“We were the world’s largest film-making country, but yet there was this lack of confidence about it,” says Sheena Sippy, fashion photographer and Bollywood royalty. “We were almost apologetic about it. But in the last five to ten years there’s been a sense of assurance growing in the industry that’s become greater than ever before. There’s an enormous sense of confidence in Indian cinema right now.”
The new Bollywood is not the all-singing all-dancing pulp factory of old, famed for melodramatic weepies such as Mother India and Devdas, and derided for bold-faced knock-offs of Hollywood mainstays such as The Godfather (Sarkar), Reservoir Dogs (Kaante) and Fight Club (er, Fight Club). Instead, it is a decidedly modern and increasingly youth-based industry, a place where, in a long awaited turnaround, Hollywood has finally come knocking for much needed source material. Thus Gangsta MD, the forthcoming movie by the American comedian Chris Tucker, is a remake of the smash hit 2003 Bollywood comedy Munnabhai MBBS, about a conman who pretends to be a doctor.
This burgeoning industry, worth $1bn a year, is portrayed in eye-gouging colour in a cerise-pink hardbound new book, Lights Camera Masala, by Sippy, the daughter of the Bollywood legend Ramesh Sippy (director of the 1975 supersmash curry western Sholay). Like a crazed fusion of Pop Art and Pop-Up, her glossy and often bravely muted images of Bollywood icons mingle with actual popcorn cartons, celluloid strips and script extracts, all glued and pinned to the pages. Meanwhile interviews with today’s megastars reveal a film-making community in enviably robust form. The book, says Sippy, is a calling card for an industry that’s not embarrassed about itself any more.
It’s also a place where a new generation of young stars with modern values is taking centre stage. Of course, respect and homage is duly paid to old industry stalwarts such as Amitabh Bachchan, who blazed a trail for classic stardom in Seventies standouts such as Deewar, Sholay and Kaala Patthar. But this Bollywood is ablaze with a new kind of precocious screen personality.
Here, it’s all about people such as Priyanka Chopra the 24-year-old star of the contentious Kashmiri terrorist drama Asambhav, released at the height of the India-Kashmir crisis in 2004. Or Salman Khan, the muscle-man hero of the Russian-set drama Lucky: No Time for Love, who’s currently in the midst of a legal case involving the shooting of an endangered species (a black antelope called a chinkara). Or Aishwarya Rai, a former Miss World and Bollywood’s first genuine cross-over icon, who will soon be seen opposite Miranda Richardson and Robbie Coltrane in the domestic-abuse drama Provoked.
It’s no wonder, then, that the film recently chosen to represent this industry at next year’s Academy Awards ceremony is to be Rang De Basanti (Colour Me Saffron), a controversial tale of youthful and ultimately violent rebellion during the fight for Indian independence, starring the male pin-up Aamir Khan and British actress Alice Patten (daughter of Chris Patten). Or that the most commercially successful Bollywood film of the year has been Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna (Never Say Goodbye), a story of infidelity and betrayal among two married Indian couples living in Manhattan. This is simply not the stuff of traditional Bollywood film-making, according to Naman Ramachandran, the author of Lights Camera Masala. “In the so-called Golden Age of Bollywood these issues and themes would not have been possible. You would never have had a mainstream film that talks about cheating on your spouse, and infidelity and all those tricky subjects. The content is definitely changing, and there’s every reason to be upbeat about the industry.”
And yet, surprisingly, the text of Lights Camera Masala is as free from theoretical polemicising as it is devoid of historical context. This isn’t another media-studies style analysis of subtext and simile in Third World cinema. Nor is it a solicitous attempt to woo the uninitiated with an idiot’s guide to Bollywood. Instead, it simply launches the reader straight into the thick of it from page one — like being tossed headlong into a dizzying industry party where big-name players such as Shah Rukh Khan, Karan Johar and Aishwarya Rai are firing anecdotes and titbits of film-making know-how in your direction at merciless speed.
“There was a very conscious decision taken not to simply present the history of Indian cinema,” says the book’s designer Divya Thakur. “Instead, we tried to reflect Bollywood as it is right now, to capture the energy of mainstream Indian cinema today. It’s not just kitsch any more, but it’s not like any other international cinema, either. It’s a different place, which is vibrant, alive, pulsating, a little bit crazy and a little bit over-the-top, and always very high on the emotional quotient. Which, for me, meant trying to present Bollywood outside the confines of paper.”
She points to the multiple fold-out pages, the spinning cardboard wheel-of-fortune, the glued-on script pages and, in the chapter that discusses star-power, the mock-up of a heartbreaking fan letter, complete with tattered envelope, that declares to the actor Abhishek Bachchan: “Abisek I really love you and must request this. Please come to Malda and marry me.”
This unusual format pays dividends. The rhythm of the book takes over, the recurring industry characters become familiar, the novelty items symbolic, and gradually some ineffable sense of the current state of Bollywood begins to set in. A picture forms of an industry alive with change.
The book’s producers see it as not aimed exclusively for industry-aware fans, either, but also as an initiation into Bollywood for Indian cinema novices.
“I hope that even for the uninitiated this sensual experience is also a fun journey,” says Sippy, who is currently working on her movie debut as a Bollywood director, and whose heavyweight family name effortlessly opened all the doors for the book’s major interviews.
“Even if you’re not aligned to the industry,” she says, “if you’re not part of it, or not interested, it is still a trip. You get a sense of it without actually going there. I think it’s a rollercoaster ride, and it reflects very accurately what the industry is like right now!”
Lights Camera Masala: Making Movies in Mumbai, by Sheena Sippy and Naman Ramachandran, is published by India Film House on Monday at £35
Shaad Ali, actor/director
‘Some of the new wave of films are really trashy; there’s utter crap being churned out. I think a lot of hell will break loose and a lot of really bad films will be made.’
Shah Rukh Khan, actor
‘I don’t think Hollywood even comes close to the kind of cinema that we do. I would rather die working in an Indian film than owning a studio in Hollywood.’
Abhishek Bachchan, actor
‘The smell. I call it the smell. You drive into a set and it’s like an experience. You drive through the gates. You feel the experience. You feel the high . . . I call it the smell.’
Shah Rukh Khan, actor
‘I have created a myth. Sometimes I think of myself in the third person – I’m ‘the’ Shah Rukh Khan now. He’s a brand of his own. It’s not me any more. Now a myth is created. This is what my films have created. That myth can be called King Khan.’
Karan Johar, actor
‘I don’t think there is anything better than making an Indian film, ever. Look at what we do. We have the magic of cinema in our hands – and I believe it’s a power.’
Shah Rukh Khan, actor
‘I am the biggest star in the world. I look at people in Hollywood – I love them and I think they are far ahead of us in technology, but I think we are ahead in resilience.’
