Worlds Elsewhere (35 page)

At the airport, the British tourist board was out in force. Five or six metres long and almost as tall, the posters marched down the concourse, a blur of fantastical scenes: the tail fin of a formula one racing car, Bodiam Castle in East Sussex, Norman Foster's swooping roof for the British Museum, someone's designer stiletto.

What these posters were doing in the arrivals terminal at Mumbai was anyone's guess. I tried to work out what kind of Britain they were intended to evoke: a proud nation of stiletto-wearing, castle-haunting racing drivers, perhaps.
O brave new world that has such racing drivers in't …
Whatever it was, I was delighted to be fleeing it.

To orientate myself in India's movie capital, I had arranged to meet a film critic called Nandini Ramnath. She wrote for
Mint,
a slick, business-orientated newspaper with links to the
Wall Street Journal.
Her reviews were sharp and cosmopolitan, her tone just this side of libellously sardonic. If anyone could guide me safely through the hyperbole of the Indian film industry, I hoped it would be her.

On the evening of my arrival, we arranged a rendezvous by the Flora Fountain in the old Fort district of South Mumbai. This was the heart of Raj territory: down the road from the Byzantine-Gothic pile of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, formerly Victoria Terminus; on the same street as Elphinstone College, where C. J. Sisson had taught. An appropriate place to debate the colonial reach of Shakespeare, I thought as I walked down from my hotel. In the rust-red dust of the Oval Maidan, bathed in honey-coloured evening light, whippet-thin
boys in trousers and shirtsleeves were playing cricket beneath the shadow of the university clock tower. Had it not been for the heat, we could have been in Hyde Park.

In contrast to her surroundings, Nandini resembled a character in a 1930s American newsroom comedy: fast-walking, furrow-browed, an unruly tangle of dark hair bunched over her fashionably thick-rimmed glasses. She barely broke stride as she collected me, disposing of one cigarette and lighting another in the same fluid, virtuosic movement.

‘You need to learn the Bombay shuffle,' she yelled over her shoulder as she crossed the road, executing a neat lower-body swerve through the maelstrom of lurching, blaring steel. The closest I could get was two paces behind.

Nandini talked as fast as she walked. In the first ten minutes, drinking warm lager at the roof bar of the Sea Palace hotel, we had raced through my plans for South Africa, the influence of Jacques Derrida on Indian university education, the state of the British newspaper market and her views on my publisher.

She moved on to
Shakespeare Wallah,
which I had watched again on the flight.

‘Oh, I
love
that film,' she said, brow momentarily unfurrowing.

I had my doubts, I said; the politics, the colonial-era nostalgia …

She expelled an impatient rivulet of smoke in the general direction of the sunset. ‘Oh,
that.
That's not the important thing. The important thing is how important Satyajit Ray is to the film. As well as writing the music, you can see his influence in how beautifully it's shot. He chose some of the locations, loaned them his cinematographer, sat in the editing studio telling Ivory to
cut, cut.
All the later Merchant Ivories are just so corseted, so
cosseted,
you know? That one's kind of free.'

What I really wanted was a primer on Bollywood. I'd read books and seen a small handful of Hindi movies, but was lacking an overall sense of how the industry worked. What made it tick?

‘You have to remember where it came from. Indian cinema has always relied on things borrowed from all over the place. There's the
nautanki
tradition – a kind of variety act or vaudeville – a bit of acting, a bit of singing, as well as bits from the Sanskrit epics, the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata.
Until about ten years ago – maybe less so now – the typical Hindi film was exactly like that. A real composite.'

She smiled wickedly. ‘There's even an industry term: the “unofficial remake”. You get the official remake, then you get the unofficial
remakes, sometimes several of them. That happens to western films, to Indian films also. Many different versions of the same story.'

Even the term ‘Bollywood' was a composite, and often misapplied. Originally a term of affectionate abuse created by the Indian English-language press in the 1970s, outside India it has come to stand for any Indian-made film. In fact the subcontinent is home to a number of different local movie industries, operating in many of its official languages and in an awe-inspiring variety of forms, from art-house indie films to lumbering commercial franchises.

Nandini marked them out with the glowing end of her cigarette. ‘Three main industries: Tamil film from the south, Telugu film from Andhra Pradesh, which is huge now, Hindi here in Bombay. But the list goes on, many different languages. And of course Bengali cinema.' She sniffed. ‘That's a cut above.'

‘Bollywood' – the mass-market, Hindi-language, Mumbai-based movie industry – produces perhaps 200 movies annually. All told, though, there are something like 1,000 films produced in India each year, double the output of Hollywood.

What these industries shared was a hunger for making money. According to a report by the consultants KPMG and crawled over by a slavering
Hollywood Reporter,
revenues in Indian cinema were around 94 billion rupees in 2013 (£0.9 billion), with growth pegged at 10 per cent-plus annually. This was half what Hollywood brought in because of the difference in ticket prices, but far higher in terms of sales. Over 3 billion seats were flogged in India each year, and the subcontinent was still what the analysts called heavily ‘under-screened' – lacking in cinemas per head of population. No wonder mass appeal was the name of the game.

‘Of course there are a lot of modernist trends in Indian cinema, some art-house, but that's broadly where the popular stuff comes from. That's the overarching idiom: a big audience, getting bigger, who must be entertained at all costs.'

I was curious as to where the notion of artistic originality came into things. Even at the major Hollywood studios there was an emphasis on making product distinctive. Did the same obtain here?

‘I don't think it's so important. What is more important is, do you make people laugh, do you make them cry? Can you appeal to a family audience? Can you sell tickets? I'm speaking very broadly. But I think that's true.'

So if one saw echoes of, say, Shakespeare in Indian cinema, they
wouldn't necessarily be there for factors of high culture or prestige? There'd be more functional factors at work?

Nandini ducked her head. ‘Got it. You pick and choose as a film-maker. You may not have read
As You Like It,
but you think – wow, great idea, girl dressed as boy. You want to get to a particular place in a film, but you haven't found a way, and it turns out Shakespeare has solved it for you. You just borrow it, and disguise the source – if you can be bothered.'

Surreptitiously, I glanced at my watch: 9 p.m. We'd been talking for an hour and a half. Nandini's evening was far from over; there were still two events to go to, a book launch and a drinks party hosted by a film-director friend. My head was throbbing, though whether from the working practices of Bollywood, jet lag or the cigarette smoke, I wasn't sure.

‘Good luck with your project,' she called as she strode purposefully into the night, past the recumbent shadows of people sleeping rough on the pavement. ‘You might even have fun!'

Holed up in my hotel room, waiting on a series of appointments, I tried to get to grips with what C. J. Sisson had been watching all those years before.

Parsi theatre combined two of the most important things in Mumbai: pleasure and profit. Parsi Zoroastrians began arriving in India perhaps as early as the 700s, driven by persecution in what is now Iran. By the early nineteenth century, they were one of the city's most important communities, with powerful interests in shipbuilding and trading, and an eagerness to do business with anyone and everyone. Cricket was one early obsession: the Parsis were among the first Indians to become obsessed by the game, and in 1848 formed the Parsi Oriental Cricket Club in Mumbai, perhaps the oldest on the subcontinent. Horses and polo were other obsessions, particularly among well-to-do Parsis – of which there were many.

British-style theatrical entertainment was yet another fascination. In 1840, a consortium of leading Mumbai citizens led by the successful merchant Jagannath Sunkersett lamented to the British governor about the lack of a ‘place of public amusement in the Island' and appealed to be allowed to build one, claiming that ‘such a measure would promote
good humour and tend to induce a desirable tone of feeling in Society at large'. The result was the erection in 1846 of the Grant Road theatre on what were then the northern fringes of the rapidly expanding city. A fifth of the size of its approximate model, the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in London, with a tight capacity of 337, it became the crucible for Indian drama in Mumbai.

Back in the eighteenth century, drama had been performed for and by British employees of the East India Company as an alternative to other principal ways of passing the off-hours in Mumbai – playing cards at home or shooting rabbits on Malabar Hill. At the Bombay theatre on Bombay Green, built in 1776 at the heart of the British settlement, amateur troupes assuaged their homesickness by staging versions of fashionable London comedies and farces. But interest gradually shrank and the Bombay theatre fell into disrepair, until it was acquired in 1835 by another eminent Parsi businessman, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy (whose statue still lords it over the Oval Maidan, and who once sent four Arab horses to Queen Victoria as a gift).

Once they had control of the playhouses, Parsi producers began to change the scene. Shows in English were gradually replaced by plays in Gujarati, Urdu and Hindustani (a mixture of Hindi and Urdu), serious works drawn from the Persian epics as well as lighter pieces. By the 1850s, theatregoing had become a fashionable pastime among the upwardly mobile Mumbai middle classes.

At first, Parsi theatre was amateur only: small drama clubs performing among their own community. Yet within a decade Parsi theatre had become a fully fledged professional, commercial operation. By the 1890s, as many as twenty companies were vying for audiences, each with teams of actors and playwrights, their own playhouses in the Grant Road area and rival publishing businesses to print scripts. According to one historian, this new drama ‘created perhaps the largest ticket-buying audience in Indian stage history'.

Despite the name, Parsi theatre, like the city that gave birth to it, was by no means monocultural. Parsi money fed the operation, but actors and spectators were drawn from many different communities and religions. Nor was it just Mumbai: rival Parsi troupes eventually operated in every corner of the subcontinent. Using the fast-growing infrastructure of the railways, companies went on tour, sometimes taking over entire trains with sets, costumes, equipment and armies of stagehands and actors. Several troupes took steamships far south
across the Bay of Bengal to what is now Sri Lanka; others travelled to Burma and Singapore. One even made it to London for the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1885, led by Khurshed Mehrvan Balivala, one of numerous actors acclaimed as the ‘Irving of India' after the renowned British star Henry Irving.

The drama they offered was a swaggering, eclectic amalgam of anything that would dazzle the eyes and stir the hearts of audiences. Early Parsi scripts had been based on the Persian
Shahnama
and the Sanskrit
Mahabharata,
but before long the Arabic
Arabian Nights
were being raided for stories, as were Victorian melodramas and the
nautanki
private theatre seen in north Indian royal courts.

Also here at the birth of popular Indian drama, as Sisson realised, was Shakespeare. Estimates vary, but between seventy-five and a hundred Shakespearian translations were created during this golden era of Parsi theatre. The first recognisable adaptation was of
Cymbeline
in 1871; others followed thick and fast. As Sisson also recognised, these adaptations were not remotely purist, even by the indulgent standards of the versions I had encountered in the western United States. Texts were gutted for their moving parts and reassembled into appealing commercial formulas: sensation was amped up, plots and characters more strongly delineated. An improving moral gloss was invariably applied.

Music was central in every sense. Space was made for ‘orchestras', usually assembled from the classical core of harmonium plus tabla and nakkara drums, also amplified by western instruments such as the clarinet. The critic Ania Loomba describes an Urdu version of
Othello
performed in 1918 that opens with Brabantio entertaining the hero with dance and music, followed by a duet between Roderigo and Iago. Sisson noted a version of
Titus Andronicus
that squeezed in an English music-hall number.