Bollywood Cinema

Temples of Desire

Vijay Mishra

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415930147
• eBook ISBN: 9781135310998
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

India is home to Bollywood - the largest film industry in the world. Movie theaters are said to be the "temples of modern India," with Bombay producing nearly 800 films per year that are viewed by roughly 11 million people per day. In Bollywood Cinema, Vijay Mishra argues that Indian film production and reception is shaped by the desire for national community and a pan-Indian popular culture. Seeking to understand Bollywood according to its own narrative and aesthetic principles and in relation to a global film industry, he views Indian cinema through the dual methodologies of postcolonial studies and film theory. Mishra discusses classics such as Mother India (1957) and Devdas (1935) and recent films including Ram Lakhan (1989) and Khalnayak (1993), linking their form and content to broader issues of national identity, epic tradition, popular culture, history, and the implications of diaspora.

Chapter One
Inventing Bombay Cinema

Cinemas, one Indian film critic has surmised, are "the temples of modern India" (Das Gupta 1988: 130). They are designed to seduce: monumental spaces gleam with light and color, vestibules are plastered with posters of gods and goddesses, red carpets exude desire and wantonness. Devotees come in huge numbers to worship, "to take darsana," at the shrine of the new image, the oneiric image that will create their new gods and even their new beliefs. In an act of sly complicity (between those who control the mode of production and those who consume the finished product), the screen projects the increasingly reward-seeking desires of the Indian lumpen-proletariat. Where once, it seems, cinematic desire was a collective middle-class desire, deflected onto a larger nationalist program, it is now the aggressive desire of phantasmal self-projection, with the nation as only one of many objectives of the desiring machine. In this aggressive sell-projection and demand for reciprocity, in the suturing of image and spectator, may be discovered the impetus of my metaphor of Bombay Cinema as temples of desire.

The massive size of Indian cinema is obvious from the statistics: eight hundred films a year shown in more than thirteen thousand predominantly urban cinemas, viewed by an average of 11 million people each day, and exported to about a hundred countries. Between 1913 (when Dhundhiraj Govind (Dadasaheb) Phalke produced Raja Harishchandra, the first Indian film) and 1981 more than fifteen thousand feature films had been produced in India. Almost as many films have been produced since 1981. By 1983 it was India's sixth-largest industry, grossing around $600 million annually and employing some three hundred thousand workers. But the form is much more than these figures show. Its value as cultural capital has to be seen in the way in which this "Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art" (Rushdie 1995: 148-49) has invaded all aspects of popular culture, from traditional folk performances to video clips, CDs, and cassettes. Its formulaic structure as well as its technical know-how (practice) are used to produce televisual films including soap operas and mythologies. As well, the industry has spawned countless fan magazines feverishly consumed by an ever-widening community of national and diasporic readers. Even in the burgeoning area of television, both local and cable, the impact of cinema is pervasive. Pendakur and Subramanyam, two experts on the political economy of Indian cinema, make this point explicitly when, referring to India's most popular satellite channel, Zee TV, they note that the "influence of the film world is omnipresent" (Pendakur and Subramanyam 1996: 68). In two areas this impact has been particularly obvious. On MTVs top twenty countdown, song-and-dance sequences are all taken from Bombay Cinema, which, in turn, has responded to this demand by incorporating stage-managed "autonomous" song-and-dance sequences in its filmic design. In recent films these sequences have either been an elaborate stage act (which can be transferred easily to the live stage in concert halls) or filmed in exotic locales in India or overseas. On cable TV, which began to reach "an awesome 8,000,000 homes by mid-1994" (Poduval 1999: 111), some of the most popular shows [Sunhere Pal, Ole Ole, and Cinema Cinema) deal with commercial cinema. The second area relates to serials produced for TV. In the relatively short history of Doordarshan (the national TV network introduced in 1959 and dramatically expanded only in the early '80s when India hosted the Asian Games), the two most successful serials ever produced have been the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata. Both of these were produced by Bombay filmmakers: the first by Ramanand Sagar (a not altogether successful film producer who is nevertheless remembered for scripting Raj Kapoor's Barsaat), the second by B. R. Chopra (a household name in Bombay Cinema). But even as the serials redefined the hitherto staid and antimodern thinking of Doordarshan, they also signaled the end of Doordarshan's domination. Since January 1991 when Satellite Broadcasting began from Hong Kong on Star TV (Satellite Transmission of Asian Region TV), the media scene in India has undergone a radical change. In the 1998 financial year, Zee Television, for instance, had grossed 475 crore rupees ($115 million). In the same period Doordarshan's income dropped by 14 percent and continues to slide (Times of India, January 24, 1999: 6). The aggressive programming on the part of the other independent TV stations—Sony Entertainment, Star TV (now part of Rupert Murdoch's media empire), and Star Plus, producer of the phenomenally successful Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who wants to be a millionaire?) and likely buyer of BBCl's Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister series—have also dented the hitherto unchallenged supremacy of the national television. Insofar as Zee TV is concerned, during 1998 it showed 25 percent of the top fifty TV serials. Cutthroat competition, especially in the cities where "the superior quality of transmissions" and the slick programs of Star, Zee, Sony, and others are "luring audiences away from the national television" (Prasad 1999: 125), led P. C. Lahiri, the corporate director of Zee TV, to make the following cynical observation:

Doordarshan, which used to be a profit-making enterprise for the government, is turning out to be another white elephant. With the government turning a blind eye to PBC, will Doordarshan end up with zero earnings and zero viewership? (Times of India, January 24, 1999: 6)

The phenomenal success of cable and satellite TV in India (and in the diaspora) has also meant that the erstwhile hegemony of film as the primary medium of entertainment has been somewhat eroded. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that in real terms the number of viewers have not declined and the film industry has very successfully intervened into television programs. So although we need to address the general question of the proliferation of visual media in India (which is why references to TV and cable networking must be kept in mind throughout this book), cinema remains the cultural dominant of India, its "sole model of national unity" (Chakravarty 1993: 310) and the dominant "simulacral realm of mass culture" through which "all political struggle [in the postmodern era]" must necessarily pass (Shohat and Stam 1994: 6). It is on these assumptions that I want to proceed.

In the context of Indian commercial cinema generally Hindi cinema or Bombay (Bollywood) Cinema is the largest player. It is also the model for popular regional cinema and is in this respect closer to being an all-India cinema. Although there is something rather artificial about the culture that Bombay Cinema constructs—a culture that is built around a (male) North Indian Hindi-speaking subject—it does give rise to the possibilities of a "shared experience" that may, if we wish to extend the argument further, make "the people produce itself continually as national community" (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 93) or transform them into the "abstract 'national' subject" (Rajadhyaksha 1999: 137). As the "major shaper of an emerging, pan-Indian popular culture" (Kakar 1990: 26) and subjectivity, Bombay Cinema seems to have transcended class and even linguistic difference by emphatically stressing "the myths on which the Indian social order survives in spite of changes" (Raina 1986: 131). The structure of the film is therefore designed to accommodate deep fantasies belonging to an extraordinarily varied group of people, from illiterate workers to sophisticated urbanites. A key binary that has been detected by almost all commentators of this form is the modernity/tradition binary. Modernity is disavowed even as it is endorsed; tradition is avowed even as it is rejected. M. Madhava Prasad (1998: 9) sees this as the classic instance of Marx's metaphor of the camera obscura, which he used to "define ideology as the inverted representation of real social relations." The contradiction implicit in any ideological formation highlights tensions in the culture itself; in the case of Bombay Cinema, although the narrative form locates itself in tradition, textual ideology is firmly grounded in modernity. The contradiction gradually gets internalized by the implied spectator and is one of the key elements that governs its filmic representationalism. To think through the question of the "intelligibility" of the form, I want to reprise some mediating forms and principles that have a direct bearing on this cinema. I refer to these mediators as epic intertexts, theatrical form, frontality, the art of Raja Ravi Varma, the foundational semiotics of the cinema of Phalke and the heterogeneous form of Indian cinematic production. My indebtedness to the work of Geeta Kapur, Anuradha Kapur, Ashish Rajadyaksha, and M. Madhava Prasad will be evident as I proceed.

The System and Its Mediators

"The epics and myths of the country," wrote Chidananda Das Gupta, "would seem to present the most widely acceptable base for the artistic development of the Indian cinema" (quoted in Chakravarty 1993: 125). My aim in declaring the pan-Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, as crucial cultural intertexts is not based on a crude theory of structural homology or even structural displacement. My interest is more with powerful texts that are "founders of discursivity" (Foucault 1980: 154). What Foucault had in mind was a theory of decisive or foundational texts that get endlessly rewritten, though not necessarily endorsed. They are critiqued, their values challenged, their structures destabilized, even parodied, but they remain foundational nevertheless. Foucault refers to Marx and Freud as the key modern founders of Western discursivity. In Indian culture that position is singularly held by the epic texts, whose rules of discursivity invade principles that govern the formation of the Bombay film. In other words, the narrative functions and discourses of the precursor epic texts are enabling conventions as well as a repository of shared information (or knowledge). These texts are marked by generic capaciousness and lack of closure, by the interweaving of relatively autonomous fragments within the main narrative structure and by "unresolved, indeed unresolvable ambivalence" (Shulman 1985: 110). The literary evidence everywhere demonstrates a delight in mixed forms, a kind of restless generic permutation—"what is not here is nowhere else to be found" (yad nā iha asti na tat kvacit) claims the Mahābhārata, and the minstrels in the Rāmāyana of Valmiki declare that their epic "is replete with all the poetic sentiments: the humorous, the erotic, the piteous, the wrathful, the heroic, the terrifying, the loathsome, and the rest" (1984: sarga 4, śloka 8). Something else needs to be stressed: these are not just secular texts of culture; they are texts of darśana, of religious homage, as well as texts that function as meta-texts of tradition and dharmik values. In them are contained those absolute values by which tradition can be maintained even as modernity is endorsed. In the realm of the popular, dharma is rarely if ever distorted so that in the end Govinda, the antihero in Shikari (The prowler, 2000), is presented as someone whose turn to barbarism arose because his own dharmik order (his father was a priest) had been so cruelly destroyed by the feudal order. The relay through dharma-adharma-dharma allows for transgressive eruptions to take place from within so that the unspeakable, the anti-dharmik, may be articulated. Hence pleasures of transgression are entertained as the spectator identifies with any number of ideologically unstable elements with the foreknowledge that the order will be reestablished. The full disruptive potential of the great epic, which ends in an apocalyptic vision of ends, thus exists only as a trace in the genre.

Three concepts—epic genealogy, the persistence of dharmik codes and the power of the renouncer—are key legacies of the epic precursor texts. The theme of genealogical purity and banishment (in the epics heroes are periodically banished) surfaces in Raj Kapoor's influential film Awara (The vagabond, 1951), where two patterns may be detected. A wife is banished by her wealthy lawyer husband because she was kidnapped by a gang of thugs. The same lawyer, later in life, refuses to acknowledge his son as his own. The relay through which parental recognition is finally endorsed allows important ideological concerns about morality and modernity to be raised. But there can be no ultimate concession to genealogical purity without first addressing dharmik principles. In Main Tulsi Tere Aagan Ki (I'm the holy basil of your garden, 1978) it is the genealogically impure half brother (whose mother was a prostitute) who finally saves the family name from disgrace. But in films like this the half brother's goodness is ontologically given—his mother was not a prostitute after all, as mothers rarely are. Any number of films—Ram Teri Ganga Maili (Rama your Ganges is dirty, 1985), Koyla (Burning coal, 1998), and so on—could be added here.

Apart from genealogy and the overriding principle of dharma, the epic intertexts also introduce the figure of the renouncer whose tapas (severe austerities) can challenge the power of the gods themselves. In the epics Bhishma and Ravana attain godly strengths through their vows of renunciation and the practice of tapas. At the level of the social the renouncer becomes something of a free-floating signifier whose independence from the social allows him enormous freedom of action. In many ways the Amitabh Bachchan figure in Zanjeer (The chain, 1973), who combined the renouncer ethic with that of the revenger, is an excellent example of how these themes can be put to dramatic use. More immediately, however, it is important to note how it is the renouncer rather than the man-in-the-world (Louis Dumont's terms for the essentialist opposition of nivrtti and pravrtti in Indian culture) who is of greater interest to the form of Bombay Cinema. Two fundamental character types may be located here as well. The first is the hero in vipralambha, the hero estranged from his lover or detached from the world. A summary of key popular Bombay actors of the past fifty or so years makes this point self-evident. So Dilip Kumar blinds himself when sight does not lead to reciprocal recognition from Nargis in Deedar (Vision, 1951). Both Raj Kapoor in Mera Naam Joker (The joker, 1970) and Dev Anand in Bambai Ka Baku (A gentleman from Bombay, 1960) lose the women they love. In Sangam (The confluence, 1964) the renouncer is Rajendra Kumar, the hero's friend with a barely disguised homoerotic feeling toward Raj Kapoor, and an actor whose periodic deaths on the screen killed off voyeuristic pleasure in one's objects of love (M. Madhava Prasad 1998: 79-87). A later matinee idol, Rajesh Khanna, was, for a while, continually in a state of vipralambha (Amar Prem, Amardeep, etc.) and Amitabh Bachchan too in an interesting movie like Silsila (Continuity, 1981) sacrifices his love for duty. The preeminent actor of the 1990s, Shah Rukh Khan (an actor who has a fine sense of the "composite" tradition of Bombay actors), adopts the role of the lover-in-estrangement as well. In a film such as Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa (Sometimes yes, sometimes no, 1996) this is certainly the case although in at least three other Shah Rukh Khan films—Deewana (Hopelessly in love, 1992), Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman (Gentleman Raju, 1997), and Mobabbatein (Varieties of love, 2000)—a high level of estrangement from the world frames the mood of the hero. To use a phrase I alluded to in my preface, we can call this the becārā complex, the complex of self-pity that produces the condition of the melancholic hero. The hero in vipralambha—the condition of the sentimentalist—is also the figure around whom the denial of materialism is enacted. But here too there is a massive ambiguity. Whereas a film's mise-en-scenes provide us with images of a well-to-do middle-class lifestyle, its verbal texture, its speech acts, are framed around an abrogation of the material. This contradiction says something about spectatorial subjectivity and how material props may be read as rewards for the ethical, renunciatory life.

The second figure is the Mother, whose representation in Bombay films (unlike that in the epics, where she has been more ambiguously constructed) is a semantic and structural invariant. The filmic Mother often renounces everything for the sake of her husband or son. Conversely, however, when a Mother renounces her own son (which is rare) or her husband (which is rarer still—after all a wife is called a dharmapatnī, the wife of dharma) the sheer emotional weight of her act is enormous. So Kunti's plea to her firstborn, KKrnaaa, for the lives of her five legitimate sons in the Mahābhārata also implies an act of monumental renunciation because Karna must die as a consequence. Similarly, Nargis must shoot her son Birju (Sunil Dutt) in Mother India because her son had subverted codes that transcend filial obligations, codes indeed of dharma itself. The moment she shoots her son dead, she is canonized, she becomes a supermother, that terrible renouncer who is at once Mother and avenging goddess Kali/Durga. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• A Note on Transliteration
• Chapter one INVENTING BOMBAY CINEMA
• Chapter two MELODRAMATIC STAGING
• Chapter Three THE TEXTS OF "MOTHER INDIA"
• Chapter Four AUTEURSHIP AND THE LURE OF ROMANCE
• Chapter Five THE ACTOR AS PARALLEL TEXT: AMITABH BACHCHAN
• Chapter Six SEGMENTING/ANALYZING TWO FOUNDATIONAL TEXTS
• Charter Seven AFTER AYODHYA: THE SUBLIME OBJECT OF FUNDAMENTALISM
• Chapter Eight BOMBAY CINEMA AND DIASPORIC DESIRE
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index