100 years of excess, a billion dreams
At a time of electoral anxiety and economic angst, good news is rare. And good news which has a historical quality, a vintage depth and archaeology of gossip is even rarer. Yet, in the middle of all the scandals playing themselves out as B- and Cgrade movies, one event stands out, loved by all and celebrated by all. As the Indian cinema celebrates its 100th anniversary this year, Himanshu Rai and Devika Rani’s Bombay Talkies studio and Bollywood stand as great metaphors for it.
Bollywood cannot survive without nostalgia. Nostalgia is a special world, it has depth, it has longing and it is memory functioning as the sugar coating on fantasy. It is sentimental, sugary and it summons the wordless sigh as a child remembers meeting Nutan or Madhuri for the first time and thinks of living it again a decade or two later. Memory has sensuality, a poetic sense of experience and voyeurism which no other event can reproduce. Imagine watching Waheeda yesterday or Deepika or Kareena today. Nostalgia allows you a surplus in a way no other emotion does.
My continent of surplus is called Bollywood and no partition can divide it. Bollywood as Bombay Talkies challenged the logic of Partition. Its greatest historian and gossip columnist was the legendary storyteller of Partition — Saadat Hasan Manto. The sadness was that Manto died penniless in Pakistan, mourning the world he had left behind.
Bombay Talkies as myth and as everydayness challenged the split world of Hindu vs Muslim. Bombay Talkies was one place where their talents and worlds had to combine, where song and music, body and relationships combined. Ashok Kumar belonged to it. Nargis belonged to it. Manto gloried in it. Bombay Talkies was a hybrid, syncretic world combining the poetry of cultures in a way no Shiv Sena could break. It was a world of togetherness, fantasy and commonness, glued further by booze, sex and creativity. The alphabet of desire was elaborate in Mumbai.
Bombay Talkies was a city beyond all cities. It was a city that made sense to every small town boy. Think of the pleasure of a small town boy standing in front of Shah Rukh Khan’s or Amitabh Bachchan’s house, waiting for an audience with a loyalty and a sense of faith no Pope or emperor could command. Amitabh was a bahuroopi; he played many roles of the city. He was a cop, paanwala, coolie, happi- ly and unhappily middle class. The city became a social contract between star, fan and audience. Bombay Talkies was the challenge to greater Mumbai, challenging the growing city with its myths of conflict and togetherness. It taught us that fan and migrant are the two schools of citizenships.
Bombay Talkies then and Bollywood today teach us about citizenship and the drama of loss and fantasy. It provides us with script, dialogues which give us dialects to understand the variants of the city. In fact, in a strange way, the city is the secret hero of Bollywood. It grows as an imagination. It is nukkad, real estate, housing society, red-light district, police station. Every fragment is played out as a miniature vision of the city.
The beauty of Bollywood is that it insists citizenship begins as a dream, a web of desire and an outline of fantasy, before it shrinks to everydayness. Bollywood dictates the city must repeat its dream again and again, with every fan as citizen. One has to believe in the dream and join the citizenship of Bombay before one can join India. Citizenship has to combine realism and fantasy, the cinematic and the civic. It is this merging of fan and migrant in the magic audience of citizenship that makes Bollywood one of the greatest urban myths ever created.
Yet one realises that it is myth that has to be lived again and again, through subtle differences in the shades of beauty or explosive breakthroughs of that one unified act called heroism. Imagine Bollywood as an album of the most beautiful, the most voluptuous and the most delicate. It is a cornucopia of loveliness. One wants a bit of Nargis, a fragment of Nutan, a touch of Waheeda, the poignancy of Madhubala, the sauciness of Helen, the verve of Sridevi, the alleged daringness of Zeenat, the missingness of Parveen, the classic features of Jaya Prada. God! Where does one cease? God exists because Bollywood exists, with even the devil dying to play a cameo role in a Salim-Javed script or outplay his imitations in Gangs of Wasseypur.
The beauty of Bollywood is that it plays out the myth of excess. Excess is not mere surplus, excess is immeasurable — it is a flow beyond dreams and expectations. Bollywood includes the man who saw Gadar 52 times. I must confess, I’ve watched Sholay at least 16 times.
Sholay, in fact, resonates the myth of Bollywood. It is the greatest B-grade movie ever made. It borrows generously from Akiro Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and from The Magnificent Seven, which had the likes of Yul Bryner and Steve McQueen. One’s mouth waters in sheer anticipation of Sholay.
In earlier myths, the poet would recite the names of ships that went to Troy, or the great heroes who died in battle. A mere recitation of names was enough to summon every storyteller around the neighbourhood. Imagine a movie festival with Sholay, Gangaa Jal, Coolie, Gangs of Wasseypur, Apaharan, Once Upon a Time in Mumbai, Satya — a festival of violence which tells India it is yet to build the civics of a city. Violence in all of them is a statement that India as an act of storytelling is incomplete. The scripts of India still need to be told. One needs a new hero, new fantasies, and new dialogues to consume the myth of India. The writer is a social
science nomad