In this essay I shall take an autobiographical line. As my experience of viewing Hindi films is very limited, the only sensible contribution I can make to this discussion is by comparing the filmic representation of the city with literary ones. Second, even the limited filmic evidence that I can draw upon, episodically and anecdotally, from personal experience, is limited to a few Bengali films. Though why people like me saw so few Hindi films is itself an interesting cultural question.
I shall here continue a line of argument made in an earlier paper,
1 presenting that view now in a fuller form. When speaking earlier on the culture of democracy I had begun by analysing a song from a film about Bombay showing that in the 1950s there was a clear, very widespread,
spatial translation of the rupture between the modern and the traditional. The villages constituted the space of tradition—of caste oppression, of stagnant customs, of poor and undeveloping lives, of religious superstitions. The city, by contrast, was the space of the modern. And since democracy, or rather the democratic principle, was distinctively modern in this view of history, democracy lived in the city.
I used the example of a song taken from a film called
CID (Criminal Investigation Department) which I had not seen, delivered in the film, I am authoritatively told, by a very popular comedian, Johny Walker, who held a typical city dweller’s image to his audience. It was sung by Mohammad Rafi, the most popular playback singer of Hindi films of the Nehru era, in an enunciative style that took great pains to communicate in its lightness of utterance a typical urban knowingness. In spite of using it often in my social science arguments, I have not seen that particular film on the screen. Yet the song is one I have heard since my childhood, my schooldays, in a small religious town, Nabadwip, about sixty miles north of Calcutta.
Since I have chosen an autobiographical line, the circumstances in which I heard the song ought to be analysed in some detail. Significantly, Nabadwip was a historic religious centre for Bengali Vaishnavas as the place of birth of the fifteenth-century bhakti saint Chaitanya. Nabadwip in the 1960s was a strange but lively mixture of the traditional and the modern. The town’s main reputation came from its association with Chaitanya’s birth. Though others with deeper knowledge of Bengali cultural history would have known that it was the great centre of Sanskrit knowledge—particularly in Navyanyaya logic and in Smriti. It was a major centre of Vaishnava pilgrimage, particularly on significant occasions of the Vaishnava calendar—like the ceremonies of the jhulan purnima, the raslila, or janmashtami. Like other great religious centres, it was a centre for thriving commerce, and the modern railway made it more accessible to pilgrims.
Its second claim to fame as the traditional centre for esoteric Sanskrit learning, and the seat of a highly specialized system of ritual legality, was by then completely dwarfed, almost forgotten by its ordinary people. Few inhabitants of the city felt any pride in great logical schools. Also unnoticed by its pilgrims, and behind the spectacular religious aspect, it was by this time a considerable centre for the production of cotton sarees. The commercialization of its religious life fed directly into modern developments like cinemas, and a booming business in speakers and tannoys, which local shops and businesses used for advertising their wares, or announcements of upcoming films by cinemas, of public meetings by political parties, and municipal announcements by the local authorities. Aurally at least these tannoys and their blaring sounds were, in a literal sense, an inescapable part of our existence.
This sociological structure produced a very specific economy of sounds in the town—of various, different, often conflicting parts—and in this the tannoys played an indispensable role. That was the ubiquitous technological link between the blandishments of commercial advertisements, the enticement of the romantic films, and the exertions of the police to control the vast crowds streaming through the narrow streets at times of festivals. But this sound was distinctively modern, demonstrating the power and vulgarity of modern things. In a crowd of other sounds, they always pushed their way through. Because there were many other sounds in the town, Nabadwip was among other things a city of unceasing music. The Vaishnava sect around Chaitanya had developed a new communal form of worship, which took two unusual forms. On festival days there were religious processions in which devotees sang, played a drum called the
khol, and collectively danced on the streets, which set this sect apart from most other Hindu worshippers. When Chaitanya first initiated this form of collective dancing and singing, it created a scandal among the orthodox brahmins of Nabadwip, who complained to the Qazi and implored him to suppress the uproar. But more routinely, in hundreds of small local temples, round the year lower-level performances called
palakirtan went on. In these, a small troupe of
kathaks (literally, tellers of tales) or performers enacted segments of the stories of the love of Krishna and Radha through a fascinating combination of simple narration, mimed enactment, sung passages recounting their famous trysts or verbal exchanges, and dancing.
It was an immensely powerful aesthetic economy—a combination of various narrative and interpretative media, held together tightly by a single theme, animated by a rasa aesthetic that the audience knew intimately and enjoyed in endless re-enactments. The average Vaishnava was strongly urged by his religious sensibility to use aesthetics—visual images, narrative forms, music and dance—to enliven and ennoble his quotidian existence; in other words, to have a fundamental attitude towards life that was aesthetic.
A part of this aesthetic reception of everyday life was a simple custom of singing a standard tune early in the morning. Except in the rainy season, despite its transcendent connections, the town experienced an acute shortage of municipal water supply; but that was offset by the ‘divine’ supply of water from the Ganga. Most people, for most of the year, went for a bath in the river early in the morning, as later in the day, especially in summer, the sand on the wide banks of the river became unbearably hot. One interesting technique of communal worship in the Vaishnava religion was that most of the songs sung in the morning had identical or very similar tunes, generically called
prabhati (from
prabhat, early morning). Early in the morning, from sunrise to mid-morning, the town hummed with this general melody of morning worship—gentle, pastoral, expressing a sense of restrained and elegant joyfulness.
Those were Nehruvian times, and the ability of authorities to enforce legal rules had not crumbled. Apparently, the municipality had a rule that banned the use of tannoys before eight in the morning. (I might be wrong about the exact hour; it may have been half past eight or nine. But in that town eight in the morning was quite late in the working day); at that exact hour, all the ‘mike shops’ (maiker dokan) on the main street started their tannoys, which usually carried the currently fashionable Bengali and Hindi popular music, instantly reordering the aural economy. This immediately introduced a different music with a very different reading of the nature of human existence.
Hindi film songs used to be vastly popular, despite the widespread belief among older family members that they were corrupting. In some ways this was rather strange. The Radha-Krishna stories were often deeply erotic; compared to them, the Bengali adhunik (literally, modern) songs and the Hindi film lyrics simply expressed a vague sense of romantic longing, in most cases narratively frustrated by immovable and unforgiving family obstacles.
Yet these songs were considered dangerous precisely because they were romantic. Eroticism of a kind was a recognized part of traditional culture. Romantic love was a modern moral ideal. Against the iron laws of arranged marriages, these songs advocated, however vaguely, the individualistic principle of the romantic choice of partners, and described this as a state of divine emotional fulfilment. Family elders might be faulted for their moral principles, but they acted on a highly accurate perception of the sociological implications of this relatively pedestrian poetry. Our family did not even own a radio through which such moral enticements might infiltrate the home. Listening to songs from Hindi films was disapproved of even more strongly, because the disapproval of romantic behaviour was compounded by the Bengali disdain for the general lowness of North Indian culture. They came under three degrees of prohibition—they were romantic, they were from films, and they were in Hindi. I first heard this song in that context.
Ironically, just as the religious music had a compelling repetitiveness, coming back to your hearing every morning and making it impossible to forget that that was the proper way to start the day (in a gentle and subtle attitude of thankfulness), this film music also had its own answering repetitiveness. Since the songs were immensely popular among the young, the shops played them often, many times a day, often during festivals when individual marquees would hire an individual tannoy with a supply of gramophone records. They were additionally often carried by popular music channels of the Delhi-based AIR (All India Radio), and for some curious reason by Radio Ceylon. Thus these songs were not an episodic musical experience; they had their own structures of repetition, which made it impossible to forget them. In a sense, they also came back every mid-morning or afternoon to remind you how to face life in the city. Long before I encountered sociological theories of modernity and tradition or heard of Max Weber, I learnt, vaguely but vividly, through this undeniable line across the musical experience of my everyday, that these two types of tunes represented two immense principles of organizing experience, or the life-world.
There are some other peculiarities to this hearing. The first interesting fact was that I heard these songs, and this one in particular, hundreds of times, without watching the film in which it figured. This indicates two important things. First, songs like these had a strangely dual character: they were both contextual, and freestanding. Of course, in the context of the narrative of a specific film, the song enhanced a situation, carried and amplified a mood, inserted a twist, or did something of immediate narrative import: within the film it was inextricably connected to the story. Indeed, in extension of an argument Mukund Lath makes, the underlying aesthetic of popular Hindi films had some distinct similarities to the aesthetic of the classical
Natyashastra, and he argued that in the
natya, i.e. a play/film, several primary modes came together to form a more complex form of aesthetic enjoyment, in which each mode enhanced the other.
2But apart from the contextual meaning in this immediate narrative structure, many of the most popular songs were capable of achieving a freestanding meaningfulness as a literary, musical object, as a rhetorical comment on life. They were also part of a story, but in a different sense, not the story of this particular love, but the essential story of love in general. They had an ability to transcend the narrative frame in which they were conceived. There could be several reasons for this. A simple reason could be that some of the most popular songs from the better Hindi films were composed by Urdu poets of considerable standing who were slowly drawn into the capacious network of the film industry in Bombay. Composing for films probably gave them a highly remunerative but relatively undemanding occupation, leaving them free thereafter to be poets rather than overworked office drudges.
In many cases, I can believe that the creative urges of these writers went into the composition of even rather mundane film songs. In many cases, these songs survived after they performed their more limited, contextual purpose of advancing a particular story. Afterwards, they achieved something like cult status as free-standing cultural items, only slightly humbler than Urdu ghazals or Tagore songs—but vastly more popular. In part, this was helped by the loose structure of the average popular Bombay film. Although the various parts formed an interconnected whole as a film, some of these parts could also be enjoyed as independent artefacts unlinked from the film. The need for an aesthetic of the crowded, teeming, fast-moving city was deeply rooted in the circumstances of Indian modernity. Such songs gave to people who lived rather impoverished lives a lilting language that achieved a miraculous ‘transfiguration of the commonplace’.
There is a second, related, point, which is linked to larger questions. The fact that items like this song could subsist as freestanding cultural objects—like poems, or songs in a superior artistic culture—was precisely because through these aesthetic processes a new aesthetic structure was being formed. This was an aesthetic structure in a narrower, technically structuralist theoretical sense—a stock of resources which were like elements for improvising acts of recombination—a cultural combinatory of the modern sensibility which managed to find a strangely joyous description of the grim city while recognizing its sordidness.
Thus the song could be said to have two entirely different contexts of meaningfulness. It emerged from a more immediate, closed context of the film narrative, which imparted to it its meaning, and in which the song in turn contributed to the total structure of meaningfulness of the film’s signifying success as a complex structural form.
But it was also part of a second structure of meaningfulness—more relevant for our present discussion—about the aesthetic perception of the city in films. This song formed part of an entire repertoire of popular songs, mostly taken from the films, in which each song with its idiosyncratic sequencing of words, internal economy of images, and mood became a supporting neighbour to others of a similar kind. This poetry and these songs were not from the same films, or from identical narratives, or composed by the same poets. But taken together each of them advanced by slow and peculiar steps an aesthetic description and elaboration of the experience of modernity, and, at its centre, of the taste of city life. They were linked—not as parts of a single narrative, but rather of a single aesthetic.
I shall now turn to the song in greater detail to substantiate my point, and then go on to argue that this aesthetic interpretation of the city has important points of distinctiveness, and that its collective ‘sense’ of the city is vastly different from the more self-consciously artistic aesthetic of modern poetry. It is through these songs, forming an aesthetic series or combinatory, that the inhabitant of the modern city formed an expressive language of his emotions and moods, and his ultimate reception of this life-world. Most significantly, as I shall argue later, they made it possible to view the modern city as a place of joy—limited, contradictory, yet in an ultimate sense pleasurable.
The text of the lyric runs as follows:
Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan
Ay dil hai mushkil jina yahan (refrain)
Zara hathke zara bachke
Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.
Kahin building kahin tramen kahin motor kahin mill
Milta hai yahan sabkuch ik milta nahi dil.
Insan ko nahin naam o nishan,
Zara hatke zara bachke
Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.
CHORUS: Ay dil hai mushkil jina yahan …
Kahin satta kahin patta kahin chori kahin race,
Kahin daka kahin faka kahin thokar kahin thes.
Bekaron ke hain kayi kaam yahan,
Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan,
CHORUS: Ay dil hai mushkil jina yahan …
Beghar ko awara yahan kahte hans hans,
Khud katen gale sabke kahe isko bisnes [business].
Ik chiz ke hai kayi naam yahan,
Zara hatke zara bachke yeh hai Bombay meri jaan,
CHORUS: Ay dil hai mushkil jina yahan …
(female voice)
Bura duniya woh hai kehta aisa bhola tu na ban,
Jo hai karta voh hi bharta, yeh yahan ka hai chalan.
Dadagiri nahin chalne ki yahan
Yeh hai Bombay, yeh hai Bombay,
Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.
(male voice)
Ay dil hai mushkil jina yahan,
Zara hatke zara bachke
Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.
(female voice)
Ay dil hai asan jina yahan
Suno bandhu, suno Mister,
Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.
CHORUS: My heart, it is difficult to live in this place,
Move aside, watch out, this is Bombay, my love.
Buildings, trams, motors and mills—
Everything’s here but a human heart.
Not a trace of a human being
Move aside, watch out, this is Bombay, my love.
CHORUS:
Speculation, gambling, thieving, racing
Robberies, skipping meals, kicks, blows.
The jobless have a lot to do here,
Move aside, watch out, this is Bombay, my love.
CHORUS:
People laugh at the homeless as at madmen
They themselves cut everyone’s throat, that’s called business.
Every single thing here bears many names …
Move aside, watch out, this is Bombay, my love.
(female voice)
He calls the world bad, don’t be so childish
Here the law is: you reap what you sow.
Bullying will not do here
This is Bombay, this is Bombay, this is Bombay, my love.
(male voice)
My heart, it is difficult to live in this place,
Move aside, watch out, this is Bombay, my love.
(female voice)
It is easy to live here
Listen friend, listen Mister, this is Bombay, my love.
The two most striking aspects of the song are its lyrics and its tune. Since I am not qualified to comment on it musically, my analysis will remain restricted mainly to its poetic elements. As pointed out in my earlier essay,
3 there is considerable poetic artifice in the lyric. Even for a song, it starts with a pleasing abruptness, and its first sense of the city is almost a tactile feeling for its bustling, crowded dynamism. It instantly communicates the bodily rhythms of a person walking through a crowded Indian city—full of unruly, jostling crowds on the pavements and traffic on the streets.
Yet its crowdedness is unthreatening: it creates an atmosphere of anonymity within which the romantic couple can enjoy the strange seclusion of a romantic exchange. The singer says you have to twist, turn, stop, give way—because this is no ordinary town: yeh hai Bombay meri jaan (this is Bombay, my love), instantly creating a sense of the incomparability of Bombay, the paradigmatic metropolis. And Bombay’s incomparability is constantly followed by the refrain: my heart, it is hard/difficult to live here (ay dil hai mushkil jina yahan).
The life-world of modernity turns into a struggle—not to live well, just to live—‘un-adjectived’ living, which should be the simplest activity of all. The song goes on immediately to set up a deliberate contrast between the modern and the natural. In the city there are buildings, trams, cars, and mills, and it is hardly an accident that these are all referred to by their English names—
kahin building, kahin tramen, kahin motor, kahin mill. Evidently, these are things not available outside the magic world of Bombay—they are absent in the countryside.
This is followed instantly by a sharp comment on the heartlessness of the city—milta hai yahan sab kuch, ik milta nahi dil. Everything is available here except the human heart. And this heartlessness is matched by the city’s general deceptiveness—ik chiz ke hai kayi naam yahan—every single thing goes by several names. The city’s defining characteristic is the difference, in paradigmatically Marxist terms, between appearance and reality, and its deep deceptiveness. Here people deceive each other smiling all the while, merchants cut throats and ‘call it business’, and those without homes or shelter are accused of being feckless tramps. In some Hindi films, particularly those by Raj Kapoor, the figure of the tramp in Chaplin is taken up with modifications as the ‘natural’ carrier of such an outsider’s vision.
There is also a subtle exchange between the two figures in the song, though in the dialogical structure the presence of the female voice is asymmetric. She says very little; but brevity is compensated by the enormous power of her interjections. She cuts into the dolorous recitation of the city’s lack of faith only twice. The first occasion is a triumph of composing technique: when we expect her to simply repeat the refrain ‘it is difficult to live in this place’, she says with unexpected, wonderful, sparkling irony, a sense of luminously optimistic surprise—ay dil, hai asan jina yahan (my heart, it is easy to live here). When we expect her to confirm the repetitive theme that it is hard to live here, she unexpectedly says the opposite. The sharp and brief sentence is not amplified. We are left to surmise: is this precisely because of the thousand excuses and occasions for deception? Is the city a great unbounded space of a lowly form of freedom, but freedom all the same, for a de Certeuesque game of disappearance from social invigilation and political control, the sordid pleasure of ‘tactics’? Does the city allow people to hide—to fall in love in its vast and comforting anonymity? Does it make it possible to find a living, using its many opportunities? The second time, the same voice cuts into the song, taking the element of levity even further. I am sure the intended meaning here is to convey a certain streetwise intimacy: the woman calls her man suno Mister, suno bandhu (pal/buddy), yeh hai Bombay meri jaan.
What is remarkable in the lyric is a kind of critical sensibility of the city which sympathizes with the downtrodden, the fallen, the destitute. One suspects that this is the view of no common poor man, but the highly educated, high-cultured, lower-middle-class protagonist of modern Indian literature, the central, dominating figure of its poetry and novels. He is a strange and potent mixture of achievement and misfortune—educated, cultured, highly sophisticated in his social and aesthetic sensibility, yet always short of money, and acutely sensitive to the constant threat of indignity. He does not face the city with the numbness, despair, and deceit associated with the ordinary poor. He faces the city with indignation and a highly refined sense of cultural violation. Both these features—moral indignation and aesthetic distaste—are conditional on the possession of standards by which to judge the world; only a possessor of clearly defined moral principles, and equally clear aesthetic standards would feel these emotions against the modern city. Therefore, he uses a strange set of ‘weapons of the weak’: not foot-dragging, stealth, shortchanging; his weapons are high principle, irony, aesthetics. He has the great rare gift of turning his humiliation into poetry. He has the unmatched weapon, as long as the conflict is in the arena of culture, of middle-class eloquence.
Purely textually too we find an interesting structure of consciousness in the lyric. Remarkably, the lyric does not counterpose the city—the space of deprivation, deceit, and defilement—with an idealized space of the pastoral idyll of the village unspoilt by history.
4 The subtler current of thought running through the song is closer to a kind of humanist Marxism. Its imagic economy is very similar to Marx’s analyses in the
Economic Philosophical Manuscripts, in the famous sections on alienated labour and the power of money in bourgeois society. The ‘badness’ of the city is contrasted not to the ‘goodness’ of the village, which Marxists would have found reactionary and nostalgic, but with a ‘natural’ condition of man. Interestingly, from this natural condition of fulness and un-alienation both the poor and the rich are estranged: the poor are ground into degradation, the rich are mired in deceit.
Accordingly, the song demonstrates a suitably popular version of what Marxists would have called a Feuerbachian general humanism. What it misses in the city is not a rural, traditional ethic, but a general humanistic sympathy: there is no sign of the general sign of ‘man’ (
insan ka nahin naam o nishan); and man in this naturalist sense is marked by the heart, which is the only thing that Bombay cannot offer (
milta hai yahan sabkuch, ik milta nahi dil). The reason I associate this critical sensibility with the wide genealogy of Marxist thought is due precisely to its absence of a nostalgic relation with a rural past—it spurns that route as sentimentality, and firmly contrasts the degrading present of rising capitalism with a natural condition of humanity.
There is also a startling presence of the voice, which, if not directly radical, carries a suspicion of subalternity, all the more surprising because it is a feminine voice, which turns the usual expectation of roles upside down. Literary studies have shown conclusively that in the artistic literary reflection of the colonial world the voice of rational control, or of rational understanding of the external—particularly city—world, is a male voice. Rationalistic figures are primarily male figures. Women are generally associated with sentimentality and sustenance, occasionally with an invincible instinct for survival or protection of their children. But women are usually not the carriers of a sly knowledge of the city and its vast world of power and opportunities. They are never at home in the modern.
Here the feminine voice in the film song is refreshingly different—not merely from the standard enunciations of the literary values of femininity, but also from the disillusion expressed by the primary male voice about Bombay itself. Her four lines therefore deserve more careful analysis. The city produces a new, soiled kind of intelligence: and in some strikingly exceptional instances, at least in literature, this sly street wisdom is carried by women characters.
This stanza expresses some fairly complex judgements: unfortunately, the world we are thrown into is a bad world. But its ways, at least in the fallen city of Bombay, lays down that those who do the work reap the benefits, and fate does not rule people’s lives. In the startling concluding turn, the woman declares a great and paradoxical truth about the city—
hai asan jina yahan—this makes it easy to live here. And the two words ‘Mister’ and
bandhu are also characteristic urban words of address. So the woman’s lines in a sense agree with what the main voice of the song says about Bombay, but also asks the man to see the city as a space of contradiction, and to get reconciled to its other side—learning to live in this city, not by compromising his principles. To my sensibility, shaped no doubt by the tastes of Bengali
bhadralok high literature, the two words of address appear a bit odd; but their meaning is unmistakable.
I now wish to take this reading in a more general direction. My reading of the lines has been frankly excessively literary: in fact, literary in two senses. First, I read it outside the narrative frame of the film, which I never saw. Second, I also read merely the words, in effect analysing what I convened from a song into a poem. But even as a lay listener, I find some features of its musical composition interesting. First, the tune contains a subtle parodic element. If we listen carefully, we begin to hear the familiar Western song, ‘O my darling Clementine’. This opens up a potentially vast and interesting subject—of imitation, mimicry, modification, and appropriation, and the meanings of all these different cultural acts. Is this an act of borrowing, stealing, imitating? Does this signify exaggerated respect, an inability to produce one’s own art? Or does this demonstrate a strange assurance which can deftly pick up a well-known piece of artistic creation and displace its meaning by highly deliberate modification? Does this demonstrate dependence of the cultural imagination, or a playful and confident creative subjectivity?
The composer has employed a technique that is not rare in Hindi film music. He has quickened the tempo and changed the tune ever so slightly to yield a very different rasa—a structure of feeling. Despite obvious similarities, users of rasa theory will not find it hard to demonstrate that the rasa-sensibility is different. The mood of the song is quick, witty, there is a sense of joyous enjoyment of the city’s crowds and the rapid rhythms of its street life. By the change of pace, he has miraculously changed the meaning and the predominant colour of feeling. I call this relation ‘parodic’ in the sense that it picks up a very well-known cultural object, takes it out of its settled, familiar context, and by making it do something unusual changes its meaning completely. Yet the fresh meaning is not an unsuccessful pretence: it is a successful creation of a new meaning which is grasped, as the vast popularity of the tune showed, by the ordinary filmgoer across the entire country.
There is an equally impish and daring example of similar parodic appropriation of a famous European tune in Salil Chowdhury’s composition of another film song:
itna na mujhse tu pyar badha which is taken from Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in G Minor and altered in tempo. Anyone familiar with the original tune cannot escape a sense of wondrous enjoyment of the displacement of meaning.
5However, I am not an ideal listener of the song; let us bring the appreciation of the song closer to a more standard understanding of its ideal audience, made up of people who are habitual Hindi filmgoers, who know the actors, and the playback singers. What would they make of this song? How would they receive its various aspects? The reception of the song is a fairly complex affair. The narrative characters in the films performed their task of artistic enchantment by a deft combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar. Narrative characters are evidently recognized as belonging to types. Their power of aesthetic signification is at least in part drawn from this fact. Yet every story, however conventional and following narrative formulae, in the modern literary context, must have a quality of unrepeatedness, of being told for the first time, and contain a sense of surprise. The surprise operates within a general structure of recognition. We may have seen many films of revenge, but a particular story is different in particulars, though we can, from the structure of the plot, from the way the actions are arranged in its narrative composition, deduce fairly accurately what the resolution at the end is likely to be.
The enjoyment of narrative is a strange combination of the reassurance of such iterative patterns and surprise of the particular. In addition to these literary-narrative features of reassurance, or what can be called aspects of recognition, there are in films other techniques of recognition. The specific characters of the story are new to the audience, but they fall into recognition by the casting of the actors. Acclaimed heroes and heroines in Hindi popular films perform this function very strongly and very often. Even before the spectators have come into the film theatre, the simple association of an actress with a particular role creates a structure of fore-meanings and narrative expectations, which the actual unfolding of the film plot hermeneutically changes and confirms at the same time. The actress’s association with a certain standard type of role is created by a long and repetitive association with roles whose characteristic attributes she is acknowledged to bring out particularly well. Thus the complex narrative experience of the filmgoer is not the sensation of being open to an unfamiliar, entirely unpredictable run of events, convolution of plots, forming of characters. It is a more complex sensation of enjoyment in which along with these elements of unpredictability and surprise, there are equally strong elements of recognition or aesthetic repetition—seeing the same face, meeting one’s favourite actor or actress—and above all a confirmation in the coloured, charged, heightened universe of imagination of the moral structure of the social world.
A second element of recognition occurs in film songs. The lyrics and their narrative frame of course are new—which offer the element of surprise. But the fact that a well-known playback singer like Mohammed Rafi or Mukesh sings it balances it with recognition—producing the peculiar work of aesthetic enchantment in the song itself.
Finally, I would make a large and speculative suggestion about this entire series of elements of recognition in the cultural universe of Nehruvian India. The films in their generally recognized and well-understood interconnection with supporting structures like the narrative economy of the world of novels, the poetic universe of lyrics, the imagic economy from assorted visual sources, produced a whole structure that acts as a complex but single aesthetic unity. I shall call it loosely an aesthetic of the city—the general sense of what ‘the city’ is.
This aesthetic sense is produced in various ways: first, it is produced by this combination of the single narrative, specific song, individual actors, etc. inside the single film. Each single film sends a message to the audience about what life in the city is as a possibility. But I am concerned with making a larger structuralist point. It is not merely the signifying relations between its dissimilar elements—the story, the acting, the songs, the stream of images inside the film—which constitute a unity. Each song forms a link, a part of a syntagmatic chain with other songs that speak about the joys and frustrations of urban love, forming a musical aesthetic of the city. Equally, this is done by the lyrics and the images. Eventually, since the spectator or the recipient is a repetitive consumer of separate but linked aesthetic discourse, the collective, iterative, total impact creates a general, overarching common aesthetic.
I wish now to briefly compare this aesthetic of the city in popular Hindi films with the aesthetic in high literature. My comparison has obvious difficulties. The Hindi film has a particular cultural habitus—a combination of the cultural styles from North Indian poetry and theatre combined with an experiential perception of the city drawn primarily from the bustling commercial metropolis of Bombay. The poetic aesthetic I am comparing it with is from Bengali literature, produced by poets of the generation after Tagore, a poetry of a deep moral scepticism and disillusionment. But there is some justification for this contrast, as both groups of people are artists engaged in thinking aesthetically about India’s modernity, and they are living at roughly the same historical time.
From its inception, Bengali high literature developed a contradictory relationship with the city. In some ways, the modern life of the mind required the environment of the city as its condition of production. Most of the great literary writers—Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Rabindranath Tagore, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay—were city dwellers. It was clearly the new kind of social and intellectual life of their city, Calcutta, which gave them the intellectual, moral, and social sustenance from which their literary work emerged.
Yet, dwelling in the city did not always convince them that the colonial form of modernity offered by the city was above criticism. Bankimchandra did not write disparagingly of Calcutta in his novelistic writings, but in one of his long and influential humorous pieces, Muchiram Guder Jibancharit—the satirical life of a scoundrel who rose irresistibly to eminence in colonial society—Calcutta and other towns figure prominently. The satire is primarily about the inversion of values in colonial public life and institutions, but as these institutions—the courts and government offices—are mainly located in cities, they get an indirect lashing of the sarcasm in Bankim’s humorous writing.
And although indirect, and secondary, the narrative establishes a central theme of Bengali writing about the city. The city is a space of travesty. It is the space in which modern principles, values, institutions, modes of life, unfold, but always in a travestied form. They are never true to their abstract principles, or even the institutional or practical form these values acquire in Europe’s modernity. The forms these principles, values, and the characters embodying them have in Calcutta are in some ways a caricature of the original—just as Bengali modernity is a caricature of the modernity of the West.
In doing this, Bankim was in one sense continuing an earlier satirical tradition in Bengali writing, and in other ways transforming it. From the rise of the modern city of Calcutta, the social and moral conduct of the modern elites and middle classes who resided in the city—referred to by the collective appellation ‘babu’—was a target of traditional farcical forms. In early Bengali literature, some highly talented authors like Kaliprasanna Sinha extended this tradition of satirical sketches and comments into a literary tradition of acerbic comment on the imitative excesses of the new parasitic urban elite.
Although this kind of comment always implies social criticism, the early writing on the city was mainly marked by its sense of fun at the expense of the babus and its general tone of light-heartedness. In Bankim’s hands, the lightheartedness is continued, and the babu remains a butt of fun; but underlying that surface sparkle of gaiety, a new highly serious historical judgement is subtly introduced. This judgement indicates that it is wrong to repose great faith in the future achievements of Bengali modernity, because the relation between its European exemplars and their Bengali re-enactment is one of travesty. Evidently, this already forms a sufficiently dark background out of which the deeper and melancholic critiques of the modern city could emerge.
Tagore’s relation with the city was predominantly one of aesthetic rejection. In his mature works, on many occasions, writing about the city in his poetry, he tries to show that the city cannot find a poetry of its own, because the city in its sordidness does not deserve poetry. His poems are therefore written with their back turned on the city they are talking about: their dominant urge is one of escape into nature, into the countryside, less frequently into a highly coloured romantic past. He is capable of writing wonderful poetry about the hazy cities of the past in which Kalidasa’s heroines lived their lives, of a wonderfully mythical Ujjaini; but Calcutta was undeserving and incapable of a lyrical celebration of itself.
In poetry after Tagore, several highly talented poets continued this tone of negative reflection on the city, but with one highly significant difference. In Tagore, escapes from this city were primarily of three types—into imagination and dreams, into the unspoilt nature of the countryside, and into nostalgia. The new poets of the 1940s cut off all these routes of escape. They consequently forced the reading public to face the dirt and meaninglessness of the city quite squarely—not as a passing phase, not as a small part of a larger green, beautiful world, but as the undeniable, inescapable present, as the only world there is.
This sense of a claustrophobic space gradually finds two types of poetic enunciation. The more aesthetically sophisticated presentation of this new aesthetic of the city came in the wonderfully colourful imagery of despair in Jibanananda Das, whose visual sensibility constantly prowls the city, specially at night when it is deserted and exhausted, when the crowds have disappeared, when the city gives up, in a sense, its vast, dark, despairing truth. Das’s poetry is an aesthetic wonder, because his weaving of words makes this despondent nightmare as beautiful as dreams. But despite everything, despite the immensely exciting craft, the amazing surprise of his imagery, the subtle, tired cadence of the understated meter, the city remains a space of despair.
To take a single typical example, which raises a complicated question about love and fulfilment, one of Das’s best known poems, ‘Banalata Sen’, is about a woman once met in the past, now lost. In painting her face, Das wrote the unforgettable lines: ‘chul tar kabekar andhakar bidishar nisha, mukh tar avantir karukarya’—‘her hair the ancient darkness of the night in Bidisha city, her face the sculpture of the past city of Avanti.’ She is eventually lost, and constantly returns in memory—not, like a similar figure in Tagore (‘Kshanika’) to comfort but to hurt.
The present, the immediate, is entirely enclosed in the claustrophobic space of Calcutta with its subtle and ineradicable curse, where everything beautiful is transient, awaiting decomposition and death. Death, decay, the corpse eaten by birds of prey, is a constant theme in Jibanananda, as in the other famous image in his poetry—deer playing in a forest clearing in the improbably bright light of stars; but these deer are destined for slaughter; what eventually ends the idyll is the sharp, final, snap of a rifle shot ringing through that enchanted night.
In Das’s poetry, love is constantly present, constantly stalked by a stealthy, confident, unavoidable death. In the themes we found in Tagore, images of love are always linked in a great tenderness of words to the past, to memory, to nature which lives serenely outside the city, and to dreams. But clearly, all these things—the past, the unspoilt countryside, nature—are transient, threatened, ultimately brought to submission by the city.
A second strand of poetic reflection on the city developed alongside this one, animated by a powerful induction of communist ideology into Bengali culture. But the communist poets’ sense of the city is not very different from the gloomy despair of Jibanananda. To take a characteristic example, Samar Sen, an acclaimed young leftist poet in the 1950s, saw the city very similarly—as a space of inevitable unfulfilment. And since love is such a shining emblem of fulfilment in earlier poetic aesthetics, this poetry shows a strangely perverse delight in soiling these traditional themes, images, and at times even well-known lines taken straight out of Tagore, continuing the tradition of parody, but with a further twist. The parody does not remain a vehicle of laughter as in Bankim, it turns vicious and primarily bears the imprint of melancholy. Women, still carriers of a remembered beauty in Jibanananda, become simply objects of lust; in Sen’s poetry the space of Calcutta is surprisingly teeming with prostitutes. Some of Sen’s lines show the working of the social sensibility behind this aesthetic with exceptional clarity: the figure of the ganika, the woman who can be bought, returns endlessly to haunt the poetic imagination, in the final travesty of love—she ‘loves’ him for the precise minutes for which the price has been paid. Samar Sen’s poetry is also admirably explicit about the subject of this poetic enunciation and this sense of the city: this is the madhyabitta, the highly educated lower-middle-class male who is equipped with a cultural sensibility which can never find fulfilment in Calcutta’s economic and social world.
By the 1940s this educated lower middle class had grown to a considerable size; and they were in any case the primary audience, the aesthetic consumers, of this poetic discourse. By the 1950s both the sociological and cultural developments conspired to ensure the utter dominance of this ‘sense of the city’ in Bengali literature to the exclusion of others. However, this connection between the sociological structure of the city and the enjoyment of its poetic aesthetics also restricted the frontiers of this sensibility. The city may have been culturally dominated by the lower middle class, but city experience was obviously more diverse. Ironically, the poor in the city did not necessarily share this gloomy sense of the city and its place in history. In economic terms, the income of different classes is a dominant consideration; but in the sociology of economic life it is the direction of movement of economic fortunes that is more important in creating a certain kind of collective sensibility. Other classes in the city did not necessarily share the historical melancholy of the educated lower middle class. The city for most people was a far more mixed and complex arena of experience. It certainly produced hopelessness and despair, but it was also a space in which anonymity gave a sense of freedom from restrictive village customs; it was enjoyed by most characters in the films as a context in which genuine love could be experienced against the deterrents of deprivation, and social and cultural taboos.
It is interesting to contrast these two sharply different rhetorical pictures of the city, and reflect about their different social and aesthetic associations. Descriptively, some of the associations are obvious. First, there is the contrast between a self-consciously ‘high artistic’ language and comportment of literary poetic writing. Writers like Jibanananda were engaging in a highly reflexive artistic enterprise in which the attention to form, the crafting of language and mood, were paramount; whether the poetry was generally intelligible was a far less important consideration. Some of the poets, engaging in self-interpretation, pointed out, quite rightly, that the intelligibility of poetry was a matter of the familiarity of conventions. Complaints of unintelligibility against modern, post-Tagore poetry often stemmed from the fact that the new poetic form or diction was unfamiliar rather than inherently obscure. Once used to the new diction (in Bengali often they used the term uccharan), the audience would begin to enjoy the new poetry and its unconventional linguistic surprises.
The rhetoric of the popular Hindi films, precisely because they were a constituent part of popular culture, entirely dependent on commercial success, could not take such high risks in terms of formal characteristics. That does not mean that there was not considerable craft in the making of the different aspects of these films. The literary elements of the films, in particular, though less visible and subordinated to commercial-popular elements, retained an aspiration to relative autonomy. Poets contributing to them wrote serious poetry independent of the films, and sedulously cultivated their literary reputations. It is not surprising that their general poetic reflection on subjects close to their heart often found expression in these compositions as well.
A second contrast between the two images of the city is probably of greater significance. Both poetry and popular films gave rise to specific aesthetic structures with very different readings of the meanings of city life. For the high artistic poetic discourse the image of the city is a dark one, where lives are unfulfilled and people go through the subtle defilement of their everyday existence. This is reflected in the strange delight that some poets have in the defilement of earlier objects of high art. Samar Sen, for instance, constantly brings up celebrated lines and images from Tagore to mock, to parody, and to defile. This sense of the city could not be a general, universal rhetoric precisely because of its narrow, partial focus on the city’s deprivations. It could only be a poetic sense which was appreciated by a relatively highly-educated, middle-class minority which had the cultural skills to understand its subtleties and the social position to experience the nearness of this particular despair.
By contrast, the cinematic image of the city is more complex; it contains the dark image, but this is constantly relieved by an opposite image of hope and optimism—as in the counterpoint of the feminine statement that it is easy to live in the city, in the lilt of the pleasurable, optimistic tune of the song, in the general narrative structures of urban love. The filmic representation might be less self-consciously artistic, prone to a melodramatic simplification of emotions, but, from a different point of view, its image of the city was of a space of contradictions—where different things took place—not just of constant, unremitting despair. Unlike the high artistic portrayal of Calcutta, the Bombay of the films was, in this respect, in subtle and important ways, a city of joy.
References
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. Habitations of Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kaviraj, Sudipta. 1998. The Culture of Representative Democracy. In Partha Chatterjee, ed., Wages of Freedom: Fifty Years of the Indian Nation-State. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Lath, Mukund. 1998. Transformation as Creation. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
This essay was first published in Preben Kaarsholm, ed., City Flicks, Calcutta: Seagull 2004.
4 For a similar discussion about the pastoral idyll of the village in Bengali partition literature, see Chakrabarty 2002.
5 Salil Chowdhury’s song occurs in a film called
Chhaya and was sung by a very popular singer, Talat Mahmood.
