40 Bollywood versus Hollywood:Battle of the DreamFactories

Heather Tyrrell

lntroduction

Theorisation around cineml and globalisation has largely been structured in termsof a basic opposition betwesn Wesiern commercial and culturally imperialist cinema,ancl Third World non-comrnercial, indigenous, politicised cinema. Much criticism ofHollywood and much support for alternative cinemas have been based on this under-

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()r ryinrl publicrtlon dealls: Exccrpted from HeatherTyrrell,,.Bollpvood versus Hollywood: Battle of theDrernt Frctories," in Tracey Skelton 2n6 1;6 4llen (eds.), Culture ond Gtobot Chonge (Routledge, | 999), pp.160 6.272,3. Reprinted by permiss;qn ofTaylor & Francis Books Ltd.

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BOLLYWOOD VERSUS HOLLYIV'OOD

exhibition; and third, oppositions to Bolly.wood as a dominant cultural force in India.By focusing on these areas I hope to diin6hitrate *hy Bo=lli"v-bbA is:&ttile,tlitoret-ical ground for pqvelopment Studies and Cultural Studie-s alfle, and may force us torethink how Third World popular culture is read.

''Bollywood and Third Cinema

'Third Cinema' is a term coined originally by Argcntine film-makers FernandoSolanas and Octavio Gettino, and ginerally applied to the ttreory of cinemas opposedto imperialism and colonialism. Bollywood, as a commercial popular cinema, has aproblematic relationship to theories of Third Cinema, which assume a non-com-mercial, minority cinema as thcir subject.

In discussions of world cinema, the mainstream is gencrally taken to be NorthAmerican and European cinema, with others as oppositional, marginal, and mostsignificandy, non-commercial. Bollywood, the most prolific film industry in theworld, and one with an international commercial market, challenges this assumption.Bollywood films are not solely politically motivated, nor are they entirely devoid ofnationalist/anti-colonialist content. They are at once 'escapist' and ideologicallyloaded.

ln Qrestions of Third. Cinemo, Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (f989) talk aboutThird World films as 'physical acts of collective self-defence and resistance'. Bollyvroodcan bc read both as defending itself and Indian values against thc West, and as a dan-gerous courier of Western values to the Indian audience, and is read in both theseways by the Ind.ian popular film press. A constant process of negotiation between Eastand West takes place in Bollywood films, operating both in terms of style (narrativecontinuity, rnise-en-scine, acting styles), and in terms of content (the values and ideasexpressed in the films). Indian cinematic style negotiates the cinematic traditions ofClassical Hollywood, while its content addresses the ideological heritage of colonisa-tion; just as, in the 'picturisation' of a single film song, hero and heroine oscillatebetween Eastern and Western dress in a rapid series of costume swaps as they danceand mime to music which is itself a hybrid of Eastern and Western styles.

But does tlis negotiation, and its often overt anti-Western agenda, qualifrBollywood as Third Cinema) A cinema does not automatically qualifi for the tidebecause it is produced in and for the Third World. Argentine film-makers FernandoSolanas and Octavio Gettino, defined any 'big spectacle cinema' financed by bigmonopoly capital as First Cinema, 'likely to respond to the aspirations of big capital'.Third Cinema was 'democratic, national, popular cinema'. But both these state-ments can equally be applied to Bollyuvood, which, despite its prolific commercialprofi.le, has always been refused industry status by the Indian government, and which,historicallg received subsidies from Nehru's government to pursue an explicitlyanti-colonial agenda.

Fidel Casuo fiercely criticised Hollywood in his closing speech at the 1985 HavanaFilm Festival:

They are poisoning the human mind in incredible doses through commercial cine-matography grossly commercial. [Third world cinema must be supported, because] ifwe do not survive culturally we will not survive economically or politically.

Compare this speech with an article by Shah Rukh Khan, India's top film star, in1996, defending Bollyrrood's commercial film industry in an introduction to afeature on 100 years of Indian cinema in Moile Internetilnel magazine.

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3 t4 CULTUML GLoBALIZATIoN I:THE RoLE oF MEDIA

I'd like to stress we are part of world cincma and we are making films - firms we like,not for film festivals ' ' . M",k mlyo.a".". a"ri"aian cinema will rule the worrd. oncewe get the technology we are going to kill thJm.

Khan's military m-c:allors are. directed elrlicitjr against the west, and not onryagainst Hollywood and_commercia.r cinema, uut ..tso against,r,. i"a.p*a.nt, alter_AT: :Ttro".r

."- festivals, _ .i".^" -.r,"t

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very popular at all. Most cinemas show i<

,"f;:t;;;;".1\4ira Reym Binford ,"yr-i'h., essay rnnotation and.Imitation in

the obligatory song-and-dance sequences of the Tqdian mainstream film are a strikingexample of indigenously based aesthetic p"".ipr.r 1*i* re mote antecedents in the tra_ditional Sanskrit dramal shaping *. "r.'"ii_i".,!d technology.

s are a form of opposition to Westernms are not musicals alone; they are an;melodrama, action, comedy, social com-ng intensely traglc scenes with jolly song)m one, extreme of feeling to another (airheatre).

rronically, while, from -the outside, Bo'ywood is popularly viewed as a moreescapist cinema than even western .o-^..iJ .inema, it has absorbed withrn it as

BOLL}1VOOD VERSUS HOLLYWOOD 3 1 5

'Hollywood Raises Hell in Bollywood'

Bollwood vs Hollywood

The reasons for Bollywood's resistance to colonisation by Hollywood are aestheticand cultural as well as political. The formula for Bollywood films has been jokinglysummarised as 'A star, six songs, three dances', and these Omnibus or Masala filmsmust have the right mix of a diverse range of ingredients to satisfy their audiences.Without them a fllm 'lacks in entertainment value'.

Flowever rigid this formula, adherence to it does not guarantee a film's success.OnIy one in ten films makes a profit, and whether a film is a hit or a flop dependson the unquantifiable judgement of the Bombay audience, who either fill or desertcinema houses in a film's first week of release . Films which imitate the formula ofprevious hits sink without a trace, while others appear from nowhere to becomeblockbusters. As Subhash K. Iha remarks ing wagazine:'The vagaries of the box-office have flummoxed film-makers and trade watchers forever'. If Indian film-gnakers are unable to guarantee audiences, Western film product is unlikely to do so.' The market for undubbed Western fi.lms in India before L992 was very small.consisting only of an English speaking middle-class 6lite, and western films'had far

3 r 6 CUqURAL GLOBALTZATTON t:THE ROLE OF MEDIA BOLLWVOOD VERSUS HOLLWVOOD

rewards. Star felt they had finally found a way to infiltrate the Indian market, by usingan Indian figurehead company. The succcssful move of multinational media compa-nies into the Ind.ian market was ultimately dernonstrated, however, when the 42ndAnnual Filmfare Awards, otherwise known aS 'the Indian Oscars', were screenedexclusively on Sony Entertainment Television's Hindi Channel in March 1997.

Populor discourses of Hollywood I Bollywood opposition

Both Hollywood and Bollyrvood have made their direct opposition explicit in India,and their rivalry has passed into popular cultural vocabulary. The promotion posterfor Stallone's Clffianger (1993) reads 'Hollywood challenges Bollywood'; Holly-wood's decision to choose Clffianger as the vehicle for its challenge was perhapsbased on a superficial read.ing ofcontemporary Indian film as high in action content,without taking into consideration its juxtaposition with other elements of the 'Masala'

mix, such as song and emodonal melodrama. Clffiangeis challenge failed. In con-trast, as one Indian trade paper commented, a series of Indian music cassettes cnti-ded 'Bollywood vs Hollywood' have been highly commercially successful.

Within Indian popular culture, the commercial success of Indian cinema hasbecome emblematic of India's resistance to the West, and Bollywood stars havebecome figureheads in what is viewed as a battle against Westernisation. ActressMadhuri Dixit, known as Bollyvzood's'queen bee', 'drew herself up and lectured theguy on patriotism' when a fan 'offered her a Canadian dollar for an autograph'. Ihave already mentioned the nationalist sentiments expressed by actor Shah RukhKhan in a Motie magazine feature . Another instance is an advert for BPL (an Indianelectrical hardware company) which appeared in g magozine, a leading IndianEnglish{anguage film magazine, every month from October 1996 to lanwary L997.The advert combines a photograph of film star Amitabh Bachchan with discoursesaround national pride. December's advert concludes:

Who would have guessed a few centuries ago that India would become a poor, Third-World countryl And who knows what India will become in the next centuryl Who knowswhat may happen if we believe in ourselves?

Hollyvood's failure to supersede Boll)ryood reveals that an existing ThirdWorld culture can be a crucial factor in halting Western cultural imperialism,even when political and economic barriers are lifted. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy(1963) describe in The Ind.ian Film\ow Hollywood monopolised ttre world cinemamarket during the First World War, while other film producers were handicappedby the loss of resources and labour-power to the war effort, and successfully definedthe cinematic experience for the rest of the world according to their product, sothat, in effect, politics shaped economics shaped culture. However, llollywoodhas not defined what makes a film work in India, where, conversely, cultural dis-pariry rather than any political or economic factor, has slowed Western commercialexpansion. [ . . . ]

Conclusion

Bollywood is a wild-card in the globalisation process of the media. Its position isconstandy shifting: influenced by its diasporic audiences, by Western moves intoIndia, by newly emerging cultural dialogues between East and West, and by new

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