Commercial cinema has always been one of the biggest indigenous industries in India, and remains so in the post-globalization era, when Indian economy has entered a new phase of global participation, liberalization and expansion. Issues of community, gender, society, social and economic justice, bourgeois-liberal individualism, secular nationhood and ethnic identity are nowhere more explored in the Indian cultural mainstream than in commercial cinema.
As Indian economy and policy have gone through a sea change, after the end of the Cold War and the commencement of the Global Capital; the largest cultural industry has followed suit. For example, the global Indian community (known in Indian official terms as the Non-Resident Indian or the NRI) has become an integral part of the cultural representation of India. It is to be noted here that Indian Popular Cinema has carved a niche for itself amongst the very many folds of World Cinema.
Stuart Hall, who in 1992, at a conference to mark a decade of cultural studies carried out by the Birmingham school, spoke very critically of “the theoretical fluency of cultural studies in the United States.”
He was not, he said, demanding that American cultural studies become more like British cultural studies. The problem was not that American cultural studies was unable to theorize power in the field of culture or that it had formalized out of existence the relations of history and politics to culture.
On the contrary, “There is no moment now, in American cultural studies,” he said, “when we are not able, extensively and without end, to theorize power — politics, race, class and gender, subjugation, domination, exclusion, marginality, otherness, etc. There is hardly anything in cultural studies which isn’t so theorized.” But by carrying out this task through an “overwhelming textualization” of the material it studied, Cultural Studies was in danger of “constituting power and politics as exclusively matters of language and the textuality itself.” This allowed no room for cultural studies to become “a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect.”
Hall then went on to propose that Antonio Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” and Michel Foucault’s “specific intellectual” were alternative ways of thinking how the student of culture might intervene in the real world of culture. In any case, whatever the particular method by which this was done, Hall’s plea was to “return the project of cultural studies from the clean air of meaning and textuality and theory to the something nasty down below.” I take this to mean that cultural studies should not avoid making moral, aesthetic, or political judgments about the world of culture that it claimed to study.
But questions arose as to, how did it come to be that a field of study that promised to investigate the production, consumption, and valorization of culture by connecting it to relations and practices of power found itself unable to make judgments about good and bad culture? Why did the scholars of culture have to restrict themselves to locating specific cultural acts within complex structures of power but refrain from becoming cultural critics?
Let us approach a few of these questions by making a quick review of the study of popular visual culture as it has developed in India in the last three or four decades.
To take the case of cinema first: there is a framing debate, going back to at least the early 1960s, about the relation between cinema and the viewing culture of the public in India. On one side is the argument that the mass audience of the Indian cinema, steeped in traditional beliefs and practices and raised for generations in pre-modern viewing cultures, is simply incapable of understanding or appreciating the rational-realist cinema. As a result, not only has serious art cinema failed to take root in India’s modern aesthetic life, but the film industry, too, has routinely churned out mythological and melodramatic rubbish that is cinematically infantile and ideologically retrograde.
As Chidananda Das Gupta, one of the most articulate proponents of this view, claimed, the audience of the popular Indian cinema was unable to distinguish between fact and myth. This was shown by the political deification of film stars in the Indian states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh and the persistence over half a century of Hindu mythological themes in the popular Hindi cinema.
Das Gupta also pointed out that, unlike folk art that is produced organically within communities, the popular cinema is industrially produced, and “vast manipulative forces” are at work.2 Reasserting the importance of taking a stand on social values, he rejected the trend of uncritically endorsing the popular cinema as popular culture. Culture could not be allowed to go uncriticized, he seemed to be saying, simply because it was popular.
On the other side is the provocative argument offered by Ashis Nandy, who insisted that the non-modernity of the popular Indian cinema and its audience was a sign of the resilience of a tradition of viewing practices that still refused to cave in before the global onslaught of a culture of modern technological and commercial rationality.
The alleged failure of Indian cinemagoers to appreciate realist cinematic narrative was in fact a rejection of the cultural values of modern industrial life and an endorsement of the inherited virtues of tradition, faith, and community. Indeed, Nandy even insisted that the popular Indian cinema, though industrially produced, has “a built-in plurality that tends to subvert mass culture even when seemingly adapting to it passively.”3 It was neither classical nor folk, yet “now that modernity has become the dominant principle in Indian public life . . . it is the commercial cinema which, if only by default, has been . . . more protective towards non-modern categories.”4
This is a difference in viewpoints that still persists, at least in the public domain in India. There is no hesitation here in making aesthetic, moral, or political judgments about the cinema, whether high or popular. In the scholarly domain, however, things are quite different.
As Ravi Vasudevan has reminded us in his survey of the analytical literature on the Indian cinema, the extreme terms of the debate between Das Gupta and Nandy have been largely superseded by the profusion of empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated studies that have appeared in the field of Indian film studies in the last decade and a half.5 Both sides in that old debate had assumed a certain pre-given and fixed structure of the viewing practices of the allegedly pre-modern Indian audience. That structure, both positions assumed, could confront the modern technology of the cinema only on the terms allowed by their own inflexible practices; the structure could not adapt or change to accommodate the new. Most theorists and historians studying the Indian cinema today will reject this assertion and, hence, reject both of the views represented by Das Gupta and Nandy. The popular Indian cinema, they will say, has in fact modernized itself as well as its audience by adapting traditionally available narrative forms and performance techniques and inserting them into a modern technological medium. In the process, both the cinema and its audience have been transformed, albeit in complex ways that need to be documented and understood. This would be the prevailing common sense among students of Indian cinema today.
It is widely believed that this change in the terms of the debate is part of a larger change that has taken place in the last three decades in cultural disciplines such as anthropology and literary theory as well as in approaches to the study of cultural history.
The older debate was fundamentally informed by a historical paradigm of modernization, whether Weberian or Marxian. The model was that of a modern sector, with modern economic, political, and cultural institutions, breaking into and transforming the traditional sector. It was with this model in mind that one set of scholars, impatient with the slow pace of transformation, complained of the rigidities of traditional practices and the lack of initiative, and perhaps even sincerity, within the modern sector to change the pre-modern. And the same model provoked the rival group of scholars to bemoan the loss of traditional virtues and celebrate the traces of resistance to modernization. What has happened in the last twenty years with the critique of anthropology as a colonial science, on the one hand, and with the emergence of postcolonial literary and cultural studies, on the other, is a realignment of the terms for the study of modernity.
Film critic Lata Khubchandani notes in her writings, ".. Some of our (Indian) earliest films...had liberal doses of sex and kissing scenes in them. Strangely, it was after Independence the censor board came into being and so did all the strictures."
Over the years, Indian Popular cinema has been called everything, from garish, vulgar and populist to tasteless, lacking in scrutiny and a charade pandering to the lumpen masses; or as the Film Encyclopedia prefers, “long, glossy, semi-literate, replete with stock situations and moralistic clichés...escapist entertainment”.
Indeed, it is often the ineluctable little-bit-of-everything quality of Indian Popular Cinema that initially confounds the Western spectators: numerous plot twists, unpredictable deviations, idealized love between a young couple who came together, are torn apart and come together again, encounters with unctuous villains and semi-clad vixens; any permutation or combination of genre-influenced elements. An assortment of buffoons or comic stereotypes to provide a required dose of Indian slapstick humor, absolutely essential song and dance sequences that defy all space, time and logic; and hyperbolic displays which permits the audience’s reactions to run the gamut (from anger and exhilaration to laughter and tears); Indian Cinema and more so the Hindi Cinema has truly “…been there! Done that!”
Needless to say that the popular cinema remains unencumbered by any obligation to reflect reality. But insults and accusations neither rob the Bollywood (the Hollywood of Bombay) cinema of its success, nor expunge its monopoly over Indian cultural life. Bollywood produces an average of 400 films annually, with a typical weekly attendance Nationwide of approximately 35 million. The industry caters to urban middle class and working classes, and appeals primarily to individuals who have migrated from rural areas to the cities.
Indian Cinema from its inception has given rise to the concept of “star” and they have for a large tenure, carried popular films on their shoulders alone! To quote M. Madhava Prasad, “Cinema, however, has from the beginning posed a problem to our assumption of the unicity or aesthetic autonomy of the cultural text. Stars, or the star system that seems to arise in any thriving film industry, always exceed the narrative framework of the film-as-story and acquire an autonomous existence as supplementary representations that are only partially anchored in films that feature the particular star.
Star personae are themselves representations but they are not constituted only through the roles played by the star. And once, a star persona is established, the roles themselves begin to exceed the requirements of ‘characterization’. The star as representation begins to communicate through other channels than the films, and even in the films, a star retains a channel of communication which runs parallel to the digetic content of the narrative.”
M Madhava Prasad also in his writings notes the term Bollywood as a fascinating idea! He writes, “Is it meant to suggest that the cinema is imitative and therefore deserves to be re-christened to highlight this derivativeness? Or is it in fact the opposite: an attempt to indicate a difference internal to the dominant idiom, a variation that is related to but distinct from the globally hegemonic Hollywood? Is it Indian cinema’s way of signifying its difference or is it (inter) national film journalism and scholarship’s way of re-inscribing the difference that Indian cinema represents within an articulated model of global hegemony and resistance?
It is natural that those who have invested in earlier models of the Indian popular cinema – the ‘so many cinemas’ model, the folk culture model,
the ‘yeh-to-public-hai-yeh-sab-janti-hai’ model, the regressive ‘pulse of the people’ model, the ideological model, art versus popular, and so on, should feel slightly resentful of this development which threatens to absorb their own special areas into its commodious (because ill-defined) purview. Bollywood in that sense is not a term with a specific signified: an empty signifier, it can be applied to any set of signifieds within the realm of Indian cinema.
Contrary to what we might expect, it does not, for instance, explicitly exclude the middle/art genres from its field. It belongs to an order of signifiers that seems to want to ‘capture a mood or style’, rather than designate a piece of reality. I too, like Ashish Rajadhyaksha in his thoughtful piece on the topic, not to mention Ajay Devgan in a recent interview, have felt resentment and indignation at what seems to be a callous act of symbolic abduction. Here, however, I want to take a deep breath and take another look at the matter.”
The term Bollywood has crept into the vocabulary of the Anglophone national culture slowly and steadily, almost without anybody noticing it. Like certain processes of which we become aware only when they are almost over, we are right now witness to the naturalization of ‘Bollywood’ as the designation for what was previously known as Hindi cinema, Bombay cinema, Indian popular cinema, etc. It is tempting to think that this process of near-universal legitimation of ‘Bollywood’ is a symptom of some other social and cultural processes, which have a wider significance.
In some recent films we get a distinct feeling that the intelligences involved in their production had bought into the Bollywood theory about songs in films, rather than spontaneously making films with songs, which might have been the situation in earlier times. The desire for Bollywood is thus a desire for the reproduction of the difference that it represents on a world platform, which the industry itself, in its current reflexive moment, is responding to. It is this reflexivity and the demand it is responding to that can be said to constitute the very stuff of the new NRI film.
But there are other dynamics at work, which are invested in transforming the Indian cinema scene, of getting rid of the old formats and establishing new logics of cultural production. Of course, people will continue to use the same term, Bollywood, even for this trend, since as we have noted above, it does not commit itself to any restrictive meaning. Nevertheless the box office statistics seem to indicate that there is another way of classifying the products of Bombay which will give us another map of the territory, such as the one Ashish Rajadhyaksha has tried to delineate, which will reveal objective limits to the scope of the term Bollywood and the fantasy that it embodies.
One of India’s great film makers, Sri Satyajit Ray also talks about the evils that has gripped the cinema of India and what needs to be done in his book “Our films, their films”.
To quote Sri Satyajit Ray, “In primitive state films were much alike, no matter where they were produced. As the pioneers began to sense the uniqueness of the medium, the language of the cinema gradually evolved.” He further notes, “In India, it would seem that the fundamental concept of a coherent dramatic pattern existing in time was generally misunderstood. Often by a queer process of reasoning, movement was equated with action, and action with melodrama. The analogy with music failed in our case because Indian music is largely improvisational.”
One may well understand the genre-at-large for Bollywood is a large mix and match. Arindam Chaudhuri, an eminent producer with having produced many star studded films in his repertoire talks about the purpose of films in India in an Internet interview –
“The purpose of cinema is the same as any other art form. It serves the same purpose as music, theatre, painting, literature etc. All of them entertain the audience. The difference is, when we talk about music, we do not mean cheap music and likewise, theatre and painting do not refer to bad theatre and bad painting. We mean their best examples. Unfortunately, any reference to cinema is automatically taken to mean the commercial one. Cinema, being one art form that subsists on the patronage of the audience at large for its very survival, keeps making concessions to common audience tastes. That is why its purpose is in question.
Thus truly Indian Popular Cinema is one for the masses. Could it ever be improved and fine-tuned?
Perhaps, the answer lies in this quote from Sri Satyajit Ray, “What our Cinema needs above everything else is a style, an idiom, a sort of iconography of Cinema, which would be uniquely and recognizably Indian.”
Copyrights and References:
1. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (London: Routledge, 1992), 277 – 94.
2. Chidananda Das Gupta, The Painted Face: Studies in India’s Popular Cinema (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1991), 256 – 57.
3. Ashis Nandy, “Introduction: Indian Popular Cinema as a Slum’s Eye View of Politics,” in The Secret Politics of Our Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema, ed. Ashis Nandy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13.
4. Ashis Nandy, “The Intelligent Film Critic’s Guide to Indian Cinema,” in Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 235.
5. Ravi S. Vasudevan, “Introduction,” in Making Meaning in Indian Cinema, ed. Ravi S. Vasudevan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1 – 36.
6. Chaudhuri, Arindam: Business and Economy Magazine IIPM News Edition on Blog
7. Sheila J. Nayar : “The Values of Fantasy, Indian Popular Cinema through Western Scripts”
8. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The "Bollywoodisation" of the Indian Cinema: Cultural Nationalism in a Global Arena’, in Preben Karsholm (ed.),City Flicks: Cinema, Urban Worlds and Modernities in India and Beyond. International Development Studies, Roskilde University Occasional Paper # 22, 2002.
9. M. Madhava Prasad - “This thing called Bollywood”; “Cine-politics: On the political significance of Cinema in South India”
10. Satyajit Ray, “Our films, Their films” Orient Black Swan Publishing
