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Bollywood's fling with the Wild West

Sunil Sethi

"Kitsch With a Niche is Bollywood Chic" runs the headline of a major report in the New York Times style section this month.

Amid the melange of images of over-the-top Bollywood taste - a cleavage covered in mehndi designs, Lagaan-type ghagra-choli sets and marigold-covered handbags and sandals a la Monsoon Wedding - is a picture of Aamir Khan sipping a cocktail at a party in a swank Manhattan apartment.

India's answer to Tom Cruise is reported as appearing a little unnerved as he says: "This is my first time actually being invited to a party on Fifth Avenue. A year ago, it would not have happened." His hostess's comment is more sanguine: "It's like having Clark Gable drop by in 1944".

Bollywood is having a wild fling with the West. The unlikeliest bedfellows have pitched in - Sushma Swaraj, Raj Kapoor's widow and Devdas getting the red-carpet treatment at Cannes, Andrew Lloyd Webber and A R Rahman opening their musical in London next month and, Selfridges, that repository of the pinstripe suit, trying to flog Aishwarya and Madhuri's hand-me-downs from Film City, Mumbai.

Sadly, the cash register isn't ringing - not for leftovers from Bollywood's costume dramas anyway. Like the hip Manhattan hostess and her anxious guest of honour, both cresting the wave of what's cool, their perceptions of the situation are poles apart. In Bollywood's conquest of the West no one is pausing to separate fad from fantasy or fiction from fact.

Long before Lagaan appeared on the Oscar shortlist, the hype was that the film would have a major cross-country release in the United States - middle to small-town America, rather than just Indians in American neighbourhoods, would be forking out at their local multiplexes to see it.

The film was released on May 10 but the fact has gone unreported. Reason: Lagaan opened with a mere 10 prints and only in the big cities. As dollar-earning money-spinners go, the dark horse has proved to be Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding. Lagaan may pick up, but since February 24 Monsoon Wedding is to be seen everywhere America - more than 225 prints and creeping deeper into the north American continent. It's takings, around $11 million, now make it among the top 10 biggest foreign film grossers in America, after Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Life Is Beautiful and Amelie.

Mira Nair's expanded home movie, borrowing from the improvisations of modern theatre and TV technique, in its use of hand-held camera, radio mikes and a cast of largely non-professional actors, was cheaper to make than Lagaan - Rs 73 million against Lagaan's Rs 250 million - so its cost-to-profit ratio will naturally be higher. But mainly it is a matter of taste that makes the Mira Nairs and Gurinder Chadhas (and Bend It Like Beckham is currently a hit in London) give a more worldly spin to Indian film-making than good old Bollywood.

Lagaan is a very well-made film too, but as Dave Kehr of the New York Times points out in an otherwise flattering review, it is mainly about "a game that even after 225 minutes remains incomprehensible to the uninitiated".

It would be as unfair to expect mainstream Indian audiences to jump with joy at Moulin Rouge, which, for all its homage to Bollywood, is descended from broad French bedroom farce. Significantly, what David Kehr asks is whether Bollywood's genre of cinema has the gumption to go global?

All realists will wonder. Perhaps Aamir Khan's New York hostess was being more than flip in comparing him to Clark Gable in the 1940s - from her point of view of Bollywood has the retro-fashionable trendiness of a curio. Like the Ambassador car it is faddishly attractive but not necessarily good business.

The Western infatuation with Bollywood could be as transient as the Beatles-Maharishi craze of the 1960s. What is wrong with Bollywood - the industry as opposed to the art form - is precisely what is wrong with other Indian industries: it is non-competitive, financially disreputable, technologically outdated and caught up in the toils of family dynasties and the star system.

According to Variety, America's Bible of the entertainment industry, India's film exports this March were set to reach a record of $188 million. But guess what Amelie, a small French film and co-competitor on the Oscar shortlist with Lagaan, has grossed so far? $134 million. When will Bollywood learn ?

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