The Road to Bollywood

But this controversial term continues to be widely used, in part because it offers a useful way to refer to Indian popular cinema, both as an industry and as a world apart. Javed Akhtar, an influential screenwriter-turned-lyricist, has described Bollywood as in effect another "state" within the confederation of modern India, along with Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Bengal. "Hindi cinema's culture is quite different from Indian culture," Akhtar says, "but it is not alien to us. . . . As a matter of fact, Hindi cinema is our closest neighbor. It has its own world, its own traditions, its own symbols, and those who are familiar with it understand it."

Most of us have experienced this alternate universe of cinema only in puzzling fragments, perhaps as a grainy video image running on the big-screen TV in a Punjabi restaurant. (What's the first image that comes to mind? Pudgy lovers in disco shirts dancing around trees?) Now for the first time, in the new wave of subtitled DVD releases aimed at NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) around the world, we firangis (Hindustani for "foreigners") have a golden opportunity to turn in our tourist visas and "go native," to become resident aliens in Bollywood. The discs you can rent from your local Sweets & Spices shop are not always top notch, and the desi (opposite of firangi) videophiles who post reviews on websites like zulm.net are mad as hell about that. But for those of us who don't speak a word of Hindi-Urdu, the mere availability of all these movies, in a form we can watch all the way through and at least begin to understand, makes all the difference in the world. If you like, you can think of this Midsection as a tour guide for day-trippers from Firangistan: Bollywood on Ten Thousand Rupees a Day.

You have to be ready to relax and settle in for the long haul, however, because Bollywood movies tend to be lengthy by Western standards, ranging from a minimum of around 160 minutes to 225 for an epic production like Lagaan (Land Tax, 01), Ashutosh Gowariker's Oscar-nominated cricket drama. Many of the characteristics that Westerners initially find off-putting here can be thought of, at least for convenience's sake, as a consequence of all the extra running time the moviemakers have to fill. The central storylines almost always branch off into a number of subplots of varying importance, and the films have adopted a catch-all heterogeneous structure in which several additional conventional "attractions" (a love story, a "comedy track," some violent action, the famous song-and-dance sequences) are attached to the central braid of interwoven narratives.

The sheer richness of Bollywood's masala format (a culinary term for a mix of several flavors in a single dish) turns out to be one of its greatest strengths. Bollywood cinema's peak achievements, like those of Hong Kong, devote immense amounts of creative energy, ingenuity, and highly evolved craftsmanship to the life-affirming task of delivering intense pleasure to the largest possible audience. But while Hong Kong cinema works by radical compression, Bollywood operates by expanding in all directions. Indian popular cinema demands an investment of time and patience that may be alien to the shriveled attention spans of modern moviegoers. But in that sense it is also possible that learning to adjust to the long-stemmed rhythms of these films may actually be good for us.

Some minor aesthetic adjustments are required, too. As critics like M. Madhava Prasad have pointed out, Indian popular movies have never fully embraced the Hollywood aesthetic of "seamless realism" and disguised artifice, in which the desired effect is a voyeuristic sense of eavesdropping upon secretly unfolding events. Bollywood filmmakers may (if they wish) reach for that kind of illusion, but they are under no obligation to deliver it. Far from disguising the stylized artifice of dovetailed plotting, setpiece "dialogues," and interpolated song sequences, the auteurs of Bombay often seem to revel in their awareness of convention. The critic Ravi S. Vasudevan may have put his finger on something crucial when he defined Bollywood as "a cinema which imagines its audience to be present."

One of the founders of the modern Bollywood idiom, Raj Kapoor, is commonly referred to as "the great showman," and the filmmakers who have followed in his footsteps seem to be equally dedicated to putting on a great show. All the articles collected here, which by design are as different as they can possibly be, have at least one thing in common: they take for granted that it is possible for us firangis to have a direct and personal relationship with these films. And in an odd way it seems to be the stylized unreality of the conventional Hindi movie that makes this immediate experience possible for us. Because no matter how strange these spectacles seem on the surface, you can still get a sense of the hospitable human beings hard at work behind the scenes, pulling the strings for our pleasure.