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HELLO BOLLY
Musical extravaganzas! romance! Exotic locales! Bollywood is India’s hottest export since curry. Bombay’s movie machine is now seducing a generation of star-struck Indo-Canadians like Lisa Ray.

Text: GUY SADDY

The actors, two of the biggest stars in the world, relax between takes on the set of You and I Will Never Know. Both are dark and almost impossibly muscled. The shorter one lights up a cigarette, ignoring the legions of largely female fans gathered for an autograph or a glimpse. The tall one – flashing green eyes, sculpted hair, full mouth – wanders toward the fans, and 100 young women swoon. Even his one glaring imperfection (he has an extra thumb on one hand) doesn’t detract from his looks: It humanizes him, makes him accessible.

The sisters are part of a mostly South Asian crowd gathered at the Richmond Centre mall in suburban Vancouver to catch a glimpse of Hrithik Roshan and Saif Ali Khan, India’s Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. They’re the two male stars of Na Tum Jaano Na Hum, the Hindi feature film debut of director Arjun Sablok, who left B.C. a decade and a half ago in pursuit of a dream halfway around the world.

While Sablok is an up-and-comer, his stars are heavy hitters in India’s commercial film industry, Bollywood. Although enormously popular in India, Asia and the Middle East, in Western nations Bollywood was until recently almost unknown outside the Indian diaspora (15 million strong worldwide). Today, it’s on the verge of becoming a global phenomenon. The musical Bombay Dreams by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Indian composer A.R. Rahman sells out nightly in London. Last May, Vanity Fair published a Bollywood special edition in the U.K. This year, Lagaan became the first Bollywood film nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar since 1958. Bollywood is even seeping into Hollywood: Ghost World includes groovy dance footage from the 1965 Hindi hit Gumnaam, while many scenes in Moulin Rouge! are full of Bolly-inspired dance, song and spectacle.

Some say that fantasy-based Bollywood movies are an ideal balm for these uncertain times. Others see them as the next step in the popularization of Indian culture, from mendhi and yoga to bhangra music and curry. Sure it’s trendy, but there’s more to it than that. "Indian culture has become really directional for us here in North America," says trendspotter Karen von Hahn, a columnist for The Globe and Mail and host of Life Network’s The Goods. "There’s this feeling that if you go to the ancient cultures of the East for inspiration, it’s going to awaken something primal and real within our jaded Western psyches."

Although its fantasy world is about as far from "real" as you can get, Bollywood is riding the crest of this wave. And Indian expats in Canada – so-called Non Resident Indians (NRIs) – are interacting with it as never before. Toronto filmmaker Deepa Mehta recently released Bollywood/Hollywood, a Bolly-style romp of a film. Its female lead, Toronto-born beauty Lisa Ray, is a top model in India. Canadian media like AAJ Magazine or Citytv’s show Viva cater to NRI appetites, while slick Websites like Toronto-based www.mybindi.com provide a steady flow of Bollywood reviews. And when a travelling cavalcade of Bollywood stars comes to town, like this past summer’s Heartthrobs concert tour, thousands of fans clog stadiums in Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto.

Raised on a steady diet of melodrama and romance, many Indo-Canadians come to know the culture of their mother country largely as it is refracted through the lens of the Bollywood camera. For them – for better or worse – Indian life is a Bollywood movie.

What, exactly, is Bollywood? It’s an industry, one that churns out hundreds of films a year. It’s a place, the commercial film hub that put the "B" in Bollywood (Bombay, now known as Mumbai). Above, all, it’s an entertainment omnibus, a combination of dance, music, drama and the entire gamut of Indian pop culture wrapped in a frenetic, over-the-top package.

It’s also a formula, explains director Arjun Sablok over a cup of coffee in a Vancouver café. The movies are generally three hours long, interspersed with exotic foreign locales and a slate of songs. Often, there are fight scenes and a comedy bit that may or may not have much to do with the plot. There’s a reason they’re dubbed masala movies. "Hindi cinema is like their food," says Sablok of Indian audiences. "They want everything in there, all the spices."

Let’s not forget romance, the most potent ingredient of all. Love, Bollywood style, is about everlasting commitment in an epiphanic instant between two strangers whose eyes lock from across a crowded room. (Laughable, considering that a lot of South Asian marriages continue to be arranged.) "My whole concept of falling in love came from Bollywood," says Ruby Bhatia, the Ajax, Ontario-raised former Miss India-Canada who, after emigrating to India, became one of its most popular television personalities. Bhatia’s infatuation with Bollywood started at age six when she landed a role in one of the first Toronto-shot Bolly films, Door-desh. A natural performer, she was encouraged by her parents, who saw Bollywood movies as an anchor to the culture they had left behind. Bhatia’s childhood dreams of stardom had faded by the time she was a University of Toronto philosophy student. But a friend persuaded her to enter the Miss India-Canada pageant, where Bhatia won first prize: an airplane ticket to India.

With her short hair and modern style, she was the perfect VJ for India’s then-new Channel V. "That’s why I was hired: to retain the Western flair but at the same time to talk about Indian things," says Bhatia, a Hindi-speaker who has made her home in Bombay since 1993. Bhatia, who has hosted a Bolly-centred TV magazine show and many Bollywood industry awards, quickly became the hottest thing since vindaloo: the freshly scrubbed face of a new generation in India and an inspiration for Canadian NRI kids.

Her life story provides the anchor for Bollywood Bound, the first film by Canadian documentary director Nisha Pahuja. It follows young Indo-Canadian actors striving for stardom in Bombay’s dream factory. The pull of the "mother culture" for a generation of young NRIs was puzzling, at first, for the director. "I thought that as more and more of us came [to Canada], as more of us continue to be born [in Canada], that we’d start to lose that connection to India. Actually, it’s been the opposite."

The reasons stretch beyond Bollywood. In largely South Asian immigrant communities, like Surrey, B.C., Edmonton’s Mill Woods and Brampton, Ont., many trace their roots back to Punjab, a largely rural, more traditional province. For South Asians who came to Canada in the 1970s, assimilation was a survival strategy; today, the community is much larger and perhaps less likely to sacrifice its culture for the sake of mainstream acceptance. But for Indo-Canadian actors, opportunities are still limited. Bollywood remains their most viable option.

While emigrating Canadian artists are making their marks in Bollywood, the movies are increasingly being made with an eye to the global NRI community – and the box-office revenue (around 20 percent) it represents. The NRIs want a more "Westernized" India onscreen, complete with slim, miniskirted "Hinglish" (Hindi and English)-speaking heroines and coy dating rituals. An abundance of foreign locales – from London’s Tower Bridge to Vancouver’s Richmond Centre – satisfy a diaspora that wants to see itself reflected in the films they now hungrily consume.

Balance this, however, with a competing longing to see the old quaint colonial India, with men in smartly pressed whites and virtuous women wrapped in colourful saris. It’s a genre many Indians disparagingly call the "NRI film": chock-full of patriotism and sentiment designed to tug at the heartstrings of the expat. "It’s like being a child: You want to go back to that place you romanticized as perfect," says Nisha Pahuja. But, as she makes clear in Bollywood Bound, it’s a longing that’s impossible to fulfill. "You can’t go home again," Pahuja says firmly. "It’s not ours."

Maybe, maybe not. Arjun Sablok has gone "home" to India and has tried to inject more mainstream film conventions into his first Indian feature: less superheroic fight scenes, for example, and musical numbers that grow organically out of the script instead of spontaneously erupting. "I try to find the very fine line between candy floss and reality," he says.

Sablok’s vision is a mix of Bollywood and Hollywood. That conflict is at the heart of Deepa Mehta’s riotous Bollywood/Hollywood, a recent hit at both the Toronto and Vancouver film festivals. The set-up: A first generation Indo-Canadian dot-com millionaire must get engaged before his sister can marry. He fakes a relationship with a beautiful woman (Lisa Ray), passing her off as his fiancée. It’s a fairly contrived Bollywood plot, except that the sister needs to get married quickly because she’s pregnant and the woman that the bachelor meets is an escort. Typical Bolly-fare, it ain’t. Is it an affectionate homage to Bollywood or an ironic take on the genre? "It’s a bit of both," laughs Mehta, whose father was a film distributor in India. "I grew up with Bollywood. And I really do love it. I think it serves its purpose… like any other cinema does: It’s entertainment!"

Films like Mehta’s serve a greater purpose too. Along with such filmmakers as American Oscar-winner Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding, Mississippi Masala) and Britain’s Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham), Canadian auteurs contribute to the NRI-film canon and to a broader understanding of their culture. As for the future, Hollywood filmmakers such as M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs) and Shekhar Kapur (Elizabeth, The Four Feathers) have opened another door through which more NRI talent will eventually pass. "We’re still writing about existing between two worlds because that’s such a defining experience," says Nisha Pahuja of fellow NRI artists. "But at some point… the fact that we’re South Asian is going to matter less and less."

"Point upwards!" prompts Poonam Sandhu, demonstrating a delicate turn to six graceful twentysomething women in her Vancouver garage. "Not point point, flail point!"

It’s been two years since the 21-year-old struggled for a glimpse of Hrithik Roshan at Richmond Centre. Since then, Sandhu went to India and landed a filmi (movie-style) dance gig, eventually performing with some of Bollywood’s biggest stars and even sharing a rehearsal stage with Roshan. Now she performs locally and teaches filmi dance to a generation of Indo-Canadians with Bollywood dreams.

Her trajectory is becoming more familiar. Alberta-born brother/sister duo Vikram and Vekeana Dhillon (featured in Bollywood Bound) landed on Channel V. Miss India-Canada pageant winners Rishma Malik and Kamal Sidhu have flirted with Indian TV and movies. Arjun Sablok is back in Bombay, looking to cast an NRI couple (an industry first) as the leads in a pending feature film.

As for Poonam Sandhu, next year she’ll marry her Canadian fiancé and return to India, with his blessing, to give Bollywood one more shot. No doubt she’ll be returning to Canada: Coming soon to a theatre near you.