why Bollywood doesn't suck.... much

As I mentioned in my previous entry, I'd recently seen the Indian movie called Fanaa, and it sparked a lot of thought re Bollywood in my mind.

I watched the movie with some people, and one of them was displeased with the film for a number of reasons, reasons with which I agreed in the past and have by no means ceased to comprehend. I will describe her main three reasons.

Firstly, the portrayal of Muslims in the film is distasteful. All the main characters are Muslim, including the protagonist, who has sex with the hero (whom she has known for but three days) in a night of agreed-upon no-string-attached frolicking before they decide to marry, and the father of the protagonist, who falls into alcohol as a cure for his grief after his wife dies. Such portrayals are propaganda that normalize such un-Islamic behaviors as premarital sex and the consumption of alcohol.

Secondly, the signature song of the movie utilizes the Islamic phrase "Subhanallah", which can be translated as "Exalted is Allah." To hear a phrase used to worship reduced to what can be essentially described as a pick-up line is jarring to the Muslim ear and mind.

Thirdly, the melodramatic plot-line of the movie is utterly unrealistic. They fall in love, have sex, and decide to marry within the span of a few days. The next day, she gets eye surgery whilst he carries out a terrorist attack (which is not portrayed as a Muslim thing, thankfully, but a Kashmiri freedom fighter affair). Seven years later, he just happens to get injured close to her house. The implausibility causes unrealistic expectations.

All of these are valid concerns, and I have shared some of them and still do.

As for the first, i.e. the portrayal of Muslims, it is true that seeing things in movies does tend to desensitize people to them. I'm not sure, however, if a film like Fanaa could be counted as "propaganda," as that word is defined by Merriam-Webster as such

1 capitalized : a congregation of the Roman curia having jurisdiction over missionary territories and related institutions
2: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person
3: ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect

Definition 1 is easy to dismiss, and the third is a very political definition. #2 is probably the definition used in the criticism, with the damaged party being Muslims. Viewed in a vacuum, the movie could be seen as deliberately designed to hurt the image of Muslims and Islam. However, viewed in the broader context of Bollywood, it follows a formula in which are inserted Hindus (and, to a lesser degree, Parsis and Christians) as well as Muslims. Of course, Muslims are a minority in India, and thus more prone to stereotyping.

As for the portrayal of pre-marital sex, it might not be so disparate from reality as many Desis would like to believe, as Nita J. Kulkarni blogs.

No matter how much parents rave and rant about the evils of western influences, and the decline of Indian culture, the facts are that the desire to interact and romance the opposite sex is natural and has always existed in India! By denying the existence of such natural feelings parents are alienating their children. In fact I did not include an interview due to a lack of space, that of an eighty year old gentleman. He told me that too much fuss was being made about premarital sex. It was not a modern affliction, he said, it existed in his day and age too. He lost his virginity at age 17 he said, several years before marraige and it wasn’t with a prostitute. This was the first time he was confessing it to anyone though. The only change now (he told me) is that sex has been dragged out into the open and youngsters do not pretend its wrong. This is a good thing according to him because it could be the beginning of the end of hypocrisy.

What the old man calls hypocrisy is, actually, so embedded in the Desi community (including the Desi diaspora of which I am a part), especially the Muslim Desi community, that a young Pakistani who drunkenly murdered a white man in 2005 actually said, in reference to drinking and being a in a premarital romantic relationship, that "In our religion you don't tell your parents. They might get upset." He didn't say that drinking and romance prior to marriage were forbidden in the religion, he said that talking about it was forbidden. This, to me, represents the embedded gag order under which Desis, especially Muslims, live. Taking the dichotomy of appearance (i.e. "we don't talk about that") vs. reality into consideration, the criticism is a poignant example of cultural synecdoche.

Alcohol is perhaps even more stigmatized than sex, but even that is changing. The consumption of alcohol by young Muslims is called a plague here, and yet the stigma is still real, as Austin Cline details in several interviews with young Muslims.

The second criticism, that of the use of Islamic phrases in Bollywood soundtracks, is not an easy one to tackle. I've heard other Indian songs use the word "Allah" and found it jarring. Theologically speaking, it's irreverent, but I know of no one who regularly watches Indian movies who cares. It could simply be a desensitization on their part, or a lack of exposure to Bollywood on mine. In any case, my knowledge of Hindi is not enough to know whether or not Islamic Arabic phrases are used in day-to-day life in a manner to which I am not accustomed.

The third criticism is easily answered via a quick glance at Bollywood. All the movies are ludicrous and over-the-top. Every single movie is a romance or is romantic in nature in a society in which most of marriage is arranged (more than 95% according to this, and 80-90% according to this). Bollywood films are intended to be romps in escapism more than a realistic depiction of reality.

In the end, no matter how much I might dislike Bollywood, there is a flip side of the story. Even though media portrayals might deride true feminism, there was a movie that sent an empowering message for women, and Indian soap operas seem to help rural Indian women develop more feminist attitudes. India's feminist scene is also quite vibrant, with groups such as the Gulabi Gang taking matters into their own hands. I suppose that since Bollywood is here to stay, even "haters" like me would better serve others by offering constructive criticism instead of hoping that Bollywood stops making movies, or completely revamps everything.

BS Factor:
The number of bangles I own...

I'll admit it, I imagine myself as graceful as some of the Bollywood actresses when I wear Desi clothes. Also, this is an old picture. I own a lot more bangles now.

why Bollywood does suck

Last weekend, I watched a Bollywood movie (this one is called Fanaa) for the first time in four years or so. The last movie I'd seen before that was Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, during the summer in which I spent a month in London with relatives. Not only did I fall asleep three quarters of the way through it, I only saw the part of it I did because I was resting in the room in which the other girls were watching television. The last movie I'd seen before that was probably sometime during early childhood.

So, it goes without saying that I am not exactly a big fan of Bollywood movies.

Firstly, they're all inevitably musicals. I hadn't developed an enjoyment of Western musicals until my senior year of high school, and then I quickly tired of the clichés of musical theatre. I do like some musicals now, but I'm quite picky as to the ones I'll sit through with any measure of enjoyment. Bollywood musicals are even worse than Western ones as far as clichés go. For example, each song must include scene shifts that incorporate the Swiss Alps (although that might presumably be due to the fact that the Alps are less troubled than the similar-looking Kashmir), many outfit changes, and endless posing, culminating with what a friend of mine once dubbed the infamous "affectionate hug:" where a Hollywood film would put a kiss between the leads, Bollywood uses its supposedly-chaster substitute. At least in Fanaa, the movie was set in Kashmir, so the gorgeous setting (if actually the Tatra Mountains, not Kashmir itself) was justified plot-wise.

The hug brings me to my second point: the seemingly arbitrary censorship of sexuality in the films. Fanaa's pivotal love scene involves a lascivious (no other word will do) dance in the rain, followed by a scene where the hero and heroine kiss each other all over the neck and shoulders and then are seen lying in bed together. It's obvious what has happened, especially considering the fact that they essentially agree to no-strings-attached love in the scene before and they agree to marry in the scenes to come (not to mention the kid she has later on, but that's not the point). Aside from the very sexy dancing that occurs in Bollywood films, the costuming is quite sultry as well. Fanaa's heroine is a blind Muslim girl and so is usually quite conservatively attired, but in other movies, skimpy attire is often the rule rather than the exception. Here's the kicker: kisses on the lips are not considered "decent" and so are almost banned from Indian cinema. So, writhing around in revealing little outfits is OK, but not even a brief liplock is allowed (of course, all this is changing)? Mmkay.

Thirdly, in spite of the implicit (if flexible) ban on displays of consensual affection, the thwarted rape scene is a standard of Bollywood cinema. It goes something like this: a girl is nearly raped by the villain and is saved by some male hero bursting in. She usually falls in love with the man who saves her. A woman screaming for help as she is about to be violated by a mustachioed man leering over her nubile form isn't obscene, but a kiss between two happy people in love is?

I'm sorry, I was puking a bit there. Onward, since I think the point is made.

Stereotyping is the fourth reason I dislike Bollywood films. Hollywood does this too, but in the flat fantasy world of Bollywood films, it seems more heavy-handed somehow. Suketu Mehta writes in his article:

Growing up in Bombay with the movies, I had come to understand Muslims as lovable, Christian girls as flirtatious, Sikhs as loyally martial, Parsis as endearingly cracked. The movies trafficked in broad stereotypes, but they were, for the most part, good-natured stereotypes.

As many a sociologist has pointed out, even a "good" stereotype is actually bad. The harm in stereotyping is not so much that it casts a particular ethnic, racial, religious, or other group in bad light, but in that a stereotype is an over-generalization that can be true or untrue depending on the individual. Additionally, the descriptions that Mehta describes are all of minority groups within India; the majority group in India in general is Hindu. Thus, Hindus are cast as the norm whereas minorities have labels thrust upon them, similar to the way in which white heterosexual maleness is the norm in Hollywood against which all difference and deviance is measured. Fanaa, for all its flaws, doesn't seem to do this much. The demureness of the heroine is more attributable to her blindness and sweet nature than to her religion, and, oddly enough, her father is portrayed as a drunk (or at least a drinker) in the latter half of the movie.

Fifthly, the sexism inherent in the Bollywood film industry is unsettling to me. Siliconeer put it very well back in 2001:

Bollywood is nothing if not sexist. Male stars can grow old but can still cavort with adolescent nymphets, but just let a female star get married and tongues are wagging. Some wonderful female stars have managed to buck this double standard with the sheer heft of their talent—Dimple and Rekha, for instance, but the double standard is well and truly alive.

Shahrukh Khan, an actor who's been in the industry as long as I've been alive, still gets cast as the "hero" in recent films, whereas older women in Bollywood (as in over twenty five) are left, as this blogger says, "playing elder sisters or spinster aunts, relegated to the background where younger (but talentless) leads steal the limelight. Roles for women are much better now than they were a decade ago, but sexism and marginalization still exist." It's a reflection of unfortunate reality: women are valued in Desi society mainly for their beauty and youth prior to marriage, since such attractiveness leads to marriage and motherhood (i.e. further propagation of the culture).

Last, but not least, I dislike the sheer predictability of the movies. Their plotlines are as follows, according to this Facebook group:

1. "I want to hook up with this girl but she's rich and I'm poor and our families hate each other."
2. "I want to hook up with this girl but she's Muslim and I'm Hindu and our families hate each other."
3. "I want to hook up with this girl but she's already in love with my best friend."

Pretty accurate, if you ask me.

BS Factor:
All the back-up dancers that no one ever sees again (pretend Aishwarya Rai isn't there)


Coming soon: a response to a conservative Muslim's criticism of Fanaa and, by extension, other Bollywood portrayals of Muslims or why Bollywood doesn't suck