Understanding Bollywood

The Grammar of Hindi Cinema

Ulka Anjaria

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000347296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Dance

This book offers an introduction to popular Hindi cinema, a genre that has a massive fan base but is often misunderstood by critics, and provides insight on topics of political and social significance.

Arguing that Bollywood films are not realist representations of society or expressions of conservative ideology but mediated texts that need to be read for their formulaic and melodramatic qualities and for their pleasurable features like bright costumes, catchy music, and sophisticated choreography, the book interprets Bollywood films as complex considerations on the state of the nation that push the boundaries of normative gender and sexuality. The book provides a careful account of Bollywood's constitutive components: its moral structure, its different forms of love, its use of song and dance, its visual style, and its embrace of cinephilia. Arguing that these five elements form the core of Bollywood cinema, the book investigates a range of films from 1947 to the present in order to show how films use and innovate formulaic structures to tell a wide range of stories that reflect changing times. The book ends with some considerations on recent changes in Bollywood cinema, suggesting that despite globalization the future of Bollywood remains promising.

By presenting Bollywood cinema through an interdisciplinary lens, the book reaches beyond film studies departments and will be useful for those teaching and studying Bollywood in English, sociology, anthropology, Asian studies, and cultural studies classes.

Part I

1 Structure

Although Bollywood films vary widely in terms of stories, contexts, and characters across time and across individual films, understanding the basic structure is essential to appreciating how films innovate on that structure. Most Bollywood films operate over a Manichean moral universe of good versus evil. In the most basic plot structure, the moral universe is established, then it is disrupted, and by the end of the film, it is restored. While that basic formula is shared across many films, the qualities attached to each side in the moral universe, the nature of the disruption, and the way it is restored vary widely, thus offering a significant range of possibilities for plots even while using the same basic formula. The moral universe is always restored, the hero always prevails over the villain, but what that hero represents, the values s/he espouses, and who the villain is changes across films. Recognizing both the consistency of the structure and the way it is subject to variety and repetition across time is the first key to understanding how Bollywood films work and how they make meaning.¹

Genre

Genre is a word we often use to classify films and works of literature into different kinds (and indeed, the word genre comes from the French word for “a kind”), like comedy, romance, horror, and so on. But genres are not only inert categories. They also set the audience’s expectations, the parameters for interpretation. In other words, we evaluate works of art differently based on what genre we understand them to be. For instance, it wouldn’t make sense for someone to watch a romantic comedy like Crazy Rich Asians and say they didn’t like it because it wasn’t scary enough. Likewise, it would be ridiculous to criticize a Star Wars movie for not being funny. We evaluate films based on the thematic and formal expectations they set up for themselves, and then judge how well they live up to those expectations.

Yet despite this, the term “genre films” – like its print equivalent “genre fiction” and like the adjective “generic” – is often used in a negative sense, reflecting a widely held notion about the difference between “good” and “bad” art against which any study of Bollywood (like any study of science fiction, or chick lit) must contend. Leo Braudy argues that the “prejudice for the unique”² that inheres in the critique of genre films comes from European Romanticism’s privileging of originality and individual creativity in the evaluation of art. This results in a bias against commercial art, or anything that would have wide appeal, with the implication that anything too popular or too formulaic is not truly art. These views are prevalent in contemporary film criticism, including film reviews and scholarship, which tend to value originality as a positive quality, as opposed to words like “formulaic,” “derivative,” “stock,” and “clichéd,” which are always coded as negative. We also see, in film reviews of Bollywood in particular, what Braudy calls the “snide synopsis”³ – when a film critic or viewer summarizes the plot of a formulaic movie in simplistic and dismissive tones, as if all you need to know about the film can be summed up in two sentences. The snide synopsis reduces the plot to its barest features and suggests that there is little of value in a film whose plot is so simple or predictable.⁴

The disdain of genre films sees genre as restrictive, as putting limitations on individual creativity or the author’s originality, and as simply profit-seeking; but we might also see genre as productive, as setting parameters that filmmakers have to abide by while still producing an enjoyable and engaging film. This is, for instance, how we read a sonnet. We do not criticize a sonnet for being too short, or for not varying its meter; instead, we are impressed that a particular poet was able to be so inventive within so restricted a form. The same might apply to Bollywood films; the conventions make films legible but what a particular film does with the conventions is what makes it enjoyable and successful.

In this way, saying a Bollywood film is predictable does not take us very far. All Bollywood films are, in the most general sense, predictable: characters do not change or surprise us, and we know there will be a happy ending. But that doesn’t mean that all films are the same or that we can’t evaluate them in relation to one another. Rather, we need to understand the basic structure on which they operate and evaluate them in relation to that structure. This means reading for or with genre, rather than against it.⁵ Films use common tropes and formulas to build on past films; sometimes, they tell new stories for new times, and other times, they give viewers the comfort of an oft-told tale.⁶ Bollywood films offer variations on a theme rather than entirely new themes. Thus we should evaluate films not necessarily for what happens at the end but for how the film gets to that end. Genre films are fundamentally intertextual, meaning that they constantly refer to other films. There is a pleasure in seeing the same kind of film with slight variations. There is pleasure in seeing one star play similar characters or characters with the same name across several films; there is pleasure in watching similar stories again and again.⁷

Accusations that Bollywood films copy or plagiarize stories from other films are in most cases overstated. The use of recognizable formulas leads critics, both in India and abroad, to see Bollywood films as copies of similar Hollywood ones, but Bollywood’s form and aesthetics are so distinctive that the differences are often more apparent than any similarities. There are, occasionally, official Bollywood remakes of Hollywood or South Indian films, but most times accusations of plagiarism function as subtle (or not-so-subtle) jabs against Bollywood’s formulaic qualities. The dismissive comments of critics who fixate on Bollywood’s lack of originality help cement an overall sense that Bollywood is a derivative genre, unworthy of further analysis, rather than the admittedly more difficult task of looking at how its formulaic qualities actually work.

The moral universe

Film scholar Rosie Thomas defines Bollywood films as operating on an “ideal moral universe,”⁸ which is the structure within which good and evil are established and conflicts get resolved. As Thomas writes, this moral universe does not represent any real cultural values, but is part of Bollywood’s generic conventions.⁹ Most films proceed in the following way: the moral universe is established (usually quite quickly), the moral universe is disrupted (the majority of the film), and then the moral universe is restored (again, very quickly, and right at the end).¹⁰ Put in this way, films might seem frightfully predictable. But in fact, this basic structure allows for a surprising amount of variation.

Establishment of the moral universe

Early on in a film, certain clues will appear that establish its moral center. The moral center can be embodied by one or more characters, or it can be a sensibility. Most commonly, this sensibility is love: when you see a character in love, it is very likely that he or she is the moral center. But other moral values include family, belief in fate, religious faith while simultaneously respecting other religions, “love of one’s country, and respect for justice, honesty, and principles.”¹¹ In addition, cinephilia, or passion for films, is also a moral quality. Mothers, or respect for mothers, are almost always coded as good.¹²

Bollywood films are not subtle in their presentation of morality. When a character or sensibility is established as a moral center, the film will convey that centrality in no uncertain terms in the dialogue, through a song, and, most likely, through its visual style. Often the morality is underlined each time a character appears, for instance through a reprise of the film’s theme song or colorful visuals. Moral characters are often able to do unbelievable things in Bollywood; in Bobby (1973), Jack Braganza is an elderly man who spends most of the day drunk, but he can win a physical fight when he needs to. In such cases, ability comes from morality rather than the other way around; Jack Braganza can fight well because he has morality on his side, he is not moral because he is a good fighter.

As viewers, we are given the clues to pick up on the moral universe right from the start. Knowing that love is so valued in Bombay cinema, when we hear a group of friends debating whether love or money is more important early on in Paying Guest (1957), and Shanti argues in favor of love, we immediately know that she will be the film’s hero. Sometimes, there are competing clues and we have to decide which to value more. Early in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), we are introduced to our hero, Raj, in a dream sequence where Simran is fantasizing about the man of her dreams. His centrality to Simran’s dream suggests that he is the hero. Yet when we first meet the actual Raj, he acts like a goofy, immature child, showing up late to his own graduation and disrespecting his father, suggesting a more questionable morality. This characterization continues as Raj does increasingly reprehensible things, like trick an older man into keeping his convenience store open past its opening hours so that he can buy beer. The immaturity, the deception, and the alcohol-drinking suggest serious character flaws in Raj, even though that early song sequence had presented him as the likely hero. What we gradually discover is that despite being immature, ultimately Raj believes in love and family. The conflict between these two sides of Raj in fact becomes the plot of the film, as Simran’s father has to be convinced that this immature man has the qualities that would make him worthy of his daughter. This is an example where although the moral universe is established early on, enough ambiguity about Raj’s character is left open to motivate the narrative.

In the many Bollywood films that are love stories, the moral universe is founded upon love. In these films, the hero is the lover, and the disruption to the moral universe occurs when a character, several characters, or another force impedes the lover in attaining her or his beloved, whether family, an accident or death, a rival lover, or something else. Love is tied so deeply to Bollywood morality that it even trumps love of family, love of country, or other important values. Chapter 2 offers a detailed discussion of love in Bollywood.

Fate is also an important signal of the moral universe. If something is fated in a Bollywood film, usually that means it is the moral center. In a love story, the lovers’ paths might cross even before they have met or even heard of one another, suggesting that their love is fated. In Sarfarosh (1999), Seema’s dupatta blows off her body and randomly lands on Ajay, precipitating their meeting and their eventual romance. This sense of fate or divine will is not connected to a particular god or religion; it is fate more in the melodramatic sense, a popularized version of karma, or cosmic justice. This belief in fate is summed up in the protagonist’s line in Om Shanti Om (2007), when he says: “Kehte hain ki … agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaaho toh poori qayanat use tumse milaane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai” (“It is said that if you want something with your full heart then the entire universe will work to try to make sure you get it”). In Karz (1980), fate is defined as the debt (the eponymous karz) that Monty, a reincarnation of the murdered Ravi, has to repay to Ravi’s mother and to society as a whole. Although he begins as a devoted lover to Tina, once he realizes the extent of this past obligation he pursues its redemption single-mindedly, thus prioritizing his karz over his love.

But despite the black-and-white morality that is often established early on, individual films also play with typical heroic traits to tell new kinds of stories. Thus, what counts as good and evil can be different across time and in different films. In Sarfarosh (1999), the hero is an Indian police officer who exposes a Pakistani spy, whereas in Main Hoon Na (2004), the hero is an army officer saving India from a rogue Indian soldier who hates Pakistan. Both films operate on the same basic formula, but Main Hoon Na resignifies what counts as heroism and patriotism to mean peace with Pakistan rather than continuing enmity.

Disruption of the moral universe

Once the moral universe is established, most films show its disruption, which constitutes the film’s plot. The nature of the disruption will vary based on what values are associated with the moral universe. If the moral universe is centered around love, then the disruption will be something that impedes that love from flourishing. If the moral universe is centered around family, then the disruption will often take the form...