Ali Baba Aur 40 Chor and the History of the Arabian Nights in South Asia

Watched this movie last week, SUPER fun! Costumes, swords, Hema Malini, horses, all kinds of good things! Not necessarily enough there-there for a full review, but a interesting jumping off place to think about Orientalism and circularity and all kinds of things.

First, the movie! It’s one of the Soviet-Indian coproductions. There weren’t many of them, but it was a thing that happened. Russia had the money to produce films, and India had the good plots and stars who were popular in Russia. Mostly what I find interesting about the coproductions is how natural they were. In the Wests mental map, India and Russia are totally different regions/ethnicities/histories/everything. But in reality, they are almost border states. People, and traditions, and languages, and skills, and all of that migrated between the outskirts of what was the USSR and what is now India for hundreds of years.

And this is what we call Orientalism! The need to put people in little tidy boxes. India is part of “The Orient”, ooooooooo! While Russia is almost part of Europe. Orientalism (the collective term for the linguists, historians, anthropologists, tourists, novelists, everyone in Western Europe who helped create a vision of Europe’s colonial states) had to justify the essential difference between “us” and “them” in order to explain why “us” had to make “them” more like “us”. Acknowledging that “us” and “them” are more of a “we” in some regions would acknowledge that all these boundaries are artificial.

So this movie has a cast that is have Hindi film stars, and have Turkmenistani and Uzbekistani actors. And I honestly didn’t notice! For half the film, I thought they were just character actors I’d never seen before, and then I looked them up and learned they were from whole other countries. Because racism is stupid, they all more or less looked the same, Dharmendra could have been Turkmenistani and the Turkmenistani actors could have been North Indian. And it’s a story set in a feudal village in an arid moderate climate, which has the same social structure and broad concerns as any village in the same sort of climate.

The cheerful uncaring melting pot approach to the cast expanded to the costumes and the plot. Dharmendra’s father is a “merchant”, his brother is a “store owner”, he is a brave fighter type. He falls in love with a princess in distress (Hema) and his enemy is the bandit who raids the merchant caravans bringing goods to their village. ESPECIALLY because the bandit destroyed the village’s dam cutting off their vital water supply. And there’s a magical spirit of the cave who protects the bandit’s treasure, and Zeenat Aman who’s merchant father was killed by the bandit and now she is out for revenge. And Prem Chopra as the evil usurper who kills Hema’s Dad. Just a lot of stuff! But why not? It’s all fun, and the essential conflicts and stories are all universal. Family relationship drama, falling in love, revenge, greed, that can be set anywhere and acted out by anyone.

And this is what the Arabian Nights tales are all about. They were a bunch of local stories that were heard by a European tourist, he wrote them up and brought them back to Europe, his book was a bestseller and eventually cheap reprints popped up all over, including all the way back to the countries where the oral tradition started. Those written versions were then turned back into oral versions as the stories were repeated, and finally into films.

Ali Baba Aur 40 Chor is part of a long heritage of narratives and performances and films that draw into question the essential concepts of Indian identity. Rosie Meyer wrote a great book pointing out how this is at the very heart of Hindi film history. The accepted first Indian film is a Hindi movie called Raja Harischandra made by a middle-class family man based on a story from Hinduism. Nothing wrong with that, lovely that this family was inspired to fund a film out of their own money and very impressive that they built a whole film studio out of it. But the first Indian talking film was Alam Ara, a fantastical magic film that drew upon the whole crazy tradition of mixed up narratives. It had magic, princes, princesses, a fairy land, everything mixed up and lovely. And it was a huge HUGE hit. One of many huge fantasy hits in Hindi film that continued on with Aan, this movie, my beloved Rajkumari, all the way through to now. It’s a parelal version of Hindi cinema, less about the middle-class Hindu community and more about the mixed up polyglot world of Bombay.

This film takes that mixed up world and expands it to show us that the whole country with it’s boundaries and divisions is a little bit mixed up. The line between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan culture and North Indian culture, very fuzzy. Those borders are just lines on a map, they don’t reflect the lived reality of hundreds of years. Everything that divides us is just as imaginary and magic thinking as a cave of wonders.