Bollywood Breakthrough

By Elizabeth Kadetsky, AlterNet. Posted April 28, 2005.

Ask an American to name a South Asian dramatic figure and you'll probably hear Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, owner of the Kwik-E-Mart on "The Simpsons." So it may come as a surprise that the best-known actor in the world is Indian, and one most Americans don't know.

Bollywood heartthrob Amitabh Bachchan is a fixture in his home country, where his visage promotes everything from Parker pens to Pepsi on TV and where his hit show, "Kaon Banega Croepati?" (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?), dominates the Hindi airwaves. He has appeared in over 150 films and is, according to a BBC poll, "the most popular film star in the world, the most recognized face, the biggest box-office draw."

In Guyana, there are Amitabh Bachchan look-alike contests; in Calcutta, there is a temple to Amitabh Bachchan. His likeness appears in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London. A query to most any South Asian will yield a reaction not unlike that of the waiter at a Midtown Manhattan hotel who placed a fist on his chest and proclaimed, "He is my friend." When asked what phrase best encapsulates the actor's profile worldwide, the Jersey-based, Delhi-born journalist Nidhi Kathuria explained simply, "He's God."

Bachchan swung through New York recently as a guest of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, which was hosting a retrospective of the 63-year-old actor's 36-year film career and a $60-a-head appearance by the screen idol himself.

Dressed in a somber gray business suit and powder-pink plaid tie, the only hint of his Bollywood pedigree two knuckle-sized silver rings and a Hindu mala around his wrist, Bachchan enjoyed softball questions from an admiring, almost exclusively South Asian coterie of journalists Wednesday. ("It's a great cause!" he was commended for his work with the Indian eye bank.) Hollywood Bollywood magazine came out, as did DesiMatch, BharatMatrimony.com and Bharat Darshan Radio. But given an opportunity for an in-person audience with the world's most beloved film star, the non-Indian New York media stayed home.

The elision raises an important question: Why don't Americans know Amitabh Bachchan?

Bachchan's mostly Hindi-language filmography spans genres from the romantic to the musical to action--though, in true-to-Bollywood form, most of his films are a hybrid of all three. He does fight sequences choreographed like Astaire and uplifting boy-meets-girl musical interludes to rival the Gershwins. The only genre Bachchan hasn't fully explored is the art film, though the 10 movies showcased at Lincoln Center highlighted the rare moments where Bollywood has intersected Hollywood's artier side--stylized, Peckinpaw-esque '70s action films and political morality tales of the last decade. Lincoln Center's curators left out Bachchan's work with the Bollyest of Bollywood's directors--Yash Chopra, for instance, who cast the actor in Kabhi Kabhie (featuring one of the great Hindi film tracks, "Kabhi Kabhi Mere Dil Mein" [Sometimes in My Heart]). In explanation of the winnowing, Bachchan pointed out simply, "Yash Chopra's films, everybody has seen."

Everybody, of course, is a relative term.

There are 6.4 billion people on the earth, and, by some estimates, a quarter live in the vast and sprawling megalopolises that comprise the world's top population centers. These are overwhelmingly in the Third World--Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Jakarta, Delhi and Bombay appear reliably on most top-10 lists.

Bollywood has numbers on its side. These population "agglomerations," as social scientists call them, are either South Asian or cities otherwise in the path of Bollywood's cultural footprint. Outside South Asia, Bachchan has permeated where there is either a sizeable Indian Diaspora population or a poverty-stricken underclass at the whim of the optimistic charms of Bollywood and a global distribution market favoring inexpensively reproduced exports from India, Egypt, Hong Kong and Nigeria.

Where American cities feel Bollywood's cultural weight is among immigrants. Of the 21 million residents of the metropolitan New York area, a quarter million are South Asian. Add the Africans, East Asians and Eastern Europeans for whom cheap Bollywood knockoffs have shaped a cultural worldview and you have a massive fan base for a figure like Bachchan.

Village Farm is a grocery on Ninth Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan that is a kind of United Nations of South Asia. It is the sort of place that brings home the message of Bollywood's vast and unifying appeal. Hindi film soundtracks echo through the aisles 24-seven, and a staff of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs hails from such diverse locations as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Calcutta and South India. Hindi is the lingua Franca.

Kejas Mehta is the counter guy, a 25-year-old one-time student at Long Island University from Bombay. India seems to infuse his life here, yet the South Asian names that are household words to many New Yorkers mean very little to him. He raised his voice over the soundtrack from Hum Tum (Me and You), a romance with starlet Rani Mukherjee, as he guessed at the identity of Satyajit Ray.

Elizabeth Kadetsky is the author of First There Is a Mountain (Little Brown, 2004). She is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and a Pushcart Prize-winning fiction writer.

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