Bollywood cinema : Globalization and cultural narcissism

The term Bollywood has gathered wide currency during the last two decades or so. It is discussed not only in the press and popular magazines but also in serious scholarly journals and academic forums. A number of books have been written on this subject, emphasizing the importance of this topic. This term, which originated in Indian film journals like 'Screen' was later put into circulation outside India by such sites as BBC's channel Four.

Originally, a word of unconcealed derogatory intent, over the years it has come to acquire more and more a neutral stance, appearing as a term of description rather than disapprobation. Bollywood cinema occupies an ambiguous space, generating conflicting approaches and points of view. Some welcome it as a necessary postmodernist development that seeks to challenge the modernist aesthetic of cinema, while others condemn it as puerile, meretricious and a promoter of uncritical pleasure associated with consumerism.

The most vocal opposition to Bollywood and its champions of it has come from makers of art-house cinema such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan. This is understandable because Bollywood in terms of theme, style, technique and intent stand in sharp contrast to the agendas of the so-called New Cinema of India. If the cinematic discourse of art films is shaped by the commands of realism and the psychological motivations, that of Bollywood is propelled by the lure of performance and spectacle and the impulse to uphold the signature features of the genre, irrespective of issues of realism and psychological motivation.

Moreover, the artistic film directors were greatly helped by the international film festivals and international channels of communication that showcased these films and gave them a greater visibility thereby investing them with a weightier legitimacy.

During the last two decades or so, international festivals, internet, serious and popular press both inside and outside India, have chosen to focus on Bollywood cinema; the transnational limelight that was focused on the artistic cinema and the legitimacy acquired thereby seems to have been dissipated.

Bollywood is a term that is glossed differently by different writers and commentators. Some deploy it as a synonym for Indian cinema; this is indeed misleading. Others use it as coterminous with Indian popular cinema; this is misleading as well in view of the fact that popular films are made in large numbers outside Bombay (Mumbai), in Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh. Some others employ this term to designate Bombay cinema. This is, in my judgment, far closer to the mark. However, we need to keep in mind that it is a recent phenomenon. It is indeed useful to and to make temporal distinctions within the Bombay commercial cinema. I think it is important to make an analytical distinction between Indian cinema and Bollywood.

Bollywood is both less and more than Indian cinema. It is less than Indian cinema, because it is confined to Bombay films made during the past two decades or so, whereas Indian cinema which has evolved over a period of about one hundred years, consists of the art tradition as exemplified in the works of such directors as Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and the various regional cinemas like those in Bengal, Kerala and Marathi as well as the other large traditions of popular cinema in Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh.

Bollywood is larger than Indian cinema because it covers a much larger area of cinematic reach - distribution and consumption- promoted by VCRs, DVD's, web sites and satellite television.

To phrase it somewhat schematically, Indian cinema is largely driven by internal imperatives while Bollywood draws its energy, in large measure, from external sources and resources. This picture is of course made more confusing by the fact that Indian cinema in general is now being increasingly subject to Bollywoodization. There is no doubt that Bollywood cinema succeeded in ushering in a new structure of feeling into Indian popular culture. Films like 'Hum Aap Ke Hain Kaun',( Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenga', 'Dil To Pagal Hai', 'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai', 'Taal' brought about a newer cosmopolitan sensibility into Indian cinema.

There are several constitutive elements, that enter into the formation of the structure of feeling that I alluded to above; light entertainment, extravagant use of song and dance, celebration of life in a consumer society, idea of self-containment, young love, traditional family values, a touch of exoticism, glorification of the traditional past, erotic and spectacular display of the body. Clearly, these different elements do not cohere well, and produce fissures and fault lines.

These become readily identifiable features of Bollywood. In these Bollywood films, one senses an uneasy union among the rival forces of globalization, tradition and capitalist modernity. To understand the rise and the phenomenal popularity of Bollywod cinema, one has to situate it in the larger context of Indian social and political developments. Concomitantly, the emergence of Bollywood sheds light on a set of political issues that is vital to modern Indian life. In the growth of Bollywood, we see, in the words of Asish Rajadhyaksha, 'the Indian state itself negotiating a transition from an earlier era of decolonization and high nationalism into the newer times of globalization and finance capital.

The BJP's own investment into the concept of cultural nationalism - a rather freer form of civilizational belonging explicitly de-linked from political rights of citizenship, indeed de-linked from the state itself, replaced by the rampant proliferation of phrases like, 'phir bi dil hai hindustani; (after all the heart is Indian), 'yeh mera india' (I love my India) - has clearly taken the lead in resuscitating the concept of nation from the very real threats that the State faces as an institution of legitimation....' When examining the importance of Bollywood as a significant cultural phenomenon, we are compelled to bring into the equation take the important role of the Non Resident Indians (NRI's).

The economic liberalization that occurred in many parts of the world resulted in citizens living abroad deciding to invest in their original countries; this is clearly seen in the case of the NRI's who have been granted special privileges so as to win over their investments.This is accompanied by another dominant trend, namely, the yearning of diasporic Indians to fashion a Hindu identity for themselves that can be readily summoned in foreign geographies.

This has resulted in their active support of right-wing movements in India and the quest for a glorified past that occupies an imaginary space. To understand the true meaning and significance of the phenomenon of Bollywood cinema, we need to examine a plurality of cultural forces that are continually inflecting it. Here I wish to focus on two of them – globalization and cultural narcissism. Globalization is both a historical phenomenon and a way of making sense of the world. This is to say, to use the jargon preferred by philosophers, that it has both an ontological and epistemological dimension, and that they are vitally interconnected..

The worldwide spread of multinational capital, the trans -nationalization of economies, the stupendous developments in communication technologies, the fall of the Soviet Union among others, have contributed to the rise of this historical phenomenon. The task of understanding this new phenomenon has given rise to a new state of mind, a new style of thinking which can be attributed to the force of globalization.

The complex and multifaceted relationship between the global and the local is most vividly represented in films. Indian cinema is, of course, no exception. It highlights issues of cultural modernity, ethnicity, secularism, cosmopolitanism, belonging in diverse ways in which nationhood is re-imagined. Cinema emerged in India, as in most other Asian countries, as a result of the complex dynamics of globalism and localism. Therefore, we need to situate cinema at the interface between the global and the local in order to comprehend its true dimensions. One of the defining features of contemporary society is the increasingly convoluted interplay between the imperatives of the global and the local. Clearly, this process has been in operation for centuries, but the velocity and intensity of it has risen sharply in the past five decades.

This interaction has precipitated remarkable transformations in the spaces of politics, economics, culture as newer forms of capital originating in the West began to imprint their local visibilities and inflect in unanticipated ways historically influenced practices. How symbolic forms and modalities associated with Western capitalism are transformed, localized, and legitimized in most countries throughout the world in relation to their historical narratives and changing life worlds is at the heart of the discourse of what is referred to as ‘glocalism.’ And this discourse is centrally connected with cinema as is clearly borne out by Indian films.

A useful way of understanding the dialectic between the global and the local is through an examination of the production of newer localities. When we interrogate the intersecting narratives of the global and the local, what we are seeking to do is to focus on the production of the local and its ever-changing contours in response to the demands of the global.

As Rob Wilson and I have pointed out in our book titled, Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary (Duke University Press), the local is never static; its boundaries, both temporal and spatial, are subject to ceaseless change It is characterized by a web of power plays, contestations, pluralized histories, struggles over signs and asymmetrical exchanges.

The local is constantly transforming and reinventing itself as it seeks to move beyond itself and engage the trans-local. What is noteworthy about cinema is that it foregrounds and gives figurality to these complicated processes in compellingly interesting ways. Indian cinema furnishes us with ample examples that are illustrative of this trend.

The well-known American anthropologist Clifford Geertz is surely right when he underlines the need in social re-description for a continual dialectical tracking between the most local of local details and the most global of global structures in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view.

The two celebrated thinkers Deleuze and Guatarri focus on this phenomenon when they refer to the notion of de-territorialization where the production of the local is inflected by the nexus of activities occurring elsewhere. What is interesting about cinema is that it makes available a representational space for the articulation of the global imaginary and its formation within the matrix of the local. A study of Indian filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan (artistic), Ramesh Sippy, Manmohan Desai, and Yash Chopra (popular) will make this apparent.

The play of the global and the local is clearly discernible in Indian cinema from the very beginning. D.G. Phalke is generally regarded as the father of Indian cinema. His entry into cinema displays the interaction of the local and the global in instructive ways. He was a talented filmmaker who was deeply interested in the freedom movement.

Commenting on his film ‘Raja Harishcandra’, which is generally regarded as the first Indian film, he remarked, ‘in 1910 I happened to see the film life of Christ in the America-Indian picture palace in Bombay……that day also marked the foundation in India of an industry….While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes, I was mentally visualizing the gods Sri Krishna, Sri Ramachandra, Gokul, and Ayodhya.

I was gripped by a strange spell.’ Later he goes on to observe that, ‘during this period, I was constantly preoccupied with the analysis of every film which I saw and in considering whether I could make them here.’ As the Indian film industry grew in strength, the shaping power of globalism became more and more evident. Today, with Bollywood, we see it in its starkest form being a constitutive force of Bollywood. The visual and spatial registers of Bollywood as well as its modes of production, exhibition and consumption cannot be understood without reference to globalization. Indeed the very term Bollywood bears this out.

The other important cultural force that I wish to single out call is cultural narcissism. Narcissism is a concept popularized by Sigmund Freud. It focuses on issues of self-absorption, self-love, self-validation etc. Freud interpreted this concept as operating at a primary and secondary level, the primary level being universally associated with childhood and the secondary being more specialized. Subsequent commentators like Heinz Kohut and Jacques Lacan sought to expand this concept. In this regard the writings of Jean Laplanche are most interesting in that he draws attention to the fact that narcissism is a way of centering narratives.

This has great implications for the understanding of Bollywood. As I stated earlier, the diasporic audiences are vital to the existence of Bollywood. They are, for the most part, caught between the attachments to the country of birth and the attractions of the adopted country; this gives rise to interesting outcomes, one of them, being the glorification of the Indian past into an idealized space and the validation of traditional Indian values, notably Hindu values. Hence, cultural narcissism constitutes a very significant strand in the fabric of the films.

Cultural narcissism is inseparably linked with nostalgia. Nostalgia, which etymologically means homesickness, reconfigures the sense of loss, absence, yearning, displacement and wish fulfillment in interesting and complex ways. Nostalgia and globalization are vitally linked. Svetlana Boym says that does not cure nostalgia but exacerbates it. As she comments, ‘globalization encouraged stronger local attachments.

In counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace, and the virtual global village, there is no less global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world. Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.’ She goes on to remark that nostalgia is a feature of global culture. What is interesting about nostalgia is that it underlines the deep-rooted desire to retreat into a culturally authentic past and the realization of impossibility of doing so.

This line of thinking has deep implications for the understanding of Bollywood. Bollywood presents us with an important site in which the oppositional and supplementary relationships between globalization and nostalgia are played out. In many of the Bollywood films the narratives of globalization and consumerism go hand in hand with a longing for a religious, historically glamorized past. Here we observe how modernity and the past are reading each other.

The interplay between globalization and cultural narcissism in Bollywood cinema can be usefully understood at different levels and at different sites in the filmic discourse. Let us for example consider the visual registers and the production of images. We live in an environment that is saturated with images. This is becoming increasingly so in India as well.

We have progressed from a social space in which images were limited in scope and reach and presence into a world in which we are incessantly bombarded with images. Images emanating from newspapers, magazines, billboards, photographs, cinema, television, videos, computers are an inescapable part of our lives, and these have deep implications for self-formation as well as cinematic representation.

These images create a thick and fragmented world. What is interesting about the images in the new world that we inhabit is that they do not refer to an antecedent social reality and a prior world; instead, very often, they refer to other images. The consequences of this for cinematic representation are enormous.

The glossy, technologized, intertextualized cosmopolitan images disseminated by Hollywood also carry local inflections. They are not purely Western or trans-local. Many of them are reflective of the intersecting discourses of globalization and nostalgia. One can examine different locations in this new image world. For my present purposes, I wish to focus on two – space and body. They are of course closely linked in cinematic representation

As a consequence of globalization, the ideas of space that govern and, give order to the world we inhabit have undergone significant transformations. The speed that characterizes the modern world inevitably has brought the world closer together both spatially and temporally.

As Paul Virilio observes, the spaces made available by media of communication are not geographical spaces but spaces of time. An aspect of Bollywood that merits closer analysis is how the newer awareness of space finds cinematic articulation. The unusual camera angles, the quick cutting accentuate the newness of the projected space.

There is the imprint of the cosmopolitan consumer world in this spatial order; at the same time, the oasis of tranquility, of religious temples, are juxtaposed in interesting ways harking back to earlier times. However, this harking back is inflected by the dictates of the moment, underlining the impossibility of re-occupying an originary cultural space.

The reconfiguration of space in cinema is vitally connected with the depiction of the human body, and this is clearly evident in Bollywood films. The body, of course, has always been of central importance in cinematic communication.

In Bollywood, we see the emergence of a new cinematic body that registers the domineering presence of globalization and consumerism; at the same time, there is a pull towards traditional postures and gestures.

The cinematic body of Shah Rukh Khan, one closely identified with Bollywood, as represented in films such as ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ and ‘Phir Bhi Dil hai Hindustani’ bear testimony to this fact. As we examine way the body is turned into a spectacle, as evidenced in the numerous dance sequences in these films, we see not only the impact of Western MTV but also the presence of the culturally learned body language. It is this intermixture that stamps Bollywood films with a distinct Indian cultural hybridization. An interesting point about the display of the body in Bollywood films is that it both enhances and disrupts the narrative discourse, drawing attention to itself in interesting ways.