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