Opinion Once a shared space

The multiplex revolution was meant to energise Bollywood. But it has had two unintended consequences. The first is the enormous segregation of viewers. In retrospect,it is difficult not to recognise the fact that Bollywood derived its power from the fact that the movie hall was something of a shared social space. Although halls were divided into the balconies and the dress circles,the medium itself had to,like the Indian politician does for his constituency,assume that the audience contained a whole world. Rather than a movie being common property,the patterns of viewing are now a mark of segregation. In this sense,the decline of Bollywood as a common medium mirrored the decline of the space of viewing.

Did Bollywood make up in artistic diversity what it lost in a unified audience? This is very much an open question. Questions of artistic comparison are always tricky. It is not wise to be presumptuous about either the past or the present. But this can be said: the availability of niche audiences has not lead to an efflorescence of great niche art. Recently,I had the occasion to see Gaman,and was reminded of the fact that for all its possibilities the multiplex has not matched the equivalent of niche films in the old days: Muzaffar Ali,Shyam Benegal and so on. So the jury is still out on whether the possibility of niche audiences produces great art. Television is more proof of the fact that the mere possibility of a market does not produce either more choice or excellence,or mass success.

There may be other underlying issues as well. It may be that the best talent,with a real pulse on the people,is actually in a medium that is now becoming a shared cultural form: advertising. But there is a deeper question. There is no doubt that rapidly changing times will be accompanied by changing aesthetic sensibilities. Bollywood’s ability to insinuate itself in our imaginations rested on two cardinal pillars. The first was its ability to tap into a grammar of emotion. The point was not to make sense of the world,as much as it was to bring a lump to your throat. Music was central to this aesthetic; and it was the medium through which the grammar of emotions could be detached from its context in the script and carried over to the tumult of daily life. In some ways music still remains important. But with one difference: its transposition outside the movie is into a context of a collective performance rather than the nuances of emotion. It is made to be danced to or performed. It is a spectacle rather than a subtle purveyor of emotions.

The second pillar was its strange,over the top,exaggerated sense of the world,where the laws of physics were often as unrecognisable as the laws of the state. Amit Chaudhuri captured this point perceptively and beautifully. “This does not mean Hindi cinema is fatalistic or metaphysical; its exuberance is indispensable to its conviction that life is an unrecognisable rather than a categorisable thing.” How much of the “professionalisation” of cinema will foreground an illusory ability to control the world,rather than marvel at its strangeness,is another open question. A very knowledgeable taxi driver in Cairo (where Amitabh Bachchan seemed to be the god of taxi drivers) once engaged me in a long conversation about Hindi movies. He ended with a rueful thought: Hindi films had the key to “kismet” — by which he did not mean luck or fate; he meant something like “you never know what will move you”.

It is not an accident that the only recent films that have enjoyed success,Three Idiots and Dabaang,had in their own different ways a return of these elements. But there is no question that both of these pillars have to be redefined. The grammar of emotions is undergoing a complex evolution in society at large. We have more of a sense that the world can be rationally mastered rather than left to the free play of chance and excess. But what are we making the transition to? Does Bollywood reflect the fact that we don’t quite know what excites us?

One of Raj Kapoor’s immortal dialogues was,“Mein apna iman bechne aya hoon.” In some ways,no dialogue is more apt for the debates of our age. Yet we would simply not know how to react to such dialogue. The sincerity it presupposes is alien to us. We are in an age of aspiration but not an age of idealism. The old emotions are wearing thin,but the new forms are not crystallising. Perhaps the difficulties of Bollywood are a transitional phase,a struggle to discover what cinema is appropriate to our complex age. But it will be hugely ironical if Bollywood,in its more professional avatar,could say things more slickly,but then get tripped on the fact that it does not know what it wants to say.

The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhi
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