The Deeper Problems Behind Recent Trending Cultural Moments from India

Make it stand out

This year’s Oscar wins for RRR’s song Naatu Naatu and documentary film The Elephant Whisperers, the Christian Dior show at the Gateway of India in Mumbai, and most recently, the opening night of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Culture Centre that saw the likes of Gigi Hadid and Zendaya sashay the pink carpet in haute couture saris. It would seem that India is finally having its moment at the global stage - but, understandably, reactions are mixed.

Feeling critical of the current mood of euphoria and not sharing in the enthusiasm of the elite in a country rife with inequalities and under the rule of a right-wing Hindu nationalist government is a valid response. Add a mixture of white validation, crony capitalism and an overall culture vulture vibe of Orientalist Western gaze and you have a deeply problematic picture, regardless of how many Hollywood awards it may win.

Let’s start with Naatu Naatu, a song from a Telugu-language action-drama period film RRR which is touted as the most expensive Indian film ever made. The movie is based on a fictionalised friendship between two martyred revolutionaries Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem who fought for the rights of Adivasis (indigenous people of India). Its director SS Rajamouli has been criticised by the indigenous community for its offensive portrayal of the Gond tribe and creating a spectacle popularising a Hindutva nationalist fabrication of history. No indigenous person was involved in the making of the film, instead it stars nepo babies from the Indian film industry.

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Little has changed from 2008 when single Jai Ho from British filmmaker Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (a fantastic rendition of poverty porn) won the Oscar. It is the same old Bollywood-style song and dance numbers that the Academy of Motion Pictures want to recognise when it comes to acknowledging narratives from India. One of the film’s actors, Jr NTR, gushed at a Golden Globes interview, “It can’t get better than this. The West accepting us — America, the mecca of film-making...” Ironically, the unabashed need for white validation dripping from his words contradicts the very anti-colonial theme of RRR.

Another win at the Oscars was for The Elephant Whisperers, which grabbed the award for the Best Documentary Short Film category. Here, too, is an indigenous story told through the lens of non-indigenous people. The couple at the heart of the story, Bellie and Bomman, foster an orphaned baby elephant at the Mudumalai National Park in southern India. It falls neatly into the elite defining the visual language of environment conservation, at a time when indigenous activists in India such as Soni Sori and Hidme Markam are routinely subjected to wrongful incarceration and police brutality. Interestingly, it is the film which did not win an Oscar, All That Breathes is perhaps one of the most riveting pieces of recent cinema to come out of India and its contemporary issues of urban pollution and social polarisation. It lost to Navalny a documentary film that clearly fits into the anti-Russia stance of the US media.

The two Academy-winning Indian films also ideologically suit the Modi government, unlike All That Breathes which centres the story of two Muslim brothers caring for injured flesh-eating birds. The film’s questioning of the country’s xenophobia, the CAA-NRC protests at Shaheen Bagh and vegetarian fundamentalism would definitely not sit well with the Indian Prime Minister’s photo-ops had the movie won.

Since the 2014 election win of Bhartiya Janta Party, India has been classified as an electoral autocracy and ranked abysmally low in the World Press Freedom Index. The two-part BBC documentary ‘India: The Modi Question’ was banned from screening while ‘The Kashmir Files’ was given tax-benefits, surmising the Indian government’s chokehold on journalism and cinema.

Oscar season was quickly followed by another event considered a major ‘win’ for India and Indian fashion—the Dior Pre-Fall show in Mumbai. The luxury fashion giant’s decision to hold the show against the backdrop of the Gateway of India is questionable: A symbol of the British empire, it was built to commemorate the arrival of George V in 1911. Dior and other luxury brands have had a long history of exploitative trade practices, therefore the collaboration with the Mumbai-based Chanakya Ateliers is a welcome change. But it is too late and too little, the use of tigers, peacocks and diya-rangoli motifs reek of cultural essentialism, so is the event really a defining moment that put Indian craftsmanship on the global stage?

As the rich get richer and the middle-class expands in India, luxury fashion brands are grabbing onto the huge market potential that India offers. But the East-meets-West culture moments are not new – In 2007, Karl Lagerfeld and Fendi staged a fashion show on the Great Wall of China. Whether this will actually bring the much-needed recognition and equal stakes in profits to the lives of the artisans on whose labour high fashion depends is debatable.

“The control of media, art, and culture remains with the rich and famous in India and elsewhere and these highly publicised cultural moments are not straight-forward wins for South Asian visibility and representation.”

March 2023 ended with the grand opening night of the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre: The NMACC’s founder Nita Ambani is the wife of Mukesh Ambani, one of the richest persons in the world, who has been accused of funding India's ruling BJP party to win elections. Naturally, the event was an over-hyped display of wealth and power, packaged within the garb of cultural and artistic philanthropy. But the conversation of American and Indian celebrities hobnobbing with the Indian elites was overtaken on social media with memes of the antics of Indian paparazzi and their mispronouncing of the names of Zendaya and Gigi. 

The NMACC is being lauded as India’s answer to the MET and Louvre. It is currently hosting the India in Fashion exhibition, which is curated by the likes of Hamish Bowles. So, for now, the Ambanis' dangerously growing power as plutocrats has been overtaken by their new-found status as patrons of Indian culture and fashion.

The control of media, art, and culture remains with the rich and famous in India and elsewhere and these highly publicised cultural moments are not straight-forward wins for South Asian visibility and representation. It is deeply problematic in a country besieged with a growing trend of totalitarianism and an ongoing climate crisis. In the end, media obsession with celebrities and billionaire industrialists does not really pander to our zeitgeist’s eat the rich sentiment—but creates a world where only the rich eat.

Words: Sudeshna Rana