Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  I thought back to the offerings of the summer just past. Most of the movies advertised in the papers had been teen-pix sex-comedies—the bastard progeny of Porky’s—and horror movies spun off from Halloween, Halloween 11 and Halloween III, themselves the linear descendants of Psycho. There were the usual Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds pictures in which the stars played their usual larger-than-life selves. There were some third-generation musicals and shoot-by-number Bond flicks. But the biggest hits of the summer, as usual, were the Stallone action sequels (full of formula patriotism and common-man heroism) and the latest pastiches from the Spielberg factory. Nearly every big picture was simply a combination of big names (Redford and Streep, Streep and De Niro, De Niro and Duvall, Duvall and Pacino, Pacino and Sutherland, Hepburn and Nolte, Nolte and Murphy, Murphy and Aykroyd …), or a remake, or an out-and-out, in-and-out exploitation movie.

  As I was thinking this, there came a knock on the door, and a servant brought Sippy the latest issue of Variety. He turned quickly to the box-office listings, and we pored over them together. At the top was Commando, and beneath it a battalion of look-alike action movies, the sons of Rambo, the grandsons of Bronson, the Western cousins of Bruce Lee.

  “AH, THESE PEOPLE,” said my aunt as we drove past the beggars and slums of Bombay on the day after my arrival. “It makes you shed tears. Real tears.”

  ———

  THE INDIAN MOVIE industry is the biggest, the most popular, the closest to the heartland of any in the world. But the American is still regarded as the best. Hollywood, not Bombay, is the capital of glamour, the nerve center of show biz, the source of every trend. And so, quite sensibly, Bombay takes its cues from Hollywood; what goes down well in America goes up quickly on the screens of India. And what is today in India is tomorrow around the world.

  Sometimes, I learned, the Indians take no more than a label from America (Satyajit Ray shoots some of his movies in a complex called Tollywood, and a typical Hindi movie stars “Sunny” and “Jackie”). Sometimes they simply appropriate a kind of trend (while I was in Bombay, the cover story of the Illustrated Weekly, the grandfather of Indian magazines, its Saturday Evening Post or Life, discussed India’s new generation of “movie brats,” who “bring to their craft a remarkable understanding of celluloid and a professionalism rarely seen in the industry”). Sometimes, the Indians take over a great notion (creating the “curry Western,” for example, simply by dressing up Amitabh in a cowboy hat). Sometimes, they even lift specific tricks—a chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark here, a plot development from James Bond there, now a camera technique from One from the Heart, now a dance sequence from Saturday Night Fever. Often, though, it is easiest to pilfer the entire movie.

  The heist was managed easily enough, an editor of a movie mag explained. By hook or by crook, through contacts in the West or relatives in the Gulf, each of the Bombay movie moguls got hold of a video of the latest Western hit. Often, they were in possession of such tapes within two months of the movie’s U.S. release and before it had even been shown in Britain. No sooner had the last credit rolled across their screens than they furiously set about cranking out frame-by-frame remakes. Thus, for example, five separate replicas of Death Wish had assaulted the screens of India almost simultaneously.

  Other American tricks could be deployed in post-production. Telling me of a “lovely” article in The Hollywood Reporter about the use of teasers and trailers, Sippy said that he planned to follow the precedent of Rambo, which had been previewed to the public through teasers in 1,000 different cinemas. Promotion could likewise benefit from the wisdom of the West. One of the most popular ads in Bombay during my stay showed a hairy-chested he-man waving a gun while flames erupted behind him; on another billboard, an incredible hulk with scars on his chest and murder in his eyes straddled the world under the legend “He Is the Answer to Every Challenge.” These two like-minded movies were certainly well advertised, I thought, as I saw the same image staring down at me from hoarding after ad after hoarding. Only when I turned to an entertainment newspaper and there found three separate full-page ads showing bestial he-men bestriding the world, bloodied, bare-chested and brandishing a deadly weapon, did I realize that all the ubiquitous ads were not selling just two movies, but several: one image served all. If Rambo did not exist, the Indian moviemakers would have had to invent him.

  The process of turning an American movie into an Indian one was not very difficult, Sippy explained, but it did require a few changes. “The Americans like a straightforward story line,” he explained, “something uncomplicated. An Indian audience likes everything complicated, a twist and turn every three reels.” In addition, he continued, the Indian hero had to be domesticated, supplied with a father, a mother and a clutch of family complications. “Take Rambo, for example. Rambo must be given a sister who was raped. He must be made more human, more emotional. His plight must be individualized—not just an obscure vendetta against the system.” Also, of course, there had to be some extra flourishes. “The average U.S. movie is only ninety minutes long; the average Hindi picture lasts a hundred and forty minutes. So we must add singing, dancing, more details.” And since even kissing, not to mention nudity, had long been banned in India, explicitness and expletives had to be toned down, while suggestiveness had to be turned up. “Let’s say a Western movie shows a typical society woman. In the West, she will sleep with ten different guys, and everyone takes it. But in India, we will make her just a high-society lady. We want puritan characters.” Even so, the buxom puritan would doubtless be obliged to play much of the movie in miniskirts, wet saris and nighties. The Indian adaptation would, in effect, be faithful to its model, but bigger, broader, louder. In the Indian cinema, nothing succeeds like excess.

  Thus the skill in producing Hindi movies lay less, it seemed, in making excellent pictures than in deciding which ones could be profitably copied. The obscure Hemingway-sister movie Lipstick, for example, had been popular, because it featured the two favorite themes of Indian movies, rape and revenge; Bronson movies were always good, since they turned on vigilantism; more surprisingly, Erich Segal’s Man, Woman and Child (thanks, perhaps, to its domestic focus) had inspired two adaptations. Sippy himself was famous for his version of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Another perfect candidate for translation, he said, would be The Natural. “Just change baseball into cricket,” he explained, “and it’s a perfect Hindi movie. The dying father. The heroine and the vamp. The bolt of lightning from the heavens. The hero who somehow triumphs.” And the implausibility of the original was, if anything, more a help to the adapter than a handicap. “How can you believe that the guy’s in a stadium with a hundred thousand people and he can see one bloody woman standing up? But it’s stirring.”

  I mentioned Flashdance, which had just arrived in Bombay, as another seemingly ideal source for a remake. It had, after all, a poverty-stricken, dark-haired girl with a gift for suggestiveness and a soulful, slightly fat-faced hero. The heroine had a lonely fairy godmother and a friend, the friend had parents who rallied round her during times of stress. The movie also had a likable comic figure, a pair of cartoonish villains and a potential Wonder Dog; lots of neon glitz and a rush of titillating song-and-dance sequences that had nothing to do with anything. It even had an inspirational it-pays-to-dream story line and a moral. “No,” said Sippy, “it’s too subtle for the Indian audience. It’s too understated. At the end, for example, Alex leaves her audition and simply embraces her boyfriend; in India, the scene would have to be spelled out.”

  I received a more personal angle on the differences between the Eastern and Western approaches to filmmaking one day when I happened to run into Persis Khambatta, the only Indian actress to have recently made it to Hollywood. An unofficial repertory company of Indians is always on hand to stock the quiet art-house movies of James Ivory and Ismail Merchant, or to fill any PBS series about the subcontinent; Shashi Kapoor and Saeed Jaffrey, and more recently Victor Banerjee and Art Malik and Ro
shan Seth, are coming to seem almost as ubiquitous in “quality productions” as John Gielgud or Alan Bates. But these characters play to small audiences in small movies that show in small theaters. Khambatta, by contrast, had followed the golden brick road all the way to People magazine.

  When I met her, however (feeding info to a gossip rag; even bad publicity was better than no publicity at all), Khambatta did not seem to be on the ascendant. She was, in fact, returning to the Hindi cinema. When I asked her about this—it sounded a little like going from riches to rags—she made a virtue of necessity, perhaps, by donning the sackcloth demeanor of an ascetic anxious to draw closer to her roots. The offer to return to India could not, she said, have come at a more propitious moment; at the time she received the call, she explained, she was cooking Indian food and all her thoughts were of the homeland. The summons seemed like a good omen. “I have to touch the ground of India every year,” she continued. “I want to marry an Indian guy and come back here for good. I have to.” On and on she raced, unstoppable. “Yes, the others in the industry think I’m crazy. But I need India. I want to be here. This Hindi picture I’ve just finished shooting is a great masala movie. I get to cry. I get to laugh. I get to dance. I play a schoolgirl in braids and a seducer. In the West, acting is all a matter of control. Here it’s all emotion. Indians have a lot of guilt, lots of emotion. In the U.S., the more control, the more excellent; here I get to sob and sob and sob.” And when, in the course of shooting, she had had to grieve over her film mother’s coffin, said Persis, she simply looked across the set to where her real mother was standing, and the tears came freely.

  There were, perhaps, a few other reasons for this sudden rush of patriotism (even as I talked to Persis, another Prodigal Child was returning to India—Bhagwan Rajneesh, who was being deported from the United States amid charges of fraud and clouds of rumors about free-love orgies and drug running and now proclaimed that the motherland he had quit only three years earlier was the greatest country in the world). Before our conversation was over, Persis had reeled off for me, unsolicited, all the movies she had made in Hollywood. Only two of the titles were familiar—Nighthawks and Star Trek—and in the latter, the most famous of her roles, the Wilhelmina model and former Miss India had been forced to play the entire movie with a shaven head, an indignity to which I could hardly imagine Jessica Lange or Kathleen Turner submitting. Though she had certainly cornered the market on Indian females, Persis herself admitted that she was seldom offered more than one role a year. And that was always the part of an “exotic.”

  IF THE INDIAN industry was Hollywood made thirty times larger, however, it was also Hollywood turned back thirty years. For one thing, its production musicals still operated on a superstar system, still reveled in Busby Berkeley-style show stoppers and still favored grand religious themes with epic casts. For another, it had spawned a whole shadow industry of fanzines and gossip rags, Cine Blitz and Filmfare and Movie and 600 others that diligently bit the hand that fed them. Now, moreover, it was being challenged for the first time ever by television. “It’s just like Hollywood in the fifties,” said a Bombay producer, boasting that TV would simply inspire moviemakers to fight back with bigger and therefore better films. “It’s really like Hollywood in the fifties,” said a leading movie critic, pointing out that the early movies of the Indian cinema, full of Cowardian repartee and Shavian wit, had given way to musical spectaculars. “The scene is just like Hollywood in the fifties,” said the editor of Stardust, the biggest movie mag. “There are affairs! Love children! Abortions! Even bigamy!”

  The moviegoing public seemed equally old-fashioned—even when it came to foreign films. At the Regal cinema in central Bombay (“the Home of Great Motion Pictures”), the big hits of the past year had been Gone with the Wind and Ben-Hur. Around the corner, one of the few other English-language cinemas in town was showing The Sound of Music. And one day I turned to the Times of India to consult the movie page and there found a new release advertised as “one of the all-time great love stories.” Farther down, I discovered that the movie in question was the doggy Disney cartoon Lady and the Tramp.

  HOLLYWOOD AGAIN CAME to mind the day I visited Film City, a studio complex on the outskirts of Bombay. The skies were a brilliant blue above the scrub hills, and the dry ridges seemed a perfect vantage point for a posse to scan the horizon for stray Indians. Inside the run-down complex (“We Solicit Silence,” said the sign at the entrance), nine or ten movies were in production (some of them doubtless featuring exactly the same actors, in much the same roles). Taking a seat on a sunlit patch of grass, I spent the next couple of hours watching the filming of a complex, if formulaic, pas de deux that would grace a movie called Pyaasi Raat (Thirsty Night).

  A few men held up reflecting mirrors and a couple of assistants stood behind small cameras. Three bigwigs sat on director’s chairs. Twenty or so others stood around getting a free taste of saucy entertainment. The principals, I gathered, were a pretty young girl in red thigh-length boots and heavy makeup, wearing a short dark blue frock that left her midriff bare, and a rotund swain dressed from head to toe in spotless white, with a T-shirt that declared, with brute simplicity, “Break Dance.”

  The scene called for the girl to approach the man, shaking her hips and wriggling her breasts. She was to slink up behind him, curl her body around his, stroke his face and put her uptilted head first on his left shoulder, then on his right. He was to break away, sending her into a frenzy of frustration. The scene picked up again with him standing contemplative against a tree (the same tree, I thought, heart beating, that had served as a love nest in a thousand Hindi movies through the ages). She had to approach him again, wind her body around his and then, pinning him against the trunk, lift her head for a kiss. When he recoiled, she was to push him down to the ground, hover over him where he lay and then, as she leaned down to kiss him, lose her balance so that the energetic couple would tumble over and over in the grass. This complicated movement was set to some capering melody, and throughout the contortions, the actress had to lip-synch (with the emphasis on lips) a tune sung by Lata Mangeshkar, or someone exactly like her.

  The two went into action. “Come on, Kammy darling,” urged the behind-camera choreographer—a slinky, very dark lady in sunglasses and a negligent robe—as the onlooking crowd tensed with excitement, “Vikky love, get closer.” The two writhed together uncomfortably as the music bounced merrily along. Cut!

  Out slithered the choreographer to give Kammy a few lessons in wriggling and flouncing. “Shake your hips like this, lovey,” she began, and toss your hair like this and narrow your eyes this way, and open your lips that way. When you rub against him, touch him like this; when you fall on top of him, tumble like this.

  She danced back behind the camera, and Kammy practiced her moves. The onlookers stared on happily. “More sexy, love,” came the choreographer’s cry. “More sexy. Like this!”

  IT WAS NEVER difficult, of course, to mock the Hindi cinema, to find fault with everything from the coarseness of its moves to the poverty of its imagination. Fairy-tale plots, broad innuendos, unquestioned piety, heroes and villains, a weakness for spectacle and a shrewd determination to give the groundlings what they wanted—all, of course, were the essence of Chaucerian or Shakespearean art. But Hindi movies remained—critics forbid!—irredeemably vulgar. They were as fat and fleshy and cartoonish as the characters they celebrated. They played—no, pandered—to the lowest common denominator in mankind. Why on earth did they always have to be so loud, so bright, so broad?

  One answer, perhaps, was that they were reflections of the world around them. Movies were everywhere in India. But then everything was superabundant in India: signs, shrines, spices, smells, men, gods, beggars, cows, sobs, titters, marvels, horrors and more marvels. India itself seemed all perpetual motion and emotion, an overfull, overbright, overdone triptych by Hieronymus Bosch. Here was life, not on the grand, but on the epic scale, the Human Comedy, the Human Tragedy,
played out on streets filled with too many people, too many feelings, too many schemes. India itself was simply too much.

  The country’s recent history alone was something of a tumultuous spectacle, piled higher with incident and thicker with Tragedy, Comedy, Melodrama—proliferative plotting and nonstop action—than any movie on earth. In the few months before I arrived in India, its longtime, risen-and-fallen-and-rerisen Prime Minister had sent her army to storm a sacred golden shrine, and then had been killed by her own bodyguards. Her son, who had never before held office, became Prime Minister. Riots had swept through the capital; men were burned alive, whole settlements were put to the torch, trains rolled through the countryside piled high with bloody bodies. Five weeks later, a cloud of poison gas had escaped from a chemical plant, killing thousands as they slept, in the worst industrial accident in history. Three weeks after that, the world’s largest democracy had held a national election. A typhoon in neighboring Bangladesh had killed as many as 20,000 people and swept whole islands into the sea. An Air-India plane had suddenly, inexplicably, fallen from the heavens, and 329 people had been killed, in one of the worst airline disasters ever recorded. A peace agreement between the Hindus and Sikhs had been reached at last, following which the moderate leader of the Sikhs was promptly assassinated by his followers. Meanwhile, civil war continued in Sri Lanka, there was more unrest in Assam and each day brought news of another politician gunned down by turban terrorists.

  Yet this constant explosion of eventfulness was, if anything, even more unrelenting on the small scale. For the sights of India are, to a large extent, the streets themselves, and the streets are chaotic open-air stages presenting life in the raw and humanity in the round. Through the avenues of Bombay stream sadhus and shamans, bullock carts and cows, rickshaws, rusty Ambassadors, turbaned men and veiled women, three-legged dogs, two-toed beggars, buses and bicycles and rites and sights and more people, more soldiers, more cows. Bleeding into this pandemonium is the confusion of the temples—not, as a rule, havens of meditation and quiet, but the Indian compendium all over again, a bombardment of sights and sounds and smells, monkeys, flames, chants, offerings, holy men, pilgrims, wonder-workers, musicians, more rites, more sights, more people. The streets of India are swollen with an embarrassment of riches, a richness of embarrassments. And it is on the streets that millions live, make love, defecate, and die.