Books
LEAVE DISCO DANCER ALONE! Indian Cinema and Soviet Movie-going After Stalin
by Sudha Rajagopalan. Yoda Press, Delhi, 2008.PERCEPTION Studies is one of the least explored areas in Cinema Studies, more so in the context of Indian cinema. The fact that Sudha Rajagopalan’s Leave Disco Dancer Alone! explores the reception of popular Indian cinema outside India’s borders, in post-Stalinist Soviet society, automatically makes it a rare and important academic work.
1 Its somewhat misleading title is indicative of the immense popularity and the contested status of mainstream Indian cinema in the social fabric of former Soviet Union for almost forty years. Even as a large number of Soviet movie-goers enjoyed and defended such Indian films as Disco Dancer for their emotional appeal, most critics and sociologists denounced them as melodramatic kitsch whose favoured reception by the audience was seen as being symptomatic of societal degradation. At the same time, the state machinery unexplainably favoured their import over other foreign films despite the existence of internal voices that were extremely displeased with the bourgeois ideology underlining Indian films.Rajagopalan analyzes this plurality of voices and multiple readings of Indian films by the Soviet audience through questionnaires, oral and written testimonials, state documents and the discourse generated around them through the press, in the process exploring the collective blurring of boundaries between official and popular culture which made Indian cinema the most successful foreign cinema import to the Soviet soil.
An outcome of Rajagopalan’s doctoral research, the book credits the Indian film festival held in Moscow in 1954 for introducing popular Indian films to the Soviet masses, and traces their reception till the end of the Soviet era in 1991. The introduction lays out the terrain under investigation by locating Indian cinema in the larger politico-cultural milieu of movie-going in the Soviet society after Stalin. The first chapter paints an extremely rosy picture of the reception of Indian films in Soviet Union, arguing that Indian films offered the Soviet audiences something which their own films did not – an escape from the struggles of everyday reality and the optimism of a happy resolution to life’s problems. It discusses the highly personal and emotionally charged audience recollections, supporting them through euphoric photographs of Indian actors being hosted by Soviet dignitaries and hounded by crazed Soviet fans.
The second chapter deals with the state’s ambivalent intentions behind importing Indian films, giving us interesting insights into the tensions and negotiations between the state body responsible for importing foreign films and the commercially motivated regional distributors. It discusses how the former found Indian films of suspect ideology but nonetheless imported them for political gains while putting restrictions on their circulation, even as the latter found in them a promise of guaranteed earnings and maximized their circulation by occasionally even deceiving the authorities. In the process, this chapter also illuminates the subversive potential of melodrama as well as its use as a propaganda tool for impressing certain ideologies on the masses. The third chapter elaborates on the educational efforts by Soviet critics and sociologists, who acted as mediators between the state and the audience by criticizing Indian films for their mushy sentimentality while encouraging the audiences to focus their attention on the many social and moral messages that the films offered. The fourth chapter explores the spaces of negotiation between these self-proclaimed mediators and the audiences by discussing the conversations between the two carried out through film magazines.
Though a commendable effort, Rajagopalan’s book has some obvious limitations, for instance, relying on a relatively small sample of respondents (33 anonymous questionnaire respondents, only 7 of them male, and 52 interviewees, 17 of them male) to shed light on the reception of Indian films in the Soviet Union over a period spanning four decades. But in the absence of any ethnographic or historical study of Soviet movie-going and the apparent difficulty in accessing research material (especially official documents as clearly stated by her), this work assumes importance by borrowing from a number of diverse sources, including many in Russian, to give us a holistic analysis of the enthusiastic reception of Indian cinema by Soviet audience during the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras.
Over and above the contents of her book, which often tend to be repetitive, it is the methodological concerns it foregrounds that should be of interest to the academic community, for in a display of self-reflexivity, Rajagopalan partially mentions the limitations of her work and privileges such research tools as oral testimonials over the more conventional questionnaires despite employing them both. Her book is clearly aimed at international readers as evident from the appendices offering short descriptions of Indian films and actors for those unfamiliar with them, but this should not make it any less engaging for the Indian reader. Instead, its lucid presentation and well-organized structure should make it a welcome addition to most serious library and personal collections on Indian cinema.
Ramesh Kumar
Footnote:
1. The only other similar work that can be readily recalled is Dmitris Eleftheriotis and Dina Iordanova’s ‘Indian Cinema Abroad: Historiography of Transnational Cinematic Exchanges’ (special issue), South Asian Popular Culture 4(2), October 2006.
HINDI ACTION CINEMA: Industries, Narratives, Bodies by Valentina Vitali. Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2008.
Valentina Vitali’s study of the Hindi action film is an extremely ambitious one that brings together industrial economics, industrial practices and films within a single analytical framework. The scale of the study is huge, spanning almost eight decades of Bombay cinema and the author backs her study of the cultural economy of film with numerous references to historical studies of the political economy of 20th century India. Vitali recounts a monumental narrative of Bombay action cinema from the times of the stunt cinema of Master Vithal, Ganpat Bakre and Fearless Nadia in the 1920s and 1930s, the Dara Singh films of the 1960s, and the emergence of the action film into the mainstream through the Bachchan ‘angry young man’ films in the 1970s, finally culminating in the machine like quality of the action star in recent films such as Dhoom.
The point Vitali makes throughout her study spanning the entire history of Bombay films is a simple one. The formal characteristics of the Hindi action film are located in the misfit between a modern film industry and an underdeveloped distribution and exhibition economy incapable of handling industrial products of a certain kind, a truly westernized mode of cinema where the form and content of cinema match a truly modern industrial economy of scale and the values of a hierarchical society required to deliver such an economy. From time to time this lag shows up as a crisis of the industry when film production goes down and existing genres of cinema start failing at the box office. This crisis is then met by a ‘democratization’ of film form through the ‘B’ action film genre that expands the industry’s mass upwardly mobile audience base as well as creates space for other kinds of films to be made.
In all this, Vitali stakes out the figure of the exhibitor-distributor in the countryside as the key figure through whom a certain fantasized and vulgar version of subaltern culture is relayed back to Bombay. These munimjis of a feudal mercantile-agrarian proto-capitalist economic and political order of yore had through traditional modes of credit transfer between urban and rurban and rural centres maintained a firm grip on the industry’s economy as well as production strategies. It is the viewpoint of this gatekeeper liminal elite class that has passed for visions of the subaltern in Bombay cinema. The resurgence of the Hindi action film at the margins of the industry also changes, over time, the form of film-making at its centre. Thus parallel to a study of the political economy of the action film through history runs Vitali’s depiction of the development of formal cinematic techniques in the industry around the action cinema that has at its heart the need to recount the history of Indian labour and its politico-economic aspirations through the visualization of varying personalities of cinematic figuration of various modes of expenditure of physical energy.
Vitali’s study is pathbreaking in setting up a new paradigm for Indian film studies (especially as a dialogical cousin to Deleuzian-Bergsonian studies of cinema in the élan vital) and will need to be unpacked by future scholars for their detail. However, through Vitali’s narrative, the logic of the visualization of various figures of the modes of expenditure of physical energy stands alone by the side without any connect with the tale of the political economy of the Bombay film industry. The disconnect lies at two levels, first at the level of a study of the changing personality and lifestyles of audiences who would have emulated the on-screen personae of action film heroes created through the technical innovations Vitali discusses so well.
The other disconnect, and this I think is Vitali’s golden opportunity missed to make a historical-civilizational point about the histories of discourses accompanying the modes of industrialization in India, lies in the lack of a theoretical framework that connects Bombay cinema’s positing of the notion of expenditure of energy as animating Indian self-imaginings in the modern and the economic behaviour underlying the shifts in political economy. For the psychic tenor of the economic life that historically colours the political economy of the Bombay film is in common parlance spoken of in terms of energy configurations. For example, deconstruction of the visual metaphors employed by Mehboob Khan in Mother India reveal the moneylender’s personality depicted in the film through Vitali’s energy deployment mode of film-making as plaguing not only India but Indian cinema as well.
A film like Mother India cries out for the historian to go to the field and unmask the social and cultural discourses that make a film like Mother India possible. In Khan’s scheme of epic cinema recounting the Indian historical unconscious, Birju’s persona from childhood to youth scarred by this economic personality emerges as the personality of not only a subaltern radical of Indian history but also of the archetypal spectator/hero of classical Bombay cinema leading into the 1960s. Likewise to be documented is a very variegated discourse about economic personality-types in the market who are in the bazaar imaginaire connected to a certain manner in which labour and capital are organized.
It would have been interesting had Vitali been able to document the connect between historical shifts in such discourses about economic behaviour amongst the economic elites of India financing the film industry and the shift in audience configurations and formal shifts in film techniques and hero creation. There is a plethora of anthropological material about the discourses of energy and fluids that mark Indian cultural and economic life. However, the need is for a historically nuanced account of how such discourses have fared in times of industrialization and capitalism. For it is in the clash of multiple discourses about the self-fashioning of the businessman as a reflection of economic practice on the ground, indeed in the visualization of all characters of Bombay film as an epiphenomenon of this economic personality, that a crucial register of the momentous struggle between modernizing cosmopolitan economic elitism and old-style feudal economic thought is played out and undoubtedly colours the passage of visualization of socio-cultural imaginaire in Bombay cinema through changing configurations of the classes in charge of its destiny through history. It is interesting to note that despite all pretensions to modernization, Bombay cinema still speaks the language of energy expenditure as the dominant medium of conveying the meaning of its films.
Kaushik Bhaumik
WOMEN IN INDIAN FILM. Series Editor Nasreen Munni Kabir. Zubaan, Delhi, 2009.
WHEN Dadasaheb Phalke embarked on his project of making the first Indian feature film, he could not find a single woman who was willing to appear in front of the camera. Even prostitutes considered it beneath their dignity to act in movies. Finally, Phalke had to cast his production company’s cook, Salunke, as Queen Taramati in Raja Harischandra (1913). Thankfully, he could persuade Kamlabai and Durgabai, mother-daughter duo who had started performing on the Marathi stage in the face of intense opposition, to act in his next film Mohini Bhasmasur.
The spirit of Kamlabai would smile with satisfaction at the appearance of Women in Indian Film, a set of ten insightfully written and elegantly produced monographs brought out by Zubaan, the noted women’s publishing house. The concise pocket sized booklets – each under 3000 words – pack a wealth of information and analysis and are informed by a loving engagement of the authors with their subjects. Under the general editorship of Nasreen Munni Kabir, who has devoted a lifetime to the propagation – almost proselytization – of Indian cinema in the West, the series reveals the myriad aspects of women in Indian cinema from the 1950s to the first decade of the 21st century. These pen-portraits of Zeenat Aman, Jaya Bachchan, Aarti Bajaj, Saira Banu, Madhuri Dixit, Farah Khan, Mumtaz, Nutan, Smita Patil and Aparna Sen, deftly intertwine the personal and professional lives of their subjects and go a long way toward dispelling the clichéd view of Indian cinema as a male-dominated woman-unfriendly industry.
As clearly stated in the series editor’s introduction, ‘Women in Indian Film aims to steer away from the "usual suspects" – and presents an unpredictable selection grown not out of a need to be representative, but rather out of personal interest and choice – and a curiosity to know more.’ Thus, while one may wonder about the inclusion of certain names – and the exclusion of others – these booklets clearly try to move away from stereotypes and uninterrogated assumptions and in the process encourage the reader to engage with Indian cinema as it has been, rather than as many wish it had been. These hors d’ouvres only whet the reader’s appetite for subsequent volumes devoted to more women performers, behind as well as in front of the camera.
While the series is expectedly weighted in favour of actresses, what comes as a breath of fresh air is its inclusion of Farah Khan (choreographer turned director and by common consensus one of the smartest and most powerful movers and shakers in the increasingly globalizing Hindi film industry) as well Aarti Bajaj (a wonderfully accomplished editor who has played a vital role in shaping the visual design of films like Black Friday, No Smoking and Dev D). Nasreen Munni Kabir has herself written the volume on Farah Khan and charts the highs and lows of her personal life while illuminating minute details of her craftsmanship.
Farah Khan’s distinctive style often ‘uses dancers to start a shot by criss-crossing the frame in a sweeping movement… create with their bodies a wipe-effect, which recalls the opening of a stage curtain.’ Aarti Bajaj reveals how Black Friday which was originally conceived as a linear narrative underwent a major process of construction and deconstruction and was ‘actually made on the editing table… In the famous chase scene of Black Friday, while I used normal accelerated montage, I altered the cutting pattern by playing with the tempo of the cuts. I added the pauses to bring out the humour while maintaining the tension of the chase.’
Clearly, such detailed engagement with the craft would not be possible with protagonists who are no longer alive. But Namrata Joshi gamely attempts to analyze as well as contextualize the association of the word ‘virtuous’ with Nutan. An in-depth discussion of Nutan’s key performances in Seema, Sujata and Bandini leaves the reader wishing for an extended treatment of Nutan’s other roles, but given the astounding ignorance amongst today’s younger generation about even the so-called ‘golden era’ of Hindi cinema (let alone silent cinema or films from the 1930s and ’40s), if this volume inspires its younger readers to seek out DVDs and VCDs of films before the era of the superstars, it would have served its purpose.
A thorough engagement with all the volumes in the series would be impossible in the space of this review. However, the portraits of Saira Banu, Zeenat Aman, Mumtaz and Madhuri Dixit are notable for their rejection of the politically correct condemnation of popular Indian cinema as commodifying female sexuality. One may not entirely agree with the respective authors’ interpretation of ‘westernized’ ‘liberated’ portrayals of Saira Banu and Zeenat Aman, the confident boldness of Mumtaz representing ‘freedom, youth and spontaneity… the opposite of Nutan [who] was poise and sexual constraint’, but it should at the very least lead to further reflection about these terms and gender roles in popular cinema. Most readers would agree with Kaveree Bamzai that Madhuri Dixit’s unparalleled combination of innocence and sensuousness was a key factor in her success.
The remaining volumes of the series engage with the middle-brow or art-house reputations of Jaya Bachchan (whose spontaneity and quiet dignity transcended her tag of the-girl-next-door), Aparna Sen (an intense and sensitive actress who also directs reflective, socially engaged cinema) and Smita Patil (who in her tragically short life left behind a legacy of strong yet vulnerable and complex characters). A valuable contribution to the growing critical discourse on Indian cinema, the series is a welcome beginning for the uninitiated as well as pleasurable reading for the aficionado.
Dhananjay Kapse
CINEMA AND CENSORSHIP: The Politics of Control in India by Someswar Bhowmik. Orient BlackSwan, Hyderabad, 2009.
Bhowmik undertakes the enterprise of weaving together many fractured discourses on censorship in India into a narrative and linear historiography, and moves away from dry accounts of free speech debates or complicated accounts of ideology of national cinema. The substantial descriptions around cases are likely to be extraordinarily useful for social researchers; for the ordinary reader the book provides an exceptional insight into the politics around narrative cinema in India from the perspective of censorship and the law. Though it doesn’t quite answer Annette Kuhn’s call for a more nuanced understanding of how censorship must be viewed as productive
1 (productive of ideal notions of citizen, of orderly and disciplined public in a movie theatre or even of propriety and cultural standards for women), it does look beyond the prohibition/institutions model at various other players that have a role in the field of censorship.Bhowmik’s account of the colonial censorship regime talks about growing anxieties about Brown audiences watching the decidedly bawdy or inflammatory films from America and England and how White people were depicted in them. This forms the rationale for separate guidelines for censorship in the colonies, and goes into the making of the structural apparatus, including pre-censorship, that is inherited by postcolonial India and remains largely unchanged today. Bhowmik also argues that postcolonial India even tightened and centralized the rather diffused structure of colonial censorship. The Indian Cinematograph Committee Report, 1927, while noting this growing discomfort of the colonial rulers, also stated that India should be discovering its own cinema. Thus in a peculiar way, it is colonial censorship that urged the birth of the now global phenomenon that is Indian cinema.
Bhowmik’s account of the newly independent India and its relation to cinema captures the contradictions of the moment between Nehru’s notion of the role of cinema as a vehicle of modernism and Gandhi’s unabashed refusal of anything worthwhile in cinema and that the film industry should commit itself to ‘reducing this poison’. However, what dominates the judicial understanding of cinema is that it has to serve broadly political objectives, and in independent India these objectives are ostensibly of democracy, nationalism and citizenship. For instance, the court’s judgment in Deepak Theatre v. State of Punjab (1991) points to this continuing belief in the role of cinema – ‘Cinemas have become tools to promote welfare of the people to secure and protect as effectively as it may a social order as per directives of the state policy…’
Despite the obvious need for a book that is an organized and thorough examination of film regulation, it is when Bhowmik deals with specific aspects such as documentary film or the emergence of a vox populi or public opinion on film, that the book makes an interesting read. Though missing out on cases by citizens against stars (Mamta Kulkarni, Akshay Kumar) or against channels (by Pratibha Naithani), the section on vox populi reveals the complexity of postcolonial censorship that cannot be collapsed into an easy framework of people wanting absolute freedom from any form of state control but neither understood as compliant docile bodies that the judiciary imagines as the orderly public at a movie theatre.
Bhowmik explores the less glamorous step brother of popular cinema, the documentary film, where the political motivations of state censorship are more transparent (Abbas’s, A Tale of Four Cities or Patwardhan’s, War and Peace). Bhowmik describes the ongoing battle with the state sponsored Mumbai International Film Festival and its requirement for a censor certificate. The uproar caused by this move led to the formation of alternative groups and eventually the approval of Sharma’s Final Solutions which led to the ouster of Anupam Kher as Censor Board chief.
However, this narrative historiography of cinema through the lens of censorship and regulation does not engage with other aspects of the legal properties of film, which are determined by what carriage it is contained in (video tapes, 35mm film for public exhibition, CDs, DVDs etc.), what spaces it is shown in (shady video parlours, touring talkies, multiplexes) and content (the field of operation for obscenity, sedition, anti-communal related laws).
When looking at the various legal properties of film, Anne Barron states, ‘Social theory, whatever label is pinned to it, needs to engage fully with legal detail if it is to offer an adequate explanation of how culture and economy are intertwined within particular social formations.’
2 Bhowmik’s detailed engagement with the legalese behind censorship does tease out important linkages, whether the preponderance of non-controversial mythological films under the colonial censorship regime, or the ‘pseudo modernist melodramatic structure’ in newly independent India.In conclusion, the book makes a strong argument that the bureaucratization of the Censor Board, incoherent guidelines, and perceptions of the audience as gullible passive spectators are what explain the inconsistent and arbitrary judgments on cinema. It also points to the eternal riddle of regulation in India – how is it that Girlfriend, Fire, or Jism are passed by the Censor Board without cuts, while smaller films like Gulabi Aaina (an attempt at a transgender melodrama) and documentary films like Bishaka Dutta’s In the Flesh on sex-workers, or overtly political films like Final Solution do not get passed. The explanation could be regional offices and bureaucratization, but Bhowmik also gestures towards how the ruling party has intangible ways of influencing Censor Board decisions (for instance the account of Kher’s ouster as the Censor Board chief).
Bhowmik only falters slightly in the end, by emphasising the embarrassment that the malfunctioning Censor Board poses, especially in relation to India’s tryst with globalization. An ode to the alleged benefits of globalization when a family has to spend almost Rs 1000 to watch a film together appears inappropriate especially when only two decades ago film-watching was the cheapest form of entertainment – an affordable indulgence for the middle class that craved the escapism of cinema.
Namita Malhotra
Footnotes:
1. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, Routledge, London, 1988.
2. Anne Barron, ‘The Legal Properties of Film’, Modern Law Review, 67(2), 2004, 177-208.
