Ire in the Soul: Bollywood's Angry Years

NIKHAT KAZMI

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HarperCollins Publishers India

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Contents •

Introduction

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Bollywood's Burden of Love

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5

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The Angry Young Man

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The Anti-Hero

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Angry Young Love

The Wild Cat and the Wimp

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Index , .

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29 54 84

99

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n ro uc ton

AMANDA: But, why

why, Tom, are you always so rest-

less? Where do you go to, nights?

TOM: I go to the movies. AMANDA: Why do you go to the movies so much, Tom? TOM: I go to the movies because I like adventure. Adventure is something I don't have much of �t work, so I go to the mOVIes. •

AMANDA: But, Tom, you go to the movies entirely too much!

TOM: I like a lot of adventure.

(The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams)

LUUJ

cinema is currently in the throes of a second

coming. Bogged down by the video and the television blight in the mid-eighties, it was suddenly engulfed in a state of emasculation. People had stopped going to movies; movie moghuls had stopped weaving their spells on screen. It was the proverbial chicken and egg situation where film makers blame d the vanishing crowds and the

Ire in the Soul

2

crowds blamed the bad cinema for the empty auditoriums in an industry which produces nearly 900 films annually. Here, where the film makers blamed the viewers for deserting the cinema and viewers indicted the film makers for the indifferent quality of films being churned out from the movie mills, even the allure of Amitabh Bachchan seemed to work no wonders. This despite the fact that his image had whipped up a mind-boggling charisma since

Zanjeer hit the screen in 1973. Even that seemed to have lost its power over the popular imagination in the age of television. The debacle began with Ganga Jamuna Saraswati,

Toofan and Jaadugar and haunted the superstar throughout the end of the 1980s. But for Hum, the rest of the films made in the early 1990s

Akayla, Ind rajeet

all failed to match

the early hysteria of his films. The fog began to lift at the turn of the 1980s, when Mansoor Khan made Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak. A small film with new stars and loads of melody, Qayamat Se Qayamat

Tak marked the beginning of a new genre in mainstream cinema. The anger of revenge and individual rebellion was replaced by the anger of love. Here was the time-tested story of love-against-odds, but the treatment was entirely new. Love became a synonym for rebellion and the lovers were no longer the mild dulcet pair of the 1960s who accepted everything, union and separation, as a quirk of fate. The success of Qayamat Se Qaymnat Tak was followed by an unstinted applause for Tezaab, Oil, Sanam Bezuafa,

Maine Pyar Kiya, Aashiqui, Oil Hai Kz' Manta Nahin and the like. It was' Action' all over again: cameras were rolling, tickets were selling, profits were spiralling and cinema was rising from its slumber once again. Until every other film became just another Qayamat Se

Qayamat Tak

a pair of new faces, a load of music, now

sounding insignificant, and love strewn with impediments. Cinema again began to reverberate with Cl sense of deja vu.

Introduction

3

Then there was the grand arrival of the Khalnayak, the anti-hero. Films like Khalnayak, Baazigar, Oarr seemed to have lifted the curtain on an entirely virginal terrain. Here, for the first time, there was a hero who was irresistible because he was bad; a plot that was engrossing because it was crooked and a treatment that appeared fresh because it dared to venture into the grey areas of the psyche. The terrorist of Khalnayak, the demented lover of Oarr and the shrewd homicidal hero of Baazigar who maintained his -

charisma despite ruthlessly flinging his beloved from a high-rise building: these became the icons of the changing times. The 1 990s then bear witness to a scenario, when the crowds are returning to cinema on the one hand. And on the other, cinema is being imbued with a sense of explo­ ration. No superstars, no super showmen, just pure cinema, where a film succeeds on the strength of its stor'yline, dramatic content, characterizations, music

. in

short, on its overall appeal. An age when Hum Aapke Hain

Kaun, traditionally described as a family social, runs shoul­ der to shoulder with Karan Arjun, the timeless pot-boiler that revolves round the leitmotif of revenge through re­ birth. An age when an actor like Nana Patekar is able to create a furore at the box office with his fiery rantings in

Krantiveer along with the scintillating presence of the new stars on the horizon

Shah Rukh Khan, Ajay Devgan,

Salman Khan. A period when stalwarts like Yash Chopra ann Subhash Ghai co-exist with the brat pack of new di­ recwrs like David Dhawan, Sooraj Barjatya, Mansoor Khan. A decade when the Supreme Court realizes the importance of cinema and indicts it for its ill-effects on the personality of the real life criminal Auto Shankar who blamed cinema for his excesses (murdering six prostitutes for which he was served the death sentence in 1994 and Was hanged in 1995) during his defence.

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pr e sent study is (Ill ilttempl. to CilptUrL' thL' glory of popular Hindi CillL'lna; to look t-'chind the pI1al1ti.ISI11agori<1 and find out why the l1Ii1gic w()rks. Why does Tom like to go to the movies llguin i1nd i1gi1in? For a.dventure i1lone? The discussion is centred around contelllpori1ry moill­ stream c i n em a C\nd covers the last three dl'Gides -,vhicl! have been divided into three bro(ld categories: the i1ge ut' the angry young n 1 iln, i1ngry young love and the cinem,l of the ilnti-hcro. Since the heroine has a\\\'o\,s bl'cn
-

1 Bollywood's Burden

Love

0

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an cinem.() change cl F'('oplc,

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society,

�n indi\'lduZlI?

Does the moving image hCl\'c the powcr to induce shift� in stands, ideologies, \',ltue syskms) Js

,I

film

more

th<111

fantastie<:d form?'1\ mctClphor without nW
full of fi rst person Zlccounts of how illdi­ viduals were coping \vith sCLlrcity, They r,ln in the fullo\\'print media

W,IS

Ing manner. •

"We were pr,Ktising for

c.horus ;ln d

,lbout 12-years-old, WClS in the frunt lir'\('. i-h� \\ ,I S clL',ll1 in his overalls, but didn t 1,<1\'c much on under the'nl, t-k \\'ClS •

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the <.,fkrnuon had not had C1nything tD cat sinc.t' the doy bd(lfl:." •

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10\'(' children

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to bin'c'

Ire in tile 50111

6

children of my own. But to hiwe one now, as I am going to, is almost more than 1 can stand. . I have four step .

children, so there are six in my family. I need fruit and vegetables. I need rest. I need yards of material for shirts and gowns. I have no blankets. I need baby clothes . I hate . .

charity...but my condition now not only forces m e to take chari ty but even ask for it."1 •

"Mrs. Schmidt took her five-year-old son Albert into J

the kitchen and turned on the gas . .'I don't know what I .

am going to give the children to eat/ said a note she had written for her husband. 'They are already half starved. I think it best to go into eternity and take little Albert along'. "2 The most persistent image of the Depression, as it turned out then, was neither Hitler nor Mussolini, but that of a •

small child, dressed in welfare clothing, unsmiling, unresponsive as he pauses to stare through the windows of a grocery store, his legs noticeably thin and his stomach slightly swollen. Almost like a gaunt Jackie Coogan. In November 1930, during an emergency Whi te House

meeting on Child Health and Protection, President Hoover was forced to admit that six million American children were chronically undernourished. Nevertheless, he imme-

diatel y added that there was no need for the policy makers und mandarins to be discouraged since at the same time, there are thirty-five million reasonably normal, cheerful human electrons radiating joy and mischief, hope and faith. Their faces are turned towards the lights

theirs is

the life of great adventure. These are the vivid, romping everyday children, our

own

and our neighbours.

Stmk, almost brut,1l insensitivity, this may seem, on first appraisal. But i1 second look is i111 it takes, to revei11 the 1.

Peter Ste\'(�n,

2.

Ibid, p.37

cd,

"Jump Cut"

in R<'Ii(l('('1I Till' Lill(,�

(1985),

p.37

Bollt/wood's Bl/reil'll

7

of LO('I'

shrewd intelligence thut lies behind this deliberate creation of the image of the other side of re a l ity. During those years o f gruelling poverty and starvation, Hoover's juxtaposition of the image of the w1dernourished American child against thirty-five million rosy-cheeked cherubs was not only timely, expedient and ingenious, but showed how easy it

was to obfuscate reali ty by creating a powerful cmmter­ image in the face of an existing unpleasant one. Charles Eckart, in his seminal essay on Shirle y Temple

elucidates this power of t h e moving image . He points out , "as the days gre'w shorter and grayer, it became obvious that for the millions, the hardest days were stil l ahead. Those already mentally and physically stunted by years of malnutrition would knovv many more years of diminished

existence before the economic boom of World War II would turn the depression around. And a few parents, broken

w1der the responsibility of caring for hungry, ill and con­ stantlv irritable children, would kill one or more of them /

- and sometimes, themselves. But then, on the other hand, there was Shi rley Temple."" Shirley Temple, who in the mid 1930s, when 20 million people were on relief, awoke in the morning singing the song 'Early Bird'; whose economics declared that was worth more t han

Cl

a

n ic k el

dollar; whose message of love,

caring and sha r i n g mer el y reiterated President Hoover's observations about Depression being 'only

a

s ta t e

of the

mind .' During the Depression, it was cinema that became the

saviour both for the people and the policy makers. While politicians directly chilfged Hollywood with the task of "cheering Americuns up", studio i d e o lo g t es like Jack '_

Warner and Louis B. Mayer

st u di ousl

y took up their new

roles as shapers of public (lttitudes. The ph en om enon of J.

[bid, pp. 42-41

Ire in the 50111

8

Shirley Temple was carefully nurtured to create the counter image in films like

Lit tle Miss Marker, Brigh t Eyes, Curly Top , Our Little Girl, The Lit tlest Rebel, Poor Little R ich Girl . As a

tiny, adorable, warm ball of love that was in a state of perpetual motion

. dancing, strutting, beaming, w hee­

dling, chiding, radiating, kissing

her principal function

in all these films was to soften hard hearts (specially the wealthy, to intercede on behalf of others, to effect liaisons between members of opposed social classes and occasion­ ally to regenerate an emaciated populace) . Thus on the one hand, there was reality

starvation,

privation, unemployment, death . On the other, there was the image

Shirley Temple, bouncing, jumping, singing,

dancing, full of a natural

joie de vivre,

presenting the only

solution to the current malaise in film after film: the trans­ forming power of love . As Eckart points out: "And now we hear her voice announcing that the Depression is over; that it never ex­ isted; that it is ending in each and every of her films; that these films are playing at our neighbourhood theatres and that we should come and see them, and that we m ust learn to love children and to weep for them and open up our hearts to them, that we m ustn't hate rich people because most of them are old and unhappy and unloved, that we should learn to sing at our own work and dance away our weariness, that anyone can be an old sourpuss about rick­ ets and protein deficiency but only Shirley Temple fans can laugh their pathology away."4 Cinema then isn't actually what it is taken to be: an impermanent tryst with make-believe, regurgitated with a diet of popcorn and ice creams, its succulence lasting only till the lights are turned on. Somewhere along the regur­ gitation, there is assimilation, affirmation and actualisation 4.

Ibid, p.

51

Bollywood's Burden of Love

9

a l so . The power of the medium was recognized both by Hitler and Mussolini, who cul tivated it as an ideological weapon to further their own political interests . The occupation of Denzig was deliberately done in a way that would allow the use of the best camera angles to the film crew. For a similar purpose, Hitler commissioned Leni Riefenstahl to make

Triu mph of the Will,

a film tha t would later serve as

the official Nazi record of the Nuremberg party rally of

1934 .

Preparations for the rally were made along w ith the

preparations for the camera work . T he objec tive was to present H i tler and other Nazi leaders in the best possible light, for which a staff of 1 20 was employed. T hey included 40 cameramen. Again, at the peak of the war, when de­ struction was the order of the day, the German newsreels showed beautiful parks and lawns peopled by handsome men and beautiful women, moving around to the accom­ paniment of the soft sensuous music in the backgroun d .

An image which denied the existence of fighting, blood­ shed and human brutality of the worst' kind . Shirley Temple's burden of love has not been laid to rest through all these years of cinematic history. Cinema con­ tinues to play the role of the traditiona l healer of society and the s tudio ideol ogues have never stopped churning out a cinema of pacification and passivity: the twin objec•

tives of the media . If Temple could talk about the transforming power of love in the 1 930s during the peak of the G reat Depression and endearingly u rge that everyone would have enough if the haves learnt to share and the h ave-nots learnt to' bear, then Mani Ratnam re-echoes simi­ lar sentiments in 1 995, when the country had yet to ward off the communal scourge. Set against the Bombay riots of 1 993, which followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the film

Bombay

reitera tes

Temple's message of love as the only panacea for all ills.

[re in the SOlll

10

Trapped in the thick of a mad riot, with mobsters lusting for blood- closing in from all sides, the hero breaks into a song which urges the sword a'nd the trident-wielding people to stop. Ruk ja, ruk ja! blares the background music as the soundtrack repeatedly gushes forth about the essen­ tial brotherhood of all mankind. This at a time when the word 'Hindu' came to stand for the trident-wielding Muslim basher and 'Muslim' meant the hard-boilpd fanatic with his pro-Pakistan ideology. The film obviously recog­ nizes no such differences of religion, caste and creed as the background song declares:

"Apni zameen, apna gagan yeh Dushman bane, apne hi hum Mazhab ko chodo, wafan ki socho Hindustani hain pehle hum T. 10 ru k' Jao ... 11

(This is our land, this is our sky; why then are we our own enemies? Forget about religion, think about the na­ tion; we are Indians first and foremost, so stop, just stop.) Confronted by this message of love, they stop. Murder­ ous mobs who seemed to have let go of reason, simply drop their weapons and there, in the middle of the smoke and the stench of human flesh, the hunters and the victims hold hands, hug each other and celebrate their Indiarmess. This, for the film maker is then the primer's principles for peace and communal amity. At a time when the country was being ripped apart by communal fires and when religious fanaticism was on the rampage, Ratnam chooses to paint the picture of the ideal Muslim and the perfect Hindu. While Shekhar (Arvind Swamy) and Shaila Bano (Manisha Koirala) the hero and the heroine who rebel against their familial orthodoxy and marry despite the communally surcharged air around may be the protagonists of Bombay, it is actually the two

Bollywood's Burden of Love

11

fathers who turn out to be the true prototypes of the com­ mon Indian, the hoi polloi for whom religion is an undeni­ able part of daily life. At the onset, they begin as natural enemies. Bred in a rural society, seeped in tradition, the two obviously meet under the shadow of incipient antagonism and communal distrust.

A tense moment in Bombay

Shekhar's father, a hard-core Hindu Brahmin, wants Rahim, Shaila Bano's father, to give him 2000 bricks in­ scribed with the word 'Ram'. The bricks, he says, are meant for the construction of the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya. Ob­ viously, Rahim sees red and springs at his would-be customer's throat (Rahim is the owner of a brick kiln) in a bloody rage. But they don't spill blood. Later, the two fight over the religious initiation of their grandchildren, a pair of twins. But underlying their outward hostility, there is a childlike pique, which lends an innocence to their rancour so that, when Bombay begins to burn, the two end up as kindred souls, members of a single family or what

12

Ire in the Soul

you will. The Muslim saves the Hindu from a murderous mob and the Brahmin, in turn, lays down his life in a bid to save the Koran, the holy book of the Muslims, from desecration. These, the film insists, are true Indians who take their religion as seriously as the unifying credo of Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai. This at a time, when the polar­ ization of the two communities seemed to have reached a state of no return and the communal frenzy could hardly be containe� with simplistic messages of love, unity and fraternity. Nevertheless, Bombay became a box-office success de­ spite the controversies and the temporary bans. The chi­ mera seemed to have worked again. The good Hindu saves the Muslim. The good Muslim protects the Hindu. The good cops shield everyone. And out of the ashes of despair and ,dissonance, phoneix-like, a new India is being born. Over the ashes of the burning city, rises the human chain formed by all the city dweller,s. One that transcends all barriers of class, caste, community and religion. National­ ity being the only cementing factor here. Yes, Bombay proves once again that with a little bit of love, Gods do rest in their heavens and all becomes right with the nation. Over the last decade, a reiteration of this state of national well-beir.g has become a cinematic obsession with film makers. And successfully so. For, in terms of pure econom­ ics, all the films which have talked of the 'foreign hand' that is responsible for internal dissension and decay have been sure-fire hits at the box office. Shekhar Kapoor's Mr. India blamed the bomb blasts (a series of bomb blasts ripped through the nation which were reportedly held to be the handiwork of Punjab terrorists) on Mr. Mugambo, the man from nowhere. Subhash Ghai's Karma pitted the dubious Dr. Deng (Anupam Kher) and his private army against the patriotism of the principled jailer (Dilip Kumar) and his three sons of the nation. All of whom repeatedly echoed

Bollywood's Burden of Love

13

the chorus Har karam apna karenge ae watan tere liye (we shall perform all our tasks for your well-being, oh nation!) in the course of the murder and the mayhem let loose by the . crafty alien. -': .

....�..,...

Naseeruddin Shah in Tahalka

In Anil Sharma's Tahalka and Hukumat, the enemy was again the ungodly outsider (Amrish Puri and Sadashiv Amrapurkar), who would infiltrate the sacrosanct border, loot, plunder and disrupt the natural harmony of the nation. In Mehul Kumar's Tiranga, there was the swarthy enemy from beyond, Pralaynath, Goondaswamy who abducted the Indian scietltists to execute his nefarious nuclear missile plan aimed at destroying the nation. But the most important in this genre of cinema that takes upon itself the responsibility of propagating national well­ being are Mani Ratnam's Rojq and Mehul Kumar's Krantiveer. Here, for the first time, the enemy loses his anonymity and is invested with a face, an identity and a clear-cut methodology to his mad designs. Set against the

14

Ire in the Soul

insurgency in Kashmir, Roja dramatizes a real life incident - the abduction of a scientist to indict Pakistan for aiding and abetting terrorism in India. The scientist (Arvind Swamy) naturally turns out to be the grand Indian patriot who douses the flames emanating from the national flag with his own body and confronts the militancy of the hard-core terrorist with his straight-from-the-heart tete-a­ tete about nationhood, national love and the like. In a telling scene of the film, the engineer Rishi Kumar, indicts the Kashmiri militant, Liaqat (Pankaj Kapoor) for his treachery. According to Rishi, the terrorists are merely puppets in. the hands of Pakistan and their 'war against innocents' is actually disallowed not only by the law of the land but by their religion too. Padosi desh ki kathputli ho tu rn, tumhari apni akal kahan hai, he queries. He tells the insurgent to shed his violent ways since India cannot be divided. Moreover this wanton shedding of innocent blood was surely anti-Islam too. Yeh u grawaad, yeh maul, yeh tabaahi,

kya Allah ko manzoor hai ... Yeh barbaadi, yeh bandook chod do . ..yeh desh kabhi nahin bat sakta, he exhorts. (This insur­ gency, this death, this destruction, does Allah allow it! Give up this destruction, this gun ... India can never be divided.) Needless to say, the hard-core terrorist has a change of heart by the end of the film. In due course, he realizes that the engineer is right, the enemy is the neighbouring coun­ try and patriotism is the only 'ism' worth pursuing.

Unhonen kaha dange-fasad karte rehna, baki sab hum pe chod do. A b u nhonen ha mare bachchon ko bhun diya, ga ddari ki humse ...yeh zulm, yeh barbaadi, yeh ugnvaad kyon? he laments. Pakistan told us to carry on with murder and (They mayhem, the rest they would take care of. Now they have mercilessly killed our young ones...they have betrayed us. Why this oppression, this destruction, this terrorism.) Indeed, a timely lesson, both for the terrorist and the common man who might have held the nation-state as

15

Bollywood's Burden of Love

partly responsibl-e for the current rise in insurgency. But for

Raia .

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Nana Patekar in Krantiveer

In Kranti­ veer, the hero who tries to avenge the death of all the innocents in the city's communal c a r n a g e (again a ref­ erence to the Bombay riots of 1993) ren­ ders a fiery patriotic speech be­ fore his pub­ lic execution for killing the corrupt min­ ister. Here again, he identifies the

enemy as the 'buglike nation next door' (pissu jaisa padosi desh). He then lambasts the neighbouring state for trying to divide the country and condemns his fellow citizens for their cowardice and non-action: Yeh pissu jaisa hamara

padosi desh, jo ek sui bhi nahin bana sakta, hamare desh ko todne ka sapna dekh raha hai. Woh yeh sapna dekh sakta hai kyonki yahan murde rehte hain, he exhorts. (This buglike nation next door, which cannot even make a needle today, dreams of breaking up ou�· country. It can nurture such a dream because here there are corpses who dwell.) In a

Ire in

16

the 50111

jingoistic call for militancy, the fiery patriot urges the 'kida­ makoda' (insects), the 'zinda lash' (living corpses) to shed their lethargy and rise in action. Set against the communal frenzy,

Krantiveer also

tries to

disprove the myth about Hindus being Hindus and Mus­ lims being Muslims and the twain never meeting. In an exaggerated, almost melodramatic gesture, the hero inter­ cedes in the middle of a riot, smashes his finger along with his Muslim neighbour 's and glibly mixes the blood of both thereby proving that the Hindu-Muslim bhai bhai bit is not hearsay alone. Undoubtedly,

Krantiveer

is crude, simplistic and ty pi­

cally mainsheam. But the applause that filled the audito­ rium for the peddled secularism and the accolades that resounded after Nana Patekar 's diatribe against corrupt politicians, greedy land grabbers and a pulverized police force proved that it could not be all kitsch and cooked up lies alone . Somewhere popular cinema does strike a chord with its Pandora's box of explanations, rationalizations, inversions and obfuscations. In the first place, it must be remembered that the sudden spate of patriotic films emerged against a backdrop of national decay. The country was being torn apart under a two-pronged attack by secessionist movements in Punjab, Kashmir, the North-East, Bihar and the increasing communalization of the political parties and the people. The demolition of the Babri Masjid, the nation-wide riots, the Bombay blasts, the increasing militancy of the commu­ nal outfits and the loss of life, property and security of the common man: the country was a state-in-peril. Adding to the chaos was the fluid state of the Congress Party (a synonym for stability), the changing governments at the centre and the emergence of new political combina­ tions almost every day. In such

a

state of insecurity and

flux, a reiteration of national identity seemed to work like

Bollywood's Burden of Love

17

a magical balm on frayed psyches. As also, the identifica­ tion of an enemy

the much maligned foreign hand -

which loomed large as a convenient punching bag for a people who didn't know where to vent their ire, whom to hold culpable for their present state of disarray. In such a scenario of deep-rooted fission, popular cinema since the mid-1980s took over the role of cementing and coalescing conflicting forces. The enemy of the nation was

9-

the outsi er, it declared. Terrorists were just way ward kids who had been misled and needed love and understanding to enable them to return to the fold, it assessed. Corruption was the aberration in the character of certain individuals - politicians, policemen

who were mere exceptions to

the general rule. One that believed in the good, clean in­ dividual who was functioning in a good, clean system, it insisted. And the viewers willingly understood, acquiesced and believed. In fact, judging by its dominant mood, popular cinema too has never turned its back on the reality of its times. Political scientist, W.H. Morris-Jones divides the political events of India into three identifiable periods. Concomi­ tantly, popular Hindi cinema can also be roughly divided into three periods on the basis of characters and themes. The first period, from 1947-1952 is represented as a period of construction when, not only is the Constitution adopted, but in every part of the system there is, after the shock of Par­ tition, a kind of self-discovery and mutual assessment. Individuals, institutions and groups were finding their way about in the new world, taking stock of themselves in rela­ tion to others. In such an age, the task was "to hold things together, to ensure survival, to get accustomed to the feel of ,

being on the water, to see to it that the vessels keep afloat."s

5.

Morris-Jones, Tlte Gouenl!nelli alld Politics of India lications, 1979), p. 72

WH.

(B.I. Pub­

[re in the Soul

18

The mood obviously was upbeat and cinema was not im­ pervious- to the optimism in the air. Thus the age of the golden triumvirate Kumar

in cinema.

The second period

Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand and Dilip

( 1952-1964)

is described as one in

which a system which has achieved a recognizable form and stability, undertakes its operational voyage. "It is not a period without substantial difficulties and these make necessary adjustments and amendments in the system. It is also a period in which the more profound and long term disparities of Indian society come more clearly into view. But on the whole, there is the achievement of contain­ ment,"6 writes Morris-Jones. Cinema expresses this sense of achievement through the joie

de vivre of Shammi Kapoor,

the romantic allure of Rajendra Kumar and the feudal grandeur of Raaj Kumar. Heroes who couldn't care less for worldly blues. The third period is described as a reversal of the earlier two, a period of destruction and deadlock. This is a period when the 'sheltered waters' have been replaced by the 'open seas', and the disparities and discontinuities of the Nehruvian period whose clamour 'outside the walls' was heard with distaste, horror and anxiety by the rulers within - these are now the very stuff of political life, in occupa­ tion of the central durbar hall itself. "The sight is not a pretty one," writes Mor ris-Jones. "T here i s much untidiness. The money-ch angers are in the temple and there is a noisy boom in political futures. It is a period of challenge. "7 And popular cinema gears itself to meet this challenge the best way it can. First by recognizing the evil, finding

6.

Ibid,

7. Ibid,

p.

73

p. 73,

Bollywood's Burden of Love

19

an innocuous scapegoat which is almost always an indi­ vidual, never the system and then purging the system from the evil by an individual act of valour. The 'stormy seas' period found its celluloid answer in the persona of the angry young man, immortalized by Amitabh Bachchan in film after film, ever since

Zanjeer hit

the screen in the early 1970s. Bachchan was angry, yes, like the average viewer. But he was never. against the system. On the contrary, he was always against an individual enemy who was held responsible for the protagonist's state of misery. The stupendous success of the image was due, not only to the viewer being able to find a re­ flection of his dominant m o o d i n the l aconic frenzy of a larger-than­

t · · •

,

-

'f'

able to blame it all -

I.

,'

p o v e r t y,

,

dweller 's existence on a recognizable en-,

..

r

I:'

ment, inequity, a slum·

,

. ' - "'� .

life hero, he was also unemploy­

-,

,

I , ...

-t -

�., •

emy. The smuggler, the' drug baron, the. mafia kingpin, the local dada, the scheming industrial­ ist, the unscrupulous rich man out there these are some of the bad guys responsible for the

'badnaseebi'

for t u ne)

busteewallah

of

(ill the

(slum

dweller). No lopsided econOffi-

Arnitabh Bachchan and Rati Agnihotri in Coolie

Ire

20

in the Soul

ics, inequitable systems of distribution, nor any unjust political 'isms' that exist only by perpetuating the everwidening chasm between the haves and the have-nots. No, nothing of this sort. Left to themselves, the have-nots are a happy lot, perchance happier than the haves. For they live together in a shared camaraderie and brotherhood born out of collective poverty. They may not have the money to make ends meet, but they do have their 'izzat' (dignity, the oft-used word in the script) that enables them to hold their head high in any and every situation and of course, 'mehnat' (labour), which ensures them its sweet fruits: a subsistence wage, an honest life, a carefree exist­ ence and a healthy night's sleep. In his introductory shot in Manmohan Desai's Coolie, the railway porter Iqbal descends from above onto the roof of the ·train and proudly declares all his assets to all and sundry: bachpan se hai sir par Allah ka haath, Allahrakha (points to falcon on his shoulder) hai apne saath. Baaju par hai 786 ka billa, bees number ki beedi peeta hoon, kaam karta hoon Coolie ka, aur naam hai Iqbal. (From childhood, Allah has

looked after me, and Allahrakha has been my consort. My arm badge is numbered

786.

I only smoke beedi number

20. I work as a coolie and my name is Iqbal.)

So where is the weltschmertz? Obviously, it doesn't exist with this proletarian hero. Despite the fact that he lives in a tenement that leaks, eats a spartan meal, works endless hours, has a job that entails hard physical labour and earns a pittance for his toils. But the Coolie is not complaining, for the Coolie is actually a rich man, as long as he has God's blessing, his falcon, his sacred badge, his favourite cigarette and his porter's vardi. Rich in the normative sense of the word, where wealth becomes a virtue of the soul. So where is the need for upward mobility, the dissatisfaction and the desire for economic advancement and the anger at the institutional impediments to success? Here, the anger

Bollywood's Burden of Love

21

is against the greedy builder who is out to grab even the little they have. Remove the thorn in the flesh and it is bliss again, irrespective of the have-not state tha t he continues to live in. This, then, is the basic philosophy that lies behind the smoke and fire of all the angry young man's incantations. And it is not merely accidental that the only overtly po­ litical film in this genre of Amitabh Bachchan's film is Inquilab. A film in which the existing ruling party, tactfully -

known as the 5arkari Party (the official party) is ousted from power b y the opposition that ha ils itsel f as the Garibon ki Party (the Party for the Poor). Amitabh, an unemployed graduate who earns his living by selling chanas (gram), is inevitably lured towards the populist party with its pro-poor stand . He not only manages to become a police Inspector with the blessings of the oppo­ sition leader (Kader Khan) but also begins to firmly believe in the need for change. The present government is responsible for the impover­ ished state of the common man, he almost begins to be­ lieve. But it is not long before he realizes his folly. For the opposition party turns out to be a gang of hoodlums, killers and men without morals. Needless to say, the 5arkari Party seems almost saintly in the face of such b estiality. And there is just one option left for the cuckolded soul. He must annihilate the new government and install the older, safer and more moral one . 50 much for status quo! Obviously, the message of Inquilab was simple for an electorate which was gradually being confronted by a vi­ able alterna tive to the existing Congress government in a post-emergency scenario. The status quo was the best. Any change could only spell doom. The opposition was just a pack of hoodlums and goons. 50 there! In such a I-told­ you-so situation, only the foolhardy would opt for change that would necessarily spell their doom.

Ire in the Soul

22 •

I •

•

•

•

•

•

•

Sujata Mehta and Charan Raj in Pratighaat In fact, the scheming politician of Hindi cinema has by arid large remained a comic figure who is more of an individual aberration that needs to be set right. Once the crooked guy is cleared out, in a climactic encounter, the system is back to its former pristine glory. In N. Chandra's

Pratighaat,

the frail and simple female

lecturer (Sujata Mehta) confronts a single goonda-turned­ politician, Kali Prasad. Once he was assassinated by the Durgaesque avatar, the reign of terror also ended and there was nothing left to disturb the idyll of the small town dwellers. Thus, in tenns of political ideology, popular cinema has never propagated a theory of change. What is needed is a movement from 'government of humans' to a humane governance. No change of systems, just a re-orientation of issues, where the dispensables become indispensables; where human concerns are brought back to the centre of

23

Bollywood's Burden of Love

state policy; where politics becomes rooted in ethics. Where

Main desh ki jadh se deemak saaf karne aaya hoon. Maa se diya gaya vachan poora karne aaya hoon, (I am here to destroy the termite from the roots of the nation.) declares the vigilante in InquiZab before all that is required is a clean up mission.

shooting down the new parliament of goons. As for the common man's lot, for him there is the charmed credo of

mehnat, imandari aur lagan

(labour, integ­

rity and diligence) that will see him through. Raj Kapoor enunciated this golden maxim as far back as

Sri

420. After

a life of dishonest accumulation of wealth, the hero re­ nounces all his possessions, picks up his tramp's apparel

garibi ka ilaj char sau bisi nahin, himmat aur mehnat, sare desh ki taraqqi, janta ka eka hai (the antidote to

again and states:

ppverty is not cheating but hard work, courage, the progress of the entire nation and the tmity of the people). Shirley Temple's imperishable, tmdeniable burden of love all over again. The magic of the so-called make-believe always seems to work, despite the fact that the average viewer is astute, choosy and hard to please. Psychologist Sudhir Kakkar points out that cinema is a "collective fantasy, a group day-dream, in contrast to the individualised fantasy incor­ porated in a work of literature, a painting or the so-called art film by an auteur director, in which the balance between imagination and reality, the intermixture of fantasy and experience is infinitely more complex." Cinema then becomes a prism that "reflects dominant psychological concerns, not only at the conscious levels, but specially the hidden unconscious concerns of the millions of men and women who frequent cinema."R

8. Aruna Vasudev, Phillipe Lenglet, Indian Cinema Superbazaar (Vikas, 1983), p. 89

Ire in the Soul

24

The central features of this collective fantasy according to Kakkar are the fulfillment of wishes, the humbling of competitors, and the destruction of the enemies ." And the p rimary p hilosophical tenets of this adult day-dream suggest that " the struggle against difficulties in life is un­ avoidable, but if one faces life's hardships and i ts many, often unjust, impositions with courage and steadfastness, one will eventually emerge victorious and at the conclusion of popular cinema thus, the parents are generally happy and proud, the princess is won and the villains are either ruefully contrite or their battered bodies satisfactorily litter the landscape . Evil too follows the same course as in fairy tales. It may temporarily be in ascendance or usurp the hero's legitimate rights, but i ts failure and defeat are inevi­ table."g Pbpular cinema then has always remained the preserver and propagator of society's ethical and political norms and its role as a pacifier has always increased in times of dis­ tress. Promotion of national well-being, where the enemy of the nation is always an individual (foreign or native), never the political system nor the institution of governance; perpetuation of the success myth where glory and failure are linked with individual effort rather than infrastructural pressures, lack of opportunity and the like; a glorification of poverty, chalUl.elizing popular angst towards a more ilUl.ocuous expression that highlights the influence of di­ vinity, destiny and the karma theory on an individual's life: these have been some of the glorious tasks that popular cinema has been called upon to perform over the years . Along with this, there has been another paramount pre­ occupation: the preservation of the great Indian 'parivar ' (family). Heroes have changed, formulas have multiplied, 11

•

9 . Ibid, pp. 89-90

BoIlywood's Burden of Love

•

25

new themes have been discovered but the obsession with the undivided Indian family has never waned in popular cinema . Even in the 1 990s when globalisation and Western­ ization seem to have made inroads into every aspect of Indian life, the Indian aversion for moderni ty and the emphasis on Bharatiya parampara (Indian tradition) still form the core of the cinematic concern . Focusing upon some of the main trends of Hollywood in recent years, Michael Medved concludes that Hollywood wants to -insist tha t happy marriages do not sell . In short, going by some of the films in the 1 980s and the 1990s, the institution of marriage and the family have become defunct in America. The advertisement lines of Deceived, a 1 991 Goldie Ha wn thriller proclaimed: "she thought her life was perfec t." An ominous warning, believes Medved' to all those "misguided souls in the movie-going audience who O " l e . may have felt satisfied and secure in their own marria g In the course of the film, Goldie appears to have i t all : a glamorous career, a beautiful daughter, a devoted and brilliant husband. However, as the drama progresses, she discovers that her affectionate spouse (John Heard) is ac­ tually leading a triple life, with several false identities and faked deaths, another wife in another city and participates in a murderous international art theft conspiracy. Eventu­ ally there is a bloody confrontation between the hitherto happily married couple. The heinous brute attempts to kill the trusting wife and she fights back tooth and nail in the protracted confrontation . And at the end of i t all, when the nightmare ends and realization dawns, she tearfully deliv­ ers the film's punch line: "It turned out that everything I believed in was a lie ."

1 0 . Michael Medved, Hollywood 1 25

vs.

America

(HarperCollins, 1 993), p .

Ire in the Soul

26

A l ie, the myth of the integrated, happily-ever-after American family, as Hollywood would like the viewers to believe, perpetuated with a spate of films where either the husband, the wife or both are out to destroy the family. In The War of the Roses

(1989),

Kathleen Turner and Michael

Douglas may be married to each other. But they have j ust one mission: to brutally, sadistically destroy each other. In She Devil,

(1989)

the wife who has been abandoned by her

adulterous husband opts for revenge-until-death and suc­ ceeds in her gory p lan. In Scenes From a Mall

(1991 ),

a long

wedded couple ( Betty Midler and Woody Allen) spend the entire movie hurling food and insults at each other while d iscussing th eir various infideli ties and betraya l s . I n ' Thelma and Louis

(1991) Geena Davis runs away from a cold

oppressive marriage as does Julia Roberts i n Sleeping With the Enemy, while i n Marrying Man

(1992) Alec Baldwn

and

Kim Bassinger are a misma tched pair who marry and divorce, three times in succession, alternating moments of burning l ust with explosions of violent rage . Popular Hindi cinema, unlike Hollywood, is not guilty of displaying any contempt wha tsoever for conventional family values . Instead of being anti-family, popular cinema has always been aggressively pro-family. Ghar Ek Mandir, Ghar Ghar Ki Kahani, Ghar Ka Sukh, Ghar Sansar, Ghar Dwar, Parivar, Swarg, Saja n Ka Ghar, Pa t i Patn; Aur Woh

the

average film has always upheld the integrated fam i l y where the family-breaker is the Westernized daugh ter-in­ law cast in the mould of the proverbial outsider, the rich, spoi l t daughter-in-law who enters the not-so-rich, never­ theless ecstatic joint family with the single kitchen, the sma l l mandir, the well adjusted kith and kin. This modern, educated outsider wreaks havoc on the traditional set-up with her newfangled ideas, her mercenary concerns and separatist tendencies (here the family becomes a micro­ cosm for the nation). She taun ts the pious elders, i rrever-

Bollywood's BlIrden of Love

27

ently scorns their a ffections and eventually b reaks the family apart. But only temporarily. For after suffering the woes of the outside world, she shamefacedly returns to the family fold. But only after she has been w ell-beaten and prop erly chastened . Th e eld ers obviously fo rgiv e h er, b laming all her misdemeanours on her 'modern' educa­ ti on . Strangely, this scorn for the modern, liberal, independent woman finds expression even today i n films like Maine Pyar Kiya, and Hu m Aapke Hain Kau n . In both these films (box office record smashers), the traditional h eroine i s j u x t a posed a ga i n s t t h e Wes ternized woman ( P a r ve z Dastur, Sahila Chaddha and Bindu) i n a manner where the Indianness of the heroine stands out as sacrosanct before the comic modernity of the other. Both Suman and Nisha, who know how to shell peas, fry pakoras, make h alwa, •

•

,

./

Bask i ng i n tradi tion: A scene from

I

Hum Aapke Haill Kmlll

28

Ire in

the Soul

who never question their elders, who are well-versed in the religious texts, who opt for self-abnegation instead of self­ assertion, who find the meaning of life in fulfilling the basic needs of the family (cooking, washing, cleaning, feeding), who are educated yet never even dream of a career, then become the perfect prototype for the ideal Indian miss. , And sweet is this extended Indian family with its bhai­ bhabhi-devar-didi bindings. Here again, cinema is merely reiterating and even pre­ serving the essential Indianness of the average Indian life­ style . For as Kakar explains, " Most Indians grow up in an extended family, a form of family defined as one in which brothers remain together after marriage and bring their wives into their paternal household. Brothers are expected not only to continue to live together after they marry, but more importantly, to remain steadfast to their parents in devotion and obedience . These ideals of filial loyalty and fraternity are the hallmark of the Indian family."ll Indian cinema too . And in case, the statistical inquiries come up with disturbing truths that families are breaking apart, divorce rates are swelling, single women profession­ als are becoming a generality, very few women are opting for the role of the housewife heroine, then all the better. For the value of a normative cinema is always enhanced when the norm is threatened . Popular Hind i cinema may then not be cinema verite at exaggerated, all . Nevertheless, i t has a reality of its own dramatized and hyperbolic in form . Yet one which does strike a rapport with the viewer, who is willing to spend money and return again and again to the magic of movies. Obviously not for entertainment alone.

1 1 . Vasudev, Aruna op. sit. Ibid, p . 91

i

I

•

I

•

,

•

•

2

hen nothing worked, there were the biceps When no one could do anything, there was the Bosman.

'ilt took 30 mon ths of war before he sprang into action, but comic book super-hero, Bosman has at last joined the side o f the besieged Sarajevans. And the superman look­ alike is ready to take on the Serbs single-handedly . . . " reports

The Sunday Times .

This, mind you, is no ordinary business, no fantasy, no realm of imagination and no pure fiction . This is war. Hard, brutal, real war with real guns, real blood, real death and real destruction . So that, when Jusuf Hasanb egovic, a former lawyer, conceived the idea for Bosman in 1 993 at the height of the Bosnian war, he seemed to have struck an instant chord �mongst the young and old Bosnians alike . "Dear Bosman," wrote Denis Kasumovic, "I wish you c o u l d c o m e to Vo gosca a n d k i l l a l l the e n e m i es . " Kasumovic, a 1 2 -year-old Muslim boy whose family was

expelled from the Serb-held town of Vogosca, was not alone

Ire in the SOlll

30

in his fervent prayer. The comic book was initia ted with a modest sum of $4,000, enough to print just 5,000 c opies that w ere to b e distributed free to soldiers and war orphans . However, after the first issue a lone, Ama Nzuber, an as­

I ,

I

s is tant ed itor w i th the production h ouse state d , " i f we heeded the letters from our readers, we should make it a weekly. " The impediments of course were the financial and technical problems that loomed large in a wa r-stricken e conomy. In a scenario of real life casualties, why was a fictiomil cha racter so popular? Nzuber has an answ er. "For the first time in a IQng time, the people have a hero," she poin ted out and the fact that thi s was no ordinary hero, but one who could save the war-battered populace from the hazards of war w i thout any extra-terrestrial quali ties holds the answer to a vital secret of human psychology. One that bri dges the chasm between the rea l and the fictional world a nd allows the existence of the hero-cult in human l i fe . The comi c book with black and white draw ings o f a hero w ith b ulging b iceps, a b l onde girlfriend and

a

h igh­

1 992. Blurring fiction w i th rea lity, the comic depicts th e April 6 ( 1 992) peace march that was targeted by sniper fire . Th e

powered motorcycle opens on the eve of the war in

young woman, who became the first Sarajevan killed in the war is p icked up by Bosman and crad led i n his arms . He then sees shots coming from the nearby Hol i day

Inn

hotel

and charges in to rout a band of hooded snipers single­ handed ly. "It's the beginning of h el l ! " h e screams to his gi rl friend and forewarns the imminent d angers of the ongomg war. •

Bosman then visi ts his girlfriend's grandfather, a w ise old man in traditional Muslim robes, who alone knows Bosman's destiny. " It's time for you to get the power you deserve," says the old man, magica lly endowing him w i th a superhero suit that would protect him from harm . Tha t

r

, •

, I ,

.,1

The A ng ry YOllng Man

-

31

night, the TV newscaster wonders aloud who was that brave Bosman who w as faster than Batman, braver than Superman . All this and yet a man: this seems to be the secret of Bosman's success . As a lso Superman, Batman and the like. Strong, i nvincible, fearless, nevertheless, still men w h o may be emulated by a weaker, less powerful section of h umanity. Attempting to analyse his popularity amongst the Bosnian readers, Hasanbegovic points out, "He d oesn't have any superpower. He can't fly or anything." Thus, h e "represents the Bosnians who had help onl y from God and themselves, no one else ." I f Bosman w a s w e l c omed w i th open a rm s b y t h e Bosnians, the death of Superman was met with a hue and cry the w orld over. "You can't take a way our hero, " cried a n anguished reader when the makers of the p o p u l a r fictional hero decided to wrap u p the series and pitted Superman aga inst a more powerful enemy. B oth these emotions

the overzealous acceptance and the sense of

outrage at the arrival and exi t of heroes l i ke Bosman and Superman b ear significant testimony to their ubiqui tous app eal and importance in the common man's life. Wh y did the angry young m a n image c r e a t e d b y Amitabh Bachchan in film after fi lm during the ' 70s whip up such a h ysterical frenzy? What made his screen persona so successful? And why did this film i c delineati on of th e hero become almost a na tional prototype of i ts time? Psy­ chologists would obviously link this unprecedented na­ tional applaus e to a basic need in the human psyche: the need for a superhero . One that w ould explain the strong affection and affinity amongst viewers-readers for charac­ ters l i k e Superman, Bosman, Batman and the l i k e . One of the major defining charac teristics of this figure i s its messianic spiri t . The super h ero i s always wielding the mantle of the 'saviour ' and thi s, for the common m an,

I

[re

32

in the 50111

caught within the daily grind of a gargantuan crushing machine, is like a lifeline. One that sees him through in his habi tual condition of d ecimation, impotency and inability to influence the anonymous forces that control his life . The ,

super hero and his saga works like the much needed daily dose of vitamins for the average man in the street. Throwing light on the inherent need for a hero who promises deliverance in the human psyche, Wilhelm Reich goes back to the rise of fascism in Hitler 's Germany. He points out that fascism was a mass movement which had the popular mandate behind it . " It is generally clear today that fascism is not the act of

a

Hitler or a Mussolini but that

it is the expression of the irrational structure of mass man ."l In other words, Hitler was actually made a hero by the common man. A ccording to Wil helm, the success of Hitler 's nationalistic imperialism and his mass organi ­ sation was to be ascribed to the masses rather than to Hitler himself. "Hitler 's success is to be ascribed neither to his personality nor to the objective role his ideology played in capitalism. Nor for that matter, is it to b e ascribed to a mere 'befogging' of the masses who followed him . We put our finger on the core of the matter: w hat was going on in the masses that they followed a party w hose leadership was objectively as well as subjectively in diametrical opposition to the interests of the working masses?"2 he asks. Obviously for its mass appeal, the National Socialist Movement relied upon the broad layers of the so-called middle classes, i.e ., the millions of private and pubic offi­ cials, middle class merchants and lower and middle class farmers. Profiling such a prototype, Reich states that on the one hand is the semi-impoverished and powerless state of 1.

Wilhelm Reich,

Giroux, 2 . Ibid, p.

The Mass Psychology of Fascism (Farrar, Straus and

1970), p. 69 74

,

33

The Angry YOllng Man ·

the common man; on the other is his identification with the fiihrer or the authoritarian father-figure . liThe more help­ less the mass individual has become owing to his upbring­ ing (defined h ere as sex-economy), the more pronounced is his identification with the fuhrer, the more the childish need for protection is disguised in the form of a feeling a t one with the fuhrer/'3 writes Reich . Thus the need for a messianic leader seems to be an intrinsic part in th e psyche of the mi ddle class man . This being the- irrational structure of mass man which is evident from his very childhood vis-a-vis h is relations in the basic unit of the family. Here, in the purely patriarchal set-up, it is father who knows best. A belief which later grows into the contention that declares the fuhrer-figure knows best. It is a reiteration of the pri mordial Nietzschian belief in the existence of men and supermen

the herd and the heroes,

and the popular cinema of the ' 70s fully exploited this psychological make-up of the middle class mind while creating the persona of the super hero. A psychology that lays down the existence of a few a priori needs like a state of crisis (economic deprivation, exploitation, war, victimization, personal helplessness), the existence of a fellow brethren who is bolder, braver and stronger and finally, th e unconditiona l belief i n th is sup e r m a n's powers of redempt i on. In a l l h i s f i l ms, Amitabh Bachchan has exhibited all those required char­ acteristics. He has belonged to the same economic class as the common man, being either a cooli e, a dock worker, a waiter, a tangewala, a cop, a petty crook. In short, alw ays a small-timer who is equally victimized by the bad guys - smugglers, drug pedlars, dacoits, corrupt politicians, mafia hoods and scheming industrialists. And thirdly, he

3. Ibid,

p.

27

Ire

34

in the So ul

is always cast in the mould of the saviour. Bachchan is always angry and against the evil doers and in his crusade against evil, he seems to tower above his fellow mortals. This vigilante mentality of the hero finds i ts perfect expression in a film like Shahenshah . Inspector Vijay Kumar Srivastava is the son of an honest police Inspector who was falsely i mplicated and suspended for taking a bribe from a group of smugglers . Unable to bear the stigma of dishon­ esty, the good, clean cop commits suicide and leaves be­ hind his young son and wife to face the hostile world and clear the family's name. Seeing his father's corpse dangling from the ceiling, the boy Vijay learns a lesson that lasts him honesty alone is not the best policy i n a a lifetime dishonest world . He realizes that an honest guy needs muscles and gui le too for his morals to survive in a tar­ nished clime.

A mitabh Bachchan in

Shahellshah

Like his father, he too dons the uni form of the cop but between the two there is a world of difference . While the Like his father, he too dons the uniform of the cop but between the two there is a world of difference . While the

The Angry Young Man

35

father chose to follow his credo of honesty and duty within the parameters of the law, Vijay realizes that the world was a bit too crooked to be set straight through formal means. Thus he chooses his own methods to impose the rule of order and law in a murky underworld . Aap to kanoon ka ek mamooli bazu the, jise kanoon ke dushmanon ne ek hi jhatke men . todh diya, maror diya. Magar mujhe koi todh nahi sakta, kyonki main bazu nahin kh ud kanoon banoonga aur aisa kanoon jo khu d mujrimon ko pakdega, khud mukadma s unega aur khud u nka

(You were just an ordinary arm of the law; one which the enemy could twist and break in a single stroke. But no one can break me because I am not the arm of law, I shall be the law itself. A law that apprehends the crimi­ nals, tries them in its own court and then passes its own verdict), he declares before the portrait of his dead father. He then acquires a novel style to combat the brown sugar barons operating within the limits of Shaitan Chowki, his area of jurisdiction. He adopts the split personality of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By day, he is an ordinary crook a friendly, pusillanimous, paan-chewing cop who is ever willing to accept the petty bribe and then turn a blind eye to their felonious games. Everything to prove that he is one of them and all this ethical spinelessness is displayed for the benefit of the crooked guy. But by night, he becomes the Shahenshah, a supermannish figure in a cloak, an armour, steel chains, blessed with super power and super strength . This super guy has just one mission in life: to seek out the bad guys and �et them right with the power of his punches. Ideologically, he is the father (the fiihrer-figure) who is out to set the errant child straight: rishtey mein h u m tumhare baap hote hain, naam hai mera Shahenshah, he announces each time his larger-than-life visage appears on screen before a cowering crook . Technically however, he is the honest, omniscient, omnipotent cop who is the executive, the l eg-

faisla karega

-

-

-

cowering crook . Technically however, he is the honest, omniscient, omnipotent cop who is the executive, the leg-

Ire in the Soul

36

islature and the judiciary all rolled in one. Thereby dispensing with the lengthy system of jurisprudence, full of loopholes, that often victimizes the common man and works in favour of the criminal . Introducing himself, he says he is the cop who does not work for the law. Instead, he makes the law himself. And the verdict of such an officer who transcends all rules is that in his territory, crime will not be able to stand on its feet nor will criminals be able to twist the law to suit their nefarious ends. (Ek aisa afsar jo kanoon khud banata hai ... us afsar ka faisla hai ki uske ilake mein na jurm apne pairon par khada ho sakega na mujrim kanoon ke sir par baithkar nach sakega.) And highlighting this messianic image of the larger­ than-life emperor who rises from within the masses is the peculiar music, ligh ting, costume and background score of the film. In fact, the title song of the film unravels the secret of the super-hero's psyche. It personifies the essence of the Zanjeer, role that he reiterates in almost all his films Deewar, Agneepath, Mard. Andheri raaton mein, s u nsaan rahon par, har jurm mitane ko, ek masiha nikalta hai, jise log shahenshah kehte hai . . (after dark nights, on lonely streets, there comes a messiah to wipe out all crime whom people call Shahenshah) goes the popular song. The keyword here being 'messiah' who h�s a clean-up mission to fulfil for the sake of a powerless mass of humanity. In Shahenshah, he has the welfare of the slum dwellers of Gafoor basti at heart; in Zanjeer, the welfare of the com­ mon man vis-a-vis the smuggler; in Sholay the security of the Ramgarhwallahs and the shredded honour of the Thakur (Sanjeev Kurnar); in Coolie, fulfilment of the basic needs of the Bombay Central porters; in Mard, there is the freedom of the entire nation at stake; in Inquilab, it is the �llible voter who must be freed from the tentacles of the eorrupt politicians . This messiah has two striking characteristics that set him .

The Angry Young Man

37

apart from the rest of the heroes that graced the screen before him.

Amitab h Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor i n Deewaar

Firstly, he is a man from the masses, thus making it easier for the common man to identify with him . And secondly, he is always angry, aggressive and rebellious in his bearing. The turmoil, the injustice and the chaos around has seeped into his psyche, leaving him a man of few words, many grunts and no smiles at all . In Zanjeer, his friend Sher Khan tries his utmost, he sings and dances, merely to make him smile . In Deewar, his girlfriend Anita (Parveen Babi) tries to wipe out the scars of his traumatic childhood with her tender love. In Sho!ay, he prefers to sit alone in the dark ' and serenade the widow in white by playing the mouth organ while his boisterous friend (Dharmendra) is rolling in the hay with the vivacious taangewali, Basanti (Hema Malini) . . In fact, anger has been the hallmark of his image of the lover too . The lover of the 70s-80s, as personified by

38

Ire in the SOld

Amitabh Bachchan in Kabhie-Kabhie, Silsila, Muqaddar Ka Sikandar, Trish ul and the like is strikingly different from a l l the earlier cinematic images. He is neither the Devdas o f Dilip Kumar, the innocent charmer of Raj Kapoor, the genteel Romeo of Rajendra Kumar, the debonair sophisti­ cate of Dilip Kumar, nor the uninhibited wild tomcat of Shammi Kapoor. Instead, he chooses to repress rather than express his love. And when he does , he expresses it more through silence than garrulous articulations of the eternal emotion.

A rn i t a b h a n d R a k h ee i n KtllJ/zie Ka/Jlzic

His macho a p peal

masculine

lies

in his unapproacha b il ity

and

his

mystique lies behind the walls tha t h e h a s stu ­

d iously b u i l t a round h i mself. A nd whenever h e o p ts for sacrifice i n p l ace of consumma tion, he doesn't forget to let the smo u ldering fires k i nd le rel en tlessly _ ... _

- .....

-J

-

--- -

sacri fice i n

---

-

place

- - - --

within .

In Yash

-

of consumma tion,

he

doesn' t forget to let

the smouldering fires k i n d le relentlessly w i th i n . In Yash

The Angry YOllng Mar!

39

Chopra's Kabhie':Kabhie, he voluntarily steps back and con­ vinces his beloved Pooja (Rakhee) to marry the man her parents have chosen for her. He gives up his poetry too and settles down for a conventional marriage and a construc­ tion business. Nevertheless, he is never able to smile again and the pain of repression, separation, pours into his present and colours i t with acrimony and anguish . Several years later, when he meets Pooja, now a happily married , wife and mother, he tells her that he is leading lIa desolate, meaningless existence where there is no light, no destina­ tion, just a lonely drift into darkness " ( Viraan, bematlab . . .

zindagi guzaar raha hoo n . Na koi rosh ni, n a manzil, na chirag, bha tak rahi h ai

i ndag i kahin andheron mein . . . ) Pain, yes. Unmitigated sorrow, indeed . But tinged with a strong undercurrent of anger against fate . So that, this tearless grief is transformed into a virtue and becomes a testimonial of strength . It is only the strong, the brave and the courageous who are not oppressed by grief, the rest the weak and whimpering lot cave in. This is sorrow that cries out for adulation and applause, not sympathy. Thus when Pooja's husband (Shashi Kapoor) expresses his sym­ path y for the couple who had suffered the pangs of un­ requited love all their lives, the angry lover brushes him aside. Explaining the heroism that lies behind their renun­ ciation, he states: Aap hamen samajh na sake, woh dard, zl.Ioh z

kasak, 10011 kl1alish jo hamne dil mein basayi, uska aap a ndaza nah in laga sakte. Hu m jhoote nahin, da rpok nahin, chote nah in,

jaan boojhkar ha l n n e apna pynr ma-bnap ki kh ushi ke liye ku rbaan

doosre ko tabalz karne se pehle, h u m khud tabah ho gaye. Hum ne faisla kiya ki agar raah mein milenge to ek doosre ko

kiya . Kisi

pehchaanege nahin . Badi himmat chahiye iske liye, bada hosla

(you haven't been able to understand us . That pain, tha t agony, that repressed desire that we carry in our hearts, you cannot fathom its exact nature . We are not liars, nor do we lack courage. We have deliberately sacrificed our chahiye . . .

-

-

-

-

- _ . --

.

-

-

-

-

_... .

J

... ... ..

'--" "-t. ...

hearts, you cannot fathom its exact nature. We are not l iars, nor d o we lack courage. We have deliberately sacrificed our

Ire in the SOli!

40

love for the sake of our paren ts . Instead of des troying others, we chose to destroy ourselves . We decided that we would not even recognize each other if we ever met again . For this, you need a lot of determination, a lot of courage . . . ) Again, i n

Muqaddar ka Sikandar,

the hero prefers to nur­

ture a dead-end love for a woman above his class (Rakhee) rather than respond to the undemanding affections of the nautch girl, Zohra (Rekha) . A spirited renunciation all over agai n . For Si kan dar, who had been spurned by h i s Memsaab's father for his lowly status, rises to an economi­ cally higher position in retaliation . Unl i ke the Devdas ilk who would have opted to drown i ts sorrow in drink alone . Thus, both as the vigilante messiah and as th e lover, Arnitabh Bachchan brought to life one common emotion: anger. Unconcealed, untempered, raw anger that found expression in uninhibited aggression . It was this quali ty that set him apart from the earlier hero-images and gave him the label of the anti-hero

a terminology that became

a trend for the first time in popular Hindi cinema. Bachchan was always a simmering volcano of di sconten t . A picture that was painted from one of his earlier films,

Zanjeer,

is

believed to have marked the genesis of the angry young man image. Time and again, he frui tlessly tries to opt for ord er, discipline and normalcy but almost always returns to the fist gam e . Until his girlfriend Mala tells him to forget about normalcy and settle all his unfinished scores for on ce . For the good sweet l i fe cannot be his until the seething volcano within erupts and the lava of discontent flows out.

Tu mhare andar ek jwalamukhi hai aur jab tak woh phatega nahin, lava bahar nahin bahega, wahan meethe paani ki jheel nahin banegi, she tells him . Unlike his earlier counterparts, the anti-hero i s always swimming against the tide. He i s against injustice, corrup­ tion, inequali ty

all social evils . But, he i s never a ' social­

i s t' revolu tionary i n the formal sense of the w ord. For

The Angry YOllng Man

41

though the anger may be ubiquitous in his films, it is by and larg� a private anger that is directed towards a per­ sonal enemy. Tha t this enemy actually happens to be a smuggler, an industrialist, a politician or a mafia don, thereby a menace to society too, is merely incidental to the plot. Bachchan's amelioration of his own lot may a lso include the amelioration of the plight of several others too. But his vendetta is always a personal one. Always against the man who separated his family, ill-treated his mother, . killed his father, molested his wife-beloved or sullied his personal honour. This tenuous balance seems to have been str uck in Zanjeer. In the first place, the film establishes the different l ook of the new hero who was to dominate cinema for more than a d ecade . The drama hinges on an incident of personal trauma. A young boy, Vijay watches the murder of ,his paren ts a t the hands of a small-time smuggler. From his p lace of hiding, he can only see the assassin's bracelet with i ts talisman of a white stallion dangling from his wrists. This one episode is enough to set his teeth on edge and isolate him from the common herd for the rest of his life . The young orphan may have been adopted by an avun­ cular cop and been provided with a normal upbringing. Nevertheless, he is never able to forget the scars of child­ hood which provide him with the requisite spirit of extra­ ordinariness that is juxtaposed against the ordinariness of the others . As a young schoolboy, he sits sullenly in class while the rest of the kids innocently recite Ba-Ba Black Sheep. When the class is over, the ebullient ones tumble out in cohesive bunches but for the little outsider who walks down the corridor alone and as the class settles down to a boisterous game of football, the boy Vijay, sits at the edge of the field, staring into space, w ith not a shadow of a smile on his childish lips. Plagued by unseen ghosts, he is robbed of. his 'normalcy' . Perpetually cast in a state of

.-

42

Ire in the So ul

sol i tary confinement, he passes from an abnormal child­ hood into an equally traumatic adulthood . Not for him the joyous pranks of boyhood nor the simple pleasures of manhood . Despite being firmly embedded in the hai pallai, he always remains a class apart by virtue of his destiny. This basic quality of being different is an integral part of the super hero's psyche and is repeated in most of his films . In Deewar, he is different from his lighthearted brother because of the tatoo mera baap char hai (my father is a thief) that was- inscribed on his arm when he was a li ttle boy. In Agneepath, as Vijay Dinanath Chauhan, the son of a Gandhian school-master who dreamed of bringing electric­ i ty to the village, he encounters his peculiar fate in early childhood again: a false allegation against his father ends with the brutal stoning of the idealist by an irate mob of villagers, led by the landowners and the greedy money­ l ender. The ten-year-old drags his father's corpse in a handcart and performs the last rites, single-handed l y, while his mother is in a state of shock. The macabre death of his noble father, the scorn of the villagers and the pow­ erlessness of the good, clean family in the face of the machiavellian forces of evil: Vijay is doomed to carry the b urden of his father's corpse on his fragile shoulders for­ ever. I t is not merely accidental that he grows up into a mafia don . Rather, his drift into the underworld is a deliberate means adopted to get even with those who sull ied his familial honour and evicted the family from i ts rightful home. But both in Zanjeer and Agneepath, the hero's perso­ nalized war tends to acquire a macro d imension and becomes a fight for the rights of the masses too . In a significant sequence in Zanjeer, the angry rebel lays down his philosophy behind his crusade for social justice . When his wife-to-be expresses her dismay a t his unending state

The A ngry

YOllng Man

43

Getting the whip hand: Amitabh Bachchan in Za1ljeer

of depression and his lack of eager anticipation at their i mpending marriage, the sullen Inspector l ashes o u t against her self-centred, individualistic approach to life . He says caustica l l y : Hum apne ghar mein kh u bsoora t pa rde

lagwayenge aur main yeh jaanne ki koshish nahin karoonga ki is parde ki doosri taraf duniya mein kya ho raha hai; hamare kh ilbs oo rat ghar ke bahar log marte hain to marte rahen . . sm uggleron ki gaadiyan masoom bachchon ko kuchalti rahen. Mujhe in sab se kya mat/ab. Main vaada karta hoon ki agar u nki cheekhen mere kaan tak pahu nchi to main kaan band karloonga, main tu mhari kh u bsoorat zulfon main apne ko chupa loonga. Main tu mhari kh ubsoorat ankhon mein kho jaaonga. Haan Mala h u m zaroor ghar banayenge. Yeh ghar jise duniya ne banaya hai, kitna badsoorat hai . . .kitne zulm, kitni beinsaafi hai, yahi chahti ho to yahi hoga . . . (We shall put beautiful curtains and I shall not try to find out what lies beyond them; if people die outside our beautiful house, let them die, let the cars of smugglers

[re in the Soul

44

crush innocent children. What do I care? I promise that if their cries reach my ears, I shall close them. I shall hide myself in your beautiful hair, I shall drown in your beau­ tiful eyes. Yes Mala, we shall definitely build a beautiful house. This house built by this world is so ugly, so much oppression, so much injustice. You want only this, so be it.) In

Coolie,

,

the protagonist Iqbal (a porter at the Bombay

railway station) is even seen wielding a sickle and a h am­ mer which he declares is the "weapon of the working class" . Flashing it before the evil troika consisting of the corrupt politician, the industrialist and the Railway Board manager, c oolie I qb a l thre a t e n i ng l y decla r e s :

Hu m mazdooron ka yeh hatyaar hai , yeh hamara pet paal bhi sakta hai aur tum jaison ka pet phar bhi sakta hai. Nothing could bear

testimony to his commitment to the worker 's cause more explicitly than this: the very symbol of the communist working class. Again, in both

Deewar

and

Coolie,

h e instigates the

workers to go on strike against the exploitative manoeuvr­ ings of the bos5es. Informal yes, nevertheless trade union­ ism at its cinematic best. Thus the film makers had taken great care to add the requisite touch of 'socialism' to the super-hero's crusade so that the personal war acquires the flavour of a battle of the masses

and Bachchan's voice

seems to echo the protest of the millions against 'zulm' (oppression) and 'na-insaafi' (injustice) . His seems :-0 ' per­ sonify commitment to society at large, as he pledges before

lnquilab, when he becomes an ACP : Main garibon a u r massoomon ki du niya mein ujala laaoonga, matribhoomi ki sewa karoonga, Jarz se kadam nahin hatoonga (I shall bring light into the world of the impov­ his mother's photograph in

erished and the downtrodden, I shall always serve my motherland, my steps shall never deflect from duty). In fact, it is this voice-of-the-millions quality, apart from

The Angry Young Man

45

the anti-hero stance, that was primarily responsible for the stupendous success of Bachchan's films. Most of them

-

Zanjeer, Sholay, Deewar, Naseeb, Coolie, Muqaddar ka Sika ndar grossed millions at the box office and slipped into the superhit category of film economics . Partly responsible for the success of the Bachchan mystique was the timing of the creation of the image of the angry young hero. The period after the Congress split in 1 969, by and large, bore witness to the erosion of the institution of the state . Political scientists have described the 1 970s as a decade that was sullied by 'the crisis of the state'. On the one hand, there was the increasing marginalisation of the common man, on the other, the consensual politics of the Congress was gradually being replaced by a confrontationist attitude tha t found its full manifestation in the Emergency in 1 975 . This is how Rajni Kothari sizes up the socio-political sce­ nario of this decade: "Central to this scenario of social and political erosion is the sharp decline in the legitimacy and authority of what was till recently considered the key institutions of the civil society, namely the modern state . Both the conception of the state as a negative good in which an authoritative assumption of disproportionate power was considered essential for providing order and security and the more positive conception of the state as an instru­ ment of l iberation and transformation have suffered a decline in credibility."4 This was a period when the crisis of the state manifested itself in the crumbling efficacy and legitimacy of the tra­ legisla­ ditional institutions of the state and the polity tures and courts, political parties and the bureaucracy. The post-Independence optimism of the Nehruvian model of -

-

4.

Rajni Kothari, 1988), p .

2

State Agaillst Democracy

(Ajanta Publications,

Ire in the So ul

46

work had petered down into large-scale discontent, unem­ ployment, poverty and unbalanced growth and the Indian landscape became cluttered by large tracts of urban slums festering between miniscule pockets of prosperity. Here was a complete polarization between a state that was in­ capable of carrying out its constitutional obligations and a people who did not know who else to turn to. In such a state of suspense, v ulnerability, and total lack of compre­ hension and given the inherent middle class mindset that longs for a father-figure, the i mage of the super hero who reflects popular discontent seemed to be the perfect answer to the people's prayers . According to Kothari, the crowning concept of the liberal theory of progress, equality and democracy was 'participa­ tion ' . However, he adds, "By the end of the '60s, it became clear that to participate in development was a prerogative of some though proclaimed as the right of all and that, it was in particular denied to the 'masses', the people and the in whose name development took place ."s In such poor a socio-political set-up, the dissenting, protesting, grabbing tactics of the angry young man seemed to illustrate effec­ tive methods of participation. Unfortunately, this was only in the realm of imagination, for Bachchan's histrionics were not only a fantasy displace­ ment for the gullible viewers, they were also built around a bundle of myths. Chinks in the Emperor 's armour? Indeed yes ! In the first place, Bachchan's working class bearings were basically a ruse. Bachchan may have been angry, but his anger was never directed against the state . Much in contrast to the workers' movement which � s always in direct confrontation with the capitalist state. Secondly, Vija y Verma may be

5. Ibid, p.

30 .

The Angry YOllng Man

47

branded the anti-hero but only on the surface. For he is never anti-establishment, anti-morality, nor against the accepted traditions of society. But first the reali ty behind the success myth . Bachchan may have played the coolie (Coolie), the dock w orker (Deewar, Hu m) the waiter (Naseeb), the coal miner (Kaala Patthar), the small-time cop (Zanjeer, Akayla, Indrajeet), the tangewala (Mard) time and again . But did he genuinely have the interests of the working class at heart? Or did he even manage to personalize their problems in the right perspective? In his analysis of E11e! Knievel ( 1972) and The Last A meri­ can Hero ( 1 973), two Hollywood successes which featured working-class heroes, Chuck Klienhans states that these two films are significantly different from the usual work­ ing-class films . Based on a biographical account of motor­ cycle dare-devil Evel Knievel and champion stock car racer, Junior Johnson, the films do not ignore the class origins of their protagonists who are real-life heroes to the working class . This being much against the general trend where the typical presentation of the American myth of success cen­ tres on the hero's trials and triumphs and considers his class origins only long enough to establish the initial 'rags' of the 'rags to riches' theme. Evel Knie11el and The Last A merican Hero d iverge from traditional directions b y p re­ senting heroes whose working-class origins are central to the narrative . However, as Klienhans illustrates, both films remain "within the limits of bourgeois ideology, particu­ larly in dealing with the success myth, for they affirm that individual success is both possible and worth pursuing ."6 The films studiously ignore the existence of institutional obstacles and the absence or denial of opportunities while

6.

Steven,

op.

cit.,

p.

79

Ire in the Soul

48

analysing the failure and final success of the hero. The typical success image in these films is presented through characters who succeed or fail through their own indi­ vidual activity or outlook . Describing this all -pervasive success myth, Klienhans points out that according to this myth, "America is the land of opportunity, males go from log cabins to the White House, the virtues of Horatio Alger ensure success." He believes that "because of its promise of reward for hard labour, the myth serves to distract people from seeing institutional obstacles to striving and from conserving the small number of wealthy and power­ ful at the top of the success pyramid in comparison to the massive base of 'failures' . " 7 The myth promises to those who lack money, educa­ tional advancement and influence the va sl majority of Americans that a personality committed to ambition, determination, perseverance, temperance and hard work will earn its appropriate reward . The harsh reality of American society is sharply at vari­ ance with the myth . In one of the landmark studies on the reality and myth of success among the industrial workers, A u tomobile Workers and the American Dream, Ely Chinoy points out that it is external conditions and not subjective factors that determine success for the working class . He explains that soon after beginning their careers, blue-collar workers find a ceiling on their upward mobility and level of achievement. Thus by denying the possibilities of group activity for the achievement of life's successes, or of measuring failure in political terms, these success myth films subtly reiterate the status quo. For subjectively, when members of the working class find their aspirations impossible to achieve •

7.

Ibid,

p . 66

The Angry YOllng Man

49

in this prevailing ideology of individualism, they resort to self-reproach and an elaborate defensive rationalization of their position . If one pursues the success myth and then fails, one can only blame oneself. Chinoy comments: "To the extent tha t workers focus blame for their failure to rise above the level of wage labour themselves rather than upon the institutions that govern the pursui t of wealth or upon the persons who control those institutions, American society escapes the consequences of its own contradic­ tions."B Even Knievel and Junior Johnson were able to achieve name, fame and success despite their-blue collar back­ ground, their inhuman employers, their unscrupulous rivals and an unfriendly destiny, simply through a combi­ nation of raw nerves, courage, action and an aggressive defiance of authority. According to Klienhans, liThe atti­ tude to authority and the social system in both films fol­ lows a similar pattern acknowledging a genuine prob­ lem, but proposing an ambiguous solution . In both films, the protagonists grow in knowledge as they learn how to bargain with and outwit authority figures so as to establish themselves in the best possible position within the system. They learn to what degree authority can be challenged .") Amitabh Bachchan's personification of the working­ class hero in the films of Salim Javed and Manmohan Desai also fall within the above parameters. In a similar vein, they r e i t e r a t e t h e H o l l y w oo d i a n success-myth f o r m u l a , whereby the coolie may bear the hammer and the sickle and instigate his fellow workers to go on strike. Neverthe­ less, when it comes to the final confrontation, he alone is a blessed as he is with the qualities of a super hero

8 . Ibid, p . 79 9 . Ibid, p. 71

•

Ire in the Soul

50

ma tch for the crooked guys . The rest, the p o w e r less masses, can on ly wait for deliverance. What is notable here is the total nullity of group action as a primary condition for success . The closest cinema comes to any depiction of group ach ievement is always in an extreme situation: the stranded p l a toon, the sinking ship, the l i feboat . Otherwise, it is always the Da rwinian theory of natural selection that is in operation . Secondly, i t is the nature of the enemy which tends to m y s t i fy t h e w o rk i ng-c l a ss problem still further. The vil­ lain of the plot is always the bad guy

the smuggler, the

industrial ist, politician, cor­ rup t bureaucrat, drug pedlar, mafia kingpin, labour don who m u s t be done a w a y w i th through d i rect action . Never a set of misconstrued poli tical and economic rela­ tions responsible for the cre­ a ti o n a n d p e r p e t ua tion of t w o p o l a r i z ed cl asses : the h a v e s a n d t h e h a v e -n o ts . This recogni ti on would obvi­ ously call for structural re­ definitions and the change in sta tus quo while the former entails

a

mere

climactic

cleansing mission . I n Za njeer, i t i s Teja the s m u ggl e r

who

must

be

k i l l ed , i n Coolie, Z a fa r the

Amj ad Khan in

Sholay

Amj ad Khan in

Sholay

enemy of the hero's family;

smuggler

who

m us t

be

k i l l ed , i n Coolie, Z a fa r the enemy of the hero's family;

The A ngry YOl l ng Mnn

51

i n Sholay the dreaded dacoit Gabbar Singh; i n Dee-war, the rival smuggler and in Inquilab the entire Parliament, which has been wrongly infiltrated by the evil opposition, needs to be b l own apart for order to return . All this can only be achieved by heroic aggression, action and dare-devil r y : character tra i ts of the extraordinary hero who h a s risen from amongst the ordinary. I n short, the viewers h a d a neat l i ttle solution to the riddle of destitution and degradati o n . You could either solve your problems like the Shahenshah or i f you lacked the courage, you could just sit back and b l a me yourself for bowing to the bad guy who is p laguing you . No need for revolution, restructuring, redefinitions and reallocation . Even i n his anti-hero stance, the Bachchan persona has its limita tions . Bachchan is not all bad . He is only angry, unsophisticated, roguish and aggressiv e . I n short; h e i s essenti a l l y a l l male . These, however, are j ust superficial aberrations. So tha t, at his core, the angry young man remains

a

good, clean guy who is merely d isgruntled and

demanding. In essence, his is the hard shell that overflows w i th

t h e Sh a k e s p e a r e a n m i l k

of human

kindness .

Bachchan may break the law in most of his films, but only momentarily. Ideologically, he is never against it and at the end o f his crusade, h e a l ways returns to h i s m o th er ' s boso m . This being a metaphor for the accepted order, the establishment, the status quo . In Sholay, the Thakur (Sanjeev Kumar) aptl y defines the e x a c t n a ture o f h i s c rookedness when h e s a y s :

Woh

(Dha rmendra and Amitabh) badmash hain, lekin bahad u r hain, khatarnak hain, is liye ki kha t ron se khelna jante hain, bu rre hain magar insaan hain (They are crooks, nevertheless they are brave; they are dangerous because they know how to p l a y w i th danger; they are bad yet they a re h u ma n ) . The duo play sma ll-time crooks who are willing to do anything to earn a quick buck . However, as the story progress, they -

-

-

--

-

-,

-- - - J

--

-

-

--

-

0

--

-

- .....

�

-- - -

-

.....

-..

- � -J

..

' ...

.. ......

.

.

....

. .......

.

.

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play w i th danger; they are bad yet they are huma n ) . The duo play sma l l-time crooks who are willing to do anything to earn a quick buck . However, as the story progress, they

52

[re in the 50111

are eager to risk their lives to apprehend the dreaded dacoit, Gabbar--$ingh. Not for bags of gold but merely for Gabbar had destroyed the good cop's the sake of justice family and killing him would be nemesis. Thus the two­ penny crooks turn out to be the true soldiers of god in due course . Both in Deewar and Agneepath, the anti-hero bears a soft corner for his mother who symbolizes the moral order in both these films. As he drifts into the world of crime, he is gradually distanced from this mother centredness. In a telling scene in Deewar, the successful smuggler scoffs at his younger brother 's principles which have brought for him merely a middle-class existence, while he has amassed the mandatory millions . "What do you have?" he queries, pointing towards his own wealth . "I have mother," smugly declares the punctilious younger brother, leaving the prodi­ gal speechless, angry, and conscience-stricken . It is this guilt that belies his all-bad status and bears testimony to the fact that this drift from the good, clean life is only a momentary one, born out of expediency. In Agneepath, when the police Inspector exhorts him to mend his ways, he shrugs him off. "This world is very bad. If you want to survive in it, you must be bad yourself," he declares (yeh duniya bahut bigdi hai, is duniya mein zinda reh na hai to bigda hona bahut zaroori hai). Having undergone a traumatic childhood and watched the murder of his idealist, non-violent father, he concl udes that the biggest evil in a harsh world is to be weak . Kamzori ka mail sachai, adarsh, bhagwan se nahin dhulta, taaqat se dhulta hai. Strength and power are all that matters. Truth, ideals, god are all secondary, believes the mafia don . But only half-heartedly. For all along, he is conscious of his mother 's reproachful eyes, is hurt by her scathing remonstrations and refers to hi mself as a 'goonda' . It is only in the end, when he has achieved his mission killed the villain, reinstated his

The Angry Young Man

53

does he fall into his mother's family in its rightful home lap and confesses, Main ghar aa gaya, main burra aadmi nah in, main goonda nahin (I have returned home, 1 am not a bad man, 1 am not a goonda). Neither a goonda, nor a bad guy. Only the prodigal, who like the biblical hero, must return. And he always does after the cathartic denouement. Thus behind the sullen, rough and rugged exterior is the genteel homme who swears by honour, duty, justice and truth. All his trespasses into no­ man's land are merely to let truth and justice prevail. Hence the irresistible lure of the angry young man and his man­ nish mission which provides the viewer a sweet r�lease from servility, powerlessness, exploitation and repression. Fantasy displacement, but fantastic nonetheless.

3 e Anti-Hero •

nd as the '80s slipped into the cataclysmic '90s, Vijay Verma, the quintessential hero of the '70s saw a second coming. This time however as Ballu Balram, the bad .m a n of Khalnayak ( 1993) the Baazigar ( 1 993) or the psychopathic, homicidal lover of Anjaam (1994) and Darr ( 1993) . This metamorphosis was once again in keeping with the times . For Ballu Balram retains the ire of Vijay Verma, but with a pronounced difference that makes him stand apart from the angry young man of the '70s and the angry young lover of the '80s . How does Khalnayak qualify as the anti-hero? In his anger and irreverence for accepted institutions of law and order, he seems to be a mere offspring of the hero immor­ talized by Amitabh Bachchan in films like Zanjeer, Deewar and their ilk. But, in his 'immorality', he stands alone: the agent p rovocateur who heralds a new breed of brave young men who have crossed over on that side of traditional ethics. Ethical iconoclasm then, is the distinguishing char­ acteristic of this negative hero whose negativity lies in his ethics. E thical iconoclasm then, is the distinguishing char­ acteristic of this negative hero whose negativity lies in his

The A n t i-Hero

55

Sanjay

Dutt in

Khalllal(ak

ruthless rejection of society's accepted book of norms . So much so, that while Bachchan's transgressions i n Vijay Verma almost all his films were mostly extra-legal and his clones were guil ty of breaking the law alone the Baazigar is a fugitive, both from the law of the land and the law of the Lord (the moral code) . In his teleological responses, the anti-hero tilts the eth ical balance in his favour and overturns old concepts of righ t and wrong, good and evi l . In their behavioural responses, both the hero and the anti-hero respond to personal (sometimes social) injustice through violence. The perpetrator of the injustice must necessarily be annihilated . Only then will nemesis U 1Jusnce through vIOlence . The perpetrator of the injustice must necessarily be annihilated . Only then will nemesis

[re in the Soul

56

prevail . This is the sole guiding principle that determines the actions of both the protagonists through the entire narrative of their films. But while the hero's mission of vengeance always ends in an expression of guilt and sur­ render to the law of the land, the anti-hero's climactic shot is an ecstatic expression of triumph and self-justification. Pangs of conscience, self-reproach or a shade of apology are totally absent . So that, while in the first instance, ho­ micide becomes unfortunately inevitable, for the anti-hero it becomes triumphantly and perchance rightfully so. The elite journal of opinion, the US Magazine brought out an annual summary of the latest fashions in America in January 1 992 . Emphasizing this trend of the negative hero, the journal declared that 'Evil' is now officially in and 'Good' is definitely out. It stated, "ever since the Joker walked off with a movie called Batman, Evil not Love is what the movies are all about." It noted that all the note­ worthy actors today preferred to play "the devil incarnate," and concluded that movie heroes and their characteri­ zations today lead us to believe that, "in Hollywood, there may be no God, but there certainly is a hell ."! In his ethical iconoclasm, the anti-hero is truly a child of his times. For this moral turpitude is a product of the changing tenor of the '90s. If sociologists were to find a prototype for this decade, they could easily turn to cinema for a real-life look-alike. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers ( 1994), with their predilection for the cul t of gore might seem to reflect society's shifting morals in their crime­ w i thou t-a-twinge-of-conscience behavioural tendencies. As the film maker points out, the film, which was inciden­ tally rated R for extreme violence and graphic carnage, for 11

1 . Michael Medved, Hollywood 203

vs.

America (HarperCollins, 1993), p .

•

The Anti-Hero

•

57

shocking images and for strong language and sexuality, " is merely a reflection of reality. Natural Born Killers, says Stone, "is an attempt to depict the cultural and social land­ scape of the 1 990s in America bigger and distorted to make people think." So that when Mallory says, " I guess I 'm born bad ! " and Mickey declares he discovered his true calling in life when "That I am a he held the shot gun for the first time they are not unravelling the realm natural born killer" of imagination alone. No, Mickey and Mallory, Stone in­ sists, are " the rotten fruits of the 20th century." That Mickey and Mallory are not alone in their glorious ungodliness further testifies to the fact that the '90s is indeed an age marked by a redefinition of evil . Killing a man has not only become a mindless act, i t has also ac­ quired a clinical perfection in a clime that is splattered with global violence. Historical events and newspaper headlines of this period prove that both the capacity to perpetrate and tolerate violence on the part of the state and the common man has reached a much higher plane of acceptance than the earlier decade . On the one hand, there are several psychological studies conducted during this period which unfold a series of startling data on the rising levels of brutality and violence among average individuals. On the other hand, there is the predominance of the death w ish in cinema, TV and fiction too. Oliver Stone's film about a couple of mass murderers, had reportedly been responsible for at least ten killings after its release. In Dallas, a 1 4-year-old boy accused of decapitating a girl after seeing the film, told friends he wanted "to be like the natural born killers." In Paris, a pair of young students went on what looked like a screen­ inspired shooting spree . Stone, however dismissed a l l culpability stating tha t "anyone who murders because of a movie is already a violently disturbed individual . Those ...

58

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in the SOIlI

kinds of people are going to be sparked by anything and the moment of ignition you never can tell." Obviously then, the success of the violent anti-hero image lies in th e fact that the powder keg already lies within the viewer and the image merely ' ignites' the imagi­ nation . The New York Times (March, 1995) reports tha t A new course, 'Murder ' has become the most popular in the history of Amherst College, with more than 300 students enrolled, a fifth of the 1 ,570 student body. That breaks the record of 'Human Sexuality' which was offered in the 1 970s . Explaining the popularity of the course, Professor Austin Sarat points out: "we are a killing society, awash with violence ... murder is a window into American cul­ ture." If America remains the repository of high crime, even a more conventional Britain does not remain immune to the contemporary virus of violence and the accentuated death wish that clouds the human psyche. According to a government study, Juvenile Violence In A Win ner Loser Culture, the rate of violent crime by young­ sters aged between 1 0-16 had risen from 99 .1 per 1 00,000 of the child population to 1 5 1 per 1 00,000 since 1 98 7 . According to the statistics which declares that the 'savage generation' has hit Britain, children are increasingly re­ sponsible for the surge in rapes, shootings, knifings and assaults. Psychologists, magistrates and educationists are most alarmed by the trend of youngsters to turn to violent crime. Some of the recent cases include: .. ..

..

A 1 2-year-old boy in Northwich, Cheshire charged in December with raping an l l -year-old girl . A boy in West Yorkshire charged in the same month with raping an eight-year-old girl days before his 1 3th birthday after inviting her to play computer games . A gang of children, including at least one 1 2-year-old

The A n t i-Hero

It

It

59

arrested recently after terrorising passengers on a train, demanding money and jewellery. Gangs of l O-year-olds in Grimsby, Humberside, who have been carrying out organized muggings of elderly women outside bingo halls. A 1 4-year-old schoolboy, armed with a pellet gun and razor blade, who was running a protection racket in his Humberside school . .

Closer home, the cult of evil too seemed to have gathered its ever increasing band of faithfuls. While individual in­ stances of grotesque violence and increasing incidence of crime, as well as institutionalized brutality have been on the ascent, the pendulum swing towards negativity is more evident in the emergence of new heroes and idols. Stock trader Harshad Mehta may have been guilty of a mega buck seam that cost the national exchequer a handsome sum of money. But umpteen surveys on the mood of the citizenry have not been able to come up with a unanimous national verdict condemning the scamster or his acts. There might have been a time when Mehta's acts could have b een categorically branded as deceit, fraud and therefore bad per se. Not any more. For survey statistics have revealed that Mehta is a hero for many, specially the upwardly mobile youngster who has lionized the 'Bull' for his intel­ ligence and money making business acumen . In a similar vein, th ere is Phoolan Dev i who h as strangely metamorphosed from a dacoit into a political figu re, winning both social sanction and applause. All this despite the fact tha t she has served a prison sentence for her misdemeanors which include alleged cases of arson, loot and the notorious Behmai massacre and still has a number of cases pending against her. Obviously then, ethical amorphousness is the defining characteristic of this decade that struggles to find a new

Ire in the Soul

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equilibri um between the pure good and th e p ure evi l . Describing the changes on the socio- political firmament i n the post ' 80s, Rajni Kothari points out tha t during the decades since the Emergency,

11

crime and violence h ave

known no boundaries and have raised their heads in the most gha stly of ways . The lower classes and the vulnerable strata of society have suffered severely including physical dismemberment and death . Individual safety and securi ty have declined precipi tously, goonda raj i s on the rise and i s often promoted by the strong men of poli tics, community orgies have taken place in the presence of local pol i ce, native forms of cruelty have been indulged in by villagers fru strated a t the collapse of th e regular machinery of law and order, and there is a growing feeling in some areas that one had to f2nd for oneself and in the process, use any means that comes ones way."2 Describing the current national mood as one that is "less of discontent and more of dismay and growing d isori en­ ta tion," Kothari sums up the current years as a period of crisis . " The decade and more since emergency has brought home to us the increasing irrelevance of mere regimes at the top . . . For some i t is basically a crisis of economic p er­ formance, for others, a crisis of leadership, for still others, a crisis of character."3 It is this crisis of character which has gradually woven its way into the cinematic discourse too . So tha t, if the anger of the ' 70s h ero was directed b oth against a particular enemy and the world in general, the anti-hero's bel l i gerence bears no traces of any kind of

Hlel fanschau llng . Increasingly, the current media h a s become peopled by

2. 3.

Rajni Kothari, 1988), p . 98 Ibid, p. 98

S t a t e Aga illst Delflocracy

(Ajanta Publications,

The Ant i-Hero

61

a host of heroes who, by the traditional j udgemental stan­ dards, are embroiled in a similar crisis of character with the conflict being waged on an internalized plane . Only here, the crisis is not always followed by a catharsis and the aberrations in the p syche and the personality of the hero must not necessarily be set right for the plot to reach its natural climax. Psychologist J ames C . Dobson describes this current state of ethical amorphousness as a civil war o f values. "Nothing short of a great civil war of values rages today throughout America (almost everywhere) . Two sides with vastly d i fferi ng and incompatible world views a re locked in a bit ter conflict tha t permea tes every level of socie ty. Bloody ba ttles are being fought on a thousand fronts, both inside and outside government," he writes. Cinema too has been caugh t in the throes of a similar civil w ar. There has been a celebration of evil o f late in cinema a nd the star parade boasts of the wolf, the vampire, Franken­ stein: in short, n atural born killers for whom blood and gore is just the ordinary business of l i fe. In his a utobiog­ raphy

The Name Above The Title,

Frank Capra, the three

times Oscar w inner, tried to dra w attention to the a l tered attitudes of cinema that forced him to turn his back on a medium that no longer talked of love, justice, mercy, com­ passion . He laments : "the winds of change blew through the drea m factories of make-believe, tore a t i ts crinol ine tatters . . . The hedonists, the homosexuals, the h emophi liac bleeding-hearts, the God-haters, the quick-buck artists who s ubstituted shock for talent all cried, 'Shake them'! "Rattle them! God is dead . Long live Pleasure! Nudi ty? Yea ! Wife-swapping? Yea ! Liberate the world from p rudery. Emancipate our films from m oralit y ! " "There was dancing in the street among the disciples of lewdness and violence. Sentiment was dead, they cried . And so was Cap ra, its aging missionary. Viva hard core

•

62

•

ITt! in

the SOIlZ

brutality ! ArrHa barnyard sex! Arriba shock! Topless shock ! Bottomless shock! Mass intercourse, mass rape, mass murder, kill for th rill shock! To hell with the good in man . Dredge up his evil shock ! shock!" At the 1991 Oscar ceremony, The Silence of the Lambs became the third film in movie history after It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) to win all the major awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (An­ thony Hopkins), Best Actress Godie Foster), Best Director (Jonathan Demme) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Ted Tally). The Silence of the Lambs may be an exquisitely crafted piece of cinema, but thematically it is the antithesis of the traditional, value-laden cinema of the popular mainstream . For not only does th e story follow the exploits of two socia l deviants a psychopath who skins his victims and an­ it makes a hero out of this form other who feeds on them of deviancy. For the New York Police Department solicits the help of none other than Dr. Hannibal Lector, the psy­ chiatrist turned cannibalistic killer to lay their hands on the other, a ll-bad psychopath. Stephen Farber, former film critic of California magazine h i gh ligh ts this lacunae between the message a nd the medium of The S ilence of the Lambs. He writes in the Los A ngeles Times: "Yes, the picture is tactfully made, but the question remains, why make i t a t a l l . The skil led craftmanship and the directorial restraint can 't ch ange what the film is a thoroughly morbid and meaningless depiction of the modus operandi of a couple of sadists ." That The Silence of the Lambs is not the only film to have won approbation, both official and individual, in recent years amply proves that the cult of the macabre hero has acquired the dimension of a trend. Consider some of the w i nners who w a lk ed down the h al l of fame of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1 99 1 -1 992 .

The Anti-Hero

63

In 1991, the Oscar for the Best Actress went to Kathy Bates for p layiI}g a sadistic psychopathic nurse who kidnaps and tortures her favourite writer Games Caan) and who, in the climactic scene in the fil m Misery, cripples him for life by shattering his ankles with a sledge hammer. Jeremy Irons in The Reversal of Fortune won the Best Actor Award for his eerily effective portrayal of Klaus Von Bulow, the cold­ blooded and adulterous aristocra t accused of attempting to murder his heiress wife, not once but twice . Joe Pesci won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for essaying the role of a demented, dangerous sadistic mafioso who kills more for pleasure than profit in Good Fellas . In 1992, the Academy Awards reflected the fascination for the darker side of the human psyche once again . Almost all the heroes nominated for the Best Actor Award had played characters who were far removed from the good, clean, right guy of traditional fiction and cinema . Three of the nominees played psychotics (Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of The Lambs, Robert de Niro in Cape Fear and Warren Bea tty in Bugsy); one of them played a homeless, delusional psychotic (Robin Williams in the Fisher King) and another played a manic depressive neurotic who is the victim of a viciously dysfunctional family background (Nick NoIte in The Prince of Tides) . The hosti lity to the traditional hero figure then seems to be the determining note of the cinema of the '90s . This being a d evelopment that marks a drastic change of focus for popul ar culture. Focusing on this change in Hollywood fare, Michael Medved points out "In years past, in the heyday of Gary Cooper and Creta Carbo, Jimmy Stewart and Katherine Hepburn, the movie business drew consid­ erable criticism for manufacturing personalities who w ere larger than life, impossibly noble and appealing individu­ als who could never exist in the real worl d . Today the industry consistently comes up wi th characters who are

p

•

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64

smaller than life - less decent, less likable than our own friends and neighbours, instead of creating elegant and exemplary figures of fantasy."4 Broadly speaking, the heroic model of the '90s falls into three broad categories. They are either the invulnerable and emoti onless martial arts masters (Arnold Schwarzennegar, Steven Seagal, Jean Claude van Demme, Chuck Norris w ith their Indian counterparts belonging to the breed of Sunil Shetty, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgan), the brooding, disturbed, unpredictable sharp-shooter whose explosive propensity for violence stems from some deep psychic wound sustained during some traumatic episode of the distant past (Sylvestor Sta llone's Rambo, Mel Brook's Lethal Weapon, Sanjay Dutt's Sadak, Jackie Shroff 's A ngaar) or the psychotic, neurotic, sadistic killer who is not normal (Anthony Hopkins, Robert de Niro, Shah Rukh Khan) . Indeed, there was a period of cinematic history where Dr. H annibal Lector (The Silence of the Lambs) is serenaded with umpteen Academy awards for his chilling cannibal­ istic yen ! Indian cinema too won international acclaim in this period through none other than the Bandit Queen, Shekhar Kapoor ' s biographical account of Phoolan Devi, the female dacoit . And it is not merely incidental that the film turns out to b e a totally eulogistic biography of an anti­ heroine, albeit in the h ands of an intelligent film maker. Kapoor may be deifying the female bandit as all commer­ cial films, like Kahani Phoolvati Ki, Daku Has ina and Kali Ganga have done in the past. But Kapoor 's plea of circum­ stantial exp ediency a s the prime instigator of a l l the protagoni st's misdeeds and their consequent rationaliza­ tion h ave that dangerous ring of plausibility b ehind the m . Phoolan Devi, under Shekhar KClpoor 's cinematic eye d oes 4.

Medved, op . cit., p . 2 0 1

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65

indeed turn out to b e a glorified larger-than-life figure, much in keeping with her public image of the prototypical wronged woman-turned-public-princess. In popular mainstream cinema, the prototypical hero of this period is the khalnayak (Sanjay Dutt), Subhash Ghai's hero in the film bearing the same title. Who is this anti­ hero, what are his primary impulses, how does he differ from the hero and what i s the exact nature of his immo­ rality: these are some pertinent questions that need to be answered here . Ghai moves into myth ology to p itch the traditional forces of good against evil in Khalnayak ( 1 993). Rama irre­ futably remains the venerable one an d finds his celluloid avatar in CBI Inspector, Ram Sinha Gackie Shroff ) . Pitted against this epi tome of goodness is Ravana, as in the epic Ramayana . In fact, till here, Khalnayak seems to fall in l ine with formulaic film making which has always delineated the climactic fight between good and evil through Rama and Ravana clones. Inspector Ram, as in the average potboiler, remains an incarnate of the maryada p urushottam and there are repeated references to the sacrosanct status of the traditional hero. Sub Inspector Ganga Gangotri Devi who happens to be the Inspector 's betrothed, sets out in search of the terrorist who threatens to besmirch the Inspector 's reputation, declaring:

Ram ka sarvanash koi nahin kar sakla . . . main apne Ram ji ki maryada ke Iiye kuch bhi kar sakti hoo n . (No one can destroy Ram . . . I can do anything to uphold the h onour of Ram.) Even the terrorist serenades the straight cop as G od incarna te, the true son of Ind i a . Ram ja sach men Ram hai, Bhamt ka saccha putra hai. But the similarities in character­ izations end here . For Sub hash Ghai's Ravana is no tra di­ tional bad man . In fact Ghai's ingenuity lies in the fact that he tries to make a h ero out of Ravana for the first time. The grandson of a freedom fighter who h appened to be a friend

66

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Soul

of Mahatma G andhi, Ballu Balram drifted through an impoverished childhood into a turbulent adulthoo d . The first signs of his moral turpitude were visibl e when he was a kid . He greedily grabbed the box of crackers which the local hoodlum had bought to bribe his lawyer father who, needless to say, was wedded to the creed of unqualifi ed honesty. His father had slapped him, but his mother had hel d him close to h er bosom declaring that i f the father did not bring crackers fOf Diwali, the kid would natural l y be a ttracted to those brought by a stranger. As a youngster, he had rebelled against his father and joined the local mafia gang, headed by the h oodlum, Roshi Mah anta who had now graduated in to big crime . He had become a hashish smuggler and manned a terrorist outfi t . Ballu grew from a small-time smuggler into a cold-blooded assassi n . He, however, committed his first crime under the guise of a misunderstanding. He was misled into believing that the Police Commissioner h ad killed his favourite sister and therefore shot h im in revenge, at the behest of Roshi Mahanta . After tha t, there was no looking back for the prodigal son who slipped down into the quagmire of crime and soon emerged as the nation's top terrorist: Ghai's archetype for . the wayward youth o f the '90s . Arres ting him for the assassina tion of the poli tical leader in the opening shots of the film, Inspector Ram declares: yeh hai hamare des !! ka

naujawan, jiski aankhon mein khoon hai, jisne chaar Iletaon ka khoon kiya hai, 9 daake dalen !lain, 20 election booth loote hain . Itni s i u mar aur itne saare jur111 . . . (This is our nation's youth, one which has blood in its eyes, who has k illed four poli­ ticians, committed nine heists, looted 20 election booths. So many crimes at such a young age . . .) After this, the film follows the usual cops and robbers chase involving Inspec­ tor Ram who is in h ot pursuit of the fugitive Ballu Balram . Ballu Bal ram however is a breed apar t . Neither the tra-

The A n ti-Hero

67

-

,

ditional villain nor is he the usual law breaker, who takes the law jnto his own hands in order to settle personal scores . He does not belong to the breed of G abbar 5ingh, the dreadful dacoit of Sholay, who is pathologically evil. The narrative of the film offers no reasons for G abbar 's vacil­ lations from the straight path . He kills, loots and plunders for the love of i t and gloats in h is ogre image for the power and misconstrued glory it bestows on him. Ag<:tin, Ballu is no kindred soul of the heroic smuggler, . Vijay Verma of Deewar. For all through his transgressions in Deewar; Vijay was cowed down by a sense of guilt and his voice of conscience constantly loomed large before his eyes in the form of his censorious mother (Nirupa Roy). Each time he broke the law, he knew he was drifting away from order a nd righteousness. So that, eventually, when all the roads were blocked, there was only one avenue left for the fugitive. Like the prodigal son, he must return to his mothe r ' s l a p and a tone for h i s sins in the sanctum sanctorum of the temple. Maa main mandir aa raha hoon. Aashirwaad delle aaogi naa ? he whispers and pleads for his mother 's blessings before he surrenders. Much unlike the Khalnayak, who fervently believes in the righteousness of his unlawful acts and even slaps h is mother for bringing the cops to arrest him. Ballu's drift towards the crooked path was not involuntary. Instead, he consciously opted for crime and easy money in lieu of virtue and impoverishment. When Ballu joins forces for the first time with Roshi Mahanta, the hashish smuggler, his father i s astounded . Bharat ke kran tikari, Jagan nath Prasad Choudhay ka pota Roshi Mahan ta ki hashish bechega ? (The grartdson of the Indian revolutionary, Jaganath Prasad Choudhary will sell the h ashish of Roshi Mahanta) he admonishingly queries and sla ps his intransigent son . The son, on his part remains remorseless and offers his reasons. He scoffs at his grandfather 's name-plate whi ch

68

[re in the Soul

a dorns the village square and declares that i t rests before a house that has not been able to pay the rent for the l ast ten years. Inside the house lives a young boy and girl who are unemployed for the last two years, despite being educated, he m ockingly declares. Under such dire circum­ stances, he has no other choice but to d iscard abstractions like family lineage, past heritage and honour for the sake of h ard-core necessi ties like bread , butter, upward mobility and economic betterment. Khandani takhti par aap baithiye,

mujhe to us takhti par baithna hai, jis par baithkar, man lri se naukar tak sirf paisa banate hai. Garibi ki ghulami se ach chi Roshi ki ghulami hai, he announces and leaves a d estitute home for greener pastures beyond . (You rest content on familial platforms . I will sit on that platform from where everyone, including ministers and servants mint money. I prefer a l ife of servitude to Roshi instead of poverty). Thi s, h owever, is j ust the beginning. For as the years pass, Ballu graduates with full honours in the world of cri me . But all along, he has his j ustifications and rational­ ization that provide a meaning to his misdeeds. In a h ot­ h eaded encounter, when the CBI Inspector castigates him for working against his motherland, Ballu offers his phi­ losophy of crime, complete with rhetoric : Ram babu, aap

sarkari afsar hain, to apne desh Bhara t mata ki baat ka renge hi. Magar kit ne nela aur afsar hai ja Bha rat mata ke naare lagakar apn i jaben bhar rahen hain, jo gariban par goliyan chala te hain, u nke munh se roti chheente hain . Yeh to aap bhi jaante hain aur main bhi. (Ram babu, y ou are a government officer, there­ fore you will na turally ta lk about your country, your motherland . But there are so many poli ticians and officers who take the name of their motherland, and yet they fill "'heir coffers with ill-gotten wealth, shoot the poor, snatch e bread from their mouth . You know this as well as I do.) The Inspector rebukes him further, declaring that some ,le's dishonesty cannot be used as an excuse for one's

The Anti-Hero

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own murky morals. For what is wrong remains immutably so . " Kuch logon ki beimani ko apni gaddari ka bahana ballakar,

tum galat ko sahi nahi sabit kar sakte. Jo galat hai, 7l'oh galat hai." Such concepts of timeless truth, goodness and evil are however ali en to the anti-hero's philosophy of life . For Ballu believes in the relativity of goodness . Confronted by the righteous Inspector's incantations, Ballu counters:

" Galat ya sahi, yeh to apna apna khayal hai . Aap ke khayal me in main Khalnayak, villain . Aapki bhakti aur bhagwan aapka desh, aapki sa rka r. Meri bhakti a u r bhagwan, mera maalik, mera giroh ." (Right or wrong, this depends on the individual's perspective. In your opini on, I am the Khalnayak, the villain. Your devotion, your God lies in your country, your government, mine lies with my employer, my gan g.) He then proudly asserts that he is not the hero, rather, the anti-hero (Nayak nahin, Khalnayak hoon main ) a melodious refrain that runs through the entire film as the opening lines of the title song. In fact, in the very first encounter with the comely sub-Inspector, he introduces himself as a goonda, a murderer, a fugitive from prison, a man who is cal led the Khalnayak in respectable society. And he uses all these negative epithets with regal aplomb and unconcealed pride, as if they were titles befitting a king. Main ek goonda, katil, jail se bhaga h ua mujrim, sharajat 11

ki kitab mein m ujhe Khalnayak kehte hain ." It is here that Ballu differs from Lakhan ( Anil Kapoor in Ram Lakhan), who historically speaking, maybe termed the big brother of the bad man . But in terms of negativity, Lakhan remains a poor cousin of the Khalnayak, despite his credo of 'one t'wo ka jou rJour two ka one,' (corruption, fraud, dishonesty.) For Lakhan, the younger brother of Ram is corrupt only till the climax of the film. After which he a dopts the good clean code of honour propagated by his venerable elder, Even the nature of his negativity i s less reprehensible than Ballu Balram's criminality. Neverthe-

•

70

Ire

in

the SOlll

less, Lakhan remains the first negative hero of the '90s: a prototype for the get-rich-quick generation that is fervently motivated by the materialistic drive. Lak han with his obsession for amassing wealth, reflects the Rayban­ the cravings of the new kids round the block Reebok race that measures success and achievement w ith m�terial possessions. Lakhan, for the first time, enunciates the code of relative ethics in contemporary mainstream cinem a . Throughout the d iscourse, Lakhan seems to harbour {)nly one desire: the desire to become a millionaire in a day. Kha pee raha hai saara zamana, fo bhooka pyasa hai woh deewana (The whole world is eating and drinking; anyone who starves then can only be a foo1) , he i ntones in a mirthful song and dance number. In fact, so strong i s his impulse to amass wealth that h e becomes a policeman to make money alone. Since he believes there are only two either as a smuggler or as a police ways to get rich quick officer. Before he joins the department, his elder brother Ram who i s the quintessential honest cop asks him whether h e woul d like to become a cop to serve the nation or to make money. " For both," replies Lakhan, w ith uncanny honesty and begins his p rofession by zealously accepting the mandatory 'chocolate box' (bribe) . "Mujhe is yudh mein

jeetna hai. Zindagi mein garibi bah u t dekhi. Magar aap i t ne chote-chote chocolate ke dibbe denge to hamare garibi ha tao programme ka kya hoga," (I have to win this war. I have seen a lot of poverty in life. But i f you give me such small boxes of chocolate then what will happen to my poverty eradi­ cation programme), h e queries, d issatisfied at the amount of bribe being offered by the plaintiffs . Big bribe, big money, big success i s what he d reams of i n an age which, according to him, belongs to Ravana rather than Rama . And when his brother indicts him for selling his soul to Satan in a compelling d iscourse on sin

•

The Anti-Hero

71

and virtue, the renegade exhorts: "Paap aur pu nya dakiya­

noosi logan ke banaye gaye shabd hain. 10 imandari aur pu nya ka ghamand liye phirte ha in woh na kisi ka dard samajhte hain na kisi ke jaz baat ko dekhte hain ." (Sin and virtue are mere words that have been coined by old-fashioned people. People who proudly d eify the cult of honesty and goodness do not understand the pain and sentiments of others.) But what about the Ramayana, i ts tenets and the heroes after whom we have been named, urges the honest elder. . (Subhash Ghai's Ram Lakhan once again recreates the epic, albeit in contemporary tones. The elder brother Ram mir­ rors the mythical hero's ethica l grand eur, w h i l e the younger Lakhan, has a nebulous set of values that are more worldly and less utopian .) The Ramayana? H uh ! Just an old book, a drama, a tele­ serial today that looks good only on screen, not in real life. The world has changed big brother! he scoffs . "Aajkal

Ramayana sirf ek p u rani kitab, ek drama, ek TV serial hai jo dekhne mein achcha lagti hai, magar karne mein bahu t fark hai. Zamana badal ch uka hai bhaiya," (Today, the Ramayana is just a book, a drama, a TV serial that looks good to see, but is different when it is enacted in real life . The world has changed, brother!), he exhorts . Lakhan ridicules his brother 's piety, walks out of his modest abode and sets out on his own individual path to glory. And en route, he h obnobs with the smugglers, drug racketeers, accepts their generous bribes, turns a blind eye to their misdeeds, sets free their cohorts and relentlessly breaks the legal and moral code h imself. For he believes that the end economic advancement does justify the means . But Lakhan's downward drift on the eth ical barometer is only a temporary aberration. Lakhan must be reinstated as the true brother of Rama a pure reflection of the pristine

•

Ire

72

in the

Soul

elder. Only then will the equilibrium be restored . " Dekh

lena, ek din mera Lakhan Ram bankar dikhayega," (Just watch . My Lakhan would prove himself a Ram one d a y ) the mother declares, even as she stands a mute witness to her prodigal son's bathos. And lo ! the mother 's dreams do come true. For before evil can blacken his soul completely, Lakhan shifts loyalties and joins hands with the forces of law, order and justice. For Lakhan has realized tha t the tenets of the Ramayana are indeed immutable and the concept of goodness does remain unchanging through the ages . "Aap sahi keh te the bhaiya, hazaron saal pehli likhi h u i

Ramayana ki baat ko h u m log na badal sake hain, na badal payenge, " (You w e re r i g h t brother, th e tenets o f the Ramayana which were written thousands of years before, cannot be changed by you and me), he concludes. Historically however, the anti-hero can be traced back to the '50s. I f one of the first identifiable anti-heroes is Ashok Kumar's p ortrayal of the petty thief in Kismet, i t is actual l y Raj Kapoor's graduate tramp turned gansgter in S ri 420 who essays the authentic bad man. One who opts for the crooked path voluntarily, after being p laced at a juncture where he could have chosen poverty and principles over money, power and moral compromise . Much in contrast to Ashok Kumar in Kis met, Raj Kapoor in Aawara, Ami tabh Bachchan i n Deewar: thieves, gangsters and hoodlums who were forced to follow the footsteps of criminals due to bad upbringing, familial pressures and the likes, and who all along, h a ted their ethical transgressions. In short, unl ike Raju in Sri 420, Lakhan in Ram Lakhan, Ballu in Khalnayak, these bad guys never did have a choice. Crookedness was the onl y course of action left if the business of l i fe had to carry on. In S ri 420, Ranbir Raj Raju is the unemployed, a mbitious, optimistic graduate from Allahabad who enters Bombay with j ust a citation of h onesty and a bagful of dreams, carry on. In S ri 420, Ranbir Raj Raju is the unemployed, a mb itious, optimistic graduate from Allahabad who enters Bombay with just a citation of honesty and a bagful of dreams,

-

The Anti-Hero

73

nurtured by a young, growing, gradually modernizing Indi a . But Bombay in the '50s had lost its soul to Mammon and the great paradoxes of develop ment

glittering

pockets of prosperity arising amidst sprawling slums were quite clearly visible i n the country's El Dorado. In the first few shots of the film, the avuncular beggar forewarns the young hopeful that Bombay is a city only for the dumb, deaf and the b lind; a city where there is no work for the educated, honest youth; where there are no avenues to earn an honest l iving but 420 ways to mint money through lies, deceit and dishonest measures . " Yeh Bam bai

hai meri jaan, yahan behre, goonge, andhe baste hain, yahan pade­ likhe imandaar jawan ko kaam nahin mil sakta; yahan sach bolkar pet bharne ke raas te dhu ndne se nahin milte a u r jhooth bolkar paise banane ke raaste 420."

•

Raj Kapoor a nd Nargis in

Sri 420

In such a 'heartless', money-oriented city, the small town simpleton begins his search for bread and b utter b y first pawning his medal, given to him for his honesty, for a

In such a 'heartless', money-oriented city, the small town simpleton begins his search for bread and butter b y first pawning his medal, given to him for his honesty, for a

•

•

74

Ire in the Soul

pal try sum of Rs . 4 0 . He then pledges to buy the entire city with the handful of notes and does succeed . Only, he loses out on love, character, integrity, conscience and goodness of spirit in h is scramble for the go'od l ife . And in keeping w i th his anti-hero status, there is no regret, no pangs of guil t for quite some time . When his pious beloved Vidya (Nargis) SP UIItS him for wallowing in the muck of deceit and dishonesty, Raju dismisses her diatribe with scorn:

" Yeh imandaari ka updesh hamesha garib logan ko kyon diya jaata hai. Tu rn clin bhar kaam karo, mehnat karo, imandari ki rookhi­ sookhi kha kar dhanwan a u r bhagwan ka sh ukr karo. Aakhir aisa kyo n ? " (Why i s i t that only the poor are taught the tenets of honesty? Why must they alone be told to work hard day and night, eat the spartan fare of honesty and then offer their gratitude to the rich and the a lmighty?) He then continues his search for the pot of gold, card­ sharping, selling bogus shares, gambling and dabbling in the 'saUa' bazaar and the like. Until he reaches the

p re­

ordained climax where his conscience arises from its tem­ porary slumber and indicts him for having everything but peace of mind . The vagrant then returns back to love and truth

having realized that the cure for poverty does not

lie in corruption and decei t . Rather, in hard work, courage, the progress o f the nation and the unity of the peop le. Raju then was not pathologically bad, but was momen­ tarily misled by the glint of gold . So tha t in his intrinsic purity, h e stood as a symbol for the get-rich-quick genera­ tion of the '50s, as did Ball u Balram, who typi fied the directionless scramble for lucre of the '90s genera tion . But between the two, ' there lay a great difference . Raju was crooked but not a kil ler unlike Ballu whose negativity involved a l l kinds of heinous crimes, including homicide! This being a mere reflection of the changing hues of evil over the decades of development and decay. Obviousl y, crime had a different definition in each decade and the involved all kInds ot heInous cnmes, InCluolng

l I U l l U C l U t:: :

This being a mere reflection of the changing hues of evil over the decades of development and decay. Obviously, crime had a different definition in each decade and the

75

The A n t i-Hero

Shahrukh Khan in

Alljaa",

.

.

de&ree of immorality acquired new tones with the passage of time, the changing value system and the insulation of the individual who seemed to be growing more accus­ tomed to d eath and destruction . The bad man seemed to have reached his nadir i n recent films like Baazigar, Darr and A njaam, the protagonists of these fil ms being characters who were entirely remorseless and with l ittle or no value for human l ife. In his final surrender to the security forces and his noble bid to save the honour of Ganga, (Madhuri Dixit) the female cop who had protected h is l i fe, the Khalnayak emerges as the hero who dons the traditional garb of goodness . In fact, the Kha lnayak's flirtations with nobility begin to emerge much U t I:: uUl Iu u r U l

u c H l � ct , �LVlaanun UIXH) (ne remale cop wno

had protected his life, the Khalnayak emerges as the hero who dons the traditional garb of goodness . In fact, the Khalnayak's fl i rtations with nobility begin to emerge much ,

Ire in the Soul

76

before the glorious end of the film. Midway during his escape bid, Ballu saves an election booth from fall ing p rey to a band of local goondas and ensures a free and fair pol l . The villagers applaud him for his valour and pin a paper replica of the national flag on his l apel. While sub-Inspector Ganga declares: "Tu rn me bhi ek achcha bharatiya khoon hai.

Har khalnayak mein kahin na kahin ek nayak chhupa hota hai. Ravana mein bhi nayakpan tha kah i n . " (There i s good bharatiya blood in you too. Every anti-hero has a hero hidden somewhere within. There was heroism in Ravana too .) It's by and large a bright scenario, both for the reel life bad guy and his real life clones, since the Khalnayak rep­ resents a generation that has been temporarily misled either by the anonymous foreign hand, a questionable upbringing or a childhood trauma or injustice that cries out for revenge . What is alarming here, however, is the fact that revenge, despite being bloody, has the moral approbation of the elders and the legal transgressions are not outrightly condemned in the course of the narrative. 50 that, what is habitually viewed as wrong gradually begins to be treated as natural and right. In its delineation of the deviant the cinema of the '90s has by and large followed a laudatory tone. The anti-hero might be the traditional bad man, nevertheless, h e is the rebel hero who kills for self-esteem. Attempting to analyse the psyche of real l ife serial killers like Ian Brady, Charles Manson, Peter 5utcli ffe, Colin Wilson has underlined " a h ierarchy o f needs ."s According to this, the first needs that people have are for food, shelter, h uman and sexual rela­ tionships . When these have been satisfied by society, the

5.

Deborah Ca meron and Elizabeth Frazer, The Lust to Yo rk Un iversity Press,

1 987),

p.

57

Kill

(New

The A n t i-Hero

77

need arises for self-esteem and respect, followed by self­ actualisation and creativity. Wilson relates this hierarchy to the history of crime . Whereas 200 years ago, most crimes were committed for food we are now w itnessing the crime that is committed for self-esteem and self-actualization . As in the case of Dr. Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs and Mickey, Mallory in Natural Born Killers and Shah Rukh Khan in Anjaam, Baazigar and Darr. Here, on celluloid, is the world which was created by Marquis de Sade (Donatien Alphonse Francois, 1 740-1 814) who promoted and popu­ larized the concept of the murderer as the hero in early nineteenth century. Cinema today seems to b e merely reiterating Sade's contention that the 'pleasures of cruelty' are entirely natural, that is in accordance with the dictates of nature . "Who doubts that murder is one of nature's most precious laws? What is her purpose in creation? I s it not to see her work destroyed soon after?"6 he queries . "If destruction i s one of nature's laws, the person w h o destroys is simply obeying her" he argues, thereby creating the sub-structure tha t supports and vindicates the exist­ ence of natural born killers. Sade's fictional world is one where vice is naturally triumphant and virtue is not only not rewarded, it is actually punished by suffering and death . So is the world of the anti-hero . The virtuous Shivani (A njaam) loses her husband, child, freedom and life in her battle against her fiendish lover who a t least has the sat­ isfaction of destroying her: something he set out to do. According to Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer, murder and violence in Sade (and in post-Sadeian writing and cinema too) is the symbol of transgress: .:m whereby the individual who transgresses is a rebel i n search of freedom and pleasure. "If killing is j ustifiable because it obeys the -

6.

Ibid,

p. 161

Ire in the

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SOlll

laws of nature, i t i s pleasurab l e because it does not obey man-made laws: it flouts the morality of society and reli­ gion and i t is this element of overt transgression tha t commends the act of murder to the true libertine,"7 they •

a rgue . Thus, the killer becomes the quintessential modern day hero, much like the ' wh i te Negro' of Norman Mail er. In his celebra ted essay on 'Hip' (a 1 950's sub-culture w i th its roots and i ts most important characteristics language, marijuana smoking

jazz,

in Black American cul-

•

ture), Mailer creates the central figure of the hipster and applauds h i m for his combination o f transcendence and transgression. Explaining his background, Mailer argues tha t the hipster emerged along with the stifl ing conformity of the post-war period in the Uni ted Sta tes . One who a d opted the way of the existentialist, courted dan ger, lived in the present, tore up roots and chall enged morality. And to be such an existentialist hero, Mailer remarks, "one must know one's desires, one's rages, one's anguish, one m u s t b e aware of the character of one's frustrations and know what would sa tisfy it." So does the Khalnayak, the Baazigar and the protagonist of Darr. Furthermore, a s Cameron and Frazer point out, Mailer 's exis tentialist hero is "akin to the psychopath, the madman whose disorder consists precisely in the fact that he lives entirely in the present and gratifies his desire at whatever violent COS t ."B As does the anti-hero of the '90s . For this cool, hep, psychopathic hero, personal gratifi­ cation of desires becomes the summum bon u m of his exist­ ence. Societal judgement and morality fal l nowhere within the purview of his individualistic concerns . Inspector Vija y of Zanjeer broke the law and resorted to violence, to ensure

7.

8.

Ibid, p . 1 6 1 Ibid .

....

The A n t i-Hero

79

the grea test good of the greatest number. Ba l lu Ba lram does i t for his personal satisfaction and need fulfilmen t . As does Shah Rukh Khan in

Baazigar, Oarr and Anjaam . This

asocial,

h i ghly individualized form of behaviour on the part of the anti-hero stands out in stark contrast to the tr,pditional hero's messia nic bids . Unlike the normal d o-gooder hero, this modern d a y 'whi te Negro' works only for h i mself and seems to believe i n the philosophy of Norman Collins, the killer of seven women in Michigan, who wrote in a college essay: "If a person wants something, he alone is the de­ ciding factor of whether o r not to take it, regardless of what society thinks might be right or wrong . . . I t's the same if a person holds the gun on somebody

it's up to him to

decide whether to take the other's l i fe o r not . The point is: i t ' s n o t society's judgemen t tha t 's i mp o rtant, b u t the individua l's choice of will and intellect ."9 Th us clear-cut demarcati ons between good a n d bad seem to have become smudged i n the cinema of the anti­ hero. As is evident in the case of

Baazigar, Oarr and A njaam,

where Shah Rukh Khan makes a virtue of evil with his glorified delineation of the obsessed lover i n

A njaam

and the cold-blooded killer of

Baazigar.

Oarr

and

The acts are

totally reprehensible if they are to be j udged by the tradi­ tional yardsticks of right .and wrong. Nobody ought to kill four people, including his best friend, and his beloved's . h usband (as in

Oarr

and

A njaam),

however strong may be

the passion for the object of his desire. And nobody ought to throw his beloved off a high-rise building on the eve of his wedding or kill the innocent witnesses (as i n

Baazigar),

even though i t may a l l be part of a grandiose scheme of vendetta . But that which is customarily wrong is h el d as right and proper by these protagonists .

9.

Ibid .

[re in the Soul

80

In Baazigar, Aj ay Sharma's impersonation as Vicky Malhotra, his double dealings with a pair of gullible sisters, his murder of the elder and his complicated game of de­ cep tion is gallantly viewed as an intelligent game of re­ venge, a .heroic fight for personal rights and an imposition of divine justice. While in Darr and A njaa m, the h ero's attempts to annihilate the heroine's state of bliss w ith the man of her choice is also a mere attempt to translate the d ivine w i l l and seek out personal gratifi cation . Shah Rukh's murderous meddlesome ways are merely a means to ensure the heroine's welfare in both the films, as the anti­ heroine doggedly believes . In a pertinent scene in Darr, the heroine auhi Chawla) reb u ffs t h e over­ tures of the mania­ ca l lover, bidding h i m to leave h e r a lone since she w ants to lead her own life . The hero i s astounded and retorts: " But that's exactly what I want you to do lead your life the way you ought to. Near me, with me, in my arms." (Main ,

b h i t o yah i c h a h ta haan ki tum usi tarah jiya jis t a rah tumhe jee n a

c h a h iye

m e re

saath,

paas,

111 e r i

mein .)

m e re ba h a n

O b v i o u s ! y,

Shah Rukh Khan and Kaj ol in Baaz iga r

The Ant i-Hero

•

81

the premise here is that the hero knows best what is right for the beloved and the hero cannot err. Specially, when love for him, as h e confesses, i s neither a profession (pesha), nor an interest (shauk), but life itself (zindagi) . In Anjaam too, the hero is quite shocked at Shivani's rejection since he believes he is the only perfect match for her. And it is merely to ensure and enshrine this perfect relationship that he wipes out the only impediment the lawfully wedded husband of the woman he loves. Yes, for the anti-hero of Darr and Baazigar, the magic of the cliche does seem to work . For everything murder, deceit, fraud - does seem fair in love and war. And th e changing morality is best reflected in the atti­ an integral figure in the drama of tudes of the mother popular H indi cinema over the decades . In Deewar, Vijay Ver rn a's mother makes a definite choice between her po­ larized sons and prefers to stay with the righteous cop (Shashi Kapoor) rather than the beleaguered smuggler. This despi te the fact that she loved h i m more and he needed her more, since he had been left alone i n his at­ tempts to keep the family together. When the errant son tries to hold her back with promises of material comfort, she coolly declares that all his worldly assets will never be able to buy the love of his mother who believes in the wealth of principles alone . Similarly, in Ag'1.eepath, the son, Vijay Chauhan, may be .ionised by the entire bustee as the benevolent overlord . But the mother (Rohini Hatthangadi ) frowns upon his status, wealth and achievement insisting that he must 'wash his hands' since they were ' unclean' . In Khalnayak, the tenor begins to change and the '90s mother lays bare her unques­ tioning, immutable love for her errant son . She learns about his horri fic crimes through newspaper headlines . Never­ theless, she hides his photograph in the Ramayana wai ting for the prodigal to return, confessing that she cannot see

Ire il1 the Soul

82

him suffer and die since she is his mother. It is only in the end does she slap h im and shower herself with sel f-re­ proach since she begins to hold herself responsible for her son's moral degeneration. According to her, her b lind, un­ cond itional love for her son and her tendency to gloss over his misdeeds was the prime cause of his criminal tenden­ cies. " I wish I had slapped you earlier when you had first stolen a pencil in school," she laments, "when for the first time you had spurned your father 's principles. Today, I'd like to teU every mother of this country that those who hide and cover up the misdeeds of their young, will a lmost a lways have sons who grow up as the Khalnayak," she forewarns. In films like Baazigar, A njaam and Aatish ( 1 994), the maternal mood seems to have done a complete volte-face from the censorious '70s . For n o w t h e mother does not merely turn a blind e y e to h e r s o n ' s transgression of the e t h i c a l - l e g a l code, she vociferously ap­ proves of them . I n Aatish, she (Ta nuja ) even castigates the younger one w h o ha ppens to b e the h on e s t cop ( A t u l A gn i h o t r i ) for a t­ tempting to a rrest th e e l d er ( S a n j a y Dutt) who is a pro­ Sunjay Dutt in Aa tish fessional killer and a kingpin of the city •

Sunjay Dutt in Aa tish

fessional killer and a kingpin of the ci ty

83

The A n t i-Hero

mafia . And the mother, as it happens, has always been a symbol of the voice of conscience in popular Hindi cinem a . Is the voice of conscience then singing a differen t tune i n the turbulent '90s? Temporarily perchance, but yes, i t is.

,

4 Angry Young Love

ve remains the terra firma on which popular Hindi cinema has built and rebuilt its glorious castles through the ages. There have always been tinsel town lovers with their on-screen romances that have borrowed heavily from the Romeo-Juliet, Shirin-Farhad myth . Always the tentative courting by two star'crossed lovers; always th e pain of separation; the pangs of longing, the passion of unfulfilled desire, until the final consummation of the rela tionship that drifts through fire and ice. Always the same ? Wel l not really. For love has changed its temper with changing times . From the soft sweet saga of the '60s, where the lovers (Shammi Kapoor, Saira Bano, Rajendra Kumar, Sadhna and their ilk) wove their sugar candy soirees beneath a balmy mid-day sun, love in the '70s l ost out to the towering inferno (Amitabh Bachchan) and his tryst with injustice . Confronted by the ire of the angry young man, the tender love story b uried its head beneath the fire and fumes of Bachchan's grand revenge dramas. From th e central discourse of the '60s cinema, it

Angry YOllng Love

85

was deliberately marginalised and reduced to the status of dramatic relief in a narrative that hinged on action alone . The angry ym.mg man seemed to have had no time left for love in his bid to settle scores and set the scales of j ustice right . The Zeenat A mans and the Parveen Babis were j ust glamorous appendages to the main plot. Mere add-ons who drifted on the fringes waiting for an occasional favour: a song or dance with the favoured one . With the social angst of the '70s hero being laid to rest, love returned centre stage once again. This time however with a changed complexion that was in perfect synchro­ nization with the new environment the guns and gore cuI t . Love in the 1 980s and th e 1 990s was more a matter of raw nerves than a tender heart. So what were the basic tenets of this new love story, one which had ousted the Shahenshah from his reign over the box office and had acquired the form of a trend ever since Mansoor Khan's Qayamat se Qayamat Tak ( 1 988) scaled the h ustings . When N . Chandra made Tezaab, h e advertised it as a violent love story. Chandra's advertisement campaign seemed to hit the nai l on the h ead . For here was a genre of cinema that conveniently b ui lt bridges across h i therto unbridgeable chasms . In the traditional love s tory, violence came onl y in th e last few reels when the obs tacle (the villain) had to be physically removed from the path of true love. But h ere was a cinema that combined action and violence w ith love and blended them together in a delec­ tabl e masala mix. Here was a k ind of bhelpuri which offered the viewer a dash of i t all: moony-eyed mush, star-crossed lovers, clan enmity, laschious third angles, fission, discord and the eventual fusion of two love stricken souls . Qayamat se Qayamat Tak (QSQT) h eralded a new form of p resentation in which the d irectors began to ingeniously blend the intrinsic violence of the era with the basic love story. They used it as a volcanic force tha t threatened to

Ire in the 50111

86

Till death do us part: Juhi Chawla and Aamir Khan in Qayamat

Se Qayamat Tak

erupt, while the lovers, unwary of the simmering discon­ tent haplessly built and rebuilt on dreams and passion. Violence interestingly forms the background in almost all the successful love stories of the post-1 975 decade. I t either takes the form of two warring clans as in the popular love ballads of Romeo-Juliet, Shirin-Farhad, Laila-Majnu or i t weaves its way into the narrative as a form of self­ expression on the part of the bad guy. In films like QSQT and Sanam Bewafa, the violent note is struck by the famil ia l feud that has existed for long between the clans of the girl and the boy. In QSQT, it is a a pair of warring thakurs, while in Sanam Bewafa, i t is a pair of two hot-headed pathan families. Both the families· have been embroiled in a land in Sanam BewaJa, i t is a pair ot two hot-headed pathan families . Both the families· have been embroiled in a land

Angry' You ng Love

87

dispute or in a tussle of honour. G enerations of hostility have carried on uninterrupted and there has been no veneer of civility to mask the ani­ mosity. The families have either discreetly kept out of each other 's way or they have clashed with the frenzy of bulls in fury. I t is in such choleric times tha t the lovers set their eyes on each other. Raj (Aamir Khan) sees Rashmi Quhi C h a w l a ) i n Q SQT and Salman ( Sal man Khan) spots Rukhsar (Chandni) in Sanam Bewafa . Cupid inevitably strikes h is tender bow. A few songs later, the duo ends up totally smitten and bound in a pledge which says till-death­ do-us-part.

• • •

•

• •

..

Salman Khan and Chandni in

Sallam Bewafa

It could have been one of those happy fairy-tale ends, but for the inter-familial discord between the two warring Rajput and Pathan families in QSQT and Sanam Bewafa respectively. In Sanam Bewafa, over a land dispute genera­ tions has caused an unbridgeable rift between the two arro­ gan t aristocrats and the note of antagonism is sounded hons has caused an unbridgeable rHt between the two arro­ gant aristocrats and the note of antagonism is sounded

Ire in the Soul

88

right at the opening of the fi lm . The drama in the first few reels centres round the high-decibel encounters between the sons and the servants of the two feudal families which seem to clash i n open battle over issues like water from a disputed canal which borders both their lands. It's a bloody encounter which repeatedly occurs while the law keeper ( the obsequious hawa ldar of the local thana) conveniently l ooks the other w a y and surfaces only for his weekly commISSIon . •

•

I t is against such an incendiary backdrop that the lovers meet and dare to build their p ri vate castle of dreams . Naturally, the bond s of hate prove to be stronger than l ove and the irui.ocen t passion of the young lovers is appropri­ a ted by the scheming elders

Pran, the father of the girl

and Danny, the father of the boy. Love becomes just an­ other weapon in the " arsenal of hate. The elders allow the youngsters to marry, but before they can settle down to blessed matrimony, the boy's father separates them. The rest is, of course, one sordid tale of revenge which unfolds in a series of gruesome attacks and counter-a ttacks leaving n o one untouched . Not even the hapl ess nine-year-old brother of the bridegroom. And all along, the lovers can do nothing more than stand as silent witnesses to the violent desecration of their monument of love. I t is only when there is a threat to the life of the heroine's baby does the mother in her rise in rebellion . Just a few hysterical screams at the climax is all she can muster. Til l then, the lovers are just a pair of extras who p op up for the song and dance b i t . And yet, all along,

Sanam Bewafa

is marketed as a love story. In QSQT, the war ends only after the bitter climax, when Rashmi is accidentally shot by a group of assassins h i red b y the girl's father and Raj ends his life in disgust . Presum­ ably to be with his beloved beyond death . In Tezaab, d irector N . Chandra chose to be a bit differe n t . J.'-ct � l l J I U

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by the girl's father and Raj ends his life in disgust . Presum­ ably to be with his beloved beyond death . In Tezaab, director N . Chandra chose to be a bit d i ffere n t .

89

A ngry You ng Love

A blockbuster that created some kind of history for having presented Madhuri Dixit in her first sensuous song and dance number (Ek Do Teen), Tezaab tried to project violence as the h i gh point of i ts story. The fil m was advertised as a violent love story, while the gory' underworld w i th its do­ or-die cult of blood and gore was no longer a mere back­ ground to the drama . Instead, the all-pervasive deathwish becomes endemic to the story which sees the lovers at­ tempting to unite beneath the shadow of death . Death comes in the form of Lotia Pathan (Kiran Kumar), the drug pedlar who has two grouses against the lovers . First he has to avenge the death of his brother who was killed in a shoot-out by the hero (Anil Kapoor) while a t­ tempting a bank heis t . Second, he wants the girl (Madhuri Dixit), a vibrant dancer, to add colour and verve as a floor show girl in his den . Aiding him in his nefarious designs . ' he girl's father (Anupam Kher) who views his daughter

Sunjay Dutt in Sadak

Sunjay Dutt in Sadak

Ire in the Soul

90

as the p roverbial goose with the golden egg . N a turally then, Munna and Mohini can hardly manage to drool over each other and talk about the moon and the stars a gainst such an incendiary backdrop . Death threats, abduc tions, exp losions, attacks and counter-attacks form the core of this supposedly romantic tale. Again, i n

Sadak,

it is the menacing shadow of Maharani

(Sadashiv Amrapurka r), a psychotic eunuch tha t l ooms large over the lovers, Sanjay Dutt and Pooja Bha t t . Maha­ rani runs a brothel in the backwa ters of th e big bad c ity. Pooja is just another sparkler i n his illicit den and like a l l good pimps, h e staunchly refuses to let go his bounty. Not even for the sake of love . So that the love tryst b etween the duo ends up as one l ong run for freedom, w here the couple is consta ntly chased b y the pimp and his hench m e n . I�

.

.

Baaghi,

i t is Salman Khan and Naghma who must fl ee

from the vicious clutches of Shakti Kapoo r , a nother b rothel owner. Like Maharani, thi s

kothewala

too holds the b rothel

above a l l else and keeps his il l-gotten kingdom together b y unleashing a reign of terror. The small town girl w ho comes to the city for a job ends up in his dragnet and b efore she knows i t, she is confined in an ill-lit boudoir that opens to let in fat, pot-bel l ied customers . Needless to say, she resists them tooth and nail a nd waits in the murky shadows for Prince Charming to arrive and set her fre e . Predictably, the Prince a rrives, but before h e ca n set her free, he must battle a ga inst the demons of society. This process of setting free is one of the foc a l points around w hich the drama of the prototypic a l love story i s centred . The h eroine is, by and large, the Cinderel l a o r the Sleeping Beauty figure, while the hero wears the mantle of Prince C h arming. Mahesh Bhatt's

Oil Hai Ki Manta Nahin ( 1 992)

recreates

th e m yth in i ts enti rety where Pooja Bhatt, the run a wa y h eiress fantasizes about the princely stranger who w i l l one

Angry Young Love

91

day walk into her life on a white horse i n the song sequence " 0 mere sapnon ke Sau dagar, mujhe a isi jagah le cha!."

Thi s film is however no exception to the rul e . Almost all the successful love stories of the last two decades have rebuilt the stereotype of Prince Charming and Rapunzel . In QSQT, Juhi Chawla spots Aamir Khan for the first time through the lens of her camera . The hero emerges on a sylvan summit against the setting sun the lone man who towers above the natural splendour of the locale. In Sadak, Sanjay Dutt emerges out of the shadows of the desolate street and sets Pooja Bhatt's caged birds free. Of course a metaphor, for h e eventually sets her free too. In Baaghi, Salman Khan arrives at the door of the heroine's boudoir as i t opens to let in the l ustful customers . In Oil Hai Ki Man ta Nah in, �amir Khan breezes into Pooja Bhatt's l ife, even as he hops into the crowded Bangalore b ound bus. In Maine Pya r Kiya, Bhagyashree finds Salman Khan the washroom where in the most unconventional place she has entered to change the towels. Nevertheless, i t is this washroom encounter that changes her whole life . And intrinsic to the Prince Charming myth is the dam­ sel-in-distress syndrome. The Prince is always d el ineated as the saviour who m ust save the Beauty from the clutches of the Beast . Thus, an inevitable part of the saviour 's cru­ sade is the heroine-as-victim bit. In 1 9 1 9, D .W. Griffi th made Broken Blosso 711s . The fil m which followed his monumental epics, The Birth of A Na t io n and In tolera n ce, was hailed both as high art and as a pro­ gressive and emotionally moving statement against mas­ culine brutali ty and racial prejudice. But Broken Blosso ll1s is important in the present discussion for the sexual politics tha t it establishes in its tender love story between Lucy, the young white girl and an immigrant Chinese man . Here was a fil m that revelled in all t he precedents of the perfec t love story. The girl Lucy (Lil ian Gish ), was the

Ire

94

in

the Soul

homes and chosen to build their own little haven, it is Aamir who brings in the moolah . Tha t too as a mere con­ struction worker, while Madhuri prefers to roll the dough

Aamir Khan and Madhuri Dixit in

Vil

in the cosy domesticity of her newly married life .

So also in QSQT, where getting together a meal of baigan ka bharta and chapattis for her beloved who is out 'hun ting' for logs is the only preoccupation for an educated J uh i Chawla . I n Maine Pyar Kiya, the hero has the experience of running the family business apart from possessing a busi­ ness degree from the States . Nevertheless, when he is asked to prove his worth by earning a paltry sum of Rs 2000, he joins the local quarry and lifts stones to do the needful . Needles to say, the business degree has been buried as worthless by now. And Suman, who proudly declares in the earlier part of the film that she i s a first divisioner, does not even think of sharing the economic burden with her beloved . Instead, she plays her ' rightful' role by knitting a sweater for her hard working beau. Thus, despite the fiery aggression of the female in the first few reels, the power equations between the lovers in Thus, despite the fiery aggression ot the temaie In the first few reels, the power equations between the lovers in

Angry Young Love

95

the latter part eventually reinforces the stereotypes of the woman-as-a-consumer and man-as-a-provider. So much so, tha t even the modem sartorial image (minis, jeans, cholis, shorts) of the initial reels is abandoned by the hero­ ine for the traditional sari and sal war kameez in the second half. Filmic love then firmly re-establishes the tradi tional gender equations in society. Not merely by recreating the traditional man-woman relationship, but by glorifying i t too . A s<;.enario where cooking chapattis conveniently be­ comes the raison d'etre for the woman's life while all the affairs of the world are left for the man. Throwing light on this kind of sexual imbalance, Wilhem Fassbinder writes: "1 am more convinced than ever that love is the best, most insidious, most effective instrument o f s o c i a l r e p r e s s i on . Th e r i t u a l o f r o m a n t i c l o v e , stereotyped by film demands a hierarchical order. One member of the couple, most often the male, takes control, the other plays a relatively passive role." The love stories of the post angry young man cinema served another important function too . Apart from reiter­ ating and preserving the gender balance in an age that was being bowled over by sexual permissiveness, it pumped new life into the image of the traditional Indian woman . Despite her Westernized education, the heroine of the prototypical love story was no stickler for women's libera­ tion. All the initial permissiveness is just superficial to titillate and ensnare the hero . And once the hero is hers, the h eroine promptly sheds the short slip for the sari . Suddenly from the truant college girl, she metamorphoses into the homespun hausfrau . Small wonder then, the perfect love story of the decade turns out to be Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (1994) followed by Main e Pyar Kiya . Both the films scaled unpreceden ted heights a t the box office in an age when cinema was strug-

Maine Pyar Kiya . Both the films scaled unprecedented heigh ts a t the box office in an age when cinema was strug-

Ire in the Soul

96

gling in the stranglehold of video and the satellite invasion . Directed by Sooraj Barjatya, both the films shifted the focus back to the 'bharatiya nari' in its characterization of Nisha -

Sal man Khan and Madhuri Dixit in Hum Aapke Hail' Kaull

(Madhuri Dixit) and Suman (Bhagyashree), the female protagonists. But with a slight difference. For both are sufficiently modern too. While Suman, a rural lass, is an Intermediate pass, Nisha, a small-town girl is a graduate in computers . No old-fashioned, backwater belles these two. Nevertheless, there is no unbridled Westernization in their value systems. The family, home, religion, society, decorum are the determinants of their behaviour. And all this worldly concern and reverence for familial welfare exists despite the overpowering 'individual' passion of love. Even the womanliness of the two girls is proved through their ex­ pertise with domestic chores, in the course of the film. While Suman excels a t the overall task of housekeeping and is able to snatch a few clandestine moments of togeth­ erness only in-between the kitchen chores (as in the song sequence, Aaja sham hone aayi), Nisha is the one who can •

Angry Yo ung Love

97

cook the perfect halwa, unlike the more Westernized Jamuna who adds salt instead of sugar. The expression of love remains asexual and the duo are willing to sacrifice their feelings for the sake of the family. Suman returns meekly to her father 's h ouse when the elders express their disapproval of the match . It is Prem who rebels against his father 's wishes and follows her to her parental homestead in Maine Pyar Kiya . In Hum Aapke Hain Kau n, both Madhuri Dixit and Salman .Khan are willing to forgo their love since the elders want Madhuri to marry Salman's elder brother. Obviously, sacrifice, obe­ dience are more hallowed than personal gratification . The absence of eroticism is another determining factor of the relationship . Love, yes, but no sex: this seems to be the credo of this 'modern' love story. In case passion threat­ ens to break the bounds of decency the lovers kiss across a cold glass wall, as in Maine Pyar Kiya . The hero (Govinda) looks askance a t the suggestive foreplay of Karish ma Kapoor in films like Dulaara and Raja Babu and relents only when she sheds her aggressive image . Hence, unlike its Hollywood counterpart, the Hindi film has treated love in its non-physical form an emotion where a physical con­ summation of the relationship does not form an integral part of love . But most importantly, the love story of the 1 990s has served its social p urpose by transforming love as the stron­ gest rebellion of all. In all these films, the lovers are an extremely angry lot, crying out against barriers of caste, class, community . And somewhere along, this sound and fury of the young lovers works as a safety valve. It channels the anger of the viewer and conveniently deflects i t to apolitical issues. When love is the ultimate rebellion and the expression of love needs aggression, violence and dis­ sent, why must anyone choose to rebel against those bor­ ing, unromantic inevitables of unplapned development:

98

Ire in the Soul

unemployment, p overty, inequal i ty? Thus there i s a con­ venient transmutation of the slightly political angry man into the totally apolitical angry young lover, where love becomes the perfect safety valve for the discontent w hich might otherwise be brimming over.

i !

i

5

•

hat is the most popular myth about Hindi cinema? The one that insists that popular mainstream films treat their women as the 'side-hero' and relegate her to the traditional second sex status . Of course, there has been a surfeit of the weeping willow image in the garb of the sacrificial mother, the silly sister who invariably looms up as the potential rape victim, the villain's woolly-headed moll or the tow­ ering inferno's (Amitabh Bachchan) glamorous append­ age . And the independent woman has largely surfaced as the female Bachchan clone: an aggressive avenging angel who is hell-bent on salvaging her outraged honour through guns and guile. Needless to say, this scorned fury is invari­ ably cast in the mould of a Zakhmee A u ral or a Daku Hasina . But that is just the inglorious past. Cinema of the 1990s might have a million firsts to boast of. However, more than the genesis of the anti-hero (the Khalnayak) as the hero ( Nayak), contemporary Hindi cinema stands out for its changing perspective on the prototypical celluloid woman . No longer a svelte second-hander who stands by for the

Ire in the SOlll

100

traditional macho act, she is setting the pace, defining relationships and brazenly defying the questionable tag of all-body-no-brain that had dung to her, ever since Amitabh Bachchan had donned the mantle of the super hero in the 1970s.

Pu neet Issar and Di mple Kapadia i n

Zakhmi Aurat

The h eroine in Bachchan's blockbusters had a lways remained an afterthought. With the super hero always holding centre-stage, the camera rarely shifted i ts focus on to the fairer sex. And when i t did, i t always chose to treat the woman in relation to the larger-than-life man . Second­ ary to the plot, the heroine was cast either as the ever­ patient, forever understanding girl-in-the-shadows, as in Zanjeer (Jaya Bhaduri), Deewar (Pa rveen Babi), Trish u l (Raakh ee), M u qaddar ka Sikandar (Rekha), Sholay (Jaya Bhaduri), Shakti (Smita Patil) Agneepath (Madhavi) . Or as the spoilt rich brat who needed a bit of 'manhandling' to cure her of her wanton feminine arrogance . Bachchan must set these erran t ladies right and help them to return to the

The Wild Cat and the Wimp

101

fol d : Rati Agnihotri in Coolie, Zeenat Aman i n Laawaris, Amrita Singh in Mard. But thal was then. Today, she may still be runn ing rotmd the trees in multicoloured micro-minis, waiting for Prince Charmings and Ramboesque Robin Hoods. But she no longer waits as a gullible little Red Riding Hood who can be swept off her feet b y t h e first smart cookie . Or one w h o m i g h t fal l for the w i l y charms of the big bad wolf. No, now she knows how to p r o t e c t h er s e l f, rarely p rostr a tes herself and almost always asserts herself a s a heady '- ! mix of body and brain. S u d d e n l y, the image has lost i ts linear p ro p o r ­ r I tions . The heroine is no longer con­ tent to rest as the Zeenat Aman in Da ku HasiJ/a hero's accommodating moll . And even if she does, it has to be as the aggressively demand­ ing, sexually assertive girl friend, an avenging angel in films like Khalnaika and A njaam, who is determined to do away with anyone who dares to tamper with her state of well-being. She is transformed into the traditional house­ wife (Damini, Saajan ka Char) with equal ease. •

-

,

,

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1 02

Rekha in

the

Soul

Khooll Bhari Maallg

And when she is not looking after kith and kin, she is looking a fter the greatest good of the greatest number as in Tejasvani. Added to all this brawn business is the 'sexy­ sexy' bit where she boldly declares in a popular song in Khuddar, sexy sexy sexy mujhe log bolen' (People call me sexy sexy sexy) or invites the heroine in Haa thkadi with a 'Let's make love, bab y' . Yes, for the first time the Hindi film heroine begins to gleefully flaunt her sexuality on screen. So much so, that this time, it is the hero who is fighting shy of the oodles of oomph that cascade forth in the p er­ missive behaviour of the fairer sex and simply tells her to " go to hell, baby" (Govinda in Haathkadi) . Karishma Kapoor obviously stands out as the perfect prototype of this dazzling cousin of eve. Her sensual d is­ play in films like Khuddar, Raja Babu, Andaaz, Muqabla and Dulaara (1 994) may have scandalized many, calling for a stricter implementa tion of the censor code. Nonetheless, in her wild, erotic display and her personal deligh t in her own lHe Lel l�ur cuae .

1'\1 0nerneless, In her wild, erotic display and her personal delight in her own ;" U I L lt:: l U l l 1-" lt:: l l lt:: l l lct L l U l l

Ul

The

Wild Cat and the Wimp

103

physicality, the 'sexy-sexy' heroine symbolizes a coming of age of on-screen prudishness. Be it the wild vixen of Raja Babu, the lal dupat te walis (Ritu Shivpuri and Raageshwari) and the raunchy rural belle (Shilpa Shirodkar) of Aankhen (1993) or the irresistible coquette who rakishly queries 'choli ke peechey kya hai in Khalnayak (1993), the hitherto bholi-bhali behenji (innocent maid) has overnight become aware of her sexuality. And moreover, she doesn't think twice before using it to ensnare and delight the hero . But unlike her Hollywood counterpart, this tantalizing blend of intelligence and eroticism is neither a Sharon Stone nor a Madonna who uses her physicality for libidinal purposes alone . For that flavour of Indianness, native film makers h ave intelligently added a suffix to all her sensual display. Interestingly, all these characters have a noble cause behind their alleged 'ignoble' acts. There was a sac­ rosanct motive behind the controversial choli ke peechey number itself. Madhuri Dixit throws off her constable's attire and dons the i tsy-bitsy choli in order to seduce the terrorist (Sanjay Dutt) and bring him back to the hallowed portals of law. Simply because this would salvage the honour of her beloved Inspector Rama (Jackie Shroff) which had been jeopardized by the terrorist's jailbreak.

"Main apne Rama ki mahJada ke liye kuch bhi kar sakti hoon," she declares and enters the Khalnayak's lair with her se­ ductive act. (I can do anything to protect and preserve the honour of my Rama .) Then, in Khuddar, the infamous 'sexy, sexy, sexy' number (later changed to 'baby, baby, baby' at the behest of the Censor Board) has Karishma Kapoor brazenly wiggling her bottom before the camera . But here too, the film maker has furnished a philanthropic motive to this saucy show. " 1 show off my thighs so that their legs may remain strong and covered," she fiercely declares to the dismissive cop (Govinda) who scoffs at her street-walker ways . The SCOTnr , ] (Govinda) who scoffs at her street-walker ways . The scorn-

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104

[re

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(Govinda) who scoffs at her street-walker ways . The scorn­ fully departing Inspector turns back and lo! there beneath the fluttering tri-colour she stands: the short-sk irted floor show girl, clustered around by her brood of hungry, half­ clad orphans who have no one but Didi for succour. Natu­ rally, the hard-boiled cynic is transformed into an a we­ stricken admirer who ends up equating this ' Bharat k i beti' with the Bhagavad Gita . " Tu m mein bhi ek Mahabharat hai" (there is a Mahabharat in you too), he declares and rever­ ently kisses her hands . Scorn has obviously been replaced by devotion. And now, for the rest of the film, this brazen girl who a lmost ended up as the star of a blue film (against her wishes of course), plays a sari clad, demure wife who doesn' t step out of her h usband's house . In Rajeev Rai's Moh ra again, Raveena Tandon p lays the seductress as a mere extension of the journalist's act . She uses her feminine charms, her half-open eyes, her alluring

•

Raveena Tandon and Akshay Kumar in

Mohra

The Wild Cat and the Wimp

105

pout actually to elicit information from intrac table sources. Even the_ popular ' tu

cheez badi hai mast-mas t nu mber'

w i th

the rumbustious pelvic twist has a reason behind i t . The journalist has graciously decided to play the irresistible snooper with th e punctilious cop (Akshay Kumar) and hel p him ensnare the baddies. I t is a mind-boggling mix of tradition and modernity that our film makers seem to have achieved of late . The empha­ sis of course, is on Indianness as opposed to absolute Wes ternization . And a perfect prototype of this modern Indian miss

one who i s neither all-Indian nor all-West­

ern can be found i n

Maine Pyar Kiya and Hum Aapke Hain Kau n . Both Bhagyashree in Maine Pyar Kiya and Madhuri Dixit in Hu m Aapke Hain Kau n are god-fearing girls, adept a t Indian dance and music, shelling peas, chopping veg­ e tables, feeding the family and caring for k i th and k i n . All this, despite their education ( Bhagyashree has completed her Intermediate and Madhuri is a graduate in computers), their modern sartorial sense and completely urbane looks . But unlike the Victorian image of the 1950s, 1 960s and 1 9 70s, tradition here does not stand as synonym for sub­ m i s si v e n e s s . Not even for unwarranted coyness . For Bhagyashree, who even closes her eyes when her beau offers to rub Iodex on her sprained ankle, sets aside all false modesty and serenades him

in a bare-all evening gown

- simply as an expression of her intense love . Juhi Chawla does it again i n

Raju Ban Gaya Gen tleman

( 1 993), despi te

being a ' propah' bustee belle with the characteristic set of m id dle class morals . She does it for h er sweet li ttle Raju who has finally managed to fulfil his dreams in the big bad city of Bombay. Needless to say this partial abeyance of maidenly modesty is for love alone. The ch anging h ues of the traditional w i fe find their greatest a r ticula tion i n Indra Kumar ' s Saraswati (Madh uri Dixit) may be the ,

Beta ( 1 9 9 3 ) . devoted patni in the

1 06

Ire in

the

50111

all her intelligence, guts and guile, she tries to outwit her Machiavellian mother-in-law (Aruna Irani) who wants her out of the fam ilial homestead . No, unlike the earlier daugh­ ters-in-law of Hindi cinema, this one is not willing to drink the proverbial cup of poison or silently bear the cross for the sake of domestic peace . On the contrary, with her sharp intelligence and worldly wisdom, she plays a perfect foil to her dim-witted husband who is ill-equipped to handle both his personal and busi­ ness interests. Her unconventional rebellion against her mother-in-law then becomes merely an observance of her wifely duties . Nevertheless, it does upset the sacrosanct hierarchy of the Indian family for a few reels of the film. In an a ge of dowry deaths, bride burning, torture and marital abuse, Saraswati stands out as the perfect answer to barbaric in-laws. Instead of giving in to familial violence and playing the sacrificial lamb, or simply walking out on an unsavory family, she opts for counter attack as her sole wea pon of defense . The familiar stereotype of the dumb belle is gradually being corroded, even in the traditional image of the woman in love . Narrative fiction, be it the novel, cinema or drama, has usually painted the woman in love as the vulnerable waif, the damsel in distress or the sacrificial wailer. The con temporary film heroine however, seems to h ave a head over her shoulders, even in these parts . In Mah esh Bhatt's Aashiqui, the protagonist Anu (Anu Agarwal) plays the woman in distress to the hilt . An or­ phan, left in the care of an autocratic warden, she cringes at the very sight of an outsider and is willing to rest content in the dismal shadows of her confinement . But only until love beckons. Then, she flees the cage and cuts herself loose from the vicious warden's octopus-like hold. And once she's out, she urges her beau to enable her to stand on her own feet, instead of being totally dependent on his do-

The Wild Cat and the Wimp

1 07

own feet, instead of being totally dependent on h is do­ gooder friend for her upkeep. Soon, she becomes a top model who is all set to sail the high seas. Again, a new angle to the Cindrella myth here, where the Cindrella girl looks beyond Prince Charming and his white steed . Anu i s no exception to the rule . I n all the immensely popular love stories of the 1990s (Oil, Qayamat se Qayamat Tak, Tezaab), the women are equal partners in rebellion . For here, love is not roses and moonlit make-believe alone . Instead, it is a revolt against authority, class and caste barriers and destiny. And i f the hero is on the run, he has the heroine by his side all through the two-man uprising. All the time, matching his guts, guile and gore. A lmost l ike a man. The power of the traditional woman manifests i tself in ful l glory in Raj Kumar Santoshi's Oamini. A simple god­ fearing woman who would have been happier to lead her life within the confines of her husband's house, Damini (Meenakshi Sheshadri) suddenly decides to forgo every­ thing for principles alone. She is willing to place everything - her husband, h ome and her family's reputation at stake so that truth and justice might prevail. Even a moist-eyed Juhi Chawla in Saajan Ka Char (1 994) does manage to make a few pointed digs about the second sex status that a conventional woman has to undergo as a daughter, a wife and a banu . The positive woman-as-crusader image that manifested itself in N . Chandra's Pra tighaat reaches fruition in Tejasvini, his remak e of the Tel ugu hit Karthavyam . Obviously in­ spired by the exploits of the woman cop, Kiran Bedi, the film h as reportedly motivated thousands of girls in Andhra Pradesh to join the police force . In a traditionally male­ oriented society, Tejasvini is the small-town girl who d e­ clares that her hands are not made to knead dough or wash utensils alone . Instead, they have the power to procure

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108

Soul

justice for the meek . TejaS7)a ni is the supercap who refuses to give up her battle against injustice, oppression and crime despite the pressures from family, her superiors and the mafi a . In fact, she refuses to give in even when the bad guys reduce her into a physical wreck . Somewhere along the way with her gritty strong-arm tactics, she deals a crumbling blow to the defenseless damsel-in-distress im­ age of the proverbial Indian woman . And then, the glittering coin turns over. Alas! there on the flip side is the counter-myth that lays bare the fettered freedom that has been won by the fairer sex over the years in popular cinema. Beyond the gloss and the glare of the image, the wildcat turns out to be a wimp and all that brouhaha about the brave new feminine breed turns out to be a mere chimera . During the 1 960s when the feminist movement was sweeping across America and women were begirming to realize that 'Occupation: Housewife' was no occupation at all, Newsweek carried a cover story to find out what was wrong with American women that they could not accept their roles gracefully. An agitated mother of four lamented: " I've tried everything women are supposed to do hobbies, gardening, pickling, canning, b eing very social with my neighbours, joining commit­ tees, running P.T.A . teas. I can do i t all and I like it, but it doesn't leave you anything to think about, any feeling of who you are . . . I'm desperate . I begin to feel I have no personality. I'm a server of food and a putter-on of pants and a bed-maker, some­ body who can -be called on when you want some­ thing . But who am I?"! In answer to this, Newsweek categorically declared : 1.

Betty Friedan,

TIle Feminine Mys t iql/e

(Pelican, 1 983), p . 1 9

•

The Wild Cnt nnd

the

Wimp

109

lands can only dream of . . . . From th e beginning of ti me, Jhe female cycle has defined and confined woman's role . As Freud was credited with saying, 'anatomy is destiny' . Though no group of women has ever pushed these natural restrictions as far as th e American woman, i t seems that she cannot accept it with good grace ." It then went on to quote a 'happy' housewife who as­ serted : " We ough t to salute the wonderful freedom we all have and be proud of our lives. I have had college and I have worked, b ut being a housewife is the most rewarding and satisfying role . . . . My mother w a s never i nc l u ded i n m y fa t h e r ' s b usiness affairs . . .she couldn't get out of the house and away from the children . But I am an Equal to my h us­ band. I can go along with him on business and to social business affairs . " Contemporary Hindi cinema has, b y and large, re­ sounded a similar echo in its delineation of the heroine. Over the years, it has tried to do what the article in Newsweek did to the feminist movement: subvert the very basis for existence, by presenting the counter-image of the woman who was happy with small mercies vis-a-vis the woman with no mercy. For despite the daring outfits, the bohemian air, the Hindi film heroine has just one b urning ambition: to comfortably fall into the pre-determined slot of the housewife heroine. When it comes to doctors, engi­ neers, corporate decision makers, politicians, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs or innovators, there seems to be an exclusive all-male preserve here. In 1993, when a popular advertisement listed the career options for women as banking, finance, law, marketi ng,

Ire in the

110

SOlll

avi ation, journalism, chartered accountancy (all th is apart from the teach�rs, doctors, engineers, a d m ini s t r a tors), there came a film like Laadla . This was the most damaging of them all . A supposedly heroine-oriented film that ended up essentially as a battle of the sexes where victory i s p re­ ordained . Instead of refurbishing the image of the indepen­ dent, intelligent woman (a hard-to-deny rea l ity i n today'S society), the film strongly indicts i t . Sridevi, a pioneering industria list, prefers to remain unmarried until she can find a man who matches her intellect, drive, status

until she

meets Anil Kapoor, a worker in her factory, who scoffs a t her arrogance and declares: "you may be number one i n everything, but as a woman, you are a big zero . " A few slaps la ter, she ends up as the number one woman too .

•

Raveena Tandon and Sridevi in Laadla

And how? For now, she has given up her factory, her house and rests content as the gajra-clad w i fe of a worker who packs the ti ffi n for her h usband and coyly pleads: h ouse and rests content as the gaj ra -cl ad wife of a worker who packs the tiffin for her husband and coyly pleads:

The Wild Cat and the Wimp

111

who packs the tiffin for her husband and coyly pleads: please come home early this evening. Needless to say the h usband has now moved from the rank of the blue collar to the white-collared status. He is now the owner-manager of his wife's company. Laadla thus restores the tradi tional gender ba lance once again: the man brings in the moolah and attends to the men's b usiness outd oors while the woman manages the home indoors . What about all that education, experience and acumen? Of course the former corporate queen would use it, b ut now as a mother and a wife, the film maker might conten d . Wouldn't she then be reduced to the two-headed schizo­ phrenic who, having once wri tten a paper on liberalization and macro economics, today writes notes to the milkman? Wouldn't a day which was once spent i n board rooms, making hard-headed d ecisions and devising b usiness strat­ egies, now look like an old Marx Brother 's comedy? One w here the female protagonist begins b y washing the dishes, r ushing the older children off to school, dashing out into the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemu ms, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, get the lunch done, sew or mend while the children nap, then cook supper and wash dishes while th e husband watches TV and finally go to bed with the gnawing realiza tion that very little of what she had done was necessary or i mportant. Would she then not tear her hair, scream and eventually end up on the head-sh rink's couch ? The film maker chooses not to know. So does the viewer. For the fil m fortl.mately ends on a 'and-they-lived-happily-ever-after ' note . At the height of the Women 's Liberation movement, the red book commented: " Few women would want to th umb their noses at h usbands, children and community and go off on their own. Those who do may be talented individu­ als, but they rarely are successful women ." In the turbulent •

on

on rnelr own . i nose wno dO may be talented mdlvldu­ als, but they rarely are successful women ." In the turbulent •

112

[re ill t h e 50111

above all else, divorce rates are spi ralling up, single women a re becoming the norm, films like Laadla and Beta choose to act as marriage counsellor and set the gender balance right once again . In both the films, the women a re m ore intelligen t than the men, but intelligence is of no concern here . Traditional roles are more important and according to these role models, a woman is best when she flowers within the four walls of the home . Yes, Hindi cinema has never outgrown Freud and dog­ ged ly insist that anatomy for the heroine is destiny. An anatomy which has d estined for her those glorious roles of the mother-provider or the better-half wife. Beta perfectly enunciates the ideal in b oth the roles of the mother and the wife. If Saraswati, on the one hand, is more intelligent, more educated and better qualified than her yokel h usband (Anil Kapoor), i t real ly does not ma tter. For Saraswati believes there is a mismatch the other way round . " Ka u n keh la hai wo mere layak nahin h a i r! . Sach to yeh hai ki main h i

, I

u nke layak nahin II00n , " she declares (who says he is not

I

worthy of me, the truth i s that I am not worthy of him). The mother (Aruna Jrani) on her part, begins by plotting against her son and daughter-in-law in order to retain her stranglehold on the property and the family. However, at the end of all the melodm ma and subterfuge, she holds her d ying stepson to her bosom and repents: Ma shabd ki hatya

I

hog i aur ha tyarin hogi main

ek ili a . Ka ikeyi ne to ap/le Ralll

ko 1 4 sal ka 'lIanpas diya Ilia, magar maine to apne Ram ko m a u l h i de di .

. (The word mother will be murdered and I, a mother, will be a murderer. Kaikeyi sent her son, Rama to exile for 1 4 years but I have sent my Rama to death i tself.) After this soulful lament, her poisoned son naturally rises . For, as he insists, "Ma ki 11lamla zahar ko blri doodh bmla del i h a i . " (A mother's love transform poison into milk too.) So much for glorified motherhood ! I ronically, in all these changing images, the antipa thy to .

The

Wild Cal

(/lId Ihe

Wimp

113

Ironically, in all these changing i mages, the antipathy to the modern woman still remains . Anything ostentatiously urban ,md Western as opposed to the Oriental and Indian is held suspect, both by the film makers and the cinegoers . The m in i -ski rted, c igarette smoking siren in the off-shoul­ der gown who throws herself on the h ero is i mmoral, l oose and un-Ind i an too . The success of Maine Pyar Kiya l ies p artly in the j uxtaposi tion of Suman (Bhagyash ree), the prototypical bha ra tiya kanya against Seema (Parvez Dastur) the icon for the 'videshi ' (Westernized) vam p . Seema w i th her seduc tive a i r, her daring sartorial sense and her permed h a i r must bear the brunt of everyone's scorn . So what if she has a sharp business sense and h elps in running the fa m i l y business? She is no match for sweet l ittle Suman with h er oiled pl aits, crumpled salwar k a m eez, Relaxo rubber chappals, accompani ed by a First d ivision i n Inter­ med i a te . In case, there is an iota of doubt, Prem (Sa l ma n Khan), the Prince Charming d ispels them all . Announcing h i s intention to marry, h e tel l s his mother he wants to ma rry a young, modern girl . He then begins to describe her: "Ma, ladki woh ho jo salwar kameez, ch u ridar kabhi na peh n e, s ir! jeans, m idis, m i n is pelme, jiske baal bilkul bade !la ho, chote-cliotf', bob cut ho, j{) really sexy ho, yell ho, u 'oh ho, a tom bom b ho . " (Mother, the girl should not wear salwar kameez .

.

and churi dar, only j eans, midis, minis; whose hair should be short, in a bob cut, who is really sexy, who i s this, that, an atom bomb . . . ) The mother merely smiles and dismisses the pueril e fantasy as a boyish prank . For according to her, such an ' atom bomb' would not be able to shell peas, d o the housework and adjust w i th the young and th e old in the fami l y. " Lekin aisi ladki ghar ka kaam tllOdi na karegi, ma tar thodi

11{1

cheelegi, badoll ki izzat, clwton se pyar, h u m u m ron se

apnapal1, yell sab g u n kal,urJ honge usme

.

.

.

Needl ess to say,

Pre m agre e�and Seema l oses him to the homely Suman . As ha ppens whenever the traditional Jane i s pitted against

Ire in the Soul

114

And it happened to Amrita Singh as the hard-as-nails

Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman

businesswoman i n

and the am­

bitious model in Aaina who lost out to the unambiti ous gentle, unambitious, domesticated Juhi Chawla . I n Aaina, Amrita, the elder sister is actually i n love with the success­ ful businessman Gackie Shroff) . Nevertheless, love for her is not the

summum bonum

of her existence and she dreams

of setting up a career as a model before settling down to domesticity. Neither her family nor the film maker can understand her. They treat her natural ambitions as some­ thing tota lly unnatural and unacceptable.

Shahrukh Khan and Amrita Singh in Raju Ball Gayaa Gelltlemall

On the eve of her wedding, the would-have-been-model wonders why she cannot postpone her marriage for a few month s . -For a t this point of time, when she is poised a t the threshold of an exciting career as a model and a fi l m star, marri age to her seems a liabili ty. She describes i t as the ' end

-

.

threshold of an exciting career as a model and a fil m star, marriage to her seems a l i abili ty. She describes i t as the 'end

The

Wild Cat and the Wimp

115

marriage to her seems a liability. She describes i t as the 'end of the road' and cries out against the standard ritua l s and customs. " Wah i laal joda, wahi saat phere, wahi ras me . . . sab kuch

itna traditional, itna rou tine lag raha hai" (the same red bridal gown, the very same customs, rituals . . . everything seems so traditionat so routine), bemoans the bride-to-be . Obvi­ ously, the younger sister looks askance a t such iconoclasm and knows tha t her sister is wrong. For, tradition, she insists, can never be wrong. This is a lesson which the ambitious young woman soon learns too. For the modelling assignment for which she deserts her fiance turns out to be a tryst with the big bad wolf and the prodigal sheepishl y longs to return to the fol d : back to the family and the fiance. Only, the family has b y now turned its back on her for injuring its honour and the fiance has discarded her as the evil eve . He h a s comfortably opted for the tota l l y traditional younger sister who luckily has no ambitions other than being a good wife and a good mother. N atural l y, no one thought of comb ining the two: marriage and a modelling career, whereby the elder sister need not have ended up as the black sheep . According to Sudhir Kakar, for both men and women in Indian society, the ideal woman is personified by Sita, the quintessence of wifely devotion . According to this myth, perpetuated by popular cinema, a good wife is by defini­ tion, a good woman . And the duties of this ' good wife' are clearly enunciated by Sita, the heroine of the Ramayana where she eloquently lays down the dharma of a n Indian w i fe w h i l e e m p h a s i z i n g h e r d e c i s i o n t o s h a re h e r husband's fate: " Fo r a woman, it is not her father, her son, nor her mother, friends nor her own self, but the husband who in th is world and the next is ever her sole means of salva tion . If thou dost enter the impen-

who in th is world and the next is ever her sole means of salva tion . If thou dost enter the impen-

l r( ' ill t h e SOli!

116

precede thee o n foot, treading o n the s p i ky Kush
2.

3.

Sudhir p. 65

Ka k kar, The 1 1 1 lIer WorlJ

I bid, pp . 67-68

(Oxford

lJ niversi ty P ress,

1 98 1 ),

Thl ' Wild Cill II l / d t il l ' Wi lll! ) -- ------

-- _

.. . .

117 _.

Shash i k <1 I <1 , H el l'n, Hi n d u . Bu t w i L h t h e onrush of modern­ ism in the- post-Zee n a t A m ,1n l'r"l ( e ver since her d el i n e ation of the j u n k i e i n Ha rp R r II l lil Ha re K ri.-; !nra), fi l m mJ kers a lso took i t u pon them seh'es t o 1 0 y d o w n i n b l ac k a n d w h i te, the p i t fJ l l s o f t h i s unb r i d l e d swi n g tow ards t h e Wes t . In Ko c h i Kali, t h e re is M a d h u ,

Cl

modern college g i r l , whc)

loves to boogev a t the d i scoth eque a n d dream; she ha tes those com mo n p l ace chorl:'s l i ke cooking, deem i n g , h O Llse­ keepin g . Encouraged b y h e r l ib er<1 l brother a n d fro wned upon by h e r tr a d i t ion a l hhahl i i, she spe n d s h er t i m e i nnci­ cen t l )' p < H t y i n g w i t h fri ends . A l most l i ke the b r i gh t , young c o l l ege-goer ll l'Xt d o or. B u t a l a s ! Bhabhi \vas r i gh t a l l a l o n g . For there beyo n d t h e La kshm an-rekha of t h e t r a d i t i on a l .'

san ctum s a n ctorum l u r k the b i g b <1 d w o l v es . The gullible In,l i d i s begu i l e d to act i n

Cl

b l u e film, sold i n a b rothel,

t o r t ur e d , w h i p p e d a n d s t r i p p e d . M e r e l y b e c a Ll s e sh e wan tl'd to l e t lwr h a i r d o wn and h a vl� SOIne fun , The i m a ge of t h e K.lC h i Ka l i ap pears t i me ;.l l1 d <1 ga i n to h i gh l ight this con fl i c t bd\-v e en tr,l d i t i on and m o d e rn i ty. A l so, to serve a s

a w a rn i n g w i th a s t r i d en t ' [3(' \-\,
f i n e i t , l i t's i n a c h a r a c tl'r l i ke Ni sh <1 , the protago n i s t o f [ hU l l Aap kp F-iaitl Kr n m . N o w N i s h <1 , born Lmd bred in the age of Pepsi and Coke is a perfect

J m '1 l

ga m of th e eClst a n d t h e

\ves t . A gr<1 J u a t e i n com p u tero n i cs, s h e m oves a round on rol l er ska tes a n d l i ves on i ce-crea m and ch ocol a tes. Nev­ ertheless, she is adept a t the fol k <1 n d c l ,1ssi cal d an ces a n d i s wel l-\'(�rsed i n t r a d i t i o n a l r i t u <1 l s a n d customs. B u t over and above a ll this, she i s willing t o h o l d fa m i l y h onour Jnd fami l i a l h i erarchy above a l l else . Even above l ove. When the fa m i l y w a n ts her to m arrv her d e a d si s ter 's h usband J

J

sh l' p mmp tly <1 grees . Desp i te the fact th a t she h a s s p e n t a l m os t t wo an d ,1 h<1 l f hou rs s eren,l d i n g a n d being ser­ e n a d e d by th e brother- i n -l 'l w.

Ire in the Soul

118

exception to the rule. It is only in an extreme situation of duress that a woman is allowed to call the shots. Mostly as the angel of doom in Insaaf Ka Tarazu, Zakhmee A u rat, Phool Bal1e Angaa rey, Khoon Bhari Maang, Anjaam and the lik e . Here the heroine has either lost her honour or her family and is consequently de-sexed for the sake of ven­ geance . She must necessarily lose out on normalcy normal family relationships, the normal business of life and be more than a woman . A devi, in short, where she is shown as an incarna te of Kali, Durga, Chand i . I n Rahul R a w a i l ' s A njaa m , Sh ivani ( Ma d h uri Dixit) loses her h us­ band, daughter, her unborn c h i l d and fre e d o m a t t h e hands of a de­ mented lover (Shah R u k h Kh a n ) . B u t before she sets out to wreak vengeance she declares to her p r i s on m a t e : " Ek

a u ra t agar daya m a m ta s ee n e m e n Rekha in Phool Bal/e A I/gaarey rakh ti hai to nafrat ki jwala bhi. A u rat agar ma bankar zindagi de bhi sakti hai to Chandi bankar zindagi le bhi sakti hai . . .sansar ne au rat ko ma behan befi ke roop mein dekha hai, magar Chandi ke roop mein nahin dekha . " (If a woman hides the treasures of pity and . .

motherliness in her heart, she also nurtures a cauldron of hate within. If a woman can impart life as a mother, she can also take life as Chandi, the goddess of death . . . . The hate within . If a woman can impart life as a mother, she can also take life as Chandi, the goddess of death . . . . The

The Wild Cat al1d the Wimp

119

can also take l ife as Chandi, the goddess of death . . . . The world has seen woman as a mother, sister and d aughter, never as Chandi .) She then meticulously kil ls the molester with the holy trident. As does Lakshmi (Sujata Mehta) in Pratighaat and Rekha in Phool Bane A ngaa rey . All of them being incarnates of destructive goddesses and far removed from the plane of the ordinary, angry woman . Even a film like Tejasvan i which tries to project the positive i mage of the Indian woman, meticulously reiterates this de-womanised version of the super-heroine. Tejasvini (Vijay Shanti) in her khakhi cop's wli form, her fiery lingo and burning passion for justice, has had to forego everything that an average intel­ ligent woman would want for an integrated l ife. She drifts apart from her family, incurs their wrath, has no time for love and ends up venerated, albeit lonely. Now how many women would like to substitute the pleasures of home and hearth with a clini cal khakhi uniform and a handful of a rid principles and a career? Obviously, here commitment to abstract causes and a complete woman cannot go together, our film makers would like to have us believe . Nevertheless with so much of manhandling, the image of the independent woman d oes occasionally raise its h ead in cinema . Shabana Azmi in A rth, Smita Patil in Subah, Sri devi i n Lamhe and Meenakshi Sheshadri i n Oamini a re some of the rebels who dare to wield the mantle of inde­ pendent, intelligent womanhood . For i f Shabana prefers to discover her own identity, rather than return to a h usband who had deserted her for the other woman, Smi ta Patil chooses career over h usband and home in Subah . I n Lmnhe, Sridevi b reaks all conventions by falling in love w i th a man who loved her mother and i n Oamini, Meenakshi manages to bring to l ife a self-righ teous, principled, cou rageous woman a l l w i thin the tradi tional parameters . For •

woman

a l l wltnm tne tracl ltlOnal parameters . r o r

Ire ;'1 the' SOIlI

120

cated wife who would have found meaning in l i fe cooking

saag for her husband (Rishi Kapoor) if she had not w i t­ ne�sed the gory rape of the family maid . Then, for the sake of truth and justice, she is wil ling to forego everything: h o m e , fa m i l y, d omes t i c pea c e . Ma in kya ka roo n , m a i n

tumhari patni hoon, magar is gha r mein paap h U (I hai, main yell kaise bhcol jaoon. Tu m h i m ujhe s ikhao kis tarah ap n e zameer ko maara jaafa hai (What should I do, I am your wife, but a sin has been commi tted in th is house, how ca n I forget i t? Teach m l' h o w am I supposed to m urder my conscience), she plea d s to her d istra ught h usband who would l i ke h er to forget the unsavoury incident for the sake of fam i l ial h on our and peace. Eventually, when reason, threats, e mo­ tional blackmail fa il, he gives up with the sad realization that h i s wife h appens to l ove truth more than him

ki

ba at

cheezen

yt'11 ', a i ki tu mhare liye mere pyar

Izl7i).

Sadly, i t is only rarely th a t

we

se ba dllka r

come a cro ss a

(Ollklz

bh i a u r

Oamilli w ho

pla ces prin ciples over patio Protagonists like these a re too few and far between to become the rule ra ther than the exception . Nevertheless, the metamorphosis has begun, i f only on the surface; the changing face of the w oma n d oes sign i fy a hear tenin g trend: the Hindi fi l m heroine i s a l m ost ready to walk out of her strait jacket and stop being the mere wind beneath th e hero 's wing . I f only the fi lm makers w ou l d I d her get more attuned to reality. . . •

Index

Anilln, 1 1 4

Bnllghi, 90, 93

Amlkhell, 1 03

Bnnzigar, 3, 54, 75, 77, 79-82

Anshiqlli, 2, 93, 1 06

Babri Masjid, 9, 1 6

A n t ish, 82

Bachchan, Amitabh, 2, 1 9-22, 30-56, 74, 85, 1 00-01

Anwnrn, 72

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 62; Awards 63

Baldwn, Alec, 26

Bnlldit Quem,

64

Barjatya, Soo raj , 3, 96

Aggarwal, Anu, 93, 1 06

Bassinger Kim, 26

Agllct:plltil, 36, 42, 52, 81 , 1 00

Ba tes, Kathy, 63

Agnihotri, Atul, 82

Beatty, Warren, 63

Asnihotri, Rnti, 1 9, 1 01

Bedi, Kiran, 107

Aknylll, 2, 47

Betn, 1 05, 1 1 2

Akshny Kumar, 64, 1 05

Bhaduri, Jaya, 1 00

Alg er, Horatio, 48

Bhagyashree, 9 1 , 96, 1 05, 1 1 3

Alien, Woody, 26

Bha tt, M a hes h, 90, 1 06

American Print Media, 5

Shatt, Poo a, 90-91

Amherst College, 58

Bindu, 27, 1 1 6

Amrapurkar, Sadashiv, 1 3, 90

Birth o n Nn tioll, 91

Alldnllz, 1 02

BOl/cuny, 9-12

Allgnnr, 64

Bombay Riots, 9, 15, 1 7

A Iljnnlll , 54, 75-82, 1 0 1 , 1 1 9

Brady, lan, 78

Arth, 1 1 9

B righ t Eyes, 8

Arunn Ir a ni, 1 06, 1 1 2

Brokm Blossol1ls, 92-93

Ashok Kumar

see

Ganguli,

Ashok K u m a r

j

f

Brook, Mel, 64 B lIgsy, 63

Auto Shankar, 3 Azmi, Shabana, 1 1 9

Caan, James, 63

Ire in the SOlll 79-80

Cameron, Deborah,

Cnpe Fenr, 63

61 -62 Ch a ddh a , Sahila, 27 Chandni, 87 Chand ra, N . , 22, 85, 88, 1 07 Charan Raj, 23 Chawla, J uhi, 80, 87, 9 1 , 94-95, 1 05, 107, 114 Chinoy, E l y, 49-50 Chopra , Ya sh, 3, 39-40 C l a ud e Van Damme, Jean, 64 Coli ins, Norman, 79 Coolie, 1 9-21, 36, 44-45, 47, 50, 101 Cooper, C ary, 63 Crisp, Oonald, 92-93 C u rly Top, 8 Capra, Frank,

Oakll Hasilla, 64, 99 Dam ill i, 1 0 1 , 107, 119- 1 20 Danny,

set'

Denzogappa, Danny

Oa!'!', 3, 54, 75, 77, 79-81 Dastur, Parvez, 27, 113 D a v is, Ceena, 26 d e Niro, Rob ert, 63-64 Deceived, 25 Oee1l'ar, 37-38, 42, 44-45, 47, 51 -52, 54, 72, 8 1 , 100 Demme, Jonathan, 03 Denzig,

9

12, 18, 38 Dixit, Madhuri, 75, 89, 93-94, 96-97, 1 03, 1 1 8 Dobson, James c., 61 Douglas, Michael, 26 O ltlaarn, 97, 102 Dutt, Nargis, 73-74 Dutt, Sanjay, 55, 64-65, 82, 90-91, 103 Dilip Kumar,

Eckart, Charles,

7-8

£'1lt'1 Kll ievei, 47 Farb er, Stephen,

62

Fassbinder, Wilhem,

95

Fisher K i ng, 63 Foster, Jodie, 62 Francois, Donatien Alphonse, Frazer, E lizabeth,

77

77-78

Cnllgn lnll11111n Snrnswati, 2 Canguli, Ashok Kumar, 72-73 Carbo, Creta, 63 Chai, Sub hash, 3, 1 2, 65-66, 71 C/lar Dwnr, 26 Char £k Malldir, 26 Char Char Ki Knllnlli, 26 Char Ka 5 ukh, 26 Char Sallsar, 26 Cish, Lilian, 91 Cood Fellas, 63 Covinda, 97, 1 03

Denzogappa, Danny,

Creat Depression, period of, S,

DeDI, Dharmendru,

Criffith, O W.,

Desai, Manmohan, Dev Anand,

88 37, 51 20, 49

18

Devgan, Ajay, 3, 64 Dharmendra see DeDI, Dharmendra Dhawan, David, 3

Oil, 2, 93, 1 07 Oil Hai Ki Mallta Nal! ill, 2, 9ll-91

91

Har.: RI1111a Hare Kris/1I1n, 1 1 7 Hasanbegovic, Jusuf, 29, 3 1 Hnthkndi, 102 Ha tthangadi, Rohini, 81 Hawn, Coldie, 25 Heard, John, 25 Helen, 116

9

Index Hepburn, Katherine, 63

Ka rt/laUl/am, 1 07

Hitler, 9

Kasumovic, Denis, 29

Hoover, 6-7

Klwlllaikn, 1 01

Hopkins, Anthony, 62-64

Klzalllayak, 3, 54-55, 65-69, 72,

Hum Aapke Haill Kaull, 3, 27, 95,

97, 1 05, 1 1 7

,

76-78, 82, 1 03 Khan, Aamir, 86, 92, 95 Khan, Amjad, 50

lndra Kumar, 1 0 5

Khan, Kad er, 2 1

Ilid mjeet , 2 , 47

Khan, Mansoor, 2-3, 86

Ir l q l l ilaab, 2 1-22, 36, 5 1

1I1sanf Ka Ta mzlI, 1 18 Intolera llce, 9 1

Irani, Aruna see Aruna lrani Irons, Jeremy, 63

Khan, Salman, 3 , 87, 90-91 , 1 1 3, 118 Khan, Shah Rukh, 3 , 64, 76-77, 80-81 , 1 1 9 Kher, Anupam, 1 2, 89

It Happelled Olle Nigh t, 62

Khooll Blrari Man/Ig, 118

jndllgar, 2

Kiran Kumar, 89

Jean Claud e Van Demme see

Kislllet, 72-73

Claude Van Demme, Jean

J ohnson,

J unior, 48, 50

jZlVtmile Violellce III A Willller Loser Culture, 58

KlllIddar, 1 02-03

Klienhans, Chuck, 47-48 Knievel, Evel, 47, 49 Koirala, Manisha, 1 0 Km 1 1 tiveer, 1 3, 1 5 - 1 6

Kabhie-Kabh ie, 38-39

Laadla, 11 0-12

Kachclli Kn li, 1 1 7

Laawnris, 1 0 1

Kaha lli P!zoolvat i Ki, 64

Lall/he, 1 1 9

Kakar, Sudhir, 24, 1 1 5

Last AlIlericn ll Hero, Tile, 48

Kajol, 80

Lector, HannibaJ, 63, 65, 78

Knla Pat thar, 4 7

Let/zal Weapoll, 64

Knli Gnllgn,

64

Kapoor, Anil, 69-70, 89, 110, 1 1 2

Little Miss Maker, 8 Littlest Rebel, The, 8

Kapoor, Karishma, 97, 1 02 - 1 03 K apoor, Pankaj, 1 4

Madha v i, 100

Kapoor, Raj, 1 8, 23, 38, 72-73

Mail er, Norman, 78- 79

Kapoor, Rishi, 1 20

Maine Pya r Kiya, 2, 27, 9 1 , 94-95,

Kap oor, Shakti, 90, 1 1 1

97, 1 05, 1 1 3

Kapoor, Shammi, 18, 38, 84

M , li i ni, Hema, 37

Kapoor, Shashi, 38, 40, 8 :

Mani Ratnam, 9- 1 0, 1 3

Kap oor, Shekhar, 1 2, 64-65

Manson, Charles, 77

Ka mll Arjllll, 3

Mard, 37, 47, 1 0 1

Ka rma, 1 2

Marryi!lg Ma l l , 27

I re i l l till' ')l)/ i I M n yer, Louis 13 "

Qlly!lll lllt Se QIlYtl /l/(/ t Tnk, 2, gS-86,

7

9 1 , 93-94, 1 117

Med \'(,d, M i c h a e L 24

R,wgeshwilri, 1 03

Meh ta , H a r sha d , 59 Meh ta ,

Suj

n

Raaj Kumilr, 1 8

ta , 22- 23, 1 1 9

Mehul Kumnr, 13

Rili, Riljeev, 1 04

M i l der, Betty, 26

RIlIIl BII/) I I , 98, 1 112-0]

Misery, 63

Rajendra Kumar, 1 8 , 39, 84

Mohrn, 1 04

Rllj l l BIl I I Gnycl Gel l t /elllll ll, 1 05, 1 1 4

Mr, illdin, 1 2

Rakhee, 39-4 1 , 1 01

M uqabln, 1 02

RIl III Lllkhil 1 1 , 69-73

M l lqnddilr Kil S lkil l l dtl r, 39, 40, 45,

Rillll(/!/tlll tl, Tlw, 71 RJl I I I /la, 6-1

1 110

Rawail, R a h u l , 1 1 8

Mussol i ni , 9

Rekha, 4 1 , 1 0 1 , 1 1 9

RtTt'r51l1 of Fort l l l l e, The, 63

N a g h m a , 90

Nllme Ahove The Tit le, Nargis

see Dutt,

The,

61

N a rgis

Riefenstahl, Leni, 9 Roberts,

J ulia,

26

Nllseeb, 45-47

Rojll,

Nat l/ rnl Bom Killers, 57-58, 77

Roy, Nirupa, 67

Nolte, Nick, 63

13, 1 5

j

Norris, C h uck, 64

Slll/ lll l Ka Char, 27, 1 07

Nuremberg Party rally, 8

Slldllk, 65 , 90-9 1 , 93 Sadhna, 84

0111' Flew Oiler the Cuckoo's Nest,

Saira Bano, 84

Snlim J aved,

62 Our Li ttle Gi r i , 7

Sil I ltlll!

49

Be,mfll,

2, 86-88

K umar, 5anJeev ,

� ,' I,

, '"'

�

�

PllriZ'llr, 26

Snntosh i , Raj Kumar, 1 0 7

Parveen B a b i , 38, 85, 1 110

Sara t, A u s ti n , 59

Patekil r, N ,m ,l , 3, 1 6

SCt'I It'S F ro ll l

Pn l l

PIlIII:

A l Ir Woh , 26

Patil, Smi ta, 1 ll0, 1 1 9

Il

Ma ll, 25

Schv..'arze nnegM, Arn old, 64

Seagal, Steven, 64

Pesci, Joe, 63

SlllIiJt'lblldiJ, 35-37

Pllool Blme A I1gna rt'y, 1 1 8- 1 9

SllIl kli, I OU

Ph o o l a n D e v i , 60, 64 Poor

L it tle R ich

G irl, 8

ShMl11n,

Ani!, 1 3

5h,l S h i k a l il , 1 1 6

Pra n , 88

Sill' Dt'j'i/, 26

P m l lgllnnl, 2 3 - 2 ] , 1 U 7, 11 9

Shesh a d r i , Meenakshi, 1 ()7, 1 1 9

P n l l l't' of

Tides,

Tllc', fiJ

Puri, A mrish, 1 J

Shel tv, Suni l , 6-1 "

Shirodka r, S h i l pn , l 03

Shi \' p ur i , R i tu, 1 03

[lId/'x SirOiIlY, 37-38, 46, 5 1 -52, 68, 37-38, 1 01 Shroff.

5 ilcl lu'

J a c k i e , 65-66, 1 03, 1 1 4 uf the Lill/i/.S, Till', 63-65, ,

7S

Temple, Shirl ey, 7-9, 24 Tewai>, 2, 86, 89-9U, 93, 1 0 7 Thclll/a and LOllis, 26 TimIlga, 1 3

S ilsilt l . 38 Singh , A m r i t a

Tejasva I I I , 1 02, 1 U7, 1 1 9

Taofn 1 1 , 2 ,

Ill l , 1 1 4

SII'I,/, i l lg With l ire E l lem y , 2 7 Sri 42U, 24, 73-76

Trislllll, 39, 1 00 Trill mph of the Will, 9 Turner, K a t h leen, 25

Sr idevi, 1 1 0, 1 1 9 Sta l l one, Syl vestorl

StewMt, Jimmy, 63 Stone, Oli vcr, 56-57

64

Vij aya Shanti, 1 1 9

Vi l la in, 5U

S ll/Jah, 1 1 9

Wllr of lilt' Roses, The, 25

Suteliffe, Pe ter, 77

Wa rner, J a c k , 7

Svv amy, An'incl, 1 0, 74

Williams, Robin, 63

S Zl'il rg, 27

Wilson, Colin, 77

Tn/lnlbl, 1 2

Zakirmee A u m f , 99, 1 1 8

Tall y, Ted, 62 Ta ndon, Ra veena, 1 04 Ta n uj a , 8 2

Zal ljl'er, 2, 1 9, 37-38, 4 U -43, 45,

47, 50, 54, 79, l OU Zeenat Aman, 86, l Ul l 1 1 6