Jessica Winter on the rise and rise of Bollywood

On a recent weeknight at the Harrow Warner Village cinema, the only film to sell out its screenings was also the only film without a promo poster displayed outside the lobby. You may not have heard of it, but the Hindi musical melodrama Kal Ho Naa Ho, directed by Nikhil Advani, has nestled comfortably in the box-office top 10 for two weeks now. Showing in just a few dozen theatres, Bollywood's latest export - three tempestuous hours of laughter, tears, strops, and spontaneous song-and-dance - boasts easily the highest per-screen average of any movie currently playing in the UK. Western pop culture has borrowed liberally from Bollywood pageantry for years, with everyone from Missy Elliott to Andrew Lloyd Webber taking a cue from Bombay, though a full-fledged crossover film hit - reaching Hindi and non-Hindi mainstream viewers alike - is yet to come. Meanwhile Bollywood abroad is doing just fine, thanks, finding a devoted audience in the UK by skipping over the major Anglo advertising outlets and concentrating promotional efforts with NRI (non-resident Indian) newspapers, TV, and radio. Overseas ticket, video, and DVD sales now account for perhaps 40% of revenues for Bollywood, a multibillion-pound industry. "The export market for Hindi films is especially important due to the low value of the rupee," says Rachel Dwyer, chair of the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of London and author of several books about Indian cinema and pop culture. "A ticket in London is 10 times the cost of a ticket in even the most upmarket theatre in India." With an eye toward attracting the Hindi communities of Southall (home of the Himalaya Palace cinema) and Jackson Heights (in Queens, New York), Bollywood has in the last decade incorporated a new staple character: the NRI returning to the motherland. Kal Ho Naa Ho - which translates as "Tomorrow May Never Come" - inverts this common premise. "The novelty is that there's no return to India - it's set entirely in New York, which is a first," Dwyer says. (Kal Ho Naa Ho was shot partly, and noticeably, in Toronto.) Just as trendsetters in New York and London have kept close tabs on Bollywood fashions and pop music, Bollywood has absorbed more and more from MTV-style choreography, graphics, and quick-fire editing; as the production values have increased, the spangly outfits have accordingly shrunk. Kal Ho Naa Ho's frenetic central love triangle (portrayed by a summit of superstars: Preity Zinta, Saif Ali Khan, and Shahrukh Khan) is further agitated by fast-forwards and re-winds, slow-motion and split-screening. The exuberant first dance sequence brings to the New York streets a multiethnic rhythm nation of cuties in halters and hip-huggers, all waving little American flags. Surprisingly, according to Vijay Mishra, author of Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, "Bollywood entrenches not so much hybridity as cultural absolutism - although in the realm of visual representation, the opposite is the case, as skimpy outfits and bulging bodies are the norm." Mishra points out that Kal Ho Naa Ho uses a marriage ceremony as a climax point (as do many popular Hindi films). "I was struck by the fact that the dance sequences related to the wedding took up a full half-hour," says Mishra, a professor of English and comparative literature at Murdoch University in Perth. "There's a voiceover intoning the Sanskrit wedding mantras, and this is both cinematic spectacle - connecting the wedding to Vedic ritual - and a statement about tradition within modernity." How to juggle traditional duties in the midst of contemporary intergenerational conflict is a theme buoying many Bollywood narratives. Queuing for Kal Ho Naa Ho in Harrow this past week with her husband and two daughters, Harshida Rajani cited the recent hit Baghban as one of her favourite Bollywood films of the past year: "It's a good family drama about the relationships between parents and children - what children expect from their parents and what the children should give back, the compromises the different generations have to make." Rajani points out similar themes in the huge smash Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (popularly known as "K3G" and directed by Karan Johar, a co-writer and producer on Kal Ho Naa Ho). Lately, Rajani notes, theatres have been consistently providing "subtitles for the younger ones," though song sequences generally remain subtitle-free - frustrating, but less so in Kal Ho Naa Ho when Shahrukh Khan belts out a Hinglish rendition of Pretty Woman, or when a club crowd gyrates Travolta-style to the chorus of It's the Time to Disco - nothing lost in translation there. All the same, Dwyer says, "A Hindi film doesn't always make sense to a western viewer. If you want to market Hindi cinema to the west, you have to give the west what it wants to see, and generally that's maharajas or poverty. They don't understand Indian girls in miniskirts. You can quote a Hindi film" - as Ghost World and Moulin Rouge did - "but the whole picture won't work." Hence the tightly targeted promotional campaigns for Mumbai's (Bombay's) exports to Britain. "Our advertising is specifically geared to the Asian community in the UK," says Eros International marketing and PR executive Martin Gough. Eros has distributed several of the top-grossing Bollywood productions of the past few years, including Baghban and the Bafta-nominated hit Devdas. "Outside of those communities, the films are seen more as art-house fare. It's a sad indictment of the moviegoing public, but a lot of people say, 'Oh, there's subtitles, I can't be bothered.' Once you have subtitles, the marketplace narrows completely. These are movies made for a mainstream audience, but financially it's just not viable for us to market them like they're blockbusters." Eros has high hopes for Line of Control (opening December 19), a four-hour account of the 1999 Kargil war between India and Pakistan featuring a glittering firmament of Bollywood actors (including Kal Ho Naa Ho's Saif Ali Khan). "We'd look to market it to a crossover audience," Gough says. But Dwyer is sceptical about its box-office chances: "Line of Control won't do well in London because it's already perceived to be anti-Pakistani - because it 'mentions' Pakistan. It loses a great section of the population right there. Many Pakistanis have already said they refuse to see it. "The dream of the crossover is yet to happen, but it will, with the right film and the right marketing campaign," Dwyer continues. "Most likely it would be a historical epic." That bodes well for the forthcoming 1857: The Uprising, starring megawatt actor-producer Aamir Khan - the name above the title for 2001's Oscar-nominated phenom Lagaan. Mishra thinks that Lagaan - the extravaganza that launched a thousand style articles and drew impressive numbers of arthouse patrons - might be the prelude to a more profitable Bollywood-Hollywood exchange. "At one level, Bollywood is crass, melodramatic excess, but at another level, it is exemplary entertainment cinema, which also makes it quite clear to the spectators that it's not reality," Mishra says. "There is a kind of distancing effect - associated with Brechtian theatre, but going back to Sanskrit drama theory - that is also part of the system. I think it is quite some cinema, and probably much underrated." · Kal Ho Naa Ho is out now.