Editorial
The Modern Day Robert Clive, neo Mir Jafars and the Slumdog Paupers
The story is not new. It has been happening for centuries. Foreigners’ obsessive inclination in exposing India’s woes has always had the support of “deshi” connivers who were more than ready to oblige them. Earlier the missionaries did it to justify conversions and Britishers practiced it to rationalize their ‘civilizing mission’. Now they are coming back in new forms. Robert Clive was lucky enough to find Mir Jafar and Danny Boyle was not unfortunate either, he had his Mir Jafars in actors like Irfan Khan, Dev Patel and Anil Kapur.
Film making does not address the issue of art alone, it in the process represents a society, a culture and engages itself with a whole range of issues. Why it is so that movies like Slumdog Millionaire grabs attention in the west? Why only such movies are acclaimed there with prizes which remain out of range for any movie of Indian making, however great it may be? These are the questions which are not easy to answer. The prizes have their own politics. Mother Teresa can get Nobel Prize but not Baba Amte. Similarly in India, the Indian government can bestow its best honours on missionaries like Sister Nirmala but to consider the names of the likes of Baba Ramdev is a taboo.
The message is clear. There is a class in the west which wants selective depiction of Indian ‘reality’. In India too, there is a class that makes itself easily available to cater to this section of western audience. They are hand in hand in making Indian poverty for sale. For them, the country of snake charmers has now become the country of slums, crimes, prostitution, filth and dirt. Are they really interested in addressing these issues which are not exclusive to Indian society? Had it been so the lead child artiste of Meera Nair’s Salam Bombay fame would not have been driving an auto in Banglore to earn a livelihood. It may appear a contradiction of sort that while Meera Nair keeps herself busy in planning new movies, the child artiste who was paid twenty rupees a day for working in her movie that catapulted her to fame has to struggle hard for his daily bread. Robert Clives and their Mir Jafars are not interested in addressing the issues, they are more keen to sell them. That’s why the copyright of the song “Jai Ho” has been sold at a whopping price making it sole preserve of a political party while the other political parties including the Leader of Opposition kept clamouring their support for it without going into the real issues. Now the supporters of that political party alone can sing the song and others singing it may invite violation of copy right act. This is what we call trade and not art!
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