Why Mother India is an orphan at the Oscars

Why Mother India is an orphan at the Oscars
Mother India (1957)
By Prayaag Akbar

The Oscars are back, with all the hysteria only languid blue sexpot aliens (or Morgan Freeman as a smoulderin' Nelson Mandela) can incite. For Indian cinemawallahs, however, this is likely to be yet another year of disappointment: one more Best Foreign Film award slides away, probably to some beret-wearing "auteur" in Spain or Eastern Europe, far from the grasp of Bollywood directors and producers.

Every year the Film Federation of India dutifully proclaims its favourite from the thunderstorm of movies that India produces. The announcement of India's Oscar nominee is greeted with great local – and perhaps localised – excitement, despite the fact that the accolade is usually meaningless. Nine times out of ten (or, to be more accurate, 58 out of the 61 times the award has been given), the Indian movie selected is deemed not good enough to compete with the other efforts on the Best Foreign Film shortlist. In effect, the best movie from India is sent to that same canister in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences where lie films from Kazakhstan, Trinidad, and all those other countries where there is no multibillion-dollar movie industry, there are no world-famous actors, no imported background dancers.

At first this might seem like a failing of the Indian movie industry. We wonder if the film critics of Los Angeles are suffering from that old colonial disease of snobbery. We wonder if they decry the ease with which we intersperse fantasy and reality, song and drama, tragedy and laughter. But things are slowly changing. Increasingly, Los Angeles is beginning to recognise that Indian movies speak to the people they are made for. Yet, the Academy Awards will not search for the best films that come out of India because that award is interested in celebrating something else: the privileged perspective of the United States.

The vast assortment of Hollywood technicians, filmmakers and actors that judge the entries seek movies that correspond with their own politics; they want movies where the noble American saves the world; and they want stories that allow them to reinforce whatever stereotypical notions they have of a foreign nation. Movies that make people think are outside the Oscar matrix.

During the ceremony, "Best Foreign Film" might sound like one of the more arty Academy Awards, but the winner is invariably the cheeseburger of non-American cinema, where every ingredient is easily discernible, and the whole is a mass of uncomplicated, fatty, stereotypical fun.
Over a brief chat, filmmaker Pankaj Butalia (from whom the cheeseburger comparison has been stolen) is extremely insightful: "The Oscars are obsessed with large-scale human drama. A foreign film must either speak of large events, or it must correspond to American political interests. The protagonist must overcome some major adversity, the lowest of the low battling the mightiest forces."

There are distinctions, of course. Films from Western Europe and Canada are allowed more leeway; because the imagery is familiar to an American audience, the cultural ties date back further, and their political interests have been mostly aligned. It is easier, then, for a Western European film to transmit a focused, genuine message without having to resort to crude stereotyping. This perhaps explains the relative success of European films: since 1947, 51 out of the 61 awards have gone to European films, five to Asian films and three to African films. Films from nations in the former Communist bloc have suffered similarly.

The Foreign Film winners from 1999 to 2001 illustrate this point well. In 1999 it was director Pedro Almodovar's classic, All About My Mother, which provides a poignant examination of AIDS, transvestitism and faith in Spain. In 2000 China won with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is a stunning, beautiful film, but fantastical in the extreme, embedded with Orientalist symbolism of flying kung-fu monks and Gengis Khan-type warlords. In 2001, Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land, a dark comedy about the Bosnian war, won, only two years after Clinton bombed the Serbs into submission. In the film, valiant United Nations representatives come to the rescue of three soldiers trapped in No Man's Land: ah yes, precisely what happened, then.

By their nature, the Awards grant Western Europe artistic license the rest of the world is not accorded.

This year, the Film Federation of India chose a delightful Marathi film called Harishchandrachi Factory, the debut film of director Paresh Mokashi. It is the story of Dadasaheb Phalke's struggle in making the first Indian film in 1913. The film is not a "small" story; it is about the birth of Indian cinema, undoubtedly a landmark cultural event, even from a global perspective. But Butalia explains that it could not hope to come close to the shortlist.

"They want caricatured versions of India," he says. "Portraying triumph from abject poverty, or sanitised representations of the anti-colonial struggle. Just like the movie that must emerge from Afghanistan is Kite Runner [in which the Afghan villain, a Talibani, of course, is interested primarily in molesting boys, and the young Hazaari boy requires the goodly Afghan-American to come to his aid] the movie that must emerge from India is the rags-to-untold-riches Slumdog Millionaire. There can be nothing in between."

Dr Arvind Rajagopal, professor of Media Studies at New York University, and an expert on the political effects of representations in popular Indian media, argues that the method of selection inherently denies any movie the opportunity to be a meaningful cultural window. In an e-mail to Guardian20 he writes, "With the Oscar shortlist, it is the U.S. that selects India's ambassador, so the films making it to this list reveal as much about the U.S. as they do about India. Poverty, misery, and the hope of redemption is the formula – and the white man's burden (of uplifting the poor and downtrodden of the world) is expressed in this formula itself, as the filmmaker Paromita Vohra has remarked."

America's privileged political status also plays a part. Dr Rajagopal continues: "Popular culture in the U.S. exhibits little interest in other cultures, except what it can get through stereotypes and clichés. Today in the U.S., Indian films are usually approached in the spirit of cultural tourism. Many Americans are happy to capture the soul of a nation in a few images – or so they may think."

But it remains a fact that almost every international filmmaker cherishes Uncle Oscar's recognition more than any other. So, for those directors in India who want to follow that route, below is a handy guide based on the three Indian films that have made it to the Academy Awards shortlist.

1. MOTHER INDIA: Mother India had unique political advantages. It was 1957, only ten years after Independence, and this tearjerker par extraordinaire was unleashed on an unsuspecting American audience of Hollywood liberals. Recognition was bound to follow for this excellent film, but only because it hit notes they could understand: landlord-peasant conflict and rural indebtedness, coupled with evocative imagery and stellar acting. "This is India," you could hear them say. As Pankaj Butalia says, "It would have won, but it was filled with songs."

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