Machaan Ado About Nothing

AS OF MID-DECEMBER 2011, the Tamil viral video hit ‘Why This Kolaveri Di’ (‘Why This Murderous Rage, Girl?’) has been watched more than 28 million times on YouTube; three weeks after its release on 16 November, it was the world’s seventh most popular YouTube clip, sandwiched between Justin Bieber’s ‘Mistletoe’ and Lady Gaga’s ‘Marry The Night’. More than 200,000 mobile phone users have now downloaded the song, which has already been remade by amateur artistes in just about every language that figures on the rupee note. The four-year-old son of a fading Bollywood playback singer even has his own suitable-for-children version of ‘Kolaveri’, which is supposed to be the launch pad for his own musical career.

The Economic Times—a dutiful chronicler of Indian triumphs in any field, business or otherwise—gleefully reported that several of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) had begun to conduct academic research on the success of ‘Kolaveri’. IIM Ranchi’s marketing club led the way by organising a seminar to examine the ‘Kolaveri’ “strategy” and the lessons for making an idea successful overnight. When ‘Kolaveri’ hashtags started appearing on Twitter, I surmised it was a clever marketing gimmick from one of the cola manufacturers—and, indeed, when a young colleague of mine checked out drinkify.org, a website that provides dubious recommendations for music-cocktail pairings, someone had already determined the best quaff to accompany your ‘Kolaveri’—(One ounce ouzo on the rocks, garnished with sparklers, if you insist). Several friends in Delhi called me up seeking to know what the lyrics meant, and when I told them, essentially, “nothing”, a few hung up in disbelief and the rest suggested maybe I had just lost touch with my mother tongue after spending a decade in the capital.

In just a few weeks, one of the most execrable songs to come out of a Chennai recording studio had become the new gold standard of Indian popular culture. And you could see it coming.

The surge of interest in the type of southern kitsch that ‘Kolaveri’ represents has been building up for a while. Rajinikanth’s last two films, Sivaji (2007) and Endhiran (2010), may not have set the box office on fire up north, but his personal pan-India popularity is at an all time high— ironically, during the winter of his career. When Virender Sehwag recently hit 219 against West Indies in a One-Day International match to break his compatriot Sachin Tendulkar’s seemingly shatterproof record, The Times of India’s front-page ‘Contrapunto’ feature, which dispenses daily topical wisdom, felt compelled to quip, “If Sachin is God, Sehwag is Rajinikanth.” Even in the south, cosmopolites sniggered at Rajinikanth in his pomp in the 1980s and 1990s. In Tamil Nadu’s more intellectual circles, he’s still regarded as an unquarantined weed that’s destroying local biodiversity.

Charu Nivedita, the author of the bestselling postmodern Tamil novel Zero Degree (1998), has been one of the cultural icon’s harshest critics. Reviewing Rajinikanth’s last film, Endhiran, he wrote that such films were the cultural and social equivalent of the Bhopal gas tragedy. If Nivedita is right, then it would seem that all of India is keen on buying slickly packaged sachets of the cultural variant of methyl isocyanate. Now there are websites and SMS-based services that offer new Rajini-isms every day, some of them so good that the superstar no longer needs his team of writers to think up new ones.

While promoting his latest big-budget pseudo-sci-fi film, Ra.One, Shah Rukh Khan said that the movie was a tribute to Rajinikanth, “the country’s original superhero”. It may have been a clever ploy to expand the market for his films in the south, but it was also an acknowledgment of Rajinikanth as the god of camp, an actor who can spin pure gold from complete corn.

Rajinikanth is hardly the only example. In 1994, MTV popularised Quick Gun Murugan, a fictional character said to have been based on Tamil curry western ripoffs, which were themselves described as a wildly popular phenomenon in the south. (Not many Tamils would even remember watching one, but why let facts spoil a convenient stereotype?) And for some reason known only to his creators, Murugan spoke with a Malayali accent.

Last month, The Dirty Picture, a biopic about the southern siren Silk Smitha, shot to the top of the box-office charts, surpassing even the huge popularity of Bollywood films like Wanted (2009) and the recent Singham (2011), which were themselves first or even second iterations of Telugu and Tamil masala flicks. It may be the case that the success of The Dirty Picture owes more to the universal appeal of smut than to a genuine interest in the tortured and tragic life and death of a southern softcore screen vamp, but Milan Luthria, the film’s director, seemed genuinely obsessed with the gaudy costumes and gym-class dance movements that held sway in the Tamil movies of the era.

It’s hard to situate a precise explanation of the sudden rage for all this kitsch: Does it represent a certain attitude of postmodern sophistication, which cherishes the ability to quote a ragbag of cultural tropes for an amused urban audience? Or the advent of a new need to demonstrate one’s sense of cool in a manner that’s simultaneously desi and metropolitan? Does the Indian middle class want to appear eclectic and knowing in a relaxed way?

R ‘Balki’ Balakrishnan, the creative ace at Lowe Lintas India and a filmmaker who directed Cheeni Kum (2007) and Paa (2009), suggested that the rise of southern kitsch is a sign of an evolving Indian sensibility. (Balki, a diehard fan of Ilaiyaraaja, insisted that the southern music maestro remix his iconic Tamil numbers of the 1980s for Cheeni Kum.) “As people become secure about their own identities, they are confident of engaging with the unfamiliar,” he said.

According to Sadanand Menon, a cultural critic based in Chennai, the phenomenon reflects a desire to engage with a certain side of culture that was hitherto hidden and has now become mockable in an innocuous way. “You don’t want to fully understand the culture, but want to make fun of the stereotypes—much like the sardarji jokes,” Menon said. Stereotypes evolve as well. Referring to Padosan (1968), Menon said, “Earlier, a Mehmood-like character [dark-skinned, sporting a Brahminical tuft, with generous quantities of ash smeared on the forehead], a loud and bumbling man, represented the southern male species. In the 2000s came Quick Gun Murugan, who paved the way for the unacknowledged admiration stemming from an unstated fear of southern superiority—be it economic, technology-related, or even in filmmaking.”

But is it also a sign that Bollywood’s creative reserves are drying up? “These phases do occur. A lot of Bollywood films are borrowing the grammar and language of Tamil and Telugu films, because Bollywood doesn’t have the experience or expertise in bending reality in a spectacular manner. Even when it comes to violence, people don’t want it to be realistic, but funny and spectacular—a bit like animation films,” said Santosh Desai, MD and CEO of Futurebrands India, newspaper columnist and author of Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India. He argues that with the proliferation of the multiplex culture, over the past few years Bollywood could not go as far as southern films when it came to camp. Now, when Hindi filmmakers see a successful formula in the making, they can’t resist plagiarising. It’s a lamentable situation, and hopefully redemption will come soon enough, thanks to the ephemeral nature of passing fads in popular culture. But I can shed no tears.

I must confess to having a rather personal stake here, which might be most simply explained by saying that attending small-town cantonment schools in North India in the 1980s was sometimes a rather traumatic experience for a Tamil kid. My own case had several further complications, beginning with my father’s insistence that I wear the caste mark, the namam—a large U-shaped, sandal-flavoured, quicklime paste on the forehead. It was a particularly visible advertisement for my ‘Madrasiness’, rendering futile the hours I had spent refining my ability to speak Hindi without any trace of a South Indian accent. Bullies had no problem picking me out. A tiffin box which, more often than not, contained mildly stinky curd rice and a strip of citron pickle, diminished any chances of lunchtime bonding with classmates. “Ayyaiyyo!” taunts were more than common. My lot was only marginally better than that of my Sikh classmates, who faced the usual gauntlet of sardarji jokes and the particular torment of being labelled terrorists during the hate-filled 1980s. Being the ‘Other’ was a way of life, and it wasn’t very pleasant. But if what my friends up north now crave is the very basest form of southern culture, I can hardly imagine a sweeter-tasting revenge.