Bollywood's India

Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India

Rachel Dwyer

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780233048
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Arti performative

Bollywood movies have long been known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But these exciting and often amusing films rarely reflect the reality of life on the Indian subcontinent. Exploring the nature of mainstream Hindi cinema, the strikingly illustrated  Bollywood's India examines its nonrealistic depictions of everyday life in India and what it reveals about Indian society.
 
Showing how escapism and entertainment function in Bollywood cinema, Rachel Dwyer argues that Hindi cinema's interpretations of India over the last two decades are a reliable guide to understanding the nation's changing hopes and dreams. She looks at the ways Bollywood has imagined and portrayed the unity and diversity of the country—what it believes and feels, as well as life at home and in public. Using Dwyer's two decades spent working with filmmakers and discussing movies with critics and moviegoers, Bollywood's India  is an illuminating look at Hindi cinema.

ONE

Unity: The Nation, Its History and Trans-nationalism

Hindi films are often concerned with what it means to be ‘Indian’ in a way that exceeds the official definition of citizenship. They query the concept of Indianness – Does one have to be born in India? Believe in ‘Indian values’ (defined within the film)? Have parents who were born in India? Can one stop being Indian? Such questions are in large part to do with domestic changes that have altered the definition from the understanding of the term that was formed up to and after 1947, famously explored in Nehru’s book The Discovery of India (1946), where national boundaries and limits of Indianness were well-defined, to one which is no longer bound by the nation state. This chapter examines how Bollywood defines Indianness, relating it to ideas of the past and ideas of the future and looking at how overseas Indians are part of this Indianness and how important Indianness is today.

Understanding the Past as a Guide to the Present

The late 1980s was a critical moment in the history of Indian media and also transformative in public understandings of Indian history and culture. India’s state television, Doordarshan, broadcast two lengthy series of the two great epics. Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayana was first transmitted in January 1987 and ran for 74 episodes. It was soon followed by B. R. Chopra’s Mahabharata, which had 94 episodes and broke all records of viewing statistics with its audience penetration. Serials based on often-told stories or myths were viewed as Indian history that provided lessons for the present. The massive impact of these series on Indian politics is undisputed: they helped mobilize Hindu nationalism as stories of the new postcolonial nation were displaced by the mythological origins of India as Bharat. The television serials were a new way of telling the epics, and although they drew on earlier versions, they came to be seen as the standard view, watched by all communities across the length and breadth of India at the same time every Sunday morning.

The mythological film, India’s founding film genre, presented ideas of the past which were read as history by many people who view the Mahabharata as ushering in the current aeon (yuga) and who believe that Rama ruled Ayodhya 5,000 years ago. By the late 1940s, the mythological film had moved into a B-genre and fewer of them were being made, although there was the occasional success of one of these in the mainstream, notably the huge hit Jai Santoshi Maa (Hail Santoshi Maa, dir. Vijay Sharma, 1975). However, it was the two television series mentioned above which conflated history and mythology in new ways and reached such enormous audiences. Films throughout the century have also reconsidered history via their historical genre. Film is one of the most powerful media from which to learn history and is often the only way that people know about history at all.

Hindi cinema interprets Indian history, telling stories about the nation whether under threat or victorious, looking at sexuality and gender, looking at great figures of the past, implying a contrast with the present, and considering other such themes – rather than trying to represent accurately the given historical moment. The past is used, then, as a heterotopia, or another place, more often than as a heterochronia, or different time. The past shown in the film can then tell us more about the present than the present itself can.

These are not the official views of history, based on facts and archives or research monographs written by professional historians. Indian cinema’s history belongs instead to another kind of history – a popular view of the past, sometimes called ‘bazaar history’, whose stories and images derive from epics, poems, theatre, and folktales. This kind of history is closely linked to the urban theatre that emerged in the nineteenth century, the Parsi theatre, and to the mass-produced image enabled by calendar art (chromolithography) and photography.

The power of cinema’s history is that it often replaces academic history in the public imagination. Indian cinema’s history is not about truth nor is it an enquiry into truth. It is a presentation of the past built on images, words and the imagination. It is interested in rumour and gossip, to which facts are subsidiary. History must be told as plots, not events. Cinema is created imaginatively, using image, music and dialogue as the foundations upon which its own poetry and metaphor are developed and elaborated with gesture and costume to create a sensibility. History has to be shown in ways that suit the features of the films and their genres.

The form of the Hindi film, with its attractions of spectacle and star power, lends itself well to the demands of the historical genre. Indian cinema audiences like familiar stories and historical stories allow for ritualization, repetition and overvaluation of the past. These historical narratives suit the melodramatic mode of the Hindi cinema as they focus on crises and conflicts over power, legitimacy and identity through encounters with sickness and medicine, morality and the law and ethics and religion in a way that stirs up emotions. The films focus on topics that are common to historical narratives of struggle, sacrifice and patriotism. The historical film is particularly skilled at depicting the nation in crisis, so the films are about the melodrama of the nation itself, not just its heroes and heroines who are struggling and often sacrificing their lives in its cause.

Hindi films are often ‘star vehicles’, and so the historical film is often history as the story of individuals and families, where a well-known historical figure is played by a major star. The star embodies national sexual and gendered values, thus the historical film allows societal and economic values from the present to be transferred to the past as those associated with the star are ascribed to the historical figure and vice versa. The star is a melodramatic figure known beyond their films and brings to film his or her other characters, as well as lending iconicity to the historical character while being part of history her/himself.

Cinema itself is also part of India’s history, and it does not just reflect official or academic history but supplements it. The Hindi film, with its enormous audiences, is closely connected to other forms of culture such as theatre, literature and television, which helps to create a common-sensical, consensual view of history. The historicals are not the products of directors who are historians manqués but rather the products of commercial film-makers aiming to reach the widest audiences using the form of the film. Although some film-makers do carry out historical research, it is the film form and its requirements which dominate.

The Historical Film in Hindi Cinema

Indian cinema’s genres are notoriously fuzzy. They are hard to define, but producers, audiences and critics seem to have no problem in identifying each one when they see it. The historical is loosely defined as any film set in the past. The Hindi historical film has many forms, themes and sub-genres, which overlap with other Hindi film genres. Some of these sub-genres are shared with Hollywood, others not, and include the social drama set in the past – often called costume drama, the war film, the biopic and patriotic films. In other words, there is no narrow generic definition.

The historical genre in particular adapts and alters its form according to when the film is made as well as the time in which the film is set. For, while historical films are about contemporary sensibilities and a present understanding of the world, the genre also looks at historical issues, connecting the present to the past.

The historical has always been closely linked to ideas of nationalism, and in India it has created new myths for the new nation by reinterpreting the past. Interesting regional nationalisms also play their part. While Indian cinema favoured the historical as one of its genres, different regions have focused on different subjects, so films about the iconic leader Shivaji (1627–80) were particularly popular in what is now Maharashtra from the 1920s.

Many arts reconsider history as a way of dealing with change in society. In the modern world, we seek narratives that deal with change, though the representation of vanishing ways of life, while engaged in modern activities, can make displacement feel more like mobility and rootlessness feel more like liberation. Viewers may also indulge in the pleasure of nostalgia, which, as Svetlana Boym argues, is not only ‘a sentiment of loss and displacement, but . . . is also a romance with one’s own fantasy’. Nostalgia, this longing for another place and another time, finds particular scope in the historical film, whether the viewers are in India or perhaps even more if they are in the diaspora, and it is immaterial whether or not they have experienced the time and place depicted on-screen.

The historical genre’s imagining of India has changed as India has changed. At Independence, when the country needed new ways of thinking about itself, the historical genre helped to create new foundational myths for a new nation. Just as Cleopatra (dir. Joseph Mankiewicz, 1963) brought at least a temporary end to the great historical epic in Hollywood, so Mughal-e-Azam/The Great Mughal (dir. K. Asif, 1960) was the last of the great historical epics in India for a long time: the genre became too expensive to make and too risky for producers to back. Audiences turned to the new musical romances in colour, whose high fashions and exotic locations mark nascent consumerism in Indian cinema in the mid-1960s. Although there were still films being shot with historical settings and references to recent historical events, as well as mythologicals, it took 40 years for the A-grade historical epic to return.

It seems that this revival was partly to do with new technology and partly to do with trends in Hollywood, to which Hindi cinema is closely linked. The epic historical film re-emerged in Hollywood around the early 2000s as CGI (computer-generated imagery) allowed the recreation of great spectacle, as seen in Titanic (dir. James Cameron, 1997). Although this was one of the most expensive films ever made, its huge success inspired other historicals, including the hit Gladiator (dir. Ridley Scott, 2000). The relation of these to the Indian historical epic is close and there have been many jokes that Titanic was really a Bollywood film made in Hollywood.

As the ‘new India’ has emerged in the last decade, yearning to be a global power, it needs new ways of viewing its past as it plans its new future. The historical Hindi films being made today are helping to lay the foundations for a history aimed at their viewership’s class, forming part of what could be called a new middle-class history of India, which is also being shaped in school texts and political discourses. These films are peopled by their own types rather than by historically accurate figures. They feature religion, family, tradition, modernity and how India relates to the rest of the world – all working around the Hindi film form itself.

The year 2001 saw the sudden revival of A-grade historical cinema with several films: Asoka (in which the great Buddhist emperor romances and dances; dir. Santosh Sivan); Gadar – ek prem katha/Turmoil: A Love Story (a Partition story with our Sikh hero single-handedly taking on the Pakistan army; dir. Anil Sharma); and the Oscar-nominated Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (featuring a cricket match which lasts longer than a Hollywood film; dir. Ashutosh Gowariker). A series of biopics such as Mani Ratnam’s Guru (2007), whose central character shares many features with business tycoon Dhirubhai Ambani, and several films about the freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, were also made during the early years of revival – a revealing litmus test to indicate which individual’s biographies are deemed to be interesting and how the films reveal history through the lives of real people.

Ancient India

The founding genre of Indian cinema was the mythological genre, which draws on tales of gods and goddesses and heroes and heroines, mostly from Hindu sources. This love of mythology is hardly unique to Indian cinema – Cecil B. DeMille said ‘God is box office’ and the first Indian film was made in 1913 partially because its director, D. G. Phalke, was directly inspired by seeing a film called The Life of Christ (probably a film of a Passion Play). However, given the popularity of the previously mentioned mythological television series, interpreted as the history of India and its culture, it is surprising that, beyond television screenings of the epics, historical stories of ancient India feature rarely in films. Myths do not show ancient India but mythological India. This is despite attention being given outside film to politically motivated discussions about sacred geography where mythological and historical narratives are conflated, for example the Ram Setu, the bridge to Lanka in the Ramayana, and the contested connections between ancient archaeological sites and Vedic texts. Myths and legends were often used in cinema in the service of Indian nationalism, especially before Independence. A striking example is Vijay Bhatt’s Ram Rajya/The Kingdom of God (1942), whose title evokes Gandhi’s vision of India as the Kingdom of God.

Sivan’s Asoka featured the superstar Shah Rukh Khan in the role of the Indian emperor Asoka (or Ashoka) the Great, who united much of India in the third century BC. Asoka’s greatness is founded upon his unification of much of what is now modern India, which was followed by his conversion to Buddhism after experiencing a series of terrible wars. His edicts, inscribed on pillars and rocks, are the oldest writing in India that can be read, and the Asoka chakra (‘wheel’) features on the flag of India, representing the turning of the wheel of dharma – that is, law and virtue. The film focuses on the warrior prince and his romance, taken from folktales, with Princess Kaurwaki and barely features his conversion and renunciation. Asoka follows the pattern of a typical Hindi film, with Shah Rukh Khan fighting, romancing the star Kareena Kapoor and dancing. Ancient India is portrayed as the land of warriors rather than religious thinkers with Buddhism only mentioned right at the end ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Unity: The Nation, Its History and Trans-nationalism
• 2 Diversity: Region, Caste and Class
• 3 Religion: Myths, Beliefs and Practices
• 4 Emotions: Sadness, Anger and Happiness
• 5 Home: Romance, Love and the Family
• 6 The World: Education, Work and Lifestyle
• 7 Agneepath/The Path of Fire, 1990–2012
• Filmography
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Index