Indians seek Bollywood's Swiss roots

In the scene, two young Indians, played by Purohit's favourite actor and actress, see their love seemingly come to an end. She kneels and prays, while he cavorts in the dark, neo-Gothic church. In the end, she breaks off an engagement and he wins her hand.

The young couple knew that the scene had been shot on location in a church in the small town of Montbovon, a couple of hours' drive from this Alpine village of winding streets, low chalets and profuse geraniums. But which church?

The first church Purohit, 24, spied had the sharply pointed steeple that he and his wife recognised from the film, but the interior was not right. The altars were different, the vaulting not rounded but sharp. Disappointed, they left the church and returned to their tour bus, where a guide helped solve the puzzle.

The exterior scenes in the film had been shot around this church with the sharply pointed steeple, he told them. For the interior shots, though, the director had chosen the church of St Grat, a short distance away. Delighted, Purohit and his wife bounded over to the second church with its familiar interior and struck poses for honeymoon photographs, aping the Bollywood stars they so admired.

For years, Bollywood's producers and directors have favoured the pristine backdrop of Switzerland for their films. The greatest of the Bollywood filmmakers, Yash Chopra, is a self-professed romantic who has made a point of including in virtually all his films scenes shot on location in Switzerland's high Alpine meadows, around its serene lakes, and in its charming towns and cities to convey an ideal of sunshine, happiness and tranquillity.

In the process, they have created an enormous curiosity about things Swiss in middle-class Indians, who are now earning enough to search here for their dreams.

"The moment you cross the border it is something else," Purohit said. "No noise, no pollution, no crowds," added Kamalakar Tarkasband, 72, a retired army officer.

Swiss tourism officials and their Indian counterparts are capitalising on this obsession. The number of nights spent by Indian tourists, who come mostly in summer (few ski), has doubled in the past decade to 325,000.Tarkasband was travelling with the Purohits and a busload of other Indians who had spent the previous 12 hours visiting movie locations around Switzerland. Most of the sites were from The Brave Heart Will Take the Bride produced by Chopra and directed by his son Aditya.

On their 12-day tour, marketed as the Enchanted Journey and organised by the Indian affiliate of Swiss travel agency Kuoni, the visitors watched DVDs of Bollywood film scenes shot in Switzerland while travelling from site to site and posed for snapshots imitating their film heartthrobs.

"This is the way Switzerland is positioned in our minds; it was the place for romance and natural beauty," said Sanket Shah, 21, from Pune, India, a guide for Enchanted Journey.

Raj Kapoor was the first Indian director to use foreign sites for shooting on location - in Venice, Paris and Switzerland - when he filmed Sangam in 1964. But the entire bus knew the story of how Mr Chopra spent his honeymoon in the Swiss resort of Gstaad.

"He promised his wife on his honeymoon that every movie he made would have to have one romantic song or scene in Switzerland," said Rajendra Choudhary, 24, who joined the Enchanted Journey.

Mr Chopra, now 77, kept his promise. Most of the Swiss sequences are dream scenes in which lovers dance or romp on Alpine meadows strewn with flowers or roll in the snow in unlikely flimsy Indian garb.

The fascination proved to be infectious, and about 200 Bollywood films feature sequences shot in Switzerland. Between stops for photos, the travellers laughed at clips of films by Chopra and others, sang along to tunes from soundtracks, and competed for prizes in Bollywood trivia quizzes.

Since Kuoni and its partners began the Enchanted Journey tours in April, about 55 groups have signed up. The company, whose shareholders include Chopra's Yash Raj Films studio, plans to add a 15-day tour, customised film tours and honeymoon trips. "It's dream tourism," said Marco Casanova, a Swiss partner in the group.

Cashing in, the town of Thun held its first Bollywood film festival in May. But not everyone shares the dream. In June, Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger featured an article with the headline "Into the Luxury Hotel with a Gas Cooker," noting that "in some hotels an entire caste of guests is no longer desired: the Indians". The article catalogued the complaints of hotel managers: guests who cook curry dishes on camping stoves in their rooms; guests who use bath oils that make tubs difficult to clean; guests who book for a husband and wife, only to show up with a much larger family group.

In Engelberg, where a visitor is more likely to encounter a woman in a sari than hear the clang of a cowbell, some European tourists are unsettled.

"I can imagine that a German or a Dutchman might not imagine Switzerland this way," Casanova said. "They want the Swiss pastoral idyll."