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Traditional Content and Narrative Structure in the Hindi Commercial Cinema

1995; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1178940

0385-2342

Gregory D. Booth,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

The commercial films of the Indian sub-continent have had an 80 year career as one of the dominant and most distinctive features of Indian popular culture.The film industry in India is among one of the world's largest, with a combined national output of between 700 and 800 Indian films annually.Films in as many as 15 different languages are produced in a variety of regional centers including Madras, Bombay, Hyderabad, and Calcutta.Films in Hindi, the most widely understood language in the sub-continent, represent the largest percentage of the annual national output; to the extent that there is a pan-Indian film style, that style may be said to be largely defined by the commercial Hindi film.Hindi films and film stars are famous throughout India and much of south-eastern and western Asia.Mass culture in parts of Europe and Africa has also been influenced by Hindi films and film-music.The Hindi cinema is, further, one of the oldest non-Euro-American cinematic traditions in the world: The first Indian-produced feature film, Rajah Harishchandra [King Harishchandra], was released in 1913 1From their inception, Hindi sound films have consistently displayed a distinctly formulaic quality.In his discussion of Hindi cinema's value as fantasy, Sudhir Kakar has noted this feature of the genre, and it's consequent similarity to other traditional narratives:. Indian sound films began four years after the premiere of the world's first sound film in 1927 (the American release, The Jazz Singer).Although many of the points made here will have relevance for other regional genres, this study is concerned exclusively with the traditional content of commercial Hindi sound films.At the conclusion of both [Hindi] films and fairy tales, parents are generally happy and proud, the princess is won, and either the villains are ruefully contrite or their battered bodies satisfactorily litter the landscape. . . .[Also] common to both Hindi films and fairy tales is the oversimplification of situations and the elimination of detail. . . .The characters of the film are always typical, . . . the Hero and the Villain, the Heroine and Her Best Friend, the Loving Father and the Cruel Stepmother, are never ambivalent.(Kakar 1989, 29) By the late 1940s, an explicitly stated formula had developed based on two stars, six songs, and three dances.These were bound together by an intensely stereotyped plot, and performed by what often appeared to be an entire cast of character actors.Dayal (1983,(53)(54) blames extensive government controls "which permeate every facet of film making--from the initial hunt for finance, through the processes of procurement of raw stock, the production of the film, and the censor certificate from the authorities" for many of the industry's difficulties, including this perceived lack of creativity.The censorship mentioned by Dayal is second only to sometimes crippling tax-rates in drawing industry criticism of government policy.Former Indian Chief Justice and Chairman of an Enquiry Committee on Film Censorship, G. D. Khosla, asked "In a country where the lingam and the yoni are publicly worshipped and where a book on Kama Sutra has been written (sic), what will happen if a couple is shown kissing as a mark of love and affection?Surely the Ganga will not be on fire!" (Ramachandran and Venkatesh 1985, 541).Khosla's protests seem to have been in vain: Despite the omnipresence of erotically suggestive dancing and a troubling frequency of rape scenes, kissing has remained, until very recently, a rarity in Hindi cinema.One result of these difficulties is that the commercial Hindi film has often been classed among the worst escapist excesses of post-colonial capitalism.This is a common reaction from western viewers and not an uncommon response from Indians.As early as 1928, Indian films were described by the Indian Cinematograph Committee as "generally crude in comparison with Western pictures . . .defective in composition, acting and in every respect."(Armes 1987, 109) Contemporary critics often characterize the commercial Hindi output as "over-inflated and often formula-ridden," shallow commodities created for an uneducated mass audience (Armes 1987, 121).Much criticism of the Hindi cinema is supported by neo-Marxist interpretations of mass culture.Manuel (1993, 47) summarizes much recent criticism; stating that "film culture, by replicating and idealizing a capitalist, unequal, and