A Critical Review of Anees Bazmee’s Neo-Colonialist, Greco-Capitalist Text, ‘Singh is Kinng’
I have a great deal of skepticism when it comes to approaching the works produced by present-day Bollywood. The underlying discourse is predominantly Greco-capitalist, anti-feminist, and rooted in the perverse dialectic of right-wing bourgeois hypernationalism. Anees Bamzee’s film Singh is Kinng with its imperial tone and othering of a minority culture does not succeed in breaking past my low expectations.
There is a great deal to criticise in Singh is Kinng. However I shall focus primarily on the Orientalist undercurrent of the text. In his support of the imperialist project, the producer Vipul Shah has created a text that is unrelenting in its placement of the Panjabi culture as being othered, culturally separate, and in contrast to the Gujeonormative themes of ‘financial’ and organised cultures.
The postcolonial scholar Purity Matchaba-Blavatsky identified the Western consciousness of tribalism as being the mechanism through which colonial powers imposed Western modes of thought and identity on occupied powers, thus perpetuating Greco-capitalistic structures of power and control even after ending their occupations of subaltern nations. This Western consciousness has been taken up by the Gujeratis, seen in their puritan adoption of temperance, their anti-female insistence on dhandho, and their remaking of the nationalistic identity by the ’symbolism’ of placing a Gujerati individual on the national currency – with quasi-ontological implications of establishing the Gujerati culture as dominant and in opposition to other minority cultures within India.
The dominance of financialism and feudal context is seen first of all in the title. Why is the title Singh is Kinng? Why does Bollywood refuse to celebrate characters who are not privileged members of the monarchy? Why is the reality of the peasantry not being depicted? The celebration of Kings rather than queens is also a celebration of maleness, which as the Dutch-German scholar Nettrich-Kahn has pointed out, is a subjugation of the femaleness. The subtexts that pervade the Indian film industry prevent it from discussing the proletariat, the queer, and the conjugated minorities in meta-realistic terms.
The retranslation of Gujerati ’superiority’ throughout the national cultural discourse has led to a false consciousness in ‘Indian’ minorities such as the Panjabis, the Bengalees, and the Jaats wherein they allow their cultural experience to be shaped through Gujerati portrayals. As the noted authority on Orientalism and sub-altern cultures Rene-Luc Pascal has pointed out, it is impossible for the culturally dominant mode to be anything but aggressive and imperial in its treatment of cultural minorities. The portrayal will be exotified, objectified, anti-diversity, anti-minority, and othering.
This exotification and othering pervades the movie, as we see when the so-called ‘humour’ of the film is derived from setting Panjabi culture as a counterpoint to the Greco-capitalist norms of ‘law’ and ‘civilisation’. This is plain from the main characters being named ‘Happy’ and ‘Lucky’, a clear pointer to the noble-savage essentialism imposed upon minority cultures. By portraying Panjabi characters as criminals when they are in the Western society of Australia, the movie reinforces Gujeonormative prejudices about Panjabi rusticity. The noted film critic Godot Nair has appropriately pointed out the dominance of the Western archetype in non-parallel cinema. In Singh is Kinng the Western archetype is demonstrated by the cornflakes which Ranvir Shorey’s character is seen to be eating. By posing parathas as a counterpoint to cornflakes, Anees Bazmee seeks to deny the agricultural experience of farmers starving in Vidarbha and the catastrophic fall in foodgrain consumption. This further demonstrates the neo-liberal and neo-colonial aspirations of the filmmaker.
The most appalling aspect of the ‘film’ is its refusal to address the issue of the Persian Gulf War in its proper context. The film centres its plot in Egypt, Australia, and Punjab, yet refuses in the most cavalier manner to discuss Australia’s illegitimate and immoral support of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. The issue of Panjabis being forced into the United States Armed Forces to obtain green cards and the attendant themes of person-of-colour immigration and Greco-capitalistic fascism are cast aside without a thought.
The Indo-radical spiritual-charismatic healer Paithyonkaari Amma has said “It does not make it easier, to look into those sad eyes that stare through your window, while you sit in air-conditioned comfort.” For the viewers who sit in air-conditioned multiplexes, it has become easy to participate in the neo-imaging of the Imperial project and impose artificial constructs of ‘understanding’ upon the minority, non-Greco-capitalist aspirations of millions of Panjabis. Singh is Kinng with its crass support of capitalism, imperialism, monarchy, maleness, and its even crasser rejection of the experience of immigrants, sexual minorities, femaleness, and the oppressed peoples of Iraq and Vidarbha shows itself to be lacking in empathy, sympathy, compassion, and guilt. It is heartless and unjust and must be overthrown immediately!
The writer, Dr. (Mrs.) Valentina Dimitrieva Pandey M.A. (lit.), M. Phil (illit.), Ph. D. (corres.), M.A.S. University, Darjeeling, is the Randall Zakuroff Chair of Gender Studies at the Departrment of Social Sciences, at the University of St. Petersburg. She can be contacted at valentina.dimitrieva@pandey.ru
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