China's
Bollywood love affair By
Debasish Roy Chowdhury
SHANGHAI - I had my
Awara moment in Shanghai.
"Yindu?"
asked the cheerful owner of the hole-in-the-wall
restaurant I stumbled across after a heavy day of
sightseeing. Reassured by my nod, he broke into a
monolog, which, punctuated as it was with the word
"Yindu", I figured was something about India or
Indians. And, judging by the approving looks of
the other diners in the small room, nice things
too. That
happens to me all the time in
China.
But then it came, slowly at first,
then the beat picking up ... "Abalagu, u uu,
abalagu".
Seeing that I wasn't quite
getting his point, he presented the final proof of
his familiarity with India, the title song of
Awara (The Tramp), a 1951 Hindi film that
was a runaway hit in China when it was released
here later.
Not that I was taken aback. I
had read that the film's late director, producer
and star, Raj Kapoor, or Li Zhi, as the Chinese
call him, is well known to older generations in
China, as he is in Russia and Romania. The magic
of the moment left an indelible spell on me, a
first-hand proof of the soft power of a juggernaut
called Bollywood.
The story of India and
China is similar to the plot of a standard
Bollywood flick: love, separation, reunion. And,
crazy as it may sound, cinema may play a large
role in making these two live happily ever after,
a la happy endings in Bollywood.
Allow me
to justify my script. The 1962 border "war"
between India and China has had a very different
impact on the citizens of the two countries.
India's foreign policy toward China prior to the
"war", as Indians know it, was defined by the
slogan of "Hindi-Chini bhai bhai" (India
and China are brothers), a policy on which the
then Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had
invested much of his geopolitical capital.
The reaction to the conflict was complete
disappointment with China and everything Chinese,
an impact manifested in Indian popular culture as
well. Subsequent generations of Indians thus grew
up on a staple of demonization of China and the
Chinese in Hindi films. More so because Indian
filmmakers till recently were squeamish about
portraying Pakistan as the "enemy" in deference to
domestic political sensitivities. China was a much
safer punching bag.
This Sino-phobia has
marked much of India's politics ever since. So
much so that when India conducted its nuclear test
in 1998, the then Indian defense minister George
Fernandes declared it was primarily because China
was India's No 1 enemy. The same China phobia -
with allusions to the Indian communists'
extraterritorial loyalties - reared its head in
sections of the Indian media recently when India's
left-wing parties threatened to block the US-India
deal on nuclear power. The general acceptability
of such anti-China rhetoric is high in India
because of the scar that the 1962 conflict left on
the popular psyche and its perpetration through
the most powerful popular medium, cinema.
The ordinary Chinese, on the other hand,
barely know, or care, about 1962. Most Chinese are
not even aware of the conflict. And the handful of
those who are, know it as a border "skirmish", not
"war", for which neither India nor China was
responsible. Instead, they have been taught to see
it as a legacy of the machinations of imperial
powers. India-bashing thus doesn't sell in China,
nor are there any visible traces of it in its
political or cultural spheres.
If the
Chinese have anything for India, it's sheer
fascination. The handful of Bollywood movies that
landed in China since Awara and Do Bigha
Zameen have been huge hits, sometimes bigger
than in India itself. Caravan, a film of
modest commercial success in India, ran to packed
theaters in China in the 1980s, under the name of
Da Peng Che. Noorie, a movie about a
village girl, also had a theater release here and
did remarkably well. I know at least one Chinese
who lost his teenage heart to Noorie: my night
editor.
Bollywood movies slacked off a bit
thereafter. It's not clear if it was because of
the flagging interest in the song-and-dance
routine and formulaic story lines or general
apathy among Indian film distributors vis-a-vis
China, or a combination of both, but the next big
theater entrance for Bollywood took place as late
as 2002 with Lagaan.
Chinese TV
channels have screened Devdas and
Asoka since, both drawing a lot of
interest. Television soaps from India, namely
Karishma and Koshish ek Asha, have a
large fan following. Aishwarya Rai sets hearts
aflutter with the same ease here as she does
there. People pay big bucks to learn "Yindu"
dance, or Bollywood-style gyrations. In short,
Bollywood is the most successful Indian export to
China though India hasn't even been selling it
hard enough.
Films didn't specifically
figure in the talks during Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh's just-concluded trip to China. Sure, there
were weightier things to discuss, like the thorny
border issue and trade. What chance did cinema
have against politics and money? None, apparently.
But the fact is, China and India have a lot to
gain on both counts from films.
China now
allows 20 foreign films for theater release each
year on a revenue-sharing basis, and most of these
are from Hollywood. In a good year, an odd
Bollywood film slips into this quota. That's a
huge market lying virtually untapped, judging by
the interest Bollywood generates just through a
handful of films that get into China as
non-theater releases as DVDs and TV broadcasts.
India's film business grossed over US$2
billion worldwide in 2006. According to a
PricewaterhouseCoopers study, revenue will cross
$4 billion over the next five years. But it is
still a fraction of global cinema revenues. India
makes 10 times as many movies as Hollywood every
year, yet grosses a fraction of what Hollywood
does. Prizing open the vast Chinese market will
give Indian films the much-needed dollar muscle.
As filmmaker Shekhar Kapoor argues, aging
North America has 65 million people in the
category of entertainment demographics, which is
population in age groups that are the highest
consumers of entertainment. Young China and India
have some 700 million in the same group. These two
heavy entertainment spenders will increasingly
demand their representation in global popular
culture. Hollywood realizes it, that's why Harry
Potter has a Chinese girlfriend. James Bond has
had one, and has been looking for an Indian date.
Movies also boost tourism - witness the
effect Lord of the Rings has had on New
Zealand. Keeping in mind the huge diaspora
population, many Indian films these days are set
and shot abroad. The ones that are not, invariably
throw in a couple of songs shot abroad, often as
an extra attraction for those who will never get
to see these places in person, thus completing the
escapade that is Bollywood movies for the millions
of India's poor. For the locations featured in
these movies, it's instant advertisement to pull
in the rising number of Indian tourists.
This is why foreign national and
local-level governments often send delegations to
Bollywood with incentives to encourage Indian
filmmakers to shoot there. Chinese locales in
Indian movies will similarly attract Indian
tourists to China, promote people-to-people
contact and draw the Chinese closer to Indian
movies.
Unlike China and India, Hollywood
has realized the potential of joining these two
mega markets. That's why Warner Bros is making its
first foray into Bollywood with a movie named
Made in China about a Mumbai cook mistaken
for a kung fu master. It will be the first
Hindi-language film ever to be filmed in China,
which, incidentally, is the third largest movie
producer after India and the US.
In return
for allowing more Indian movies, China can
directly push its own films into India, not
through Hollywood, as it now does. This will open
up a market of 1.3 billion people for Chinese
films and help Indians see the Chinese minus the
Hollywood prism.
But how in the world will
cinema ease political tensions between the two
countries? Once Indian filmmakers wake up to the
potential of the Chinese market, they will
incorporate Chinese tastes, locales, faces and
sensitivities in their movies, maybe
Chinese-related plots such as Made in
China. A powerful vehicle of Sino-phobia will
thus have been converted into a stakeholder in
Sino-Indian peace. Watching the same movies, the
Chinese and the Indians will laugh together, cry
together, fall in love together and, at some
point, fall in love with each other. I'll wager
that no bilateral problem will look that
insurmountable then.
One of the standard
Bollywood themes down the years has been about
brothers separated at birth, growing up in
different circumstances and finally finding each
other. Here's to the hope that the long-lost
Hindi-Chini bhais will go to the same movie
and rediscover each other some day.
Debasish Roy Chowdhury is a
senior editor with China Daily.
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