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Comments from the Gallery

Author(s): Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul and Girish KarnadSource: India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1, Indian Popular Cinema: Myth,Meaning and Metaphor (MARCH 1981), pp. 97-107Published by: India International CentreStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23001939 .

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Comments from the GalleryKumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Girish Karnad

It would have been useful to collect material that bearson the attitudes and intentions of the men and womenwho are the creators of the Indian popular cinema.But this is not merely a mammoth task, it calls forspecial skills and techniques in interpreting suchmaterial and assessing its relevance to our purpose. Wehave done the next best thing, and invited commentsfrom a few film-makers who represent an importantand influential current of opinion in Indian cinema.Mani Kaul and Kumar Shahani burst upon thescene ten years ago as the enfants terrible of NewCinema in India. Less enfants today, they have persistedin an unremitting rejection of all that popular cinemastands for. Girish Karnad is less easy to slothis workas a Kannada playwright and film-maker mark him asa Highbrow, set apart not only from the canons ofcommercial cinema, but also from the formal, esotericpositions that Kaul and Shahani occupy at the otherextreme. On the other hand, Karnad's increasingpenchant for appearing in 'character roles' in theBombay cinema is, at the very least, an embarrassmentto the neatness of any category one may devise forhim.At any rate, it is important to bear in mind thatthe views in this section are those of individuals whoare situated, by choice and conviction, in positionsthat challenge or reject the assumptions of commercialcinema. Nevertheless, they offer an interesting counterpoint to the views of sociologists and anthropologistscontained in the main body of this issue.

Guest Editor

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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 awardat Karlova Vary, but was not released commercially in India. Shahani'scareer has been blighted by his inability to find backers for his filmprojects 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 beenprolific and significant. Shahani was anchor-man for a widely acclaimedtelevision series in Bombay which aimed at promoting the appreciationof international film classics.On the analysis of filmI have a fundamental objection to the kind of content analysis of filmthat goes on all the time. What is this content that critics and sociologists and even Marxists base their analysis on? They look at the brutethematic nature of the event that occurs on screen, the brute matterthat has been photographed. From this is derived the 'plot' or'narrative structure' of the film. This is ridiculous! You cannot reducethe overtones of a film to the meanings contained in a story line or inits images. I can understand non-Marxists doing this, but whenMarxists do it, my blood boils. The greatest Marxist thinkers in cinema,Eisenstein and, to a lesser extent, Pudovkin and Kuloshov, highlightedone very basic fact which is one of the first things you learn at FilmSchoolthat in the act of juxtaposing two images, in the joining of twomaterial things, a new thing emerges. The process of making a film isnot merely additive; nor is the audience's perception of a film merelybased on a linear story line.

Any kind of analysis that doesn't therefore take into account thelanguage of film, its semantic elements, is widely off the mark. Nobodydoes this in literary criticism. But with film, people are far more willingto ignore the process of creation and to deduce the 'content' from a mereviewing of the photographic event. The concerns that guide this kindof 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 beenborrowed from literary criticism. Both the Structuralist and New Leftapproaches to popular cinema have been unable to overcome theproblem of transposition from a linguistic basis to an audio-visualone. It is a difficult problem, and I don't see any easy answers. But ifwe are to try to solve it we will have to find new tools, a new languageof criticism. It would be unfortunate to come up with a new jargon, butif we are serious, the best way is to interview a lot of people actuallyworking in the cinema, and perhaps to invent a language of analysisthat is drawn from their methods, the actual process of making a film.The language of criticism must emerge from the praxis of creating afilm.



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COMMENTS FROM THE GALLERY 99On the value of studying popular filmHow is it usually done? You start out with a concept of Indian mythology, or the Indian psyche, and you look at popular cinema to seewhether it confirms your initial hypothesis. This happens all the time.The academics pose the questions, and they go on to show how thepopular cinema reflects society by expressing some fundamental concept in terms of Woman or Nature or the Hero, and so on. They look atbox-office trends and deduce that this particular theme is what everybody wants. It's very easy to be clever with post facto analysis.But it is not success or failure that provides the insights. The commercial film distributors, the financiers and film-makers, are all concerned with just how to keep an audience glued to its seats. They area clever bunch of manipulators, but even so they are unable to predictjust how a particular film will be received. Eighty per cent of these filmscrash every year. And it would be presumptuous to believe that sociological analysis can fare any better.The modes of the exploration of success are very crude. Critics tendto have no idea how films are made, how they function, the backgroundagainst which they are made, the relations of production that underliethe final work. Besides, success or failure is not only difficult to predict,it is also irrelevant to a sociology of the cinema.For a sociological understanding of popular cinema we must lookbeyond the patterns of patronage, and try to understand all the complexinterests and perceptions within the class system in which these moviesare made and viewed. . . .In order to explain the nature of particular films, modern psychoanalysis is capable of giving us new insights. Psychoanalysis alone isequipped to explain the universalization of the particular, and I think itcould make a big contribution in the future provided that (and this ismost 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 changingarchetype of the 'hero', which does provide some insight into the socialprocesses that are going on all around usthe transformation of say,Devdas into the Junglee kind of hero, and more recently, to the criminalhero personified by Amitabh Bachchan and Amjad Khan. Today, theidea of a criminal hero is accepted by children tooperhaps this isbecause in our society, children feel very persecuted by the very fact ofbeing children. But in general, society not only accepts criminality as away of life, it actually admires it. A major shift in value systems hastaken place in the last fifteen years or so. This is probably related to thefact that the criminal elements are perceived to be the only kind ofpeople who can succeed in a society riddled with bureaucratic restric



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100 MANI KAUL

tions and the pressures of an elitist class system.But if you look a little further, at where these images originate andwhom they are projected at, you will begin to notice certain interestingpatterns. The bourgeois transformation of society has not taken place inIndia. Instead, power in the urban centres lies with the lumpen

bourgeoisie, which has great similarities with other lumpen elements inthe cities. They share a symmetrical lifestyle, they have similar values,and it is these groups that are the backbone of the film industry as wellas its most enthusiastic consumers. Their attitudes are reflected in thefilms. The violence is totally gratuitous, the production culture is utterlywasteful and erratic, and this rubs off on its aesthetics as well.

This is one of the most important things that has happened to Indiansociety in the last 15 or 20 yearsan important section of the urbanbourgeoisie behaves like lumpens. The same process is evident inelectoral politics, in law, over and over again. In the Nehru age, Devdasexpressed the hope, the yearning to go back to Nature, to childhooditreflected a rather naive hope in the bourgeois transformation of society.All that is lost nowit stands in sharp contrast with the machismoworld of the 'Curry Western', in which women are objects of use orabuse.

Mani Kaul, 39, earned his Diploma in Screenplay Writing andDirection from the Film Institute, Pune, in 1966. He has made a numberof documentaries and five feature films to date: Ashad Ka Ek Din, UskiRati, Duvidha, Ghasiram Kotwal and Sateh Se Uthta Aadmi. None ofthese films have had a commercial release in India, though they have wonawards both in India and abroad. Duvidha won the Bronze Hugo at theChicago Film Festival in 1975, and the same year, a National Award forBest Direction. Kaul was awarded a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellowship in1976 to write a dissertation on 'The Crisis of Form in Cinema'. He hasserved on the Berlin International Film Festival Jury, and he foundedthe Yukta Film Co-operative in Pune.On the nature of popular cinema in IndiaPopular cinema is extremely conservative, extremely orthodox. In animportant sense, it has taken the place of the temple in our societyasectarian temple that is surrounded by a lot of superstition and manyrituals. It's not a religion in the sense that it has a philosophy, but it doescommunicate moral pressures and is a social force of great power. And,as all religions do, it reinforces the social institutions of society andmakes them more oppressive. It therefore only serves an exploitativepurpose in society. It is important to try to understand the popularcinema as a process of mythologizing that serves a political, exploitative



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COMMENTS FROM THE GALLERY 101

end.The reason why the commercial cinema succeeds, lies in the alienationthat the ordinary Indian faces in his life and work. If it were possiblefor such a person to be truly involved with his work, if he could createan object through which he could objectify himself, he would have noneed 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 cannotidentify with their work. This fundamental alienation is not reserved forthe poor rickshaw-pullers and labouring classes alone. There are theterribly rich whose affluence fails to reduce the extent of theiralienation.Let me make it clear that what I am talking about is not a materialalienation alone in the classical Marxist sense. This alienation is a

spiritual exhaustion, a relentless seeking after meaning. The relationshipbetween the cinema and its audience is based upon this need. But theneeds are never really satisfied. It's like Pavlov's dogthe bell rings withthe promise of meat, but there's no meat, just the bell ....The commercial cinema peddles a set of myths, but the myths don'tchange, they are endlessly repeated. It's like a tamsic version of thesalvia experience of endlessly intoning the words of the Ramayana.With the Ramayana there is at least the justification that repetition helpsto concentrate energy. But endless exposure to the cinema only distracts,and the instant one distraction ends, another one is offered. The filmsonly succeed in scattering you. Like I said, it's the Pavlovian syndromethere's only the bell.On the conservative message of the commercial cinemaIn the commercial film the conservativeness is not in the ideas alone.What is conservative is the sensuousness attending upon the idea. This isimportant to understand because you may have a very radical idea thatemanates from radical political philosophy, but in terms of its relationto other ideas, in terms of its repercussions, it may have an impactwhich is in fact conservative and even feudalwhat really appeals to youin the idea is its sensuousness, not the idea or the image as such.Take for instance the criminal-herothe image as such only fulfils amoral obligation that today we cannot have an absolute hero. The heromust be a criminal, something which was unthinkable in the '50s. Thatthese films appear to be radical in that they have criminal heroes is trueonly to the extent that they are satisfying a growing lumpen need. Butthe idea is never carried to the point where it becomes radical,politically. In the end the hero will still be supporting justice and thestatus quo. The hero may be conducting a revolution but the sensuousness that attends the image is such that it conforms to ideas of loyalty(which is a feudal idea), jealousy, or to emotions that by and largeremain unqualified.



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102 MANI KAUL

I think the couching of these ideas in a radical phraseology has to dowith certain developments that have occurred in our lives. There is ahistorical tendency that makes it incumbent upon everyone in ourcountry to project a certain radical view of society. At the same timeit is impossible for any commercial film-maker to project really criminalvalues.

This tendency may not be a conscious decision at all in the commercialcinema, 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 toillustrate it, thereby thinking that they are doing some brave intellectualwork.On who takes the decisions in thefilm industryMore than the director or scriptwriter or actor, it is the distributor whoactually fashions the images. He is the one who supports and financesthe 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 isexploiting them, and more than the producer or director he is the onefrom whom the ideas flow. Of course the ideas that the distributorhands over are crude and schematic, and it is the film-makers who giveit back to him in a polished form. Distributors do go wrong many atime but, if you take the whole thing as a system, he is the crucialfactor. Since the structure of film financing is such that the distributor isalso the financier, he is the one who bears most of the risk, and he is theone who is most affected by the failure of a film.

Surprisingly, sometimes it is the distributor in the commercial cinemawho comes up with ideas more radical than those of the writers ordirectors. And the director will say, 'How can you make a film like this,it will offend this sensibility or that sensibility.' But the distributors assuch are an almost entirely illiterate class and the working of their mindsis closest to the workings of the level of the masses. It never works inrefinements but it works successfully. To me, if you want to understandcommercial cinema the clue lies in the mind of the distributor.

Girish R. Karnad, 43, has written a number of successful Kannada plays,of which Yayati, Hayavadana and particularly, Tughlaq, have been widelytranslated and enacted all over India. His first film, Vamsha Vriksha(with B.V. Karanth) won him a President's Award, and he has sincemade three others, Kaadu, Tabbaliya Neenade Magane and OndananduKaladalli, which have all won critical acclaim. Karnad was the Directorof the Film and Television Institute, Pune, in 1974 and 1975, and hisinvolvement with the cinema includes a number of scripts (for ShyamBenegal) and not a few appearances as an actor in commercial films.



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COMMENTS FROM THE GALLERY 103On the relation between popular cinema and societyAny film, and particularly the commercial Hindi film, works two ways:it reflects society at the same time that it influences it. Unlike a folksong which evolves slowly and unconsciously, drawing upon a collectiveexperience, borrowing the words of different poets, a film is put togetherwith a very deliberate purpose. It is a commercial artefact. A lot ofpeople actually sit down together and say, 'Now, what is it that willsell.'To this extent, the popular cinema doesn't automatically reflectsociety. There is an element of hard sell, a kind of brainwashing thathas gone on in India at least since World War II. The fact that 700films are made every year creates the feeling that the audience is free tochoose what it wants to see. But this obscures the fact that the audiencehas really been conditioned to like certain things. A whole generation ofIndians have been brainwashed into believing that it is not beingbrainwashed! One cannot therefore look at these films as receptacles ofmeaning without making allowance for the fact that they are commercialproducts 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 doesin some way creep into the films. If you look at the films of the '40s and'50s, their sentimentality, their namby-pamby heroes, and the centralobsession with the family, they conform so well with the moral concernsof the middle class of that period. Contrast that with the hero of today,exemplified by Amitabh Bachchan: a man without a family, an angryyoung man who is able to break the law because he knows that right ison his side. This is something which has evolved over the years. It is notas if someone sat back and said, 'Ah, here is something new that willwork.' Films like Zanjeer and Deewar, which started the trend, didsucceed in touching something real, which reflected certain changes thathad 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 countryyou will realize that the cinema is essentially an urban medium.Although we are told that the cinema is an all-India mass-based medium,it is not; it is essentially and totally an urban medium. And if you beginto look for influences on the cinema, it is the cities that have played amajor rolethe form as well as the content of the cinema has changedaccording to the social composition of our cities.In the '30s, our cities were mainly non-industrial, business-orientedcommunitiesessentially the educated, middle class, white-collarpopulations, who were sympathetic to the Nationalist movement interms that were related to their own business interests and their ownprosperity. It is not surprising, therefore, that Prabhat Studios were ableto come out with successful films on the theme of nationalism and socialreform. There really wasn't any sizeable industrial proletariat in the cities.



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104 GIRISH KARNAD

If you compare the Nadia-John Cavas stunt films with the actionfilms of today you will notice the difference. The former were aimed ata particular audience, for the most part made up of children andmenials. More important, there was no crime in them. They werethriller stunt films located in a kind of Ruritanian landscape, but therewas no crime and certainly no kind of social awareness.The whole form of production has since changed, it used to beconfined to 8 or 10 studios in the '30s and '40s. But a lot of money beganto flow in with World War II, and the whole production structure wastransformed. Meanwhile, an uprooted population came to the cities asa consequence of Partition and the devastation of the countryside. Thispopulation had the qualities that characterized the next phase of ourcinema: both, anger at being torn from its roots, and a great sentimentality for the family.After thirty years, the refugees have more or less settled down, butthere has, meanwhile, been a steady growth in the size of our industrialproletariat in the cities. They are people who have been uprooted fromtheir 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 havehad to leave behind. This could explain the co-existence of the 'angry'Amitabh Bachchan film with the soppy 'family social' such as MaangBharo Sajna, which extols the virtues of tradition and family life.On the social background of the creators of Bombay cinemaOne must remember that a lot of people in the Bombay film industrycome from the same classes they address themselves to. It is not an accident that a lot of producers are Sindhi and Punjabi. The uprootment ofPartition is within their memory. The upholding of the status quo andconservatism are a part of their outlook. These people have made asuccess of themselves in this society. They cannot see why anyone elsecannot also make good. They are saying that everything is alright withthis society if only the man who is fighting to make good has a littlemore justice on his side. And their cinema reflects the actual beliefs andvalues of these people.I was recently asked to speak, in Calcutta, on 'The Class System andthe Indian Cinema.' I said, This is ridiculous! They have no concept ofa class system. These are people who have come from the dregs and haverisen to the top. They are like the American businessmen of the 1880s.That is the ethos that they understandthey are the upwardly mobileand successful. And they have done it not only in film; their brethrenhave done it in business. A whole new class has risen to the top.On who is responsible for the particular concoction of Bombay cinemaThe director most certainly isn't, barring a few exceptions like RameshSippy 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 bythe distributor, and to an extent by the stars. This is because of thepeculiar structure of film financing in the industry.It is far more risky to make a low-budget 'Art' film than a big-budgetfilm in Bombay, because a big, 50 lakh film will have 20 distributorswho have chipped in 2.5 lakhs each. In the small-budget film, one manhas put up 6 lakhs. In any case, this institution whereby distributorsput up the production money means that they control, as financiers, agreat deal of the power to make decisions. In order to get the finance, theproducer must pack his film with a whole lot of stars. This is where theautomatic packaging of the product begins; first with an eye to catchthe distributor's attention, then the audience's.On how the 'formula' worksThe problem is how to fill the theatres in the first week. From thesecond week onwards, it may depend on how the film appeals to itsaudience, but at least for the first week you need stars to draw theaudiences. What is sold at the beginning when you say that the film hassuch and such a star? You have already informed the audience aboutwhat kind of film to expect. Each star has his own particular image:Amitabh Bachchan is a tough, angry young man who hits out; ShashiKapoor is a nice, amiable, romantic man; Dharmendra is part romantic,part comic, he is another melange of characteristics. When you castJeetendra you know what kind of a film to expecta lot of women willcome to see this kind of film because he has an image as a singing,dancing, romantic hero. Each actor or actress must work at projectinga particular image. He can change this image only at the risk of ruininghis career. It is not as if some of these stars are not good actors. Theyare. But woe to him who tries his talent and shatters his image by tryingto project a complex, realistic human being!

The hero type is by no means static. For instance, look at AmolPalekar. Here is a man who looks and behaves like a bank clerk! Thereis no such precedent in the history of Indian cinema. But somewhere,something touches a responsive chord. The Amol Palekar image wascreated by Basu Chatterji on a hunch that it will appeal to a middleclass audience. I don't think that it is an accident that Amol is verysuccessful in Bengal. The image that he projects touches on a particularkind of insecurity and it brings in a particular kind of audience. Butthis image is plugged into a film only so long as the distributors thinkthat the image still works and still brings in the audiences. That is whyheroes 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 playeda good sympathetic role in Anand. But it so happened that a film likeDeewar succeeded, and there he was. When he tried to break out of the



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mould in other films, they did not succeed, and he didn't try again. Astar, I think, is essentially like a friend to the audience, and by 'star' Iinclude the villains as well. Just as when I drop in to see a friend, Iexcept him to project a certain familiar personality. But if I found himcompletely different, I would be terribly upset. You expect the peopleyou 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 expectationsof 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 isacceptable is limited: a star can be a little more angry, or a little moreironic or a little more humourousbut he must remain true to hisparticular image.This does not mean that popular images are static, they change asaudience tastes change, even as the character of the image remains thesame. That is why there is so much insecurity amongst actors. If onewere to try and relate the changing hero type to the audience towardswhich he is directed, I think one could certainly say that there is agradual changeover from a middle-class to an essentially working-classaudience targetfrom a conservative, middle-class audience with liberalpretensions, to an essentially uprooted working-class audience with anostalgia for the bonds of the family.On genres in the Bombay cinemaI think the word 'genre' is a misnomer in this context for it suggests thatthere are various styles of film-making that co-exist. In fact, whathappens is that a particular kind of film succeeds upto a point, butwhen it is seen to be ailing, there takes place a development of the sameform into something else. Only in the '30s can you talk about separategenres in Indian cinema. There was the Mythological; the Arabianfantasy that Imperial Studios made; the Stunt films that WadiaMovietone was producing; the Socials that Prabhat and New Theatresmade. These were the dominant genres of the '30s. Today, the Socialand the Stunt film are not distinguishable: Amitabh Bachchan is requiredto fight 20 people at the same time at which he is fighting social injustice.But broadly, I think you could distinguish between the films aimed atthe matinee crowds of women, the middle-class film, and the Amitabh'Action' film. A fourth kind which rarely appears in the cities is thefairy tale Mythological which has a large following in the 'C' graderural centres but may also be successful among women in the cities.But even after outlining these genres one has to admit that theaudiences are not really as segregated and focused as we would liketo believe. There is certainly no homogeneity of taste that one wouldexpect within, for instance, the upper class. Popular taste has widenedto include a broad spectrum of society. At the same time, audience tastesare not static. Look at a film like Devdas, in which Paro is accepting of



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

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