Maximum City

by Suketu Mehta

  Hindi film directors detest the term Bollywood: They point out that the film industry in Bombay is older than the one in Hollywood, because American filmmaking started out on the East Coast before moving to California in the early twentieth century. The Lumiere Brothers brought their cinématographe to Bombay in 1896, only a few months after the wondrous invention debuted in Paris. A Maharashtrian named Bhatvadekar started making short films on wrestling matches and circus monkeys in Bombay in 1897. Through the movies, Indians have been living in Bombay all their lives, even those who have never actually been there. The wide sweep of Marine Drive, the beach at Juhu, the gateway to the West that is Andheri airport—all these are instantly recognizable in Kanpur and Kerala. And Bombay is mythic in a way that Los Angeles is not, because Hollywood has the budgets to create entire cities on its studio lots; the Indian film industry has to rely on existing streets, beaches, tall buildings.

  Most commercial Hindi films are musicals, with anywhere from five to fifteen song sequences. Western moviemakers abandoned musicals when they abandoned the movies themselves, in favor of television. Musicals demand sweep, scale; they do not fit on a pinched nineteen-inch screen. There was another unreasonable demand that reviewers and audiences imposed on Hollywood musicals: that the song fit the plot. Hindi movies face no such fascist guidelines. The suspension of disbelief in India is prompt and generous, beginning before the audience enters the theater itself. Disbelief is easy to suspend in a land where belief is so rampant and vigorous. And not just in India; audiences in the Middle East, Russia, and Central Asia are also pre-cynical. They still believe in motherhood, patriotism, and true love; Hollywood and the West have moved on. So the Russian families in my apartment building in Jackson Heights, New York, sang the same Raj Kapoor songs that we Indians did. “They are clean movies,” an Egyptian taxi driver in New York once explained to me. “You can see them with your family. You’re not embarrassed by them.”

  Toward the end of the twentieth century, Hindi films started getting segmented. A gulf opened up for the first time: What the computer engineer in San Jose likes is not what the farmer in Bilaspur wants. So filmmakers like Yash Chopra, Subhash Ghai, Mani Ratnam, and Karan Johar changed their movies to fit the overseas taste, where, in the long run, the money is. Tanuja paraphrases what such filmmakers believe: “We don’t want any poor people in our films, we only want beauty.”

  Before coming to India this time, I have watched an average of one Hindi film a year. The plots can’t hold me past the beginning. Increasingly, the overseas market demands plotless musicals: movies with a dozen elaborate song sequences and minimal conflict, such as Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, a film that is essentially an extended wedding video with fourteen songs. The movies replaced the ancient traditions of Hindu weddings in my extended family in England and America. The costumes, the sets, and many of the ceremonies are taken from the movies the community watches every night on the VCR. The bride and the bridesmaids now dance, not to the parting-lament songs of the villages but to sprightly Bollywood numbers.

  The diaspora wants to see an urban, affluent, glossy India, the India they imagine they grew up in and wish they could live in now. They want love stories with minimal conflict, even between rivals. Back home, the movies play on the newest insecurity of the children of the Indian middle class. Their parents won’t arrange a marriage for them, as parents have for generations. Now everybody is expected to find love by themselves, in college, at work. Women are expected to know how to flirt, to play games. The movies show them how.

  Overseas Indians want a film they can take their kids to on a Saturday afternoon, to show them an example of “Indian values.” The wedding-and-romance extravaganzas fit the bill. Violence doesn’t work for them. The lust for story is in Bihar, UP, places where villagers listen to the Ramlila, the staged version of the Ramayana, driven by the same hunger for narrative. So another class of filmmakers makes movies just for the interior of the country, filled with more violence, more earthy sex, and more goddesses, following the B-movie trail. The Hindi movies can unify Bihar and Delhi, even Bihar and Karachi, but not, in the end, Bihar and London.

  I grew up in a Bombay before television, and my dreams were bigger than the dreams of children growing up in the city today because they were played out on a vast screen, hundreds of times bigger. The movies gave me the raw material for my fantasy life, in which I rescued the girl I loved from villains and saved her from dishonor in the nick of time. My plots closely followed those of the movies, which in those days closely followed those of the epics. Growing up in the cities, we did not have the benefit of the temple priest reciting the Harikatha at dusk. We had to go to the movies for our story fix. Few stars lived on Nepean Sea Road; they were mostly those who had retired from the industry. I knew nobody connected to the film industry in my childhood. But then, I knew nobody connected to crime or prostitution or politics, either. The movies were safely unreal; the players distant enough not to interfere with what my imagination made of them.

  When I moved to America I would watch Hindi movies for nostalgia’s sake; it was the cheapest round-trip ticket home, four bucks at the Eagle Cinema in Jackson Heights. Then, in college and beyond, I stopped, finding them increasingly absurd and pointless. Coming back to Bombay this time, I realized I would have to undergo a crash course in Hindi films if I wanted to talk intelligently to the people who make them. It was not something I looked forward to.

  One day in the summer of 1998 I found myself in distant Arunachal Pradesh, which even Indians need a permit to enter. There, a woman at a tea shop on the highway told me about the sacred geography of the area. “And here, near the water tank in this village, the shooting for Koyla happened. Shahrukh Khan was here.” This is where the new myths come from. The old tribal gods have been replaced by the Bombay gods. In the neighboring country of Bhutan, in a mountain town that has only one street, I saw Tanuja’s name on a film poster. This most isolated country on earth knows the Bombay movie stars, their food habits, and who they’re romancing, as if they were their neighbors.

  What is a South Asian? Someone who watches Hindi movies. Someone whose being fills up with pleasure when he or she hears “Mere Sapnon ki rani” or “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.” Here is our national language; here is our common song.

  Vidhu Vinod Chopra: Mission Kashmir

  One afternoon soon after I move to Bombay I am to meet the writer Vikram Chandra for tea at the Sea Lounge, but when I call him on his mobile I discover that he is in Bandra. I am supposed to be in that suburb later that evening, so I suggest we meet somewhere in Bandra instead. He asks if I would like to come along to a story session he is participating in with his brother-in-law, a director named Vidhu Vinod Chopra.

  The house is a six-story bungalow in a small winding lane near the sea, in the Catholic part of Bandra, with its little villages. A private elevator takes me up to the fourth floor, to a cheerful well-appointed living room with a view of palms and the sea from floor-to-ceiling windows. It is luxurious, but not in the Bombay filmi sense. There are no wall-sized mirrors, no chandeliers. I shake hands with Vinod, a trim, intensely forceful man, who is pushing fifty but looks younger. His trademark in publicity photos is a baseball cap over thinning hair, but he is not wearing this at home. In collaboration with Vikram and a young Gujarati playwright named Abhijat Joshi, he is writing a film about the conflict in Kashmir. Amitabh Bacchan, hero and god of my adolescent dreams, has agreed to star in the project. Bacchan is to play Khan, a police officer, and Shahrukh Khan will play Altaaf, a militant. By the end, the militant will have seen the error of his ways and had a patriotic conversion. Vinod is a Punjabi Hindu who grew up in Srinagar; his ancestral house was burnt down by the militants. His last film was a love story, Kareeb, which flopped.

  The next day I phone Anu, Vinod’s wife (and Vikram and Tanuja’s sister), who ably covers Bollywood for India Today, to speak to her about the industry. I hear Vinod’s voice on the speakerphone instead. “We miss you, yaar! Why
don’t you come here for the story session?” And so I go again that day to the house in Bandra, sit with Vinod, Vikram, and Abhijat, and discuss plot, character, motivation. Over the next two years, without ever formally signing anything or even making a verbal commitment, I find myself becoming part of the scriptwriting team on Mission Kashmir. I am now doing what millions of Indians dream of doing: working on a Bollywood movie.

  A Hindi movie script is not so much written as talked out, and the director has to display enormous enthusiasm for his own ideas. Although Vinod comes truly alive when he’s speaking in Punjabi, most of our conversation about the script, including the dialogues, is in English. The industry is dominated by the middle and upper-middle classes, and a newcomer who doesn’t speak English well is at a distinct disadvantage and has to learn fast. In the Hindi films I’ve seen being made, most of the directing—the development of the story, the instructions to the actors, the barked commands to the crew—is done in English. A couple of years previously, I sat with the actors Shahrukh Khan and Madhuri Dixit over lunch as they talked about the American films and TV shows they loved—Sleepers, Jack, The X-Files—and complained about an interview they had just done for Doordarshan, the government TV channel, and being forced to speak in Hindi. They didn’t even know some of the words in Hindi, they said.

  Vinod’s study is full of English books, screenplays by foreign directors. Vinod says this will be his last Hindi film; if it does well, he wants to use the profits to make a Hollywood film. His entire career is at stake. After Kareeb, he is about a crore in debt. If the next film he produces doesn’t make money, his time in the movie business is essentially finished. “If this film fails, my house will be put up for sale.” The audience should come into the theater already educated in the narrative—the newspapers would be the silent partners of such a topical movie—but nothing should be allowed to provoke or challenge the state’s position on the conflict or, for that matter, that of the militants, who could bomb his house if displeased. Most of the political complexity of the Kashmir issue—the alienation that the majority of the people in Kashmir are feeling, the economic and administrative reasons for the long slide into rebellion—has to be rigorously eliminated during the scripting. Again and again Vinod says, “I don’t want this to be a controversial film. I don’t want death threats and I don’t want it to be banned. The Censor Board is made up of little shits. They will watch my film and get up and say, ‘Chopra saab, great film.’ Then half of them will vote not to give me the U certificate.” This would restrict the audience to those over eighteen, killing the film’s commercial prospects. For Indians, going to the movies is a family enterprise.

  Every afternoon, we sit around the study with the nice view, drink tea, and throw ideas at one another. I learn about the construction of a script. Every single scene has to have dramatic value, not merely convey information. Vinod says, “I shouldn’t have to be doing this. I would love nothing more than if the three of you went away somewhere and came back and gave me a bound script. I should be directing.” He has two fatal comments about an idea he doesn’t like: “too filmi” (offending his senses as an artist) and “the Hindi film audience won’t accept it” (causing him financial concern). Although they might be generated by the writers, the ideas that make it into the script are the ones Vinod can somehow make his own, as if they had come from him all along.

  Vikram writes a series of changes that make the script much more complex. Vinod has his doubts. “Let’s not forget that we’re making a Hindi movie. If the movie was to be in English it would be completely different.”

  Vikram is a fan of L.A. Confidential, and he uses the thriller’s structure to argue for his version of the script. “I’ve seen it seven times and I could see it seven more times.”

  “If L.A. Confidential was a Hindi movie, it wouldn’t run for a single day,” says Vinod. “It’s too brainy.”

  I point out to Vinod that the Indian audience is fully capable of understanding complexity; after all, it is schooled in the most complex narrative myths in the world, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Each character in the epics is multidimensional, the plots multilayered, and the message morally ambiguous, demanding a high degree of thought. There is nothing easy about the epics and they both end unhappily, with the death of the leads. But it is not my movie or Vikram’s or Abhijat’s; it is Vinod’s. And he is certainly possessed by it. At one point both he and Abhijat, while illustrating the kind of song they want in a scene, start singing Kishore Kumar’s “Aa chal ke tujhe.” They continue singing, their faces shining, till they’ve sung the entire song. It has nothing to do with the work at hand; it is a detour into pleasure. When Vinod demonstrates a violent scene, he becomes violent. He thrusts his face in yours, grabs your shirt, and screams out the lines: “Madharchod, I’ll fucking kill you!” I am energized by Vinod’s violence. I come home one night, and Sunita tells me someone has been ringing the doorbell and running away. “I’ll kill them, motherfuckers. I’ll fuck them,” I tell her, and then bend down to say my nightly prayers.

  What is fascinating to me is not so much the scriptwriting process as hearing Vinod explain what is politically acceptable and what’s not. Infinite care has to be taken, as the papers put it, to avoid “hurting the sentiments of a particular community.” Vinod goes back and forth and back again over what religion the female leads should profess, what might cause offense, what would play well with the audience. Finally, he splits the difference: Mrs. Khan, the cop’s wife, is Hindu, and Sufi, the militant’s girlfriend, is Muslim. The constraints we operate under are peculiar to the country. Vinod can’t have fade-to-black in his movies. He had five of them in one of his early films, after he came out of the Film Institute, and the audience started jeering and whistling. They thought the arc light was going. In the interiors the projectionists cut fade-outs out of the reels to keep the audience from wrecking the theater.

  One early draft ends with the heroine waiting for the hero to come down from a helicopter, dead or alive. When she sees him alive, she starts laughing. “You’re alive!” are the final words. But then Vinod runs through the end again and shakes his head. “Too late. The lights will come on and the doors open before they even get into the helicopter.” In theaters all across India, audiences have a built-in sense about when a movie is ending. This sense is aided by the doors opening and the dimmer lights coming on, five minutes before the actual ending. People with small children need to leave early, to get a taxi or rickshaw outside. So the last five minutes of any Hindi film are inevitably lost even if you stay in the theater, because most people in front of you are standing up. This is why most movies end with a song or a rapid reprise of the film’s highlights, like the life of a dying man flashing before his eyes. It stretches out the end. Thus, Mission Kashmir ends with a pointless dream sequence of playing cricket in the snow and a reprise of a song.

  The influence of the epics is strong. An incident in which Mrs. Khan asks the boy to lay down his arms for the sake of her husband is referred to, naturally and always, as the “Kunti scene,” after the mother in the Mahabharata. Like most Bollywood films, the film is a paean to motherhood, the one thing you can never be cynical about in a Hindi movie. Most Indian movies are about the joint family splitting up and coming back together again. For two and a half hours, they depict and overcome the dissolution of the country’s urban families into nuclear, single-parent, and divorced households. This film category is called the “social” movie. Housewives come to the matinee showing and weep copiously into little white cotton handkerchiefs embroidered with small colored flowers. Vinod himself is devoted, like a good Hindi movie son, to his mother. He cancels dinner plans with us once because his mother says you can’t eat food cooked during an eclipse.

  The narrative principles that propel the plot are alien to those of, say, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I spent two years. I entertain myself by imagining what would happen if the script were put up in workshop. My contribution to the scrip
t is minimal at best. I propose an idea that departs from the standard Hindi film formula. Vinod thinks about it. “We can’t do it because if we put it in the film the audience will burn down the theater. They will rip out the seats and burn down the theater.”

  I withdraw the suggestion.

  He is not exaggerating. Indians take their films as seriously as Italians take opera. When they feel their heroes are diverging radically from what they ought to be doing, the audience can get physical. As we are scripting, we read that in Ludhiana, after the first showing of the film Fiza, in which the hero also plays a terrorist, the audience was disappointed by the way their idol was portrayed. They expressed their disappointment by getting up and ransacking the theater. I feel an enormous responsibility now as a scriptwriter. We construct the film with one anxious eye on the rickshaw wallah in the lower stalls with the can of petrol.

  I ask Vinod his opinion of the art films made in India. It is not high. “I think the art film in India is like speaking Greek or Latin to an average Indian. This is our colonial hang-up. The art cinema is made for the West, except Ghatak, who made films in Bengali for Bengalis. Ray’s power came from the West, after Pather Panchali, not from Bengal.”

  Vinod can speak with authority about art films. As you learn in the course of a first meeting with him, he has been nominated for an Oscar. Fresh out of film school, he made a short film about homeless children in Bombay, An Encounter with Faces, which was nominated in the short non-fiction category for the Academy Awards. The two movies he made later were critically praised but barely broke even. After that, he started making flat-out commercial films: thrillers, romances, starting with Parinda, his first mainstream film. The underworld loved Parinda; it was the first time in Hindi movies they had been shown as they really are. I remembered Mohsin the hit man watching a scene from Parinda on the hotel room TV and telling me, “This is a correct scene.”