My neighbourhood clapped-out cinema from the 1950s has recently emerged from a makeover — not as a swanky multiplex but as a plush single-seater with attached four-floor shopping mall set round an Italianate fountain court. The foyer is paved with slabs of gleaming pseudo-Carrara marble and hung with fake white Murano chandeliers. Like some far-fetched fantasy of a rococo Tuscan palace stuck in an old refugee colony in south Delhi, its interiors come dressed in white and gold. The men’s room has so many gold mosaic tiles that a two-minute stand at the urinal can make your head reel.
It is patently the wrong place to see a film about starving, suicidal farmers of rural India; but it is showing Peepli Live, the much-acclaimed debut directed by the husband-and-wife team of former TV journalists Anusha Rizvi and Mahmood Farooqui, and produced by the glamorous Aamir Khan. The glaring contrast between venue and subject alone should alert us to chasms of the urban-rural divide — and also raise a couple of moot questions about what separates the relatively well-off middle class from the poor. From Rs 200 to Rs 600 a seat, can even the urban poor afford a ticket? Morever, do the poor necessarily want to be entertained by a film about their blighted lives?
Peepli Live is a no-frills attack on many burning, contemporary issues — farmers’ suicides and the futility of rural empowerment schemes, political chicanery and bureaucratic sloth, above all the trivialising intrusions of TV news — but it would be wrong to see it as descended from the path-breaking 1950s social or lyrical realism of Bimal Roy’s Do Bigha Zamin or Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali. Its cinematic style is not especially remarkable and its tone teeters unevenly between high farce and deepening tragedy. Its treatment of political and media characters (though brilliantly cast) is a little simplistic and its principal female characters are all hectoring harridans — from the cantankerous village crone to her abusive daughter-in-law to the stony-hearted anchor/reporter in pursuit of her scoop. Yet Peepli Live is both a promising start and compelling film not just for what it says about contemporary Indian realities but also for its unspoken comment about contemporary Indian cinema.
Possibly the biggest on-the-ground change in Indian cinema economics in the last decade is the disappearance of the large, old theatres that catered to a wide cross-section of the film-going public, with multi-tiered ticketing priced to accommodate stalls, back rows, balconies and boxes. The bulldozing of these cinemas due to soaring real estate values has resulted in, what the film analyst Avijit Ghosh calls, the “multiplexing of Indian movies”. Only the affluent middle class can afford these cosseted aisles of luxury. (My night out at Peepli Live for a family of four, at Rs 200 per ticket plus parking and a couple of tubs of popcorn, cost Rs 1,500.)
This fact alone, Ghosh argues in his recent book Cinema Bhojpuri, about the rise of a regional film industry, has had a profound impact on the themes and subjects taken up by the mainline film industy. Rural, small-town India, or low-budget stories about the deprived or dispossessed that were the backbone of 1970s parallel cinema, have been squeezed out, airbrushed off the screens by the trendy, uber cool genre of filmmakers exemplified by Karan Johar and Farhan Akhtar. Their affluent characters suffer from the dilemmas and angst of the rich as they disport themselves in Goa, Majorca or Manhattan. They wear designer jeans and speak a posh Bandra or Greater Kailash lingo. The dialects of the Hindi heartland, together with the troubles or triumphs of those who inhabit it, hardly exist. The reason why Bhojpuri films are so successful, says Avijit Ghosh, is small-town audiences flock to them in ever-larger numbers to see their stories at affordable rates.
From aping Hollywood, Bollywood has gone to become its new avatar. It has reinforced the urban-rural divide. The commercial success of Peepli Live could help bridge the gap.
