Bollywood magic

As a child growing up in the 1980s, when it can be argued that Bollywood was perhaps not at its finest, I wasn’t allowed to watch commercial cinema because my mother disapproved of the objectification of women in these films. The heroine sings, dances and runs around in the rain with a hero. Cut to a scene of bees humming and a field of flowers. Cut to a scene of an anguished and disapproving father of his daughter’s behaviour before marriage. Cue innuendo about loose morals.

Apart from the fact that it sounds just as confusing as it looked, there were several levels to my mother’s objection. She was a film buff at heart but, to her, the mindless singing and dancing and the way women were depicted in these films did not represent reality.

Most of all, she believed that Bollywood did not represent Indian cinema.

Indeed, she was a fan of the likes of Satyajit Ray, one of India’s most renowned film directors, who accepted an Oscar for lifetime achievement from a hospital bed, where he lay dying. She was also a champion of his films, which represented the overlooked genre of regional films in India.

Almost two decades later, I found myself sitting on a panel about Indian cinema during the Indian Film Festival in Abu Dhabi, defending that which I was brought up to abhor. Although Bollywood has progressed extensively through production values, budget, sound and other technical details, the scripts are still formulaic.

But Bollywood has, amid all this, managed to bring together the Indian diaspora across the world. I had watched it happen for more than 12 years, when I lived in Canada and was witness to the fan frenzy in the Gulf. In their thirst to reach out and cue into their culture, Indians everywhere looked to the silver screen.

Whether it was fans wearing ethnic clothes under winter jackets in Toronto during one of the coldest days in January awaiting the arrival of Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai for the world premiere of Guru, or the actor Govinda having to fend off hordes of fans at a shopping mall in Abu Dhabi while on an impromptu shopping trip during the Do Knot Disturb shoot, the passion to reach out and connect was the same.

Even during this festival, the largest audiences were for the two Bollywood films, although the slant of the festival was to introduce regional art house cinema to the Gulf.

The magic realism of Bollywood has been successfully channelled by major Bollywood production houses who have started to create niche films for their expat crowds – usually filled with stories about a protagonist’s (male or female) journey to a foreign land.

Of course, they also always portray lavish lifestyles and unbelievable opulence, but one is yet to figure out what exactly hooks a homesick Indian. Likely, the idea of an imagined homeland still intact in values.