Varied and various as my many morning rituals are, there are some things that remain constant no matter where I am. Coffee is rule number one; rule number two is not talking to anybody. People who make me violate the sanctity of either ritual do not stay in my life for long (or any life, if I had my way). More recently, radio has become an integral part of my mornings. It wasn’t always so, but since I started living alone a few years ago, the first thing I have tended to do as I come to terms with the conscious world is to leave the radio on. Perhaps it’s because that way I am guaranteed a one-way conversation. I don’t mind hearing other people talk, it’s just that I’d rather not reply, particularly in my morning voice, which sounds like Darth Vader swallowed glass.
In Pakistan I would switch on either the BBC on my phone or FM89. I loved the FM89 morning shows, with their colourful variety of accents and all-round tones of bourgeois niceness and togetherness. Listening to entire shows about what people are buying for Eid, or how much they are looking forward to the coming weekend always made me feel like I was in Pleasantville, or rather Pleasant-hire, a freak-fantasy version of Lahore in which everyone is a ‘burger’ and is interested in other burgers for reasons other than social mobility.
The only difference between Coldplay's new music video and the Incredible India tourism campaign is that the Coldplay video has some famous people in it
I’ve stopped listening to FM89 since my arrival in New York, mainly because whenever I tune in live, it’s playing deep-bass tracks for evening revelers and not chirpy morning songs (time difference). So instead I turn to the publicly funded National Public Radio, or NPR as everyone here calls it. It has a reputation for being very liberal and quasi-pretentious, and it’s true that the closer I get to the evening programming the more I think should own a smoking jacket. It’s also terribly self-aware, taking care with gender pronouns, ethnic pronunciation, racial diversity, historical attribution and all those other good things that go along with political correctness. Most of its radio anchors are older men and women with resonant honeyed voices and liberal views, which makes the channel’s coverage of Donald Trump that much funnier this season.
But I’ll leave politics to another day because recently, on one of the morning segments, there was a fiery discussion on cultural appropriation. They were interviewing a college professor about the endemic impact of children seeing their culture ‘stolen’ by non-caring, western-centric people of privilege. It took me a good while of sifting through apologist academic phrasing to figure out that they were, in fact, talking about a Coldplay song.
Beyonce's look in the new Coldplay music video
Coldplay, the iconic British soft-rock band, released a music video for their new song ‘Hymn for the Weekend’, which is shot entirely in India and features Beyonce in ambiguous eastern-goddess-wear. After hearing the song and then reading some of the outrage it has caused in the West (and a few claim in India too) I googled the video fully expecting to see Beyoncé hanging off the trunk of a Ganesha sculpture while Coldplay strung instruments in the background dressed like officers of the East India Company. But this was not the case. The song is in fact quite alright. It has lots of scenes of holi, of sunsets against Mughal domes, or desi kids break-dancing on the streets and of Sonam Kapoor releasing doves (or was it leaves?) into the air from an alcove.
Beyonce was in the video, though it looks like her scenes may have been shot in a studio somewhere not ridden with mosquitoes. She was dressed in a choli and gharara but otherwise could have passed for a Dolce & Gabbana couture ad trying to look like a religious icon.
The furor is basically a repeat of the sentiment that Coldplay has simplified India into a series of clichés that are, now that the world knows better (#livesmatter), inappropriate and culturally insensitive. I don’t see that at all. The only difference between that music video and the Incredible India campaign videos is that the Coldplay video has more famous people in it. Twirling bharatnatyam dancers and temple pools reflecting orange skies have long since been a staple of videos exoticising India to the West, and the images have been championed most aggressively by India itself. Indeed, the fact that a black woman was pretending to be Indian is far more thought-provoking than it is offensive, considering that South Asia is convinced that fair equals lovely. I mean: how many dark-skinned heroines do you really see in mainstream Bollywood? (Don’t say Nandita Das and look pleased with yourself.) So when people get upset about the video, I don’t quite understand whether that’s because it made India look too nice or not nice enough. Were they meant to include water-bourne diseases and violence against women? Was there meant to be a terrorist in there for the sake of balance, or a Hindu lynch-mob for the sake of verisimilitude? What makes it a bad thing to have shot a video in India over, say, Japan?
What’s so wrong with this video that wasn’t wrong in, for example, the movie “The Darjeeling Limited”? Or the two “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” movies? Do people have the same issue when they now rewatch Michael Jackson’s Egyptian-themed music video “Do You Remember The Time”? To be fair, I don’t believe most Indians have any issue with the video at all. The cacophony is mainly coming from trigger-happy Western liberals. I do respect the idea that we need to be mindful of unequal cultural appropriation i.e. the idea that a society of privileged people unfairly appropriates or absorbs another’s heritage without any kind of awareness or attribution (white rappers etc.). But there comes a point where being mindful stops being culturally sensitive and starts to sound a little like segregation. Cultures are, by definition, malleable and morphing. They interchange, mingle, borrow and transform. To insist on separating them, and policing any kind of use of their symbols with calls of racism eventually begins to reek of apartheid, no matter how well-intentioned the calls for mindfulness were to begin with.
I say go ahead and use the products of other cultures to create new things, but do it mindfully. Like I did when I combined the concepts of the movie Pleasantville and the city of Lahore to make Pleasanthore. Actually, on further reflection, Pleasanthore can be taken to mean something entirely different, so don’t do that.
