Video and Film

Whenever I seemed to verbalize the sense of vulnerability I felt as a person of colour in London I was meant with confused looks.Why would someone feel vulnerable in a city that was so diverse? Surely, people from all over the world have come to call London home. This did make me reconsider the validity of my concern. However, It was when I was surfing the net that I came across the video of Jacqueline Woodhouse taken on the tube that was the embodiment of my concerns; being subjected to abuse even when you are minding your own business. It can happen in a place as common as public transportation, and could happen to anyone.

The video and the feeling it invoked ended up becoming the basis for one of my paintings. The process of the painting where I repeatedly used Jacqueline's words was about making the hurtful words lose their significance and possible hold on me as a person. The repetition was cathartic. A way for me to deal with the abrasive comments that could very easily be faced by me.

I wanted to recreate the incident upon my canvas without the particularities of space and individuals.

Hamilton is all the rage nowadays. Unfortunately that makes it that much harder to get tickets to the show. However, I did listen to the Mixtape. Out of all the songs the " Immigrant song" intrigued me. The video is filled with subtle references to several different immigrant crisis. The song consists of the work of MC's from all around the world, talking about the particular issues that are prevalent within their community leaving in the US. The video helped me understand the effectiveness of the metaphorical depiction of events. A less than direct approach helps the viewer stay interested where they try to decipher imagery for themselves. I have tried to adopt a similar approach in my work.

Recently I came across the Ba Na hills in the Vietnam in a travel show. Somehow, out of all that happened in the half an hour episode the only thing that stuck is the historical significance of the place. The Ba Na hills was a settlement for Frenchmen during the colonial period. It was a space where they used to escape the heat. After the end of the French rule the space was abandoned for a very long time till recently where it was resurrected into a tourist attraction. What is interesting about this space is how different it is to the environment. It is a space that is a replica of a European town, surrounded by the lush green lands of Vietnam.

Somehow something that initially had negative associations of colonialism and suppression have now evolved into a tourist spot or source of revenue. However, there is something that is inherently sadistic about profiting off one’s tragic past and in the process glorifying one’s oppressor. Pakistan seems to have similar problem, where several roads, colleges and other spaces are named after British men.

Having come across the Ba Na hills I revisited this article that I had read about a tree in Northern part of the country that was chained to the ground by a drunk British officer that claimed that the tree was being insubordinate by moving without permission. In order to show his dominance he chained the tree to the ground. The incident that on the surface is a humorous account is more than just a drunken mistake, it reflects how any resistance by the locals was put down with force. The tree that is symbolic of the subjugation of the natives has now become a tourist spot.

I have recently started reading more on mimicking cultures of the colonizer as well as the idea of ownership. There are so many habits we have adopted from the British such as tea drinking. Though we have modified it to large extent and it is largely ubiquitous in Asian homes does that give us the right to take ownership of it? One other such example is shared in the show “Patriot Act” which talks about international cricket today- A sport that was introduced almost all over the world by the British empire. A game that is described by the New York Times as the ultimate colonial “civilizer” and a means to export their culture.

In this particular case it is seen how nation’s have adopted the sport and excelled at it, defeating those that introduced them to it on an international platform. India now seems to be controlling the very sport that was imposed on it and made it their own. The country has hegemony over cricket as they are the deciding factor as to who plays and how players and teams are treated. They also make the majority of profits from international cricket. So much power in their hands has resulted in corruption and bullying that in turn has hurt the sport. Minhaj best describes it as “ we are so concerned with owning the sport it isn’t about cricket anymore. It’s about colonizing it for ourselves”.

India, in every sense of the world is the dominating country when it comes to International cricket but is justified for them to call cricket their sport?

It is not just a “whitening” of our person that is something South Asians aspire to, but the literal whitening of the skin is also preferred. Men and women both seem to endlessly slather their faces with whitening creams while playing hide and seek with the sun because being fairer is considered more desirable. I remember having seen several many locally produced ads promoting the same mindset, where the product is described as a ticket to the good life. So damaged is our psyche that I’ve been told numerous times by relatives and friends about how lucky I am when it comes to skin colour as I can easily be mistaken for a foreigner. According to them I should be grateful that I wasn’t similarly afflicted with the curse of dark skin.

The ad for Zubaida Aapa's whitening soap is just one of the latest in the long standing trend of promoting whitening creams and products. This ad particularly experienced quite a backlash for using a tag line "now all of Pakistan will be white". Despite the negative publicity the product still seems to be doing well. The popularity of these products only show how the majority of the population is still uncomfortable in their own skin. What is more alarming is that there are 50+ companies producing skin whitening products in the country, each more profitable than the other.

When watching the video made by the BBC I realized something highly disturbing. Even though individual's realize that the idea of making one's skin fair is ludicrous and for all the wrong reasons that does not stop them from doing so. They are the part of the vicious cycle that promotes certain beauty standards. These beauty regimes are ubiquitous, as people use them in order to maintain a certain value in society.

In many articles and talks this phenomenon is referred to as a "disease" or "epidemic". The colour of one's skin defines one's destiny, it determines whether they will be more eligible for marriage, promotion at work or even if they are going to be the favourite child. Thus, the discrimination based on colour is not only within a foreign space but also very much prevalent within our own community.

Mid night’s children is a movie quite centred on the idea of displacement and identity doused in the south Asian demographic. What I find particularly interesting about the story is how it is placed in a time post partition but it keeps giving us hints as to the past and how certain situations came about to be because of events in history. In every scene/ frame there is a subtle marker of colonialism. Such as the portrait of a British officer in a hospital ward behind the bed of the lead character or cheap replica of a European painting. This seems to be a rather effective way of hinting at a controversial opinion. The less assertive or dogmatic approach seamlessly blends with the rest of the fictional narrative. It gave me an idea of how to maintain a certain amount of ambiguity in my work, so the viewer similarly experiences a certain confusion that led me to create the work.

The film subtly highlights how everyone is a product of history. No generation stands in isolation, we are just living the choices of our fore fathers or even their tumultuous present.

The protagonist himself embodies the idea of a hybrid individual in so many ways; in race, in status and also nationality. His person is a product of his circumstances.

The film shows him going from being born to a poor family, to being switched at birth and living a comfortable and affluent lifestyle. His identification immediately being changed from a Hindu to a Muslim. His tumultuous life shows the fluidity of identity. He then goes from being in India with his family to being shipped off to relatives across the border. The interesting part is that he is shown to surrounded by his own yet the setting is portrayed as being completely contrasting because of the prevalent antipathy. This is also revealed through the line “ all the wars in those days were between friends “.

This line also explains why on his return to India he found his house bombed by a regiment that was led by his own uncle. Than comes his days of being in a comma as he is hit in the head with a spitoon that comes flying from the wreckage of his burning house. The beauty of the film is how they so seamlessly document the massive shifts in the protagonist’s identity. This is seen throughout the film as he vacillates from being Indian to Pakistani to Indian once again, while all this time he has also been the bastard child of a British officer and a street musician.The only thing constant in his life- the silver spitoon . This reminded of when I was looking at the citizens archive of Pakistan's project where they collected stories of people and any object they associated to their heartbreaking journeys in the wake of partition. The material objects whatever they maybe were a symbol of their former life or pretty much the only thing left of it.

The protagonist also talks about a sense of confusion when it comes to picking sides because he considered both as his home and was terrified to see it wounded. This brings to mind the growing antipathy between the two countries and the futility of waging war against your own kind.

The movie also talks about how one's birth determines their privilege and place in society. That is an idea pretty much prevalent today. The landscape you grew up in determines how successful/ unsuccessful you will be in life. The story though based in the past reflects an idea very much relevant today or perhaps even in the future.

One of our tutors introduced me to the work of Kimberle Crenshaw and what she terms as "Intersectionality". Even though my work focuses more on national identity, the concept "Intersectionality" seemed quite relevant as the Pakistani identity or any for that matter, can not be analyzed using a blinkered approach. We cannot separate national identity from gender, class and other forms of identifications that make up the individual.

The idea of Intersectionality proved to be very important in helping me understand the ideas that I have been grappling with the entire year. It also give a name to a phenomenon that is largely prevalent in the society.