The race for Mary Kom

This morning I saw a photograph circulating on the internet of a young black couple and their six little babies that was a sharp, bitter reminder of racist stereotypes in an allegedly post-race world. The beautiful couple, toned bodies and all, seemed to be crouched in what looked like a red earth cave, the shirtless man sprawled on the floor in blissful sleep, six wee babies huddled into various warm nooks of his body, while the mother sat up keeping watch over her mate and cubs. The image had been posted by New York based Sara Chana -- whose webpage describes her as a ‘public figure’ — in praise of the fact that the couple in question after having lost a pair of twins prematurely, had lo and behold now produced six new younglets. This animistic depiction of the much-prized fertile black libido, had elicited close to 6 lakh ‘likes’, over 30,000 shares and 20,000 admiring sighs from mostly white or Asian consumers of ‘black power’. Having felt compelled to point out that the picture was grossly racist to the swelling swarm of revelers, I discovered that my party-pooper act was promptly erased from public view.

This episode reminded me about the debate that Omang Kumar’s film, Mary Kom, stirred up recently. Various media articles had pointed out that Priyanka Chopra playing Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom, and Darshan Kumar playing Mary’s husband Onler, was symptomatic of a deep-set racism in mainland India against ‘chinki-looking’ people. The North East Students’ Forum at Jawaharlal Nehru University organised a panel discussion, of which I was a part, to ask whether Mary Kom’s casting was a case of ‘white washing’. What emerged through the afternoon by way of anecdotes, analysis, and facts, held up an alarming mirror to the insidious nature of racism in India, and the entrenched role of popular culture in soft-peddling racist sentiments in a country obsessed with large eyes, sharp noses and fair skin. 

Popular Hindi cinema, with its cigarette-flicking Anglicised vamps, kohl-lined Muslim terrorists, African or Chinese villains, and sambar-licking Madrasi comedians, has always marked the other of the North-Indian Hindu figure through gendered, racial and religious stereotypes. The only substantial challenge to this has been in the reclaiming of the Muslim identity by Salman Khan, and contemporary female protagonists’ slight loosening of their chastity belts. As an enthusiast of Indian cinema, one knows that Bollywood calls upon latent and often repressed desires in conjuring up fantasies epic in scale, and mythic in character, addressing the ‘real’ in a completely tangential way. Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar had drawn attention to the seductive power of popular cinema in expressing ‘collective desires’ a little before serious scholarship on Indian cinema began to consolidate it as a discipline. It has also been a long-established practice to leverage star appeal to sell the repressed collective desires of the masses back to the market. It should therefore, be no apparent shock that Priyanka Chopra, the biggest star with the smallest nose be chosen to act as a Manipuri girl from the Kom tribe, in a biopic outlining her phoenix-like rise from a curfew-plagued and poverty-stricken Manipur to the pinnacle of boxing as world champion.

One may well argue that the fundamental principle of acting is embodying another, and verisimilitude should have no business here. The bad news is that since lens-based media including cinema have deployed visible ‘likeness’ as part of their common grammar, making a case for Mary Kom’s casting as creative license or modernist deviation would be a mere joke. The creative license argument may work when we get to a stage where a biopic on a typically North Indian looking person, say a Kiran Bedi, or why not Amitabh Bachchan, for argument sake, could be played by a slight bodied, small eyed person from the North East. After all, if the 5.2 ft Mary Kom’s particular boxing technique doesn’t get mutilated by the 5.7 ft Chopra, why is it unimaginable to think of an Assamese or Manipuri actor to play Bedi or Bachchan? 

It is telling that there is not one actor from any of the North-Eastern states who has gained firm foothold in the Bombay film industry — the Sikkimese-Bhutia actor, Danny Denzongpa was possibly the lone exception, and the Nepali Manisha Koirala was as close as Hindi cinema got to romancing ‘slit eyes’. Even Hollywood, with its entrenched identity politics at least has its token black, European, and Asian faces to summon up when needed. If commercial cinema marks the limits and possibilities of a nation’s popular imagination, it would be true to say that the national imagination of Indian popular cinema falters as soon as it hits the chicken neck corridor. For too long we have harped on about the Aryans and the Dravidians being the primary racial types in India, completely glossing over the fact that the racial diversity in the country is far more complex, and includes Central and East Asian Mongoloid groups as well as communities like the Siddhis of African descent.

In a convoluted way, Omang Kumar’s film draws the Manipuri Mary Kom into a hegemonic national framework via the de-racialised figure of Priyanka Chopra, further decontextualised from the realities of Manipur’s troubled relationship with the Indian state, and particularly its draconian Armed Forces Special Act. The Tata Salt ads proclaiming ‘maine is desh ka namak khaya hai’ and the national anthem played out in the concluding scene of the film, both reinforce assimilation as the logic of the Nation state, and its national popular cinema. The fact that the film was declared ‘tax free’ almost as soon as it was released in cinema halls across the country — released everywhere that is, except in Manipur, where the screening of ‘Indian’ films has been banned by insurgent groups – that it has already recovered over Rs55 crores from box-office collections, and that in all likelihood Priyanka Chopra will win a few awards for her performance, reveals the neo-imperialist tendencies of the nation and its cultural machineries, happy to erase race in the service of economics, but unwilling to look it in the eye at all.

The writer teaches cinema studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University