ASIAN POP Bollywood Berkeley is not your parents' Bharatanatyam

ASIAN POP Bollywood Berkeley is not your parents' Bharatanatyam

by Sandip Roy, special to SF Gate

Friday, February 4, 2005

 
The UC Irvine dance team competes at the Hindi Film Dance... The UC Berkeley Raas team does an exhibition act at the H... Onstage at the Palace of Fine Arts, competing teams wait ...

This is not your run-of-the-mill boy-meets-girl story. It's boy meets girl to the beat of half a dozen songs plus 16 dancing friends, multiplied by 1,000 cheering fans. The fourth annual Hindi Film Dance Competition comes to San Francisco this Saturday, riding a wave of global popularity for the world's biggest film industry.

"When we started Bollywood dance classes in 2003, we never imagined that it would become one of our most popular offerings," says Sunita Prabhu, program manager at the India Community Center (ICC) in Milpitas (there's also a facility in Sunnyvale), which offers classes on everything from Urdu to table tennis.

Now, Indian parents who once dragged their grumbling kids to Hindi lessons and Bharatanatyam classical-dance classes are spending their Saturday mornings watching their children, some as young as five, willingly learn Bollywood-style hip swivels. "It gives them something to show off at a party," says one mother with a laugh. "And it's exercise."

At UC Berkeley, dozens of students showed up for the Hindi Film Dance Team tryouts last year. The troupe, consisting of nine men and nine women, has been practicing until midnight, choosing hit songs, putting glitter on their costumes and choreographing complex dance numbers. "The energy is contagious," says team coordinator Anita Bhat, a 21-year-old senior in business and political economics. "We once stayed up till 2 am making our props -- putting together a tree."

The quintessential Bollywood dance number, you see, has to have a tree for the lovers to run around as they lip synch love songs with at least 50 backup dancers performing moonwalk-meets-classical-kathak stunts in acrobatic, bosom-heaving unison. A fountain (or five) is also good for the obligatory wet-sari sequence, and four changes of costumes -- one for each stanza, including a chiffon sari with a backless blouse for a scene set in freezing Himalayan snow -- is de rigueur.

In some ways, Bollywood has hardly changed in 50 years. The winning formula is still three and a half hours of family misunderstandings, mustachioed villains, star-crossed romance, dishum dishum action, comic sidekicks, car chases and a cabaret number. Songs can still make or break a movie: many films sell as much on the reputation of choreographers such as Farah Khan and composers like A. R. Rahman as that of their actual stars.

But in other ways, it's no longer the Bollywood of my youth.

Growing up in Calcutta, I rarely watched Hindi films. Going to the movies usually meant viewing English-language evergreens like "Born Free" and "Willie Wonka," or hoary literary classics with dialogue in my native Bengali. Bollywood was a risqué world with money but little class where the vamps flashed thigh and cleavage and the heroes kept their shirts unbuttoned. At my school, we had regular "hair check" days, at which school staff made sure our locks were not curling over our collars like some "two-bit Bombay film star." We knew Bollywood produced more films than Hollywood, and millions of Indians queued up on opening weekend to buy tickets on the black market, but I was taught to look down my nose at the genre's kitschy excess.

Now, to my surprise, Bollywood is entering the American mainstream, thanks to movies such as Mira Nair's art-house hit "Monsoon Wedding" and the Bollywood-inspired pageantry of "Moulin Rouge." Indian beauty queen Aishwarya Rai recently appeared on "60 Minutes," and rapper Dr. Dre was slapped with a lawsuit for mixing a snatch of an old Hindi song into his single "Addictive." It's also hit academia in media-studies courses on campuses from UC Berkeley to MIT.

"India is a very PC, very cool place to be in right now," says Renda Dabit, whose event-production company, Hennagarden, helped put together a Bollywood theme party for the Academy of Friends Oscar gala in San Francisco last year. "After 9/11, the Moroccan theme parties [and] Arabian Oasis nights were not so popular anymore. But Bollywood is hot."

Much of the Bollywood surge comes from greater availability. Even 10 years ago, Bollywood's only audience in America consisted of homesick immigrants willing to suffer through streaky pirated videos. Now, Bollywood films screen regularly at multiplexes such as Fremont's Naz Theater and the IMC6, in San Jose. The latest Bollywood DVDs are available on Netflix and merit their own section at Blockbusters.

But the films are changing as well, becoming technically glossier. "They are not just for rural audiences anymore," explains Vamsee Juluri, assistant professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco. "And MTV in India has made film music cool." "Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India" (2001) nabbed an Oscar nomination, 2002's "Devdas" broke all spending records and "Kal Ho Na Ho," with its Bollywood-ized "Pretty Woman" soundtrack (sorry, Roy Orbison), was shot entirely in New York.

Slick packaging and modern story lines have garnered the genre a new generation of fans -- young Indian Americans born and raised in U.S. suburbs. "I thought Bollywood films were pretty cheesy," admits Natasha Banerjee, a biology major at UC Berkeley. Now, as vice president of the Indus Council, a student organization for Indian students at Cal, she is up to her elbows organizing the Hindi Film Dance Competition. "There are definitely many more Indian guys with Aishwarya Rai posters than five years ago," concurs Tejas Nerechania, the computer-science and political-science major who serves as president of Indus.

"It's an identity resurgence," says Juluri. "Kids are not embarrassed by it anymore, because the films have changed technically and are going after an urban youth as well as an overseas audience."

In 2001, UC Berkeley was the first school to host a dance competition. Now, the trend is spreading across the country, as teams travel everywhere from Detroit to Los Angeles to take part in contests and even spend $400-$500 each out of their own pockets for costumes and other expenses. Though Cal had long hosted competitions for Indian folk-dance styles like bhangra and ras, film dance had never been regarded as a bona fide art form. The problem is that, unlike classical and folk dances, Bollywood dance is a grab bag of styles that defies neat classification.

"It's got north Indian kathak, south Indian classical, hip-hop, disco, folk, jazz, all combined with a lot of style," says Montre Bhiwandiwala, who teaches Bollywood dancing at the India Community Center and at Naach, a Sunnyvale school focused exclusively on Hindi film dancing. Bollywood music, which is also called filmi music, has always been remarkably eclectic, borrowing freely from classical Indian ragas, Sufi love songs, Bengal's baul folk music, disco and rap but giving everything a uniquely Indian twist. The Berkeley dance team, says coordinator Anita Bhat, gets it inspiration as much from a Tamil movie as from the latest Usher video.

For team member Sheetal Kapadia, the Hindi Film Dance competition is not about copying a Bollywood film; it's really about the team telling its own Bollywood-style love story through six song segments in exactly eight minutes. This year's number, fresh from winning the gold at a national competition in Detroit, is "something we can all relate to," says Kapadia. It's the romantic tale of the most popular boy on campus, who like any Bollywood hero worth his masala is also a dancing whiz and tries to impress the new girl on the block. And though it might be compressed into eight minutes, rather than spread out over three hours, the Bollywood magic can still work in real life as well. "My roommate and his girlfriend met at the second Hindi Film Dance competition," says Indus Council President Tejas Nerechania.

But for the team members, the biggest plus is how Bollywood has brought them all together. "One family drove us down in a 15-seater van to Southern California for a competition," remembers Bhat. "Then we stayed in a motel owned by another student's family." Parents are especially surprised that the boys are doing something cultural, Bhat adds. After watching female fans swooning before male megastars like Shahrukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan, male students seem little concerned about whether dancing is for girlie-men.

Bollywood films, with their often top-heavy patriarchal family values and traditional gender roles, in which women routinely make sacrifices for their husbands, might seem a bit of a throwback for a modern Indian-American generation. "But we can make up our own stories that break that stereotype," says Bhat. "And it's great for girls to know they don't have to be nearly naked to be regarded as beautiful."

But even the traditional family values have their appeal, says USF Professor Vamsee Juluri. "Bollywood is heartfelt; it's about a representation of families and relationships you don't often get in Hollywood." Tinseltown certainly has little room for three and half glycerine-soaked hours in which a mother's noble love helps errant sons reconcile with stubborn fathers to the tune of a thousand violins. "In Hollywood, we save the world for God or from megalomaniacs," says Juluri. "In Bollywood, we are saving the world for Mom."

Even as Bollywood casts its candy-colored spell, Bhat acknowledges there is a danger it will be appropriated by the mainstream film industry for its exotic colors and sounds. "There is a fine line between exotification and appreciation," she says, pointing out that many rap songs sample snatches of Hindi lyrics without having any idea what the words really mean. But Juluri says that Bollywood has undeniably given India a good face to put forward to the rest of the world. "I am not sure we have had one as big since Mahatma Gandhi," he says.

That giddy excitement was apparent last weekend in Detroit, when the UC Berkeley team nabbed the Hype award for making the audience scream the loudest. This weekend, Bollywood's excellent adventure continues on home turf for Bhat and her teammates. "It's getting bigger every year," says event organizer Natasha Banerjee. "Some of the parents even say it's looking better than the actual Hindi films."

Bollywood Berkeley Hindi Film Dance Competition, Saturday, Feb. 5 at 7 pm, Palace of Fine Arts, 3301 Lyon St., SF, CA; $10 ($15 at door); for more information, go to www.indus.berkeley.edu, e-mail induscouncil@berkeley.edu or call (510) 541-3116.

Sandip Roy is an editor for the Pacific News Service and host of "UpFront," New California Media's radio show on KALW 91.7FM in San Francisco.


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