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A Cultural Grand Salaam

A Cultural Grand Salaam

Author: Richard Corliss
Publication: Time
Date: April 26, 2004
URL: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040503-629361,00.html

Can 2 billion people be wrong? The music, movies and literature of South Asia are the most popular in the world. Now America is falling under their spell

The brash young man seizes the stage of Manhattan's Broadway Theater, sings and dances to a vigorous bhangra and, feeling his rock-star-in-the-making oats, shouts, "Are ya with me, Bombay? ... Are ya with me, New York?" This scene from the new musical Bombay Dreams poses the cultural question of the moment. South Asian pop - Bollywood movies, Indian music and dance, the whole vibrant masala of subcontinental culture - not only enthralls a billion Indians at home but also spans half the world, from Africa and the Middle East to Eastern Europe and the Indian diaspora in Britain and the U.S. Now Indi-pop is close to a critical mass in the U.S. The 2 million American Desis (mainly people of Indian and Pakistani heritage) have made it a burgeoning niche industry. But can it finally catch on in the mall theaters and dance clubs and living rooms of America? Will ya be with it, New York? New Orleans? Nebraska?

The cultural stew is simmering and ready to boil over. Just as Indian food graduated from big-city exotica to mainstream international cuisine, Indi-pop culture could become a new part of American pop culture. It certainly has the energy and glamour to curry favor with more than those who favor curry. It might even gain the hipness it has in Britain - where, as Meera Syal, the original librettist of Bombay Dreams, boldly said, "Brown is the new black."

This process, notes writer Hanif Kureishi, "is inevitable, because culture moves forward by taking new and original voices from the margin and moving them into the center. You saw it with Elvis. You saw it with Toni Morrison." If Bombay Dreams is a hit, you may see it with Indian composer A.R. Rahman. You can already see it in the critical and commercial success of novelists like Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy. Their success has led the way for a slew of South Asians, including Michelle de Kretser (from Sri Lanka),

Monica Ali (from Bangladesh) and Mohsin Hamid (from Pakistan).

One of the most fertile areas for East-West cross-pollinations is music. At S.O.B.'s in New York City, Rekha Malhotra, a.k.a. DJ Rekha, plays bhangra, a cool fusion of electronic dance and hip-hop beats with traditional Indian folk sounds. So popular is Rekha, 33, that her parties have become tourist attractions. "I can go anywhere in the country," she says, "and someone will go, 'Oh, I've been to Basement Bhangra.'" At Sonotheque in Chicago, Brian Keigher, 31, spins a popular fusion style known as "Asian underground"--fast, irresistibly danceable music studded with sitars and thumping tablas. Wade your way through the crush on the dance floor, and you will find Indian students, Pakistani locals from Devon Avenue, white clubgoers from the North Side and West Side blacks, always hungry for a new sound. At music clubs and universities, crowds can listen to Funkadesi, a band that mixes Indian music with reggae and funk.

From the dance floor, Indian music percolates to the recording studio. Hip-hopper Jay-Z and British-based Indian producer Panjabi MC served up Beware of the Boys, which featured Jay-Z rapping over a remixed version of a song that Panjabi had made a hit in Britain and India. Even Britney Spears is getting her Ganges on; she used British - South Asian producer Rishi Rich on her last album. And you know a culture is hip when it generates a superhero; that's Bombaby, a cult comic-book out of California.

Then there's Bollywood - Hollywood in Bombay and, by extension, all the country's dozen separate film industries - producing the Indian musicals that nearly everyone in America has heard of and practically no one in America has seen. Bollywood films provide the primary entertainment for half the globe; the top films earn millions more in U.S. theaters catering to Desi audiences. But Bollywood has not dented the mass, or even the class, movie public. The Oscar-nominated Lagaan took in 10 times as much in the Desi houses as it did when Sony Pictures Classics gave it a general release. Bollywood films are also hard to find in video stores, although they're easily available online and in Indian-American neighborhoods.

Why are the films having more trouble finding an audience than the music and books? America's current cultural insularity aside, the musicals are a hard sell. At three hours - plus, with family-loyalty plots out of the hoariest Hollywood weepies, and all that singing, a Bollywood epic is too old-fashioned for the art-house crowd and too sedate, too girlie, for young males.

All of which makes Bombay Dreams a big risk for Broadway: a $14 million musical with no stars, a score by a composer famous in most of the world (see box, below) but not in the U.S., and a story set in the Bollywood milieu unknown to Broadway's conservative audience. Producer Andrew Lloyd Webber hired writer Thomas Meehan (The Producers, Hairspray) to cut a lot of in-jokes, pump up the mother love - domesticate the Bollywood beast. Will the transplant work? The show has a $6 million advance; and at a preview last week, the audience, perhaps 25% South Asian, seemed to love the infectious songs and rain-drenched dancing. So salaam, Bombay.

But Bombay Dreams needs to fill only 14,000 seats a week. How do you get millions to see an Indian movie? For a true crossover, you need a movie that just happens to be Indian, that pours a familiar tale into an Indian milieu. That's Marigold, the story of an American starlet, stranded in India, who works in a Bombay movie to get airfare home and falls for her Indian leading man. Bollywood is not the genre here; it's just the backdrop for a fish-out-of-water plot. Says Steve Gilula of Fox Searchlight, which distributed the breakout hit Bend It Like Beckham: "American popular culture is good at absorbing influences from around the world. But we embrace the elements, not the complete form. We have borrowed from parts of the culture and integrated it into ours."

Beckham, Gurinder Chadha's inspirational comedy about a young woman (Parminder Nagra) who flouts her traditional Sikh family values to achieve soccer stardom, is the model for this transcultural form. The film, made for about $6 million, earned $32.5 million in North American theaters and an additional $44 million abroad. It has also given Chadha a chance to try making the first crossover Bollywood-style musical: Bride and Prejudice, with Jane Austen's Bennet family transformed into Anglo-Indians and Bollywood goddess Aishwarya Rai in the lead. "It's got the love story, it's got the songs, it's fun - like a Grease," rhapsodizes Rick Sands, COO of Miramax Films, which will distribute Bride in the U.S. "It's a Bollywood musical, but it's not going to be 3 1/2 hours long." Chadha, who says, "I don't make Bollywood films, I make British films," calls Bride "a Bollywood-inspired movie for a Western audience."

Beckham had another perk: it landed Nagra a continuing role on ER. (Finally! An Indian doctor on a U.S. hospital show.) But while contestants on The Bachelor go on a Bollywood-theme date this week, few South Asians are on the big or small screen in the U.S. (The Simpsons' Apu doesn't count.)

For the most part, Indians are more successful behind the camera than in front of it. M. Night Shyamalan made the megahits The Sixth Sense and Signs. Mira Nair, director of Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding, is making an Indian-infused take on Vanity Fair, with Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp. And Nair has a three-film slate for her company, International Bhenji Brigade, financed by an Indian businessman.

"I came from India to Harvard in 1976," Nair recalls, "and I was one of only three Indians in the undergraduate class. Five years ago, when I went back, Harvard had 1,500 South Asian students. Which means in five more years, America will be run by people who look like us. We bear no illusions about the elite anymore. We are the elite."

Now the question is whether the nation's wealthiest minority can have the same impact on show business as it has in business, medicine and technology. And whether 290 million other Americans will want to see them onscreen, dance to their music, go to their shows. About 500 years ago, Columbus sought India and found America. Now it's time for America's cultural consumers to discover India.

Reported by Simon Crittle, Lina Lofaro and Jyoti Thottam/New York, Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles and David Thigpen/Chicago
 


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