Comments from the Gallery Author(s): Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul and Girish Karnad Source: India International

Centre Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1, Indian Popular Cinema: Myth, Meaning and Metaphor (MARCH 1981), pp. 97-107 Published by: India International Centre Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23001939 . Accessed: 31/05/2013 04:44
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Comments
Kumar Shahani,

from the Gallery

Mani Kaul, Girish Karnad

have been useful to collect material that bears on the attitudes and intentions of the men and women It would
are who the creators of the Indian popular cinema.

But this is not merely a mammoth task, it calls for in interpreting such skills and techniques special
material and assessing film-makers its relevance to our purpose. an We

have
from

done
a few

the next best thing, and

who represent

invited

comments
important

and influential current of opinion in Indian cinema. and Kumar Shahani burst upon Mani Kaul
scene ten years ago as the enfants terrible of

the
New

Cinema in India. Less enfants today, they have persisted in an unremitting rejection of all that popular cinema stands for. Girish Karnad is less easy to slothis work as a Kannada playwright and film-maker mark him as of set apart not only from the canons a Highbrow,
commercial cinema, but also from the formal, esoteric

positions extreme. penchant

Bombay to the

that Kaul and Shahani occupy at the other Karnad's On the other hand, increasing in 'character roles' in the for appearing
cinema neatness is, of at the any very least, an one embarrassment may devise for category

him. At any rate, it is important to bear in mind that who the views in this section are those of individuals in positions are situated, by choice and conviction, of commercial that challenge or reject the assumptions cinema. Nevertheless, they offer an interesting counter and anthropologists point to the views of sociologists contained in the main body of this issue.
Guest Editor

97

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98

KUMAR

SHAHANI

Kumar Shahani, 39, got his Diploma in Direction from the Film Institute, Pune. He has made one feature film, Maya Darpan, which won an award in India. Shahani's at Karlova Vary, but was not released commercially career has been blighted by his inability to find backers for his film projects after Maya Darpan, but a new film is reportedly in the offing. He has been a Homi Bhabha Fellow, and his writings on film have been prolific and significant. Shahani was anchor-man for a widely acclaimed television series in Bombay which aimed at promoting the appreciation of international On the analysis film classics.

of film

I have a fundamental objection to the kind of content analysis of film that goes on all the time. What is this content that critics and socio logists and even Marxists base their analysis on? They look at the brute
thematic nature of the event that occurs on screen, the brute matter

or From this is derived the 'plot' that has been photographed. You cannot reduce 'narrative structure' of the film. This is ridiculous! in a story line or in the overtones of a film to the meanings contained I can understand non-Marxists its images. this, but when doing Marxists do it, my blood boils. The greatest Marxist thinkers in cinema, Eisenstein and, to a lesser extent, Pudovkin and Kuloshov, highlighted one very basic fact which is one of the first things you learn at Film

two images, in the joining of two in the act of juxtaposing Schoolthat material things, a new thing emerges. The process of making a film is not merely additive; nor is the audience's perception of a film merely based on a linear story line. therefore take into account the Any kind of analysis that doesn't semantic is off the mark. of its elements, film, widely language Nobody does this in literary criticism. But with film, people are far more willing
to ignore the process of creation and to deduce the 'content' from a mere

event. The concerns that guide this kind viewing of the photographic of analysis seem to me to be the spurious product of a false ideology. What has tended to happen is that the tools of analysis have been borrowed from literary criticism. Both the Structuralist and New Left
approaches to popular cinema have been unable to overcome the

from a linguistic basis to an audio-visual of transposition problem one. It is a difficult problem, and I don't see any easy answers. But if we are to try to solve it we will have to find new tools, a new language of criticism. It would be unfortunate to come up with a new jargon, but if we are serious, the best way is to interview a lot of people actually working in the cinema, and perhaps to invent a language of analysis that is drawn from their methods, the actual process of making a film. The language of criticism must emerge from the praxis film. of creating a

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On the value of studying popular film is it usually done? You start out with a concept of Indian myth ology, or the Indian psyche, and you look at popular cinema to see whether it confirms your initial hypothesis. This happens all the time. The academics pose the questions, and they go on to show how the some fundamental con popular cinema reflects society by expressing How
cept in terms of Woman or Nature or the Hero, and so on. They look at

box-office trends and deduce that this particular theme is what every body wants. It's very easy to be clever with post facto analysis. But it is not success or failure that provides the insights. The com mercial film distributors, the financiers and film-makers, are all con cerned with just how to keep an audience glued to its seats. They are a clever bunch of manipulators, but even so they are unable to predict just how a particular film will be received. Eighty per cent of these films crash every year. And it would be presumptuous to believe that socio can fare better. any logical analysis The modes of the exploration of success are very crude. Critics tend to have no idea how films are made, how they function, the background that underlie against which they are made, the relations of production the final work. Besides, success or failure is not only difficult to predict, it is also irrelevant to a sociology of the cinema. of popular For a sociological cinema we must look understanding
beyond the patterns of patronage, and try to understand all the complex

interests and perceptions within the class system in which these movies are made and viewed. . . . In order to explain the nature of particular films, modern psychoan of giving us new insights. Psychoanalysis alone is alysis is capable of to the universalization the and I think it particular, explain equipped could make a big contribution in the future provided that (and this is most important) the particular referred to is not a collective (e.g. the 'racial' or the 'national'). On the archetypical'hero' One of the things that interests me in the popular cinema is the changing archetype of the 'hero', which does provide some insight into the social processes that are going on all around usthe transformation of say,
Devdas into the Junglee kind of hero, and more recently, to the criminal

and Amjad Khan. Today, the hero personified by Amitabh Bachchan this is idea of a criminal hero is accepted by children tooperhaps because in our society, children feel very persecuted by the very fact of being children. But in general, society not only accepts criminality as a way of life, it actually admires it. A major shift in value systems has taken place in the last fifteen years or so. This is probably related to the fact that the criminal elements are perceived to be the only kind of restric people who can succeed in a society riddled with bureaucratic

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MANI

KAUL

India.

tions and the pressures of an elitist class system. But if you look a little further, at where these images originate and whom they are projected at, you will begin to notice certain interesting patterns. The bourgeois transformation of society has not taken place in

Instead, power in the urban centres lies with the lumpen bourgeoisie, which has great similarities with other lumpen elements in the cities. They share a symmetrical lifestyle, they have similar values, and it is these groups that are the backbone of the film industry as well as its most enthusiastic consumers. Their attitudes are reflected in the films. The violence is totally gratuitous, the production culture is utterly wasteful and erratic, and this rubs off on its aesthetics as well. This is one of the most important things that has happened to Indian society in the last 15 or 20 yearsan important section of the urban like lumpens. The same process is evident in behaves bourgeoisie electoral politics, in law, over and over again. In the Nehru age, Devdas expressed the hope, the yearning to go back to Nature, to childhoodit of society. reflected a rather naive hope in the bourgeois transformation All that is lost nowit stands in sharp contrast with the machismo world of the 'Curry Western', in which women are objects of use or
abuse.

his Diploma Mani in Screenplay Kaul, 39, earned Writing and Direction from the Film Institute, Pune, in 1966. He has made a number of documentaries and five feature films to date: Ashad Ka Ek Din, Uski Rati, Duvidha, Ghasiram Kotwal and Sateh Se Uthta Aadmi. None of these films have had a commercial release in India, though they have won awards both in India and abroad. Duvidha won the Bronze Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival in 1975, and the same year, a National Award for Best Direction. Kaul was awarded a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship in 1976 to write a dissertation on 'The Crisis of Form in Cinema'. He has Film Festival Jury, and he founded served on the Berlin International in Pune. the Yukta Film Co-operative
On the nature cinema of popular is cinema in India extremely orthodox. In an

Popular

extremely

conservative,

important sense, it has taken the place of the temple in our societya sectarian temple that is surrounded by a lot of superstition and many rituals. It's not a religion in the sense that it has a philosophy, but it does
communicate moral pressures and is a social force of great power. And,

as all religions do, it reinforces the social institutions of It therefore only serves an makes them more oppressive. in society. It is important to try to understand purpose cinema as a process of mythologizing that serves a political,

society and exploitative the popular exploitative

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end. The reason why the commercial cinema succeeds, lies in the alienation that the ordinary Indian faces in his life and work. If it were possible for such a person to be truly involved with his work, if he could create an object through which he could objectify himself, he would have no need to see such films. But the vast majority of our society is alienated, they have to go on doing what they are doing even though they cannot identify with their work. This fundamental alienation is not reserved for the poor rickshaw-pullers and labouring classes alone. There are the affluence fails to reduce the extent of their terribly rich whose alienation. Let me make it clear that what I am talking about is not a material alienation alone in the classical Marxist sense. This alienation is a spiritual exhaustion, a relentless seeking after meaning. The relationship between the cinema and its audience is based upon this need. But the needs are never really satisfied. It's like Pavlov's dogthe bell rings with the promise of meat, but there's no meat, just the bell .... The commercial cinema peddles a set of myths, but the myths don't change, they are endlessly repeated. It's like a tamsic version of the salvia experience of endlessly intoning the words of the Ramayana. With the Ramayana there is at least the justification that repetition helps
concentrate energy. But endless exposure to the cinema only distracts,

to

and the instant one distraction ends, another one is offered. The films only succeed in scattering you. Like I said, it's the Pavlovian syndrome there's only the bell.
On the conservative message of the commercial cinema

In the commercial film the conservativeness is not in the ideas alone. What is conservative is the sensuousness attending upon the idea. This is important to understand because you may have a very radical idea that emanates from radical political philosophy, but in terms of its relation to other ideas, in terms of its repercussions, it may have an impact which is in fact conservative and even feudalwhat really appeals to you in the idea is its sensuousness, not the idea or the image as such. Take for instance the criminal-herothe image as such only fulfils a

moral obligation that today we cannot have an absolute hero. The hero must be a criminal, something which was unthinkable in the '50s. That these films appear to be radical in that they have criminal heroes is true only to the extent that they are satisfying a growing lumpen need. But the idea is never carried to the point where it becomes radical, politically.
status quo.

In the end the hero will still be supporting

hero may be conducting a revolution

justice
the

and the
sensuous

The

but

ness that attends the image is such that it conforms or to emotions (which is a feudal idea), jealousy, remain unqualified.

to ideas of loyalty that by and large

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KAUL

I think the couching of these ideas in a radical phraseology has to do with certain developments that have occurred in our lives. There is a historical tendency that makes it incumbent upon everyone in our country to project a certain radical view of society. At the same time it is impossible for any commercial film-maker to project really criminal
values.

This tendency may not be a conscious decision at all in the commercial cinema, but, in the 'middle' cinema it is a conscious act. It is only in the 'middle' cinema that directors work out a certain equation and try to illustrate it, thereby thinking that they are doing some brave intellectual
work.

On who takes the decisions

in the film industry

More than the director or scriptwriter or actor, it is the distributor who actually fashions the images. He is the one who supports and finances the films, he is the one who can reject or change sequences and scenes. The distributor is closest to the audience and he is the one who is exploiting them, and more than the producer or director he is the one from whom the ideas flow. Of course the ideas that the distributor hands over are crude and schematic, and it is the film-makers who give it back to him in a polished form. Distributors do go wrong many a time but, if you take the whole thing as a system, he is the crucial factor. Since the structure of film financing is such that the distributor is also the financier, he is the one who bears most of the risk, and he is the one who is most affected by the failure of a film. cinema Surprisingly, sometimes it is the distributor in the commercial who comes up with ideas more radical than those of the writers or directors. And the director will say, 'How can you make a film like this, it will offend this sensibility or that sensibility.' But the distributors as such are an almost entirely illiterate class and the working of their minds is closest to the workings of the level of the masses. It never works in refinements but it works successfully. To me, if you want to understand commercial cinema the clue lies in the mind of the distributor.

Girish R. Karnad, 43, has written of which Yayati, Hayavadana and translated and enacted all over won him a (with B.V. Karanth)
made three others, Kaadu,

a number of successful

Kannada plays, have been widely particularly, Tughlaq, India. His first film, Vamsha Vriksha President's Award, and he has since
Neenade Magane and Ondanandu

Tabbaliya

Kaladalli, which have all won critical acclaim. Karnad was the Director of the Film and Television Institute, Pune, in 1974 and 1975, and his involvement with the cinema includes a number of scripts (for Shyam as an actor in commercial films. Benegal) and not a few appearances

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COMMENTS On the relation between popular cinema and society

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Any film, and particularly the commercial Hindi film, works two ways: it reflects society at the same time that it influences it. Unlike a folk song which evolves slowly and unconsciously, drawing upon a collective the words of different experience, borrowing poets, a film is put together with a very deliberate purpose. It is a commercial artefact. A lot of sit down is it that will and what 'Now, actually people together say, sell.' To cinema doesn't automatically reflect extent, the popular There is an element of a kind of hard sell, society. brainwashing that has gone on in India at least since World War II. The fact that 700 films are made choose what it has really been Indians have every year creates the feeling that the audience is free to wants to see. But this obscures the fact that the audience conditioned to like certain things. A whole generation of into believing that it is not being been brainwashed of One cannot therefore look at these films as receptacles brainwashed! without allowance for fact are commercial the that meaning making they products which are made to be sold and to make a lot of money. In the long run, however, one also cannot deny that social reality does in some way creep into the films. If you look at the films of the '40s and this

'50s, their sentimentality, their namby-pamby heroes, and the central obsession with the family, they conform so well with the moral concerns of the middle class of that period. Contrast that with the hero of today, a man without a family, an angry exemplified by Amitabh Bachchan: who able to man is break the law because he knows that right is young on his side. This is something which has evolved over the years. It is not as if someone sat back and said, 'Ah, here is something new that will

work.' Films like Zanjeer and Deewar, which started the trend, did succeed in touching something real, which reflected certain changes that had taken place in Indian society since the '50sor more specifically, changes in our cities since the '50s. If you look at the distribution of the 9,000 odd theatres in the country that the cinema is essentially an urban medium. you will realize we are told that the cinema is an all-India mass-based medium, Although it is not; it is essentially and totally an urban medium. And if you begin to look for influences on the cinema, it is the cities that have played a major rolethe form as well as the content of the cinema has changed of our cities. according to the social composition In the '30s, our cities were mainly non-industrial, business-oriented

the educated, white-collar middle communitiesessentially class, who were sympathetic to the Nationalist movement in populations, terms that were related to their own business interests and their own prosperity. It is not surprising, therefore, that Prabhat Studios were able to come out with successful films on the theme of nationalism and social reform. There really wasn't any sizeable industrial proletariat in the cities.

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KARNAD

confined to 8 or 10 studios in the '30s and '40s. But a lot of money began to flow in with World War II, and the whole production structure was transformed. Meanwhile, came to the cities as an uprooted population a consequence of the countryside. This of Partition and the devastation the next phase of our had the qualities that characterized population cinema: both, anger at being torn from its roots, and a great sentimenta lity for the family. After thirty years, the refugees have more or less settled down, but

If you compare the Nadia-John Cavas stunt films with the action films of today you will notice the difference. The former were aimed at a particular audience, for the most part made up of children and menials. More important, there was no crime in them. They were but there thriller stunt films located in a kind of Ruritanian landscape, was no crime and certainly no kind of social awareness. The whole form of production it used to be has since changed,

there has, meanwhile, been a steady growth in the size of our industrial from proletariat in the cities. They are people who have been uprooted their villages by poverty; they are angry at not being able to find justice, and at the same time are sentimental about the families that they have had to leave behind. This could explain the co-existence of the 'angry' film with the soppy 'family social' such as Maang Amitabh Bachchan Bharo Sajna, which extols the virtues of tradition and family life. On the social
come from

background
same classes

of the creators of Bombay cinema in the Bombay

themselves to. It

One must remember that a lot of people

the they address

film industry
is not an acci

dent that a lot of producers are Sindhi and Punjabi. The uprootment of Partition is within their memory. The upholding of the status quo and
conservatism success of are themselves a part in of this their society. outlook. They These cannot people see why have made else a anyone

cannot also make good. They are saying that everything is alright with this society if only the man who is fighting to make good has a little more justice on his side. And their cinema reflects the actual beliefs and values of these people. I was recently asked to speak, in Calcutta, on 'The Class System and the Indian Cinema.' I said, This is ridiculous! They have no concept of
a class system. These are people who have come from the dregs and have

of the 1880s. risen to the top. They are like the American businessmen are the upwardly mobile That is the ethos that they understandthey and successful. And they have done it not only in film; their brethren have done it in business. A whole new class has risen to the top.
On who is responsible for the particular concoction of Bombay cinema

The director most certainly isn't, barring a few exceptions like Ramesh Sippy and Manoj Kumar who are able to assert themselves as directors

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because they are producers as well. By and large, the film is shaped by of the the distributor, and to an extent by the stars. This is because peculiar structure of film financing in the industry. It is far more risky to make a low-budget 'Art' film than a big-budget film in Bombay, because a big, 50 lakh film will have 20 distributors who have chipped in 2.5 lakhs each. In the small-budget film, one man has put up 6 lakhs. In any case, this institution whereby distributors put up the production money means that they control, as financiers, a

great deal of the power to make decisions. In order to get the finance, the producer must pack his film with a whole lot of stars. This is where the automatic packaging of the product begins; first with an eye to catch the distributor's attention, then the audience's. On how the 'formula' works The problem is how to fill the theatres in the first week. From the to its second week onwards, it may depend on how the film appeals
audience, but at least for the first week you informed need stars to draw the

audiences.
such and

What is sold at the beginning when you say that the film has
such a star? You have already the audience about

what kind of film to expect. Each star has his own particular image: Amitabh Bachchan is a tough, angry young man who hits out; Shashi is part romantic, is a nice, amiable, romantic man; Dharmendra Kapoor of When you cast he is another characteristics. part comic, melange Jeetendra you know what kind of a film to expecta lot of women will come to see this kind of film because he has an image as a singing,
dancing, his career. romantic hero. Each actor or actress must work at projecting

a particular

image.
It is not

He can change
as if some

this image only at the risk of ruining

stars are not good actors. They

of these

are. But woe to him who tries his talent and shatters his image by trying to project a complex, realistic human being! The hero type is by no means static. For instance, look at Amol Palekar. Here is a man who looks and behaves like a bank clerk! There is no such precedent in the history of Indian cinema. But somewhere, image was something touches a responsive chord. The Amol Palekar created by Basu Chatterji on a hunch that it will appeal to a middle I don't think that it is an accident that Amol is very class audience. successful in Bengal. The image that he projects touches on a particular kind of insecurity and it brings in a particular kind of audience. But this image is plugged into a film only so long as the distributors think that the image still works and still brings in the audiences. That is why
heroes come and go.

An individual actor's image is often shaped by one particular success. Take Amitabh Bachchan. He is capable of good comedy and he played a good sympathetic role in Anand. But it so happened that a film like Deewar succeeded, and there he was. When he tried to break out of the

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KARNAD

mould in other films, they did not succeed, and he didn't try again. A and by 'star' I star, I think, is essentially like a friend to the audience, include the villains as well. Just as when I drop in to see a friend, I except him to project a certain familiar personality. But if I found him completely different, I would be terribly upset. You expect the people

you know to be consistent. It's exactly the same thing with a star: 'Ah, here's Amitabh, let's see what he's up to.' They have certain expectations of him, but if he were to suddenly play a soft, affectionate, comic figure, then the audience just would not be able to take it. The range that is is limited: a star can be a little more angry, or a little more acceptable ironic or a little more humourousbut he must remain true to his particular image. This does not mean that popular images are static, they change as audience tastes change, even as the character of the image remains the same. That is why there is so much insecurity amongst actors. If one were to try and relate the changing hero type to the audience towards which he is directed, I think one could certainly say that there is a to an essentially working-class gradual changeover from a middle-class audience targetfrom a conservative, middle-class audience with liberal audience with a pretensions, to an essentially uprooted working-class for the of the bonds nostalgia family.
On genres in the Bombay cinema

I think the word 'genre' is a misnomer in this context for it suggests that there are various styles of film-making that co-exist. In fact, what happens is that a particular kind of film succeeds upto a point, but when it is seen to be ailing, there takes place a development of the same form into something else. Only in the '30s can you talk about separate cinema. There was the Mythological; the Arabian genres in Indian Studios Stunt films that Wadia that the made; fantasy Imperial Movietone was producing; the Socials that Prabhat and New Theatres made. These were the dominant genres of the '30s. Today, the Social

Amitabh Bachchan is required and the Stunt film are not distinguishable: at the same time at which he is fighting social injustice. to fight 20 people I think could But broadly, you distinguish between the films aimed at crowds of the matinee women, the middle-class film, and the Amitabh film. A fourth kind which rarely appears in the cities is the 'Action' which has a large following in the 'C' grade fairy tale Mythological rural centres but may also be successful among women in the cities. But even after outlining these genres one has to admit that the are not really as segregated and focused as we would like audiences to believe. There is certainly no homogeneity of taste that one would

expect within, for instance, the upper class. Popular taste has widened to include a broad spectrum of society. At the same time, audience tastes are not static. Look at a film like Devdas, in which Paro is accepting of

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does. Fifteen years later, in lilms like everything that her husband Anubhav and Swami, husband and wife are now seen to fight, are allowed to go to the point of 'splitting', though it is obligatory that they are reconciled at the end. Today you have a film like Ek Baar Phir, where the wife leaves the husband to go off with her lover. So there is certainly a progression in the films and the kind of ideas that the audiences are willing to accept.

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