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The term to describe Hindi movies is here to stay. Feeling offended by it is a denial of the fact that film stories in this country are often adapted and inspired from Hollywood, writes Shakuntala Rao
What is this incessant comparison with Hollywood?" wrote a well-known critic in a recent issue of Outlook magazine. "Our [Indian] film industry is different and we should hold our head high on our own merit." "Bollywood is a pejorative term," writes Satvinder Rana of BBC Radio. "It was probably conjured up by some cocky western journalist to describe the Indian film industry in a somewhat idiosyncratic and derogatory manner." Actors like Sunny Deol and Kareena Kapoor, too, abhor references of Bollywood. "I don’t use Bollywood to describe where I work," said Deol in an interview to Cineblitz. "It gives people the impression that we are nothing but imitation films." Being insulted by the term Bollywood to describe the Hindi film industry seems to emanate a false sense of national/cultural pride. It is also a denial of an acknowledgment that Bollywood stories are often created, cloned, adapted and inspired from Hollywood. For decades one of the strategies employed by Hindi filmmakers to reduce the chance of box-office failure has been to adapt or remake Hollywood, Telugu, Tamil, and older Hindi films. "Bombay filmmakers," writes scholar Tejaswini Ganti, "regard box-office hits in other Indian languages and from Hollywood as attractive remake material because, having already succeeded with a set of audiences, such films are perceived as having a higher probability of succeeding with Hindi film audiences as well." Hollywood films are selected not only on the basis of box-office outcome, but also for plots that seem amenable to Indian adaptation. The "Indianisation" of Hollywood films is a way to mix what is Indian with what is alien and produce something uniquely successful. How is a film Indianised? The inclusion of songs is the most obvious strategy. Take the case of Tom Cruise’s 2004 hit thriller, Collateral, which has already been re-made into two Hindi films, Taxi No. 9211 and The Killer. Each film has four songs with extensive choreography. The other strategy employed by Indian filmmakers is a meandering narrative with characters from the protagonist’s family and several comedic, romantic, and dramatic subplots. According to filmmaker Vikram Bhatt, "Our films are twenty times more difficult to make than a Hollywood film. A Hollywood film can interest its audience with one track, one storyline. When our audiences come to the theatre, they have a set belief that the cinema should contain everything—family life, romance, songs, everything they want, which becomes very difficult to achieve."`A0`A0`A0`A0 Meanwhile, Bollywood is not the only distant cousin of Hollwyood. Nollywood, the burgeoning film industry from Nigeria and third largest in the world, also adapts Hollywood hits. Fackson Banda, film studies professor from Rhodes University, South Africa, says that most filmmakers in Nollywood take pride in the fact that their films are copies of Hollywood blockbusters. "They don’t see such copying as morally problematic but rather paying homage to a film industry that has given them brilliant films worthy of adaptation," says Banda. Far away from the hills of California, Bollywood continues to provide alternative cultural and social representations for the millions in the subcontinent and beyond. The term Bollywood is here to stay.
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