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Bollywood Follies
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19957 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
1,920 Words |
| Author
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Rajesh Alfred
Rajesh Alfred is a writer based in the Washington, D.C.,
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SHOW BUSINESS
Shashi Tharoor
New York: Acade, 1992
304 pp., $19.95
Shashi Tharoor, the British-born Indian author who, much like Peter Sellers in The Party, walked out of a prop onto the Western literary stage last June and won for his book The Great Indian Novel and himself tremendous critical acclaim and generous review attention, may very likely have done it again. His latest novel, Show Business, though not prompted by an epic of the magnitude of the Mahabharata, nevertheless deals with, or at least purports to deal with, an equally gargantuan theme: "Bollywood," Tharoor's name for the locus of the largest film industry in the world.
Show Business at the very least proves that Tharoor is an author of industry, intelligence, and wit, who brings to his work elaborate paraphernalia of linguistic devices, albeit of the kind that rich campus kids might blasphemously giggle over between tokes on a reefer. Regardless, he is indeed an author of world stature.
Show Business, though clearly not inspired, was also not intended to be a novel of any significant dimension--if it was intended to be a novel at all, that is. Among the many things it does to imitate art and make literature, in the fore it very plainly lampoons the life and times of India's (and quite probably the world's) most popular matinee idol, Amitabh Bachchan, and in the aft, simplistically recants the assumed politico-religious reasons for the immense fascination of this "great" people with the cinematic medium.
Third World or not, its masses perspiring beads of abject poverty maybe, India happens to be the world's most prolific producer of movies and Indians perhaps the most avid, if not also the most gullible, movie buffs. In a land that can only be appropriately described as a melting pot within a melting pot of cultures and languages, the Indian move culture remains unique, cutting across all the traditional barriers of class and sect, rich and poor. Against this mammoth, even if tawdry, backdrop Tharoor has set Show Business and attempted to provide us (the Western reader especially) through its many frayed holes with a few unsurprising and unrevealing glimpses of the corruption, nepotism, and human misery that oil the wheels of this giant industry.
Ashok Banjara (a simple device, the initials are those of Amitabh
...
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