Imagining Global India: Bollywood's Transnational Appeal
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This article was downloaded by: [Hamilton College], [Patricia ONeill] On: 08 April 2013, At: 09:31 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20 Imagining global India: Bollywood's transnational appeal Patricia O'Neill a a English and Creative Writing, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA Version of record first published: 21 Mar 2013. To cite this article: Patricia O'Neill (2013): Imagining global India: Bollywood's transnational appeal, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 27:2, 254-266 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2013.766309 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2013 Vol. 27, No. 2, 254–266, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2013.766309 Imagining global India: Bollywood’s transnational appeal Patricia O’Neill* English and Creative Writing, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, USA Indian commercial cinema, often referred to as Bollywood, may be considered more than a national cinema because its transnational appeal encompasses a large and diverse audience. Bollywood’s affective aesthetics and narratives also differ significantly from the presumed ‘universal’ techniques and narratives of Hollywood. In recent years, films like ‘Dil Se’, ‘Kal Ho Naa Ho’ and ‘Guru’ export an image of Indianness that negotiates tensions between homeland and diaspora and underscores India’s cultural authority for its imagined community of viewers. By challenging the conventions of Hollywood, creating a sense of solidarity among diverse ethnic Indians and showing Indians as exemplary and superior to nationals from other developing nations, Bollywood demonstrates Appadurai’s point that there is something ‘critical and new in global cultural processes’. By imagining a global India, Bollywood appeals to the imaginations of its transnational audiences and challenges us to rethink our approaches to cinema and the world that global media is constantly reinventing. Why are we a Third World country that begs from the West? We can be a First World country. (Guru, Mani Ratnam, 2007) In 2008 Slumdog Millionaire, a relatively low budget film about a Mumbai youth who is a contestant on India’s ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’, surprised the Anglo- American film industry with its box office success and sweeping of the U.S. Academy Awards. The British film was a collaboration between Indian and British writers and directors, based on a novel by Vikas Swarup and directed principally by Danny Boyle. The film’s blending of action and melodrama, its use of on-location shots of Mumbai and a fast-paced narrative that moves back and forth across time to reach its happy ending also seemed to borrow from both Indian and Western commercial cinema. Despite being heralded as a ‘crossover’ film, however, its depiction of the impoverished and fragile lives of children in the slums of Mumbai offended a number of viewers in India. Controversy ensued over the film’s graphic and violent representations not only of the slums but also of the criminal underworld, which seemed to cast a negative reflection on the nation as a Downloaded by [Hamilton College], [Patricia ONeill] at 09:31 08 April 2013 whole. At the time, India had been enjoying quite good press internationally for its economic boom and partnership with the USA in the war on terrorism. Film scholar Brian Larkin compared the Indian response to Slumdog to what followed the international acclaim for Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (1955). He notes that Ray’s adoption of Western aesthetics made his movie acceptable to Indian and European intellectuals but caused concern for nationalists who wanted India to be seen as a modern nation. With the increased access and speed of film images as they circulate through film festivals and awards events, and as they assume popularity in the public sphere, films’ representational value intensifies (Larkin 2009). In the case of Slumdog, the film’s realism *Email: [email protected] q 2013 Taylor & Francis Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 255 underscored the problems of underdevelopment in India in ways that Western viewers might expect. For fans of Indian cinema, however, Slumdog did not crossover, for it lacked both the affective aesthetics of Bollywood cinema (Jones 2010) and the formal complexity and ethos of Satyajit Ray’s films and those of other independent Indian filmmakers. Instead, Slumdog’s narrative reinforces an unacknowledged stereotype of India as a former colony, still developing nation, struggling for survival and not yet ready to assume First World status. Underscoring this Eurocentric view of India, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, ‘The film’s universal appeal will present the real India to millions of moviegoers for the first time.’1 Such claims for the film’s representation of the ‘real’ India predictably sparked protests from India’s most beloved actor Amitabh Bachchan (for whom the child character Jamal swims through shit to obtain his autograph): ‘If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as [a] Third World, dirty underbelly, developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations. It’s just that the Slumdog Millionaire idea authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a Westerner gets creative global recognition’ (quoted in Stephanie Nolan’s review in Canada’s The Globe and Mail,3 February 2009). As Bachchan and postcolonial scholars understand, Western aesthetics and industrial capital here conspire to reinforce the view that only places like India have to deal with crime, poverty and corruption. But even if we see this nationalistic response as overly defensive, for surely viewers of Hollywood films see lots of the ‘murky underbelly’ of a developed nation, the point of reconsidering this controversy is to understand the relationship between what Ebert claims was the ‘universal’ appeal of a certain type of cinema and its presumed representation of the ‘real India’. If we understand that cinema itself is constantly negotiating the local and global in its stories and style of presentation, then we can begin to expand our understanding of the effects of cinema in the processes of cultural globalization. In this article, I want to explore the role of Indian commercial cinema, what is called ‘Bollywood’, as it circulates a quite different image of India to a vast multinational audience. In my conclusion, I reconsider the different cultural values and agendas that seem to underlie Slumdog’s and Bollywood’s representations of India in the twenty-first century. While Bollywood has become a serious field of study for film scholars in recent years, it has been treated more often than not as a national cinema which is of importance only to the peoples of the subcontinent and their diasporic communities around the world. Given the millions if not billions of people who are thus potentially engaged and affected by Bollywood films, especially now that satellite TV and other means of accessing Downloaded by [Hamilton College], [Patricia ONeill] at 09:31 08 April 2013 Bollywood productions are available, it seems important to reconsider Bollywood as a global medium in which modes of address are exerting at least as much ideological and cultural influence as Hollywood’s. In particular, it seems important that film scholars not limit their discussion of Bollywood to that of a national cinema, either in the local sense of where its films are produced or in the sense of an ethnic or Third World cinema that works as an oppositional cinema to transnational media conglomerates. Instead, Bollywood, as something between a national and a transnational cinema, sheds light on a now international imaginary as it reflects and potentially shapes attitudes, values and beliefs of its viewers. In other words, Bollywood’s narratives and structures of feeling not only challenge the ‘realism’ of Hollywood representations of India, but also extend the cultural authority and political significance of the nation by appealing (this time in the sense of making an appeal) affectively and ideologically to its transnational audiences. 256 P. O’Neill My interpretation of Bollywood narratives and film style seeks to understand the role of cinema in the creation of a public culture, as Dwyer and Patel distinguish it from popular culture (2002). For these critics, popular culture (with its affinity to mass culture) seeks to locate what is specifically Indian in folk/oral traditions and takes a more or less ethnographic approach to understand questions of religious belief, family and kinship relations and aesthetic practices. In contrast, the idea of ‘public culture’ understands that films create meaning in the now global context of political, economic and social institutions. We can think of this as a social theory of film, which analyses a film’s narrative and style to reveal the ideological connections between cultural forms and political realities.