Can 2 billion people be wrong?
The music, movies and literature of South Asia are the most popular
in the world.
Now America is falling under their spell
By RICHARD CORLISS
Monday, Apr. 26, 2004

The brash young man seizes the stage of Manhattan's Broadway
Theater, sings and dances to a vigorous bhangra and, feeling his
rock-star-in-the-making oats, shouts, "Are ya with me, Bombay? ...
Are ya with me, New York?" This scene from the new musical Bombay
Dreams poses the cultural question of the moment. South Asian pop -
Bollywood movies, Indian music and dance, the whole vibrant masala
of subcontinental culture - not only enthralls a billion Indians at
home but also spans half the world, from Africa and the Middle East
to Eastern Europe and the Indian diaspora in Britain and the U.S.
Now Indi-pop is close to a critical mass in the U.S. The 2 million
American Desis (mainly people of Indian and Pakistani heritage) have
made it a burgeoning niche industry. But can it finally catch on in
the mall theaters and dance clubs and living rooms of America? Will
ya be with it, New York? New Orleans? Nebraska?

The cultural stew is simmering and ready to boil over. Just as
Indian food graduated from big-city exotica to mainstream
international cuisine, Indi-pop culture could become a new part of
American pop culture. It certainly has the energy and glamour to
curry favor with more than those who favor curry. It might even gain
the hipness it has in Britain - where, as Meera Syal, the original
librettist of Bombay Dreams, boldly said, "Brown is the new black."

This process, notes writer Hanif Kureishi, "is inevitable, because
culture moves forward by taking new and original voices from the
margin and moving them into the center. You saw it with Elvis. You
saw it with Toni Morrison." If Bombay Dreams is a hit, you may see
it with Indian composer A.R. Rahman. You can already see it in the
critical and commercial success of novelists like Kureishi, Jhumpa
Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy. Their success has led
the way for a slew of South Asians, including Michelle de Kretser
(from Sri Lanka),

Monica Ali (from Bangladesh) and Mohsin Hamid (from Pakistan).

One of the most fertile areas for East-West cross-pollinations is
music. At S.O.B.'s in New York City, Rekha Malhotra, a.k.a. DJ
Rekha, plays bhangra, a cool fusion of electronic dance and hip-hop
beats with traditional Indian folk sounds. So popular is Rekha, 33,
that her parties have become tourist attractions. "I can go anywhere
in the country," she says, "and someone will go, 'Oh, I've been to
Basement Bhangra.'" At Sonotheque in Chicago, Brian Keigher, 31,
spins a popular fusion style known as "Asian underground"--fast,
irresistibly danceable music studded with sitars and thumping
tablas. Wade your way through the crush on the dance floor, and you
will find Indian students, Pakistani locals from Devon Avenue, white
clubgoers from the North Side and West Side blacks, always hungry
for a new sound. At music clubs and universities, crowds can listen
to Funkadesi, a band that mixes Indian music with reggae and funk.

From the dance floor, Indian music percolates to the recording
studio. Hip-hopper Jay-Z and British-based Indian producer Panjabi
MC served up Beware of the Boys, which featured Jay-Z rapping over a
remixed version of a song that Panjabi had made a hit in Britain and
India. Even Britney Spears is getting her Ganges on; she used
British - South Asian producer Rishi Rich on her last album. And you
know a culture is hip when it generates a superhero; that's Bombaby,
a cult comic-book out of California.

Then there's Bollywood - Hollywood in Bombay and, by extension, all
the country's dozen separate film industries - producing the Indian
musicals that nearly everyone in America has heard of and
practically no one in America has seen. Bollywood films provide the
primary entertainment for half the globe; the top films earn
millions more in U.S. theaters catering to Desi audiences. But
Bollywood has not dented the mass, or even the class, movie public.
The Oscar-nominated Lagaan took in 10 times as much in the Desi
houses as it did when Sony Pictures Classics gave it a general
release. Bollywood films are also hard to find in video stores,
although they're easily available online and in Indian-American
neighborhoods.

Why are the films having more trouble finding an audience than the
music and books? America's current cultural insularity aside, the
musicals are a hard sell. At three hours - plus, with family-loyalty
plots out of the hoariest Hollywood weepies, and all that singing, a
Bollywood epic is too old-fashioned for the art-house crowd and too
sedate, too girlie, for young males.

All of which makes Bombay Dreams a big risk for Broadway: a $14
million musical with no stars, a score by a composer famous in most
of the world (see box, below) but not in the U.S., and a story set
in the Bollywood milieu unknown to Broadway's conservative audience.
Producer Andrew Lloyd Webber hired writer Thomas Meehan (The
Producers, Hairspray) to cut a lot of in-jokes, pump up the mother
love - domesticate the Bollywood beast. Will the transplant work?
The show has a $6 million advance; and at a preview last week, the
audience, perhaps 25% South Asian, seemed to love the infectious
songs and rain-drenched dancing. So salaam, Bombay.

But Bombay Dreams needs to fill only 14,000 seats a week. How do you
get millions to see an Indian movie? For a true crossover, you need
a movie that just happens to be Indian, that pours a familiar tale
into an Indian milieu. That's Marigold, the story of an American
starlet, stranded in India, who works in a Bombay movie to get
airfare home and falls for her Indian leading man. Bollywood is not
the genre here; it's just the backdrop for a fish-out-of-water plot.
Says Steve Gilula of Fox Searchlight, which distributed the breakout
hit Bend It Like Beckham: "American popular culture is good at
absorbing influences from around the world. But we embrace the
elements, not the complete form. We have borrowed from parts of the
culture and integrated it into ours."

Beckham, Gurinder Chadha's inspirational comedy about a young woman
(Parminder Nagra) who flouts her traditional Sikh family values to
achieve soccer stardom, is the model for this transcultural form.
The film, made for about $6 million, earned $32.5 million in North
American theaters and an additional $44 million abroad. It has also
given Chadha a chance to try making the first crossover Bollywood-
style musical: Bride and Prejudice, with Jane Austen's Bennet family
transformed into Anglo-Indians and Bollywood goddess Aishwarya Rai
in the lead. "It's got the love story, it's got the songs, it's fun -
like a Grease," rhapsodizes Rick Sands, COO of Miramax Films, which
will distribute Bride in the U.S. "It's a Bollywood musical, but
it's not going to be 3 1/2 hours long." Chadha, who says, "I don't
make Bollywood films, I make British films," calls Bride "a
Bollywood-inspired movie for a Western audience."

Beckham had another perk: it landed Nagra a continuing role on ER.
(Finally! An Indian doctor on a U.S. hospital show.) But while
contestants on The Bachelor go on a Bollywood-theme date this week,
few South Asians are on the big or small screen in the U.S. (The
Simpsons' Apu doesn't count.)

For the most part, Indians are more successful behind the camera
than in front of it. M. Night Shyamalan made the megahits The Sixth
Sense and Signs. Mira Nair, director of Salaam Bombay and Monsoon
Wedding, is making an Indian-infused take on Vanity Fair, with Reese
Witherspoon as Becky Sharp. And Nair has a three-film slate for her
company, International Bhenji Brigade, financed by an Indian
businessman.

"I came from India to Harvard in 1976," Nair recalls, "and I was one
of only three Indians in the undergraduate class. Five years ago,
when I went back, Harvard had 1,500 South Asian students. Which
means in five more years, America will be run by people who look
like us. We bear no illusions about the elite anymore. We are the
elite."

Now the question is whether the nation's wealthiest minority can
have the same impact on show business as it has in business,
medicine and technology. And whether 290 million other Americans
will want to see them onscreen, dance to their music, go to their
shows. About 500 years ago, Columbus sought India and found America.
Now it's time for America's cultural consumers to discover India.

Reported by Simon Crittle, Lina Lofaro and Jyoti Thottam/New York,
Desa Philadelphia/Los Angeles and David Thigpen/Chicago