Why ABCD 2 proves Bollywood can't get Make in India right
On Sunday, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi spiritedly led the world into exploring the ancient Indian art of yoga, Varun Dhawan was impressing packed theatres with some feisty imported dancing, in the process raking in a whopping Rs 17.5 crore at the domestic box office for his new film ABCD 2.
Varun's latest has so far enjoyed the highest opening weekend (Rs 46.35 crore) for any Hindi film this year and is being hailed as the next blockbuster out of Bollywood. At the end of the year when top ten lists are drawn, most trade pundits believe ABCD 2 will have minted enough to make the cut.
The point of irony about the grand success story of Remo D'Souza's film, hailed as a new-age Indian dance flick, is that it actually hawks very little Indianness by way of USP - just as the first ABCD film. Even hardcore fans would agree that the film is nothing more than a desi Step Up rehash.
If Make in India is PM Modi's biz buzz for the world, Bollywood's theory of realising that slogan has always seemed a bit amusing. For our filmmakers, the idea of Make in India has forever seemed to be about picking up Western filmy fads (sometimes entire scripts) and reorganising them to suit Indian tastes. ABCD 2, mainly rehashing several Western popular dance forms, is only the latest Hindi film to showcase that template.
The notion comes across as far removed from V Shantaram's dance hits Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baaje or Navrang, original classics that continue to represent the bona fide Indian dance movie. But then, the picture of a dhoti-clad gent performing nritya to beats of Hindustani classical-based music is obviously not as cool as Gen Now hero Varun Dhawan hiphopping amid pyrotechnics, with Prabhudheva's elastic moonwalk thrown in for greater effect.
The comparison between the original and the inspired Bollywood dance movie would perhaps not be relevant but for a significant sociocultural context. We live in times when the spirit of fierce nationalism has supposedly resurged as a bestseller brand in the popular Indian psyche. Apart from some forced sentimentalism concerning a bunch of Indians winning a dance contest abroad (the idea was already shown in Happy New Year last year), there is very little that underlines true desi spirit in ABCD 2.
Imported dance forms are nothing new in Bollywood films. Pick a major dancing star of any era at random and you are thinking foreign influence behind his success. The sixties saw Shammi Kapoor emerge as the iconic dancing hero of his generation replicating Elvis Presley's rock n' roll moves. In the eighties, Mithun Chakraborty became a heart-throb of the masses riding his avatar of Bollywood's Disco King. Govinda mixed Michael Jackson's breakdancing moves with self-styled pelvic thrusts to fashion his dances. New-age dancing sensations Hrithik Roshan and Shahid Kapoor have never ventured beyond the safety zone of assorted imported genres.
Make in India, for Bollywood, has rarely ever been about being original. Can a dance movie like ABCD be different?