Of Chai and Samosas: Indian cinema and exhibition in the U.S.

Distribution and exhibition of Indian films (mostly Hindi language Bollywood films) in North America have been un-organized sectors for nearly five decades now. In cities/regions with a large concentration of South Asians - New York/NJ, California, Toronto, and so on - a desi family would often run a weekend business that involved screening films at university halls or by renting a screen (for one weekend) at a local cinema theatre. While things have changed in larger cities - from dedicated screens to entire multiplexes (Naz8 in California, for e.g.) for Indian films - there has been no concerted effort to organize distribution and exhibition across the continent.

However, given the ways in which the “NRI market” has been targeted in increasingly sophisticated ways by the film industry in Mumbai, perhaps it is not a surprise that a Bollywood company has decided to launch a major exhibition venture. According to a story in India West, Adlabs is in the process of acquiring close to 200 cinemas in cities across the U.S. (link):

The new theater chain will likely be branded as Big Cinemas and will program a mix of Hindi, South Indian, and first-run and second-run Hollywood movies.

It has already begun a quiet rollout: the company’s first West Coast property to open is the Norwalk 8 Theaters in Southern California, which will screen the subtitled Hindi thriller “Tashan” and the unsubtitled Tamil romance “Santhosh Subramaniam” starting April 25, along with a mix of second-run features such as “Fool’s Gold” and “The Spiderwick Chronicles.”

If Adlabs does succeed in establishing a chain of theatres across the U.S., I have no doubt it will change the way Bollywood imagines and mobilizes an “overseas market.” In addition to bringing about a shift in distribution and marketing practices, this will also allow filmmakers to track revenues in a more organized and reliable fashion.

On being desi in post 9/11 America

After a session on Goodness Gracious Me, I usually get students to watch Hanif Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic in an attempt to talk about cultural citizenship and the ways in which religion has become an increasingly important fault line. And until now, I’ve never found a film like My Son the Fanatic that might help us talk through these issues in the context of South Asian-Americans. Mississippi Masala only gets us so far. Last night, I learned about “Punching at the Sun,” a film that takes on the question of what race, nationalism, and citizenship mean for South Asian muslim youth in post-9/11 Queens, NY. Here’s the trailer, and you can watch the entire film on Jaman:

Links to reviews and interviews with the filmmaker Tanuj Chopra here.

Tracking Bhangra: DJ Rekha on NPR

On NPR’s weekend edition, a feature on DJ Rekha - listen here. The site has links to earlier features on Rekha, and a nice 6-minute piece from June 2000 on the rise of bhangra in the U.S. club scene (link).

Tamil cinema and the NRI Question

I recently watched Sivaji-The Boss and it made me wonder why Tamil cinema (and other “regional” cinemas) doesn’t seem burdened with the NRI problem, of re-positioning the NRI within the national family. As far as I know, there hasn’t been a Tamil film along the lines of a DDLJ or a K3G, blockbuster Bollywood films that reclaimed and redefined the NRI as one of our own. I find this intriguing, especially given how strongly the Indian diaspora of late-modern capital (90s, high-tech migration) has been defined by cities like Chennai, Bangalore, and Hyderabad.

In Sivaji, Rajni plays an NRI who returns to Chennai with the lofty aim of serving the poor by providing them access to free education, healthcare, and so on (synopsis here). It is striking that there isn’t a single instance in the film when Rajni’s outsider-status is questioned - in contrast to NRI-focused Bollywood films (Swades is the obvious parallel here), here Rajni’s outsider-status is located within a corrupt political landscape and he is like any other person (only richer) in a city like Chennai who cannot get anything done without the help of powerful politicians and wheeler-dealers. There is no hand-wringing about who Rajni is - he is a Tamilian, and that’s all there is to it.

The easy way out, of course, is to fall back on the national-regional hierarchy that has been in place for over 7 decades now (since the advent of sound in cinema) and suggest that “regional” cinema’s concerns are “regional” and not (trans)national. But would it not be more productive to conceptualize Tamil cinema as having always had a trans-national dimension in the sense that it interrupts the narration of the nation by Bombay cinema? This is the argument that Vijay Devdas makes in a piece on “Rethinking Transnational Cinema: The case of Tamil Cinema” (link). Devdas surveys Tamil cinema from the period after independence to the late 1970s to argue that -

“…over time, there has been a shift within Tamil Cinema from a pan-Indian construction of the nation, that was part of the anti-colonial cinema of British India, to the call for communally centred, closed, ethno-nation, premised on a discourse of Tamil cultural nationalism.”

It is perhaps because of the strength of this discourse of Tamil cultural nationalism that Tamil cinema feels no need to re-territorialize Tamil NRIs.

What Brown Can(not) Do For You

A week from now, I will be on my way to Boston to participate in a workshop at M.I.T where a group of academics will talk about Unboxing TV. Following the model established by Flow, this workshop is organized as a series of roundtable discussions with each participant outlining a provocation instead of reading a paper for 20-25 minutes. Take a look at the program and the provocations here.

I decided to take this opportunity to think through the MTV-Desi experiment, and use discussions surrounding MTV-Desi to think about the relationship between the South Asian diaspora and TV. Over the next week, I will be working through answers to the questions I raise and will have more to say. For now, here’s what I wrote:

In July 2005, MTV Networks announced the launch of MTV-Desi, a niche channel for South Asian American youth. Launched with great fanfare and made available on Direct TV, MTV-Desi featured Bollywood sequences and Indi-pop (sourced from MTV India), diasporic artists in North America and the U.K., and shows about desi life in the U.S. Recognizing the transcultural nature of South Asian American youth culture, executives and producers at MTV-Desi worked hard to define MTV-Desi as a unique site of cultural production that neither mainstream American television nor Indian satellite TV channels could match.

Eighteen months later, MTV Networks pulled the plug on MTV-Desi, stating that the distribution model failed to draw in South Asian Americans. As one prominent South Asian journalist commented, “we published next to nothing on the channel, because I couldn’t find anyone who watched the satellite channel: no college students, no twenty-somethings with spare change. And it wasn’t just me. All the tastemakers I interviewed - DJs, other music types - said they didn’t know any MTV Desi subscribers either.”

While pricing and poor marketing were cited as the major reasons for failure, it is worth noting that MTV-Desi’s business and content-production strategies were shaped not only by the institutional politics of the U.S. television industry but also by the operations of satellite television channels such as ZEE, STAR, and Sony Entertainment that cater to South Asian audiences worldwide. MTV-Desi executives were also attuned to reports emphasizing that South Asians are now among the fastest growing minorities in the U.S. and, more importantly, as a niche demographic with tremendous purchasing power. Thus, at one level, it appears as if executives at MTV-Desi did nothing wrong in terms of identifying an audience community. So what, besides the premium distribution model, went wrong?

I wish to argue that the MTV-Desi experiment constitutes an important moment in the history of diasporic media production, and that a critical post-mortem will allow us to grapple with challenges faced by media producers and cultural critics in imagining and mobilizing a diasporic audience community. Outlining the changing dynamics of migration between South Asia and the U.S., and competing definitions of desi identity and being brown in the U.S., I will tackle these questions during our roundtable discussion:

- In what ways does the institutional framework of the television industry in the U.S. limit the possibility of imagining a “post-national” audience community?

- If Bombay, as a film and television capital, is dominating and defining the production and flow of South Asian content, what possibilities remain for diasporic television production?

- Does “diaspora,” as a socio-cultural and political critique of the nation-as-community, need TV?

Bollywood and Dollar-Pound Markets

A feature in Rediff outlines some key reasons why the dollar-and-pound overseas territories matter for producers and filmmakers in Bollywood today (link). Even modest 3-4 week runs in cities like New York, L.A., London, and Toronto make a significant difference and currency rates aside, here is another important factor:

The importance of the $40 million overseas market is understood better when the returns to the producers are factored in. In India, because of the exorbitant entertainment tax, a producer gets just about 35 percent of the box-office gross. But from a film’s gross abroad, a producer can net about 55 percent.

The feature also points out that Sony’s first Bollywood venture - Saawariya - will be closely watched to see if a better exhibition strategy makes a dent in digital piracy.

The market could also benefit if Bollywood films are released in more upscale theatres. In recent years, a few distributors like Yash Raj have shown their films in multiplexes that also screen mainstream movies. The situation could alter dramatically when Sony releases its first Hindi language film, Saawariya, in over 80 theatres across the country in November. Most Hindi films are released in about 60 theatres in North America.

And the most interesting part of this feature revolves around the problem of defining the market/audience and tracking sales (ticket sales, revenues, etc.). We know that this remains difficult to do within India - sales figures are fuzzy because under-reporting continues to be a problem and while multiplex pricing seems fairly standard across the country, ticket prices in single screen cinema halls vary a lot (even within the same city). And as Tejaswini Ganti documents, knowledge regarding territories and audiences is generated in and through well-established social networks among directors, producers, distributors and exhibitors. I’m struck by how this model of information-flow is, at least partially, defining Bollywood’s imagination of the overseas territories as well -

The calls and e-mail messages start flowing early in Toronto one Sunday evening, and the producers of new big budget films won’t have an idea if their films are on their way to being a hit or an also-ran film or a flop till they have pored over the weekend figures from New York, London, Dubai and in recent weeks, Australia.

Who are these people making calls and sending emails? Are they established exhibitors like Shiraz Jivani (of Naz 8 cinema in California)? What kind of work do U.S./U.K.-based distribution offices of key players like Yashraj Films perform? Do film journalists based in these dollar-pound countries track sales/revenues as a matter of routine? How does this information flow back to “trade-analysts” like Taran Adarsh in Bombay? I think it’ll be fun to come up with a map of this social/information network. Stay tuned.

“My film industry is bigger than your film industry”

Couldn’t resist posting the Goodness Gracious Me bhangramuffin’s (sanjeev bhaskar) take on Bollywood -

We hear a lot of Westerners dissing these movies saying that they is not realistic, but we say: KISS MY CHUDDIES! They is not supposed to be realistic. The question shouldn’t be: “Why aren’t those films more like the real world?” but: “Why ain’t the real world more like these films?” Why can’t we do triple back somersaults when fighting 20 thugs, while only being armed with a spoon? Why can’t we burst into song when we is on the bus? Let’s face it, what world would you rather live in, innit? I blame Western society, man…Bollywood makes more movies than anywhere else, like in the galaxy man. So next time you go dissing my posse, just remember - my film industry is bigger than your film industry…innit!

Eros expansion: from “regional” to translocal?

Over the past decade, London-based Eros Entertainment has emerged as the leading content provider across multiple platforms (on-demand, DVD, and online) for the U.K. and North American markets. According to a press release (link), sales of Bollywood films in the U.S. now represents a $1.5 billion yearly market that is expected to grow by 16% annually over the next five years – bringing U.S. sales to over $3 billion.

A few months back, Eros International formed a joint venture with Ayngaran International, arguably the only legit distributor of Tamil language films in overseas markets. And most recently, Eros’s new media division has signed content licensing deals with media corporations in South-east Asia including SingNet (Singapore), Mauritius Telecom, and Radio Television Malaysia (RTM).

Press reports on this new deal in South-east Asia only mention Bollywood films, but I wonder if Eros Entertainment will also take advantage of their stake in Ayngaran to fortify the market for Tamil cinema in places like Singapore and Malaysia. With the exception of big-budget ventures like Sivaji-The Boss (Anygaran tied up with Eros for this film), we are yet to see filmmakers in Chennai think creatively about the overseas market. Hopefully Eros’ expansion(s) will spur the “regional” industries to imagine their audiences in more translocal ways.

Teaching hybridity? Try “an arranged shag”!

I was a little worried if students in my class would get Goodness Gracious Me - many skits in the show do draw, after all, on very specific aspects of everyday Brit life (from the mid-late 1990s, no less). But I shouldn’t have worried at all - the episode I screened opened with this hilarious skit about an “arranged shag” and in less than a minute, everyone was hooked! Makes it easy to then talk about diaspora, identity, hyrbridity, and so on.

Becoming Indian-American: a historical marker

I came across this wonderful “historical marker” while driving around in the University Circle neighborhood of Cleveland, and it got me thinking about the critical role of Indian Students Associations in shaping ideas of being and becoming Indian-American (especially during the early phase of migration - late 1960s-1970s). There have been a number of academic articles and books that map different realms of the Indian-American experience, but there isn’t a good ethnographic-historical account of “Indian” student associations.

And now I’m also curious about what “LOTUS, the first Asian Indian community newspaper,” can add to our understanding of media and diasporic identity during the late 1960s. Until I came across this historical marker, I believed that the story of print culture in the Indian-American diaspora began with India Abroad, a newspaper started by Gopal Raju in 1970 (in New York city).