There’s no description of Bombay quite comparable to that of Salman Rushdie’s in his novel Midnight’s Children:
“Our Bombay: it looks like a hand but really it’s a mouth, always open, always hungry, swallowing food and talent from everywhere else in India. A glamorous leech, producing nothing except films bush-shirts fish ...”
Perhaps the dualities that seem so indigenous to Bombay (or Mumbai, as it is commonly known) are the ingredients that make the city uniquely flavorful. Like Rushdie’s multifarious illustration, this is a climate stewing with contradictions. Bombay has always been big enough to contain both colonial and native customs, corporate culture and slums, high art and populist entertainment, tradition and revolution.
Bombay is the cultural and industrial capital of India, as well as the epicenter of the Hindi film business—Bollywood, as it is fondly christened, is quite simply the most ample movie industry in the world. Home to a synthetic cavalcade of romantic melodramas and shrill-timbred chanteuses, the studio lots of Bombay generate more than 800 masala movies, mainly musicals, on a combined budget of $300 million a year (less than the total production costs of Titanic and Waterworld). Few of them reach American audiences, but India makes more movies than any other nation and nearly doubles the amount Hollywood spawns annually. Ten million Indians go to the movies every day. Movies run a minimum of three hours to give destitute viewers the maximum return for their payment. Audiences are thoroughly engaged as they sing and dance along with the effervescent characters. Internationally, Bollywood boasts an excess of $3.5 billion in profits, and this is expected to leap by 120 percent internationally in the next three years.
In Bombay, an element of fastidious glamour has always kept its place, but it’s more evident these days. At present, western culture is far more accessible in India than it was before the rise of the Internet as a source of global pop proficiency. The presence of western dance music, fashion, food, and television—when mixed in with Bombay’s bold tastes and lust for the spectacular—makes for an outlandish, bold, and thoroughly modern youth culture.
In turn, the west is just as entranced by the kitsch and glitter of the Indian film industry—what with its recent salvos to Bollywood—as Hindi cinema is by America’s pop mainstream. After Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, overflowing with songs from the last thirty years of Indian cinema, Bollywood practically became a household name. Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical Bombay Dreams was inspired by a coterie of Hindi film tunes. Baz Luhrman, director of Moulin Rouge, learned a thing or two from the flamboyant aerobics of Indian cinema. That Bollywood culture is a global commodity is no exaggeration. The South Asian populations of the U.S. and Britain account for 55 percent of international ticket sales, and Bollywood has fans ranging from gypsies in Eastern Europe to Tanzanians, Israelis, and Cambodians.
Of course, with all the campy appropriations of Bollywood culture, there has certainly been a substantial share of opprobrium. When composer Bappi Lahiri filed a lawsuit against hip-hop magnate Dr. Dre after four minutes of the old song “Thoda Resham Lagta Hai” were borrowed without permission in the hip-hop single “Addictive” by Truth Hurts, the conflict became more apparent. In general, much criticism has been hurled against the understanding of Indian culture as an extravaganza in trend and exoticism. The obloquy extends to the condescending stereotypes of Indian pastiche, seen in films like The Guru, with its tongue-in-cheek allusions to Hindu mysticism, the Kama Sutra, and the flashy posturing of Bollywood culture. Something about the mishaps of the main character, a docile naïf played by Jimi Mistry, and the recontextualization of Indian cinema (epitomized by blonde, blue-eyed temptress Heather Graham shimmying around to a Bollywood-inspired number) leaves a bad taste in the sentient spectator’s mouth. But even in the midst of current criticism, the cultural commerce between east and west is a legacy that’s unlikely to be handed off anytime soon.
