It was a delirium, so in retrospect some of the details are hazy, but this I clearly recall: for four months last year I was in the grip of Bollywood fever.
A few times each week I’d go to stores that rent or sell videos of Indian films and take five, maybe ten cassettes home to dupe, collate and sometimes watch. Beginning my siege in near-total ignorance of the genre, I could soon name, if not properly pronounce, the subcontinent’s top movie personalities. I ravaged the Internet for helpful sites, bought several published histories on the industry, scoured the half-dozen English-language Indian weeklies published for New Yorkers, pestered friends with Indian-film expertise, went to a Bollywood Awards show on Long Island, wrote a few TIME stories on the subject — I did just about everything short of going to local theaters that show the films. But I had plenty of visual research. In short order I’d amassed some 200 full-length extravaganzas, from the 1935 “Devdas” to the 2002 “Devdas,” and including compilation tapes of stars, directors, composers and playback singers (whose function I’ll explain shortly).
I’m not the only American of non-Indian descent who’s caught the jolly folly of Bollywood. A few other critic types, notably the trend-setting, retrospective-begetting David Chute, have found in Indian-pop cinema some of the same exuberance and craft they earlier detected in Hong Kong movies. At Chutes urging, Turner Classic Movies, the exemplary cable skein specializing in venerable Hollywood fare, is devoting four Thursdays this month to a dozen Bollywood epics. It’s a chance for those unfamiliar with the terrain to get their footing — to survey the grand landscape of one of the film world’s most productive and accomplished art-industries.
Now Bollywood has eyes to conquer the firangis — Hindi for “foreigners.” U.S. viewers may have seen fragments of Bollywood films at their local Indian restaurants, which often have a video playing for atmosphere; I know one gourmand who chooses her Indian restaurants based on the films shown there. American moviegoers know Bollywood secondhand from Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge” (the production number with the elephant), “Ghost World” (that goofy disco clip, from the 1965 film “Gumnaam”) and the art-house hit Monsoon Wedding (the dance that brings a fractious family together). “Bombay Dreams,” the Bollywood-themed West End musical with an irresistible crossover score by top Indian composer A R Rahman, is a hit in London and headed to Broadway.
But can the real thing make it here? Can Americans open up to the real Bollywood? They will if I have anything to do with it. So read on, adepts and neophytes, for one stranger’s personal view of Bollywood. It may take a while: this week and next, and maybe a third. I guess the fever hasn’t broken yet.
BOLLYWHAT?
First, most of you are asking: What the heck is Bollywood? The word, which an Indian journalist coined in the 70s to convey the message that Bombay (where Hindi-language films are made) was a rival of Hollywood, refers in the larger sense to Indian pop cinema — the world’s most teeming film industry, an exotic, rhapsodic blend of chuckles and tears, song and dance. With nearly 1,000 films a year in more than a dozen languages, Bollywood’s output far outstrips Hollywood’s.
These aren’t your uncle’s Satyajit Ray movies — stately pace, unknown actors, Ravi Shankar sitar music. As I wrote in a TIME story last year, Bollywood is a star-driven cosmos: actresses with names like Dimple Kapadia, Preity Zinta and Karisma Kapoor (an important supporting player of the 50s was known as Cuckoo); hunks of every age, from three-decade mega-stalwart Amitabh Bachchan to giga-charmer Shahrukh Khan to the young, elaborately muscled Hrithik Roshan. (All three graced the 2001 blockbuster “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.”) Bollywood operates under the vulture eyes of a voracious entertainment press and under the shadow of organized crime. Two years ago, Hrithik’s father, director Rakesh Roshan, was shot and severely wounded after he reportedly refused a “request” for his son to appear in an underworld-financed film.
Things are exciting onscreen too — though in these three-hour extravaganzas there’s not much violence, no nudity, hardly any kissing. Forced to sublimate, Bollywood taught itself to revel in full-blooded, full-throated drama. “The formula is essentially a family epic,” says Indian writer (and Brooklyn resident) Suketu Mehta. “A family that breaks apart and then comes together. It’s also the story of Partition.” The partition of India and Pakistan, that is — but with vagrant, fragrant hope of union within diversity. A father denounces, then tearfully embraces his son (“Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham”). A group of 19th century peasants battle their Brit overlords in a game of cricket (Lagaan, nominated for a foreign-film Oscar in 2002). A naive media star falls in love with a terrorist (many recent films have used this politically explosive plot device, including “Mission Kashmir,” for which Mehta collaborated on the script).
And in the midst of the starkest plot twists, everyone sings and dances. Virtually all Bollywood films are musicals. For 60 years, they have provided India with most of its hit songs (in effect, the movie industry is the music industry). And not just songs — immense production numbers. Dozens of chorus boys in leather and houris in saris frolic while the stars risk dislocating their shoulders and display ’60s-style legwork not seen in the West since the Peppermint Lounge closed. The stars dance, but they don’t sing. That’s the job of “playback singers,” unseen onscreen but famous on CDs. One playback diva, Lata Mangeshkar, has recorded some 50,000 songs in a 60-year career. (Sinatra, you slouch!)
The Bollywood masala — savory cultural stew — restores melodrama to its Greek-tragedy and Italian-opera roots: melody-drama, in which emotions too deep to be spoken must be sung. Imagine Julia Roberts in “Erin Brockovich” dancing around the utility company’s lawyers while lip-synching a tune sung by Faith Hill, and you have a hint of the divine madness that is Bollywood.
LOG ON TO “LAGAAN”
I have the TIME.com readers to thank for my obsession. In a piece that was posted the day the 2002 Oscar nominations were announced, I offered this offhand jape: “The usual ignorance attended the selections for Best Foreign-Language Film. Except for ‘Amelie’ and ‘No Man’s Land,’ the foreign pictures that earned most critics’ plaudits were absent. In their place we got an Argentine melodrama (‘Son of the Bride’), a Norwegian film about an insane couple (‘Elling’) and a four-hour Indian film about cricket (‘Lagaan’). If any of these turns out to be faaaabulous, I promise to apologize in this space.”
Within a fortnight, two things happened. I received nearly 100 e-mails, most of the how-dumb-are-you? variety from aggrieved Bollywood fans. (No Argentines or Norwegians wrote in.) And I saw “Lagaan,” programmed by renowned Indophile Hannah Fisher as part of the Floating Film Festival, which sailed the Mexican Riviera under the aegis of swami, guru and Maharajah Dusty Cohl.
To catch “Lagaan” with 150 movie sharpies who had never seen a Bollywood picture was to see snickers turn to smiles, and indulgence to rapture. The crowd was with it from the thunderclap — a cue for riotous dancing — in the first torrential rainstorm. They cheered star Aamir Khan and his fellow Indians in their desperate cricket match with the lords of Empire (if the locals win, they get a break on their lagaan, or land tax). They embraced the mix of melodrama and character comedy; they fell into the humid, but urgent rhythms of what, even in a country where the average film runs close to three hours, is a long slog. They bought the trope of music and dance as an expression of life’s deepest, most soaring emotions. Had they known the words, they would have sung along. (Hannah had the foresight to bring copies of A R Rahman’s sound track, which were avidly snatched up.)
Some of the fondness the FFF audience showed “Lagaan” was surely the surprise that what they thought might be a history lesson proved so enjoyable. I think they also experienced a larger, more salutary shock. They learned that a country best known for spicy food, Internet brainiacs and a fatal family feud with Pakistan also, for Pete’s sake, could make enthralling entertainment. Hannah and “Lagaan” pried their eyes open. Their hearts followed.
So, dear pestering readers, I hereby apologize for making light of “Lagaan.” And at the risk of seeming to curry favor with those who favor curry, I thank you for opening my eyes and heart to the baroque beatitudes of Bollywood.
DEAF TO “DEVDAS”I confess that “Lagaan” fascinated me without quite winning me over to Bollywood. That conversion came three months later, when Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s “Devdas” played the Cannes Film Festival — the first time an Indian musical had been chosen for the official program of the world’s largest film bash. When I saw it, I wished “Devdas” had been in the competition for the Palme d’Or; it bested the Festival winner, Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” in verve, visual acuity and the hero’s sanctified suffering. Here are some of my comments on “Devdas” in various TIME stories last year:
There’s no more colorful introduction to Bollywood than “Devdas.” The priciest movie in Indian history (at about $10.6 million), it could also be the most visually intoxicating film ever. The plot, based on a 1917 novel, is good-old family-values propaganda, drenched in luscious masochism: rich boy Devdas (all-world charismatist Shahrukh Khan) leaves home, abandons girl friend (former Miss World Aishwarya Rai), dallies with prostitute (worldly-wise Madhuri Dixit), suffers magnificently. It’s played with such commitment that the tritest plot twists seem worth believing — and singing about, in nine nifty production numbers. But the fervid emotion and visual chic are what make the thing sing. Beyond that, “Devdas” is a visual ravishment, with sumptuous sets, fabulous frocks and beautiful people to fill them; it has a grandeur the old Hollywood moguls would have loved.
My devotion to “Devdas” was a minority opinion at Cannes. The pack of international critics is usually a tolerant one; I might say they share some of the “Devdas” hero’s self-flaggelating tendencies, since each May they sit obediently through dozens of mopey minimalist movies. (This year’s prime example: “The Brown Bunny,” the notoriously painful American indie that only a handful of scribes walked out on.) Yet in 2002 they demonstrated a low threshold of pain for a pretty film with pretty people singing of love and loss. Exactly one critic — and by now you’ve figured out who — was there at the end.
And, so far as I know, exactly one American one critic put “Devdas” on his year-end Ten Best list. I ranked it fourth — though for TIME’s International editions, I went further, really too far, and named it the film of the year. Chalk up that wooziness to a resurgence of Bollywood fever, or, to give me a break, a grateful acknowledgment of all the wonders of Indian cinema I’d fallen in love with last year.
But you never heard of “Devdas.” That’s because no review appeared in the major New York or L.A. newspapers, or in most others, when the film opened last July. Yet “Devdas” was not only the year’s biggest Indian hit, it earned more than $5 million in North America. In the U.S., the film played in about 40 theaters that cater to the NRI (non-resident Indian), or desi, community; the gross for a top Bollywood film can exceed that of American art-house hits. Some day the nation’s film critics will see it as their duty — I hope, also as their pleasure — to cover this vital, sprawling part of world cinema.
BOLLYWOOD, LONG ISLAND
I returned from Cannes still intoxicated by the idea of Bollywood and needing to know more about it. One TIME colleague, Ratu Kamlani, kindly lent me some cassettes of films from the 80s and 90s; thus I had my second glimpses of Shakhrukh and Aamir Khan and my first of another swoon merchant, Salman Khan. (This 90’s trio of top male stars were of course known as the three Khans.) TIME’s Alan Abrams, a veritable vacuum cleaner of pop arcana — he knows every Broadway song since Cohan, and had scoured Chinatown video stores for DVDs of obscure Hong Kong films before moving on to India — shared his blooming expertise with me.
One June night Alan and I trekked to the Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, Long Island, N.Y., 7,800 miles from Bombay, for the 4th annual Bollywood Awards. It was quite a sight, sound and smell. The house was packed, 10-12,000 strong, with fans of Indian movies. At the food kiosks in the lobby, patrons stood in line for jaleba, alu vada and samosa chhole, while pitchmen handed out free samples of Roopak Luv-U’s, the “flavoured mouth freshener.” On stage, perky hostess Ruby Bhatia (an Alabama-born host of Indian TV chat shows) chirped, “So without much ado, let the Bollywood Awards begin!”
Over the four-hour evening, the many-gowned Bhatia provided suitably hyperbolic introductions — “His immense talent is about to unfold on this very stage!” — to a dozen or so top Indian musical acts that whipped the crowd into a cheerful frenzy. The stars had flown through 11 time zones to be there, and to pick up checks ranging from $10,000 to $70,000 for their trouble (though Shahrukh and Aishwarya, in New York City that week to promote “Devdas,” did not show). Salman Khan gave a dancing display of his muscles; I forget if he removed his shirt. Between the numbers, Indian film celebrities appeared to accept awards in such categories as Best Villain, Best Comic and Most Sensational Female.
Their Indo-American fans, many gorgeously duded in turbans or silk saris, had come from across the tri-state area to reestablish their cultural identity and bond with the popular art form of their homeland. To Indians, and to the far-flung millions in the subcontinental diaspora, movies matter: they unite India and Pakistan as surely as politicians separate them. These movies, with a high percentage of Muslim stars and writing talent, are loved in both the rival nations. (Most of the cheapo compilations of Indian stars’ Greatest Hits are manufactured, without much regard for legality, in Pakistan; phone numbers for Karachi video stores run in a ribbon across the bottom of the image.) In the U.S., Bollywood is a $100 million industry, from DVD sales and rentals, pay TV, live shows like the Bollywood Awards, and big-screen exhibition; 14 of the 24 largest U.S. urban areas have at least one theater showing Indian movies.
If I wanted to see Bollywood movies, I could have gone to one of these specialty houses. Loew’s State Theatre, in the basement of Times Square’s Virgin Megastore, shows Indian movies, and it’s five short blocks from my office. But one new film a week would not nearly feed the fever. I required total immersion, in current and classic Bollywood.
ADVENTURES IN CURRY HILL
The great concentration of Indian video stores is in Jackson Heights, Queens. To me, though, Queens is a borough for airplanes and baseball games. Call me a snob and a stay-at-home, but I didn’t care to travel an hour to get my Bollywood fix. Ratu to the rescue! She gave me the address of Naghma House, an electronics and video store on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan’s Murray Hill. The neighborhood has so many Indian shops and restaurants that it’s called Curry Hill, and the designation is apt: the scent of that spice drapes the streets. One day I passed two policemen and heard one telling the other that the area had the poorest air quality in the city.
Enter Naghma House, a store about 14 feet wide and 50 feet long, and find desi newspapers in a rack on the right, electronic appliances stretching down the left. Videos and DVDs in the back. The rear side walls were stacked with shelves of videos, but two deep: a thousand or so cassettes in a series of “book case,” 10 feet high in perhaps 12-foot wide segments, that could be arduously rolled aside to reveal further stacks of videos on shelves against the wall. The film titles were arranged alphabetically. Another section was devoted to the compilation cassettes: stars (“Comedy Highlights of Amitabh Bachchan”), directors (“Hits from B.R. Chopra”) or playback singers (“Lata Mangeshkar Queen of Melody — Sad Songs”).
On my first visit I met the proprietor, J.I. Keen, a round, genial middle-aged man whose father, he told me, had shown Indian films at NYU 30 years earlier. Mr. Keen the younger now had to educate me. I knew I wanted Indian films, the seminal ones; I just didn’t know what I wanted. Mr. Keen suggested two 1957 works — “Mother India,” often called the “Gone With the Wind” of Indian cinema, and “Pyaasa,” Guru Dutt’s tale of a questing poet — and the 1951 “Awara,” starring and directed by Raj Kapoor. (The three he recommended are showing on TCM this week or next.) I rented those videos and the DVD of “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.” Rental price for the four: $24. The rental price skidded to $4 and then to $2 per video as we got to know each other and he came to trust my bona fides. What’s Hindi for mishpocha?
Most days, Mr. Keen was managing other parts of his entrepreneurial empire, and I was in the gentle, firm hands of Magan Shrestha. a slim graduate student with an Aishwarya-lovely wife. Magan (hymkes with lagaan) got used to seeing me cart my satchel into the store, take out the videos I needed to return and consult my portable references: “The Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema,” an invaluable source of biographies and filmographies; and printouts of Internet Movie Database lists of actors’ and directors’ films. Magan was helpful and patient, even when I rushed in a minute before closing, even when I provoked his distressed smile by mangling the pronunciation of the simplest Indian names. He also took interest in the TIME articles I wrote on Indian films. I think he hoped he would be mentioned in a future story. Sorry, Magan, but this is it.
Across the street from Naghma is Video Palace, a walk-up video store and spice shop. (You needn’t buy any spices; just walking into one of these shops unclogs your sinuses.) There the very accommodating staff rents videos for $2 — and sells them for $3! On amazon.com, a “Devdas” DVD costs $60; at Video Palace the video dupe can be had at a 95% discount. With very little prodding the gentleman behind the counter took my requests for films to be duped. That’s how I finally nabbed Shantaram’s 1955 “Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje.” And because Video Palace also stocks some Tamil films, I am now the proud possessor of every Mani Rathnam film from his 1987 Mafia classic “Nayakan” to last year’s “A Peck on the Cheek,” which I was able to purchase and savor before it played at the Toronto Film Festival. Ah, the joys of collecting!
There were hurdles to jump; clearing the thicket of my ignorance wouldn’t be an adventure without some challenges. The quality of the prints is often murky, with films in eighth-generation dupes. The cassettes often have commercials breaking up the film every hour or so (every 20 minutes in a few tapes I saw), and often a ribbon of phone numbers for Karachi or Dubai or New Jersey video stores run in a ribbon across the bottom of the image. And about half of the videos I rented didn’t have subtitles. That’s not fair; some have Egyptian subtitles. That made me pay stricter attention to the movies’ visual style — and to the plot synopses of the films on two excellent websites, UpperStall.com and Planet Bollywood.com.
Part of my Bollywood obsession can be explained as collectomania: to own is as important as to know. And I did not watch all of every video I duped. But as any collector can attest, fascination with a new field of research grows exponentially. A good film piques many curiosities. The amazing “Mother India,” for instance, got me chasing down other films directed by Mehboob Khan, other starring roles for its leading actress, the great Nargis. Alan Abrams recommended the works of director V. Shantaram, a folklorist of the most picturesque stripe. Raj Kapoor was essential: a star-director, as popular in the Soviet Union as he was in India, who looked like the later Ronald Colman and patterned many of his screen roles on Chaplin’s Tramp character. I amassed most of the films of Shahrukh, my favorite of the modern actors, and Rahman, the composer whose irresistible tunes set the pulse of some of the finest Indian films, including most of Mani Rathnam’s.
BLACK, YELLOW, BROWN
Rahman’s “Bombay Dreams,” which I’ll discuss in detail next week (or the week after), has a libretto by Meera Syal. She’s the author and actress who, after her Brit-com “Goodness Gracious Me” became a cross-cultural hit, uttered the notorious dictum, “Brown is the new black” — meaning that, in pop culture, all things Anglo-Indian were suddenly as hip as all things African-American had been.
That set me wondering (and, please, pardon the metaphorical crudity): In American cult culture, could brown be the new yellow? Specifically, could Bollywood films win over the trend-setters in video stores and on the Internet who for years had championed Hong Kong films? The two national cinemas have so much in common. They developed in regions long administered by the British but with their unique national twists. They are extreme forms of popular movies; they stretch, to the limit and beyond, narrative strategies developed in Hollywood. Like Hollywood films, they rely on a star system. Again as in Hollywood, these are commercial products, financed not by the state but by investors who expect a return on investment. Often, in both cinemas, those capitalists are gangsters. And often, the movies they finance are terrific.
Now here’s why Bollywood will not be the new Hong Kong. Because the average Indian film is nearly twice as long as the average Hong Kong film. Because Bollywood films imitate an unfashionable genre (the romantic melodrama) while Hong Kong movies imitate and apotheosize the American action film. Because Bollywood films are usually about reconciling family tensions — their deepest connections are domestically vertical rather than horizontal — whereas Hong Kong and contemporary Hollywood movies are about friends, enemies and lovers; the heroes in these might as well be orphans. Because Bollywood is essentially a feminine genre, while Hong Kong is macho; and guys rule! And because, in Bollywood movies, people sing and dance like they mean it; and nothing can turn off a young male like a sentiment put to music. To young American trend-setters, Bollywood brown is the new white … bread.
But, as we’ll discuss further next week, that’s a cramped, myopic view of a faaaaaaaabulous cinema — one that deserves an intelligent viewer’s loyalty, fealty. Fever.
