Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti (eds),
Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4579-4
US$25.00 (pb)
340pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)
My local community arts centre now offers Bollywood Dhamarka every Thursday. The South Asian population of the suburb is minimal so who are the participants of this fun-filled hour? I suspect they are the “soccer mums”(there are lots of children in the neighbourhood) who want to stay fit – and trendy. I mention this development because it supports the thesis advanced by Gopal and Moorti; that Hindi song and dance now permeate all corners of Western culture, even a sleepy middle class suburb of Perth. The question is when did this cultural form tip from something that was considered ludicrous and faintly exotic to a mainstream activity enjoyed by people with no cultural affinity to India whatsoever? The contributors to Global Bollywood don’t exactly address this conundrum but they go a long way towards providing an answer.
Global Bollywood comprises twelve chapters organised into three sections, Home Terrains, Eccentric Orbits and Planetary Consciousness, plus a long introduction by the editors that provides a context. Essentially the editors argue that Bollywood filmi music has followed a specific trajectory from regional (Bombay) to national (All India) to global; that a particular music form associated with a derided cinematic form has become pervasive, its influence occurring in the most unexpected of places. The introduction sets out the historical framework for this argument clearly and comprehensively.
Bollywood film is not just about song and dance but, of all its elements, the music is the most attractive and pervasive. Filmi song is inescapable in the Indian environment, largely because of technology. Initially the 78 rpm record and gramophone played an important role in the dispersal of film music. Then it was the cassette, as Peter Manuel famously showed, and now it’s the MP3 and DVD. Collectively these technologies spread the music nationally and then internationally creating the vast Home Terrain the first section deals with. Anybody who has attended a cinema in India can understand why the music is so popular. As soon as a particularly popular song is cued into the soundtrack the audience begins to tap their feet and clap and then, when the song bursts on to the screen in a riot of colour, changing locations and rich orchestrations, they begin to sing along. It’s hard not to be caught up in this seemingly spontaneous celebration of life; it is equally just as easy to lose sight of the fact that filmi music performs multiple narrative functions and has an interesting history of reception by audiences.
Bollywood songs draw upon India’s rich sonic history, weaving traditional folk songs together with Western music genres. The songs can be pure romance, they can comment on society, they can advance the plot or they can act as a form national “glue” where they seek to bond Indians together, transcending the differences that constitute the social fabric. (This is particularly true of the war films that follow the struggles with Pakistan). In short, when thinking about Bollywood song you have to be particularly sensitive to the placement of the song in the film narrative and to the lyrics. If I have a criticism of Global Bollywood it is that the various authors have not paid sufficient attention to the lyrics of the songs they discuss. Moreover, there is a sense that authors collectively assume that filmi music has always been popular and widely accepted by all classes of Indian. The disapproval of popular music by Satyajit Ray is mentioned but not fully explored. Ray’s Their Films, Our Films (1992) is a key document in understanding the strong anti-popular strands of contemporary Indian culture. Ray was a cosmopolitan whose world-view was constructed within an elite Bengali cultural formation and, while he is revered in the west, there are still vast sections of the Indian film audience who have never heard of him let alone seen one of his films. While Global Bollywood, rightly, is about the pervasiveness of the music, it could at the same time spent a little more time delineating the opposition to it among India’s cultural elites.
The five articles dealing with the domestic setting cover a range of topics. Anna Morcom provides a very useful, and neat, schema that allows her to see Hindi film music as evolving through eras. Central to this evolution is technology and Morcom very clearly shows how the prevalence of satellite TV in India has shaped the final stage of the film music industry into an entertainment conglomerate. In short, the development of the Indian music industry mirrors closely the changing Indian economy, from autarky to market forces. Biswarup Sen augments Morcom’s work with an interesting argument about the relationship of film music to modernity that is very persuasive. Basically Sen sees Bollywood music and songs as hybridic and open to external sources, hence the music of A R Rahman, the brilliant orchestrator and composer who has had successes on the West End and Broadway as well as with films such as Bombay (India 1995), Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (India 2001) and two Oscars for Slumdog Millionaire (UK 2008).
For Sen the golden era of Bombay music was 1931 to 1955. In the 1960s a new paradigm was set by composers like Kisham Kumar and R. D. Burman that he takes as signifying a new modernity in India that eventually gave rise to “Indipop”, particularly in Britain, and Rahman. This music can be characterised as pluralistic, “open-ended, hybrid and multiple”; the key elements of the style and substance of contemporary Bollywood music. It is also important to remember that, for significant sections of the Indian elites, it is these elements that this book celebrates that are wrong. The songs represent a dilution of Indian culture. The music is tainted by western influences and the sheer volume of the music, in all senses, distracts from the pure Indian forms presented by the masters of Indian orchestration and instrumentation. This view is largely outdated but it did underpin the famous occasion in 1947 when B. K. Keskar, Minister for Information and Broadcasting in the Nehru Congress government banned, unsuccessfully, popular filmi music from All India Radio. There are still critics who lament the failure of this attempt to protect Indian culture from the incursions of western-inspired modernity.
The three other chapters in this first section explore similar issues but with greater specificity. Bhattacharjya and Mehta discuss the “the circulation of nationhood” through Bollywood film, Kumar looks at the impact of Bollywood on regional production, specifically Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad and Basu discusses the film Dil Se(India 1998) as representative of emerging conventions in Bollywood in the late 1990s where song and dance become “subversive power”. In addition to these themes, all touch recurring issues, some more explicitly than others. These issues are nation, selfhood, technology, the relationship of Bollywood to other markets, identity and the Indian diaspora, all of which are taken up and explored in the following sections of the book.
Section two comprises three papers that deal with the unexpected influence of Bollywood on a range of different cultures. David explores the influence of filmi music on dangdut music in Indonesia, Armbrust discusses the impact of Bollywood on Egyptian popular culture and Parciak analyses the surprising presence of Bollywood filmi inspired sequences in Israeli state promotional materials.
Anyone who has studied Indonesia at an Australian university will not be surprised at the parallels between Indonesia and India that David draws upon. The deep-rooted cultural influence of India in Southeast Asia is most obvious in Bali, which remains a Hindu culture in a sea of Islam but even within mainstream Indonesian culture the Hindu influence is significant, and is frequently acknowledged. Interestingly, when the Sukarno government (1949 – 1965) attempted to support the creation of an Indonesian film industry, quotas were placed on the import of Indian films, not Hollywood. These restrictions seem to have been lifted in the post-Suharto era and Indian films became very popular, especially with urban middle class youth. Dangdut, which is an erotic, hip shaking and energetic dance form, took hold around the same period, much to the chagrin of the cultural elites and Islamists, who saw it as a tainted form. David makes an impressive case for the influence of Bollywood on contemporary Indonesian youth culture and talks about it in terms of “parallel modernity”.
According to Armbrust “Indian” is a term of scorn applied to cultural production and yet Amitabh Bachchan is a very popular figure in popular culture. The contradiction inherent in the Bollywood film becomes magnified in cultural exchanges, such as that between India and Egypt. Indian films were widely available and popular between the 1930s and the 1950s and clearly influenced Egyptian film practice. Thereafter they became less popular, especially as Egypt became more conservative and the Islamist grip on popular culture became tighter. Israel, by contrast, has had little cultural interaction with India, which makes Parciak’s offering so interesting. In the 1970s, as Parciak points out, a few Indian songs “infiltrated” Israeli culture but, beyond that, one would be hard pressed to find anything more. Thus, for Israel, for Bollywood influenced sequences to suddenly appear in Israeli state promotions is perplexing. Parciak suggest it is representative of an increasingly cosmopolitan Israeli imaginary, which seems as good as any explanation.
These three forays into the external influence of Bollywood only touch the surface. Accounts of Bollywood film in West Africa, East Africa, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Greece, Mauritius, Trinidad and Guyana could also be written, indeed Australia or anywhere else where there has been a significant diasporic Indian presence. It is the diaspora that the third section, Planetary Consciousness, addresses.
Shresthova provides an account of the Berkeley Hindi Film Dance competition, an annual celebration of “Indianness” that has assumed significance among the young second and third generation Indian Americans. The highlight of this piece is the analysis of the “Dola re Dola” sequence from Devdas (India 2002), danced by Aishwarya Rai and Mahduri Dixit, which to my mind is one of the most brilliant pieces written on filmi dance. Despite this strength, the article does have one weakness. It assumes that the transition of film dance from the early transpositions of classic and folk dances through the raunchy 1970s to the present distinctive form has been smooth and uncontested. The fierce arguments of the traditionalists and the elites, who saw film dance as a travesty of the classical tradition and inescapably vulgar and inauthentic, are ignored. The recognition of film dance as an autonomous form is fairly recent. That quibble aside, Shresthova has written a highly commendable essay that should be read by all interested in Indian film.
Chan also provides an important addition to the literature with his timeline, where he charts the growing awareness, and availability, of Bollywood music in Britain and America. Chan sees the path taken by Bollywood into western popular culture is messy and shaped by prejudice and racism. Its popularity is possibly driven by an “excess of cultural difference”, something that Dudrath and Zumkhawala-Cook take up in their contributions, Dudrath in his account of Bollywood in the clubland and Zumkhawala-Cook in his tracing the rise of bhangra and its derivatives in the western pop world. Both of these articles discuss at length the importance of Bollywood in forming identity for the diasporic youth. Indeed permeating the articles in this collection is an assumption that one of the major functions of Bollywood filmi music has been to act as a cultural transmitter, as a means whereby Indian ethnicity could be generated among the diasporic youth in the face of the overwhelming western popular culture. By viewing Bollywood films the young could learn what it really means to be Indian, appreciate Indian values and hopefully accept the authority of their parents. This may be true of the present but in the not to distant past watching Bollywood was an illicit pleasure for many young people of Indian descent precisely because their parents despised these films as inauthentic, essentially un-Indian and vulgar. This valuable collection of essays describes the present situation where Bollywood is now accepted and even celebrated but it fails to establish the moment when the transition from rejection to acceptance occurred.
Finally, in a number of places the point is made that Bollywood is the preserve of all South Asians. That, in the diaspora, the music, songs and dance can bring together Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Nepalese and Sri Lankans. This may appear so in the clubs of London, Leeds and Manhattan but in Dhaka, for example, the films, the music and above all the songs are viewed with suspicion, as the cutting edge of Hindi imperialism. Global Bollywood assumes an homogenising process for Bollywood music wheras in South Asia regionalism remains a strong political and cultural factor. Bangladeshis, even with their adherence to Islam, prefer Bengali culture and revere Rabindranath Tagore in preference to the filmsongs of Bollywood.
Brian Shoesmith,
Edith Cowan University, Australia.
Created on: Sunday, 30 August 2009