New Delhi: It appears that Dharma, if anything, cannot be American.
Reacting to the 1 November US release of Errol Mark Morris’ documentary film American Dharma, Indian economist and writer Sanjeev Sanyal took to Twitter to call out the “far from harmless cultural appropriation” at play in the title. For its part, the movie aims to explore the slow unfurling of controversial figure Steve Bannon — the man credited with engineering the divisive Right-wing strategies that made the 2016 election of Donald Trump possible in the US.
American Dharma as a title then, seeks to create a hybrid meaning at the intersection of two concepts — identification with ‘being American’, and a divine call to duty, as prevalent in certain Indian religious traditions. In a post-Bannon America, director Morris appears to argue, the two are no longer separate: A new set of duties has been carved, inspired, it seems, by politically-divine call to American nationalism.
It’s not the association of the word dharma with the American Alt-Right that Sanyal has a problem with, however, but that, as he tweeted, “a few years from now, some Harvard prof will tell us about the true meaning of dharma based on impressions from this movie & we will internalise it.”
Am uncomfortable with a movie about Steve Banon being called "American Dharma". Have nothing personal against him, but such cultural appropriation is far from harmless. It has been done before by 19th & early 20th century German nationalism 1/n
— Sanjeev Sanyal (@sanjeevsanyal) November 10, 2019
Sanyal asserts that the appropriation of Indian-origin words, especially by a culturally hegemonic West, has the ability to rewrite its meaning in global consciousness moving forward.
“It has been done before by 19th & early 20th century German nationalism,” he says, explaining that “the appropriation of the Swastika symbol and the term “Arya” by racists was not sudden”, but “based on systematic research by Europeans scholars looking to create an ancient lineage for themselves & their ideas”.
The Swastika symbol, as Sanyal points out, was long considered to be Indian signage, belonging to Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions for centuries, and connoted good luck. German scholars stumbled upon it somewhere in the 19th century, when they started “translating old Indian texts” and “noticed similarities between their own language and Sanskrit,” Mukti Jain Campion explains in a 2014 BBC article.
These similarities were then used to conclude that “Indians and Germans must have had a shared ancestry and imagined a race of white god-like warriors they called Aryans”, Campion adds. This theory was then used by Nazi nationalists to appropriate the Swastika into an anti-Semitic symbol, justifying it as a marker of their superior Aryan ancestry.
Sanyal, author of renowned books like The Incredible History Of India’s Geography and Land of Seven Rivers: History of India’s Geography, stresses this point as well. “Given this long history of cultural appropriation & misuse of Hindu ideas/symbolism, one needs to be wary of this appropriation of the word ‘dharma’. The long-term consequences may be costly if not opposed right now.”
Whose culture is it anyway?
But the line between cultural appropriation and collaboration is a fine one, as Delhi University English professor Hany Babu tells ThePrint.
“If you go into history, we’re not even sure where a lot of these symbols originate from,” he says. “Even the swastika had records claiming it existed in parts of ancient Europe.”
Babu isn’t wrong. Reported archaeological findings place versions of the Swastika symbol in ancient Greek, Celtic and Anglo-Saxons traditions, with some of the oldest examples being found in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans.
“So if they suddenly come and say, ‘No this is ours, you can’t use it’, then how would that make any sense?” Babu argues. Similarly, he doesn’t see the title of the movie as problematic per se. “Cultures do rub against each other, evolving globally over time, and not everything can be looked at as appropriation. English, in particular, is a grammatically borrowing language rich in suffixes,” he tells ThePrint.
“Like chutnify, for example, making a verb out of chutney, is easy because the suffix is already available. But in Hindi, if you had to use the word ‘apply,’ you’d have to say ‘apply kiya,” he says. “However, appropriation can happen if the power differential is exploitative, but that’s not the case this time. I don’t subscribe to a monopoly of cultures, ideas, words and concepts, you can’t always look at the world through that lens.”
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‘Chai tea’, turmeric lattes, beer yoga
The debate surrounding cultural appropriation, however, is not a new one. Celebrities like Beyoncé and Gwyneth Paltrow, as well as many high-profile chefs and food influencers in the West, stumbled upon the health benefits of turmeric as recently as 2015. Google searches for turmeric doubled in November that year, making it “one of the top trending foods on the internet”, Today reports.
A beverage known as ‘Turmeric Latte’ (haldi doodh to you and me) soon became a sensation and was subsequently sold in cafes across the world — San Franciso, Sydney, Berlin and London — for as much as $4.5 a glass (close to Rs 300 at the 2015 exchange rate).
And it’s not just Bey and Gwen who have been accused of unfairly, and inaccurately, borrowing from Indian traditions. In fact, the number of times it has happened has been so frequent, that it even inspired a listicle. From Selena Gomez’s red bindi to popstar Katy Perry sharing a picture of the goddess Kali to express her #mood on Instagram, “cultural appropriation is the gift that keeps on giving”, Marquaysa Battle wrote for Elite Daily in 2017.
For Miley Cyrus, perhaps one of the greatest examples of a child-star shuffling through a range of personalities to see what fits, making her dog wear a bindi three years ago was “tooooo cute”.
Bindi on a Beagle ??? tooooo cute
Miley Cyrus यांनी वर पोस्ट केले शुक्रवार, १२ ऑगस्ट, २०१६
The corporate West isn’t far behind. American traveller Brook Eddy, for example, made a reported $35 million dollar selling ‘Bhakti‘ tea a few years after she visited India in 2002. When Inc. profiled the entrepreneur, they tweeted a link to the article with the caption: “On a whim, this hippie founder packed her bags for India. Now, she’s made $35 million selling chai tea (sic).”
On a whim, this hippie founder packed her bags for India. Now, she's made $35 million selling chai tea. https://t.co/i5hOgFzE53
— Inc. (@Inc) March 26, 2018
Y'all white people stop calling it chai tea I can't deal with the audacity of the caucasity anymore. https://t.co/NHpjMNOqTK
— Wash Hands/Panic Carefully (@Vaishnavioffl) March 28, 2018
Superna Chopra, a yoga teacher, told ThePrint earlier this year that in terms of cultural appropriation “the sanctity of yoga cultures and traditions has been repeatedly compromised and corrupted a lot in the West”. “They do anything to market it and make it look more exotic, but a lot of it is very superficial,” she added.
“Beer yoga, for example, is cultural appropriation,” yoga instructor Priyanka Gupta had said, referring to a form of yoga where practitioners are encouraged to drink beer while performing the asanas.
“The moment we disrespect yoga and add elements that take away from its essence, such as the stillness and the spiritual aspect of ahimsa, which are part of the eight limbs, then we are in danger of appropriating it.”
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