Insult without Injury
Representational Sin at the Oscars
One of the calling cards of our cultural psychosis is that aggrievedness (and the power one derives from being aggrieved) has greater currency than social progress itself. That’s why our celebrations of triumphs so often seem short-lived or bittersweet, and why those triumphs are so frequently eclipsed by countervailing laments.
The content of the lament itself is unimportant. We can lament the fact that the triumph had to happen at all, and what that says about our society; or that the triumph is but a distraction from all the work that remains to be done; or, as in the case I am about to highlight, that some faux pas perpetrated in the celebration of the triumph has degraded it. The point is to perpetually maintain that there has been no progress. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
This week’s example hails from the Oscars, where among other atrocities (mainly the fact that best movie of the year Tár didn’t win anything), an Indian film was awarded Best Song without the occasion being sufficiently used as an opportunity for South Asian “representation.”
What? you ask. Isn’t the Oscar selection of a musical number from Indian cinema a win for South Asian representation? In a sane world, it would seem so. In this world, however, not so fast. Or at least not unless the dance troupe that covers the song at the actual Oscars ceremony is flown in from India to perform it.
The song in question, “Naatu Naatu,” is from the movie RRR—a product of South Indian Telugu language cinema or “Tollywood.” For the awards ceremony in Los Angeles last Sunday, original singers Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava were brought in to sing the song, but the academy chose to save some money by recruiting a diverse cast of thirty-or-so dancers locally to perform the accompanying dance onstage.
Big mistake.
In the aftermath of the ceremony, Twitter and TikTok lit up with the “yes, but” pronouncements that make up the tribal war paint of the social justice warrior, all accompanied by the now classic hashtag “#oscarssowhite.” (Apparently the fact that many of the dancers were Middle Eastern and black did not occasion a reconsideration of the hashtag.) “This one hurts,” declared the headline of a Yahoo! News article, which went on to quote liberally from a viral TikTok video by Dr. Maheetha Bharadwaj, a resident in urology at the University of Washington: “’Naatu Naatu’ will be performed at the Oscars and not a single South Asian, let alone a South Indian, let alone Telugu person is going to be dancing. How is this okay?”
Bharadwaj went on:
So, you are taking a song that was developed by the people of various parts of South India—a culture—and you are representing them and you’re bringing them and you're honouring them on international stage and you’re not having a single South Asian, let alone a single South Indian or Tamil or Telugu dancer dancing this? It’s 2023.
It’s 2023, indeed. Two things merit highlighting here. First is that in the face of Bharadwaj’s representational scandal, the objectively much more important fact that “Naatu Naatu” won an award is rendered moot—not only yesterday’s news, but totally superseded by the ethnically incorrect casting of the dancers. Second is Bharadwaj’s hostile recasting of the Oscars performance, ostensibly a celebration of an outstanding work of music, as an act of “taking”—of quasi-neocolonial plunder.
Yahoo! News editor Abhya Adlakha takes this uncharitable argument further by claiming that the two lead dancers in the Oscars performance, who are of Lebanese-Canadian and American heritage, “were passed off as being Indians on the stage.” Reading this irresponsibly-worded statement, a reader could be forgiven for assuming that the lead dancers had performed in brownface, when in fact they were simply chosen for their passing resemblance to the lead dancers in the movie.
It is tempting for us to assume that if the Oscars organizers had simply thought things through a bit more thoroughly, they could have avoided this latest Twitter mob. But this is a mirage. In fact, Bharadwaj informs us that even if they had recruited a troupe of exclusively Indian dancers, this too might have been insufficient. Citing historical discrimination against Telugu-speaking Indians by India’s Hindi-speaking majority, she says: “To take a culture that has historically faced erasure and mockery even in India, to bring it onto an international platform, and then what are we doing? Erasing the people that contributed to that culture.” The implication is clear: even had the Oscars recruited an all-Indian dance troupe, they would still have been guilty of representational sin if the troupe had not been sufficiently Telugu.
But we need not get so technical. The real point here has nothing to do with Hindi, Telugu, Indian, or Tamil. It has merely to do with guilt.
I am guilty for what has been done by me. Not what has been done by others!
The Oscars is first and foremost about acting. People get to act what ever part their given, including being a dancer in an Indian dance troupe. That's what acting is. Actors are not meant to be the parts they play, only to act so. This is something basic that the poster ignored for his own self-righteousness.
Self-righteousness has its uses, but the only productive one that is known by me, is that it keeps one warm in a cold environment. Otherwise it is a lot of uselessness that produces nothing but ill will.
I think the problem is that there's a lack of suspension of disbelief happening with the complaining parties. They want to be transported into their own sacred myth at best, or group identity at worst. This is perfectly normal because the whole point of art is to take one out of this world and into another one and I think what this Hollywood presentation did was to destroy this natural human desire. These Telugu people, like about 3/4 of the planet, don't want to become atomized random particles. And this attitude is very, very hard for modernists to comprehend.