Conjugations

Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema

Sangita Gopal

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226304274
• Thema: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Thema: Darstellende Kunst

Bollywood movies have been long known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But when India entered the global marketplace in the early 1990s, its film industry transformed radically. Production and distribution of films became regulated, advertising and marketing created a largely middle-class audience, and films began to fit into genres like science fiction and horror. In this bold study of what she names New Bollywood, Sangita Gopal contends that the key to understanding these changes is to analyze films' evolving treatment of romantic relationships.

Gopalargues that the form of the conjugal duo in movies reflects other social forces in India's new consumerist and global society. She takes a daring look at recent Hindi films and movie trends—the decline of song-and-dance sequences, the upgraded status of the horror genre, and the rise of the multiplex and multi-plot—to demonstrate how these relationships exemplify different formulas of contemporary living. A provocative account of how cultural artifacts can embody globalization's effects on intimate life, Conjugations will shake up the study of Hindi film.

CHAPTER ONE

When the Music’s Over: A History of the Romantic Duet

In the final sequence of Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008), Jamal and Latika’s lips freeze in a brief screen kiss. Almost immediately, Boyle goes to credits intercut with a Bollywood-style song-and-dance number—“Jai Ho”—that enacts how this kiss feels to the long-suffering, long-separated sweethearts. This couple is twice constituted—first through a kiss and then in the performance register of the romantic duet. By formally separating the kiss from the song, Boyle evokes the uneasy relationship between these modes of affection in popular Hindi cinema. By locating the kiss in the diegesis but consigning the song to the credits, this Bollywood-inspired global blockbuster revises the aesthetic codes of Hindi cinema where the song sequence rather than the kiss has historically functioned as an engine of couple-formation. I start with Boyle’s film because it captures fundamental shifts ongoing in New Bollywood cinema whereby the kiss, banished from the screen since the 1930s, is making a reappearance, while the song sequence, which has long served as the primary expressive device for constituting the romantic couple, is being sidelined. If “Jai Ho’s” extra-diegetic location references this gradual disappearance of the romantic duet as an engine of couple-formation, Jamal and Latika resemble a New Bollywood couple in other regards. Though he is Muslim and she is Hindu, their relationship is not thwarted by parental interdiction (they have none); nor do societal norms (they are waifs and command no social capital) inhibit their union. What temporarily comes in their way is chance and Salim’s (Jamal’s brother) illicit desire for Latika. Once a global game-show and Jamal’s “street cred” turn the slumdog into a millionaire, he can have the girl and kiss her too. Slumdog Millionaire thus cites the couple’s emergence in New Bollywood cinema as private, nuclear, and typically located in urban space with weak links to family and community. This couple-form, I argue here, conjugates with an unfolding project of aesthetic reform whereby the song-and-dance sequence is no longer as ubiquitous as it once was. I explore two important periods in the conjunction of song and dance and couple-formation in the history of popular film. I track the emergence of the romantic duet in the first decade of sound and explore how it illuminates Hindi commercial cinema’s relation to modernity, nationalism, and public culture. I then turn to a number of recent films to see how they, in turn, modify the song-and-dance sequences’ relation to couple-formation. In brief, this chapter examines why the couple-form once conjugated with song and how this tie is now dissolving.

Sealed with a Song

From its very beginnings, the song-and-dance sequence has been a feature of Indian popular cinema. Rationales for the persistence of the performance sequence range from the culturalist (song and dance in Indian tradition) to the sociological and techno-industrial, though no single approach may be fully capable of explaining this enduring phenomenon.¹ Song sequences come in a wide variety—devotional songs, songs celebrating festivals and rituals, “cabaret” numbers staged in nightclubs, and so on. While such song situations can be naturalized (people after all do sing at parties, temples, or weddings) and thus folded into the narrative, the romantic duet–which is our focus here—tends to break entirely free of the narrative milieu. It operates as an adjunct module within whose space sovereignty is accorded to the couple by means of the formal characteristics of the song sequence itself, its mode of production, and the extent of its circulation. These include the containment of the song sequence (it has a beginning and an end); its disregard for realist codes (it is not subject to the laws of continuity); its mode of production (highly diffuse with composer, lyricist, singers, musicians, actors, choreographer, director, and producer contributing to the end product); the convention of playback singing (the stars on-screen lip-synch to songs recorded by playback singers); and finally, its extra-cinematic life (on radio, TV, cassettes, CDs, as ringtones, in nightclubs, weddings, on the web).²

So while the song sequence might appear paratactical, excessive in relation to the narrative, I would suggest that what the song adds is so much more than a kiss. I make my case by tracking the emergence of the romantic duet in certain key films of the 1930s alongside critical and fan discourse around the celluloid fashioning of conjugality. In these discussions, the couple and their figuration become the grounds for debating broader issues such as cinema’s implication in nationalism, its commercial imperatives, its “publicness” as technology and art form, and its social effects as an agent of the modernity. In this decade, Indian cinema sought to legitimate itself by participating in the mainstream nationalist project; thus cinematic discourse was recast from “the cosmopolitan mode of the 1920s to an increasingly bourgeois nationalist mode in the 1930s.”³ As a “native enterprise” trying to compete—in the face of a colonial state hostile to it—with imports from Hollywood and Britain, the film industry had impeccable swadeshi (lit., “of the nation”) credentials. Yet, the nationalist elite were wary of the industry’s output on two counts: first, films were viewed as frivolous, sensation-based instances of a debased modernity; second, the increasing popularity of cinema as a mass medium made the colonial state and its nationalist adversaries alike anxious about its mobilizing power. One way to fix this public-relations problem was to improve the product and make it a worthy bearer of national culture, so that cinema could redirect its technological prowess to not only entertain but also enlighten the masses. One must view the debates around the aesthetics of coupling (i.e., song-versus-kiss), in the context of this quest by the film industry for greater legitimacy, while keeping in mind that the shape and extent of reform was also set by cinema’s status as a profit-making enterprise.

The song’s emergence as an instrument of couple-formation, I suggest, helped resolve this push and pull. I illustrate this by examining in some detail song sequences from three early sound films, Nitin Bose’s Chandidas (1934), Franz Osten’s Achhyut Kanya (The untouchable girl, 1936), and V. Shantaram’s Admi (Life is for living, 1939) to demonstrate that even though the song sequence has always been critiqued for its mimetic deficit—people do not sing and dance in real life—it enabled Hindi popular cinema to capture the particular stakes of couple-formation in India. In all three films social problems like casteism are approached through the framework of cross-caste romances, and although such transgressive conjugality might not always find a happy narrative resolution, the song sequences allow us to sensually experience the stakes of such coupling. Made by the three leading studios of the 1930s—New Theatres in Kolkata,⁴ Bombay Talkies in Mumbai, and Prabhat in Pune—these films tackle the most urgent social issue of decade, caste discrimination, and thus reveal the reformist leanings of the social film. Though, as shall see below, each film embraces a different ideology (from the uncompromising romanticism of Chandidas through the sentimental idealism of Achhyut Kanya to the radical realism of Admi ), their use of the song sequence to enact modes of conjugality whose time has not yet come coexists with a tragic narrative conclusion in which such couples do not find social sanction. Interestingly, the later films enter into intertextual relations with song sequences in the former—thus illustrating the progressive consolidation of the romantic duet as well as the song sequences’ tendency to break free of and circulate apart from the film. Indeed, the very fact that these couples find fulfillment only in song and dance points to the failure of the reformist film to enact a truly democratic union, thus reinforcing the conformism of a commercial cinema structured by elite nationalist ideologies. At the same time, the pleasure offered by the romantic duet, its extra-cinematic reach, and the citational relation of these sequences to each other ensure that the vision of conjugality offered by the song survives the narrative conclusion. By assembling the couple through the two representational modes of narrative and performance, popular film form provided a nationalist resolution to the “couple question” even as it continued to draw upon cinema’s technological capacity to figure modernity and conjure for the public the pleasure and promise of romantic love.

As a quintessential sign of the modern, romantic love is a favored subject of cinema globally, since film, a technology of modernity par excellence, is especially suited to embody couple-formation in a sensuous mode. The centrality of romance in Indian cinema must therefore be viewed in this light: as the technology was introduced to India, so was the celluloid couple. Cinematic explorations of love would serve as excursions into the ideas, concepts, habits, and techniques, as well as the sights and sounds of modernity. From the early days of sound (the first sound film was Alam Ara [Ardeshir Irani, 1931])—and even in the silent period—couple-formation emerged in Indian cinema as a key site for negotiating the still unconstituted national body.⁵ For instance, in the 1921 Bengali film Bilet Pherat (Foreign returned, N. C. Laharry), the Westernized hero’s unique views on love and matrimony make for some trenchant satire, while the Gujarati production Telephone Ni Taruni (The telephone girl, Homi Master, 1926) explores an interethnic marriage between a working girl and a leading lawyer. Films like Bhaneli Bhamini (Educated wife, Homi Master, 1927) and Gunsundari (Why husbands go astray, Chandulal Shah, 1927) connected women’s education to more egalitarian conjugal relations, while Andhare Alo (The influence of love, Sisir Bhaduri and Naresh Mitra, 1922) and the silent Devdas (Naresh Mitra, 1928) put forth in the figures of the childhood lover and courtesan competing models of romantic desire.⁶ The reformist social film—set in the present and dealing with contemporary problems like caste discrimination, modernization, female emancipation, urban life, alcoholism, gambling, and divorce—was the emerging bourgeois genre of the 1930s and 1940s, and conjugality occupied its thematic core. Couple-formation across the lines of caste and ethnicity—though doomed in the end—was a way to imagine a more democratic social body, while romantic choice modeled not only subjective freedom but also forms of political sovereignty.⁷ Though the cinematic couple-form expressed what Madhava Prasad has called the “desire for modernity,” it also had to figure in issues of cultural difference, that is, it had the charge of being simultaneously modern and Indian.⁸ What pressures did this double charge exert on Indian cinema’s representation of conjugality? One might approach this question by looking at the face-off between the kiss and the song that occurred in the first two decades of the sound film.

Kisses were not unknown in Indian films—in fact the Bombay Talkies production Karma (1929) was infamous for a four-minute kissing scene between Devika Rani and Himanshu Rai (the film allegedly flopped despite this attraction)—but clearly by 1940, they had fallen into disfavor, supplanted by the romantic duet.⁹ In March of 1940, a fan letter to the preeminent English-language film magazine Film India queried this development:¹⁰ “Why is it that kissing is taking place in Western films but not in Indian films?” only to be told that “the technique of love-making in the East is different. It does not need kisses to express love. Westerners believe love has to be seen to be believed. With the Indian, love does not need so obvious an advertisement.”¹¹Aside from demonstrating the proactive role taken by film journals in using cinema to consolidate a nationalist pedagogy of romance, this exchange is one of many that reads the kiss or its absence in civilizational terms. Thus a nationalist cinema requires an aesthetic that favors, in matters of love at least, the oblique over the direct mode of representation. One should, no doubt, read this preference for the oblique mode as registering elite anxieties about on-screen carnality, enhanced through techniques like the close-up that transform the visual field and redistribute social power in disconcerting ways.¹² Whatever the reasons for the disappearance of the kiss, the discursive production of this absence as a distinguishing feature of Indian cinema is significant. Another reader from Natal in South Africa protests that censoring the kiss interrupts narrative flow, “Just when they are so near, the artists are separated and the audience is required to imagine the rest.”¹³ Such obtrusive editing, he suggests, undermines cinema as a technology of the real, for it forces the viewer to conjure up rather than gaze upon the future course of screen intimacy.¹⁴ Since the kiss, in order to be visible and pleasurable, would require that the image be magnified through a close-up, realism is construed here not in terms of verisimilitude but of narrative relay. This reader clearly grasps that such editing is strategic rather than a function of underdeveloped filmmaking. A third reader poses the relation between the kiss and song as one of deliberate substitution, motivated by nationalist drives. He remarks, “Indian films use a duet to express love. Don’t you think they would do well to use a kiss instead?”¹⁵ Threaded together, these three remarks suggest that the disappearance of the kiss and its replacement by song are somehow linked to the emergence of a national cinematic idiom that deliberately forecloses the kiss while siphoning off into song the visceral pleasures of cinema. This formal move, as indicated above, is linked to cinema’s desire to recast itself as a nationalist-bourgeois enterprise.

The response of Film India’s editor, Baburao Patil, to such fan queries clarifies that this national style deviates significantly from international norms as defined (mainly) by Hollywood cinema. He writes, “Yes, a kiss would be the shortest cut, which perhaps the audience would also like it if it is passionately given. But what about the dialogue writer who wants to spit out love through the painted lips in the shape of senseless words? Then there are the censor boards with their unromantic inspectors—won’t they fall to pieces if they see a good longwinded kiss on the screen? They haven’t even kissed their wives.”¹⁶ Indeed, a kiss as an expression of love would not only render more sensory pleasure but would also be more real, rational, and economical—after all, song sequences do add considerably to the extraordinary length of the typical Hindi film and make them mimetically deficient. Patil, however, reads the replacement of kiss by song in productive terms—invoking a mode of manufacture in which the film product is assembled through multiple attractions (“senseless words” add value to the film). Other commentators, such as Baburao Pendharkar, producer-director of Navyug Chitrapat Limited, also note how songs compromise narrative economy: “More than often superfluous songs add to the footage. . . Songs must be the outburst of intense feelings, at its [sic] white heat point. . . How many intense spots (which have to be sung out) can there be in a picture?” Though Pendharkar concedes that love, “the ruling subject of many of our social pictures,” needs songs to express white-hot intensity, he begs for some moderation in the interests of rational storytelling.¹⁷ Further, while there is no direct reference to the absent kiss here, Pendharkar’s figures—“intense feelings,” “white heat point”—evoke a metonymic relation between sex and song to suggest that the latter can provide the affective intensities of the on-screen kiss. Further, both Patil and Pen­dharkar alert us to the productive aspect of the song sequence, at both an industrial (providing employment to composers, lyricists, musicians) and discursive level. It is important to remember that the industry, already subject to punishing levies, had to keep its eye on the bottom line. Patil’s views on the kiss/song dialectic are noteworthy in other regards. In playfully alluding to the fusty inspector who has not even kissed his wife, he aligns representational interdictions with social habits and a regulatory regime acutely sensitive to the mobilizing power of cinema and thus wary of the “dangerous” effects of on-screen intimacy on a mass audience. Censorship—in this case the informal prohibition of the kiss—as Ashish Rajyadaksha reminds us, is not only about excising a particular view but also ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Conjugating New Bollywood
• 1 When the Music’s Over: A History of the Romantic Duet
• 2 Family Matters: Affect, Authority, and the Codification of Hindi Cinema
• 3 Fearful Habitations: Upward Mobility and the Horror Genre
• 4 Conjugal Assembly: Mulitplex, Multiplot, and the Reconfigured Social Film
• 5 Bollywood Local: Conjugal Rearrangement in Regional Cinema
• Conclusion: New Bollywood and Its Others
• Index