Did you know that Chicken Tikka Masala doesn't exist in India? Britain's national dish, Chicken Tikka Masalam was the creation of Pakistani chef, Ali Ahmad Aslam, the owner of Glassgow's Shish Mahal restaurant. It originated after a customer insisted that the chicken they served was too dry. All Ali did was pair the chicken with a typical South Asian gravy made from onion and tomato and dried spices and voila, the dish became a staple in the UK. In India two sums of the whole are eaten separately: you either get a chicken tikka that's prepared in a tandoor or you get a Butter chicken with the velvety gravy.
All of which is to say, the intermingling of culinary traditions and cultures altogether is just one of the effects of colonialism. And yet, you won't need a historian to notice how interconnected the UK ans India are, not just because of our past but with immigrant culture and the South Asian diaspora in the present. The best example of this would be UK's official Oscar entry for 2024: a Hindi film. Directed by British-Indian filmmaker Sandhya Suri, Santosh is an international co-production with British and French producers and an all-Indian cast.
Shot in Uttar Pradesh, Santosh is a character-driven crime thriller about a newly widowed woman who steps in as a constable in place of her late husband, working in the murder investigation of a young girl from a lower class. The film premiered in the 'Un Certain Regard' category at the Cannes Film Festival this year. This is also Sandhya's narrative feature debut after her acclaimed documentary I for India (2005) and the BAFTA nominee short film The Field, which won Best International Short at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018.
To be selected as a nominee for the International Feature Film Award at the Academy, a film has to be a feature-length motion picture (over 40 minutes) produced outside the USA and its territories with a predominantly (more than 50 per cent) non-English dialogue track. This year, Jonathan Glazer's Holocaust drama, The Zone of Interest, won the Best International Feature Oscar at the 2024 Academy Awards. It was the first British film to win an award in that category.
Santosh as UK's official entry for the Oscars garnered a lot of mixed reactions online, and rightfully so. Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor tweeted, "How utterly astonishing that a Hindi language film with an Indian cast is the UK‘s official entry for the Oscars! Guess we should be rooting for it too." Other users thought it wasn't a big deal taking in account the brilliance and ingenuity of Indian storytellers that has enriched our cinematic heritage.
Within the discourse there is pride, maybe even blind pride, something we are guilty of when it comes to any accomplishment on the global landscape. There is also the subtext of a post-colonial entitlement which allows the colonizer to see the culture of the colonised as their own. It is between these two narratives that a lot of contention about this film is born in the online spaces. But despite this, there is the joy of recognition as well, from the production team, that is free from either of the above and is rooted in pure merit. And I think that's the one we should all go with.
Who should be credited for the film? Where the story comes from or the creators that contribute in bringing the story to the world? Both. That's the point of an international feature. The category represents the beauty of people coming together to highlight stories from across geographies and cultures. Like its predecessors that brought stories about a Czech concert cellist (Kolya - 1996), a French octogenarian couple (Amour - 2013), a Mexican domestic worker (Roma - 2018) and 4 Danish high school teachers (Another Round - 2020) to the foreground, Santosh is an important film too.
India is infamous for its casteist and religious tones that undercurrent the crime ans especially the murders in the country. These things have a way of being misinterpreted and can turn into a caricature of the issue when not portrayed authentically. On the other hand, our society also has a tendency to censor voices of dissent in order to maintain the status quo which is why in a land where Hanuman is worshipped, Dev Patel's Monkey Man struggled to find a theatrical release India.
For this reason, I'm glad Santosh comes from a team of British producers with a British-Indian director known for her cinéma vérité style of storytelling. It's the best of both worlds converging purely for the love of craft and truth and I'm certainly rooting for it.
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