Secondsaturn's Blog

Cine Durbar was once again instrumental in organizing through the IFFI, a panorama of Naveketan films to celebrate 60 years of the film producing company owned by Dev Anand. Mr Dev Anand was himself present as a bonus for the audiences along with the premiere of the coloured version of a Dev Anand starrer, Hum Dono. The theatre was packed with eager viewers from every generation awaiting the arrival of the star on the event. As soon as the star of the 1950’s arrived, notwithstanding the 50 years that stood between the times that his films were first released and now, the audiences mobbed him, jostling for autographs or a hand shake, or even a glimpse of the star. The compeer was pathetic; in a voice quivering with intense excitement at the sight of Dev Anand she was completely taken over by the star’s charisma. While the compeer repeatedly appealed to the audience to leave the star alone as he soon would be on the diaz, the mob around the old frail man was unnerving since one cannot guarantee the well being of such elderly when they find themselves trapped in a whirlpool of such volumes of carbon dioxide emitted from the mob that was falling on him, touching his feet and shaking hands. One fails to understand why the organizers did not bring Dev Anand directly on the diaz though it is possible that he needed some rest in the chairs and gather himself up before he could climb the steep steps to the podium.

The event was as badly planned as it could be as there were two very low level officers who struggled to open the cellophane packet from which they segregated a shawl, barely being able to open it up from the folds to make it of adequate dimensions that could be better settled around  the star’s ageing and drooping shoulders. Just before the gifting the shawl the Ministry gave a bouquet of standard sunflowers and carnations for the star to hold which he had to clutch all through the shawl ceremony and while delivering the acceptance speech. The compere was so stunned by the star continuing to be amazed at whatever Dev Anand did in her shrill quaky voice that it did not occur to her to lend the star a helping hand.

Dev Anand started by objecting to the contents of the felicitation speech; he said that the felicitator has stressed too much on what he had been when she should ideally have said what he is, continues to be and will emerge shortly as his new film releases. It is interesting that Dev Anand continues to make films and uses a felicitation ceremony as an occasion to promote his forthcoming releases. The Ministry officials were commenting on the delusion of grandeur that Dev Anand seems to be suffering from because notwithstanding his flops and the complete abandonment of Navketan by the financiers, he continues to believe that he can and that she should make films and that too for the good of the nation.

As Dev Anand continued to make his speech, three things came out very clearly. Firstly, the makers of popular Hindi cinema see themselves as serving the nation. Indeed, in the programme called Vishesh Jaymala in the Vividh Bharati of All India Radio and the television programme Jai Jawan almost equates film artists with the military, both as serving the cause of the nation. Secondly, Dev Anand believes that his cinema in particular and cinema in general is most successful if it speaks of timeless and eternal truth. One could immediately see the star-director-producer’s problems in failing to align himself with the times. Dev Anand insists that he is always modern and indeed he is very receptive to images of modern men and women, and to modern technology and techniques, to modern professions and occupation structures and to modern personalities, he convinces himself that there is no specific politics of the modern and hence he cannot capture the drama of changing times. In short, in the mindscape of Dev Anand, the world is timeless and eternal; it only changes on the surface. Such a belief system has been his failing as much as it was his success in the 1950’s.

Popular art uses the politics of its age in order to project the victories of the present power struggle as an eternal state, and this is the utopia into which the popular must escape into. Successful films are sensitive to the specific contradictions of their age but also clever enough to use narrative strategies and cinematic techniques to project such conflicts as an eternal truth when resolved in favour of the protagonist. The problem with Dev Anand is that while he very successfully pursued the utopia, he missed the trees for the wood because he was unable to address the conflicts and contradictions that emerged in a variety of ways over the past 60 years of Navketan’s existence. Is there a sociological reason for this? Yes, perhaps there is and my surmise is as follows.

We have to understand the politics of the Hindi cinema in terms of its basic ideological and political agenda which is intricately located in its history. The Hindi commercial cinema in particular and the Indian popular film in general were products of the new middle class intelligentsia that saw itself as the leader of the Freedom Struggle and as creators of new India. The Indian Constitution was considered as the ideal state of affairs and the cinema was supposed to imagine this idyllic state. For Dev Anand, since the idea of the ideal did not change, he felt no need to change cinema. What he missed out on was how changes of everyday life postponed the attainment of the ideal and therefore, what his cinema subsequently missed was an understanding of the concrete and temporal reality.

But what Dev Anand brought to Hindi cinema is perhaps no less than Phalke himself because his works marked out much of what cinema looks like today. If the Hindi film is formulaic, then it was none other than Dev Anand who had much to do with the setting out of this formula. Dev Anand had himself selected four of his films that showcased what he is all about – Hum Dono, Baazi, Guide and Taxi Driver. All his creations are variations of these four films. Of these, Guide is in colour and Hum Dono, an original black and white film has been rendered into colour. In the course of his ruminations about himself and his work, Dev Anand said that when he closed his eyes he sees black and then slowly the darkness emits strong light, the cinema. His cinematic images are thus not out there but those that reveal themselves from the background of nothingness. No wonder he has excelled in the black and white with strong images that are not contrasts of darkness against light but aporia of light through darkness. Hence his images and montages illuminate to reveal themselves. No wonder then Dev Anand films have dealt so much with mysterious happenings in our society in which the rich and the powerful are the villains. Further, if the rich man happens to be the father of the girl the hero loves then the former would have to be the villain. In this essay we will discuss Baazi and address through an analysis of the film how and why Navketan has played a central role in the formalization of the Hindi film

In a Dev Anand film, the hero is an underdog as always is the case but he is innocent, very often, innocent of what is the good and the bad. In this innocence he makes some “mistakes” that in today’s world would be considered as grave and unpardonable. For instance, he teases a well-meaning woman doctor, sneering at her generosity in running a free clinic and also for her being beautiful and professionally qualified and also for being the daughter of a rich man. There is vigilantism, depravity and above all bad taste in this depiction of the ideal male. Though the hero says later in the course of the narrative that he had misbehaved and was indeed sorry but the depiction of the bad behaviour was depicted as being suave and smart. The director, writer and of course the actor all of who had arrived at a consensus in creating the hero persona revealed to almost similar levels contempt not only for the female in the public space of a knowledge based profession but elevated the hero who had the “guts” to hurt a woman, pure in her intentions and untrammeled by poverty because of her riches. Dev Anand’s depiction of the ideal male thus attacks the women folk of the privileged in order to make his point against poverty. He establishes social envy of the have-nots through contempt for the haves by harassing, insulting and sometimes to the extent of emotionally violating their women.

Baazi is one of the central films of Navketan. Guru Dutt has directed the film, Balraj Sahni has written the script and Dev Anand plays the main protagonist. The hero is an underdog, a taxi driver by profession who falls in love with a rich, educated doctor, the only daughter of a rich lawyer. Romance is not the main story though it is the peg on which the tale hangs. The main story is that of the protagonist, the trials and tribulations he faces as he tries to manage a “normal life” through poverty. The idea of a “normal” life is the bond between a brother and a sister, the brother who looks after the sister and be with her through thick and thin. The image of the hero is therefore the protector brother, who can go to any extent in order to sacrifice for the sister. In Baazi, the sister is ill and the brother enters into the world of crime in order to be able to meet the expenses for his sister’s medical treatment. But that is too little and he has to go in search of a doctor who treats poor patients free of cost. But as soon as he encounters the heroine, who will eventually be the hero’s beau, he forgets about the sister and looking at this educated, beautiful, rich man’s daughter who dedicates her life to persons like he, the hero’s ego is ruffled and in a bid to cover up his own feelings of inadequacy in front of such a perfect picture tries to tease her, sabotage her efforts, insult her and destroy her confidence in every possible manner. Despite such insults, for being very capable and yet charitable, the doctor, played by Kamini Kaushal comes on her own to treat the sister. The hero feels even more humiliated at her kindness because he can, in no way match up to her. He calms down manageably when the heroine falls head over heels in love with him perhaps for his excellent looks and smart demeanor. Dev Anand helped his viewers to place a lot of value on appearance and style and in a way quite convinced his viewers that good looks could launch one anywhere in the world.

The hero of course would never imagine taking any help from a “woman” and especially as the woman has already fallen in love with him. The sister talks of the doctor as her “bhabi” and in this sense there is a possibility of marriage between the hero and the heroine and hence the hero, keeping to the social convention that the man must earn more and become the provider of women, proceeds to become an even larger gambler that what any gambler can possibly be. It is at the gambling den that he meets the vamp, who too falls in love with the hero instantly and later, also sacrifices her life for him. The Paro-Devdas-Chandramukhi triad is achieved, something that has been very central to the image of Dev Anand. The two women, one noble and one fallen both pine for the hero; the hero sets his own image vis-à-vis both women. Both women are well meaning and equally noble but they are set apart by the kind of choices they have. Rajni, the doctor can marry any well-qualified and well-settled man and yet chooses the taxi driver, our hero. Nina, the bar dancer can marry any rich man yet she chooses the hero. The hero passes tests in both worlds and thus, in the eyes of the viewer emerges a winner among all kinds of men at all available to women of any kind. Dev Anand, through two women set widely apart in the society, exhausts the social space as the best man who ever walked the earth. The principal narrative function of two women is to help the hero pass tests as the best man.

As the hero earns enough money to pay for his sister’s treatment and hence he is free of the heroine’s charity, he gains in confidence and starts meeting Rajni openly and soon attracts the ire of Rajni’s father. One day when on the way back from the sanatorium where the hero’s sister is admitted, the hero listens to Rajni and her father talking in the rear seat he immediately identifies the voice because as a taxi driver he is used to listening to people talking in the rear seat. The voice belongs to none other than the mysterious owner of the gambling den who people only heard but never saw. As he is about to spill the beans to the heroine, the father lays a trap for the hero and through unexpected turn of events, Nina is murdered trying to save the hero and the hero is charged with murder and sentenced to the gallows. The investigating police officer, the heroine’s childhood friend and presently head over heels in love with her was ill-disposed towards the hero but now rises to the occasion and investigates the matter. He proves that all evidences pointed out to the hero’s innocence but the hero, who the villain, the owner of the gambling den and Rajni’s father has threatened of dire consequences for the ailing sister refuses to budge from his confession to the crime. In the end, the police officer through his cunning extracts a confession from the villain and gets him and the accomplice arrested and the hero is let off scot free.

Nina, the ‘other woman’ dies sacrificing for the hero, which is, in the narrative, less of her loss and more of a gain for the hero. Since Nina is a fallen woman, death appeared to be her best option as she could not have possibly emerged into society. The vamp or the prostitute has always died for the hero because while they are used to portray the hero’s sexual powers and erotic charm, they are usually dispensed with because in genteel society such women have no place. But, in the film narrative, the best songs are sung through her and the songs “ tabdeer se mara hua taqdeer bana le, apne par bharosa hai to ek daun laga le” and “ samay guzarta jaye… so na na, kho na na” set the principles of the hero’s character. It is interesting as to why the vamp should articulate the basic principles of the hero’s character and his state of being and not the heroine.

Today the Hindi commercial cinema is known as Bollywood rhymed with Hollywood, a name by which the American film industry is known. Hollywood is a neighbourhood in Los Angeles, in the state of California in the USA, which has a concentration of film studios and residences of directors, film stars, producers and writers. Bollywood, therefore is derived from Bombay, also to indicate a plethora of such film personalities who live in the city now called Mumbai. Similarly Kollywood means Kerala cinema, Tollywood means the essentially Bengali cinema produced out of studios of Kolkata that are mainly located in Tollygunje and Lollywood means Lahore cinema and so on. But the term Bollywood used for the Hindi commercial cinema has a few interesting connotations which takes into account some sweeping changes that have taken place in the Hindi commercial cinema ever since 1995, the release of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, a period that also corresponded to the opening up of the Indian economy to global markets which, in turn brought about a radical change in the nature of the Indian state and its policies towards its citizens. The predominant popular culture, namely the Hindi commercial cinema too changed and Bollywood became a new way of making, circulating and consuming the entertainment cinema produced out of Mumbai.

The main points of difference between the Hindi cinema and Bollywood is that while the former was consumed by a substantial portion of the underclass along with the middle class, Bollywood today is mainly consumed by the middle classes. Hindi cinema was famous for its appeal to the masses, the chavanni chhap, a term that indicated viewers who stamped the cheapest tickets at 25 paisa to sit in the front row; today’s Bollywood typically release in plush multiplexes serving expensive food stuff where the main profits come from selling popcorn than from the sale of tickets. The multiplex is an entire lifestyle with its food stalls, advertisement kiosks, American corn counters and uniformed staff, a veritable hospitality centre into which film watching is located. The film is ensconced in such an environment of being an out of reality experience. Bollywood films are sleeker with sensibilities to suit a social class that has not had to struggle for survival as the earlier social class of intended film viewers of the Hindi cinema were supposed to be. Bollywood’s intended viewers are persons who are already there but now has to belong to the class of the super powerful and the super rich. Bollywood’s intended viewers are those of the creamiest of the creamy layers of the society who have had an upward mobility from the upper middle class into that class of the corporate crorepatis where professional acumen wins enough money to translate into political power. While there was a time when film stars would join politics to encash on one’s popularity as a film star, today’s politicians seek Bollywood stars to strengthen legitimacy among the masses.

Further, Bollywood cinema concentrates now on designer homes, super expensive coffee shops, exotic tourist destinations, all in a way to promote a life style. Gone are the days when exotic locations were natural sceneries from various countries and lifestyles portrayed were often contrasts between the one that the protagonist had and the other that the villain possessed; usually modest for the former, and ostentatious for the latter. Wealth was looked down upon as something immoral and bad, probably because of the socialistic ethics that guided Indian politics ever since Independence to economic liberalization. But after economic liberalization, the abashment about opulence waned off and what came in its place was the pursuit of wealth as an indication of macho power. Leadership, nationalism, masculinity, power and wealth all rolled into the ideals of the middle class to pursue in the neo liberal politics in which corporate houses and state power confound while the media, also controlled by the corporate houses tries to produce a non critical consensus. Bollywood also reflects this ideology of consensus distracting audiences into issues around romance, friendship and fidelity. Since the time when Bollywood was born with the release of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge in 1995, the genre itself has changed from the family where ageing parents were the unquestioned bosses into films of “different flavor” where individuals, often shown as rootless and alienated persons were the protagonists and thus dissociating the individual from the family and opening her to a further control by media generated ideals.

Apropos to the above, the media, namely the newspaper and the television has “lifestyle” exposures, with fashion, cookery, eating out, home furnishings with large supplements of film personalities thrown in. Celebrities also express their minds in forty character “tweets” in social networking sites, and those appear as marquee in the television news channels during Breaking News ! This is in sharp contrast to the earlier stars of the Hindi cinema where they led such sequestered lives that one had to spend days and even years trying to “catch” an interview with them. The value of Hindi film stars was in their invisibility beyond the frames of the cinema; today’s celebrities must be seen more in the outside world than as actors in cinema screens. The stars are seen at award functions, as hosts of reality television shows, as live endorsers of commercial products and brands and auction their company as dining companions of “ordinary men and women” for money ! They are also known to “sell” their statuses by being esteemed guests at wedding parties albeit at a huge price from the hosts. Sometimes, real estate companies have celebrities as neighbours to raise premiums. Film stars are now cookie points which you can buy if you have the money and move up the social ladder, the new form of Sankritization, a process by which people who had come into riches could buy their way into the upper caste by imitating their customs and rituals.

Bollywood is more technically intense, though it is definitely smaller in scale than the Hindi cinema. One cannot have a Mughal-e- Azam nor a Sholay, Bollywood has the money, the talent, the resources but no longer has the canvas of the mind that the makers of such large films had. There can no longer be the sacrifice of Mother India, nor the tragedy of Deewaar; there can never be a Meena Kumari in Kareena Kapoor, nor can Devdas be as in Shah Rukh as Dilip Kumar has been. Bollywood productions can be sleek and smart, but never with the passion of the Hindi cinema. Hindi cinema stars would read scripts for the emotions in them; Bollywood stars read the script to understand the attitude of the characters. This makes a huge difference in the scale, where Bollywood is about actors, while Hindi cinema was about stars. No wonder then the Bollywood actors are more of celebrities, by dint of familiarity of faces and a lifestyle of opulence, always creating a distance between them and wannabes of good life. The lifestyle of the celebrities are posited as ideals that people must follow, leading us to a path of consumerism and social competition often making us fall into the traps of debts by those very financiers who also lend to cinema.

A reckoning of a few remakes of Bollywood blockbusters will help us understand this problem better. Let us take the films Don (1978) and Don (2006). The former was a film starring Amitabh Bachchan in a double role. As Don, he was a lethal and merciless character; as Vijay he was simple and rustic. Don dies but the police officer wants to put Vijay in Don’s place so that he (Vijay) can play a Trojan Horse in Don’s gang and help the police to bust it. Don is then the figure, dangerous but absent while Vijay the simpleton has to impersonate him. The greatest idea of the film was to have Vijay “catch” Don as he continuously tries to emulate him and learn his manners. The entire film is based on a rhythm, the rhythm of the lead star, Amitabh Bachchan. The rhythm of Don is generated basically by Amitabh’s running away from his enemies and the police. There is a lot of running that Vijay does, from Roma who wants to kill him, the gang to know that he is a police decoy, the police who think that he is the real Don and metaphorically, Vijay too chases Don as an image as he tries to become the same man. This rhythm is replicated in Helen’s cabaret, in Roman’s dance and in the famous songs Main Hon Don and Khaike Paan Benarasiwallah. The film Don helped to explore Amitabh Bachchan’s “body” as a star and this went a long way in establishing him as the superstar that he was. The film also integrated the two aspects of Amitabh – one the cold, rational, calculative and strategic inaccessible man, and the other as a comic, light hearted simple soul into a single character. The music of Don was the binding factor that connected the frames, piece by piece into the totality of the film. The characters of Don supported the central character played by Amitabh Bachchan as Don and drew their distinct personas from being a part of the whole the whirled around the central but now absent character of the dead Don, thought to be alive. Kamal Kapoor as Narang, Pran as Jasjit, Satyen Kapoor as Inspector Verma, and above all Om Shivpuri as the smooth Interpol officer, Shetty as Shakaal, Mc Mohan as Ma, Helen as Kamini, Zeenat as Roma and Iftekar as the DSP, D’Silva are characters that are brilliantly etched in the mind as one recalls the film. But in the new version, these characters have nothing to define them.

The new film Don (2206) is made out of the “feelings” that one gets by watching Don; it is a viewer’s response to the original film. The director Farhan Akhtar is the new age director while its writer is his father and also as Javed Akhtar, one of the Salim-Javed duo who wrote the original Don. The new Don is an exercise in suavity, and serves to show how suave the actor Shah Rukh Khan has been, but unlike in the original Don in which the director establishes a core attribute, namely the body rhythm of the star, Amitabh Bachchan, in the new Don, the director tries to establish Shah Rukh Khan in a certain kind of attitude, smart, suave, elegant and yet ruthless. Since the new Don did nothing to the “body” of Shah Rukh Khan, its music failed to create any impact except appear as a remix. Besides, the music was the main stay of the original film, and its use by a later film without the images thrown up in a similar rhythm made the new Don fall a bit flat. Besides, the crux of Don lay in its music and beat; a beat that was centrifugal absorbing free floating episodes and characters into the centrality of form. The centrality of form emerged from the lead character Don, who commanded and controlled everything and had the power to do so.

In the new production, Don (2006), Don was played by Shah Rukh Khan. The image of Shah Rukh, unlike that of Amitabh Bachchan is not one who orders chaotic masses, not one whose power extends to bring things lying at the margins into the centrality of concern. The crux of Shah Rukh’s power does not lie in ordering or centralizing; his power lies in extending his will to areas beyond his reach. While Amitabh’s movement is from the outer to the inner, or strengthening an inner core to absorb more of the outside world into the inner core of his ideas of perfection, Shah Rukh’s movement is from the inner to the outer, restlessness that wants him to be everywhere and with everyone all the time. This makes Shah Rukh’s image one of panning out, becoming less dense and lighter as it spreads over progressively extended areas. The idea of Shah Rukh as Don is Don being physically present everywhere, while the idea of Amitabh as Don is to have a dense centre with his “men” working under his centralized command. When the Don indeed disguises as the taxi driver to kill the runaway Ramesh, in case of Amitabh, it becomes lethal because the great Don has unseated himself to deliver the fatal blow, but in case of Don as Shah Rukh Khan, it is not a shock because that’s how he generally is.

In Amitabh’s Don, Don had to die and Vijay had to find him. This is in tune with the essence of Amitabh’s image which transforms, breaks, dissolves and finds itself anew. Shah Rukh’s image is one of self-preservation, one who persists, prevails and pursues. Such an image knows no transformation and hence he could not pull off in his version of Don, the essence of Amitabh’s Don, of finding Don afresh through Vijay. Don (1978) was the rediscovery of Don through Vijay, an opportunity for revisitation. In Shah Rukh’s Don, it was to revel in the tricks of the original Don, who in the former version was already defined and set aside as if in a sanctum sanctorum, to be explored and investigated. The music of Don was born out of moments of the original version and hence fell flat in the later one. Farhan Akhtar wants to make yet another version of Don, only possible with the profanized image of Shah Rukh Khan as Don. In the original version with Amitabh Bachchan, Don was sacred, one who could not be repeated and one who no longer remained in the grips of the profane world to be manipulated or even be killed!

It is only obvious that the two versions made at two different points of time should express the ethos of their ages. In the original version, there is an attempt at control and command, a sense of individual agency, a finiteness of space and a connectedness of characters as if the film is a jigsaw puzzle, or a kaleidoscope where a strong and steady pattern forms each time out of the pieces. In the later versions, the character goes out and like Alice in Wonderland meets characters all of whom look warped and jaded as if in a Mad Hatter’s tea party. The difference in form indicates the changes in the politics of then and of now. The post liberalization age of India has been individuating, isolating given to competition and self gratification; it is an age when one has to run very hard just to stay in place. This age spells a huge crisis for the middle class for who the world has become fast moving and uncertain. The age before now was one of nationalism, with a leaning towards socialistic ideals when redistribution was a preferred to growth and when it was possible for the individual to negotiate and bargain with the powers that constrained him. In such a situation, the individual had more power to order the world according to an idea and this lent to cinema, a consistent form, a kind of closure and compactness where events came to their logical conclusion and everything contingent seemed to be able to be controlled and contained in the film as well as believed to be so in life.  Such a polity exuded the power of the institution which in turn gave the individual her power through her position as an incumbent in the institutions. Such a political economy notwithstanding various barriers to social mobility was nonetheless stable and the rules of its games unchanging and certain. The age as this was an age in which it made sense for the individual to dissolve herself and die as a martyr, seek self redemption through retribution and renunciation, because this was an age of preservation when individualism had a value and hence death also have one.

The political economy of liberalization on the other hand is a release of the constraints on the individual. The free reigns to private enterprises and private profits may seem to unbridle individualism yet it appears that everywhere neo-liberalism actually isolates and decentres the individual. This is because the State has given way to the market and the individual who used to define herself vis-à-vis the rather tangible constraints on her now finds herself anchorless. The loss of the tangible forces of the State and its institutions has given the individual a loss of her boundaries and as she seeks these boundaries she extends herself, expanding endlessly, losing her centre, her origins, floating away, sometimes without aim. This is exactly how Shah Rukh Khan appears as Don in a sharp contrast to the well defined, well-bounded and definitive image of Don essayed by Amitabh Bachchan. The difference in the two versions of Don tells us of two conditions of individualism between a nationtalist and socialistic system and a neoliberal polity.

We will now turn to Devdas (1955) and Devdas ( 2002), one in which the lead role is played by Dilip Kumar and the other in which Shah Rukh Khan plays Devdas. The differences between the two versions are glaring. The former is soft hued and soft spoken while the latter is loud and garish. Devdas portrayed by Dilip Kumar is a man who is tragic because he has nothing to mourn for; Devdas portrayed by Shah Rukh Khan seems to make an exhibition of his state and finds an occasion to mourn at everything. The latter’s sorrow rises when he sees Chunnibabu, or his family servant, or Chandramukhi. Shah Rukh’s Devdas is a man who has been bereaved. Dilip Kumar’s Devdas is a character who is moving about in a vacuum. Interestingly, Devdas of Dilip Kumar’s tragedy is drawn from the fact that all constraints have been removed from him because Paro, his beloved is married off to another man. In case of Shah Rukh Khan’s portrayal of Devdas, he mourns through a sense of still holding on to Paro. Relationships appear to be better defined in the earlier version and hence the sense of vacuum once such relationships dissolve. In the later versions, absence of Paro, is itself a relationship and hence Devdas, emerges from a vacuum into a definitive state through his pining for Paro. While Dilip Kumar’s portrayal could appeal to a society where relationships were firmly defined and hence the undoing of ties meant so much of a vacuum, Shah Rukh’s portrayal of Devdas happened in an age where individuals were relatively free from binding ties and at least craving for Paro became an anchor in the character’s life. While Dilip Kumar’s Devdas sank more and more into himself, becoming denser by the moment like a collapsed star moving towards a black hole that would son draw every moment of the film into the star persona, in Shah Rukh’s version, the star emerges above everyone else through his obsessive attachment to a woman who is not his. A much later production called Dev D, a modern reinterpretation of the almost mythical Devdas, the protagonist moves out of Paro, into Chandramukhi, finding in the latter, a new way of life and a new experience. In the above versions of Devdas, we find that in the former, the individual is defined through a web of relationships, the loss of which sinks him into a vacuum, while in the latter instance, the individual has no stable relationships and finds one to define himself with, namely that of his unfulfilled love, Paro.

There are also differences between how unrequited love is dealt with in the two ages. In the former case, unfulfilled love represented the greatest tragedy of the characters; in the latter period, it became a reason for obsessive behavior. Dilip Kumar in Devdas and Andaz, Raj Kapoor in Teesri Kasam, Waheeda Rahman in Khamoshi were characters who lost their loves. These tragic images contrast sharply with Shah Rukh Khan in Darr, Anjam and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Imran Hashmi in Murder. The succinct sense of tragedy in the age of liberalization is replaced by unrequited love turning into an obsession. Clearly, the sorrow of the age of liberalization is no longer in relationships but in success or failure. Hence when Karz, a film made in 1980 was revisited by yet another film called Om Shanti Om in 2007, the character, unlike in Karz was less pained by his wife’s betrayal and instead felt humiliated because he was never given a chance to become a hero in films. The pain of neo-liberal cinema is not of relationships but of victory and defeat, where relationships are trophies to be savoured. This is why when Karz was remade in 2008 along the lines of the original film in 1980, it fell flat, because relationships no longer define individuals at present than what they used to do. The difference is due to the way individuals and the various constraints on them have been redefined in liberalization.

One of the greatest fall out of neo liberalism’s freeing of the individual from her ties that bind is the rise of Aamir Khan’s brand of films namely Taare Zameen Par and 3 Idiots where the pain of our times have been located and articulated, namely in success and failure. Both such films are about succeeding or not succeeding and the pains of failure. Similarly, in Chak De India, the protagonist, the hockey coach, once again played by Shah Rukh Khan is pained at not only failing to win the gold medal in the World Cup but also being branded as a minority. Failure to win and non performance constitutes his tragedy and not relationships.

The change in the nature of tragedy in cinema reflects the change in the priorities of the society. Indeed, not love nor passion drives people in neoliberalism, but the pursuit of success. This makes the entertainment cinema lose what we had always known as its formula. The formula of the Hindi cinema was about individual agency, efforts of the human beings to overcome their constraints and move towards their goals, the goals being defined by the large body of intertextually related works produced under the banner of commercial cinema from studios of Mumbai and Chennai. The fact of goals being defined and created by the interrelatedness of works towards which individuals must progress and thus insisting on a Hegelian linearity of character consistent protagonists of cinema can only be the formula of a society which is limited but certain in its outcomes. The Hindi cinema thus develops through its protagonist, a critique of the entrenched powers of the society and a theory of constraints that do not allow individuals to climb up social ladders despite the Constitution of Independent India mandating an open society with equal opportunities for all. Needless to say that the Hindi cinema was born out of the Freedom Struggle when the nation was imagined as a universal space in which individuals would exist as individuals beyond those socio-economic particularities of class, caste and creed that defined them and constrained their life chances. The individual was to become free under the aegis of a panoptic State and hence should fight her/his traditions that promoted superstitions, prejudices and preconceptions. The Hindi film critiqued the society from the standpoint of a rationalist, secular and humanist discourse with large supplements of socialistic ideals of equality and redistribution.

However, when economic liberalization took place, apropos to the neo-liberal State everywhere else in the world, the Indian State too was to withdraw as an economic presence and a moral force. It became corporatist in the sense that its expenditure had to be limited through its revenues and this resulted in a large scale and almost shrinking back of the State as a force that ordered the society and economy. Free enterprise, mindless pursuit of private gains and the collapse of institutions of welfare threw the individual into the open sea of ruthless competition. For a while, through the films of Sooraj Barjatya and Karan Johar, the cinema tried to set the large Indian joint family as a support system which very soon collapsed under the weight of a contrary Indian reality in which growing demands for increased income made families greedier and selfish. The formula of the family that survived on socialization and social bonding proved to be economically beyond bounds for most Indians in a system in which income inequalities were only increasing.

As the income gaps became wider and the ideology of equality and upward social mobility continued, there emerged a spate of imitative practices by which the lesser endowed classes in the society could “copy” styles of the better ones and hence disguise themselves as elites that they definitely were not. Soon, the insignia of fashion, perfumes, gaits, hairdo, perfumes and models of mobile phones became markers of social status which in turn helped people to find employment and develop contacts for businesses. The “showy” culture of the Indian society necessitated by the needs of the economic forces of its times pushed the cinema of Bollywood into becoming lifestyle statements. Films like Wake Up Sid, or Oye Lucky Oye and even Dev D explored emotions that were new to cinema but very relevant for the times in which we live.

The individual who apparently is free in a neoliberal State is unfortunately rather unfree because of the various uncertainties in employment and income that she faces. She has to always run in search of employment most of which do not last for more than a few years at best and a few months at least. This instability of employment and income has made the individual acquire a rather tentative self identity and self image; the decline of stardom is an outcome of the decline of a consistent self image of the individual. One of the greatest fall-out of the loss of character consistency is the collapse of the typical song and dance routine. Songs that for the Hindi cinema would emerge out of the story, articulating its moods and discourses have become “item numbers” in Bollywood, being used out of the context of the story and as an addendum more like a garnishing rather than the spices.

In today’s world there are no stable jobs and hence no assured income streams for individuals. Unlike in the days before liberalization, individuals looked for stability in employment, in today’s world; stability means stagnation and often stable poverty. Therefore, individuals would want to hit the jackpot, get huge chunks of money which would then be invested for good returns. The idea of speculative windfalls that can be translated into rental income and in all of this, there is little ends-means relationship of profits to work. The crux of modernity that was based upon returns to labour and which constituted the core of the Hindi film’s morality today makes way for “smarter” people, with supercilious manners and little sense of power of work. Hence Bollywood produces smart alecs, wit, suavity and evasive characters those who know how to manipulate, dodge and slip away; but as creators of social orders taking charge of one’s life they seem to have outlived their age. The characteristics that Bollywood seem to develop in direct contradiction to the constituents of a Hindi cinema formula is thus in response to the neoliberal state in a globalised economy that make nations based on socialism and equality things of the past.

What does the media explosion mean for us? On the positive side it means that democracy is taking roots almost universally, communication is addressing a wide variety of interests and the public space of communication is widening to include greater participation from people. But looked at closely, the picture appears suspect. The television channels and other related media activities like outdoor campaigns and radio broadcasting seems to be all doing pretty much the same things. If we observe the television channels or track the FM radio stations, or even scan the leading newspapers, we are struck by almost very similar kinds of news coverage. In deed, the views expressed by the various channels too are perceptively similar. This means that despite the multiplicity of channels we do not get competing and contesting interpretations. In other words, channels do not challenge one another in a battle of views but compete to out perform each other through standard programmes. Teleserials of scheming women, jokes, reality shows, quiz shows, sports and cookery and film gossip form most of what we know as entertainment. The news is invariably a one-sided view of promoting speculative investments, life styles or of political scandals and crime. A vast chunk of reality of technical knowledge, psychological counseling, crime detection, stresses of development, employment trends, assessment of government programmes, and social issues concerning women and minorities are left behind or never addressed at all. This trend is harmful for democracy because on the one hand we get channels that reaffirm a rather one-dimensional view of things and on the other hand the large number of channels crowd out those persons who have less money power to launch channels but may have alternative stories and genuinely educative programmes.

The other fall out of such media explosion is a competition for advertisements. Larger number of television channels put the advertisers in a better bargaining position vis-à-vis the channel owners and this leads to desire of monopolistic concentration among the channels. The liberalization of the FDI is used to increase money and hence monopoly power of the channel. Since channels due to competition among themselves produce only standardized programmes, there is hardly anything in each channel that would help viewers to choose one channel over the other; viewers’ preferences are thus directed towards the channel that provides the most audio-visual intensity. This promotes extravaganza in the television, which raises costs of production and yet at the same time empties the programme of sensitivity. In this way, packaging over content produces meaninglessness in television programmes, opening up the television space to monopoly and one-dimensionality.

The question that we ask here is why do the media all over the world express the same tendency towards one-dimensionality? The prime reason for this is that the television channels compete among themselves. Just as we try to read the same books as our classmates and write similar answers for our examinations in our desire to do well, the channels too try to do the same thing in order to be “selected” by the viewers’ remotes. Yet another possible reason behind this is that since the channels draw their sustenance from corporate advertisements they move in the same set of business houses over and over again. These business houses are eager that the television channels project their interests through the programmes. What are these corporate interests? These interests promote consumerism among the viewers. While promoting consumption of various products like consumer durables, cosmetics, apartments, mobile phones, snacks, fast food and even insurance, it is an absolute necessity that advertisers also covertly push messages and sponsor television content that specifically portray dazzling economies and a plethora of promising opportunities that support an economy and culture driven by consumerism.

Since most people purchase consumer durables like television, washing machines and even apartments through credit, either through the credit card companies or through the equated monthly installment schemes of the dealers, it is clear that these purchases are made on the anticipation of future income. The consumer, in order to be lured into buying these consumer durables must be made to believe that her income flow will not suffer in the future. It is for such reasons that stories that deal with factory closures, farmer suicides, shrinking employment growth, or even economic recession are pushed behind the camera and protests over land acquisition whether in Singur or Nandigram, or even the SEZ in Goa are constructed as a sabotage of this grand process of economic liberalization. In the case of consumer non-durables, or fast moving consumer goods, or FMCG, the pattern is even more sinister. Cosmetics and food items are portrayed as style statements and are projected as symptoms of your social worth. In case these statements influence your employer, it will be difficult to get employment if you do not put on lipstick or use particular brand of a body spray. The companies make crores of money on trying to cow you down into an image that will speak of your uncritical acceptance of the politics of the media imagery. The use of celebrity helps in this process because it somehow communicates to us the attributes we associate with our favorite celebrities into the brands thus advertised and lend legitimacy to these brands.

Mukesh Ambani’s wealth or the posh bungalows of Hollywood film stars that the new life style channels promote try to tell us how wonderful wealth is and how it must be pursued by all in order to find happiness. The use of celebrity images help making very specific instances appear as universally applicable rules and hence such display of celebrity wealth not only legitimizes greed but also communicates a message that such prosperity is achievable. These images form the basis for lifestyle politics where class is defined by what its members consume. Thus aspiring to consume, possess and command is the key to upward social mobility and possession charts form important ingredients of one’s social class and hence of social worth.

It is not as if the media does not help the case of democracy, but the only thing is that it should be sensational enough. Crime is sensational, but an inquiry into its sources is not. Political leaders are sensational, the scandals are sensational but investigation into why people vote for them is not. Even in such reporting, there is no attempt at trying to understand the root of crime, the reasons behind violence. While the media has indeed cried for justice and created in us a demand that people from the upper strata of the society too should fall to the hangman’s noose, and thus pandered to our instincts of social envy of the people who are better off than us, Santosh Singh and his father in this case. Was this story to be retold from the perspective of crime against women, the right that men feel that they have over women’s submission, the assumption that men make that women must acquiesce to their advances we would have developed a critical perspective into the way women are looked upon in our country. Such perspectives would have helped us deal with the mind set that kill fetuses, use technology to give birth to boys only and also make it difficult for women to participate in the work force. It is quite the same thing in case of the Jessica Lall case or even the Nitish Katara case; the roots of violence are not explored.

In the above paragraphs we assume that the viewers uncritically accept the media images that are beamed to them. While it is true that the several channels, despite the severalty communicate to us similar images and similar news content, yet there is an everyday life that people lead and when the images contradict the life, which is actually lived-in, there is a resistance. A classical instance of this is the defeat of the earlier government due to their propaganda of India shining, when the reality was all about locked out enterprises and the swell of unemployed youth in cities, towns and villages across the country. But the problem is that people tend to judge the real life as wrong and the contradictory image in the television as the right. This makes people imagine that they are worth more than what they are getting as their pay packets. Most IT companies hide the fact that the huge salaries are only for the slim percentage of the top brass, the vast bulge of middle level employees are as badly paid as anyone else. The image of the highly paid CEO is important in attracting the talent into the sector and the low salaries to the bulk of the employees are a strategy to get the best by paying the least. This leaves the employee of the middle rung wondering that she actually can earn more and keeps switching employment, depleting her provident funds and seniority. Were we to track the high incidence of mental agony and depression we could find significant connection between the television myths and the shocks of real lived in life. Chetan Bhagat’s novel, One Night @Call Centre illustrates this distress wonderfully. Bhagat writes that the call centre workers use all kinds of theories to explain their agonies but all feel that if they earn enough money that will end their exploitation little realizing that they will never earn the required amount of money because there are others who will earn more than them always.

There is yet another reason why the television channels in a collusive manner must push the hunky-dory stories of good times. If we look carefully into the media inflation we would find that it is far higher than the growth in incomes of its advertisers. If we take into account the growth of the manufacturing sector that has grown 12% over the last one year and the financial sector which has grown by 15% over the same period, we find that the growth of the media is still higher. The sales growth of the FMCG sector is 16%, while that of the infrastructure sector is 8%. The growth in the consumer durable sector is 15%. In all of these, we find that the rates of growth have remained lower than the growth rate in the media. Then where is the media drawing the extra growth over and above the usual growth trend among its advertisers from? There is one sector in which the growth has been astronomical – this is the real estate sector. It is possible that money from the real estate sector is flowing into the media companies, or the financiers of real estate also financing the media sector. Let us address ourselves to the fact that the growth in the media is higher than in the growth of its advertisers and in which case, there is a surplus growth in the media that has to be tracked. Could it be possible that much of the so-called revenues of the media companies only book entries and not actually realized payments? If this was to be the case, then the media companies could only gain by pushing stories of high growth, explosive opportunities and hopeful future so that the consumer demand keeps mounting. This is perhaps the principle reason why stories that may in any way puncture the perfect picture of bliss are to be avoided. If the real estates get involved into the media business as appears to be a possibility with DLF Universal, a leading real estate company of India that sponsored the Indian Premier League cricket, then it is all the more important for them to reinforce the impression that property prices will climb up due to the overall growth of incomes in the economy, so that their profits go higher and higher to finance the high growth rates of the media. In either case, there are sound economic reasons for the media to promote a world of lies that will cover the truth which is of rising income inequality and increased insecurity of livelihood and incomes all over the world.

The tendency of the media to survive on constructed truths than on empirical facts may lead to both national and personal disasters, a matter of serious concern for authorities and viewers alike.