9 April 2009
A.R. Rahman isn’t the first Irish number one act who was born in India—that’d be child of the Raj, Cliff Richard—but he provides our first chart-topping representative from the rich Indian tradition of music for cinema. The feature credit to Nicole Scherzinger is odd, since she was still a member of The Pussycat Dolls. Sure enough, by February 2010 all the non-Nicole members had left the group, which I admit is a baller way of Nicole to go solo.
Beyond the fact of Rahman’s participation, though, I’m not sure how enthusiastic I can be about the rest of this project’s representation of India. The video (below) of the single is a big day out for cultural appropriation. The single is an Americanised version of the original song from the soundtrack to the movie. And the movie? Well, it was one of the cinema hits of 2009, and our friends in India will have the views that matter on Slumdog Millionaire’s Western depiction of Indian society. (India also has its own rich tradition of cinema, with its own depictions of Indian society.)
I’ll confine my remarks to this single’s connection with the movie’s astonishingly problematic concept of destiny. Free will, social justice, and especially female agency: a male protagonist’s destiny (read: possession-based social status) beats ’em all! This is less to do with Indian society and more with Hollywood’s own sexist, patriarchal paradigm – the hero prospers (all thanks to an imported British TV quiz show format! There’s cultural colonialism for you!) and gets some was-reluctant, now-compliant celebratory totty to boot. But for Western audiences the romanticised buzzword ‘destiny’ was their flashcard takeaway from Slumdog Millionaire’s mocktail of misery tourism and new-age orientalism. That’s the wave this single is surfing, so it’s difficult for me to consider it in isolation. Anyway, here’s its score – I mean, its destiny.
Irish Number Ones 