“Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?”

This past summer, as the pandemic encouraged binge-watching, even quite a few non-Indians were feasting on a show that was all about arranged marriages in India.  The eight episodes of Indian Matchmaking provided entertainment for many who otherwise couldn't be bothered to learn anything about India.  That's entertainment!

I didn't watch even one episode, but I read plenty of commentaries about the show.  And, yes, I blogged about it!  In that post, I noted:

The average non-Indian viewer might not imagine an India beyond the Hindu upper-caste that the show is about: 

Though the show is called Indian Matchmaking, it portrays no couples who identify as Muslim, Christian, or Dalit—communities that represent close to 40 percent of India’s 1 billion–plus population.

I ended that post with this:

Netflix has the last laugh in this, similar to how the current President owes it all to the entertainment of the lowest kind.

What a depressing and sad state of the world!

We did recently watch a six-episode show that was also about matchmaking and weddings in India.  It was not merely entertainment, however.  A viewer who knew nothing about the Subcontinent but delightfully watched Indian Matchmaking would not have watched this show because it requires paying attention to the characters, their names, their religions, the words they use, the differences among them, the political backdrop, ... It would have been too much of a learning experience. 

As an educator who has tried his best to get a few people interested in the Subcontinent--and failed miserably at that--I don't expect a lot of crossover audience from Indian Matchmaking to ... A Suitable Boy.

The title for this post comes from a New Yorker interview with the director of A Suitable Boy--Mira Nair:

I’ve talked to a bunch of friends who’ve read “A Suitable Boy,” and some of them have said a version of “When I read that book when I was eighteen or twenty or twenty-three, I was so angry about who Lata ended up with. And now I’ve read it as someone who’s thirty-five or forty or fifty, and I understand the decision she made.” You don’t have to tell us how your series ends, but did you have a similar feeling with the book, and do you understand that emotion?

I understand Lata, and I never wanted to feel in the film that Lata settles. She sees people for who they are, to some extent, in her youthful way, but the question, which I love, that Vikram asks in the book is “Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?” That’s Lata’s question, really, all the time, and I think she makes a decision that she knows will work to make herself grow. So that’s the way I saw it.

“Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?” 

That's not an Indian question.  It is universal.  

The characters, their language and religions, the locale, and plenty more could be different across the world, but the universality of “Is it possible to be happy without making others unhappy?” is beyond doubt.  (If only people would read fiction set in other parts of the world, and watch foreign movies.  Here again, I am trying my best as an educator, like a freshman seminar in which students can learn about the world by reading and discussing a short story every week.)

The actor who plays the character Lata, Tanya Maniktala, relates to her own personal life:

Maniktala teared up over the phone as she reflected on her own grandfather’s trauma as a Hindu refugee forced by the 1947 partition to flee to India from what is today Pakistan. “I realize how important pain is, and the lessons” to be found in that, she said.

“The kind of empathy people had — I feel the humanity aspect has been on the decline,” she continued. “We have to remember where we came from. We can never forget.”

The trauma of the 1947 partition continues to haunt India and Pakistan.

Mira Nair's movies are never mono-cultural, nor are they set in any comfortable geographic spaces.  NPR's Scott Simon asked Nair about this:

SIMON: Miss Nair, I have to ask you - back to the first film of yours I saw, "Mississippi Masala." Your films have been a wonderful celebration of the masala, if you please, of multiculturalism, of people from all various parts of the world spontaneously being thrown together and making a society out of themselves and each other's lives and joining together to create something distinctive and unique and amazing. Are you worried about the prospects for multiculturalism in today's India and, for that matter, today's America?

NAIR: In America, I feel that we are waking up to multiculturalism. We are waking up to the power of culture, of color, you know? I mean, with the whole movements, finally, of Black Lives Matter and even the #MeToo movement, there's been an enormous sort of galvanizing. So I feel actually here, energized. Part of what inspired us, Sooni Taraporevala, the writer and myself, to make "Mississippi Masala" was first the racism within us in our own Indian community. And that led into this interracial love story, really, with the African American community in Mississippi.

I sort of see it as an anthem to Kamala Harris. Like, Kamala Harris is, in a way, the child of Mina and Demetrius in "Mississippi Masala." And finally, 30 years later, today's young can see that she didn't come out of nowhere, that this is a culture that is there and not seen. So I must say, there is a feeling of being heartened here.

In India, I refuse to despair, but I am deeply disturbed about the systematic obliteration, really, of precisely that that makes us powerful and strong, which is, I think, our plurality and our layered - our interconnectedness, not just really from - you know, from the entire silk route, from Iran, from, you know, all through Pakistan, Balochistan to India. This is a region that has influenced so many aspects of who we are as Indians, you know, today in religion and music and poetry. This is so much what also is in "Suitable Boy." So I feel that that is our power. And it would be very reductive to make it a one religion, one nation. That is not the absolute extraordinary glory of where we come from.

If only more people watched such shows and reflected on the human condition!