Bollywood in Australia Extract

Bollywood in Australia
Transnationalism and Cultural Production
Edited by
Andrew Hassam and Makarand Paranjape
First published in 2010 by UWA Publishing Crawley, Western Australia 6009 www.uwap.uwa.edu.au
This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Copyright Introduction and collection, Andrew Hassam and Makarand Paranjape, 2010. Copyright in each essay remains with the individual contributor. The moral right of the authors has been asserted. A full CIP record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia. ISBN: 978 1 921401 08 4 Typeset in 11pt Bembo by Lasertype
Dedicated to the memory of Devika Goonewardene
Introduction
Andrew Hassam and Makand Paranjape
The global context of Bollywood in Australia

Makarand Paranjape The transcultural character and reach of Bollywood cinema has been gradually more visible and obvious over the last two decades. What is less understood and explored is its escalating integration with audiences, markets and entertainment industries beyond the Indian subcontinent. This book explores the relationship of Bollywood to Australia. We believe that this increasingly important relationship is an outcome of the convergence between two remarkably dynamic entitiesglobalising Bollywood, on the one hand and Asianising Australia, on the other. If there is a third element in this relationship, which is equally important, it is the mediating power of the vibrant diasporic community of South Asians in Australia. Hence, at its most basic, this book explores the conjunctures and ruptures between these three forces: Bollywood, Australia and their interface, the diaspora.
1
It would be useful to see, at the outset, how Bollywood here refers not only to the Bombay film industry, but is symbolic of the Indian and even the South Asian film industry. Technically speaking, the term is a neologism of comparatively recent provenance, invented by combining Bombay and Hollywood. The entry of the term into the Oxford English Dictionary was announced in its June 2001 quarterly online update.1 In the following year, its inclusion in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary was noticed by The Times of India.2 A year later the same newspaper marked its entrance to the new illustrated Oxford Dictionary with a picture of Aishwarya Rai from Devdas (2002) holding her lamp of love in her hand.3 However, the term was in circulation in the Western press much earlier, as the title of an article, Hooray for Bollywood, by Richard Corliss that appeared in Time magazine in 1996, shows.4 There is something distinctly pejorative or patronising about these early uses of Bollywood; as Corliss observes, somewhat wryly: In any other national cinema the antics in the first reel of Mukul S Anands Khuda Gawah (God Is My Witness) might be giggled off the screen. But, of course, Bollywood films are like no other: it is sheer pop opera, dealing with emotions so convulsive they must be sung and danced, in a solemn, giddy style and curry westerns and wet-sari musicals are avidly watched by millions across the world. No wonder The Times of India article of 2003 quotes a variety of Bombay film figures complaining about the use of the term. Noted art film director Govind Nihalani, for instance, muses:
What can I say? It looks like the Oxford Dictionary is moving with the times. But Bollywood is actually a disrespectful reference to our film industry. It primarily means were aping Hollywood and have nothing original to offer. In fact, Bollywood as a term puts the focus largely on the song-and-dance cinema and ignores everything else about Indian cinema.5
Subhash Ghai, one of the great showmen of Bollywood, was even more emphatic: Bollywood is actually scoffing at our film industry. He mentions how the London press was already using the word as far back as 1989, when it sneered at the success of Ghais hit film, Ram Lakhan (1989):
I saw the coverage on TV and they were saying how the Bombay film industry is copying the style of Hollywood premieres in terms of fashion and jewelleryand they focused the camera on shoes and jewellery of the stars at the party.
2
Bollywood in Australia: Introduction
The Times of India article concludes: So the dictionary entry is more like rubbing salt on a wound. Yet it would appear that it is Bollywood that is having the last laugh. If the success of Slumdog Millionaire (2008) is anything to go by, it is Hollywood that is now copying Bollywood. In addition to the vast audience following that Bollywood movies enjoy, the Bollywood culture industry translates into huge revenues for the fashion, glamour, cosmetics, food and jewellery industries and many other related enterprises that benefit, as Frieda Pinto, the debutant star of Slumdog Millionaire, is flashed on the covers of the leading magazines, including Vogue, Maxim, Vanity Fair and Cosmopolitan. Even Anil Kapoor, whose role in Ghais movie in 1989 won him no international visibility, rides the tide of global recognition after Slumdog Millionaire, appearing on CNN, BBC, Oprah, not to mention the Oscars in Hollywood. Hence, given its currency, it is no surprise that we use the word Bollywood in our book; yet, we do so in its somewhat newer, more comprehensive sense, not only referring to Hindi movies made in Mumbai, but also symbolic of the Indian and even the South Asian film industry. While parody and fun cannot be entirely removed from its connotations, it does denote to us something more serious, a large, vibrant and increasingly global cultural phenomenon. There are many reasons for seeing Bollywood in this broader and more inclusive fashion. In the Indian context, for instance, there has always been considerable integration between the different film fraternities in India, especially between Bengal and Bombay earlier, between Hyderabad and Bombay in the 1970s and 1980s and between Madras and Bombay to this day. So, despite all the different centres of production and the distinct character of all the different language cinemas of India, in some senses there is considerable mixing and amalgamation between them. Similarly, Hollywood, in a broader context, not only refers to the US film industry, but also symbolises the interaction and assimilation of several not just European, but even Australian, elements, including directors, technicians, actors and so on. When we examine the cultural relationship between Bollywood and Australia, we are also, indirectly, implicated in the connections between two larger global entities. Bollywood has long been the worlds second cinema, as one of the papers in this volume asserts. Bollywood films have circulated globally among the Indian and South Asian diaspora as a shared cultural idiom. They have also been immensely popular in the erstwhile Soviet Union and on the African continent. Further, in an age when creative,
3
information and services industries propel economic growth, Bollywood and its modalities of production, distribution and reception, are seen as important players in global culture industry networks. Countries of the developed worldSwitzerland, Ireland, The Netherlands, Australia, and New Zealandgo out of their way to welcome Bollywood production teams to shoot in their pristine locales. Local cinema houses in Australia, the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and Europe regularly run shows of newly released Bollywood blockbusters. Many Hollywood producers now outsource their post-production work to Mumbai at costs lower than those they would incur in the US. Yet, only specialists, rather than the general, movie-going public, have known these facts. This is because the dominance of Hollywood has been obvious and widespread in wealthy and technologically advanced societies, while the slow but steady proliferation of Bollywood has not been easily noticeable or recognised. Bollywood produces more films each year than Hollywoodor, for that matter, any other film industry in the world. Its viewership is also probably greater. Bollywood and, more generally, Indian cinema, which is made in more than a dozen languages, is not only popular in the Indian diaspora spread over more than seventy countries across the world, but also, increasingly, among non-Indian audiences the world over. One might argue that such cultural flows as this book explores are merely a part of the broader workings of globalisation, which works to integrate markets, economies and cultures. Yet, such a view would be somewhat simplistic. As we can observe, Bollywood is not integrated with, say, the Czech Republic to the same degree as Australia. Many other factors are responsible for the kind of impact that it has on Australia. Among these are the English language and the older colonial circuits that linked India and Australia. The Indian diaspora finds it easier to migrate to English-speaking countries. These countries, in turn, find it easier to receive cultural products from India. In the case of Australia, its close cultural ties with the UK and the US also make its society more receptive to Bollywood. That is because Bollywood, as mentioned earlier, is also increasingly integrated with Hollywood. Therefore, it can impact Australia not only directly, through the mediation of the South Asian diaspora, but also indirectly, via Hollywood, which has also become a carrier of Bollywood and its cultural cargo. As we were writing this introduction, for instance, Australia has been washed over by the Danny Boyle Slumdog Millionaire wave. The story of the astonishing success of the film is only too well known. Its first brush with fame was its bonanza of Golden Globe awards and then
4
its even more successful and plentiful garnering of nominations for the Oscars. The film was released first in the US, where it has raked in more than US$138 million (A$202.6 million) as of 26 March 2009,6 then in the UK, where the collections were over 30 million (A$62.6 million) as of 22 March 2009.7 The film was finally released in India on 22 January 2009, in the original English version and in the dubbed Hindi version. In Australia, it has been showing to packed audiences for several months; as of 14 January 2009, it had already grossed more than A$3 million,8 but, according to noted critic and academic, Vijay Mishra, it has also created among white Australians an unparalleled interest in Bollywood.9 Whatever it may or may not do for Indias image, Slumdog Millionaire has certainly brought Bollywood to the worlds centre stage. The film sets itself up as a self-conscious, if slightly parodic, tribute to Bollywood, complete with an improbable plot, song and dance sequences and the overwhelming force of destiny driving its protagonist from rags to riches. While a post-colonial reading could easily show how the movie misrepresents or distorts Indian realities, that is beside the point. The movie marks the coming of age of Bollywood in the Western world, even if it is Hollywood pretending to be Bollywood. Clearly, Slumdog Millionaire does instantiate the travels of Bollywood to Hollywood, not only in terms of its directors, actors, technicians and musicians, but also in terms of its style and structure, content and technique. The Cinderella-like transformation of a slum child into a multi-millionaire is not only the stuff of the American Dream, but also very much of Bollywood fantasy. To put it simply, the game show in the movie is itself a symbol of Bollywood, the worlds largest dream factory, which makes the impossible come true. Bollywood, with its links to glamorous film stars and the underworld dons, is also depicted in the movie so extensively that it is almost a tribute to the industry. Jamals initial defining moment is literally to rise out of a pile of shit to get Amitabh Bachchans autograph. There are several clips from earlier Bachchan movies and one of the early questions in the quiz asks who starred in the superstars 1973 hit, Zanjeer. Similarly, the tune of the Surdas bhajan, again a link between Jamals life and the quiz show, is taken from a Hindi movie. The depiction of the underworld in the movie is also derived, as several critics have pointed out, from earlier Bollywood films like Satya (1998) or Company (2002). Although, visually, the film is clearly the work of outsiders, the cinematic style mimics Bollywood, as do the dialogues and the improbabilities in the plot. These latter, however, cannot be simply wished away because they are implicated in a politics of representation.
5
The film has been hailed as signifying the arrival of Bollywood in Hollywood. Yet, what is not equally obvious, though it is equally important, is the fact that the movie also illustrates a Hollywood to Bollywood movement. The direction of the cultural flows is not just one-way or two-way, but multidirectional. In Slumdog Millionaire, it is the case of a British director, reaching out to Bollywood for his story and setting, using a multinational film crew to make a product that is sold all over the world, but chiefly in the US, UK and India. The travels, hence, are not just from Bollywood to Los Angeles (LA), but from London to Bombay, then Bombay to LA, Bombay to London and then to Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane, Cairns, Darwin, Hobart and so on. But it is also important to note that not only is Bollywood the worlds second cinema, it is also an alternative cinema in that it works according to different principles of organisation and meaning. In other words, Hollywood and Bollywood have different grammars of representation and embody different meaning-making systems. If we were grossly to oversimplify, Bollywood is essentially a cinema of emotion and sentiment. It has been called melodrama, though we do not think that that is a particularly happy or apt expression. Bollywood films are also mythopoetic in their structure, conveying their thematic values through archetypes, some of which are ancient and mythic. This is also a cinema in which song, dance, poetry, music and action fuse to create a synthetic and composite form. Bollywood has been accused of being escapist and unrealistic, but it engages with social and political reality more directly than any other medium of creative expression. It does so through the use of exaggeration, symbolic representation and metaphor. Bollywood is also a cinema of excess, that is, of excessive sensuality and stimulation. The costumes, sets, locations, props and so on, are expected to be lavish, to the point of being fantastic. Characters are often larger than life and their abilities amplified till they seem almost caricatures. This is partly because of the pressures of the star system that dominates Bollywood. Films are sold based on the mass appeal of Bollywood superstars, who command fees rivalling Hollywood actors. So it would be financially disastrous to show the protagonist, say, dying halfway through the film, because the enormous fee that the star has been paid would then be underutilised or wasted. Despite its peculiarities, over a billion viewers easily understand its codes. This is because these viewers have been schooled in reading Bollywood films since childhood. Even experts, who have studied these films for years, often fail to pick up the complex subtext of Bollywood films, with
6
their complicated intertextuality, self-referentiality and subtler cultural nuances. To that extent, Bollywood, despite its increasing globalisation, remains somewhat ethnic in its character and constitution. In the last two decades, not only has there has been a greater integration between Hollywood and Bollywood, but more and more Bollywood films are shot overseas, not just to cater to the rich Indian diaspora market, but also to teach audiences in India about the rest of the world. Australia has emerged as one of the favoured destinations of such Bollywood films. No wonder today in countries such as Australia, in the domain of popular and material culture, Bollywood circulates as a potent aesthetic and cultural marker of Indianness. Clothes, jewellery, food, footwear and even dance fitness schools proudly wear the Bollywood label. At the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, held in March 2006, the closing ceremony featured an elaborate dance and musical ensemble on Bollywood themes. This study is intended to mark this coming of age of Bollywood in Australia. The first such book to be published in Australia, this is a collection of academic papers by largely Australian critics and scholars who have made notable contributions to the emerging field of Bollywood studies. A good deal of the book is based on papers presented at an international workshop entitled Transnational Dialogues on Bollywood: Australian Perspectives, held at the Monash University Law Chambers, 30 November 2006, in Melbourne, Australia. The workshop brought together scholars from around Australia and from India to explore the transnational impact of Bollywood on public spheres around the globe and to assess its contribution to creative industries in Australia. The success of this workshop and indeed of film festivals, exhibitions and above all commercial screenings of Bollywood movies in Australia, shows the rising interest in Bollywood in this country. What is more, Australia reaps considerable commercial and collateral benefits when Bollywood films are shot in here. Besides the direct financial gains to technicians, extras, hotels and other service providers, such films generate powerful, if unintended by their producers, publicity for Australia, making it an important and distinct presence in the Indian imagination, drawing students, tourists and visitors from the subcontinent to Australia. This book has been in the making for nearly three years, somewhat longer than expected. What we have learned by this is that there is a great deal of fluidity and progress in this area of study. Culture itself transforms at a furious pace, as do its manifestations. The situation is
7
no different when it comes to Bollywood in Australia. We have already spoken of the enormous success of Slumdog Millionaire in Australia. This makes it a special case, even if it is, strictly speaking, neither a Bollywood movie, nor one that is set in Australia. Our effort has been to concentrate on films that are both made in Bollywood and set, at least partially, in Australia, or have some other palpable Australian connection. When we started our project the most outstanding example of this kind of film was Salaam Namaste, set almost entirely in Australia. It has been discussed in several papers here. Then, while the manuscript was in progress, another film, Chak De! India, had a crucial Australian connection. The films climax is an international womens field hockey final between an Indian and an Australian team, which takes place in Melbourne. In this film, as one of the papers in the book observes, Australias renown as a sporting nation is central to the plot and to the victory of the Indian team over the hosts. The film, thus, engages with an important aspect of Australian culture, not just using the country as an exotic location. More recently, a few more Bollywood films were set in Australia. The first of these, Sajid Khans Heyy Babyy (2007), concerns three young South Asian men in Sydney, whose freewheeling lives are changed when they have to take care of a little baby called Angel. The film is a rollicking comedy, with not much going for it except the laughs. As Beth, a Bollywood fan from Champaign, Illinois, put it in her blog: If you have these three clowns as dads, at least theyll sing and dance for you!10 The film shows, typically of Bollywood, that rich Indians abroad have white servants and white girls hovering around them (Beth calls them contextless cheerleaders). Yet, if we set aside such clichd and superficial references to Australia, we do see, once again, that a foreign country becomes the site of what, by Indian standards, would be a highly unconventional family arrangement, with three males looking after what is supposedly a six-day-old baby (she has teeth). Like Salaam Namaste, the film has a didactic component for audiences at home: it redefines gender roles and emphasises that males need to learn how to nurture and not just treat women as sex objects. Not surprisingly, though, the end restores convention by emphasising that a family, really to be a family, needs both a mum and a dad. The other Bollywood blockbuster that contained a strong Australian connection was Singh is Kinng (2008). It is the story of Happy Singh (Akshay Kumar), a bumbling Punjabi villager sent to Australia to bring back another villager, Lucky Singh, an underworld don on the Gold Coast, where much of the film is set. The film is mostly a farce without
8
serious engagement with the host country. But there are one or two things that do stand out. First, Ben Nott, the films cinematographer, is an Australian. Nott is better known for working on horror films and the movies official website jokingly highlights the, as yet, negligible collaboration between the Indian and Australian film industries by maintaining, facetiously, that Nott accepted this film by mistake, thinking the title referred to his favourite writer, Stephen King.11 Though the treatment of Australia in the movie is largely superficial, its inversion of the power relationship between the don and the underdog when, as a result of Luckys accident, Happy Singh becomes Kinng, does allow a representation of marginalised black Australians, a representation absent from previous Bollywood depictions of Australia. In one scene, the dons goons are sent to remove a hot dog seller and his family who are taking custom from an expensive restaurant. The family in question appear more African American than Aboriginal Australian, and the scene could well come out of a Hollywood movie; yet, given the typical Bollywood disregard of verisimilitude, we could read the family against the screen image as Aboriginal and the film offers the hope, and maybe the possibility, that future Bollywood movies set in Australia will portray greater political sensitivity and recognise the existence of Aboriginal Australians as part of a more inclusive Australian society. Finally, a third, Bachna Ae Haseeno (2008), from the Yash Raj film factory, once again directed by Siddharth Anand of the Salaam Namaste fame, was set partially in Australia. Released on 15 August 2008, the film features Ranbir Singh as Raj, a young man with a somewhat instrumental attitude to women. The story, as it unfolds, shows his growth and development over a twelve-year period, from eighteen to thirty, during which time he has three serious relationships. In the first two, he has behaved like a cad, jilting the women who loved him. Now, a successful computer engineer in Sydney, he falls in love with Gayatri, played by Deepika Padukone, a part-time cab driver and business management student. However, this time Gayatri turns him down. Raj embarks on a pilgrimage to his two earlier girlfriends to atone for his sins, serving them until they forgive and release him from the weight of past misdeeds. When he returns, he finds Gayatri waiting for him, having changed her mind. Again, the film only uses Australia as the setting of a part of this largely Indian-overseas Bildungsroman, but it is noteworthy that this country presents fresh possibilities of hope, healing and regeneration. Anand, who is known to play with stereotypes, scores another clever trick by making his Indian studentcabbie a woman.
9
Even as we were preparing to go to press, a spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia, once again, brought to the forefront the complex relationship between the two countries. One of the essays in this volume already noted such events in the past, but the violence was unprecedented and alarming. Curiously, Bollywood was, almost instantly if inevitably, embroiled in the dispute when Amitabh Bachchan turned down an honorary doctorate from the Queensland University of Technology citing the attacks as his reason for refusing the degree. In his popular blog, he wrote:
I mean no disrespect to the Institution that honours me, but under the present circumstances, where citizens of my own country are subjected to such acts of inhuman horror, my conscience does not permit me to accept this decoration from a country that perpetrates such indignity to my fellow countrymen.12
Like Bachchan, other Bollywood stars have reacted to these attacks. Aamir Khan, for instance, said, Its very unfortunate. Its very sad and very disturbing.13 Not to be left behind, Bollywoods biggest union, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE), has also banned its members from working down under. Dinesh Chaturvedi, the head of the Union, said, We prefer to call it a non-cooperation movement because we feel what is happening in Australia is painful and shameful. The Australian government is just not taking adequate steps to find the culprits.14 More amazingly, Mohit Suri, a young Bollywood film-maker, actually plans to make a film about these incidents. Slated for shooting later in 2009, the film features an Indian student in Australia who is the victim of racist attacks. Not surprisingly, Suri plans to shoot the film in Australia, despite the protests and bans: I dont think banning the country is going to achieve anything, he said, How can I not shoot in Australia when that is where my story is based?15 Australia is a popular educational destination for Indian students, with some 95,000 of them currently estimated to be in the country.16 Their total contribution not just to Australian universities, but to ancillary businesses like travel, real estate, retail and so on would be immense. While both countries are in a damage control mode over these incidents, they highlight some of the underlying contradictions in Australian society. On the one hand, many universities are increasingly dependent on foreign students for their revenues. On the other hand, several thousands of these students are interested not just in education, but also in migration. Several small colleges and institutes specifically
10
target and exploit such potential immigrants, offering low-quality education but enhanced opportunities for settlement. But instead of accountancy or engineering or other in-demand fields, many of these students end up as taxi drivers, waiters, shopkeepers, petrol pump attendants and so on, which local Australians find threatening.17 Films like Salaam Namaste, which deal with Indian students in Australia, fail precisely to engage with such tensions. It would be fair to assume that, for many Bollywood films set in this country, Australia remains merely a backdrop rather than the real setting where the story makes a significant intervention. Yet, despite the somewhat superficial treatment of real issues like racial tensions in Australia, Bollywood continues to be interested in and engages with Australia. This relationship, notwithstanding these unfortunate attacks, does not appear to be in jeopardy. We have tried to argue that Bollywood, though a cinema of entertainment, also has elements, at times totally unexpected, of edification. Its engagement with its overseas locations and audiences also keeps changing and progressing in unpredictable ways. By the time this book is released and read, there may be more movies with Australian themes and connections. While it is difficult to predict what directions they may take, as long as there is a market in Australia for Bollywood and in India for Australia, as long as the South Asian diaspora in Australia is dynamic, even expanding, then we may be sure that Bollywood will keep its connection with Australia alive.
Filming Bollywood in Australia

Andrew Hassam The use of Australian locations in Indian movies dates from the mid1990s. A lovers fantasy song sequence in a Tamil film, Indian, released in 1996, opens with reputedly the first appearance of kangaroos in Indian cinema bounding across the screen;18 and later in the same song sequence, the films stars, Urmila Matondkar and Kamal Haasan, dance in front of the Sydney Opera House and on top of the Harbour Bridge. Daud (1997), a Hindi movie released the following year, contains a song in which Urmila Matondkar is filmed in Australia a second time,
11
on this occasion dancing against the Pinnacles in Western Australia with Sanjay Dutt. The rise in Australias popularity as a location in Indian films coincided with Urmila Matondkars own rise in popularity following the success of Rangeela (1995) and in Deewane (2000) she returned to Australia a third time, dancing again at the Pinnacles, this time with Ajay Devgan. Yet while Indian, Daud and Deewane contained song sequences filmed in Australia, the action of the films was set elsewhere. The first Indian films to base their stories in Australia were Prem Aggan and Soldier, both released in October 1998. The final section of Prem Aggan is set in Sydney, to where the heroines father removes her for an enforced marriage, and the villains in Soldier flee to Sydney with their ill-gotten gains. In both films, as in the song sequence in Indian, Sydney is merely a picturesque overseas location. In Soldier, especially, this is not Sydney as it is known in Australia: the replica of William Blighs Bounty is a Sydney Harbour tourist attraction rather that the private yacht of an Indian gang boss and Soldiers hero, played by Bobby Deol, is shown travelling from Sydney airport to Sydney Harbour on a Melbourne tram. Sydney appears in a more familiar form in Dil Chahta Hai (2001), the first Indian film set in Australia to achieve international success, with the Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and the replica Bounty all making their by now predictable appearances. Yet while Sydney, like the action in Dil Chahta Hai, may be more naturalistic (the hero goes there to work and no one gets shot dead), the film nonetheless employs Sydney mainly as a backdrop for a predictable romance between its male and female leads, Aamir Khan and Preity Zinta. Melbourne, lacking Sydneys Australian iconicity, is less recognisable internationally and took longer to become popular with Indian filmmakers. Melbourne first appeared in a tram scene in Soldier, with the comic actor, Johnny Lever, as a tram conductor. Soldier later sets a romantic song sequence between Bobby Deol and Preity Zinta against the Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road, a Victorian tourist location 280 kilometres from Melbourne also used in Prem Aggan and in the Tamil film, Kaathalar Thinam (1999). Melbournes CBD makes a fleeting appearance in Janasheen (2003), a film which, though ostensibly set in Sydney, avoids recognisable Australian locations and footage of Sydney is restricted to Clovelly cemetery, while Sydneys CBD is represented, in Bollywood style, by shots of Bangkok. The first Indian film to make extensive dramatic use of Melbourne was yet another Tamil film, Nala Damayanthi (2003), though the pull of Sydneys icons nonetheless proved too strong for the films producers:
12
Sydney Harbour Bridge is glimpsed as the heros plane lands at Melbourne; the hero, Ramji, commutes to suburban Melbourne across the Sydney Harbour Bridge; and some of the song sequences feature Sydneys Darling Harbour. Melbournes sights are less recognisable to audiences in India and while many will have heard of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, other tourist attractions that appear in Nala Damayanthi, the casino and the aquarium, have no distinctive Melbourne associations. Melbourne, therefore, operates more generically to provide an urban lifestyle environment containing a range of tourist attractions: Ramji (Madhavan) enjoys a family day out in the city, walking in the grounds of the Royal Exhibition Building and visiting the Melbourne Museum; he performs rituals for his dead father by the River Yarra; and he encounters emus and kangaroos at the zoo. Melbourne does have its icons, such as the colourful beach huts at Brighton that are glimpsed in a song sequence in Nala Damayanthi and again in two songs in Koi Aap Sa (2005), but Melbournes Brighton Beach is not as famous overseas as Sydneys Bondi. The song sequences in Indian popular cinema are distinctive and the use of Australia in song picturisations seems bizarre to Australians not used to the Bollywood convention, which allows song sequences to be situated outside the time and space of the story. South Asian audiences understand such discontinuities, appreciating song sequences for their emotional intensity rather than their realism, and an Indian diasporic audience in Perth cheered at the song sequence in Aa Ab Laut Chalen (1999) shot in Kings Park in Perth, even though the film was set in the USA.19 On the other hand, Australians from outside the South Asian community are bewildered by the spectacle of Hrithik Roshan and Amisha Patel in Aap Mujhe Achche Lagne Lage (2002) dancing in front of government buildings in Canberra, a bewilderment due as much to the rare sight of Canberra in a feature film as to the disjunction between Canberra and Bollywood dancing. Indian film-makers enjoy the flexibility of being able to choose overseas film locations for their exotic looks, ignoring their connotations for those who live in them. Popular definitions of Bollywood include the convention that they should use exotic locations, though the exotic location in Hindi films is not necessarily overseas and fantasy song sequences have been filmed at locations within India, such as the mountains of Kashmir (Bobby, 1973) or the beaches of Goa (Dil Chahta Hai ), locations which contrast with the everyday world of the mass audience. Sri Lanka also continues to be popular, the Tamil film Poi (2006), starring the Australian, Vimala Raman, using it extensively. Film-makers first started filming in
13
more distant locations in the 1960s, thirty years before they filmed in Australia. The arrival of colour cinematography encouraged the use of romantic, outdoor settings,20 and overseas locations were used mainly as outdoor settings for the romances of the period, as in Sangam (1964), Love in Tokyo (1966) and Evening in Paris (1967). Purab Aur Paschim (1970) established London as a location for a story, though more as a site of Western decadence than as a setting for romance, and Londons corrupting influence on the Indian abroad was reinforced in Des Pardes (1978). The replacement of the romantic hero with the angry young man in the social analysis films of the 1970s, associated above all with the film Sholay (1975) and the screen persona of Amitabh Bachchan, made exotic overseas locations less necessary; as Asha Kasbekar puts it: Gory spectacle in disused warehouses and colorful cabaret dances in the sleazy, smoke-filled bars frequented by the hero replaced the mellifluous love songs set in natural scenic beauty.21 With the return of romance as the dominant element in Bollywood in the late 1980s, there was a return to filming romantic song fantasies overseas. The veteran producer and director, Yash Chopra, turned Switzerland into an Indian honeymoon destination with a number of films beginning with Faasle in 1985 after the troubles in Kashmir prevented filming in Indias mountainous north;22 and Scotland, in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), and New Zealand, in Daud and Deewane, have often doubled for Kashmir to provide spectacular mountain scenery for song sequences. London and New York are, of course, the market leaders in attracting Indian film-makers, with London featuring in at least a dozen major Bollywood productions in 2007. And Switzerland, Canada and South Africa remain enduring locations. However, recently there has been increased competition from newer global cities, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Dubai, which have sought Bollywood film production, much as the UK, the US and Australia have done, in order to offer a showcase to attract Indian tourism, business migration and foreign investment. Australia has, nonetheless, witnessed a relative boom in attracting Indian film productions in the last two or three years. Salaam Namaste (2005), Preity Zintas third Australian film, did for Melbourne what Dil Chahta Hai did for Sydney and two more Hindi blockbusters set in Australia opened in 2007: Chak De! India, a vehicle for Bollywood superstar, Shah Rukh Khan, much of which was filmed in sports facilities in Melbourne and Sydney, and Heyy Babyy, starring Akshay Kumar, shot on location in Sydney and Brisbane. In 2008, four more big-budget Bollywood movies featuring Australia were released: Love Story 2050, filmed in and around Adelaide; Singh
14
is Kinng, filmed on the Gold Coast; Bachna Ae Haseeno, by the director of Salaam Namaste, Siddharth Anand, filmed in Sydney; and Victory, a cricket movie, filmed during the Australia-India Test matches played in Sydney and Melbourne in 2007/2008. In addition, Salman Khan filmed Main Aur Mrs Khanna in Melbourne in May 2008. Tamil movies make much less impact among nonTamil speaking audiences, as is the case for those Telugu, Kannada and Punjabi movies that have featured Australian locations, but their contribution is welcomed by the Australian film industry and, having pioneered the use of Australia in Indian movies, Tamil film-makers continue to shoot regularly in Australia. Australia is most often used as a backdrop to one or two fantasy song sequences, as most recently in Maaya Kannaadi (2007) and Pokkiri (Prabhu, 2007), but Nala Damayanthi has been followed by Thiruttu Payale (2006) and Unnale Unnale (2007), both of which also set part of their stories in Melbourne. The volume begins with Adrian Mabbott Athiques chapter, The Crossover Audience: Mediated Multiculturalism and the Indian Film, which undertakes a critical examination of the term crossover as it is being deployed in the context of the Indian film industry and its engagement with Western media industries and export markets. Within the specific context of Australian multiculturalism, this crossing over
Figure 1: Tanisha and Vinay in Unnale Unnale in front of a Melbourne tram advertisement featuring Aishwarya Rai
15
is a form of cultural and commercial exchange defined by the success of a media artefact originating in a South Asian ethnic culture with a majority audience located in another, the so-called Anglo-Australian culture. As Athique argues, South Asians resident in the West have given popular Indian cinema a commercially viable presence in the new context of multiplex exhibition, and it has been the subsequent ringing of cash registers that has instigated a new affection for Indian films in the Western media. Events, such as the Indian Film Festival, have been designed to promote Indian films amongst a more mainstream audience, though as Athique also notes, obstacles, such as the need for subtitles and the length of the movies, limit the success of Indian popular cinema in Australia. Against this background, Athique raised the question among a number of young Australians who showed an interest in Indian films of how likely it seemed that a significant crossover audience for Indian films would emerge in Australia. Athiques conclusion is that it still remains to be seen whether the current flirtation with Bollywood will be just a passing fashion or an ongoing addition to the cultural repertoire of metropolitan Australia. Despite his scepticism, however, Athique believes that enthusiasm for Bollywood is one of the more benevolent examples of Western ignorance of non-Western cultures and should perhaps be encouraged, rather than disparaged. In Cultural Encounters: The Use and Abuse of Bollywood in Australia, Devika Goonewadene reflects on her own experience of the increasing visibility of Indian popular cinema in Australia from two specific vantage points that are derived from her own political and academic position as a post-colonial, diasporic South Asian: that of migrantcitizen and that of teacher of Indian knowledges in the West. By reflecting on her own cultural engagements with Bollywood in Australia in its different manifestationsfrom dance and music performances to the cinema and lecture theatresGoonewardene shows how Bollywood can be used to fashion a social and cultural identity that allows a migrant to feel at home in an Australian space through that spaces incorporation in Hindi films. Particularly important is the way Goonewardene recounts teaching International Relations though the medium of Hindi cinema, choosing to do so because the visibility of Bollywood in Australia allows her to utilise, and tease out the implications of, her students knowledge of an everyday phenomenon. Goonewardenes experience of being among the crowd watching the filming of Chak De! India (2007) in Melbourne makes her optimistic of the effect of Bollywood in Australia in a postSeptember 11 world:
16
At a time when cultural, ethnic and religious difference is the object of international and domestic terrorismHindi cinema is one means of showing that there is a ground on which we can all meet peaceably.
While Athique focuses on cinema audiences and Goonewardene on the classroom, in Salaam Namaste, Melbourne and Cosmopolitanism, Andrew Hassam looks closely at the methods used by Australian government film, tourism and trade commissions to attract Indian producers to film in Australian locations. Taking the internationally successful Yash Raj production, Salaam Namaste (2005), as a case study, Hassam analyses what the Indian producers are looking for in choosing an Australian film location and how far the world of Bollywood matches the Brand Melbourne that was pitched to them by state film and tourism commissions. He also considers what images are being excluded by the projection of Australia appearing in Bollywood, such as the lives of the housewives, the shopkeepers and the taxi drivers who comprise the audience of radio station Salaam Namaste. Hassam concludes that, while Indian film-makers and Australian government bodies collude in the projection of Australian cities as modern, Western and cosmopolitan urban spaces, they do so in different and contradictory ways as a result of differing definitions of cosmopolitanism: Australian government agencies project Australia overseas as a culturally diverse nation, while Indian film-makers seek images of a globalised consumerism for the gratification of audiences in India. The result is Australian government support for a depiction of Australia in Bollywood that not only erases the lives of urban Indigenous Australians, Chinese Australians and, ironically, Australian Sikh taxi-drivers, but also fails to promote the non-elite cosmopolitanism found in Australian suburbs. In Chak De! Australia: Bollywood Down Under, Makarand Paranjape argues that the film Chak De! India rewrites the earlier Lagaan (2001), with the shift between them, from a colonial cricket match between India and England to an international hockey match between India and Australia, marking the move of Bollywood and the South Asian diaspora into a global arena, an Indianisation of the globe. Bollywood is fast gaining recognition and legitimacy as the second cinema of the world, and the first part of this chapter examines, in broad theoretical terms, the relationship between Hollywood and Bollywood:
While Hollywood, though appearing to be universal, excludes several sections of the worlds population from participating as equals in its
17
offerings, Bollywood it would seem offers surreptitious enjoyment, even voyeuristic pleasure, to those whom it does not even address directly.
In the second part, Makarand explores how Bollywood is being both shaped by, but is also shaping, the newly globalised Indian. With a complex and evolving history of representation of Indians abroad, Bollywood has not just shown sensitivity to changing social, cultural and economic ethnoscapes, but has also served the education of the Indian masses on how to regard Indian expatriates. Bollywood is not only a cinema of allurements, but also of pedagogical engagement: rather than being merely escapist, Bollywood is also educative, teaching folks back at home how postmodern relationships develop and work themselves out. Srilata Ravi approaches Bollywood in Australia from what she calls a gastropoetics standpoint of Bollywood. India is a land of diverse food culture and Cook Cook Hota Hai : Indian Cinema, Kitchen Culture and Diaspora is an exploration of not only the role of cooks and cooking that are a key feature of Indian cinema, but also how a gastropoetics of Bollywood permits Indian films set in Australia to be compared with those set within other diasporic South Asian communities. Ravi selects four films for discussion, all with professional male cooks as the protagonist: Saif Ali Khan as the suave Nikhil Arora, architect-turned-chef in Melbourne in Salaam Namaste ; Madhavan as an unsophisticated cook in the Tamil movie, Nala Damayanthi (2003), also set in Melbourne; Madhavan again in Ramji Londonwaley (2005), the Hindi remake of Nala Damayanthi set in London; and Amitabh Bachchan as the sixty-four-year-old Buddhadev Gupta, owner and head chef of Spice 6 in London in Cheeni Kum (2007). The four films depict the South Asian kitchen as a transnational space through which professionals, students, tourists, permanent residents and illegal immigrants all pass, and, following a close analysis of the transnational interplay between economics and social practice, Ravi concludes:
As owners of small businesses with financial and cultural interests in multiple locations, Nick, Buddha and both the Ramjis are prime examples of a new breed of entrepreneurs who contribute to the efficient circulation of talent, capital and revenues in a transnational world.
Like the films she discusses, Ravis study adds a new dimension to culinary politics in the Indian diaspora. She exposes the subtle cultural politics of vernacular cinema and permits a more nuanced understanding of the nationalist politics of global Indian cinema.
18
Anjali Gera Roys chapter, Rangla Punjab in Canberra, Yamla Jatt Folk Night in Sydney, Oorja Nights in Melbourne, considers the ways in which Indian popular cinema has broadened the appeal in Australia of Bhangra, music associated with Punjabi harvest ritual and naturalised globally as a Bollywood song and dance formula. As Roy notes, Bollywood Bhangra, a new Bhangra genre produced in Bollywood, has played a significant role in enabling Bhangras crossover from regional folk music to national, and now global, popular music. Through interviews conducted with Australian Bhangra practitioners in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne, Roy explores how Bhangra, while serving as the most important ethnocultural signifier of Punjabi identity in Australia, also circulates in Australia through the overlapping global flows of British Asian music and Hindi cinema, placing it at the centre of the production of Asian youth cultures in Australia. Yet Roy also discovers that an increasing number of non-Punjabi fans have developed a taste for Bhangra, due to its inclusion in crossover films like Monsoon Wedding (2001), Bend it Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004), as well as in Bollywood hits like Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006). In Orbits of Desire: Bollywood as Creative Industry in Australia, Debjani Ganguly explores Bollywood as soft power. Using Joseph Nyes idea that creative and cultural contributions to the public sphere are as important as military or economic power, she argues that it is Bollywood that is most responsible for the global allure of India. According to her, in the last two decades, the fulcrum of Bollywoods global power has shifted from the transnational impact of popular Bombay films to lucrative zones of extra-cinematic visuality, which include live dance and musical spectacles, fashion, food, tourism, art exhibitions, aerobic fitness centres, dance classes, music albums, television productions and an array of other digital and web-based modalities of entertainment. These products create a broader market than just cinema-going South Asians in the diaspora. Examining two case studies from Canberra, Bollywood Dimensions, Canberras first dance and fitness school run by Anshu Srivastava and Project Samosa, an intercultural youth film project conducted by Australian National University (ANU) students, Ganguly concludes that:
Bollywood, in the eyes of the Australian political and cultural establishment, now appears to epitomise an all-encompassing Indian performative modality in a first world multicultural society, as also a placeholder for Indian cultural diversity in late modernity.
19
The last academic paper in the volume is Sweet Dreams are Made of This: Bollywood and Transnational South Asians in Australia by Devleena Ghosh. Ghosh starts by commenting on the viewing habits of Indo-Fijian immigrants to Australia, for whom Bollywood films and TV serials are part of a weekly family ritual essential to feeling Indian. She observes, however, that there are intergenerational conflicts and differences in the manner in which these movies and TV shows are viewed. While the older generation insists on being part of their culture and tradition, the younger, often Australian-born, children often find some of their contents uncool, if not ridiculous. At the same time, Bollywood-style parties, Indo-chic and remix music do shape a large part of the identities of young South Asian Australians. Ghosh shows how the experience of the South Asian diaspora in Australia is refracted through prisms of the Bollywood culture industry. This experience, she believes, radically transfigures the concept of Australian, subverting and shaping the way in which a mainstream Australian youth identity is constructed in the public sphere. Yet, while such subversion of the received ideas of what it means to be Australian may produce liminality, such liminality does not necessarily result in aimlessly postmodern or floating selves. Instead, the blurred boundaries and radical re-enchantments of both the past and the present reveal the always contingent, contested nature of subjectivity, a subjectivity grounded in:
a thousand plateaus, subjectivities felt and experienced through the body, through historical landscapes, through domestic spaces, and through performance, as well as through the much more difficult realm of the imaginary, of the impact of ideals and the weight of history.
The volume concludes with an insiders view of the successful bid to attract Harry Baweja to film part of his blockbuster movie, Love Story 2050 (2008), in Adelaide, South Australia. In his interview with Andrew Hassam, AK Tareen, the Senior Trade CommissionerIndia, Government of South Australia, talks about the importance of promoting bilateral ties between South Australia and India and the role of film in attracting Indian trade, investment, tourism and skilled migration to Australia. Prior to accepting his current post, AK Tareen worked for almost twelve years for the Australian Trade Commission in India and was instrumental in attracting the very first Indian film to shoot in Australia, a Tamil film called Indian (1996). As he is based in Chennai, Tareen gives an additional perspective from the South of
20
India, a perspective in particular on Tamil movies made in Australia and which, with lower budgets and production values and with a more restricted language community, fail to attract attention outside Tamil communities, including the Sri Lankan Tamil communities, in Australia. However, as Tareen points out, Tamil films such as Nala Damayanthi and Thiruttu Payale (2006) are nonetheless regarded by Australian trade, film and tourism commissions as important ways of promoting Australia in India, a timely reminder that the appearance of Australia in Indian films has an indirect value over and above headline figures of budgets and box office receipts.
Notes to the Introduction 1 OED OnlineQuarterly Update, 14 June 2001, <http://www.askoxford.com/ pressroom/archive/oedonline>, viewed 30 March 2009. 2 Bollywood Joins the Dictionary, The Times of India, 21 November 2002, <http:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/28909264.cms>, viewed 30 March 2009. 3 Bollywood in Oxford Dictionary, The Times of India, 2 July 2003, <http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/articleshow/54816.cms>, viewed 30 March 2009. 4 R Corliss, Hooray for Bollywood!, Time, 16 September 1996, <http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,985129,00.html?internalid=atm100>, viewed 30 March 2009. 5 Bollywood in Oxford Dictionary. 6 Box office/business for Slumdog Millionaire , Internet Movie Database, <http://www. imdb.com/title/tt1010048/business>, viewed 30 March 2009. 7 ibid. 8 ibid. 9 Personal conversation with the author, 25 March 2009. 10 More on Heyy Babyy, Beth Loves Bollywood, 10 September 2008, <http:// bethlovesbollywood.blogspot.com/2008/09/more-on-heyy-babyy.html>, viewed 31March 2009. 11 Singh is Kinng : the Crew, 2008, <http://www.singhiskinng.com/main-final.htm.html>, viewed 30 March 2009. 12 B Henderson, Bollywood star turns down honorary degree after attacks. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/india/5417702/Bollywood-starturns-down-honorary-degree-after-attacks.html>, viewed 8 August 2009. 13 Attacks on Indians in Australia very disturbing: Aamir Khan. <http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/India/Attacks-on-Indians-in-Australia-very-disturbing-Aamir-Khan-/ articleshow/4598556.cms>, viewed 8 August 2009. 14 Bollywood boycotts Oz over racist attacks on Indians. <http://ibnlive.in.com/news/ bollywood-boycotts-oz-over-racist-attacks-on-indians/94333-8.html>, viewed 12August 2009. 15 Bollywood film set in Australia to focus on attacks. <http://ibnlive.in.com/news/ bollywood-film-set-in-australia-to-focus-on-attacks/95086-8.html>, viewed 12 August 2009. 16 Bollywood film set in Australia to focus on attacks. <http://ibnlive.in.com/news/ bollywood-film-set-in-australia-to-focus-on-attacks/95086-8.html>, viewed 12 August 2009.
21
17 See Michiel Baas PhD dissertation Imagined Mobility. Migration and Transnationalism on Indian Students in Australia, submitted to the University of Netherlands, Amsterdam, 2009. 18 Interview with AK Tareen, Senior Trade CommissionerIndia, Government of South Australia, 27 February 2007; an edited version of this interview appears in the current volume. 19 M Madan, Bollywood Down Under: Imagining New Neighbourhoods, South Asia, vol.13, 2000. 20 A Kasbekar, Pop Culture India! Media, Arts and Lifestyle, ABCClio, Santa Barbara, California, 2006, p. 195. 21 ibid., p. 196. 22 B Jaisinghani, Shooting with a Business Angle, Financial Express (Mumbai), 13 June 2004, <http://www.financialexpress.com/fe_full_story.php?content_id=61229>, viewed 11 June 2005.
22
The Crossover Audience: Mediated Multiculturalism and the Indian Film

Adrian Athique
I cant keep it inside my head anymore! All this preaching by the Western media about what I should appreciate from my own popular culture. One Bride and Prejudice (Gurinder Chadha 2004) comes along aimed at ignorant white audiences, and they lap it up because everything Indian is the flavour of the season.1
Writing in Metro at the end of 2005, Sapna Samant, a trustee of the Asia Film Festival Aotearoa, is stirred into action by a sense of indignation at the appropriation of popular Indian cinema by the machinery of the Western media industry. Recent attempts by Hollywood to sell hybridised Bollywood style to Western audiences and the profusion of Bollywood copy in glossy magazines have all served to threaten Samants sense of ownership and of privileged inside knowledge, over the products of the popular Indian cinema. As Samant puts it: Bombay cinema is my cinema. I know what its all aboutI dont like those Johnny-come-lately ignorant Westerners and media people advising me about it.2 The argument made by Samant is all about authenticity: that the real experience of Indian cinema can only be accessed by those who
23
are steeped in its cultural context and its history. By extension, those viewers must themselves be authentically Indian or, at the very least, India specialists. This is a position open to criticism in a number of respects, but here I will restrict myself to the specific context of cinema, firstly, by pointing out the long-standing influence of Western film fashions on Indian film-making and the frequent appropriation of Hollywood styles, themes and even scripts for the Indian market; and, secondly, by recognising that Indian cinema has long enjoyed popularity with audiences spread across the globe, who have little detailed understanding of Indian society but who have consistently found enjoyment in the mixture of action, eroticism and sentimentality pedalled by the Bombay filmwallahs. In Samants defence, however, it is also fair to say that the breathless insiderism of Western journalists explaining to their readers how to enjoy Indian cinema as kitsch, cult and full of colour is every bit as patronising as the scorn that used to be poured upon Indian films when they were laughably unfashionable. It is understandable, therefore, that all this might annoy anyone with a long-standing commitment to the Indian cinema. It may also prove to be the case that, while the blissful miscomprehension of the more subtle aspects of Indian cinema by viewers in Nigeria or Turkey has had little influence over the workings of the industry itself, the newfound interest by dilettantes in the Anglophone world could have far larger implications for the way that the Indian film industry functions. This, however, brings us to the major omission in Samants narrative, which is that this is not simply a case of appropriation by the machinery of the Western media, it is also an indication of the new strategies devised by the Indian film industry to sell itself more effectively in a global marketplace and of the larger rebranding of India as a global economic power.3
Imagining a Western audience

The notion of a Western viewer is as old as the study of Indian cinema. Since the days of the Indian Film Society movements in the 1950s there has been a comparison between an Indian audience, typified by illiteracy and an enthusiasm for escapist fare and an occidental viewer acculturated to a diet of realism rather than fantasy, drama rather than melodrama and psychological motivation over musical excess.4 Of course, besides the music, this realist model of Western audiences rather contradicts the popular fare consumed in European, North American
24
The Crossover Audience
and Australasian cinemas. It did, perhaps, suit the kind of audiences addressed by art-house cinemas and film festivals, which in Anglophone countries have traditionally been the most common environment for the screening of foreign-language films. Prior to the 1990s, the only Indian films to reach any significant Western audiences were art-house films operating in this niche market. As Jigna Desai puts it:
The phenomenon of the art house is based on positioning foreign films as ethnographic documents of other (national) cultures and therefore as representatives of national cinemas. In particular, foreign Third World films that can be read as portraying the other through cultural difference (i.e., gender and sexual experiences or nativist renderings of rural village life) are deemed as most authentic.5
The art-house audience in the West represents a collection of consumers with various degrees of investment in an ethno-cultural scheme of World Cinema. This coalition of interests might include those with an academic or professional interest either in cinema or in the so-called producing culture. It also encompasses viewers whose consumption of foreign films represents a mixture of autodidacticism and aesthetic pleasure-seeking, gaining them a measure of cosmopolitan cultural capital. Art-house outlets often collocate a Third World exotic with European auteur cinema and with the alternative or independent sector of the host nations local film culture.6 During the last decade, however, Indian films have escaped this aesthetic ghetto and begun to appear in the popular imagination. Part of the reason for this is that South Asians resident in the West and inhabiting the same metropolises as the old art-house audiences have given popular Indian cinema a commercially viable presence in the new context of multiplex exhibition.7 The subsequent ringing of cash registers has instigated a new affection for Indian films in the Western media. The sporadic, derisory remarks of the past have given way to some talking up that has focused upon key figures in the Indian film industry (such as superstar Shah Rukh Khan, former Miss World Aishwarya Rai and director Yash Chopra) who have proved most popular with Indian cinemas diasporic audiences in the West and who have used this popularity to reposition themselves within the international market.8
25
The making of Bollywood

Ashish Rajadhyaksha has described these recent trends and the international rebranding of Indian commercial cinema as a process of Bollywoodisation.9 While the popular press now presents Indian cinema and Bollywood as effectively synonymous, Rajadhyaksha is at pains to make a distinction between the two.10 Rajadhyaksha makes this distinction for two major reasons. These are, firstly, because the cultural industry surrounding the Bollywood brand extends far beyond the production and consumption of feature films and, secondly, because the high-budget gloss and transnational themes of the major Bollywood films are far from representative of the majority of Indian film production. By Rajadhyakshas definition, the Bollywood culture industry does not encompass Indias small art, or parallel, cinema or the regional-language cinemas which constitute the bulk of film production and consumption in the subcontinent. Even as a sector of Hindi cinema, the Bollywood brand appears to exclude the low-budget comedies and vigilante films which constitute the majority of screenings. Instead Bollywood is defined by the high-budget, saccharine, upper middleclass melodrama which represents a tongue-in-cheek repackaging of the masala movie within an affluent, nostalgic and highly exclusive view of Indian culture and society. These productions are consciously transnational and have been increasingly saturated with product placements for global consumer fashions and multinational sponsors.11 So if Bollywood is not the Indian cinema per se, it might be adequately described as the export lager of the Indian cinema, since it is Bollywood productions that dominate Indias film exports, becoming centrally positioned as the trademark Indian film. Indian politicians have recently become keen to emphasise the worldwide popularity of these films and, in particular, their success in key Western markets as ambassadors for Indias growing global ambitions.12 For their part, Indian producers have attempted to consolidate their success in the West by widely promoting the Bollywood brand in a Euro-American market that continues to see itself as the central, hegemonic field of global media culture. Apart from an interest in the box office now being made from Indian films in the West, the newly fashionable status of Indian films amongst Western commentators can also be related to economic shifts in the Indian mediascape itself where Western media concerns are seeking to become major players.13 A further factor at play in the buzz surrounding Bollywood in the West has been the success of a number of directors of Indian origin working within various Western film industries who
26
have produced Indian-themed films which have successfully targeted audiences in the West.14 Despite the obvious differences between these films and mainstream Indian cinema, the films of US-based Mira Nair, Canada-based Deepa Mehta and UK-based Gurinder Chadha have frequently been conflated with Bollywood in the Western media. Both Indian and expatriate directors have benefited from this popular fallacy: mainstream Indian films have been associated, for example, with the success of Nairs Monsoon Wedding (2001), whilst the colour as culture connotations of Bollywood branding have also been used to market the films of non-resident Indian (NRI) directors, such as Chadhas Bride and Prejudice (2004).
The crossover audience

The success of Bollywood and NRI films with niche audiences in the UK has encouraged the staging of events designed to promote Indian films amongst a more mainstream audience. In 2002, the British Film Institute (BFI) organised an extensive showcase of Indian cinema, ImagineAsia, as part of a nationwide Indian Summer festival which also included the use of Bollywood themes in department store merchandise, visual art exhibitions and theatrical productions. This celebration of Indian popular culture under the rubric of multiculturalism was designed to promote Indo-British trade exchanges, emphasise official recognition of Britains large South Asian population and to draw profits from providing a context for the consumption of Indian cultural products by the UKs majority white population. The BFIs ImagineAsia festival of Indian cinema was considered a success, primarily since it drew almost a third of its audience from outside Britains South Asian population.15
ImagineAsia was a hugely successful, all-singing all-dancing masala festival. There hasnt been anything quite like it before. As one of the bfis largest ever events it broke new ground on several fronts: introducing a broader appreciation and mainstreaming of South Asian film cultures to a cross over audience in the UK.16
The term crossover deserves some attention because, as Desai has also observed, its use is synonymous with the quest for white audiences for ethnic media artefacts.17 The crossing described by the term is unidirectional, that is from a niche audience to a larger mainstream
27
audience which promises greater exposure and profits. The term is generally not used, for example, to describe the consumption of mainstream media by niche audiences. The crossover audience for both Indian-produced and NRI-directed films is imagined as a desired market based upon a collective notion of culturally literate cosmopolitan members of the majority population willing to extend their consumption of media cultures (and media as culture). Within the context of multiculturalism, this crossover can be defined as the success of a media artefact located in one ethnic culture with a majority audience located in another. This is because, whilst the logic of multiculturalism challenges the idea of a culturally homogeneous national audience, it continues to assume that there are certain audiences that are commensurate with communities and demographic populations.18 As such, the emphasis on crossover success shifts discussion away from the issues associated with the burden of representation and the relations between cultural producers and black British communities to appealing to white demographic markets, with Indian films becoming integrated into capitalist expansion through the logic and rhetoric of multiculturalism.19 Of course, multiculturalism is not only a rhetorical project, it also constructs and naturalises an industry with both internal and external aspects. Within the host nation a range of leisure industries, providing music, textiles, movies, literature, furniture and food facilitates the acquisition, possession and display of products of foreign cultural provenance. The external interests of the multicultural industry facilitate this trade in commodities between the importing and exporting nation, but are also incorporated with other aspects of interstate trade and the movements, in both directions, of financial, military and ideological capital. In the case of cinema, the celebration of the media projects of other cultures is also related to furthering desires to extend economic opportunities for the national media industry in those markets. Western media companies now view India as a potentially lucrative media market and, with Indian production budgets also increasing dramatically, a number of national industries have been keen to court Indian producers and their appetite for offshore production and post-production facilities. The British have despatched industry delegations, government ministers and even Prince Charles to Mumbai in recent years to drum up trade.20 Australia has also been in on the action, with millions of Bollywood dollars entering Australia in the last ten years, leading to the setting-up of the Film, Arts, Media and Entertainment (FAME) chapter of the Australia-India Business Council and trips to Indias film capital by
28
leading Australian politicians, such as Queenslands then-Premier Peter Beattie in 2004.21
The crossover industry

Australian film producer John Winter believes that, despite current high expectations in India, only a small number of Indian movies will actually have the potential to reach audiences in the West beyond the niche ethnic and art-house audiences. According to Winter, a foreignlanguage film will not succeed at the national level in Australia unless it consciously addresses a crossover aesthetic in both plot and style. However, Winter believes that it is possible to make such translations, since:
Indian films arent that different from Australian/American films in terms of structure, in terms of storytelling. Theyre linear, they have the same use of past, present and future that we use as devices. They have the same characterisation in terms of goodies and baddies and conflict and resolution of conflict.22
Winter claims that some elements of the standard Indian feature would require modification in order to cultivate an Australian audience. Winter identifies the minor hurdles to be overcome as adjusting movie length and making the song sequences accessible to a Western viewer. A more serious obstacle is the poor fit in market terms between the audiences already inclined to consume foreign-language films and audiences oriented around the kind of commercial entertainment typified by the Bollywood film:
Where they are inaccessible is foreign language for a start, so youve got a foreign language film but it is obviously clearly commercial. So were used to seeing foreign language films that are designed forwell more likely go for them that are art-house, you know. That collection of the Australian public will go to see an art-house film, theyll got to see a French film with subtitles, thats OK, but if it was a totally commercial film, which the Indian ones are, I can see that with subtitles you have a crossing of demographics.23
Despite these difficulties, there have been a number of one-off festivals directed at mainstreaming Indian commercial cinema, such
29
as Bollywood at Bondi (2002) and Bollywood at Cremorne (2003). A more substantial vehicle is the Beginners Guide to Bollywood or Bollywood Masala festivals which have toured Australias state capitals annually since 2003. All of these events have been directed towards developing a white, urban, crossover audience for Indian films and have been accompanied in the Australian press by the descriptions of Bollywood chic so offensive to Sapna Samant.24 Festival co-director of Bollywood Masala, Marcus Georgiades, stated that the primary aim was to introduce Indian cinema to Australian audiences, who have never seen an Indian film other than Monsoon Wedding and to build the crossover market.25 The Bollywood Masala festival has each year begun with a ten-day run at Fox Studios Australia. This twenty-nine-hectare site, formerly the Sydney Showground, is a movie production studio in Sydneys inner city, conjoined with a shopping and entertainment complex. The venue is situated next to Sydneys famous cricket ground and exemplifies the ethos of multiplex exhibition, although a site of this scale might be better described as a megaplex.26 Ben Goldsmith and Tom ORegan describe the Fox Studios site as both a locomotive for production and a stargate, a source of media glamour and a symbolic expression of an international, entrepreneurial city.27 Hoyts, one of the major, nationwide Australian cinema exhibition chains, operates a flagship cinema at Fox Studios known as La Premiere, along with Hoyts Cinema Paris, a smaller four-screen, art-house venue. According to their publicity, Cinema Paris is dedicated to local, national & international art-house through to quality films of a wider appeal and has become the new home for International film festivals. Cinema Paris has therefore hosted festivals of Spanish, Mexican, Serbian, Irish and, most recently, Bollywood films.28 Launched as a Beginners Guide to Bollywood at the Cinema Paris in September 2003, the festival was intended to serve as an introduction to Indian films for the Australian mainstream, rather than catering to their existing audience and it was with this in mind that the eleven movies screened in 2003 were drawn from the biggest hits of the last decade.29 Relaunched the following year as the Bollywood Masala festival, it offered metropolitan Australia the major Indian blockbusters of 2004 alongside a couple of art-house features.30 Here, a festival trailer preceded each screening, with a filmed introduction by patron Yash Chopra and advertisements from festival sponsors.31 For the opening night of Bollywood Masala, sari-clad hostesses showered festival-goers with petals as they entered the cinema. The opening film on two screens, Main Hoon Na (2004), was introduced by the Indian High
30
Commissioner in Australia.32 As well as the film screenings, Bollywood Masala also included Q & A sessions with young directors, Rohan Sippy and Nikhil Advani and a ticketed opening-night party which sold itself on the chance to meet the directors. This was held at Arena, an adjacent hospitality bar within the Fox Studios complex and was attended by a mix of local Indian fans and Australian media personnel. Outside the festival schedule, the Cinema Paris is now a regular venue for a small number of Indian films throughout the year. Indian films are also being shown at a select number of Hoyts cinemas in the major cities, making the involvement of the Hoyts chain crucial to mainstreaming Indian films in Australia. According to Mark Chamberlain, national film programmer for Hoyts Cinemas and the man responsible for making Bollywood films accessible to Australians:
Bollywood is a trend thats taking over the whole world and Australia is no exception. On a trip to Birmingham in early 2002, I visited one of the citys multiplexes. Out of its 12 screens, five were showing Bollywood movies. I remember asking myself if there was any reason why the same couldnt happen in Australia. After all, we pride ourselves on our multiculturalism.
Figure 2: Indian Film Festival 2004
31
Chamberlain, a die-hard fan of Bollywood movies wasted no time and, by mid-2002, Devdas, Indias first movie to be officially selected at Cannes (2002) also became the first-ever Bollywood flick to be screened at Hoyts.33 The story behind the mainstreaming activities of Hoyts is a complex one, arising from their partnership with MG Distribution who supplies the festival features.34 MG Distribution, in turn, has close links with one of Indias premier production houses, Yash Chopras Yash Raj Films (2005).35 It was in the context of securing production work that Melbourne-based Black Cat Productions approached director Yash Chopra at the International Indian Film Awards (IIFA) in Malaysia in 2002.36 According to Mitu Lange, co-director of the Bollywood Masala festivals and of MG Distribution, Chopra offered instead the distribution rights for his movies in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. MG Distribution was the new company that arose from this discussion, seeking to build a market for commercial Indian movies through mainstream Australian exhibitors. Lange describes their nascent audience:
Our first release was on 20 December [2002] with two really big films. One was Yash Chopras Saathiya. Another was Kaante. We were screening them at Forum Cinema, which is one of the heritage cinemas in MelbourneIt[]s been really interesting for me to see the different kinds of audiences that weve been havingWhen we started it was just Indian students, and a few families. And when they started knowing the films were all subtitled for sure, then we started getting a lot of Indian students with their Australian spouses and their Australian friends and so on. And after a while we started getting Greek and Italian families then there was a significant amount from the gay community who came. They bought the CDs and we had a little bar at the Forum and they had scotch with a samosa and they just loved the film.37
Recognising that the mainstream market is limited compared to the number of movies available for release, the strategy of MG Distribution is to ensure that a small number of the best Indian movies get a mainstream release at key sites in the main Australian cities. The Bollywood Masala festival is the major publicity flagship for their activities and, according to Sydneys Sunday Telegraph, has become one of the most popular film events in Australia.38 Lange claims that in the course of its tour across Australia in 20045, the festival recorded an attendance of 40,000-odd people of which 80 percent were non-Indians.39 With an explicitly crossover mandate, the festival consciously addresses a
32
cosmopolitan, inner-city consumer, sensitive to global fashions and can rely on widespread coverage from mainstream press publications. This promotional drive to create a crossover audience in Australia has, however, to be seen as a qualified success because, while the profile of film festivals in the inner city may be high compared to everyday exhibition practices, such events are only able to access a relatively small component of the nationwide, Australian cinema audience. In an effort both to reduce the level of piracy in the Australian market and to relocate Indian films away from the grocery stores associated with the Indian community and into mainstream outlets, MG Distribution teamed up with another Australian distribution company, Madman Entertainment, in April 2004. Madman Entertainment produces and distributes niche media in playback formats (including Japanese anime, Australian and other independent film, Asian martial arts and sports features). As a joint venture, the two companies launched the Bollywood Masala label to distribute Bollywood titles in the mainstream Australian playback market. Lange announced the new label at the opening of Bollywood Masala 2004 at Cinema Paris, along with a polite plea to festival-goers to stay away from the video pirates. The first two titles on the label, Chalte Chalte (2003) and Armaan (2003), were publicised in the festival programme in terms favourable to a mainstream viewer (Shah Rukh Khan was presented as the Indian Tom Cruise and Amitabh Bachchan as the Indian Clint Eastwood) and these and subsequent titles can now be found in the art-house sections of some of Australias major rental franchises. Another formal partnership between legitimate Indian film distributors and the mainstream Australian media was established when fifty-one per cent of MG Distribution was acquired by Swish in October 2007, creating Swish MG Distribution, now handling both theatrical and playback distribution in Australia and expanding its operations in NewZealand.
Crossing over: a case study

In the first place, the Bollywoodisation of Indian cinema in Australia clearly underscores the influence of global media fashions in the US and UK upon the Australian market. As part of these trends, Englishlanguage movies such as Moulin Rouge! (2001) or The Guru (2002) have plagiarised (and thus popularised) Bollywood movie stylistics, as have broadcast advertisements in Australia for yoghurt and cars. So, whilst
33
a mainstream audience for Indian movies remained putative during 20032005, when the following case study was conducted, the profile of Indian films had undeniably been heightened within the intertextual and transnational media sphere operating across Australian society. As early as 2003, The Australian was confident enough to claim:
Indian films make up the most enthusiastically fluorescent, kinetic and kaleidoscopic national cinema anywhere and slowly but surely Australian audiences are succumbing to the charms of these all-singing, all-dancing love stories.40
The veracity of such a proposition rests of course on how the words slowly and surely are interpreted. In order to explore this extraordinary claim, I conducted interviews with a number of young Australians who showed an interest in Indian films. During these interviews, I raised the question of how likely it seemed to them that a significant crossover audience for Indian films would emerge in Australia. Of these interviewees, the Indian-Australian respondents were in broad agreement, based upon their own perceptions of Anglo-Australians, that there was little chance of Indian films succeeding with a mainstream audience. Priyas response is simple and direct in this regard:
Not Aussies, noI dont think thats going to happen. I mean, noI think that Indian movies are too different to be something that everyone might want to watch. Theyre dealing with different things that you wouldnt see in normal movies.41
In another response, Asha emphasised the unwillingness of Australians to watch foreign-language films. She believed that Indian films cannot be adequately translated for mainstream consumption in Australia and, at the same time, she also felt that attempts to undertake such a translation would probably alienate the niche audience that may be prepared to watch Indian films:
No. Simply the language barrier. You could screen Bootmen, a completely Australian movie in the UK and people would still go and watch it. But you cant put in an Indian movie, in a different language and expect people to sit, people want to go there and turn their mind off, they dont want to sit there and read the screenIt wouldnt work and people who, the ones that wanted to watch it because it was an Indian film, would want Indian accents, the ones who wanted to know what it was all
34
about would just go thats the cheesiest thing Ive ever seen and walk out of there or enjoy the backseat very much.42
Another Indian-Australian interviewee, Leela, observed that, from her experience, there was simply little chance of mainstream Australians bringing themselves into contact with commercial Indian films in the first place, since they tended to hold negative preconceptions regarding the quality of Indian films. Leela described the audiences she encountered at Indian film screenings as overwhelmingly Asian. However, Leela did think that the commercial fortunes of some art films might be different as they attract a different audience and are judged by different standards from more commercial features:
Not a mainstream audience. I dont think so. Not really. Im just going on my own personal experience but most of my friends here are Australian. And Ive tried to get them to come with me, but theyre just not interested. And a few of them make fun of the movies and I think, I dont think it will really catch onI dont see a lot of Australian people wanting to watch them. Like even when they showed the movie, they showed Main Hoon Na, in Wollongong. It was all Indians or Malays or people from the Middle East. There were no others there.43
In contrast to the consensus of an unenthusiastic Aussie audience provided by Indian-Australians, my Anglo-Australian interviewees were more hesitant about providing a generic description of this imagined collective. This is perhaps because the implicit positioning of a mainstream Australian audience as a body of white viewers made it imperative for them to consider their own positioning within this imagined community, leading to more qualified descriptions of this audience.
I think thats a really hard question. I think if people are like me, theyll love it, but I know that, even with raving about a couple of the movies that Ive seen, you know, the looks that I get from...like what the hype about it? I think it has to be seen to be believed. And I dont know that theres a great deal of exposure like if people are going to pay to go and see a movie, they want to know that theyre going to enjoy it before they go and see it. And I think theres still that element of uncertainty, not knowing whats going to be in an Indian movie to really enjoy, you know. So I think people might psych themselves out before they actually get there. But I think if people were to actually give it a go,
35
Ithink itd definitely be a following in Australia. Id like to think that there would be anyway. It could go either way.44 It depends on the audience, like I know are a lot of people who are interested in that sort of thing, but you need to appreciate their culture to actually really understand what the film is aboutI think Australians are a bit, well, they have no culture or they dontwell, theyre always after just whats on at the time. They dont think aboutits action thats all, reallyTheyre influenced by other countries like America. Their films appeal mostly here. And, yeah, everyone is focused on American ways and they dont reallyAustralia is still developing their own, like, their own sort of culture. So its not as diverse as what an Indian culture is. But were a young country; so, yeah, were influenced by other countries too easily.45
In order to further explore some of the key claims made by these interviewees regarding the potential interest (or lack of it) in Indian films by an Australian audience, I conducted a screening survey with a group of ninety Australians in March 2004.46 Participants were asked to complete a paper questionnaire before, during and after being shown twenty-minute excerpts from four different contemporary Indian films.47 The questionnaire prompted participants to provide short qualitative responses describing their preconceptions, analysis and reaction to the films. Participants were also asked to rate each film clip on a numerical scale. No introduction to Indian cinema was given prior to the exercise. Following the screenings, participants were asked to contribute their overall impressions of Indian films, based upon the screened excerpts and to comment on the suitability of the films for an Australian audience. Given the limited scope and artificial nature of the sample, this body of respondents is not presented here as directly representative of an Australian mass audience. These people are, nonetheless, taken to be members of a wider audience and familiar with the content and social context of the Australian media environment. In terms of their previous knowledge, this group did not prove to be a completely medianave community in relation to Indian films. Twenty-four participants indicated that they had previously seen at least one Indian film against sixty-six who claimed to have had no previous exposure. Of those who had seen an Indian film before, the most common context of viewing was the publicly-owned multicultural broadcaster SBS, which occasionally screens Indian films, the majority of which are parallel or art
36
features. This would explain the following statement of expectation by one respondent, who expected to see: Mud bricks, coloured sarongs, a very slow temporal building up of themes and slow, reserved, more lifelike playing-out of the story. However, the influence of the Bollywood brand could be clearly seen in some other expectations given prior to the screenings as well as the transmission of this notion through the products of Western popular culture that have claimed to be influenced by it:
I expect to see cortosans [sic]. Based on what the Moulin rouge based its play on, full of dancing Ive a vague idea that Indian cinema is often referred to as bollywood and that it takes a lot of conventions from western film. Such as the roles of characters e.g., the hero, the mafia boss, the mother, I think I remember some of this from comments in the movie The Guru. music, singing and dancing, ideas of Bollywood, cultural/national identity emphasised, subtitles, national e.g., religious/cultural themes, use of colour + film techniques e.g., like music clips.
Some respondents, however, displayed a more definite conception of the rudiments of popular Indian cinema in their expectations, as indicated by this example:
I expect to see a movie with Indian characters who struggle between class within a romance. I expect also to see some basis of religion and males being the predominant characters.
Overall, Indian cinema was expected to be mainly concerned with religiosity and ethnic colour. For a minority of respondents, their preconceptions of Indian films were clearly influenced by the notion that India was a backward and poverty-stricken country and therefore likely to produce fairly unsophisticated cinema. Examples of these type of responses were Bad films, cheap & tacky, low budget, not as clearly edited as American films and I dont expect there to be so much technological details in it. For some other respondents who seemed inclined to see Indian culture in a more positive light, expectations proved to be strikingly similar: Indian films were expected to present the more simple aesthetics of a traditional society untainted by modernity and capitalist consumerism. Accordingly, having watched the film clips, the majority of the survey group displayed surprise that
37
Indian films were so convincingly modern, where modernity was conflated with Western culture and, in particular, with Hollywood cinema. Although a few respondents were scornful of the films as cheesy, the majority of the group were pleasantly surprised to find that Indian films were not too dissimilar to Hollywood films and therefore more accessible than they had expected them to be. Here are some representative responses:
There was a lot more variety than I expecteda lot more modern, my impression before this on Indian film was that it was far more traditional, and reflective of traditional Indian values. I expected a much more traditional Indian film, in terms of costume, sound + themes. However was much more modernwestern influenced than anticipated. I enjoyed watching Indian film much more than anticipated. Theyre really entertaining, and I like the romance theme. It reminds me of the type of movies I enjoyHollywood-type romantic comedies. Theyre beautiful & well-shot which I appreciate in films.
A further finding made by the survey exercise challenges the common wisdom that the biggest obstacle separating Indian films from a Western audience is the proliferation of song and dance sequences. Of the respondents who did describe the Indian films viewed in favourable terms and even some of the more equivocal respondents, it was the musical interludes that seemed to emerge as the most popular element:
Its something different and Indian films seem to be quite entertaining. I also like the high levels of music and dancing. I thought the acting wasnt too good, plots and story lines were kind of cheesy + fake but I did like the action and suspense and characters in some of the films. I also thought the music video parts were interesting.
Sixty-three of the ninety participants expressed an interest in seeing more Indian films in the future. Concluding the exercise with a collective effort to imagine the possibility of a crossover audience in Australia, members of the survey group were asked to provide comments in response to the following question: What do you think it would it take for Indian films to gain a significant audience in Australia?:
38
give everybody in Australia a head re-adjustmentmost Australians probably wouldnt get past the subtitles. Marketing. Cinemas willing to show it would be a good start. If proven to work somewhere else in world, e.g., US or Britain, Australia would follow lead. a great deal. I dont think they would get an audience. We are too happily saturated with American products. Our cinema culture is American. I think it would be difficult. Perhaps if they use less imitation of Hollywood and more reliance on cultural differences and reality, they might find an audience that appreciates difference. Less Americanisation in our youth. I work for a cinema and most of our customers are teens or young people. These people are very Americanised so much so that watching foreign films would hardly occur to them. a story everyone can relate to, for instance a story envolving [sic] Indian cultural which is common to Australia. Ultimately though, interesting unique storylines and bright and witty scripts.
In contrast to their own generally favourable response to the screenings, the survey group were overwhelmingly sceptical about mainstream success for Indian films in Australia. There was clear evidence here of the third-person effect, where the description of a wider Australian audience took on notably lumpen overtones. These responses also appeared to bear out some of the findings of Bennett, Emmison and Frows Australian Everyday Cultures Survey.48 Bennett et al. found that the natural point of comparison for Australians in this age range commenting on popular culture is overwhelmingly US products, rather than Australian ones. At the same time, however, these responses also indicate that Australians maintain a strong sense of national identification. Taken together, these two points of identification contributed to an interesting feature of these responses to Indian films, where a shifting position was often adopted between a subjective identification with Australian or Western culture.49 This was evidenced by the comparison of Indian films with an Australian aesthetic preference that was in one instance conflated with a larger Western culture and, in another, described in terms of an antagonistic stance towards an American media imperialism.
39
Despite the fact that audience research in this context is almost inevitably market-research in some form, it is not possible, on the basis of the comments presented here, to establish clearly whether Indian films will, or will not, develop a larger audience in Australia. What has been demonstrated here, I think, is a degree of the lack of knowledge of modern Indian culture decried by Sapna Samant as ignorance. However, these responses also appear to indicate a growing awareness of Indian cinema as a potential choice of entertainment media due to the very promotional activities that have produced Samants indignation. Samant, being a director of an art-house festival, would surely also recognise that what we are seeing here is the weakening of the hegemony of the art-house aesthetic over the appreciation of foreignlanguage film culture. As such, the performance of cultural literacy in that arena is now likely to coexist with more populist appropriations of foreign films for the purposes of relatively uninformed eye-candy entertainment of the kind pioneered in the 1970s by that other Asian giant, the Hong Kong martial arts movie.50
Conclusion
The rebranding of commercial Indian films in the West as postmodern pop art, as exemplified by the trope of Bollywood, is very much part of the continuing cycle of orientalism. From the Western perspective, it is possible to discern a certain cultural ennui couched in this latest commercialisation of liberal multiculturalism as cosmopolitan ethnic chic, whilst in India the imagination on-screen of a transnationallyorientated middle class and its occupation and consumption of the West represents the symbolic counterweight of the orientalist binary.51 It is imperative, therefore, to recognise that any discussion of cultural consumption, which juxtaposes East and West, remains powerfully inflected by the historical exercise of power in the Indo-European encounter. The relative lack of knowledge amongst Australians concerning India also has to be placed in a wider historical context. The separation of India from Australias Asian concerns, despite their Commonwealth and sporting connections, has resulted in a large part from the divergent strategies of the two countries during the Cold War. Whilst India has long occupied perhaps the most significant space in the imperial imagination of the British, Australian conceptions of Asia have always been fixed upon North and South-East Asian countries. Thus, Indians
40
in Australia are generally referred to as Indians, rather than Asians (which is the signifier used in the UK due to its historical role in Asia and its relative lack of migrants from China or Vietnam). As such, in Australia, where the South Asian proportion of the population is much less than it is in the UK, despite showing strong recent growth,52 the consumption side of the engagement with Bollywood has been inspired by the global circulation of fashion trends as opposed to a domestic multicultural agenda. There are changes afoot, however, as migration from the subcontinent to Australia has increased. Australias relations with India are also going through a period of re-evaluation, due to Indias considerable success in the global IT industry and the identification of the potential spending power of Indias middle classes, regarded as an emerging market for restless global capital.53 Indias rebranding also results from the desire of the advanced Western countries to find a balance to Chinas growing economic clout and, perhaps, an awareness of the significance of India as a major power on the Eastern edge of the Muslim heartlands in the Middle East. As such, a new picture of India is emerging in the pages of English-language news and business glossies, replacing its previous role as spokesman for the traditional societies of the Third World with a new role as a dynamic, modernising and capitalist society, amenable to incorporation into the New World Order. Beyond the geopolitical context, the Bollywood fad can also be seen as the latest manifestation of Indias status as one of the most successful nations in the former Third World to take advantage of the appropriation of its cultural produce in Western markets. India has always been one of the heavyweights for multicultural products: from rustic tribal jewellery, oriental fabrics, sixties-style spiritualism, ethnocultural and adventure tourism, new-age music, exotic foodstuffs, ethnographic texts and new literatures. Popular Indian films have now joined this considerable bankroll as another source of foreign exchange earnings and another form of cultural currency in the ongoing encounter between India and its highly significant Western other. As such, the machinery of Western appropriation clearly functions with the support of an equally significant machinery in the Indian economy which sells the idea of India abroad. In this particular case, it remains to be seen whether the current flirtation with Bollywood will be just a passing fashion or an ongoing addition to the cultural repertoire of metropolitan Australia. In my final response to Samant, it is worth pointing out that the promise of an off-the-peg experience of authenticity is one of the primary strategies
41
employed in the marketing of multiculturalism (and specifically mediaculturalism). This is, in almost every case, a fallacy convenient to all of those involved. As such, the dusting-off of Indian popular cinema and its new life as the camp, glamorous and low-context Bollywood is typical, rather than atypical, of marketing Asian cultures in Australia. Nonetheless, the wider circulation of Indian films and the spin-off of Bollywood club cultures and Bollywood dance schools emerging in the Australian cities, are helping to make the Bollywood dance routine the acceptable, Western-friendly, face of multiculturalism in Australia at a time when other markers of difference, such as the hejab, have become symbols of conflict and irrational fear for the white majority.54 Enthusiasm for Bollywood is thus one of the more benevolent examples of Western ignorance and should perhaps be encouraged, rather than disparaged, by those located in the internationalist, enlightenment values of the film festival circuit. Indeed, it may be more important than ever to avoid confusing a lack of knowledge with real ignorance.
Notes 1 S Samant, Appropriating Bombay cinema: why the Western world gets Bollywood so wrong, Metro, Winter 2005, p. 84. 2 ibid., p. 86. 3 P Stahlberg, Brand India: the storyline of a superpower in the making, Media and Identity in Asia, CD-ROM, Curtin University of Technology, Sarawak, 2006. 4 R Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2000. 5 J Desai, Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film, Routledge, London, 2004, p. 39. 6 For a long time, the art-house audience was the normative taste culture addressed by academic film studies. Interestingly, the turn towards audience studies has been accompanied by a parallel shift towards the products of popular cinema as the object of study. Together, these developments have had the curious effect of making the normative spectator of the previous generation one of the least researched audiences of all. 7 F Kerrigan & Mustafa F Ozbilgin, Art for the masses or art for the few?: ethical issues of film marketing in the UK, International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, vol. 7, no. 2, 2002, p. 2002. 8 R Dwyer, Indian values and the diaspora: Yash Chopras films of the 1990s, West Coast Line, Autumn 2000. 9 A Rajadhyaksha, The Bollywoodization of the Indian cinema: cultural nationalism in a global arena, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003. 10 ibid., p. 28. 11 R Inden, Transnational class, erotic arcadia and commercial utopia in Hindi films, in C Brosius and M Butcher (eds), Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India, Sage, New Delhi, 1999; R Kaur, Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema Through A Transnational Lens, Sage, New Delhi, 2005. 12 S Swaraj, Keynote address on entertainment, ethnic media and the diasporic identity, Pravasi Bharatiya Divas, New Delhi 2003, <http://www.indiaday.org/pbd1/pbdsushmaswaraj.asp>, viewed 23 September 2004.
42
13 D McMillin, Localizing the global: television and hybrid programming in India, International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2001; M. Butcher, Transnational Television, Cultural Identity and Change: When Star Came To India, Sage, New Delhi, 2003; D Page & W Crawley, The transnational and the national: changing patterns of influence in the South Asian TV market, JK Chalaby (ed.), Transnational Television Worldwide: Towards a New Media Order, IB Tauris, London & New York, 2005. 14 Desai, Beyond Bollywood. 15 A White & P Rughani, ImagineAsia Evaluation Report, BFI, London, 2003, <http://www. bfi.org.uk/about/policy/pdf/imagineasia-evaluation.pdf >, viewed 4 March 2004. 16 ibid., p. 9 17 Desai, Beyond Bollywood, p. 66. 18 ibid., 19 ibid. 20 Prince Charles kicks off Bollywood film, BBC Online World Edition, 4 November 2003, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3240547.stm>, viewed 4 November 2003; Bollywood targets UK movie base, BBC Online World Edition, 9 February 2004, <http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3471723.stm>, viewed 9 February 2004; Jowell enticing Bollywood to UK, BBC Online World Edition, 15 March 2004, <http://news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3513442.stm>, viewed 25 March 2004. 21 Queensland Government attracts Indian film industry to the Smart State, Films and Casting Temple, <http://www.filmsandcastingtemple.com/media/premier%20beatie. html>. viewed 12 March 2004. 22 John Winter, interview 3 July 2003. 23 ibid. 24 See, for example, E Tadros, Get into India, Sydney Morning Herald, 29 August 2003; S Mahonen, Bollywood set to bowl us over, Stonnington Leader, 19 November 2003; A Arora & A Moses, Bolly good show, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 September 2004; AArora, Planet Bollywood, Sunday Telegraph Sunday Magazine, 14 August 2005. 25 Bollywood magic captures down under, Press Trust of India, 15 September 2003. 26 CR Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes and Global Culture, Duke University Press, Durham and London. 27 B Goldsmith & T ORegan, Locomotives and stargates: inner-city studio complexes in Sydney, Melbourne and Toronto, International Journal of Cultural Policy, vol. 10, no. 1, 2004. 28 Hoyts Cinema Paris, <http://hoyts.ninemsn.com.au/cinema/cinemaparis.asp>, viewed 29 March 2005. 29 The ten-day roster for the Beginners Guide to Bollywood in 2003 included the following titles: AKS (2001), Asoka (2001), Devdas (2002), Dil Se (1998), Dil To Pagalhai (1997), Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Fiza (2000), Hero (2003), Khabi Khushi Khabhie Gham (2001), Lagaan (2001), Saathiya (2002). 30 The ten-day roster for Bollywood Masala in 2004 included the following titles: Main Hoon Na (2004), 3 Deewarein (2003), Ab Tak Chappan (2003), Chameli (2004), Chokher Bali (2003), Hum Tum (2004), Khakee (2003), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Kuch Na Kaho (2003), Main Madhuri Dixit Banna Chahti Hoon (2003), Munna Bhai MBBS (2003), Meenaxi: Tale of 3 Cities (2003). 31 Bollywood Masala received sponsorship from a range of Australian concerns: Plan Australia (an overseas child sponsorship scheme), World Movies (a pay-TV foreign and art-house cinema channel), Sharwoods (the international food company), SBS Radio, Australias Health Insurance Commission (with a Bollywood-themed advertisement), Australian carrier Qantas (which had recently launched a direct service to India) and tourism operator Intrepid Travel. 32 Global synchronicities came into play here as the Commissioner introduced the film, a hostage drama which centres on terrorists who take over an upper-class Indian college. The tragic events of the high school siege in Beslan in the Russian Federation Republic
43
of North Ossetia had unfolded over the proceeding days, prompting the Commissioner to remind the festival audience that India, like Russia and Australia, was also deeply involved in a war on terror. 33 A. Arora, Planet Bollywood, Sunday Telegraph Magazine, 14 August 2005, p. 21. 34 MG Distribution, <http://www.mgdistribution.com.au>, viewed 1 April 2005. 35 Yash Raj Films, <http://www.yashrajfilms.com/>, viewed 10 February 2005. 36 In an attempt to capitalise on growing press interest abroad, leading figures in the Indian film industry launched the International Indian Film Awards (IIFA) in 2000. The IIFA is an Oscars-style glamour event, designed to promote Indian cinema on the international stage. The first event was held at Londons Millennium Dome in 2000 and subsequently the IIFA have been held in Sun City, South Africa (2001), Genting Highlands, Malaysia (2002), Johannesburg, South Africa (2003), Singapore (2004) and Amsterdam (2005). 37 Mitu Lange, interview October 2003; Akash Arora claimed in 2005 that at The Midnight Shift on Sydneys Oxford Street, theres now a popular Bollywood drag show (Arora, Planet Bollywood, p. 21). 38 Arora, Planet Bollywood, p. 21. 39 Lange in Arora, Planet Bollywood, p. 22. 40 R Higson, Adding substance to song and dance, The Australian, 27 August 2003, p. 12. 41 Priya, interview 15 August 2003. 42 Asha, interview 20 August 2003. 43 Leela, interview 10 September 2004. 44 Carly, interview 12 September 2004. 45 David, interview 30 August 2004. 46 Participants in this exercise comprised a body of students at the University of Wollongong enrolled in a number of disciplines, who were taking a subject entitled Film Form and Style. The survey group comprised largely domestic students, although there were fifteen international exchange students who also took part (mostly US citizens but also including three Koreans and one Japanese). The age range of the group was 1834, with two thirds of participants aged 1921. The gender balance of the group was approximately 2.5 females to each male. Only one participating student was of a South Asian background (Tamil). 47 The film clips were taken from Dil Chatha Hai (2001), Supari (2001), Devdas (2002) and Boom (2003). 48 T Bennett, M Emmison & J Frow, Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1999. 49 In the context of discussing popular culture in Australia, Western culture would seem also to be a cipher for Anglophone, rather than European, culture. 50 For an examination of the appropriation of Hong Kong cinema by audiences in India, see S V Srinivas, Hong Kong action film in the Indian B circuit, InterAsia Cultural Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 2003. 51 R Kaur, Viewing the West through Bollywood: a celluloid Occident in the making, Contemporary South Asia, vol. 11, no. 2, 2002. 52 C Voigt-Graf, Indians at home in the Antipodes: migrating with PhDs, bytes or kava in their bags, in B Parekh, G Singh & S Vertovec (eds), Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora, Routledge, London and New York, 2003. 53 L Fernandes, Nationalizing the global: media images, cultural politics and the middle class in India, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 22, 2000; R Dwyer, Indian values and the diaspora: Yash Chopras films of the 1990s, West Coast Line, Autumn 2000. 54 This is perhaps ironic, given that the appropriation of Middle Eastern music and dance traditions by Bombay cinema has made a major contribution to Indian film culture.
44

Bollywood in Australia Extract

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Bollywood in Australia Extract

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Bollywood in Australia

Transnationalism and Cultural Production

Andrew Hassam and Makarand Paranjape

Dedicated to the memory of Devika Goonewardene

The global context of Bollywood in Australia

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

Filming Bollywood in Australia

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

Bollywood in Australia: Introduction

The Crossover Audience: Mediated Multiculturalism and the Indian Film

Imagining a Western audience

The Crossover Audience

The making of Bollywood

The Crossover Audience

The crossover audience

The Crossover Audience

leading Australian politicians, such as Queenslands then-Premier Peter Beattie in 2004.21

The crossover industry

The Crossover Audience

Figure 2: Indian Film Festival 2004

The Crossover Audience

Crossing over: a case study

The Crossover Audience

The Crossover Audience

The Crossover Audience

The Crossover Audience

The Crossover Audience

Вам также может понравиться