Weekend shoppers and gamblers at Montecasino, Johannesburg, were agog last Saturday as a legion of jet-lagged Bollywood stars swept into the NuMetro Cineplex, straight off a flight from India. Indian glamour had come to Fourways and a handful of photographers craned to snap the stars as they took their seats for a chat about the movie Gandhi My Father.
Sought after was the actor-turned-producer Anil Kapoor, in regulation black leather, hair in a bad burgundy rinse and designer stubble on his cheeks. Kapoor, progeny of a family with 50 years’ experience in the movies, had come to launch his movie, a controversial portrayal of the Mahatma’s troubled relationship with his son Harilal. To quote the official summary, Gandhi’s son “converted to Islam as a rebellion, reconverted to Hinduism as a penance then drank himself to death”.
Speaking about his reasons for making the film, some of which was shot in South Africa, Kapoor said: “Gandhi was not your regular leader of men, and we have seen the political Gandhi in other films. But the challenge of this film was not to make value judgements — here a son confronts a great man. A mother is trapped between her love for her son and reverence for her husband. And there is the anguish of the son and the compulsions of a father.”
If there were doubts as to the magnitude of the occasion these were dispelled the following night when President Thabo Mbeki cut the ribbon on the movie at its international gala premiere. Pandemonium reigned, people queued for a metal detector and the president emerged from NuMetro’s private bar in the sky hours late.
For NuMetro distribution of Gandhi My Father is a relatively large release and is being shown at 12 cinemas across the country. The movie signals an intensification of trade and cultural links between India and South Africa on an unprecedented scale.
Next up is the nine-week cultural programme Shared History, which will take place mostly in Johannesburg as part of the Arts Alive International Festival from August 23 to October 31.
“India is clearly positioning itself as a significant player in our economy and wanting also to have a presence in our cultural and community lives in South Africa,” says Steven Sack, director of arts, culture and heritage services for the City of Johannesburg.
“Previously they were happy if they brought a group out to a local Indian audience. They would invite friends, and if you went you were part of a half a dozen white South African people there. Now they’re starting to ask, ‘How can we engage with all citizens of the city?’ And that’s why they’ve come into Arts Alive.
“They want to be talking, not only to the Indian diaspora but to everyÂbody in the city. It is driven by Ibsa, the India-Brazil-South Africa partnership within the whole trade environment. There is a big meeting in South Africa coming up. So it is linked to the political environment and big Indian companies being set up in South Africa.”
An obvious partner is the Consulate General of India in Johannesburg. Navdeep Suri, the consul general himself, is appearing on the literary platform of the event titled Words on Water that will see eight major Indian writers in discussion with their South African counterparts.
The literary festival is being organised by academic Isabel Hofmeyr (see sidebar). Topics under discussion will be sex and sexuality, sport, biographical writing, fiction, consumerism and translation.
Suri is the grandson of legendary Punjabi writer Nanak Singh and translator of his grandfather’s work Pavitra Paapi into English, titled Saintly Sinner.
“When we talk of shared history, people tend to recall the shared history of Mahatma Gandhi,” Suri says. “But really we know, and the generation of the ANC knows, how close we were to each other right through the days of the struggle. India was the first country to take the issue of apartheid to the United Nations Security Council; we were the first to impose full economic sanctions against South Africa in 1948.
“We pretty much halted our bilateral trade, which was very significant at the time. We broke it completely even though it meant a big loss to India in terms of tea and jute exports. We took our boycott of sporting links to a point where we not only refused to play cricket with South Africa for all those years, but we even refused visas to members of the English team who had been playing with South Africa.
“We were the first country to give full diplomatic status to the ANC office in Delhi.”
So India, then, forms part of the DNA of South African democracy. Yet our understanding of the culture of that great subcontinent is pigeonholed into Bollywood, the bygone historical figure of Gandhi, religious practice of communities around us, and some exclusively South African-Indian content on radio and television.
The Shared History programme will contribute to breaking down old stereotypes and will, hopefully, forge new links.