Provincializing America? My Name Is Khan and Modernity

Seeing My Name Is Khan with a group of sophisticated movie-goers guaranteed the usual bouts of exasperated sighing that accompany the credits of a Karan Johar film. In fact, this one is so over-the-top that the top is no longer even in view; it makes Kuch Kuch Hota Hai look like Scenes from a Marriage by comparison. As with all masala epics, suspension of disbelief is a given...nobody in any audience would think it realistic. But in some ways MNIK reaches much farther than the usual Hindi film. For one thing, in this as in other recent dramas (I'm thinking of Paa, which I just saw), set musical pieces are gone entirely, replaced by a more "Western" soundtrack-montage overlay. For another, and much more importantly, the film turns a sociological lens -both broadly and minutely- upon another country, the United States, in ways that suggest a new form of "globalisation" for the Hindi film. Instead of, as many scholars have pointed out, merely transporting the action to foreign shores or focusing on the culturally cosmopolitan wealthy middle classes in India, the post-1990s Hindi film is also making its first attempts at representational authority.

What do I mean by this? It's not only that a non-Western film takes America as its subject. Plenty of such films exist. MNIK does so, however, without any pretence of subtlety or objectivity, yet from a universalist standpoint. It revels in its own partiality and stereotypes with confidence. Previously, Hollywood filmmakers would throw up a hasty sketch of a foreign country where the workings of that society, including timelines, would be hopelessly blurry. And of course it would all be defensible on the grounds of artistic licence! If a serious foreign film ever looked back, it would be from a verite or underground perspective. But here, we have a Hindi blockbuster taking the same kind of sloppy liberties, and the result is oddly exhilarating. Thus, most average Americans are shrill caricatures, racist and suspicious and decidedly unfriendly (contra the usual view of typical American openness and friendliness; see the scene where the cable car passengers crowding around Shah Rukh in the middle of the street are all abusing him, except for the good-hearted Indian Kajol). George Bush in 2008 is greeted by hundreds of happy supporters waving signs and flags at a speaking appearance. Politics don't exist (conversely, do Slumdog or City of Joy ever discuss the intricacies of party politics and opinion polls?). Along the same lines, teachers in San Francisco Bay Area (!) schools tell children that Muslims are evil. Scrappy college journalists can break a national story regarding torture by passing it on to the local television station...on this count Johar is far too naive and optimistic about America! And so on.

The most head-scratchingly bizarre choice of stereotype is the pre-Civil War Deep South village milieu Johar constructs (on a set in Bombay), with Big Mama Jenny and her little boy living in a shack and praying at the local church with all the other black folk. Prima facie this is all immensely racist, condescending, and ham-handed. There is a wish for some kind of alliance between the oppressed here (singing "We Shall Overcome" together, the convoy of good-hearted Muslims delivering supplies through the waist-deep water when no government aid arrives), but having no understanding of the experiences of minorities in post-industrial society (Katrina affected the poor urban population, not some idyllic hamlet where cows outnumber people 3 to 1) and pulling out the worst from the "yes'm massa" bag of tricks is no way to go about it. Then again, Karan Johar has always been a very conservative kind of filmmaker: witness the considerable abuse heaped upon the Anglo-Indian caricature in KKHH as disloyal and foppish (forget English! Sing Vande Mataram...and this in a film that supposedly celebrated the Anglicised youth).

Yet there is something very telling about this crude attempt to "provincialize America," as Dipesh C. would say. Johar does not merely see America from another (outsider) angle and thus renders it unexceptional, he in fact robs it of the modern and the universal. The loudest howls of protest from my friends were to the effect of, "Where is the government aid? How come Shah Rukh - and Kajol, and the film crews, and the helpful volunteers - can get to this village by taking the bus, while no state or federal authorities are to be found?" In taking the experience of Katrina to its logical extreme, Johar asks: what if America really was a Third-World country, as so many Americans who watched helplessly in 2005 feared it would resemble (yet, of course, not literally ever become)? This isn't an obscure or philosophical point. When a natural disaster happens in India, Pakistan, or even Romania (seasonal floods are always in the news), there is often no government aid for a while, if ever. Many of the places affected are isolated agricultural villages that really exist, unlike the absurd Wilhelmina, GA. The United States and fellow Western democracies are commonly understood as societies where the state has reached hegemony along with dominance (cf. Ranajit Guha), where its apparatus of ameliorative bureaucracy and impartial law extends, imperfectly but expectedly, across every inch of its geographical space. Furthermore, this theme runs throughout the film. The interrogator who tortures Shah Rukh is the mirror of the policewalas in Slumdog, the perfect Western metonym for Indian corruption and arbitrary use of power. Whereas a Western filmmaker would undoubtedly present similar critiques of government inaction or illegality from the realistic, gritty and ultimately liberal point of view that produces "social pressure" for reform, Johar is after the sentimental generalisation that is not so easily resolved. His vision of America is of the many tendencies believed by American reformist progressives to be flaws in an incompletely generalised system needing to be fixed as constitutive elements of a pre-modern, archaic society. This is why, and not because he's stupid or insensitive, he must rely on a vision of rural America from the 1850s.
So, while MNIK is ultimately a silly film, it delights in a cheeky right to represent that it would be a pity for Hindi film to lose. Backed by global capitalism and increasingly entering into international circuits of exchange, such exercises can inject some needed vitality in the rather staid debates about meanings and aspects of modernity.

Five Life-Changing Undergraduate Readings

As I rapidly approach the end of my undergraduate education, I look back at what I've accomplished academically in four years at Berkeley and I am tempted to conclude that it's all been rather mundane: semester followed by semester in an indistinguishable haze of half-completed readings, "winged" finals and papers, and beer-soaked celebrations.

There were, however, moments of genuine clarity and learning, when my perspective on the world shifted and I could suddenly think in a new way about a certain subject. I've thought of five assigned readings from my classes so far that have been able to accomplish this, in however small a measure. I do not include the many fascinating books and articles I've read for research or outside interest inspired by my studies, which would be far too many.


1) Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s. Ed. Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen. Trans. Carol A. Flath (New York: New Press, 1995). Read for Letters & Science 40: The Soviet Experience, Prof. Irina Paperno (Spring 2006).
This collection of diaries is a remarkable insight into the minds of ordinary Soviet citizens living during the years of Stalin's Terror. What is most surprising about these fragments of memory is how much the official ideologies of the state were a living force in people's daily lives. The most shocking example is that of Leonid Alekseevich Potemkin, a student who earnestly tries to become the "new man" and struggles through some unsuccessful attempts at getting a girl. In his clumsy yet charming words the glorious visions of Stalinist propaganda meet the banal facets of everyday life.


2) Jyoti Puri, Woman, Body, Desire in Post-Colonial India: Narratives of Gender and Sexuality (Routledge, 1999). Read for History 114B: Modern South Asia, Prof. Eugene Irschick (Fall 2007).
Indian women have been traditionally conceptualised by the West either as hopelessly sensuous and sexual or as repressed and traditional, in a perverse dichotomy borne of a heady brew of Orientalist, colonial, patriarchal and other nasty discourses. Puri's work is based on actual interviews with contemporary women, talking about their sexual lives and the challenges they face, from pleasing their husbands to understanding what it means to be an "Indian" woman in the 21st century.


3) Violent Environments. Ed. Nancy Peluso and Michael Watts (Cornell University Press, 2001). Selections read for ESPM 168: Political Ecology, Prof. Nancy Peluso (Spring 2008).
This collection of essays takes on dominant assumptions of environmentalist thinking, by debunking the idea of natural scarcity as a driver of conflict and challenging the violence of capitalist enclosures and conservation measures. Perhaps the most interesting piece is by James McCarthy, who does something completely unique in academia: applies the analytical tools of political ecology, normally used to defend local resource control by Third World indigenous peoples against big bad Western environmentalists, to the First World case of the Wise Use movement in North America.


4) Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Political Life (Knopf, 2007). Read for Public Policy 103: Wealth & Poverty, Prof. Robert Reich (Spring 2008).
The main reason why this book makes the list is that having Reich as a Professor is one of the small yet incredibly rewarding perks of being a Berkeley student. What he says is not particularly original or controversial, but he has been able to express in clear language some basic truths of our age: that the economy has undergone a fundamental shift in the last thirty years so that I am now a "symbolic analyst," that corporations have no morality, and that we all have choices to make as consumers and citizens. The fact that I was taking Reich's class in the year of Obama's election and the beginning of the economic crisis makes it that much more of a timely and unforgettable read.


5) Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (University of California Press, 2005). Read for History 280U: Histories of the British Empire, Profs. Thomas Metcalf and James Vernon (Fall 2008).
Since I only read the first chapter, I hesitated to include it on this list. But Cooper touches on what is perhaps the most important concern animating my current scholarly interests: the tension between resisting the modernity of colonialism and the fact that colonised people often appealed to "Western" or "Enlightenment" notions of rights, citizenship and justice to make claims. Cooper uses the example of West Africa under French rule, but similar arguments have been made by Indian historians like Sumit Sarkar who have been very inspirational to me outside of my undergraduate curriculum.