June 8, 1998
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How to be
a Killjoy Some people can achieve the impossible. They can make even Hindi cinema boring. By Ashok Malik IDEOLOGY OF THE HINDI FILM
For one, his book tackles too many subjects -- from the economics of cine-production to critical reviews of individual films. It gives the impression of being a collection of somewhat non sequitur essays rather than one comprehensive narrative. Second, Prasad seems only too keen to use the book to present his definitive analysis of Indian society, politics, contemporary history, class tensions, and so on. Critiquing the Hindi film is often reduced to a subsidiary venture. There is also an overdose of other people's views. Prasad quotes everybody, from Marx to Hegel to Fanon -- and occasionally B.R. Chopra. Further, some of the issues he addresses have, frankly, been done to death. For instance, kissing on the screen or the emasculation of a couple's privacy by family and tradition. While it is interesting to learn that a survey in the '60s found that "51 per cent 'expressed the view that kissing scenes should be deleted from Hindi films' ", Prasad's writing in this sphere is not exactly revelatory. Equally irritating is his insistence on unearthing innuendoes where none exists. Discussing Sangam -- a film in which the heroine sacrifices her true love for a war hero who has her friendship but not her heart -- Prasad talks of "her complete submission to a love that she did not reciprocate but which, backed by the might of the state, never encounters the need to justify itself". Expanding on romance in the patriotic film, he argues: "It used war as the legitimising ground for an assault on the domestic enclosure, prising it open to insert the absolutist imperative, to repudiate the sanctity of mutuality and reciprocity as signs of true domesticity." Unfortunately for Prasad, nobody really believes Hindi filmmakers are the Gestapo of a tyrannical Indian state. The coup de grace is Prasad's deconstruction, through a picture caption, of Deewar: "The sequence shows Vijay's (Amitabh Bachchan's) exclusion from the Oedipal enclosure, as brother Ravi (Shashi Kapoor) occupies the place of the father, beside the mother. The mother goes along with the phallic imperative, punishing Vijay with her righteous defence of the law." Whoever said Hindi cinema often confused erudition and claptrap was right in more ways than he thought.
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This book is the nerd's revenge on Hindi filmdom.
It has an arresting cover; unfortunately much of what is within is itself held under
arrest -- by jargon. It is not often that a subject as popular and as passionate as Hindi
cinema is viewed through the academic's microscope. M. Madhava Prasad had the opportunity
to produce a readable yet insightful book on a phenomenon which holds India in thrall.
Simply put, he's failed. 
