Show me the real India pleads Mrs Moore (Peggy Ashcroft) in the iconic A Passage to India, a 1980s film whose evocative clash of cultures on unequal terms remains all too painfully relevant in our new century. In the OneWorld search for the real India - that is for a better understanding of the challenge of overcoming poverty and injustice - can we find help in the ever expanding catalogue of films made in and about the country? Where are the successors to the wonderful Salaam Bombay?
Bollywood presents a fairly determined obstacle in our search. Its genre is escapist to the core, true to the traditions of its Californian namesake. The last thing that the average Indian cinema-goer needs is a reminder of the struggles of daily life. Even those Indian film-makers moving on from song and dance fantasy are drawn to period colonial drama like moths to the flame. Lagaan - Once Upon a Time in India is the most widely travelled of these films, famously pitting the
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Conflict with the British seems to make better box-office than conflict between rich and poor
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locals against their tax-levying enemies in a cricket match. Conflict with the British seems to make better box-office than conflict between rich and poor. Perhaps this will change as the wealth gap in India becomes more extreme and less acceptable, - and as the colonial images stale, just as they did in the 1980s after a succession of fine films on the theme Heat and Dust, Gandhi, not forgetting the television drama The Jewel in the Crown, still a favourite in American sitting rooms.
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it is the genre of travel and documentary films which circle closer to real social issues
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Inevitably it is the genre of travel and documentary films which circle closer to real social issues. The highly regarded The Soul Of India tours familiar places but boldly interviews many ordinary people in its search for understanding of caste and religion amongst more familiar territory. Panihari: The Water Women of India
is a short film about hard village life in Rajasthan, symbolised by the womens task of collecting water in a desert community. Another film focusing on a specific region is Hidden India: The Kerala Spicelands which salutes the harmony of a highly multicultural society in a region which has itself achieved much in the field of human development. And its amazing to find that the Malgudi Days series made for Indian TV station Doordarshan is available on DVD - the subtleties of R.K.Narayans small town life doubtless have their echoes in modern India.
But ultimately we cant allow Bollywood to slip too far from our hopes that mainstream Indian cinema might get to grips with the social issues underlying its market. Its well-known that Bollywood directors have found inspiration in Shakespearian themes with Othello inevitably to the fore - in Hindi films such as
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the title character is a bandit leader whose love life gets in a familiar tangle of jealousy
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Omkara in which the title character is a bandit leader whose love life gets in a familiar tangle of jealousy. Jane Austen too gets regular treatment, most recently with Bride and Prejudice, a smart title that she would surely have preferred - along with the dancing Mr.Darcy. British critics loved the sheer bravado and energy of this film. From Jane Austen surely its only a small step to Dickens, especially as the coexistence of rich and poor in Indian cities veers ever more closely to the profile of Dickensian London. A Bollywood dose of Hard Times or Oliver Twist might at last bring a popular rush of social reform into Indian politics.
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