Bollywood's shadowy underbelly

The underwold has a strong grip on Bollywood, and that is evident in the films that come out of it today

Partha Chatterjee Delhi

Far away and long ago in 1959, Guru Dutt (Padukone) made Kagaz Ke Phool in black and white and Cinemascope. In it an unhappily married director falls in love with his protégé. It was a truly felt love-story, and a resounding flop, commercially. Now, in 2006, it is a cult classic appreciated even by non-Hindi speaking audiences. Nothing has been produced of its calibre in Hindi Cinema in the last forty years.

In truth, the Hindi Cinema of Mumbai, erstwhile Bombay, has regressed into an infantilism that can be attributed to spiritual malnutrition. This decline is part of a larger social malaise, a lumpenisation following the abdication of all responsibility, social and political, by a microscopic educated elite, which has allotted to itself every financial and political privilege.

Cinema, in India as elsewhere, has been an entertainment industry. In other parts of the world hedonism, as a logical upshot of rampant consumerism endorsed by the US, has found expression in films.  Notwithstanding a very small coterie of dissent representing artistic, mature, committed cinema. In India, particularly Bollywood — as Mumbai's Hindi film Industry has come to be known - no such force exists.

Legitimate financing of films has always been a problem. Producers, beginning their careers, and even later, have to borrow money from loan sharks at a back-breaking 4 per cent per month (or 48 per cent per annum), thus inflating costs due to production delays; mostly attributed to clashing dates of stars who 'sell' films and try to make the most of their usually short-lived careers. Banks, rarely if ever, back films for they regard them as high-risk investments.

Corporatisation can certainly streamline production methods; keep films within budget by completing them on time. It can, in the near future, also attempt to create an exhibition chain, parallel to the existing one, which represents certain unseen, vested interests. What corporate investment in mainstream Hindi film production cannot guarantee is meaningful yet entertaining films. Entertainment translates as manoranjan in Hindi. It is an exquisite word, meaning painting or rather illuminating the mind — since any idea of painting involves light.

Things are quite different in reality. The average Hindi film celebrates mindless sex and violence, and mirrors consumerism imposed from without by the US and its adjunct, satellite television. In Bollywood, there is hardly any attempt to open the mind to beauty. It is assumed that the average filmgoer, whether the rural poor, middle class, rich and city-bred, is no more than a creature responding to limited aesthetic stimuli.

One who likes to see flashy clothes, fast cars, skimpily-clad women, huge gaudy sets with the latest gadgets and people putting away enormous quantities of alcohol and rich food: to top the topper — blood and gore punctuated by inane dialogue and "item numbers" that show acres of female flesh gyrating to loud music. This assumption is both true and untrue because it is precisely those Bollywood products that contain these elements that succeed financially. But box office success also has a rider, that the film be interestingly narrated. It is incorrect to assume that people, rural and urban, cutting across class barriers, want to see only one kind of cinema. For the record, only ten percent of the commercial Hindi films released make money, another fifteen percent break-even and the rest sink without a trace.