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Understanding Bollywood
When that great art of mechanical reproduction – cinema – came to India with the release of Dhundhiraj Govind (Dadasaheb) Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra in 1913, it drew its soul from India’s ancient epics (which continued to be orally transmitted), its theatricality from a vibrant Parsi theatre of colonial India, its representational format from the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) and its gestures (dramatic mudrās) from both classical dance forms and folk theatre, notably Nautanki. When sound came to Indian cinema in 1931 (with the first talkie Alam Ara) these features were given greater prominence through the use of music and dialogue (largely derived from the Persian mathnavi-inspired performances and nondiegetic music of Parsi theatre) and poetic language: Hindi-Urdu for the cinema primarily based in Bombay, regional languages for cinemas based in other parts of India.
There is now an extensive bibliography on Indian cinema, especially on Bollywood cinema, which examines this cinema from perspectives derived from the discipline of film theory and criticism generally. Although the word “Bollywood” is now a respectable term which refers to a quite specific form of cinema and is not a derisory term for a second rate imitative cinema (based on the deference to Hollywood in the descriptor) and has indeed made its way into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a few general comments about the cinema must be made as a prelude to the chapter proper. Bollywood, the cinema based largely in Mumbai (Bombay), has produced some 9000 films since the coming of talkies to India in 1931. (This must not be confused with the output of Indian cinema generally, which would be four times greater.) The triumph of Bollywood (over other regional cinemas) is nothing less than spectacular and indicates, furthermore, the growing global sweep of this cinema not just as cinema qua cinema but as cinema qua social effects, national cultural coding, and entrepreneurial nous. The Hyderabad-based Ramoji Film City constructs stage-sets for any locality in the world, and in doing so gives another definition of the global nature of Bollywood. Indeed it was Bollywood which provided the metaphor for the shift from Melbourne to Delhi for the Commonwealth Games in 2010. The Melbourne closing ceremony was marked by Bollywood pop stars Aishwarya Rai and Saif Ali Khan doing a veritable Bollywood romp. International games (the Olympics, World Cup Soccer, Asian Games, Commonwealth Games, and so on) are often expressions of a nation’s own emerging modernity. For India that modernity, in the realm of culture, is increasingly being interpolated by Bollywood.
This essay brings together four key elements of Bollywood cinema:
1 the lure of the mythological;
2 the allure of the Muslim courtesan, and Urdu, Bollywood’s language of love;
3 the hegemony of melodrama; and
4 the persistence of song and dance.
The essay concludes with an examination of a classic 1963 film which may be used as the touchstone for the items discussed under the subheadings.
The Lure of the Mythological
The Mahābhārata claims, “what is not here is nowhere else to be found” (I. 56.34). Given this claim, it may be suggested that the epics (both the Mahābhārata and its lesser sister epic the Rāmāyana:) laid the foundations of Indian cultural forms, foundations so old and influential, yet their impact remained pervasive. It may therefore be argued that modern Indian cultural forms, and notably cinema, connected directly with the epics, which were also repositories of religious belief, albeit sometimes in heavily mediated ways.
It must be said at the outset that Indian modernity has not parted company with religion; nor has modernity transformed religion into coded narratives and characters through whom an alternative version of the sacred may be imparted. There are no figures (be they Superman, Gandalf, Saruman, or the Principal of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry) whose bodies and language mark out an alternative, postmodern sacred. In Bollywood (the variety of Indian cinema which is our archive here) gods and goddesses or divine personages generally come down to earth themselves, which is a time-hallowed mode of travel in the Hindu scriptures. Indeed Indian cinema began with mythologicals, a genre which continues to shadow Indian cinema generally by providing it with some of its basic narrative structures as well as ethical norms.
The mythological is primarily an episode from the epics or the later Puranic texts. It is marked by a story which has a distinctly human dimension, in which gods may figure, and humans in the end must bow down to their will. What is important, however, is that it is never God-centered, nor is it devotional in the strict sense of the word. Although piety and submission to the will of God (here as pre-written karma) are crucial, the narrative is not defined by the discourses of devotion. The latter is characterized by prayers, bhajans (hymns), sacrifice, worship, transvaluation of sacred spaces, the ‘act of manifestation of the sacred (hierophany)’1 and by the overriding discourses of bhakti or devotion. Encounters with gods and goddesses are not with the absolutely other (ganz andere) within the framework of sublime awe, the mysterium tremendum,2 but as part of an interconnected system.
Narratives formed through the mythologicals, beginning with Raja Harishchandra, made as we have noted by the legendary Dhundiraj Govind (Dadasaheb) Phalke (1870–1944) in 1913 introduced the hero as renouncer.3 The renouncer-ideal permeates Indian cinema, and the grand text of this ideal, after Phalke’s seminal film, was Raja Harishchandra. Since 1913 no fewer than eight versions of this story have been made, 3 silent films and 5 talkies: Raja Harishchandra (dir. D.G. Phalke, 1917), Raja Harishchandra (Kohinoor Productions, 1924), Harishchandra (dir. N.D. Sarpotdar, 1928), Harishchandra (dir. K. Rathod, 1931), Satyawadi Raja Harishchandra (dir. J.J. Madan, 1931), Harishchandra (dir. Dhirubhai Desai, 1958), Harishchandra Taramati (dir. B.K. Adarsh, 1963), Harishchandra Taramati (dir. B.K. Adarsh, 1970). What is important to underline is that the mythological established the narrative and thematic norms of Indian cinema: what is not there is nowhere else to be found. These norms fall under the following general categories/groups/themes: unqualified adherence to the principles of dharma or the eternal law; the hero as the follower of the complete Christian 10 commandments with the proviso that Hindu polytheistic monism replaces the Judeo-Christian God and images of gods are a necessity; the woman as the sacrificial/devoted wife/mother/female companion; the hero bereft of the seven deadly sins; the narrative constructed around a theory of a secular, impartial nation based on the idea of the common good for all; the triumph of good over evil. Around these, many more themes may be added but all within the over-riding principles of acts which are not linked to fruits of action.
Of the nine versions already mentioned, the 1963 Harishchandra Taramati (remade in color by the same director seven years later) is representative of the form. The tale of Hariścandra is itself something of an anomaly since, as fleshed out by Bollywood, it does not exist in this extant form in the literature. Although it is recorded in the great epic, in one of the Brahmanas and in the Markhandeya Purāna, the tale is present there only in skeletal form. In Book Two of the Mahābhārata (the Sabhāparvan) when Yudhisthira asks Nārada, “What feats did Hariścandra accomplish?” the latter replies: “He was a mighty monarch (rājābalavān), an emperor who ruled over all the kings (samrāt sarva mahīksitām).” The epic tells no more than this. It may stand to reason then that stories simply grew around this king. The tale itself was gradually embellished by other cognate stories of piety and self-sacrifice.
The film begins with a variation on the Judgment of Solomon scene. It is Queen Tārāmatī (Jaymala) and not King Hariścandra (played by Prithviraj Kapoor fresh from his success as Emperor Akbar in Mughal-e-Azam, 1960) who dispenses the correct judgment by declaring that the child claimed by two women should be cut in half and given to both. At this the first woman declares that she would rather see the child given away to the other woman than so inhumanely divided. The other woman remained silent. The Queen, in a repeat of Solomon’s judgment, orders that the child should be given to the first woman as only a real mother would rather lose her child than see him slaughtered. In these establishing shots we are also told about the King’s promise to save one Candramani from her evil paramour, Ānandkāl. We are informed that the King has a son, and that the King belongs to the lineage of the Sun kings of the Kingdom of Ayodhya of which, later, Lord Rāma is also a prince. Further, we are informed that such is the King’s dedication to the path of truth that even the heavens are afraid of him since fidelity to absolute truth – he is called satyavādī – threatens the primacy of gods. To challenge the King’s fidelity to truth, he is tempted.
What follows is a series of trials and tribulations in which the King and his family are tested by the powerful guru-saint Viśvamitra. The King works as a laborer, as a cobbler, as a man-servant, as a potter; the Queen as a maid; and the child Rohit (Babloo) earns money through kick boxing to pay their guru daksina (or guru gratuity) to Viśvamitra. Whenever a daksina is collected, Viśvamitra cheats them and in the end they are sold into slavery to pay their guru debt. More intense difficulties follow, often framed within well-known narratives.
The worst is yet to come as the pious king, the follower of the eternal dharma, the upholder of truth – all ancient Hindu verities – takes on the job of a candāla responsible for burning the dead. This act, an unclean act, is however followed through with the same sense of dharmik propriety since following one’s svadharma (the dharma of one’s caste) is more important than following another dharma (the Bhagavadgītā 18.47). In this role the King not only asks his wife, who has brought their dead son to the cremation grounds, to pay him before the son can be cremated (which she does by stripping her own sari and thereby compromising her modesty), but he condemns his own Queen and accuses her of murdering their child. She is charged forthwith and condemned to be executed. In all this, to the world the King never declares his identity; he suffers, and this is ennobling suffering, the kind of intense sacrifice of the self which again threatens the order of the universe, just as his dedication to truth had done before. The cosmos is threatened with pralaya (apocalypse); the gods are afraid, for such tapas, such austerity, such an act of renunciation, if unstopped, would make the King a god himself. So Vishnu, the Preserver, intervenes, and the King’s son is brought back to life, his Kingdom is returned and the moral order reestablished. In all its severity, this is the definitive allegory on which the genre of the religious film is based. Beyond that, Bollywood cinema, as a single interconnected text, will find much of its idiom as well as its narrative model in this story.
It is not the aim of this chapter to declare the extent to which Raja Harishchandra, like Gogol’s overcoat (of which Dostoevsky declared all writers were children), has spawned all other Bollywood films. It is sufficient to argue that the genre of the mythological film (which Salman Rushdie has termed “theologicals”4) has provided cinema with some of its key structural and thematic forms. There are four ways in which mythologicals have functioned in Bollywood: as a reenactment of the life of Rāma as God incarnate (Sampoorna Ramayan, Homi Wadia/Babubhai Mistry 1961); as an exemplary text of bhakti (devotion) and saintliness, as in the demi-god Hanumān’s unqualified love for Rāma (Bajrangbali, dir. Chandrakant, 1976); as the absolute instance of brotherly love and duty, as in the relationship between Rāma and his brother Bharat (Manibhai Vyas’s Ram Bharat Milan, 1965); and as God’s transhistorical or synchronic presence in our midst (Jai Santoshi Maa 1975, dir. Vijay Sharma; 2006, dir. Ahmed Siddiqui). It is the latter form which continues to energize Bollywood, although with less obvious divine intercessions.
Rewriting Mythologicals I: Jai Santoshi Maa
Released in 1975, Jai Santoshi Maa is a cheaply produced religious film, yet one of the great hits of the year and, arguably, the most influential devotional film of all time. The film was remade with the same general theme but placed in a late modern Indian context in 2006. A number of issues of worship, faith, and devotion within the apparati of Hindu belief systems come together in these films. We shall consider these issues with reference to both versions of the film. The 1975 film brought together well-known stars of religious/devotional films: Trilok Kapoor, Manhar Desai, and Bharat Bhushan. Mahipal and Anita Guha are the last two best-known actors who played the roles of Rāma and Sītā respectively. Jai Santoshi Maa declares its eponymous goddess’ connections with the establishment pantheon immediately as she is the daughter of Ganeśa himself. Santośī Mā, however, has no establishment genealogy like the other Hindu goddesses. The aim of the film is to construct one for her. How then does the text work its spell on the spectator and effectively start the worship of a little-known goddess, at least for a decade or two after the film’s release? The remarkable effects of the film on the Hindu imagination may be explained in a number of ways. The first is the need for synchronous revelations in Hinduism, or the actual presence of divinity among us from time to time. The pervasiveness of cults such as that of Śirdi Sai Bābā (1836–1918), popular among filmmakers, and of the still-alive Satya Sai Bābā (1926–) are instances.5 One may wish to add claims of many gurus, including Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, to the list. In this respect a story in which Śantosī Mā comes into the lives of people here and now confirms the idea of the eternal recurrence of divinity among us. The second is the way in which the film is encoded in the discourses of popular religiosity, notably those derived from the Tulsīdās Rāmāyana.6 Wrapped in a red cloth, Satyavati’s father (Bharat Bhushan) chants from it and in doing so foregrounds yet again the film’s lineage in the tradition of bhakti. Third, the film actually constructs a new āratī, a new prayer-hymn for this goddess. It takes the form of the song mai to āratī utāri re santośī mātā kī/jai jai santośī mātā jai jai mā written by Bollywood’s preeminent devotional lyricist Pradeep and sung by Usha Mangeshkar, sister of the prima donna Bollywood high-pitched crooner Lata Mangeshkar. Fourth, the film confirms, as indeed the extended final sequence of dance, homage, and āratī in the temple scene shows, the very Hindu idea that gods may enter into our lives at any time, in any form: nā jāne kis bheś mem nārāyan mil jāye. Finally, the sacrificial woman is seen as the embodiment of the quintessential Indian woman, a point made in a background song sung by one of Bollywood’s rare classically-trained singers, Manna Dey: mat ro mat ro āj rādhike jo dukh se ghabrā jāye vah nahīm hind kī nārī (‘Do not cry today, Rādhā, for whoever is flustered by suffering is no woman of Mother India’).
A religious film which makes money has to be repeated and so we get another Santoshi Maa, 30 years later, in 2006. It is not my aim here to connect religious texts with shifts in capital – from an immediately postcolonial social democrat capitalism to a late modern free market capitalism, the first producing the 1975 text, the second its late modern avatar. Nor am I concerned, given the metaphysical rather than distinctively materialist tenor of this chapter, to explore how the Santoshi Maa films critique heteropatriarchal social formations or how internal to these texts is the presence of the Muslim as writer and/or director. It is sufficient to allude to these productive and critically self-aware modes of analysis but move on to the more formal dimensions of the religious film and its place in the construction of the Bollywood film syntagm.
Santoshi Maa (dir. Ahmed Siddiqui, 2006) pays direct homage to the 1975 original at the outset: dedication to Pradeep the lyricist, the chanting of the āratī, mai to āratī utāri re santośī mātā kī, the uncanny resemblance of the Santośī Mā statue with the Satyavati of the 1975 film, and ongoing allusions to the original film throughout. In this 2006 version, the tale of a latter-day Santośī Mā devotee is presented as a framed narration. A modern media girl, Preety (Garima Kapoor), interviews Mahima (Nushrat Bharucha) about the miraculous birth of her son when science could not cure her infertility. Mahima is observing the 16th Friday vrat (fast) of Santośī Mā and invites Preety, who is in the throes of a divorce, to her home. Mahima then recounts her life story which parallels the life of the earlier Satyavati. In Mahima’s case, too, she is separated from her husband Anurag (Rakesh Bapat) and is abused by her extended family. Like the Satyavati prototype, Mahima is sorely tested and undergoes suffering only to triumph in the end. Although the other divinities in the Hindu pantheon do not figure in this version, Santośī Mā’s presence is felt throughout the film as once again she participates in person in the final pūjā to tell her followers: “Arise my children, be content, be happy, this is my blessing.”
In a foundational essay on the 1975 Jai Santoshi Maa, Veena Das pointed out a number of fascinating features of this film.7 First, it seems Santośī Mā is very much a creation of Bollywood cinema along the lines of earlier creations, though not by Bollywood, of goddesses such as Śītal in Bengal to explain a smallpox epidemic there in the nineteenth century. However, unlike Śītal, Santośī Mā is not related to an epidemic and hence is not constructed as an embassy of death to be appeased. Nor is she a purely rural phenomenon as she has been appropriated, via cinema, by the Indian middle class. Second, Santośī Mā belongs to what may be called the tradition of tribal and not savior religions8 in the sense that she does not bring any huge metaphysical baggage with her. There is no commentarial tradition behind her, no personal history such that attributed to Laksmī or Pārvati, goddesses whose reincarnations are interwoven into the textures of Hinduism. Instead what Santośī Mā symbolizes is the efficacy of renunciation as a constituent feature of devotion. In other words, both Satyavati and Mahima, as model devotees (hence figures to aspire to), are marked by intense sacrifice and suffering; their rewards coming only after their sufferings have been so acute and so painful that there is indeed no more that can be asked of them short of death itself. The renouncer ideal is therefore embedded into the figure of the person-of-the-world, the two no longer seen as irreconcilable items in a binary set of oppositions but as a sequential order in which to suffer or to renounce is a precondition for a divinely sanctioned, contented life in this world. Finally, the emergence of what is in effect a new deity (Santośī Mā’s presence in the canon is completely marginal) shows how Hinduism constructs new gods out of old in response to the requirements and needs of a changing social order. In reaffirming sacrifice and moral uprighteousness even as modernity effectively precludes such absolutes, the new cult, and the cinema which has created this new cult, refines the received tradition and simplifies it through emphasis on personal worship. The heimlich (homeliness) of ’s (she has no major temples) makes her a presence in a home centered around the figure of the homely wife who imbibes the grace of this goddess. The centrality of the heteropatriarchal order is disturbed because the Friday vrats are undertaken by women who alone are granted a personal vision of the goddess. The Arjuna-Krishna classic bonding of the Bhagavadgītā gets rewritten as the Satyavati-Santośī Mā dialogue.
Rewriting Mythologicals II: Ekalavya
A principle of structuration: no Bollywood film is unaffected by the absolutist norms of Hindu culture, the norms of dharma and karma, of law and of individual action as constitutive of the higher moral order; our acts, in other words, condition not only our lives in this world but also in the next. Any number of Bollywood films may be cited to make this point but I want to turn to the case of Eklavya (2007) since this film comes at a time when the religious film is either truly dead or it cannot uncritically reaffirm the old moral absolutes. Located in the midst of a late Indian modernity, globalization, and the Indian diaspora as a key market for Bollywood, Eklavya indeed shows how much more difficult it is now to represent, even as allegory, the religious canon.
The story of Ekalavya is found in the ādiparvan (1. 123: 1–39) of the Mahābhārata.9 The preeminence of Arjuna, the great archer and favorite pupil of Drona, is challenged by Ekalavya, a hunter’s son who asks Drona to be his guru. Drona declines on grounds of caste. Ekalavya, however, retreats to the forest, makes an image of Drona, pays homage and reverence to the image as if it was Drona himself and, following the rules of a pupil, masters the craft of archery to an unparalleled degree. One day Arjuna and his brothers and cousins go hunting. Their dog smells a black hunter wrapped in uncouth clothing and keeps barking. Annoyed by the sound, Ekalavya shoots seven arrows into the mouth of the dog (without of course seeing the dog). The dog, its mouth filled with arrows, walks back to Arjuna and his brothers. Arjuna is taken aback by the hunter’s prowess, locates him in the forest, and sees for himself his immense dexterity with bow and arrow. Worried that there is an archer superior to him, he returns to Drona demanding that he keep his promise that no “pupil of his should ever excel him.” Drona locates the aboriginal Ekalavya (“his body caked in dirt, hair braided, dressed in tatters”) shooting arrows with great precision. Ekalavya touches Drona’s feet and acknowledges him as his guru.
tato drono ’bravīd rājann ekalavyam idam vacah
yadi śisyo ’si me tūrnam vetanam sampradīyatām
ekalavyas tu tac chrutvā prīyamāno ’bravīd idam
kim prayacchāmi bhagavann ājñāpayatu mām guruh
na hi kim cid adeyam me gurave brahmavittama
tam abravīt tvayāngustho daksino dīyatām mama (1. 123: 33–35)
Then, O king [Yudhisthira, the narratee], Drona said to Ekalavya, “If you are my pupil, you must give me a fee.” Having heard this, Ekalavya said happily, “What can I give you, sir? Let my guru give his command. Greatest of Brahman-scholars, there is nothing I would not give my guru.” He replied, “You must give me your right thumb.”
Such is the eternal law, the unchanging Law of Dharma that a guru’s request must be honored. Without hesitating and delightfully, Ekalavya slices off his right thumb and gives it to Drona. Ekalavya enters Hindu everyday life as the symbol of honor and as the tragic hero who commands respect.
To understand Eklavya we need to know the eponymous hero’s function in the epic narrative and we also need to know how “Ekalavya” circulates in culture and the symbolic role he plays in it. Of special importance is the place given to Ekalavya in current Dalit literature and everyday life. The Dalits (formerly “Untouchables”) see in Ekalavya an earlier Dalit sacrificed for the greater glory of the higher castes. Their reasoning is that Nisāds (hunting caste) were in fact proto-Dalits and aboriginal peoples, people born out of interbreeding and consequently rejected. This view also resonates with the Damodar Kosambi thesis about autochthonous elements in the epic.10 In some Dalit circles the author of the later epic, the Rāmāyana, Vālmīki, is also seen as a Nisād. Ekalavya for the Indian Dalits then symbolizes in a graphic, albeit poetic form, an alternative ennobling which the high caste epic must reduce to a cipher, to a moral anecdote, so as to advance its own perverse definition of dharma and demonstrate its fear of miscegenation. Although the connection between Nisād and Dalit is ingenuous (though not totally indefensible) in everyday Dalit life it has gained an epic grandeur in which Ekalavya is lifted to the status of a mythic hero, a dying god figure, the unnameable signifier (the characters within the Ekalavya episode in the Mahābhārata do not name him) who must be sacrificed before fertility can return. In this respect the Dalit is the sacrificial victim whose blood renews the land. It is this reading of the Ekalavya-Nisād-Dalit which underpins Eklavya, the film.
At the outset a voice-over connects the film with its epic antecedent: “It is a story from the Mahābhārata … an aboriginal child … who followed the eternal dharma by honouring the request of his guru.” The addressee is a child who repeats the manner in which the dog is shot: “without any sign of blood or pain.” As the voice-over ends and the credit stills fade we enter into a tale of intrigue, murder, revenge, and honor. The tale combines capitalist modernity with feudal structures and values since the subject of the film is a postcolonial Indian principality which somehow functions both as part of a democratic polity and outside of it. Located in this ambivalent, if radically contradictory, position is the new Ekalavya (Amitabh Bachchan) who is at once biological father of the heir apparent and defender of the principality. In this reworking of the myth, one would have expected a bold statement connecting Ekalavya to his Dalit origins. Instead the Dalit role is given to a deputy superintendent of police, Pannalal Chohaar (Sanjay Dutt) in whom is located the new social order of India. For Eklavya the film can do no more than construct his moral dilemma in an instrumental modernity. The Sanskrit axiom dharma madhyata rudhyate (“dharma must be restrained by reason”) is often repeated to underline this new morality. When it becomes clear to Ekalavya that the heir apparent Harsha (Saif Ali Khan) had in fact killed his putative father (Boman Irani) to save his biological father, who is himself, Ekalavya is faced with an epic dilemma. It is Harsha who reminds him of his duty, “Now you must follow your dharma and kill me, isn’t that so?” In the epic Ekalavya must sacrifice what he loved most, his right thumb, for without it he could no longer be an archer. If the Law of Dharma were to be followed to the letter (and not with the rider “dharma madhyata rudhyate”) Ekalavya must sacrifice his son (angūsthā, “thumb” also means soul), which is what he prepares to do. But he doesn’t and with the strains of the Gāyatrī mantra, the Hindu Lord’s Prayer (tamaso mā jyotir gamaye … ), interwoven into the dialogue, Ekalavya concludes, “This time I didn’t cut off my thumb.” The father and son embrace.
The eternal dharma of the mythologicals in late modern Bollywood now becomes a matter of postmodern contingency, not a transcendental absolute. As Georg Lukács wrote, in the age of capitalism, the epic can no longer be written because the unities that the epic stood for (the unity of work value and use value for instance, the primacy of the artisan, the certainty given to felt life through ethical absolutes, and the like) can no longer be replicated.11 The epic gives rise to its degraded avatar, a genre such as the novel which, through irony, tries to come to terms with the world’s fragility. In these terms Eklavya, the film, can no longer rewrite the epic tale of Ekalavya since dharma now is contingent, the epic absolutes are gone. Still what Ekalavya the film cannot do is declare Ekalavya himself a Dalit (in line with this new alternative, subaltern historiography) and thereby allegorically suggest that the Indian nation state (for the principality is a microcosm of the nation here) itself has a Dalit/Aboriginal origin.
The religious film is dead; long live the religious film. In a deeply religious culture, religious narratives are replicated as well as invoked; they have a dynamic narrative (that is plot) as well as structural (that is systemic or absolutist) function. From Achhut Kanya (dir. Himansu Rai, 1936) to Om Shanti Om (dir. Farah Khan, 2007) and Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (dir. Aditya Chopra, 2008), “salvation” or indeed the “good life” lies in humility, in detachment, in equanimity, indeed, in the qualities of the renouncer. Where once the renouncer-ideal worked with twice told texts (which were orally transmitted from mother to child) and established the foundational genre of Indian cinema, it now functions as thematic, driving the machines of Bollywood. In spite of the lure of a capitalist modernity, the eternal verities of the religious film – verities of dharma, the law, and karma, correct action – continue, even if ambiguously and impossibly as in Eklavya, to define Indian cinema. In this respect the legacy of the religious film is deep and enduring: what is not in Bollywood cinema is to be found nowhere else.
The Allure of the Muslim Courtesan and Urdu, Bollywood’s Language of Love
We have noted in passing Urdu plays performed in Parsi theatre, none perhaps more influential than Laila Majnun, a play derived from the Persian Sufi poet Nizami’s poetic rewriting of an Arab tragic romance. The Arabic tale seems to have originated in the late-seventh century and was reputedly based on a Romeo and Juliet-style tragic love of one Qays ibn al Mulawwaht for his beloved Layla. In Nizami’s version, the story gets overlaid with strong mystical symbology and the relationship of the lovers is also rendered as an allegory of human love for the divine. Parsi theatre used the story in its more secular “Shakespearian” form and Bollywood too emphasized its secularity. The story, though, has deeper significance in that its narrative was often presented as the quintessentially Muslim story around which the tale of the tragic Muslim courtesan unfolded. This figure of the “Muslim courtesan” remains pivotal to the Bollywood conception of the heroine but also suggestively points to the at-once central and marginalized Muslim in Bollywood. Without the power of Urdu and Muslim culture, the distinctiveness of Bollywood cannot be fully grasped. Yet this power, pervasive and aesthetically dominant as it is, is nevertheless captured in a figure of cultural exclusion and erasure. A quick look at four films – Anarkali, Mughal-e-Azam, Pakeezah, and Umrao Jaan – should make this ambivalence clear.
Where and how the Anarkali legend began, no one is too sure. We know that a silent film about her was made in 1928 by Imperial Film Company (directed by R.S. Choudhry) and it stands to reason that a play of sorts predated the film. We know that the Urdu dramatist Afga Hashar Kashmiri wrote a play on the subject early in the twentieth century and the fact that the names of the characters and the story line have remained unchanged tends to suggest that the origin of the legend may well have been literary. It seems clear that the original writer felt that the great Arab-Persian love story should be given an Indian context and what better way to do it than by locating it in the court of the great Mughal Emperor Akbar. The story line is then about Akbar’s son, the Mughal Prince Salim (later Emperor Jehangir), falling in love with the court dancer Nadira, named Anarkali by none other than Akbar himself. This leads to political and dynastic tensions, open warfare between father and son, the sentence of death on both Salim and Anarkali, a final reprieve to the son but Anarkali’s death by being entombed alive not revoked. The 1928 silent version as well as Imperial Company’s talkie version (with the same director and lead actors) of 1935 adheres to this story line. The same fidelity to the narrative is shown in the 1953 film version (Anarkali, dir. Nandlal Jaswantlal) perhaps the best rendition of the story. It is interesting that in this version it is Emperor Akbar himself who enters into extensive dialogues with Anarkali on the question of love and the law, agreeing with her that perhaps love is higher than the law. The proof of the latter lay in the love of Anarkali herself (about which for a while he remains ignorant). Much of the performance is staged, but Marshall Braganza’s cinematography is so good that the film captures the fragility of Anarkali remarkably well. Then there is also the haunting use of song, especially the song yah zindagī usī kī hai jo kisī kā ho gayā pyār hi me kho gayā (“life is for those who love, who get lost in it”) with which the film more or less begins and ends, and a song, in both its original version and later avatar, as pyār kiyā to darnā kyā, celebrated by both M.G. Vassanji (in The Book of Secrets, 1994) and Salman Rushdie (in Shalimar the Clown, 2005).
The establishing shots of Anarkali (1953) juxtapose a tomb and a song, one signifying death, the other transcendence over it. As a film of the Muslim courtesan, Anarkali lays claim to the soul of Bollywood cinema as a “Muslim” soul of love and longing, of poetry and self-denial. It also lays claims to a central tension between law, justice, cultural norms, and love. In this battle, love triumphs even if tragically. The Muslim theme and the film’s historical location also lays claim to a syncretic Indo-Muslim heritage and argues that the Muslim is crucial to Indian cultural identity, especially for those people who speak Hindi/Urdu, the language of Bollywood. In a much grander version of the Anarkali theme, K Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960), the centrality of the Muslim is given a retrospective legitimacy through the recasting of Akbar, the great Indian emperor, in the codes of ancient Hindu dharma, so that justice is not simply a matter of jurisprudence, a philosophy of what is just and right, but relies on codes that predate the arrival of Muslims and into which the Muslim establishment also reinserts itself. So in this epic remake K. Asif distorts the myth by letting Anarkali escape death because Emperor Akbar had given his word to Anarkali’s mother, who had brought good tidings to the King on the birth of his son, that if and when she asked for a favor of the king, her wish would be granted.12 What neither of the films erase is the centrality of the mujra, the dance of the courtesan in Bollywood whose definite form is the pyār kiyā to darnā kyā (“why be afraid when in love”) dance of Anarkali in Mughal-e-Azam. At the same time, the endorsement isolates the form, confines it within a specific genre so that in effect there is no type of recognizable Muslim film other than a version of Anarkali.
“Anarkali,” sign as well as theme, is the antecedent of two key courtesan filmic dramas: Pakeezah (“The Pure One,” dir. Kamal Amrohi 1971) and Umrao Jaan (1981). The first of these takes the figure of the tavayaf/courtesan but presents it not so much as a sign of absolute exclusion (which in reality it is: a figure of illicit desire, but a threat to normative family values) as a symbol (precisely because of its otherness) through whom values of high aestheticism and love may be expressed. The courtesan thus becomes, in Bollywood’s version of Muslim culture, emblematic of an elusive but aesthetically pure and culturally pivotal formation without which the culture itself is emaciated and forlorn. At the same time, though, the culture cannot endorse or celebrate the courtesan in social practice: no courtesan can become a mother or a wife; she can only be the desirable Other through whom love, often absent in arranged marriages, can be given felt expression. Indeed, the courtesan affirms a fact of Indo-Muslim culture generally (where cousin marriages are the norm): only in the courtesan outsider (who by definition cannot be part of a family) is desire fulfilled. So in the case of Pakeezah the excluded courtesan (whom the respectable man marries but cannot bring into his family) must live her life twice over, once as herself, and again as her daughter before she is incorporated back into respectability by the nephew of precisely the man who had rejected his courtesan wife (it is the nephew who marries Nargis, the courtesan’s, daughter Sahibjaan).
In Pakeezah the courtesan enters the text fully formed; she is what she is and it is Shahabuddin’s fate to fall in love with her. It is a love signified by both mother (and later by her daughter) through the symbology of a caged wingless bird (pinjre kī cidiyā) and the torn kite (kī patang) hanging from the branch of a tree – both established metaphors of loss in Indian art. In Umrao Jaan the courtesan is part of patriarchal violence towards women, as the young girl Amiran is forcibly taken from her village by men seeking revenge of wrongs done to them by her father. They take her to the city of Lucknow to be sold. Poet Muzaffar Ali, the director of this film, however, uses the tragic history of rape, abduction, and sexual slavery to extend the link between the aesthetic and the courtesan. It may be that Muslim poetic forms derive much of their strength from the figure of the courtesan whose khotā (brothel) provides a space where dance and song, desire and passion, sex and poetry can fuse into one, uninhibited by either religion or family. The khotā is a space of romantic transformation, where reality is changed into fantasy. In Umrao Jaan the poetic impulse itself is connected to the courtesan. It is she who writes poetry and who seduces as much through song as through body. The film then becomes a vehicle for the transmission of high Urdu dialogue and verse as the courtesan masters both music and literature, mastering the rules of both khayāl and alfāz, both poetic suggestiveness and sound combinations, as in the establishing song of the courtesan: dil cīz kyā hai āp merī jān lijiye. Yet in spite of lovers’ trysts that fill the film with exquisite moments of romantic love, the exclusion of the courtesan from society is not negotiable. When she finally returns home, she is rejected as the bazārū aurat (the available woman of bazaars). The final shot of the film is of Umrao Jaan looking at herself in a mirror: the courtesan is only an image, a reflection, a sign into which is poured romantic meaning but of itself is only a mirage, unreal, and like poetry in the end untranslatable.
Muslim courtesan films demonstrate both the centrality of Muslim culture in Bollywood and at the same time their exclusiveness. For that culture can only exist as a source for poetry and dance, for expressions of that elusive desire that cinema, as the art of the imaginary, always endorses. Without that cultural input Bollywood cannot be what it is; and yet the texts through which that culture is signified also exhausts that very culture, confining it in expressive terms, to just one form. When the form is reinterpreted through what Rajadhyaksha had called a “techno-realism,” where the sites of the culture are “simulacrally” displaced,13 as happens in the highly finessed 2006 remake of Umrao Jaan, then the legacy of the genre itself is strained, its centrality misplaced. Where Muzaffar Ali’s Umrao Jaan made a statement about the necessity as well as the tragedy of the courtesan in Muslim high culture, the 2006 version (dir. J.P. Dutta) transforms her into a pious, uncontaminated figure of sentimental remorse, replacing in effect the character by the star Aishwarya Rai. We need to keep in mind the 1981 version so as to remember that to understand Bollywood the Muslim as expressed in the canonical genre is pivotal: it is the Muslim and her language and culture that has mediated what has come to be known as Bollywood.
The Hegemony of Melodrama
If Parsi theatre provided Bollywood with a narrative structure, a mode of representation, songs, dialogues, and a repertoire of cast, Hindu culture gave it a vast archive of myths about gods and man as well as key moral absolutes, Muslim culture provided poetry, a courtly language, and the figure of the dancer-courtesan, it was English/colonial melodrama, suitably indigenized with rasas (notably of love-longing and the tragic), which gave Bollywood its distinctive content. We can follow this through the singular achievement of Devdas (1935) and its later remakes. The person who was instrumental in creating the figure of the melodramatic hero was Pramathesh Chandra Barua (1903–1951), often referred to as Prince P.C. Barua, the son of a ruler of a tiny native state in Bengal-Assam.14 However, given that his father was, in fact, nothing more than a large landowner, the title of prince was not a little misplaced. His life, though, was anything but simple, expressing a mixture of oedipal longings (he had his first solid food at the age of nine – one imagines he survived on nothing but milk up to this time!) and guilt. Aged 14 he married a girl of 11 (Madhurilata), had many unhappy affairs, married four times in all (the last remained secret to the end) and was struck by tuberculosis (seen then as very much the disease that affected artists, rich in a kind of Bloomsbury cultural excess). All these items added to his melodramatic persona and mystique. His visit to England in 1926 after his mother’s death a year earlier was clearly a defining moment in sharpening his sense of exile, and released his nascent nationalism. A key motif in his films therefore became the idea of the journey, and here Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s (Chatterjee’s) 1917 novel Devdas,15 the film’s source, was the perfect text as it provided Barua with key components of a distinctly Bollywood melodrama: the renouncer who cannot win his beloved; his tragic life; his escape from the world indicated through mis-en-scenes of drunkenness, the lonely train ride or the walk towards the horizon. Devdas and its remakes (Bimal Roy, 1955; Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2003) established the melodramatic frames of reference within which Bollywood operates. Its tenacious grip on the form may be seen in Bhansali’s Saawariya (2007).
Saawariya is based on Dostoevsky’s sentimental romance “White Nights,”16 a short story written in 1848, in which the hero, like Dostoevsky’s criminal, takes upon himself the act of mourning, loss and melancholy which, in his absence, would have been borne by others. It follows, as Bakhtin suggests in another work, “that we might substitute for our own life an obsessive reading of novels, or dreams based on novelistic models (the hero of [Dostoevsky’s] White Nights).”17 The short story was made into a film by Luchino Visconti in 1957 (Le Notti Bianche) with Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell.18 It is a film which provides Bhansali with a visual as well as an interpretative model with which both the narrative of the Dostoevsky original and the received Bollywood tradition of the sentimental romance are mediated.
Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” tells the tale of a man aged 26 who falls in love with a woman over four nights and then loses her. It ends with the melodramatic hero’s declaration of what can only be read as perverse gratitude:
May your sky be always clear, may your dear smile be always bright and happy, and may you be forever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart!
Good Lord, only a moment of bliss? Isn’t such a moment sufficient for the whole of a man’s life?19
The Bollywood spectator’s memory takes him (the masculine gender is consciously used because of the paragraph’s autobiographical subtext – visual pleasure here is masculine) back to what he may call the “Bollywood sentimental syntagm.” He recalls his first moments of watching the Raj Kapoor films: Aag (“Fire,” 1948), Barsaat (“Monsoon,” 1949), Awara (“The Vagabond,” 1951), Aah (“Sighs from the Heart,” 1953), Jagte Raho (“Stay Awake!” 1956), even Sangam (“The Confluence,” 1964). He thinks of Devdas (1935) and its remakes (1955, 2003); he thinks through what circulates in popular terminology as the bicārā complex (the hero who makes a virtue of self-pity20); he thinks of Dilip Kumar in Andaz (“Style,” 1949) and Deedar (“Sight,” 1951), Dev Anand in Bambai Ka Babu (“A Gentleman of Bombay,” 1960), Guru Dutt in Pyaasa (“The Thirsty One,” 1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (“Paper Flowers,” 1959), Rajendra Kumar in Dil Ek Mandir (“The Heart is a Temple,” 1963) and Sangam, Rajesh Khanna in Anand (1970), and even Shah Rukh Khan in Kal Ho Na Ho (“Even if Tomorrow Never Comes,” 2003). Like the unnamed hero of Dostoevsky, he sings songs from these films – zindā hūm is tarah ke game zindagī nahīm (“I live without living” (Aag) ), chor gaye bālam (“My beloved has left me” ’ (Barsaat) ), ham tujh se muhabbat kar ke sanam (“Having fallen in love with you” (Awara) ), huem ham jin ke liye barbād (“For whom I’ve sacrificed everything” (Deedar) ), yād nā jāye bīte dinom kī(“It is hard to forget those once forgotten days” ( Dil Ek Mandir) ), dost dost nā rahā (“My friend you are no longer a friend” (Sangam) ) – till his voice goes hoarse. He knows that this is what Bollywood romance is, and even when the ending is happy, which is true of most films, the path towards that moment of happiness is marked by a discourse of sentimentality, even if presented as tableaux. The auteur who looms large in this version of romance is Raj Kapoor (1924–1988). That filmic dominant, that history of romance and sentimentality, especially in the achievement of Raj Kapoor, find their most consummate and artistically most accomplished form in Bhansali’s magnificent Saawariya (2007), a film which shows the artistic possibilities of the genre. Bhansali is no Dostoevsky (who can be?) but from him he learns how to construct an artistic monad out of the predictable genre of the sentimental romance. The form that he adopts though depends heavily on Visconti too as he creates a filmscape which is not grounded in any recognizable [Indian] geographical space. This space, like Visconti’s, is “artificial and meant to be seen a such,” evocative of the “réalisme poétique of Carné.”21 There is then a master text which carries the genius of Dostoevsky; but there is also Visconti’s operatic melodramatic interpretation which is then fed into the major tradition of Bollywood itself as made exemplary in the early films of Raj Kapoor. The weight of the lineage is heavy and complex; it is to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s credit that he pulls it off.
Saawariya, released by Columbia Pictures (the first Bollywood film to be financed by Columbia Tristar Pictures), is memorially constructed but unlike “White Nights” not from the point of view of the unnamed hero. The narrator is in fact the courtesan Gulabji (Rani Mukherjee) whose first words make it clear that her tale is located in a city of dreams (khvābom ki ek śahar). The establishing shots reveal this city of dreams through a bluish-violet color palette, a digitally constructed city of canal, bridge, street and quadrangle. The bar in which this courtesan works has neon lights with the sign “RK.” The homage to the great Bollywood auteur and actor Raj Kapoor is clear as is the presence of Le Notti Bianche where Visconti introduces the figure of the prostitute as a “permanent feature of the landscape”22 and as a contrastive point of reference (although not as narrator) to the deeply confused and apparently hysterical Natalia (Natasha). Raj Kapoor, whose films changed the idea of the sentimental romance forever and whose title song (āvārā hūm) in the film Awara had a similar effect on film music, stands as the crucial reference point throughout the film. Like Visconti’s studio set with its “Esso,” “Farmacia,” “Assic,” “Sport Bar” signs, Bhansali’s streets are lit up with neon signs with no other significance beyond an affirmation of the réalisme poétique: “Lilianjis,” “Windermere,” “Capitol,” “Ace,” “Old Town,” “Clifton Hotel,” “Sheskhomar,” “Symphony,” “Rockstar.” There are pictures of the Mughal Queen Mumtaz in whose memory the Emperor Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal; there is the muezzin’s cry, “Allahu Akbar,” and statues of gods replicating the trinity of gods captured in the dream sequence in the film Awara in which Nargis, Raj Kapoor’s favorite actress, sings ghar āyā merā pardesī (“My long lost lover has come home”). The mise-en-scenes here are under strict directorial control so as to ensure that background and theme remain interwoven throughout.
Although there is a play with “double time,” the film’s internal time remains confined to a few days. It is in the RK Bar that Gulabji first meets the sentimental hero (Ranbir Kapoor) whose name (as he later tells his landlady Lilianji (Zohra Sehgal) ) is Ranbir Raj, which, as any Bollywood spectator knows, are Raj Kapoor’s first names.23 He is also the wanderer of Visconti’s Le Notti Bianche, and not the city-based hero of Dostoevsky. The homage therefore gets underway in the opening scenes: the name of the bar and the name of the person both are brought together. Like many of Raj Kapoor’s own heroes, Ranbir Raj is a singer and a musician. Through Gulabji he gets a job in the bar where, as a trial run, he sings the first verse of the film’s title song and then again, a little later, sings another song to the courtesans of this fantasy town. At Lilianji’s he finds board after his characteristically excessive sentimental discourse persuades her that through him she could regain the spirit of her dead son Vincent and smile again. However, our hero is alone, and as Gulabji says, “he was ours but he had no one.”
After the neon sign (“RK”), and the name (“Ranbir Raj”), comes the third crucial reference to the intertext: that evening, for so it seems, our hero sees a woman (Sonam Kapoor) with an umbrella. Behind the image stands another umbrella and a haunting song from Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420 (1955). In the latter scene Raj (Raj Kapoor) and Vidya (Nargis) share a cup of tea in the rain; they walk together alternately using an umbrella, and then, as common sense dawns on them, they share it. A musical note harkens towards Raj Kapoor’s signature rāg bhairavī and the voices of Manna Dey (for once not Mukesh, Raj Kapoor’s preferred background singer) and Lata Mangeshkar define the song pyār huā ikrār huā hai, pyār se phir kyūm dartā hai dil (“Love has blossomed, a confession made, then why is the heart so afraid of love?”). The rain continues to pour throughout the song sequence, a sequence which, alongside, Raj Kapoor’s own āvārā hūm (“I am a vagabond”) song (in Awara) and the hall of mirrors song pyār kiyā to darnā kyā (“Why be afraid when in love?”) in Mughal-e-Azam (“The Great Mughal,” 1960), has continued to define the Bollywood song and dance sequence.24 We must pause to take in the first encounter between Raj and the woman. We may assume it is Dostoevsky’s first white night. The woman with the umbrella is being hounded by hooligans; Raj offers to help but she says no. Her look, her momentary gaze, captivates Raj who breaks out into a song, māśā allāh (“My God, how extraordinary!”). During the song sequence (the third song in the film) we see the painting of the Mughal Queen, we see the girl running umbrella in hand, we see them both on a boat in the canal and we also see them against the backdrop of gods. As the song ends, he asks her if he could take her home. She hesitates, again says no, and umbrella up, she walks on the bridge. The hooligans reappear, but so does our hero, and with each holding the folded umbrella at one end he takes her home. They jump over potholes. It continues to rain and they both come together under the one umbrella in a direct homage to the scene from Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420. He writes down her name – Sakina, which means “tranquillity.”25 At Lilianji’s, draped only in a towel, he sings his fourth song: “since our gaze met”.
It is the second white night. Raj meets the girl again. He holds her hand and takes her to the top of a building from where they both see the simulacral city. A conversation ensues with snippets of dialogue from the scene in Awara between Rita (Nargis) and Raj (Raj Kapoor) before that memorable song: dam bhar jo udhar muh phere (“If only the moon could turn its face away for a moment”). The words of the dialogue in Saawariya (lafangā, āvārā bhī hūm, aur janglī bhī, aur buddhū bhī, “ I am a braggart, a vagabond too,” “And yes you are uncivilized, and stupid as well”) replicate parts of the earlier dialogue, both in continued homage to the definitive auteur of romance and to the genre. He declares his love but she says she is waiting for someone else, a man called Imaan, whom she loves a lot. She tells her story in which a green color palette is also introduced. She lives with her blind grandmother (Begum Para) and their servant Jhumri. The blind grandmother ties the ends of her dress to her petticoat so that she is always there to talk and read to her. She ties Jhumri’s skirt to her grandmother’s and gets away at night. Financially stretched, the grandmother needs to keep a tenant and one rainy night a lodger arrives. He knocks, Sakina opens the door and sees a man in the rain who greets her with māśā allāh (“My God, how extraordinary!”). The lodger tells her grandmother that he drinks milk, not tea, in a direct echo of Raj’s own first words to the barman at the RK Bar, “A glass of milk please?” She falls in love with the lodger and one night enters his room. Later the lodger takes the family to see a rerun of the classic Mughal-e-Azam, a film which like Visconti’s grandmother character (who recalls snatches of the arias of Rossini’s Barber of Seville), Sakina’s grandmother too can memorially recall. Then, abruptly, he leaves promising to return. He gives her a coin as a token of remembrance. Her tale at an end, “The coin is fake; your tale untrue,” says Raj. As Sakina and Raj stand together in the rain a drunken stranger comes along singing barsāt mem ham se mile tum sanam (“In monsoonal rain we meet my beloved”) from Raj Kapoor’s second film Barsaat. Raj feels as if she is falling in love with him and sings his fifth song, thorī badmāś ho tum, thorī nādān ho tum (“A little wicked are you, and a little innocent too”). The song complete he tells her that Imaan is not going to come. She then gives him a letter to deliver to Imaan and leaves him. Left alone on the bridge, letter in hand, Raj pauses to reflect. Then, abruptly, he burns the letter and drops it in the water. Later, in a scene dominated by the courtesans (which ends in a song, the sixth in the film, sung by them) Gulabji tells Raj to ask for Sakina’s forgiveness for burning the letter.
The third white night – a boat, an umbrella, and a woman. Raj surveys the scene. Sakina walks on the bridge with her umbrella. The umbrella flies out, she calls, “Raj.” Another scene intervenes: Raj dances and sings with the dervishes as Muslims await the new moon, marking the end of fasting. This, the seventh song, ends and by the bridge Sakina asks if Raj had received the reply to her letter. Instead of answering her, Raj again declares his love, saying he wants to marry her. These protestations Sakina treats as a joke.
The scene shifts to the RK Bar at which Sakina finally comes with him. This may be the fourth white night or the seamless merging of two nights into one. She stands up to leave and he sings the film’s theme song, “sāvariyā,” replicating Visconti’s dramatic staging of a rock ‘n’ roll number in the café to which Mario brings a tense and hysterical Natalia. He thinks Sakina is his and he phones Lilianji (whom he calls Lillipop). However, as he phones, Sakina rushes out. “Forget him [Imaan],” cries Raj and adds, “I love you.” She does not reply. Bereft of love, he seeks out Gulabji declaring to her that at least he can love her physically. At this Gulabji calls her pimps and he is beaten. Hurt, he makes his way to the bridge. There he tells Sakina that he had burnt the letter. She concedes that Imaan may not come and smiles when he asks if there is some room in her heart for him. Under the conspicuous RK neon sign they dance with the umbrella and reenact a classic Raj Kapoor-Nargis pose in the film Barsaat which, after that film, became the iconic emblem of the RK (Raj Kapoor) film. Snow begins to fall (“It’s snowing, it’s snowing,” Mario and Natalia delightfully scream in Visconti’s Le Notti Bianche); the color palette brings a dash of red to Sakina’s clothes. The ninth song, jāne jā, is sung. The song ends, and they walk towards Lilianji’s house. A bell tolls, she looks back and sees a man on the bridge. “He has come, I have to go,” exclaims Sakina, “please forgive me, you understand?” He shakes his head. “A moment’s love is enough,” he says.26 He holds the umbrella and gives the coin back to her. On the bridge Imaan gives a subtle hint about his life – quite possibly that of a Muslim terrorist – when he asks her, “Do you accept a painful life with me?” She nods and they walk away. A blue-grey color palette dominates as Raj watches and waves his bowler hat. He walks down an alleyway where the potholes are. He jumps over them, and picks up the anklet Sakina had dropped in one of them during their first meeting there. The umbrella opens up again.27
The Persistence of Song and Dance
Aishwarya Rai and Saif Ali Khan’s Bollywood kitsch alluded to in the opening paragraph of this essay said something which is internal to the structure of Bollywood as a genre. For here, as in our exemplary melodramatic film Saawariya, song and dance constitute the indispensable ingredient of the film, and this structural universal of Bollywood is not to be confused with Hollywood-inspired musicals. Bollywood films are not musicals in the Western sense of the word. Bollywood is a multilayered, capacious genre which has grown out of prior similarly coded literary texts. The third-fourth century playwright Kalidasa’s great dramatic fable Śakuntalā (primarily in Sanskrit) opens with its stage director (the sūtradhāra) uneasy about how the gathered audience would respond to the play that day. He needs to distract them for a while and make them feel at ease. The lead actress asks, “what can we do to help?” to which the stage director replies:
kim anyat asyāh parisadah śruti pramodahetor imam nāticirapravrttam upabhoga ksamam grīsmaklam adhikrtya gīyatām tāvat28
What else, but sing about this recently arrived season of summer, the season of enjoyment. Yes, bring joy to the audience with a song.
The director goes on to suggest possible ways in which the song may be sung, and in particular ways which would bring metaphor and feeling together. Taking up the challenge (given in the latter part of the director’s speech in poetic metre) the lead actress sings, not in Sanskrit but in Prakrit, that is, in the vernacular:
Sensitive women adorn their bodies
With mimosa flowers
Delicate filaments of which
Are kissed fleetingly by bees.
The director is ecstatic – “susthu gītam,” “beautifully sung,” he declares – and is so carried away that he forgets the name of the play which is to be staged.
Although I have referred to a text which predates Bollywood cinema by close to two millennia, the snatches of dialogue from Śakuntalā recalled above have a direct bearing on the role of song and dance in Bollywood cinema. It is clear that Kalidasa’s song has a function in drama-as-performance and that its language, Prakrit, decouples the play from its patrician patrons who, one suspects, are the spectators referred to by the director and who speak Sanskrit. Love (both in separation and in union), seasons, desire within a predominantly pastoral/romantic discourse, are also the themes of the Bollywood song. Beyond its thematic specificity the Bollywood song in its poetic variety is grounded in Indian ragas, musical forms, or are variations on the dominant notes in any given rāga. Thus, while the song āvārā hūm is intrinsic to the film Awara it is also rendered in raga bhairavī, Raj Kapoor’s signature rāga which marks key songs in all his major films. So zindā hūm is tarah ke game zindagī nahīm (Barsaat, 1949), āvārā hūm (Awara), rājā ki āyegī bārāt (Aah, 1953), merā jūtā hai jāpānī (Shree 420), merā nām rāju, (Jis Desh Mem Ganga Behti Hai, 1960) and dost dost nā rahā (Sangam, 1964) are all rāga bhairavīs, most of which are written by Shailendra, the perfect sentimental Bollywood lyricist. Rāgas constitute a parallel narrative (a narrative which may be constructed through moods rather than through actual narrative events) in all great Bollywood films including films such as Baiju Bawra (1952), Mother India and Mughal-e-Azam. More recently the use of rāga bhairavī by A.R. Rahman whenever he wants to return to an indigenous form (in songs such as rādhā kaise na jale in Lagaan, 2001 or jiyā jale jām jale naino tale in Dil Se, 1998) are important indices of the persistence of classical musical forms. So, the “dolā re dolā” song in Bhansali’s Devdas is in fact a variation of rāga hindola (hence the play on the word dolā).
In their introduction to their book on Hindi song and dance in Bollywood, Gopal and Moorti note, “To talk of Bollywood is inevitably to talk of the song and dance sequence” which, they continue, is “the single most enduring feature of popular Hindi cinema.”29 This feature of Hindi cinema now occupies different contexts and has created hybrid musical forms such as the Trinidadian “chutney,” the Greek “indoprepi,” the Javanese “dangdut,” (“a hybrid pop music extremely popular among the lower classes”30), the Nigerian “bandiri,” among many other hybrid forms yet to find a distinct name. Yet, and very appropriately, Gopal and Moorti make it clear that the presence of song and dance as a structural universal (a deep structure) in Bollywood does not mean that Bollywood films are variations on the Western musical. Indeed the point of the volume is to demonstrate that Bollywood is a distinct genre which has its sub-generic forms such as the social, the mythological, the stunt, the romance and so on. Further, the circulation of song and dance and the capacity of spectators (and not necessarily just Indian spectators) to memorially reconstruct films through songs is a special feature of Bollywood. Song and dance in fact function as parallel texts of cinema for purposes of recall. Some of the classic films – Awara, Mother India, Pyaasa, Kaagaz ke Phool for instance – are in fact remembered through their songs. A song writer such as Shailendra becomes crucial for the success of Raj Kapoor’s films, his lyrics becoming part of Bollywood romance.
Beyond the idea of a parallel text, the circulation of film songs through technological advances in the medium of transmission (from radio to iPod and the Internet), their varied reception in significant “circuits of globalization: metropolitan, diasporic and subaltern,”31 and, within India, their role as a form that dilutes “ethnocentrism,” are other important features of this cinema.
The commercial success of film songs by and large depended on the success of the parent film although it must be conceded as well that films without great songs were, as a general rule, never successful. Hence among the great auteurs – Mehboob Khan, Raj Kapoor and Guru Dutt – songs were part of the success of their films, be they Andaz (1949) and Mother India (1957) (Mehboob Khan), Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955) (Raj Kapoor) or Mr and Mrs 55 (1955) and Pyaasa (1957) (Guru Dutt). Since India does not have a separate equally vibrant independent popular song industry, film songs have traditionally occupied that role and became a form which changed styles in line with western popular taste in songs. This being so, for a while Radio Ceylon’s Binaca Geetmala program which played Hindi film songs when the latter were banned from the All India National Radio Program was the rage in the 1950s. (Dr Balkrishna Vishwanath Keskar, Minister of Information and Broadcasting in the first Nehru Government, called filmgit or film song fit for no one but “raw and immature people like children and adolescents”32). These were precassette and CD days; in recent years the picture is very different and the circulation and reception of film songs are not linked to radio or indeed television. They have a different value as a commodity which can be packaged, easily disseminated, copied, and endlessly replayed. Technology creates new forms of social relations outside of the dominant ideologies of the nation state.
The success did not come early as film song struggled against tremendous odds to establish its legitimacy as a key cultural artefact. In spite of colonial denigration and postcolonial cringe, the form nevertheless grew in strength and was embraced by some of India’s finest Urdu-Hindi poets (Sahir Ludhianvi, Shailendra), musicians (Timir Boran, O.P. Nayyar, A.R. Rahman) and singers (K.L. Saigal, Mohammad Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Kishore Kumar, Mukesh).
“At what point do the musical insertions stop being complimentary spectacles and assume a life of their own, and begin to destroy a basic integrity of storytelling,” is the question asked by Anustup Basu.33 Would it not follow that such an assertion privileges realistic narrative over the pageant, the carnival and the like? Basu reads film song as a free market commodity, free-floating, eccentric, and eminently consumable. He calls it the logic of “geotelevisual” production which “dis-locates” performance and places it in a transnational idiom. This disjunctive, nonnarratological relation of event to dominant text often without any anchoring (the song and dance can be located in variable global centers) thus points to an alternative worlding, one which is not located in an identifiable archival memory but works through modern technology towards an alternative, global aesthetic which in turn functions as both texts within discrete filmic narratives and as autonomous moments with their own logic.
In the Indian diaspora, film song and dance sequence function as a form of cultural memory, bringing India’s heterogeneous communities together. Song and dance function as transferable cultural capital which the diaspora can then declare as its own. Filmgit or film songs make their way into American hip-hop and other popular genres. There is, however, another side to this consumption which E.K. Chan has referred to as the “dirty pleasures” of the film song and of Bollywood generally.34 Thinking through the reception of the film song not by the diaspora but by NBCs (“nontraditional Bollywood consumers”), Chan argues that the songs “promote a kitchy ‘otherworldliness.’ ” They are outlandish, excessive, and an example of “exotic kitschification” (recall Shah Rukh Khan’s rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” in Kal Ho Naa Ho, 2003), because in the absence of an “abstract” (in effect essential or metaphysical) negotiation of the film song, an NBC’s consumption of it will always be “dirty.” The liberal imagination wants us to enter into the song’s “abstraction”; the reality is that Bollywood songs as consumed by the NBCs are marked by an excess – a lurid, extravagant delight in its form, indeed a different mode of consumption which is akin to Chan’s appropriation of Vivan Sobchack’s cinesthetic film theory in which he spoke about “bodies not merely objectively beheld but subjectively lived.”35 An NBC’s subjective living of the filmsong body creates an excess, a stain in the diaspora’s own response to it.36
Conclusion: Gumrah (1963)
The first frame of Gumrah, B.R. Chopra, the producer’s logo, carries a voice over which repeats the great Hindu religious text’s one-verse manifesto (Bhagavadgītā 2.47): karmanyevādhikāraste mā phalesu kadācana (“Your entitlement or duty is to the act itself, never to its fruits”). The directive is clear – your life is meaningful in terms of the purity of action, not its consequences – and the film, although modern and secular in its theme, must be read as an allegory of the failure to uphold this directive. Should the sonority of the Sanskrit verse (which is not translated either through subsequent voice-over or subtitle) be missed by the spectator, the film’s next frames are scenes from the Rāmāyana which deal in quick succession and in the style of Mughal miniatures, with Sītā’s request to Rāma for the skin of the golden deer, Rāma’s seeming death-cry for help, and Laksman’s departure from their hut upon Sītā’s insistence that he does so to help Rāma. Before he leaves he draws a line in front of the hermitage with an arrow and tells Sītā not to cross it under any circumstance. The line is known as laksman rekhā (“Laksman’s line”) which, as we know, Sītā does cross when Raāvana arrives in the guise of an itinerant sādhu to abduct her. The scenes at an end, the voice-over now declares the moral: aurat kā suhāg isī ke andar hai (“A woman’s state of wifehood, her married bliss, is contained within this line”). The film, as the voice-over makes even clearer, will allegorize the moral: isī tarah kī lakīr kī kahānī yah hai (“This is a tale of a similar laksman rekhā”). For a woman there is always a laksman rekhā which she must never cross. Invoked through a graphic citation from a religious text, the obvious patriarchal underpinning of the laksman rekhā (the act of female containment) is seemingly erased as what emerges is a larger principle of dharma rather than patriarchal control mechanism. The film Gumrah, which confronts head-on both premarital sex and postmarital affair, and is in this respect quite radical, must address these transgressions in the context of the eternal dharma which, momentarily, even divine Sītā transgresses. In the end, in spite of Sītā’s innocence, she pays a mighty price for her error as upon her return to Ayodhya, the vox populi is so rigidly moralistic that she has to be banished yet again. In Gumrah the husband, Ashok (Ashok Kumar), does not follow the path of Lord Rāma although Meena (Mala Sinha) continues her affair with her lover Rajendra (Sunil Dutt) even after her marriage. The scenes themselves produce one of the finest songs of forlorn love in Bollywood cinema: calo ik bār phir se ajnabī ban jāye ham dono (“once again let us, you and I, become strangers to one another”). Modernity now recodes Sītā’s transgression through a post-Enlightenment narrative of lost love and forgiveness.
I conclude this chapter with a reference to a film from Bollywood’s realist period to establish a more general principle about the nature of this cinema and our understanding of it. What the film does is bring together the various strands of Bollywood. The reference to dharma, the eternal law that governs Hindu society, takes us back to the beginnings of Indian cinema since the principle governed all the mythologicals, beginning with Phale’s Raja Harishchandra. The use of high Urdu poetry for the songs – āp āye to khayāle dile nāsād āyā (“beautiful thoughts arise when you come”) and calo ik bār phir se ajnabī ban jāye ham dono – affirms the tenacity of Muslim influences on this form, as well as shows the link between film and song in Bollywood, reinforcing the point made earlier that for a long time great Bollywood films were also the ones with immensely catchy and highly poetic songs. Finally even duty or dharma cannot exist outside of melodrama. So Meena must sacrifice her love for Rajendra and marry her brother-in-law Ashok because she finds it hard to let go of her nephew and niece upon the death of her sister Shanti. The seeds of the sacrifice are fed to her by her own father who points out the evils of a step-mother and the subsequent loss of his grandchildren should Ashok remarry someone other than a family member. In this respect, like much else in Bollywood, the mythological included, the genre of melodrama underpins the form and the form cannot be any other. Audience reception, the corner stone of rasa aesthetics, is built around intense moments of melodramatic dialogue. Gumrah too is not free from the power of genre.
However, in as much as Gumrah enters into a difficult arena of sexual politics and explores it even when its answers do not question the eternal norms of dharma, the film points to the role of Bollywood as the site where ethical issues are debated. Slavoj Žižek referred to the Eastern sublime as offering “a useless solution to a real problem” whereas the Western sublime offered a “practical solution to a problem that does not arise.”37 The ethical questions raised by Gumrah are a “real problem” in Indian culture; the solution offered is a useless solution in that it simply reinforces the sanctity of eternal dharma and not the power of desire. Although Bollywood cinema now circulates as more than just culture-specific texts consumed by people who know it as one single interconnected text, one can therefore conclude by saying, with Žižek, that in the end Bollywood too offers no practical solutions to real problems. The verities of the mythological, suggestively encased in melodrama and poetically suffused with Urdu lyrics, it seems, remain intact. Bollywood triumphs over social reality.
Notes
The names of Bollywood films and proper names generally in this essay are given in the film industry’s own romanized forms. In places this chapter draws on essays published in The Sage Book of Film Studies, 2008; Textual Practice, 2009; Postcolonial Studies, 2009; and Brill’s Encyclopaedia of Hinduism, II, 2010.
1 Eliade (1987, p. 11).
2 Otto (1977).
3 The classic study of the renouncer and the man-in-the world in Hindu culture is Louis Dumont (1960).
4 Rushdie (1988, p. 16).
5 Dwyer (2006, pp. 94–95).
6 Tulsīdās (1947).
7 Das (1981, pp. 43–56).
8 Munz (1970, pp. 188–199).
9 Sukhantar (1942, pp. 549–553); Brodbeck, (2006, pp. 1–34).
10 Kosambi (2005, pp. 248–275).
11 Georg Lukács (1971).
12 The granting of a boon, even at the expense of great personal loss, has its textual antecedent in the Rāmāyana where King Dasaratha gives his kingdom to Prince Bharata and banishes his eldest son and heir to the throne Rama because Keikeyi, mother of Prince Bharata and the king’s youngest wife, demanded that boons given her by the King must be honored.
13 Rajadhyaksha (2003, pp. 25–39).
14 Nandy (2001).
15 Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (1876–1938) was alive when P.C. Barua made both the Bengali and Hindi versions in 1935. The moment of Devdas also signals Bollywood’s debt to the realist-sentimental novel. Indeed what Barua did was bring Sarachandra Chattopadhyay’s novel, a colonial literary form, self-evidently bourgeois, and different from the texts of Parsi theatre, into cinema.
16 Dostoevsky (1968).
17 Bakhtin (1987, p. 32).
18 Visconti (1970).
19 Dostoevsky (1968, p. 201).
20 Mishra (2002, pp. 6–7).
21 Nowell-Smith (1973, p.122).
22 Nowell-Smith (1973, p.128)
23 In real life Ranbir Kapoor is the auteur Raj Kapoor’s grandson. His father Rishi Kapoor is Raj Kapoor’s second son.
24 Recall the jānam dekh lo mit gayī dūriydā m (“Beloved, see our separation has gone”) song in the film Veer Zaara (dir. Yash Chopra, 2004). This song, which constructs a fantasy around an impossible love, also foots in the rain.
25 See Dawood (1999, p. 248): “Therein shall be tranquillity from your Lord.” Dawood footnotes “tranquillity” as follows (p. 36): “This is the meaning of the Arabic word sakīnah, which, however, may well be related to [the Hebrew word] shekhīnah (the Holy Presence) in the Old Testament.”
26 The dialogue echoes Visconti: “Try to forgive me” (Natalia) … “Go to him, God bless you for the moment of happiness you’ve given me” (Mario).
27 In Visconti Mario gathers his disheveled coat, shakes it, puts it on his shoulder and walks slowly. A stray dog (seen earlier in the film) comes to him. Mario continues walking, followed by the dog.
28 Kālidāsa (2006, p. 52).
29 Gopal and Moorti (2008, p. 1).
30 Gopal and Moorti (2008, p. 179).
31 Gopal and Moorti (2008, p. 7).
32 Gopal and Moorti (2008, p. 90).
33 Gopal and Moorti (2008, p. 153).
34 Gopal and Moorti (2008, p. 279).
35 Gopal and Moorti (2008, p. 284).
36 The excess, the kitsch that Chan writes about finds a place in queer readings of film song, especially among the queer Indian (“desi”) diaspora. This is the point made by Rajinder Dudrah’s essay on gfooter and sexuality in Bollywood films (“Queer as Desis”) in the Gopal and Moorti (2008, pp. 288–307). Dudrah examines, very smartly, the ways in which the Bollywood aesthetic is appropriated by queer desis, and indeed how seemingly heteronormative representation gets reinflected towards queer aesthetics. The point is also made that in India itself, cinema halls patronized primarily by men, constitute a darkened space for homoerotic desires. The “new libidinal possibilities” of Bollywood, often implicit in the common Bollywood buddy semantics of yaar and dosti (frifootship) and parodied in Kal Ho Na Ho, relocate desire and redefine the erstwhile heterosexual reception of the form.
37 Žižek (2002, p. cvii, n. 124).
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