White actors of any gender found work scarce immediately after Partition. The taboo against filming Hindu women had withered. More to the point, perhaps, Indians were now able to focus on their own culture. In the mid-Fifties, while most filmmakers put their money into escapist fantasies, a few .directors hired Russians for films celebrating the Sovietbacked non-aligned movement. This was also the period when Hindustani cinema rediscovered the Raj. Mining the past to forge India's present identity, Indian filmmakers hired white actors to play twisted colonels, racketeers, bigoted district commissioners. (Tom Alter may be able to speak poetic Urdu and chaste Hindi, but he often has been cast in these sorts of roles: a sadistic British Army officer, an underworld cape's pilot.) By the Sixties and Seventies, white actors, when they were being cast at all, were portraying characters who seemed to represent a certain kind of low-life Other: drug-dazed hippies, heroin smugglers, hit men. In many films, Christian· (and sometimes Parsi) characters stand in for Westerners to represent the eternal alien in India who must be either integrated or expelled. On celluloid these characters are often cowards, fools, or drunkards, providing dramatic contrast or comic relief for what Tejaswini Ganti, an anthropologist who studies Bollywood culture, calls the "unmarked" persona in Hindi film: the middleclass Punjabi, the hero.
One might expect today's movies to reflect India's soaring influence in the global market by including more nuanced Western characters: the Australian entrepreneur who funds a call center in Bangalore, the bold American intelligence agent tracking radical Islamists in Kashmir. But although Westem actresses have picked up a few positive roles in recent years, such examples remain rare. When I asked Gary Richardson about the new wave of Indian directors making films with complex Western characters, he scoffed. "I'd like them to say that in the same
room with me," he said. Whites might score speaking parts here and there, Gary explained, but the roles often made you feel dirty, because you were promoting a negative stereotype-white men as brutes and buffoons. The role landed by the ew York comedian Brandon Hill, for instance, was that of an American billionaire who is duped into "buying" the Taj Mahal. And in one film whose premiere I attended, the character portrayed by Corin emec-an American actor known for such immortal works as RoboDoc, Operation Dumbo Drop, and Mansquito--travels to Gujarat to learn more about Gandhi but (like E. M. Forster's Adela Quested) suffers a breakdown when . confronted with the "real" India. He ends up smashing furniture and getting bombed on country liquor. Bollywood's· racism toward whites, Gary said, was most pronounced when it came to a white man dating an Indian woman. The grievance was personal for him, since Gary's wife is Indian; he leaned on the point repeatedly.
Later, Gary told me a director had just offered him a part in a film. "An actress comes into my hotel room," he said, describing the role. "I see her, throw a fit, call her a prostitute." This character, Gary said disgustedly, pressures the girl for sex; she rejects him in horror. I asked him if he took the part. Of course not, he declared. "I said, 'I'm not inreresred.'"
My pulse quickened,"I'm interested," I breathed. Gary lifted his eyebrows.
"Y ou don't mind being seen as a rapist? Because every time they need a white rapist, they'll call on you." I didn't mind, I told him. I jotted down the
number of the director whose part Gary had refused.
had attended so many showbiz parties that I earned a mention in "Boomtown Rap," the film-gossip section of the BombayTimes-two lines that would have cost me 50,000 rupees ($1,200) had I contracted for them. On a night when no parties were scheduled, I went to see a movie at the Regal, a beat-up Art Deco theater with a khaki-colored lobby, gloomy paneling, and a vast ocher orchestra section filled with steel seats. The film, Salaam-e-Ishq, was three hours and
thirty-six minutes long, not counting intermission; it was crammed with song-and-dance routines and featured the stars Salman Khan and John Abraham as well as hordes of gyrating women. The narrative was familiar: a married man tempted by a luscious stranger; an eloped couple whose better half has lost her memory. Balance, in the end, is restored. Lighting and camerawork were first-rate, but otherwise Salaam-e-Ishq seemed loosely put together: choppy continuity, flaccid editing. English sentences were dropped in randomly and without subtitles (just as Hindi dialogue is tossed into T amil, Bengali, and T elugu films, and vice versa). Songs bubbled up without warning. This looseness was something that I, accustomed to more tightly produced Western fare, at first found wearying. But I had become accustomed to it, even started liking it. The movie included a white South African actress who played the unlikely love interest of a taxi driver. Her character was as clueless and alien as that of most whites in Indian cinema, but the part had comic pith. I thought as I watched her: I could do something with a role like that.
There were few customers in the Regal. I sat in the seventy-rupee seats, toes practically touching the screen, surrounded by two dozen moviegoers, all male, all betweenthe ages of twelve and twenty-five. I supposed the low turnout might support what the new directors say about the decline in the cities of traditional masala and the growing influence of TV. Yet this audience seemed to make up for its size by its expressions of love for every aspect of the film. They called out to the actors, sang snatches of songs, guffawed at gags, slumped distraught in the face of tragedy. The older, wealthier crowd in the hundred-
rupee rows made less noise rJ"' but appeared no less rapt. . lhe next morning I called Anant Mahadevan, the director in need of the sexually rapacious gora, and reached him first try. Mahadevan was friendly. He asked me to send a head shot. He was shooting three films at once, and the scene he said I might work in-part of a noir-style thriller called Aggar, or If-was buried far down his agenda. Come to Andheri anyway, Mahadevan urged, ten days from now, to watch him shoot something for TV.
Gary had made another suggestion: to check with the Salvation Army hostel in Colaba, where backpackers sleep. Recruiters from the studios visit the hostel daily, trolling for extras. When I went th~re a couple of days later, the desk clerk just shrugged no. I dialed the numbers of my acting agents: Kiran, Amjad, Warren, Jesse, Patrick. They had no work but put me on to two more touts named Tiran and Hussein. Raja wanted more cash and insisted that I deliver it to him at home. He exploded when I balked. "You're gora, I'm Indian!" he screamed over the phone, as if my reluctance were proof of deepest bigotry. "You're gora, I'm Indian!" I noticed that the number for "Tiran" was the same as that for "Kiran," [esse's contact. Jesse, who worked with Annabel, also worked with the dreadlocked agent from Film City. Amjad told me that the airport shoot he had in mind for me had been scrapped. Because of the elections, no one could obtain security clearance. Warren didn't answer. Kiran/Tiran hung up when he heard my voice. It occurred to me that my lines of contact were starting to cross, causing short circuits. Continued >>>
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