‘Golmolization’ of the Punjabi Ethos

Simulation as Representation in Bride and Prejudice

 

– Rajesh Kumar Sharma –

 

 

he Punjabi diaspora has almost colonized the representational space of Punjabi film in recent years. The reasons are obvious. Historically poor in resources, the Punjabi film has found a redeemer in the NR(P)I, the Non-Resident (Punjabi) Indian. The conversion rates of currency being quite high, a low-budget film can bring a good deal of pounds and dollars. And for bonus, you can relish the gratification of being in the international circuit. At home too, people enjoy the spectacle of diasporic experience: it catches their inflammable fantasies of the lands of plenty beyond the seven seas, even as it brings them live the sorrows of their beloved people in exile. And so the films often succeed commercially even when they are cinematographically amateurish. Ji Ayan Nu ਜੀ ਆਇਆਂ ਨੂੰ and Asa Nu Maan Watanan Da ਅਸਾਂ ਨੂੰ ਮਾਣ ਵਤਨਾਂ ਦਾ are cases in point.

In the diasporic context the destiny of the qualifier ‘Punjabi’ is unlikely to emerge out of the shadows in the foreseeable future. The dispersal of ‘Punjabiat’, or Punjabi ethos, along the axes of deterritorialization and globalization evokes ambivalent sentiments. While the Punjabi culture appears to be an important stakeholder in the emerging global cultural order, the skeptics would have the costs calculated, arguing that the so-called global conquests of the Punjabis necessarily come at a price. And the price could be incalculably high and difficult to assess because it is intangible. It could mean spiritual attenuation, cultural contamination, or plain homogenization. Ostensibly there is space for the articulation of differences, but this is so only within permissible limits and only within an economy of sameness. Dissemination, or desemenation, or (de)same/nation? The emerging condition forces a severe crisis of signification.

Since the world, to a postmodern mind, is not supposed to exist essentially, one may – out of respect for the discursive protocol – not speak of any Punjabi essence. Yet it can be a lesson for cultural survival, with reference to the historical formation called the Punjabi ethos, to read the order of appearances for the sign of things to come.

The hybrid neologism “golmolization” in the title of this short essay is intended to capture simultaneously the operations of homogenization, erasure and evasion in the politics of cultural globalization. The Punjabi and Hindi proverbial expressions such as “gol kar jana”’ and “golmol jawab dena”, respectively meaning “to gobble up something or make something disappear” and “to evade a clear reply”, interlock quite suggestively and productively with “globalization” to afford a critical insight into the nature of a certain “global” kind of cinematic representation of the Punjabi ethos in our times.

 

Gurinder Chadha: “I am English. When I speak in Punjabi, I seem very Indian.”

 

The idea of a Gurinder Chadha, a global filmmaker of Punjabi descent, re-scripting the firangi Jane Austen’s canonical novel into a popular film of romantic cultural-racial encounter seems at first thought to be endlessly flattering to the Punjabis in particular and the South Asians in general.¹ Some postcolonial theorists are likely to even sight here a rich harvest of contestatory cultural production.² But a close look even at the title of the film – not to speak of the film itself – hints at rather ominous undertakings: what is potentially postcolonial discourse of resistance is co-opted in the service of a neoliberal, neocolonial global cultural order.

The traffic of signification in Balle Balle: From Amritsar to L.A. (the hybrid title of the Hindi version of the film), for instance, has a direction that implies not only the relatively unequal positions of Amritsar and Los Angeles in the global hierarchical order but also a celebration of departure from a particular location and arrival at another. This operation (of signification) is part of a larger and subtler movement that is indicated by the substitution of “pride” with “bride” in the title of the film in English: Jane Austen’s ironic take on the patriarchal investment in the institution of matrimony in the English society of her time is suppressed in the interest of a vacuously interesting mating game with elaborate ethnic frills. The conflict – that attends on the playing out of the game – and its resolution reduce a wider historical conflict to a mere “prejudice” that is not so much overcome as brushed quietly under the conscience. Lalita’s (Aishwarya Rai) unsettling questions about racism and Western hegemony posed to William Darcy (Martin Henderson) never get answered. They just evaporate when Darcy’s personal character is discovered by her, curing her of her “prejudice” against him in particular and against the West in general. This conflation of the historical with the personal covers the event of colonial (and neocolonial) rape with the non-event of an inter-racial wedding performed with the paraphernalia of a typical Western tourist itinerary: the man comes beating a dhol on his friend’s wedding to carry away his own bride-prize on an elephant through the lanes of – no, not Kerala, but – Punjab. In the process, the various historical, cultural and racial conflicts that the film had managed to expose are suppressed in the patriarchal resolution of wedding. It is as if nothing else matters so long as a man and woman’s supreme destiny can be realized. Indeed, Lalita’s critical acumen seems – in retrospect – to have existed for one purpose only: to qualify her to be a white man’s bride.³

The two establishing shots of the film are emblematic of the underlying cultural-ideological structure of the film. The first is the opening shot of the Golden Temple . This is a long-distance shot, taken from a stationary position but moving quickly in time. The illusion of movement in time, from an early dark to a bright morning, is obviously managed through digital manipulation of the image. The image rapidly transforms pixel by pixel into daylight. Here is the technologically simulated time. And since the reverse sequence too could be manipulated equally well, you will not ever know which image is the real one – that in the first frame or the one in the last. The other establishing shot is of the famous agricultural fields of Punjab . Mr. Bakshi (Anupam Kher) is giving some instructions to an old-looking man, a rural Punjabi Sikh, and addressing him as Bhaiyya-ji, not Bhaiya-ji – as the correct mode of address should be (the former is used in Punjab to address an immigrant labourer from the eastern states of India). Significantly, this is the only time we see Mr. Bakshi against a background of fields: elsewhere he is throughout shown living in a bungalow – with a colonial façade – in the heart of the city, without even so much as a hint of a farmer’s lifestyle and manners. Indeed, the bungalow serves as more than a nostalgia item for the white English audiences. It metaphorizes, in reverse, the heart of the film as a contemporary diasporic artifact: the façade of critical postcoloniality with colonial interiors.

The fabrication doing duty for the Punjabi ethos in the establishing shots paves the way for the entire film’s unrolling and makes its representational value suspect. Indeed, it can be argued that simulation has been used here to produce the effects of representation. As a result, what you get to glimpse is not the Punjabi ethos (as in Gulzar’s Maachis) but a designer ethos for global consumption, on display in a cultural shopping mall of exotic ethnicities. Having been “designed” for niche audiences, it can conveniently accommodate garba alongside bhangra. And it has space for guitars and Goan nightclubs but certainly not for traditional wedding songs of Punjab .

Perhaps it would not be incorrect to describe Chadha’s film as an exemplar of the Indian diaspora’s version of Orientalism. A careful spectator can see Chadha’s own prejudices in her discriminatory framing of spaces. The camera catches the landing at Amritsar airport from behind the concrete limbs of buildings under construction. Later you see the bazaars of the city with their squalor and chaotic traffic. Nowhere in the film do you see the well-planned urban spaces of Amritsar . In comparison, London is first captured aerially and then on its exclusive tourist circuit. And Los Angeles is no more than a luxury hotel owned by the Darcy family and an eerily quiet neighborhood. The underside of Western urban spaces never finds its way into the diegetic frame.

The representation of characters too is determined by Chadha’s diasporic-Orientalist gaze.  All the four Bakshi daughters are stereotypes. Lalita is intellectually sharp, Jaya docile and conventional, Maya unselfconsciously silly and Lucky juvenile. Mrs. Bakshi is a perpetually anxious mother whose single aim is to find husbands – suitable or unsuitable – for her daughters. Mr. Bakshi is a liberal-minded, loving dad. Mr. Kohli is an extreme caricature: an idiot who has made it big in the U.S. but nevertheless the dream of parents who have marriageable daughters. Darcy is a cardboard cutout, with an immobile face and the awkward movements of a still photographer’s model who has been coaxed into acting.

It is intriguing that the Western characters are all working people. Even Darcy’s mother is a successful business woman. Darcy himself remains extremely busy, even when he is holidaying. The Bakshis seem to be, in comparison, born idlers. There are muted hints of Mr. Bakshi’s occupation, which seems to be farming, but it is never emphatically brought out as it is in the case of the people from the other side of the world.

The meeting ground between characters from the East and the West is Lalita, played inevitably by Aishwarya Rai. Lalita takes interest in her father’s work, carries herself with dignity, and is well-informed in history and cultural politics. And Rai, with soft green eyes, extraordinarily fair skin and fluent English, is the closest an Indian woman could get to represent the Western stereotypes of feminine beauty.⁴ As the former Miss Universe, she is – symbolically – a racially and culturally globalized but disenfranchised Indian. A global ambassador of a global order. Her wedding to a white man does not really threaten either the Asian subject or the Western, because her action would not provoke sharp prejudices in either part of the world.

How do Lalita and Darcy solemnize their wedding? With Christian rituals or with Hindu rituals? The film passes silently over this fact and shows instead the two riding a decked-out elephant with a JUST MARRIED poster. The feudal princely India , the British Raj and the post-reform India with its resurgent tourism come together in the spectacle. But they come together only as depthless images without histories. Like the actors who represent Punjabi characters in the film, but who are themselves anything but Punjabi. With the exception of Nadira Babbar. Perhaps.

 

Notes

 

¹ A reading of Gurinder Chadha’s interview (with its subtext) in which she identifies herself should be instructive: “I am English. When I speak in Punjabi, I seem very Indian.”

² Suchita Mathur is of the opinion that the film enacts, through its specific intertextuality as hybridity, “postcolonial subversion” or “reversal”. Nevertheless, it fails as a “politically enabling” project because it is constrained by “contemporary Bollywood’s implicit ideological framework” which is defined by patriarchy and cultural nationalism. My argument, among other things, is that it is mainly the film’s neocolonial complicity that undercuts its critical-postcolonial pretensions.

³ Mathur’s reading that “[the] cultural snobbery of the West is effectively challenged by Lalita” is not convincing as it does not address the implications of Lalita’s inconsequential “challenge”.

⁴ Mathur’s contention that “[the] East-West union in Aishwarya Rai’s portrayal of Lalita as a modern woman destabilizes the stereotypes” is very insightful. But Mathur does not address the nature of the destabilisation, which is not emancipatory but only reinforces the inequalities of the neocolonial global cultural order.

 

Works Cited

 

Chadha, Gurinder (Dir.). Bride and Prejudice/Balle Balle from Amritsar to L.A. Perf. Aishwarya Rai and Martin Henderson. Miramax, 2004.

Chadha, Gurinder. Interview with Subhash K. Jha. Bride and Prejudice is not a K3G. 30 Aug. 2004. 3 May 2007 http://www.rediff.com/movies/2004/aug/30finter.htm.

Mathur, Suchita. “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?) Colonialism”. M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 3 May 2007 <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/06-mathur.php>

 

[Courtesy: South Asian Ensemble, Spring 2010. Vol 2 No 2. Mississauga Canada ]

 

Patiala-based author Rajesh Sharma is
Editor of South Asian Ensemble.

E: sharajesh@gmail.com