“People Don’t Want To See Problems On The Screen”: Why The West Won’t Watch Bollywood

By Guest Contributor Margaret Redlich

Kajol (l) and Shahrukh Khan in Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenga. Courtesy: planetradiocity.com

When they’ve tried to make realistic pictures about the poor and the middle classes, they get miserable attendance…People don’t want to see problems on the screen.

So says a 2001 article from Smithsonian magazine about the rise in popularity of the Indian movie industry, a.k.a. “Bollywood,” in the West during the 1990s.  And this is the general assumption many in the First World like to make about Indian film: that it is an escapist genre, and that all the poor people of South Asia need to be happy is three hours of brightly colored fantasy.

Indian films have been the main source of popular culture for all of South Asia and popular in many other countries throughout the world since the 1950s. The first international hit was Raj Kapoor’s Awaara in 1951, followed by Shree 420 four years later. Although the 50s are generally considered the “Golden Age” of Indian film, the Indian film industry had been around for 40 years before that, with the studio system already thriving within 20 years. Although the West, especially America, likes to pretend that they invented the movies and every other country is merely imitating them (as is implied in the very name “Bollywood”), in fact India has been making movies in its own style since the advent of the artform.

The West didn’t suddenly make a Columbus-like discovery of Indian film in the 90s; it was a result of a calculated strategy on the part of the Indian industry. A series of political shifts in Indian government had led to weakening import/export regulations as well as the legalization of investments in the Indian film industry. Therefore, there was suddenly more money around to make these globe-hopping song- and dance-filled extravaganzas. And that money could be turned into even more money by making plots that were universal and of interest to Desis and others living in the First World. What is more universal than romance?

The Smithsonian piece summarizes what it sees as Indian cinema’s standard plot: Boy meets, wins, loses and regains girl. In the process, they run through vast wardrobes, turn up at locations all over the world, kiss (rarely) but in no other way indulge their passion, serenade each other with no fewer than six songs, and join chorus lines in half a dozen dance numbers. While all this is going on, family crises erupt and are settled, murders are committed and solved, cars are chased and destroyed. Oh, and the good guys win.

This was basically how your standard Bollywood film would unfold between 1992 and 2009. The first major international hit done in this style was 1994′s Hum Aapke Hain Koun (HAHK) That next year, Dilwale Dulhania le Jayenga (DDLJ) found an international audience by featuring an NRI (non-resident Indian) hero and heroine, which appealed to Indians abroad while, at the same time, having a romantic plot and traditional style which has made it the longest-running film in India 17 years and counting (for more details, I recommend critic Anupuma Chopra’s book on the film).

In 2009, the film 3 Idiots became a record-breaking success for the Indian international box office, even getting some box-office success in America on Christmas weekend that year where it finished 12th overall, on the same weekend Sherlock Holmes opened and Avatar was still running in theaters.

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