THERE IS A FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPH of Jawaharlal Nehru taken in 1963 with three of Bombay cinema’s most legendary figures: the actor, producer, and director, Raj Kapoor; and the period’s two other reigning screen idols, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand (fig. 2.1). The stars were attending a fundraiser organized by the National Defence Committee in New Delhi at which Nehru was present. As was typical of the man whose movie-star good looks and personal style rivaled any leading man’s, Nehru had a special affinity for the Bombay industry, and lore is that he invited the matinee idols to his official residence at Teen Murti Bhavan where the photo was taken. Not long thereafter, on May 27, 1964, Nehru died. His legacy, though, was secure in the hands of these men. As Raj Kapoor affirmed in a reminiscence of Nehru: “Pandit-ji said that he wanted every Indian in this country to do something for the nation, to build it up into the beautiful dream that he had. He was a visionary and I tried to follow him, to do my best, whatever I could, through films” (as recorded in Kak 1987; also quoted in Nanda 1991:74).
Kapoor was not the only bearer of Nehru’s dream, though he may have been one of its most influential. Film was his medium, and he reached millions in the blockbusters he wrote, directed, acted in, and produced. However, notwithstanding the filmmaker’s personal admiration for Nehru and his family’s close ties with the prime minister, Kapoor’s work can hardly be characterized as singularly focused on “building . . . the beautiful dream [Nehru] had.” In fact, as this chapter shows, Kapoor’s cinema intersected only briefly with what might be called the Nehruvian dream. Equally quickly, it diverged from it to expose the many social fissures and political corruptions that rendered that “dream” a figment of midnight, largely unavailable in the clear light of day.
FIGURE 2.1 Left to right: Dilip Kumar, Jawaharlal Nehru, Dev Anand, and Raj Kapoor (January 1963).
Kapoor’s respect for the first Prime Minister aside, his cinema had its own mission. “I want my pictures,” he explained in a 1956 interview, “to portray faithfully the life and times in which we live.”1 Hindi cinema likewise insisted upon its independence from New Delhi, and at no point did the obstreperous industry serve as a blind propaganda machine for the center.2 Yet Kapoor’s remarks on Nehru’s charisma remind one that from an early and formative stage the Indian film industry aligned—if not allied—itself with the nation (“to invite [the spectator’s] attention to problems which have contemporary relevance” insisted Kapoor).3 Cinema’s arrival and development in India coincided with the emergence of Indian nationalism and the birth of the nation. To those who could not read or did not understand Nehru’s cinematically evocative “tryst with destiny” speech in 1947, Hindi film provided its own dreamscape of India. In a series of wildly popular blockbusters, the cinema imagined the social geography of India, tackled its problems, and addressed their solutions. As the political theorist Sunil Khilnani observes, “such films dramatized in a diffuse but evocative way a democratic outward-looking and secular nationalist sentiment.”4 While Kapoor identifies the nation as Nehru’s dream (“the dream that he had”), this chapter makes clear that Kapoor’s most popular films—and others made in Bombay generally—at different moments commented, critiqued, and even revised those dreams in significant ways. Nehru may have been the visionary that Kapoor set out to extol, but his fellow citizens also had their own visions that the cinema captured. At their broadest, the blockbusters of Bombay reveal the many nations to be conjured by “India.” They explain both the ideals of the nation as well as its anxieties. Rather than representing a unity, these blockbusters provide a plurality, clarifying but also confounding the world of which cinema remains part.
This chapter explores a very specific aspect of these larger questions of nation-building and social cohesion. It analyzes dramatic changes in attitudes toward crime and punishment in the most popular Hindi films that were made in two crucial moments in the nation’s development: those from the so-called Golden Fifties, that immediate post-Independence moment when the victories of the liberation struggle were unblemished by subsequent betrayals; and a blockbuster released during the 1975 Emergency when the myth of the nation seemed to have evaporated along with due process, civil liberties, and adherence to constitutional law.
In the representation of crime and its punishment, the new nation most visibly revealed its ideals and its idealism. Memories of the large-scale violence of Partition undoubtedly underwrote the desire for a social order that could guarantee civic tranquility. Hindi film collaborated in this project, creating villains and heroes in an apparently endless confection that seemed to provide some form of entertainment and edification for all its different audiences. In selecting and depicting a particular kind of crime, in fashioning and eventually reforming a particular kind of criminal, post-Independence Hindi blockbusters did much in articulating the fantasies of a newly created citizenry for what constituted acceptable social behavior and asserting the mechanisms that would reproduce the good and reform the criminal.
For many, it is a cinema characterized by three things: musicals, dancicals, and fightsicals.5 “We don’t make talkies,” Girish Karnad dismissed in a 2003 interview with the author. “We make singies.” Until relatively recently, most observers evaluated this cultural product accordingly, dismissing it as a saccharine cocktail of elements that characterize escape and fantasy. Taking a cue from Gramsci that all popular forms provide fantasy and illusions, this chapter probes the particular public fantasies embedded in Hindi cinema.6 Like the private fantasies of individuals, the public fantasies of a collective can be conscious (i.e., willed by the collective just as daydreams are by the individual), or unconscious (requiring interpretation to uncover), or they can be somewhere in between. Fantasies might express a desire for wish fulfillment (“to build up the nation” as Nehru expressed) or a defense against an unpleasant reality (by offering an “escape” from it). They might provide real solutions to imaginary problems, or imaginary solutions to real ones. And they might render reality palatable either by exposing it, or by covering it up.
Fantasies, in short, are a device for managing desire. They vary by what they seek (namely, their purpose: cover-up or exposure), in how they seek it (namely, their function: conscious or unconscious), and when they seek it (namely, at what specific time). Fantasies might conceal, reveal, revise, or renew desires, sometimes all at the same time. They have a logic that is consistent if not always coherent, and a mise-en-scène designed to dramatize desire and resolution. To understand fantasies requires the tools of analysis and interpretation. Properly used, these tools provide a way to unearth desires and to understand them better without reducing their complexity or coherence.
The Hindi film blockbusters that this chapter studies with their enduring popularity convey a set of conscious and unconscious public fantasies that condense on the idea of India. These public fantasies throw into broad relief the psychic geography of Indian nationalism at its apex in the 1950s and its nadir during the Emergency in the 1970s, two moments when the idea of India was under particular scrutiny. A reading of these blockbusters provides a way to analyze some of the public fantasies conveyed during notably fraught moments of national self-definition.
The chapter proceeds in three parts. The first elaborates on attitudes toward crime and punishment depicted in a triptych of Raj Kapoor’s blockbusters spanning the period of Nehru’s administration in the 1950s till his death in 1964, addressing a massively popular filmmaker’s engagement and disengagement with Nehru’s beautiful dream. The second part explores popular cinema’s depiction of crime and justice during the Emergency captured in Ramesh Sippy’s blockbuster, Sholay (1975). Finally, the conclusion analyzes the ways in which Hindi popular cinema exposes public fantasies and revises the notion of “India” across the first quarter century following Independence.
“TWO DYNASTIES THAT RULE THE NATION’S POPULAR IMAGINATION”
Raj Kapoor built a film empire in Bombay from his family’s modest origins in Peshawar. Fair-skinned, blue-eyed, dashing and cosmopolitan, with impeccable diction in Hindi and English and a perfect ear and eye for beauty, Kapoor wrote, directed, acted in, and produced films that played before enthusiastic audiences in most parts of the world. He has been called the great showman with a reputation unrivaled in Indian cinema and “the monarch of Indian cinema’s royal family.”7 To speak of the Golden Fifties is to speak first of Raj Kapoor before contemporaries such as Guru Dutt or Bimal Roy, both of whom were publicly respected but never popularly revered to the extent Kapoor continues to be today. Even Kapoor’s critics grudgingly acknowledge his Midas touch for creating entertaining and purposeful films for half a century.
Of the three most successful films at the box office from the 1950s, two were Raj Kapoor’s: Awara (The vagabond, 1951) and Shree 420 (The gentleman cheat, 1955).8 Both films played in packed movie houses and continue to circulate among audiences in India and overseas (notably the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, East and southern Africa, parts of Latin America, East and Southeast Asia). A 2002 Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, Bombay Dreams, paid homage to Kapoor’s blockbusters: Weber’s heroine too pulls the protagonist back to Bombay in a scene borrowed from the ending of Shree 420, and the play is rife with dialogue from Awara, including the signature line, “it’s not you; it’s my face.” More recently, a 2011 retrospective during the Toronto International Film Festival claimed Kapoor “the biggest superstar in Indian cinema,” and the neighboring city of Brampton named a street after him.9
As a young filmmaker, Raj Kapoor’s respect for Nehru was both intellectual and personal. His father Prithviraj was a close friend of the Prime Minister’s who saw in the renowned stage actor an ally and a cultural envoy whom he deputed for cultural missions and later nominated as a Member of Parliament to the Rajya Sabha. The connections between the families, both symbolic and real, continued for several generations and had one biographer observe that “the Nehru-Gandhis and the Kapoors are two dynasties that rule the nation’s popular imagination.”10 In a sense, both Nehru and Kapoor might be credited with publicly imagining powerful fantasies for India in the post-Independence period, fantasies that resonated with a broad public if not always with each other. In an oeuvre spanning half a century and over seventy productions that is equal parts entertainment and edification, melodrama and melancholy, Kapoor created a powerful mythography of India that was—and remains—simultaneously an elaboration of and an alternative to the prevailing myth of the nation promulgated by Nehru.
Called a “romantic nationalist” by one biographer (Madhu Jain 92), Kapoor’s work falls into three main phases in which the “nation” was always a presence however romanticized, even when it was spectral at best. In the 1940s, Aag (Fire, 1948), Kapoor’s breakthrough hit, barely addressed Partition even as trainloads of mutilated bodies were crossing an incomprehensible new border and survivors were making their way to his family’s Matunga flat. Youth and romance defined this early body of work that included Kapoor’s disquisition on love and the artist in Barsaat (Rain, 1949), his first major box office success. The 1950s brought new themes into focus: Awara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955) comprise his most direct paeans to Nehru’s “dream.” The tenth anniversary of Independence saw films like Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (Delhi is not far now, Amar Kumar, produced by Kapoor, 1957) that, along with Pyaasa (The thirsty one, Guru Dutt, 1957) and Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957), were direct invocations of Nehru (who is scripted as a character in Dilli) even as they were beginning to catalog the corrupt social and political system that even Nehru could not fix. By the time color entered Kapoor’s oeuvre with Sangam (Union, 1964), so did spectacle, and the third phase of his work replaces a national vision with social commentary alongside eye-popping visuals and button-popping bosoms.11
In key ways, the man described as “mostly apolitical”12 and “no great ideologue” was nevertheless not “allergic to ideas” as Kapoor’s collaborator, the Communist writer K. A. Abbas, noted of him.13 In Kapoor’s public mythography of India in the 1950s, two central ideas circulate: the nature of crime and efforts to reform it; and the predicament of the “little man” caught in a hostile social world. Kapoor neither owned these themes nor was he their sole exemplar. He was, however, their most popular explicator. Kapoor so defined the issue of crime and punishment in the 1950s, especially with Awara and Shree 420, that every treatment since is noted either as a departure from his vision (Sholay) or an elaboration of it (Satya [Truth, Ram Gopal Verma, 1998]). A triptych of Kapoor’s works from the 1950s captures the alternating fantasies of a society seeking social and legal justice as well as its anxieties of betrayal. In its expression of conscious desires and unconscious fears, the triptych conveys both Nehru’s “beautiful dream” and the increasing limits of the dream as the euphoria from Independence receded before the challenges of building a just society. The triptych inevitably conveys optimism and disenchantment. More crucially, it also conveys ways of managing optimism and disenchantment as fantasies so critically do.
SHREE 420
Shree 420 centrally addresses the presence of crime and the many avenues of containing it. The film takes its title from an article in the Indian Penal Code under which cheats and frauds are prosecuted. In Hindi today as in the 1950s, the number 420 is used both as a verb and a noun to designate behavior just on the other side of the law. The film opens with a penniless protagonist, Raj, who will shortly turn into a 420, walking from Allahabad to Bombay hoping to hitch a ride. Frustrated because no one will stop for him, he pretends to faint on the roadside. Within seconds, he is offered refuge in the car of a wealthy Bombay businessman and real estate developer, Sonachand Dharmanand (the name literally means “Gold and Silver, Happy Religion”), and the family wonders what caused Raj’s state.
Dharmanand thinks Raj must have collapsed on the roadside because of starvation. His daughter breathlessly mourns that Raj must be love-struck. Mrs. Dharmanand ripostes that Raj is probably a thug (uthai-gira), best left by the roadside where he belongs. These three responses to the unknown Raj reveal the range of middle-class attitudes in recently decolonized India toward the anonymous migrant, the working underclass, and the starving. Dharmanand’s conviction of Raj’s poverty is an astute one borne of exploitative capital. In recognizing Raj’s hunger, Dharmanand perceives in Raj one more laborer who will work for subsistence pay in his booming real estate business. The daughter’s fantasy of Raj as lovesick speaks of a world of postcolonial youth engulfed in romantic fantasies. Mrs. Dharmanand’s suspicions and severity mark the complacence of a class that criminalizes the migrant and the poor with scant concern. Her attitude toward Raj stands in for that part of the social order that the film implicitly seeks to reform.
In the course of the film, Raj travels to fulfill these three fantasies of his social destiny: the starving, the lovesick, and the criminal. He desperately searches for and fails to find an honest job. He falls in love with a beautiful schoolteacher, Vidya (played by Kapoor’s then-lover, Nargis), and hopes to have a home with her. He becomes a hustler in high-end card games at Bombay’s Taj Hotel, then a con artist in a complex stock fraud in a precious gold mining company (fig. 2.2), then the marketer of a fraudulent housing-scheme to the very street people who had once housed him on the sidewalk when he had nowhere to go (fig. 2.3).
However, Raj Kapoor redeems his character from his criminal pursuits at the end. In a marvelous inversion predictable from the early scene of misrecognition in the car, Raj and Sonachand Dharmanand change places. In the tense shoot-out at the end of the film in which he is first killed then reborn, Raj reveals the businessman’s villainy in devising scheme after scheme to defraud his investors and the poor alike in which Raj is himself trapped against his wishes. If Raj is a 420, he comes nowhere near Dharmanand’s order of criminality augured early in the film in the businessman’s car’s license, 840 (figs. 2.4 and 2.5).
The dénouement occurs when the police and the poor together storm Dharmanand’s mansion and take him and his corrupt cronies off in handcuff s. Raj abandons Dharmanand’s get-rich-quick seductions and delivers a moving speech to the homeless masses whom he had almost swindled out of their life’s savings. The film adumbrates the message that solidarity and honesty will prevail over the ways of unscrupulous and exploitative capitalism.
In reinstating Raj’s essentially socialist and humanist solutions to the problems spawned by urbanization, unemployment, migrancy, and homelessness, Shree 420 articulates a discomfort with capitalist modernity and its economic structures (banks, real estate developments, gold speculation, venture capital). Its resolution reinstates premodern, pro-socialist solutions and values (solidarity, collective ownership, community, honesty) into what is represented as an increasingly alienating economic landscape. In the film’s resolution, Sonachand Dharmanand is the real villain not just because he defrauds innocent people (Raj does this as well). Dharmanand is the villain because he manipulates capitalism’s manifold technologies first to perpetuate, then to mask widespread treachery and fraud (“it’s your signature on the stock certificates, not mine,” Dharmanand slyly warns Raj when the latter tries to exit his schemes).
FIGURES 2.2 AND 2.3 Raj’s criminal enterprises in Shree 420 (1955) include a stock scam in a gold mining concern and a fraudulent housing scheme (“Janta Ghar”) that defrauds his fellow footpath dwellers.
(COURTESY YASH RAJ FILMS)
FIGURE 2.4 Raj Kapoor under the “Bombay 420” marker in Shree 420.
(COURTESY YASH RAJ FILMS)
In displacing crime from the fraud alluded to in the 420 of the title to capitalist modernity, the film gives voice and name to its audience’s unnamed apprehensions, projects them on screen, and dissolves them through the compensatory satisfaction of seeing Dharmanand led out of court in handcuffs, presumably to serve time in prison. Meanwhile, Shree 420 restores Raj to its audience’s affections. He redeems the honesty-medal (imandari ka enam) that he had pawned shortly after arriving in Bombay, and he wonders whether he should stay in the city with Vidya or return to his hometown, Allahabad.
FIGURE 2.5 Sonachand Dharmanand’s automobile (BMZ 840) in Shree 420.
(COURTESY YASH RAJ FILMS)
Raj’s origins in Allahabad are hardly accidental, nor is Allahabad referenced as a stand-in for a generic anytown (as E. M. Forster, for example, intended with the fictional Chandrapore in A Passage to India). Allahabad was Nehru’s birthplace, a city deeply associated with him and with his particular vision of harmony among difference. Situated by the confluence of three major rivers (Ganga, Yamuna, and Saraswati), Allahabad is known for the view of this coming together (or sangam), which became a major aspect of Nehru’s—and Kapoor’s—vision for modern India as a place of coexistence amongst different faiths, ideologies, and practices. Kapoor honored the concept of sangam in a blockbuster of the same name (Sangam, 1964) with its hit single “Bol, Radha, bol . . . sangam hoga ki nahin” (say Radha, will a union happen or not?), riffing on the union between two very different lovers whom the song compares to Ganga and Yamuna.
In other Hindi films, characters associated with Nehru’s vision of tolerance and sangam get similarly marked, such as the poet, Akbar Allahabadi, played by Kapoor’s son, Rishi, in Amar Akbar Anthony (Manmohan Desai, 1977). In that blockbuster, the poet’s name recalls both a late-nineteenth-century nationalist poet as well as the sixteenth-century Mughal emperor Akbar, who built a major fort in Allahabad and whose political legacies include due process and access to legal recourse, much as Nehru would insist for modern India. In Manmohan Desai’s version, Nehru’s political and social vision has its origins in Emperor Akbar’s legacy. Desai’s character Akbar Allahabadi effortlessly combines religions in worship, uses poetry for persuasion rather than his fists, and is frequently seen wearing a Nehru jacket with a red rose (fig. 2.6), much like the Prime Minister in popular iconography.14
FIGURE 2.6 Rishi Kapoor in white Nehru jacket and red rose as Akbar Allahabadi in Amar Akbar Anthony (1977).
(COURTESY DEI ENTERTAINMENT)
Thus, for Raj in Shree 420 to “return” to Allahabad or to stay in Bombay is not just a choice between past and future, origin and destination. It is also a political and philosophical conundrum: whether and how to carry one’s origins into a new, modern future—and how that markedly different future might harmoniously blend with a markedly different past, much as Allahabad’s rivers seem to in their sangam.
Shree 420 ends with this dilemma—a serious one under any circumstance, providing the once-penniless migrant with the luxury of choice. And the rhetoric of choice is exactly what the films of the Golden Fifties purveyed: the right to choose the kind of nation India was to be and to choose its means of achieving this national destiny. One choice Shree 420 poses is between Dharmanand’s exploitative capitalism or Raj’s soft socialism coded as 840 vs. 420. It was a rhetoric that underwrote a narrative of empowerment that Hindi film as public fantasy extended to every strata in Indian society, even to those forced to live below or outside its borders.
In Kapoor’s earlier blockbuster, Awara (1951), a petty criminal, again named Raj, is saved from the gallows by the passionate appeal of his lawyer and lover, played by Nargis, who places half the blame for Raj’s attempt at murder on the father who long ago abandoned his wife and unborn son. Instead, Raj is sentenced to three years in prison. As he bids farewell to his lawyer-lover, Raj rejects his earlier life of crime and embraces his sentence for the choices it provides:
RAJ: I need this punishment. I’ll deserve you [Nargis] only once I’ve served my time in prison. I’ll be good. People will respect me. I’ll read. Study. As my mother dreamed, first I’ll become a lawyer, then a magistrate. Then a judge.
It is not just Raj’s belief in the criminal justice system that is striking (the sense that prison can fully reform him) but rather the particular fantasy Awara so effortlessly deploys. Not content to reform the criminal and reintegrate him into society, the film’s fantasy insists that only by becoming his exact opposite in the social spectrum can the criminal be fully redeemed. Not content to be good and read and study, Raj has to choose to become a judge in order to win society’s respect—and presumably to reform other 420s like himself.
For this project of reform, to an extent never screened before or since, Awara places complete faith in the newly formed institutions of civil society. It depicts these institutions as blind to the claims of caste and privilege, capable of delivering justice within laws that are both fair and just. The court scenes in Awara are amongst its most inspiring and optimistic (fig. 2.7):15 a rookie lawyer on her first case makes an appeal in a death penalty case. Both she and the defendant offer passionate speeches before the bench that outline the social causes of crime and the court’s duty to locate just punishment on all culprits. “You have to commit a crime to get the chance to be heard as seriously like this,” Raj observes in his speech before the judge and jury. He is pardoned from the gallows.
FIGURE 2.7 The court scene in Awara (1951).
(COURTESY YASH RAJ FILMS)
Unlike Shree 420’s complex approach to crime—it is not what you do but what you are made to do; it is not what the individual does but what society does to him—Awara purveys a fairy-tale attitude toward crime. The ease with which Raj places his faith in the justice system to reform him from his life of crime recalls the melodramatic code that virtue and corruption are superficial qualities that can be transformed as long as the individual’s heart is in it. Such faith in the redemptive power of a criminal justice system that can effectively isolate crime, decisively mete punishment proportional to it, and reform the criminal was a crucial article of faith in a newly decolonized India.16 Not for long. Neither crime nor punishment would continue to have such reassuring faces in film or in public life for much longer in the 1950s. Despite also addressing itself to criminality as the earlier Awara did, Shree 420 never shows its criminals in court, nor does it demonstrate the kind of justice that due process or a court trial might deliver. The later film places reform largely on the social network (on the schoolteacher, or the well-intentioned fruitseller) and not on legal institutions. What can be described as Awara’s innocence has given way to Shree 420’s experience in which the crime at stake is beyond the reach of the justice system.
As if to alert the audience of this transformed world without entirely souring their faith in the nation of which it is part, Shree 420 sutures an extended tutorial on the rapidly decaying political order of post-Independence India. In this pivotal early scene, Dharmanand stands at a podium in Chowpatty Beach dressed in a politician’s signature khadi (homespun), making a slick speech before potential voters. “Look at me: I’m dressed in Swadeshi from head to toe. I’m an Indian, here to serve you,” he begins. “And look at me,” interrupts Raj’s voice: “I’m wearing Japanese shoes, English pants, a Russian hat, but my heart: it’s completely Indian!” Raj is back, and in the exchange that follows, he and Dharmanand vie for the crowd’s attention. In the end Raj wins because he more effectively taps into the desires gnawing at his audience. He promises that the Jai Hind (Hail India) toothpowder he is peddling is a cure-all for the underlying canker of the nation. “Without teeth, how can we eat? And if we can’t eat, how can we be strong? And without being strong, we’ll be colonized all over again,” he exhorts. As the crowd swells to purchase his toothpowder, Dharmanand’s cronies expose Raj’s fraud. What is in the jars is not toothpowder but sand and crushed bones. The crowd turns on Raj, who is severely beaten.
Despite his university education and a gold medal for honesty, neither Raj’s intelligence nor honesty is evident in his sales pitch for fake tooth-powder. What is visible is the ease with which political rhetoric and public spectacle obscure both virtues. Once a marker of integrity and idealism during the anticolonial struggle, Swadeshi apparel such as khadi on Dharmanand invokes those ideals without occupying them. The crowd flocks to Dharmanand because of what he wears, unable to detect his hypocrisy; it flocks to Raj because of what he speaks, unable to detect his duplicity. It is their honesty and intelligence that this scene exposes. The real tutorial is that neither clothes nor words deliver: both are corrupted in this tarnished moment, and the public has to exercise a degree of wariness against both that was previously unnecessary. And that, in the end, is Shree 420’s larger message: it is not clothes that make the man (neither Swadeshi nor Japanese shoes are indicative), but the heart (dil) that lies obscured behind them. To understand dil requires the audience’s keenness and intelligence. The scene serves as caution of the perils of innocence as well as an exposition on experience that confront the citizen of the new state.
The tutorial on innocence and experience soon passes. Larger questions on choice and political destiny ebb as well, reappearing at the very last minutes of Shree 420 when much of its audience was already departing the theater. The love affair with India becomes one between Raj and Vidya, and an agreeable romance displaces disagreeable politics through much of Shree 420, earning it the reputation as “easily one of [Kapoor’s] most delightful and socially significant comedies” in the words of a prominent documentarian (Kak 1987).
AB DILLI DUR NAHIN
Shree 420 marked a break from the oeuvre that succeeded it. Delight and social significance parted ways in Kapoor’s 1957 production, Ab Dilli Dur Nahin, a film ostensibly made to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Independence. Like Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa and Mehboob Khan’s Mother India that were released the same year, Dilli comments on the elusiveness of the earlier national fantasy and the demons intrinsic in it. In different ways, all three landmark 1957 films expose the mounting political and social corruptions of the day, even while ascribing very different causes to them. Mother India displaces long-standing social corruption on individual sacrifice: the revolutionary who promises to avenge his mother’s rape is killed in order to preserve their village’s harmony. As if anticipating objections to his murder, his mother accepts her lifetime of suffering, insisting “even if life is poison, we have to swallow it; once we’re born, we simply have to live” (duniya main hum aaye hain to jeena hi parega; jeevan hai agar zahar to peena hi parega).17 Walking the nighttime streets of Calcutta amongst beggars and brothels, Guru Dutt’s protagonist, more directly than others, asks, “zara mulk ke rahbaro ko bulao . . . jin he naaz hai Hind par, vo kahan hai?” (call the nation’s residents [and show them these streets] . . . where are those who are proud of India?). The question forms the refrain of a lengthy poem by Sahir Ludhianvi that is picturized more as social documentary than song in the feature film. That both these critiques of India in Pyaasa and Mother India appear as song is no accident. The powerful lyrics and musical scores simultaneously contain the disruptive message even while establishing it in the auditor’s memory. The songs allow critique a space in the films, but also contain it as an “interruption” to the plot.18
In Kapoor’s Dilli, critique is handled differently and more directly. The issues are not just social (such as poverty and class exploitation) as they were with Guru Dutt’s or Mehboob Khan’s films of the year, but political as well. In contrast to the earlier Awara and Shree 420, Dilli focuses less on crime than on justice and the little man’s access to it. In further contrast to Raj in Awara or Shree 420, Dilli’s little man is literally little. A 10-year-old sees his father sentenced to death based on circumstantial evidence. When a friendly pickpocket has evidence to exonerate the father, the boy walks 200 miles to Delhi to deliver it to Prime Minister Nehru and ask for his clemency. Nehru appears as a spectral presence in the film, in speedy motorcades, posters, photos, and as a speaker at distant rallies (figs. 2.8–2.10).
Apparently persuaded by Kapoor that “the film would put his government on a high pedestal and bring the desired credibility,” Nehru initially agreed to appear in the last shot of the film when the boy finally meets him, though he later declined, and, as Rishi Kapoor recalls, “the film fell flat. Obviously no one could empathise with it.”19
The anecdote about Nehru’s appearance in the film says much about the close ties between the two mythographers. More significantly, it also reveals the Prime Minister’s limits and the filmmaker’s reach. By India’s tenth anniversary, it was not just achieving industrial and agricultural targets that were at stake for the new nation. The very fabric of the social had to be remade, and cinema was a crucial participant in the project. When Kapoor and others tried to do whatever they could through film to build up Nehru’s beautiful dream, they quickly discovered its sordid underbelly. Nehru’s cosmopolitan, urban vision was one in which the individual could arrive in the city, reform it and himself there, and provide some sort of a happy ending as happens in both Awara and Shree 420 among others. But the other reality of India where its majority lived and that Gandhi had labeled its destination was the village, and here the abominable injustices of caste and usury were unreformed and rampant. The little man was caught in a permanent cycle of poverty in the hands of an upper-caste moneylender who took possession of his land (his capital) and his labor (his means of production). To reform this India required a conjurer, not the courts that Awara provided, and a conjurer is precisely what Nehru got in Kapoor when he produced Dilli.
FIGURES 2.8–2.10 Nehru as image and specter in Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957).
(COURTESY SHEMAROO)
It became apparent quickly, though, that even the magician could not conjure Nehru’s fantasy to include rural India. The entire justice system in it was crooked. Not only does it prey on the little man in Dilli, it incarcerates him when he objects as the father did in threatening the unscrupulous moneylender who had ruined him and the entire village. Kapoor’s signature optimism dissipates quickly in Dilli’s village scenes and returns only when the young protagonist finds himself in Delhi in the company of other runaways like him. In this alternative urban community, everyone is equal, a meager meal of rotis is shared by all, an upper-caste landowner is sent packing, and the entire community of children vows to seek Nehru for their friend and get justice.
At the end of Dilli, Kapoor provides the happy ending that the film required, but years later his son Rishi is not wrong to insist that “it fell flat.” No amount of urban mythography could dispel the horrors that awaited Dilli’s protagonist on his return to the village, and none could quite distract from the social canker beyond the urban surface. In a film most directly invested in giving Nehru’s dream its desired credibility, Dilli instead paradoxically exposed the many disruptions to the idea of India.
Nehru’s embrace of political modernity on August 15, 1947, ushered a hierarchical, caste-ridden society into democracy; his Fabian socialism exposed the real attractions embedded both in capitalist and socialist modernity; and his cosmopolitan urban vision was an inevitable contrast to M. K. Gandhi’s insistence that the real India—and the only one—was in the village. In short, the political, social, and economic modernity Nehru sought disrupted another, older, premodern India to the core. Dilli exposed the intractable nature of a conflict to which no sangam seemed possible, a conflict according to which the vast majority were not fully allowed—or prepared—to participate in the bounty of the modern state. Kapoor’s salute to Nehru in Awara and Shree 420 embraces his idol’s cosmopolitan vision and largely ignores the other side of it. Nehru repeatedly appears in these films as a benevolent visual backdrop to Raj’s foreground (figs. 2.11–2.13).
Raj’s origins in Allahabad in Shree 420 gesture to Nehru’s own, and Kapoor’s sartorial smorgasbord in these blockbusters combining Chaplin, Visconti, and James Dean (figs. 2.14–2.16) echoed well with the Prime Minister’s own hybrid style with its bespoke Swadeshi jackets and an English tea rose in his buttonhole (see fig. 2.6).
Awara and Shree 420 are frequently regarded Kapoor’s landmark social films and his contribution to the contract between modernity and nation spelled out in Nehru’s beautiful dream. Dilli’s rural realism, on the other hand, has relegated it from Kapoor’s canon (it is seldom screened in retrospectives both during Kapoor’s lifetime and since). However, considering Dilli as constitutive of Kapoor’s 1950s oeuvre allows a study of the three films as a triptych that marks the journey from innocence to experience. The triptych’s evolving responses to the common problem of criminality and justice in post-Independence India reveal an increasing wariness toward the ability of civic institutions to address social problems. Awara’s inescapable optimism about crime and punishment was balanced by Shree 420’s nuanced compromise, with its focus on social solidarity to solve problems that civic institutions could not. Together, the two films provide ways of managing the extraordinary expectations that Independence inevitably ushered. Rather than deflating public fantasies for justice that Awara celebrates, Shree 420 displaces them upon the community, which is charged with delivering what the state’s institutions cannot. In contrast, Dilli dispatches with both optimism and compromise and retreats from civic institutions altogether. If there is an arbiter of justice left available, it is the mythic Prime Minister himself, but the figure is spectral at best, fleetingly glimpsed but impossible to access (fig. 2.10). As the scholar Nandini Chandra avers in her reading of Dilli’s children: “Nehru does nothing for them.”20 The little man is on his own here, severed from community when he searches for justice.
FIGURE 2.11 Nehru as backdrop to Raj in Shree 420.
(COURTESY YASH RAJ FILMS)
FIGURE 2.12 Nehru as backdrop in Shree 420.
(COURTESY YASH RAJ FILMS)
FIGURE 2.13 Raj Kapoor on stage with Nehru at the National Defence Committee fundraiser in New Delhi (January 1963).
(COURTESY SIDDHARTH KAK, RAJ KAPOOR LIVES)
In Dilli, Kapoor exposed an India that could not (yet) be incorporated fully in the dream before him. Inimical both to colonial modernity and the Nehruvian version elaborated during Independence, this India is represented as the source of “crime” in Dilli, a crime that the judicial system can neither reach nor reform. Since social revolution was never Kapoor’s interest, he left it aside and developed the cosmopolitan version of modernity and its attendant crimes in films following Dilli such as Bobby (1973) and Ram Teri Ganga Maili (Ram, your Ganges is dirty, 1985), where the emphasis falls on class, not caste, and the disruptions to social stability that romantic love exposes.21
FIGURES 2.14–2.16 Raj Kapoor as Chaplin in Shree 420 (above) and (next page) recalling Visconti and James Dean in Awara (1951).
(COURTESY YASH RAJ FILMS)
By the 1970s, however, the easy separation between the Nehruvian social vision and what is somewhat crudely named the Gandhian was not so easy to maintain. For one, the little man was no longer a figure easily contained by region or class, nor was he easily identified by his origins or even his destination. The nation that Nehru dreamed died with him in 1964, and a new one had come to the fore that Kapoor’s mythography had yet to address. As his publicist and later biographer Bunny Reuben alerted Kapoor in a published open letter:
Between 1964 and 1970, many changes took place in the country and in the entertainment world, changes which I submit you were only faintly aware of, and of which you took little or no cognizance, sitting as you were in the ivory tower of Chembur. . . . The “little man” has said his say. Over the past decade or so, the entire strata of India’s middle class, instead of being able to rise to a higher economic status, has been reduced to the penury of the “little man” due to steady inflation, the spiraling cost of living, and growing corruption at all levels of social and national life in our country. We have all been reduced by bad government to the economic status of “little men” and we do not want to be reminded of it in the movies we pay to see. . . . Witness therefore the colossal box-office success these days of purely escapist films.22
Reuben’s allegation of Kapoor’s isolation notwithstanding, the film-maker was hardly removed from the changes that 1964 ushered. Indeed, Nehru had died, the era of the red rose had ended, India embarked on two wars (in 1965 and 1971), and Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, was elected prime minister in 1966.23 Nehru was deemed so sacred in political life that no prime minister following him has moved into his official residence. Teen Murti Bhavan was, quite literally, rendered a secular shrine to him and exists as the country’s premier historical repository, entombing the glorious revolutionary struggle and its many public fantasies. Indira Gandhi’s election in 1966 removed her to a different residence, much as her political vision was characterized by a marked departure from—even a displacement of—her father, Nehru’s.
Kapoor was not so much ignorant of the changed world, as he chose to ignore many parts of it. His own fantasies of India were not encumbered by Nehru’s. Kapoor’s little man sometimes became a big man (as he did in Sangam where he plays a fighter pilot wounded in an unnamed conflict), and at other times a young cosmopolite, as Raja in Bobby (1973). His oeuvre continued to explore the exploitation of this figure and his desire for respect. But Kapoor had given up the notion that the respect was forthcoming from the institutions of the state. In every work since Shree 420, the sources of degradation and violence remain social (such as rich landlords, industrialists, ambitious parents, businessmen, the dowry system), and the solutions increasingly borrowed from melodrama and its code of individual reform.
But Bunny Reuben is correct in one crucial regard: if audiences of the 1970s did not wish to be reminded of their degradation in the films they saw, they still sought some respite from it. And for this, the cinema continued to play a role in managing desire, even if Raj Kapoor was not always the man to provide it.24
On June 26, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of Emergency in India that was to last for twenty-one months into 1977. Two months later, on August 15, 1975, the anniversary of Independence, the filmmaker Ramesh Sippy released Sholay (Embers) upon audiences starved and humiliated within a blatantly corrupt and increasingly unscrupulous political system. The journalist, Anupama Chopra, captures the period as follows:
The early seventies were a time of social and political upheaval. The post-Independence optimism of the fifties and sixties was slowly giving way to a deepening disillusionment with authority. The legacy of selflessness and integrity left by the politicians of the freedom struggle had been replaced with widespread corruption, and the use of violence for criminal and political ends was on the rise. The common citizen felt that law and order had broken down. The mood in the country was one of hopelessness and frustration, even anger, and a new morality was taking shape, typified by Jayaprakash Narayan’s socialist movement.25
Critics panned Sholay almost immediately, faulting it most prominently for its violence. The Illustrated Weekly of India named 1975 “The Year of Violence and Sex in Films.”26 “You realize that a story built on negative emotions like hatred and violence can have no lasting impression on the mind,” wrote Raju Bharatan,27 notwithstanding which Sholay played for over five years (267 weeks) at Bombay’s first-run Minerva Cinema.28 “Where the film fails is in its music,” Bharatan continued (ibid.): yet R. D. Burman’s song, “Mehbooba, Mehbooba” (Beloved, Beloved), was still being played in discos twenty years later and “Yeh Dosti” (This Friendship), the “male bonding anthem” (Chopra 13), found new meaning in Bombay’s emerging gay subculture of the early 1990s.
Shortly after its release and throughout the decade, many superlatives accrued to Sholay and its lore circulated: the first 70mm film made in India; the most expensive film made to date; the first production to hire American action directors for stunt sequences; an early multi-starrer, casting Bombay’s most fabled stars; and, above all, the film that remains the all-time biggest grosser at the box office for Hindi cinema.29 Sholay was bigger, bolder, and more daring than any Hindi film made to date. And audiences loved it to a degree hitherto unseen in Hindi cinema.30 Yet the critics did not get it at all. Anupama Chopra records the major reviews panning it during the first week for a “gravely flawed attempt” (India Today), its “unsuccessful transplantation attempt . . . an imitation Western” (Filmfare), with “no reason for a repeat show” (Film Information).31
In an India Today essay condemning Sholay’s violence entitled “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” the journalist Bindu Batra prevailed upon reason to make an argument about the film’s portrayal of “intoxicating action, brutal sensationalism, and barbaric fights.” “There is no need to end violence in the cinema,” she placated her counterparts who insisted otherwise in the uniform outcry that followed Sholay’s popularity. “On the contrary, there is a need to encourage its portrayal with the injunction that it must be shown in realistic terms [as an undesirable way of life].”32
Batra’s criticism of Sholay unwittingly identifies the film’s sustained appeal among its immediate audiences. Sholay’s familiar plot and setting derive extensively from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, earning the film the epithet, “a curry western.”33 Like the Western tradition that inspired it, Sholay depicted a lawless world in which even the sheriff turns to the vigilante for justice. The temptation to claim the film as just another “story” is strong, but it is worth recalling, as its coscriptwriter Javed Akhtar did, that Sholay’s story captured the zeitgeist of the 1970s in a particularly resonant way:
If you considered the political mood of the country [in the 1970s], you’d find a lot of frustration. Social protest had begun. That was the time when Jayaprakash Narayan’s socialist movement had begun. Hindi films are most widely seen in the Hindi belt and in that area, law and order was gradually breaking down. So the common man was experiencing upheaval. There was disillusionment with all the institutions, colleges, the police force. People were disillusioned with the government. So it wasn’t surprising that the morality of the day said that if you want justice, you have to fight for it yourself. No one will fight on your behalf. And if you didn’t fight, you’ll be crushed and finished off. . . . You can see that the hero who has developed between 1973–75—the Emergency was declared in India in 1975—reflected those times.34
Akhtar’s remarks, published almost twenty-five years after Sholay was released, recall the range of institutions that had “broken down” in the 1970s, including the government, the judiciary, and even the educational apparatus. Other films of the period such as Deewaar (The wall, Yash Chopra, 1975; see chapter 3) and Roti Kapda aur Makaan (Food clothing and housing, Manoj Kumar, 1974) amplify the special pressures of a “broken” educational system as college graduates confronted one of the worst employment conditions in memory, and large-scale social unrest threatened to erupt at any moment. The industrialist, J. R. D. Tata, on the other side of the political spectrum from Akhtar, lamented of the period: “You can’t imagine what we had been through here—strikes, boycotts, demonstrations. Why, there were days when I couldn’t walk out of my office on to the street. The parliamentary system is not suited to our needs.”35
In Sholay, two modern, jeans-clad city boys named Jai and Veeru are obliged to seek work in a remote village without automobiles or telephones. The dissonance between their urban world and the one they are called upon to protect vividly underscores the persistence of a rural India coexisting alongside one of strikes, boycotts, and demonstrations. Rather than being an arcadia, however, the village of Ramgarh closely resembles the lawless cities Jai and Veeru have left. Neither world seems to be able to deliver justice or order, and both seem prey to forces that threaten to disrupt them without a moment’s notice. Both worlds, in short, require the labor of underclass migrants to preserve and to protect them, even as they criminalize migrants and deny them basic civic protections. If Sholay’s release date links it to a political order associated with Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, other cues clarify just how elusive Nehru’s dreams for a just society have become in the Age of Indira.
A few minutes into the film, two revealing conversations take place that capture the dramatic shift in social attitudes toward crime between the 1950s and the Emergency era. In the first conversation, an armless expolice inspector now a civilian asks a jailer to help him locate two men named Jai and Veeru. “But they’re absolute crooks,” the jailer expostulates. “Total thieves. They’re no good at all those two.” The Thakur prevails with the logic that a good heart redeems even the criminal when he argues: “For all their vices, they have virtues too.” “A fake coin is fake on both sides,” the jailer insists in a statement that recalls Mrs. Dharmanand’s dismissal of unknown youth in Shree 420. The contrast between the punitive righteousness of power (in this case, the law) and the moral right of the powerless (here deemed “thieves” and “crooks”) collides head-on in this exchange. Sholay proceeds to thematize their intractable conflict and to reconfigure a latent economy in which “crooks” nevertheless deliver justice.
In a flashback that immediately follows, the Thakur recalls a conversation he had while he was still a police inspector with the alleged crooks who audaciously insist they are just like him. “We work for money just like you do. We too play with danger in our jobs. And like your job, ours too requires bravery.” The Thakur tries to separate himself from Jai and Veeru by claiming he works within the law, they against it. But Jai dismisses this logic immediately: the similarities prevail over the differences since both jobs require bravery. The real distinction between the two groups is contained in a throwaway line the Thakur off ers when justifying his line of work. “I don’t need to work for money as such,” he tells Jai and Veeru. “My ancestral lands provide me with sufficient income to live quite well.”
Herein lies the difference between these two uneasy allies. The Thakur represents the leisured order of landed property, unified with state power (the police), while Jai and Veeru are the landless needing to work where they can find it. They may be criminals under the old order that the jailer reminds the Thakur of in the first conversation, but in the new world of the Emergency, these two are as good as the police. In fact, they are better, because when the Thakur’s lands need protection, he does not go to the police but to Jai and Veeru and the particular code of “justice,” bravery, and violence that they represent. On a manifest level, Sholay is the most reactionary of films, invoking not noblesse oblige but a kind of underclass-oblige, calling upon those most oppressed by the feudal order to protect that very oppressive order. The murder of the Thakur’s entire family displaces the audience’s attention from any other kind of suffering (i.e., that perpetrated by him and his class upon the villagers), and the film becomes a narrative of upper-class suffering at the very moment in post-Independence history when that class had extracted and was enjoying its greatest privileges. That subaltern group of rootless, indigent laborers most dis-armed and dismembered by social “progress” is called upon to restore the authority and “dismembered” prestige of an upper class that has oppressed it in the first place. Despite this reactionary content, Sholay was a huge success among lower-class and rural audiences.36 Why?
A large part of the reason lies in the film’s depiction of violence. Despite critics who decried it, the problem with Sholay’s violence was not that it was inordinate or particularly brutal, but rather that its brutality and savagery (the chopping of arms, the extermination of an entire clan) were so resonant with a moment when whole neighborhoods of the working poor were being exterminated by government bulldozers, and men of all ages among the lower classes were being forcibly sterilized under government-sponsored programs to control population growth.
FIGURES 2.17–2.19 Gabbar delivering his punishment of choice to the Thakur (above), and Veeru (fig. 2.18). Jai and Veeru to the rescue with their weapons of choice (fig. 2.19) in Sholay (1975).
(COURTESY EROS ENTERTAINMENT)
Sholay’s appeal lay in affirming the logic that violence and brutality can only be redressed by more violence and brutality; that modern civic institutions such as the state and the police are complete failures in protecting the people.37 The film’s unabashed dismissal of civic institutions and the implicit critique of their governability and corruption make Jai and Veeru more than copies of Leone’s inverted cowboy-heroes in the Western tradition. As vigilantes called to restore peace to the Thakur’s villages, the JaiVeeru duo amplify a desperate solution to a modern problem, though it comes with some caveats.
Hindi cinema has always been reluctant to accept the vigilante fully or to allow him unambiguous sanction. In landmark films such as Mother India (1957), the lone vigilante, Birju, is first beaten, then expelled, and finally killed after he takes on a usurious moneylender whom he threatens to bring to court for his crimes against an entire village. Even though Mother India endlessly exposes the moneylender’s atrocities upon the village’s most vulnerable population of widows and fatherless children, it still manifestly casts Birju as the problem for the disruptions his acts instigate, implicitly preferring to await a solution from above rather than endorsing one from within or below. When Birju as vigilante is the self-appointed arbiter of justice in his village, he is promptly ejected from it for his attempt to replace the old order with a new one. (It merits mention that Birju in Mother India is already a considerably more outspoken figure than the Puckish original as scripted in Mehboob Khan’s Aurat [Woman, 1940]. In the earlier film, Birju goes “bad,” and his mother dies of heartbreak. In the 1957 remake, Birju’s pursuit of social justice permeates the film’s ending, and his mother’s efforts at containing him seem as futile as the filmmaker’s.)38
Likewise, in Sholay Jai and Veeru are initially hailed for their courage in standing up against the dacoit who has terrorized the Thakur’s village. However, their efforts are rapidly contained. Their instructions from the Thakur are to bring him Gabbar: “zinda!” (alive). After Jai dies in a shootout with Gabbar’s men, Veeru storms Gabbar’s hideout and has him in a noose when the Thakur appears. “Remember your promise; Gabbar is mine now,” the Thakur insists, and Veeru hands him over. It is a critical transaction that underscores Veeru’s vassalage to the Thakur. Veeru’s visual glamour and masculine bravado notwithstanding, his vigilantism is subordinate to his employer’s authority, which denies him even the honor of avenging a friend’s death.
Sholay’s “vigilantes” are a far cry from the typical figures who “maintain justice and order in an imperfect society” (OED), nor are they figures who protest an existing order as Birju did. At best, they are paid enforcers in a desperate law-and-order situation who protect the status quo (i.e., the Thakur’s class), which is being threatened.39 Unlike the typical vigilante who maintains order or delivers justice because of the belief that it is not otherwise available (Birju in Mother India is a key example), Jai and Veeru work for money, not for ideals.40 Their many attractions aside (including the star power that Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra brought to the roles), Jai and Veeru remain subalterns to the ruling class, and their contract with it commits them to restoring that class to its power. Any disruptions by Jai or Veeru to this class’s sense of stability are rapidly contained. Jai is killed when he threatens the baronial marriage plot (first for attempting to marry the Thakur’s widowed daughter-in-law, Radha, and then for thwarting Veeru’s marriage to Basanti, the belle of the Thakur’s village).
Jai’s death is symbolic—and necessary—in other ways. As the repository of history (“I always forget these stories: you’re the one who remembers them and has to tell them to my kids,” insists Veeru), Jai represents the persistence of past memories that need to die in the new present of the Emergency. His subaltern position notwithstanding, Jai vigorously challenges the Thakur’s logic on class and criminality (“we’re just like you,” he reminds the policeman in the early exchange in a remark dripping with irony). His presence in the film thus symbolizes both the past (history), and past ideals (read Nehru) that once connected the state with the citizen in a shared social contract. The Emergency renders both kinds of past and its social contract null, and both are made to die in Jai’s gory and prolonged death sequence.
Like the fictional Raj in Shree 420, the biographical Amitabh Bachchan who plays Jai also hails from Allahabad, Nehru’s birthplace, and his end in Sholay symbolically underscores the necessary demise of the national icon during the Emergency.41 If Jai’s death is symbolically necessary so that the ideals he represents can be laid to rest, it is also a death redolent with exposure: weeping over his dead friend, Veeru finds the counterfeit coin that Jai had used to win every important coin toss. It is a small form of subterfuge that Jai used to good ends, but it underscores that even noble ideals sometimes have dubious origins.
In contrast to Raj Kapoor’s fantasy that criminality can be identified, neutralized, and eventually redeemed by benign and just social institutions such as the courts and the penitentiary, Sholay unquestioningly introduces Jai and Veeru as the only solutions to a corrupt and irredeemable institutional crisis. Neither the court nor the penitentiary can contain them, or Gabbar for that matter, who boasts that a jail to hold him has yet to be built. The issue of reforming Jai and Veeru never appears for they are essentially good sorts, while Gabbar is irredeemably evil and corrupt—just like the state and its institutions that are incapable of holding him. Rather than the criminal embodying society’s worst fears of antisocial elements that must be reformed or neutralized, as Kapoor depicts him in his films from the 1950s, Sholay’s power lay in insisting that the real criminal elements lay beyond society’s reach, insulated by their absolute evil, sheer power, and total corruption. The violence that these criminals practice upon their victims is amplified by Gabbar’s gratuitous and sadistic violence, which renders the Thakur’s brutality in attempting to crush Gabbar to death all the more thrilling.
What Sholay’s public fantasy achieved is two things. In locating the nature of criminality beyond the individual and on social and political institutions, it helped articulate a growing public unease with a political and social system gone horribly wrong in the Emergency. In redressing criminality not through liberal-humanist beliefs or institutions but by the economy of violence (an eye-for-an-eye, an arm-for-an-arm), Sholay offered an alternative narrative to help cope with the demise of a utopian nationalism gone bad. The film’s putative satisfaction lay not in the order that follows it, for none does. (Jai dies; Radha rots in lonely widowhood; the Thakur has lost his family and his arms for a very belated revenge; and Veeru rather than settling in Ramgarh leaves it with Basanti, though it is not clear to where or for what.) The film worked among audiences not by addressing their fantasies, but by helping exorcise their fears. Rather than providing prescriptions, it provided depictions of a grim everyday that had not been projected on screen before.
Despite the generally gloomy reading of a manifestly reactionary film, Sholay’s popularity was unabated. Indian audiences claim to have seen it ten and twenty and forty times, revealing an entirely new calculus of consumption in popular Hindi cinema.42 Sholay’s songs and dialogues were played and purveyed endlessly on radio and cassettes that formed part of its extraordinary appeal.43 Gabbar, more than any other figure from Sholay, enjoyed a special popularity. He got the best dialogue, with lines such as “kitne aadmi they?” (How many men were there?) entering oral legend. His military fatigues and swagger became the standard of masculine aspiration among youth, and Brittania’s Glucose D biscuits sold millions among little children following an ad campaign calling the biscuits “Gabbar ki asli pasand” (Gabbar’s real favorite).
In Gabbar, Sholay presented a villain so immune from justice and so insulated from the reach of the law that he became a new kind of hero. “Everybody wanted to be Gabbar, not Jai or Veeru, in their own theatres of the bedroom,” recounted Ramesh Sippy in an interview.44
“The audience loves the villain because he can do things they can’t,” explained the actor Gulshan Grover, who made a career playing screen villains in the 1980s.45 In giving face and flesh to some of the audience’s worst fears of civil society gone awry and social justice corrupted, Sholay served not to promote or satisfy public fantasies, but to identify and magnify its worst fears. In this regard, it became a corroboratory narrative of what many in India were going through before and during the Emergency. The film touched upon the violence and criminality simmering below the surface of what one critic has called “a people eulogized for their tolerance” (Batra 31), in an era punctuated by the Emergency that came to mark the destruction of the myth of civic harmony so crucial to Indian nationalism. Rather than fulfilling deeply held though inchoate wishes, as Kapoor’s films of the 1950s did, Sholay functioned by exorcising deeply ingrained and very specific demons. Its appeal lay exactly in this inversion. It was cathartic in the classically tragic tradition that provided its audience pleasure not by projecting fantasy but by arousing fear. It simultaneously reassured its audience by the ethos that absolute evil requires absolutely evil solutions (violence stops violence) and the satisfaction that the film could share and exorcise its audience’s deepest demons.
As the next chapter elaborates, Sholay was very much part of the cinema of the 1970s, in kind if not degree. In characterizing this cinema, the scholar Madhava Prasad notes a key feature that he calls its “aesthetic of mobilization,” described as strategies by which the “hero” becomes a figure of what Prasad names “national reconciliation and social reform” (Prasad 1998:141). According to the argument, the hero affirms the prevailing national story and mobilizes a predominantly middle-class majority to validate it as well. Prasad locates the source of that mobilization in the figures of Jai and Veeru in whom, he argues, criminality is “deployed as a metaphor for all forms of rebellion and disaffection.”46 A reading of Sholay’s manifest plot would fully support this. The film’s mise-en-scène with its admiring, even adoring, gaze lavished over Jai and Veeru’s towering forms and the extended camera sequences of their camaraderie is in stark contrast to the almost perfunctory attention the camera gives to the figures of Basanti (played by Hindi cinema’s “dream girl,” Hema Malini) or the semiclad Helen in a sultry item number. A lot of the camera’s attention went into creating the Jai–Veeru “aesthetic” and its attractions (figs. 2.20 and 2.21).
FIGURES 2.20 AND 2.21 The Jai–Veeru glamour in Sholay.
(COURTESY EROS ENTERTAINMENT)
But Gabbar’s immediate and long-standing popularity among audiences suggests another kind of “mobilization” at work, resonating with an entirely different—and perhaps more powerful—register of rebellion and disaffection that validates a profoundly counter-hegemonic narrative embedded as Sholay’s latent plot. This inverted narrative does not affirm the national story, but exposes it. The focal audience of this latent narrative is not the middle classes, as Prasad urges, but the lower classes who stand to lose everything from the “reconciliation” work undertaken by the middle classes in the manifest plot. In Gabbar, one finds a villain “doing things [the audience] can’t,” as the actor Gulshan Grover observed. But unlike Jai and Veeru (who also do things the audience can’t), Gabbar gets away doing things while Jai and Veeru do not. Jai dies after challenging the Thakur and daring to claim equal status with him (“we’re just like you”); Veeru is forced into exile far from Ramgarh when he snares a domesticity that has been snatched from the Thakur. Their “rebellions” are short-lived in a plot that provides them no happy ending. In contrast, when the Thakur strangles Gabbar, Gabbar chops off the Thakur’s arms; when Gabbar is jailed, he escapes; and in the version that circulated for a quarter century and consolidated Sholay’s fame, Gabbar survives the Thakur’s efforts at apprehension to likely escape, for he has already shown that no jail can hold him.
Focusing on Gabbar as the film’s “hero” exposes Sholay’s latent plot, one that effectively challenges the authority of the feudal order and its complicity with the state. Whereas the manifest plot celebrates Jai and Veeru, it also affirms the hegemonic status quo that they are hired to serve, in however unorthodox a fashion, even as they expose its weaknesses. In this regard, Jai and Veeru confirm what the writer Fareed Kazmi calls Sholay’s “conservative, status-quoist, even regressive” elements that do not frontally combat the agents of social and political oppression.47 That challenge does exist in the film, but it comes from Gabbar, on whom the camera lavishes equal if not similar attention. He is heard about before he is seen, in lore before language, possessing his own haunting background score that plays each time the camera nears him. His possessions appear before his presence in a much-heralded sequence that reveals first Gabbar’s bullet-studded belt then his spurs, then his boots before his face, or his full form (figs. 2.22–2.24).
In contrast to the glamorous jeans-clad Jai and Veeru, Gabbar’s appearance is sinister and counter-heroic. Paunchy, unshaven, dressed in military fatigues, chewing paan, he speaks with a strong lisp and a regional accent in crude, nonstandard Hindi that had seldom been performed on large-screen before.
FIGURES 2.22–2.24 Gabbar Singh’s first appearance in Sholay (boots, belt, legs, before face, before whole body).
(COURTESY EROS ENTERTAINMENT)
Any overt sympathy for Gabbar dies in the manifest plot when he returns the mutilated body of young Ahmed to the village as a warning to the Thakur. But the scene equally decisively abolishes the Thakur’s claims to sympathy as the villagers mutiny against his demands and blame their plight on him.
DINANATH [pointing to Ahmed’s body]: Look at what you’ve done to us, Thakur. It’s all your fault.
THAKUR: To live an honorable life, you have to pay a price, Dinanath.
SHANKER: We are farmers not soldiers. We can pay with grain, but not with our children’s lives.
THAKUR: Yes, Shanker. We’re farmers. This country has been a country of farmers for many ages. But when an oppressor [zalim] attacked us, it was farmers who melted their ploughs into swords. The blood of cowards does not flow in our veins.
CHACHA: But how is this violence and bloodshed going to help? Nonviolence [ahimsa] has its place too.
THAKUR: I believe in ahimsa too, Chacha. But to bow before an oppressor [zalim] isn’t ahimsa: it’s cowardice.
KASHIRAM: Those who don’t bend, break, Thakur.
THAKUR: The Thakur will neither bend nor break, Kashiram. The Thakur can only die. But as long as I live, I’ll live with my head held high.
It is an unusually frank exchange between slave and master that to a degree hitherto unseen in Hindi cinema exposes the ignobility of the class that continues to demand the blood of its slaves to prop up its position. The heated exchange over Ahmed’s body is remarkable. The villagers emerge as courageous pragmatists, preferring to bend rather than break, to pay Gabbar’s tax in grain not blood. The tax-exempt Thakur emerges as increasingly unhinged. His invocation of hallowed nationalist rhetoric (zalims, attacks by oppressors, ploughs into swords) paradoxically aligns him with the bombast of unscrupulous politicians rather than the burnish of nationalist saints whom he eschews when he rejects the Gandhian practice of ahimsa. In response to each of the villager’s challenges, the Thakur’s voice and rhetoric get more impassioned, suspended from both logic and community as he clenches his teeth and delivers his replies with repeated vocatives. He invokes ideals like honor; they see the price in their children’s blood. He invokes oppressors (zalims), missing entirely his own oppression over the subsistence farmers from whom he demands both labor and blood for the prosperity of his class. The scene dissipates quickly into peroration from an unexpected quarter when Ahmed’s father, the blind Imam, tonelessly observes: “It’s time for my namaaz. Today I’m going to ask God why he didn’t give me two or three more sons to martyr for this village.” Unable, once again, to provide or to protect, the Thakur has the most wounded in the village rescue him. In this case the blind and bereaved father is called to provide the peroration for the Thakur’s faltering logic.
In retrospect, the exchange laments the death not just of Ahmed, but of the nation as well. If the Imam has no more sons to offer, the nation has no more heroes either. The zalims have gone from being outsiders (foreigners) to being insiders (the Thakur). If the villagers are not fully successful in standing up to the Thakur, Gabbar is, which is one of the reasons that he mobilizes Sholay’s unprecedented popular appeal, not Jai and Veeru, as scholars such as Prasad have suggested.48
Sholay’s manifest narrative, urging the preservation of the feudal order at all costs, gets rewritten in the new economy of consumption inaugurated by the Emergency. Two things happen in this rewriting that illuminate the film’s powerful latent counter-narrative. Gabbar emerges as the unexpected hero with a popular appeal dramatizing the plight of a class for whom the “national reconciliation narrative” proposed by critics such as Prasad is not paramount. It is this class that suffers, more directly than others, the violence of feudal and state overlords. Gabbar helps draw attention to an India that the state has forgotten or wishes to forget, providing an urgent reminder of those living below or outside middle-class purview. His person and presence counter the Jai-Veeru appeal addressed to the middle classes and their aspirations, and his counter-hegemonic stance addresses a subaltern culture to which it extends the bounty of voice and the hope of political inclusion.
Along with Gabbar, the figure of the Thakur also gets reconfigured in the film’s latent narrative. Rather than rejecting the Thakur outright, Sholay’s viewers seemed to identify with him. If his suffering is melodramatic and unrealistic, theirs is not. While the Thakur loses his entire family to Gabbar’s bullets in the film, the subalterns lose theirs to Sanjay Gandhi’s bulldozers and his aggressive sterilization campaigns in everyday life. In exaggerating the sufferings of a ruling class, the film paradoxically ended up providing a believable portrait of India’s underclass, one that viewers voraciously absorbed in their consumption and discovery of Sholay’s latent content. Sholay’s revenge plot allows a coexistence (or sangam) between latent and manifest content, absorbing the aspirations of multiply-motivated viewers and simultaneously allowing for the coexistence of profoundly contradictory ideologies and identifications.
CONCLUSION
Despite differences in compulsion and composition, Kapoor’s triptych and Sholay both align with post-Independence India’s underclasses and articulate their attractions to and disenchantments from the social contract. Like Awara and Shree 420, which were both committed to the “little man,” Sholay’s latent plot in which Gabbar appears also speaks to that figure and brings his needs and preoccupations to the center of the screen. Like the Rajs in Kapoor’s films, Gabbar too represents public fantasies. He too addresses a fractured civil society and a national dream irretrievably shattered. His use of violence and confrontation dramatizes the form of public control exercised on the subalterns, but it is not to be mistaken as an endorsement of action by them. Gabbar provides a potent tutorial (not dissimilar to Raj’s on Chowpatty Beach in Shree 420) on the urgency of retrieving and recalibrating a national fantasy to include the little man and his concerns. The figure of Amjad Khan, the actor who played Gabbar, provides a small but powerful biographical detail connecting him to Kapoor’s social vision beyond the logic of a role: Amjad Khan made his screen debut in 1957 playing Lachchu in Kapoor’s Ab Dilli Dur Nahin.
Though Sippy’s film shares much with Kapoor’s, it also diverges from the earlier oeuvre in key points. The two appear almost a quarter century apart. Much changed in the four years between Shree 420 and Ab Dilli Dur Nahin, and even more between Dilli and Sholay. It is not just that the era of the red rose had come to an end with the death of Nehru. It is also that Nehru’s wide class base was fractured in the Age of Indira. The center of gravity from the 1950s’ oeuvre, with its slum dwellers, sidewalk sleepers, and urban migrants as the focal point of screen and narrative, has given way in Sholay to a narrative dominated by the concerns of an aspiring middle class. Kapoor’s soft-focus critique of that class is edgier and more direct in Sholay. If Raj in the earlier films can display national icons as backdrops to his ideology (fig. 2.25), Sholay exposes the narcissism of 1970s’ ruling elites, who surround themselves with self-portraits to promote their claims to social ascendancy, as the Thakur does in his somber office (fig. 2.26).
Yet the heterogeneous subjects in these different bodies of work separated by a quarter century share one thing—a passionate, even persistent sense of what could have been but is not. Both sets of work provide ways of managing desires for that beautiful dream as well as regret over its demise. They both provide ways to contain, displace, and conceal large-scale public desires. They provide tutorials and critiques and embed melancholy and memory for the many fantasies that Nehru tried to combine into the idea of India. Raj Kapoor’s ideal and idealized social solutions satisfied the fantasies of a post-Independence public keen to believe in political and institutional solutions to social problems. With Sholay, audiences discovered their nightmares projected on screen in films that outlined the inner lives and fears of viewers. If Raj Kapoor’s films from the 1950s talked to Nehru’s utopian nationalism, Sholay talked (and talked back to) his daughter, Indira’s. In Sholay’s public fantasy, audiences had their fears both acknowledged and played out, and in this regard Sholay did much to “give reality to our dreams” as Nehru had urged in the “tryst with destiny” speech from 1947.
FIGURES 2.25 AND 2.26 Raj with Rita and Nehru’s picture in background (Shree 420). (Courtesy Yash Raj Films) / The Thakur (right) and jailer with pictures of the Thakur and his class at the Police Academy in background (Sholay).
(COURTESY EROS ENTERTAINMENT)
It is this process of talking and talking back that marks Sholay as distinct from the body of revenge films, frequently starring Amitabh Bachchan, that it spawned and with which it is frequently associated. In contrast to that cinema of immediate reaction, Sholay’s narrative and visual density made demands on its audience to contemplate, absorb, and reflect on images and desires projected for the first time on a 70mm screen. The result was, initially, stunned silence. “There was no reaction. . . . As on the premiere night, there was only silence,” records the writer Anupama Chopra of the film’s opening night (Chopra 2001:163). A week later, the theaters started filling up, and one owner informed Ramesh Sippy that his film was a hit, “because the sales of my soft drinks and ice creams are going down. . . . By the interval, the audience is so stunned that they are not coming out of the theatre,” he explained (Chopra 2001:169). As viewers began to get the film, or parts of it, they returned for more, and kept returning for the multiple viewings that catapulted Sholay’s enduring success.
The encounter with Sholay was not short-lived. It required and requited a dialogue, both as noun, and as verb. One was in dialogue with Sholay, with its manifest and latent plots, with their contradictions and opportunities, a dialogue that began in the silence of absorption that marked Sholay’s first public screenings. Its latent plot inverted the manifest. Gabbar, paradoxically, contained Jai and the propulsive star power that Amitabh Bachchan had accrued by 1975 with Zanjeer (Chains, Prakash Mehra, 1973), Deewaar (The wall, Yash Chopra, released earlier the same year; see chapter 3), and now Sholay. In contrast to these Bachchan starrers that created and eventually destroyed an industry, Sholay had one crucial element none of the Bachchan revenge films of the later 1970s and 1980s had: Gabbar. Sholay’s complex latent plot required reflection not (re)action. Gabbar’s actions were so outrageous that they halted imitation. Jai’s on the other hand had a logic that was familiar and even rational. He would spawn imitators, and had to be eradicated. It is no accident that he has to die in Sholay.
However, in the cinema that followed without Gabbar’s cautionary presence, Bachchan’s characters proceeded unchecked in films such as Andha Kanoon (Blind justice, T. Rama Rao, 1983), Inquilab (Revolution, T. Rama Rao, 1984), and Aaj ka Arjun (Today’s Arjun, K. C. Bokadia, 1990). Unrestrained by a Gabbar figure, Bachchan’s avenging characters think nothing of gunning down brothers, friends, and even all of Parliament before disappearing in smoke themselves (as Bachchan’s character did in Inquilab). If audiences could not like Gabbar, they would not imitate him. With Bachchan’s characters, on the other hand, there was much to like and so less to restrain imitation. With these films, regrets the scholar Ziauddin Sardar, “society disappeared into a nebulous background blur, social justice was replaced with implausible, ridiculous scenarios of avenging personal wrongs,” a depiction that aptly captures one of the darkest periods in Hindi cinema (Sardar 49–50). The diegetic violence associated with Bachchan’s angry films underscores the gulf between this cinema and the 1950s, a decade “when culture, decency, and idealism prevailed. Those were the times of Jawaharlal Nehru,” lamented Javed Akhtar, who scripted most of Bachchan’s angry films.49 Bachchan’s oeuvre reveals two legacies that originate in his birthplace, Allahabad. One legacy is associated with Nehru and the other with his daughter, Indira; one with the rule of law and the other with the outlaw; one with unity, the other with rupture. After Bachchan (or Indira), sangam was no longer possible.
But before that decade arrived, and even alongside it, there appeared a corpus of films that pursued public nightmares not personal desires, social problems not ideals, criminals not solutions. In that corpus, which the following chapter analyzes, popular Hindi cinema seemed to have found a way to manage public fantasies and to be them when necessary.
