Cinema India: The Visual Culture of Hindi Film PDF
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ENVISIONING ASIA CINEMA INDIA The Visual Culture of Hindi Film RACHEL DWYER AND DIVIA PATEL A oO tite1l Chester A College of the University of Liverpool Library fie Le Gee ltOltl [10 /T0i1M09i0h20h6 Tl Cinema Iin 24d ia | S7e 2sm © 7 bast oN aba” a ay awl ij iGfbe eYdts Aé ENVISIONING ASIA Series Editors: Homi Bhabha, Norman Bryson, Wu Hung In the same series Fruitful Sites Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China Craig Clunas Camera Indica The Social Life of Indian Photographs Christopher Pinney China into Film Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema Jerome Silbergeld In the Image of Tibet Tibetan Painting after 1959 Clare Harris The Shogun’s Painted Culture Fear and Creativity in the Japanese States, 1760-1829 Timon Screech Hong Kong Art Culture and Decolonization David Clarke a CINEMA INDIA The Visual Culture of Hindi Film Ree ie VW Ver Ren dally VAMP AT EL I4tS iZ3© | CHESTER COLLEGE ACG No, O10 AC20s ‘ C7L ASCSa NAlo . REAKTION BOOKS DEDICATIONS Rachel: For my Bombay homegivers, Imtiaz, Maithili, Rekhi, Udita and Shaad Divia: To my grandfather, Bhanabhai S. Patel Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 79 Farringdon Road London ECIM 3JU, UK www.teaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2002 This work is published with the support of the Society for South Asian Studies Copyright © Rachel Dwyer and the Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum 2002 Rachel Dwyer and Divia Patel assert their moral rights to be identified as the authors of this book. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Series design by Ron Costley Printed in Hong Kong British Library Cataloguing in Publishing Data Dwyer, Rachel Cinema India: the visual culture of Hindi film. — (Envisioning Asia) ' 1.Motion pictures — India — History I. Title II. Patel, Divia 791.4'3'0954 - ISBN I 86189 124 5 Contents Preface,6 Introduction, 7 t Indian Cinema, 13 2 Film Style: Settings and Costume, 42 3 The Art of Advertising, 101 4 Advertising and the Communication of Meaning, 183 Conclusion2,1 5 References2,19 Select Bibliography, 232 Acknowledgements, 233 Photographic Acknowledgements, 234 Index, 23 5 Pretace This book is the result of a collaboration of two authors who have, over the last decade, witnessed the rising interest in Indian cinema and the visual culture of India. The authors’ aim is to provide a unique insight into aspects of this field of study, which hitherto has not been researched or written on in any great depth. It brings together Rachel Dwyer’s extensive knowledge of Indian cinema and Divia Patel’s expertise in Indian art and design. Thus, in chapters One and Two, Rachel Dwyer has written an overview of the history of Indian cinema, followed by an in-depth study of the visual style of films as created through sets and costumes. In chapters Three and Four Divia Patel examines the visual culture of film advertising, first from an historical perspective and then by means of a study of the greater meaning of these cinematic images and their use in a wider field. The Introduction and Conclusion are jointly written. Many Indian cities have changed their names in recent years. For this book the authors have preferred to use Bombay (for Mumbai), Poona (for Pune}, Calcutta (for Kolkatta), Madras (for Chennai) and Baroda (for Vadodara). “> Introduction ‘One of the most significant phenomena of our time has been the development of the cinema from a turn-of-the-century mechanical toy into the century’s most potent and versatile art form. In its early chameleon-like phase the cinema was used variously as an extension of photography, as a substitute for the theatre and the music hall, and as part of the magician’s paraphernalia ... Today the cinema commands the respect accorded to any other form of creative expression. In the immense complexity of its creative process, it combines in various measures the functions of poetry, music, painting, drama, architecture and a host of other arts, major and minor.’! So wrote Satyajit Ray in 1948. Less then ten years later he was to become India’s first internationally acclaimed film director. Ray’s words, however, were not an accolade to the Indian film industry, rather they were an observation of the cinemas of Italy, France, Germany and the Soviet Union. For, according to Ray, India had failed to produce anything that could match their quality. He felt that the Indian film industry needed ‘a style, an idiom, a sort of iconography of cinema, which would be uniquely and recognizably Indian.’ Influenced by these other cinemas he made his first film, Pather Panchali, for which he won an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956. Since then Ray’s distinct ‘art-house’ films, made in black and white, with their simple linear narratives conveying realism and emotional truth, have come to define, and be regarded in the west as synonymous with, Indian cinema. Yet this is not the only cinema of India. Today, more than fifty years later, India has developed many cinemas, each with its own film styles, each with its own combination of ‘poetry, music, painting ... and a host of other arts’, and of those many cinemas it is the distinctive style of the Hindi commercial cinema that is the focus of this book. Its films are criticized for their excessive length, their complicated plots within plots, their song and dance sequences, their colourful costumes, and their incongruous locations. In 1948 Ray believed that a ‘truly Indian film should steer clear of such inconsistencies and look for its material in the most basic aspects of Indian life, where habit and speech, dress and manners, background and foreground, blend into a harmonious whole’.? It is precisely these inconsistencies, however, that have since come to define the style of the Hindi cinema. Hindi cinema’s style is unique and recognizably Indian. It is deter- mined by the film sets, locations and costumes seen within the film (as well as the cinematography) and is projected beyond the screens and cinema halls through the film’s advertising and promotional material. These components constitute the visual culture of the Hindi film. Considered vulgar and kitsch by some and glamorous and trendsetting by others, this ‘filmi’ style, as it is known, permeates every aspect of Indian and Indian diasporic culture. Its ubiquitous nature is made apparent through the music that is played in people’s homes, through the clothes worn on the streets, at weddings, in nightclubs and social gatherings, as well as the profusion of cinematic images visible across the landscape, on hoardings and posters in the streets, on magazines, on television and on the Internet. Thus, rather than reflect the ‘harmo- nious whole’ that is an observation of everyday Indian life as envi- sioned by Ray, Hindi commercial cinema has become part of everyday life, part of its ‘habit and speech, dress and manners, background and foreground’. This all-pervasive visual culture is an integral part of the complexity that comprises Indian cinema and any study of it. It is the aim of this book to explore that visual culture, its production and reception, and its cultural, historic and aesthetic significance. The Hindi Commercial Cinema: Local/Global Culture Spoken largely in northern India, Hindi is the government’s designated national language and as such has become the most widely understood language across the country. The Hindi commercial cinema, although produced in Bombay, is considered to be the national cinema of India, in part because of the language in which it is produced. As such it is a prominent form of mass entertainment and is therefore distinguished from the other cinemas of India. There are, however, many other regionally defined commercial cine- mas, of which the most notable and largest in terms of production are the Telugu- and Tamil-language cinemas of South India. It is here that the cinema halls are concentrated and the largest cinema-going public is to be found. These films are rarely shown outside of their heartlands, except where Tamil and Telugu speakers have settled elsewhere in India or overseas. Similarly, the ‘art-house’ cinema, which includes avant-garde and experimental films, is also regionally defined. Here it is the Bengali cinema that has achieved a prominentsposition, largely because of Satyajit Ray, but this is followed closely by the Malayalam- language cinema of Kerala, South India. While these cinemas are inter- nationally acclaimed, primarily because they fall into a recognized school of film making, within India their appeal is restricted to a rela-
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