Ire in the Soul: Bollywood's Angry Years

a m HarperCollins Publishers India

Contents

Introduction Bollywood's Burden of Love

The Angry Young Man The Anti-Hero Angry Young Love

The Wild Cat and the Wimp Index

Introduction

AMANDA: But, why - why, Tom, are you always so restless? Where d o you go to, nights? TOM: I - go to the movies. AMANDA: Why do you go to the movies so much, Tom? TOM: I go to the movies because - I like adventure. Adventure is something I don't have much of at work, so I go to the movies. AMANDA: But, Tom, you go to the movies entirely too much! TOM: I like a lot of adventure. (The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams)

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opular cinema is currently in the throes of a second coming. Bogged down by the video and the television blight in the mid-eighties, it was suddenly engulfed in a state of emasculation, People had stopped going to movies; movie moghuls had stopped weaving their spells on screen. It was the proverbial chicken and egg situation where film makers blamed the vanishing crowds and the

Introduction

AMANDA: But, why - why, Tom, are you always so restless? Where d o you go to, nights? TOM: I - go to the movies. AMANDA: Why do you go to the movies so much, Tom? TOM: I go to the movies because - I like adventure. Adventure is something I don't have much of at work, so I go to the movies. AMANDA: But, Tom, you go to the movies entirely too much! TOM: I like a lot of adventure. (The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams)

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opular cinema is currently in the throes of a second coming. Bogged down by the "ideo and the television blight in the mid-eighties, it was suddenly engulfed in a state of emasculation. People had stopped going to movies; movie moghuls had stopped weaving their spells on screen. It was the proverbial chicken and egg situation where film makers blamed the vanishing crowds and the

2

Ire in the Soul

crowds blamed the bad cinema for the empty auditoriums in an industry which produces nearly 900 films annually. Here, where the film makers blamed the viewers for deserting the cinema and viewers indicted the film makers for the indifferent quality of films being churned out from the movie mills, even the allure of Amitabh Bachchan seemed to work no wonders. This despite the fact that his image had whipped up a mind-boggling charisma since Zanjeer hit the screen in 1973. Even that seemed to have lost its power over the popular imagination in the age of television. The debacle began with Ganga lamuna Saraswati, Toofan and ]aadugar and haunted the superstar throughout the end of the 1980s. But for Hum, the rest of the films made in the early 1990s - Akayla, lndrajeef - all failed to match the early hysteria of his films. The fog began to lift at the turn of the 1980s, when Mansoor Khan made Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. A small film with new stars and loads of melody, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak marked the beginning of a new genre in mainstream cinema. The anger of revenge and individual rebellion was replaced by the anger of love. Here was the time-tested story of love-against-odds, but the treatment was entirely new. Love became a synonym for rebellion and the lovers were no longer the mild dulcet pair of the 1960s who accepted everything, union and separation, as a quirk of fate. The success of Qayamat Se Qayalnat Tilk was followed by an unstinted applause for Tezaab, Dil, Smzaln Bea)afa, Maine Pyar Kiya, Aashiqui, Dil Hai Ki Manta Nahirz and the like. It was 'Action' all over again: cameras were rolling, tickets were selling, profits were spiralling and cinema was rising from its slumber once again. Until every other film became just another Qayillnat Sr Qayamat Tak - a pair of new faces, a load of music, now sounding insignificant, and love strewn with impediments. Cinema again began to reverberate with a sense of dija 71u.

Introduction

3

Then there was the grand arrival of the Khalnayak, the anti-hero. Films like Khalnayak, Baazigar, Darr seemed to have lifted the curtain on an entirely virginal terrain. Here, for the first time, there was a hero who was irresistible because he was bad; a plot that was engrossing because it was crooked and a treatment that appeared fresh because it dared to venture into the grey areas of the psyche. The terrorist of Khalnayak, the demented lover of Darr and the shrewd homicidal hero of Baazigar who maintained his charisma hespite ruthlessly flinging his beloved from a high-rise building: these became the icons of the changing times. The 1990s then bear witness to a scenario, when the crowds are returning to cinema on the one hand. And on the other, cinema is being imbued with a sense of exploration. No superstars, no super showmen, just pure cinema, where a film succeeds on the strength of its storyline, dramatic content, characterizations, music - in short, on its overall appeal. An age when Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, traditionally described as a family social, runs shoulder to shoulder with Karan Arjun, the timeless pot-boiler that revolves round the leitmotif of revenge through rebirth. An age when a n actor like Nana Patekar is able to create a furore at the box office with his fiery rantings in Kmntiz~eeralong with the scintillating presence of the new stars on the horizon - Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgan, Salman Khan. A period when stalwarts like Yash Chopra and Subhash Ghai co-exist with the brat pack of new direcLors like David Dhawan, Sooraj Barjatya, Mansoor Khan. A decade when the Supreme Court realizes the importance of cinema and indicts it for its ill-effects on the personality of the real life criminal Auto Shankar who blamed cinema for his excesses (murdering six prostitutes for which he was served the death sentence in 1994 and was hanged in 1995) during his defence.

The present st~td\lis an attempt to cnpt~rrc> the glor-vr:I( popular Hindi cincrna; to look bchinii thc pllai~tasmngori~~ and find out ~ v h ) the . n~ag-ic~.\.orks.M'li:~ does Ti~mlike to go to the rnox1ies again and again? Far ad\.cnturc alone? The discussion is centre-d arouitd co~~ternporar!-mainstream cinema and colrers the iast three dt.cades ;vhicli have been divided into three broad categories: the age 01 the angry young man, angry young love and the cinema of the anti-hero. Since the ht-.roine has al~\ravsbeen an s ~ , i.; ~isc.t~aratt1 integral part of the cinematic c l i s c o ~ ~ rthere discussion c j i i the changing hues of the heroine's irnpi~rtance in poy~tlarcjnema.

Bollywood's Burden of Love

e

a n cinen~achCingea pcoplc, 1' soiiet); an incli\.ld~~al? Does the moving iinngt. ha\,c the poTver to il-icjnic sl~iits in stands, ideologies, \,aluc. s)~sti~rns? Is 1' iilrn ll\i)r.c, thari fantastical form? - A mctnphor i\,ithout meCining? During tl-ie C;rcat Ucprc~ssionin tlte lL130s,ilic i\rnc>ricCl~l print media was full oi ijrst pcrson accounts of h01v i ~ i d i viduals were copi~;g1vit11 scarcitl.. Tlic~rr'ln in tht>i ~ l l o ~ ~ r ing manner. "We were prCictisingtor a chorus and ,I littlc bo\., ; l i ~ ) ~ t 12-ye'irs-old, Tvns in the tront li11c1. F1tl is ile,ll~in his overalls, but didn't 1ta1.c. n i ~ ~ 011 c i ~under t l i c l ~ l t . He, 1 ~ ~ standing in the lint1 \vl-ic>na11 at once, 111. pitilled ior\v;lrd in a dead faint. 'This \\.as t ~ v cofcic>ckin the c~iti.r~loon... I ie had not had anything tc, eat siiiccs the d a y before." "Five l-iuncircd s'11c)c)I cI1ildr~1-I,nos L i \ r i t l l liagg~irci faces and in tattereil clothes, pnr;ltic>~i through C llii'tgo's d o w l ~ t o ~ vst'ctio~t n tc: cjemcind th.h~c%111 [?I-0\ride them ~ vti1i f o o L i." "1 lo\,c: c\ljlcjrcxil cll~ii1 Iitl\'t' 0!tt,!1 ;\r'inti.d 10 11;1\,0

children of my own. But to ha1.e one now, as I a111 going to, is almost more than I can stand ... I have four step children, so there are six in my family. I need fruit and vegetables. I need rest. I need yards of material for shirts and gowns. I have n o blankets. I need baby clothes ... I hate charity...but my condition now not only forces me to take charity but even ask for it."' "Mrs. Schmidt took her five-year-old son Albert into the kitchen and turned on the gas ...'I don't know what I am going to give the children to eat,' said a note she had written for her husband. 'They are already half starved. I think it best to go into eternity and take little Albert al~ng'."~ The most persistent image of the Depressiori, as it turned out then, was neither FIitler nor Mussolini, but that of a small child, dressed in welfare clothing, unsmiling, unresponsive as he pauses to stare through the windows of a grocery store, his legs noticeably thin and his stomach slightly swollen. Almost like a gaunt Jackie Coogan. In November 1930, during an emergency White House meeting on Child Health and Protection, President Hoover was forced to admit that six million American children were chronically undernourished. Nevertheless, he immediately added that there was no need for the policy makers and mandarins to be discouraged since at the same time, there are thirty-fi~remillion reasonably normal, cheerful human electrons radiating joy and mischief, hope and faith. Their faces are turned towards the lights - theirs is the life of great adventure. These are the vivid, romping everyday children, our orvn and our neighbours. Stark, almost brutal insensitivity, this inay seem, on first appraisal. But a second look is all it takes, to reveal the 1. Peter Stc[.cn, e d . , "lump Cut" in 2. Ibid, p.37

Rc~ticlc,c~riTlrcl

,=hreM,dintelligence that lies behind this deliberate creation of the image of the other side of reality. During those years of gruelling poverty and starvation, Hoover's juxtaposition of the image of the undernourished American child against thirty-five million rosy-cheeked cherubs was not only timely, expedient and ingenious, but showed how easy it was to obfuscate reality by creating a powerful counterimage in the face of an existing unpleasant one. Charles Eckart, in his seminal essay on Shirley Temple elucidates this power of the moving image. He points out, "as the days greuTshorter and grayer, it became obvious that for the millions, the hardest days were still ahead. Those already mentally and physically stunted by years of malnutrition rvould know. many more years of diminished existence before the economic boom of World War I1 would turn the depression around. And a few parents, broken under the responsibility of caring for hungry, ill and constantly irritable children, rvould kill one or more of them - and sometimes, themselves. But then, on the other hand, there was Shirley Temple."' Shirley Temple, who in the mid 1930s, when 20 million people were on relief, awoke in the morning singing the song 'Early Bird'; whose econoinics declared that a nickel was worth more than a dollar; whose message of lolre, caring and sharing merely reiterated President Hoover's observations about Deprt:ssinn being 'only a state of the mind .' During the Depression, it was cinema that became the saviour both for the people and the policy 111akers. While politicians directly cliarged Hollyrvood with the task of "cheering Americans up", studio ideolog.-~eslike Jack Warner and 1-ouis R.Mayer studiouslv took up their new roles as shapers o f public attitudes. The phenomenon of

1 . o r t ~(1985),p.37

3. Ibid, pp. 42-43

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Ire in the So111

Shirley Temple was carefully nurtured to create the counter image in films like Littlr Miss Marker, Bright Eyes, Curly Top, Our Little Girl, The Littlest Rebel, Poor Little Rich Girl. As a tiny, adorable, warm ball of love that was in a state of perpetual motion - dancing, strutting, beaming, wheedling, chiding, radiating, kissing - her principal function in all these films was to soften hard hearts (specially the wealthy, to intercede on behalf of others, to effect liaisons between members of opposed social classes and occasionally to regenerate an emaciated populace). Thus on the one hand, there was reality - starvation, privation, unemployment, death. On the other, there was the image - Shirley Temple, bouncing, jumping, singing, dancing, full of a natural joie dr z~iure,presenting the only solution to the current malaise in film after film: the transforming power of love. As Eckart points out: "And now we hear her voice announcing that the Depression is over; that it never existed; that it is ending in each and every of her films; that these films are playing at our neighbourhood theatres and that we should come and see them, and that we must learn to love children and to weep for them and open up our hearts to them, that we mustn't hate rich people because most of them are old and unhappy and unloved, that we should learn to sing at our own work and dance away our weariness, that anyone can be an old sourpuss about rickets and protein deficiency but only Shirley Temple fans can laugh their pathology away."" Cinema then isn't actually what it is taken to be: an impermanent tryst with make-believe, regurgitated with a diet of popcorn and ice creams, its succulence lasting only till the lights are turned on. Somewhere along the regurgitation, there is assimilation, affirmation and actualisation 4. Ibid, p. 51

Bolly7~1ood'Burden s of Love

9

also. The power of the medium was recognized both by Hitler and Mussolini, who cultivated it as an ideological weapon to further their own political interests. The occupation of Denzig was deliberately done in a way that would allow the use of the best camera angles to the film crew. For a similar purpose, Hitler commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to make Triumph of the Will, a film that would later serve as the official Nazi record of the Nuremberg party rally of 1934. Preparations for the rally were made along with the preparations for the camera work. The objective was to present Hitler and other Nazi leaders in the best possible light, for which a staff of 120 was employed. They included 40 cameramen. Again, at the peak of the war, when destruction was the order of the day, the German newsreels showed beautiful parks and lawns peopled by handsome men and beautiful women, moving around to the accompaniment of the soft sensuous music in the background. An image which denied the existence of fighting, bloodshed and human brutality of the worst 'kind. Shirley Temple's burden of love has not been laid to rest through all these years of cinematic history. Cinema continues to play the role of the traditional healer of society and the studio ideologues have never stopped churning out a cinema of pacification and passivity: the twin objectives of the media. If Temple could talk abbut the transforming power of love in the 1930s during the peak of the Great Depression and endearingly urge that everyone would have enough if the haves learnt to share and the have-nots learnt tbbear, then Mani Ratnam re-echoes similar sentiments in 1995, when the country had yet to ward off the communal scourge. Set against the Bombay riots of 1993, which followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the film Bombay reiterates Temple's message of love as the only panacea for all ills.

Ire in the Solrl

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Trapped in the thick of a mad riot, with mobsters lusting for blood-closing in from all sides, the hero breaks into a song which urges the sword ahd the trident-wielding people to stop. Ruk ja, ruk ja! blares the background music as the soundtrack repeatedly gushes forth about the essential brotherhood of all mankind. This at a time when the word 'Hindu' came to stand for the trident-wielding Muslim basher and 'Muslim' meant the hard-boiled fanatic with his pro-Pakistan ideology. The film obviously recognizes no such differences of religion, caste and creed as the background song declares:

Bolly7i~ood'sBurden of Love

11

fathers who turn out to be the true prototypes of the common Indian, the hoi polloi for whom religion is an undeniable part of daily life. At the onset, they begin as natural enemies. Bred in a rural society, seeped in tradition, the two obviously meet under the shadow of incipient antagonism and communal distrust.

"Apni zameen, apna gagan yeh Dushlnan bane, apne hi hum Mazhab ko chodo, 7~atanki socho Hindustani hain pehle hum To ruk jao ..." (This is our land, this is our sky; why then are we our own enemies? Forget about religion, think about the nation; we are Indians first and foremost, so stop, just stop.) Confronted by this message of love, they stop. Murderous mobs who seemed to have let go of reason, simply drop their weapons and there, in the middle of the smoke and the stench of human flesh, the hunters and the victims hold hands, hug each other and celebrate their Indianness. This, for the film maker is then the primer's principles for peace and communal amity. At a time when the country was being ripped apart by communal fires and when religious fanaticism was on the rampage, Ratnam chooses to paint the picture of the ideal Muslim and the perfect Hindu. While Shekhar (Arvind Swamy) and Shaila Bano (Manisha Koirala) -the hero and the heroine who rebel against their familial orthodoxy and marry despite the communally surcharged air around may be the protagonists of Bombay, it is actually the two

A tense moment in Bonrbay

Shekhar's father, a hard-core Hindu Brahmin, wants Rahim, Shaila Banofs father, to give him 2000 bricks inscribed with the word 'Ram'. The bricks, he says, are meant for the construction of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. Obviously, Rahim sees red and springs at his would-be customer's throat (Rahim is the owner of a brick kiln) in a bloody rage. But they don't spill blood. Later, the two fight over the religious initiation of their grandchildren, a pair of twins. But underlying their outward hostility, there is a childlike pique, which lends an innocence to their rancour so that, when Bombay begins to burn, the two end up as kindred souls, members of a single family or what

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Ire in the Soul

you will. The Muslim saves the Hindu from a murderous mob and the Brahmin, in turn, lays down his life in a bid to save the Koran, the holy book of the Muslims, from desecration. These, the film insists, are true Indians who take their religion as seriously as the unifying credo of Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai. This at a time, when the polarization of the two communities seemed to have reached a state of no return and the communal frenzy could hardly be contained with simplistic messages of love, unity and fraternity. Nevertheless, Bombay became a box-office success despite the controversies and the temporary bans. The chimera seemed to have worked again. The good Hindu saves the Muslim. The good Muslim protects the Hindu. The good cops shield everyone. And out of the ashes of despair and .dissonance, phoneix-like, a new India is being born. Over the ashes of the burning city, rises the human chain formed by all the city dwellers. One that transcends all barriers of class, caste, community and religion. Nationality being the only cementing factor here. Yes, Bombay proves once again that with a little bit of love, Gods do rest in their heavens and all becomes right with the nation. Over the last decade, a reiteration of this state of national well-beir.g has become a cinematic obsession with film makers. And successfully so. For, in terms of pure economics, all the films which have talked of the 'foreign hand' that is responsible for internal dissension and decay have been sure-fire hits at the box office. Shekhar Kapoor's Mr. India blamed the bomb blasts (a series of bomb blasts ripped through the nation which were reportedly held to be the handiwork of Punjab terrorists) on Mr. Mugambo, the man from nowhere. Subhash Ghai's Karma pitted the dubious Dr. Deng (Anupam Kher) and his private army against the patriotism of the principled jailer (Dilip Kumar) and his three sons of the nation. All of whom repeatedly echoed

Bollywood's Burden of Love

13

the chorus Har kararn apna karenge ae ulatan tere liye (we shall perform all our tasks for your well-being, oh nation!) in the course of the murder and the mayhem let loose by the crafty alien.

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Naseeruddin Shah in Tahnlka

In Anil Sharmafs Tahalka and Hukurnat, the enemy was again the ungodly outsider (Amrish Puri and Sadashiv Amrapurkar), who would infiltrate the sacrosanct border, loot, plunder and disrupt the natural harmony of the nation. In Mehul Kumar's Tiranga, there was the swarthy enemy from beyond, Pralaynath, Goondaswamy who abducted the Indian scientists to execute his nefarious nuclear missile plan aimed at destroying the nation. But the most important in this genre of cinema that takes upon itself the responsibility of propagating national wellbeing are Mani Ratnam's Rojs and Mehul Kumar's Krantiveer. Here, for the first time, the enemy loses his anonymity and is invested with a face, an identity and a clear-cut methodology to his mad designs. Set against the

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Ire in the SotlI

insurgency in Kashmir, Roja dramatizes a real life incident - the abduction of a scientist - to indict Pakistan for aiding and abetting terrorism in India. The scientist (Arvind Swamy) naturally turns out to be the grand Indian patriot who douses the flames emanating from the national flag with his own body and confronts the militancy of the hard-core terrorist with his straight-from-the-heart thte-athte about nationhood, national love and the like. In a telling scene of the film, the engineer Rishi Kumar, indicts the Kashmiri militant, Liaqat (Pankaj Kapoor) for his treachery. According to Rishi, the terrorists are merely puppets in the hands of Pakistan and their 'war against innocents' is actually disallowed not only by the law of the land but by their religion too. Padosi desh ki kafhpufliho tum, tulnhari apni aka1 kahan hail he queries. He tells the insurgent to shed his violent ways since India cannot be divided. Moreover this wanton shedding of innocent blood was surely anti-Islam too. Yeh ugrawaad, yeh maut, yeh tabaahi, kya Allah ko lnanzoor hai ...Yeh barbaadi, yeh bandook chod do ...y eh desh kabhi nahin bat sakfa, he exhorts. (This insurgency, this death, this destruction, does Allah allow it! Give up this destruction, this gun ... India can never be divided.) Needless to say, the hard-core terrorist has a change of heart by the end of the film. In due course, he realizes that the engineer is right, the enemy is the neighbouring country and patriotism is the only 'ism' worth pursuing. Unhonen kaha dange-fasad karfe rehna, baki sab hurn pe chod do. A b unhonen halnare bachchon ko bhun diya, gaddari k i hulnse ...y eh zulm, yeh barbaadi, yeh ugnuaad kyon? he laments. (They - Pakistan - told us to carry on with murder and mayhem, the rest they would take care of. Now they have mercilessly killed our young ones ...they have betrayed us. Why this oppression, this destruction, this terrorism.) Indeed, a timely lesson, both for the terrorist and the common man who might have held the nation-state as

partly responsible for the current rise in insurgency. But for

Roia.

In Krantiveer, the hero who tries to avenge the death of all the innocents

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in the city's communal c a r n a g e (again a reference to the Bombay riots of 1993) renders a fiery patriotic speech be-

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fore his public execution for killing the corrupt minister. Here again, he identifies the

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Nana ~atekarin Krantiveer

enemy as the 'buglike nation next door' (pissu jaisa padosi desh). He then lambasts the neighbouring state for trying to divide the country and condemns his fellow citizens for their cowardice and non-action: Yeh pissu jaisa halnara

padosi desh, jo ek sui bhi nahin bana sakta, hamare desh ko todne ka sapna dekh raha hai. Woh yeh sapna dekh sakta hai kyonki yahan murde rehte hain, he exhorts. (This buglike nation next door, which cannot even make a needle today, dreams of breaking up our country. It can nurture such a dream because here there are corpses who dwell.) In a

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