Opinion A longing for elsewheres

Hindi cinema has never had a settled location,even if the industry has. This means that an enormous amount of labour has gone into the task of imagining a national audience as well as the task of anticipating and deducing provincial tastes to pitch stars and genres accordingly. This labour has gone through several cycles of adjustment. It has had to take into account successful formulas,internal constraints and sustained,even if fanciful,myths. The “masses” have been routinely alleged to be illiterate,star-struck and devoted to the idea of family,among other things.

But the corporatisation of the industry — from production to exhibition — has given this process a structural stability. The emergence of the multiplexes,fetching the bulk of the returns at the box-office,has meant that the Hindi film is now housed in fairly standardised settings. This has streamlined,to some extent,the film product as well as the audience. The emergence of genres in Bollywood has also helped reduce outrageous speculation towards a “universal hit”.

In spite of the diversely located audiences,the multiplex itself,as a sensorium of desire,draws its audiences out of their respective neighbourhoods. Yet,as they are drawn into another universe,the question of belonging lingers. The withdrawal into multiplex-malls is partly compensated for by the nostalgia for elsewheres. This has led to the emergence of two major trends in the post-multiplex Bollywood.

On the spatial axis,there is the emergence of “small-town” films marked by a distinct provinciality,often north-Indian in orientation. Starting from Haasil and running well into Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela,a huge number of films have evoked the small town,where the excesses of bodily expression are celebrated and lawlessness goes unquestioned. These towns make possible large-hearted grandeur,as in Jab We Met’s Bhatinda,and also fantasies of violent orgies,as in Gangs of Wasseypur. The small towns are presented as affable,loud and stylish,but we are simultaneously warned of a near-complete collapse of law and order there.

On the temporal axis,there is emergence of “retro” films,either set in a cinematic past (Special 26,Striker,Once Upon a Time in Mumbai and Once Upon a Time in Mumbai Dobara) or explicitly remaking an old Hindi film (Himmatwala,Agneepath,Zanjeer,Don I and II). These films produce a zone of re-enactment. By admitting to the inadequacy of the present to tell its own stories,they allow the present to perform ventriloquism through the past. They also encourage the audience to indulge in a parody of the past as well as of the present,allowing them to belong to neither. In a sense,these films encourage the audience to stay mobile on the axis of time instead of locating themselves.

Both the genres work strictly within the multiplex economy,though some of their appeal — particularly through the stars — may spill beyond the multiplex. Very often,the temporal and spatial elsewheres may come together,as they do in Barfi and Lootera. The small town films had become successful before Dabangg turned them into a blockbuster formula. Films like Khiladi 786,Bol Bachchan,Singham and Boss,often starring Ajay Devgan and Akshay Kumar,have also blended the north Indian small town films with south Indian remakes. Both the genres also allow stars with an outdated code to reinvent themselves,even if the genre fails to revive all careers,like that of Shahid Kapoor.

Also,to produce internal consistency,this new Bollywood economy is littered with loud signatures,such as dance moves,as well as statements — all cast in a provincial mould. The arrival of multiplexes took less than a decade to draw Bollywood out of “Bombay”. Contemporary films set in Mumbai often take the retro route. Delhi-based films,however,are unable to realise their urban potential,highlighting only a locality-based provinciality.

The truly unresolved question here is that of Indian urbanity — the crisis of the urban form inside as well as outside cinema. How do we narrativise the city? How do we tell a story that is viscerally urban yet dramatic enough to hold the cinematic burden? Threat and desire,the two dominant narratives of the erstwhile urban forms,now face an acute crisis: while consumerist desire continues to exceed metropolitan India and reach towards global megalopolises,the threat narrative seems far more conducive to fantastic small-town India.

The two narratives may still punctuate the Indian metropolis,but they fail to encapsulate its complex intermittence,best captured,in the last few years,in Dhobi Ghat and Lunchbox. The urban psyche and architecture are in perpetual tension. Toggling between cultural utopias and dystopias,fantasies of urban life spill over outside the unstable and intermittent Indian cities. Often,they take refuge in the re-enactment of narratives already de-linked from their surroundings.

Sustained by the architecture of denial — the multiplex — the locations of Bollywood point towards locations that

are emerging,and locations being dissolved,even as Indian cities find their feet within global modernity.

The writer is a research scholar at the University of Glasgow where he is working on the historical geography and the political economy of India’s vernacular cinema

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