Once again, Amitav Ghosh has written an essay so thoughtful, rich and beautiful I feel compelled to react at length with my own comparatively disjointed yet (I hope) somewhat constructive thoughts. In "Confessions of a Xenophile," which appeared last year in Outlook, he puts forth something approaching a condensed vision of his entire personal and professional life, anchored in the formative experience of living in an Egyptian village in the 1980s. He begins with a revelation about Hindi films:"My hosts and I discovered one medium of communication where we were on equal terms: this was the language of aflaam al-Hindeyya – that is to say, Hindi film songs. When all other efforts at communication broke down, we would burst into song – this was no small accomplishment on my part as I am a terrible singer. But many of the younger people in the village sang very well and knew innumerable Hindi songs. Indian filmi music thus became a shared language and opened many barriers and earned me many invitations to meals. The Hindi films that were best known in Lataifa were of the fifties vintage – films that featured such stars as Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Padmini, Manoj Kumar and Babita..."
Here we have a classic case of cross-cultural exchange of the kind extensively facilitated by such products as Hindi films in many parts of the world during the 1950s and 60s- not just in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Indeed, so popular were Raj Kapoor films in my native country, Romania, that the name is still readily recognised and frequently used; for instance, reviews of Slumdog Millionaire in the newspapers referenced its hero as an archetypal "vagabond" successor of Kapoor. Of course, much was lost in translation since virtually no Hindi was spoken or understood in the many parts of the world these films reached. Thus, the 1950s Romanian crooner Luigi Ionescu recorded a version of the song "Awaara hoon" (I am a tramp) that came out through misunderstanding as "Avaramu" (it can still be widely found on the internet today under this title, and it's a safe bet almost all Eastern Europeans wouldn't know it as anything else). It's quite an amazing thing that Romanians, Russians and Egyptians were singing in Hindi words they did not know, much in the same way so many of the world's teenagers today ape American pop songs without speaking English. The phenomenal worldwide success of Hindi films at this time was a different kind of globalisation, deeply tied to a specific set of political changes in the postwar era. Ghosh explains,
"Broadly speaking, those circumstances could be described as the spirit of decolonization that held sway over much of the world in the decades after the Second World War; this was the political ethos that found its institutional representation in the Non-Aligned Movement. We are at a very different moment in history now, when the words Non-Aligned seem somehow empty and discredited; today the movement is often dismissed not just as a political failure, but as a minor footnote to the great power rivalries of the Cold War. It is true, of course, that the movement had many shortcomings and met with many failures. Yet it is also worth remembering that the Non-Aligned Movement as such was merely the institutional aspect of something that was much broader, wider and more powerful: this, as I said before, was the post-war ethos of decolonization, which was a political impulse that had deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonances. In the field of culture, among other things, it represented an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance. It was, in this sense, the necessary and vital counterpart of the nationalist idiom of anti-colonial resistance. In the West, Third World nationalism is often presented as an ideology of xenophobia and parochialism. But the truth is that many of these movements of resistance tried very hard, within their limited means, to create an universalism of their own. Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers - a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism. These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased."
There is much to discuss here. First, as a point of historiography we can see the organising principles behind Ghosh's tendency in both his fiction and non-fiction to explore the connections between people and places in a pan-Asian or Indian Ocean-centred arc. Thus, he has written movingly and with equal sensitivity about Egypt, the Gulf states, India, Burma, and Cambodia. Historians are nowadays setting their sights on these kinds of "comparative" and "regional" histories, but for clarity of purpose and beauty of prose none can match Ghosh. Secondly, he provides the key institutional context for understanding the spread of a cultural product. Hindi films with Raj Kapoor were not popular in Egypt or Romania because they were socialist (though the affinity of the Nehruvian ethic with the political aspirations of these other nation-states was certainly a factor). Their populism was, if not subversive of the state, certainly not dependent upon it. As Ravi Vasudevan notes, popular Hindi cinema appealed to a "mass public which lies beyond the borders of institutions legitimated by the state," and thus could "provide a distinctive route for the social imaginary." The manner of its translation abroad should not be read as a mere extension of relations between states but as a true globalisation: the spread of words, ideas, images and ways of seeing the world across vast numbers of people in many places at the same time.
Naturally, this included political ideas, and once again we are not speaking exclusively of state structures. The transnational popularity of leaders like Nehru and Nasser alluded to by Ghosh was widespread, and the sentiment is not entirely dead even today. Earlier this year, I was in an electronics store run by an older Egyptian fellow in Berkeley, just off of Telegraph Avenue. I was buying a converter to use with my laptop in England, where I was going to do research for my thesis at the British Library. The man asked me what I was studying, and I said imperialism. His eyes lit up and he exclaimed, "Do you know who the leader of Egypt was after the British left?" "Yes, Nasser." He continued with glee, "Do you remember what he did to the British? He stuck their nose in the mud!" That the Suez incident of 1956 should evoke such a passionate reaction in 2009 from someone who could barely have been a boy at the time is, if anything, a powerful reminder of the persistence with which the non-aligned moment lives on in people's minds.
Today's globalisation is of a fundamentally different kind; Ghosh refers to the alliance of "capital + empire," with fundamentalism thrown in as the third pillar of the new world order. The changes can be easily tracked in Hindi cinema. Rochona Majumdar writes, "In the six decades since the country’s independence, inaugural prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s nationalist, populist government, rooted in socialist ideals, has given way to neoliberalism and globalisation. On the screen, this evolution meant the end of the category known as 'the people'" exemplified by Raj Kapoor films. Thus,
"To Bollywood songwriters in the 1950s and ’60s, city streets were playful and teeming with possibilities. Albeit idealized, their depictions animated a then-true national identity: in 'innumerable' songs, Majumdar says, 'you see the dream of socialist India come to life.' As the global economy arrived at India’s shores in the 1980s, however, the collective people disappeared from Bollywood screens. The iconic city street darkened, becoming a 'contested space,' she says, where people from different religions, castes, and professions—criminal or otherwise—strove for dominance. Bollywood itself splintered, producing different films for distinct audiences. India’s wealthy diaspora saw movies in which characters from large, affluent families fall in love and get married, their weddings setting the stage for grand musical sequences. Often these films, which emphasize individual—rather than universal—experiences, are set abroad in places like Switzerland, Egypt, or New Zealand. These are the films foreigners consider typical Bollywood fare, and their popularity has inspired Hollywood and other film industries to use Bollywood conventions, directors, and stars for movies like Monsoon Wedding, Bend It Like Beckham, and Bride and Prejudice."
While Majumdar makes some great observations about the use of space (the changing meanings of the street and the choice of filming locations), what is most important here is the particular kind of globalisation processes Hindi films participate in. In the 1950s, a self-consciously nationalist Indian cultural form resonated with foreign audiences. Today, the mainstream Hindi film is a fragmented product that is slowly being woven into a truly global tapestry of interchangeable symbols. Dancing in the Alps or under the pyramids, surfing on the beach in Australia, partying in nightclubs and so on are the common aspirations of the moneyed "good life" driven by notions once viewed as typically American and Western European. It is not a question of recovering the "Indianness" of films in danger of being "Westernised," but of recognising that such categories are themselves rapidly becoming obsolete.
In parallel, the rise of the Hindu right in the 1990s and the prospect of communal violence has provoked the most sustained attempt by the Hindi film industry to address the relationship between religion and nationalism since the first few decades after the independence. Noted filmmaker Shyam Benegal speaks of a revival in recent years of "hugely successful films like Lagaan which equate an inclusive secular unity with nationalism." Other films that have appeared since then that explore urban life in contemporary India, including Rang de Basanti and Mumbai Meri Jaan, feature explicit plot lines revolving around the suspicion and hostility between Hindu and Muslim characters that is happily resolved in the end. Unlike the old days, however, when censor boards would not allow any impression of communal tension to make it to the screen, the new crop of films are didactic without being unrealistic, as they often begin by openly acknowledging mistrust and conflict. Many of these films perhaps owe more to their Nehruvian predecessors than to the homogenising tendencies of our globalisation. And Hindi films remain popular abroad, though offering a much different kind of entertainment than they once did.
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