Poster colours

Delhi designer Nida Mahmood was playing on that connection when she included Gabbar jackets—sleeveless short jackets stamped with the face of the baddest villain ever—and tees and trousers with over-the-top Bollywood colours and dialogues. “We are trying to bring out the Indian element in a modern context,make things in a way that people would probably identify as cool,” says Mahmood,pointing at a trunk which has Ab tera kya hoga Kaaliya emblazoned on it. Mahmood and her business partner Raul Chandra recently set up the The New India Bioscope Company that brings out kitschy products. Handpainted posters,inspired by Bollywood of Seventies and Eighties,are used to adorn trunk tables,furniture,clothes,bags and table lamps.

Walk into a product design store in any metro and you’ll see how the iconography of Bollywood is getting a cheeky makeover in bric-a-brac meant for your home. Pick from you choice of Jodhaa Akbar/Rekha/Dev Anand/Anarkali cushions,wooden chests with digital prints of movie art,Rajnikanth tees and notebooks,coasters that flaunt their filmi wit: with lines like Kutte mein tera khoon pee jaaonga.

As Bollywood goes through changes,shedding some of its loudness and tackiness,there is obvious nostalgia for its aesthetic of a simpler time. There is a renewed interest in poster art and artists who have been thrown out of work by the digital revolution. A new book,Bollywood in Posters (Om Books International,Rs 2,500),taps into that fascination. The 200-odd posters in the book are sourced from a personal archive of Mumbai-based author S.M.M. Ausaja. The 39-year-old has been scouring old streets,film companies and flea markets for film memorabilia for 25 years now and has an enviable collection of 5,000 posters.

The book includes posters from 1931 to the present and has some rare ones—Devdas (1955),Do Bigha Zameen (1953),Jaane Bhi Do Yaaron (1983),Prahaar (1991) (the last hand-painted poster made in Bollywood). “I had to pay a bomb for the Devdas poster. There were many more that I had to leave out for want of space—like the posters of Golmaal,Satyakam,Saudagar and Shahenshah,” said Ausaja. Though exhaustive,Bollywood in Posters could have done with better design and more engaging text.

Mahmood has several poster artists working for her. She picks up ideas and leitmotifs from iconic films and gets them hand-painted all over again. Artist Baba Anand,for example,has been jazzing up vintage posters since 2002 for a global audience. He first gave a kitsch makeover to a poster of Sangam with sequins and rose petals and pasted Swarovski crystals on the hand-painted poster of Taj Mahal (1963). With several solos in India and abroad,including New York and London,Anand feels the market for posters is widespread. “Internationally,people buy the posters because of kitsch value and in India it’s more because of the sentiments associated with movies,” he says.

Parr,who works with Oxfam,got hooked to Bollywood in 1995-96 when he dropped in on a film appreciation course conducted by author Rachel Dwyer at The School of Oriental and American Studies,London. Last year,in the gloom of recession,when he needed something to cheer him up,he decided to give his car a makeover. But he believes there’s more to Bollywood than the happiness quotient. “Its ability to speak for the zeitgeist of India is really remarkable. It’s amazing how swiftly it reflects people’s aspirations and the changes around us. The six-pack abs spoke to the growing obsession for gyms and the body,a film like Dostana pushes boundaries of what is accepted in society,” he says.

The spokes of Basanti’s wheels are also done up in motifs typical of Pakistani truck art. “I got that from Rawalpindi and the artwork is by a Daryaganj poster artist. It would be fun to take this car to the Wagah border,wouldn’t it?” he says,spinning out a nifty Yash Chopra script in a second. To quote the wise old Coolie on top of the Ambassador,“They all come with lots of emotional baggage.”
—Amrita Dutta,Paromita Chakrabarti,Piyasree Dasgupta,Vandana Kalra