India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy
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In July 2003 Prime Minister Vajpayee spent a week in China. In Beijing he inked an agreement affirming India’s recognition of Tibet (conquered in 1950) as an integral part of China. The Chinese returned the compliment by accepting that Sikkim (annexed in 1974) was part of India. In Shanghai, Mr Vajpayee focused on economics, calling for an alliance between Indian software firms and Chinese manufacturers of computer hardware. It seemed that the two previously hostile countries were now ‘taking a new road’ and moving ‘towards a cooperative partnership’.62
Two years later the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, came to India. Remarkably, he chose to visit the city of Bangalore ahead of the national capital, New Delhi. His hundred-member delegation was composed mostly of businessmen, and their meetings were mostly with Indian chambers of commerce. In a speech in Bangalore, Wen Jiabao echoed Vajpayee’s call for an alliance between Indian software and Chinese hardware, thus ensuring, as he said, that the twenty-first century would be an ‘Asian century’. Speaking to a television interviewer, the Chinese ambassador to India remarked that, to them, ‘the “B” of business [co-operation] is more important than the “B” of boundary [disputes]’.63
XI
In 2004 the Indian economy became a subject of debate in the American presidential election. This was unprecedented, but even more striking was that it was not the poverty of Indians but their wealth that was being discussed. In several speeches on the stump, the Democratic challenger John Kerry stoked fears of more American jobs being shipped east if President Bush were re-elected. Kerry promised that, if elected, he would reinstate a protectionist regime to save American jobs from being ‘Bangalored’. This too was another first: the first time that a presidential candidate had singled out an Indian city by name as a threat to American interests.
Other American politicians had got into the act before Kerry. In 2002 a computer programmer from Florida ran for Congress on a one point programme: an end to ‘outsourcing’. The same year a woman member of the New Jersey Senate introduced a bill forbidding the outsourcing of state contracts to foreign firms. Like her counter part in Florida, her main complaint was against Indian computer firms and professionals. These politicians were responding sympathetically to the ‘pissed-off programmers’, to the Americans who had lost their jobs to Indians and wanted them back.64
In December 2003 the influential Business Week ran a cover story on ‘The Rise of India’. It noted that there were now more IT engineers in Bangalore than in the whole of Silicon Valley. And they were mostly doing work for American clients, for giant corporations such as General Electric who wanted complex engineering problems solved as well as for Kansas farmers who wished merely to have their tax returns filled out. This ‘techno take-off is wonderful for India’, commented Business Week, ‘but terrifying for many Americans’. The local workers laid off by foreign substitutes would face ‘wrenching change’; few would ever land a job as well paid as the one they had just lost. ‘No wonder India [was] at the centre of a brewing storm in America’. State legislatures were under pressure to ban outsourcing; some succumbed, like Indiana, which cancelled contracts awarded to Indian firms.65
It must be emphasized that these concerns are expressed throughout the Western world; they are by no means confined to America alone. When British Rail outsourced timetable enquiries to India there were protests in the United Kingdom, although some saw it as poetic justice, a case of the empire’s victims striking back. In the summer of 2006 both French and Belgian politicians expressed concern at the possible sale of their biggest steel firm, Arcelor, to Mittal Steel, a company owned and run by Indians. Although the sale finally went through, both popular prejudice and state power were invoked to try and thwart the takeover. The new buyers, it was said, would not adequately appreciate the ‘culture’ of the firm and its workers.
Some commentators on India’s economic rise write in paranoid terms; others out of admiration. In April 2004 Newsweek informed its readers that India was no longer a poor, benighted, Third World country; it was now ‘a good place to do business’, indeed, ‘an investment-worthy partner’ for Americans and American capital.66 Two years later, to mark President George W. Bush’s visit to India, the same magazine wrote a breathless celebration of what it called ‘Asia’s Other Powerhouse’. ‘In India, the individual is king’, claimed Newsweek. While the credit card industry grew at 35 per cent a year, and personal consumption made up 67 per cent of GDP, ‘statistics don’t quite capture what is happening. Indians, at least in urban areas, are bursting with enthusiasm. Indian businessmen are giddy about their prospects. Indian designers and artists speak of extending their influence across the globe . . . It is as if hundreds of millions of people have suddenly discovered the keys to unlock their potential.’67
In a widely read book that was published in 2005, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that twenty years ago India ‘was known as a country of snake charmers, poor people, and Mother Teresa. Today its image has been recalibrated. Now it is also seen as a country of brainy people and computer wizards.’68 In another much publicized book that appeared the same year, the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs celebrated ‘India’s historic escape from poverty’. He also spoke of how ‘the return of China and India to global economic prominence’ would ‘reshape global politics and society’ in the twenty-first century.69
This was a coupling that was becoming increasingly common, with the implication generally that China was ‘the tiger in front’.70 However, some strategic analysts argued that while India was the ‘newest Asian tiger’, it might in course of time become the biggest. Its democratic traditions and younger population meant that while China would be ‘the big winner between now and 2040, India is now driving fast and will pick up all the marbles in the latter half of this century’. The US, UK, France and the south-east Asian countries were all seeking better relations with India. And ‘with all competing for its favor, India may find itself the kingmaker or perhaps make itself king’.71
The predictions come thick and fast – that Indians will takeaway American and European jobs; that India, with China, will become the global superpower of the new century. Whether they stem from fear and paranoia, or from wonder and admiration, it must be reckoned a miracle that such forecasts are made at all. For through most of India’s history as an independent nation it has heard altogether different tunes being sung. With every communal riot it was said that India would break up into many different fragments. With every failure of the monsoon it was predicted that mass starvation and famine would follow. And with every death or killing of a major leader it was forecast that India would abandon democracy and become a dictator ship.
Those earlier prophecies also stemmed from a variety of motives some were made with concern, others out of pity or contempt. They prompted anger and embarrassment among educated Indians. These more recent predictions, however, have led to arising tide of self-congratulation. Indian newspapers and magazines run stories captioned ‘Global Champs’ and ‘On the Way to Number One’. One Delhi columnist was so certain that India was becoming the world’s titan that he worried that it would repeat the errors of those it had replaced. Where the West in its heyday had callously exploited its colonies, he urged ‘Indian business to establish a loving and friendly relationship with other countries’. The important thing, he said, was ‘to ensure that India is not seen as a cruel imperial power in the world of tomorrow’. That India would indeed soon be an imperial power was, however, taken for granted.72
Those older anticipations of India’s demise were greatly exaggerated. For the constitution forged by the nation’s founding fathers allowed cultural heterogeneity to flourish within the ambit of a single (and democratic) nation-state. However, these celebrations of India’s imminent rise to power are premature as well. Despite the manifest successes of the new economy there remain large areas of poverty and deprivation. Only purposive state intervention can correct these imbalances, and the state as it ex
ists now is too corroded and corrupted to act with much purpose. It was mistaken, then, to see India as swiftly going down the tube; it is mistaken, now, to see it as soon taking its place among the elect of the earth.
30
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A PEOPLE’S ENTERTAINMENTS
We have to see that our pictures are spun into the web of national life, that they sculpt and reflect the real India.
V. SHANTARAM, film director, 1940
There is no Pakistan in Indian music at least.
D. P. MUKERJI, sociologist, 1945
I
THE CHAPTERS OF THIS book have explored the labours and struggles of the citizens of free India. But how have they entertained themselves? What do Indians do when they are not working or fighting or raising a family?
The short answer to this question is: most of them go to the movies. Feature films are the great popular passion of India, cutting across the social divides featured so heavily in this book – the divides of caste, class, region, religion, gender and language.
It was in the last week of 1895 that the Lumière brothers launched the first Cinématograph in Paris. Soon, intrepid Indian photographers were shooting and showing films on such topics as Poona Races ’98 and Train Arriving at Bombay Station. The first Indian feature was made in 1913 by a printer named Dadasaheb Phalke, who was inspired by a pictorial life of Jesus to film the life of a legendary prince, Raja Harishchandra. Eighteen years later the first Indian sound feature appeared, Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara.
During the 1920s and 1930s Indian films had to compete with pictures made in Europe and North America. But after the end of the Second World War the number of films made in India dramatically increased. In 1945, 99 feature films were produced; two years later, by the time of Independence, the number had jumped to 250, two-thirds of these made by first-time venture capitalists.1
Some early films took up devotional or romantic themes; others were influenced by the social and political currents of the time. A 1930s classic, Achhut Kanya, was about the love of a Brahmin man for an Untouchable girl.
The movies of the inter-war period were redolent with patriotic imagery, the love for the nation-in-the-making manifest in their dialogue and songs. While film directors and actors were influenced by the national movement, the latter was supremely indifferent to them. The producer of Achhut Kanya was unable to get that lifelong crusader against Untouchability, Mahatma Gandhi, to watch his film. (Apparently the only film Gandhi saw – and even that not to its end – was a mythological story titled Ram Rajya.)2 Nor is there any record of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel or many other early leaders visiting cinema theatres.
Where some nationalists ignored the movies, others more actively proselytized against them. There was always a puritanical streak in the Indian freedom movement, which was repelled by the colourful costumes, the love stories and the song-and-dance routines of the popular film. After Independence some puritans assumed high office, from where they spoke out against an industry they did not like. In September 1950 the chief minister of Rajasthan rued the ‘baneful influence’ of motion pictures, while admitting that he had seen only one film himself. Three years later the chief minister of Madras complained that the focus of films on sex and murder was corrupting India’s youth. He urged film-makers to ‘reduce the sex appeal in pictures’, and think instead of ‘the production of Puranic [religious] pictures in colour’. ‘How can we progress in other matters if every young man is thinking of this [sex] stuff all the time?’ he complained. He especially ‘asked the poor wage-earners not to see cinemas, not because he disliked the cinema trade, but because he felt that they could find better use for the money. The rich could afford to go to pictures and ruin themselves.’3
In truth, such sentiments were not restricted to the political class. In December 1952 a committee appointed by the Syndicate of the Calcutta University found that a major reason for the high failure-rate in examinations was that students spent too much time at the movies.4 Two years later a petition was sent to the prime minister claiming that films threatened ‘the moral health of the country’; apparently, they were ‘a major factor in incitement to crime and general unsettlement of society’.5 The petition was signed by 13,000 housewives, whose cause was taken up in Parliament by Lilavati Munshi, herself the wife of a well-known puritan politician named K. M. Munshi. Speaking in the Rajya Sabha in November 1954, Mrs Munshi argued that ‘the cinema can make or mar the whole generation and the entire nation’. She thought the latter more likely, since (in her view) the celebration of crime and sex was encouraging young Indians to repeat these acts in real life. She was especially worried about ‘the showing of the flesh of girls in an unseemly way to excite the crowds’. She was answered in the House by the great actor Prithviraj Kapoor, who insisted that in a free society art could not be throttled. From the artist’s point of view, he added, ‘sunshine and shadow went hand in hand’.6
To counter these objections a Censor Board was constituted, which saw every film before granting it an approval certificate. Scenes that were sexually suggestive were prohibited, while films with scenes of violence were granted an ‘adults-only’ certificate. Withal, the industry grew at a terrific pace after Independence. By 1961 there were more than 300 films made annually, these shown in 4,500 theatres spread across the country. By 1990 the number of cinemas had doubled and the number of films made more than tripled.
By the 1950s the city of Bombay had become the acknowledged centre of the Indian film industry. The most popular films were in Hindi, a language understood across much of the country, but there were also thriving industries in the other languages. In 1992, for example, while 189 films were made in Hindi, nearly as many (180) were made in Tamil, 153 in Telugu, 92 in Kannada, 90 in Malayalam, 42 in Bengali and 25 in Marathi.7
By 1980 India had surpassed the United States as the country that made the most films in the world. Film going in India was now unarguably the most popular form of entertainment ever devised. In 1997, the fiftieth year of Independence, it was estimated that the daily cinema audience in India was12 million – more than the population of many member-states of the United Nations.
The growth of the film industry has had a noticeable impact on the physical landscape of urban India. Cinema halls dominate smaller town centres; in larger metropolises they are strung across the city locality by locality. Even more ubiquitous are the film posters, exhibited in vivid colours and various sizes, some small enough to be stuck on the side of a wayside shop, others gigantic billboards that tower above the road. Some 70,000 posters are printed for a big-budget film; pasted wherever a blank wall presents itself, these stay on in their faded glory well after the film itself has passed into history.8
II
The ingredients of the average Hindi film are well known; colour (Eastman preferred); songs (six or seven) in voices one knows and trusts; dance – solo and ensemble – the more frenzied the better; bad girl, good girl, bad guy, goody guy, romance (but no kisses); tears, guffaws, fights, chases, melodrama; characters who exist in a social vacuum; dwellings which do not exist outside the studio floor; [exotic] locations in Kulu, Manali, Ooty, Kashmir, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo . . . See any three Hindi films, and two will have all the ingredients listed above.9
So wrote the Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray. Ray’s own films had no dances and few songs. He took his viewers into the homes his characters lived in, showing the clothes they wore and the food they ate. The lives his protagonists led were utterly and compellingly real. Still, while his films have their (undeniably elevated) place, the popular Indian film has its place, too. Ray might dismiss this as a ‘synthetic, non-existent society’, a ‘make-believe world’. But it was precisely because the world they depicted was unreal that these films appealed. And those who made the most popular movies knew as much. A successful film director of the 1970s, Manmohan Desai, said of his work that ‘I want people to forget their misery. I want to take them into a dream world where
there is no poverty, where there are no beggars, where fate is kind and God is busy looking after hisflock.’10
Peasants and workers in independent India went to the movies for the same reason as, back in the nineteenth century, a newly literate working class in Britain chose to read stories of the rich and the famous. As a character in a George Gissing novel remarks, ‘nothing can induce workingmen and women to read stories that treat of their own world. They are the most consummate idealists in creation, especially the women . . . The working classes detest anything that tries to represent their daily life.’11 Only farce and melodrama, wrote Gissing, went down well with the British working classes. Such is also the case in India where, however, farce and melodrama have been suitably indigenized. Some recurrent themes make less sense outside the Indian context – a son’s devotion to his mother, for example, or a mother-in-law’s contentious relationship with her daughter-in-law, or the difficulties(and glories) of choosing one’s life partner in defiance of caste and family custom. Again, in the Indian film the ‘bad guy’ and the ‘bad girl’ play more central roles than in the typical Hollywood melodrama – these are the villain and the vamp, malevolent characters in opposition to whom the hero and heroine appear purer than one would have thought humanly possible.12