Indians Who Made It Big Abroad
The Shakespearean in Bollywood’s dreamy, bittersweet fantasies
Indians Who Made It Big Abroad
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And it’s true. The Bollywood genre has survived and prospered mightily over the decades, offering its audience a genuine, thriving musical cinema long after Hollywood gave up on the idea. One thing the Indian film industry has had no difficulty surviving is the ignorance and condescension of the British reviewers: and I’m sorry and embarrassed to say that I could have done a lot more to reverse this situation in my case. And of course Indian cinema means more than just Bollywood. One of the first films I reviewed professionally was Santosh Sivan’s The Terrorist, in many ways a remarkable premonition of the global nightmare of 9/11. But here again I have had to defer to the great passion of my colleague Derek Malcolm, from whom I first heard the names of Guru Dutt, Bimal Roy, V. Shantaram, Ritwik Ghatak, and latterly Adoor Gopalakrishnan.
Just after I started on The Guardian in 1999, I made my first visit to South Asia: a trip to Dhaka, and then Delhi and Rajasthan in India. It was while I was there that I fell into conversation about the great master, Satyajit Ray. “You know The Music Room, of course?” I was asked. Numbly, I shook my head. More education was needed—I made a start on rectifying that, and before I left India I bought a copy of Ray’s fascinating short stories, a collection called Indigo, which is now on my desk as I write.
What happened is we woke up to the existence of massive stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Shahrukh Khan and Aishwarya Rai. Now, I myself have written rather ungallantly about Aishwarya, calling her performances wishy-washy. But I have to put on record that she is easily the most beautiful and glamorous star I have ever seen in the flesh: far more hypnotic than people like, say, Nicole Kidman or George Clooney, whom I have also stood near at various premieres. I once found myself standing near Aishwarya at a dinner at the Cannes Film Festival, and she was like an impossibly gorgeous creature from another planet, with a benign aura. I found myself standing there in a slack-jawed daze. Like everyone else.
Again and again, watching Bollywood movies I have been struck by their emphasis on bittersweet fantasy, and again and again I scribble the same words in the notebook on my lap: “Shakespeare”, or specifically “late Shakespeare”, the Shakespeare of Pericles, The Tempest and Cymbeline. However broad they are, the films have, for me, a connection with something dreamlike and gentle and escapist, which reminds me of Shakespeare—there’s simply no other way to describe it, although I know of no other writer who feels it as strongly as I do.
Now that brings me back to Satyajit Ray’s 1969 film, Days And Nights In The Forest: a wonderful film, which is a perfect example of Ray’s almost miraculous, unforced, untutored cinematic style. When the four bachelors encounter the two women from a well-to-do family in an elegant country estate, it conjures the sublimely Arcadian world of Shakespeare: the world of As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I found myself re-reading Ray’s short story, Patol Babu, Film Star, about a middle-aged guy, quite the amateur thespian in his youth, who becomes wildly excited to be offered a walk-on part in a movie. All he has to do is bump into the leading man in the street and say the single word: “Oh!” And so, as he waits around for his scene, he frantically starts thinking about he can endow this monosyllable with meaning. This is a lovely, gentle, funny story, building up to something quite different from the embarrassing catastrophe I had been expecting. It’s a reminder of the energy, sophistication, and sheer enjoyment to be had from Ray, and Indian pictures generally.
(Bradshaw is film critic of The Guardian)