Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  It was this modernized Hinduism that Gujarat in 2002 provided a glimpse of, as Benetton-clad young Hindus carted off the loot of digital cameras and DVD players in their new Japanese cars. It is this Hinduism that Ayodhya presents both a miniature image and a sinister portent of, with its syncretic past now irrevocably falsified, its mosques destroyed, its minorities suppressed, an Ayodhya where well-placed local abbots helped by elected politicians wait for new lucrative connections to the global economy and prove, along with much else, the profound modernity of religious nationalism.

  BOLLYWOOD

  Indian Shining

  In Bombay in December 2003 I met Mahesh Bhatt, one of India’s most famous and successful filmmakers. He told me, “Bollywood is part of what our culture has become. We are lying to ourselves all the time.”

  It wasn’t what I expected to hear from Mahesh when I e-mailed him from London, explaining that I wanted to explore the world of Bombay films, or Bollywood, and requesting an interview. I had seen and liked some of his forty-odd films, the autobiographical ones about his illegitimate birth, his unhappy childhood with his Muslim mother, and his extramarital affair with a mentally ill actress that had made his reputation in the 1980s. Though he had stopped directing films five years back, he still wrote screenplays and supervised his daughter’s and brother’s production companies. He had published a book about his philosopher friend U.G. Krishnamurti. He made documentaries but was also increasingly known for his denunciations in the press and on television of Hindu nationalists, sexual puritans, and U.S. foreign policy.

  I saw him often on television, where he was a striking figure in his loose black shirt, which set off the white hair remaining on his shiny pate. I had once seen him shout during a debate with a Hindu nationalist leader, “I insist on my right to watch pornography.” “Mark my words,” he said on another occasion, “Hindu fundamentalism will destroy this nation.” More recently, he had turned down an invitation to a breakfast prayer meeting at the White House and described George W. Bush as the “worst villain in the world.”

  Drama was clearly important to Mahesh. “My God died young,” he told me, and then went on to describe how he angered by a God who kept apart his Muslim mother and Hindu Brahmin father, had one day immersed his small statue of Ganesha in the Arabian Sea off Bombay. When I first met him in Bombay, on the sets of Murder, a film he had written for his brother, he had just returned from his first visit to Pakistan. It had been, he said, a profound emotional experience. He had felt his buried Muslim self come alive in Pakistan. The visit had also stirred up memories of his long-suffering Muslim mother.

  Though only fifty-five years old, he remembered his life as a long journey with clear-cut stages In his twenties he had taken a lot of LSD and gone “shopping in the spiritual supermarket.” In his thirties, when he finally made it as a filmmaker he had come to know a “great inner emptiness,” feeling only sadness as his fax machine spun out box-office figures from across India. It was in Los Angeles, the “capital of materialism,” that he had decided to renounce the “pursuit of success.” He had rejected his onetime guru, Osho Rajneesh, by flushing his rosary beads down the toilet. He spoke with passion and conviction, and I didn’t feel I could ask him if the water pressure in his Bombay toilet had been strong enough to flush away the beads.

  His outspoken views had made him unpopular in Bollywood. “He is a self-publicist’” one film journalist told me. “Ask him why he helps his brother and daughter make B-grade films. Or why he rips off Hollywood plots for his scripts.”

  But Mahesh was frank about his own work. “I have made a lot of trashy films. Recycling old formulas, which is what Bollywood does most of the time. I guess one has to keep working.” He said he regarded filmmaking without illusions as a business like any other. “Don’t wait for the ideal offer; there is no such thing,” he told a young actor, a part time model with a gym-toned body who had come to seek his advice. “What will you do at home anyway, apart from bodybuilding?”

  After the actor left, he turned back to me. “These young people probably want to hear something else. They come to me they think I am in the business, doing a lot of work and will encourage them. But I can’t. I can’t make Bollywood bigger than it is.”

  He said that his own films even those that had made him rich and famous, had left him “deeply unfulfilled.” He added, “But I know that there is no fulfillment awaiting me anywhere. My friend U.G. Krishnamurti says that there is no other reality apart from the one you live with every day.”

  There seemed something too neat and packaged about Mahesh’s self-awareness. But while in Bombay I found myself traveling often to his office in the suburb of Juhu. I walked straight past the reception to his small room, where I usually found him lying on a long sofa, under a broad window with a view of shanties cowering under grimy buildings. Two mobile phones rested on his ample stomach. One of them rang more often than the other, but Mahesh picked up both at the sound and then, raising his neck from the sofa, squinted at their screens for what seemed a long time before deciding to answer.

  He was brusque on the phone, except to his wife and daughter. “Who is this?” he would often ask, and then start repeating, “Bye, bye, bye,” in rapid succession before ending the conversation. The door opened to admit Nirmal, his personal attendant with tea and coffee, or some of the young, trendy people working at the office. Occasionally there would be someone Mahesh had arranged to see: a Pakistani actress hoping to work in Bollywood; a Parsi musician and ballet dancer wishing to try her hand at films; a tall, arrogant-looking actor wearing a Superman T-shirt who, I learned, was the grandson of a notorious Bombay politician and had acted in Murder. Soni, Mahesh’s wife, came once; a petite, shy woman, she had acted in many art house films in the eighties and was now trying to direct a film.

  The door opened less often for the aspiring actors, directors, musicians, distributors, and publicists who waited at the reception, hoping to waylay Mahesh or his brother, Mukesh. They grew animated as Mahesh emerged from his room. A couple of them often trailed him, with pleading voices, all the way to the building’s compound and spoke rapidly and uninterruptedly until he got into his car.

  There were more young men at the gate to the walled compound. I saw them every day, chatting with the chowkidar (watchman) and the drivers of the cars parked inside, breaking off only to gaze expectantly inside cars going into the compound. Mohammed, the driver of my hired car, said that they were “aspirers” who had traveled to Bombay from various parts of India, hoping for a “break” in Bollywood. They were often found outside producers’ offices, waiting to catch the attention of the important or powerful people there.

  This was how most people tried to gain a foothold in what was a very crowded and self-contained world. India produces more films annually than any country—up to a thousand in several Indian languages, made in Bombay as well as Madras, Hyderabad, Trivandrum and Calcutta. Bombay, or Bollywood is the biggest and best known of the Indian film industries and has the biggest audience. Releasing up to two hundred films a year, it faces little competition from Hollywood, which has never garnered more than 6 percent of the market in India.

  In 1896, the Lumière brothers brought moving images to India, shortly after introducing them to Europe. The first Indian feature film was released in 1913 in Bombay. By the 1930s a film industry of sorts was in place in Bombay, with studios and independent production companies and stars and films that borrowed or adopted narrative styles as varied as village folk theater, Victorian fiction, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and Hollywood comedies and melodramas.

  The film industries in India now employ up to six million people, mostly on a contractual basis. There are twelve thousand cinema theaters in India with an average capacity of seven hundred seats, priced anywhere between thirty cents and three dollars. Since the finance for films comes from outside the legal economy, no one knows what the actual turnover of Bollywood or of any other film industry in India, is. Films are
often made for less than a million dollars, although some of Bollywood’s recent films have cost as much as thirty million dollars, much of the money spent on music composers, shooting stints in Europe and America, and the stars, who are now more powerful than anyone else in the business.

  Not surprisingly, most of the aspirers wanted to be stars, not technicians. Occasionally, one of them succeeded and gave fresh currency to the dream of success. Mallika, a young actress I met at Mahesh’s office, was an aspirer when two years ago she left her conservative family in a small town near Delhi in order to seek a career in Bollywood. Long queues of “gorgeous women,” she said, preceded her at every producer’s office she went to. After a few modeling assignments and casting couch offers, she had finally found some “decent work.” But then her father ostracized her after her first film in which she kissed the male lead seventeen times—a record of sorts in prudish Bollywood.

  Mallika thought that he was unlikely to respond well to her next film, Murder, in which she had played an adulterous wife.

  She said, “The film is very bold, although I hate the word. People abuse it so much in Bollywood, which is full of dishonest tight-asses. How long are they going to show sex by bringing two flowers together on the screen? India has the second-largest population in the world. Do they think it came about by bringing flowers together?”

  I met Mallika at the end of what had been a long day of shooting for her. But she came into Mahesh’s office looking very excited, wearing a small white T-shirt and low-slung blue jeans over very high heels. A preview, or what she called promo, of Murder had just begun to appear on many of India’s film-based television channels.

  I had seen an unedited version of this promo at Mahesh’s office earlier that afternoon, accompanied by a film “broker.” A rapid succession of scenes shot in India and Thailand showed Mallika being undressed by invisible hands, making love, and walking provocatively on a beach, the camera firmly focused on her hips. The broker had pronounced the film “very bold.” It was likely to get an Adults certificate from the censor board. But this did not much bother the distributors, who were convinced that Murder was going to be a “big hit.”

  Mallika said, “I have been getting lots of SMS about the promo. It is very hot. Lots of skin show. But you tell me. You must have seen lots of films in London; what’s so bold about showing a housewife feeling passionate and saying she wants to make love? What is a bored housewife to do when she is feeling horny?”

  Mallika told me that filmmakers from South India constantly approached her, wishing to cast her in soft porn films. They appalled and depressed her, as did most filmmakers in Bollywood. She really wanted to work abroad, in Europe or America, where “real” films were made. She spoke of the work of Pedro Almodóvar and Roberto Rodríguez.

  As she spoke, she kept brushing back thick, wavy hair from her fulllipped, oval face. On that Sunday evening, Mahesh’s office was deserted, with only a chowkidar waiting four floors down along with Mohammed, the driver of my hired car. Mallika and I sat on a sofa, separated by a few inches, the narrow space into which she suddenly dropped, while still speaking of Almodóvar two glossy photos.

  They were publicity stills from Murder and showed her pouting in a bikini and sarong. When Mallika asked me if I had seen the promo for Murder, I had lied, mostly because I couldn’t work up a response. But now the photos lay on the sofa, and as I looked at them, I felt Mallika’s eyes on my lowered face.

  She said, “I want you to look at them. I want you to tell me if men are going to drool over me or not in this film. I want you to give me an honest opinion.”

  English in India can be a deceptive medium. Even when the language is used well, as it is by an elite minority among the country’s two hundred million—strong middle class, the undertones can be confusing. Moods and gestures are hard to figure out. Irony and humor are often perceived but rarely intended.

  “You should meet Mallika,” Mahesh had said. “She is the next sex bomb of Bollywood. It would be an interesting story for you.” Mahesh had many such stories for me. But although grateful, I wasn’t always sure what he made of them or what his true relationship with Bollywood was.

  One evening, as we were leaving his office, Mahesh paused before entering his car and gestured to one of the young “aspirers” standing near the gate to the compound.

  The man Mahesh had signaled to was a tall, rather handsome man wearing a black bandanna. As he walked toward us, his broad shoulders stooped, until he stood half bowed in a silent namaste before Mahesh.

  Mahesh said, “This is Pritam. He has been coming to my office every day for eight years now, hoping to get a role in my films. I have often offered him money for the return fare to his town in Bengal, but he has always refused. Would you like to talk to him?”

  I felt Pritam lift his head slightly to look at me. I felt a small crowd at the gate watching us. I nodded.

  Mahesh told Pritam while slowly getting into his car, “OK. Be here at two-thirty tomorrow.”

  Driving back to my hotel, Mohammed was frantic with curiosity. He knew about Pritam, who was apparently famous in these parts. He had indeed been coming to the office for eight years but had not managed to speak to Mahesh sahib for the last three. And he had never gone up to his office. Was he now finally being given a “break”?

  I said I didn’t know. When I arrived at the office the next day—late around four—Pritam was standing with the drivers. As my car slid past the gate, his face appeared in the window. Half bent, he accompanied the car until it stopped and then held my door open. I saw his beseeching eyes and the sweat patches on his ironed blue shirt. I said I was sorry to be late. He didn’t seem to understand. I said that I was sure Mahesh would call for him soon.

  Upstairs, Mahesh was lying on his sofa, bubbling with news. He got up as I came through the door. He said he was traveling to Delhi the next day to see Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of both the Congress Party and the opposition in the Indian Parliament. Some Muslim theologians had arranged the meeting. They felt that Mahesh was best placed to convey their frustration with the Congress’s failure to fight the anti-Muslim program of the Hindu nationalist government.

  Mahesh said, “It is a sad reflection on our politics that they can’t find anyone to approach except Mahesh Bhatt.” He showed me a folder of photographs sent to him from the western Indian state of Gujarat. The pictures were of Muslims attacked, some by Hindu policemen, in recent months: close-ups of bloody wounds on skulls, backs, and legs or of shattered car windshields, television sets, and dressing table mirrors. Each photo had the date and time of the attack written on the back. The accompanying letter from a Muslim described how his daughter had been “beaten like a dog.”

  We talked about politics for a while. Mahesh’s mobile phones kept ringing. A journalist wanted Mahesh’s opinion on the Oscars. “To hell with the Oscars,” Mahesh said, “I am not interested in it. Bye, bye, bye.” Another journalist asked about the film Mahesh planned to make about the real-life con man caught conspiring with the police commissioner of Bombay. His daughter called. Her first film was due for release. Mahesh said that she was very nervous about it.

  Nirmal brought us fresh coffee in styrofoam cups. A publicist from Lucknow arrived. “An important man,” Mahesh explained. He was there to talk about Mahesh’s upcoming visit to North India.

  Around five or so Mahesh told Nirmal to summon Pritam.

  Mahesh said, “He told me once that he had committed a murder—his uncle I think. I think he wanted to impress me. I want to ask him about that.”

  When Pritam came through the door, his face glistening with sweat, Mahesh said, pointing to the bathroom behind him, “Go and wash your face.”

  Water dripped from his face and onto his shirt when he came out. Mahesh said, “Sit down.”

  He looked awkward on the small, high-backed chair, his long legs jutting out.

  Mahesh gestured toward me. “He is a writer, wanting to know about Bollywoo
d. What can you tell him?”

  This was how Mahesh introduced me to actors, producers, distributors and others in the film industry, often exhorting them to take me behind the “glossy surface” of Bollywood and reveal its “harder reality.”

  As it turned out, Pritam couldn’t tell me much about Bollywood, partly because he had spent eight years hoping that Mahesh would introduce him to it. He hadn’t gone to any other filmmaker convinced that Mahesh would give him his “break.”

  “Why do you think that?” Mahesh asked.

  Pritam smiled uncertainly and said in slow but precise English “Because I know that in my heart, sir. I know that you will take me to the summit of success. I have believed this for the last eight years, and I will believe this for the rest of my life.”