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Bollywood
Mumbai is the center of India's huge Hindi film
industry, producing 120 feature films a year. Much of the glamour
associated with the city stems from its celebrated position as the
dream-factory of the nation. The local film industry is known as Bollywood. It's a ragtag speculative trade, flush with black money and low
on innovation. The films it produces tend to be spectacular melodramatic
fantasies. They are known disparagingly as 'masala movies' because they
are made to an established formula that mixes a variety of ingredients -
action, violence, music, dance, romance and moralizing - into one
outrageous blend. While plenty of thought- provoking 'artistic' Indian
films are appreciated in the west, masala movies are largely viewed with
contempt. It's not hard to figure out why. Stock characters, exaggerated
acting, self-conscious editing, implausible, narratives and heroines who
burst into song every five minutes are just the beginning of a long list
of unlikely features that you are going to have to accept at face value if
you want to enjoy a Bollywood flick. Despite being dismissed as escapist
claptrap, plenty of masala movies get their narrative drive from social
issues like communalism, ethnicity and caste. Many also address the
effects of modernization and urbanization on traditional Indian institutes
such as the family and marriage. As you'd expect from any vibrant cultural
form, masala movies are a reflection of India's social and
political milieu. This doesn't diminish their appeal or (thank goodness)
unduly imbue them with profundity, but it does mean they have an
astonishingly direct feed into the lives of their audiences
that outsiders may find hard to fathom. On the surface it may
be Rambo, Romeo and Robin Hood, but the subtext is likely to be the
Mahabharata, dharma, and social justice. In this context , it's not
surprising that masala movies have been one of the most potent forces
shaping Indian ideas of nationhood.
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