Bollywood in Samoa

Saturday, 19 July 2008

I still remember the day a few years ago when my journalist friend Tamani Nair returned to Fiji from Samoa and told me about their famous chilli sauce and something else just as hot – Bollywood cinema.

My first reaction was disbelief. After all, even in Fiji it took a long time for non-Fijians to even consider spending three hours watching romantic drama and scantily clad Indian heroines running around trees with besotted lads in tow. But after a few decades it caught on, especially in rural Fiji where Fijian farmers worked alongside Indo-Fijians in the fields. It kinda made sense.

But in Samoa ?

Well Bollywood certainly fired things up a few years ago. In fact television stations had no choice but to schedule back to back Hindi film and drama so they could meet the demand. And the fans were not Indians, but full-on Samoans.

Sure, Bollywood has been flavour of the moment across Europe, the US and Australia for a few years. But that’s been largely due to the success of art house films including Monsoon Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham. Oh, and a few achievements and scandals involving Indian stars.

Now I’d missed out on investigating this the last time I was in Samoa. So naturally, this time, it had to be explored. What else is an Indian supposed to do when he has a cab driver in Apia telling you he “only watches Bollywood for the song and dance”.

Well, it all seems to have started with my lot. Yep, Indo Fijians and their predilection for Bollywood resulted in Samoan university students returning from Fiji with DVDs in their bags.

In no time the phenomenon caught on, TV stations started running shows and video store owners like Oscar started stocking Bollywood DVDs. Oscar reckons the dramas are popular because Samoans feel comfortable with clean family drama, comedy and music.

But my friend Chris Sablan says melodrama, issues of class conflict, and rags to riches tales also appeal to Samoans. He says these “valorise the poor…showing them to possess undeniable moral strength and dignity”.  In a deeply Christian community, it’s not hard to see the strength of such an argument.

But it’s Lisha Sablan, Chris’s sister who inspires me to organise a Bollywood gathering at my journalist friend Cherrelle Jackson’s place. We film Lisha watching a movie with friends.

I never really thought doing this on our last night would work. Well it almost didn’t because of dramas with the TV set and all. But every minute we tape is worth the dramas that precede it. We watch the most expensive film ever made in Bollywood – Devdas. It stars two icons Aishwarya Rai and Sharukh Khan, whose photos Lisha carries around with her on her Blackberry. She’s watched Devdas a couple of times but you can see that she still gets a rush during her favourite scenes. And when Aishwarya appears, the guys wolf whistle away, just like the fellas do at the cinema in India.

In the end, I honestly stopped trying to understand why Bollywood works for Samoans. As Chris Sablan points out, it was the first non-Hollywood produced, non-Caucasian dominated TV trend that caught fire in Samoa. And the fire still burns, as Lisha’s enthusiasm attests.

But importantly, it’s just another example of how things with universal appeal most certainly transcend cultural and geographical boundaries.

And that includes a touch of romance, drama and just that bit of masala spicy mix, Indian style.

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