Mother and child: Rekha Golub (Anita Kanwar), a prostitute and Manju Golub (Hansa Vithal), daughter of Baba (Nana Patekar, the film’s handsome brutal pimp)
Dear friends and readers,
I’ve just finished my paper for a coming ASECS conference, Diasporic Jane: images of displacement, exile and homelessness in the Austen films
where I successfully demonstrate the not so paradoxical truth that Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility when turned into a film has yielded a plethora of images of displacement, exile, and homelessness, and Austen’s matter fits today’s Indian and transnational cinema because of her character types, and gender and class norms (e.g., Prada to Nada; Aisha)
I begin here lest I need more justification that my Austen blog as a place where I discuss women’s art. I await Nair’s Austen film: she’s not done one yet, but I don’t doubt it’s coming. This is a blog on Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay, and some thoughts prompted by a couple of adverse poor reviews and one thoughtful long essay by Irving Epstein in this film in the context of others about street children and the realities of educating children and giving far more of them a decent chance to fulfill themselves for real in our culture. At its close I justify (with Epstein) showing films in classrooms and suggest they can reach many people in ways books alas don’t. My title alludes to a particularly egregious example of pseudo-thought and examination of serious gender and sexual issues in films about family life.
I’m not wrong to say Salaam Bombay is a stunning gem of filmic art. For storyline, the making of, Guardian contextual review, and imdb. Besides Salaam Bombay, so much that I see in film or TV looks like pap that I watched. It reminded me the worst thing about Hollywood’s dominance is its films replaces great local movies which tell real lives and truths with glamorized cotton-wool.
It’s the story of one streetchild — boy Chaipua (Shafiq Syed) — heartlessly ejected by his mother from their circus home, who survives, with vignettes and substories (sometimes disconnected) about how he manages this, mostly through the film with the help of a half-crazed drug addict, Chillum (Raghuvir Yadav) who dies near the end of the film and whose death, brought on by Baba, Chaipau revenges.
Chillum deteriorating badly
Perhaps it is most interesting as a study in dependency. Character after character begins as the dominant one in the relationship, the tutor say, and ends up the dependent. Perhaps this is a relationship of most concern to women as it’s what often happens to them in marriage.
We experience with Chaipua what he does, see what he sees. And with little vignettes of all the people around him. It ends with Chiapua, having escaped the orphanage (risking his life as it’s covered with barbed-wire and high walls), back in the streets alone, having been separated from the prostitute, Rekah, whom he tried help flee her pimp, Baba, when he shrugs off the loss of their daughter who she says was the center of her life. Rekah and Chaipau are parted from their suitcases too by a mindless crowd worshipping imbecilic looking statue. We see him sitting again on a wall as the film ends.
The most chilling scene of the film is one where on a terrace Baba makes Chillum dance frantically by hitting his poor feet (in rags of shoes) with a whip while Chillum has in his hands hot tea he and Chaipau are selling to others for money. Chiapua is befriended by the prostitute, Rehka, who loses her child to an orphanage where the people running it scorn her.
The authorities have the right and power to remove her child
The irritated official who has no intention of giving Rehka back her daughter
How indifferent the world is not only to these children but the women who are their mothers — the children are snatched away as in the Australian film on Rabbit Fences.
The vignettes of women are so telling; casually we see Baba who is tempted simply to throw Rekah and his little girl off a terrace, decide not to; he could have gotten away with this murder. Who would care? The violence of people to one another in India is startling in all the Indian films I’ve seen. The woman he lives with is intensely relieved; the child is her daughter and was terrified for the moment, some instinct told her how much in danger she was.
The film is filled with images of women and children, from brothel madams and young virgin prostitutes to more middling to glimpses of super-rich upper caste ones.
After a bought virgin girl has been punished for weeks, Baba comes in with kindness and gifts to seduce her into prostitution
Now seen by Chaipua on the way to a client
A pathetic moment: we see Chaipau paying a man to send letters home to his home; played by Irfan Khan (of Namesake and Slumdog Millionaire fame), we see that after the boy leaves, he pockets the money and tears up the letter. He cannot get the letter to the mother, the boy’s address is unreal:
*************
I turn to the film criticism I’ve found. As with Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach, I was startled to find that academics loathe the film, are scathing about it!
For example, an attack direct called “Haraam Bombay!” by Rustom Bharucha, Economic and Political Weekly, 24:23 (Jun. 10, 1989): 1275-1279. Nair is accused of everything awful: complacency, voyeurism, appealing to our emotions without prompting analysis; using stereotypical stories of prostitutes, pimps, obvious scenes of cruelty — obvious. I wondered if the source of this is the perverted kind of nationalism which wants to deny all flaws to a culture, or simply misogyny towards women’s films. Nair has made since pandering films and that Namesake has its flaws (which it takes from those in Lahiri’s book), but she’s made great films too (Hysterical Blindness), and this seemed to me perverse at many points.
Not all were angry. Julie Gillespie shows that the Broadway music, The Secret Garden (1991), and by Marsha Norma (with many women in the crew) the movie by Agnieszka Holland, The Secret Garden has images very like those found in Salaam Bombay (“American Film Adaptations of The Secret Garden, The Lion and the Unicorn 20.1 (1996) 132-152).
The one I want to call attention to is by Irving Epstein, “Street Children in Film,” (Curriculum Inquiry, 29:3 [Autumn, 1999]: 375-388) is about how the filming of the children in Salaam Bombay resembles the filming of children in other street children movies. The other two are Kids, directed by Larry Clark, written by 19 year old Harmony Korine (a girl), and Pixote directed by Hector Babenco (probably Slumdog Milionaire too). Epstein writes that in all 3:
“the street” and “the child” become focuses of social criticism of three types of states: consumerist, authoritarian, and neocolonialist. In each film, street life is used as a metaphor for the way in which the state expresses its authority … the directors’ share gendered views of children and childhood innocence, and see the street as offering its inhabitants the
opportunities for pleasure and liberation, along with suffering and dependency …
I know that as a teacher I acted as an agent of the state and some of the worst aspects of my job were where I was acting out authoritarian behaviors to get them to do the work, with an implied promise that they would be justly rewarded outside the classroom too. Untrue I knew.
Epstein says
90 million children between the ages of eleven and fifteen … are forced into regularly contributing to the international workforce. Ten million children under the age of seventeen systematically exchange sex for money; millions of others, having been orphaned by the AIDS epidemic and displaced as victims of war, have turned to the streets for their survival. The existence of street children is not limited to the developing world, as the North American experience with homelessness attests …
Police brutalize and girls are regularly raped by those placed in positions where they are supposed to help them.
But we are civilized in the classroom, controlled and I tried hard to make it an ethical courteous compassionate social space. Street-life is an extension of the state, its brutality, its unacknowledged amoral hedonism. Both Kids and Pixote are also accused of gender stereotypes.
Epstein says that all three films present pessimistic conclusions regarding the potential amelioration of the suffering experienced by their characters in the streets and the institutions offered by the state; the adults they meet are corrupted, brutal or helpless to give them any permanent aid to improve their condition.
I’d add that although Austen has children centrally dramatized in Mansfield Park, and is in her letters resolute in her lack of interest in children until her nieces and nephews grow into early adulthood; nonetheless she is (as it were) theoretically centrally concerned with the education of children, because she had this idea that their upbringing made them the adults they are. She does not sufficiently take into account the history of a moment, the cultural milieu but looks to what went on between parents and teachers and children, siblings and those immediately in the household.
Maria and Julia are told by Mrs Norris that Fanny cannot help it if she is so stupid and cannot read a map (1983 MP)
As with The Secret Garden, Austen presents only an ironized refuge (private, expensive, class-based) as a solution and struggling and enduring otherwise.
Thinking about it, classroom cultures do not help much either; if softened inside the classroom, once the student leaves, he or she is thrown to those dogs (21st century capitalism, neo-colonialism, sexism, racism) again. Ideally teachers ought to admit that their authority comes from other sources and exists for other reasons than the curriculum of the classroom.
I see the power of the visual image as I see it in the Austen and all other movies I’ve been studying and just loving. Epstein suggests that maybe films can induce some lasting awareness and provoke and critique beyond being emotionally satisfying. He asks if we can do more and actually effect some good in active forms of social and political commitment.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Further sources to read:
Dalglish, Peter 1996. The State of the World’s Street Children: Message From the Founder. Street Kids International Web page: http://www.net/-ski/html.
Giroux, Henry A. 1996c. Hollywood, Race, and the Demonization of Youth: The “Kids”A re Not “Alright.” EducationalR esearche2r 5 (2): 31-35.
Hatch, Thomas. 1996. If the “Kids” Are Not “Alright,” “I’m Clueless”: Response to a Review by Henry Giroux of the Movie Kids.E ducational Researche2r5 (7): 40-43.
A friend wrote: “I read your blog on Indian film and have also been thinking quite a bit of college instructors as agents of the state. What triggered my thoughts was overhearing a student yesterday tell another student about getting “2 points” taken off some project he knew he “had done perfectly” because he didn’t put his name and information on the proper part of the title page. It stuck in my mind not only because I find such things ridiculous in an academic environment, but because my students are always pestering me about them–do we have to have a title page? Should we put our name and page number in the upper or lower right hand corner? Do we need a title? Etc..” and went on to detail her experiences … And I know I benefit from it–they’re a docile group, on the whole, the “professor” carries an automatic aura, I, in my mild and kindly way, do crush them early so that I can get them, ironically, to think about challenging authority-they need someone they see as authority to authorize challenging authority–well, we do what we can do. “
I finally wrote a blog on _Salaam Bombay_ which I had been putting off because of the Epstein article. It is true that women have long been concerned with writing about education and it was the one remunerative profession (though not very) they were allowed into. School is another place we tell such lies about. The ways in which people want it to function are at odds with what school can really provide. Like other groups in society who want to protect their salaries and justify their existence, colleges collude with these false or unreal expectations. As a teacher towards the end, I increasingly refused to pretend I could do any more than help with some skills or write a letter of recommendation. In the last two years I couldn’t even do that for medical school as GMU set up a kind of board within the school where the recommending teacher had to send the letter to this board and then someone would make a “composite” letter. It quickly became useless for me to try to write a good individual letter.
I don’t know when I became that the authoritarian behavior of a teacher in a classroom was far more important than any liberal talk he or she might self-flatteringly spout. You have to enact some and use the weapons at your disposal to get many of the students to do the work but at some point I began to do as little as I could get away with. Not all students appreciate liberty. Early on I laughed at nonsense (years ago) that to do research one must use a 3X5 index card this way and no other and teachers who demanded students actually fill these things out a specific way and hand the cards in. How you filled out the card was not the point at all. Most students could see that. But later when I used Trimble who defies all sorts of elitist prescriptions in writing I found students who felt angry or mistaught. They want to conform because they think that’s the way to be promoted and get ahead or be accepted. Others saw me a “push over” after a while. We’ve said that the political point of view someone enacts or votes for is a product of their character. I did try not to lie in the classroom and I would tell truths if asked questions many teachers would ignore or repress. I’d use a wry ironic voice in telling some things.
I don’t know if I ever got them to think about challenging authority in the way you suggest. I suppose it’s a good exercise if you can get them to question you but I think I was chary of undermining order since as it was it was a struggle for me to dominate the space as teacher. I could never have managed in a classroom where the students are not a voluntary audience of genuine young adults. I didn’t like sarcasm and cruel remarks either aimed at other students or myself and would bluntly repel any mockery of me, probably breaking social taboos early in the term when anything like that occurred. Students would drop my course when they recognized duplicity as such, game playing was not something that got respect in my classroom. I’d use Feynman’s little fable of cargo cult science: we are not going through the motions here, doing the outward things so that at the end I get a check and you get a grade, but some belief in the inward value of what was happening about learning the material for its own sake was assumed.
I did until the very last years occasionally have a student or couple of students in a class who disliked me intensely at the same time as I had until the end a few students who liked me intensely. Middle class white girls from “better’ homes especially would sometimes just detest me. When I was young I really thought they were jealous as I was pretty too. But when I was no longer pretty, the occasional deep resentment would surface. The very last years this did become unusual.
Well all over now for me,
Ellen