PREFACE: THE SOCIAL WORK OF CINEMA
1. Bunny Reuben, “An Open Letter to Raj Kapoor,” Star and Style, April 30, 1971, 10. Chapter 2 further addresses Raj Kapoor and his funk in Chembur following the failure of Mera Nam Joker.
1. BOLLYWOOD’S INDIA
1. In 1938, to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Indian film, M. K. Gandhi was asked for a message to congratulate the film industry, to which his secretary responded as above, noting: “As a rule, Gandhi gives messages only on rare occasions—and these only for causes whose virtue is ever undoubtful.” From Dipali, June 16, 1939, as quoted in Erik Barnouw and S. Krishnaswamy, Indian Film, 117n63.
Interviewed a decade earlier (in 1927) by the Indian Cinematograph Committee, Gandhi primly voiced his objections to the cinema: “Even if I was so minded, I should be unfit to answer your questionnaire, as I have never been to a cinema. But even to an outsider, the evil that it has done and is doing is patent. The good, if it has done any at all, remains to be proved.” Indian Cinematograph Committee, 1927–28, v. 3 (Calcutta: Govt. of India Central Publishing Branch), p. 56, as quoted in Rachel Dwyer, “The Case of the Missing Mahatma: Gandhi and the Hindi Cinema,” Public Culture 23.2 (2011): 349. Dwyer notes that Gandhi only saw part of one feature film during his lifetime, Vijay Bhatt’s devotional Ram Rajya (1943). Prime Minister Nehru meanwhile took an active interest in Indian film, dashing off letters on official stationary to filmmakers whom he personally admired, cultivating others such as Raj Kapoor, and serving, on occasion, as unofficial consultant to films such as Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957), to which he advised adding more songs and shooting a new beginning to celebrate industrial India besides the rural. Chapter 2 develops these themes.
2. Raj Kapoor as recorded in Siddharth Kak’s documentary, Raj Kapoor Lives (Bombay: Cinema Vision, 1987).
3. Jawaharlal Nehru, “Tryst with Destiny” (1947), in Salman Rushdie and Elizabeth West, eds., The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947–1997, 1, 2.
4. Benedict Anderson develops the role of “imagining” national consciousness, which he locates in two transformative innovations of print capital: the novel and the newspaper. In the case of India, neither form of print was likely to reach more than the 16-odd percent literate at Independence in 1947. Other forms of public transmission in India have more vitally played the role of “imagining” that print did in European nationalism. As Anderson acknowledges in a revised edition of his foundational work: the advent of broadcasting and what he elaborates as “advances in communication technology, especially radio and television, give print allies unavailable a century ago” (135). Film was one such ally in imagining modern India which, in Anderson’s evocative language, “helped give shape to a thousand inchoate dreams” (140). See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
5. See M. Madhava Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction, 9; Sumita Chakravarty’s pioneering, National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema, 1947–1987; and Jyotika Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation: Indian Popular Films as Social History.
6. In Max Weber’s memorable phrase, the state has “a monopoly on legitimate violence” that it affirms through institutions such as the army, the civil service bureaucracy, the judiciary, and elected representatives. See Weber, Politics as a Vocation, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills.
7. The concept of third space was developed by Ray Oldenburg in The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day. The historian Bryant Simon has a powerful chapter on Starbucks’ claims over Oldenburg’s concepts; see Simon, “It Looks like a Third Place,” in Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America from Starbucks, 82–121.
8. Freud’s analytical project has tended to be remembered by this phrase alone, and not by the equally important sentence that follows which underscores how crucially narration enables the “transformation” of misery to unhappiness: “With a mental life that has been restored to health, [the patient] will be better armed against that unhappiness.” Sigmund Freud, “The Psychotherapy of Hysteria,” in Josef Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey with Anna Freud, 305.
9. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act, 61–62.
10. Chapters 2 and 3 elaborate on these themes more fully. Consider two titles (of many possible) that use concepts developed in psychoanalysis to understand very different historical phenomena: Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, and Françoise Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Métissage.
11. Ernst Renan, “What Is a Nation?” (1882), trans. Martin Thom, in Homi Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration, 19.
12. The political theorist, Sunil Khilnani, has called Bombay with its cinema industry India’s “cultural capital . . . permanently lodged in the popular imagination as a totem of modern India itself.” See Khilnani, The Idea of India, 137.
13. It is remarkable how little scholarship there is on the Emergency in contrast, for example, to the aftermath of Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 or the destruction of the Babri Mosque in December 1992. Until recently, those interested in studying the Emergency had to turn to fiction (which added to the mythology of the period). Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) has a dark chapter on it called “Midnight”; and Rohinton Mistry’s novel, A Fine Balance (1995), is more centrally focused on the period. Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us (1985) is set during the Emergency, but it focuses on a set of social and domestic crises for which the period seems a backdrop.
Even recent scholarly works seem to echo this strange diplomacy toward the Emergency: the index to Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy provides no listing for the Emergency, whose events are instead indexed under Indira Gandhi, “authoritarian methods.” Popular film, meanwhile, has addressed the period as an inscribed absence: never quite frontally, but always with presence and persistence in works as widely different as Sholay (1975; chap. 2), Deewaar (The wall, Yash Chopra, 1975; chap. 3), and Roti Kapda aur Makaan (Food clothing and housing, Manoj Kumar, 1974). In contrast to Bollywood, the New Cinema of the 1970s that addressed political topics of the day more frontally “appears, in hindsight, relatively marginal” contends Ashish Rajadhyaksha in “The Indian Emergency: Aesthetics of State Control,” Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency, 241. Meanwhile, the pogroms that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 rapidly received serious scholarly attention by figures such as Veena Das and Amitav Ghosh; and the riots of 1992–93 have an entire library call number devoted to them. Neither popular cinema nor fiction have been reticent on these latter moments either; both powerfully contributed to the public conversation as films such as Bombay (Mani Ratnam, 1995) and Zakhm (Wounds, Mahesh Bhatt, 1998) among many others show. The Emergency period is an anomaly for its dearth of scholarly analysis, one that this study along with other works cited throughout attempts to redress (see Rajadhyaksha, Tarlo, and Vitali for notable contributions). For an elaboration of some of these themes, see Priya Joshi and Rajinder Dudrah, eds., The 1970s and Its Legacies in India’s Cinema, and also Joshi and Dudrah, “The 1970s and Its Legacies in India’s Cinema,” in a Special Issue of South Asian Popular Culture 10.1 (2012): 1–5.
14. Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi, 2; see also Arvind Rajagopal, “The Emergency as Prehistory of the New Indian Middle Class,” Modern Asian Studies 45.5 (2011): 1003–1049.
15. Indira Gandhi’s Twenty-Point Programme, instituted during the Emergency, was ostensibly initiated to eradicate poverty, but it equally skillfully set up mechanisms to further class divisions. Items #1–12 of the Programme were pro–rural poor (involving land redistribution, housing, the elimination of bonded labor and rural indebtedness; more delivery of power, water, etc.). Items 12–16 leaned toward an anti-wealthy platform (#12: “special squads for . . . conspicuous constructions and prevention of tax evasions”; #13: “confiscation of smugglers’ properties”; #14: “action against misuse of import licenses”). The last four were reserved for middle-class interests (#17: “income tax relief for the middle classes”; #18: “essential commodities at controlled prices to students”; #19: “books and stationary at controlled prices”; and #20: “new apprenticeship scheme to enlarge employment.”
On paper, the revolutionary socialism of the Programme looks assured: to help India’s poor and working families by pursuing conspicuous excesses of the rich. In practice, the Programme underscored Mrs. Gandhi’s fabled divisive tactics: to regulate the rich by fear (of confiscation of property or prosecution for corruption) and to placate the poor by programs designed to capture their votes. (Ironically, even after Mrs. Gandhi’s electoral defeat in 1977, the TPP, as it is called, remains in effect, and a 2006 version eliminates the anti-rich and pro-middle-class points for a program almost entirely targeting rural poverty.)
16. Valentina Vitali’s Hindi Action Cinema: Industries, Narratives, Bodies usefully connects the economic environment of the 1970s with films that were produced during the decade. See esp. 184–229.
17. The notion of cinema “gentrifying” has been developed with nuance in Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry.
18. Ashis Nandy, “Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics,” in Ashis Nandy, ed., The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema, 5.
19. The term “malltiplex” is Amit Rai’s; see his chapter “On the Malltiplex Mutagen in India” in Untimely Bollywood: Globalization and India’s New Media Assemblage, 133–78.
20. See H. R. F. Keating’s Filmi, Filmi, Inspector Ghote (1976), credited in the OED for first using the term “Bollywood” in print. It bears mentioning that film was obliged to function through informal networks of accounting, distribution, and finance since it was denied industry status that would have allowed access to low-cost bank loans and other forms of secured financing. All this changed in 1998 when the state conferred industry status on film, and much changed again in the new millennium (see chapter 4).
21. See Madhava Prasad, “This Thing Called Bollywood,” Seminar (May 2003). Sangita Gopal cites an Indian journalist, Bevinda Collaco, for using the term in 1978, a few years after Keating’s coinage. See Gopal, Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema, 11.
22. Amitabh Bachchan’s discomfort of the term has been widely recorded. “Today when I go abroad, and I am introduced . . . they refer to me as a Bollywood star. Why? For a country that produces the highest number of films, why must we carry a Hollywood crutch? Why that word? Why not something else? Don’t we deserve better? In the final analysis, it all stems out of a deep-rooted complex.” Recorded in Bhawana Somaaya, Amitabh Bachchan: The Legend, 197 (emphasis in original).
23. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4.1 (2003): 25–39. Rajadhyaksha’s work serves as a reminder of other preoccupations and productions from the 1970s that the term “Bollywood” neither captures nor coincides with.
24. The ideological commitments associated with the cinema called Bollywood have been propelled to a new level by an influx of capital. And with this influx, as the anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti shows in her decade-long ethnography of the industry, the cinema underwent a process of what she calls “gentrification” which displaced “the poor and working classes from the spaces of production and consumption” (Ganti, Producing Bolly wood, 4; also her chapter, “From Slumdogs to Millionaires: The Gentrification of Hindi Cinema,” ibid., 77–118). Sangita Gopal’s schema of Hindi cinema identifies the cinema following liberalization as “New Bollywood,” claiming it a “radically new art form that must be analyzed on its own terms.” See Gopal, Conjugations, 14, emphasis added. For Gopal, aesthetics (“art”) rather than ideology differentiates the cinema following liberalization from what preceded it. In short, she sees ruptures in the cinema where others see continuities.
25. In a vivid ethnography of Indian elections, the anthropologist Mukulika Banerjee documents: “The electorate [in the national elections of 2009] has nearly 715 million voters, 1 million voting machines, nearly 7 million polling stations, and 543 constituencies in a country of enormous linguistic, cultural, and physical variety. Two million people serve as officials to conduct the elections and the results are declared within less than 12 hours of the final vote being cast, and with negligible instances of recount.” See Mukulika Banerjee, “Elections as Communitas,” in Social Research 78.1 (Spring 2011): 88–89 (in a Special Issue titled India’s World, ed. Arjun Appadurai).
26. Sudipta Kaviraj, “The Imaginary Institution of India,” in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, eds., Subaltern Studies VII: Writing on South Asian History and Society, 2.
27. Mani Ratnam, Dil Se (From the heart, 1998). Author’s translations.
28. As reports concur, “India Now” was a major branding exercise involving a $5 million budget with key support from business and political leaders. See “Delhi in Davos: How India Built its Brand at the World Economic Forum,” Knowledge at Wharton, February 22, 2006 (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1394).
29. In a widely cited paper from 2003, Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman argue: “If things go right, in less than 40 years, the BRICs economies together could be larger than the G6 in US dollar terms. By 2025 they could account for over half the size of the G6. Currently they are worth less than 15%. Of the current G6, only the US and Japan may be among the six largest economies in US dollar terms in 2050. . . . India’s economy, for instance, could be larger than Japan’s by 2032.” Following the 2008 economic crisis, growth stalled in most G6 countries. India, on the other hand, has seen a “downturn” in growth from almost 9% to 5% in 2013, a figure that would be enviable in the United States as well as other G6 nations. Thus, while the Goldman Sachs paper predates the economic crisis, its conclusions about India’s growth prospects have yet to be obviated by the aftermath of the 2008 global collapse. See Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, “Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050,” Global Economics Paper #99 (Goldman Sachs, October 2003) (see www.goldmansachs.com/ceoconfidential/CEO-2003–12.pdf).
30. Rachel Dwyer makes a similar point about Shobha Dé’s novels where “‘foreign’ is a place without foreigners for it is always peopled exclusively by South Asians” (as cited in Christopher Pinney, “Public, Popular, and Other Cultures,” in Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, eds., Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics and Consumption of Public Culture in India, 13).
31. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 130.
32. For a fuller elaboration of these themes, see Joshi and Dudrah, “The 1970s and Its Legacies in India’s Cinemas,” 1–5.
33. For key examples of research primarily focused on industry practices rather than on narratives of the cinema, see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid; Valentina Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema; Tejaswini Ganti, Producing Bollywood; Adrian Athique and Douglas Hill, The Multiplex in India: A Cultural Economy of Urban Leisure; Amit S. Rai, Untimely Bollywood; and Swarnavel Eswaran Pillai, “The 1970s Tamil Cinema and the Post-Classical Turn,” South Asian Popular Culture 10:1 (2012): 77–90, with Pillai’s especially useful discussion of how the arrival of the lightweight Arriflex 35-2c camera enabled location shooting and loosened—literally—the studio’s “hold” over Tamil cinema and its stars (see Pillai, pp. 82–85).
2. CINEMA AS PUBLIC FANTASY
1. Raj Kapoor, “Self Portrait,” Filmfare 15.24 (November 23, 1956): 7.
2. Some researchers such as Firoze Rangoonwalla observe that “Nehru brainwashed Mehboob Khan to make Mother India [1957, a remake of Mehboob’s 1940 Aurat]. He was looking for a more positive vision of Indian nationalism, not a grim reproduction of Indian rural life.” What Nehru got was an extended opening sequence with its docu-realist paean to 1950s agricultural hardware (tractors and earth movers) sutured on to a rural life whose grimness even lavish color could not redeem. (Rangoonwalla interview with the author, Mumbai, June 2003.)
3. Raj Kapoor, “My Films and I,” Filmfare 9.22 (October 21, 1960): 51.
4. Khilnani, The Idea of Indi a, 137.
5. Ashis Nandy, “The Popular Hindi Film: Ideology and First Principles,” India International Centre Quarterly, 92.
6. “One must analyse the particular illusion that the serial novel provides the people with and how this illusion changes through historical-political periods.” See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower, 376
7. Derek Malcolm, “Monarch,” The Guardian, June 4, 1988, 34.
8. The third major hit of the 1950s was Mehboob Khan’s Mother India (1957), which is discussed later in this chapter and figures again in chapter 3.
9. See “Raj Kapoor and the Golden Age of Indian Cinema,” Toronto International Film Festival (June 2011), at http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff belllightbox/2011/201104270054032 (accessed June 2011). Kapoor’s fame following Awara (1951) brought him to the United States and an audience with Harry Truman and another U.S. president in the making, Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actors Guild.
10. Madhu Jain, The Kapoors: The First Family of Indian Cinema, xvi. Jain reports that Indira Gandhi once sought the hand of Raj’s daughter, Ritu, for her son, Rajiv, a match that never took place (xv). “While the political family impinges on our public lives, the show business originals inveigle themselves into our intimate lives and fantasies, feeding our notions of romance, and even our notions of history,” she concludes (xvi).
11. Raj Kapoor’s penchant for spectacle had its origins in Awara’s fabled 9-minute dream sequence that transformed the film from a family melodrama to passionate social commentary. For a discussion, see Gayatri Chatterjee, Awara, 81–88; and Wimal Dissanayake and Malti Sahai, Raj Kapoor’s Films: Harmony of Discourses, 44–45. Later Kapoor films such as Sangam (1964) included an hour-long honeymoon sequence in Europe, though in contrast to Awara’s spectacle, the extended travel sequence did little to advance Sangam’s plot.
12. K. A. Abbas, “Raj Kapoor and the Writer,” Cinema India International (April–June 1985): 16.
13. See K. A. Abbas, “Thanks, Raj—and Damn You!” Filmfare 19.25 (December 4, 1970): 38 and 39, respectively. Abbas collaborated with Kapoor on numerous films for which he received the writing credit. In a reminiscence from 1970 published in a special issue on Raj Kapoor in Filmfare, Abbas recalled: “It is Raj Kapoor’s uncanny mastery of the box office, the intuitive grasp of what will appeal to the public, his subtle way of weaving in music, as an integral part of the narrative, his almost unequalled ability to purvey popular entertainment without pandering to the popular bad taste. It makes him, and his films, a uniquely powerful and potent medium for the transmission of ideas. Being a peddler and purveyor of ideas, that is very important for me. While no great ideologue, Raj Kapoor is not allergic to ideas. Indeed, with his basic sympathy for the cause of the common man, he is more than amenable to socially progressive ideas and humanist ideals, so long as their presentation does not interfere with the popular potential of his films” (Abbas, ibid., 39).
14. Allahabad’s role as a crucible for India’s democracy took an unexpected twist under Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi. Her 1971 election victory in Allahabad was challenged in the high court, and Mrs. Gandhi was found guilty of fraud. Shortly thereafter, she declared the state of Emergency, suspending democratic processes and the Constitution for twenty-two months.
15. Not only was Awara’s court scene impressive; the set itself became one of the most sought-after locations among other Bombay filmmakers, according to Vishwa Mehra, Raj Kapoor’s uncle and close assistant at RK Studios (interview with the author, June 19, 2003).
16. At no moment is the public trial by judiciary more crucial than in the period immediately following a national struggle. Thus, the assassination of M. K. Gandhi in January 1948 saw an elaborate public trial with an extensive set of documents made publicly available to underscore the message that all criminals had access to due process in the new nation. The assassin’s defense, made in his own voice and words, remains in print today: see Nathuram Godse, May It Please Your Honour: Statement of Nathuram Godse; see also Ashis Nandy, “Final Encounter: The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi,” in At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics and Psychology, 70–98.
17. Despite claims that Mother India has played in one theater or another every day since its release, its infanticide was hardly a satisfactory solution to the problems of the village. The film’s narrative core was refashioned numerous times, and chapter 3 addresses three symbolic remakes in Hindi cinema. On Mother India’s popularity, see Gayatri Chatterjee, Mother India, 9; see also research by Rosie Thomas and Paroma Roy on the figure of Nargis in her role in Mother India.
18. See Lalitha Gopalan on the modes of “interruption” constitutive of popular Hindi cinema (Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema); see also the collection edited by Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti meditating on song’s particular form of “interruption”: Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance.
19. Rishi Kapoor, quoted in Rana Siddiqui Zaman, “Blast from the Past: Ab Dilli Door Nahin,” The Hindu, October 10, 2004.
20. The scholar Nandini Chandra regards Nehru the “poster patriarch” in Dilli. See Chandra, “Merit and Opportunity in the Child-Centric Nationalist Films of the 1950s,” in Manju Jain, ed., Narratives of Indian Cinema, 130.
21. See Sangita Gopal’s Conjugations for an exposition on the social work that the couple performs in Hindi film narratives.
22. Bunny Reuben, “An Open Letter to Raj Kapoor,” Star and Style, April 30, 1971, 10.
23. The following is a report on Kapoor following Nehru’s death: “When Nehru died, Raj was abroad, but soon after he returned, he went to Shantivan to lay flowers. He met Nehru’s gardener who gave him a marigold. The era of the red rose had ended.” See “Behind the Showman,” Filmfare (December 4, 1970): 17. As if to emphasize Kapoor’s relationship to the new India now characterized by Nehru’s daughter, two of his leading ladies were appointed MPs to Parliament, Vyjyanthimala and Nargis. Kapoor’s loyalties, however, remained with Nehru, not with Congress, and his cinema receded from a direct engagement with New Delhi following Nehru’s death.
24. The remark on Kapoor’s waning popular presence in the 1970s is not fully accurate: in the 1970s, Kapoor’s Bobby rivaled Sholay and Jai Santoshi Maa in the box office and in popular memory. It is #11 in the list of all-time worldwide box office grossers of Indian cinema, just behind Amar Akbar Anthony (#10) and DDLJ (#9). See “Biggest Worldwide Grossers of All Time (adjusted for inflation),” www.ibosnetwork.com/asp/actualalltime_worldwide.asp (accessed June 2013).
25. Anupama Chopra, Sholay: The Making of a Classic, 19.
26. Raju Bharatan, “1975: The Year of Violence and Sex in Films,” The Illustrated Weekly of India, December 28, 1975, 24–29.
27. Raju Bharatan, “Sholay: Anatomy of Violence,” The Illustrated Weekly of India, August 31, 1975, 35.
28. Sholay’s record remained unbroken till Dilwale Dulhaniya le Jayenge (DDLJ, The man with the heart gets the bride, Aditya Chopra, 1995) played continuously for over 700 weeks at the Maratha Mandir in south central Bombay. Industry insiders and some scholars note that this “continuous” run is subsidized by the Yash Raj production house: the film played only once-a-week in the unpopular morning slot in 2007 when this scholar attempted to see it, and then too, screenings were mostly cancelled if a more lucrative film could be booked at the theater.
29. Sholay today remains the #1 all-time grosser at the box office in figures adjusted for inflation, towering over Hum Aapke Hain Kaun? (Who am I to you?, Sooraj Barjatya, 1994), DDLJ (1995), Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), and Bobby (1973), which rank #5, 9, 10, and 11, respectively. See “All Time Worldwide Box Office Grossers of Indian Cinema,” www.ibosnetwork.com (accessed July 2012). Other accounts of Sholay’s status can be found in Wimal Dissanayake and Malti Sahai, Sholay: A Cultural Reading, and Anupama Chopra, Sholay.
30. The writer, Ziauddin Sardar, recollects his dismay at watching Sholay for the first time in the UK: “The children with whom I watched the film knew Gabbar’s lines by heart: every time he appeared on the screen, they would repeat his dialogue and imitate his actions.” Recognizing the wide enthusiasm for the film, Sardar’s own view was quite different: “I was appalled by what I saw. Here was the complex world of Indian culture filtered through a western lens and rendered totally incomprehensible.” See “Dilip Kumar Made Me Do It,” in Ashis Nandy, ed., Secret Politics of our Desires, 49 and 47.
31. See Chopra, Sholay, 161.
32. Bindu Batra, “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” India Today, May 15, 1976, 31.
33. Javed Akhtar, Sholay’s coscriptwriter, cites The Magnificent Seven, The Five Man Army, and A Fistful of Dollars as influences, describing in particular Sergio Leone’s influence on Gabbar and the massacre scene. “We were very influenced by Sergio Leone. I would say there is some Mexican blood in Gabbar. He’s a bandit, not a dakku” (recorded in Nasreen Munni Kabir, Talking Films: Conversations on Hindi Cinema with Javed Akhtar, 58).
34. Javed Akhtar, as recorded by Nasreen Munni Kabir, Talking Films, 75.
35. As quoted in “Fundamental Blunder,” in Ayaz Memon and Ranjona Bannerji, eds., India 50: The Making of a Nation, 130.
36. See Wimal Dissanayake and Malti Sahai’s research on this phenomenon in Sholay: The Making of a Classic (especially the ethnographic interviews in the concluding appendix).
37. For instance, Jai and Veeru, not the police, protect the villagers and the Thakur from Gabbar’s raids; Thakur-sahib is the only effectual police officer in the film; a Hitleresque parody of another jailer actually lets Jai and Veeru escape through his incompetence; and so on.
38. Other differences mark the sedate Aurat and its more political 1957 remake as Mother India. In Aurat, the husband, Shamu, leaves the family because of poverty; in Mother India the husband’s departure is engineered by the moneylender; in Aurat, the moneylender undergoes a change of heart; in Mother India he remains rapacious till the end; in Aurat Radha pays off her debt to Sukhi; in Mother India the debt remains unpaid and thus justifies Birju’s vigilantism against the moneylender. Finally, Aurat is about the woman, and it ends with Radha dying of a broken heart with Birju (as she does in the mythic story of Radha and Krishna/Birju). In Mother India, the film leans more closely on Birju, whom the mother shoots to death, while she lives to a ripe old age. Not surprisingly, the film-maker, Mehboob Khan, seemed to want it both ways: to introduce a revolutionary figure like Birju as a critique of an unacceptable social order, and then to insist that the diegetic focus be on the saintly mother, Radha. In a 1955 script, Khan explains the film’s title: “We have intentionally called our film Mother India as a challenge to [Katherine Mayo’s] book in an attempt to evict from the minds of the people the scurrilous work that is Miss Mayo’s book” (as quoted in Gayatri Chatterjee, Mother India, 20). Grateful thanks to the staff of the National Film Archive in Pune for enabling a private screening of Aurat. A useful summary of the film can be found in Shampa Banerjee and Anil Srivastava, One Hundred Indian Feature Films: An Annotated Filmography, 39–41.
39. The film’s original ending (the director’s cut) in which the Thakur kills Gabbar and falls weeping into Veeru’s arms was ordered cut by the Censor Board who, according to Anupama Chopra, “objected to the suggestion that a police officer—even one who was no longer in the service—would take the law into his own hands and commit a murder” (Chopra 2001:148). Despite the Sippys’ appeal, the Censor Board’s ban held, and a new ending had to be shot in which the police appear just as the Thakur is about to crush Gabbar to death with his nailed shoes. This version remained in circulation for the first quarter century and includes cuts to many of the most violent scenes, including one in which the young Ahmed is tortured over fire and another in which Veeru drags a lassoed bandit over a mountain. A Sippy family dispute left Sholay the property of G. P. Sippy, its producer, and not Ramesh Sippy, the director, who lost control over its rights and distribution (author’s interview with Ramesh Sippy, Sathe House, Khar, June 21, 2003).
In 2002, an unmarked DVD of the director’s cut was released by Eros Entertainment, apparently made available from Sippy Films’ vault absent any commentary on the different version of the film put in circulation. In an interview, Eros’ distribution arm had had no knowledge that the print was a substantial departure from the version that had been in circulation since 1975 (author’s interview with Arjun Lulla, Eros Entertainment, March 17, 2003). The two DVDs are virtually indistinguishable in their covers save that the “original” is noted at 189 minutes, and the director’s cut at 204.
40. To underscore Jai and Veeru’s mercenary natures, when the Thakur’s safe promises a larger payout than their contract with him does, it becomes their object early in the film.
41. During the Emergency, a piece of graffiti allegedly appeared on numerous city walls in Bhopal: “Swarag se aie Nehru ki pukar / Indira beti, mat kar itna atyachar” [Up from heaven, Nehru called down: “Indira, stop these atrocities, won’t you.”]. The graffiti was probably apocryphal, though the verse (linking Nehru’s vision with his daughter’s practice) was repeated endlessly and has persisted in public memory of the period.
42. For a report of over 200 interviews conducted among Sholay’s viewers, see Dissanayake and Sahai, Sholay: A Cultural Reading, 69–131.
43. See Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India.
44. Ramesh Sippy in an interview with the author, June 21, 2003, in Sathe House, Khar.
45. Gulshan Grover, as quoted in Nasreen Munni Kabir, Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story, 90.
46. Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film, 155 and passim.
47. Fareed Kazmi, The Politics of India’s Conventional Cinema, 224.
48. Reflecting on Hindi cinema a year after Sholay’s release, its director Ramesh Sippy observed with rare candor: “It is ironic that while so much care is showered on making every aspect of the film functional to the achievement of the desired impact on the mass audience, nobody seems to bother whether the end product, the film itself, is functional to society. . . . This is precisely the tragedy of commercial films and the justification for replacing them with a new cinema.” Taken in the context of the films Ramesh Sippy made and continues to produce, his remarks are not to be mistaken as a manifesto for an alternative cinema (that was already prospering in India during the period). Rather, they underscore a new calculus of consumption at play in which popular cinema’s social work was resonant with its society’s desires, however unarticulated and inchoate. Ramesh Sippy as quoted in Bharat B. Dogra, “Sholay: The Tragedy of Commercial Films,” Filmfare (November 12–25, 1976): 23 (emphasis added).
49. Javed Akhtar in Kabir, Talking Songs: Javed Akhtar in Conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir, 51.
1. Emergency Broadcast as recorded in “Fundamental Blunder,” in Memon and Bannerji, eds., India 50, 130.
2. See Rushdie’s account of Mrs. Gandhi’s defamation suit against him in Salman Rushdie, “His Own Mt. Sinai,” Outlook India, May 8, 2006 (outlookindia.com; accessed June 2013).
3. See Dilip Bobb, “Kissa Kursi Ka: The Case of the Missing Film,” India Today, June 1–15, 1978, 24–33; Padmini Sukumar, “Kissa Kursi Ka, End of a Controversy,” The Illustrated Weekly of India, June 16–22, 1985, 40–41. According to Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen, the anti-Gandhi themes notwithstanding, the film’s director, Amrit Nahata, “later joined the Congress Party and disowned [Kissa Kursi Ka].” Rajadhyaksha and Willemen, eds., Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema, 432.
4. My thinking and phrasing here borrow heavily from Jane Tompkins’ work on the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in nineteenth-century America, a work that Tompkins argues “retells the culture’s central myth (crucifixion) in terms of the nation’s political conflict (slavery) and its most cherished social belief—the sanctity of motherhood.” See Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860, 134.
5. Michael Rogin, “Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies,” Ronald Reagan the Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology, 238.
6. Laura Mulvey’s foundational work on early Hollywood melodrama inspired the phrase and insight on cinema’s role as primal scene of India’s modern mythologies. See Mulvey, “‘It Will Be a Magnificent Obsession’: The Melodrama’s Role in the Development of Contemporary Film Theory,” in Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill, eds., Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, 121.
7. “International Business Overview Standard,” see ibos.network.com/topgrosserbyyear.asp?/year+1975 (accessed March 15, 2006).
8. Jyotika Virdi, “Deewaar: Fact, Fiction, and the Making of a Superstar,” in Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, eds., Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, 238. See also Ranjani Mazumdar, “From Subjectification to Schizophrenia: The ‘Angry Man’ and the ‘Psychotic Hero’ of Bombay Cinema,” in Ravi Vasudevan, ed., Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, 238–66; and Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire.
9. Jyotika Virdi further observes that not just Deewaar, Hindi cinema tout court “projects the imagined nation on the terrain of the family . . . through contestations that throw into relief its social structures and realignments.” See Virdi, The Cinematic ImagiNation, 7.
10. To a degree hitherto unprecedented in Hindi commercial cinema, Salim-Javed’s scripts profoundly shaped the films that emerged from them. The writers were known to present bound scripts to directors who made virtually no changes to them. The director and producer had the choice over stars, music, movement, but little else. “Prakash Mehra . . . likes to tell a story, not to disturb the frame. . . . Yashji always zooms, for every shot. . . . Movement means a lot to him,” noted Bachchan of the directors of, respectively, Zanjeer and Deewaar (as recorded in Rachel Dwyer, Yash Chopra: Fifty Years in Indian Cinema, 98.) Recalling Deewaar, director Yash Chopra observed: “That was one script and screenplay where you didn’t have to delete anything after making, it was such—such a perfect script. We didn’t do anything [to it]” (as recorded in Dwyer, ibid., p. 100).
Both Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor concur, the latter in a 2003 interview with the author. Bachchan, in particular, held the writer’s words sacred: “He never messes with a writer’s lines,” recalled Yash Chopra of his star. “[Bachchan’s] maxim being if the writer has spent so much thought on the choice of words, it must have a reason, and altering them would alter the mood and the message of the film” (as recorded in Bhawana Somaaya, Amitabh Bachchan: The Legend, 123).
11. According to “International Business Overview Standard,” Trishul ranks #25 among Hindi film’s worldwide all-time grossers adjusted for inflation, while Deewaar comes in at #23 (see ibos.network.com/asp/actualalltimes.asp; accessed June 2013). If returns just for the decade are reviewed, the rankings are higher, and the same source has Trishul at #8 and Deewaar at #7 (see ibos.network.com/topgrosserbyyear.asp?/year+197; accessed June 2013). In contrast, BoxOfficeIndia.com, another industry source, provides returns by decade, according to which Deewaar’s earnings place it at #11 and Trishul’s at #15 (see www.boxofficeindia.com/showProd.php?itemCat+124&catName+MTk3MCOxOTc5, [accessed November 17, 2010]).
12. Other differences across the films: in Deewaar, the father’s ideals absent him from his family; in Trishul, his ambitions absent him from his son but keep him at the center of the family; and in Shakti, the father’s ideals preserve him in the family and exile the son from it. Mothers are central in all three, but in Deewaar the mother is vengeful and prevails till the end; in Trishul she is vengeful but dies so her son can achieve a happy end; and in Shakti she is portrayed as a gentle figure seeking compromises that eventually kill her, a fate in which her son joins her. Infanticide, or its threat, plays a role in all three: in Deewaar, it disrupts the family altogether; in Trishul, where the threat is headed off, the family reconstitutes itself in a happy unit; and in Shakti, infanticide is a sacrifice that is tragic but necessary to assure the stability of a now-truncated family and the nation.
13. Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances” (1909), in vol. 9 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 238–39.
14. Madhava Prasad, among others such as Jyotika Virdi (2003) and Sumita Chakravarty (1993), provides a genealogy in which Hindi cinema through the 1960s is characterized by a focus on the family structure that Prasad names “the feudal family romance” (Prasad 1998:64). For Prasad, the term simply refers to a story in which the ideology of the family is central. In contrast, my usage of the term develops Freud’s, and I use the upper case throughout to signal the technical (vs. colloquial) referent (see Prasad 1998:30–31).
The concept of Family Romance has been used in other ways as well. Some scholars such as the historian Lynn Hunt see the family as the unconscious unit underlying national politics and thus use the concept of Family Romance to understand different models of the family that underwrote revolutionary politics in eighteenth-century France. Others such as the political theorist Françoise Vergès consider the family as a myth imposed by colonial rulers for manufacturing consent, as Vergès shows in the case of France in Réunion. Both scholars focus on the family (which provides the unit of analysis for broader social and political events) rather than the romance, and both see the Family Romance as a mechanism deployed by authorities for manufacturing consent among subjects. In contrast to Hunt and Vergès, I regard the Family Romance as a mechanism fabricated by subjects for evading consent to authority. See Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution, and Vergès, Monsters and Revolutionaries.
15. The historian Vinay Lal regards Ravi’s locution of ownership as the “voice of patriarchy” in which Ravi has become the “reincarnated husband.” In contrast, my analysis reveals a patriarchy that is overtaken by the castrating figure of Maa, who has ambushed its traditional authority. Ravi represents the intrusion of the state onto the family: he is neither the husband Maa married (Anandbabu), nor the husband she chose (Vijay). Unlike both males marked (literally and figuratively) by the ideals by which they live, Ravi is a figure marked exclusively by ideology. All his actions require the instruction and sanction of others and the grandiloquence of rhetoric that issues from “Mere pas Maa hain.” See Lal, “The Impossibility of the Outsider in the Modern Hindi Film,” in Ashis Nandy, ed., The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability, and Indian Popular Cinema, 241.
16. The specifics of India’s economic turbulence in the 1960s and 1970s were to have consequences not just on the lives of its citizens but also on the Hindi film industry more broadly, a point noted by Madhava Prasad (1998), Rajadhyaksha (2009), and usefully detailed by Valentina Vitali. Prasad and Vitali propose that the “rise” of Bachchan occurs as a consequence of transformations wrought by Mrs. Gandhi’s rollback of economic liberalization and the ensuing urgency to locate capital for film production. As Vitali documents: “Larger amounts of money were thus wrapped around those narrative ingredients that proved to sell at the lower end of the market, including and above all action. . . . Over less than four years, the combination of these selling points . . . led to the landmark action films of Amitabh Bachchan.” See Vitali, Hindi Action Cinema, 203.
17. There is a twist to the story of gold and India. In July 1991, India pulled itself back from the brink of default by transferring—literally—47 tons of gold to the Bank of England as surety in order to secure credit on the world market. The desperate situation—and the gold that staved off disaster—inaugurated a policy of economic liberalization that soon brought about astonishing economic growth that has (almost) wiped out the destitution of the 1970s. For a dramatic account of what the gold transfer enabled, see Ajit Balakrishnan, “India’s IT Industry: The End of the Beginning,” in Social Research 78.1 (Spring 2011): 1–20 (in a Special Issue titled India’s World, ed. Arjun Appadurai).
18. As recorded in Deepa Gahlot, “Look Back in Anger,” Cinema in India 3.12 (1992): 53.
19. The “India is Indira” slogan was developed by Dev Kant Baruah, an Assamese politician and Indira Gandhi loyalist who was president of the Indian National Congress during the Emergency. Many thanks to Mrinialini Pande and Kumud Pant for providing this detail. The scholar Rosie Thomas reproduces the 1985 election poster in “Sanctity and Scandal,” her classic 1989 essay on Mother India. Special thanks to her and to the photographer Behroze Gandhy for its use.
20. Harleen Singh’s comments to an early version of this chapter spawned the associations that led to these insights on Indira Gandhi and Maa. In Midnight’s Children (1981), Salman Rushdie memorialized the Emergency as the particular nightmare of midnight, creating a devouring mother, the Widow, who sets up special torture factories to crush her children and prevent them from reproducing. “Test- and hysterectomized, the children of midnight were denied the possibility of reproducing themselves . . . but that was only a side-effect, because they were truly extraordinary doctors, and they drained us of more that that: hope, too, was excised, and I don’t know how it was done.” Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 523.
21. See A. K. Ramanujan, “The Indian Oedipus,” in The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker, 394. Javed Akhtar arguably claims that “in our country we don’t have a strong tradition of bonding between father and son anyway” (as recorded in Kabir, Talking Films, 24).
22. Figures provided from ibosnetwork.com, “Biggest Grossers of All Time (adjusted for inflation),” ibosnetwork.com/asp/actualalltime.asp (accessed June 2013).
23. Javed Akhtar mentions a key detail about Trishul: “The first time we [ever] revised a script was for Trishul.” See interview recorded in Nasreen Munni Kabir, Talking Films, 56. It was a script, moreover, that Akhtar and Salim Khan wrote with Yash Chopra at their side, though Akhtar would not elaborate on what aspects of Trishul’s script or its tone Chopra shaped. Following its box office success in Hindi, Trishul was remade in Tamil as Mr. Bharath (dir. S. P. Muthuraman), starring Rajnikanth, its new title underscoring the film’s claim to a symbolic national culture (Bharat).
24. The scriptwriter Salim Khan was the son of an Indore police officer, which might partly explain the depiction of semi-benevolent police patriarchs in Salim-Javed films such as Shakti (and, above all, Sholay).
4. BOLLYWOOD, BOLLYLITE
1. In 1988 when he died, the front pages of major Soviet newspapers carried lengthy obituaries of Raj Kapoor. A few years previously, one observer of the Soviet Union had remarked: “Anyone who has visited the Soviet Union, either its European or Asian wings, will confirm that it has three Indian heroes: Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Raj Kapoor, although not necessarily in that order. Probably the reverse.” From A. Malik, “Who’s the Hero of the Soviet Union?,” The Statesman (August 25, 1985), as quoted in Wimal Dissanayake and Malti Sahai, Raj Kapoor’s Films: Harmony of Discourses, 19.
In China at about the same time, the novelist Vikram Seth unexpectedly received a forbidden travel pass to Tibet because he was Indian, and the local police chief in a remote province thought Hindi films in general and Kapoor’s Awara (1951) in particular provided recognizance enough for Seth’s intentions. Seth records the anecdote in From Heaven Lake, a book of his travels to Tibet that came about from his familiarity with Awara.
2. The popularity of Hindi films around the globe has been analyzed in a number of studies, including a special issue of South Asian Popular Culture 4.2 (2006), titled “Indian Cinema Abroad: Historiography of Transnational Exchanges,” guest edited by Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Dina Iordanova. See also Sangita Gopal and Sujata Moorti, eds., Global Bollywood: Travels of Hindi Song and Dance; Sudha Rajagopalan, Indian Films in Soviet Cinema: The Culture of Movie-Going After Stalin; and Anjali Gera Roy and Chua Beng Huat, eds., Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA.
3. For statistics on Slumdog’s circulation, see www.thenumbers.com/movies/2008/SLUMD.php.
4. The transformative presence of Bollywood in a global frame has been explored in Raminder Kaur and Ajay J. Sinha, eds., Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens; also Anandam Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar, eds., Global Bollywood; and Rajinder Dudrah, Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema.
5. The story of Bollywood’s travels to the West has a UK dimension to it as well: in 2002, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Bollywood-inspired musical, Bombay Dreams, opened in London’s West End. Madame Tussaud’s unveiled a wax figure of Amitabh Bachchan, voted the greatest star on stage or screen in a 2000 BBC Millennial poll in which Bachchan beat out Laurence Olivier (#2) and Charles Chaplin (#3) for the honor. (Tamil cinema’s Govinda made #10, following Marilyn Monroe at #9. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/millennium/jun/winner.stm [accessed May 10, 2006].)
Main Street and K Street were close behind these trends: in 2002, Selfridges ran a Bollywood-themed shopping month in their flagship store on Oxford Street, and when Webber’s musical was set to arrive on Broadway, his first preview performance was for George W. Bush at a dinner the U.S. president hosted for Queen Elizabeth during a 2003 state visit to London. See Lawrence Gelder, “Arts Briefing,” New York Times, November 20, 2003, C2.
6. Monsoon Wedding’s “foreign” (i.e., non-U.S.) gross was $16.9 million with a worldwide box office of $30.7 million; Bride and Prejudice’s “foreign” gross was $18.5 million for a worldwide box office of $25 million. More on these films follows later in the chapter. See www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=monsoonwedding.htm; and www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=brideandprejudice.htm (accessed October 3, 2006).
7. M. Madhava Prasad, “This Thing Called Bollywood,” Seminar 525 (May 2003): 3.
8. It remains an important exercise to date when precisely the cinema of Bombay embraced excess as its constitutive mode. Raj Kapoor’s dream sequence in Awara, for instance, is visually and cinematically spectacular, but its connection to the plot and to the characters is indisputable. One might say the same for Kapoor’s 1964 hit, Sangam, with its long interlude in London, Venice, and Paris that is consistent with the plot (the couple are on their honeymoon) but is not necessary to advance it. By the 1970s, hits such as Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) and Don (1978) dispense with linearity and, with it, most visual unities. In some ways, these narrative disruptions and their extravagant expression are regarded as the “Bollywood” element, though again, when one could date their suffusion in the industry remains an exciting project. On the origins of the term Bollywood and the tensions around its usage, see Prasad, “This Thing Called Bollywood.”
9. Bollywood does not include the films produced in other Indian languages, notably Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada that together comprise over 60 percent of India’s annual film production, though these cinemas remain largely regional phenomena without Bombay’s transnational reach. The question of language is hardly an issue: Bombay’s films have traveled unsubtitled and undubbed in all reaches of India and many parts of the world; the same cannot be said even for Tamil or Telugu films whose vast popularity remains largely local. Exceptions such as Rajnikanth’s Muthu (1995) and Enthiran (The robot, 2010) are just that and have yet to characterize the reach of their wider industry. On Hindi cinema’s “national” reach, see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The ‘Bollywoodization’ of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 4.1 (2003): 25–39.
10. Farrukh Dhondy, “Keeping Faith: Indian Film and Its World.” Dædalus 115.4 (Fall 1985): 131. Ashis Nandy made a similar argument over a decade later in his introduction to The Secret Politics of Our Desires, 11.
11. Ashis Nandy, “The Supermarket of Dreams,” The Illustrated Weekly of India, March 16–22, 1986, 48.
12. The Kannada director Girish Karnad observed: “What saved the Indian film industry and made it invulnerable to Hollywood were the songs and dances. Hollywood could not match or beat them.” Interview with the author, May 27, 2003, Nehru Center, London.
13. Data on Bollywood’s worldwide grosses come from “International Business Overview Standard”: see http://ibosnetwork.com/aso.actualalltime_worldwide (accessed June 2013).
14. Raj Kapoor, as quoted in Ritu Nanda, Raj Kapoor: His Life and his Films, 81. Kapoor records a slightly different version of the memory in the Siddharth Kak documentary, Raj Kapoor Lives (Bombay: Cinema Vision, 1987). Archie and Riverdale High influenced other Hindi blockbusters such as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something happens, Karan Johar, 1998). As Sharmishta Roy, the film’s art director, recalls of the look of the film: “It was meant to be an Archie comic. It was meant to be Riverdale High . . . because that was my briefing. I was told, ‘It’s Riverdale High.’ It’s not an ordinary college.” As recorded in an interview with Tejaswini Ganti in Producing Bollywood, 104.
15. Kapoor recalls his first meeting with a teenage Nargis in which she answered the door with hands covered in batter that she wiped across her hair. The scene is reenacted in Raja’s first meeting with Bobby, and the reminiscence is recorded in Siddharth Kak’s documentary, Raj Kapoor Lives.
16. Scholarship by the historian Veena Talwar Oldenburg on the phenomenon of “dowry deaths” characterizes this form of gender violence as murder. “Bride burning . . . is murder, culpable on social, cultural, and legal grounds, executed privately, and often disguised as an accident or a suicide. Burning a wife is, perhaps, even more appalling than poisoning, drowning, strangling, shooting, or bludgeoning her, but it is patently chosen for the forensic advantage it has over the other methods” (xi). See Oldenburg, Dowry Murder: The Imperial Origins of a Cultural Crime.
17. Why Bombay was able to succeed over other Indian cinemas such as those from Calcutta, Madras, or Hyderabad remains a crucial question that few have been able to address adequately. The city itself might be one response, but from the outset motion pictures in India thrived in numerous cities, including Calcutta, Madras, and Lahore, among others. Bombay pulled talent from other regional film industries, but that talent also on occasion remained regional, as the Kannada and Tamil stories recount. Lahore’s demise as a center for Pakistani film production is often blamed on the Partition, though that does not fully explain how Pakistan has become a thriving producer of serials televised on global cable, while its film industry relies on bootleg Bombay imports screened in decaying theaters.
18. See Rajagopalan, Indian Films in Soviet Cinema, 163, 164. Alongside public responses to Bollywood, the cinema’s mythologization in the Soviet underground is equally notable. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (1968) includes a revealing exchange when Zoya, the nurse, begins singing “Awara hun” from Kapoor’s Awara.
Oleg’s face instantly clouded. “No, don’t! Not that song, Zoya, please . . .”
“It’s from ‘The Tramp,’” she said. “Haven’t you see it?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Isn’t it a wonderful movie? I saw it twice.” (In fact, she’d seen it four times, but she didn’t quite like to admit it.)
What follows is Oleg Kostoglotov’s denunciation of life in Soviet Russia, cast as a critique of Awara, with the conclusion: “They are only too happy to kick a man when he’s down, and then they have the nerve to wrap themselves up in a cloak of romanticism, while we help them create a legend, and even their songs are sometimes sung on the screen.” Notable about this particular exchange is not just Oleg’s denunciation of Awara but his use of Awara’s socialist themes (scripted by the Communist playwright K. A. Abbas) in order to denounce Soviet policies. From Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Cancer Ward, trans. Nicholas Bethell and David F. Burg, 170, as quoted in Gayatri Chatterjee, Awara, 133–35.
19. Brian Larkin, “Bollywood Comes to Nigeria,” Samar 8 (Winter/Spring 1997). As reproduced in www.samarmagazine.org/archive/article.php?id=21.
20. The reports tend to vary quite considerably each year depending on the data and the respective industries’ need to spin them in the most positive light. It is, therefore, best to regard the data as generally illustrative of rapidly evolving industries. Their general contours are indicative despite variations across the years.
21. “Bollywood Meets the Bankers,” Asiamoney 16.5 (June 2005).
22. According to S. Narayanan, CEO of In2infotainment India, “Indian films were funded by the most unbelievable sources. There was a time when rich tobacco and rice farmers from the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh would make a good profit, travel to Madras and fund a film production. If the movie did well in the box office, the farmers would make another. Otherwise, they would return to their farms to try to get one more good harvest before investing in motion pictures again. Cinema had this kind of appeal” (as quoted by Gautam Bhaskaran, “India Gets Schooled in Film Finance,” Hollywood Reporter 389.19 [International Edition], May 31, 2005). More recently, Subhash Chandra, a former rice trader who bested Rupert Murdoch in the Indian television market, founded Zee TV, a media giant producing TV shows, films, music, and internet sites in India and another 120 countries.
23. Other films since have vied for the “most expensive” honor, each overtaken seemingly within a year. See Ghajini (Aamir Khan, 2008, $13 million), Don 2 (Farhan Akhtar, 2011, $14 million), and Ra.One (Anubhav Sinha, 2011, $27 million). Each of these “most expensive” productions has had palpably puny overall box office returns, even with the U.S. box office included. Ra.One’s U.S. returns were $2.5 million; Don 2, $3.7 million; and Ghajini did not even make the list of 100 top-grossing foreign-language films in the U.S. box office, according to Box Office Mojo (boxofficemojo.com; accessed June 2013). See also table 4.2.
24. The market for Hindi films is divided into six distribution territories: five in India and a sixth, overseas. Given the size of territories, distributors purchase rights for an entire territory and sell off subsidiary rights to smaller sections within. The sale of distribution rights funds a film’s production and occurs at the very early stages of development.
25. Evening screenings in large theaters at 9 p.m. and midnight are generally reserved for B-films and for adult fare which can draw an unsavory and rowdy crowd given to tearing apart a theater at great cost to the owner. Theaters that show these films are often so ravaged by abuse that they can no longer draw a respectable audience to their regular shows.
26. Shyam Benegal, as recorded by William van der Heide, Bollywood Babylon: Interviews with Shyam Benegal, 39.
27. Raj Chopra, as quoted in Ratna Bhushan, “The Show Begins Here,” The Hindu Business Line (Internet Edition), December 26, 2002; see: www.blonnet.com/catalyst/2002/12/26/stories/2002122600030100.htm (accessed May 19, 2006). See also Derek Bose, Brand Bollywood: A New Global Entertainment Order: and Athique and Hill, The Multiplex in India.
28. Ron Inden, “Transnational Class, Erotic Arcadia, and Commercial Utopia in Hindi Films,” in Christiane Brosius and Melissa Butcher, eds., Image Journeys: Audio-Visual Media and Cultural Change in India, 62.
29. Athique and Hill, The Multiplex in India, 43, 42.
30. See Amit S. Rai, “On the Malltiplex Mutagen in India,” in Untimely Bollywood, 133–78.
31. Father Dominic Emmanuel, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Delhi and producer of the film, observed, “In India, the one medium that attracts mass attention, whether literate or unlettered, rich or poor, small or big, low caste or upper caste, is cinema.” See “Hooray for Bollywood,” in U.S. Catholic, November 2005, 5.
32. Kaveri Bamzai and Sandeep Unnithan, “Show Business,” India Today International, January 24, 2003, 48.
33. Salim-Javed’s idea was expanded to a three-and-a-half hour epic in a month of sittings at the dimly lit “Sippy Writing Room” with Salim Khan, Javed Akhtar, and Ramesh Sippy. See Anupama Chopra, Sholay: The Making of a Classic.
34. The remarks were made by Komal Nahata, editor of the trade publication, Film Information, as quoted by Bhaskaran, “India Gets Schooled in Film Finance.”
35. Kirloskar, quoted in ibid., 49.
36. Bhatnagar, quoted in ibid., 48.
37. In contrast, 2002 was a bumper year for Hollywood’s box office receipts. John Fithian, head of the National Association of Theatre Owners, claims that part of the credit for this fiscal success belongs to “an important trend toward family-friendlier films. None of the top 20 films, all of which grossed over $100m, was rated R,” he reported in the Financial Times. Fithian quoted in Christopher Parkes, “Family Films Give Hollywood Bumper Revenues,” March 5, 2003, 6.
38. In contrast to Bombay’s box office flops of 2002, the twenty-five major films released in the first half of 2003 earned $50 million in box office receipts, with Chalte Chalte (As we walk, Aziz Mirza) earning more than $7 million internationally in its first month of release. The figures come from Bryan Pearson, “Bollywood Writes Comeback Story,” Variety, August 25, 2003, 18.
39. The figures on break-even occupancy in India versus in “developed” markets come from Ratna Bhushan, “The Show Begins Here.”
40. See box office returns tabulated by ibosnetwork.com (accessed June 2013).
41. Eric Bellman, “Bollywood’s Movies Are All the Rage but Stocks Draw Skeptical Audiences,” Wall Street Journal (Eastern Edition), December 6, 2005, C1.
42. Corey Creekmur, K3G, in “Philip’s Fil-ums”; see www.uiowa.edu/~incinema/K3G.html.
43. Anil Ambani’s Reliance Big Pictures, which owns a stake in Steven Spielberg’s Dream-Works, recognizes that the audience for Indian exports remains largely diasporic. Though it is moving rapidly into the U.S. screening market, Reliance Big’s acquisitions of theaters is confined to what one report identified as “areas populated by Indian diasporic communities.” See “Can the Indian Film Industry Go Global?,” The Hindu, April 22, 2011 (hindu.com). KPMG’s industry report on Indian film for 2011, Hitting the High Notes, rues that a decade of efforts later, “the market for overseas distribution has not opened up to the levels anticipated” (56).
As the Indo-Canadian actor, Lisa Ray, echoes: “In terms of classic Bollywood, I don’t think Western audiences are ready for that, other than as a novelty.” As quoted in Shab-nam Mahmood and Manjushri Mitra, “Bollywood Sets Sights on Wider Market,” BBC Business News, June 24, 2011 (bbc.co.uk; accessed June 2013).
44. One is always likely to get in trouble when venturing views on what makes a “real” Bolly wood film. Stars are clearly one component, but not the only one if Monsoon Wedding and Bride and Prejudice are taken into account. Lillette Dubey, Naseerudeen Shah, and Vasundhara Das (from Monsoon Wedding) have all appeared in enough blockbusters to make them “genuine” Bollywood figures, though they all have also appeared in enough alternates to the industry and, in the case of Shah, in the parallel cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, to be regarded in multiple ways. Meanwhile, Aishwarya Rai and Anupam Kher from Bride and Prejudice are seeped in Bollywood productions, so they would appear to be the genuine articles performing in Chadha’s film. Yet the casting of stars is simply not enough to render a film a Bollywood production: its director, writers, sequencing, editing, production, dialogues, music, financing, and distribution go a long way in defining the film’s provenance. While both of these films did well in the U.S. (and UK) box office, neither appears in the top 50 list of gross receipts for India.
45. See “International Business Overview Standard,” at http://ibosnetwork.com/asp/actualalltime.asp (accessed in June 2013).
46. Nair, quoted in Adina Hoff man, “The Big-Bash Theory: Mira Nair’s Latest Movie Revels and Reels,” The American Prospect (March 25, 2002): 28.
47. Reviewing top box office earners for the 2000s including domestic and foreign returns, Sangita Gopal observes the prominence of Karan Johar’s productions: K3G, Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (Never say goodbye, 2006), Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow may not be, 2003), and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something happens, 1998). “Clearly, the overseas box office belongs to ‘KJo,’” she concludes (Gopal, Conjugations, 64).
48. The anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti locates the erasure of labor in Hindi film in the industry’s efforts to appear “cool” in the post-liberalization period. “Hindi cinema’s social transformation, or path to ‘coolness,’ often lauded by filmmakers and journalists, began in the mid-1990s with the erasure of the signs and symbols of poverty, labor, and rural life from films, and with the decline of plots that focused on class conflict, social injustice, and youthful rebellion.” See Ganti, Producing Bollywood, 79.
49. See Meheli Sen, “‘It’s All About Loving Your Parents’: Liberalization, Hindutva, and Bollywood’s New Fathers,” in Rini Bhattacharya Mehta and Rajeshwari V. Pandhiripande, eds., Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, Diaspora, 149.
50. Mulling over K3G in the context of his oeuvre, director Karan Johar observed of Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006), his feature on marital infidelity among NRIs in New York: “This time I’ve given no candy floss. . . . I’ve matured. I’ve changed.” See Johar’s interview with Subhash K. Jha, “I Can’t Go Back to Candy Floss: Johar,” at www.ibnlive.com/printpage.php?id=20341§ion_id=8 (accessed September 11, 2006).
51. These remarks and those that follow come from Ratna Bhushan’s account of the changing multiplex landscape in India, “The Show Begins Here.”
52. The remarks come from Tarun Mehrotra of Satyam Cineplexes in response to a concern he acknowledged: “What if no good movies are made next year? Software is one area we have no control over.” As quoted in Ratna Bhushan’s industry survey, “The Show Begins Here.”
53. The Hollywood film industry too once vertically integrated with studios owning production, distribution, and exhibition of films, till 1948 when a Supreme Court ruling forced studios to sell their stakes in exhibition halls. Today, productions by studios and independents in the United States compete for screens, with distributors apparently having the upper hand in bringing a film to screen.
54. See Satish Poduval’s analysis of Hrishikesh Mukherjee’s cinema characterized by what Poduval calls its “affable young man”: “The Affable Young Man: Civility, Desire, and the Making of a Middle-Class Cinema in the 1970s,” South Asian Popular Culture 10.1 (2012): 37–50.
55. In contrast, the U.S. has 117 screens per million people (or circa one screen per 8,500 people). See Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), “Theatrical Market Statistics: Cinema Screens” (2012), 22.
EPILOGUE: ANTHEM FOR A NEW INDIA
1. See data compiled in KPMG-FICCI, The Stage Is Set, Indian Media and Entertainment Report (2014), 3. Television continues to lead media in India with revenues in 2013 of INR 417 billion; film comes third (behind TV and print) in revenues at INR 125 billion. KPMG-FICCI’s 2013 report observes, “India is an outlier country where print is still a growth market” (see The Power of a Billion: Realizing the Indian Dream, Indian Media and Entertainment Report [2013], 10). While the data on film include cinema in all languages, the report is dominated by products coming out of Bombay, with fleeting references to the Tamil and Telugu film industries (which each generally produce more films than Bombay).
2. Yash Chopra, Karan Johar, and Jehil Thakkar, “Foreword,” KPMG-FICCI, Digital Dawn: The Metamorphosis Begins, Indian Media and Entertainment Report (2012). Chopra and Johar served as 2012 Chair of the FICCI Media and Entertainment Committee and Co-Chair of FICCI Frames, respectively, and the emphasis on Bollywood themes throughout the report reflects the industry’s still dominant place in the media ecology. (In 2013 and 2014, Ramesh Sippy took over Yash Chopra’s chair duties.)
3. Anil Arjun and Siddharth Roy Kapur, as quoted in “Films: Spotlight on Growth,” KPMG-FICCI, Digital Dawn (2012), 59.
4. “The Indian M&E Industry in 2013: An Introduction,” in KPMG-FICCI, The Power of a Billion (2013), 11.
5. See KPMG-FICCI, The Power of a Billion (2013), 109–110.
6. Sanjay Gaikwad, CEO of UFO Moviez India, as quoted in KPMG-FICCI, The Power of a Billion (2013), 63. KPMG’s 2014 report is even more cautious about the growth of multiplexes: “Going forward, multiplex growth is expected to slow down, in line with the overall delays and future expectations for retail sector and commercial real estate development, impacting box office growth in the short term.” See KPMG-FICCI, The Stage Is Set (2014), 4.
7. Nukkad theaters are planned to serve as school classrooms outside screening hours, according to a program called “Nukkad ki Patshala” (Nukkad’s Schools), taking the notion of “greater social good” to a new and very literal level. See http://nukkad.unitedmediaworks.in/Nukkad-Ki-Pathshala.htm (accessed November 2013).
8. On the Indian middle classes and their contested numbers, see Leela Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform; Diana Farrell and Eric Beinhocker, “Next Big Spenders: India’s Middle Class,” McKinsey Global Institute (May 19, 2007, at www.mckinsey.com/Insights/MGI/In_the_news/Next_big_ spenders_Indian_middle_class, accessed January 2014); Christian Meyer and Nancy Birdsall, “New Estimates of India’s Middle Class: A Technical Note,” Center for Global Development, Peterson Institute for International Economics, at www.cgdev.org/doc/2013_MiddleClassIndia_TechnicalNote_CGDNote.pdf (accessed January 2014).
9. See Sangita Gopal, Conjugations, especially the claim that “New Bollywood cinema’s address is deliberately narrow and aimed at a transnational, urban, middle class audience” (14).
10. See S. Ganesh, “Lage Raho Munnabhai: History as Farce,” Economic and Political Weekly 41.41 (October 14–20, 2006), 4317–19.
11. The film scholar Rachel Dwyer insists that “the specific melodramatic mode and requirements of the Hindi film are not well suited to the character of Gandhi.” See Dwyer, “The Case of the Missing Mahatma,” Public Culture 23:2 (2011): 370. Earlier in the essay, Dwyer observes of Lage Raho: “Although Gandhi is back, it is not the historical Gandhi, a challenging and difficult figure urging the abandonment of consumerism, but a Gandhi of India’s new middle classes” (Dwyer 353). Other critics, following Ashis Nandy’s work on Gandhi, catalog Nandy’s four Gandhis and conclude, as Arunabhava Ghosh and Tapan Babu do, that Lage Raho’s “Gandhigiri is perhaps closer to the fourth variety of [Nandy’s] Gandhi,” who has been refashioned to become an “icon of popular culture.” See Ghosh and Babu, “Lage Raho Munnabhai: Unraveling Brand ‘Gandhigiri,’” Economic and Political Weekly 41.51 (December 23–29, 2006): 5225–26.
12. Ashis Nandy, “The Lure of ‘Normal’ Politics: Gandhi and the Battle for Popular Culture of Politics in India,” South Asian Popular Culture 5.2 (October 2007): 167. Dwyer’s essay, “The Case of the Missing Mahatma,” documents Gandhi’s absence in popular cinema and the medium’s selective treatment of his life.
13. Ashis Nandy recounts Gandhi’s last lonely days when “Let Gandhi Die” was commonly heard around his last fast and, according to Nandy, “his mail usually brought a large number of abusive letters. The attendance in his daily prayer meetings was dwindling, and most of those who came, some say, came ritually.” Threats of assassination were known but ignored by a state largely tired of the man. See Nandy, “The Lure of ‘Normal’ Politics,” 174 passim.
14. Ibid., 175.
15. In Vikram Chandra’s novella, “Artha” (1997), a fabled wrestling teacher of the old school blames Bombay’s frequent riots on the unrelenting demand for land that is inconveniently occupied by long-term residents. “Do you know, when I first opened this akhara here, forty years ago, this was all an open maidan? . . . Now everything is built up. Even this land they want. . . . Perhaps next time there is trouble in the city, I’ll find all this gone, burnt down” (203). Later, the teacher connects the city’s “unrest” to agitations manipulated by the criminal underworld for the purposes of grabbing land for developers: “The big fellows, all they’re good for is scaring people. Destroying houses and huts and slums. Clearing land. If anyone dies, they die—it’s incidental.” See Vikram Chandra, “Artha,” in Love and Longing in Bombay, 210.
16. See Inden, “Transnational Class, Erotic Arcadia, and Commercial Utopia in Hindi Films,” in Brosius and Butcher, eds., Image Journeys, 41–68.
17. Bollywood remains the name for a cinema that however clumsily captures a wide(r) swathe of audience share than its producers predict, as the KPMG reports in note 1 of this chapter further underscore. It is also the name for the cinema that inspires widespread imitations. A discussion of the cinema’s own references to its past would need to address the A-list blockbuster, Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan, 2007), in which the 1970s are not so much remade as reincarnated as a site of possibility that must be exhumed from a grave with the help of specters and spectacle. The sociologist Rajinder Dudrah observes the many remakes of 1970s Bollywood blockbusters in the 2000s and identifies them as an effort to rescript millennial history in a new way. Developing Elizabeth Guffey’s work on retro, Dudrah names the remakes “retro Bollywood,” which express both a “longing for the past with a suspicion of the new and current.” See Rajinder Dudrah, “The Retro Noughties: 1970s Hindi Films in 2000s Bollywood Cinema” in Joshi and Dudrah, eds., The 1970s and Its Legacies in Indi a’s Cinemas, 102.
Among recent low-budget remakes of 1970’s Bollywood blockbusters, films such as Malegaon ke Sholay (Malegaon’s Sholay, Nasir Shaikh, 2000), made and circulating in Malegaon, a poverty-stricken town outside Mumbai, reveal local experiments in production that enjoy passionate if narrow circulation and audiences. See the documentary, Super men of Malegaon (Faiza Ahmad Khan, 2008) depicting the Malegaon phenomenon.