CINEMA
Out of India
AJIT DUARA
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A problem with the book is that the writing style is academic and does not reach out to the general reader.
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Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, edited by Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, Sage Publications, 2005, p.343, price not stated.
BOLLYWORLD is a book of essays by film scholars on the sociology, history and aesthetics of Indian cinema. The book is largely about the effect of this cinema on the huge and culturally diverse Indian diaspora and an interpretation of what this means, vis-à-vis the globalisation of popular culture from India. No doubt it is an interesting subject, but one is surprised by the use of the word "Bollyworld" in the title of the book and the frequent use of the term "Bollywood", in the context of a supposedly academic work of this kind.
The word "Bollywood" is a creation of the Mumbai film press and is culturally disparaging as well as inaccurate. It implies that Hindi cinema is a take off from Hollywood, which it is not. Hindi films have a history, structure and narrative that is unique and that owes nothing to the novelistic tradition of Hollywood. The editors of the book, in their introduction, say that they have used "Bollyworld" as a "neologism" to refer to Indian cinema through a transnational lens "at once located in the nation, but also out of the nation in it's provenance, orientation and outreach".
Complex amalgam
This is no justification for the use of the term. Indian cinema is a complex, diverse amalgam of melodrama, myth, and music, told through an essentially operatic Indian narrative tradition. The word "Bollywood" immediately conjures up to the world a sort of exotic, oriental version of Hollywood that has been cooked up in Mumbai. It is like calling that delicious fish, "Mumbai duck". It is not a duck!
The other problem with the book is that the writing style is academic and does not reach out to the general reader. Even in the dry world of academic publishing, there must be some ground rules about precisely how dull you are allowed to be. Even the editors are guilty of this when they divide their book of essays into sections that they call "Topographies", "Trans-Actions" and "Travels". The alliteration is terrific but is that what the reader wants to appreciate?
The best-written essay in the volume is undoubtedly "Fearless Nadia" by Rosie Thomas. The star of "Hunterwali" (1935) was a blue-eyed blonde called Mary Evans and the Wadia brothers, Jamshed and Homi, had the temerity to present her as an Indian heroine and the skill to bring off the hoax successfully. By the early 1940s, in the midst of nationalism and the independence struggle, "Fearless Nadia" was one of the biggest female stars in Indian cinema. Such was her image as defender of the exploited that merchandising, in the form of "Fearless Nadia" belts, whips, match-boxes and playing cards were being sold, long before our consumer culture era of creating trivia to produce cult!
The Wadia brothers were clever. Fearless Nadia's role as an action heroine could easily transgress the Indian heroine's dress code without raising eyebrows, the mask across her face hid some of her obviously Caucasian features. In addition, the Wadia style of filmmaking drew on Urdu and Parsi theatre, Indian myth and legend, and with Jamshed Wadia's ideological leanings towards M.N. Roy's Radical Democratic Party, the films also started to incorporate contemporary political debate.
Dual vision
Rosie Thomas's argument in this well-written piece is that the image of "Fearless Nadia" was created within the dual vision that runs through Indian cinema to this day. The first vision is premised on "an essentialised Indian cultural tradition while the second better recognised the hybridity and fluidity within the porous borders of this modern India". This is how, she argues, that despite Fearless Nadia's obvious white skin and light hair, the figures she played were read as anti-colonial icons working in a narrative that had direct anti-British allegorical references.
This is a very interesting interpretation, particularly applied to contemporary Hindi cinema. Many Hindi films, catering both to the diaspora and to the Indian audience, frequently have a heroine who is westernised, speaks poor or accented Hindi, even dyes her hair a lighter colour, yet gradually gets transformed, usually with the help of a hero within the Indian cultural tradition, into what can be read as a modern Indian woman, ready to be wooed, won, married or cast off for another woman.
One final question needs to be answered about Bollyworld. A number of essayists in the volume refer to the work of a film scholar called Ravi Vasudevan. He seems to be omnipresent in the minds of these writers and they quote him frequently. Who is he and why does he not have an essay of his own in this book?
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