Home > Liberation Main Page > Index Page September 1997 > ARTICLE

It’s a Love Triangle

Amitava Kumar

I’m Indian, but you should not assume I have read the Kama Sutra.

Although I did have in college a dorm-mate whom everyone called Kama Sutra. For no apparent reason other than his first name, Rama, rhymed with the title of the fourth-century text.

But as far as I could tell, Rama had as much knowledge about sex, which is to say very little, as the rest of us.

While we were on the subject, although I’m from India, you should not assume that I recognize the India in Mira Nair’s new film, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love.

I should not necessarily mind it when filmmakers of Indian origin prove that if Hollywood can make a spectacle of India in films like A Passage to India and City of Joy, then we Indians can do it even better. Heck, we also can make a spectacle of ourselves.

Janet Maslin of The New York Times said in her review of the film that the sensual detail was so real she could “almost smell the incense wafting from the screen”. Perhaps next time, if either the filmmaker or the reviewer moves into things more current, Maslin will be able to taste the curry chicken.

What do I mean by current? I certainly couldn’t mean the evocation of the lushness, the languor and the erotic in Maslin’s review. That way of looking at the East is much older than — to use a standard Americans might recognize — even Strom Thurmond.

It is the centuries-old vision that set up the lure of imperialist conquests and legitimated control.

But now that I think of it, it seems to me that Nair’s effort, while tired, is not without its own kind of fresh charm.

Of course, this is the India of courtesans wearing outfits more beautiful and stylish than those being produced in the sweat-shops of Kathie Lee-Gifford. But consider the real question: what is this for?

Yes, Nair’s effort is current, in spite of its being situated in the 16th century. Because unlike her last film set in India, Salaam Bombay, her latest effort makes that part of the globe attractive once again to Americans.

In recent years, American capital has been flowing to the opened markets of India under the guidance of the Washington-based World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Now, with Nair’s film, investors can relax. Their money is going on a vacation. Their profits rendered more sensuous than mere Dow Jones averages. Their interests accompanied by the call of peacocks and the jingle of women’s dancing bells. Nair’s film is set in the present precisely because it is set in the 16th century.

Now, although I am Indian, you should not assume that I should see doctors and computer scientists in a film to make it real.

I’m only arguing that, even if I did not recognize the India in Mira Nair’s film, I think the film, in a perverse sense, is only too real.

Though, now that we are on the subject, I want to find out if there is a relationship between Nair and all those Indian doctors and computer scientists.

After all, America’s super-technological revolution has benefited enormously from the cheaply produced intellectual capital imported from places like India. Is Nair one of those who might be described, then, as a part of the imported Third World cultural capital, whose goal is to make the world more alluring for American finance? And vice versa?

If that is what the film Kama Sutra is all about, then, we might ask, as Tina Turner did a while back, with emotions more powerful than this film can provoke, “what’s love got to do with it?”

 

Home > Liberation Main Page > Index Page September 1997 > ARTICLE