As Hollywood suffers the worst box office slump it has seen in two decades, India’s prolific Bollywood industry continues to rise and rise. Once derided by Western audiences who occasionally caught a glimpse of them (usually on late night television), the primacy of Bollywood films is now impossible to ignore, with the genre transcending diasporic audiences and enjoying an influential ascent in the international big picture.
In many ways, the development timeline of Indian cinema mirrored that of Hollywood. Early pioneers began exploring the form in the late 1800s, with the nation’s first indigenous feature Raja Harishchandra (derived from religious epic, The Mahabharata), emerging to critical and popular acclaim in 1912. India’s multitudinous languages were suddenly united through images; a studio system was born, and over the century to come, several key cinematic hubs sprung up and thrived.
Most visible of these was the Bombay-based ‘Bollywood’. The city became Mumbai, but the nickname stuck. Bollywood quickly became the world’s largest movie factory, churning out hundreds of films a year, generating billions in revenue, and reaching a global audience of approximately 3.6 billion people (besting Hollywood around by around a billion).
Harnessing the universal languages of music, song and dance, flamboyant Bollywood fare was no longer under the mainstream cultural radar, emerging first as cool-kitsch, then social commentator, and now, full-fledged cultural driver. And it’s not just the films.
Bollywood music, fashion, dance, and memorabilia are hot commodities around the world – setting trends, dominating markets, spawning imitators, attracting headlines and commanding analysis.
So what’s the appeal?
Karen Shakhnazarov, CEO of the Russia’s Mosfilm Studios, spoke to the immense popularity of Bollywood in Russia while contributing to a documentary entitled The Secrets of Bollywood. Said Shakhnazarov (also a film director): ‘Bollywood movies give to the common man what the Soviet and later the Russian films, as well as Hollywood, has failed to give.’
Veteran film director Yash Chopra, suggested what that missing link might be, in an interview with National Geographic. The 72 year old says the secret to the Bollywood mania is simple – its films are ‘wholesome’. The winner of several national awards for ‘popular and wholesome entertainment,’ Chopra has made a huge impact on Indian cinema, introducing much of the lavish spectacle now considered a staple to the form. ‘In Hollywood they call these films musicals,’ he told National Geographic. ‘Here, every film is a musical.’
Is the Bollywood mainstay onto something? In a post 9/11 world, it’s hardly surprising that Western audiences shy from moral complexity, and connect with clear-cut narratives and extravagant escapism – black hats, white hats, boy gets girl. Their real world comfort zone fading fast, cinema goers around the world are discovering the Bollywood ‘catalogue’ in force, finding a screen world where young lovers don’t elope, but diligently lobby for parental approval; where tradition is paramount, but happy compromise doesn’t hurt anyone. Bollywood films crystallise this universe for mass consumption.
But there’s more at work that social safeguarding and a Hollywood/US backlash. While some audiences are drawn to heightened moral clarity in their entertainment, other are simply seeking a more diverse palate, and Bollywood has benefited from this burgeoning hunger for international screen voices for some years. Indian filmmakers have been happy to oblige, offering up the best of Bollywood, and adeptly engineered ‘cross-over’ films that capture Bollywood’s vibrancy, but speak with a Western accent (such as Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding).
There’s also a thematic element in Bollywood narratives never more timely – the conflux of tradition and modernity. In a world grappling with globalisation, the struggle to marry the tribal with the technological reverberates across continents. So too the clash of the titans – religion and secularism. The deceptively ‘simple’ melodrama of Bollywood movies frequently incorporates these struggles as a plot device – characters quest their way through temptations and trials of the modern world to find a transitional space between East and West, where religious and cultural heritage can co-exist alongside an American model in a mini-skirt; the temple alongside the internet. It’s a harmony scarcely found off-screen, and rarely explored in Hollywood productions.
And of course, there’s economics in play.
Says Dr. Rachel Dwyer, chair of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of London and author of several books about Indian cinema and pop culture: ‘A ticket in London is 10 times the cost of a ticket in even the most up market theatre in India.’ ‘The export market for Hindi films is especially important due to the low value of the rupee.’
Dwyer tells us that overseas ticket, video, and DVD sales now account for a substantial percentage of Bollywood revenue, a multibillion-pound industry. And production costs for Indian films have long been a fraction of Hollywood budgets, enabling the industry’s massive output and subsequent dollar return. A whole cottage industry has sprung up around the production of Bollywood film, exemplified in Film City, a 500-acre wonderland of sets and studios on the outskirts of Mumbai, where a lot of Bollywood product takes shape.
But the Bollywood beat is changing.
The flipside of globalisation is seeing Indian films appropriate more of the West, at the same time as the West appropriates talent and product from the East.
The use of English in Bollywood is growing, and the industry is consciously adopting more sophisticated marketing methods and streamlining their product (whereas most Bollywood films averaged some three hours in length, a new wave of work is filling out more ‘Western friendly’ 90 minutes). Films are being written and packaged to traverse geographical boundaries – the world matters, and Bollywood wants to matter to it. There’s also a new corporate structure emerging in the Bollywood belt, forging greater alliances with Hollywood and business worldwide.
The changes are expected to further boost Bollywood visibility, well beyond Asian and Middle Eastern markets. Some worry this ‘Westernised’ Bollywood is a damaging dilution, its output no more valuable than the thinnest US blockbuster. But the region’s outward spiral is yielding positive developments to the form at large – such as Mira Nair’s Kampala film school for south Asian and east African students. ‘There are so many stories to be told in these countries in south Asia and Africa,’Nair told the BBC. ‘This is one way we can train people to translate them on film.’
Through cross-cultural initiatives of this kind, Bollywood and its children are honouring the genre’s original, if unwritten, mission statement – to hurdle language barriers, and unify via something bigger and better. Requisite qualifications for a true cultural force.