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Hello, Bolly! The Idiot's Guide to Bollywood I grew up in Pakistan on Bollywood films. At the time, though, we didn’t use the term. We called them Indian films, to distinguish them from the churnings of Pakistan’s comparatively dwarfish film industry. Indian films were banned but available everywhere; posters, newspaper cutouts and pirated video cassettes all testified to India’s domination of the popular culture. That ban has now been lifted. The demand for Bollywood in neighboring Pakistan has soared so consistently that the government, despite its covert war with India in the mountains of Kashmir, has had to give in: this year, for the first time in decades, a Bollywood period piece is being shown in movie theaters across Pakistan. India’s film industry is today the largest in the world, producing more films per year than any other country, including the United States. But Bollywood, which has become synonymous with Indian films, is only one of the country’s cinemas. South India has four distinct film industries, each with its own language, and Bengal, arguably the cultural treasure trove of North India, has an independent film scene that has been in good health since the day cameras first set foot in the subcontinent. How is Bollywood’s hegemony to be explained? It is certainly linked to the status of Hindi/Urdu, the highly malleable and eclectic language of the Bombay cinema. Hindi/Urdu is the lingua franca of North India. It is the most widely spoken language in the subcontinent. (It is the national language of both India and Pakistan, though India recognizes at least sixteen other ‘regional’ national languages.) Hindustani, as it is called by linguists, is a blend of Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Turkish. Its grammar is speckled with English – the language of the British Raj. Hindustani is then a language that belongs to no one and everyone. A Pakistani viewer will find a Bollywood blockbuster more accessible than most movies produced in his own country. Time, too, is on Bollywood’s side. Unlike the novel, which came to India long after it first surfaced in Europe, film was not accompanied by the disadvantage of a time lag. Raja Harishchandra, the first full-length Indian film, was released as early as 1913, eighteen years after the Lumiere brothers showed the first film ever at a café in Paris. Sound and color were quick to follow, making the Indian film scene one of the oldest in the world. And from the beginning it was its own master: the early filmmakers drew on classical themes and positioned them along the formal conventions of theater. Singing and dancing were vital to Indian theater. From the Sanskrit plays of Kalidasa, said to have been penned before the birth of Christ, all the way down to the devotional performances at the Muslim court of Awadh in the nineteenth century, the song-and-dance routine was an established and celebrated aspect of narration. Film provided a new medium with which to continue that tradition. But it is this very tendency to break into song, to erupt into a synchronized dance routine, that has proven to be most fascinating (and amusing) to the outsider. Bollywood films are received in the West with a knowing wink. Think of Moulin Rouge, a film that claimed to draw on Bollywood for inspiration. This amounted, ultimately, to shrieks and diamonds, and an overall loony glaze. Critics, too, speak chucklingly of the song-and-dance sequence; a film review in a leading American newspaper is likely to use the word ‘playful’ with cheerful abandon when attempting to describe the Bollywood aesthetic. And whenever an analogy is required, the long-dead American musical of the 50s and 60s is dragged out of its coffin for demonstration. This is misleading because it does not take into account Bollywood’s fundamentally different worldview. The musical is grounded in a rigid realism. Fred Astaire tap-dancing at the bottom of a staircase is sober and even demure compared to the violent hip-thrusts of a Bollywood heroine, who is surrounded by an army of dancing-girls and changes outfits seven times within the space of a single song. And it isn’t all fun and games; the song-and-dance sequence is very much a formal device. It deliberately interrupts the narrative. It freezes the plot and allows room for rumination. The song-and-dance sequence works much like interior monologue in a novel. The lyrics of the song will be linked to what has just happened in the preceding scene, or what is about to happen in the next one. This creates a flux that sharpens the moment preceding or following the interruption. It is a way of hurling aside the chains of the temporal and lingering around a tree to dwell on a sentiment, a feeling, the blossoming of a brand new romance. It acts as an intensifier of emotion. And it is a collaborative act. The songs are penned by a lyricist, who is often a highbrow poet, and put to music by a music director. The songs are then rendered in the voice of a famous playback singer, choreographed by a dance choreographer, and “picturized” (this is the official term) on a hero and heroine. The American equivalent would require the services of John Ashbery, Dave Brubeck and Mariah Carey. Now imagine Claire Danes lip-syncing her way through the whole thing as she rolls off a bed and lands in the mountains of Switzerland. * Genre was never a Bollywood concern. The 60s, 70s and 80s belonged entirely to the masala flick – a spicy mishmash of genres. Comedy, romance, action and family drama all came together in the masala flick to form a narrative of Shakespearean proportions. At the heart of these sat a pair of star-crossed lovers, surrounded by a hedge of dramatis personae. The villain, for instance, was almost always played by the ghoulish Amrish Puri, while the role of his sidekick-cum-girlfriend went to Bindu – a tall, cruel-looking actress with feline curves and a beehive hairstyle. Even Hollywood, when it came to India, had to work within these casting conventions; recall Amrish Puri as the quintessential masala villain in Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Other presences, peripheral to plot or story, were indispensable to the masala enterprise. There was, for instance, Helen – a superstar of 1960s Bollywood who rarely uttered dialogue and had no more than a few minutes of screen time per film. She was famous for her dancing, and appeared usually in casino or nightclub scenes, shimmering across a dance floor to a tipsily rendered song with saucy lyrics. The cinema-going audience recognized Helen, applauded her dancing skills, and expected a performance at least once in a three-hour masala flick. Characterization, then, was not determined by the arc of the story; story was suspended to make room for popular personalities. This cameo tradition has been an Indic literary convention for as long as the category has existed. The Ramayana and Mahabharata, two of classical Sanskrit’s greatest texts, are populated by a cast of celebrity characters, many of whom vanish after a single appearance. Krishna, for example, is the hunky superstar of Hindu mythology. The telling of a story offers one more opportunity to have him show up at a dinner party, or in the middle of a war, and just be his sexy self. He doesn’t have to be required by the story. The story will make room for his appearance. The disregard for genres, too, can be traced all the way back to the classics. Rasa theory – the system of aesthetics that governs classical Sanskrit – imagines all narrative in terms of mood. ‘Rasa’, which means taste, flavor or essence, is divided into nine types: love and beauty, comedy, compassion, anger, valor, terror, disgust, wonder, and peace. The masala flick, then, with its singing and dancing and snake-charming villainy, subscribes to a code of narration established long before cameras were invented. But the last ten years have seen rapid encroachment on the sands of Bombay cinema. The term ‘Bollywood’, for instance, was originally used by gossip columnists to dish out the dirt on the industry’s superstars. Article headings like The Buzz in Bollywood were meant to be catty in the early 90s. Even then the term was met with resistance. The actress Shabana Azmi famously attacked the word, claiming it suggested a copycat identity derived from Hollywood. Today, however, ‘Bollywood’ as descriptive term has acquired the armor of normalcy, in India and abroad. This has come about largely as a result of post-globalization self-consciousness; the Bombay film industry now has an aerial view of itself, and knows that it must keep in mind a widely growing audience. A visible Indian diaspora has emerged in Britain and the United States, with money in its pocket and a nostalgia for the homeland in its heart. A large space has opened up for Bombay cinema in the Western market. India wants to speak to the West, and the West is willing to listen. ‘Bollywood’, carrying a familiar ring for both India and the West, has therefore become an ideal term of exchange. This renaming has been accompanied by the death of the masala flick, which has been replaced in its popularity by the family drama, a genre that makes increasing references to home-and-abroad. The skyscrapers of Manhattan are no longer confined to the dreamlike song-and-dance sequence; they now figure in real time, appear as settings for drama and dialogue. Some of the biggest earners at the box office in the last few years have been woven around the figure of the lonely immigrant. The censors, too, have relented; the French kiss, long a site of heated debate, has now become natural and even expected. Villains have departed, and action heroes have softened. Bollywood actors perform regularly in live stage shows in places like New York and Toronto, where they are applauded by some of their most ardent fans. In 2001 this coveted niche in the North American imagination was consolidated when the film Lagaan was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Academy Award. The diaspora has accelerated this process by taking the camera into its own hands. Filmmakers like Mira Nair and Gurinder Chaddha (whose teenage rom-com Bend it Like Beckham grossed over $100 million in the US) have applied the global Indian’s eye to themes that were previously the business of locals. Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, in fact, has been seen by some as the initiator of postmodern Bollywood – a genre that marinates the realism of cinema verite in the song and dance of Indian weddings. Formally speaking, in terms of narrative strategies, Bollywood has remained independent. The song-and-dance sequence is as popular as ever, and miracles, coincidences and supernatural occurrences have continued to inform a vibrant worldview. The conventions more than just reflect the popular culture of South Asia; they shape it. On my last trip to Pakistan I noticed that my cousin was spending all her mornings in the garden with a basket in her hand. She was, apparently, trying to collect dewdrops. “Why?” I wanted to know. “To drink,” she said. “Why?” “Because it makes you fair-skinned.” “How do you know?” I asked, raising an incredulous eyebrow. “Because,” she said, her voice swollen with conviction, “I saw it in that Bollywood movie.”
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