Rediscovering sensibility

For a third of the movies' 75-year life in India, they were stuck in the rut of expressing the angry frustrations of a disjointed newly-urban working class, but leading lights of Bollywood exult as Hindi movies once more give voice to a vibrant urban youth with contemporary sensibilities

David Devadas Mumbai/Delhi

This article is not about the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and yet it is. Nor is it about Jessica Lall, but then again it is. It delves into the societal commitment that is once again animating young Indians, but only tangentially. At its core, it is about Hindi cinema’s re-engagement with the traumas and concerns, the complexities and angsts, of young middle class India.

Witness Aamir Khan’s recent career – on-screen and off. Over the past few weeks, he has appeared to want to translate the epic battles of a Mangal Pandey or a Chandrashekhar Azad into support for displaced persons.

Witness too what happened a couple of months ago. A procession of concerned citizens gathered to demand justice for Jessica, the model who was shot five years ago when she refused to serve a man a drink. They gathered at exactly the spot, India Gate, where a vigil of students and others demanded justice for an air force officer in Rang de Basanti, which was running to packed houses at the time.

It is worth examining what has been happening at the heart of the nation, not the events so much as their reverberations – the real in tandem with the celluloid. Indeed, the two have seemed to blur at times almost into a continuum, as if a Matrix-like editor had cross-cut life and art into an inter-dimensional montage.

So has art been imitating life or life imitating art? When that becomes a chicken-and-egg conundrum, one can be sure that a nation’s popular art is pulsating with the rhythms of its heart and mind, the current wavelength of its evolving soul. What we are witnessing is the re-emergence of Indian cinema as the most vital reflection of the concerns of at least urban middle class India – not only the chronicler of, but the creative greenhouse for, its flowering in a globalised environment.

Several Hindi films of the first decade-and-a-half after independence played a sterling role in moulding modern India (Awara, 1951, Do Bigha Zamin, 1953, Jagte Raho, 1956, Mother India and Pyasa, 1957, Kagaz ke Phool and Sujata, 1959, Mughal-e-Azam, 1960, Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, 1962, and many others). Something similar is happening again and, although it has been gradually manifest over the past five or six years, it is becoming more evident in this seventy-fifth anniversary year of Indian movies.

Of course, India is far more complex today than it was half a century ago and most films can at best address a part of its variegated socio-economic reality. Dilip Menon, Professor of social history at Delhi University, says the social contract in the films of the `50s included all citizens but now includes India's "200-million strong” middle class alone. “The concentration on the NRI and urban lifestyle and the fact of the PVRs, where not everyone has access, go together. The separation of an elite from popular spaces is tied up with a new elite which coheres around itself rather than a notion of the people at large,” he says.

Within the world of upwardly mobile middle class India, however, recent commercial films have been remarkably successful – and daring. Ranging from Salaam Namaste, which focused on a live-in relationship, to Mixed Doubles, which delved into partner-swapping, they are dealing with challenging social issues far more than they were for most of the last quarter of the previous century. 15 Park Avenue boldy led viewers into the world of a schizophrenic. And just last month, Being Cyrus took audiences into the decaying world of the Parsi community as it explored greed, cruelty to the aged and India’s farcical criminal investigation set-up.

Rang de Basanti’s slick editing of SUV drives and its skilful interplay of nationalist history are among reasons for its phenomenal success, but a more vital factor is the contemporary chord that it struck among young Indians, disgusted with corruption and cynicism in politics. If it went overboard in plotting a violent denouement – and most people seemed to think it was great except for the last part – the actual public mood was evident in the response to the acquittals in the Jessica Lall case: anger and disgust directed at bringing the guilty to book through due process rather than through crimes of revenge.

In fact, the bloodbath through which the filmmaker chose to resolve his story harked oppressively back to the dismal dramas of a decade or two earlier. No doubt it was fear of the box office that made director Rakeysh Mehra resort to the sort of violence that once worked the turnstiles so smoothly. But middle class India, it would seem, has grown up considerably since those morbid early `90s, those bad old days of Sunny Deol’s blood-soaked dhishum-dhishum scenes. Notions of citizenship have matured. The social contract has enthusiastic takers. So, despite the flawed ending, the film’s fun-filled focus on down-to-earth students, interspersed sparingly with the nationalist fervour of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, pulled in audiences in droves.

It is worth noting that just when hoary old strategic analysts were holding forth about India having arrived on the world stage and its talent pool turning it into an economic superpower, Mumbai’s film world was buzzing with talk of Indian cinema having come into its own with Rang de Basanti – almost as if its release were cinema’s equivalent of the Bush visit.

The film marked the “coming of age of Indian cinema” is how Bhavani Iyer, who wrote the script of Black, put it. Even as respected a filmmaker as Shyam Benegal praised the film for making history relevant to the young, although he excoriated its “essentially fascist” denouement. He predicted soon after its release that “it’s going to be an all time hit.” (In fact, its producers say that, after the best opening weekend ever in Mumbai and Delhi, it became the second highest grosser ever after Mangal Pandey: The Rising, making Rs 67.77 crore in the first six weeks, Rs 24 crore of that from foreign markets.)

Script writer Javed Akhtar, who has helped to mould Indian cinema for four decades, saw it as a pointer to the arrival of a new generation of cinema  patron. “They are secular. They are concerned. They are angry,” he says. “They are not retarded.” 

In tandem with the rise of this new generation of intelligent young cinema patron, a relatively evocative, sophisticated cinema has flowered over the last decade, for the first time since the golden age of Hindi cinema – the time of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy and Mehboob Khan – ended in the `60s.

It augurs well for this most multicultural of nations that contemporaneous films that were both commercially successful and had artistic integrity were made in Malayalam and Tamil before those southern winds helped the much larger – and therefore, on a national scale, more influential – Hindi film industry to rediscover itself.

The common man wants to be entertained, says Iyer, but what entertains has changed since a decade ago. “Deewar was representative of its time, this one of its time,” she says. “It’s inspirational.”

Rang de Basanti has become a landmark film, for everyone seems to have a strong opinion about it, good, bad or intensively both. But it is not as if Hindi cinema – or Indian society – changed overnight early this year. Change has occurred, imperceptibly but surely, since at least the beginning of this decade. Mainstream commercial films have even addressed subjects such as physical disability in Black – “a completely new kettle of fish” in Indian cinema is how Akarsh Khurana, assistant director in Rakesh Roshan’s current project Krrish, describes it – and other kinds of challenged person, as in Rakesh Roshan’s Koi Mil Gaya.

Such themes would have been unthinkable for producers and financiers a decade earlier. Now, they have not only found backers, they roped in top rung stars such as Rani Mukherjee, Hrithik Roshan and Amitabh Bachchan, and have kept the cash registers ringing. Some critics thought Khamoshi – The Musical made by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who also made Black – was a better film but audiences were not ready for it in `96, nor for Yash Chopra’s Lamhe a few years earlier.

Menon points out that, while Black dealt with the theme like Hollywood presenting Helen Keller, Bollywood has smoothly made it its own in recent weeks. Pointing to the recent comedies, Tom, Dick and Harry and Pyare Mohan, he says: “Black actually opened up a space for engagement with disability. What Bollywood has done is completely normalised it, so that it becomes available to all - like Bobby Darling has come to stand in for the gay in a commedy track.”

The handicap theme is only one sort among a huge variety of films that indicate greater sophistication among both filmmaker and patron. Dil Chahta Hai at the turn of the decade addressed a new generation with a love story that revolved around three friends. Of course, Aditya Chopra’s hugely successful Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Sooraj Barjatiya’s Hum Aapke Hain Kaon had already reinvented Bollywood’s love story in `95. (DDLJ also had a nifty business strategy. Set in England, it was Bollywood’s first big film for India’s vast and lucrative diaspora.)

Bollywood may have survived through the late `80s and early `90s on street gang and mafia films but Anurag Kashyap’s script for Satya, which was shot largely on the streets, broke even that mould in `99. In it, National School of Drama alumnus Manoj Bajpai played Bhiku Mhatre as anything but a glitzy don.

Not only has the treatment of underworld characters changed, the proportion of action films among the top 50 Hindi films of the year (in terms of box office revenues) dropped from 47 per cent in 2000 to 40 per cent in 2001, a third in 2002 and just a quarter in 2003. On the other hand, although the proportion of romance films increased to a little more than half in 2002 and 2003, even that figure has declined slightly over the past two years. Filling the gap, almost a third of the films made in the first half of 2005 did not fit into either the romance or action categories, forcing industry analysts to class about 15 per cent as “off the beaten track.”

Although “we have become more moral today as a result of the BJP,” as the accomplished filmmaker Anurag Kashyap notes about the middle classes at large, writers and directors like him are eager to experiment with new themes, techniques and budgets. It is, to be sure, not nearly as exciting a time as in France amid the radical student riots of the late `60s. Yet, he points out that Mixed Doubles was made for just Rs 60-70 lakh, with a lot of people putting in “virtually free work.”

Several factors have over the past decade or so contributed to this evolution but, given that similar films were made earlier too but generally bombed, the pull factor seems to be primary. “There is an audience developing in India that is demanding its own films, and that audience is getting aggressive,” says Sudhir Mishra, whose eouvre includes Hazaaron Khawaishe Aisi.

Meenakshi Shedde, film critic of Daily News and Analysis, points out that 40-50 per cent of film audiences everywhere are in the 15-30 age group. Benegal analyses this fact in historical terms, saying that this generation has grown up with “a decolonised mind.” Kashyap adds that, since about `94-`95, youth has been more experimental. “It seems to me like a new generation,” says the 33-year old. He notes that 15-year-olds discuss sex techniques in coffee shops, oblivious to who might be listening. Since the release of Rang de Basanti, he adds, he has even overheard them arguing over politics.

Fresh, off-beat scripts are pouring onto producers’ desks as filmmakers seek to meet the expectations of this new generation. And Mumbai is full of aspiring script writers and directors (see accompanying story) with a far more rounded education and a much deeper creative urge than one might expect in Bollywood. Iyer says that, although the writing course at the Film and Television Institute of India is only two years old, she found “wonderful, wonderful minds” while teaching the class. Not one of the 15 students had come up with a run-of-the-mill term project, she says.

Since the end of the `90s, a crop of young film personnel has streamed into Bollywood, brimming with ideas and a fresh sensibility, even for other kinds of film-related work than writing and directing. Although many of them come from small towns, they are in terms of education and aspiration very different from those that came before them. Shyam Shroff, who heads Mumbai’s Shringar Films, estimates that half of technicians and other film personnel are now women.

Of course, an even more vital change has revived cinema in India over the past decade – at the retail end of the business. It happened in 1994, says Shroff: first, 1942: A Love Story was released with Dolby Surround Sound that year and, three weeks after, Hum Aapke Hain Kaon released with sound in the even more sophisticated Ultra-four track format. That very year, as it happened, Ajay Bijli – then 25 years old – revamped anupam cinema in Delhi’s upmarket Saket as India’s first multiplex and audiences were treated to a new theatre experience. That, says Shroff, was “the turning point.”

The industry had been in the doldrums for about a decade by then. As the upper and middle classes increasingly stayed away from cinemas, theatres across the country had either closed down or gone to seed. On the production side, says Benegal, entertainment taxes were very high and producers, functioning in a virtual cottage industry, often raised funds at usurious rates of interest – 36 per cent, even 48 per cent. So, he says, “film making became a very dicey proposition from the `70s on.”

It was not just the filmmaking business that went through a crisis. The audience did too. Indeed, one might say in that context that the nation did. Benegal points out that a huge number of Indians had urbanised, as B class and C class towns grew through the `70s and `80s – creating a large mass of moral, disempowered people, often employed in factories, who were trying to redefine their position as citizens. This was the disoriented class, torn from comforting environs and lifestyles, that lapped up what he describes as “vigilante movies,” the ones that often starred Amitabh Bachchan.

Javed Akhtar, who wrote many of those scripts, agrees with that view, saying that the 150 million Indians who entered the middle class in that period changed its character. “In my childhood,” says the 60-year old Akhtar, “middle classes were either landed gentry or professionals from the extended land-owning class, jahil nahin (not uncivilised).” It was the sophisticated taste of that earlier class that appreciated a Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam, a Sujata or a Pyasa, he adds.

While audience sensibilities coarsened, the Mumbai-based mafia, which amassed great wealth from the real estate boom of the `70s, saw film finance as an easy way to launder funds, says Benegal – and discovered a soft target for extortion. So underworld taste came to influence not only the kind of actor that got cast but also the kind of script that got funding. “All takes on life got subsumed into one take, the gangster’s take,” remarks Sudhir Mishra. During the early `80s, Manmohan Desai “stands out as a social historian in his own way,” he adds, “but by the mid-80s, films provided only entertainment for gangsters.”

Things got steadily worse through the `80s on another front. The middle classes turned increasingly to colour television and the video cassette player, leaving theatres more and more to the lower urban classes. Shroff bemoans the resulting loss of a generation of filmmakers between about `84 and `94.

Each period, however, generates its own sensibility and its particular art. Witness for instance the difference between Shakespeare’s plays written during Elizabeth I’s reign and those written when James I succeeded her (The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale, etc.). “It is a demand and supply situation really,” says Akarsh Khurana. Influences – whether of Bengal’s film Titans in the `50s or Hollywood today, the underworld in the `80s or the NRI market now – too make a dent.

So it was that, in the early `90s, Indian cinema reached its nadir. Now that multiplexes have brought the upper classes back to the theatre, Akhtar observes that the children of those who faced the wrenching angst of social dislocation in the `70s and `80s have matured with a finer sensibility. The upbeat urban mood generated by the economic boom of the past decade has supplanted angst with aspiration, a desire for popular art that explores the fast-changing world they have inherited.

Of course, films that speak to this upwardly mobile urban class are unlikely to strike a chord among rural audiences and others left out by the consumer boom. However, as Akhtar says, “if Mumbai’s film industry doesn’t make films for Bihar, someone else will.” Already, more and more money has been invested in films in relatively minor north Indian languages. Ajay Devgan was recently signed to star in Nirmal Jani’s Dharti Kahe Pukar Ke in Bhopjuri. Amitabh Bachchan – who has signed other Bhojpuri films – and Hema Malini are also to play roles in that film.

If indeed dialects are to fill the gaps left by Hindi cinema in the cow belt, it would not be the first time mainstream Indian cinema has segregated. Akhtar recalls the parallel industry for “stunt films” in the `60s. It had separate stars, including Dara Singh, separate filmmakers and crews, separate theatres, including Taj, Edward and Alfred in Mumbai, and a separate audience.

Benegal expands on the other segregation that occurred when the mainstream went downmarket, during the `70s: the rise of “art cinema.” He traces its growth  – believe it or not – to foreign policy. Influenced by men like Romesh Thapar, he says, Indira Gandhi put a squeeze on foreign films, making it tough to repatriate earnings. Since the few cinemas that used to show English language films were starved of content, they readily accepted the sorts of films that Benegal, Saeed Mirza, Girish Kasarvali, Muzaffar Ali and others made. These often appealed to audiences that preferred foreign films to Bollywood fare.

At a time when Michael Moore has greatly enhanced the salience of documentaries, a new pattern of segmentation could now be emerging in popular cinema. Several filmmakers say the really exciting work today is being done in documentaries. When the number of good documentary films and filmmakers reaches a critical mass, says Benegal, “then they cannot be ignored.”

Happily, not only the upper crust of the intelligentsia responds to good documentaries. An interesting vignette of developing small town taste was manifest last month: an audience packed a theatre in Allahabad for a hurriedly arranged screening of the documentary, Continuous Journey, which had won the Golden Conch in its category at the Mumbai International Film Festival a few days earlier. Filmmaker Ali Kazimi apologised that the historical film, based on very limited visual material, was in English. But the largely Hindi speaking audience was rapt for an hour-and-a-half and kudos kept pouring in for days.

At least fictionalised documentaries, in which events are recreated by professional actors, are becoming common even in crime shows on Indian news channels. And Shringar Films recently took the plunge on behalf of the commercial mainstream by screening Ashvin Kumar’s Oscar-nominated short documentary Little Terrorist in some of the smaller halls of its multiplexes.

That such unpredictable things are happening successfully is ample evidence that, 75 years after the movies hit India in a storm of colour, song and heart-wrenching emotion, the business is so dynamic that one cannot predict which way it will go next. The only certainty is that Indian cinema is alive and kicking.

with inputs from Karan Amar Makhija and Gautam Doshi