An interesting essay by Pankaj Mishra on modern Hindu Identity:

The invention of the Hindu

Hinduism is largely a fiction, formulated in the 18th and 19th centuries out of a multiplicity of sub-continental religions, and enthusiastically endorsed by Indian modernisers. Unlike Muslims, Hindus have tended to borrow more than reject, and it has now been reconfigured as a global rival to the big three monotheisms. In the process, it has abandoned the tradition of toleration which lie in its true origins.

Go to Amardeep Singh’s blog for links to this and other articles, and some very cogent comments on the article. Amardeep Singh points out that Mishra is rehashing an argument he has been making for a while, and what some of the problems with Mishra’s argument might be.

The utility of the Mishra piece is that he is saying things that need to be said again and again, and it is something I can pass along to my aunts and uncles who are not academics but think about these issues.

Boingboing.net posted that Marvel comics is coming out with a South Asia version of Spiderman. Peter Parker is Pavitra Prabhakar (Pure Light/Luminosity) a Mumbai boy who fights crime while dodging rikshaws and swinging from the Taj Mahal. What is more, Spidey, I mean Pavitra wears a combination of his signature read and blue tights with a dhoti! It not clear from Gotham’s website if the comics will be multi-lingual or only in English.

This is very exciting news for somebody who loved the Spiderman TV show (yes, they broadcast it in India when I was growing up), and loved Amar Chitra Katha Comics with their stories from Indian mythology and history. However, I wonder if the fusion will work for India. For one thing, Marvel comic/Gotham might be assuming that Indians, like the US audience is uncomfortable with something that is too “foreign,” so stories and characters need to made palatable for the Indian market, just like zari trimmings and bindis are added to fashions in the West, you know, to add a little bit of spice but not too much. But the Indian audience has been used to unadulterated Western fare for a while (lets say about 200 years).

Second, from what I remember of my school days, folks liked Western things because they were DIFFERENT, in fact the exclusively English speaking “hep” folks would not dream of indulging in such Indian fare as Amar Chitra Katha too openly, or read the very popular Hindi comic Chacha Choudhary. In fact a lot of these people did not even speak an Indian language very well, so if these folks have re-produced themselves, I wonder if a dhoti-clad Spiderman will go down very well with them.

Of course, I may be completely wrong. With the resurgence of the RSS and the notion of Hindu pride, and given the fact that a lot of the support for right-wing ideologies is centered around an urban, and middle/upper-middle class population, Pavitra Peter might be just the thing. And the erstwhile “hepsters” might be quite comfortable with this new avatar. Or it might be seen as an appropriation, causing the Shiv Shena to organize riots.

In any case, here is a nice little piece about comics in India by Manan Kumar, a journalist in Delhi, who also happens to be from my home town, Dehra Dun.

I haven’t seen this film, but this film has caused a militant right wing group to riot, and has been excoriated by the lesbian and gay community in India. This is a Bollywood film with a lesbian as a central character who is leading a innocent presumably hetero girl “astray,” according to the film’s website, “There are hidden desires in Tanya. Wild desires, which lead her to clash with Rahul in a fight to (the) wild finish.” it seems that the film locates Tanya’s “pathology” in her abuse and incest ridden childhood. And ofcourse she is punished with a terrible death at the end of the movie.

This brings to mind two other films with violent women in them, “The Bandit Queen” (Shekhar Kapoor, 1994) and “Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill “(Russ Meyer, 1966). The latter is one of my favorite films. Roger Ebert says of Russ Meyer:

The quintessential Russ Meyer image: a towering woman with enormous breasts, who dominates all the men around her, demands sexual satisfaction and casts off men in the same way that, in mainstream sexual fantasies, men cast aside women.

In this movie the main character with her girlfriend, picks up an “innocent hetero” girl and goes on a wild rampage. The film ends with her death, but what is memorable is not that she dies, but how she lives:

Russ Meyer has created here a new reality — a society where women are either equal in power or superior to their oppressors. In fact, this is less a battle of the sexes than the Armageddon recast. (”If this is female empowerment, watch out!” — critic B. Ruby Rich)

Maybe its the rampaging woman that the right wing hooligans are objecting to.

This brings me to a celebrated film about the famous bandit, Phulan Devi. When I was in school, the papers were full of Phulan Devi’s exploits, she had executed spectacular raids and reportedly killed several people, and massacred all the men in the village of Behmai.

This much lauded film was a travesty. As Madhu Kishwar says:

…At the high profile film premier, director Shekhar Kapur introduced his film as depicting the brutal “truth” about the oppression of women and lower castes in India. It is supposedly a sympathetic account of her life an attempt to justify her taking to banditry on account of oppression and maltreatment by her own family (father, husband), as well as the upper caste Thakurs of the region.

However, the person most upset about the film is Phoolan Devi herself. The director and the producer have refused to show her the film despite repeated requests. She feels, based on the accounts she has heard from people and little clips of the film she saw on television, that the film seriously distorts and falsifies her life and invades her sexual privacy by showing her raped and re-raped even though she has never talked about this aspect of Phoolan Devi’s life with her biographer Mala Sen, on whose book the film is supposed to be based.

The film perpetrated the same violence on Phulan, that it was purportedly attacking. It completely ignored the fact that much cast and gender violence has to do with ownership of land, and control of resources like water, and Phulan’s banditry was not a personal “pathology” per se. “Girlfriends” just seems like a degraded version of Bandit Queen, as far as the “violent” woman aspect goes. I wish there were more Faster Pussycat type films, the best film every made or will be made according to John Waters, time for more “Feminator” films!

BBC News, 14 June, 2004
‘Girlfriend’ causes India storm
By Jayshree Bajoria
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3805905.stm

The Telegraph, June 16, 2004
Two Women – Editorial
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1040616/asp/opinion/story_3373843.asp

The Times of India, June 16, 2004
The XY-rated Film: Thought Police are Oxy-morons
Bachi Karkaria
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/741171.cms

see also the the URL for the official website on the film:
http://www.girlfriendthemovie.com/

At least some of the BJP high-command understands that they lost the election because of the 2002 violence in Gujarat. There seems to be a division within the party regarding their own politics, but this is an interesting turn of events.

Former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee today emphatically stated that “Gujarat” will be discussed at the party’s forthcoming National Executive in Mumbai.

Regarding the Gujarat violence, filmmaker Rakesh Sharma has made a four part documentary, Final Solution, about the events of 2002. If you get a chance to see the film do so. While the film is more like a catalogue rather than a narrative, it makes clear the complicity of the State in the death of thousands of people.

There is a lot of documentation about the riots, and also the source of funds outside India that go into supporting such political violence. You can get to those sites via Kerim’s blog:

http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/000507.html

My latest project, a Ripfest film which I edited, was covered on Fox News. Director Ted Sperling (The Full Monty, Titanic) and star Tonya Pinkins (Tony award winner, and nominated for Caroline or Change by Tony Kushner) were interviewed.

It seems that Charles Sobhraj has been charged with murder in Nepal. The BBC covered it a few months ago.

This is where I’ll post the latest info about my films, as well as other information of interest. You can subscribe to the RSS feed on the right, and I also plan to implement e-mail updates via bloglet.