"Queen" and the Paradox of the Colonized Mind

Vikas Bahl’s “Queen” was released last year to intense critical acclaim from the media in India. The plot is that Rani, a soon-to-be-bride, is shocked when her fiance cancels their wedding at the last minute. Since the flight tickets for their honeymoon were already bought, she decides to travel to Paris and Amsterdam by herself. Through leaving India for the first time, Rani is portrayed to grow as a character and return to India a more confident woman in control of her life. Despite being released last spring, within the last two months it’s taken in a slew of awards at the 2015 Screen Awards, in addition to the 60th Filmfare Awards, both of which awarded the film for Best Director and Best Film. Critics devoted particular attention for its supposed sincerity and simplicity, in addition to its focus on being “intensely local [while] gloriously global." The recent acclaim for this film cannot be understated. Praise that emphasizes poignant messages of globalization, not afforded to many Bollywood films, separates “Queen” from its peers in that it is commonly perceived and respected as a transcending work that celebrates discovering the self through interacting with and embracing other cultures. Unfortunately, a close examination of the film’s politics and implicit messages reveal a different story: “Queen” is a film that pretends to celebrate global culture but still reassures its audiences that Indian culture is superior. Foreign cultures should be enjoyed not for any inherent value they possess but rather for their amusing contrasts to Indian culture. In other words, the film attempts to straddle a thin line between a message of branching out and trying new things foreign to Indian culture, yet comfortably reassuring its audience that such activities cannot undermine the superiority of the way they’ve been doing things all along. “Queen” achieves this through an overly naive main character, a trait which the film confirms by asking its audiences to simultaneously laugh with and at her. Having grown up in a “restrictive” and apparently conservative halwai New Delhi household (that oddly caters to her every whim and has no objections to her traveling alone as unmarried woman to begin with), Rani is shocked to find that things like prostitution, drinking, and casual sex in the world exist and becomes more open to them. This process of loosening her conservative morals is not controversial or challenging. The problem is that Rani does not become open to or learn from other culture. This is not a loose interpretation - the character proudly states word-for-word that “India is best at everything” on multiple occasions, especially in comparison with other culture’s cuisines, music, and architecture. Rather, Rani becomes open to safe guilty pleasures that are by this point quite well accepted in the Indian middle class, the film’s primary intended audience. Rani therefore becomes open to nothing new to the audience’s tastes, and this character transition is possible only by making the character unrealistically naive to begin with. From the beginning of the film, which opens with a standard Punjabi wedding dance song intended to give the audience familiar messages and images associated with positive emotion, India is portrayed as an overly saturated, colorful land of friendship and family, where stylized editing and wide angle shots is used to portray a young and attractive way of life. Contrast this with the scenes in Paris and Amsterdam, which have the film’s color palette considerably toned down and shot in more unflattering and cramped angles. Foreign lands are shown to be full of danger from both law enforcement and crime, have unrealistically disgusting food, and contain strange customs that require getting used to as opposed to truly understanding or accepting on a deeper level. What makes this particularly egregious is that this portrayal of foreign cultures is coupled with the message that touring through them is a fun and desirable activity so long as nothing from it is taken to the heart. When Rani eats at an Italian restaurant and requests more lemon and salt for her dish to make it taste more familiar, the sleazy Italian chef berates her for her Indianness, claiming that “you Indians” like to “ruin” the taste of dishes that aren’t Indian in nature. The chef later returns to inexplicably invite Rani to a cooking competition, where her pani puri forces him to admit that, indeed, “Indians cook best.” Everything about this character, from his over-produced accent to his simultaneous propensity to flirt and berate Rani, plays into unflattering Italian stereotypes, and the film makes it a point for him to acknowledge the defeat of the culture he represents. The film is full of offensive characters like this, and the its message of the triumph of Indian culture is deeply embodied within the assortment of friends that Rani makes through her journey. The pattern of a representative of another culture growing to embrace Indian culture at the expense of their own is reinforced through Vijaylakshmi, a promiscuously dressed Indo-French maid, who, at Rani’s insistence, is last shown to the audience in traditional Indian garb with a promise to tone down her way of life. Moving down the assortment of the next batch of friends, the only real character trait that Oleksander from Russia has is his enjoyment of painting and even greater enjoyment of beer. The only time he references anything of substance, that his paintings represent a protest against violence, goes unquestioned and unengaged by Rani who displays no interest in it. Also worth noting is that the film treats Rani’s deliberate refusal to pronounce his name correctly (even though she gets flustered when others mispronounce or can’t understand Hindi words) as a light joke by the script - Rani deliberately makes fun of Oleksander’s foreignness and he clearly establishes his discomfort with it, which is supposed to play into the joke but comes off as an unsettling instance of mild xenophobia. The French Tim doesn’t really do much besides play guitar in the background. The Japanese Taka, played by Anglo-Chinese actor Jeffrey Ho, is unquestionably the most racist and offensive portrayal of all. The film had already stereotyped Japanese people once before when a massive flock of Japanese tourists rush to all snap pictures of Rani vomiting after being forced to endure the horrors of French food, but Taka as a character is more offensive and insincere in the film’s attempt to give him depth while also denying him any seriousness as a character. The character’s brand of comic relief comes through his jumping around the screen like a cartoon monkey (a historically negative stereotype of Japanese people dating before WWII), and he’s the only character in the film to speak in garbled, incomplete sentences in English littered with what is supposed to Japanese. Unfortunately, Jeffrey Ho’s lack of Japanese skills and poor pronunciation make even that dialogue unrecognizable to a native Japanese speaker. Later the film reveals that Taka’s parents were killed in a tsunami, and his traveling in Amsterdam is some attempt to cope with the loss of his family, but this is still not explored in any depth. Was Taka’s family perhaps among the many that were completely swept away by the tsunami of the triple nuclear disaster of March 11th, 2011 (3.11)? Or maybe they affected by the nuclear accidents near Fukushima? Or was it 3.11 at all? We’ll never know; the film doesn’t care enough about engaging with its characters to stop and divulge such information, and treats the audience as if they don’t really care themselves beyond happily allowing themselves to become emotional at the general story of a child losing their parents. The key point is this: despite Rani’s positive interactions with a large assortment of friends from various cultures, not once does she actually learn anything from them about their cultures, as all she does is transfer her own culture outwards. The one time the film gives her a chance to do so she never asks Oleksander about the violence he may have seen growing up; the most she gets out of Tim is learning that her French toast isn’t actually French. It’s all superficial. The film simply does not celebrate diversity of culture; it instead celebrates having diverse and fun experiences in foreign lands, and then returning to India to be able to talk about it. This is a crucial difference and caters to the postcolonial Indian mindset. Bollywood films are historically no stranger to the exploitation and exoticization of foreign land for item pieces, or even using them as settings for entire films as the industry became more sensitive to the middle class Indian expat community in the 1990s. Typically, the message is the same: India is simply superior to other cultures, and characters away from India almost universally long to return to it or feel alienated by their foreign surroundings. This is not to say that experiencing other cultures is not valued - it certainly is and having foreign experience is often considered a social plus. But the postcolonial insecurity - that India needs to prove itself as a serious contender in the world both politically and culturally and that many psychological remnants remain from India’s British colonization - can compel Indians to simultaneously mentally value and undervalue their own culture. Nationalistic pride is loudly stated, and films like “Queen” reinforce this paradox of the virtues and drawbacks of the local/global: the us and them. To be an effective film, the plot of “Queen” must act as if its audience suffers from collective cultural narcissism combined with a retaliatory hostility to the intoxicating threat of foreign cultures. These assumptions are, unfortunately, nothing new to either the Indian film industry or to Indian sociopolitical analysts.