Video Night in Kathmandu (43 page)

Even many of the foreigners who came to India came, after a while, to seem Indian. This process had begun when some of the eccentric Brits of the Raj, as described by Paul Scott and Gerald Hanley, had decided to go native. It had continued with those flocks of Western believers who had come over to India, donned orange robes and taken to the ascetic life. Even today, many of the bohemian vagabonds who drifted around the country in huge numbers seemed, in their beaded and sandaled and ragged
forms, to have taken on something of the poverty and shapelessness of the country around them. In Thailand, or Indonesia, or Japan, I suspected, such transformations were almost unknown.

Thus, just about every influence here was ultimately assimilated into the heterogeneous Indian rush. In Bombay, the U.S.S.R. Books and Periodicals store was just down the street from the Cambridge Lending Library, and around the corner from the Yankee Doodle American Dream Pizza Parlor; on TV, two of the most popular shows were a version of
Dynasty
and an adaptation of
Pride and Prejudice
, both turned into their Hindi equivalents. China, I thought, preferred to keep visitors out; many Southeast Asian countries invited foreigners in, with an ambiguous wink and a smile; Japan smilingly greeted visitors at the door and appeared to admit them without ever really doing so. India, by contrast, took in all the hordes and simply swept them up in the undifferentiated tide.

AN ORDINARY MIDDLE-CLASS
child had been kidnapped, 1 was told. One year after his disappearance, his parents chanced to see him in a marketplace, dressed in rags and working as a cripple for some latter-day Fagin. By then, however, it was much too dangerous for them to try to get him back.

JUST BEFORE I
left the country, I made one last attempt to clarify my understanding of India’s relation to the West, as reflected in the movies, by returning for a final chat with Masud. A typical Indian gentleman of distinction, he invited me to join him one leisurely Sunday morning for breakfast at the Cricket Club of India, a club in the great British tradition. We ordered some toast and a pot of tea and talked beside a sunlit pitch on which white-flanneled cricketers went through their motions with lazy grace. All the hubbub of Bombay was screened out in the quiet morning; we could almost, I thought, have been in Oxford, in a tranquillity broken only by the diffident thump of bat meeting ball, an occasional polite scatter of applause. A few girls in polka-dot dresses and high heels rambled around the pitch in the warm sea breeze. On the horizon were the steeples and towers of the red-brick Gothic buildings left by the British. And through the mild sunny morning we chatted about
Gremlins
, disco, the effects of PR.

Cinematically speaking, said Masud, the Western influence on India fell into three rough categories. There was the Hollywood Raj of Attenborough and Forster. There was the familiar disco culture of America (“Downright soulless and vulgar,” he said, since it had been transplanted with no understanding of its context or meaning. “At least
Flashdance
has a certain lightness, a humor, a poetry. But go to Studio 29 here, an imitation of your Studio 54. It’s pathetic”). Most salutary of all, in Masud’s opinion, was the third category: the effect of the German and French thinkers on dissent, from whom many young Indians had learned their rebelliousness.

The first two traditions, both popular and in their way romantic (the British a relatively straightforward romance of elegance and class, the American a matter of instant gratification and cheap thrills), had obviously colored the commercial cinema. But the effect of the third was most apparent in the so-called parallel cinema. These were the art movies of the educated elite, pioneered by Ray and continued by a whole generation of young directors trained at the Film and Television Institute of Pune, South Asia’s only film school. Although Ray had tried to fashion a rigorous cinema at once sophisticated and close to the heart, creating in his
Apu Trilogy
a true voice for rural India, many of his successors were determined intellectuals who concentrated exclusively on their nation’s social problems. They had no time for escapism, no patience for clownish song-and-dance routines; they wanted to bring droughts to the screen, and caste tensions, poverty and subjugation. Often they wanted simply to shake their fist at the society around them. “You read the newspapers and you feel totally helpless,” Govind Nihalani had told the
Illustrated Weekly
, “so you try to select something by which you can express your anger.”

The art movies were the equal of anything put out in the West—in part, perhaps, because they had taken so much from the West. Ray, after all, had spent time when young around Jean Renoir, while Kumar Shahani had assisted Bresson. The angry young men acknowledged, even boasted, that they took their cues from Eisenstein, Godard and Fassbinder (though not, curiously, from the one director whose careening intensities and cheerful grotesqueries seemed tailor-made for the Indian scene—Fellini). They quoted Kafka and referred to Jancsó and Genet.
Even the name they gave to their movement—the New Wave cinema—was taken from the Continent.

Masud, I imagined, must be a champion of these thoughtful alternatives to the commercial formulae, if only for the relief they afforded after a day of gaudy pantomimes. I was wrong. He had once been an admirer of the New Wave, he explained to me. But all too often, its products proved to be pessimistic, self-indulgent, derivative. “These films are very intense,” he continued. “But they do not take up the human thing. The new cinema has fallen into its own kind of orthodoxy. They all make films like Godard or Bresson, but they do not convey the reality, the humanity, the warmth of India. They do not bring out the feel of what is happening in India. All these directors are artists. But they are removed from the people. At least in the commercial cinema, there is a connection between the director and the audience; in the New Wave, there is no connection, no sense of the day-to-day experience of the average filmgoer. These films are forms of abstraction. In the West, it is possible to abstract oneself from one’s environment, to concoct a film-within-a-film. But in India, you cannot do that.”

Yes, said Masud, people like himself might appreciate the nuances and flourishes of the New Wave. But they were part of a tiny minority. “The commercial filmmaker exploits the people,” he said. “But he also entertains them. He knows what they want, and he gives it to them. But with the parallel-cinema makers, it is all imagination: their films are good only for critics and a few people in the cities.” In their way, he added, the serious directors were no more guided by integrity and originality than the commercial directors they mocked. “These directors are living off their earnings from the West. They train themselves in Western technology and then make films to please Western audiences.”

He closed with a powerful example. “Three days ago,” he said, “there was a New Wave film on TV about the poverty in Bihar. My two servants, who are from Bihar, walked out after thirty minutes. Why should they want to see that? They have already seen it—in real life. They came to Bombay to leave all that behind!”

I was at first somewhat skeptical of this line of reasoning. But a couple of months later I had a chance to see some of the most acclaimed of the New Wave movies when the Festival of India
came to California. Leading the pack was a movie about campus unrest called
Holi.
It was, without a doubt, the least entertaining movie I’d seen in years.

The film established its mood in the first five minutes, and there its development ended. It began with a group of nihilistic students sitting around in a dilapidated hostel, drunk and with nothing to live for. Full of angry energy, they shouted and ran around. The graffiti on the hostel walls said “When? Why? Where?” The students shouted and raced around some more. Along the corridors was painted a huge question mark. The kids screeched and shouted. On one wall was the word
kal
, meaning both “tomorrow” and “yesterday”; a student spat on it. The kids shouted and screamed. Then they sang a song. “For one thing we pray / To witness doomsday.” Later they sang another song, “No affection, no love / No virtue, no sin / No hope, no direction / No intention, no purpose / No direction, no goal.” Then they pelted a visiting speaker with rotten fruit and ran around screaming and shouting. Then they tortured a fellow pupil. Then there was a suicide. Nobody could accuse
Holi
of subtlety.

Yet few could remain unaware of
Holi’s
strident aspirations to subtlety. It was full of showy overhead shots and very long takes. It had the nice device of containing forty-five single takes and a central take that had forty-five parts. It was designed to be symmetrical—it began with the kids drinking beer and concluded with them smoking dope. It was performed by a group of nonprofessionals who improvised as they went along (not for nothing had its well-educated director dedicated his first movie to Brecht). And the whole picture was, I thought, a farrago of borrowed gestures and secondhand beliefs. It had all the blank anger of a punk movie with none of the bravado. It had all the brutality of a kung fu movie with none of the extraordinary stunts. It had much of the behaviorism of
Lord of the Flies
but none of the point. I did not mind that the movie was boring, repetitive and crude. But I did feel cheated by its unspoken assumption that it was addressing a serious problem with serious candor, bravely fighting despair with despair. More than anything, I recoiled from its air of self-importance; it seemed in more ways than one a sub-Continental kind of movie.

True to Masud’s claim, however,
Holi
seemed to find its ideal audience in America. It had been shown at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York and had been praised, with some bemusement, by a critic in
The New York Times
who mistook the whole setting for a coed high school and, failing to understand it, chivalrously tried to find something to praise in it. Many viewers in California felt they could relate to its shock-therapy anarchy, its vision of a society in ruins. They found it clever, intense, realistic. They may even have enjoyed the cafeteria song-and-dance routine that was at once a sneering parody of Hindi movies and a rip-off from
Fame
, by way of
Rock ’n’ Roll High School.
But I wished I were watching the mad singing and dancing of
Mard
instead. And had I been a regular Indian, besieged by chaos, struggling to survive, surrounded by corruption and poverty and noise, and in no position whatsoever to enjoy the allusions to Buñuel and the virtuosity of the swiveling camera, I would have bitterly, desperately wished that I were seeing
Mard. Mard
at least had a happy ending.

TEN DAYS AFTER
my arrival in Bombay, my schedule called for me to go to Kathmandu for ten days. When I arrived back, a young cousin of mine picked me up at the airport. The relative who had been in such agonized pain, he said, had died. And two days later, the man’s healthy old father, shaken by the tragedy, had followed him to the grave.

W
ELCOME, MY
friend! Welcome to Bangkok!” cried the small man in sunglasses hurrying toward me, hand outstretched and smile well-rehearsed. Outside the dumpy single block of Don Muang Airport, the tropical dusk was thick with sultriness. On every side, lank-haired, open-shirted cabbies were whispering solicitations. Smooth-skinned soldiers were fingering $100 bills. Girls in loose shirts slouched past, insouciance in their smiling eyes.

“Have a good time in Thailand!” offered the signs inside the terminal. “Have a good time in Thailand!” said the boards on the back of the baggage carts. “Bank of Love” read the sign on the back of a minibus.

“You wait for official government bus into city?” my new friend demanded.

I nodded.

“Very good!” He slapped an arm around me, half comrade and half conspirator. “I am official government guide.” By way of proof, he pointed to the official government badge he wore on
his heart. “Johnny,” he explained, then whipped out an official government form.

“Okay,” he began, frowning over his form. “Your name? Your country? Where you stay? Business”—he gave a quick leer—“or pleasure?” Every answer Johnny repeated to himself, syllable by syllable, then painstakingly copied down on his form. For that, I was most grateful. Clearly, Johnny was completing some neglected formality, or taking down some information required by the tourist police, or, at the very least, giving me the receipt I would need when I boarded the bus. Clearly, he was trying to save me, or rescue me from, trouble.

Sure enough, as soon as his interrogation was concluded, Johnny ripped out his chit, handed me a receipt and grinned expectantly. “Ten dollars!” I smiled back. I had, I explained, paid for my bus ticket already.

Johnny looked decidedly unnerved. I had not, he suggested, paid for the official government service already. Then, with the weariness of a much-tried bureaucrat, he opened the thick black folder he was carrying and began flipping through its pages. Finally, he stopped at a black-and-white passport photo of a sloe-eyed nymphet. “Miss Joy,” he explained. “Tonight. Three hours. Miss Joy take you everywhere in Bangkok. Car included.” I looked a little dubious. “Official government service,” he continued. “Very good service. No problem, my friend.”

This was indeed a thoughtful offer, I said, but perhaps a guidebook might serve my needs as well.

“Miss Joy Number One girl,” Johnny shot back, with more than a hint of tartness. Of that, I hastily assured him, I had no doubt, but still I felt obliged to decline. “I think, perhaps, tonight, I might, actually, want to rest.”

“No problem, my friend,” the incorrigible smiled back. “Miss Joy come to you hotel. Eight o’clock? Eight-thirty? Nine o’clock?”

“That’s very kind. But, well, I think, perhaps, you see, I might, very possibly, have to do some work tonight.”