical issue about religiosity in Girish
Kasaravalli’s “Hasina”. Ray’s depiction is based on what is a cliché
in the understanding of Indian poverty by the majority, while with
Girish; it is a pastiche of visualization of what is popularly given
as the poverty of a specific religious mass.
All that which is minority and urban and are subject to a Kannada
filmic representation—the Christians, Muslims, the notion of an Arab
and Mumbai—have a common point of view: they can’t speak proper
(filmy) Kannada, like the Northern Karnataka people. In other words, I
am pinpointing at the closeness and limitations that the tradition of
Kannada films has drawn upon itself from past half a century by being
sincere to a Kannada which is specific to specific geographic areas
close and proximate to the capital city its administrative apparatus
in the democratic setup as if it is a continuation of its own past
feudal structure. The Kannada in films is a language of the feudal
deceptively continuing beneath a democratic veil. It is the language
of the feudal urban—the areas of South Karnataka, the geographic
premise of the Mysore Maharaja province.
Somehow, cities like Mumbai and the absence/deterioration of Kannada
are both mutually related—both possess threats of diminishment to the
identity of Kannada which means the dual colour flag (red and yellow),
an approved male chauvinism, pure Kannada which means the language
spoken in the areas of Mandya to Chitradurga to Davanagere are
legitimized as the Kannada in films. Raj Kumar alone could do deliver
a talk which would avoid specification of dialects. Sai Kumar, the
dubbing artist turned Kannada hero, from Telugu industry, does it
loudly and Ramesh Aravind retains that Brahminical dialect a la the
linguistic dialect of Kannada in tele-serials.
The Kannada television serials, in general, have already legitimized
this Brahminical lingo and expression (which, in a way, is not to be
repetitive rather than hyper-expressive. One can see is exemplified
when one observes how Umashree in ” Kichchu” serial, had to, cut down
upon her typical dramatized body gestures drastically, to fit into the
smaller format of the television. Raj Kumar had to do the same in
Laxminarayan’s film ” Naandi”, In an interview, the superstar said it
was appreciated for that contrived acting—a half job and half
expression of what he was actually capable of! The whole presumption
was that the Parsi theatre-oriented vigor of body gestures in films
were unsuitable for a good acting, or what the cultural authorities,
mainly through Art Films, with capital A and F, thought it and
projected it to be so.
The Brahminical (not cast-oriented by read it as ‘mainstream’)
contrived-acting of repetitive-mode replacing a dramatic, theatrical
acting finds a kind of solution to the threat of ‘other urban’ in
Kannada movies. Since ‘repetitive mode’ shifts filmic representation
to another form of expression–television screen, it refutes the rasa
of Bhibhatsa so much readily availed by the location of Mumbai it
equates other urban with hyper dramatization.
*
Many of these films, produced by the neighboring Karnataka State, have
‘picturised’ Mumbai (known as Bombay when most of these films were
shot) as the ‘other’ city than as ‘our’ city. Bangalore was yet to be
treated as a city, and as a city worth shooting. The other south
Indian films taught the locals about its own lush green, that too
through black and movies .*6* On the other hand, Bangalore, the
capital of Karnataka, has been depicted by the Bollywood movies (made
in Mumbai!) as a pleasant holiday spot, with specific identity of its
own. Interestingly, when a city looks at its neighboring one as a spot
to relax, the second one’s consider the first (Mumbai) as a
‘city-of-threat’, inspite of being known as the one that belongs to
nobody in particular. In other words, Mumbai belongs to everyone other
than Kannada speaking crowd, according to Kannada movies.
The main anthropological reason for this is that Mumbai, when it was
still Bombay, belonged to the other half of the nation. The Kannada
film makers are adept to their audience who live more with the South
Indians (from three other States) rather than those who speak the
north Indian languages. Hindi, Marati etc., which is well known in the
northern part of Karnataka, belonged to Mumbai, Hyderabad and Madras,
outside Karnataka, five decades ago! I am speaking about the 1970s and
80s in particular, when (Eastman) colour films were made and the song
sequences were yet shot within India. Mumbai was a foreign location
and it was threateningly so! For Hindi films, shooting in Bangalore is
shooting in a relaxed, not rural-areas. Kannada movies don’t have a
relaxed spot which is urban, within its representational structure.
Consider some specific cases of how Kannada movies treat(ed) Mumbai
within the celluloid frames. There are three memorable ‘model’ set
within popular Kannada movies that have contributed immensely towards
this notion of Mumbai as a city to travel and the one that threatens.
C.P.Surendran, in one of his newspaper article about foreign visits,
says that the first thing that one faces while s/he considers
him/herself in a foreign, is the threat to life. The films also acted
as role models and provided specific ‘structure’, over the decades,
for other Kannada movies as well with such a device wherein the
audience would be taken in for scary-rides, as in Disney World/Land
horror shows—into and out of ‘other urban’. Hence Kannada films
partially set in Mumbai form the scary-movie in the history of Kannada
movies *7*, as far as picturising is concerned.
In reality, a large population has migrated to Mumbai from Karnataka.
Kannada films have refused to look at the city from their point of
view. Even the body of fiction writings by Kannada writers like
Yeshawant Chittala, settled in Mumbai, search for a solution to the
anxiety of living in Mumbai ‘outside’ itself! In other words, Mumbai
metropolitan ‘acts as a screen saver’ to family feuds and relational
disagreements that were actually initiated ‘outside itself’, in remote
villages of the land in Kannada literature. It is exactly from an
opposite of this position that Kannada films are construed. Mumbai
construes a dialectic discourse between two modes of Kannada cultural
expression. The city peels of the old wounds of a rural, past,
nostalgia of the internal diasporic Kannadiga while in the literature
that is inspires. At the same time, Mumbai creates a chaotic
arrangement, pushing back the filmic character back to his/her
hometown, thus formulating home in rural (kannada movies) and
homelessness within itself (in Kannada literature).
*
Why is Mumbai–unlike the ‘distant’ capital city Delhi or the ‘remote’
old capital Calcutta–specifically picturised more in Kannada films
and why is it an unwanted but desired representational background?
Bangalore–wherein lies the heart of the Kannada films in areas like
Gandhinagar—imitates Mumbai more than the other Indian cities. Mumbai
movies (Bollywood) are ‘imported’ for exhibition, all over the Kannada
State while Kannada movies are rarely ‘exported’ to Mumbai. The
protagonists of the above mentioned Kannada movie (Dr. Raj Kumar,
Vishnuvardhan, Shivraj Kumar) continue to speak Kannada even while at
Mumbai, do not mind the Bollywood actors (usually playing the roles of
villains) speaking in their own language (Hindi) in ‘our’ movies.
Heroes never come from Mumbai but heroins do! It is the horror,
villainous characters and sensuous girls who come from there, but
never go there from here. In other words, Kannada movies desire the
effect produced by Mumbai’s threatening nature but never export
anything from here, even the good hearted modesty of the Kannada
characters.! It is a city that threatens, doesn’t let people to
migrate from Karnataka in reality (thought the north Karnataka and
south canara people are all over there). It was a city of choice, for
it repelled the Kannada film units to go to Madras/Chennai not due to
the linguistic proximity but due to linguistic alienness. One
practical reason would be that the whole production of Kannada movies
depend a lot on Madras and not on Mumbai. The metropolitan in question
has a different and interesting and elite landscape comparatively,
given the presence of the sea coast (in Mumbai) and the absence of it
(in Bangalore).
Within aesthetic premise, the double personality of the hero (Daari
thappida Maga—the son who was lost) is nurtured in Bombay as a villain
but he gets rectified (in Vishnu’s Saahasa Simha), though he would be
the Bombay beggar boy. The metropolitan is like an injection tube, not
to penetrate too much and not to be withdrawn—for Kannadigas. While
south Indian heroins are preferred in Mumbai, Bombay-girls come over
here and act, though they can’t utter a word of the language in which
the film is all about. Right now this has become one way traffic with
singers coming from there, while South Indian male actors and both
gendered singers were not welcome in Mumbai film industry.
Interestingly, films in Karnataka are in Kannada while the films made
in Mumbai are not necessarily in Marati!
(III)
So the descriptive-argument till now can sum up as below:
Kannada films have projected and represented a very specific world
wherein a specific dialect of Kannada, a specific fear about a
neighboring urban (Mumbai) and a specific attitude as to who is a
minority (Muslims/Christians and not Buddhists/Jains/Parsis)—are all
construed. This ‘construct’ mutually connects the (i) urban, (ii)
minority and (iii) a specific geographical Kannada. Whose
Kannada-world is it that has been subject to representational politics
of Kannada films and what is the motive behind the erasure of
(Derridian kind) other Kannada worlds outside there, but never gaining
entry into the representational motifs of Kannada films? Thousands of
films and locations, hundred thousand songs and yet such a specific
polity in the making of the phenomena of Kannada films haven’t been
addressed. In other words, not only is the ‘other’ suppressed, but an
addressal of the absence/refutation of ‘other’ Kannada worlds in the
form of a critical discourse has either been suppressed or/and absent.
Any remote possibility of the existence of such a Kannada
film-discourse has been deviated towards addressing only those films
which fit into the category called ‘NFDC-Art Movies’ which also speaks
about the success rate of the popular Kannada movies’ capacity in
silencing the possibility of space for an intense discourse. In other
words, those who have been speaking about Kannada films have been
writing only about Art Movies, and paving way for an enormous amount
of mediocrity in the journalistic discourse about popular movies. The
pastiche and cliché are at the heart of the discourse about Kannada
films, while a serious pedagogy exists within static visual arts,
literature of the Kannada world.
The innumerable problematic that the above points pose would evoke
within the reader also means to question the representational devices,
roots and sources of Kannada films, generally speaking. It is a
‘representation’ by script writers/directors/even actors that would
have presumed what the audience ‘want’ not according to the audience
as such (because there is no history of such census ever made) but
according to what the filmmakers presume it to be the taste of the
audience! Herein, the filmmakers take up the self-assigned
messiah-hood of speaking for a community. And hence it is an ‘imagined
community’, which arguably and metaphorically it is
anti-nationalistic, for it considers the Statehood itself as a nation.
The migrant, diasporic and traveling lower middle class Kannadiga (all
the three of which is a rarity, even to this day), would have a laugh
at the language’s filmic representation regarding such an urban
geography and religion. In other words, while (and due to)
representing the mega-urban in films–before Bangalore itself began to
grow/outgrow as a disorganised urban—the Kannada films presumed its
audience to be non-migratory and it also presumably considered the
other language people as not the potential audience for its films.
Foot Notes:
*1* Read: Suketu Mehta “The Maximum City”, 2005, winner of Kiriyama
Prize-2005, Pulitzer Prize Finalist-2005, short listed for the BBC4
Samuel Johnson Book Prize for Non-Fiction.
*2* ‘ If the city grows beyond the four towers in four corners,
destruction strikes’, this was the belief that old timers held about
what the founder of new Bangalore, Kempe Gowda had said about the
limitations of Bangalore. Does it mean that myths about urban can
predict that which the town planners overlook? And does it have an
implication about how Kannada films ‘perceive’ Mumbai—as the ‘other
urban’ of alienation?
*3* Well known novels by Jnanapeet Awardee Kannada litterateur Dr.
Shivarama Karantha, called “Marali Mannige”, T.K.Ramarao’s “Bangarada
Manushya”, written before Shahruk Khan was born has striking
similarities with Shah Rukh Khan’s movie “Swadesh” in Hindi. I find a
certain coincidence between this coincidence and Salman Rushdie’s
statement a couple of years ago about the best Indian literature being
in English (as against the writings in each and every and all Indian
regional languages and their historicity). Rushdie’s interview and
Swadesh are what are given to the world as the ‘actual’ Indian while
the deep rooted branches and the immensity of variations set within
the regional specifications from whose superficial surface such
constructs in the form of interviews and films are born, are, lost in
translation, ignored and miss-manipulated by the very (mere)
constructs in that which occupies the prime position of postcolonial
representation by the making of a Swadesh here and a Rushdie’s
statements there. While ‘Swadesh’ is strictly for pardes Rushdie’s
statement is from that kind of a person who excels in nurturing an
amazingly laudable, in-depth ignorance about the literature of the
country he is born into a film in Hindi and being a writer in
Internationally recognizable English is being /becoming urban. The
urban becomes the privilege herein and construes a platform which is
well demonstrated in the film “Taal” in that sequence ( just before
interval) when the rural singer arrives at the urban stadium and sees
and hears his composition being re-mixed and articulated and thus made
fit for endorsement. The urban becomes an importing and censoring
spatial agency for what lies within the un-urban premise both within
and without filmic representations in India.
*4* Visual artist N.Pushpamala’s set of photos called “Kismet–Phantom
Lady” can be read as a take on this very male double construct in
Indian (Bollywood) films in general and this Kannada film in
particular. In both the cases (Photos and the film ” Daari Thappida
Maga”) the separated brother who is essentially (ill)groomed in the
city (like Mumbai) is killed in the end and the more rural half
brother/sister lament over the loss of the ‘other half’. Italo
Calvino’s famous story of the half split/cut character (in the war)
comes to mind, wherein the half-personality is traced by everything
that is halved on the route that the half-character trod, rather half
mindedly. The urban/foreign city with an alien (to Kannada) language
is thus treated as something that infects an incurable disease into
the other half of the Kannada film protagonist which can be solved
only by a physical mortality. The French painter Gericault’s painting
” Raft of Medusa”, based on a true sea-tragedy during his lifetime in
the 18th century was exhibited in London as though it was a
performance at Piccadilly Circus area. The artist spent a few weeks at
the ‘other urban’-London, and was inflicted with a peculiar disease
specific to the Thames river. Gericault subsequently died due to the
same urban virus. ‘Other urban’ within the premise of cultural
production—both in the case of Gericault and Kannada films—also
indicate double-standards adopted by representational devices.
Even the characterization of the hero in “Saahasa Simha” wears a mask
to look like the very actor who plays the role, till the end. A
re-view of the film affects the viewers’ mind with one face while what
they see is a false face which (both) is actually the face of
Vishnuvardhan! The urban (Mumbai) in Kannada films serves the very
face of the leading character faceless for the face given as a visual
and projected in the psyche of the audience are two different faces of
the very same character. The face of the protagonist doubles up as the
other face of the other urban that is a personified representation of
a threatening urban which marks the extreme stage of urban, within the
representational politics in Kannada films.
*5* The post-September 11 is best depicted by the director Shaun Penn
in his short film, one of the several, by various directors around the
issue of September 11. The whole notion of the urban (New York) and
the twin towers had affected an allegoric middle class life style of a
retired old man, grieving his wife’s demise– is shown through the
absence of its narratives. The shadow of the twin towers crumble down,
availing the old man’s room with natural, sun light that surreally
enlivens the plant in the pot, perhaps for the first time. Kannada
films, on the other hand, never resort to any other mode of
representing that city-threat in any other way other than aggressive
depiction, as is visualized in the Mumbai bazaar street in Om Prakash
Rao’s “AK 47″. In this movie the whole city is personified by those
bearded dhukan-wallas (Kiosk-owners) of Mumbai who gang up against the
solitary Kannadiga hero, who, in turn finds the barbed wire as the
only protective apparatus against them—the ills of the ‘other Mumbai’,
a satirical take on the “Aamchi Mumbai” slogan of the insiders.
*6* Tamil and Kannada film ” Kokila” (Kamala Hassan and the legendary
Shobha) was the first movie to shoot extensively in Bangalore after
which the Kannada films began shooting it in colour. Arguably, the
non-Kannada films suggest a better representation of the city,
comparatively.
*7* However, this is a Catch—22 situation. Is the notion that a
Kannadiga is a bad migrator—has it emerged out of its visual/literal
representational politics? The major verbal texts in the form of
novels by Yeshwanth Chittala, always treats Mumbai as an aftermath of
the protagonists childhood, nostalgia and innocence. Mumbai in
Chittala’s writings has a specific geography within which the
institute of family always has threat coming from a larger, wider
institution that contains the institution of family within itself. But
somehow it is different from what it contains as a portion of
itself–the family! Read his novel: particularly ” Siddhartha”
(re-intervention into Buddha’s childhood), “Shikari” (the hunter) and
“Chedha” (split). Mumbai is an ideal spot for the climax of his
narratives. Also continuing the question of the notion of migration as
to whether it is a fact or a mere representation within the
Kannada/Kannadiga identity, see Kumkum Sangari’s text in Khoj-2001
catalogue. What her write-up generally implies is that the illiterate
emigrants (Gujarathis) out of Indian carried their language with them
due to their lack of education and English. The second migration after
centuries is where the Kannadiga migration fits into. It is the
English-literate Kannadiga migrants carried themselves but left behind
their language for the sake of that language which had availed them
with an earning in the first place. Thus Kannada films, apart from
other art forms (excluding literature) have already began serving them
as portable nostalgia. ////
Recent Comments