Globalisation and Bollywood
By Maithili Rao
A paradox bridges the last century and the bright new millennium. The geriatric 90s sought rejuvenation through the infusion of young blood into tired old stories told by Bollywood's panicky dream merchants. New stars zapped us with their wattage, new attitudes strutted unto the global catwalk with panache... The 1990s boasted all this plus the chutzpah to carry it off. The 90s were like a wise but ageing courtesan, a statuesque descendant of voluptuous temple sculpture, down-sizing herself into minis and hot pants to seduce an MTV-addicted Generation X.
This was the flamboyant face India showed off to a world already bedazzled by Indian beauties laying repeated claim to Miss Universe and Miss World titles. Bollywood made the Indian Babe hot and sultry, yet demurely biddable. The high visibility of the indigenous fashion industry also changed the look of the screen siren and shaped a new body image. Wide hipped voluptuousness - so evocative of the Mother Goddess's abundant fertility - was banished. The new image of desirability was svelte slimness clothed in tight jeans and desi (native) haute couture. The Indian hunk followed suit: iron-pumping bodies showcased in international designer labels but plumping for homegrown virtues of filial obedience. There was to be no pre-marital sex despite all that red-hot wooing across continents. India was sexy and Hindi cinema sexier. Despite the riots and ravages of Third World poverty, political upheavals and natural calamities, India edged her way to the world's attention, even if only at the periphery.
It's always the economy, stupid, and not just for an American presidential election. This was the historic moment when India's creaky economy was forced out of an old comfort zone. Earlier, domestic protectionism was presided over by bureaucrats waving ideological rulebooks at international entrepreneurs seeking new markets. Ironically, ideologues continued to spout shop-worn socialist rhetoric to a middle class clamouring to enter the new consumerist paradise. A 5,000-year old culture was both a cherished legacy and a liability for guilt-free seekers of conspicuous consumption. Ancient India raised asceticism to a spiritual level but also worshipped Lakshmi, the Goddess of Wealth, supremely unaware of ironical contradictions. India's entry into the hazardous freedom of globalised market wasn't just a matter of economics. It was a seismic shift that not only convulsed India's economy and polity but also dictated how Bollywood manufactured and sold new dreams to an audience it could no longer take for granted.
Shifts in national sensibilities and deepening of collective anxieties don't follow the precision of calendar dates. But there is something about the 90s of a century, especially one leading to a next millennium, which forces these subterranean movements to the surface.
The Amitabh Bachchan era of the angry young man who voiced the despair of the marginalized and the neo-fascist vigilantes who provided violent solutions had passed. Irrevocably. Into this post-Bachchan vacuum came the mantra of globalisation. Bollywood led the incantatory chant with fervent hope and febrile anticipation, finding its vocation with missionary zeal. When a conservative, caste-ridden society - internally pulled apart by ethnic and religious divisions - is hurtled into a globalised society of instant gratification and instant punishment, it is cast adrift on a sea of moral confusion. The old certitudes are gone and there is an almost xenophobic fear of losing one's cultural identity. Bollywood allayed these deep fears that were shrilly voiced by revalidating traditional virtues and the sanctity of family values.
Popular culture senses the zeitgeist far more quickly than it is credited and offers quick fix answers with equal alacrity. This also coincided - accidentally or by historical inevitability? - with the rise of militant Hindutva which sought to impose a semitised version of a tolerant religion as India's answer to the perceived threat from western cultural hegemony. Hindutva seeks to homogenise India's multi-religious society into its neo-fascist image. This aggressive cultural nationalism found endorsement in phenomenally popular family sagas through the 90s, starting with Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, Dilwale Dulhaniya Lejayenge, Raja Hindustani, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Hum Saath Saath Hain, down to 2001's Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham.
This soft patriotism has its hard-sell counterpoint that appealed to a nation torn by internal secessionist movements. The initial inspiration came from the South in 1992 with Mani Ratnam's Roja. Its path-breaking popularity emboldened hitherto timid jingoists into naming Pakistan as the enemy. Krantiveer, Sarfarosh, Pukar, Mission Kashmir, Gadar are the more successful examples of this super nationalistic genre. Except for Sarfarosh, almost all these films wallowed in xenophobic excess, refusing to look inwards to find the causes of ethnic unrest. It was as if you couldn't love your country without hating your neighbour. Bollywood was blind to the fact that the West too had been stricken by the resurgent tribalism that had surfaced in many parts of the globalised world. Globalisation and tribalism are the Siamese twins that no surgeon's scalpel can separate.
Drunk with the success of the new formula of push-button patriotism, Bollywood continues to dance gleefully on the razor's edge. What was perceived as a threat seems to have turned to manna from the heavens, ; heavens ruled by powerful NRIs who beam benediction down on Mumbai's Mughals. What is new is the gratifying respectability bestowed by the critical scrutiny of academics exploring a whole new territory of post-colonial popular culture. It took decades for cultural fashions to be set in the pre-information highway age. But now, cultural studies follow in the wake of markets. Bollywood suddenly seems to be the flavour of the season - in Europe and across the Atlantic, in addition to the taken-for-granted audiences in the Middle East, South-Asia and parts of Africa. You now see Bollywood trimming its sails to seduce the hitherto resistant West and enlarge its familiar appeal to the newer generation NRI kids. The Indian Diaspora is prone to acute attacks of nostalgia. Bollywood assiduously feeds this craving with its staple fare of star power, music and stories that remain essentially the same.
The external face of Bollywood's globalizing zeal is obvious in the simultaneous release of blockbusters at home and abroad, stage shows that draw hysterical crowds and the conscious introduction of the NRI element into the story. From the time of Maine Pyar Kiya, where the homecoming hero returns from studies abroad, to K3G's migration of the rejected son to London, Hindi films have exploited the love-hate relationship Indians have with their NRI cousins. Vicarious pride in their achievements in alien lands is vitiated by envy and the hurt of desertion. Bollywood responds with the emphatic reiteration of traditional Indian virtues such as family loyalty and self-denial in all the feel good films of the 90s.
The eye candy of sumptuous foreign locations is more than a package deal of armchair tourism for desi audiences who clamour for exotic settings. So often, songs or a key sequence - like K3G's poignant meeting of the estranged Raichand paterfamilias and his son - is set in a shopping mall. The utopia of conspicuous consumption couldn't be advertised more effectively by any Madison Avenue ad wizard. These images also flatter the lifestyles of wealthy NRIs, whether it's the mansion by the bay in Pardes or pastel pretty suburbia of K3G.
This opulence abroad is matched by overpowering magnificence at home. Not even the President of India, who occupies the Viceregal palace in Delhi built by Imperial Britain, lives in the unreal grandeur of K3G's baronial mansion. Chandni Chowk's overcrowded squalor is sanitised to pink blandness because there is no room for working class grime or middleclass grit in these designer made fantasies. That is the biggest change that has overtaken Hindi cinema - in look, feel and attitude.
This gradual change coincided with the explosion of satellite TV. This was also the period of the yawning post-Bachchan vacuum when no formula could work... until young love blessed by family elders was invented in a culture which had previously celebrated the rebellion of obsessed young love against inimical society. The legend of Laila Majnu or Heer Ranjha gloried in love's subversive passion. Now, lovers court family elders with more ardour than the beloved. Romance has become contemporary, based on friendship rather than incandescent passion. But finally, love conquers only after submission to the family's greater good. This is the new formula patented by the Bollywood brat pack - Aditya Chopra, Karan Johar, Dharmesh Darshan and adopted by older showbiz moghuls like Subhash Ghai (Pardes, Taal and Yadein show that he has learnt the latest lesson) and even Yash Chopra, the originator of the chiffon and roses romance.
But some new auteurs refuse to be part of the brat pack. Foremost among them is Ram Gopal Varma who graduated from Sholay (his avowed text book) to Tarantino's post-modernist violence. Satya and its latest follow up, Company, reveal how brilliantly Varma has imbibed Hollywood technique and married it to the topicality of newspaper headlines. Mafia wars and Bombay's criminalized underbelly are revealed in a style that owes as much to Scorcese, Tarantino and film noir as to Varma's quirky, restless sensibility. This direct influence of Hollywood is now out in the open, with no shame-faced apologies about "inspiration". Abbas-Mastan transformed a little seen HBO film, A Kiss Before Dying, into Baazigar. Shahrukh Khan's charming killer was different precisely because there was no emotional justification offered prior to the killing spree. This new amorality, and the subsequent glamorisation of violence on its own terms, contradicts the dominant trend of the family saga. But this well-made valorisation of crime and killers doesn't seem to have the all-India appeal of the other genre. Technique is secondary to morality.
But Hollywoodisation continues. It duplicates the trendy look of film noir but shuns the moral ambiguities of the borrowed genre. Aks (2001), a biggie made by the talented ad filmmaker Rakesh Mehra, takes off from Hollywood's Fallen. It is a triumph of moody cinematography and Bachchan's brilliance. But the moralising script tries to impose the simplified philosophy of Karma from the Bhagvadgita on an action thriller and the film came a cropper at the box-office. But take Vikram Bhatt's Raaz (2002), the sleeper-hit of the year. This What Lies Beneath rip off, starring models turned actors, dresses up the occult with the heroics of a chaste wife fighting to protect her husband! Moral vindication of traditional virtues, especially in modern women who might tear the family apart with their aspirations of personal fulfilment, can always trump more ambitious rivals.
Bachchan's legendary status, even after acquiring the warmth of avuncular affection on the TV game show Kaun Banega Crorepati, does not guarantee success. Bachchan's pioneering effort of bringing corporate discipline to film production failed initially but has more takers now. The corporate culture has trickled down to insuring films but will this withstand the notoriously fickle public, which shifts allegiance without forewarning? Despite the risks, the trend continues. Product placement (with lamentably laughable results in Yadein) and merchandising à la Hollywood,are in the ascendance . Coffee table tomes on the making of hyped films - Asoka, K3G, Lagaan - fuel a whole new industry. Aamir Khan may not have won the Oscar but the campaign to woo a crossover audience has been launched. Market savvy has come to stay. An essential skill if you want to compete in the global market.
At home, a whole new generation has grown up on MTV-ised fare dished out by the satellite TV invasion of Indian homes. The Khan triad of saleable younger stars - Shahrukh, Aamir and Salman - in tailor-made vehicles has destroyed the Bachchan mystique for younger viewers who want their idols to dance like Michael Jackson, swagger like Tom Cruise, emote like Russell Crowe, fight like Jackie Chan - and still croon to the beloved in Swiss meadows, caper along London streets and deliver rhetorical dialogue with panache! That is, when they are not spouting the mantra of pop patriotism and espousing sacrosanct Indian family values whilst enjoying the best of western material comforts. It is like having your Indian cake and licking the forbidden western icing too.
Maithili Rao is a renowned film critic and has written regularly for Sunday Express, Times of India, Cinema in India and international film journals like South Asian Cinema. She lives in Mumbai and often edits film festival publications.
