Today, the brand is changing again. As India transforms itself economically from a lumbering elephant to a bounding tiger, it needs a fresh brand image to keep up with the times. The government even set up, with the collaboration of the business association the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), an India Brand Equity Foundation. They were tasked with coming up with a slogan that encapsulated the new brand in time for the 2006 World Economic Forum session in Davos, where India was the guest of honor. They did. “India: Fastest-Growing Free Market Democracy” was embla-zoned all over the Swiss resort. Brand India was born.
But though it's a great slogan, is it enough? Coca-Cola, for years, offered the “pause that refreshes”: it told you all you needed to know about the product. Does “fastest-growing free market democracy” do the same? India's rapid economic growth is worth drawing attention to, as is the fact that it's a free market (we want foreigners to invest, after all) and a democracy (that's what distinguishes us from that other place over there, which for years has grown faster than us). But isn't there more to us as a country than that?
In fairness to the smart people who coined the phrase, the more attributes you try to get in, the clunkier the phrase and the less memorable it becomes. It's easier for smaller countries that aim for one-issue branding. The Bahamas came up with the great message “It's better in the Bahamas.” Puerto Rico sold itself as a “tropical paradise,” and there's “surprisingly Singapore.” But what do we want the world to think of when they hear the name “India”? Clearly we'd prefer “fastest-growing free market democracy” to replace the old images of poverty and despair. But surely there are other elements we want to build into the brand: the exquisite natural beauty of much of our country, encapsulated in the “Incredible India!” advertising campaign conducted by the Tourism Department; the glitz and glamour of Bollywood and Indian fashion and jewelry designs; the unparalleled diversity of our plural society, with people of every conceivable religious, linguistic, and ethnic extraction living side by side in harmony; and the richness of our cultural heritage, to name just four obvious examples. Yet it would be impossible to fit all that into a poster, a banner, or even a TV commercial. (And we'd still have left out a host of essentials, from ayurveda to IT.)
So the challenge of building Brand India continues. But one essential fact remains: what really matters is not the image but the reality. If we can make India a healthy and prosperous place for all Indians, the brand will be burnished all by itself. Then, and only then, we might even return to “India Shining.”
62. India, Jones, and the Template of Dhoom
ONE OF THE MORE STRIKING INDICATIONS of the way in which perceptions of India have changed around the world lies in your answer to a simple question: Could Steven Spielberg make a film like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom today? It's been just over two decades since that blockbuster swept the world's movie screens, taking boy-wonder Spielberg (who'd already gone from the dental—Jaws—to the transcendental—Close Encounters of the Third Kind) into the cinematic stratosphere. Despite lame dialogue, contrived plotlines, and a visual gloominess that makes you wonder why anyone sat through the thing at all, the real problem with the second film in the Indiana Jones trilogy was undoubtedly its grotesque depiction of India.
The heart of Spielberg's story lay (along with the hearts of assorted human unfortunates) in the eponymous Temple of Doom beneath a palace somewhere in northern India, near the Himalayan border with China. Indiana Jones accompanied by a blond moll and a Chinese sidekick (actually played by a Vietnamese, but the film-makers probably figured that all Asians look alike) enter an Indian temple in quest of a translucent Sivalingam that belongs to an impoverished village. The intrepid trio proceeds to annihilate a blood-thirsty cult of Kali worshipers there and liberate a swarm of children the villains have enslaved. At the end they return the kids and the stone to the village, now prosperous and green again. Virtue has triumphed over evil.
Sounds pretty good, I suppose. The critics thought so (the film scores an astonishing 93 percent favorable rating on the Web site rottentomatoes.com) and so did the fans, who flocked to cinemas from Sacramento to Sydney. Stepping goggle-eyed off Spielberg's celluloid roller coaster, hundreds of millions of people, mostly young and impressionable — people who almost certainly had never set foot on the subcontinent, met an Indian family, or read an exposition of Hinduism — acquired an abiding image of India. It was of a country where kings and courtiers feasted on stewed snakes and monkey brains, where Kali worshipers plucked out the hearts of their victims and embroiled them in flaming pits, and where evil, poverty, and destitution reigned until the Great White Hero could intervene to restore justice and prosperity.
Never mind that anyone with some education and a little common sense should have been able to see how absurd these propositions were — the filmmakers correctly assumed they wouldn't. Given both the relative youth of the audience and the colossal global ignorance about India in those days, the Indiana Jones view of India was swallowed without challenge by cinegoers around the world. (Many NRIs recounted tales of foreigners canceling prior commitments to dinner for fear of being served stewed snakes and monkey brains by their Indian hosts!) Of course, Steven Spielberg and his accomplices weren't involved in any sinister conspiracy to denigrate India; what was at work was not bias but indifference, even sloppiness. Spielberg may well have learned of the exotic culinary practices of some Chinese in Hong Kong, found them sufficiently revolting to be filmed, and put them quite literally into the mouths of Indians. Who knows the difference, he may well have thought, and who cares?
It was in the same vein, then, as his supposedly “Himalayan” village populated not by stocky, high-cheekboned Gurkhas or Garhwalis, but by dark-skinned, long-limbed Sinhalese speakers: those were the extras he found on location in Sri Lanka, and all foreign languages sound alike anyway, don't they? So too the scenes in the temple — he knew what kind of horror would make his shrieking patrons choke on their popcorn, he knew just how his phantasmagorical Temple of Doom should be depicted, and if neither bore any relation to any kind of Indian reality, who would give a damn? After all, an Indian actor was prepared to drag one of his goddesses into the gore and to mouth lines about his religion's desire to stop the spread of Christianity by any means. Why blame Spielberg, if Amrish Puri could sell his self-respect for several fistfuls of dollars?
I can imagine Spielberg's fans rising to his defense with the argument that the film wasn't meant to be taken seriously. But entertainment is a highly effective method of instruction, and the fantasy in Indiana Jones is always anchored in reality: thus, there is a real city (Shanghai), a real country (China), and a real mountain range (the Himalayas), which no one suggests are figments of Spielberg's fancy. But he does not invest any of them with nonexistent sins. India, Indians, and Hinduism, however, do not escape so lightly. The film-makers are cavalier in their disregard. If they had to show Indians, a notoriously vegetarian people, eating yuckily, why with the worst excesses of Chinese carnivorism? If they had to libel a cult, why not invent one, rather than abuse a goddess revered by millions? (The film is set in the 1930s, when Kali worship did not include human sacrifice — a century after the elimination of the Thugs, who by comparison with Spielberg's Amrish Puri, seem positively humanitarian.) Where in a Hindu temple would one worship grotesque skulls and skeletons, and find slogans on Kali scrawled on the walls like so much political graffiti? The reason all these feature in this appalling film is, quite simply, that the filmmakers knew they would get away with it. No one would care — except Indians, and we didn't matter.