Salaam Namaste

Over the weekend I watched the Bollywood movie Salaam Namaste. The plot is based around an Indian couple made of young, aspiring adults who fall in love and endure hardships and changes within their relationship. I watched it with a Middle Eastern friend of mine who said the movie was really controversial since it was the first time a couple was shown living together and doing loving things. The movie, however, was one of the biggest box office hits in 2005 and was the biggest hit overseas of the same year.
My preconceived notions of the movie were that it would have a lot of traditional Indian clothes and other items, have a couple of corny dance/sing-song scenes, and be very conservative. The movie, to my surprise, was extremely Western in its choices of clothing. While it seemed to incorporate what I perceived to be the “Indian style”, the clothes were still like what every day, American young adults would wear. The movie did indeed have a bunch of corny dance/sing-song scenes. I personally thought it was hilarious to watch. Each dance scene would start with some deep voice saying a word like “cool” in an extremely cheesy way. I think I might have annoyed my friend with my constant mimicking of these words. Salaam Namaste was not as conservative as I expected it to be. Although nothing was really risqué, I guess the mild showing of affection within the movie might have been controversial in India. The movie would have surely been rated PG-13 at the most in America. Another thing I noticed about the movie was its clean comedy. There was never an outrageous curse word or a revolting act throughout the movie. It was honestly quite refreshing to see a hit movie not be filled with vulgarity. Although most of my preconceived notions on the traditional aspect of the movie were dispelled, I was definitely right about it being corny.
Some anthropological concepts I noticed while watching the movie were the emic perspective and ethnocentrism. I used the emic perspective by getting my friend to explain to me why aspects of the movie were seen as controversial. I thought I exhibited ethnocentrism because, as sad as it is to say, I felt my culture was “superior” since Bollywood was trying to mimic the Western culture in certain ways. Although the movie was very cheesy, I found it to be unintentionally hilarious because of the corny parts of the movie. I would say that I had a good time watching this movie. I enjoyed the movie, and I would definitely not be opposed to watching another Bollywood film.