Garth Davis, director of “Lion,” accepts a Golden Lion at the 2015 Venice Film Festival. Image courtesy of WikiMedia Commons.
By Jahnavi Pradeep ’23
Staff Writer
The movie “Eat Pray Love” directed by Ryan Murphy situates the viewer in India through quick shots of crowded streets. Bikes and rickshaws furiously honk at each other over the evening traffic. Children run across streets with sheer abandon, and vendors prepare food for the gathering crowds. M.I.A.’s “Boyz” plays in the back as Julia Roberts enters the scene in a cab, eyes reeling at the reckless driving and noise around her. As the cab slows down, she offers her hand to the bunch of children gathered by her window, guarded. A sense of exasperation permeates both her and the audience at the sight of this chaotic surrounding. India, as seen here, is an impenetrable and uncivilized mess.
This peculiar depiction is reflective of the larger Western interpretation of India. Western media showcases South Asia as either an exotic and unfamiliar realm or a poverty-riddled subcontinent juxtaposed against the quintessential West. This caricaturing erases the complex sociopolitical realities of Indian people, misrepresenting their cultures and skewing the country’s issues with class to reinforce Western understandings.
“Eat Pray Love” follows the life of Liz Gilbert, an American woman looking to reinvent herself by traveling across the world to Italy, India and Indonesia. India becomes an exotic vacation spot where Liz can have a spiritual awakening, and the film centers primarily around an ashram where Liz takes vows of silence and heads prayer meets. But what a selective encounter this is.
Liz never interacts with the children on the street or attends to the unsanitary garbage piles that the film continually shows us glimpses of now and then. In one scene, when Liz is about to drink a bottle of soda, her American friend jokingly warns her that “the first rule in India is never touch anything but yourself!” They laugh at the unsanitary conditions of the country and leave it at that. The real-life experiences of Indians are pushed to the background as mere wall-hangings.
The sole portrayal of an Indian character is Tulsi, a 17-year-old girl Liz meets at the ashram, but even this amounts to little more than a caricature. Tulsi is forced into an arranged marriage by her parents, and in her interactions with Liz, woefully cries about it. This depiction sets up all Indians as simply backward and oppressive. The film portrays India as a strange land, much unlike the America that Liz comes from. The overall impression is that the country is a place for Westerners to go only in pursuit of pleasures.
But “Eat Pray Love” is hardly alone in its skewed portrayal of the subcontinent. While it focuses on the American experience in exotic India, other Western films have made efforts to talk about the Indian experience in India with little success. An example is the critically acclaimed 2008 British drama “Slumdog Millionaire.”
While striving to be more authentic to the Indian experience, “Slumdog Millionaire” contributes to India’s narrow representation as a backward third-world nation. Daniel Boyle’s film stars Dev Patel as Jamal, an orphan from the Bombay slums who competes in “Kaun Banega Crorepati,” the Indian version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” The film weaves together harrowing flashbacks from Jamal’s life, which is filled with corruption, communal strife, child labor and gangsters on the prowl for orphaned children.
These dark and violent events are a well-documented reality of happenings that do occur in the country. However, the problem with “Slumdog Millionaire” is how it points this experience in a wholly Western direction. The portrayal of the slum is one-dimensional — everyone is terrible and out to get you. This reaffirms Western understandings of India as a country of uncivilized people while failing to address the political realities that lead to poverty and crime. Framed more around Jamal’s love story, “Slumdog Millionaire” ensures a happy ending in which he wins 20 crores and reunites with his childhood sweetheart. The film is even subtitled “The Feel-Good Film of the Decade,” adhering to this lighthearted tone. In the process, the sociopolitical reality of poverty in India gets sidelined by the illusion that it can be overcome without any call for structural change.
This portrayal of Indian poverty without accompanying socioeconomic critique reappears in “Lion,” a 2016 Australian biographical drama directed by Garth Davis. Patel (once again) stars as Saroo Brierley, an Indian boy who gets lost and separated from his family and village in India. An Australian couple eventually adopts him and, years later, Saroo returns to find his lost home. A significant chunk of the film follows the younger Saroo in Kolkata after he gets lost. We watch him run through landscapes that resemble those in “Slumdog Millionaire,” such as littered garbage dumps, child trafficking sites and oppressive orphanages. “Lion” does not attempt to confront poverty, either, instead turning to Australia as a sort of solution.
Saroo’s adoptive Australian parents are portrayed as a calm and loving couple dedicated to helping underprivileged children like Saroo. In one scene, Saroo’s adoptive mother, Sue Brierley, tells him how it was always her dream to adopt, “to take a child that was suffering, like you boys were, and give you a chance in the world.” This depiction strengthens the white savior complex — the West is a sanctuary that can help the brown person become civilized and explore both the world and their own potential.
“Eat Pray Love,” “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Lion” all claim authenticity by being based on either real-life accounts or books by authors of the Indian diaspora. For example, “Lion” is based on Saroo Brierley’s autobiography, “A Long Way Home.” Western media relies on this authenticity to retell the same tales and further preexisting assumptions about India. Western projects in the recent past have also tried to prove authenticity by including more Indian filmmakers as directors and producers. Prominent examples are Mindy Kaling, Aziz Ansari and Mira Nair. However, despite this inclusion, much of their content still suffers from lack of authenticity. While it is a step in the right direction to include a more nuanced perspective, future Western media must focus on confrontations of the sociopolitical realities of the people it represents rather than reaffirming its own viewpoints. This will do justice to the Indian people regarding the representation they genuinely deserve rather than their current caricaturing.