Re-situating Bollywood cinema

The term Bollywood has gained wide currency during the past two decades or so. It is highlightred not only in the press and popular magazines but also in serious journals and academic forums.

Several important books have been written on this subject, emphasising the significance of this topic This term, which originated in Indian film journals like Screen was later put into circulation outside India by such sites as BBC’s channel Four. Originally, a word of unconcealed derogatory intent, over the years it has come to assume more and more a neutral stance, appearing as a term of description rather than disapprobation.

Bollywood cinema occupies an ambiguous space, generating contradictory viewpoints and approaches. Some welcome it as a postmodernist development that challenges the modernist aesthetic of cinema, while others condemn it as inane, meretricious and a promoter of uncritical pleasure associated with consumerism.

The most vocal opposition to Bollywood and its champions of it has come from makers of art-house cinema such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan. This is understandable because Bollywood in terms of theme, style, technique and intent stand in direct contrast to the ambitions of the so-called New Cinema of India.

If the cinematic discourse of art films is shaped by the dictates of realism and the psychological complexities of characters, that of Bollywood is driven by the lure of spectacle and the desire to respect the demands of the genre, irrespective of issues of realism and psychological motivation.

Moreover, the artistic filmmakers were greatly helped by the international film festivals and international channels of communication that focused on these films and gave them a greater visibility thereby investing them with a greater legitimacy.

Since, during the past few years, international festivals, internet, serious and popular press both inside and outside India have been calling attention to Bollywood cinema, the transnational limelight that was focused on the artistic cinema and the legitimacy acquired thereby seems to have been taken away.

Interpretation

Bollywood is a term that is interpreted in diverse ways by various critics and commentators. Some use it as a synonym for Indian cinema; this is misleading. Others employ it as coterminous with Indian popular cinema; this is misleading as well in view of the fact that popular films are made in large numbers outside Bombay, in Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh.

Some others employ this term to designate Bombay cinema. This is, in my judgement, far closer to the mark. However, we need to keep in mind that it is a recent phenomenon, and seek to make temporal distinctions within the Bombay commercial cinema. I think it is useful to make an analytical distinction between Indian cinema and Bollywood. Bollywood is both less and more than Indian cinema.

It is less than Indian cinema, because it is confined to Bombay films made during the past decade or so, whereas Indian cinema which has evolved over a period of about one hundred years, consists of the art tradition as exemplified in the works of such directors as Satyajit Ray and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and the various regional cinemas like those in Bengal, Kerala and Assam as well as the other large traditions of popular cinema in Tamilnadu and Andhra Pradesh.

Bollywood is larger than Indian cinema because it covers a much larger area of cinematic reach – distribution and consumption- promoted by VCRs, DVD’s, web sites and satellite television. To put it somewhat simplistically, Indian cinema is largely driven by internal imperatives while Bollywood draws its energy from external sources and resources. This picture is of course complicated by the fact that Indian cinema is being increasingly subject to Bollywoodization.

New structure

There is no doubt that Bollywood cinema introduced a new structure of feeling into Indian popular culture. Films such as Hum Aap Ke Hain Kaun, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenga, Dil To Pagal Hai, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and Taal brought about a newer cosmopolitan sensibility into Indian cinema. There are several constitutive elements, that go into the formation of the structure of feeling that I alluded to above; light entertainment, extravagant use of song and dance, celebration of life in a consumer society, idea of self-containment, young love, traditional family values, a touch of exoticism, glorification of the traditional past, erotic and spectacular display of the body.

Clearly, these different elements do not cohere well, and often produce fissures and fault lines. These become inescapable and indelible features of Bollywood. To phrase it differently, in these Bollywood films, one perceives an uneasy union among globalisation, tradition and capitalist modernity.

To understand the emergence and the popularity of Bollywod cinema, one has to re-situate it in the larger context of Indian social and political developments. Concomitantly, the emergence of Bollywood shines light on a set of political issues that is vital to contemporary Indian life.

In the growth of Bollywood, we see, in the words of the well-known Indian film critic Asish Rajadhyaksha, ‘the Indian state itself negotiating a transition from an earlier era of decolonization and high nationalism into the newer times of globalisation and finance capital.

The BJP’s own investment into the concept of cultural nationalism – a rather freer form of civilisational belonging explicitly delinked from political rights of citizenship, indeed delinked from the state itself, replaced by the rampant proliferation of phrases like, phir bi dil hai hindustani; (after all the heart is Indian), yeh mera India (I love my India) – has clearly taken the lead in resuscitating the concept of nation from the very real threats that the State faces as an institution of legitimation….’ When examining the importance of Bollywood as an important cultural phenomenon, we need to take into consideration the role of the Non Resident Indians (NRI’s).

The economic liberalisation that occurred in many parts of the world resulted in citizens living abroad deciding to invest in their original countries; this is clearly seen in the case of the NRI’s who have been conferred special privileges so as to attract their investments.

This is accompanied by anther prominent trend, namely, the desire of diasporic Indians to carve out a Hindu identity for themselves in alien lands often resulting in the active support of right-wing movements in India and the quest for a glorified past that occupies a transcendental space.

Significance

To understand the true meaning and significance of the phenomenon of Bollywood cinema, we need to examine a number of cultural forces that are continually shaping it. Here I wish to focus on two of them – globalisation and cultural narcissism.

Globalisation is both a historical phenomenon and a way of making sense of the world. This is to say that it has connections to both being in the world and knowing the world, and that they are vitally interconnected. The worldwide spread of multinational capital, the trans-nationalisation of economies, the stupendous developments in communication technologies, the fall of the Soviet Union among others, have contributed to the rise of this historical phenomenon.

The problematic of understanding this new phenomenon has given rise to a new state of mind, a new style of thinking that constitutes an important consequence of globalisation.

The complex and multifaceted relationship between the global and the local is most vividly represented in cinema. Indian cinema is, of course, no exception. It foregrounds issues of cultural modernity, ethnicity, secularism, cosmopolitanism, belonging in diverse ways in which nationhood is re-imagined.

Cinema emerged in India, as in most other Asian countries, as a consequence of the complex dynamics of globalism and localism. Therefore, we need to situate cinema at the interface between the global and the local in order to understand its true dimensions.

One of the defining features of contemporary society is the increasingly complex interplay between the imperatives of the global and the local. Clearly, this process has been in operation for centuries, but the velocity and intensity of it have risen sharply in the past five decades.

This interaction has precipitated remarkable transformations in the spaces of politics, economics, culture as newer forms of capital originating in the West began to imprint their local visibilities and shape in unanticipated ways historically formed practices.

How symbolic forms and modalities of association with Western capitalism are transformed, localised, and legitimised in most countries throughout the world in relation to their historical narratives and changing life worlds is at the heart of the discourse of what is referred to as ‘glocalism.’ And this discourse is vitally linked to cinema as is clearly borne out by Indian films.

Dialectic

A useful way of understanding the dialectic between the global and the local is through an examination of the production of newer localities. When we examine the intersecting narratives of the global and the local, what we are seeking to do is to focus on the production of the local and its ever-changing contours in response to the demands of the global.

As Rob Wilson and I have pointed out, in our book Global/Local, the local is never static; its boundaries, both temporal and spatial, are subject to ceaseless change. It is characterised by a web of power plays, contestations, pluralised histories, struggles over signs with many meanings and asymmetrical exchanges.

The local is constantly transforming and reinventing itself as it seeks to move beyond itself and engage the trans-local. What is interesting about cinema is that it foregrounds and gives figurality to these complicated processes in compellingly interesting ways. Indian cinema furnishes us with ample and cogent examples that are illustrative of this trend.

The well-known American anthropologist Clifford Geertz is surely right when he underlines the need in social re-description for a continual dialectical tracking between the most local of local details and the most global of global structures in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view.

The distinguished thinkers Deleuze and Guatarri focus on this phenomenon when they refer to the notion of de-territorialisation where the production of the local is shaped by the nexus of activities occurring elsewhere. What is interesting about cinema is that it makes available a sign- space for the articulation of the global imaginary and its formation within the phenomenology of the local. A study of Indian filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Mrinal Sen, Adoor Gopalakrishnan (artistic), Ramesh Sippy, Manmohan Desai, and Yash Chopra (popular) should make this evident.

Father of Indian cinema

The play of the global and the local is clearly visible in Indian cinema from the very beginning. D.G. Phalke is generally regarded as the father of Indian cinema. His foray into cinema displays the interaction of the local and the global in interesting ways. He was a talented filmmaker who was deeply interested in the freedom movement.

Commenting on his film ‘Raja Harishcandra’, which is generally regarded as the first Indian film, he remarked, ‘in 1910 I happened to see the film life of Christ in the America-Indian picture palace in Bombay……that day also marked the foundation in India of an industry….While the life of Christ was rolling fast before my physical eyes, I was mentally visualising the gods Sri Krishna, Sri Ramachandra, Gokul, and Ayodhya.

I was gripped by a strange spell. Later he goes on to observe that, ‘during this period, I was constantly preoccupied with the analysis of every film which I saw and in considering whether I could make them here As the Indian film industry grew in strength, the impact of globalism became more and more apparent. Today, with Bollywood, we see it in its starkest form, globalism being a constitutive force of Bollywood. The visual and spatial registers of Bollywood as well as its modes of production, exhibition and consumption cannot be understood without reference to globalisation. Indeed the very term Bollywood bears this out.

The other important cultural force that I wish to call attention to is cultural narcissism. Narcissism is a concept popularised by Sigmund Freud. It focuses on issues of self-absorption, self-love and self-validation. Freud interpreted this concept as operating at a primary and secondary level, the primary level being universally associated with childhood and the secondary being more specialised. Subsequent commentators like Heinz Kohut and Jacques Lacan have sought to expand this concept. In this regard the writings of Jean Laplanche are most interesting in that he seeks to underscore the fact that narcissism is a way of centering narratives.

This has great implications for the understanding of Bollywood. As I stated earlier, the diasporic audiences living outside of India are vital to the existence of Bollywood. They are, for the most part, caught between the imperatives of the mother land they left behind and the adopted country, and this produces interesting result- one of them being the glorification of the Indian past into a transcendental space and the validation of traditional Indian values, notably Hindu values. When one examines works of Bollywood cinema, on observes that this cultural narcissism constitutes a very significant strand in the texture of the films.

Nostalgia

Cultural narcissism is inseparably linked with nostalgia. Nostalgia, which etymologically means homesickness, reconfigures the sense of loss, absence, yearning, displacement and wish fulfillment in interesting and complex ways. Nostalgia and globalisation are vitally linked. Svetlana Boym says that globalisation does not cure nostalgia but exacerbates it. As she comments, ‘globalisation encouraged stronger local attachments. In counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace, and the virtual global village, there is no less global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world.

Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defence mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals. She goes on to remark that nostalgia is a feature of global culture. What is interesting about nostalgia is that it underlines the deep-rooted desire to retreat into a culturally authentic past and the realisation of the impossibility of doing so. This line of thinking has deep implications for the understanding of Bollywood.

Bollywood presents us with an important site in which both the contradictory and supplementary relationships between globalisation and nostalgia are played out. In many of the Bollywood films the narratives of globalisation and consumerism go hand in hand with a longing for a religious, historically glamorised past. Here we find how modernity and the past are straining to read each other.

The inter-animation between globalisation and cultural narcissism in Bollywood cinema can be usefully understood at different levels and at different sites in the filmic discourse. Let us for example consider the visual registers and the production of images. We live in an environment that is saturated with images. This is becoming increasingly so in India as well. We have progressed from a social space in which images were limited in scope and reach and presence into a world in which we are incessantly bombarded with images.

Images emanating from newspapers, magazines, billboards, photographs, cinema, television, videos, and computers are an inescapable part of our lives, and these have deep implications for self-formation as well as cinematic representation. These images create a thick and fragmented world. What is interesting about the images in the new world that we inhabit is that they do not refer to an antecedent social reality and a prior world; instead, they refer to other images.

The consequences of this for cinematic representation are enormous. The glossy, technologically-driven, cosmopolitan images disseminated by Hollywood also carry local nuances. They are not purely Western or trans-local. Many of them are reflective of the intersecting discourses of globalisation and nostalgia. One can examine different locations in this new image world. For my present purposes, I wish to focus on two – space and body. They are of course closely linked in cinematic representation.

Transformation

As a consequence of globalisation, the spaces that govern and, give order to the world we inhabit have undergone significant transformations. The speed that characterises the modern world inevitably has brought the world closer together both spatially and temporally. As Paul Virilio observes, the spaces made available by media of communication are not geographical spaces but spaces of time. One aspect of Bollywood that merits consideration is how the newer awareness of space finds cinematic articulation.

The unusual camera angles, the quick cutting accentuate the newness of the projected space. There is the imprint of the cosmopolitan consumer world in this spatial order; at the same time, the oases of tranquility of religious temples are juxtaposed in interesting ways harking back to earlier times. However, this harking back is guided by the dictates of the moment, underlining the impossibility of re-occupying an originary cultural space.

The reconfiguration of space in cinema is vitally connected with the depiction of the human body, and this is clearly evident in Bollywood films. The body, of course, has always been of central importance in cinematic communication.

In Bollywood, we see the emergence of a new cinematic body that registers the domineering presence of globalisation and consumerism; at the same time, there is a pull towards traditional postures and gestures. The cinematic body of Shah Rukh Khan, one closely identified with Bollywood, as represented in films such as ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’ and ‘Phir Bhi Dil hai Hindustani’ bear testimony to this fact.

As we examine the specularisation of the body, as evidenced in the numerous dance sequences in these films, we see not only the impact of Western MTV but also the presence of the culturally learned body language. It is this intermixture that stamps Bollywood films with a distinct Indian cultural hybridisation. An interesting point about the display of the body in Bollywood films is that it both enhances and disrupts the narrative discourse, drawing attention to itself in interesting ways.

Diasporic existence

To illustrate what I have been saying so far, let me briefly refer to three Bollywood films. The first is Yash Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenga, which is a film about diasporic existence. Baldev Singh is a newsagent who lives in London, longing for his homeland in Punjab. It is his wish to go back to his cultural past by compelling his daughter to marry the son of an old friend. Prior to this trip, his daughter Simran undertakes a tour of Europe; there she happens to meet Raj and falls in love with him. This has the effect of making his autocratic father to want to return immediately to Punjab with his family.

Raj arrives in Punjab and vows to save her from the enforced marriage. With the intention of attaining his goal he makes his way into the household under false pretenses and makes the planned marriage unworkable. In the end, Raj marries Simran.

Yash Chopra has made this story into a highly popular film with Shah Rukh Khan in the male lead. In films like these, globalisation, consumerism, romantic love and cultural essentialism combine to create newer cultural subjectivities for the spectator.

Marriage

The second film that I wish to allude to is Hum Aap Ke hain Kaun by Sooraj Barjatya. This film deals with the institution of marriage. Rajesh and Puja are the nephew and daughter of two extremely wealthy families. The film deals largely with the festivities associated with the marriage of these two in the temple of Ram as well as in the mansions of the two families, allowing the director ample opportunity for the display of spectacle. This film is a re-make of a film made some twenty -two years earlier – ‘Nadiya Ka Paar’ by Rajshri.

The original film was a failure while the remake became a phenomenal success. One reason for its success is the clever way in which capitalist modernity, traditional virtues and the pleasure of sight have been combined; in other words the combining of globalisation and cultural narcissism.

The third film is ‘Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani.’ It once again combines aspects of globalisation and cultural narcissism both agonistically and complementarily. The contemporary world of media is at the heart of the experience of this film.

The specularisation of the consumer society- the gigantic displays of Swatch watches is are an example- fashionable attire, technologies of modernity are combined with the pure love for what is Indian. The title of the film emphasises this fact. What Bollywood films like these do is to ease the transition of audiences into a postmodernist consumer society.

If the films of the fifties and the sixties paved the way for the emergence of society from pre-capitalist to capitalist modes of living, then Bollywood films of the last decade have opened a transitional pathway from nationalist capitalism to postmodernist multinational capitalism and consumerism.

The emphasis on cultural narcissism with its unifying impulses and centering of narratives is a way of countering the discontinuities, fragmentations and de -centering that inevitably follow the path of globalisation. Bolllywood as a popular and tarns-nationalised medium of entertainment is moving forward very rapidly absorbing, re-shaping and giving direction to newer trends. Hence the desire to re-situate it periodically within cultural discourse is a compelling one.