Big Screen, Small Dreams

A study of Indian cinema post-liberalisation uses Bollywood’s subtexts to examine the great Indian middle class

If there was one song we (and here I mean anyone who looks at movies as more than just ‘timepass’) had to pick to serenade Bollywood, it would be this one from Delhi Belly: ‘I hate you, like I love you, I hate you, like I love you, love you, love you’. As much as we adore Hindi cinema and its cultural influence, we also love to scoff at its excesses and foibles, to dismiss it as escapist, or, apply to it that catch-all word: entertainment. It doesn’t help that Bollywood cops out at the first sign of seriousness, throwing the word ‘entertainment’ back at us. Like petulant but lovable Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, Bollywood has a propensity to brush off everything, including itself, as ‘phony’.

This may explain why there exists little serious analysis of Hindi cinema. Rachel Dwyer, the author of Picture Abhi Baaki Hai, describes herself as an “acafan”; an academic and a fan of Hindi cinema. She teaches Indian cultures and cinema at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and has written widely on the subject (100 Bollywood Films, Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema, Cinema India: the Visual Culture of Hindi Film), with a serious voice that never loses the elemental joy that comes of watching movies.

Here, Dwyer sets out to analyse the movies of post-liberalisation India. As everything changed in India after the reforms of 1991, so did our movies. The new middle-class of India are the primary consumers of movies, and the author, with the eye of an anthropologist, looks at their lifestyle, their politics, their belief systems and their attitudes to love and family—to see how these are reflected on the big screen. Dwyer posits that Bollywood is a major source of India’s dreams, a space where Indian men and women can imagine how they may live their lives: ‘Although there is a huge market in self-help books in India, films remain a guide to life and lifestyle, from what to wear and how to speak to how to fall in love and live a family life.’

Over the last twenty years, one man has taught us how to fall in love, of course: Shah Rukh Khan, who ‘represents a modern Indian emotionality, appealing to his audience as a gentle, suffering person who responds with tears and only occasionally with anger. Indeed, in many films, Shah Rukh’s emotions are opposed to those of Amitabh’.

Dwyer looks at some of the biggest movies of our times, which become texts and develop meaning that the makers probably did not intend. Great fun especially when she turns her eye to Karan Johar (the master of weepies) entertainers. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, that ode to ‘HFV’ or Hindu Family Values, is reinterpreted as a story from the Ramayana, where the adopted son is sent into exile, only to be brought back by his younger brother. The love between Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan is no less than the devotion shared by Ram and Lakshman. And Kancha Cheena, the villain from the recycled version of the Hrithik Roshan-starrer Agneepath, lives in the island of Mandwa, a modern-day Lanka. While reading new meaning into the movies of modern India, she constantly connects the dots within the history of Indian cinema. Her enquiry, for instance, into the issue of caste in Lagaan, references Bimal Roy’s Sujata.

The author is at her most effective when looking at the intrusion and absolute exclusion of certain subtexts in Hindi cinema: the absence of caste, the stereotyping of regions (the Everyman is the North Indian male, everyone else is a source of ridicule), the omnipresence of Hindu religion through the celebration of festivals and rituals.

At the very outset, Dwyer says that her understanding of Hindi cinema and Indian society is shaped by the movies she has watched and loved. These are the big banner productions made by Yash Raj Films and Karan Johar, giving the book a definite tilt toward blockbuster family entertainment. This focus becomes problematic, though Dwyer explains her reasons for leaving out multiplex, middle-of-the-road, indie cinema, which she sees as not embodying the true spirit of Bollywood. It seems a bit dated to say that Bollywood is defined by song-and- dance-filled, larger-than-life spectacles, when Karan Johar himself has taken to producing indies. The last two decades of Bollywood have been as much about big films as they have been about small big films, and any study of contemporary Indian imagination is incomplete without looking at those.

Here could be Dwyer’s next project; to borrow her use of that ubiquitous phrase, ‘picture abhi baaki hai’.

Picture Abhi Baaki HaiRachel Dwyer