That the grand-daughter of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and the daughter of Murtaza Bhutto, controversially killed in a police encounter when his sister Benazir was at the helm in Pakistan, has chosen to write on Hindi cinema, Turkish soap operas and Korean pop, intrigued me no end. Educated as she was at Bernard College in Columbia University and at SOAS in London, Fatima Bhutto, the author of New Kings of the World, focuses in the book on the decline of America’s worldwide cultural supremacy and the concomitant rise of a largely Bollywood driven new global pop culture.
America’s pop culture — represented by Coca-Cola, jazz, jeans, rock-n-roll and Hollywood — was once the only global pop culture available and it catered mainly to Third World elites. The American culture was spread not just by its inherent coolness but also by the American Defence Complex that helped export this cultural power.
The American military has been the most widely deployed army in history, and it once maintained a massive infrastructure outside its borders with bases across all continents. At its height, in 1968, more than one million American troops were deployed in 54 countries. They brought their cultures with them; their films, their music, their tastes and their products. Global affinity to Coca-Cola, rock-n-roll, and blue jeans was in fact born out of American military bases. With just under 2,00,000 personnel overseas today, marking the lowest American troop deployment in six decades, it’s argued that as troop numbers have decreased, so too has American cultural dominance.
The book tells us about the new global pop culture that has emerged from the East and has surpassed America’s monopoly of soft power since the end of World War II. The primary focus here though is on Bollywood and how it has travelled to over seventy countries riding piggyback on the unparalleled stardom of Shah Rukh Khan.
Fatima Bhutto does a scholarly study of the evolution of Hindi cinema in the process. Bollywood’s early stars, Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar, and Dev Anand, were all inspired by Nehru’s ideals of nation-building, but the growing inequality and corruption of the 1970s led to the rise of the anti-establishment Angry Young Man personified by Amitabh Bachchan. “It’s only in the 1990s that Bollywood’s historic left-of-centre ideal is finally defeated. The 90s hero no longer danced in sugarcane fields with farmers but in London’s Trafalgar Square with a gang of leather mini-skirted blondes”, Bhutto points out.
Bollywood’s narrative took a paradigm shift notably through the films of Karan Johar “that recast the NRIs as the epitome of sophisticated modernity, as the masters of global capital and international savoir faire”. No longer were stories set in rural India but in Indian mega cities, or else in American and European capitals. Shah Rukh Khan epitomized Bollywood’s nouveau riche aesthetic. The yuppie hero was carefully packaged in a flexibily secular modernity with traditional values in urbanized settings. This hero, while driving Ferraris, buying clothes at the Gap, and keeping posters of Madonna and Micky Mouse in his bedroom, still bends to touch his mother’s feet every morning.
Fatima Bhutto has traveled extensively in course of exploring popular culture emerging from the East. Her most surprising discovery was to find an entire subculture of Bollywood fans in Peru, where Shah Rukh Khan had attained the status of a demigod. Indigenous Peruvians who migrated into capital Lima from the Andean highlands and who didn’t speak English, they quite knew all the Hindi lyrics of Bollywood songs. Campo de Marte, a park in downtown Lima, was filled with people every Sunday dancing to Bollywood music. Women turned shawls into saris and stuck sequins on their foreheads as bindis. Bollywood films make the Peruvians feel seen; they see their struggles and their dreams mirrored in the story lines.
No wonder the Limenos have been stirred by Khan’s films that abound with themes of high family values. There’re stories galore in Lima which follow a pattern of deep despair being lifted by watching films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Kal Ho Naa Ho. A petite fortysomething housewife Marlid, for example, was so inspired by Khan’s films that she got rid of her old alcoholism and, having married thereafter, she named her son Aryan Valentino, after Khan’s own son!
Though primarily focused on India, this book also briefly touches upon two other cultural industries challenging American soft power: Turkey and South Korea.
A dizi is a soap opera for television in Turkey. Often adapted from Turkish literary classics that run over two hours, every dizi has its original soundtrack and can have up to fifty main characters. ‘Magnificent Century’, a dizi based on the life of the tenth Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, has reportedly been sold to over hundred countries and seen by over 500 million people. The previous Guinness World Record holding American TV programme, The Bold and the Beautiful, watched by a peak of 26.2 million people worldwide in 2008, looks like a run-of-the-mill show in comparison. The behind-the-scene account of Turkey’s biggest TV extravaganza and the way it has impacted global pop culture has been described deftly by the author.
Fatima Bhutto also travels to South Korea to see how K-pop transformed the world of popular music. K-pop has become a $5 billion-dollar-a-year industry. In 2016 K-pop music videos were watched 24 billion times on YouTube, with 80 percent of the views coming from outside South Korea. Interestingly, YouTube didn’t even know videos could be watched over one billion times until Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ famously broke their counter.
Indian films, Turkish television dramas or Korean pop songs have more universal appeal than a piece of American work. They look modern and appealing in the same way that American film, soap opera or music looks. But uniquely, these are all cultural products set firmly in the realm of values. They are concerned with principles, with how one defeats temptation, greed, and avoids dishonor. So, for the most part, there is less violence, no nudity and romantic relations are portrayed in a chaste manner. Bollywood films exemplify these traits. A K-pop song too may be enjoyed with one’s grandmother in the room, no lyrics have to be beeped out. A Turkish dizi might as well be watched with the entire family in attendance.
American or Western pop culture is no longer a vaunted soft power. After President Trump used ‘Game of Thrones’ imagery to announce renewed sanctions on Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, dismissed American decision by highlighting America’s declining cultural, rather than military, cache:
“The United States is much weaker than it was forty years ago. The United State’s soft power is worn out. It has been destroyed”. Reading the book the Ayatollah’s words would appear utterly convincing, for sure.
(The review has been done by Ajay K Singh, who is a Joint Secretary rank Officer in the Government of Jharkhand. Singh is a bibliophile having a voracious appetite for reading)