BOMBAY’S GIANT POSTERS
Adil Jussawalla
Bombay is an open-air gallery packed with paintings. Five major studios and about ten minor ones producing them—handpainted film posters that blaze like gigantic mirrors in the sun, reflecting a common urban dream.
In a city which has a quarter of the area of London, with the least amount of recreational space in the world and the highest density of citizens (115,000 per square mile as compared to New York’s 26,000 according to one estimate), Bombay’s six million citizens have a constant dream and the stuff it is made on is celluloid. From its beginnings in 1913, the Indian film industry has made almost 12,000 feature films. It made 401 in 1972, second only to Japan, and, as India’s film capital (though Madras makes many more films per year, they are less widely distributed) Bombay is India’s leading dream-maker.
A visitor to Bombay, however, would probably conclude that the dream has become a nightmare. Few cities in the world have such large battlegrounds of colour for their posters, such a primitive clashing of primaries. But, for the citizen of Bombay, few battles are resolved so satisfactorily. He loves his posters. Sometimes they seem to him to provide the only bits of colour in an otherwise drab, neglected city. Here, a pale green has a dark orange by the throat. There, a violet breast balloons heavenwards. These the citizen of Bombay takes for granted as someone might take his own language for granted. It is a sign language he knows by heart.
Fortunately for the visitor, it is an easy language to learn. India’s high rate of illiteracy and the fact that there can be as many as fifteen or sixteen different language-speaking groups in a city like Bombay compel the film poster to exist without copy. Nor can the visuals do anything less than scream their message from the house-tops. Leading but ageing film stars must be painted an unnatural pink and have at least their faces lifted. Villians must be shown in their true colours, all of them cold, occasionally lined with an impassioned red. The essentials of the film’s dramatic conflict must be seen in a flash.
When copy is used it is generally in English and consists of a short phrase like ‘Good Man God’s Man’ or, as for the film Purab aur Paschim (East and West), ‘The best of both the worlds’.
Publicizing ‘the best of both the worlds’ a few months ago was a campaign that was representative of the most advanced kind of film publicity in India, using not only the usual cloth hoardings and paint, but plaster, glass, and other materials that glitter but are not gold. Bombay’s Opera House, where the film was showing and where the British once rolled up in carriages to listen to travelweary singers, is renowned for the ambitious displays of publicity along its outer walls and the one for Purab aur Paschim was no exception.
An entire Hindu temple, complete with carved pillars and bells, had been made to fit snugly between panels representing the holy East and the unholy West. The temple, one gathered, was the area where ‘the best of both the worlds’ met as, among the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, there was a crucified Christ.
One Eastern panel represented a devotional group, among them an old man bowed with wisdom, in various attitudes of piety. The Western panel showed a blonde kissing the hand of someone who looked vaguely like Peter Sellers while a figure looking more definitely like a mother or a mother-in-law stood starchly disapproving in the background. The panel also showed two oiled ladies about to sprint at each other in the act of making love or war.
Such suggestiveness is about as far as Indian film producer can go, and for prudish India, this is far enough. In the absence of the kiss, outlawed from the Indian film by outdated censorship laws, both film directors and publicity men throw their stars into inventive raptures that suggest not only the kiss but the very extreme of physical passion. Of course there’s always a moral in it somewhere to take care of the prude. In the hoarding for Purab aur Paschim a chastely robed figure, alias Good, had his back firmly turned on the ladies of dubious intent.
But the message must be driven home. And a single eye-catching symbol must be found to do it. Purab aur Paschim found a symbol that rose all over Bombay, towering above its double deckers, shimmering in an armour of glass. It was the West, symbolized by a young blonde, holding a drink in her right hand, a cigarette in her left and wearing a mini-dress, a combination designed, one supposes, to traumatize the Indian into rushing back to the temples again. The film, needless to say, only set out at unskilful length what its publicity did so skilfully and effectively.
In view of the skill involved, it was surprising to discover that the studio responsible for the publicity, Parduman Studios, employs hardly any academically trained painters.
The preliminary ideas for a campaign are generally provided by Mr Parduman himself. Stars who have found their faces disproportionately small to those of rival stars have sometimes forced the studio to redesign an entire series, but such occasions are rare.
Once a poster is completed it is transported to its attendant hoarding on a handcart specially lengthened and widened to take its enormous size. Bombay’s traffic conditions being anarchic at the best of times, these posters travel through the city in the dead of night.
The local publicity required for a big-budget film can cost a producer between £4,000 and £5,500 in posters covering about 150 hoardings in Bombay alone. The studio would charge roughly the equivalent of £18 for an average-sized poster. The artist would get £3.
We step out of the studio and, driving through the city, see the posters that have become part of its architecture. Here, there is a touch of art nouveau, there, stickers for an anti-Communist election campaign protect the vulnerable parts of the hero and heroine with crossed swords and shields. Another heroine’s hairdo is a mass of bird-droppings. An orange monster has faded to pink under the fierce sun. The evocative names go by. Truck Driver, Hongkong, and the familiar Bombay dream begins to assert itself. I want to see a film.
Should I go and see Hongkong? I see the city’s buildings smothered by one of its truly original art forms and remember that when the posters began creeping up the sides of Victoria Terminus, Bombay’s beautiful Oriental-Gothic Station, some citizens asked for them to be torn down.
But if some citizens have no need for the posters, the posters certainly have no need for them. Like moss, or malignant creepers, they will continue to spread from Bombay’s five major studios and ten minor ones, until chopped, if at all, by the technological shears of sophisticated printing presses. Then and only then will one of India’s unsung cottage industries come to an end.
In the meantime one recalls the recent event of a film, that, as an experiment, was released without its convoy of posters. It was a success. And I am struck by the realization that if the posters exist to draw people into the cinemas, they are also there for a less obvious reason.
They are also more to reflect the Indian film industry to itself, a mirror for self-homage that depends only marginally on the response of the onlookers, even if they have learned to love the language of the act and appreciate its every nuance. Indian film posters are the Indian film industry’s supreme advertisements for itself. If they had to go, it is the industry which would miss them most.
So, among six million citizens, an ageing actress contemplating her face in her favourite mirror, the Indian film industry sits, powerful, narcissistic and completely besotted with itself. Though recent restrictions by the Indian Motion Picture Producers’ Association on the annual number of films a star can be involved in have caused major schisms and walkouts, and though producers are beginning to feel the failures of their many costly epics, the Indian film industry has many years to go before, like Hollywood, it realizes its big-spender days are over.
Perhaps, quite simply, the peoples’ tastes will change in favour of less ostentatious, low-budget films and take the film industry along with them.
I find my tastes have changed too. I decided to go and see Hongkong.
This essay was first published in the summer 1973 issue of Orientations (Hong Kong) as ‘The Medium Is the Message’.