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

by Pankaj Mishra

  “No one,” Aditya said, “should be fooled by the success of films like KHNH. It is like the big party the feudal landlord throws before he goes bankrupt. People might make a little money by promoting the regressive values of these confused Indians living abroad. They are like salesmen who have persuaded people to buy a defective lighter. But sooner or later people are going to realize that the lighter doesn’t work, and they need a better one.”

  Aditya went on to describe the growing financial nexus between politicians, film stars, and the mafia. He spoke of the illegal and illogical ways in which films were financed. There were probably personal reasons for his bitterness; he had financed his own new film with difficulty. But I saw little reason to dispute his account.

  In London, I had gone to see KHNH with Sally Potter, a British filmmaker known for her experimental style. She gasped when after two very long hours the intermission sign came up. But she appeared to be enjoying the film, especially the songs, which effortlessly appropriated and mixed the rhythms of disco, rap, and gospel. When I saw her a few days later, she said that she wanted to explore the musical form in her next project. It was capable of speaking a universal emotional language that was no longer possible for cinema in its more rational European or American forms.

  This seems right, and probably explains why Bollywood films managed to reach a very large and diverse audience in the third world. With their songs and dances and their unabashed love of glamour and escapism, they offer to Western audiences what Hollywood films have rarely attempted since the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the counterculture. Their fonnulaic plots seem refreshingly artless to people who have grown weary of the irony, cynicism, and pessimism of European and American films. This partly explains the success in Britain and America of the musical Bombay Dreams and, to a lesser extent, the Bollywood-influenced Moulin Rouge.

  ButRougeand I didn’t tell Sally Potter thisRougeKHNH baffled me. For a hat ke film, it barely acknowledged the peculiar dilemmas of people living between cultures, a theme that gives much literary fiction about Indian-Americans its emotional richness. And KHNH was, as I discovered, typical of many new Bollywood films set abroad or in a purely notional India. Their character seems to be fazed by neither Indian tradition nor Western modernity, neither home nor abroad. In KKHH, a miniskirted Indian student from London breaks into a devotional song after being taunted for her lack of cultural roots by the other students at the Archie comics school. In KKKG, an Indian child manages to get all the white British people present at her school in Hampstead to sing the Indian national anthem.

  These films seem to me to use a different idiom from the one that once gave Bollywood a devoted following in underdeveloped countries. It was in Bombay that I began to understand something of their emotional language. I began to see that they were rooted in something after all and that their amiable visions of a world that existed for Indians to painlessly inhabit, and perhaps, dominate, had a potentially vast audience.

  “I write out of my experience,” Karan johar had told me. This experience seemed limited; like many young hat ke filmmakers, Johar was, I discovered, the son of a rich producer. But it was more widely shared than I had imagined.

  After ten years of economic liberalization, a small but growing number of Indians live as well as middle-class Europeans and Americans. During this time, many Indians in Britain and America have begun to see their ancestral country as an investment opportunity and a cultural resource. These rich but insecure Indians have bankrolled generously the Hindu nationalists’ rise to power and now support the assertion of Indian military and economic power. They also form the newest and most lucrative market for Bollywood. films.

  “India is shining,” the Hindu nationalist government claimed in a series of poster and newspaper advertisements in late 2003. The prime minister and his deputy repeatedly cited the growing prominence of Indians around the world and asserted that twenty-first century was going to be the “Indian Century.” Many of the new Bollywood films increasingly came out of, and stroked, the same Indian fantasy of wealth, political power, and cultural confidence.

  The fantasy isn’t without basis. The gap between the two hundred million-strong middle class and the other eight hundred million Indians has widened, but the consumer economy has grown steadily, along with India’s foreign exchange reserves. And so in Bombay, the stylish hoardings for KHNH, the baby-faced actors on it dressed as if for a wedding, seemed rightly indistinguishable from the “India Shining” ads the government’s pictures of happy-looking Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs—as well as the giant posters of Amitabh Bachchan and other Bollywood superstars cheerfully promoting Swedish cell phones, Swiss watches, and American colas.

  Film posters in my childhood hadn’t been so slick. Nor were the government’s ads for family planning, Hum Do, Hamare Do (“Two of Us, Two We Have”). The austere culture of underdevelopment those badly painted images spoke of now exists out of sight, in the villages and towns, where the country’s poor majority still live or in the slums, almost entirely concealed by giant hoardings along many Bombay streets.

  Cable television channels as well as the new pages in the English-language newspapers report on fashion designers, models, former and current Miss Worlds, theme parties, new clubs, and champagne-tasting sessions. They appear to take their cues from upper-middle-class Indians wishing to, as the Hindu nationalists claimed, “feel good.” And Bollywood films set in the West or a Westernized, unrecognizable India seem to have become yet another echo chamber of upwardly mobile Indians.

  In Bombay, I often found myself gazing at the many pictures of Bachchan in a gray beard and smart Western suit looming over the stagnant traffic. The angry young man of the seventies seemed as iconic as ever in the ad where he said, with a reassuring smile, “Don’t worry, be happy.”

  Mahesh told me, “People attribute greatness to Bachchan. They have a statue of him at Madame Tussaud’s. But I find him an empty figure. There is not much there. Many people feel this. But no one wants to say this in public. It is part of what our culture has become.”

  He added, “We are lying to ourselves all the time.”

  This was what he had written about in The Times of India that morning. His friend Vijay Anand, who made many of the acclaimed films of the sixties, had died the previous day. Mahesh wrote that he had been “revolted” to see the news of a distinguished filmmaker’s death conveyed by ticker at the bottom of the screen on television while a reporter breathlessly described how the crockery for a leading actress’s wedding was being imported all the way from Paris. He had accused the media of “trying to create a world in which we hope to eliminate life’s most unbearable features and replace them with those which conform with our own wishes.”

  I had grown used to these pronouncements from Mahesh. They appeared in The Times of India on an almost daily basis, usually sharing the page with reports of opulent weddings and wild parties. I often agreed with them. But their frequency and intensity made me wonder.

  I met many people in Bollywood who doubted Mahesh’s intentions and described him as a publicity seeker. He also had many admirers. The actors he has worked with spoke well of him. Tishu had said, “That man has talent. He is connected with an emotional reality outside Bombay. This is rare in a place where people lose sense of who they are and what they can do after just a little bit of success. That is why these people from small towns flock to him.”

  I still wasn’t sure. Had Mahesh been sincere when he told Pritam that he would like to try him out? At his office, Pritam still tried to catch my eye anytime my car passed him. Mohammed asked me almost continuously if anything had happened. When I asked Mahesh, he said that he was waiting for his brother’s next film to move ahead.

  I have never identified with Bollywood,” Mahesh had told me. And now he was, he claimed, looking at life beyond it. He couldn’t see himself in politics, which had turned into a circus; he mocked the reports and photographs in the newspaper of film stars joining
the BJP or Congress. He said, “But I do want to speak for the Muslims in this country. Two thousand Muslims were killed in Bombay in 1992 and ’93, and now two thousand of them have been killed in Gujarat. But no one gets punished; the killers are free and flourishing. I fear we are breeding a generation of terrorists.”

  His meeting with Sonia Gandhi had gone well. He had spoken frankly, telling her of the desperation of Muslims in Gujarat. She had listened carefully and thanked him afterward.

  There had been a moment of uncertainty when the Muslim theologians accompanying him had asked him to button up his shirt at his chest. He said he had complied, but only after some hesitation. He didn’t want to defer to politicians. There were enough film people already doing that.

  The day before I left Bombay, the newspapers there were full of reports of a row at an awards ceremony in Dubai, one of Bollywood’s versions of the Oscars, between the reigning superstar, Shah Rukh Khan, and Amar Singh, the powerful politician accompanying Amitabh Bachchan. Apparently, Singh had shouted at the businessmen organizers of the event after discovering that they had placed Bachchan and him in the eleventh row. It was an insult, he said, to the great artist who ought to have been in the front row. Shah Rukh Khan had intervened on the organizers’ behalf, and there had been enough angry words for journalists to feast on.

  Asked to comment by The Times of India, Mahesh attacked Amar Singh. “When will our power-drunk politicians realize that with power comes responsibility?” he wrote. “What was the need to use brute force in a matter as trivial as seat arrangement?” He also criticized Bachchan: “No one in the world can insult you without your permission.”

  Two days later I was in the Simla hills, preparing to leave for London, when Mahesh rang me from Lucknow. “You missed the excitement,” he said. “My piece created an uproar. I have just had the wife of a senior police officer on the phone. She told me that I should get out of Lucknow. It is Amar Singh’s territory, and he was out to get me.”

  Mahesh said, “I am staying where I am. not scared of Amar Singh.”

  Apparently, the businessman organizer who had stood up to Amar Singh had lost a contract worth twelve million pounds in India. Feeling himself under intense pressure, Shah Rukh Khan had apologized to Singh. But his pride had been hurt, and he was reconsidering his position. He had sent a text message to Mahesh, saluting his courage and honesty.

  Mahesh said, “Such is the inner rot of Bollywood.”

  In London, I read of a dispute between Mahesh and Mallika. The latter had not only refused to do a nude scene in Murder but had also rejected the option of a body double. Mahesh had been quoted as saying, “My only grouse is that she agreed to the nude scene in the first place. She remains a small town girl with a conservative heart. What is the point of pretending otherwise?”

  But when I rang Mallika from London, two day before Murder was due to be released, she had forgotten about the nude scene. She had apparently forgotten too her wish to work abroad.

  She said she was flooded with new offers. “The initial reports of Murder are just great,” she told me. “The distributors are over the moon. The producer is receiving ‘overflow checks …’”

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Probably, something good. But you must be here to see it. The movie has created a big hoopla, you know. It is everywhere; the promos were a sensation; the TV channels, the press, everyone is talking about it …”

  She faltered briefly when I asked why this was so. “Oh, you know … .” she began. “It is probably because of the skin show, the promos, lots of hot shots, bold scenes, adultery …

  “But you know,” she added, “there is so much more to the film. Lots of women trapped in loveless marriages will identify with my character.

  “Anyway, it is a great feeling to have the film rising from my shoulders,” she said. “You know, I am much sought after. Interview after interview. The BBC just called from London. By the way, can you get a magazine called Man’s World in London? I am on the cover. They say I have ‘the hottest body on the planet.’”

  She gave a short, nervous laugh. “They can’t think beyond this, but I guess it is their problem, not mine.”

  Murder opened on April 2. In his review for Midday, Khalid denounced the film for its “voyeuristic flashes of semi-nudity and obscenity,” mocked Mallika for her “motor mouth and cheesy posters,” and accused Mahesh of hypocrisy. But the opening box-office collections were as good as Mallika had predicted, and within days, Murder had become the first successful Bollywood film of 2004.

  In London I read a report about Mahesh and Mallika’s visiting a Delhi cinema where Murder was being shown. “I come here to titillate you,” Mahesh was quoted as telling a rapturous audience. Mallika told a journalist that her father wasn’t happy with the film and her mother couldn’t get a ticket. She blew kisses at the audience and said, “I have worked like a Viagra when the market was so down.” The report said Mahesh and Mallika were planning to work together on another film.

  On my last day in Bombay, I had seen Pritam standing in the small crowd outside Mahesh’s office. In early April, I called Mohammed from London and asked him to find out what, if anything, had happened. Mohammed reported that Pritam was still where I had last seen him. He had hoped to get his break in May, when work began on Mahesh’s brother’s next film, but he was less sure now. I wondered if I should ring Mahesh. And then I thought that he had been right all along: I thought that Pritam should go home.

  PART TWO

  KASHMIR

  The Cost of Nationalism

  1. The Killings in Chitisinghpura

  On the evening of March 20, 2000, Nanak Singh was chatting with some friends and relatives near his house in Chitisinghpura, a remote Sikh-dominated village in the Himalayan valley of Kashmir. Most of the locals were hung over, having spent the previous days celebrating Holi, the Hindu festival of color, which the Sikhs also observe. Singh, who works for the animal husbandry department of the India-backed government in Kashmir, wasn’t particularly suspicious when about seventeen armed men in combat fatigues showed up and ordered the men out of their houses, telling them to stand before the gurdwara (the Sikh prayer site), with their identity cards.

  Singh assumed, like many other Sikhs that the men were from the army; people in villages all across the valley were accustomed to being searched and interrogated by Indian security forces. The four million Muslims of Kashmir live precariously between the eternally warring countries of India and Pakistan. Nanak Singh, however, is, along with most other residents of Chitisinghpura, a Sikh, and thus a tiny minority of Sikhs in Kashmir, just over 2 percent of the population, have enjoyed a tentative immunity throughout the ten years of violence, an immunity that neither the local Hindus, most of whom have migrated to India, nor the Muslims, always suspect in the eyes of Indian security forces, have had. If you were a Sikh and worked for the government, as many of the Sikhs in Chitisinghpura did, such checking was a formality. Nevertheless, there were a few Sikhs who had premonitions and hid themselves in their houses.

  It was dark, and Singh couldn’t really see the faces of the men, although they spoke both Punjabi and Urdu, the languages of North India and Pakistan, as they used flashlights to check the identity cards of the nineteen Sikhs standing and squatting before the walls of the gurdwara.

  The checking done, the soldiers stepped back a few inches from the lineup. A moment passed; there was a single shot, and suddenly they raised their guns—AK-56s or AK-47s—and began firing blindly at the Sikhs.

  Singh felt the entire row of Sikhs crumple with brief cries of pain and fell immediately to the muddy ground himself, dragged down by the weight of the dying man beside him. He assumed that he had been hit and found it strange that he felt no pain. In fact, by collapsing so early to the ground, he had missed a bullet.

  Half buried by a bloodied corpse, Singh heard the armed men move away with quick steps to the other side of the village. Minutes later he
heard more gunfire.

  Soon after that the men were back; they seemed to be in a hurry. Singh heard their leader instruct the men to quickly put a bullet into each of the nineteen Sikhs lying there, all of whom except for him, Singh believed, were already dead.

  Not daring to breathe, Singh dimly perceived a tall figure loom over him in the dark and raise his gun. He heard the shot; he felt the bullet penetrate his left thigh, felt the first warm sensation of pain, and then the man moved away.

  As it turned out, Nanak Singh’s luck lasted; he is the only survivor of the village massacre in which thirty-five Sikhs died.

  Since 199U thousands of Muslim guerrillas have been waging a war against the Indian presence in Kashmir, a war in which more than fifty thousand people—civilians, guerrillas, Indian soldiers, and policemen—have died, a war that came after four decades of Kashmiri resentment of Indian rule. The guerrillas are supported by Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan, who wish to see Kashmir incorporated into the latter as part of a larger Islamized state. Pakistan, which was carved out of Hindu-majority India during the violent and confused partition of 1947 as a separate homeland for Indian Muslims, has never stopped claiming the Muslim-dominated valley for itself. India has fought two wars over Kashmir with Pakistan, in 1948 and 1965, and came very close to a nuclear war in both 1990 and 2002. The Indian government sees the Pakistani support of the guerrillas as a “proxy war” and has deployed up to half a million soldiers to suppress the insurgency.

  But the Sikhs have remained neutral, and over the last ten years guerrillas as well as soldiers from the Indian Army camps frequently visited Chitisinghpura, their usual aggressiveness and tension defused by the isolation and serenity of the pastoral setting—the houses with thatch and corrugated iron roofs and vegetable gardens and the brisk stream and the melancholy willows and the forest of chenar, walnut, and almond, and the high mountains looming above the village—which even today make the great turmoil of the valley seem far away. The guerrillas, some of whom were from Pakistan and Afghanistan, used to play cricket with the children; they often asked for wheat and rice (Chitisinghpura is relatively prosperous, with revenues from apple and rice farms and transport businesses). The Indian Army, which routinely patrolled the village, knew about the guerrillas’ visits from some of the concerned villagers but was strangely indifferent.