Jennifer Aniston & Adam Sandler’s Murder Mystery 2 iterates Hollywood confusion over India’s pluralism

Jennifer Aniston in off-white ghagra choli and Adam Sandler in matching sherwani would seem quite the showstoppers on a fashion runway, you reckon, as the duo goes desi with sartorial modishness in their new film, Murder Mystery 2. The two stars are soaking in Hollywood’s newfound love for inclusivity, in a film they have co-produced. The reason they don ethnic Indian chic is a scene showcasing the great Indian wedding — or whatever the film’s makers have perceived such a ceremony to be, perhaps influenced by the sort of shaadi naach-gaana that goes on in Bollywood productions. Which is not a problem really, except unlike most Bollywood biggies, the writer and director of Murder Mystery 2 clearly have no idea about India’s complex identity as a pluralistic society. Jeremy Garelick’s crime comedy, otherwise a passable entertainer with the odd spoof twists, becomes inadvertently amusing for the confusion its script unleashes while trying to toast the colours of India, muddling up culture and identity tropes of North and South India without the makers probably realising the fact. The groom at the wedding is a Maharaja, played by British actor Adeel Akhtar, who walks into the film caricaturing the swagger and body language of Punjabi rappers. His deliberately accented English and wardrobe — kurta-pyjamas with sneakers, pearl necklace and gold-framed shades — are, of course, meant to underline comic characterisation, though you don’t miss the inherent stereotyping. Everything about the wedding Sangeet that follows bears a trademark Punjabi punch, duly set to mood as the DJ belts out Bollywood hits from Khadke glassy to Chhamma Chhamma. Nice touch, you feel, as Aniston in ghagra jives to Avinash-Vishwajeet’s original composition King di wedding. And then, amid the pomp of an extravagant Punjabi wedding, comes the whopper: As Akhtar’s Maharaja makes a grand entry on an elephant, the DJ announces his name: “The groom — Vikram Govindan!” Writer James Vanderbilt would perhaps have no way to realise what’s irrational about such an ethnic incongruity, so by a stretch of imagination we will grant the makers of Murder Mystery 2 the licence of imagining Akhtar’s Vikram Govindan as a rare Tamil Brahmin who walks, talks and weds like a Punjabi. Maybe Aniston and Sandler watched too much of Kunal Nayyar as Rajesh Koothrapali in The Big Bang Theory before deciding the on-screen profile of Vikram Govindan the Maharaja. In that popular show, Koothrapali, clearly a South Indian name, is depicted as a North Indian man with origins in Delhi. Things obviously haven’t changed much since the days Peter Sellers was accused of perpetuating Brown stereotypes without bothering about details in the Blake Edwards hit, The Party, though, spurred by its ongoing wave of inclusivity Hollywood seems more interested in accommodating India and Indianness in screenplays now. Back then, The Guardian critic Shane Danielson had described Sellers’ 1968 hit as “a comic masterpiece”, but added in the same line: “Hardly the most enlightened depiction of our subcontinental brothers”. Casting Brown actors Adeel Akhtar and Kuhoo Verma as Vikram the Maharaja and his sister Saira would seem like progress from the time White actor Sellers donned brown make-up to essay the Indian protagonist Hrundi V. Bakshi in The Party, but the overall lack of understanding what constitutes India’s multicultural essence is yet to begin in Hollywood. It is the same lack of awareness about India’s pluralistic culture that SS Rajamouli tried highlighting recently in the United States, shortly after his film _RRR_ won the Golden Globe for the song, _Naatu Naatu_, and a few days before the film would go on to win an Oscar in the same category. During the promotional campaign for the Oscars, the filmmaker addressed a group of American journalists after a screening of his film at the Directors Guild of America. He introduced his film saying: “This is not a Bollywood movie. This is a Telugu film from the south of India, where I come from.” Many among India’s Twitter brigade took affront at Rajamouli’s comment, claiming RRR was nominated as an Indian entry and not as a Telugu or South Indian film. While the contention is not wrong, Twitterati criticising Rajamouli’s comment seem to be missing the filmmaker’s point of view: Over the years, the mainstream Indian brand of cinematic entertainment highlighted by song-dance sequences, loud action and melodrama has come to be generically, and somewhat unfairly, defined as ‘Bollywood’. Outside India, especially in the United States and Hollywood, any commercial film coming out from our country is still prone to be classified as Bollywood fare simply because of the West’s lack of knowledge about the several regional language film industries that also exist.

Hollywood’s lack of awareness about India and its culture is also closely linked with the industry’s stereotyping of characters based out of our country. Peter Sellers and The Party were, after all, not a one-off case. One can recall Amrish Puri’s Mola Ram in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom (1984), a thuggee priest engaging in human sacrifice. Puri’s get-up — bearing Aztec, African and Hawaiian styles — hardly looked Indian. The film itself was absurdly offensive in its depiction of India as a country where people feasted on monkey brain and where human-sacrificing cults thrive. Stereotyping Indian culture in a way it reveals lack of awareness in Hollywood can be seen in the animated space, too, notably in a show as popular as The Simpsons. As recently as in 2017, the show created an uproar with its racially cliched character Apu, so much so white actor Hank Azaria, who voiced the role, finally quit with an apology. While sundry other Hollywood films have tried to regale using the larger-than-life song-dance template of Indian mainstream films before _Murder Mystery 2_, a very different breed has tried projecting what they perceive as the realistic face of India. Most such films — typified by _Slumdog Millionaire_ (2008) and _The White Tiger_ (2021) — choose to present the country as a mammoth slum witnessing the chaos of unplanned development. A lot of it is true, but there are many more authentic facets of India waiting to be understood and discovered, in between the worlds of the Slumdog and the Maharaja. Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist and journalist who loves to write on popular culture. Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.