IMAGE AND REALITY: HINDI CINEMA
Pranjali Bandhu
Industrial Structure
Nineteen Forty-seven marks no watershed in the development of Hindi cinema, no leap forward, no change in direction. The fundamental characteristics of the Hindi cinema industry today had been established during the period of the Second World War. The essential formulaic elements of Hindi cinema developed in the ‘40s were more or less continued after ’47 too. The number of feature films produced in all languages per year now averages over 800 and is one of the highest in the world. The number of Hindi films produced per year has been increasing, but their percentage in te total number of films has been declining since the ‘60s. Today more films are made in Tamil and Telugu than in Hindi. Over half the total film production is in the four South Indian languages.
Presently foreign films constitute around a mere 10% of the total number of films shown in India. But we still cannot speak in terms of an independent, self-reliant film industry in any region of the country. The reasons are a continuing basic infrastructural dependency on imports for equipment, raw stock, chemicals and cosmetics. Paying for French, German, US and Japanese supplies takes up a formidable chunk of the investment in the film industry. The Hindustan Foto Film Company does not produce raw film stock in sufficient quantity, and even its black and white film stock is high cost and of unreliable quality. The Hollywood model continues to strongly influence the mainstream Hindi cinema, as also the language cinemas. The various genres of Hollywood films – westerns, action films, thrillers, etc. are more widely available than ever before and popularly seen on video all over the country. Many commercial theatres are renovating themselves and specialising in screening Hollywood films and trying to enhance their viewership in the bigger urban centres.
Distribution and exhibition remain in private hands. The number of cinema houses at around 12,000 today is low in relation to the population. The distribution of the cinema houses expresses the rural-urban dichotomy, whereby 25% of the population in urban areas has 85% of the facilities. In comparison with the Northern States, the rural areas of some Southern States, like Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh are better served by cinema theatres. In the last few years over 1000 cinema halls have closed down all over the country. Competition from tv and video is one reason. Income from advertisements has come down as advertisers are preferring to utilise tv and video. High license fees, entertainment tax rates and other disincentives are making investors turn to more profitable areas like the building of 3 to 4 star hotels or shopping complexes instead of theatres, particularly in the North.
The film industry is at present the 8th largest in the country with an annual investment which is estimated to range between 1,800 to 3,200 crores, but it is not recognised as one by the government and does not have any of the benefits of a recognised industry. Lacking institutional finance (from banks, government etc.) it relies on finance from outside the industry. The Hindi film is financed mainly by black money sources of drug and liquor barons, smugglers, prostitution and real estate racketeers, who lend their illegal money at exorbitant interest rates. The Film Policy Committee Report of 1980 put the interest rate at 30 to 40% with advance payment of the interest charges. The Film Enquiry Committee Report of 1951 had put the interest rates at as high as 60 to 100%. In order to borrow this capital the producer offers the security of the star value of the actor(s) he plans to engage and the assurance that the film will be replete with the usual ingredients of song, dance, sexual titillation, violence etc. In view of the prime box office value of the star actor he is in a position to and does impose his views on the producer regarding story, dialogue, employment of a particular director, cameraman, make-up artiste or fellow artistes. In this set-up the position of the director has been decreasing in importance. He does not command an income which comes anywhere near that of the stars and does not have freedom in the choice of theme, cast, etc., which either the producer alone decides, or at best in consultation with him. Production of films takes place largely by fly-by-night producers, who do not own studios or have any permanent interest in the film industry or even any idea about the art of filmmaking. Speculative commercial interests being paramount, profits made are not invested back into it. Due to this highly speculative nature of film business permanent but artificial capital stringency is there.
The size of the black money or parallel underground economy is estimated to be at least half of the total economy in terms of the Gross National Product. This throws light on the investment pattern which is geared to such a considerable extent towards speculative and not productive investment. The attractiveness of investing speculatively in real estate, luxury hotels and the film business is that the rates of return can be much higher and quicker, sometimes even 1000 to 2000 percent than when productive investment is made. Incomes from such investments are unreported and go untaxed. Forming such a high component of the overall economy the black money economy is an index of structural distortions and of the parasitic nature of the ruling classes.1
Another angle is the stranglehold of the distributors and exhibitors over the financial situation and thus over the production values of the industry. In contrast to the fly-by-night producers who quit after one or two films the distributors and exhibitors present a stable element in the industry. Most films, if not all, are presold to distributors who advance the money necessary to complete the film. This enhances their power over the kind of film that is made. In recent years distributors have strengthened their hold over the exhibition channels by creating large circuits. Sometimes a distributor may have a chain of 80 to 100 cinema halls in the country. Anyone wishing to distribute a film himself is at a great disadvantage because of the exorbitant rentals charged by exhibitors. The producer may get a minimum guarantee of a certain sum of money for a territory whether the film does well or not. Or he may get a percentage of the profits which he shares with the distributor/exhibitor. In dealing with the exhibitor he is responsible for the entire publicity. The interest rates being very high he works out a strategy that ensures quick and substantial earnings, i.e., he spends a lot on publicity and makes more prints so that a film can be simultaneously released in many cinema halls within a city and in many parts of the country. Within this kind of distribution /exhibition network the producer tends to make his film in conjunction with the distributors, who will buy his film even before he has completed it.
Among the exhibitors too there are chain owners who maintain the cinema halls at a low cost but charge high rentals. Sometimes these owners give their theatres on a long term lease to some other person. A person who has such lease rights may look after the day-to-day management of the theatre but surrenders the booking rights to some other person who negotiates with the distributors, fixes the rent, decides release dates and accepts payments, sometimes in terms of unauthorised premium on fixed rent. Such a chain operator has no responsibility for the maintenance and upkeep of the theatre. He only ensures a fixed income to the leaseholder and picks up the surplus for himself. It is difficult for somebody to run a theatre without joining a chain. Within the exhibition circuit black money is also generated which is used to expand the chain. Exhibitors are often given ‘theatre protection money’, i.e., a minimum amount whatever the fate of the picture at the box office, and part of the actual collection in black.
This financing, production, distribution, exhibition structure of the film industry, which had more or less established itself in its essential contours in the pre-’47 Second World War period, was left largely untouched by the Congress government when it came to power. The Film Enquiry Committee, set up in 1949, and which submitted its report in 1951, had recommended state intervention in financing, in the expansion of distribution facilities and the setting up of a Film Institute and other film promotion bodies. But, for the time being, the only new thing that the government did was to make cinema into a major source of revenue and channelize some of the black money finance into its own coffers. Taxes are levied at central and State government levels, as well as by local municipal bodies. Taxes imposed by the central government include import duty on raw film stock and equipment, censorship fees, fees for storage of films, rentals on Films Division documentaries and newsreels, income tax and super tax, excise levy on each exposed film. Taxes levied by State governments are: entertainment tax, cinema tax, tax on advertisements, sales tax, electricity duties etc. Among taxes realised by local bodies are show tax, tax on posters, license fees for various operations, octroi and terminal duties, police charges. Before ’47 most provinces had entertainment taxes of 12.5%. By ’49 they were ranging from 25 to 75%. With a major chunk of the ticket money going to government and distributors/exhibitors, producers are left with about 10%.2 Of course, the industry is adept at various means of tax and excise evasions. It is an impression created by the film industry that the bulk of films produced are commercial flops. The purpose of this is tax evasion. By inflating the cost on a variety of items, the producer can still gain by purifying ‘black’ money, even if the film is not a box office success.
To have the State governments levy the entertainment tax was a clever ploy on the part of the central government. Languishing under insufficient sources of income, in part due to the unjust financial structure between States and the centre, States have resorted to garner resources from such high income sources as cinema and the liquor industry and trade and tended to hike up the entertainment tax whenever shortfall in budget is there. After excise, entertainment tax is the second largest source of revenue. Entertainment tax is levied from the filmgoers and raises the price of admission. Tax rates vary from State to State. In Andhra Pradesh and many other States the rate is nearly 100% of the price of admission, while in Kerala it varies from 24 to 48% of the net admission rate.
There are tremendous inequalities within the Hindi film industry. On the one hand, you have the handful of stars and superstars with their indecently opulent lifestyles, palatial mansions, imported cars, lavish wardrobes and trips abroad – all financed out of their untaxed black money income, which some of them judiciously invest within and outside the industry. On the other hand, there are the three lakh or so workers: the technicians, that is the assistant cameramen, dolliemen, carpenters and their assistants, electricians and lightmen; junior artists or the extras in the films who are used in the crowd scenes, in the roles of doctors, police inspectors, assistants to fight directors, duplicators for heroes/villains, stuntmen; the music directors and musicians in the orchestras; and lastly the female extras who are the worst organised. Income among these categories of workers, who are further divided into various grades, is by and large low. Wage payments are at times months in arrears, sometimes they may not be paid at all. A film company is liable to change its name and label in order to get rid of the claims of the employees, and if possible of the creditors too.
The large majority of workers are employed on casual, daily rated, temporary or contractual basis. They have no security of service in their old age. The conditions of work in the studios are quite awful. As we have already noted, money made from the industry is not invested in it but siphoned away. Toilets are filthy, make-up rooms dirty. Lack of proper ventilation makes the place of work unbearably hot. Accidents are common in studios, but the workers are not protected by insurance. Management tries to get out of any compensatory or hospital bill payments by asserting that the worker was careless, drunk etc.3
The plight of the women junior artistes is bad. It is difficult for them to get work for the day unless they “giggle with the agents, make friends with them, touch them.” (Sunday Observor, June 21, 1987, p. 19). Sheer economic necessity has driven a large number of young girls into the ranks of the extras. Only rarely are they able to realise their wish to make it to the heroine grade, most often the path leads to prostitution.
The film industry is not a recognised industry and this leaves the workers largely untouched by the various labour laws and welfare schemes. In 1978 they went on a token strike. In 1982 a Bill was passed attempting to regulate the conditions of employment in the industry without regulating the industry itself. Under this Bill every producer has to enter into written agreements with each of his workers. The agreement will be registered with a competent authority and in case of disputes will have to be referred to the conciliation office of the State or to the central government, which in turn will refer it to a single member Civic Workers Tribunal. A final appeal is possible to the High Court. By the time this cumbersome procedure is gone through a fly-by-night producer can become untraceable. Other regulations of this Bill also have loopholes and have not substantially improved the position of the workers.
Prostitution is not a phenomenon confined to the female junior artistes, who are most often compelled into it by sheer economic necessity. It is an organised racket within the film industry involving stars and starlets. The commoditisation and degradation of women on the screen are a reflection of the same in real life by financiers, businessmen, directors and producers. Many a young woman resorts to selling her body to advance in her career and to lead a physically more comfortable and luxurious life.
The conditions in the industry are such that shooting is done in a piecemeal and disorganised manner spread over an unduly long period of many years escalating costs. There are many reasons for this. The producer gets money only in instalments from the financiers or distributors for a period of 5-6 days. To get the dates from the stars and assemble everybody together is also difficult. Late-coming is common due to other engagements or simple undisciplined highhanded ‘star’ behaviour. Scripts are hardly ever completed beforehand and given to the actors to study, or studied and rehearsed by the unit as a whole. One or two days before the actual shooting the writer may pen the scenes. In the absence of any coherent sustained work in any one picture and due to the nature of the film itself which is geared towards one or more stars rather than a well defined story content, the actors stick to a stereotyped kind of acting adding on a few of their own mannerisms. Stereotyped role casting of actors, actresses, villains and vamps is common, which casts its own spell of repetitiveness apart from other formulaic ingredients. The audience is geared towards seeing a star in a particular kind of role and often visits the movie hall just for that. Imitation of star’s mannerisms, hair cut, dress, manner and mode of dialogue is commonly found among the youth and children everywhere.
Alice in Wonderland...
Part of the neo-colonial economic set-up commercial Hindi cinema plays a strong role in upholding the neo-colonial system and its values. It does this by creating an essentially unreal world. Commercial cinema has a manipulative approach towards the people, whom it wishes to attract in their masses. The universal pan-Indian Hindi film, like the universal Hollywood picture, from which it draws its inspiration, is not at all interested in engaging itself with the concrete realities of the people’s lives, their actual sufferings, confusions, conflicts, engendered through specific relations of production and their struggle against these. On the contrary, it wishes to draw them away from their frustrating, degraded, alienating and dehumanising living conditions for a short while, enable them to have a cathartic experience, and return them fresh for continued exploitation and oppression in their everyday lives. Through the dissemination of certain attitudes and values the people are made into active or passive agents in the chain of their own and each other’s exploitation. To be able to do this commercial cinema takes up the real needs, problems, aspirations and dreams of the people, but puts them together in hackneyed situations and patterns with easy and ready-made solutions which offer cathartic relief to the audience. Instead of uncovering in their interconnections the contradictions enmeshing the people, their problems and needs are falsified, trivialised, individualised and reduced to very small dimensions.
The Hindi film quite deftly adapts itself to the changing social situation and brings in new themes. But the overall pattern into which these new problems and situations are fitted undergo no fundamental change. It continues to play the role of defusing violence and aggressions arising from the frustrating conditions of living and channelizing them in such a way that they become useful to the system and help preserve it. This standardised form, or formula as it is called, has become so familiar to the people that it causes no surprises; in fact, they participate and delight in anticipating the turn of events, the end and so on. It does not tax the mental or emotional faculties too much and, in general, is not at all conducive to jolting anybody out of confirmed habitual ways of seeing and dealing with themselves and the world.
In the name of giving ‘them’ what they want a hoax is perpetrated upon the people. It is not only that they are financially fleeced, but cheating and deception takes place on the level of surrogate satisfaction of their needs, while letting them remain weak, servile underdogs of the system, and not its active and conscious shapers. The commercial film acts as a narcotic in the sense that it helps to make the viewer feel comfortable with himself. It does not disconcert by leading to a twilight zone of reality and unreality where she is confronted with disparate parts of her being and their contradictoriness. It does not hold a mirror to the soul and bring out the horror and tragedy of complicity in one’s own and others’ exploitation. It does not disturb equanimity, hypocrisy, mental lethargy and inertness which make people into daily sacrificial offerings. This relationship between the viewer and film has become so well grooved that any alternate cinema has to come to grips with how to shake it up and become a ‘cinema of cruelty’, offering no false sublimation and catharsis, but helping in self-exploration and a painful process of purging and purification, which simultaneously helps clarify the systemic factors and those controlling it, and brings out the people’s action against them for their elimination, so necessary for their rejuvenation.
The so-called masala form is peculiar to the mainstream Hindi film, meaning there are no clear-cut distinctions between the various genres of family melodrama, action or suspense films, dacoit films. The Hindi film is rarely a comedy, never a tragedy. Each film has more or less a little of everything, romance and sex, stunts, chases, violence, some tears, some laughter, song and dance sequences. Life is variegated, and an operatic form which tries to fuse the various art forms into a synthetic whole can be used to express it. But the way this is done in the Hindi film is peculiar in the sense that these various parts are simply strung together without much coherence and are not subordinated to the story or content, or the working out of various characters. The plot line is most often contrived and unrealistic. Things happen in a coincidental way, fate reigns. Events are not subjected to any analysis because the Hindi film aims at distraction and forgetfulness, not involvement and thought.
It is by constructing an essentially unreal and stereotyped world, which appeals to and canalises conscious and subconscious needs and wishes that the commercial cinema is guiding and influencing people’s minds and confirming and creating certain attitudes, the implications of which are by no means socially harmless, indeed are dangerous, and this calls for analysis and critique.
Hindi Cinema and Cultural Fascism
We would like to indicate here some further modes by which commercial Hindi cinema helps in sustaining the present exploitative order. One of the most well-recognised and lauded functions of the Hindi film is to spread a uniform all-India culture, important for ‘national integration’, something crucial to the all-India big and bureaucrat bourgeoisies. The Hindi film does this by not locating itself in any specific region in India. The location is very often Mumbai itself, the centre point of international finance capital in the country. Names— usually without surnames—are either North Indian or from the epics. For male characters, but increasingly for female characters too, it is the western dress that is the norm. The Hindi cinema has helped to spread the North Indian way of wearing the sari and the North Indian Muslim dress of salwar kameez. The theme of national integration is also bombastically emphasized in almost every Hindi film through the propagation of communal harmony – the harmony of the main religious communities – Hindu, Muslim, Christian and nowadays the Sikhs also. India is not shown as a multinational country with each national formation having its own special history, culture and identity, but the diversity is perceived primarily as that of various religious communities. The unity of these is by no means projected as that between equals; the character belonging to the Hindu community is usually in the dominant and superior role extending his benevolent patronage and tolerance towards the others.
Patriotism for mother India, a prison of forcibly integrated nations, is part of the ethos of a Hindi film. The peoples of the neighbouring countries are projected as enemies threatening this country suppressing the fact that in the border skirmishes with China and Pakistan India has been an aggressor, not to speak of the occupation of Northern (Tamil) Sri Lanka by the IPKF (Indian Peace Keeping Force) in 1985. Today this patriotism, an ideology serving the expansionist aims of the Indian big bourgeoisie in the subcontinent, is also directed against the struggles against militants in various parts of the country, who are shown to be colluding with the enemy across the borders to break the unity and integrity of the Indian nation.
The hero is never a black or darkskinned Dravidian from the South, but is generally ‘fair’ or rather brownskinned/’wheat complexioned’ so as to typify the so-called ‘Aryan’ race. Quite a few Muslims from the North have had and continue to have a successful career in Hindi films. We find this same practice in Delhi-based Doordarshan programmes and serials. The languages of the Southern nations, their customs, are generally caricatured and anyone from the South, irrespective of the State he belongs to, is lumped as being a Madrasi, and projected as a rather uncultured being. Though the Sikhs have been among the most militant fighters against the central state, for the sake of the national integration image, they can be projected as good humoured, helpful bumpkins.
The hero and heroine traipse through green meadows, sing in snowy mountains, boat in idyllic lakes, but the peoples inhabiting and working in these paradisiacal locales are hardly in evidence. Their culture, their often not so very paradisiacal conditions of living, do not come into the picture at all except perhaps as an exotic background for the song and dance sequences. Kashmir, which was a favourite haunting ground for Hindi cinema, has now been put out of bounds for the industry by the Kashmiri militants fighting for independence from India. Any unity between peoples can only be on the basis of knowledge, understanding and respect for the other’s specific history, identity and aspirations. Hindi cinema only perpetuates ignorance, prejudice and North Indian feelings of crude domination and superiority over the other nationalities. In the Hindi film, in the name of patriotism and national integrity, Hindu communalism and North Indian racist and chauvinist attitudes are being propagated and reinforced.
The Hindi cinema constructs a certain kind of image of tradition and modernity and puts them in juxtaposition in order to promote neo-colonial values and culture. Modernism is generally equated with the possession of western dress and material goods. It is the culture of dining tables with glass cutlery and table napkins, sofas and cushion laden drawing rooms with a staircase leading symbolically to higher realms of somnambulism. Imported cars, foreign liquor, cigars, usually enjoyed by villainous businessmen, cordless telephones and other wonders of the modern world are all projected on the screen for the materially deprived and not so well off people as indicators of what constitutes a good life and to enable them to vicariously participate in it and also arouse a desire to possess at least some of these objects.
Modern city life with its crime, corruption, smuggling, brothels, bars, gambling dens, night clubs, hotels, is glitteringly shown as ‘bad.’ Today, for what is understood as ‘Indian’ increasingly read ‘Hindu revivalism’. However, the lure and excitement of the ‘bad’ is such that the devil of modernity turns out to be more attractive and enticing than the native gods. This kind of conservatism or pseudo-nationalism is very appealing and reassuring to the petty bourgeois sections. On the one hand, they see for themselves all that is so ‘evil’ in this kalyug and vicariously and voyeuristically participate in it. At the end, however, they feel comforted about the goodness of their relatively simple life, about the need for family stability, their religious rituals and ceremonies, non-emancipation of women from their traditional roles etc. Blunting the rough edges of poverty, glamourising the simple rustic life, have the obvious aim of consoling the poor for their deprivations, for they are the good. It also caters to the nostalgia, which often remains only a nostalgia, of the urban sections for the simple and more natural rural life, because they are mostly too stuck to urban comforts and have no perspective of the possibility of their reconciliation.
Hindi films are generally big city based in terms of their locale and are geared towards urban audiences and life. A large part of the audience is migrant workers from the crisis ridden rural areas of the various parts of the country. Agricultural development is sectoral leaving vast areas neglected and unirrigated. This, along with merciless exploitation of forest wealth, has resulted in increasing numbers of famine and drought prone areas. In the absence and insufficiency of local level industrialisation, the labour market in the big urban centres offers the poor peasantry, landless agricultural labourers and artisan castes a way out of a situation of destitution and starvation. Availability of employment in the organised industrial sector is scarce. Most migrant workers end up working in the unorganised sector as construction workers, in transport and repair shops, as rickshaw pullers, balloon sellers, rag pickers, watchmen, scooter, taxi and truck drivers, in various small scale and household industries, as domestic workers, as launderers, petty traders, porters, cooks, waiters, unskilled office workers, in traditional artisan trades and skills, as beggars and prostitutes. Children form a big chunk of the unorganised workforce. Among the youth, many remain unemployed, fall into drug addiction, and deal in illicit liquor or get into the smuggling trade.
In the cities and towns the earlier way of life, and linked with it, its cultural expression in song, music, dance and drama are disrupted. Most of the migrants retain their rural ties and to some extent the folklore. The mode of exploitation in the urban centres is semi-feudal with elements of bondage. Disorganised and scattered cultural disorientation ensues; hardly ever are they able to develop and adapt their cultural forms in a class conscious way to their new situation. Instead, they fall prey to the culturally degrading influence of the new mass media of TV and video, apart from the film and radio, which had already penetrated and to some extent influenced and corrupted their folk art forms in the rural areas. Just some years back poor construction workers in Delhi self-confessedly could not afford to cinema houses, and after a hard day’s labour most men spent a good part of their evenings drinking and the women sang their folk songs. Today we find most of them silently clustered around a jointly hired colour video set playing the latest Hindi film, or listening to the desi disco of Hindi film music or of independent singers on cheap, local made transistors or tape recorders. We find the youth buying picture postcards or blow-ups of female stars or models scantily clad. Even simple wallets selling on Delhi’s roads will have vulgar pin up photographs inside. Unemployed youth will be lounging around cinema theatres showing “red, hot, sexy” NRI imported films. The social and political implications of this extreme level of cultural degeneration and lumpenisation of large chunks of the working people have already made themselves felt in the fascisization of this city.
The middle classes increasingly remain huddled at home in front of the TV/video, rarely liking to venture out to higher cost entertainment in increasingly dilapidated movie halls cornered by the city ‘riffraff’. In the face of the increasing complexity, crises, chaos, insecurity and violence on the social and political fronts they prefer to retreat in the safety of their homes to the dream world of depoliticised romantic young love of films like Chandni, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak and Maine Pyar Kiya, the blockbusters of recent years.
The rural areas of the various regions in this country remain the arena for nationality based struggles with the peasantry as their motive force. the disinherited and uprooted masses coming from these rural areas to the urban ones are to some extent alienated from these struggles and are drawn into the vortex of neo-colonial cultural degradation. Their sense of identity is shaken. Those who are already entrenched in the city for many years in the lower echelons of the bureaucracy and the varied institutions have already become more or less solid part of the corrupt vulgar materialist and consumerist comprador order. These sections become helpless victims of state violence and that of the militants. Or they become votaries of the use of the state organs of the police and army against the militants. Sometimes they become active agents in ruling party organised communal rioting, looting and rape (1984 riots against the Sikhs, for example).
Hindi films play a major role in upholding the authority of the pillars of the neo-colonial state – the army, the police and judiciary. The bureaucrats and politicians rarely come into the picture due to the ostensible apolitical stance of these films. The people’s basic experience of the police as very corrupt, oppressive and brutal is sought to be transformed into the belief that there are ‘good’ policemen and ‘bad’ policemen, just as there are ‘good’ businessmen and ‘bad’ businessmen. Through identification with the artificially constructed ‘good’ within the ruling sections, or their organs, their essential role in the system is mystified and adherence to the status quo sought. The ‘good’ policeman is often the ‘hero’, who almost singlehandedly fights the criminal forces, generally by circumventing the normal legal procedures. But he is helped in the end by some other good elements higher up in the police force, or/and by a bad element changing heart, which is aimed at resurrecting the tattered image of the police. The Censor Board is particularly vigilant on this count.
Lengthy court scenes were almost mandatory in earlier films. However, with the loss of faith in legal procedures and the growth of revolutionary violence in the late ‘60s and ‘70s in various parts of the country, we find the Hindi film trying to subvert and canalise this anti-system violence into safer individualistic channels. The underworld becomes the prime criminal. Here also, exciting fascination for and acceptance of the ‘bad’ rich world which may also have its ‘good’ elements is paramount. Its vital nexus with the politicians, policemen, big business, and within that the film business, the role of black money economy within the overall neo-colonial economy is covered up. Violence, anger, frustration boiling up from one’s conditions of living are canalised into gang warfare, personal revenge and vendetta feelings, all acting as a safety valve for maintaining the status quo as well as aiding the process of fascisization because it is precisely from among such gangs, goondas and floating elements that bourgeois political parties, businessmen and the underworld derive their henchmen to settle scores and carry on their affairs. In its preoccupation with the criminal underworld Hindi cinema plays upon a fascination with crime on the part of the people which exists because it is something that seems to circumvent oppressive legality and is a perverted ‘illegal’ and violent search for justice within an unjust social and economic order, where the law is meant for the protection of the rich. In the words of Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux: “One murder makes a villain, millions sanctify.” The common man on the lower or bottom most rungs of society sees and knows that only those who are ‘criminal’ get to the top of the ladder and achieve riches and limelight, which he also ardently desires for himself. While playing upon these feelings, the cinema ultimately vindicates the triumph of bourgeois legality, the police.
The whole question of identification with a ‘hero’ star is dicey for the realisation of a democratic set-up. The implications of inculcating the attitudes of ‘hero worship’, of being ‘star struck’, are obvious in the body politic. It is a corollary to the need and demand for strong political leaders, preferably one ‘charismatic’ figure who will act for the people and hold the country together, maintain ‘law and order’ and keep chaos at bay. This attitude is a signal of fascism, not of parliamentary democracy leave alone participatory democracy. The diversion of people’s interest, particularly of the youth and women, in the trivial and often concocted affairs and opinions of cine stars through an incredible number of gossipy film and fan magazines and now also in the supplements of many daily newspapers in all languages is an index of deep depoliticisation, emptymindedness, frivolity and moral turpitude. The incursion of a fair number of cine and TV stars into politics and their use in election campaigning by some ruling class parties, though not always successful, tries to capitalise on this mentality of the people. If nothing else, it has a curiosity value and acts as a sure crowd puller, which is also a sign of the underdeveloped self-consciousness of the people.
The portrayal of women in Hindi cinema, the attitude fostered towards them, the manner in which male-female relationships are portrayed, are also grist to the mill of the fascisization trend. If the status of women is any index of the cultural level of a society then the extreme degradation of womankind on the screen pierces through all rhetoric of the dignity of Indian womanhood and the mother concept. Over time there has been a steady deterioration in this portrayal till today she is reduced to a sex kitten, a doll with no personality, no character. Her main role is to look glamourous, wear modishly western and ethnic clothes, and pose with a vacuous look alone or with the male hero as for a photograph. Many a screen heroine of today is a former modelling girl and is as look-alike as the next. She is never independently active and is an appendage to the active hero, himself a dehumanised monkey-like figure, who freely slaps her around, all as part of the expression of his ‘love’ and affection.
Violence against women is an essential component of the Hindi film. Male supremacist ideology keeps the role and image of women circumscribed within the framework of mother, whore, wife. In all these roles she serves certain male needs within a patriarchal set-up and is not accepted as an independent entity. One prime way of keeping woman in her subordinate and subjugated position is physical and mental violence. Mental violence is keeping her convinced of her essential worthlessness outside of serving male needs as wife/mother. The most extreme violence against her person—rape—is used as an ever present threat if she ventures out too far from a circumscribed domestic sphere. All levels of violence against women are shown in Hindi films and in such a way as to strengthen male dominating attitudes. The woman to be wife until quite recently was essentially identified with the chaste Sita image, and had as her counterpart the figure of the vamp/whore embodying unsatisfied male sexual fantasies and attraction for the sexually liberated westernised woman. Today, with extreme penetration of neo-colonial culture, the vamp/whore figure has become fused with the lover heroine, with some reversal to the traditional image at the approach of marriage.
By pandering to male supremacist ideology Hindi films also aim at blunting class consciousness. In cinema the entire world of women seems to be within the reach of the poor common man. It is routine for rich girls to fall in love with a poor man and let him impose his will on her. Similarly, he is made to indulge in the fantasy of possessing the white woman through watching the imported porn and soft porn films. Real life class barriers are easily surmounted on the screen, whereas the role of caste hardly finds any reflection.4
The male star is also presented as a he-man and/or romantic hero for the voyeuristic satisfaction and wish fulfillment of the female audience. Women particularly fall for those kind of movies in which the man goes to extravagant lengths to prove his love and is literally ready to die for the woman. The more popular because the more contrary to the real life situation. The real world of human relationships with their darkness and light is far away from the screen world.
A society which has strict sexual mores and where marriage is largely based on class and caste conveniences has its screen world constantly filled with titillating sexuality. This leads to extreme hypocrisy in this question particularly on the part of women. It also has fascistic implications for the society. The anti-Mandal commission protests against reservation for backward castes in Delhi in 1990, joined by farmers from neighbouring areas, had definite aspects of sexual harassment and assault on the chic middle and upper class girls from the universities and colleges.
Some time back there was a spate of heroine oriented films, in which the woman becomes the revengeful factor, or is the justice meting policewoman. These represent a retrograde concept of women’s emancipation and put forward fascistic role models for women. There are many more zones of dehumanisation in the Hindi movie. One very important one is the depiction of the lower classes. Reflecting the values of the parasitical and unproductive upper classes it places no value on the working people, on whose toil the rich live. Among these it is the domestic servant alone who is given special prominence. Servants are an essential part of the Hindi film, wholeheartedly involved in their master’s doings, lyal like slavish dogs, but are ridiculed as idiots of the subhuman species. The physically handicapped are the butt of jokes. People from the rural areas are shown as being quite dumb and ignorant in comparison to ‘smart’ city dwellers in consonance with the exploitation of the countryside by urban industry, and ignoring the fact that it is the poor and landless peasantry and the tribal peoples who remain the last repositories of national cultures.
Corrosive Rhythms
Music is the language of the soul; it is the language of the soul of a people. The almost magical powers of music to take hold of the innermost being of man and effect changes in it is long recognised. Mythologies all over the world relate tales about the divine and humanising force of music. Celebrating the power of music is the Greek myth of Orpheus, the famous poet and musician, who not only enchanted the wild beasts, but made even the rocks and trees move and follow the sound of his music. Rhythm and melody, by expressing and representing man’s varied innermost emotions of joy, love, sorrow, anger, fear, tolerance, courage, revolt, also naturally have the power to arouse these same feelings in the listener. Hence, depending on the quality of the music and the emotions expressed, it can have a positive effect, i.e., enhance the combative spirit, engender solidarity and direct human energy into collective actions; or if it is vulgar, can dehumanise, have a sophoric, soul and thought killing deadening effect.
Music can have many functions within a film. It can be in the form of accompanying (or background) music to a scene, an action, commenting on it, reinforcing or expressing a mood, an emotion. Or it may stand in a kind of counterpoint relationship to a visual or independently of a visual, have a message to communicate. It can be used as an alienating device in the Brechtian sense. The film form itself may be allied to a musical form. In all these cases music or song are an integral part of the whole and do not stand as extraneous elements. In Hindi films songs and dances are artificially baked in for their own sake with no essential relationship to the content of the film just adding on dollops to their entertainment value.
The songs in a film may often be a major reason for its popularity. Film songs are the mainstay of radio, and song sequences (often with dance) are broadcast on TV. Hindi film songs, popular and known in every corner of the country, are rightfully regarded as contributing a great deal toward national integration. Lata Mangeshkar, the most popular playback singer star for many decades for not just Hindi cinema, who has sung a number of patriotic songs during India’s wars with her neighbours, is rightfully lauded as a “tuneful symbol of national integration.” (The Hindu, Feb. 8, 1991 , p. 17).
The style of filmi song music has penetrated and is influencing that of even the devotional songs of many new and old cults. The character of this music, which has caught the ‘nation’ by storm needs examination. The mediocrity and sameness of the film tunes being churned out today by tune banks (whereby it is not necessary that one music director scores the entire music and songs in the film, implying further commercialisation and separation of song from the film) are well recognised. What is also acknowledged is that melody, one of the essential elements of music in India, is being increasingly lost to simplistic, mechanical, mindless rhythms of western imitation music. It implies an impoverishment of the emotional or mood content of music. Not that the trend of imitating western music is new to Hindi film music. It was there right from the beginning. Hindi film music is recognised to be hybrid music whereby it has taken over elements of western music like harmony and orchestra5 as well as many western instruments like the piano, harmonium etc., which use the tempered scale.
Tribal/folk and classical music in the different regions of the country have a rich musical heritage of rhythmic and melodic sophistication as well as musical instruments of great variety. There are about 280 kinds of drums alone in India, 80 to 85 different kinds of stringed instruments, 50 to 60 wind instruments. The musical scales use the microtones or shrutis, which greatly enhance melodic expression and cannot be expressed on the western tempered scale. The local musical traditions are increasingly lost and fail to be revitalised and developed when recourse is taken to plagiarisation and imitation of western tunes and songs, which, of course, does not imply a xenophobic shutting out of any kind of influence from the outside. A lot of the pop, disco and jazz music with its rapid beat sets the feet of the young dancing here is an emasculated white version of originally much more strong and free rhythms of black music from the Americas.6
The lyrics of Hindi film songs are often banal, erotic, with vulgar sexual innuendos—a clear cut degeneration of a musical tradition where song and dance were inextricably linked with work, individual and collective. Sowing and harvesting, spinning and weaving, grinding and pounding, social events like births and marriages, religious and seasonal festivals, wars, have all been accompanied or celebrated with song, music and dance. As the rhythm of agricultural work is divided by nature into different times of the day and seasons, each with their specific functions, so also is the music guided not only by the rhythm of the work, by mood and feeling, but also time and season.
When a rural migrant, whose lifestyle has been so closely linked with song and dance in its varied aspects comes to the city and is exposed to its forms of entertainment he is naturally first of all attracted by the song and dance elements in these. The degenerate manner in which these elements are present in Hindi films do nothing to develop his consciousness to more complex levels of understanding of society and his place in it. it is a music alienated from the actual labour processes and functions as a distraction, as a background noise, serving to make bearable the unbearable, a substitute collective for the lonely urban housewife and youth.
Shadow of Hollywood
There are still many cinema theatres in urban centres that are controlled by US or British film companies. These have long term contracts with or even own some of the cinema houses or have a share in the ownership. In the colonial period the foreign films imported were mainly from the US or UK. Political films from any country, particularly from the Soviet Union, were banned. We do not find much of a change in this situation after an ‘independent’ government came to power in ’47.
Licenses of independent Indian film importers were withdrawn in the mid-‘50s giving the tight foreign exchange position as an excuse. The FFC (Film Finance Corporation), formed in 1960, imported some films but the majority continued to be imported by the Kinematograph Reuter’s Society (KRS), representing the distributors of American films in India, who paid the FFC a canalising fee. The Chief Controller of Imports and Exports also refused to issue direct licenses to independent Indian film importers. The FFC gave a group of pictures to KRS members on a straight percentage basis, but it sold distribution rights of certain foreign films to Indian distribution companies making a neat profit. Another discriminatory aspect was that KRS members were asked to pay only a canalising fee, while Indian distributors getting their films from FFC had to part with a share of their profit. In the case of KRS members the stipulation that a certificate of origin be furnished was not insisted upon, their films were cleared without previewing, which was necessary in the case of all other foreign films. Violating as it did the government’s own Import and Export (control) Act and Import (control) order of 1955 it was indeed revelatory of the leeway given to US distributors. The KRS was not only bringing in North American products, but, taking advantage of loopholes in import regulations, was also dumping B grade films made in Europe, Singapore, Taiwan, Hongkong etc. The sway of Hollywood within films imported continued in spite of a grandiose statement by the Information and Broadcasting Ministry that films would be imported “on a global and non-discriminatory basis.”
The FFC was amalgamated with the Indian Motion Pictures Export Corporation and transformed into the NFDC (National Film Development Corporation) in 1980 and was given the sole responsibility for not only the import of foreign films but also for the export of Indian films. Apart from its agreements with the Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA), the Arthur Rank Organisation and Sovexportfilm, NRIs were also permitted to enter the film import field. NFDC, receiving a substantial canalisation fee of US$ 15,000 for every film imported, allowed a whole lot of outright C grade stuff to invade the market. When there was a sort of noise about this the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting set up a panel to vet the films before they went to the censors. But this has not made much of a difference. Even if the censors, though quite liberal in matters of sex and violence, cut out certain scenes, these are later quietly restored by the importer. Film producers and directors here have cashed in on these kinds of imports by tagging on entire sequences from such films into theirs, often without any direct bearing on the plot.
This latest phenomenon of lifting and interpolating footage from foreign films is in line with a long history of a plagiaristic relationship with western cinema. Starting with Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra, we find behind many a Hindi film the shadow lines of a Hollywood, or sometimes British or French, movie. Just a few examples: Tehelka – The Guns of Navarone; Parichay – The Sound of Music; Main Azad Hoon – Meet John Doe, and the list is legion. Producers and directors routinely attend International Film Festivals held here for the sole purpose of seeing what can be copied and adapted. Of course, as an underdeveloped country, we cannot compete as far as sophisticated and latest equipments and astronomical budgets are concerned and cannot achieve the gloss, the finish and spectacular ‘special effects’ that Hollywood studios are capable of. Not to speak of the more liberal approach to kissing and nudity in their films which our hypocritical censors still bar in our films, but let pass in theirs, though the latest films passing the limits of vulgarity show that this bar is increasingly on the wane.
The lure of Hollywood cinema for those addicted to both rests on the fact that it does better whatever the Hindi cinema tries to do, and is the original stuff, whereas Hindi cinema is only second-hand imitation. The situation can be compared with that in the consumer goods field where the original foreign-made good is preferred over the Indian assembled one. There is a fascination for the speed and high technology of foreign films, a kind of technology fetishism. They are seen from the attitude of wanting to know about, experience and consume these things though from a distance. The mind oscillates between the offerings of the high technology gods and home-grown lethargy, between imitation and the awareness of the impossibility of imitation. None of them activate. Both are sophorics.
All our nationalist pretensions notwithstanding, till now the Hindi cinema has not produced even one good film dealing with the anti-colonial struggles in India. What did happen is that the government under Indira Gandhi gave part of the funds (one-third of the total US $ 22 million) and facilities to British director Richard Attenborough to make Gandhi, which projects the national liberation struggles in India from a pro-imperialist point of view.7 Merchant/Ivory film productions are also collaborations where the colonial hangover and nostalgia persist. Most of their scripts are either written by or based on novels by Ruth Prawar Jhabvala, whose special theme is the trials and travails of white upper class women, the memsahibs, in India.
Acting in a Hollywood, or any foreign, i.e., West European, film for that matter, is the path sought for international recognition by many cine actors and actresses. They don’t mind playing bit or large ‘oriental’ roles on TV or in films which are unabashedly expressive of white supremacist and sickeningly paternalistic attitudes. (Shabana Azmi in Madame Sousatzka and again in City of Joy). Nowadays there are a number of Indians making movies in Hollywood having a part of the locale in India. These films have as a main target audience the large contingents of peoples from India settled, or wishing to settle in the US. These have some nostalgia, memories or links with the homes left behind, but are also caught up in the desperate race of assimilation into North American society and keeping up with the Joneses, where some degree of ethnicity is an asset. Their ethos is best expressed by the US settled novelist, Bharati Mukherji.
References
1. T.G. Jacob: India: Development and Deprivation. Mass Line Press, New Delhi, 1985, p. 210.
2. See R.D. Jain: The Economic Aspects of Film Industry in India. Atma Ram and Sons, Delhi, 1960.
3. Balraj Sahni: The Film Artiste, in Seminar, Special no. Film, May, 1980.
4. See also on this subject also Kumar Shahani: Myths for Sale, Framework, no. 30/31, 1986.
5. The principle of orchestration is actually not at all unknown in music in the Indian subcontinent. There was a time when the curtain to a play used to rise to the beating of dwadesh mridangam (12 drums). Tribal music very well knows orchestration as different from accompaniment. It was during the medieval period that classical music, dropping the tradition of collective music, gave preference to individual performance.
6. “The white musician can jam if he’s got some sheet music in front of him. He can on something he’s heard jammed before. But that black musician, he picks up his horn and starts blowing some sounds that he never thought of before. He improvises, he creates, it comes from within. Its his soul; its that sould music... he will improvise; he’ll bring it from within himself. And this is what you and I want. You and I want to create an organisation that will give us so much power that we can do as we please.” (From a speech by Malcolm X to the Organisation of African Unity, June 28, 1964, in Frank Kofsky: Black Nationalism and the Revolution in Music. Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970.
7. For details of historical distortions in this film, see Amita Mallik: Gandhi: An Indian Views, in Robert M. Crunden (ed.): The Traffic of Ideas Between India and America. Chanakya Publishers, Delhi, 1985, pp. 167-77.
[The above was published as Chapter Three of the book, Black and White of Cinema in India, Odyssey, Thiruvanthapuram, 1992]