India After Gandhi (125 page)

A sixtieth-birthday tribute to Bachchan spoke of how his career had ‘traversed emotions and generations’.
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Perhaps the only other figure to have done that successfully is the singer Lata Mangeshkar. She too had a gifted father, the singer, actor and composer Dinanath Mangeshkar. He diedin 1942, when Lata was only thirteen but having spent the better part of her life learning music from her father. As the eldest of five siblings, Lata very quickly became the family’s main breadwinner. She sang at first in Marathi films, but soon moved to the more popular and better-paying Hindi arena.

Lata Mangeshkar’s first song as a playback singer was recorded in
1947. By the end of the decade she had become the best-known singer in India. As well as the most sought-after, for no producer or director could think of a film without a song by her. In a career spanning five decades she has recorded more than 5,000 songs.
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Before Lata Mangeshkar, most women singers in films possessed husky voices. Lata’s veered towards the higher end of the scale. Shrill to some, her singing was to others the very embodiment of soft femininity. It soon became the best-known voice in India, the ‘voice to which the road-side vendor in Delhi has transacted his business, the long-distance trucker has sped along the highway, the Army
jawan
in Ladakh has kept guard at his frontier bunker and to which the glittering elite have dined in luxury hotels’.
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Her appeal cut across both class and political orientation. The nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru was an admirer, not least because Lata made famous asong (‘Ae Méré Vatan Ké Logon’) saluting the martyrs who had fallen victim to the Chinese invasion in 1962. But so, much later, was the chauvinist Bal Thackeray, who upheld the little lady as a splendid exemplar of Marathi womanhood.

One feature of the film industry has been its capacious cosmopolitanism. Parsi and Jewish actors have rubbed shoulders with Hindus and Muslims and Christians. Some of the greatest film directors have been from Bengal or south India.

A very representative example is one of the most successful films ever made,
Sholay
(1975). Its director was a Sindhi, while its lyricist and one male lead were Punjabi. Other male leads were from Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and North-West Frontier Province respectively. (Another, who was dropped at the last moment, was from Sikkim.) Of the two female leads, one was a Tamil, the other a Bengali domiciled in Madhya Pradesh. The music director was a Bengali – from Tripura.
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It was not just in Bombay that the film industry was socially inclusive. In the Madras studios of the Tamil director S. S. Vasan the ‘make-up department was first headed by a Bengali who became too big for a studio and then left. He was succeeded by a Maharashtrian who was assisted by a Dharwar Kannadiga, an Andhra, a Madras Indian Christian, an Anglo-Burmese and the usual local Tamils.’ As one of Vasan’s scriptwriters was to recall, ‘this gang of nationally integrated
make-up men could turn any decent-looking person into a hideous crimson-hued monster with the help of truck-loads of pancake and a number of other locally made potions and lotions.’
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Above all, the film industry provided generous refuge for India’s largest and often very vulnerable minority, the Muslims. Many of the best lyricists, as already noted, were Muslim; so were some popular scriptwriters. Some of the best male singers were Muslim. So too were some top directors and, even more strikingly, some top actors. When, shortly after India’s first general election, a Bombay magazine asked its readers to choose their favourite actor, a Muslim man polled the most votes, a Muslim woman the second most.
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Interestingly, both had assumed non-Muslim names – Yusuf Khan becoming the Hindu-sounding Dilip Kumar and Fatima Rashid taking the neutral pseudonym Nargis (after the Narcissus flower). As Muslim actors and actresses became more established, they no longer needed to resort to such subterfuge. A great star of the 1950s and 1960s was the actress Waheeda Rahman. Much later, in the 1990s, the top male stars in Hindi films were three Muslims with a common surname, Khan.

The novelist Mukul Kesavan writes of his Delhi childhood that in his school and home he never came across a Muslim name. Then he adds, ‘The only place you were sure of meeting Muslims was the movies.’
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Notably, the content of the movies also reflected their presence and contribution. Because so many scriptwriters and lyricists were Muslim, the language of the Bombay film – spoken or sung – was quite dissimilar to the stiff, formal, Sanskritized Hindi promoted by the state in independent India. Rather, it was closer to the colloquial Hindustani that these writers spoke, a language suffused with Urdu words and widely understood across the Indian heartland.
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Again, while most films featured Muslim characters, these were ‘rarely shown in an unfavourable light. They were honest friends, loyal soldiers, good policemen, bluff Pathans, friendly uncles.’
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There remained one significant taboo – against romantic relationships between Hindus and Muslims. This taboo was partially breached by the 1995 hit film
Bombay
, which showed a Hindu boy falling in love with a Muslim girl. However, the reverse was not conceivable: no film could go so much against the grain as to show a Muslim man marrying a Hindu girl.

In the world of Indian film Muslims have occupied an honourable place. The leading Malayalam film actor Maamooty remarks that ‘I have been in this business for the last two decades and a half and I don’t
remember even a single occasion in which my Muslim identity stood in my way.’
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Would that we could say the same about other spheres of life in independent India.

For ‘an Indian world full of strife, tension and misery’, writes one critic, the popular film provided ‘just the right escapism the country needed’.
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While most films took their viewers into a fantasy world, there was also a significant strain of realism. In the first years of Independence, three filmmakers in particular (partially) bucked the populist trend. These were Bimal Roy, whose
Do Bigha Zamin
(1953) sensitively portrayed the sufferings of the rural poor; Mehboob Khan, whose
Mother India
(1957) interwove the story of a heroic mother with the story of a new nation coming into its own; and Guru Dutt, who in a series of remarkable films explored the darker side of life, as experienced especially by artists shunned by a crassly materialistic society.

The pre-eminent representative of an ‘alternative’ tradition of film making in India, however, was the Bengali giant Satyajit Ray (1921–92). The son and grandson of writers, Ray himself was very variously gifted. An accomplished short-story writer in Bengali, he was knowledgeable about classical music (Western and Indian), and for many years made a living as an artist and designer. His debut film,
Pather Panchali
, released in 1955, was the first of a trilogy that followed a boy named Apu from childhood into manhood, in the process delineating, with great sensitivity and skill, social changes in the Bengal countryside. Over the next three decades he made virtually a film a year, these with one exception all set in Bengal. Several were based on novels by Rabindranath Tagore, by whose scepticism regarding nationalism and aesthetic sensibility Ray was deeply influenced. He received an Oscar for ‘lifetime achievement’ in 1992; in the same year, he was awarded India’s highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna.

Ray’s films dealt with an astonishing range of subjects.
Jalsaghar
(1958) was a paean to music,
Mahanagar
(1963) a portrait of his own city, Calcutta;
Nayak
(1966) an exploration of an actor, his art and his constituency;
Aranyer Din Ratri
(1970) a juxtaposition of the worlds of the urban middle class and the forest-dwelling tribal. Other films deal with politics without being ‘political’; one was set during the Swadeshi
movement of 1905–6, another at the time of the Naxalite movement of the late 1960s. He made some marvellous children’s films, based on stories written by his grandfather, as well as several detective films based on his own novels. In his films women play strong and often pivotal roles; they are intelligent, artistically gifted and, above all, independent.
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Satyajit Ray was an iconic figure in his native Bengal, his films discussed in newspapers and magazines and in trains and buses as well. He was also greatly admired abroad; his films were regularly shown at Cannes and other festivals and his work was handsomely praised by Akira Kurosawa and other peers. Within India, however, he could attract criticism, as when the actress Nargis alleged in Parliament that he show cased Indian poverty to attract attention in the West. The charge was petty, not to say petulant; it was probably provoked by Ray’s own less-than-flattering remarks about the Hindi film.

Among Ray’s distinguished contemporaries were two fellow Bengalis – Ritwik Ghatak (1925–76) and Mrinal Sen (born 1923). Both were influenced by the state’s communist movement, and their films were often sharply political, dealing with such themes as peasant protest, Partition and the great Bengal Famine of 1943. The leading radical film makers of the next generation were Shyam Benegal (born 1934) and A door Gopalakrishnan (born 1941), whose movies foregrounded such issues as the reform of the caste system and the prudery and hypocrisy of the Indian middle class.
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Known sometimes as ‘art cinema’ and at other times as ‘parallel cinema’, the movies made by Ray, Ghatak, Benegal and company had a subtlety of method and an attention to social realism that distinguished them from the escapist fantasies of the formulaic Bombay film. Although few art films were successful at the box office, they were acclaimed by critics, and won a galaxy of prizes at film festivals. And they often had a long after-life, circulating and being shown at film clubs – often run by college students – in the major cities of India and abroad.

Outside of the cinema, Indians have also taken succour in various forms of ‘live’ entertainment. One such is theatre. The subcontinent was home to a rich tradition of classical Sanskrit drama; besides, each region had its own form of folk theatre, where dialogue was usually interspersed
With song and dance. Known as
jatra
in Bengal,
natya
in Maharashtra, and
Yakshagana
in Karnataka, these folk forms skilfully adapted to the modern world. The costumes remained traditional, but the themes of the plays now squarely addressed the debates of the time – whether women’s liberation, the reform of caste or the conflict between economic development and environmental sustainability.

The creation of linguistic states gave a fresh fillip to regional theatre. They now had a ‘captive’ audience, so to speak, thirty or forty million speakers of the language in which the plays were performed. New groups and movements took shape, working within the ambit of the linguistic state but with an eye open to the wider world.

Among these groups was Ninasam, established in 1949 by an areca nut farmer named K. V. Subanna in his native village in north Karnataka. Subanna studied at the University of Mysore, where he was inspired by his teacher, the poet Kuvempu (K. V. Puttappa), to combine a life of farming with that of artistic creation. On returning home to Heggodu, he first started a theatre group, followed, in time, by a newspaper, a publishing house, a film club, a drama school and a full-fledged repertory company.

Fifty years after it started, Ninasam is thriving, run now by Subanna’s son K. V. Akshara, himself a graduate of the National School of Drama and of Leeds University. Ninasam organizes ‘culture camps’ in which peasants and artisans interact with distinguished scholars from all over the world. But their main activity remains the theatre. Ninasam runs a full-fledged drama school, many of whose graduates then join their travelling repertory.

Every year, during the annual culture camp in Heggodu, three plays are premiered at an auditorium named for the Kannada writer and polymath Shivarama Karanth. The playsare all performed in the local language; one is usually an
original
Kannada play, the second a translation of a play written in another Indian language, the third a translation of a classic Western work. Thus, on successive days, the village audience might see plays by, for example, Girish Karnad, Mohan Rakesh and Anton Chekhov. These treats are not restricted to Heggodu; after being premiered there, the plays are thentaken by the Ninasam repertory to different towns and villages in the state.
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In an average year the repertory performs around 150 plays before audiences totalling some 300,000 people, the bulk of which are rural and
small-town folk. And ‘so you found farmers who grew areca, rice and sugarcane in daytime turn themselves into connoisseurs of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Molière and Ibsen at night’.
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Another innovator who has successfully blended folk with classical forms is the director Habib Tanvir. A product of the radical Indian People’s Theatre Association of the 1940s, Tanvir later studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London before returning home to his native Chattisgarh. There he worked with local singers and actors to create a series of superb plays in which song and dance were used to satirize the petty corruptions of the village elite and the more brutal corruptions of the state. His repertory consisted chiefly of local actors, who spoke in the local dialect. Yet their skill allowed them to present their director’s ideas to audiences well beyond Chattisgarh itself.
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