The descent of the accent
Carmen Van Kerckhove of Addicted to Race, a sister blog to Racialicious, did a half-hour podcast on the Simpsons issue. She kindly let me shoot my mouth off about the Rudyard Kipling - Peter Sellers connection to Apu despite having a face made for radio and a voice fit for mime. The ‘Gunga Din’ bit is at the very end, check it out:
If you’ll recall the abused, subservient water carrier in Kipling’s poem ‘Gunga Din‘…
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Sam Jaffe in brownface as Gunga Din |
An’ the man that spied me first
Was our good old grinnin’, gruntin’ Gunga Din…‘E carried me away
To where a dooli lay,
An’ a bullet come an’ drilled the beggar clean.
‘E put me safe inside,
An’ just before ‘e died:
“I ‘ope you liked your drink,” sez Gunga Din…Din! Din! Din!
You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din!
Tho’ I’ve belted you an’ flayed you,
By the livin’ Gawd that made you,
You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din! [Link]
That’s what Apu reminds me of when he gets shot and wishes his robbers, ‘Thank you, come again.’
‘Gunga Din’ may just be the Patient Zero of the bad desi accent. It inspired three horrid movies in brownface: Gunga Din (1939), The Party, and the Monkey Brains Express itself, Temple of Doom:
Gunga Din is a 1939 RKO adventure film… about three British sergeants and their native water bearer who fight the Thuggee, a religious cult of ritualistic stranglers in colonial India. The movie stars Cary Grant… Douglas Fairbanks Jr. … and, in the title role, Sam Jaffe…
In The Party, Sellers plays an Indian actor in the role of Gunga Din, and a parody of the film’s climax has Sellers blowing his bugle to warn the British Army to such annoying effect, that his own troops start shooting at him; in Revenge of the Pink Panther, the mad genius Dreyfus quotes the insane guru’s speech… Many of the events and scenes from… Temple of Doom are taken from Gunga Din, including casting a lookalike as the Thuggee leader… [Link]
This colonialist piece of lint was nominated for an Oscar at the time:
The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White. In 1999 the film was deemed “culturally significant” by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. [Link]
Peter Sellers then worked on his bad accent in The Party, and the accent inspired Hank Azaria’s voicing of Apu.
Carmen often responds to reader comments. You can comment here, leave a message at 206-203-3983, or email to addictedtorace@gmail.com. You can also subscribe to the podcast from iTunes.
on Wednesday, July 25th, 2007, 3:14 am in Issues, Radio, Simpsons, TV › 
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Hey Manish, thank you so much for coming on the show! You were great - I hope we can do it again soon.
Manish, believe it or not. There was a guy who acted and sounded like Peter Sellers in the Party at my college. And to make things funnier, he was the one who recommended The Party to me. He was a smug know it all though. So the similarities ended with the accent and goody expressions.
And the Short Circuit whitey in brownface? Hate to break it to you. But in the 80s, that was not far off reality when it came to some Indian grad students. I thought he did an OK job with the accent considering a certain amount of exagerration always takes place in those kind of cheesy comedies.
kipling was also a supporter of reginald dyer (responsible for the jallianwala bagh massacre), as part of a group of brit sympathizers who raised some money for dyer after he was stripped of his military title and sent back to england.
I saw gungadin..I dont think even the actors are Indian in that movie..they make movies on India but without indian actors. strange. No wonder,accents are different and characters are unreal and dont depict real Indians in India of those times.
Gandhi being played by Ben Kingsley was a better one at least had roshan seth and a lot of indian actors in the movie..
Ismail merchant made a movie with pierce brosnan on Indian bandits story probably based on around the same time as Gunga din, but there were a lot of indian actors in that movie which was more realistic than Gunga din. The movies name was “Deceivers”. It was produced by Merchant Ivory. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094979/
Peter Sellars in “The Party” was fantastic. He’s playing an actor that’s supposed to be playing Gunga Din.
I personally was glad when that motherfucker Gungadin dies at the end. And that idiotic scene where he gives the fucking salute and proud to be an honorary British soldier.