Bloodshed in Bollywood

Ziauddin Sardar (above) discovers that images of mindless violence in the Indian film industry aren't confined to the big screen

BOLLYWOOD is running scared. Its stock in trade images of mindless violence, blood-curdling revenge, massacres, murders and shootings have spilled over on to real life. Producers and musicians are gunned down in broad daylight. Stars are being threatened. Cinemas are ransacked and burned. The underworld that figures in almost every Hindi film has walked out of the celluloid to acquire a vice-like grip over the whole film industry.

It all began with the murder of the 'Cassette King', Gulshan Kumar, just over a year ago. Kumar was a legendary figure in Bollywood. He started out as a street vendor, selling fruit juice, and clawed his way to the top by making and selling bootleg audio cassettes. Eventually, he acquired a near-monopoly on the music dubbing industry, which meant he owned the music rights to practically everything produced in Bollywood. He was killed in a hail of bullets, just like villains in Indian films, while returning from a temple. What followed shocked the Indian film industry out of its wits. A string of prominent stars - Shah Rukh Khan, Jackie Shroff, Salman Khan, Chunkey Pandey - were interrogated, then police implicated Nadeem Akhtar, a prominent music director, in the murder. The connection between the underworld - the Mafia, the smugglers, the crime dons and the extortionists - and Bollywood is now so deep that severing it would bring the whole Indian film industry to a halt. It is all so removed from the classical period of the 50s and 60s when stars and producers were genuine artists, and movies had real stories. Things began to change in the 70s with the emergence of the 'angry young man' and the violent epic. The trend was established by Sholay (Flame), a 'curry western' modelled on The Seven Sumari. Its main exponent was Amitab Buchen whose only talent, demonstrated in Zangeer (Chain), the film that made him a star, was beating villains to pulp. Relying heavily on emotional melodrama, pretentious rhetoric, conservative values and ludicrously unrealistic plots, the Bollywood output of the 70s and 80s was designed to create instant mythologies for uncritical mass consumption. It had two main effects. Serious film makers left Bollywood in droves. As profits and star salaries escalated, so did tax on film. The Indian New Wave Cinema emerged as a revolt against the bland curries served by the popular films. Even though they are totally male-dominated, what makes popular films popular is their treatment of women. The women are always chaste. Even when they are prostitutes they are virgins. But being chaste does not stop them from being vamps or performing vulgar dance numbers: no Bollywood film is complete without the routine grind of the leading lady's pelvic gyrations. New wave directors such as Shyam Benegal and Mahesh Bhatt set out to release screen heroines from the image of chaste, decorously seductive, all singing and dancing but always submissive wives. 'New wave' projected itself as a woman's cinema and grounded itself in realism, portraying women as thinking, independent individuals trying to find their space in a patriarchal society. But realism does not speak either to the Indian soul or to Hindu mythology, though it may well describe the sordid realities that people have to live with. Indian audiences want escape - not to be reminded of the grind of their daily lives. By the early 90s, as the largely neglected new wave turned to froth and began to evaporate, Bollywood faced a new threat. The arrival of satellite and cable TV gave the Indian film industry its first real taste of competition. Bollywood responded with the blockbuster. Mostly shot in wide-screen in exotic locations, these films had not one but two or three superstars. Violence became even more graphic, dance routines more outlandish and grandiose - and costs escalated. A blockbuster costs several million pounds which, when turned into rupees, is truly astronomical. Combine this with film tax of 300% and you begin to realise the film producers' problem of raising finance. Enter the godfathers of Mumbai Mafia. As Dilip Kumar, a loved and respected actor, says "wrong people, greedy and glamour struck, with access to easy money from crime and other speculative fields have taken over. If 100 films are made in a year, 85 are flops. But these intruders continue because the industry has to go on and they alone have those kinds of funds". Dilip Kumar himself faced a death threat from a Mafia don who, unknown to him, was financing a film out of which he had walked out due to differences with the director. Over half of Bollywood's movies are now made with underworld money. In return for their financial backing, the Mafia dons demand huge profits from new films. In particular, they insist on getting all rights to the highly lucrative overseas markets. And they always make an offer you can't refuse. So far, about 200 stars and celebrities have received death threats; the police have provided many with armed guards. To keep gangsters away from their doors, producers of blockbuster films now routinely declare their new movies to be total flops. APART from gangsters, Bollywood has another enemy - the Hindu fascists running the city of Mumbai (previously known as Bombay, from with Bollywood took its name). Here too there is a deep relationship between image and reality. In a host of films during the last decade, such as Roja and Border, Bollywood has promoted violent patriotism. Hindustani (Indian), one of the 90s' most successful films, for example, glorifies fascism and vigilante violence in equal measure. India has become totally corrupt: law, order and justice have no meaning, the film argues. The only way for individuals and communities to fight what they see as corruption is to kill the corrupt. Not surprisingly, the message was warmly received by Shiv Sina, the extreme right wing section of the ruling BJP. The Shiv Sina has now set itself up as the moral guardian of the nation. A couple of months ago, it ransacked theatres showing Deepa Mehta's Fire, accusing the film of being unpatriotic and corrupt and condemning its nudity and lesbianism. With both popular blockbusters and art movies in trouble, a new type of film that combines the concerns of the arthouse with the style of popular cinema has emerged. The 'middle cinema', as it is being dubbed, replaces the old angry young man films with the angry young women films. Two films released early this year typify the trend. In Mrityudand (Death Sentence), arthouse actress Shabana Azmi is coupled with Bollywood megastar Madhuri Dixit. It is a story of three women who rise up against their pathetic husbands and meet a certain inevitable doom. While Dixit fights the conventional way, beating the villains to pulp, Azmi's character takes a more unconventional route. She has an adulterous affair with her family's hired help. When Azmi is caught after she gets pregnant, an execution is planned in the village for her and her lover. Cue bucketloads of gore and blood. In Godmother, a rip-off of Bandit Queen, Shabana Azmi plays Ramjiben, illiterate wife of Veeram, a destitute villager. Veeram leaves his village for the city life and soon gets involved with the mafia. After killing a mafia stalwart, he becomes a caste hero and is adopted by a politician. But when Veeram decides to go straight he is killed. Ramjiben adopts Veeram's mantle and rapidly climbs the ladder of mafia politics. But her macho advance comes to a halt when her son ambushes and brutally beats his Muslim rival in love. When, like her husband, the Godmother realises that she is falling into a criminal abyss, she tries to step back and ends up dead. Like Veeram, her death turns her into a martyr. Both films combine cynicism and violence with mindless idealism. Both rely on blood and carnage to do good business at the box office. But now, as stars, directors and producers in Mumbai have discovered, it is not always easy to distinguish violence in films from violence on the streets. Ziauddin Sardar is a cultural critic and editor of the journal Futures Bollywood films are increasingly being made in Scotland. Indian blockbuster Aarzoo was filmed mainly in Perth and Edinburgh. Another Scottish collaboration, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, is India's biggest ever box office success. Scotland's only film house dedicated to Bollywood movies is the Bombay Cinema in Glasgow

Copyright 1999
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.