Cultural citizenship in Indian popular cinema

[Part 2]

Vidya is introduced to them as a princess; she is very uncomfortable in that role and in that company. She is horrified but what she sees around her and is greatly disillusioned. Raju exults in his newly gained wealth, while Vidya much to his consternation, comes to know that he has come by his wealth through immoral means. Meanwhile, it is discovered that Raju is not the prince that he has been pretending to be. He is offered a job in a bogus company that has been set up to take advantage of unwary stockholders. When Raju realizes that it is a bogus company, he reacts strongly against it. Sethji, who is responsible for establishing the company, aims to blackmail him into submission. He points out that Raju could be arrested under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. Raju realizes the folly and the perils of what he has been doing up to now.

This film unfolds against the background of Nehru’s new India. The film deals within an obviously melodramatic framework, with the hardships and tensions characteristic newly emergent nation. Raju comes from a small town to the big city of Bombay in which he looses his innocence and succumbs to the blandishments of the city. The city is both a symbol of the promise of the new nation dedicated to modernity as well as a symbol of the perils that are part and parcel of urban life. The city then becomes a space of both hope and despair. Shri 420 is an allegory of the nation confronting its future path even the names of the characters with their suggestions of triumph (Raju), knowledge (Vidya), wealth (Sonachand), an illusion (Maya).

The Nehruvian influence is evident through out the film. The film ends with a proclamation by the protanist, which reinforces the importance of maintaining the national unity and turning away from any desire to bring about a structural transformation. He says that when he came to the city of Bombay, he had honesty, a good education, hopes of becoming a wealthy man and raising a good family. However, his greed for money forced him to lose everything. He realizes the mistake of living in a world of moral corruption. The remedy for these mistakes is the development of the nation and the unity of the people. The influence of Nehru on the films made during this period is even more clearly in evidence in a less well known film called, Ab Dilli Dur Nahin. In this film, a group of children make several attempts to see Uncle Nehru.

The first time, they wait for Uncle Nehru’s car to pass by but miss it. Disappointed, they make other plans to get close to him. Ultimately, they manage to handover a letter to the Prime Minister Nehru at a public rally. In its simpleminded way, the film seeks to focus attention on the rampant corruption, brutality, and injustices discernible in Indian society and on the great hope people reposed in the ability of Nehru to eliminate these evils. The films made in the 1950’s and 1960’s project a vision of cultural citizenship that is in keeping with Nehru’s proclaimed social vision. However, if one pauses to read these films symptomatically, one begins to see the aporias in Nehru’s vision. Hence the idea of cultural citizenship should be seen as a site in and a means through which the regnant vision of society could also be interrogated.

The 1970’s are characterized by Indian film historians as a period in which a new type of cinema that focused on the actions and emotions of a group of wronged and angry young men came into prominence. Amitabh Bachchan became the dominant signifier of this filmic movement and the central cultural icons of this period. The so-called angry young men films rewrote the genre of popular cinema by focusing on the actions of these anti-heroes. Instead of the world of romance and love and the concomitant affamation of the institution of the family, copios dance sequences and songs, here we find anti-heroes wronged, vengeful, seething with anger fighting against what they perceived to be clear injustices. Many of them, it is evident, have been victims of corruption, injustice and inequities that are rampant in society.

This is not to suggest that the ideological ambivalences that characterized earlier commercial films are absent in these new works. Clearly, they are there. But now, they operate on a different plane of narrative discourse and perfomance. The angry young men films dramatize the crisis of the post- colonial state in India, that in many ways triggered this movement was Deewar (The Wall) made in 1975. But the earlier film Zanjeer (The Chain) made in the same year marks a significant point in transition. In this film, we see the transformation of the hero from a police officer into a vigilante. As a child, he happened to see the murder of his parents by a killer wearing a chain around his wrist.

Haunted by the image of the chain, he becomes a police officer firmly resolved to wipe out corruption and evil from the city of Bombay. Deewar deals with two brothers of a family; one is an admirable police officer while the other is a criminal. The link between the two is the mother who loves them both. The brother who is a criminal, Vijay is at the center of the narrative. He earns his living by various menial jobs and encounters numerous insults in his efforts to fund his younger brother’s education. He later joins a dock- yard gang of smugglers and quickly assumes its leadership.

His brother Ravi is forced to take him into custody. Vijay resolves to marry his lover Anita, who is a dancer and lead an honest life. However, she is murdered paving the way for Vijay’s emergence as a ruthless vigilante. In the meantime, his mother accedes to Ravi’s request to bring his errant brother to justice. At the end, Vijay shot by his brother and he keeps his promise to meet his mother at a temple. This film focuses on the problems and privations of working class rebels seeking justice; but at the same time it is important to realize that the mother (who in Indian cinema is a metonymn for the nation) agrees somewhat reluctantly to bring to justice her errant son thereby focusing on the state as a preserver of law and order.

Reputation

Before the making of Zanjeer, Amitabh Bachchan did not enjoy the kind of reputation that he did after the film. However, after the phenomenal success of this he became a superstar. He went on to act in a number of films that had a profound influence on the popular imagination and the Indian film industry, and he began to enjoy a popular acclamation that no other actor until then had won for himself. Among his other films Sholay (Flames, 1975), Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), Dostane (Bonding, 1980), Naseeb (Good Features, 1980), Laawaris (The Orphan, 1981), Namak Halal (The Ungrateful 1982), Khudda (Streets 1982), Andhar Kannoon (Blind Justice, 1983), Coolie (1983) should be mentioned.

In these films, Amitabh Bachchan comes across as a man representing the frustrations, resentments, and anxieties of the socially marginalized. He represents the lives of the oppressed and the dispossessed. In Deewar, he is a minor employee in the dockyard who later becomes a leader; in Sholay he is a minor crook; in Kalia he is a taxi driver; in Namak Halal a household servant; in Amar Akbar Anthony, a bootlegger. Through proletarian characters such as these, the film makers have sought not only to focus on the exploitations of the proletariat by the wealthy but also the ability of the persona of Amitabh Bachchan to bring social justice where the police have failed.

Popular cinema

Amitabh Bachchan, then, introduced a new note to Indian popular cinema and the role of the rebel became supremely important thereby re-inflecting in interesting ways the idea of cultural citizenship produced by Indian popular cinema. To understand the impact of Amitabh Bachchan’s films we need to pay attention not only to the narrative discourses contained in them, but more importantly, to the cinematic presence of Bachchan himself.

He foregrounded a type of acting that was controlled, fiery and introspective. If Charlie Chaplin was an inspiration behind the cinematic persona of Raj Kapoor, Marlon Brando and Clint Eastwood are perhaps the main influences behind the cinematic persona of Amitabh Bachchan. However, it needs to be remembered that he was able to modulate these influences to create a hybridized and native anti-hero.

In cinema, the concept of the body as the site of complex inscriptions and transformations of social desires and power become extremely important. The body is cinematically written by desire and signification, and the cinematic presence of Amitabh Bachchan illustrates this very clearly. Ranjani Mazumdar says that “mediating the marginalized through the symbolically central figure of the ‘angry man’ Amitabh Bachchan became in many ways the most powerful and perhaps the last iconic hero that Hindi cinema has ever produced. Attempting the illusion of unity through a complex process of performance and representational masking, Bachchan’s body became the site of a magnified subjectification.”. She goes on to make a further observation that in Bachchan’s performances the socially oppressed operated with marks of poverty visually inscribed on the body and the behavioral codes of a high -class upbringing communicated through his postures and gestures. This intermingling not only made for greater viewer identification and the desire but also to invest his performances with a great measure of self- confidence.

The angry young men’s films of the 1970’s represented in interesting ways the disenchantment with the Nehruvian social vision and the crisis of the post-colonial nation state of India. The contradictions of capitalist modernity began to show through as social conflicts intensified, class divisions widened, urban problems magnified. For example, people living in the slums of Bombay were subjected to unprecedented government intervention. One has to understand these angry young men films against this background of proletarian and middle class resentments. These films seek to enforce the importance of law and order even as they dramatize the impotence of the police to fulfil that mission. This was a period in Indian history marked by failure of law and order and the introduction of repressive regulations such as the Essential Services Maintenance Act, National Security Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Bill were introduced. Moreover, as terrorism and lawlessness was on the increase as the state encouraged various types of vigilantism which was clearly seen in Punjab, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh.

Commenting on this phenomenon, Fareeduddin Kazim makes the observation that the state instigated citizens, at times with monetary and other inducements to take the law into their own hands in the fight against lawlessness and violence. Vigilantism was now supported by the state as a legitimate means of challenging the perpetrators of crime and violence. This became a central topic of popular cinema of the 1970’s giving it a new organizing center and a new narrative trajectory. One can discern here, an interesting interplay between the authority of the state and the legitimacy of vigilantism.

The vigilantes were seen as powerful as the state; through them, it was believed, the widespread law and order problems could be eradicated. However, in these films, once the vigilantes have accomplished their proclaimed mission, they either surrender to the state or are apprehended by it. Ultimately, there is the re-establishment of the state-centric law and order. The hegemonic closure that this implies, and the concomitant normalizing of discourse, has deep implications for the construction of cultural subjects alive to the tensions in the social space that they inhabit in Indian popular cinema.

Inequalities

As I stated earlier, the angry young men films focussed on the inequities, injustices, brutalities, and corruption in society. However, the answer to these vexatious issues, according to these films, are not found in any kind of willed and purposive social transformation but in a change of heart in the individuals and a transformation of individual morality. This is because, in these films, the social tensions and transgressions are uprooted from their social matrix and are displaced on to the level of individual acts and motivations.

Therefore, while the films of 1970’s dealing with rebels and anti-heroes opened up a new and interesting territory for cinematic exploration, they also circumscribed their own field of operation by privileging the individual over the social structure.

In the 1980’s a new type of film emerged in popular cinema and this marks an important moment in the growth of commercial cinema in India. As with earlier departures from the established modes of representation and address, these films which are generally referred to as films of avenging women, occupy an ideologically ambivalent space. Inevitably, they have become the site of contestations of meaning over the interplay among female sexuality, spectatorial desire, scopophilic investments, female agency and social power, even as they widen the discursive boundaries of Indian popular cinema and succeeded in adding a new dimension to the projected image of cultural citizenship.

The film that started this trend was B R Chopra’s Insaaf Ka Tarazu (The Scales of Justice, 1980) which was indeed a commercial success. Although there were hints of this line of thinking in some earlier films most film historians would agree that Chopra’s work animated this genre. This film deals with female rape, and social justice -two features that came to signify the distinguishing features of the avenging female films.

The story of Insaaf Ka Tarazu is full of melodrama and coincidence. Ramesh, an extremely wealthy man rapes Bharati, an advertising model. He is duly arrested, but Bharati fails to secure a legal conviction against him. She and her sister Nita resolve to leave for another town. There Ramesh rapes Nita; Bharati seething with anger kills Ramesh and is apprehended.

She is prosecuted by the same attorney who defended Ramesh earlier and the judicial proceedings take place before the same judge who presided over the earlier case. There are three rape sequences in this film that generate much spectatorial voyeurism and scopophilic desire.

Sexual violence

The film that gave this genre of avenging female films was N.Chandra’s Pratighaat (Retribution, 1987). This film inscribed indelibly the trope sexual violence against females on this genre. Lakshmi is a college teacher in the fictional town of Dharmapura- ironically it means the city of righteousness. She becomes increasingly uncomfortable about, and anxious with the ever rising levels of violence and corruption in the city perpetrated by Kali and his mob. He is notorious for kidnapping, abducting, killing, and abusing workers etc.

In desperation, Lakshmi files a complaint with the local police; her husband, who is an attorney and her in-laws ask her to withdraw the complaint fearing retribution and her personal safety. In order to teach Lakshmi a lesson, Kali disrobes Lakshmi in public and subjects her to the ultimate humiliation. Kali decides to seek election for the Legislative Assembly and Lakshimi decided to oppose him by becoming a contestant.

Through trickery and unfair influence Kali wins the election. Lakshmi goes to his victory celebrations where she axes him to death. The axe is an interesting symbol in that it is not only the election symbol of Kali, but also the weapon closely associated with Parashurama. Pratighaat dramatizes vividly the constitutive elements of the avenging female films- injustice against women and retribution by them as they acquire a sense of social agency and a scopophilic desire that pulsates through the narrative and visual registers. Similarly, in Zakmi Aurat (Injured Woman, 1988) a police- woman played by the popular actress Dimple Kapadia is subjected to multiple rapes. When the legal system refuses to convict the suspects, this police- woman forms an alliance with the victims of rape in the city and they seek to capture the suspects and castrate them.

Dimple Kapadia

These three films then, represent the actions of what Mathili Rao has termed the lady avengers14. They share some features in common. In Insaaf Ka Tarazu, and Zakmi Aurat, the main roles are played by two well-known and beautiful actresses-Zeenat Aman and Dimple Kapadia; in Pratighaat, a beautiful new comer Jayata Mehta plays the lead role. In all three films serious shortcomings of the law are emphasized and the framing of the narrative carries undertones and references to the authority of the nation state as well as to the two epics, The Ramayana and Mahabharata. In, Inzaat Ka Tarazu, the female protagonist is Bharati- the femine name for India; in Pratighaat the lead role is played by Lakshmi (Goddess of Wealth) and the villain is Kali (The Avenging Goddess); in Zakmi Aurat, we see photographs of Gandhi on the walls of the courtroom and there are footages of the Indian flag. Even the disrobing of Lakshmi in Pratighaat reminds the spectators of the disrobing of Draupdi, the wife of the Pandavas, in the court of Hastinapura.15 As with the angry young men films of the 1970’s the avenging female films of the 1980’s grow out of, and bear a direct relationship to, existing social conditions.

Rajadhyaksha and Willemen commenting on, ‘Insaaf Ka Tarazu’ remarked, “this notorious rape movie followed in the wake of growing faminist activism in the 1970’s after the Mathura and Mayu Tyagi rape cases, the amendment to the Rape Law and the impact of e.g. the Forum Against Rape, which offered legal assistance to rape victims16.

This new trend resulted in the production of a number of films, some of which were initially banned by the censor board and required many deletions before being allowed for general release. For example, Chopra’s Aj Ki Aurat (Today’s Woman, 1993) illustrates these problems. However, the film, which created a sensation as well as wide controversy both nationally and internationally is Shekar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1995).

It is based on the life of Phoolan Devi, a low caste woman. Married at the age of eleven to a much older man who rapes her she flees home, gets into trouble and is locked up by the police who gang rape her. After her release from jail, she joins a gang of bandits and emerges as the most celebrated outlaw in Northen India’s Chambal valley. Her activities foreground issues of caste, class, and gender warfare in rural India. There were other films, which belonged to this category such as Sherni, Khoon Bhari Mang, Commando, Kali Ganga, which display many features in common.

Commenting on these films, Lalitha Gopalan observes that a standard narrative pattern characterizes many of these films. “films open around family settings which appear happy and normal according to Hindi film conventions, but with a difference: there is a marked absence of dominant paternal figures. The female protagonist is always a working woman with a strong presence on screen.

Conditions

These initial conditions are upset when the female protagonist is raped. The raped woman files charges against the perpetrator who is easily identifiable. Court- room plays a significant role in these films, if only to demonstrate the state’s inability to convict the rapist on the one hand and to precipitate a narrative crisis on the other.”.

She goes on to make the observation that this miscarriage of justice marks a turning point in the film allowing the transformation of the female protagonist from a sexual and judicial victim to and avenging woman. These lady avenger films had the effect of both complicating and widening the discursive boundaries that shaped cultural citizenship in popular cinema.

There are a number of factors that we need to bear in mind. The crisis of the state was deepening; violence was rampant; patriarchy was extending its tentacles; the law and the judicial system were ineffective to do justice to female victims; women were becoming increasingly subject to male violence; there was no other recourse but to acquire a sense of agency for themselves.

(To be continued)