Word: indianism
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...cultural stew is simmering and ready to boil over. Just as Indian food graduated from big-city exotica to mainstream international cuisine, Indi-pop culture could become a new part of American pop culture. It certainly has the energy and glamour to curry favor with more than those who favor curry. It might even gain the hipness it has in Britain--where, as Meera Syal, the original librettist of Bombay Dreams, boldly said, "Brown is the new black...
This process, notes writer Hanif Kureishi, "is inevitable, because culture moves forward by taking new and original voices from the margin and moving them into the center. You saw it with Elvis. You saw it with Toni Morrison." If Bombay Dreams is a hit, you may see it with Indian composer A.R. Rahman. You can already see it in the critical and commercial success of novelists like Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy. Their success has led the way for a slew of South Asians, including Michelle de Kretser (from Sri Lanka), Monica Ali (from Bangladesh) and Mohsin...
...most fertile areas for East-West cross-pollinations is music. At S.O.B.'s in New York City, Rekha Malhotra, a.k.a. DJ Rekha, plays bhangra, a cool fusion of electronic dance and hip-hop beats with traditional Indian folk sounds. So popular is Rekha, 33, that her parties have become tourist attractions. "I can go anywhere in the country," she says, "and someone will go, 'Oh, I've been to Basement Bhangra.'" At Sonotheque in Chicago, Brian Keigher, 31, spins a popular fusion style known as "Asian underground"--fast, irresistibly danceable music studded with sitars and thumping tablas. Wade your...
From the dance floor, Indian music percolates to the recording studio. Hip-hopper Jay-Z and British-based Indian producer Panjabi MC served up Beware of the Boys, which featured Jay-Z rapping over a remixed version of a song that Panjabi had made a hit in Britain and India. Even Britney Spears is getting her Ganges on; she used British-South Asian producer Rishi Rich on her last album. And you know a culture is hip when it generates a superhero; that's Bombaby, a cult comic-book out of California...
Then there's Bollywood--Hollywood in Bombay and, by extension, all the country's dozen separate film industries--producing the Indian musicals that nearly everyone in America has heard of and practically no one in America has seen. Bollywood films provide the primary entertainment for half the globe; the top films earn millions more in U.S. theaters catering to Desi audiences. But Bollywood has not dented the mass, or even the class, movie public. The Oscar-nominated Lagaan took in 10 times as much in the Desi houses as it did when Sony Pictures Classics gave it a general release...