The subtitle of this beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated book is: "A Visual Journey through the Heart of Bollywood." With its comparison to the American film product ("Bollywood"), its implication of a pleasingly emotional ("heart") content, it nicely indicates not only the commercial ambitions of the ordinary Hindi film, but also the scope of this book itself.
The ordinary Hindi film is a product, built to satisfy a need, and it is fitting that the first of the 14 sections that make up this book should begin with an essay on publicity, and then move on to considerations of the posters, the production banners, how the credits emphasize content, and the songs and dances embedded within the film.
Film critic Deepa Gahlot well describes the Bollywood film. It is a popular cinema, its stories distantly inspired by epics and folk theater. It thus works only within set parameters. If there are no songs and dances, the film is considered an exception. And "in keeping with oft-repeated story lines, formulaic elements and audience expectations, characters usually fall within broad stereotypes."
There is the hero, epitome of goodness, strength and noble values. He may sometimes appear as an antihero, but he always upholds family values. The heroine is usually his virginal, submissive foil. She is also usually fair-skinned, wide-eyed, long-haired.
Countering these is the villain, a role that comes in two varieties. If male, he is there to represent the forces of evil that will ultimately be vanquished. If female, she is the wicked stepmother or the overbearing mother-in-law. She can also be the courtesan, the cabaret dancer, the home-breaker.
The story is constructed among such archetypes so that, no matter the film, usually more or less the same tale is perhaps to be expected.
The Hindi epic is made of similar materials, and behind these pleasant, ephemeral, didactic films loom the vast shadows of the epic poems "Mahabharata" and the "Ramayana." The influence is sometimes literal, and Marijke de Vos describes the deities involved before outlining their modern incarnations in the Bollywood product.
Just as character is purposely stereotyped, so is the structure of the film itself. Most, if not all, popular Hindi films aim toward a wedding finale, a marriage scene in which the principals are rewarded, the wicked are foiled, and conservative ambitions are satisfied.
Writer and scholar Gayatri Chatterjee estimates that more than 90 percent of all films produced in India concern love. Couple formation is central to this theme, and in most films the romantic couple ultimately marry. This means that the marriage/love scene is an indispensable link in narrative chain.
When I was once on the set of such a film, the person taking me around asked the director if he had done his wedding scene yet. Interested, I asked him what the director's film was about. He said he didn't know but that the wedding scene was generic to all cinema and usually meant that the film was almost in the can.
Such generic cinema usually reassures an audience. You know what is coming next and you will not be surprised.
In her essay on entertainment and/or escapism, Chatterjee conflates the two and suggests that they satisfy a popular urge for pleasure/happiness.
Further, she continues, they posit a utopian world where such was once possible. "Indian films portray childhood as the most important repository of perfect happiness, a golden age to be regained."
Love, which is ultimately what most Hindi films are about, creates this paradisiacal world and the simplicity of the morality creates the kind of innocence we have all lost and continue to search for.
There are many such insights in this collection of essays, but the proposition is (as the subtitle suggests) celebration. Sections are devoted to how the rest of the world came to love the Bollywood product. Tamil cinema gets an essay because of resemblances, but there's nothing for the vibrant, completely different Malayalam cinema, and India's greatest director, Satyajit Ray gets one small mention.
Visually, the book is a delight. Shaped like a movie screen, it has pages devoted to details of posters, theaters, plates emphasizing the textures of theatrical paintings, whole fields of India's colors: dusty brown, cinnabar red, olive green, velvety black. It is indeed a "visual journey."
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