Subject: Re: East is east
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 03:50:22 PDT



East is East is written by a Bangladeshi-British playwright, Ayub Khan Din. 
He was born in the UK, and is in his 30s. And no, he is not white. The play 
was produced first; the film followed. So how th Spivakism, of white men and 
brown men and women apply here, is a mystery to me. But then I am not an 
academic.

I suppose everyone's viewing/reading of the film is, by definition 
subjective; I felt Om Puri, who plays the father, brought the internal 
contradictions of being an Asian in the UK of 1970s rather well, of trying 
to build his own little laager around his family, to protect it from the 
city around him, when Enoch Powell was warning about blood on the streets 
(or was it the Thames)? And I think the film humanized, rather than 
caricaturized the Pakistani caught between two cultures; and in the end, the 
intent was to show the pathos, the tragedy, of being caught in those two 
cultures *and* the hypocrisy it entailed. I say this was an intent because, 
clearly, some of the comments on the list suggest that the intent did not 
come through. Of course, I say this without justifying the behaviour of the 
Pakistani husband. Nor do I buy the hype surrounding the film, which 
pretends that it is somehow a path-breaking film.

Salil


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