Detecting Orientalist Representat

INTRODUCTION 2 Makers of Meaning 3 Introducing Orientalism 6 Summary of Analysis 9 CHAPTER 1: Detecting Orientalist Representations in The Indian Detective 12 Introduction 12 Meritocracy and The Indian Detective 13 Indian Despotism in Colonial Discourse 16 Locating Meritocracy and Colonial Discourse in The Indian Detective 21 The Indian Detective as Orientalism 26 CHAPTER 2: The Essentialization and Commodification of Spirituality in The Darjeeling Limited 31 Introduction 31 Synopsis of the Film 34 Grounding the Discussion in Colonial Discourse 35 Content Analysis 38 Narrative Analysis 40 Orientalism in The Darjeeling Limited 47 CHAPTER THREE: British Orientalism and American Orientalism 50 Introduction 50 India as Site, Not Subject 52 The Subaltern in American Orientalism 53 The Subaltern, the Immigrant, and the New Brown Savior 54 American Orientalism as Transforming the Foreign to Familiar 56 Conclusion 60 CONCLUSION 61 REFERENCES 64 2 INTRODUCTION If you have never personally traveled to India, which images come to your mind when prompted with the word “India?” Perhaps you immediately imagine a cow, a blue god, or a village. Likely you conceptualize India as a place with mud huts, poverty, pollution, red light districts, and overcrowded trains. You might know that India has billions of people, spicy food, and arranged marriages. If you have never personally traveled to India, what constructed this conceptualization of India in your mind? For many Americans who have never spent time in India, their understanding of India and Indian identity is largely constructed and shaped by representations of India in the media, especially the mediums of film and television. As a white identified Christian woman who was born and raised in the American South, it seems necessary to confess that my positionality on the topic of representations of India is an admittedly biased position, shaped initially by mediated representations, but recently informed by direct experience and personal relationships with people in Madhya Pradesh, India. During my most recent trip to India, an Indian friend of mine asked me, “Before you came to India for the first time, what came to mind when someone said ‘India’? What did you think India was like? What did you think we were like?” In response, I admitted that I was embarrassed to share with her my preconceived conceptualization of the country. The mentioning of India connoted essentialized, stereotypical, and ignorant ideas of religion, culture, and society. India seemed so disparate from my suburban context in America. Movies like The Jungle Book, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Slumdog Millionaire showed me that India was uniformly a place of exoticism, adventure, and even danger. To me, everything that America was, India was not. I thought, “How lucky I am to have been born in America instead of there like them.” However, 3 visiting and engaging with the complexity of the country provided a much more nuanced understanding of the geopolitical space. That understanding informs this thesis. Makers of Meaning Although they are commonly regarded as entertainment, films and television shows offer mediated visual information to the audience about distant places and people. Following the post-war period, media and communication technologies brought faraway events and identities to the American living room (Ramasubramanian, 2005). Through images and narratives, the American viewer was exposed to knowledge about places and people they might have never engaged with personally. Even now, as transportation and communication technologies have spawned globalization and have produced a more interconnected world, media representations have persisted as a primary lens through which American viewers observe foreign nations, cultures, and peoples. For example, in 2009, more people had viewed Slumdog Millionaire (2008), a film about a boy from the Mumbai slums, than had visited India in the same year (Mitu Sengupta, as quoted in Privitera 2015, p. 276). Members of an American audience may never travel to India, but India can travel to their living room through films and television. While multiple social forces actively work to shape our perceptions of others, mass media representations are especially influential due to their pervasive presence in our society, their wide accessibility, and their ability to be viewed multiple times across various platforms (Mitra, 1999 & Ramasubramanian, 2005). Through the combination of audio and visual information, films and television shows have the ability “to create a realistic presentation of real-world experiences” (Ramasubramanian, 2005, p. 245). As a consequence, the lives and experiences of people in faraway places are permanently captured, schemas through which the audience 4 perceives other places and peoples are constructed, and stereotypes about other cultures are produced and maintained. Films and television shows are not benign forms of entertainment as many may think, but are imbued with power as makers of meaning. Meaning is communicated to the audience through representations. Orgad (2012) defines representations as “images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding what the world is and why and how it works in particular ways” (p. 17). The act of representing, therefore, is the process of producing meaning through representations. We give things meaning by how we represent them - the words we use about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of them we produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and conceptualize them, the value we place on them. (Stuart Hall, as quoted in Orgad 2012, p. 21, emphasis in original) For Americans who have never traveled to India, their conceptualization of India is largely constructed through words associated with India, through narratives situated in India, through images of various spaces in India, and through emotions elicited from viewing representations of India. Many of these ideas have their roots in colonial ideologies that have been reproduced and circulated through various media such as literature, historical records, print journalism, and art. According to Ferdinand de Saussure (1974), these words, narratives, images, and emotions operate as signs because they communicate meaning about an object to an audience. Saussure’s (1974) work on semiotics and structuralism identifies meaning through signs in the way we understand the world. Signs can be words, images, or objects that do not have any intrinsic meaning, but are endowed with meaning through the concepts it is associated with. A sign contains both a signifier and a signified meaning. The signifier is a single word, image, or object. The signified is the mental image or concept that is associated with that word, image, or 5 object. The act of representing India in film and television forms mental images of India in the national consciousness of America. It is through the process of representing that images of poverty, mysticism, and tribalism (the signified) become mentally associated with India and Indians (the signifiers). As India is represented in film and television, meaning and identity are ascribed to the geographic place, the culture, and the people. In order for the ascribed meaning in mediated representations to be understood by the audience, it must be communicated through messages in the process of encoding and decoding. In his 1993 work “Encoding, Decoding” Stuart Hall outlines the production and circulation process of a media text. Just as language communicates meaning, meaning is communicated visually through the deployment of signs in film and television. Hall (1993) refers to the sign as the “object” within the production process. In the production of the object, the producer ascribes meaning to the sign. The producer has an intended and desired meaning for the audience to receive. Therefore, the producer serves as the encoder, making specific decisions in the production of the object in order to communicate a certain message to the audience—the decoder. The reception and consumption of the object by the audience is a critical part of the production of a message because it leads to the circulation of that message. “Before this message can have an ‘effect’, satisfy a ‘need’ or be put to a ‘use’, it must first be appropriated as a meaningful discourse and meaningfully decoded” (Hall, 1993, p. 509). Without the decoding of meaning by the audience, the meaning cannot be enacted into social practice or public consciousness. The power of representations to influence, entertain, inform, or persuade comes from the encoding of meaning by the producer of the object and the decoding of the same intended meaning by the audience. 6 Representations gain their power from their ability to circulate particular ideologies in the form of discourse. Discourse is defined as knowledge that is regarded as true and meaningful because of history, political conditions, social relations, and institutions (Orgad, 2012). The encoded messages within the production process are comprised of, reflect, and reproduce knowledge. This knowledge is shaped by the socio-cultural and political context in which it exists (Hall, 1993). As the producer engages in the act of representing, the ideology of the producer determines the knowledge that is encoded in the message. The socio-cultural and political context, along with the ideology of the producer, functions as discourse that is then communicated and reflected

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