Salaam Bollywood

Representations and interpretations

Vikrant Kishore, Amit Sarwal, Parichay Patra

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138649620
• eBook ISBN: 9781317232858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This book traces the journey of popular Hindi cinema from 1913 to contemporary times when Bollywood has evolved as a part of India's cultural diplomacy. Avoiding a linear, developmental narrative, the book re-examines the developments through the ruptures in the course of cinematic history. The essays in the volume critically consider transformations of the Hindi film industry from its early days to its present self-referential mode, issues of gender, dance and choreography, Bombay cinema's negotiations with the changing cityscape and urbanisms, and concentrate on its multifarious regional, national and transnational implications in the 21st century.

One of the most comprehensive volumes on Bollywood, this work presents an analytical overview of the multiple histories of popular cinema in India and will be useful to scholars and researchers interested in film and media studies, South Asian popular culture and modern India, as well as to cinephiles and general readers alike.

Part I
Histories

Mainstream and alternative

1
Myths, markets and panics

Bombay cinema and the historical significance of the popularity of two Gujarati stage plays at the turn of the 20th century

Kaushik Bhaumik

Through the 19th century, Indian mercantile communities had been growing in wealth and status through colonial trade in opium and cotton. Most of this trading in Bombay was carried out by Gujarati-speaking businessmen. The opium trade to China, followed by the cotton boom following the American Civil War, had established the city as the industrial capital of the subcontinent. The period following the plague of 1896 was one of immense changes for the city of Bombay. Not only did the plague entail a huge loss of population through deaths, morbidity and exodus, but it also shook up the entire socio-economic framework of the city. This is an aspect that is being researched extensively, pointing to the event’s status as a watershed in the city’s history in modern times. The colonial government and the Gujarati-speaking elite reacted to the gravity of the situation by refurbishing the city through massive urban renewal projects financed by the city elite. The sheer scale of investments in projects of urban renewal in the wake of the plague is a good indication of the power of these mercantile communities in Bombay.

Huge investments of Indian capital in the colonial infrastructure had a number of implications, two of which form the focus of the chapter. The first was an obvious one – increasing opportunities for business also increased the volume of speculation in the market. The second fallout was in the cultural front and this involved the increasing modernisation of the communities and their emergence into public life, leading to the formation of a vibrant public sphere defined by debate and agonistic competition over wealth and cultural performance. This was more apparent after the period of the plague, something that I shall refer to later in the chapter. Out of this second development came a substantial investment in public entertainments and cultural production, the most important of which was the institution of the Parsi Theatre that before the advent of Bombay cinema in the 1920s was the biggest indigenous mass entertainment medium on an all-India scale.

The chapter that follows is largely an informed speculation upon the possible reasons for the popularity of two stories, those of the kings Harishchandra and Nala, in the repertoire of the Parsi-Gujarati theatre, stories that if the sheer number of performances and their legendary status are anything to go by were important articulators of Indic public imagination in the period between the 1870s and the 1910s.

Harishchandra and the Bombay merchant

Of all the stories from the Indian epic-pauranic traditions that of Harishchandra had until recently been the most popular in public performance.¹ Gandhi referred to the seeing of a play version of the tale as a child in Porbandar as being a turning point in his life, his turn towards a lifelong preoccupation with being stringently truthful. It is, of course, now a well-known fact that the first feature film produced in India in 1913 was a treatment of the same storyline. When V. Shantaram made Prabhat’s first talkie Ayoddhyachhe Raja he meant Harishchandra, king of Ayodhya, and not Rama. What is not so well known is that, before that epochal moment of the arrival of Indian cinema, the story had had a long life on the Indian stage in multiple versions for almost 40 years. Originating on the Bombay stage, performances of the tale had travelled to all corners of India and had the made the careers of many a playwright, actor and theatrical company. It should be noted that this story was played out more frequently on the stage than the story of Rama.

The core of the Harishchandra story involves Vishvamitra first denuding him of his kingdom and then coming back time and again to ask for various sums of money to be paid to him within specific periods as part of a promise the king had made to the sage. In order to do so, Harishchandra auctions himself and his family away as slave assistants to an untouchable dom (the head of a crematorium) and earns his money by burning dead bodies. His family undergoes enormous travails; and he loses his son to snakebite, but just as he is about to burn his son Vishvamitra intervenes and tells him that he has passed his test and as a boon revives his son.

For the Bombay merchant, such a story had very personal meanings. The merchant, above all, was famed for being a man of his word, which in premodern times was all that ensured the passage of goods on credit and the redemption of costs on the safe passage of the goods. Such an informal system of word of mouth was also what contracted the debtor to the creditor at levels of monetary transactions. Recent research on Gujarati mercantile communities has revealed the role of bardic communities in ensuring the flow of investment through the practice of tragu that involved fasting unto death, as well as mutilating the family and self to the point of death, in order to exert moral pressure on the culpable party to redeem the debt.² It might be noted in passing that such a method of extracting debts through extreme moral pressure has a lot in common with the Harishchandra story, where the king harms himself and his family in order to redeem a word of honour involving monetary debt. The fact that the story of Raja Harishchandra or Harichand forms an integral part of the bardic repertoire of folk theatre performances in western and north-western India makes the connection between this story and mercantile communities of the region, the bards served a marker of collective identities. It is to be found in an Ismaili ginan of Pir Sadruddin as well as in the Guru Granth Sahib of the Sikhs. Indeed, to date, it is the most frequently performed story in the repertoire of folk theatre narratives, cutting across the entire spectrum of such performances across every region of India.³

Harishchandra’s story has to be understood against a time of intense speculation that made the returns from investments uncertain, creating more opportunities for sudden loss against time-tested mechanisms of investment, thus bringing visions of financial and social ruin quite easily to the fore. The stable kingdom stood for a world of stable investment, which is then torn apart by a debt demand. For the merchant, the inability to pay back debt meant loss of face, social ostracism and loss of jati. Thus, a play that made an untouchable out of a king of the solar dynasty was all the more poignant for the audience code, as it did the threat of becoming a social untouchable through the inability to pay back debts incurred. Also, this devilish vision of downward social mobility was made doubly painful, with the traumatic visitations of physical labour and disease on wife and child as well as the threat of menial labour that for all practical purposes reduced a merchant to the status of the untouchable. For the merchants of Bombay who styled themselves as urban princes in this period, the play dressed up in regalia must have cut quite close to the bone in a period of great financial uncertainty. But, such a play could also be read by upcoming traders as a graphic depiction of the vicissitudes of the world of business, one that entailed enormous hard work in order to keep oneself solvent as well as great sacrifices made by kith and kin for making a household tick along. Much was made of everyday scenes of menial labour carried out by wife and son, scenes that would have reflected the everyday in ordinary trading households of the city that were run on family labour. Here, exile could be read as leaving the familial home due to the worldly demands of success and coming to live in a city to set up trade. And, indeed, so much of early Gujarati prose would be dedicated to this issue of loss of status and face due to boom and busts in the market, stories full of pathos of the diligent and suffering wife and the calamitous visitation of illness upon the child at home (usually a son) that resulted in spectacular melodramatic gestures and denouements of equally spectacular turns of fortune restoring peace and prosperity.

Harishchandra could then serve a double purpose of consoling merchants at a time of grave economic upsurge that made status unstable for even the most powerful (the fall of the cotton king Premchand Roychand, the unofficial ruler of Bombay, is still the stuff of legend, a cautionary tale for contemporary businessmen of the city) as well as reiterating the need to keep the mercantile ethic of honesty intact during such times of uncertainty. As we shall see in the case of Nala, ethics could easily go astray and cause enormous damage to prestige as well as to the fabric of a kingdom, here standing in for the infrastructure of the mercantile world. Harishchandra advised merchants to keep working hard despite reverses as well as keep on struggling in an honest manner on a day-to-day basis to make good in the world of speculation and business. Thus, both successful old timers and newcomers were joined together in the story, and this was possible because of the specific condition of the onset of capitalism that increasingly posed the question of solvency in terms of time. The fact that modern markets were more stringent as regards the laws of debt repayment as well as regards daily survival in the commodity market made time the prime player in urban life. Above all, to appear in secular law courts in the full glare of the public gaze was something unbearable to countenance for members of the mercantile community fiercely defensive about the issue of ‘face’. One could be bankrupted for not keeping time in matters of debt repayment and all kinds of calamities became the fate of families hurtling down the economic downhill. Vishvamitra, the time traveller, is indeed time itself in the form both of a sudden misfortune as well as that of debt that demands timely satisfaction in the most drastic fashion testing human endurance to its utmost. But for the newcomer into business, Vishvamitra is time as the bare minimum income that would ensure the survival of the nuclear family that was just beginning to become somewhat of a norm in Bombay. The proscenium of the public stage merely emphasised the public nature of modern time’s vice-like grip on people’s destiny exercised through money now circulating through faster and institutionalised channels of the public market and the law.

Nala-Damayanti and the Bombay merchant

It is said that in Bombay anything and everything could be gambled upon. And, indeed, Gujarati merchants retain a notorious reputation for gambling to this day. This, of course, is codified in the connection between the worship of Laksmi, the goddess of wealth, during Diwali, the consecration of the new bahi (account books) and auspiciousness of gambling on the day. After all, gambling is an extension of the speculation in the commodity market that still forms the bulwark of this community’s pre-eminence in mercantile circles in India. But today, gambling in other forms is not something that anyone in the mercantile community would be proud to admit. And yet, gambling formed a part of the world of entertainment of the Bombay merchant’s world in spectacularly public ways at the turn of the century. One of the favourite modes of gambling was to speculate on the date of the arrival of the monsoon and on which house would be the first to receive raindrops. Much excitement and festivity went along with waiting to hear the first patter of raindrop in a bucket placed on the rooftop terrace of the houses of the merchant princes. Success at such forms of gambling added to the reputation and charisma of a merchant. But, it also shows how much of the city’s identity itself was tied to speculation as a public adventure through the thrills its elites sought through gambling in such spectacular ways. But change was on the way; we shall see how plays dealing with the story of Raja Nala and his consort Damayanti would articulate mercantile anxieties about practices, such as gambling, in the same period that Hariścandra was giving lessons in business ethics.

As Velecheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman put it, ‘Wherever one goes in the sub-continent, Nala was there first’ (2011: 1). The story has a long tradition of adaptation into the corpus of the Jaina Apabhramsa literature, and thus a longstanding relationship with western India and in particular Gujarat. In more recent times, it became symbolic of Indian modernity through Raja Ravi Varma’s painting depicting Vidarbha princess Damayanti listening to the swan praise Nala’s virtue, a eulogy that would lead to her falling in love with the king of the Nishadhas. The tale was played on the Parsi-Gujarati stage innumerable times and was filmed many times by various film companies in Bombay during the silent era. Like Harishchandra, this tale found more favour with Gujarati audiences than did a similar tale from a more famous epic.

The tale recounts the vicissitudes of Nala, who having lost his kingdom to his brother at a game of dice goes into exile with his wife Damayanti who had chosen him as her consort in preference to the gods. Thinking that his wife would be happier without his unhappy presence, Nala abandons her while she is sleeping. Damayanti after much travail finds refuge in the kingdom of Chedi, while Nala afflicted by the Karkotaka Naga loses his beauty and becomes the charioteer for Ikshvaku monarch Rituparna, a master at dices. Nala befriends the monarch and learns the art of dicing and uses the skills to regain his kingdom from his brother. But before he does so, he has been reunited with Damayanti.

The motifs of exile, moral and physical struggle during that period and the loss of dear ones unite the Nala and Harishchandra story in a single moral universe of sorts. However, such a fall is in Nala’s case a result of his addiction for gambling, something that makes the moral lesson his life has to teach quite different from Harishchandra’s. The latter is seen as a paragon of virtue, keeping his word at any cost and has no moral flaws like Nala’s. But, as in Indian tales of this type, even Nala is not without virtue. Far from it! By his very position as a king, he is the apotheosis of virtue. In the story, Nala’s fall is due to an affliction by Kali, the same dimension of time and history that lends its name to Kaliyug, the last of the four great ages of mankind – the most flawed one – after which Apocalypse must destroy the world and the world reinvented in Vishnu’s dream. Nala’s addiction for gambling is momentary, for which lapse he has to suffer much. And this motif of a momentary lapse of reason leading to much suffering would have been very attractive to Bombay merchants in the throes of a speculative age. On the one hand, speculation is a gamble with chance, a moment of investing fortunes into the futures market that can either make or break a merchant. On the other, the volume of gambling proper goes up in a speculative age, leading to much perdition and misfortune in the life of the gamblers. Many a silent film, play and story in the Gujarati cultural world would symbolise the world of early modernity through the motif of gambling that leads to the ruination of individuals and families. If Harishchandra portrayed the general rigours of a mercantile world on account of its being anchored in an ethic of keeping one’s word, then Nala dramatised the fickle nature of time and fortune revolving around the very moment of investment warning individuals against gambling unwisely in any form.

But the Nala-Damayanti story has another dimension that was equally important for the Gujarati audiences at the turn of the 20th century. It is one of the great love stories of India, a story that almost always finds its ways into any anthology of romantic tales of yore, alongside the loves of Pururava and Urvashi. And, indeed, the cry ‘He Nala’ that Damayanti utters in the play when she carries out a desperate search for Nala in the forest became a byword in the Gujarati world in this period and continues to be legendary. The trick sequence where Damayanti recognises the mortal Nala casting aside four gods disguised as Nala lookalikes to test Damayanti’s love was the pièce de résistance of every performance of the story – in theatre and cinema alike. For entire generations, it came to symbolise the vicissitudes of love and longing in difficult times. But at the turn of the last century, a story centred around two young lovers would have been momentous, given that modern love and the modern conjugal couple were just beginning to emerge in urban public life as new and much contested institutions of modernity. Suklaji Street in Bombay, an area adjacent to the Native Town but also to the indigenous entertainment district of the city around Grant Road, had become the refuge for young couples livin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Salaam Bollywood: introduction
• Part I Histories: mainstream and alternative
• Part II Bollywood dance: rereading history
• Part III Changes in the cityscape, changes in cinema
• Part IV Other regions, other nations
• Index