March 8, 1999
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THE
POLITICS OF INDIA'S CONVENTIONAL CINEMA On Bollywood's Hidden Agenda But is Hindi filmdom even capable of being Hindutva's supporting cast? By Alaka M Basu THE POLITICS OF INDIA'S
CONVENTIONAL CINEMA I was listening to a tape of Mohammad Rafi duets as I began this book. That music was so lilting, so romantic, so moving, that I found it difficult to relate it to Fareed Kazmi's distinctions between high and low culture, popular and mass culture, conventional and innovative cinema and so on. I could not think of anyone-high-born or low, villain or saint, Punjabi or Malayali or for that matter Russian or Ethiopian-who would not want to sway to Rafi and Geeta Dutt agreeing that Rimjhim ke taraane leke ayee barsaat. And therein lies my partial dilemma with this book. To intellectualise the role and impact of mainstream cinema to an extreme that misses out one of its most powerful ingredients-the words as well as the melodies of its music-is to overintellectualise it. As a devotee of mainstream Hindi cinema-at least of the cinema of the '60s and '70s-I cannot see conventional cinema merely as an opiate or as "conscious" propaganda for the status quo. I see it also as a much needed aesthetic antidote to the stresses of everyday life. This cinema must have made us all a gentler people because of its distracting charms. One more important gripe before I praise this book. While I agree with the author that cinema legitimises and reinforces many distasteful ideologies (patriarchy and an aggressive nationalism in particular), it does this through its simplistic formulations of good and evil, formulations that sit uneasily on ideologies of religion or region. Indeed, to many of us growing up in the '60s and '70s, that was the whole point of Hindi films and the people who made these films possible-they blurred regional and religious distinctions. So even my grandmother saw nothing surprising or wrong in the Iyengar Hema Malini marrying the Jat Dharmendra, for hadn't she seen them fall in love on the screen? Nor were we fazed by the knowledge that Dilip Kumar's real name was Yusuf Khan, for hadn't we seen Waheeda Rehman play Rosie and Rekha Umrao Jaan? I thus find it difficult to be convinced by Kazmi's suggestion that the Hindutva brigade has benefited from or dictated Hindi cinema. For each example he gives of the negative portrayal of minorities in Hindi films-but these are all relatively recent films, so he may have an important point there about a new communalism on the screen-I can think of several (old and new) that focus instead on notions of brotherhood and tolerance, however simple and unreal. But the book did open my eyes in many ways. In particular, the first two chapters, which spell out more precisely the meanings of terms that we use interchangeably and critically review the existing literature on the role of the mass media. And the last chapter, which tries to develop a framework for what Kazmi calls "popular cinema" as opposed to "mass cinema", is upbeat. However, Kazmi's analysis of three highly successful films (Sholay, Coolie and Hum Aapke Hain Koun) is disappointing. Independently, each film is very well analysed for content and message. But when the three analyses are taken together to produce a unified theoretical description of the content and message of mainstream cinema, it runs into too many contradictions and invalid generalisations. Kazmi cannot have it both ways-he cannot accuse filmmakers of being motivated solely by financial greed and at the same time also accuse them of some sinister conspiracy to uphold the socio-political status quo. That is giving them far more credit than they deserve. NEW RELEASES «A Practitioner's Guide
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