Why I Write: Essays

What Bollywood Must Do

What would Manto have made of Bollywood? I don’t think he would have been surprised by the fact that it remained in Mumbai (he would be amused by the city’s renaming). He understood quickly and instinctively that this was the only place in the subcontinent that was both civilized and liberal to support an industry that could only blossom on the cusp of immorality. Manto would perhaps have been disappointed and pleased at today’s Bollywood. Disappointed because the higher aspects of what he expected from the business never materialized except in what we know as art or alternative cinema. He would have been pleased because film has been the most effective medium for spreading ideas, more than print. In this essay, he sets ideals for the industry he worked in and loved, and had to let go when he later moved to Lahore.

In 1913, Mr D G Phalke made India’s first film. He thus began the art of filmmaking in the subcontinent. It was his dream to bring cinema to India and the dream was realized when he sold his wife’s jewels to raise money.

However, the dream that the progressive youth of India have seen has still not come to fruition. There is but one reason for this: the people in charge of moviemaking here are old-fashioned and simple-minded. They have neither the desire nor the intention to progress. No art can come out of this lot, whose lives are like still waters.

India’s youth, whom I am representing, who want to explore every aspect of life, who want to soar in flight despite having their wings clipped, aren’t satisfied with the state of filmmaking.

They are witless children, yes, ignorant of the ways of the world, true, and vagabonds, perhaps. But the desire in their hearts, the eagerness on their faces is worth something. It should make the fat-walleted businessmen, who control the Indian Motion Picture Congress, ashamed.

But in fact these young Indians are thought to be sick. And indeed they are. They are infected with love for their country. They want to mount the chariot of the State and see India delivered to its destiny, where other great nations already stand. They are willing to die for this.

They don’t have the clinking coins of the businessmen but they flash a more valuable asset: the crimson sparkle of their blood. This is madness, but it should be respected. India needs it.

We want good films. We want great films, such as we can put up against the work from other nations. We want every aspect of India to shine. This desire burns in us and we cannot separate it from our being.

Before its revolution, Russia was in a worse state than India. There were no sign of either literature nor poetry. But in a short burst of genius, Russia produced her Wali, her Mir and her Ghalib. And so it is also with her films. Russia has produced directors of such greatness that they will remain a source of pride for all humanity.

But for the last twenty-five years, made of 9,125 days, what have we got to show? Can we put on display our directors? What about our writers, who exist by ripping off the writings of others? Can we show our movies — all of them copies of American films — to others?

No.

India should make Indian films. We don’t at the moment. Take our social films, made by the dozen today. Are they really Indian in their sensibilities? No. You hardly see any “Indianess” in them; often characters dressed in western clothes to appear American and the reverse, a western actor wearing dhoti-kurta. These absurdities are called social films, just as our actors refer to themselves as ”artists”.

Art has not been defined in India. The Lord alone knows what it is thought to be. Art is a paint-filled tub into which everyone dips their clothes. But this isn’t really art and such people aren’t artists. The other word bandied about is “masterpiece”. If everyone in the studio, from the director to the fellow who hammers nails into the set, is an artist, it is also a fact that every Indian movie from Raja Harishchandra to Sitara is a masterpiece. Because of this, art has lost its value and masterpieces have depreciated. Here are my observations on our movies and what is needed to improve our cinema.

Films and Producers: analysis and criticism of India’s filmmaking is published regularly. But the press doesn’t really help here. This is because the film press is focussed on its business, which is to make money. And the advertising in such magazines is mainly from producers. We have many papers and magazines but no real journalism. This will change when we become less barbaric as a nation, and this in turn will come only after the populace is finally exposed to the thinking of intellectuals.

There are many ways of educating a nation, but there is consensus that film is an important one. It is easy and efficient to communicate a message, even one that is complicated, through movies.

Texts weigh heavy on the individual and for most children, so does schooling. It is no different in college, of course. But the message that might take months of studying to properly understand, however, might be passed on in an instant through films.

India needs entertaining movies that also educate, exercise the mind and introduces us to new ideas and new thinking.

At the moment, our producers believe in nothing but profit. This is fine as it is after all a business, but we must complain. First, very often third-rate films are produced and screened in the belief that they attract more viewers and bring in more profit. This notion is misplaced. Entertainment is produced; it doesn’t produce itself. If there are many among us who like cheap entertainment, it is the doing of our producers.

There isn’t great interest in stories of sorcery, mumbo-jumbo and magic as our producers think. People want to see something that concerns them. The purely physical is always transient, and how many of us still remember the stunts of Master Vithal?

What we need is films that teach, not ones that make us forget. Films that make us love our language, our nation. We want the pages of humanity to be opened before us. Can’t our producers do this? Can’t they make profits by doing this?

Need for brevity: looking at the length of our movies from the silent era, it appears our producers think that unnaturally long films are preferred by the audience. Perhaps there is some truth to this. But the fact is that this is the age of being to the point. When a film’s story can be completely revealed in seven or eight thousand feet of film, what is the point of extending it to 15,000 feet?

What happens when this is done is obvious. Like a piece of rubber which can only be stretched so far and no further, the film’s story snaps. It loses the integrity that it had in the shorter version.

However skilled a movie’s director may be with the digressions that extend the movie, he cannot succeed in improving the original.

A longer film must necessarily have longer dialogues. The actors will be forced to slow the pace and the plot will appear stupid. Longer movies also take longer to make and cost more money.

Films that could be made within 60,000 or 70,000 rupees take a lakh to finish. And if they flop, they seriously damage the producer. The other thing is to make a lengthier film, producers and directors introduce unnecessary song and dance. This is supposed to prettify the film but the aim is rarely, if ever, achieved. The additional money spent in shooting is not justified by the result. Songs and scenes have a place and time. Removed from these, they lose their meaning and beauty. So it’s important that our producers make their films shorter.

Cutting their 18,000-feet movies in half can produce a revolution in moviemaking. To set a two-hour programme, our producers should follow Hollywood. Before the movie, a newsreel or a reel or two of cartoons should be shown, as is also the case in Europe. Audiences are kept informed of the latest news from other nations.

Here, we have been needlessly watching lengthy films for twenty-five years. It’s time to end this chapter.

Stars: for thirty years, the masters of Hollywood have puzzled over this question — is the star more important or the film? So intensely has this been debated that the very thought of it now raises emotions. Perhaps the one valid response to this question would be to ask: ‘What is that you just said?’ It’s as absurd as asking whether the chicken came first or the egg. If a satisfactory answer to this can be found, we will no doubt also be able to figure out whether the film is more important than the star.

Frank Capra, the famous director from Columbia Pictures, recently expressed his views in an English newspaper regarding this. He said: ‘I’m with those who think that the film is most important. It is the film that makes the star and the biggest star cannot rescue a bad film.’

This is obvious but here in India, people are not in complete agreement with the statement. The best way of looking at it is to ask: ‘How are stars formed and with what?’

Capra answers this most interestingly: ‘If producers handed me all their money and said — “Now make us three stars”, I would be at a loss. I have no idea where to get a star from.’

In the silent era, Hollywood’s stars came from anywhere — hotels, factories and offices. Now, in the time of talkies, the supply ended because more skill was required. Here in India, stars came from the stage or the brothel. In the future, just as it happened in Hollywood, the supply of stars is going to end here as well.

Anyway, we were talking about what is it that results in the making of a star? Capra, who has directed the biggest stars of Hollywood, says that casting a film right is what produces a star. In his opinion, a Chinese character must only be played by a Chinese. Similarly the part of a man who is handicapped must be essayed by one who actually has that particular handicap.

I agree with Capra. We, you and I, can play ourselves better than we can someone else. Capra has given many examples of what he means, including that of Gary Cooper. He says Cooper presents himself on screen in true colours. That is to say, in real life because he is of good humour and classy, he can communicate that without much effort.

So a good and sensible casting makes stars out of actors. That of course is not the end of it because right casting merely doesn’t produce a hit film. Other things are required and as a viewer, you are familiar with what these are. Good actors and technicians are of course crucial. Till everything is in place, a hit film will not be produced. Just like a very expensive watch must be put together flawlessly for it to be able to tell time accurately all the time, a film in all its minutest parts and components must be perfect.

Directors: the biggest problem of Indian cinema is the lack of stylish directors. All storytelling requires a certain sense of style. It is this which separates the work of one writer from another. It is no different for films and their directors. In the absence of this individualism, films will resemble one another. Indian films have been screened for some years now, but there have only been a handful in which we can observe the style and individualism of a director. The rest have been put together in much the same way, and their makers have neither seen things differently nor originally.

We may surmise that the problem was that the producers hired less than competent directors who themselves didn’t understand the story and its narrative. Nor have they been able to make their audience understand.

Many films are made and shown in India these days but truth be told, few of them are really “films” if judged against the craft of filmmaking. Most directors have no sense of imagination. They only know close-up, mid-shot and long-shot. This they set about to do with the story in hand, bringing the camera every so often to the heroine’s face. They don’t really understand the idea of a close-up and where it should be deployed.

They are like writers who indulge in meaningless word play.

If an Ernst Lubitsch film is shown without credits, we can still identify it from the comic scenes and the smallest details. In an exotic outdoor location, when we see a heroine flitting about like a butterfly, we can feel the heart of D W Griffith, a lover of nature and the outdoors, aflutter behind the camera. Similarly, Eric Von Stroheim’s love for realism cannot be hidden. Many such examples can be given of directors and their individualism. Almost every Hollywood director has his own sense of style and this is the reason for his success.

In India, such a director is a rarity. Only two come to mind, Debaki Bose and V Shantaram. Rajrani Meera, Puran Bhagat, After the Earthquake and Vidyapati, in all of these you can see the dreamy vision of Bose.

Similarly, Shantaram’s love for grandeur and allusion, his two favourite themes, is always on display. A film which shows them relentlessly can be identified as the product of his Prabhat Film Company. This is why he is our greatest director. Nitin Bose is not on this list because he isn’t really a director so much as he is a showman.

Acting: acting is the ability to show various moods and emotions. Like poetry, painting, writing and sculpture, it is one of the fine arts. There are of course those who will disagree, like Tolstoy and his followers. They don’t consider the work of stage and cinema as art. Tolstoy stands apart in thinking this way. But each to his own.

Acting is as ancient an art as storytelling. Good acting is to convincingly recount and imitate the emotion felt by another.

When a child describes how his terrified grandmother hid from a mouse in the bathroom, how she trembled in fear, he is in fact acting. If he is able to convince you and involve you in his telling of the story, he is a good actor.

Films are exactly the same but on a large scale. The difference is that there are many people — young and old — doing together what the little boy did alone.

The other thing is that nobody directed the child or the perspective. The camera’s angle keeps changing and so does the lighting. The actor must remain in the frame while showing his act, unlike the boy who can move about at random. If the actor moves too much, he slips out. If he turns his face the wrong way even slightly then again the camera will punish him. He has many such difficulties.

Acting is a tough art and needs a special mindset and physical ability. In Hollywood, people are sought who fit the written role precisely. How seriously they go about doing this can be discerned by knowing that every company has scouts in many countries who keep a lookout for the right man and woman.

Much money is then spent on training these people and then, on the magical night of their first release, they become famous in an instant.

When India began making films, musicians and prostitutes were enrolled as actors. Not much has changed though many years have since passed. Any man with a decent voice and who can render a song competently is cast as a hero and six of his films are released in a year. In actresses, all that is sought is a pretty face. Because our fundamentals are wrong, there is no great skill in our actors, as it isn’t expected of them. This doesn’t mean however that we are lacking in great actors and actresses. Unfortunately, they will never get the opportunity to prove themselves.

The Saint: even if you are not a particularly keen observer, you must have noticed one unique thing about our films that keeps repeating itself. I’m referring to the faqir or sadhu that our directors love inserting into their plots. It happens in this fashion: the script reads that the heroine is dejected and is sitting all by herself and the director must show this dejection, the melancholy. His solution is to conjure up a singing mendicant. A singer is always around in the studio to be included where necessary and so this is easily done.

He doesn’t know why he is singing. He’s a singing machine that needs to be switched on. I know someone who has sung dozens of songs under every tree of the studio’s sets. By the sea, on the river bank, in a car and on the road. God alone knows how many songs he has delivered on demand, sometimes as a bearded faqir and other times as a dreadlocked sadhu. He is made up as an old man and dispatched to the sets. He rehearses and then the camera swallows him. When the projector vomits him out, we see the heroine on a sofa (long shot followed by a close-up). She is in tears, and a pained voice sings from outside:

My heart weeps and

I pine for you so much

She squeezes out a couple of more tears. Cut.

We are now in a market where our man dressed as a mendicant is belting out his anthem of grief. He goes on for seven-and-a-half minutes, during which we see the heroine sighing with the song’s emotions, and then we are back to the singer. When the song ends, the girl’s father, standing outside his door and magically able to make the connection between the song and his daughter’s feelings, steps in to say: ‘My darling, why are you so sad?’

I want to know the reason for such stupidity in the movies. When we are sad, do the city’s sadhus and beggars announce it through their songs? It can happen in a couple of films and we can forgive their directors. But to be subjected to this in almost every film? Intolerable.

Five years ago, and this is true, when I wasn’t really familiar with Indian films, I was fascinated by the sadhus and beggars I saw on the streets. Now when I spot one, I am reminded of my singing friend and turn my face away in disgust. I have come to realize that whenever our directors are short of an idea, they deploy the sadhu maharaj and his song and think they’ve killed two birds with one stone.

In terms of cinematic structure, this intrusion is also an error. The audience’s attention turns away from the narrative to the aside, the singing sadhu. He vanishes after a few minutes while the story does not move. Why do we have this diversion at all?

I think some film with this sequence was a big hit and producers have attributed its success in part to the singing sadhu. The relentless use of this scene shows how short on creativity is our filmmaking. The sadhu has become a box office regular now, endlessly irritating those in the audience with a bit of taste and discernment. Please let’s be done with this fellow.

Villains: early American cinema’s ideas and formats dominate our industry even today, as we celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary. The plotlines and treatment are copied with such diligence that all our films are now alike. We need to change this immediately. Originally, the earliest American movies used to be centred around three characters — hero, heroine and the villain.

In India this is still the format. The producer picks a hero and then immediately a heroine and a villain.

I accept that there must be good and evil and light and shade but surely there must be some method and some logic in how they are shown? In general, I have no objection to heroine and villain. They could be important elements of the story. But I do have a problem with villains who are labelled so, even before their characters have a chance to reveal themselves. Villains who are villains in every role.

Literature and film in my opinion are like saloons where bottles have no labels. I want to taste each one myself and figure out which is what. If I’m denied this by labelling, then my entertainment is considerably lessened.

The other thing I find idiotic is how all our heroes look the same. Handsome, young, brave, kind and so on. He fights from start to finish as if swords will never bruise him. And his love is always true, unlike the poor villain’s lust. I find such characters totally unconvincing and am not drawn to the plot they are a part of. To me, a hero must be a character I’m able to accept. For whom I have sympathy, who is human with all the traits that humans have. I want nobody angelic because I live on earth. He can soar in the sky but he must be rooted to the ground. I have no grouse against angels, but I love my fellow human beings more, who share the world with me.

I find our goody-goody heroines trying as well. Few writers are able to present an accurate picture of a woman and the reason for this is the purdah that veils our women. Such separation of the sexes produces ignorance. I would say that eighty per cent of our female literary figures are fantastic and unreal. The are counterfeit and lack the clink of real coins. They don’t have the aspects of true femininity that goes into making a woman. They are fantasy figures, who don’t belong to our world, and I have the same feeling about our villains. These are lifeless figures of clay, standing in because the script needs them.

There are bad people among us, accepted, and certainly we have no shortage of criminals in society. But to me, a man who is villainous throughout the day, seems unable to see the good from bad, or white from black, cannot be convincing, turning around, in a moment at the end to protect the writer from criticism.

Should we not move beyond these stereotypes? Our heroes are blemishless because our writers think any stain on the character is a stain on them. This childishness, laziness, this sentimentalism has no place in first rate literature.

Stories are not meant to be played out on a chessboard, where each piece moves in a defined manner. The world is its domain, where an infinite number of possibilities exist.

Plots, heroes, side-heroes, heroines, side-heroines, villains, side-villains, vamp and side-vamp — without all of these, stories can still be written.

Only a little understanding is needed.

— (Originally published as

Hindustani Sanat e Filmsazi Par Ek Nazar)