India After Gandhi (127 page)

For a decade after Independence the Union minister in charge of information and broadcasting was Dr B. V. Keskar, a scholar with a deep interest in classical Indian culture combined with a lofty disdain for its modern variants. In a speech in 1953 he noted that

Classical music has fallen on bad days and is on the point of extinction in North India. Classical music has lost touch with the masses, not due to the fault of the public, but because of historical circumstances. In the past, it was patronized by Princes and Sardars, but that support has almost ended. During the last 150 years we were under the British who would not understand and support Hindustani music . . . The main problem before musicians and All India Radio is to revive public contact with classical music. We must make them familiar with our traditional music, and make them more intimate with it.
⁴⁸

Already, from the late 1930s, All-India Radio had begun employing classical musicians on its staff. The artists were ranked in various grades according to their age, ability and experience. They were assigned to the station nearest their home and expected to advise on programming as well as give regular recitals. By the late 1950s as many as 10,000 musicians were on the state’s payroll. They were from both the Hindustani and Carnatic styles, and included some of the greatest artists then living, among them Ali Akbar Khan, Bismillah Khan, Mallikarjun Mansur and Emmani Shankar Sastri.

Most stations on All-India Radio played several hours of classical music a day. Saturday night featured the prestigious ‘National Programme’, when a single artist played or sang for a full ninety minutes. Every year the AIR organized a Radio Sangeet Sammelan, a festival of live concerts held in towns and cities across India, whose recordings provided material for a month-long celebration of Indian music over the radio.

Along with his love of the classical genres, Dr B. V. Keskar also had a particular distaste for films and film music. For the first few years of his tenure, popular music was banned on the airwaves. Fortunately, better sense prevailed and AIR launced a new station, Vividh Bharati, devoted exclusively to film music. The broadcasts soon found their way into millions of homes and attracted commercial advertisements that made the station self-supporting.
⁴⁹

Without All-India Radio, Indian classical music might not have survived the death of the princely order. But AIR also played a wider role in national integration, by linking popular culture with high culture, and region with nation. The least appealing part of AIR was its news bulletins. These reported all events – national or international – from the perspective of the party in power, the propaganda made even less palatable by the monotonous drone in which it was delivered.

From the early 1970s television began supplementing radio as a major source of entertainment (as well as propaganda). It was the latter objective which at first predominated, with programming on the state-owned Doordarshan focusing on the government’s achievements while appealing to citizens to grow more food and forge more steel. By the 1980s the channel had discovered the delights of programmes sponsored not by the state but by the market. The
Ramayan
and
Mahabharat
serials were trail-blazers here, attracting millions of viewers as well as millions of rupees in advertising. These were followed by soap operas which followed the saga of a family over fifty or more episodes. (An early success was Ramesh Sippy’s
Buniyaad
, which told the tale of a family from Lahore making a new life in India after Partition.) While viewers were entertained, the state was being enriched; in a mere ten years, 1975–85, the revenues of Doordarshan increased sixtyfold.
⁵⁰

In the 1990s the airwaves were opened up to private operators. While FM stations sprung up in the cities, the main beneficiaries of this liberalization were television channels. These proliferated at an amazing rate, operating in all the languages of India. By 2000 there were more than 100 private channels in operation, some very specialized, focusing only on sport or business or film or news, others more catholic in their approach, taking in all the above subjects (and some more besides). This was a ferociously competitive market, with a high rate of mortality for new entrants and much poaching of staff. The consumers themselves were spoiled for choice – where once there existed a single state-owned channel, now there was a dazzling variety of alternatives on offer.

The critic Chidananda Dasgupta once claimed that ‘India’s popular cinema . . . speaks not in the international language of cinema, but in a local dialect which is incomprehensible to most countries in the world’.
⁵¹
Dasgupta may have been speaking here as a friend and biographer of Satyajit Ray, and for Bengal, whose artistic standards have tended to be different from (or superior to) other parts of the country. In fact, from very early on, the Indian film has also appealed to (and resonated with) audiences that were not Indian.

A pioneerin this regard was Raj Kapoor, scion of India’s most celebrated film family. (His father, Prithviraj Kapoor, was a celebrated stage and cinema actor; his two brothers, Shashi and Shammi, were notable film stars, a tradition continued by his two sons and their children.) Raj Kapoor was a sort of Indian Charlie Chaplin who played the tramp in self-directed films.
⁵²
He formed a memorable partnership with Nargis, a gorgeous beauty with whom he starred on seventeen occasions. When the duo showed up at a premier in Calcutta, they were mobbed by ‘hordes of autograph-hunting juveniles’.
⁵³
More surprisingly, they got the same kind of reception in the Soviet Union. When they visited the USSR in 1954 and again in 1956, old veterans of the Czar’s wars lined up to shake their hands, while pregnant ladies told them that they would call their child Raj, if it were a boy, and Nargis, if it were a girl.
⁵⁴

Raj Kapoor’s breakthrough film was
Awara
, released towards the end of 1951, in which he played a lovable rogue forced by family circumstance to turn to a life of crime. The reviewer in an up-market English-language newspaper wrote sniffily of the ‘stilted artificiality’ of the film, of how its ‘continuous contrivance for effect’ had ‘shatter[ed]realism in the story and rob[bed]the picture of its most essential quality’.
⁵⁵
But the masses flocked to it nonetheless. And not just in India. When the film’s scriptwriter visited the Soviet Union, he discovered that ‘all bands and orchestras were playing tunes from this film, Russian and Ukrainian and Georgian teenagers were singing the Awara songs in chorus, and one met people who boasted that they had seen the film twenty or thirty times. In the whole history of the Soviet cinema no film had ever won such popularity, and no film or stage star had won such renown in so short a time’.
⁵⁶

Hindi films have been popular across Africa, in the Middle East and in Southeast Asia. An anthropologist doing fieldwork in a Malay village had to take his respondents every week to the nearest cinema to see what they simply called ‘a Hindi’.
⁵⁷
And in Japan the films of the Tamil star Rajnikanth were, for a time, all the rage.

Less surprising has been the popularity of Hindi films in countries that share the same broad culture. An American tourist in Pakistan found that in both public buses and private homes, the music that was most likely to be heard was Hindi film music. Pirated cassettes abounded, as did pirated DVDs of the latest films, which were officially banned in Pakistan to protect the domestic film industry.
⁵⁸
Further to the west, in Afghanistan, music of all kinds had been banned by the Taliban. But when that regime fell, it was reported that the briskest business was done by barbers who cut beards and by vendors who sold photos of Indian film stars. Songs by Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammad Rafi once more blared out of Kabul homes. More daringly, young men and women were inspired by Hindi films to choose their own life partners, in violation of family custom and tradition. A court in Kabul was besieged by cases brought by such couples, who pleaded that they be allowed to marry without the permission of their parents.
⁵⁹

More recently Hindi films have found a market in western Europe and North America, this chiefly comprising what are now substantial and wealthy communities of diasporic Indians. In 2000 as many as four Hindi films featured in the top twenty releases in the United Kingdom that year.
⁶⁰
Three years later
Time
magazine reported that the worldwide audience for Indian films comfortably exceeded that for Hollywood – at 3.6 billion, it was a whole billion greater.
⁶¹

In view of this growing audience overseas, and in keeping with changing mores within India, film characters and themes were undergoing subtle shifts. Western clothes were now more common and ‘love marriages’ more acceptable. The vamp had been rendered redundant, since the heroine was now no longer pure and virginal but capable herself of intrigue and seduction. And the films themselves indulged in the unabashed celebration of wealth. In the past, even if the hero was not poor or unemployed, he tended to identify with the downtrodden. Now, however, it was ‘a party of the rich’, with the audience ‘invited to watch, from adistance’.
⁶²

In the first year of the millennium a wax image of Amitabh Bachchan was unveiled at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks in London. This was a
greater honour than being chosen ‘actor of the century’ by the BBC, in a poll biased by frenetic mass voting by Indians. Still, it was not Bachchan but some younger Indians who were emerging as the face of the industry in its new, globalized phase. One was the actress Aishwarya Rai, a former Miss World celebrated by Julia Roberts as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’. Rai made the cover of
Time
magazine’s Asian edition, served on international film juries and was wooed by prominent Hollywood directors. A second was the actor Shahrukh Khan, the most successful ‘hero’ of his generation, whose speaking and singing tours across Europe and North America were wild hits, attended by thousands from the ethnic Indian, Iranian, Afghan and Arab communities and by a growing number of Caucasians as well.

Another international success was the composer A. R. Rahman. A child prodigy who composed his first film songs when he was not yet in his teens, Rahman first made a name in Tamil cinema before moving on to score Hindi films. His training (courtesy of his musician father) was in the classical Carnatic style, which he was adept at blending with rhythms and instruments from other parts of the world. In 2002 Rahman was invited by Andrew Lloyd Webber to compose the music for his
Bombay Dreams
. After that musical’s success in the West End and on Broadway, the Indian was commissioned to co-write the music for the first major stage adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
, a production whose budget was £27 million, one-tenth of this being the fee of the composers. Then, in 2004, Rahman was invited to conduct the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, whose first conductor had been Sir Edward Elgar.
⁶³

One who would have gloried in Rahman’s success was his fellow Tamil S. S. Vasan. Back in 1955 Vasan had pleaded with an audience of puritans in Delhi to abandon their ‘prejudice against film-men’. ‘Recreation and entertainment’, he argued, ‘are almost as important as food, clothing and shelter.’ If ‘public men work for the good of the public’, said Vasan, then ‘showmen do, as a matter of fact, work for the pleasure of the public’.
⁶⁴
At the time both parts of the statement were true, for the public men then active included Jawaharlal Nehru and B. R. Ambedkar. Fifty years later only the latter part holds good. Where public men now work mostly for private gain, the ‘showmen’ of India – among whom we must include singers and composers as well as actors, and women equally with men – still work creatively for the pleasure of their ever-growing public.

The Sikhs may try to set up a separate regime. I think they probably will and that will be only a start of a general decentralization and break-up of the idea that India is a country, whereas it is a subcontinent as varied as Europe. The Punjabi is as different from a Madrassi as a Scot is from an Italian. The British tried to consolidate it but achieved nothing permanent. No one can make a nation out of a continent of many nations.

G
ENERAL
S
IR
C
LAUDE
A
UCHINLECK
, ex Indian army C-in-C, 1948

Unless Russia first collapses, India – Hindustan, if you will – is in grave danger of becoming communist in the not distant future.

S
IR
F
RANCIS
T
UKER
, ex Indian army General, 1950

As the years pass, British rule in India comes to seem as remote as the battle of Agincourt.

M
ALCOLM
M
UGGERIDGE
,broadcaster and author, 1964

Few people contemplating Indira Gandhi’s funeral in 1984 would have predicted that ten years later India would remain a unity but the Soviet Union would be a memory.