Indian Film Books
Gayatri Chatterjee, Mother India. London: BFI Publishing. 2002.
ISBN: 0 85170 917 6, 96pp, £8.99 (pb)
Rachel Dwyer, Yash Chopra. London: BFI Publishing. 2002.
ISBN: 0 85170 875 7, 202 pp, £13.99 (pb)
(Review copies supplied by the British Film Institute)
The publication of both of these books coincided with the “Imagine Asia: a celebration of South Asian film” event, held in London in 2002. The highlight of the celebration was an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum that displayed posters and screened loops of significant popular Indian films. The significance of this exhibition lies in the fact that Indian film in the Western imagination is no longer synonymous with the work of Satjayit Ray. Now we can recognise and celebrate the cinema of excess that constitutes the Indian popular film that is characterised by complex narrative, song and dance, riotous colour schemes and melodrama. Increasingly Indian popular film is referred to as masala fillum; spicy, mixed, piquant, full of action and movement. In short the Indian popular film not only mixes genres – it transcends them. The two books under review provide considerable insight into how this occurs.
Mother India deals with a seminal film first screened in 1957 and continuously thereafter in a variety of locations and comprises a brief acknowledgements section followed by a long a detailed analysis of the film that provides production details, scene and textual analysis as well as considerable contextual materiel. It’s difficult for a Westerner to comprehend the significance of this film for Indian audiences. It is in part social realist text and part mythological, drawing upon deeply held cultural beliefs about Indian femininity and motherhood. It may also be read as a post-colonial text, rebutting the infamous book Mother India by the American journalist Katherine Mayo, published in 1927 that attacked Indian social beliefs and structure as barbaric and uncivilised, focusing on child marriage, sati and the inferior role of woman, especially widows in traditional Hindu society. In Mayo’s book the title is ironic. Mother India here is a burden and barrier to social progress. These accusations still reverberated in the 1950s, in the post-independence period. In the film the title is entirely positive. Here Mother India is the repository of culture, metonymic of India as a whole, sustaining and strong. Chatterjee makes this very clear in her excellent analysis of the film.
Chatterjee sees the film as an open text, available to a multiplicity of readings. Consequently she takes us through the production details, provides a detailed discussion of the director, Mehboob, but doesn’t ignore the other key technicians crucial to the production of an Indian film – the scriptwriters and dialogue writers, the cinematographer and musical director. She also discusses with insight the cultural context of the film as well as engages in textual analysis.
The film under discussion was produced in a transitional period at the end of the “heyday of the Bombay studio” and the rising dominance of the freelance producers and directors. Mehboob is a key figure in this era. Basically the 1940s and 1950s were the period of secular film in the Indian context, mirroring the Nehruvian project of creating and maintaining a secular state based on a clearly defined constitution that recognised all of the religions and communities of India without privileging any one. Mehboob and Nargis, the main actor, were a devout Muslim and liberal Muslim respectively. Most of the other key technicians and players were Hindus but together they produced a film that was both profoundly Hindu in its culture and secular in its aspirations. No mean feat given the immediate post-independence trauma of partition.
The greatness of the film lies in its ability to appeal to all sections of the South Asian community. It is very much a film of its time but also it seeks to transcend these limitations. Chattrejee makes all of these points well. She writes clearly and with great sensitivity. You can screen Mother India and give the book to students to read with confidence. Their understanding of the film will be enhanced. Finally, Chatterjee is a very modest author. After providing the best exegesis on the film that I know of she immediately draws the reader’s attention to the partiality of her account. Hopefully, the book will encourage others to undertake the sort of in-depth analysis Chatterjee calls for.
Rachel Dwyer’s Yash Chopra is another important addition to the growing body of work on Indian cinema available in the west. In many respects it is significantly different from the Chatterjee book but, on another level, there are important intersections. Both authors see their respective filmmakers as auteurs, although not excessively. They both present the filmmakers as representative of their times, able to articulate deeply held collective social views. Both are filmmakers who revel in excess and melodrama, although Mehboob was also drawn to a form of social realism. Both filmmakers were masters of the medium, with a clear vision for film that they expressed in their respective texts. For Dwyer, Chopra explores in his films the new middle class sensibility that has emerged in India since the 1970s. Mehboob drew his inspiration from the past; Chopra is very much a creature of the present.
The book is organised both thematically and chronologically into seven chapters. Chopra has produced twenty films in a thirty-eight year career. Many of them, such as Daag (The Stain, 1973) and Darr (Fear, 1993) are considered as seminal texts of the post-studio Bombay filmmaking tradition. Chopra, in many respects, epitomises the post-Independence Punjabi freelance filmmakers who have dominated the national screen with their popular Bombay Hindi films. However, as Dwyer shows, being a freelancer in the Bombay industry is fraught, and success comes with the creation of an effective ensemble of actors and film technicians. Chopra has been particularly successful with his actors, musicians and singers. The credit lists for the films (provided in an appendix) are a veritable who’s who of modern Indian cinema and include Amitabh Bachchan, Lata Mangaeshkar, Asha Bhosle (great playback singers), R. D Burman (musical director) and Waheeda Rahman and Saeed Jaffrey (actors) to mention a few.
What really interests Dwyer, however, is the later body of Chopra’s work, films that she characterises as romantic films. This interest arises out of Dwyer’s earlier work on the emerging urban middle classes that have created its own aethetic traditions that Chopra so neatly captures in his films such as Kabhi Kabhie (Sometimes, 1976) and Silsila (The affair, 1981). These films display a new aesthetic sensibility explore in women’s style and fashion, location and colour. Chopra mirrors the changing aspirations of the new middle class, a case that Dwyer makes convincingly.
Dwyer’s work on film and the new Indian middle class is important and provides us with fresh ways of thinking about popular Indian film that goes beyond the earlier accounts that wanted to dismiss them as formulaic, trivial and unimportant. Dwyer shows otherwise in her study of Yash Chopra. The organisation of the book, the biographical details and the production and contextual materials are all excellent. Where the book fails is in its plot summaries of the complex narratives that drive the Chopra films. Given the nature of the text this is not surprising but it is a distraction. This point aside, Yash Chopra like Mother India is a welcome addition to the literature of Indian film. We can only hope that the BFI continues to imagine Asia.
Brian Shoesmith,
Edith Cowan University, Australia.
Created on: Friday, 30 April 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Apr-04