My Own Country: Immersion in rural Tennessee milieu.
New energies are clearly at work on the South Asian scene in New York. Within the last decade, we have seen the rise of new art galleries and performance spaces, of museum exhibits, new film projects, ongoing play readings and much more. Of course, given our metropolitan flux, many new initiatives also evaporate or are quickly transmuted into other forms. Still, some of that energy was to be seen in the variety of films and plays offered at Indo-American Arts Council’s First Festival of the Indian Diaspora in November. Between the nostalgic Raj-twilight of the early Merchant-Ivory Shakespearewallah (1965) and the wedding masti of Delhi’s export new-rich in Mira Nair’s award winning Monsoon Wedding (2001) there lies a great deal of history and film making that deserves to be more widely seen and discussed.
The profiles of the film makers were diverse: they included Pennsylvania-based Harish Saluja; American-trained Nagesh Kukonoor, now living in Hyderabad and working in English; young Gaurav Seth, from Bombay, now in Ottawa via the Moscow film school; New York based writer-director Tony Gerber, fresh out of Columbia Film School, working with his wife, Lynn Nottage; Revathy Menon, an established Tamil actress with close connections to the film and TV world of Madras making her directing debut. The theater projects presented in cooperation with The Lark Theater likewise featured both experienced writers (David Freeman) and relative newcomers (Sisir Kurup, Sujata G. Bhatt and actor Aasif Mandvi). The festival included Indian and American writers/directors dealing with subjects of Indian interest.
The subtle take on patriarchy in Harish Saluja’s quiet 1997 gem The Journey could retain its interest for a long time. Kishan Singh a schoolteacher in India (Roshan Sheth), having recently lost his wife arrives in Pittsburgh to spend some time with his son and daughter-in-law. His social clumsiness and his bad habits (expectations of being waited on) create some stress in his son’s marriage and so for a while he lives with a long lost friend (Saeed Jaffrey) now also living nearby. Uncommonly for the film medium, the talk is thoughtful and not only there to advance the narrative. His characters belong to the educated Indian middle classes and the scenes are filled with a rare and genuine capacity for empathy. Saluja’s characters are all capable of unconscious oversight, but, as well, of deep human insight, and there remains a bracing and uncommon literacy about them. Despite his obvious discomfort in unfamiliar surroundings, Roshan Sheth’s Singh can make himself known and loved. A quiet and beautifully controlled film with fine performances by a great cast. A similar loss (a mother lost) brings a little boy into the care of his distant uncle in Seth’s film fable Passage to Ottawa: a coming of age film with a great performance by the young leading character.

Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding.
Gerber’s intricately crafted and comic take on the ethnic diversity of borough New York Side Streets (2001, awaiting release early next year) is like an eventful subway ride: for the curious, fill of insights into the private lives of colorful characters, arresting juxtapositions, occasional threats of catastrophe, but finally a sigh of relief as you get off the train, much the wiser. The five stories weave in and out of each other with occasional “transfers” between the different routes, each ingeniously worked into the narrative. Shashi Kapoor plays Vikram Raj an ageing, corpulent past his prime movie star hosted by his younger brother Bipin (Art Malik). Bipin and his wife Chandra (Shabana Azmi) are burdened by their guest, but, given the relationship, dare not protest. Their lives are thrown into a spin by their esteemed relative’s presence, but this tale ends quietly in a little wisp of smoke, an exquisite reminder of the evanescence of things.
My Own Country may be remembered from its original broadcast in 1999 on the Showtime Channel, the film’s producers. It is based on Dr. Abraham Verghese’s memoir of his time in a Southern hospital as the director of a department of infectious diseases, which detailed his close interactions with a whole range of his HIV/AIDS patients; his emotional connection with those stricken (from unabashedly promiscuous big-city-returned gay couples to rural folk to upstanding members of neighboring towns whose moral compass cannot accommodate their fates) — and the toll his work takes on his marriage. The strength this film lies in its firm immersion into its rural Tennessee milieu — the broad range of characters sketched faithfully and with insight. Nair does not labor her film’s clear political points. What stands out is the self-critical consciousness, the intelligence, the honesty and the astuteness of observation in the material of Verghese’s own memoir and the respect and affection he receives from (and gives to) his predominantly white patients. Verghese’s own thoughts about his nomadic life thus far and his deep sense of not being at home explains to some extent his immersion in the lives of his patients.

Queen of the Remote Control.
Since his return to India, Nagesh Kukonoor carved out a niche for himself with his first film Hyderabad Blues followed by Rockford: both films in English with considerable success in the small domestic English film market. His new satirical Bollywood Calling (2000) is a behind-the-scenes look at the indigenous film industry: the inefficiency in work, the routinization of production, the craze for the “foreign” thing, the corruption, the opportunism and yet the “charm” of it all that keeps everyone hooked on the cinema. We start with the character of Pat Sturmer, an out of work and decaying ex-star of thoroughly routine American action thriller, a surprise hit in India and thus, the dream of producers there. An aspiring Telugu film Moghul Subramaniam (Om Puri) comes to the United States, just with such ambitions and signs him up. Sturmer’s adventures in Hyderabad allow Kukonoor an external point of view for his sharp criticisms of industry practices (no scripts, projects approvals just on the basis of stars signed up, the marginality of actresses in the business, the plight of technicians and “junior artists,” etc., etc.) Manuji, the ageing matinee idol (self-mockingly and well played by the equally over-the-hill 70s Bombay star Navin Nischol) provides an excellent foil. Miraculously Strumer’s pilgrimage to India instills a renewed sense of purpose and returns to his wife a changed man. Kukonoor’s earlier films — and this is so of the other such recent Indian-made English language films by directors like Dev Benegal and Kaizad Gustad — the ruling trope is incongruity and the style ironic, even blaze. The “outsider” point of view surely indicates something about the dynamics of culture both within India, as well as the exchanges with “diasporic” culture and implies complicated questions of self–exoticization.

A First Class Man.
Combining the now-familiar trope of the anonymous e-mail romance with a rather old-fashioned women’s-film look at the unfortunate decline of love within a marriage, we have Revathy Menon’s Mitr (2000). Coming from the world of the mainstream world in south India, her first foray into “serious” filmmaking has no songs and conventional elements, but does adopt the by now equally conventional realism of the Indian “parallel” cinema. Still, it’s a form that is generally accessible and appears to be able to address contemporary issues in a way that can generate further discussion. If Kukonoor’s Laxmi is an outsider’s view in Hyderabad, Menon’s Laxmi is another is San Francisco and thus we see the traffic moving both ways.
Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding a delightful and satisfying ensemble-piece made with the abandon of a boisterous wedding will surely receive the promotion and the attention it deserves when it is released sometime early next year and her fans will have an opportunity to see it for themselves.
Many of the films screened certainly deserve to be known more widely. We hope Bollywood distributors here might widen their sights a bit and up some of these films too. In keeping with recent demographic changes in numbers and concentrations of south Asians, the market has grown in a big way for films, but we also need more forums for more critical discussions and analysis.
The play readings were really works in progress, but there was remarkable range and originality there as well. It could take great daring to attempt to update Shakespeare (iambic pentameters and all) for a south-Asian milieu on LA’s Venice Boulevard, but that is precisely what Sisir Kurup does in his imaginative and daring tour-de-force. Holding on to the spirit of Elizabethan bawdy, Kurup has put in everything he knows: the ugly realities of communal conflict at home and abroad, but also of the encyclopedia of American mass culture in his rapid-fire allusions to contemporary events and the wisdom of our times. Kurup is an actor, writer and songwriter who has worked for theater and television.
David Freeman’s A First Class Man offered a biographical reconstruction of the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan, India’s premier mathematician. The cast of characters included his senior colleagues at Cambridge and the clash of cultures there: particularly exacerbated because Ramanujan’s inexplicable genius is embedded in the colonial relation. Freeman explores this through a rich gallery of minor characters on both sides of the divide including Cambridge based native Indians whose political angst is posed as another extreme to Ramanujan’s extreme humility.
The valley girl narcissism of Shipla in Queen of the Remote Control is counterposed to the complacently narrow cultural horizons of her parents. But this complacency hides a darker reality. The third act was pitched rather high and too summarily brought up deep crises among the characters to resolve them just as quickly.
In the series of labels that we have come to find useful, “diasporic” is the most recent. And while it is very suggestive it would require some clarification. At one time the term Indian was used inclusively to designate a wide variety of people of sub-continental origin, but the hegemonic ring of that usage soon grated on our ears, so some of us adopted the British weight of “South Asian.” But hardly had we started to loosen the ties of native college, city and town, when we seem to have switched to the notion of the “diaspora.” In one sense, since there is now movement in both directions and everywhere, this could include a very disparate lot.
And what is “our” diaspora? If it is not to be simply another term for a “jet set,” at the very least, it ought to be predicated on some irrevocable separation from origin. Otherwise, it is merely a fashionable badge. Furthermore, now that ease of international travel and the world wide web makes us all at home at all times, one may have to ask how it is even possible to be “away” from home. A failure to deal seriously with the basic questions leaves us prey to cliché and what is worse to the very constructions we are presumably fighting (the idiocy of stereotype.)
One side of our diaspora maintains a voice of authority from within that original culture; another (from a distance) is getting increasingly central to agendas both political and cultural in India (look at the new patterns of political support or, for that matter, every Hindi film with an ‘NRI’ character) but there is a large category that has hardly any voice at all (the marginalized: migrants, the undocumented, etc.) If the term is intended to have some moral weight — the romance of “marginality” — that claim needs now to be properly substantiated.
Still, within the last few years there appears to be a new generation trying to get a word into the general discussion. After the psychic bags have been finally unpacked and the mother culture no longer provides such solid frames of reference for the test of experience, new immigrants have finally found the courage and the impulse to image their condition.
The children, always steered into “safe” professions and careers in the corporate world are now taking up the arts. Of course, such unsafe careers are always vocations and, while there is the promise of fulfillment, freedom and rich rewards, there are also ground realities to deal with — the narrow range of material that popular culture can institutionally accommodate — in other words, hard-to-dislodge basic stereotypes: even the new ones that develop as our visibility increases (list them: waiters, medics, chauffeurs, convenience store clerks, computer geeks, restaurateurs, etc.)
Then, there is the persistent question of “translatability,” that is, the possibility of “crossing over” and entering the mainstream — a condition that leaves us all speaking, as it were, over each others shoulders, addressing some imaginary and sympathetic other, someone who understands. But while it can be a bridge, it can also equally turn out to be an abyss with no echo; a vacuum in which one is perhaps protected but finally alone. And still, at the end of a performance, it is always posed: “But, will it speak to a wider audience?” The unavoidable fact remains: nothing can speak widely until it can speak narrowly.
As it stands, story material generally tends to be rather familiar: the pain and achievement of immigration itself, the nausea and ambivalence, children navigating the conflict of cultures, “kinks” waiting to be ironed out, and so on. And then, there is the horrifying thought that this condition — thought to be absolutely unprecedented — is not that at. It has always been so. Thus, we search for others with whom we can share our experience with the hope of achieving some greater generalizability — and larger markets.
We have so far had very little grass roots efforts not driven by this kind of demographic thinking — very few projects addressed to narrow audiences, and calculated in form and ambition to explore private spaces of experience. We need to create new rhetorical forms, new genres that can significantly combine a range of languages and accents with what is genuinely novel in our experience.
Festivals are only a resume of the state of cultural production and while they undoubtedly serve a useful function, they cannot constitute a culture. The rise of writers’ workshops, of theater groups, of artists’ associations — however informal — are a truer index of how energies are developing. It is increasingly important to develop new and relevant artistic themes as well as audiences (however small initially) that can grow in tandem. The lure of the great audience is a powerful one, but its danger is that it is, on the one hand, inhospitable to notions and ideas that cannot immediately be pressed into large scale circulation and, on the other, it can insidiously consume talent one at a time. More regular internal support from a smaller, immediate constituency may be a less “sexy” idea, but a vital continuing relationship to a sympathetic audience is vital for the nourishment of talent.