BOLLYWOOD HAS IT ROUGH IN the new millennium. The cinema competes in a dense entertainment ecosystem that includes television, print, the internet, radio, cricket, social media, and gaming, all nimbly delivering content skillfully niched to consumers. In 2013 the Indian film industry of which Bollywood is a part came third in revenues behind television and print.1 Meanwhile, as the previous chapter detailed, the influx of capital into the newly recognized industry in the millennium failed to deliver the anticipated hits. In a 2012 industry report commissioned by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the consulting firm KPMG cautiously names the year a moment of “Digital Dawn” (the title of the report). Bollywood’s A-list producers, Yash Chopra and Karan Johar (who coauthored the report’s foreword), remark on the “mixed fortunes” and “hyper competition” that India’s media and entertainment industry faces. Any certitudes on what audiences “wanted” seem up for grabs in this new dawn, they conclude.2 Anil Arjun, the CEO of Reliance MediaWorks, one of the largest corporate entities to enter Indian film, observes that “films which are termed ‘Mass’ . . . and expected to do well in Tier 2 and 3 locations have also done extremely well in urban centers with Tier 1 audiences. . . . Alternatively, the urban centric stories . . . which were traditionally targeted towards metro audiences have done extremely well in smaller centers.” Arjun’s remark illuminates a cinema whose audiences create its fortunes largely on their own, apparently ignoring the corporate interests that manage distribution and screening by establishing “tiered” markets. Notwithstanding predictions, films defy their destined tiers and routinely reach audiences outside them. Observing this trend, Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO of UTV Motion Pictures (an Indian subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company), offers: “such cinema works at [the] box office provided it guarantees entertainment to the audience.”3
Neither Arjun nor Kapur addresses how cinema works at the box office or what entertainment it guarantees to its audiences. In a document invested in quantifying the industry and reporting on outcomes not processes, KPMG’s report relegates content to the general category “entertainment,” leaving the substance of the cinema absent from discussion. In KPMG’s 2013 report, film’s revenues behind other media such as television and print are explained by market fragmentation. Here as well, content is largely ignored, even when the industry’s main stakeholders ponder ways to reach a broader audience: “The vision set out for the sector, of engaging communities, entails reaching out and understanding multiple segments, creating greater connect, and leveraging this connect to influence for the greater social good.”4 At a moment when distribution, exhibition, and markets are being exhaustively analyzed, when single-screen theaters are being refurbished for digital screening, when the multiplex is expanding vertically to provide luxury entertainment at the hitherto unimagined cost of INR 1,000 a ticket (approximately $20) and downwards to Nukkad theaters (literally, corner theaters) with tickets priced at INR 15, or 30 cents,5 the industry underscores its seriousness about “reaching multiple segments” absent a recognition of content’s central role in “creat[ing] greater connect” and “influence[ing] the greater social good.”
Bollylite’s strategies from the early years of the twenty-first century to focus on well-heeled viewers by purveying content and exhibition targeted to gentrifying tastes seem to be nearing a conclusive demise. Niche production and marketing still prevail, but without providing the returns that make them worthwhile. The multiplex boom documented in the previous chapter continues, but not quite in the form anticipated a decade ago when it was regarded as auguring the single screen’s death. At the time of writing, single screens continue to bring in box office revenues, and industry figures document that “in reality, the per show revenue of the single screen is higher than that of multiplex[es],” which are now obliged to program broadly popular fare such as World Cup cricket matches to offset declining feature film revenues from the distracted middle- and upper-middle-class viewer.6 As chains like Nukkad take off, a version of the single screen is being reborn for lower- and lower-middle-class viewers in previously under-served regions.7 The masses, such data underscore, are getting content and exhibition venues much as they did in the previous century. Moreover, as content destined for one tier crosses over to others, the margins are closer to the mainstream than their designation implies.
Concluding a book about Bollywood as public fantasy when both Bollywood and public fantasy remain present has challenges, but also opportunities. Bollywood’s India focuses on the content in the cinema and outlines a set of preoccupations that characterize the cinema called Bollywood. As some of the procedures within the cinema have changed, as its financing, production, distribution, and exhibition are transformed, as the relation between the cinema and its audiences undergoes shifts in a media environment dominated by the internet and the opportunity for on-demand viewing, the cinema’s social responsiveness has persisted even when the subjects of response are different today than they were in previous decades.
This Epilogue sketches Bollywood’s persistence in what some claim to be a “New” India. It outlines the cinema’s skillful retrofitting of novelty in remarks framed around two recent blockbusters, Lage Raho Munnabhai (2006) and 3 Idiots (2009). Rather than being full-scale critical analyses of these films, the remarks are illustrative of trends in recent cinema and are applicable to other blockbusters as well. The Epilogue concludes by offering areas of further research in a rapidly transforming environment.
. . .
Bollywood is thriving in spirit and substance in the current moment. The cinema’s continued ambition to reach the widest audience in the present media environment echoes aspirations from the decades immediately following Independence when it confronted a different set of challenges. During that moment, as this book details, the industry had little state support, infrastructure and exhibition were cottage industries, studios were in decline, notwithstanding which the cinema secured audiences across regions and classes and kept them there for almost half a century. A large reason it did so resides in the content of particular blockbusters that captured the public fantasies of the day in an enduring cocktail of stories, stars, music, and tropes.
This study identifies social responsiveness as the defining feature of the cinema named Bollywood and shows how Bollywood’s appeal lies in its ability to capture audiences by addressing dispersed apprehensions and aspirations. The content of the cinema—its narratives, their treatment, the constellation of tropes, and their mise-en-scènes—became features that conveyed cultural capital upon Bollywood’s blockbusters that made, remade, and unmade “India.” Ideas about “India” were a central preoccupation of the cinema, and the cinema nimbly evolved to address them.
With the onset of economic liberalization in the 1990s, India’s economic and social landscape changed. More people joined the middle classes in the decade following economic liberalization in 1991 than they did in the four decades following Independence in 1947.8 The gentrification of the social order ushered a gentrification in the cinema as well. The influx of capital from new corporate partners in the millennium ushered global ambitions that have led some to claim the cinema of the post-1990s as the cinema of global capital addressed to those who aspire to it.9 What gets lost in the bland summary is the unevenness of neoliberalism’s economic and social processes that occurred fitfully and sporadically across the past quarter century, leaving large swathes untouched or unfairly touched by liberalization’s bounty in India. The social tensions of the 1970s have persisted in kind if not degree alongside other tensions introduced by the neoliberal economy. The cinema continues to address these anxieties frontally in blockbusters that, like those of the preceding decades, travel widely, reaching the fragmented market lamented in the KPMG media industry reports.
Cinema remains a key player in India’s public culture despite lagging behind television and print in revenues. Much of cinema’s content gets another run on television and the internet. Its blockbusters continue to address the anxieties of the moment. If the state is no longer the sole object of critique, its institutions are. Rather than the police and judiciary being singled out as they were in films such as Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Shree 420 (1955), Sholay (1975), Deewaar (1975), and Shakti (1982), other institutions such as the education system, healthcare, the media, and the labor market come under scrutiny alongside corruption, land grabs, terrorism, organized crime, social stigmas, and what some identify as the “new” Indian family. In its responsiveness to the idea of “India,” Bollywood today remains consistent with its past from the 1970s, even as its treatment and emphases have inevitably evolved, occasionally borrowing from the procedures identified with Bollylite as detailed in the previous chapter.
Blockbusters such as Lage Raho Munnabhai (Keep at it, Munnbhai, 2006) and 3 Idiots (2009), both directed by Rajkumar Hirani and produced by Vinod Chopra, skillfully manage corporate interests (inserted in lengthy opening slides that preface both films) and the media (the theme of Lage Raho) in works that radically critique the nature of new wealth in twenty-first-century India. Unlike the tortured Vijay from Deewaar who roves Bombay as a solitary fixer for the criminal underworld, Lage Raho features the affable gangster, Munna, in the company of his loyal sidekick, Circuit, who calls him Bhai (brother) and is always nearby, even when Munna has his morning tryst over the airwaves with the radio jockey, Jhanvi. Where Deewaar’s dark violence is visually paired with its somber colors and claustrophobic cinematography, Lage Raho’s violence is coated in cheerful South Beach hues accompanied by a kinetic camera. When Munna discovers Jhanvi’s devotion to Gandhian principles, he rushes to acquire them as well, eventually hallucinating that M. K. Gandhi himself is standing and speaking by his side.
Lage Raho’s latent critique of ruthless land grabs obliges Munna to make choices between accumulating kinship (the woman of his dreams) or capital (from his criminal activities). His transformation from being street muscle to hosting a live radio call-in talk show in which he espouses a version of Gandhi’s nonviolent philosophy that he delivers in Mumbai gangster argot spawned critical detractors who found the film’s resolution superficial and distracting from the crises it identifies.10 Notwithstanding Lage Raho’s manifest protests over the consumerism and the superficiality of Mumbai’s yuppies, youth prevail in the film over the aged; violence, or its threats, prevails over Gandhian nonviolence; and humor, music, and Munna’s hallucinations of the nation’s great soul cheerfully accept quite a bit of chicanery. Munna’s fusion of selected Gandhian philosophy with gangster efficiencies fixes quite a few problems. It enables rapprochements between Munna and Jhanvi, and between parents and children; it publicly exposes a corrupt astrologer; and it reforms the rapacious land developer threatening Munna and Jhanvi, transformations all achieved by Munna’s earnest radio broadcasts, or his (and Circuit’s) weapons.
The critical insistence that Lage Raho is not serious or serious enough misses the point of both film and Bollywood. The density of M. K. Gandhi’s philosophy, its idiosyncratic nature, and its rambling articulations do not lend themselves easily to film of any kind, much less to popular cinema.11 For a man whose image appears on Indian rupee notes of every denomination, whose name appears on a street in virtually every Indian city, whose image graces interiors in most public institutions, Gandhi is curiously absent from popular culture. For the scholar Ashis Nandy, “Gandhian values are more like a potentiality incompatible with both classical and some aspects of the popular and can appeal to these sectors only under specific conditions.”12 Lage Raho’s revival of the Mahatma gives him a second inning, and the figure has to appear as hallucination, a shadow of Gandhi’s “real” self that was incomprehensible even to those who knew him.13
The Gandhi that script writers Rajkumar Hirani and Abhijat Joshi fabricate in the Bollywood blockbuster is a device, much as Nehru was in Raj Kapoor’s films, a figure both borrowed and abstracted from history. Bollywood’s Gandhi provides not a tutorial on the author of Hind Swaraj (1909) but a tutorial on modern citizenship. Surrounded by forces immune to decency, the desperate citizen of post-liberalization India learns to conduct his own version of passive resistance by offering his underwear to a corrupt pension officer demanding a bribe. The public self-humiliation works, and the pensioner rapidly receives his pension.
Such is Bollywood’s version of Gandhi’s message, not espousing nonviolence, per se, but providing appropriate weapons for the weak. For scholars such as Nandy, Gandhi’s appearance in Lage Raho offers a reminder to a new generation that “someone in this very country dared to experiment with another kind of politics, defying the academic and bureaucratic canons and, while this other politics might be taboo in the high culture of the Indian state, it still makes sense to millions in the world.”14 Nandy’s account of Lage Raho places Gandhi as the engine of critique, rather than the cinema of Bollywood, as this study does. Likewise, others remarking on Lage Raho observe the blockbuster’s inevitable refashioning of the historical figure, missing perhaps that the film is not about Gandhi. Lage Raho is about Munna—and India.
The figures of Gandhi and Munna become ways to address an India entirely alien to the Mahatma—and itself. Confronting a moment when the state, corporate interests, global ambition, and outsize greed collaborate on massive land grabs that remove inconvenient residents from prized real estate by any means possible, Gandhi’s methods against the colonial state from the previous century are remade, this time to address the enemy within. The arrival of this Gandhi—of any Gandhi—in popular film absorbs attention away from the conflicts the figure putatively addresses. Thus, Lage Raho’s detractors reference the film’s contradictions and inaccuracies over the biographical record, rather than its depiction of practices convulsing many parts of India caught in the often destructive vortex of neoliberal development.
Like Bollywood’s blockbusters from past decades that form the core of this study, contemporary blockbusters such as Lage Raho continue to play a role in addressing public fantasies, without necessarily redressing them. Lage Raho has no “solution” to offer in the battles against real estate developers. Its comic depiction of passive resistance barely hides the brutality inflicted on an aged schoolteacher who has to beg for his pension. However, alongside Lage Raho’s skillful cinematography, which renders Mumbai a convivial media utopia, the film’s pitch-perfect casting and toe-tapping music also deftly convey a ruthless India where a home for senior citizens can be razed for its valuable land on a bureaucratic technicality, where a son exiles his inconveniently ageing parent, and where the only choice available is a wallet or a bullet as Lucky, the real estate developer, offers his victims.
Land grabs, which are Lage Raho’s core conflict, have long been present in Bollywood as Shree 420 (1955), Deewaar (1975), and Trishul (1978), among others in the present study, reveal. However, in the earlier blockbusters, land was grabbed for and by the working and middle classes—as Raj tried to do in Shree 420 or as Vijay and his developer father attempted in Trishul. In today’s India, on the other hand, land is grabbed from the middle and working classes, as Lage Raho underscores with Lucky’s efforts to claim the senior residence for a high-rise. No one and nothing are safe in the greedy neoliberal race.15 Bollywood’s articulation of this violence and the cinema’s representation of its widespread practice, much like the cinema’s articulation of gendered violence in films such as Bobby (chapter 4), underscore the form’s engagement with and as public culture. Lage Raho’s manifest visual and aural pleasures sugarcoat its more sinister latent content, much as Bollywood’s blockbusters from the past half century did for the anxieties of the day.
Across the decades of this study, Bollywood’s blockbusters have conducted a dialogue over the idea of “India,” recognizing that cleavage rather than coherence is its dominant topos. In recent blockbusters, the social embrace of what the anthropologist Ron Inden called “commercial utopia” (characteristic of films from the early moment of economic liberalization in the mid-1990s) is balanced in the cinema with caution over liberalization’s social costs.16 Thus, the extraordinary wealth of a Lamborghini-sporting Raj in DDLJ (1995) is considerably tempered a decade and a half later. The 2009 blockbuster 3 Idiots opens with a successful engineer gloating over a photo of his Lamborghini and swimming pool in Silicon Valley, sneering that a long-desired meeting with a reclusive Indian inventor, Phunsukh Wangdu, will propel him to unimaginable wealth. “Look at me, and look at you idiots!” he boasts to his former engineering college classmates. The film closes with Phunsukh Wangdu being none other than the Silicon Valley engineer’s one-time college nemesis, an inventor who checked out during the rush for global gold for a more rewarding alternative far outside the corridors of soul-destroying corporate labor. The Lamborghini and private plane that featured so flamboyantly in DDLJ give way to solar-powered vehicles and bicycle-powered washers in Wangdu’s social utopia, which concludes 3 Idiots. Bollywood refocuses the novelist Chetan Bhagat’s reform-of-Indian-education novel, Five Point Someone (2004), into a wider critique of neoliberal social values that prioritize economic wealth over individual worth, objects over subjects.
3 Idiots’s exuberant conclusion has dissenters from India’s neoliberal dream convene in a border zone resembling an ashram. There, a woman who fled a loveless trophy marriage, an engineer who tossed a career to pursue a calling, and the reclusive inventor-turned-teacher stage a romance to counter the aspirational world of Lamborghinis that now grovels before them. The film concludes in Ladakh, a state on India’s political borders far outside its metropolises and their hubs of economic production. The “idiots” in the film have to rove all over India in a Volvo (a brand associated with a country fabled for its “Third Way”) in search of it. When they finally arrive and find Wangdu, they discover a place both within and without, an alternative to and a reminder of the “India” that should be but is not. The entrepreneurial zeal that takes India’s engineers to Silicon Valley is refashioned in Wangdu’s borderland “ashram” where young inventors propose human and bio-power solutions to address India’s needs, not Silicon Valley’s. Lambdas replace Lamborghinis in Wangdu’s “Ladakh,” where everybody is equal, educated, and has electricity. If all this sounds somewhat “Gandhian,” it is, recalling Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram with its social experiments in equality and entrepreneurship. Of course, somewhat typically, Bollywood’s Wangdu is rich, far richer than Sabarmati’s, capable of buying out the Silicon Valley braggart.
Meanwhile, in a series of political films that contend with the threats of global terror and the state’s feeble responses to it, Bollywood stages the ideals of India more directly. In the thriller, A Wednesday (Neeraj Pandey, 2008), the call against a hamstrung state apparatus is delivered by a lone vigilante who holds Bombay captive while he executes four men responsible for masterminding a decade of terror on the citizens of India. The vigilante’s critique of the state and its defunct due processes is so persuasive that it has to be expunged from official records and can only be recalled in the twilight memories of a retired police commissioner who finds himself unable to confront or arrest the vigilante. In Kahaani (Story, Sujoy Ghosh, 2012), an India that has turned against itself in the form of a rogue double agent who drops chemical weapons in a subway car can only speak from the grave, leaving its future stillborn. The film’s female detective insists on speaking to a dead man whose child she pretends to carry, articulating the direness of a political identity whose past and future are largely inconceivable.
. . .
These concluding remarks about the socially responsive and engaged popular cinema named Bollywood reveal both similarities and differences across the decades of this study and usher directions for future research. In India’s present media ecology, the travel of films across carefully tiered and niched markets is also accompanied by the arrival of new forms that include indies, fanvids (fan videos), and local productions, all enabled by inexpensive technology and new media platforms for production, distribution, and exhibition. Beyond the notion of Bollywood, the very concept of “blockbuster” now needs to account not just for films that break national records as those in this study have. As Hindi cinema moves into the new millennium, the concept of “blockbusters” that guided the present study may need to be reconsidered to include films that sustain local records and regional capital in claiming the popular (thus, blockbusters with the emphasis on “block” as a smaller unit than current). If Bollywood today is being remade elsewhere as some are beginning to suggest, future scholarship will need to contend with Bollywood’s legacies and afterlives outside the mainstream and beyond the prism of the 1970s, as Bollywoo d’s India pursues.17
Above all, the industry’s own bafflement over its product and processes as captured in KPMG’s reports underscores this study’s core claims. Narrative and content dominate in the cinema; production and distribution practices play a smaller part in determining the overall product. In India’s evolving public culture, the stories in the cinema and their forms of appeal play the major role in finding and preserving audiences, a detail evidently overlooked by the corporate moguls and A-list producers who collaborated on the KPMG reports. What some name India’s global self is engaged and refuted in this cinema across the decades. The diaspora that once was the global self in Bollylite hits (see chapter 4) is now reconstituted, even rebuff ed, in the more recent iteration, as blockbusters such as 3 Idiots adumbrate. Globalization in the present cinema is often regarded as a means to an end, rather than a destination in itself.
Rather than narrowing the notion of “India,” Bollywood’s blockbusters continue to expand it, remaining the site where versions of the nation are played out and retrieved. As long as the cinema engages with public fantasies of the day, there will continue to be a Bollywood, even if one day it migrates from Bombay.