In Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, a Hindu woman sneaks around with her Muslim lover, while her parents send her cheesy pictures of men from a matrimonial website. A Malayali nurse hasn’t seen or even spoken to the man she ‘arrange-married’ after he went to Germany for a job. A widowed cook is being forced out of her home to make way for an expensive development. All this happens in the city of Mumbai.
Now consider this: Does this seem Indian enough to you?
I know, it’s a strange question. But according to Film Federation of India President Ravi Kottarakara, it’s what disqualified the Cannes Grand Prix winner from the Oscars race. The Oscar jury, he said, “felt that All We Imagine As Light is like a foreign film and not like Indian cinema”.
That the selection process of “India’s famously unpredictable Oscar committee” is flawed has been widely discussed for years. But this year’s remarks on Indianness and the citation for the selected film, Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies (2023), have added a new dimension to the debate.
Kottarakara even had an explanation for why Laapataa Ladies made the cut—“this is something that happens only in India”.
The sweeping statements dismiss the urban Indian woman’s life, and struggles, as foreign.
At the end of the day, it’s not what kind of film we send for Oscars. What’s at stake is what kind of woman is truly regarded as Indian. Classified matrimonial ads in India have long used ‘homely-cum-working woman’ for modern wife material. As if the ideal woman must exist between the cracks.
The Indianness debate
Kottarakara and the jury are right when they say that the bride-swapping mishap in Kiran Rao’s film can happen nowhere else but here. But it is also equally true that this idea of India—that of ghoonghats, forced marriages, dowry deaths—caters to the white man’s view of the country.
That’s not to say that this idea of India is untrue, but exalting it as the only one that is true is where the fallacy lies.
It’s an updated version of ‘India—the land of snake charmers, elephants and beggars’, an image that we had to work for years to shed.
Ironically, All We Imagine As Light, that the jury describes as foreign, has been praised for its Indianness. “Of the many films set in India that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Payal Kapadia’s feature debut is the only one to hone in on the country and its character,” wrote Deadline.
Outlook heaps high praise, saying it has captured India’s temper “…the fraught interplay between micro lives of its citizens and the larger mood of the nation, with such bracing minimalism and precision.”
And while I think that All We Imagine As Light was the clear standout, at least in terms of winnability, I’m not here to lament about what could have been.
But letting Kottarakara’s comment pass under the radar is a disservice to the four women who were celebrated for bringing laurels to Indian cinema on the global stage. Payal Kapadia, Kani Kusurti, Divya Prabha and Chaya Kadam deserve better than being called foreign.
What rubs salt on the wounds is that France, a country famously known to turn up its nose at anything that’s not ‘French enough’, shortlisted the Indian film for their Oscars pick.
Even the UK missed the memo on ‘Britishness’ it seems. The country that saw anti-immigration riots earlier this year has picked a Hindi-language film, Santosh (2024), directed by a British-Indian Sandhya Suri, featuring an Indian cast as their official entry for the Academy Awards. It follows a woman in rural North India who inherits her late husband’s role as a police constable.
What represents Indian women?
The jury says it wanted to highlight “the plight of the Indian woman”, and with four ‘women-centric’ films to choose from, they were spoilt for choice.
Apart from Kapadia and Rao’s film, there were two offerings from Kerala—Aattam (2023), which won the National Award for Best Film, and Ullozhukku (2024), which bagged its lead Urvashi her sixth Kerala State Award.
The first tackled sexual assault and the second told the story of a woman and her daughter-in-law in the aftermath of her son’s death. Both were flooded with nuance that is rarely reserved for women on screen.
But it’s almost as if the jury’s aim was to be able to write the first line of the citation—“Indian women are a strange mixture of submission and dominance”.
The citation was an insult to Rao’s gently crafted tale of small-town antics. But it’s hard to ignore that it’s the only one of the four films where the woman chooses to conform to what society expects of her—to be a submissive participant in an arranged marriage, the meek wife waiting for her husband to come and claim her; because going home would bring shame to the family.
Sure, the other bride, who lies, uses a phone, and ultimately runs away to study organic farming, shows that women can be ‘non-conformists’. Or in the words of the jury, “it shows you that women can happily desire to be home makers as well as rebel”.
The true ‘plight’ of Indian women is men like this (because of course, the jury is all-male) who think that even the women on-screen need to be just the right amount of submissive and ‘Indian’ to be worthy of representing the country.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)