Liberty Theatre
Watching movies is about private delights in public situations. They present the freedoms of pleasure and danger that we experience through contact with films
DDoes a film on freedom make us feel freer? You know the answer to that and I won’t insult you by putting it in words.
Neepa Mazumdar, in her book, Wanted: Cultured Ladies Only, interviews Girish Karnad about Fearless Nadia, the stunt star of the 1930s. He talks of how half the pleasure of watching Nadia’s films lay in being able to imitate the fights and stunts afterwards. We all have this story—about a dance move we practised, a swagger we adopted, a phrase we began to use as if it were our own. I remember feeling this mouthwatering desire to own the cool of Pawan Malhotra’s character in Saeed Mirza’s Salim Langde Pe Mat Ro—his swagger, indolent flamboyance and verbal flair. It bypassed gender, sexuality and social class via bodily pleasure, right from the screen into my being. Much is said about the messages of conformity that films offer us, watched as they are in a group. But in our hearts we know it is the sneaky freedoms of pleasure, danger, thrill and fun that shimmy into us through this bodily contact with films, which we carry
out of the cool, dark, germinating moistness of the cinema hall into the world outside.
Watching movies is about private delights experienced in public situations—and so they present the inherent conundrum of freedom and belonging that each of us grapples with. Maybe that is why Indian films always seemed to be a sometimes sly and sometimes perplexing interweave of the realist and the fantastical, the permissible and the impermissible, all in one frame.
Early cinema was full of fantasies, stunts and romances. Watching what remains of Dadasaheb Phalke’s films, even stories of gods were really about the magic of cinema, the transformative enticements of special effects which liberated us from the predictability of earthly life and, metaphorically, from what seemed logical. Cinema’s unique property of verisimilitude brings what is real and what is imagined in one place, liberating these lovers into togetherness, instead of keeping them separate as rational hierarchies and sometimes national ones, insist on doing.
BOLLYWOOD NATION
The growing idea of nationhood breathed an anxiety of realism into films. We saw films grappling with what it means to be Indian from the 1930s onwards, often expressed as the question of who are the ideal Indian man and woman. Chandulal Shah’s 1927 Gunsundari, where a woman woos her straying husband back by becoming a modern miss, was remade in 1934 as the power of the virtuous woman to save her family, a theme that has recurred in films for years afterwards.
At the same time you had the record-making hit Kismat, the story of a nowhere man, an orphaned thief, who finds his family, and its famous song: ‘door hato ae duniyawalon, Hindustan hamara hai’. Overtly a message of the colonially supportive Indian (the song insists we will bow before no one, German or Japanese), it only thinly disguised another nationalist-in-the-making Indian. A map of India recurs in the song, through the pattern on the stage curtain, through a backdrop and the formation of dancers in a clear V-shape to mimic the map of India through their bodies. How deliciously, sneakily daring this must have felt in 1942.
And how invigorating perhaps, in the years just after, where films often staged songs about what it means to be an Indian of a new India, aka what to do with freedom, as a kind of social argument. Sometimes these songs suggested that the real India was in villages. At other times, they indicated that the rural Indian was backward, practically anti-national. ‘Hum BA Pass, Hum BA Pass, badi mehnat se, badi mushkil se, humne bhi kiya hai BA Pass’, sang out a group of women graduates in the song ‘Hum Bharat ki Naari’ from Mr. Sampat (1952), which featured women as nurses and men as doctors, forwardlooking builders of a new India, while narrow-minded village ladies accused them of knowing nothing about the home and hearth.
Watching these songs from a distance, one senses that so charged are Indians with a desire for modernity and progress, it generates a huge anxiety around the loss of roots. To become India—dams and dames, doctors and nurses, teachers and engineers—was shot through with worries of how to still be rooted to a less defined Indianness. Films freed these anxieties into discussion. Even as these issues were being worked out, with an overwhelming message of idealised national identities (upper caste, Hindu), gender roles and heteronormative sexual choices, the films bucked their own formulae and sneakily offered other freedoms in sly ways, sometimes palatable, mostly not.
Think of all the cross-dressing songs we have seen in films—I am sure their number exceeds 377.
Biswajeet as a woman and Babita as a man, sang ‘Kajra mohabbat wala’ (Kismat, 1964), Kuldeep Kaur as a man and Nalini Jaywant as a woman, sang ‘Gore gore, o banke chhore’ (Samadhi, 1950), Kishore Kumar as a plump, nomadic woman and Pran as a village man were frisky frenemies in ‘Aake seedhi lage’ (Half Ticket). In the 1957 film Johnny Walker, a heterosexual couple travel in fantasy sequences, becoming lovers from Delhi, Calcutta and Agra. At one point they even switch heads, a man on a female body and vice versa, a cheerful role-play if there ever was one. Even if vamps never got the guy, think of the lush eyelashes and sequinned feathery excess of Helen and Bindu, the insouciance and flair of vamps and villains doing forbidden, transgressive things, singing ‘Reshmi ujala hai, makhmali andhera, aaj ki raat, aisa kuch karo, ki ho nahin, ho nahin, ho nahin savera’. Wait for me I’m coming, you wanted to shout as your mann broke its seema-rekha. For that matter think of the good heroes and heroines singing into phones, riding bicycles in cherry printed shirts down the road of love and how that messed up the conformity of public identity and private desire. If the permissible came wrapped in piety, the impermissible came wrapped in pleasure and we took its offered freedoms without having to commit ourselves verbally, out of the cinema, into the world.
Hindi cinema has long been criticised (although that is changing) for its baggy capacious form, its digressions from the main plot into a champi tel maalish song—just for fun; into the non-realistic lip-sync song, just for pleasure or emotion. As if just for fun, and pleasure and emotion were bad things, which they are, if you have a problem with liberation of the senses and liberation from probability into desire.
Our present-day fetish for ‘gritty realism’ is often presented to us as a new freedom from the old formula film, its untidy sprawl. This evokes an odd orderliness where everything is kept in its place, and the excesses of melodrama and high-stakes are often subdued into a formatted drama. The corporatised segmentation of films into types or genres—a film on female freedom, another on communal issues, another on the underworld—separated like pure veg and non-veg restaurants, convert film viewing into obedient acts of consumption, masquerading as choice, and the anxieties of politics into campaign videos, like Pink or Lipstick Under My Burkha. So neat, so schematic is this cinema, it makes freedom, which is a complicated, exhilarating, naughty and unwieldy business, seem impossible.
Commercial cinema has also been criticised (not unfairly) for its representation of marginalised figures: the courtesan/ sex-worker, the Christian drunk, the good Muslim, the dark-skinned thug. And yet, their presence in one frame, with the idealised or normative central figures, presents a tension. The marginal figure is a challenge to the central figure just by virtue of being there. Because we might decide to choose them.
Just as we feel this world of possibilities and unformatted freedoms is lost, a film like Kaala will come along, which will present the tension of world-views— of the Dalit mohalla leader and the upper-caste politically backed builder. Replete with symbolic languages, rich with ‘superfluous’ pleasures of love, romance, sentimentality, extravagant acting. We start to feel the stirrings of pleasure in song and dance and largerthan-life dialogue and anger at injustice and urgency of desire. Our senses feel unleashed. We come out of this cinema suffused, the world looks different. We feel free, of everything we were before, if only for a minute. We start to become something new.