Fifty years ago, at the height of the British Invasion, The Yardbirds released "Heart Full of Soul" (28 May 1965) and The Kinks, "See My Friends" (30 July 1965). Both attempted to evoke something exotic, mysterious, and distinctly different from the flood of productions competing for consumer attention that summer. Drawing on Britain’s long fascination with “The Orient,” these recordings started sixties British pop down a path that proved both rewarding and problematic.
The post The British Invasion, orientalism, and the summer of 1965 appeared first on OUPblog.
By Gordon Thompson
At the July 29, 1965 premiere of the Beatles’ second film, Help!, most viewers understood the farce as a send-up of British flicks that played on the exoticism of India, while at the same time spoofing the popularity of James Bond. Parallel with this cinematic escapism, a post-colonial discourse began that questioned how colonial powers justified their economic exploitation of the world. Eventually, Edward Said’s Orientalism would describe the purpose of this objectification as “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978: 3). In effect, Said and others argued that portrayals of the non-Western other—of which Help!, written by Marc Behm (who had also created Charade, 1963) would be an example—attempted (consciously or otherwise) to justify the myth of European racial superiority. Perhaps Behm, director Richard Lester, and the Beatles saw their film as in the satiric tradition of the Carry On film comedies popular in Britain and parts of the Commonwealth. But for Britain’s growing population of South Asian immigrants, the film would have been one more example of the dominant white culture twisting the identity of an economic underclass to serve the end of dominating it.
Most Westerners have never quite grasped the importance of the Hindu deity Kālī (presented in Help! as “Kāīlī”) and associated her with eighteenth and nineteenth century Indian organized-crime families (Thagīs, the root of the English word, “thug”), some of whom had worshiped her. As the goddess of time, Kālī also represents death, that great leveler of social classes and a figure both honored and feared. British governments fighting crime families profiled Thagī practices, such that for them mother goddess worship joined the list of criminal characteristics. Perhaps they also distrusted any religion that elevated a non-subservient feminine identity to the divine, and Kālī is anything but subservient. Subsequently, Kālī and Thagīs have presented irresistible conflated subjects for novels and films, even as recently as 1984 in the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
The culturally naïve world of the Beatles in 1965 experienced its own loss of identity control as others attempted to manipulate them, a growing disaster to which they contributed. Earlier that spring, a dentist had surreptitiously spiked Lennon and Harrison’s coffees with LSD at a dinner party in an attempt to ingratiate himself. And the Beatles’ extensive use of marijuana on the set of Help! had rendered them extras in their own film. However, early in the filming, the Indian instruments in one scene attracted George Harrison who would have already been aware of the interest in Indian music floating in the British air that spring and summer. A number of other musical compatriots had already been inspired by Indian music, from the Yardbirds (“Heart Full of Soul” in May) to The Kinks (“See My Friends” in July).
Over the next few years, Harrison would more deeply embrace Indian culture, especially music and Hinduism, and renounce the use of psychoactive drugs. Ironically, youthful Western audiences in the sixties created their own Orientalist vision of Indian culture by creating an association between Indian music and drugs and sex. Of course, their purpose was not to support British eco
New in paperback this month is Robert Irwin's Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism & Its Discontents. Widely praised when published in late 2006, Dangerous Knowledge explores the legacy of the Orientalists from ancient civilization to modern times. Critic Michael Dirda wrote in The Washington Post Book World: "Dangerous Knowledge will be hotly argued about in departments of literature and Middle Eastern studies for some time to come. Still, like Robert Irwin, I strongly believe that most scholars work hard to discover and tell us the truth. Dangerous Knowledge is a paean to that noble purpose."
Here’s a quick question from one of our readers.
Sidney Woolf wrote The Twins from Ceylon in the early 1900s. Sells for around $100. She wrote a follow up: More About the Twins in Ceylon. One exists in Brit Library. One in National Library of NZ. None apparently in N America. Do you know anything about it?
Romylin
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