The tree-lined streets of Bombay suburb Juhu is Bollywood country, home to many of India's cultural glitterati. Big homes are the norm. Shiv Sagar, the grandson of a fabled Indian film producer and media mogul, greets a visitor in a spacious room that could pass for a film set. It's decorated with a gargantuan painting featuring Hindu deities.
That's fitting. After all, the Sagar clan is Bollywood's first family of Hindu mythical drama, a hybrid of solemn pageantry and entertainment that has shaped Indian popular culture for decades.
Throughout much of India's early post-colonial era, family patriarch and film director Ramanand Sagar, who founded production company Sagar Arts in 1950, turned out a string of films, mostly historical dramas and love stories. He's best remembered, however, for a hugely successful TV series in the late-1980s called Ramayan, based on the Hindu god Ram.
The elder Sagar passed away in late 2005. And now a new generation of family entertainment entrepreneurs, including Shiv, 28, wants to make its own mark by building what it says will be, "the world's first spiritual theme park." It will be called Ganga Dham. "We are positioning it as a fun place with wisdom and trying to make it cool," explains Sagar.
Sacred and profane
Construction on the first phase of the planned infotainment park (costing $6.5 million) is expected to begin later this year, and the Sagar family hopes to have the theme park up and running by late next year or early 2008.
It will feature high-tech rides, knowledge centers about India's spiritual heritage, food courts, and other attractions.
Sagar has already secured a 25-acre site along the banks of the Ganges River in the northern holy city of Haridwar. This is a revered pilgrimage spot for Hindus and attracts 18 million visitors every year, some of whom, in accordance with Hindu legend, take a dip in the Ganges to cleanse themselves of sin.
On top of that built-in potential audience, Ganga Dham would also surely see a huge influx of visitors in 2010 during a Hindu festival called Maha Kumbh Mela that takes place in Haridwar only once every 12 years. That makes for a big incentive to see the project through. "They are expecting 50 million people for the Kumbh, and that's a huge number," says Sagar.
Deity parade
This Disneyland on the Ganges, as it has been dubbed, isn't just a commercial proposition, though making money is clearly a priority. The park's design will feature replicas of ancient Hindu temples, and theaters in which actors representing major Hindu deities such as Krishna, Ram, Sita, and Hanuman will impart cherished spiritual wisdom.
The park will also include entertainment and retail outlets. Every evening there will be a Disney-style parade, complete with fireworks and music. But the characters will take the form of Hindu religious figures instead of Mickey and Donald. "It definitely is for the masses," says Homi Aibara, partner at consulting firm Mahajan & Aibara, which worked with the Sagar family on the park's design.
Sagar and other park backers have been careful to stress the educational aspect of the park so as not to offend devout believers or the powerful Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in New Delhi. So far, the reaction has been cautious, but not hostile.
Storytelling
"The merchandising of religion is happening all over the
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