FEAR OF THE ‘ OTHER URBAN’ MUMBAI, MIGRATION AND XENOPHOBIA IN THE REPRESENTATIONAL POLITICS OF KANNADA FILMS: H.A. Anil Kumar
Mumbai: As a Den-set, Villain and City of Travel:
Mumbai is popularly known as a city-of-migrants. Often aggressive
politics considers it as a city of immigrants. The population and its
variety have been represented only as ‘bewildering’ within Kannada
films that have depicted Bombay/Mumbai. Also, there is an outright
refusal to ‘depict’ Mumbai’s population as a ‘specific entity’ within its
filmy frames. On the other hand, arguably, Hindi films or Bollywood
films allege a specific entity of Mumbai. No film in Kannada is wholly
located, narrated and set within Mumbai. The population of Mumbai
and its linguistic variety indicating a permanent linguistic (and hence)
cultural diversification is something that is an integral part of being
‘urban’ and ‘threatening’ to the otherwise homogenized construct of
Kannada through its films. Mumbai and Bollywood films have never been
able to encroach the positivist psyche of the process of Kannada film making,
despite the former’s authority and populace in the art of filmmaking.
This Mumbai is considered as a ‘city-of -travel’ in the
history of Kannada films. Kannada heroes always visit
Mumbai only to ‘move out of it’ at the end! It is a city that
houses the villainous other-half of the protagonist (the
villain Raj Kumar in “Dari Tapped Magi” (1975), literally
defaces and pinches off the pleasure of childhood for
another hero (Vishnuvardhan in “Saahasa Simha”; 1982),
avails with friends who turn out to be terrorists and
jeopardize the institution of family and nation (“AK 47”,
1999, “Slum Baala”, 2008). ‘Emerging out of Mumbai’ also
indicates that the Kannada film protagonists always enter
it at the first place but never begin from or end up there.
Generally speaking, it is Mumbai and not Bengaluru
which is the ‘urban’ in Kannada films. It is the only city that
behaves so in Kannada filmic representation. It also means
that there is ‘only’ urban but no ‘foreign’ in Kannada films.
Herein Kolkata is almost absent, Delhi and the Himalayas
are meant only for song sequences, for instance. The rest
of the world outside India, in the films produced after
90s are fairylands that refuse to have specific addresses.
Kannadigas don’t speak but only sing in Kannada in foreign
location within filmic representations by and large.