This picture shows my dad working around the home. His love for us.
Why do I always tell people that love is work? And why does no one ever agree with me or understand what I am saying? The answer is simple. I am Indian. I am Punjabi. I live and work in a white world. Where all the rules of love, the expectations, the meanings, the behaviour, everything is different. Where love is not work. Love, whatever it is, is something else. Not work.
But in India, in the Indian consciousness, in the film ‘Rab ne Bana Di Jodi’ (2008) – ‘God has Made the Pairing’, we have this ideology of love as work.
The heroine is heartbroken. On the eve of her wedding, her fiancèe dies. The father of the bride asks one of his students, the Punjabi hero (who loves the professor’s daughter secretly) to marry her and fulfil his dying wish as he is dying of a heart attack. The heroine and the hero get married. But then the heroine tells the hero she has no love left in her heart.
The saddened heroine, assailed on all sides by death and loss, separation, has two interests. Bollywood heroes and dancing. So the hero dresses up like a Bollywood hero in a secret disguise and starts dancing with her in a competition. He is inexperienced with women but he makes her laugh, he charms her. He spends all his time trying to make her happy again.
Note: He changes his personality and image. He learns how to dance. He works to make her happy. He learns how to talk to women when he has never had any women in his life. He transforms his personality from a shy introvert into an extrovert. Learning upon learning. Work upon work.
The original man that the hero is does not make the woman happy. She is miserable in the marriage. She learns only to become happy with the pretend hero. When the hero fights in a sumo match to win holidays to please her and is injured, all he gets is a scolding and the harsh words that the heroine cannot love him.
The pretend man tries to get the woman to run away with him – to cheat on himself. However, this is when – by divine intervention, through the hand of God – the woman finally learns to love her husband, seeing him as a god. Then they realise the truth – how much the man has always loved the woman. Through her awareness of everything – including the work that he has done for her – the woman finally realises that she loves him. Not for what he pretends to be. But for what he is.
A happy ending, no?
So here, we have the Indian ideology of love as work. As the original husband that fights in the sumo match and gets injured, as the guy that emulates the Bollywood hero and the dancer, the hero is someone that works to get love. He makes the woman love him. Why not? The audience want a happy ending.
But we live in the West. This is not India, where love is work. Where when you show someone how much you love them they will love you back. This is not the world of reciprocity. The rules are different here. And, can I ask, even in India, in real life, is love work? When you think of someone and you do stuff for them, is that recognised as love? When you work in your job so that you get love, so you can provide for them, so you are recognised as a man, is that love?
Why do they have this ideology in the films? If it is not true?
Imagine you have a family. You have a wife and children. You are the provider. You work every day for them. They are your motivation. That is the love I have been expected to emulate. That is what my father did for me, my brothers and my mother. So why have the expectations changed? Why is it, that when you dedicate your life and the most precious object in your life, time, to someone, that is not regarded as love here? Time, attention, effort, feeling. Everything is invested in love as work. And yet, that is not recognised here. What are the rules here? A few slippery and meaningless words? Empty promises? Being treated in a cavalier and aloof way without ever being allowed or able to reveal your real feelings? Drunkenness in a bar? I prefer the Indian philosophy. Love as work. When you are attentive and you put someone before yourself. When you go through the ordeal for them. When you can dedicate your life to them. When you are honest and when you reap what you sow. When you are rewarded and recognised for your work. That is the love of the Indian man. That is the philosophy of love as work.
In life, in love, you can become helpless. You cannot force someone to love you. You cannot force love. You cannot change yourself so that someone can love you. You cannot drop your responsibilities and your commitments – your integrity, your duty – for love. You cannot appeal their decision when they do not choose you. There is no court of appeal for love. And no one knows this more than the loser in love.
At the same time, you cannot force yourself to stop loving someone. If only you could switch off all of your feelings. How simple things would be. How free from pain. You are stuck. Helpless.
So what remains? Within the supreme moment of helplessness. Within the moment of the complete loss of power. Within the moment of surrender to the impersonal and hard forces of fate. Is there something? Anything? Is there the will that remains? Is there resilience? What power can be left to you when you are bereft, devastated, grieving? When life holds no happiness for you? When you are crushed like an insignificant insect beneath the stone of reality? When the disappointment seems too much to bear: she is gone, she is in the arms of someone else, she will never be yours…
Somehow, you still have to live. Without the dream. A life that you do not want. Somehow, you have to find the power within yourself to love someone again. As Indian people say, the whole universe is built upon a foundation of hope.
A Hindi song where these issues are explored are in the film Baazigar (1993) – the title itself has a range of connotations with meanings such as ‘acrobat’, ‘player’, ‘gambler’, ‘one who uses deceit to attain ends’, etc. The film is an unofficial remake of the film ‘A Kiss Before Dying’ (1956).
The song is called Don’t Know How to Hide It – Chhupana Bhi Nahin Aata (my translation).
I want to focus on two lines. The context is that Karan (named after the lower caste hero of the Mahabharata who sacrifices his life for his mother that rejects him, one of my heroes) is watching the anti-hero and the heroine loving each other, dancing with each other, enjoying the happiness of each other. Karan loves the heroine. But now that she is with someone, what can he do? So he thinks back to the times in college when he loved her from afar. The song comes. It reveals his emotional state. And then, these lines come from the song’s lyricist [1]:
hatheli par tumhaaraa naam – upon my palm your name likhte hain mitaate hain – I write and I erase
To understand these lines, you have to understand that the lyrics are referencing the idea of palmistry and fate. So when Karan is writing the loved one’s name upon his palm, he is linking her destiny with his. Or, he is ordaining his own fate. This seems powerful. Again, the idea is that of a tattoo. He is trying to make a permanent change in his life. Yet notice the idea of helplessness in love here. First of all, writing someone’s name on your palm is not going to achieve anything. It is a wish. It is not an act. It is the action of a wisher.
Secondly, while he writes the name of the loved one onto his palm, at the same time, even in the same moment, he is erasing the name. His actions are doomed to failure. To erasure. Whatever he does is not going to work. The action can only be temporary. A god can write his own fate. A human cannot. The loser in love cannot write their own destiny.
Let us attempt to understand the ambiguous game of power and powerlessness here. Who is looking at the name on the palm, whether it is there or not? The obvious and crude answer would be that it is Karan himself. And this goes with the rest of the lyrics, which are about not being able to hide that you are in love with someone and also not being able to tell them that you are in love with them. The song is about a personal state of mind.
What we have with the name on the palm is a slippery game of selfhood. It is my palm. I want to link her identity with my name. I want her to be my destiny, my fate. Yet, she does not want me to link her name with mine. So I cannot do what I want to do. So, following what she wants – what her wish and choice is – I have to erase her name from my destiny. Something that I don’t want to do. Because I love her, her choice has become my choice. She has become my Queen.
What has happened here, then, in this game of power and powerlessness, is that the self has been invaded by the Other. Man has become woman. Even his body is not his own any more. His will is not his own. His body is not his own. His destiny is not his own to control any more.
And because there is a fight between man and woman, the fire and the ice, the one that loves and the one that does not. Because of that, there is the irresolution and the helplessness. The moment when every action in the world is fighting against itself. When nothing can be achieved and yet you still cannot give up. You want your fate to be decided. You are living in both hope and despair. In short, you are experiencing all of the horrors of a split personality.
What is the cure for the loser in love? You cannot force someone to love you when they don’t. You can’t force yourself to stop loving someone.
So all you can do is to write their name upon your palm. And then erase it. Over and over again. In the lyrics, the way that the words are sung, the way the verbs are formed, it conveys the impression of compulsion. You are stuck in a time warp where you do the same thing again and again. There is no way out. Can you become like the one with no love – the one that cannot love you? Can you escape from being the one that loves – the one that cannot stop loving her?
There is no solution. There is no resolution. Your hands are tied. You cannot bother someone. You cannot press them to give you what you want. You cannot forget. All you can do, like Karan, is to watch helplessly. As the woman you love walks out of your life. With someone else. And all you can do, in the supreme moment of powerlessness, is to wish desperately that your fate was different. Because this is the last connotation of the lyric. That you are trying to change the lines of fate on your hand by writing her name upon it. In the books of palmistry, the lines on your hands are fixed. They are unalterable. Yet what you are doing is making all of the efforts that you can to fight fate by writing her name upon your palm. You are trying to make permanent what is temporary in your life – her presence. You want to die – you are trying to live. And to live, you need to feel that you are powerful. Not subject to the impersonal and uncaring forces of the universe and the minds of others. You have to believe that you are god or that you are strong enough to fight god.
This is the paradox of helplessless in love. You are both absolute subject and absolute god. The two poles are sutured onto each other and they collide with each other. There is only conflict. Can you imagine the psychic force of this tussle within you? Can you imagine the energy that it takes? You are grieving. One part of you wants to die – become the Other that does not love you. The other part of you wants to live – to remain yourself. To fight against the world that does not love you. And her that rejected you.
It is like Freud said: the reality principle (accepting that you are worthless and insignificant to her) is fighting against the forces of the wish (believing that you are worth something and significant to her). The death instinct (die for her, because of her, thanatos) is fighting against the life instinct (eros, love). The id is fighting against the ego. Self against selflessness – but even then, the self is that you write her name upon yourself. There is paradox, contradiction, ambiguity everywhere.
You have become the superiority complex absolute and the inferiority complex absolute. You have become god and slave. You have become man and woman. You have become… contradiction.
And this unstable contradiction, this compromise. It is written upon your body as Freud found out. It is a mental illness. The lyric signifies automatism, repetition of symptoms, the body as text to perform the identity of the loved one that you have lost.
You should never care what someone thinks about you. Because when you do – when you fall in love, this is the risk that you take. That you are going to be the loser in love. Because, then their rejection of you – their assessment of you as unworthy – that will threaten to overwhelm you and your sense of self.
Afterthought – Erasing her name is a form of revenge – symbolic violence directed at her. For her destruction of the man’s ego. But again, here, the man is assuming the woman’s personality – so there is her in the act too.
[1] I will discuss under the terms of British ‘fair use’ which allow the public to comment for the purposes of academic thought and scholarship and which I feel are appropriate here on a non-commercial personal blog where I make no money.
Although it was appreciated in India and won a number of awards, the Hindi film Damini (1993) is largely and unfairly unappreciated in the West. It is one of my favourite films. What you see is an answer to the injustice of the middle classes that masquerades as legal truth. and how to base resistance against it. The resistance to the law is in the form of the image, idolatry and photography. The film is not obviously about vision and photography, although for those that see nothing and will try to stop others seeing, it is emphasised that photography is integral to the medium of film.
Damini is about English law, the remnant of British colonisation in India, and its relationship to vision, particularly the vision of a woman of the lower classes. Damini (‘the lightning’) is a lower-class girl that marries into a rich family and makes friends with the house-maid Urmi. Damini’s brother-in-law Ramesh (‘the ruler of Rama’) rapes Urmi, pinning her down below him with the help of his friends and Damini sees him doing so. Damini finally agrees to say what she saw in the court of law, but every attempt is made to exclude her lower class woman’s truth by the middle class which is fully in control of the western-derived legal apparatus, a truth in which the exploitation of the lower classes forms a continuum with the sexual violation of woman and her forced submission to masculine desire. Damini is indeed confined to the mental asylum because of her truth – the lawyer who goes up against her says that she is mad. Here, Damini is indeed driven insane.
Then, in one of the most powerful scenes in world cinema, Damini sees a procession of Durga Maa (‘the Invincible’, Devi Maa, the Mother Goddess, Mata Rani, The Mother Queen, Maa Shaktishaali, The Powerful Mother) in the streets accompanied by the common people through a window in the asylum and regains her memory. The look of the idolater upon the idol, the Mother and the multiple forms of Hinduism behind her, the last true religion of syncretism and one that is not organised around scripture (whatever its other faults), merges with an intense tandava, perhaps one of the most intense dance sequences on film. Damini (‘the lightning’) flashes and her energy is converted in Shiva’s dance, the dance of creation, preservation and dissolution. Shiva is Durga’s consort – her lover. Damini becomes the lightning because it illuminates the world in a flash – like photography and the writing of light.
The dance begins with the eyes and the eyebrows, as can be seen in the video. For it is the opening of Shiva’s third eye, the eye of power. It is a dance of vision. Damini’s bindi, the red mark on her forehead, represents the third eye. The story of Shiva’s third eye is traditionally associated with anger and the renunciation of desire, the renunciation of the desire for the middle class in the movie, it would appear, and the form of power that they represent. The dance is not a solo performance. It is directed at the enemies of the Indian lower class woman. The dance requires mastery of will and body, improvisation and the knowledge of classical forms. The dance is a fight which pre-empts the moves of its opponents, which enlarges and expands the body, which can suit the circumstances and adjust and adapt, which can bedazzle and confuse its opponents. The dance is a carefully constructed martial arts performance, like kata in karate. It is both exhibition and internal consciousness.
Shiva’s third eye is a vision bestowed from integration with the Mother Goddess. For Shiva, like Damini, is the one that loves the goddess – Shiva is Damini’s consort. The love of the Mother Queen and Damini’s bhakti returns her to herself and her vision and gives her the energy to fight for her truth, the truth and vision of woman and the lower classes. It allows her to fight against the legal system of the middle classes and flee the asylum. It gives her the force to say what she saw and destroy the forces of concealment and reorder the world.
The empowered Damini unites with a good lawyer who submitted himself to the desire of woman, his wife, in order to take up his occupation and she is triumphant. The good lawyer returns Damini to her alienated husband, he returns her to her love: he gives her back her desire. In one scene, the good lawyer calls himself a tiger: the tiger is the vehicle of the Mother Goddess, also known as Maa Sherawali, the Mother with or of the Tiger. The good lawyer’s wife, now dead, is only presented to us as photograph, the image. When one looks at the traditional images of Durga, the connection is clear. In an inversion of the picture of the rape that Damini saw, with woman pinned down by men, the Mother is above the tiger, it is her vehicle which she directs (the tiger itself is the national animal of India and Mother India). Above the law, there is the Mother and the law itself must only be the Mother. Thus, the quote by Mahatma Gandhi at the beginning of the movie which is said to have inspired it: “There is a higher court than courts of justice and that is the court of conscience. It supercedes all other courts”.
Damini’s justice is self-serving. It has an identity which it declares and serves, the identity of an Indian lower class woman. It is meant to protect a lower class woman that is her friend. Damini’s justice is based in emotion and empathy. She feels the hurt of another. Damini’s justice invokes a different form of power to the middle class men in power, a power that is feminised and derives its source from the mother and the sphere of the maternal. Damini’s justice is resistance: to serve not those in power, but those that are disenfranchised from power. In India, rapes are concealed by men so that the honour of their household is maintained. Thus, the powerful can prey on the weak. Damini’s justice exposes the act of making the less powerful submit to the powerful via gender in Indian society and calls for the public to claw back their honour. It is a film where justice operates in the honour economy and not the property economy of the West, where the white middle classes not only control the legal apparatus, but are also favoured by it as clients because they have more money.
I’ve been watching Hindi films since I was a child. It is how I learnt to speak Hindi (my language at home – my mother tongue – is Punjabi, not Hindi). Hindi speakers have many words for love. Not like English speakers. Here are some – Ishq, Aashiqi, Mohabbat, Pyaar, Prem, Lagan, Chaahat… There’s probably more. Hindi is a rich language.
Here are some more metaphorical ones, which touch on some of the ways that love is experienced and conceptualised in Indian culture:
Ibaadat – Worship. When you love someone, you love them like a god or a goddess. They are important, powerful, masterful over you. They rule over your heart. They take the place of a god or a goddess, commanding all your loyalty and faith. You trust them without question. You hope everything from them.
Aetbaar – Belief. When you trust them with your heart. You can rely on them without question. They are the one person in the whole world that you can count on the most to stay with you through thick and thin. You expect everything from them, total commitment.
Wafaa – They hold your loyalty. You will never stray from them. The trust and the bond between you is unshakeable.
Behosh/Mere hosh udhgayee – Unconscious/My senses have flown – How love is experienced. Your mind goes on a holiday when you see them, think about them, are around them. They command all your attention. You can’t focus on anything else.
Amaanat – They say that your lover (usually a woman) is your ‘amaanat’ (‘thing or property committed to the trust and care of a person or group of persons’ – https://rekhtadictionary.com/meaning-of-amaanat?lang=hi ) A red flag for Western feminists, but indicates the possessiveness that a lover will have over their sweetheart – and even in English, you still say to someone ‘You are mine’ or ‘You are my girlfriend’.
Here are some terms of endearment which further indicate what love means in Indian culture:
Jaanu/Janaam/Jaaneman – ‘My Life’. Love is for life. Your lover is your life. They are everything for you and they are for you forever, like your own life. They are precious like your life.
Mitwa/Yaar – ‘Friend’. Indian culture does not make a distinction between friendship and love between a man and a woman in this term. Which perhaps indicates the truth – that your lover is your best friend.
Humraaz – Someone who has the same secrets as you – you share your secrets with them. You trust them. They are the only ones you can share your most personal thoughts with.
Humnava/Humsafar – Someone who is a fellow traveller through life’s journey with you (the ‘ride or die’ chick). You are committed to the same journey. You have the same mission in life.
Humdum – Someone who has the same life force/breath (‘dum’) as you, your soulmate, someone who is the other part of yourself. The sense of connection, of seeing yourself in them.
Humdard – Someone who shares the same pain as you, because you are so connected. What you feel, they feel. They are the mirrors of you and you are the mirror of them (love’s mirror).
Huzoor – Master – they rule over you because you love them. And you accept their sovereignty over you.
Deewana – Crazy one – because you go crazy in love for someone.
See more terms of endearment from the Hindi movies here:
(posted again 03.07.2023. Note: My advice to anyone that is rejected is to remember that you have been rejected because someone couldn’t see your potential and/or value – and also, sometimes, a lot of the time, because of their prejudices and poor judgement. Don’t see yourself as a reject. I have been rejected in all the important things in life for no good reason – and because of racism – and yet I have taught at Cambridge and Oxford, got a PhD and several degrees with good grades, and become a published author and poet as well as taught voluntarily to change society for many years. I have achieved most of my ambitions despite rejection and the fact that most people wouldn’t give me a chance or what I really wanted. Rejection does not and cannot define you.)
(…) In the evening, we watched Megamind again. If you haven’t watched it, there is a spoiler here. So stop reading if you’re planning to watch it.
Megamind is a computer animated film about a super villain that eventually turns into a superhero. The theme is about how goodness and badness are related to ideas of rejection and love. Rejection leads to badness. The super villain starts off as a nice enough child, but rejection makes him choose the path of badness. Love cures him and puts him on the path of goodness, when he is finally accepted by the woman, Roxanne. Rejection by the woman makes Titan transform from a superhero to a super villain too.
Even the makers of an animated cartoon film know that rejection can make someone bad. I look into my past life and I know that it is rejection that made me do bad things, my major mistakes in life. Does this stop people from rejecting certain individuals and groups in our society? Of course it doesn’t. Something that everyone knows doesn’t change the habits of people in this world. As Michel Foucault said, society needs deviancy. It is structural. It is because we know that rejection makes deviants that people reject. People are malicious. Is rejection inevitable? Yes.
Megamind is rejected because he is different. He looks different and has a different skin colour. He is never allowed to be good. Why is Titan rejected? Titan is a sad figure. He has to go to work with the woman he loves every day and she never reciprocates his feelings. In the past, you had no contact with a woman that you might love. She was usually in the home and you had no opportunity to talk to her. Titan is forced to see the woman that he loves all the time. She is constantly on his mind and they are forced into a situation of intimacy where they are constantly alone together. Titan lives by himself in the city, a lonely individual. It appears that he doesn’t really have anyone except for Roxanne. He has curly red hair, has an overweight and unsightly body and doesn’t fit the conventional standards of male beauty. He also looks remarkably young. The woman that he loves, Roxanne, chooses a male with a different sort of appearance: he wears glasses, looks old, has a conventional hair colour and is tall and thin. He looks like a father figure rather than a young boy. Titan is thus rejected because he is seen as immature. Even when he takes on the musculature and figure of a hero, the woman still won’t see him as attractive. Is it fair to say that Titan doesn’t grow up? Is this why he is rejected? Or is it because the woman can only be attracted to someone that reminds her of the father figure?
When Titan therefore turns into a homicidal maniac that is bent on destroying the woman that has rejected him and the city, which we assume has also rejected him, since he is alone, should we be too judgemental? Should we accept that he is an immature person not fit to be a hero? I don’t think that we should. By the logic of the film, we should see Titan as just another victim of rejection and stereotyping. But this is not the direction that the film takes us in. If Megamind is the figure that is able to overcome the feeling of rejection, then Titan is the bad figure that is unable to take it.
It is obvious who I identify with. Not Megamind, the eventual hero of the tale, but Titan. Titan is right to destroy the kind of city and the kind of woman that rejected him. This is not to justify attempted murder or the systematic destruction of the physical city. These are simply fictional acts which have to be read as symbolic. The type of person that rejects us must be systematically dismantled so that they can no longer reject us because of the stereotypes that have in their minds and the false patriarchal ideals that have been planted there. The type of environment that rejects us must also be systematically dismantled so that we don’t have to be seen as bad and therefore become bad. We have to build again and arrange space differently. We have to become children again like Titan and refuse to accept rejection any more. We must not be fooled into accepting conventional love whose ultimate condition, as in the fulfilment of the romance between Megamind and Roxanne, is the preservation of the status quo, the heartless city and of the conventional identities of women and patriarchal identities, those entities which reject particular groups and build deviancy and deviants into the system.
The Mother (2023) – Jennifer Lopez, American Anti-Abortion Law and the Beauty of the State’s Violence
19.06.23
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.
When I was a youngster, I had a poster of Jennifer Lopez on the wall of my bedroom which I shared with my brother. Like most males at the time, I thought she was one of the most beautiful women in the world. As someone who has a loyalty to beauty, I have watched several films and music videos of hers over the years, just to look at her. She is not the best actress in the world. She is not a good singer, although she has had some catchy songs. But she is beautiful. So, when I was in the rare position of having the TV to myself yesterday, I watched a movie that Jennifer was in now.
The film was a piece of propaganda for the current Anti-Abortion Law of the American state. Jennifer is fighting against someone that tried to kill her child in her womb with a knife to protect her daughter who is called ‘Zoe’, which means ‘Life’, as we are told in the film. The film is about ‘pro-life’ (although the paradox is that it is not about ‘pro-life’ because Jennifer kills many people in the film). I am an anti-abortionist myself. Before the charges of misogyny and so on begin, I will state that I am descended from the Indian villagers that murder girl children in the womb just for being girls. That is the reality of ‘choice’ and ‘women’s bodily autonomy’ in favour of, in the West, its fictitious ‘independence’ (subjection to the capitalist order and its ‘career’ structure). And although I am against abortion in principle, I am not going to side with the presentation of the Law in the form of Jennifer Lopez as an anti-abortionist. Because what we see with Jennifer Lopez’s character – this body of almost superhuman beauty – is the face of absolute fascism. The face of Law’s fascism and its control of violence.
Why is it that women’s right to abortion is a problem for the American law at the moment? It is not to safeguard children’s rights, however much the law tries to present a face of benevolence. On the contrary, the law’s rights in these unborn children are predicated on absolute selfishness and ruthlessness and violence. The point is that only the law can control violence. So the villains that try to abort Jennifer Lopez’s baby are seen as having illegitimate violence. But Jennifer Lopez herself, as the face of the Law and ‘legitimate’ violence, is able to kill anyone that competes against her for the monopoly of violence. She is the state. She is the law. She is absolute legitimised violence. She has fought in Afghanistan in the movie and works in the Secret Services. The American law is anti-abortionist because no one except the law is allowed to kill (especially not ‘powerless’ women as others). That is the privilege of the law.
Even when Jennifer Lopez saves her child who has grown up and force feeds her, in a controlling, facist relationship, after having butchered several animals to do so, she tells her daughter that everything that she eats comes from violence. This is our relationship to the state in a nutshell. And to law itself, which is founded on violence, propels violence into the core of our being and attaches beauty to this violence, as in the face of Jennifer Lopez. We are being seduced into this violence in the aesthetic of an action movie.
As a vehicle for ‘pro-life’ Law, the film reveals that absolute violence is directed against any critic of the law or anyone that has a difference of opinion, such as as the people that think abortion should be legitimate. I am not siding with the abortionists. I think that they are wrong and they are justifying murder. However, the point is that most of the would be abortionists are women. The film as a whole has to be seen as directed against women. This is the face of facism.
The proof is in the ending of the film. First of all, mother and daughter have to be separated as per the usual construction of Western law which replies on an Oedipal subjectivity in which the son/daughter is separated from the mother through misogyny (I have written about this a lot, I will not go into it again). Secondly, in the final scene, the daughter pretends to shoot her mother from a distance – as they are separated – and Jennifer Lopez as mother feigns death in order to receive the ‘wound of (Western) love’. The ending of the film is in violence directed at the mother’s and woman’s body, a legitimate violence that is seen as ‘love’. This is the ‘love of the law’ that the West has – it is founded in violence against women as other (let us remember also that Jennifer Lopez is an ethnic minority in America – the violence is also founded in racism).
This is the beauty, benevolence and the seduction of the law – absolute violence against the other, against the critic, against the dissident, against anyone else such as the feminist and abortionist that wants a different order and being. If the law is the most beautiful woman in this state and law-loving culture, then she is a cold-blooded killer.
Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway (2023) – My Bedtime Review
12.05.2023
‘They think that their culture is the best because their country is rich. And they think that we have no culture because our country is poor.’ – quote from the film.
I haven’t watched a film in about a year. I made a special point of watching this one. It was the true story that the film is based on which appealed to me. Mrs Chatterjee, an otherwise unknown immigrant, had her children taken away from her by the Norwegian state because she raised them with traditional Indian practices. As a result, she was declared unfit by the racist and xenophobic Western authorities that believed only their ways of bringing up children were right. However, this Indian mother fought against an entire country to get her children back, a fight that would escalate into a publicised political clash between Norway and India and her ultimate victory as it was proved that an Indian mother could be a fit mother. This fight was not just for herself. It was for all the immigrant families affected by the welfare law in Norway. It was a fight for diversity and difference.
What was my particular interest in this film? Firstly, in my family, we worship the fighting mother, Mother Durga, the Mother Queen who fights against sin, or Mother Kali. Mrs Chatterjee is a heroine based on this particularly Indian role for the mother. Secondly, I have watched Western people judging me silently or in words whenever I tell them about my family, upbringing or anything personal (because we are different as Indians). This quasi-legal arrogance – based on privilege bought at the expense of imperialism and neo-imperialism and its wealth – is particularly disgusting and it is what this film criticises and destroys. (Incidentally, Indian people are actually the majority in the world spread out over all countries, not Western people. If you believe in democracy (i.e. the rules of the mass), then we are right, not anyone else). Thirdly, my first published academic article on Indian film showed that the Western Oedipal complex (with its construction of the legal subject) is based on separation from the mother. This separation itself is based on xenophobia and misogyny directed at the Asian or Indian mother, something that the film attacks. Article link here:
So, having said all this, now to the review. Hindi films are the only medium which can make me emotional. This one did the job. However, I will not talk about this. What I will talk about is the idea in this film. Mrs Chatterjee – the immigrant, the poor, Indian woman – someone that has a precarious being in a country hostile to her – is denied a voice by Western law. Time after time in the movie she is told to be silent in the courtroom. Her son, who is taken from her, is also forced into silence by the brutality of the Western law which is supposed to put children’s best interests at heart. He stops talking. In contrast, the Indian law lets everyone speak, even when they have no locus or standing. All perspectives are allowed, all can say what they want to express. We cannot criticise the unjust Western law, the prostitute of power. The Western law can criticise us. This is one difference between the law in the film and the law in the West.
In the film, the father of the children abducted by the Western state only wants his citizenship at any cost. He doesn’t care about his children. He cares about money. This is a representation of the type of immigrant kept in precarity that will do anything at any cost to get money from the rich and powerful state. A state that he will not attack no matter how much it will attack him and his family, children and future. This is a real person who I have met many times. The slave that would not accept his emancipation in India’s Independence.
The film is not just about one woman’s fight. You have never watched the children turn into people that cannot speak their own language, know their own culture. That behave like the state loving fascists that spat on us, didn’t give us work, excluded us, turned us down and kept us down. The state has abducted our children in the state schools and we cannot do anything about it. But Mrs Chatterjee did it. She fought this abduction and she won. She was a poor woman without any resources. She was someone who couldn’t even speak the language. She was powerless but she fought the power. Like the Mother Goddess, she became Shakti (power). She defeated the arrogance of the state – like Gandhi. The one with nothing goes against the one with everything and becomes the greater. It is an Indian story. It is our history and who we are.
Against judgement, we protest justice. Against the state, we protest love. Against separation, we protest the union of mother and son. I am named after it. I am named after the actor that played the son of Mother India in the film and married her in real life (Sunil Dutt and Nargis). This is a film that reminds us that we are Indian (and by that, I personally mean the village, not the state. The people, not the politicians). And we will not accept a Western law which is based on separation from the Indian mother, no matter how much it is fed by wealth, power and the delusion of superiority.
At home, they sit in a neglected and increasingly dusty pile – with my other language learning books picked up mainly from charity shops – or the internet when the owners lost their interest in learning them (14 languages in total and building). Untouched, they are marked out for future study when my life is not just about work and academia, carefully compiled: a set of Korean language books. I picked them up in a free hotel book sharing point in a country where they have many Korean workers (it is not Korea, my friends).
Although I never got onto the Korea loving bandwagon with ‘Gangham Style’ or ‘Squid Games’, and I didn’t watch the film that won the Oscars (‘Parasite’), I have taught several Korean people when I used to volunteer to teach English to refugees and migrants over five years. I watch some K-Pop, although it is just one band called (G)-IDLE as I like watching the young women dance and perform and I enjoy the cinematography of the music videos. So it was with this light acquaintance in need of improvement and because I wanted to see the Friday Late at the V & A that I meandered my way at the end of the night into the ‘Hallyu the Korean Wave’ exhibit.
The exhibit is exciting, eclectic and vibrant and speaks to the young. Inundated with interest, the walls showcase Korean film, music, beauty and fashion. All of the senses are awakened and rejuvenated by an immersion into a colourful Korean cultural life.
When you go in, you are confronted with several screens showing ‘Gangham Style’ and its parodies. Of course, this song is synonymous with K-Pop and is probably one of the only contemporary songs that everyone in cities around the world probably knows. We get to see the audacious pink suit that Psy wore for the music video. But the surprising thing to learn is that the song and the suit mock South Korea’s ‘hyper-consumerism and material pursuit’, using the district of Gangham as an example. The suit is a sneer at what the elites wear in that area and the iconic dance moves are snipes at posers and wannabes that emulate that kind of lifestyle.
If Korean culture is currently chic, then the next section of the exhibit makes us reflect on the historical miracle of how a colonised, war-torn country which was ravaged by the Cold War and also ‘one of the most violent conflicts in modern history’ in the Korean War of 1950 has followed a ‘remarkable trajectory’ to become a ‘leading cultural powerhouse by the early 2000s’. The formula seems to be ‘governmental control, daring strategies and IT innovation’, alongside quick hands and quick minds.
I will write about the parts that excited me the most in what followed on the journey through the massive space that the exhibition enfolded. A long term fan of athletics and gymnastics, I was entranced by the Volunteer guide uniform for the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games. The clothing draws inspiration from the national costume which is called hanbok. The outfit is beautiful, graceful, an accomplishment of functional style inter-weaved with the Olympic spirit and colours. It is the perfect metaphor of endurance, of a people that have kept their traditions while becoming truly international, even though enmity and colonisation attempted to destroy their way of life. Here, as elsewhere in the exhibition, I was reminded of the affinities of Korea’s history with India’s. In fact, there was even a Hindi film poster which showed a pirated (‘adapted’) Korean film, which influenced my finding of affinities with my motherland even more.
It was also a surreal experience to see the wig worn by Choi Min-sik in ‘Oldboy’. This is probably the most memorable Korean film I have watched. When I was immersed in this filmic universe, I just assumed that the wig was the actor’s real hair. In the exhibit, removed from the face, the wig was patently, even insolently artificial. Yet it still teemed with an energy, almost like that of life. The make up and hair director of the film, Song Jong-hee intended to infuse the wig with wildness to convey the ‘feral emotions’ and the effect of the years of incarceration on the protagonist of the film. To me, raised in Hinduism and Sikhism, where hair is sacred and the god Shiva is known for the strength of his hair, the hairstyle raised the resonance of India, religion, power, feelings hard to express or even describe.
A particularly interesting section of the exhibition was the exploration of beauty standards in Korean culture, since the nation is a ‘global trendsetter’ in this area. The historical background until the 1910s (perhaps longer?) is seven hundred years of maintaining beauty as a ‘moral obligation’ as attractiveness symbolises not only social status, but also virtue.
Where did I spend the most time in the exhibition? I sat before a big screen watching a compilation of snippets from K-Pop videos, admiring the crystal sharpness of today’s video cameras, the lightning flashes of Korean dance moves and the stunning physical beauty of the people. It was intoxicating. Yet, as I watched, the critical part of my mind kept on turning over the question of whether what I was watching was something authentic and organic, something different, or just indoctrination and influence from the Western world, a parroting of the Western music video. I am still not sure.
Surely, ‘Hallyu the Korean Wave’ is one of the most memorable exhibitions that I have been to. I was also pleased to see that the exhibition seems to have been put together from Korean descent people, which seems to give it the authenticity that is lacking from Orientalising Western depictions of Asian people such as Indians. I learned a general history of modern Korea, was amused, inspired to learn more, ever more determined to one day make a serious foray into the language. I felt the unity of Asian culture as a man of Indian descent, almost a sense of belonging. Out of the three exhibitions I went to in the V & A that day, the exhibition was my personal favourite. I never felt even a moment of boredom in it and my attention was focused entirely on the exhibits.
Often, we retreat from the very great but empty noise that the Oscars make. However, on this occasion I decided to watch one of the films that was up for the nominations, ‘Writing with Fire’. Famously, if one is from an Indian ethnic background, the documentary is the first Academy Awards nomination which has been directed by an Indian director (Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh). It is also one of the only films, Indian or otherwise, which has ‘untouchable’ women as heroines. Luckily for me, the film is on BBC IPlayer and is available to stream online as part of their ‘Storyville’ series.
‘Writing with Fire’ is about the perils and adventures of three lower caste (‘Dalit’ which translates as ‘oppressed’) women journalists, Meera, Suneeta and Shyamkali. They work for the only entirely woman run newspaper in India, Khabar Lahariya or ‘Waves of News’. In the opening credits, the film makers write that when these Dalit women set up a newspaper in 2002, they ‘started a revolution’. The film follows the newspaper story from 2016 when the publication went digital. The attempt is to show a sea-change. Meera says, “In our region, a journalist meant you are an upper-caste man. A Dalit woman journalist was unthinkable. Over the last 14 years we’ve changed this perception.” Meera asks us to consider what it would be like if Dalit women had power and what they would do with it.
What follows in the film is a traditional and thoroughly conventional hero narrative which has been built up over thousands of years. The difference is that the hero is not a hero, but a heroine, and from the lower castes. What is the traditional hero narrative? The hero comes from humble origins, like the Greek demigods raised secretly by peasants as children. However, such humble origins disguise the greatness, nobility and royalty of the hero, which are revealed later. The hero faces adversity and mortal danger, as in a glorious battle. It is stated in the credits that India is one of the most precarious places in the world to be a journalist, with many murdered. The film shows the response to one murder of a female journalist by the workers of Khabar Lahariya. The hateful trolling of the women journalists is illustrated as well as their vulnerability to the Indian mafia. The hero is threatened by a return to quotidian life, like Hercules compelled to clean the stables. Thus, the women’s husbands attempt to stop them writing for the newspaper to work in the home instead as housewives. Finally, the hero must triumph. Khabar Lahariya is presented as an out and out success, measured by the amount of YouTube views it attracts, which number in the tens of millions.
This hero narrative unfolds amidst a glorification and justification of journalism, the pursuit that the women have dedicated their lives to. Towards the end of the documentary, Meera recites that the journalists are fighting to transform society. That they are holding the powerful to account. That they have made their journalism the voice of democracy. That they didn’t let the fourth pillar fall. And that they continue to hold a mirror to society. Thus, the film seems to be about everything that lip service holds dear: truth, balance, democracy.
Not only this, but the journalists are presented as law-givers. The screen first jumps into motion with Meera asking a woman in person about being raped multiple times in her home by four men. The opening credits mention how many Dalit women are subjected to violence across India and the film shows how Meera and others are trying to challenge the justice system which doesn’t respond to these atrocities. The unnamed rape victim says that the police refuse to lodge her complaint and intimidate her when she attempts to do so. The woman is going to newspaper because they are the only ones that listen to her story. As the husband of the victim says, “We don’t trust anyone else. Khabar Lahariya is our last hope”. Meera confronts the police about the multiple rapes and she proclaims that she is “fighting for justice in a democracy”.
My impression of the film as a whole was that it was a story told well. Certainly, Dalit women deserve to be seen as heroes too. The focus on the stories of the three women journalists gave that personal touch which made the abstract ideals the film supports into something concrete and something that the viewer could really relate to. The cinematography by Sushmit Ghosh and Karan Thapliyal was very beautiful. However, I am more pessimistic about the role of journalism in society. The documentary aims to present the journalist as objective, neutral, impartial, a server of truth, justice and democracy. These are claims that are a stretch of the imagination much too far for me. Again, I am troubled by why the Western media has nominated the film for an Academy Award. Khabar Lahariya is the voice of the poor, oppressed women in India. Naturally, they are pessimistic about power and the government in India. That is, they criticise the society they find themselves in because they hope to transform it and make a better position for themselves. This is fine. This is acceptable. Indeed, I support these women in their mission. However, what is unacceptable, is that the Western media and its public discourse always criticise India when they know nothing about it, in a supreme act of Orientalism and racism. The Academy seems to have selected a film which presents India as a colossal sewer because this is what they think about the country. This is not fine. This is what is unacceptable. And in this, they are trying to use that objectivity associated with journalism to try and present their racist notion of a whole country as the unqualified truth. Final verdict? A good, revolutionary film spoiled by an Oscar nomination and Western practices of racism.
Abstract: Women are seen as bodies, not minds. As such, they are seen as suitable for bodily performance in a patriarchal society rather than for composing music which is perceived as a non-bodily and abstract form of representation. This division between body and mind underpins the division between the private and the public sphere. Keywords: Music, Feminism, Patriarchy, Body, Mind, Secret Superstar, Public, Private
Knowledge of the history of women’s musical practices is aided by a concept which I call ‘musical patriarchy’. The division of musical work into a largely male public sphere and a largely female private sphere is a trait of Western music history and also of many musical cultures from all around the world. Lucy Green, Music, Gender, Education (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15.
I was listening to some songs by Vidya Vox, the famous YouTuber recently. I had downloaded them for free off of her website. Vidya sings in a combination of Hindi and English, as well as other languages. She does cover versions of songs and mash-ups. I grew curious about the singer and her music, so I put her name into a search engine. It turned out that the music behind Vidya’s songs comes from her white husband. Here was yet another female singer that didn’t produce her own music and that traded on her Indian ethnicity and sex to entice audiences while relying on a masculine, Western sound and mind.
Racial dimensions aside for the time being, the question was, why were there so few famous female music producers both in India and the West? Personal experience, as usual, prompted the question. One of my amateur pursuits is singing and song-writing. I also compose the music for my songs and make the music myself. Although my musical education in England was peculiarly lamentable, I went ahead and learned how to do everything myself. Is my music perfect? Of course not. It doesn’t have a professional sound and even my singing is just recorded on the computer using the free and in-built software. However, the point is, that I can sit down and compose my own music and, if I had enough free time and money, I could produce my own tracks to a good standard. I could even lay down tracks for the melodies and sounds that I can invent in my head but am currently unable to represent in concrete musical form due to my lack of ability and skill in playing music. Why can’t more women do the same thing successfully?
One could gather various ideas to answer the question. I have put the quote at the top of this piece to show one possible interpretation. The argument is that women’s music is regarded as private, rather than public. It is men’s music that is regarded as public. However, what I want to argue in this short piece is that women are not admitted to the masculine sphere of music because it is a form of representation that is regarded as abstract, invisible and bodiless, qualities associated with men and not women. It is my contention that in a patriarchal society, women are regarded as incapable of mastering the abstract discipline of music and of transcending their bodily form to enter into the realms of thought and meaning. This is why there are so few famous female musical composers and why the ones that do exist are not rewarded and recognized for their efforts. https://www.billboard.com/…/female-music-producers-industry…
I want to start, as I often do, with a Hindi film which I watched. I am talking about the huge international success which was recently released, Secret Superstar (2017). I will not go into the story too much, nor criticise the type of feminism which was portrayed in the film. Instead, I will concentrate on the relationship between femininity, the body and music in the film. There is a young girl in the film that becomes famous on YouTube for singing in burqa which covers her whole body, including her face. The burqa makes her “bodiless” and as invisible as it is possible to be without advanced technology. At this stage of her career, the girl is capable of composing her own music and songs. She doesn’t need any man to guide her voice. She is both singer and songwriter, player and composer. However, the girl doesn’t want to be bodiless and invisible, because that would mean that she remains anonymous. She wants to be known. This desire to be recognised as a person, as a singer, to enter the public stage and leave behind the private sphere of the domestic, leads the girl to a famous male composer. It also leads her to abandon the role of music composer, a being that is invisible and bodiless because he, and it is usually a he, usually stays behind the scenes. She then becomes the voice for the male music composer’s music and finds success. The girl is therefore led into the patriarchal music establishment and away from composing her own music because of her desire to become a body with a recognisable face, to be seen as a woman with a woman’s body. She leaves the realm of abstraction, invisibility and thought to become a performing body, the face of music rather than its “soul”. Such is the brand of “feminism” in Secret Superstar: a female’s desire can only be to perform as a body, to become a voice. She cannot become one with abstract thought, invisibility and the abstract and non-bodily representation of music.
In fact, if you watch Secret Superstar closely enough, you will find that the girl rebels against all forms of abstract thought. Her rebellion is chiefly conducted against her father, who is an engineer and relies on the abstract disciplines of maths. She also rebels against her education in maths and science. The young girl supports her uneducated mother over her educated father and leaves education to do so, running away from school secretly. She even effects a separation between her uneducated mother and her educated father (in the film’s defence, he is depicted as an abusive father and husband). Clearly, the girl does not wish to remain within the realm of thought. She wants blissful ignorance and to be seen as nothing more than a body, to be accepted in the realm of the body.
My speculation is that Secret Superstar reflects the existing reality of music in a patriarchal society; that there is a gendered play between the bodily performance of voice and the abstract and non-bodily performance of music. To enter onto the public stage in musical performance, the rules dictate that women have to be seen as bodies, not as minds. It is men that are celebrated as being of the mind and having rational “souls”. It is men that can give birth to music, which is, of course, related to maths (look up Pythagoras and his ideas about maths and music if you don’t believe me). Thus we have an explanation of why there are so few successful music composers in both India and the West. I have argued at length about the relationship between the body and non-bodily abstraction and their relationship to the private and public spheres throughout my writing and I believe it informs most aspects of the society that we live in. The body is therefore supremely important as a site from which to make the resistance against the forms that constrain us and the female body is, I think, the supreme form which can fight against the forces of concealment, invisibility, pretended abstraction and universality. There is a further speculation: that the music that we all listen to and enjoy is founded in a masculine mind set and worldview. The very nature of our listening and auditory enjoyment is founded in patriarchy and its conditions. Films like Secret Superstar can reveal exactly what the nature of that patriarchal sound is and how it operates, if only we watch carefully and learn. One thing is clear: such a sound hates synaesthesia since it separates listening and sight, music and the body.
diary of a lone man 