Crossover Cinema

By Angshukanta Chakraborty | February 15, 2013

Scene 1: SOAS Students Hostel, Central London, Year 2010

A group of Indian students in London are trying desperately to locate the DVD of English, August (1994). After a long and arduous search on the Internet, and after knocking on the doors of every known Bollywood Blockbuster video store in London, they at last stumble upon a blog entry by the film’s director Dev Benegal. The page is titled “Why Isn’t There a DVD of English, August?” The answer, “I wish there were.” The unsaid: there’s none, as yet, though the film had won the Silver Montgolfiere and the Gilberto Martinez Solares prize for the Best First Film at the 1994 Festival des 3 continents, the Best Feature Film in English at the 1995 National Film Awards, India, as well as a Special Jury Prize at the 1994 Torino International Festival of Young Cinema.

Scene 2: Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. Year 2007

The Gangulys had calendar-marked this March Sunday for a very special reason. They have come out en masse (Mr. and Mrs. Ganguly, Sandeep their college-going son, Sugandha, their teenage daughter, Bani Ganguly, the widowed mother living with her son for over a decade now) to watch the film The Namesake, based on the eponymous novel by Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri. The Gangulys know that they share their last name with the protagonists in Lahiri’s novel, hence the greater excitement. Mr. Ganguly has already addressed Sandeep as “Gogol” a few times.

 Scene 3: DT Star Savitri, Greater Kailash-II, New Delhi. Year 2012

Brian Murphy has travelled from his NGO office in Jangpura, New Delhi to catch the latest “crossover film” English Vinglish. Okay, slight correction: Brian has been coaxed and dragged to the theater by his girlfriend Avantika Mohan, who is a research fellow in law in Delhi. Murphy, who hails from Colorado, takes a casual interest in Bollywood, hence he’s not particularly averse to the idea of watching a Bollywood film in English (albeit he thinks it ironical). Avantika insists on calling it a “crossover film.”

So We Have a Crossover Cinema?

Between English, August and English Vinglish falls the shadow. It’s a shadow of a silent cinematic revolution, a silhouette, perhaps still imperceptible under the trillion-watt blaze of global Bollywood, but it’s a ghostly corpus that’s gradually taking shape and scrounging its way into the world of cosmopolitan Indian filmdom. “Crossover Cinema,” or the cinema of transnational Indian origin (either in English, or bi/multilingual with English as the major linguistic component), has come to represent in the urban Indian imagination, both within the nation and in its vastly expanded diaspora- represented by the students in SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), the Gangulys of New York City, and well as Brian Murphy and Avantika Mohan, the peripatetic American NGO worker and his Indian legal researcher girlfriend- the filmic equivalent, though perhaps still a “poorer cousin,” of Indian Writing in English. Although the latter has a much longer history at its disposal, but still, deeply interrelated, these two share a linked history and politics of representation, and claim to a sensitive and nuanced depiction of the changing global realities.

The cinematic assemblage is all around us, but at times a particular kind of cinema speaks to us a bit more than the rest. To narrate the story of the birth of this intriguing genre- Crossover Cinema, or Transnational Indian Cinema in English (TICE)- and its struggles for over two decades to define itself against the dominant centers of film production, such as Bollywood, Tamil, Telegu and Malayalam in the South, Bengali in the East and Marathi in the West, is a fascinating exercise in excavating the recent history of a culture and society in flux, witnessing its metamorphosis into a fluid, transnational, world phenomenon of a cosmopolitan lifestyle that connects a diaspora as multitudinous as the Indian with the adhesive of a sensibility that is purportedly Indian and a language that had been the tool of 190 years of colonial subjugation.

However, English Vinglish Hinghlish Globish- the remains of the Raj and an Empire on which the sun never set once upon a time- still sets the tone, or constructs the obscure skeleton, upon which the flesh of Crossover Cinema is strewn by a new breed of young and restless (or slightly older, and even more restless) filmmakers. The latest in the steady creative experiment is Gauri Shinde’s directorial debut English Vinglish, in which the 1980s superstar Sridevi plays Shashi, a Marathi housewife with halting spoken English, who must undergo the trial by the fire of foreign travel and break into a (background) song in New York’s iconic Manhattan. This “item song” notwithstanding, English Vinglish is a heartwarming story of an average Indian housewife tasked with performing on the glittering dais of transnational family networks the role of the perfect hostess- English-speaking and steeped in a culture that’s an eclectic mix of Indian and American.

Crossing Over What?

But the story of Shashi and its popular reception in India and its diasporic base in America, Britain, Australia and Canada have been made possible by a slew of other vaguely-situated cinematic works circulating within the highly diffused and expansive transnational Indian (but also South Asian) popular and public cultures. Far less numerous than the average Bollywood film, but steady since its (re)beginnings about two decades ago, the homegrown Indian cinema in English is now an established genre in itself, as the trickle became a stream and got populated by films like English, August (director, Dev Benegal, 1994), Bombay Boys (director, Kaizad Gustad, 1997), Split Wide Open (director, Dev Benegal, 1999), Everybody Says I’m Fine (director, Rahul Bose, 2001), Hyderabad Blues (director, Nagesh Kukunoor, 1998), Rockford (director, Nagesh Kukunoor, 1999), Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (director, Aparna Sen, 2002), Amu (director, Shonali Bose, 2005), Being Cyrus (director, Homi Adajania, 2006), 15 Park Avenue (director, Aparna Sen, 2005), Black (director, Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2005), Morning Raga (director, Mahesh Dattani, 2005), Parzania (director, Rahul Dholakia, 2007), The Last Lear (director, Rituporno Ghosh, 2008), English Vinglish (director, Gauri Shinde, 2012). Depicting the English-speaking Indian bourgeoisie in diverse contexts, these films occupy a protean zone of intermediary space, one between the Indian popular cinema in Hindi, the regional language film cultures, the various cinemas of Europe, Latin America, Mexico, China and Japan, and Hollywood- thus reflecting a heterogeneity in their formative influences.

What binds these independent, often small budget, films together is an unwavering focus on the critical question of transnationalism, on being Indian outside the borders of the country, a sort of venturing beyond the professed boundaries, a preoccupation with frontiers and “otherness” and how they are stepped over or negotiated in the everyday lives of people who “cross over.” In fact, the emphasis has now shifted from questions of frontiers, crossing over and lives in exile to those of multiplicity of roots and attachments, an expanded and more inclusive notion of the self that is at once more fluid and dynamic as well as more connected and reaching out to other modes of being. The stories of the self-identities that are forged over a lifetime of negotiations, that are more accepting of differences and diversity, that are somehow more connected to the larger questions of global urban experiences, become the nodal points of reference in Crossover Cinema.

Scenes vary in these films, each unique to its subject, content and form, but, nevertheless, bespeaking a universal language of crossing over and discovery or self-realization. A random bus-ride turns into a life-changing experience as a Hindu Tamil Brahmin woman and an upwardly mobile Muslim male photographer are thrown together amidst bloody communal riots, as depicted in Aparna Sen’s much-acclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Iyer. An adopted Indian-American girl journeys back “home” in Shonali Bose’s Amu to seek out her biological family, which was wiped out in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in the aftermath of the former Prime Minister of India Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s assassination. An Indian rock band headed by an NRI-returnee struggles to fuse Western rock with classical Indian music of Karnataka in Mahesh Dattani’s Morning Raga. We are presented with a succinct and bathetic portrayal of the decaying community and rotting away of representative social life amongst the Parsis in India through a compelling psychological thriller in Homi Adjania’s Being Cyrus. We enter the intense but nebulous world of a deaf and dumb and blind girl and her dedicated tutor in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black. We get the intriguing opportunity to compare it with the closeted world of an erstwhile Shakespearean stage thespian now fallen into hard times forcing self-imposed social ostracization in Rituporno Ghosh’s The Last Lear. It’s quite evident that the themes and content of the transnational Indian films in English have been as diverse as their production teams scattered in New York, Washington, London, Birmingham, Melbourne, Toronto, as also Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi and other important cities from all over India and the world at large. Polemical, controversial and politically challenging, these films dare to make breakthroughs in terms of thematic audacities and aesthetic choices, thereby shattering many prevalent stereotypes and generationally handed down almost mythologized notions in their way.

Influence of South Asian Diasporic Cinema

The term “crossover” gained currency within the South Asian diaspora in the late eighties with films like British director Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987, screenplay by British Pakistani novelist Hanif Kureishi), Indian filmmaker Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (1991), British-Asian Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (1993) etc., which dealt with pains of cultural dislocations, nostalgia for the homeland, hybridity and multiple identities of Indian immigrants in Britain and the United States. However, at the same time, films like the legendary Ismail Merchant’s cinematic adaptation of Anita Desai’s novel In Custody (1993), debutant Dev Benegal’s English, August (1994, adaptation of the eponymous cult Indian English literary work by Upamanyu Chatterjee), were highly acclaimed ventures, experimenting with distinctly Indian (or subcontinental) issues like the decline of Urdu language and poetry and the claustrophobic experience of a thoroughly ‘English-ed’ IAS officer Agastya Sen (played by the superbly subtle Rahul Bose) in the rural solitude and eventlessness of the remote Indian village Madna- “a tiny dot in the Indian hinterland.”

Using the language of global communication and capital, all these films were addressed to a transnational audience, viz., elite Indians, Non-Resident Indians in Europe, America and South-East Asia as well as a general international viewership intended to delineate the many “Indias” within and outside the country. Interestingly, this was the same time when the Indian economy opened its doors to multinational corporations and disinvestment became the key feature of the country’s economic liberalization. These mutually facilitating cultural and economic exchanges allowed for greater inclusivity (though at the expense of huge exclusions), giving expression to gradually generated hyphenated identities, myriad postcolonial experiences, and greatly expanding the scope of “crossing over.” Crossover Cinema, therefore, records the continuity of themes and contexts with the diaporic cinema of Indians in America and Britain, made during the period preceding the explosion of communication technology and jet-age travel, before the world shrank into a global village and globalization became the fin-de-sicle buzzword that bracketed off the information age from its past.

Moreover, the distinctly British Asian or Indian American cinema- such as Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham (2004), Meera Syal’s Life Is Not Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), Damien O’Donnell’s East is East (written by Ayub Kan-Din, 1999), Piyush Pandya’s American Desi (2001), Nisha Ganatra’s Chutney Popcorn (1999), Bala Rajasekhurani’s Green Card Fever (2003)- articulate the experiences bred under the shadow of the immediate political contexts of the adopted countries, Britain, United States or Canada. The story of immigrants, their struggles for self-expression, their ceaseless attempts at making themselves heard against a dismissive and still heavily prejudiced Western media, government and culture, their strife against the prevailing stereotypes in the films and small-screen productions of the West, their battles to depict the increasingly multicultural society from the ethnic-minoritarian standpoint, and their aesthetic self-discovery under the burden of the melodramatic and song-and-dance-ridden Hindi film industry (before it transformed into the glamorous Bollywood)- these were the subject of the minority filmmaking in the diaspora. The gaze was decidedly different: it was plaintive and angry, not effervescent and celebratory, as it was to become in later films. Whether depicting the 1980s ruckus-infested Thatcherite London in My Beautiful Laundrette or portraying the riotous suburban Bradford in My Son the Fanatic, the films reveled in a political immediacy that was a far cry from the unquestionably “softer” subjects of Crossover Cinema, although the latter’s filial connection to the former is beyond doubt.

Behold The Not-So-Glorious NRI Hero

Not a neat band of films, not a bunch with clearly defined goals, themes, subjects or aesthetic strategies, not spearheaded by one or two “auteurs” with their unique directorial style and cinematic choices, yet Crossover Cinema does put something firmly into perspective: that is the myriad experiences of the Indian cosmopolitan transnational bourgeoisie, whether by satirizing them, or by poignantly portraying the bittersweet vagaries of their lives in constant transit. That is the reason why the rubric of Crossover Cinema can possibly include films in English by established art-house filmmakers such as Aparna Sen or Rituporno Ghosh, as well as those by relative newcomers like Homi Adjania or Gauri Shinde. With the increasing convergence of the diaspora within the homeland, and vice-versa, thanks to the accelerating churn of the centrifuge of globalization, the transnational and the national are overlapping at an unbelievably fast pace. What Crossover Cinema offers, is, in fact, a scathing assessment of the sugarcoated Bollywood saga directed at the NRI, both in theme and content. As opposed to the filthy rich NRI hero, played by Shah Rukh Khan in films such as Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Pardes, etc., who lays his rightful claim on the NRI/Indian heroine after he proves his mettle through the tortuous crucible of maintaining Indian values and preserving family relations, crossover films like Bombay Boys, Hyderabad Blues, Everybody Says I’m Fine!, Split Wide Open, Monsoon Wedding or Being Cyrus offer pitiless dissections of not only the NRI predicament but also the so-called Indian tradition.

      
Bollywood has a history of presenting the NRI as either a super-rich patriarch fortifying the three pillars of remittances, investment and lobbying (which aim to increase the influence of the prosperous diaspora on the submissive, slightly feminized homeland that is in awe of the transnational moneyed elite represented by the NRI characters) or as a conniving arch-villain, still very rich of course, who has forgotten his/her Indian roots, and must be reminded of the indissoluble bond that exists between the prodigal son/daughter and their professed, as well as imaginary, “home.” This black and white dichotomy has done great disservice to the understanding of Non-Resident Indians or People of Indian Origin, who have been painted in garishly broad brushstrokes of uninspiring and insipid colors, bereft of a finer, layered characterization. It is precisely this lacuna that crossover cinema has a stated agenda to fill, to bridge the gaps in appreciating the cultural hinterlands of such tangled encounters.    

For example, the three male protagonists of Kaizad Gustad’s  Bombay Boys are NRIs in search of their Indian roots, who arrive in Mumbai only to be flabbergasted by the unaccustomed fast pace and the notoriously violence-ridden underbelly of the “world city.” With Mumbai’s claims and aspirations to match China’s Shanghai, with its torrential flux of cosmopolitan and parochial possibilities existing at once, inhabiting the same physical space, the three “heroes” are rendered gloriously “unheroic” in their fumbled interactions with the city. Whether to discover one’s sexuality, gay or straight (at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in India, before the British colonial relic of IPC Section 377 had been read down), or to be absorbed by the ocean of Bollywood, or to reconnect with a lost brother- all the three individual journeys get pockmarked with holes and punctuated with unexpected hiccups. The NRI is not the smooth-talking, dollar-flaunting investor, but the peripatetic backpacker of Indian origin, whose claim to a “dual citizenship” would not be answered by the FDI-hungry state.  

Similarly, in Dev Benegal’s Split Wide Open, the NRIs are framed as a predatory pedophile on the one hand and a voyeuristic journalist on the other, both implicated in “penetrating” the nation in different ways for personal benefit. The transnational equations are not without the complications of a gender battle, and often the homeland is consumed as spectacle or body to satisfy a cannibalistic global desire for the “exotic” or the “authentic.”  The “NRI-boy meets Indian girl” staple romance of Bollywood is turned on its head, and the unstated politics of even the film itself becomes revealed by pointing an invisible finger at the “camera gaze.”  In the same vein, Rahul Bose’s 2001 directorial debut Everybody Says I’m Fine! reflects mixed magic realism and cinema of the fantastic (in the lines of the French film AmŽlie) with India’s twenty-first century culture of ubiquitous consumption and the beginnings of the still on-going frenzied liberalization. The consumer utopia of Everybody is replete with a hidden menace, lurking under the carpet, as the moneyed elite of Mumbai, with their transnational connections and globe-trotting relatives, compete over latest acquisitions and circulate scandalous gossip on each other’s hollow sex lives. Their lives resemble a page torn from a British or American tabloid, as they ape the global celebrity culture, while participating in the ritual bhangra dance or the Diwali bash at their farmhouses or resplendent bungalows.

This patsy face of transnationality had not been explored before, despite the trope of “journey into the mystical and chaotic East” being done to death by several Western filmmakers, the latest example being the international blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire. It is, as if, tired of the Western media’s constant tutoring of India’s homegrown and transnational cinephiles on what to expect from Indian cinema, Bollywood, or otherwise, that this quiet rebellion had been taking shape. It is a reassertion of space, place and authorship, as well recreating identities, contesting passed-over traditions, as much as deliberating on what constitutes being a transnational cosmopolitan Indian in the present global village. Unafraid of excavating the comparatively fouler, uglier side of transnationality, Crossover Cinema has surged ahead of Bollywood by miles and miles of cinematic experimentation.

Exploring Inner Exiles

Films such as 15 Park Avenue, Black or The Last Lear break away from even the novelties of tinkering with the vagaries of transnationalism, and situate the struggle in the tortured mindscape of the protagonists, who hail from a transnational background, but suffer the consequences of a psychosocial breakdown. Moving away from the din and noise of Bollywood, with their overwhelming song-and-dance routines and high-decibel, photochromatic extravaganzas, this tributary of the river of Crossover Cinema listens to the sounds of silence, insists on senses other than the visual, asks us to take a leap of faith into the dark, bottomless crevices of these incomprehensible imaginations.

The brilliant insinuations of these films point towards the “excessive” in cinema, that which is hidden from plain sight. In Aparna Sen’s 15 Park Avenue, Meethi is a young woman suffering from schizophrenia, whose elder sister Anjali is a professor of physics at an acclaimed Indian university. Anjali has given up a lucrative global career at Ivy League American universities to take care of Meethi, and clearly, her friends and connections bespeak an international circle of intellectuals and scientists. But Meethi, who is caught in her alternate world of vivid hallucinations, whose condition has aggravated after she is gang-raped during a journalism assignment (undertaken during a brief period of lucidity) in a remote village, eventually challenges Anjali’s worldview of academic seminars in plush conference rooms of global universities, of visa and passport renewals, of institutional accreditations and workshops. Meethi’s version of a family at 15 Park Avenue is as fully imagined as the so-called real world of Anjali and her friends.  

Likewise, in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Black, which called itself a Bollywood film despite proofs to the contrary, and which had in its cast the reigning stars of Indian cinema Amitabh Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee playing the most challenging roles of their careers no doubt, the inner exiles of these affluent transnational classes get emoted. After Amir Khan’s Oscar-nominated Lagaan (2001), Black was supposed to be India’s route to the coveted Academy Awards, though those hopes were subsequently dashed.

Nevertheless, the trajectory of an unusual teacher-student relationship, that of a deaf, dumb and mute girl with her instructor, was charted in a manner that signaled the advent of truly “great” and “ambitious” Indian cinema, according to the film critic Saibal Chaterjee, who wrote: “Black is a dazzling cinematic achievement. Both in terms of the scale of its technical virtuosity and of the enormity of its dramatic impact, Bhansali’s meticulous labor of love is many freeways ahead of anything that the dream merchants of Bollywood are capable of churning out.”

The reception of another star director Rituporno Ghosh’s The Last Lear was more guarded. Depicting how the contending world of cinema intrudes into and usurps the earlier medium of theater, this film is Ghosh’s attempt at venturing into the world of Crossover films, of transnational themes, aspirations and circulation. As a washed out Shakespearean theater veteran (played once again by Amitabh Bachchan) rediscovers himself by acting as a clown in a debut feature film of a shrewd but competent filmmaker (enacted by Arjun Rampal), the competing media of performance arts clash head on. The film is a careful and self-reflexive meditation on the politics of cinematic aesthetics in the age of global cinema and celebration of NRI-oriented “Bollysagas” on the one hand, and the resurgence of stage theater worldwide on the other. Nods to legendary Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s idea of “the face as a mask” and “identity as performance” are acknowledged, with the ideas equally applicable to the questions of developing and contested identities of Indians within and outside the geopolitical borders of the nation.   

Multiplex Cinema and Crossover Audience

One need not baulk any more at the visual parallels between the scenes at the Star City multiplex in Birmingham, UK, or the splendid entertainment hubs in New York, Los Angeles, London, Sydney, Melbourne, Dubai or Montreal, and the plush shopping malls cum multiplex theaters in India such as those of DT Cinemas, Wave Cinemas, PVR Cinemas, Satyam Cineplex, Fun Cinemas and many such multiplex chains in the bustling cities and metropolises. The retail and entertainment boom are hands in glove with the new breed of Indian cinema in English, both of which bespeak certain comfort in negotiating transnational ideas, desires, subjects, goods and capital. With the movie-going experience itself “spectacularized,” one consumes the zones of entertainment and places of film exhibition as much as s/he gets entertained by merely looking at these oases of conspicuous consumption.

The Crossover Cinema, therefore, remains a significant beneficiary of the global multiplex culture, which is now an established phenomenon in India as well. The low-budget, experimental “crossover” film becomes part of a long list of products available for purchase at these multiplex theaters, which are usually situated inside gigantic shopping malls with every luxury good under the sun on sale. This disguised menu card, that clubs cinema with goods, openly acknowledges that in the present times, the crossover audience is one that dabbles in movie-going as an adjunct experience to the mainstream of enjoying oneself by enacting the foremost role of the “consumer-citizen.” Anybody, who partakes in this globally aspirational, transnationally connected life-style, who navigates the circuits of international knowledge and capital, whether Indian, NRI or even a Westerner residing in the multicultural cities of Britain, America or UAE, could be a potential cinema-goer and an appreciator, or a reluctant consumer (much like Brian Murphy) of Crossover Cinema. It’s precisely this fluidity of production and reception that makes this brand of film and filmmaking both unique and significant in the overcrowded galaxy of global Indian cinema. Perhaps the DVD of Dev Benegal’s now out-of-circulation English, August may yet emerge, signaling the ultimate acceptance of this interstitially positioned, boldly hybrid class of contemporary cinema, even though Benegal cautions on his blog “It’s painful. I dislike looking back.”