The West may have the biggest stalls in the world’s media bazaar, but it’s not the only player. Globalization isn’t merely another word for Americanization–and the recent expansion of the Indian entertainment industry proves it. For hundreds of millions of fans around the world, it is Bollywood–India’s film industry–not Hollywood, that spins their screen fantasies. Bollywood, based in Mumbai, has become a global industry. India’s entertainment moguls don’t merely target the billion South Asians, or desis, at home; they make slick movies, songs and TV shows for export. Attracted by a growing Indian middle class and a more welcoming investment environment, foreign companies are flocking to Bollywood, funding films and musicians. The foreign money is already helping India’s pop culture to reach even greater audiences. And it may have a benign side effect–cleaning up an Indian movie business long haunted by links to the underworld.
For Indian and foreign entertainment investors alike, the South Asian diaspora–some 25 million strong, relatively affluent and passionate about keeping their culture alive–is a ready-made audience. The United States and Britain, where large populations of South Asians live, account for about 55 percent of international Bollywood ticket sales. When the love-triangle musical “Taal,” starring India’s megastar and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai, opened last summer in the West, it was a top box-office draw in America for six weeks.
But Bollywood has millions of non-Indian fans in the Mideast, Africa and Southeast Asia, too. Romany Gypsies in Eastern Europe tune in to India’s Sony Entertainment Television, as do Hindi film fans in Fiji and the Philippines. In Israel, the two-year-old box-office hit “Dil to Pagal Hai” is playing to packed houses in Tel Aviv as “Halev Mistagya”–“Crazy Heart”; in Arab countries, fans opt for Hindi movies over Hollywood ones. Bollywood hits, say Egyptian cinema critic Ahmed Kamal with a shrug, “are now simply part of Arab culture.” In Tanzania’s capital, open-air theaters screen the latest Indian romances, with interpreters standing in front of screens translating story lines. In Zanzibar, Swahili-speaking schoolgirls skip down the street singing Hindi love songs–despite not speaking a word of Hindi. “Indian entertainment products have been globally accepted,” says director-producer Subhash Ghai. “No other cultural product–except Hollywood’s–has such a sweep. And it’s still growing.”
New Delhi’s economic reforms are accelerating that growth. Last year the government made overseas entertainment earnings tax-free. As a result, media firms have focused on foreign markets more than ever. India’s movie exports jumped from $10 million a decade ago to $100 million last year, and may top $250 million in 2000. That’s peanuts compared with Hollywood’s $6.7 billion in overseas profits last year–but as the market has grown, even multinationals like Sony and Universal have taken a new interest in Indian entertainment. Since New Delhi began to ease rules on foreign investment in 1991, such companies have set up shop in Mumbai, targeting both domestic and international markets. Indian entertainment executive Amit Khanna, riffing on the “Pax Britannica” of the British Raj, calls the spread of Indian pop culture a “Pax Indiana”–an empire of song-and-dance dramas, Indi-pop songs and Hindi television soaps. If early Indian cinema was “a weapon to drive out the British,” declares the Bollywood trade title Supercinema, then “filmmakers of the 21st century have to use it as an instrument to entertain the world.”
Slick salesmen and satellites are helping them do it. On a Mediterranean yacht two years ago, British-based steel billionaire Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, metals industrialist Gokul Binani and movie distributor Kishore Lulla–all South Asians–decided that the overseas Indian market was waiting to be developed. Why not use satellite technology to launch a 24-hour digital Bollywood channel? Lulla’s Eros International already had the rights to 1,000 Indian movies, which it distributes to 100 countries. Last fall, B4U–or Bollywood For You–launched in Britain and the Arab Gulf; last week it launched in the States. The packaging is slick, and anchors speak “Hinglish,” or English peppered with Hindi. “B4U is focusing on being a global player,” says chief executive officer Ravi Gupta. “It wants to create a significant platform for Bollywood on the international map.”
B4U faces stiff competition. Subhash Chandra, a former rice trader, formed Zee Television in 1992–the first non-state-run channel to hit it big after India’s economy opened up. Six years after establishing a TV joint venture with Rupert Murdoch, Chandra last year bought out his partner for $300 million. Chandra’s Zee Network is now producing TV shows, movies, music and Internet sites. Aired in 23 million homes domestically, the channel reaches 30 million viewers in 120 other countries, too. Chandra is now working on a $755 million project to get an Indian satellite in orbit by 2002.
Attracted by the growing buying power of India’s middle class and potential foreign sales, foreign capital has poured into the TV industry. Murdoch is back; last month his Star Plus announced aggressive new plans to compete with Zee, including an infusion of native flavor by increasing programs in Hindi and Hinglish. As India’s economy has opened up, xenophobia in the entertainment industry has faded. When Sony set up shop in India in 1991, columnists at Hindu nationalist newspapers warned of the perils of the “pollution” of Indian culture by high-tech colonizers. To woo India, Sony Entertainment Television (SET) aired a sumptuous video of the national anthem “Hail, Mother India,” featuring a massive Indian flag, scores of dancers in national costumes and starring India’s popular music director A. R. Rahman. “From the beginning, we wanted to participate in the local culture–and provide Indian artists with a global platform,” says Sony Music’s marketing director Shridhar Subramaniam.
The seduction worked. Within a year SET broke even; within three, it had garnered 13 percent of viewers and had ratings rivaling Zee TV’s. Sony now has a film-production company, three television channels and a Hindi music company. With its steady diet of films, soaps and game shows, the Hindi-language SET now airs in 126 countries, and last year had a revenue of about $100 million. Sony-Columbia started Hindi film distribution last June. William Pfeiffer, Hong Kong-based managing director of Sony Asia, says the company’s Indian success “has far exceeded my wildest dreams.” Last year Sony launched a third Hindi channel, Sony Max, which carries cricket and Hindi hits to a global audience. Both Universal and Warner Bros. set up Mumbai offices last year.
Eventually, the foreigners may modernize the TV business in India. Though Sony charges for Sony Max, it hasn’t started charging subscribers for SET. “The day India’s cable viewers start paying even a dollar, you’re talking big money,” observes Kunal Dasgupta, CEO of Sony India. India’s distribution is still a patchwork of local operators and outlaw cable wallahs who deliver pirate service to shantytowns. Once foreign media giants come in, buy up small outfits and set up encryption strategies, says Dasgupta, “someone’s going to make a pile of money in this market.”
Foreign companies are chasing Indian musicians, too. The country’s pop-music industry moved 300 million units last year, making it the world’s second largest after the United States’. “People are able to buy things like music,” says R. V. Shrikhande, of the Indian Music Industry, a Mumbai-based industry group. “Before, the middle class was small and didn’t have any spare money.” With an eye on the global market, Sony, EMI and Polygram are grooming stables of Indian singers. Sony bought rights to the soundtrack of blockbuster “Kuchh Kuchh Hota Hai” (“Something Happens”), starring Shahrukh Khan, India’s answer to Tom Cruise, two years ago. The album has sold 8 million units, unprecedented for film music. In the early ’90s, Channel V, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., and MTV began showing Indian videos across Asia; over the past decade, Indi-pop, a blend of South Asian folk and funky Western beats, has grown hugely popular. Music-industry profits have jumped about 30 percent a year.
Abroad, concerts by movie and music stars keep fans’ passions alive. Indian stars appear on stages in New Jersey, California–even Florida and Chicago. Some 11,000 turned out to see megastar Khan, known for his devilish charm and dynamic acting, when he performed at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1998. Many of the fans were Asian, but they brought non-Asian friends–a nascent crossover audience. “The fans are crazy about him, even if they don’t understand the movies,” says Nadia Hudda, manager of a video store in Chicago’s Little India. “Especially the ladies.”
Sex appeal is one way to sell movies to non-Indian audiences. In some developing countries, though, it’s the non-American quality of Indian movies that draws audiences. Indian movies’ dreamily suggestive dance numbers (Indian censors don’t allow sex) go over well in many conservative societies. Given the choice between a Steve Martin divorce comedy and a musical about the virtues of God and family, Arabs, Africans and Southeast Asians often choose the latter. Ads for last year’s overseas hit “Hum Saath Saath Hain” (“We Stand United”) bore the treacly tag line: “The family that prays and eats together stays together.” “Indian movies are feel-good, all-happy-in-the-end, tender love stories with lots of songs and dances,” says Khanna, chief of Mumbai’s Plus Channel, which produces TV programs, movies and music. “That’s what attracts non-Indian audiences across the world.” In the Middle East, anti-Americanism works in Bollywood’s favor. “Our prejudices against American movies have grown,” says Egyptian political columnist Assem Kamel. “The politics of the U.S. government has affected the popularity of American movies among Arab audiences.”
That doesn’t stop Americans from watching Bollywood flicks, too. In the past three years, three major Indian film-distribution companies have opened U.S. offices. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs chill out at Fremont’s newly opened Naz8 Cinema–North America’s first multiplex devoted to Bollywood movies, where the concession stand sells samosas and naan along with popcorn and Coke. Even in south Florida, Bollywood films show in 16 film theaters in seven cities. Says Ft. Lauderdale housewife Sameera Biswas: “We go to the movies to keep our culture alive.”
That culture is changing along with its audiences. Bollywood has begun tailoring movies for Westernized fans. Mumbai producers have long shot fantasy sequences in exotic locales like Switzerland and Scotland–in dream scenes filmed through Vaseline-coated lenses. Today plots are actually set in London and New York, or feature encounters between overseas Indians and natives. In the 1995 megahit “Dilwale Dulahniya Le Jayenge” (“Braveheart Will Win the Bride”), produced by Yash Chopra, who pioneered Bollywood’s move into foreign markets, an Indian boy living in England comes to India and wins the girl who is being forced into an arranged marriage by her father. (Chopra’s current project, “Mohabbatein,” or “Loves,” starring idol Shahrukh Khan, is also a love story, but the producer isn’t revealing the plot.) Chopra has featured Britain so prominently that in 1998 the British Tourism Authority gave him an award.
The modern world is racing in. The Internet, with scores of sites retelling Bollywood gossip, is already a great promoter of India’s pop culture. On desiclub.com, a million visitors a month swap news of parties, clubs and Bollywood tidbits; chaitime.com, a Philadelphia-based South Asian culture site, offers its 750,000 monthly visitors everything from a Web soap called “Young and Desi” to discussions of how many times Aishwarya Rai changes her hairstyle in “Taal.” The site’s been so successful that it recently landed a $25 million infusion of venture capital and is planning to open offices in Mumbai and London this spring.
Foreigners may be stampeding India to package and sell a global Indian culture. The question remains, however, as to whether they’ll change the structure of the business–or just the films themselves. In the long run, with all the global interest, will Bollywood be swamped by Hollywood and its alluring big bucks? India’s entertainment executives predict that the foreign money may clean up the film industry’s dirty practices. Until last year, when New Delhi declared the entertainment industry a legitimate business, Bollywood had been dominated by shady underworld bosses, who financed films and took huge cuts. Banks shied away. Producers and actors were regularly threatened by gangsters; many had police escorts for protection. Last month producer Rakesh Roshan was shot and wounded outside his Mumbai office after refusing to give the overseas distribution rights to a gulf-based gangster. Foreign companies like Sony and Universal will not only demand transparency in accounting; they will provide a financing alternative to the mafia. “Once the big players come in in a big way, the whole entertainment industry is going to change,” says TV mogul Khanna. “The days of the shady moneybags will be over.”
Mumbai directors admit that they are adjusting their traditional, romantic themes slightly to new foreign audiences and changing tastes of overseas Indian audiences; but they insist that the soul of Indian pop culture will remain unchanged, despite all the money and foreign interest. Bollywood already sells around 6 billion tickets a year–with about 15 percent sold overseas. And the profits just keep going up. Why would Hollywood want to change that? The foreign money will keep pouring in, the great Indian directors will keep churning out close to 800 films a year, and the actors will keep singing and dancing. If you missed last year’s Mumbai blockbusters, never fear: you can plan on catching another rollicking Bollywood musical, coming soon to a screen near you.
