Beginner's Guide to Bollywood classics

 

For many years, my arty-farty and rather snooty knowledge of Indian cinema was restricted to Satyajit Ray – in other words, to Indian art films that would be shown in film clubs. I knew that Bollywood existed, and that there was a lot of dancing, but that was about it. 

But, of course, the relationship between high art and popular entertainment has always been full of overlaps, and it’s not surprising that there are many classics from the popular tradition, nor that more recent Bollywood films have started to become much more aware of other ideas and attitudes 

One positive result of the Coronavirus lock-down is that I have had the time to watch several Bollywood films, and so I am entitled to construct a mini-guide to the Indian film industry in less than a thousand words.

 

Which leads me to the first point: Bollywood films are long. Three hours seems to be about the average for the “classic” titles. Frequently the stories are so rambling that it is difficult to know how they could be shortened.

 

How to choose your Bollywood classic film? I started by consulting the many top ten lists available on the Internet, as well as the useful (but dated) guide to Bollywood by Ashok Banker (2001). It’s important to remember that lists of top ten Indian films haven’t (yet) been corrupted by PhD studies and the inexorable drift of Hollywood towards the academy. No, the best Bollywood films for many people are the worst technically.

So what are my recommendations for beginners to Bollywood? 

Sholay (1975)

If there could be one film that summed up Bollywood, this would, I think, be it. It combines melodramatic plotting, Bond-style action, a (rather limited) love interest, and finally, celebration of anarchic humour in the shape of the two lovable villains, played by Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan, who bear more than a passing resemblance to Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere in Les Valseuses (1973).

Sholay is a lovely film because the seriousness of the main plot – a policeman plotting revenge against the bandit leader who killed his family – is balanced by the charming antics of the two small-time crooks. Bachchan steals the show.

Unlikeliness rating: 5/5 (for staging a fight between a man with no arms and a gangster, and the gangster losing) 

Lagaan (2001)

Starring (and produced by) Aamir Khan, this film cleverly combines the rags to riches formula of Hollywood (think 42nd Street) with the British Empire. The film was highly successful outside India, since it presented a very simple plot of villainous British rulers against an oppressed group of villagers who at the start don’t even know how to play cricket, let alone defeat the British at it. It was fun to think that today, Indian cricket is far more lucrative and successful than the game in England.   

Amar Akhbar Anthony (1977)

Here is another three-hour blockbuster, but this time, although the entire plot is ludicrous, the film-maker (and all the cast) seem to be aware of it. There is a feeling of enjoyment throughout this film that makes it very easy on the eye for the spectator.

Three young boys are separated from their parents and brought up as Christian, Muslim and Hindu. Later in the film they are (inevitably) reunited and of course bond happily together. This demonstrates another principle of Bollywood movies: although they are almost always shown from a (perhaps rather too easily assumed) Hindu perspective, they typically take pains to stress their ecumenicalism. There is an element of tokenism in all this, but it’s better to have some mention of other ways of life than no mention at all.

Again, the film is stolen by Amitabh Bachchan, as Anthony Gonsalves, brought up as a Christian, and demonstrating his religious adherence by jumping out of an oversized Easter egg at the start of a crazy musical number.

Unlikeliness rating: 5/5 for the first 15 minutes, which covers more narrative than many full films elsewhere. And that’s just the start – the film continues at a hectic pace, with car chases, jokes, and gunfights.

Greatest moment in the film is the final scene where the three brothers collaborate using outrageous disguises to hold up a wedding. They succeed, with a lot of music and dancing en route. 

Three Idiots (2009)

Here is a much more recent Bollywood film, and it reveals a major trend in Bollywood away from the traditional genres of large-scale and very colourful Hindu wedding ceremonies, good heroes versus evil gangsters, and similar rather hackneyed themes, to more contemporary themes. Three Idiots is a good example. While ostensibly following the student careers of three pranksters, headed by Aamir Khan, looking at least 20 years younger than his age - he was 44 when the film was made, but looks very convincing as a young student.  Yet while retaining the trappings of Bollywood, there is a serious point to the film, revealing the pressure felt by students in higher education within an exam-driven culture, unsympathetic teachers, and boys-school culture of bullying and oppression of new students. The film has an excellent script, in one scene revealing just how money-focused a suitor for the heroine is. When a drink is spilled on his shoes, his first response is to tell everyone how much the shoes cost. We all know people like that.

Other indicators of a drive towards more present-day concerns include Queen (2014), based on the startling idea that a woman jilted at the altar by her would-be partner might want to go on a honeymoon by herself; and Dil Se (1998), a love story set against a background of terrorism. The terrorists are a minority group fighting for recognition and political rights – a theme covered with sensitivity and awareness, yet at the same time, Dil Se includes a magnificent musical number set on the roof of a moving train – one of the great set-pieces of Bollywood, I am told, and it looked quite astonishing, filmed before AI tools made it unnecessary for most stunts to be carried out live.

So the future looks good for Bollywood, as long as it continues to resist the government's continuing push towards an unthinking Hindu perspective for every new film. The dancing and singing have not (entirely) gone away, but the plots have moved towards a new realism and to some awareness of contemporary issues. I certainly look forward to my next encounter with the next blockbuster, including a thumping musical soundtrack, fast-moving plot, and lots of action.

Books that can be right as well as wrong

 

Peter Thonemann, writing in the TLS, makes a passionate celebration of Moses Finley, the historian: 

More than any other individual, it is Finley we have to thank for shaking ancient history out of its mid-century belletristic torpor and restoring it to a position of respectability among the historical sciences. 

More specifically, Thonemann goes on to describe Finley’s best-known book, The World of Odysseus (1954) and it is very apt (for once) that his review (of a series of essays by academics about Finley) is entitled “Homer for everyone”. When I read Finley, I felt he was not talking down to you; he is writing for a general and a learned readership at the same time.

Interestingly, Thonemann makes the case for the book’s importance not in what it says, but for Finley’s refreshing approach.  Thonemann continues: 

Whether that argument is right or wrong (it is probably wrong) does not matter very much. What gave The World of Odysseus its extraordinary impact was not Finley’s overall thesis, but his uncompromisingly sociological approach. Finley was not interested in Homer’s poetry itself, but in what Homer’s poetry took for granted: the social relations, economic structures and ethical values that underlay the fictive narrative of the Iliad and Odyssey. 

For a reader like me, who had probably read no other books on the classics before reading Finley, the appeal was not just the subject matter. It was that Finley could write, in a straightforward and uncomplicated way, with genuine enthusiasm, about his subject.

 Here is the paradox of many great books. We read books for many different reasons, but unfortunately only rarely with enthusiasm. It is always a great surprise to discover a book that  captures your imagination by a combination of learning and ability to enthuse. And all the more fascinating to discover, years after you read a book for the first time in a fever of excitement, that actually the argument was full of holes – and yet it doesn’t matter, because the author has communicated their thesis with passion. Here are a few examples:

Ernst Panofsky: he carries you along with his astonishing range of visual and literary sources, and his tone so confident that you feel whatever he is saying must be correct, and all other (modern) critics wrong;

Paul Hazard: the French historian of the Enlightenment, who seizes you with enthusiasm, for the eighteenth century, one of the least interesting periods for students of literature; 

George Dangerfield, whose The Strange Death of Liberal England grips you from the title alone. Here are the opening lines of the book: 

The right honorable Herbert Henry Asquith was enjoying a brief holiday on the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, bound for the Mediterranean on some pleasant excuse of business …

Dangerfield’s depiction of the Suffragettes seems to have aged badly; but that doesn’t detract from the novelistic quality of a dry historical narrative.

E P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Classes; I cannot read the name of some East Anglian towns and villages without remembering the raw injustice of industrialisation foisted on a rural community.

These are writers who write with learning but equally with passion. What Thonemann points out is that they can be wrong in their argument, but right in their passion. Perhaps all education could consist of celebrating “wrong” books. Who cares about the argument when they could write so grippingly?