Masala Mad Men!

The point is often made that contemporary television in the US is going through one of its golden ages and possibly its most interesting one ever. HBO spear-headed this ‘revolution’ more than a decade ago and the networks have followed in turn. The more interesting facet about this entire cultural episode is the extent to which (and this has been commented on by many) the iconic appeal of television now far exceeds that of cinema. This isn’t so for the usual reasons of home access and the diminishing of cinematic aura. Television has always been a critical part of popular culture since its initial appearance but for the longest time it could not occupy the space of cinema and technological change that deconstructed ‘the movies’ over time is only part of the answer. The much more relevant factor here, and one which cultural critics have been acknowledging for a while, is that Hollywood in its quest for globalization increasingly produces ‘generic’ cinema which necessarily neutralizes local registers of meaning. In other words once upon a time Hollywood made completely ‘American’ films that were then consumed all over the world. What people fell in love with was the very particular ethos represented in these works. Today it is just the opposite. Hollywood tries to make its products (really the best word for these films) much more ‘basic’ and hence ‘readable’ across different cultures with minimal ‘translation’. And so it has evolved into a cinema (which is to say on its major productions) that is simply not interesting enough. It is more or less disposable entertainment that provides the ‘obvious’ for a couple of hours and consequently leaves no residue of any sort. It is often enjoyable and equally often instantly forgettable. Television on the other hand is helped by its format (no limits to length and so forth) but it is this conjunction of factors that makes this medium not just iconic in the usual sense but in ways where it occupies the space of cinema. People discuss television shows today the way they once did movies. For good reason. Put crudely the best television shows offer much more to chew on than most Oscar winning productions.

A rather instant parallel with the ‘economies’ of Bollywood instantly asserts itself. The impoverishment of Hindi cinema over the last few decades is something I have constantly lamented. It isn’t about changing trends etc but once again the evolution of a much more basic cinema that is only interested in providing those obvious ‘stimuli’ that can sustain an audience for a few days. It hasn’t been for the most part and for the longest time about the ‘writing’. Even with directors who seem much more aware of ‘international’ technical values and standards and who are informed by a ‘film festival’ grammar (not without its own problems!) of filmmaking the works in question are still rather banal if not soulless. Not surprisingly Bollywood too has been on its own mad quest over the same period to cater to a global diaspora and here too it has found it useful to empty out the ‘local’ to various degrees. I have often commented on the political underpinnings of this entire set of decisions and at both ends of the screen (the production side and the audience one) but here I am much more interested in drawing out the Hollywood to TV analogy and approaching my privileged topic of ‘masala cinema’ through this lens.

Before I get to that however let me add by way of an aside that even though there has been a lot more ‘rooted’ cinema over the last decade or more, at least terms of its geographic coordinates, this too is a more ambiguous move than might seem so initially. When the norm is about a plastic cinema that is not firmly anchored in any kind of specific ‘local’ references (‘native’ or otherwise) the other side of this dynamic often involves a ‘museum’ look at ‘rooted’. You see for example Delhi’s old city or small town Northern India (completely interchangeable in this paradigm) representing a kind of ‘hyper-reality’. An excess of the ‘local’ with all its human and non-human paraphernalia. The rooted on steroids. A native experience which keenly tracks a ‘colonial’ imagining of India which is always about ‘too much’. To get to the spiritual heart of India or more prosaically ‘Indian family values’ one must pass through its hyper-reality. And so there were the ‘set in London or NY or…’ movies that over time gave way to the ‘Delhi or Amritsar or..’ film. Note how Yashraj was able to straddle this split rather easily and profit on both sides. Much as with Johar’s recent Agneepath a similar mind-numbing excess defines Bombay. RGV of course began this whole phase for the city but his cinema operates with a very different charge. When Johar attempts the same it is part and parcel of his older brand of cinema. On these terms there is absolutely no contradiction between Dilwale Dulhaniye Le Jayenge and Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi. It is the very same continuum. The very same gaze that defines first the ‘normal’ coordinates of the former and then the frenetic ones of the latter. The mundane of the first is supplemented with the anthropological museum of the second!

A connected point must be made here to make everything even clearer. When Amol Palekar missed the bus, when Anthony went to a rundown bar, when the newly married couple constantly struggled for privacy in a chawl, the function of those films wasn’t to highlight the cultural specificity of those worlds. These were the backdrop against which a story was constructed. The backdrop shouldn’t be understood in the passive sense of the word. It was very much an active part of the proceedings but moreso because the story emerged from it in very organic fashion. As opposed to this we see films in the present where the entire point is to represent that specificity of Bombay or Delhi or what have you. It is a tourist’s gaze in many ways. When we visit new places this is precisely how we access them. We never take those local specifics as a given. These sites dominate our ‘sense’ of these newly discovered places. This is exactly how much of contemporary Bollywood ‘relates’ to its ‘native’ environment. There is hence no ‘normal’ Bombay or Delhi that can be engaged with in an ‘unconscious’ way (as was once the case). These names (of cities) are actually ‘signatures’ for much larger ‘problems’ or confusions for those who make these films and the vast majority of the audience that consumes them. So it is not that one watches a rooted film set in Delhi but that rootedness here is synonymous with a hyper-real representation of Delhi. The latter ‘is’ the point of the film and (in an exact reversal of what happened in those older movies) the story becomes almost incidental.

Why have I always insisted on masala cinema? Not as a naive ‘nostalgist’! I’ve said this elsewhere but the questions that were singularly raised in masala cinema in the 1970s have not found an easy equivalent in any age since (or indeed before… with the possible exception of the 50s). Ideologically I might favor certain answers to these questions or for that matter certain formulations overall but I am much more interested in a deeper level of interrogation coming about to begin with. This is not an argument against cinema as ‘mere entertainment’ but about fostering more meaningful entertainment that can at least hint at the medium’s artistic potential even when it does not seek to become high art. All of this does nothing to dislodge the ‘mere entertainment’. Those kinds of films can still be made though they do not set the terms of the debate as has unfortunately very often been true over the last two decades or so. Theoretically, if a very different brand of cinema could address some of the very same socio-political or economic or cultural questions with equal force I would have no objection. But this has not happened so far and I don’t think this is simply coincidental.

The epic registers of masala cinema were not simply an understandable historical feature or did not just represent the ‘plumbing’ of tradition for obvious commercial gain. Were this true it would not have taken till the 70s to fuse these epic resonances with a politically programmatic cinema. But these were useful for the ferment of the 70s (one needn’t recount all the histories here) because the political and cultural institutions of the state and much received memory connected with these were being seriously de-stabilized for the very first time. The epic and especially its overman heroes offered the guarantee of both transcendence and historical continuity. In other words the hero could rise above the limitation of his circumstances, derail the ‘history’ of the nation-state, all the while relying on older epic archives for this questioning and potential re-fashioning. Note how this move was radically different from the later TV one of ‘literally’ recreating the epics. Those were conservative operations aimed at using the past to justify the counter-reaction of the present (which is always the right-wing fascist move par excellence.. you pretend to simply resuscitate tradition when in fact you are reinventing it dramatically) whereas the ‘angry young man’ was the latest in a line of epic heroes seeking to overturn everything for the sake of a greater (and older.. hence timeless..) truth. Again it isn’t a coincidence that the ‘angry young man’ was never actually named after a famous epic hero in any of his iconic films (rather late in the date this happened in Aaj Ka Arjun but by then the BJP revolution was already in full force.. of course even here there was the perverse twist that the character was actually named Bhima in a film with that title!). Because ‘Vijay’ was ‘like’ his epic forebears; he wasn’t simply ‘repeating’ them. If the assumptions of the nation-state had to be questioned in the most profound sense it was necessary to go around this entire structure. The angry young man in his principal films never found all the existing political, social, economic arrangements less than impediments. His idea of justice could never quite be adjusted to the latter. Hence even when many of these films end ‘happily’ (which is to say with conformist angles) these resolutions are often somewhat forced if not totally unconvincing. In any case case the epic register offers this chance — a hero not constrained by the existing power apparatus and at the same time for the very same reason also not completely nihilistic either. Compared with this masala tradition (and in fact even the middle cinema of that great decade performed similar moves in far more gentle ‘comedies’) the films of the 60s (to take an example) are hopelessly comfortable with the world as it is. This is not an argument about actors or genres and so on but about an archive that cannot even think of approaching the framework of the state. Again in contrast with the preceding 50s where for example and most notably in the cinema of Raj Kapoor the state (including its institutions) is always a problem to be addressed. Similarly in most of Dilip Kumar’s key films over that same period the protagonist has a very anxious and even neurotic connection with his surroundings. As I’ve said before most of the iconic films of the 50s are anything but celebratory. One cannot discern any euphoria in them about a newly independent state.

For all these reasons it has not been easy to ‘repeat’ the masala configuration in a different guise. Unlike the US (at least at this point in its history) the ‘idea of India’ is still too ‘contested’ by various political groupings for its nationalist contours to be hegemonic in quite the same way. Put differently the institutions of the US nation-state are not at odds with its larger mythologies. But in India (and this is one of the system’s strengths) there is often conflict between the two. And it is here that those epic registers often provide a ‘controlling’ framework. If one wishes these away one is not left with an obvious alternative or some other structure that allows one to raise the same questions with equal force.

Incidentally Rathnam’s Raavan is a crucial film for this entire discussion…