Little India
The little we know of India comes mainly from books and movies, and the occasional vintage record album like the now classic Concert for Bangladesh by George Harrison in the early 1970s, that gathered the best recording artists at the time for a benefit show for what actually was the former East Pakistan. But make no mistake about it, the lines between Bangladesh and Pakistan and India and even Kashmir began to blur upon hearing the sitar of Ravi Shankar, the maestro who has outlived his devoted student Harrison, sometimes also known as The Quiet Beatle. No wonder he was so silent: half his soul was swimming in the Ganges to keep himself sane during the height of Beatlemania. It was the time of the Sexy Sadie Maharishi, of Hare Krishna and Hare Vishnu and the Mahavishnu Orchestra.
But before the recent Slumdog Millionaire craze there was Gandhi that also reaped Oscar glory for the story of the father of modern India. The lead Ben Kingsley become so synonymous with the role, that when moviegoers see him on screen in another movie they say, “Look, it’s Gandhi!”
Slumdog has no instantly recognizable lead but is an excellent showcase of ensemble acting, through the three sets of the three lead characters Salim, Jamal and Latika, to the supporting players, from the typical game show host to the execrable gangsters in the underside of Mumbai.
It has been described as a feel-good movie despite scenes of torture and a child falling into excrement, as well as the death of one of the lead characters in a bathtub filled with money, yet despite the odds the protagonist wins his millions and gets the girl in the end.
There’s a dizzying chase scene through the slums of Mumbai, the squalor as seen through handheld camera reminiscent of City of God with its depiction of inner city Rio de Janeiro and its gaggle of lowlifes and child survivors.
The closing credits had the only song-and-dance number in Slumdog, a tribute to Bollywood whence it came, a departure from what we usually see on the Indian cable channel where the actors break out into song and dance at the drop of a hat or turban.
“All Indians know how to dance,” a wire report quoted one of the actors as saying. The movie, being distributed by an independent arm, has however not been screened commercially, although pirated DVDs of the movie litter the sidewalks and malls of the sweltering city, the resourceful cineaste does not have to wander into Little India for a copy.
In the underside of Quiapo the country’s armpit might be found a rare work of Indian filmography, Ritwil Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star, set in the late 1950s to early ’60s in rural India. The language may sound strange but there are subtitles to get by, and the movie itself is a kind of realism à la Brocka and Bernal where the heroine is a long-suffering martyr who puts family ahead of any of her own interests, including losing her boyfriend to her younger sister, until she contracts TB and winds up in a sanitorium in the mountains.
Already we see traces of an imminent Bollywood, through the singer-musician of an elder brother who tries to restore his sister’s health and pay back the support she had given him when he was still a struggling artist.
Cloud-Capped Star was described as having an “impressionist” soundtrack, and true enough there are times the musical instruments we are hard put at identifying resemble the thrusting of swords into flesh, the pain felt by the heroine like so much aural stigmata.
Closer to home there was a finalist in last year’s Cinemalaya, a draft script on an Indian family residing in the Philippines, with the rather longish title bearing a series of numbers ending in the predictable and somewhat racial profiling 5-6.
Unfortunately, indie filmmaker Eman de la Cruz said they ran out of actors for the parts, or so few Indians wanted to audition that they had to shelve the project. A pity because had it pushed through, it could have beaten Slumdog in ushering renewed interest in things Indian on local shores.
De la Cruz and fellow ufo Films cohort Michiko Yamamoto however continued to work on the script, renaming it The Singhs of Singalong, which won first prize in the Palanca awards last year in the screenplay category.
There must be innumerable stories there waiting to be told, not just in Singalong, but also in nearby Paco what with its Mahatma Gandhi Street, intersecting San Gregorio where traffic can build up during special Indian holiday.
Of course there was the first conjugal electric fan bought in a merchandise store called Bombay Plaza along Grove Street Los Baños 26 years ago, which appliance went through several residences until it was all but falling apart, although the motor was still running. The fan came with a free T-shirt advertising the store.
As kids, too, we were of the generation that was threatened with the Bumbay as bogeyman, who was just out in the street ready to take away naughty or disobedient children.
In cuisine there’s the staple chicken curry, which can be found in turo-turos from Port Area to Pila and Pagadian. In the old abandoned neighborhood there used to be a Betamax rental shop owned by an Indian which we called Bombay Max, and a computer rental and fax shop owned by another Indian which we called Bombay Fax.
We have yet to venture to Little India located along a stretch of UN Avenue, near corner Quirino Avenue Extension with the Sikh temple, where there are rows of Indian stores and curios selling spices and whatnot, the residents there not seeming about to ad lib and improvise with music in the background.
There really is something opaque about the culture, which can’t be said of all cultures exotic and foreign. Which is why they are consigned as outsiders by profilers referring to them as 5-6 — banned from the streets on Wednesdays, otherwise the stereotype motor-riding collector of loans — in the same manner that we too are outsiders to them.
The Indian culture here will remain impenetrable until such time that works like The Singhs of Singalong will finally be put on film, and so serve as a kind of bridge of understanding, never mind transparency.
