New Kings of the World

Dispatches from Bollywood, Dizi, and K-Pop

Fatima Bhutto

• Publisher: Columbia Global Reports
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781733623711
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

A vast cultural movement is emerging from outside the Western world. Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge yet to Hollywood, McDonald's, blue jeans, and other aspects of American mass-produced popular culture. This is a book about the new arbiters of mass culture —India's Bollywood films, Turkey's soap operas, or dizi, and South Korea's pop music. Carefully packaging not always secular modernity, combined with traditional values, in urbanized settings, they have created a new global pop culture that strikes a deeper chord than the American version, especially with the many millions who are only just arriving in the modern world and still negotiating its overwhelming changes.Fatima Bhutto, an indefatigable reporter and vivid writer, profiles Shah Rukh Khan, by many measures the most popular star in the world; goes behind the scenes of Magnificent Century, Turkey's biggest dizi, watched by more than 200 million people across 43 countries; and travels to South Korea to see how K-Pop started. Bhutto's book is an important dispatch from a new, multipolar order that is taking form before our eyes.

Part One

I think I’m able to fulfill each latent desire of a woman in whatever role she comes in front of. I’m able to make a mother feel nice, I’m able to make a sister feel nice, I’m able to make a sexy girl feel nice, I’m able to make a girl who doesn’t love me—and tells me—feel nice. I think I’m able to make a daughter feel nice. I think I, somehow, stand for every emotion a woman can’t express in this world, they can express it to me and I will understand it.

—Shah Rukh Khan

Chapter One

Every day, 14 to 15 million Indians go to the movies. India produces between 1,500 and 2,000 films a year—more than any country in the world, and in over twenty languages. The number of cinema tickets sold is the highest national total on the planet; in 2012, India sold 2.6 billion tickets compared to Hollywood’s 1.36 billion. Bollywood boasts the highest growth rate in the movie industry, barreling ahead at 11.5 percent a year. By 2020, Indian cinema, exported to over seventy countries, is expected to bring in close to $4 billion in terms of gross box office realizations. India loses the battle of revenues to Hollywood, but with average multiplex tickets costing $4 and many of India’s cinemas divided into classes like airplanes, you can see a movie for under a dollar if you don’t mind sitting uncomfortably right in front of the screen.

India’s cinematic origins are deeply entrenched in the history and fabric of Indian life. Bollywood was born in the plays performed in the Mughal court. Though the artisanal skills came from the Muslim community, the elaborate narratives were taken from Hindu holy books and mythology. Padmaavat, the 2018 film that caused a violent furor in India with right-wing mobs calling for the lead actress to be beheaded and the Supreme Court intervening to roll back state censorship of the film, comes from this culturally syncretic legacy: Padmaavat, the story of an imaginary Hindu queen, was written by a Muslim Sufi poet. Bollywood is a meeting point of this prism, a communion of Islam and Hinduism.

In 1914, Hollywood released Cecil B. DeMille’s directorial debut, The Squaw Man, which some consider to be the first feature film ever made.* However, the first fully Indian feature film, Raja Harishchandra, based on stories of Hindu gods from the Mahabharata, was released a full year before DeMille’s film. The Jazz Singer, Hollywood’s first talkie, was a musical, and though India released its first non-silent film, Alam Ara, four years later, they would never let go of the song and dance formula.† “We don’t make talkies,” the writer, director, and actor Girish Karnad has said, “we make singies.” Ashis Nandy, the psychologist and social theorist, similarly recalls seeing films advertised as “dancicals” and “fighticals.”

Though the films of the 1930s and ’40s would have as many as forty songs—the world record for most songs in a movie belongs to Indrasabha (1932), which had seventy-one—mercifully, today the standard is only five or six. The songs are accompanied by choreographed dance routines, which can have as many as a hundred backup dancers. Though much is made of Bollywood’s devotion to endless musical numbers, its genesis is culture, not kitsch. In Hinduism, when a priest addresses the gods, he seldom talks. He sings. Ragas, Bhajans, even Bharat Natyam, a type of Indian classical dance, were originally performed in temples as devotional offerings to beloved deities. In the Muslim or Christian tradition, supplicants address God via his prophet, his son, his clergy, or else his books; prayer is performed internally, in silence. In Hinduism, while there are intermediaries such as the pundit, or priest, devotees address their gods through the spectacular—song, dance, ceremony, and sacrifice.

Although the term “Bollywood,” a portmanteau word blending “Bombay” and “Hollywood,” was first seen in print in 1976 (when a British crime fiction writer, H. R. F. Keating, who had never set foot in India, used the term in his detective novel Filmi, Filmi Inspector Ghote), the rules were established right from the start. Bollywood films are epic extravaganzas, often lasting as long as three hours. They are lush, unadulterated fantasy. Cinema, no matter its provenance, is built on the abiding principle of dreams. Most of us go to the movies to get away from the banality and disappointment of real life, not to be reminded of it. Hollywood, of course, is no more realistic than Bollywood and is also loyal to its own particular fantasies—wherein humankind is forever fighting off monsters and aliens, American wars are never lost, members of U.S. intelligence services are valiant, noble servants of mankind, and it is easy, if not effortless, to fall quickly and meaningfully in love.* It is an industry built on a “dictatorship of good intentions,” as Joan Didion said, with a fierce attachment to happy endings. Bollywood’s tropes are no more absurd than Hollywood’s. Rather, they connect to a repository of longings and sorrows for millions of people around the world.

Bollywood plotlines introduced in the first half hour can be abandoned midway through the film with no explanation. No matter the level of violence, there is only ever mild profanity, no sex, and—only very recently—some kissing.* In the films of the 1980s and ’90s, in lieu of snogging, there was a lot of deep exhaling, chest throbbing, and moaning. Without fail, regardless of the season, a monsoon shower would break out, and the frustrated couple would splash about in the rain wearing their tightest, most see-through clothing. When sex was to be implied, the camera would leave the amorous couple and turn instead to roses blooming, birds nuzzling (swans, parrots), and things exploding (pillows, light bulbs).

There is always a villain who never sings, and a vamp who performs what is known as an “item number,” a sexy song and dance that, once upon a time, the love interest, a pure and chaste woman, would never do. (In the early days of Bollywood, mainly Anglo-Indians performed item numbers.) The hero’s characteristics change through the decades, evolving as a mirror of contemporary politics, but even if he’s just a college student or chartered accountant, the hero can single-handedly beat up a gang of armed thugs. Audiences understand this as normal; he simply has better karma. The nation is beloved and beyond question. If there is snow, preferably situated in Switzerland or Kashmir, it will be danced upon by the heroine wearing as little clothing as possible, while the hero is snug in a down parka. And love, no matter how passionate and honorable, is always secondary to duty, family, and country.

From its inception, Bollywood’s political sensibilities mirrored India’s. Emerging from centuries of British colonial rule and the bloodiest partition in modern history, India’s vision of its newly independent future as constructed by its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, was one of social justice, liberty, and fraternity. This romantic Nehruvian nationalism found its cultural expression in the idealistic films of the 1950s in which nation-building is emphasized and utopian social realism is the dominant aesthetic. The stars of the day, Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, and Dev Anand, were all inspired by Nehru’s ideals.

Kapoor, arguably the greatest actor of his generation, was at the forefront of this early national expression, and exemplified the hope, virtues, and inclusive patriotism of the era. One of the most beloved Bollywood songs of all time is from Kapoor’s Shree 420 (1955), where his Charlie Chaplin–esque character sings, “mera jhoota hai Japani, yeh patloon Englistani, sar pe lal topi Russi, phir bhi dil hai Hindustani.” (“My shoes are Japanese, these trousers are English, on my head is a red Russian cap, but still my heart is Indian.”)

By the 1970s, though, pervasive corruption and growing inequality had corroded the archetypal Bollywood hero’s romance with the nation. The Angry Young Man of this period, personified by Amitabh Bachchan, is still socialist in spirit, driven by a fierce desire for justice, and unafraid to fight the two forces abusing the common man: the state’s violent representatives and the big city’s corrupt, Westernized oligarchs. Bachchan represented an attack on babudom, the stifling power of Indian bureaucracy, or the establishment. For the poor, he was a hero. For the rich, he represented the barbarians at the gate, armed and dangerous. Bachchan’s characters of this period were not the lovable tramps of Kapoor’s time, but homeless shoeshine boys who were no longer willing to be insulted by men in bell-bottomed suits discussing the stock market. Bachchan’s heroes were never associated with the rich, marked by their cruelty and brittle, Anglicized Hindi accents, but always with the displaced and downtrodden.*

The heroes of 1970s Bollywood were at home in both India’s villages and discotheques. They drive their motorcycles through sugarcane fields and revel in the bonds of brotherhood and community. Rural India was so welcoming that even a Catholic schoolteacher like Mary, played by Simi Garewal in 1970’s Mera Naam Joker (My Name Is Joker), can turn up and dance around a field in her short mod dress without the villagers batting an eye. The village was a place of values and traditions; it is the city that destroys the hero, with its corruption built upon the broken backs of the migrant poor.

Bachchan’s successor in the 1980s was a young Bengali actor who had once been a Naxalite, a member of the leftist guerilla movement that rose up against the Indian state. Mithun Chakraborty, known simply by his first name, played more heroes than any other star that decade, notably portraying the silver jumpsuit–clad Jimmy in 1982’s blockbuster Disco Dancer. As Mithun pranced about onstage in his cult classic song “I Am a Disco Dancer,” he was the embodiment of conservative, socialist values. “What are huge palaces, wealth, and property?” Jimmy’s child avatar sings as a wealthy girl invites him to play his drums in her bungalow garden rather than on the footpath. “Those who have the wealth of heart are affluent.”

Jimmy wants to be a disco dancer not for fame or money, but so that he can exact revenge on the rich businessman who had unjustly jailed his mother. The absolute humiliation and ostracization of India’s poor was at the center of the films of the 1970s and ’80s. The rich, with their wide lapels and uncreased suits, lie and cheat and steal from the most vulnerable, while the poor, ever anxious to defend against threats to their dignity, have only their izzat, or honor, which cannot be taken from them. The rich of 1970s and ’80s Bollywood are anti-heroes; they are villains, the destroyers of dignity and dreams. Those who are rich and not evil were tragic figures, eventually destroyed by the venality and cruelty of their class.

There was nothing sleazy or subversive about India’s 1980s disco fixation—Mithun became a beloved icon from Afghanistan to the Soviet Union, where Disco Dancer was the number one movie the year it came out. Nazia Hassan, the Pakistani teenage pop star, was another nascent sign of a culturally multipolar world in the 1980s. Hassan, the first modern pop star to come out of the subcontinent with her own disco-loving album, Disco Dewane (Crazy for Disco), was the first Pakistani to enter the British charts or win a Bollywood Filmfare award. She was a hit from Brazil to the West Indies.

It is only in the 1990s that Bollywood’s historic left-of-center ideal is finally defeated. The ’90s hero no longer danced in sugarcane fields with farmers but in London’s Trafalgar Square with a gang of leather miniskirted blondes. As the Soviet Union broke apart, leftist ideals encompassing equality, fairness, and justice that had been present in Bollywood since its birth also collapsed. America had won the Cold War, and the upper castes that had traditionally run India’s cinema industry, both by funding it and by designing its narratives, were released from the confines of India’s centralized socialist economy.

In 1991, India liberalized its previously protectionist economy. Import tariffs were cut, state licenses were slashed, large corporations were given free range to compete, a few important state-owned industries were privatized, and multinationals swarmed India’s previously closed borders. India’s growth rate jumped, hitting over 11 percent at its peak. But though its GDP rose, until 2018 it continued to have the largest population of desperately poor people in the world.

Unleashed into unfettered capitalism, Bollywood was uninterested in the fallout of India’s neo-liberal experiment. India had suffered a severe agrarian crisis, an epidemic of farmer suicides, millions migrating to urban centers that could not support them, and drastic declines in social indicators.* One of the most visible and visceral fallouts of India’s economic liberalization and experiments in unbridled capitalism came from the emergence of millions from poverty into the lower middle class. Large populations of young men uprooted from villages and transplanted to big cities found themselves adrift and unmoored, faced with what Pankaj Mishra calls “a desperately sought after but infuriatingly unattainable modernity.” With their aspirations largely unmet and taunted by the unreachable lives of plenty promised by globalization, these men were consumed by rage, vulnerable not only to violence but also to the seduction of demagogues who parlayed this economic and social ressentiment into false notions of nationalism, religious chauvinism, and communalism.

On-screen, the story lines of India’s poor that once pulled at the heartstrings of Bollywood’s films were swiftly abandoned. Instead, the industry reformed itself to chronicle the elite’s accelerated economic prowess and privilege. By 1992, an average of 2.5 films were released per day, and the mood of new Bollywood was unrepentantly celebratory. The hero drives a BMW and wears Nikes. His family lives in a mansion—this period is also marked for Bollywood’s narrative turn to Non-Resident Indians (NRIs), whose money and economic agility had bought them homes in the English countryside and penthouse apartments in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Epilogue
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Further Reading
• Notes