Vaseem
Khan first saw an elephant lumbering down the middle of the road in 1997 when
he arrived in India to work as a consultant. It was the most unusual thing he'd
ever encountered and served as the inspiration for The Unexpected Inheritance of
Inspector Chopra.
Mumbai – once
Bombay – is, for many people, the greatest city on the subcontinent. It is
known as the ‘city of dreams’ – people are drawn here from all over the country,
arriving daily by the train and truckload, seeking fortune . . . and fame – in
the world’s most prolific movie industry: Bollywood.
For decades a
microcosm unto itself, in recent years Bollywood has begun to flex its all-singing
all-dancing muscles overseas: three billion tickets are sold to Bollywood
movies each year, half a billion more than Hollywood. Production values are
rising, and foreign distributors are increasingly willing to pin their hopes on
colourful Indian potboilers as marketable fare for a variety of audiences, not
just the Indian diaspora.
The third
novel in my bestselling Baby Ganesh Detective Agency series, The Strange Disappearance of a Bollywood
Star is set in this dynamic, fast-moving environment. In this book
Inspector Ashwin Chopra (Retd) and his faithful one-year-old elephant sidekick,
Ganesha, are on the trail of a kidnapped Indian film star. As Chopra begins to
investigate he soon discovers that, in Bollywood, as in India, truth is often
stranger than fiction ...
The idea for
this novel came to me during the decade I spent working in India in my
twenties. I was based in Mumbai, and quickly learned how Bollywood permeates
the very fabric of life there. From the ubiquitous slums to the glittering
towers of India’s uber-rich the movie industry is a topic of endless conversation
and controversy in this multifaceted mega-city. Like Hollywood, Bollywood is by
turns a vehicle for escapism, and, increasingly, a hard-edged mirror reflecting
the social realities of the day. Bollywood movies are often called ‘masala’
movies, which means that they are composed, like India herself, of many
different, often contradictory, parts – lurid action, coquettish romance, weeping
melodrama, boisterous music, and, of course, those dervish-like dance numbers
that are the signature of the subcontinent’s celluloid tradition.
During my time
in Mumbai it was, perhaps, inevitable – as a lifelong writer with a writer’s
nose for stories – that I would seek to peer behind the scenes of the Indian
movie machine . . . and this was when I first learned about the relationship
between Bollywood and crime.
One day a famed
film producer was gunned down in the street just yards from where I worked in
the bustling suburbs of Mumbai. The producer survived but the incident left me intrigued.
What had precipitated such an act in an industry I had hitherto regarded as exotically
benign?
I began to
research, and what I discovered cast a shadowy illumination into the darker
corners of the Bollywood I had thought I knew.
The Indian
film industry, it appeared, had long been plagued by connections to the
underworld. Because of the Indian government’s refusal to allow film producers
to access regular channels of funding, the door had been left open for criminal
gangs to finance movies, as a means of laundering money. And once they became
entrenched these ‘Bollywood dons’ began to snake their tentacles into all
corners of the industry. Lurid cases of threats against producers, directors,
and actors who refused to toe the line became commonplace.
These
revelations now underpin my latest book, in which I take the opportunity to
explore the magic and absurdity of Bollywood, as Chopra moves through the
smoke-and-mirrors murk of India’s premier movie industry in search of the
kidnapped young actor. Chopra has three mysteries to solve: how did the
criminals manage to abduct the notorious star from in front of a live audience;
why they kidnapped him; and who was
behind the kidnapping.
My aim with these
books was always to take readers on a journey to the heart of modern India. (The
first book in the series The Unexpected
Inheritance of Inspector Chopra, was a Times bestseller, an Amazon Best
Debut, and a Waterstones paperback of the year.) Bollywood is so integral to
the identity of the subcontinent, that it was, perhaps, inevitable that I would
find myself employing the silver screen as a canvas at some point in the series.
Today, as
India marches gloriously towards global superpowerdom, Bollywood has begun to
shed the shackles of its dark past. With the legitimizing of funding for the
movie industry the floodgates have opened, and Bollywood producers have
responded by expanding their ambitions. Bollywood is on a roll – but some
things will never change.
As Chopra
discovers, behind the glitz and glamour there are still dark corners in the subcontinent’s
beating movie heart.
