99% Invisible - 353- From Bombay with Love

Episode Date: May 8, 2019

From the 1950s right up to its collapse, people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. India and The Soviet Union had completely different politics, languages, and cultures. But for a brief time, these two nations found they had much more in common than expected, and realized this through a love of movies. From Bombay with Love

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Deepa Basti grew up in a very small town in southern India, with mainly books to keep her company. I'm an only child, so there was no one to sort of, you know, fight with and play with at home. And she didn't have many links to the outside world. This was the early 90s before email took off, or AOL chat rooms realized their full, creepy potential. That's producer Vivian Lee. But one day, when she was 10 years old, Deepas father brought her home a children's magazine with potential pen pals listed in the back. Back then, the idea of the penpal was very popular. To have a penpal who lived abroad was

was a big thing. There were pen pals listed from all over the world. Asia, Europe, South America, and Deepa decided to write to two girls living in Russia. But there was a problem. This particular magazine actually came from a second handshop and was completely out of date. The magazines that my dad found for me were from I I think, the early 80s or so, so I would and I found them much later in the 90s, so there was almost a sort of 7 to 8 year gap. But even though 7 years had passed since they listed their addresses in that magazine, these two Russian girls, who were teenagers at this point, actually wrote back. Deepa actually still has a lot of these old letters

and read me one from one of her pen pals named Marina. Dear Deepa, how are you? Thanks for your letter and photos. I was glad to see your letter. I have a family, mother, father, and sister. Our town is very small, but I like it. It starts off pretty predictable, but then Marina starts talking about some of her favorite

actors. My favorite actors are Shahrukh Khan, Amir Khan, Govinda, Anil Kapoor, Akshay, Karishma Kapoor. They were all Indian. I like India. Indian films, dances, songs, etc. I have the collection photos, actors, songs from Indian films. Deepas Russian pen pals were obsessed with Indian films, more specifically Bollywood. They seem very very interested in Bollywood.

Bollywood is the Hindi language film industry that comes out of Mumbai, India. It's a portmanteau of Bombay, the former name of Mumbai, where these films are produced, and Hollywood. Bollywood is often conflated with the film industry as a whole, but really, it's just one very flamboyant slice of it. It's usually packed with elaborate song and dance sequences, a fight between good and evil, and a beautiful hero and heroine. There's very little that is left for interpretation, so you know that, okay, there's this guy, there's this girl, they're gonna fall in love and then sort of end up happily ever after.

And so it's a fairy tale, I think that's the best way to describe it. When she first got these letters, Deepa didn't think much about her penpal's Bollywood fascination. It wasn't until years later that its struck her just how odd it seemed that these girls all the way in Russia knew so much about Shah Rukhan and Neil Kapoor. I don't think a really processed word they meant that somebody sitting so far away in some small town which probably was just like you know the small town I was growing up in way before the internet why were they interested in movies that even be probably weren't watching as much. What Deepa didn't know at the time was that

Russian Bollywood fandom wasn't unique to her pen pals childhood experience at all. From the 1950s right up to the collapse of the USSR people in the Soviet Union were completely infatuated with Indian cinema. While the United States was in the grips of Bidlemania, Bollywood Mania was taking over the USSR. There's even a famous story about an Indian actor in the 1960s who was visiting Moscow. He was quietly waiting for a taxi when, out of nowhere, he was swarmed by Russian Bollywood crazed fans.

He jumped into a taxi to escape, but instead of the car racing forward, it started rising up into the air. These fans had lifted the taxi over their heads and carried it down the street. It's possible that story has been embellished over the years, but it speaks to a very real, very intense connection between the two countries. India and the Soviet Union had completely different politics, languages and cultures, but for a brief time, these two nations found they actually had a lot in common and realized this through a love of movies. In the beginnings, in the 20s especially, film started to be very important economically,

together with what brought lots of money to the state. This is Kieryl Razlegov, film critic and historian based in Moscow. He is basically the Russian Leonard Mulden. I am watching about 1000 films per year. And in the early years of cinema, Razlikov says that Soviet directors were at the forefront of filmmaking, not just within the USSR, but in the world.

Lennon himself said, of all the arts, for us, the cinema is the most important. He believed that a film had the power to reach the masses better than any artist medium and that it could operate as art and propaganda at the same time. But when Stalin came to power, the scales tipped dramatically in favor of propaganda. Everything was controlled even personally by Stalin,

so the censorship was very hard. You have the crystallization of a cultural policy that says that all cinema and the arts and literature and everything else needs to follow a set of rules. This is Sudha Rajagopalan, senior lecturer of Eastern European studies at the University of Amsterdam. She says that this set of artistic rules was called Socialist Realism. Socialist realism dictated, in a sense, that all books and films needed to have a standard narrative. Film will show glory of the Politarian struggle. Comrade does heroic acts. All will see the ideal Soviet society and understand the true meaning of communism. Roll credits. Socialist

realism limited artistic creativity, and World War II didn't help. A lot of the factories, a lot of the industries of cinema houses and theaters had to be closed down. Kieril Razlagoff explains that the war caused a shift in the Soviet Union's movie-making priorities. Rather than spending money on making a bunch of movies a year, the Soviet Union wanted to concentrate on just making a handful of well-produced films. Before the war, Razh's Soviet Union made about 70 films per year.

After the war, it became 5-10 films per year. The idea was to make fewer films, but to make only successful films, which was impossible. The state wanted to focus on quality over quantity, which in some circumstances could be a good thing. But even on its best, imagine if Hollywood was only producing five movies a year, and those movies were Shenler's List, Million Dollar Baby, Sophie's Choice, The Deer Hunter, and 12 Years of Slave. There are masterpieces, but going to the movies would be such a drag. These were hard years for Soviet cinema? So the USSR was producing fewer movies than ever.

And the trajectory of Soviet cinema mirrored that of Soviet life, strict censorship and a rejection of anything remotely bourgeois. But by 1953, that would finally begin to change, with the death of Stalin. After the death of Stalin, there were great changes in the film industry. In 1953, Nikita Khrushchev came to power, and he wanted to chart a new course forward for the nation. In 1956, you had this momentous event when Khrushchev gives what is called the secret

speech. The need was not so secret because it turned out that within a few days everyone knew about it. Khrushchev denounced Stalin's cult of personality and kicked off a period known as the Khrushchev Thaw. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners were released from gulags, political repression subsided, and censorship was relaxed. But Khrushchev also wanted to make ordinary citizens feel more free and happy in their daily lives.

Part of this whole desitialization, as it's called in the 1950s, is a kind of shift in the rhetoric about how to address issues of everyday life. And part of this large debate on personal consumption is are people really having a good time. I mean, it really is as simple as that. Are people really having a good time is a simple question that marked an important shift in the government's priorities.

And Krušov decided that one way to ensure that people were having a good time was to get them back in the movie theaters. To also giving people a sense of stability, right? That war is over, that now these are normal times. You can also just go to the movies. You can just hang out with friends. It's also practicality, okay?

You need to rebuild your economy. You need to draw people back into the theater. You need to generate revenues. But in order to get people people back into the theater, you need to generate revenues. But in order to get people to go to the movies, the USSR had to increase the amount of films playing in theaters, which required importing more foreign films. America was the biggest movie producer at the time, but this was the middle of the Cold War and a majority of Hollywood films were seen as inappropriately capitalist.

And so the USSR went looking for someone else, a new, fun friend who could entertain millions of fun-starved Soviets without offending their political sensibilities. And it found the perfect candidate in India. It was very important to the Soviet Union to have a friend in India at the time. In 1947, after years of fighting British colonial rule, India became an independent nation. The Soviet Union at the time was looking to build relationships with developing countries, and even though India wouldn't take an official side

during the Cold War, it still looked like a promising choice for friendship. It was a country that had a very strong anti-imperialist politics and political sympathies among its intellectuals. And so both of these things made it actually a very attractive site for the Soviet Union to try out its geopolitics. The idea was that this would be a cultural exchange between the two nations.

The Soviet Union would import Indian films and India would import the same number of Soviet films. They would become cinematic pen pals. In 1954, the Soviet Union took a big step towards the artistic partnership by hosting an Indian film festival in Moscow. It was a very huge event in the beginning of the 50s because the Indian films came to Russia. This is Kieril Radlegov again. Radlegov was just a kid in 1954, but he still remembers this festival because it was the debut of a Hollywood film called Avada,

which translates to the Vagabond. Avada. Avada. Avada. Avada centers around a Charlie Chaplinous tramp character who's forced into a life of crime, but true love makes him see the error of his ways. It's full of sentimental music, lessons in morality, a lot of deep longing stairs, and some troubling misogyny. Was the biggest ever commercial success in Soviet Union in that period? Avara was literally the number one movie in 1954 in the USSR selling over 63 million tickets. To put that into perspective, the top-grossing movie of 2017, Star Wars The Last Jedi, sold 57 million tickets in the US.

This is Anton Seidouzoff. He grew up in Uzbekistan when it was still a part of the USSR, and he remembers just how huge Avada and other Indian films were for Soviet audiences. After that first film festival in Moscow, the film star Raj Kapoor quickly became a mega celebrity throughout the Soviet Union. Truck drivers had a photo of Raj Kapoor on their windshields next to Stalin.

That Indian actor that we mentioned earlier, the one who was mobbed by Russian fans and was hoisted into the air in a taxi, that was Raj Kapoor. They were so excited to see him that they apparently lifted his taxi and carried it over their heads. I mean, it sounds incredible, but yeah, such was his popularity in the USSR. Raj Kapoor became kind of a cultural ambassador between the two countries. When he visited Moscow in 1956, he spoke about the ways in which movies could bring their countries closer together, and even quoted Lenin's original feelings of what cinema could accomplish.

And that cinema is the greatest weapon to mold your country and to bring about different countries into one. of what cinema could accomplish. And if the peak of their Bollywood craze, Soviet movie theaters were constantly showing Indian films. So there will be 20 movie theaters operating from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. to hours a day and yeah, good half of them will be playing Indian movies. And even the music from these films became popular. Maybe a little too popular. Neighbors in the apartment complex at my family lived at were playing Indian songs on their vinyls from 6 a.m. to practically midnight.

Sometimes the same song or over and over again. The USSR's intense love of Indian cinema sometimes even seeped into the content of Bollywood films. Deepa told me about a Raj Kapoor movie from 1955 called Tree 420, in which the main character nods to the close relationship with the Soviet Union in one of the songs. This is very old and very popular song called Meera Juta Hejapani.

Can you please sing it for me? Why I can't? I mean, I'm not a singer. I know one other show with a singer. Okay. Okay, this is going to sound really bad. Um, Mirajuta hejapani, Patluun Englishtanis, Sarpelato, Viresi, Pervidel, Hejostani, Mirajuta hejapani, Patluun Englishtanis, Sarpelato, Virusi, Pervidel, Hejostani. The lyrics in Hindi translate too are shoes are from Japan, my trousers are from England.

But most importantly, there's a lyric that says, the hat on top of my head is from Russia. It's very curious that there is this Laltopiru scene or the red hat, obviously a communist reference, knowing that they have a very wide Russian audience and that it's always good marketing strategy to include them in the you know in the solv It's hard to say exactly why Bollywood became such a phenomenon in the Soviet Union But part of the reason is that they offered something you simply couldn't find in Soviet films. You do not see the kind of unbridled personal emotion that you see in Indian cinema, you know, where it's, I mean, those who don't like it say it's over the top, right? Here's

Surah Rajagopalan again. So it's in a sense where you have a man and a woman and they fall in love and then you have four songs that are only about falling in love, right? And then you have dance sequences shot out in the nature and then you have a rainfall that falls and they drenched and they're in love and they're exultant and there is this, there is an unbridled sense to Indian cinema, right? A sense that there are no boundaries to what you can feel and how you can express those feelings.

But it wasn't just that Bollywood felt exotic and different. The exuberant sentimentality was certainly unfamiliar, but there was also something deeply relatable at the core of Indian cinema. Indian and Soviet films were both often about self-sacrifice, a world divided into good versus evil and class struggle, but Rajagopalan conducted a number of interviews of Indian film fans in the former Soviet Union, and a lot of them pointed to something that we don't quite have a word for in English. So, a lot of Russians would say to me we used to watch Indian movies, and are Dusha's

they matched. And Dusha is the Russian word for soul. The soul she's talking about isn't an individual soul. Instead, Dusha is kind of a national essence, or a collective identity. So the Dusha, that's the Russians like to talk about their soul is one that endures. It has been through hard histories, but it endures, it's resilient, it's kind of spiritual in that sense of not being attached to material pursuits. And so this Dusha, they believed, was one that they shared with Indians.

and so this dusha, they believed, was one that they shared with Indians. Bollywood films played on theater screens in the USSR right up into the later years of the Soviet Union. Towards the 1980 new era of DHS, and that's exactly when Arnold and Stalone they completely removed Raj Kapoor another Indian actress from the screens of ordinary Soviet audience. In the final years of the USSR, rather than watching Shree 420 or Zita Engita, a lot of people preferred watching bootleg videos of Conan the Barbarian in Rambo. And when the Soviet Union collapsed,

American film and television quickly flooded the market. But Bollywood isn't totally gone. There's still a channel on Russian TV that broadcasts Indian films and television 24 hours a day. And if you ever do karaoke in Uzbekistan, you might just hear an old man singing songs from Avada. Avada. Avada.

Avada. Avada. Avada. Avada. Okay, so that's the first half of the story. But this was a one-to-one exchange, right? So now we gotta talk about all the Soviet films that were popular in India and how Deepa Boss they grew up with posters of Soviet film stars in her bedroom.

Not so much. We never watched any Russian film in India, you know, in those, in those years. Oh, that's awkward. Unlike Indian films which were widely beloved in all parts of the USSR, Soviet films were just not popular in India. Indian movie theaters weren't great at distributing Soviet movies and when they did, they often screened them late at night when no one would even want to go see a movie. And these were, you know, these were very serious and somber films.

I mean, you know, you watch them at 11 at night, you know? I mean, it's not the best hours. Seriously, you tried watching Tarkovsky's stalker at 11 p.m. and staying conscious. I tried, I failed, I never looked back. They bought a far more from us. They distributed them much better than we ever did theirs. And our films were much more popular popular than their films were in India.

That was the reality. Soviet films just didn't have the same mainstream appeal as Indian films did. Of course, there were surely Indian film nerds with thick framed glasses who could appreciate Russian art house cinema. But on the whole, people in India just weren't as drawn to socialist realism.

But even though Soviet film never really took off in India, the goal of a two-way cultural exchange wasn't a total failure. It just took another form. Here's Deepa Basti again. Soviet books were flooded into the country in all languages. The USSR made Soviet literature widely available all over India. Beautiful, hard-bound Russian classics were translated into multiple Indian languages and available at incredibly low prices. There were several generations of Indians who grew up on these books. So we had everything from Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, all the greats of Russian literature,

to children's books, to science and technology, textbooks. Deep it told me there wasn't even a bookstore in our town, but her bookshelf at home was filled with great works from Russian authors. In fact, I think I was about 10 or 11 when I picked up Maxim Gorkey's mother that I remember was my first big adult novel and it was for me it was fascinating because it was like a big book it was fat and it was hard bound. She went on to read Pushkin selected works in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot all before the age of 17. Deepa grew up and became a writer, and she believes she owes a lot to growing up surrounded by Russian literature.

Obviously, you know, reading these books at that age definitely influenced the way I read now, the way I think now, the way I write now, because I read them at a very formative age and I still have a deep connection to to these books. As I was talking with Deepa, I kept thinking about the intention of this whole cultural exchange to influence. So I asked her if she thought at all about the fact that those books were part of some larger geopolitical propaganda scheme. Yes, I do think about this whole propaganda side of it, but for me it was, you know, literature for itself to be enjoyed because it is great writing. I don't think anyone's going to remember a politician's speech, but you

talk about books or you talk about cinema or you talk about music and that stays with you possibly for the rest of your life. And how exactly did the Soviets watch all those American movies that flooded into the Soviet Union at a time when not that many people had a VCR? Well they watched them on the movie bus. Vivian tells me that story after this. So I'm back in the studio with Vivian Lee, who produced and reported that story. And there was actually a little piece of this story

that actually got you started that didn't fit in the story that we're gonna talk about now. Yes, that is very exciting for me. So yeah, a while back I stumbled on across this article in the Atlantic by someone named Elmar Hashmoth. So Elmar is an English professor at Biola University now, but he was born in a city called Baku in the Azerbaijan's Soviet Socialist Republic, and he grew up watching a lot of movies

in the Soviet Union. And so, obviously, this was before the fall of the USSR, so before 1991. Yes, he was born in 1979, and he said that the 80s were kind of an odd time to be a young person and a movie buff in the USSR because it was pretty close to the collapse of the USSR and that tension and anxiety tended to seep into Soviet media. The 80s were kind of a dark and cynical time and I think that was reflected in the films and shows that were made. A lot of it was just sort of dark and critical and hopeless.

This sounds like a lot of the sentiment that we talk about is making people turn to Bollywood's and I'm like, have some hope and something like that. Is that what he did? Yes, so he did grow up watching a lot of Bollywood films. He told me that his first crush was Hemamolini from Zita and Gita, but he actually watched a lot of Hollywood movies too. So a few American films did make it into the Soviet Union? Yes.

So the Soviet Union, like they did still import American films during the Cold War. They were just very selective of what they would screen and films were heavily censored or edited. And Elmer told me about this kind of funny example of a classic film that they used to play. The one I always think about is some like it hot with Marilyn Monroe. But in the Soviet Union, it was actually translated

Girls Only and Jazz. I don't know what that's better. It sounds provocative. It really does. Yeah what that's better. It sounds provided. It really does. Yeah. That's weird. Yeah, and he told me that scenes were often cut or edited out or just translated completely differently to change the context.

A lot of the more spicy language was also cleaned up and there were some scenes that were completely cut or translated differently. But towards the end of the 70s, bootleg movies were a lot easier to get a hold of because of the VCR player. And so this is how a lot of people like LMR first watch uncensored American. That's what I was just talking about here. The way you save VCR player is if you are of an agent

which you've never touched when. I grew up with those really thick plastic VHSs. a whole I had a whole collection. So you should just say VCR. Okay. Okay. So he had a VCR. Okay good. Not a VCR player. Yeah so like this is how he first watched uncensored American films. Like you told me the first action film he saw was first blood the original Rambo movie. Yes, and it's kind of funny. Like it wasn't even that these movies were exciting because they were illegal. But compared to Soviet films, American films just offered a lot of stimulation.

It was kind of like a barrage on the senses. I just remember the violence, the blood and sweat and machine guns and yeah, like Sylvester Stallone's bulging muscles. Yeah, those films were not known for their subtlety. No, they're pretty intense. Yeah. But yeah, so at least in Baku where El Mars from, people got pretty creative with how they screen these movies

because they were still legal at this point. So he actually grew up watching bootleg Hollywood films in video vans. Oh, so tell me how that works. Yeah, so in certain parts of the Soviet Union, like from probably like the 70s to about the 90s, there is this popular form of transportation called the Mushrutka. It's sort of like a cross between a taxi cab and a bus and they were these Latvian-made mini buses that were called it was like the Roth series and so people refer to them as Rafics. So during the days these were just public transit

but at night some of these Roth drivers would convert their buses into mini mobile movie theaters. And so did they have like TVs and VCRs or screens? Like how did it work? Yes, exactly. So at this time, it wasn't really super common for people to own their own VCRs and their homes. So this made it just a lot easier to bring movies to larger groups of people to watch together.

And so were these planned? Was he like, like, were they like ice cream trucks? Were they just would show up? Yes, that is actually exactly what it was like it was it was bored of mouth and there's like no official schedule I compare it to like an ice cream van or it just showed up and people will be like the video van is here And well the kids from from the yard were just run over and and watch a movie did they get inside the van and watch a movie? Yes, yes, so I guess it's kind of like a like a grittier version of watch a movie. Did they get inside the van and watch a movie? Yes, yes. So I guess it's kind of like a grittier version

of watching a movie on one of those entertainment systems in a family mini van. So the television and the VCR would be in the front of the van right behind the bus driver's seat. And there'd be curtains on the windows to block out light and make it a little bit more discreet from the outside. We all sat like you would sit in the bus facing forward and one of my vivid memories is that it always smelled like stale cigarette smoke because people smoked probably in there all day.

Sometimes people would actually be smoking while we watched a movie. There's a little 10-year-old sitting next to someone to change smoking the bus. Oh my god, so weird. But something that I thought was interesting was the way that these films were translated. So it was really common that the people who dubbed these movies into Russian, like he speaks Azerbaijani, but he also speaks Russian too.

And so a lot of these movies were screened in Russian by translators or journalists or film critics by day. And at night, they would illegally translate Hollywood Hollywood movies and usually it was directly over the original soundtrack usually guy and usually in one take. So they just doubt right over it. Right over. They even remove the old dialogue. They didn't I don't even think they lowered the dialogue. I actually have a clip here for you to hear what it sounds like. So this is a clip from the movie The Thing. And here, this was something.

I don't know what the hell's in there. I don't know what's in there. To have something terrible, Bening's, to be honest. What's this? What's happening? Hey, palmer, what's this? I know where the hell it is. Child.

That's what the flame trover is. Mac will never leave. What do you mean? Agnemyot, shivelis. He's not really selling that. I know that. I know that. I know that. I know that. He's not really selling it. No, he's not going to win any best acting awards for this. What a strange introduction to American culture. Yeah, I can't imagine. You must think that America is the weirdest place in the world.

You're just seeing all these movies. But Elmar said did say something kind of funny, which is that because of the way these films were dubbed over, with you being able to hear both English and Russian at the same time, he has a theory that it made him better at acquiring new languages. I speculate that that's how I got so good at English. We were constantly hearing a direct translation of what we were hearing in the

original English. I mean, he came here in 2006. Oh goodness. And his English is almost perfect. Like, I barely detect any kind of accent. And this is based on his own wild speculation because a lot of people grow watching these movies, but his English is very good. There's actually a great documentary

called Chuck Norris versus communism about the Romanian woman named Irina Nistor, who single-handedly dubbed like 3,000 Western movies into Romania during those times. So if you're interested in watching that. Oh, wow, that's so cool. If people want to read Omar's original story, we'll link to it on the website.

Yes, that will be on the website. That's so good. Oh, this would a great little detail about the story. Cool, thanks so much. Thank you. 99% invisible was produced This Week By Vivian Lee Mixing Tech Production By Sheree Fusif Music By Sean Rial

Katie Mingle is our senior producer, Kurt Colstade, is the digital director. The rest of the team is Avery Trollman, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald Delaney Hall, Taren Mazza, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to Jessica Bachman at the University of Washington. She organized an oral history project called Bollywood and Bolsheviks, Indo-Soviet Collaboration in Literature and Film, and to Deepa Basti. You can find out more about Bollywood and Bolsheviks as well as find some of Deepa's writing on our website.

99% Invisible is Project of 91.7 K-A-L-W in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful, Downtown, Oakland, California. We are a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI Work. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But our true home on the web is 99PI.org. Radio tilp you. From PRX.