Bollywood may become India's greatest export, says USCC. But is it really creative?

Maybe it’s because of all the big-budget movies set in America (and shot in Canada) or because President Obama met Mallika Sherawat, but the US Chamber of Commerce has woken up to Bollywood. Recently, it issued a statement that informed readers that “the creative sector lies at the heart of the Indian culture and economy” and that “creative content may edge its way up to be India’s greatest export”. But the press release also wagged its finger at India by expressing great concern about piracy and copyright infringement in the country. The website Techdirt found the press release a touch whiny. Considering the impressive statistics for the Indian film industry (not just Bollywood), the US Chamber of Commerce’s concerns seemed illogical to Techdirt. [caption id=“attachment_887129” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Courtesy: Facebook[/caption] “You’d think those are signs that copyright law was working (largest film industry in the world, largest employment sectors, over 1,000 films produced annually — about double Hollywood) and that this would imply that whatever level of copyright there is in India — which is supposed to be an incentive to creativity —was doing a decent job. … this laxity [regarding punishing copyright infringement] incentivised the creation of nearly double the films that Hollywood produces. Perhaps – and I’m just suggesting things here – the “international norms” and the higher levels of enforcement are holding back the industries elsewhere. If anything, this report seems to suggest that other countries should move towards broad exceptions, since it appears to have been quite successful in India.” Obviously Techdirt isn’t familiar with the esteemed Bollywood traditions of either script doctoring or looking for inspiration. The former requires a writer to stitch together what is usually an unholy splatter of a story into something close to a coherent script. The description of the latter has changed over the decades. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, it meant locking a writer in a hotel room that had a working TV and VHS/DVD player, with a stack of films to watch. These were usually Hollywood titles. If the producer and director were adventurous, a new script was cobbled together from bits and pieces of various films. Otherwise, the writer’s job was to put in VHS/ DVD, transcribe and translate what he saw while suggesting the modifications necessary to Indianise the story. In the early 2000s, looking for inspiration meant going to Sarvodaya or Digital World in Bandra and asking for the latest foreign movies. This is why the first thing any reviewer does in India, even today, is figure out which older film inspired it. Curiously, I can’t remember the Indian censor board ever refusing to certify a film for not being original. It became more difficult to do this when foreign studios set up shop in India and a few of them went after the Indian remakes . These days, Bollywood has become far more open-minded. It’s not held against a scriptwriter if s/he has original ideas. Some of them even get made into films, provided a star likes the sound of the script. According to a recent report on the Indian media and entertainment sectors by Ernst & Young, a few billion dollars are lost every year because of piracy and ticket prices in India are among the lowest in the world. Despite all this, the report is full of optimism for the Indian film industry. Admittedly, it’s been a good few years for mainstream cinema at home and abroad. The industry has become decidedly more professional. The technical quality – cinematography, sound, editing, stunts, CGI, costume – has improved by leaps and bounds across regional and aesthetic divides. For instance, Bengali mainstream films, which for decades looked like home videos shot on handicams, now look glossy and can pull off Bollywood-inspired song sequences like this one from 100% Love . Business for commercial cinema has boomed. Last year saw nine Bollywood films enter the Rs 100 crore club. Compare that to 2008, when only one film made that much money. The budgets for big-budget films are getting bigger. Successful actors are able to command the kind of pay packets that could save a drought-struck village or two. More offbeat films – often without starry casts – have not only been produced, but they’ve also been released. And it’s difficult to find a part of the world where people don’t break into a wide grin at the sound of “Bollywood”, which has come to mean Indian cinema. However, this isn’t the whole picture. For all the popularity of Bollywood, our blockbuster films don’t hold a candle to their Hollywood counterparts, either in terms of imagination or storytelling. The only thing we do better than anyone else is kitsch. Aside from a few rare examples, the plots in Indian commercial cinema – regardless of language – pole vault over logic with a nonchalance that Sergei Bubka would envy. Ok, so we can’t afford the kind of budgets that The Avengers and Man of Steel had, but where are our _Love Actually_s and Little Miss Sunshines? Why haven’t we been able to be part of a multi-national production like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon or been able to capitalize on the success of Slumdog Millionaire? China, incidentally, milked the popularity of CTHD and since its release in 2000, Chinese films have earned billions annually at the US box office. There’s a theory that difficult circumstances bring out the best in creative people. In a thought-provoking piece, Adam Richardson wrote : “Constraints have a Goldilocks quality: too many and you will indeed suffocate in stale thinking, too few and you risk a rambling vision quest. The key to spurring creativity isn’t the removal of all constraints. Ideally you should impose only those constraints (beyond the truly non-negotiable ones) that move you toward clarity of purpose.” Think of Hindi mainstream cinema, and the observation seems valid. It seems India offers all its citizens the freedom of expression that is central to democracy. However, for filmmakers particularly, this isn’t entirely true. As anyone who has made a film will tell you, there are numerous constraints that straitjacket a director. Producer’s demands, actors’ whims, budgetary constraints, shooting disruptions, live cricket matches, numerology – the list of people to appease and things to consider is long. Once you’ve finished making the film, there’s the censor board, whose bizarre notions of what is permissible on screen inspired this video by Mihir Desai and Varun Grover . And there are all those who are ready, willing and able to be offended by a film’s content. From barbers to lawyers to self-appointed custodians of ancient Hindu culture – yes, the same one that cherished the erotic religious poetry of Jayadev and whose epics include graphic scenes of rape and violence – there’s no telling who will be up in arms. This may not be quite as restrictive as China, but it’s not quite a free and fair world in which our filmmakers have to operate. So perhaps there’s hope yet. Perhaps all these constraints will bring out the best in our storytellers soon. Maybe we’re moving towards a future in which well-made films like Ship of Theseus and Fukrey won’t be exceptions. Fingers crossed.