Columnists
Lost in translation
With an innocent wink, Priya Prakash set millions of teen hearts aflutter. Enter, the fringe
It doesn’t take 15 minutes to be famous anymore. As the Priya Warrier video — a clip from the young actor’s debut film on innocent love — shows, it happens in the wink of an eye. And generates a controversy with a disparaging lift of a brow. With 15 million hits, a spawn of memes, TV discussions and a rage of endorsement from neighbouring Pakistan and faraway Egypt, it just seemed too good to be true. After all, the clip is about the innocence of the earth’s purest and most primal emotion called love. The thing with its engulfing hugeness is that it swallows most but also attracts the tiny desperados that oppose it like moths to a flame. So it is that as the nation went “video gaga”, a couple of radicalised fringe elements in Hyderabad raised a banner of moral revolt against Priya and her film, saying it insulted Prophet Mohammad and was unIslamic. They even filed a case against it, seeking withdrawal of the promotional video from all platforms and compelling its filmmaker to apologise for hurting sentiments. Seeking recourse in upholding religious and minority rights — a euphemism for strong-arming some relevance for their isolated selves — the reverential aspect of the song, they felt, was diluted by the exchange of glances between the onscreen characters.
What they seem to forget is that the song, on which the young love is picturised, talks about the love between the Prophet and his wife and her knowing that he was The One in the glance of an eye. The ditty is quite popular in Kerala and has been used as a film leitmotif since the 1970s, the instrumentation and background score changing to suit the times. But the lyrics, driving home the divinity of love, have never been played around with. The extreme absurdity of fringe logic lies in the fact that the Malayalam version doesn’t sound right when translated into English, a far-fetched extrapolation of a culture statement. Given the lingual diversity in India, much would get lost in translation but would it demean the celebration and divinity inherent in the original composition? Or would we keep versions that suit political contexts and stifle the others? Clearly logic doesn’t matter when it comes to radicals who will clutch at easy headlines to grab the spotlight. The more worrisome bit is that it is not done by the hawkish old guard of the Karni Sena but young engineering students of Hyderabad, avid netizens who know the democracy of the Internet and negotiate it daily as a forum of youth engagement. And all would agree that this is not the first time that any film is exploring the first crush moment with eye movements and a gentle blush. If these fanatics are given further legitimacy, then it would indeed be a heartbreaking moment for a nation that has lost its innocence anyway.
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