A century ago, Britain sent its Oxbridge finest to govern the Punjab, and they returned home with tales, trinkets and tiger-skin rugs. During the hippie era, the Beatles and other seekers went to the Subcontinent for spiritual enlightenment and came back with sitars and gurus. Today, Britain’s glitterati, glossy magazine editors and theater impresarios make the trip and have come back with “Bollywood”-inspired razzle-dazzle.
This summer, London is gripped by Bollywood fever, obsessed with the Bombay-based movie industry’s muscled heroes, spangled heroines and shoulder-shaking rhythms. Andrew Lloyd Webber, composer of “Evita,” “Cats,” and “Phantom of the Opera,” has produced “Bombay Dreams,” a Bollywood extravaganza. Oxford Street ran a monthlong salute to Bollywood, stocking maharajah-worthy jewels and recreating the Bombay home of Hindi film star Dimple Kapadia. Even the rather doughty Victoria and Albert Museum-named after a British-born empress of India-is reveling in high multicultural camp. On show currently: “Cinema India: The Art of Bollywood,” a collection of movie posters.
Unlike earlier plunderings of Eastern riches, the current interest in Indian glitter is made more complex because it’s not merely white English people obsessed with Eastern exoticism, but South Asian Britons who are helping import culture from the home country. The centerpiece of London’s Bollymania, Lloyd Webber’s “Bombay Dreams,” was a genuinely multicultural collaboration, mixing Lloyd Webber’s skills as an impresario with a book by British-Asian comedienne Meera Syal, music by the celebrated Indian composer A. R. Rahman and lyrics by British lyricist Don Black, who has written scores for the James Bond and Pink Panther movies.
Nightly in the Victoria Palace Theatre, Akaash, a young Bombay slum dweller falls for Priya, the beautiful daughter of a movie mogul. Backed up by a stagefull of Bombay types-eunuchs and movie queens, beggars and mob bosses-they sing, dance and produce the requisite happy ending. The young British-Asian cast grind their pelvises and bared midriffs with impressive dexterity. It’s certainly the first West End musical complete with a chorus of hijras-the Indian sub-caste of eunuchs who make their livings singing and dancing at weddings and funerals. In the show-stopping “Shakalaka Baby,” number, jets of water spurt scores of feet high, as spangles, bosoms and high notes shimmer. The music, by A. R. Rahman, who has sold more albums than Madonna and Britney Spears combined, makes it worth sitting through the rickety script and dull lyrics.
The show’s first night last month was a surreal affair, with such Western celebrities as Michael Caine, Bob Geldolf and Ivana Trump jostling for space with Indian movie actors and wealthy British-Asian immigrants. In honor of the event, London partygoers went native: artsy British males opted for Nehru jackets; blonde socialites sported bindis and carefully tailored Indian-inspired outfits with lashings of spangles. At the after-show party, guests ate food inspired by Bombay street vendors.
There’s something rather weird about mainstream London’s sudden discovery of Indian pop culture. In truth, Britain’s capital has been a great South Asian city for decades. British-Asians began climbing London’s socioeconomic ladder just as it was poised to become a global financial center, back in the 1980s. (Today, multiplexes show Bollywood movies alongside Cruise and Spielberg extravaganzas, and Indian movie stars regularly stage melas, or stage extravaganzas, in massive stadiums. Southall, a London suburb so Subcontinental that it’s a sort of Delhi-by-the-Thames, gets videos of the Ambitabh Bhachhan flicks within days of their Bombay releases. As the most prominent Indian shopping district in Europe, it draws South Asian brides-to-be from Germany and France.)
Lloyd Webber and London socialites needn’t have trucked all the way to a different time zone in search of Bollywood culture. It’s been in their own city for years-they just hadn’t bothered to look.
