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.