Toilet: Ek Prem Katha to Shubh Mangal Saavdhan | 2017 saw extraordinary success for ordinary tales

For a long time, stories based on the lives of people from the middle-class, who form a major chunk of the movie watchers, were left out of the Bollywood narrative. Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee were among the filmmakers who made movies about the common man. However, that changed later when foreign locales and glossier cinema gained a foothold in Bollywood. And the ones that were made seemed synthetic and superficial.

However, that seems to have changed in 2017. Be it movies like Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (TEPK), Meri Pyaari Bindu (MPB) and Hindi Medium, or the recent Bareilly Ki Barfi (BKB) and Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (SMS), it’s the stories of this part of the population that has drawn the audience to the theatres.

Local faces, global issues

While these movies may have been based in smaller cities and towns, the issues they brought to the fore had a global appeal. Bhumi Pednekar, who starred in TEPK and SMS, says, “Around 70 per cent of our country is your B and C centres or your smaller towns and they are not unaware of what’s happening around. Even though Dum Laga Ke Haisha was set in a smaller town, we were speaking about body shaming or body image. In TEPK, we spoke about open defecation. One may think that it’s a problem that affects rural India, but it’s an issue that people around the world have to deal with.”

Heroes among us

The audience would rather see a hero among them than a person who seems extraordinarily powerful. Hitesh Kewalya, who wrote SMS, which spoke about the topic of erectile dysfunction that disrupts of a soon-to-be-married couple, says, “We have to give credit to the audience for choosing the cinema that they have opted to see. We, as a country, as a society, are changing. We are looking inwards. We want to hear our stories. The hero-who-is-a-superhero concept has died. We are at a stage where we are looking at heroes among us. I would admire someone like my father. Not because he is someone who can bash up 10 people, but as a person who does the right thing. Or my mother who works outside the house and manages the house. This is the new middle class that’s forming. The stories are the same, but we are looking at icons now.”

A wave of nationalism

Bhumi feels that the changing aspirations of our countrymen have a lot to do with this trend. Bhumi says, “There has been a wave of nationalism that has suddenly come where we are interested in India. We are proud to be Indians, which had lessened in the ’90s. Back then, there was this wave of wanting to go abroad, whether it was to study, work, or whatever. Now, everyone is coming back home. People want to watch these heartland stories. People want to know what’s happening in their neighbourhood and their country.”

Storytellers have their say

Pankaj Tripathi, who was seen in Bareilly Ki Barfi and Newton this year, feels that along with the audience it is the storytellers who have given heroes from the middle-class. He says, “Look at people like Nitesh Tiwari (director). Their holidays were spent in smalls towns or villages. They didn’t go to Europe every now and then. So, they tell the stories that they are familiar with.” He further states that even if they or he were to show Europe in their films, it would be very different from what people have seen till now. “Because the perspective would be different,” he says. Aanand L Rai, who has consistently brought small towns and their inhabitants in focus with movies like Raanjhanaa, Tanu Weds Manu and Tanu Weds Manu Returns, and backing movies like Bareilly Ki Barfi, says, “I think it happens subconsciously. I belong to that middle-class world and I want to stay real to my stories. 

I pick up tales from my roots. I also believe in original content. Original is something I’m comfortable with and that for me is a small town or the middle-class, which makes me give a slice of my world to the content. I will come out of that structure when it starts to feel like a comfort zone. My film with Khan Saab (the untitled film that has Shah Rukh Khan playing a dwarf) is also completely ‘Indian’ film; it just has a lot of VFX.”

Get real

Realism is the name of the game. Bhumi says, “These are the stories that we want to watch as urban people. We have watched enough of Switzerland and LA. Today, the world has become really small. Today, Switzerland doesn’t excite me, but these are the stories that I am unaware of. These are the things that haven’t been tapped into and cinema is all about newness. It’s not about fantasy anymore. You take reality and turn it into somebody’s fantasy. That’s why it appeals to people so much.”

Rajkummar Rao, who seems to have become the poster boy of this kind of cinema, feels, “Small towns have more of a character than urban cities. In every gully of a small town, you will find so many characters. And most of our country lives in small towns, so it makes sense for their stories to be liked by people in all parts of the country. The struggles of these characters are real and so people identify with them so much.”

Time for run-of-the-mill stories is over

The so-called macho men seem to have taken a backseat in B-Town. More and more A-list actors are looking at stories that are inspirational rather than heroic just on the face of it. Hitesh says, “I have grown up in the ’80-90s, when our aspirations were a lot different. Of course, people have aspirations, but they have changed. Today the audience is exposed to a lot more. The time for run-of-the-mill stories seems to be over. I don’t want to see those because I don’t believe in them and I can’t relate to them. At one point, I wanted to see things that were larger-than-life because cinema was the only medium of entertainment. But now I have a lot more options, so now I (the audience) will choose what to watch.”