Local is my favourite colour
Hauz Khas Village, the most rapidly gentrifying quarter of south Delhi, throws up a lot of uneasy juxtapositions. Such as a “pay-what-you-will” café whose walls are adorned with suitably wrinkly-and-wise local colour from the Himalayas, and has a large picture window providing an inviting view of the Village’s own brand of local colour – tiny children, dragging canisters of water up to their shacks down the lane.
But this unwelcome reversal, with the inhabitant unwittingly turning into the object of contemplation and worse, a marker of “authenticity”, for a whole other class about to destroy the very qualities they prize and celebrate as “edgy”, “real” or “colourful” is a sadly universal story.
There is another window down a lane in the Village, which also invites the spectator to contemplate the local colour. The kitsch artefacts in the window are the usual agglomeration of hallucinogenic-candy-coloured horn-OK-please, ideal boy, and Bollywood imagery, but at gringo-baiting prices. It’s a slice of the street, thoughtfully sanitised for those who think the street is seething, perilous chaos. Think that cutting chai tastes of dysentery? That the auto moves like a rampaging bull? That the cow – wait, you have to get a picture of that, or nobody will believe you’re actually in India. Anyway, just put all this on your cushions – chai cups, autos, cows – and voila, you can congratulate yourself on being so giddily foreign that you may well have been reincarnated as a Hindoo.
While kitsch is so well entrenched as a failsafe business strategy in high-class consumer goods, it makes most of this rant just sound like high-minded churlishness, there is something different about this window. It's clearly the product of a uniquely foreign, neo-colonial gaze – with a post-modern twist, as one of the (albeit better-produced) lines dramatises. Aside from a "gaai mata" cushion or two, the line includes coasters and mugs made out of what appear to be “found” studio photographs of south Indian men, posing with touching sincerity, in pastel shirts, lustrous moustaches, and flamboyantly 70s hairdos.
The founder of the product line is a French lady with an enthusiastic sense of humour – who, earlier this year, posted a picture of pink-shirted youths with mullets and moustaches on her product label’s Facebook group, wishing its members a joyous 2011, “filled with lovely moustaches”. Admiring members return the enthusiasm, professing they “love” these men, and occasionally, that they want to marry them.
This light-hearted chatter rings a bit hollow and hypocritical, amplifying the chasm between classes and nationalities that's increasingly making the Village more disquieting than delightful. Quite clearly, these products showcase the charmingly naïve vanity of the local third-world relic, who sports a moustache unironically, qualifying him to be a quaint Other, served up against an equally comically unfashionable starred-or-striped-or-leopard-printed backdrop for the amusement and pleasure of the first-world sophisticate.
As the critic Catherine McDermott puts it, “Kitsch is a sensitive area because enjoyment of it relies on a sense of knowing superiority, which is not far removed from condescension or arrogance. To put it simply, objects that enjoy the status of kitsch in a smart city drawing room may at the same time be on display as an object of reverence in another home.” Like the original studio portraits, which might resonate with personal sentiment for their subjects, and those close to them.
“If you like Kitsch and India, you’ll love us,” goes the catchphrase of the product line. You will, especially if you think kitschy India is best admired from afar, safely behind picture windows and screen-printed images.
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