Letting the Other In, Queering the Nation
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Letting the Other in, Queering the Nation: Bollywood and the Mimicking Body Ronie Parciack Tel Aviv University Bombay’s film industry, Bollywood, is an arena that is represented and generated by the medium as a male intensively transmits cultural products from one na - homosexual body. tionality to another; it is a mimicking arena that in - cessantly appropriates narratives of Western Culture, particularly from Hollywood. Hence its nick-name Bollywood and the work of mimicry that contains the transcultural move back and forth Bollywood, Mumbai’s cinematic industry, is an inten - between and Bombay/Mumbai, all the while retain - sive arena absorbing foreign cultural products, mainly ing the ambivalent space positioned betwixt and be - Western. Characters, cultural icons, genres, lifestyle tween, and the unsteady cultural boundaries derived accoutrements such as clothing, furnishing, recreation from the postcolonial situation. styles, western pop songs and entire cinematic texts This paper examines the manner in which this have constantly been appropriated and adapted dur - transcultural move takes place within the discourse of ing decades of film-making. gender; namely, how the mimicking strategy forms a The mimicry phenomenon, with its central locus body and provides it with an ambiguous sexual iden - in the colonial situation and the meanings it contin - tity. My discussion focuses on the film Yaraana ues to incorporate in the postcolonial context, is a (David Dhawan, 1995) – a Bollywood adaptation of loaded focus in current discourse on globalization and Sleeping with the Enemy (Joseph Ruben, 1989). The localization, homogenization and heterogenization. Hollywood story of a woman who flees a violent hus - This paper examines the way in which the mimicking band exists in the Bollywood version, but takes on a deed can highlight the gendered layout of the mim - minor role compared to its narrative focus: an (insin - icking arena. This specific aspect has not yet been dis - uated) gay man turning heterosexual and choosing cussed in an explicitly analytical manner, even though one of two female options: the first is apparently variegated aspects of gender deriving from subalterne - Western, and the other – Indian. If Sleeping with the ity have been widely discussed (Nandi, 1983; Enemy can be interpreted as driven by the desire and Chakravarty-Spivak, 1988; Krishnaswamy, 2002). the claim on the boundaries of the body, the body of The foci of discussion concerning mimicry and the the raped protagonist whose boundaries are trans - mimicking strategy assume that the imitated culture gressed repeatedly, then this claim also motivates has a power stance within the mimicking culture. The Yaraana . In the latter case, the boundaries in question mimicking act is therefore a symbolic one, operating are those of symbolic bodies: the body of the film, in the arena of cultural power relations, and relating which is exposed, through the assimilation of the Hol - to possible dynamics regarding intercultural differ - lywood narrative, to the invasion of the Other – and ences. hence the imagined body of the Indian Nation, which Does the culture perceived as hegemonic serve as isa.e-Forum © 2011 The Author(s) © 2011 ISA (Editorial Arrangement of isa.e-Forum) 1 Parciack an object for mimicry in a culture that strives to as - Yaraana: Narrative and Gendered similate it as much as possible? Or, in other words, is Structures mimicry a tool for intercultural homogenization, At first glance, there is a huge gap between Yaraana globalization, and ultimately westernization? Ulf Han - and Sleeping with the Enemy . Apart from a few scenes nerz’s words that “ When the centre speaks, the periphery that seem to have been copied almost shot for shot listens, and most often does not talk back ” (1992, p. 21) (e.g. the visit of the runaway woman to her hospital - could support this line of thought. The idea is that the ized aunt - not mother, thus enabling the violent man periphery is passive, and thus the unambiguous cul - to trace her) - nothing apparently links these two tural hierarchy is accepted by both the mimicking and films. Joseph Ruben’s film focuses on a woman fleeing mimicked (hegemonic) cultures. A more complex pic - her violent husband, leaving a desolate house on a lim - ture, i promoting the reading of mimicry as a dynamic inal-like space marked by the coastline on the beach, arena, was suggested by Arjun Appadurai (1994), who and arrives in an all-American protecting space, signi - pointed out the radical changes made in western ele - fied by the suburb. There she meets another man and ments when they undergo imitation (Appadurai, a different life, which are presented as equal, harmonic 1994, p. 327). These very changes might undermine and free of gendered violence. iii This life - these values, the assumption of passivity implied by Hannerz, as are established by the filmic work as embodying the well as the hierarchical structure and the process pro - American ethos through shots presenting the suburb moting homogenization/westernization. and the protagonists next to flags of the USA. Homi K. Bhabha’s seminal essay “On Mimicry and Yaraana opens with shots of a fleeing woman: but Man” (1984/1994) depicts a complex dynamic of this is not a woman fleeing her husband as the patri - symbolic power and domination relations built up archal consciousness constructing the film cannot bear through the mimicking strategy. His central argument the thought that a married Indian woman would rebel is that mimicry is the sign of a double articulation: the against the male dharmic /legal authority established Other is appropriated because it symbolizes power, by marriage. This is a woman fleeing a violent man whereupon it undergoes a transformation that subju - who wants to marry her by force. But in any case, gates it to the local, annuls its power and carves out Yaraana scarcely deals with this fleeing woman. The the opposition to the force that is signified in it. The character the film places at its narrative centre is Raj mimicking arena is therefore interpreted as a platform (Rishi Kapoor), a man who goes through a double for changes operating symbolically in an arena of re - transformation of objects of desire. The first is a trans - sistance, side by side with a desire whose object is the formation from a masculine object of desire into a power stance of the imitated culture. This dynamic feminine one, and the second is a transformation of a may be characterized by ambivalent structures of de - western object of desire into an Indian one. Yaraana sire and rejection, containment and exclusion, and therefore narrates the story of a man – not a woman; these are read as mirroring the inherent ambivalence, its title clearly indicates the sexual context discussed fluidity and ambiguity of the postcolonial situation. intensively through the film. Yaar is a Hindi word It is easy to apply the dynamic model outlined by meaning boyfriend or a male close friend; this is a Bhabha to the Bollywood arena and the intense debate term of endearment among men in a way that parallels it has sparked on topics of cultural and national iden - the word buddy . Yaraana is the name for this friend - tity. ii However, Yaraana makes extensive changes in ship/fraternity between men, and indeed, the focus of the narrative and gender structures inside the mim - Yaraana , which is also a variation on the buddy-film icking arena, some of which, as I will genre, is this friendship between men; this homosocial show – are direct byproducts of the mimicking deed. friendship that might serve as a foundation for the male-dominated world, while at the same time posing a threat to the heteronormative order due to the ho - moerotic and homosexual potential it embodies. 2 Letting the Other in, Queering the Nation Indeed, at the opening of the film it turns out that tures, including the narrative pattern of Yaraana , toil Raj refuses to get married in spite of the family’s pres - to neutralize the threat embodied in the male couple, sure, and that he has a good male friend. Nothing is and normalize one of its protagonists. This interpre - said explicitly, though in the well encoded world of tation is further strengthened by concepts developed the Bollywood film, enough can be gleaned from the by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) and a narrative for - family’s despair, Raj’s reservations about arranged mar - mula described by Halperin. Sedgwick states that riages and women in general, and the physical attrib - phallocentric anxiety over the collapse of the hetero - utes of his male friend, Banke (Shakti Kapoor): a normative order will bring about the need to end the caricature-like image of what the patriarchal con - threatening succession of the homosocial – the inter- science imagines as homosexuality - high-pitched male friendship in its a-sexual meaning – and the ho - voice, theatrical feminine bodily gestures, ostenta - moerotic. tiousness, over-adorned and extravagant clothing and Furthermore, Halperin notes, the normalization a contemptible profession related to being put up for process is a painstaking one, since the male pair is display (he is a club-owner and an actor). Raj is thus based on a structured asymmetry: one of its members half of a self-sufficient male pair, in a way that fits has greater importance, while the other is personally, David Halperin’s description in: “ Heroes and their socially and narratologically subjected to him. And at Pals” : the end of the day the weaker friend sacrifices himself and dies. This death functions as the climax of the “ […] a close friendship between two, and no more friendship, and paves the way for the stronger member than two, persons. These two persons are always male; they form not only a pair, but a relatively isolated to return to the heart of society (Halperin, ibid., 77- pair: the two of them are never joined by a third; 79).