It's a complaint I've seen frequently made in the context of African music or literature: simply, that to ascribe a single cultural identity to an entire continent that is the size of Africa is cultural blinkered at best, and outright racist at it's worst.
My ongoing education in and enjoyment of Hindi cinema (or Bollywood, as it is now popularly known) is teaching me something very similar about India. India at least, is a single nation, unless you want to include Pakistan and Bangladesh as part of the 'single nation' which was broken at the original moment of Independence/Partition in 1947 (but that is to be far more politically contentious than I either wish, or even feel qualified to be here). Yet, it's also a collection of federal states, all with their particular individual cultures and languages, a palimpsest of the many different cultures and rulers that have existed in the subcontinent. It's sobering to think that the only language which is spoken across the entire subcontinent is English. Indeed - and enough people have told me this, so I take it to be true - despite efforts on behalf of Hindi, it's still not really spoken in the South of the Subcontinent, seen as a cultural imposition in a way that English is not (and English is after all the international language of the world - business, academia, etc.).
It may only be an inadvertent consequence of the particular writers I've read, but I realised a while ago that, aside from R.K. Narayan, all of the Indian writing I've read comes either from the North, or else from Bombay. Is this just a consequence of the particular books which are available to me, especially in Britain? I'm sure I'm not the first to say this, but one of the unfortunate consequences of the rise of Indian writing in English over the last few decades is that it has also flattened our view of the subcontinent. Arguably Rushdie's real lasting influence after his Booker win with Midnight's Children was not his style of magic realism, but rather his concern with Indian history and politics, and the sense that the Indian nation could be encapsulated entire in Very Big Books.
Bollywood of course, is only one particular film industry in India. As an arthouse film enthusiast, the first Indian filmmaker I encountered was naturally Satyajit Ray. When I first saw The Chess Players and Pather Panchali as an undergraduate, as far as I was concerned I was watching 'Indian' cinema. I knew that his work was different from Indian popular cinema (if I even had much of an idea of what that is at that point), but that was only because all arthouse cinema is culturally positioned adjacent to more popular work. And from what I understand, Ray was also a filmmaker who was concerned to position himself as very different from the majority of cinema produced in India (whether this was because he knew that he had a substantial audience abroad, or for reasons of cultural snobbery, I don't rightly know; likely it was some combination of the two). Now of course, I would contextualise his work as part of Bengali cinema, even though I've still seen very few Bengali films.
Right, this is a much longer preamble that what I intended to write, when all I really wanted to do was post a couple of videos! Like humour, cultural and regional stereotypes are one of the hardest things to translate. So I'm very lucky to have the Punjabi girl I'm married to sitting next to me when I watch some of these films, as she can explain cultural nuances and stereotypes when Bollywood uses them. And the more I see, the more I'm starting to recognise. Something I have noticed is the presence of Punjab. Part of this is probably down to the presence of so many Punjabis in the industry both in front of and behind the camera. Or so I am told this is the case. The presence of song and dance numbers in Bollywood films - one of the main things which signals 'Bollywood' to foreigners like me - may even be down to the use of musical numbers in traditional Punjabi theatre. When sound arrived in Hindi cinema, they were the natural people to employ in the industry, since they already had a strong tradition of acting, and so the theatrical traditions were also imported into the new sound cinema (no doubt the actual history is a lot more complicated than this). Of course, we used to have musicals in English language cinema too, and that was probably a similar theatrical influence from Broadway to Hollywood. It just wasn't part of the whole of the English language theatrical tradition (which means we have some missed opportunities; just imagine Jimmy Cagney's gangster films with added musical numbers - White Heat with songs! - you can't tell me it wouldn't have been awesome!).
One of the commentators on the second video below complains about all the Punjabi references in contemporary Hindi cinema, which potentially fails or slights audiences from other backgrounds that Hindi cinema should(?) also be serving. It doesn't strike me as an entirely unreasonable complaint, although it feeds into the idea that Hindi cinema is the Indian 'national' cinema, responsible for representing the entire nation in a way that other Indian regional cinemas are not expected to do. But on the other hand, I'm married to a Punjabi girl, so for me personally, I'm happy to go along with songs which celebrate Punjabi wedding songs:
Or which appears to amount to little more than 'Being Punjabi is awesome!':
Shot in a single take!
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