Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  The greatest figure in the pantheon, however, was Amitabh. His divinity had been recognized even at birth, hagiographers noted, when he was given the name of the mythical King of the Land of the Pure. In 1982, when he suffered a near-fatal accident while performing a stunt, the whole country was stricken: one man walked three hundred miles backwards to persuade the gods to spare his hero, while thousands of people gathered outside his hospital to pray for his recovery and the Prime Minister herself canceled a foreign trip to rush to his bedside. When at last the fallen star arose from his deathbed, many took it to be a kind of resurrection. “God Is Great—Amitabh Lives!” said the signs on the streets; they could as easily have said “Amitabh Is Great—God Lives!”

  To his new part, as to all the others, the resurrected star rose like a hero. Every morning, he held mass prayers at home before thousands of prostrate devotees, and the word went around that he could heal the afflicted. When the Hindi cinema released its first 3-D movie, it was Amitabh who came on screen beforehand to still the worries of startled moviegoers and give the project his blessing. Even a respected newspaper asserted, in a peculiarly Indian allusion, somewhat askew but nobly Shakespearean, that “Amitabh continues to stride the scene like a modern Colossus.” Why, even his name, in Sanskrit, meant “Infinite Life”! Much of this reflected nothing more, perhaps, than the power of images on an unsophisticated audience ready to take their gods where they found them (the towering hero was often shot from below in order to increase his stature). But it also seemed to reveal a deeper, more widespread hunger for heroes. I could think of no American star who could command the same kind of worship from old and young, rich and poor, housewife and illiterate villager.

  Except, perhaps, for President Reagan. With that fact in mind, it was hardly surprising that Amitabh had exploited his status as a god—and extended it—by standing for office. At least one other star, Sunil Dutt, had joined him in the ranks of the Congress (I) party. Their main antagonist, the head of the largest opposition party, was N. T. Rama Rao, who had come to prominence by playing the Indian Superman, Lord Rama, and many other deities in 292 mythological movies. Rao’s predecessor as the country’s leading oppositionist was M. G. Ramachandran; he had risen to the top politically through acting in 100 films in none of which he died.

  In America, however, such former actors as President Reagan or Clint Eastwood effected a smooth transition to politics simply by transferring the tricks and tactics of self-promotion—a confident manner, a soothing voice, an ease before the cameras, a sympathy with the crowds—from one arena to the other, while at the same time taking pains to downplay the less than dignified roles for which they had originally won their fame. In India, by contrast, the process, like everything else, was much simpler and much larger. Amitabh had to do nothing but extend his godlike demeanor from the screen to life, and then from life to politics; he occupied the same role in fact and in fiction. In India, after all, both movies and politics were effectively responding to the same basic need: for a figure broad enough and huge enough—mythic enough, really—to transcend all divisions of region and religion, to tower above all earthly problems like a god.

  Early one morning, as I drove through Delhi, I caught my breath to see a giant figure looming over the city in a central open lawn; it was, I learned, an eighty-foot-high statue of Indira Gandhi, erected to commemorate her death. The only comparable figure was Amitabh, standing ten feet high on the posters for Mard. As actors turned into gods, and gods into politicians, it was only logical that politicians were turning into gods, and then into actors. Indian politics, as Edmund Taylor noted forty years ago, “are the dream life of the masses.”

  Small wonder, then, that the hottest topic of intellectual discussion while I was in India was Rajiv Gandhi’s manipulation of video dreams. His role as a celluloid hero had begun, by all accounts, at his mother’s funeral. For four straight days on national television, the young man had enacted the scene beloved of Hindi movies (and featured in Mard): that of the bereaved son—handsome, soft-spoken, a little ill-starred—standing at his mother’s bier, dutifully performing the appropriate rites amidst the threat of more violence and the odor of revenge. Twelve times the new leader had circled her funeral pyre and each of those times, so the pundits said, he had picked up another 10 million votes. Then, out of her ashes, he had arisen like a phoenix to lead the country to peace. Ever since, he had kept himself constantly in the eye of the camera, so constantly, in fact, that local wags—and they are never in short supply in India—had rechristened prime time “Prime Minister time.” Shrewdly, however, Gandhi tended to present himself, not as a leader delivering stuffy speeches, but simply as another regular guy, playing with his children, talking to workers, mingling with the people as easily as Henry V on the eve of Agincourt. An ordinary man, in short, in an extraordinary position—like Amitabh, say, or a god.

  Thus the biggest and most popular family drama in India continued to be played out by the First Family itself. For thirty-five of its thirty-eight independent years, India had been ruled by a single clan, which passed down the prime ministry from generation to generation as if it were a scepter. And through all the years, the House of Nehru had kept the public enthralled with a domestic soap opera quite as eventful as anything in the movies—first shy Indira’s emergence to take over from her heartthrob father, and then the rise of her shady younger son, and then his sudden death and his wife’s battles with her mother-in-law, and then Indira’s violent death and the sudden emergence of her quiet elder son, who found himself opposed by … his sister-in-law. Foreigners might balk at this mom-and-pop version of democracy, but many Indians seemed thrilled by it, and reassured that the entire country was run, like so many of its businesses, as just another family business, attended by all the usual familial tensions. In its creation of a democratic monarchy, the ruling household made the entire country seem like one big happy, and unhappy, family. Indira Gandhi, in fact, was known to many of her 600 million constituents as Amma (Mother), a mother to the motherland (in India, as Salman Rushdie has shown, even metaphors go forth and multiply, while myths and parallels proliferate fantastically). And already, many of the new Prime Minister’s supporters were beginning to call him by the affectionate pet name of Raju.

  HER HYPOCHONDRIACAL FRIEND, said my aunt, had recently told her that for the first time in her life she was feeling well. Three months later she died.

  OF ALL THE unlikely opposites that the Hindi cinema promiscuously brought together, however, the most surprising was its blend of sensuality and sententiousness. Certainly, there could be little doubt that the most arresting feature of the industry was its unremitting sauciness; thanks to the longtime prohibition of kissing, filmmakers had devised endlessly inventive ways of showing nothing at all, and everything: lovers who never quite made physical contact spent two hours on screen lustily dancing around couches, toppling into rivers and, of course, slithering around trees. Thus the movies, which bodied forth all the lip-smacking, hip-swinging salaciousness that was generally kept under wraps in India, had become a virtual catalogue of the varieties of irreligious experience. In one film I saw, hero and heroine animatedly sucked popsicles inches from one another’s face. When next we saw them, they were bouncing up and down on a well-oiled carousel. As soon as the lovely nymph lay down, the movie cut to a shot of a panting man jacking up his car; and whenever the maiden walked around the room (her dress, of course, was filmy), she let her hand fondle an erotic sculpture or two. By Indian standards, however, all this was mild. “Should I give you tenderly / Something like coconut water?” asks one throbbing hero. To that his heaving lady answers, “When he satisfies his hunger with a fruit / Honey flows where he has entered the fruit.”

  All this, I thought, was fair enough in popular art, and universal enough too: not for nothing did ads for comedies, horror movies and teen pix in the United States invariably come appointed with girls in bikinis (and not for nothing did the people who scorned those “ex
ploitative” shows hurry to the art cinemas to see the latest from Bertolucci, Pasolini or Oshima).

  But the engaging idiosyncrasy of Hindi movies was that every one of them seasoned its gaudy provision of sleaze with earnest homilies. “Tamil films are all sex and violence,” said a Tamil uncle of mine. “But still they manage to get everything in: crime doesn’t pay; love conquers all; all’s well that ends well.” Hindi movies were no different. For 140 minutes, the screen was a racy riot of the polymorphous perverse in which every dress was clingingly wet and every symbol phallic. Then, in its final scene, the movie would suddenly provide its final thrust: a moral. The aforementioned popsicle sucker, his amours complete, cried, “We’ve got a duty to our motherland!” and the same exercise in ingenious naughtiness was full of such clinchers as “A diamond is a diamond—even in mud.”

  It came to seem, therefore, as if every single movie had been co-produced by the local equivalents of Jerry Falwell and Bob Guccione. When I consulted the ads in the papers, I found one that offered “an Explosive War of Principles,” another promising “Woman’s Thrilling Assault Against Man’s Lust.” One picture solemnly pledged to show how “Truth saves from the trouble and untruth ruins,” while another vowed to address the question “Are Women Considered to Be Cheap?”—with the question mark drawn in the shape of two breasts. “Sensible, sexciting teenagers” was the quintessentially Indian offering of that quintessentially Indian film The Blue Lagoon, Malayalam-style. The same disarming division was carefully observed off screen. There had been a near riot, I heard, when ardent moviegoers learned that a favorite actress had not, as her director claimed, been a prostitute in real life. Yet Sridevi, one of the hottest actresses of 1984, thanks to her teases and wiggles and full exposures, claimed in all seriousness to be a virgin.

  In some contexts, this moralized debauchery might sound hypocritical, reminiscent of the Saturday-night libertines and Sunday-morning churchgoers of a Tammy Wynette song. But hypocrisy implies a real discrepancy between public and private selves, and in India, where all opposites are flung together into the same helter-skelter confusion and dichotomies are, if not united, at least entertained simultaneously, the term seemed hardly to apply. Besides, the movies were only providing a bigger, bolder, more colorful and immediate version of the very mix of gin and tonic that pervaded the society as a whole. In one railway bookstore, I saw The Life of Mahatma Gandhi next to Jackie Collins’s Hollywood Wives; the most popular English novels, I found, were still those of Ayn Rand, mistress of self-important philosophizing, and those of Harold Robbins, master of wish-fulfillment smut. Along the streets of the cities, those billboards that did not lay bare the fleshly torsos of the movie gods and goddesses were likely to offer maxims: “Lane Driving Is Sane Driving,” “Small Family Is Happy Family,” “Don’t Play with Fire / The Consequences Are Dire” and—my favorite—“Let Us Solicit the Serenity of Silence (Blow Horn If You Must).”

  So before one vilified the blend of worldly and otherworldly attractions to be found in Hindi movies, one had to recall that this was the home of the voluptuously carnal goddesses of Khajuraho and the phallic lingam of Siva, the birthplace of the Kama Sutra and of all those other Tantric arts in which sexual union was seen as a means of spiritual discipline. In a country full of symbols, the sensual had often, no doubt, been the most immediate and apprehensible model of the spiritual. Masud, as ever, was succinct. “Every movie producer is trying to seduce the public,” he said. “Some by sex, some by religion.” The best tactic of all, by the sound of it, was to make religion sexy.

  ———

  “THERE IS NO hand, there is no foot,” said an old lady, itemizing her ailments. “There is no leg. So what is there? What to do now? What to do?”

  THE THIRD AND final great titillation in Hindi movies, as strong in its way as either sex or religion, was simple, filthy richness. Whenever the camera was not focusing on its stars’ physical assets, it was usually lingering, with no less licentiousness, on their liquid assets; at one point or another, the actors always moved in a fairy-tale world of fancy cars and white-columned mansions and laser discos.

  In part, this was just a visible manifestation of the basic assumption of all movies. “The people want illusions,” explained Sippy. “They want palatial lifestyles. There’s no way that the average man’s going to see a cabaret in his life, so he wants to see it in the movies. And how else is a villager ever going to see a disco?” If Hindi movies were tattooed as promiscuously with brand names as a Judith Krantz novel, it was for much the same reason. The lure of entering behind the closed doors of the wealthy is everywhere the same: one wishes both to marvel at the gowns in their closets and to smirk at the skeletons clattering by their side. In India, moreover, this double purpose seemed quite consistent with the country’s mix of sensualism and moralism, its voyeurism made righteous: the movies deified the rich, and then went on to show that they were no different from you and me. Democratic monarchy, you might call it.

  Yet in India, this lavish display of consumables had a particular poignancy, because luxury goods were almost invariably foreign goods. The portly heroes drove Mercedes-Benzes. They flashed Nikons at the camera. They decanted bottles of Johnnie Walker and showed off copies of Time on their coffee tables. And the poignancy was further redoubled by the fact that the government imported no goods whatsoever, and assessed an enormous import duty on all foreign goods that were privately imported; thus, foreign substances had the lure not only of unattainable luxuries but also of forbidden fruit.

  The lust for foreign goods—“crazy for phoren,” as the local phrase had it—was therefore intense. “You can say that above wine, women and song,” a Bombay critic had told me, “the great dream of the Indian intellectual is to go abroad. He hungers for it. Even I feel more at home in New York or Paris than in Bombay or Delhi.” For those at an even greater distance from the West, the desire was, if anything, even greater. I saw this most touchingly in Arvind, a twenty-four-year-old hotel worker whom I encountered at a camel fair in the deserts of Rajasthan.

  The day on which we met had begun in a typically Indian fashion. I had got up at 4:30 a.m. (in a $1-a-night dorm that took in new sleepers at irregular intervals throughout the night) and hurried to the Jaipur bus station to get a bus to Pushkar. No tickets were available, said the man at the kiosk, until five minutes before the bus left. I waited for an hour and a half, then asked for a ticket. How, asked the man in the kiosk, could he sell me a ticket only five minutes before the bus was leaving? After much ritual gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair, I was finally allowed on the bus. There, I was cheerfully informed that it did not go to Pushkar at all, but stopped only at Ajmer, eight miles away. When we arrived at Ajmer, therefore, I should get off and look for another bus to Pushkar. When we arrived in Ajmer, I got off and was told no bus to Pushkar existed; I would have to take an auto-rickshaw. I walked out of the bus station and enlisted the aid of two of the less persistent of the local rickshaw drivers. How much to Pushkar? $10. I’d give them $5. Fine, they said, but they couldn’t take me anyway. I would have to take a taxi. And where could I find a taxi? At the train station. And where was that? On the other side of town. Could they take me there? Of course, they said, quoting an exorbitant price. I haggled them down to something absurd, and off we went.

  As we passed at a leisurely pace through Ajmer, my drivers decided to try to supplement their business. They made a bid for my jeans. They promised to sell me a girl. They offered to give me a girl in exchange for my jeans. Finally—and not a moment too soon—we arrived at the train station. No taxis were in sight. The taximan was not here, my chauffeurs happily pointed out. But for some more money, they would help me find him. How much more? They mentioned an absurd price, I agreed on something ridiculous, and off we went. At long last we arrived at the taximan. How much to Pushkar? $10. I would pay $5. The man shook his head. I would have to take a bus. No problem, said the boys with the rickshaw: for some more money, they would take
me back to the bus station. They suggested a ridiculous price, I beat them down to something enormous, and off we went. En route, they offered to buy my watch and tried to sell me a girl.

  At last we returned to our original starting point, the bus station. Of course there was a bus to Pushkar, I was told. Over there. I stood in line for twenty-five minutes and then was told that it was the wrong line. I stood in another line for thirty minutes, and then observed that it was not moving. I decided to take a taxi. Walking out of the bus station, determined to learn from experience, I hailed a horse cart and asked him to take me to the taximan. Okay, he said. One dollar. Fifty cents, I said. Okay, he said, and drove off without me. At that point, I heard some excited cries behind me and saw the two boys with whom I had already done business. How much to the taximan? They quoted an enormous price, and I beat them down to something outrageous. Off we went.

  My clothes, and the ladies of Rajasthan, still unsold, I was taken at last to the same taxi driver as before. $7, he said. $5, I said, provided that we go right away and I don’t have to share. Fine, he said, ushering me into the back seat. His custom assured, he then closed the door and strolled off to enjoy some tea. At last he returned and off we went.

  Perhaps five minutes later, the driver stopped again and got out. We were, I noticed, again at the bus station—the home from home that I was now visiting for the third time in the morning. After a considerable delay, my driver returned, trailing a family of unhappy-looking passengers. This quintet was thrown on top of me, and off we went.

  Sometime before we arrived at Pushkar, the taxi driver stopped. Cars were allowed no farther, he said: not to worry, though, the tourist tent was only a short walk away. I got out and began walking. Twenty minutes later, I stopped one of the many cars careening down the forbidden road. How far to the tourist tent? A mile and a half. Could he take me there? No: the distance was too short. Still, he said, I could take a shortcut by way of that distant temple over there. I walked and walked to the temple, passing through narrow streets made virtually impassable by 20,000 pilgrims. How far to the tourist tent? I asked a passerby. Two miles. Which way? Away from the temple. I walked a little farther, and stopped another man for directions. The tourist tent was very close, he said, pointing to a street obscured by crowds. I labored along, guided by some more people, and walked down an endless driveway. At last, the tourist tent! Oh no, I was told when I walked in, this was the tourist bungalow. The tourist tent was on the other side of town. How far? Four, maybe five kilometers.