India is now a bankable brand taking the world by force, writes Susan
The jewel in the crown | The Australian
The jewel in the crown
Kurosawa | August 29, 2009
Article from: The Australian
MOVE over, Cool Britannia and Luxe Dubai. The pop-culture pundits say India's time has come, that this sprawling subcontinental democracy, with its population power and exotic culture, is so hot it is emerging as the reigning It nation.
That's It as in Style Central, and not the more obvious IT, although India leads the world in exports of information technology services, too.
India as a creative arts, fashion, film and technology force has not arrived fully formed. But since its economic reforms and liberalisation of trade and investment in the early 1990s, the country has put out the welcome mat and accommodated the resulting rush.
These days, megastars such as cricket hero Sachin Tendulkar beam from India's billboards, extolling 21st-century standard accessories such as Visa credit cards. But a country once viewed as full of beggars and mayhem is still cut from its own colourful cloth. India's inherent exoticism, its English-speaking accessibility and sheer vibrancy have made it to many of us the most engaging destination.
Australian journalist Geoff Hiscock's two books -- India's Global Wealth Club and India's Store Wars (John Wiley and Sons, 2007 and 2008 respectively) -- focus on this newly affluent nation. Hiscock links India's soft power achievements in film, fashion and fiction to economic good fortune.
"Before (Aravind Adiga's) Man Booker Prize-winning white tigers and (Danny Boyle's) Oscar-winning slumdog millionaires took the world by storm, a decade of business expansion helped 1.2billion people grow in confidence," he says. "India's seven secrets of success are its market size, its science, its diaspora, its cultural history, its English literacy, its strategic weight and its switch to a globalisation mindset."
Hiscock reckons an early catalyst was Bill Clinton "charming his way across India in April 2000, imparting a can-do spirit". He was the first US president to visit in 22 years.
Tourism can thank Clinton, too. During that landmark visit he set up his mobile White House command centre at Rajvilas, a five-star retreat built by the Oberoi group in the reimagined style of a Rajput fort in the northwestern state of Rajasthan. Americans watched in fascination as images of a contented Clinton were beamed back; India didn't look like such a dump and tourism from the North American market took off.
India used to be the destination of choice for budget travellers but stories of Delhi belly, unreliable infrastructure and confronting images of poverty kept many potential visitors away. The delayed passengers hall at Kolkata's splendidly named Dum Dum airport, for instance, used to be the size of a football field; I swear some of the defeated travellers were covered in cobwebs. Pre-deregulation, the government-owned domestic carrier Indian Airlines had a monopoly and unexplained cancellations and indifferent service was the norm. Now there are privately owned airlines such as national cricket sponsor Air Sahara that offer new aircraft, on-time delivery of passengers and abundant low-cost deals.
The accommodation options, too, are wide and frequently five-star, from cruises aboard converted rice-boats in the southwestern state of Kerala to palatial suites with pleasure swings and mirrored mosaics in restored maharajas' palaces. In 2007, a reader poll of the top 100 hotels in the world by US magazine Travel+Leisure placed Udaivilas, a contemporary lakeside palace-hotel in Udaipur, Rajasthan, as the planet's best. Such gilt-edged publicity has proved to be priceless in reassuring sceptical tourists.
Last month another Travel+Leisure poll placed Udaipur as the world's No.1 city, well in front of survey stalwarts such as New York, Rome andSydney.
India's middle class is a well-educated, status-conscious group conservatively estimated by the US-based McKinsey Global Institute last year at 50million and projected to swell to 583 million by 2025. There is no labour shortage, no lack of customers here.
As commentator Mira Kamdar writes in Planet India (2007) -- a book in which she boldly contends that India's dynamic free-market economy is transforming the world -- "even if China forever eclipses India in sheer economic might ... it will never be able to match India's immense advantage as an (English-speaking) democracy". Kamdar's research for Planet India reveals there will be 550 million teenagers in India by 2015. "India is the world's youngest country; 50 per cent of India's people are under the age of 25," she claims.
Even in this doom-laden year, its economy, the world's second fastest developing, after China's, is expected to grow. "With a little bit of effort, a (gross domestic product) growth rate of about 8 to 9 per cent (is possible) ... notwithstanding the difficulties on the international front," Prime Minister Manmohan Singh predicted last month.
It has been a remarkable journey. In mid-1991, India's foreign currency assets had sunk to a dismal low and inflation reached a dizzy high; the country was in economic meltdown. The newly elected Congress party government of Narasimha Rao needed a bright new strategy. With circular synergy, the then finance minister who masterminded what became known as the new economic policy was Singh.
His policy of deregulation stabilised the economy, provided increased competition and dazzled consumers with a broad array of goods and services at lower prices. The government opened the market to multinationals and, as one example, Pepsi Cola was the first soft-drink conglomerate to race in. Suddenly global brands were shoving aside local players of the ilk of Limca lemonade and the quirkily named Thums Up cola.
So many South Korean car companies set up factories around Chennai that the Tamil Nadu state capital became known as Tamil Motown. No country had undergone such a broad transformation so rapidly. The hippie-era tourists who loved India for its spirituality and perceived wisdom, its rather quaint backwardness, began to bemoan the stirrings of the global-village homogenisation that would sweep the land. They mourned the rise of McDonald's and the loss of carefree only-in-India advertising, such as the Panama cigarettes campaign that promised "nothing comes between you and the taste ... not even a filter".
The importance of Arundhati Roy's 1996 Man Booker Prize-winning novel The God of Small Things in repositioning India also should not be underestimated. Headlines recording its success, such as "The empire strikes back" and "Raj reversal", carried more weight than their quick-grab cleverness suggests. Roy's win wasn't the first of note among Indian-born writers but it really cut through to the West, marking a coming of age of Indian literature in English amid the country's spectacular economic growth.
"The 1980s and 90s have been the most productive and eventful decades ... in terms of (Indian literature's) abundance, variety and richness," Shyam Asnani writes in Caring Cultures, Sharing Imaginations: Australia and India, edited by Anuraag Sharma and Pradeep Trikha (2006). He credits Salman Rushdie's 1982 Booker for Midnight's Children as presaging the "phenomenal success" of new Indian literature and acknowledges the impetus of the record advance paid in 1993 to Vikram Seth for his whopping, 1350-page A Suitable Boy, set in 50s India. Seth received $US1.1 million from Indian, British and American publishers; the book subsequently sold 250,000 copies in hardcover and more than one million in paperback. (Seth is writing a long-anticipated sequel with a probable release date of 2013.)
"The Indian mind is on a rampage," Asnani contends, adding that what is most significant among recent novels is "the bewildering variety of thematic concerns ... that enthral the global audience". He cites recurring topics such as "Raj nostalgia" and "diasporic experience" as well as "fabular imagination".
In the past the colonial angle was strong, exemplified by Booker winners Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) and Staying On by Paul Scott (1977); in the subsequent 1983 movie based on the former, it was all white linen and dalliances with rajas, and Western cinema audiences lapped it up.
Scott's panoramic series based on the last gasp of empire, The Raj Quartet, was to captivate television audiences in the mid-1980s as The Jewel in the Crown, a 14-part miniseries, named for the quartet's first book, published in 1966. Mutinies and rebellions aside, viewers across the world were transported to an India of peacocks and palaces, glittering jewels and swishing saris. It was to make a star of Pakistani-born British actor Art Malik, who has since clocked up hundreds of small-screen hours in British productions and guest-starred in the spoof interview show The Kumars at No.42 with Sanjeev Bhaskar, whose series Mumbai Calling, recently shown here on ABC television, sends up India's call-centre and outsourcing phenomenon.
The juggernaut that is Bollywood, that wonderfully apt conflation of Bombay and Hollywood, shows no signs of slowing. With an estimated worth of $US15 billion last year (and growing), this is the world's biggest film industry, churning out an assembly line of formulaic romances and chorus-line extravaganzas known as masala movies. Like the masala spice mixture, they have a little bit of everything: action, comedy, romance.
Indian leading man Akshay Kumar was recently quoted in British newspaper The Guardian as saying Indian films are "one tone higher" in terms of emotions. "If someone is crying, they are a little more hysterical; if someone is angry, they shout a little louder; and if someone is happy, they smile a little wider. That's the difference between Bollywood and Hollywood."
There is a small movement in Bollywood to make more serious movies with themes that better reflect contemporary India's widening economic gulf between rich and poor. But only a few titles have broken through, notably Deepa Mehta's Water (2005) and Ashvin Kumar's Oscar-nominated short film Little Terrorist (2004). In a country where government estimates put 54 per cent of the population (some social commentators claim the figure is closer to 80 per cent) as living below the poverty line, audiences overwhelmingly want escapist pulp and their money's worth; Bollywood movies are typically 2 1/2 hours long.
Bollywood's stars are so wealthy, they even own sports teams. The seemingly unassailable demigod of the silver screen, Shah Rukh Khan, owns the Kolkata Knight Riders team in the Indian Premier League Twenty20 cricket series. Bollywood actress Preity Zinta owns the IPL's Kings XI Punjab, one of whose members is Australian fast bowler Brett Lee, no stranger to Indian cinema. Lee recorded a duet album with Bollywood diva Asha Bhosle in 2007 and will soon make his acting debut in the Indian-made Victory movie with fellow Australian cricketers Mike Hussey, Brad Hogg and Simon Katich.
Other foreign celebrities who've recently hit Bollywood to pad their pockets include Will Smith and Kylie Minogue. Tania Zaetta has been a hit in Bollywood but she wasn't the first Australian to appear in an Indian film. In the 30s and 40s, Mary Evans, a circus performer from Perth, rose to fame in Bombay and beyond as the kohl-eyed Fearless Nadia. Sylvester Stallone and Denise Richards have small roles in an upcoming Bollywood-funded action flick shot in California. "The day India unseats America as the media and entertainment superpower may be coming sooner than we think," says Kamdar.
The latest trend is the Bollywood crossover movie. Indian (which can mean British-Indian or indeed any strain of the diaspora) producers and directors are harnessing the magic of the subcontinent into palatable packages for Western audiences. Mira Nair's New Delhi-set Monsoon Wedding (2001) was an early breakthrough example, and others such as Gurinder Chadha's Bride & Prejudice (2004), set in the Sikh city of Amritsar, have merged Bollywood tinsel and glamour with universal plots. Western audiences have related to echoes of the big musicals of the 30s and 40s in many such hybrid movies and been swept away.
Emerging, too, are films carved from bestseller novels by non-resident Indians (always NRIs in the slightly sneering shorthand of those members of the middle class who have stayed put) based on the emigrant experience, such as Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's Mistress of Spices (2005) and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (2006). These are not niche or art-house films but mainstream releases with marquee-value US stars: Dylan McDermott stars in the former alongside 1994 Miss World and Bollywood's green-eyed It girl Aishwarya Rai.
But all else pales beside this year's eight-Oscar haul of Slumdog Millionaire, based on the well-regarded novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup, an Indian diplomat. Putting aside some critics' reservations about its glorification of the poor, the movie has catapulted India centre-stage and proved its gritty urban landscapes can work as cinematic backdrops just as well as fairytale palaces and crenellated desert forts.
And then there is Bollywood dancing. This sensuous style, with its fast-beat musical accompaniment, is often promoted as a fitness regime and classes are on the rise, from Melbourne to Montreal; participants get a quick cultural fix as well as a workout. In Australia, the choice includes studios such as Mango Dance and Bollygrooves. With a diaspora estimated at 25million, there is a ready-made market for almost any pop-culture export from India and even non-Indian dance studios are incorporating Bollywood moves.
With hot dancing comes cool clothing. Loose Indian garments were popular among hippies. Who can forget the Beatles, togged up with Nehru collars, tunics and garlands of marigolds, hanging out at the holy Ganges-side town of Rishikesh with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1968? London socialite Jemima Goldsmith hurtled the salwar kameez into the fashion world's fickle glare when she wed Pakistani cricketer turned politician Imran Khan in 1995.
Then her friend Diana, princess of Wales, also donned the loose-fitting trouser suit and international runways swished with similarly floaty silken outfits. "One can walk in it, one can bicycle in it, one can even run a 100m race in it," boasts one Indian fashion house that fills one-size-fits-all salwar kameez orders from foreign customers. But for most of us with an interest in India, it's the continuing feed of good literature that sustains our appetite. Dynasties are starting to emerge, such as mother and daughter Anita and Kiran Desai, the latter scoring the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss. The emigrant experience is the most common thread and the best examples -- US-based Lahiri's Pulitzer prize-winning Interpreter of Maladies (2000) and, from Canada, Anita Rau Badami's Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006) -- range beyond the specifics of Indians abroad to encompass the sense of dislocation common to all exiled races. In doing so they appeal to a broad audience, especially female emigrant readers who relate to the tales of new brides from old lands, homesick women perpetually caught in an emotional version of the splits.
There is almost a factory line of Bollywood proportions packaging such takeaway bride literature, including some with names as blunt as Anne Cherian's A Good Indian Wife (2009). Well-received collections, such as Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate (2003), edited by Amitava Kumar, strive to analyse the past two decades of exile literature, with offerings from writers as stellar as Hanif Kureishi and Rohinton Mistry. Publishing has not seen such a seemingly unstoppable genre since the spate of Cultural Revolution survivor literature from China in the 80s and 90s.
Indian tourism is on a roll, too, in advance of the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Delhi. As the world hospitality industry declines, Amanresorts has just opened a property in New Delhi with private pools and exclusive falderals worthy of the most moneyed of maharajas. In a move to snare some of the lucrative African safari business, the Taj Hotels group has built premium lodges covering four tiger reserves across Madhya Pradesh, a state the size of Italy with terrain that inspired Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book. The facilities here are at least as luxurious as those enjoyed by the pooh-bahs of the Raj.
Nostalgia also sells holidays and there is what amounts to a Raj relic industry, with India-based companies such as Neemrana Hotels restoring bungalows, tea planters' cottages and hill forts to re-create a sense of colonial heyday. Somewhere just offstage one can almost imagine an imperious memsahib barking orders at the staff.
With entrepreneurial zeal far outweighing navel-gazing or raking the cruel coals of its subjugated past, the amazing life force that is Mother India just keeps redefining itself, doing whatever is takes.
Susan Kurosawa is the author of Coronation Talkies, a novel set in 1930s India that has recently been optioned as a film.
