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Retro-chic: “Johnny Gaddaar” pays homage to the icons of the syncretistic pop-culture.

It is not merely Russia; wide swathes of natives in the Levant, North and East Africa form the larger, non-Indian audience for Hindi films. Similarly, Rajnikanth’s “Muthu” gathered a wide cult following in Japan, where it was released in a dubbed version.

I stayed for a summer in a university campus in the south of France, near Cannes, in 2001. That year Murali Nair’s “Pattiyude Divasam (A Dog’s Day)” won a place on the “Un certain regard” roster; but no more than 50 miles away, French and francophone North African teenagers were more eager to determine if I had seen Aishwarya Rai in the flesh — evidently they were quite captured by her in “Mohabbatein”, a film that received tepid response in India, or for that matter in the NRI capitals of London, New York, Nairobi and Dubai. “Mohabbatein” was not a critically acclaimed film. It was fully Bollywood in its sensibility, just as “Muthu” had all the elements to make it a textbook hit in Tamil Nadu; yet the impact that both these films made on a foreign audience was significant.

Crossover art, be it music, film or literature thrives precisely because of its universality. Khaled’s Rai-pop track “Didi” and Los del Rio’s “Macarena” climbed the charts in India; Usha Uthup even did a cover of “Didi” at some of the bigger puja pandals in Kolkata later that year. That none of us understood a word of Arabic of Spanish did not get in the way of our appreciating the vitality of their music and their rhythms.

Crossover cinema, likewise, is characterised not merely by the foreignness of the culture, but the eternal aspects that delight the mainstream audience, beyond the confines of the film-festival circuit. This audience lives on the permeable boundary between home and abroad, in a space that now has the perfect neologism to define it: Bollystan.

Increasingly, Bollystan is asserting its own expression as a form of cultural diplomacy. Earlier last month, Warner Bros. picked up the North American home-movie rights to “Americanizing Shelley”, written by one Namrata Singh Gujral — born in Dharamsala, raised in Bahrain and manicured in Los Angeles. American Pride Films Group, the independent studio behind “Shelley”, founded by a former U.S. Air Force officer, declares that its purpose is to ‘generate stories that boast a healthy non-partisan view of the American spirit’. The audience to which it boasts this integrative view of the American Spirit is the American heartland; accordingly, “Americanizing Shelley” premiered to huge fanfare in country music capital Nashville, Tennessee. Having Namrata around helps aesthetically, and politically — she was once voted Republican babe of the week in an online poll popular among Washington DC’s young wags and Republican policy-pundits alike.

Indian cinema is not only diffusing outward, towards Bollystan, but it is also absorbing the influence of this global culture. This September also saw the nationwide release of Sriram Raghavan’s crime-caper “Johnny Gaddaar”, Bollywood’s first retro-chic film: LA Confidential meets angry-young-man kitsch. In “Gaddaar”, Sriram Raghavan pays homage to the icons of the syncretistic pop-culture that he grew up with — Amitabh Bachchan, Stanley Kubrick and James Hadley Chase.

India TV Russia, “Americanizing Shelley” and “Johnny Gaddaar” represent counter-current flows in Indian crossover cinema today — one direction pushing Indian film into the mainstream globally, and the other bringing a global sensibility to mainstream Indian film. Thus far, Bollywood’s old studios have been skittish about deviating from boy-meets-girl or the more sanctimonious “social message” stories; what improved over the 1990s were just production values and packaging — better costumes, sets and film-stock. The critical, as well as commercial success of crossover films should convince Indian filmmakers and distributors that their audience is more discerning and more receptive to radical innovation than they assume.

The changing business of desi showbiz offers such promise of innovation. The entertainment industry in India is formalizing itself along the lines of any other kind of enterprise. Many studios are raising money from the stock markets — The India Film Company Plc. and UTV Motion Pictures Plc. both debuted on the floor of the London Stock Exchange in the second half of 2007. Whereas producers have so long been under the thrall of individual distributors and financiers, who typically underwrote their productions and thus exercised considerable creative control over films; with increasingly accessible public financing, many production houses are now able to assume greater creative risks in their projects.

Crossover film is not necessarily multiplex cinema, which is too involved in the idiosyncrasies of urban India. As service and manufacturing jobs in our growing cities replace agricultural jobs among increasing numbers of Indians, multiplex cinema fulfils an important need to create Indian urban identity. But by its very definition, crossover cinema is not created with some explicit intention along the lines of “we must capture the market in the cosmopolitan south of France”.

The crossover success of Aamir Khan’s “Lagaan”, by no means merely a multiplex film, is testament to the power of universal themes; audiences unfamiliar with India’s colonial history, rural traditions or even cricket, were able to identify with the underdog and root for him. The best that Indian auteurs can hope for is that their films have the eternal spark that anyone, anywhere can readily identify with; are executed in loving detail; and provide the comfort, entertainment and escape of all truly great cinema.

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