Planet Bollywood Part One
by David ChuteA preliminary, discontinued version of a cover story written for the LA Weekly. The final cut is due to be published in mid-July, 2002, and will be posted here shortly thereafter.
Unfortunately, on the day I met him, Amitabh Bachchan had a toothache. There was no way I could have known that, of course, as the six-foot-three-inch 59-year-old, dapper in a floor-length black Armani overcoat, was reaching out (with a pained half smile) to shake my gingerly offered hand. This key fact, the recent advent of an agonizing dental crisis, was revealed only several hours later, when I was informed by my contact on the set of Kaante (Thorns), the Bollywood production that brought the actor to downtown San Pedro in October, that my scheduled interview with The Big B would, with profuse apologies, have to be canceled. This idol of millions, this axiom of the cinema, had been whisked off to undergo a root canal.
Bearing up stoically (as it emerged) in the face of blinding physical discomfort, Bachchan looked a great deal like the brooding poets and doctors he had portrayed in his youth in middlebrow semi-art movies, figures close to his own patrician upbringing as the son of a famous poet. But he only became an authentic axiom in the mid-1970s, when he went down-market in a string of populist action films like Sholay (Flames, 1975), the industry-altering "curry Western" whose box office title stood unchallenged in India for over 15 years. Bachchan is, in truth, a authoritative and fine-grained actor, with a sonorous baritone voice, and his bottled-up ferocity was magnetic even in the cartoonish hero vehicles he settled for in the '80s, such as Coolie (1983) and Mard (He-Man, 1985), in which he laid waste to hundreds of leering foes and could communicate with animals. And in the comeback projects of his middle years Amit-ji has regained all of his missing dignity, and then some, as the most imposing patriarch of the Hindi screen. In epic melodramas like Mohabbatein (Loves, 2000) and the current superhit Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Happy Sometimes Sad, 2001), he has re-invented himself yet again, this time as a monumental representative of Hindu Family Values.
If the brief snippets of ferocious action I witnessed on the set that day are any indication, however, Bachchan has undertaken a fairly Mard-like role in Kaante. There was a pistol-whipping, plate-glass-door-smashing, and a brief gun battle, after which a brace of prop police cars were loudly detonated. A few days later the crew repaired to Century City, where the main cast of tough-guy bank robbers did the slow-mo walk across the pedestrian bridge.
An unabashed Hindi-language re-make of Reservoir Dogs, Kaante is proudly described on its web site as the first Indian movie to be shot entirely in the US. According to Sanjay Dutt, the droopy-eyed "Robert Mitchum of Bombay" who is Bachchan's co-star in Kaante and also one of its producers, "We guys have all grown up with Hollywood films. All the educated people in India stay up to date with the films made here, and we see the quality. It was always my dream to do this, to come here and work with an American crew and shoot like they shoot here."
This Journey to the West may have more to do with a tarnished self-image than to nessecity. Hindi movies have indeed often dismissed in the past as garish, excessive, and slapdash, as films, in short, that could stand to take a few pointer from the pros in Hollywood. That dismissive judgment, however, is at least a decade out of date.
The average Hindi movie today is probably handsomer than it has been at any time since the 1950s, the so-called Golden Age of Bollywood, when artists like Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt dappled their three-hour melodramas with expressionistic black & white chiaroscuro. The wide-screen color films of the '70s and '80s often went in for blinding TV-style flood-light illumination, but a definite shift was already apparent in the early '90s, when a group of gifted filmmakers from the South Asian Tamil-language cinema, including Mani Rathnam (Roja, 1992) and Ram Gopal Varma (Rangeela/Colors, 1995), helped set a new visual high-water-mark. A younger generation of well-educated, westernized Bombay directors, including Mohabbatein's Aditya Chopra and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham's Karan Johar, took up the Southern challenge. By now richly textured imagery has become the Hindi norm. At this point, says Krutin Patel, the writer-director of the Indo-American indie ABCD, "Bollywood movies have some of the highest technical standards in the world, second only to Hollywood."
Hindi movies achieve their world-class production values on budgets that would barely reach shoestring levels in the States. India's official entry in this year's Oscar derby, Ashutosh Gowariker's four-hour historical cricket epic Lagaan (Land Tax, 2001), fielded a top Bollywood star (Aamir Khan), recruited scores of gifted character actors (including a dozen from the UK to play Raj-era British officers), and was filmed on location in the Hindu Kutch, in a 100-acre, full-scale reconstruction of a 19th century peasant village. Director Gowariker still had enough rupees left over to stage a knock-down one-hour cricket match and six elaborately choreographed A.R. Rahman song sequences-all for the equivalent of just $6 million, less than half of Brad Pitt's current asking price.
Purchasing power, though, is only part of the story. The Kaante team sought American backdrops and American production textures because their ultimate goal was to turn out the first true crossover film in Hindi. The footage (I was told) was being carefully shot so that it could be assembled into two very different movies. The cut they hoped to screen for non-Indians in Europe and North America would be almost an hour shorter than the Indian release version, minus the five-to-six songs that have been de rigueur in Hindi cinema since the dawn of the talkies. And we wish them well, if only for the sake of Mr. Bachchan, who deserves to be every bit as famous in our world as he is in Bollywood. Nevertheless, we have our doubts. When Mira Nair heard about the Kaante plan, she reminded us of the sad case of Vijay Anand's prestigious literary adaptation Guide (1965), based upon the R.K. Narayan novel. Guide was actually filmed twice, once in Hindi and once in English, and although the Hindi version was a major hit for the director's brother, matinee idol Dev Anand, the shorter, songless, English version sank without a trace. "This sort of thing," Nair says flatly, "has never worked."
It's hard not to sympathize with Indian moviemakers who have come to believe that making Bollywood more like Hollywood, which in the first instance means short and songless, is the only way to tap into the beckoning global marketplace. Hindi movies are a tough sell. Quite a few South Asians have dispiriting stories to tell about their failed attempts to convert non-Indians to the overabundant pleasures of the masala movie, with its heaping helpings of action, romance, comedy and music. One such is David Rathod, a music video and commercials director in San Francisco who made the pioneering NRI-themed indie West is West in 1987, with then-actor Ashutosh Gowariker in the leading role. "The biggest obstacles that I've found," Rathod says, "are the songs. That's kind of a painful thing for me to say, because they're my favorite part. I live for the songs, pretty much. But a lot of Anglos, when they hear the word 'songs,' they just kind of glaze over." And filmmaker Krutin Patel says flatly that while "Bollywood cinema exists on its own and has an audience, I don't think it can expand beyond it's current market, because the film language is so specific."
On the other hand, if you listen to the right people, you could begin to suspect that a Hong Kong Cinema-style Bollywood-chic cult is gathering force even now, posied to erupt into mainstream. Supposedly there are now hopeful signs everywhere you look: in that photo of Madonna sporting henna and a bindi at a Hollywood premiere, in the beautiful brief snippet of Bollywood song and dance in Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World, in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" item on rising star Hrithek Roshan, in director Baz Luhrmann's famous assertion that Moulin Rouge owes a large debt to Bollywood. You may even have heard the soaring "world music" strains of Lagaan composer A.R. Rahman on Weekend Becomes Eclectic. No-one seems to be more buzzed about this than your typical, Bolly-mad, Indian-American. According to Vipul Gupta, a business and entertainment consultant working to bring about collaborations between the two film cultures, "The NRI audience takes so much pride in seeing anything Indian in the mainstream, they love seeing their culture gaining recognition"-even, he admits, when the recognition takes the form of a momentary filmi parody on The Simpsons, which could thus be interpreted as a put down.
Perhaps, in their heart-of-hearts, some NRIs secretly endorse the snideness of these depictions. As the critic Jacob Levich observed, in a 1997 article published in the Village Voice, "many middle-class Indians have internalized critical snobbery about [Bollywood's] excesses." Levich was also one of the first writers in the US to discern the crossover potential of South Asian entertainment, when he had spotted Manhattan hipsters trolling for novelty items in Indian video stores, or dancing in downtown clubs to Bally Sagoo's re-mixed Bollywood song tracks. Levich wrote: "It's a good bet that Indian popular film will be the next beneficiary (or victim) of the cycle by which foreign cinemas are discovered, briefly romanced, and then discarded by American consumers."
Some of the more delirious predictions of an imminent Bollywood thrust into mainstream (read "white") consciousness have arisen in England. In October, The Guardian's thoroughly mainstream movie critic, Derek Malcolm, went off the deep end. "If Bollywood...is ever to make it outside the Indian Diaspora," he announced, "that time is now." In fairness, Malcolm's outburst came hard on the heels of some tangible cultural breakthroughs in Blighty: the bare-chested medieval battle epic Asoka was about to open, and it was attracting major English-language media attention; and Lagaan was playing to full houses in Central London, had been well reviewed in the English-language press, and was edging into the top ten at the UK box office, attracting measurable numbers of non-Indians in the process.
The wild card here, of course, is Britain's Asian-oriented ethnic mix. There are roughly the same number of South Asians in the UK as in the US, around 1.5 million, but they constitute a much larger percentage of the overall British population. South Asians have been described as "the Latinos of the UK," in the sense of a minority group that has grown large enough to effect a pop culture paradigm shift. The Anglo-English have been vibrating for years to the hoop-ha pulse of Punjabi bhangra music (and to the infectious Indo-pop of Cornershop and Talvin Singh) and chuckling over the Indian family sit com Goodness Gracious Me on telly. During a recent Parlimentary bi-election a politician stirred up a tempest in a chai pot by declaring that Chicken Tikka Masala was now as characteristically British as bangers and mash. One of the most anticipated offerings of the London theatre season is the lavish West End musical Bombay Dreams, a Bollywood-themed interracial love story that is being co-produced by India's current cross-over king, Shekhar Kapur (Bandit Queen), and Broadway giant Andrew Lloyd Weber. The music is being been composed by (who else?) A.R. Rahman.
The situation in the US is quite a bit different. There is a certainly a market for Bollywood movies here, and it is quite a flourishing one, with pictures like Taal (Rhythm, 1999) and Lagaan flying in under the radar to rack up impressive totals at the box office. In December, Kabhie Kushi Kabie Gham achieved landmark status, becoming the first Indian import to crack Variety's top ten. But the so-called "NRI circuit" has achieved these results while acquiring almost no visibility outside the ethnic Indian community. The Hindi-movie scene in the US is almost entirely an ad hoc, catch-as-catch-can affair: apart from a few designated Indian-only theaters cinemas in big cities, like the outposts of the Bay Area's Naz 8 chain, or Boston's Bombay Cinema, the screenings are mostly one-off four-wall affairs organized by local entrepreneurs who make no attempt to promote the events to non-Indians. Even when the films are subtitled the fact is rarely advertised. At the Bollywood screenings I've attended locally, at mall cinemas in Northridge and Diamond Bar, my pudgy white face was glaringly conspicuous.
In 1999, no less an authority Shri Amitabh Bachchan himself told journalist Lisa Tsering, in an interview published in the weekly newspaper India-West, that "the marketing and distribution of our films has been a little undisciplined and not professionally handled. I'm sure when the day comes, Indian cinema will get a much large audience." Vipul Gupta, too, who has thought long and hard about these issues, believes that the US theatrical and video distributors of Hindi movies are hampered by their "it's a desi thing" attitude: "They feel they're already getting enough business just from the Indian audience. The top guys, being based in India and working so deeply within the Indian entertainment scene, feel that the films and the stars are already popular here. They don't realize that these are two different marketplaces, and that they have almost no contact with each other."
There may be more to this than meets the eye. Lisa Tsering, a non-Indian Bollywood journalist, based in San Francisco, who writes about the desi entertainment scene for the English-language NRI weekly India-West, believes that the failure to reach out beyond the immediate community is not entirely based on business calculations. She has discerned something a more subtle level of reistance in local Indian movie entrepreneurs, like the managers of the Naz 8 theater complex in the NRI enclave of Fremont. "There's an odd sort of ambivalence there," she notes. "The most obvious way this expresses itself is in the issue of subtitles, which you would think would be the most obvious way to make the movies more accessible. The big Indian distributors offer the exhibitors a choice between a subtitled and an un-subtitled print. There's no difference in price between the two versions, and the decision as to which to show in a specific case seems to be totally spur of the moment. There's no overall policy. And even when they show a subtitled print they don't announce the fact with an ad in the English language papers. When I ask them about this stuff they act almost embarrassed. I've never been able to get an adequate explanation out of them."
The beginnings of a possible explanation may lie in the role Hindi film screenings have come to play in NRI communities around the world. Although the overseas Indian market has only become huge over the past decade, it has always had a passionate nostalgic relationship with films from the motherland. In an essay published in the book Live Like the Banyan Tree: Images of the Indian American Experience, sociologist Vinay Lal notes the difficulty of forging a sense of unity in a far-flung diaspora that embraces such diverse elements as "South Asian Hong Kong Muslims, Canadian Sikhs, Punjabi Mexican Californians, Gujarati East Africans now settled in the U.S. by way of England, South African Hindus, and so on." Lal concludes: "The popular Hindi film provides a considerable element of commonality to Indian communities, even among those where Hindi is not spoken, a profound homage to the Hindi film's rootedness in the deep mythic structures of Indian civilization." (It is no great secret that the plots of most Bollywood movies are derived, more or less explicitly, from one of the two great Indian epics, the Ramayana or the Mahabharata.)[1]
It's not hard to understand why Indians might want to erect half-conscious barriers designed to preserve Hindi cinema as a private cultural refuge. The Indo-Canadian director Nisha Pahuja, whose NFDC documentary Bollywood Bound tracks four overseas hopefuls trying to break into the movie business in Bombay, recalls growing up near Toronto "in a period where a lot of people from the subcontinent were migrating to Canada, and so we were subjected to a great deal of racism. One of the results of this, especially for a child, was just not feeling comfortable with your own physicality and your color. I hated being brown. The movies, specifically the stars of my childhood like Amitabh Bachchan, gave me a world that I could belong to." As writer-director John Sayles observed in a very different context: "A sub-theme of [my film] Men With Guns, because of all the different languages, is that one of the ways you keep your culture unchanged by the outside world is by making it difficult for other people to understand."
Indian film lovers have often been stung in the past by foreign reactions to their cinema in the past. Why would they open themselves to that sort of heartache voluntarily? According to a leading Indian film critic, Maithili Rao, "Injured pride replaces honest bewilderment when confronted with the fact that The All India Film (critic Chidanand Dasgupta's characterization of the mainstream Hindi movie) is either condescendingly dismissed or seen as a cultural curiosity in the west: as a species of oriental exotica or as a Third World artifact to be deconstructed by academics exhausting yet another post-colonial territory."[2] And we are bound to admit that anxious Indians may have a point, when it comes to being wary of the provincialism, self-importance, and Hollywood-centrism of many Americans, even of the hardy few who claim to love specific foreign cinemas. In America, prickly new stuff tends to be embraced first by a grass roots fan cult, and only later (sometimes much later) by the mainstream. Japanese animation was a fervent minority cult for over a decade here before it became a presence on the shelves at Blockbuster. Hong Kong action films, too, were a pass-along craze on VHS for several years before Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon made it to the Oscars. But the films in thes genres that first attracted the attention of Western fanboys tended to be those that were already strongly influenced by the West: the gangster/gunplay films of John Woo, or the SF/fantasy brand of anime aimed at teenagers. And the enjoyment of these movies often incorporated a large dose of superiority and sarcasm. As an early HK movie booster I was often revolted by the behavior of the mostly male college-age crowds that turned out for some the early Hong Kong "cult"screenings, whose primary source of pleasure seemed to be jeering at the bad subtitles.
So perhaps we should consider it a blessing in disguise that Bollywood movies have not yet even achieved first-stage cult status in the US, although the basic ingredients for such a development all seem to be firmly established. The most promising sign by far in this regard is the recent explosive growth of the Indian DVD market. In the close-packed video stores of Little India, on Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia, and in emporia like India Music & Boutique in Culver City, a dozen fresh titles on DVD, from specialty labels like Eros and Yash Raj and DEI, are added monthly to the hundreds already on the shelves. In terms of visual quality the discs are not always first rate (to put it mildly), but they do almost always come equipped with optional English subtitles. The gorgeous new DVD of Lagaan from Columbia-TriStar, the first Bollywood offering from a major American label, also offers titles in French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Thai. Subtitles are key: if Hong Kong action films had not been readily available on subtitled VHS in the 1980s, the cult for that explosive cinema might never have gotten started.
Bollywood probably has a long row to hoe with the laddish fan boy crowd that has embraced anime and Hong Kong cinema. And when people talk about getting some fan buzz going they always seem to think first of the young men who made Ringo Lam and Miike Takeshi into household (or at least dorm room) names. But there are lots of other kinds of movie freaks around, just waiting to be catered to if our more adventurous indie distributors are willing to do some digging. More than one on-line commentator has noticed that an inordinate portion of the new Anglo fnas of Bollywood cinema seem to be women. And one of the leading non-Indian voices (and the best writer) on the Usenet chat group rec.arts.movies.local.indian is a Canadian drag queen who performs in clubs in the Toronto area dressed up as Helen, the legendary dancing vamp of high-60s Hindi cinema; his piece de resistance is Helen's legendary "Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu" number from the Anand Brothers' pop-art thriller Jewel Thief (1967). "I grew up on a constant diet of pessimism, cynicism and irony," says the artist in question, Muffy St. Bernard, "and quite frankly that sort of thing turns my stomach now. I've seen too much of it. What I love about Bollywood movies is what makes them different from other types of films."
At the moment, though, Lagaan is probably Bollywood's best shot. A huge hit in India and on the NRI circuit over the summer, it has also played consistently well elsewhere, snagging the People's Choice Award from an all-European crowd at the Locarno Film Festival in August. If Americans weren't so entrenched in their anti-Bollywood attitudes, we might even be able to endorse the conviction of the movie's star and producer, Aamir Khan, that Lagaan has what it takes to become the Indian Crouching Tiger. "I think the reason the film is connecting to different audiences across the world," he says, "is because it is a good film and a universal human story, a story about the underdog achieving the impossible. It's kind of like an Asterix comic book, our version of the little Gaulish village standing up against the Roman Empire."
As Lagaan demonstrates, it really doesn't take much effort to create a film that honors all the central codes of Bollywood and yet is perfectly accessible to the firangi. The real lesson of Crouching Tiger, after all, is that foreign filmmakers don't have to abandon the distinctive national genres and narrative strategies, which they have already at their fingertips, in order to seduce non-native audiences. Quite the contrary, in fact; the very foreignness of a foreign movie can be a selling point, provided it's properly packaged. Ang Lee's central innovation in CTHD was actually quite subtle, a brush-stroke application of psychological nuance to characters that on their home turf were familiar heroic wu hsia archetypes. What this comparison suggests is that if Bollywood truly wants to conquer the world, it would be well advised to abandon misguided efforts to learn a bunch of new tricks from Hollywood, and continue playing to its strengths. Bollywood's leading lights are the only moviemakers on earth who don't have to start from scratch every time they want to make a musical. Song and dance could be the Bollywood equivalent of kung fu.
Aamir Khan, who became a major star in 1989 and is now in his mid-30s, is at the forefront of a group of Bollywood "young Turks" who are vigorously pursuing aesthetic and technical reforms, like synch sound recording and unified production schedules, which are already helping to make the films look more presentable in conventional western terms. Back in the bad old days in the 1980s, when video piracy was rampant and every Indian production was a do-or-die long shot, actors got into the habit of attaching themselves to six or seven fly-by-might projects simultaneously, just to be on the safe side. The films were often shot piecemeal in two or three week chunks, whenever the actors happened to be available, over a period of up to two years. "In America," says Sanjay Dutt, "they plan for years and they shoot for weeks. In India they plan for weeks and shoot for years." In fact, more and more Bollywood movies (including Dutt's Kaante) are now being shot "Hollywood style," on a single production schedule, a condition Khan insisted on for both of his 2001 releases, Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai (The Heart Desires), an excellent yuppie-buddy drama written and directed by a first timer, 26-year-old Farhan Ahktar.
This one-movie-at-a-time approach has obvious financial benefits, especially if you're borrowing money and sweating the interest payments, but it can also pay creative dividends. One small example: Rather than sporting a single generic hairstyle designed to be more or less appropriate for half a dozen disparate roles, Khan was able to change his appearance radically when he moved from Lagaan to Dil Chahta Hai, adopting for the latter a short-cropped, mini-bearded look that sparked a tonsorial fashion craze among Bombay teens. In the long term, the added verisimilitude afforded by on-set voice recording could have even more radical effects: the aggressive echo-chamber boom of looped dialog has been a major contributor to the tone of grandiose unreality that some Westerners have found off-putting in Hindi cinema.
The range of subject matter in the films is changing, too. The global-chic appearance and relaxed lifestyle of the sleek, rich characters in a picture like Dil Chahta Hai may look startlingly "Western," but Khan insists that they were not created with that effect in mind. They simply reflect the globalized social reality of the new, emergent Indian middle-class. "Indian cinema has not begun addressing the international audience," Khan insists. "We are addressing the Indian audience. What you're seeing in a film like Dil Chahta Hai is the work of a young director who has grown up in a city like Bombay, which has a strong western influence. He is somebody like myself: we studied in English, the language we think in is English. So we are a group of people, which is growing larger and larger in India, which has got influences from all over the place, and as a result the way we think might be different from that of the filmmakers of the 1970s and before. But we don't think about the foreign audience. Now maybe we do, a bit, after the success of a movie like Lagaan. That films was not made for an international audience. The fact that it has done so well whenever it has played to non-Indians, that kind of opened our eyes."
As Indian commercial movies have improved technically over the past few years, Indian attitudes about their own cinema have begun to shift, as well. "When I was growing up in India in the 1970s," Mira Nair recalls, "we might moon over the love songs from an Amitabh Bachchan film like Kabhie Kabhi [From Time to Time, 1976] but there was also a snobbery about the high-kitsch aspects of Bollywood. Now life has changed in India, where on the one hand Bollywood movies have become much more slick and refined, and on the other hand there is the attitude that to be Indian is to be cool. What we show in Monsoon Wedding is what now actually happens at a Punjabi wedding, that the sister of the bride will imitate Madhuri Dixit's latest movie dance for the family. Believe me, that would not have happened even five years ago. The dance would have been much more traditional."
Multi-hued fusions of cultural elements from around the globe are of course commonplace in the globe-spanning information age, and more and more movies are taking note of the fact. The Los Angeles-based writer-director Somnath Sen has made a film called Leela that mixes established Bollywood stars like Dimple Kapadia and Vinod Khanna with young Indo-American performers. The film is set and was shot in the US, and its dialog is all in English, but it also features several full-dress song sequences, sung in Hindi by "playback singers," lip-synched by the top-line stars, and sensuously "picturized," in full-dress, high-Bollywood style.
Director Sen views the mixed aesthetic signals that he is sending out in Leela as an acknowledgement of the fact that as an adult he has finally learned to stop worrying and love Bollywood: "I was raised in India but educated in the States. I went to film school at USC. And I am sad to say that I too bought into this stuff about Indian things being low quality. As a student I was into Godard and Truffaut. When I went back to India and began working in the Hindi film industry, I did some research. My thesis is that while filmmaking may have been invented in the West, there also is a distinctive way that we in India tell our stories. We have always used song and dance to our storytelling. Almost every classic form of theater in India is based on song and dance. And in the 1950s and 60s, the great Bollywood directors like Guru Dutt and Bimal Roy used music as an extension of their storytelling. They could take 15 minutes of storytelling and compress it into a four-minute song."
Aamir Khan, too, refers back to the fabled Golden Age when outlining his aspirations as a performer-turned-producer: "When I think of the films I want to emulate I don't think of Hollywood. I think of the great Bollywood films of the fifties and sixties, of directors like Mehboob Khan, who made Mother India, of K. Asif, who made Mughul-e-Asam, of Bimal Roy and Guru Dutt. And as an actor I look to the great ones of those days, especially Dilip Kumar. These are the artists I find inspiring."
The director Shekhar Kapur, who has worked on both sides of the east-west divide, also seems to be coming to roost these days. In 1987, Kapur made the classic Bollywood comedy thriller Mr. India, whose celebrated Sridevi kootch number "Hawa Hawaii" is an item in Muffy St. Bernard's drag repertoire. But in the years following that success he seemed to be desperate to put Hindi cinema behind him, turning first to Indian art movie Bandit Queen (1944) and then to Elizabeth (1998), than which few things could be more aggressively, almost jingoistically British. Now he's teamed with Lord Lloyd Webber to re-kindle his Bombay Dreams. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Kapur seemed to advocating a resurrgeant form of Bollywood nationalism: "It's not a question of making films more like Hollywood. Indian popular cinema has a style and a tradition of its own which should not be bastardized. ... (We) should look more towards Asia than America. There's a huge audience out there with its own cinematic traditions. It's becoming more powerful. India should lead the way."
1. So fervent is the desire of comparatively well-heeled Indians abroad to use movies as a way of keeping in touch with the home culture that since the mid-90s a distinct genre of "NRI movies" has developed in Bollywood, celebrations of Hindu Family Values (like the current Bachchan vehicle K3G) peddling what critic Anupama Chopra describes as "desi values draped in Yankee slickness." Films like Hum Apke Hain Koun (What Am I to You, 1994) and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Braveheart Will Carry Off the Bride, 1995), which launched this trend, constitute a kind of "super-genre" that incorporates elements from every past phase of Bollywood movie history, while focusing upon huge "joint families" that are devoutly Hindu yet flaunt up-market, Westernized, consumerist lifestyles. It has been suggested that up to 65% of the box office gross for some these films is earned not in India but overseas.
2. One of the most blistering recent expressions of this "injured pride" came straight from the horse's mouth, from top Bollywood producer-director Mahesh Bhatt, whose home-production Raaz (Secret, '02) was one of the major hits of the spring season in India. In a piece published in February in the Bombay trade magazine Screen, Bhatt wrote: "The bitter fact is that this nation of one billion people does not even exist in the consciousness of the American people. We may like to delude ourselves and believe that our movies are now beginning to grab the attention of the young brain-damaged kids of the United States. But that is only wishful thinking.... Americans do not give a tinker's damn for India, least of all for our movies." A few days before the Oscar telecast in May, Bhatt renewed his complaints in the Bombay daily Afternoon: "I don't give a damn about the recognition given by the white men. If you want to wag your tail and party if you get an Oscar, good luck to you. ... If you are ready to eat a white man's shit, eat it."