‘Hindujas created a huge market for Hindi cinema outside India’
ACTOR AKSHAY KUMAR URGES FAMILY TO ONCE AGAIN INVEST IN BOLLYWOOD AT BOOK LAUNCH
THE book launch of Hindujas and Bollywood, written by film critic Ajit Rai, last Sunday (3) at the Institute of Directors in London was a little like the shooting of a Bollywood movie.
The glittering cast included the Hinduja brothers – London-based Gopichand (Gopi); Prakash, who lives in Geneva but always makes a point of attending the Cannes Film Festival; and Ashok, who had flown in from his home in Mumbai. Other members of the Hinduja clan had walk-on parts.
A large crowd of onlookers enjoyed the dialogue, especially a guest appearance from the Bollywood superstar, Akshay Kumar, who urged the Hindujas, who had either financed or distributed 1,200 Hindi films in the past, to come back into the business.
The crowd applauded as he gently encouraged the Hindujas: “You have distributed 1,200 films, but what now? This is the past, but when will you return? Now is the time. I think Bollywood needs you; India needs you. I’m sure a lot of people would be very happy if you came back to this industry.” Gopi was ready with a good jawab (reply). “Akshayji, I can assure you, if you gave me some good suggestions, I will invest money in it,” he quipped.
He had written homespun lines for himself, asking the crowd: “Shall I start with ‘Lords, Excellencies...’ or ‘Dear Friends...’”
To the cry of “Dear Friends”, Gopi went on: “You will all be shocked and surprised that in all the movies we financed or distributed, we never lost a single penny. What was the reason? The reason was the hard work.”
Movies were edited for length and dubbed. And he recalled the scenes in Teheran when Raj Kapoor attended the release of Shree 420.
Gopi was expert at playing the crowd: “I can never forget the first movie (the Hindujas distributed), Shree 420, when it was released (in 1955). Oh, my dear. The whole street in Teheran was packed and there was no way for Raj Kapoor to get out from the theatre.
“So I had to ring up the police and get him a van, and we took him out from the back door. “Everywhere Hindi films started working.” He remembered, too, the visit by Sunil
Dutt, Naris and Sanjay Dutt, when the latter “was a baby in Nargis’s arms.
At the premiere of Mother India, which Gopi had bought for “5,000 rupees” after the director Mehboob Khan had initially failed to make a success of it in 1957, “the crowd pushed Sunil Dutt out of the way. They wanted Nargis. It was on the front page.” Last Sunday afternoon, the cast included mistress of ceremonies, Baroness Sandip Verma; Hindi film producer Vashu Bhagnani, who has made Coolie No 1, Hero No 1 and Om Jai Jagadish, and apparently intends shooting four movies in London; and the Foreign Office minister of state Lord Tariq Ahmad.
Ahmad, who was urged to become the UK government minister for Bollywood,
had some catchy lines, too. He spoke fondly of his late mother and “Aunty Sunita” going every other Sunday to the Cinema Grand in Clapham Junction to see the latest Bollywood releases.
“One thing Bollywood did more than anything else for the community here in the United Kingdom was it was a home away from home,” he said. “It brought people together. It did not matter what your background, religion or community was.
“It was Amitabh Bachchan who famously said, ‘What the movie theatre does when you sit down – it doesn’t matter whether you’re Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, you’re together as one.’ And that’s the uniqueness of film.”
Urged by Prakash to promote UK-India co-productions, Ahmad sounded a converted man.
Speaking as a British government minister, he said: “Gopi just said about Indo-UK relations and the roadmap. I was saying to Akshayji, ‘I think you’ve set the ball rolling.’ There’s much for us to do, and we’ll be focused very much on that.”
Off set, as the crowd tucked into vegetarian high tea, Rai, the author of Hindujas and Bollywood, spoke to Eastern Eye. “I am not a man of Bollywood. I have no great idea about Bollywood and the Hindi cinema. I have specialised in world cinema. My job is to report and write about international cinema for my Hindi-speaking audience,” he said.
At Cannes in 2017, he recalled bumping into Prakash, who invited him to a dinner the Hindujas were hosting at their home, Villa Paradisiaque. The idea of a book came to him as he listened to Gopi talk about how the Hindujas had taken 1,200 Hindi movies to Iran, the Middle East, Egypt and other countries.
Rai was amazed that the Hindujas had allegedly not lost money on a single movie.
“They created a huge economy for Hindi cinema outside India. Nowadays we are watching Baahubali and Dangal and our films are doing very well across the diaspora. But in those days, when there was nothing, they distributed Hindi films on a large scale.
“The Hindujas took commercial films mainstream. These films represent Indian culture. For Indians working or living outside India, it is the tool for connecting with their roots in India.”
In writing the book, he interviewed Gopi and Prakash at length, and also film directors and producers who were grateful that the Hindujas had often come to their rescue with much-needed finance.
But what made writing the book difficult was the lack of printed material.
“I hardly found any documentary material, even though they revived the Hindi film industry at a
time when India was in recession – in the 1950s and 1960s,” Rai revealed.
A couple of Iranian film critics had written about the popularity of Hindi films in their country.
“One wrote that 59 films were released in Iran in one year. They talked about how Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Vyjayanthimala, Rajendra Kumar, Rajiv Kumar and Sunil Dutt visited Iran. But who took them? They never mentioned that. My book tells some of these untold stories.”
As for the appeal of Hindi movies in Iran, the Middle East and elsewhere, Rai summed up: “Happy ending and emotional melodrama because people are so puzzled by their life problems. It’s an emotional catharsis of their feelings.
“And in the narrative and storytelling styles, Iran is very similar to India.”
Hindujas and Bollywood, translated from the original Hindi by Murtaza Ali Khan and published the Vani Prakashan Group in India, was distributed free of charge to the crowd until copies ran out.