"crossover film”

"crossover film” - pictures that aim for both an Indian
and a western audience

Shyam Benegal, India’s most respected independent filmmaker, is working on a comedy that has us both shaking with laughter before he is halfway through describing the plot. The film is named after its central character, Maha Dev, who is the traditional letter-writer and letter-reader for his illiterate fellow villagers in an impoverished corner of northern India. As in thousands of such villages, modernity has not visibly intruded, barring the occasional bicycle.

Then somebody acquires a television. The villagers are mystified by what they see: a mix of glamorous US re-runs, such as Baywatch and The Bold and the Beautiful, and a host of ritzy Indian urban daytime soap operas. Even the commercials, which nobody who has watched Indian television could possibly forget, mesmerise the villagers. The characters in Indian car advertisements always seem to be driving along pristine highways in Scotland or California, with never a pothole or a sacred cow in sight. As for the household appliances commercials, in which corner of India do people reside in outsized Mediterranean villas? Pretty much everywhere according to the advertisements.

”As the only literate man in the village and the one who has always interpreted the outside world to them, the whole village turns to Maha Dev to explain what they are seeing on the television,” says Benegal. “Naturally Maha Dev is as clueless about what he is seeing as everyone else. But he has to pretend he knows what is being depicted. He does his best.”

We are seated knee-to-knee in Benegal’s cramped office in downtown Mumbai - formerly known as Bombay - where I am soliciting his views about changing images of India. My thesis, I tell him, is that India’s image has progressed a long way from the days when it served as the principal locus of western fantasies of the Orient. The west, I say, as often as not nowadays dispenses with its romantic lens altogether. By the same token, India’s self-image has also altered, from one that saw itself as beyond comparison with normal countries, to a new globalised mindset that was as predictably flag-waving but also as insecure as anywhere else.

Of course, I continue, my account was almost certainly too simple, since India has an irksome knack of demolishing neat conclusions almost as soon as they are formed. But to my surprise, Benegal is already nodding in agreement. In his late 60s and sporting an arty grey beard, Benegal’s eyes sparkle with sympathy. “Of course it’s true,” he says. “Look at yoga or any other “spiritual” product of India. It has become a global commodity like any other - charged at $60 an hour. Nobody looks to India for spiritual enlightenment any more. Once something becomes a commodity it is fundamentally changed.”

Attempting to capture India on the page (or the screen) is as futile as trying to put humour into a bottle. India, like any other nation, has no essence or core - it is a series of perceptions. And perceptions of India, both from outside and from within, are changing. Having reported on India since 2001, I have come to the view that the nation’s traditional romantic image is, if not dead, then certainly overshadowed by strikingly new and different ones.

Someone once said that it cost a lot to keep Mahatma Gandhi in poverty. Nowadays, most people praise Gandhi’s notion of holy poverty only to bury it. In an age of information technology and nuclear weapons, India’s image overseas can no longer be reduced to the rope trick, the maharajas and their elephants, or even the self-denying ordinances of its freedom fighters. The Beatles’ pilgrimage to India in the 1960s seems almost as long ago as the tall stories Marco Polo told in the 13th century. What then is supplanting these old myths?

Most foreigners have not yet heard of it. But there is no better place to start than Gurgaon, a satellite town of New Delhi that is rapidly becoming the headquarters of India’s service economy. Like Bangalore in India’s south, Gurgaon is home to dozens of call centres and back-office processing units. Like Delhi, 20 miles to its north-east, Gurgaon’s roads are chock-a-block with fancy foreign cars. And like Mumbai, 850 miles to the south-west of Gurgaon, it is sprouting shopping malls and multiplex cinemas with a furious impatience.

But unlike India’s other metropolitan centres, Gurgaon is almost wholly middle class. A decade ago its population was 30,000. Now it is half a million. Gurgaon is projected to hit two million within the next five to 10 years. Measured against India’s vast population of 1.05 billion, Gurgaon is barely a drop in the ocean. Yet to any Indian advertiser or filmmaker, Gurgaon is already shorthand for one of their most important “demographics”, or target audiences. Gurgaon is the most undiluted version of what is happening to every Indian suburb. Someone who lives there is a “guppie” - a Gurgaon yuppie.

What is the guppie’s idea of India? H.K. Bhutani, a former colonel in the Indian army, manages the City Centre Mall, the first shopping mall to be built in Gurgaon, and only the second in India. Although it only opened in December 2002, Gurgaon has another 35 malls in various stages of planning or construction. There is also 2 million sq ft of office space in the pipeline and a roughly equal amount of residential apartment space on the way. Gurgaon already has 3.6 million sq ft of “Grade A” office area - more than five times that of New Delhi.

We meet at Barista, India’s version of the Starbucks chain, in the main foyer of the shopping mall. Around us are the familiar brands of retail centres anywhere in the world - Domino’s Pizza, Adidas, McDonald’s and a multiplex cinema that is showing Collateral, Terminal and Bride and Prejudice.

Bhutani seems benignly puzzled by my questions. I ask him why everything in Gurgaon has a Californian name. The apartment high-rises are called Beverly Hills, Belvedere Towers, Silver Oaks, Windsor Court and West End Heights. The office blocks are called Royalton Towers, Icon Pinnacle, Plaza Tower and Gateway Tower. And the malls are prefixed by Metropolis, or Mega or Super or City. Which way is it to India? I joke.

”We offer a total experience for the full family entertainment,” says Bhutani, as we sip our cafe lattes. “It is a total all-round experience. You don’t have to haggle in the retail outlets, the prices are fixed. You don’t have to watch rats scurry across the floor in the cinema or worry the power supply will go. And afterwards you can eat in a restaurant with a clean kitchen and guaranteed quality.”

Total satisfaction is assured, it seems. Much the same applies to the Delhi Golf and Country Club down the road, which, like the City Centre Mall, is owned and operated by Delhi Land and Finance, a billion-dollar family-owned developer that has built half of Gurgaon. The 130-acre golf club is managed by Kapil Kaul, another retired colonel.

Kaul, sporting a straw hat, proudly gives me a tour of the site. The wedding-cake club building is serving a Saturday buffet lunch to its members. Most of the men are wearing the cheesy uniform - baseball caps, naff jumpers and slacks - of any golf club in the world. Membership is $15,000 for four years. It is India’s number one golf course. In the foreground are dozens of caddies in neatly starched uniforms. In the background are the plush residential high-rises of MNC (multinational corporation) Gurgaon. Almost everyone here works for some MNC or other. Gurgaon is headquarters to the Indian operations of Pepsi, GE, Seagram, Nestle and many others. Naturally golf is the principal networking activity.

”Every single blade of grass has been carefully planned,” says Kaul, as we glide in his golf buggy towards the first of 18 holes. “Close your eyes and you could be anywhere in the world. Over there,” he continues, eyes firmly open, “is what I like to call my ‘Manhattan skyline’.”

Driving through Gurgaon is like flitting in and out of Singapore or Phoenix and then back into India. The city is still in its infancy, so there are large tracts of scrub, grazing land and stray dogs. Then you are suddenly in a thicket of high-rises again. Billboards advertise “Villas in Mediterranean and Arabian style”. Behind them and still visible through the frontier-town dust of construction are the residential complexes that contain the three, four and five-bedroom apartments of everyone’s dreams.

”It was only when I saw Gurgaon that I realised we could now return to India,” says Naveen Mishra, who works for a multinational that he asked me not to name. We are having dim sum at an upmarket Chinese restaurant. Until five years ago, Mishra and his family were based in Singapore. As a middle-aged executive at an international corporation, Mishra is a quintessential guppie. Bribes hardly ever need to be paid, he says. And almost all of his friends pay taxes. “In reality, we are still living the expatriate lifestyle,” he says. “Almost everyone here has lived abroad.”

Mishra and some friends recently set up the Gurgaon Wine Club. It has 65 members. At their last meeting the theme was Chilean wine. “Do I ever need to go to Delhi?” he asks. “Not really. Everything we want is in Gurgaon. Perhaps if we have friends staying from abroad I will take them to Chandni Chowk [Delhi’s largest street market]. But it is quite dirty and noisy, and I wouldn’t go there often.”

Everyone in Gurgaon seems to be dreaming of California: dreams fuelled, as they are everywhere, by the images of America pumped out for the last century by Hollywood. But now Bollywood has emerged as a rival dream factory. The sheer vigour of its directors, actors, choreographers, musicians and writers is capturing an ever-wider audience at home and also abroad, initially through the spreading diaspora of non-resident Indians (NRIs, as they are known everywhere).

Film City is a park on the outskirts of Mumbai, where many Bollywood pictures are shot. The sprawling 517-acre site sits adjacent to the Rajiv Gandhi National Park, a jungle that encroaches, sometimes dangerously (leopards have paid frequent nocturnal visits to the studio’s make-up rooms), on the suburbs of India’s commercial capital. Situating Film City in such terrain was deliberate. No Bollywood film would be complete without one or two dance sequences in the forest or a lover’s duet on a stone bridge overarching a stream. We drive through the sprawling campus, dodging impromptu film shoots from the backs of jeeps and in dappled vales beside the road. Everywhere there are Bollywood starlets in brightly coloured hotpants or cut-off jeans and dark glasses.

The buzz in Bollywood nowadays is about the rise of the “crossover film” - pictures that aim for both an Indian and a western audience, the latter presumably encouraged by their NRI neighbours, colleagues and friends. Which explains why so many of the sets we stumble across are foreign. I find myself sitting in a precise replica of a Jubilee Line carriage in Charing Cross station on the London Underground. “This is a complete copy down to the patterns on the seats,” the set director tells me. He is not exaggerating. All I would need to complete the experience is a sweaty armpit in which to place my nose. “We have to do this otherwise the western audience won’t find it believable.”

The quest for that elusive serious western audience is going to extravagant lengths. Films are now frequently shot twice, once in Hindi and once in English. To cater to western tastes, the English scenes are shorter and punchier and there are fewer set-piece dance sequences. But the NRI audience - once a much-derided cousin of the resident Indian middle classes - is real. And their influence on the content and style of Bollywood films is growing.

Independent film-makers complain bitterly that the space and finance for films that deal with India’s “social reality”, or even rural India, have virtually disappeared. Many films ostensibly based in India are actually filmed in plush resorts in Mauritius or even Switzerland, where the scenery resembles Kashmir. Dev Benegal, a cousin of Shyam’s and also an independent film-maker, says: “When we pitch a film about Indian social reality, the financiers say: ‘We don’t want to do a documentary, we want real acting.’ There is no space for serious films in Bollywood.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, in the aftermath of India’s independence from Britain, Bollywood sold the dream of development and modernisation and films were often set in rural India and depicted heroes battling against the evils of feudalism. Nowadays Bollywood would more accurately be described as an arm of the consumer goods sector. The contemporary formula - which has left rural India, in which two-thirds of its people live, on the cutting-room floor - caters to the tastes both of Gurgaon and the NRIs.

Quite by chance, my tour of Film City coincides with the presence of Amitabh Bachchan, India’s most revered film star, whose 62nd birthday has just been celebrated in dozens of newspaper supplements. I am halfway through an interview with Sanjeevanee Kutty, the civil servant in charge of Film City, when her assistant rushes in: “Mr Bachchan is ready now,” says the assistant. Ready for what? I inquire. “Mr Bachchan is ready for his interview with you,” he says. This qualifies as one of Bollywood’s improbable little twists. Having no idea that Bachchan was in the vicinity, I had not requested an interview. Had I done so, it would have taken weeks of faxed letters and conversations with public relations agencies to get even the ghost of a chance. Led by Kutty in her official white Ambassador, we pile into a cavalcade of cars and rush to the shoot.

Like most of Bachchan’s shoots nowadays, it is a commercial. Wherever you are in India, the chances are that if you close your eyes and throw a dart it will land on a billboard or bus-siding bearing Bachchan’s distinguished grey-bearded visage. Whether it is Pepsi Cola, Cadbury’s chocolate, Parker pens or Maruti cars, no amount of exposure seems to dilute his brand equity. This time Bachchan is starring in an advertisement for Dabur, a health-food chain.

Although we are on the edge of the jungle and the temperature is more than 30 deg C, Bachchan is wearing a balaclava and looking flushed. Behind him a machine billows out fog. It is clearly a winter scene. “Are you wearing that [balaclava] for the shoot?” asks Kutty, evidently awkward in the presence of a living legend. “Well obviously, Ma’am,” replies the megastar, emphasising “Ma’am”. My interview is short and to the point. Many independent filmmakers say that Bollywood ignores the realities of India, I say. “Well, yes of course,” says Bachchan, with the same edge to his tone. “It’s called escapist cinema. Why should somebody pay to see a film with poverty in it when they see poverty in their neighbourhood every day?”

But why are so many of the films set in Switzerland or New York or some constructed fantasy of India? “People don’t want to be reminded where they live,” says Bachchan as if (and not entirely without merit) talking to someone who has difficulty understanding. Would you like to make more films that remind people where they live? “I really don’t see the point. Nobody will pay to go and see a film like On the Waterfront [the Marlon Brando 1954 classic set in the New York dockyards].”

As we are ushered out of Bachchan’s presence, Kutty says to me: “It was so kind of Mr Bachchan to give his valuable time, he is always giving of himself. That is why he is so loved by everybody.” By this stage I have become quite fond of Kutty and her self-effacing, always helpful manner. I want to find out what she thinks. It takes some pressing but eventually she admits: “Personally I don’t much like watching these films. I suppose they are a bit silly. But I am in a minority.”

Before leaving Film City, we gatecrash another shoot. A young girl, dressed in a frazzled nightclub outfit, is being harassed by her lover under the shade of a large tree. The shooting over, the young actress heads directly to where we are sitting. “Would you like to interview me?” she asks, with almost unseemly directness.

Shabana Sultan, it turns out, is a 21-year-old NRI who was born and brought up in Tripoli, capital of Libya, where her father was an orthopaedic surgeon, sometimes consulted by Colonel Gadaffi, Libya’s dictator. Sultan has always dreamed of being a Bollywood actress and this is her first film. “I am not at all nervous,” she says. “The camera is my lover.” Her father, who never lets his daughter out of his sight (”Even the boys are no longer safe in Bollywood,” he tells us) hands over his daughter’s portfolio, which she is keen for us to peruse. The portfolio is a series of pictures of her in different costumes - one in western evening dress, another in sultry nightclub attire, the next in a sexy “wet sari” pose, a fourth in more restrained sari mode, and so on. There was not a written word in the file, not even her name. “I don’t know why they gave me the part,” she says, absent-mindedly. “There wasn’t even an audition.” As we leave, her father rushes after us clutching a small piece of paper. “This is Shabana’s mobile telephone number,” he says. “In case you want to continue the interview.”

The typical Bollywood film is a blend of brilliantly choreographed titillation, which goes down very well with much of the male audience, and a resolutely conservative ending, which meets with the approval of their mothers and wives. A recent hit, Dil Chata Hai (My Heart Wants), shows a young man falling for an older, divorced woman. Much sultriness ensues before she falls ill and dies. The young man ends up with a girl of his own age. Or take another, not-so-classic film, Girlfriend, which inexplicably provoked a nationwide boycott by rightwing Hindu groups. A lesbian, who spends her spare time beating up men in amateur kick-boxing sessions, seduces her drunken and unsuspecting best friend. The latter’s wholesome fiance cottons on to the former’s preferences and, in confronting her, is almost killed in a furious, muscular assault before he finally prevails. The final scene shows the conventional Hindu couple paying their respects at the lesbian’s Christian gravestone. Convincing scripts are not Bollywood’s strong point. “Bollywood is expert at having its cake and eating it,” says Dev Benegal. “It shows you some flesh but it always ends by disapproving of such behaviour.”

But it is the impact of the NRI on India’s self-image, whether via Bollywood’s scripts and through journalism or even tourism, that is most strikingly apparent. I talk to Sunil Khilnani, author of the The Idea of India, one of the most widely cited books on modern India. Khilnani, an NRI himself, to whom many opinion-makers in the west turn when they want a judgment on contemporary India, is head of the South Asia department at the School of Advanced International Studies in Washington DC.

”In the past there was an Indian self-image and a romantic foreign image of India and the two were fairly distinct, although often linked,” Khilnani tells me over the telephone. “Now it is very hard to keep the two apart - often they are one and the same thing. And that is because of the NRI.”

Khilnani cites a number of Indian trends that have come from NRI communities, whether it is bhangra rap - dance music from the British Midlands that is based on traditional Punjabi music - or chicken tikka masala, a dish previously unknown to India that was popularised by Marks and Spencer in the UK. Equally, Bollywood films nowadays often show Indian characters playing basketball or driving sports utility vehicles. Such habits are starting to catch on in real life.

Perhaps the most vivid example is www.shaadi.com, a matrimonial website set up to enable NRIs to find partners. Now with more than two million members, of which only a third are NRIs, shaadi.com is thriving in India. NRI couples often ask for their weddings to be modelled on sequences in recent Bollywood films, complete with the same costumes, musical numbers and dance lessons so that they can learn the moves. The films themselves are targeting the NRIs. This is life imitating art inventing tradition.

”India has for centuries played up to an image of itself - however contrived or invented - that the west had of it, which the west then picks up and sends back,” says Khilnani. “Now, with Bollywood and other media and a large and wealthy community of NRIs, it is a much more continuous two-way process. But it is the NRI rather than the traditional westerner who is often driving it.”

What impact does all this have on traditional India, sitting around the television set with Maha Dev? Has its self-image changed? Shyam Benegal tells me that the idea for his film (which will not have any dance sequences) came to him when he was visiting a small village near Bhopal in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Benegal overheard a group of children in school singing a series of what sounded like nursery rhymes. On closer listening they turned out to be catchphrases from popular television commercials. “But too often,” he cautions me, “us metropolitan types tend to romanticise the poor. In fact they don’t have much time to think about these matters. They are worried about where their next meal will come from.”

My final excursion is to Benares, India’s holiest city and the site of the famous ghats, or steps, that flank the Ganges, the most sacred river for the majority of Hindus. Benares, or Varanasi, as it is also known, is India’s most ancient holy city, with some structures dating back more than two millennia. Customs do not change rapidly in Benares - but they do change.

I saunter along the narrow backlanes of Benares with Dipankar Gupta, one of India’s most respected sociologists and a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Gupta has not visited Benares for years and he has forgotten how insanitary it is. We pass long lines of barefooted pilgrims trudging through cobbled streets awash with overflowing drains, cow’s urine and the everyday detritus of mass tourism.

We peer through small courtyards and catch glimpses of pregnant women feeding vegetables to sacred cows that are standing indifferently in their living rooms. The act of feeding and worshipping a cow, they believe, will protect the unborn child. Everywhere there are bells and incense. Gupta wrinkles his nose. “It really wouldn’t take much to clean this up,” he says. Gupta is among a number of Indian academics who has helped retrieve the study of Indian society and, in particular, the Hindu caste system, from the clutches of western romantics and their Indian acolytes. “Until a decade or two ago, the prevailing view of Indian caste and therefore of Indian society, was that it was entirely a world to itself. Unlike any other society, India could only be studied in reference to itself,” he tells me. “This was principally the view of French and American sociologists.”

Nowadays, Indian sociology takes a more comparative and less obscurantist view of Indian society. We are sitting on a boat on the Ganges. Our boatman has a degree in commerce and is chattering away to us about the tourists. At dawn every day opposite the ghats downstream, the river teems with boatloads of Japanese and Europeans, all struggling to catch some camcorder footage of burning corpses. Traditionally, the Ganges is the most auspicious place to be cremated.

Gupta points to another ghat where semi-clad women are washing themselves ecstatically. Three steps above them a teenage boy is urinating. Nobody pays him the slightest attention. “The Ganges washes away all impurities so no external dirt or matter can possibly affect them,” he says. “In this setting, unlike any other, these women are unselfconscious about their bodies.” Then he pauses. Something in the town’s medieval quality has unsettled him. “This makes me feel like a foreigner in my own country,” he says.

Millions of Indians visit Benares every year. But large numbers have the same response as Gupta - a mixture of amusement, displaced reverence and repulsion. None of my Indian friends could understand my motives for visiting: “Why would you want to go to Benares?” they asked. A number of civic-minded Indians have been agitating to clean up both the Ganges, which is chronically polluted, and its attendant holy towns - so far with little result. In the end they will probably succeed.

In the meantime, Benares is not on the itinerary of the guppie or of the Bollywood starlet or of any but the most unflinchingly devout of NRI tourists. Yet a large proportion of guppies and NRIs are also Hindu nationalists, a very recent movement in India’s long history, which aims, without always openly stating it, to emulate the unity and discipline of Christianity and Islam. In spite of their global brand names and manicured golf courses, many of Gurgaon’s residents tend to vote for the Hindu nationalist BJP, which was turned out of power at India’s last election in May. “We don’t like the targeting of minorities and we do not approve of the extremist branch of the BJP,” Naveen Mishra, the MNC executive, had told me over our Chinese lunch in Gurgaon. “But we are proud of our culture. You could say we are cultural nationalists. We see the BJP as reformist and modern.”

I turn again to Sunil Khilnani, who admits he is not a close follower of Bollywood - “although the rumour of Bollywood is always in the air”, he says. Like Gupta, Khilnani is also a critic of Hindu nationalism. But he sees little contradiction between living in Gurgaon, or Houston, or Singapore, and supporting Hindu nationalism. Far from it. “The further away you are from the social realities of India, the easier it is to buy this packaged and simplified version of Hinduism,” says Khilnani. “It is a paradox everywhere of globalisation. You have your comfortable lifestyles and your consumer goods. But you need something more, something to fill that empty space.”

Some people fill it with Bollywood. Others with new age mysticism - at which India excels. Still others with cultural nationalism. And some confine themselves, if at all, to homeopathic doses of the above. In Maha Dev’s village such needs are still a rumour, although a fairly outrageous one. Sitting in front of the village television, Maha Dev’s neighbours are learning about a completely different world, some of it fantastic, some of it true. How will they decide which is which?

Source: Edward Luce is the FT’s South Asia bureau chief