About 20 years ago, it was terrifically downmarket to say you liked Hindi films. For poor sods like me who grew up cheering an ageing Amitabh Bachchan, a young Anil Kapoor or an upcoming Shah Rukh Khan, the best option was to keep their mouth shut or get sneered at. It was all right to discuss Beverly Hills Cop (a film I loved) but not its Hindi remake, Jalwa (beautifully done by Pankaj Parashar).
Then somewhere in the early part of the millennium, that changed. It was suddenly cool to like popular Indian cinema. It soon became mainstream; now it is positively respectable. Dabangg doesn’t pretend to be anything but a base-level entertainer straight out of the eighties. Ditto for Robot, Bodyguard or Golmaal 3 — the big hits in the last couple of years. But it is amazing how nobody minds them.
There is now a huge amount of discussion, online and in the mass media, on how “different people have different tastes”, how the multiplex film can co-exist with the mass-market one. It comes close on the heels of a slew of books that “discuss” Indian cinema, its popular icons, filmmakers or influences. Most of these come from Indian academics based abroad or foreign ones; some are from film journalists. Even ten years ago, books like Yash Chopra by Rachel Dwyer or Global Bollywood by Anandam Kavoori were unheard-of. There seems to be this whole movement that intellectualises Indian cinema, giving it a respectability it never had.
What happened? There are a few theories and some facts that point the way. Rajeev Masand, CNN-IBN’s entertainment editor, reckons that Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ, 1995) was the turning point. “It caught young people’s imagination by speaking in a language they could relate to. Till then most young people thought Indian cinema was gaudy and tacky. But DDLJ appealed even to Indians with Western sensibilities and changed their attitude to cinema,” he argues.
Around the same time, two other things happened. One, a new set of critics – like Masand and Anupama Chopra – came on the scene. They were totally in sync with popular cinema. You never had the feeling that they were looking down on whatever they were writing on. So audiences were being offered an alternative point of view on a popular film — something that had so far not been available. Note that, even now, most TV and film critics are largely sneery about popular entertainment.
And two, corporatisation took off in the late nineties. It helped not just to clean up the business, but also unleashed creative energy. Thanks to multiplexes, filmmakers were freed of the need to create one-size-fits-all films for cavernous 1,000-seater single-screen theatres. Indian cinema flowered. Omkara, Kaminey, Peepli Live, A Wednesday or Taare Zameen Par would never have been possible in the pre-corporatisation days.
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To come back to Masand. His reference to DDLJ is bang on, not just because it was a good film with a modern idiom. It was the first really big NRI hit. The film opened up the whole overseas market further after the success of Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. Others such as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Dil To Paagal Hai, Muthu and Kabhie Khushi Kabhie Gham followed from there. Soon Indian films were firmly on the radar of foreign markets. Many European and Asian countries have since worked hard at signing treaties that encourage Indian films to shoot there, and offer tax breaks and subsidies.
There is a subtext to this generosity. There are now only a handful of markets, such as Korea and India, left with a local film industry. Hollywood dominates almost every other market. Note that there are no quotas and no restrictions on the number of foreign films that can be screened in India. Yet Hollywood continues to hover around five to eight per cent of the total box office.
The Indian film, whether it was in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam, just refused to die or fade out — even when things were very bad, in the eighties and nineties. It survived and thrived in the face of complete neglect from policy makers, derision from critics and competition from Hollywood. It is this resilience that has attracted many European and Asian scholars who have seen their industries dying. That is when they pointed out, without judging it, how our narrative style was different and couldn’t be classified in homogeneous buckets like that from Hollywood. And that is when Indian films gained respectability in India as well.
There is, then, hope for television. TV shows in India have been berated for long for being regressive. It took the work of two foreign economists to show that cable television was actually empowering women in rural India. All we need is some French or Polish scholar to “discover” Indian TV soaps. Wait, then, for the intellectualisation of Indian television.