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“So, Where the Bloody Hell Are We?” earless f nadia “So, where the bloody hell are we?” The Fearless Nadia Occasional Papers on India-Australia The Search for Relations The Fearless Nadia Occasional Substance in papers are original essays commissioned by the Australia India Institute focusing on various aspects of the relationship between India and Australia-India Australia. Fearless Nadia (1908- 1996) was an Australian actress born Mary Ann Evans in Perth, Relations Western Australia, who began her career working in the Zarko circus and eventually became a celebrated star of Hindi films in India. Fearless Nadia brought a new joie de vivre and chutzpah into Indian cinema with her breathtaking ‘stunts’. Her role in the renowned film Hunterwali, where she Sally Percival Wood appeared dressed in boots and wielding a whip, became an iconic image in 1930s Bombay. The Occasional Papers series seeks to inject a similar audacity and creative dialogue into the relationship between India and Australia. Winter 2011: Volume One www.aii.unimelb.edu.au The Australia India Institute was established to contribute to greater understanding, cooperation and partnership between India and Australia. The Australia India Institute sees itself as a bridge between nations by creating strong academic, professional and cultural links. Editor: Genevieve Costigan The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and not necessarily of the Australia India Institute. The Australia India Institute is funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. Permission to use the name and image of “Fearless Nadia” is a courtesy extended by Wadia Movietone to the Australia India Institute for use only as the title of its Occasional Academic Papers. This is on the clear understanding that the name and image will be used only for the Occasional Academic Papers under this umbrella, and not for any commercial use. Wadia Movietone retains sole global copyright and ownership under intellectual property and copyright law of the Fearless Nadia and Hunterwali characters and personas, and any depiction and usage of the same. The Australia India Institute expresses its deep gratitude to Wadia Movietone for this gesture and wishes to record the contribution of JBH Wadia who thought up the Hunterwali character, gave Mary Evans her screen name, and popularized the Fearless Nadia persona through his films. “So, where the bloody hell are we?” The Search for Substance in Australia-India Relations Sally Percival Wood Abstract: It seems inevitable that Australia-India engagement will only deepen as China continues to rise and the US becomes comparatively weak in Asia. The time, therefore, has well and truly passed for Australia to be agonising over ‘reinvigorating’ or ‘revitalising’ its relationship with India. Australia and India are getting on with it. But what about people-to-people relationships? Deepening ties between Australia and India will depend upon the quality of, and commitment to, our mutual understanding – and the way to do this is through culture. Introduction At a recent conference on public diplomacy in Australian-Indian relations in New Delhi, an Indian scholar gave a presentation on ‘nation branding’ – how governments construct their national image in publicity campaigns. He discussed, as an example, Australia’s controversial tourism campaign of 2006: “Where the bloody hell you are?” The Australians present exchanged glances and smiled quiet smiles. It was, of course, a perfectly correct Hindi translation where the word order is different in an interrogative. While there was much vigorous discussion at the conference – on issues such as racial etiquette in India-Australia relations, journalism and the Colombo Plan in the 1950s and 1960s, and the media’s portrayal of the shameful spate of attacks on Indian students in Melbourne in 2009 – this moment, I thought, crystallised something about the nature of the relationship. It was a moment of insight into the way we observe and form opinions about each other and the stubbornness of mutual stereotypes. But more subtly, it revealed how the English language, which we celebrate as a gift from the British that binds us, obscures as much as reveals meaning in our cross-cultural exchange. The English language has been an insufficient interlocutor in establishing an enduring mutual comprehension. This paper explores this idea by pondering how Australians and Indians perceive each other as expressed in films and popular media. Before the advent of travel, student exchanges, and globalised media, this is where people-to-people impressions have been formed over the course of Australia- India engagement. State to state relations are generally framed around ‘hard power’ economic and security issues, while culture – or ‘soft power’ – forms a lubricating sort of function. It ought to stimulate curiosity, dialogue and, in turn, a deeper understanding of each other. This, in turn, leads to greater trust, more trade, closer military cooperation and, ultimately, stronger ties. Conversely, cultural misunderstanding can send us in the direction of mystification, irritation or even distaste. 1 The conference was sponsored by the Australia India Institute at the University of Melbourne and the Public Diplomacy Division of India’s Ministry of External Affairs. It was the second international conference organ- ised in partnership by the Alfred Deakin Research Institute, Deakin University and the Department of English, earless f nadia Radhani College at Delhi University. 1 Sally Percival Wood For Australia and India there have been misunderstandings aplenty – cricket-related stoushes, Australia’s refusal to sell uranium to India and the violence against Indian students studying in Australia in 2009. These topics shall be noticeably absent from this paper. It is not that they are not important, but these issues have been discussed at great length in the Australian media in recent times. As an historian I am more curious about the subtle evolution of our mutual perceptions. I wish to explore the broad trajectory of state-to-state relations and the parallel formation of cultural perception through the cinematic and popular media lens to discover the disjuncture between policy initiatives and people-to-people perceptions. To begin, I sketch an historical overview of Australia- India relations since India became an independent nation in 1947. I then take an admittedly sweeping look at mutual Indian and Australian representations in an attempt to understand how Australians and Indians see each other. State-to-state relations The 1950s and 1960s It is perhaps surprising to note that Australia opened diplomatic relations with India, and a defence alliance was considered, as early as 1944 – three years before Indian independence. Asia was still a region of colonies at the time and this demonstrated the importance of India to Australia, and the degree to which familiarity flowed from our joint British connections. At the time of Indian independence Australia was governed by the Labor Party, which was sympathetic towards India’s break from colonial rule. Prime Minister Ben Chifley and External Affairs Minister Herbert Evatt enjoyed a warm relationship with India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nevertheless, Chifley was not entirely comfortable with the fact that the new Republic of India and Australia were both members of the new Commonwealth of Nations. He was an Anglophile who saw Commonwealth membership as a ‘triangular relationship’ between Britain, Australia and New Zealand, primarily because loyalty to the British Crown was absolutely central to their mutual identities. Furthermore, as a Republic, India’s loyalty to the Commonwealth was doubted in some quarters. Though friendly towards India, Chifley did not welcome the sudden proliferation of Asian heads of state that came with decolonisation: ‘It used to be a great distinction to be a Prime Minister but now they are two a penny’ he lamented (Bongiorno 2005: 24). The Australia-India relationship changed fundamentally after 1949 when the Liberal Party led by Robert Menzies came to power. Meg Gurry has written that Menzies did not grasp the ‘cultural distance’ between India and Australia: ‘there was no room in his imagination for Asia at all.’ In his memoirs Menzies dismissed India ‘as a place too difficult for any “Occidental” to understand’ (Gurry 1992: 513). Menzies’s dismissal of India was compounded by Cold War ‘pactomania’ – as US Ambassador to India (1951-53) Chester Bowles called it – which drew Australia into the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) in 1954. India had adopted a policy of non-alignment and Nehru saw such containment alliances as nothing more than ‘a modern version of a protectorate’. Menzies, on the other hand, thought non-alignment was ‘foolish’. Australians retained some fixed – and one would have to say patronising – ideas about Indians in the 1940s and 1950s. These were not just political opinions, but assessments of personal characteristics, which made their way into cultural and racial stereotyping that has proved difficult to dislodge. earless f nadia 2 Sally Percival Wood Sir Walter Crocker, who led Australia’s Diplomatic Mission to India from 1952 to 1955 and again again from 1959 to 1962, reaffirmed some fairly typical views in his book Nehru: A Contemporary’s Estimate (1966). Crocker saw Indians as loyal, intelligent (especially South Indians), tolerant, enduring, spiritual, affectionate and sensitive (Crocker 1966: 44-45). These complimentary views were tempered by rather more worrying tendencies around truth and morality. Indians, he thought, regarded the truth as ‘sheer bad manners’ and moral obligations to those outside one’s own group (caste and family) were ‘much less pressing or might be seen as non-existent.’ One can therefore, ‘with a clear conscience, exploit the misfortunes of people outside your group, such as those starving in times of famine’ (34-35). Crocker’s Indian counterpart in Australia General K.M. Cariappa, who was India’s High Commissioner to Canberra from 1953 to 1956, would no doubt have been exasperated with such racialised nonsense.
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