Video Night in Kathmandu

by Pico Iyer

  I spent the next hour moving in ever-widening circles, under a noonday desert sun, all my worldly possessions in my hands, directed this way and that by villagers who spoke no English, villagers who knew the word for “right” but not for “left,” villagers who happily steered me to the tourist bungalow, villagers who shook their heads in abject pity. Pushkar was more crowded than any place I had ever seen. I stopped another taxi. I would pay well, very well indeed, I said, to be taken to the tourist tent. He was not allowed to go, said the driver, but he would be happy to look for another car. He found it. I would pay well, very well, exceptionally well, I told this second fellow, to be taken to the tourist tent. It was too close, he said. And besides, look at the crowds! It was at that point that a young man appeared, saw my plight and, courteously identifying himself as a part-time employee of the tourist tent, offered to show me the way.

  That evening, by way of repayment, Arvind invited himself into my tent for a chat. It was one of those strange exchanges, peculiar to the Third World, during which I sensed that it was not just my company that appealed to my newfound friend. For it seemed to me that each of us was a symbol to the other, both to be cherished and to be put to use (a double irony here, since I, completely Indian, served Arvind as an image of the West). And all evening long, an unspoken request seemed to hover in the air. The happiest aspect of traveling in the developing world is that it allows cross-cultural exchanges in which each party can give something to the other. Yet the fact that both parties have something to gain from the giving is surely the saddest thing about traveling in the developing world. On both sides, it pays to be kind.

  Arvind told me that he was twenty-five years old and worked in a hotel not far away. As I could imagine, he went on with pride, his job was wonderful, for it afforded him the greatest luxury in all the world: the chance to talk to foreigners. Once, he said, a Swedish man had fallen ill in his hotel and Arvind had taken him to a doctor and put him up at his home and nursed him back to health. When the man returned to Stockholm, he had sent him $1,000; when Arvind’s first son had been born, he had sent another $250.

  As I could imagine, Arvind continued, he was the envy of even the wealthy. The sons of rich men offered him as much money as they could spare, or anything else he wanted, if only he would do them one small favor: let them shake the hand of a European girl, or even sit by her side for a moment. Arvind looked kindly on such ambitions; he had actually slept with a French girl, and with another tourist from Spain.

  Yet still he had never been abroad. And abroad, even the next country in Asia, had acquired for him an ineffable luster. His great dream, he said, was to be hired by a VCR importer, one of those black-money makers who paid men to go to Singapore and Bangkok to bring back video machines they could sell for vast profit. If only he could meet the right man, said Arvind, he might be able to spend at least a night in Bangkok.

  Twice he had come close to making it abroad. His grandfather, a professor of linguistics, had promised to take him to a conference in Europe. But then the old man died. A friend of Arvind’s had even got as far as the University of California. But no sooner had he arrived than his father died. Two hours later, his mother died. That was the end of his California studies.

  Arvind’s plight was hardly unique, of course; I had met scores of Arvinds in Indonesia and Nepal and China and, most heartrending of all, in every closed country from Burma to Cuba to Nicaragua. The inconsistencies of this longing in a country full of nationalism had been explored by Satyajit Ray in The Home and the World in which the hero of the Swadeshi movement, aiming to eliminate all foreign goods, smokes only foreign cigarettes and travels only first-class. That too, however, was hardly unique: the anti-Western dictators of African countries (followers of that great non-Westerner Karl Marx) proverbially drove Mercedeses, while President Sukarno, to name just one, had turned his back on the West in a fit of nationalism and decided to make Jakarta a great modern metropolis—by stocking it with Western hotels and conveniences. In a movie like Mard, the cry of patriotism was a great rabble-rouser; but the great audience-pleaser was still the parade of foreign goods. Evil was foreign, and so too was the good life. That was a contradiction common to just about every developing country.

  What did seem unique in the Indian regard of things Western, though, was its divided loyalties toward different kinds of West. For much of the world, India remained the greatest symbol of the British Empire. Yet modern India, especially under Rajiv, was hell-bent on following the way of the future, generally considered to be the American way. More even than Hong Kong, therefore, India, great amalgam of a hundred races and religions, was torn not just between tradition and modernity, but, more specifically, between the British and the American Empires. To paraphrase one of the country’s most-quoted heroes, Matthew Arnold, India was caught between two worlds, one dying, the other struggling to be born.

  This strange sense of divided loyalty informed every aspect of middle-class city life. My college-age cousins spent much of their time trying to get hold of records by Bob Dylan, Don McLean and Simon and Garfunkel; yet when it came to reading, they clearly felt most comfortable with P. G. Wodehouse and C. P. Snow. The central monuments of downtown Bombay were still unofficially known by their upstanding imperial names (Crawford Market, Flora Fountain, Victoria Terminus), though increasingly they were being besieged by Waikiki fast-food joints and Pac-Man restaurants. The streets of Bombay were, in fact, a chaos of mixed origins and competing influences—over here Caesars Palace and the Hollywood shop and a sign for mango juice in a “freaked-out box,” over there Lady Diana Tailors, the Jolly Stores (serving “lovely pop-ice”), Textoriums galore and, most dignified of all, the Nota Bene “Cleaners of Distinction.” Some of the pop-cultural artifacts, of course, were British—the Beatles and Wimpy Bars were popular too. But even they were British borrowings, after a fashion, from American models. America might represent riches, glitz and success, but Britain still had the monopoly on sophistication and class. People spoke of getting a few bucks to buy some fags.

  I spent only a week in India in 1984, but more than once in that time, I was asked whether it was true that Gary Coleman was dead (Different Strokes and Here’s Lucy were the only foreign shows on Indian television at the time). That same week, however, a lady in Ahmedabad shyly approached me for information on a different kind of West. “Do they say still in England Old chap’ and ‘old man’?” she asked. The question was not for her, she quickly added, but for a fifteen-year-old boy of her acquaintance who was determined to get his British manners exactly right.

  In time, of course, this mix was beginning to change, and India seemed, in its slow and elephantine fashion, to be sloughing off some of its musty Edwardian past and taking on more of the bright new futurism of America. Thirty years ago, a British accent might be the main selling point in a negotiated marriage; now the best draw of all was an American green card. In my parents’ day, every bright student went to Oxbridge; now, as my cousin prepared for his GRE exam, he told me how one classmate had gone to Kansas, and one to Columbia, one to UCLA and one to Indiana. Rajiv himself, the country’s great Everyman, had been educated at Doon School, India’s grandest version of the English public school, and had followed his mother and his grandfather to Oxbridge; now, however, he stood as an apostle of the new, computerized, yuppie way of knowledge—the American way. One fairly typical Indian patriarch I heard about memorized a classical English poem every day (he had all the wartime speches of Churchill down by heart), and made his family read The Times of London over breakfast, retire after dinner to read biographies of Asquith and reassemble at nine o’clock each night to listen to the news on BBC World Service (a treat he had missed, he boasted, only four times in his sixty-one years). When his son finally got to Cambridge, however, he had been so shocked at the absence of cummerbunds, Apostles and Conan Doyle streetlamps that he had suffered a nervous breakdown.

  The sad story served, among other things, to highlight what w
as perhaps the strangest of all the features of India’s relations with abroad: that many of India’s dreams of the outside world, whether British or American or even Soviet, were curiously dated. Neither Don McLean nor P. G. Wodehouse, after all, was notably popular on the streets of London or New York. But in this land of dusty stairwells, Humphrey Bogart-style black telephones and Ambassador cars unchanged for twenty years, they fit right in. And even as “jolly good”s still echoed around the gentlemen’s clubs, the movie mags trafficked in a fast talk full of “groovy gals and guys.” The respectable daily newspapers still followed the sober and august example of The Times of London, hardly recognizing that their model had itself become zappily popularized, and to that extent Americanized; the glossy new magazines took their models from America, but here too they seemed somewhat behind the times, India Today appropriating the red border and structure of Time but investing it with some old-fashioned fast-and-Luce rhetoric, while newborn Debonair billed itself as the Indian Playboy but still adhered to a fifties sensibility of black-and-white modesty. “No, I’m sorry, Miss Brasenose,” said the caption under the cartoon in The Statesman, one of India’s most respected papers, “but ‘coitus interruptus’ was not the first Roman governor of Ireland.” The slightly jejune nature of the joke, its Latin atmosphere, its provision of its heroine with the name of an Oxford college—all this gave even a semi-daring crack the somewhat musty and cobwebbed air of a Victorian schoolroom.

  That skewed and displaced quality seemed peculiar to India. For where Thailand, the Philippines, Nepal and Bali all excelled, in their different ways, at re-creating every rage from the West, India simply naturalized them. The most obvious example of this was the half-erudite, half-errant English still spoken in many educated quarters of India. But more recent examples were everywhere. India had not imported McDonald’s, as most countries had done, but had created instead its own fast-food emporia, Pizza King and Big Bite, which offered hamburgers without the beef. India did not have Coca-Cola (it had been outlawed in 1978 after the company refused to disclose its formula), but instead offered Campa-Cola, which took its name, its logo and its concept from Coke, though sadly not its taste. Just so, the commercial movies borrowed their props, their symbols, even their plots from abroad, yet finally produced something that was strangely old-fashioned and thoroughly Indian.

  Even many of the foreigners who came to India came, after a while, to seem Indian. This process had begun when some of the eccentric Brits of the Raj, as described by Paul Scott and Gerald Hanley, had decided to go native. It had continued with those flocks of Western believers who had come over to India, donned orange robes and taken to the ascetic life. Even today, many of the bohemian vagabonds who drifted around the country in huge numbers seemed, in their beaded and sandaled and ragged forms, to have taken on something of the poverty and shapelessness of the country around them. In Thailand, or Indonesia, or Japan, I suspected, such transformations were almost unknown.

  Thus, just about every influence here was ultimately assimilated into the heterogeneous Indian rush. In Bombay, the U.S.S.R. Books and Periodicals store was just down the street from the Cambridge Lending Library, and around the corner from the Yankee Doodle American Dream Pizza Parlor; on TV, two of the most popular shows were a version of Dynasty and an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, both turned into their Hindi equivalents. China, I thought, preferred to keep visitors out; many Southeast Asian countries invited foreigners in, with an ambiguous wink and a smile; Japan smilingly greeted visitors at the door and appeared to admit them without ever really doing so. India, by contrast, took in all the hordes and simply swept them up in the undifferentiated tide.

  AN ORDINARY MIDDLE-CLASS child had been kidnapped, 1 was told. One year after his disappearance, his parents chanced to see him in a marketplace, dressed in rags and working as a cripple for some latter-day Fagin. By then, however, it was much too dangerous for them to try to get him back.

  JUST BEFORE I left the country, I made one last attempt to clarify my understanding of India’s relation to the West, as reflected in the movies, by returning for a final chat with Masud. A typical Indian gentleman of distinction, he invited me to join him one leisurely Sunday morning for breakfast at the Cricket Club of India, a club in the great British tradition. We ordered some toast and a pot of tea and talked beside a sunlit pitch on which white-flanneled cricketers went through their motions with lazy grace. All the hubbub of Bombay was screened out in the quiet morning; we could almost, I thought, have been in Oxford, in a tranquillity broken only by the diffident thump of bat meeting ball, an occasional polite scatter of applause. A few girls in polka-dot dresses and high heels rambled around the pitch in the warm sea breeze. On the horizon were the steeples and towers of the red-brick Gothic buildings left by the British. And through the mild sunny morning we chatted about Gremlins, disco, the effects of PR.

  Cinematically speaking, said Masud, the Western influence on India fell into three rough categories. There was the Hollywood Raj of Attenborough and Forster. There was the familiar disco culture of America (“Downright soulless and vulgar,” he said, since it had been transplanted with no understanding of its context or meaning. “At least Flashdance has a certain lightness, a humor, a poetry. But go to Studio 29 here, an imitation of your Studio 54. It’s pathetic”). Most salutary of all, in Masud’s opinion, was the third category: the effect of the German and French thinkers on dissent, from whom many young Indians had learned their rebelliousness.

  The first two traditions, both popular and in their way romantic (the British a relatively straightforward romance of elegance and class, the American a matter of instant gratification and cheap thrills), had obviously colored the commercial cinema. But the effect of the third was most apparent in the so-called parallel cinema. These were the art movies of the educated elite, pioneered by Ray and continued by a whole generation of young directors trained at the Film and Television Institute of Pune, South Asia’s only film school. Although Ray had tried to fashion a rigorous cinema at once sophisticated and close to the heart, creating in his Apu Trilogy a true voice for rural India, many of his successors were determined intellectuals who concentrated exclusively on their nation’s social problems. They had no time for escapism, no patience for clownish song-and-dance routines; they wanted to bring droughts to the screen, and caste tensions, poverty and subjugation. Often they wanted simply to shake their fist at the society around them. “You read the newspapers and you feel totally helpless,” Govind Nihalani had told the Illustrated Weekly, “so you try to select something by which you can express your anger.”

  The art movies were the equal of anything put out in the West—in part, perhaps, because they had taken so much from the West. Ray, after all, had spent time when young around Jean Renoir, while Kumar Shahani had assisted Bresson. The angry young men acknowledged, even boasted, that they took their cues from Eisenstein, Godard and Fassbinder (though not, curiously, from the one director whose careening intensities and cheerful grotesqueries seemed tailor-made for the Indian scene—Fellini). They quoted Kafka and referred to Jancsó and Genet. Even the name they gave to their movement—the New Wave cinema—was taken from the Continent.

  Masud, I imagined, must be a champion of these thoughtful alternatives to the commercial formulae, if only for the relief they afforded after a day of gaudy pantomimes. I was wrong. He had once been an admirer of the New Wave, he explained to me. But all too often, its products proved to be pessimistic, self-indulgent, derivative. “These films are very intense,” he continued. “But they do not take up the human thing. The new cinema has fallen into its own kind of orthodoxy. They all make films like Godard or Bresson, but they do not convey the reality, the humanity, the warmth of India. They do not bring out the feel of what is happening in India. All these directors are artists. But they are removed from the people. At least in the commercial cinema, there is a connection between the director and the audience; in the New Wave, there is no connection, no sense of
the day-to-day experience of the average filmgoer. These films are forms of abstraction. In the West, it is possible to abstract oneself from one’s environment, to concoct a film-within-a-film. But in India, you cannot do that.”

  Yes, said Masud, people like himself might appreciate the nuances and flourishes of the New Wave. But they were part of a tiny minority. “The commercial filmmaker exploits the people,” he said. “But he also entertains them. He knows what they want, and he gives it to them. But with the parallel-cinema makers, it is all imagination: their films are good only for critics and a few people in the cities.” In their way, he added, the serious directors were no more guided by integrity and originality than the commercial directors they mocked. “These directors are living off their earnings from the West. They train themselves in Western technology and then make films to please Western audiences.”

  He closed with a powerful example. “Three days ago,” he said, “there was a New Wave film on TV about the poverty in Bihar. My two servants, who are from Bihar, walked out after thirty minutes. Why should they want to see that? They have already seen it—in real life. They came to Bombay to leave all that behind!”