In a scenario where almost all countries are falling like dominoes into the catchall trap called the Global Village, it is very easy for people of individual countries to lose their cultural identities. We are already witnessing this trend in India, where everyone seems to trying to be everything except Indian. I’d say that our indigenous moviemakers have a lot to do with this – the typical Hindi movie glorifies the West and painfully caricatures Indians.
Thankfully, we also have our share of serious firm makers. This breed has taken upon itself to underline Indian culture, and to reawaken a new sense of national pride among Indian movie-goers. The fact that such offerings are rarely as well-received as the ‘Westernized’ ones does not speak well of our already mutated mind-sets, but it does stand to the credit of our mature directors and scriptwriters. A movie has, after all, the power to both kindle a light and to extinguish it.
Culture is a fragile light at best – in many minds, it either flares, flickers or snuffs out in accordance with the direction of popular opinion. Cultural pride is a rare and precious thing that serves to preserve values of national and historical importance. Today, this precious flame is at the mercy of the mass media market. The generations that treasured culture for its own inherent value are rapidly dying out, leaving a younger and far more cynical generation to tend to this legacy. These new generations are typified by short attention spans, a hunger for instant entertainment gratification and wide-spread confusion about where they come from.
Leaving a country’s culture in such hands is surely a gamble, and not an educated one at that. However, because of the very attributes that characterize these younger generations, movies can and do have a decided impact. In India, we saw an unprecedented upsurge of national pride when films like ‘Lagaan’ and ‘Rang De Basanti’ hit the silver screens. These movies entertained like few had managed to before them – but they also emphasized the fact that Indian culture and values are things worth remembering, treasuring and fighting for. The directors of these films – Ashutosh Gowariker and Rakesh Omprakash Mehra – did something enormous with their offerings. They reawakened an entire nation from the torpor of faux modernism and rekindled patriotic sentiments. After these films, being Indian was suddenly seen as ‘cool’ again.
Similar efforts by evolved film-makers are underway in Japan, while the French film industry has always been extremely successful in keeping pride in the country’s culture alive. Each country has its share of mainstream and ethnic films, and it doesn’t take a movie connoisseur to see that the mainstream fare looks suspiciously the same all over the globe. However, it is the more nationally-oriented films that define the state of a country’s cultural pride. In fact, such films actually mould national sentiments, and are often a country’s only true ambassadors.
