by Pico Iyer
And so, like a god from the heavens, he brought justice and democracy and happiness back to the afflicted land. Right beat Might. Love conquered all. The people were redeemed. And always there was plenty of singing and dancing.
The masses called him “Mard” (He-Man).
MARD WAS THE cultural event of the season when I was in India. “Mard,” shouted the monstrous, many-colored hoardings that towered above the streets of Bombay. “Mard,” proclaimed the huge trailers splashed across the newspapers. Mard was the subject of passionate debates and diatribes. A single name was on a million minds and lips across the country: Mard.
Mard was a match made in celluloid heaven. Its director was Manmohan Desai, godfather of the blockbuster, the Spielberg of the subcontinent. Its star, returning to the screen after too long an absence, was Amitabh Bachchan, the country’s Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford and Sylvester Stallone all rolled into one. And Amitabh was not only India’s leading man for a decade, and something of a risen god, and a personal friend of Rajiv Gandhi’s, but also, now, a member of Parliament. The Wonder Dog, the Wonder Horse, a nationalist theme, a staggering $4 million budget—Mard had everything!
But it promised even more. It promised to bring king-size entertainment back to the giant screen. It promised, like Rambo, to reverse history, to redress the past and, once and for all, to render to the devil of colonialism what belonged to the devil. It promised to boost the prestige of the new generation of young politicians who belonged to the ruling Congress (I) party, exemplified by Amitabh. It even promised to come to the rescue of the embattled movie industry by punishing its hated rivals; fully $800,000 of the budget had reportedly gone to releasing the movie simultaneously across the country, a preemptive strike against the shameless pirates of the video market. And so, only days before Divali, the Hindu Festival of Lights, Amitabh came down like a god from the heavens into 250 theaters at once, a man of the streets, yet larger than life, here to bring law and order and romance—as well, of course, as a good deal of singing and dancing.
The response was titanic. Performances were sold out for days in advance at every cinema in town. Black marketeers did a roaring trade in heavily marked-up tickets. Those who were still unable to get in had had to content themselves with scratchily pirated videos. And the people rose as one to acclaim the spectacle. As the ads in the newspapers declared, “Record Crowds Hail the Man of the Masses!”
SUDDENLY, SAID THE servant, just a few days earlier, the lady had lost consciousness. There was no explanation for it. “There was little blood,” he recalled. “Nobody knew. It was a sweet death.”
INDIA, I HAD always thought, was humanity itself, an inflation of humanity, an intensification of humanity. The very scale of the place was fantastic: 16 major languages and 1,652 dialects and more than 2,000 castes and at least five main religions and 500 former kingdoms and thousands upon thousands of gods (many of them like humans, only more so). In India, the numbers alone were staggering—hundreds killed in each bus accident, thousands lost in a natural disaster, hundreds of thousands born each day. India, I often felt, was humanity itself, only more so.
Indian movies were India, only more so.
The Indian film industry makes twice as many movies each year as its American counterpart. Almost 100 million movie tickets are sold in India every week. Nearly 5,000 touring theaters travel year-round from village to village—more mobile projection units, in short, than there are theaters in Britain. Recently, of course, the industry had been torpedoed from two sides—the sudden 1984 explosion of the Doordarshan government-owned television network, which quickly reached a viewership of more than 50 million people each night, as well as the mounting invasion of video (at last count, some 40,000 video libraries, together with 12,000 video-equipped coaches, had seized almost 60 percent of the movie market). Yet still the film industry continued unvanquished, grinding out 800 or more movies each year, in several different languages, from all parts of the country, most of them mega-shows that brought superstars and monster hits by the score to the giant screen. When it came to the production of dreams—or gods—India had the biggest, busiest, noisiest industry in the world.
It was hard to ignore. I flew into Bombay, late at night, and as my relatives drove me into town, I saw hordes of men in white shirts, hundreds of them, filing along the narrow road in the dark. Was this part of the Divali festival, I asked. “No, no,” said my aunt. “Movies. The drive-in.” She pointed out into the dark. And there, under the moon, sending images across the fields and over the tumbledown shacks, watched in wonder by hundreds of people beside the trees, was a silver screen.
As we drove into the heart of the city—still bustling less than an hour before midnight—we passed through a gallery of hand-painted, twenty-foot billboards screaming of the latest cinematic delights, and from all the cabs and shacks and shops I heard what I always think of as the sound track of Indian life, the shrill, squeaky lilt of a woman’s voice delivering movie songs that spill out from radios and cassettes in an endless stream of good cheer. The tiny, hundred-yard street where I was staying, my cousins told me, was known as Hollywood Lane, in honor of all the movie stars who lived here. Another of my uncles, I was told, had just bought a flat next to Zeenat Aman, screen darling of the subcontinent. My grandmother was still putting up a pair of lodger-brothers who were still putting up thousands of rupees in the hopes of making more rupees out of movies. The legend was all around.
Early the next morning, I was awakened by a cry from the street. I went out to the balcony to see what was happening, and found a mustachioed impresario wheeling a movable merry-go-round from house to house, calling out as he went for customers. The four brightly colored cars in his sad-happy carousel had “Feat,” “Empala,” “Toita” and “Maruti” painted on their fronts, and on their sides, the names of movies. The same names shouted out at me from the streets, from the newspapers, from signs beside the temples. Hindi movies were everywhere in India.
But Hindi movies were everywhere in other parts of Asia too, especially where there was little else to be seen. I saw Indian films in village theaters in Nepal and Indonesia. I was cross-questioned about Amitabh by a middle-aged woman in Burma. I saw an Australian documentary on the Indian industry in Japan. “Nahi, nahi,” sang the laughing girls in the shops of Bali whenever they saw me passing (in honor of the coquettish demurrals of Hindi-movie starlets), and when I sat down on a nearby beach, they collected around me in excited numbers. Did I know Amitabh? Was Dharmendra still married to Hema Malini? What was the story with Shashi Kapoor? I go to a Hindi movie every day of the week, even if I have to borrow the money, said a Balinese girl; I have 250 tapes of Hindi sound tracks, said a boy.
Even more surprisingly, Hindi movies were not just everywhere in Asia; they were everywhere in the world. A Turkish cabdriver once gave me a lecture on Raj Kapoor as we drove to Istanbul’s airport at 4 a.m., while a Greek au pair in England once explained how she had first seen the Kapoors at home in her tiny island village. Raj Kapoor’s Aswara was one of the most popular foreign movies ever seen in the Soviet Union, and in Eastern Europe the same filmmaker was said to be more famous than Nehru or Gandhi. I once saw a Hindi classic playing in Peru, and, five minutes from my office in midtown Manhattan, I once sat through a seven-hour double bill at the Bombay Cinema. “The Gulf, Mauritius, Fiji,” recited a Bombay movie producer, listing some of the top markets for his films. In all, Hindi movies were exported to more than a hundred countries around the world.
By now, indeed, the Hindi cinema had penetrated every level of society, from critics to laymen, in First World and Third. Yet the movies’ popularity remained strongest and truest in the heartland. All across the world, unlettered peasants who could barely follow the unsubtitled dialogue crowded each night into village huts to marvel at images of Amitabh. The Hindi cinema seemed to strike some universal chord in the common man, and in his longing for an uncommon redeemer.
MY SECOND DAY in India, a man was
asked about a close friend. She was praying, he said, and a candle fell on her. “After four days, she died.”
THE INDIAN FILM industry is the very model of a mass-production system. It manufactures films in masses, aimed at the masses, and distinguished largely by their mass. Every hero in the popular Hindi cinema is plump and every heroine chunky (as a sign of prosperity); so too every movie is overweight, at least two and a half hours long, with a minimum of six song-and-dance routines and a frenzied cornucopia of sex and violence, fights and seductions. The audiences for Hindi movies do not want just to see a love story, a crime melodrama, a musical, a domestic tale or a moral parable—they want to see them all, with every spice and every ingredient stirred together in a single epic concoction.
And what the audience wants, it gets. The Hindi movie industry is popular art in its highest, or its lowest, form; democracy in action. Filmmakers find out what the people want, and then produce it and produce it and produce it, ad infinitum and ad nauseam. Since four out of five Hindi pictures are never completed, risks are not encouraged. If an actor makes a hit with the crowds, he will be asked to star in almost every movie ever made; if a scene plays well—an actress emerging from the ocean in a clinging sari, for example—it will be ritually reproduced in picture after picture. Every movie becomes a mulligatawny stew in which all genres are thrown together to make what is known as a masala (mixed spice) movie. So too, the sound track of every film is a catholic cacophony of bouzouki tunes, Motown choruses, ancient ragas, rock chords, classical music from East and West and anything else that may stir up excitement. Novelty and surprise are no more prized in the Indian movie industry than in litanies or hymns. Formula is content.
Thus the big Hindi movies are mass-produced in assembly-line fashion. For twenty years, the same few stars have been moving their lips to the same kind of songs dubbed by the same few singers. All the stars, moreover, look just about the same: the men, Burt Reynolds look-alikes to a man, their beloveds, the spitting image of Cher after a decade of heavy meals. And all the movies feature much the same plots, the same sequences, even the same sets (some Bombay residents pull down $6,000 a month by hiring out their bungalows to a succession of different movie crews).
Thanks to this unvarying sameness, the principals themselves must often be as omnipresent as the deities they impersonate. Thus the facts grow ever more fantastic. Shashi Kapoor has at times been signed to act in 140 films simultaneously, and many actors routinely whiz each day from one set to another, and then to a third (sometimes delivering the lines from one movie in another, without, it seems, adverse effect); the leading songwriters have to churn out the scores of two entire musicals each week; one moviemaker is so busy that he has to direct his films over the phone; and the main playback singer, Lata Mangeshkar, has completed 30,000 recordings—a world record—and even now, in her late fifties, produces the same high, girlish tones as when first she conquered the scene more than thirty years ago.
Hindi movies even have the same audiences time after time. A large percentage of their revenues, a critic told me, comes from “repeat viewers.” “Many people are going to see Saagar ten times,” he explained. “You mean,” I asked, incredulous, “that they’d rather see Saagar ten times than see Saagar nine times and Mard once?” He smiled indulgently at my innocence. “Of course not: they will see Saagar ten times, and they will see Mard ten times.”
There were, of course, many practical reasons for this deadly consistency. Foremost among them was the heterogeneity of the audience. There is probably no country in the world more diverse than India, divided as it is by races, religions, regions, castes and a jangled kaleidoscope of special needs. Romu Sippy, a Bombay producer, gave me an eminently sensible explanation for why the tried way was the true way. “Mythological films are not popular,” he said, “because they offend the Muslim people. Regional films are okay, but they cannot appeal to people who do not speak the language. If you make a dacoit [bandit] movie, you miss out on the South, where they don’t have dacoits. Westernized movies may be popular among the educated young people of the cities, but what about the rickshaw wallah, the small vendor, the villager? If you get an Adult Certificate [equivalent to an X], you miss out on the young audience. If you make a good, clean film, it may be well received by the critics, but commercially it will do nothing. Even a little sex is likely to offend the orthodox Hindu in Uttar Pradesh who goes to see a film first to find out if it’s suitable for his daughters. The only thing that all people can relate to and understand is action.”
Heaven help any filmmaker who chooses to depart from this scheme. “There’s no corporate financing here,” explained Sippy, “no insurance. Every commercial film is independently produced.” His unspoken implication was spelled out for me by Iqbal Masud, perhaps the leading movie critic in Bombay. As a tax commissioner for thirty-seven years who had long moonlighted as a critic, Masud had seen the business from both sides of the tracks. There was only one way, he explained, for producers to raise the $1.75 million needed to bankroll a typical blockbuster: black money. As soon as they were backed by mobsters, producers could guarantee a good return on their investment—by paying a respectable businessman $50,000, say, to lend his name to the film, or by slipping a few critics $4,000 each for their appreciative notices. Having had their projects underwritten by gangsters, however, the producers were hardly inclined to risk failure in the service of High Art.
And so the logic of filmmaking proceeded, as simple as ABC or QED. The producers knew what the masses liked. They also knew what they could do. It did not take a master syllogist to work out the bottom line.
Sippy, in fact, evinced little embarrassment at the compromises the form demanded. “Look,” he said straightforwardly. “The intelligence of the average moviegoer in India is that of an eleven-year-old. That you must always remember. Look at Mard and you’ll see what I mean. The Wonder Dog puts up his paw and whistles. It’s just berserk. Another movie was made in which a dog has flashbacks, and the whole movie—the whole damned movie—was shown from the dog’s point of view. There was even a background song sung by the dog, saying, ‘Oh, my master, you left me and I miss you.’ In the end, of course, the dog avenges his master.
“Yes, I know that in the West you have Lassie, Benji, the Lady and the Tramp. But this is just crazy.” Maybe so, I thought. But in the West we also have E.T. And Jaws. And R2D2. America has sent Bugs Bunny as its emissary to every continent, and installed Mickey Mouse as a patron saint in many a Third World land. The Paramount head office once cabled Cecil B. De Mille that “what the public demands today is modern stuff, with plenty of clothes, rich sets and action.” And the United States does not have a 65 percent illiteracy rate, or half its population living under the poverty level.
As we went on talking in his Bombay office (a plush carpeted place on the second floor of a fantastically run-down old house, its polished shelves full of books on Hitchcock and Sam Goldwyn), Sippy laid out for me, with a craftsman’s clarity, the nuts and bolts of an Indian movie. In every case, he said, there must be a hero, a hero’s friend (often a clown), a heroine, a vamp and a villain (I thought of The Two Gentlemen of Verona). If the hero was rich, the heroine was poor, and vice versa (I thought of Romeo and Juliet). If there was a poor hero, he had an aging mother; if a rich heroine, there was a strict father (Much Ado About Nothing). And the poor must always conquer the rich (Coriolanus).
“Look at Manmohan Desai,” he continued. “All his films have the same pattern. Always there are two brothers who get lost in childhood—one good, one bad.” (I thought of King Lear, The Comedy of Errors.) “Then they meet in adulthood, and fight one another, and then they gang up and kill the villain.” What about the women? “Yes,” he said, a little impatient at my simplicity. “The good brother loves the heroine. The bad brother loves the vamp. And if he’s very bad, at the end he will save the hero’s life and die.” And all this was unvarying? Well, he added, sometimes there were three brothers. “And every suc
cessful Hindi film has a vendetta,” he went on. “Action and a vendetta.” Oh, and one more thing, added Sippy—all Indian movies are nothing more than The Taming of the Shrew.
And then, of course, there was the formula fairy tale about the wicked queen with the poisoned apple, and the rogue who steals into the sleeping beauty’s bedroom, and the princes who are raised as shepherds and must prove themselves in battle, and the god who suddenly appears onstage, and the nearly murdered girl dressed as a boy who wakes up next to the decapitated clown, and then the grand finale where everything is resolved, and everyone is reunited, and twenty-eight plot strands are brought together, and love wins out, and hero marries heroine, and children are returned to parents, while the country is rescued from its conquerors. But that was Cymbeline, and they hadn’t turned that into a Hindi movie yet.
Just about then, though, Sippy, having itemized all the right moves of the Hindi formula movie, took me by surprise. “In America,” he said, “it’s not so different, is it? I have seen so many versions of First Blood. Look at the Chuck Norris picture Missing in Action. There are lots of replicas.”