Dividends of Dreams

I LIKE THINGS MORE THAN PEOPLE,” SAYS ART collector Shalini Passi, seated on what looks like a throne, surrounded by art ranging from Raza to Anish Kapoor—and worried about the piece that has to be cleaned by “someone coming from Paris”. She’s the star of the third season of Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives and is the epitome of everything money can buy. She is also, surprisingly for a film industry that venerates wealth, shown as a “human installation”, as someone too over-the-top to be taken seriously.

The show, made by an offshoot of Dharma Productions, ought to be a celebration of money, given that they made movies such as Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006), where private planes, country homes, and Manhattan pads were par for the course.

This eat-the-rich phenomenon is sweeping across the world, from hit movies such as Parasite (2019) and the Knives Out franchise to popular shows, like HBO’s Industry and Netflix’s The Perfect Couple. Wherever there is too much money, there is also mystery and misery. In India, a spate of shows and movies is either exposing or mocking the rich. You could say it all began with Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023), where Alia Bhatt’s middle-class and culturally enriched Bengali family with its ancestral haveli is seen as superior to Ranveer Singh’s loud, prosperous Punjabi family with their faux White House. She idolises intellect, he worships the body; her family discusses the General Election, his is more focused on the Bigg Boss evictions; her family sings Tagore songs, his makes Dhanlakshmi laddus.

The contrast between the rich and everyone else is nowhere as pronounced as in Payal Kapadia’s Grand Prix-winning All We Imagine As Light, which begins with a montage of every­day Mumbaikars, loading freight at the docks, working as maids, selling things. There are people who have been in the city for over two decades and yet are afraid to call it their home. And there are also those who make tall towers to feel like God, says a voice off camera.

IN THE PRIME VIDEO SERIES, Call Me Bae, wealth is exaggerated to the point of caricature. The hero­ine, Bella aka Bae, lives in a bubble of privilege that only money can buy, from a private jet to a 24-hour butler from IIM Ahmedabad, from a collection of luxury handbags to crisis meetings with Elon Musk. It is the same array of bags that comes to the heroine’s rescue when she is thrown out on her ear by her husband for sleeping with her personal trainer and has to make her own way in the world. A world where her cards are de­clined; where she has to eat white bread (which she thought was eradicated like polio) and where she has to travel by au­torickshaws. Gone is her family where there is no such thing as too much bling, yachts, and IPL teams as birthday gifts, and their WhatsApp group is called the “House of Gucci”.

Swapnil Rai, assistant professor, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, frames this new narrative from a historical perspective. As she says: “In the 1950s, for example, a movie like Awara showed us the judge’s opulent mansion, but we viewed it with envy through the eyes of the vagabond. These were narratives from a newly indepen­dent, aspirational nation struggling with poverty. The 1990s were about opulent Scottish mansions in films like Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham because they represented a rising wealthy diaspora and projected the positives of economic liberalisation. In the current era, India is doing well economically with a rising GDP, but there is a tremendous wealth gap, and there are more aspira­tional masses in the lower class as well as middle-class allies that understand the journey, and we are back to valoris­ing the struggle of the underclass, be it through films centring small towns, arguably a more authentic India that makes for more interesting inspiring narratives.” At the same time, she adds, there are almost obscene displays of wealth, too, when it comes to celebrity weddings providing daily fodder for pop culture and social media.

In essence, in some ways, she adds, it depicts the socio-cultural realities of our time, and in the contemporary moment, the negative perspective stems from the wealth gap, which is very stark for India. There’s another powerful aspect of this on display in Vasan Bala’s recent film Jigra. As the adopted distant relative, the parentless Ankur (played by Vedang Raina), is made to take the drug rap for the son of his rich patron, a hotelier, just because he is poor and hence expend­able. His sister Satya (Alia Bhatt) knows that well. As she tells her fellow employ­ees: “We are staff, not family. And the staff is always on duty.”

Somen Mishra, one of the producers of the movie, says much of the pop culture today is defined by social media and vice versa because the medium has become a great equaliser. And it’s the same for showing wealth too. “New car, new shoes, new holi­days, new books, or even new tattoos. Everything is for public consumption. We are sharing everything. But what has also happened is the two extremes—one is the wealth aspiration that reflects in shows like Shark Tank, the other is a complete dismissal with eat-the-rich entertainment,” he says.

THERE IS A CHANGE WITHIN the most predominant deter­minant of popular culture, the Mumbai film industry. The new millennium has seen the emergence of small-town cinema, usually written and directed by men and women who grew up outside Mumbai’s rarefied air between Juhu and Bandra. Directors such as Anurag Kashyap, Imtiaz Ali, Anubhav Sinha, Reema Kagti, and Kiran Rao are giving us a glimpse of India be­yond Mumbai’s busy streets and Delhi’s wide boulevards.

It’s the same small-town efflores­cence that occurred in advertising in the 1990s when Piyush Pandey and Prasoon Joshi started celebrating Hindi as the medium of communication. Suddenly, advertising was dominated by the everyman and everywoman, with brands such as Asian Paints, Fevicol, and state tourism boards. Apart from celeb­rity ads, it was a quirk that worked.

In cinema too, the sweeping stair­cases of the 1950s movies were replaced by small-town roofs where people gath­ered to drink in privacy; the grand piano where the hero sang his heart out was substituted by the less expensive guitar or as in Gully Boy, the un-accessorised motormouth; and the genteel cricket match made way for a game of grimy football. If the difference between rich and poor was seen in cultural terms in socialist India (the Westernised rich vs the Bharatiya poor in Purab Aur Paschim, 1970) in noughties India, it is seen in terms of square footage. In Gully Boy (2019), Ranveer Singh’s character realises the bathroom of his NRI friend Kalki Koechlin’s home is bigger than his chawl. When she writes graffiti on Mumbai walls, she writes ‘Feed Me’ over an anorexic model’s image. He, instead, writes ‘Roti, Kapda, Makaan’ plus ‘In­ternet’. Those are basic demands of the working class, not idealised wishes for a perfect, wrinkle-free, poverty-free society.

In the retelling of our myths, we also see the three goddesses of knowledge, wealth, and power, as what we seek, which is Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Durga, while the gods are what we do, which is create, preserve, and destroy (Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva). In most myths, Saraswati and Lakshmi are forever in conflict, which is reflected in the position of knowledge and wealth in the corporeal world as well. As Devdutt Pattanaik has written, to have both Saraswati and Lakshmi together, one must pray to Ganesh, who alone can remove the obstacle to wisdom.

This is clearly the basis for the long-running success of Kaun Banega Crorepati. It began in 2000 and is now in its 16th season. While the other shows that started in its aftermath have fallen by the wayside, the game show hosted by the actor Amitabh Bachchan survives because it com­bines knowledge with money.

The attitude to wealth differs depend­ing on its provenance. If it is inherited money, it is somehow regarded as supe­rior to the wealth acquired overnight, probably a remnant of pre-liberalisation socialist India. As a veteran Parsi businessman says in BBC Two’s Streets of Gold, the old rich live in bungalows, and the new rich live in flats. The three-part series that aired earlier in the year celebrates the country’s one-percenters in a most unironic way, featuring their over-the-top parties and vertical palaces. It features Mumbai’s posh displaying their wealth with great sincerity, from Yash Birla’s bungalow nestled between highrises to Sandeep Khosla of the Abu- Sandeep fashion label talking of how he has a separate band of cleaners to dust his collection of artefacts, and how they can only do so in shifts.

And it brings one back to the argu­ment of the moment, sparked by the cringe binge Fabulous Lives. Who is more fab? Delhi or Mumbai? Delhi, which has big homes, bigger artworks, and grander parties? Or Mumbai, which is content with its avocado toast, handbags with pet names, and Gauri Khan interiors of pocket-size apartments?

The outrageous display of wealth may be Passi, sorry passé, but the Mumbai-Delhi debate is not.

Ananya PandayaspirationCall Me BaeFabulous Lives of Bollywood WivesIndian popular cultureRocky Aur Rani Kii Prem KahaaniWealth Issue 2024