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A
decade is a short time in a country as ancient as ours and with a
film history that is almost a century old. It would merely be a
second in history’s inexorable clock. And then, the nineties of
any century are always special, caught in a fin-de-cycle syndrome.
When the nineties are poised on the cusp of a millennium, it gives
rise to extraordinary expectations and is fraught with unexpressed
anxieties. Moreover, we are speaking of telescoped times that has
made globalisation its mantra, and entertainment the most enduring
industry in a boom and bust world economy. Whether we like it or
dread it, the world has really shrunk and paradoxically, our
expectations have spiralled out of control. Change has never been
so swift and fashions never so fickle. What was path breaking in
1993 seems outdated in 2003 even in the formulaic world of
Bollywood, desperately seeking success in the chaotic flux of
colliding trends.
We begin with Bollywood because it reveals our collective
response, however inarticulately, to the perceived threat of
globalisation. The coming of satellite TV and economic
liberalisation were synchronous factors that spawned unresolved
ambivalences. The world impinged too oppressively on our sense of
self, of national identity and cherished cultural values. It was a
strange convergence of opposite ideologies, when both the Hindu
Right and the liberal Left saw globalisation as a threat to our
culture and nationhood. Alongside was a clamorous consumerism, let
loose after decades of a bureaucratically controlled economy. It
was no accident that in a post-92 atmosphere of triumphalist
Hindutva and calculated use of religion to whip up atavistic
passions and dormant hatreds, Hindi cinema responded by
celebrating the undivided Hindu family and espoused values like
filial obedience, instead of young love defying the world to
pursue a romantic dream. The geriatric Nineties sought
rejuvenation from the infusion of young blood into tired old
stories told by Bollywood’s panicky dream merchants. New stars
zapped us with their wattage, new styles flaunted their brand
equity pizzazz, new attitudes strutted unto the global catwalk
with panache...the nineties boasted all this plus the chutzpah to
carry it off. I can’t find a more apt simile than what I have
already written for the BFI’s Imagine Asia programme,
even if it seems immodest. “The Nineties were like a wise but
ageing courtesan, a statuesque descendant of voluptuous temple
sculpture, down-sizing herself into minis and hot pants to seduce
a MTV-addicted Generation X.”
This was the inevitable spin-off from the beauty industry that
assiduously turned out assembly line Miss Indias who dazzled the
world and repeatedly walked away with Miss Universe and Miss World
titles. How dare you say that this is because the world-wide
cosmetic industry was now eyeing the dusky-hued middleclass market
in India, and so crowned our fillies at the finishing line? This
was the indignant cry of outraged patriots at the mere hint that
the cosmetic industry’s marketing savvy had something to do with
our beauties winning so many titles.
What cannot be denied is the total makeover of the concept of
beauty to fit international trends. Bollywood made the Indian Babe
hot and sultry, yet demurely biddable. The archetypal bahus
and betis of the Barjatya khandan waited assiduously
on their men folk, plying them with haath ka bana huwa khana
wearing kilos of zardozi and weighed down by jewellery
while the soni kudis of the Yash Chopra stable are all
chastely Indian at heart even if they cavort the night away with
NRI-young men in permissive Europe. The NRI community looms large
in the mindset of filmmakers – in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad,
Bangalore and Thiruvananthapuram (Kolkata seems to be the sole
exception) anxious to pander to the nostalgia of emigrating
Indians caught in a time warp, coming to terms with the different
norms of their adopted countries. Subhash Ghai, Bollywood’s
self-crowned showman, hitherto content to make action-based
revenge sagas, jumped on the NRI bandwagon and preached Indian
values to the corrupted young men of the West. His heroine in Pardes
is symbolically named Ganga and she cleanses the youngsters who
have gone astray in the decadent West. The NRI audience was at
times even more important than the desi one for some of our
so-called classy Moghuls. Along with the usual live shows in
summer by descending hordes of starry troupes, self-promoting,
glitzy award functions began to be staged in the UK, US and other
places like Malaysia and South Africa. Hindi films were the
dispensers of ethnic fashions, family values and the soul food to
keep NRI cultural roots healthy in easy to swallow doses.
The high visibility of the indigenous fashion industry also
changed the look of the screen siren and shaped a new body image.
Voluptuous, wide-hipped screen apsaras – evocative of our
temple sculpture and the abundant fertility associated with our
many Mother Goddesses – were banished and the new desirable
image was one of svelte slimness to display tight jeans and desi
haute couture. The Indian hunk followed suit, iron-pumping bodies
showcased in international designer labels but plumping for
homegrown virtues of filial obedience. Pre-marital sex was taboo
though lovers were licensed to indulge in red-hot wooing across
scenic locales in Europe, America and the Antipodes. Suddenly,
India was sexy and Hindi cinema sexier, subject to post-colonial
dissections, academic analyses and festivals devoted to popular
kitsch, from films to poster art. Where Bollywood leads, its
clones in regional cinema follow. This fashion trend infiltrated
the more rooted and ethnically authentic look and feel of regional
mainstream films. Authenticity, individual vision and thematic
relevance were left to the dwindling practitioners of parallel
cinema.
What is even more regressive is that the torchbearers of disguised
Hindutva, packaged as wedding video opuses and NRI-based love
stories (Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, Dilwale Dulhaniya
Lejayenge, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai) were all made by young
filmmakers with modern sensibilities. But what sold at the box
office was revivalist, comforting pap-packaged with superior
gloss. This is the soft patriotism that filled the post-Amitabh
Bachchan vacuum in the early nineties when the old certitudes were
gone and a hysterical edge of xenophobia became part of the
“muscular patriotism” advocated by Hindutva fascists who
denied the multi-ethnic cultural plurality of India.
Soft patriotism is the obverse of the patriotic hard sell that
came into prominence by the mid-nineties. It was enormously
appealing to a nation torn apart by secessionist movements in
Kashmir, the Northeast – though the convulsions in Punjab had
abated by then. The all-India popularity of Mani Ratnam’s Roja
(endorsed by the then chief election commissioner, Seshan) is a
landmark in Indian film history. This is the first time that a
film dubbed from Tamil was able to cross the Vindhyas and
emboldened a lot of lesser filmmakers to spout hard patriotic
rhetoric. Hitherto timid jingoists began to name Pakistan as the
enemy, instead of hiding under ridiculous euphemisms as their
predecessors did. Krantiveer, Sarfarosh, Pukar, Mission
Kashmir, Gadar are the more notable specimens venting a hyper
nationalistic rhetoric. Sarfarosh and Mission Kashmir are
the exceptions because there is an effort to look inwards to find
the causes of ethnic unrest. Bollywood refused to acknowledge that
we too were stricken by the resurgent tribalism that has surfaced
in many parts of the globalised world. Globalisation and tribalism
are the Siamese twins that no surgeon’s scalpel can separate. Border
was the much hyped war film based on a real battle but it was not
free from the fatal mixture of jingoism and religious revivalism,
though it was shot on an epic scale and was convincing for the
most part.
The nineties also saw the emergence of auteurs who refused to be
part of the brat pack. Ram Gopal Varma has gone on to become an
industry in himself, patron saint of talented assistants who are
encouraged to make their own films under his banner, even if they
fail both critically and commercially. Varma reinvented the
musical in Rangeela and delighted in taking pot shots at
the film industry that was wary of this hugely talented and
voraciously ambitious outsider. Varma made the definitive
breakthrough film with Satya, exploring the criminal
underbelly of glitzy Mumbai with touches of Quentin Tarantino’s
post-modernist brand of violence verging on farce. Inevitably, he
set off imitations (Vastav is the most prominent, claiming
to comment on the closure of mills in Bombay with resonant echoes from the Mahabharatha) and today,
the mafia film has graduated to being the latest of Bollywood’s
favoured genres, along with the family saga. A curious paradox but
then, India is a land of paradoxes co-existing without rancour and
recriminations.
To come back to the refiner of the desi mafia film (with
due acknowledgment to the founder Mani Ratnam, who made Nayakan,
the best Godfather-inspired Indian film), Varma restlessly pillages genres, from capers to horror to
road movies. Company reveals how brilliantly Varma has
imbibed Hollywood technique and married it to the topicality of
newspaper headlines, charging it with ferocious energy and telling
it with elliptical economy. Internecine Mafia wars and Bombay’s
infamous police encounters are narrated with an edgy, staccato
style that has become the new aspirational model for eager
acolytes who are unable to replicate the mentor’s noir
mood and look but end up glamorising crime. Hollywood’s direct
influence is now out in the open, with no sham evasions that spout
“inspiration”. Mahesh Bhatt is brazen about borrowings and the
surprising success of Raaz and Jism,
Hollywood-inspired films in a bleak year of flop after mega flop,
indicates the chaotic perceptions of Bollywood in the new
millennium. These small budget films with barely known models made
their bare bodies and hot sexuality the new formula for success,
where murder, mystery and adultery are accepted without a blink of
the puritanical eye.
Earlier, Abbas-Mastan had transformed a little seen HBO film, A
Kiss Before Dying, into Baazigar. Shahrukh Khan’s
charming killer was different precisely because there was no
emotional justification offered prior to the killing spree. This
new amorality, and the subsequent glamorisation of violence on its
own terms, contradicts the dominant trend of the family saga. But
this well-made valorisation of crime and killers doesn’t seem to
have the all-India appeal of the sumptuous family drama like Kabhi
Khushi Kabhi Gham. K3G takes consumerism to a new
height – or low, depends on your moral stance – by setting the
scene between estranged patriarch and benediction-seeking bahu
in a London mall.
The story of Bollywood in this epoch-making decade falls neatly
into a pre and post-Lagaan period. Lagaan almost
made it to the Oscars – the holy grail of our industry – and
that gives it the claim to landmark status according to industry
pundits. What they forget is that Lagaan restores passion,
commitment and a daring sense of adventure to an industry where
sentimentality passes for emotion, gaudiness masquerades as
grandeur and a minor casting deviation is flaunted as being
“different.” Lagaan is astoundingly simple in
conception and astonishingly sophisticated in execution, more so
considering its rustic ethos and simplified Avadhi patois.
Simplicity and sophistication have to be redefined, given the
sheer audacity of the film’s imaginative leap in combing our two
national passions – cricket and movies. Lagaan has the
fresh approach and imaginative élan to carry off a historical
anachronisms, the dramatic vigour to sweep you away in the tide of
upbeat emotion, of a peasant David taking on the colonial Goliath
at his own game and beating him with native panache. In the
fuzzily defined crossover film race, Lagaan was a near
winner, its closest rival being US-based Mira Nair’s Monsoon
Wedding. Aamir
Khan’s sustained marketing blitz and the film’s inherent
feel-good factor got it theatrical release in the West but it
failed the test of a true crossover film – of attracting
mainstream foreign audience.
The euphoria-tinged-with-regret mood filled the heads of Bollywood
Moghuls with delusions of making it big in the West. The BJP-led
government has been courting Bollywood most assiduously and took
an enormous contingent to Cannes and unleashed Devdas on an
unsuspecting audience. Self-proclaimed auteur Bhansali’s
over-the-top retelling of a hallowed classic sold opulent kitsch
as high art to a credulous public. The degradation of popular
visual culture, already corrupted by regressive TV mythologicals,
touched a new low. Devdas proves that popular Hindi cinema
has lost not only its innocence but that essential quality of
touching the collective heart – at least for a fleeting moment
– that even the most pedestrian film had managed to retain. In
the absence of box-office records – they are easy to fudge and
pliant statistics can be manipulated to flatter bruised egos – Devdas
survives on its curiosity value: the most expensive Hindi film
where the money has apparently gone to create faux mansions with
fake stained glass and expanse of marble, and kilos of gold
embroidery for immeasurable chiffon yards. The intended artistic
interpretation of a tragic archetype makes hackneyed blurb writers
look like literary geniuses.
Along with the new entity called the ‘metrosexual’ man –
whatever it means – we have the equally hyped phenomenon of the
multiplex film. It has come to mean a Hinglish or wholly English
film made on a shoestring budget and a risqué subject, making
models and VJs into new cult stars. Boom is the latest
example of hype gone bust. But films like Stumble, Freaky
Chakra, Bombay Matinee, Joggers’ Park all share one thing in
common: the predominance of English and unusual themes…ranging
from the bitter middle class burning its fingers in the
scam-ridden money market (Stumble) to the late blooming of
an eccentric forty-ish single woman courtesy an affair with a
young man (Freaky Chakra), to a 32-year old adman’s
anxiety to lose his virginity (Bombay Matinee), to the
unlikely May-December romance between a retired judge and a young,
free-spirited model (Joggers’Park). All are grist for the
multiplex mill in search of niche cosmopolitan audiences. The rash
of decent to bad to indifferent films is here to stay at least in
the first decade of this new millennium. The inspiration springs
from trendsetters like Naagesh Kukunoor’s Hyderabad Blues,
Gustaad Kaizad’s Bombay Boys, Dev Benegal’s Split
Wide Open, Rahul Bose’s Everybody Says I’m Fine.
The best of this new sub-genre, Mr and Mrs Iyer and Let’s
Talk showcased a new facet of Indian cinema, the fact that an
established auteur like Aparna Sen and first time director Ram
Madhvani both chose to tell their stories, voice their concerns in
a language that had ceased to be the hated tongue of the colonial
ruler. They represent a growing trend that underlines India’s
globalised ethos. English is as much Indian as Hindi or Bengali or
Kannada or Tamil and Indians – the urbanised sections – are as
comfortable interacting with each other in an “alien” language
that has accommodated supple nuances of regional inflections.
Is this reaching out to the smaller but significant audiences
outside their region the sign of a new trend? Aparna Sen chose
English to tell a bitter-sweet brief encounter in the time of
violence and found a wider audience than any of her well-crafted,
feminist oriented Bengali films. And now, she wants to make films
in Hindi. So does the other great talent from Bengal, Rituparno
Ghosh. Ghosh is the filmmaker most critics and other filmmakers
watch out for. He has a Ray-esque facility with scriptwriting and
creating intensely engaging characters. He has been prolific too,
in a short period and every actress wants to act with him,
considering what a gem of a role he created for Kiran Kher in Bariwali.
Other auteurs of Bengal, Budhadev Das Gupta and Gautam Ghosh, keep
the banner of personal cinema flying. This is all the more
significant in a climate inimical to parallel cinema as a
movement. After its heyday in the seventies and eighties, the
attenuated new cinema barely sustains itself on the fitful
patronage of film festivals and film society screenings.
The movement is dead. Only auteurs survive. That is why, you have
masters like Adoor Gopalakrishnan, whom critical consensus regards
the true heir of Ray’s classical humanism. It is humanism with
an edge. And the edge is often deliberately ambiguous, the clarity
of vision subverting the lyricism of the narrative. At the end of
a meticulously crafted film, Adoor invariably leaves us pondering
over disquieting questions that have no easy answers. What is most
encouraging is that a serious director like Adoor has now found
foreign funding for his latest film Nizhalkuthu. As has the
other Malayalam filmmaker Shaji Karun for his third film Vanaprastham.
Such largesse is withheld from another distinguished filmmaker
with a substantial body of impressive work. And that is Girish
Kasaravalli, ploughing a lonely furrow in the arid land of
Karnataka, once the thriving ground for path-breaking art films.
His last masterpiece Dweepa is an indictment of
“progress” – a small family is islanded on their ancestral
home when the rising waters of a big dam inundate the verdant
land. Jahnu Barua has chartered the concerns of the marginalised
people in his native Assam, bringing their concerns to the wider
world with gentle humanism.
The new multiplex culture is not conducive to this kind of cinema
that is true to its artistic vision and social commitment. It is
the cinema of Mani Ratnam, the most popular filmmaker with foreign
audiences, which fuses serious themes with the known pleasures of
traditional narrative devices like songs, that has a better chance
with the all-India audience. Actually, the mythical all-India
audience is becoming something of a mirage. Almost an extinct
species. Indian cinema as a whole, be it mainstream, middling or
art, has to be satisfied with niche audiences. Will this help a
hundred flowers bloom in a garden of amicable co-existence? Only
time – and our fickle audience – can tell.
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