The Dubious Korean Connection

By Prasenjit Biswas

The Northeast’s extant form of globalization can be gauged from the forest of antennae and new satellite hook-ups that are exemplified by cable agents who popularize a channel such as Arirang TV.

What sets it apart from, say, Australian TV, Animal Planet or AXN, lies in the “cool” stuff it carries that affects both high and popular cultures in the region, especially Nagaland, Manipur valley and parts of Mizoram.

Even DD-I (the national channel) for the first time aired a Korean drama called Emperor of the Sea and then the MBC hit drama A Jewel in the Palace that had viewers glued to the screen.

DVD and CD shops in Nagaland and Manipur are priding themselves on their collections of Korean films, songs, information about everything Korea, starting from hairdos to Ginseng to cooking styles in mainland Korean households and restaurants.

Often the distinction between North and South is blurred in this craze for everything Korean. At the high table of tribal cultures in the Northeast, some recognize a kind of cultural and racial similarity between Korean and regional lifestyles as projected in some of the TV dramas and serials.

The archetypal Korean film or drama hero, who undergoes emotional ups and downs in the course of life-changing experiences and ends up in severe tragic flaws, fascinates the North-eastern psyche and generates instant identification.

One sees here a distinct and emergent pattern in accepting the Korean life-style which, going by Seoul standards, is in reality far too distant.

Yet in phantasmic and heroic performances, Korean small screen actors, the simplicity and soundness of Korean life, provides a catharsis to the drudgery of existence in the region.

The contrast of worldviews between Hindi pop and Korean sop lies in the latter’s instant appeal in developing experiential connections between producers and audiences across local and diasporic themes.

For example, a theme of the Korean TV show Men of the Bath House, written by Kim Soo Hyun, deals with very ordinary people who struggle in togetherness to keep alive the Confuscian value of sharing both joy and suffering in a common place, a bath house. It also recreates and reproduces the largely Asian cultural symbol of the “bath-house” prevalent from China to Japan that finds its echo in youth dormitories in Nagaland and Mizoram.

The culture of in-group decision-making and reverence for the most intelligent and diligent in a North-eastern tribal village find its more colorful parallel in the work of Lee Joo Hyun, Kim Hee Sun and others in Korean TV drama.

Like the story of how a rich grandmother drives out her granddaughter-in-law and ruins the life of her grandson, who, in turn, wrecks the lives of the women with whom he falls in love with. It evokes empathy for the “victim” as there is a submission of masculinity to the values of fidelity that still rules family life in Korea.

Apart from such TV shows, video parlors in Nagaland and Manipur find many takers for hit Korean films like My Sassy Girl, A Moment to Remember, Windstruck, My Wife is a Gangster, Silmido, Joint Security Area, Sex is Zero (a Korean version of American Pie), etc. Posters of Korean actors and actresses like Gweon Sang-woo, Cha Tae-hyun, Jeon Ji Hyun, Jung Da Bin and Song Seung Hun and many others adorn hostel rooms in colleges and universities. Even phraseology determined by Korean dialogue is frequently exchanged on the street and the youth often greet each other with anna saiyo (hello), sarange (I love you), watuke (what to do) and waju waju (yes, yes).

If this symbolizes South Korean up market stuff, North Korean imagery does not lag behind. In Kohima and Imphal, one comes across T-shirts embossed with portraits of President Kim Il Sung underscored by anti-American messages. One even hears talks of the Korean style of baking cakes during Christmas and how mouth-watering Korean bamboo shoots are.

Of course, one also knows the Koreans are not too fond of what the Nagas cherish – red chillis. But however much the Korean kitsch for satisfying a transnational palate is not really included in the North-east context, it has managed to evoke a taste for a decidedly curious reason in the region.

This rapid advance of Korean television might be enough to incense homegrown media circles – after all, how have Korean products acquired such popularity even without any direct cultural, linguistic or ethnic connections – but then there is the undoubted emergence of a “virtual neighborhood” between the Northeast and fellow Asian countries because of spaces having been electronically intervened.

These virtual neighborhoods bring home the taste of other cultures and promote an electronic reproduction of local cultures that purport to make survival possible. They surpass the spatial realm and sustain themselves by flooding the lived-in spaces of North-east tribes to exemplify the concept of connecting “distant shores”.

In analysis, the Koreanisation of the Northeast serves to point a finger at the forces that are at work in Nagaland and Manipur.

**The writer is associate professor, department of philosophy, North East Hill University, Shillong