Once again, India has been shamed at the Oscars. While we didn’t even send the right film in the Best International Film category (so let’s not even go there), some thought we had a good chance in the Best Short Film (Live Action) category with the touristic annoyingly prim Anuja, because Priyanka Chopra was a producer.
A lot of noise was made in the media for Priyanka Chopra’s name being associated with the short film Anuja. Although several producers’ names are also linked to this mawkish poverty-is-liberating kitsch that the West loves, it is only Ms Chopra’s name that was pushed around for grabbing eyeballs.
What’s Anuja About
Anuja, a story about two impoverished sisters with unbelievably shiny teeth, laughing and sobbing their way through a gauntlet of designer-suffering, is 22 minutes of treacly kitsch. The self-conscious “poverty realism” of the presentation is just what the West wants to see in India .
The Western Gaze positions two dusky girls Palak (Ananya Shanbhag) and Anuja (Sajda Pathan) in a tailoring organisation founded on child labour and run by a cheesy supervisor straight (Nagesh Bhosle) straight out of Oliver Twist.
This Mumbai-bred Fagin is dirty and leery and he wants the two sisters in his office early in the morning before the work force arrives on the same day when the younger sister Anuja is supposed to sit a crucial test which would ensure her escape from drudgery.
So much melodrama in a short film is itself a feat. The fact that the presenters of this poverty-prom would have us believe that they actually care about the Anujas of the city, is laughable. Director Adam J Graves’ gaze and vision are completely divorced from ground reality.This is realism as per imperial guidelines. The two girls—ah, those brave tortured giggly souls!—are just waiting to be rescued .
In the meanwhile they lighten the load of their misery by watching Vyjayanthimala dancing to Udi jab jab zulfein teri in the 1958 film Naya Daur with two bags of popcorn in a millennial mall.
If this isn’t escapist realism at its best, what is?
