text.
Chapter 1
Setting the stage
Common wisdom has it that you can always skip the first twenty minutes of an Indian movie. Filmmakers know this, they don’t put anything important in that section; it is all filler designed to allow you to find your seat, buy popcorn, and greet your friends. Then the first song starts, heralding the real beginning of the film.
However, the best films use this time to set the stage for the rest of the picture. They avoid any important plot or character information, but they will show you a police officer traveling by train, horse, and finally on foot to a remote country house (Sholay); or a middle-aged man walking through London, homesick for the Punjab (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayange). And you will begin to understand what this story will be, and where it will be, and how it will be.
So read this Introduction, and the subsequent ones at the start of each chapter, with that in mind. You don’t have to read it, the rest will make perfect sense without it, but I hope it will help you to understand why you are reading what you are reading.
When I first found Indian film, more specifically Hindi Film, I was going to college at a school with a massive desi population. Literally all of my friends were of South Asian heritage. More than that, I was living in Chicago, a city large enough to support a major Indian immigrant community. Two busses and a train could take me to eight concentrated blocks of Indian groceries, handicrafts, and clothing. And, of course, movie stores. I had my pick of five stores where I could buy or rent any film I wanted, along with soundtracks, fan magazines, and star biographies. I had my pick of three large theaters in the city, which showed every major Indian release, in addition to the school organized viewings in the dorm common rooms. Indian film was everywhere and with everyone.
Graduation was a shock. I was still living in the same place; I could still watch movies in theaters and rent DVDs as much as I wanted, but I had lost my community. There was no one who shared my devotion. A bigger shock was when I started making friends who weren’t South Asian and realized that they knew nothing about these films. Or even worse, they knew nothing but thought they knew everything. I was confronted with the misconception that these films were laughable, niche items, full of song and color, but signifying nothing. People were very confident in this opinion! No matter what I told them or what I showed them, they continued to talk about forbidden romances and unbelievable scene changes as though that was all these films could contribute.
I finally gave up on finding a pre-existing community and started building my own community instead. I invited young and enthusiastic co-workers, graduate school classmates, and fellow church members over to my apartment. I showed them a film and while we were watching, I told them why I liked it, why it was important to me, and what effect it had had on the world. I discovered that the most important element in appreciating these films was an open mind and an open heart. My classmates in my film program had no patience for them. They were already intellectually committed to the Western film style, and could not conceive of an industry which had no concern with continuity or cohesive narrative. My fellow church members were also, generally, unable to appreciate them. They were good, caring, liberal and open-minded people. But their hearts were already entangled with the issues of America and Americans; they had no space to learn about the problems of South Asia and how they affect and are affected by Indian film. It was my co-workers who responded best. They were too young to be overwhelmed by the world’s problems; their only idea of film was that they knew what they liked — they were the ones who became my new community. Over long evenings spent in my tiny apartment, I converted them to the Indian film universe. It is that experience I am trying to recreate on the pages of this text.
So pretend you just walked up three flights of stairs to come into a studio apartment on the northside of Chicago. I greet you with a big bowl of homemade popcorn and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. I give you a tour of my big screen TV, my grandmother’s piano, my three DVD shelves, and my massive Shahrukh Khan poster with the incense under it. I invite you to try to find the five other Shahrukh pictures before you leave, not missing the one hiding behind the bathroom door. And then we sit down on the couch, and I ask you what you already know about India, and about film, and about Indian film. What kind of mood are you in today, what kind of movies do you usually like, what kind of movies do you want to watch? And once I have finished my interrogation, I put in the perfect film for where you are at this moment. As we watch, I tell you all the things that make these films wonderful, and I hope that you are listening to me and understanding me, because if you let them, these films can make your life so much richer.
In the Beginning …
In the mainstream Western press, in some sources in academia, and in advertising and promotion, the term Bollywood
has been accepted for the past few decades as the only way to describe the Hindi film industry of India. Bollywood
brings up immediate mental images of dozens of dancers in colorful saris, swelling music, and over the top dialogue. Mention it to someone, and you will get a smile of recognition, followed by an imitation in an insulting accent, a quick gesture of Bhangra dance, or a joke about dancers appearing from nowhere. Bollywood
sounds like a theme park or a carnival ride, a fake place filled with fake people that exists purely for outsiders to visit and explore. However, use the term Indian film
or, even more accurately, Hindi Film,
¹ and you know it is a film industry like any other, as worthy of respect as any other cultural product, and an industry that has a connection to a real place with real people speaking a real language, not just an existence in Bollywood.
²
From the beginning, Indian film has been dismissed as an imitation of Western products, like coolies merely following the path broken for them by a Great White Hunter. In fact, Indian film has always been forced to struggle, invent, and discover new paths and detours around the obstacles thrown in its way. To overcome these obstacles and create their art, the filmmakers had to be inspired by something approaching religious fervor, a fervor which the films have communicated to the audience, making them the most devoted fan
