The 1970s and its Legacies in India's Cinemas

Priya Joshi, Rajinder Dudrah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781134927661
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The 1970s was a pivotal decade in the Indian social, cultural, political and economic landscape: the global oil crisis, wars with China and Pakistan in the previous decade, the Bangladesh war of 1971, labour and food shortages, widespread political corruption, and the declaration of the state of Emergency. Amidst this backdrop Indian cinema in both its popular and art/parallel film forms flourished.

This exciting new collection brings together original research from across the arts and humanities disciplines that examine the legacies of the 1970s in India's cinemas, offering an invaluable insight into this important period. The authors argue that the historical processes underway in the 1970s are important even today, and can be deciphered in the aural and visual medium of Indian cinema. The book explores two central themes: first, the popular cinema's role in helping to construct the decade's public culture; and second, the powerful and under-studied archive of the decade as present in India's popular cinemas.

This book is based on a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture.

Cinema as family romance

Priya Joshi
Temple University, Philadelphia, USA

This essay analyses the narratives and iconographies of India embedded in a trilogy of blockbuster Hindi films from the long 1970s: Deewar (1975). Trishul (1978). and Shakti (1982). These films represent some of the decade's aspirations as well as its repressions that together constitute its public fantasies. Their narratives provide access to the political unconscious of modern India revealing the profound anxieties that pervaded the public culture of the decade. The essay explores the extent to which the traumas of the decade were displaced on the family, and the crisis in political culture was recast in social terms as a Family Romance in popular Hindi film. It analyzes Deewar" s tensions at narrating and containing an incendiary critique of the decade, and it exposes the 'revisions' to this film's masterplot as they were rescripted in Trishul and Shakti. The essay concludes with proposing the social function of cinema as a Family Romance.

Hindi films can be regarded as contemporary folklore. And a folk hero, in any period, in any decade, is a personification of the moral values of that decade; he reflects the collective fantasies of the time.

– Javed Akhtar (qtd. in Kabir 72)

I. Introduction

This essay analyzes the narratives and iconographies of India embedded in a trilogy of blockbuster Hindi films from the long 1970s: Deewar (1975, d. Yash Chopra), Trixlwl (1978, d. Yash Chopra), and Shakti (1982, d. Ramesh Sippy). All three were scripted by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar; all three cast Amitabh Bachchan as a character named Vijay, and all three mobilize the family as a topos around which the nation's imaginary is structured and on which its anxieties are projected. Deewar and Trishul were blockbusters; Shakti is regarded a film to rival Sippy's Sholay (1975), though it never quite achieved the latter film's outsize achievement at the box office where Sholay remains the #1 all-time top grosser adjusted for inflation (ibos.network.com).¹ These films represent some of the decade's aspirations as well as its repressions that together I call its public fantasies. Through a reading of these blockbusters, this essay explores the extent to which the traumas of the decade were displaced on the family and the crisis in political culture was recast in social terms as a Family Romance in popular Hindi film.

For reasons that will become evident shortly, films such as Deewar invert the nation's central political conflicts in terms of the family and reframe it around its most cherished social belief – namely, the sanctity of motherhood.² In this inversion, the oppositional culture of political life is represented as infecting private life as well, and both are revealed unstable – even combustible. Rather than resolving conflict, the mother is placed as the source and center of it both in political life (where she is symbol of the nation) and in private life (where she is represented, often in highly sentimental terms, as the center of the family).

The biological family and the symbolic nation-as-family become sites of mutual threat in 1970s Hindi cinema, each destabilizing the other in cinema's representation of the period. These narratives of popular cinema, I argue, provide access to the political unconscious of modern India in striking and contestatory ways revealing what the political theorist Michael Rogin in the context of Cold War US cinema identifies as the 'register of anxiety' that pervaded the public culture of the decade (Rogin 238). The nation's political unconscious, like that of human subjects, speaks in symbols in order to evade the strenuous repression of the nation's conscious, and cinema's use of formal symbolism renders it the medium most capable of expressing and evading the apparatus of repression especially characteristic in the decade of the Emergency.³

In a series of wildly popular blockbusters such as Salim-Javed's Deewar-Trishul-Shakti triptych, popular Hindi cinema imagined the social geography of India, addressed its problems, idealized their solutions, and – to borrow a phrase from Laura Mulvey –generally became the primal scene of many of independent India's modern mythologies.⁴ Appearing a few months before the Emergency when the myth of the nation appeared to have devoured its young, Deewar's manifest content initially appears conciliatory if not downright celebratory of the state. It is, after all, a story of a boy who is unjustly rendered homeless, arrives penniless in the metropolis, and nevertheless makes a home and a fortune for himself. When it is discovered that his wealth is the result of smuggling operations, the state comes down hard, and the man is shot by his younger brother, a righteous cop. Both subject and state get their moments of triumph, though in the end, it is the collective, in the form of the state, that prevails over the individual who is punished.

However, rather than restoring the nation's myth of opportunity and justice, Deewar exposes its collapse and uncovers a form of violence so grotesque that it is displaced onto the family. Here, the latent narrative is one of a mother who desires her son, commissions his murder when her unspeakable desire is brought to light, and a state that rewards her for it. In short, the film rescripts the Oedipal drama from Jocasta's point of view with her desires and agency at the center. In this script the victim is criminalized and the criminal rendered the victim. However, the ironies of this displacement are cued throughout the film, and Deewar's family violence on the child is widely understood to symbolize the state's upon its citizens. Uncovering some of these acts of displacement in Deewar and their revisions in Trishul and Shakti exposes both the social work that the cinema did in India and the social work it did for the nation.

An important vein of scholarship has posited popular Hindi cinema as a site that produces and reinforces the ideology of the state, a point developed in an influential study by Madhava Prasad who argues for 'cinema as an institution that is part of the continuing struggles within India over the form of the state' (Prasad 9). A host of books with 'nation' in their title or subtitle make similar claims that condense all possible 'Indias' under the term nation.⁵ In contrast to these works that regard the 'nation' and 'state' as largely interchangeable, this study insists on distinguishing between the two formations that it regards as fundamentally different and even divergent.

The state refers to those political and administrative components of modern polity that have the power and authority to govern. The nation, in contrast, is the set of imaginative constructions that, ideally, are congruent with the enterprise of the state and underwrite its governance, but more commonly contest and correct the practices of the state. The nation. in this formulation, is both more and less than the state in key ways: it is the repository of ideals and ambitions – not all homogenous – that precede the formation of the state; it can create the state, but it also contests it, diverges from it, or coalesces into it on some issues and diverges from it over others. 'We have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to our dreams,' urged Nehru during Independence, clarifying the difference between the two concepts at stake (Nehru 2). The state marks a 'reality' that is often compromised; the nation, its 'dreams' that are also possibly its nightmares.

In this act of collective dreaming, popular cinema plays a role that is both a revision of reality and a reclamation of its originary impulses. It neither fully represents the state nor the nation as the aforementioned scholars posit: rather, popular cinema in my reading is a contact zone between the two, at times corroborating and at others contesting the formation of both in the construction of an ever shifting narrative of 'India.' Popular cinema provides a space for engagement, enchantment, and possibly re-enchantment if not with the nation itself then with the stories that undergird all acts of collective fantasy of which the nation is but one example. At best, it is a third space that fabricates and filters the experience of politics and modernity for its viewers.

The essay proceeds in three main parts. It analyzes the dominance of the trope of the family to represent anxieties of the period; it then explores Deewar's tensions at narrating and containing an incendiary critique of the decade; and it develops the 'revisions' to Deewar's masterplot as they were re-scripted in Trishul and Shakti. The essay concludes with proposing the social function of cinema as a Family Romance.

II. Film, family, and family romance

The persistent use of the family as source and symbol or national tension is not new to Deewar. What is remarkable in Deewar is how the deadly national traumas of the 1970s are displaced almost wholesale upon the family which in turn is rendered patently evil in the film. The hitherto mythologized mother is a murderer; the crime she commits an infanticide; and the state a handmaiden in the cover-up. Rather than the family providing solace from the state, it provides solace for the state which escapes culpability for its crimes through the act of displacement.

Deewar' s dystopian account of both family and nation had a rawness hitherto unseen in a commercially successful film. The story was too intense with its exposure of too many wrongs for its ending to be fully satisfying. And so the scriptwriters Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan rewrote the story, and kept rewriting it till they got it right.⁶ This essay analyzes Deewar, its first revision Trishul (1978, which easily outpaced Deewar in the box office for the decade and in retrospect)⁷ and Shakti (1982), the second effort to rewrite Deewar from a different directorial perspective. The rewrites are a structuralist's dream. The essential elements remain the same: nation allegorized in the family, conflict between parent and child, youth as a problem, the identity of criminality, and the diegetic use of death to accentuate — or to solve — problems.

What changes across the films, however, is the role each element plays in creating and solving problems. Thus, in Deewar the state creates a problem that the family solves; in Trishul, a parent creates the problem that the child solves; and in Shakti, a cardboard criminal outside the social order creates a problem for both the state and the family that the two together solve.⁸ The migration of criminality across the three films from state to a caricatured smuggler external to the social order serves to contain problems and even to render them innocuous by the time they are staged in Shakti where the drama of national conflict has devolved into a family melodrama. In each new script, youth goes from indicating a problem (Deewar) to being the problem (Shakti). The death of the protagonist halts the future in Deewar; in Shakti, it enables it.

The three films together form a Salim-Javed trilogy that functions as what I had earlier called a Family Romance, and the term deserves some explanation. The Family Romance was fleetingly outlined by Freud in 1909 as a mechanism by which a subject, almost always male, authors fantasies about his origins that are more amenable to him than his real family is. Freud postulated that the child's ability to create an alternate 'reality' through storytelling generally involved 'getting free from the parents of whom he now has a low opinion and of replacing them by others who, as a rule, are of a higher social standing' (Freud 238-239). Read another way, the Family Romance is a liberation narrative that enables the child to master a world in which he is otherwise powerless. The gesture of narrating – of telling a story – is a way of liberating the subject from his subjection. In Freud's account, the power of the family is typically inverted in the Family Romance, and its taboos – notably the Oedipal complex – are evaded by the act of fantasy and storytelling.

From this summary, it is clear that the Family Romance serves in understanding two main functions of narrative. It provides a frame for reflecting on the structure of stories and also for postulating their function, and here is where it has such resonance in domains beyond the couch. In enabling the subject to fabricate an alternative history to the one he lives, it enables him to manage and eventually to accept 'reality,' even as it liberates him from it. The Family Romance can thus be thought of as an epistemological project: its act of narration is also one of interpretation, one that explicates even as it narrates. What matters is not the actual story itself but the act of ordering and telling stories that the term Family Romance captures. It is thus both a form of exposure (of the subject's deepest desires and his 'reality') as well as of subterfuge (in which one reality is covered by another more desirable one).

Applied beyond the individual to culture more widely, the concept of Family Romance allows one to probe the work that particularly popular narratives do in a specific cultural moment and to ask what traumas they mask, what 'reality' they seek liberation from, and to explore the kinds of fantasies a culture develops in the process. Above all, the application of this concept from individual to society enables one to uncover the structure and function of narratives that were particularly popular and to ask what kinds of unconscious they convey and conceal.⁹

III. Deewar, the manifest narrative

Released on 24 January 1975, Deewar's story has a singular preoccupation with provision that captures above all the shortages of the decade. Every character in the film, and every conflict, is driven by the singular desire to provide materially for others, or to withhold provision from others. Workers ask management for a share of the profits from their labor to provide for their families; parents sacrifice to provide for their offspring; children do the same for their progenitors and siblings; the state proves unable to provide basic amenities such as housing and food; and criminals step in at the breach.

Home for the Varma brothers, though, is not where the hearth is: it is where Maa is. In the most famous scene f...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• List of Contributors
• Introduction The 1970s and its legacies in India’s cinemas
• Cinema as family romance
• ‘Relationships which have no name’: Family and sexuality in 1970s popular film
• The affable young man: Civility, desire and the making of a middle-class cinema in the 1970s
• The construction of 1970s femininity, or why Zeenat Aman sings the same song twice
• Ritual reverb: Two ‘blockbuster’ Hindi films
• The 1970s Tamil cinema and the post-classical turn
• Aesthetic dislocations: A re-take on Malayalam cinema of the 1970s
• The retro noughties: 1970s Hindi films in 2000s Bollywood cinema
• The afterlives of 1970s Hindi cinema
• Working Note From ceiling fans to A/C and juice: Javed Akhtar in conversation with Priya Joshi
• Index