Complicating Bollywood
Many of the books on Hindi and other Indian language cinemas are somewhat sneery of the subject. Across the English-speaking world of editors and writers I could name at least a dozen who write on Indian cinema but have no feeling, love or appreciation for it. They have not grown up watching the films that shaped entire generations. They watch them only to analyse them or trash them, not because they enjoy watching them. This is especially true for Hindi films. Thankfully, Provincializing Bollywood and its writer Akshaya Kumar have their heart in the right place. Mr Kumar has clearly watched loads of Hindi and Bhojpuri films and has immersed himself in the history and dynamics of the whole space. And he comes from a place of affection for Indian cinema. That to my mind is a good beginning.
Through Provincializing Bollywood, Mr Kumar, an assistant professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, attempts to understand the interplay between Bhojpuri cinema, its language, symbols, the people it represents, and Hindi cinema. This was the subject of his PHD. And if you are a Hindi cinema aficionado, the book has examples and observations that resonate — if you can understand them.
That, then, is the biggest problem with this book. It uses a dense, inaccessible language that makes it imperative to read a paragraph two or three times before you get what the writer is attempting to say.
While discussing Amitabh Bachchan’s performances and “…his nuanced provincial performativity…” in films like Don (1978) or Hera Pheri (1976) among others this is what Mr Kumar says: “Performative belonging resides in relative inexactitudes, in playing with proportions and amplifying cultural signatures with playful ease, instead of precision.” What it means is that Mr Bachchan played these characters with an ease — bringing their language (Awadhi in this case), gestures, their way of thinking into play.
“The distributive-performative kernel of curatorial informalities is rather unlike the algorithmic regulation of the media catchment. The curatorial imperative of media emerges out of the necessity to make sense of an expanding world of media objects……” In plain English that means that curated content works differently from algorithmically generated ones and both have different implications for the people who consume it and for society at large.
Here is a sample from the blurb on the back page: “Provincializing Bollywood argues that Bhojpuri cinema exemplifies the overflow of a provincial derivative form that defies its place in the given scheme of things. Situating it at the intersection of the vernacular media production and the infrastructural-political re-ordering of provincial North India, the book shows that Bhojpuri media’s characteristic ‘disobedience’ is marked by a libidinal excess….”
These are just some examples of the language used throughout the book. This makes it a tough read even for devoted cinema fans. You could argue that this is an academic work and not meant to be popular fiction. The question publishers and academicians have to ask themselves is: Do academic books have to be inaccessibly written to be taken seriously? For a subject that gives us so much joy — cinema — why couldn’t the editors at OUP have stepped in to make the book a better read? If books on science, business and economics can be readable, why shouldn’t the same apply for those on popular culture? Does theorising about cinema have to make for a boring read?
Having said that, if you can plough through it, then the book does offer some lovely perspectives on Bhojpuri cinema, its context and the place it occupies in popular Hindi cinema. More importantly, it places it, not just in geo-political context but also against the economic realities of India. It talks at length about migrants from the very areas that Hindi cinema talks about. The best parts are when Mr Kumar delves deeps into several Bhojpuri films — Sasura Bada Paisewala (1998), Nirahua Rickshawala (2007), Jaan Tere Naam (2013) — among others. He decodes them, from his perspective. That is when the book comes alive — there is an illustration, perspective and a voice that is distinctly Kumar’s. You only wish there was more of it in this well-intentioned book.