Indian film and music is reinventing itself, invading Western fashion and creating heated debate back home
CINEMA: Derek Malcolm
MOST in the West know little about Indian cinema, one of the oldest, most varied, largest and most glamorous entertainment industries in the world.
The conception is that there was Satyajit Ray, a great director of art movies like Pathar Panchali, and there is Indian popular cinema, which has absurd characters running round trees and singing of love.
The best, however, do not. Besides outstanding directors like Ray and his fellow Bengali, Ritwik Ghatak, throughout the history of the Indian cinema there have been directors like Guru Dutt and VS Shantaram, who have manipulated the commercial clichs differently, genuinely great stars to compare with those of Hollywood, and playback singers and musicians, often classically trained, of real genius.
Like Hollywood, the golden age of Bollywood was during the Forties and Fifties. Now, however, a “fusion” is taking place. Indian films with themes stolen from Hollywood are being made, in an attempt to attract the new middle classes, who admire the West. The music and song seem stranded in a limbo between Indian and Western culture.
This isn’t necessarily a sad decline. It means that Indian movies are becoming technically more proficient and accurately reflect a rapidly changing and confused society, attracted to the West but determined to keep much of its own culture intact. A consequence of this is that, occasionally, a film comes along that, in attempting to break down barriers, offends officialdom.
One such film was Shakur Kapur’s The Bandit Queen, the story of Phoolan Devi, the most famous of Indian women outlaws. It dared to show the multiple rape she suffered at the hands of villagers who resented her power, contained no songs and drove a coach and horses through the clichs of the bandit genre.
After its success at Cannes, where it was bought for screening all over the world, the film was released in India to considerable acclaim. But not before there was a huge outcry, at first orchestrated by Devi herself, an influential political figure who wanted her past forgotten.
Now there is another test case. Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra, with a screenplay by South African Helena Kriel, was rejected by the recent Indian International Film Festival at Trivandrum in the southern state of Kerala. It was cut by the Indian censor- board and further shortened by India’s supreme court, to which Nair appealed. Scenes in which bare breasts and buttocks are seen must be reduced to seconds of screen time, and there can be no frontal nudity.
Nair, who made Salaam Bombay, another great success at Cannes, and then went to Hollywood to make Mississippi Masala, has directed a film based on the ancient classic stories, and claims that the intellectual community in Bombay and Delhi, where she lives, have given the movie a “heart-warming” response.
“My film,” she says, “is to do more with sexual politics than with sexual positions.” But it’s a title that comes with a lot of baggage. “Television is full of foreign imports. And dozens of times you will see men and women dancing as if they were copulating. But we in India are brilliant at fixing things, and how we fix sex is by cloaking it in song, dance and violence. Look at the rape scenes in so many Indian commercial pictures.
“Women are still supposed to be either virgins, good wives and mothers, or whores. But they feel empowered by the film. It’s the men who feel threatened.” Another film, shown at the Trivandrum Festival, though it almost caused a riot, was Deepa Mehta’s Fire, in which two married women become attracted to each other, largely because of their boring husbands.
“There are no lesbians in India,” wrote one journalist. “Such things are merely a corruption of the West.” Mehta, who lives in Canada but made the film in India, otherwise got a good reception, though assailed by questions about her own sexuality by an avid press.
On a par with the excitement over Kama Sutra or Fire is the fact that the tax authorities last month began their largest ever probe into tax evasion by some of Bollywood’s biggest stars. Just before Christmas, 15 superstars had their offices raided, as did producers, directors, singers and even stuntmen.
What with this and the new morality, Bollywood may never be quite the same again.