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ShareMumbai: Hindi Cinema: An Insider's View
Anil Saari
Oxford University Press
222 pages, Rs495
Anil Saari is that rare, old blend of journalist-litterateur, who was well up in his trade but had wider and deeper interests in the arts. Throughout his eventful life -- he passed away in 2005 due to cancer -- he kept up with his interests. Born in 1945, he came of age in the 1960s and lived through the socialist highs and lows of the '60s and the '70s. His father, Arjun Arora, who lived in Kanpur, was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of India in Uttar Pradesh. It was natural then that Saari could connect cinema and society, cinema and politics, and even cinema and the economy. This did not mean that he was unaware of film aesthetics, but for him, it was a part of the bigger picture.
Compared to those who have lazily labelledpopular Hindi cinema as Bollywood, Anil offers an intellectually brilliant definition: "Existing in a no-man's land, the popular Indian film or, as may be a more appropriate definition in aesthetic terms, the Indian pop film, is an eclectic, assimilative, imitative, plagiaristic creature that is constantly rebelling against its influences -- Hollywood and European cinema and traditional Indian aesthetics and lifestyles." He encapsulates all the problems and strengths with regard to popular cinema and he gives it the catchy label of 'Indian pop film'. One can see a brilliant mind at work, not ponderous, but intelligent, passionate and clear-headed.
And he places the Indian pop film in its social and political context: "Very often the pop film turns out to be the first among the mass media to locate and comment upon new social trends. This is because newspapers and magazines in India are fairly elitist and rarely express the common man's perspective. And when they do express his perspective, it is only in terms of deflating his ego...newspapers and magazines coerce their readers to imitate things that are being done abroad. But the Indian pop film reduces objects and fashions from Euro-American civilization into caricatures adorned with the shape, colours, and awkwardness of the Indian urban landscape."
What these insights reveal is originality and simplicity of thinking which is only possible for someone who is sincerely engaged with the subject. What is the tragedy of a figure like Anil? It is that he was a struggler through his life, despite his brilliant thinking and engagement with his subject, and that in India there is no legitimate intellectual space for a thinker. The university-ensconced scholar-clerics are dullards in comparison with a mind like Anil's.
Anil's engagement with cinema can be seen in the self-confession that is then generalised. He recalls how as a 19-year-old he saw Rajshree in the film Geet Gaaya Patharone made by her father V Shantaram, "...Rajshree went around in a number of scenes with her shoulders bare, her alabaster-white waist caressing the breeze (flowing out from sighing male filmgoers) and her mouth open in a perpetual pout." Then he draws the generalisation: "...for young men whose fathers were not members of big, colonial clubs, the only place where they had the chance to see a pretty girl for a reasonable stretch of time, was in the movies."
If Anil had been in Europe or in America, he would have been lionised as a formidable intellectual. The petty politics among intellectuals in India is such that Anil is not known as much as he should be. Hopefully, this book and the others to follow will right this wrong.
