Quotes of the Day

Where have I been all these weeks? Forty days ago, in my last column, I self-diagnosed my Bollywood fever — the addiction for Indian popular cinema that smote me a year ago — and promised another column or two in succeeding weeks. Then, like a levitating snake at the climax of a fakir's performance, I disappeared. My army of constant readers e-mailed me to ask whether my next Bollywood column had been lost in cyberspace. Both of you deserve an explanation.

To quell the rumors... Perhaps I was fully occupied with my day job: writing for TIME not-com. (I did have a few assignments for the magazine, but I try not to let ephemera get in the way of my vocation.) Perhaps the fever had again abated, and my Hindiscretion cooled to Hindifference? (Not a chance.) Perhaps I had developed Indian reservations. (No way, and enough with the egregious puns.) Perhaps I thought there was nothing more to say on the subject. (Au contraire: too much.) Perhaps I went on holiday. (Yes, and I try not to let my vacation get in the way of my vocation, either. I took tapes of a dozen Indian films with me, and pored over Bollywood history books in the Massachusetts and upstate New York sun. On the way, I made a convert. I played the CD of A R Rahman's West End show "Bombay Dreams" for my brother-in-law, George Horn, who was so beguiled by the music that he played it even while I wasn't with him. At the end of our trek, I gave him my spare copy of the CD.)

Cramming for a nostalgia column: the idea is preposterous. The memories are supposed to well up and spill through my typing fingers. But sometimes what's an old feeling for others — in the case of Bollywood, a billion others — is new, and news, to me. I can think of three such cinematic revelations in the past 15 years: when the TNT channel, and later TCM, opened the vaults of those sassy antiques, the Warner Bros. films of the early 30s; when I went kung-flooey for Hong Kong movies; and now, with the masala movies of Bombay and sometimes Madras. You see the connections. All three cinemas are marked by vigor, visual ingenuity, signposts to a land so remote and exotic it is measured in decades, or ten time zones. These are territories I can explore for years, yet not exhaust their riches.

As for Indian pop cinema, I've stepped inside and, like Alice, am falling into a weird, magical world. Ask me today to name ten great international filmmakers, and the list would have to include Guru Dutt — the supersensitive actor-producer-director whose "Pyaasa" ("The Thirsty One," 1957) and "Kaagaz Ke Phool" (Paper Flowers," 1959) are rhapsodic expressions of a poet's dreamy isolation. Ask what's the best film I've seen this summer, and I might reply "Awaara" (1951), Raj Kapoor's volcanic parable of righteous paternal mistrust, with one of the all-time sadistic-sexiest beach scenes and a dream sequence that starts in delirium and revs up to delicious. Ask what actress has my heart at the moment, and I'd confess, without guilt or irony, Waheeda Rehman, the whore-muse in "Pyaasa" and Dev Anand's radiant, misunderstood companion in "C.I.D." (1956) and "Guide" (1965).

I traveled the length of Indian cinema — from the 1935 "Devdas" to the latest films — though not the breadth; there's still so much to discover. So where have I been? I've gone Bollywood. And I haven't come back. This is a message from deep inside the fever.

This time, let's address ten Bollywood FAQs. Frequently Asked by me, that is. I don't know the answers to all these questions. Some Hindi-film adepts, including author-screenwriter Suketu Mehta and Internet Movie Database staffer Michel Hafner have offered help. I'd also like to hear from readers. At the end I'll give you some lists to be explored in the next column (soon). You're the experts.

1. I love Bollywood movies, but why are they sooooooooooooo looooong?

I fell into this Bollywood trap, you may recall, when I lightly mocked the Oscar-nominated Indian film "Lagaan" as a four-hour film about cricket. That Aamir Khan blockbuster is longer than most Indian movies, but not much longer. Pictures starring top-guy Shahrukh Khan, supersmashes like "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham" and "Mohabbatein," typically have a running time (or lightly sauntering time) of three to 3-1/2 hours. In the 50s — to me, India's Golden Age — the big movies ran between 135 and 180 mins., an hour longer than most American films of that day. And the hits just keep gettin' longer. Are Indians length freaks?

The way I heard it, Indian dramas have always been lengthy. Even a Western version of an Indian myth, Peter Brook's "The Mahabaratha," ran eight hours on stage and nearly 5-1/2 hours when filmed. When Indians go out for an evening's entertainment, by Vishnu, they want an evening's entertainment — in scope as well as in length. They want the full, three-generation saga, the life story, with full-throttle melodrama and comic relief, with fights and beautiful sets and aching, soulful stares. And of course with songs.

2. Why don't the characters kiss on the mouth?

OK, sometimes they do. In the 1933 "Karma," Devika Rani and Himansu Rai shared a long full-mouth kiss, with the woman on top. But these are rare exceptions. The typical Bollywood sex or love scene has, for 70 years, been nothing but a lip-tease: either an urgent hug that one might give Mom or a series of prissy kisses on the face, strategically missing the lips — to quote the title of the latest Mani Rathnam film, "A Peck on the Cheek." (In Rathnam's 1995 "Bombay," Hindi hero Arvind Swamy tells his Muslim beloved Manisha Koirala, "The quicker we marry, the sooner I kiss you.")

The ever-helpful bollywhat.com website, which has the answers to many other Indi-movie FAQs, offers this reason for osculatory obfuscation: "Ideas of morality differ widely from group to group. Why include a kiss when you can easily leave it out and avoid the risk of offending customers?" Granted that Indian movies are shown in Muslim countries with stricter social standards, but since a film is often released in different versions at different lengths, why not permit the occasional lip-lock? It is the visual metaphor for passion the world over.

In this year's semi-steamy "Jism" (that's right, American readers, and the word means the same in Hindi), supermodels Bipashu Basu and John Abraham finally smooch up a storm an hour-and-a-quarter into the film. This low-budget bodice-ripper — which is still way tamer than any of U.S. cable's late-night erotic series, or for that matter Mira Nair's 1996 "Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love" — proved a surprise hit in India. So, of course, other producers will now be inspired to tilt at the censors and go racy. But they'll be fighting a silly, endearing prohibition that has held fairly firm for most of a century.

3. Virtually every Bollywood film is a musical. Why do the characters have to sing and dance?

A few possibilities are suggested. Song and dance are an integral part of Indian dramatic tradition — in Sanskrit, drama and dance are the same word. The first Indian sound film, "Alam Ara," boasted 20 songs, and when it became a hit other producers (all other producers) made musicals too. "Into the new medium came a river of music," write Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy in "Indian Film," their seminal history book, "that had flowed through unbroken millennia of dramatic tradition."

Indian talkies started as musicals and stayed that way. The first songless film, J.B.H. Wadia's "Naujawan," was released in 1937, after some 500 sound films in Hindi and another couple hundred in Tamil, Bengali, Telugu and Marathi. Soon producers discovered another reason to keep singing: the numbers from a movie, and later the soundtrack album, would be released weeks or months in advance, become hits and help sell the movie, as well as contributing crucially to the film's profitability. Today, the river of music is a major revenue stream

Still... big production numbers in every thriller, every romantic melodrama, every socially uplifting tale of the downtrodden? I here except art films, from "Pather Panchali" to "Bandit Queen." Indeed, the major difference in India between popular and "artistic" movies is that one sings, the other doesn't.

Mind you, I'm not complaining. For non-Indian movie lovers who miss the vanished buoyancy of old musicals, the formal strategies that allow a hero like Shahrukh Khan in Mani Rathnam's 1998 "Dil Se" to switch instantly from moping about a lost love to mouthing the Rahman-Gulzar Sufi chant "Chaiyya Chaiyya," while dancing like a spasmic Stallone with dozens of chorines atop a train speeding to a rendezvous with a gorgeous terrorist, are among the giddiest pleasures of going Bollywood. That's partly because "Chaiyya Chaiyya" is my absolute favorite song of the past few years. And to reader Jenny Ketcham, who wondered which version I preferred — the film original or the one used in the West End musical "Bombay Dreams" — my answer is b. It's tighter, bolder, more expertly sung. (You can download the original at A R Rahman Music Central.)

But just because I love the trope of movie people singing at wildly inappropriate dramatic moments doesn't mean I can defend or explain it.

4. The movies are musicals, but the actors don't sing; they lip-synch to songs previously recorded by playback singers. How come?

Once upon a time, in early talkies, all sound was "live"; actors like K.L. Saigal, in films like "Street Singer," had to speak their lines, sing their lyrics, and the match of voice and face made them stars. When the playback technique was developed, it gave producers the option of having on-screen actors mime tunes that had been recorded by vocalists in a studio. This happened occasionally in Hollywood — Lauren Bacall's singing voice in "To Have and Have Not" was supposedly provided by the young Andy Williams! — but the only well-known playback singer was Marni Nixon, who sang for Margaret O'Brien in "The Secret Garden," Deborah Kerr in "The King and I," Natalie Wood in "West Side Story" and Audrey Hepburn in "My Fair Lady."

In Indian films, the dubbing practice become the norm. Few stars in the last half-century — Kishore Kumar was one — did their own singing. (In "Jism," the male lead had not just his singing but his speaking voice dubbed.) But I don't understand why stars don't sing. And while I'm at it, why are there so many actors, so few singers? All-time playback diva Lata Mangeshkar, who sang for Nargis in the late-40s classics "Andaz" and "Barsaat" and kept going through "Dil Se" and "Lagaan," has recorded something between 30,000 and 50,000 songs; any way you add and divide, that's thousands of movies. Her sister Asha Bhosle was pretty prolific herself, as was the top male singer Mohammad Rafi.

These singers could vary their tone and delivery to suit different actors, but their own star status required them to be recognizably themselves. And their influence was so seismic that their vocal timbre — Lata's trilly soprano and Rafi's clear tenor — could make or break careers. Amitabh Bachchan, the Hindi megastar who was voted Actor of the Millennium in a BBC News Poll (way to stuff that ballot box, Bollywood fans!), had trouble getting jobs early in his career because his voice was thought to be too deep and surly: who could sing for him? Plenty, it turned out, including Rafi. And, on a few occasions, Amitabh himself.

Still, the playback practice dominates. Why? In a land of a billion people, there must be some actors who can sing as well as they dance. Which, come to think of it, raises the indelicate question:

5. Why can't they dance?

I could be arrested for exposing my cultural ignorance here, but here goes. The production numbers in Bollywood musicals are as extravagant as a Busby Berkeley wet dream, yet the dancing skills of the performers seem rudimentary by Western standards. In the last 15 years, the MTV mode of quick cutting has hidden some of the physical gaucheries, but it can't give them graces they don't possess.

The men's movements especially look raw: vigorous but clumsy. With their jacket sleeves rolled up and their fists rhymically pounding imaginary doors, they display the stolid athleticism of a 70s steelworker unexpectedly teleported from the health club to the Studio 54 dance floor. Gene Kelly, George Chakiris, Donald O'Connor, John Travolta for Pete's sake: these dancers had astonishing athletic skills too, plus a lot more finesse in revealing personality — a man's subtle joys and profound chagrins — through dance. They also had lots more moves.

Indian actresses, at least, get to express themselves in dance; their supple bodies speak ancient semaphore, a kinetic language developed over centuries of pleasing God and man in temples, palaces and bordellos. No Indian actor has, to my knowledge, become a star mainly on his dancing skill, but actresses have. Madhuri Dixit, barely 21 when she made "Teezab" and "Dayavan" in 1988, exuded a Madonna-ish sensuality in dance numbers that became instantly notorious. "A star is porn," one critic said. Anyway, a star was born, and Madhuri danced flamenco on men's libidos for the next decade. Similarly, Urmila Matondkar, a movie moppet from the age of six, grew up fast in the 1995 "Rangeela" (she'd just turned 22) with a series of pert, vigorous, taunting dances. Urmila is still at the top; she gets scared witless in this year's ghostly thriller "Bhoot" — a movie, incidentally, with no songs or dance numbers. (Maybe that's why its running time is under two hours.)

I showed my dance-savvy wife Amitabh's "Shava Shava" number from the 2001 blockbuster "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham": goofy and elaborate, with Amitabh switching in a wink from patriarchal elegance to jerking his body like a deranged marionette as 112 partygoers cavort around him. I'd hoped Mary would be beguiled. Instead, she remarked that the choreography was "sub-West End." Ouch: the ultimate insult, as anyone who has seen Brits try to match the muscular precision and ease of Broadway terpers will realize.

We could both be wrong. Indian choreographers and actor-dancers could be working in some gestural code we don't understand. They could have seen Astaire and Rogers and rejected a dance style we find sublime. In the Indian tradition, their form of dance could be tripping the light fantastic above ours, not clodhopping beneath. But Indian film imitated and transformed virtually every other aspect of Hollywood movies. Why wouldn't they dance the way Astaire or Travolta did, except that they couldn't?

6. Another touchy question: Why are the actors usually light-skinned, even in films from Southern India?

A billion people of all shapes and shades: you'd think some of the darker beautiful ones would have become stars. Not that I've noticed — though it took me a while to realize they are worth looking for. The melancholy fact is that in countries with lighter and darker citizens, the light ones dominate movies. It happened in Italy, Mexico, Hong Kong. In the U.S., when black actors were forbidden to be in most Hollywood films, and libeled as shiftless or scheming when they were in films, the one prominent African-American director, Oscar Micheaux, notoriously favored light-skinned blacks. What I wrote last year about Micheaux's movies may be true of many films from many countries: if they're not racist, they're certainly shade-ist. Indian films would be even more glorious if they displayed the rainbow of handsome, powerful talent available.

If I'm sadly benighted on this subject, please enlighten me.

7. What's with those kooky credits?

To study movie credits is to learn much about an industry's inner workings and, sometimes, that of the larger society. The opening credits on Indian films differ in many instructive ways from those on Hollywood pictures of the same period.

Start with the studio logo. For the past 80 years, most Hollywood movies have came out of six to eight large studios, and their logos — the Paramount mountain, Warner Bros. shield, the MGM lion — are icons known worldwide. Indian film production is much less concentrated. In the Golden Age, producer-directors released films through their own companies, and some of the top auteurs had their own logos. Mehboob Khan's films ("Andaz," "Mother Earth") began with the image of a hammer-and-sickle monument — odd, since Mehboob wasn't Communist — logo and a voice intoning an Urdu saying, which can be loosely translated as "Don't let the bastards grind you down; God will do that for you." Raj Kapoor's films ("Awaara," "Shri 420") would open on a shot of the star-director seated in prayer, swathed in incense, which dissolved to the R.K. Films logo: a silhouette of Raj holding a fainting Nargis.

In one way, Bollywood's credits are like Hollywood's: they're in English and, usually, only English. (Question: If only two to three percent of Indians read English, how does the other 97% know who's in the movie, and who made it?) Yet the film titles are usually untranslated. "Awaara" is known as "Awaara," not "The Vagabond" or "The Rogue," in the English-speaking world. "Do Bigha Zameen" is easily translated as "Two Acres of Land," and the all-star 2001 hit "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham" as "Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Sad," but no one in the West calls them by their English titles. Then again, it's so much more fun to say "Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham" — or, in current shorthand, "KKKG."

Hollywood films of the 30s would name perhaps a dozen actors and a few craftspeople — director, writer, cinematographer, music director, maybe art director. (Today, of course, the end credits of big films may cite 500 or more contributors; every chauffeur and caterer gets to see his name on the crawl.) Golden Age Hindi films listed many more names and crafts. First would come the star actors, often listed in order not of their star power or importance in the film, but by age. In "Awaara," Prithviraj Kapoor (Raj's father) gets top billing over his son and Nargis; "KKKG" toplines veteran star Amitabh Bachchan over current idol Shahkrukh Khan. Indians, or Indian credit-deciders, must respect their elders.

Even in the 50s the list of actors ran to 20 or more, some with mono-monikers that sound goofy to a Western ear: Cuckoo, Nimmi, Dyke, just to name three players in movies by ... Mehboob. (Don't forget Johnny Walker, the comic whose name was taken from a bottle of scotch, and which was often spelled "Johny.") Then another 40 names, or upwards of that, from every craft: the playback singers (often listed simply as Lata, Asha and Rafi), the sound engineer on the set and the one in the recording studio, the people who did the publicity and took the on-the-set photos, plus a dozen assistants. Some credits are mysterious, tantalizing: in "Awaara," Kapoor gives the large credit just before his own to "A Friend."

8. A lot of Bollywood movies bear a suspicious resemblance to earlier Hollywood movies. What's the Hindi word for "plagiarism"?

In the East, I guess, it's called hommage. Hong Kong frequently swiped whole plots from distant climes — e.g., "Black Cat," filched from "Nikita." In India, the purloining is bolder and balder. As one thieving filmmaker rationalizes In "Bombay Dreams": "Copyright means the right to copy."

Sometimes just one element is used: Guru Dutt's "Pyaasa" borrowed the twist from "Sullivan's Travels" where the hero gives his coat to a derelict who is then killed by a train and mistaken for the hero. But sometimes a whole Hollywood movie is Bollywized. A half-dozen Hindi films, from Raj Kapoor-Nargis "Chori Chori" (1956) to the Aamir Khan-Pooja Bhatt "Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahin" (1991), are uncredited, unpaid-for remakes of the 30s Oscar-winner "It Happened One Night," right down to the rich girl's jumping from her yacht into the water and the poor guy's attempt to thumb a ride. Recent thefts include "Raaz" ("What Lies Beneath") and "Jism" ("Double Indemnity" and "Body Heat"). Strangest cine-larceny: the 6th episode of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Polish TV series "Decalog," which he expanded into the minor art-house hit "A Short Film, About Love," and which last year became the sexy-ish Manisha Koirala thriller "Ek Chhotisi Love Story."

There are many such unacknowledged adaptations. Readers are encouraged to list a few famous films I haven't mentioned, and to explain how the world's largest movie industry (Bollywood) gets to steal so regularly and blithely from the world's most popular one (Hollywood).

9. Throughout the 90s, India produced something like 1,000 movies a year, with "only" about 200 coming from Mumbai / Bombay / Bollywood. What about the other 800?

India has traditionally been a country of regional film sites, with each state producing films in its own language for its own audiences. In the 1970s, the polyglot production pulse raced, with feature films in 18 different languages. By the end of that decade, an average of 100+ movies were being made in each of four languages: Hindi (Bombay), Telugu (Andra Pradesh), Tamil (Madras) and Malayalam (in the southwestern state of Kerala). Indeed, in 1978 and 1979, there were more films produced in each of the other languages than in Hindi.

Today, each film region has picked up its own nickname. The Telugu industry is known as Tollywood. With the T-word having been taken, Tamil film folk called their industry Kollywood. (Shouldn't it be Tamalewood?) The Malayalam film center is called Mollywood; I'd prefer Keraliwood. I guess Bengali films — Calcutta — must be made in Bengaliwood. I'm not sure what the adjective is for the movie biz in Kannada, a region that produces more feature films per year than Canada. Canadian?

I'd like to see this fun formation spread to other countries. Poland would be Pollywood, Japan Jollywood, Finland Follywood, Mexico Mexicaliwood. West Africa could have a production center called Somaliwood. The South Pacific needs a film industry: Baliwood? Germans moviemakers could hum Wagner on the soundstages of Valhalliwood. In rainy England, film workers could take their umbrellas to Brollywood. And Israeli picture people would munch on a bagel in Bialywood. (OK. Back to work.)

Alas, India's regional film industries are faltering. Tamil-film output has dropped by more 70%, from 150 to 43 (though Rathnam, the top Madras director, continues to make his movies there). In the same period, Telugu-language film production is down 50% in 20 years, from 152 to 65-70. The culprit is cultural centralization. Moviegoers and movie renters in every part of India now lap up both the Bombay-made product, usually dubbed from Hindi into the local language, and the American films that have long dominated the world box office and have recently made crucial inroads on the subcontinent. It's a trend not unique to movies: the big get bigger, the small get bit. So once-flourishing regional art-industries surrender to Hindi and U.S. juggernauts: the two major Ollywoods.

10. I hear the voice of the Bollywood novice: "OK, you've browbeaten us into a mild interest in Indian film. So where can I get them?"

Chances are, if you live in a city or near one, in the U.S. or Western Europe, there's a Little India near you. Follow the curry scent and ask a local where the video store is. Come prepared with a list of films, from IMDb or Upperstall.com. The movies will be offered, as at any video store, in DVD and VHS, for sale or rental. Chat up the clerks; they're usually helpful, and chances are they speak English as well as you do.

If you're stranded, or shy, try the Internet. Yash Raj Films owns some of the classic films, often with beguiling extras: a homemade documentary on Raj Kapoor that accompanies the discs on "Barsaat" and "Shri 420," and, on the "Aar-Paar" and "Khagaz ke Phool" discs, an impressive Channel 4 docu on Guru Dutt (by Nasreen Munni Kabir, who expanded the three-part show into the excellent book "Guru Dutt: A Life in Cinema").

Netflix.com, the rent-by-mail online service, has about 400 Indian titles, mostly of recent vintage. A bit less than half of the films I've mentioned here are available there, but not some of the prime ones: "Aware," "Do Bigha Zameen," "Mother Earth," "Jism" (gotcha!). Your subscription price depends on how many films you have out at a time, from $13.95 for two films to $39.95 for eight. IndoFilms.com has a much more comprehensive library — 2,500 titles in eight languages — including most of the older films I've mentioned. "The Hindi collection," says a press release, "ranges from 1940s films such as 'Devdas' with Dilip Kumar to the present day 'Devdas' with Shah Rukh Khan." Never mind that the Dilip "Devdas" came out in 1955; try IndoFilms. You sign up to get two DVDs a month for $14.95, four a month for $24.95.

I hope I haven't numbed those new to Bollywood, or shocked the savants. Some of you surely know the answers to these ten FAQs. And if you want to aid me in our next endeavor — the Bollywood Ten, a column of lists — try these topics:

1. Top composers in Indian film history.
2. Top poet-lyricists.
3. Bollywood's best songs.
4. Top Indian cinema pioneers.
5. Most prominent actor-politicians.

Drop me a line, if you grew up with Bollywood fever or, like me, are a recent victim. Extra credit for neatness; extra thanks for passion.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss is back, with questions about his favorite new national cinema. You provide the answers