India After Gandhi (124 page)

In truth, such sentiments were not restricted to the political class. In December 1952 a committee appointed by the Syndicate of the Calcutta University found that a major reason for the high failure-rate in examinations was that students spent too much time at the movies.
⁴
Two years later a petition was sent to the prime minister claiming that films threatened ‘the moral health of the country’; apparently, they were
‘a major factor in incitement to crime and general unsettlement of society’.
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The petition was signed by 13,000 housewives, whose cause was taken up in Parliament by Lilavati Munshi, herself the wife of a well-known puritan politician named K. M. Munshi. Speaking in the Rajya Sabha in November 1954, Mrs Munshi argued that ‘the cinema can make or mar the whole generation and the entire nation’. She thought the latter more likely, since (in her view) the celebration of crime and sex was encouraging young Indians to repeat these acts in real life. She was especially worried about ‘the showing of the flesh of girls in an unseemly way to excite the crowds’. She was answered in the House by the great actor Prithviraj Kapoor, who insisted that in a free society art could not be throttled. From the artist’s point of view, he added, ‘sunshine and shadow went hand in hand’.
⁶

To counter these objections a Censor Board was constituted, which saw every film before granting it an approval certificate. Scenes that were sexually suggestive were prohibited, while films with scenes of violence were granted an ‘adults-only’ certificate. Withal, the industry grew at a terrific pace after Independence. By 1961 there were more than 300 films made annually, these shown in 4,500 theatres spread across the country. By 1990 the number of cinemas had doubled and the number of films made more than tripled.

By the 1950s the city of Bombay had become the acknowledged centre of the Indian film industry. The most popular films were in Hindi, a language understood across much of the country, but there were also thriving industries in the other languages. In 1992, for example, while 189 films were made in Hindi, nearly as many (180) were made in Tamil, 153 in Telugu, 92 in Kannada, 90 in Malayalam, 42 in Bengali and 25 in Marathi.
⁷

By 1980 India had surpassed the United States as the country that made the most films in the world. Film going in India was now unarguably the most popular form of entertainment ever devised. In 1997, the fiftieth year of Independence, it was estimated that the daily cinema audience in India was12 million – more than the population of many member-states of the United Nations.

The growth of the film industry has had a noticeable impact on the physical landscape of urban India. Cinema halls dominate smaller town centres; in larger metropolises they are strung across the city locality by locality. Even more ubiquitous are the film posters, exhibited in vivid colours and various sizes, some small enough to be stuck on the side of
a wayside shop, others gigantic billboards that tower above the road. Some 70,000 posters are printed for a big-budget film; pasted wherever a blank wall presents itself, these stay on in their faded glory well after the film itself has passed into history.
⁸

The ingredients of the average Hindi film are well known; colour (Eastman preferred); songs (six or seven) in voices one knows and trusts; dance – solo and ensemble – the more frenzied the better; bad girl, good girl, bad guy, goody guy, romance (but no kisses); tears, guffaws, fights, chases, melodrama; characters who exist in a social vacuum; dwellings which do not exist outside the studio floor; [exotic] locations in Kulu, Manali, Ooty, Kashmir, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo . . . See any three Hindi films, and two will have all the ingredients listed above.
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So wrote the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Ray’s own films had no dances and few songs. He took his viewers into the homes his characters lived in, showing the clothes they wore and the food they ate. The lives his protagonists led were utterly and compellingly real. Still, while his films have their (undeniably elevated) place, the popular Indian film has its place, too. Ray might dismiss this as a ‘synthetic, non-existent society’, a ‘make-believe world’. But it was precisely because the world they depicted was unreal that these films appealed. And those who made the most popular movies knew as much. A successful film director of the 1970s, Manmohan Desai, said of his work that ‘I want people to forget their misery. I want to take them into a dream world where there is no poverty, where there are no beggars, where fate is kind and God is busy looking after hisflock.’
¹⁰

Peasants and workers in independent India went to the movies for the same reason as, back in the nineteenth century, a newly literate working class in Britain chose to read stories of the rich and the famous. As a character in a George Gissing novel remarks, ‘nothing can induce workingmen and women to read stories that treat of their own world. They are the most consummate idealists in creation, especially the women . . . The working classes detest anything that tries to represent their daily life.’
¹¹
Only farce and melodrama, wrote Gissing, went down well with the British working classes. Such is also the case in India where, however, farce and melodrama have been suitably indigenized. Some recurrent themes make less sense outside the Indian context – a son’s devotion to his mother, for example, or a mother-in-law’s contentious relationship with her daughter-in-law, or the difficulties(and glories) of choosing one’s life partner in defiance of caste and family custom. Again, in the Indian film the ‘bad guy’ and the ‘bad girl’ play more central roles than in the typical Hollywood melodrama – these are the villain and the vamp, malevolent characters in opposition to whom the hero and heroine appear purer than one would have thought humanly possible.
¹²

A celebrated film director once described his productions as ‘pageants for peasants’.
¹³
These pageants, naturally, were set in locations the peasants could only dream of. Sometimes this was a mythic past, where men flew on horses and conversed with gods; at other times, in places on earth that the viewers would never get to. Indian films were – and are – shot on the French Riviera, in the Swiss Alps, on the South African coast, with its characters wearing clothes not worn in India and driving cars never seen there. This was a ‘wholly voyeuristic cinema, where the object of desire could be anything from Dutch tulips to fancy telephone instruments’, and through which the viewer ‘lived at second hand a lifestyle lived Elsewhere’.
¹⁴

Where the Indian film rises above stock themes and stereotypes, and becomes truly original, is in its music. Traditional Indian plays and dramas all had songs of one sort or another. This method was carried over to the cinema, where each film includes about half a dozen songs, sung off screen by a voice not the actor’s, who merely lip-synchs the sung words.

In a historic accident, or perhaps an accident made possible only by history, these songs of love and despair came to be written by some of the finest poets of the age. At the time of Independence, and for perhaps a century before that, the pre-eminent language of poetry was Urdu. Before and after Partition, many Muslim writers – and not a few Hindus – found refuge in the Bombay film industry. Their
noms de plume
– Sultanpuri, Jaipuri, Ludhianvi, Azmi, Badayuni, Bhopali – evoked the towns of north India where Urdu had flowered, as a syncretic language spoken with an exquisite refinement by Muslims and Hindus alike.

One reason that film songs were so popular was because of their lyrics. These were delicately worded, rich in puns and historical or
political allusion. And they were set to music that was no less appealing. The melodies drew from classical music and folk songs, but their orchestration also borrowed heavily - and for the most part, innovatively – from Western exemplars. The sitar and the tabla mixed more or less harmoniously with the saxophone and violin. ‘Long before fusion music became fashionable’, wrote one student of the subject, ‘it was being performed every day in Bombay’s film studios.’ This was a heady brew which mixed folk melodies from the Gangesdelta with ‘slivers of Dixieland stomp, Portuguese fados, Ellingtonesque doodles . . .’, the whole set to the strict structure of a classical Hindustani
raga
.
¹⁵

Traditionalists dismissed the film song as ‘a degraded – even degenerate – form of Indian classical or folk genres’. But, as Ashraf Aziz points out, this was neither folk nor classical, but ‘a new genre of song obligatorily created for the cinematic narrative’. It was ‘a new synthesis resulting in an entirely new form of music’.
¹⁶
A form, one might add, that was more widely and intensely loved than its predecessors. For, as a great classical vocalist once complained, the songs of the films were ‘on the tongues of high society ladies of Calcutta as well as the tongawallahs of Peshawar’.
¹⁷

Indian audiences, writes the film historian Nasreen Munni Kabir, are ‘resigned to stock characters and predictable dialogue’. But they know, and hope, that these ‘tired old stories’ can yet ‘be brought back to life by good-looking stars and six or eight great songs’. These audiences ‘can accept repetition in storylines’, but ‘they will reject a film’s music if it has no originality’.
¹⁸

From the 1940s to the 1980s films were watched by two kinds of Indians -young men in all-male groups, and families. An anthropologist working in northern India found that ‘many unmarried men are intensive users of film culture’. They liked films in themselves, for the entertainment they provided and for offering them an escape from the trials of family living. The theatre was a place where they could smoke cigarettes (prohibited at home), and joke and play around with their friends. Although young women rarely went to the movies, older men sometimes took along their wives and parents. The two groups tended to
prefer different kinds of films. Young men liked those with ‘unrestrained dance and fight scenes’, whereas mixed groups chose to watch films depicting the joys and troubles of family life.
¹⁹

The passion for films was even more intense in south India. Here, male moviegoers had constituted themselves into fan clubs, each devoted to celebrating a particular male star. The town of Madurai in Tamil Nadu, for example, had as many as 500 such clubs, whose members were mostly in their late teens or early twenties. They included tailors, rickshaw pullers, vegetable sellers and students. The club’s activities were aimed at promoting their star, by pasting posters of his films, buying tickets to watch them and generally singing his praises in public and in private. Occasionally, the club’s activities took amore philanthropic turn, by donating blood in the hero’s name or raising money for disaster relief.
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In earlier chapters we have met M. G. Ramachandran of Tamil Nadu and N. T. Rama Rao of Andhra Pradesh, movie stars who became chief ministers of their state on the strength of their acting career alone. As adored in his native heath was the Kannada film actor Rajkumar, although he did not seek to convert this adoration into political advantage. In all cases, the veneration was a consequence of the fact that, in this part of India, film was a prime vehicle for the articulation of linguistic nationalism. The people of the south saw their languages under threat from Hindi; mobilizing to protect it, they sought hope and support from the actors who spoke most eloquently their own beloved tongue. In their films, these stars enacted the essential themes of human existence – life and death, romance and betrayal, prosperity and misery – and did so in phrases and idioms drawn from the rhythms and cadences of everyday speech. Literally as well as metaphorically, NTR and his fans, MGR and his fans, and Rajkumar and his fans
spoke the same language
.

In the Hindi heartland, the love of films was not so closely tied in with one’s social identity. (As it was spoken by more Indians than any other language, Hindi was scarcely seen as being under threat.) Still, because their catchment was bigger, the Hindi stars could command a wider – though not necessarily deeper – appreciation. Arguably the most popular film star of all time is the Hindi actor Amitabh Bachchan. (I speak here not merely of India but of the world as a whole – Bachchan was voted as such in an online poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 2001.)

Born in 1942, the son of a famous Hindi poet of Allahabad, Amitabh Bachchan joined films after a stint in the corporate world. He was very tall and fairly dark, in both respects at odds with the popular heroes who preceded him. These handicaps were soon overcome by his imperious manner and his magnificent deep voice. Bachchan rose to stardom in the early 1970s – a time of great cynicism with regard to the political system, which was being challenged by such extra-parliamentary forces as the Naxalites and Jayaprakash Narayan’s Bihar movement. His roles were in keeping with the times. He played the angry young man, pitted against but always overcoming the system – as a militant worker against unfeeling capitalists, an honest police officer against corrupt superiors, even as an underworld don whose wicked manner hid (not very successfully) a golden heart.
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In 1982 Bachchan was hospitalized after an accident suffered on the set. Millions prayed, successfully, for his recovery. Three years later he became a Congress MP from Allahabad, at the invitation of his childhood friend Rajiv Gandhi. ‘Who will replace the angry young man?’ asked the popular press plaintively.
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Fortunately, he and Rajiv Gandhi then fell out, with Bachchan leaving Parliament to return to the screen. As he has grown older, his roles have changed. He is astonishingly versatile – in his sixties, he can play the stern father as well as the quirky policeman (as in
Bunty and Babli
, 2005). In the first years of the new millennium he took on his most popular role yet, as the host of
Kaun Banega Crorepati
, the Indian version of
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
? The show was spectacularly successful, in part because it was in tune with the get-rich-quick temperament of post-liberalization India, but also because of the fame and personality of the host. Bachchan was brilliant – by turns gentle and sharp, and superbly bilingual, his improvisations worthy of his father, a Hindi poet who was also a professor of English literature.