Hindi Films and “the other”
Why are Hindi films of interest to the India Hand? Dismissed as cheap entertainment for
the masses, these films provide unique entree into the Indian subconscious. The
hackneyed and repetitive plots are constructed by professional writers to appeal to the
widest possible audience in a highly diverse country. Like American Hollywood films,
they are blatantly constructed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and
increasingly to an audience of adolescent and post-adolescent males. In a country like
India, where dating remains practically unknown, and most women would not go out in
public without their families, it is young men, often unemployed or underemployed, who
congregate in roadside bazaars and wile away their hours in “cinema halls” avidly
following the exploits of the galaxy of Hindi film starts. As such, Hindi films
increasingly pander to the sex and violence which inhabit adolescent male fantasies
around the world.
Bollywood films are pure fantasy, but fantasy should not be dismissed as of no value or
merit. In a country in which the average person still ekes out a harsh living in a povertystricken environment, the vast masses in India remain devoted to their Hindi films, and
project their dreams onto them. The films help them to construct the fantasy world many
of them inhabit as a coping mechanism to deal with mind-numbing poverty and lives of
continual toil and setback. To see a Hindi movie is often to inhabit the dream world of
the average Indian.
But, unlike Hollywood, Bollywood must reach out to a more universal audience. It is not
unusual to see three generations of one family attending a Hindi film together and there
must be something for everyone. There are sex and violence, but also healthy doses of
religion, romance and family values.
Much has been written about the inherent conservatism of Indian culture, and despite the
increasing nudity and bedroom scenes, and gangsters and violence, there has always been
a solid bedrock in Hindi films that panders to a very traditional and conservative society.
The result is often a strange schizophrenia that is apparent to the foreigner watching a
Hindi film, but not at all obvious to the Indian viewer.
One of the big quandaries that Indians are coming to face is how to deal with
globalization, and the push to emigrate to other countries. India is the fount of a vast
Diaspora. Poverty and the desire for economic opportunity push millions of Indians
abroad to seek their livelihood. Indian culture is all-embracing and all-encompassing and
provides the Indian with a comfortable identity enmeshed in religion, family, language,
food, music, and Hindi films. While Indian culture can be comforting, it can also become
a security blanket to help Indians cope with a harsh and hostile world. As a result,
Indians can carry their culture and their identity with them wherever they go, and
wherever they go, they find fellow Indians doing the same thing. This has sometimes
resulted in a closed-minded parochialism and inbred consciousness that excludes
everything “non-Indian.”
This has been compounded by the sense of guilt that many NRI’s (non resident Indians –
those who have left the country to seek their fortune) often harbor. Just beneath the
surface of their psyches often lies the feeling that they have betrayed their Indian-ness by
going abroad.
For Indians who remain inside the country, there is the growing divide between the
English speaking “westernized” minority and (in North India) the vast majority of Hindi
speakers who can find themselves increasingly alienated in their own country. Indian
media (including Hindi films) is lionizing the Westernized India, which speaks a strange
hybrid of Hindi and English (Hindish), wears western clothes and seems bent on defying
conventional Indian values and chasing the consumerist dream.
North Indians, who speak only Hindi, can feel shut out of this glamorous western fantasy
world, for without English, they do not have access to Western culture, and, more
importantly, the high-paying jobs that open the door to conspicuous consumption. For
these Indians (easily 90 percent of the population), this frustration leads to insecurity and
hostility to things Western. In a defensive reflex, the Hindi speaking masses want a film
that will lionize them as the “real” Indians who epitomize traditional Indian values.
Hindi film producers have been quick to latch on to these cultural undercurrents and
frame the Indians’ relationship to the foreign “other” in terms that make the Hindi
speaking audience feel good about themselves and to cope with their inherent sense of
insecurity.
This is not an entirely new phenomenon. One can view Hindi films from forty years ago,
in which a decadent fantasized “westernized” elite engages in forbidden activities in the
“nightclub.” It used to be required for every Hindi film to have a “nightclub scene” in
which Indians wore western clothes, drank alcohol, cavorted in mixed company, and
danced. The tone was always condemnatory, as the Indians, who had been seduced by
the decadent west either came to a bad end, or realized the error of their ways, repented
and embraced traditional Indian values. The agent of moral reform in these films was
usually the “mataji” the widow in a white sari who is the keeper of tradition and whose
moral power overcomes the errant Indian in a highly emotional scene that never fails to
leave the movie audience in tears.
The newer Hindi films are more complex and reflect the increasing influence of
globalization. It is no longer so easy to condemn all things Western, when they are the
object of fantasy for millions. Thus emerges a very schizophrenic type of Hindi film,
featuring foreign locales (New York City, Europe, and Australia) that seem to have
nothing to do with the film or the characters. One variant of this theme is the NRI film,
which supposedly depicts the lives of glamorous NRI’s living in foreign lands. We find
characters that supposedly live in Sydney, New York or London, but every character in
the film is Indian and all speak only Hindi. The native inhabitants of these foreign lands
are nothing more than backdrops, part of the scenery and the NRI’s have no non-Indian
friends or co-workers and spend 100 percent of their time only with Indians. For the
Hindi film viewer, the underlying theme seems to be, that it is perfectly normal to live in
a foreign country and have nothing to do with the inhabitants or their culture. Cultural
ghettoization is supposedly the norm for Indians.
Another very troubling aspect of these films is the problem with sexuality and sexual
repression. Indians who are “westernized” invariably go to discos (where they engage in
synchronized dance numbers to Hindi songs). Westernized girls wear skimpy clothes and
associate with males (always Indian) and go out on dates. However, the Indian girls only
go so far and engage in no pre-marital sex. Instead, the Indian boys in the disco dance
lascivious dances with scantily clad blond white women. Psychologists would have a
field day with such imagery. White blonde women as the object of sexual fantasy for
repressed Indian men, Indian women as titillating, but in the end “pure.” Here, the
underlying message is that Western women (always white) are sexually immoral and
easily available, but remain the forbidden fruit and the object of sexual fantasy.
At no time in a Hindi movie is a non-Indian character ever depicted as anything more
than a backdrop, part of the scenery, a little exotic color. The characters deal with nonIndians only as bus conductors or stewardesses on the airplane. Here, the message is that
it is best for Indians not to get involved with foreigners. They have nice buildings, good
scenery and lots of technology, but are of no inherent interest. Indians are to be content
within the confines of their own culture and space and can only make friends with other
Indians, even when they live abroad.
The most successful purveyor of such films has been Bollywood producer Karan Johar.
In two notable multi-starrer blockbusters, he skillfully purveys these messages. In his
film “kabhi kushi, kabhi gam” (sometimes happiness – sometimes sadness), the moment
of realization for the NRI (Hindi film standby Sharukh Khan) comes when his son must
attend a school function in London. All the fellow students are white and British and he
has tried to make his son fit in. In the middle of the school picnic, the NRI’s son stands
up and bursts into song singing the Indian national anthem and the white British people
are immediately moved to tears, see their error of their ways, and accept the NRI family
as the epitome of patriotic Indians.
Johar’s most recent film “Kabhi Alvida na Kehena” (never say farewell), is purportedly
about NRI’s in New York. It contains all of the parochial elements of Hindi films, with
an oddly disturbing twist. Amitabh Bachan plays the family patriarch who has been
settled in New York for many years. He has totally forgotten his Indian ways and has
become a notorious playboy and womanizer, but he will only go out with scantily clad,
blonde, white women. In practically every scene, he is accompanied by two such
women, one on each arm, who say nothing and are depicted as little more than sex
objects. The film, of course, has the obligatory scene, in which the NRI children, born
and raised in New York, put on an Indian cultural show in their exclusive all-white
school, which is obviously better than anything the American children can come up with
and wows the entire audience, convincing them of the inherent superiority of all things
Indian.
India’s interaction with the West has not been without its share of pain and suffering.
India was first colonized by a blatantly racist British imperialism, which denigrated all
things Indian and left the colonial subjects feeling inferior. In the post-colonial era, India
has been widely perceived as a poverty-stricken and backward country whose traditional
values are “enemies of progress.” This painful legacy has left many Indians very
defensive in their interactions with foreigners. It is ironic that in attempting to deal with
centuries of racist discrimination, Indians have, in turn committed some of the same sins
and depicted western people and their culture in a series of offensive negative
stereotypes. One wonders how Indians would react if western films took the same
liberties regarding Indians and their culture. There seems to be no realization in
Bollywood of the inherent hypocrisy of its approach.
We should see the first signs of this changing in a new type of Hindi film, in which
Indians are comfortable in their own skin and don’t espouse cultural chauvinism. In such
films, Indians would interact with the “other” in a more open and broad-minded sense,
and would finally break out of parochialism and embrace a cosmopolitan acceptance of
things “foreign” and come to see the value in new ideas.
Two schools of Indian film have begun to express these new attitudes. One is the Indian
film made in English. These films are primarily for Indians residing abroad who are now
more comfortable speaking English than Hindi, and for those in India with considerable
exposure to life abroad (a very narrow segment of the Indian audience).
The Hindi language itself has become a barrier to accurate depictions of interactions
between Indians and non-Indians. When a film is aimed at a mono-lingual Hindi
speaking audience, the characters must, by definition, converse in Hindi (the only
language the viewer understands). Hindi is not a world language. Very few foreigners
would speak enough Hindi to realistically converse with an Indian in a foreign country.
Likewise, subtitles are not a practical possibility, for 50 percent of the Hindi viewers are
illiterate, and many of the remainder would be very uncomfortable reading subtitles or
dealing with characters speaking a foreign language. Some Hindi films have tried to get
around this, by actually having foreign characters speak in Hindi. Most, however, simply
ignore “foreigners” who don’t converse with Indian characters at all – beyond hello and
good-bye and thank you.
When the entire film is in English, the Indian characters can interact with the foreign
characters. These films often depict people of Indian descent (often second generation
immigrants) interacting with foreigners. In some such films, especially those made in the
UK, the principal theme is the inability of the second generation to obtain acceptance or
integration in a racist society. The Canadian and American films are usually less somber
and sometimes deal with themes that have little or nothing to do with “Indian-ness” but
rather with the daily lives of characters that just happen to be of Indian background.
Another genre of Indian film dispenses with foreign-ness altogether and attempts to
depict the lives of ordinary Hindi-speaking Indians in a more realistic fashion. In reality,
most Hindi-speaking Indians will never travel abroad or have any interaction with nonIndians. They will remain in villages and provincial towns throughout the “Hindi belt.”
A new generation of Hindi films caters to these average Indians in a straightforward
largely non-chauvinistic fashion. Instead of romantic foreign locales, the films are set in
the towns, cities and villages where most Indians live. Western culture and its impact is
either not present or only a passing backdrop. These Indians are not ashamed of their
provincial roots and their traditional values and Hindi language. They are genuinely
comfortable in their own skin. They have nothing to prove to anyone.
The recent Hindi film “Vivah” (marriage) is a perfect example of this genre. It depicts a
traditional Indian marriage from engagement through the final wedding ceremony. The
characters are proud to be Indian, but not preachy about it. The message seems to be, we
are Indians. We are comfortable being Indians. Our culture has many positive aspects,
and we should stick to our positive values and have a positive self-image. Under this
scenario, there is no need to engage in “negative nationalism” in which the evil “other” is
contrasted with the “Indian good.” Non-Indians are viewed in a broadly humanistic sense
as persons from other cultures with their own values, with no need for value judgments.
This is a positive development in Indian cinema and shows how quality film-making can
deal with painful subjects in a constructive way.