Last week, my class “Forms of Writing for the Screen” was taken to the Louvre Abu Dhabi to witness a temporary ongoing exhibition, “Bollywood Superstar”, on India’s iconic Hindi film industry based in Mumbai — Bollywood. The exhibition was inaugurated on Jan. 4 and will be open until Jun. 4. I am not entirely sure what expectations I, as your usual Indian Bollywood-buff, went into an exhibition about the industry from a Western lens with. But needless to say, what I witnessed was a hyper-exoticized, cunningly whitewashed representation of what is certainly one of India’s fondest achievements within the entertainment industry.

First off, there was a sheer lack of chronology or a methodical pattern in representing the many aspects of Bollywood. The exhibition begins with a snippet of a song from the infamous Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham of 2001, which plays on loop probably throughout the day. This is followed by a series of artworks and antique posters on how Krishna, one of India’s most widely revered divinities, was the face of Indian cinema from the 1920s to 1970s. This particularly felt random and out of context, considering that there was little substance justifying how Krishna was part of Bollywood’s cinematic history — that is, except for portraying a few repetitive scenes of Krishna fighting a snake across decades and showing the clichéd theme of good over evil. There was then my favorite part of the exhibition — an interactive screen-dance with Deepika Padukone, where you can stand in front of a T.V. screen and virtually dance with the Bollywood legend on one of her ‘banger’ songs.

The last excerpt of the exhibition was the screening of snippets from ‘legendary Bollywood films’ across the decades from 1970-2000s in a theater-like setting, with couches and side tables. In about ten minutes of watching the compilation I could identify a pattern in the snippets. They were all clippings from Bollywood songs, not a single dialogue scene probing into the depth of the films was chosen. The songs themselves were either purely romantic, or royally staged with heavy costumes and flamboyant dances. A few peppy dance numbers were also thrown somewhere in the mix. The orientalism here was pervasive — the Orient is nothing but a fantastical land full of glam and glitter, and occasional barbarism. In this exhibition at least, Bollywood was condensed to pretty much just that, and was portrayed as an emblem of melodrama and extravagance.

Understanding Bollywood with all its complexity and not just viewing it as a simplistic musical-dance spectacle is excruciatingly important, because after all, Bollywood is politics: it is thrill and horror and unparalleled comedy. It is a source of representing some of India’s most pressing social issues, and while it is also most definitely melodrama and vibrant romance, filled with fancy dances it can and must never be reduced to essentially that. Moreover, it feels like the western gaze tries to compare Bollywood’s genre characteristic and filmmaking style to that of European or American films in which melodrama is viewed as an inferior form of expression. In Bollywood, on the other hand, melodrama is so much more than just an unnecessary overload of emotions. It serves to represent complex layers of emotion about commonly found values in South Asia like religion, cultural identity, familial norms, and so much more. This need to redefine melodrama under a more culturally accurate context to India, or the Hindi-speaking populace, is needed to decontextualize it from its western connotations which are often imposed on Hindi films by culturally ignorant audiences.

That said, in no way do I intend to glorify Bollywood as a film industry through this article. There persists a grave amount of concerns within the industry in terms of its representation of women, patriarchal constructs, gender, sexuality, caste and class — all of which are also issues that exist in the realm of all other Indian entertainment fields. However, when exhibitions such as ‘Bollywood Superstar’ narrate the history of Bollywood, they often do so through an Orientalist lens, focusing on its music and dance culture, instead of making informed criticisms of such ideas that ignore the specific context of India.

Not that it would be fair to expect the Louvre to encapsulate the sheer diversity of Bollywood within the exhibition's physical and philosophical limitations, but it was almost shameful to observe that next to no attempt was made to explore the multi-layered aspects of the industry. If, by the end of this article, you’re questioning that I may be ‘too mad,’ it’s because I am. No matter how much Bollywood tries to diversify itself, it will always be reduced to a superficial, whitewashed impression, and remain a fantastical and dreamy source of exoticism for the west, especially in influential art institutions like the Louvre Abu Dhabi.