Urban love, celluloid illusion: A re-evaluation of Bombay middle cinema of the 1970s

ABSTRACT

Critics and scholars have read films belonging to the genre of Bombay middle cinema as texts marked by consistent political and social ordinariness. This paper re-visits films portraying the ordinary lives of urban middle-class subjects of 1970s to present a more nuanced understating of their political and ideological position. I do acknowledge this general sense of ordinary passivity in these films; however, I argue that these films need to be interpreted in the context of the biopolitcal excesses enforced by the Indira Gandhi government. Instead of producing just stabilized, passive male subjectivity, these films actually encourage them to become miniaturized version of State’s totalitarian sovereignty. This paper specifically looks at a number of films directed by Basu Chatterjee, the most prominent and prolific filmmakers whose works belong to this genre, to argue that a number of these films are cultural reinforcement of State’s biopolitical strategies. The repetitive depiction of everyday spatio-temporality of “normal” citizens is not a mere apolitical representation of their lives; rather, they are staging of the male hero’s process of undergoing subjectivation and self-governance to adjust within the presence of pervasive presence of governmental dispositif. The paper further argues that one of the significant aesthetic strategies deployed by these films to underline its reality-status is to distance itself from big-budget popular cinema. Middle cinema performs an ideological interpellation of the (male) civil subject by recognizing and referring to popular cinema’s role as a fantasy apparatus in corroborating such stabilization.

KEYWORDS:

• Middle Cinema
• Bombay Cinema
• Basu Chatterjee
• Biopolitics
• Indian Emergency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Although some film historians have argued that the origin of middle cinema can be traced to the middle-class cinema of the 1950s, a closer look at the genre formation may suggest that this actually started with Basu Chatterjee’s Piya ka Ghar (1971). Chatterjee’s debut film, Sara Akaash (1969) too could be seen as the beginning of this genre. I, however, think it is his second film that launched the genre of urban middle cinema.

2. Justice Jagmohanlal Sinha of Allahabad High Court, in a case between the State of Uttar Pradesh against Rai Narain, found Indira Gandhi guilty of electoral malpractices in the general election of 1971 and passed a ruling unseating her from the parliament and barring her from participating in any election for the next six years. Although this was the recorded reason behind Emergency, as Emma Tarlo and Vernon Hewitt have suggested, this was a result of a long chain of events since the late 1960s. Several articles published around that time in the journal Economic and Political Weekly, indicate that the Emergency was an inevitable culmination of a series of economic, industrial and political problems starting from the late 1960s and particularly since India’s war against Pakistan in 1971 (Sau; Frank; Gandhi; Ram). Andre Gunder Frank suggests that the Emergency did not actually end with its formal conclusion and India experienced an emergence of ‘Permanent Emergency’ even after Gandhi’s defeat in the 1977 election.

3. Bombay cinema, of course, was not detached from these political upheavals. In the popular genre, the angry young man movies have been read either as an expression of subaltern anger against an unjust system or as legitimizing narratives of petty-criminals and extra-legal vigilantes who were needed to vanquish irredeemable criminals. The social-realist New Wave cinema was propagating the need for speedier modernization in the ‘backward’ corners of the nation. Prasad, for example, points out how this movement towards national efficiency gets inserted in a film like Shyam Benegal’s Manthan.

4. Anecdotes suggest that industrialist JRD Tata could not even get to his car from his office without fearing for his life. Besides Tata and several other corporate figures, Gandhi received strong support from prominent voices based in Bombay, including journalist and the then editor of the influential magazine, Illustrated Weekly, Khushwant Singh.

5. For Agamben‘s detailed analysis of ‘dispositif’, along with its similarities with and differences from that of Foucault’s, see his lecture titled ‘What is a dispositif?’ http://www.egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/what-is-a-dispositif. My deployment of the concept is influenced by recent scholarly interest in dispositif as a heuristic tool for making connections between social politics and media politics. As Weihong Bao observes in her recent book on the cinema as an affective medium in China, an inquiry along shifting modes of dispositif in cinema can reveal unexpected conversations between ‘historical political discourse, institutions, and material practices in shaping public perceptions and experiences’ (7). I thank Hui Liu for bringing this book to my attention.

6. The fractured modern Indian self, Ashis Nandy observes, makes a journey to the city with the rise of 19^th century colonial economy to look for employment and to escape the feudal social structure in the village. However, this ambiguous journey is never without ‘turning back.’ Nandy analyzes films from the 1950s’, among other texts, to argue that a rural imagination, which is almost forgotten in post-globalization India, was instrumental in imaginatively turning the cities into utopic and egalitarian communities.

7. Through a narrative demonstrating the need for an inter-species solidarity, this instructional animated film convinces the spectators that any difficult job can be accomplished and any threat can be averted through the power of unity.

8. For some of these rumors and facts see D.R. Mankekar and Kamala Mankekar.

9. Chawl is low-end, multistoried tenements in Bombay. Usually congested, small and dilapidated, it can be thought of as vertical slums in the city.

10. ‘Jai Jawan/ Jai Kisan’ (‘Hail the soldier/ Hail the farmer’) was a slogan coined by the second prime minister of India, Lal Bahadur Shastri, in 1965. Soon after Shastri came to power, India got into a war against Pakistan. Shastri used this slogan to energize the army to fight for the nation’s sovereignty and to encourage the farmers to increase food production.

11. This is perhaps an inter-textual reference to Vedyache Ghar Unhat (‘Madman’s House out in the Heat’), a play by famous Marathi playwright Vasant Shankar Kanetkar. Kanetkar also won the Filmfare Award for the Best Story for Ansoo Ban Gaye Phool (‘Tears Have Become Flowers,’ 1970; Dir. Satyen Bose).

12. Here I must note that suggestions of such inevitable reconciliation with the modern city appears in the 1950s’ Bombay cinema made under the Navketan banner and also in few other Dev Anand starrers. See in this context, Sudipta Kaviraj fascinating reading of the famous song ‘Yeh hai Bombay meri jaan…’ from the film C.I.D. (1956).

13. Matthew Connelly, ‘Population Control in India: Prologue to the Emergency Period.’

14. Starting from this period, having a ‘large’ number of children became a regular comic trope in Hindi cinema. It must be mentioned that popular cinema did not always play a conformist role. Nasbandi (‘Sterilization,’ 1978; Dir. I.S. Johar), a satirical comedy on the compulsory sterilization drive, was immediately banned, ironically, by the government who came to power because of their opposition to Gandhi’s policies during the Emergency.

15. In her reading of state-funded non-commercial cinema in India, Srirupa Roy demonstrates how the citizenship discourse produced an immature ‘citizen-subject in need of statist intervention’ (236). These films, mainly documentary and instructional in nature, try to make the postcolonial subject aware of a ‘lack’ s/he needs to overcome in order to become a modern, economically viable citizen.

16. Allegedly Gandhi used a wide network of intelligence, including India’s national intelligence agency R&AW, to spy on both her political opponents and allies.

17. Till then the only Indian film under this title was made in 1943 (Dir. Chaturbhuj Doshi); a film on the same story was made with the same title in 1979 (Dir. Chandrakant). I am not sure whether Piya ka Ghar is referring to a re-release of the 1943 flick. If this was a reference to Doshi’s film, a brief commentary by Rajadhyaksha and Willemen is relevant here: ‘[…] its real interest for contemporary viewers is in the tale’s overtly Oedipal overtones together with its status as a blatant allegory about female sexuality as both a life-restoring force and a potential threat to be brought under control by and for men (including highlighting the function of religion in this process of repression)’ (300). Such a reading of the devotional film can make us think of this as an unwitting but relevant intertextual reference vis-à-vis Malti’s repressed sexuality in the film.

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Suvadip Sinha

Suvadip Sinha is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Asian Languages and Literature, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His area of specialization is modern South Asian literature and culture. Sinha has published several research articles in South Asian Popular Culture, Interventions, Cultural Critique, and Feminist Media Histories. He is currently editing a volume of essays on postcolonial animality in literature and cinema.