The Amitabh phenomenon

A forthcoming book by SUDHIR KAKAR looks at Hindi movies to arrive at valuable insights into the Indian psyche. Exclusive extracts from the introduction by T. G. VAIDYANATHAN and the from the book.

From the Introduction

POPULAR cinema in India - the new home of the non-rational in India - received scant attention in the past, although, of late, it would seem a compulsive object of study for sundry intellectuals in search of a subject. But Kakar is the first serious thinker to throw psychoanalytic light on Hindi cinema as Wolfenstein and Leites (and, more ornately, Parker Tyler) had done on American cinema nearly fifty years back. The essay begins on a disarming personal note - his movie-going days began, we learn, in Lahore in the 1940s where a grand-uncle owned a cinema theatre ('Prabhat Talkies') and Kakar seems to have virtually gorged himself on Hindi movies which he now clinically classifies on the basis of a threefold caste hierarchy! - but quickly moves on to consider weightier issues. Acknowledging their role in keeping 'the road to childhood open,' Kakar goes on to consider popular cinema 'as a collective fantasy, a group dream.' Fantasy - 'the bridge between desire and reality' - is further extolled in psychoanalyst Robert Stoller's lyrical tribute, as 'the vehicle of hope, healer of trauma ... cleanser of the soul.' Noting in passing that not even the German cinema - during the economic crisis of the 1920s - or the Japanese cinema - in the aftermath of the Second World War - 'elevated fantasy to such an overwhelming principle,' Kakar locates the reasons for the ubiquity of fantasy in the Hindi cinema in the realm of 'cultural psychology' rather than in the domain of the socio-economic. In India, since 'the child's world of magic is not as far removed from adult consciousness as it may be in some other cultures' - remember Kakar's thesis of Indians maintaining 'more troops at the narcissistic position?' - Hindi films 'seem to provide this regressive haven for a vast number of our people.'

'Dogmatic rationalists' err in dismissing Hindi films as 'unrealistic.' This is to needlessly reduce the scope of the real to 'exclude the domain of the psychologically real.' Adapting Bruno Bettelheim's classic dictum on fairy tales to movies, Kakar declares that 'Hindi films may be unreal in a rational sense but they are certainly not untrue,' for they exhibit 'a sure-footed grasp of the topography of desire.' There follows a masterly summary of Raj Kapoor's Ram Teri Ganga Maili - using the Freudian 'third eye' which 'merely cracks reality's stony surface to release its inner shape of fastasy' - in the course of which Kakar offers an absolutely novel theory of rape in Hindi films (which caused consternation when I attempted to introduce it at a feminist seminar in Bangalore in the early 1990s). 'The wished- for father-daughter intimacy became a major fantasy in India', observes Kakar, 'because of the fact that in the Indian family the father's withdrawal from the daughter is quite precipitate once she attains puberty.' At this period of 'inner turmoil' for the girl, 'the rape by the father is then the forbidden sexual aspect of her encompassing longing for intimacy.' For the Indian male, the locus of the rape fantasy is in the trauma of the 'second birth' (see Kakar's The Inner World, pp. 126-33). 'In the cavernous darkness of the cinema hall, the fantasy may at last surface gingerly and the associated masochistic pleasure be enjoyed vicariously in the pain and subjugation of the woman with whom one secretly identifies.'

Kakar breaks up the chronology of the early Hindi film broadly into the Majnun-lover phase - the Majnun-lover ('coiner of poetic phrases,' his natural habitat the kotha, 'home for vile bodies' (italics mine), the phrase an inadvertent echo, perhaps, of the title of Evelyn Waugh's wickedly satirical novel, Vile Bodies!) here seeks to retain the paradise that was lost 'before the separation from the mother's anima took place' (Kakar observes in passing that 'it is only the phalic illusion of modern western man which has tended to deny their legitimacy and reality') - and the Krishna-lover phase (none other than the eveteasing hero of oh, so many, many Indian films). Kakar's observations are refreshingly original and wholly free of the realistic hang-ups that so often plague criticism of Bombay films. Honed to perfection by Shammi Kapoor (of Junglee fame), the Krishna-lover is, for Kakar, the 'phallus humbling the pride of the unapproachable woman.'

However, it is in treating Amitabh Bachchan - recently voted the top actor of the millennium by the users of the BBC's Online services - 'who has personified a new kind of hero and lover': the 'good-bad hero' - that Kakar breaks new ground. Rather like Karna in the Mahabharata, the Bachchan hero 'reflects the psychological changes in a vast number of people who are located in a halfway house - the transitional sector...' The good-bad hero is 'neither overtly emotional like Majnun nor boyishly phallic like the Krishna-lover'; he is very much like the hero described by Faiz in his well-known poem, 'Do Not Ask of Me, My Love.' Kakar's short essay - less than 16 pages, really - bristles with so many startling insights into the Indian psyche that one wishes he could have devoted a full-length study to the subject. He could do it yet!

* * *

THE last 15 years of Indian cinema have been dominated, indeed overwhelmed, by Amitabh Bachchan who has personified a new kind of hero and lover. His phenomenally successful films have spawned a brand new genre which, though strongly influenced by Hollywood action movies such as those of Clint Eastwood, is neither typically western nor traditionally Indian.

The Bachchan hero is the good-bad hero who lives on the margins of his society. His attachments are few but they are strong and silent. Prone to quick violence and to brooding periods of withdrawal, the good-bad hero is a natural law-breaker, yet will not deviate from a strict private code of his own. He is often a part of the underworld but shares neither its sadistic nor its sensual excesses. If cast in the role of a policeman, he often bypasses cumbersome bureaucratic procedures to take the law in his own hands, dealing with criminals by adopting their own ruthless methods. His badness is not shown as intrinsic or immutable but as a reaction to a development deprivation of early childhood, often a mother's loss, absence, or ambivalence toward the hero.

The cultural parallel of the good-bad hero is the myth of Karna in the Mahabharata. Kunti, the future mother of the five Pandava brothers, had summoned the Sun when she was a young princess. Though her calling the Sun was a playful whim - she was just trying out a mantra - the god insisted on making something more of the invitation. The offspring of the resulting union was Karna. To hide her shame at Karna's illegitimate birth, Kunti abandoned her infant son and cast him adrift on a raft. Karna was saved by a poor charioteer and grew up into a formidable warrior and the supporter of the evil Duryodhana. On the eve of the great battle, Kunti approached Karna and revealed to him that fighting on Duryodhana's side would cause him to commit the sin of fratricide. Karna answered:

It is not that I do not believe the words you have spoken, Kshatriya (warrior caste) lady, or deny that for me the gateway to the Law is to carry out your behest. But the irreparable wrong you have done me by casting me out has destroyed the name and fame I could have had. Born a Kshatriya, I have yet not received the respect due to a baron. What enemy could have done me greater harm than you have? When there was time to act you did not show your present compassion. And now you have laid orders on me, the son to whom you denied the sacraments. You have never acted in my interest like a mother, and now, here you are, enlightening me solely in your own interest.

Karna, though, finally promised his mother that on the battlefield he would spare all her sons except Arjuna - the mother's favourite.

The good-bad Bachchan hero is both a product of and a response to the pressures and forces of development and modernisation taking place in Indian society today and which have accelerated during the last two decades. He thus reflects the psychological changes in a vast number of people who are located in a halfway house - in the transitional sector - which lies between a minuscule (yet economically and politically powerful) modern and the numerically preponderant traditional sectors of Indian society. Indeed, it is this traditional sector from which the Bachchan movies draw the bulk of their viewers.

The individual features of the good-bad hero which I have sketched above can be directly correlated with the major psychological difficulties experienced by the transitional sector during the course of modernisation. Take, for instance, the effects of overcrowding and the high population density in urban conglomerations, especially in slum and shanty towns. Here, the lack of established cultural norms and the need to deal with relative strangers whose behavioural cues cannot be easily assessed compel the individual to be on constant guard and in a state of permanent psychic mobilisation. A heightened nervous arousal, making for a reduced control over one's aggression, in order to ward off potential encroachments, is one consequence and a characteristic of the good-bad hero.

Then there is bureaucratic complexity with its dehumanisation which seems to be an inevitable corollary of economic development. The cumulative effort of the daily blows to feelings of self-worth, received in a succession of cold and impersonal bureaucratic encounters, so far removed from the familiarity and predictability of relationships in the rural society, gives rise to fantasies of either complete withdrawal or of avenging slights and following the dictates of one's personal interests, even if this involves the taking of the law into one's own hands. These, too, form a part of our hero's persona.

Furthermore, the erosion of traditional roles and skills in the transitional sector can destroy the self-respect of those who are now suddenly confronted with a loss of earning power and social status. For the families of the affected, especially the children, there may be a collapse of confidence in the stability of the established world. Doubts surface whether hard work and careful planning can guarantee future rewards of security. The future itself begins to be discounted to the present. The Bachchan hero, neither a settled family man or belonging to any recognised community of craftsmen, farmers, etc., incorporates the transitional man's collective dream of success without hard work and of life lived primarily, and precariously, in the here- and-now.

The last feature of the portrait is the core sadness of the good- bad hero. On the macro level, this may be traced back to the effects of the population movements that take place during the process of economic development. The separation of families, the loss of familiar village neighbourhoods and ecological niches, can overwhelm many with feelings of bereavement. Sometimes concretised in the theme of separation from the mother, these feelings of loss and mourning are mirrored in the Bachchan hero and are a cause of his characteristic depressive detachment, in which the viewers, too, can recognise a part of themselves.

As a lover, the good-bad hero is predictably neither overly emotional like Majnun nor boyishly phallic like the Krishna- lover. A man of controlled passion, somewhat withdrawn, he subscribes to the well-known lines of the Urdu poet Faiz that 'Our world knows other torments than of love and other happinesses than a fond embrace.' The initial meeting of the hero and heroine in Deewar, Bachchan's first big hit and widely imitated thereafter, conveys the essential flavour of this hero as a lover. The setting is a restaurant-night club and Bachchan is sitting broodingly at the bar. Anita, played by Parveen Babi, is a dancer - the whore with a golden heart - who comes and sits next to him. She offers him a light for his cigarette and tells him that he is the most handsome man in the bar. Bachchan, who must shortly set out for a fateful meeting with the villain, indifferently accepts her proffered homage as his due while he ignores her sexually provocative approach altogether. Indeed, this narcissistically withdrawn lover's relationships with his family members and even his best friend are more emotionally charged than with any woman who is his potential erotic partner. Little wonder that Shashi Kapoor, who played the hero's brother or best friend in many movies, came to be popularly known as Amitabh Bachchan's favourite heroine!

Afraid of the responsibility and effort involved in active wooing, of passivity and dependency upon a woman - urges from the earliest period of life which love brings to the fore and intensifies - the withdrawn hero would rather be admired than loved. It is enough for him to know that the woman is solely devoted to him while he can enjoy the position of deciding whether to take her or leave her. The fantasy here seems of revenge on the woman for a mother who either preferred someone else - in Deewar, it is the brother - or only gave the child conditional love and less than constant admiration.

The new genre of films, coexisting with the older ones, has also given birth to a new kind of heroine, similar in some respects to what Wolfenstein and Leites described as the masculine-feminine girl of the American movies of the 1940s and 1950s. Lacking the innocent androgyny of Krishna's playmate, she does not have the sari-wrapped femininity (much of the time she is clad in jeans anyway!) of Majnun's beloved either. Like the many interchangeable heroines of Bachchan movies, she is more a junior comrade to the hero than his romantic and erotic counterpart.

Speaking a man's language, not easily shocked, she is the kind of woman with whom the new hero can feel at ease. She is not an alien creature of feminine whims, sensitivities and susceptibilities, with which a man feels uncomfortable and which he feels forced to understand. Casual and knowing, the dull wholesomeness of the sister spiced a little with the provocative coquetry of the vamp, she makes few demands on the hero and can blend into the background whenever he has more important matters to attend to. Yet she is not completely unfeminine, not a mere mask for the homosexual temptation to which many men living in the crowded slums of big cities and away from their women-folk are undoubtedly subject. She exemplifies the low place of heterosexual love in the life of the transitional man, whose fantasies are absorbed more by visions of violence than of love, more with the redressal of narcissistic injury and rage than with the romantic longing for completion - a gift solely in the power of a woman to bestow.

Having viewed some dreams in Indian popular cinema with the enthusiast's happy eye but with the analyst's sober perspective, let me reiterate in conclusion that oneiros - dream, fantasy - between the sexes and within the family, does not coincide with the cultural propositions on these relationships. In essence, oneiros consists of what seeps out of the crevices in the cultural floor. Given secret shape in narrative, oneiros conveys to us a particular culture's versions of what Joyce McDougall calls the Impossible and the Forbidden, the unlit stages of desire where so much of our inner theatre takes place.

The Essential Writings of Sudhir Kakhar, Sudhir Kakar, Oxford University Press, Rs. 595.

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