A Cultural Grand Salaam

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But Bombay Dreams needs to fill only 14,000 seats a week. How do you get millions to see an Indian movie? For a true crossover, you need a movie that just happens to be Indian, that pours a familiar tale into an Indian milieu. That's Marigold, the story of an American starlet, stranded in India, who works in a Bombay movie to get airfare home and falls for her Indian leading man. Bollywood is not the genre here; it's just the backdrop for a fish-out-of-water plot. Says Steve Gilula of Fox Searchlight, which distributed the breakout hit Bend It Like Beckham: "American popular culture is good at absorbing influences from around the world. But we embrace the elements, not the complete form. We have borrowed from parts of the culture and integrated it into ours."

Beckham, Gurinder Chadha's inspirational comedy about a young woman (Parminder Nagra) who flouts her traditional Sikh family values to achieve soccer stardom, is the model for this transcultural form. The film, made for about $6 million, earned $32.5 million in North American theaters and an additional $44 million abroad. It has also given Chadha a chance to try making the first crossover Bollywood-style musical: Bride and Prejudice, with Jane Austen's Bennet family transformed into Anglo-Indians and Bollywood goddess Aishwarya Rai in the lead. "It's got the love story, it's got the songs, it's fun — like a Grease," rhapsodizes Rick Sands, COO of Miramax Films, which will distribute Bride in the U.S. "It's a Bollywood musical, but it's not going to be 3 1/2 hours long." Chadha, who says, "I don't make Bollywood films, I make British films," calls Bride "a Bollywood-inspired movie for a Western audience."

Beckham had another perk: it landed Nagra a continuing role on ER. (Finally! An Indian doctor on a U.S. hospital show.) But while contestants on The Bachelor go on a Bollywood-theme date this week, few South Asians are on the big or small screen in the U.S. (The Simpsons' Apu doesn't count.)

For the most part, Indians are more successful behind the camera than in front of it. M. Night Shyamalan made the megahits The Sixth Sense and Signs. Mira Nair, director of Salaam Bombay and Monsoon Wedding, is making an Indian-infused take on Vanity Fair, with Reese Witherspoon as Becky Sharp. And Nair has a three-film slate for her company, International Bhenji Brigade, financed by an Indian businessman.

"I came from India to Harvard in 1976," Nair recalls, "and I was one of only three Indians in the undergraduate class. Five years ago, when I went back, Harvard had 1,500 South Asian students. Which means in five more years, America will be run by people who look like us. We bear no illusions about the elite anymore. We are the elite."

Now the question is whether the nation's wealthiest minority can have the same impact on show business as it has in business, medicine and technology. And whether 290 million other Americans will want to see them onscreen, dance to their music, go to their shows. About 500 years ago, Columbus sought India and found America. Now it's time for America's cultural consumers to discover India.