Erika Varez, late to class, bounds up the stairs barefoot, having already left her shoes on the landing. Her long, straight black hair is loose around her shoulders, she wears a block-printed blue kameez and loose black churidar leggings. Her students have already started practicing without her; ‘Maar Dala’ is playing loudly on the speakers. In Devdas , the iconic Madhuri Dixit dances to the song. Here, at the Centro Cultural India in Lima, it is being performed by twelve Peruvian girls.
Erika drops her bag at the entrance and pauses for a moment, touching a poster of Saraswati, Hindu goddess of the arts, the paper yellow with time, that hangs near the door. Erika bows her head down to touch the floor of the dance studio in submission, the way a Hindu would enter a temple, before she springs up and runs into class. Her students, ranging from a teenager in a football jersey to an elderly woman in a knee brace, are relieved that their teacher has finally arrived. Erika stops the music and like a classical Bharatnatyam teacher, sings the beats out loud, snapping her fingers — dum dum ta ra ra dum — as the girls flop about.
No! Erika shouts as her students fall to the ground, crawling on the floor and smiling as they imitate Madhuri, the courtesan broken by longing for the man she cannot have, Shah Rukh Khan’s alcoholic Devdas. “No!” Erika shouts at their happy faces, “Suffre! Suffre!”
Jhonn Freddy Bellido, Erika’s manager and best friend, and I are watching the class from outside. Jhonn, wearing thick black and white glasses, is the founder of Bollywood Peru. He is a connoisseur of Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and even Pakistani, films. His family are originally from the highlands, Ayacucho, but he was born here in Lima. Though his day
job, carpentry, was handed down by his father, Jhonn is an entrepreneur. Besides running his Indian cinema appreciation group, he manages a troupe of twelve Bollywood dancers and works for the Indian embassy’s cultural center as an ambassador of sorts. Over the weekend he organized a screening of Jab Harry Met Sejal which stars SRK as a grumbly, bad-boy tour guide who gets roped into traveling the continent of Europe by Anushka Sharma in order to find her engagement ring which she has lost somewhere between Lisbon, Budapest, Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna and Frankfurt. Two hundred people attended the screening, Jhonn tells me. “But Shah Rukh Khan is not my favorite,” he confesses. “Rajinikanth is.”
Erika teaches Bollywood dance at the center twice a week but tonight Jhonn has also organized a performance of his dancers at Mantra, one of Lima’s few Indian restaurants. Besides his small black shoulder bag, Jhonn pulls a carry-on bag behind him as we leave. Three of his troupe will be performing tonight and Jhonn chooses and designs all the costumes. He goes to Gamarra, where there’s nothing but tailors for ten blocks. There, you can order a lehenga or sari for $20, but Jhonn is a perfectionist. He spends about $100 an outfit. It’s the fabric, he says, good cotton is expensive. The girls dance at weddings, cultural fairs as well as Diwali and Indian Independence Day parties, making about $30-$50 per dancer for a show. Once a month they dance at Mantra, and Jay Patel, the restaurant’s Gujarati owner, advertises the evening on his Facebook page.
In the Uber to Mantra, Erika and Raisa, another of the dancers, wearing blue eyeshadow and her hair pulled into a tight bun, sit in the back with Jhonn. Erika sings a bhangra song, stopping to check if she’s pronouncing the Punjabi correctly by Googling the lyrics. ‘Mi Gente’ by J. Balvin is on the radio, but Erika sings the bhangra in a low note, as if she doesn’t hear the reggaeton at all.
In the restaurant, decorated with Indian miniature paintings and a small rack selling brightly colored spices and tea, tables are filling up — aside from the owner, Jay Patel, who moved to Lima from Ahmedabad ten years ago, there are no Indians. Limenos on dates, families, even the director of Peru’s tourism promotion board, sit at the tables facing a large TV and order their dinner.
Erika is the first to come out, dressed with jasmine in her hair, a red bindi on her forehead and henna painted delicately over her fingertips. Again, she touches her hand to the floor and then to her head in submission before she begins to dance. Raisa and Victoria follow, all three are unbelievably natural. They move gracefully, singing the lyrics of classic Bollywood songs as though they have grown up speaking Hindi, their eyes and their hands moving perfectly, seamlessly, as the audience claps and cheers.
Jay Patel sits at a table next to mine, his spectacles on a string around his neck. “God knows why the hell,” Patelji shakes his head, his Indian accent thick and untouched by Spanish, “this Shah Rukh Khan is so much popular here. There are fans and fanatic fans of Shah Rukh Khan, not even in India I have seen so much.” He estimates that the rest of Bollywood accounts for just 10 percent of Peru’s feverish adulation and it’s “cultural” movies that they love, the kind “where they wear saris and family things” happen.
Patelji scrunches his face and shakes his head again. “My personal guess is he looks like Peruvian or something.” He turns to Jhonn — who, as much as he likes food, is studiously avoiding the cup of rich milky chai in front of him — and says in a mix of Spanish and Hindi. “Parece cholo, hain na, Shah Rukh?” (He looks like a cholo, doesn’t he, Shah Rukh?)
Peru began its tryst with Indian cinema, or cines Hindu as it’s known, in the early 1950s. Unlike other markets where Bollywood is popular, Egypt or Nigeria for example, Peru has neither historic ties with India nor a sizable NRI population. Until 1963, the two countries didn’t even have diplomatic relations. Fifty-six years later, there hasn’t been any significant bilateral business or political cooperation between India and Peru. Though the steel magnates Tata set up shop in 2010 and trade is set to grow, the momentum is still relatively slow. According to the Indian Embassy, no more than 400 Indians live in the entire country.
Two films, 1954’s Mendigar o Morir , Boot Polish in the original Hindi, and the 1957 classic Madre India , kicked off Lima’s love affair with Bollywood. At the time, there were two cinema halls that showed Indian films regularly, City Hall and Metropolitan. A third, Colosseo, had screenings too, and along with Metropolitan was in a poorer neighborhood than the more centrally located City Hall. Not only were the Bollywood classics instant blockbusters, but Madre India was screened especially on Mother’s Day as well as during Holy Week. “You can understand Mother’s Day,” Professor Ricardo Bedoya, Peru’s most eminent film critic, told me as we sat in his apartment overlooking the Malecon, “but what’s interesting is that during Semana Santos, people here feel you don’t go to the movies to have a good time but to suffer, to feel empathy with the suffering of Christ.”
It was mainly poorer Limenos who flocked to those three cinema halls, migrant laborers and women who left their homes in the Andean highlands to come and work in the capital. The films are easy to understand, they don’t condescend to their audience and are built around the nobility of suffering and the valor of the poor and dispossessed. Boot Polish was produced by Raj Kapoor but it was the arrival of El Joker ( Mera Naam Joker ) in the 1970s, a Kapoor starrer, that truly cemented Peru’s affinity with cines Hindu.
Extracted from Chapter V of New Kings of the World: The Rise and Rise of Eastern Pop Culture (Aleph) by Fatima Bhutto .
