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R ilm CIty lies inside a nature preserve, and newcomers are told not to wander off into the bushes, since leopards there have developed a taste for gaffer. And for squatters, who live in shanties along the hillsides, in hollows amid the trees. I talked my way past a guardhouse and soon came upon a Greek temple, which stood beside sets framed up to look like a Rajput palace and a Bombay high street. The studio. where the Seventies spoof was being shot resembled the fortified lair of a Bond villain. But filming had been canceled for the day. Shahrukh Khan was away hosting a game show. No one needed a gora here. Try Studio 10.
Several soundstages were grouped together in a nearby valley. Through one door I watched a man and a woman gaze passionately at each other, their profiles hard as nacre in the klieg lights. An actor I vaguely recognized tried to break through a cordon of meaty guards outside a building labeled MUNICIPAL COURT and was severely thrashed for the camera. The director demanded take after take. Behind the scene, auto-rickshaws and women with packages on their heads passed without concern. Continuity did not seem to be an issue. I trudged around a dusty hillock, under trees bearing a hand grenade-shaped fruit, on which monkeys played and parrots flitted. Two rows of buildings that looked like abandoned airplane hangars stood to my right. A family of squatters tended a campfire on one side. I spotted a young white woman in tights standing in the doorway of an orange blockhouse. She was slim and blonde and whirled what looked like twin bolas, dipping to their rhythm. Her name was Katya, and she had eyes the color of jade. "I am dancer," she said, jerking a
tail bar on the right. Beside the bar a bearded man in a black fedora sat glowering at the stage. There were people everywhere: lighting men, assistant directors, camera crew, chai men. Others loitered, just taking in the girls as they climbed onstage and shed their shirts to reveal lace-up leotards. "Music!" a choreographer yelled. A thumping, Hindified disco started to pulse. "Roll camera." A spot boy held
chy is steeped in India's colonial history. Although interracial sex and even marriage were not uncommon in the early days of British rule, such unions ended with the 1857 revolt. Thereafter, if the odd sahib could still enjoy his native concubines, Indian males were granted no reciprocal license .. White women became forbidden fruit: a symbol of the wealth, and inequity, of colonial power. The third tier among thumb toward the door.
"They don't ask me now because I have dreads." Katya was a silk-screen artist from St. Perersburg, and the blockhouse was base camp for a ten-girl dance troupe made up mostly of other Russians. All but Katya had been flown there on contract. A tall Goan, also in dreadlocks, called out, "Girls! Girls!" and the dancers drifted toward the nearest hangar. I followed, uninvited.
Inside, a tacky dance club, brilliantly lit, appeared out of the airconditioned dark. Black-red walls in Marimekko shapes, an elevated dance floor, posters for French films, a cock
up a board bearing the name Dhol.
"Action," someone shouted.
The girls went through their routine, legs flashing like sabers, rumps thrusting arrogantly; they did something pretty with their hands, then froze in place. The music stopped. "Number ten," the choreographer's voice echoed over the P A. "You were slow. Do it over." Spot boys brought the girls Bisleri water.
Russian dancers are treated relatively well in Bollywood. They rank second in a four-tier system, with white dancers from English-speaking countries in the top position. This hierar-
dancers consists of educated, bourgeois Indian girls, dancing for a lark or because they hope to break into film. The lowest in rank are the "junior artists," who do the dancing in most of India's myriad films. The first three groups are rarely .mistreated, but junior dancers work exhausting hours for a pittance. They are beaten, coerced "into sex, abused in other ways.
Take nine. Take ten. Props were broken, lights dragged around. For every change or repair, a dozen men stood ready to haul kliegs, scale staging, buff the disco floor on hands and knees, fetch chai for the director, who
sat aloof, smoking, watching a monitor. I was impressed, despite the overstaffing, by the rough efficiency of the operation. Everyone, from upper-caste Punjabis and masked [ains to the skullcapped Muslims and Dalit errandrunners, seemed dedicated to getting this fifteen-second sequence exactly right. This was old-time masala, cobbling together everything-Brooklyn nightclub, Russian dancers, Hindi pop, . Punjabi star-to craft something that
would wow them in the hills of Uttar Pradesh, in the slums of Surat, in the exile video stores of New Jersey. Standing there, I found myself longing to be part of this fantasy. I could be that sinister guy in the fedora; I could play the Ukrainian pimp, the L.A. dealer. I could be the boyfriend of Katya, say, hanging by the bar.
Finally the star sashayed onstage.
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