Bollywood Dreams : Part 3

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

(Page 3 of 4)

In South Korea, a curious ritual plays out weekly. A group calling themselves the Bollywood Lovers Club gathers to watch Hindi movies, which they themselves have painstakingly subtitled in Korean. They watch, in the club leader Kwanghyun Jung's words, in "Indian style." That is, they "make noise, laugh, and abuse the villain." The club also runs Bollywood dance classes. Some of the 7,000-odd members wear Shah Rukh Khan T-shirts and drink coffee from cups with his photograph on them. Only one Indian movie has ever been released in South Korea - a Tamil language film called Muthu: The Dancing Maharaja, in 1998.

In a paper called Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities, anthropologist Brian Larkin writes about the influence of Bollywood in northern Nigeria, where Lebanese exhibitors started importing Indian films in the 1950s. Larkin writes: "To this day, stickers of Indian films and stars decorate the taxis and buses of the north, posters of Indian films adorn the walls of tailors' shops and mechanics' garages, and love songs from Indian film are borrowed by religious singers who change the words to sing praises of Prophet Mohammed. For over thirty years, Indian films, their stars and fashions, music and stories have been a dominant part of everyday culture in northern Nigeria." The Germans are more recent converts. The first Bollywood film to have a major theatrical release was Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sorrow) in 2003. In Germany, DVDs of dubbed Hindi films are sold with the tag line Bollywood macht glücklich! Bollywood makes you happy!

In Pakistan, Bollywood has had the added frisson of being contraband. In 1965, after the second Indo-Pak war, the Pakistani government banned the import and screening of Indian films. But Bollywood is everywhere. Pirated DVDs of the latest films are available on the day of release. The press, both English and vernacular, carries reviews of these films. Even though Radio Pakistan does not play Hindi film songs, fans are up to date on the latest hit numbers, dances, fashions, and gossip. On the streets of Karachi and Lahore, Shah Rukh looms large from billboards, selling international products. His ancestral home in Peshawar is a tourist destination. Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt once remarked that one of the reasons Pakistan will never go to war with India is because Shah Rukh lives there.

The name Bollywood, which combines Bombay with Hollywood, has long been a controversial construct. New York Times language guru William Safire traces it to crime fiction writer H. R. F. Keating, who first used it in 1976. The culturally disparaging name suggested that the Hindi film industry was a derivative of the American film industry - the Third World clone of its infinitely more powerful, artistic, and glamorous Western counterpart. Hindi film actors and filmmakers have persistently objected to it, but Bollywood was picked up and popularized by the Indian film press. The coinage passed into popular usage (in 2001, it was included in the fifth edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) and became, over the years, a global brand. Like Yoga or the Taj Mahal, Bollywood is shorthand for India.

There are many Indias. The country is the seventh-largest globally in terms of size, with the second-largest population. It has twenty-three officially recognized languages and 2,000-odd dialects. It is home to multitudes of religions and has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan. India is a nation of extremes where affluence, progress, and education are matched by poverty, backwardness, and illiteracy. Disparate centuries exist side by side. In Mumbai, the largest slum in Asia is separated only by a ten-minute car ride from a five-star hotel where Louis Vuitton bags are showcased in the lobby and meals cost several hundred dollars. Both are valid Indian realities. In his book From Midnight to the Millennium, author Shashi Tharoor asks, "What makes so many people one people?"

One answer is Bollywood. Hindi films function as a global glue, binding together Indians across gender, geography, religion, and age. This includes the estimated 20 million non-resident Indians scattered across 110 countries. For them, Hindi movies are an umbilical cord to the motherland. Second- and third-generation immigrants watch Hindi movies with subtitles because they can no longer speak the language. Bollywood is a primary and sometimes solitary link to an exotic ancestral homeland that they have heard of but perhaps never visited. In cities like New York and London, they flock to nightclubs for Desi nights, where Indian DJs play Bollywood remixes. In fact, Bollywood is no longer the shabby, slightly embarrassing country cousin that the parents insist on bringing home. Hindi films are trendy. So is India.

Shah Rukh Khan is the face of a glittering new India. He is a modern-day god. On streets in India, his posters are sold alongside those of religious deities. Shrines have been erected in his name. For Indians and the varied non-Indian lovers of popular Hindi cinema, Shah Rukh is bigger than Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt combined. Over fifteen years and fifty films, he has straddled Bollywood like a colossus. In the paan-stained studios of Mumbai, Shah Rukh's story, how a middle-class Muslim boy from Delhi became one of the biggest movie stars in the biggest film industry in the world, is legend. So when he flicks away cigarette butts people pick them up as souvenirs. The media, in tones that aren't ironical or mocking, refer to him as King Khan.

Shah Rukh's home, a sprawling heritage bungalow in suburban Mumbai, has long been a tourist magnet. Buses carrying vacationers routinely stop in front of the gate. On Sunday evenings, when Mumbai, a frenetic city of 18 million people, pauses for breath, men and women gather for a darshan (sighting). Sometimes, when he is at home, Shah Rukh Khan steps out on the terrace and waves at his devotees.

But Shah Rukh's life is more than just a dramatic show-biz success story. He is a Muslim superstar in a Hindu-majority country and his life reflects the fundamental paradoxes of a post-liberalization nation attempting to thrive in a globalized world. His story provides a ringside view into the forces shaping Indian culture today.

The rise of Shah Rukh Khan can be understood as a metaphor for a country changing at breakneck pace. During the 1990s, India underwent avalanches of change. In 1991, under the threat of imminent fiscal collapse and facing an inability to repay World Bank loans, the government introduced wide-ranging economic reforms. The centralized socialist economy was dismantled. Several major industries were deregulated and multinational corporations were allowed entry. In the same year, satellite television - CNN, STAR TV, MTV - arrived.

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.