Bollywood Travels

Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema

Rajinder Dudrah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136451300
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

Using an interdisciplinary framework, this book offers a fresh perspective on the issues of diaspora culture and border crossings in the films, popular cultures, and media and entertainment industries from the popular Hindi cinema of India. It analyses and discusses a range of key contemporary films in detail, such as Veer Zaara, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom, and Dostana.

The book uses the notion of travel analytically in and through the cinema to comment on films that have dealt with Indo-Pak border crossings, representations of diaspora, and gender and sexuality in new ways. It engages with common sense assumptions about everyday South Asian and diasporic South Asian cultures and representations as expressed in Bollywood cinema in order to look at these issues further. Moving towards an innovative exploration beyond the films, this book charts the circuits and routes of Bollywood as South Asian club cultures in the diaspora, and Hindi cinema entertainment shows around the world, as well as its impact on social media websites. Bollywood Travels is an original and thought provoking contribution to studies on Asian Culture and Society, Sociology, World Cinema, and Film, Media and Cultural Studies.

1 Introduction

Studies in Bollywood Travels

Bollywood cinema’s star has been on the rise and has continued to grow over the past 15 years. At least, this is the first impression that might be gathered if one were to look at the increased media attention that the popular Hindi cinema from Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, has been receiving over this same period. Since the early 2000s, Bollywood has been celebrated as Indian cinema in various incarnations: through the idea of marking an Indian summer, to reportage of Bollywood cinema as if it had been discovered by the Western media as a viable economic alternative to Hollywood; to Hollywood studios interested in co-production deals in India as a new audience market; to thinking about recent films with cross-over appeal to mainstream non-South Asian audiences; to selling commodities through a fascination for all things Bollywood in mainstream Western music, theatre, fashion, television and high street department stores in the West (on this use and coverage of Bollywood, see Desai 2004: 40–69; Dudrah 2006c: 16–18, 148–55).

Sometimes in this reporting Bollywood cinema is conflated as standing in for Indian cinema per se, where claims have been made in some media coverage that Bollywood produces over one thousand films each year.¹ This is inaccurate, as Bollywood as the popular commercial Hindi cinema of India is only one of at least a dozen regional language cinemas in the country, which together collectively make up Indian cinema across the nation.² All of India’s regional cinemas together produce in excess of 900–1000 films each year and Bollywood films account for approximately over 200 films annually. Nonetheless, Bollywood does have the largest distribution and consumption of its films around the world, and together with its broad language appeal (a vernacular Hindi-Urdu lingua franca), this makes it the most popular of all India’s cinemas.

Talking of Indian cinema in this way, and Bollywood in particular as the hegemonic referent which is almost always invoked, one could be forgiven for thinking that Indian cinema’s international rise has perhaps been a recent development, only over the past 15 years. While during this period Bollywood cinema has undoubtedly been increasingly documented outside of India, with some of its biggest films now regularly featuring in the Top 10 UK and Top 20 US box office returns, as well as the cinema having begun to be studied by scholars around the world, Indian cinema – and Hindi films as one of its outputs – have always been global since their inception in the early 1910s.³ However, the past 15 or more years appear to be a time in the study of popular Hindi films when its cinema, now also known as Bollywood, came to prominence as it was increasingly registered as growing on the international media landscape, and travelling around the world in a number of ways.

This book is an attempt to make sense of some of Bollywood’s travels through the following and related ideas: culture and diaspora (especially as the cinema works with and produces a sense of diasporic culture); and border crossings in and through the films and their related popular cultures and media entertainment industries. Indeed, these ideas might be considered keywords in making sense of a cinema that seems to have ‘suddenly arrived’, but more so in terms of attempting to track a cinema that is consumed by millions around the world, that continues to develop, and is indicative of a globalized media phenomenon that traverses multiple locations and possibilities simultaneously. Moreover, like other cinemas, Bollywood also includes telling stories to its audiences audio-visually, but with its own socio-cultural dynamics.

In some respects, this book is a follow-up to the earlier publication Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies (Dudrah 2006c). That former research was interested in grasping the possible relationships between cinema, culture and society through an interdisciplinary conversation with studies of the cinema from film and media studies, cultural studies, and sociology. It applied and developed a sociological imagination to Bollywood cinema that was concerned with the private and public issues of the day, writ large through the silver screen and popular cultures of Bollywood cinema. Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies explored some of the dynamics, possibilities and tensions inherent in the workings of cinema as a global industry, films as popular cultural texts, and the relationships that are possible between cinema and its audiences as agents of socio-cultural change (ibid.: 15–16). In part, Bollywood Travels also embarks on these intellectual pathways and revisits and advances some on-going concerns as explored in the previous work; but more so it attempts to chart new subjects and territories in the contemporary moment of a globalizing Bollywood cinema through the ensuing chapters.

As we set out on Bollywood travels in this monograph, with the accompanying lenses of culture, diaspora and border crossings through which to view this cinema, it is worth considering a few brief examples as a way into this work. First, is the chorus from a song from the film Shri 420 (Mr 420, dir. Raj Kapoor, 1955), playbacked by singer Mukesh to the music of Shankar Jaikishan:

Mera Joota hai Japani / My shoes are Japanese

Yeh Patloon Inglistani / These trousers are English

Sar pe lal topi Rusi / The red hat on my head is Russian

Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani / But still the heart is Indian.⁴

This is by now an oft-cited refrain when people talk about the global circulation of Hindi cinema. At least two aspects of this song are interesting for our purposes here. The song lyrics refer to the globalization of material goods which are desired by the Charlie Chaplain-esque character in the film, played and popularized for the Hindi screen by the film’s lead actor and director Raj Kapoor. A clear indication exists that even by the 1950s Hindi cinema was in dialogue with processes of cultural globalization and had created an affectionate attachment to the signifier of the protagonist whose heart and soul remain Indian, despite worldly attractions. Second, the film’s actor and director Raj Kapoor is also known for his showmanship in Hindi cinema not just in India but also around the world. Accounts exist of his and his female co-star Nargis’ huge popularity among non-Indians in the former Soviet Union throughout the 1950s and 1960s, where their films were also screened. The pair also visited Russia and their live appearances were greatly appreciated by large crowds (Kubchandani 2005; Jain 2005; and on Raj Kapoor as auteur, see Mishra 2002: 89–124).

The line ‘Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani/But still the heart is Indian’ is perhaps one of the most popular phrases in the vernacular cinephilia of Hindi cinema, being used and reused countless times since its original release, through quotation, imitation, parody and pastiche. In 2000, a film of the same name was produced, starring Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan and directed by Aziz Mirza. It is a satire on 24/7 news media culture in which an unscrupulous reporter, played by Khan, is disturbed by his social conscience over the state hanging of an innocent man. This leads him to reform his ways and uncover the truth in front of the nation via a live news telecast. The opening title track of the film, also of the same name, pays homage to the 1955 film song in terms of its patriotic sentiments, though in the context of a neo-liberalized India at the turn of the millennium.⁵ Like the 1955 film, this film was also seen by audiences not just in India but across the South Asian diaspora, as well as elsewhere around the world where Bollywood cinema’s circuits of distribution and broadcasting were able to travel, through legitimate or pirated means.

In 2011, Bollywood stars are increasingly keeping in touch with their fans, endorsing products, and promoting the release of their next project, which may or may not be a forthcoming film, through the new media of Facebook or Twitter. These two social networking sites that have themselves grown with multi-million numbers of users over the past decade alone, appear to have become the first choice of media communication between Bollywood stars, their production teams and audiences. These sites have fast supplemented the old mediums of radio, cinema and TV, and are favoured by stars and celebrities to make their next formal announcement due to the instant and viral nature of how information is communicated and travels fast over the internet.

These three examples are telling of the ways in which Bollywood cinema as part of a history of films in India has been global and was in circulation long before the period of the past 15 years. They include instances of Bollywood cinema being a blend and polyglot of a number of other cultural sources and part of processes of cultural globalization in the production, circulation and consumption of its filmic texts. A notion of the ideal or patriotic Indian is also constructed and regularly disseminated as one of the predominant ideologies of this cinema, even as India is considered as a rising socio-economic player in the neo-liberal context of emerging BRIC markets (Brazil, Russia, India and China), in the twenty-first century. In this way, an intended relationship of affect between the homeland and its diaspora is produced. Finally, traditional mediums of communication and representation are complemented with and being superseded by newer ones; and this is occurring in an ever changing international media landscape in which Bollywood is increasingly a visible part. A key concern of the research enquiry in this book, then, is what happens to issues of culture and diaspora in Bollywood cinema, especially as it develops as a cinema and popular culture in the era of globalization, and how might we track and make sense of these issues? How far, and to what extent, do some of its films and related products (i.e. stars and its related film industry) travel across borders of various kinds (cultural, social, economic and actual nation-state boundaries), as an audio-visual mediation that offers certain kinds of ideologies? How do audiences take up some of these mediations and incorporate them into their lives beyond mere cinematic spectatorship? In order to offer possible answers to these questions, let us in turn consider the key areas of enquiry in this project.

Bollywood

If, as has been incorrectly reported in some instances of media coverage on the subject, the term ‘Bollywood’ is simply not all of India’s cinemas, then neither is it simply all of Hindi cinema from the arrival of the talkies, or Indian films with sound, since 1931.⁶ Even though in current everyday usage and in media reportage Bollywood has now come to mean Hindi cinema from Mumbai, historically and in the present, the academic usage of the term is a bit more complex. This can be seen in recent scholarly attempts to delineate the term as well as to offer possible working definitions that account for the global circulation, appeal and study of this cinema.

Madhava Prasad, when attempting to make sense of the widespread use of the term over the past several years, asks:

Bollywood: what a strange name! But stranger still is the wide acceptance that the term has gained over the last few years in a country where the dominant prevailing view is that Indian popular cinema is an entirely indigenous product. Today, not only the English language media which is probably the term’s original habitat, but also the Indian language press, not only journalists but also film scholars employ this term to talk about Indian popular cinema. Is this a name that incorporates a criticism? Is it meant to suggest that the cinema is imitative and therefore deserves to be rechristened to highlight this derivativeness? Or is it in fact the opposite: an attempt to indicate a difference internal to the dominant idiom, a variation that is related to but distinct from the globally hegemonic Hollywood? Is it Indian cinema’s way of signifying its difference or is it (inter)national film journalism and scholarship’s way of reinscribing the difference that Indian cinema represents within an articulated model of global hegemony and resistance?

(Prasad 2003)

For Prasad, the term is about how we might be able to think about the relationships between popular Hindi cinema and the hegemonic centre of Hollywood film production and distribution around the world. From a once-derided and ridiculed cinema in the English language press and in Western film criticism, Bollywood is now a cinema with a body of studies, critique and theory that seeks to understand it. Prasad argues that the rise of Bollywood can be made sense of in terms of the development of non-resident Indian (NRI) popular cultural practices and socio-economic remittances to and from the homeland, which have in part, been represented in films from Hindi cinema from the mid-late 1990s onwards.

In a seminal essay on the subject, Ashish Rajadhyaksha considers Bollywood as a term that accompanies not just films but also its related entertainment and media industries (Rajadhyaksha 2003). These have been crucial in constructing and disseminating messages about Indian cultural nationalism in and through entertainment, not least since when Indian cinema was granted official industry status in 1998 by the state.⁷ He goes on to develop this argument in his book-length study on the subject where he posits ‘Bollywoodization’ as part of a longer process in the history of popular Indian cinema where Hindi cinema comes to prominence as a hegemonic centre (Rajadhyaksha 2009). By studying this centre he argues the case for understanding the relationship of cinema, the state and a developing market economy in which films become only one part of the overall analysis. As he puts it, he uses Bollywood:

as an appropriate recent instance with which to explore a far longer history: that of the cinema’s role in rendering publicly intelligible, narratable, the administrative and technical operations of modernity – namely, the modern state, the modern political process (including modern systems of cultural resistance) and the modern market.

(Rajadhyaksha 2009: 69)

Bollywood, for Rajadhyaksha, becomes more ‘a producer of cultural commodities of which film is only one, and therefore the role that films plays is a key sub-set in its overall self-definition’ (ibid.: 83).

Vijay Mishra (2008) acknowledges the ascendance of the signifier Bollywood with its formal entry in the Oxford English Dictionary since 2003. He develops his argument in conversation with the previous ideas put forward by Prasad (2003) and Rajadhyakhsha (2003) and notes how Bollywood has become the preferred term, replacing earlier descriptors such as Bombay Cinema, Indian Popular Cinema, and Hindi Cinema, as he says:

The triumph of the term (over the others) is nothing less than spectacular and indicates, furthermore, the growing global sweep of this cinema not just as cinema qua cinema but as cinema qua social effects and national cultural coding.

(Mishra 2008: 1)

Bollywood for him too involves thinking through a relationship of Indian modernity, including its diaspora, which in the realm of culture is increasingly represented through the audio-visual idioms of Bollywood cinema. Mishra further encourages us to think about whether Bollywood means ‘more than a film industry? Is it a style that transcends its cultural origins, making cultural specificity inconsequential?’ (ibid.: 2–3).

In thinking about the transnational circulation of Bollywood cinema, Raminder Kaur and Ajay Sinha (2005) bring together a collection of essays that consider the distribution and consumption of Hindi cinema, past and present, across South Asia and its diasporas, Europe, North America, the Caribbean, South Africa and Nigeria. They organize the eclectic chapters of their book through the notion of ‘Bollyworld’ to refer to:

Indian cinema through a transnational lens, at once located in the nation, but also out of the nation in its provenance, orientation and outreach. Bollyworld may be taken in at least three senses: first, to allude to the inherently hybrid constituency of Bollywood yet also an index of variant senses of Indian identity; second, the global distribution of Bollywood movies and a conveyor of ‘Indianness’ to diverse audiences; and third, as a means of negotiating both Indianness and its transformation, particularly when representing and being received by diasporic populations.

(ibid.: 16)

In yet a further reworking of the term Bollywood and especially of the nuances within it, Priya Joshi (2010) posits her own concept of ‘Bollylite’. By focusing on the success of the film Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle, 2008) in the USA, which draws on aural and visual codes from earlier Bollywood films since the 1970s, Joshi argues that we need to contend with such films that take up specific referents from Bollywood cinema and offer them in more palatable forms for mainstream Indian multiplex and cross-over audiences. Joshi coins and defines her use of the term as:

Bollywood Lite or Bollylite. Bollylite, I argue, is a relatively recent fabrication that heavily pillages formal characteristics from the Bollywood cinema that Slumdog Millionaire honors while shearing much of that cinema’s fabled social substance and political edge. If Bollywood keeps both slums and high-rises in its view, Bollylite extols the high-rises only as it altogether erases the surrounding slums from view. Thus lightened, Bollylite travels – though in contrast, to Bollywood, with a remarkably limited commercial and critical half-life.

(ibid.: 247)

This survey of recent contributions to the nomenclature of Bollywood reveals that the field of Bollywood studies is now growing, possessing a critical interdisciplinary line of enquiry primarily from the arts and humanities, and renders problematic any easy use of the term as a catch-all for all of Indian cinema in its varied multiplicities. It also invites us to consider issues of Indian cultural modernity and its relationship to the diaspora as expressed in and through the cinema and its related cultural industries (Prasad; Rajadhyaksha; and Mishra), while others further complexify the term with new concepts and ideas to argue for the importance of tracking and making sense of the historical and contemporary routes, patterns and circulation o...