Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (16 page)

The other feature of the ’90s media landscape was the regular presence of dubbed Hollywood films. Rather than expressing anxiety about competition from Hollywood films, filmmakers were quite confident in Hollywood’s inability to appeal to the vast majority of Indian audiences. In fact, some filmmakers welcomed their presence as a sort of pedagogical tool for audiences, which would enable Hindi filmmakers to improve their own filmmaking. Screenwriter Honey Irani—who wrote
Lamhe
— predicted, “The audience which is watching will also improve. They’ll accept new things from us. When they’ve seen, they’ve opened their eyes to see, ‘
arre, arre, yeh bhi ho raha hai, yeh ho raha hai
’ [Oh, this is also happening; this is happening], so when we do some experiment, they will accept it, instead of rejecting it. So definitely it will help them to grow and help us to grow” (Irani, interview, May 1996). Once again an intrinsic connection is asserted between audiences and filmmakers—whereby the evolution or maturation of audience taste has a positive impact upon filmmakers’ own identities as creative individuals and artists.

If the altered media landscape of the ’90s fostered cinematic quality by helping the “masses” or the “common man” to become more discerning viewers, the other feature of the discourse of improvement was the celebrated “return” of middle-class audiences to the cinemas. Producer/ director Rakesh Roshan was blunt in connecting quality to the composition of the audience, asserting, “First we were stuck with front-benchers, but now directors have a choice” (in Chandra 1995: 122). Komal Nahta, the editor of the trade magazine
Film Information
, stated that wealthier people were patronizing Hindi films again, evident by the “hi-fi people of Bombay” arriving at the movie theaters in the posh areas of downtown Bombay via their latest imported cars. He also mentioned that college students, who were once dismissive and contemptuous of Hindi films, had started watching them because films like HAHK, DDLJ, and others appealed to their sensibilities. More than the content of films, however, Nahta emphasized the material conditions of film-viewing as the main impetus for elites to return to cinema halls.

Differential pricing of tickets, based on seat location, meant that class hierarchy and separation had always been maintained inside the cinema hall. Nahta’s observation that the most expensive seats in the theater were priced so high that wealthier viewers were assured that slumdwellers would not be sitting next to them, however, demonstrates that the narrative of improvement in the mid-’90s was less about the quality of cinema, than about the
quality of the viewing experience
for middle and upper classes, who were seeing all of the films on video anyway. With the steep increase in ticket rates, the “front-benchers”—who according to the press were “extending to the dress-gallery” (Jain 1991: 28–29) by the early ’90s—had been priced out of these areas and put firmly back in their place in the cinema hall; therefore, the celebrated “return” of audiences to theaters in the mid-1990s was really about reinforcing social hierarchies and re-inscribing social distance into spatial distance within the public space of the cinema hall. The advent of multiplexes several years later, with their extremely high ticket rates, means that elite viewers do not even have to acknowledge the existence of poorer viewers, as they are simply priced out of the movie theater; thus, with respect to theatrical exhibition, a literal process of gentrification has been taking place.

If the return of middle-class audiences to the theaters was interpreted and explained as a sign of cinematic progress, what were the features of this new and improved cinema? Many scholars have discussed how films from this time period were very different from anything that had come before.
²¹
Aesthetically, films in this period exhibited vastly improved production values that included digital sound, foreign locations, extravagant song sequences, and lavish sets. Much greater attention and emphasis began to be paid to the clothing, styling, and physique of stars, as well as the overall production design of films. Narratively and thematically, the
most noticeable differences had to do with the representations of class, youthful romance, and the Indian diaspora.
²²

A very visible contrast between the successful films from the mid-to late 1990s and earlier Hindi films, focusing on families and romance, was the nearly complete erasure of class difference and the tremendous focus on wealth. All signs of poverty, economic hardship, and struggle were completely eliminated from these films, and the protagonists, rather than being working class or lower middle class as they were in earlier films, were incredibly rich—usually the sons and daughters of millionaires. Sachin Bhaumick, one of the most prolific and successful screenwriters, who began his career in the Hindi film industry in 1956, commented on what he found peculiar about HAHK: “India is such a poor country, but the picture,
mein koi
economic crisis
nahi hain
[there isn’t any economic crisis in the film]. Not a single character is poor. All of them are happy, and all of them are rich, and all of them have no monetary, economic problem” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996). Not only was there an absence of poverty, the moral valence about wealth had also shifted within these films. Sharmishta Roy, the art director for some of the biggest hits of the late 1990s and early 2000s, who played a key role in defining a new visual style that became identified as the hip and cool new Bollywood, discussed how the representations of the wealthy had changed in Hindi cinema: “People we show as rich now. . . we don’t show them as flashing their money. You see when we used to have
zamindars
[wealthy rural landlords] in our films, they were very rich and they were flashy. Or they were autocratic and feudalist in their attitudes. It’s not so now. The rich are rich, but they are not bad. The whole concept has changed. Previously, rich was bad and poor was good, right? Rich is not bad anymore, and that’s not how they’re going to be portrayed either” (Roy, interview, October 2000). Roy’s statement about the moral values associated with wealth and poverty is a reference to earlier eras of Hindi cinema, where the main villains in films were frequently moneylenders, rural landlords, and wealthy businessmen, while peasants, workers, or others of modest economic means were the heroes. Whereas wealthy businessmen were frequently the symbols of exploitation, injustice, and even criminality in Hindi films from the 1950s through the 1980s, by the mid-1990s they were more commonly depicted as benign, loving, and indulgent fathers.

The narrative focus and valorization of wealth was also explained in terms of the aesthetics of production design. During my interview with screenwriter Anjum Rajabali in 2000, he narrated an anecdote in response to my observation that all signs and references to poor people had disap
peared from contemporary films. He told me that he had come up with an idea for a script with the mill closures in Bombay as the backdrop—he thought he could base the protagonist in one of the
bastis
(slums), trying to fight the mills being shut down. He convinced a director with his idea, and so he and the director went to a producer to pitch the story. The producer was absolutely aghast and exclaimed, “But we can’t make a film like this! We can’t have such poor people. They’re so poor—it won’t look nice!” Then the producer asked, “What will Ajay Devgan [the star that they had in mind for the role] wear?” When Rajabali responded, “I don’t know, jeans, a kurta, and
chappals
[sandals],” the producer was horrified and exclaimed, “Ajay Devgan can’t wear chappals! What if we set it in Canada? Then everyone can look nice.” Rajabali complained, “No one in the industry wants to show a slum anymore.” He told me that in his previous screenplay,
Ghulam
, when the producer asked him if it was set in a slum or a lower middle-class colony, he answered “lower middle-class colony,” for the sake of expedience since, “slum has become a really bad word.”

With Rajabali’s story in mind, I asked Roy her thoughts about why most contemporary Hindi films did not depict slums or working-class milieus as they had in the past. She surmised that the directors she worked with had grown up in a very privileged setting and were basically interested in replicating or improving upon that world. She explained that they would not have much interaction with, or desire to represent, people of lower class backgrounds because it would contradict the directors’ aesthetic sensibilities: “Okay, if there has to be an interaction between someone from the
basti
[slum] and someone from an upper-class society, there will still be a slight amount of crudeness to it, because people who come from a
basti
will not have the same sophistication as someone from the upper society. I don’t think they ever want to get into that, everything has to be very, very classy” (Roy, interview, October 2000). Roy’s statements illustrate how the discussion about quality and aesthetics in cinema is imbued with judgments about social class.

With the erasure of poor and working-class protagonists from filmic narratives, love stories from the mid-1990s were also quite different from earlier eras, which frequently had class difference as the source of parental disapproval, which therefore played the central conflict in films. With protagonists of the same class background, the source of dramatic tension and narrative conflict in films from the mid-’90s was internalized and centered on the conflict between individual desire and duty to one’s family. The plot manifestations of this conflict either involved a love triangle or strict parents who eventually yielded to their child’s choice of
partner. In both types of stories, the character was torn between someone he or she loved and someone he or she was obligated to marry. Roy explained, “That kind of feudalism is not there in our films any more. It’s more about people from equal societies falling in love, and then there’s probably a triangle now. I think that’s what most of the themes are there today, it’s not so much rich versus poor and opposition, it’s more about a triangle, all from the same society” (Roy, interview, October 2000). With her choice of the term “feudal” to describe the plots and themes that focused on class conflict, Roy implicitly positions the ’90s films, with their emphasis on elite social worlds, as a more modern and desirable state of affairs in filmmaking.

Although Hindi films have had a long history of depicting youthful rebellion, especially against strict fathers,
²³
after HAHK and DDLJ, the theme of compliant lovers, willing to sacrifice their love for the sake of family honor and harmony, became the dominant norm. The hero and heroine’s passivity—and obeisance to patriarchal norms of honor and notions of filial duty—illustrated the essentially conservative outlook of these Hindi films, regardless of their cosmopolitan and mtv-inspired visual style. These family entertainers presented a commodified Indian identity arising from a specific North Indian Hindu cultural milieu, based on stereotypes about the “joint family,” the Indian English phrase to denote a multi-generational, patrilocal household. Thus, the success of such films was interpreted by the media and the state as a celebration of “family values” and an affirmation of “Indian tradition” in an increasingly globalized world. Discussing the part of the plot in HAHK where the female protagonist decides to sacrifice her love out of her sense of duty to the family, Bhaumick declared, “Madhuri, anytime could have spoken out, ‘I’m not going to marry my brother-in-law, because I’m in love with Salman Khan,’ but there is a tradition: the girl should not talk before the elders, and they kept it up, and this clicked now in the ’90s. Very fantastic thing. That shows in our heart; we have maintained our values” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996).

The emphasis on family values and Indian tradition extended to the cinematic depiction of diasporic Indians as well, which was a significant transformation ushered in by this period of Hindi filmmaking. Since the mid-1990s, Hindi films have frequently represented Indians living abroad as more traditional and culturally authentic than their counterparts in India. While earlier Hindi films used characters of Indians living abroad for comic relief or as villains, many Hindi films after DDLJ have diasporic Indians as their protagonists and are set almost entirely in countries
like Australia, Canada, England, or the United States. Thus an authentic “Indian” identity—represented by religious ritual, elaborate weddings, large extended families, respect for parental authority, adherence to norms of female modesty, injunctions against premarital sex, and intense pride and love for India—is mobile and not tied to geography. One can be as “Indian” in New York, London, or Sydney as in Bombay, Calcutta, or Delhi.

Through their valorization of patriarchy, the Hindu joint family, filial duty, feminine sexual modesty, and upper class privilege, the family films of the mid-to late 1990s were much more conservative than films from earlier eras; however, their visual, narrative, and performative style made them appear modern and “cool.” Shah Rukh Khan, the male lead of DDLJ, characterized it as a very “modern” film, asserting that all of the analyses about its success being based on a celebration of traditional values had missed the point: “I think people have pinpointed the wrong reason for its success. They talk about its values, they talk about going back to the old values like respecting parents.” Rather than being rooted in tradition, Khan argued that his character was actually very savvy, a welcome change from the standard depictions of young romantic heroes in Hindi films: