Hollywood and western pop culture is increasingly depicting Indian — rather Hindu — iconography in its art these days. Movies like Life of Pi have left a spiritual mark on the western audience but most often this pop culture panders to specific western taste and secularizes the rituals by taking them out of context. In the long list of false portrayals, ColdPlay came out with a mediocre song called “Hymn for the Weekend” this year and it got famous on the back of the video they shot in India depicting Hindu life. Times have moved from outright contempt for Hindus as shown in movies like Slumdog Millionaire to subtle cues left in this video.
The video tries to portray Indian religion as a “colourful fancy culture” as opposed to “true religion.” The west subtly tries to discredit Hindu religion by isolating the theological connotations from our customs by making it look like colours, song and dance. So Holi becomes a fancy festival of colours as opposed to the victory of Pralhad over Holika. Diwali becomes a festival of light as opposed to the victory of Ram. Yogi becomes just another street performer, little Shiva becomes just another fancy dress, Varanasi becomes just another beach, the saffron flag becomes just a rag on top of a stick and all the kids are malnourished. This is Slumdog Millionaire Ver 2.0 — all they had to do was add a snake charmer scene and it would have been the wet dream of a racist evangelist.
In any case the video still manages to push the Christian cultural agenda. If you notice at the end the kids are watching projector images which say “Maria Mata” — which in vernacular languages refers to Mother Mary. Have you seen a more subtle way of delivering a gospel message?
Now watch that video again to understand the context. You will realise that Beyonce — known by her fans as “the queen” — has postured herself as Maria Mata civilizing the exotic pagans who love song, dance and colours. She is trying to execute the white man’s burden (ironic, since she is a black woman and victim of the white man’s burden herself!).
If Indians were to commit similar blasphemy, what would they have to do? Just to give an analogy, this video would be the moral equivalent of Rani Mukherjee going to the US, putting black paint on her face and picking cotton with the good old Negroes on the plantation to “show the beauty of American culture.”
There are other nuances which are strategically placed to add context to the Holi and Diwali celebrations portrayed in the first half of the video. The first 70% of the video is full of stereotypes dedicated to establishing to the western audience the “Indianness” of the subjects portrayed — as the west sees it — which they use in the latter part of the video to reinforce their Christian iconography when they show those “die-hard Indians” thronging to hear Mata’s message. It is an euphemism for the openness of all kinds of people to the grace of the gospel.
Although one can say that we are reading too much into the video, given the western assaults on pagan Hindu traditions in academia and elsewhere it is difficult to reject that it has not been done intentionally to pander to the populist views of westerners. How could it be just a spontaneous coincidence to find fancy-dress Hanuman, Shiva, Holi and Sadhus in one video? Unless of course their presence was arranged to aid the furtherance of a certain message — and the message is: no matter how strong your native culture is, there will always be takers for “our message.”
Probably the Church algorithm works in the following way. First come out with a diktat and when people oppose it, use propaganda to resist the people’s views as long as possible until the Church starts losing adherents. But when they see that many are disobeying the diktat and the Church will lose a significant amount of followers, they change. That is how they tackled the “problems” of abortion and gay rights. They resisted as long as they could, but once they realized that the popular backlash was too strong and people were moving away from religion, they made peace with it — and the Pope came out in support of gay rights out of the blue. This itself belies their claim of being the “divine word of God.” Nothing divine about it if you keep changing it for political convenience. Retaining power IS your moral stance.
The “strategic thinkers” in the Christian community see the pagan rituals as a threat and have copied their rituals from a very long time — the Easter egg being a prime example. Either they try to ban pagan rituals or appropriate them in global culture. Now the west has started a copycat festival of colours called Color Run, in order to appropriate Hindu culture and take away our USP. The fact that they responded, and responded so fast, means that there IS probably a central thinker who IS keeping an eye on us and playing it like a chess game — unlike seculars who say “No, there is no Christian agenda. You are seeing too much.”
P.S. To add some insult, the video also features a 5-second clip of Sonam Kapoor. But maybe she deserves this treatment for being hungry for appreciation from western mlecchas!