EVERY NOW AND THEN, A film leaves the screen. Not once during its almost five-year first run did I watch the 1975 curry western, Sholay. It didn’t seem to matter because the film was everywhere when I was growing up in India in the 1970s. We heard the songs on the radio, the dialogues were echoed in conversation, tailors speedily copied the film’s fashions for every size and wallet, and thanks to my mother’s formidable gift of narration, I felt I had seen the entire film with its larger-than-life characters shooting each other from steam locomotives and water towers.
A number of studies of this iconic film have grappled with what might be considered the Sholay effect, namely, the special status this blockbuster enjoys, often abstracted from its particulars, by “viewers” like me who might never have seen the film at the time. Returning to the primal scene as a scholar, my research affirms that Sholay’s outsize success was created in no small part by its formidable production that made it India’s first 70mm film marshaling a multi-star cast with imported talent for shooting stunts and editing fight scenes. Sholay’s meticulous production transformed a four-line story to more than three hours of action-drama repeatedly reenacted by fans far from the large screen.
For some, the technical details of production and the institutional context of cinema in the 1970s remain the best approach for studying Sholay. For others such as myself, the film is best approached by studying its narrative strategies, their cultural contexts, and their combination in a mise-en-scène that exceeds the sum of its parts. The study of Hindi cinema has grown in the last decades to the point where both approaches can prosper productively without engaging in fratricidal warfare. The Thakur and Gabbar, arch enemies in Sholay, are both alive, although they don’t live in the same village.
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Bollywood’s India analyzes the social work of popular Hindi cinema by focusing on the narratives of some of Bollywood’s most iconic blockbusters. Tropes preoccupied with crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community, have persisted in the cinema across half a century despite dramatic changes in the industry’s production and distribution practices. Attentive to the practices of the industry, I focus on analyzing the narrative content in the cinema and apply a range of interdisciplinary methods to understand Hindi blockbusters in the context of India’s public culture. In this public culture, the stories in the cinemas, their shifting emphases, and their forms of attraction play a major role in capturing audiences. Bollywood’s India focuses on these narratives of the cinema.
I analyze blockbusters produced during three tumultuous decades when the idea of modern India was made, unmade, and remade. During the 1950s, the 1970s and the 1990s, popular Hindi cinema played a major role in Indian public culture as it captured the diffuse aspirations of the nation as well as challenged them. Rather than being consonant with the interests of the state and a conduit in its production, popular Hindi film has served as a contact zone between the state and the nation. At times the blockbusters of the cinema have corroborated and at other times contested the formation of both nation and state in the construction of an ever-shifting narrative of “India.” These often contradictory narratives condense around certain aspirations that I call public fantasies. Bollywood’s India analyzes the public fantasies captured in the blockbusters of Hindi popular cinema and studies the political work they undertake as they travel the globe.
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Well before the study of popular Hindi cinema was formalized in the academy, scholars were writing about the cinema. The bibliography lists essays such as “Imran Khan, Sherlock Holmes, and Amitabh Bachchan” (Nandy 1987) that regard the appeal of Hindi cinema in India as a mania akin to that for cricket and detective fiction. In playful, sparkling prose, these essays develop a core claim: that popular cinema is popular because it “works” for its audiences and addresses their psychic lives. Written by scholars often trained in the social sciences who leaven their disciplinary methods with those borrowed from the humanities, these studies consider consumption broadly without being freighted by counting consumers; they “operationalize” narrative and its procedures using interpretive methods borrowed from psychoanalysis, history, anthropology, political theory, sociology, and literary analysis. Above all, their respect for popular film is propelled by an evident affection for it. Their work advances the study of popular Hindi cinema by inviting its diverse publics in. These studies have opened the party to all revelers for whom film is part of a vital public culture as it is in modern India.
As Hindi cinema has become an object of academic study with departments, peer-reviewed journals, scholarly book series, and conferences dedicated to it, the sparkle of its earlier analytical language and its intellectual accessibility have often been replaced by a specialist vocabulary and an occasionally strident insistence on the “proper” way to analyze the cinema. Scholars of Hindi cinema sometimes appear like Raj Kapoor after the release of Mera Naam Joker (My name is Joker, 1971). The cerebral, self-referential Joker virtually bankrupted Kapoor who had no idea that its language and treatment had isolated the film from its publics and cost him the magic that had hitherto been his at the box office. According to the biographer Bunny Reuben, Kapoor was only “faintly aware” of the changes around him, “sitting as [he was] in the ivory tower of Chembur.”1 It took an Archie comic and a plunge back into popular culture for Kapoor to leave the ivory tower and make a comeback with Bobby (1973).
Bollywood’s India celebrates an area of study that has taken off because of scholarship by “outsiders” whose interdisciplinary approaches to cinema have placed it in broader contexts and ventilated the field in language accessible to the common reader and scholar alike. The study was inspired by the immense pleasures of the cinema and written to share them. Its methods are interdisciplinary and the language is straightforward. My intention is to celebrate popular Hindi cinema and welcome others to participate in its pleasures.