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1
Introduction
K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake
The cinema is still the favorite pastime of most populations across the globe. It is clearly so in India, which is the largest film-producing country in the world. Its output now has a formidable global reach. After years of marginalization by academics in the West, as well as by local elite cultural commentators, Indian cinema has moved from the periphery to the center of world cinema in a comparatively short space of time. The reasons for this remarkable journey are many and complex.
At one level, we have Amitabh Bachchanâs comment, âIt is not we who have changed, it is the people who are looking at us who haveâ (Bachchan 2004). At another level, we can state, to borrow some remarks from John Fiske (2010) that were made in a different context, that beneath the surface of Indian cinema lie a multitude of meanings and ways of interpreting and understanding them, not all of them intended by the film producers themselves. The interpretive function and the proactive role of audiences have been justly recognized by modern film theorists.
In putting together this volume of essays on Indian cinema we were guided by the following important considerations. First, we believe that cinema is a significant cultural practice. What we mean by this is that we need to recognize that cinema is art, entertainment, technology, industry and ideology all at the same time. All these aspects intersect so as to constitute a complex unity. We can understand the true nature of Indian cinemaâor for that matter any other cinemaâonly if we pay attention to the complex interlacing of these facets. Most of the essays in this volume have been guided by this conviction.
Second, we believe that cinema is a powerful reflector of society. It mirrors the social transformations, cultural tensions and new trends that are surfacing in society in interesting ways. At the same time we are also mindful of the fact that cinema is a shaper of those social transformations, cultural tensions and new trends that emerge. It is important that we keep in view this dual function of cinema, and this is most relevant in the case of a country like India. The authors of the chapters in this collection are sensitive to this fact. We believe that cinema is a vital adjunct of the public sphere molding views, attitudes and opinions of the vast movie-going public.
Third, as we were planning this volume, the question of the relationship between cinema and the Indian social imaginary was at the back of our minds. The concept of the social imaginary is one that culturally oriented film scholars and critics can employ usefully. As the eminent social philosopher Charles Taylor (2004) remarked, the concept of the social imaginary encompasses something much wider and deeper than analytical schemes and intellectual categories that scholars employ when exploring social reality. He focuses on the âways in which they imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met and the deeper normative notions and images which underlie their expectationsâ (ibid.: 23). Here Taylor is focusing on the experiential dimension of living which we can invoke usefully in our film analysis.
Fourth, cinema has been examined traditionally in terms of the nation; the trope of national cinema has dominated film analysis. This is particularly important in a large country like India in which films are made in a number of different languages. However, in recent times the interactions between the national and the international have increased exponentially, focusing on the international implications of Indian cinema. Bollywood cinema, for instance, which is gaining a global audience and visibility, indexes this fact. Hence in this volume we have chosen also to focus on diasporic filmmakers and diasporic audiences, as a means of extending the discursive and exegetical boundaries of Indian cinema.
Fifth, there has been a strong connection between cinema and the culture of modernity from the very beginning in India. In India cinema has played and continues to play a vital role in disseminating an urban consciousness, and facilitating the transition from feudal and agricultural societies to urban and industrial societies, and from there to consumer and postmodernist societies. The cinema has been a facilitator of social transformation in India in complex ways. Indian films reflect these transformations and the authors featured in this volume highlight this facet of Indian experience. How Indian cinema connects with, and is informed by, technology, consumerism, spectacle, the march of modernityâever-changing facets of representation related to an India on the moveâis a theme that many of the chapters in this Handbook have addressed.
Sixth, we also wanted our book to be representative of diverse approaches to cinema. This is all the more important since in recent years there has been a tendency for Indian scholarship to rely too heavily on Western theories. To avoid being unduly subservient to Western theories, we decided to clear an analytical space within the covers of this volume where diverse theories, vocabularies and analytical tools could freely intermingle while making the chapters easily accessible to a variety of readers.
This Handbook of commissioned chapters in which contributors were asked to provide a survey of their chosen topic analyzes many aspects of Indian cinemas to reveal their explicit and implicit (and often opposite) meanings. In our attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, we have opted to combine an historical and thematic approach. Indian cinemas need to be understood in their historical unfolding as well as their complex relationships to social, economic, cultural, political, ideological and institutional discourses. Thus, considering the diverse contributions of the regional cinemas of India, often marginalized in much of the literature, we have flagged them as much as space allowed. We are aware of the problems involved in such an approach for, to quote âThe Making of Indiaâ (Social Scientist 2005), we are dealing with a nation that is held together neither by a common language, shared religion nor primordial racial myth. The contributors in the first section demonstrate the many facets of the Indian cinemas by discussing Popular, Parallel/New Wave and Regional cinemas. The spectacular rise of Bollywood is underlined.
The thematic sections provide a framework for some of the leading scholars on Indian cinemas to weave an up-to-date critical narrative on diverse topics such as audiences, censorship, corporatization of the film industry, diaspora, documentary studies, film distribution, film music, nationalism, property rights, sexuality and social networking.
The Handbook provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge survey of Indian cinemas and an invaluable resource for Indian film historians, students, academics and all those with a serious interest in Indian cinemas.
Note
The translation of titles of Indian films into English has always been a problem. Some films have no officially sanctioned translations; others have many. Hence, we have left this problematic issue to the discretion of each individual author. With regard to the changed names of cities, we felt that as this Handbook is meant for academics, scholars and discerning readers familiar with Indian society and history, there was no compelling need to provide both variations.
Overview of the chapters
Part I Historical analysis
Part II Themes and perspectives
Part III The business of Indian cinemas
Part IV Cinema halls and audiences
Bibliography
Bachchan, A., âPeople First,â India Today special issue, (5 January 2004), indiatoday.intoday.in/story/everything-looks-good-so-indian-films-look-wonderful-amitabh-bachchan/1/196896.html.
Fiske, J., Reading the Popular, London: Routledge, 2010.
Social Scientist, âThe Making of India,â 33(11â12) (NovemberâDecember 2005).
Taylor, C., Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.
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I
Historical analysis
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2
From Cultural Backwardness to the Age of Imitation
An essay on film history
M. Madhava Prasad
There are a number of ways in which the spectator of a popular film might find him or herself at the receiving end of cinemaâs pedagogic vocation. Here we need only look at two relevant ones. Thus melodrama is an entertainment form with a pedagogic mission. Its very existence attests to a relation of cultural education between the pioneering missionaries of the bourgeoisie and the expropriated âfree laborâ flocking to the cities.1 To give another example, it is well known that Hollywood cinema, when it reaches the ends of the world, is more than likely to be regarded by the second- or third-order viewership there as a source of knowledge and values which hold the promise of a better life. This impact of Hollywood overseas is further divisible into two related aspects: first, the direct social impact which has been an object of concern and investigation since at least the 1920s, as is clear from the report and proceedings of the Indian Cinematograph Committee (ICC) of 1927â28;2 and second, the formal pressure exercised by Hollywood upon the film industry, which is so strong that for some prominent filmmakers in India today, Hollywood is nothing less than a Platonic realm of ideas which they aspire to reproduce.
In the case of melodrama, we are dealing with the intersection of two distinct domains of cultural practice: a bourgeois culture and a popular culture that catered to working-class and peasant audiences (for the moment restricting ourselves to the European social conditions that attended its origins). In the second instance, we routinely encounter discussions of national cinema (and Indian cinema in particular) which regard it as having arisen from the depths of the soil. In some cases, of course, this is true: it can be said of post-revolution Iranian cinema that it is a distinctive national style, although the same could not be said about Iranian cinema from before this time. However, Indian popular cinema long ago entered into a relation of common measure with Hollywood, a relation that is acknowledged, albeit in a playful or mocking tone, in the popularity of the term âBollywood.â The mode of employment of this common measure may differ from case to case. In melodramatic narratives we often find popular culture proclaiming its own inferiority faced with the finer products of a classical culture (Shankarabharanam, Abhiman). Its value system seems imposed from above. In the case of Bollywood, the pressure exercised by Hollywood upon it is strictly a matter of postcolonial desire. It is the Indian filmmakers who imagine a common measure and aspire to achieve parity with Hollywood under it.
There are two orders of commensuration, one internal to the Indian social formation, the other external. Both are equally important determinations for the current state of Indian popular cinema, but there is also a third relation that is emerging. This can take the form of a relation between the two orders just described, insofar as these relations themselves are productive and identifiable with different tendencies in film production. Concretely, we find in contemporary Bombay products a sustained campaign to reconstitute the narrative and moral coordinates of filmic narration. The old film form is undergoing changes to accommodate the new values and ideals associated with the currently emerging capitalist society. There are many ways in which the cinema has turned into a classroom for the re-education of the Indian spectator for the era of globalization,3 including, to give a quick example, the familiar, if not by now already forgotten Archie Comics-inspired views of Indian college life.
This chapter is divided into three parts. The first part analyzes a film that uses the cultural backwardness of the Indian spectator as a ruse to overcome a narrative impasse. The second part turns to the ICCâs report in order to trace the historical construction of the culturally backward spectator. The third part returns to the present to describe developments in contemporary Indian cinema as constituting a moment of social and formal imitation as re-education of the Indian subject.
Trumping the culturally backward spectator
Pyar Tune Kya Kiya (Rajat Mukherjee, 2001; hereafter PTKK) is of interest as an attempt to dramatize the historical predicament of a spectator caught between two logics of narration. It could be described as a film about the perils of spectatorship in the new world. The new spectator is one who will have been stripped forcibly of the traditional modes of reading and rendered free, and therefore obliged to work for his or her meaning. PTKK shows the spectator how it is done.
From the beginning, PTKK adopts an editing strategy that juxtaposes and runs together two logics of narrationâone with which the average spectator is familiar as a viewer of Hindi films, and another which is associated with Hollywood. It combines shots that seem to harbor an enigma instituting suspense and demanding interpretation and transitions that seem to restore the reassuring already-knownness of what is to come. Individual scenes are readable within an anticipated order of unfolding but will later turn out to have had another intention, an intention which the spectator will remember having suspected but brushed aside out of an inherent trust nourished by decades of Hindi cinema. The spectator finally ends up in a jam for not having read the signs and has to pay the price for it. S/he must fall into line by pretending actually to have read the signs: that is the punishment which, once undergone, can also turn into something of a reward. In the process the spectator will have given up on a moral principle too.
To briefly recount the narrative of PTKK: Riya, the spoilt child of a rich widower, is persuaded by Jai, a fashion photographer, to work as a model. Convinced that Jai is in love with her, Riya finds out on visiting him at home that he is married. After this discovery, Riyaâs latent psychosis emerges full-blown and the rest of the film follows the lead of Hollywood stalker films like Play Misty for Me, Fatal Attraction, etc. In what could be seen as a concession to Indian sensibilities, the film concludes with an epilogue where Jai and his wife Geeta visit Riya, now confined to a mental hospital, only to find that his presence reactivates her psychosis. They q...
