Will Hollywood Ever Show Us the ‘Real India’?1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIn a minor scene in the new film The White Tiger, released three days ago on Netflix, rich-kid businessman Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) exclaims to his driver, Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), “you know the real India”. The two of them are at a Delhi dhaba – a local quick-stop restaurant, one of hundreds spread over north India – tucking into what looks like a simple meal. Balram possibly eats an even sparser version of this food every day. But Ashok is just back from the US, American-Indian wife in tow, and giddy at the promise of what this market of over a billion people holds for his new business ideas. To him, this meal is one more step towards understanding the puzzle that is his home country.
Like Ashok, filmmakers in the West have tried for many years now to see and show the “real India” – imagining it as a land of unknowable contrasts, teeming poverty, boundless opportunities and exotic mysticism. And of course, brown people. The White Tiger, based on the 2008 Man Booker award winning book by Aravind Adiga, may or may not show a real India, but it definitely features real Indians. For Hollywood (and British cinema), where Peter Sellers as Hrundi V Bakshi in The Party (1968) and Sir Alec Guinness as Professor Godbole in A Passage to India (1984) could paint their faces brown and try to pass as Indians, a movie with an almost entirely Indian cast and crew is a step forward.
Image Credit: Netflix
