'KP~A&C& INDUSTRIES, NARRATIVES, BODIES ALTERNATIVE LAW FORUM LIBRARY - 12214, Infantry Road, B'lore I ...c.': ....................... ACC NO. '.-: 4f-)Cl OXFORD . UNIVERSITY I'RESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road. New Delhi 110 001 Contents Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dares Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With off~cesin Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Photographs vii Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Viemam Note on the Transliteration of Film Titles and Names ix Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press Acknowledgements xi in the UK and in certain other countries. ... Introduction xlll Published in lndia by Oxford University Press, New Delhi O Oxford University Press 2008 The 1910s The moral rights of the authors have been asserted The 1920s Database right Oxford University Press (maker) The Action Ingredient First published 2008 Sharda Film Company and Master Vithal Conclusion All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical. including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and 2. WOMEINN A CTIONF ILMSIN THE 1920s AND 1930s retrieval system, without permission in writing from Oxford University Press. The 1930s Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be From Artistic Pictures Corporation to Wadia Movietone sent to the Rights Department. Oxford University Press, at the address above Fearless Nadia's Stunt Films You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer 3. INTERLUDET: HE1 950s The Bombay Film Industry during Nehru's Administration Post-Independence Euphoria and the Marginalization of Action 4. THE1 960s Typeset in Dante MT 10.5 / 12 The Bombay Film Industry in the 1960s by Eleven Arts, Keshav Puram, Delhi 110 035 The Economy in 1960s India Printed in lndia at De-Unique, New Delhi 110 018 Dara Singh and the Hindi Small-budget Film Published by Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Dara Singh's Wrestling Films vi Contents 5. THE1 970s The Literature on the 'Angry Young Man' Prelude Photographs lndira Gandhi's U-Turn The Bombay Film Industry in the 1970s The Action Films of Arnitabh Bachchan While considerable effort has been made to correctly identify the ~i bliography holders, this has not been possible in all cases. We apologize for any apparent negligence, and any omission or correction brought to Index our attention will be remedied in future editions. French athlete Louis Seidinger lifting 2400 pounds of flour (Modern Review). B.S. Nayampally, founder of Bombay's National Athletic League (Bombay Chronicle). Wrestler Babu J.C. Goho swinging clubs weighing 100 pounds each (Modern Review). Master Vithal in Burkhewala/ White Devil (Mauj Majah). Master Vithal in Bhedi Rajkumar/Mysteriow Prince (Filmland Pictorial News). Ganpatrao Bakre (Cinema Vision). Still from Love Immortal/Rani Rupmati (courtesy of NFAI). Still from Maharathi Karna (Cinema Rsion). Durga Khote in Maya Macchindra (Filmland). Advertisement of Sharda Fim's Rahadur Beti/She, starring Zebunissa (Bombay Chronicle). Advertisement of Azad Abla/Daring Damsel (Mauj Majah). Miss Padma in The Amazon/Dilruba Daku (courtesy of Vinci Wadia). Miss Padma in a late action role in Chalak Chor/Black Bandit (Ranjit Bulletin). Advertisement for Toofan Mail (courtesy of Vinci Wadia). Advertisement for Dilru ba Daku /The Amazon (Mauj Majah). viii Photographs Poster of Toofan Mail (courtesy of Vinci Wadia). Poster of Sinh GarjandLion Man (Cinema Vision). John Cawas (courtesy of Vinci Wadia). Note on the Transliteration of Still from Miss Frontier Mail: Shyamlal's futuristic communication technology (courtesy of Vinci Wadia). Film Titles and Names Industrialization as desirable horizon for the future: Still from Miss Frontier Mail (courtesy of Vinci Vadia). Gym sequence: Stills from Miss Frontier Mail (courtesy of Vinci Wadia). Booklet of FauLui (courtesy of NFAI). For the transliteration of Indian film titles and names, I have adopted Stills from King Kong: Dance sequence. the spelling as it appears in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999).F or all films, I have used the official English title whenever the film has been given one, either on release or in existing filmographies. For films which do not have an English title, I have given a literal translation of the original title, unless the title is the name of a character. Acknowledgements This book was written in conversation with Paul Willemen, who also helped with the research for Chapters 1 and 2. I thank him for hls patient support, intellectual integrity, and invaluable practical help. Of the many people to whom this book owes much, special thanks go to Ashish Rajadhyaksha. Without his friendship and work, and the friendship and writings of Madhava Prasad, whom I also met at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (Bangalore), my interest in Hindi cinema would long have waned. My friend Francesca Orsini, who encouraged my research on Hindi cinema from the beginning, also read early versions of the manuscript and offered much-needed advice on how to make my writing more accessible. I also wish to thank Virchand Dharamsey for sharing his boundless knowledge of Indan silent cinema during long afternoons in the dusty corridors of the Asiatic Society Library, Mumbai. Vinci Wadia generously granted me access to material that enabled me to write Chapter 2. I would like to thank him here for preserving that precious material in the first place and for the time he devoted to my questions about the work and outstanding writings of his father, J.B.H. Wadia. Chapter 4 owes much to the professionalism and kind assistance of Urmila Joshi, Lakshmi Iyer, and Arti Karkhanis at the National Film Archives of India. Many thanks also go to Rachel Dwyer, who encouraged my first foray into Hind action cinema and enabled the publication of years of research on the subject. Much of the funding for the research came from the Society for South Asian Studes, which supported the project fiom its inception. Finally, I am for ever grateful to Flavia and Aleardo Vitali for the confidence they have shown in me ever since I can remember. To them and to Paul Wdlemen, with whom it started, I dedicate this book. Introduction not a quel works in correlation with their time, but, rather, in t he time ir I which th, ey are bon~, of presenting thc tinl e that knows them. -Walter Benjamin, 'Liter;x ry History and the Study of Literature' RAJKUMAR SANl iLLS THE S TORY OF KA SH1 NATH - - (Sunny Deol), LLCJ ull ul a llauull&t hero who sets out to free the residents of a small tow :t errorizu1 gr egime: of arch-va ain Kaq fa (Dannyr Denzongpa). I atures seb reral fights and ne2 lrly all of them are witnessed by a kaegenc)\ crowa. Ihe final conrronration betwe- e- n.. n,r a.s-1 n. i and Katya inscribes the spectator in the viewing position of the crowd, standing by and cheeriri g as the Ih ero kills the other man. This type of rnise en scPne is very c ommon i n action cinema and there is nothing particular about this film that one cannot fmd in many other action movies. Except, that is, the time 1A at knew Ghatak as a film. I first saw it as a newly released film in 1996. I Tv- a-s then 1i ving in Allahabad, in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a~ L----.w hen the popularity and influence of the UI~C Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was fast rising in the Hindi belt. Watching the film's dosing scene from my balcony seat, I remember thinking then that I was seeing a film that was part of a swelling cultural-ideological wave which would be flooding large parts of the country for a long time to come. In many ways, tlus book emerges from, and is an elaboration of, that impression of seein-g a film, not simply as a story or as a cultural objec: t that ma .y or may not be a \ work of art, but as an integral moment of ar 1 unfolding historic;3 1 process Cl onvention ally spe:w. I.:-n- lg, ullr might say that this book is about the relationship between history and cinema. The problem with such a lntroduction xv xiv Introduction and Pierre Sorlin (1980), involves measuring the film retrospectively formulation is that it risks suggesting that cinema is one thing and history against other historiographic accounts that, although not necessarily another, the relationship between the two being a matter for historians taken to be 'truthful', are nevertheless understood to be offering a fuller and film theorists to discuss in an interdisciplinary exchange. Historians and more objective picture than the one presented by the analysed film. have many useful observations to make about films and about cinema The film's emphases, omissions, or simply 'distortions' are examined as a cultural form, while film scholars have written insightful things by resorting to certain techniques of psychoanalysis-and especially to about the history of their object of study, but juxtaposing cinema and Freud's account of the four processes of distortion at work in dreams3 history as distinct, though related, fields of enquiry obscures the fact that The information disclosed by such an approach can provide useful cultural forms emerge from within history. The question is thus less clues to the way a film functions as a text-in-history, bearing the marks about how a film's relation to history should be understood, than the of the geo-temporal location, of the conditions of its production and/ reading and understanding of films as technologically and industrially or circulation, and of the institutions that regulated both. But h sa pproach bundled discursive constellations animated by the very substances and has also tended to put more emphasis on what is not in the film, rather rhythms that we refer to as history. Films are primary sources every bit than on assessing what is. For instance, in his analysis of Lev Kuleshov's as much as statesmen's diaries, minutes of governmental meetings, or Po zakonu/Dura Lex/By the Law (19 26), Ferro maintained that 'the historical the objects and detritus that can be found on the sites of ruined cities. and social reading' of this and other films enabled historians 'to reach Just as historians have to pay serious attention to the specificities of the invisible zones in the past of societies--to reveal self-censorship or lapses media in which source material is encountered, so the specificities of (which remain in the unconscious of participants and witnesses) at work cinematic discourses considered by film theorists are not separate from, within a society (1977: 20). Along the same Lines, Sorlin argued that cinema but are an integral part of historiography. When films have been examined as primary sources, attention has underscores a way of looking; it allows the distinguishing of the visible from the tended to focus on two particular aspects of the indexical dimension of invisible and thus the ideological limits of perception in a certain age. [Ulnder films.' The most widely practised approach has been to examine what the cover of an analogy with the sensible world, which often allows it to pass as the films' stories have to say about events or periods already defined and a faithful witness, cinema creates a fictional universe by reverting to comparison, labelled by historians. Plots, dialogues, and their settings are scrutinized matching, development,r epetition, ellipsis (1977: 242; English translation from to identify historically pertinent information in what film scholars call Casetti 1999). the pro-filmic event, that is to say, in the 'reality' recorded by the camera Psychoanalysis can have a simcant role to play if we are to understand and the microphone. Although documentaries and newsreels are the how thoughts and intuitions are transformed as they are made to migrate types of cinema privileged by this approach, it is generally conceded from one level of consciousness to another, or from one medium into that documentary aspects may also be discerned in fiction films. For another. But, as Freud once said, there are times when a cigar is just a instance, in the 1950s some French critics2r egarded feature films as quasi- cigar. Notions of condensation, displacement, or secondary elaboration documentaries about actors: a film starring Ava Gardner was seen as, are to be kept in mind as a useful way of tracking when the image of a among other things, a film about the actress Ava Gardner. There are cigar is not just a cigar, that is to say when it stands in as a symbol of some merits to this proto-modernist way of reading films as being also about other preoccupation. However, it is equally important to be able to tell the materials with which they are made, but, in practice, because of the when a cigar is just that, what brand it is, what economic circuits must reductive understanding of a film's 'materials', this remains a rather be operating for that cigar to get to that smoker in that film at that place limited approach to cinema as history. and time, and why someone such as that smoker may want to purchase A second, more sophisticated, way of dealing with cinema as history and smoke it. By attaching importance exclusively to a film's distortions, has been to examine a film as a historical account marked by emphases that is to the relations between the visible and the invisible (or repressed), and omissions that are due to state- or self-censorship, lack of money, or the approach pioneered by Ferro and Sorlin overlooks many of the psychic repression. This approach, pioneered by Marc Ferro 1988 [I9771 xvi Introduction Introduction xvii complexities that the visible (and the audible) itself involves: its direct exclusively on films (at the expense of the cinema's technological, and immedlate (or unmediated) implications, rather than its more or economic, and social dlmensions), for having relied on inadequate research less hdden associations. tools (such as personal memories of stars or of the researcher) and Questions about the relationship between films and history and the analytical categories (such as notions of 'schools', 'movements', or 'periods'), reading of films as historical documents imply that a film is inserted and for having adopted a linear model of historical 'development', when, into a social context and that its functioning as a text, its capacity to produce in reality, cultural-historical change follows far more contradictory meaning, is informed and limited by that context. The story of the study patterns. One factor in this resurgence of interest in questions of film of cinema has been marked by many attempts at grappling with the and of hstory was growing awareness of the problems of 'doing history' question of how material socio-economic arrangements shape cultural in general. As historians began to regard cinema as a historical source, production and, through culture, modes of thmking. Conceptualizations film scholars began to open their object of study to political, economic, of that interaction have informed, for instance, debates on notions of and social history (Casetti 1999: 289-91). In this context, as Kracauer's national cinema, that is to say of a cinema's connectedness with the ~ o rbkec ame the object of renewed interest, the historiographic model historical constellation that generates it and which, by addressing that pioneered by Jacobs and Kalbus came to be regarded as unproductive constellation cinematically, cinema in turn helps to shape. As Siegfried because, with its evolutionary, historicist underpinning, it forestalled Kracauer argued in 1946: 'Through an analysis of the German films, the possibility of understanding how specific economic arrangements deep psychological dlspositions predominant in Germany from 1918 to may shape cultural issues. 1933 can be exposed4spositions whch influenced the course of events In Europe, the study of cinema acquired special status in the during that time and which will have to be reckoned with in the post- aftermath of 1968, when, engagingdlrectly with the practices and politics Hitler era' (1974: v). of cultural activists, intellectuals used cinema as a platform to find better Setting out to demonstrate that there was more to cinema than a ways than were available in the study of literature for understanding machine bound to new production, models, markets, professions, and the functioning of industrial cultural practices as processes that help to economic values, Kracauer produced an account that successfully fused sustain or to disrupt the given economic dynamics governing social the industrial and national dimensions of cinema, better to understand relations. The disciplinary split that followed those debates on cinema how German films' cinematic characteristics sustained 'chspositions' led to the opening of the first film studies departments (as separate enacted in history. Over the years, however, it was the historiographic from literary studies) in universities. At the time in which 1 write, the model pioneered by, among others, Lewis Jacobs, in his The Rise of the opposite movement is taking place: medla studies, in which film is firmly American Film: A Critical History (1939), and Oskar Kalbus, in Vom Werdm suborhated to television, electronic media, andjournalism, has emerged Deutscher Filmkunst (1936), that became the norm. Jacobs's book, in and achieved institutional recognition as a ground for the formation of particular, has come to be regarded as a template for the writing of national a reserve army of labour for a limited range of (mostly) national cultural film histories. Divided into six parts, entitled 'Fade In', 'Foundations', industries.T he smdy of cinema, on the other hand, is increasingly confined 'Development', 'Transition', 'Intensification', and 'Maturity', Jacobs's to language and literature departments, where it is once again brought book chronicled both the cultural and the industrial dimensions of into line with what used to be called the 'literary sciences', that is to say cinema by relying on a linear notion of history that understood both into the realm of the 'high arts' and aesthetics. Within this disciplinary cinema and the nation to be the organic result of an evolutionary- reshuffling,t he understanding of cinema and of other media as functions indeed a maturational-trajectory. of the public sphere is made seemingly irrelevant. Indeed, film students While debates about film history date back to the 1920s, interest in are ever more insistently being urged to devote attention to the marketing the relationship between films and history underwent a significant of films, while research on cinema is fine-tuned more and more closely to resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s. To begin with, scholars began to the study of 'consumption habits'. In thls context, film authors or directors distance themselves from traditional approaches to the hstory of cinema are being 'studied' as if the concept of auteur had never been unpacked such as Jacobs's. This historiography was criticized for having focused from the humanist underpinnings that Cahiers du Cinema originally gave xviii Introduction lntroduction xix to it, while national cinemas are 'learned' by way of lists of exemplary somethng 'halfway between a textbook of aesthetics and a bookseller's directors and their most 'representative' films or, worse, their box-office catalogue' (1999a: 459). Four years later, he completed what he later hits. What such canons represent, however, is rarely asked. Vague notions described as an attempt to formulate a theory of cultural production of context are invoked, but the conceptualization of either that context that would be 'completely useless for the purposes of fascism'. or of the films' relation to it is postponed ad infinitum. National histories ~ ~mocre mhodest ly, but equally urgently, this book re-proposes a tend to be presented like series of bookmarks arranged one after the line of hstoriographc inquiry that seeks to open up the connections other, linear trajectories from birth into maturity to whch films are made between the ways in which a film is made and circulated within a given to fit, retrospectively, as the natural and necessary mirrors ('reflections') socio-economic juncture, and the film's strategies of address (film as of their time. The biggerthe box-ofice earnings, the more the film reflects discourse) as functions of that constellation. By way of an examination of the Zeitgeist, conceived as 'what people want'. the action cinema made in Bombay, I try to demonstrate the productivity This way of proceeding blocks the understanding of the relation ofa framework that may enable US better to analyse how specific interests, between a film's strategies of narration and the socio-economic context more or less consciously by hstorical agents (whether individuals that shaped, and which was in turn shaped by, the film because it fails to or as social categories) work themselves into film texts that help shape reflect, directly and critically, on the hstorian's operation-the time in our future through the filters and institutions of cultural production. which she speaks, the interests that direct hislher reading of the films, A cinema, perhaps even more directly than other industries, constitutes and the tools used for analysis. A framework is assumed for our reading its audiences while constituting itself as an industry (Hozic 2001: xv). of the films that prompts us to suppose that similar formal devices had Of the few analytical tools available within film theory, the concept of the same narrative function 'then' as they have 'now'. Fundamental genre is the most open to industrial-commercial considerations, and, to differences are overlooked in the operation of cultural forms as they are that extent, dlscussions of individual film genres can be, and often are, mobilized 'here' and 'elsewhere'. At worst, a historiographic-analytical the most exposed to the kind of instrumentalization sketched above. model patterned on the uniquely specific development of the most At worst, dlscussions about particular bundles of films are caught in a powerful film industry today, located mainly in Los Angeles, is projected contradictory tension between, on the one hand, genre as an empirically onto films that are produced and which circulate under differently given, hstorically specific set of narrative traits and, on the other, genre specific cultural-historical contingencies. In this way, the coalition of as an abstract, theoretical category. To put it another way, to identify interests sustaining that dominant, North American industrial-financial a film as belonging to a particular genre, the critic has to know what constellation is allowed to dictate the terms by which we relate to films the features of that genre are, but, equally, the critic only knows those that, while also made in the context of globally incubating (American- features by reference to films identified as constituting the genre (Tudor controlled) capital, are differently positioned within its expanding 1974: 135). Failing to resolve this conundrum, critics tend to define a operation, sometimes also critically so. Past cultural series are reduced genre retrospectively: having identified a set of narrative ingredients or to fetishes, obsolete clusters of commodities seemingly immaterial to sales points in films that are marketed under a label dictated by some the understanding of the becoming of the present that we inhabit. Their sectors of the film industry, the critic undertakes a search for similar study is instrumentalized, made conducive to the reproduction of the hgredlents in other (older or newer) films--only finally to reproduce very industrial-cultural forces whose operation we originally intended in the definition of the genre the marketing strategy that the industry to historicize. developed to promote a particular group of films at a particular time. Like the many histories of national cinemas that followed his book, There is a difference between talking about a film and talking about Jacobs inherited his linear conceptualizations of history and of cultural the ways in whch the film is sold. Much writing on individual genres series from the type of literary historiography that Walter Benjamin had tries to find coherence in the marketing categories by which bundles of attacked only a few years before in hs' Literary History and the Study of films are sold and, ultimately, projects onto the films those marketing Literature'. In 193 1,w hen he first published that essay, Benjamin described categories. But genre history can provide the conceptual space where contemporary literary history as 'a kind of applied taxonomy of taste', questions can be asked about the ways in which a cinema constitutes its xx lntroduction lntroduction xxi audiences or subjects and, through them, its conditions of existence as [genres]i ntervene between the instances of the process of subject regulation: an industry. As Christine Gledhill has written, 'in this space issues of hato f mainstream narrative and that of the individual text. Genres [elstablish texts and aesthetics--the traditional concern of film theory-intersect a regulation of the variety of mainstream narrative across a series of individual with those of industry and institution, history and society, culture and texts, organising and systematising the difference that each text represents, filling audiences-the central concerns of political economy, sociology and inhe g ap between text and system. [Glenres function to move the subject from cultural studies' (2000: 221). In and of themselves, marketing strategies, text to text and from text to narrative system, binding instances together into a of which genre is one, do speak of an economic fantasy, a preferred or constant coherence, the coherence of the cinematic institution. (1980: 49) desired horizon. A film also speaks of the specific economic constellation While Neale's seminal conceptualization of genre had the merit of of which it is a part. It is worth avoiding the practice of projecting finally opening up for film theory the possibility of tracing connections markering categories onto f h sd irectly and, in so doing, reducing a film between empirical genres and the socio-economic pressures that lend to a sales strategy while instructing spectators to read the film as 'just bundles of films their shared traits, he stopped short of specifying the that'. Instead, this book examines action cinema as a structural category nature of the regulation imposed, presenting instead generic regulation marking the site where specific social-economic factors generate cultural as one more instance of narrative regulation in general, and plugging objects configured in particular ways and featuring determinate (and the gap with vague references to 'the cinematic institution'. But a cinema, determined) modes of address. It is in such configurations that this book whether as an industry or as a series of texts, is always situated in a hstorical seeks to find the reasons why some filmmakers in certain sectors of the context. Marketing is one of many important dimensions of that context industry were moved to prioritize one selected narrative ingredient and of the institution of cinema, but it is not always a determining one. (action), as well as for the diverse ways this ingredient was mobilized at What I am concerned about here are not just the processes of industrial different times in India. transformation that led Indian filmmakers to make and market films Genres are systems for the regulation and circulation of meaning. They on the basis of the action ingredient. Rather, I am interested in the manner have a public, hstorically specific existence. The ancient Greeks devised - in which one may, as it were, reverse-engineer the historical dynamics theoretical systems whereby fictional works were divided into genres underpinning the ways in which action became (or not) a defining on the basis of mode of delivery: the lyric was a workin which only the ingredient of cinema in India at any given time. In this way, the study of author or narrator spoke; in drama only the characters spoke; while in cinema may help us to illuminate the nature of the relationship between the epic both narrator and characters could speak (Ducrot and Todorov economic and cultural priorities at specific historical junctures. How 1972: 198).A hierarchy obtained within tlus system and within the genres does a cinema produce the conditions for its own existence and growth? themselves. This is to say, genres are first and foremost modes of address What can the changes in a cinema's economic and narrative structures or delivery designed to regulate the circulation of meaning on the basis of tell us about the conditions for the sustenance of other economic sectors, given (hierarchical) social relations. Existing social relations determine and about changes in those conditions? If one dimension of hegemony who speaks to whom, about what, and in whlch way. Steve Neale was among is the ability to organize fantasies, how do films produce new social spaces the first scholars to discuss film genres as processes of systematization. and, over a period of time, participate in the causation of hstorical change? He argued that, on the one hand, genres are crucial to the film industry If, at one level, the problem lies with the ways in which the notion because 'they provide, simultaneously,m aximum regularity and economy of film genre has been theorized and used in film studies, at a more in the utilisation of plant and personnel, and the minimum degree of fundamental level, it is the models of history and of culture that have difference necessary for each individual product' to be sold (Neale 1980: tended to be deployed for the study of film genres (as also of film authors, 51-3). On the other hand, film texts consist of a weaving together of a national cinemas, and so forth) that have left important dimensions of multitude of discursive currents, each with their own semantic fields and cinema out of sight. In 'Theses on the Philosophy of History' Walter implied subject positions. According to Neale, Benjamin famously imagined history as an angel with his face turned