Can Bollywood Survive Modi?
From the May 2020 issue: Aatish Taseer on how Modi has trampled the founding idea of India  Everybody is just shit-scared and wanting to lie low, a woman who is closely involved with the industry told me recently. This is such a vindictive government. The day before we spoke, tax authorities had raided the home and offices of one of the countrys finest directors, along with those of an actor he worked with. Both are outspoken government critics, and the raid was widely seen as politically motivated. As we talked, a director friend sent me a vanishing message on Signal, the encrypted-communications platform, about a case before Indias Supreme Court. A senior Amazon executive in India was facing arrest, along with others, for a nine-part political drama called Tandav, which includes a portrayal of the Hindu god Shiva that some found objectionable. The director of the series had apologized, and removed the offending scene. And according to the message I received, the court had declined to offer protection (a decision it later revised). The problem, one senior executive for a major streaming service told me later, is that the director is Muslim and the actor is Muslim.  Soon, another showBombay Begumswas under fire, with Indias National Commission for Protection of Child Rights calling on Netflix to pull the series on the grounds that it would pollute the young minds of the children by normalizing drug use. The more credible motivation was that the series normalized interfaith relationships, as well as LGBTQ ones. I got to know Indias movie industry starting in 2013, when I was dating a Bollywood director, a protg of Karan Joharone of the citys biggest producers, known as KJo. Johar is the Hindu half of a storied collaboration with Shah Rukh Khan, a Muslim and one of Bollywoods biggest stars. Their partnership began in the 1990sat first yielding popcorn-and-bubblegum films, and then moving on to iconic post-9/11 dramas such as My Name Is Khan (2010), which dealt with growing Islamophobia worldwide. Bollywood, in its upper echelons, is tight-knit, and through my boyfriend I met the whole A-list in a matter of days. It was a world of blacked-out SUVs that swept into underground garages, where men with walkie-talkies conveyed you up to palatial apartments overlooking the Arabian Sea. The Indian film industry turns out more than 2,000 movies a year. Bollywood, its largest component, produces as many as Hollywood. The intensity of Bollywood celebrity is unmatched. One night, Ranbir KapoorIndias Ryan Gosling, you might say, and the leading man in a movie my boyfriend was directingpicked me up at my hotel in a tinted SUV. Kapoor was with his then-girlfriend, the actor Katrina Kaif. Soon we were speeding to a private dinner. Word traveled along the Mumbai streets that Ranbir was on the move, and by the time we had arrived at our destination, a crowd of several dozen had gathered.