Winds of change that films portray
ONE of the joys of living in our colony is that I am kept abreast of all that is happening in the world. I read several papers and watch many YouTube news channels that bring different perspectives, but the most satisfying feedback comes from the people who live around me. I like to think that the colony we live in is actually a microcosm of the larger world out there. There are all kinds of visitors and people I meet through the day. Some old, some young. Young adults, schoolchildren and workers who cook and clean as well as those who work as guards, electricians, drivers or gardeners. There are delivery boys from our local stores and many others who come and go. Like most Indians, each one prefers a political ideology and has a favourite political party or leader. Chatting with them brings another India to me, one that is quite different from the one I occupy. In short, they provide me with all the material I need for my writing and thinking.
Of late, there are two ‘hot’ topics: the movie ‘Pathaan’ and the Adani affair, depending on whether one belongs to one class or another. I seldom go to see a movie in a cinema hall now but I am determined to go and see ‘Pathaan’. For one, its release created a furore among the saffron brigade and the rest but mainly because both Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone seem to have set the screen on fire. Every person who has seen the film cannot stop raving about its cast and special effects. From all accounts, it is definitely worth one viewing and many who have seen it have generously offered to see it again with this aunty. Their enthusiasm took me back to my own youth and the heady delight of bunking classes to go and see a movie on the sly. In 1968, when I joined university, there was precious little by way of entertainment but see every film as soon as it was released. Those simpering, over-dressed and coy heroines and rakish heroes (some who wore lipstick!), were the ones from whom we copied our hairstyles, clothes and stupid nakhras. I laugh now as I remember those giddy times but on a more serious note, I can now see how those films and their music were reflections of a slow social and cultural change that we were then unable to discern.
Some years ago, Meghnad Desai wrote a book tracing the Nehruvian arc as reflected in the films of Dilip Kumar. I edited the book and was struck at how prescient those films were about the momentous changes taking place in the India of the first two decades after Independence. The hope, innocence and optimism of that time, reflected in the unforgettable lyrics of poets such as Sahir Ludhianvi or Shailendra among others, were the early indications of how hope was receding and dark clouds appeared on a blue sky. The films made by the IPTA group, a progressive band of left-leaning filmmakers in the Fifties and Sixties, were focused on the lives of peasants and rural India. ‘Do Beegha Zameen’ and ‘Mother India’ come readily to mind as moving stories about the lives of simple peasants exploited by landlords and usurious money-lenders. The love of their land and village, the close sense of family and kinship, an unshakeable moral core and their touching faith in justice and religion were exactly the qualities I most remember from our own growing-up years in small towns. Yet, behind this idyllic, pastoral world lay the looming presence of the industrial cities, such as Bombay, where many impoverished farmers and landless peasants went to seek employment in the mills and factories as labourers. The Bombay ‘chawl’ became the favourite location of so many stories that tumbled from its tightly-knit world. The villainous mill-owner and the stark differences between the lifestyles of the owners (huge bungalows, flashy limousines, spoilt children) and the seths who lusted after money and Anglo-Indian crooners in clubs where Goan and Anglo-Indian men and women danced to western music. Then came the Charlie Chaplinesque films that introduced us to the world of RK Films. With names like ‘Shri 420’, ‘Awaara’, they portrayed the big bad city and its immoral world of money, greed and lust. A counterpoint to this was provided in the films of Guru Dutt and the disenchanted lonely poet whose honesty was drowned under the deluge of money and power.
Films such as these were mirrors of a changing social environment that was later to become known as India and Bharat. The big, bad world of the megapolis introduced us to smugglers and charlatans who shamelessly broke rules to make their fortunes. Does this sound familiar? Political patronage, dirty money and dodgy operators who care little for what they destroy brought us the Angry Young Man and the Amitabh Bachchan films with scintillating scripts and dialogues written by Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar.
The last chapter of this journey ended with the NRI, who straddled the foreign world and India. Karan Johar took this trope to create a world that reflected the split personality of a nation that was at once proud of its heritage and ashamed of its poverty.
So, the Bombay film industry is a weathercock that has unerringly indicated every wind of change.
