Half Full Cup of Chai: India’s Image in Marvel’s ‘Eternals’

With “Eternals,” Marvel’s cinematic universe has reached – in a rather risky manner and to mixed reactions from the cinema-going crowd – in various directions. More into space and cosmic-level events, more toward super powerful, alien heroes, toward a new team of heroes, toward greater diversity… and even to India.

This text is, in a way, a continuation of my piece in the October 2021 issue of The Diplomat’s magazine. That earlier commentary focused on the rising diversity in Marvel’s cinematic universe: on how women and people of color are gradually taking the front stage in the MCU. (They had appeared in the Marvel comics much earlier). Among these appearances, South Asian characters are to be given more space. The upcoming show, “Ms. Marvel,” is to feature an American girl of Pakistani origin, Kamala Khan, in the role of a lead hero. Another forthcoming MCU animation, “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” will apparently let viewers meet the Indian Spider-Man, Pavitr Prabhakar, as well as invite them to visit an Indian metropolis, Mumbattan, a fictional city somewhere in an alternative universe.

Moreover, Marvel hired a Pakistan-born American comedian, Kumail Nanjiani, to play one of the members of its new superhero team in the recent movie “Eternals.” The diversity of the cast and characters is much wider than this, but in the case of India, MCU went beyond the rather token representation and put stress on the country of the hero’s origin, and referred to its history and culture. In “Eternals,” Nanjiani plays the role of an Indian superhero and a Bollywood star named Kingo. He is assisted by another Indian character (Karun, played by Harish Patel), and they converse on screen in Hindi. The film also features a wedding scene that took place in ancient India, a scene on a Bollywood movie set, and a funeral rite where a Sanskrit stanza from Bhagavadgita is chanted. This makes “Eternals” the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie to make proper references to India.

However, it is not my intention to simply keep writing a chronicle of such references. Contrary to my previous article on this subject, what I want to focus on this time is not diversity as such, but how India is being presented in the film. To delve into this a bit more, I will, in a certain way, go to the meta level, looking at how this vision of India was viewed in India (based on Hindi and English reviews of the movie).

This may be a typical case of a half-empty and half-full glass – one’s judgment’s may heavily depend on personal expectations and attitude. The half-empty glass, and let’s say it is a cup of chai, has been served by me above. “Eternals” is at heart a Hollywood movie, where one seldom stumbles upon proper and deeper representation of any non-Western culture. It is also a Marvel movie, a superhero film, not a cinematic treatise on civilizations. Or, to put it even more brutally, the movie was made by an American company, and it is their choice if they want to present any other culture, and to what degree.

It is from this perspective that the chai is half filling the cup. It is true that references to the country are scattered and of no real importance to the main plot, but at least the movie does feature India. The film jumps across centuries of human history in a very superficial manner, but at least one of the choices is to set a wedding scene in the ancient Gupta Empire, one of the largest kingdoms to ever exist in Indian history. As far as the plot is concerned, the makers of the movie could have chosen any setting – it could have as well been medieval Europe or early modern Japan. Not that they deserve words of special gratitude for this, but at least they decided to choose a historical state that is as well-known in India as it is virtually unknown for a Western audience; the average Western cinema-goer might have heard of the Gupta Empire for the first time from “Eternals.”

But it must be noted that reactions in India to the film have been mixed. Some reviewers positively noted the very fact their country was featured. And it is the secondary and comic character played by Harish Patel, the only ordinary Indian to feature in the movie, which received most uniform praise. On the other hand, some mainstream critics frowned at the way India was depicted in at least one of the scenes.

Nanjiani’s character in the movie, Kingo, is a Bollywood star, and in one of the scenes we see him preparing for a movie about himself for his Indian audiences. The scene is thus an Indian movie, set within an American movie, and in a very stereotypical way. Kingo is shown rehearsing for, of course, a Bollywood film dance number. This Bollywood-in-Hollywood scene sequence is what was particularly noticed in Indian reviews, and what I found to be a particularly curious case of debates on presenting other countries. More importantly, it was not only the poor choreography of the dance scene that got bashed by some Indian commentators (“He can barely hold his own on the dance floor,” wrote Nandini Ramnath for Scroll.in; “The dude looks so disinterested and frozen,” wrote Tanul Thakur for the Wire).

In one review of “Eternals,” the established Indian movie critic Anupama Chopra was of the opinion that the Bollywood-in-Hollywood scene was a “lovely idea to […] include another style of mainstream moviemaking [in an American movie].” But she went on to say that this was a “very superficial understanding of a Hindi movie.” Similarly, Harshita Pathak’s Hindi review for Lallantop declared the scene, with all people wearing dazzlingly colorful clothes, looked like a 1970s Bollywood movie, and suggested that the moviemakers should have watched some newer Indian movies instead, to get the taste of their current style. Chopra also suggested that famous Indian choreographer Farah Khan could have been hired to handle the scene. Writing in The Wire, Tanul Thakur was perhaps in a minority by being angry not at how Bollywood was presented, but by the movie’s use of Bollywood as an image of India: The reviewer called it an “infuriating trope that reduces India […] to Bollywood[,] to garish costumes[,] to melodramatic songs.”

These judgments may be a bit harsh to be meted out on a movie that features superhuman eternal personae as its heroes – and hence declares no intention of being realistic. Yet, the commentary from some Indian reviewers is still telling. In hindsight, a line of criticism I would have expected would focus on the idealistic, one-sided picture of the country. The choice of the Bollywood dance scene could be paired with the Gupta Empire period wedding scene. In both cases, when it was decided to include a scene set in India, it was a colorful, dazzling, and ornate one. Many will surely agree that when the image of India comes to the Western mind, it appears at extremes: either dejecting pictures of abject poverty (think “Slumdog Millionaire”) or rosy scenes of colorful opulence (something closer to “Monsoon Wedding”).

But Indian commentators were more precise in their criticism than what I would have admittedly assumed. Those among them who did criticize the representation of India mostly did not focus on idealizing as such – they pragmatically realized that scenes presenting a wedding set in a distant past or those which present the shooting of a contemporary movie are not the same as presenting the country as such. What they called for was, so to speak, more realism-within-fiction: the Bollywood dance scene was not understood by them as Indian reality, but it was pointed out that it could resemble a real Bollywood dance sequence better.

There is probably a conclusion within reach here. When a film clearly sheds all pretense of realism – as in fantasy or superhero movies – this is probably accepted across audiences. This is, of course, different in case of movies that pretend to, or attempt to, be set in our reality (such as, say, political fiction or crime stories). It is in the latter case where Hollywood is criticized most often (the constant sepia sky over Mexico is just a tip of the iceberg here). But this is not what is being considered here. A convention is a convention, and fiction is fiction. Yet, what may be expected by foreign audiences is more realism within that fiction.

In simpler words: If you want to have Bollywood in Hollywood that is fine, and it will not necessarily be understood as a misrepresentation of India – just make sure it is not a misrepresentation of Bollywood. Maybe this is where more avenues of cooperation between Hollywood and Bollywood – or more generally, between the West and the rest – should open, not just in the case of dance sequences, but also attire, languages, and music.