CineBlitz,
Love and Longing in Hindi Cinema.
VJM Media: Mumbai, 2009
ISBN: 978-81-908829-0-5
US$40 (hb)
206pp
(Review copy supplied by D.K.Agencies)

Love and Longing in Hindi Cinema (hereafter LLHC) is a glossy coffee table book comprising a fabulous collection of stills from a variety of Hindi films over a period of time, a selection of quotes on the topics of love, lust and longing (a coded reference to sex which has long obsessed the gossip magazines surrounding the Bombay film industry) from the parent magazine CineBlitz by Hindi movie stars as well as scholarly essays, interspersed with advertisements for a number of brands of up-market Scotch. The latter content indicating the market for the book; the new young, prosperous urban middle classes for whom movie attendance remains an important leisure activity.

LLHC is in the tradition of the souvenir books published by the Bombay film industry since at least the 1930s, which have become an invaluable source of information for film historians seeking to piece together the tangled history of early Bollywood. However, none of the earlier publications can match the production values of LLHC. The glossiness of the book signifies the changing values of Bollywood itself – or the new Bollywood as some critics are writing; one that is more confident, cosmopolitan and infused with glamour, luxury and wealth to an unprecedented degree. The book was produced to coincide with a new publisher deciding to take CineBlitz international with British and American editions. The film mags are thus playing an important part in the transformation of Bollywood.

There were sixty-eight film magazines published in India in 1938 and the number has grown exponentially since then. Their collective fare has been celebrity, gossip and sexual innuendo, although some of the more serious journals carried important production details and critical articles and these have demonstrated a longevity that is impressive. Filmfare and Stardust are still worth reading if you want to know what’s happening in the Bombay industry although the competition from the seemingly thousands of websites devoted to Bollywood have captured much of their audience.

CineBlitz was founded in 1974. Its parent magazine Blitz was first published in 1941 and generally supported the British war effort, hence its name, a stance that opposed the Nationalist position but then Blitz was a radical tabloid publication with strong links to the political left.

However, Blitz celebrated Bombay rather than politics and was avowedly cosmopolitan in its outlook and thus opposed to the Maharashtrian chauvinists such as Shiv Sena who came to dominate Bombay politics in the 1980s. One of the highlights of the weekly Blitz was the film column of K A Abbas, playwright, scriptwriter, novelist and director who was a significant figure politically as well as culturally. So popular was Abbas’ column that the publishers decided to augment Blitz with a film magazine.

Like its many counterparts CineBlitz dealt in celebrity and gossip but at the same time published serious article. In the 1970s it was a must read, largely for the quality of its writing but also because of the cosmopolitan stance on issues that faced Bombay in the 1970s and 1980s. Not least of these were changing attitudes towards filmic representations of sexuality. Indian cinema was governed by a particularly puritanical set of codes, inherited from the British but enhanced by Congress politicians that curtailed any expression of sexuality in film. In response, Bollywood developed a series of tropes that were always read as metaphors for sex by the audience but were able to pass the censors. As Kirtana Kumar says “we have developed a native, non-western cinematic language to articulate sex and sexual arousal” (p. 28). This language included the wet sari scene, the crashing waves on the beach scenes and the incredibly erotic dancing of Helen, Queen of the Nautch Girls (who was of Anglo-Burmese ethnicity and thus able to exploit her sexuality. No nice Hindu or Muslim girl would move like Helen – or so it was argued). LLHC charts this language in an entertaining fashion.

Of particular interest are the quotes collected over the years from Bollywood stars, male and female. These quotes do two things; they chart the changing attitudes towards sexuality over time and they implicitly show that Bollywood is a patriarchal world. The changes are shown in what is actually said. In the 1970s the talk was of fidelity and marriage. In the 1980s women began to discuss their sexuality and needs and by the 1990s the stars are talking of one-night stands. In short representations shifted from portrayals of the eternal Mother India, nurturing her sons; where virginity is highly valued and female transgression severely punished to representations where partial nudity is common and women, even the ‘good’ girls partake in raunchy dances. When we look at the quotes from men we find statements like “I am a typical Indian male, of course I have double standards. I find them convenient. I have a ball with other chicks…. Bigamy! Why not? It’s a complement to womanhood” (Randhir Kapoor, 1982). Whether Kapoor actually uttered these words is open to dispute seeing that the film mags, even CineBlitz, have been know to manufacture controversy. However, other quotes reinforce what appears to have been an accepted male view of sexuality common in Bollywood since the 1920s.

The real strength of LLHC, however, is the collection of stills. They range from the 1950s to the present and include such past stars as Waheeda Rahmin, Meena Kumari, Guru Dutt, Dev Anand and many others.

Finally, one of the ongoing controversies about the representation of sexuality in Indian cinema concerns the issue of kissing in popular Indian films. It was deemed un-Indian by cultural critics and politicians in the 1930s and 1940s, as part of the attempt to demonstrate that India was culturally and historically different to the West. The erotic statues of Khajurao, among others, were dismissed as non-Indian, the product of aliens. Kissing in films became the focus of this cultural dispute and for some time Indian filmmakers avoided showing their stars actually kissing and developed elaborate choreographed moves for the actors whose faces came closer together only to slide past one another at the last moment; an erotic moment that illustrates Bazin’s notion of the asymptotic representation of reality that characterises film. Runa P Bannerjee’s chapter on kissing, however, throws into doubt many of the commonly held beliefs about kissing on the Indian screen, showing that it occurred more frequently than poplar memory concedes.

While not a scholarly book LLHC is a welcome addition to the literature on Indian cinema because it provides the basis for further critical exploration of one of the ongoing concerns of Indian cinema; how to portray sexuality in film.

Brian Shoesmith,
Edith Cowan University, Australia.

Created on: Monday, 23 August 2010