A Cultural Grand Salaam

By Richard Corliss Monday, Apr. 26, 2004
    • JOAN MARCUS/AP

    THEATER: Dancers perform in Broadway's Bombay Dreams

    The brash young man seizes the stage of Manhattan's Broadway Theater, sings and dances to a vigorous bhangra and, feeling his rock-star-in-the-making oats, shouts, "Are ya with me, Bombay? ... Are ya with me, New York?" This scene from the new musical Bombay Dreams poses the cultural question of the moment. South Asian pop — Bollywood movies, Indian music and dance, the whole vibrant masala of subcontinental culture — not only enthralls a billion Indians at home but also spans half the world, from Africa and the Middle East to Eastern Europe and the Indian diaspora in Britain and the U.S. Now Indi-pop is close to a critical mass in the U.S. The 2 million American Desis (mainly people of Indian and Pakistani heritage) have made it a burgeoning niche industry. But can it finally catch on in the mall theaters and dance clubs and living rooms of America? Will ya be with it, New York? New Orleans? Nebraska?

    The cultural stew is simmering and ready to boil over. Just as Indian food graduated from big-city exotica to mainstream international cuisine, Indi-pop culture could become a new part of American pop culture. It certainly has the energy and glamour to curry favor with more than those who favor curry. It might even gain the hipness it has in Britain — where, as Meera Syal, the original librettist of Bombay Dreams, boldly said, "Brown is the new black."


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    This process, notes writer Hanif Kureishi, "is inevitable, because culture moves forward by taking new and original voices from the margin and moving them into the center. You saw it with Elvis. You saw it with Toni Morrison." If Bombay Dreams is a hit, you may see it with Indian composer A.R. Rahman. You can already see it in the critical and commercial success of novelists like Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy. Their success has led the way for a slew of South Asians, including Michelle de Kretser (from Sri Lanka),

    Monica Ali (from Bangladesh) and Mohsin Hamid (from Pakistan).

    One of the most fertile areas for East-West cross-pollinations is music. At S.O.B.'s in New York City, Rekha Malhotra, a.k.a. DJ Rekha, plays bhangra, a cool fusion of electronic dance and hip-hop beats with traditional Indian folk sounds. So popular is Rekha, 33, that her parties have become tourist attractions. "I can go anywhere in the country," she says, "and someone will go, 'Oh, I've been to Basement Bhangra.'" At Sonotheque in Chicago, Brian Keigher, 31, spins a popular fusion style known as "Asian underground"--fast, irresistibly danceable music studded with sitars and thumping tablas. Wade your way through the crush on the dance floor, and you will find Indian students, Pakistani locals from Devon Avenue, white clubgoers from the North Side and West Side blacks, always hungry for a new sound. At music clubs and universities, crowds can listen to Funkadesi, a band that mixes Indian music with reggae and funk.

    From the dance floor, Indian music percolates to the recording studio. Hip-hopper Jay-Z and British-based Indian producer Panjabi MC served up Beware of the Boys, which featured Jay-Z rapping over a remixed version of a song that Panjabi had made a hit in Britain and India. Even Britney Spears is getting her Ganges on; she used British — South Asian producer Rishi Rich on her last album. And you know a culture is hip when it generates a superhero; that's Bombaby, a cult comic-book out of California.

    Then there's Bollywood — Hollywood in Bombay and, by extension, all the country's dozen separate film industries — producing the Indian musicals that nearly everyone in America has heard of and practically no one in America has seen. Bollywood films provide the primary entertainment for half the globe; the top films earn millions more in U.S. theaters catering to Desi audiences. But Bollywood has not dented the mass, or even the class, movie public. The Oscar-nominated Lagaan took in 10 times as much in the Desi houses as it did when Sony Pictures Classics gave it a general release. Bollywood films are also hard to find in video stores, although they're easily available online and in Indian-American neighborhoods.

    Why are the films having more trouble finding an audience than the music and books? America's current cultural insularity aside, the musicals are a hard sell. At three hours — plus, with family-loyalty plots out of the hoariest Hollywood weepies, and all that singing, a Bollywood epic is too old-fashioned for the art-house crowd and too sedate, too girlie, for young males.

    All of which makes Bombay Dreams a big risk for Broadway: a $14 million musical with no stars, a score by a composer famous in most of the world (see box, below) but not in the U.S., and a story set in the Bollywood milieu unknown to Broadway's conservative audience. Producer Andrew Lloyd Webber hired writer Thomas Meehan (The Producers, Hairspray) to cut a lot of in-jokes, pump up the mother love — domesticate the Bollywood beast. Will the transplant work? The show has a $6 million advance; and at a preview last week, the audience, perhaps 25% South Asian, seemed to love the infectious songs and rain-drenched dancing. So salaam, Bombay.

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