Fiction, Film, and Indian Popular Cinema

Salman Rushdie’s Novels and the Cinematic Imagination

Florian Stadtler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415807906
• eBook ISBN: 9781135964375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Literature

This book analyses the novels of Salman Rushdie and their stylistic conventions in the context of Indian popular cinema and its role in the elaboration of the author's arguments about post-independence postcolonial India. Focusing on different genres of Indian popular cinema, such as the 'Social', 'Mythological' and 'Historical', Stadtler examines how Rushdie's writing foregrounds the epic, the mythic, the tragic and the comic, linking them in storylines narrated in cinematic parameters. The book shows that Indian popular cinema's syncretism becomes an aesthetic marker in Rushdie's fiction that allows him to elaborate on the multiplicity of Indian identity, both on the subcontinent and abroad, and illustrates how Rushdie uses Indian popular cinema in his narratives to express an aesthetics of hybridity and a particular conceptualization of culture with which 'India' has become identified in a global context. Also highlighted are Rushdie's uses of cinema to inflect his reading of India as a pluralist nation and of the hybrid space occupied by the Indian diaspora across the world. The book connects Rushdie's storylines with modes of cinematic representation to explore questions about the role, place and space of the individual in relation to a fast-changing social, economic and political space in India and the wider world.

1 Creating ‘Imaginary Homelands’

In The Moor's Last Sigh, the painter Vasco Miranda sees himself and Aurora Zogoiby as ‘exponents of an “Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art” in which the unifying principle was “Technicolor-Story-Line”’ (Rushdie 1996b, 148–149). Vasco's claim aptly describes Salman Rushdie's own method of writing with its emphasis on the epic, the mythic, the tragic and the comic brought together in a high-octane storyline narrated within cinematic parameters. This book sets out to examine this process and will focus on the filmi style of Rushdie's fiction that is borrowed directly from Indian popular cinema and its visual culture. This distinctly filmi style is reliant on film sets, location and costumes and the way they are depicted by a particular cinematography. The reach of Indian popular cinema is all-pervasive and films permeate the nation's culture through advertising, film music and promotional material. Together they form part of what Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel have called the visual culture of Indian popular cinema (Dwyer and Patel 2002, 8). Rushdie draws directly on this visual culture for his narratives of and arguments about independent India and its position in a globalizing world. Thus Vasco Miranda's assertion serves as a succinct description of the visual aesthetic and culture that this monograph addresses.

Crossing disciplinary boundaries between literary, postcolonial and film studies, this book brings together debates about colonialism, postcolonialism and globalisation while focusing in on Rushdie's engagement with Indian popular cinema in his fiction. Frequently, Rushdie uses Indian popular cinema intertextually as a reference point to highlight his own philosophical and political arguments. In this respect, the filmi style of Indian popular cinema is adapted by Rushdie to serve as a visual narrative strategy in his description of independence movements and nationalisms in South Asia, the role of women in relation to emergent discourses on nationhood, transglobal migrancy, hybridity, globalisation and terrorism. This chapter will discuss more broadly the aesthetic conventions and concepts with which this book is concerned. It will focus on the importance of the city, in particular Bombay, for the imaginary world of Rushdie's fiction and for Indian popular cinema, the relationship between Rushdie's fiction and postcolonial discourse analysis, and different genres of Indian popular cinema–the ‘All-India’ talkie, ‘mythological’, ‘social’ and ‘historical’. By analysing the visual aesthetics from which Rushdie's fiction and Indian popular cinema draw, there emerge several sites of engagement for Rushdie's hard-hitting critique of the postcolonial nation state and a globalising world. Rushdie's fiction and Indian popular cinema circulate across the world and impact in complex ways on how people imagine national identity and communal belonging. The process of imagining community has become deterritorialised through global circulation and this book will trace how such borders have been subsumed. Indian popular cinema becomes in this respect a crucial reference point in the creation of ‘Imaginary Homelands’.

From Indian Popular Cinema to Global Bollywood

Indian cinema celebrated its centenary in 2013 with the release of the first full-length feature film, Raja Harishchandra (1913). Yet perhaps less known is that the development in India of cinema as a medium of visual artistic expression is closely tied to the development of cinema as a whole. Indeed, Marius Sestier, who worked for the Lumière brothers, screened the first film at Bombay's Watson Hotel in 1896. Although showcasing the invention to a British audience and not to Indians, the medium's potential was widely recognised as a new and interesting way of depicting the world in moving images and, in 1898, Hiralal Sen started making films in Calcutta (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 2002, 17). By 1906, J. F. Madan and his Bombay-based Elphinstone Bioscope Company had established a dominant position in the marketplace. Yet the development of the Indian film industry was hampered by a restrictive quota system during the final decades of the Raj and the lack of official recognition as an industry post-independence, which impacted greatly on its financing–the sector was only accorded industry status in 2001.

The evolution of a domestic Indian film market and industries in different regional centres is a multi-dimensional and complicated process and does not fit any neat, coherent historical trajectory (Dudrah and Desai 2008, 3–4). Yet there are recognisable groundbreaking moments which have shaped the style, form and conventions of Indian popular cinema, such as the advent of sound and the emergence of studios including Wadia Movietone and Bombay Talkies in the 1930s, landmark films, directors and producers and as already mentioned, recognition of cinema production as an industry. However, it is also important to understand Indian popular cinema in the wider context of Indian popular culture (Dudrah and Desai 2008, 5). Indian popular cinema has developed its own distinct style, drawing from a range of Indian and European influences and traditions. It continues to dominate the domestic film market in India. The largest internal market exists for Hindi-Urdu language cinema, produced mainly in Bombay,¹ which dominates local distribution and has led to heated debates about the increasing dominance of Hindi as a national language (Trivedi 2006, 51–86). Ravi Vasudevan (1989) and Rosie Thomas (1985) have pertinently pointed out that, in any analysis of Indian popular cinema, its own traditions and aesthetics must be factored in. Moreover, Indian popular film defies linearity and can be at once discursive–commenting on ethical, political and philosophical issues–as well as marked by emotional excess, comedy and song and dance (Vasudevan 1989, 30). As I discuss later in more detail, the genre has evolved an ‘omnibus’ form of storytelling, blending tragedy, comedy, music and dance. It finds its roots in nineteenth century Parsee theatre which drew on South Asian and Western source materials, including mythology, epics, history and legends, as well as English novels, plays and farce (Vasudevan 1989, 31). Indeed midnineteenth century Victorian melodrama and innovations in staging which emphasised spectacle can be seen as a ‘prelude to the cinema’ (ibid). Though other theatrical and oral storytelling traditions have also influenced narrative structuring in Indian popular cinema, the influence of Parsee theatre is illustrative of the cross-fertilisation across genres and highlights ‘the difficulty of defining cultural specificity’ (ibid). As Ranjani Mazumdar succinctly puts it, Indian popular cinema ‘is an evolving, unabashedly hybrid cultural form that narrates the complicated intersection between tradition and modernity in contemporary India’ (2007, xvii).

Though film technology was imported from Europe, it soon emerged as a medium of storytelling catering to Indian audiences in its own right. However, in the early years of silent cinema, imported films by far outnumbered local productions. Nevertheless, Indian films, by developing their own style of storytelling, proved to be successful box-office draws for local audiences. Yet, it took until the 1930s and the advent of sound for locally produced Indian language cinema to supplant foreign imports, leading to the formation of a number of studios and production companies in Bombay, Pune, Madras and Calcutta.

Any descriptor for the Indian film industries is riddled with shortcomings and inadequacies. Indeed, even in the early years of cinema many different regional centres for film production existed, ranging from Pune in Maharashtra to Calcutta in Bengal. Bombay-based Hindi-Urdu language films only started to dominate the field in the early 1950s (Vasudevan 2000a, 382). Yet since the 1980s this tendency has been challenged by regional language cinema in Telugu, Tamil and Malayalam which, added together, supersede the amount of film releases from Bombay (ibid).

Much recent scholarship has focused on the emergence of ‘Bollywood’ as a subject of study and whether it subsumes previous designations such as Indian popular cinema, Hindi-Urdu or Hindi cinema, or Bombay cinema. In this study I privilege the term ‘Indian popular cinema’, which to me still encapsulates best the film industry, its mode of production and the narrative style with which this book is concerned. Within the context of an analysis of Rushdie's fiction, the focus in the main is on pre-1990s Indian popular cinema, which renders ‘Bollywood’ inaccurate and anachronistic, though Chapter 6 does focus on its emergence and how this type of cinema works within the wider context of Rushdie's narratives. Furthermore, Indian popular cinema as a term describes better the cinema on which Rushdie draws, which is not simply the films produced in the dream factories of Bombay, but also those from southern India's regional cinema. I recognise that ‘Bollywood’ has increasingly dominated as a label to describe India's commercial film industry originating in Bombay/Mumbai. Indeed, much scholarly literature on the subject has been published in recent years (see Dudrah 2006, 2012; Dudrah and Desai 2008; Dwyer 2005; Dwyer and Pinto 2011; Gehlawat 2010; Gopal and Moorti 2008; Jolly, Whadwani and Barretto 2007; Kaur and Sinha 2005; Mishra 2002; Roy and Huat 2012). It is also a term with which India's popular culture is increasingly associated in the mainstream press in the USA, UK and South Asia as a shorthand descriptor for Indian popular cultural productions ranging from film, music, fashion and theatre.²

Nevertheless, the usage of ‘Bollywood’ and its signification in popular cultural and academic discourse remains vexed (Vasudevan 2011a). A composite of the ‘Bo-’ in Bombay grafted onto the ‘-llywood’ of Hollywood, the term has become a popular designation for the Indian film industry, which is contested by critics and practitioners in the Indian film industry alike (Prasad 2003; Rajadhyaksha 2003, 2009; Dudrah and Desai 2008), as the moniker implies that Indian popular cinema is derivative of Hollywood (Kabir 2001, 21). The term is often used as a blanket generalisation that amalgamates the various regional, art house and middle cinemas, which is then perpetuated by satellite television channels catering for India's diaspora and by the British terrestrial television Channel 4 in its annual Indian film season. The history of the term itself is contentious and it is not quite clear from where it originated, although it has been suggested that it was coined by journalists writing for the film magazines Cineblitz and Screen. M. Madhava Prasad traces the lineage back to 1932 and the American engineer Wilford E. Deming who was assigned to help produce one of India's first talkies in the Calcutta suburb of Tollygunge, which he and his colleagues renamed ‘Tollywood’. It seems more plausible, Prasad argues, that the term ‘Bollywood’ was coined by this linguistic detour (2003).

Yet wider questions remain about what ‘Bollywood’ might actually mean. For Rajadhyaksha, Bollywood ‘occupies a space analogous to the film industry’ but represents ‘a more diffuse cultural conglomeration involving a range of distribution and consumption activities’ (2003, 27). For him, Bollywood describes a larger culture industry, in existence since the early 1990s, of which film makes up just one significant aspect, and has a much longer and complex history of development than the term ‘Bollywood’ can do justice to. In this respect it is more useful to see ‘Bollywood’ as ‘an export-orientated, transmedia product’, a significant part of Indian popular cinema, but by no means its totality (Dwyer and Pinto 2011, xiv). If anything, Bollywood has become a brand with which India is becoming increasingly associated in the global arena. In his essay ‘The Meaning of “Bollywood”’, Ravi Vasudevan provides some useful historicisation of the Bollywood phenomenon, seeing its emergence linked to the reorientation of India from nation state into global nation. This happened through processes of economic liberalization during the 1990s and new modes of distribution of Hindi cinema through DVDs, satellite television, digital media and multiplex cinemas. He situates the currency of the term with the release of Aditya Chopra's Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) and the films that follow, which thematise the Indian diaspora (Vasudevan 2011a, 4–5). Indian cinema defies any ‘essentialist’ definitions, considering how much its development is bound up with histories of the Indian state, its transition from colonialism to independence and Partition, competing regions and languages. In this respect any descriptive attempt remains flawed and requires a recognition and constant awareness of inherent multiple meanings in the terminology used and its inevitable shortcomings (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 2002, 9). It raises the spectre of having to confront a cultural form which contains too much diversity and, consequently, defies simple categorisation. Indeed, Aijaz Ahmad has raised this issue in relation to descriptions of Indian literature, too often marked by empirical and theoretical deficiencies (1994, 285). Ahmad contends that ‘cultural productions everywhere greatly exceed the boundaries set by the colonial state and its policies so that the highly diverse historical trajectories may simply not be available for generalizing theoretical practices and unified narratives’ (1994, 244). It seems to me that this applies similarly to a critical analysis of Indian popular cinema and has a bearing on the way writers make recourse to it in their fiction.

Indian Popular Cinema and Rushdie's Fiction: An Aesthetic of the City?

Rushdie's fiction grows out of a specific location–Bombay. The 1950s and 1960s, when Rushdie was growing up there, were a particularly exciting time for the city. Spurred by the optimism of the first decade of Indian independence, many consider it Bombay's ‘golden age’.³ Midnight's Children, The Moor's Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet in particular celebrate this time. For Rushdie, Bombay during this period is an emblem of the ‘All-India’ idea, a cosmopolitan city and a cultural interstice. As Rushdie has eloquently explored in his seminal essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’, the urge to write about his childhood in Bombay was the major driving force behind Midnight's Children, to enable him, now living in Britain, to retrieve home from a clouded past and faded memories (Rushdie 1982b, 18). Rushdie's project, then, is related to memory and remembering, a process of recuperation that takes place solely in his imagination, triggered by visual images such as family photographs. Yet, through imagination and writing, Rushdie wants to go beyond the black-and-white image of the family photo album to make the images come alive ‘in CinemaScope and glorious Technicolor’ (ibid). The cinematic imagination is the method by which the memories contained in the photos are reanimated, and subsequent chapters will analyse in detail these cinematic-narrative processes with which Rushdie articulates the cityscape of Bombay, and later London and New York.

For Rushdie, Indian popular cinema is an obvious source, considering that, like his novels, it belongs to the urban culture of modern India that he considers intimately intertwined with Bombay, which, in his own words,

is full of fakery and gaudiness and superficiality and failed imaginations, it is also a culture of high vitality, linguistic verve, and a kind of metropolitan excitement that European cities have for the most part forgotten. And this is true of that over-painted courtesan Bombay, as it is of Ray's Calcutta. (Rushdie 1990, 9)

Rushdie's imagining of Bombay springs from the tension between the city's garish flamboyance and superficiality and its vigour and dynamism, which drive Rushdie's urge to retrieve the city in cinematic terms, in a need to bring it to the big screen. This tension, then, allows for a textured image of the city to emerge through the orchestration of plots along the principles of Indian popular cinema's syncretism, which I discuss later in further detail.

Rushdie's preoccupation with Bombay marks him out as an author primarily concerned with the metropolis and the urban centres rather than rural India, setting himself apart from a previous generation of Indian authors writing in English such as Mulk Raj Anand or Raja Rao.⁴ Rushdie explores different ways of expressing an urban sensibility, translating the bustling, teeming, noisy metropolis, its argot and its culture not only into fiction, but also into English. Here Indian popular cinema becomes an important tool for his imagining of the city as it provides a template and rich source for a stylised portrayal, recuperated from his memories (Rushdie 1982b, 18). In this respect it is useful to think about the presentation of urban spaces in Rushdie's fiction in filmic parameters. These spaces serve as a setting and represent a heightened version of reality as backdrops against which his narratives unfold. In The Satanic Verses and Fury, London and New York read more like dressed sets in movie studios. London in particular becomes ephemeral, an imagined city that comes alive as the Emerald City of ‘Vilayet’, which in reality is a harsh, unyielding, challenging, hostile and confrontational space.⁵ Rushdie's Bombay is also a stylised version of the city, however meticulously observed, which powerfully encapsulates the city's diversity and sprawling scope. Yet Rushdie only engages with fragments of it, privileging a camera focus on Bombay's upper middle class and its experience of the city during a narrow period in time.

While Rushdie writes about different metropolitan centres, Bombay remains a key focal point throughout his oeuvre. For Rushdie, his characters operate as a lens that filters different and often conflicting urban realities in the city. Bombay represents modernity in the context of India, and one way of expressing that modernity in his fiction is through the deployment of Indian popular cinema, its styles and conventions. Both Indian popular cinema and Rushdie's writing embrace quintessential local forms of storytelling and transform them through the prism of the metropolis. Increasing mobility and social diversity through the process of migration creates in any city a new sense of dynamism, which clearly influences social and cultural developments and innovations, and these are culturally reflected in art, particularly film and literature (Mazumdar 2007). This period of transformation in Bombay culminated...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Creating ‘Imaginary Homelands’
• 2 Heroines, Mothers and Villains: Cinema and Postcolonial National Identities in Midnight's Children and Shame
• 3 Filming Rushdie: From Documentaries, Film Criticism to Screenplays
• 4 The Satanic Verses and Shree 420: Negotiating Identity through Indian Popular Cinema
• 5 The Moor's Last Sigh: Rewriting Mother India
• 6 The Ground Beneath Her Feet and Fury: Bollywood, Superstardom and Celebrity in the Age of Globalisation
• 7 Rushdie's ‘Mission Kashmir’: Mughal-e-Azam and Shalimar the Clown
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index