Picture Abhi Baaki Hai
Bollywood as a Guide to Modern India
RACHEL DWYER
To the memory of Yash Chopa, 19322012
First published as Bollywoods India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India by Reaktion Books, London, 2014
First published in India in 2014 by Hachette India
(Registered name: Hachette Book Publishing India Pvt. Ltd)
An Hachette UK company
www.hachetteindia.com
This ebook published in 2014
Copyright Rachel Dwyer 2014
Rachel Dwyer asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved. No part of the publication may be copied, reproduced, downloaded, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover or digital format other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Print edition ISBN 978-93-5009-856-1
Ebook edition ISBN 978-93-5009-860-8
All views, ideas and opinions expressed and all statements of fact are as reported by the author. The publishers are not in any way liable for the same.
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Contents
Chaudhry Baldev Singh (Amrish Puri) feeding birds in Trafalgar Square in Dilwale dulhaniya le jayenge .
Picture Abhi Baaki Hai is an investigation of the imagined worlds of mainstream Hindi cinema, whose interpretations of India over the last two decades are, I argue, the most reliable guide to understanding the nations dreams and hopes, fears and anxieties. This book explores the nature of Hindi cinema now best known as Bollywood and whose non-realistic depictions of the everyday are often dismissed as escapist entertainment by considering how escapism and entertainment function and are mobilized to think about life and the world.
India is changing rapidly, and in the last twenty years following liberalization in 1991 social and economic transformations have been occurring at an unprecedented speed. Long acknowledged as one of the worlds greatest and most ancient civilizations, and notorious too for being home to many of its poorest people, India now enjoys a new and unaccustomed role as a potential emerging superpower, and is producing some of the planets richest individuals and one of its largest middle classes. These changes have been so rapid and so pervasive that their impact can barely, as yet, be understood. While journalists and other writers have examined these transformations, tracing their causes and their impact in the social, political and economic realms, it remains difficult to know how people have adapted to the changes, how they interpret them, what their hopes and fears are, how they see their future and how they look at their pasts. Indians know that they are now serious players on the international stage, but how do they see themselves as having changed and how do they see the world and their lives how do they make sense of it all?
As cinema does not reflect society but rather imagines it, and Hindi cinema does so in ways that often eschew the values of realism, Picture Abhi Baaki Hai emphasizes the role of the imagination, suggesting that cinema plays a highly significant role in creating a way of comprehending the way society is and how it should be. This way of thinking about Hindi cinema is also a way of looking at India, and this book is concerned with the present as India changes: what are the rights and duties of the individual and their responsibilities to one another; how do pre-modern hierarchical ideas interact with modern political ones; how does individualism relate to society?
Like other arts, cinema is about standards of behaviour and their consequences, a way of understanding the self and the world which can be interpreted in many ways. However, the Hindi film is also a mighty cultural product, consumed by millions of people in India and worldwide as a global media form. As a new postcolonial nation, India created new myths and national texts. Some of these took shape in movies which have become myths, reaching out beyond the cinema halls into everyday life as they inculcate beliefs and offer ways of understanding the world.
Hindi cinema has itself been transformed since 1991, particularly with the formation of what is now known as Bollywood, the high-profile, globalized mainstream cinema which lies at the heart of the growing entertainment industry. This is the focus of this book, not the other forms of Hindi cinema which have emerged recently, notably the multiplex/independent ( hatke or different, offbeat, indie) films. These have different economies of production and content, being less star-oriented and more realist, and have other circuits of distribution mostly limited viewings in multiplexes or at festivals and through other media. While it is widely acknowledged that these films are not viewed universally in India, whether by choice or by need, it is also undeniable that Bollywood permeates Indias public culture more significantly than the viewership of the films themselves. The use of Bollywood dance rather than folk or classical forms in the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006 signified its cultural dominance and coming of age, yet many regarded it as a nail in the coffin of traditional Indian culture.
Picture Abhi Baaki Hai does not see cinema as a direct reflection or representation of society indeed it would be foolish to believe this but rather as a series of symbols and meanings which are created between practice and theory. It thus looks at cinema as a repository of imaginaries and imaginary worlds, showing ways in which change is visualized in films, depicted in narratives, images and sounds where meanings are condensed, displaced by star images and intensified by melodrama. It also considers how Hindi cinema in turn shapes the way that people see modern India and interpret it how its images, words, music and affects generate or regenerate images of India across many media forms.
This is neither a sociological profile of Hindi cinema nor a potted history of the cinema industry. The largely undocumented history of Indian cinema deserves many more books devoted to it, but this one aims to examine what the imagining of India in the last twenty years has to say about the new and emergent India, rather than it being about Hindi cinema itself. It is nonetheless based on a study of this cinema to inform its understanding of the cinematic imagination and thus investigates arguments and aspects of cinema such as narrative, audio and visual forms which have been discussed by scholars of film studies. Nor is Picture Abhi Baaki Hai an encyclopaedia or a gazetteer; instead it looks at a selection of key films as a way of understanding India over the last twenty years: at the invitation to dream, at the imagining of India by Indians, at the collective dream and at Indian cinema itself. The films discussed in this book were released up to July 2013, when the manuscript was completed. They have been chosen because of their popularity, as many of them have become part of new mythologies endlessly told, retold, quoted and imitated in everyday speech and elsewhere.
