Issues in Multiculturalism: Paradigms of Inequality

Jayant Dasgupta

I will begin by discussing two films that I happened to see recently on cable television and which have exhibited, through both intention and irony, issues which are crucial to my argument and to the very survival and efficacy of multiculturalism as a way of life.

The first of these films is Matrix Revolutions (2003). In the opening sequence of the film, when Neo wakes up after his long sleep at the Train Station, midway between the Matrix and the real world, the first thing he sees is the beautiful, almost angelic face of a young girl peering anxiously over him. The girl, about ten years old, is Indian. Although Neo finds nothing unusual about this last fact, care has been taken in the visual construction of the girls face, her noticeably brown skin, the suggestion of kohl lining her eyes and the way her hair is done up in plats, to emphasize her Indianness, although her speech does not show her as Indian. She talks like a white American of her age would.

The second film is titled The Guru (2002) although it might interest you that it was originally released in the United States as The Guru of Sex. The story is familiar. It is about the ambitions of one Ramu Gupta, a young man from a small town in India who arrives in New York to give shape to his dream of making it big in the entertainment industry. He is a dancer who made his living teaching the steps of Makarena to middle aged women back in India. He faces the usual hurdles he is expected to face, works in an Indian restaurant as a waiter and then is led to act in a pornographic film from where he is thrown out because of his inability to ‘perform’ in front of so many people and finally finds spectacular success, through a series of serendipitous incidents, as a sex guru who teaches rich Americans how to be in touch with their real selves by shedding their fears and inhibitions. His dreams of romance, which are fed on a rich diet of Bollywood films, are realized with his female co-star from his failed cinematic venture, who doesn’t quite approve of his living under false pretences. He then confesses to his shocked disciples that he is a fake and, conscience laundered, rides into the sunset with his new bride in a typically Bollywood type explosion of song and dance.

The relevance of this film to the topic at hand as well as my take on this is-- apparently this is a film on the multicultural America and the immigrant dream. But, the significant fact is that it is not a parody of the typical Bollywood film .This is a Bollywood film for all purposes and intents. Just that it was made in Los Angeles and by a director with the rather unlikely (in this context, at least) name of Daisy von Scherler Mayer. The context of the film would have been entirely different if this were a film made by a non-resident Indian filmmaker who takes an amused look at the typical masala film the way they are made in the home country. The point I am trying to make here is that now evidently the Bollywood film is a recognized brand, not merely among the Indian diaspora but in the International scene of mainstream cinema.

Coming back to the first film I would like to mention that some time ago I had read in a syndicated column from an American newspaper that   what is remarkable about the scene is that this is perhaps the first time that an Indian is depicted in Hollywood cinema as a real person and not a caricature. The image of the young girl is symbolic of the new economically powerful India and that India and Indians had, finally, arrived. Going by the way Indian characters have been depicted in Hollywood films in the past, for instance the Peter Sellers variety of films, and even in the recent past in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films, there seems to be some point in the argument. But I wish the writer of that column had chosen not to disregard what follows immediately afterwards and the camera pans to include the rest of the family and Neo meets the girls father who, (surprise !) is a computer programmer and although dressed in jacket and tie speaks in the singsong accents of the caricature Indian and when Neo invites him to come away with his family and escape the matrix, says that is his karma to stay back. The girl’s mother, though dressed in western clothes, just smiles demurely and does not speak a word. The little girl herself, we are told, is named Sati.

If we look at these films we will agree that multiculturalism notwithstanding, in spite of the intentions, or perhaps because of them, essentialism persists in the West’s view of Indians and cannot go beyond the stereotypes limited by sex and spirituality, karma and kama and, of late, information technology and, of course, Bollywood.

But what, precisely, is my objection to these characters or, rather, the way they have been depicted in these films? Is it that they are not real enough? Or, to use the buzz word of multicultural discourse, are not authentic? Are they more or less authentic than, for instance, the characters in stories by Jhumpa Lahiri and Amitav Ghosh or in the films of Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta? Even if they conform to the principle of hybridity that is necessarily an aspect, as per Homi Bhaba, of a postcolonial, transnational construction of culture, which elements of which culture goes into the construction of a given hybrid identity, is always a matter of choice.

The inequality, as I see it, lies not so much in these constructions as in the issues concerning who is allowed to construct- in the equations involving acceptance, provision of platforms, publications/production, funding etc.- in short, the entire mechanics of control over modes of production in the First World vis-à-vis representation of Third World cultures.

Expanding the scope of this argument and also shifting the location to Australia where the government was one of the first, along with Canada, to endorse multiculturalism as an official policy to integrate different migrant communities within the national mainstream, we find the observations of Sneja Gunew, in conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, useful. Talking about government funded agencies to facilitate immigrant writing, both in English and the migrant mother tongues, she refers to their tendencies to be selective-“They choose what parts they want to hear, and they choose what they then do with this material; and what seems to happen in very crude ways, within the context of multiculturalism, is that certain people are elevated … to those who speak for all immigrants……. As a result you don’t hear about the rest, because ‘we have covered that’ and those token figures function as very secure alibi’.(Gunew)

This tokenism, as we are aware, exists throughout the first world both in the academy as well as in the field of culture and that certain third world representatives accept the role of ‘informant’ within the structures of what Paul Gillroy has termed as ‘ethnic insiderism’. This has its flip side too, as Spivak mentions that she is given to interrupting others when in spirited conversation with westerners and she tells them “You know, in my culture it shows respect and interest if someone interrupts”(Gunew) and immediately there are pious faces and serious nods till she has to tell them that she was joking.

Rustom Bharucha draws our attention to the inherent inequality in multicultural interventions by contesting the notion of a world without borders. The experience and the ability to cross borders are different as regards first and third world artists and intellectuals in that the former, particularly those with US and British passports, can cross borders easily and thus can feel that borders exist only in the mind. But for those from the Third World, borders are very real and not so easy to cross. Recent events have borne that out.

Multiculturalism can either be understood as a political strategy where through government policy countries with large immigrant populations have attempted to assimilate these communities into the mainstream, or as a cultural practice which aims at a possible shared universality. It is possible to argue that both have failed. In the first case it has helped to harden national and ethnic identities as opposed to class identities in multi ethnic societies and has resulted in dividing communities against each other. It has also resulted in, as Kumkum Sangari has pointed out, communities transplanting their patriarchies and religious fundamentalisms in the new locations. The entire exercise has been called as ‘celebrating difference without making a difference’, or at least a positive difference. In Britain, it has been pointed out that the state sponsored multiculturalism has resulted in weakening of alliances of non white groups comprising Asians, Africans and Afro Caribbeans against the racially discriminatory practices of the state.

In the second case, the quest for universality has been equally elusive, because positions of power and privilege have undermined the equitable exchange intercultural practices.

One of the strongest critiques of multiculturalism has come from Slavoj Zizek who writes, “ Multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a ‘racism with a difference’—it respects the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a self enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position…The multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority.” {Zizek,1997). The title of Zizek’s essay, ‘Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism’, draws attention to the fact that with the coming of globalization, along with governments, particularly the West, it is now multinational corporations that determine the movement and ownership of culture, with possible far reaching consequences for the Third World. The following passage will illustrate this:

“…transnational cultural corporations may obtain all rights to exploit for profit any piece of music, any image, any text they believe to have commercial potential. The consequence will be that these corporations may become the exclusive owners of substantial pieces of artistic cultures wherever in the world and thereby influence, perhaps even determine, the directions in which these cultures may develop”.(Smiers,1997,quoted in Bharucha, 2001)

I will end, as I had begun with a discussion of two films that I have seen recently. The first of these is Spike Lee’s The Inside Man. It is about a bank robbery in the Bronx in New York and film opens with scenes of the city and shots of the bank with a clientele that illustrates the multiracial demography of New York. And then the robbery happens and Lt. Cole and his assistant of the hostage negotiation cell of NYPD match wits with the perpetrators. To my mind the brilliance of the film lies in its ability to make use of all the signs and tokens of the multicultural claims of the city and also subvert them. It is believed that an immigrant community, one of the comparatively recent ones, is involved in the crime, as is revealed in the recording of voices in the bank, but they cannot understand the language. But that is not really a problem as all the languages of the world are spoken on the streets of New York and soon enough someone is able to identify the language as Armenian and excitement about an imminent breakthrough turns out to be short lived as it is soon revealed that the recording is that of a public speech of the President of Armenia exhorting his countrymen to strive for progress. An employee of the bank, a Sikh, is hard tackled by the police with scant regard for his turban despite his angry protestations. The leader of the criminals, when he at last begins to communicate with the police, speaks in a clipped, upper class British accent and there is irony in the fact that the two police officers who are all the time demonstrating to all the multiracial actors in the drama, an overriding insensitivity to and incomprehension of racial issues, are both African Americans, victims of discrimination and injustice of a long standing.

I approach the last film with some trepidation as it is one about which a lot has been said and written. It is Rang De Basanti by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra. I will, however, not address the politics of the film, not even its artistic and cinematic merits, but restrict myself in my discussion to the encounter between the East and the West in the film. We have this set of young people who represent the lifestyle of a large number of middle class youth of India ( if one is to go by the popularity of the film among the young). They are apolitical, unaware of their history, dissatisfied with the way things are in the society and yet are prevented by ennui to do anything about it, and spend their days in mindless pursuit of pleasure. The arrival of a young woman, an Englishwoman, changes all this, but not at once. The visitor is dealing with her own ghosts of the past as her grandfather was a policeman in colonial India and had played the unwilling role of an oppressor with respect to the luminaries of the freedom movement in India in the 1920s.(In a slightly irrelevant way, it can be pointed out that there is a measure of inter-textuality in play here as Chris Patten, the father of Alice Patten who plays the character of Sue in the film, was the last British Governor of Hong Kong till the hand over to China, therefore the last British colonial official) He( the character of the grandfather in the film) had maintained a diary in the midst of that tumultuous period and that has been the Indian education of this young girl. She wants to make a film about the lives of those young freedom fighters. She interacts with our set of young people and although initially they couldn’t be further from her idea of the revolutionaries from the past, she senses the fire within them and decides they could be the characters in her film. The point that I want to make is that in the film it is only through the mediation of the West that India begins to make sense of her past. Even the present, as far as the young people in the film are concerned, needs to be validated and even valorized by Western acceptance. The leader of the group, a young man called DJ, played by Aamir Khan, feels a strong attraction for the white woman because, as he puts it, “ Yeh to sab samajhti hai!”, “She understands every thing.” In a sense it is once again a case of Western knowledge of the East deciding the course of history in the latter. In this case, even the past reveals itself through the agency of the West. Memory is the link between colonialism and cultural identity and the act of remembering, according to Homi Bhaba, ‘is never a quiet act of introspection or retrospection. It is a painful re-membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present’(Bhaba, 1994, quoted in Gandhi 1998).

I will now draw your attention to an interesting point raised by Spivak in her interview with Gunew-about the right to criticize. She talks about a frequent occurrence in her class when a student, let’s say a young, white, male student, politically correct, who will say: “I am only a bourgeois white male, I can’t speak”. She would then ask him to begin to investigate what is it that silences him rather than take this deterministic position  and also say to him, “ If you make it your task  to learn  not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programs of study, but also at the same time  through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will see you have earned the right to criticize and you will be heard”…….in one way you take a risk to criticize, of criticizing something which is Other, something you used to dominate.”(Gunew)

Alice Patten’s character in the film Rang De Basanti has taken that risk and succeeded, because she has done all that she had to do in order to earn the right to criticize. Also, she has loved.

Bibliography:

•	Bharucha, Rustom. The Politics of Cultural Practice, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001
•	Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1998
•	Gunew, Sneja and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’ in (eds.)
•	Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram. Women’s Writing in Exile, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill & London, 1989
•	Parekh, Bhikhu. What is Multiculturalism? (www.india-seminar.com/1999/484.htm)
•	Sangari, Kumkum. Which Diversity? (www.india-seminar.com/1999/484.htm)
•	Zizek, Slavoj. ‘Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism’ New Left Review, No.225, September/October 1997

Jayant Dasgupta used to teach English. Now he is trying to reinvent himself as a film scholar and filmmaker. He lives in Pune.

In the second of the two essays on the meaning of multiculturalism, the author looks at a different facet of the construction of images. Even while the notion of the ‘mainstream’ has been widely discredited, a choice is still exerted on how images of the ‘other’ may be constructed. There appears to be, in effect, a kind of ‘orientalism’ even within the independence nominally permitted within multiculturalism. It would be interesting to see KR Usha’s argument in this context. Writers like Jhumpa Lahiri are cultural icons in India but were they not created in a milieu where the construction of the multicultural other has been, in a sense, dictated?

Editor