I cleaned up in Italy. As a woman of colour, I was impressed with the appearance politics of Italian men. I felt confident that my race was never taken into consideration when I received matches. Also, all my matches were heaps attractive. These were not desperate white losers who had to ‘lower their standards to people of colour’. The world has convinced both us and them that this is a real thing.
My track record did not last long. A month later in Cape Town, the clean sweep turned into a shitstorm. In South Africa, I got no white matches. Appearance-based biases ruled all. We may have shared an interest in Pulp Fiction, but the superficial mattered more. Tinder in South Africa is nothing but fertile ground for race-based rejection. And this subliminal rejection hurts. In fact, it hurts more than rejection in person. It hurts more because it so strongly reaffirms the powers of exclusionary politics.
Tinder is, at its heart, a test of implicit bias. It sorely confirms the fact that subconscious prejudices are so deeply embedded in our cellular memory, so concretely moulded by society that there is no way for users to divorce themselves from what they’ve been told is attractive and what isn’t. And beauty is white.
So pervasive is this belief in South Africa that, instead of subtly exercising their agency through a swipe, many people will state their racial preferences in their descriptions. I don’t have to tell you, a lot of them look like this: ‘No Asians. I’m not racist but whites only please.’ Or: ‘I have a lot of black friends, but I am only looking for white dates.’
Then, of course, we need to consider that the app is location-based. Areas like Cape Town are characterised by a whiter demographic, so the success rates for interracial matches decrease significantly because exclusionary politics increase so much. What does a brown girl have to do to get a date around here?
I soon realised that if and when I made ‘white’ matches, they generally fell into one of two categories:
1. The person had an ‘exotic’ fetish.
2. They swiped right only to let you know that you were cute … ‘for a brown person’.
According to my experiment, the only white match you’re likely to get (in South Africa at least) is the one that pairs women of colour with disposability and perpetuates the habitual dumping of these women into the ‘throwaway’ demographic of what is now a technocratic society. Several studies confirm that Tinder users, especially women of colour, suffer from low self-esteem and reduced body-image satisfaction related to frustration and constant rejection.
Tinder is a pocket, full of rejection. No different from a science-garden experiment on interracial relationships in 1994. Look how far we’ve come.
A better life with Bollywood
Friday nights were Bollywood movie nights. It was one of the few nights we were allowed to stay up late, mostly because Bollywood movies are so long that you have to stay up late to finish them. Then we would spend Saturdays mimicking the dances and miming the songs. We dressed up in the lower-quality Indian rags we were allowed to play with, gathered from my mom’s cupboard, and put on a show. There’s a really embarrassing home video of this somewhere. Let us speak of that no more.
I watched Veer-Zaara on a Friday night in 2004, the year of its release. We set up camp in the lounge, made popcorn and settled in for an epic two hours and then some. We were joined by another obligatory presence: a box of silky soft tissues, my mom’s trusty companion through her many years of Bollywood movie viewing.
In Veer-Zaara, Saamiya Siddiqui meets prisoner number 786 on a gloomy afternoon. Saamiya is a Pakistani lawyer on a mission to pave the way for women’s empowerment in the Islamic country. Her late father was a lawyer too, and he believed in the education of girls. He wanted his daughter to have a better life. Now, she has been given prisoner 786’s case – her first – after the government decided to review the cases of a few Indians. The odds are stacked against her. The prosecutor is an intimidating, hard-headed patriarch who assures her she is playing a losing game – mostly because she is a woman in a man’s world. More than that, prisoner 786 has not spoken a word in twenty-two years and it’s unlikely that Saamiya could help him win his freedom without his testimony.
In the early 1980s, Zaara Haayat Khan makes her way to India from Pakistan. In a rare act of rebellion for a woman of that time, she goes against her family’s wishes to travel alone and secretly crosses the border with the ashes of her Sikh governess. (Before her passing, the governess had asked Zaara to take her remains to the holy Sikh city of Kiratpur and scatter them in the Sutlej River, among those of her ancestors.) Zaara is the only daughter of a well-known, high-ranking political family in Lahore. She is expected to marry a husband of equal standing to strengthen the position of both families, but cannot see herself conforming to the norms of Pakistani Muslim society. She is far too independent and carefree.
Zaara completes her governess’s final rites with the assistance of squadron leader Veer Pratap Singh, who rescues her from a bus accident and takes her the rest of the way. They then embark on a colourful tour of India. The journey ends in Veer’s home village where Zaara meets his uncle and aunt who run a school for girls. Veer is an orphan.
He fulfils his final promise of getting her home safely. The anticipation of the train to Lahore is matched by Veer’s anxiety. He wants to tell Zaara he loves her. But their moment of eye-locked intimacy is cut short by Zaara’s fiancé, who has come looking for her. The train departs fuelled by the gaze of two lovers who will probably never meet again. All Zaara leaves behind is a silver anklet, a stop sign of sorts. A symbol of the end of their bond and a constant reminder that something beautiful ended before it began.
Zaara arrives in Lahore heavy with the baggage of longing. Her feelings for Veer are contradicted by her duty. She has to maintain the family’s honour. But a future of furthering her father’s political career through marriage to her fiancé feeds her depression and finally a confession haemorrhages out of her. It’s blasphemy in a time of religious turmoil between India and Pakistan. It also comes at a time when Pakistan and India are torn apart by terrorism and war.
First she confides in her best friend. Then she confesses to her mother: she has fallen for an Indian man. Zaara’s mother curses her, angry at what she sees as disrespect and ignorance on Zaara’s part. She warns her daughter that the news of his only child having a relationship with an Indian man will kill her father. Zaara adorns herself with misery during the events leading up to the wedding. Saddened by her disposition, Zaara’s best friend writes to Veer and asks him to take her away.
But when Veer arrives in Pakistan, Zaara’s mother confronts him in a surprise visit. He is asked to leave. Because he respects elders, he agrees. On his way home, Zaara’s jealous fiancé, fluent in corruption and equipped with a tarnished ego, secretly frames him for terrorism and he is imprisoned for life. Zaara is unaware. She never hears from Veer again.
Twenty-two years later, Saamiya, the young lawyer with a point to prove in the name of feminism, meets prisoner 786 in a dark cell. He is nursing a silver anklet in one hand, and his other hand secures a blanket over his shoulders. He is old and his body has been destroyed by heartache. His wrongful conviction has gnawed on him from the inside for far too long. He warms up to Saamiya after she offers him an Indian sweetmeat similar to the ones his mother used to make him. He agrees to share his story with her on the condition that she never mention Zaara’s name in the proceedings or subpoena her family.
In Islam, the number 786 is regarded as a holy number. Saamiya calls Veer ‘God’s own man’. She promises to restore his identity and return him to India, a land he has not set foot in for twenty-two years.
Veer-Zaara has a romantic parallel behind the scenes. The movie is held together by old, untouched compositions by Madan Mohan, an Indian composer who died in the 1970s. His son released the tracks to support the film and requested that Lata Mangeshkar sing the songs as Mohan had asked – another dying wish. Lata is the most respected playback singer in India, with a
career spanning seventy years. Her voice can be heard in over a thousand Hindi films, and she sang in over thirty-six regional Indian and foreign languages.
Lata and Madan had a professional relationship that spanned decades. Tying his music to her voice so many years later carries a special kind of poignancy. The partners reunite even after death has parted them. When she arrived in the studio, the legendary singer said, ‘I feel I have gone back in past.’ The statement echoes Veer’s return to his home after twenty-two years.
Bollywood films were where we learnt to make sense of the culture that parts of us unknowingly left behind. They were the vehicles that took us to the homelands of our grandparents and great-grandparents, who arrived in South Africa and never returned. Those vehicles drove our ancestors home, they drove our parents home and, years later, they drove me home.
When I visited India with my mom and sister for the first time a couple of years ago, the warmth of all those Friday movie nights and exposure to my Indian culture left my heart burning with a love for India that seemed bigger than my body could carry. I travelled with an Overseas Citizenship of India passport – documentation you can acquire after a lengthy process of proving you have ancestors from India, some of whom came over as indentured labourers. It was a symbol of belonging. I went to India on an Indian passport; I arrived home with so much more.
But for those who have never visited their country of origin or never again had the chance to return, Bollywood gives them the courage to wear their patriotic hearts on their sleeves. It’s the Bollywood movie that lets them escape the existential confusion of being an immigrant. It’s the Bollywood movie that stops them, even if just for a couple of hours, from doing as the Romans do, and allows sixteen million people of the Indian diaspora to be consumed by the beating heart of their country as it pounds with yearning through their veins. It provides a connection to their traditions and their roots, and reminds them that while they have left many things behind, they have brought a lot with them as well.
The most decorated song from the Veer-Zaara soundtrack is ‘Tere Liye’, which translates to ‘For Your Sake’. It’s apposite in meaning. Nothing fits the plight of the diaspora more than the lyrics of the song, which explores the bottling up of emotions. The consequences of living in silence while still holding a candle of hope that things will return to what they once were. All in the name of loyalty and love.
Western societies have long slated Bollywood films for being melodramatic, having thin plots, being repetitive and being far too long. Many people refuse to watch them because they hate reading subtitles and despise the bad sentence construction and grammar when Hindi is translated to English.
But there is a reason for this ‘bad’ translation: India has a history of maintaining a high rate of illiteracy. This comes as a result of poverty and a lack of access to education. For a long time, literature was incapable of penetrating the populace. Books could not bind people together the same way movies managed to. When the films moved from India to reach the diaspora around the world, the industry was aware of the fact that the people might have lost their home language without speaking it very often, and that English may have been acquired only partially.
Subtitles, therefore, were simplistic, making them easier for people to read. In this way, a viewer on the other end of the world who spoke no Hindi, for example, and only broken English, could still be satisfied because they understood the story. Interestingly, newspaper reading has since increased in India because Bollywood subtitles have helped raise English literacy levels in villages with no access to schools.
Another point of disapproval in the West is the fact that every single Bollywood film is a musical. They can’t understand it. They find it irritating and unnecessary.
An extensive original soundtrack of anything between five and fourteen songs supports each Bollywood film. The actors don’t sing them; they mime. Behind the scenes, a team of composers, musical directors, session musicians and playback singers is hard at work.
The only two things more important to Bollywood than the music are happy endings and showing respect for mothers in every single storyline. Bollywood respects mothers the way the offspring of Indian families enjoy Hindi films. They have to. They have to love them like they love their maternal guardians. They. Just. Have. To. And like our mothers, Bollywood (to an extent) helps shape our hearts and minds. First it sets up the battle between the emotional and the rational, and then the films extinguish the fight between what is kitsch and all that defies common sense with a well of victory: victory for the lovers, the fighters, the abolished. You can’t escape its triumph and the sense of winning that the last scene of every movie gifts you.
Bollywood lives in the Mumbai of our hearts. A place of the striving. A place of the abandoned. A place of conflict between moral and immoral choices. It is the lost-and-found bin of emotions and it houses our love. And it quite literally sings us through the streets of our feelings.
In all fairness, though, Bollywood suffers the same level of success – or failure, rather – as Hollywood when it comes to quality. Three-quarters of the releases are nonsense, the remainder quite good. But the West’s denigration of Bollywood is much harsher when compared to its US counterpart. For some reason, people can’t seem to step away from insulting the Indian film industry’s plots even though they are as far-fetched and fanciful as Broadway musicals (whose plots are never deemed thin). I have never once heard a white person say a bad word about Grease, for example, and is this not also a blockbuster where songs pop up at any given moment? What difference does it make if this same thing occurs in another language born of a different country?
Finally, there’s this age-old argument: Bollywood movies are stupid because the lovers never kiss and they’re always coy and run around trees and stuff. This is what we call culture. India is a conservative country and the film industry has to reflect this because it plays to a vast audience who possess a variety of ethical views. In newer films, physical romantic interaction has become the norm, but not without tussles between the producers and the Central Board of Film Certification. Often, films are cut and censored to avoid the social scrutiny and criticism of culturally taboo issues like public displays of affection. Some viewers don’t mind an onscreen kiss, but others find it offensive and culturally inappropriate. I believe in a free and fair media. Censorship is generally wrong, but what if, in the case of Bollywood, the censorship of physical intimacy is right? After all, art imitates life and all that. People never kiss in public in India. They’re modest, and modesty is honour and respect. Even Veer-Zaara only sees the hero and heroine touch each other in a fantasy song sequence.
Maybe it’s this kind of censorship that keeps Bollywood films housed in a cloud of warmth and innocence. In this way, they remain wholesome. People crave this. Hollywood, on the other hand, breeds ambivalence. There is always an air of indifference when it comes to family, for example. Bollywood does the opposite. The stories unfold in a utopia of pre-cynicism where there is faith in love and patriotism and parents.
And as much as these movies are castigated in foreign societies, so too are they embraced. Bollywood isn’t a billion-dollar industry that puts Hollywood in the shade only because of its home country and the Indian diaspora. These films have penetrated the globe in ways we forget to mention. The Soviet Union (at the time) started to screen Hindi films as far back as the 1950s. The industry has an – almost inexplicable – mass following in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The films come in peace to both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Their thin storylines are translated into dozens of languages from French to Mandarin and beyond.
Virtue is nourishing, regardless of where you’re from. Citizens carry the lyrics of Bollywood songs around the globe – even if they have to recite them in English. Every country in the world speaks the language of love just like every country in the world understands the language of grief. Familiar feelings are family and so Bollywood movies are accepted in the home
s of many. The over-the-top acting and plots are forgiven because of the innocence that is their bedrock. Bollywood is good people. And often, Bollywood is life.
Life is explosively colourful and the characters are explosively colourful. The films are materially and fundamentally vibrant. The clothing is rich with the tapestry of the culture and the people are rich with the personalities we’ve all encountered at some point in our lives: those who have loved you and those who have left you. The enemy, the friend, the teacher, the villain, the lover.
Life is repetitive and Bollywood movies are repetitive. Repetition doesn’t always cause boredom. Sometimes it’s just structure, and structure is control. Sometimes repetition is trust. We wake up, go to work, go to sleep, and in between all of that we do other things, like eat. This pattern of behaviour is as old as, well, India, and in some ways it’s endearing – just like those movies. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Bollywood is a song and dance. Life … should be. We often live without singing and dancing for periods of time, but we can’t live without it at all. Just like a Bollywood movie, life would be incomplete without these two things. It would lack joy and celebration. What would we do at weddings or birthday parties? How would we enter a New Year? Reality TV would suffer without singing and dancing shows, I’ll tell you that much. Music is memory and without it there would hardly be anything to recall. Our lives have a soundtrack, just like Bollywood movies.
Life is long and the films are long: like the script of any Hindi film, life too can transport you from one emotional town to the next. There’s drama and comedy and tragedy, and it’s all wrapped up in one lengthy package. Moments of emotional investment are contrasted with feelings of wanting to give in and give up. There’s a time for loyalty and a time for betrayal. And sometimes it feels like these things go on forever.
Sorry, Not Sorry Page 12
