S I G H T S

Lessons from Indian Cinema

by Vamsee Juluri

"It was like a movie," many of us said on that Terror Tuesday. After all, who could have ever imagined that one morning we would all witness the ghastly spectacle of airplanes crashing into towers.

Yet, our one point of familiarity in the immediate aftermath of this tragedy was, indeed, our popular culture. We remembered Independence Day, The Siege, Godzilla, and we could have recalled a lot more. Hollywood has given generations of spectators the strange pleasure of watching cities and skylines decimated. We could even get a closer experience of many of these thrills if we only waited in line at one of the theme parks: infernos, floods, tornados, King Kong and the inevitable gift store.

Now, as we rethink the entirety of our lives, as well as the future of entertainment in the post Sept. 11 world, one sobering yet uplifting thought has come to mind: It was like a movie, sure, but it certainly wasn’t like an Indian movie.

The Indian film industry continues to make more movies (and related songs) than any other film industry on earth; it entertains rich and poor even in the age of globalization and satellite television; it routinely sends its stars to elected office; it holds a diverse — and at times divisive — nation together. And it offers faith in the morality and goodness of the universe in the face of myriad tribulations, ranging from poverty and family conflict to political upheaval and, of course, terrorism.

One recent example of this was the film Mission: Kashmir, a slick thriller (with many songs, of course) set in the troubled Indian state of Kashmir where the tension between the demand for regional autonomy and the imperatives of postcolonial nationhood has been tragic and devastating.

The concerns of this movie have now become the concerns of Americans, too; if not Kashmir in particular, at least the whole broad question of trying to live our lives as human beings in the face of increasingly complex political questions and devastatingly violent "solutions." The plot is gripping: A group of young militants, led by an ex-Mujahidin mercenary, conspire to blow up two places of worship, a Hindu temple and a Muslim mosque, so that the two communities would blame one another and lead the nation into civil war.

The plot, and the film’s formidable action sequences, may not seem like the best example of why Sept. 11 was not like an Indian movie, but the resolution certainly is: What triumphs ultimately in this and many other Indian films is the spirit of familial bonds. These are not necessarily bonds of blood or religion, just bonds of affection and devotion for one another. The turn to militancy, and, finally, away from it, are both framed within the lives and sentiments of ordinary people shattered by larger conspiracies.

The young protagonist trains as a terrorist in the first place because he realizes that his foster father, a police officer, had killed his own parents who were bystanders in a police raid on a militant gang (the police officer orders this raid because this particular gang has instructed doctors not to treat police officers and their families, and his own son has died as a result of this). The young militant seeks vengeance all through the film, but in the end, the memory of his adopted mother prevails. He scuttles the plot and ends up saving the temple, the mosque and the world.

Is there a difference in saving the world for mom (Indian style) and saving the world for the fun of it (Hollywood style)? At the outset, I must confess that I am imputing the mandate of saving the world to Indian cinema, and it never makes any such claims (that sort of noble megalomania only comes from Hollywood). Indian cinema is completely about ordinary people simply trying to save themselves and what is dear to them, although this sentiment has been expressed in a variety of forms and genres ranging from the mythological films of the early 20th century to the present bunch of political action thrillers.

It did not matter whether it was the child-god Krishna representing the ideals of childhood and friendship in the older films, or the vigilante "angry young man" of the 1970s bringing smugglers and corrupt politicians to justice and simultaneously reuniting his family. Indian cinema has always been all about home. And home never needed whole cities destroyed for the price of popcorn and admission.

We are obviously never going to be able to watch our movies in the same manner we did before Sept. 11. As the film and television industries try to excise remotely "offensive" scripts and references to planes, terrorists and mass destruction, I think it is a good time for us to make some demands for a positive vision from the makers of our popular culture. It is ironic, but we now have to ask Hollywood for an escape from precisely the sort of escape that it previously gave us.

You could escape into disasters and urban destruction only if you lived in a cocoon of safety, and now that cocoon has been disturbed. The new escape does not have to come from a restrictive creative culture — where we go on making movies like we did in the past but simply snip out troubling pieces (although one big piece I would be happy to see snipped is the emerging genre of autopsy-fetishism on TV and cinema; it is really, really distasteful now, more than ever). The new escape has to be a positive one, and I think there is no harm in looking at Indian cinema for ideas.

I believe that Americans can demand, and certainly deserve, a positive vision of their lives from Hollywood. We need a break from this new reality — a reality that seems too much like all the movies we’ve watched and now we just can’t turn it off. We need to see movies that express our humanity and not our jobs or Mad-Maxianic delusions of despair or grandeur. The sentiments of Bollywood with the resources of Hollywood can make it all quite pleasant (and keep the media exports strong as well; Hollywood has to reexamine its belief that its foreign markets are what drive the need for explosions and mayhem).

For the visionaries who are reading this, and just about anyone who wants to see a movie about better days that we can hope for, my suggestion is that you watch an Indian movie. And not that "art" Indian movie you may find next to Bergman and Fellini; that doesn’t help. You need to find the masala film, the "spice," with songs and sentiments screeching like violins, all three hours of it (ask an Indian friend to get you one).

That’s escape. That’s how we will save the world.

Enter the Pop Forum
Can Indian cinema provide a positive escape?

Vamsee Juluri is an assistant professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco.

Related Sites
From PopPolitics, Bernie Heidkamp looks at how pop culture connected us to Sept. 11.
Read a review of Mission: Kashmir from Planet Bollywood.
Hollywood, not Bollywood, makes the most money and has the greatest international reach. The BBC reports that India’s government is trying to change that.