In one of the most memorable series of sketches from the BBC television comedy show Goodness Gracious Me (1998-2001) an Indian man, known only as Mr "Everything Comes From India", repeatedly persists to persuade others of how various well-known Western texts and cultural figures are in fact all of Indian origin. The sketch unabashedly pokes fun at the Indian stereotype of obstinately conceptualising, defining and narrating everything in relation to an Indian cultural context. In the case of cinema however, this social stigma has since become a reality as dozens of high-profile popular Hindi filmmakers endeavour to mask Western cultural icons, tropes and conventions behind the face of the Indian through (often unacknowledged) film adaptations. Within the last decade, the Bombay (Mumbai) based film industry known as "Bollywood" has experienced a surge of remake films like never before. Since the year 2000, over seventy of the industry's major commercial film releases were remakes, with the majority of these being directly influenced by or lifted from American cinema. But to what extent does this act of appropriation impact on the conventions of popular Hindi cinema? What are the reasons behind this national cinema's impulse to reproduce, manipulate, and efface foreign conventions? And what is the overall impact and effect of such a form of cross-cultural intertextuality? In order to offer some answers to these questions, this article analyses key instances of contemporary Bollywood remaking, revealing in particular how aesthetic conventions and representations are reconfigured through cultural borrowing.
Let us begin by considering a scene from Farah Khan's 2004 action blockbuster Main Hoon Na. In this film, we see Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan play Major Ram Prasad Sharma, an Indian commando who has gone undercover as a college student in order to foil a terroristic plot to sabotage a peace pact between India and Pakistan. During his mission, Ram finds himself chasing a gang of terrorist henchman with only the aid of a rickshaw. We watch him exit a road tunnel in slow-motion, narrowly escaping the explosions from a CGI petrol tank that bursts out from behind him. The chase sequence is accompanied by a musical score of frantic beating drums and classical raag (Indian vocal percussion). However, as we watch the Rickshaw hurtle down a hill, rebound off a rock, and launch into the sky, we hear this music suddenly merge into a parodic rendition of the theme tune to Mission: Impossible (1996). The camera encircles this hyper-real moment of action, prolonging and intensifying it as the henchmen (and cinema audience) gasp in amazement at Ram's stretched out body, now frozen in mid-air, shooting his gun in Matrix-esque bullet-time; handgun in one hand, rickshaw in the other.
How are we to read this intertextual moment? Is this popular Hindi cinema unashamedly hijacking the Hollywood action-film aesthetic on account of its own lack of imagination and innovation? Perhaps. Or perhaps, as I would argue, there is more to this moment of pastiche beyond cinematic referencing for dramatic effect. Consider issues of star persona or "celebrity textuality" (Verevis: 2005: 20): The known fact that actor Shah Rukh Khan is widely referred to as the "Tom Cruise of Indian cinema" allows/suggests that the relationship between Cruise's special agent Ethan Hunt and Khan's Major Ram Sharma functions self-referentially beyond the film text, commenting instead on questions of stardom and casting. In addition, if this is a case of pure plagiarism, why does filmmaker Khan choose the rickety Rickshaw as the hero's vehicle of choice, and not a motorbike as in the case of the Hollywood original, or other successful Bollywood action blockbusters such as Dhoom (2004)? Having screened this particular film sequence to numerous film students, I have found it interesting that the reaction is always particularly one of laughter at the sight of the Rickshaw - a symbolic icon of the underprivileged, technologically inferior third-world. By placing Khan/Ram on the Rickshaw, the director makes a conscious effort to ironicise the substitute transport, encouraging Hollywood film-literate members of the audience to reflect upon this deliberate juxtaposition with the American Blockbusters of Cruise. In both the Bollywood and Hollywood action genre, the power of the grunting motorbike or sports car engine is often used as a sign of machismo, accessorising and enhancing the masculinity of the heroes. Khan/Ram's masculinity is therefore oddly compromised by his tinsel tasselled cart and frenzied cycling, indicating an Indian cinema that would rather reflect upon and ridicule its own aesthetics than straightforwardly present an action sequence for dramatic effect.
In Bollywood, cultural borrowing and textual remaking manifest in a variety different forms; from shot-for-shot reconstructions and mirroring homage movies, to more subtle and temporary moments of quotation, citation and intertextuality, as exemplified above. Few have paused to contemplate the complexity behind such forms of textual play in Hindi films, instead abandoning it to the bottomless pit of empty pastiche. Sequences like the one described above are seen to offer nothing more than a verification of the films' (and indeed, the Indian film industry's) perpetual inferiority to popular American cinema. Remake texts, in general, inevitably fall victim to the laws of fidelity and the defenders of the film/literary canons they often allude to. For example, concerns surrounding a remake's loyalty to its original have proven to fuel and dominate much of the critical discourse on remakes and adaptations. In his survey of pre-1980s Hollywood movie remakes, Michael B Druxman comments on the danger that fidelity holds for the remake: "people cling to their precious memories of a grander cinema in days gone by and…almost no remake – despite its quality – can shatter the fondness a spectator might hold for the original version he saw in his youth. It's called nostalgia" (Druxman, 1975: 24). However, such discussions distract us from other more positive traits of remake cinema. As Brian Macfarlane notes, the fidelity argument prevents the drawing of attention to "adaptation as inevitable artistic (and culturally rich) progress; the more interesting process of transference and adaptation; [and] the powerfully influential production determinants in the film remake which may be irrelevant to the original" (Macfarlane, 1996: 10). Thankfully, later adaptation theorists have attempted to shift the focus away from comparative quality-analysis, and towards interpretation. For example, Robert Stam has proposed that we look at remakes/adaptations as "translations" (Stam, 2000: 62), encouraging a study of the way in which original texts are manipulated and altered to produce new meanings, perspectives and experiences.
The scholarly work produced on film remaking is itself diverse in its approaches and perspectives. For example, some theorists argue that remaking is a fundamental part of all cinemas, and that all texts are applicable to the term since every film is guilty of re-presentation or prior conception. As Stam comments: "All texts are tissues of anonymous formulae… conscious and unconscious quotations, and, conflations and inversions of other texts" (Stam, 2000: 64). Others however have tried to classify and order the term - see Druxman (1975); Harry Roy Greenberg cited in Verevis (2006: 8-9); Thomas Leitch (2002: 45-49); and Robert Eberwein in Horton and McDougal (1998: 15-33). Gerard Genette (1982/1997) first used the term "transtextuality" to refer to special/unique instances of repetition, and attempted to divide, organise and group these instances into multiple sub-genres; whilst Stam later confirmed the complexity of the remake-adaptation as a subject of study by noting its many tropes and transformation processes (Stam, 2000: 62-68). But despite the varied work done on adaptation and textual appropriation, some areas still remain relatively under-explored.
A handful of scholars have produced interesting accounts on textual boundary crossing between various national cinemas, including studies of remakes from Hong Kong (Bordwell, 2000; Aufderheide, 1995); Eastern Europe (Horton, 1995) and France (Willis, 1995; Mazdon, 2000). In her book Encore Hollywood: Remaking French cinema, Lucy Mazdon focuses on the ways in which the aesthetic cross-fertilisation of French and American cinema questions cultural identity and interrogates or interrupts the formation of French or American national identity. Mazdon highlights the importance of determining how the signifying structures of the original text are replaced by those of the target culture in the remake, arguing that remakes do not simply copy, but that they remake and produce new identities (Mazdon, 2000: 26). Thus, to paraphrase an important question posed by Genette, there is an urgent need to investigate cross-cultural adaptations and ask what dynamics and dimensions are involved in such films where language, cultural traditions, psychology, and even narrative sense may differ greatly (Genette cited in Horton and McDougal, 1998: 4). Such discussions have almost denounced discourse on textual fidelity in favour of studying the way in which remakes "resist" and perform in opposition to their originals (Dika, 2003: 20).
Undeniably, the majority of theoretical work on film remaking has focused on Western and specifically American cinema. Particularly in the case of mainstream Hollywood, the remake text is associated with the following distinctive characteristics: the pre-sold text, the reiterated formula, a bigger budget, updated technical effects, extensive marketing and publicity campaigns, blatant commercial film-making methods; as well as often explicit incentives: guaranteed financial gain, cultural imperialism and "defensive production", where a popular foreign text may threaten to compete with or steal its inland box office spots (Verevis, 2005: 3). Remakes have offered Hollywood studios hit-guarantees via recyclable plots, economic-efficiency by recycling studio-owned material (Druxman, 1975: 14), quick profit through non-remakes (films simply bearing the same title and author of previous films); plus the chance to re-package old texts successfully with the help of nothing more than updated dialogue, star casts and technical advancements in sound, colour and ratio-format (Druxman, 1975: 15).
Although the aforementioned appraisals may certainly be relevant to scholars investigating, say, the commercial filmic adaptations of William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, or the Batman franchise; they do not suffice to explain the phenomenon of all other forms of remake cinema – such as the Bollywood remake. While American cinema has several decades of official movie remaking behind it, the same cannot be said of Bollywood, to whom the concept is arguably more of an abrupt millennia-phenomenon rather than a natural progression. Since the Indian film Industry's economic liberalisation in 2001, mainstream Hindi cinema has gone through major changes – particularly in terms of its formal aesthetics. This has included increased experimentations with special effects (Krrish [2006], Love Story: 2050 [2008], Drona [2008]), narrative chronology (Saathiya [2002]), new genres (vis-à-vis the rise of horror, sci-fi, heist and super-hero movies), as well as its high-profiled appearance in international award festivals - Devdas (2002) at Cannes, Lagaan (2001) at the 2002 Oscars. It has also given birth to a booming series of foreign film adaptations, such as Kaante (2002) (Reservoir Dogs [1992]), Koi…Mil Gaya (2003) (E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial [1982]), Krishna Cottage (2004) (Ringu [1998]), Sarkar (2005) (The Godfather [1972]), Fight Club: Members Only (2006) (Fight Club [1999]), Partner (2007) (Hitch [2005]) and Ghajini (2008) (Memento [2000]). In addition, this phenomenon has also lead to the production of several direct remakes of successful Hindi films - such as Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag (2007), a remake of Sholay (1975) and Don (2006), a remake of the 1978 film by the same name – as well as several film sequels, such as Dhoom:2 (2006), Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) and Sarkar Raj (2008) [1]. And for those wondering, despite the genre and subject matter of their originals, the majority of the above mentioned remakes do still feature several musical song and dance numbers.
But what has sparked the Bollywood film industry's sudden wholehearted and extensive investment in this special form of repetition, having previously conformed to more familiar and traditional methods of Hindi movie making? Before addressing the ways in which Bollywood remakes can operate as a form of resistance and innovation, it is best to begin with a brief account explaining Indian cinema's inherent hunger for textual appropriation.
The remake, in its various forms, is not wholly unfamiliar territory to Hindi cinema. On the contrary, the act of repetition has been considered fundamental to Hindi cinematic tradition. Film historians have revealed how today's Bollywood industry evolved from the dramatics of Sanskrit Drama, Parsi theatre, folk myths and ancient religious texts. One particular religious myth, the Ramayana, has been repeatedly looked upon as a framework for almost every commercial "masala movie" ever produced vis-à-vis its Proppian stock characters, including the gallant hero who must rescue an endangered damsel from an evil demon-baddie (Propp, 1968). Criticisms of Hindi cinema have thrived on this compulsive custom to repeat the same clichéd and repetitive stories, characters and outcomes. For example, whilst tracing Western criticisms of Hindi cinema, Rosie Thomas comments that "the story-line will be almost totally predictable to the Indian audience, being a repetition, or rather, an unmistakable transformation of many other Hindi films, and… it will be recognized by them as a "ridiculous" pretext for spectacle and emotion" (Thomas, 1985: 122).
Many have outwardly denied the possibility for change or development within Indian cinema. According to Vinay Lal the Indian film medium, like its nation's culture, is trapped in past traditions; each time inevitably reproducing the same old ideas and conclusions:
Whereas the Western concept of continuity construes it as "only a special case of change", in Indic traditions the language of continuity, which assumes that all changes can be seen, discussed or analysed as aspects of deeper continuities, occupies a predominant place. Change, in other words, is only a special case of continuity – and this is best exemplified in the Hindi film (Lal, 1998: 232).
Although the Hindi film industry has long been in the business of recycling narratives and formulas, it has rarely resorted to such blatant repetitions for it to fall under the category of Druxman's "direct" or Thomas Leitch's "true" remakes (Verevis: 7-12) which carry the same title and character names – with the exception of cross-regional remakes (such as the equally under-explored numerous Bollywood Hindi-language adaptations of South Indian films), movie versions of religious classics (the Mahabharata and the Ramayana), and filmic adaptations of Saratchandra Chattopadhyaya's literary classics, Parineeta and Devdas.
In the case of Devdas, the story of the lovesick and doomed alcoholic has been remade nine times: in 1928 by Naresh Mitra as a silent movie; 1935 by P.C. Barua in Bengali (and redone in Hindi a year after); 1953 in Tamil and Telugu by Vedantam Raghavaiah; 1955 by Bimal Roy; 1974 in Telugu by Vijaya Nirmala; 1979 in Bengali by Dilip Roy. More recently, 2002 saw the release of two more versions – by Bengal's Shakti Samanta and the high-profile Bollywood blockbuster by Sanjay Leela Bhansali - whilst Anurag Kashyap attempted to update the story with his modern-day rendition Dev.D (2009). However, it is important to remember that these remakes are literary adaptations and not copies or sequels of original film screenplays, the latter of which have only emerged in paucity over the past 20 years. Nigahen (1989) the follow up to Nagina (1986) and Return of the Jewel Thief (1996), a sequel to Jewel Thief (1967) stand as two rare examples, and are incidentally both regarded as critically disenchanting financial flops [2]. With this track record of failure in mind, why then should there be a sudden urge to invest in remakes now?
Bollywood's remaking incentives have been stirred as the industry has recently shifted away from the confines of the native Indian viewing public and instead towards a global audience. In the era of globalization, Hindi cinema's increasing desire for world-wide appeal and its attempts to reel-in Indian diasporic audiences can been considered primary catalysts for the cinema's increased modernisation and experimentation. But despite this motive, some still see this act of borrowing from or copying foreign cinema as symptomatic of the sheer lack of good writers in Bollywood - inevitably leading to the artistic theft of Western stories with more depth and substance than the average recycled masala movie. As Bollywood film director and remake-connoisseur Vikram Bhatt confesses:
If you hide the source you're a genius [...]There is no such thing as originality in the creative sphere [...] When you begin creating a work, you look around for inspiration […] something that you wish to replicate [...] If the Indian market begins to invest in writers, more people will see it as a career option and you'll have fresh ideas rolling in [...] Till that happens, I would rather trust the process of reverse engineering [remaking a film] rather than doing something indigenous (Bhatt cited in Banerjee: 2003).
From a more positive perspective, others have considered this process of "reverse engineering" as a sign of Hindi cinema finally nurturing a conscious desire to improve/update itself, now aware of its "backwardness" in comparison to its Western (and Eastern) cinematic rivals. This opportunity for creative extension is particularly evident through the way in which Hindi remakes have brought about technical progression vis-à-vis special effects. With its recent discovery and employment of special effects aesthetics in the form of CGI, time-slicing/bullet-timing and green-screening [3], Bollywood has been inspired to produce a wide range of action movies which often allude to sequences from Hollywood blockbusters such as Mission: Impossible and The Matrix, as demonstrated in the case of Main Hoon Na. In addition, the aforementioned boom in self-remakes of classic Hindi films from the 1970s and 80s could also be viewed as an active formation of a Hindi film canon, indicating a nostalgic Indian cinema endeavouring to eternalise itself.
Furthermore, in reference to spectatorship, it is also important to acknowledge, to a certain degree, the Indian film audience's potential incompatibility with non-Indian film texts, having been used to forms of textual/narrative coding that are unique to popular Hindi cinema. Thus the remake offers such audiences a way of enjoying, understanding and accessing these foreign texts, whilst conforming to a specifically Indian filmic language.
Once it has borrowed from and indigenised external foreign cinematic modes, the remake potentially promises Bollywood a status akin to Hollywood. At times it can offer a false sense of empowerment through a seeming act of "reverse-colonialism" (a concept which I will return to later); at others it stands as a symptom of the collapse of Indian identity in the wake of globalisation, making cross-cultural mixing a possibility, if not a necessity. It can be a terroristic device, mutating and sabotaging employed Hollywood codes; it represents the frustration of a cinema wanting to escape from itself, lead by a new generation of filmmakers; and it is the perfect platform for a newer "cooler" global Bollywood, where previously non-Indian filmic forms, styles and characters can flourish and fuse with the familiar.
Finally, the recent boom in Hindi remakes could also be seen as a "historically specific response to the postmodern circulation/recirculation of images" (Verevis, 2005: 23) and hence a product and vehicle of modernisation, globalisation and global postmodernism. Writers such as Jean Baudrillard (1983) and Frederic Jameson (1991) have proposed how, within today's postmodern era, in a world starved of new ideas the obvious choice is to attempt to recreate and reinvent the "past", even if this "past" is not our own. Bollywood's urge to reinvent Western texts under its own banner could be seen as an example of this postmodern impulse to rewrite pasts, indulge in the mass-reproduction and simulation of images, blur boundaries and engage in cultural eclecticism. But whatever the reasons behind this new genre of Hindi films, the consequences of this current phase of Bollywood cinema could prove to not only problematise Hollywood codes and conventions once they have become wholly indigenised, but perhaps even prove apocalyptic for Bollywood's own genre, authenticity and identity.
In considering the above possible reasons for the emergence of the Bollywood remake, it is also important to consider the impact and consequences of this particular species of contemporary Hindi cinema. Contemporary Bollywood remake films not only encourage the indigenisation of foreign film styles, but as a result, they can often problematise notions of Indian identity. Authentic notions of Indian identity can become confused, fragmented, mutated, or in some extreme cases, lost all together. Indian cinema has had to compromise and sacrifice some of its traditional conventions in order to appeal to a wider audience and compete on a global scale. However, as a consequence, it simultaneously strives to find new ways in which to re-assert its Indianness and preserve its cultural heritage. As Mira Reym Binford comments:
The present day Indian commercial film is the end result of a lengthy process of imitation, adaptation, and indigenization. Confronted with challenges from abroad, Indian society has often responded by indigenizing invasive foreign cultural elements and creating a new synthesis that is fundamentally Indian […] Hollywood is one of its parents, but this effectively indigenized hybrid form functions on its own terms, continuing to absorb and transform the foreign fertilizer fed to it (Binford, 1998: 78,82).
Some see the recent surge of Bollywood remakes as the end of traditional Indian cinema as more and more filmmakers adopt a Western look and feel to their movies. However, I would argue that this Western influence can also be an effective form of internal critique. For example, in Kaante we see how Hollywood cinematic conventions are employed and simultaneously exposed.
In his remake of Reservoir Dogs, director Sanjay Gupta unusually takes an American low-budget independent film and presents it as a Bollywood film through using stylistic techniques better accustomed to a Hollywood blockbuster. But these Hollywood conventions are unable to customarily function or achieve affect when applied to a semi-Bollywood regime of story-telling. Equally, although the film still adheres to the Hindi song-sequence formula, its musical sequences are distorted via the film's Western cinematic style. For example, the song "Mahi Ve" (My beloved) is sung in traditional Punjabi-Urdu style, yet it is visually presented in an American nightclub in the mode of a Westernised music video. The sequence follows in the style of a contemporary MTV pop video, almost contradicting and undermining the folk song music track it accompanies. In Kaante's song sequences, conventional Bollywood images of hip-swinging chaste Indian women in traditional outfits are replaced with close-up shots of the bottoms of multi-racial dancers in tight hot pants, whilst images of women dancing sexually with other women or muscular black men almost subliminally flash onto the screen. The effect of merging traditional folk songs and Bollywood choreography with a glamorised, carefree and controversial American lifestyle (striptease and drinking culture) is extremely disorientating - producing a cinematic style that altogether deviates from both Western and Indian modes of film making.
Kaante's opening title sequence also helps expose cinematic conventions. The sequence mimics the famous Reservoir Dogs shot of a gang of black suited men walking in slow motion - only this time, the scene is further dramatised by large bold green title-credits that flash onto the screen in Hollywood blockbuster-style. A loud, dramatic, fast-paced action movie-style soundtrack is laid over the image of the six protagonists who are dressed in designer sunglasses, suits and leather jackets; wearing twinkling gold jewellery, swinging chains, smoking cigarettes and chewing gum in slow motion. This two minute sequence repeatedly uses the same rapid zooms and panning shots to an extent that the scene eventually becomes almost monotonous. Such a moment of cinematic quotation can be read on two levels: firstly, as an act of pastiche simply for the sake of heightening dramatic action via an aesthetic of "American coolness", or secondly, as a moment of semi-parodic play (humour aside) with Hollywood's own forms of overt-dramatic stylisation. The very techniques that American cinema would hope to disguise in order to achieve verisimilitude, Kaante uses to bring artistic construct to the fore. Thus, likewise, the film's climactic bank robbery shoot-out sequence is shot in a style familiar to the Hollywood action blockbuster (slow motion gun-play, loud rapid gun-fire, fast-paced action music, high-rigged explosions). However, each element of this style, from the sound of gunfire to explosions and plausibility of stunts, is exaggerated [4]. The sequence is padded with repetitively recycled shots and sound effects lasting so long that it can almost be read as a parody of the style itself. What's more, the scene consists of cameras positioned everywhere but at eye level; several different images overlap and occupy the frame at one time; diagonal tilts, rapid zooms and distorted camera angles are used to follow the action, as well as several shots taken at floor-level, inviting characters to jump directly over the camera. The intended effect is not of realism, but of a drawing attention to the stylistic techniques of the action movie.
When viewed at surface level, Kaante can appear a cheapened blank pastiche of its acclaimed pseudo-original, which is itself a remake of Ringo Lam's City on Fire (1987) [5]. But at a deeper level, one can also find opportunity for critical appreciation. By playing with Quentin Tarantino's trademark "coolness" in such a way, Kaante becomes a mocking caricature. As the film text's mode of presentation is revealed as performative, it exposes itself as a cinematic construct for the sake of spectacle and sensationalism. In Kaante we witness independent American cinema collapse into Bollywood, which effectively collapses into Hollywood, until it soon becomes difficult to distinguish between the opposing styles and to shoe-horn the text into film categories bound simply by nation or status (commercial cinema, experimental cinema etc). Kaante thus succeeds in producing a commercially successful Bollywood hit whilst de-authenticating and deconstructing American cinema in the process.
Kaante is also interesting with regards to how it constructs Western identity. Despite being entirely set in Los Angeles, the film appears to refute any accurate portrayal of America. The L.A. portrayed in this Bollywood remake is an America without Americans; it is never quite allowed to represent itself as a "real" place with "real" American people. Cityscape shots consist of empty sky scrapers and deserted office blocks. American extras often have their backs to the camera, are blurred out entirely, or appear as caricatures - such as a bald, fat, tattooed, thuggish American drug-dealer with a comic moustache who appears at the start of the film. Ironically, it is instead the film's Indian actors and lead protagonists who are set up to represent Americanness more genuinely in the film: they speak and dress American; they effortlessly occupy an American lifestyle; and in effect, they simultaneously overwrite authentic Americanness in the process.
Rather than Otherising the West and placing it in opposition to Indianness, in Kaante American identity and Hollywood are hijacked and swallowed up by Bollywood in a process of "reverse-colonialism" per se. Through such films, India fulfils a secret fantasy of switching places with its "white-man" colonizer. In many contemporary Bollywood films, it is now often the Indians who teach the Westerners how to live; the Indians who represent and evoke the "American cool"; the Indians who run American businesses; and the Indians who are called to rescue the West from external threats. To take this point a little further, one may also argue that, in aspiring to beat American cinema at its own game, these Bollywood remakes seek to resist Hollywood hegemony by dismantling it in the process. Admittedly, a film like Kaante could easily be dismissed for simply adopting and endorsing American culture as a universal concern. However, to paraphrase Richard Dyer, the act of pastiching can also affirm the position of the pasticheur and may consequently form part of a politics of undermining and overthrowing the original (Dyer, 2006: 157). The sheer excess of appropriating Hollywood aesthetics in such a way can end up weakening their very impact and power; cross-cultural copycatting thus allows Western power to be "translated" or transferred into the Indian context (Dudrah, 2006: 144). Thus, as Thomas Leitch comments: "The true remake admires its original so much it wants to annihilate it" (Leitch cited in Mazdon, 2000: 4).
Despite the industry's endeavours to modernise and liberate itself through adopting Western aesthetics, the Bollywood remake also reveals how contemporary Hindi cinema cannot or will not escape its origins so easily. In Koi…Mil Gaya, the unofficial Bollywood remake of Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial) [6] there is a willing adaptation of a Hollywood narrative logic and the stylistic conventions of the science fiction genre (previously a genre literally "alien" to Bollywood), using sophisticated modern special effects technology never before seen in the history of Hindi cinema. The film story deals with a young mentally-premature man (Rohit) who befriends an alien called Jadoo, who has been left behind on earth by his mothership and needs to get back home. However, despite this innovative style and subject matter, we can tell simply from the way in which Jadoo's character is constructed and presented in the film that Bollywood, despite surrendering to modernity, cannot let go of its past. Jadoo appears not as the wrinkled, pale, dough eyed creature of Steven Spielberg's original. Instead, he is blue, with leaf like Indian eyes, and adorns something closely resembling the tilak (or urdhva pundra - the Brahman marking of a half-moon and three horizontal lines) which is worn on the forehead in the Hindu religion. Jadoo is in fact the cinematic incarnation of the Hindu God Lord Krishna, and comparisons between the two are made throughout the film.
Despite its noted science fiction narrative, stylistic, and thematic continuities, Koi… Mil Gaya - unlike its original - does not opt to achieve narrative plausibility through scientific rational. Diegetic realism is instead unusually sought after through a narrative rooted in religious superstition and mythology. Here, religion becomes the vessel through which one can observe, contemplate and conceptualise science. This affinity for a "Vedic science" rather than atheistic science (Alessio and Langer, 2007: 227) is evident in the film in several ways. Firstly, we can consider the importance of magic in the film in relation to the classical Hindu mythological folktale. The magical is associated with Godly powers; each of the many Hindu deities are known for their individual super-powers and ability to perform magic. Both the Ramayana and Mahabharata include moments of magic such as levitation, disappearing, shape-shifting, and the ability to fly. Koi… Mil Gaya's similar emphasis on the spectacular and miraculous is generated through the character of the alien, who is appropriately named after the Hindi word for magic. In the context of Rohit's mental handicap, Jadoo's powers to heal him are not presented as an extra terrestrial advanced super ability, but rather as a "divine miracle", implying that the sublime wonder in this film is not so much the CGI spaceship or the animatronic alien, but rather the "mysterious and magical work of God".
The impingement of the religious upon conventional scientific contexts can also be seen to impact on certain cause-effect elements of Koi… Mil Gaya's narrative. In E.T. the aliens come to planet Earth in order to collect plants, but in Koi… Mil Gaya, it is the Sanskrit "Om" chant created by Rohit's father's computer (accidentally re-activated by Rohit) which originally calls the aliens to Earth. At the start of the film, Rohit's father describes the Hindu word Om as a universal code which transcends language (and apparently spatial) boundaries, and contains "the vibrations of the universe" [7]. Jadoo's rescue spaceship is also subsequently summoned by the Om computer, whilst E.T.'s spaceship is signalled through his self-assembled satellite transmission device This conversion of a technical device into a religious symbol serving a religious function (the Om computer is literally made to sing the Hindu prayer) is interesting in relation to issues regarding the constant negotiation between modernism/technical advancement and tradition/primitivism in Indian culture. Religion has a particular significance and centrality in Koi… Mil Gaya, serving a purpose or function above and beyond genre conformity. It can be strategically used to attack the master narrative of Western science, to dissolve scientific rational into mythical superstition, and most significantly, to help regulate if not challenge modernity.
Ultimately, film production within a reactionary or culturally conservative Indian society continues to create a particular dilemma for the Bollywood science fiction text. As Koi…Mil Gaya reveals, it is equally tied to modernisation and its obligation to tradition; torn between its need to adjust to the tastes of a global or Western audience and its obligations to maintain a sense of Indian identity.
Bollywood's urge to remake foreign films can be explained through notions of accessibility and translation. As André Bazin explains, the adaptation text as "digest" makes its original more accessible to its audience not by simplifying it, but by presenting it through a different mode of expression. In Bollywood's case, the remake text alters the original film lingo to better suit the Indian audience. As Bazin puts it, it is "as if the aesthetic fat, differently emulsified, were better tolerated by the consumer's mind" (Bazin, 1948: 26). But what is it about Indian viewing strategies that require such a process of the translation or "digestion" of Western texts? It is not enough to assume this process as solely an issue of language or cultural-incoherencies (though, no doubt this would be the argument of many a sociologist). Rather, I believe Bollywood cross-cultural remakes also spring from the Indian audience's need for different methods of enunciation, and henceforth, greater levels of emotion and sensation. Additionally, there appears to be a need to transfer what is literal into the figural. Images and symbolism seem to elicit more pleasure than merely discursive storytelling, which would explain why Bollywood remakes tend to appropriate Western cinematic imagery more frequently than film scripts. It is this heightened sensation and figural excess that most significantly marks the moment of translation between the Bollywood remake and its foreign original, and both are in need of further investigation and analysis.
There is also a particular kind of gratification to be found in the act and experience of cross-cultural translation itself. This unique pleasure is evident through my prior examples of reverse-colonialism, and through the fact that Indian audiences thrive on seeing Bollywood film stars hybridise with those in the West. They enjoy seeing Amitabh Bachchan as Marlon Brando (Sarkar [2005]); or Shah Rukh Khan as Tom Cruise. Just as we would imaginarily superimpose ourselves onto our on-screen heroes, Indian audiences take pleasure in viewing the superimposition of their national heroes onto global heroes. In considering this method of inter-referential "star-crossing" it becomes clear that the Hindi remake film offers its audiences a unique pleasure that it could not produce, were it an original. With respect to the international audience however, the opposite effect is achieved. Despite their attempt to employ an iconography and aesthetic that is more accessible and appealing to foreign markets, Bollywood remakes have yet to successfully capture the interests of the non-Indian audience [8]. The resemblance of the Hindi remake to its original is often uncanny – familiar, yet very different. It is this uncanniness, coupled with the aforementioned internal critique/parody of adopted foreign film traits, that makes the Bollywood remake all the more unsettling and perhaps contributes to the negative reactions of non-indigenous audiences towards this particular mode of Hindi film making.
Specifically with regards to its inability to ever straightforwardly and substantially stage the content of its foreign original, there is a certain sense of failure that accompanies the Bollywood-Hollywood remake. Changes to an original text's storyline often occur in order to accommodate Indian ethics and censorship [9], and this is one way in which cross-cultural remaking proves problematic. For example, one could argue that a film such as Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) can never really be remade in Bollywood due to the fundamental sensibilities which Hindi cinema and its audience rely upon: dishonest/sinful heroes must repent; the anti-heroes motives must be morally justified; and the favoured-protagonists must live. Thus, in the Bollywood pseudo-remake Bunty aur Babli (2005), the realist and gritty style that lay at Penn's original text's core is transformed into a colourful tongue-in-cheek Rom-Com caper, to an extent at which the film bares little or no resemblance to its original and becomes an as-good-as-original in its own right. As Horton and McDougal observe, film remakes "constitute a particular territory existing somewhere between unabashed larceny and subtle originality" and even "problematize the very notion of originality" (Horton and McDougal, 1998: 4).
The very fact that Bollywood is rarely held back by copyright laws has allowed the remake to flourish and cross-cultural referencing to penetrate a high number of recent Hindi film releases. This lack of policing has enabled remaking to form part of modern day Hindi cinema's standard practice, at times even making it difficult to separate or differentiate borrowed foreign-styles from the normative or "authentic" style of contemporary Bollywood. Copying, it seems, is now intrinsic to the identity and generic form of the globalised/international Hindi film. Once Hollywood aesthetics become confused with Bollywood conventions, Mr "Everything comes from India's" presumptions are realised: John Woo's action stunts, bullet-time technology, Tarantino-esque masculinity, and aliens from outer space are now as much a fundamental part of the memory and (hyper) reality of contemporary Bollywood as any other cinema. As to the question of whether these copycat films should be regarded as quotation or plagiarism, I would argue that they are at once both and neither. A postmodern perspective might instead suggest that they enter as plagerisations, but later become reinventions and innovations.
Once translated by Bollywood, an original text may face a certain level of loss of affect. As The Matrix (1999), Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) and Reservoir Dogs are manipulated and exposed through remaking, a certain level of lost-aura (Benjamin, 1970) takes place as a consequence. In some extreme cases, the original text's autonomy and authenticity may be threatened, particularly with regard to the so-called Indian multiplex audience's [10] relationship to it after having viewed its remake. Hollywood codes, once consumed by the remake, are no longer as monolithic; Tarantino's aesthetic coolness no longer has the same effect once we see it in exaggerated form in a film like Kaante. As the Bollywood remakes reveal, intertextuality can be at once seductive and destructive.
Contemporary Bollywood is in a state of flux where a bricolage of multiple styles and genres continue to cancel out and invalidate one another. The remake is the prime example of the current identity-collapse of Bollywood cinema. However it also paradoxically signals the beginnings of a new form of cinema. The film remake should therefore never be underestimated, for it too, as Leo Braudy comments, is a "species of interpretation" (Braudy, 1998: 327). It is only in its self-destructive state (as a remake) that the Bollywood text can begin to critically pull apart not only its own, but other more universalised cinematic techniques, such as those of Hollywood. In the contemporary Hindi remake, Hollywood cinema is "recast to fit the nuances and developments in the cultural landscape of popular Hindi cinema's audiences" (Dudrah, 2006: 146). However, simultaneously, Bollywood too is being recast and remoulded to fit the international market. This circular process has resulted in producing a confused, fragmented and schizophrenic form of Hindi cinema. Ultimately, it seems that the cross-cultural Bollywood remake's agenda sits and shifts simultaneously between five things: profit and capital (multiplex, global and Diasporic appeal), exploitation, cultural-political commentary, a postmodern art-for-arts sake sensibility, and accident. Most ironically, it shows itself to be an example of Indian cinema at its most inventive and innovative – a classic case of art renewing itself through creative mistranslation (Stam, 2000: 62).
[1] Although I mainly cite Bollywood remakes produced over the past eight years, I do not intend to fix a date-period to this phenomenon. Hollywood narrative adaptations in 1990s Bollywood cinema have been partly explored by Sheila J. Nayar (1997). Also, we can find earlier evidence of such appropriation in films such as Mr India (1987), which works almost as a cultural inversion of Steven Spielberg's Indian Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and in the 1950s with screen legend Raj Kapoor's involvement in reworkings of Charlie Chaplin films, Frank Capra's It happened One night (1934), and Vittorio De Sica's Shoeshine (1946). But what I wish to emphasise is the shift in remaking from being previously something occasional and cursory, to a now much larger-scale investment and cultural trend that is being recognised the Indian film media and embraced by the industry and its audiences like never before.
[2] It should be noted that South Indian director Satyajit Ray's sequels in his Apu Trilogy predate these films. However, as Ray's films do not form part of the mass-consumed popular cinema that Indian audiences identify with, I have excluded his work from my account of popular Hindi film remake-series.
[3] Most notably established in the Hollywood sci-fi film The Matrix.
[4] At one point in the film, the audience is presented with an assortment of over 35 consecutive shots of guns being seamlessly loaded and fired independently of the narrative context.
[5] It is also important to note that although Kaante's director has refused to openly acknowledge the film's origins, Tarantino has himself praised the film for being one of the best foreign adaptations he has seen of his film. See Srinivas (2007).
[6] E.T. was itself accused of being a plagiarism of Bengali filmmaker Satyajit Ray's unmade film The Alien. The production was abandoned by Columbia pictures, the same studio that produced E.T. See Ray cited in Andrew Robinson (2004: 295).
[7] This chant is also a reference to the musical motif used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), although there the music is arguably somewhat stripped of its spirituality and religious origins.
[8] Indeed, through my own experiences of screening these films to Western film studies students, the films tend to be met with an almost instant disregard, insult, ridicule or rejection.
[9] For example, in Zinda (2006) the oedipal sexual theme of the original Korean film Oldboy (2003), seen as too controversial for the Indian audience, is replaced with an insight into the 'immorality' of the Bangkok virgin sex trade.
[10] The 'multiplex audience' refers to modern Indian spectators who have knowledge of and consume a wider repertoire of cinema, incorporating both Hollywood and Bollywood films. The term comes from the growing number of cinema multiplexes in India which now simultaneously offer screenings of both national and foreign/international films.
Alessio, Dominic and Jessica Langer (2007) Hindu Nationalism and Post colonialism in Indian Science Fiction: Koi... Mil Gaya (2003), New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 5 (3), pp. 217-229.
Aufderheide, Patricia (1998) Made in Hong Kong: Translation and transmutation, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley, Calif. and London: University of California Press.
Baudrillard, Jean (1983) The evil demon of images/The precession of simulacra, Simulations. Semiotext: New York.
Bazin, Andre (1948/2000) Adaptation, or the cinema as digest, Film adaptation. London: Athlone Press.
Benjamin, Walter (1999 [1970]) The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, in Hannah Arendt (ed), Illuminations. London: Pimlico, pp. 219-253.
Binford, Mira Reym (1998) Innovation and Imitation in the contemporary Indian cinema, in Wimal Dissanayake (ed), Cinema and Cultural identity: Reflections on films from Japan, India and China. University press of America: USA.
Braudy, Leo (1998) Afterword: rethinking remakes, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley, Calif. and London: University of California Press.
Chattopadhyaya, Saratchandra (2005) Parineeta, translated by Malobika Chaudhuri. Penguin Books India.
Chattopadhyaya, Saratchandra (2002) Devdas. Penguin Books India.
Dika, Vera (2003) Recycled culture in Contemporary art and film: the uses of nostalgia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Druxman, Michael B (1975) Make it again Sam: A survey of movie remakes. A.S. Barnes.
Dudrah, Rajinder Kumar (2006) Bollywood: Sociology goes to the movies. New Delhi, Thousand Oaks, London: Sage.
Dyer, Richard (2006) Pastiche. London: Routledge.
Genette, Gerard (1997) Palimpsests : literature in the second degree, translated by Channa Newman & Claude Doubinsky. London, Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.
Horton, Andrew (1998) Cinematic makeovers and cultural border crossings: Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies and Coppola's Godfather and Godfather 2, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley, Calif. and London: University of California Press.
Horton, Andrew and Stuart Y. McDougal (1998) Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley, Calif. and London: University of California Press.
Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. Verso: London.
Lal, Vinay (1998) The impossibility of the outsider in modern Hindi film, in Ashis Nandy (ed), The secret politics of our desires: Innocence, culpability and Indian popular cinema. London: Zed Books.
Leitch, Thomas (2002) Twice-told tales: disavowal and the rhetoric of the remake, in Jennifer Forrest and Leonard Koos (eds.), Dead Ringers: The remake in theory and practice. USA (Albany): State University of New York.
Mazdon, Lucy (2000) Encore Hollywood: remaking French cinema. London: BFI.
McFarlane, Brian (1996) Novel to film: an introduction to the theory of adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Nayar, Sheila J. (1997) The values of fantasy: Indian popular cinema through Western scripts, Journal of Popular Culture, 31 (2), (Summer), pp.73-90.
Propp, Vladimir (1968) Morphology of the folktale, L.A. Wagner (ed), 2nd edition, University of Texas.
Robinson, Andrew (2004) Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye: the Biography of a Master Film-maker. London and New York: I.B Tauris.
Stam, Robert (2000) Beyond Fidelity: The dialogics of adaptation, Film adaptation. London: Athlone Press.
Thomas, Rosie (1985) Indian cinema: Pleasures & popularity, Screen, 26 (3-4), pp.116-131.
Verevis, Constantine (2005) Film remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Willis, David (1998) The French remark: Breathless and Cinematic Citationality, Play it again, Sam: retakes on remakes. Berkeley, Calif. and London: University of California Press.
Banerjee, Kanchana (2003) Cloning Hollywood, The Hindu (August 3rd) Available at:
http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2003/08/03/stories/2003080300090400.htm [Accessed 1st March 2009].
Srinivas (2007) The Quentin Conversation, Passion for Cinema. Available at: http://passionforcinema.com/the-quentin-conversation [Accessed 1st March 2009].
Bonnie and Clyde. 1967. Dir. Arthur Penn. Warner Bros.
Bunty aur Babli. 2005. Dir. Shaad Ali. Yash Raj Films.
City on Fire. 1987. Dir. Ringo Lam. Cinema City.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 1977. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Columbia Pictures.
Devdas. 2002. Dir. Sanjay Leela Bhansali. Mega Bollywood.
Dev.D. 2009. Dir. Anurag Kashyap. UTV Motion Pictures.
Dhoom. 2004. Dir. Sanjay Gadhvi. Yash Raj Films.
Dhoom: 2. 2006. Dir. Sanjay Gadhvi. Yash Raj Films.
Don. 2006. Dir. Farhan Akhtar. Excel Entertainment.
Don. 1978. Dir. Chandra Barot. Nariman Films.
Drona. 2008. Dir. Goldie Behl. Eros International.
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. 1982. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures.
Fight Club: Members Only. 2006. Dir. Vikram Chopra. Rising Star Entertainment.
Fight Club. 1999. Dir. David Fincher. Twentieth Century Fox.
Ghajini. 2008. Dir. A.R. Murugadoss. Geetha Arts.
The Godfather. 1972. Dir, Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. 1984. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Paramount Pictures.
Jewel Thief. 1967. Dir. Vijay Anand. Kapurchand and Co.
Kaante. 2002. Dir. Sanjay Gupta. Pritish Nandy Communications.
Koi…Mil Gaya. 2003. Dir. Rakesh Roshan. Yash Raj Films.
Krishna Cottage. 2004. Dir. Santram Varma. Balaji Films.
Krrish. 2006. Dir. Rakesh Roshan. Filmkraft Productions.
Lagaan: Once upon a time in India. 2001. Dir. Ashutosh Gowarikar. Aamir Khan Productions.
Lage Raho Munna Bhai. 2006. Dir. Rajkumar Hirani. Vinod Chopra Productions.
Love Story: 2050. 2008. Dir. Harry Baweja. Baweja Movies.
Main Hoon Na. 2004. Dir. Farah Khan. Venus Films.
The Matrix. 1999. Dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski. Warner Bros.
Memento. 2000. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Team Todd.
Mission: Impossible. 1996. Dir. Brian De Palma. Paramount Pictures.
Mission: Impossible 2. 2000. Dir. John Woo. Paramount Pictures.
Mr India. 1987. Dir. Shekar Kapur. Narsimha Enterprises.
Nagina. 1986. Dir. Harmesh Malhotra. Eastern Films.
Nigahen: Nagina Part 2. 1989. Dir. Harmesh Malhotra. Eastern Films.
Oldboy. 2003. Dir. Chan-wook Park. Show East.
Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag. 2007. Dir. Ram Gopal Varma. Adlabs Films.
Raaz. 2002. Dir. Vikram Bhatt. Vishesh Films.
Reservoir Dogs. 1992. Dir. Quentin Tarantino. Miramax Films.
Return of the Jewel Thief. 1996. Dir. Ashok Tyagi. Arshee Films.
Ringu. 1998. Dir. Hideo Nakata. Imagica.
Saathiya. 2002. Dir. Shaad Ali. Yash Raj Films.
Sarkar. 2005. Dir. Ram Gopal Varma. K Sera Sera.
Sarkar Raj. 2008. Dir. Ram Gopal Varma. K Sera Sera.
What lies beneath. 2000. Dir. Robert Zemeckis. Twentieth Century Fox.
Zinda. 2006. Dir. Sanjay Gupta. White Feather Films.