The Uniqueness of Indian Cinema-Part1/4

“There is one more state in this country, and that is Hindi cinema. And Hindi cinema also has its own culture… quite different from Indian culture but it is not alien to us, we understand it.”
Javed Akhtar in ‘Talking Films’

Indian filmmakers depart from their Hollywood counterparts in different ways. Whereas Hollywood filmmakers strive to conceal the constructed nature of their work so that the realistic narrative is wholly dominant, Indian filmmakers make no attempt to conceal the fact that what is shown on screen is a spectacle, an illusion, a fiction.

A number of elements invest Indian popular cinema with a clear identity but they can rarely be considered authentic images of Indian society or reality. However, they do reflect Indian society, seen as it were, through a distorted or broken mirror. Among the distinctive features are the following:
- Indian popular films are, in most cases, not realistic and not rooted in any specific culture within India as they aspire to reach out to all-India audiences. In fact, often a great effort is made to make sure that it cannot be identified with any particular region of India.
- Acting is exaggerated as it is derived from the traditional Indian folk forms.
- Melodrama has an abiding presence in terms of plot, character and use of background music.
- The use of the camera is often flashy, drawing attention to itself. The editing too is obtrusive which sometimes stand in contrast to Western concepts of continuity.
- Characters are rarely unique individuals; they are often social stereotypes or archetypes.
- Songs and dances are crucial components of a film’s appeal. They intervene into the narrative flow, often without much justification. Thus, films are not always ‘organic’ in the Western sense but neither is there much need to make it so. This may be the reason why Western audiences resist this form of cinema, i.e. for its lack of organicity.
- Films rarely fall into genres as it is understood in case of American cinema. Rather, every film is typically a combination of different genres. Hence the concept of the masala mix or the thali meal.

Indian popular films never pretend to be wholly realistic. They are governed by conventions commonly shared between filmmakers and audiences. These conventions have evolved historically and have reached a measure of stability. Indian popular films cannot be judged by the realistic yardstick applied to Western films.

It is an open secret that Indian cinema’s greatest weakness is the screenplay. The craft of writing has rarely been taken seriously in the Indian popular cinema and this reflects in the fact that scriptwriters are usually poorly paid, if at all. That also explains the vicious circle why serious writers do not want to venture into screenwriting. All this stands in direct contrast to the way films are made in Europe or America where the screenplay is the bedrock of film financing and screenplay development is a huge industry.

Hollywood, in particular, invests huge amounts of money in developing screenplays, only a small fraction of which actually find their way to production. In India, development funding for films is rare or non-existent.

NARRATIVE:
“It is much more difficult to write a screenplay for Naseeb than for a Western or ‘art’ film, where you have a straight storyline. A commercial Hindi film has to have sub-plots and gags, and keep its audience involved with no story or logic.”
(K.K. Shukla, scriptwriter of Naseeb)

The assertion that Hindi films have ‘no story’ is sometimes confusing to those unfamiliar with the genre. “Who cares who gets the story credits. Everyone knows our films have no stories”, and, in fact, the story credits are often given to friends or relatives for tax adjustment purposes. What is meant by ‘no story’ is that the storyline will be almost totally predictable to the Indian audience, being a repetition, or rather, an unmistakable reworking of many other Hindi films, and also that it will be recognised by them as a ‘ridiculous’ pretext for spectacle and emotion. Films which really have ‘no story’ i.e. non-narrative, or are ‘just spice of life’, or have the comparatively single-stranded narratives of many contemporary European films, are considered unlikely to be successful.

“The difference between Hindi and Western films is like that between an epic and a short story.”
Javed Akhtar

There is of course good evidence that Hindi films have evolved from village traditions of epic narration, and the dramas and the characters, as well as the structure, of the mythological epics are regularly and openly drawn upon. Film-makers often insist that: ‘Every film can be traced back to these stories ‘, and even that ‘There are only two stories in the world, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.’ In fact, it is the form and movement of the narrative that tends to distinguish the Hindi films, the crux of this being that the balance between narrative development and spectacular or emotional excess is rather different.

The narrative of the Indian popular cinema is often built upon a simple opposition between good/morality and evil/decadence, and connotations of ‘traditional’ and ‘Indian’ are appended to morality, which is an ideal of social relations which includes respect for kinship and friendship obligations, destiny, patriotism and religion (and religious tolerance) as well as restrained sexuality. Evil or decadence is broadly categorized as ‘non-traditional’ and ‘Western’, although the West is not so much a place, or even a culture, as an emblem of exotic, decadent otherness.

Filmmakers are quite aware of building their narratives around terms of an opposition so basic that audiences cannot easily avoid immersion:

“Kinship emotion in India is very strong – so this element always works – that’s what ‘lost and found’ is about. It does not work so well with educated audiences who go several days without seeing their families, but it works with B and C grade audiences who get worried if they don’t see a family member by 6.30 P.M., whose family members are an important part of themselves and their experience of the world “
(K.K. Shukla, screenplaywriter)

Bibliography :
a) Indian Popular Cinema : A narrative of cultural exchange" by K Moti Gokulsing and Winmal Dissanayake
b) Talking Films : Interviews with Javed Akhtar by Nasreen Munni Kabir
c) Bollywood : The Indian Cinema Story : Nasreen Munni Kabir