Chapter Excerpt

Dreams come true in Dalton. The small, unimposing town in Georgia, mostly known as the carpet capital of the world, is a setting for miracles. Bhavesh Sheth knows that.

Bhavesh, a portly, spectacled man with curly hair and an eager manner, stands out in Dalton. He is among the handful of Indians living there; only 2 percent of the town’s 27,912 residents are Asian. Many of these are doctors, but Bhavesh is in the motel business. His father, Ramesh, runs a Super 8 Motel located near the Dalton Convention Center. It is a family business. Ramesh is the general manager and Bhavesh the assistant manager. Their wives also help to manage the two-star, 102-unit motel.

Bhavesh has never lived in India. His father emigrated in the early 1970s, and Bhavesh was born in Canada in 1974. Ramesh went where there was work. Bhavesh grew up in Detroit, Houston, and Tennessee. He visited India with his parents when money and time permitted. But in 1999, in accordance with his parents’ wishes, Bhavesh had an arranged marriage with Tejal, a girl born and brought up in Gujarat.

Like millions of Indians across the world, Bhavesh connected with India through Hindi films. His parents watched them regularly, usually on video. The grainy pirated prints couldn’t take away from the power of these fantasies. Each time Amitabh Bachchan died artfully on-screen, Bhavesh, only nine, wept copious tears. Ramesh assured him that India’s most enduring superstar was only “faking it.” As he grew older, Bhavesh continued to watch Hindi films avidly. Tejal was also a fan. Their son Kishan, born in 2002, was seduced by song-and-dance before he could talk. So when Temptation 2004, a Bollywood rock concert performed by some of Mumbai’s leading actors, came to the Gwinnett Center in Atlanta, there was little choice. Bhavesh cashed in his birthday and marriage anniversary gifts and bought tickets at $150 each. By the time he called, the best seats at $200 were already sold out.

Temptation was a typically Bollywood blend of actors lip-synching popular songs and dance performances interspersed with comedy routines and fan interactions. It featured six leading stars, each enacting a different temptation. The biggest draw was superstar Shah Rukh Khan. The two-month-long tour was sold out in sixteen cities across Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada. Each venue, with seating ranging from 7,000 to 20,000, was packed. The most expensive tickets were between $300 and $400, but the steep prices did not deter fans. In Toronto, so many people were turned away from the gargantuan Air Canada Centre, which seats 19,800, that a second show had to be organized three days later. In London, two shows were done back to back. In Antwerp, the hall was packed with immigrants. These were Indians who had immigrated to Holland via its erstwhile colony Suriname, where Indians were shipped between 1873 and 1916 as indentured labor. Being several generations removed from India had not diminished their passion for Bollywood.

It was, as filmmaker Nasreen Munni Kabir documented in her film The Outer World of Shah Rukh Khan, Elvis-level hysteria. Fans speaking in thick American accents kept vigil in hotel lobbies at 2 A.M. to catch a glimpse of their favorite star. At the shows, weeping girls screamed, “We love you, Shah Rukh Khan!” Local organizers said they were refusing $2,000 offers for backstage passes. Time magazine’s Asian edition, which featured Shah Rukh on the cover of the Asia’s Heroes special issue the following month, reported that Shah Rukh’s bodyguard, a burly bald man with two teenage daughters, had so many offers of sex in exchange for access that it had become “disturbing” for him.

On September 3, 13,000 people filled the cavernous arena at Gwinnett Center to capacity. Bhavesh, Tejal, Kishan, and Bhavesh’s brother Rupesh drove in from Dalton. Bhavesh was carrying a printout from Yahoo! Maps in his pocket. When Tejal asked him why he was holding on to the piece of paper, Bhavesh replied, “You never know. I might go onstage and meet Shah Rukh Khan. Then I’ll get an autograph for Kishan.” A week before the concert, Bhavesh had told Tejal that he had a dream that he was dancing onstage with Shah Rukh. Tejal had laughed and remarked that there was no way that was going to happen.

They were seated twelve rows away from the stage. As part of the act, Shah Rukh selected two audience members to do a routine with him. A girl who had won a raffle contest was called first. Then Shah Rukh announced that he was looking for a man who could dance. Something came over Bhavesh. He told Tejal that he had a crazy idea that was likely to embarrass her. Tejal, by then giddy with the glamour, said she didn’t care. So Bhavesh, who weighs 200 pounds and is five foot nine inches tall, stood on his seat and started to do the Bhangra, a robust North Indian dance. Shah Rukh pointed at him and said, “You, over there, come onstage.”

The realization that he was actually going to dance on a stage with Shah Rukh Khan didn’t sink in immediately. Bhavesh stood still on his chair, confused. Was Shah Rukh calling to him or someone else? Tejal yelled, “Go before they call someone else!” Bhavesh ran. His legs were moving, but his mind wasn’t fully alert. He was in shock. Bhavesh clambered up onstage, panting, holding his heart, overcome by the intensity of emotions rushing through him. Tejal thought he was going to start crying.

When Shah Rukh handed him the mike, Bhavesh said, “I had a dream seven days ago that I would dance in Atlanta with Shah Rukh Khan. I swear to God. My wife wouldn’t believe me. She said, ‘You’re crazy, Bhavesh.’ I said, ‘Goddamnit, it’s going to happen.’” Shah Rukh listened with the indulgent smile of a much-loved deity and replied, “I’m very touched, but as a guy you should be dreaming of naked women.” Then Bhavesh mumbled, “I must do this; don’t get insulted.” And in the ultimate Indian gesture of reverence and respect, one reserved for family elders and men of God, Bhavesh bent down and touched Shah Rukh Khan’s feet.

Bhavesh spent almost thirty minutes onstage with Shah Rukh. They performed a popular dance routine from the film Devdas together. Shah Rukh asked if there was anything in particular Bhavesh wanted. Tejal’s birthday was coming up so Bhavesh requested that Shah Rukh wish her a Happy Birthday. Bhavesh also got him to sign the map for Kishan, who was sleeping by then. As the grand finale, Shah Rukh gifted Bhavesh with an autographed bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey and a round-trip ticket to any destination in the world.

Those moments at Gwinnett Center marked Bhavesh. He became “the man who danced with Shah Rukh Khan.” Bhavesh felt that he had been touched in a special way. “It is one of the biggest highlights of my life,” Bhavesh said, “right after the birth of my son and my marriage.”

Indians suffer from a particularly virulent case of movie madness. India is the largest film producer in the world, making 800-odd movies a year. Of these, nearly 200 come from Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay. They range from shoddy quickies made on threadbare budgets in twenty days to epics that feature as many stars as costume changes.

In a country mired in poverty, crowds, and oppressive heat, each day some 15 million people troop into over 12,500 cinemas to watch a movie. The demand for tickets outstrips the supply to the point that scalpers, or “black market” men, are as ubiquitous at theaters as popcorn. They shuffle near the theater entrance, muttering the increased price of the much-wanted ticket. The venue itself can differ dramatically. Large cities such as Mumbai and Delhi have ultra-plush multiplexes where uniformed servers bring caramelized popcorn to velvet seats. Villages make do with stiflingly hot tent cinemas where the audience sits on the floor and the projectionist manually rewinds the film. But the movie will nearly always be the same: an extravaganza of song and dance, in which romance, melodrama, comedy, tragedy, and action are blended, sometimes skillfully and as often clumsily, to create a unique masala mix.

The audience’s involvement with the frames flickering on-screen is passionate, noisy, and sometimes aggressive. So viewers will applaud loudly when a star makes his first entry or when a line of dialogue is particularly pleasing. They will sing along with songs and sometimes even throw coins at the screen and dance in the aisles. A successful film in India is one that has a “repeat audience,” that is an audience who watches the same film many times. Some blockbusters have run consecutively for five, even ten years. Spectators are not looking for realism in the Western sense of the word. Instead they want spectacle—a larger-than-life drama.

Classical Indian aestheticians advocated the mixing of bhavas, or emotional states, in drama. The Hindi film unapologetically mixes genres, locations, style, and tone. In Bollywood anything is possible. So the sweaty tension of a murder mystery might be broken by a fantasy sequence in which the hero or heroine dreams of gamboling on Swiss hilltops. A separate comedy track can interrupt the main plot at random intervals. The hero can, without extensive effort or injury, fight ten men and emerge victorious. The heroine will wear trendy mini-skirts and perform a seductive dance number but remain a virgin till the end titles roll. Characters and homes are impeccably groomed. Even those meant to be poor exude a carefully constructed frayed glamour. There are only two rules: There must be love and there must be songs.

Songs are the living heart of popular Hindi film. Music has traditionally been part of the Indian narrative. The great Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, were written in verse. Mirch Kattika, a 3,000-year-old Sanskrit play, had narrative interspersed with songs. Bollywood form originates in theater: the high classical traditions, Urdu-Parsi theater, and folk forms such as street theater, all of which use music and song as part of the dramatic experience. Music in cinema is a logical progression.

In the 1930s and 1940s, it wasn’t unusual for films to have as many as forty songs. Indrasabha or The Court of God Indra, made in 1932, had seventy-one songs. But by the 1950s songs had dropped down to less than ten per film. Most Bollywood films average six. These songs permeate and punctuate South Asian lives around the globe. They are played at weddings, parties, nightclubs, religious ceremonies. A popular Indian way to “do time pass,” or kill time, is to play Antakshari, a game that involves singing film songs. Until the 1970s, practically the only pop music tradition that existed was film music. In India, film stars are also rock stars.

Bollywood plots are overwrought but uncomplicated. Hindi films are largely morality plays with actors inhabiting archetypes. The earliest Indian films were mythological; India’s first filmmaker, Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, who made Raja Harishchandra in 1913, came from a family of priests. The traditional Hindi film hero is invariably an avatar of Lord Ram, who in the Ramayana is referred to as maryada purushottam, the Upholder of Honor. That is, he is handsome (usually light-complexioned), upright, and without blemishes. While the hero is virtuous, the villain is immoral, and good always conquers evil. The story might include a passionate rain song (in which the leads, usually in wet, clinging clothes, are amorous) or dastardly acts of wickedness, but invariably the narrative affirms the status quo. It is wholesome entertainment in which family values and the heroine’s virtue stay intact. Hindi films present life not as it is but as it should be, which perhaps explains why they travel so well. Non-Indians, in countries as diverse as Peru, Indonesia, Greece, and Ethiopia, can connect with the songs, spectacle, and unbridled optimism. For an estimated annual audience of 3.6 billion worldwide, Hindi cinema is a necessary comfort and a collective expression of hope.

But Bollywood isn’t just a style of filmmaking. It is also a culture and a religion. Hindi films dictate dress codes, language, rituals, and aspirations for both the Silicon Valley software engineer and the villager in India’s most backward state, Bihar. Technology has helped to spread the Bollywood cult. DVD, satellite, and the Internet have cultivated fans even in countries where Hindi films are not distributed.

In South Korea, a curious ritual plays out weekly. A group calling themselves the Bollywood Lovers Club gathers to watch Hindi movies, which they themselves have painstakingly subtitled in Korean. They watch, in the club leader Kwanghyun Jung’s words, in “Indian style.” That is, they “make noise, laugh, and abuse the villain.” The club also runs Bollywood dance classes. Some of the 7,000-odd members wear Shah Rukh Khan T-shirts and drink coffee from cups with his photograph on them. Only one Indian movie has ever been released in South Korea—a Tamil language film called Muthu: The Dancing Maharaja, in 1998.

In a paper called Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities, anthropologist Brian Larkin writes about the influence of Bollywood in northern Nigeria, where Lebanese exhibitors started importing Indian films in the 1950s. Larkin writes: “To this day, stickers of Indian films and stars decorate the taxis and buses of the north, posters of Indian films adorn the walls of tailors’ shops and mechanics’ garages, and love songs from Indian film are borrowed by religious singers who change the words to sing praises of Prophet Mohammed. For over thirty years, Indian films, their stars and fashions, music and stories have been a dominant part of everyday culture in northern Nigeria.” The Germans are more recent converts. The first Bollywood film to have a major theatrical release was Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sorrow) in 2003. In Germany, DVDs of dubbed Hindi films are sold with the tag line Bollywood macht glücklich! Bollywood makes you happy!

In Pakistan, Bollywood has had the added frisson of being contraband. In 1965, after the second Indo-Pak war, the Pakistani government banned the import and screening of Indian films. But Bollywood is everywhere. Pirated DVDs of the latest films are available on the day of release. The press, both English and vernacular, carries reviews of these films. Even though Radio Pakistan does not play Hindi film songs, fans are up to date on the latest hit numbers, dances, fashions, and gossip. On the streets of Karachi and Lahore, Shah Rukh looms large from billboards, selling international products. His ancestral home in Peshawar is a tourist destination. Filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt once remarked that one of the reasons Pakistan will never go to war with India is because Shah Rukh lives there.

The name Bollywood, which combines Bombay with Hollywood, has long been a controversial construct. New York Times language guru William Safire traces it to crime fiction writer H. R. F. Keating, who first used it in 1976. The culturally disparaging name suggested that the Hindi film industry was a derivative of the American film industry—the Third World clone of its infinitely more powerful, artistic, and glamorous Western counterpart. Hindi film actors and filmmakers have persistently objected to it, but Bollywood was picked up and popularized by the Indian film press. The coinage passed into popular usage (in 2001, it was included in the fifth edition of the Oxford English Dictionary) and became, over the years, a global brand. Like Yoga or the Taj Mahal, Bollywood is shorthand for India.

There are many Indias. The country is the seventh-largest globally in terms of size, with the second-largest population. It has twenty-three officially recognized languages and 2,000-odd dialects. It is home to multitudes of religions and has the third-largest Muslim population in the world, after Indonesia and Pakistan. India is a nation of extremes where affluence, progress, and education are matched by poverty, backwardness, and illiteracy. Disparate centuries exist side by side. In Mumbai, the largest slum in Asia is separated only by a ten-minute car ride from a five-star hotel where Louis Vuitton bags are showcased in the lobby and meals cost several hundred dollars. Both are valid Indian realities. In his book From Midnight to the Millennium, author Shashi Tharoor asks, “What makes so many people one people?”

One answer is Bollywood. Hindi films function as a global glue, binding together Indians across gender, geography, religion, and age. This includes the estimated 20 million non-resident Indians scattered across 110 countries. For them, Hindi movies are an umbilical cord to the motherland. Second- and third-generation immigrants watch Hindi movies with subtitles because they can no longer speak the language. Bollywood is a primary and sometimes solitary link to an exotic ancestral homeland that they have heard of but perhaps never visited. In cities like New York and London, they flock to nightclubs for Desi nights, where Indian DJs play Bollywood remixes. In fact, Bollywood is no longer the shabby, slightly embarrassing country cousin that the parents insist on bringing home. Hindi films are trendy. So is India.

Shah Rukh Khan is the face of a glittering new India. He is a modern-day god. On streets in India, his posters are sold alongside those of religious deities. Shrines have been erected in his name. For Indians and the varied non-Indian lovers of popular Hindi cinema, Shah Rukh is bigger than Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt combined. Over fifteen years and fifty films, he has straddled Bollywood like a colossus. In the paan-stained studios of Mumbai, Shah Rukh’s story, how a middle-class Muslim boy from Delhi became one of the biggest movie stars in the biggest film industry in the world, is legend. So when he flicks away cigarette butts people pick them up as souvenirs. The media, in tones that aren’t ironical or mocking, refer to him as King Khan.

Shah Rukh’s home, a sprawling heritage bungalow in suburban Mumbai, has long been a tourist magnet. Buses carrying vacationers routinely stop in front of the gate. On Sunday evenings, when Mumbai, a frenetic city of 18 million people, pauses for breath, men and women gather for a darshan (sighting). Sometimes, when he is at home, Shah Rukh Khan steps out on the terrace and waves at his devotees.

But Shah Rukh’s life is more than just a dramatic show-biz success story. He is a Muslim superstar in a Hindu-majority country and his life reflects the fundamental paradoxes of a post-liberalization nation attempting to thrive in a globalized world. His story provides a ringside view into the forces shaping Indian culture today.

The rise of Shah Rukh Khan can be understood as a metaphor for a country changing at breakneck pace. During the 1990s, India underwent avalanches of change. In 1991, under the threat of imminent fiscal collapse and facing an inability to repay World Bank loans, the government introduced wide-ranging economic reforms. The centralized socialist economy was dismantled. Several major industries were deregulated and multinational corporations were allowed entry. In the same year, satellite television—CNN, STAR TV, MTV—arrived.

For fifty years since independence, India had struggled with a stagnant economy. Economist Raj Krishna labeled it the “Hindu rate of growth,” which averaged just 3.5 percent annually. India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, envisaged a “socialist pattern of society,” which would combine the best of socialism and capitalism so that Indians could enjoy both economic egalitarianism and democratic freedom. Instead, the extreme protectionism and state-controlled public sector created the “License Raj,” a Kafkaesque maze of regulations and permits that forced businessmen and ordinary citizens customarily to use bribes and “contacts” in high places. The License Raj distorted the economy and filled the markets with low-quality, made-in-India goods that were two or three decades behind the West. Factories were forced to produce goods in line with centrally mandated Five Year Plans on the Soviet model; producing more scooters in a year than the annual quota allowed for was as much of an official sin as producing fewer. In this environment, even ordinary American products such as Kellogg’s cereals and Levi’s jeans were considered status symbols. They implied that one had the money and good fortune to travel to foreign lands. America, with its vast supermarkets groaning with consumer delights, was a faraway paradise.

The reforms changed the urban Indian landscape. Suddenly cereals, jeans, and dozens of other branded products were available at the corner store. Television, which earlier featured hours of staid, government-run programming on two state-run terrestrial channels, now boasted dizzying alternatives. There were dozens of cable channels, inexpensive enough to be bought by anyone who could afford a television set. Tedious political speeches and discussions on agriculture were replaced by glitzy, titillating shows such as The Bold and the Beautiful and Baywatch. The West, with its seductive promise of modernity, glamour, and a sumptuous lifestyle, entered middle-class homes.

As India’s economic growth rate rose beyond 7 percent in the 1990s, the middle classes with their increased spending power came to the forefront. The Delhi-based National Council of Applied Economic Research, which prefers the term “consuming class,” estimated that in the mid-1990s this consuming class was 32.5 million households or 168 million people. (By 2005, experts estimated that the middle class numbered over 250 million people—that is only 50 million less than the total population of the United States.)

Globalization, and the ensuing consumerism and competition, created an enormous cultural churning. The conventional rules no longer held. Negotiating between tradition and modernity, between new desires and deep-rooted expectations, the middle class was wracked by confusion and insecurity. Stress, depression, divorce, long considered ailments of the affluent West, became more widespread. The Indian family, women’s roles, marriage, and relationships were irrevocably redefined.

These shifts were paralleled by various reactionary trends, particularly the rise of a muscular Hindu right wing. In December 1992, Hindu fundamentalists destroyed the Babri Masjid, a disputed religious site in North India. Riots followed. Mumbai, long heralded as India’s most cosmopolitan city, was torn apart by two spells of rioting. According to the government-ordered Srikrishna Commission Report, 900 people died and 2,036 were injured. Over 50,000 were rendered homeless. The patina of globalization couldn’t camouflage or quell the religious conflict, poverty, corruption, and violence that simmered underneath. A sleepy society, mired in 5,000 years of culture and tradition, wrestled with the “shock of modernity” and asked itself: What does it mean to be Indian?

Shah Rukh Khan provided one very persuasive answer. In films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride, also widely known as DDLJ: 1995), Dil To Pagal Hai (The Heart Is Crazy: 1997), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something Is Happening: 1998), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), and Kal Ho Naa Ho (If Tomorrow Comes: 2003), he told Indians that an Indian could be a hybrid who easily enjoys the material comforts of the West and the spiritual comforts of the East. You didn’t have to choose between the two; the twain could meet without friction or confusion. So in DDLJ, Shah Rukh’s character, Raj, is a London-born Indian who drinks beer, wears a Harley-Davidson jacket, and is clearly a European man-about-town; but Raj doesn’t take advantage of his intoxicated heroine because he “respects an Indian woman’s honor.” Shah Rukh’s subsequent characters also reiterated this idea, that the international-designer-label exterior cannot undermine an essential Indian identity. Shah Rukh personified the new millennium Indian who combines a global perspective with local values and is at home in the world.

Shah Rukh became both the face and the catalyst of the new consumerist society; he was one of the earliest Bollywood stars to plunge into advertising. Shah Rukh rarely met a product he could not endorse. He sold everything from Pepsi-Cola to Tag Heuer watches. The commercials accentuated his screen persona and helped transform the actor into a brand.

A popular song from a film released in 1955, Shri 420 (Mr. 420), puts it aptly:

Mera joota hai Japani

Yeh patloon Englistani

Sar pe lal topi Rusi

Phir bhi dil hai Hindustani

My shoes are Japanese

These pants are British

The cap on my head is Russian

But my heart is Indian.

In 1955, this cosmopolitanism was perhaps a cherished hope for most Indians; today, it is an inescapable reality. Shah Rukh Khan, like Marilyn Monroe, is an icon for an age. This is his story.

Copyright © 2007 by Anupama Chopra