juxtaposing cinemas

2010-04-04T06:17:00.000-07:00

Om Shanti Om: A tale of self-reflection from Bollywood[1]

--by Ratnakar Tripathy

Senior Research Fellow,

Asian Development Research Institute [ADRI]

Patna

Prefatory remarks

I would justify the selection of ‘Om Shanti Om [OSO]’ for interpretative analysis by claiming it to be one of the most daring and radical critiques of Bollywood cinema, as well as, its most unashamed and unequivocal vindication in recent times. The startling thing here is that such an inseparable medley of both critique and blatant adoration has come from within Bollywood itself. Hindi cinema has had on occasions reflected on itself with fulsome dedication in films like ‘Kagaz Ke Phool’, ‘Mera Naam Joker’ and more recently ‘Taal’ before a Bombay bred choreographer Farah Khan decided to give us her own wholesale take on the Mahabharata called Bollywood in OSO. The point here is not simply to gauge or assess the self-consciousness shown by a genre or a specific work but also to examine how it incorporates this self-consciousness in its narrative flow and whether its self-consciousness enables it to transform and transcend itself.

There have been in the past any number of films with patchy or passing references to the medium itself, and the elusive epithet ‘filmy’ has curiously emerged from the trade as one of those indispensable and yet ineffably polyvalent concepts. We keep rediscovering this slippery notion not simply in cinema halls but in the midst of everyday wide awake usage, even though being asked to precisely put your finger on it may seem to spell trouble. This term probably seeks to emphasize a certain genre specific stance and style shared by the eyes looking at the screen as well as the spectacle on the screen. Having survived several decades of critical neglect and despise, Hindi cinema now seems to speak in far bolder tones about its ‘filminess’ than before. Ironically, this has become possible at a point in time when Hindi cinema may be going through a sea change both in terms of its content and the technology, promising to become rather unrecognizable perhaps in the next decade or so. Even as I say this, I can sense Minerva’s owl make a timely traverse across the year 2008. This is broadly the historical backdrop for this article.

There is however also a theoretical context, which requires to be made explicit at the outset. First, I have to admit that the moment I find a genre, any genre, be it a self-referent village Nautanki in Bihar or an elegant ‘Eight and a Half’ by Fellini, that seems to reflect on its own being, my heart warms up and I lose my sense of proportion, both in terms of my distance from a given show and my urge to apply ruthless tools of analysis to it. Part of this oblivion and security may arise from the fact that when a certain self-reflectiveness is already in evidence, I don’t need to start from scratch as a critic. I feel secure in the realization that someone seems to be producing a cultural object not in the frenzied assembly line mode of manufacturing plastic buckets, and that there is a critical eye present on the stage or the screen, to begin with. Call it quality control if you like, but I prefer to call it self-respect or a natural and nurturing fondness for the given medium by its faithful members in all possible epochs and eras.

Another reason I delay or douse my critical responses almost perversely is that I wish to continue to enjoy, indeed enhance my enjoyment of spectacles and not turn into a critical-analytical food processor incapable of tasting its own morsels. I have no desire to turn into a critic-analyst who has risen above the petty matters of pleasure and pain into a state of numbed objectivity. I thus applaud the filmmaker for the unrestrained fun OSO brought me. And yet, lest fun and enjoyment begin to sound like porcine wallowing, I would like to rise above the muddy splashes of joy to make a more enduring and explicit sense of the film.

The second theoretical issue is related to my own methodological ambivalences in analyzing popular culture over the years. On the one hand, there were finely shaded theories of ideology and hegemony which tried to forcefit the elements of popular culture into a number of allegedly conforming moulds such as heterosexuality, family, patriarchy, community, caste, class and the nation state, not necessarily in that order. At times they seemed unfairly procrustean and reductionist, but at times they led to deep insights, a very mixed bag of results indeed! But even within the embrace of such approach, there is a need to distinguish between a tendency to see pervasive and immanent ideological hegemony in popular art, and one that claims to see the opposite everywhere it looks - rebellion and dissent through and through. A bit like the well-known gestalt illustration, the same figure can cause you to see an hourglass at one moment and human faces at the other, hopefully not both at the same time in a schizoid montage.

On the other hand, there are approaches that may be broadly described as psychoanalytic/psychological which see in popular culture a patient’s unrestrained outpourings as he lies on the analyst’s couch. In its worst moments, such approach seemed to equate the entirety of popular culture with the fantasies and anxieties of wholesale confessions made to a psychiatric counselor[2]. In its best moments of course, it led to insights unavailable elsewhere, especially when supported by other sources such as myths, fairy tales and literature. This is no place to try to resolve a fundamental theoretical issue but I must admit that over time I have often been disloyal to both these approaches in all their grandeur. The reason is I now try to ensure that my deeper loyalty to empirical reality remains uncompromised, in order to as they gallantly say, ‘save the phenomenon’. This makes me a theoretical opportunist with no sense of ontological commitment, and I must admit right away that I feel no shame in committing this grave philosophical sin. I suppose, in my incessant chase after a phantom, I only need to keep the quarry in sight without having to consult a compass to indicate direction. Settling the issue of the nature of reality or even the visual image with finality before beginning to figure out OSO doesn’t seem a prudent or pragmatic idea anyway.

Retelling the story of Bollywood by Bollywood

To get down to the main business of analyzing Om Shanti Om, here is my own retelling of the film. The film comes in two parts – in the first part, you start with a male protagonist who happens to be a second generation junior artist, the very dregs of the film industry in caste terms, if you like. He lives with what he calls a ‘filmy’ mother and spends a lot of time mouthing stale movie dialogues at home and among friends. His entire existence seems like a grandiosely miserable kitsch on 70 mm. But he is blessed with a singularly hyperactive imagination. He not only dreams of turning a superstar but goes and falls in love with none less than the reigning movie star of the day called Shanti. He stands in front of her hoardings, confessing his love in his gushy filmy language. And yet significantly, he is not a neurotic stalker. In fact he is self-conscious enough to break his confessional monologue in front of a gigantic hoarding of his dream girl by asking her - ‘kahin tum bore to nahin ho rahee ho…[I hope you are not getting bored]’ – the very anxiety of a true blood entertainer.

Soon, the pathetic junior artist begins to rise from a state of disdained insecthood to levels deserving the compassion, if not the empathy of the audience. And then he makes a sudden and spontaneous leap to hero-hood when he jumps into a blazing movie set to rescue Shanti, not unlike the legendary real life scene between Sunil Dutt and Nargis on the sets of ‘Mother India’. The life motto of this aspiring hero is very simple – ‘they say, if you really wish for something sufficiently strongly, the whole world gets together to ensure that you get it’. Never heard of any such faux proverb or quote before I saw OSO! This mantra anyway has nothing to do with the fiery motivational formulas spouted by a Deepak Chopra or an Abdul Kalam. It quite likely means that in order to fulfill your dreams all you need to do is to switch off reality, shut your eyes and put on your own ‘my favourite fantasies’ channel. And your resourceful neurons will provide a much better picture quality than the latest lasers! My guess is, the filmmaker’s injunction here is – ‘don’t despise your daydreams. Just drag some of them into your daylight life and see what happens!’

As against this, glamorous Shanti’s life seems steeped in the utterly sordid despite her starry status. Secretly married to a film producer, the villain of the piece, she is faced with both pregnancy and rejection by him. The hero Om happens on the scene of their final confrontation and ends up makings another heroic but unsuccessful intervention, trying to foil the villain’s attempt to murder Shanti. In the process, both the hero and the heroine get swallowed by the huge pyres created by the villain and die. The chapter of pure unmixed desiring thus ends up unfulfilled, which is why the need for propitiation of perturbed spirits and the title ‘Om Shanti Om’!

Before we move on to the next half of the story, let us make due note of the fact that the villain here is a film producer or more appropriately a financial wheeler-dealer and a behind the scenes man – the key authority figure in the Bollywood industry. As we shall see later, the villain soon shifts to Hollywood after the crime and starts producing films for the NRI audience – perhaps Farah Khan’s personal revenge against the breed. Another self-deprecatory slogan recurrently used by the director in the film is ‘happy endings’, indicating how the story teller of Bombay cinema has to hover above the common miseries of life such as boredom, disease and death, and invariably conclude a tale with happy endings. Tragic incidents thus may play the rhetorical role of assuring an audience that the storyteller’s job is not over yet and one must wait for the undoing of the tragedy. As the protagonist teasingly reminds the audience - ‘Picture abhi baki hai [the movie hasn’t ended yet!]’.

In the second half, we move from the early 1980s [the period of Hollywood’s Peter Proud [1975] and Bollywood’s Karz [1980] to the present. Now Om reborn is seen as the only child of a superstar from yesteryears. The second generation film hero in his new birth slowly realizes that he is just a lowly Om in another birth – a miserable junior artist reincarnated into a star – verily, a junior artist’s dream come true. The one visible link between the two births seems to be the occasional pyrophobic attacks, the only chink in the armoured self of a new Om. This episodic neurosis however slowly culminates in a blast of memories from the past birth. But before all that happens, we see him attain all the tinselly dreams of wealth a junior artist may nurse. These dreams include red satin dressing gowns, velvety sandals, servants holding glasses of juice for him, doing his bidding every step of the way as he moves around like a crashing tornado, with a brattish nonchalance of manners bordering on mindless brutality. But not to worry! You just wait and see. He will turn out to have a good heart hidden deep under layers of arrogance masking his innate innocence for a while!

In the meantime, Om’s mother is driven nearly crazy, unable as she is to get over the resemblance between her son and the new superstar. In a rare non-filmy scene we see the filmy mother dragging along the star’s limousine in the manner of a stalker, as he curses her for rousing his conscience and well, nudging memories of his modest birth out of dormancy. Once the reborn Om fills up the gaps in his memory as a full-blown reincarnate, and rather quickly comes to terms with his dark past, he goes back to his family and friends as a reformed man. He admits as much to his present father in the middle of a filmland roust when he wins a best actor’s award, the other contestants being real life Abhishek Bachchan and Akshay Kumar. In the meantime, he has already won the audience’s empathy, even though the storyteller doesn’t bother with the likely angst of having to square up a deprived childhood with the glittering wealth of the present. We now have in front of us a hero humbled by the losses of the past and ready to outgrow his infantile self. The story of two separate births turns out to be a mere tale in two parts.

Fully armed with the emotional wealth of an earlier life, the hero is now ready to face his life assignment as an eager adventurer – the obvious challenge being revenge against the villain on Shanti’s and Om’s behalf! To make that possible at all, the NRI villain promptly makes a comeback in Bollywood after decades and decides do a film with Om. In order to complete the circle of happy endings, the hero has to find a new Shanti of course, who may complement him and whose appearance may cause cracks in the villain’s sleek façade and flummox him into erratic behaviour. The idea is to wring evidences for a long-forgotten murder. Another Shanti, a lookalike [Deepika Padukone in a double role] and an aspiring actress is found. She is then made to stage a ghostly, phoenix like rebirth from the ashes. Face to face with an apparition, the incredulous villain goes against his rational instinct and makes a murderous attack all over again. The original guilt comes back swimming promptly to the surface. But even before Om is able to nab the perpetrator, a huge chandelier drops right on top of the villain. Om gets a brief glimpse of the haunting spirit of Shanti, who executes the crash from behind the scenes before waving a final goodbye on her way to redemption. Om is left behind with Shanti’s new avatar and a happy ending is obtained. Everything fits in neatly and it’s time to go home.

Oscillating between the fairy tale and the epic

Throughout the film I could not help feeling that I am watching a work where at every stage the author takes a step ahead and pauses, as if planning to preempt the audience’s expectations, and yet moves along the predicted course, stealing a teasing look at the audience in the meantime. In brief, the surprise is there are no surprises. If the surprise succeeds it is for a very common reason – faced with characters so self-highly conscious of themselves, we intuitively expect them to behave differently from the set Bollywood pattern. But they don’t. The filmmaker thus throughout ruthlessly mocks Bollywood and yet ends up making another quintessential Bollywood film. The phrase that occurs to me here is another Bollywoodism – ‘thoda hat ke’[somewhat different] – which is reminiscent of the kathavachak tradition in folk culture where every teller of the Ramayana story is invariably and willy nilly thoda hat ke. In the process, the film ends up confirming every cliché, every stereotype, and trope, traditionally used by Bollywood. But instead of feeling cheated, let us admit may be this is the effect the filmmaker wished to create, as she indeed did! And who knows, may be the audience sees in this ongoing scam of repetition and remakes, a reward rather than a swindle!

OSO is a difficult film to analyze for the same reasons that make it interesting. It is Bollywood at its self-conscious best and all the critical points you wish to make as an advocate of realistic daylight cinema are already made by the filmmaker within the text. Additionally, there are also some poignant comments on the power equations in the Bollywood hierarchy. There is thus little else you can add but vent your anger at someone who commits a crime in full awareness and with conviction, an unusual situation in Bollywood, where we critics like to point out the hopeless but also helpless stupidity of the filmmakers, allegedly incapable of anything better. The filmmakers in turn habitually blame the stupid audience of course which is where the buck stops. OSO has thus effectively swallowed, digested and spat decades of criticism and sarcasm faced by Hindi cinema from within India and the west. It is now immune to both the bilious sneering of the educated Indian as well as the uncomprehending mockery of Hollywood.

In brief, OSO seems to carry a conscious ideology that is visibly embedded in its story line, dialogues and visuals. I feel that the ideology is best summarized in the phrase ‘Darde Disco’, a startling phrase that seems to simultaneously carry a sense of self-pity and proud assertion. ‘Bollywood is cheap, crass, kitschy and gross, and we know it, but what to do, this is what the audience wants’, goes one line of argument. ‘This is the ‘ishtyle’ [style] in which we talk of our dreams, sorrows and experiences, and if you can’t stomach it, to hell with you, since the audiences love us, and that matters the most’, goes the other argument.

Before moving further, let us remember that the junior artist in OSO is also a diehard fan, a film fanatic and this sleight allows the filmmaker to place the audience-cum-junior artist squarely at the centre of the screen. In the second half when Shanti II turns up, she makes it clear that she is more a fan of the star than an aspiring actress. It would seem then that the filmmaker is clearly imposing on the audience the hero-heroine mantle, while the film producer gets painted as a villain in the ‘us against them’ mode.

With the democratization of the entertainment industry in the post-independence era, an auteur would obviously want to be freed from the enforced patronage of the Bollywood moneybags and connect directly with her film audience. But as students of the entertainment industry, we very well know that such mediations, however much you hate them, cannot be wished away. They are integral parts of the structure and the fabric. Ironically, when the entertainer was able to connect most directly with his audience, it was in pre-industrial and pre-democratic era and mostly under the hopefully benign gaze of a feudal patron. In which case, is the director of OSO trying to share with us one of her own daydreams, namely freedom from the Bollywood movers and shakers and a direct handshake with her audience? Is it a case of the storyteller hugging her audience to point fingers in unison at the producer-villain? Will the audience become willingly complicit to this scheme? These are questions seeking answers. One has to admit that a storyteller seeking autonomy from the financer – producer in our times has two potential pawns or weapons it can use – the crazy fan/audience, and the star he is crazy about. Indeed, the fan-star duo makes the most perfectly ‘involved’ consumer-commodity pair. People may love cars, shampoos and mixies, but they don’t worship them, the way a fan worships her idol. In fact the star icon are meta-products used to endorse and sell ‘earthly’ products like soaps and shampoos. Prima facie, their worthiness as weapons in a director’s hands seems fairly assured. The irony is the director-storyteller now ends up becoming a slave to the fan-star duo instead.

Before drawing any more conclusions, there is a moment of bad faith involved here which I wish to magnify and scrutinize. Lest we overlook it, we need to remember that in the maelstrom of the Bollywood industry, it is often difficult to pinpoint the storyteller with any precision. In case of Raj Kapoors and Gurudutts, we clearly knew who our storyteller was. I feel that when Farah Khan collapses the artist/audience/storyteller together in the manner of a folk form, she is indulging in grave self-deception. Let us not forget that in Bollywood it is stars that have fans and not film directors, and quite fittingly, Om in his new avatar in OSO has been shown flitting between film sets and planning the schedules/locations of the film to be financed by the villain producer. The question is – is this a case of an actor Shahrukh Khan doing the job of Farah Khan, a director well-known for her stern intolerance for any interference in her projects? If not, why is the director/auteur missing from Om’s new film project? Indeed, in the last scenes of OSO, when Farah Khan, the director arrives in person to attend the celebrations, there is no one waiting to receive her. She finds the stage abandoned and she has to go running after an auto to get back home. Through a brief and somewhat comic sequence she ensures to point out the powerlessness and redundance of the director vis a vis the star and the producer, as also her ability to laugh off her own plight. And this suppressed authorial hurt is what may provide OSO with some links to the agony of Mera Nam Joker and Kagaz Ke Phool. The creative person in the industry is hounded by the ringmaster of a metaphorical circus, as Raj Kapur would put it, or forced to create kagaz ke phool [paper flowers], rather than real ones, as Guru Dutt would put it. In the case of Farah Khan, this hurt is more than compensated by the ecstatic stampede of all the major Bollywood stars, the community of gods from today and yesteryears who bless the film with their presence. A bit like a gathering of all the sects under one ecumenical umbrella! Or a dragooning of all the star brats under the schoolmarmish gaze of a master choreographer! This is a point I will bring up again towards the end of the essay to draw its full significance.

To go back to the earlier themes of ‘Darde Disco’ and the ‘filmy’, it is not uncommon for an educated Indian to first enjoy a Hindi film thoroughly and then switch to a critical daylight mode only to analyze the film to bits of infantile incoherence. This ambivalence hides a fundamental truth of Bollywood that requires to be admitted. It is perhaps the same ambivalence that makes Javed Akhtar invent the phrase ‘Darde Disco’. I will term it the shame of the daydreamer - once the movie gets over and the hall lights are put on, an audience faces both – the loss of a snug dream and the shrinking of his own infantile self, which he must mask in a hurry. The adult exiting the cinema hall resents the child that walked into it three hours ago.

Indeed, if I must rise above my own ambivalence here, I should begin by pointing out that despite its utter self-consciousness, OSO is one more fairy tale in both its pejorative and non-pejorative senses produced by Bombay. Once I conjure up the image of an eight year old curled up with her grandmother and listening to fairy tales however, most of my infuriating shame over enjoyment of OSO seems to perish. That a grandmother chooses not to dwell on social reality stops bothering. Mind you, fairy tales are not only about projection and fulfillment of desire. According to Bruno Bettelheim[3] among others, an essential component of fairy tales are the obstacles, the fears, and the villains that come in the way of fulfillment, which must be conquered. In the process of arduous struggle, the fulfillment itself acquires a new adult meaning. In fact, there are fairy tales, such as some of Grimm’s that come so packed with overpowering horrors that fulfillment or victory may not even seem worthwhile to a lazy daydreamer. The need for horrific content may even be proportional to the prevalent social conditions, e.g. children in a war torn area may require a higher dosage of violence in stories to learn to contend with it. At any rate, if the grandparents of the world tell fairy tales to their grandchildren, it can’t be because they wish them turned into passive daydreamers. On their part, if the children did not relish the adventure and looked for fulfillment alone, they won’t need to hear fairy tales. They would go for lollipops instead. Fairy tales allow the listener to rehearse the harsh reality and also one’s selfhood in imagined scenarios, through both identification and individuation, through a ‘what happens if…’ kind of reasoning.

And yet, if OSO was entirely and literally the same thing as grandmother’s tales, there was no need for a paper like this. The fact that we may need the aid of fairy tales in adulthood is not altogether regrettable. But reluctance to admit the need and the over-elaborateness of adult fairy tales seem to indicate that we don’t club them entirely with the fairy tales of childhood. There are thus some glaring dissimilarities between the intimate fairy tale and the Bollywood genre – the technological and social contexts and scales are quite different, but let us try to go beyond such obvious divergences. The sense of grandeur that OSO tries to achieve through elaborate, heroic and public action are attempts, I feel, to give it the semblance of an epic or more accurately a faux epic. If one were not to insist on the canonical requirements or the literary fixtures of an epic or a Mahakavya, both the idea of the ‘filmy’ and the ‘heroic’ action would begin to make a new sense. Indeed, between the epic and the fairy tale lie a number of gray categories like Khandkavya, ballads and elaborate yarns of adventure that approximates the epic form. Perhaps the stringent requirements of an epic prescribed by our classical acharyas are only attempts to ensure that we in our unrestrained egotism don’t end up claiming cosmic significance for all our experiences.

It is possible to claim that in OSO as also in Bollywood generally, we are perhaps dealing with two extremes of reality, first, in its private fairy tale sense of intimate dreams, visions and desires on the one hand, and on the other, an epic cosmic stage, where human life as such becomes the target of reflection. This is a stage where the mundane social realities as we know them, do not figure except in broad brush strokes. And here again the phrase ‘Darde disco’ [pain caused by disco kitsch or pain seen as disco kitsch?] too would make sense as the yoking of private pain with the wide public arena of the dance floor. No wonder, Hindi cinema has to work hard to make space for social reality in its prosaic sense, and the drudge job has to be performed by the countless small screens of the TV soap, in a curious division of labour. OSO requires us to take a leap from the baby’s crib to a galactic stage, from fairy tale to epic proportions, as the workaday social reality gets lost in the creases of this gigantic fabric.

The magnification of the fairy tale into the epic spectacle however, is not an easy task, requiring tremendous narrative stretching and performative wizardry, which may explain the presence of the songs, the Nautanki-Tamasha element, and the comical distractions etc., which both threaten the structural integrity of the Bollywood narrative form and also lend it the stamp of uniqueness. Additionally, to contrast an OSO with global mythologies like Spiderman, Batman or Krish, OSO is not about a fight between the good and the evil in a mundane sense, but about what happens within the self, in arenas made of the hearts and the souls of the audience. OSO does not deal with evil declared as evil out there but with the evil that that spumes out of the strife between desires and their fulfillment or frustration. The chief binary concern of OSO in brief, is not goodness-badness but innocence-corruption. The difference between goodness and innocence lies in that you can try and become good, but you cannot try and attain innocence. Similarly, you may not be demonstrably bad, but your soul may carry a rot within. Let us say, goodness is a worthwhile heroic quality only when it is built over the foundations of innocence. In this sense, the idea of innocence is somewhat comparable to ‘internalized’ goodness as a driven form of goodness rather than conscious ethical policy.

Unfortunately, despite its literary or characterological appeal, the innocence-corruption binary does not translate easily into either modern public ethics or juridical discourse. And indeed, innocence in this sense can be a dangerous ethical/political category – you see clear glimpses of it in the Idi Amin of ‘The Last King of Scotland [2007]’ in its initial stages[4]. You get a brief glimpse of it in the menacing character that Shahrukh portrays in his new birth in OSO before he encounters his past. It also defines the inimitable political style and humour of a Laloo Yadav. You get the most fulsome view of it in the life of the most playful, the most amoral and yet the wisest Krishna, as a stealer of butter in infancy, as a wandering playboy in youth, and a statesman in adulthood. Brajbhasha and Awadhi are rife with poetry admiring the infant Krishna’s lies and thefts. Theft – limitless sexual license - ruthless cunning thus emerges as the distilled ethical essence of Krishna’s life, unless you have a notion of innocence to make him seem acceptable, indeed adorable, and ascribe godliness to him, auralizing his mundane actions into ‘leela’ [ludum, play] in the process.

It would thus seem that yoking of the snug intimacy of the fairy tale with the spectacular heroism of the epic is very likely Bollywood’s method of creating showbiz deities and gods of our times. And the ‘leelas’ of their lives connect with both our fairytale and epic imagination. Clearly, according to Bollywood, despite the risks involved, innocence stands as a greater value than goodness, and is even claimed as the true basis for natural rather than assumed or cultivated goodness. It is a quality that raises you above ordinary mortals.

Alternating between reverence and ridicule: the existential jugglery of OSO:

Through my reflections on OSO, I have thus far only extended the task that Farah Khan took up in the film – to trace the trajectory of the desires of a movie fanatic, an aspiring hero, and see what an individual does with the raw material of his desires and fantasies. Let us put down this chain of desire and fulfillment – you want to meet your movie idol? Alright, here she is, as her chunni gets stuck in your buttonhole in a stroke of destiny. You want to be a star? You get even better – you are reborn as the only child of a superstar. You want your idol to fall in love with you? You get an even better deal. Your idol comes to your embrace as your fan. What else do you want of life? But yes, in order to attain any of this you have to immolate yourself in the fire of love, and out of your ashes, a world of fulfillment is created.

Before we wind up the analysis of OSO however, there is a task that still remains only partly attended. We now need to again give due attention to two brief but crucial moments in the film, when Farah Khan places herself outside the main text to make a statement on Bollywood. In an early scene, Om and Farah khan are shown to be struggling over a jacket thrown by Rishi Kapoor to the audience. The scuffle is presumably over the legacy of the past[5]. The implications of this tug of war become apparent towards the end when Farah Khan turns up to join the celebrations on the stage, a major highlight of the film also discussed earlier, only to find there is no one waiting for her. Over time, Om is able to acquire the mantle of a star but the Farah Khan at the end of the tale is left grasping at wisps of nothingness. Her redundance and exclusion from the grand Bollywood show at the end of the film is made starkly apparent. She is seen rushing in and out in a common auto. No limousines for a lowly director, she seems to admit, as she leaves the stage in sullen haste.

The point is – is Farah Khan’s repeated presence comparable to the casual appearances made by Subhash Ghai, the maker of ‘Karz’ in his own films. Or is there more to it? We do have a choice here. We could declare these interventions insignificant and ignore them. I am of the opinion that even though Farah Khan leaves the implied humiliation and the neglect in the above scene altogether unarticulated, it is difficult to dismiss her last gesture of self-mockery. While these brief appearances of the storyteller take self-reflection to new heights, they are also quite disturbing.

Long ago, Gurudutt’s ‘Kagaz Ke Phool’ dwelled on the auteur’s soul agonies, stretching matters to the point of unashamed self-indulgence and self-pity, and Raj Kapur raised his creative conflicts and passion for women to epic levels. If one were to take a rather mean-minded and ‘dard e disco’ view of their grandstanding, both men seem to grieve over the loss of women ‘created’ by them, a bit like being abandoned by their Pygmalion. Farah Khan on the other hand, decides to mask her own auteurial plight, her ‘dard’ [creative agony] in a crass disco din instead of making an issue out of it. May be that is why the director ends up laughing off her own creative agony as an uncaring voyeur unto her own work, condemning her soul pain as a cacophonous ‘dard e disco’. May be it is simply a sign of changing times and changing rules of the industry. But the ambivalence reflected here is troubling – we here have a woman storyteller who shows enormous empathy and humanity in transforming the kitschy sentiments of Om into a near sublime epic, and then ends up jeering at her own auteurial efforts. Is this a reflection on the self-regard of a director in our times?

I am not sure that the above voyeur-empathizer conflict can be resolved easily. I am also not sure if you can revere and ridicule human angst in the same breath, especially when it happens to be your own. Or does this ambivalence reflect the auteur’s discomfort at releasing a genie out of the bottle – a star out of a junior artist? How can I tell! But I can imagine a long line of Bollywood directors crouching under the gigantic shadows of several generations of godly stars consecrated by them, and wondering – was it part of my original purpose? Like a conscientious craftsman, you first create an image, then like a priest you consecrate it into deityhood. But you are horrified to find that at the end of all the narrative rituals, the idol refuses to immerse – there is no visarjan. Instead a huge monster called the star emerges out of the submarine depths of public consciousness and occupies the stage till long after the show.

The auteur now seems to have an impressive lineup of adversaries – the old style producer-distributor, the new corporate honcho – and the star, which together turn the storyteller into a largely titular authority. Well, well, well! If this take on OSO sounds slippery, the following lines from the great Portuguese poet Pessoa would confirm that too hard a look at an author’s intentions lead you into a Babel-like eddy of ambiguities:

"Autopsychography"[6]

The poet is a faker. He
Fakes it so completely,
He even fakes he's suffering
The pain he's really feeling.

And those of us who read his writing
Fully feel while reading
Not that pain of his that's double,
But one completely fictional.

So on its tracks goes round and round,
To entertain the reason,
That wound-up little train
We call the heart of man.

— translated by Edwin Honig

Whatever the ‘real’ intent of the storyteller, it becomes apparent that OSO and perhaps Bollywood look at themselves with an opportunistic mix of reverence and ridicule, of adoration and contempt. Om [and his mother as well as his sidekick] reveres his kitschy dreams with much piety but doesn’t fail to ridicule them. The audience reveres the stars in the darkness of the cinema hall and identifies with them but may dismiss them with contempt in daylight. The director reverentially creates spectacles whose reality she then keeps questioning. The director also creates stars that begin to cast an eclipsing shadow on her own self-regard. Finally, the creative agony of the storyteller would seem to get drowned in the din of ‘Dard e disco’ as an ecstatic consummation of artistic satiety and a monumentally loud burp. This is an exact reversal of the desire-fulfillment sequence. It brings to me the image of a devotee face to face with divinity in a very unlikely state – guffawing at her idol’s deformities and insignificance into one audio channel, and mumbling respectful prayers in the other. Gurudutt’s reading of a similar situation was that the world is afflicted by inadequacies even as he brooded on his own. Raj Kapoor questioned the reality of the circus with vedantic profoundness despite his secularism and came to the conclusion that impenetrable avidya of maya is all we have, reflected in the song ‘Jeena yahan, marna yahan, iske siwa jana kahan! [We live here, we die here, there is nowhere else to go]. He was of course using show business as a metaphor for human life itself and vice versa. As for Farah Khan, she decides not to take herself seriously at all! Or if she does, she won’t let us know!

To put this chaotic assemblage of the ‘auteurial selfs’ into perspective, one needs to ask – how does it become existentially possible for popular culture to live with a cocktail ontology of reverence and ridicule? Let me try to throw some light on it at the risk of sounding split-headed myself. Popular culture in India entered a phase of secularization barely a century ago and the process still carries on. The secularization process should be seen however, not as a linear matter since it seems to consist of an undulating dialectical chain of sacralization – desacralization – re-sacralization – desacralization. If this sounds opaque, remind yourself of the innumerable Saraswati [or Durga or Ganpati etc. etc.] pujas where throngs of youth play item songs from movies to create forms of ecstasy quite unrelated to religion and yet part of religious proceedings. Remind yourself of a festive fair in temple in a small town where bar girls imported from Bombay gyrate in front of local brass, police officials, and common populace [except women perhaps] who devoutly ogle at the exposed women. Devout and near sacrilegious, such orgiastic behaviour seems to come together in some kind of Dard e disco - a sutra and a site where the sweet gentleness of love explodes into an orgiastic explosion of blood, mucous and bile.

The question of how popular culture deals with the binaries of phantasy-reality, worship-sacrilege and reverence-ridicule and how a person copes with life situations by juggling between them is an issue not to be settled in a hurry, e. g. in an essay on OSO. It requires analysis of many texts, forms, rituals, performances and events to even begin tackling a puzzle that the educated often solve by promptly declaring such cultural traits as vulgar and tasteless without looking at the internal structure of such ‘vulgarities’, making prompt judgments which insulate and protect us from the infuriating reality of popular culture[7]. It is as if the pedant in us names or adjective-ises an object and sits back smugly in the belief that we now have a good knowledge of the object.

Before moving on to the last segment of the essay, I feel the need to candidly reveal what I understand of why I enjoyed OSO a lot more than the usual run of Bollywood films. The reasons behind my liking ironically, seem related to what I also found disturbing. The roller-coaster ride between reverence-ridicule, and between heroism-averageness, I believe lends the film and its characters a peculiar charm. Om turns out to be a lovable character precisely because the immodesty and the enormity of his dreams make him very vulnerable. In the first half when he jumps into the fire to save Shanti, it is because he would do it for anyone. In fact Om is taken aback at his own impulsive feat, not having ready plans to see how it feels to commit a good act. In the second half his elaborate scheme to punish the villain is driven by a desire to come to terms with his own neurosis. Shanti, the star too sits in symmetry with Om – no wild dreams here, as all she wants is a marriage and a child. Most of all, one can detect a consistent rhythm of ascent and descent in a narrative where the protagonists alternately rise and fall in their greatness. To elaborate, OSO unlike the usual run of Bollywood avoids a linear, one way progression from a fairy tale to epic grandeur[8]. Time and again, it keeps returning to a modest fairy tale level attaining levels of intimacy with the audience commensurate with the fairy tale format as many other good Bollywood films do. In the same vein, when the director makes a modest bow before the audience, one is compelled to cheer a diffident little girl lost in the wilderness of show biz. I must admit that the filmmaker has found in me another accomplice and my critical remarks are mostly an afterthought.

Conclusion

I am now compelled to end this round of my discussion on OSO somewhat abruptly but heavy-heartedly for a number of reasons that seem pressing to me. First, I feel there is something like interpretive fatigue or satiety that persuades me to leave OSO aside, at least for the time being and move on to other self-reflective Bollywood texts mentioned at the outset. Second, I suddenly notice a hallucinatory visitation on the horizon, and wish to obviate the experience of seeing the cosmos in a single film text, somewhat like Yashoda’s epiphany when she looked into infant Krishna’s mouth. Third, I am aware I came dangerously close to pronouncing judgments on an author’s ‘real’ intent, a cardinal sin for an exegete. But this temptation is only as unforgivable as unstoppable. Last, the world outside the text beckons me to step out and take a long deep breath. Dwelling too long within a text can lead to claustrophobic sensation in a fickle exegete like me, unaccustomed as I am to unending hermeneutic gyrations of a believer within the confines of a ‘the’ book.

To leave epics and fairy tales aside and to conclude on a daylight note, isn’t it interesting that akin to the junior artist [an ‘extra’ in politically incorrect language] Om in OSO, a choreographer [dance master] has made the stalwarts of the movie industry dance to her tune and stampede for brief glimpses in front of the camera, in the manner of overeager junior artists? Hasn’t Farah khan told us a Bollywood tale never told before? Bollywood may be pullulating with all the star sons for sure, but we have of late had ‘fight masters’ and makeup men directing the tallest of Bollywood stars. It is now possible for us to wait for an inspired light boy for a kathavachak, who would descend from the catwalk to give us a new perspective on Bollywood, if not the next Bollywood epic. That the hierarchy within Bollywood is seen crumbling through OSO, does prove Farah Khan’s point – a daydream goes a long way and the troubled desires of an underdog’s infancy and youth may indeed find appeasement tomorrow. As in cinema, so in society! Insha Allah! Om Shanti Om!

[1] An earlier draft of this essay was read at a seminar ‘Bhojpuri and Other Cinemas’ at the Asian Development Research Institute [ADRI], Patna on 22 August, 2008. Originally planned as the last part of a monograph on the theme of self-reflection in Bollywood, as mirrored in the oeuvres of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, and Subhash Ghai, the paper in its present shape can be read on its own.

[2] Notably, in a therapeutic situation, the therapist is expected to react skeptically to a patient’s confessions and has to come to his own conclusions. Even a police interrogator is likely to turn suspicious when confessions come far too readily or voluntarily.

[3] Bettleheim, Bruno, 1976 The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Knopf, New York

[4] I find it difficult to forget the mesmeric traction felt by the character of the young British medico falling hopelessly for the charms of Amin, and losing his ethical compass right till the end when he has to violently tear himself away.

[5] Subhash Ghai’s “Karz’ [1980] inspired OSO. Karz in turn is supposed to be inspired by Peter proud [1975]. The movie was remade into Tamil by Kamal Hassan in 1984 as ‘Enakkul Oruvan’ and in Kannada by ‘Ravichandran as Yugapurasha’. 2008 saw another rebirth of the tale in ‘Karzzz’, by Satish Kaushik.

[6] http://www.disquiet.com/thirteen.html

[7] As I write these lines on the penultimate day of Chhath, a sun festival in Bihar, the loudspeakers in the neighbourhood have switched from devotional songs to the usual ‘item’ numbers from Hindi films. At sundown, after thirty six hours of severe fasting, the populace can now feast on milk and rice and also bomb its ears with sexy numbers before going on a twenty four hour fast again. Cultural commentators continue to harp that these are modern distortions, a claim which I continue to refuse to believe. The so-called ‘modern distortions’ seem more like modern middle class wishfulness and ostrich like defensive behaviour to me.

[8] The outcome of such progression is very interesting-it seems to lead to a new sort of realism spawned by the Bollywood phantasy machine. I wonder if such organic realism may flourish in the coming years, enabling Bollywood to move beyond its present narrative crisis.

Ethnographizing traffic movement in India

2010-02-15T22:37:00.000-08:00

Ratnakar Tripathy

'Negotiating' traffic in many parts of India [and I am sure elsewhere] is not just an idiomatic expression. You do very often end up in a mess of intricate negotiations that don't get you anywhere by way of fixed rules even if they let you reach your destination for the day.
I should know. I nearly crashed my bike into a cow goaded by the owner this morning. It is commoner for the cows and other domestic animals to occupy the central space on the thoroughfare, letting the traffic make their curving detours. This is the context for this 'traffic ethnography', which is really about movement in public spaces, one's and other's bodies, and ownership of spaces.
Much has been written about the chaos of Indian roads, both with indulgent humour and deep chagrin. But if you have to 'negotiate' the roads yourself, it is small help calling it chaotic and gnashing your teeth in road rage. You must learn the language of negotiation used on the roads. This language has dialects, varies from place to place and is tweaked by locals in villages, small towns, city roads, lanes, neighbourhoods and inner city mazeways. Here's an account of its vocabulary:
Honking on Indian roads in not noise! It's the presiding part of an unevenly visceral and multi-sensed language that includes eye contact, body language, acceleration, deceleration, lights, nods, and well filthy abuses under the breath. Honking itself has many registers ranging between a quick sharp squeak to persistent hectoring. Then of course, you have bikes fitted up with truck horns and there are also ones that sound like a train has come hurtling right behind your butt. There are honks that sound like a request and ones that intend to madden you into surrendering your space. This is a lexicon that keeps expanding like any other language.
As for the question of power, let me give you a few examples. There are roads with shops on the sides where the pedestrian is generally the king. This equanimous king doesn't react to the loudest of honks and moves gently like an overweight rhino. Especially if you are behind him! If he's in front of you, you can try eye contact and plead your way through. But there are also roads where a pedestrian gets a taste of his own medicine – these are roads you can't cross till a small traffic snag develops and you hurry across. In fact traffic snarls are not dysfunctional and play a vital role in the business of free movement. They check the accident rates on roads just like the zigzagging bicycles and absent-minded pedestrians. Allowed to speed at will, the majority of the Indian drivers may be seen as assassin + suicide by two to construct an ideal type.
A routine news item in Patna papers – 'Boy run over by a truck, roads and train tracks jammed by relatives and neighbours for five hours'. Then comes the senior police officer to argue, cajole and to promise cash compensation, never to be delivered. the crowd are suddenly reminded there is this thing called the Indian state you can go sulking to. But there is no branch of humanities looking at this aspect of our lives. I propose we start a department of Body Movement Studies, an inter-disciplinary field combining sociology, politics, ethology, socio-biology, cognitive psychology, kinetics and socio-linguistics and of course everything else. Any takers?
There are indeed city roads where the impersonal traffic rules have taken over completely and the Indian state enjoys full authority. But the majority of other spaces are constantly contested, negotiated and apportioned after tiresome rituals. As for the traffic cop, he's really a tired choreographer mimicking the passage of people, making encouraging signs towards people who are coming and making a shoving gesture towards those who are going. This makes for a very vibrant community life on the road. Does it sound sufficiently disgusting?
I get the feeling sometimes that being in public spaces of any kind in India including a lift, you have a choice between turning into a dumb bullock uncaring of other's bodies and movements, of being a frenzied predator cutting through the masses of human flesh, or a slimy fox, sidling through spaces with cunning and speed.
Life on the road in my country is thus like being in a huge overcrowded and transient temple fare. In this lemmings like stampede, you are on your own. The laws and the state come in only if you break someone's leg or have your own broken!
In brief, we write and rewrite our traffic rules every day of the year.
And well, erase it in the evening before finding our first 'eureka' axiom. Can you now please draw our learning curve?
Small populations will never understand why we are compelled to move the way we move.

Note- this is a highly limited ethnographic report based on my experience in the cities of Patna and Hyderabad. A reminder – India probably has the highest fatality rate for road mishaps in the world.

‘Slumdog Millionaire’: the day day after

2009-04-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

This piece is not so much about ‘The Slumdog Millionaire’ as the numerous controversies that arose in India after the film was released. This by itself indicates that this piece aspires for a special place somewhere above the media din or attempts to clear the Augean stables or what I say must be seen as a privileged. Or does it any of that?

Let me crawl out of the brief tunnel of self-reflection and make my point anyway. The first comment on ‘Slumdog…’ I saw was written by a journalist before seeing the film. The word comment is not right. Incredibly, it was a long piece which started with a frank and I thought a daring declaration that the author is yet to see the film, but in the meantime, nevertheless …. I was left biting my nails in consternation.

In the following weeks I was unable to check if the prescient author wrote on Slumdog again after watching the film. My guess is probably not. The reason may be that everyone has now seen the film and the body of expert opinions on the matter have swelled to a noisy stampede. No one is listening to anyone anymore. People may be just looking at other’s opinions and placing their own in ever shifting alignments. The film is still doing extremely well in small town Bihar and our Chief Minister in Bihar, India, Niteesh Kumar rode on a cycle rickshaw to see the film at a cinema in the early weeks.

I propose that on issues like movies that rarely involve high levels of scientific precision or predictability, there should a be a system whereby we ‘experts’ write three analytical reviews of a film – one before seeing it to register all the effervescing expectations if any, another one which faithfully records our reactions during the viewing, and a last one that is formulated after much thinking and discussion, may be a few months after the owl of Minerva’s has already flown past. This makes for a complete hermeneutic life cycle for a text and the reader as well if he bothers to keep track. We will ignore the obsessives and addicts who would want to talk about Slumdog forever as well as the catatonics not sufficiently forthcoming.

As for me, I loved the film and was moved by it. Like a true Brahmin and a member of the middle class, the shit-bathed sequence seemed excessive to me in that I wanted to puke in the middle of what seemed an absorbing tale. May be this is the reaction the filmmaker sought - to show the cruelty of a life where tangible smellable shit seems more acceptable than its picture in paint box richness. Interestingly, I have managed to walk through foul smelling slums with more tolerance. May be it has to do with our theatrical cannons – according to our sage Bharata, live performances should not include organic/intimate matters such as eating and copulation. You will find family scenes in Hindi movies where a family settles over a large feast but no one seems to eat as the conversation flows. And no talking while chewing the food! Very unlike Hollywood movies where people are forever drinking coffee or munching sandwiches! Not to mention slobbery kissing over all variety of compliant lips made available by the production guys. I was forgetting – Salman Khan made farting fashionable in Hindi films for a whole year some time ago. All about Guajarati/wedding food!

To come back to the point, in the last few months I saw such a surfeit of comments on the film, my head is now bursting with controversy. Slumdog has gone out of my mind entirely. My experience of watching the film has completely faded. All that’s left is a bundle of woolly controversies. And now I don’t want to think of the film or talk about it. I don’t even have any good memories of it left. So when I write these lines it is with a sense of anger over the fatigue caused by the critical din. It is the irritation of a tired man sick of his own doxological effeteness. Is it a natural process whereby meanings dissipate over time or is it me?

All I know are these three or four stances which typify the whole range of critics. The stances are there but the movie is gone. Like in the ancient times, the text is gone, only the glosses are left. When the glosses go, just the brief quotes remain as surviving redactions. And finally the highly memorable footprints in the sand get wiped out. I am aware that my children may come back to Slumdog after a decade to remember a classic. But this is what critics have done to my martyred enjoyment of the film in the meantime. But the point is – I am one of them too.

I have written this piece to share a feeling of distaste and disquiet. I have now begun to wonder if cultural criticism may at times or rather too often lead to cultural exhaustion, a greedy scraping of cultural meanings from an essentially receding reality.

H’m, what was I trying to say really? Okay, here it is -

When a very pleasant film is made about India in soothing colours, the critics rush in to remind that parts of India are ugly too and that the filmmaker suffers from a reality deficit. On the other hand, if you focus on the harsher sides of India, everyone busily reminds you that Indian reality can be very quite pulchritudinous and that again the filmmaker has a warped sense of reality. In brief, just listen to what we say about ourselves and no further comments, please. Both your admiration and despise only confirm you are once again the ex-colonizer. You must have a balanced opinion of us and we’ll let you know as and when. The privilege of extreme views belongs solely to us. Oh, the ever slippery piety of repeatedly eternalized victimhood! Don’t I see enough of it in my own family-clan?

To wind up, let me dredge out the reasons why I liked the film from my long suppressed and muddied memory of the past few weeks. First, I liked the idea of a young boy telling his shitty life story to a torturer under duress. There was no other way the story would have been told. I find this very moving – the only time you get a chance to tell your tale is when it may save your life. There’s a touch of another Oscar rendering – ‘the Reader’, here, albeit in reverse. This is not a storyteller fondly remembering his past on a rainy evening with a finger of 100 Pipers on a Burma teak surface, if I may borrow an image from a widely viewed add for the scotch label in India. This story was retrieved from a black-shithole and carried to the Oscar stage. No big deal in itself and yet no excuse for snooty despise. That a lot of Oscar is crap does not go to prove that Slumdog is one too.

Second, the protagonist of the film finds all his quiz answers from the most painful moments of his life. Fates/furies in their most benign form compensate him for all the pain through a series of serendipitous coincidences. It is almost as if pain isn’t ever about nothing, is the anchored message. We know that that’s not true, and yet how many of us are able to bear pain better imagining a fat cheque in the next mail by way of repair. Even though endowed with a robust sense of reality as we are, we don’t exactly go rummaging through the mailbox next morning!

There were other reasons I liked the film, but I have forgotten most of them since I put on my argumentative airs hoping in all my vanity to put a debate to rest for myself and attain a state of interpretive repose.

Will these do for the time being?

May I suggest a certain ‘singularity’ here – sum of meanings of a film = sum of controversies it may create. Or even more strongly, that which is not objectionable is culturally insignificant. If this is culture I don’t know how to define politics. And there is in it an attempt to go at a tangent from the text in question towards other interpreters as the main text in running till the point of exhaustion and datedness. There are people who seriously argue for example that Boyle ‘encashed’ Indian poverty as the only way he knew to make money. To respond to such nonsense – our most famous folk playwright in Bihar, Bhikhari Thakur definitely did theatre as the only way to earn his livelihood although he was a barber by ‘birth’[caste] and training.

By meaning, I of course mean those intangible rays that scatter far and wide even if they never reach the soul. As meanings flow fast and thick past us, we are left grabbing ludicrously at any little fragment that makes sense or helps preserve self-respect in the interim.

There are these megalomanic moments when I feel mobbed by meanings I don’t want to shake hands with. And then there are moments too when I am begging for meaning on the streets, in the libraries, and among friends, asking for the semblance of a clue. Slumdog was good experience, I remember. I was neither begging nor turning away, and I came home with a heart full and heavy and a mind ready to think afresh. Does this sound a bit like religious conversion? Yes, but good art converts you n times - everytime you are ready for it.

Is all I remember about Slumdog now!

2008-09-02T02:12:00.000-07:00

Difficulty as a fine art

The other day my friend Joe mentioned to me a curious experience with his academic peers. Having recently submitted an MPhil thesis on cricket at the English and Foreign Languages [EFL] University, Hyderabad, he showed a paper to his friends hoping for critical comments. The most outstandingly critical comment he got was this – ‘your writing is too simple. It requires no effort to understand’. This was followed by according to Joe, the disgustingly sage advice – ‘if you continue to write this way, you may damage your academic career. If people can understand you without any strain, they will not value your work.’
These comments reflect on the quality of the mind of the critic in more than one sense. I felt moved by a sense of utter innocence reflected in the plain admission here that abstruseness may be the most distinguishing trait of good academic [or theoretical] writing. I remembered my own graduation days when we struggled to inject as much academic argot as possible into our writings in order to be able to look down at the laity. This was done with unseemly hurry and exuberance and often made us sound like the new rich kid on the block. The problem was partly that of language – we were mastering high order concepts from a foreign language. English was not exactly our language of intimacy and yet we hoped to be on first name terms with its most refined words and concepts – a bit like paradropping over the Everest summit by way of preparing for a trek in the Himalayan foothills. But matters seemed to go deeper – there was a sense of lack of continuity between our inherited concepts and what was taught in the class. Of course, such intellectual breaches proved to be more of a challenge than a handicap over the years for the more fortunate students like me. Others continued to run franchises of foreign families of concepts.
In our promiscuous post-modernist times, a difficult writing often carries a heavy load of playfulness along with awe. It is no longer the unmixed awe associated with a stern Hegelian or a spare Wittgensteinian text with all the untranslated or untranslatable Germanisms etc. There is, these days, more commonly a sense of play to be seen in the author’s slippery text. ‘You can try but you cannot catch me in the midst of all the gelatinously mazy mass’ – it seems to say. The reader on her part continues the chase to get some feel of the shapes around her. In this the reader is often guided by the dim submarine glow of the author’s intent, enjoying and cherishing brief flashes of comprehension and mastery. And thus the hermeneutic game of reading and re-reading goes on in the absence of an arbitrator [except for the little matter of the grades]. But there is an anomaly here – even if a text is rarely allowed to take a permanent or stable position at the Olympian heights, an individual reader has full rights to place it on his own personal pedestal. It is a bit like having several gods to choose from but with an option to decide how devout you wish to be towards your particular god. And indeed, a devotee may choose to exhibit heights of monotheistic passion rare even in days of high monotheism.
In brief, even though we rarely unite in our reverence for the master-text, many of us continue to worship our chosen fragments with great fervour. Along with this fervour goes a sense of ‘sacral’ awe, and along with the sense of sacral awe goes a sense of difficulty and opaqueness. I remember how devoutly some of my friends uttered names like Foucault or Derrida while elucidating their quoted passages. Of course, it was very frustrating when the listener refused to be swayed, exposing his banality without shame! But at the same time, the aura associated with textual ‘difficulty’ seemed heavily endangered too.
This is no place for me to attempt a typology of either difficulties or ambiguities. But what the campus critics may have failed to include in their advice is the very practical matter of the rewards that come with the mastering of difficulty. I will never forget how angry and clueless I felt after my first viewing of Tarkovesky’s ‘Solaris’ – equally angry with myself and the filmmaker, not to mention Lem. When I saw the film a second time however, things fell into place through a split second revelation within ten minutes of the opening, and the rest was sheer pleasure.
The point then may be – did one get rewarded for all the wrestling with an author’s textual difficulties, or one has had to come back empty-handed? May be the campus critics forgot that there is nothing like ‘pure’ difficulty and that it means different things at different times to different people. It is indeed possible to lend a certain conceptual density or thickness to one’s writing – probably the closest thing to pure difficulty. But is that a mostly stylistic or a substantive issue? In my experience, despite a Sokal, it’s quite rare to make a living out of difficulty alone. You need to garnish it with substance. And yet the Sokal scandal continues to haunt us!
These days I find myself brooding on the many contexts and kinds of difficulties without getting anywhere. But every time I get angry with an author for being opaque and walk away, I wonder if I am a bit like the fox of the grapes story. While the fox stopped at the modest slander ‘the grapes are sour’, after several attempts I do begin to ask ‘do the grapes really exist’? And also the obvious question - am I a rare breed of foxes that has developed unnatural fondness for grapes of all things?
In sum, we as textual commentators of all hues seem to be in the business of creating difficulties as much as that of simplification. Like a see saw, when truths seem intolerably obvious we question them, and when mysteries seem unacceptably impenetrable, we try to simplify them.
Any opaqueness in this piece, incidentally, is unintended or let us say, I have not worked on it enough, according to Joe’s friends.

An appeal to a terrorist with conscience

2008-08-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

The recent explosions in Bangalore, Surat and Ahmedabad have sent renewed shivers among the common citizens all over India, where we have a rich variety of ‘terrorists’. As usual, there has been a spate of articles and statements demanding stricter laws and better intelligence. And yet no one is willing to admit that if an individual/group seriously decides to kill people and is willing to pay the price, there is nothing much you or me or the state can do about it except after the event. All you can do is keep an eye on how kids are growing up in your neighbourhood over time. Call it community policing if you want. But this is not a counsel of despair!
Ironically, as the terrorists discover greater individual liberty and empowerment on behalf of the common citizen, it is often the common citizen that ends up becoming the target of these attacks and not the state – a zero sum game. Hitting out at the state via the common citizen is a very unethical but also a very circuitous idea. I reckon that in any terrorist group, half the members would be people with qualms, and the rest must be men and women who were anyway on their way to turning into suicides, serial killers, or child and wife beaters. It’s just that they find an excuse in a cause, and settle down to a humdrum career in violence. Many such people in India become cops and political leaders and succeed in sublimating their ferality to various extents.
The bombs e. g. in Surat were spread all over the place like garbage as if the bombers suffered a serious bout of moral reluctance on their way to work. I think it’s high time terrorists of all hues rethought their purpose – is the idea to hurt the state directly, or to hurt common people who will then turn and accuse the state of failing as protectors? If they are really earnest in their cause, why don’t they target government buildings emptied of people, or construction hubs and cinema halls after midnight? I think such acts would serve the cause better, although I remain strongly prejudiced in the favour of satyagraha. Significantly, even the meaning of 9/11 minus the 3,000 deaths changes radically!
The question is – does a terrorist want to kill people or win support among them? This appeal is clearly not directed at those egos that have a macho-er than thou problems with the super-macho state, or those caught in a deadlock who will anyway end up in a lover’s embrace with the big bro. But in case our terrorists want to win some support and sympathy among the citizenry, it may be a good idea to create spectacles where the citizen remains confined to the status of an onlooker/audience staring fascinatedly at their ideological fireworks, and not a target/victim. Lastly, I would recommend that before blowing up a huge building, a terrorist group should run up and down firing blanks at people to force them to leave. This much terror is still robust and anyway actually amounts to tender care.

Ratnakar Tripathy

reflections on item numbers in Hindi films

2008-07-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

Since my friend Alice Samson from EFL University, Hyderabad, India suggests that i should write brief posts on blogs, and i respect her views, i will herewith comply.

for some time i have been wondering about the role played by the item in Hindi films. so here are some observations presented unsystematically before i put them down in a better structured piece.

first of all, the item seems a regressive developement in the Hindi film form in a non-pejorative sense. the item is perhaps a throwback to folk theatre, where the main performance would be interrupted by side shows that could be both desultory or highly attractive. to demystify this formal jugglery, these sideshows allowed the artists to change their costume and makeup, e g from that of a pretty princess to an unpretty hirsute demon, whic is not something you can do in haste. at any rate, they carried more enertainment content than the ad breaks on the TV channels these days. and the audience stuck on to their seats without seductive supplications from the long-legged VJ, unless nature called.

today's items may remind us of the vamps of the yesteryears, but this is false memory. item girls are rarely full-blooded 'characters' like our olden vamps, whether Nadira, Helen or Bindu. they seem to do their bit and move away from the stage...

...the point is, what is the 'bit' done by them for which an artist gets payed an entire temillion rupees these days? here is my response.

i have felt for some time that Hindi movies have traditionally been very uncomfortable with intimate but prosaic, everyday love scenes. they tend to confine sexual intimacy to song sequences picturized among flowers, bees, mountains, mist and rivers. the idea is to treat the universe as a dance floor and as Chidananda Dasgupta claims in 'The naked Mask' , to attain orgasm through a duet!

the item seems another attempt to fill up sexual spaces with crowds, riotous crowds such as in 'Beedi Jalaile' in 'Omkara', but also genteel corporate crowds as in Mallika Sherawat's dance in 'Corporate.'

i will now present a strong proposition - Hindi cinema [thus far] believes that if you have no right of entry into a love scene, it turns pornographic, and you are just a dirty voyeur. otherwise you are a normal healthy participant in an orgy of exposure and stripping, and your fawning and pawing are easily forgiven.

it will take me a while to recover from this ontological topsy-turvy, but i will be back with a longer piece even if i end up defying Alice's advice.

2008-05-07T23:58:00.000-07:00

Jahaji Music

by Ratnakar Tripathy
I recently saw Jahaji Music, an excellent documentary film on the Caribbean by Bombay-based filmmaker Surabhi Sharma. The word Jahaji means fellow-travelers on ships that carried indentured labor to the Indies from India to work on sugar cane plantations owned by the British. This nearly two hour film takes you very close to the fervent musicality which the Caribbean is known for in both senses – the stereotypical and the profound. I walked into the theatre with incongruously cheery associations in my head. At some point in college, I had admired Bob Marley, which is a very sober and adult way of admitting a passing but intense phase of madness. Marley was for a long time stuck like an audio loop in my mind and well, in my body, for the way it made you want to dance in innocent and celebratory rather than insane or drugged ecstasy. I had always puzzled about the cultural associations that went with Marley without looking too deeply into them – the cannabis, the Rastafarian cult and its unlikely association with the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, and the even more unlikely and bizarre linkages with Judaism and queen Sheeba of all people. Even now this delightful broth of legends seems a good example of history written under the influence. Somewhat later I discovered Tosh, the original one, and heard his ‘Legalize it’ with a lot more detachment. I am reminded of it since I recently saw the slogan on the t-shirt of a Sherpa coolie in Gangtok with the tri-pinnate cannabis leaves.
Surabhi’s main focus in the film was the diasporic angle – the rather incredible journey and transformation of music between India and the Indies. It’s as if every indentured labour carried his own India all the way to the distant lands and reverse engineered it for his own purposes, before reinstalling it on a pedestal of faith. Surabhi’s film makes you wonder what crazy somersaults our memories can perform and how the mind is capable of incredibly intricate set design, changing completely alien spaces into home with some help from music, rituals and costumes.
Anyway, what I found or rather rediscovered through Surabhi’s film was how strongly and centrally music may matter to one’s identity. To those accustomed to the centrality of linguistic, caste or religious identity, there is something incredible about the central idea of film. Also, if I may point out, the Trinidadian Indians and Africans seem to posit their musical identity primarily for themselves, and the viewers seem to be incidental passersby. Throughout the film it seemed fairly clear that the Chutney or Rege defined identity primarily among the practitioners themselves rather than the outsider. There was an air of innocence about their music and dance in that its primary purpose seemed to be self-absorption among the performers rather than display. The raw sexuality that the film brings out is just that – pristine and raw sexuality with no patina of the pornographic, and the coy dissembling that often goes with it.
I also didn’t notice any anxiety among the performers over the image that the outsider may form of them. There was no purveying of the ‘look at our culture’ line at all. This is of course understandably a somewhat relative point as any performance is clearly aimed at display rather than purely private narcissistic viewing. The conclusion here may be that while choosing to posit our identity we also choose the dimensions so to say through which our identity is affirmed, and it is interesting to see that unlike some societies who choose religion, language or race, certain other societies choose music and dance. Why music seems as puzzling to me as the question why language or religion. I am sure dimensions such as religion, language and race do matter to the Caribbean but I get the impression that music and dance perhaps have a more decisive sway. Despite how things look from a few thousand miles, I am aware that what I say may not be true of the entire Caribbean society at all, but a smaller urban segment trying to rise above its misery with the help of music.
I am aware that smaller communities in Bihar, India have certain song forms such as chaita or biraha running in their veins. But I am not sure they are as music-dance mad as the Trinidadian. There is also the instance of the rather unique movie madness of the Telugus and the Tamils in India, which is as incomprehensible to those under its divine influence as the outsider, to those who live out this madness with great élan and poise, and those who see in it as an inscrutable puzzle. While rhythm seems to so central to the West Indian, I must admit, melodies matter to me a lot more. I have never forgotten a tale told by a friend who went to the US at a very young age. After being admitted in a campus residence, she quietly sat on her bed feeling crushed by a sense of utter loneliness. Suddenly she heard the strains of a Geeta Dutt song and followed the trails of the suspected hallucination, in the process making her first friend with a fellow Indian and perhaps laying the first mental foundations of a new home. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist would have us believe in his ‘Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007)’ that rhythms are neurologically more fundamental than melody but in melodically intense moments like these I am no longer sure. I somehow feel the Indian ear identifies more easily with the melody than the rhythms.
To conclude, I wonder if it’s possible to speak of ‘accents of identity’ wherein you have a wide range of features marked by traits like cuisine, smells, language, religion, melody, rhythm, terrain, physical appearance, costume where the needle of identity may find repose. Some pick on language and some others on music or cuisine. This would of course be a case of a harmless form of identity which seeks familiarity/commonality of some kind and in the process makes its preferences clear, whether for music or religion, to mention two examples. ‘Jahaji Music’ shows that the chutney singers often don’t speak Hindi and simply mug up the lyrics. There is thus no great passion for the language as such involved here. Superimposed on such preferences is of course the more politicized form of identity. A combination of the sensuous and the political [cerebral] can form a very tight and rather inescapable circle of identity. And then you have the questions of claimed identity and that which is placed like a mantle on you whether you like it or not!
Irrespective of all those unpleasant issues, the most beautiful part of the story here is one that involves an almost categorial definition of culture, rather rare in practice or theoretical discussions. We are informed that it is usually deadly dangerous to enter Trenchtown, Jamaica [where Bob Marley grew up] even during daytime. But once the scheduled musical event begins, the whole area turns into a glowing utopian haven of goodwill even in the dead of the night. I thought this contraposing of music and violence carries an implicit definition of culture - violence in, music out, music in, violence out. I have quite fallen for this variety of clarity after watching ‘Jahaji Music’. Remember, the Taliban in Afghanistan did not only whip its women for showing their faces, it also dynamited the ancient figures of Buddha in the Bamiyan caves.
I am aware that art and violence have no simple relationship, but it’s good to see them both declared antonyms even for a night of unalloyed pleasure.

Sulking religiously… or how to Punish Godly misdemeanors

2008-04-05T02:44:00.000-07:00

Rarely does a faith allow its adherents to freely indulge in doubt or openly voice their skepticism. On rare occasions the church may allow the faithful to withdraw from society and battle their demons in the solitude of the monastic crypt. But the Bhakti tradition in Hinduism allows a Hindu to go on a private or even publicly articulated sulk against a God. This sulk could be a passing whim against a deity who did not, for example, help a lazy student pass an exam. But it could take the shape of a major episode bordering on sacrilege. According to a report in The Indian express [ May 5, 2006, Pune edition, Page 5] the inhabitants of Gethasalu in Tamilnadu decided to shut down the temple of god Jadiasamy when the well-known bandit Veerappan carried out a massacre in their village on October 8 1993. When Veerappan was killed on October 18 in 2004, the temple was reopened and god Jadiasamy found himself restored to his former status. This was indeed a big sulk, lasting more than a decade. We do not know if the village deity Jadiasamy has been large-hearted enough to forgive the villagers, but the villagers have definitely condoned their god as if nothing had ever happened.

There is of course no way to find out if this misdemeanor still rankles in the heart of the god Jadiasamy and whether everyone has started afresh on a clean slate with no vestigial karma. To sustain blind faith in the shapeless and formless almighty is a tough task emotionally. There is a constant fear of internal wavering and then there is the challenge of convincing others fellow believers of being rock steady in one’s belief. The only consolation is the din of those innumerable rituals and ceremonial prayers that suppress the doubts murmuring in the heads and the hearts of the believer. And thus the long gaps in faith go undetected, and thankfully unpunished.
Whether religious or non-religious, sulking is a very intimate act. First of all one only sulks in order to cause either hurt or irritation in the victim. For example, you don’t sulk against a green grocer who has shortchanged you. Instead you either argue or just blow up. Sulking is often directed towards someone superior or intimate such as parents. I heard the unforgettable example of a private secretary to a top manager, going into a sulk when he did not notice a smart haircut. Sulking scenes are a constant feature in Hindi films. You see religious sulk when a character rings a dangling bell outside the temple and walks straight to the god, delivering a long monologue in a plaintively angry mood. The marble face of the good may seem impassive to you, but the hero or his mother as the case may be, make sure to give him their piece of mind. These sulkers perhaps leave only when they are able to vividly imagine a chastened look on the face of the idol. Filmy heroines in Bollywood tighten their nooses on the hero through their sulking when they say – ‘I am not talking to you’. Often the hero has to sing a song or two in all kinds of deserts and mountains before the heroin rewards him with a smile.Arguably, the most intense emotion in a large Indian household is neither hate nor love but the sulking. It seems to radiate in invisible waves, traveling through neuronal circuitries, spilling out of brains till the entire house fills up with a strange choking haze. Husbands, mother in laws, brother in laws refuse to meet each other’s eyes. When asked if something’s the matter they tend to mumble monosyllables alleging that ‘nothing’s the mater except your imagination is working over time.’ In brief, denial of sulking is its greatest strength.
But sulking can be a double-edged weapon. In a religious context it comes very close to sacrilege as in the case of the victims of Veerappan. By way of fathoming the sentiments of those villagers, did they intend to declare their god impotent or did they doubt the very bona fides of the deity? Did the villagers feel cheated by a god who did not come to their aid when in need, or was the god blamed for sitting impassively in his abode when his men were being butchered?

This is an emotional quicksand that is difficult to fathom. We don’t quite know if it’s this way or that. Most likely it’s just a messy combination of all these sentiments.It would then seem that sulking can reveal depths of faith rarely seen in the fickle minds of human beings. A devotee goes into a sulk only when he can feel god in his gut, in all his/her realness. But it also reveals the sacrilegious temptations of a believer whose expectations must be met by a god to prove that he continues to care for his followers. Interestingly, when the residents of Gethasalu stopped worshipping their deity, they did not altogether banish him or shut his shop, nor did they make a doctrinaire declaration that his existence is herewith discontinued through a theological dictat. They just decided to teach him a hard lesson when he seemed to deserve it, the same way they decided to embrace him all over again after a decade when Veerappan was eliminated by the STF.

It is very tempting to compare this to the role played by the fans in Telugu and Tamil cinema in India. While the outsider may want to imagine that the fanatical fandom ensures a sort of voluntary slavery, S V Srinivas in his study of Chiranjeevi’s fans [fan clubs and individuals] found that the star himself faced constant pressures from his fans. In fact Chiranjeevi seems to carry a gnawing anxiety over every move and statement he makes in public life. Indeed ‘ye raste hain pyar ke, chalna samhal samhal ke’[‘make sure to tread warily on the pathways of love’]. The halo that you often see around the south Indian stars, may thus be largely composed of whirling photons of neurotic insecurities and anxieties, rather than unmixed deityhood. It would seem that god Jadiasamy after his last experience is now condemned to a life of perpetual torment, experiencing alternate waves of omnipotence and impotence with the sort of rollercoaster frenzy that we mortals remain ever unlikely to experience. Unless, of course, we decide to defect from the margins of madness to its vertiginous center.
ratnakar tripathy

A question of taste :The disgust of the arrogant

2008-02-25T08:10:00.000-08:00

In my two earlier posts, I tried to approach society through cinema. I now wish to give this leg of the journey a sense of fulfillment however illusory by approaching cinema through society.
In the past couple of weeks a number of channels [I watched Sahara and Aaj Tak] provided elaborate and vivid footage of celebration of Chaita by the two brothers in law of Laloo Yadav in Patna. The footage showed a number of hired women performers dance with vigorous abandonment while a large crowd of supporters and friends riotously cheered them. In fact, it was difficult to believe this was real life – it seemed like a seedy version of a B grade Bollywood film. There were other appendages that disturbed the press – menacing characters strewn all over playfully fired their guns in the air. Dotting the crowds were the inevitable silk-clad and gold-chained roughnecks whose fingers twitched over their pistol triggers in the close ups. The hosts in both cases were the brothers in law of Laloo Yadav – Sadhu and Subhash – the two humourless criminal stalwarts, unleashed by the Laloo-Rabri regime, who nevertheless lack Lalu’s panache and sense of timing.
In all the reports including the Times of India [13 April, 2007, Patna edition] I found that the descriptions and the comments invariably carried a strong sense of disapproval, derision, disgust, and even downright condemnation. At least in one case the newscaster kept grinning coyly and implyingly, probably wondering over the unspeakable barbarity of it all. At least Subhash Yadav himself seemed somewhat self-consciousness when he asked a journalist – ‘vulgar, what?’, making a feeble attempt to distance himself from the general merriment. Imagine Subhash in a Fabindia suit and a Tilonia leather bag defending Bihari folk culture in the environs of Mandi House or Prithvi Theatre.
Having made the context clear let me discuss reasons for my own disquiet. I found that our middle class educated journalist were trying hard to paper over their own snooty incoherence and confusion – in the sense they didn’t seem clear if they were disgusted by the bad ‘taste’ reflected in the raw display of sexuality or the moral corruption of a decadent durbar. In brief, I wondered if the disapproval was esthetic, moral, or both. I wondered too if the journalists left this distinction deliberately ambiguous. I also wondered if the same commentators would like to look within and give us a clearer verdict on the source of their disgust. I feel a journalist should be sufficiently self-conscious to answer my query with some clarity or admit the lack of it.
Having posed the above question, I would now like to present a series of interpretations discrete or overlapping, for the above orgies.a. The Yadavs as the rulers are making a symbolic attempt to gain ascendancy not simply through modern democratic politics, but also through feudal gestures monopolized earlier by the upper castes.b. The two leaders are trying to appeal to their essentially rustic and pastoral origins in defiance of Patna’s urbanism.c. The two orgies were meant to cure the depression of the forlorn party cadre reduced to tinselly fantasies after their spell in power.d. The Yadavs as the rebels are making feudal gestures associated with bandits – dancing girls, guns, disruption of ‘peace’ in a posh urban neighbourhood – all equally telling. Bandits from Bollywood force their women to dance and sing a la Hema malini in Sholay. [remember the great scamster Telgi dispensing his millions in the Topaz dance bar in Mumbai?]e. A political caucus in decline is making a desperate attempt to commune and connect together .These are by no means the only interpretations possible. It is quite likely that they are all valid to different extents.
But to go back to my question – is the commentator in his disgust referring to esthetic taste or moral badness? Is the commentator uncomfortable with the naked display of gun power and its illegality or immorality, or an equally naked and ribald display of rented female sexuality?In case the cool-headed journalist is bothered by the technical-forensic issue of ‘unlawful carrying of fire arms under political patronage’ I can understand the objection. However, I fail to comprehend the accompanying angst. Any number of Hindi and Bhojpuri films show the same items albeit with greater production value. Do our commentators find occasion to show a similar disgust for them? I don’t remember. I don’t think so.
But if the orgies on the Yadav premises are fantasies very difficult to forgive and ignore, why? Why does the sweet syrup of Hindi films suddenly turns vinegary?My explanation for this for the time being is as follows:While we have come to accept the fantasies plied by our cinemas, we expect that they will remain confined to the celluloid screen. It is very disturbing for us when a reckless hood comes hurtling to implement all such fantasies as part of wide awake daily life. We find the idea of commandeered and incarnated fantasies disturbing. We feel esthetically disturbed by it. But we only have a moral language to express the disturbance. [Also, often when we see an actual hero and heroine sitting in the park and crooning a song, we begin to want to banish them. remember Operation Majnu from Meerut last year?]
I don’t pretend to be aware of the rules of translation between the real and the fantastic. My intention here was twofold – first, to bring to the surface a categorial problem [moral and esthetic] that we need to be aware of and second, to be better aware of how we relate specific fantasies to their daylight versions.

[earlier published in sacredmediacow]

The explosion of Bhojpuri Cinema

2008-02-22T06:16:00.000-08:00

BHOJPURI CINEMA:
REGIONAL RESONANCES IN HINDI HEARTLAND

By Ratnakar Tripathy

The Context: Dead Ends and Outlets

The sudden and phenomenal growth of Bhojpuri cinema in India since 2001 provides a number of opportunities for a close look at the cultural dynamics in the most underdeveloped parts of India[1]. With eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar at its core, the dynamics in question directly involves the large Hindi speaking region of the country. It seems possible to use the cinematic frames as windows on caste relations, democratization process, rise of urbanism and language. At a broader level, the phenomenon also allows us to develop and fine tune our ideas on the correlations between changes at the local-regional- national and even global levels. The close relation between political aspirations and cinematic fantasies which seems to vary from region to region in India is another valuable source of cultural insights. While all these tasks cannot be performed within the present article, an attempt will be made to travel along some of the chosen cinematic lanes and to map out the several pathways such studies could meaningfully follow. This may even help us evolve a hermeneutic stance and strategy for making sense of similar cultural phenomena elsewhere. It is helpful to remind ourselves that Bhojpuri cinema is yet too young, and one needs to be economical with conclusions and comparisons, however tempting they may seem.
The phrase ‘cultural dynamics’ may seem too tame or trivial without a discussion on the dramatically charged metaphors of change used to characterize Bihar and parts of eastern Uttar Pradesh associated with Bhojpuri cinema. The metaphors range from barbarization, decline, stagnation, decay, breakdown [of the institutions], backwardness, ferment, and turmoil to recount some of them. These make an interesting mix of a tremendous sense of happening with nothing to show for it. Or running furiously to stay in the same place – so much so one may summarize the situation as some kind of inconsequential but excited state of eventlessness! These metaphors may seem confusingly sententious apart from being contradictory, unless we look at some of the contrasting states of India such as Mahrashtra or Karnataka where the urban centers symbolize social and economic dynamism for the entire country. Urban centers such as Bangalore and Hyderabad have in recent years defined the orientation of the Indian society and economy in its forward thrust, with states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh symbolizing stagnation or even regression. While it remains true that perception of change per se deserves attention, these metaphors are not arbitrary and are often backed by statistics. To take just one example, given the continuing decay and backwardness of Bihar if one recalls that in the late 1990s, not more than half a dozen films were made in Bhojpuri as against 76 of them in 2006, the uninspiring phrase ‘cultural dynamics’ acquires a sense of urgency. Looking at the figures alone one begins to feel that there is an interesting intellectual challenge looming over the figures and that the monopoly for ‘dynamism’ may not belong solely to states such as Maharashtra and Karnataka. A scholar of Bihar can decide almost as a matter of ‘esthetic’ taste if he is more fascinated by dead ends or the supposed changes that never seem to happen, or those changes that forcibly impinge on the senses directly and through media. The results at the end of the two pathways however are quite likely to converge time and again!
What makes the rapid spurt of Bhojpuri cinema interesting, indeed fascinating is that the concerned region is marked by a number of social and economic dead ends. It would not seem surprising if Bhojpuri cinema continued to decline, offering no surprises to a student of development and change. The grand judgmental metaphor of decline in Bihar is thus often accompanied by a more prosaic and spatial one, namely ‘dead-end’ or ‘impasse’[2]. It is in fact possible to enumerate the best-known among the dead ends – declining agricultural productivity despite Bihar’s dependence on agriculture, de-industrialization over a number of decades, and a serious rupture of law and order[3]. Law and order have been at such low ebb that the press routinely talks of a Kidnapping ‘industry’ in Bihar indicating its sheer size and role in the economy as well as public discourse[4]. Also, while the middle and the lower rungs in the rural societies have experienced some upward mobility in the past three decades since the 1970s, this has often led to internecine conflicts characterizing everyday life in the region – a good enough reason for both the upper and the lower sections to consider leaving the scene of rather ‘unfruitful’ action[5].
Pitted against these stark figures and images is the clichéd but seemingly unrelated scene of crowds thronging the cinema halls! Thronging to see not Bombay films however, but Bhojpuri films! There will always be a place for a social analyst who is never startled by anything at all, since in hindsight everything seems ‘inevitable’ or at least highly likely. The fact however is that this cinematic explosion requires continued analysis by the more readily puzzled social theorist for both reasons – its inherent significance, and also its value as a momentous cultural index for a society at a standstill. Sometimes it doesn’t help to take shelter in the ontological platitude that everything is in continuous flux, more so when one is unable to characterize the flux at all. To put it plainly, the question is what are the factors underlying the dramatic growth of Bhojpuri cinema?
Interestingly, while the isolated audience may produce a very coherent reason for joining the ticket queue for a Bhojpuri rather than a Hindi film, even he often has no clue why suddenly seventy six Bhojpuri films arrive to occupy the main street of Indian cinema[6]. He in fact expresses surprise at the milling crowds around him and can’t figure out the richness of the ‘phenomenon’ in the midst of a cultural wasteland. Often all he can tell is he feels an intimate tug in the heart looking up at the Bhojpuri hoardings. At any rate, he seems to have no idea why 76 Bhojpuri films were not made seven years ago!

Moving out of Dead Ends: Migration and Social Mobility

Just like the metaphors of change and stagnation, perceptions of dead end are neither as rigid nor claustrophobic as they may seem. It is an existential platitude that very often, when situations do not provide openings, people tend to move out of them. In this case, the extent of migration from Bihar would seem to be the major relieving factor[7]. Embracing the top and the bottom layers of the society, it has reached gigantic proportions comparable to the Indian Partition of 1947. The migrant population from Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh shows an interesting differentiation within – ranging from middle class professionals to skilled but mostly unskilled labor – all of which stream down the Indian peninsula, as far as Hyderabad and Bangalore! Another differentiation is of great cultural significance – a great part of the small town and rural populations migrates temporarily or makes sure to keep their economic links and communication with the ancestral land. Migrations by their very nature are fraught with intense emotions wherever you look – at the point of origin where people seem to make their departures for a variety of unpleasant or pleasant reasons, and at the points of arrival where they face adaptive challenges.
As against the broader picture of migrations in plural, one would expect that every individual tale of migration carries its own emotional flavour unique to the person, the predicament and the locale. This once we are not dealing with the uniform tale of a mass exodus along the highways in response to drought, war or epidemic! Thus one wonders if it is possible to capture something of the emotional ‘tone’ characterizing the specific region, social predicament or wave of movement at a broader scale. Looking at things from a grand global perspective, the issue of emotional tone and flavour may seem like an irrelevant detail. But for someone standing in the thick of the cultural phenomenon, they stand for the reality itself with all its minute but significant nuances. The emotional tones in question may range between migration as a happy voluntary act and a virtual ejection from an existential dead end. At the other end it may range between a sweet welcome in the distant work place to a virtual entrapment, ghettoized alienation or even murder by the incensed hosts in a city[8]. The alchemy of love and hate, and the subtler emotions directed at the place of origin and the destination together form a complex web characterizing the deep ambivalences of a mobile population. The simple universal sadness of the sepia image of a family abandoning its abode is in brief no longer adequate in a world full of hectic departures and arrivals. It is very relevant to know who left, why he left, how he felt about having to leave, whether he continues to come back to his soil, how he relates to it after a number of decades, and how he passes on his stories to his successors. We need to remind ourselves that the simple word ‘home’ has lost its simplicity and innocence, and even a poor illiterate peasant from Bihar is now doomed to redefine it unendingly all his life. Unlike an oustee from a large dam site, he cannot even redefine it once for all as permanent dislocation. This in effect means a series of significant modifications in the social and familial lexicon!
The emotional tones and flavours are not exactly issues that can be relegated to literature or drama with an easy conscience. They are closely related to concrete sociological realities. What intensifies the characteristic emotional pitch of recent Bhojpuri migration is that while the relatively well-off sections are abandoning the region rather decisively, it is the less affluent, rural and quasi-literate segments that have kept their placental links intact. Interestingly, it is also these recent waves that have redefined the cultural and emotional tone of the broader historical process of the Bhojpuri Diaspora.
Let us not be oblivious to the paradox that those segments who left the soil out of despair – either due to pressing economic need or because of their miserable social predicament [read as - their place in the sclerotic caste hierarchy] have turned out to be the most loyal audience of the Bhojpuri film industry. The upper castes migrating to the bigger cities have found greater joy in mingling with the national elite as indistinguishably as possible. The nostalgia felt by the upper class and higher castes is likely to be accompanied by sighs of relief at escaping the daily humiliation at the hands of the middle and lower castes, who in turn may want to heighten their joy of self-assertion by constantly rubbing salt over the wounds of the upper crust. It is important to remember that the humiliation here is not just about coming down in the world but losing ritual status and the supposedly indestructible halo of the bloodline. Clearly, the most liberal among the upper caste migrants tend to have a highly uneasy relation with their roots, even when they continue to marry within their own communities outside Bihar. If one looks at the society as a whole, it becomes possible to see the often contradictory sentiments of different caste groupings. Through the numerous elections and change of state governments in the region, being ‘in power’ and ‘out of power’ can be a very real experience for a group or even an individual, whether situated in a remote Bihar village or working on a construction site in the midst of Mumbai.
The discrepant behaviour of the social segments and classes is a very good indicator of a cultural stampede in the society as a whole, where you witness a wide variety of movement, motives and emotions in all their ambivalent splendour. The various currents and countercurrents of movement, struggle, hope and despair would also indicate the complexity of feelings and relationships. To reiterate, these emotions may reflect predicaments as diverse as relief at being rid of one’s roots to missing them horribly despite the economic compensations. This is clearly a matter difficult to quantify but its scale becomes rather obvious on the ground. Vertical mobility within the social hierarchy and physical mobility through migration make a potent mix that should be expected to release great literary and artistic energy among other things. The phrases ‘emotional tone’ and ‘emotional flavour’ have been used interchangeably in the article precisely to capture something of this nuanced reality.
While it remains debatable if the results of the literary energy are sufficiently evident in Hindi literature, popular music and cinema clearly appear as the vehicle for this tidal force. It also needs to be emphasized that contemporary Hindi literature seems to largely reflect the relatively milder fidgety emotions of the urbanized middle classes towards life in the village, although the ‘anchalic’ [regional] genre has shown a moderate spurt in recent years.
Besieged by the various social changes and problems, this region clearly faces the danger of seeing migration and development become near synonymous[9]. This is important to understand and underline. While we sit and debate over the definitions of entrepreneurship and leadership within a given social context from our academic cocoons, the social initiative on the ground would clearly seem to belong to the migrant ‘outsider’ rather than the struggler on the site. We have a situation where the only means to a better life may lie beyond the frontiers, and where remittances sent back to the village make a clinching difference [accounting for 25-30 percent of the family income, seen by economists as a critical figure] to the depressed lifestyles[10]. Survival, movement, exposure to the outside world, changes in the world within – these become the stuff of everyday life impacting culture with ferocious directness. Trains overloaded with migrant workers on their way to or fro, railway platforms packed with the novices and journeymen of migration present us with a two-ended phenomenon[11]. Bangalore train junction simply becomes a depository, a clusterized version and a mirror image of the many Sultanpurs in Uttar Pradesh and the Chhapras in Bihar.
Imagine a journey of above 40 hours in a train between Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh and Bangalore and it becomes easy to see the first cultural form that would take a free ride all the way down the peninsula – the folk songs. Let us not pretend that songs come very easily to the lips of the distressed traveller. But they do turn up since life is looking up and now seems more like a widening rather than a narrowing tunnel!
Reverse the trip and you can hear the latest tunes from Bombay cinema along with the traditional ones. Indeed the only telling precursor to Bhojpuri cinema in hindsight could have been the cassette and CD revolution in the region in the 1990s, which created a number of stars in the region. Music is perhaps what drew a clear cultural map for the entrepreneurs of Bhojpuri cinema. After all Manoj Tiwari, one of the two superstars of Bhojpuri cinema began his career as a folk singer in country fairs and local TV stations!
There is no need to pretend that placing oneself back in the 1990s, in the midst of the musical explosion mentioned above, one could have predicted a sympathetic resonance in cinema. But it serves well to remember that before the arrival of the talkies the gramophone companies had already harvested classical and popular music from different corners of the country[12]. In a sense, the very songs that had been heard in a disembodied form earlier made a comeback in the guise of the ‘talking and moving pictures’ in the 1930s. It may be interesting to note that the musical industry in Bombay today is still largely coterminous with the movie industry and singers have a tough time making a career entirely outside the movies. The Bhojpuri cassette and CD revolution was however an exception – it had no natal connection with cinema. Even now it has an independent market and follows a different business model. Parthasarathi [2005] vividly indicates how extensive surveys and recordings were carried out by enterprising executives of newly found gramophone companies from the US and Europe, who keenly competed for the market. Music as an unwitting harbinger of cinema seems an interesting idea to explore!
It is useful to make explicit the following assertions before moving deeper into the world of Bhojpuri films:
First, the expanding Bhojpuri music industry played the harbinger to its cinema and on a more generalized level, music perhaps lies at the very core of Indian cinema. Music arguably forms the selfhood of Indian cinema around which stories, characters and visuality accrete. Despite the musical prelude, however, no one had an idea that Bhojpuri films were about to walk on to the stage unannounced and occupy it without hesitation or unease.
Second, the mainstay of Bhojpuri cinema is provided by the following segments: migrants in bigger cities from the lowest rungs of the middle castes, and semi-literate and illiterates from middle and lower castes from the smaller towns in the native region. Add to it a sprinkling of the Dalits [untouchables] and the relatively uneducated and economically under-privileged upper caste inhabitants and your profile for the Bhojpuri film audience is near complete. If this seems confusing, eliminate the educated and the upper castes [whether resident or non-resident] from the Bihar society and you zero in over the same sociological profile.
Third, if one excludes the inaffluent upper caste members from the above profile you begin to closely approximate the base of voters supporting parties and regional governments that have lead to the empowerment of the middle castes and to some extent the Dalits in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh in the past two decades. Thus there seems to be a strange resonance and correspondence between the demography of the Bhojpuri film audience and the new caste alliances in the region’s electoral politics. It would seem that vertical social mobility and migratory mobility are closely related, often blending together in the cinema halls and on the cinema screen.

Arrivals and Departures I: Dreaming on Screen

True, when Bhojpuri cinema irrupted on the Indian scene in the year 2001 there was no one waiting for it. But this sudden arrival needs to be qualified. Strictly by way of origin, Bhojpuri cinema goes back to 1962, when Kundan Kumar made Ganga Maiyya Tohe Piyari Chadhaibo [roughly translated as ‘Mother Ganges I will make an offering to you if…’], which has now firmly settled, in public memory for its songs[13]. A few success stories separated by prolonged gaps and hiccups followed: in the 1980s films such as Mai [Mother], Ganga Ki Beti [The Daughter of Ganges], Hamaar Bhowji [My Brother’s Wife] and ‘Bhaiyya Dooj’ kept up as if the bare idea of Bhojpuri cinema alive[14]. However, by the 1990s Bhojpuri cinema was dying like a character from Hindi films – reluctantly but inevitably.
In 2001 the phenomenal success of Saiyyan Hamaar [My Sweetheart] put a big question mark on the inevitability of the demise. By 2005, Sasura Bada Paisa Wala [My Father in law- the moneyed Guy] which earned about fifty times its production budget of Rs 4.5 million made the several decades of irreversible coma seem like a preparatory nap before a bout of action. In great haste, Bhojpuri cinema produced its first superstars Manoj Tiwari and Ravi Kissen – and the cultural gestation collapsed the past several decades into months and weeks. In this particular case, the media hype has cautiously trudged behind the phenomenon ever since. In the perception of the trade, all this is still too good to be true.
A series of confirmations of the good times have followed in the past few years - Daroga Babu I Love You [Darling Cop, I love you], Panditji Batai Na Biyah Kab Hoi [Priest, priest, when will I get married], Dharti Kahe Pukar Ke [My Land calls me] and Bandhan Toote Na [Our Ties shouldn’t break] [15]. According to trade analyst Taran Adarsh "Most Bhojpuri films are made in small budgets, usually Rs 20-30 lakh [$50,000], and they fetch Rs 1-2 crore [$ 200,000-400,000]. Several of these films are grossing 10 times their production costs. A good film can even make a profit of Rs 10-12 crore...’[16].
Raghuvansh Singh, president of Bihar-Jharkhand Movies Distributors Association, says ‘Bhojpuri films are catering to over 200 million Bhojpuri-speaking people in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Besides, the Bhojpuri Diaspora in Mauritius, Ghana, West Indies, Fiji, Nepal, Dubai, Indonesia, and the Netherlands constitutes a good enough market for our films. Stars like Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgan and Naghma have done films in Bhojpuri. As many as eight films are released in a month [17].”
Those familiar with Bombay mainstream cinema are likely to find certain close resemblances in Bhojpuri cinema – the falling in love, the love song, the serious social consequences that soon catch up with the lovers, a debate over family relationships, and the destruction or conversion of the villain[18]. But as you begin to view more films certain perplexingly unfamiliar scenes will appear. The viewing experience can be rather confusing and an impatient viewer is likely to walk out of the cinema declaring Bhojpuri films to be a regressed C grade version of the Bombay product, a further ‘massifed’ version so to speak of mass culture. Even though with increased budgets, Bhojpuri films seem increasingly sophisticated with every passing year, shoddy camera work, impromptu seeming choreography, ham acting and general disregard of professional standards may simply seem to confirm the view[19]. But repeated viewing may reveal differences that are far from subtle – they are glaring.
It would seem that apart from its own style of theatricality, Bhojpuri cinema magnifies certain selected aspects of Bombay films. In the process, Bhojpuri cinema acquires a new and different personality while it retains several popular gimmicks of Bombay films. This distinctness is definable in the following terms: the village becomes the primary theatre of action and moral drama despite the presence of the city [but remarkably rarely the slums], family interactions become very elaborate, and the moral discourse turns a lot more outspoken than in Bombay films. Interestingly, while the social conflicts and ‘evils’ of village life find more overt mention than Bombay, one cannot miss the point that the village forms the preferred emotional universe for the main characters. Despite that, in a Bhojpuri film when a boy from a peasant family sits by the muddy village pond in his branded jeans and T shirt waiting for his lover, it seems rather evident that he is breathing the seaside air of Marine Drive, Bombay. These mental journeys back and forth may make the viewer giddy, but the soul of the film remains bucolic. Urbanism despite being unavoidable continues to represent immanent corruption and degradation.
If one were forced to clearly specify aspects of Bombay cinema that have been magnified in Bhojpuri films, it would be a combination of the social dramas and the village based stories, both of which were eased out of the Bombay mainstream by the 1980s. There have been exceptions to this rule such as the recent Vivah [The Wedding] 2007, from the Barjatya banner, but they seem to be just that.
The national media in India has taken due notice of the tremendous vitality of Bhojpuri cinema and columnists have had to offer an explanation for this. The explanations come in mainly two types. The first typically focus on the recent changes within Bombay cinema and can be summarized as follows: Bombay cinema in the last decade or so has shown an increasing tendency to appeal to the big town audience and the Indians settled in Europe and the US. Even its stories have shifted from the Indian soil to locales such as New Zealand and the US and are populated with Indian characters based in Bombay, London and New York. Such outward movement has created a vacuum that is now understandably filled by Bhojpuri films[20].
The second explanation turns to the other half of the phenomenon – the regional against the global, pointing out the growth of a new regional audience, almost presuming that an audience had been waiting for Bhojpuri cinema to come into existence[21].
The two stock explanations are not entirely off the mark, and manage to catch the basic flavour of the phenomenon. Once one admits however that the two explanations [instances of verstehen] are complementary, the complexity of the sociological issues becomes apparent. It would seem that we are dealing with a gigantic change that can be best expressed through the dynamic continuum: Hollywood cinema - Bombay cinema - Bhojpuri cinema. It is possible to talk about this continuum not simply as a theoretical construct with heightened relevance in the age of globalism, but a ‘real’ experience from the audience’s viewpoint. On any given day for example in Patna, the audience has a choice not simply between a Hindi and a Bhojpuri film, but also dubbed version of Hollywood films. Who knows, there will be a day when Hollywood films would be dubbed in Bhojpuri! And if the audience is found lapping up James Bond in Bhojpuri, who are we to complain of cultural dissonance! Even more incredible images have popped up in the past just as the media commentators wondered over their unlikeliness![22]
If one were to present the above argument schematically and as a theoretical construct the following one would arrive at the following cultural map, starting from bottom upwards:
Regional films [Bhojpuri films etc.]
Hindi films for Indian audience
Hindi films for ‘global audience’ [relating to the Diaspora audience]
Hindi films for the global audience [relating to audiences inclusive of non –Indian origin in parts of Asia and Africa]
Hindi films as a global option [as yet an aspiration][23]
Hollywood cinema
It is very tempting to see in the above schema a sort of symmetry where for example one may aver that the relation between Hollywood and Bombay films is analogous to relation between Bombay and Bhojpuri films. As a playful [ludic] heuristic the symmetry would seem harmless and even useful if one compared results produced from the schema to extant reality. But when applied mechanically it will lead to hermeneutic failure. Bhojpuri films as folk versions of Bombay cinema, and Bombay cinema as Indianized version of Hollywood are good but limited models incapable of dealing with cultural fault lines and discontinuities. Additionally, we often do not know who ‘originally’ borrowed from whom, given the fact that cinematic themes and tales have a habit of endless back and forth mobility between the mint and the market. Most of all, in the field of cultural studies the discontinuities are often more interesting than the continuities. For example, Bhojpuri cinema in its most interesting moments is likely to dwell on themes that Bombay would habitually ignore. The purpose behind saying so is however not to undermine the significance of the continuities. This point will receive due attention in the section devoted to analysis of selected scenes from Bhojpuri films.

Arrivals and Departures II : Resonance and Conflict

What the two explanations provided by the media would seem to leave out is the core cultural and social process of coming together and consolidation of the Bhojpuri audience – a process that is by no means complete. The use of the word ‘resonance’ in the title aims to focus on the coming together of an audience over a period of time. True, the same population has shown its political sinews over the last two decades by challenging the hegemony of the upper castes through a number of movements and platforms as rallyist and voter. But it is only with the rise of Bhojpuri films that it has found a certain cultural commonality and resonance in the regions of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar[24]. It is in fact an audience that is still in the process of coming together. We thus have a situation where political mobilization and cultural resonance continue to consolidate as we find them reach a mature stage.
Probably the most striking basis for this consolidation lies in the everyday experience of the audience as citizen in this part of the country. The process of temporary and permanent migration from this region has over time compounded the rural and the urban experience into a single whole despite the polarities, incorporating Sultanpur or Chhapra and Bombay within the same continuum. This finds a parallel in Hindi cinema where increasingly Bombay and New York simply provide two different acts of a smooth-flowing story or a diptych. The strength of both these continuums is that they do not focus on a given site with total attention, nor to they draw opaque walls around the local experience. There is a situation as if of a see-saw or a constant arrival - transit – departure that lends a particular poignancy to the stories and the emotions.
Having drawn a parallel between the mainstream cinema and Bhojpuri it is important to explain what is meant by consolidation. The explanation lies in the very nature of this extremely flexible dialect with a huge embrace. Bhojpuri in actual experience ranges from being seen as a style of Hindi [‘Bhaiya’ or Bihari’] to a large cluster of dialects spoken natively in Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, and parts of Madhya Pradesh. First, while the label Bhojpuri is most handy, one needs to understand that its local variations are immense. Bhojpuri cinema has to thus constantly seek a balance that would ensure viewership in the entire region, albeit at a much smaller scale than Bombay films. Second, Bhojpuri cinema is seen not just by Bhojpuri speaking populations, but also by ones that speak similar tongues. In some cases the allegiance comes from speakers of tongues which are far from similar – Maithili e.g. is a language spoken in the non-Bhojpuri Mithila region and has a classical literature to boast of. Bhojpuri on the other hand is rarely found in the written form and is largely dependent on oral literature. In brief then, Bhojpuri is not a simple ‘given’ as defined by a grammatical ukase but a consolidated result of a process that has taken several decades. This has a close parallel in Bombay cinema which has to strike a balance over a much broader canvas covering a wider cultural and linguistic territory.
There is another vital socio-cultural process unfolding in the region that relates to the caste dynamics. In the past three decades, the entire region has seen a dramatic upward mobility among the middle castes such as Yadavs and Kurmis, and to a lesser extent among the lowest rungs, the Dalits in the society. State politics in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh is now largely in the hands of coalitions dominated by not just middle segments, but also certain Dalit castes and Muslims. These processes can be best understood perhaps through a close look at the upward mobility of certain lower castes and their highly reflexive and adaptive ways of making the most of the electoral and democratic processes. There is a clear need to admit the centrality of the above issues for any study on the region. Thus in brief, migratory movement and upward mobility, the twin factors directly influence both the content of Bhojpuri cinema and the rise of the Bhojpuri language.
The above two processes are not inherently linked in the sense that one does not follow the other. Nevertheless, they happen to be yoked together experientially, defining the life of the migrant and also the non-migrant in different ways despite the overlaps. The emboldening of the week thus acquires several layers – migration often ensures that the world outside seems less scary, and the dominant castes in the world within seem less fearing due to social mobility. Of course, the upper castes look at this confidence as newfound arrogance and vulgarity. No wonder then that Bhojpuri films are often condemned for their vulgarity and lack of esthetic appeal, perhaps as ‘esthetic’ retaliation to political hurt[25].
It is not difficult to see that in a region marked by bitter caste wars, deepening social conflicts, and lack of politically inclusive ideologies, a cultural form such as Bhojpuri cinema has the potential to create a new resonance not found elsewhere. While a number of opportunistic political coalitions have begun to emerge on the landscape, lack of ideological coherence is not easy to compensate. With the aspirations of different castes and sub-castes aligned in uneasy coalitions, politics would almost seem to make space for an inclusive cultural arena such as a cinema where people can commingle to create a broader identity. Clearly, political dialogue on its own may prove to have its own limitations and a society is often left to confront its most vital issues at the level of culture. The hope that politics alone can resolve social conflicts has proved vain in the past, choking spaces that culture should rightfully occupy. There is a clear need thus to look closely at some of the continuities between the realms of culture and politics in the region in the coming years, given that several processes are still in the state of unfolding.
Before we begin to recapture theoretically the relation between the life experiences of the audience and the content and thrust of Bhojpuri cinema, a word of caution is due. Just in case this paper gave the impression that Bhojpuri cinema is an inclusive genre in the sense of being all-inclusive, we need to admit that the process of consolidation has thus far excluded both sections – the upper crust that opts out of Bhojpuri films, but significantly also a lower crust that has no access to movies. Lack of access may be explained by practical financial reasons, or simply by unfamiliarity with entertainment involving high technology. Although it is difficult to quantify, there is a large rural or small town segment that does not connect with Bhojpuri films, just as it is unable to join the migrating hordes for a better life. There are castes such as Musahars and Doms and other illiterate groups with no prior exposure to cinema and for a variety of reasons no evident interest in it[26]. Thus while positing the Hollywood-Bombay- Bhojpuri continuum, one needs to remember that while Bhojpuri may scratch desperately at the bottom of the society, it clearly doesn’t reach far enough. Just as the expanding universe of newspapers, television, and mobile telephones seem to leave out a considerable part of the society, so does cinema.

Arrivals and Departures III : Fashioning Fantasies

Living in the village, living in Bombay [or Bangalore or rural Amritsar as disparate migratory destinations], traveling between the city and the native village, and coping with the cultural transitions both at home and abroad thus form the experiential raw material of a ‘new’ cinema. This new cinema began as an offshoot of the mainstream Bombay genre around 50 years ago, went through a long gestation, and is now emerging as a medium on its own. We don’t know yet how lasting it will prove in the years to come. We do not even know if Bhojpuri cinema is simply a sign of fragmentation in the entertainment media made possible by new technologies that allow business focus on smaller markets with comparable or higher rates of returns[27]. These returns may prove high enough to seem tempting to big business at this point, but may not seem attractive enough in future[28].
In order to make sense of the increasing individuality and the ‘difference’ posed by Bhojpuri cinema from its Bombay counterpart one needs to focus on a continuum of experience which proves as first hand for the migrant as many of his relatives and neighbours in the village. The continuum with all its breeches could be posed somewhat schematically as follows:
Village: small town: capital of the province: national metropolis: global metropolis.
While the above schema carries an air of linearity and theoretical simplicity, we need to remember that the Bhojpuri audience mentally travels a million times between these frontiers and even has some idea of the global metropolis through the Hindi films. Everyday experience ensures to create a maze of back and forth movement that constantly recreates the collision and the collusion between the myriad values from the village and the city. Although what we get to see as the end product is a song or a film or a story, the cultural auteur/protagonist/audience of the story lives it out and rehearses it endlessly before positing the end product in front of us. Despite all our attempts to recreate something of this emotional and intellectual struggle, we can only uncover a few layers of it at a time.
One feasible way of approaching and approximating the migrant’s struggle to make sense of his composite and kaleidoscopic universe is to look at his life situations in terms of two extreme predicaments. First, a situation when a migrant finds his village and city values rather similar or comparable. This may understandably be a simpler situation though fraught with considerable debate and oscillations. A more complex situation may be that of incommensurability, when village values [or situations] and city values [or situations] pose conflicts that prove impossible to resolve. And yet for practical reasons, they need to be resolved at least for the time being. The issue of incommensurability is thus to be placed in a pragmatic context and not in an abstract logical space, where a person can very well wring his hands and declare that the dilemma has no answer, and walk away unimpeded.
It is not difficult to see that even when compelled or driven by practical exigencies, the migrant has to live out an endless series of ambivalences, which he must resolve for the time being quite simply in order to carry on living as a morally sensate human being. It would also seem that the ambivalent predicament is rarely resolved for ever. The mental journeys between the village and the metropolis never come to an end, and in a sense the migrant spends a lifetime traveling back and forth not depending on where he is actually situated. In a sense then, leaving the frontiers of the village is like being doomed to a lifetime of ethical nomadism that has to be ‘translated’ constantly into a rooted existence. The fear of the unknown, as if, needs to be tamed by grasping part of it, any part of it, for the time being. Unthinking or opportunistic mimicry, strong resistance to it, slow absorption of alien values, promotion of such values in the village or town setting – all these would seem to provide the migrant with his bag of tricks or his arsenal of social strategies.
The tremendous reflexivity required of the immigrant is thus often reflected in Bhojpuri cinema. This reflexivity emerges from the frequently unseen ‘interstices’ of cultural systems and features[29]. What one probably needs to remember is that while the migrant faces tremendous pressures, he is also driven by a powerful existential force that combines his helplessness and despair with a great sense of opportunity and hope. Just in case, the above paragraphs seem to draw a rather agonized portrait of the migrant, one has to admit that theorizing may often permit if not encourage some amount of hyperbole. It also needs to be admitted that the rough edges of existence hide many of these daily struggles in their interstices – the intensities as well as the mechanical insouciance of daily living.
The above points need illustration from scenes from Bhojpuri cinema. This is important for getting a clear idea of hermeneutic openings that everyday experience may provide a person. To put in differently and perhaps more effectively, illustrations from Bhojpuri film story may give us a clear idea of how a person imposes his own interpretive take on a real life situation, since interpretive opportunities are anyway rarely available to a passive agent. The selected episode goes as follows:
In Pyaar Ke Bandhan [The Bonds of Love] the heroine, a lively but snooty daughter of a landowner insults a cobbler [a chamar!] in English, throwing his fee at him like he was dirt. The cobbler grabs this opportunity to give her an elaborate lecture in Bhojpuri-accented English on the value of education in refining one’s character. He tells her that sadly, education has instead only degraded hers[30]. The heroine stands corrected and promptly falls in love with the character, of course.
The above lecture explicitly talks about the dignity of labour and the value of education [English education], all of which goes on at a fairly overt level. Both these values are fixtures from the most boring of school assembly sessions, and the entertainment-hungry audience would normally refuse to tolerate such cliché beyond a few seconds, far from cheering it. The long lecture results in cheering from the audience because of what it implies. The message floating close to the surface is – learn to respect a chamar for both his work and his education, if not for his ‘chamarhood’ alone. The tame lecture thus carries a subversive sting in its tail, making the sequence exhilarating for the audience. Members of the potter and the carpenter castes can freely apply the morale to their own predicaments. And so can a plumber [not a caste, but a modern occupation]!
In an earlier paragraph, the heroine was depicted as an intrepid lover ready to fling her heart at the slightest opportunity. We probably need to modify this portrait. The heroine is more likely to brood endlessly on the brief homily, and sort out her ambivalent reactions after a great deal of interpretive agony. Of course, the film does not dwell on these broodings. Instead it makes something very unlikely happen – a landlord’s daughter falls in love with a cobbler! The ‘sweet’ euphemism of Bhojpuri films leaves it open whether the hero is chamar by caste or occupation only, making matters more palatable for an upper caste audience than they would have been [31]. In a sense then, the interstices are not provided by experience but sought out actively and intently by a person. At times these interstices turn into roomy windows, and at other times the interpreter has to ram away at the frontiers to create a narrow crack for an opening. The relative degrees of gentleness and violence may be commensurate with the toughness of the task at hand.
A second example from Kanyadan [2006] focuses on the issue of female infanticide. Having given birth to a series of girls, a not so young wife makes the discovery that her husband has been consigning the newborns to the sacred river Ganga. Rather uncharacteristically she confronts him and calls him a rakshasa [a demon]. Even more uncharacteristically for a Bombay film, the husband actually cares to defend his actions by recounting a trauma that made him completely averse to daughters. When young, he witnessed his father being humiliated by his sister’s husband. When the son in law found that he did not receive support from his father in law in the local elections, he dragged his wife and deposited her at her father’s feet. ‘You can take your daughter back’, he told his father in law. The arrogant son in law did not relent even when the father in law removed his headgear, the very symbol of his caste pride and put it at his son in law’s feet. The young boy interpreted this incident to mean that the very presence of a girl in the family made you vulnerable – anyone could decide to trample on your honour. All you could do is swallow your pride and beg for mercy.
The above dialogue between the wife and the husband is very revealing, in fact too revealing for a Bombay film. But the Bhojpuri film brings out the psyche of the ‘hurt’ male with great patience, not justifying it, but simply making it explicit. ‘Let the men squirm in their seats’, the thinking may seem to be, ‘they will take it from us’. Later on, in the King Lear fashion the story goes on to depict the surviving daughter as her father’s saviour as against a disloyal and feckless son, thereby demonstrating that the father interpreted his trauma wrongly. The story thus places the trauma where it belongs – with the original sufferer, namely the sister who was used as a pawn in a political quarrel. The husband had just dispossessed his married sister of her trauma, claiming it to be his own. In a sense then the film takes us to the rock bottom of the man’s misogyny[32].
What is striking here is not the situation itself, but the depth to which it is uncovered. In a sense what a Bhojpuri film is doing is to borrow a stock situation from Bombay cinema to magnify it with far greater patience than Bombay cinema is likely to show. Even if we see Bombay and Bhojpuri films as part of a continuum, it is such moments of discontinuity and thematic magnification that reveal unexplored terrains such as the details of a youth’s trauma mentioned above. Here again the intention is not to lay down rules of interpretation but to simply trace a certain strategy of storytelling, where a Bhojpuri film may be able to focus much more closely on the social fabric than Bombay cinema. Bombay cinema faces a somewhat different challenge in dealing with a wider social context, and perhaps has less space for nuances such as above. The apparent commonalities thus between Bombay and Bhojpuri quite simply bring out the common cultural ‘thresholds’. It is likely that regional cinemas will fin their own individual trajectories beyond the threshold often defining their own styles in the process.
The above reading of the event is by no means complete but adequate for our purpose here. Having examined the broad socio-economic features of the Bhojpuri speaking and understanding region, and having looked at a number interpretive stances and opportunities available to the migrant/non-migrant audience, it is now time to move on to the issue of Bhojpuri, the language.

Arrivals and Departures IV: Voicing Fantasies in the Vernacular

In a very significant sense the Bhojpuri language is much more than a tool of expression for a large section of the region in question. While Hindi has found a secure place in the spaces outside the family and the village, it still lacks the intimacy of dreams for a large majority. Over the past 150 years or so, Hindi has come a long way. Hindi as the language of literature and poetry, Hindi as the free-flowing practical language of the media, Hindi as a language of national politics – these are some of its different channels with somewhat different norms and styles. These vary between the extremes of the over-sophisticated literary expressions to by now an almost pan-Indian popular glossary of democratic electoral politics at the street level. But to an illiterate rustic, Hindi in its chaste form is often also the language of the bureaucracy, underlying the power of the educated sophisticates. For nearly a century the advocates of Hindi have thrived on the basis of pitiful anti-English sloganeering on the one hand and bullying strategies that include imposition of the ‘national’ language on unwilling regions[33].
The story of opposition to Hindi in many parts of the country and its grumbling and gradual acceptance in fits and starts is an interesting tale on its own. What is relevant here however is that the growth of Hindi as a common cause has resulted in the overshadowing of a number of dialects and even written languages, which have rarely reacted with hostility nevertheless. In fact, even though some of these languages such as Braj and Awadhi lost their quasi-classical status, they were happy to make a common cause for and with Hindi. With a vast hinterland of dialects, Hindi developed the ability to communicate with a very large population. Hindi cinema synthesized its own version of Hindi by evolving an Urdu-Hindustani dialect that made it even more acceptable to the audience, even though this is a version that cannot be used in daily life without turning the speaker into a laughing stock.
Yet the very growth of Bhojpuri cinema would indicate that Hindi is unable to cope with large territories of experience, except perhaps through translation from these languages. Interestingly, it is in recent times too that Bombay cinema has made place for the Bombay Hindi dialect in the Munnabhai series [2005-2007], proving a great success with near cult following[34]. The urdu tehjeeb [style, manners, polish] of Bombay cinema has had to give way to the crudely expressive tongues spoken by the common man. Thus while Hindi continues its heroic balancing act between influences from Sanskrit, Urdu, English and the dialects and may begin to grope southwards towards the Tamil family, languages like Bhojpuri cannot spend a lifetime behind the wings, forever repressing themselves voluntarily[35].
The rise of the middle castes and Dalits and their continued empowerment, their cultural self-assertion through literature and cinema, and their continuing political and ideological assertion are likely to change the shape and status of Hindi in the coming years. While it remains true that the relation between Sanskrit and the vernaculars, and Persian or English and the vernaculars has not been the same as between Hindi and its dialects, the unquestionably domineering position of ‘classical’ [shudhdha/pure] Hindi is likely to be questioned more frequently than before. If the proponents of Hindi decide to see a threat in the growth of the dialects, it may even lead to a new turn ious swerve in the politics of languages in the country.f Hindi s between Hindi of democratization iin the politics of languages in the country. At this stage, however there is a greater feeling of complementarity than conflict. It is quite likely that in the coming years the dialects will assert themselves not simply through independent platforms but by modifying Hindi itself to suit the needs of a greatly varied population ranging between the slums in metropolises and the smaller towns and villages across the nation.
Hindi has shown signs of adequate flexibility and ability to deal with rural and urban contexts of every day life and the rich variety in between. With the rise of globalism, Hindi’s adversarial stance towards English is quite likely to be complemented with a relatively pacific acceptance of their co-existence. Correspondingly, Hindi may feel enriched and not threatened by the consolidation of its dialects as its foot soldiers pitted against the onslaught of global English. The dialects themselves may range from the quasi-classical ones such as Braj and Maithili to Hyderabadi [Dakhni] and to the recently spawned ones like Bomabaiya [Bombay Hindi]. Hindi’s bitter envy of English is now increasingly based on its inability to make inroads in the South, where again the lifting of prescriptive grammatical sanctions and phonetic may allow different Hindi styles to find fertile soil in the coming decades. In fact such alchemy has already begun on the streets of Bangalore with some help from Gulbarga Urdu. Hindi’s real issue with English is likely to be in the realm of ideas and intellectual discourse, where the vernacular has to wrestle with the might of the cosmopolitan in an ‘unfair’ battle. Along the way, Hindi quite sensibly gave up its claims to provide scientific terminology except till the high school level.
In the midst of all the linguistic churning, Bhojpuri and other dialects clearly do not have aspirations that threaten the status of Hindi. But they equally clearly have the potential to create and even more important, legitimize many Hindis in all their richness, expanding the lexicon and the stock of regional idioms and sounds.
On the whole then, the dialects would seem to support the case of Hindi in its envious jostling with English. With the whole world fondly gazing at the vast Indian and Chinese markets, who knows if Hindi along with Chinese may make hasty inroads into the western curricula, causing another twist in the tale within our own lifetimes! Given that China’s preparations for the next Olympic Games include quick and aggressive mastery over Basic English by a large population, language learning may at times even acquire epidemic if not pandemic proportions!

Arrivals and Departures V: Political Aspirations and Cinematic Fantasies

Political Aspirations: Openings and Barriers

Having traveled along a number of hermeneutic routes, it now becomes possible to celebrate with the seasoned migrant, the happy confusion between the words ‘arrival’ and ‘departure’. Coming to a work site whether in Assam, rural Punjab or Bangalore seems as much an arrival as a journey back to the village with suitcases spilling out gifts and cash. Going back to secure and relatively lucrative employment in Hyderabad may seem as sweet and snug as homecoming. The lonely wife or the parent in the village too has to learn to rejoice as much in the migrant son’s departure as his arrival, despite the profuse tears. The conceptual confusion here seems more a sign of comfort than dyslexic disorientation. This exaggerated picture of warm and snug selfhood however dissembles many bitter tales of dissonance within the self, divided between home and destination, between the destiny of rural poverty and the free will of gainful employment abroad. Most of all, for a student of cinema and society, it is challenging to find out how the lyrical fantasies of cinema nestle together with the prosaic aspirations of politics within the embrace of selfhood. This is not an easy question to answer at any level – whether at the level of generality, or even in the specific context of Bhojpuri cinema. But it would be tragic if a social researcher decided to let the question pass without a comment.
While the last ten years of Bhojpuri revival make it difficult to make bold assertions, it is perhaps easier to tell the quintessential political tale. The last three decades in the region have seen the rise of what may be called the ‘politics of humiliation and humbling.’ Indeed, given the nature of caste, it is difficult to visualize any other mode of democratization. Being punished and humiliated repeatedly seems to be the only democratic answer to the ceremonial hierarchy based on birth alone. And yet while the hierarchy crumbles in flesh, the idea of caste as a disincarnated ghost may continue to haunt the body politic. The upper castes in the region have been through several rounds of humiliation at the hands of the middle and lower castes through the formation of a number of middle-caste and Dalit dominated governments. It seems castes such as Yadavs will now have to take their turn willy nilly. The downfall of the Laloo Yadav regime in Bihar and Mulayam Singh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh may represent a second phase of humiliations, of the middle castes in this case, with the possibility of Kurmis in Bihar taking their turn some time in the future. Within the process of humiliation may lie a gentler process of humbling too, when Brahmins willingly reduce themselves to the junior partnership of Dalits in Uttar Pradesh, and Bhumihars do the same with Kurmis in Bihar. The upper castes thus are now learning to swallow their pride, humbling themselves in the process. The humbling involved is not simply a matter of subjective sentiments – a survey of the Rajput and Bhumihar opinion of the Brahmin’s collusion with Dalits in Uttar Pradesh is sure to make it seem very substantial.
The above process would seem to be entirely in line with the logic of democracy if one remembers that the mundane process of democratization is not so much about generation of sublime democratic ideals and values as elimination of the non-democratic ones, and not so much about the creation of ‘dignity’ as pruning of hubris and pride.
Unlike the story of politics in the region, the tale of Bhojpuri cinema is yet to unfold its storyline. Bhojpuri cinema in its inchoate phase has much exploring to do. It has to reflect the chastening and chiding the traditionally privileged castes and gender must receive from the unprivileged. But it can make itself interesting to the outside world or find a place under the global sun only by representing the community of the region in entirety or a semblance of it. The logic of both the community and the market place dictate that cinema should most often perform both the tasks simultaneously – of looking within, and also looking beyond its frontiers to project its image abroad. These tasks together define the spaces and the cultural gamut over which Bhojpuri films can freely move.

Cinematic Fantasies: Openings and Barriers

The section ‘Arrivals and Departures III’ in its analysis of selected scenes from Bhojpuri films deals with the first half of cinema’s task, that of reflecting on the conflicts and resonances within the society. But it is important to see briefly how Bhojpuri cinema and Hindi cinema try to locate themselves in the global context, and represent the outer world to themselves, in the process adapting to the intrusive challenges of globalism.
In the film ‘Firangi Dulhaniya [Foreign Bride]’, 2006, the central theme is that of an Indian boy coming back to the country with a foreigner [read white skinned Caucasian] bride. While Bombay cinema has occasionally dealt with such challenges, for a Bhojpuri film it amounts to a major social trauma. It seems the film was based on the real life story of a small town medical student enrolled in Russia who returned home with a Russian bride along with a degree. One begins to get an idea of the complex web of Bhojpuri Diaspora when told that the Russian actress in question learnt her smattering of Bhojpuri from a tutor from Fiji. What is remarkable however is that Bhojpuri cinema took this predicament as a challenge, managing to resolve the nightmare by turning it into a sufficiently harmless fantasy. But the question is – is Bhojpuri cinema capable of dealing with traditionally a highly uncomfortable issue in India such as extramarital relations?[36] The answer is a clear no at this stage. Bombay cinema has shown the ability to tackle the theme with sufficient aplomb only in the new millennium. ‘Silsila’ [1981], ‘Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna’ [2005] have for this reason become milestones in Hindi cinema, paving the way for a series of films on the theme.
Clearly, just as different communities and societies find their own way to globalize, Bombay or Bhojpuri cinemas are willing to globalize on their own terms! Imagine for a moment the very obverse of ‘Foreign Bride’, namely a situation where a foreigner groom comes home with a local bride. This is not beyond the imagination of Bombay cinema. ‘Namaste London [Hi London]’, 2007 deals precisely with a situation such as this, even though the ‘London-returned’ bride rejects the upper class British suitor in the favour of a Punjabi groom. But Bhojpuri cinema is miles away from being able to handle a delicate situation like this, in a sense leaving the audience to deal with similar real life situations as it pleases. In brief, it is yet a nightmare refusing to transmogrify into acceptable fantasy. Reluctance, indeed refusal to surrender its women to the outsider thus remains a sentiment heavily fraught with symbolism of self preservation and identity, revealing the heavy-handed masculine cultural bias with all its insinuating cunning and violence! This is not surprising – burqa clad software engineers, women with postgraduate degrees from US universities hunting for grooms in India through helpful but often bewildered parents are some other exotic but basically male dominated solutions to problems created by globalism.
Strangely enough the one occasion when the Indian malehood seems willing to make a compromise in media is during the beauty contests at local, national and international levels. The motives behind beauty contests are however difficult to read. They seem highly ambivalent – on the one hand they represent the boast of the male as the master, showing off ‘his’ women and the charisma of his bloodline. On the other hand they seem to indicate a sense of exposure, even surrender of his women to the world outside. To the smaller world of likely grooms? Or the wider world of superior white men who need to be impressed! In the Hindi film ‘Banti aur Bablee’, 2006, the female protagonist who sets out to win a beauty contest in the distant metropolis finds a lover from her own hometown, again turning a potentially disruptive tale into a tame fantasy.
The above discussion is by no means complete, but the purpose here was to demonstrate that a popular form like Bombay or Bhojpuri cinema is marked by both thresholds and openings as well as closures and silences. In the everyday life of the industry they are known as the dos and the don’ts of cinema. Although at any given moment they seem to have a fairly rigid and static appearance, the fact is they are always in a state of debate and modification[37]. For a student of cinema it is important to look closely at this process of internal legislation, clauses of which are detectable in narratives defining the thresholds of articulation as well as the barriers, beyond which lie the acres of silence. Thus, in a metaphorical sense, Bhojpuri cinema moves over a territory that spreads across the world within and the world without, reflecting over its own constituencies as well as the wider world.

Aspirations and Fantasies: Ambivalences and Resolutions

The two sub-sections above aim to bring out in relief the uneven terrain of Bhojpuri cinema. This terrain consists of the conflict ridden spaces within the Bhojpuri society, and the world without where Bhojpuri culture needs to posit coherent self-images. These self-images may serve to modify projections made by others and aim as much at one’s own satisfaction, as acknowledgment from others. Altogether, it would seem that Bhojpuri films are endowed with a large territory to navigate in. But one needs to understand that a popular form must move very carefully, choosing to say what must and can be said, leaving aside wide swathes of the unstated for future exploration. This uneven terrain is thus marked by deep chasms that cannot be filled up easily. Film scenes analyzed in the earlier sections make it clear that thematic shifts over this terrain often do not allow smooth or continuous movement. Thematic leaps, evasions, euphemisms, stark lies, cover up, and silences thus become means of keeping an audience intact. On the whole however, it seems a good idea to leave the portals of cinema open to castes and classes that are still mulling over the hoardings outside, wondering if they should walk in to take a seat. Bhojpuri cinema is thus divided between its indebtedness to the tales of conflicts within, and the need to amplify tales of resonances to the outside world. This is an ambivalence capable of providing a genre with sufficient moral, emotional and esthetic energy to continue for decades in search of a kaleidoscopic array of temporary narrative resolutions. A wonderful thing about cinema is it may continue to ‘rehearse’ social reality as long as the audiences are willing to purchase the tickets. The daily life of cinema thus contrasts with the five-year timescale of electoral politics, even if the two processes are seen as parallel. Another wonderful thing about cinema is it succeeds in tilting down utopian consummations from beyond the horizon to the cinema screen – a line from a dialogue and caste system may evaporate, a close up of brimming eyes may demolish aeons of social inequality at a glance on immediate basis!
The above terrain almost simultaneously gives us an idea of the typology of Bhojpuri films, its future course, and the thematic limitations[barriers] and possibilities[thresholds] that the Bhojpuri industry has to work with – issues which deserve continued analysis in the coming years. It may however be pointed out at this stage that on one extreme lies a world untouched by Bombay cinema – aspects of regions, religions, mythology, legends, castes and sub-castes, communities, ceremonies and many other unexposed crevices ready to dehisce untold tales. On the other extreme, Bhojpuri cinema faces the temptation to woo the upper castes and classes by retelling the Bombay tales in Bhojpuri. Given the heavy backlog of telling and retelling, Bhojpuri cinema is unlikely to find itself unemployed any time soon.

Conclusion: The Stillness within Movement

Let us remind ourselves - the hectic departures and arrivals, and the cultural tornado of cultural ambivalences depicted above amount to an exaggeration which is acceptable only because it helps us highlight selected areas of reality. The fact is we all have to live with our selves wherever we go, creating or ‘constructing’ moments of pragmatic calm in the midst of ceaseless din. Among the many selves that form part of clustered selfhood, the focus in the above pages has been on the individual as a citizen/voter and as audience of Bhojpuri films. The middle caste and Dalit voter in Bihar and Eastern Uttar Pradesh has been experiencing social mobility and empowerment at an accelerated pace ever since the mid-1970s. The migration from Bihar really forms part of a larger twin tale, adding a sense of cultural poignancy and urgency to the equalitarian and democratic ideologies. Democratization in these societies itself seems to ride over waves of self-assertion by castes and sub-castes, at times helping generate spaces for individual liberty, but at times squeezing the individual to the limits of his liberty. Broadly, the same segments of the society hastily formed an audience for Bhojpuri cinema as ‘late’ as the new millennium. As stated earlier, while the rise of Bhojpuri cinema is inherently interesting, it begins to seem more fascinating when seen as part of a broader and diffuse change in the power equations among the caste groupings[38]. This process continues to unfold through myriads of twists and turns as Bhojpuri cinema continues to find its character and shape.
The overlapping or parallel developments in the realm of politics and culture throw light on the changing social equations within, but also the society’s self-image and its relation to the world without, in its national and global dimensions. One cannot ignore the state of the self in this scenario. While the above passages depict a number of ambivalences and dilemmas faced by the self, the tussle between the dignity of an individual and dignity for a caste [or any other grouping] seem to lie at the very core of our predicament in 2007. This is not an easy ambivalence to resolve, there are many ways to resolve it for the time being, and it might even be argued that it cannot be resolved forever even in theory through some kind of categorial summation or wizardry. The ambivalence is faced at many levels – juridical, economic, and cultural, and these are not easy to align together. However it would seem that the aspirations for equality, the forcible seizure of freedom and dignity obtained through political fight need to be supplemented by fantasies of willing acceptance and acknowledgment by the social enemy turned friend. Indeed, the taming of cinematic villains perhaps makes for more fulfilling narrative than their slaying. The reason for this may be quite pragmatic – once we assume we have to live together or spend three undisturbed hours in cinema halls, peace seems a desirable goal. It is often not possible to curb or alter the socially disruptive extremes of many equalitarian ideologies, but it’s possible to supplement them repeatedly and perhaps unendingly with fantasies of innocent togetherness[39]. The ‘undoing’ of the caste system in India thus forms an essential part of the democratization process, and ‘in the last instance’ we do not clearly know yet how finite the process may turn out to be.
One may conclude by reiterating a methodological point - a student of cinema must try to read both the said as well as the unsaid, admittedly a cliché. But remember - while insights obtained through interpretation of the ‘said’ are ‘falsifiable’ to various extents, uncovering the unsaid may often turn out to be rather a wild hermeneutic adventure. This inherent risk is however unavoidable. It is crucial to use both the above prongs to catch social reality in its most interesting moments. Refusing to comment on the silences, the ‘unsaid’ aspect of cinema may reduce the researcher to duplicating the results and insights of empirical sociology under the rather redundant rubric of cinema. One would expect that a study of cinema should frequently, if not regularly tell us things about society that often slip out of the grasp of the more direct approach of empirical sociology. Using cinema to only confirm findings from other empirical sources, in brief, seems such a waste!
To conclude on a more mundane and specific note, at the end of these discussions it would seem that relation between [a] Hollywood - Bombay - Bhojpuri as genres is somewhat similar to also the relation between [b] English –Hindi [or Tamil etc. in a different context] - Bhojpuri with a structural sociological parallel in [c]upper castes - middle castes - lower castes untouchables. While we may continue to use independent models and metaphors for the three different realms of experience, it would be interesting to use them as models for each other[40]. The shifting relation between the elements of the three continuums/lacunae may lead to insights relevant exclusively to each domain as well as those that may be applicable to wider public life. There is a strong basis to suspect that through a series of comparisons and contrasts between these inter-relationships, one would be able to delineate not simply a set of fruitful hermeneutic stances, but also an inchoate functional model with some causal content, in however limited or ‘weak’ sense.
in lar or higher margins of profit. ntation in the entertainment media made possible by new technologies that allow business fo

[1] ‘For the Indian film industry, 2006 was a watershed year. It produced the largest number of films ever - a staggering 1,091. ... With 76 films produced in 2006, Bhojpuri films have recorded the fastest growth rate — a 100 per cent increase over 2005. They also account for 7 per cent of the total number of films produced, only marginally behind Malayalam and Kannada films, according to figures released by the Central Board of Film Certification. …More Telugu films were made last year than Hindi. Against 223 films in Hindi, Telugu banners produced 245 films in 2006. The Tamil industry, which was in first place five years ago, slipped to third with 162 films.’ in Singh, Gurbir, ‘Bollywood Turns into Bhojywood’, Hindustan Times,[ Mumbai], 22 February, 2007.

[2] For a clear idea of the regressive metaphors and tendencies, specifically deindustrialization see ‘Bihar Development Report, 2006’, Institute of Human Development, 2007, New Delhi
[3] Kishore, Avinash, ‘Understanding agricultural Impasse in Bihar’, Economic and Political weekly, July 31, 2004 provides a keen diagnosis of the ailment.
[4]"Kidnapping Industry Continues to Thrive", The times of India, (Patna) 22 March 2007.
[5] Redistributive reasoning and political action based on it makes limited sense in a rural economy often driven by ‘cost recovery’ as the target of one’s hard work, a term tellingly used by Tushar Shah, quoted in Kishore, ibid.
[6] This is based on the author’s recent conversations with film viewers at a cinema hall in Patna, Bihar. The conversations form part of empirical work for an ongoing research project on Bhojpuri cinema.
[7] Deshingkar, Priya et al, ‘The Role of Migration and Remittances in Promoting Livelihoods in Bihar’, Overseas Development Institute, London, December 2006.
[8] Dasgupta, Barun and agencies, ’16 More Biharis killed in Assam’, The Hindu [online edition], Sunday, November 23, 2003.
[9]‘… there were 27.69 per cent households reporting migration in 1982-83. By 1999-2000, there is a steep increase in the number of households with at least one migrating family member (hereby referred to as migrating households) and their percentage jumped to 48.63. It means approximately every alternative household is effected by migration, whether for a short or long duration, depending upon the whole host of circumstances’ in Saran K., Anup, ‘Changing Pattern Migration from Rural Bihar’, Bihar Times, www.bihartimes.com. Accessed on 2.1.2007.
[10] Ibid.
[11] A casual visitor to Bihar will feel puzzled at the amount of newspaper reporting on fracas caused by delays and glitches at the railway stations on a daily basis.
[12] Parthasarathi, Vibodh, ‘Construing a New Media Market: Merchandizing the Talking machine c. 1900-91’ in Bernard Bel et al ed. ‘Media and Mediation’, Sage India, 2005.
[13] ‘I will offer you a yellow sari, O Ganges if you unite me with my lover’ was the theme song of the film
[14] Bhaiya dooj is a festival celebrating sister-brother relation and is based on ancient mythology.
[15] The movie titles have been translated to underline a clear contrast with Hindi film titles for those familiar with it.
[16] Tewary, Amarnath ‘Move Over Bollywood Here’s Bhojpuri’, Story from BBC, published: 2005/12/15 09:28:12 GMT.
[17] Shankar A, ‘The Rise of Bhojpuri Cinema’, Business Standard [New Delhi], February 21, 2007.
[18]A note of warning - this oversimplified depiction of Bombay cinema would have been more valid till the late 1990s. With Bombay cinema itself going through a serious transition and redifferentiation, we are dealing with shifty grounds. This study however focuses on the stable Bombay tradition to highlight the thematic departures characterizing Bhojpuri cinema. Recent changes in Bombay cinema clearly require a separate study apart from the comparisons with Bhojpuri cinema.
[19] ‘Production standards and budgets are fast changing however – “Firangi Dulhaniya is shot extensively in foreign locations, which is quite rare for Bhojpuri films. ‘Tanya is making history because she is the first foreign actress in a Bhojpuri movie," says director Rajan Kumar Singh. The film is inspired by the real-life story of a student in Patna, who went to study in Russia, fell in love with a Russian girl, married her and brought her here,"he adds. Tanya plays the young bride who tries to adapt to an alien culture, language and food. She learnt to speak Bhojpuri from a teacher and Bhojpuri language expert from Fiji” Sahay, Anand Mohan, ‘Russian Actor in Bhojpuri Film’, Rediff India Abroad, September 16, 2005 from http://www.rediff.com//movies/2005/sep/16bhojpuri.htm, accessed on 23.4.2007.
[20] a typical comment – ‘ It’s ironical to note that while our noted film producers like Aditya Chopra and Karan Johar are making handsome gain of Rs. 10 to Rs. 35 crores, are considering making films catering to taste of foreigners and multiplex audiences in India, ignoring the poor and backward masses living in states like Bihar, UP, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh.’, ‘Advance booking creates history in Jaipur’, Screen, September 23, 2005.

[21] ‘According to me, Bhojpuri films got a boost with the release of Sasura Bada Paisewala and since then there has been no looking back for the Bhojpuri film industry. Moreover, the Bhojpuri audience which likes to see more of their own culture has been ever-growing. And to top it all most films released after that have been successful.’ Sahay, Subodhkant, The Union Minister for Food & Processing Industries, India in an interview to Screen, December 08, 2006.

[22] Within three months after writing these lines, the author discovered that Spiderman III has been dubbed in Bhojpuri and is receiving an excellent run in the cinema halls.
[23] the types numbered 2,3,4,and 5 indicate the cultural differentiation within Hindi cinema.
[24] It is interesting to note that among the Hindi speaking states, consolidation of regional identities has often proved to be problematic. While Haryana, Rajasthan and Punjab seem to have strong identities, Bihari identity continues to be defined vividly by the outsider with reluctant validation from the Bihari populace as almost an afterthought. Culturally, eastern Uttar Pradesh, the very heart of the state seems to have more in common with Bihar than western Uttar Pradesh.
[25] ‘The city media tries to brush aside such cinema as loud and obscene, but Ravi argues, "These films are propagating values that are long lost in Hindi cinema like the respect for bhabhi, the relevance of ghoonghat. Even how rivers like Ganga have been part of our lifeline." "As for the songs, there is a degree of loudness the way people celebrate the occasions in the region. It's being reflected on the screen," adds Ravi’, in Kumar Anuj, “King Bhoj Speaks’ The Hindu, Friday, Jul 14, 2006

[26] A parallel observation - there are times when even a desperate social niche and ‘known’ status in a village may seem more secure than the possibility of moving out into the ‘unknown’ chaos of an urban job market.
[27] ‘It follows, then that a logical technology choice for India is "electronic cinema". Electronic presentation systems can be installed for considerably less money than high quality "digital cinema" systems. Such systems will not be as stellar in presentation as digital cinema, but will could offer enough improvement over the worn film prints and low quality film projection systems of the B and C-grade centers to attract patrons back to these cinemas.’ in Karagosian, Michael and Nirav Shah, ‘Digital Cinema in India’, INS Asia Magazine, December 2004.

[28] ‘Noted Bollywood film producers like Subhash Ghai and Nitin Manmohan are considering making Bhojpuri films. Boney Kapoor has released his film Matrubhoomi in both Hindi and Bhojpuri languages.’ in news ‘Advance Booking Creates History in Jaipur’, Screen, Mumbai, September 23, 2005.

[29] Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London ; New York: Routledge, 1994. Homi Bhabha’s notion of the interstices, the hybrid in culture, and some of the spatial metaphors form the basis for some of the concepts used here. However, the idea of ambivalence was elaborated and interpreted in this specific sense in the doctoral thesis ‘Freud and the Theory of Culture’ [unpublished] submitted to the University of Poona, India, 1985 by Ratnakar Tripathy.

[30] ‘The audience erupted deafeningly at this scene, with applause and whistles lasting several minutes. It later turned out that this same sequence was to be found in many of Tiwari’s films, beginning with his first, the 2005 blockbuster Sasura Bada Paisawala. Explains Aslam Sheikh: “The point is to show an image of what can happen when the cobbler learns English. Many Scheduled Castes are now educated.” ’ in Nelkantan, Latika, ‘The Heartland Values of Bhojpuri Cinema’, Himal, Kathmandu, October, 2006.
[31] Of late Bhojpuri films have shown a tendency to name castes. Over time if the audience is able to stomach the candour without breaking into riots, this may be a seminal contribution to the process of democratization in the society!
[32] This confession occurs not on the analyst’s couch but in a face to face conversation between a husband and his dying wife!
[33] See Orsini, Francesca’s ‘The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism’, Oxford University Press, New York. 2002, and also ‘Tulsi Kyon [Why Tulsi]’ in Vaak, inaugural issue, 2007, Delhi.
[34] Bombay Hindi combines Bhojpuri, Marathi, and some south Indian languages.
[35] The author is indebted to two works noted for their sweep as well as numerous insights – ‘The Otherness of English,India's Auntie Tongue Syndrome’ by Probal Dasgupta, New Delhi: Sage 1993, and the more recent ‘The Language of Gods in the World of Men’ by Sheldon Pollock, Permanent Black, Delhi, 2007. The original purpose of the two volumes is however not directly related to the discussion here despite their highly relevant ramifications and implications.

[36] This is not just a general moral issue. Prolonged absence of migrant men from the village creates a wide variety of family crises, some of which seem routine. Clearly, there are situations that can turn the sweetness of nostalgia quite bitter. What e.g. if a story line tries to make place for a young wife who having run out of tears, decides to have some fun with other men! While it is easy to decry the silences of a popular form, one needs to appreciate the difficulties faced by the storyteller.
[37] In the Bombay film trade argot the word ‘masala’[combination of spices or recipe] refers to the strange alchemy of narrative strategies that moves between the horizons of the dos and don’ts to the higher plane of commercial success, rather than just acceptance. In a sense, with every success, the masala/s get redefined all over again, in turn modifying the dos and don’ts to some extent.
[38] Majumdar, Sudip, ‘An Unlikely Alliance: How one politician has begun reordering the country's politics—and its notorious caste system’, Newsweek International edition, May 28,2007
[39] It would be interesting to conduct an in depth inquiry to explain the gap of two decades between the rise of the middle castes/Dalits in the region and the rise of Bhojpuri cinema in the new millennium. Perhaps Bhojpuri cinema had to wait before the ‘political’ noise associated with caste strife settled into a more positive ‘cultural’ resonance.
[40] One would suspect that the discrepancies between the three would prove more interesting than similarities. While similarities and simple analogies tend to blunt hermeneutic and causal analysis, differences pose unavoidable but worthwhile challenges difficult to subdue.