Stars, scandals and fandom

Today's Mirror column:

Reading in English about Hindi movies: a very brief history of the Indian film magazine as we know it.

Writing about films is one thing; writing about film stars is quite another. There are those who do both with aplomb. But in India, most long-running film magazines have been much more interested in the lives of film celebrities than the content of films.

The first Indian magazine completely devoted to cinema coverage was the Gujarati Mauj Majah, first published in 1924. Among English magazines, Baburao Patel's well-regarded monthly FilmIndia, published from 1935 to 1961, was one of the first. (The legendary and indefatigable Patel, who produced the entire content of the magazine himself – later aided and finally replaced by his wife Sushila – is the subject of a new book called The Patels of FilmIndia, which I'm looking forward to reading).

This was followed by the first trade publications, like KayTee Reports and Tradeguide, concerned not with stars but with predicting the commercial success or failure of particular films. In 1951 came Screen, launched by the Indian Express group in a colour broadsheet format. Screen, because it was concerned both with recent events in the industry and with films under production, could “be situated somewhere between the trade and the fan magazines”, writes film scholar Rachel Dwyer.

Close on Screen's heels came Filmfare, launched by the Times of India group in 1952. Filmfarewas glossy and upmarket, but it intended to be a family magazine and a sophisticated one. The first issue contained a manifesto that stated, “This magazine represents the first serious effort in film journalism in India. It is a movie magazine – with a difference. The difference lies in our realisation that the film as a composite art medium calls for serious study and constructive criticism and appreciation from the industry as also from the public.” This noble intention was cemented by the institution of the Filmfare Awards in 1953. Filmfare remained biweekly until 1988, when financial troubles forced it to become a monthly, which it has been since.

But the big moment of change in English-language film journalism in India was the 1970s, when a clutch of new magazines changed both the way we related to the stars and the language in which we were meant to do it. Jerry Pinto summed up the 70s magazine scene in his superb bitchy-funny Introduction to The Greatest Show on Earth, a spectacular anthology of writing on Hindi cinema that he edited in 2011. “Filmfare was the grand old lady, still published in an improbable size that meant you couldn't open it fully in a crowded bus or train. Stardust was the snazzy newcomer with a hint of middle-class contempt for the arrivistes and outsiders that made up the film industry. Cine Blitz came later and launched itself on the unsuspecting public with Protima Bedi – a Bollywood citizen through her open marriage with Kabir Bedi – running nude on a city beach. In between, for a brief while, there was Super, which had an almost indecipherable column, written as a letter, by Bubbles. Since Bubbles assumed we all knew the stars' nicknames, I often read it wondering at what was really happening and who was doing what to whom. When one did know (Daboo was Randhir Kapoor and Kaka was Rajesh Khanna) one felt validated in one's knowledge.”

Stardust, writes Dwyer, was founded in 1971 by Nari Hira of the Magna Publications group “as a marketing opportunity for his advertising business”. It was meant to be something along the lines of the American celebrity gossip mag Photoplay, more salacious than the then-staid Filmfare. Dwyer's 2001 essay contains the following wonderful account: “Twenty-three year old Shobha Rajadhyaksha (later De), who had been working for Hira for eighteen months as a trainee copywriter, was hired as the first editor. She had no interest in the movie world and had never worked as a journalist, but was hired on the strength of an imaginary interview with Shashi Kapoor, whom she had never met.” The imaginary interview was clearly a thing, combining an opportunity for writerly showing-off with a jokey fantasy that indulged the star's fans. Jerry Pinto cites one ridiculously risqué one with Bindu, from the now-defunct Film Mirror, which ends with the “reporter” waking from a dream. But more of that in another column.

To return to Shobhaa De, she apparently produced the first Stardust issue alone (with one paste-up man). She was later joined by a production staff of three and a team of freelance reporters who “collected stories which she wrote up”: a one-woman show not far from Baburao Patel. But De seems to have stayed put in her office, somewhat unusual for a young journalist. In her memoir Selective Memory: Stories from My Life, De's version of it is: “My eyes and ears were so attuned to reportage that I preferred my colleagues' version of their meetings with the stars to personal encounters.” Dwyer puts it somewhat differently. “De stubbornly refused to move in the film world, only meeting the stars if they came into the office,” she writes, making one envisage a scenario that seems nearly unimaginable today, when a respected and senior film journalist told me that even he finds it difficult to get interview appointments with current stars. Most stars, he added, seem in such a huge rush to finish the interview that it can barely become a conversation.

Super, too, was founded by an exceptionally young team that included Bhavana Somaya and Namita Gokhale. Gokhale, then 20, encountered Dev Anand some four decades later at the Jaipur Literature Festival, and was amazed to have him recall the last time they had met. “It was in 1981, I think,” he mused. “You were with your editor Rauf Ahmed – what was the magazine called...?” Whether it was the fact that these young people were just exceptionally memorable, or that stars in those days met less journalists, I don't know.

Book Review: Dim Lighting

A book review I did for India Today magazine: 

Rachel Dwyer's latest book offers a guided tour of the new Bollywood. But her glancing style can miss crucial shifts and details.

When Rachel Dwyer's new book was published in the UK, it had Aishwarya Rai beckoning seductively from beneath the title Bollywood's India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India. The American edition traded that in for a more artsy "meta" cover, appropriate for the University of Chicago Press: a beach lined with life-size cutouts of film stars that people can pose with. For the Indian edition, both those have been forsaken for a text-heavy cover that foregrounds the book's new name: Picture Abhi Baaki Hai. The Hinglish rechristening even lends itself to a suitably filmy four-letter acronym, akin to many of Dwyer's favoured films: PABH.

PABH sets out to explore how the imaginary worlds of mainstream Hindi films have changed since the 1990s, partly or wholly in response to socio-economic and political changes. She makes it clear that this is a cinema that "eschews the value of realism", and she wants to look at it as a "source of India's dreaming".

The term Bollywood is being used more and more as a too-loose synonym for all Hindi cinema across all time, so I was glad that Dwyer, who co-edited a 2011 collection called Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood with Jerry Pinto, adheres to the narrower definition proposed by film scholars, including Ravi Vasudevan, in that book: the "high-profile, export-oriented Bombay film" that has emerged since the 1990s as a commodity for the global entertainment industry. So Dwyer's cut-off date for films in this book is 1991, marking the moment of economic liberalisation, which she calls "as important a watershed in India's history as 1947".

However, the watershed film, which she also recognises, came four years later -- Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995). One problem with using 1991 as the point of departure is that Dwyer feels compelled to include films like Khalnayak, Raja Hindustani, Karan Arjun and Baazigar, though they belong to what the book's own blurb calls the cinema of thakurs and judwa bhais. For example, having mentioned that servants are "rarely seen these days", Dwyer cites Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! andRaja Hindustani as exceptions, without noting that they date to the very beginning of her period:1994 and 1996 respectively.

The missing servants also provide an instance of how Dwyer's glancing style can miss crucial shifts. Bollywood's near-erasure of servants seems fascinating, especially since servants are far from disappearing from Indian life, and increasingly finding place in affluent NRI households. But Dwyer, having given servants two lines in a half-page section on "Friends", moves disinterestedly on to discuss pets.

While she might not always zoom in on the telling detail, Dwyer largely succeeds in providing a panoramic view. The book is not, as she says, a sociological profile of Bollywood, or a potted history of the industry. Her chapters deal not with particular films, genres or directorial oeuvres, but with the broad themes with which she thinks contemporary Hindi cinema is preoccupied: nationhood and transnationalism; caste, class and region; religion; home and family; love and romance, and so on.

Naturally, each of her seven chapters must cover a great deal of ground. The "Unity" chapter, for instance, whizzes through depictions of ancient India (Asoka) and medieval India (Jodhaa Akbar) to ask whether the proliferation of Bhagat Singh in films maps on to a disenchantment with Congress politics, before moving swiftly on to films on Partition and NRI nationalism.

When Dwyer pauses the sweep of her narrative to analyse a set of films she knows well, she can be very engaging-as when arguing that the Gandhi of the Munnabhai films is tailored to not challenge a consumerist world, or pointing out how frequently the suffering Shah Rukh Khan persona involves being "widowed, rejected, ill, injured, or disabled".

Unfortunately, the book's structuring makes it circuitous and sometimes repetitive. "The poor" for instance, appear in an early chapter, but only in the penultimate chapter does the book register the massive wealth of most Hindi cinema characters today. A chapter on "Emotions" seems out of sync with the rest of the book.

As an expert on Yash Chopra (to whose memory this book is dedicated) and on Hinduism, Dwyer is insightful on the changing filmic depictions of romance (the focus shifting from the family's acceptance of the couple to the hero's problems with decision-making) and religion (from the popular religiosity of "overt miracles" to a more ostentatious performance of rituals and festivals).

But even on religion, PABH often feels too pat. For one, Dwyer's account is handicapped by her refusal to step away from big-budget extravaganzas and acknowledge the widespread success of supernatural thrillers, where all kinds of Hindu practices-from Vedic chants to Aghori rites and black magic-appear in conversation with science and psychiatry. She mentions only Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007), ignoring a narrative imagination that extends from Rakeysh Om Prakash Mehra's Aks (2001) and Ram Gopal Varma's Bhoot(2003), all the way to the Bhatts' Raaz franchise. For another, she falls back frustratingly on an ahistorical Hinduism to explain specifically contemporary Indian phenomena: in explaining the new legitimacy of wealth, for instance, her first port of call is Lakshmi, not liberalisation.

India is too diverse to lend itself to broad generalisations, and Hindi films reflect that, if nothing else. So sweeping declarations, especially about politics, caste and class, sometimes end up either sounding banal, or revealing Dwyer's blind spots. "It is quite unusual to have a hero in naukri-paid employment," she writes, dismissing in one fell swoop countless office-centred movies (Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year, Life in a Metro, Karthik Calling Karthik and Pyaar Ka Punchnama, just off the top of my head) and the clean-cut corporate heroes of so many others (Ra.One, Swades, Tanu Weds Manu, Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu, Love Aaj Kal, Cocktail and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara).

Written for a non-Indian readership, PABH often glosses things in an annoyingly facile manner, "the upper castes, which include Brahmins, warriors and merchants". Its Indian publishers have not seen fit to remove even obvious Britishisms, like "Ganga -- the goddess of the river Ganges". Despite these irritants, Dwyer's book fills a slot. For anyone who hasn't grown up in the Bollywood universe, this is as good a guided tour as they're going to get.

Book Review: What isn’t Bollywood?

A review of two books about Hindi cinema - one academic and one not - written for a section on writing about films and film music that I guest-edited for the last issue of Biblio.


The Greatest Show on Earth: Writings on Bollywood
Edited by Jerry Pinto
Penguin Books India, 2011
ISBN : 9780143416128
472pp, Rs. 499

Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood: The Many Forms of Hindi Cinema
Edited by Rachel Dwyer and Jerry Pinto
Oxford University Press, 2011
ISBN: 9780198069263
300pp, Rs. 695


“…I sometimes find academic books about Bollywood really funny. These people sit down and dissect everything and they make connections between Prakash Mehra’s movies and the Naxalite movement that was happening here, and I don’t think Prakashji ever thought about that kind of thing. He probably thought, ‘Amitabh ke dates mil gaye, chalo picture banaate hain’.”
– Elahe Hiptoola, long-time producer for the films of Nagesh Kukunoor, speaking to interviewer Jerry Pinto in Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood

There is admittedly something remarkable about a book that is able to contain this remark (unannotated except for Pinto’s uncharacteristically gentle response: “But don’t you see how the zeitgeist affects the movies you make?”) and contain several essays by exactly the sort of film scholars who “sit down and dissect everything”. There is also something slightly schizophrenic about it.

The most striking form in which this schizophrenia expresses itself is with regard to the use of the term Bollywood.

On the one hand, there is the book’s opening essay, in which film historian Ravi Vasudevan discusses the possible meanings of ‘Bollywood’. This is a characteristically thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, and I will try and provide a sense of his arguments here, because they lay out the terrain within which I believe not just the two books under review, but all books on ‘Bollywood’ today must operate. Vasudevan begins by reminding us that the term became widespread after 1995, in what might be referred to as the post-DDLJ moment. It was the time when the Bombay film industry first started to get high returns in the export-oriented sector, and during which the “territorial nation” (whose economy, boundaries and cultural protocols needed protection) came to be replaced by the “global nation”, in which the very imaginary of Indianness could be redefined by a select section of Non-Resident Indians. He then points out that while ‘Bollywood’ has been associated with the reinvention of the family film genre to reach diasporic audiences, it is equally about “provid[ing] a mise-en-scene for the new types of commoditization that have developed around cinema in India”.

Here Vasudevan cites Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s important argument that films are now only one of a whole complex of elements that make up the contemporary entertainment industry called ‘Bollywood’: television, music, fashion, advertising and websites. But while Rajadhyaksha suggests that ‘Bollywood’ gained traction by laying claim to an indigenous authenticity and addressing a ‘family audience’ on the basis of ‘family values’, Vasudevan points out – citing reports from the 1950s and 1960s – that family has been central to the institutional imagination of the Indian film audience much before ‘Bollywood’ emerged on the scene. More importantly, the new configuration of business that Rajadhyaksha puts his finger on is actually producing a cinema more varied in its genre structures than before: though Vasudevan, in his characteristically careful manner, is quick to acknowledge that this variety “is intimately related to corporatization and its bid to create differentiated product”.

Vasudevan points to the odd phenomenon of the term ‘Bollywood’ being publicly disavowed by people such as Shah Rukh Khan and Subhash Ghai (also Amitabh Bachchan, whom he doesn’t mention): “people who… are also robust icons of Bombay cinema’s global spread, its integration with other image/music enterprises, in a word, its Bollywoodization.” A specific kind of cultural nationalism is at play here, which insists on a national location and the production of cinema for “an audience of a billion people” ‘at home’ while also claiming to be the authentic voice of India in a global context. But what interests Vasudevan here is the increasingly widespread incidence of ‘Bollywood’ in academic usage. This, he argues, replicates the way publishers of trade and popular discourse now privilege a diasporic reference point with regard to Hindi film viewing, including reading back in time so that any reference to Bombay Hindi cinema is couched as ‘Bollywood’: even a 1926 viewing of Light of Asia at Windsor Castle in 1926. While acknowledging that academic usage of the term in Britain and North America may want to push an oppositional cultural agenda that emphasises multi-sitedness, contemporaneity, diasporic identity politics and a story of Bollywood diversity versus Hollywood hegemony, Vasudevan warns that jumping on the ‘Bollywood’ bandwagon might end up “accepting or involuntarily reproducing the parameters set by the business form”.

Rachel Dwyer’s Introduction to the volume opens by taking Vasudevan’s piece as an injunction to restrict the use of the term ‘Bollywood’, both historically (taking DDLJ as its beginning) and thematically (to the diasporic romance). This is the basis on which she then proceeds to lay out the contents of the volume as being about “Hindi cinema that lies beyond Bollywood”. By Dwyer’s reckoning, the stunt films/ action-adventures of early Bombay cinema (discussed here by Kaushik Bhaumik); the Islamicate fantasy films that were part of the transition to sound (examined here by Rosie Thomas); the whole range of B-movies, whether the religious genres or the horror films (whose supposedly unique popularity in the 1980s is analysed here by Valentina Vitali); and a massively popular classic like Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal (1949) (which Dwyer argues “is a film that contains many of the features of later Bollywood, yet remains somewhat apart from its history”) are all “outside most accepted definitions of what is Bollywood” (p. xiv).

If we return to Elahe Hiptoola, however, we find that she refers to “Bollywood masala movies” when talking of the 1980s, and then to the family values enshrined in “the Bollywood of the 1970s”. But it’s not only Hiptoola whose use of the term happily ignores all the categories and limits that Dwyer and Vasudevan have just so carefully laid out: Jerry Pinto, the book’s co-editor, introduces the fascinating interviews which close the volume with these words: “… where the essays represent an engaged and critical encounter with Bollywood, the interviews present the insider perspective… though we have not chosen to burrow too deep into Bollywood”.

This is all rather confusing. It appears that the various sorts of films that the essays engage – the Wadia stunt films, Islamicate fantasy, B-movies, the Gothic romance of Mahal – all qualify as Bollywood for Pinto. (More on this when we get to the other book under review, where Pinto is the sole editor.)

What doesn’t qualify, apparently, are the films associated with the people Pinto chooses to interview. These include filmmakers who make feature films out of Bombay but choose “not to be co-opted” by “the industry”; alumni of the Film and Television Institute, Pune, those of them who have not been “absorbed into the great maw of Bollywood”; film festival directors; directors, actors and even producers who see themselves as part of what Pinto calls (in all seriousness) hatke cinema. “This is the new cinema of the multiplex, which may well have some small claim to being ‘beyond Bollywood’ too. Its indices seem to be an absence of stars, a foregrounding of alternative narratives, a smattering of English dialogue, a self-consciousness about cinema, and an ironic appreciation of some of the elements of classic Bollywood such as songs.”

Some of Pinto’s interviewees – documentary filmmaker Arun Khopkar, film editor and Kerala film festival director Bina Paul, Jabbar Patel – are quite clearly outsiders to ‘Bollywood’, whichever way one chooses to define it. But for others – Anurag Kashyap, Abhay Deol, UTV Spotboy’s Rucha Pathak, Moser Baier’s Harish Dayani, Hiptoola – it seems much more a matter of their defining themselves as being outside it in some way. So we hear Anurag Kashyap complaining that “Bollywood is dialogue-heavy… the more lines [actors] have, the happier they are. But that isn’t the way it is on my set. And my set isn’t Bollywood, it’s cut away, so that’s all right, I don’t have to go out and change the way it is in Bollywood”. We hear Rucha Pathak describing the films that she did as Executive Producer with Pritish Nandy Communications in 2004–2006 “as not quite Bollywood” although they had “elements of classic Bollywood with songs etc”.

It is remarkable that this list of films includes Shabd (Sanjay Dutt, Aishwarya Rai) (Leena Yadav 2005), Ek Khiladi Ek Haseena (Fardeen Khan, Kay Kay Menon) (Suparn Verma 2005), Ankahee (Esha Deol, Ameesha Patel and Aftab Shivdasani) (Vikram Bhatt 2006). None of these, I think, would fit Jerry Pinto’s definition of hatke above, whether in terms of alternative narratives, the absence of stars, certainly. But for Pathak, having bound scripts (“which surprised a lot of Bollywood people”), letting in new directors, having “an emphasis on content” and just the absence of “those Bollywood horror stories…: no dons turning up on the set, no eerie telephone calls from somewhere in Dubai, no bags of five hundred rupee notes to be ferried about” is enough to define her work as ‘not Bollywood’. While ‘Bollywood’, on the other hand, is what “comes buzzing around” when a new director has a hit, without having either a script or a sense of his/her work: “They just want the guy to direct another film, any film. That’s what’s so wrong with going Bollywood” (Italics in the Pathak/Pinto original.)

Let me at this point move swiftly to the other book under review. This book is arguably the most satisfying and various anthology of writings about popular Hindi cinema currently in existence. It contains essays by academics who provide a certain kind of thoughtful distance: the wonderful Connie Haham on the more wonderful Manmohan Desai, Susmita Dasgupta’s analysis of Amitabh Bachchan as tragic hero for a disillusioned polity, Mukul Kesavan’s seminal but characteristically lucid, surefooted exploration of the Islamicate roots of Hindi cinema. It contains pieces which are interesting precisely because of the intimate relationship that the writer has with the object of his attentions: Vinod Mehta on ‘his heroine’ Meena Kumari, Vir Sanghvi on his childhood love for Dara Singh, even – dare I say – Jerry Pinto on Helen. It contains autobiography: RK Narayan’s wry and hilarious description of dealing with filmwallahs during the making of Guide, Dada Kondke’s somewhat odd account of his Asha Bhonsle affair (translated from the Marathi), and rarely seen (if slightly disappointing) pieces by Manna Dey (on himself) and Bhisham Sahni (on his brother Balraj) – and extracts from some very engaging biographies: Anupama Chopra on Shah Rukh Khan, Madhu Jain on Raj Kapoor and his women. It includes a wonderful piece by Dorothee Wenner about how Nadia became the Hunterwali of Wadia Movietone’s stunt films. It includes Suketu Mehta’s superb account of “struggler” Eishaan (nee Mahesh) and his tragicomic journey through the religious B-movie circuit. And it is subtitled ‘Writings on Bollywood’.

I imagine that it is clear by now that ‘Bollywood’ is (a) a term that is here to stay, whether we like it or not; and (b) a term that different people use to mean quite different things, and sometimes the same person may use to mean different things, too. This is true not just of people within the Hindi film industry, but also academics, journalists and writers. So that Pinto can lump everything he doesn’t like about today’s commercial Hindi cinema into ‘Bollywood’ while also using the same term when celebrating “all that Hindi cinema has done for us”. And Rachel Dwyer can simultaneously have on the market books called Bollywood's India: Hindi cinema as a guide to modern India (2010), One hundred Bollywood films (2005) (whose blurb says that Bollywood is India’s national cinema) and Beyond the Boundaries of Bollywood (2011), and Mahal (1949), for instance, can feature in all of them. Perhaps, as Vasudevan says at one point, it is simply the case that ‘Bollywood’ has provided a brand name that helps publishers position their product, and therefore pressurizes authors to adopt this category (even if sometimes with the prefix “Beyond”). What is important is not to let the associations of the term flatten and limit our understanding either of the multifarious Hindi cinema that has gone before, or of the many transformations that are still to come. That would be a real pity.