Bollywood in China

As interest in Indian movies, music and style finds favour in the Land of the Dragon,
Shakuntala Rao checks out if Indian filmmakers will be able to break through
the barriers of the highly regulated Chinese film market

DRIVING through the wide streets of Shanghai, China’s cultural capital of 19 million, I see a giant well-lit poster of Hrithik Roshan. He has his signature smile and is selling mobile phones to the Chinese — in Mandarin.

This is no Raj Kapoor’s Mera joota hai Japani, phir bhi dil hai Hindustani allegory of Asian nationalism coupled with stark socialism, which many in China were familiar with when they talked of Indian films. Bollywood’s message to China today, similar to China’s message to the world, is driven by consumerism and entertainment.

In China, interest in Bollywood stems from a growing interest in India. China and India have been making attempts to erase their embattled foreign policies since the winter war of 1962. The two countries are now part of the formidable BRIC alliance, an acronym for the collective economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China, countries that had their first meeting in Russia in 2008 and are projected to be the top four world economies by 2050. Media reports of Indian President Pratibha Patil’s visit to China this year suggested that China has emerged as a strong supporter of India’s ambition to be one of the full-fledged permanent members of the UN Security Council.

As any video nerd-historian will tell you, the two most exciting movie industries of the past few decades have been Hong Kong and India. While European filmmakers went inwardly minimalist, those teeming Asian cinemas generated robust entertainment of pin-wheeling action and violence (Hong Kong) and unabashed sentiment and music (Bollywood), different in temperament but alike in their vigour and brio.

While Jackie Chan and Jet Li, after years as stars in the East, have made a dent in the international market, brand Bollywood with its anglicised movies Bride and Prejudice and Slumdog Millionaire, too, have successfully entered the global cinema bazaar. Yet there’s been little foreign exchange between the two national cinemas. So far as I know Nikhil Advani’s Chandni Chowk to China, with its global distributor, Warner Brothers, received a fairly wide release and represented the first A-budget crossbreeding of Bollywood and Hong Kong. While results of this genetic experiment were mixed (Chandni Chowk bombed at the Indian box-office), it might have started a new phase in India and China’s film histories.

It was evident from the students in my class at Zheijiang Wanli University, where I recently taught a summer course on Bollywood, who were highly curious about Indian films and were amused to hear that India has had its own Jackie Chan and that Chan had featured India prominently in one of his films, The Myth, which also starred Bollywood actress, Mallika Sherawat.

Professor Li Yinhua, who teaches global communication at Zhejiang, says, "If you watch any entertainment programme on CCTV (China’s state-owned television), there are now Chinese singers and dancers, who will dress in Indian film style and play Indian music. India has become very fashionable."

The interest in Indian film music and style has not translated to box-office draw. Bollywood filmmakers still have to break through the barriers of China’s highly regulated film market. The Chinese movie industry is protected by a quota system, which only allows around 20 foreign films, most from Hollywood, to be screened a year, and permission for foreign companies to shoot in the country are difficult to obtain.

But things are slowly changing. In a month-long event this summer, the Indian Government showcased India’s movie industry for the Chinese. The festival, which was inaugurated at the Broadway Cinematheque Moma in Beijing in June, played several contemporary films to sold-out audiences. The festival was attended by India’s well-known film personalities like Yash Chopra, Bobby Bedi, Rahul Bose and Aparna Sen.

"These are small steps," says Yinhua, "It is only a matter of time that the two movie industries will start partnering and find audience in each other’s countries."

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