Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  Mahesh said, in Hindi, “But why did you tell me that you had killed your uncle?”

  Pritam wiped his mouth and leaned forward on his chair. “It is true, sir. I wanted to tell you that I can be very serious about anything, even murder. I only have to put my mind to it.”

  He described how he had been provoked into murdering his uncle. He seemed to have worked on the story, which came out smoothly. His father had died when he was very young. Soon afterward, his uncles had appropriated his mother’s land and house. One of Pritam’s uncles had been particularly vicious. Pritam had seen him repeatedly assault his mother. At seventeen, he had first thought of murdering him. He spent a year planning the murder before finally stabbing the uncle in question. As part of his meticulous preparation, he had left no clues for the police; they were still baffled by the murder.

  His mother, Pritam said, was a devi, a goddess. He couldn’t bear anyone being cruel to her and wanted above all to look after her.

  Mahesh said, “In that case, what are you doing in Bollywood? You have come to the wrong place. You come to Mahesh Bhatt thinking he will make you a star. Mahesh Bhatt is telling you that you are chasing illusions, that you should go home and look after your mother. Do you want money for the train fare?”

  Pritam shook his head. “I want you to give me a chance, sir. I won’t go home without having worked with you.”

  Someone opened the door to announce that the publicist from Lucknow was leaving. Mahesh said to me in English, “Why don’t you talk to Pritam while I meet the publicist in my brother’s room?”

  Without Mahesh in the room, Pritam relaxed. I wanted to know where and how he had lived in Bombay for the last eight years. He replied, looking distracted, slightly puzzled perhaps by the bareness of the room he had long wanted to enter, that he lived like an ascetic, did not drink or smoke, and ate very little. He stole whatever money he needed.

  How? I asked. But Mahesh returned to his room just then, and Pritam produced a letter in Bengali from his mother, evidence, he said, of his mother’s good heart.

  Mahesh asked him to translate it aloud.

  “My dear son’” Pritam began slowly, his eyes darting from Mahesh’s face to mine, “I have not heard from you for a long time and you have not sent me any money. I don’t worry much, because I know that your faith in Mahesh sahib will be rewarded one day …”

  The letter spoke of her continued suffering at the hands of her greedy relatives. When it ended, Pritam looked up hopefully at Mahesh. One of Mahesh’s phones rang just then. He picked both up and, while squinting at them, said to Pritam “I think you should go home and help her.”

  Pritam stayed on for a few more minutes, drinking tea, surveying the room, while Mahesh spoke on the phone. I was relieved when Mahesh told him as he left that he would “try him out before the camera.” Outside, Pritam immediately conveyed the news to the crowd of chauffeurs and aspirers. Mohammed was very pleased on his behalf; it was the kind of break he hoped for himself.

  I wondered later if Pritam had written the letter himself, just as he had made up the story about the murder, in order to impress Mahesh. In its extreme, raw emotions, his story sounded too much like a Bollywood film.

  I didn’t suggest this to Mahesh, however. I wanted Pritam to have his “break.” Also, I knew a little about Mahesh’s background, and he seemed unlikely to doubt a story just because it was too melodramatic. His own father, also a famous producer and director in his time, had lived with his Hindu wife while maintaining a Muslim mistress, Mahesh’s mother, in another part of Bombay. He came irregularly to his second home, and didn’t stay long. As a child Mahesh had spent many hours waiting for his father and then, when he did not turn up, consoling his mother.

  Mahesh said, “My mother loved him intensely until her death. I always remained slightly in awe of this aloof man who would come and go away, and who had such a hold over my mother. When she died a few years back, he came to our house chanting Hindu scriptures and holding gangajal [Ganges water]. He saw my mother’s corpse and said, ‘Put some sindoor [vermilion the cherished symbol of matrimony for Hindu women] in her hair. She was always asking me,”Put some sindoor in my hair.” I want this done now.’”

  The extent of Mahesh’s father’s love for his mistress was made clear, Mahesh explained, when his father himself died. “I used to ask my mother, ‘Where will his corpse go?’ As it turned out, he had left explicit wishes that he be cremated in our part of town. My mother’s sisters knew what this meant. He was publicly acknowledging his devotion to the woman who loved him. My aunts showed up at the cremation. I saw them whispering and stealing a fistful of ashes. I asked them what they had done with the ashes. They said they had sprinkled them over my mother’s grave. They were wishing for some kind of union. Critics accused me of melodrama when I put some of my background in my film Zakhm. I felt with that gesture that I had made my peace with him. This is what melodrama does; it reconciles people. This is what the best Bollywood films achieve.”

  My own memory of Bollywood films was different. As a child in small railway towns, and then as an undergraduate in Allahabad, I had watched them frequently. For weeks I would gaze longingly at the posters suspended atop electricity poles, or draped on the sides of the tonga that clattered down dusty, narrow streets with understocked shops and faded signboards, the driver announcing through a megaphone, the latest arrival at the local cinema.

  I was particularly struck by the posters of new films. They often featured men gnashing their teeth and pointing outsized guns at each other against a backdrop of exploding skyscrapers and women showing bare arms and, sometimes more daringly, legs. My parents did not allow me to watch these films, claiming that they were too violent. They spoke fondly of the tragic or flamboyantly romantic male actors of a previous era—Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Guru Dutt, Dev Anand. They happily let me go to films from the 1950s and 1960s, some of which enjoyed reruns in small-town cinemas, and whose mostly melancholy songs, leaking out of a hundred transistors in our railway colony, filled the long afternoons of my childhood.

  But I wasn’t much interested in the stories, where love, timidly expressed, was usually thwarted, worldly success proved an illusion, and whose songs rendered sweet the cruelest disappointment. Like many young men in India—and unknown to me also in Africa and the Middle East—I was fascinated by Amitabh Bachchan although I watched most of his films after I left home and was pursuing an undergraduate degree in Allahabad.

  Bachchan a gawkily tall actor with a baritone voice, often played the role of the poor, resentful young man pitted against venal politicians, businessmen, and policemen; women apart from tearful mothers, played minor roles in his films and were often treated ungallantly. There was little in Bachchan’s own background that hinted at political discontent. Before seeking a career in films in Bombay, he had held a well-paid boxwallah’s job in Calcutta. His father, a distinguished poet in Hindi, had friends among the Nehrus and the Gandhis. But on-screen Bachchan was the “angry young man’” and he spoke directly to an audience that was no longer moved by the gentle self-pity of the actors that my parents liked.

  For many Indians, there was much to be angry about in the 1970s and 1980s. Freedom from British rule in 1947, and the proclamations of socialism and democracy, seemed to have benefited only a small minority of the country’s population, mostly politicians, big businessmen, and civil servants, people who plundered the state-controlled economy and protected their power and privilege almost as fiercely as the British had once dealt with challenges from the natives.

  Bachchan first became famous around 1975, the year that Indira Gandhi responded to a mass political movement protesting against corruption and inflation by suspending India’s democratic constitution and imprisoning many people opposed to her. In several of his films, Bachchan expressed the cynicism and despair that were particularly acute among unemployed lower-middle-class men in small towns. He usually sought to avenge himself on an unjust society. Pure ex
hilaration rippled across the always frankly expressive cinema audience when, after successive humiliations, he finally exploded into violence.

  This was an especially gratifying moment in Allahabad. For some years before I arrived, the university, once known as the Oxford of the East, had been a setting for battles between unemployed and probably unemployable, young men seeking to make a career in state- or national-level politics. Crude bombs and guns often went off in the middle of the campus. People like myself, who were there to acquire a degree and then apply for a job with the government, felt small and anxious and scared most of the time.

  Bachchan empowered us briefly. I remember watching one of his films in Allahabad: how the audience roared its approval as he, playing a chief minister, first eloquently denounced his cabinet and then machine-gunned all its members.

  A more intractable world began just outside the cinema, where the police constables waved their iron-tipped lathis and exacted bribes from rickshaw drivers and street-side vendors. Corrupt men ruled here through a long, invisible hierarchy—the money passed all the way to the police officers at the top—and the best way to deal with them was to join them. But to spend three hours in the cinema—on the bare wooden seats, amid the peanut shells on the floor the cigarette and bidi smoke languidly rising through the rays from the projector—was to partially fulfill all the fantasies the posters had nurtured. It was to shed, however briefly, our deprivations and to embrace the heady conviction that if the world failed to yield its richness—sex wealth, power—it would be severely punished.

  As it turned out, I rarely went to the cinema after I left Allahabad and moved to Delhi. The older I got the more Bollywood films began to seem long and unreal. Occasionally, late at night in Indian hotel rooms, I would come across previews of Bollywood’s offerings on television. A few glimpses of songs and dances in Swiss meadows, or at opulent weddings, Muslim terrorists in Kashmir and Pakistani villains plotting against India, and plump action heroes saving their motherland, and I felt I’d had enough.

  I couldn’t enter these films as unselfconsciously as I had before. Yet neither was I distant enough from them to enjoy them as kitsch. And there were always enough unread books on the shelves staring plaintively at me.

  It was years later, while spending part of my time in London, that I became interested again in Bollywood films. Popular among a younger generation of British Asians, they were shown frequently on television. In the late nineties, new Bollywood films had begun to appear in the U.K. box-office charts. Academics published monographs on them, arguing for their sociological import and neglected artistic quality. In 1999, Amitabh Bachchan, his name still unknown to most people in Europe and America, was elected ahead of Laurence Olivier as the “Star of the Millennium” in a BBC online poll.

  Articles and profiles of Bollywood stars appeared in even the mainstream English newspapers following the success of the West End musical Bombay Dreams which Andrew Lloyd Webber produced in collaboration with A. R. Rahman a Bollywood composer. These articles usually portrayed Bollywood films as an exotic, somewhat amusing novelty. They rarely tried to explain why these films had been popular in many places—the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, China, and the Far East—where Hollywood had little or no influence or how they had penetrated countries with such strong indigenous cultures as Egypt and Indonesia.

  After many years, I saw a new Hindi film in London. Kal Ho Naa Ho (“Tomorrow May Never Come”), better known as KHNH, was a worldwide hit, especially popular among South Asians in Britain and America. Its male lead was Shah Rukh Khan, one of three superstar Khans who are apparently as bankable in Bollywood as Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks in Hollywood. Part of a new “youth movement,” its producers had turned their back on the formulaic films made throughout the eighties and early nineties—sterile years, I had read, for Bollywood and very different from the current climate since, according to various Web sites and magazines I looked up, there were now in Bollywood people with the talent and the courage to be hat ke (literally “different from”). KHNH, for instance, was hat ke. So was its young director, Karan Johar. The hat ke generation was bringing about as much of a revolution in Bollywood as young filmmakers inspired by European cinema, had briefly achieved in Bollywood in the late sixties and seventies. They were the counterculture connecting to a new, sophisticated audience.

  KHNH was unlike any Bollywood film I had ever seen, mostly because it was set entirely in New York City and its characters were almost all Indian-Americans But it also featured many songs, and its plot traced a romantic triangle much used in Bollywood. A woman meets two boys, loves one, and is loved hopelessly by the other. Together they sing and dance for a bit, along with a gregarious cast of brothers, sisters, parents. grandmothers and grandfathers, before the young man she fancies is revealed to be fatally ill. Many tears later (the film is more than three hours long), he dies, but only after bravely singing and dancing through the lavish wedding of his heartbroken survivors.

  The next day I looked up DVDs of Johar’s previous two films, both of which had been equally successful among middle-class and expatriate Indians. Their titles also beginning with the letter k, they were known as KKHH and KKKG respectively. They were set in London and in an India greatly resembling a cross between England and America. KKKG was, the subtitle claimed, “all about loving your parents.” The parents in this instance headed a corporate family that lived in an English-style country house and traveled in helicopters. Their son lived in London—not in any of the modest suburbs where most of the Indian immigrant communities live but in posh Hampstead—and he drove a red Ferrari.

  Johar’s other film, KKHH, was partly set in a college modeled on Riverdale, the American high school depicted in Archie comics, and the main characters based on the high-spirited teenagers Archie, Veronica, and Betty. They played basketball instead of cricket and eventually secured highly paid jobs in an India made up almost entirely of equally affluent and charming relatives.

  I saw other new films. I read books and fanzines and online interviews with Bollywood stars. In December, I finally traveled to Bombay, where I met Karan Johar. “My films reflect,” he told me, “my own reality. I love my parents, they love me. No matter where we are in the world, we are Indians and at home. I write out of my experience.”

  Johar was upbeat about Bollywood which he said was entering another era of filmmaking. Another young filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma much praised for his films about the Bombay mafia, said, “There is no point in patting ourselves on our backs. Our best films are not much better than an average film from Hollywood. I feel we have much more to learn from even B-grade Hollywood films. I have learned a lot from The Exorcist.”

  Was this true? I couldn’t tell. In Bombay, I became more aware that Bollywood was a world unto itself, in which the criteria normally used for judging films and their makers were only partly valid.

  “Pictures,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “have a private grammar, like politics or automobile production or society.” Fitzgerald thought that people merely watching and commenting on films could not understand how Hollywood studios actually worked, the peculiar pressures they brought to bear upon screenwriters, directors, and actors. Bollywood too seems to have its own peculiar grammar. The songwriter, or lyricist, music composer, dance director, and costume designer are frequently more crucial to a film’s success than the script, which is often improvised on the sets.

  Bollywood’s economic workings are more mysterious. It still exists in what was known as the informal and high-risk sector of the Indian economy. Banks rarely invest in Bollywood, where moneylenders are rampant, demanding up to 35 percent interest. The big corporate houses seem no less keen to stay away from filmmaking. A senior executive with the Tatas, one of India’s prominent business families, told me, “We went into Bollywood, made one film, lost a lot of money, and got out of it very fast,” adding that “the place works in ways we couldn’t begin to explain to our shareholders.” />
  Since only six or seven of the two hundred films made each year earn a profit, the industry has generated little capital of its own. The great studios of the early years of the industry are now defunct. It is outsiders—regular moneylenders, small and big businessmen, real estate people, and, sometimes, mafia dons—who continue to finance new films, and their turnover, given the losses, is rapid. Their motives are mixed: sex, glamour, money laundering, and, more optimistically, profit. They rarely have much to do with the desire to make original, or even competent, films.

  Sometimes, shooting schedules drag on for years as the producer struggles to make interest payments to his various creditors. The delays are often caused by actors working in several films at once. The actual process of filmmaking seems equally arduous. For instance, actors record their dialogue not during but after the shooting, which can cause their voices to seem out of sync with their facial expressions, thus heightening the impression of artificiality. It is rare that an actor working without a proper script turns in a good performance.

  In any case, not much by way of acting—as distinct from dancing and fight stunts—seems required of Bollywood stars in the films they choose to work in. Even in real life, they tend to act out fantasies nearly as extreme as those they help create on-screen. The most famous of them was recently caught hunting deer and gunrunning. A few months before I arrived in Bombay, Salman Khan, one of the three superstar Khans, had run over and killed or wounded four men sleeping on a pavement while speeding late at night in his Land Cruiser. Mohammed pointed out the spot of the accident to me every time we passed it and repeated his account of how Khan had managed to bribe the witnesses to change their accounts of the event.