ABSTRACT
Color plays a large role in the Bollywood film industry. The Indian audience’s obsession with fairness of the feminine skin, especially women appearing on the silver screen still remains a significant factor behind the casting of fair-skinned female actors even for roles best suited to women of color. The prejudice, however, is not just against colored women but also against men of color, especially members of the Black community, in particular those whose origins are in Africa. This paper explores the subtle racial prejudices that some Indian filmmakers hold against members of the Black population, resulting in the de-humanization of the characters on screen.
Keywords: Black, African, race, prejudice, Bollywood, gender, de-humanization
In one of the biggest hits of the year 2000, Hadh Kar Di Aapne, there is a scene where the character of Raj (played by Govinda) is beaten black and blue by a Black character whom he refers to as kaala saand (black bull). This Black character, who speaks an unintelligible tongue, is all beefed up and behaves in a manner that is otherwise expected of an animal/brute (saand implying the animal). This scene, despite its brutality, is one of the funniest in the film and makes the film one of Govinda’s greatest hits in the comedy genre, strangely because the violence meted out to the character of Raj by the Black character borders on the slapstick. The Black character’s anger and subsequent act of violence stems from the fact that the character of Raj has mistaken the Black character’s wife for his love interest. As such, the Black character, deprived of a humane agency of expression of his insecurity, does what any human or animal would do to protect their partner from other predators, i.e. by expressing his anger by beating up Raj. This combination of human insecurity and animalistic reaction, no matter how problematic, makes the scene both brutal and funny at the same time.
In another movie from the same decade, Deewane Huye Paagal (2005), there is a scene where the character of Rocky (played by Akshay Kumar) is challenged by a seit (businessman) to a duel with a Black character who is referred to as Kaalia (kaala as in black). The black character, unlike the aforementioned one who evokes laughter, educes fear and brutality.
The common link between the two characters is that neither is given a name, but rather a label based on the color of their skin (kaala for black), both the characters are deprived of an intelligible tongue, and both serve the purpose of evoking a particular emotion in the spectators. Their identities are mere manifestations of the stereotypical perception that many Indian audiences entertain of their race and culture. Even on looking up the internet, it is impossible to find the names of the persons playing the characters: they serve no greater purpose than item songs in Hindi films, contributing nothing to the plot, and serving as mere props to evoke varied emotions, like laughter and fear.[1]
The movies offer examples of art imitating life. In 2017, a Nigerian student named Imran Uba was beaten to the extent of hospitalization by an angry mob in Greater Noida under the false impression that some African students had allegedly eaten an Indian classmate.[2] Earlier in 2016, a Congolese teacher was beaten to death, on the eve of his twenty-fourth birthday, by three men in South Delhi’s Vasant Kunj over a petty argument involving an auto-rickshaw ride.[3] Incidents such as these are not rare in India, a country that is otherwise known internationally for its hospitality to foreigners (Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam). The hospitality, however, is put to the test when it comes to accommodating guests of color, especially members of the African community. In one of her interviews with Dalit Camera, the novelist-activist Arundhati Roy explained, “Indian racism towards Black people is almost worse than white peoples’ racism,” and the recurring incidents of violence against Black people bear testimony to her statement.[4] To place the prejudice in proper perspective, I must point out that, on the one hand, violence against the Black community is inflicted by a small minority of the Indian population that is deprived of higher liberal education and principles of social harmony. On the other hand, the distorted representation of Blacks in Bollywood cinema is much more prevalent.
A repercussion of such distorted representation in the popular cinema is the nature of copycat crimes committed against Blacks, or against people in general, irrespective of their race, in India and elsewhere.[5] Such films have an aberrant effect on people’s psychology, leading them to commit crimes of violent nature.[6] This kind of onscreen violence has also been found responsible for various short-term and long-term effects on the viewers’ minds, especially of young people, resulting in unexpected behavioral changes.[7] Films like Kill Bill and Pulp Fiction have been proven to incite real life violence.[8]
The 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation, by D. W. Griffith was so racist in its portrayal of African-Americans that the film is widely credited with the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan after its disbandment in the late-nineteenth century, growing to include nearly ten percent of the adult male white American population by 1924.[9] The film showcased Black men as savages trying to attack White women while the Ku Klux Klan was portrayed as the honorable and heroic savior of American ideals, leading to the close association of Blackness with criminality.[10] Such representations also resulted in the unwarranted use of the Black body by the White supremacists as a “scapegoat for all problems, real or fictional.”[11] In this article, I offer the argument that racist behavior towards Black people, along with various other socio-political factors, is stimulated by the felonious and stereotypical portrayal of the members of the Black community in cinema.
The Indian audience, by and large, has been skeptical of the West’s portrayal of India and Indians,[12] be it in animated form such as in The Simpsons or in sitcoms like Seinfeld[13] and The Big Bang Theory. However, the Indian visual medium’s own representations of racial diversity seem problematic on many levels. Indian filmmakers often tend to project members of the Black community as bolsters to support the narrative without actually allotting any significance to their part. At times they serve as comic relief while on most other occasions they become the on-screen manifestations of savagery and physical strength, only to be vanquished by the racially, culturally, and physically superior Indian hero.[14] What is even more problematic is the juxtaposition of Black bodies as the obverse of morality and values, stripping them of their human individuality, and projecting them as the antithesis of human.
Analysis
Here is a snapshot from a scene in the 2008 film, Fashion, directed by Madhur Bhandarkar and starring Priyanka Chopra and Kangana Ranaut in the lead roles.
A scene from the 2008 film Fashion where Meghna (played by Priyanka Chopra), after a night of vinous celebrations, wakes up to find herself lying naked beside an unnamed Black character. Source: Netflix. https://www.netflix.com/in/title/70111162.
As evident from the picture, Priyanka Chopra’s character is horrified to find herself lying next to a Black man, bereft of clothes. The film tells the story of a small-town girl who goes to Mumbai to pursue a career in the fashion industry. As she reaches the zenith of her career, she finds herself leading a life of sheer debauchery. This particular scene is about a night when, under the influence of alcohol, Chopra’s character sleeps with this nameless Black man, and becomes flabbergasted on regaining consciousness.
Western film and television are often infamous for their stereotypical representation of Indians. From Indiana Jones and Close Encounters of the Third Kind to The Big Bang Theory, the Indian has often been portrayed as superstitious, evil, or simply naive who “tries to adapt to the American Way of life but fails.”[15] However, in the context of Indian Hindi films, the problem is the blatant stereotyping and eventual de-humanization of Black people, exemplified in the scene in question.
Priyanka Chopra’s character in Fashion realizes her downfall and gradual slide towards a life of immorality only when she ends up sleeping with a Black man. However, the same sense of guilt is not driven by her action of getting involved in a romantic relationship with a married Indian man, or any other (hu)man for that matter. The Black man serves as the antithetical rendering of the human attributes of Priyanka’s character, for having sexual relations with a human perhaps might be morally wrong but sleeping with a Black man is not just anti-cultural, but also anti-human. The Black man, in the process of being constructed as an agent of self-realization for the character of Priyanka, is eventually de-humanized, as the act of sharing a bed with a Black man while inebriated is not sexual, but bestial.[16]
First, let us examine the sexuality embedded in the scene above. In Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), Laura Mulvey defines what she calls the male gaze. According to her, the viewer at a cinema is in a masculine position and the person/s on the screen is the object of desire—the women characters.[17] The viewer derives (sadistic or fetishistic) pleasure by looking at the objectified woman character. In this scene, when the character played by Priyanka is horrified the morning after, the scene is desexualized both on screen and in the mind of the audience.
Next, let us study the bestial aspect in the scene above. In his essay Animals on Film: The Ethics of the Human Gaze (2010), Randy Malamud reorientates Mulvey’s idea and introduces the concept of the human gaze, that is the gaze directed at animals in the visual culture.[18] There are multiple ways of looking at animals on screen. Popular animal characters like Winnie-the-Pooh and Baloo are looked at with tenderness and joy, while those like Godzilla and King Kong are gazed at with fear and horror. Priyanka’s character gazes at the Black man as if he were a Godzilla, reducing him to a non-human entity that induces loathsomeness, fear, and the urge to destroy it.[19] The nameless Black character also serves as the antithesis to the Priyanka character’s moral and cultural values that are quintessential to the becoming of a true and ideal Indian woman.[20]
Here is a snapshot of a scene from the 2006 film, Phir Hera Pheri, directed by Neeraj Vora, and starring Akshay Kumar, Suniel Shetty, and Paresh Rawal in the lead roles.
A scene from the 2006 film Phir Hera Pheri where an unnamed Black character is shown breaking a lock open with his teeth.
Source: YouTube. https://youtu.be/qhyndgHD04A.
As evident from the picture, the Black unnamed character can be seen breaking a lock with his bare teeth. This is one of the many instances where members of the Black community are super-humanized, rather than de-humanized.[21] By projecting these characters as bearers of superhuman strength, the visual medium tends to bestialize them.[22] Like the Black character in Fashion, this Black character too is nameless and does not utter a word during the course of the entire film. This is problematic not just from a racial standpoint but also from the perspective of a visual art form.
Some representations of Blacks in Bollywood cinema encompass farce and comedy, as shown above. Richard W. Waterman explains: “In its title sequences, the Keystone Comedy Studio referred to its films as a “farce comedy,” adding that a farce is defined as “a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations.”[23] Waterman posits that farces are supposed to evoke laughter, they are not supposed to be dark or foreboding, and although the Keystones were replete with senseless cartoonish violence, they were not supposed to represent the dark side of our lives. Yet, he adds, from some of the very first images projected by the motion picture, dark racist images were prevalent, with violence illustrated and directed toward African American men, women and children. “These images represent a time capsule of what I call the dark side of the farce,” Waterman explains.
The Black character is not given an agency of expression, but rather constructed as the agency itself. He is bereft of any intelligible dialogues/monologues; he is simply established as the medium through which the central characters realize their fallacies and fears. For instance, when the character of Priyanka Chopra (Meghna) in Fashion finds herself lying next to the unnamed Black man, she is left aghast and leaves the room while the unnamed character still sleeps, unaware of the whirlwind of emotions he has involuntarily engendered in Meghna’s mind, thus getting reduced as a medium without an agency of expression.[24] One way of looking at this (mis)representation would be from an anthropocentric point-of-view.[25] He does everything that would appear non-human to the audience, acts that are otherwise expected of an animal/monster, for the purpose of evoking either laughter or fear.[26] It is not just an exhibition of racial supremacy but also of sub-conscious speciesism.[27] However, if the same character does something even remotely close to humane (like empathizing with one of the central characters), the act is represented as his evanescent redemptive arc.[28] The misrepresentation also leads to the cinematic othering of the Black community, to be perceived as binaries within a socio-political framework.[29]
Conclusion
The visual medium plays a crucial role in both breaking and constructing racial stereotypes. Fashion did a lifetime business of INR 60 crore (budget INR 18 crore) while Phir Hera Pheri made INR 69 crore at the box office. These statistics give us a clear idea of the viewership that these films had attracted and are still garnering over various OTT platforms. On social media, scenes featuring the Black characters from these films were made into memes and circulated on the Internet, leading to further caricaturing of this community of people. Also, most of the films with characters from the Black community are presented as comedies, drawing especially adolescent spectators with very impressionable minds. As such, this unwarranted onscreen de-humanization leads to the construction of an indecorous social identity of the Black people, resulting in more cases of racism and racial violence. Furthermore, what is presented as carefree entertainment actually possesses the power to stereotype an entire race of people as brutish and savage. Therefore, filmmakers ought to be far more sensitive when representing any community onscreen, otherwise it would result in the othering of an entire group of people.
Prasanta Mahanta is currently teaching in the capacity of an Assistant Professor (ad-hoc) at Mahapurusha Srimanta Sankaradeva Viswavidyalaya, Nagaon, Assam in the Department of English. He completed his Master’s degree in English from The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad in 2018. He has authored a novel christened Love-Not Out-Peace (Notion Press, 2013), and has co-authored a book, Concepts in Language and Linguistics Simplified (2022). He has published a paper titled The Changing Face of Hindi Horror Cinema: From the Ramsays to the Bhatts (2022) in Creatcrit, a biannual peer-reviewed journal. His areas of interests are visual culture, subaltern studies, language studies, and Indian English literature. He intends to pursue his doctoral thesis in film studies and wants to take up teaching as a full-time profession.
[1] Rita Brara, “The Item Number: Cinesexuality in Bollywood and Social Life,” Economic and Political Weekly 45, no. 23, (2010): 67–74.
[2] Maya Prabhu, “African Victims of Racism in India Share their Stories,” Aljazeera, May 3, 2017, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/5/3/african-victims-of-racism-in-india-share-their-stories.
[3] Pheroze L. Vincent, “African Teacher Killed in Delhi, African Woes Spill Out,” The Telegraph, May 22, 2016, https://www.telegraphindia.com/india/congolese-teacher-killed-in-delhi-african-woes-spill-out/cid/1491023.
[4] Arundhati Roy, “Indian Racism Towards Black People is Almost Worse than White Peoples’ Racism,” Dalit Camera, June 8, 2020, https://www.dalitcamera.com/indian-racism-towards-black-people-is-almost-worse-than-white-peoples-racism/.
[5] Jeanette Ferrara, “The Psychology of Copycat Crime,” JStor Daily, May 11, 2016, https://daily.jstor.org/psychology-copycat-crime/; Also see, Hafiz Muhammad Ahmad, Wajiha Raja Rizvi, Farahat Ali, “Fearing the effect of Hollywood, Bollywood, and Lollywood films on crime in Punjab,” Journal of Media and Communication Studies (April 2021): 1-20.
[6] Shruti Das, “When Cinema Kills,” The Patriot, October 25, 2019, https://thepatriot.in/2019/10/25/when-cinema-kills/.
[7] L. Rowell Huesmann, “The impact of electronic media violence: Scientific theory and research,” The Journal of Adolescent Health: Official Publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine 41, no. 6 Suppl. 1 (2007): S6-13. doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2007.09.005.
[8] Thane Peterson, “Too much kill in ‘Kill Bills,’” NBC News, May 5, 2004, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna4906827. Also see, Gordon Dahl, and Stefano DellaVigna, “Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 124, no. 2 (2009): 677–734. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40506241.
[9] Desmond Ang, “The Birth of a Nation: Media and Racial Hate,” HKS Working Paper No. RWP20-038 (November 23, 2020), available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3740907 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3740907.
[10] Calvin John Smiley, and David Fakunle, “From ‘brute’ to ‘thug’: The Demonization and Criminalization of Unarmed Black Male Victims in America,” Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment 26, no. 3-4 (2016): 350-366, doi:10.1080/10911359.2015.1129256.
[11] Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
[12] Shilpa D. Dave, Indian Accents: Brown Voice and Racial Performance in American Television and Film (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
[13] Sharita Forrest, “Western Media’s Stereotypes of Indian Culture,” Illinois News Bureau, September 1, 2010, https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/198683.
[14] Poonam Arora, “Devdas: Indian Cinema’s Emasculated Hero, Sado-Masochism, and Colonialism,” Journal of South Asian Literature 30, no. 1/2, (1995): 253–257.
[15] Sheldon Cooper to Rajesh Koothrapalli, The Big Bang Theory, Episode 10, Season 8.
[16] Colleen Glenney Boggs, “American Bestiality: Sex, Animals, and the Construction of Subjectivity,” Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 41–76, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/bogg16122.6.
[17] Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16, issue 3 (Oxford University Press, 1975), 6-18.
[18] Malamud, An Introduction to Animals and Visual Culture.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Sneha Singh, “The Ideal Indian Woman: Defined by Hindu Nationalism and Culture,” International Journal of Social Science and Human Research 4, no. 9 (2021): 2369-2377.
[21] Adam Waytz, et al., “A Superhumanization Bias in Whites’ Perceptions of Blacks,” Social Psychological and Personality, Science 6, no. 3 (April 2015): 352–359, doi:10.1177/1948550614553642.
[22] Palatinus, Levente, David, “The Anthropocene, War and the New Bestialization of the Human: A Popular Visual Media Perspective,” Itinerari 2 (Thematic Issue): Perspectives in the Anthropocene: Beyond Nature and Culture, ed. Stefania Achella and David L. Palatinus (Mimesis Edizioni, 2020), 101-116.
[23] Richard W. Waterman, “The Dark Side of the Farce: Racism in Early Cinema, 1894–1915,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 9, no. 4 (October 2010): 784-806.
[24] Vladimir J. Koenci, “Emotion in Painting and Art Installations,” The American Journal of Psychology 128, no. 3 (University of Illinois Press, 2015): 305-322.
[25] Adam Weitzenfeld and Melanie Joy, “An Overview of Anthropocentrism, Humanism, and Speciesism in Critical Animal Theory,” Counterpoints 448 (2014): Pages 3–27.
[26] David H. Stymeist, “Myth and the Monster Cinema.” Anthropologica 2, no. 51 (2009): 395–406.
[27] Christopher Smith, “Speciesism,” Social Work 46, no. 2 (2001): 189–189; and Joel Freedman, “Speciesism,” Social Work 46, no. 2 (2001): Pages 189–189.
[28] Judith Franco, “‘The More You Look, the Less You Really Know’: The Redemption of White Masculinity in Contemporary American and French Cinema,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 3 (2008): Pages 29–47.
[29] Martin Berny, “The Hollywood Indian Stereotype: The Cinematic Othering and Assimilation of Native Americans at the Turn of the 20th Century,” Angles 10 (2020).
