2009-06-10 18:10:04

WINDRIDER SUMMER ONLINE MOVIE SERIES: SOUTH ASIA DON’T PLAY

Filed under: Asia, Books, India, John Marks, Kashmir, Vikram Chandra
Posted by: John

When I was twenty two, I spent a few months in India, and as you might expect, my life changed.

In India, I found the fractured world in full, found its form and mystery in concrete ways, discovered real politics and serious criminality and genuinely militant religion. I spent the following two or three years studying Hindi and working on a novel that might capture the experience in the bottle, but never finished it.

How could I? It was a terrible book, doomed from the start to the usual oblivion of first novels, the moreso because I had tried to drag India down to the level of my own mundane literary ambition. That country would no more yield to a coming of age novel about a young Texan abroad than it would submit to the many travesties and caricatures that the British had created to explain and confine it.

At the end of the experience, shelving the novel and giving up the language and despairing of any hope of a quick return, I came away with few certainties, but I had a fixed impression. India was a place so rich in energy and civilization that it broke the senses. I’ve never quite recovered mine.

So it was with a certain amount of weariness that I pressed the play button on the latest Windrider film, Sharat Raju’s “American Made”. Movies about immigrants in America almost always drain the ornery nuance from their subjects and turn them into vehicles for our thinking on alienation and communication. South Asians, in particular, tend to lose all their particularity and become the sum total of their overturned stereotypes. One feels the determination in filmmakers to play against every cliche, but less discipline when it comes to playing against the cliches that result from that determination, if that makes any sense.

I’m not criticizing the genre of immigrant epic per se, okay? From Elia Kazan’s America, America and The Godfather films to Maria Full Of Grace, Mississippi Masala and Michael Winterbottom’s astonishing In This World, there’s a lot of great stuff. It’s a vivid and necessary body of work, but it has been heavily mined in the last decade or so by independent film, and a hoary body of cliche–along with some truly great art–now clings to the subject matter.

The Namesake, for instance, struck me as tedious in its obviousness and thin in its portrayal of Indian life shoehorned into the American experience. I’m a fan of Kal Penn’s work in general, but not in that movie; he’s dragged down by its schematic quality, forced to become the mold for a current rendering of a type, which he recapitulates in “American Made.”

Give me instead his anarchic, dope-addled Kumar of Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle any day of the week. I swear I see the hidden demonic hugeness of South Asia between the lines of that movie.

But hey. Who am I to doubt the truth or challenge the quality of this piece? I haven’t lived as the child of immigrant Sikhs in the United States. The movie is well-made and cast. It feels coherent. It must be right and true and good. It must hit the nail on the head in some way. It’s certainly relevant. Sikhs have been mistaken for terrorists. Raju seems to know precisely what he’s doing and executes well. The moment when the younger son comes across his father with unbraided hair is shocking and sorrowful and lovely and makes up for a lot of the more familiar stuff in the early sections, which could have been cut.

The rebraiding of the hair feels less effective, on the other hand, like a rush back to the open arms of convention.

While I’m on the subject, do we really need one more worry-wort Indian mother, trying to get her kids to eat and complaining about their loose, assimilating ways? Hasn’t that immigrant mother—depicted in the same notes and colors across the five continents and surely based in a reality that nevertheless deserves better than to be turned into hackneyed cinema–worn out her welcome as a cliche? Doesn’t she deserve to be loved and hated in greater detail by her movie-making tribe? I think so.

I feel much the same way about India, the only country in South Asia I have ever loved and lost. The place and its people are too easily simplified and predigested for American audiences in these immigrant tales, which reduce the outrageous bounty to a four-square squatter’s meal. So instead of patting Sharat Raju on the back for delivering the goods to an audience that may be willing to take a lot on faith, I put a challenge to him.

Even in the tales of our immigrants and their children, let’s see more of the South Asia that Americans never get to see. Get us closer to the bone, deeper into the soil, harder into the cut. For my money, right now, it’s all gone a bit soft. Have a look at Vikram Chandra’s magnificent detective novel Sacred Games and tell me it can’t be done.

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