The first part of this article was
published in last week's Artscope.
Indian cinema going global
Aravinda HETTIARACHCHI
Fanaa is a film that represents the love between two local cultures
in India. In Sri Lanka, we find a parallel to this in the late '70s film
Sarungalaya.
It expresses the love between two national cultures and between two
ethnic communities within one national culture, under one State, just
before the 1977's 'radical' economic changes in Sri Lanka.
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A scene from Fanaa |
Yet Fanaa foreshadows and searches for a love, for future
co-operation between different cultures within one nation State, and
against the Euro-US cultural supremacy of today.
Fanaa therefore is a film that confronts the cultural tactics of the
Euro-US hegemony in another way, it is a film, a mirror, which
represents the need of building a neo-national culture of love and the
limits of doing it.
Politicized culture
'My dear friends' - 'Mitravaruni' as JR uses to commence his
speechifying in Sinhala - is Euro-US culture the only ideal for
expanding the cultural horizons of Asia? There was a common belief among
most South Asians that Indians living in Europe or the US always stick
to their own cultural identities. Yet Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehena is a film
that contradicts this, and shows that these identities are changing
rapidly today.
This film's narrative is developed through the mode of a commercial
Euro tragicomedy. It reveals how imperial capital functions to alter the
Indian culture of love and introduces a Euro-US model of sexuality as
the only alternative to go beyond the cultural limitations of Indians in
their love relationships. In another way, in today's society, this is
the new condition of cultural inequality imposed by global capital.
Commercialized love
The main setting for Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehena's 'love' emerges in a
scene where Maya (a businessman's wife) and Dev (a football player who's
married to a fashion magazine editor) talks of how to ignite the passion
and drama (in the context of Euro commercialized way) of the sexuality
of their families. This discussion drives them into a new sexual
relationship.
The story goes on to show the rising conflict between their two
cosmopolitan families, and also who they patch it up through the Euro-US
alternative within love relationships through the events introduces by
its sex market and culture. In Sri Lanka, we may find a parallel to this
in the film Duhulu Malak, made in the mid '70s when the nation was
strong. Yet at the end of that film the family did not break up.
There, the director settled the matter by having the illicit lovers
break up. I don't propose it as the solution, yet I wanted to expose how
the same problem reacts in between two politico-economical contexts of
nation State and none-nation State. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehena however goes
beyond the national limitations of India. Yet the formula for resolution
of this film has already been provided by Euro-US Capitals. This film
therefore changes the typical cinematic form of India within the context
of mere sexual love and sexuality, by replacing the spiritual mold of
the Indian conscience, with regard to love, sex or sexuality, with the
more material basis of the Euro-US conscience.
Harmonic ways
In the future, when the composition of the capital of this
neo-capitalist system comes to a head with the development of the
division of labour, its harmonic condition will affect every country in
different ways to make for a new age of development. So who shall appear
as the next agent of the future historically developed condition of
monogamous relationships. Which cultural ideology will represent
equality between women and men in their gendered social life, as well as
mutual understanding despite biological differences?
To me, in the future, the Euro-US hegemony will not be the only model
for the world's culture of freedom of sexuality, woman's freedom and the
social freedom to love. It will find its cultural anchor in a place in
between the cultures of Asia, Africa, the America and Euro-US. |
