Reimagining India: Unlocking the Potential of Asia’s Next Superpower (36 page)
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Authors: McKinsey,Company Inc.
In the mid-1980s, the government of Karnataka began producing an excellent annual state of the environment report, assembled by the top-ranking biologist Cecil Saldanha and with contributions from leading economists, ecologists, energy scientists, and urban planners. These essays sought to direct the government’s policies toward more sustainable channels. Such an effort is inconceivable now, and not just in Karnataka.
A wise and caring political class would have deepened the precocious, farseeing efforts of our environmental scientists. Instead, rational, fact-based scientific research is now treated with contempt by the political class. India’s leading journal of opinion,
Economic & Political Weekly
, notes that the Union Environment Ministry has “buckled completely” to corporate and industrial interests. The situation in the states is even worse.
India today is an environmental basket case, marked by polluted skies, dead rivers, falling water tables, ever-increasing amounts of untreated wastes, disappearing forests. Meanwhile, tribal and peasant communities continue to be pushed off their lands through destructive and carelessly conceived projects.
A new Chipko movement is waiting to be born.
1
.
Court News
7, issue 2 (April–June 2012),
http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/courtnews/2012_issue_2.pdf
.
2
. J. Mark Ramseyer and Eric B. Rasmusen,
Comparative Litigation Rates,
Discussion Paper No. 681, John M. Olin Center for Law, Economics, and Business, Harvard Law School, November 20, 2010.
3
. The Supreme Court, High Courts, and district and subordinate courts of India together had a working strength of 14,797 judges in 2012, according to data published by the Supreme Court.
Court News
7, issue 2 (April–June 2012). This figure presumably does not include judges who served on tribunals during that time. Then again, the backlog data published by the Supreme Court also presumably does not include cases pending before tribunals.
4
. Abhinav Chandrachud, “The Informal Constitution: Unwritten Criteria in Selecting Judges for the Supreme Court of India,” JSM thesis, Stanford Law School, May 2012.
culture & soft power
Bollywood: Inside the Dream Machine
The Paradise of the Middle Class
Jerry Pinto
Jerry Pinto is a novelist, poet, and journalist whose recent works include
Em and the big Hoom
and
Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb.
For centuries, India treated performers with something close to contempt. Actors, singers, and musicians might be revered, even worshipped, but you didn’t marry them, you didn’t let your sons associate with them, and you certainly didn’t let your daughters perform in public. The line between performer and audience was drawn in blood.
Which is why Bollywood was all wrong from the beginning. The Indian film industry as we know it now was brought into existence in the early years of the twentieth century by a Brahmin, a member of the priestly class, who ventured to Germany in 1909 to learn more about motion picture technology. For a Hindu in those days, crossing the seas that surrounded India meant a loss of all the buttresses of Hindu society—caste, kinship, friends, family, and food.
Dhundiraj Govind Phalke didn’t seem to care. We know that Phalke, the man now hailed as the father of Indian cinema, was inspired by a film on Jesus; he wondered (perhaps a hangover from being a temple child) whether the new medium could be used to tell stories from Indian mythology. But what drew the young boy from the coast of Maharashtra to cinema is not clear. In that very different age, no one, least of all Maharashtra’s Brahmins, saw cinema as an art form.
Perhaps Phalke was driven by the idea of using film to stir up opposition
to the British, who were harvesting souls and opium in India. Perhaps he was just fascinated by the technology; he loved getting his hands dirty, another no-no for elites of the time. Or maybe he was a storyteller who recognized the new medium’s potential.
Whatever his urges, Phalke (or Dadasaheb, as he came to be known) was uninhibited by the culture of his time. He went abroad to learn how to film. He dirtied his priestly hands with not only technology but also money. So low was acting in the hierarchy of professions in India that when he sought female talent for his films, even the sex workers turned him down; to play the women’s parts, Dadasaheb had to train a group of boys.
Phalke’s first film,
Raja Harischandra
, recounted the story of a king from Ramayana legend who sacrificed his kingdom for honor. Shot and edited in Bombay and first shown to the public in May 1913 at that city’s Coronation Cinema, the forty-minute reel is considered the first movie produced in India. It was an immediate box office smash.
So began what we know as Bollywood—but with an important difference. Today Bollywood means cinema in Hindi. The films Phalke made were silent and so could have any of the twenty-plus languages to which what the British called their Indian territories was heir. To change the language of the film, all one had to do was swap in new intertitles.
The advent of talkies changed all that. But there was no reason Hindi movies should have originated from Bombay. The city by the sea was home to three languages: Marathi, Gujarati, and English. As far back as the 1850s, signs for the city’s monumental Victoria Terminus were created only in English and Gujarati. Those were the languages of commerce, and the men who spoke them were the ones who rode on trains.
But Bombay has always had a knack for keeping one eye on the West and the other on India’s hinterland. One can imagine the Gujarati-speaking financiers, seeking a new industry to parlay profits earned in textiles and shipping, peering over a map of India, marking out a vast swath of land from the northern state of Kashmir through to the heartland of the Central Provinces. It would have been easier to make films in
Gujarati or Marathi, but either language would have limited the market to a single state. Shooting films in Hindi, on the other hand, opened a huge market sure to bring in the punters.
But an art form aspiring to be Pan-Indian would have to appeal to a daunting variety of people and cultures. It would need a fight for the young men, a romantic story for the women, a devotional song for the elderly. Films made for the entire Hindi-speaking market would have to be patriarchal, right wing, jingoistic, and patronizing in their attitudes to anything non-Indian and nonmajoritarian. The Bollywood formula all India has come to know and love—the three-hour, six-song-and-dance-routine extravaganzas that have dominated the Indian imagination since the 1950s—was crafted to please the great unwashed.
Producers saw no need to conceal their contempt for audiences. They happily boasted to English-language film journalists that they made cinema for “the masses.” The great 1970s director Manmohan Desai liked to say that he made films for people who had to sell their blood to see them. (In those days, before hepatitis B and AIDS, the standard fee paid by blood banks in public hospitals matched the price of the cheapest cinema ticket.)
Today, as India emerges as a superpower, those of us who think of ourselves as part of India’s middle class feel free to confess that we too have always loved Bollywood—the over-the-top sentimentality, the florid sets, the breast-jiggling dance routines. It makes us feel a little better that Richard Corliss, the
Time
film critic, shares our guilty pleasure. On his blog, Corliss quotes an American film preservationist who admits that “there is something almost intoxicating about movies that are so emotional and unashamed of it.”
But an efficiency expert visiting the set of a Hindi film would marvel that anything gets done there. What Bismarck said about the law and sausages is true of Bollywood. On set within one of the cavernous studios
our visiting expert will find all manner of glitter and beautiful people. But the light boys and “spot boys” (gofers) have no insurance and the extras get greasy lunches from fly-spotted vessels. The costumes come from a trunk, the toilets are backed up, and the wiring is a swarm of black, red, and yellow snakes. Nothing happens on time.
Even so, Bollywood sets exude self-satisfaction. Even the lowliest extra knows he is living the Indian dream. In the realm of Indian fantasy, only cricket players rank higher.
Popular art emerges from the space between gut and heart. In India, that relationship feels especially visceral. Folk performers at country fairs and religious festivals will repeat a line again and again, milking every last tear and laugh. Even classical musicians feel their way thorough a performance, encouraged by the audience’s loudly expressed appreciation or hastened on by its silence. Indians carry these patterns over to film viewing. Spontaneous applause breaks out after a well-delivered line. Showers of small coins patter and tinkle during dance sequences. In smaller towns, audiences harangue the projectionist to show a certain reel again. He always obliges, even if it means skipping other reels to finish on time. In Hindi cinema, audience response often dictates how many minutes a film plays as well as how many days it remains in the theater.
Production can drag on for years, with costs mounting astronomically. Record keeping is spotty. Contracts are largely unheard of. Plagiarism is rampant from stories to storyboards to songs. And most films flop; only 10 percent recover their costs. And yet Bollywood continues to churn out new films year after year, providing jobs for six million people in defiance of economic logic.
The industry is not as large as one might think. Bollywood sells more tickets than Hollywood but it prints fewer films; where an average Hollywood film will have five thousand prints made, a top-line Hindi film will have five hundred to seven hundred and play them until they are almost completely worn out. The annual box office for Bollywood films made in Hindi is thought to be about $1 billion, barely a fifth that taken in by films made in Telugu, a South Indian dialect—though no one can
be entirely certain; India’s film industry has a history of underreporting income. By even the most conservative estimates, however, Hollywood’s worldwide revenues are fifty times those of Bollywood’s.
And yet, from a cultural standpoint, Bollywood rules. No one in Delhi hums a film song from any of the other regional cinemas—at least not until some enterprising Bollywood plagiarist nicks it. But contestants on televised regional singing competitions will break into Hindi film songs without a second thought.
The cinema plays ambassador to the language, overcoming the parochialisms to which any diverse nation can be heir. Bollywood’s dominance offers an object lesson to all those who wish to legislate language. What the diktats of Delhi could not do when the government tried to impose Hindi as the national language, the seductions of Mumbai, a city that has a small claim on Hindi or any of its variants, have achieved with ease.
Bollywood is not just a film industry. It is all-pervasive: a homegrown, film-a-day dream machine that maintains a pleasant stranglehold on our imaginations. It determines—or at least shapes—how we see ourselves, how we think, how we talk, dream, speak, love, fight. It is the past perfect, the present imperfect, and the future uncertain, our national metaphor, our custom-made synecdoche, the spirit bagasse that fills the empty spaces of our lives.
We succumb to Bollywood’s illusions even as we mock them. Not too long ago, a friend who works at a blood bank called in a mild panic. “I have to replace sixteen bottles by five o’clock,” she said. It was nearly noon. “Any blood type. Can you come?” I could. I went. I donated my blood, ate my biscuits, drank my coffee, and went home. My friend called the next day. “
Main is khoon ki har ek boond ka keemat chukaaoongi
” (I will pay you back for every last drop of this blood), she said, riffing a Bollywood line with conscious irony. Bollywood offers Indians from all backgrounds a vast trove of shared references, a parallel language that lies just under every tongue, the sound track of our lives.
We borrow from Bollywood whenever—to describe the superficial slights of an ordinary day or to express our deepest anguish. This
borrowing has no snob value. It’s not like quoting Shakespeare. It is the equivalent of jumping into the village pond; anyone can do it.
We are proud of the way Bollywood has withstood the pressure of Hollywood, proud of its position as a cult cinema in the world. No one understands how Mumbai’s film industry has managed this feat of cultural defiance. My own guess is India’s comparative imperviousness to the charms of American-made blockbusters has something to do with the emotional tonality of cinema. In 2002, when Tarantino’s
Reservoir Dogs
was remade as
Kaante
, directed by Sanjay Gupta, the thieves were given clear motives to make sense of their desire to participate in a heist. That made them moral players rather than just men who want more money. For Indian viewers, exposition is important in an old-fashioned way.
