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ShareTo pick more viewers in India these channels have started focusing on India-centric subjects and one of the more interesting documentary series on right now is Paul Merton in India, that follows the eponymous British comedian as he tours the country trying to make sense of the many contradictions that form this huge and diverse country. He tries to stray off the beaten path and concentrates on thebizarre and strange so that his viewers get something more than just skyscrapers, slums and call centres.
An ad in Indian papers advertising the series shows a cow sitting in a textiles shop somewhere in middle India with the tag line "If you think this is weird" see Paul Merton in India... well, you get the idea.
But that is hardly the biggest oddity on the show. Merton (or his researchers) have found many more -- transgenders, eunuchs, dwarfish body builders, a wedding in an ashram where everyone is naked save the ash on their bodies and where they do strange things with their members. Of course Bollywood is in the mix too.
All through this Merton the quintessential Englishman, dressed appropriately for the tropics in a white linen suit and a collapsible hat is bemused, lost and loose-limbed, the silly white who makes a fool of himself. The series must have scored well in Britain and in other parts of the world; as for Indian audiences, I can only quote a critic in The Guardian: "He was either in India or some surreal India of the imagination."
Now obviously this is not all imagination, it all does exist. Merton couldn't have invented it; he found it. We in India may pass most of this by in our daily lives, but it catches the eye of the visitor. It is weird and wonderful and colourful and, dare one say it, exotic. And if it is exotic, trust the visiting documentary maker from Britain to find it.
Now we all know what prickly souls we Indians are. Every slight, real or imagined, sets us off. We shout, protest, write petitions. In India we go out and break some public property; if we live in the West we sue and collect. Full careers have been made on rising against insults to our culture and tradition.
Bollywood filmmakers and American fast food manufacturers have learnt the hard way that making fun of any one tribe or community can be expensive. Yet, I have not heard a squeak about how Merton has exoticised India, concentrating on the colourful underbelly rather than talk about the enormous successes of this modern, emerging power.
Where is the space programme, the computer whizzes, the cool restaurants, the smartly dressed youth? Why eunuchs, why not the tycoons who are buying up British companies? Is Merton still living in the past? Even TV critics who catch this kind of thing have not commented. How come?
I can think of two reasons. The first is that despite its heavy publicity, the show is on a niche channel and has therefore not caught the eye of people of the protesting kind. But I like to put it down to something else -- we simply don't care. Watching the show occasionally, the constant focusing on the grotesque just appears tiresome.
Forget being cliched -- it isboring, repetitive and trying too hard to raise a few laughs. Occasionally blood pressure rises and one wants to scream, "where do you get off you stuck-in-the-colonial-past Englishman" or "are you nostalgic about those Victorian freak shows with bearded ladies and tiny men" but that mood subsides quickly. I suspect many others who have watched the show feel the same way and simply change the channel.
Two lessons can be drawn from this -- one, no matter what we do or what we become, India will never lose that image of being a "vast land of tremendous diversity and old and strange traditions and cultures." We should see that as strength and not a weakness. As long as that remains, the visitor (especially if he is making an expensive documentary series) will always poke in dark corners to unearth oddities.
And second, it is possible, if we want, to simply show supreme indifference whenever such films, shows, articles appear rather than go into a sulk or get upset. So welcome Merton sa'ab and the next time you come maybe you might get to see something that is not so peculiar anymore.
