By Lavina Melwani

India invades the British Isles.

Scene from Bend it Like Beckham.
Ten years ago if an astrologer had predicted that Lord Andrew Lloyd Weber would one day make a huge musical extravaganza starring two unknown Indian actors set in the slums and film lots of Bombay and that Bombay Dreams would be a big success on the West End, he would have been scoffed at.
And if he had said that Selfridges, one of the biggest department stores in London, would launch a huge, huge tribute to Bollywood -- yes, that turn-your-nose-at Bollywood -- with Dimple Kapadia's bedroom occupying pride of place along with dhaba snacks and Shahrukh Sunset cocktail drinks, you would have rolled your eyes at that too.
And a huge pinch of salt would have been in order if he had further prophesized that London's venerable Victoria and Albert Museum, redolent with its Raj history and antiquities, would host an exhibition devoted entirely to Bollywood posters and even fly in those anonymous and unsung painters of street hoardings.
Well, all this has come to pass -- and more! The Diaspora is abuzz: it's a full-scale Bollywood invasion of the United Kingdom! If one looked at the calendar of events in London, it did indeed look like a genuine Indian Summer, with not only film, art and music events, but also major promotions in department stores, malls, bookstores and museums, as well as on television. In her jubilee year, Queen Elizabeth for the very first time ever even dropped in on a Hindu Temple, the Highgatehill Murugan Temple in North London. Actress Meera Syal and the innovative Moti Roti group have entertained at celebrations in Buckingham Place. And even as England lost the World Cup, the film making big news and big bucks was Gurinder Chadha's Bend it Like Beckham, the story of a young British Asian girl's passion for soccer. The film has raked in millions of pounds, made the top ten lists and has attracted audiences irrespective of age, gender or race.

Andrew Lloyd Weber's Bollywood musical extravaganza Bombay Dreams, is the hottest show on West End.
The words of British Asian writers like Sir V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Hanif Quereshi have long enthralled British readers and joining their league is British Indian writer Hari Kunzru whose debut novel, The Impressionist has earned an incredible advance of £1.5 million.
The British seem to have developed an insatiable fascination with all things Indian. While books by Indian authors are flying off the shelves, tandoori fare is reputed to have overtaken fish and chips as the national favorite. In fact, the United Kingdom boasts of a record 8,000 Indian restaurants. Music created by British Asians is vitalizing the club scene with its funky sounds and Indian dance and theater is enriching the arts. And Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham became the first Hindi film to climb to No. 3 on national cinema charts, screening at 41 theaters.
So what exactly is happening? Is India, the former colony, colonizing the colonizer? Not at gunpoint, but by the force of ideas, by the seduction of its spices, its tantalizing web of music, dance and Bollywood cinema.
As Britain is infiltrated by its former colonies, the immigrants are bringing their tastes and rhythms that the colonizers once hankered for but didn't quite conquer. There are close to 1.3 million people of Indian origin in the U.K, almost 450,000 in London alone, with large concentrations in towns like Bradford and Leicester. The Punjabis and the Gujaratis dominate the Indian population, between them accounting for almost three quarter of all Indians.
The Punjabis immigrated from India largely as industrial workers while the Gujaratis came in large numbers from Kenya and Uganda in the early 70's, with entrepreneurial and educational skills, as well as capital. Today Indians have penetrated practically every field, especially the medical professions, railway and postal services, and health care, and more recently financial services.
You encounter people of Indian origin right from the airport as service workers and corner shop staff all the way to major industrialists and businessmen. Indians are a vital part of the British economy, a lot of it being energized by Patel power. Asians are routinely on the richest Britishers list. A London Weekly The Eastern Eye tabulated the 200 richest Asians in Britain, and prominent amongst them were Lakshmi Mittal at £1.9 billion, followed by the Hindujas at £900 million, Mike Jatani at £450 million, Jasminder Singh at £409 million and Lord Swarj Paul at £225 million. Not surprisingly, the list of the richest also included 11 Patels, who were worth more than £10 million.

Nearly 1.5 million people visited Selfridges during its Bollywood tribute.
One measure of arriving in British society is a royal title and Indian lords are also proliferating, a sign of the Queen's acknowledgment of desis. Starting with Lord Swarj Paul, you have Lord Bhikhu Parekh, Lord Megnad Desai, Lord Navnit Dholakia and Baroness Sheela Flather. Raj Bagri is the Chairman of the London Metal Exchange.
While the first generation has, understandably, a deeper connection to its homeland, the second and third generation has integrated well into British life. Many of the latter may have never been to India, but the music and the food -- and of course, Bollywood -- still draws them. While for some the links to India are very strong, for others the emotional attachment is kept alive through language, music and cinema.
This summer, gaudy, bawdy, lovable, larger-than-life Bollywood is center stage in an amazing summer of movies, music and events. Descending into the netherworld of the London Underground, the posters of Bombay Dreams, right next to those of Les Miz, Phantom of the Opera and The Lion King, strike you, the familiar strangeness of it all.
It was a pilgrimage to see Bombay Dreams, Andrew Lloyd Webber's production of A R Rahman's musical at the Apollo Victoria Theater. It was almost three years in the making, with a reported budget of £4.5 million.
The play, based on an original idea by Shekhar Kapur and Andrew Lloyd Webber, has a book by Meera Syal, lyrics by Don Black and music by A.R.Rahman. It stars Raza Jaffrey and Preeya Kalidas, with Dalip Tahil, Ayesha Dharker, Ramon Tikaram, Raad Rawi, Raj Ghatak, and Shelley King. Bollywood's own Farah Khan choreographs the Bollywood dance sequences.
With all the buzz created, there are as many opinions as people seeing the show. In a scathing review, The Times wrote, "Consider the writing talent that Lloyd-Webber assembled for this show: the film director Shekhar Kapur; the veteran lyricist Don Black; the Goodness Gracious Me creator Meera Syal. Then consider the results. Scenes that lurch into each other like blind elephants. A plot that disintegrates into a ragbag of sitcom skits on Miss World, women's lib and the like. The lamest ending in West End history. Trite lyrics. Cardboard characters. Dialogue that would test the patience of Mother Teresa."
The Daily Mail was more generous: "It's as subtle as a panto, but then so is Bollywood, which this show joyfully echoes. Great fun, great costumes, and a refreshing change from every other West End show."
In reality, though the story is a bit threadbare, the show is extremely enjoyable with all the grand excesses associated with Bollywood. The song Shakalaka Baby is catchy and the dance sequences, with the effervescent Ayesha Dharker, are truly an eyeful, and one sits back and enjoys a visual and musical masala feast -- not unlike a Bollywood movie.
More, it's a wonderful feeling to see Indians dominate a West End show, especially an Andrew Lloyd Weber one. Desis have been turning up in droves, bringing in a whole new audience for theater, since many of them have never ventured to the West End before. And this may actually make more India-related shows viable as a commercial venture.
Standing in the packed theater lobby, one could see a well-mixed audience of whites and browns, proving that Bombay Dreams is cutting across racial boundaries. As one paper commented, Weber's Cats! was also an unknown quantity when it first opened; when it recently closed after years, it had became the longest running play in theater history.
Even as the crowds bombarded Bombay Dreams, they also headed to the Bollywood tamasha at Selfridges, its biggest and most successful promotion ever. Over a period of 3 weeks nearly 1.5 million people visited the London and Manchester stores. Designer Nitin Desai who's designed the sets of such films as Lagaan and Devdas had turned the store into a colorful Bollywood carnival.

"I think we understand now that clean lines, simplicity and order can never really be fixed -- life just isn't like that," said Vittorio Radice, CEO of Selfridges. "The time has come to explore a new attitude, for us to have fun in a world in which there's a place for everything and where anything goes. So it will be goodbye to the niceties of taste, to carefully defined categories and restraint. Expect something different, and because this is Bollywood, expect it to be on an epic scale."
Calling the Bollywood aesthetic "maximalist" and the opposite of minimalist, the store had mixed gaudy ornaments and real gems, beautiful silks and Hindu God stickers, decorative elephants and stylish clothing, all in a glorious Bollywood concoction. The designers Abu Jani and Sandeep Khosla, who have designed actress Dimple Kapadia's home, recreated her luxurious home in Selfridges, right down to the sumptuous silver bed, silken drapes and scores of candles. Visitors could wander through the home of a real live movie star and order the same furnishings.
Want to look like a Bollywood star? There were makeup lessons from the pros from M.A.C., which created the makeup for the film Lagaan. And yes, outfits worn by Madhuri Dixit, Kareena Kapoor, Twinkle Khanna, Amisha Patel and Preity Zinta in Bollywood films were for sale.
Fashion, so crucial to Bollywood with its seven costume changes per song, was also big at this promotion with men's and women's fashions by India's leading designers, including Manish Malhotra, the costume designer to Bollywood stars, along with Rina Dhaka, Aki Narula, Rohit Bahl, Tarun Tahiliani and Rajesh Pratap Singh.

There were Bollywood dance performances, workshops and seminars by dance experts and a modern dance troupe was flown in from Bombay. There was also Bollywood music from traditional and contemporary musicians, bands and DJs, as well as appearances by the cast of Bombay Dreams.
Selfridges' food halls had been transformed into a little corner of India with street foods, while the main restaurant was turned into an Indian dining experience by Taj chefs. In a nod to the dabbawallas of Mumbai, tiffin boxes with curry and rice and other meals were also introduced. There was a chaiwalla offering tea to the thirsty visitors and yes, the clay pot of mango kulfi was available too. Nor was India's Kingfisher forgotten. There were also red and white wines from Chateau Indage and Omar Khayyam sparkling wine.
Bollywood was also the toast of the elite world with "Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood," a special exhibition of film posters at the prestigious Victoria and Albert Museum. Amazingly, the museum had these in its collection for over 50 years and these posters tell the history of a nation through its popular culture.
Besides posters from such classic films asMother India and Kagaaz Ke Phool, also on view were trailers from films like Sholay, the Star Series by Catherine Yass, with light box images of stars like Amitabh Bachchan and Madhuri Dixit, Bollywood-inspired poster art by New York artist Annu Palakunnathu Mathew, and images of India's wonderful art deco cinema houses by the photographer Adam Bartos. Two hoarding artists had been flown over from India to paint huge murals from the film Mughal-e-Azam.

Chutney Mary's Namita Panjabi: "Spices and chillies are addictive."
After a glittering opening party at the V and A, one stepped out to the curb to see an unlikely sight -- an Ambassador car in London! And it's no ordinary vehicle, but a tribute to Bollywood, upholstered with Bollywood posters, with a whiff of incense and yes, there's filmi music too. Tobias is the quirky British owner of Karma Kars with several themed Ambassador taxis -- Maharaja, Sheesh Mahal, Kama Sutra besides the Bollywood car.
"I lived in India longer than most Indians!" brags Tobias, cool and very desi in his white cotton kurta pajama. "Karma Kars is not a cab company -- it's a philosophy -- and the philosophy is that the journey is more important than the arrival. So enjoy the journey in life and don't always think about the destination!" The cost of the journey? £40 an hour.
Bollywood mania is on full scale and there are a handful of books out about Bombay's film industry and its star inhabitants. One of the most sumptuous isBollywood published by Lucky Dissanayake of Dakini Books. Indeed, Bollywood seems to affect even people who know little about it: Dissanayake, who is originally from Sri Lanka, met Shahrukh Khan at a party and hit upon the idea of doing a book on Bollywood since there was such scanty literature available on the subject. So enamored of the project was she that she bet her house on it.
"Would you put up your home to publish a book?" Dissanayake asks. "I put up my flat for sale!" It was a risk but a calculated one -- she sold out the first edition of the detailed and richly photographed book. She says, "Just about everybody is buying it -- Indians and Europeans. Old people buy it for their children and children buy it for their parents in the Indian community." Indeed, Bollywood culture seems to have enthralled the British – Lagaan, Monsoon Wedding, and Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gam have been successful crossover films. And Britain's love affair with all things Indian doesn't stop with Bollywood: ImagineAsia is an eight-month UK-wide celebration of the cinema cultures of the subcontinent, including British-Asian work.

Girish Karnad: "London in a sense combines the best elements of Washington and New York."
More than 50 film and arts organizations around the UK are taking part in ImagineAsia, staging hundreds of events and showing more than 300 films. The National Film Theatre is presenting retrospectives of acclaimed directors Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal and interviews with Bollywood's Yash Chopra and Mira Nair.
The British Film Institute (BFI) is re-releasing new subtitled prints of classics Mother India and Mughal-E-Azam back onto the big screen and films from leading Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak on video. It is publishing seven film related books, including works on directors Yash Chopra and Shyam Benegal, on films Mother India and Pather Panchali and on Bollywood in Cinema of Interruptions.
Indian cinema seems to hold an enduring fascination for the mainstream for the festival has master classes with visiting filmmakers, talks and workshops, schools events and the first-ever Indian cinema education pack for teachers. The ImagineAsia website also features a critics' poll of the 400 essential South Asian films.
Bollywood posters had taken over not just London but many other cities. New York photographer Ram Rahman was in Manchester with a huge installation work at the Manchester Gallery of Art in England. Working with hoarding painters in Delhi, he made plywood cutouts of life size figures with moveable heads... Gandhi, David Beckham, the Queen of England... against a real film hoarding with Dilip Kumar and Waheeda Rehman. These were shown along with his own images of India.
The mass appeal of Bollywood is also explored in a new exhibition, "Bollywood in Love," which features posters, behind the scenes photography, memorabilia and film clips. The exhibition tours to London, Bradford, Birmingham and Bristol. One somehow can't quite imagine a festival of this magnitude, passion and painstaking detail, where mainstream organizations organize such an all-out Bollywood love fest, happening in the United States yet.
Bollywood seems to have permeated the media: Lubna Bhacci, a British Asian whose parents are from Pakistan, is a TV producer who is making a film looking at Indians in the UK and celebrating test cricket and Bollywood. It is the first program in the season for Indian Summer, a program for Channel Four. She says the program explores the British love affair with Bollywood, and whether this is just a passing phase or something that might help Indians in the UK by introducing British society to their culture.

Lucky Dissanayake: Would you put up your home to publish a book?
Indeed, Britain's fascination with its former colony and jewel in the crown of the Raj, is an old and enduring one, fueled by memories, but also, equally importantly, by chai and cuisine. Back in the 60's there were only six restaurants in the whole of Britain – in 1960 there were 300, 1970 there were 1200 and in 1980 there were 3000. And by 2000 there were 8000 restaurants. Tikka, tandoori cuisine and pappadum have become staples of the British cuisine, and are available at pubs, take-outs and even frozen in supermarkets.
Gaylord's was one of the first Indian restaurants to bring the tandoor to the U.K, after demonstrating it at the World's Fair in New York in 1965. Says Salil Bhatia, Director of Gaylord, "Indian food has caught on because the spices are addictive and the food is very filling. Indian food is no. 1 and Chinese is no. 2. There is tremendous potential because you can play with food and create new dishes, and also many more people are turning vegetarian."
Cambridge educated Namita Panjabi, who was the first female merchant banker, of any nationality, in London, switched careers and opened Chutney Mary in 1990. Her philosophy has been to bring the gourmet regional cuisines of India to the British masses. As she points out, curry houses, which form 90 percent of the restaurants in the UK, are not owned by Indians, but by Bangladeshis. It's a formula fast food that actually doesn't have much relevance to Indian cuisine. She estimates that only ten percent of the restaurants in this country are owned by or have Indian chefs cooking the food. So what is Indian food? Panjabi believes that it is a catch all phrase for the many diverse cuisines of India: "I really wanted to tell the story that there are at least 35 different cuisines in India. I brought the chefs in from five or six different regions and sent them to homes to learn the cuisine in Goa, Hyderabad and Kerala."
Today she and her husband Ranjit Mathrani own the very stylish and upscale Chutney Mary, the traditional Veeraswamy as well as the funky and fun Masala Zone. She says, "While the spicing is hundred percent Indian, we are living in this country so we are taking local ingredients and giving them an Indian touch. It's happening even in India where avocados and courgettes are being imported. So it's about the evolution in Indian food."
She points out that while there are about 2,000 restaurants around London, the clientele is mostly British as Indians, eating their own cuisine at home, prefer to try Thai or Italian when they go out. The younger Indians do tend to go out more and they favor Indian food, especially if they are no longer living at home.

Karma Kars' Tobias: "Karma Kars is not a cab company – it is a philosophy."
"Every single street has an Indian restaurant and spices and chilies are addictive," she says. "Indian food is supposed to be the most popular food in this country, but looking at it from the inside, it's still not a mainstream food; there is still only a percentage of the population that likes and eats Indian food."
The fish and chip corner shop has disappeared, but its demise may not be due to the tandoori craze, but rather to an aversion to greasy food in a health-conscious society. Panjabi adds, "I think this whole thing about tikka masala overtaking fish and chips has been a bit over-dramatized. In fact, there are reports that for the first time in 30 years Indian food is now seeing a slow-down. There are other cuisines like Thai which are registering a higher rate of growth in this country."
The British are getting a taste of many different kinds of cuisine from India with scores of restaurants. Yatra, which opened in 2000, offers a mix of modern Indian cuisine combined with traditional dishes, such as tandoori salmon on a bed of coriander risotto. Once a week it even offers a 40-minute yoga class combined with an Ayurvedic meal, popular with young British office girls.
Sonu Lalvani, the owner, says of the countless curry houses in London: "One sauce was made for the whole day but that's now slowly changing and new chefs are coming in and each dish has its own flavor." Yatra catered the party for the world premiere of Andrew Lloyd Weber's Bombay Dreams with 900 guests at the Victoria Plaza Hotel. Lalvani also runs Bar Bollywood, a Mayfair nightspot that attracts a happening young crowd with its DJs, dancing and Bollywood-themed drinks. In fact, during the Selfridges promotion, Lalvani had converted its Gordon's Bar into a Bollywood-themed watering hole.
Recently, Britain's House of Commons voted to open an in-house Indian restaurant in recognition of the cusine's popularity among British MPs. Curry fan reportedly include Chancellor Gordon Brown and House Leader Robin Cook. David Hinchcliffe, the Labor Chairman of the Commons Health Select Committee, another Indian food fan was quoted in the Telegraph: "It's a fantastic idea provided it is authenthic curry. I don't want a tame English version."
Indian culture and cuisine, music and dance, theater and films may all be seductive to the mainstream, but a lot of the credit has to go to the Indians themselves for placing it within touching distance of the larger populace. London is many people, many neighborhoods, vibrant communities that are keeping alive their own culture as well as taking bits and pieces from the surrounding cultures.
As the Indian community has grown and multiplied, the restaurants, the star shows, the bhangra pubs, and the desi movie theaters have all proliferated and been introduced to the mainstream. Names like Apache Indian, Bally Sagoo, Nitin Sawhney and Tavlin Singh are all known to a wider audience that listens to a mix of Asian jazz and fusion, Bhangra and Hindi Bollywood music.

Lord Swarj Paul hosted his annual reception at the London Zoo: "I am 100 percent British and I am 100 percent Indian, so I have no problem with identity."
Whether it's the Rath Yatra Festival organized by the Hare Krishnas dancing in Trafalgar Square or a visit to the magnificent Swaminarayan Temple in Neasden by British school kids, the exotic is becoming the familiar now. At the Bharati Vidya Bhavan scores of Britishers come to learn, along with Indians, the many musical instruments, the languages of India and yoga. They look for answers at the Ramkrishna Vedanta Center, a retreat just outside London, and also visit the Bhaktivedanta Manor, the famous Hare Krishna Temple, which was formally George Harrison's home, and is now a center for retreats.
The Nehru Center, India's cultural nucleus in London, is one building that has stood through all the change. Purchased by the Indian High Commission in 1947, it has gone through many uses and was even a marvelous canteen for desi food when there were no Indian restaurants in London. Noted actor and playwright Girish Karnad has been the director of Nehru Center for the past two years and has also had his plays performed in London, including the latest, Bali -- The Sacrifice.
He observes, "London in a sense combines the best elements of Washington and New York. It's a capital and it has the artistic energy of a New York. You can sense the history. The encouragement given by the British government has been extraordinary to Asian arts."
Indeed, there has been a flowering of local British Indian talent, including artists like dancer Shobana Jeysingh and Akram Singh and performers Tavleen Singh and Nitin Sawhney. The theater group Tamasha has successfully toured the country with its English stage adaptation of the Bollywood film Hum Aap Ke Hain Kaun while Tara Arts is known for its innovative work. Observes Karnad, "A whole new generation of artists is coming and making itself felt and that's essentially because the arts council decided to encourage ethnic arts. Not so much traditional arts, but what the local Indian generation is producing in terms of modern fusion. In that sense, if you see India as the source of this cultural activity, then really the modern interpretation of all that is happening here -- even more than in Canada and the United States -- because here there's funding for it."
At the Bollywood poster opening at the V and A, a mixed crowd of many races stopped to watch the action packed trailers of Sholay and the posters from films like Awara and Bombay. As the crowds swirled around, Corinne Julius, a journalist with Radio Four and the London Evening Standard, observed that British Indians are now part of the mainstream in multicultural Britain.
"They are now at an age when they can put in an intellectual input and appreciate it by looking at their own British culture and their own traditional culture, and they can do it tongue-in-cheek; they can laugh at themselves," she said. "So they have come of age. There are radio and television programs in which they observe their own lives and laugh at themselves. And once you laugh at yourself, you make it acceptable for others to laugh too, with you and not at you."

Lightbox images of Amitabh Bachchan by Catherine Yass.
Last month Lord Swarj Paul held his annual reception in the London Zoo, a gathering for parents and their children, in memory of his daughter Ambika who died of leukemia. All through her illness the zoo had been her favorite place and after she passed away, he often used to visit it. When he heard that it was going to be closed down due to lack of funds, he donated one million pounds to it.
"I enjoy coming here and come here every week. It's nice to see children and parents interacting and enjoying the zoo," said the affable Lord Paul, as children of many nationalities laughed and played about. It is a pointer to his political clout that the event was studded with luminaries from the corridors of power, including the First Lady of Britain, Sheri Blair.
Ask him whether he considers himself British or Indian, and he says, " I am hundred percent British and I am hundred percent Indian, so I have no problem with identity. Those who have, I feel sorry for them."
Indeed, the Indian immigrants in Britain seem to have embraced the British Asian label more than Indians in America have accepted their hyphenated identity. Lord Paul says of the Indians in the U.K.: "They are a tremendous asset to this country and all three political parties recognize that. As more education comes, I think they will feel even more comfortable. They've done a marvelous job at assimilating themselves. It's a very successful community. The India craze is good, it's more recognition of India, more recognition of Indian people and it's partly because of the recognition of the contribution of the Indians living here."
Paul Boateng, chief secretary to the treasury, the first black cabinet member in England concurs: "The Indian community is playing an absolutely central part in the life of Great Britain, not just economically but culturally in every way. The links between India and Great Britain are long but it's not about looking back, it's looking to the future. So India isn't just a part of our past -- it's a part of our future in this country."


Web Sites
Bombay Dreams: www.bombaydreamsthemusical.com/
Imagineasia: http://imagineasia.bfi.org.uk/
Cinema India: www.vam.ac.uk/

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