Bollywood: Further Research

There is already a flourishing Bollywood theatrical circuit in North America, with venues ranging from dedicated cinemas like the Bay Area's Naz 8 in Fremont to occasional four-wall engagements in other major cities. But for most non-Indians the scene is a tough nut to crack. The events often feel more like community get-togethers than film screenings, so perhaps it's understandable that the organizers seem ambivalent about reaching out beyond their base audience. The prints screened are not always subtitled, and when they are the fact is not always advertised. Even if you frequent a desi video emporium and pick up one of the locally published NRI newspapers (like the excellent India-West), there's always a fair amount of anxiety involved. Will the print be subtitled as promised? Will the screening be oversold? For most of us, video and DVDs remain far more comfortable options.

As recently as five years ago you were lucky to stumble across even a second-generation VHS dub of a Bimal Roy film imported from Dubai, with barely legible subtitles in both Arabic and English. The current Indian video scene is idyllic in comparison, although there is certainly room for improvement. Piracy is rampant, aspect ratios are not always respected, and the failure to subtitle song lyrics as well as dialogue is an ongoing frustration. But there is world-class work being done by the best Indian DVD companies-like London's Ayngaran International (http://e-sales.ac/ayngaran), which specializes in high-quality, no-zone releases of Tamil films. The class acts of the Hindi-language market, DEI (indianfilmsdvd.com) and Yash Raj Films Home Entertainment (yashrajfilms.com), have separate "classics" labels devoted to reissuing Golden Age work.

It will always be more fun shopping for DVDs in a real Indian video store, especially in well-equipped NRI neighborhoods like Jackson Heights in Queens or Artesia's Little India in Orange County. But every Sweets & Spices shop in America now seems to have a few DVDs available, and on-line sources abound, notably IndiaPlaza.com and the India Weekly site at panindia.com. My current source of choice is the all-Indian rent-by-mail service IndoFilms.com, which is modeled on NetFlix and offers fast turnaround times.

Although there are dozens of websites that track and rate Indian DVD releases, my favorite is the labor-of-love fan site zulm.net, which posts super-picky videophile reviews illustrated with frame grabs. There are far too many Bollywood-related websites and chat rooms to list here, but for starters try upperstall.com, a prickly smart (and beautifully designed) resource on the Golden Age classics, BollyWhat.com, which offers song-lyric translations and language resources for the non-Hindi speaker, the lively fan site Planet BollyBob (dazzled.com/dangermuff/bollybob/index), and the entertainment pages at rediff.com and indiaexpress.com, solid mainstream news sources for upcoming film (and film music) releases.

It's still possible to get a fair amount of information the old-fashioned way, from books printed on actual paper. Indian popular cinema has become a hot academic topic in recent years, both in India and the U.K., and a dozen new books on the subject are readily available either from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk or from specialized sources like firstandsecond.com (in India) or indiaclub.com (in exotic New Jersey). The bas news is that only a few of these volumes contain what a friend calls "primary source criticism," writing that directly implicates the critic in the movie experience. After plowing through several of them I swore a solemn oath never to use the words "liminal" or "imbricate" in polite company.

One could never accuse midsection contributor Nasreen Munni Kabir of pretending that she has not herself been seduced by the immediate experience of watching Hindi movies. The great strength of her lucid and thorough book Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story (Channel 4/PanMacMillan, 01) is that it's the work of a lifelong scholar-fan who is not too proud to admit (to paraphrase Robert Warshow) "that in some way she takes all that nonsense seriously." (Kabir's biography of Guru Dutt and her book-length interview with Sholay screenwriter Javed Akhtar, both from Oxford India, are also excellent.) Other crucial basic texts include Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen's Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema (BFI/Oxford, 99; second edition), an indispensable reference book, and Yves Thoraval's 500-page The Cinemas of India (Macmillan India, 00), the definitive soup-to-nuts history of the entire field.

Among the new wave of serious Bollywood scholars, London's Rachel Dwyer is a rare bird: an earnest academic openly delighted by her subject. Her book All You Want Is Money, All You Need Is Love: Sex and Romance in Modern India (Cassell, 00) is a trailblazing study of India's emerging middle class and its shape-shifting impact on popular culture. Dwyer has also written a full-dress biography of producer-director Yash Chopra (BFI, 02) and co-written (with Divia Patel) the ravishing Cinema India (Reaktion Books, 02), a lavishly illustrated study of the major visual "attractions" of Hindi cinema, from its characteristic approaches to set and costume design, to such distinctive pictorial motifs as song sequences arbitrarily filmed in Switzerland. (Patel's chapters consider the garish splendors of Bombay's giant-billboard ad culture.)

My favorite writer on Indian popular culture and cinema is the Delhi-based "political psychologist, sociologist of science, and futurist" Ashis Nandy. Even in books that are not primarily about movies, like The Tao of Cricket (Oxford India, 00) and An Ambiguous Journey to the City (Oxford India, 01), Nandy raises the subject so often, and in such surprising contexts, that he ends up clarifying themes that have animated Indian cinema from the outset. The anthology The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema (Oxford India, 98), which Nandy edited, contains his influential essay "Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum's Eye View of Politics," which is primary source criticism of the highest order. Nandy invites his readers to think about "cinema and the politics of cultures in less conventional ways, unencumbered by formal film theory and trendy hermeneutics of the kind that, for reasons of academic correctness, sucks all life from one of the most vigorous expressions of the selfhood of the Indian caught between the old and the new, the inner and the outer, the local and the global."

M. Madhava Prasad's Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Oxford India, 98), which is knee-deep in the clotted turf language of academic film studies, may strike you at first as exactly the kind of enervating "secondary source" criticism Nandy dismisses. But Prasad is a muscular thinker who wields the cumbersome socio-critical apparatus of ivory tower Marxism with surprising delicacy. He makes a strong case for the proposition that Bollywood's filmmakers are not attempting to adhere to Hollywood's codes of "seamless realism" and somehow bungling the job. Prasad insists that they are in fact quite adept at making a different kind of movie altogether, exactly the sort of movie their audience wants. His chapters on the primordial "root" genre of Hindi cinema (which he identifies as "the feudal family romance"), and on key aesthetic concepts like "frontality" and the "heterogeneous mode of production," enrich our experience of the films by helping us understand how their creators work and think-the highest standard to which any critic can aspire.

AFTERWORD

Are the terms "Bollywood" and "Hindi cinema" interchangeable synonyms? Not necessarily. Bombay is the production capital of Hindi-language cinema. And the movie scene in Bombay is Bollywood, to the extent that anyplace is. But the Bollywood idiom is employed by the Tamil, Telegu, and Malayalam commercial cinemas as well. One reason I persist in using the term "Bollywood" is that it can be used loosely to refer to the work of influential Tamil directors like Mani Rathnam and Ram Gopal Varma even when they aren't working in Hindi. These ambiguities probably help to account for the fact that the designation of choice in academic circles is "Indian popular cinema." - David Chute

© 2002 by David Chute