Poverty porn is
peddling poverty and misery as an art by constructing a narrative around it
(its truth isn’t important), presenting the selected components
(often the worst ones which can be turned into a melodrama onscreen or in
print) of a disadvantaged community, a poor society or a tribe, and stringing
together these worst anecdotes/incidents into a single story to garner
accolades for having made a ‘’thoughtful work” .
One of the best known
earlier works in print for these genre is the novel City of Joy by Dominique
Lapierre where he describes life in a Kolkata slum for Bihari migrants in
1960s, puts in a white Christian missionary as a saviour (and slyly dedicating
two pages to praise Mother Teresa). Its no surprise that the most acclaimed
director from India in the west is Satyajit Ray, whose films did an exceptional
job in selling India’s poverty beyond its shores. It was a celebration of
India’s penury and deprivation by the world audience and Mr Ray never spoke a
word about wanting to change all this. It was just like paying a trip to the
zoo, looking at the sad faces of caged animals and then going home. NRI and PIO
directors too have been very notorious for this be it Ismail Merchant who with
James Ivory made movies throughout his career glorifying the British Raj and the
Victorian era, or Mira Nair who made films like Salaam Bombay
(1988) which centered around slums and brotherls,
or Kamasutra (1996) which has to be the most grotesque representation of
medieval India, where 16th century people dress like its 2nd century
BC and indulge in nothing but sex sex and more sex. Slumdog Millionaire
(2008) is the most prominent international example of poverty porn winning the
highest accolades, including Oscars for best director and film. Not one thing
about India is shown good here. Alongwith the copius shots of Dharavi,
garbage dumps and beggars, Danny Boyle’s fascination with feces is featured
prominently here as it was in his earlier film Trainspotting (1996). Not a single
Indian character in this film is shown having an iota of decency.
The newest entrant in
this category is Parched, which claims to show the poor Indian rural woman’s
plight and lonely womans longing for love. In the set narrative of India which has to hover around poverty and
kama sutra style sensuality, another epithet has been added recently:- Misogyny
and rape culture. Ever since the Dec 2012 horrific rape and murder of Jyoti
Singh (Nirbhaya) in Delhi, India has largely been painted as a land of rapes by
liberal western media. No opportunity is lost to enforce this narrative, and no
thought is given to the fact that India in respect to its huge population has one
of the least number of crime rates in the world (any research on any statistics
will reaffirm this fact).
**SPOILERS**
Parched is a story of
three friends in a remote fictional village (which speaks a fictional dialect) in
Kutch in Gujarat, Rani (Tannishtha Chatterjee), a 32 year old widow with a
spoilt teenage son, Lajjo (Radhika Apte), a childless woman regularly battered
by her husband, and Bijli (Surveen Chawla in a grossly overacted performance),
a dancer and a part time prostitute. Rani buys a bride Janaki (Lehar Khan) for a
hefty sum of Rs 4 lakh for her son Gulab, but the bride is discovered to have
shorn hair and is hence ridiculed by everyone in the village. Gulab feels
cheated, starts hating his mother and starts visiting prostitutes. Rani, Lajjo
and many other women in the village sell their handicrafts in an NGO started by one of the villagers Kishan. Lajjo is the most
talented of them, and she starts believing in herself once Bijli tells her that
her being childless might be her husband’s fault, not hers. Bijli is threatened
by the arrival of a younger dancer in the troupe. Her dancing troupe is also threatened
by the imminent arrival of cable TV in the village for which all the women have
pooled in their resources.
The
men in the village
are shown as good for nothing, who do nothing more other than drink and
deride the women or get paranoid about them getting eloped with someone
else due to mobiles or cable tv. A token panchayat scene is shown where a
young woman facing sexual abuse is forcefully sent back to her in laws
place. Nothing else is shown of the panchayat making any decisions of
value for the village. Rani, Lajjo and Bijli go on a full fledged fun
trip around the outskirts of the village, where Bijli makes Lajjo to
sleep with one of her mystery lovers, an ascetic (Adil Hussain wasted in
a miniscule role). Rani is forced to surrender her house to the money
lender as Gulab steals all the money meant for loan repayment and
absconds. Bijli realises that the troupe member who she thought loves
her wants to elope with her because he wants to pimp her out. In a
typical commericial film ending , on dusshera, Lajjo's husband is burnt
alive after accidentally catching fire from while beating her. All
three women escape the village, giggling towards an uncertain and
exciting future. The end.
All
their talk revolves around how their men drill them and what part of
anatomy they would like in them. This is the boldness the director
proudly shows us, including the dialogue in the end where Rani exclaims
"we can survive by sewing, if not f***ing" . The highlight of the film's
boldness is Lajjo riding the caveman (woman has to come on top in these
films, literally). And these three skinny dipping.
All
the three protagonists in the film arent without flaws which denies
them any moral high ground. Rani’s encouragement of her mystery stalker
on the mobile phone is portrayed as her longing for love. Sorry Leena
Yadav, stalking is not cute, its creepy and no harassment can be cute.
Shes shown as large hearted by sending her abused daughter in law with
her earlier love interest, but her culpability in ruining her life by
getting her married to her good for nothing son cant be denied. Bijli's
ruin is by her own poor life choices. Lajjo tries blackmailing her
husband in the end to accept her child by other man by his or be shamed.
Or the womens escape in the end, where in the real world they can be
easily apprehended as murder suspects.
**SPOILERS END**
Unfortunately, it is
this kind of bleak and depressing (and often stereotypical and misrepresented ) fare from or about India that gets picked by
movie festivals the world over.The sad part is that the people lapping up these
kind of films are not just the western audiencies and critics of the film
festivals, but also the urban English educated higher middle class and affluent
part of the society. People outside India have to understand that the biggest
sufferers of colonial mentality are these so called elite classes, because its
them who have made self hatred and putting the white man on pedestal the norm
and look down on their fellow Indians coming from the lower strata of the
society with more contempt than any outsider. These are the people who take
pride in speaking English, who try to wipe out every traces of Indianness from
themselves and view anyone unable to speak English in a proper accent or
diction as lowlife, these are the people who keep Shakespeare alive long after
England has forgotten him. This ‘’film festival’’ gang of directors from India
or from abroad also come from this same class. And there is nothing more
valuable for this cocktail circuit than approval from the west. It is their
currency, their validation, their salvation and their collective orgasm.
These
movies are made for international audiences so that they can feel good
about themselves for being ‘lucky’ to live in the ‘first world’ (and
getting fooled by their politicians into thinking so). They
know their audience, and more so, they know the jury in various film festivals
(Cannes, Venice, Toronto etc) or international
film awards , which are comprised of militant progressive liberals who want to “save’’
Asian and African countries via some kind of manufactured social change. The
filmmakers (and actors) know very well how to play to this gallery, hence
feminism, gay rights, sexual awakening and victimhood glorification are main
themes of their films, and these elements are forcefully added even if there is
no place for them in the script, because these are the lobbies in the western
media that are to be pleased, if one has any chance of ‘’acclaim’’. And they
scream to them “we are your trained monkeys, selling your commandments,
evangelizing every possible audience to your ideology. Please give us that
award now”.
This is just another example of typical agenda of stereotyping India like countries by cherry picking
isolated incidents and weaving them into a single tear jerking story,
continuing it from where the previous similar maker left off. There are issues
in all societies, but every society has some inherent goodness, some beauty
which these western based agenda driven directors and writers--often with
Indian names—refuse to see. All
societies have grave issues within them, male dominance is everywhere,
and the west is hardly the parameter to judge morality.
Because what fits the
narrative is Mexico as a country ruled by drug cartels and whores, Russians
being nothing more than spies or gangsters, Brazil as a country of gangsters, drug peddlers and favelas (and ofcourse poverty),
Chinese being either martial artists or buffoons, Africa being a continent
where each country has a civil war, and of course India as a country which is a
slum where a few happen to be call centre employees. Any attempt to talk sense
into these filmmakers is brushed away by their next film which toes the same
line.
Some horny teenagers might enjoy Ms Apte’s topless scenes in this film, but it is nothing more than forced titillation in this equally forced narrative of how an Indian village is, and will be totally nonsensical to the average Indian adult. While men are nothing more than almost comically cruel caricatures here, sadly women too are reduced to nothing more than sexual objects. Why do all of such films which claim to speak for disadvantaged women only talk of carnal desires? Are there no issues like women dying in childbirth or due to poor sanitation facilities in villages? But hell, those issues arent kinky nor money spinning for the screen. There is no dearth of "Avant Garde wannabe" film-makers pissing on poverty by sexualizing it and using it to titillate Westerners. If stereotyping, disrespecting, and misrepresenting some of the most defenseless and vulnerable people in the world is ''meaningful cinema'' then cinema has come to a very sad state.This is like enlarging a photograph of a tribal teen with v Its like forcibly grabbing the old, torn saree of a poor Indian village woman and displaying it to Westerners so that they can ejaculate on it. All of this just to win some silly awards. May these so called filmmakers realise their own slave-mentality and find a way to understand what true freedom really is. Until then, its only for a sane observer to grasp the depth of their intellectual and spiritual poverty. And that of the audience that consumes, rewards, and encourages ideological porn like this.
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