Today's most pressing global concerns make up Bollywood's brave new frontier, notes a fervid Irrfan Khan in conversation with Gamal Nkrumah The multiple Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire and New York propelled him to Western stardom. Yet he remains an icon of Indian cinema, and was honoured along with Anil Kapoor at the 33 rd Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF). Irrfan Khan has taken on many guises in the course of his trailblazing career, often with the Islamic inflections of his own religious heritage and aggressive heavy breathing, an arresting juxtaposition with audiences worldwide. For those fond of gloating, Slumdog Millionaire, the book, is an unsatisfactory read. The film, however, is a world apart. No recriminations, no settling of scores -- simply life in the tough and rough shantytowns of India's metropolises. The heart-wrenching story evolves into a downbeat coming-of-age fable that pulsates with passion. The benefits of Bollywood are innumerable and variegated. Small wonder then that with 25 films on show, India was the Guest of Honour at the 33 rd CIFF. And for the next generation of Indian actors and actresses, the latest trends in Indian cinema could mean the difference between success and failure, happiness and despair, fortune and financial ruin. Hollywood, Khan insists, continues to be the prime inspirational motivator of Bolloywood's best movies. Bollywood is India's answer to America's Hollywood. However, "Bollywood can't compete with Hollywood," he states nonchalantly. Yet, contrary to common misconceptions, Bollywood is not megalithic. There are three great regional traditions, or foci in Indian cinema -- Northern Indian films, Southern Indian films and Eastern Indian films. The three strands of Indian cinema have radically different approaches to movie- making, according to Irrfan Khan. "In South India, lead actors and stars are gods," Khan explains. "East Indian cinema simply apes North Indian cinema, but with an intrinsic cultural specificity." The jury of this year's CIFF was headed by none other than Malayalam (the official South Indian language of the State of Kerala), filmmaker Adoor Gopalakrishnan. His lightness of touch with a voice of an archangel bludgeoned by volume made space for South Indian declensions to reverberate and shine through the CIFF. According to Khan, some of the East Indian directors have made a tremendous impact on Bollywood. He identified directors such as Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, pioneers of Tollywood (East Indian or Bengali cinema) as trendsetters. South Indian filmmakers, on the other hand, highlight the local Dravidian languages and tend to zoom in on parochial themes. "It is extremely difficult in the kind of event such as the Cairo International Film Festival to find films representative of the sprawling spectrum of Indian filmmaking," Khan concedes. "There are the box-office hits, the money-making commercial films, on the one hand. And, on the other, there are the so-called parallel cinema -- which is equally important as far as I am concerned." For Bollywood directors, timing is all. Social problems are tackled head on. Yet the viewer is permitted to dream, to enter a trance-like experience where he or she could reflect on the forbidding realities of contemporary Indian life. Irrfan Khan, born in 1962 in Jaipur, Rajasthan, played the diabolical police inspector in Slumdog Millionaire for which he was awarded the prestigious Screen Actors Guild Award. He also won two Filmfare Awards. He excels at depicting cops and secret agents. He was Roshan, the FBI official, in the Bollywood 2009 thriller directed by Kabir Khan and produced by Aditya Chopra -- screenplay by Sandeep Srivastava. The film revolves around emotional entanglements resulting from the aftermath of 9/11. "Films like New York, inspired by Hollywood, hint at a new trend in Indian cinema," Irrfan Khan told Al-Ahram Weekly. "I do not like to use the term escape when referring to Indian cinema," he confesses. "Yes, some films recreate a dream world, a fantasia of song, dance and drama." He notes that there is a trend in Indian cinema that involves actively engaging the layman, the ordinary Indian man and woman, in the dramatic spell that films can furnish. Song and dance will remain permanent fixtures of Indian cinema in the years to come. "The uniqueness of Indian cinema lies in the sense of celebration of life often expressed in song and dance that is born and bred in the Indian experience," Khan contends. Slumdog Millionaire creatively used such elements to bolster its Indian credentials. "Song and dance will always be an integral part of the Indian film." Language and class have emerged as modern themes of Indian thrillers -- Bollywood and Tollywood -- a reminder that so much of the Indian experience is geared towards the bitter struggle for survival, and not just entertainment. Nothing superfluous is contained in Bollywood. The Pritish Nandy Communications feature film Saluun premiered at this year's CIFF. Indian woman actresses, as much as their men, are wandering along the corridors of cinematic power, whipping a willing audience into acknowledging their presence. "For many years women were some kind of a decorative embellishment of the Indian movie," Khan asserts. "This is fast changing." He stressed that the trend is for women in Indian cinema to be depicted as real people. "There is a move away from the larger than life idealistic woman who sacrifices her life for her husband, children and brother. The very notion of Mother India is fast changing. Woman is a warrior, just like man. Even though her weapons can sometimes be different from the daggers of man." Khan acknowledges that Bollywood hungrily regurgitates the sex and violence as exemplified in Hollywood box-office hits. The London-based director Asif Kapadia gave Khan a lead role in The Warrior (2001). He also starred in The Namesake, directed by Mira Nair in 2006. Maqbool (2003), an Indian adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, was an instant success story, critically acclaimed both in India and abroad. Soon after graduation and after obtaining a masters degree from the National School of Drama, New Delhi, in 1987, Khan landed a cameo in Salaam Bombay in 1988. Born to a Muslim aristocratic Nawab family, he happily played the role of the revolutionary Urdu poet and Marxist activist of India Makhdoom Mohiuddin in Kahkashan produced by Ali Sardar Jafri.
