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

by Pankaj Mishra

  Bachchan, whom I had once idolized, seemed disappointingly unaware of what he represented to millions of Indians or what he could do with his enormous influence. In interviews he deflected questions about his political friends and spoke instead of his new intimacy with his son, Abhishek; he said he talked to him every day about girls, and they exchanged dirty jokes. In recent years he had lost millions of pounds in ill-advised business ventures, including the Miss World Contest. Helped by politicians and businessmen, with whom he was photographed frequently, and the popular Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which he had anchored, he had recently managed to emerge from debt; he returned to making mediocre but well-paying films.

  It wasn’t easy, as I had discovered in London, to sit through most of Bachchan’s films again. I found I preferred the older films my parents had admired, the films about love and loss, in which male as well as female characters faced adversity with strength and dignity and did not confuse revenge with justice. I liked too the more contemporary films made by Mahesh Bhatt, Gulzar and Ram Gopal Varma. I did not like remembering the self that had once been stirred by Bachchan’s films, by their visions of private, bloody revenge.

  I was not surprised to learn that these films had been made during a particularly low moment in Bollywood’s history. Watching them again made me think that a small-town audience of today was probably better served by new films with multisyllable titles, even if it felt bemused by their pseudo-Indian setting and characters and their detachment from issues of poverty and corruption.

  But as I learned quickly in Bombay, the small-town audiences with their cut-price tickets and long queues of eager, young fans don’t matter as much as they used to. The rapid spread of television in the late eighties and early nineties forced many cinemas to close down. The big profits now came from the multiple cinema complexes, or multiplexes, of the big cities, such as Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Pune, and Bangalore, and what was known as the “NRI (nonresident Indian) circuit.”

  Karan Johar was one of the shrewd auteurs making films for the growing upper middle class of the larger Indian cities as well as for the millions of Indians living in England and America, the Indians who, according to Shah Rukh Khan, “seem to like love stories, pretty things, yellow flowers, high-speed action, women in saris, opulence.” Excited by the success in 2002 of a film called Lagaan, nominated for the best foreign film category at the Oscars, many people in Bollywood are aiming even higher, at Hollywood, the American and the British market. But even those who scoff at such ambitions, arguing correctly that most Americans are likely to find Bollywood wholly alienating, have little time for audiences outside the big cities.

  “Frankly, I couldn’t give a fuck for the villages,” Ram Gopal Varma was quoted as saying in Time. When we met, he denied having said this but then went on to stress that he was content to make small-budget films for educated people in the cities. Sitting serenely in his office high above Nariman Point, miles away from the dusty northern suburbs of Bombay, where most film people live and work, Pritish Nandy, once a poet and journalist and now a film producer, told me, “I don’t want to make films for people I don’t know.” Karan Johar, made defensive by my suggestion that his films spoke primarily to affluent Indians, asserted, “No one now can make a film for an all-Indian audience.”

  People still try, however. LOC Kargil, the biggest film of the winter of 2003, was defiantly non–hat ke, a throwback to such big-budget multistarrers as Sholay, the all-time Indian hit. Four hours long, it features almost all of Bollywood’s established and rising stars, including Amitabh Bachchan’s son, Abhishek. Its success seemingly assured, it deals with an event that has aroused much passion in India, the deaths of over five hundred soldiers in the summer of 1999 during the desperate Indian effort to regain the hills in Indian-held Kashmir, seized by a group of Pakistan-backed Muslim militants.

  The day before the film was released across India, I went to a preview with Khalid Mohammed. I first met him when he was a writer with The Times of India, famous for his slash-and-burn reviews of Hindi films. He still reviews new releases scathingly in the evening daily Midday. But he offends more people in the industry now that he is a filmmaker himself “He should make up his mind about what he wants to be,” one director had complained to me.

  I liked Khalid. He seemed a solitary man in the bare, curtained-off rooms of his apartment, where he had lived with his grandmother and where he had written scripts for films about his Muslim family: the mother who, abandoned by her Pakistani husband, married a Hindu prince from Rajasthan, only to die with him shortly thereafter in a plane crash; the aunt who shuttled for years between India and Pakistan, wanted in neither country. Mohammed was especially happy to drive me to Khalid’s home. He and his family had seen twice Khalid’s film about the survivors of the anti-Muslim pogrom in Bombay in the early nineties.

  When I met Khalid in Bombay in late 2003, his new film had just been released. It was unlike anything he had done, a drama, inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s Autumn Sonata, about mothers and daughters. Mostly panned by other reviewers, it had disappeared from most cinemas and was playing at a resoundingly empty thousand-seater in Bombay. A friend of Khalid’s told me, “He was lucky to make the film he wanted—even very distinguished filmmakers can’t get sponsors for their projects—but now he has blown his chance.”

  Khalid felt the failure keenly. “I am reeling,” he said, only halfjokingly, on the phone. He blamed the distributors. It was a “multiplex film,” but they had released it in the big halls. He was writing a novel about Iranian restaurant owners in Bombay and updating his coffee table biography of Amitabh Bachchan.

  We drove to the preview of LOC Kargil in Film City, a few miles out of Bombay. Khalid said that the Bachchans were anxious about their son’s career. It was Jaya, Amitabh Bachchan’s wife, who had arranged the preview.

  I had heard about other anxious parents in Bollywood. Many of the new actors had little to recommend them apart from their famous film families; to the “aspirers” they appeared to be blocking their way. Mallika had complained, “Abhishek Bachchan has had fifteen flops, but he still gets great offers.”

  Abhishek wasn’t present at the preview, but the audience, arriving in new, imported cars, mostly constituted his friends in the industry. A few minutes into the screening, it became clear that the film wasn’t going to boost young Bachchan’s, or anyone else’s, career. Although, in reality, the United States government had forced the Pakistani government to withdraw the armed infiltrators from Indian-held Kashmir, Hindu nationalists in India had claimed a military victory over what they described as a perfidious enemy. LOC Kargil attempted to elaborate this myth and to justify and commemorate the martyrdom of Indian soldiers.

  For the first hour, the soldiers tearfully took leave of their wives, lovers, sisters, and mothers. Thrown into battle, they uttered invocations to the goddess Durga as they clambered up steep, stony hillsides. They sang patriotic songs as they died and shouted crude profanities as they plunged their bayonets into the hapless Pakistanis. I left the hall after three hours of this and paced the deserted foyer until with a final patriotic song the film ended, and all the chauffeurs standing at the back emerged and hurried to their cars.

  In the car on the way back to Bombay, Khalid’s mobile phone rang continuously. There had been other previews across the city. The reviewer of Midday’s rival, The Afternoon Dispatch & Courier, rang to say that the film was “major trauma.” Karan Johar called to say he was watching and hating it. Someone from the preview said that he had seen Abhishek’s mother, Jaya, weeping copiously as the flag-draped coffins of Indian soldiers appeared on the screen. Khalid himself was cautious, wondering only if the film had come at the wrong moment. Relations between India and Pakistan had dramatically improved. There was talk of the Indian cricket team’s traveling to Pakistan for a series of matches. But no one could tell how the audience might react.

  Khalid was more severe in his r
eview three days later. Titled “Out of Control,” it described the film as a “four-hour plus bullet-o-rama.” It mocked the film’s “umpteen flashbacks to the beauteous, tearful and suffering fiancées and wives waiting back home.” Then, in a more serious tone, it deplored the “disturbing religio-political sub-text” and the fact that none of the principal actors portrayed an Indian soldier from the Muslim community.

  When I returned to Bombay after seven weeks, the Indian cricket tour to Pakistan had been announced. The verdict on LOC Kargil was also in. The Indian Army had gone out of its way to help its director, J. P. Dutta, who had already made a successful war film. Hindu nationalist leaders had organized special screenings in Delhi and exempted film exhibitors from sales tax. But they had not managed to save the film from sinking rapidly at the box office.

  Its failure did not seem to have affected Abhishek’s career very much, however. I saw him at a dinner party at the JW Marriott Hotel, a favorite haunt of young Bollywood stars. Almost as tall as his father, but with a fuller face and smile, he sat surrounded by his friends, young directors, writers, and actresses, and entertained them with an account of his visit to a film festival in Morocco. He recounted a long story about the Irish actor Colin Farrell and his desperate and unsuccessful pursuit of a Bollywood starlet at the festival.

  Khalid was among the guests seated farther away from Abhishek and exempt from joining in the slightly forced laughter. He said he still felt hurt by the failure of his recent film. He had abandoned his novel. A producer had given him money to write and direct a thriller set in London. If all went well, he would start shooting later in the year. He wanted to wipe out the “stigma of a flop.”

  This stigma of failure seemed to weigh slightly more heavily on J. P. Dutta, the maker of LOC Kargil. He seemed surprised when I rang him from Mahesh’s office and told him that I would like to meet him. “Can you come right now?” he asked.

  Mahesh said, “He is probably surprised anyone wants to see him.” Mahesh had told me earlier that his daughter’s film had done badly. “She is now learning what failure means, especially in the film industry, where only success counts. She is entering the real world.”

  Sitting in his office—all sleek white marble and black leather swivel chairs and statues of Ganesha—J. P. Dutta seemed disinclined to enter the real world. A small man wearing a gray beard and thick silver chain around his neck, he spoke in monosyllables until I asked him why KHNH had succeeded and LOC Kargil hadn’t.

  It was an unfair question, but it set him off. He spoke at length, interrupting his monologue with short, bitter laughs.

  “I will tell you. Because we are not making films anymore. We are marketing them. Please understand what I am saying. People are making films for the metros [metropolitan cities] and claiming that they are hits. But India is not confined to the metros. Our cinema must come out of Indian culture. The films of the fifties and sixties were also city-based. But people outside cities identified with them. It is because they had meaning and depth. What has happened now? Our values have degenerated. The idealism of independence is gone. We are not reflecting our times. Where is the human angle in our cinema? I knew I was not making a commercial film with LOC Kargil. It was a tribute to our soldiers who risk their lives to defend their nation. My brother was an air force officer who died in a MiG-21 crash. I know what my film means to our nation’s soldiers. I was not concerned whether it sinks or swims with the general public. But you know it is doing great business outside the metros. There are big queues outside the cinemas in UP and Orissa …”

  “They all say that,” Tishu said when I reported Dutta’s remarks to him, “particularly the old, feudal-style filmmakers who feel left behind by the new kids on the block. But he has a point about the new films lacking roots in India.”

  I had known Tishu when he was a student at the university in Allahabad. In Bombay last winter, I sought him out after discovering a film about student politics in Allahabad that he had written and directed. The film’s characters and settings conveyed accurately the violence and cynicism through which most people at the university picked their way. Its lively dialogue employed well the Hindi dialect of the region. It seemed to me more like a hat ke film than any I had previously seen.

  But it also had songs and dances, which disrupted the narrative and its carefully built up mood and rendered a good film more or less unwatchable for an audience outside India.

  Tishu didn’t disagree with me. He simply said he couldn’t have raised the money for a film without songs. It had been hard enough anyway to make something that reflected the world he lived in. He had “struggled” for ten years in Bombay, writing scripts or working as assistant director for very little money, before he could dream of making his own film. The student leaders in Allahabad had protested against their depiction in the film. The university authorities had accused him of showing the university in a “bad light” and had canceled his permission for shooting on the campus. Then the producers had delayed distributing the film for more than a year.

  Things had worked out in the end. The film had made a profit; it had also got good reviews. Tishu had just finished shooting his second film about drugs and foreign tourists in Manali and was already planning his third venture.

  However, despite his success, he wasn’t happy in Bombay. It was expensive to live in; the weather was oppressive, the work hard; he hadn’t had a vacation with his family for over fourteen years. Worse, he couldn’t escape the sense of being only slightly better than the mediocre people around him.

  He knew how his work compared to the contemporary cinema of England, France, or even Iran and Egypt. A friend of his, an established writer-director, claimed to be successful only because Bollywood had never had a George Cukor.

  Bollywood is in a crisis, financially as well as intellectually. The overwhelming majority of the films failed at the box office, partly because the people making these films did not know India outside of Bombay. They barely knew anything about the experiences of ordinary people in Bombay. The audience couldn’t be fooled forever. After all, it now had satellite television, other modes of fantasy to choose from. Not surprisingly, Bollywood had lost much of its traditional audience in not just India but also places like China, North Africa, and the Middle East.

  There were young, talented people around, but it was absurd to think of them as forming a countercutture as yet. For there were still relatively few opportunities for them to flower. The money went to established names working with old formulas, and the lessons of their repeated failure were not learned. There were more expensive miscalculations like LOC Kargil on the way and more talentless sons and daughters of rich people waiting in the wings.

  It isn’t just outsiders like Tishu who chafe at the inadequacies of Bollywood. One evening in Bombay, I went to see Shashi Kapoor, a member of Bollywood’s first film dynasty and one of the few Indian actors known internationally, primarily for his roles in such films as Shakespeare Wallah, Heat and Dust, and My Beautiful Laundrette. Unhappy with his work in Bollywood—there was no film of his, he said, he felt proud of—Kapoor had set up his own production company in the 1970s and made a series of much-admired films, including the award-winning 36 Chowringhee Lane. But the “financial news” remained bad—there were no audiences for the films in India—and, in the early nineties, Kapoor had found himself in the courts with his creditors. He said, “The same people who used to call me the Messiah of Good Films sued me for very small amounts.”

  “Shashi,” Mahesh had told me, “has seen the dark side of the industry.” But Shashi appeared content to be out of the business. “I was a failure; I knew I couldn’t make money, and I decided to leave. I am sixty-six years old. I have had a good life. Why complain?”

  The younger filmmakers trying to work their way out of the mainstream didn’t, and perhaps couldn’t, share Kapoor’s equanimity. Aditya Bhattacharya, the grandson of Bimal Roy, the greatest filmmaker of Bollywood’s golden era, had recently return
ed to India after several years in Italy, attracted by the news that things were changing in Bollywood. He had then discovered that they were not changing fast enough for him. Some weeks before we met in the new Taj hotel in the suburb of Bandra he had published a letter in Midday to the creator of Boom, the biggest flop of the season. “What happened to the story, bro?” he had written. “Things like script, editing, storytelling, the movie? What was this magnum-pocus about? What exactly did you want to share?”

  When I saw Aditya, he was full of rage at the people who had financed the film. “This clever boy arrives in Bombay,” he said, “talking of what he had done in London and New York. They give him seventeen crores [two and one-half million pounds] to play with; he signs up Amitabh Bachchan and other big stars and then produces a turkey.

  “I saw the script. It had disaster written all over it. But people here didn’t have a clue. Most actors and actresses don’t know how to assess a script. They are happier if someone narrates them the story. No wonder, they still don’t work with scripts and improvise the dialogue on the sets.”

  We left the hotel and walked down the promenade beside the sea. It was very late, but a few families still lingered around the peanut and popcorn stalls. Aditya pointed out to me the bungalows of Bollywood’s famous stars. He then suddenly began to denounce them.

  They did nothing, he said, when their own city burned during the anti-Muslim pogroms in 1993 and instead prostrated themselves before Bal Thackeray, the chief of the Shiv Sena, the Hindu extremist organization, which then ran the city’s government. He spoke of the stars’ close friendship with the mafia and their hypocritical refusal to support Bharat Shah, a popular financier arrested for his alleged links to the mafia. Bollywood celebrities, he said, still lined up to appease Bal Thackeray, whose daughter-in-law had become a powerful fixer in the industry.