Bollywood Dreams : Part 2

King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema
by Anupama Chopra

(Page 2 of 4)

Bhavesh spent almost thirty minutes onstage with Shah Rukh. They performed a popular dance routine from the film Devdas together. Shah Rukh asked if there was anything in particular Bhavesh wanted. Tejal's birthday was coming up so Bhavesh requested that Shah Rukh wish her a Happy Birthday. Bhavesh also got him to sign the map for Kishan, who was sleeping by then. As the grand finale, Shah Rukh gifted Bhavesh with an autographed bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey and a round-trip ticket to any destination in the world.

Those moments at Gwinnett Center marked Bhavesh. He became "the man who danced with Shah Rukh Khan." Bhavesh felt that he had been touched in a special way. "It is one of the biggest highlights of my life," Bhavesh said, "right after the birth of my son and my marriage."

Indians suffer from a particularly virulent case of movie madness. India is the largest film producer in the world, making 800-odd movies a year. Of these, nearly 200 come from Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay. They range from shoddy quickies made on threadbare budgets in twenty days to epics that feature as many stars as costume changes.

In a country mired in poverty, crowds, and oppressive heat, each day some 15 million people troop into over 12,500 cinemas to watch a movie. The demand for tickets outstrips the supply to the point that scalpers, or "black market" men, are as ubiquitous at theaters as popcorn. They shuffle near the theater entrance, muttering the increased price of the much-wanted ticket. The venue itself can differ dramatically. Large cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have ultra-plush multiplexes where uniformed servers bring caramelized popcorn to velvet seats. Villages make do with stiflingly hot tent cinemas where the audience sits on the floor and the projectionist manually rewinds the film. But the movie will nearly always be the same: an extravaganza of song and dance, in which romance, melodrama, comedy, tragedy, and action are blended, sometimes skillfully and as often clumsily, to create a unique masala mix.

The audience's involvement with the frames flickering on-screen is passionate, noisy, and sometimes aggressive. So viewers will applaud loudly when a star makes his first entry or when a line of dialogue is particularly pleasing. They will sing along with songs and sometimes even throw coins at the screen and dance in the aisles. A successful film in India is one that has a "repeat audience," that is an audience who watches the same film many times. Some blockbusters have run consecutively for five, even ten years. Spectators are not looking for realism in the Western sense of the word. Instead they want spectacle - a larger-than-life drama.

Classical Indian aestheticians advocated the mixing of bhavas, or emotional states, in drama. The Hindi film unapologetically mixes genres, locations, style, and tone. In Bollywood anything is possible. So the sweaty tension of a murder mystery might be broken by a fantasy sequence in which the hero or heroine dreams of gamboling on Swiss hilltops. A separate comedy track can interrupt the main plot at random intervals. The hero can, without extensive effort or injury, fight ten men and emerge victorious. The heroine will wear trendy mini-skirts and perform a seductive dance number but remain a virgin till the end titles roll. Characters and homes are impeccably groomed. Even those meant to be poor exude a carefully constructed frayed glamour. There are only two rules: There must be love and there must be songs.

Songs are the living heart of popular Hindi film. Music has traditionally been part of the Indian narrative. The great Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, were written in verse. Mirch Kattika, a 3,000-year-old Sanskrit play, had narrative interspersed with songs. Bollywood form originates in theater: the high classical traditions, Urdu-Parsi theater, and folk forms such as street theater, all of which use music and song as part of the dramatic experience. Music in cinema is a logical progression.

In the 1930s and 1940s, it wasn't unusual for films to have as many as forty songs. Indrasabha or The Court of God Indra, made in 1932, had seventy-one songs. But by the 1950s songs had dropped down to less than ten per film. Most Bollywood films average six. These songs permeate and punctuate South Asian lives around the globe. They are played at weddings, parties, nightclubs, religious ceremonies. A popular Indian way to "do time pass," or kill time, is to play Antakshari, a game that involves singing film songs. Until the 1970s, practically the only pop music tradition that existed was film music. In India, film stars are also rock stars.

Bollywood plots are overwrought but uncomplicated. Hindi films are largely morality plays with actors inhabiting archetypes. The earliest Indian films were mythological; India's first filmmaker, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, who made Raja Harishchandra in 1913, came from a family of priests. The traditional Hindi film hero is invariably an avatar of Lord Ram, who in the Ramayana is referred to as maryada purushottam, the Upholder of Honor. That is, he is handsome (usually light-complexioned), upright, and without blemishes. While the hero is virtuous, the villain is immoral, and good always conquers evil. The story might include a passionate rain song (in which the leads, usually in wet, clinging clothes, are amorous) or dastardly acts of wickedness, but invariably the narrative affirms the status quo. It is wholesome entertainment in which family values and the heroine's virtue stay intact. Hindi films present life not as it is but as it should be, which perhaps explains why they travel so well. Non-Indians, in countries as diverse as Peru, Indonesia, Greece, and Ethiopia, can connect with the songs, spectacle, and unbridled optimism. For an estimated annual audience of 3.6 billion worldwide, Hindi cinema is a necessary comfort and a collective expression of hope.

But Bollywood isn't just a style of filmmaking. It is also a culture and a religion. Hindi films dictate dress codes, language, rituals, and aspirations for both the Silicon Valley software engineer and the villager in India's most backward state, Bihar. Technology has helped to spread the Bollywood cult. DVD, satellite, and the Internet have cultivated fans even in countries where Hindi films are not distributed.

Copyright © 2007 by Anupama Chopra

About the Author

I belong to a family steeped in Hindi film. My mother Kamna Chandra sowed the Bollywood seed. She wrote scripts for two of Bollywood's finest directors: Raj Kapoor and Yash Chopra. My siblings followed in her footsteps: my sister Tanuja Chandra is one of the few women directors in the Hindi film industry. My brother Vikram Chandra is a renowned novelist (Sacred Games) who has also written film scripts. I am a film critic. And I'm married to Vidhu Vinod Chopra, a well-know Hindi film director whose short film, An Encounter with Faces, was nominated for an Oscar in 1979.