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Literary Review
A new cultural lexicon
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In the face of threats by foreign television and entertainment industry, Bollywood had to reinvent itself in the 1990s. With the parallel decline of folk traditions and middleclass biculturalism, the screen has become the site of contemporary discussions on modernity and tradition. It would be simplistic to dismiss Bollywood as offering formulaic escapism, says SUNIL KHILNANI, reviewing two books on the subject.
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From "Kabhi Kushi Kabhi Gham": a remaking of images.
BOLLYWOOD has become an international brand name, evoking the gaudy, gyrating world of the Indian entertainment industry. But what exactly does it stand for: cheap fluffy escapism — masala for the Indian masses, exotic kitsch to others; a canvas on which the profound psychic and political conflicts of a new post-colonial nation are screened; or highly stylised renditions of universal predicaments?
For long, the answer has seemed clear. A precociously magisterial Satyajit Ray, in his 1948 diagnostic manifesto, "What is wrong with Indian films?" listed his complaints against the commercial Indian cinema: "Starting a production without adequate planning, sometimes even without a shooting script; a penchant for convolutions of plot and counter-plot rather than the strong, simple unidirectional narrative; the practice of sandwiching musical numbers in the most unlyrical situations; the habit of shooting indoors in a country which is all landscape; — all these stand in the way of the evolution of a distinctive style". Nirad Chaudhuri, more curt, warned that Indian films would turn his countrymen into "a typical town rabble, a plebs urbana, crying for the circus".
Most Indians continue still to cry for bread, not circuses, but in the decades since Ray and Chaudhuri wrote, the Indian cinema has evolved an unmistakable style of its own, growing to be a vast and prosperous enterprise that, beyond the films themselves, encompasses an empire of music, videos, magazines, and touring stage shows. Nasreen Munni Kabir's engaging survey and Lalit Mohan Joshi's fittingly opulent volume, an upbeat gambol through Bollywood's history, are both the work of knowledgeable enthusiasts. Both books outline the formulae, actors and the aspirations of the industry and, alive with the voices (Kabir's text is interspersed with excerpts from interviews with Bollywood denizens) and images of Bollywood, they are excellent general introductions to this large, bewildering world.
Bollywood's scale is striking. Annually, around 3 to 4 times as many Indians as Americans go to the cinema; it is claimed that around 12 million Indians go every day. An average of 800 films are made in India every year, roughly 200 of those in Hindi, or more accurately in Bombiya — the distinctive dialect of the Indian screen (though this is now being replaced by "Hinglish"). The levels of money are also becoming significant: the biggest hit of the 1990s, "Hum Aapke Hain Kaun?" brought in an estimated profit of $21 million, and the most recent annual revenues for the industry are estimated at around $1.3 billion — large by the standards of a poor country. The sheer volume of Indian cinematic production, and the relentless diffusion of its imagery and melodies, fills a large part of Indian cultural space. Along with cricket and voting, the cinema is among the most important collective experiences that Indians have.
Bollywood's recent international recognition caps a decade which saw the gradual liberalisation of the Indian economy, one that challenged many of India's economic behemoths. One might have expected the 1990s to have had adverse effects on Bollywood: many feared that the rapid entry of foreign entertainment media, and the proliferation of satellite and cable television would destroy the Indian industry. But Indian audiences have proved resistant to Hollywood, and to Western television entertainment more generally: as Rupert Murdoch and others have discovered, Indian viewers have their own unbending preferences. In the face of these challenges, the Indian film industry replied by remaking itself during the 1990s.
The rise of television and the popularity of MTV and music videos, the entry into India of the global cosmetics industry and its push of events like Miss World and Miss Universe, transformed production values as well as standards of beauty. As the director Mahesh Bhatt puts it in one of the essays in the Joshi volume, during the 1990s there developed "an obsession with looks — all [stars] had a homogenous look, as if they had come out of some kind of assembly line". Bombay cosmetic surgeons and gyms flourished. The newly shaped stars, meanwhile, used their branded status to advertise a world of consumer goods disembarking on Indians shores. Directors began to make films with diasporic audiences in mind, catering to the "NRI" (Non-resident Indian) taste for the "trendy and traditional, both bhajans and pop" as Madhu Jain puts it in her essay in the Joshi volume.
This strategy has enabled Bollywood, at least for the moment, to successfully defend its own patch from global marauders, and it has also won it new audiences among the Indian diaspora — North America is a leading export market for Indian films, which now accounts for 30 per cent of the industry's revenues. Beyond the diaspora, it has also found fans among directors and impresarios like Baz Luhrmann and Andrew Lloyd Weber, who have plundered signature elements to revitalise their own work. In an era when other national film industries are crumbling, or having painfully to adjust to the Hollywood juggernaut, the Indian film industry has emerged as perhaps the most aggressive riposte to Hollywood.
Unsupported and unregulated, Bollywood during the 1990s deepened its edgy relationship with crime. In contrast to its image, at once glossy and cuddly, Bollywood is financed by a murky underworld, prone to making offers that cannot be refused. The Indian government has never recognised the commercial cinema as an industry — which would have made it eligible for favourable bank loans and corporate finance — and whatever government funding existed was mainly directed towards non-commercial cinema, and in recent years has dwindled. Left to fend for themselves, directors and producers turned to the cash rich dons and slum barons of Bombay — for whom investing in films was a way both to converting black money and to rub up against the stars. The relationship has been a tense and sometimes bloody one, with kidnappings and murders of directors rocking Bollywood in the past few years.
Indian popular cinema has been regularly dismissed on two counts: its formulaic character, and its escapist inclinations. Both Kabir and Joshi stress the formulaic character of the films, and provide plenty of evidence: character types, standard plots, the ubiquitous stars and singers, a penchant for remakes. But repetition and familiarity have a special function in the Bollywood universe. Pleasure is drawn precisely from this sense of familiarity — which expresses not so much an escapist desire as one that wishes to be able to recognise order and pattern, and makes it a rather worldly cinema. Bollywood is a macrocosm of stories, plots, heroes and heroines, songs and dances, all of which interleave with one another: it is, as some have almost suggested, a modern-day version of the Mahabharata, a technological machine for mythological affirmation and diffusion. The pleasure of Bollywood depends heavily on how alert one is to such connections: individual films are not so much discrete artefacts as links in a garland. Merely following the supposed formula is no guarantee of success. The great majority of Bollywood productions are flops: only very few succeed, those which can fasten onto this universe, which can become links in the garland.
To see Bollywood as simply purveying pure escapism is also too simple. Its themes speak to the anxieties and aspirations of its diverse audiences: on the one hand, a brash new middle class, connected to global currents, and determined to sample modern pleasures on its own cultural terms; on the other the assertive lower castes of India, who have found through democracy a way of making an impress on public life. The great themes of the 1950s and 1960s — class inequality, caste injustice, the hand of kismet or destiny, sacrifice, the position of women, the morality of the city versus that of the country, have receded. But Indian directors continue to engage with historical and contemporary subjects, and some of the most successful recent films address awkward topics: the 1993 Bombay riots, religious violence, terrorism in Kashmir, the inefficacy of the state and the injustices it visits on its citizens, as well as more reassuring themes such as the family, young love, and the return of the prodigal NRI. Bollywood's trademark is to give these sometimes messy contemporary themes a highly stylised filmic presence, but one which is not necessarily wholly simplistic. Using parody and irony, many of these films exude a knowingness that, in their portrayal of violence for example, is reminiscent of a Quentin Tarrantino. A new cultural repertory is being formed, drawn selectively on Western and Indian elements, presented in a style of defiant crassness.
Hrithik Roshan at a Bollywood Show in New York.
Critical opinion about Bollywood has begun to shift over the past decade. The judgements of those like Ray and Chaudhuri have been superseded by a new intellectual regard for the Indian commercial cinema. Bollywood imagery and locutions have entered a wider consciousness through the work of Indian novelists writing in English. The rise of cultural and film studies in the universities, and their fascination for the "popular" and the "public" (politely marked off from "mass" culture) is itself part of a more general celebration of the non-elite — a turn which has been particularly strong in the Indian case, where "subalternity" has become an organising interest of academic inquiry.
Ashis Nandy, one of the first Indian intellectuals who tried to take Indian popular cinema seriously, has famously argued that it offers a "slum's eye view of politics". Indian movies are a psychic text, through which to read the desires and fantasies of the "middle classes" — groups uprooted from their traditions, decultured. The slum, like the cinema, "recreates a remembered village", gathering together strangers (who ordinarily would be divided against one another) and creating its own bonds and novel culture. Nandy accepts that "the popular film is low-brow, modernising India in all its complexity, sophistry, naiveté, and vulgarity"; but the cinematic screen is where the contemporary discussion between tradition and modernity occurs, displacing the previous arena, which was commanded by the once-dominant, deeply bicultural elites (of whom Ray and Chaudhuri were differing examples). With the decline of folk traditions, as also of traditional middle class bi-culturalism, with its familiarity with both Indian and Western classics, it has fallen to the commercial cinema to create a new cultural lexicon for Indian public life.
It is, of course, a highly selected lexicon. Bollywood is often cited as a social microcosm of India: a world where Muslims, Hindus and others all work creatively together. But that thought needs testing. A strong Muslim aesthetic impress on the Indian cinema is undeniable; but it is much harder, for instance, to see any distinctively Muslim political presence in the Indian cinema, nor has it proved possible to establish a distinct Muslim voice. In this sense Muslims remain as unrepresented here as they are in the political arena.
Still, Bollywood has come in part to express a certain Indian aspiration for its own version of the modern and desirable. The foreign and the western are incorporated (sometimes mocked), they are made locations for Indian dramas (and song and dance routines), by methods that accomplish a kind of imaginary reverse colonisation. The West appears as backdrop, not as challenge or problem. A recent Bollywood vogue has been to film in locations like Switzerland, Scotland, New Zealand, and in European capitals. One might see this as part of the immense absorptive capacity of Hindi cinema, an ability to draw in both domestic diversity and global influences. In this sense Bollywood is a metaphor of what many have seen as a peculiar Indian historical capacity: it serves as an antechamber or conduit, where the foreign and the modern are received, entertained, and made Indian.
Bollywood: Popular Indian Cinema, edited by Lalit Mohan Joshi, Dakini Books, £29.99. ISBN 095370 32 23
Bollywood: The India Cinema Story, Nasreen Munni Kabir, Channel 4 Books, £12.99. ISBN0 7522 1943 X
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