3 Idiots , or more

3 Idiots  , or More?

Genetically Modified 

Cinema

                 It is a recent thing. The film 3-Idiots was much in the news and people were raving about it. In that atmosphere, it was reported that the film`s producer, director and its hero Aamir Khan were received by the Union Cabinet Minister for Human Resource Development, Kapil Sibal, to discus how to make the national education system more sensitive and innovation-friendly. It could have been just the usual publicity seeking by both the sides, or it could have been the usual wangling for Padma Shri or Entertainment Tax waiver, etc but something in this bit of news kept troubling me for weeks. There was something very odd.

I went and saw the film. It is about how a bright, original-thinking boy fought the soul-deadening engineer- churning I I T type institution's System and in the end won, in every sense. Fine . But the nagging sense of some oddness did not go away.

In the height of early Raj Kapoor's Gorkyesque social-realism days he was never invited by a Finance or the Labour Minister to discuss the economy or the employment situation. While he was a great star, Amitabh Bacchan was never invited by a Home Minister to discuss crime or smuggling. Such a thing was just not thinkable. Awards, acclaim etc. was another matter, okay, but not this. Something new had happened with 3 Idiots . What?

  I got it finally . Since it has been insidiously unfolding and not happening with a bang it has been difficult to spot, but today it is there on newspaper pages. A Cabinet Minister and Aamir Khan smirking at each other, reforming education. It is this: the brazen camp feeling , a teenagerish cosiness , and a fullblown ideological collusiveness between the national power structure and Bollywood. This is  what was troubling me.

Those who know or care about Indian cinema will notice how astonishing this is , and how it is a profound and historic about-face with portents for the future. Let us see a bit, how historic.

Since 'Raja Harishchandra', the greats of Indian Cinema like Agha Hashr Kashmiri, Sohrab Modi, Dada Phadke, etc. were making films not for narcotic entertainment but – in bald terms --  for catching and fanning the peoples` revolt against  British Colonialism. It is not remembered today, but film censorship in India was carried out by Bristish Army Officers, and even today the substance and style of the Indian Cinematograph Act retains the compulsions of those birth-pangs --  cut this scene, omit this dialogue, change this angle, and so on. The dialogue writers of the those  days used to introduce figures of speech and colloquialisms to ridicule the British which the Hindustani-trained firangi army captain on major sitting in the cinema hall could not catch. Like much else they learnt from India, the British Army officers eventually learnt to interpret the cinema by the tone of laughter evoked in the audience, or the undertone of anger in it. These are not isolated incidents of personal bravery. By now enough historical research material has emerged to establish that in the decades leading up to independence the best of Indian cinema was at war with the colonial rulers in a hundred ways – as a part of the peoples' national movement. Far from cozying up,  indeed. 

 

And it was certainly not merely a PR-ish accompaniment to Congress` national freedom movement which was actually an usurpation by the bourgeoisie of a much deeper peoples' churning which had started around 1857 in response to the colonial onslaught. It was not even a middle-class safe caper like clean-environment, anti-aids, pro-wildlife, and suchlike campaigns. Cinema was the actual reflection of the mood and desires, and dreams, of the working masses. In films they had finally found their own medium, founded as it was on their "chawannies" much like tu'penny theatre goers of Shakespeare's times. The very forces which gave a 20^th century technological boost to the colonizing economic interests in exploiting the labouring masses had also produced the new technological art of cinema which, based as it was on their hard-earned chawannies as no other art had hitherto been based, gave to the  masses the medium of resistance, rallying, and revolt against those very forces . This deeper quest, this larger undertaking of Indian cinema was proved in its evolution after 1947. 
 

In that golden quarter-century till 1970s, what was the essential magic spell of Dilip Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, and others? What were the stories played out by them, on which their mass audience showered chawannies totalling billions of rupees every year? All those stories were, in reality, variations around one story: a peasant youth, or the educated son of peasant parents, comes to realize his dreams and destiny in the promising and wealthy city; but the tawdry realities of the rich man`s city nearly break his heart and courage; and he is saved body and soul from doom by the decent values he had brought with him – helped along by an unspoilt girl. Film after film this was the story. This was the story the masses wanted to see; because in their own lives they themselves were not, unlike their heroes , wining the battle . Cinema showed hope, post 1947, while actual lives were not quite improving , except for the rich.The underlying spirit of the period was:

apney liye jeeye to kya jeeye;

tu jee, ai  dil, zamaney ke liye.

(what is life, if lived only for oneself;

O heart, live for the whole world)

      Cinema, better than other arts, does indeed reflect the mind of the society. But it is not the reflection of a plain mirror , as is assumed by totali tarian regimes like Nazi fascism, Sino/Soviet communism, or today's American militarism. It is more complex -- like reflection from inner surfaces of a prism or, better still , like an ensemble of prisms: like a diamond !  It reflects what is , what is not, and what ought to be --  all at once. There is nothing magical in this. Society does nothing without a purpose. It makes agriculture, military, medicine… It makes arts – to see itself, at present and in future; Cinema does it best, far better than other arts and soothsayers.

      By the onset of 1970s that gleaming, great era of Shriman 420, Naya Daur, Hariyali Aur Raasta, Madumati, Pyasa, Kala Pani, Aan, Anari had vanished; it was shown up – as Time does , alas --  as innocence, and fantasy. Even today that whole era of black and white films shines and sparkles in memory and imagination because it was made of hope and good faith; while the later technicolour films, also now past, evoke not beauty and brightness but somberness , anger.

      A quarter of a century passed after India became free. The generation of "midnight  children" came on to its own in the 1970s. And what did it find? The country did not grow enough food to feed itself, the poor remained poor and without prospects, the dreams of a good life after throwing off the firangis had evaporated. When the people expressed their disapproval through the admittedly flawed mechanism of elections, the rulers went so far as to abandon the constitution itself and turn its armed power on to its own citizen --  bared its fangs, like the firangis.

        Not unexpectedly, Indian films abandoned its nice heroes. It was the time of "the angry young man". Amitabh Bacchan, otherwise a ham actor, spoke for the people in Sholay (fire ), Coolie (labourer ), Zanjeer (chains ), Roti Kapda Aur Makaan (food , clothing, shelter ) , Don ( mafia chief ) , Muqaddar Ka Sikander (master of destiny), Deewar ( barrier wall ), Naseeb ( fate ) … The titles of the films speak for themselves. The young hero, by now quite uprooted from the village life, and thwarted by the System at each step, now has no option but to take up arms himself and, propelled with anger and frustration, to fight and eventually defeat or kill the representatives of the System. Film after film, for the next two decades, this story unfolded in goriest of detail -- exposing in stark dramatic excellence independent India`s comprehensive and systemic corruption in the form of the anti-people collusion of politicians, judges, policemen, gangsters, businessmen.

      Those days it was difficult to judge, but looking back today, it is amazing that scores of "mainstream", "box-office", films were so astonishingly clear and bold in their exposes and so accurate in diagnosis ! All actors like Vinod Khanna, Shatrughan Sinha, Mithun Chakraborty, had to follow the Bacchan mould; all script writers, dialogue writers, directors had to bend to the needs of their chawanni audience -- bend gratefully.

The "parallel cinema" of this period with its academic, constipated, political consciousness has been much talked about and it is okay that this should be so; but serious scholarly attention is yet to be paid to the vulgar, mainstream, bollywood's much sharper and more sustained political critiques in the 1970s and 80s. Still based on its chawanni mass audience, Indian cinema could not but reflect these masses -- of course, reflect variously. The spirit of the times was in the song:

rotey huwey aate hain sab,

hanstey huwey jo jayega

muqaddar ka sikander

wo kahlayega.

(everyone comes

into the world weeping;

he who goes away laughing

will be called Alexander of Destiny.)

                 Political analysis of modern India is now slowly beginning to grasp that 1975 is a date as important as 1857 and 1947, if not more. This land`s first national consciousness – yes, historically first -- incubating in a colonial oppressive regime reached adolescence by 1857 and hurtled onto adulthood in 1947, by which time people saw themselves as a people for the first time . Made of a transient amalgam of basic religious instincts, signages of the indigenous tradition of self- sacrificing sainthood, and shrewd dealmaking hunches of a commercial lawyer, Mohandas Gandhi's charisma had managed to put together a consensus of classes -- which he handed over to the big business in 1947.

      But nation building required if not a true vision then a degree of sophistication or deep cunning which was beyond the ruling elites.  By 1975 the Indian dirigisme-regime had collapsed and the fig leaf was wrenched off and the masses beguiled by Gandhi saw -- what they had a foreboding of , all along -- that not only they had been betrayed but that their apparent inclusiveness was a sham all along. In Rousseau's sense the social contract was breached, torn asunder by 1975. The Indian dream --  the currently popular   term “ Idea of India”--  nursed for over a century and half was shattered.

This is not the occasion for it but most of India's subsequent political developments can be traced from this watershed of disillusionment -- failure of Janata govt to indict Indira Gandhi regime, separation of the regional satraps of Congress by morphing into "regional parties" of today, surge in separatist movements, shift towards "techno-managerial" solutions in policy spaces, reversion to foreign–reliant economic policies, coalition govts, attempts to disperse the masses by Mandal ( caste ) and Kamandal ( communal ) politics, recourse to jingoistic, or cultural nationalism, serious criminalization of legislature, and so on. In short, politics of social  apartheid. And Indian cinema showed it all, loud, but clear.

In a sense all films are documentary films.  The fourth dimension of films is of documenting the times after their first three dimensions -- story, money, and public ratings -- have had their being. And as time passes, this fourth dimension is nearly all that is bequeathed to posterity and collective memory. The record of a nations` films is perhaps its best historical record , like a time-machine for the past .

The gigantic tectonic shift underneath Indian society initiated on the 20^th century Plassey of 1975, and which is still unfolding, can be clearly seen mirrored in the roles Amitabh Bacchan was to play from the 1970s to 1990s. Starting as underclass characters of a labourer, petty pick-pocket, coolie, mineworker, goonda, etc. in Zanjeer (1973), Deewar (1975), Sholay (1975), Don and Muqadder ka Sikander (1978), Coolie (1982), he gradually shifts during these 20 years to take opposite roles of a mafia don, police commissioner, military colonel, politician, and similar estabilishment figures in the 1990s, promptly loses public esteem, and becomes an MP and, later  an actual corporate figure ! 180 degrees.

The native political hesitation during this period of the Indian State , which had started distancing itself from the masses since 1975, vanished after it got the signal of an omen it had been waiting for : collapse of the soviet union in 1989. Promptly, in the Budget speech of 1991 the then unelected finance minister and today's unelected prime minister announced the ideological turnaround. "Time has come", he declared in the India`s parliament , "to unleash the animal spirits of the Indian economy".  Mohandas  Gandhi's concern for the "poorest of the poor" which had made Indian State embrace a shade of Keynesian welfare-statism -- and which the corporate intelligentsia called "socialism" just as they are doing to Obama's social policies today — was thus officially jettisoned by the newly unleashed  animal spirits of corporate tycoons -- homegrown and foreign. The State was now openly for the "rich and the richest". The concern for the poor is only for providing a social "Safety Net"-- safety of the rich. This  has certainly been an historic political turnaround ! 180 degrees.

At this turnaround Indian Cinema too, like all other national forces, had to make a choice .  It did so . It abandoned its genetic role of siding with the masses and made a Faustian pact. It turned coat and sold its soul to the Indian State in return for untold wealth, Oscar awards and darbari oomph. For doing this, the film industry -- now in the hands of sons and daughters of its midnight children -- had to renegotiate its material umbilical cord with the chawanni masses. It did so by adopting , like other industries in India , the American business model: of multiplex-based sale .

  The technology for multiplexes had been around for nearly half a century ; the first commercial multiplex was set up in Canada in 1957: the Elgin Theatre, Ottawa. In USA and the western world the multiplex mode of cinema distribution became the norm during 1970s. India had to wait till mid 1990s for this shift away from chawanni audience. The meanest multiplex in India charges Rs. 100 per ticket, well above US$ 2 per day – the global poverty norm. Alongwith cine-multiplexes came satellite cable- television , not to mention malls , mobikes , and mcdonalds. The vexed question of plagiarism , which was essentially the poors' revenge, was solved by selling TV rights of films to cable-TV after the first two/three weeks of simultaneous release in 2000 or more screens (which collected the first and main catch of gross cash – the plagiarists can jolly well come later and pick the carcass ). The decisive link with the masses was broken , and in Indian film space the apartheid was complete -- materially and spiritually.

And what does the Brave New World of "animal spirits" look like? Forever- teenage spoilt brats of Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and Aamir Khan addicted to and circumscribed by popcorn and ice-cream; equally at home in locales of Trafalgar Square, Brooklyn Bridge, Singapore, and Ambi Valley; sexy babes like Kajol, Kareena Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, Bipasha Basu, forever affecting early teenage innocence with giant polystyrene hearts, stuffed toys, and greeting-cards paraphernalia, preferably set amidst laden shelves of K-marts, ready to break into tarty , seductive lap dances ; squeaky-clean "international" stories in which there are no roots to any nation, culture, or class, and if there is any conflict -- for most stories have some conflict -- it is purely personal or "psychological"; new breed of dexterous Cinema Academy trained directors who know the craft inside out and who miss nothing, grasp nothing, equally "at home" in all genres; music represented by uniform tunes of likes of K.R. Rahman which are clever, ethnic versions of international muzak -- equally suitable for a romantic situation, opening ceremony of some sports tournament, inauguration of some business project, or marriage of the offspring of some Forbes list tycoons (where Khans and Katrinas also "perform" as a sideline).

There have been notable "reforms", yes , and I am not sneering at them. Film direction skills have improved manifold and most films are well mounted , crisp, grand, and even slick by any standards. Art direction has had a revolution: what Bansi Chandragupta of Satyajit Ray did painstakingly out of personal genius , today`s art-direction graduates do as a matter of course. Shooting schedules are exactingly managed, and are rarely thrown out of gear by the stars` loves, breakups, boozings , or breakdowns – except for the shrewdly timed and carefully scripted TV-friendly "scandals" jointly orchestrated by the stars` and producers' publicist companies. Music  is no longer controlled by half of a half dozen music-directors or singers -- there is a bewildering variety now; moreover the music itself has substantial intake of folk forms, as also international pop. Finally, stars are no longer mysterious, tantalizing recluses, but are professional, accessible in TV Shows, commercial ads, blogs, SMS, and twitter; they are ready to shed all mystique and sell hairoil, tyres, cement, and biscuits, and also "perform" at weddings and parties of the rich -- for a fee. Much of Indian film industry has emancipated itself from the old, feudal, gharanabazi, and has become capitalistically rational.

Although I wish it was all much, much more fraught and chancy. I would like my stars to be seen only shining in the dark and not available as daylight merchandise. I would wish they had wrenching, calamitous passions, awe-inspiring love affairs, breakups leading to extremes of murder, suicide or escape into Himalayan monasteries, upsetting all rational planning by mice and men. I wish films were full of foreboding, portents, magic, and metamorphoses. But, this is only me: please ignore this little paragraph.

What are the stories being told now ? Lagaan (2001), Devdas (2002) Koi Mil Gaya (2003), Veer Zara (2004 ), Rang De Basanti (2006), Lagey Raho Munna Bhai (2006), Dhoom (2006), Om Shanti Om (2007), Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), 3 Idiots (2009) are the top grossers. There is no pattern . Doomed to Sartre's "infinite choice" by delinking from the chawanni masses and linking to 15% middleclass India, cinema has reached a new , liberated, neo-Protean space where all stories can "work" --  although there can be no silver or golden "Jubilees" anymore.

    Having hitched its wagon to the new animal spirits State, Indian cinema too, like all other economic activities and policy-impulses now , is  beholden to the 15% middle/upper class , urban audience considered necessary and sufficient by the global business think tanks. Take the Devdas (2002). Here is one slick, post-modern deconstruction par excellence , but the film has no gravitas , only spectacle . The irony is strange. Post colonial societies like India's, because of its class-composition, pass directly from pre-modern quagmires to post modern seamlessness without ever touching modernity. Jai Ho!

    Okay, But in this new deal with the Manmohanist Indian State what do the film have to deliver ? What should it reflect, now that they are not of the masses ? What is its assigned function? There is one , and it is admittedy a big thing, in return for the Faustian sale of its soul. It is: creation of a viable ideology for the 15% elite of India.

    In the initial years of 1990s it was enough for Shah Rukh Khan in a film to have no clear profession and, after working through the emotional / filial tangles with the Kajol, or Rani, etc. (without fistfights: the staple clinchers of older heroes!) , to walk into a foreign sunset to an unclear but assured felicity. But the 15% India knows it is not enough. They are the   I T professional, techies, doctors, not carpenters and tailors and shopkeepers in Southall (as in Dil Wale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge). They have seen it all and they know that Indians are not liked by the firangis. They need self-esteem and a fuller, opulent, competitive , but a native destiny – famous foreign locales are not enough . Cricket works, up to a point – India doesn't always win. Hindutva was tried, but quickly abandoned –- it looked like the mirror–image of Islamic Jihadis. This 15% India needs genuine, homebased, sustainable pride ,  needs it badly. Manmohanism hangs by this thread .

Indian cinema is beginning to produce this . In Rang De Basanti a bunch of yuppies take up arms against the Indian State, take over a TV Station and broadcast against the government and , appropriating hallowed signs of Indian history of martyrdom , are killed in a commando action. Was the film banned and banished like some naxalite thing? No. It was awarded and rewarded by the Indian State. What were the yuppies upset about in the film? Was it the loss of a friend in a patriotic war? No. Was it against the warmongering of the State? Was it for peace? No. It was because a friend, a Mig aircraft pilot, had been killed in a peacetime aircrash. They were rebelling against an insensitive, and perhaps corrupt, ministry babudom which was keeping on the defective Russian planes in the Air Force.  They wanted better warplanes !

Lage Raho Munna Bhai takes up terminal healthcare in hospitals. All Indians knows what hospitals are , indeed.  Sanjay Dutt in the film, not even an MBBS, takes up the cause of medical and psychological suffering of terminally ill patients, who are made to subsist only on impersonal, cold, clinical attention provided by the medical profession. How does he do it? By reforming medical education? By redesigning patient handling systems of hospitals? By redefining staffing and HRD principles of hospital industry? No. He offers a sentimental, vapid, "Gandhigiri" love to change the hearts of otherwise cold doctors! Yet another distillate of poor Mohandas Gandhi… Farce, you say? The Health Minister of India should have invited Sanjay Dutt to discuss health industry reforms. Probably did.

3 Idiots has gone further, broken new ground.    I I Ts and other top technical education centres of India are indeed factories to produce humdrum engineers who green- card it to the west for mid-level jobs there. Their curriculum, professors, exams , etc are accordingly designed. What will innovative and original thinkers do? India cannot absorb them. The West will not absorb most of them -- it can barely absorb its own. So what will an Indian inventor or a genius do? In Tapan Sinha's Ek Doctor Ki Maut, the original Indian scientist committed suicide because he was initially feted and then plagiarized out by a firangi scientist.(It did not represent a freak case ; Indian scientist in India have been routinely committing suicide over the years -- no one knows why). But then, this will not do in the post - Manmohanist era . 3-Idiots provides an "out of the box" Manmohanist solution. The brilliant original thinker -- Aamir Khan -- does not buckle under, does not commit suicide. He challenges and beats the deadening technical education system. How? He makes inventions, gets global patents on them, makes seriously big money on these patents. And what does he do with the money? Global apartments, cars, yatchs , fleshpots, the customary flash of the rich ? No. He lives simply, as an innovative school-teacher in Ladakh, teaching original thinking to lovely, cuddly , tribal children of India! Audience stands up and applauds, tears in eyes…

After our global experience with them in the 20^th century it will come as no surprise that mythologies are powerful political engines. In the 1960s the Naxalite theoreticians in India, like their brethren elsewhere in the world , had stated that Indian big bourgeoisie was essentially comprador. Actual experience has proved them wrong. It is quite nationalist . It will be stupid if it were not  so , when the Manmohanist Indian State is so wholly and singlemindedly   subservient to its interests! It is far from being stupid indeed.

It is being nicely helped along to privatise nation`s minerals, agriculture, water , electricity, roads, electromagnetic spectrum, weapon-production, and more by a gradual, step by step, Hindu Rate of Privatization. But it is, therefore, feeling exposed and vulnerable. It is increasingly in deed of a workable mythology so as to provide ideological sustainability to this gigantic national expropriation. Indian Cinema, now suitable "reformed", is on this vital job -- as I have tried to show.

  Mythologies are complex things. These must not only interpret the felt past but also must posit an honourable and wished-for future in a unified seamless construct. The job has now become easier for Indian Cinema by its genetic realignment to only cater to 15% affluent segment -- just like all other sectors of socio-economic activities. This GM Cinema of India is now coming onto its own , feted and cosseted by ministers` approbation, awards and  social status. For its Promethean past it has exchanged, in this bargain, a Narcissistic future. Without any sense of uneasiness and irony its song is:        

give me some sunshine,

give me some rain,

give me another chance,

I wanna grow up once again

              What of the abandoned 85% India? Its past and future both appear to have gone mute and opaque – wiped off from cinema, T.V. and news media and national discourse. There is a deafening silence echoing around. But nature and society never ever come to a stop ; in fact the dialectical counter-motion has already begun .These apartheid's victims are groping for their own new openings and mythologies. Helped by cheaper digital technologies , already Bhojpuri , Chhatisgarhi , Garhwali , (Meerut`s) Khari Boli , and other films have now left porn well behind and embarked on viable paths towards filling the silence . Who knows, perhaps the internet would turn out to be for the  cinema of the 85% what multiplexes have been for that of the 15% .  Experience has shown that no regimes, Manmohanist or otherwise , can silence them for long. They will find a way. The GM cinema of 3 Idiots or more, is not that way.