See all those fellows in the photo, staring raptly at images on the screen? One of them could be me, if the snapshot had been taken in New York City, and if one of the men happened to be Caucasian. (No, I don't watch movies in the lotus position.) For I am that strange, nearly solitary creature: a non-Indian fan of Indian movies.
Indian popular movies, that is. The movies that sing. The movies that show beautiful people suffering glamorously, wrestling with dilemmas of family honor and filial loyalty and, when words can't express the ache or ardor in their hearts, dancing vigorously with a couple of hundred of their best friends. The movies that enthrall, enrage and obsess a billion Indians, on the subcontinent and around the world. The ones that almost no serious film critic west of Suez notices, let alone cherishes.
To critics and film lovers in the West, the phrase "Indian movies" has long had an entirely different meaning: the stately, languorous studies of Satyajit Ray and his art-house progeny. Most film-savvy Westerners don't know, or care, that India also possesses a huge national cinema that rivals Hollywood in quantity and quality.
This was not always the case. In the early 1950s the Cannes Film Festival, then as now the introducer and arbiter of international movie taste, showcased several mainstream Indian films. V. Shantaram's Amar Bhoopali, Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zamin (a prize-winner), Raj Kapoor's Awara, the Kapoor-produced Boot Polish (which won a special award for child actress Baby Naaz)—all played on the Cannes screen, announcing that the newly independent India, like post-war Japan, was making movies that deserved the world's respect. But in 1956 Cannes showed Ray's Panther Panchali. From then on, until Devdas played last year, popular Indian musical dramas vanished from Cannes. The "other" Indian cinema was now the one the worldwide film community recognized as "Indian."
That's the one I knew of too—until I saw a retrospective of Mani Rathnam's work at the Toronto Film Festival in 1994. Rathnam, a Tamil who made his movies in Madras, is not exactly Bollywood. But Nayakan (a gloss on The Godfather, retold and musicalized with the vigor of Singin' in the Rain) and Roja (one of the director's early I-love-a-terrorist dramas, boasting A.R. Rahman's first major movie score) were similar in form and style to the Bombay product. They were also, to me, revelations: thrilling proof that someone knew how to make serious films with a racing pulse. For decades a chasm had separated two genres: the churning, air-headed "movie" and the slow, austere, art-house "film." Rathnam reminded me that movie entertainment could also be—should be—film art.
I threw myself into Bollywood-style films, without reservation or condescension. Since they were not to be found even in specialty video stores in New York City, I ventured into Manhattan's Little India. There, the trove opened. The older tapes might be of execrable quality, and the films might not all be subtitled. But they showed me that India's movie splendor stretched back a half-century (the art industry's golden age was the '50s ) and forward, if more haphazardly, to the present.
A movie critic's trade secret: we want you to think we are scholarly types, exegetes of the director's art, but like any passionate moviegoer, we love to fall in love—with tender or terrible stories, with exotic locales, and especially with movie stars. Kapoor and Guru Dutt were gifted directors, but they were also charismatic actors: Kapoor, to me, is a swarthier Ronald Colman; Dutt, a softer Johnny Depp. They also had radiant co-stars: slim, intense Nargis for Kapoor and, for Dutt, Waheeda Rehman, so luminous she lights up the murkiest scene. I find Shabana Azmi a glorious and heroic figure—in her films and her public life. I'm in awe of Amitabh Bachchan's stature and Old Testament God voice; then I dissolve in admiring giggles as, in the Jumma Chumma number from Hum, he marches around a saloon carrying a hose that seems to spritz geysers of beer from his loins—a true Bachchan bacchanal. Of the younger stars, Shahrukh Khan still beguiles me with his range, his pout, his dimples. And I'll see almost anything with Tabu or Urmila Matondkar.
I'll probably see them alone. When Devdas was shown at Cannes, I was the only critic still there at the end. But I really don't care if Indian popular cinema attracts other acolytes from among my critical colleagues in the West. I'm happy to be a solitary cultist whose true brethren are in that photo, entranced by the beatitudes of Bollywood.