Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (44 page)

Sachin Bhaumick, articulated what he felt was the Indian audience’s disapproval (the italicized portions in inverted commas are to indicate Bhaumick speaking as an audience member): “
Lamhe
did very well abroad, but not here because they say, ‘
I see one woman giving birth before
my own eyes, by my money, and now the mother is gone, and the child has
been kept in my house brought up by Waheeda Rehman
[the actress’s name]
who also brought me up. Then I can marry her? In India it is not possible.
She’s like my daughter, because I have seen her from birth to her growing up.
She was brought up in my house, so how can I think of getting married with
her?
’ People didn’t like it at all” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996). By mentioning that
Lamhe
did well abroad but not in India, Bhaumick constructs the difference between overseas audiences and those in India as being based upon an adherence to, and awareness of, proper kinship behavior. Bhaumick reinforced his point about how seriously Indian audiences view appropriate kin behavior, even when the ties are fictive, by discussing the failure of an older film,
Bambai ka Babu
(The Gentleman of Bombay, 1960). In this particular film, the protagonist (played by actor Dev Anand) enters a house to rob it and is mistaken by the elderly couple and their daughter (actress Suchitra Sen) for their long-lost son; he then starts living with them as their son. Anand falls in love with Sen, who thinks of him as her brother. During
Raakhi
—the festival where sisters tie colorful bands (
raakhi
) around their brothers’ wrists as a symbol of the bond of love and protection between them; when Sen tries to tie a
raakhi
around Anand’s wrist, he refuses her, for then he would have been bound to her as a brother and would not have been able to consummate his romance. According to Bhaumick,

Coming back to the issue of
Lamhe
, Bhaumick related that after he saw the film he had warned the director, Yash Chopra, that it was “dangerous.” He felt that if the script had been written in such a way that the two characters had no contact with each other while the girl was growing up and met later on in life, fell in love, and then discovered their prior connection, audiences might have accepted the fact that a man once in love with a woman could fall in love with her daughter. He reiterated his point about the importance of being sensitive to the dominant kinship idioms through which such a plot would be interpreted in India: “
Ab ghar mein
bada hua
, [Now she grew up in his house] he knows her development, then she’s like a daughter in the house.
To woh
India
mein jamega nahin,
nahi jama, nahi chala
[So that doesn’t gel in India; it didn’t gel; it didn’t run]. Like
Bambai ka Babu
flopped that way. People will not accept [it]” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996).

By referring to the older film’s failure, Bhaumick asserted the immutability of kinship codes and principles. Bhaumick’s explanation of
Lamhe
’s box-office failure is an example of a culturally indexical interpretation of commercial outcome, which is the primary way that filmmakers impose meaning upon box-office results and make sense of the uncertainty of audience response. For if
Lamhe
had succeeded commercially, it might have elicited from filmmakers (and the press) narratives about social change—about how audiences were less beholden to the ties of fictive kinship and what was previously taboo (as registered by the commercial failure of
Bambai ka Babu
) was no longer so. It is also entirely plausible that
Lamhe
’s success would have been simply attributed to its stars, music, director, and other details specific to the film.

While Bhaumick brought up
Lamhe
and
Bambai ka Babu
as examples of filmmakers’ lapse of judgment regarding deep-seated beliefs, he discussed his own insensitivity to, and lack of reflexivity about, social conditions at the beginning of his screen-writing career. He had written a film titled
Lajwanti
(1958) where a woman leaves her husband, a hard-working lawyer, because she feels neglected by him. Bhaumick narrated how Nargis, one of the leading actresses of that time and who was to play the part of the woman, told him that the picture would not run because the conflict presented in the film would not be meaningful to viewers.
²⁶
According to Bhaumick, Nargis said to him, “Who understands that here? That a husband should spend time with a wife, nobody understands that. The husband comes from Bihar, he comes here for three years, earns, doesn’t see his wife’s face at all, only sends her money. She buys a cow with the money. He goes back home two or three times, stays for seven days,
fathers a child, comes back, and doesn’t meet her for another three years. All the wife thinks is, ‘my husband is great.’ It is not a Western country. Economically, there are so many problems, who the hell is thinking of their time with the husband?” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996). The use of “understand” in the above comments could easily be replaced with “identify,” as Nargis’s statements present audiences in India, for reasons of economic hardship, as incapable of identifying with a woman’s need for companionship in a marriage.

Nargis suggested to Bhaumick that if he portrayed the husband as cheating on his wife, then audiences would be sympathetic to the wife’s plight. Regarding audiences’ reactions to the film, she said (in Bhaumick’s words), “The audience will accept her sorrow if she’s a good girl, but her husband is going to another one. Then only the audience will accept. . . companionship: this is not an Indian concept. Companionship is only a rich people’s concept. Poor people always stay separately. . . It won’t run, I’m telling you it won’t run” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996).

In addition to Nargis’s admonitions, Bhaumick described how Mehboob Khan, one of the top producer/directors of the time, responded when he heard about the script. Like Nargis, Khan also told Bhaumick to make the husband unfaithful to his wife in order to elicit audience sympathy and provide an appropriate rationale for her departure. Bhaumick narrated Khan’s criticism of the script, which paralleled Nargis’s in terms of articulating a hierarchy of needs:

When Bhaumick related these sentiments to the film’s producer and expressed his doubts about whether the film would be successful or not, the producer disagreed and reassured him that the film would be successful. According to Bhaumick, the producer, Mohan Sehgal, said to him, “No, Sachin, it’s very nice. The wife is sitting there all dressed up ready to go
to a party and the husband doesn’t come. It will run.” The film flopped, confirming to Bhaumick that Nargis and Khan were right in their assessments of the irrelevance of such a theme to the majority of audiences. He said, “It didn’t run because he’s not doing anything wrong. He’s working all night to pay off debts. He’s doing hard work, earning money for the family. He gave her such a big house; he’s giving her jewelry. In India, this is happiness. In India, companionship is not understandable because the economy is so poor” (Bhaumick, interview, October 1996). According to Bhaumick, the onscreen depiction of material comfort and the fulfillment of kinship obligations (being faithful) worked against the narrative logic and rendered the conflict in the film meaningless, as the majority of audiences were poor. In his view, poverty was a constraint, not in the obvious manner of preventing or limiting consumption, but in terms of being able to identify with certain themes and narratives. Poverty appeared to preclude the desire for companionship in a marriage, but not the desire to see films, since Hindi films were posited as a form of escape or fantasy for poor and working-class audiences.

The other major constraint, also connected to poverty, posed by the mass audience was their low level of formal education, indexed by low rates of literacy. The issue of illiteracy was frequently brought up in my discussions with filmmakers as a major reason for the self-professed formulaic nature of popular Hindi cinema. As apparent in Subhash Ghai’s contrast between Indian and Western audiences in the beginning of this section, for filmmakers illiteracy signified the inability of audiences to comprehend, appreciate, or identify with a greater variety of themes, subjects, or genres. Thus, filmmakers stated that they felt limited in the kind of films they could make. “The level of the audiences’ understanding binds us,” Vikram Bhatt asserted in an email. “A filmmaker like me, who would be dying to make a sci-fi film, could never make it. Audiences here are so illiterate that they don’t know all about our very own country. Making a film about the fifth moon of Mars is unthinkable. Though that looks like no great loss, it really is when you look at the fact that a whole genre of film has become useless for us” (1999). Bhatt’s statements present a very circumscribed definition of knowledge and awareness, predicated upon solitary acts of literacy, and completely ignores and discounts the variety of oral and social means by which knowledge is disseminated in India. In his statements, we also see the effect of the imagined audience on his own sense of self: “filmmaker like me.”

Unlike the other constraints posed by filmmakers, however, illiteracy is a condition that can be rectified tangibly. Aditya Chopra was opti
mistic during our interview that, as literacy increased, Hindi filmmakers would be able to make films that were more diverse in their subject matter. Feeling hopeful about the near future, Chopra asserted that literacy levels were rising slowly but surely in India: “You are coming to know of people also in villages who now know English; it will take time, but it will definitely happen. It’s just that it will take a few years” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). Chopra then launched into an explanation of how an increased awareness of the world associated with rising literacy levels was a necessary precondition for diversifying filmmaking: “You see Hindi film is commercial art, so everything will have to be done when you know there is a promise of making money. You understand? Nobody is going to make a quality film about an aids victim when nobody’s going to come to see it, so you need to first educate them about aids. First, tell them that aids is there, okay, then when everybody knows about it, and you make a film about aids, then it makes sense, but here people don’t even know about aids” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). As often happened, filmmakers’ discussions about the inadequacies of the Indian audience culminated in a celebration of Hollywood and its purported freedom to make any sort of film it desired. Chopra ended his remarks by asserting admiringly, “That’s why where Hollywood scores is that they just don’t have any limit, any
bandish
[restriction] on their expression. They can make a film on anything! They make a film on—I mean I’ve seen films on just one line. . . and they’re good films. . . it will definitely happen, but it will take some time” (Aditya Chopra, interview, April 1996). In addition to literacy being defined as literacy in English, what is striking about Chopra’s statements is how discourses about audiences, film-viewing, and filmmaking are intertwined with the teleological discourses of development and modernization. Chopra presents a narrative in which once audiences become literate, Hindi filmmakers, like their counterparts in Hollywood, will have more creative and artistic freedom. Unlike the state’s frequent exhortations to the industry—oft echoed by the earlier generations of filmmakers—to make films that can serve as tools to spread knowledge about social issues and problems, Bhatt and Chopra—both in their mid-to late twenties when these interviews were conducted—explicitly rejected any developmentalist or pedagogical role for commercial cinema and assigned that responsibility to other institutions and structures.

While it is easy to hold up Chopra’s discussion about the incongruity
of
making a film about an aids victim as an example of how market-driven forms of cultural production are inherently conservative and risk-averse,
Chopra’s assessment of audience interest is not markedly different from that espoused by Khan, Nargis, or Bhaumick regarding
Lajwanti
. In both cases, material conditions—that is, poverty and its concomitant, illiteracy— are presented as the dominant force in shaping the interpretive frameworks through which audiences can (or cannot) understand, identify, or relate to a film. In Bhaumick’s example about
Lajwanti
, audiences’ struggles to eke out their existence renders certain conflicts as incomprehensible, while in Chopra’s example, audiences’ ignorance about certain issues reduces their interest in films made upon those topics. Unlike moral codes and kinship norms, which are represented as arising from cultural essences and thus appear immutable, however, poverty is a condition that could be ameliorated, allowing filmmakers to imagine a future when they may be less constrained in their filmmaking.