India After Gandhi

by Ramachandra Guha

  A celebrated film director once described his productions as ‘pageants for peasants’.13 These pageants, naturally, were set in locations the peasants could only dream of. Sometimes this was a mythic past, where men flew on horses and conversed with gods; at other times, in places on earth that the viewers would never get to. Indian films were – and are – shot on the French Riviera, in the Swiss Alps, on the South African coast, with its characters wearing clothes not worn in India and driving cars never seen there. This was a ‘wholly voyeuristic cinema, where the object of desire could be anything from Dutch tulips to fancy telephone instruments’, and through which the viewer ‘lived at second hand a lifestyle lived Elsewhere’.14

  Where the Indian film rises above stock themes and stereotypes, and becomes truly original, is in its music. Traditional Indian plays and dramas all had songs of one sort or another. This method was carried over to the cinema, where each film includes about half a dozen songs, sung off screen by a voice not the actor’s, who merely lip-synchs the sung words.

  In a historic accident, or perhaps an accident made possible only by history, these songs of love and despair came to be written by some of the finest poets of the age. At the time of Independence, and for perhaps a century before that, the pre-eminent language of poetry was Urdu. Before and after Partition, many Muslim writers – and not a few Hindus – found refuge in the Bombay film industry. Their noms de plume – Sultanpuri, Jaipuri, Ludhianvi, Azmi, Badayuni, Bhopali – evoked the towns of north India where Urdu had flowered, as a syncretic language spoken with an exquisite refinement by Muslims and Hindus alike.

  One reason that film songs were so popular was because of their lyrics. These were delicately worded, rich in puns and historical or political allusion. And they were set to music that was no less appealing. The melodies drew from classical music and folk songs, but their orchestration also borrowed heavily - and for the most part, innovatively – from Western exemplars. The sitar and the tabla mixed more or less harmoniously with the saxophone and violin. ‘Long before fusion music became fashionable’, wrote one student of the subject, ‘it was being performed every day in Bombay’s film studios.’ This was a heady brew which mixed folk melodies from the Gangesdelta with ‘slivers of Dixieland stomp, Portuguese fados, Ellingtonesque doodles . . .’, the whole set to the strict structure of a classical Hindustani raga.15

  Traditionalists dismissed the film song as ‘a degraded – even degenerate – form of Indian classical or folk genres’. But, as Ashraf Aziz points out, this was neither folk nor classical, but ‘a new genre of song obligatorily created for the cinematic narrative’. It was ‘a new synthesis resulting in an entirely new form of music’.16 A form, one might add, that was more widely and intensely loved than its predecessors. For, as a great classical vocalist once complained, the songs of the films were ‘on the tongues of high society ladies of Calcutta as well as the tongawallahs of Peshawar’.17

  Indian audiences, writes the film historian Nasreen Munni Kabir, are ‘resigned to stock characters and predictable dialogue’. But they know, and hope, that these ‘tired old stories’ can yet ‘be brought back to life by good-looking stars and six or eight great songs’. These audiences ‘can accept repetition in storylines’, but ‘they will reject a film’s music if it has no originality’.18

  III

  From the 1940s to the 1980s films were watched by two kinds of Indians -young men in all-male groups, and families. An anthropologist working in northern India found that ‘many unmarried men are intensive users of film culture’. They liked films in themselves, for the entertainment they provided and for offering them an escape from the trials of family living. The theatre was a place where they could smoke cigarettes (prohibited at home), and joke and play around with their friends. Although young women rarely went to the movies, older men sometimes took along their wives and parents. The two groups tended to prefer different kinds of films. Young men liked those with ‘unrestrained dance and fight scenes’, whereas mixed groups chose to watch films depicting the joys and troubles of family life.19

  The passion for films was even more intense in south India. Here, male moviegoers had constituted themselves into fan clubs, each devoted to celebrating a particular male star. The town of Madurai in Tamil Nadu, for example, had as many as 500 such clubs, whose members were mostly in their late teens or early twenties. They included tailors, rickshaw pullers, vegetable sellers and students. The club’s activities were aimed at promoting their star, by pasting posters of his films, buying tickets to watch them and generally singing his praises in public and in private. Occasionally, the club’s activities took amore philanthropic turn, by donating blood in the hero’s name or raising money for disaster relief.20

  In earlier chapters we have met M. G. Ramachandran of Tamil Nadu and N. T. Rama Rao of Andhra Pradesh, movie stars who became chief ministers of their state on the strength of their acting career alone. As adored in his native heath was the Kannada film actor Rajkumar, although he did not seek to convert this adoration into political advantage. In all cases, the veneration was a consequence of the fact that, in this part of India, film was a prime vehicle for the articulation of linguistic nationalism. The people of the south saw their languages under threat from Hindi; mobilizing to protect it, they sought hope and support from the actors who spoke most eloquently their own beloved tongue. In their films, these stars enacted the essential themes of human existence – life and death, romance and betrayal, prosperity and misery – and did so in phrases and idioms drawn from the rhythms and cadences of everyday speech. Literally as well as metaphorically, NTR and his fans, MGR and his fans, and Rajkumar and his fans spoke the same language.

  In the Hindi heartland, the love of films was not so closely tied in with one’s social identity. (As it was spoken by more Indians than any other language, Hindi was scarcely seen as being under threat.) Still, because their catchment was bigger, the Hindi stars could command a wider – though not necessarily deeper – appreciation. Arguably the most popular film star of all time is the Hindi actor Amitabh Bachchan. (I speak here not merely of India but of the world as a whole – Bachchan was voted as such in an online poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 2001.)

  Born in 1942, the son of a famous Hindi poet of Allahabad, Amitabh Bachchan joined films after a stint in the corporate world. He was very tall and fairly dark, in both respects at odds with the popular heroes who preceded him. These handicaps were soon overcome by his imperious manner and his magnificent deep voice. Bachchan rose to stardom in the early 1970s – a time of great cynicism with regard to the political system, which was being challenged by such extra-parliamentary forces as the Naxalites and Jayaprakash Narayan’s Bihar movement. His roles were in keeping with the times. He played the angry young man, pitted against but always overcoming the system – as a militant worker against unfeeling capitalists, an honest police officer against corrupt superiors, even as an underworld don whose wicked manner hid (not very successfully) a golden heart.21

  In 1982 Bachchan was hospitalized after an accident suffered on the set. Millions prayed, successfully, for his recovery. Three years later he became a Congress MP from Allahabad, at the invitation of his childhood friend Rajiv Gandhi. ‘Who will replace the angry young man?’ asked the popular press plaintively.22 Fortunately, he and Rajiv Gandhi then fell out, with Bachchan leaving Parliament to return to the screen. As he has grown older, his roles have changed. He is astonishingly versatile – in his sixties, he can play the stern father as well as the quirky policeman (as in Bunty and Babli, 2005). In the first years of the new millennium he took on his most popular role yet, as the host of Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? The show was spectacularly successful, in part because it was in tune with the get-rich-quick temperament of post-liberalization India, but also because of the fame and personality of the host. Bachchan was brilliant – by turns gentle and sharp, and superbly bilingual, his improvi
sations worthy of his father, a Hindi poet who was also a professor of English literature.

  A sixtieth-birthday tribute to Bachchan spoke of how his career had ‘traversed emotions and generations’.23 Perhaps the only other figure to have done that successfully is the singer Lata Mangeshkar. She too had a gifted father, the singer, actor and composer Dinanath Mangeshkar. He diedin 1942, when Lata was only thirteen but having spent the better part of her life learning music from her father. As the eldest of five siblings, Lata very quickly became the family’s main breadwinner. She sang at first in Marathi films, but soon moved to the more popular and better-paying Hindi arena.

  Lata Mangeshkar’s first song as a playback singer was recorded in 1947. By the end of the decade she had become the best-known singer in India. As well as the most sought-after, for no producer or director could think of a film without a song by her. In a career spanning five decades she has recorded more than 5,000 songs.24

  Before Lata Mangeshkar, most women singers in films possessed husky voices. Lata’s veered towards the higher end of the scale. Shrill to some, her singing was to others the very embodiment of soft femininity. It soon became the best-known voice in India, the ‘voice to which the road-side vendor in Delhi has transacted his business, the long-distance trucker has sped along the highway, the Army jawan in Ladakh has kept guard at his frontier bunker and to which the glittering elite have dined in luxury hotels’.25 Her appeal cut across both class and political orientation. The nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru was an admirer, not least because Lata made famous asong (‘Ae Méré Vatan Ké Logon’) saluting the martyrs who had fallen victim to the Chinese invasion in 1962. But so, much later, was the chauvinist Bal Thackeray, who upheld the little lady as a splendid exemplar of Marathi womanhood.

  IV

  One feature of the film industry has been its capacious cosmopolitanism. Parsi and Jewish actors have rubbed shoulders with Hindus and Muslims and Christians. Some of the greatest film directors have been from Bengal or south India.

  A very representative example is one of the most successful films ever made, Sholay (1975). Its director was a Sindhi, while its lyricist and one male lead were Punjabi. Other male leads were from Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and North-West Frontier Province respectively. (Another, who was dropped at the last moment, was from Sikkim.) Of the two female leads, one was a Tamil, the other a Bengali domiciled in Madhya Pradesh. The music director was a Bengali – from Tripura.26

  It was not just in Bombay that the film industry was socially inclusive. In the Madras studios of the Tamil director S. S. Vasan the ‘make-up department was first headed by a Bengali who became too big for a studio and then left. He was succeeded by a Maharashtrian who was assisted by a Dharwar Kannadiga, an Andhra, a Madras Indian Christian, an Anglo-Burmese and the usual local Tamils.’ As one of Vasan’s scriptwriters was to recall, ‘this gang of nationally integrated make-up men could turn any decent-looking person into a hideous crimson-hued monster with the help of truck-loads of pancake and a number of other locally made potions and lotions.’27

  Above all, the film industry provided generous refuge for India’s largest and often very vulnerable minority, the Muslims. Many of the best lyricists, as already noted, were Muslim; so were some popular scriptwriters. Some of the best male singers were Muslim. So too were some top directors and, even more strikingly, some top actors. When, shortly after India’s first general election, a Bombay magazine asked its readers to choose their favourite actor, a Muslim man polled the most votes, a Muslim woman the second most.28 Interestingly, both had assumed non-Muslim names – Yusuf Khan becoming the Hindu-sounding Dilip Kumar and Fatima Rashid taking the neutral pseudonym Nargis (after the Narcissus flower). As Muslim actors and actresses became more established, they no longer needed to resort to such subterfuge. A great star of the 1950s and 1960s was the actress Waheeda Rahman. Much later, in the 1990s, the top male stars in Hindi films were three Muslims with a common surname, Khan.

  The novelist Mukul Kesavan writes of his Delhi childhood that in his school and home he never came across a Muslim name. Then he adds, ‘The only place you were sure of meeting Muslims was the movies.’29 Notably, the content of the movies also reflected their presence and contribution. Because so many scriptwriters and lyricists were Muslim, the language of the Bombay film – spoken or sung – was quite dissimilar to the stiff, formal, Sanskritized Hindi promoted by the state in independent India. Rather, it was closer to the colloquial Hindustani that these writers spoke, a language suffused with Urdu words and widely understood across the Indian heartland.30 Again, while most films featured Muslim characters, these were ‘rarely shown in an unfavourable light. They were honest friends, loyal soldiers, good policemen, bluff Pathans, friendly uncles.’31 There remained one significant taboo – against romantic relationships between Hindus and Muslims. This taboo was partially breached by the 1995 hit film Bombay, which showed a Hindu boy falling in love with a Muslim girl. However, the reverse was not conceivable: no film could go so much against the grain as to show a Muslim man marrying a Hindu girl.

  In the world of Indian film Muslims have occupied an honourable place. The leading Malayalam film actor Maamooty remarks that ‘I have been in this business for the last two decades and a half and I don’t remember even a single occasion in which my Muslim identity stood in my way.’32 Would that we could say the same about other spheres of life in independent India.

  V

  For ‘an Indian world full of strife, tension and misery’, writes one critic, the popular film provided ‘just the right escapism the country needed’.33 While most films took their viewers into a fantasy world, there was also a significant strain of realism. In the first years of Independence, three filmmakers in particular (partially) bucked the populist trend. These were Bimal Roy, whose Do Bigha Zamin (1953) sensitively portrayed the sufferings of the rural poor; Mehboob Khan, whose Mother India (1957) interwove the story of a heroic mother with the story of a new nation coming into its own; and Guru Dutt, who in a series of remarkable films explored the darker side of life, as experienced especially by artists shunned by a crassly materialistic society.

  The pre-eminent representative of an ‘alternative’ tradition of film making in India, however, was the Bengali giant Satyajit Ray (1921–92). The son and grandson of writers, Ray himself was very variously gifted. An accomplished short-story writer in Bengali, he was knowledgeable about classical music (Western and Indian), and for many years made a living as an artist and designer. His debut film, Pather Panchali, released in 1955, was the first of a trilogy that followed a boy named Apu from childhood into manhood, in the process delineating, with great sensitivity and skill, social changes in the Bengal countryside. Over the next three decades he made virtually a film a year, these with one exception all set in Bengal. Several were based on novels by Rabindranath Tagore, by whose scepticism regarding nationalism and aesthetic sensibility Ray was deeply influenced. He received an Oscar for ‘lifetime achievement’ in 1992; in the same year, he was awarded India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna.

  Ray’s films dealt with an astonishing range of subjects. Jalsaghar (1958) was a paean to music, Mahanagar (1963) a portrait of his own city, Calcutta; Nayak (1966) an exploration of an actor, his art and his constituency; Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) a juxtaposition of the worlds of the urban middle class and the forest-dwelling tribal. Other films deal with politics without being ‘political’; one was set during the Swadeshi movement of 1905–6, another at the time of the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s. He made some marvellous children’s films, based on stories written by his grandfather, as well as several detective films based on his own novels. In his films women play strong and often pivotal roles; they are intelligent, artistically gifted and, above all, independent.34

  Satyajit Ray was an iconic figure in his native Bengal, his films discussed in newspapers and magazines and in trains and buses as well. He was also greatly admired abroad; his films were regularly sh
own at Cannes and other festivals and his work was handsomely praised by Akira Kurosawa and other peers. Within India, however, he could attract criticism, as when the actress Nargis alleged in Parliament that he show cased Indian poverty to attract attention in the West. The charge was petty, not to say petulant; it was probably provoked by Ray’s own less-than-flattering remarks about the Hindi film.

  Among Ray’s distinguished contemporaries were two fellow Bengalis – Ritwik Ghatak (1925–76) and Mrinal Sen (born 1923). Both were influenced by the state’s communist movement, and their films were often sharply political, dealing with such themes as peasant protest, Partition and the great Bengal Famine of 1943. The leading radical film makers of the next generation were Shyam Benegal (born 1934) and A door Gopalakrishnan (born 1941), whose movies foregrounded such issues as the reform of the caste system and the prudery and hypocrisy of the Indian middle class.35

  Known sometimes as ‘art cinema’ and at other times as ‘parallel cinema’, the movies made by Ray, Ghatak, Benegal and company had a subtlety of method and an attention to social realism that distinguished them from the escapist fantasies of the formulaic Bombay film. Although few art films were successful at the box office, they were acclaimed by critics, and won a galaxy of prizes at film festivals. And they often had a long after-life, circulating and being shown at film clubs – often run by college students – in the major cities of India and abroad.

  VI

  Outside of the cinema, Indians have also taken succour in various forms of ‘live’ entertainment. One such is theatre. The subcontinent was home to a rich tradition of classical Sanskrit drama; besides, each region had its own form of folk theatre, where dialogue was usually interspersed With song and dance. Known as jatra in Bengal, natya in Maharashtra, and Yakshagana in Karnataka, these folk forms skilfully adapted to the modern world. The costumes remained traditional, but the themes of the plays now squarely addressed the debates of the time – whether women’s liberation, the reform of caste or the conflict between economic development and environmental sustainability.