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| From knowledge to seduction (Source: www.hole-in-the-wall.com, www.desinuts.com/pages/2/) |
“May victory be yours”. It’s hard to see where this sentence, the meaning of ‘Jai Ho’, fits in to anything portrayed in the Pussycat Doll version of this song. But, as being one of the few people in North America who hasn’t watched Slumdog Millionaire, who am I to judge. I think the degradation of the meaning of the song into portraits of scantily-dressed, seductive women has a lot to do with the reproducibility of the genre of art. Walter Benjamin describes loss of authenticity of an original piece of art as versions of it are reproduces (1936, pp. 6). With this in mind, I thought the next logical step would be to locate the original source, and then trace all of its adaptations down to the Pussycat Doll hit version.
So, just as any good university student would, I went to the source of all knowledge on the internet: Wikipedia. I soon discovered that Slumdog Millionaire was an adaptation of the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup. From this point, I wanted to figure out where the inspiration for the novel came from. Surprisingly, there was an original project implemented in a slum of Delhi called ‘Hole in the Wall’. Experimenters installed a computer in this slum and allowed children to interact and learn from it without any guidance or direction.
The big question is how is the Hole in the Wall Project linked to the Pussycat Doll version of Jai Ho?
This gets back to what Walter Benjamin (1936, pp. 2) was getting at when he discussed how art loses its ‘aura’ as it gets reproduced. I had to break it down into basic concepts in order to relate each reproduced product to the next version. What I gathered from the Hole in the Wall project website was that its main purpose was to show that the need to obtain knowledge was compulsory, and hardwired into what it is to be human. I think this was the first and most basic form of art. It is almost a human ritual to gain knowledge, and the ways in which the children were doing so was almost in a pure and innocent fashion. The way that this translates over to the novel form has to do with this link of knowledge. In the book, the main protagonist is retelling his life story to a lawyer about how he knows the answer to questions asked in a game. Then the movie adapts this version with Jamal recounting to the authorities on how he has gained certain knowledge over time in order to win the Mumbai ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. Going from the project to the interpretive movie form already depreciates the original art. This occurs just in the way that Benjamin Walters describes in terms of a focal point (1936, pp. 4). In the original experiment, people would analyze the behavior of these children and interpret for themselves. The novel is a whole new form of art for this idea of knowledge. The text mediates between the audience and the author’s interpretations of the original project art. Slumdog Millionaire, in the words of Clifford Geertz (1973, pp. 11), is just another interpretation of an interpretation. The same basic theme of understanding how knowledge is gained is preserved, but the camera instead of text is mediating between the audience and how the script writer and director want to portray the story.
Connecting this to the original music video of ‘Jai Ho’ is a little more difficult. The music video exemplifies the result of the movie. Jamal is victorious in winning “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”. And from this comes the Pussycat Doll version. The degradation of the original art is pretty absolute. The ‘aura’ is almost completely gone. Trying to derive the original concept of compulsory knowledge gain from a music video including half-naked dancing girls is virtually impossible. But, maybe the music video holds some new art form for analysis.
Works Cited
Geertz, C. (1973). Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
Walters, B. (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Los Angeles.
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