Deepening the Shades of the Brown Gaze

By Prerna Chaudhary (Advertising and Marketing Communications ‘22)

“Don’t bring too much attention to yourself. Nazar lag jayegi” “You’ll get the evil eye’s/negative auro’s attention,” or at least that’s how it translates to English to the best of my Hindi heritage speaker ability.

Nazar is a concept people from various cultures are familiar with, and we even see some derivative version of it in cinema: the gazes. Male, white, heteronormative, female, etc. If nazar is other people’s attention despite the type of sentiment behind it, then gaze is a form of it. The various gazes are what the eye or camera focuses on and brings attention to. Many times, minorities seek to subvert stereotypes by being the opposite of them, but that performance is still a product of the systems that enforce the stereotype. In the Western world of white male heteronormative gaze, can minority cinematic nazars exist independently or solely as a response?

One of these minority gazes comes from Asian Americans. At this point, Asian American issues are dominated by the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes since March 2020, but, before that, there was something else: representation. Anyone participating in Asian America’s discourse was bound to come across it. Now, with other (more?) pressing concerns first, being seen has taken a backseat…temporarily.

It makes me wonder if representation was the concern that so much attention was directed towards because it was easily digestible – income disparity, varying education levels, prejudice and ununified political leanings aren’t as sexy as aching to see yourself in Hollywood. The “yourself” being the privileged sector of Asian Americans that make up the forefront of the discourse. To be fair, it’s not just the Asian diaspora that pays a great detail of attention to seek validation from Hollywood, a notoriously exclusive industry known for its gatekeeping. Other minority communities, like the LGBTQ, Muslim, Latinx and even women communities discuss their desire to see themselves in mainstream media publicly, sometimes in think pieces like this one. The difference is the prevalence of representation in Asian America’s discourse, at least the one that I encountered, within itself and its projections to those on the outskirts. Representation, however, as sick of hearing that word as I am, is essential and can be effectively sympathy (and tear) inducing when done right.

It’s movies like “Mogul Mowgli” that remind me of this. Emmy award winning and Oscar nominated actor Riz Ahmed co-wrote the movie with writer/director Bassam Tariq. Ahmed revealed in New Yorker’s Radio Hour that while being an actor requires one to leave oneself behind, he never gets to play anyone like him. Not in “Venom,” “Star Wars Rogue One,” “Sound of Metal,” or even “The Night Of,” where he played a young Muslim man, Naz. While he has the privilege of playing non South Asian or Muslim characters on screen because he can look white passing at times, even “The Night Of” felt like media from the white gaze. What else can you expect when none of the screenwriters were Muslim themselves? The mini series critiques the American justice system’s treatment of Naz and how the prosecutors categorized him as a rebel simply because he was Brown and Muslim, which can be the same to anyone outside of the politicized identities.

While the show effectively sheds light on Naz’s mischaracterization, a minority struggling at the hands of white people and their system is what the industry produces with big budgets. We watch it, too, and assume that one portrayal to be the truth. “Mogul Mowgli” seeks to define the South Asian/Muslim/Diasporic/Brown gazes by simultaneously going against and being entirely independent from the white gaze. In the same interview, Ahmed pointed out that he and Tariq went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on an extended guided tour of the Islamic Art exhibition. Black American and LGBTQ filmmakers have had their own genres of movies that are specifically made for people in their communities and have a few common elements. Similarly, going to the art exhibition allowed them to pull from Islamic, not European or white American, art styles and motifs, like the inclusion of Qawwali music. Using these elements shaped the authenticity of their world for the Brown diaspora and made it tangible. Ahmed and Tariq were successful in opening a possibility of narratives like theirs.

“Will the blurred lines between reality and precocious thoughts be a staple in Brown gaze cinema and media?”

Throughout “Mogul Mowgli,” the main character Zed struggles with his dichotomous identities: British vs. Pakistani Muslim, commercial rapper vs. artist and alternative vs. modern medicine patient. He is both but feels like he has to choose one: be a mogul or mowgli, a misguided interpretation of a South Asian character that capitalized the colonized. Right when Zed thinks he has it figured out and is about to get his big break as a rapper, he visits home for the first time in years, ironic for someone who’s music profits from and seeks to define home and their place in post-Brexit Britain:

“Where You From” by Riz Ahmed “Britain’s where I’m born, and I love a cup of tea and that But tea ain’t from Britain it’s from where my DNA is at ... And I just got the shits when I went back to Pak And my ancestors Indian, but India was not for us

... Now everybody everywhere wantin’ their country back If you want me back to where I’m from, then bruv, I need a map”

Both the creator of Mowgli from “The Jungle Book,” Rudyard Kipling, and Zed are creating art and capitalizing off of a culture that they cannot call fully call their own. After Zed was diagnosed

with an autoimmune disease, the audience sees visions, deliberately confusing in their relation to reality. Some are Zed’s visions, some his father’s, who suffers trauma from narrowly escaping the brutality of the India-Pakistan partition. Ahmed’s own tracks, “Toka Tek Singh” and “Mogambo,” are used for parts of the score to explain two seemingly unrelated partitions. Seeing the effect of the partition, even indirectly through the father’s dreams, on the big screen was one of the most satisfying moments of the movie for me. In so many ways, there are parallels between the partition and Brexit. The depiction of Zed and his father experiencing the same exclusion and mental displacement is viceral. In Zed’s visions, he starts out wearing a hospital patient’s generic gown with a small pink print. As his visions progress and he reconnects with his family, his gown becomes more and more embellished with South Asian clothing elements: small circular mirrors and a vest with tassels. The film has been described as magic realism, a term that I only became aware of when I read Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Will the blurred lines between reality and precocious thoughts be a staple in Brown gaze cinema and media?

The film further carved out its place in the overarching Brown gaze by having characters speaking Urdu/Hindi and not translating each part in the subtitles. By Zed’s mother ridding him of his nazar before his big break. By Zed switching between languages and merging them. By showing Zed’s father’s distrust of Western medicine. By Zed attending the mosque and then smoking right after. The beauty of having a genre dedicated to a subgroup is that the people in that group are more likely to understand the media than those in the dominant group. The minority is the audience. This media contains inside jokes, cultural references and parts of our communities we don’t see in the white gaze. By having our own genres, we can redefine our narratives.

Without getting too broad, the following media has made me feel validated in my existence:

• Ramy Youssef’s “Ramy”

• Hasan Minhaj’s “Homecoming King”

• Nida Manzoor’s “We are Lady Parts”

• Mindy Kaling’s “Never Have I Ever”

• Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko”

• Charles Yu’s “Interior Chinatown”

• Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger’s “Love Victor”

• Issa Rae’s “Insecure”

• Anna Konkle and Maya Erskine’s “PEN15”

• Sally Rooney’s “Normal People”

Still, there is tons of media with Asian Americans, diaspora communities and children of immigrants that I do not relate to, but I can have sympathy for the characters, which is the goal (outside of profit). And I realize how ironic it is to point out the problems with the main narrative of Asian diasporic topics being dominated by representation while that is the essence of this piece. Am I a hypocrite? Yes. I do, however, believe that stand out pieces that actually come from the communities they represent deserve recognition if they are deepening our stories. We are continuing to define and live through Brown America, Brown diaspora, the Brown experience. With that in mind, I’ll continue to quote Riz Ahmed’s “Fast Lava”:

“I’ll spit my truth and it’s Brown.” Perhaps we can work to deepen the shades of the Brown gazes through our own nazar.

Nazar lag jane do. Let the nazar be on you. Embrace it.

“Mogul Mowgli” movie poster (source: imdb.com)

Naz rapping (screenshot from “Mogul Mowgli”)

Toba Tek Singh (screenshot from “Mogul Mowgli”)