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Cinema
A Bolly Good Show
by
Mehru Jaffer
 Amanda
Whittington, a former journalist and English playwright, loves Bollywood
films. She stumbled upon them in the late 1990s, after Hindi movies made
a comeback to the big screen in Britain and mainstream cinema chains
were looking at Bollywood as an emerging market, particularly those
films that focused on the Indian diaspora.
Whittington, 39, already has a reputation for writing plays that seldom
failed to pull at the heartstrings. She claims that Bollywood enchanted
her instantly and inspired her to use both the music and the theatricals
in her own writing. When the Dennis Potter Screenwriting Awards (named
after the celebrated screenwriter and instituted to nurture and
encourage the works of writers) invited her to participate, she
submitted 'Bollywood Jane' as a television script in 2001.
'Bollywood Jane', billed
as a bolly good fusion between English theatre and Asian cinema, is yet
to make it to television. However, the play opened to rave reviews, as
an official event to the Fringe Festival of the very glamorous
International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) awards held recently in
Yorkshire.
Soon after the special performance for the press at the prestigious West
Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, the BBC gushed that the production was
special for its spectacular Bollywood-style fantasy moments.
The play is a bittersweet glimpse into the world of 16-year-old Jane,
from a white working class family in Yorkshire, who finds it difficult
to live up to the entrepreneurial ideals unleashed upon the country by
former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Jane's life is shabby,
to say the least. Her mother is an illiterate, clad in leather and
always drunk. And Jane does not know who her father is.
 But,
unlike her self-destructive mother, Jane discovers she has spirit. She
experiences her spirit soar joyously after a chance peek at 'Dilwale
Dulhaniya Le Jayenge' in a drab 1930s picture house. She is swept
off her feet. Within moments, Bollywood has transported plain Jane from
the grime of the kitchen sink to the world of community dancers who
resemble sunflowers in one scene and, in the next, drop before the
pretty protagonist like snowflakes.
What Bollywood does to Jane is to rouse her dormant imagination. It
lights up hope in her heart and the determination to seek out different
ways to make her dreams come true. Bollywood makes Jane believe that
miracles happen all the time.
For Raj Parmar, an aspiring actor and one of the 40 dancers in the
production, the play is much more than the fantasy of a poor white girl.
"It is about the grim economic situation here that has affected
everyone. It is about sexual awakening and racial tensions," he says.
"It is a play about cultural difference as well as integration and my
job was to reflect and to propel the drama through movement," adds
Zoobin Surty, originally a Mumbai choreographer and classical dancer
described by BBC Bradford as a West Yorkshire-based Bollywood dance
specialist. For 'Bollywood Jane', Surty trained dancers, like Parmar,
along with white Britons - some of whom had never danced before.
Bollywood was first introduced to post-war Britain when British Asian
entrepreneurs took over cinema houses, left unused by white Britons, to
screen popular Hindi films in the large urban cities of Birmingham and
London. Reopened as theatres of Bollywood entertainment, most notably
during the 1970s, the cinema halls were located in predominantly black
and ethnic minority areas.
The period lasted till the early 1980s, after which the arrival of the
video cassette recorder (VCR) halted the British Bollywood cinema march.
Then there was a revival in big budget spectacular movies around the
year 2000.
Today, there are over two million visits to Hindi films in the United
Kingdom annually, and Hindi films remain the most popular foreign
language films here.
"This is partly to do with Indian filmmakers, who are pushing for
international recognition of their work like never before," explains Dr
Rajinder Dudrah, Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies, University of
Manchester. Dudrah was also the curator of 'Celebrating Indian Cinema',
an exhibition of Bollywood posters, photographs, promotional material,
film clips and unique artefacts that opened at Bradford's National Media
Museum to coincide with the main events of IIFA.
Indian filmmakers in the past decade realised the enormous commercial
opportunity in directly addressing the South Asian communities in the
United Kingdom, Europe and America. It was video, at first, and then
satellite television that opened up a global market for Indian cinema
with promises of a great opportunity for both culture and commerce.
It is estimated that 17 million people watch Indian films every day in
cinemas or at home worldwide and annual revenues exceed 800 million
pounds, according to reports by the Bollywood Initiative (BI), backed by
Patricia Hewitt, British Member of Parliament. The BI was launched by a
group of Asian entrepreneurs three years ago to raise millions of pounds
as investment in Indian films, featuring Indian and British talent and
filmed on location in the English Midlands.
What makes Bollywood hot property in this region is the presence of
large and economically active communities of South Asian origin that are
heavy consumers of Indian films, film-inspired media and of live events.
Leicester, for example, is second only to Birmingham and London these
days as a key producer for Indian film-related content such as
television software, music, DVDs and video as well as an offshore
platform for distributing these in Europe and the US.
Dudrah, whose exhibition has been a colourful introduction to the world
of Bollywood, exploring 50 years of romance, song and dance, hopes that
the audience will soon rise above the stereotype image of Bollywood
films as only singing and dancing kitsch. "This is true about Bollywood,
but only to a point. Now audiences must realise there is much more to
Indian cinema than just song and dance. If they don't, then that would
be a shame," he concludes.
July 7,
2007
By arrangement with
WFS
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