Chidananda Das Gupta

THE PAINTED FACE
Studies In India's Popular Cinema
Chidananda Das Gupta

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C Chidananda Das Gupta, 19')1.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the gener-
ous support of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars, Washington DC, and ITC Limited, Calcutta. A grant was
also received from the Taraknath Das Foundation, New York.
The author gratefully acknowledges their help.
The editorial team at Roli Books took keen interest in ~
book; it would not have been possible without their umtinted
help and patience. Ram Rahman accompanied me on a trip to
Madras and Hyderabad and took many photographs, some of
which are reproduced here. Help also came from P.G. ('Film
News') Anandan, Saeed Naqvi and Amitabha Bhattacharya.
Grateful thanks are due for various materials and suggestiom to
Robert L. Hardgrave, Ashis Nandy, Monojit Lahiri, Bindu Batra
and Saibal Chatterjee.
A version of Chapter II (Seeing is Believing) was published in
Film Quarterly, University of California Pr~, Fall 1989; Chapter
III ( City and Vil/age) was presented as a paper at the seminar of
the Hawaii International Film Festival 1987 and published in the
East-West Film Journal of the East-West Center, Vol I, No 2; a
section of Chapter VII (Woman: Playmate, Wife and Tawaif ),
an analysis of the film Ek Cbadar Maili S~ came out in Indian
Express in 1987 and another section in The Telegraph, Calcutta
under the heading 1be Text and Sub-text of Rape in 1988;
Chapter VIII (Return of the Mythological) was published in
another version in Cinema in India, 1988; a preliminary version
of Chapter IX (1be Painted Face of Politics) was published in
Cinema and National Identity ed. by Wimal Dissanayake, Uni-
versity Press of America, 1988 and another version, written with
J . Hoberman, in Film Comment, New York, 1987.
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"In the jargon of cinema, a 'co,nmercial' film is not one
that brings in money, but a film conceived and executed
in accord to the canons oftbe businessman"·
-Jean Renoir
''In myth, things lose tbe memory that they were once made".
- Rolland Bartbes
''When do people need 'escapr most? Wben they have little

involvement wttb tbe malting oftheirfuture".
- Ariel Do,fman
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CONTENTS
Preface 9
I. Of Myth and Fact 14
2. Seeing is Believing 35
3. City and Village 45
4. Why the Films Sing 59
5. The Oedipal Hero 70
6. The Iconic Mother 107
7. Woman: Playmate, Wife and Ta waif 126
8. The Return of the Mythological 165
9. The Painted Face of Politics 199
10. How Indian is Indian Cinema? 248
11. The Value of Trash 262 .
Notes 285
Appendices 293
Bibliography 308
Index 311
On111nalffom
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PREFACE
his book marks the beginning of an effort, on the part of a

ftlm critic for several decades committed to 'high art' in the
cinema, to understand. the workinp of the mind behind the
Indian popular ftlm. The urge for it came with N.T. Rama Rao's
meteoric rise to power in 1983 in Andhra Pradesh. For the second
time the foremost actor of a linguistic region had become the
Chief Minister of his state. Realization dawned quickly that it was
much more than that; the cinema had taken over the state,
through the magic of its illusion. In Andhra Pradesh, the process
seemed even more dramatic than in Tamil Nadu because in a
mere nine months run-up an actor never before in politics
defeated the high-powered Congress(I) party whose main cam-
paigner was the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, a year before
her assassination. In the event, N.T. Rama Rao's party did not
last beyond one te1,i1, unlike M.G. Ramachandran's in Tamil
Nadu. But NTR remains in the field of politics even though the
political clout of the cinema in Andhra Pradesh petered out with
his collapse in the 1989 electiom. On the other hand, MGR's
prolonged illness ending in death remained the decisive element
in the political scene of Tamil Nadu for a long period. The battle
for succession was fought between protagonists known to the
public for their cinematic prowess, and the eventual successor,
M. Karunanidhi, was a film scriptwriter and one-time collaborator
of MGR. The leader of his Opposition who later wrested power
from him, Jayalalitha, was MGR's leading lady at one time.
Evidently, in Tamil Nadu, the cinema has passed the zenith of
its power but has by no means collapsed as yet.
The tum of events in the two states comtitutes perhaps the
most dramatic instance of the cinema's intervention in politics
seen anywhere in the world. Chapter IX of this book, 1be Painted
Face Of Politics, describes and discusses this unique phenome-
non, together with the brush with politics on the part of Amitabh
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1111:: PAINTED FACE
Bachchan, the biggest all-India box-office star in the hmory of

Indian cinema.
Obviously,the logical processes that worked in these two
states could not be ab.wlutely peculiar to them; they underlie the
entire field of popular cinema in the country. One of the reasons
why they manifested so decisively in these two states was the
sheer size of their cinema, and the extent of its rural penetration.
Of the 800-odd filrm produced annually in the country, alm~t
50 per cent come from these two states. AJso, between the two,
they account for a third or so of the total number of cinema
theatres in India's 25 states and most of the travelling cinemas,
which have a much greater reach into the rural hinterland than
the permanent theatres. Elsewhere in India, the cinema is more
strictly an urban phenomenon. Yet, the proclivities that surfaced
in these two states underlie the rest of popular cinema, turning
the cinema into the cultural springboard of politics. It ~ to
be predica~ed upon the pre-industrial tendency to equate myth
with fact, imitation with reality, in a country where analytical and
analogical thinking have always existed side by side, but never
more so than today, in the midst of transition to an industrial
age1•
The content analysis of certain major box-office hits in all-
India Hindi cinema of more than two decades shows a striking
continuity of concerns. Even a cursory examination makes it clear
that the popular cinema is as deeply stirred by the winds of
change as the more obviously serious cinema or 'high art'. c.ertain
themes constantly appear and reappear. Problems of tradition
and modernity, East and West, city and village, family and state,
feudalism and democracy, individual and society, religion and
science, the role of women in society, are constantly explored
behind the facade of 'entertainment'. In fact, poring over scenes
in a number of Amitabh Bachchan fdms, sometimes late at night
and alone, running them backwards and forwards, I would
wonder why the fwm were described as entertainment at all. A
fdm like Trisbul , which I consider seminal to the whole issue,
seems more of a grim morality play than a matter of amusement.
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Only the songs bring relief, even though they are full of
philosophy, p~ionately felt and ably exp~d, however trite
they may be in their generalizations. In this kind of cinema, the
tramcendental quality of the song lifts it way above the level of
the rest of the film, as discu~ in Chapter IV.
I wished repeatedly that I were a trained psychologist. In film
after fdm, the Indian Oedipus stared one in the face (Chapter V,
The Oedipal Hero). It seerm strange that social psychologists
should not have trained their guns on this area, apart from
occasional remarks in their rare forays into an individual ftlm or
their suggestion of very broad concepts on the popular cinema
as a whole. But if the ftlm critic often seerm to ignore the
psycho-sociological dimemions in h~ pursuit of the aesthetic,
the psycho-sociolog~t can be charged with the failure to relate
the formal qualities of a film to its subject and read the essentially
indivisible statement ·of a work. The cinema speaks basically
through its images; and the acknowledged primacy of the image
in the operations of the unconscious makes cinema the inevitable
mirror for the projection of impressions developed in childhood.
So the need ex~ for making a holistic connection between the
psychological and the sociological on the one hand and the
aesthetic on the other. The more one goes into it, the more it
seerm impossible to understand cinema, particularly popular
cinema, without seeing that one ~ues out of the other. Equally
neglected ~ the conjunction of what Levi-Strauss describes as a
lack of sense of history among primitive societies2 and Erik
Erikson calls the inclination towards total~m in individuals who
fail to come out of the shadow of the mother3• The increasing
obsession with the mother figure, the attenuation of the father
and the emergence of a mysogynic male camaraderie have
become extremely obvious in the cinema of recent decades.
Here again, a marriage of the film critic with the social psycholo-
g~t becomes a crying need. In the lack of that happy event,
the ftlm critic with ambitions for a hol~tic understanding tries to
tum androgynous in order to bring together two sets of appre-
Xi
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11lE PAINTED FACE
hensions that are inextricably related and ame out of each other.
With all its pitfalls of amateumm, the effort has to be made.
. For this ftlm critic, the lkvi-Strauss equation of myth with the
primitive and of historical consciousness with modem societies
translates itself into the relationship of cinema as myth and
cinema as fact. Chapter I, OfMyth and Fact, is thus concerned
with the cinema's special ability to record fact and apprehend
the materiality of matter. It explores the confused conjunction of
analytical and analogical reasoning and the consequent inability
to distinguish myth from fact in pre-industrial societies, espe-
cially those in the throes of modernization•. This thread is picked
up again in Chapters IX and XI in an effort to outline the
predisposition towards totalitarianism inherent in the equation
of myth and fact. Hence the mythological film (Chapter II, Seeing
Is Believing ), with which Indian cinema really began, can be
said to have climaxed in the coming to political power of M.G.
Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu and N.T. Rama Rao in Andhra
Pradesh, and Amitabh Bachchan's failure to come to power, as
the detailed essay on them (Chapter IX, 1be Painted Face of
PoliHcs) attempts to show. Hence too, the Return of the Mytho-
logical (Chapter VIII) in a Government-owned television is
significant as a renewed attempt to establish the equation of myth
and fact, this time in a direct projection toward the middle class
which is at the heart of the television audience and largely
dete1111ines the direction of the country's culture - and conse-
quently, of its politics. In between lies the rearguard action in
which the older type of mythological retreated before the
onslaught of modernism but regrouped its forces to mythologise
the present (Chapter V, 1be Oedipal Hero and Chapter VI, 1be
Iconic Mother) . The concept of the family becomes an integral
part of the discussion and its contours are deter111ined by the
regulation of the relationship of the sexes (Chapter VII, Woman:
Playmate, Wife and Tawaif ). The polarity of the city and the
village is an important extension of the concept of the traditional
family and forms one of the cornerstones of the popular cinema's
structure of beliefs (Chapter III). •
xii
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I
Prefa~e
It seem important to try to acquire some freedom from

populist imperatives to which the growing consumerism of our
society tends to subject the critic. In orthodox M~t societies
the intellectual was (the past teme seerm more apt at this point
of time) required to expiate his original sin of having been born
a bourgeois by surrendering his individuality to the State. In
capitalist-comumerist economics, the intellectual is under a
similar pressure to surrender it to a homogenized society acting
on the principle of economy of scale in regard to both goods
and human beings. He shares the Marxist's seme of guilt for
being privy to a world of knowledge and a capacity for individual
thought that 'the people' do not have. There is thus a double
process of expiation working within him; first, the effort to tell
himself, and others, that he is 'actually just like every one else',
and second, the tendency to cmcover virtues in whatever sells
('if so many people like it, it must be good'). The 'cola' drinks
proliferating in India are not noted for their nutritional properties,
yet they are generally perceived as 'more fun than fruit juice'. A
compulsive populism (Chapter X, How Indian is Indian Cin-
ema.') seems as fraught with the risk of falsification of judgement
as the cultivated elitism of the votaries of high art which negates
the significance of social and aesthetic expression in all pop art
without deigning to examine its products.
Inevitably after this, one must raise certain questions of value.
There is need to distil them from the markedly detached, value-
free observation one constantly comes across in otherwise highly
perceptive writings on the sociological aspects of cinema,
whether of the mainstream (popular) or parallel (high art)
variety. There must be a question of right or wrong in the way
the cinema influences a particular society at a particular juncture
of history. The non-existentialist problem of value is raised here
despite its alienness to much of scholarship and with an acute
awareness of its importance to the future of our society.
xiii
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1
INTRODUCTION:
OF MYTH AND FACT
ntil fairly recently, the convention in the 1~ developed
regional cinemas in India was to make up the face of the
hero to extreme faim~, leaving o t h e r ~ parts of the body
unpainted. A concomitant of this selective tramformation was to
leave the subsidiary characters to nature's devices, without the
benefit of the make-up man's ministratiom. Only the hero (and
the heroine) were to have a painted face. Varying traces of this
convention are still discernible in the popular cinema in all
languages and regiom.
Obviously, this has to do with the traditional consciousn~
of the faim~ of the skin as an indicator of high caste and, among
the relatively modem, of social class. Etymologically, the word
vama meam colour (hence, .in a way, vamasbrama, or the caste
order, is also a colour order). Even as Arjuna laments the idea
of killing his kin in the Gita, he goes off suddenly (in an
extreniely obvious interpolation) into a tirade against vamasank-
anu, or the progeny of intercaste marriages. As Nirad Chaudhuri
remarked1, the preference for fair skin relates to a claim to Aryan,
i.e. Caucasian ancestry. If there is any truth to an Aryan origin,
the sentiment harks back three and a half millenia. Despite
the ceasel~ admixture that has taken place in the melting pot
of races in India - Greeks, Persiam, Sakas, Hunas, Turks and
Mongols and so on over this vast stretch of time, the memory
of racial purity persists. The higher the caste, the fairer the skin
is, or i$ expected to be. It works even better in reverse; if the
skin is fair, the caste·must be high.
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THE PAINTED FACE
The hero must either represent high rank in the social order
or at least the potential for catapulting himself into it. In a country
with a very wide range of skin tones obtaining among a polyglot
population, the fairness of his eo111plexion is a reflection of his
innate superiority. Therefore, if the hero is not naturally endowed
with a fair skin, he must be given one, apart from any enhance-
ment that the camera and the film stock may technically require.
This is the archetypal image the hero must co, respond to.
Hence it is that with Peter Brook's Mababbarata, one of the
major objections of the average Indian audience is to the use of
black 11ien as Bhishrna, the pttamab~ progenitor of the Kurus
and Pandavas or as Kama, who is born of the Sun. The objection
to Kunti as a black woman also s p ~ from an allied archetypal
image of the heroine; women belonging to the high social order
must be fair. There was no voice raised against the Caucasian
complexions of Arjuna, Krishna or Draupadi, all three of whom
are described in the original epic as dark.
In the context of public performance, extended into and
indeed appropriated by the cinema, this convention translates
itself into a lack of need for realism and a low threshold for the
suspemion of disbelief. The mind turns myth into fact, and
symbol into reality. If the face is fair, the symbol of nobility and
leadership has been established, regardless of what happens to
the hand and feet, which are mere servants of the face. The face
represents the identity, consolidated by the costume.
The source of the convention must be sought in folk theatre
performances given almost exclusively at night in large outdoor
spaces, often on a raised surface Oit by torches - or, more
recently, by petromax lam~). and seen mostly from a distance.
This enhanced the need for the heroic characters to be seen and
identified in teffllS of the fairness of the face and the splendour
of the costume. In the flickering light of torches, as mythical and
superhuman heroes came to life, the degree of their visibility too
was dcte.111ined by their fairness. The lower visibility of the
ordinary characters was a part of the system. The painted face
was also a mask. As Girish Kamad points out, "...if in the modem
western theatre .the mask is used in contrast to the face, the
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OJMythAndFact
persona as against the real person ... in Indian traditional theatre,

as in the Greek, the mask is only the face writ large•. But he is
careful to draw the c:&tinction between folk and classical theatre:
'It is interesting that Samkrit theatre, playing to a small audience
of 200 to 400, did not use masks for nonnal human characters•,
and goes on to show the connection of the mask in folk
performance to 'the spirit by which the dancer seeks to be
PQSSesscd•2• It is obvious that in this respect, the painted face
performs the role of the mask - in folk theatre as well as in
primitive cinema. The mask is myth; the face, reality.
In the inteJ111ediate stage between folk.tradition and the early
decades of the cinema there was the agency of the Parsi theatre,
an eclectic amalgam of song, dance and dramatic passages meant
to please all kinds of audiences, which set the pattern for the
future growth of the all-India Hindi fdm in its suppression of
regional and other group characteristics. It played this inteJ111e-
diate role throughout the silent period and gave up its ghost only
with the advent of the talking (and singing) fdm'.
The circumstances of folk (and Parsi) theatre also meant,
straightaway, that the es.sence of melodrama was given to the
situation; there was no means of developing conviction with a
minute logicality, step by step, in an imitation of the processes
of real life, fust anchoring the actor to the role enacted and then
achieving transformation through a close-knit psychological lead
up along a chain of cause and effect. Suspension of disbelief
was granted on the basis of myth and symbol, not fact. The
fullness of pre-determined stimuli depended on the extent to
which the performance kept its faith with the convention of the
genre - in Yaksbagana or Jatrtl, Nautankt or· Bbavai.
But while on the formal level the melodramatic conventions
of folk theatre (and Parsi theatre) required the obviation if not
the suppression of the individual behind the mask and social
reality behind the transmission of traditional assumptions, the
innate realism of the cinematic image caused discovery and
awareness. The adaptation of the cinema into the body of
tradition presented insurmountable problems.
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THE PA/NIED FACE
The earliest falrm were documentary; they recorded facts

faced by the camera. The cinema, we know, was invented by
scientists in order to record motion - e . g. the movement of the
animal or human body. Thus Eadweard Muybridge, for instance,
published 781 plates of such motion and reached conclusions
like these:
If the moving feet of an animal are one in advance of

and the other to the ,car of the supporting less, the
supp:>rting legs are always diagonals, i.e. left fore and
right hand, or right fore and left hand.
If the two moving feet are seen under the body between
the supporting less, the supporting less are always
lateral, Le. both left and both ~ -
When the train pulled into a station or workers came out of

a factory in the falrm of the Lumib'es at the tum of the century,
the ·resemblance to reality was too drastic to confuse with
symbols of it; the train was alm~t rolling over the audience.
Indeed the cinema came into being in industrialized societies
in answer to the need to reflect new dimensions in the perception
of material reality. Neither the amtraction of the language of
words (T.S. Eli<>t's taximeter ticking away like a beating heart)
nor the frozen moment of painting (or moments, as in Duchamp's
Nude Descending .A Stairr:ase) was enough to satisfy the appetite
to see the real thing. The new perceptions had to be seen in a
mirror to be contemplated upon and understood. A railway
engine steaming away against the sunset, an aeroplane flying
through the clouds, the sound of a horn stuck in a car in the
middle of the night, the wail of an ambulance speeding through
the traffic, a man seen walking along a street from the top floor
of a skyscraper (probably the movement of just his hat, from
which the presence of the man had to be deduced) - these were
perceptions of new fortN and relationships that pre-industrial
man was not familiar with. The very process of perception was ·
speeded up in the industrial world, because there was so much
more to perceive. When two high speed trains e r ~ each
other, the flickers of light and the sudden doubling of sound
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OfMyth And Fact
volume called for a speed of perception that the stagecoach or

the bullock cart had never demanded. The new apprehension
of reality brought about a heightened understanding of materi-
ality. The eye and the mind had to quickly assess a moving
object: is it flat or round, square or. circular, is it coming at me
or will it pass me? These judgements are made rapidly in today's
urban world and they are much more exact than those of
pre-industrial man. No wonder a new medium had to be devised
by applied physics and chemistry, projecting flickering light and
shadow on a reflecting screen (a 'mirror'), mass manufactured
by socialized labour and sent out in a tin can through a marketing
network. •
The basic value of the cinematic image lies in the flow of non-
verbal information it is able to present before the eyes, giving
rise to a constant stream of reactions in the mind of the spectator
who must interpret them, .like still photograpm, which, as Susan
Sontag points out, are •inexhaustible invitations to deduction,
speculation and fantasy" precisely because they •cannot explain
themselves"5• Even when words were added to "explain" the
content, the demand for direct personal interpretation of the
basic -cinematic image did not alter. Indeed, in so far as the
realistic narrative ftlm presented a complex set of sights, sounds,
words and music, the task of interpretation began all the more
to resemble its role in reality. Sometimes the audience's interpre-
tation agreed with the filmmaker's, sometimes the two images
did not coincide to form a single focus. Even in the act of
breaking out of them in certain types of cinema, the processes
of real life and the task of interpreting them act as the point of
reference. In Michael Rohmer's words: ·
All of us bring to every situation, whether it be a business

meeting oc a love affair, a social and psychological
awareness which helps us to understand canplex mo-
tivations and relatio.Mhips. 1his kind of perception,
much of it non-verbal and based on apparently ~ignill-
cant dues, is not limited to the educated or the gifted.
We all depend upon it for our understanding of other
people and have become extremely proficient in the
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11IE PAINTED FACE
inrerpretation of subde signs- a shad1ns .In the vok:e, an

averted glance 1hia nuanced awareneas however is not
easily called upon by the arts, for il is p-edicated upon
a far more immediate and total ie:xperience than can be
povided by literature and the theatre with their depend-
ence upon words or by the visual arts with their depend-
ence upon the unase- Only fun render.. experience widl
enoush inimediacy and totality to call into play the
pupctual proce11es we employ .In life llltclf'.
The transplantation of this unprecedented realism conveyed
by the cinema, a medium developed in industrial society in
search of a new n:icdium of communication, into a pre-industrial,
agricultural society inevitably led to a severe dash of two idiorm
with their separate, in some ways contrary, p u ~.
The traditional relatiomhip of audience and performer and
the stylistics that regulated it in folk theatre were radically
different. Basically, the cinema does not admit of the painted
face. The language deals primarily not with symbols but with the
surfaces of reality. In its ~ c e it 11SCS these fragments of
· 'immediate and total experience' as its building blocks. The
cinema can be said to be the ultimate in the pressure towards
maximal realism that has always existed in the popular arts.
When primitive man drew animal-hunting pictures in prehistoric
caves, believing that it would bring him success in killing animals
by the magic of imitation, he did not think he was being anything
but realistic in his portrayal. His realism matched the stage of his
ability to grasp the morphology of matter. Deliberate distortion
of representational form did not occur until the Industrial
Revolution which turned skill, earlier only a by-product of a
function, into 'art", a product in itself, a 'useless' commodity for
sale. From cave paintinp to icom to portraiture and landscape
painting, from photography to the silent moving image to the
colour sound ftlm, the progression of realism was obvious. At
each stage, there was a widespread 'artistic' rejection of the new
level of realism (e.g. Otaplin as practitioner, Rudolf Amheim as
theorist). Thi, was countered mostly by the business tycoon or
the functionalist theoretician (e.g. Sam Goldwyn or ~emtein).
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OfMytltAndFact
In the silent cinema, the equivalent of the non-verbal element

of the talkie was made up by the incidental components of the
scene as opposed to its central action - the degree to which the
total universe within which the central action takes place was
composed and contributed to the understanding of the whole.
Thus Scene 6 ( Off To 7be Fire) of Edwin Porter's 7be Life OfAn
American Fireman (1903) showed •countless pieces of appara-
tus, engines, hook-and-ladders, hose towers, horse carriages etc.
rushing down a broad street at top speed, the horses straining
every nerve and evidently eager to make a record run. Great
clouds of smoke pour from the stacks of the engines, thus giving
an impression of genuineness to the entire senes•1 .
Inevitably, cinema in pre-industrial society ignored the imme-
diate and total experience essential. to the medium. More par-
ticularly, it ignored or marginalized the subtle non-verbal com-
ponents of the medium which form its core. It im~ed upon
the medium the pressure of the loudly declaimed word, the grand
gesture and the broad symbols dictated by traditional perform-
ance and its urbanized adaptations to the proscenium stage.
II
Suddenly faced with the new medium and anxious to adopt
it, Indian cinema did not quite know how to connect it to its
own.visual tradition. The very earliest films, made soon after the
fll'St fdm show by the Lumieres in 1896, were documentary.
Hamhchandra. Bhatvadekar and others are known to have
photographed wrestling and other entertaining actualities. Hira-
lal Sen turned to the theatre for his subject and photographed
plays. The question of the nature of the visual culture required
for the cinema had not arisen at all. The conscious choice would
appear to have been made by D.G. Phalke in his fll'St Indian
feature ftlm Harisbcbandra (1913), whose surviving fragments
bear testimony to his stylistic predilections. As apprentice to Raja
Ravi Verma, Phalke's obvious visual model was in the forms
created by his mentor's adaptation of British academic painting
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•
THE PAINTED FACE
of the time. What the stage of knowledge of Im~ionism or

post-Impressionist painting in India was at that time is not clear.
If Ver11aa or Phalke had seen any, there is no evidence of it in
their work. Ravi Venna's ang)icized Indian gods_and heroes had
already established theimelves in popular visual culture and set
the images of Rama, Sita, the sages and of course the gods
themselves through the inexpensive oleographs Verma painted,
printed and distributed across the country. The gods cast in that
mould have become so much a part of the popular iconography
that even in the late eighties, a defender of Ramanand Sagar's
television serial Ramayan said in justification of the un-Indian
character of these images that had Sagar followed the Indian
iconographic tradition obtaining within the indigenous visual
tradition, the audience would not have accepted his characters
as genuine'. ,
And of course the Verma model overflowed the divine
moulds and spilled over into other popular visual manifestations
such as star pinu~. beedi and other indigenous smallscale
industry product labels, shop signboards, graffiti on the backs of
trucks and two wheelers, bazaar photo studio backgrounds for
portraiture and, above all, fdm posters and hoardings and the
fihm theimelves, in an extraordinary blend of the realistic and
the unrealistic, to create an Indian pop. The main device derived
from Ravi Verma is an obfuscation of perspective in an otherwise
realistic rendering celebrated in the dialect of a· free, primitive
draftsmanship. Add to Ravi Verma elements from the quasi-Per-
sian decadent Mughal sentimentality of Abdur Ralman Chughtai
seen on Hyderabad's Nirmal ware, on engravings of recumbent
females on glass panels in cinemas or on bazaar calendars; the
paintings of bathing beauties in skin-clinging saris executed by
Hemen Majumdar and 'Mr. Thomas' in Bengal which formed a
further bazaar extension of the British academic style and the
most sentimental examples of the Bengal school of painting, and
you have today's pop visual. These elements went into the
making of popular visual culture in the early 20th century and
became source material for the popular cinema to draw upon.
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m
Yet alternative models were readily available. The groupings
and placei11ents in .AmaravaU and Sanchi low reliefs in the 2nd
century BC. and in Ajanta frescoes over some 800 years show a
sophistication of high order and techniques eminently adaptable
to the requirements of the cinema. Ajanta figures in a number
of frescoes are so grouped that the movement of the beholder's
eye from character to character is fluidly, assymetrically balanced
within the mural. Eye-matches between characters form lines
that ~ in diagonal and other varied angular planes. 1be
faces almost never look at the spectator. In the nearest to frontal
attitude, the character will look just off the observer's eye, thus
retaining a self-contained narrative illusion to which the observer
is an outsider. The narrative style of Ajanta is thus very similar
to that of the cinema in which the convention is of averting the
camera stare that would destroy the illusion by including the
observer i.e. the camera, representing the audience in the cinema
theatre. What is more, Ajanta murals are multi-focal and accom-
modate a connected flow of viewpoints as the observer moves
from one spot to another, recalling the freewheeling motion
picture camera. In comparison to Ajanta, the Phalke grouping
conventions, followed by later cinema, especially the mythologi-
cals, have a fared centre within eye-level space, the stiffly
horizontal character movements recalling exits and entries on
the proscenium stage.
Ravi Ve111aa and Phalke's iconic frontality is also not of Indian
origin. In the European tradition, the saint or the subject of the
portrait looks directly at the beholder. Indian gom face the
devotee, ready to receive his prayer, but do not look directly at
him. When Prahlad faces Vishnu and I.akshmi in profile in
Phalke's Bhakta Prali/ada, there is an instant sense of eye contact
and the whole scene, with the divine pair reclining luxuriantly
before the lowly devotee, is oddly reminiscent of a feudal lord
receiving a bonded supplicant. In other words a typically Indian
content is put into a modern western framework. In dealing with
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111£ PAINTED FA.CE
the moving image, Phalke struggles with the movement from the
frontal to the horizontal position to avoid having the charader
turning away &o.11 the audience. .
Phalke's nationals spirit sought to prove, in common with
other pioneers in diverse fields, to the Indian and the British
alike, that we could make thing, just as well as the ruling race,
with its pride of superiority, could. In this he was true to Ashis
Nandy's seminal proposition on colonialism in which the ruled
are asked to fight the ruler within the ~chological terms set up
by the latter, from which it followed that 'beating the West at its
own game is the preferred meam of handling the feeling., of
self-hatred in the modernized non-West110• In that we may fand
an explanation of why Ravi Ve,allil and his apprentice sought the
ruler's rather than the indigenous tradition's way of organizing
the depiction of interading figures on a tw<Hli.memional surface.
Many of the Phalke conventiom tCiaaain in essence un-
change4 in the popular cinema to this day. While action se-
quences have achieved some freedom, the staging of dialogue
remains trapped in the horizontal axis. It is as compulsive as the
popular cinema's need, to this day, to light the entire scene with
total clarity, avoiding movement between dark and bright areas
or changes in facial tonality in accordance with variations of light.
The painted face must rei11ain painted, unchanged by move-
ments of the camera or of objects within the frame.
IV
What is more, Phalke's heroic and pioneering intervention in
creating an indigenous cinema shared tI1e nationals initiatives
of the 19th and early 20th centuries only in the limited sense of
assertion of self-resped by boldly wielding the new instrument
developed.by the politically dominant races. It bore little or no
connection with either the urges arising from the Industrial
Revolution that resulted in the invention in the West or the
reformist-rationalist ideology that had come to dominate Indian
literatures. It presented the content of an unmediated traditional
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•
0/MytltA.ndFact .
mythology in a new vessel - the moving picture. It helped to

revalidate the myth., of Sanatan Dbanna (he was a traditional
Brahmin educated to be a Shastri or learned priest) without
modifying them in the direction of the changing ideological urges
of the time.
-
The cinema is a late entrant into the series of catalytic agents
of realignments and reformations that have resulted from the ·
impact of western science on India's traditional agrarian society.
For more than 200 years, the country has faced the challenge of
the West, manoeuvring its vast, timeless bulk not only to protect
its identity but to absorb some of the strength., of the challenger
and thereby work out a modus vive,idi with the modem world.
In the arts as in so much else, India has had the basic shrewdness
to choose what to take and what to reject.
At the time of the arrival of the cinema, a renaissance in
virtually the entire field of art and literature was in motion. From
their bedrock of myth-oriented verse, literatures in many lan-
guages had begun to move into realistic narrative prose modelled
on western forms but with a completely Indian and largely
contemporary content. From this, the early Indian cinema was
more or less removed. It remained concerned with unchanging
mytm and with the painted face rather than with the face itself
and what it expressed through its individuality in manifold ways.
The cinema had not become an instrument of apprehending
material reality, except in a marginal way. Although it soon
developed forms other than the mythological its creative and
intellectual energy remained well behind the other arts, espe-
cially literature.
Perhaps the reason is to be sought in an inability to di&inguish
myth from fact, to grasp the materiality of matter, and to think
in hi&orical rather than timeless terms. A servant who had
recently arrived from a village in Midnapore was dusting a
painting of Jamini Roy in my house in Calcutta. The Bengali
middle class was at that time very dubious about the worth of
the improbable long necks of his women and the extra-wide
eyes projecting sideways out of the run of the face in the style
of Jain miniatures. When I asked the young man what he
24
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THE PAINTED FACE
thought of the painting, he said: "It is just like a photograph•.

His seme of geometry and of spatial proportions, ability to
differentiate between degrees of lik~ of two objects, i.e. his
grasp of materiality, belonged firmly to the pre-industrial period.
The fact that he was also able to accept and worship gom with
many anm or an elephant's head over a human body does not
belong to the same category of thought but is not unrelated to
it. Hinduism is the only ancient religion in the world whose
mythical aspects have not been eliminated or marginali7.ed by
growth in material experience and understanding. It is also the
only major religion to continue the worship of idols and con-
tinue, in a diminished form, the sacrifice of animals, as in Durga
or Kali Puja in Bengal. A comparable situation would be the
continuation of the worship of Zeus and the Greco-Roman
pantheon accompanied by pilgrimages to the oracles of Delphi
or to the idols of over three hundred and fifty godd~ in
pre-Islamic Arabia. In Japan the custom of painting the eyes of
the Buddha to inaugurate any action or institution does continue,
but it is a minuscule symbolic extension of the past in compari-
son to the wholesale continuity of Puranic Hinduism. The
Catholics did perhaps bring back Isis in the form of Mary, Osiris
as Jesus and minor gom in the form of saints, all of them adored
in human form; but none of them are worshipped as God or
have animals sacrificed to them. In India human sacrifice was
not uncommon till about a hundred odd years ago and is still
not altogether unknown. In other words the rule of myth has
not been displaced and myth and fact retain the capacity to
exchange places. The cinema and television, as we shall see,
have indeed reinforced the credibility of myth and protected past
beliefs from the depredations of the present in this unique arena
of perhaps unparalleled continuity in many major respects. The
essay on The Painted Face ofPolitics, which appears later in this
book examines in detail the rise of two fdm stars to political
leadership in two southern states, bearing further witness to the
interchangeability of myth and fact.
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Primitive societies, says Uvi-Strauu, have no sense of his-

tory11. India, with its continuous civilization of 5,000 years,
presents his fl)l"lllulaUon with some difficulty. Actually India
thinks both analogically and analytically, with myth as the
mediator between nature and culture. The two kind, of thinking
- the analogical and the analytical - are not mutually exclusive;
they can and often do extend the comdousnes.1 and connect the
various levels of it. There is perhaps no other society in the world
that constellates the old and the new, the mythical and the real,
to the extent that India does. However, in the section of the
population that the popular Indian cinema serves, the inability
(and the disinclination) to interpret the non-verbal signals within
an image of a fragment of reality recorded-by the camera is a
concomitant of the inability (and the disinclination) to separate
myth from fact . . To illustrate the perslstence of this trait in the
cinema, let me describe a scene in the big hit Ankbion Ke
jbarokbon Se(Behind the Flutter of the Eyelid,, 1978). The father
of the boy looks hard at the mother of the girl when the latter
comes to visit him. It becomes obvious within second, from the
non-verbal signals that something has gone wrong with the
proposed wedding we know about. But the father goes on at
length about the preparations he has mad~ the jewels he has
bought for the bride and so· on, until she tells him that the
marriage cannot take place. All the non-verbal signals are totally
ignored; the situation in the fdm cannot change until the
statement has been made in word,. Dialogue. must be the basic
vehicle of communication. This pte111ise is derived directly from
the folk theatre where the actor is observed from a distance with
flat lighting and therefore the understanding of facts (other than
action like sword faghts, broadly belligerent gestures·etc.) must
spring from the spoken word. Ot must be added that in the
example I have quoted, the ignoring of the non-verbal signals
serves no other dramatic purpose). The WQCds correspond here
to the painting of the face; they become a part of the process of
deduction of reality through the mediation of symbols rather than
its direct induction from the observation of fact12•
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11IE PAJNIED FACE
V
No wonder therefore that the earliest, for a long time most
su~ful and still the initiator of new rural audiences to the
cinema should be the genre of the 'mythological', to which
virtually all ofO.G. Phalke's filrm belonged. But the 'social' fdms
that soon came in its wake appear to have developed a greater
affinity towards the reformist ideology of emergent nationalism.
In 1925, Olandulal Shah's silent fdm Gunasundarl pictured
the modem wife as her husband's equal, signalling the rise of
the 'social' ftlm in an industry so far dominated by the mytho-
logical. A spate of social reform ftlms followed, attacking
traditional social institutions like the persecution of widows,
untouchability, polygamy, the dowry system, landlordism and
the exploitation of bonded labour. There were such landmarks
as Debaki ~e•s Cbandidas (1934), celebrating the love be-
tween a caste Hindu and an untouchable; Pramathesh Barua's
Debdas(1935) made tragedy out of marriage imposed by parents,
and Mukti (1937) advocated divorce. In the south there were
equally zealous ftlms like K. Subramanyam's Balyogtnt (1936) on
the predicament of widows and 11:,yagabboomi (1939) on the
condition of untouchables. Sohrab Modi's historical falms of
Mughal emperors instilled a pride in the country shared by
Hindus and Muslims alike.
In other words, cinema was close to the aspirations of a nation
struggling against foreign rule and trying, in the proc~, to
redefine itself on its own terms rather than those imposed by the
coloniser upon the colonised. The cinema was part of a reformist
crusade against the caste system, against the persecution of
widows and generally against superstitious beliefs. It was also
taking a cue from literature, especially the novel, a form derived
from the West but charged with a completely Indian content.
Critics who airily dismis.s the idea that pre-Independence
Indian cinema had greater identity with national aspirations than
today's should review some of the classics of the thirties. In a
series of works beginning in 1936, Master Vanayak, a brilliant
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OfMyth And Fact
Marathi actor-director, ridiculed everything and everybody, his

special target being the traditionalist. Even Mahatma Gandhi was
not spared where his views on family planning were concerned.
In Brabmacbari One Celibate, 1938), the initiative in a long and
lively pursuit of love was taken by a woman who in the end won
her man, a bmbmacbari sworn to celibacy. Today's big com-
mercial cinema is in essence so conformist that it would be
unimaginable for it to make fun of the cult of Bajrangbali
(Hanuman) the monkey-god, in the way Vinayak did or to
permit a decent (not marginalized) woman to pursue a man.
Audumbar, a simple minded idealist, is impressed by the ha-
rangue of a brabmacbari with a long theatrical beard on the
importance of celibacy. He takes a vow in public before the god
Hanuman to remain a bachelor forever, goes home, throws
away the pictures of Norma Shearer and Claudette Colbert
adorning his walls, and starts on a programme of strenuous
physical exercise. In order to live the life of his choice properly,
he joins an ashram. But storm devastates his life in the comely
shape of 'modem' girl Kishori (played with great verve by
Meenakshi). She pursues him resolutely and in the end marries
him.
While Vinayak makes fun of everybody, he has clear social
intentions to which he testifies himself: "I for myself do not think
that film is a means either to entertain or to get rich quick. It
has ~emendous capacity to influence the social mind for the
good of the community". When the bearded brabmachari, who
could have walked out of a Ravi Verma painting, exhorts the
audience: Nao-jawano,jago, utho,pratigya learo lee chaye, coffee
nabin piyenge, natak, cinema nabi dekhenge, aurat se bazar
baat door mbenge (Young men, awake, arise and swear never
to drink tea or coffee, see plays or films, and to stay a thousand
cubits away from women), a thin man in a western suit pipes
up: Bal bachche nahin bonge? (And not have children?). When
Audumbar meets a modem woman on the train, he mutters to
himself: Auraton ki azadi, mardon ki barbadi (women's libera:.
tion is disaster for men). If ever the conflict of modernity and
tradition resulted in real comedy, it was in Vinayak's Bmb-
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11lE PAIN1ED FACE
macbarl. His technique confonm to the cinema of the time,

but the fum flows with a restless energy; there is never a dull
moment. The humour may be flat at times, but Vanayak's verve
carries the ftlm along wtil it hits the next high point.
By comparison, P.C. Barua's Rajat]ayanti (1939) is laboured
and has little social purpose. He came into his own in the solemn
tragedy of Debdas (1935). Saratchandra Chatterjee had written
th~ novel at the age of 17. It is s~ing that this immature
piece of fiction should have created such an archetypal hero, a
romantic, self-indulgent weakling, who fmck solace in drink and
in the bosom of a golden-hearted pro.,titute. The character of
Debdas has been reincarnated a hundred times in Indian cinema
under many guises; its ghost refuses to die. Perhaps the
deathwish hides in all of us. The dream of surrendering life's
troubles to the·solace of drink and the anm of a lover-mother is
too attractive an escape to be banished altogether from our
secret selves.
Barua was not only the creator of Debdas, he was Debdas.
That is why the Hindi version with Saigal in the lead seems so
drab to anyone who has seen the Bengali version. Apart from
being handsome (which no one could accuse Saigal of being),
Barua had a tragic, if rather solemn, intensity. His voice had
depth, and he spoke in a low, understated manner which Saigal
could not assay. On the social side, Barua represented a
somewhat naive, nevertheless liberal-modem outlook. While
Debdas voices the right to love a woman of one's own choice,
Mukti champions the moral validity of divorce and even defends
adultery as a natural component of its easygoing liberalism. My
main quarrel with Mukti is the quality of the hero's pain~,
which deserved the punishment by death that came to him at
the end. Barua's exeaable taste in matters of art perpetuated
in Bengali cinema, perhaps in Indian cinema altogether, a cult
of third-rate painting and sculpture, and an image of the artist as
a weak man.
Made .a year before Mukti, Shantaram's Du,:,tya Na Maane is
an exptession of heroic will - the very opposite of Del:xJas. It
remains perhaps the most remarkable Indian ftlm of the pre-In-
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OfMyth And Fact
dependence period, both in its daring subject and its cinematic

skill. The story (by N.H. Apte) is about a woman who is married
off for money to a man old enough to be her father. She
resolutely refuses to comummate the marriage, fmally making
him see his folly. The falm exudes an exceptional integrity and
power. Main abala boon, Hindustan me paida but boon, le'ldn
a
tnsaan boon am a woman and I have been born in India but
I am still a human being), she tells her husband. That statement
could still raise echoes in women today. In the eighties, falms
on dowry deaths are as rare in the cinema as they are rampant
in reality; rape is today used to reconfann the male macho. The
women in current films merely scream 'Help'; Shantaram's
Ninnala would have gouged out the rapist's eyes. In Duniya
Na Maane, the social worker Sushila, Nirmala's step-daughter, is
a dignified person with obviously independent, 'modern' char-
acteristics that would have been derided in later falms. Even
when the two sing a Longfellow poem, mouthing ennobling
sentiments, we do not laugh: such is the falm's integrity and
passionate identification with its social cause. The fact that the
wife is tom by doubt when faced with the prospect of totally
repudiating a woman's traditional attitude towanb her husband
should be seen as a realistic obstacle rather than as a reversal of
her struggle fc. independence. It is in a later falm like Padosi
(1941) that Shantaram became schematic and mechanical in his
treatment of Hindu-Muslim brotherhood.. From this schematic
framework, even Dr. Kotnls (1946), a smartly made, fast-moving
film, was not altogether free.
These films were the culmination of a trend set in the pre-
Independence period in the cinema of Damle and Fatehlal in
Maharashtra, Himamhu Rai in Bombay, B.N. Reddy in Andhra
Pradesh, K. Subramanyam in Tamil Nadu and Debaki Bose in
Bengal - all of whom strove to affirm a new Indian identity in a
period of momentous change.
The pre-Independence cinema's audience was dominated by
the middle class - a class that was tuned to the leading ideas of
the new times and was more capable of separating myth from
fact. The war years and the fifties saw the runaway growth of a
30
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working class with more money than education, migrations into

cities aeating unorgani7.ed and unemployed ranks and a prolif-
erating lumpen. It is this segi11fflt of the urban population that
began to dominate the cinema. Wartime shortages had already
created black money and centres of illegitimate economic power.
Independence failed to check their growth. They took control
of film production in large measure. From an organized studio-
based, bank-fmanced operation, the film in~try came to be
fuelled by black money which bought over the stars and brought
studio production to a halt and in is place instituted iradividual-
ized gambling in search of windfalls. .
The fifties.for111ed a watershed. Something of the fervour of
the·pre-Independence struggle continued in the fint decade or
so of independent India. In the ftlrm of Raj Kapoor, Guru OJU,
Bilnal Roy and Mehboob, there emerged an inte11nc:diate cinema
between the reformist zeal of the pre-Independence period and
the sex, violence and neo-traditionalism of the popular cinema
of today. Their fillm cried out for justice but expected it to come
from the new social Mitutiom and the constitutional structure
of iradependent India. There was faith in the new era and the
promise it held. The marginalized poet (Pyaasa), the neglected
wife of the idle rich (SabibBibiAurGhulam), the vagrant youth
(Awam, Sbree 420), the untouchable (Sujata) made common
cause in their demarad for social recognition and justice. Within
the popular cinema, these directors made some personal state-
ment and were able to address them to an audience composed
of all classes.
One director we often lose sight of in this period is S.S Vasan.
His Cbandmlekba image of a flamboyant, extravagant maker of
popular commerical ftlrm always obscured his serious social
concerii6. In Mr. Sampat (1952) he aeated an unforgettable
figure, (played by Motilal), of a modern conman who manipu-
lates people through his glib talk and exploits the talent of a
dancer and the political ambition., of a businessman to further
his own en~.
Paigam (1959) is marked by a fine performance by •Dilip
Kumar as trade union leader - perhaps the mo.,t realistic in our
31
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commerical cinema - and at least two outstanding love scenes.

The fdm idealizes the worker, somewhat naively by having him
pull a rickshaw, and later his swadesbi engineering prowess.
The engineer-hero remakes a part of the imported machine in
the factory with much drama and fanfare.
The factory and union scenes have a sense of reality. Vasan
manages to keep the love interest and the song and dance
routines from impairing the basic credibility of his narrative; the
right of workers in independent India is repeatedly emphasized;
paternalistic management is derided; the union leader behaves
responsibly rather than emotionally. These are qualities absent
from many later fillm on similar subjects, such as Tapan Sinha's
Sagina (again with Dilip Kumar as a union leader) and even
Hrishikesh Mukerjee's Namal, Hamm. · Besides, Vasan invests
an unwed mother in the fdm with a quiet dignity, free of the
melodrama that is usual in latter-day cinema.
For all his brilliant fdmmaking, his ftne sense of cinematic
rhythm and feeling for music and dance, Guru Dutt inherited
something of the weakness of the Debdas character - its absence
of a developed intellectual framework, its all-too-quick admis-
sion of failure and its lack of positive self-assertion. Even in a
period action fdm like Baazi (1953), the active role is played by
Gita Bali as Nisha, while Guru Dutt, as the prince out to recover
his kingdom, see,1~ inclined to spend his time in dalliance rather
than in warfare. The poet of Pyaasa (1957) is overdrawn and
tenm to simplistically romanticize; he consigns himself all too
readily to the outcast role in order to fmd solace in the arms of
the mother-woman, again a prostitute of Barua vintage. This is
not to deny Pyaasds appeal as a fdm and as a piece of social
criticism. But Guru Dutt does give the impression of being a
poet and social critic who has too much emotion in him and
too little intellect, something that holm true of his spiritual
mentor P.C. Barua as well. It is in a fdm like Sahib Bibi Aur
Ghulam, in which Guru Dutt is producer-actor, but not the
director (although the stamp of bis style with its poignant rhythm
is clearly visible), that he fmm a significant framework in a tale
of declining feudalism, written by an established author, more
32
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T11E PAINTED FACE
than in the stories of hi.1 own concoction. In Kasaz k Pbool

(1959), the cinematic vision is captivating, but the weak, senti-
mental streak is. also visible. It is not without significance that
the hero of the film is shown making a new version of Debdas
and that alcohol plays a terminal role in his life. Perhaps it was
with him and the death he brought upon humelf that the curtain
came down on the pre-Independence spirit and its glowing
aftermath of the fifties.
From the sixties onwards, the film industry went more and
more under the control of the traditional mercantile class rather
than the new industrialist. · The MBAs, farst from Harvard and
later from Indian schools of management, the American style
yuppies, dominated the growth of all other industries but not
of the cinema, which remained with the trading community, its
illegitimate periphery playing an increasing part in fdm produc-
tion, distribution and exhibition as the years went by. The 'dean'
element represented by the Parsis (such as the Wadias) lost what
hold it had to the smuggler, the usurious moneylender, the
profiteer, the land speculator lying outside the pale of the
legitimate, organized sector, who expanded the parallel econ-
omy with their underground activity.
As a direct result of this, the mentality of this class affected
the nature of the fwm made. The sixties saw the transition from
the love story to cabarets, rapes, fights and car chases, glorifying
the male macho's hold over money, power and women. The
elegant, romantic hero embodied by Rajesh Khanna gave way
fU'Sl to the seductive machismo of.Dharmendra and then to the
vengeful menace of Amitabh Bachchan, on the national level.
As increased production resulted in wealth, the maldistribution
of it increased, resulting in a burgeoning middle class on the
one hand and rural deprivation and the cultural lumpenzation
of uneducated labour both employed and unemployed, station-
ary and migrant, on the other. Income disparities fuelled violence
and this was seized upon by fdmmakers to create the formula
of revenge that dominated tl)e cinema of the seventies and early-
eighties and continues as a major strand lo this · day. The
contradictions, dilemmas, clashes of belief, confusions of myth
33
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OJMytb And Fact
and fact that had lain dormant beneath the Utopian vision of
independence and the progressive persuasions of charismatic
leadership in the early decades of independence began to surface
in the seventies and assumed threatening expl~iven~ in the
eighties, the period with which this book is mainly conce,iaed.
The pre-Independence and the early post-Independence
· perio& saw a certain struggle to put fact before myth, the
· individual before humanity lumped together as 'society' and its
standard typology, in its social ftlms; this was reversed from the
sixties on and especially in the seventies. From the mythology
of old, we proceeded to mythologise the present and to
re-establish the primacy of myth, which will be explored from
various angles, direct and indirect, in the chapters that follow.
34
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SEEING IS BELIEVING:
SCIENCE IN AID OF MYTHOLOGY
ne remarkable outcome of grafting the technological art

of cinema onto India's pre-industrial society is that the
adage 'seeing is believing' has acquired a new significance. In
industrial societies, the audio-visual media, whether on an
optical or electronic base, is trusted as well as distrusted. News
stories on television are by and large believed; love stories on
the cinema screen may affect the emotions yet are recognized
as fiction. Fictional ftlms may influence attitudes but are not
believed as fact. The situation in India is different and the
differences are not always easy to understand.
When ftlms began in earnest in India, with Phalke's Harlsb-
cbandm in 1913, suddenly the gods and god-like men of
mythology came to life. The 3,700-foot film on a mythological
personification of noble sacrifice was an overwhelming success
(it was re111ade twenty times in eight languages in fifty years). Its
successors, Phalke's own Bbasmasur, Mobini Savitri, I.anka
Dahan, were equally popular and established the 'mythological'
as a long lasting genre of Indian cinema. Hitherto the Hindus
had seen the trinity and pantheon in their minds and in images
of clay, wood and stone; now they saw them walking, flying
in space, throwing flaming discuses (Vishnu's Suda~na-
Cbaltra), setting offenders aflame with a burning look, making
the dead come alive, appearing ou~ of, and vanishing into,
nowhere. This is how the gods had dwelt in the mind's reces.,es,
held -aloft by a network of myths and legends spawned by the
epics and the ~ - The loves and hates of the gods had been
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1HE PA/NIED FACE
seen as lee/a, divine play, evoked by the bbakla or devotee in

his imagination. That imagination now became reality1; here was
Raja Harishchandra walking barefoot through the brambles,
giving away his son
Rohita, his wife Taramati, for the sake of
charity; and there, Rama roaming the Dandakaranya forest with
Sita. Inside the cinema theatre, the devout took off their shoes,
sat with folded hands and even threw offerings at the screen.
Ramrajya, the ideal kingdom ruled by Rama, King of Ayod-
hya, had always lived in the Hindu mind unrelated to historical
time - a Utopia the Hindu hid in his heart through a millennium
of alien dominatio·n, first by the Islamic kingdo~ eXpanded into
an Indianized empire, then by the Christian British. It is to this
deepseated nostalgic dream of Ramrajya, sanctified into divine
myth, that Gandhi appealed in support of his non-violent
struggle against the British when he declared in a moving speech,
at King Edward Hostel in 19202 - "This is Ravan-Raj". No wonder
Gandhi made a kind of contact before the days of mass commu-
nication technology that leaders of later generations could not.
Naturally, the early films were mostly mythologicals. Until
1923, 70 per cent of the films made in India had mythological
themes. They ensured large audiences and their appeal was
firmly addressed to diverse groups linked by a common under-
current of religious belief. Besides, they helped to hide the moral
and social stigma of the performer, traditionally a member of one
of the lowest castes, especially if it was a woman behind the
divine garb. It also served the deeper purpose of confuming faith
in an age of alien challenge.
The British conquerors were preceded and followed by the
missior:iaries of their faith. They were ever ready to bribe the
native believer with their education, guaranteeing advancement
in the new world of their making, full of marvellous innovations
such as railway trains, buses and trams, post offices, telegraphs
and ships. The advantages of embracing the conqueror's faith
were many and, at poorer intellectual and social levels, difficult
to resist. It was even more difficult to separate the self into
behavioural compartments outwardly in consonance with the
36
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Seeing is &IIINm/l
•
conqueror's nonm, and inwardly conforming to traditional faitm.

For the urban majority exposed to the cinema, the act of seeing
the gods became a subtle aid in propping up the belief in them.
The fact that humans were dressed up as gods mattered little.
Rich people took Prem Adib (Rama) and Shobhana Samarth
(Sita) in the full glory of their make-up, straight from the studio
floor to their homes, and offered puja to them.
This was different from seeing them in the folk theatre. The
gods of Jatra (Bengal) or Yaksbagana (Karnataka) could not
actually fly, or bum or vanish. The lee/a of the gods was visually
manifest only in the cinema, therefore difficult, impossible, to
disregard. The actors in the folk theatre were too real; .too often
you knew where they lived, and saw them paint their faces
before they entered the arena. In the cinema they were real yet
shadowy, not gross enough to 1~ their distance and dignity.
The folk form was (still is, despite its decline) based on what we
today call Brechtian alienation, that filmmakers like Ketan Mehta
invoke in their falms. As the screen lit up in the vast night in the
open air or inside the dark womb of the theatre, before their
eyes a primeval dream unfolded in which the gods lived and had
their being, emerging from an ancient co1nmunal memory se-
creted within the self. The thrill was no less than that of audiences
in Europe, tren1bling as the train approached the station in the
tiny fragments the Lumi~res showed everywhere at the close of
one century and the beginning of another. For the devout
Hindu, it was almost like the traditional glimpse of God in a
dream that directly influenced action - something enshrined,
decades later, through the sympathetic but sceptical eye of
Satyajit Ray in Delli.
The medium of cinema works against the stylization of folk
fonm. When it is stylized today, in the works of a Mani Kaul or
a Nirad Mahapatra, it loses the popular reach of the folk form.
In pre-industrial society, production was individualized, region-
ally faxed; its art was largely an anonymous by-product of religion
and regional culture enclosed within the narrow limits of social
and geographical mobility. The difference between art and craft
37
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THE PAINTED FAct·
-was marginal. The maker of an image or a water pot knew the

buyer of it personally and sold it through direct encounter. The
folk theatre reflected this reality. Its performers were known
entities of flesh and blood and belonged to well-defined geo-
graphical areas. It drew both its religious and secular content
from the prevailing tradition of the area, sometimes fusing
them, sometimes treating them separately. It projected them in
a way suitable for open spaces and dim lights. Naturalism in
acting and staging was hardly possible; the voice had to be raised
in order to be heard, the gesture had to be magnified in order
to be seen. It is this style that was at first directly transferred to
the cinema but modified over the years to acquire a greater
degree of naturalism. In any case, compared to the folk theatre,
the illusion of reality in the cinema was greater even at the
beginning. For one thing, the miracles wrought in Phalke's
mythological, with the innovative flair of a Melies, came to life
far more vividly than they could ever have on either the
newfangled proscenium stage or the traditional folk theatre.
In an interview in 1979, Kamalabai Gokhale, reminiscing on
her acting in the early mythologicals of Dadabhai Phall_<e around
1914, commented on the cinema's disconcerting immediacy:
"Theatre acting is done within the norms of restraint. It is
symbolic, particularly in love scenes. On the stage you keep your
distance, decide your limit and say that I would go no further
than holding hands.,.. But in a love scene in a film, you have to
embrace - really embrace - the other fellow in front of the
camera. Otherwise it would make no sense". This was not long
after the period when even prostitutes found it socially embar-
rassing to appear in the cinema, and men often had to play the
part of women.
ij
The cinema has a lot to do with materialism. The apprehen-
sion of individual and collective life, and the factors surrounding
38
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Seeing i, Believing
or determining them must be made, in industrial society,

through a new ability to understand material things. The cinema
was invented by scientists who sought to fashion an instrument
for gauging the optical illusion of movement (persistence ·of
vision) or animal locomotion or the .transit of a planet. Babbage
was a mathematician, Herschel an astronomer, Eti~nne Jules-
Marey an anatomist; Eadweard Muybridge, photographer, may
be considered the only artist among the inventors of cinema.
The rest were scientists or, like Edison and Dickson, technolo-
gists.
The very need for an additional dimension to man's commu-
nicative abilities ar~ out of conditions created by the Industrial
Revolution. Modem technology, urbanization, high mobility
and rapid communication introduced a whole new set of sights,
sounds, symbols and their material inter-relationships which ,
demanded interpretation. A jet fighter shooting up in the sky
leaving a vapour trail, or a man walking along the street seen
from a hundred floors above can be evoked in writing, but when
they are seen in the cinema, they carry a different kind of
conviction of materiality. It is to this instrument of belief that the
latter-day gods of Indian politics produced by the mythical world
of the cinema repaired to induce con.viction in their divinity and
eligibility for elections.
Men do become gods in the cinema; but some of the cinema's
gods too have become men of power on earth - avataras of
Krishna or Rama. Indeed the two of them who promised, and
created, something of the illusion of realising Ramrajya, both
bear his name - Madanapally Gopala Ramachandran in Tamil
Nadu and Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao in Anclhra Pradesh. The
process of equation of myth with fact, the easy movement of the
mind between the two, is helped by the nature of visual
perception in pre-industrial societies. For the servant just arrived
from a village a painting by Jamini Roy was exactly like a
photograph; the illusion of verisimilitude was easy. The morpho-
logical perceptions of industrial man, tempered by a scientific
~ment of what appears real, are sharper; they instantly verify
39
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11lE PAINTED FACE
the fonn in tern~ of geometry, gauging its solidity, comparing it

to others of the species and, through inductive logic, moving
from experiences of the particular to some general gestalt.
The appearance of any element depends upon its place and
function in the pattern as a whole. 'Far from being a mechanical
recording of sensory elements, vision turned out to be a truly
creative grasp of reality'. Thinking within the· orbit of Baconian
science, · one would conclude that all vision is grasped by a
struggle for an orderly conception of natural form, proceeding
in a logical development from the perceptually simplest patterns
to increasing complexity. "When we look at one side of a ball
we also 'see' the other, i.e. not a partial but a complete sphere"3•
But to the average Hindu, the elephant-headed god Ganesha
is not a representation of an abstract idea; he exists even though
he cannot be encountered in the flesh. So is Jamini Roy's
impossibly long-necked, extra-wide-eyed woman· the same as a
photographic image. The question of tl1e purely material exist-
ence of a fonn is unimportant, because in traditiqnal Indian art,
as opposed to the academic art born of a scientific awareness
of materiality in post-Renaissance Europe, the fonn is seen in
the mind, not in reality. Yet it exists. T11us the form of the
seated Buddha is a representation of the idea of meditation; the
dancing Nataraja (Shiva, the king of dance) embodies the idea
of _cosmic rhythm. The idea assumes human form, thus manifest-
ing itself in.material ternis. In post-Baconian European percep-
tion, the material form comes from nature and is then informed
by an idea. There is a process of reversal from this in post-in-
dustrial society's 'art'; but that is confined to a small minority
producing a market commodity rather than the whole of society
yielding art as a by-product of essential socio-economic proc-
esses as in pre-industrial societies. Even so, modem art remains
a scientific perception; it analyses light, or density, or assembles
aspects of material reality; the point of reference from which it
withdraws, and eliminates, is the naturalistic image.
40
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m
But far from inducing a 'modem', sceptical, secular spirit, the
early cinema gave the Hindu pantheon access to this powerful
instrument of belief; imtead of retreating before science, as in
the West (where are Zeus and Apollo or Athena today?), the
Indian gods obtained new life from it.
The realistic illusion-making power of the cinema therefore
works in favour of the merging of myth and fact rather than
their. separation as evidenced in pre-industrial societies. "Even
after seven decades of fil~, gullible members of the audience
were seen laying themselves prostrate before the screen deity in
motion picture theatres throughout when Jai Santosbi Maa
(1975) was shown••. For the bulk of the population of India,
the process of perception has not been metamorphosed by
science into a way of grasping the material existence of an object.
Only in high-literacy areas subjected to Western thought struc-
tures, especially rationalism and Marxist materialism, such as
the states of Kerala and West Bengal, does the cinema audience
have a ready ability to separate myth from fact. Prem Nazir held
the Guinness Book record for having made the largest number
of fil~ of any actor in the world (more than 600), but when
he developed political ambitions, the people of Kerala made
it quite clear that their matinee idol in the cinema would not be
acceptable as their political chief. This is in direct contrast to
M.G. Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu or N.T. Rama Rao in Andhra
Pradesh.
But the cinema is the product of a new need for grasping
the material reality of the industrial-scientific world. It represents
a pressure, within the evolution of the popular arts, towards
greater naturalism, farther and farther reaches of conviction of
materiality. Indian cinema, developing on a large scale within
a mainly agricultural population with myth-laden minds, coun-
tered this pressure in the land of elephant-headed Ganesha and
the stone lingam by mythologising the present. With the expan-
41
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11IE PAINTED FACE
sion of the industrial-urban sector, the mythological as a genre

has had to beat a retreats; it cannot deal with the manifest
phenomena of modem society and therefore becomes inade-
quate, despite exceptions like Jai Santoshi Maa, an enormously
successful film which spread nationally an earlier very restricted
cult6. What happens then is that cars, skyscrapers, jet planes
and gunfights are used to endorse the same basic faiths as the
'mythologicals' without denying the audience its visual expe-
rience of the new phenomena.
Amar Akbar Anthony has its three brothers, estranged in
childhood, grow up under surrogate fathers of the three major
religions of contemporary India - Hinduism, Islam and Christi-
anity - and brings them together again at the end in a realization
of their CT-lindu) unity. The brothers, coincidentally together
throughout, have their mother present among them without
their knowledge of her identity. They treat her as their surrogate
mother. She has lost her eyesight in an accident, but regains her
vision in a dramatic moment in the dargah of the Shirdi Sai Baba.
While Akbar sings to the statue of the saint, two blobs of light
(you can see them, they are there) issue from the eyes of the
saint and travel across the screen in a panning shot over the
congregation, stop at the mother's eyes and get into them. Now
she can see. Other manifestations in the film - clothes, houses,
cars, trains - are modem; but the faith invoked is no different
from that in Bhakta Prah/ada or Bharat Milap or any of the
professed 'mythological' films of old.
In films like Trishul and Karz, dead mothers call upon their
sons from the other world to take revenge on their enemies.
They power the muscles of the protagonists with a divine
maternal boon, enabling them to perform miracles such as
defeating 30 strong men with their bare hands. In Karz, the mix
of the modem and the traditional peaks in the reincarnation of
the hero, whom a sexy but evil woman had run over with a car
near a shrine of Goddess Kali. Divine retribution consists of the
villainess being run over by a car near the same shrine. Thus is
42
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the present constantly mythologised and the currents of tradi-
tional belief kept alive beneath a modem exterior.
Except for the core of religious doctrine and ritual, all other
physical manifestations are jazzily modem in these fal~; per-
haps the object is to emphasize the means of resolution of
conflicts as divine and eternal, above the purview of social
change. Traditional faith is not allowed to be subverted by the
freedom to doubt old beliefs and the spirit of scientific enquiry
that led to the invention of modem industrial products parading
across screen space. aosely related to this is the way certain
new visual models came to dominate the mythological. As we
have seen, Raja Ravi Veima's imitative English academicism
recreated Indian gcxb and goddesses, transforming them from
the supably idealized figures of the Ajanta frescoes and the stone
images of Vishnu or Shiva into florid bazaar oleographs in crude
homage to the naturalistic idiom of the colonial ruler's art. Today
any treatment of the gods in the cinema that does not follow
Ravi Verma's- prescription in imagemaking may be in trouble
with the audience. The prescriptions of the medieval Vishnud-
barmottara Puranawould not be understood. In the cinema this
is the model of mythology that has retreated under the pr~ing
need for encounters with the modem. Interestingly, it has
re-asserted itself through television, where the driving spirit
behind its appearance is a certain view of tradition uninformed
by either a historical sensibility or an understanding of Indian
art traditions7•
It is interesting to compare all this with the 'superman'
mythology of American cinema. Laser weapons melt human flesh
and encasements of steel; lethal weapons unleash spectacles of
colossal disaster, projecting not only the possiblity of conquest
of the denizens of outer space, but of Armageddon on earth. It
is as though two tracks laid on the visions of the future of a
super-industrial society travel through its mental space, one of
conquest, the other of destruction, of which the impatient present
can no longer wait for either. It is a mythologisation of the future
arising from the compulsions of the 19th century dream of man's
43
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11IE PA.INTED FA.CE
conquest of all he perceives, wh~e fulfilment ~ alm~t

~ible.
India's age-old society, faced with the spectre of modem
science, baulks at the prospect of being dominated by it and
shaken out of the security of traditional faiths. The significant
but small minority wh~ body and soul have both entered the
industrial stage and adopted the rule of science, produces the
'new cinema'; the vast pre-industrial sector mythologises both
the past and the present, perha~ propelled by a fear that calls
for a return to the womb'. The city is where the modem and
the traditional meet and where the dream factories are located.
The ways in which the cities of modem India are related to the
moral sector determine the nature of the battleground of ideas
that the cinema represents.
44
Digitized by Go?gle Original from

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
3
OLD AND NEW:
THE VILLAGE AND THE CITY
ahatma Gandhi came from a well-to-do urban merchant

family and was educated in London. When he lived in a
city, he chose his dwelling in the slums among the poor and
from there carried on his dialogue with the high and mighty.
There was no urban-rural divide in him. The fact that he dr~ed
like a villager but came from an urban background and spoke
English perfectly, did not visit temples and preached against the
caste system, did not alienate him from either the village or the
city. His doing., in the city were seen by the villager as the labours
of a leader of the country as a whole. It is remarkable that until
Independence and at least for a decade thereafter, the city was
not evil; in fact, in it lay the promise for the future of India. The
social ftlrm of the thirties projected the city as home to the new
ideals of independent India-to-be, the dream that rural audien~
ought to dream.
fn Shantaram's Duniya Na Maane (1937), a modem woman
from the city helps her old father's young wife in her dete111li-
nation to fight off his attempts to consummate the marriage. On
his death bed, he asks her to remarry - an inconceivable idea for
the traditional Hindu woman, and for the commercial cinema
today. Raj Kapoor's Awara(1951) and Sbree420(1955) do show
a heartl~ city but believe in the possibility of its redemption,
Guru Dutt's films see the cynicism of the modem world; but
neither associate it especially with the city, nor are they nostalgic
about rural values. Indeed it is a very urban sensibility that
distinguishes Guru Dutt. In Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy, the son of
Original from
111£ PAINTED FACE
an impoverished Brahmin family in a village moves fust to the

ancient city of Varanasi in search of better times, and thence to
the modem city of Calcutta to educate hirmelf. In Bibhutibhusan
Bandyopadhyay's novel on which the trilogy is based, Apu .
leaves his little son with relatives and goes off to Tahiti - a long
way from the village in which he had been born. The progres-
sion is from the village to the city to the world - with hope.
Satyajit Ray changed the ending; but Apu's evolution from
the traditional village to the modem world is deeply etched. The
city is the source of liberal values. In Delli Clbe Goddess), the
rich landlord with his traditional education is wedded to out-
dated beliefs. It is his son, representing reason, who tries to
prevent the tragedy that overcomes his Vfife because of his
fathCC:s religious superstitions. Thus the city is the source of
light, and of liberation from servitude. The British had to leave
because of the able leadership of the western-educated Indian
and the whole country knew it. The massive mutiny of the
previous century had failed because it did not know the source
of its enemy's strength.
In more recent times, Marxism, an ideology of pervasive if
varying influence in India, has cast the city in the lead role.
Revolution must begin with the working class, whose habitat is
the industrial city; intellectuals who help to bring about the
revolution are city bred. The Maoist way shifted the accent to
the countryside for a while; but the Naxalite movement inspired
by it reduced itself to terrorist groups and failed to become a
people's movement. As a result the Marxist parties of various
hues retained their city-centric culture. This highly urban attitude
is shared in varying degrees by nearly all of the New Cinema,
which treats the city as the centre of all change. In West Bengal,
all ftlm activity is Calcutta-based; all filmmakers live in Calcutta.
This is not merely becaus~ Calcutta is where the. facilities for
fllmmaking exist; it is wllere all modem culture lives. Tradi-
tional cultural centres such as Murshidabad, · the home of past
Muslim glory, and Nadia, the centre of Hindu thought and
indeed of the Bengali language, have declined to rack and ruin.
46
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The Village And Tht Cily
Even though cultural activity persi&s in these pla<."O and not

all of it is of a low order; Calcutta remaim the indisputable
cultural growth centre. Kerala, another Marx-influenced state,
is unique in having an urban-rural continuum that prevents a
rigid city-village divide. Bombay, India's commercial capital and
its most cosmopolitan, westemized city is, not unnaturally, the
archetypal source of ideas for the mass f1hn. The models• it has
developed are continuously intemali7.ed by the commercial
system of regional cinemas virtually wholesale, turning their
products into a sort of poor man's Hindi fdm in a local language.
Although the South produces more than half the total number
of filrm made in the country, its modes of thought and formal
structures are basically derived from Bombay. It has strong
regional characteristics, but the underlay of ideas and the
approach to film form bear a deep impress of the cultural matrix
forged in Bombay.
Indeed 'Salaam Bombay' could be the name of India's mass
cinema, not merely of Mira Nair's film. The city is also an
important centre of the New Cinema; coming in the wake of
the movement in Calcutta, it produced the notable works of
Shyam Benegal, Saeed Mirza, Ketan Mehta, M.S. Sathyu and
others. Indeed its dissent against the mores of the commercial
film has gone furthest in the uncompro,nising works of Mani
Kaul, as also in those of Kumar Shahani, which defy all'accepted
norms of mass communication. Perhaps because of the abso-
luteness of its commercialism, th_e city also had to produce the
antibodies against the virus within its own system. Notably,
Calcutta or Trivandrum has not needed such extreme forms of
ideological- aesthetic protest, despite the strong Marxist presence
that marks both cities. In the rest of the country, the cities,
indeed the metropolises, dominate cultural 1novement and are
seen as good or evil depending upon which cinema. you
subscribe to - the progressive New Cinerna or the orthodox-to-
fundamentalist commercial cinema, particularly the .all-India
Hindi film.
47
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· THE PAINTED FACE
II
To the New Cinema, the city is the source of progress; to
the commercial cinema, it is evil. One mounts a critique of the
village, the other idealizes it as the home of tradition, family
bonds, religious faith, indeed of all virtue. Saeed Mirza's Albert
Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon. Ata Hai (Why Does Albert Pinto Get Angry,
1978) has his liberal humanist motor-mechanic hero evolve into
militant Marxist in classic pattern, complete with Brechtian
alienation and musical confirmation of dogma. Another
Brechtian, Ketan Mehta, attacks traditional patterns of exploita-
tion of the poor in Bhavni Bbavai (1980) and Mircb Masala
(Spices, 1986), using a folk dance-music form in the fJJ'St and
the advent of the gramophone in the other.
Many others in the New Cinema share this critical view of
rural social organization. Archetypal to the cinema in this aspect
are Shyam Benegal's Ankur (Seedling, 1974) and particularly
Nisbant (End of the Night, 1975), whose patterns are repeated
in Gautam Ghosh's Paar (The Crossing, 1987), Prakash Jha's
Damul (Bonded Until Death, 1984), Mrinal Sen's Oka Oorie
Katba (The Outsiders, 1978) and B.V. Karanth's Cbomana Dudi
(Choma's Drum, 1975); all are forceful in their portrayal of rural
oppressions.
Of course these realists expose the evil aspects of the city
too, in film after film; what is remarkable however is that that is
in no way a denial of the leading role of the city - it remains the
home of revolutionary and evolutionary change, with science
and technology as its instruments. Even critiques of the
scientism of progress arise from within the urban system.
By and large; the regional cinemas, even in their most populist
form, see less evil in the city than the all-India product in Hindi
and in the vast dream factories of south India, more especially
Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh: Thus Bengali cinema's-popu-
lar products idealize character both· in city and country, or
criticize both. In Oriya, a film like Parvati Ghosh's Cbbamana
Ata Gunta (Six point eight measures of land, 1986), based on
48
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TIit Yllla,t And Tltt Cuy
Fakir Mohan Senapati's classic novel, cannot be labelled New

Cinema as such but is resolute in its denunciation of age-old
patterns of oppression of peasant by landlord. These patterns
are. repeated in Assamese and other regional cinemas. It is the
popular all-India or southern ftlm that almost invariably idealizes
the village and sets it up as an embodiment of the wish to return
to the Utopia of the womb, the apotheosis of the death wish.
The city is evil because it disseminates doubt, destabilizes
tradition. Struggle against it is debilitating; a line of retreat from
it must be kept open at least within the spirit if not in reality.
Given the size of India's population, the 25 per cent that
lives in the urban areas still forms a large audience for the
cinema. Except. for some touring cinemas located in the south,
the cinema theatres are .overwhelmingly urban. The · rural ele-
ment of the audience comes from the urban periphery. Villagers
who come to town to buy and sell often see a show before
returning home by bus or train, or on foot. Fairs, festivals and
places of pilgrimage attract both men and women with their
children, and provide another important point of contact with
the cinema. In some villages, television sets owned by rich
peasants and landlords, plus some government-given commu-
nity sets, provide a certain amount of cinematic fare. The radio,
which is ubiquitous, constantly blares forth fihn songs, without
which the popular cinema would not be what it is. Most
villagers, of course, have relatives in towns whom they visit and
who in tum visit them, providing a conduit for the transmission
of direct or vicarious experience of fihns. Nevertheless, the
cinema
.
remains a basically urban phenomenon. It requires . the
supply of electricity and infrastructural facilities that limit its
spread to rural areas where·such facilities are at best inadequate,
even though over 60 per cent of India's 575,000 villages do have
some electricity and are connected by bus routes. A study in a
district in south India in 1968 found that while 27 per cent of
the population in the city had never been to a film, in the villages
76 per cent had not1• For the majority of villagers in India, cinema
represents an episodic medium. Until Independence, even this
peripheral audience was minute in size. Cinema theatres were
49
Original from
1HE PAINTED FACE
concentrated in the cities. Inevitably, the fil~ made at the time

primarily adclr~ed themselves to the middl~ class, which had
expanded considerably during the -consolidation of British ad-
ministration and the infrastructure created in its service. The
main concerns of the films were social reform, the glorification
of Indian history and the revival of its mythology through the
magical properties of ftlm techniquel.
Independence set in motion a proces.5 of rapid industrializa-
tion and urbanization, which in turn resulted in largescale
migration to the cities and the growth of an urban working
class. The uneducated began to dominate the cinema audience
because the expansion of the cities altered the cultural compo-
sition and the money map of the urban areas. The working
class made rapid progress in terms of money; but the ranks of
the unemployed also swelled and made urban destitution much
more fearful than rural poverty. The fact is that urbanization in
India, as in most developing countries, does not foil ow the classic
pattern of a development based on the disposal of the rural
supplies but is predicated upon rural impoverishment. The
emphasis on industrial expansion without corresponding invest-
m~nt in educational opportunities and standards led to a rapid
lumpenization of the uneducated. The enthusiasm for social
reform slowly evaporated out of film. The middle class audi-
ence was mostly subsumed into the urban lumpen which had
lost much of its rural moorings iri tradition though it failed, at
the same time, to acquire an urban character. The slums of the
• cities - about 30 per cent of the metropolitan population -
exerted far greater influence on the. standards of filmmaking
because the producers constantly sought the lowest common
level of acceptance for their products. They tried to find a
commonality in the superficies of modernism rather than in the
depths of regional tradition for an extremely varied audience.
The slowly expanding rural cinema audience was subjected
more and ptore to the urban lumpen standards that the cinema
had begun to adopt. At the same time, the Gandhian-Nehruvian
identity with the rural masses had declined, and the cultural
divide between the rural masses and the urban leadership had
50
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The Village And The City
widened. In 40-odd years of independence the increase in the

percentage of the urban population has been only five per cent,
but this gives no idea of the impact of rural-urban migration.
Absolute figures show an increase from 70 million to 200 million'.
Most of the migration has taken place directly into the metro
cities•, the homes of filmmaking. The movement from the small
towns to the metro itself constitutes a kind of rural-urban
migration; the gap between the two is so great as to make the
small town a first cousin of the village. What is more, the impact
of science on the body of traditional faiths divides society into
urban and rural; fundamentalists in the cinema see traditional
virtues in the village because it continues to hold to tradition,
and evil in the city because it promotes doubt.
By the sixties, the middleclass oriented films and their effort
to hold all audiences together in the work of Raj Kapoor, Guru
Dutt and Bimal Roy had died out. Bimal Roy himself made Do
Bigba Zamin (An Acre of Land) about a debt-ridden peasant
who comes to the city to make money as a rickshaw puller. The•
ftlm was hailed by the educated audience and is considered by
many as a precursor of Satyajit Ray's early neo-realism. But,
like the Apu films, Do Bigba Zam in was rarely seen by the lower
sections of the urban audience and its rural periphery.
When the New Cinema came into being with Satyajit Ray,
Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, a fum divide developed between
the cinema of the elite and that of the con1mon man. In a sense,
the divide was also between the urban and the rural, because
the new films acquired a more markedly urban outlook. It was
the point of view of the urban-·educated that went into these
films. The so-called commercial cinema continued let.design its
appeal to that sector of the urban population th~,had arrived
from the villages not so long ago and suffered from a sense of
alienation. Few among the migrants to the city did not have
strong links with the villages they had left behind. Most of them
were men without women, having left their families in the village
home. For them, as also for the producers who r.nade films for
them, the village came to represent tradition and goodness; the
city, modernity and evil. The village girl was good,i the city girl
51
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bad; you had your fun with the city vamp but married the village
belle. This equation quickly expanded to take in the Indian as
opposed to the Western. In An Evening i11 Paris Sharrnila Tagore
played two sisters, one modem and the other traditional, leaving
you in no doubt about which one was better. In DoRaaste<:rwo
Roa~) and PurabAur Pascbbim (East and West), similar judge-
ments were made. In q>kaar(Doing Good To Others), the city
corrupts the migrant from the village. These are films from the
sixties. But even in a big hit of 1988, Cbarno Ki Saugandb
(The Vow), the city brep. hero, played by matinee idol Mithun
Chakravarty, marries a sophisticated girl from the city and tames
her into accepting the traditional mores of the village. In
between, the seventies saw falms like Ga,iwaar (The Rustic),
starring Rajendra Kumar as a village bumpkin; the film has him
asserting his native intelligence against the city stickers. In Gaon
Hamara Sbabr Tumbara (The Village For Me, The City For
You), Rajendra Kumar and Rekha discover that their village is a
better place to live than Bombay. Corning to the eighties, Sitara
and CbalaMurari HeroBan11e(Murari Goes To Become A Hero)
dealt with star-struck villagers (Zarina \Vahab in the former,
Asrani in the latter) aspiring to become fihn celebrities, only to
realise the futility of their quest for fame and money. The second
film was directed by Asrani, who had played a similar role in
Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi. In Khudga1-z, Shatrughan Sinha
is a rustic living in a big city who owns a large plot of land and
believes in the virtues of honesty and austerity. His conflict is
with his friend Qeetendra), who wants to buy his land and build
a hotel on it. But the most important recent expression of this
philosophy of urban greed and rural purity was in Raj Kapoor's
Ram Teri Ganga Maili. With the characteristic sweep of his
vision, Raj Kapoor traced the story of a. girl from up in the
Himalayas who is progressively more defiled as she moves down
fro~ the idyllic mountains. The analogy is with the river Ganga,
which has been subjected to the same fate. Of course, in the end
the girl's uncorrupted spirit triumphs over the destruction of her
body. Also worth mentioning is a falm from the seventies, Ada/at
(The Court), in which Amitabh Bachchan played both father and
52 ·
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The Village And The Cily
son. The tyrannized father migrates to the city, brings up his son
there, and in the end takes revenge on his old tormentor back
in the village. Thus the city and village stereotypes are occasion-
ally reversed, but not in order to condemn the ways of rural life
as such. That polarity remained unchanged within the two roles
played by the same actor. Of course, such dichotomy often
represented an inner conflict between two selves resting within
the same soul, as Otto Rank says in The Double. It was also an
indicator of the social dilemmas of choice. In no time, the
bikini-clad woman, the vamp,_the nightclub singer, the photog-
rapher's model, became the embodiment of the evil city; the
mother emerged as the icon of the family; the symbol, although
not an active agent, of an unchanged tradition emhrined in
the archetypal village.
Once upon a time, the family was an agricultural concept
of kinship bound by the common ownership of land and the
labour upon it, untrammelled by geographical mobility or by the
seductions of new professions and occupations. The happy man
was defmed in the Mababbarata as the one who did not live
away from home (Apravasf)5 - an ideal that persisted for
thousands of years before the coming of the railways and of
mass production. That image of the village had now ceased to
be real in the life of the migrant and turned into a dream. The
village lived more and more in the country of the mind and
eontinued to supply an increasingly unrealistic model. Families
in the city splintered, gradually becoming nuclear; land holdings
in the village grew smaller and smaller under the pressures of
nuclearization of the family. The extended family became im-
pos.5ible to sustain in the competitive, con1bative atmosphere of
the city. These dangers to the family became embodied in the
villain who harmed it, and therefore revenge had to be
wreaked upon him. The Mother and the Family and the
protection of their Honour became the formula of the seven-
ties. The presiding deity of this world view was Amitabh
Bachchan, India's biggest box-office phenomenon ever, who
acted in a series of amazing blockbusters. He was for some time
•
an elected Member of Parliament but continued to act in f~.
53
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11IE PAINTED FACE
.
with uncertain results. The guardian of rural values had defected
to the city, losing much of his welcome. The charges of corrup-
tion laid at his door placed him in the very centre of the city's
evil heart. The urban villager could no longer identify with hitn6
III
The frequent d~ppearance of the father in the films of this
period and the resultant dominance of the mother could well
reflect the situation of the rural family wh~e migrant father
leaves the children in the care of the mother exposed to multiple
clangers. The city divides, the village unites. The village is the
fountainhead of security and identity in the psyche of the
uprooted. The migrant cannot strike new roots in the urban
psychological ground, composed of totally different patterns of
interdependence deter111ined by institutions, rather than indi-
viduals. Th~- pre-industrial dream .haunts the soul impraoned
in the unfamiliar, impersonal situation created by the divisive
nature of production itself· and .t~e alienating anonymity im-
posed by the bewildering variety and the sheer massiveness of
urban human conglomerations. The migrant is a lonely man
forever regarding himself as a temporary resident, harbouring in
his heart a dream of return which he consciously knows to be
impo~ible7• He is caught in an inexorable, irreversible change
which he cannot fully accept. The major part of the urban
cinema audience is thus rural at heart. The city itself bears the
burden of an urban-rural divide within it. Yet the city is where
the modem and the traditional meet and join ~ue, and where
the dream factories are located. The ways in which the cities
of modem India are related to the rural sector, the largest part
of pre-industrial society, are important to the battleground of
ideas that the cinema represents.
In a country that has lived for thousands of. years as a
honeycomb of self-contained group identities at its grassroots,
with shifting imperial boundaries but no concept of the nation-
state, the sucJden breakdown of dividing walls in the industrial
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TM vu1ag, An4I n, City
world, with its rapid communications and changing confagura-

tions, its high social and geographical mobility, poses a serious
threat. A secret fear of homogenization haunts the mind. Will
my son eat beef when he goes to the city? Will he marry some
girl of his own choice who will be unacceptable to the mother?
Thus the rural population, the urban working class, the
unemployed migrant, the petty trader and the slum-dweller
remain a community set apart from those who have accepted
the values of the city and continue to see it as a centre of
growth, the point of take-off into a great future. In Anand
Patwardhan's film on Bombay, Sohrab Godrej the industrialist,
standing on the roof garden of his penthouse flat, says: 'Why
don't these people (the slum dwellers) go back to where they
came from? After all, they came from somewhere'. What he is
talking about is the great divide that separates the city from the
. village. When the villager lives in the city, he does so on
sufferance.
Once we see this, it becomes clear why the advanced middle
class needs its own separate cinema. It continues to see itself as
the determinant of the country's destiny, despite the divide that
has descended between the elite and the. masses with the loss
of the power of persuasive communication of the Gandhi-Nehru
era, compounded by the frustrations over the inequity of distri-
bution of the fruits of development. In spite of its own criticism
of the evils of the city, the post-Ray generation sees itself on
the cutting edge of social reform, redress of economic and
political wrongs as well as aesthetic development - the very
areas vacated by popular cinema. Thus there is no pastoralism
in the New Cinema but a strong social critique of rural conditions,
both economic and cultural. .
Very often; films of the New Cinema are nqt seen by the
people about whom they are made. This is especially true in
the field of the all-India Hindi ftlm. Regional films have a
somewhat better time but are not entirely free of the problem...:.
In Bengal, for instance, Satyajit Ray's fit~ are widely seen,
often achieving comme,rcial success. But that too is due to the
presence of a large, expanding, politically aware middle class.
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The situation is better still in Mapdst-dominated K~la, where ·

literacy is high and the urban-rural divide is weaker, almost all
of coastal Kerala being one semi-urban continuum. Taken all in
all, however, the audience divide in the country is so real that
the exploration., of the New Cinema are at best exercises in
self-discovery and a search for identity with the majority on the
part of an alienated elite. At worst, they constitute a pursuit of
new aesthetic sensations within certain modish formulae of social
awareness. Thus a film like Gautam Ghosh's Paar projects a
moving portrayal of a migrant peasant couple in the city with
the certain knowledge that the film will not be seen by the people
whose fate it depicts. Arousing the middle class comcience
seems to be the sole social satisfaction they can hope to derive
- at least within the present privately owned, profit-seeking
set-up of distribution and exhibition, even for films financed
mostly by the state and sometimes by individuals for the social
good and for the sake of artistic achievement.
N
Ironically, the New Cinema, beginning with Satyajit Ray, has
a slow rhythm derived from the traditional pace of country life.
Apu's journey through·· 1ife is unhuFried, a model set by a
pre-industrial society that ignores the models set by the islands
of modernity in which the films themselves are made. Nirad
Mahapatra's Maya Miriga, an exquisite study of the breakup of
a joint family, is Ozu-like in its stillness and belongs to the
rhythm of life of its region. Even Satyajit Ray's Big City (1963) is ·
set to the rhythm that would be natural to a genteel, middle class
Calcutta woman orienting herself to a working life. The rhythm
is part of the realism of these films and their effort to get to the
essence of a way of life.
It is in the commercial cinema designed for the semi-urban
and the rural masses that we come across a frenzied pace. If
Ketan Mehta's Mirch Masala were to be remade by the movie
moguls, it would be sped up one hundred per cent. In the
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average blockbuster, the major part of the two and a half hours
are taken up by songs and dances; so experiments in exporting
them without these numbers have resulted in umaleably short
features. Being spectacles, these ftlrns move incredibly fast in
order to prevent their audiences from having any chance to think.
The songs and dances, especially the dances, are cut with
amazing speed and finesse, using a very large number of minute
cuts where the New Cinema would use much longer, contem-
plative takes. This rapid-fll'e style of cutting in the commercial
film derives clearly from the West, in direct contradiction to the
pace of life of both its subject and its audience. Sometimes the
rhythm is aptly used, as in the opening sequence of Sbaan
{Pride), in which Mazhar Khan, playing a maimed beggar in the
employ of a gang of bandits, rolls his wooden platform along
the streets of Bombay with skyscrapers zooming above him in
low angle shots as he speeds on his way to inform the gang chief
of his latest findings. In the opening sequence of Sbolay,
India's best-made and most famous Curry Western, the smartly
executed race across the top of a speeding train could have come
from an Amercian Western.
In other words, the commercial cinema uses a city slick
pace, regardless of the pace of life of the people it portrays or
the place in which its story is located. The New Cinema adopts
the rhythm of its subject. In Ray's _1be Middleman (1975), the
pace is much faster than in Big City. The can1era moves restlessly
as it follows the brisk pace at which the novice is walking with
the seasoned businessman along the streets of Calcutta to learn
the tricks of the trade. The· pacing also has to do with the
attitude to the city. The Calcutta of Big City was benign; in Tbe
Middleman, the city has become evil. In Ray's vision of it, the
industrial city brutalizes the youth in transition from a pre-indus-
trial state of mind. In Saeed Mirza's Albe,t Pinto Ko Gussa Kyon
Ata Hai a sizzling quarrel takes place on a motorbike slicing
through peak traffic in Bombay between a boy and his girl-
friend, fully reflecting the pace of the city and the state of mind
of the characters. Thus the attitude to the city affects the formal
elements
. .
of filmmaking as much as its content. Broadly speak-
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nIE PAINTED FACE
ing, this is true of the commercial cinema as well. In the Hindu

concept the cycle of creation is composed of 4,320,000 years
divided into four parts, the last of which is Kaliyug, the evil aeon,
now drawing to a close. In other words, the end of the world
is approaching, and in this evil age, the city is the centre of
destruction.
This is not quite as fanciful as it might at first seem, for all
over the 'developing' world, megacities are turning into vast,
festering, soul-destroying sores; the U.N. forecasts a population
in 2001 A.O. of 26 million for Mexico City, 24 million for Sao
Paulo, 16.6 million for Calcutta, 13.5 for Seoul and for Delhi, with
Buenos Aires and Cairo having only one per cent less. In the
'developed' world, on the other hand, population growth rate
is predicted to be low to zero. In some cases, as in London,
population is expected to go down from 10 million to 9.1
million•. Thus, the more India's popular cinema idealizes the
village, the more marked will be the trek to the city. Nor will
the city cease to be the source of educational, cultural and
economic growth, for it is only when they bring their bounties
to the widest sections of the people that zero or negative growth
will be registered in the megacities.
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4
WHY
THE FILMS SING
here are a number of ways in which the popular film

struggles to overcome the built-in naturaliml of the cinema,
and to bend this medium, developed in a western technological
society, towar~ its own pre-industrial, mythical style of dis-
course.
A beard on Valmiki in the Ramayana - whether on filin or
on tel~ion - is not a photographic record of a real beard on
a real man; it is a photograph, but of the beard symbol of
someone who is supposed, by tacit agreement between fdm-
maker and audience, to be a traditional sage. As noted earlier,
many a film in Telugu or Malayalam would paint the hero's
face white (fair) but leave his limbs dark and not paint the minor
characters at all. The idea is a little like painting the faces of
Kathakali dancers; there are specifac colours and iconographic
features by which Bhima or Dushashana are recognized, by
common agreement as in the case of the meaning of a word.
The camera is thus made to record a symbol instead of a fact.
Fact is turned into myth. There is a complete subversion here
of the purpose of invention of motion picture photography in
the industrial age, which is the promotion of a superior appre-
hension and judgement of the geometry of movement of shapes
and sizes, distances and differences, through which the mind
understan~ the materiality of matter.
The instrument, however, which achieves this turning of fact
into fiction, of the present tense of the camera eye into the past
and the future, is the song. It is the transcendental element in
the language of popular cinema. It expoun~ philosophies;
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1HE P.AINTED FACE
proposes inductive and deductive syllogisms on the 'truths of

individual life in relation to the social universe; explains hidden
meanings; comments, like a chorus, on the worth or conse-
quences of an action, besides providing aural enchantment to
the o t h ~ music-I~ urban world at its rural gra.s.Yoots. Take
the title song of Raj Khosla's Do Raaste :
There are two types of people in the world, two roads,
Two fonns of Ufe; in order to live
Step out carefully...
Make it dear to every·aazy fellow-
One road takes you to the temple
The other takes you to the tavern;
Don't lOl!IC your way, traveller,
Don't let yourself be duped.
If ever there was a ~ionate romantic in Hindi cinema, it

was Guru Dutt. He was perhaps the only one to create some-
thing of a personal cinema within the commercial format,
complete with son6 and dance. He is the one who came nearest
to a form fashioned out of drama, story.and song, with one
complementing rather than interrupting the other. He also
combined the most romantic elements of both Urdu-Muslim and
Bengali-Hindu culture. Here is a rough translation of one of his
most popular songs from the ftlm Pyaasa (Thirst), 1957, written
by Sahir Ludhianvi:
What will I gain if I win this world,
Of palaces and thrones and aowns,
Of society that is the enemy of man,
Of rich rulers hungry for wealth?
What will I gain if I win this world
Of wounded bodies and thirsty souls,
Of confused eyes and sad hearts?
What will I gain if I win this world,
Where life is but a toy,
Where walking skeletons bow before death,
Where death is cheaper than life?
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Why the Films Sing
What will I pin if I win this wcrld,

Where youths loaf around shJfdesa,
Where young bodies are decked out for sale,
Where love is but a bus~ deal?
What will I pin if I win this wcrld
Where loyalty means nochin&
Where friendship stands foe nothing,
Where love counts for noching?
Oh, this world, desboy a,
Take it away from me, from my sight
It is yours, and you can keep k -
I have no use foe it, none anymore.
(translated by Mani M1strl and Chldananda Das Gupta)
The lyrics and melodies of today exemplify a withdrawal from

the middle cl~ Urdu-sbairl of even the somewhat woolly
philosophic level of Guru Dutt in the fifties; but the song
continues to function as a transcendental device, even in fdrm
full of nightclubs and street fights. The inveterate didactici.ffll of
Indian cinema, both in its high art and pop forrm, ftnds an outlet
in the latter's son~. Invariably, they spout facile philosophy, ·
giving vent to the Indian predilection, even among the illiterate,
for moralizing and generalizing on every event. The oral con-
vention runs deep within the process of transmission of popular
wisdom from one generation to the other, just as the Brahminical
tradition is able to retain canonical texts in Sanskrit in pristine
form. In the popular cinema's survey of contemporary sins and
search for ways of returning to tradition, the song holds centrest-
.age, giving it win~ to soar above the fights and chases, the
melodrama of heroes and villains, the nightclubs and slinky
dances, to declare the meaning of life and the nature of duty.
It is because of this transcendental imperative that the cultural
level of the song is often strikingly different from that of the rest
of the fdm. The words are skilfully written by mature poets,' the
melodies composed by talented musicians, often forming an
individual, harmonious .whole, utterly different from the frag-
mented variety show of repetitive types and situations that make
61
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111E PAINTED FACE
up the action and dialogue sequences. From the illiterate lumpen

level of entertainment, there is a leap into creativity more typical
of urban high art. Even if the sentiments expr~ed are sometimes
trite, the songs are often written in felicitous language and
perfect syntax, and their eclectic melodies come from folk
traditions, the Urdu gbaza~ even da~ical music or Rabindra
sangeetand western pop music. It is only in the late eighties that
one begins to come aero~ a mindl~ streak, in the songs of
Anand Bakshi, Bappi Lahiri and their ilk, that refuses to take off
from the low average level of the action and dialogue sequences.
They celebrate a new ug)in~ that has invaded the screen.
Music, like other elements
•
of a ftlm, has changed its character
with the shift of emphasis from the middle to the working
class and other illiterate or semi-literate urban groups since
Independence. In the thirties and the forties, film melodies
were largely derived from a classical base; the dilution began
in the fifties and by the sixties, the mixture of all ~ible
sources, with fresh innovations in the blending of disparate
elements, was complete. .
The manner in which the song is treated reinforces the fdm's
power to ignore the deman~ of realism. The convention is that
there should be no tonal perspective; whether the person
singirig is far from or near the camera allows no difference in
the volume or depth of the sound. Invariably, the voice of the
same playback singers emanate from all the characters in ftlm
after film. Instead of appearing absurd, the samen~ of the
voice in different characters seems to provide a comforting sense
of secu1ity. Whenever a song is played, the projectionist imme-
diately pushes the volume to its loudest. The only conc~ion to
verisimilitude is in the difference of singing voices for different
characters within the same ftlm.
'
The song is like divine speech, filling the fumatnent, and all
vacant space on earth. It flows into the pores of the mind, like
balm on woun~ inflicted by the daily battles of existence. It
represents an experience shared by a vast, varied, divided
populace in the cinema theatres, in roa~ide restaurants for the
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Why the Films Sing
poor, at fairs, festivals, temple yards, wedding., and all celeln-

tions. 1bere are no music-halls in the cities; traditional folk forms
do not satwy the neem of a changing situation in which people
want ways to resolve new conflicts raging within thermelves.
Music, for the common people in urban areas and the rural
periphery 11aeans, by and large, falm music. Some traditional
music survives on the streets at night when people may gather
around a fue in winter, but this is mainly among rurally oriented
migrants, markedly different from the urban lumpen. Falm music
blares forth everywhere for everyone, induding the unwilling
ears of those who are used to high art. This .imminence of the
falm song shared by all lifts it way above the bounds of realism
required by particular films and gives it an autonomous, tran-
scendental presence in society. It has been said that the predomi-
nance of the song ~ i o n has thwarted the growth of more
cinematic elements and the devdopment of a cinematic gram-
mar. However, .this has been offset to some extent by the
sophistication of 'song picturisation', a unique feature of Indian
cinema that revels in quick cuts and fast movements, slow
motion and other special effects. The song steps forward sud-
denly from the context of the fdm; the visuals underline and
frame the song rather than the opposite. The concept of fmding
a choreographic action correlative to the music may have been
taken from Hollywood musicals, but its development has be-
come peculiarly Indiah. This is true despite occasional sugges-
tions of the childish and the aesthetically awkward when judged
bf absolute standards derived fro1n the grammar of dancing and
its. .formal unity both in classical and folk manifestations.
Film music derives from traditional music in at least one
respect. The high pitched three-octave range of 1.ata Mangeshkar
or Asha Bhonsle's voice is thrown at the audience in the same
way as an itinerant folk singer's in the open spaces of the
countryside. It is always on a high enough scale to be heard
across streets and buildings and over the noises of the city.
Within tl1e theatre itself, it descends to a loud whisper; it is as
though it is coming not through powerful if distorted speakers,
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111E PAINTED FACE
but directly from a human being with a miraculous pair of lungs.

The quality of folk music performed out in the open has been
transferred into the enclosed space of the theatre with the
reproductive outfall in the city's spaces very similar to music
in the countryside.
Folk theatre, such as Jatra in Bengal, Yaksbagana in Karna-
taka, Tamasba in Maharashtra or Nautanld in Uttar Pradesh and
so on, has traditionally relied on lung power. The need to be
heard raised the scale in a medium that functioned in open
spaces for people of all ages and levels of culture. The village
teacher or priest could be a sophisticated person who normally
spoke in low tones; but when he went to a folk performance
he would accept the ·high pitch and the force of voice-throw.
The pressure on the voice, of course, affected the style of acting
and promoted the melodramatic technique of declaiming the
surfaces of an emotion rather than exploring the motivations
that led to it, much as the need to be seen from a distance
imposed a breadth of gesture on acting. Thus the conditions of
performance dictated its very nature and arti&ic content. What
I am suggesting here is that in theatrical rather than dance forms,
the melodramatic element iS not due to the heightened gestures
and stylization of, say, Katbakali, which has its own imperatives
of choreography, but at least partly to the physical circum-
stances of performance. Hence it is interesting that an· e~en-
tially folk theatrical style should be transferred to a medium that
does not need it since it provides its own amplificatio11 of both
the aural and the visual dimensions (occasional variations in soft ·
tones provide the exception rather than the rule).
A parallel can be drawn from acting to provide a clue. When
Dilip Kumar answered Prithviraj's melodramatic declamation
(in fil~ like Mughal-e-Azam) in the low tones of normal
speech, he took Indian cinema to a new level of realism within
the commercial format Audiences overjoyed by the recognition
of familiar instead of mannered speech made Dilip Kumar the
new hero, dubbing Prithviraj old fashioned. What -this indicat~
is that; in pre-industrial societies, the audience's concept of
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.,
Wby IN FIims Sm,
verisimilitude changes from a primitive likenes., of reality to a

d ~ apprqximation of it. This is pos.,ible primarily through the
training the ftlmmaker imparts as his own ability to dose in on
reality improves. The cinema as a 'sdcntiflc' medium then coc11es
into its own. Perhaps this leads us once more to the rural base
of what is, at least physically, an urban medium (sec Chapter
IIO. One must re111ember here that early Indian cinema derived
from ~ Parsi theatre, which presented a variety show of song,
dance and drama in a melodramatic style designed to meet the
same needs of an urban audience,. alienated from folk drama.
The blending of music, dance and drama in both the claaical
and folk traditions have led many to the facile conclusion that
popular cinema is their legitimate heir. In actual fact, the staging
of Sanskrit plays like Bhasa's Madbyama Vyayoga or Shudraka's
Mritcbcbaltatilta shows a vastly superior degree of artistic unity
in the blending of song, dance and drama than the popular
cinema has ever achieved. The same is true of folk perfonnanccs
because they represent a social harmony, whereas popular
cinema struggles with alienation from traditional faiths and
modes of living. Afflicted by doubts and fears born of the clashes
of faith and unable to come to terms with a technological mode
of apprehending reality, the popular film emerges in the form of
a variety show of disparate elements rather than a'unified whole
(see Chapter XI for a discussion of folk and pop). What gjvcs
this form its only significant core is the song. Belonging to a
different cultural level from the rest of the film, dismissing the
~ancb of dramatic continuity and defying the fnbuilt realism
of the medium, the song acquires an autonomous presence rising
above the disparateness of the other elements in a film. In some
of the playbacks of Kishore Kumar, the singing is free even from
the inappropriateness of an outdoor style of rendering (in any
case, this has been less of a problem with male singos); it has
an element of the private, the inner monologue. )be fad that
such song., as CbingariKDi Bbarkeor Kabbie Kabbie are popular
shows that audiences are prepared to accept a sophistication in
music that they are deemed unable to take in the idioms of
..
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THE PAINTED FACE
.cinema. The privacy of the song monologue, one must note, n

often destroyed by their ovcrtoud and ovcrcoostant wault on
· the cars all over urban space. Even so, it is obvious that in song,,
this cinema i.1 able to-raise the level of audience cor iess;
in the rest, it lowers that level. There is a tacit agree111ent betwem
filmrnaker and viewer that the song i.1 for transcendence. ·
The autonomy of the fwri song is fek imide the theatre as
. much as outside it. With each song, the attitude of the audience
changes imtantly. Even the slight suspension of disbelief the
narrative demands is suddenly relaxed. During this interlude of
philosophic or lyrical ca1u1lCtlt, the theatregoer can go out for
a cigarette or a cup of tea and still hear in the foyer the song he ·
has probably heard many times before. Mothers, so long
wrapped up in the story, can tum to the children to see if they
a
need anything. If a feeding bottle or change of nappies.is called
for, this is the time, the inta111CZZO, in which to do it before the
story is resumed. .
Inescapably, the inta1uption of narrative by song has an
effect on the acting. One must .. remember here that the song is
not the sole inta1 upter; there are the dances, the fights (directed
by the dance or fight director), the downing and the chases, ·all
of which are played in an exaggerated, larger-than-life style in
the ~tic sense. The dialogue, like the characters, falls into
dear stereotyped progressions," which the audience can normally
predict. The actor knows ~t the lines he speaks are meant to
lead up to a dimax marked by a song or a dance or a fight.
The acting therefore becomes a charade, a little game played
between actor 'a nd audience, full of floumhes signifying little.
These floumhes, and not what the acting~. detaminc
the success of the actor. The novelty, appropriaten~, and the
dramatic (as in a dance) effect of the stances and looks and
manner are what matter. Expression of meaning is left to the
song. The song romantidus, pbilosophizes, comments. It is the
most 'serious' elanent iri the content of the film. Here is a song
that moralises on the duty of woman: ·
66
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WIiy the Film, Sing
Man: A waman must be like this

Even if ahe learns Enslilh in sweet Tamil Nadu
Woman· Tell me and I will do as you say
Clwlge me this way and that as you wish.
Man: Here chastlty and modesty are lhc dothcs of women hence
woman must be like this
She must not show off her body for public admiration - and
She mustn't let her clothes expose her belly
She mustn't paint her lips red1•
This can also be read as an ode to regionalism; in sweet Tamil

Nadu-women are chaste and modest (at least they are expected
to be); elsewhere they are, by implication, bad, especially the
ones that have learnt English or expose their bellies like north-
erners.
So~ have an important climactic, orpsmic function as well,
Indian cinema being the most erotic in the world behind its
puritanical facade. Ever since the kiss was banned by the censors
in the late thirties, Indian cinema has been in search of a sexual
climax to replace it. It has never found one. The world's largest
ftlm industry is also subject to its strictest censorship. A boy meets
a girl, they realise they are meant for each other and rush into
an embrace; but what then? The falm must back away from the
oncoming kiss, usually by sublimating it with a song. Sudderaly
the heroine will fly from the impending meeting of the lips and
start singing while entwining herself round a tree or rolling down
a hill slope with the hero in hot pursuit. The onrush of the 'Big
Sound' orchestra combining Western and Indian instruments and
the loud voice bursting forth is very orgasmic in its sudden
release. The comtraints of the plot are sudderaly rc;moved;
avoiding the kiss is.no longer a problem, the figure-of-eight walk,
the rolling on the grass, the big breast shake, the quick jerk of
the hips to the rhythm of music from a hundred-piece orchestra
all suddenly, magically, come into their own, climaxing in an
intimate orgasmic experience wrapped up in fantasy unique to
the Indian cinema.
The total ban on the kiss has now been removed; but neither
actresses nor audiences favour the lip to lip kiss. When used, it
is somewhat perfunctory, puritanical; it re11iains within the
67
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7HE PAINTJ!D FACE
charade, never suggesting the sa~faction., of a real, wet km

exploring the entire body as it were through the mouth - all of
which would be too overt for the audience. Driven underground,
eroticism therefore becomes compulsive and·pervades the entire
film. It builds up a subterranean energy in the sequences of love
play full of physical proximity and innuendoes that must be
allowed to erupt from time to time. As the sexual ten.,ion builds
up and yet backs away from the actual union, it erupts into song.
Thus it takes some of the frustration out of what might be called
the recurrent coitus interruptus of the Indian cinema.
In traditional rural communities music was, and still is -
though to a lesser extent - presented at religious assemblies, fairs
and festivals where folk plays are performed occasionally by
itinerant players, and folk son~ sung. For people as inward-
looking, emotional, philosophically-minded and mortality-con-
scious as Indian.,, music is nec~ary in large doses and high
frequency. The social system that supported the structure of rural
music has eroded with the phasing out of the big landlord who
presided over it in the past. Where he still exists in defiance of
state policy (of abolishing landlordism and its concomatants), he
no longer cares. The state has largely taken over the patronage
of the arts in the cities but not in the vast rural areas where 75
per cent of the people live. There is thus a vacuum in art
patronage in most of India's 575,000 villages. Besides, the winds
of change are ruffling the villagers' traditional lives in even the
smallest hamlet. They, too, want to know, and to understand,
something of the change taking place in the cities and in the
country at large. In this the film song, wafted across the
countryside from the cities, helps in some broad and general
way.
But Indian cinema, one must repeat, is an urban phenome-
non. The country's 13,000-odd cinema theatres are situated
overwhelmingly in towns and cities where electricity is available.
Villagers go to the cinema only when they visit the nearest town
to buy or sell or to pray in. a temple, or for some such purpose.
In the four southern Indian states, there are some touring
cinemas that go to the villages. But the people who live in the
towns and cities were themselves villagers not so long ago. The
large majority of urban people today, including some of the rich
and the educated, came from the village one or two generations
68
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Why tlw Films Sm«
earlier. The need for music of these urbanites is met solely by

the cinema; only the rich and culturally advanced have the access
to, or the inclination for, the high art of concert halls, awettes
and recorm. Reproductions are expemive, making even folk
songs a property of the rich. Folk songs may be heard on the
radio, but who W21lts to hear them, anyway, after escaping from
the drudgery of the village into the excitement of the city? It is
the inteipretation of the new values of city life, the artefacts of
science, the wealth of consumer goods, and the complex new
relationship of these things within the society revolving aroood
them, that is necessary to provide some emotional adjustment to
the migrant labourer working alone in the city, the nuclear family
broken off from the extended one bade in the village, the
industrial worker with the ever-pregnant wife, the young student
who must be the saviour of his family one day but sees no
prospect of employment at the end of his studies. For all these
variously frustrated people trying to cope with a relatively new
environment, the cinema provides an interpretation of the envi-
ronment, however crude, as well as an escape from it. Nothing
symbol i:zes either the interpretation or the escape more than the
songs. And in the absence of any other forum for popular music,
the cinema is its only source. While in many other parts of the
world the change in musical taste affects the kind of music that
goes into ftlms, here the position is reversed. It is ftlm music
which sets the trend and moulm musical tastes.
Hindi cinema would not have had its all-India acceptability,
nor popular regional ftlrm their own without songs. A wordy
•drama would tax the non-Hindi audience to the extent of
discouraging it; and entirely action-oriented. cinema would be
unable to c:xplore the issues of tradition and modernity that
exercise the minm of most Indians and form an important
underlay to the texture of India's popular cinema. No wonder
popular ftlms are sold to distributors before they are made - on
the strength of the stars and the songs. The bottom would fall
out of the present kind of commercial ftlm, very probably, if an
alternative, inexpensive source of popular song and dance were
to be built up along with visual accompaniment, as in music-halls
in the West.
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THE
OEDIPAL HERO
•
n the seminal Hindi film Trishul (1973), starring Amitabh

Bachchan (son) and Sanjeev Kumar (father), the two are
locked in a lifelong combat ending in the death of the father.
Neither is a free agent; each is doing his duty as enjoined by his
mother. It is, in a sense, a battle of mothers, fought through the
sons. Vtjay (Amitabh Bachchan) is the illegitimate son of Shanti
(Wah~ Rehman) and Raj (Sanjeev Kumar). Raj's mother, who
has no objection to Shanti as such, earnestly wishes that her son
would marry the daughter of the rich busines.gnan he works for
ancJ . thus become an important man. On her deathbed, she
extracts from her oruy son the promise to fulfd her last wish.
"Remember", she says, •before you loved Shanti, you loved me•.
Meanwhile, the spurned other girl has become pregnant, but
in the face of his promise to his mother Raj can do nothing
about it. The outraged Shanti gives birth to her son, brings him
up, and at her own deathbed, makes him promise vengeance on
the father for his inhuman neglect of her. Father and son are
thus ordained to do battle, without knowing each other. In time,
Vijay tracks down his rich father, reduces him to penury,
destroys his pride and finally becomes instrumental in his
murder. In the end the father regrets the grievous wrong he
had done, and atones for it by death even as father and son are
tearfully reunited.
In Deewar (1973), the brothers, one a police officer, · the
other a bandit, compete for the love of their mother. When the
bandit (Amitabh Bachchan) taunts the police officer (Shashi
Kapoor): •1 have all this - what have you got, with your
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111B PAINIBD FACE
honesty?" the other blandly replies:-•! have mother'. It is for her

sake that the bandit buys the land where she had once worked
as a construction labourer and builds a nw~sion for her. •1 have
done all this for you, mother", he says. She replies: •You can't
buy your own mother. You're not that rich yet.• It is in an
attempt to see his dying mother that he fmall) loses his life. And
mother, .though always resolutely on the side of the yirtuous
police officer, loves the bandit son no less, perhaps even more.
At the beginning of the fdm the father is a highly respected
labour leader; he betrays the cau.,c to save the lives of his
children, and becomes a man of disrepute on whose account
his sons tiave to endure the in.suits of their neighbours and peers
(•Gal; gali me sbor bai, .Anand Babu cbor bat •). He then
disappears and towards the end of the film is discovered dead
His son, the police officer, finds the body. In the fmal battle
the police officer shoots and ki& his bandit brother, who could
have escaped, had it not been.for his overwhelming wish to sec
his dying mother.
In .Amar, .Akbar, .Anthony (1977), the three brothers arc left
orphans under a statue o( Mahatma Gandhi, and are reunited
with their lost parents at the end. They are heroes who, having
lost their parental support, struggle to prove themselves in their
different ways and regain their kingdom, as it were. Although ,
the father is a criminal, he is devoted to his children and takes
to crime only to protect them from a vicious world. Their mother
·is constantly around (although they are unaware of her identity),
and the sons save her life in a hospital by donating blood
When Amar (Vinod Khanna) and Anthony (Amitabh Bachchan)
fight, she intervenes, saying that they are both like her sons.
All three, sons, especially the eldest, prove their mettle in
adversity. After being absent from the opening sequence on, the
father comes back towards the end; the three brothers discover
their true identity, fand their parents and are reunited with them,
along with their own respective brides. The father is revealed
as a good human being who did his best to save his children.
In another popular film, Mukaddar Ka Slltandar (1979), the
hero (played again by Amitabh Bachchan) is an illiterate orphan
71
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who has lived by his wits since the age of about ten. He soon
acquires a mother, a kindly woman (Nirupa Roy, who plays the
mother in many fil~ of this period} and tries hard to adopt a
surrogate father (a widower with a· daughter nearly the hero's
age), but is crue\ly rejected. He grows up through many
hardships to be strong and rich and comes to the aid of the
father he had tried to adopt, who is now old and ailing and has
fallen on bad times. He also acquires a lawyer friend who, like
him, is · a fighter. The two help each other as brothers would -
unaware that they are in love with the same woman (the rich
man's daughter, whom the hero has loved from childhood),
until it is too late. In the end the hero gives his life to get his
(adopted) sister .m arried. While he fails to achieve his objectives,
his friend and alter ego succeeds in every respect, marrying
the girl the hero wanted but who rejected him, and so obtaining
as father-in-law the man whom the hero had sought, since his
childhood, to adopt in a similar manner.
These four films are typical of many others, especially Hindi
films of the seventies, in whic~ the hero is separated at birth
from his parents, recovers his fortunes, and is reunited with his
family, of which the mother is the permanent centre, the father
a shadowy, mostly absentee head who dies in the end. Of the
four, Trisbul and Deewar are the most interesting because they
come very close to certain archetypal patterns frequently encoun-
tered in world mythology and in analytical psychology. The other
two •share the same characteristics in a less concentrated but
perhaps more complicated and no less revealing way. Otto Rank,
a collaborator of Sigmund Freud who later fell out with him,
collated 22 of the most famous hero m~ of the world and
showed their similarities and complicated interpenetration, their
'attenuation\ 'reversal' and 'embellishments' in the variations
upon the basic myth of 'exposure', or abandonment of the
child-hero; his comequent separation from one or both parents,
and his triumphant retum1• The generic myth of expqsure and
the specific myth of Oedipus are so clo.5ely associated that for
all practical purposes they can be considered as one. Even
though the myth and its _variations are wellknown among
72
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1HE PAIN11!D FACE
scholars, it may be useful to go over them here, since they

have hardly ever been related to India's popular cinema. Sadly,
ftlm critics must venture into the territory of psychologists since
the latter have paid little or no attention to these man;festations
in the popular cinema and thus a vitally important relationship
has remained u ..1cxplored.
n
The oldest of the exposUl'e mytm is that of Sargon the First,
founder of Babylonia (about 1.800 BC, recently revised down-
wards by some scholm to 2360-2305 BC). According to the story
as told by Sargon hilmelf, his mother was a vestal virgin, and
"my father I knew not". His mother bore him on the bank of the
Euphrates, laid him in a vessel made of reeds, closed it, and
set it afloat in the ring which carried him to Akki, the water
carrier, who brought him up as a gardener. Finally, through
many adventures, he became king and ruled for 45 years.
The earliest version of the Moses story is told in the second
chapter of Exodus. His mother bore a son, hid him for three
montm, then set him afloat in a reed basket. The Pharaoh's
daughter found him and, taking pity on him, got him a Hebrew
nurse who brought him up and then took him back to the
princess, whose son he became. She called him Moses "because
(she) drew him out of the water' (the word 'Akki' in the Sargon
legend means the same; hence Sargon of Akkad).
Apart from similar Hebrew legends such as those of Abra-
ham and Isaac, one that interests us here is that of Kama in the
Mababbarata. Kama was born to the unmarried Kunti who put
him afloat in the river. Here he was espied by the childless
Radha, wife of the ·charioteer Ajiratha, who rescued him and
brought him up as her own. Years later Kunti recognized the
grown-up Kama by a divine- mark upon him and tried to stop
him from fighting Arjuna, her legitimate son. Kama brushed
aside her claims to motherhood and died fighting Arjuna. The
Kama story is very similar to that of Ion, ancestor of the Ionians,
73
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just as the legend of Krishna, whom Kansa tries to kill at birth
because of a prophecy of his own death at the hand of cousin
Devaki's son, is akin to the story of Jesus. The story of Jesus is
· also one of a series of myths of virgin mothers. Herod tried to
have him killed because the wise ,ak!n of the East had seen a
star signifying the birth of a new king of the Jews. Hercules,
who was brought up on the strength-giving waters of the
fountain of Dirca, had drunk Hera's milk (Krishna drank Pu-
tana's) so ferociously that she·had to fling him away in pain.
In the Shah Namab, Firdausi (c. 1000 BC) tells of King Darab
who nominated his daughter (and wife) Humai as his successor.
His son Sasan was aggrieved by this and withdrew into solitude.
When Humai gave birth to a son after the death of Darab, she
placed him in a box and put it in the Euphrates, where the child
was found by a tanner and raised as his own. As the boy-grew ·
up, he became so strong that other children could not cope with
him (note the similarity to Krishna). He trained himself to be a ·
warrior, forced his foster mother to tell him the truth, and joined
the a111ry Humai was then sending out to fight King Rum. His
bravery caught the attention of Humai, who recognized him as
her son and named him her successor.
In the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh (3rd millenium BC),
Chaldean fortune-tellers predicted that the son of King Seno-
chros' daughter would take the kingdom away from his grand-
father. The king therefore imprisoned his daughter, but she
conceived secretly from an unimportant man. When the guards
threw the little boy from the Acropolis, where the daughter had
been imprisoned, he was caught by an eagle on its back before
he could hit the ground. The eagle raised the boy, who grew
up to be the hero Gilgamesh, and became King of Babylonia.
The Christian legend of Judas is one of a series of similar
myths and is also close to Oedipus. Before his birth, his mother
Cyboread was warned in a dream that her son would ruin his
people. The parents exposed the boy in a box on the sea and
the waves carried him to the island of Scariot, where the childless
queen found him and brought him up. Later they had a son of
their own, whom Judas killed out of jealousy. He fled the
74
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11IE PAIN1BDFACE
· country to work at the court of Pontius Pilate, winning great

honour; but he unknowingly killed his own father in a fight and
married his mother. When he discovered what he had done, he
went to Christ to repent and become one of his apostles,
eventually betraying him to Pilate and bringing about the
Crucifixion.
1ne ·Oedipus legend, in essence, rum thus: King Laius of
Thebes and his queen Jocasta have been childl~ for a long
time. The king comults the Delphic Apollo, and the oracle tells
him that fate has decreed that he will be killed by his own son.
Despite this fear, one day an intoxicated Laius makes his wife
pregnant. When the son is born, Laius orders him to be exposed
in the river Cithaeron with his ankles pierced; but the shepherd
entrusted with the job gives the baby to another shepherd in
Corinth, ruled by King Polybus, at whose court Oedipus is
brought up. A variant has Oedipus exposed in a box on the
sea and picked up from .t here by Periboa, Polybus's queen, after
which the royal couple bring him up -as their own son. Oedipus
finds out, accidentally-, that he is a foundling, but fails to discover
his true parents. He is merely told by the oracle that he was
ordained to kill his father and marry his mother. For fear of
harming his foster parents, he flees from Corinth to Thebes, but
on the way he gets into an argument with King Laius and kills
him. He liberates Thebes from the plague of the Sphinx by
solving a riddle set him by that maneating momter, and in
reward is given the hand of Jocasta, his mother, as well as the
throne of his father. Then·Thebes falls prey to the plague again,
and Oedipus, intent on fmding out the cause, discovers the truth,
blinds himself and goes into exile.
The Oedipus legend had been extant for a long time before
Sophocles (5th-4th century BC) wrote it as a play. It has been
translated into many languages and performed in many coun-
tries. -In India, a well-known production was Bohurupee's (in
Bengali), in which Shambhu Mitra played Laius.
75 .
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JN o«Jlpal Hero
m
An interesting example of contemporary concern with the
mythic mother obsession in literature can be seen in Garcia
Marquez' Autumn Cf1be Patriarch. Speaking of the decompos-
ing but unyielding dictator, Marquez says: • ...He knew he was a
man of history without a father like the most illustrious despots
of history, that the only relative known to him and perhaps the
only one he had was his mother of my heart, Benedicion
~varadi, to ,-,horn the school texts attributed the miracle of
having conceived him without recourse to any male and of
having received in a dream the her111etical key to his messianic
destiny, and whom he proclaimed matriarch of the land by
deaee with the simple argument that there is no mother but one,
mine...•2 Again, the father has been denied and the mother made ·
the matriarch opposite the patriarch in an unholy symbol of all
the conquests of the dictator.
According to anthropologists, the only important taboo uni-
versally observed by all cultures, whether primitive or developed,
is the one against a son's sexual intercourse with his mother'. A
similar relationship between father and daughter is not as
universally excluded; one of the many examples of this is in the
ancient Persian epic of King Oarab. As told by Firdausi in the
Shah Namah, the king nominated as his successor his daughter
as well as wife, Humai, much to the chagrin of his. son and her
brother Sasan, who withdrew into solitude. In Indian mythol-
ogy, the father god (Brahma or Prajapati or Oaksha) attempts to
rape his own daughter, until she is rescued by Shiva. Moreover,
this well-known myth is tolerated and viewed positively by
Hindu texts (which tell of the birth of all animal life from the
incestuous union of father and daughter) as •an essential contrast
to the negative incestuous coupling of son and mother"" But
where the mother and son relationship is concerned, the taboo
is uniform in all cultures past and present since time immemorial.
Yet the mother is the first woman man comes across in life, and
represents for him a safe haven of love and comfort as long as
76
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11l1l PAlNIBD PACB
he lives, whether in reality or in his imagination. The '\\'Wh to

return to the warmth and sccurly of the womb is a part of the
death wish in it& oq:,rbSion of weariness with the struggle of
life: The desire to re-enter the womb is not fundamentally as
distinct from the desire for sexual union with the mother as it
might at first ~.i. As Jung points out: 'The mother is the first
feminine being with whom man-t~~ comes in contact, and she
cannot help playing, overtly or covertly, unconsciously or con-
sciously, upon the son's·masculinity, just as the son in his tum
grows increasingly aware of his mother's feminity, or uncon-
sciously responds to it by instinct.s.
In real life, the Oedipus complex is almost never actually
played out to the end by begetting children upon the mother.
It remains in many states of unresolved inclete1111inacy, troubling
the individual's mind, sometimes to the extent of unhinging iL
What Sophocles' drama does is to push an unconscious process
out in the open as a basic fear in life and take it to its logical
conclusion, making us face the consequences of the Oedipal
wish, were it ever to be fulfilled. Since the taboo against sex
with the mother is universal, the triangular relationship among
father, mother and son is buffetted by emotio~ and stresses
resulting from it. Thus the Oedipus play is Greek, but the story
behind it is universal. If Sophocles had not written it, someone
else would have had to. Even if it had never been written,
~choanalysts, treating patients suffering from its sympto~,
would have discovered it as a universal human trait with which
man ·struggles from around the time of puberty. In other words,
if Oedipus had not been there, he would have had to be
invented.
Perhaps only ~choanalysis reveals the true meaning of
these uniform myths with differing element.c: and embellish-
merats, attenuations and reversals, as Otto Rank calls them. It is
well known that in exploring drea~ in the world of neurotics,
the daydrea~ or fantasies of both the mentally disturbed arid
the pormal, as well as the imaginings of the child, many of these
myths and their elemerats appear and reappear in significant
ways. The ~ t important of them are, of course, Freud's findings
Original from
..
11» o«/lpol H,,o
·· in relation to the Oedipus legend of the son killing the ·rather

•· ' and marrying the· mother - something that has spilled out of
psychology and become a part of popular wisdom. As Freud
says of King Oedipus: •H~ fate moves us only because it might
have been our own, because the oracle laid upon us before our
birth the very curse which r.estec;l ·upon him. It may be that we
were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses towards our
· · mothers and our fll'St impulses of hatred towards our fathers; our ·
dreams convince us that we were. King Oedipus, who slew his
• father Laius and wedded his mother Jocasta, is nothing more or
less than a wm-fulfdment - the. fulfilment · of the wish of our
childhood"6• .
. He also points out that the legend of Oedipus •sprang from
. some primeval dream material which has as its content .the
distressing disturbance of a child's relation to his parents owing
to the first st~ings of sexuality.• His oft-quoted lines from Lewis
Campbell's translation of Sophocles' play, spoken by Jocasta at
a time when Oedipus is still ignorant of his situation, bear
repetition:
Many a man eie now in dreams
bath laid with her who bare him.
He bath Jeast annoy
who with such omens troubleth not his mind .
.
Although it is clearly "the key to the tragedy and the comple-
ment to the dream of the dreamer's father being dead", Jocasta,
like any wise woman, dismisses it as a meaningless, th9ugh not
uncommon, dream. In the Freudian theory, now well a~orbed
not only in psychoanalytic practice but in the modem world's
folklore, the child's early life is beset by many problems, one of
them the fear of losing the closeness of his mother. Hence the
birth of another baby, which needs and thereby attracts more of
her attention, is a traumatic experience for the child to survive,
even though it may sound 'childish' to adults who are usually
unaware of the depth of children's feelings in these matters.
Another thing that troubles him is that he has to share his mother
with his father, who has mysterious claims upon her that he
.cannot understand. His biggest problems come with puberty.
.
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'11le PAINDJD PACE
He is caught in the process by wJuch he will wean hbmclf away

frot11 his paicnts, primarily hi, mother, in order to find sexual
fulftlmcnt· with an unrelated partner and thereby answer the
biological-evolutionary need to start his own family. Most young
people are able to accomplish this - a kind of overcoming of the
Oedipal ties to the mother and underlying h~tility to the father
- and grow up to be normal adults. lbose who cannot, become
neurotic. In the case of girls a similar o~tacle - sometimes
called the 'Electra complex', or obsession with father - has to be
overcome for them to attain maturity.
IV
However, the popular notion that this mother - or father -
complex is only a perverse, hideous underground monster is also
misplaced. Jung pointed out clearly the positive aspects of an
o~essive love of mother. First he defined it for us in terr,~ of
what m~t of us see and fmd in mother, and also related the
positive and negative aspects of the relationship: "The p~itive
aspect of the fust type of (mother) complex, namely the overde-
velopment of the maternal instinct, is identical with that well-
known image of the mother which has been glorified in all ages
and all tongues. This is the mother-love which is one of the most
moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious
root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming,
shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and·
in which everything encb. Intimately known and yet strange like
Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, joyous and untiring
giver oflife...mother carries for us that inborn image of the mater
nature and mater spirih'lalis, of the totality of life of which we
are a small and helpless part ...it is just this massive weight of
meaning that ties us in the mother and·chair1s her to her child,
to the physical and mental ·d etriment of both"7 •
On the negative side, Freud brings out the characteristic
effects of the mother complex in the shape of Don Juanism,
which is a form of search for the mother in every woman, or
in homosexuality, which is an inverted rejection of mother as a
result of an unsatisfactory relationship with her. Jung is careful
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to· classify this and correct the possible one-sidedness of the

notion, derived from the study of neurosi.1. · .
In this d~ssion of the Mother Archetype, he PQints out that
a man with a mother-complex can have (as a result of it) "a great
capacity for friendship, which often aeates ties of astonishing
tenderness between men...He may have good taste and an
aesthetic sense which are fostered by a feminine streak. Then
he may be a supremely gifted teacher because of his almost
feminine imight and tact. He is likely to have a feeling for
history and to be comervative in the best sense and cherish the
values of the past. Often he is endowed with a wealth of religious
feeling" ...ln this problem of Oedipal conflict and resolution, the
place of the hero is best brought out by Bruno Bettelheim: "1be
boy wants Mother to admire bim as the greatest hero of all. He
resents his father for standing in his way of receiving Mother's
exclusive attention, and wants Father out of the way. This idea,
however, creates anxiety in the child, because without Father · .
to protect and take care of Them, what would happen to the
family?" It's no use telling him that one day he will grow up,
marry, be like Father; "Such realistic advice provides no relief
from the pressures the child feels right now. But the fairy tale
tells the child how he can live :with his conflicts; it suggests
fantasies he could invent for _hirmelf". The hero slays dragons,
solves riddles and finally frees the beautiful princess and liVes
with her happily ever after. "No little boy has ever failed to see
hirmelf in this starring role. The story implies: it's not Father
whose jealousy prevents you from having Mother all to yourself,
it's an evil dragon". Father is metamorphosized in fantasy into
an evil dragon and Mother into a beautiful princess. Yet they
also continue to exist as Father and Mother, and the dragon and
the beautiful princess are entirely separate in the child's logic;
otherwi.5e his sense of reality is disturbed. He does not know
that he is creating a dragon to symbolize Father and a beautiful
princess to symbolize Mother in order to resolve the conflict
which .creates anxiety in him. "'Thus a child can have the best of
the worlds, which is what he needs to grow up into a secure
adult"'
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V
. '
As Otto Rank points out: "For the young child, the parents
are, in the first place, the sole authority and source of all faith.
To grow up like father or mother ~ the most portentous wish of
a
the child's early years. Trifling occurrences in the life of child,
which induce a mood of di.,satisfaction, lead up to a mticism of
the parents. In neurosis, the causative factor most often is the
feeling of being neglected. The feeling that one's inclinations-are
not entirely reciprocated seeks its relief in the idea - often
consciously re111~ed from very early years - of being a
stepchild or an _adopted child. The boy shows a far greater
tendency to harbour hostile fcdinp towarm his fath~ than his
mother, with much stronger inclination to emancipate himself
from his father than his mother-. · · ·
This is where myth and dream begin to intersect. First of all,
many adults who are not neurotics can recall such influences
and happenings in their lives with the acute awarenes., of having
suffered ar~e. Then there is what has been called the 'family ·
romance' of the neurotic. In the neµrotic, as indeed in poets and
artists and people of highly sensitive imagination, there is a
developed-capacity for _intense daydreaming. In children espe-
cially there is a tendency to be rid of the parents and to supplant
them with superior beinp more to the child's liking - in which
the erotic and the. . ambitious are interlinked.
. The connection
. with
myth becomes still more apparent in the case of neurotics, many
of them reduced to that condition by the parents' attempts to
~ them of 'bad' sexual habits. Through their imaginings,
dlildren divest the parents of their power, hold themselves as
as
the only legitimate ~es. <&missing their siblings illegitimate,
sometimes imputing many love affairs to the mother, getting rid
of an attractive sister by disclaiming her membership of the
family, almost e1:actly as in the myths, and often for the same
reaSt>ns.
Such a child's ingratituc¥ is only apparent; he is inventing
cnlted parents, ·investing them with·an the qualities they do not
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possess in his eyes, only in order to get closer to them. "lbe

entire c;ndcavour to replace the real father by a more distin-
guished one is merely the exptession of the child's longing for
the vanished happy times...the over-valuation of the earliest
years of childhood again claims its own in these fancies•. It has
been repeatedly found in dream interpretation that everi in later
·years, in the dreams of emperor or empress, these princely
persons stand for father and mother. "1be ego of the child
behaves in this respect like the hero of the myth, and as a matter
of fact, the hero should always be interpreted merely as a
collective ego which is equipped with all the excellences•.
The exalted personages, the king and the queen, and the
humble man and woman (sometimes symbolized by an animal)
are thus one and the same, divided only by fancy. The hostility
of the father is an inverse expression of the child's hostility to
the father as a justification of ~is feeling. The basket, box, casket
or other receptacle simply means th_e womb.and the 'exposun
symbolizes the act of birth. The perils which the hero survives
denote, in his (the child's) mind, the unwillingness with which
his parents brought him into the world.
One of the great enigmas that obsess the child mind is the
parental concealment of the sexual nature of birth; hence the
simplistic images_ of a casket, box or other receptacle. The
exposure in the box 'asexualizes' the birth process in a childlike
manner. Dream interpretation shows how wish-fulfilment con-
ceals itself from the consciousness by reversing the actual
thought; the king's unwillingness to have a child is expi-essed as
the wish for one; falling into water as emerging from it. "'Ibis
infantile rebellion against the father, apparently provoked in the
birth myths by the hostile behaviour of the father, is due to_a
reversal of the relation known as projection, which is brought
about by the very peculiar characteri&ics of the myth-forming
psychic activity. The projection mechanism-which also bore its
part in the re- interpretation of the birth act, as well as certain
other characteristics of myth formation - necessitates the uniform
characterization of the myth as a paranoid structure, in view of
its resemblance to peculiar processes in the mechanism of certain
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psychic distwbances". In this view, · the child ego elevates the
unnamed mother to inaprcgnation by a divine force ( Jesus,
Kama, Ion), later marrying a mortal who then appears as the real
father ( Joseph, Pandu), the god episode being a part of the
child's exaltation of the father image. Al the same time, the virgin
birth i.1 also a kind of oomplete repudiation of the. role of the
father. .
1bc paranoic 'splitting' of one personage into two is a
c:ommon <>CCUJTenCe, as we have seen above. But, like dream.,,
myths are also complex and constantly changing. Sometimes,
IMtcad of splitting a personality, the imagination invents a
'double', as with Cyrus the Great... Harpagos receives the child
from the king, with an order to 'expose' it; he therefore acts
preca:ly like the royal father and reta~ins true to the fictitious
paternal part of his reluctance to kill the child hirmelf, but
delivers it to the herder Mithradates who is thus again identified
with Harpagos. The different figures filling the plac:e of the father
at various times arc in fact one.
Many a paranoic is actually given to claiming that the people
who.,e name he bears are not Im real parents, but that he ls the
son of some exalted person; he was to be removed for some
~crious reason (danger to their lives?), and was therefore
given to his 'parents' as a foster child. His enemies, however, ·
wjsh to maintain that he i.1 of lowly descent.
The hero is thus a man of unusual birth and superior abilities
that enable him to overcome obstacles. His life is dccrccd by
fate; Oedipus does not know that the man he has killed is his
father; the woman he has married, his mother. But al), heroes are
not fated to be destroyed like Oedipus. Some, like Sargon or
·Krishna, will conquer everything with a divine power (Krishna
· does kill lCatma, his uncle-father). Generally speaking, he is the
child of distinguimed parents, usually of a king. His early life is
beset with diffJCUlties and the path to his recognition by his
parents surrounded by hazarm prophesying doom for his father
(or grandfather or other surrogate father figure). Usually, he is
surrendered to the water in a caslriet (Sargon, Kama, Moses, Cyrus
the Great, Ion, Oedipus, Judas, and so on); found or saved by
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lowly persons (Radha,Joseph, Pharaoh's daughter, Periboa, etc.)

or an animal (eagle, donkey, wolO. After he has grown up, he
finds his distinguimed parents, takes his revenge on his father
. on the one hand, and is acknowledged by his mother on the
other. He now achieves the height of glory, or tragic death
(Oedipus.Judas, Kama), either of an elemental quality or in some
way of noble proportions'. · ·
The mythological hero, with his similarity across the world in
the myths of many countries, has been explained in many ways.
Migration of myths from Babylonia or In4ia has been suggested,
and, among other ~ . migration of myths from the interde- .
pendence of mythological structures, an idea which was gener-
alized by Braun as the basic law of the nature of the human
mind: •Nothing new is ever discovered as long as it is possible
to cop}"'. It has also been noted that in the migration of mytl_ls
•the appropriation of mythological contents·always represents at
the same time an independent mythological construction; be-
cause only that can be retained pennanently which corresponds
to the borrower's stage of mythological ideation•. Besides this,
of course, there is the simpler reason that the general similarity
of human traits is responsible for the similarity in myths, aided
perhaps by migration and modified by.each area's own internal
generation of myth components, small myths that conglomerate
with others and ftnally attach themselves to something that fats,
•
and satisfies10•
VI
A.K. Ramanujan has pointed out a trait in Indian Oedipus
myths: while in the. Greek (and others listed by Rank, let it be
noted) the direction of aggr~ion or desire flows from the son
·to the mother and the daughter to the father, in Indta, the
direction is reversed. Arjuna kills his son Babhruvahana; Santanu
takes his son BhWuna's youth to enjoy it himself, and so does
Yayati with his son. Hindus believe that fathers are reborn as
sons. ■in Hindu hiRory no major instance (to my lay mind) seems
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to be recorded where a son overthrows or assassinates hi.1 father
and usurps the throne... There are no Prometheus or Cronos
figures overthrowing 01' defying the elder gods in Hindu my-
thology"11.
Curiously, in the four (more especially two) fihm we have
~ . the line of aggression flows from the son to the father
and the desire from son to mother; in film after film, the father
is some sort of aiminal, the ~ an epitome of goodnes.1 -
another way of promoting the son-positive angle. It is closer
to what Ramanujan points out.as a Muslim _radler than Hindu
trait. "But in Muslim (Mughal-and p~Mughal) history, fathers
or ·e lder brothers are regularly imprisoned or assassinated by son
or father - it is almost a rite de passage, a ritual of succession".
In Chapter VI, on the Iconic Mother, I discuss the West Asian
7.oroastro-Judaic-Ou'istian-Islamic (not . just Muslim) style of
patriarchy as the possible source of the Jo_ng-suffcring mother
image developed in the popular Hindi film, particularly in the
seventies and eighties and more particularly in th~e scripted
by Salim and Javed with the hero enacted by Amitabh Bachchan.
The point made there is also relevant in the present context, for
it may additionally indicate a ~itivc ·s on-to-mother direction
of relationship, particularly as mother. is seen as passive.
Ramanujan's quotation from E. Conze's Buddhist Texts
1brougb The Ages is also extremely interesting in relation to the
opening sequence of Trisbul (described earlier and discussed
below): "Finally, as the time of the human being's death ap-
proaches he sees a bright light, and being unaccustomed to it at
the time ·of his death he is perplexed and confused. He sees all
sorts of thin!P such as are seen in dreams, because his mind is
confused. He sees his (future) father and mother making love
and seeing them a thought arises in him. If he is going to be
reborn as a man he sees humelf making love with his mother
and being hindered by his father; or if he is going to be reborn
as· awoman, he sees himself hindered by his mother. It is at that
moment that the Into1nediate Existence is destroyed and life and
comciousness arise and causality begins once more to work. It
is like the _imprint made by a die; the die is destroyed, but the
patto11 has been imprinted"12•
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There.is a strange sense of infantile voyeurism in the pre-tide

~uence of ·rrlsbul - the·· ~ i n g sense of watching
parents engaged in romantic play, parents who are rio longer
very young (played by an over-hefty Sanjeev Kumar and · a
Waheeda Rehman of rather faded beauty- very unlike romantic
lovers in the usual popular film). There is a sense of embarrass-
11icnt aboµt the dose-ups, laden with soulful looks, which
puzzle us '"1til we realize, much later, that we are looking at a
romantic scene bet~een the parents of the hero, and it· is
through the latter's eyes that we see the episode. Since we
identify with the hero by convention and dramatic construction,
we are witnessing, as it were, a scene of romance ·between
our parents. The source of the awkwardness .w ith which the
scene is staged and the embarrassment it inspires in us becomes
dear as the story unfold.1. We now see the opening pair, no
longer as lovers, but as the parents ?f Vijay ·(i.e. A~tabh
Bachchan). The basic Oedipal context, which will culminate in
the son being ·instrumental to the death of his father, has been
established even before the story has begun. The age· of the
parents, as we divine it, is clas.,ically right . for the son's entry
into puberty and adolescence, locked in combat with the secret
power of the Oedipal pull.
What Raj's mother says to him on her deathbed, to extract
from him the promise not to marry Shanti but his rich employer's
daughter, is so unmi.ukably Oedipal that it bears repetition: ·
"Remember, before you loved Shanti, you loved me". Shanti's
son (no time is wasted in explaining such unimportant details as
how the unmarried mother managed to bring up her son to
adulthood despite the stigma she must have had to bear) is close
to his mother, and b~mes her mother's only hero. Even at her
death, he is not separated from her; at the time of her cremation,
the soundtrack tells him in her voice, "I will look at you from
the stars....sweet flowers will spring up when I look at you•. Then
he sets out to punish his father. It is like a voice from the sky
(altasbvan,), whose behest cannot be • denied because it is
divine. ·
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At the same time Vijay is also in search of a reconciliation

with his father; he brutally hits Rafs ene11l}' Balwant for speaking
ill of Raj (that being his sole privilege as the son). And the last
scene brings out his pent-up hunger for a father's protection,
typifying the dilemma of the son divided between the rcjcction.
and the need, of the father figure.
Although the hero of Multaddor Ka S11,andar is illiterate, the
indication is that he comes from a well-to-do family ('noble birth'
in world myths, as we have seen) and rises through a strength
derived frol11 his ancestry. He wishes to be accepted by a
· powerful surrogate father by hoping to marry his daughter, but
his failure to do so is his undoing. In other words, he wahs for
the heroic prophecy buried inside hi~lf to be fulfilled, but in
vain. It is a variation on the classical myth of the birth of a hero,
and an interesting one because, by inverting a part of the myth,
it implies that failure to diKover one's parents and inherit from
them results in tragedy. It is the story of the flawed hero whom
fate will not allow to succeed. He has some of the characteristics
of the classic hero, but not all; therefore he is doomed to failure.
It is noteworthy that although he rather briefly finds a surrogate
mother, there ,is_ no powerful mother figure giving him strength
of resolution as in Trlsbul or Deewar. Victory is not for the
motherless. Equally important, his friend and alter ego succeeds
in marrying the girl he loves and so acquires the father (in the
f01111 of father-in-law) whom he had wanted to adopt.
Deewar's competition for a mothe · between the two brothers
is as dogged as though they are rivals for the hand of a girl. And
yet the two brothers are actually one, 'split' into good and bad
halves - Jekyll and Hyde .;. a common enough device in India's
popular cinema. Again, father is got out of the way early enough
in the film, leaving the field clear for the son's (either singular
or plural) conquest of the mother. Just as the struggle between
the good son and the bad one is about to enter its climax, the
father's death (offstage) is announc~ in the maMer of a Greek
tragedy. There is a spiritual reconciliation with the a~nt father
figure in the seme of the sons' growing knowledge of his
goodneu and his past saaifices for· their sake. Again, as in
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Trlsbu( at the time we fust meet the children and the father
disappears, the mother is still as attractive as she can be in the
traditional Indian way at an age when her sons are at the
pre-pubertal period, the classic point in the male struggle with
the Oedipus complex. Besides, there is a hint that although the
mother dutifully supports the good son. at heart she loves the
bad one more. The good son loves .a girl and is to be mamed to
her; the bad son has a liaison with an entertainer, an outsider,
one with whom marriage would not be approved by the
audience. The nature of the bad son's link with the mottier is
thus more rakish, unconventional and attractive.
.Amar, .Akbar, Anthony uses the frequent fantasy device of
making a f~ter-mother or otherwise surrogate mother out of the
•
real mother, which goes back to the classic hero myths and the
findings of psychoanalysts examining the sources of neurosis. It
is linked to the child's endeavour (in his fantasy world) to get
rid of his real parents and replace them by others, either more
exalted or more virtuous. By this token, Amar, Akbar and
Anthony are enabled by the scriptwriter (J.M. Desai) to disclaim
their gangster father Kishanlal and the main hero, Anthony
(Amitabh Bachchan) to adopt ·a priest as a surrogate father, i.e.
the opposite, in te111~ of sin and virtue, to his real father. Yet
this does not mean a rejection of the- real father but only an
exaltation of him, because Kishanlal is a gangster alm~t against
his wishes, and is repeatedly shown to be exceedirigly fond of
his children. The reunion '\Vith father at the end thus retaim its
force and comes as a resolution of the mental disturbances the
hero has undergone. It is significant that while the father is a ~
from the scene most of the time, the sons never lose contact with
their mother; in fact their relationship with her is strengthened
and sanctified by blood donation, even though formally they are
. orphans. The ideas of the four fwm discussed are echoed and
re-echoed in a series of others - Lawaaris, Sbakl~ Dard, Mebendi
Rang Layegi, Viswasgbaat and so on.
The mythicaliZation of the birth and growth of the hero in the
seventies is itself a retreat from the consciously modem concerns
of the fifties and the romantic, intermediary stage of the sixties.
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Added to thi.,, the glorification of the mother in the bizarrely

non-traditional manner moved the cinema further away from the
country's struggle to modernize society and at the same time to
maintain its umbilical cord with tradition. It has been suggested
that one of the major i.1sues that concerns the popular cinema is
'its ability to act as an interface between the traditions of the
Indian society and the disturbing modern - or Western - intru-
sions into it'"· The aptness of the observation is acutely seen in
some of the filim of the sixties (Evening In Paris, Purab Aur
Paschim, Do Raastc) which directly address themselves to this
mue, always resolving it by endorsement of tradition.
The thirties had seen a vigorous intervention of the cinema
on behalf of the modem (Duniya Na Maa,1e, Acbbut Kanya,
Jeevan Pmbbat, Devdas); the forties continued this endorsement
in a less certain but more varied, innovative manner (Dr. Kotnis
Ki Amar Kahan~ Ramsbastrl, Neecba Nagar, Dbarti Ke Lal,
Kalpana). The f afties and sixties, as we have seen, contended
directly with social problems facing the country. The retreat into
the womb in the seventies signifies a •psychic gravitation•, a
tendency of the ego to return to its original unconscious state,
inversely proportional to the strength of consciousness. "The
more free libido is available to the ego as will and interest, the
smaller is the inertia expressive of psychic gravitation• 1• . One of
the symptoms of psychic depression is the loss of libido in the
consciousness resulting in a corresponding loss of will and
enthusiasm. The series of Oedipal films, especially of the
seventies, centred upon a basically passive, personal mother but
an active mother-image, may thus represent the failure to
resolve the conflict of the traditional and the modem at the
grassroots level and a falling back on the family nucleus as a
refuge from the ·crisis of identity imposed by that confli~.
1ncre is a cl~e parallel here with the adolescent who fails
to resolve his Oedipus complex and turns neurotic, incapable of
grappling with life's problems. Perhaps a better definition would
be a regr~ion from maturity to adolescence, considering that
ftlms of the earlier decades showed much greater. signs of a
capacity to resolve the identity split into the traditional and the
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modern. What Nandy calls the process of •ritually neutralizina .
those elements of the modem world which have to be ~cceptcd
for reasons of survtval•15 is achieved here at an adolescent level;
the manifestatiom and imtruments of modernity that one must
live with are accepted in isolation, without resolving their irmer
conflict with tradition.
VII
-
'The serious, realistic, 'art' cinema is easy enough to under- ..
stand Even in Satyajit Ray's Devi, the devout old zamindar's
desire for his beautiful daughter-in-law·is clear to anyone who
is willing to look. In fact, it was so apparent that an acutely
embarrassed Bengali middle class condemned it to box-office
failure. On the other hand, it accepted Charulata's sexual love
for her husband's brother (cousin). A father's struggle with his
son for the hand of the daughter-in-law outrages an important
and widespread taboo agaimt incest, whereas a young brother's
attachment to his elder brother's wife is a socially accepted
attitude because it has a fmn base in marital practices even to
this day in many parts of the country. Marrying an elder brother's
wife on the brother's death is a well-known and age-old custom
that only the very 'modem', Western-influenced generation has
forgotten. When E.V. Ramaswamy Naicker (Periyar) paraded
floats depicting Lakshman flirting with Sita, he wanted to
devastate a north Indian model but not without a shrewd
knowledge of the meaning of devar (derived from the Sanskrit
dwi va,r,i or 'sec01'\d husband').
In popular cinema, deep psychological fears, conflicts and
motivatiom are buried under innocuous appearances, much as
fairy tales conceal children's secret anxieties and their resolu-
ti9m. Bruno Bettelheim has shown" how the story of Snow
.· White and the Seven Dwarfs deals with a girl child's curiosity,
fear of memtruation and sex and resolves them in a way that
comforts the child without making her conscious of her proc-
esses. A 'logical' explanation of the facts of life would not have
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allayed her anxieties in the way the story of Snow White

does. Much of the popular cinema's treatment of mothcr-
son-father and father-daughter-mother relationships require
analysb.
Among the many 'formulas' of the commercial fdm, an
outstanding one b the conflict of father and son. To understand
its significance, the critic must don the robe of a psychoanalyst
and lay the popular fdm on a couch to trace its inner associa-
tions. He has to dbsociate ~ analysb from the •art~ic' values
of the film. It is a pity that psychologists theimelvcs have not
come forward to make this analysb; equally a pity that fdm
commentators have taken these 'formulas' at their face value and
simply glorified them or deplored them without understanding
them. In writing on popular ·cinema, some wax eloquent on the
validity of the formula fdm as an art form (these are mostly
foreign-based critics), while others dbmiss popular cinema and
the urban popular culture of today as a degenerate phenomenon
without significance (these are mostly Indian critics allied to
'serious' cinema). In the amence of psychologists probing ~
problem, one ·must venture, however inadequately, to examine
some of _the facts behind the appearances.
It is surprising that hardly anything has been written on the
Oedipal significance of the frequently repeated relationship
between father, son and mother. Sometimes it has been referred
to as a generation gap, at others as a sign of revolt, or of falling
values. As we have seen, there is no taboo so universally held
among all human communities, from the most primitive to the
most sophisticated and throughout history, as the prohibition of
sexual intercourse between mother and son (followed by father-
daughter sexuality). Attachment to the parent of the opposite
sex and an attendant fear of violating the taboo haunts the inner
recesses of the human mind; i~ conquest forms a basic step in
the business of growing into a 'normal' adult. The combination
of mother love with sex is archetypally established in Barua's
Debdas where the prostitute is a surrogate mother whose love
is made explicit but the sexual~ is pushed under the
carpet. She b clearly a substitute for Parvati, Debdas' lost love,
rolled into one with mother, whom Debdas needs so badly in.
.
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his hour of sorrow. :Echoes of this relatiomhip with the prostitute
have become a scaet but essential temion-imparting element in
numerous popular filrm. No wonder Debdas has been remade
so many times. Lawaarls repeats the mother-obsession and
father-hatred of Trisbul (the son is again Amitabh). In Mu/tad-
dar Ka Sikandar, as in Barua's Debdasand some of Guru Dutt's
ftlrm, the ·prostitute or some other woman outside 'normal'
society becorm surrogate mother, fusing sexual love with
motherly affection. An interesting variation is. found in Kabbi
Kabbie, the analogue of the Oedipal relatiomhip is between
father (Amitabh) and daughter, alienating the mother in the
process. The love relationship of the daughter breaks up,
suggesting that she would fall back again on her father's
affection. The ftlm pushes the daughter's obsession for father
to a point hardly ever seen in Indian cinema; it also makes a
departure from the mother-son obsession that takes over in
Amitabh's later filrm.
Interestingly, the rise of the mother-cult coincides with an
increase in misogyny and in male camaraderie. It is worth
quoting here again that in Deewar, the nightclub girl who
loves Amitabh tells him her name, and he retorts: 'What's the
use? Girls like you change your name as often as you change
your~•. In Don Amitabh the bandit says: 'I don't like two
kinds of women - one that comes to me too soon, and one
that takes too long'. In Silsila, the bonholl)ie of Bachchan and
Shashi Kapoor is more pronounced and more credible than the
love-play between Bachchan and Rekha, which is abandoned
in favour of an unloved wife for the sake of overly glorified family
values. The increased emphasis on male camaraderie assumes
an underlying homosexuality which is associated by Jung with
mother obsession.
Is this all fanciful and western-inspired.' Are Indians above
such ignominious incest-wishes? A.K. Ramanujan tells us the
opposite in 11,e./ndian Oedipus, which I have already quoted.
There are plenty of Oedipus tales in Indian folklore, in classical
· literature, the epicsand the Puranas. Sudhir Kakar and Irawati
Karve had earlier called attention to this: Karve's paper is called
A Marathi Vemon of tbe Oedipus story. Dakshinarajan Mitra
Majumdar's 1bakurdadar jbuli has a tale of a young woman
92
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111B PA/NlED PACE
•
married to a newborn baby whom she brings up on her own;
Ramanujan reoounts a tale from Northen, Kamataka in which.a
mother, who discovers herself married to her son, sings to their
child before killing herself: 'Sleep/0 son/0 grandson/0 brother
to my husband/ sleep O sleep/sleep well'17•
In the classics, Prajapati (Brahma) has sexual intercourse
with his own daughter; the Greek Oedipus is inverted in father's
aggression against son in the Ramayana, and in Bhishma's self
imposed celibacy so as to enable his father Santanu to marry a
&hergirl in the Mababbamta. Significantly, Rama, banished by
his father, tells the story ofYayati who had asked for and received
from his youngest son the gift of prolonging his own life of
sexual pleasure in exchange for his son's celibacy. In Bhishma's
story of Saint Dirghatamas, the embryo in the womb prevents
.Brihaspati from having sex with his elder brother's wife, Mamata:
'Ibe embryo in the womb resists the father-figure'. Today,
traditional hostility between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law
is invariably laced with claum on the son-husband's love.
It would thus seem that Salirn-Javed's scripts and Prakash
Mebra and Manmohan Desai's ftlms are full of incest-w~es and
variants of the Oedipus complex. The fact that their· psychologi-
cal probl~ lie buried deep within society and have roots
going into ancient history may give some clue to their popularity.
But it does not mean that through the enactment of such inner
conflicts in the garb of 'entertainment' they are resolved. Perhaps
they are merely explored because there is a secret need to do
so. Indeed, how do we know that the explored but unresolved
conflicts do not breed, or add to, the restlessness and the violence
on the increase in society today?
Oiie Nakane, famous mefllber of that rare breed, the Japa-
nese woman intellectual, said in a lecture that the Japanese man
is more attached to his mother than his father, and the daughter .
more to the father than to the mother. In addition, as Nakame
and others have_averred, the Japanese father, after he retires,
ceases to be the head of the family; that place is quickly ~en
over by the bread-winning son. But .on being asked if this
indicated an Oedipal situation, she uttered a horrified 'No! No!'11•
So would many a pundit in India, if one were to point out
the male parent's frequent violence towards the son or the
93
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1h'" Ordtpal n.,o
female's abhorrence of the other claimant on her son's love, his

·wue. Psychologists would not hesitate to suggest that the bride
burning episodes contain a strong element of the mother's
Oedipal hostility towards her daughte_r-in-law. Until not so long
ago in Bengal, a son about to depart for marriage (which the
mother is not permitted to attend) woutd utter the ritual words:
'Mother, I am going in order to bring a maidservant (dast) for
you'. Obviously, this is an attempt to mollify the mother, and to
assure her that she need not fear the loss of her son's love to
her traditional rival. But such conclusiom remain confined to
academia; if they are brought out to the general public or even
to the average intellectual in other sphere$, there is a chorus of
protest.
VIII
Yet all one has to do is look. In a film like Ek Cbadar Maui
SI, made .by Sukhwant Dhadda in 1985 and based on the novel
by Rajinder Singh Bedi, it is imJ>O$ible to miss; Oedipus hits
you right between the eyes.
The film itself is interesting, being a few cuts above the
av~ge formula film. But perhaps its subject is too awkward
for society to face. When Bed.i's novel was published in the
forties, it is said to have caused a storm of outrage, pulling a
skeleton out of the cupboard that, for m~t people, is best left
there. The novel and the film are about the custom, among
poorer Jats, of the younger brother · marrying his bbabl, sister-
in-law, on his elder brother's death. In the novel, the woman
virtually brings up her brother-in-law like her own son; the film
reduces the age difference drastically so that Rishi Kapoor and
Hema Malini should not look as ill-matched as the novel
tragically suggests. The central Oedipal theme is bared when the
pancbayat and the old grandfather decide that Mangat (the
younger brother) must marry Rane (the elder brother's widow).
Exclaims Mangat: Cbadar daloun aapn; maa par ? (Marry my
own mother?) A tabooed object for sex. Not unnatunrlly, Mangat,
forced to give up the girl he loves (to whom he had described
Rane as his 'mother') and to marry his bbabb" takes to drink.
Original from
THE PAIN/ED FACE
'
Still less surprisingly, he refuses to consummate the maniage.
With. his drinking, however, he gives hi.1 new, now forlorn wife,
a clue. Her previous husband was a tonga driver who would
come home drunk every evening and beat up his wife before
making love to her. Indeed, whenever he failed to beat her she
would know something was wrong and would goad him to do
so. Now she baits the hook for his brother. Laying her plans
carefully, she sends her daughter away. She knows that once
she had provoked Mangat enough to hit her, she will be his. And
sure enough, after he beats her up hi.1 look changes; he sees her,
suddenly, as a woman. Lightning flashes appropriately, and the
two fall to the ground amidst claps of thunder. The marriage is
comummated. So sex, ~ popular ~om, has cl~ ties with
violence, a notion that could claim support from behavioural
scier,tists.
So far the story seem, simple, if bizarre, to those unfamiliar
with the customs prevalent, not only among Jats, but many
Himalayan communities such as sections of the Nepalis. In
Tibetan polyandry, the girl is married, Draupadi-like, to the
eldest son of the family and thereby to all the brothers. El, Cbadar
Maili Si has as many as fwe Oedipal triangles which must be
explored. Rane's daughter Guddi is -so outraged at her mother's
proposed maniage to her uncle that $he declares her intention
of poisoning herself. Obviously, for her it is a great betrayal of
her father's memory. After the marriage, when Mangat asks her
for food, she refuses, saying to her mother: Tera kbasm bai, tu
roti kbi/a Q-le's your husband, you serve him food).
In the early part of the film, Rane's mother-in-law comtantly
berates her, picking daily fights, later accusing her of 'eating
up' her sons. 'Au/ad mard lti boti bai, aurat ki nabi' - children
belong to the father, not the mother, she reminds Rane. At
another end, Mangal's childhood love, Raji, is left high anc;l dry
by the sudden appearance of Mangal's erstwhile 'mother' as her
rival.
The piece de resistance comes at the end, when the killer
(through mistaken identity) of Guddi's father obtains the family's
pardon, and marries her. The situation thus stands as follows
with the wife, Rane, at the centre of five Oedipal triangles:
9S
Original from
11- o.Jlpal Hs,o
Elder Brother Daughter
•
Mother
Younger Jilted
Brother Beloved
The interesting difference between this Indian configuration

and the Greek model is in the ending. Ravi, Guddi's father's
killer, confesses his crime-by-error, and seeks to make amends
by marrying his victim's daughter, thus solving a problem for
the poor family. He is not, like Oedipus, pursued by fate till
the bitter end.
Of course the Oedipal element here is not direct, but
expressed in terms of surrogates. By killing his future father-in-'
law, whom his prospective wife loved, Ravi stands in an Oedipal
relationship with his victim. Similarly, in marrying Rane, Mangat
has married not the real but a surrogate mother. Nonetheless,
in the Indian treatment of the problem there is at the end a
forgiveness and reconciliation not granted to the Greeks, who
were ever tormented by a fate unconcerned with human error.
The old grandfather justifies the custom of bbabbi-brother-
in-law marriage in economic terms (a kind of fate?): 'Cbadar
96
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1HE PAIN11!D PACE
dalna to garibi me cbadar dalna bat ' (to marry this way is to
save ourselves from poverty). If Mangat married his beloved
instead of his bbabb~ he might have lost interest in the larger
family and even gone away; and then who would have looked
after the old man and the women? It is thus a complex social
situation in which economic neem play an important part, but
the Oedipal element cannot be whed away altogether.
A curious aspect of the film, and the custom it portrays, is
that the traditional Hindu notion of jootba (a woman who, like
food, has been touched by another man and must therefore be
shunned), which still makes divorcee or widow remarriage
difficult, does not impinge upon the elder brother's widow.
Perhaps because it happens within the family, it is not seen as
an impurity, as it would o t h ~ be, in the case of a woman
who has had sex with another before marriage.
A more remote but no less real Oedipal suggestion underlies
the story of Apama Sen's Paroma. A mature married woman is
awakened to her identity through a love affair with her husband's
In
nephew's friend, several years younger than herself. traditional
society, she would be old enough to be his mother. When the
affair comes to be known, the shock it imparts to the family
has much to do with the young man's age. Paroma's adultery is
unique in the way it puts her on the dock before the whole
extended family, and her adolescent children. At the early
pubertal age, the idea of parental sex is shocking enough, not
to speak of a mother having sex outside marriage, with a young
man not very much older than her son with his budding
moustache. No wonder the film kicked up a lot of dust wherever
it was shown.
With Basu Bhattacharya's Pancbvati, we move from the
mother-son taboo to another formidable one - an elder brother's
relationship with a younger brother's wife. Sadhvi, a painter, gets
attracted to Vikram, a married businessman with a quiet
strength of character and an inert, conventional wife. She gets
married to his younger brother, who is a crude and unfeeling
huckster, in prder, perhaps, to stay close to the elder. During
a trip to Nepal with the !:lder brother, the inevitable happens
97
Original from
and Sadhvi produces twim (a throwback to Lav and Kush,
Rama's sons in the Ramayana). The ending title says: El, aur
Pancbvati, which is rather curious because Rama did not beget
his twins on Urmila. However, another taboo is broken, at the
root of which there is the fatherly position of the husband's elder
brother (we are back again to surrogates).
· The analysis of one or two fihm throws up so much of social
reality that it gives one hope. The very preliminary probes in the
present work into the psychological roots of popular cinema's
vision of familial relationships and their place in the socio-cul-
tural outcomes desired at the urban grassroots and the entre-
preneurship of popular cultural products gives ample proof of
the wealth of knowledge waiting to be excavated from below
the surface of what is described by the captains of the film
industry as 'pure entertainment'. Obviously a large sample of
entertainment filim need to be analysed in depth by a combi-
nation of falm critics and psychologists in separate or combined
personas. The age of self-consciousness must dawn upon this
pre-industrial society in rapid transition. The more the hidden
skeletons in the social cupboard are brought out into the light,
the more will be the ability to face ~rsh truths of self-knowl-
edge and the emergence of realism capable of determining the
true role of culture in the natural unfolding of society and in
social engineering. ·
98
Original from
.j
Pad,nlni Koibapun in Dev Anand's Swami Dacb , by Indian
cinema's definition, afreewomon bas to bra 11unginolpenon iii
society.
99
Original from
Oigib,ed "' Google UNIVERSITI OF MICHIGAN
,,,,,,,.a,, Google On alfr TI
A.,_,. Z.Jt : Dft1iJ,a Rani and Himanssbu Rai in Karma
(1955) : unmuaily for
Indian r;inema, tbis ~ sr;enear;tl<IQ/Jy .rnge.sa tbesatisfar:tioru of
a real, wet .-us, aplorins tM entire body, as it - , tbrousb tM
mouth.
Al>ow rlabl : Rajesb Xbanna and Hema MaJini in Prem Nasar: tM age of
romantic.tcwe.
ujt : P.C. &maplayins Dcbdas (rtabtJ in bis/Um of tMsame nam~
101
Original from
Oigib,ed "' Google UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
L~ft : fawnine - /ranlt, guilt-free in11ita1io11 to IOfJL
Top : Gun1 Du,: ,md Maki Si'1ba /11 Py.u,sa, tbe angst of love.
Abov. : Reltba and Naseeruddin Sbab ill Umno Ja:an.- /ooe in lbe ltotba.
103
Original from
Ory alfrom
I bft :
A~ :
Na,zlsa11dRajKapoor i,i lb~lattm-'s Shrtt-420.
Dbarmmdra and Rttna Roy In Badie Kl A3g: ,ni/d IOMKbo
, Google
'°"'""CC;
conibinH 11,,j/b
ongnalfn
105
Above · Roadside corner biflboard, Hyderabad, famasy-a11d...aro11sol eff«t
Jex-stnrwd youth.
0 11
106
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6
TIIE
ICONIC MOTHER
n a series of recent fthm, the mother is the central point

around which the children's fortunes revolve. Indeed, the
fthm of the seventies and eighties are remarkable for their
emphasis on the centrality of the mother figure. In a number of
fthm featuring Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest star in the Indian
fdm fannament, an almost passive mother presides as the symbol
of family unity. Her word is law, and her happiness is her son's
primary concer11.
She has replaced father in prose literatures in various lan-
guages in modern India. The figure of the long-suffering mother
as the protector of the family emerged around the tum of the
century and remained central until recently, how recently de-
pending upon the degree of contemporary consciousness in
each literature. At fust it contended with the modernization of
the family and the fragmentation of land holdin~. the break-up
of a complex network of infonnal support structures and mutual
dependencies. Gradually thereafter came the thrust towards the
liberation of women from the chains decreed by Manusmriti,
keeping pace with the spread of educational opportunities for
women. Without denying the n ~ of the home, the develop-
ment of a woman's personality both inside and outside the family
became a major concern of the middle class. Today there is
hardly any fiction or critical literature which commands a return
to the kitchen; the reconciliation of the kitchen, and motherhood,
with a larger, fuller life, has become literature's preoccupation
in dealing with the condition of women. And at no stage did
Original from
11lE PAINTED FACE
literature dismiss the role of the father as recent popular cinema

has.
The changing image of women in literature has nec~rily
been confined to the middle class. As the cinema's major
audience came to be composed of the less literate within the
urban population and the upper strata of the rural periphery, the
fears of the major part of that public in regard to the break-up
of family ties .and the ero.5ion of traditional values that bonded
the family units together began. to buffet the popular cinema.
Hence the glorification of mother has frozen into a fJXture, unlike
in literatur~, where it has evolved. It has become a monument
to all the subterranean fears of loss of identity and security within
the family structure that continue to trouble the minds of those
who live between tradition and modernity without the mediation ·
of literature that smoothes the path of the middle class. For them
today, self-contained agricultural communities are increasingly
being disturbed by industrialization and urbanization. With the
expansion of large industry and of urban centres, many rural
professions are being displaced by mass production. Migrant
labourers come together in giant steel plants or power stations,
drawn from many regions, language groups, and castes. The
workplace becomes more secular and modem, if insecure::. The
home in the village remains the refuge, the repository of tradition
for the members of a family increasingly dispersed geographi-
cally and occupationally. In the popular cinema, the family is
constantly broken up early in the film and reunited at the end
in order to provide hope and reassurance.
One possible factor behind the emphasis on family values,
justifying revenge for the redemption of family honour, may
well be the mistrust of a larger notion of society developing in
a country of shrinking distances and increasingly centralized
direction. The motif of revenge, common in the c~ema of the
last twenty years, is bound up with the concept of family.
Together they seem to say that the unwritten but better-known
laws framed within smaller units of society, the village and the
family, are more to be trusted than those prescribed for the entire
population of a vast country. The 'inside' is within the family,
Original from
11rr lro,ric MotJ,rr
over which mother presides. The father is practically without

significance, except in his violence towards his son. He hardly
ever enjoys the son's respect ot has· a ~itive, formative
influence on him. ~ . ! _ J q making m~~~-~ugh 'modem'
_ mean5 while mother keeps the f~rn.i~Y. t<>gether through tradi-
tional means (religioo.Jtv. patience, love, sufferingj~
- · 'lbe concern is not with the deliverance or society at large,
but with the protection of its small units. The sights are set
increasingly on the family and the group. The suggestion is that
society as a whole is too distant and nebulous and therefore a
somewhat fearsome concept, compared to the accessible and
reassuring values held with the family and the group. Outside,
the world is a · battleground where laws are not respected, if
indeed they are worth respecting. It is here that the Indian
revenge model diverges sharply from the American, from which
it has borrowed the basics. In the American Western, the hero
mostly battles for his society, not his family. But, like his
American mentor, he can either be a respected member ofsociety
or an outlaw. In either case, however, the group to which he
owes loyalty is the family.
And so the favourite subject of the commercial cinema all
through the seventies and the early eighties has been that of
revenge. In this Sbolay (1975), the best made of them all, remains
a landmark. In film after film, the family honour is somehow
tarnished by an outsider and must be avenged - outside the law.
Whether the law eventually gets the better of the bandit or not
is irrelevant, because he remains the hero. He singlehandedly
metes out justice that the law would take too long to administer.
He turns into a Robin Hood, taking from the rich and giving to
the poor -which justifies violence, gets the audience on his side,
and leaves the fdmmaker free to glorify that violence as a means
to an end.
Perhaps the formula reflects the absence of a social philoso-
phy and hence concerted social action; it is up to the individual
to correct social wrong, until violent death brings his efforts to
an abrupt end. .There is a quiet, basically insidious assumption ·
the audience is asked to make - that neither the establishment
10')
Original from
1111:.. PAINTED FACE
nor organized ideological action will bring social justice to the

people, that in this co1TUpt age (Kaliyug), only the individual
must make the heroic protest, fruitl~ or not. t
The ~ential difference between Amitabh Bachchan, who

has typified this hero in some two dozen box-office hits since
7.anjeer (1973), and the real-life bandit Chhabiram is that the
ftlm hero stands tall for justice, way above the caste hatreds of
the tbakurs, their rival bandits. He is the idealized hero of
contemporary India, completely without faith in the future
promised by constitutional ideology and centralized planning.
Besides, he is determined to save the sanctity of family relation-
ships and traditional values from the threat that 'modernity' po.5es
to them.
In this, the ftlm bandits and the real life Malkhan Singhs and
Phoolan Devis are held together in a common bond. The bandit
hero continues the East-is-good-West-is-bad, family-is-good-ser
ciety (state)-is-bad syndrome of an earlier generation of films; he
continues to represent the failure of the country's leadership
since Independence, to take its vision of synthesis between East
(tradition) and West (modernity) to t h e ~ of people and to
set up models that remove their disaffection with democracy
and the rule of law in the common man, leading him towards
totalism which, according to Erik Erikson, results from a failure
to grow from adolescence to manhood. Indeed Malkhan Singh
said at his surrender that he had turned to banditry to fight
injustice, that he had never betrayed the trust of the people, had
protected women and the poor and the infmn.
But the icon at the heart of the struggle against modernity is
the Mother, who presides over the extended family, tends her
sons (daughters are not basic to the picture) in their estrangement
from father, sometimes promoting murderous hatred of him. As
we have seen, winning the love of mother is the major motive
in the life of her sons. Woman is great, noble, divine, only as
Mother bringing up her sons in the face of a welter of problems.
She must be Yashoda (foster mother), bringing up Krishna away
from the evil eye of Kamsa; if she can be both Yashoda and
Devaki (Krishna's real mother), as in Aya Sawanjhoomke, where
the real mother enacts the foster mother, she has achieved the
apex of her existence.
110
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The Iconic Mother
II
Oddly enough, Indian mythology, epics and Sanskrit drama
have no portraits of the Great Mother from which Indian cinema
could draw inspiration. Sita in the Ramayana is the great -wife;
so is Draupadi in the Mababbarata. Gandhari, aged mother of
a hundred Kauravas, could have been one, but never shaped up
to it.She did mourn their I~ on the battlefield, but the dominant
impression she gives is of wifely loyalty as she goes about in a
blindfold. Her husband does not have the use of his eyes; so the
wife deprives herself of hers. Ahalya is turned fust into stone
by her son's curse on her tres~es and then back into human
form by Rama's touch. Damayanti goes through her suffering for
Nala as does Saivya for Harishchandra. Parvati's asceticism wins
her a great husband in Shiva; Savitri's single-minded devotion to
her husband defeats death. The examples are too many to
recount. Kalidas celebrates sexual love in Kumarasambbavam
and waxes poetic over Parvati's pregnancy but does not draw a
portrait of the long-suffering mother giving up all for her sons.
It is the husband who forms life's goal for" the great women of
Indian mythology.
Only when we tum to the Puranic pantheon do we come ·
acr~ the inescapable presence of the Great Mother in both her
aspects - the benign and the terrible - as a great independent
being to be worshipped in herself and not as a consort of a male
god. In fact, the kind aspects of the goddess, Lakshmi/Parvati,
are husband-Oriented, concerned more with the relationship with
Vi.shnu or Shiva than with the mothering of the children, either
the human hordes of them, or the few divine and personal ones
they bring forth. As the young Gauri, the goddess had performed
penance to win the hand of Shiva; as the gentle Parvati, she
invariably appears with Shiva 'in a position that shows her
feminity to be encompassed in the male principle and.subordi-
nate to it'. It is only in the concept of woman as Sbakti (power)
that she stands by herself; Durga (beautiful as she is) kills
•
111
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THE PAINTED FACE
Mahishasura (the buffalo-demon), and Kali, the dark, naked

god~ thirsty for blood, stands over the prone body of her
husband with a garland of human heads hanging from her neck.
Durga, copcemed with the deliverance of her human children,
comes closest to the image of the strong and good mother. In a
way, she is an into111ediate goddess, standing somewhere
between the gentlertess of Parvati and the terror of Kali. Perhaps
also the powerful goddess, standing by herself, represents an
underlying strand in tribal, folk Hinduism with its residual
matriarchal bias (sometimes even active matrilineality). This
fearsome aspect is reconciled with the patriarchal Aryan system
of latter times by the image of Parvati and Ganesh in medieval
Puranic texts. They may indeed be related to the male's fear of
woman as a dark force with mysterious, unfathomable powers
and the potential of return to matriarchal sway that it represents.
They may be a throwback to the suppressed cult of worship of
the Great God~ who presided over human destiny before the
Iron ·Age practically throughout the world.
One is thus hard put to find a true model of the widowed ot
estranged long-suffering mother who gives all for her children
which we repeatedly find as a stock figure in Indian cinema -
almost a self-contained archetype of its own. It is, in other words,
a modem myth manufactured partly by literature but m~tly by
the popular ftlm. One of its early and very powerful manifesta-
tions was in Mehboob's Aural (1963), later updated in colour in
Molbft" India (1957). In both, the mother figure is exalted to more
J than just a long-suffering figure; she is an active agent, in full
control of her family and, indeed, her community. She is just,
fmnly virtuous, hardworking and so solicitous of her commu-
nity's welfare that at the end she shoots her villainous son to
1
punish him for his comes when nobody else is able to do so.
i Her values stand out dearly: chastity, work ethic, loyalty to
I family, self-sacrifice, a sense of honour and duty. In calling the
first the generic Aural (Woman), Mehboob portrayed the tradi-
tional Indian ideal as he understood it, and in the second, Mother
India, he emphasized the Indian interpretation of motherhood
in the face of West-inspired challenges against the traditional
112
Original from
'111t Iconic Mother
concept. Besides, he Invoked the concept of the country as

mother, Bbaratmata (Mother India is a direct translation), as did
many pre-Independence leaders and patriots. The film offers her
(Mother India) a tribute that parallels, invokes and, as it were,
expatiates on, Bankim ChandnJ's song Bande Mataram (Hail
Mother) which was until recently treated as next only to the
national anthem beginning Jana Gana Mana .Adbinayal,aJaya
Hey, Bbarata Bbagya Vidbata (Hail, leader of_the destiny of
India and of the minds of its millions), written by Rabindranath
Tagore. The latter was adopted as the national anthem because
of its more secular, all-eliibracing messa3e invoking the broth-
erhood of different regions, religions etc., as opposed to the more
Hindu Mother Goddess invocation of the first.
· Mehboob's film has no co~unal-religious resonances; per-
haps it is for that reason that he translated Bbaratmata iJ:ito
English. as the title for a Hindi film so as to remove it from a
solely Hindu ambit. Evidently he also meant it to protect
traditional values from ·the challenges of western Influences
. fashioning the 'modem' woman, popularly considered less moth-
erly because she suggests a greater emphasis on her personal
fulfilment than of her sons. It is significant that Aurat and Mother
India establwi the mode, adopted in later popular ftlrm, of
re11ioving the father from .the scene at an early stage so that
mother can be at the centre of it. This is a common device in
as
literature well; in Bibhuti Bhushan Bandyopadhyay's Patber
Panchal( (on which Satyajit Ray's film was based), Harihar,
unable to make both ends meet in the village, goes away to cam
money, leaving his children in the care of his wife at a time of
d ~ . In Ray (as In Bandyopadhyay), of course, the matter
does not stop there, with mother as the be-all and end-all of
existence; Apu grows up and goes away from his mother. On
her. death (in Aparajito), as Bandyopadhyay says more overtly
than Ray, he feels, alo~ide his sorrow, also a sense of liberation
from her all-consuming love - a clear conquest of the mother
complex as a basis of growth.
Later Ray ftlrm, like Mabanagar, trace the development of
the individual identity of the woman as herself rather than as
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merely a wife or mother; in the popular cinema, there .is

unflinching devotion to the ima~ of the .mother sacrificing
herself for her children, more prea.,ely for her sons, who do not,
unlike Apu, outgrow their ~ i o n with mother and thus never
become fullgrown, mature men. ·
· However, it is important to observe that Mehboob .s aw his
Mother .a s the mother of all in so far as she exercises a role in
her village society and symbolizes a maternal deity presiding
· over the country. He does not define her narrowly as a passive
backdrop, however inspiring the idea of motherhood, to her
sons' fulfilment of their destiny.
,
m
Later fillm, especially of the seventies, whittled down the
Mehboobian mother image to an inactive shadow, required only
to provide inspiration for heroism and as the pivot for the mother
complex. Mother is no longer seen as the just and dutiful force
presiding over the community (Bharatmata); she is only the
symbol of the holding together.of her family and, what is more
important, the cause of the tragedy that visits her sons, who arc
too bound to her to be able to stand on their own. Trlsbul 's
hero gives his life to avenge mother's suffering, Deewar 's dies
by the hand of his brother attempting to win mother's love. In
.Amar, Akbar, Anthony, the achievements of the heroes end in
enacting the will of fate · in the reunion of family; there is no
assertion of quality in their individual development out of the
family, beyond the life span of the parents to whom they arc
reunited. Unlike the mythical, archetypal heroes, they do not
achieve greatness during their separation from parents.
In ·Mukaddar Alo Sikandar the vain search for a surrogate
mother and father ends in the untimely death, i.e. failure, of the
hero. In Karz the mother's resolve of revenge is achieved, but
once again, there is no suggestion of the development of the
son's own identity. The hero is thus contained within the
mother-complex and registers his inability to grow. It is sympto-
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matic of a society in which the larger community has come to

mean little and there is no faith in society's ability to provide
opportunities for the individual's developinent, thus pushing him
bade taw2rds the only image of security left within his psyche -
the security of the womb he cannot re-enter. In other words,
there is a death wish implanted within him, a despair of the
present and the future which is the cause for his return to the
past and its mythic resonances, striking those chords m~t
sympathetic to his despair. Hence this return to the mythological
in modern garb, exalting fate above free will, im~ing a
world-view that sees society and its manifestations as illusion
(maya) of no consequence, and life as the playground of the
Great Mother's .games Oila). O~ion with the mother and
family i., symptomatic of indifference to the good of society as a
whole. Pate is the dominant factor in life; it is not controlled by
man, but by invisible forces, concentrated in the archetype of
the Great Mother as art emblem of extreme patriarchy and utterly ·
different from the prehistoric Great Goddess who embodied the
domination of woman in society through matrilineality in deri-
vation of identity and property and matrilocality in marriage
(whereby the husband must live with the wife at her residence).
The psychic disorders whose examination revealed the links
between neurotic dream, and myths to psychoanalysts may not
be unrelated to this situation. The mother-obsessive Oedipal
force exer~ises its pull over the adolescent and suggests a
continued neurosis resul~ from the absence of resolution,
examples of which have been discu~ above. There is also
more warmth and d~eness among men than b(;twC<in men and
women. Love betweei:i men and women is enacted as a kind of
a
performance, box-office ritual. thrown in for good measure.
Amitabh Bachchan does not seek women; if he has them around
it is because they seek him out. The misogyny is apparent
enough, therefore, and is complimented by Jung's description of
the mother-obsessed man, who rejects women and finds solace
in his own kind.
In the major popular ftlrm of the fifties (other than Meh-
boob's), there is little of this harking back to the mother. Raj
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Kapoor's heroes ay out for social justice, and for the right to
love the person of one's own choice. .Awaw, bies to .establish
the individual's right to an identity of his own against· judge
Raghunath's stereotype of decent people producing decent
children, evil ones perpetuating evil in their progeny. It is a
protest agaimt the glorification of heredity above environment
and the advocacy of social rigidity. In Birnal Roy's ftl!m there is
a ~imilar urge to remould social ideas. Sujata, an outcast, ought
to have equal rights. with others on the strength of her own
qualities rather than those of her caste; Do Bigba Zamin's hero
must struggle agaimt the avarice. of the village moneylender and
redeem hilmelf Guru Dutt, the romantic individual~ berates
society for undermining the art~•s well-being, and asserts his
right to recognition and to love. The social satire of Mr. & Mrs.
55 deals with divorce, class distinctiom and women's rights in
a forthright, non-mythological manner.
In none of these works is there a significant mother-figure
ruling the lives of the protagoni.1ts either actively, as in Mehboob,
or passively, as in the ru~ of the seventies. The sixties saw the
dominance of Dharmendra as a kind of muscular-romantic hero.
His benign machismo is an independent force projected by his
personality and not a reflection of a visible or invisible mother-
figure providing the impetus. In Samadbt; for example, his fight
is for the hand of a woman and for the well-being of his son; no
mother lurks behind. The other important hero of this period,
Rajesh K-'1anna, also wields his romantic charm suggestive of an
innate kindness of his own, without off-stage or on-stage
prompting from an all-embracing mother. One of the major
Rajesh Khanna fd~, .Amar Prem, subsumes the mother-aspect
of woman into that of the beloved.
It is also remarkable that so many of the suc~ful ftl!m of
the seventies, especially those in which the hero is played by
Amitabh Bachchan, should present universal myths in such a
concentrated fashion. Mythical elements can be discovered in
earlier ftl!m too, but hardly ever have they constellated so
integrally around one heroic actor figure. Trisbul is probably
its purest expres.,ion in te111l., of archetypal character. It was
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TIit fco,eic MOllttr
•
scripted by the Salim and Javed team, who fashioned a well-
turned mould that others have used for CMting their wares. · Par
from being simple entertainment, these film, are almost terrifying
in their eamcstn~, their exaltation of fate as the determinant of
hurnal) destiny. It is a harking back to the mytho,ogical - now
in d~~ behind the fast cars, cabarets and the karate chops.
The ftlrm of the fifties were far more conce1,1ed with ju.,tice,
equality and freedom, here and now, not only in the revolution-
ary zeal of Raj Kapoor and in the measured statement of Bimal
Roy, but even in the romantic agony of Guru Dutt. There is
hardly ever a suggestion in these earlier film., that all outcomes
in life are ~ermined, or that traditional answers to contem-
porary problem., are the only ones to hold validity. They were
'social' ftlrm, not aypto-mythologicals- It was as a separate
g~e that the mythological ftl.m coexi1ted with the contempo- .'
rary, catering to a la.Bely separate-- audiencc of its own. The

issues in the film, of the sixties were real; division of land
( q,J,aar), break-up of family due to the impact of Western ideas
(Do Raaste), the problems of a bandit in coming bade to normal
life (Sangam, (lJJeaar). Most of the film., dealt directly with the
particular subject, not through world myth.,, as in the seventies.
As the decades proceeded and the country became more
urbaniz.ed, newly developed notions of modernity and the need
to celebrate its manifestatio~ tended to make the mythological
unfashionable and drove it underground. The mythological
per se has not completdy disappeared; it has beaten a retreat.
But the mind that required the mythology has not changed.
Hence it is that the big hits of the seventies came to be
'mythologicals in disgu~•, brandishing gum imtead of swor&,
leotar& in place of leopard skins and supermanly feats of
bravado instead of old-fashioned miracles. Occasionally, how-
ever, the miracle erupts even in a contemporary fdm; in Amar,
Akbar, AntbonY., two blobs of light issue out of the eyes of the
statue of the saint Shirdi ·Sai Baba and travel along a crowded
courtyard to focus on the blindness of the great mother of them
all, Nirupa Roy, restoring her vision, so that she can see her sons
in the final moment of family reunion. In Karz, the dead son
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returns to life, through reincarnation, at his mother's bidding, to

take revenge upon the murderers who had run him over with a
car.
•Sbalttt offers one of the most important metaphors of all of
the Salim-Javed scripts in its basic plot and character dc:welop-
ments. The District Commissioner (Dilip Kumar) see~ to be a
sort of Abraham figure, willing to follow his calling and to
sacrifice his only son, in this case not on the altar of God but to
the Law....on the one hand fathers need their sons to continue
their blood line. On the other hand they perceive their sons (not
their daughters) as their rivals and threats...as well as perfect
sacrifices to God.. .Abraham's son did not actually die. He was
replaced by a ram...Vijay (Arnitabh Bachchan). Vijay's is a
sacrifice that is completed...lack of trust brin~ about the pro-
gressive alienation of father and son until in the end the father
commits the act that the son had feared all along, not with an
axe but with a gun, not on a holy mountain but in modern
Bombay■ 1 • ·
At one point in the falm, Vijay staggers as he carries on his
monologue with the quietly listening Roma (Smita Patil): "I have
a lot of money but not (enough) for medicine for my mother.
You know, my father got married twice, once to my mother and
once to his work. I am my mother's son, and my stepmother's
son, that is my father's second wife's .son. The law is my
stepbrother. I ran a~y from the house, but my stepmother and
my stepbrother have imprisoned my mother in my father's house.
And my mother is sick. And I can't do anything because any
medicine I touch· becomes like poison for my mother. My
mother and father do not seeme as a son but as a poisonous
snake. You should be afraid of me because I am a poisonous
snake12• ·
In other words, the mother myth in contemporary Indian

cinema is a modern myth. 'Mythological in disguise' suggests
ancient myths clothed in modern garb; but analysis of the mother
figure, the cornerstone of the cinema of the seventies, shows that
it is a double disguise, being a modem myth made to appear
ancient in feeling under a contemporary garb.. The halo of
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mythology is bom>wed to exalt a C01ltct11p01ary Idea to make it
acceptable. Ja, Sanl06b, Maa (1973), one of the few traditional
mythologicals of the decade but a record-breaking succes.,, lifted
a minor regional deity into a virtually all-India cult, aeating_
modem mythology in traditional mythological style; the mother-
myth fihm create new mythology with contemporary bric-a-bric,
at the same time giving it misleading ancient resonances for
which there is no basis. The only tenuous link one can trace is
with world archetypes of the Great Mother identified with ancient
fertility goddesses; the Isis myth ·in Egypt, the Earth itself in the
Rig Veda, invoked, like Nut in Egypt, as •the coverer who takes
the dead man to herself"' and the Madonna in Christian mythol-
ogy, making up a primordial and inward image within the human
psyche, manifested in the myths and artistic creations of man-
kind. "The child ..first experiences in his mother the archetype
of the Great Mother, that is, the reality of an all-powerful
numinous woman on whom he is dependent in all thing.,, and
not the objective reality of his personal mother: the particular
hi.1torical woman which his mother becomes for him later when
his ego and consciousn~ are more developed•.
There may be an analogy here with a uniycrsal link that may
~ bet~een a life of crime and a devotion to mother". James
Cagney's crime ·fJlnu had the accent on mother and the familial
tie. The same nexus is obvious in the Italian mafia tradition
where the family is the surrogate for society, in real life and in
fwm, as in Tbe Godfather. However, such archetypal structures
are common that they do not explain the sudden emergence of
an overwhelming .mothcr-obses.,ion in a group of fwm in a
particular country. .. .
Mehboob, Salim-Javed (significantly, it is on their reroa11111en-
dation that Prakash Mchra cast Amitabh Bachchan in the lead
role in Zanjeer, his fust s~cular hiO: there is an interesting.
pos.,ibility that the mother theme should come from Zoroastrian-
Judeo-Christian-Islamic patriarchy sources from West Asia. Meh-
boob's mother figure of the fifties, fust proposed in .Aurat with
much sincerity and then consolidated into a more melodramatic
mould in Mother Ind"', was an active agent who could hold her
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own against those who would take advantage of her lonely

.situation and who later stood ·up for the social good to the extent
of killing her own criminally-minded son. The mother figure of
the seventies and eighties is a passive icon in the family alcove,
a symbol of family values of which her sons . are the active
protectors. The onus of action had passed on from the father to
the mother and finally to the son.
The glorification of the son as the hero has resulted in the
diminution of· the father - a much more important figure in the
thirties and forties. In most of the ~ of the recent period
dominated by the revenge theme, the father is a weak man
subjected to manipulations he cannot counter; he dmppears
from the script early in the film only to return towards the end,
merely to complete the unification of the family.
how
It is inta-esting to ask the mother came to supplant the
father in the scale of the son's loyalties. Most of the time, there
is a conflict between father and son and some kind of violence
is done to the latter, either by the father hirmelf or during the
father's absence or due to the inability of the father to protect
his fa~. Archetypally, Rama~ndra of the Ramayana is the
ideal son, completely loyal to his father, and ready to carry out
even . his most unfair command -Indeed in Ramanand Sagar's
very popular Ramayan tel~ion serial (see ~cussion in Chap-
ter VIIO, Rama reminds his mother that her sole duty is to obey
her husband. Yet, in the revenge cycle of filrm spawned in th~
seventies ·which proliferated in the eighties, the father is a
shadowy figure mostly to be ashamed of ( Gali gali mein sbor
bat, .Anand Babu dxw bat). The son's primary loyalty is to the
mother, of whom the father is, as it were, a pale shadow, an
appendage. there is simply no in.stance of Ram-like father
obsession in any way comparable to the attachment to mother
endemic to the fdrm of this· period. Psychologists should probe
the reasons for this: is the hero's generation ashamed of the one
. that begat it and is that-w hy he goes out to fight for family honour
with mother as his mascc,t.) Are- young people ashamed of
political leaders (father figures) who have failed to deliver the
goods? Is it the strength of the mother figure of Indira Gandhi?
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Tit~ Iconic Motlltr
Or is the Oedipal ilttprCSS so stroilg that the son hardly ~ to

recogniu, the father's existence? Or, again, is the mother seen
almost as the Vilgin Mary of the Christiam, who gave birth to
her son without the iJ1q,urily of the sexual act which would
weigh heavily on the son's mind as a reminder of S9111ething he
resents, i.e. past sexual relations between his parents? Is k the
enmple of the Ownbal bandits who played avenger to their
families and Robin Hood to their dan? A further pc&ibility
suggests itself: is the shamefacedness over father a reflection of
the illegitimate moneymaking preoccupation of the nacn presid-
ing over the popular cinema's fmances and therefore of its
mov~ Or is it simply the amoral urgency of survival within the
.migrant lumpen male who begets children and leaves them to
the care of the wife? ·
A man's sbamfor honour 'is something flexible, depending
on a man's behaviour, way of talking and acting; his sbarafcan
be acquired, augmented, diminished, lost, regained and so on"'.
But women are bound by a specific, inflexible honour, 'ird,
which determines their proper conduct and upon which men's
honour, sbaraf, depends. The concept of 'inl is inflexible: a
woman is born with it and grows up with it; she cannot augment
it, because it is something amolute, but it is her duty to preserve
it. A sexual offence on her part, however slight, causes her 'inl
to be lost, and once lost, it cannot be regained. Then the man
or men whose honour is affected by the lapse on the part of the
particular woman (brilliantly depicted in Yilmaz Gunay's Turkish
film Yol), will temporarily lose their sbaraf. When they avenge
that loss, male honour will be restored; usually only her dead
body, not necessarily her lover's, will achieve this redemption of
male honour. How the woman comes to I~ her virginity (or
ch~ity in marriage) is irrelevant. Her responsibility is absolute'.
The purdah is part of this protection of male honour, further
reinforced by the reduced but not eradicated practice in some
Muslim majority countries in West Asia and Africa of what is
euphemistically called female circumcision but actually consists,
unlike in the male surgery, of the removal of the specific organ
of enjoyment of sexual intercourse, i.e. the clitoris. Male circum-
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cision is an assertion of virilty carried out with public cere1110ny;

female circumcision •w typically canied out in private, surrepti-
tiously, the operation calculated to im~ the girl with her own
inferiority in relation to boys!'. In 1977 the World Health Organi-
zation reported that female genital mutilation was a widespread
practice, in spite of legal bans, in some countries, such as Egypt
and Sudan. It should be noted that the practice is unknown in
India7 •
What this male code of family honour, taken in conjunction
with the elimination of female sexual enjoyment enforced by
ditorectomy must imply is a glorification of woman's function
as mother, fulfilling her biological function of reproduction, and
.as an object serving the sexual enjoyment of man. It drastically
reduces the aggressive, self-fulfilling aspects of feminity that
many other mythologies and civilizations have celebrated. Like
the pre-Christian Great Goddess, Innana, Art~is, Isis, Kali and
Durga today invoke the lost but still incipient power of woman,
not her captivity by man. But the Great Goddesses of Europe,
Egypt and West Asia, derived from, but going far beyond, the
primitive fertility goddesses, represented sexuality as a positive,
creative force; they did not have a benign mother-aspect but it
was not in conflict even with ritual prostitution practised at their
temples. They were obviously near cousins of the Indian god-
desses (one of the names of Lilith, the terrible black goddess of
Sumer, was Kali)8. They, along with Shiva, the Indian counterpart
of the Greek Dionysius9, impired the efflorescence of erotic
mitbuna reliefs that illuminate the walls of Indian t~ples. They
celebrate woman, not mother.
In emphasizing thd' West Asian code of female honour, Hindu
society was however reinforcing and conte_mporanizing in tc:1111.1
of the culture of the dominant power something that had been
developing with its own traditiom.
Indeed, the total contrast of this set ·or values to those in Indian
mythology and epics and historical accounts of ancient and
medieval Hindu urban civilization is remarkable. The five great
women (Pancbakanya) to be recalled every morning were none
of them.c haste by the above standard. They are: Draupadi, Kunti,
Tara, Ahalya and Mandodari. Significantly, Sita, the model wife,
is not one of them. Draupadi had five husbands; Kunti's three
•
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legitimate sons were all begotten by men (gods) other than her
husband (who was banned sexual intercourse because of a
curse); Tara, wife of the monkey king Bal~ man'ied hi1 brother
Sugriva after he had killed her husband; RishiJamadagni ordered
hi1 wife Ahalya to lie with a king, a guest in the home, according
to contemporary custom, and she was turned into stone by the
curse of her son, who protested against the practice (also
reflected in the Uddataka-Svetaketu talc in the Q,andq/ya
(l,antshad).
In the contemporary consciousness of Hindu society, these
great women of Indian tradition hardly figure. The one that docs
most. especially in north India, i1 Sita of the Ramayana. But, as
we have already noted, it i1 primarily as a wife that she SCIVCS
as a model for today's Hindu, not as a mother. And it i1 from
the time ofTulsidas (18th century) that the model was establi1hcd
in north Indian Hindu society, particularly in the Hindi speaking
belt (see also the di1cussion of the Ramayana on tcl~ion in
Olapter VIIO.
The West" Asian model of the male code of honour probably
came into India with the series of Islamic conquests culminating
in ~e Mughul Empire. It consolidated, over the centuries, a
fundamental change in the Hindu perception of the role of
woman. It reduced the female dominance celebrated in a whole
corpus of Puranic mytm, and ~ed to elevate the image of Sita
above that of the other great women of the epics, especially
through Tulsidas's retelling of the Ramayana, which gave it a
depth of religious inflexibility that it_originally did not have. It
also seems to have introduced a certain ambivalence and indeed
a guarded revulsion towards the free sexual adventures of the
gods in the Puranic myths and of men and gods in the epics (and
on the walls of temples). Similarly., the erotic aspect of the
Kmhna cult. despite its allegory to the relatiomhip of the
individual soul and God, came under a cloud of shamefacedness.
In orthodox Hindu homes, women were often forbidden to sing
erotic songs of Krishna and Radha. The Mababbarata has in
fact ceased to be a sac1ed text in north India, having been
supplanted by the Ramayana.
The flowering ofMughal culture also pushed romantic poetry,
music and dance into the Lakhnavi leotba (the house of the
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sophisticated dancer-singer-prostitute whose cult home is

Lucknow), and took it out of the ordered relationship of men
and women in mainstream society. There is to this day a distinct
genre of very popular fdrm filled with the angst of a lost J,otba
romanticism (Paleeezab, Dastak, Umraojaan, segments of Mu-
kaddar ka Sikandar and so on). Kotba romanticism served to
separate the beloved from the wife in the Indian Muslim social
order and helped confine her to her role of mother. Much of
· this separatism spilled over into Hindu society in the areas of
Muslim social dominance and integrated well with other separa-
tive factors in Hindu marital practice - the dependence on
astrology (ho~copic determination of suitability of a particular
match) and the institution of dowry, both of which require the
separation of love from marriage. It also serves the interests of
the extended family system by preventing the young from
asserting their separate identity through love before marriage by
choice instead of arrangement. It is for this reason too that love
and marriage are so often separate in the bulk of popular cinema.
The Islamic input into North India reinforced in Hindu society
its mounting misogyny and turned it further away from its earlier,
relatively freer (though already shrinking since Vedic times)
sexual values towards the comtraints of a family structure of
ironclad puritani.,m for the female - without the safeguards that
Islam provided her - the freedom of remarriage and compensa-
tion for divorce.
The Vedic woman had rights to take part in a yagna, to wear
the sacred thread, to choose her husband in a swayamvan-1
cere111ony and to divorce her husband, among other things.
Even though her position in pre-Vedic society had been far
higher, she still retained rights that were gradually taken away
closer to the Chri.,tian era. A projection of the new role model
of the woman took place with Manu (2nd century BC) and a
process of denigration of woman was set in motion thereby.
Thus arose the medieval idea of aksbatayoni, or the un-
harmed hymen, of the woman fit to be married in an increasingly
patriarchal vision of society. Ever since then the revulsion
towards a woman already touched by another man has run deep
in the Hindu tradition. All the labours of reformers have failed
to d.i slodge the absolute bias against the remarriage of a widow.
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Hence also the abhorrence for divorce, which opens up the way
to the remarriage of a woman whose hymen ~ not intact, i.e.
who has been touched before, and is thus polluted. This bears
a close parallel to the taboo against food that has come in touch
with another's mouth, even indirectly. The Hindi word jootba
would exactly dcsaibe a woman who is.not alisbatayoniO,atin
'intacta'). Th~ concept, which ritually compares the body of a
woinan to food, is unique to Hinduism. No major civilization or
_relig~on in the world shares to the same extent the thought of
the woman made impure by the touch of man other than her
husband in any circumstances. The concept of 'ird in some
Islamic countries concerm the honour of a husband and his ·
family if a ~e commits sexual transgression while married to
him, but does no.t prohibit her marriage after divorce or the death
of her husband. The Catholic doctrine of virgin birth, in which
Mary's hymen is considered intact even after the act of giving
birth, is strictly confined to the Virgin Mary and has never
engendered prejudice against the remarriage of a widow.
. British rule reinforced the puritan sexual ethic with the sense
of guilt inherent in Ouistianity's St. Augustinian concept of
original sin, and overlaid it with the new acceptability of
monogamous mar,iage. In a tradition as old and as diverse as
the Hindu it is always possible to quote some authority to
emphasize certain aspects and ·c1evatue others in order to justify
the trend of the moment. Thus, almost without knowing it, a
large section of caste Hindu society absorbed these late Hindu ·
traits· reinforced by foreign influences and transformed itself so
as to consider West Asian Oudeo-Christian-lslamic) cultural traits
to be its own ideals. Indeed the majority of middle class Hindus,
unaware of the mutations in tradition, regard this amalgam of
South Asian, West Asian and Western values as a true reflection
of the ancient Hindu ideal of womanhood. On this is based the·
absolute · goodness of the mother figure, to which all other
womanly aspects are denied, that has come to dominate the
popular cinema's positive image of woman. ·
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7
WOMAN:
PLAYMATE, WIFE AND TAWAIF
he cinema is the ardbanariswara of the visual arts; its right

side is man and its left woman. The relationship of man
and woman has been central to narrative cinema from its early
days. It is the direct subject of the vast majority of fi~ made
throughtout the world, regardl~ of the state, the religion and
culture of the society within which they are made. The three
basic images of the cinema are the trinity of the hero, the heroine,
and the two together. These images look upon us from highrise
buildings, street comers and glossy magazines - not to speak of
the film screen itself - and form the stuff of dreams for the
modem world. The images on billboards advertising soaps and
fashion wear, cosmetics or automated vehicles, are not only
similar to the cinematic ones; they are their extensions, often no
more than parasites on the body of the cinema, living on its hold
on the public imagination. Fellini's delectable image of a
bosomy Anita Ekberg leaning from a billboard exhorting us to
drink more milk (Buvep;o I.ane) in his episode in Amon- in Cina
O.Ove in the City, 1953), is archetypal; it rolls mother and beloved
and sex object into one - an omelette the cinema is forever
unscrambling and putting together again. Indeed, what would
the cinema be, without sex?
Anthropologists have long been agreed that human social
organization is the product of the primordial prohibition of
incest, the farst and most basic step in the regulation of the
man-woman relationship and control of the biological urge that
animates it. "I.be most fundamental religious notion deals with
the difference between the sexes. Each is perfecdy normal in its
Original from
Woman: l'lay,naw, Wifo and Tawalj
way but contact between them is pregnant with danger for both
of them"1 •
Religion is the enforcement agency of a culture. Complex
social organization would not have been possible without the
means of integrating the biological family into the social group.
Incest, the main clanger to the social edifice and its component
units, ·could not have been effectively prohibited without the
active support of.religious sanctions. Hence, no ancient religion
ever left human sex life to the privacy of the individual. Hinduism
makes detailed prescriptions to this day on the auspicious hour
of sexual intercourse for f:>egetting (male) progeny - in the
annually published almanacs that follow an ancient lunar calen-
dar. Muslim Personal Law refuses to recognize the right of the
state to make any deter11ainations in regard to the rights of women
or the relationship of the sexes. Christian Catholic faith has
similarly rigid injunctions against contraception. Religion and sex
are thus inextricably related with the fabric of traditions that
gove111· the lives of people today.
Tradition here implies a body of beliefs understood by a
group of people at a given time and place to have been handed
down from the beginnings of the ·particular religion - quite
irrespective of historical facts established by scientific evidence,
literary-linguistic, archaeological, anthropological or whatever.
Thus the average Rajasthani Hindu believes the self-immolation
of a widow (Sall) to be a traditional expression of the highest
virtue in a Hindu woman. There is no such tradition in south
India; its people do not see any embodiment of Hindu virtue in
the act of Sati. Similarly, they do not perceive the veil as a sign
of modesty •in a woman, unlike their compatriots in the Hindi
belt who still see its lack, and the wearing of flowers in the hair,
so common in the south, as a sign of prostitution. In the
north-eastern states, purdah for a woman would be considered
ridiculous; the po.,ition of a woman in society is high.
Faced with this plethora of different perceptions of tradition,
carrying within them varied notions of the relations of religion
and sex, the dominant all-India cinema in Hindi sets a model
that comes closest to commonality and also imposes, to the
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111B PAIN11!D F.ACB
extent ~ible within the commercial framework's need to sell

the product widely, the values obtaining within the linguistic
region it primarily represents - the Hindi belt. This prevails
despite the fact that, linguistically, the fihm are pragmatic enough
to adopt a liberal Hindustani tongue rather than sbuddb (pure)
Hindi.
The protagonia of the all-India film, which sets up the model
for regional cinema as well, is the north Indian, Hindi-speaking
Hindu. It is his dream that the rest of India is beiJlg taught to
dream. (See Chapter II for a detailed discussion). A newspaper
reports that a 19-year-old girl climbed the waterpipes of a
building, reached the roof and jumped from it, J.cilling herself
because she could not endure the tortures of her mother-in-law.
Such dowry deatm (actually incitement to suicide) and dowry
murders are charged with the high drama of human relationships;
but it is an unpopular subject for filmmaking. So is intercommu-
nal relationship,-such as between a Hindu man or woman with
a Muslim man or woman, or between a Brahmin and Harijan,
popular in Gujarati Bbavai and other folk performances. Once
in a while, if such a film is made, wor:d will go round _the power
centres of the fdm industry to make sure that it is not effectively
released. It is said to have in the case of M.S. Sathyu's Garam
Hawa even though it conce1ned mainly the internal problems of
the Muslum and its love story had nothing to do with Hindus.
And it was a moving, well-made ftlm. The mere fact that it was
a syi11pathetic portrayal of the Muslim predicament seems to have
been eriough for the_overlorm of the industry to _throttle its voice.
Testimony to their power is implicit in the a~ence of certain
themes, tabooed by a co~iracy of silence and an implicit
self-censorship, regardless of the dramatic power of the story
and its suitability for ftlmmaking.
In 1982 a girl by the name of Asha in Meerut', a town ·not far
from Delhi, ran away to the capital city because her parents and
brothers insisted that she should marry, whereas she wanted to
continue her studies and be jndependent. Faithful to the diktat
of Manu, the males in the family were horrified by the idea of
a woman living alone without a guardian and doing her own
128
Digitrzed by G oogle . -- --·· . .

.
.Original frorri
.
woma,.,. l'lay,,,a#, Wifa and Taf!JOif
thing- a sure sign of lost virtue. Arriving. at Delhi, Asha somehow

found her way to Saheli, a women's organization that helped her
to find lodgings and a job. Her brothers pursued her to the city
and traced her to her benefactors. They d~ded her address
of the Saheli volunteers and roughed them up when they re~ed
to oblige. The police sided with the brothers of the errant girl.
Saheli women were accused of kidnapping and running a
'
brothel. •saheli volunteers go coll«tively to lodge a report at the
police station. The Station House Officer reinforces the misde-
meanour (of his juniors). The Press reporter is dragged by his
hair and illegally confined•.
The case hit the national Press headlines. Fifty women got
together to protest in front of the police station; senior members
of Saheli got in touch with the high and mighty. An enquiry was
ordered. The Station House Officer was transferred; the sub-In-
spector faced an enquiry. •we felt the senior officer was more
answerable, so we take a stand. We will give evidence against
both or nonc...we are aware that this could only happen because
we are middle class women with access to the Press and the
bureaucracy. A writ of habeas corpus is filed by Asha's mother
in the Supreme Court. The Chief Justice of India passes a
judgement granting Asha, as an adult citizen, the right to choose
how and where she lives her life...•2
The story of Asha is the story of the conflict raging between
the Constitution of India and the traditional perceptions of the
majority of the people in regard to the position of woman in
society. It is obvious where, in the unlikely event of a commercial
ftlm being made of this highly dramatic story (or any other of
the many similar ones), the sympathy of India's popular cinema
would lie. It would clearly come down in favour of the last M311u
(circa 2nd century B.C., contemporary of Confucius in China,
advocate of a similar philosophy of patriarchism and absolute
male control of woman). On the other hand, the so-called 'New'
or serious·cinema, the high art paralleling the pop enterprise of
the fdm industry, would equally certainly have sided with the
girl, upholding the Constitution of India.
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·11IIJ P.AIN11iD PACE
This problem goes well beyond the question of avoidance of

controversy or of the money-making ability of the product. Had
profit been the sole consideration, the Hindi ftlm formulae would
have changed far more rapidly and radically than they do,
comidering that the vast majority of the fdrm made every year
fail at the box-offace. In the fashion wear or perfume business,
where the variables are no less complex, market research would
have played with the product determinedly until it fitted .the
market. Indian cinema's adaptations are much less scientific or
thoroughgoing. As a result, the same fon11ulae go on blundering
about until something makes a hit, causing a stampede of failures
in that direction. The level of education and culture within the
production apparatus of the popular cinema is far below that of
the .MBAs who rule ' today's industries. The cinema does not
properly belong to the organized sector; a major part of its capital
comes, not from banks or from public shareholdin~, but mostly
from illegitimate operations such as blackrnarketeering or smug-
gling or drug-peddling or, at best, from tax evasion.
II
One of the most successful fi.lrm of 1980, which ran well into
1981, was B.R. Chopra's Insaa/Ka Tarazu (The scales of justice).
In a community of one-time producers, Chopra belon~ to that
rare species in Indian cinema - a producer of long standing with
a string of successful filrm to his credit. (He later became more
famous as the producer of the 1V version of the Mababbarata).
The heroine of InsaafKa Tarazu was the old workhorse of the
Indian cinema's sexual circus - Zeenat Aman. In this film she
portrays a photographer's model (and therefore) is almost always
half-clad. She is in love with a man who would marry her if he
could. But long before matrimony is actually mooted, she is
raped by someone of consequence who was piqued because
she would not go to bed with him. Soon thereafter, her half-~ister
is raped by the same man while working overtime in her office
on a dark evening, with the due amount of lightning and thunder
130
Original from
in the background. Zecnat goes to court both times. She loses
her own case, but wim her half-s~er's.
. Chopra claimed vociferously that he had made a film vindi-
cating women's rights. But here is some dialogue that throws
interesting light on the true intent of the film. After the rape of
the elder sister, her suitor takes her on a walk and tells her, rather
feebly, that he still loves her and would like to marry her in spite
of the rape. She declares:
She: I am no Ioneer pure. . ·
He: If someone steps on a mirror and breaks k, is l the mJrrors
fault?
She: No, but you can't see your face in that mirror any more.
He: I think purity of the mJnd is more impoftanL
She: No, for a.woman, the purity of the body is more important
than the purity of the mind
During ~-examination, the counsel for the defence asks
her why she was not ashamed to talk about her rape in public;
any decent woman would be. This is a statement echoed by
others in the film - the audience in the courtroom, and even her
own sister. In the sequences showing Zeenat being phot<r_
graphed as a model, she is shown in a variety of daring costumes
and in sexually provocative postures. What the audience is
asked to infer is that as a woman who lives without a guardian
and on her own, she has to be a marginal person in society,
living on the edge, if not in the middle, of the sinful life, exactly
. as Asha's brothers had inferred in real life. THe second inference
offered is that since she was almost a prostitute (being dr~ed
the way she was and allowing her body to be photographed),
she deserved to be raped anyway. A further thought that the
audience is asked to carry home is that it is better for. a woman
to accept the misfortune of rape and to hide the shame of it than
to expose it to the public gaze by going to court, the newfangled
invention of non-traditional India. Rehabilitation after rape is
out of the question, because the purity of a woma.n's body is
more important than that of her mind.
In her self-abnegation, Zeenat Aman of Insaaf Ka Taiazu
exactly parallels the stance of Sita in Ramanand Sagar's television
•
131
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11IE PAlNIED PACB
Ramayana serial. Valmiki's Sita is rejected by Rama before his

subjects raise the question of the purity of her body. Immediately
on returning to Ayodhya he summom Sita into his presence and
tells her in rude language that he had not fought the long and
bitter war agaimt Ravana in order to recover her, but in order to
redeem the reputation of his famous clan. He is in grave doubt
of what happened to her while. in Ravana's keeping, and has no
time for her now. In the Mahabbaratds brief summary of the
story of the Ramayana, Rama compares her to gbee that has
been licked by a dog. He asks her to go away with anyone she
likes - she could take Lakshmana, Bharata or Shatrughana (his
highly devoted brothers), Sugriva the monkey or Vibhishana the
momter. Sita gives a spirited reply to all this, quoting the fact
that she was a famous princess, daughter of King Janaka and
could not be spoken to in such insulting language. As a scion of
the famous clan of the Raghus, Rama, she says, ought to be
ashamed of his own behaviour'.
Indeed Rama's misdemeanour in unjustly rejecting Sita had
been criticized by dramatists and poets like Bhavabhuti and
Bhartrihari in later times - before Rama was made into a god. By
Tulsidas' time, the deification of Rama, which had begun in the
10th century, was complete. So what does Sagar do to suppress
the evidence of the original epic and of the Mababbarata? He
makes Sita ask to be banished because, according to her, it was
Rama's fust duty to save the reputation of Raghukula. Whether
she had actually sinned with Ravana (according to Valmiki, she
had not; Ravana had wanted her but not agaimt her wishes),
was unimportant. The important thing was that she was deemed
to be impure by Raina's stibjects. It is this medieval version that
Ramanand Sagar adopted in his Uttara Ramayana over televi-
sion.
Hinduism is the only religion in the world that declares a
woman unfit to be married or remain married to if she has
already been touched by another man. The concept of the ritual
impurity of f!Jod touched by another is extended to woman.
Woman is a kind of food to be comumed in pure condition. A
Brahmin's food is made impure if the shadow of a Muslim or an
132
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Woman: l'laymall,, 1Vft- and Tawaif
untouchable crosses it; a woman is impure if the shadow of

another man has been cast upon her. If a woman becomes a
widow, she is somehow responsible for her husband's death;
that vague feeling is what makes traditional Hindu society regard
the widow with contempt. Thus Puranic Hinduism enjoins
self-immolation as the noblest course for a widow, the next best
being living death. Under no circurmtances can a widow or a
woman rejected by her husband be rc11ianied. The whole idea
of remarriage of a woman is repugnant to Hinduism. A woman
touched by another man is jootba, contaminated food. Harsh as
it is in its patriarchy, Islam does not see any impurity in the
remarriage of a woman, just as it has no injunction against the
eating of food touched by another. Judaism and Christianity do
not endorse the eating of food by all from the same plate as the
Islamic (umma) brotherhood does, but neither do they consider
such food impure, nor a woman touched by one unmarriageable
by another. The Shankaracharya of Puri, one of the pillars of
traditional Hinduism, refused to grant an audience to Mrs. Indira
Gandhi when she was the Prime Minister of India because she
was a widow. He fmally agreed on condition that a cow should
stand between him and her so as to cleanse him of the proximity
to her widowhood, ipso facto impure in orthodox Hindu belief.
Medieval Hinduism (dating from the 12th century if we take
the Indian History ·eongress defanition) rapidly lowered the
position of woman in society from what it had been in the late
classical period (650 AD to 1200 AD) and earlier. Even though
the earliest Vedic times represented a break away from the
worship of the Great Goddess and the attendant domination of
the feminine principle in the Bronze Age Ondus Valley civiliza-
tion in India, the Shang Dynasty in Oiina, the Hyksos period in
Egypts and so on), it did not repudiate all the rights of women
at once. In the Rig Veda she is still entitled to take part in
sacrifices, to be initiated with the' saaed thread, to educate
herself to the extent of composing mantras O.Opamudra, Apala,
Visvavara, Ghosha, Savitri, Vak, and Indrani were authors of
suktas of the Rig Veda itselO; she is similarly free to marry the
man of her choice, to re1narry on the death of her husband, or
133
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,
THE PAINTED F.ACE
to stay unmarried all her life with the right to her father's
property.
Eighteen suktas of the Rig Veda (10/95/1-18), comisting of a
dialogue between Pururava and Urv~i, have intrigued scholars,
with good reason. Having spent four years on earth with King
Pururava, Urvashi, the heavenly damsel, departs, ignoring her
husband's entreaties to stay with her. "I have come away, like
the fust of the Ushas", says Urvashi. •one cannot hold the wind;
you cannot hold me•. At this total rejection, Pururava then prays
that his fall should come immediately, and mighty wolves should
devour him. Urvashi comoles him by saying that •a woman's
love does not last, a woman's heart is like a wolrs•. Finally, she
assures him that he would find bliss in heaven.
D .D. Kosambi6 has shown that this sultta bears a strong .
suggestion of human sacrifice before the Great Goddess. By
_comparing a woman's heart with a wotrs just after Pururava has
mentioned that wolves should tear his body apart, Urvashi
confums his worst fears. She assures him, not of corttinued
prosperity on earth, but bliss in heaven, i.e . after his death.
Urvashi likens herself to the fust (the chieO of the Ushas, a class
of Goddesses in woman-dominated society, who were free to
comort with any men they wanted and could demand their
sacrifice. "Pururava is to be sacrificed after having begotten a
son and a successor upon Urvashi; he pleads in vain agaimt her
determination•. This sacrifice of the male chief (deity, king) was
closely related to fertility rites. "The mystery cults developed
around the theme of the precariousness of the earth's fertility
and the vital requiren1ent to renew it regularly..-.hence the rite
of the dying male deity (Allis, Osiris, Adonis, Dionysius, Tam-
muz) whose spilled blood drenching the ground fertilized the
Earth Mother, the universal genetrix, only to be reborn with the
next crop"7 • This is very probably the past, remembered with
some horror in the Rig Vedic suktas on Pururava and Urvashi at
a time when the shift towards patriarchy had begun to take place.
By the time of the epics (beginning from around 500 BC and
going on till about 400 AD), polyandry, which was commonplace
in a woman-dominated .
matrilineal society, had become unde- '
134
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Woman.-~. Wifa and Tawalf
sirable. Hence the exceptional, although still accepted, position

of Draupadi with her five husbands in the Mababbarata.
Throughout the Vedic and po.,t-Vedic period, there is a gradual
lowering of the position of woman. Fiist she loses her right to
take part in sacrifice, then to initiation, and then to remarriage.
Even so, Manu 's decrees in the 2nd century BC do not represent
what actually obtained in society, but emhrines what he consid-
ered the ideal. In the early centuries of the Christian era, in_the
Gupta age and even thereafter, we fmd the wtitution of
swayamvara, a monument to woman's freedom of choice in
marriage. Similarly, the right of divorce continued. The age of
marriage for women was high. Even in the late classical age,
there were prominent women in politics, scholarship and po-
~ -
m
lbere is considerable evidence to show that the mixing of
mer:i and women was relatively free of a seme of guilt, especially
on festive occasions, and courtesans and devdasis had an
important, respected role in classical and late classical India. The
temple of Somnath had 500 devdasis. Sex as an essential, creative
aspect of life was celebrated in temples - a tradition that lasted
till almost the 15th century in Hindu kingdo~. Purdah originated
among rich married women as a sign of their social distinction
or to shield t~lves from the common eye rather than as a
restriction imposed on them. Women of royal families were
known to come into court without wearing a veil'. Manu's
decrees were very gradually spreading their hold but did not
emerge victorious - until the coming of Islam. A newfangled
puritanism in the discussion and portrayal ofsex came into being,
woman was confined within four walls and the wife (son's
mother) was separated from the tawaif(beloved).
Tulsidas's · image of Sita - chaste and submissive to male
domination, dedicating her life solely to the good of her husband
and children without any thought for herself, or any participa-
135
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11IE PNNTED FACE
tion in non-familial activity, was a direct product of centuries of .

Turko-Mughal rule. Subjected to ·the domination of an alien
r:eligion and forced to make an existentialist peace with it, the
Hindu mind was anxious to find common ground with it and
to adapt to it without losing self-respect. Islam's absolute
patriarchy could be intemali7.ed only if it was charmelled through
some conduit of Indian tradition. What was more suitable for
this than Manu's Sambita?
The Indian story of the gradual denigration of woman is part
of a global movement recorded in the history of civilization. In
horticultural economies (based on superficial earth-scraping
cultivation) women were the main food producers; this position
was·reversed in favour of the male when deep ploughing was
introduced_in the Iron Age. The deities worshipped until then
were all Mother Goddesses. With the emergence of male domi-
nance, male gods started to make their appearance. In Egypt,
for instance, Hathor, the goddess forming the canopy of the sky
with her arched body while her leg., and han~ rested on. the
earth, was quietly replaced by Sun-God Ra.
Among the Semitic Babylonians, Sun-God Mardock scored
a decisive victory over Tiamat, the Mother Goddess from whose
body the world was born. The snake, revered as a symbol of
cyclical fertility in India and many ancient Ian~ because of its
· ability to cast off its skin and rejuvenate its body again and again,
became the 'evil' .s erpent who tempted Eve and prompted man's
fall from the Garden of Eden.
Simultaneously, the concept of woman as the sole magical
procreator gave way to the realization of man's role in fertilizing
woman and enabling her to bear children. This realization
changed man's entire relationship with nature and with woman,
so long identified with -it. •Power of creation was mythically
transferred from the womb (the lotus goddess Padma in India)
to the male navel (Vishnu's) or to the brain (Athene springing
from Zeus' head)•. The Sun took over from the moon.
-The vast Eurasian steppes and · Arabian deserts favoured the

nomadic-pastoral, stock-bn!eding way of life and the violent
centrifugalism of a patriarchal outlook, whereas the agricultural,
136
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WC>ftMffl: ~ . WT/&' and Tawa'f
~mg types of cu11ure epread out n the Middle P.a• and India
avoured, under the aegja of what waa Wt of the Giat Mother,
a typically centtipet2l oudook. 1be physical collision between the
two principles in the shape of the 91eat invasions, the dynamic
agsre&1Jon of the centrifugal pattian:hs tearing into the vitals of
the peaceful cenlrip,'lal cultures of 1hr sealed populations, was
shattering and hlatoric:ally dedslve...a 80lt of Duk Aae brousht
about by D11iltipl.,. nvuiona of Jroo.bearing hone-drawn, char-
iot-riding barbarians...••
In India this centrifugal movement was represented by the

Aryan invasion · of Persia and the Indus Valley (a recently
disputed theory which still holds centrestage), paralleled by the
onrush of the Dorians into Crete, the Casseans into Mesopotamia,
the Turko-Mongols into Otina - all at· about the same time,
between the 17th and the 14th century BC. There ensued in these
areas, including India, a Dark Age devoid of archaeological
remains or other manifestations of civilization. However, the age
saw feverish 'masculine' intellectual activity resulting in the birth
of speculative thought in India of a very high order in the
CJ>anisbads, followed by Buddhist philosophy. The mythopoeic
style of thinking of the nature-oriented Great Goddess gave way
to an ethical, rational, unmythical enquiry into the nature of the
cosmos.
The 'masculine' aspect of this movement was best brought
out by Zoroastrianism in Persia in which 'woman, the eternal
female, comes into play primarily as an ally of the diabolic
Ahriman (Satanic enemy of God Ahura Mazda, later callled
Ohrmazd)'11• Although created by Goel, woman, in the Zoroas-
trian-Magian account, chose to play the harlot with Satan and
thus became .the storehouse of evil. Because she had consorted
with Ahriman, enemy of Goel, woman began to menstruate and
thus to defile man. Ohrmazd laments, "had I found another
vessel from which to make man, never would I have created
thee (woman)". It was also clearly stated, again and again, that
for Ohrmazd to defeat Ahriman, it was essential for woman to
produce male children. Woman was blessed only as mother and
housewife.
137
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THE PAJN11!D PACE
This was the view of woman bequeathed by .Zo-· 'ri!llr11S111

to Judaism, and by Judaism to Islam. . All the three contended
with the power of the Great Goddes., worshipped in their
societies and laid her low.
Before the anival of the Aryans, Persian society was matrilin-
eal. The status of woman was so high in parts of Kurdistan that
they even commanded the armed forces. The rise of the Persian
civilization resulted in the fall of woman from her pinnacle of
power. Similarly the Jews were surrounded by worshippers of
the Great Goddes., which included sacred prostitution. At the
temple of Astarte in Syria, even high-born women had to offer
their bodies for money, which would go to the maintenance of
the temple12• It was a part of the rituals of worship - simulation
of the fabulous union of the divine pair who created the world
- and was not treated as prostitution in the commercial sense in
which we understand it today. But the Old Testament, full of
hatred for feminine domination, lost sight of the healing, loving,
humane aspects of the Mother Goddess when it fulminated
against Babylon as "the mother of harlots and the abomination
of the earth"u. TheJews, it must be remembered, had been slaves
to the Egyptians, who in that period worshipped the Great
Goddess Isis. Jewish priests proclaimed in their misogyny that
a man was made ritually impure by coming into contact with
"reptiles, lepers, and menstruous women•1•.
In the c.ase of Islam, the nomadic Bedouins of Arabia, into
whose deserts the change from a matrilineal to. a partrilineal
structure came very late, reacted as violently as the Jews, from
whom they inherited much, against the dominance of women.
The Kitab al-Aghani says: "the women in the Jahiliya (pre-Islamic
Arabia), or some of them, had the right to disthi§ their
husbands, and the form of dismissal was this. If they lived in a
tent, they turned it around, so that if the door faced East it n~
faced West, and when the. man saw this he knew he was
dism~ed and did not enter'15• Women had several such visiting
husbands concurrently. Although the Prophet was himself from
Mecca and belonged to a patrilineal clan, his father only visited
from time to time. More than 300 goddesses were worshipped
138
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Woman:~. lff/i' a,,d Tawa#f
by society at large; there do not appear to have been any male

gods worth the name. ·
In other words, society was
• •
in tramition from a matrllineal
and matrilocal to a patrilineal and patrilocal structure and both
coexisted for some time. The Prophet's own personal life lends
credence to ~ view. His first maniage was to Khadijah Bint
Khuwaylid who was a wealthy widow, twice married, several
years older to him and conducted a trading business through
agents. She hel~ him considerably in his prophetic calling,
help that the Prophet did not spurn. However, contrary to the
customs of the time, he married several times thereafter. In the
event, .Islam came down heavily on polyandry then current,
fmnly substituted it by polygamy and declared the supremacy of
men over women. "1be men are overseers over the women by
reason of what Allah bath bestowed in bounty upon one more
than another, and of the property which they have contributed
(i.e . the marriage price}; upright women are therefore submissive,
guarding what is hidden in return for Allah's guarding (them);
those on whose part ye fear refractoriness, admonish, avoid in
bed, and beat; if they obey you, seek no (further) way against
them"16• .
The subjugation of women has its counterpart in the strength-
ening of bonds among men. "Free from sex-related problem,,
thanks to the complete elimination of women from social and
political life, the exclusively male compound of multitudes of
disparate societies was able to instil...a real feeling of democratic
equality..."17 As we have noted elsewhere in relation to the
Bachchan fihm of the seventies and early eighties, there is a clear
psychological relatiomhip between misogyny and the bonding
of males. ·
The background to· the average Indian attitude to women
today (especially in the Hindi belt) is made up of diverse strands.
One is drawn from well within the Hindu tradition as idealized
by Manu and gradually implemented and hardened until the
arrival of Islam. As Muslim rule established itself, its Hindu
subject suffered fror11 the need to go on the defemive, protecting
his religion by fencing it off with ritual prohibitiom and unbend-
139
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11IE PAlNIED PACE
ing adherence to progressively narrower interpretations of tradi-

tion fed into the community by its priestly order. At the same
time, he felt a more secret need to arrive at a modus vivendi with
the alien ruler through a subtle adaptation of his social codes.
This took the form of a reinforceaiient of male supremacy through
a selective emphasis on the patriarchal aspects of tradition. Smrlti
became more important than Sbruti; i.e. cu11ent exegesis and
extensions of tradition gained ascendency over the original texts,
.. in order to bend them better to present neem and to bring Hindu
•
• attitudes to women closer to th~ of the Muslim rulers .
••
•I Purdah was strictly enforced, the age of marriage for girls
., was sharply lowered (enforcing better obedience) and their
....
..• education practically forbidden; preference for sons was institu-
• tionalized, sati was glorified and increased vastly in incidence,
. Rama of the Ramayana became more divine and Sita was
•.. enthroned as the model of womanhood. Oncidentally, succes-
..'. sive Muslim rulers had attempted, without success, to ban sati
• as a barbaric custom). Most of this was achieved though the
pundits of Smriti, such as Smarta Raghunandan of Bengal, where
Kulin (highest caste) Brahmins married even a hundred wives,
saving them from the blight of spinsterhood by visiting them
once in a year or years and sleeping with them for a fee. During
..
,,. their peregrinations in the countryside, they had to carry a
register of the addresses of their wives. This custom of extracting
a price for sexual intercourse with one's wife is portrayed in
Apama Sen's Sati (1989). Compared to this, Islamic polygamy
was infinitely more de111ocratic and disciplined.
An ancilliary but important effect of Muslim rule was the
growth of sexual puritanism in Hindu society. The openness in
the discussion and portrayal of sex in literature and the arts was
now inhibited by a sense of guilt derived from the Zoroastro-Ju-
deo-Christian-Islamic tradition. The nude body became an un-
mentionable thing. The difference in attitudes between areas
directly under Islamic rule and others such as the Vijaynagar
Kingdom where Hindu political authority continued, or the
absence of purdah where Muslim rule did not reach or reached
140
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.
Woman.·~. 1fffi, and TaUltl#f
very late such as large parts of the south, provides ample

evidence of the puritanical effec:t of the Islamic impact.
It is neces.,ary to strCM here that' none of this was forced on
the Hindu by his Muslim ruler. Indeed if the Islamic faith had
really been forced upon India, as some would have us believe,
Hindus would have been reduced to a small minority centuries
ago. Only the early Islamic rulers ruled India from the outside;
by the time of the Mughals, they not only lived in India but had
adopted its language and culture, as is evident in the rise of Urdu,
the spread of SuflSlll (which is denounced by the orthodox
Muslim as a Hindu-influenced trend, for Islam itself has no place
for mysticism), the vogue of Kathak dancing and the vast Muslim
contribution to north Indian classical music. They diluted the
devotional base of both ·and turned them into thin~ of beauty
and enjoyment, not in the hereafter, but in thehere and now.
IV
And both Kathak and Hindustani classical singing were
assimilated into the cult of the tawaif As the uneducated wife
was incarcerated inside the home, man began to seek refined
companionship and erotic dalliance in the woman set apart from
society for that specific pu~. Within society, the purdah hid
the worn~ from the men. In Guru Dutt - M. Sadiq's Cbaudbvtn
KA Chand (1960), the lovelorn Nawab had one fleeting glimpse
·of Jamila; the rest of the story was of mistaken identities. The
course of true love ending in marriage could seldom run smooth
in sqch confines, except in the case of cousins, where the whole
episode was hidden within the family walls. Romance was easier
with the tawaif, the dancing- singing girl whose signal m~t was
that she was the only.unrelated girl who could be seen by men.
The fact that she was trained to sing and dance - something that
girls from 'normal' households, Hindu or Muslim, could not
dream of - enhanced her charm. The ftddenCM of her favours
only strengthened men's resolve to win· her 'forever'. Poetry
and music flowed at her feet. She offered the wit and charm of
141
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1HE PAINIED PACE
sophisticated companionship, in elegant and luxurious sur-

rounding.,, amidst the aristoaatic manners and the proud corn- ·
pctitiveness of powerful men. Unlike love before marriage, the
romance did not fade prcci.,ely because there was no question
of marriage.
The capital of this culture was Lucknow, in the sunset glow
of the Nawabs. F.arlicr Mughal glory has been consigned to
history books; it is only its decadence that dimly lives in the
minds of recent generations. Hence, perhaps, the persistent
sadness of the kotba song., of Paieezab or Umrao Jaan. At its
heart is not only the regret for the impermanence of love but •
nostalgia for a lost splendour. Mughal culture and the mores of
its society had influenced all who came in touch with it and
became a part of their lives. Mughal nostalgia lives in Hindu
hearts almost as much as among Musluns. The appeal of
Pakeezab or Umrao Jaan's narrative or the song., that are part
of it are shared·pretty much by both comm:unities. It is a part of
north India's culture. While Hyderabad was the other chamber
of its heart, its capillaries extended. to Calcutta, Bombay and
beyond. But its character changed as it moved away from its
centres; in Barua's archetypal Del:xlas the prostitute is not a
romantic companion but a surrogate mother, comforting the soul
of the sensitive, if weak, man.
Guru Dutt, spiritually fathered by Barua, has streetwalker
Gulabi perform the same function for the poet Vijay in Pyaasa,
Even in his Sahib Bibi Aur Gbulam (1962), while the great babu
tells his wife to drink, sing and dance if she wants him·to stay
home with her, he has no romantic feeliJ:lg., towards the dancing
girls he patronizes; he merely wants to conform to the ways of
his times, to show off his wealth and enjoy his power. His wife,
who plays the iawaif in order to conquer his heart, is not far
removed from the surrogate mother in her concern ·for him. The
DefJdas syndrome has the mother cult at its heart; it is essentially
different from Lucknow's tawaif culture, the focus of a certain
species of ·Urdu poetry still popular in sbe1iris and gbazals,_
however watered down.
142
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But the.angst for romance is real in Hindu society too, where
·caste and· dowry and the remnants ol purdah keep love and
marriage fumly apart in large sections of society. Marriage is a
busineM deal; romance is therefore to be sought outside mar-
riage. Where else to find it but in the l,otba or the never-never
land of the popular cinema? If romance is to be conducted
indoors, it must be in the llotba, real, achievable and Muslim in
orientation; if it is to be outdoors, there will be flights of fancy
with shades of Krishna's lee/a with the gopts in the plains and
woods of Vrindavan, ·over which a modem veneer of jeam and
jackets·must be lightly superimposed. The llotba is the indoor
wing of romance. Because its interior ~ a shade more realistic
than frolicking in the great outdoors, it acquires a touch of
intimacy. Its songs, as in Pakeezab or lminio Jaan, are more
personal, I~ loud; here music is more the food of love than the
fodder of mass romance. Passion for the tawaif is charged with
thrill of the illicit, the quest for the imp<>§ible. The tawaifis what
she is because she is not a wife; she is not forever. It is therefore
suitable for ·the masculine degance, the .cultivated sadneM; the
delicate conceits of Urdu lyricism of a nostalgic kind that forever
wallows in tears and . heartache. .
But the soc~ position of the tawaif was forever faxed.

Where the tawaifsought to become the wife, it ended in grand
tragedy, as in Kamal Amrohi's Pal,eezab (1970). The ex- tawaif
is invariably spotted by ex-clients before or after marriage in
innunlCrable ftlrm of this genre, and hopes of living happily ever
after arc instantly dashed to the Jvound. As long as marriage is
avoided, romance with a tawatf, unlike with a wife, can last
forever. Similarly, where the wife tries to tum into the tawatf,
as in Guru Dutt-Abrar Alvi's Sahib, Bibi aurGbulam, the tragedy
is equally inevitable. Almost .all the ftlrm of this genre, except
B.R.Chopra's altruistic and self.comcious Tawaif (1983), tdl
· their audience the ghastly comequences of straying from type.
Wife and tawaif must not try to exchange identities one way or
the other; each must stick to her predestined role. The fact that
Umrao Jaan in M11zaffar Ali's 1981 film of the same name was
143
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111B PMNIBD F.dCB
abducted and forced into the life of the tawaifwas not her fault;
yet acceptance, not revolt, is the answer for her. Marriage is
not for love. It is busines., tran.ucted between two families.
Mltaab, tramlated into Engli.m as marriage, has more of the
sense of a social contract than the sanctification of union
bestowed on it by both Hinduism and Christianity. The purpose.
of love before marriage is fulfilled with the reproduction of (the
male oO the species; thereafter it loses its mison d'etre and its
death is inevitable. Love with the tawaif can last because it
serves no social purpose - except, perhaps, in its by-product,
poetry, which is also considered 'useles.,' by --society at laige. ·
Similarly, the tawaif must not marry, because her mamage
would leave the stigma of her erstwhile occupation on her
progeny and on the husband's family ~ well.
If that left any woes in her mind, she ~d not.talk about them,
and her silent anguish only made her more romantic. At least
she did not have to bear children or contend with a mother-
in-law. She was detached and she knew how to promote
attachment. What more, to impire poets? Some of the most
romantic Hindi film sonp have been dedicated to her; witness
Pakeezab or Ummojaan. Today's Muslim nostalgia clinp, not
to the heights ofMughal glory, but to its decline; it is the laments
of Bahadur Shah on the loss of his kingdom, and the sonp of
the tawaif's .unattainable love that bring tears·to the Muslim eye.·
But, as I have noted before, the shared experience of the self
divided between wife and tawaif - one too faithful to be
romantic, the other too romantic to be faithful - belong to both
the Hindu and Muslim psyche in north India. The tawatfhad
subsumed in her the lost Hindu tradition of the courtesan coming
down from the mythical Urvashi to the Vasantsenas and
Vasavadattas of the great d~ical cities of India. She had the
.same fell combination of wit and charm, long-lasting beauty and
elegance of the ganlllas of the d~ical and _late cl~ical,
pre-Muslim period. It is not surprising therefore that the appeal
of a Paleeezab or an Ummojaan should be shared almost equally
144
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Woman:~. 1Rfa and T'"°"'ff
by Hindus and Musluns. Here it must also be reinembered that

the memory of the last Mughal·sovereign, Bahadur Shah n, is
somewhat especially shared. His was the flgUl'e that united the
· forces of what has ~ described by the British as the 'Sepoy
Mutiny' and by Indians as the 'FtrSt War of Indian Independence'.
. In Bengal, the memory of the last independent Nawab, Shir.J,z-
ud-Qaula, is treasured equally within the racial memory and
celebrated in litet:ature and drama. There was thus a shared
history ·anc1 culture within which the tawa#f cult lived. .
In south India, for the major part, the temple devdasi contin-
ued the tradition of.sacred pro.,titution of southeastem Europe,
West and South Asia and, very probably, the Indus Valley
civilization, wh~ racial inheritance may reside among the
Dravidian.,. Devdasls were temple virgiN only in the sense that
they were not allowed to marry; their prostitute (the wrong word
to use in the context of the Great Goddess tradition) aspect
was less declared than assumed, less dejure than defacto. Their
inability to marry may have caused them, and their lovers, as
much anguish as the tawaifs of the north (probably more, since
the marriage of tawaif and Nawab. did take place, although
rarely). Significantly, the devdasi cult slowly declined under
Islamic rule, with its traces virtually wiped out by British law.
This wife-tawaifseparation is what B.R. Ch6pra's Tawa#f, to .
which I have referred earlier, sought to obliterate; along with its.
aura of sophisticated decadence. He marries off and makes an
ideal wife of the tawaif and makes the whole community fall
in love with its darling daughter-in-law (Ratl Agnihotri). She had
. actually been depo.gted there for safekeeping by an_arch crimi-
nal, but love upsets all calculations. When, at the end, the
aimina1 redauns
. her and
. the neighbourhood discovers her past,
both her keeper and the community have fallen so hard for her
that they cannot give her up. 'J'.heir hearts overflow with the milk
of human kindness and they redeem the sinful girl for main-
stream society. Nawabs and aristocrats are avoided, for ~eh
•
145
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.
1}llJ PMN11!DPACB
. ,
, .
redemption by confederated affection can only be expcaed from .,

the poor al_)d the d<nmbo ac~. ·
Chopra's attempt to Hinduizc a pcnistcnt myth of Islamic
culture is, however, too inept to destroy the sturdy tree. ·•. ·
C.Ontrary to thi.1, Pal,eezab confirms the power of the social
convention that separates the two categories. When the priest
· asks Meena Kurnari her name al the nillaab-cer.emony out in
the open on a little plateau, she does not answer. Rajkurnar, the
groom, answers for .her and names her Pakce7.ah (pure). Upon
thi.1, the outrag~.tawa#faics out "Nahint": and runs away, her
burqa flying out like the winp of a great black bird as she runs
down the hill. It is a magnificent sequence enshrining the
1\Jrko-Arabic code of honour that. requires total monogamous
loyalty of the wife (if not ritual purity as in the case of the Hindus)
to her husband (in )"ilmaz G.unay's Y~ the family demands that
the-wife be killed by the husband for her sexual transgressions
· during.hi., absence). Kamal Amrohi's film exposes the traditional
danser · of marrying a tawa#f whcn an eistwhile patron r~-
nties her on the street.. The effort to make a ·wife out of a tawa;f,
'the _film tells us, is doomed to failure.
· In Muzaffar Ali's Umrao Jaan, the Nawab is content to
frequent the l,otba and makes no attempt to rescue her from it,
being well aware of the social realities. Ali eliminates all trace
of the unique cC>.U('age of the U1nrao Jaan Ada of Mirza Hadi .
Ruswa's book and surrenders her, and hirmelf, to the self-indul-
gent, cloying-sweet sentimental romantic lyricism of cl~ic l,otba
culture. He shows a sophwticated understanding of detail tare
in this genre; his interiors, and the intricate web of relationships
he weaves, have the look, ring;· and logic of authenticity. The
music, too, has the exact shade of plaintive melancholy that
evokes the nostalgia of . MOtba culture of decadent Mughal
. tradition·in the hearts o f ~ who had shared its experience in
any way, however remote. <llopra, the Hindu Oater to -be the
ardent Hindu of the Mabahbarota), tries to di.1lodge the conven-
146
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.
1VO£ff11n. ~ . "fli'and T.,.Y
tiom of the genre and fails; two Mualb111, Kamal Arnrohi and
Muz.affar Ali, cona'4111 them and bring success to their fllrm.
.
V
The l,otba, the house where the courtesan met her dients, is
the indoor aspect of dalliance in Hindi cinema, evoking the late
Mughals, and the Muslim-Urdu culture of Lucknow and Hyder-
abad Outside this convention, love in the popular cinema is
hardly ever enacted within the confines of a house. The Hindu
tradition invokes, not the ganO. of daaical India, but the
dalliance of Krishna with the ~ in the great outdoors. The
earliest reference to Krishna is _in the Cbbandogya q,anubad
(c.800 BC) which mention., him merely as a Brahmin student,
son of Devaki. The divinity of Krishna crystallized over a period
of at least 700 years, probably more, stretching from the earliest
version of the Mababbarata (400 BC) - Jaya, the story of the ·
conflicting claim, and warfare of the Kuru clan - to the Harl-
w,masa (circa 3-8th century AD), the V&slmupurona and fuwly
to the Bbagaw,u, Purana (a later text). Over this long tramition,
be i.1 metamorphosed into God. In the basic war story of the
Mababbaroui (i.e. its earliest version), he appears very human,
an .astute diplomat who engineers the Pyn'hic victory of the
Pandavas over the Kauravas. Thereby he hel~ the Brahmins
(he is hirmelf a Kshatriya) in the Mababt,arata establish the
Kshatriya's duty of waging a just war and fighting to the end, no·
matter. how bitter it may be. Krishna guides the course of events;
he interferes directly each tbnc through subterfuge, only when
he thinks victory might elude the Pandavas, which suggests that
something more is at stake than the dbarma of the Kshatriyas.
Krishna explaim to an angry Balaram (his brother) the logic of
the unfair killing of i:>uryodhana: he points out that, taking into
account the dose rclat~p between the Pandavas and the
Yadavas, the prosperity of the former would mean the Yadavas'
pro$pC(ity, as well. .
. · 147
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11IEPAINIH) F.ACE
.
He uses the same argument in ~ i n g the unfair killing
of Jarasandha by Bhima - that the Yadavas,. who had been
unable to curb Jarasandha's power, would benefit by his death.
The divine aspects of Krishna appear in the two sets of interpo-
lations going on till about the 5th century AD, i.e. well into the
clas.sical period. What was a ·historical figure is slowly trans-
formed into God, typically of clas.sical civilizations, without a
sense of the linearity of historical time (Alexander became God
within a hundred years of his death).
A1so important-is that Krishna, like most other Puranic deities,
is not an exclusively Indian god but part of a wide geographical
.network of divinities held in co11~11on with other countries,
especially Greece~. He was a sun god and as such repr~ted
the victory of masculine power over the Mother Goddesses. No
wonder, therefore, that he emerged, over the centuries during
which patriarchy _was consolidated in India, as the beloved
master of thousands of women, having precisely 16,108 wives.
He defeated the demon Narakasura, who had imprisoned 16,100
princesses, and freed them. When they saw Krishna, the women
fell in love with him and he sent them all to his home in
Dwaravati. Besides, when he married Satya (Satyabhama), her
father gave him 10,000 cows and 3,000 young maidservants as
dowry. He also abducted Rukmini, princess of Vidarbha, Mi-
trabinda, princess of Avanti as well as Lakshmana, princess of
Madra, and married Bhadra. Narada vistied Krishna at Dwaraka
to see for himself how he fared with such a large number of
wives. He was impressed by Vishwakarma's design of the interior
so
of Krishna's home but more to see Krishna consorting in every
room at the same· time with a different wife19•
However, what interests us more here is Krishna 's youthful
dalliance, before his many marriages, with the gapf.s of
Vrindavan. One early autumn, when they were bathing in the
Yamuna and singing of Krishna, he appeared there with his
friends, stole their clothes and climbed a Kadamba tree to watch
them frolicking in the water. When they asked-for their clothes,
he summoned them to the shore. They covered themselves with
both hands as best as they could, and came up. Then Krishna
148
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asked them to fold their palm, above their heads to beg him for
• their clothes. It was only when they did so that Krishna returned
these to them, saying: •your love for me 1.1 not for sexual
satisfaction. Go now to Vraja. You will sport with me (this)
autumn night• 30• ·
The ambiguity of that·speech has informed the entire spec-
trum of Krishna's relationship _with women ever since. As he
acquired divinity and reached higher in the Hindu pantheon,
elaborate exegeses establi.med the parable of union between
Jeevatma (individual soul, the ~ . and Paramatma (unive1sal
soul, Krishna). However, this union 1.1 progressively described
in more and more graphic te1111.1 as the centuries pass, and
Krishna becomes a ·meeting place of the earthly and the divine.
However explicit the descriptions of his union with Radha
(who came into the tradition long after the main texts) and the
gq,is, it always left room for a spiritual interpretation of what
delighted the reader (of the texts) or hearer (of texts or sonp)
or viewer (painting) with its poetry and its earthiness in the
depiction of love between man and woman, freeing it of any
sense of sin. In the poetry of Jayadeva or Vidyapati, the
explicitness was complete and yet sanctified. Its perfect mod-
em-day equivalent is in the famous song in Raj Kapoor's
Sangam (Union, 1964): Bol Radba bol, sangam boga Id nabin
(Tell me Radha, will we unite or not?) Since the word sangam ·
also meam sexual intercourse, the double entendre is realised
with perfect cunning, yet well within the conventional balance
of myth and fact. ··
Even Rabindranath Tagore's poetry and son~ are subtly
imbued with the Vaishnavite Radha-Krwina imagery and feeling.
He updated its.formula for legitimacy of what seemed just plain
love poetry celebrating the union of man and woman by saying:
Aarpal,o l,otba, devataraypriyo kari, priyeray devata (what else
can I do - I tum God into beloved and beloved into God).
Centuries of poetry, painting, sculpture (the fll'St Gopika,,;lasa
sculpture dates· back to the Gupta period) and folk theatre built
up this conjunction of earthly and divine into a reliable rock
where what see1iaed contradictory forces could rest together.and,
indeed, fuse.
149
Original from
711/J PAIN11JD PA.CB.
Song and dance formed important ingredients to Krishna's

lee/a. He summoned the gopis with hn flute, making housewives
leave stealthily at night (Radha was married, in some accounts
to Krishna's uncle), wary of waking ~p the dreaded mother-in-
•law and sister-in-law with the jangle of their ankle belts. One of
the many famous song., endlessly repeated in north Indian
classical music echoes this fear exactly: ]ban jban jbana payal
baaje, jage morl sasa nanadla (my ankle bells jingle and my
. in-laws wake up). In Rasleela, Krishna holds hands with the
SoJ)is and they sing and dance. In Manipur it is still enacted in a
classical dance with ~uch reverence and ritual stylization.
Innumerable folk fonm celebrate the union of Kri5hna and
Radha and depict his sport with the gopls, their rivalries and
quarrels and recondliatiom.
VI
It is with this background that the popular film's song and
dance sequences, already discussed, invariably staged outdoors,
have to be understood. Krishna the cowherd's dalliance with the
gopis (milkmaids) inevitably took place in the lap of nature and
away from the prying eyes of other men (or women). In fwm,
it is in these song and dance numbers that all the pent- up
eroticism exuded by the ways of the hero and heroine, their
::lothes ~d gait and exchanged looks of unconcealed desire
built up by the drama, bursts forth in an orgasmic flood to the
'Big Sound' of the hundred-piece orchestra that echoes the
tension and its release in exact manner, perfected through
thousands of fwm forever attempting the same thing ~ different
ways. There is no disrobing or simulated sexual union as in
Western fwm; but an effective alternative is found in the writhing
of bodies, the thrust of the breast, the ripple of the navel and
the shake of the hip. The man may place hi5 head and his hands
with apparent innocence dangerously close to the erogenous
zones of the woman. Every time the movement$ build up
towards an obvious climax, the two fly apart in a sort of perpetual
coitus inter1uptus and come together again to repeat the exercise.
150
Original from
Womma: ~ . ~ and Tt:n11t,1fl
Music plays a vital part in the ~ecdings, receding and coming

forward, ming and falling in end parallels to the action between
lover and beloved. ·
Undoubtedly the role model for the lover in the woods is
Lord Kmhna. His leelawith the gq,&.f takes place out in the open
and is delightfully free from the constraints of marriage. Thett
is a touch of the engagingly wicked in him; witness the stealing
of the women's clothes
1'._
and the trick to make them take their
hand, away from tneir genitals. Krishna loves Radha (only fro■aa
medieval times; the earlier texts made no reference to her), but
spends night6 with other gopis, and comes back with bitemarks ·
on his body only to sweet-talk Radha into making love with him
again. Of course there is the elaborate backdrop of the]eevatma
and Paramatma allegory to all th~; but what the audience
actually sees and hears is the loveplay of a man and woman in
flesh and blood. Since at one re11aove, the man is also a god, he
is thus free to savour the joys of love without bending to,its
responsibilities. It is not the diplomat Krishna of the Mabab-
barata, Arjuna's friend, philosopher and guide, husband of
16,108 wives, who provides the model o( the archetypal lover.
The youthful, unmarried Kmhna of Vrindavan is more suitable
for the purposes of ·popular cinema. (The two Krishnas have
never been satisfactorily fused despite laborious attempts). In
fad, this Krishna is not really a lover; he is the beloved, to whom
women are naturally drawn. Women appeared primarily in the
role of lover in the Vaishnava religion, but pre-eminently as
mother inn tea;;~ of the tramition from matrilineality to patri-
archy; the Mother in Sa~m.
This statement can be best interpreted in the Mother Goddess ·
who always had the bull and a Dionysius at her service all over
West Asia and southwestem Europe. The extraordinary resem-
blance between Dionysius and Shiva has been amply com-
mented upon in discussiom of comparative theogony. Krishna,
on the other hand, is a solar god22, like Achilles (who also died
of a shot in the heeO, and represents the patriarchal revolution.
The astronomical extent of his polygamy is a triumphant decla-
ration of the victory of the Male God _o ver the Mother Goddess. .
151
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111B PA1NIBI> PACE
Hence the hostility between him and Shiva and the constant
effort at the reconciliation of the two in order to remove the
impression of conflict and present a hannortious picture of the
Pantheon - an exercR of great skill on the part of the
Brahmanical interpreters. Yet, Shiva is ardbanariswara ac-
knowledgina the equality and unity of the sexes; not Vishnu.
The feminine associations with Krishna are thus misleading. The
fact that women come to Krishna as soon as they hear his flute,
. and that he can do as he pleases with them, only reinforces the
patriarchal principle - it is totally the opposite of Pururava
begging Urvashi not only for her continued love, but for his own
life, as we have seen in the di.,cussion of the eighteen suktas of
the Rig Veda. Indeed D. D. Kosambi has shown how Krishna's
many wives are earlier mother goddesses worshipped in their
.o wn right who are transformed into his wives in the transition
to patriarchy of which Krishna is the symbol and the master-
mm . dzs.
Women, let us note, come on their own t9 Amitabh Bachchan
in all his macho filrm from Zanjeer onwar'1s. He repeatedly
~es the point himself, in Don, in Amar, Akbar, Anthony and
so on, as we have noted several times. His mission in life is to
set the world right, to obtain justice for the_wronged; to this
Krishna-like purpose, women are incidental, made for youthful
dalliance. Such masculinity of pu~e also spells bonds of
friendship with other men. The Bachchan machismo is drawn
more to camaraderie with men as evident, again, in all the fdrm
from Zanjeer onwards. Particular note could be made here of
the drunken friendship in Silsila, where the bond with family
and friend (Shashi Kapoor) carries a much greater emotional
charge than the romantic relationship with Rekha, which exhib-
its his prowess in doing what he likes with a woman more than
a sense of caring for her.
. In the event, when the crunch comes, he opts for the family
bond; the Rekha episode is quickly reduced to dalliance, a word
that compulsively invokes the image of Krishna. The famous
Holi song sung by Amitabh himself in an obvious extension of
his erotic power over Rekha harks clearly back to Krishna, who
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.
had played with the .gapis .by throwing colour on them.
Before and after Bachchan, indeed the entire history of the
popular cinema is replete with Kmhna in apse. To take two
random yet typical examples: in Mera Gaon Mera Desb Dhar-
mendra hides behind the trees in a village and watches the girls
bathing; in Ar.zoo, Dilip Kumar plays the flute in the vicinity of
the village, hidden among the trees alongside a pond, and
Kamini Kaushal sings: Cbbuplte cbbupl,e aata bat, bansi bajaata
bat (he comes · stealthily and plays the flute). In KbUf:1-dar
Bachcha(l re-enacts Krisbnaleela with the song Mach gaya sbor
nagri mein, aya Bmj 1ta balta, samba/ teri gagari re (The news
is out in town, the playboy of Braj is here, take care of your
water pots, girls). In all of this the throwback to Krishna is a
device to legitimize it by filtering it through myth.
Where Bachchan enacts his loveplay indoors, as in Mukaddar
Ka Siltandar, the context is the kotba, not the great outdoors.
But . once more, the kotba and the tawaif invoke, not Kmhna,
but the masculine will ruling over society, permitting only the
marginalized women to.enact romantic love precisely because it
cannot reach fruition. The nightclub dancer, the smuggler's moll
(Mona in Zanjeer, Anita in Deewar and so on) are the mode111,
vulgar, cheaply westernized versions of the tawaif. ~ey are
there in plenty in the macho identity of Bachchan - for instance
in Deewar, where the woman who dotes on him is a nightclub
dancer, a hanger-on of the superior criminal type. Bachchan does
not even want to hear her name, because girls like her 'change
their names as often as they change their clothes', as he reminds
her rudely. A·cabaret girl in Deewarspells out the nature of the
relationship, singing:
You ue doing me great favows,
But they aie only for the night;
Morning will bring another day;
A new faoe brings new excitement;
But like the.seasons, you will change -
I have never seen anyone really fall in love.
• This song acquires greater meaning when we remember the

filrm of earlier decades, where romantic love, with the man
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· wooing the woman tenderly, as in Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor, Bimal

Roy and many of the fihm featuring Rajesh Khanna (notably
AmarPre,n, 1971) and even Dhannendra, Amitabh's predecessor
in machodom, whose masculinity is decorative, rather than a
threat. .
Whenever there is proximity between man and woman within
four walls, all the sexual tension celebrated in the outdoor song-
dance sequences vanishes. 1be relationship goes into a coma-
tose chastity, an exaggerated innocence. In Zanjeer Maia and
Vijay sleep in the same room but with total unawareness of the
gender difference. In Bobby, the innocence is a little tess
. assumed because the protagonists are young; here the possibility
of sexual tension b d~ipated by the song Hum tum ek Jeamre
mein bandb bo aur cbavi l,bo jaye (you and I are locked in the
same room and the key is lost). The song makes the situation
hypothetical and projects it into the future, bypassing the present
which, in reality, would inexorably produce sexual tension. In
Zaltl,.,,,,Aurat Onjured Woman, 1987), Dimple and her suitor
sleep in the same house without the presence of a third party,
again with the same chaste unawareness of bodies. In Deewanft,
Zeenat Aman changes from her wet sari into the man's clothes
in his room, but without ·the slightest sexual tension. It would .
· be a sin if they embraced indoors, however lightly; outdoors, in
song-dance numbers, daring postures that brinA the man~s face .
next to, or upon, the woman's breast or groin would pass for
nought. The suggestion is that outdoor loveplay, however
risqu~. would not culminate in the sin of sexual union, while
indoors it could. Besides, the invisible but ever-present umbrella
of the Krishna archetype would provide a sort of legitimizing
protection in the lap of nature. ~ a l union indoors would
relate dangerously to fact, not safely to myth. It would bring up
images of either the wife (which would be unromantic, since she
is there only to produce children) or the taw(lif, which would
be unsavoury as an invocation of her prostitute aspect.
Even life with the tawaif is shown within conventions; its
sexual tensions are not realistically pursued to fulfilment, but
romanticized with song and dance, wit and elegance. Thus both
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the ~ and the tawalf arc mythicalizing agents that ward off
the realistic dangers of the association of man and woman.
There is a real sexual charge in the dance numbers; they arc
male-oriented and meant to arouse; but they are sufficiently
conventional so as to make the eroticism , subliminal and subli-
matable. Any realistic sign, of intimacy are in their publicly
displayed affection for each other when they are old, which
arouses only indulgent good humour among the young - as in
Karma (1986), between Dilip Kumar and Nutan, besides many
other mrm.
1be loving old couple is a convention that goes back into
tradition, for imtancc in the .Abladi images in Bengali folk art,
somewhat similar to the fat old men. of Chinese pottery who,
however, are single. The sense of partnership between a young
couple facing life that gives the second part of Gautam Ghosh's
Paar its extraordinary warmth is totally impossible in popular
cinema, because it treats its characters as symbols, not as people.
It never steps out of myth. Its sole aim is to keep reaffirming-the
traditional stereotype; it is, therefore, incapable of dealing with
reality.
Where dien is the place of the wife in the popular cinema?
Qearly, it is at home, within the confanes of four walls, as mother,
long-suffering caretaker of her sons (is there a single popular
.film in which she has an important role of continuous caring
for her daughter?); upholder of tradition, worshipping Balgopal
(Krishna as archetypal child) while her sons romp around singing
in nightclubs or rolling in the hay with the (milk)maicb. Krishna
is both her God and her son. She is cast in the mould of the
Yashoda archetype, taking care of God in his infancy on earth,
going through infanite pain on that account, braving the dangers,
·the wrath of Karma, the evil uncle (a surrogate father) whom
the son she loves is destined to kill24•
The wifely phase that woman goes through is brief (it is
almost never explored in te111~ of human relationship 9ver an
extended period); she is mother reincarnated into her period of
youth in order to make the birth of sons possible. Once that
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111B PAINTBD PACE
function has been achieved, she reverts to the role of mother as

Durga to her sons, Kali to her daughter-in-law.
VII
The famifial relationship between the sexes has always been
a preoccupation of cinema everywhere; it can be seen as the key
to the core of a culture, an index to the inner state of its being,
and to the position of woman in society as a whole. It is, in
other words, at the heart of the conflict between tradition and
modernity. In the Islamic countries, the question of the position
of woman has become the focal point of the attitude to modern-
ization and its apparent concomitant, wcstemization. In a similar
way in India, different religious groups are in varying degrees
shaken by the basic changes brought about by·modem industri-
alized society and perceive the position that women threaten to
assume in it as an important symbol of a new social order.
Generally, girls are depicted going to school or college, but
there is an ambivalence, as educational institutions are often
shown as playgrounds for lovers' dalliances. The homely girl
with old-fashioned rural virtues, good at housework, shy and
wary of the other sex, is rated above the better-educated and
independent one, even though the appearance of the educated
girl in the cinema has increased almost in proportion to real life,
and women's education as such is not overtly denigrated.
Widow remarriage may be hinted at (even advocated, as in
Sbolay), but the girl or the man must die so that the marriage
cannot take place - despite the labours of Ishwarchandra Vidy-
asagar and other 19th century reformers who sought to remove
its stigma. In Dil El, Mandir Ha~ a sick husband discovers that
his wife and his doctor are in love. Sure that he is going to die,
the husband makes the wife promise that she will marry the
doctor after his death; but the husband recovers, and it is the
doctor who has to die so that the problem of divorce or
remarriage is removed.
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In Silsi/a, the husband falls in love with another woman but

decides, at the moment of truth, that religion and tradition
decree that he should rc111aih wedded to his wife even though
he will never love her. Thus is the dreaded p~pect of divorce,
relatively easily granted under present law, kept out of the
bounds of reality. Dowry deaths abound in parts of northe111
India, more especially in its Hindi speaking belt. The accounts
published in the newspapers are tragic and dramatic, and
obvious material for popular cinema; but the subject remains
almost totally banished ~m the screen. Once more we see that
in its treatment of woman, the popular cinema tolerates some
modernity but clearly prefers tradition.
Suspicious of modern Western ways, the cinema rates tradi-
tional mores above them. Some filim strain to contrast East and
West; Do Raaste, Evening in Paris and Purab aur PtUCbim
declare the East superior and-the foreign devil a threat to home
and integrity. Others exp~ the same beliefs ·by implication
in an occasional sequence or stretch of dialogue. This often
relates to the roles of women. The westernized woman, for
instance, is admitted mostly at the margins of society; she is the
nightclub singer or bandit, or the golden-hearted prostitute living
outside the mainstream of society and therefore well accus--
tomed to episodes of sex or viol~ce. Also, a woman who may
have consorted with a man other than her husband has forfeited
the right to choose her partners in bed; she must accept whoever
comes along.
It is interesting to contrast Insaaf Ka Tarazu, made by
Bombay's north Indians, with a much-maligned product from
Kerala- the Hindi version ofI.V. Sasi's ManKaAngan. Sasi has
the doubtful distinction of being the best-k.nown maker of the
so-called soft porn filim of Kerala. His avowed interest in sexual
relationships is, however, enlivened by some innovative cine-
matic devices. But apart from that, what should interest us here
is the fact that in Man Ka Angan, he shows sexual attachments
from the point of view of the woman. It is she who, by her free
choice, moves from liaison to liaison and remembers one man
while in the embrace of another, until she can take it no longer.
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111B PAlNIBD F.ACB
The film was loudly denounced by the very people who

·sanctioned the moral subterfuge of Insaaf Ka TaNZu where
every action i.1 seen strictly from the male viewpoint, which
blames the woman for somehow having provoked, and then
not borne in silence, her self-invited fate. Writing on the
molestation of Delhi University women in public buses, a woman
recently complained: 'Ot is) as if there was something wrong
with us (women) and not with the leering, lecherous men'. And
that, unfortunately, is often the attitude _of onlookers, fellow
travellers and even families: 'She must have invited the attlention;
she must be to blame.zs. In Nillaab (1982),·chopra tries tb make
amends; he borrows the basic idea from Man Ka Angan and
transfers it to a tightly confined Muslim social situation, making
some statements from a woman's point of view which h~ would
not dare make in a ftlm about Hindus.
Unfortunately no social organisations, not even women's lib
·--committees, have researched the reactions of the audience- men
and women, old and young, literate and illiterate - to see what
impact this ftlm has had on society. But even without a scientific
study, it is not diff1CUlt to guess the •~ons an average audience
would draw from it. Most • ~ cinema' films seek to confum
rather than challenge the prejudices, beliefs and stereotypes of
the audience, so as to lull the consumers into a sense of security.
It would see111 that InsaafKa Tamzu goes we~I beyond this role
in order to activate and heighten existing prejudices instead.of
removing them.
Over the last three decades, the romantic view of woman has
given way to an assertion of male machismo, tending towards
physical dominance and rough handling of women. It ~ possible
to relate this to the growing harassment of women in real life,
apart from dowry deaths, extending to mol~tation on..the streets
and in public transport. For young women, particularly the
educated and modem ones, it has become more dangerous to
be alone in many areas of the countr.y. .The root of this
phen9D}enon may lie in frustration, as the sexual fantasies young
men see on the saeen cannot be realized in life.
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Woman: Playmaw, Wif, and Tawaif
Love·and marriage, in the context of the dowry system, are ;

two differer1t things for most people; for the br_idegroom, it ~ a
matter of direct economic gain; for the family it is a meam of
improving its fortunes. The fantasy of love on the screen and the
reality of dowry dea~ are in fact the inverse of each other. It is
the impracticability of marrying the woman of one's choice after
a period of courtship that hdps to bring about the element of
violence towards women. The more •
sexual attraction is made to
see1n illegitimate, the more it becomes susceptible to violence.
It is almost as if the young man feels that since it ~ his duty to
marry to improve his family's fortunes, why should he not have
a good time meanwhile, as do the heroes on the screen? In order
not to mm that dimemion in h~ youth, he has to do something
outside marriage, regardless of the wishes of women who may
attract him; So the treatment ·o r sex on the screen, and its fantasy
and arousal- effect·o n sex-starved youth, often leads to bru~lity,
11'.lolestation, and rape in real life, especially among caste Hindus
in northwestem India, where the incidence of dowry violence is
at its highest. The nexus between fundamentalism in the cinema
and in real life can be clearly glimpsed in Hitlerite Germany's
translation of the ideal womanhood of myth into fact by pre-
scribing three things to women:
~ .
the church, the kitchen,
.
and the
children . .
·As woman is cast in the mould of the absolute mother image,
her aspect as wife is attenuated to the point of disappeararice.
The wife living in a fulftlling relatiomhip with her husband is
virtually non-existent in the popular cinema. Being the wife is .
only the preparatory phase to her graduation, flJ'St to mother, ·
and then to mother-in-law. In that last high status, she can
revenge herself upon society for the destruction of her own youth
by visiting it upon her daughter-in-law. In so doing, she has the
additional sadistic satisfaction of alienating her beloved son from
his newly acquired wife, her rival for his affection. The family's
perceived economic need to extract more and more dowry from
the bride's father sometimes leads to murder of the new bride
with the help of her husband, giving the mother a physical thrill
that may go far deeper than economic gain. ·
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11lE PA.INTED FACE
In other wor~, what some psychologists have rationalized

·as the healing effect of collective fantasy may in India well be,
in matters of love and marriage, the exact opposite. Instead of
resolving the inner problem, fantasy aggravates it towar~ erup-
tion into real life violence.
VIII
One of the manifestations of violence against woman is in
rape, an essential ingredient of the popular ftlm and an increasing
reality, particularly in north India's Hindi-:speaking area27•
'Bacbao, bacbao' (help! help!) has been the parrot cry of the
screen victims of rape for decades. One has never seen a woman
about to be raped in an Indian .ftlm really fight her tormentor,
although in real life such behaviour is far from rare. For instance,
;
in Surendranagar, two village girls thoroughly beat up a man
who tried to rape one of them (1be Hindustan Times, 1 Septem-
ber, 1986). In the Brazilian ftlm Chico Rei, a slave woman in
chains puts up a fantastic resistance; a popular Indian film has
practically never permitted her to do so. However, of late,
revenge by the raped woman has been glimpsed significantly.
But what has been hailed by some as the emergence of the power
of woman in certain: big hit ftlms of recent years, notably
Pratigbaat, (1987), and ZakbmiAurat, (1988), may be a double-
edged weapon that deserves examination. In cinema, the sub-
text contained in the ·non-verbal statement is more important
than the proclaimed text.
The success of the first was an unexpected eye-opener; it was
a cheaply-made film without any big names that apparently made
crores of rupees. A good-looking woman who seemed to be the
simple housewife next door (played by newcomer Sujata Mehta)
revolts against a sue.cession of outrages and kills the villain in
public, like Durga slaying the demon before her devotees. In
the second film, an actress (Dimple Kapadia), so long celebrated
as a sex symbol, appears as a police officer who is gangraped
and takes her revcmge by literally castrating the rapists. In both
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Wo,nar,.· ~ . ~ and Tawatf
cases, the victim fU'St goes to the law, but by an inexorable

convention in popular cinema, the Law is an Ass; so, unable to
fmd justice, the injured wreaks personal vengeance.
That itself is not new. Revenge has been the primary theme
of Indian popular cinema from around the late sixties. It took
its cue from the Nixon period of Hollywood (Dirty Harry, Nevada
sm,tb · etc.) which have spawned innumerable imitatiom in
. Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. But apart from borrowing a formula,
p<:>p cinema was also resp01lding to the mounting disillusion and
cynicism of India after Nehru. The enonnous success of Amitabh
Baohchan's extremely violent revenge ftlrm, for well over a
decade from Zanjeer(1973) onwarm, repeatedly underlined the
demise of the sense of hope that imbued the ftlrm of the fifties
and the early sixties. The romantic hero gave way to the macho,
using woman as chattel. The proliferation of consumer goods
in a poverty-stricken country fuelled the flfeS of bride-burning
and thereby turned romantic love into its antithesis. The new
women's revenge ftlrm lend novelty to an old relish for violence,
as well as fresh excuse for rape scenes. Nevertheless, they
should be examined by social scientists,1because their implica-
tions go far beyond entertainment. But those pundits have so
steadily ignored the subject that mere film critics must hanrd
their speculations. Besides the two ftlrm I have named, there was
the box-office success of Be-Abroo (1985), in which a raped
woman lures her rapists and kills them one by one. Building up
hatred for the villain and unleashing vengeance on him in the
end is the formula which may have attained fresh success
because of the novelty of having a woman pro tagonist. At any
rate, it is remarkable that predominantly male audiences should
enjoy, applaud, and apparently approve, the. torture wreaked
upon male villains by their :women victims. In Zakbmi Aurat,
the traditional view of the raped woman is directly challenged,
and showri to change radically. The would-be mother-in-law, on
hearing of the rape, tells her son in no uncertain terms that the
woman is polluted, jootba, and quotes the Ramayana, in which
Sita is sent for her trial by burning. To reverse this at the end by
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1HB PAINI1ID PACE ·
having the same mother-in-law anoint the raped woman with

sindoor in court is to send out a very loud, new signal.
However, in popular entertainment, the subtext is as ·i mpor- .
tant as the signal. In the matter of the man-woman equation,
Indian society has .b een giving off two different signals at the
same time. One shows the increasing power of woman, the other
her abject helplessness: In a woman Prime Minister's regime,
bride- burning registered a spec:tarular increase, especially in the
Hindi-speaking 'cow belt'. The enthusiasm for sati in Rajasthan
has. been as evident as the increase of women entering the IAS.
A report says that an area in Rajasthan recently had its fll"St barat
in two decades; because of universal female infanticide, there
has been no question of a bridegroom coming to these villages.
In Zakbmi Aumt, an important fact is that the victim and
vengeance-seeker is a police officer. Her name is Kiran Dutt. For
obvious reasons she could not be called Kiran Bedi, but the
allusion is more than obvious. In other words, the gang humili-
tates a woman in authority to be feared by the criminally minded;
a woman who, instead of being subjugated to man, has climbed
to a position of power over them. Here it is important to
remember that the series of rapes in the ftlm, including that of
Kiran, is, for the purposes of the audience, a real event; her
revenge, along with a doctor whose daughter had been raped
and who lur~ rapists to her operation table at the hospital to
castrate them, is unreal, improbable, a figment of the ftlmmaker's
fancy. The humiliation of a woman who wields power over men
is thus the real event; her revenge is sensational, but not to be
taken seriously. The fight that Kiran offers her persecutors is of
the usual, mythicalized karate variety, full of sound and fury
signifying nothing. The significant moment comes when the
rapist unbuckles her belt, takes off her pants and han~ them
over a blade of the ceiling fan above (a telling image).
Another factor that drives the denouement into unreality is
the blandness with which Kiran's lover accepts the fact that his
beloved has been raped. He does not tum a hair. There is no
conflict, no hesitation, only a ready response that gives the lie
to his statement, reducing it to a sanitized meaninglessness. On
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Woman: Playmate, Wife and Tawaif
the other harid, when the castrating doctor's husband, in flash-

back, tells his wife that she has time for her patients but not for
her child and· that is why she came to be raped, we hear
something familiar, credible. The rapes, particularly of the ado-
lescent girl and another that could be called rape in the water,
are very titillating, complete with hands between thighs and a
very wet body slithering through grasping hands. The effort is
to make the sexual urge in rape as real and obvious as possible
(in Kiran's rape the emphasis is more on humiliation). There is
no sanitization or mythicalization here; the ftlmmaker seems
instinctively aware of, and determined to exploit, the biological
link between violence and sex.
There could be no objection to explicitne~ or seductiveness
were it not for the fact of rape. It is obvious that whenever rape
is made attractive, the male audience is being asked to gather
vicarious satisfaction. It is analogous to the cry of 'kill him, kill
him' at boxing matches. No revenge device, however inventive,
can wipe out the subtext of sexual satisfaction left between the
lines of this moralistic tale. In our ftlms,.rape alone can provide
the opening for the frank and open sexuality that is sublimated
by the song in love stories in difference to the squeamishness of
the audience and its protectors. Only the rapist, that is, the
criminal, is allowed an open expression of the animal in us. It is
safe to watch him at the act, because he stands condemned
already as an outsider to decent society. If you get a secret,
vicarious satisfaction from watching the act, there is no need to
talk about it. The chorus of disapproval will drown such talk
anyway.
The treatment of the law in popular cinema urgently requires
dose examination._Zakbmi Aura~ running true to form, makes
a travesty of court procedure. When a hotel.register is produced
before the judge to show that the accused was out of town on
the date of the crime, there is immediate acquittal. The scene
does not even have a prosecution lawyer. No one cr~-examines
the hotel keeper or checks the signature of the accused. It may
be argued that variety entertainment films of our kind do not
have time for such niceties; but there can be no doubt that such
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11IE PAIN11ID FACE
•
o~ions present the proces., of justice in a ludicrous light to a

credulous audience, making it out to be far worse than it is. The
logic of the revenge, then, is simple; the law is incapable of doing
justice, therefore it must be taken in one's own hands. Hundreds
of fdrm have propagated this viewpoint. It is impossible that it
would not have any effect on the audience. The ftlrm do not call
for the reform of the legal process, but its rejection; that is, the
rejection of the democratic framework. What can take its place?
The only candidate one can think of is dictatorship, with its
ever-ready appeal of the shortcut. Thus the denigration of the
law is not just a part of simplistic entertainment or immature
negativism; it constitutes a real danger. Don't judges or lawyers
ever see ftlrm? The m~age to the woman is clear; she cannot
expect redr~ from the court.
Sujata Mehta of Pratigbaat, acting in a fdm that hit the jackpot,
could have expected to become the next big heroine. Of that,
there has been no sign. Her succes., was due to the very fact that
she has no sexual allure, despite being good looking. She creates
a dimension that diverges sharply towards realism within a
standard pi_ece of melodrama. The violent ending does bring her
back to the mythical but, in between, she administers a dose of
realism that takes the audience by surprise. This film, like many
others today, denigrates the electoral process. Money and greed
play too big a part in elections for them to secure justice for the
downtrodden. Because there are serious flaws in the process,
the baby should be thrown out with the bathwater - that is what
the fdrm say. Not one film or two, but scores of them. Again, the
alternative offered, by implication, is dictatorship. Thus the
consumerism that the pop cinema promotes in its opulent
interiors, fast cars and cabarets is wedded to a fundamentalist
rejection of democracy in favour of a Ramarajya that sounds
idealized and mythical but can only translate itself into a fascist
reality.
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THERETURN
OF THE MYTHOLOGICAL
he cover of an ~ue of the Bengali magazine Sananda

featured a colour photograph of an elderly woman with
rouged wrinkles and painted fingernails, draped in a borderless
chiffon sari and flanked by two short-haired girls in jeans and
fashionable tops, offeringpuja to a cow in celebration of the cult
of Santosbi Mad-. It is here that the latter-day mythological
success of the ftlm Jai Santosbi Maa is totally different from the
mythologicals of the past. Jai Santosbi Maa scored an enormous
success not only with the common man but with the sophis-
ticated, 'wcsterilized' Hindu middle class vibrating to waves of
fundamentalist Hindu resurgence. ·
The older mythological ftlrm, which held sway in the pre-
Independence period, and continued for some time thereafter,
had about them a certain pre-industrial nafvete. That is why
they formed a conduit for the induction of new audiences into
the cinema and still do, to some extent. As the cinema reaches
new rural and traditional audiences, it is still to the mythologicals
that the converts are fll'St drawn. The fact that the falms are about
gods and goddesses free them from the aura of sinful modernity
that the cinema often represents to traditional groups. (They are
equally suspicious of the morals of men and women, especially
women, who act on screen as though they are wives or beloveds
of r11en actually unrelated to them). As we have seen, in the
days of Pre111 Adib and Shobhana Samarth in Vijay Bhatt's
Ramrajya and a whole series of similar films, Adib and Samarth
would often be picked up after the day's shooting by rich fans
and taken home in costume and make-up, to be worshipped
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11-lE PAIN/ED FACE
there by the women as Rama and Sita incarnate. People took

off their shoes and fell on their knees in the theatre while their
fthm were on. The traditional mythological did not (and with the
striking exception of fat Santosbi Maa, still does not) form the
favourite medium of the middle classes in the progressive,
modernist fthm ofNewTheatres, Bombay Talkies, Shantaram's
Duniya Na Maane or Master Vinayak's Brabmacbarl (the last
with its extraordinary burlesque of traditionalist religiosity). The
demand for freedom from the shackles of tradition merged with
the demand for freedom from foreign rule to form the motive
force of the 'social' films of the period and determined the middle
class response to them. After Independence, with modernization
and industrialization placing a premium on a more secular-sci-
entific outlook, the overtly mythological fdm slowly retreated
into the background The popular cinema began to mythologise
the present, creating new models of divine power invested in
humans destined to protect traditional virtues. The rise of the
Mother cult, the spectre of East-West cultural conflict and the
primacy of the theme of revenge through individual action in
saving the honour of the family, spun traditional myths out of
the realities of Kaliyug. Audiences sought the surfaces of modem
reality reflected in films, and were given a surfeit of it. A tour
of the delectably sinful modern world ended in the praise of
virtues of village and family, pati-bbakli (devotion to husband)
and filial piety. But the form was no longer that of the
mythological. It was largely due to the preMures radiated by the
educated middle class that the mythological beat its retreat.
The eighties saw Government-owned television, dedicated to
democracy and the cultivation of a scientific temper in many of
its other programmes, bring back the mythological falm of the
forties. Audience response too has gone back four decades. This
was made more convenient by television's iconic frontality and
the suppreMion of depth characteristic of primitive falmmaking.
Myth has once more transformed into fact; the scientific Frazerian
magic of cinema has again turned imitation into reality. wA crowd
of over 40,ooow, reported 1be Times of India, wwaited patiently
outside Jaipur's Birla Mandir to have a glimpse of Rama (Arun
lti6
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Govil) and Sita (l)ipika) who ~ due to grace the shrine. Even
ministers jostled with mesmerised fans for a darsban' 2• Once
more, people were taking off their shoes before watching Rama
on the s a ~ and throwing ·flowers at it. The Ramayan serial
looked every iodl like the Rama films of the forties that the
audience had rejected_. in the earlier decades..Yet that is what
they seemed to love again. Perhaps it m partly the po~er 9f a
good story full of the marvellous, with loads of special effects;
~ the .rcnC'\Ved. noolgia of a generation inaeasir1gly di-
~ d from tradition. More probably, it is a direct reflection of
Htridu revivalmn__of the eightles, the vicious . ijabri Masjid
wrangles and the Ahmedabad and Bhagalpur riots, the sudden
Muslim anxiety to offer · namaz in antique mosques conserved
as national monuments by the Archaeological Survey of India.
·Archa~ogy, being a 'modem' pm>tcupation arising from a
lix:ral education in the sciences and the humanities, has be-
come the target. of . lClltaJi&s. So, for that matter, has
~iaory. According to Balsaheb Deor.as, neither the High Court
ofJudicature nor the Archaeological Swvey of India has a right
to give a decmon. on whether Rama was .born at the spot
desaibed as Ram Janmabboorm or not. Both science and art
arc. enemies or·the orthodox..Yet the hmtorical strand in the
epics is recogn~ by mo.,t _scholars. The Mababbamta has
described itself, 'a mong ·othel: things, as history ·(Bba,r;,tasye
tlbasasya punyam g,r;,ntbarlba-sanyutam). ·
The en01111ous succe&1 of a serial like Ramanand Sagat's
Ramayan reflects the rel~ity that ·rejects hmtory or archaeol-
ogy as 1ncre 'scieriee', -The-first, mo.,t ironical fact about-the
fom1 of the mythological in India11 cinema is that it is directly
derived froan the West. Its style has nothing to do with Indian
art; its costumes and its settings are anathema to Indian history. .
The earliest known sculptural depictions of ancient IJ1dian
cosw11a are the Didargunj Cllauri-Bearer of the 3rd century BC
and in Bharhut.and Sandli dating back ·to the 2nd century BC. .
Going by-them, Sita would not be wearing a sari but would be
topless.
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711B PAINIBD FACE
Even though one would not expect Ramanand Sagar to be

faithful to historical fact to that impractical extent, his Ramayan
remaim, in more ways than one, un-Indian. Its vi.rual culture
is directly derived, as in all Indian mythologicals, from the fonm
created by Raja Ravi Verma, who _a pplied Western academic
painting styles to Indian gods and god~es. completely ignor:--
. ing Indian tradition in their depiction. 1bese fonm are much
closer to (and yet much below the staodard of) colonial
painters such as Daniel, Doyly, Madam Belnas or Bardcl than
to the murals of Ajanta or Sitthanavasal, Jain or Rajasthani
miniatures or Oriya patacbltms. The 19th century spawned a
·whole generation of imitators of Western academic painting in
the work of Ravi Verma, 'Mr. Thomas', Hemen Majumdar and
others, who remained decisively under the British academic
influence. Together, they engendered and propagated a style of
depiction of gom and humans that became the hallmark of the
bazaar calendar with the woman in a wet saree and the bazaar
oleograph with its pink Shiva. Unlike the folk painters of
Kalighat, or tribal art in many regions, they did not adapt to
modem reality by modifying tradition; they gave up tradition
and simply imitated. What they imitated, too, was not the best
of the West, but its weakest and most backward aspects, those
that Europe was in a hurry to discard. In Ravi Verma'~ time,
Impressionism had flowered in Europe; but what he imitated
was the academic, not the adventurous art of Europe. Jaya ·
Appaswamy referred to the heaviness and 'staginess' of his old
paintin~; "This style which, for lack of a better phrase, I might
call Victorian-Indian, was echoed in the art schools and was
responsible for vitiating the taste of the new middle class, who
had lost all contact with their ancient heritage".
In our ancient and medieval sculpture and painting, divine
beings are represented with a perfection of line, proportion and
colour. The images have a characteristically Indian rhythm.
Sbastras like the Visbnudbarmottara Purana laid down the
specifics of the imaging of the gods. The eXpr~ions on the faces
of the Elephanta or Konark · sculptures have a sublimity and
inwardness that has of course eluded the art departments of
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RMum o f " ' - ~
mythological film makers. The difference between the aallCfi and

women of the Bharhut relief's or the Ajanta frescoes and Ra-
manand Sagar's Dasaratha or Rama or Kaikeyi is the same as
between Kalidas' desaiption of nudity and sex with that of
pornography sold in dark street comers. Compare even the more
recent Rajasthani miniature paintinp of Rama with bazaar cal-
endar pictures of him, and one sees the depth of that difference.
The low reliefs of Rama at Pmnbanan in Java, Rama depicted in
Rajput miniatures in Orissa patacbitrm, in Madhubani painting,
or the leather puppets of Andhra, to name only a few of the
traditional arts, have no relatiomhip whatsoever to the Ramayan
presented to us on th~ idiot box. The Ramayana dance in Bali
even today is far more traditional in spirit and style than the
· television epic. Rama and Sita on a piece of Kalabasti Ka/amllarl
textile are Indian. The drawing, are flat, there is no shading or
perspective, no naturalism in the Western sense. Studying the
structures in any of these indigenous f ~ . one finds that they
achieve more drama and a far greater integration of line, mass
and colour than either Sagar's Ramayan or the oleograpm from
which they are derived. An 18th century Rajasthani miniature
evokes the es.,ence of the relatiomhip between Rama, Sita,
I.akshmana and Hanwnan with a delicacy and charm, an under-
standing of spacing and grouping of figures and their imposition
on a two-dimemional surface that is never even approached in
the television series. All through Sagar's Ramayan, there is the
marginal~tion of the non-verbal that is characteristic of popular
cinema or television. There is a pretence that it matters little if
the non-verbal contradicts the verbal. In the scene where Kaikeyi
obtaim her boom, she has slinky hair falling over her shoulders,
her face made up, with heavy eyeshadow. Kaikeyi's body
language, the way she stands, the way she pouts her lips, her
coquettish arrogance before Rama, all indicate a wlgar sexual
hold on an aging monarch which the words strenuously deny.
Here Sagar is trying to extract all the commercial juice he can
out of a sexy situation. It is impossible to think that there is
anything aristocratic about this princess from the kingdom of
Kekaya who makes eyes at Dasaratha in a way the whores of
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Bcnegal's Mandi would be ashamed to do. Dasaratha's own

way of looking at Rama at that moment is not remorseful, just
guilty. Visually, all this gives the complete lie to Rama's later
statement to Lakshmana (in the serial) that Dasaratha's banish-
ment of him had nothing to do with sex: Unlta sankat streemoba
nabin bai.
Let us compare this with Valmiki who, in some exquisite
verses, likens Kaikeyi, stretched out on the white bed, to a golden
flame, as Kubja incites her to make the king reverse his order
for the coronation of Rama. When the old king sees his young
wife whom he loves more than his very life (sa vriddbasta"'nim
bba,yam pranebbyopi gariyasim), she is like a creeper that has
been cut and is lying on the earth; again, she is like a goddess
fallen from above (latamiv vinisbltrittam patitam devatamiva).
Her buttocks are heavy, her stomach low and her breasts large
(pratipumam cha jagbanam suptnow cba payodbarou). The
king is filled with desire (sa ltamabalasamyukto ratyartln);
indeed he had come to her for sex in any case and· was hence
hasty and rash in his promise, since she would not otherwise
grant his desire. Valmiki makes no bones about it all; there is
no ambivalence in him about the old man's lust for his young
wife. Sagar turns him into a whited sepulchre.
As an actor, Dasaratha, like Rama, is plain ham; every time
he looks guiltily at Rama; his hand•shakes as though he has
Parkinson's disease. By contrast, a 17th century Mewar painting
showing Dasaratha after being tricked by his jealous wife,
Kaikeyi, portrays the state of the aged king: Dasaratha lies
sprawled aa~ his bed with his eyes half-closed and his head •
thrown helplessly behind him.- The strips of his garment swirl
around him wildly, reflecting the chaotic state of his mind and
the sudden movement of his fall. The colours of the entire scene
are subdued and cool, suggestive of hopeless sorrow's quiet
isolation'. While Sagar's costumes and settings are Ravi Verma
imitations, the casting and acting certainly do not approximate
the best Western or Indian standards. Compare Sagar's Rama
with Pasolini's Christ in 7be Gospel Sagar's hero is a naive,'
overfed character highly suitable for advertising oily foods;
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Pasolini's radiates .a holy aura. In India, we have had a supc1b
example of an idealized treatment of Hindu religious tradition
in G.V. Iyer's Sbanltam and, to a lesser extent, in his Madb-
vacba,ya. From casting to costume, setting, lighting and com-
position, Iyer is fully in touch both with the best of Indian
tradition and the best of the cinematic technique evolved in the
West. No Ravi Vmna has cast his un-Indian shadow on G.V.
Iyer's imagery. He owes nothing to the traditional falm. Nor
does Aravindan in his remarkable Kancbana Sita (1978). Com-
pared to Iyer's evocation of period (9th century. in Sban/eara,
the 13th in .Madbvacba,ya), the techniques used in]at Santosbt
Maa or Sagar's television Ramayan are much the same as in
the old mythologicals of Vijay Bhat and his kindred spirits, but
have lost their primitive innocence. They are now employed
with a cunning awareness of the appeal to the present 'lost'
generation often unable to write a letter in their own language,
not to mention reading the epics in the original. The miracles
so easily concocted on the television screen have an odd, instant
appeal to the illiterate masses as well as the sophisticated public
so alienated from its own culture that it is desperate enough to
surrender all rationality in order to find some cultural-spiritual
te,,-a firma under its feet.
When these miracles are described in a text or enacted on
the stage, their appeal ~ to the imagination, which is forced to
conjure up a mental picture. In this way, a larger-than-life
spiritual image is generated instead of the bizarre physicality of
the absurd When what is obviously a child's bow-and-arrow
set appears in the hands of a supposedly legendary hero and he
fells equally legendary opponents, it becomes a travesty of the
picture that the imagination unfolds in the mind of a reader or
of the child who hears the story from its grandmother. If this
reductionism were to be remedied, and the miracles made
credible in their physical impressiveness, the imagination and
resources of a Stanley Kubrick of 2001 space Odyssey, and not
the pitiful abilities of Ramanand Sagar, would be called for.
No wonder the miracles constitute an important element in
the appeal of the television Ramayan to the younger generation
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111B P.AIN11JD FACB
bred in-the F.nglim-medium schools to which the Hindi chau-

VU'liQ and the Hindu fundamentali$ts, particularly frolaa the most
backward areas of the country i.e. the Hindi belt, aai~QUS(y.
send their progeny. It is there · that they became 'convent
educated' and dowry-worthy. It is to them that the primitive
techniques of Ramanand ·sagar have a New York punk-like
~ i v e pop appeal. This ·appeal flJSCS bizarrefy with the pull
of a resurgent Hinduisn that seem, to sanction female infanticide
after sex determination through aminocenl;esis, brkle-bumin8 in
aid of dowry to buy more VCR's and scooters, denJal of.rights to
Harijans, burning of widows etc., in order to reduce the number
of feminine claimants to the country's riches.
n
It is sad that this is the vi1ual and dramatic standard at which
a vast scdion of the Indian population m:ust see one of its great
epics. The Ramayana is a treasure trove of history loaded with
confusion by ancient and medieval rewrite men; it is also a noble
story of man's greatness as well as his failing.,. It is by no means
the simplistic encounter between the. polarities of good and evil
that recent centuries have made of the great epic. Ravana was a
hero, a man o'f great penance who earned boons froa11 Shiva
for his virtuous devotion. In some later versions of the Ramay-
ana, Ravana is depict~ as a devotee of Rama. Today's historical
scholarship has little doubt that Ravana was ·a non-Aryan king
·wh~ territory was violated by Rama and wh~ abduction of
Sita was done in revenge·and for the redress of wrongs he had
suffered4• The · bases for such conclusions are clear in the
Valmiki text itself. The view of Ravana as a Hindi cinema style
villain is a very late . populist concoction.
--
. Unlike the devoted-slave of her husband that she is sup-
.
posed to have been, Valmiki's Sita t~lls Rama after he-rejects her
that he is talking like a low-born man speaking to a woman of
common .birth. She reminm him that she is the daughter of the
earth, known by ·the name of Raja Janaka; that Rama is not
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blumoftMMylbologla,l
treating her with the natural respect due to her. Her heart has
always been his; she was not responsible for her body when
it was under the control of another. ~ is her spirited reply to
Rama's callous statement that his war against Ravana had not
been waged for her sake but to retrieve the honour of his
dynasty, that he suspects her fidelity and that she is for him as
painful to behold as bright light is to a man with an eye c&ease.
He asks her rudely to choose Oet it be noted) Lakshmana or
Bharata or Shatrughana (Rama's brothers - under certain ancient
customs still prevalent among some communities in India, a
younger brother could marry the widow or rejected wife of the
elder); Sugriva, or Vibhishana (a moNter). Rama's words here
are as insulting to his brother as to his wife, since Lakshmana,
the Ramayana tell us, never looked above Sita's feet. The
Vantf)arva · of the Mababbamta too, in its synopsis of the
Ramayana, has Rama comparing Sita to gbee that a dog has
licked: Sbwavalidbam navi,yata. Thus Rama was not the
model of good behaviour any more than Ravana was an evil
demon.
The Ramayana is a tragic human tale that may perhaps dimly
reflect a historical outline. Rama's humiliation of Sita over an
imagined wrong reflects the tragedy of superstitious belief in a
particular period during the rise of patriarchy. Only much later
did Rama's rejection of a virtuous wife (he regrets it hirmelf to
Valmiki in Uttam Kanda when he claims Lav and Kush as his
own som) come to glorify one of the basic flaws of medieval
Hinduism - its insistence on regarding the woman who has
mated with another man as jootba or contaminated food, at the
same time afflrming the male right to polygamy. Hinduism, as
we have observed, is the only major religion in the world to
deny woman the right to remarry. The poet of the original
Ramayana may have grieved over the tragedy brought about
by an over-zealous patriarchism, at that time still relatively new
in Indian society. The mythologicals of today celebrate Sita's
humiliation as the triumph of patriarchal power in defiance of
the democratic tenets of modem India proclaiming the equality
of man and woman.
'
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11lE PAINim FACE
What makes this worse is the insidious way the epic is being
used to reinforce the values of an aggres.,ive, resurgent Hindu-
ism. Quite directly, the values espoused contradict the goals of
the Constitution of the country. Men and women are not equal;
Rama tells his mother that her sole duty is to follow the wishes
of her husband. In other words, she has no identity or rights of
her own. No matter what today's Hindu might say about the
Muslim's legal right to many upto four wives, he will have no
objection to Dasaratha's three. The underlying acceptability of
polygamy to the Hindu of today is idealiz.ed in Rama's repeated
equation of his father's two wives to his own mother in his
affections. Father's word is law - even if it is immoral. The
patently visible guilt on Dasaratha's face and the arrogant
sexuality of Kaikeyi are disregarded by the text of Sagar's
Ramayan which papers it over, as indeed interpolations in the
epic itself had done, to hide the culpability of Dasaratha by
inventing and emphasizing the curse, that much-abused device
of the rewrite men of our Puranas and epics anxious to hide.
moral and cultural differences between one historical period and
another. His father, says Rama, had given his two unspecified
boons to Kaikeyi and now had to honour his word. Under what
circurmtances had he made those promises? Why did Dasaratha
go on and on, almost forcing Kaikeyi to ask for the boons?
Was he right in doing so? Had he not given his word also to
his subjects that Rama would be the heir?
To Kaikeyi, Rama says in the television series: Maa, aap ell
sanket kartin bain to apne cbamre leejoote banata boon. [Mother,
if you give me one signal, I will make shoes out of my skin (for
you)]. Evidently, Mother (as father's wife, in this case) is also
above the law. Parents must not be seen as individuals - they
are to be regarded as divine, inviolable institutions. The glorifi-
cation of woman as mother, an inert icon in the family above,
and of. man as all-powerful is directly in line with the revenge
ftlrm of Amitabh Bachchan. .
Thus the epic of the Ramayana its~lf offers one of the most
glaring instances of parental violence towards offspring. That
it was not the only one of its kind in Indian mythology is evident
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RMMm o/lM Mytbolop:al
froxt1 Yayati in the Mababbamta, who made one of his sons give
up his youth so that he hirmelf could enjoy sex for a thousand
years. Sure enough, one of his som obliged, and was b i ~
for it. If such examples of respect for parents are to be glorified,
which son would refuse to oblige his father by extorting a dowry
from a helpl~ woman's family and burn her thereafter by
parental command? In other wor&, the glorification of such
aspects of the epic is directly related to ~e present self-interest
of uNOUpulous fathers. The bride-burming psyche seeks to
sanctify marriage by parental choice and indirectly condemns
the idea of the individual rights of two adults in deciding their
lives.
The religious significance of Rama is seen by most Hindus
today as a part of our tradition. The fact is that, until the 10th
century, no temples were raised to Rama. Rama was just a
famed hero, not a god. The earliest depiction of Rama was
probably made outside India in the Prambanan temple in
9th-century Java. In ancient Indian literature (Kalidasa 5th
. century AD and Bhavabhuti 7th century AD) for iNtance, there
is strong criticism of Rama's behaviour in killing Bali unfairly
(how like Krishna in the Mababbamtd) and in not accepting
the purity of Sita. Even within Valmiki's Ramayana itself, there
are strong criti~ of Rama which later versiom gradually
suppressed. Thus Sita, seeing Rama h,•1vily armed in the free
and natural atmosphere of Dandakaranya, says: "I do not like to
go (with you) or enter the Dandaka (forest) _so heavily armed•.
Sita's intelligence, another element gradually ren1oved from her
character, shines through in her next statement: -Though osten-
sibly these weapom are for the protection of he1111its and other
forest dwellers, wearing them all the time (nityam) will make
your mind (buddb{) violent or warlike (mudn), as ·it happened
in the case of a he111lit in whose ashrama Indra had cleverly
planted a sword OIi. viii. 1- 19)...Why kill Ralisbasas, residents
sheltered in Dandaka, without any cause?...our minds are tainted
(lealusa) by resorting to or keeping a ~ in a forest or hermitage.
You can follow your Kshatriya prof~ion (of fighting) after going
to Ayodhya•5• Aspects like this have been totally left out in the
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111B PAIN11!D PAGB
television epic because Sagar wanted to pander to the revival~

fundamentalist Hindu by painting Sita as the meek, unintelligent,
cver-su~ive wife favoured by the bride-burning mafia of
today.
•An analysis of the development of the Sita legend in a
historical context reveals that the emphasis on chastity and the
assumption that the ideal marriage is based on female devotion
arc aspects which were grafted on to an originally simple story".
Valmiki himself combined earlier Rama ballads and a tale of
Ravana to create an epic'.
What is even more interesting is that the rise of the religious
significance of the Ramayana and the new intapretation of its
text began in the 10th century and culminated in Tulsidas7, a
period that coincided with the rise and comolidation of Muslim
power in India. It seeim very probable that the Hindus internal-
ized the rigidly patriarchal ideas of Islam, abolished the relative
freedom women enjoyed in ancient India, clamped purdah on
her, and elevated the Ramayana to religious heights in order
to fmd support, within their own tradition, for a new patriarchal
order declaring the supremacy of man enjoined by the Quran'.
Significantly, Sagar's television Ramayan ~ a medieval ver-.
sion of the expulsion of Sita in which, in a highly eloquent
s~ch, she persuades an unwilling, loving, devoted Rama to
banish her in order to save the honour of his dynasty.
~
m
Except perha~ in Kamataka and Kerala and partially Bengal,
the Mababbarata has hardly any religious relevance in India any
more. The bbakti movement all over India and Tulsidas in the
Hindi belt put the Ramayana on a .religious pedestal. Bbaja
Govindam, mudbamatay, taught Adi Shankaracharya to a coun-
try about to fall to the Muslim invader. Rama, the other avatar
of Vishnu, naturally took pre-eminence. The change had the
additional advantages of divesting Krishna of his Mahabharatan
image of the secular and rather cunning statesman, and of
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reinforcing the patriarchal system and the inferiority of women
inherent in the religion of the ruler. Women are far too
independent in the Mababbarata, so an inconvenience was got
rid of by rawng the Ramayana above it. It became easier to
adjust to the mores of an alien ruler through the imtruments
offered by an indigenous epic. Draupadi, the wife of five, was
known to be a pandita, a learned woman; whether Sita, the
model of chastity, was literate or not the Tulsidas Ramayana
omitted to say. Certainly she is denuded of her intelligence,
made patent in Valmiki, and is devoid of the ·greater sense of
independence the women of the Mababbarata are endowed ·
with. Kunti had her pre-marital (J(anina) son Kama; none of
the Pandava brothers were Pandu's sons, being the outcome
of the custom of Niyoga (Ksbetraja sons). Evidence of the
·independence of woman is further seen in Gandhari; devoted to
her husband as she was, she nevertheless chastised him severely
for being ambivalent about the evil her sons represented. She
similarly reprimanded Krishna for not preventing the fratricidal
war. What is more, she, a mere woman, cursed Krishna (God)
with the destruction of his clan and an ignominious death - both
of which came true. Similarly, Draupadi reprimands her hus-
bands in a way no Hindu wife would be allowed to do in a
Hindi falm today. •we come across the indomitable spirit of
Woman in an epic which many misconceive as celebrating a
male-chauvinist ethos. Whether it is Shakuntala, proudly assert-
ing her integrity and beating a cowardly Dushyanta (a very
different woman from Kalidasa's swooning, lovelorn, helpless
maiden); or Devayani demanding that Kaea return her love and
later imperiously brushing aside a lust-crazed husband; or Kunti
refusing to pervert herself into a mindless womb, producing child
after child to gratify the twNed desires of a frustrated husband
- time and again it is Woman standing forth in all the splendour
of her spirited autonomy as a total human being which attracts
our admiration and rivets our attention119• Thus it is impossible
to glorify the Mab,abbarata as a religious text without outrageous
distortion; its characters are not painted in black and white as
•in the Ramayana, but in intermediate shades too complex to
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11IBPNND!D P.ACB
interfere with. 1rvrx ia:ria, who i.1 the only one who comes
dose to being the 'villain', dies with dignity before a.shamed
Bhima w.ho has hit him below the belt against their long-
agreed rules of warfatt, at Krishna's as-usual coming imtiga-
tion. He goes to heaven. In certain areas of· the Garhwa1
Himalayas, he is still worshipped as a god. Yudhmhira, the
virtuous, has an uncontrollable addiction to the game of dice,
and never ceases to regret the disastrous war he has unleashed.
Thus, the Mababbarata proved too great for later generations
to saniti1.e, despite generous interpolation. It continued to retain
its character as a compendium of the expealence of a whole
country and the tragedy ofheroic individuals with divided selves.
Its .deep probing of the contradicti<>N of human behaviourto
make it too universal to be turned into a religious text. Suddenly,
with the comolidation ofMuslim rule, many Hindus were slightly
ashamed of the Mababbaratt,t, it is little more than a collection
of great but strange stories, whereas the Ramayana has become
a .religious text. Indeed folk knowledge of the Mababbarata is
in many ways greater in.Indonesia, a Muslim country, than in
India. The Mababbbrata tells today's Hindu too many things
about ancient India that he does· not want to know.
Perhaps for that very reason, the Ramayana~ capacity to
invoke provincial (i.e. non-universal) passions, divisive motiva-
tions, religious bigotry, is infinitely greater today than it was in
the days of Tulsidas It is also more dangerous, for the saine
reasons; than the Mababbarata.
•
IV
Or so it seemed. The foregoing had been written before B.R.
<llopra's Mababbarata followed on the heels of Sagar's Rama-
yan. The very opening heralded the attempt to sanctify the
Mababbarata into a Hindu religious text. <llopra cumingly
devised his standard introduction to each episode in a signature
tune, text and visuals to place Krj.,hna at the centre of the epic,
not Krishna the statesman who fust mediated between the two
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clans and then joined the Pandava side to lead them to vk.tory
by undermining the then obtaining ethical standards, but
Krishna, God of Harlvamsa, Srimadbbagavata and Tbe Gita.
Kmhna i.1 the one who taught the·Pandavas every dirty trick
in the book to fell the enemy by foul means, who made
Yudhisthira speak the one untruth of hw life, induced Arjuna to
kW Bhwhma by hurling an aJTOW on him fror11 be~ the female
Shikhandi whom Blmhma would not hurt, encouraged Bhirna
to hit Duryodhana below the belt. When Duryodhana was about
to imprwion Krishna acting as ambassador of the Pandavas, ·he
shows Im VuwanfJa (cosmic image) to prove that he w God.
But, unlike Arjuna, Duryodhana w not impres.,ed. He sends a
mes.,age to Krishna: 'Brave· i11en are not intimidated by magic
shows. Krishna, you have suddenly become famous, but don't
forget ~ you were a mere slave (dasa) of Kam.u; that .w why
no king of my standing will fight with you•. Today Krishna
images are often worshipped along hw ~rother Balaram's. But
Balaram sided with .the Kauravas in the war and time and again
Krishna justified Im own actions to rus brother by citing the good
that would conic to Im own community, the Yadavas. For
.. instance, when he persuades Bhima to kill Jarasandha in an
unfair f~t, he declares that thw was necessary because
Jarasandha was an enemy whom the Yadavas would never be
able to defeat on their own. The Machiavelli of ancient India
must have ended S a ~ and countered the non-violence of
the Buddhwts by establwhing the principle of the good end
justifying the evil m~. This possibly hwtorical figure of the
original Mababbar'Ota has been throughly ~lved into the
~ as God, avatar'O of VIShnu in the Gita and the Krishna,
first of Harlvansa, and then of the Bbagavata Pur'Ona in pop1Jlar
Hindu tradition. · .
Oiopr;a's anxiety to heighten the Krishna-God figure as com-
mercially understandable; it enables him to approximate the
highly popular religiosity of Sagar's .Ramayan and rawe his
rating.,. He introduces each e p ~ with a divine voice chanting
(off-screen): yada yadabi dbamuuya glanirbbavatl Bbar'Ota.,
the sblol,a so dear to the N.T. Rama Rao of Bobblli Puli and
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similar fihm (see Oiapter IX, page, which also gives a translation
of the entire sblol,a).
It is well known that the Kmhna of the Gita is not central
to the story of the Mababba,ata, even though the Gita (possibly
in a much shorter version) is supposed to have been spoken by
him on tbc battleground Gandhari hold, Kmhna ftnnly respon-
sible for the enormous, and fruid~, massacre of the Kwuk-
shetra clan. In the·analysis of the Mababbamtds text scholars
have definitely arrived at three versions - the original, much
shorter, vemon, delineating the basic Ksbatriya story and ending
with Swee Paroa (24,000 sblolaas); the two stages of interpola-
tions, one that added the side stories of Hamhchandra, Nala and
Damayanti etc. without harming the integrity of the text, and the
. final 'Brahmanical' version that sought to inject large doses of
religion. and ethical sermons of the Astikaparva, Shantiparva
etc.(100,000 shlokas)11•
Indeed the Mababbamta itself refers to the three stages of
its composition: Cbaturotmsbatisabasrlm cbalwe Bbamtasamb,-
tam; upakbyanairotna tavadbbaratam procbyate kudbaib
(1/1/61). Manwadi Bbamtam kecbidastikadi tatbapare,tatbo-
paricbaradanye viprab samyagadbeeyate (1/1/50). Much, if not
all, of this history of rewrites was endorsed by the greatest
intellectual advocate and justifier of Kmhna ever, namely
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyayu.
It is equally well known that the Gita has been regarded as
an independent religious text for centuries by the traditionali&s
thermelves, as distinct from the historians and textual analysts.
Its ·nexus with the Mababbamta is thin, to say the least. The core
of its spiritual ·wdom is derived from the CJpanishods from
which its main difference lies in the use of the concept of
immortality of the soul to promote fratricidal :warfare. This
materialist purpose of the Gita is stated very briefly; most of its
voluminous verses are devoted to a superstructure of justifica~on
so deeply spiritual that the materialist mason d'etre is easily
forgotten until one is actively remipded of it. No wonder
Gandhiji, the advocate of non-violence, reduced the ( Gitds)
battle of·Kurukshetra to a metaphor of good and evil raging
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Rllumoftlw·~
within the heart of man. He never commented on the Gita as

a part of the Mababbamta as such.
In thi., context of scholarship on the Mababbamta, Ol91D's
total emphasis on the divine aspect of Kmhna as the .overarching
presence in the epic goes .even further than the Brahmanical
(Bhrigu clan) into polatiom.(which forn1 tMHhird1 of the pre-
sent mass of the epic and were completed by tile 4-5th centuries
AD)13• Oearly, he seeks to tramf01111 the epic into a religious
mooument to a resurgent, militant Hindusm as profitable to him
as some temples are to the priests who impose a toll on the
cntiy of the faithful into their precincts. (Neither the Muslims nor
the Christiam charge a price for entry into mosque or church).
It is obviously with this purpose of the profitable sanctification
of a secular epic that Chopra plunges into the .birth and growth
of Krishna as related in the Harlvamsa (barely 1.aenti9ncd in
the Brahmanical interpolatioo towards the end of the final text
of the epic and the later text of the Bbagavata). Otherwise, he
began reasonably well. The Santanu and Ganga episodes made
some attempt to create a seme of another time in their treatment
of lan&cape, costume and miracle. Ganga's white drapery
stood out wcll agaimt the water and the greenery; the total ·
absence of other humam produced some feeling of being away
fron1 the tb1ies and spaces of our experience. The bizaJTe tale of
the mother killing her som was told with a modicum of dignity,
even inscrutability. The trou_b le began when he came to the birth
and childhood of :Krimna; the whole thing crashed at once to
the level of the conventional mythological at its worst. But the
general nature of the acting and the language are poor through-
out because there i., no understanding of the great spirit of the
epic or of the social and ethical ~cs it deals with on a vast
universal scale and yet with intimacy. Except for Bhimrna, no
character has any dignity and all are typed heavily, declaiming
their words in a manner befitting the absolute division between
good and evil imposed on the epic. All the characters look like
people today strutting about in (incorrect) period costume.
In a highly perceptive essay, Sukumari Bhattacharya estab-
lishes the Mababbamta as the world's gseatest epic, discussing
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it in relation to the /Had, the Ody.uey, the .Aeneid, the Gllsamesb,
the Elder Edda, the Niebelungenl,ed and so on. The pillars on
which its nobility is based, according to her, are firstly, the fact
that the Mababbarata has no unmixed good.and evil characters
-with the exception of the relatively minor ones of Bidura and
Shalruni. Yudhisthira's pass'°n for chess, his usurpation of the
right to bid the wife common to him and his brothers, his false
statement to Dronacharya. are the flaws in an otherwise noble
character. Duryodhana.lives the life of a Kshatriya, is killed by
unfair (adbarmfli) meam; he says, as he is dying: Ko nu
swantataro maya (who can die a better death than mine?)
Casting his eyes on his relations and friends, he remarks that it
is his good fortune that their lives have survived the massive
death toll of the war. When he 11acets Satyaki on the battlefield,
Duryodhana says: "We were do.,e friends in boyhood; why are
we trying to kill one another? Fie upon this Ksbatradbarma
(duty of the Kshatriya), this greed, anger and so-called manli ·
nesst• In the Brahminical inteapolatiom, Duryodhana goes to
heaven, much to Yudhisthira's anger when they meet there.
Narada calms Yudhisthira, saying ·that the prince had fought like
a true Kshatriya and had earned his place in Wralc>Aar, (abode
of the brave) in heaven.
Another trait of the Mababbaratds major individuals (they
are not types) is that they are tom by dilemmas within them-
selves. Dhritarashtra is caught between the calls·of justice and
filial love. C.Omciously he accepts defeat in his inner struggle.
Gandhari does not; she kee~ trying to make her husband come
to his senses to stop his som' folly, but fails. Therein lies the
source of her pain. Yet, w.eak as he is, Dhritarashtra refuses the
magical vision Vyasa offers him, for he does not wish to witness
the fratricide. He gets his secondhand account froa11 Sanjay, who
is given that vision. Yudhisthira's dilemma lies between the
Kshatriya's dbarma and the dbarma of humanity (reminiscent
of Buddhist abimsa). He could have taken up one of them
without being guilty in the eyes of the world. His Kshatriya ·duty
was to claim his throne and to conquer it; yet when the
prospect of shedding the.blood of his kim1aacn came up, he went
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to his cl.ders on the battlefield and begged them to avokl the
massaae that would follow. Similarly .A,junavllapa (Arjuna's
lament) is one of the noblest passages of the Gita. Gandhari,
·one of the greatest characters of the Mababbarata, · shares this
moral dilemma. When Duryodhana cor11es to her to ask for her
bl~ings before joining battle, she withholds them,. saying:
justice (dbanna) shall win. At the end of the war she curses
Krishna ·for his evil tricks and condemns him to a horrible
death after the self-destructioo of his clan.. Both come tnie. It w
Krishna, much of whose character is the creation of the Brah-
mms in their interpolatiom of the third enlarged version of the
Mababbarata, who is unshaken in his resolve to induce the
Pandavas to go into battle as Kshatriyas and diverts them froa11
the peaceful path (a ~rahmanical ~ion apinst ·Buddha's
ablmsa). Kunti tries to -persuade her illegitimate, premarital son
Kama not to fight his brothers, but fails; which is probably why,
when Yudhmhira wim hi.1 throne, Kunti, who has lost her first
son, goes away to a hermitage along with Gandhari, who had
lost a hundred som.
Bhishma, the · of virtue, also suffers in his inner
struggles. He had given.up hi.1 own good for the sake of his
father's pleasure, and_life had given him-little but the guardian-
ship of the Kauravas. Yet he lives to see them, and jpin them,
in their evil enterprise agaimt the rightful claimants to the throne.
He is silent over the humiliation of Draupadi and all the other
misdeeds of his wards - because he is their paid servant. Orona,
Shalya, Kripa and the other acbaryas all say the same thing to
Yudhisthira: . A ~pu,usbo daso (man i.1 bound by money);
we must serve the Kauravas, for they have paid us. Hear us, O
King, we have to speak like cowards: Kltvavadvakyam vmvimi
lnuu~ndana.
The final tribute to the Mababbaratds seculansm is its own
statement: Gubyam brabma yadidam te vmvimt.na manusb-
asbresbtaram biJdncbit- let me tell you a sec1et; there is nothing
greater than man (12/1.88/20). It describes itself as the body of
Bharata Ondia), its truth, and its immortality. Yet its conscious-
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nes.,of mortality is keen too. In the Shw Paroa (the end of tre
original Mababbamta), it says:
,rvay /Csbaytmtab nlcbayab, patanant<.b sonaucb-

broyob Somyogab vf)rwi.,..,_antab, marrmatan cha
}#vltam.
All that is collected, gets ~pleted; all that mes up
ends in a &11; all union e,,ds in aeparation. and all life
ends .in death..
Religious bigtory seeks to reduce such epics to farce, to take

them away from humanity in order to make them into . the
property of the Hindus of India of the eighties and nineties,
bent upon destroying them.,elves like the Yadavas, Krishna's
clan. To tum such universal epics into cinema i., not the work
of small men. What we also have in our tel~ion epics i.1 an
arrogant rejection of sophi.,ticated filmmaking identified with
modernity. Neo-primitive cinema is ~ e d as a . part of tr.tdi-
tionali.,m. Hindu fundamentalism has brought back Phalke's
iconic frontality to the cinematic image.
It is .interesting, though perhap., painful, to compare Chopra's

Mababbamta with Peter Brook's .
The fust question that comes to mind i.1 of the very idea of
cross-cultural art; i.1 it by nature contemptible ar is there any
valid possibility to it? Qearly, it is impos.,ible for people of one
culture to apprehend another totally in the ter,11.i of the first;
perforce, an Indian audience will understand aJapanese fdm and
an American audience a Kathakali perfonnance in its own way.
That understanding - misunderstanding, if you like, is bound
to be absorbed and reflected within the culture of the receiver -
even the most well informed. Even within India, one region
has odd problems with the cultural products of others. Magnifi-
cent Naga dances often provoke laughter among audiences
from the plaim. Is such ~ u r e essentially wrong, corruptive
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of both? Should cultures be hennctically sealed off except where
the out.skier can bcaxne an imider through lifelong effOl't?
But it can equally well be argued that one lifetime i.1 not
enough to get to the heart of another culture; it takes generaUon.,
to do so. What happem then to the aeative energies generated
by the inevitable contact between cultures in a shrinking world?
The fact i.1 that ~tural products are inevitable and cannot
await anyone's pleasure, including that of the country &orn
which ~ are made. Hybridisation has beer., and re-
mains, an essential part of the flo,w of cultures. We in India are
comtantly adapting Western falms and plays into our languages.
both in elite and popular theatre and cinema. Do we decontex-
tualise them or not? IPdlan cuhure today i.1 the product of
admixtures with Persians, Greeks, Sakas, liunas, Mongols, Cau-
casians; with the lndus Valley people, the Aryam and the tribals,
and. finally, the Europeans. What is hybrid in one century often
represents the-essence of purity in another.
What is more, the Mababbarata takes us back to a time when
the nation-state of today was unknown. Borders shifted with the
fortunes of frequent battle; borrowings and commonalities were
plentiful. To attack another k~'s territory was a duty~ a part of
Ksbatradbarma. What we tend to see as a unique tiadition today,
such as the Hindu pantheon, was actually shared with the Greeks
·and large sections of West Asia. Shiva .and Dionysius have
uncanny similarities and so have Krishna and Achilles; one of
the names of.the tenible Sumerian god~ Lil~ was Kali; the
worship of Durga corresponm with harvest festivals acro.,s vast
transnational territories and harks back to the days of matrilineal
society dominated by the worship of the Great Goddess. The
ancient Indian war chariot was the.same as those used in Assyria,
for instance. Indeed the type shown in Brook's Mababbarata is
very like the HiWte variety seen on Carchemish bas reliefs of the
12th-8th century BC, very close to the period generally asaibed
to the Kurukshetra war. Northwestern India of the fust millenium
BC was a polyglot mixture of races with varying physiognomies
and many hues of complexion. It. ls in the nature of nation-state
chauvinism today to ignore these past commonalities and see its
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11IBPMNIPI) PACE •
own tradition as a uniquely national produd uncontaminated by

Mlecbcbas and Yavana.s and people across what was regarded
·as Kalapani until a·few decades ago.
So the only valid way to judge a aoa-cultural product like
the Brook film is by its internal logic rather than the exactness
of its correspondence, literal or otherwise, to our epic. As for its
'essence', how many Indians understand it 'and how many
understand it even roughly the same way? The popular view of
.the Mababbarata reflected in B.R. Chopra's series on Doordar-
shan is of a battle between good and evil. This is very far rc1,1oved
fror11 the actual text, which is laden with contradictions and
an;d>iguities that in fact make it the great and universal work it
is All it needs to respond honestly to a foreigner's view of the
epic is to see it with an open mind and to make allowances f(){
Jiffercnces of cUltural perception.
This is easi~ said than done. Not so curiously, even elite
commentators see111 to find it easier to accept Cau~iam as
opposed to AJiicam. Many find it im~ible to see the remark-
able individuality and character in Kunti, .played with intemity
and assurance by Miriam Goldschmidt - whose· face is like a
cubist painting ~ just because she is black. Similarly, the tall,
ascetic agelessness of Sotiqui Kouyate as Bhishma is unaccept-
able in its blackness. They do not object·that Krishna and Aijuna,
both of whoni arc described as black in the text, arc played here
by· Caucasiam.
There arc many ~ .unusual dementS in Brook's
film; the variety of races is only one of them. Take, for instance,
the use of Rablndrasangeet. The very opening scene has the
song .Antan1 mama bilaasita Iran>, antaratani bay. It is the
individual's prayer to the being within to open the mind, to
make it pure and to illuminate it. In my childhood in Brahmo ·
Society, it was always .sung ori children's birthdays. It 1.1 the
PlainJane among.Tagore songs. To hear it at the opening of the
Mababbarata is, to say the least, startling. But usually it is sung
at a sprightly pace with a hannonium or cottage organ accom-
paniment, often by someone in the family with a very homespun
voice. Here it is abno,t unrecognisable, sung to an e:xbemely
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Ram o f " - ~
slow tcltapo, making it almost into a chant. Sharmila Roy's limpid

voice renders it with exceptional purity and stcadincs.1. .
As the keynote to a story of massive destruction infonncd by
a simultaneous quest for the truth of what is right or wrong, the
song is deeply moving. I tried hard to forget the meaning of the
words and to judge it as pure sound and it still sec111ed very
profound in its impact as the camera panned across the future
scene of disast'!I' to be brought about by a throw of dice. The
song is later picked up on the esraj as the theme tune and is
brought back in Shannila's voice as the exile of the Pandavas is
pronounced. It was impossible not to be struck by the sense of
purification through suffering suggested by the words. The
Rabindrasangeet in slow tempo had become a little like an
Indian equivalent of the Gregorian chant. A similar effect is
achieved at the end. of the war when Shannila Roy sing., the
Upanishadic verse Srlnvantu Visbwe ~mirita.sya Putmb, a lofty
call to humanity by one who has seen the luminous being who
lies beyond all .darkncs.1. Both the songs, at the beginning and
the end, underscore a spiritual quest in strange contrast to the
war of total destruction around which the narrative is con-
structed. Toshi Tsuchitori's music does not try to enhance the
··effect of the visual or suggest the meaning of the particular event
on.screen; it is almost entirely intrmpectivc, meditative and
imbued with a sense of prayer for understanding - mostly
through a gentle counterpoint to the image.
Cinematically the most su~ful aspects arc the casting (if
one concentrates on the sharp individuality of countenance and
form), the battle scenes and the images of Gandhari and Dhrita-
rashtra sittirtg waiting for or l~ening to news of the war. Except
in one or two cases (such as of Krishna helping the arrow into
Bhishma's body - which is very Oiopraesque), the battle scenes
are impressive. There is both a sense of massive confrontation
and of a misty past in which it is taking place. Considering that
it is shot on the basis of a theatre performance the sense of battle.
is remarkably well achieved.
However, the theatrical base of the film betrays itself in the
grouping of characters in the other scenes. Characters are
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1HBPMNI1JDPACB
. invariably hudcDed together, no cinematic sense of large spaces

.is ~ted; dialogue never takes place between people far away
frot11 each other.
Camera angles are limited by the same factor. For instance,
the scene of Yudhisthira's dialogue with Dhanna at"the pond
after the death of his brothers cries out for a view from above,
which could have been spectacular. In the epic, Nakula climbs
a tall tree to spot water in the areas; so a top shot is literally
ihdicated. Similarly, a low angle shot fron1 the point of view of
I;>hanna, who is in the water, is also avoided. The eye-level shot
:predominates throughout the fdm.
One of the things that helps the film's sense of spiritual quest
is the acting of Rysard Cieslak in the role of Yudhi&hira arid
particularly the use of his eyes, which have great depth. His
quiet bearing contrasts vividly with Duryodhana's restl~ness.
Duryodhana is the body and Yudhisthira is the spirit, as it were.
But Duryodhana is by no means all ev-il, just as no character in
the Mababbarata is wholly good. He is wholly a prince, an
embodiment of Kshatriya desire for wealth and power. He fights
for them honourably, will not strike a fallen eneairy without anns,
always observes the rules of warfare. He has no time for the
introspection that is Yudhisthira's life. Both actors convey the
contrast to perfection.
Draupadi eludes Brook as much as she does Chopra, and, I
suspect, virtually all of us. She is ·a polyandrous woman sur-
rounded by polygamous mm. Yet there is little comment (except
Kama's at her unclothing) within the Mababbarata or its exege-
ses on her unique status. Here is a strong, independent character
and yet she ~ subjected to much humiliation, little of which is
related to her polyandry. She is extremely attractive; compared
to her, other women (the text says) are as female monkeys; yet
there is little manifestation of.her sexuality in the epic. Was some
of the text related to her excised by the rewrite men? In any
event, it is difficult to blame the fdmmakers for not being able
to do justice to her. Both Mallika Sarabhai and Rupa Ganguly
have the unusual strong features, but neither know what to do
with the character.
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blum qftl# Mylbokp:ol
Sadly, we Indiam have yet to do justkc to our epics in the

medium of cinema. It is a pity that Satyajit Ray's plan in the late
sixtes to fdm the Mababbarata fell through; it would have been
interesting to sec how high art dealt with a subject so often
treated in the traditional mythological.
Much has been made of the absence of Bidura, who.,e
moralising commentary is an important part of the text. But this
does not sec111 all that important in the style and content of
Brook's presentation. The ambiguity of the epic is amply re-
flected without such commentary. Is Krishna God or man? Brook
is as evasive on this as Ganesha who says in answer to young
Janamejaya's question, "One can never be sure". The epic itself
is not sure, no matter how much B.R. Chopra tries to bend it. If~
Krishna is God, how is it that he can see. _s ome of the coming
events but not others as the battle progresses? How can Gandhari
curse him with the destruction of his own clan and an ignomini-
ous death? Why should his brother Balaram go against him and
support the Kaurava claim to the throne? Most of all, why does
he try to save the women of his clati by sendlng Arjuna to escort
them from Dwaraka? This episode is barely described by Krishna
and not shown.
To my mind, it is the most serious omission, because in the
epic itself it makes Krishna a ·protagonist in the drama and
provides the biggest contradiction to his claim to divinity, which,
as we know, is the creation of Brahminical interpolators. The
destruction of the Yadavas also gives a great sense of the end of
an era and raises the question: what did Krishna gain by helping
the Pandavas to regain their kingdom at the cost of dbarma and
of the annihilation of their world? In this unanswered question
may lie the key to the historical meaning of the Mababbarata.
Even if Brook has stuck mainly to the Kshatriya war story (as did
the fll'St 24,000 verse tradition of the epic, called Jaya), the end
of the Yadavas should have been a part of his scheme. More.
than Yudhisthira's ridiculous climb (up a rope ladder) to
heaven,it is the self-destruction of the Yadavas, Atjuna's loss of
his heroic power, and -the death of Krishna by an arrow struck
in his heel Oike Achilles) that spells the end of the Mababbarata
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11/EPAINl1!I) PACE
war. Did Kmhna, rcfC11ed to as Devakiputra in the Cbban-

dogyopanisbad, where his name is first mentioned (in Indian
traditio.n , he is always described as his mother's son, hardly ever
as his father's), actually lead the change from ~trilineal, God-
dess-worshipping, woman-dominated, polyandrous society to
the establishment of patriarchy? He hirmelf had 108 wives and
16,000 playgirls - the archetypal male, the exact opposite of the
woman-dominated man in a polyandrous, Goddes.,-worshipping
matrilineal society whose traces we -see in Draupadi, in Kunti's
premarital pregnancy and in Gandhari's authoritative spirit,
undaunted by Krishna's divinity. Obviously this is too grey an
area, fraught with modem inte1pretative controve1sy; for Brook
and Carri~e to enter. They are content to take the stunning story
of the Mababbarata as it exists today, with all its interpolations
and comequent contradictions, and to present it without over-
emphasizing its miraculous or divine aspects, maintaining its link
with earthly reality as also its spiritual quest. In that effort, they
have succeeded eminently.
However, the Mababbarata is too great to be absorbed, not
to speak of being exhausted by one film. It p r o ~ in
digressions and is a vast compendium of stories. It worlcs at many
levels, and everyone who comes to it can take from it what he
wants. It took n~rly a thousand years to acquire its present form.
There is a saying to the effect . that what there isn't in the
(Maha)bharata, there isn't in Bharata Ondia). In Indian perform-
ance tradition, it is treated episodically, in great detail. Perhaps
there was need for a modern, linear narrative view as well (the
Mababbarata is not lacking in one, as its original version Jaya
clearly shows), compressed into one whole. One hopes that
many film., will follow, in India as elsewhere •i n the world, in a
wealth of different interpretations, ending the monopoly of the
traditional mythological genre's kitschy hold on it.
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A_,., MGRa,tou1on Qslrfftln.Madros: dnemataltinsOIJff'tlHstate.
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~ : Modffn"-On"b¥)<if1b.Santoshl.Muftlm-in!ipirwicull.
Top , ld110li%Dlio11 of Hindu religious tmdilion in G.Y. iyff"s Adi
Sanbracharya .
ANW': Prablad Jlamb before Lord Vishnu and bis ~ Bhakta
Pr:ahb.da, 19.19.
193
,,,,,,,,,., Google Original from

Lqt , ~ lmditionai "'Ytbologicai.
Abotif': Siwji Ganeum: widely cCWJSitktvd a bener actor than MGR, but
nft'ft'" al?k rtplicotf' the lottf'r's politico/ succn:s.
195
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196
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Ujl .- An1itabb as politicnl leader. stot1ed by a11 electorate tbat liked bis
rebel films but 11ot bis new i11canwlio11 as a cbampio11 of the
esudJUsbmem.
Top : Gimll Siuajl cu/Outadon,ing a slreet ill Madras.
A ~: Nl1l 1ui1b Radba In Ch:lnda$ilsaruidu (Tbe Dictator), 1be image 1iw
reflected in so"'e of bis political ac1io11s as Chief Minister.
197
Oigib,ed by Google Original from

A IHwe : Chief Ministers, pa.SI and presem: MGR wilb feyalalilba In Raman
Thecb.i Scc1hai (Rama 's quest/or Si1a).
198
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9
THE
PAINTED FACE OF POLITICS
'In the next ten years, there ~ going to be a big increase in the
semi-literate population. I shall be their leader. My determination
will be to keep them semi-literate".
1
- C . N. Annadomi, 1967
ew events have ever revealed the nexus between culture

and politics as dramatically as the coming to power of ftlm
stars in two of India's most populous states - Tamil Nadu and
Andhra Pradesh.
Both were the most popular stars of their different language
areas; both were at the peak of their popularity at the time they
became chief executives of their states. Even when they stopped
acting, their fwm continued to be screened with revivals orches-
trated by them.5elves. One had made 262 and the other 292 ftlms
at the time they became Chief Ministers. In both cases, it is clear
that their political victory was the direct outcome of their screen
image. Neither of them was a Chief Minister who happened to
be an actor in the past and was merely using that experience to
enhance his public performance as a politician, unlike President
Ronald Reagan of the United States, who was never a superstar
anyway. The Indian actor-Chief Ministers became political lead-
ers because they were the superstars of their cinema. Their
political personae are extensions of their cinematic selves. This
fact must also be considered in the context of the number of
cinema theatres in the south (6830 out of the country's total of
12,284 in 1984), which is twice the national average. The bulk
Original from
11IE P.AINTED FACE
of the touring cinemas, which have a higher penetration into the

rural areas than the permanent theatres, are also located in the
south. The highest number of cinemas is in Tamil Nadu (2136),
followed by Andhra Pradesh (2131). "No village in Tamil Nadu
is so isolated as to be beyond the reach of film" 2•
Both Chief Ministers restructured the entertainment tax in
their states in such a way that reruns of their films would be
more profitable than new fihm - in most cases. The quantum
of tax levied is no longer based on the sales of a film; it is now
dependent on the population of the town in which the cinema
theatre is situated. This slab system based on population
provides an edge to films with big stars. The dissident film with
new actors and values must pay the same tax as the big star
'vehicles', and thus has no means of making itself economically
.viable in relation to the particular audience for which it might
have an appeal. M.G. Ramachandran's reruns were besieged on
opening nights by his fans all through his life. N.T. Rama Rao's
last film, made before he became Chief Minister, was released
after his assumption of office on his birthday. The film was titled
Chandasasanadu (fhe Dictator). As the two Chief Ministers sat
in their offices deliberating matters of state, their painted faces
and caparisoned bodies flickered on the screen, reinforcing their
images. With more than 250 ftlrns to each Chief Minister's credit,
these reruns have had a useful inexhaustibilty.
•You will forgive me if I am overcome by emotion when I
talk of cinema", said N.T. Rama Rao, the Chief Minister of Andhra
Pradesh, at an International Film Festival in the capital of his
state. "It nurtured, promoted and made me what I am today".
M.G. Ramachandran, Chief Minister of adjacent Tamil Nadu,
could have said the same thing, with equal truth.
Tamil Nadu presents a unique case study in the history of
cinema as well as of politics. In 1967, when the Dravida
Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) defeated India's ruling political
party, the Indian National Congress, the cabinet of ten formed
by Chief Minister C.N. Annadorai (1908-1969) had nine members
from the ftlm industry, including himself. A scriptwriter at a time
when his tribe was billed above the director in the titles,
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1be Palnl«J Face ofPolUlcs
Annadorai was the engineer of the cinematic force that laid low
the mighty Congress party. 'How can actors run a govem-
ment?4' scoffed Kamaraj, Tamil Nadu's highly capable (and by
caste, untouchable) Chief Minister before the 1967 elections. But
the DMK had the last laugh. The cinema had taken over the state.
As if to underscore this, Madanapally Gopala Ramachandran, a
Keralite of Sri I.ankan origin who through 292 ftlrm had been
the matinee idol of the Tamils for years, became the Chief
Minister in 19n, and, but for a brief interlude, remained so till
his death in 1987.
II
To understand how this came about and how the intricate,
usually unconscious link between culture and power was delib-
erately forged by the DMK, one must briefly outline the history
of the movement that catapulted the cinema into the centrestage
of politics.
Traditionally there are four castes among the Hindus - the
Brahmins, or the intellectuals, the Kshatriyas, or the warriors, the
Vaisyas, business people, and the Sudras or labourers. The
Brahmin is said to have been born out of the mouth of God
Brahman, the Kshatriya out of his anm, the Vaisya from his thighs
and the Sudra from his feet. Over a period of some 2,000 years
the occupational division stratified into an unshakeable hierar-
chical status accepted by the bulk of Hindu society. There is a
fifth class - the untouchables, like the Eta Oater called the
Burakomin) in Japan. But in south India, there are no Kshatriyas
or Vaisyas; all castes are either Brahmin, Sudra or untouchable.
Over the centuries the Brahmins, a tiny minority of three per
cent in the state and less in the rural areas, had to work out a
power-sharing relationship, a modus vivendi, with landowners
of a Sudra caste - Khammas, Reddiars and Vellalas.
For Brahmins, position and status were independent of their
residence in any given local area; for non-Brahmins, rank was
directly dependent on village economic and ritual dominance
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11lE PAINIID FACE
transactionally corroborated'. The conflict was tht:refore primar-

ily between Brahmim and non-Brahmim of high status. Sud-
denly, transition from village to town meant, for the non-Brah-
mins, drinking water out of a separate pot, not from the same as
with Brahmins back in the village. As forward segments of the
non-Brabniins became urbanized, this disenfranchisement
caused a severe reaction among their ranks and quickly found
its focus in a 'Dravidian', anti-Brahmin, anti-North, anti-Aryan
crusade".
The concept of Dravidian-n~ was, unsurprisingly, one that
had been developed by European scholars, some of them British,
and all of them excellent Tamil scholars. The Reverend Robert
Caldwell (1819-1891) developed the theory of Aryan domination
of the south through the Brahmins (three per cent of the
population). Some British officials agreed with this formulation
and felt that the word Sudra had been forced upon the south by
Brahmins from the north. 'It was these Sanskrit speakers, not
Europeans', said Mounstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, Governor
of Madras, in an addr~ to the graduates of the University of
Madras in 1866, 'who lumped up the southern races as Raksbusas
- demons (sic). It was they who deliberately grounded all social
distinction on Varna,or colour'. The words must have fallen on
avid ears.
It was not the fll'St time, nor the last, that the British had fuelled
the fires of division among their Indian subjects. Educated
non-Brahmins were quick to point out that the Brahmins (being
descendants of Aryan invaders) were also foreigners to India,
like the British. When the Indus Valley civilization was discov-
ered and posited by many as a pre-Aryan Tamil manifestation,
the Brahmin/non-Brahmin, north-south, Sanskrit-Tamil divide
became sharper than ever. In 1916, the Justice Party was
founded with the idea of securing justice for the non-Brahmins.
It constantly submitted petitions to the British government
seeking increased non-Brahmin representation in the administra-
tion. Socially and culturally, the thrust of the movement was
towards establishing the •Brahmin as the negative symbol and
the non-Brahmin as a positive one. In the new modes of
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1btl Palnl«J Pau ofPolllks
self-definition, non-Brahmin became synonymous with

Dravidian, with the rejection of Sudra status, i.e. of Vamasbrama
Dbarma. The past greatness of the Tamils and their language
mooted by European scholars was promptly internalized and
idealized into a Utopian vision of a casteless pre-Aryan society.
The religious basis of the superiority of the Brahmin was steadily
undermined among the urban non-Brahmins; it was necessary
to harness the vast masses of the underprivileged by infusing
them with a pride in the cultural distinctiveness that had become
the motive force in fighting the north and Sanskrit-deprived
Brahmin supremacy for the elite non-Brahmiil of Tamil Nadu.
This philosophy was radicalized and elaborated into a doc-
trine by E.V. Ramaswami Naicker (widely kno~ as EVR) with
the publication of his book Kudi Arasu and the fonriation of the
Self- Respect League in 1925. EVR had been a staunch supporter
of the Congress, but resigned in 1924 over an incident in which
Brahmin and non-Brahmin eating facilities were segregated in a
school run ·under Congress auspices. EVR represented the radical
section of the Self-Respect movement which sought, not the
reform, but the overthrow of Hinduism. EVR criticized publicly
the central mythologies of the Hindu religion, advocated the
burning of the Manu Sambita and the Ramayana. One of EVR's
famous statements was: 'If you see a Brahmin ancj a snake, kill
the Brahmin ftrSt'. Periyar ( as he came to be called) broke images
of Ganapathi, paraded floats on the street showing Sita in the
embrace of her husband's brother Lakshmana, and liQnised
Ravana, the traditional symbol of evil whose effigy is burnt during
the Ramlfla in large parts of north India to this day.
Many scholars dispute the north-south, Aryan-Brahmin vs.
non- Brahmin Dravidian concepts as simplistic or untrue. The
whple idea of an Aryan invasion has indeed been challenged or
bypassed by many scholars who see a possible continuity from
the Indus civilization to later developments instead of a conflict
between the twoS. According to some scholars, the Brahui
language in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent is proof
that the Dravidians, once upon a time, inhabited parts of the
country other than the south6 •
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71lE PAlNIFD FACE
Sanskrit and Tamil were clooely related even 2,000 years ago.
Silappadikaran, the great Tamil epic composed in Kerala be-
tween the 2nd and 5th centuries AD, describes a festival in
honour of the great Aryan God Indra held at Pumpuhar. 'In the
din created by politicians, the Tamil people have become deaf
to the voices of their own past'7 • However, the call for self-respect
was a stronger manifestation of the attempt, not only to secure
political 'justice', but to achieve structural change in south Indian
society. Self-respect meant self-respect for the Dravidians (cul-
turally and politically downtrodden) and freedom from the
'slavery of the mind'.
m
For a while. the Justice Party and the Self-Respect League
functioned side by side in a pattern of increasing co-operation.
While the Congress party was dominated by the Brahmins (their
three per cent of the population provided 20 per cent of the
prisoners in the 1942 Quit India movement), support for the
Justice Party and the Self-Respect League came from 'Tamil,
forward, non-Brahmin, caste Hindus'. To enlarge this base,
Indian language newspapers were developed. But a mass move-
ment was yet to be born. Politics belo nged to high culture and
was still petitional, not agitational.
The introduction of compulsory Hindustani in schools in 1938
triggered the fust eXplosion of the gathering force. This was
when C.N. Annadorai, later to become a leading author and
screenplay writer before taking over as ChiefMinister, first gained
his reputation as a skilful agitator, propagandist and organiser.
The demand arose for a separate Dravida State. 'The language
issue was portrayed as a superficial manifestation of the sinister
penetration of Aryan ideas into Tamil culture through the
political control of the Brahmin'. It made the separation of the
land of Dravidians from the rest seem essential. EVR supported
the British war effort, and his paper was subsidized by the British
Government during the war years. EVR met Sir Stafford Cripps,
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11H, Pamt«J Face ofPolilk:s
then Jinnah and Ambedkar, to press upon them his plan for a
separate Dravida Nadu by partitioning India.
But the prospect of Congress ruling independent India
loomed large, making it difficult for the Dravidian movement to
enli& the support of the mas.,es and even the backward non-
Brahmins. Hence the birth of the Dravida Kazhagam (DK) party
under the leadership of C.N. Annadorai ('Anna') at the Salem
Conference of the Justice Party in 1944. Anna sought to mobilize
~ support by re111oving the impression that the Justice Party
was a rich man's self- interest group in league with the British
and divorced from the main thrust of the independence move-
ment. The name of the Justice Party was changed to Dravida
Kazhagam at this conference as a result of a resolution moved
by Anna. The demand for separation from India was dropped.
Wheri EVR declared August 15th, the day of India's Inde-
pendence, as a day of mourning, Anna publicly dissociated
himself from that stand. At the 1948 DK Conference at Erode,
Anna was chosen as EVR's successor.
But the 71-year old EVR named 29-year old party worker
Maniammal as ~ new successor, also announcing his impend-
ing marriage to her. Many refused to accept Maniammal's
leadership and came out in open criticism of EVR's despotism.
1
In the rift that ensued, Anna found the opportunity to establish
his Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) or Tamil Improvement
Party in 1949. Three-fourths of DK membership went over to the
new party.
Annadorai invited intellectuals to join the movement, wrote
radio dramas, presented party philosophy through traveHing
theatre grou~, used songs to propagate his ideas, sponsored
poetry contests on political subjects, combined political and
literary conferences, and emphasized scholarly studies of Tamil,
which led to a renaissance of Tamil literature.
Every party leader published a newspaper or a magazu:ie.
But all these became only the precursors and support-structures
for the main instrument he fashioned for converting the ~ e s
to DMK ideology: the cinema. It was not only eminently suited
to reach the mas.,es, but was owned largely by non-Brahmins.
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11IE PAINIFD FACE
for example large studios and producers such as AVM and

Jupiter.
English had already ceased to be the main language of the
DMK's political discourses; by elevating Tamil, it had expanded
its frontiers and established an edge over the Congress. But the
cinema was more significant because 'the Cinema Hall was the
first performance centre in which all the Tamils sat under the
same roof. The basis of the seating was not on the hierarchic
position of the patron but essentially on his purchasing power.. ·."
Earlier Tamil tradition classified K14ttu performances (as in the
early classic Silappadikaran) on the basis of the social status of
the audience - the Vettiyal (of kingly nature) and the Potuviyal
(of non-kingly or commoner nature). When the performing arts
moved into the temple, the hierarchical division became ritu-
alized because the lower castes were not allowed entry into the
temple. Later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Terukuttu was
patronized by the higher castes, and the social hierarchy of the
spectators was well reflected in the seating arrangement9•
N
Much of this must have been clear in the mind of Annadorai
when he decided to make the cinema his major instrument for
wresting political power from the Congress. He instinctively
realized what the Congress, too sure of its ground as the
architect of Independence and the chosen leader of free India,
did not: that the cinema was the leveller of classes, the only place
where the lowliest felt equal to the mightiest because he had
bought his right of entry. An unshaken Anna was prepared to
bide his time when the Congress won a thunderous victory in
the general elections after Independence. Congress Chief Min-
ister, J3rahmin C. Rajagopalachari, compared cinema to alcohol
and said that liquor also brought in tax money but still he
campaigned for prohibition and had successfully implemented
it. He went on to say that 'if the industry could stop producing
fil~ they would be doing a signal service to the community'10•
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1be Painted Face ofPolitics
Considering that most of the actresses of the time were drawn

from socially unacceptable grou~ such as devadasis (temple
maidens often regarded as prostitutes) and that most of the
entrepreneurs themselves were of lowly origin, such an attitude
was not surpming. But the inability to see beyond its westem-
ized-brahminical superstition was to cost the Congress dear.
Kama.raj echoed Rajaji's sentiments when he scoffed, "How can
actors
•·
run a government?" and lost.
In 1~2, in the Andhra Pradesh elections, when Mrs. Indira
Gandhi was pitted against legendary ftlm star N. T. Rama Rao,
she may have had similar thoughts - even though she was the
champion of the 'new cinema' and did not share the Victorian
prudery of Rajaji or Kamaraj. She, too, lost.
The fll'St ftlm to make a clean break with the traditions of
Tamil cinema was Anna's Ve"/aikkari (Maidservant) ·in 1948. Its
portrayal of the sufferings of Anandan, son of a poor peasant,
'showed how the traditional religious institutions were used to
keep the peasants in ignorance and poverty...the arguments put
forward (in Anandan's rhetoric at the temple) were so radical
and heretic that they posed a threat to the very foundations of
the traditional rural Tamil society'. DK"S anti-Brahmin, atheistic,
anti- Varnashrama rhetoric was woven into the personal lives of
the dramatis personae. Anandan often directly addressed the
audience, as in the scenes at the temple and the law court. Anna
was not taking a chance with the audience's understanding of
visual subtleties.
Parashakti (1952) opens with a monologue bewailing the
plight of Tarnilians who have had to leave their native country
because of poverty, and are now toiling and suffering in foreign
lands or sleeping on the streets. Religious superstition and the
corruption of temple priests are criticized, while the government
is found to be indifferent. Even in 1968, a year after the DMK
had come to power, there was applause in the theatre over these
scenes and speeches. The ftlm had been written by Karunanidhi,
later to be Chief Minister and remain leader of the DMK for
decades. The main actor was Sivaji Ganesan, who became
famous through DMK plays and films but was later to join the
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11IE PAINIF.D FACE
Congress. In almost all the DMK films the characters at some

point speak of the plight of the poor, of people living on the
streets, of starvation, of political corruption, all linked to the
ineptitude of the Congress government. What was internalized,
however, was not always the radical ideas (such as atheism, DMK
communism and so on), but the cultural definition of what it
meant to be a Dravidian.
The irony of it was that the DMK's strategy in the cinema was
made possible by the Congress party in two ways: firstly, the
electrification programme helped the extension of the cinema
into rural areas; second, cinema theatres were largely owned by
Congress supporters, even legislators, and they, finding the DMK
type of fdm popular, played these in their theatres, without
realizing what the end result would be.
It is not as if earlier Tamil films had no social or political

significance; even the silent cinema had 'clear political over-
tones'. Thus AnadaiPonnu (Orphan Daughter, 1930) dealt with
injustice towards women, Nandanar(1930) dealt with the Hindi
saint of that name who had belonged to a pariah caste but by
dint of his great devotion to Shiva was able to obtain entry into
the temple (a repeatedly remade story). K. Subramaniam's
Balyogini (1936) showed the sad plight of child widows. Even
titles like Desamunetram (Country's Progress, 1938) showed the
urge to deal with social problems. The choice of these subjects
was doubtless inspired by the Congress movement and the
Gandhian effort to remove social evils such as untouchability,
an essential part of the political struggle. If overtly political fdms
could not be made, it was because of the vigilance of the British
government. Eknath (1938) was banned because it supported
Gandhiji's programme of the social uplift of Harijans, being a
film about a 16th century Marathi saint who preached against
untouchability11 •
Original from
111e PollfllJtl Face of Politics
In the fihm of eot11cdian N.S. KNhnan, there was a distinct

social and political thrust. To understand this, it is nec~ary to
know the structure of the conventional Tamil film. 'Any average
Tamil film would have its •serious• side in which the trials and
tribulations of the hero and the heroine are portrayed but the
comic side to provide relief was contributed by the comedian,
a descendant of the traditional Vidusaka (buffoon) of Sanskrit
drama, with his well-loved antics. N.S. Krishnan used this ·pattern
to provide a parallel- theme...a sub-plot within the major plot of
the film - and the relevance it would have to the main theme
would be minimal and nominal. Very often the comedian is a
friend of the hero and would perhaps hetp· the hero at some
crucial moments'12•
Ramalinga Swamikalhas a dig at the caste system and argues
that there are only two·kin~ of human beings, the good and the
bad. In Anandashramam, any rich man who exploits the poor
is doomed to disaster. In Salwabanan, Krishnan argues in favour
of inter-caste marriage. 1be anatomy of the comedy sequence is
manifest in the very way it was developed. NSK composed the
comic scenes and shot them hirmelf with actors and actr~ of
his own choice; even the songs for them were written by a
member of his troupe. N.S. Krishnan could rightly be regarded
as a pioneer to exploit film for political advantage. Though
basically a Gandhian believer in non-violent non- cooperation,
NSK began to support Annadurai openly from the time the DMK
was formed in 1949. In Panam (Money) he skilfully used a pun
to mask, for the purpose of the censors, his glorification of the
new party, n-mu-ka, explaining the word aw.ly as an abbrevia-
tion of Tirukkural Munnanik Kalagam. The DMK regarded the
nrukkural, an ancient Tamil didactic text, as a seminal work
from which it derived many of its tenets13•
The opening up and exploiting of the various facets of Tamil
filrm sustained political propaganda with a social overtone. It
must be emphasized that their dialogues, noted . for powerful
rhetoric and profuse sentiments, were largely responsible . for
awakening among the masses in Tamil Nadu a close affinity for
20')
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• Digitized by Google Original from
THE PAINTED FACE
the ideals of the Sclf-Rc:sp«t movement and especially for the

pro-Dravidian and anti-caste fccling of the DK and the OMK14•
Thi.1 phase of the DMK's orchestration of the cinema as a
mean., of political self-assertion was led by the writers An-
nadurai and Karunanidhi and was dominated by words - it was
in .fact, in extending the use of political plays that the DMK
discovered the power of cinema and began to accentuate it The
fust phase began in 1948, and went on till about 1957, the year
in which the DMK entered the arena of electoral politics. Two
other factors contributed to the tramition to the next phase;
Annadorai and· Karunanidhi's increasing investment in day-to-
day politics as distinct from their phil~ophic-propagandi.1t func-
tion (even though they did not give up ftlm writing) and, more
importantly, the me of M.G. Ramachandran as an actor and a
luminary of the DMK. The fust film in which MGR played the
lead was written by Karunanidhi in 1950 and called Meruda
Nattu Ilavarasi -· a film about a princess who turned into a
commoner in order to marry the poor man she loved because
her status stood in the way of their union.
VI
If the fust phase emphasized the word, the second provided
its logical follow-up - action. The concepts broadcast by An-
nadurai and Karunanidhi were now embodied in the superhu-
man feats of a swashbuckling hero. The switch to .action helped
to bring the cinema cl~ to the illiterate populace. . We still
have dramatic narrative but 'the world of conflict exi.1ts only as
a world centred round the hero and the personal emancipation
symboli7.es the emancipation (of society) from the social evil
depicted'. Since M.G. Ramachandran (MGR) eh~ to act only in
the roles that showed him bringing succour to the needy in many
walks of life, the identification of the actor·with the character
was quickly achieved. The hero had .an immediate social rele-
vance for the majority ofTamil ftlmgoers. He became the symbol
of their wish-fulfilment. Most of the time, he represented char-
210
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71tt Pai111td I-act of Politics
actcrs dr2wn fro.11 lower social groups, ~dally in the early

part of his long career spanning 292 films. One by one, he
covered the vocational groups of the underprivileged Tamils._He
was projected·as being always honest and hatdworking, facing
social opposition but overcoming it. By contrast, Sivaji Ganesan,
the better actor, does not have the saviour image. 'In acting
talent Sivaji is head and shoulders above MGR, but Sivaji had
played a great variety of roles; he is often the tragic hero, people
sympathize with him but do not idealize him. MGR is always
portrayed as the saviour. As a result, Sivaji has never been a
Vote-getter'15•
The MGR image was constructed with fmes.,e. Grid by grid
the proletariat was ~ematically covered; there was a film about
&he111.en (Padaltotd ), another about rickshaw-pullers (RJclt-
sbawkaran), about the peasant ( Vivasayi), the carter (Mattukara
Ve/an), and the domestic servant (.Neetbiltkutbalai Vananku). In
each, MGR plays the good man, the Robin Hood, the dispemcr
of justice, the saviour of the d i s t ~ A maidse1Vant came back
home sobbing; she had just seen •MGR killing a tiger to save his
mother's life - in this day and age•16• He never entered the grey
areas, not to speak of playing the villain or other unfavourable
characters. 'Between the mid-fifties and the early seventies, if
MGR played in 100 -fdms, not in one did he die' 17 • In real life,
whenever he had a do.,c brush with death, MGR's popularity
inaeased on account of it - first after the incident in which actor
M.R. Radha shot and injured him, and then after the illness that
took him to Brooklyn Hospital, New York, for treatment in 1983.
Unlike his fellow-Chief Minister N.T. Rama Rao in neighbour-
ing Andhra Pradesh, MGR avoided playing go& or mythological
characters, because the DMK began on_ an anti-Brahmin and
anti-God platform. F.ntry into God's temples was guarded by the
Brahmin. However, to bring Christians into the DMK fold (the
south has a long Christian tradition going back, it is said, to the
4th century, and to conversiom by St. Thomas himselO, on
Dec:ember 25, 1969, MGR launched the 1be Life ofJesus Christ
It was a great occasion that looked like •a wedding of the DMK
and the church presided over by Christ Himself. At the long
211 '
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11IE PAINTED FACE
table bef<>tt the assembled guests, MGR, properly attired for the
occasion, was joined on one side by the Archbishop of Madras
and on the other by Olief Minister M.Karunaniclhi, leader of the
ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam(DMK)• 11• The cunning with
which this ·was done is plain in the eyes of MGR playiog Ouist;
only he and his followers were typically unaware of the intimate
vibrations given off by the cinematic image. All that the situation
lacked was a Luis Bunuel to fdm this farst supper.
MGR's production C0111pany sported the DMK flag, and very
often he wore its red and black in his film costumes. His film.,
frequently began with Arlnadorai's portrait and ended with the
rising sun, which was the symbol of the DMK party. Within
the ftlm there would often be a portrait of Anna on the wall,
alongside one -of Mahatma Gandhi. Art adaptation of 1be
as
Prisonerqfknda had MGR the king issuing a decree which
read like the DMK party manifesto. Screen populism was steadily
supported by real-life paternalism; when there was incessant rain
in Madras, MGR bought raincoats emblazoned with the DMK's
rising sun for 600 rickshaw pullers. A fdm on the rickshaw pullers
reinforced this charity and boosted the fdm's sales. He also
co~istently advocated temperance. His charity, his moral stance
and his highly visible and int~ party activity conveyed to his
public the message that he was more than a film hero.
It has been said that MGR, being childless though he was
married twice, gave most of what he earned to charity - a
statement contested by his arch-rival M.R. Radha. To reinforce
the image of his prow~, he was shown carrying K.R. Vijaya in
a still. photograph soon after her recovery from a broken leg.
Shivaji would act in any good role, but MGR would choose
his ftlm to make sure of his image. You never saw him smoking
or drinking or chasing girls other than the one he was s u p ~
to love. Even if there was a scene showing him drunk, there
would be a twist to show that he was 1,aerely acting as a
drunkard. In the fdm Nadodi Mannan (Vagabond King), when
the vagabond becomes king, he orders his minister to give
everybody a house in which to live and a bullock. '1be ordinary
mob will think that if MGR becomes a king, he will do all these
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11rt Painted Fatt of Politics
thing.,. 90 per cent of the villagers have these sentiments'. Songs

in the ft1ms praise MGR.
His circurmtances are shown to be very ordinary- he belongs
either to the working class, or the peasantry, or the impoverished
middle clas.,. No wonder, then, that MGR became the symbol
of the audience's wim-fulfilment. He had been acting since
1936, but it was around 1950, with ftlrm like Meruda Nattu
Jlavaw,sl and Marma Yogi that his clear links with the DMK
were forged. In Nadodlmannan (1958), he was the one to
introduce the DMK symbol of the rising sun; from then on his
place in the party was assured. He had attained a position of
equal power with Karunanidhi.
As luck would have it, Sivaji Ganesan, hitherto the symbol of
the DMK's social criticism in the cinema, began to drift away,
clearing the path for MGR with the DMK. Choo.,ing his ftlms
carefully, MGR declared that he would act only in ftlrm conso-
nant with his social and political views. The party came to be
more and more dependent on him, especially for collecting
aowds at its mass meetings and for votes in the electiom. 'We
need your image,' Anna said, and MGR gave it ungrudgingly. 'If
he appears at a meeting, we get 40,000 votes; if he speaks, we
get 400,000'19•
At Annadorai's death in 1969, there was the inevitable battle
of succession, which was won initially by Karunanidhi. But
Karunanidhi, with the entire party organi~tion in his hands, yet
needed MGR's support to become Chief Minister. The writer
gradually lost ground to the actor.
In a rearguard action, Karunanidhi ~ said to have tried to
build up his son as a superstar, presumably to produce a more
manoeuvrable surrogate for MGR. The two leaders fell out soon
thereafter. In 1972 MGR formed his own party, the AIADMK. In
1977 he became Chief Minister, dislodging Karunanidhi. The
actor had defeated the writer; action had taken over from words.
In MGR's filrm, although rhetoric was retained, swashbuckling
action was always more important. By this time the DMK's
violent anti- Brahmin anti-God posture had weakened; MGR was
able to preside benignly over a less divided electorate. Indeed,
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111£ PAINTED FACE
in order to heal the wounds of the traditional~, he made highly

visible journeys to various temples housing the gods and guarded
by the Brahmins whom EVR, Anna and Karunanidhi had flayed
for two generations. When Pamsbaktt or Vellaikarl were shot
there was no puja at the opening. "Now Karunanidhi comes for
all the pujU. He also acted in Ramalinga Swamf,gal, a religious.
ftlm.
The wheel had come full circle. The early DMK ftlrm and
plays had fulminated against religion and its guardians, the
Brahmins; in the second stage, as it flowered into political
domination through MGR, it beat a careful retreat from its
atheistic doctrine. One reason for this may have been the
counter-move of the Psablishment, which became popular:
Sivaji Gaoesan staffed in a number of mythological ftlrm after
his exit from the DMK. Sampooma Ramayanam (1958), for
instance, glorified the epic that was anathema to the DMK. Films
were also made from what some scholars have called 'Little
Tradition', celebrating the local cult gods and their prowess ·(as
opposed to the Great Tradition of the Sanskritic goals). S.S.
Vasan's .Awa(yarportrayed the life of the deeply religious Tamil
poet of that name. These films were immensely· popular. The
Great Tradition had proved to be too powerful. There has, if
anything, been a resurgence of religious ritual and festivity all
over Tamil Nadu. The Aryans may have conquered the south,
but it was so long ago that the people were not prepared to
throw out their Gock at the DMK's behest. The tirade against
God had been an extension of the movement agamt Brahmin
domination in the administration, in the universities and other
power centres of urban expansion. Once the elite non-Brahmins
had gained their place in the sun it became uMecessary,
perhaps dangerous, to go against long-held religious beliefs.
Has atheism ever been sustained outside the counsels of the
intellectual? The DMK's return to religion (in real life; in fllrm
they have not actually re-e1nphasized the role of religion as such)
has provoked little protest; it has perha~ provided welcome
relief to the ·religiously-minded majority temporarily disoriented
by the atheistic lhetoric of leaders they otherwise admired.
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Th~ Paillted Fae~ qf Politic!
Indeed, some erstwhile mociates of the DMK affirm that it was

when the party entered the cledions that it dropped its strident
atheism reflected in songs writen by Kannadahasan, who wrote:
•An image cannot eat, why do you offer food to it?" or, •when
are you going to blast the ~ges of Srirangam and 11rupati
temples?" When Sivaji left the DMK, he too went to the TICUpati
temple to underscore his change.
Manoeuvres and counter-manoeuvres like this are easier in
the south than elsewhere. As we have noted earlier, film
production was owned largely by non-Brahmin.,; many cinema
theatre proprietors were Congtea supporters oblivious of the
havoc caused to their politics by the DMK films they played for
profit; to aown this, the stars acquired control over the film
industry and used it for political gain. Sivaji has his own cinema
theatre, and MGR had his studio. It is reported that a contract for
acting for either included control of distribution rights in Madras.
Stars could make or break a producer, who therefore became
pliant enough to carry the message of the master".
VII
According to most observers, economic indications show a
decline in Tamil Nadu. The spurt in industrial growth in the fifties
and early sixties ran out of steam; power is in chronically short
supply, and so is water. MGR's reign lasted many years but his
populist actions yielded little concrete result. The per capita
consumption ofwater·in Madras has been one of the lowest in
India - 70 litres .a day against Calcutta's 128 litres, Bombay's 178
and New Delhi's 218. Even these 70 litres had, by 1983, been cut
to about 5 litres a. day.Journalist S.V. Mani painted a lurid picture:
•wunes., the rapidly expanding poverty scene: the thousands
living like wor11i., in the slums and pavements of Madras, the
hundreds walking miles for a pot of drinl(ing water in the villages
or long water queues in. the cities; human beings suddenly
ei11erging frol11 sewerage wells, shaking off the muck and slime...
thi.1 is the reality, the outcome of the politics of illusion*21•
215
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.
THE PAINTED FACE
The power of that illusion can be measured by audience

reaction to K. Balachander's film 7baneer, 7baneer (Water,
· Water) a film ~ensibly out to indict the MGR government's
failure to provide water. But the effect was the opposite. •If only
MGR had acted as the hero•, someone commented, •it would
have been a different story•zz. MGR, with his supernatural
strength, would have brought water to the village.
The economic policies of the MGR government tended
towards unproductive, paternalistic patronage more than the
generation of wealth and opportunity. Investments in modem
India have often been of Jong gestation peri~ fraught with
mass impatience with the slowness of governmental action; but
many of them have paid off. They have relevance not only in
team of the country's achieving setf~sufficiency but also in the
mushrooming of ancilliary private industries based on the heavy
industries and the infrastructure developed by government. Not
so in Tamil Nadu. After a brilliant start under the Congress in the
fifties and early sixties, decline set in under the fd11r. Raj2'. Madras
has been heavily dependent for electric power on the Neyveli
Lignite Corporation, a Government of India enterprise located in
Tamil Nadu. Except for handloorm (Co-optex), there is hardly
any other success story in their industry, the general picture being
one of decline.
Dramatic attemps at rainmaking with imported technology or
the much-touted canal link with the river Krishna in Andhra
Pradesh produced little worthwhile result. MGR's propaganda
secretary and erstwhile heroine Jayalalitha claimed he should get
the Nobel PriZe for his pet scheme of providing free midday
meals for children. "The scheme had a tremendous impact on
the enrolment of children in primary schools. An additional 2.63
takh children in the 6-11 age group had been enrolled in standard
I to V within 10 weeks of its inception... The scheme has, in
addition, generated gainful employment for some 1,47,000 ~
pie - m~tly widows and destitute women134• Others point out
that it is not an economic activity but a dole, like the distribution
of raincoats to rickshaw pullers for the release of Ricksbawl,aran.
216
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1be J I ~ 'MIii I JI poma to be an
albalro. round MGR'a iv-:k,..teacb,rs ,peo,i ~ time
at ration shops and groceries and kitchens than in
c:fatm,QmS, -,Jl has put !mnv I l8e pasure Oil food stocks,
the public diilribulion syatem wl the price line. What
• .wc.x, the .dw-ro,; lladf la •kl to have been the
braJnchid ol Kamuaj, the c.oowe- Q1'ef Minitter be-
.be the rile ol DMK - annv•h"'8 WGR Ja at paw to
denya5, .
MGR has been aa.,ISC(l ol many such attempts at ~

history. Recalling the patriotaaa of P.T. Thyagarajan of the
Justice Party, MGR recounted Im exploits of 1932, whercu the
man passed away in i927. Similarly, he had Pattabhi Sita-
ramayya winning the ~ Presidency against Subhas
<l1andra Bose, wheras the actual results were the reverse. His_
age, too, commentators say, changed according to the event of
the past whose glory he wanted to appropriate. He claimed
that as a lS- year old boy he had left the C.OOgrm in protest
when Gandhiji had espoused Pattabhi Sitaramayya's candida-
ture against Bose. Since his autobiography gives 1917 as his date
of birth, he could not have been 15 in 1939, when the_
Bose-Sitaramayya contest took place». · ·
The cavils of critics notwith.,tanding, MGR was conferred a
doctorate in Law (bonorls .causa) of the Madras University on
the occasion of its ·125th Jubilee celebratiom. Among others
similarly honoured on the same occasion was world-famous
astrophysicist S.-.. '3Se Nr of the University of Oucago.
MGR announced the opening of departments to study Jainism,
Salva Siddbanta, Islam and Annaism. The last, he explained, was
•a blend of socialiml, capitali.,m and humanism127• The list of 11
names was ratified at a special meeting of the Senate 'CQnvened
under unprecedented haste'. Most of the members of the Senate
and the Syndicate had not been informed of the meeting except
by a newspaper adverti.,ement publi.,hed the previous day. •Dr.
Maradhur Gopalamenon Ramachandran, the Ouef Minister of
Tamil Nadu•, said Tbe Statesman, •has at last arrived. Pr0111
playing bit roles in touring drama troupes to top star billing in
217
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THE PAINTED FACE
Tamil fwm, fror11 an ordinary worker of the DMK to founder..

leader of t h e ~ he moved up the ladder of Tamil socictJ
till he reached the summit. But something was ~ing from Im
life which he eagerly craved - recognition as a man of learnil18
and acceptance as an equal ampng intellectuals•. It should be
mentioned here that Karunanidhi, writer and leader of the
Opposition, had received a doctorate yeais earlier.
His 27,000 fan dubs with a membership of 1.5 million
provided an important bridge between the actor and the politi-
cian. These fan clubs became the party units when MGR broke
.away (01111 the DMK and formed the Anna Dravida Munneba
Kazhagam (ADMK).•An analysis of the composition of the fan
dubs showed that the bulk of the 111e111bership came from the
non-prof~ional classes and that Harijans and Vanniyas formed
the largest section. 73.4 per cent earned I~ than Rs. 4-00 per
.month and 56.7 per cent•~ than Rs. 300. A large number among
the latter were daily wage earners, and had a low literacy level
- 76~6 per cent of MGR fan dub members had dropped out of
education between the grades of 3 and r•
Many would go without meals for days to buy a ticket on the
black market for the opening day. A Youth Front launched by
MGR in 1982 was likened by some journalists to stonn troopers.
Trained in combat skills, this 'private army' was composed of
•lumpen students and the unemployed and the marginally
employed•. Half a million musdemen who fonned the Youth
Front would carry out the leader's orders without question.
■when three civil liberties organi1-ations in Tamil Nadu jointly
sponsored a national enquiry into the killing of 20 Harijans and
agricultural workers in North Arcot and Dharampuri di&ricts in
1980, a 300- strong mob attacked the lodge where they were
staying. The mob banged open the doors, destroyed their
hag.gage, beat them up and made sure they had no material to
document•29• MGR i., humelf reported to have said at the
launching of the Youth Front that if the officials tried to put
obstacles in the way of the young, the party wou.l d not remain
silent, sending a chill down the spines of even the police force.
218
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TIie Paint«I Fact of Politu:1
In his efforts to tame the Press with a draconian bill, .MGR

had to beat a retreat, but not before a protracted battle. Qiticiml
of MGR in the ~ was as vociferous as his adulation by the
populace. No wonder the aeaturc of one medium, the cinema,
set out . to muzzle another, the press. His ordinance of 21
~ 1981 came down heavily on •~ly indecent or
scurrilous matter' without defining the parameters of either
offence. 1be police were empowered to take cognizance of
such material, to arrest those suspected prima facie of being
guilty and to keep them in custody. Ironically, the fll'St petition
under the law that came up at the Madras High Court was agaimt
~ i t y in journals allegedly patronized by the Oiief Minister's
own partymen. MGR also ~ued orders prohibiting Government
officials fror11 furnishing information to the Press. 1be returning
officer for a by-election refused to give the Press details of
nominations and withdrawals. The editor, managing· director
and two directors (who were not liable under the Press Regula-
tion Act) of the Opposition paper Etbiroll were arrested .on
January 6, 1982 for reporting that the Central Bureau of Investi-
gation would probe allegations of bribery and corruption against
the then Health Minister in MGR's government. Similar action
was taken agai.mt a newspaper for reporting that five children
had vomited blood after eating a free meal provided by the
government. "The Tamil Nadu Oiief Minister', commented 1be
Statesnian, "does indeed seem to have reason to be wary of an
independent Press. With an estimated 300 deaths in police
custody in recent years, the state is fast acquiring a particularly
unflattering reputation". It went on to say that Tamil Nadu was
'the only state which was called upon by the Supreme Court to
. answer charges of having tried to wreck the nervous system of
Naxalite prisoners". In the face of mounting criticism .of his
draconian law, and the resignation ..of the journalists from a
committee to ~ine it, MGR fll'St refused to repeal it but soon
had to eat his words, pledging its annulment on July 18, 1983,
nearly two years after its promulgation.
Repression extended beyond the Pre~ to all forms of dissent.
Signatories to a petition complained of having been charged with
219
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THE PAINTED FACE
sedition even for seeking ~ i o n to hold meetings or agitat-

ing for minimum wages. 'Anyone organizing the rural poor or
talking about collective bargaining is a lefti& in its (the Tamil
Nadu government's ) vocabulary. And a le~ is an extremist
and an extremist is a Naulite to be 'dealt with suitably'. The
premises of Sldlls, a cultural organization, were searched without
warrant and without the presence of two independent witnesses
as required by law. The police were said to have misbehaved
•
with one of its office bearers, Cllandralekha, a well-known
Bharatanatyam dancer. Skills sued the government in the High
Court and won.
But the Godmen of the cinema, accustomed to adoring
applause, are as impatient of the Courts as they are of the Press.
On April 27, 1983, judges of the Madras High Court 'unanimously
expressed concern over police surveillance of their movements
and activities". V.M. Tarkunde, an eminent jurist, had been
ruthlessly beaten up a few months before as he led a peaceful
procession of about 40 members of the People's Union for Civil
Liberties (PUC.) in Madurai in protest against police atrocities in
the state. Justice V. Ramaswami caught a CID agent tailing him
and his family; the agent confessed that he had been instructed
to keep an eye on the judge. Justice Sadasivam, who had
investigated charges of corruption against the government and
was now probing the 'spirits scandal', received phone calls
threatening his life. While government officials denied any link
between judgements passed against them and the attack on the
judiciary, the Press thought otherwise. "The current controversy
does seem to have its roots in a series of recent judicial
pronouncements by the Madras High Court which have embar-
asscd the State Government"'°.
MGR hi~elf gave the game away by making attacks on the
judiciary. "Courts in Tamil Nadu", he moaned, "are giving a
stepmotherly treatment to the State Government.... It is the law .
which speaks in the court and not comcience". That last sentence
befits a film star used to playing the dergooder, the man of
Original from
The Pain11td Fact of Politics
conscience who drew his gun at the drop of a hat to satmy his
conscience which was .independent of the law. In virtually all of
India's popular cinema - not only the Tamil - the heroes see the
law as a hindrance to their supemuman ability to dispense instant
justice. And true always to his fervent Tamil nationalism, MGR
pronounced against the practice of appointing judges on an
all-India basis: "We are not in favour of a non-Tamil speaking
judge to be appointed as ChiefJustice of our High Court•.
That the MGR charisma lingered through his prolonged illness
and survives his death underscores the power of the illusion he
created. Iris ghost made its presence felt in the Tamil Nadu
elections of 1989, with both his wife Janaki and his one-time
~eroineJayalalitha claiming his legacy and invoking his memory.·
VIII
•
A 16th century astrologer in a hamlet in Andhra Pradcsh is

said to have made some startling predictions about the future of
India in his book, Kalagyanam (Knowledge of lune). Some
examples for the 20th century: •A bania (merchant) will bring
freedom to the country", and •A widow will rule India•. Mahatma
Gandhi did come from a 11aerdlant community. Indira Gandhi,
India's Prime Minister (from 1966-1984 except for an interlude
of three years) was indeed a widow.
Early in 1982, the supel'$tal' of Telugu fihm was asked to play
the role of this astrologer, Veera Brahmendra Swami, in a film
about him. He was given the book of predictions to read, in
preparation to playing the role of its author. Poring over it,
superstar N.T. Rama Rao came acr~ a line predicting .that, .
around that period, •a man with a painted face will rule Andhra•.
He sat up and exclaimed: 'But that's me!' Within a few weeks,
he had formed a party, TelUBU Desam (felugu Country), named
after the language of the state, and after nine months of impired
.campaigning, defeated Indira Gandhi's long-ensconced party in,
221
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THE P.AIN/1!D FACE
~ state elections, becoming the second film star Olief Minister

ofa state in India'1 •
In deciding that the prediction was about him, N.T. Rama Rao
was not being vain, but factual. At age 59, the foremost film
actor of Andhra Pradesh carried a big load of paint on his face,
tramforrning his dark skin into a glowing pink that contrasted
vivi<lly with jet black eyebrows and bright lipstick. Since he
mainly played roles of gods or god-like 1nen, the paint was a
must, for all gods, with the exception of Kmhna and (in the
south) Rama, are supposed to have been Caucasian in the
fairness of their skin. The Indian anthropomorphic pantheon
came into being within some 1,500 years or more of the coming
of the Aryans and some 300 years after Alexander's invasion.
The time was ripe for a film actor with a god-image to take
over the affairs of state. Frequent changes of Otief Minister,
dictated by New Delhi, had caused deep resentment, compound-
ing the problem., of corruption and maladmin~ration, and
highly inccming a proud people who had played an imperious
role in ancient and medieval India. The abrupt dismi§al of
Anjayya incensed all Andhra despite a lack of faith in his
efficiency. According to many political commentators, the Otief
Ministers were chosen, not for their regional following, but for
their loyalty to Delhi. A.a one local wag quipped, •Mrs Gandhi
changes Andhra's Otief Minister as frequently as her saree•.
The main NfR film playing in Andhra's theatres through 1982
was BobbUI Pull O'he nger of Bobbili). The fdm'.s story is of a
much-decorated Indian Army officer who is turped into a
deserter and an outlaw by the machinations of his villainous
father. He escapes frorn prison, fonns his own band of followers,
rounds up the judge and the police officers in a cave, and treats
them to a homily on the evils of modem society and on the
nature of true justice. "Whenever virtue is on the decline•, he
tells them in stentorian tones, ■i appear on earth to rescue the
good and punish the bad•. The words had been spoken by
Kmhna in the Gita when he was persuading the reluctant Arjuna
222
Original from
n,~ Paillt«J Fa« ofPolitic,
to fight against his enemies. The mm heralded NTR wherever he

went, and played an important role in bringing about his victory
in the elections.
The audience in the cinema not only cheered loudiy but threw
confetti on the screen. The ra8$ed urchin., in the front rows
sccmcd to carry an inexhaustible supply in their pockets. The
theatre I went to was so small, decrepit and tucked away in the
heart of a slum miles from the nearest town that it took hows to
fmd it. Once found, it proved to be empty inside and besieged
by a aowd outside, waiting patiently all day for the power failure
to end Evening came, but the electricity did not. One had to
go back the next day to contend with ticket holders of both days.
Finally the manager arranged for us to see the fdm standing in
the projection cabin. All around, the buildhig bore the signs of
the recent elections. The initials NTR still remained stencilled
on urinal walls; torn 'Vote for NTR' posters flapped in the wind.
The filql released on NTR's birthday after his accession to the
Chief Minacrship was, as mentioned before, Cbandasasandu
(The Dictator). It opened in 90 theatres in 50 towns of Andhra
Pradesh, spinning money for its makers and boosting the image
of the just-elected leader. In the ftlm, the dictatorial feudal lord
drives out his saer for marrying a left-wing leader. Her son Raja,
also played by NTR, joins the workers in their struggle agaimt
the dictatorial landlord. This fdm, said NTR, •shows my true
character as a strong-willed and just man•. It could well be said
that playing the two roles, NTR's two selves, one dictatorial and
oppressive, the other identifying_with the common man and
benignly anxious to relieve his lot, are shown locked in a struggle
for ascendancy. His political actiom as Chief Minister gave
enough proof, as we shall presently see, of both these conflicting
streaks in his character. In fact, at the time of the dubbing of the
film, NTR was already Chief Minister and was thus actually living
a brief double life.
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11lE PA/NIED FACE
IX
It became evident as he aswmed office that the Olief Minister
had a simple and strong seme of ~ion. At this point his
sincerity was never in doubt,. even to his worst enemies. It was
evident when he campaigned for nine- months across his large
state, often following or preceding Mrs Gandhi. People saw in
him the God they had seen in 262 ftlrm. In most of these he had
played supermen - the gods and their incarnations. For decades
they had flocked to see him and bow to him, and now they were
doing so again. Riding a ·1940 Chevrolet turned into a caravan
with a platform and a public address system on top, the god of
cinema had · his state's 275,000 square kilometres
to be greeted with rousing receptions everywhere. The members
of his 600 fan clubs served as his emissaries, and people came
to his meetings in hordes. "He would begin his day at 7 a .m .
and end at 2 a.m. the next morning", said his biographer
Venkatanarayan. "During the.last 19 days of the campaign, the
travelling became a round-the-clock affair. He carried just two
pairs of khaki trousers and fullsleeved bush shirts, bread, butter,
honey, lemon juice and soda. Inside the van, he would sit in an
aircraft type seat, surrounded by garlands collected at the
meetings and boxes containing cassettes of his speeches to be
distributed to party workers".
As soon as the driver alerted him to an approaching crowd,
he would climb through a hatch onto the roof and speak to the
thousands who ran towards the NfR 'chariot' as soon as they
heard it coming. In the early hours of the morning, the caravan
would stop wherever it was. After three hours of sleep, NfR
would wake up, sit by the roadside or near a well, shave, bathe,
wash his clothes, eat out of a leaf held in his hand and then carry
ori again. On the red-letter day, a record number of 21,496,754
voters exercised their franchise, of whom 9,623,361 voted for
NfR's Telugu Desam party, giving it 199 seats in the legislature
of 286. And thus the cinema swept to power in one of India's
largest and most backward states, weighed down with poverty
224
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TIit Pai111«1 Fae, ofPolitics
and illiteracy. As the large, handsome Olicf Minisicr sa~ straight

on a big chair in his olftCC at six in the morning, ~ in the
saffron robes of a religious mendicant, an earring dangling from
hi.1 left ear (as prescribed by hi.1 astrologer), it was im~ible
not to re111cmber the lines from the Gita in hi.1 recent film, about
God appearing on earth •to rescue the good and punwh the evil•.
Asked about his policies as Chief Minister in a 1983 inteaview,
NTR said: "You have seen the film (Bobbili Puli ). There is a man
'w ho always sides with the wronged sectiom of the people. So
naturally there is sympathy for the hero. That is the style of role
I perfonn. So that people expect good things to .come of my
service to them•.
If any leader could ever be the total opposite of Jawaharlal
Nehru, it is Nandamuru Taraka Rama Rao. He is the son of a
fanner, born on May 28, 1923 in the small village of Nimakuru,
then inhabited by less then 500 people. The village had no
school of its own; a teacher would walk five kilometres to take
classes in a shed. Few people in those days had money with
which to pay the teacher. Says Rama Rao, •If I dose my eyes,. I
can see my master coming to our village, helping the villagers
and teaching us the whole day and walking back to his place,
with vegetables in one hand, a tumbler of buttennilk in the other
and a sack or two of rice on his head. His farmer-father was
determined that Rama Rao should be properly educated, unlike
himself and other fanners of the day. If it rained, the father would
carry his son to school on his shoulders along the muddy paths
through the rice fiel&, and once there, wash his feet and wipe
them and leave · him in the care of the venerable teacher.
Eventually, he sent the boy to college. Here Rama Rao caught ·
the eye of his Telugu professor, who was a playwright. The
handsome young man was cajoled into playing the role of tne
heroine, there being no question of girls acting with boys in
those days. Rama Rao was ready to go on stage when the
professor arrived in the green room and ordered him to shave.
his moustache. The future superstar of Telugu cinema politely
but finnly ~lined to re111ove what he called "the symbol of
manhood•. In a frantic last-minute compromise, Rama Rao went
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711£ PAINTED FACE
.
on with his moustache hidden under a pile of make-up. He
was an instant s u ~ and earned the nickname •Meesala
Nangamma• (moustachioed Nangamma).
At 20, Rama Rao married Basavanna Taraka, who was to be
the mother of his seven sons and four daughters. He recalls
that marriage so absorbed him that he twice failed in his
examinations. Finally he passed his B.A. and found a govern-
ment job after a long wait, but gave it up to get into ftlms.
On his fust day's shooting Rama Rao played a police officer
asked to pu~h a group of anti-government demonstrators. •IJke
a bull in a china shop, Rama Rao ran after the volunteers for
about 500 yards without a break and beyond the gates of the
studio. His director's. protestations that he was moving out of the
camera, and that he shouldn't beat the poor extras so hard, fell
on deaf ears•. Later he learnt to stay within camera range, but
never to pretend to fight. The musdemen in fight scenes in his
later films . allege that he would pummel them with all his might.
Asked why they did not hit ·b ack instead of taking it from him,
one of them said: "Sir, it's an honour to be beaten up by NTR".
And no wonder, because he was not only strong and
handsome as a god, but god-like in his wealth. Before turning
to politics he is said to have charged fees of 20 lakh (two million)
rupees per film, acting in several films at the same time, in two
or three shifts per day. In the five years preceding his Chief
Ministership, most of his ftlms yielded fantastic returm. Some of
them - Vetagada, Kondaveeti Simbam, Bobbili Puli, Sardar
Paparayudu and ]~lice Cbowdbary - were reported to have
made crores (tens of millions) of rupees. K. Rameshwara Rao,
director of several of NTR's films since 1953, said: "Telugu films
may never come across another artiste like NTR, so fully involved
and dedicated to the role he portrayed...for example, in Pandava
Vanavasa (the Pandavas in exile in the forest), a story from the
Mahabbarata, he had to play Bhima...he refused to use the light
mace made for him. Instead, he made a real heavy mace for
himself which was difficult to lift even with two hands. He
struggled with the heavy mace, and in the process, he really
appeared like Bhima. He identified with that role totally•.
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Tlw Pailtled Fa« qf Politia
Appropriately enough for his destined role, N.T. Rama Rao

began his career in · 1949 with the fwn Mam, Desam(Our
C.Ountry), the film in which he was to beat up the extras on the
first day's shooting, as recounted earlier. His enthusiasm paid
off. In the next film he was elevated from police Sub-Inspector
to hero. Nagi Reddy and Olakrapani hired him for their newly
founded Vikaya Productions. Here he worked in a series of hits
such as Sbanltar, Pelll Cbesicbuda and others of which Pata/a
Bbalravi, a .folk tale directed by K.U. Reddy, was the real
blockbuster and catapulted N.T. Rama Rao to stardom. Although
S.U. Rama ran away with the acting honours, NTR's image as the
~viour of darmels in d ~ was finnly established. As the ·
gardener Ramadu, he saved the king's daughter and was of
course eventually married to her. This image, obviously popular
although lacking in serious drama, of the darling youth who
crossed the shores and subdued the demons, led to scores of
Ramadu ftlrm.
It was in the mythological f ~ that NfR found his metier. In
1957 he made Mayabazar under director K.V Reddy and went
on to act the main roles in Bblsbma (from the Mababbarata),
Daltshaayagnam (a Puranic tale of'Shiva) in 1962, then /.avakusa
(the story of Lav and Kusha, Rama's two sons in the Ramayana),
Krisbna,junayuddbam and others drawn from the epics and the
Puranas. Nartansbala showed Arjuna, the Pandava warrior of
the Mababbarata, in exile. During the year the Pandavas had
to remain incognito at King Virata's court, the great warrior had
to don a woman's garb and teach dancing to the princesses at
court. In playing this double role, NfR summoned up all his
acting prow~ and made a success of it.
~t it was in his own mythologicals that NfR began to
introduce an ideological twist. He made sure of being seen as
the saviour; even when he played a traditional villain such as
Ravana (whose effigy ~ burnt as the image of evil during
Ramlila celebrations in India's Hindi-speaking belt), the charac- .
ter took on a noble aspect. M~t of these films demanded not
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THE PAINTED FACE
only the grand gesture of folk melodrama but its lung-power.

"Our films are more audible than visible", said one commentator.
"Sardar Paparayudu has so much sound packed that lit] is
enough for half-a-dozen fdnu"sz. In the story, the villain makes.
adulterated milk powder that kills schoolchildren, but his daugh-
ter falls for the·good man - played, of course, by N.T. Rama Rao.
Make-up on N.T. Rama Rao sometimes looks like the tattooing
on some primitive tribes 95• Whatever the make-up or the cos-
tume and whether the fdm was mythological or social or
historical, NTR was invariably on the side of right. In real life, he
maintained the image of Mr. Clean, doing without cigarettes or
drink or any other common vice. However, the ascent of the
NTR image towards all-India leadership soon came to a halt and
began, indeed, to decline. One incident after another showed
him to be impulsive and lacking in foresight, fast eroding his
credibility as a national leader.
X
A bull in a china shop, that is how some .people think of NTR
in politics. He tried hard to fulfd his campaign promises · - fast.
He never had the time for commissiom and expert committees
and even, according to some commentators, comultation with
cabinet colleagues. From the beginning, he had been impatient
with the democratic process in the running, if not the election,
of government. On. a numb~ of issues, he had to backtrack and
whittle down impetuous promises, sometimes creating new
problenu in the process. Thus his free lunch programme for all
school children had to be pruned continually until it was reduced
to children from the low caste and backward ,communities. The
result was a peculiar caste and community-based discrimination
dividing the children in school. Impulsively, he reduced the
retirement age for government employees from 58 to 55, without
notice, two months before the end of the fiscal year, causing
untold problenu to those who had to retire without preparation,
· 22.s
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711~ Pointm F~ o/Polllies
and to those who .remained to ~ the government budget

fOf' praentation to the legislature. More ·than half the govem-
nlC.lll's 600,000 employees went on strike.
"Wages of populm11• was a headline in comment when the
Supreme Court ofIndia directed the Andhra Pradesh government
to mmtate hundreds of its retired employecs34. Officers hurriedly
promoted in the Dk!antlmc bad to be hurricdly dcn1oted to their
_former positions. Aa in the case of the midday meal, somebody
had ·forgotten to do his homewotk. over the years, the Chief
Mumter's relationship with ha administration soured so much
that. fmt his Qiicf Secretary B.N.. Raman. was thrown out for
oppomll8 some. of the Chief Mini.,ter's repressive measures
against the striking junior ofiCCJS'S, then a few senior administra-
tors fQllowcd suit and by 1986, 20 of than were seeking tramfer
out of the state".
· Othes: ·evidence of the actor-politician's Cbandasasanadu
characteristics surfaced with widespread criticim1 of police bru-
tality in his state. JJke the hero of·Bobbili Pu/~ the policemen
were- nlCtlng out imtant justice. When the Court ordered the
exhumation of the grave of a tribal who was said to have died
because .o f police torture, it could not be found; apparently it
had been removed and the decea$ed's brother demanded the
arraignment of the police for destroying· evidence'7. The list of
complaints made by the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Commit-
tee (AP(l.C) against NTR's aue,npt to curb .people's rights is very
long and included" alleged 'encount~ killing' and 24 police
lock-up deatlw". . .
Like his neighbouring actor-politician MGR, N.T. Rama Rao
launched an attack on the Press by legislating against it and like
him, had to withdraw the 'draconian' bill. He blamed.on his aides
his flagrant self-contradictiQm and his extravagant declarations
of welfare measures, hastilywiihdrawn when they proved to be
too grandiose. When· the Press ·reported these faithfully it at-
tracted his ire. So did the Press Council for passing strictures
against ha minmry for its harsh treatment of reporters~. Besides,
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11/EPAINIBDFACE
the Press had widely reported illegal tramactiom in the at-

tempted conversion of Rama Rao's Ramakrishna Studio in
Hyderabad to two large cinema theatres'•, as also his academic
jihad for the replacement of university Vice-Chancellors by men
of his choice who were not always academically distinguished_.
With his flair for the dramatic on the other hand, he has always
been grist to the ·journalists' mill - h~ earring dangling from one
ear, his saffron robes topped by religious leader Vivekananda's
style of turban and his general air of flamboyance. •He sits like
a Duryodhana, walks like a Rama and talks like a Krishna•, said
a journal~ well before NTR's elevation to Chief Ministership.
Faced with the need for funm for electioneering in local self-
government polls, NTR announced h~ decision early in 1987 to
act in films again to raise money. He would play, he said, the
role of Vishwamitra, the mythological warrior-saint and teacher
of Rama knowri as much for his bad temper as for his penances,
in a film which he would himself direct. •significantly■, o~ed
one newspaper, •the Olicf Mimtcr has decided to delegate• all
party powers to h~ son-in-law and Secretary of the party during
h~ prolonged absence froa11 the state capital•.a.
"NTR's dec~ion to act in fahm, said another, •is only an
exercise to refurbish his image and divert the attention of the
people from the problem, confronting the state••s.
XI
Indeed, catapulted to the apex of their state administratiom,
both Chief Ministers must have felt the l<>M of the lever that had
landed them there. A nagging fear of what absence from the
cinema would do to them may have played on their minds, for
both MGR and NfR at nearly the same stage in their political
leadership sought to get back into fahm. MGR's reason was his
large backlog of income tax; he sought leave from h~ job to
make a couple of fahm so as to earn enough to pay h~ taxes.
The muburat (auspicious opening of the shooting) was in fact
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TM Paiutl Face qf Politic1
held for the film Vidamatten O shall not leave you), in the
presence of the entire Tamil Nadu cabinet with the exception of
two minsers who were not in town, with the Chief Minser
driving two kilometres of the approach to the studio appropri-
ately festooned and overhung with banners. The subject of the
film was said_to be politicaUy loaded agailw the Opposition, led
by emwhile screenwriter Karunanidhi. The girl to play agailw
the 64-year old Chief Minser was Sangeeta, age 2~.
In the event MGR did not follow up his inteqtion. How he
met hi.1 arrears,·or to what extent, re11iains shrouded in mystery.
But the reasoning was suspect anyway; new fihm would bring
in money, but they would generate fresh income tax dues. If
the same logic had to be followed he would have to keep going
back to filmmaking il.erely to postpo~e catching up finally with
the taxman's demands. So a more real, behind-the-dark-glasses
explanation would be the desire to swim with the sharks in the
seas again, to feel the excitement and the refreshing sense of
charismatic power renewing his vitality before returning to the
toils of politics. Significantly, thi.1 was just before his fall from
power.
N.T. Rama Rao expressed the same desire, for other reasons
- "to divert the attention of the people from the problems
confronting the state•~, according to a journalist; but according
to him, his object was to raise resources to meet his party's
expenses in the local dection.1. The role he announced as his
choice was intriguingly remini.1cent of Veera Brabmendra
Swam~ in which he had appeared in the title role just before
becoming Chief Minser, perhaps indicating a secret desire to
take up where he had left off; the exhilaration of charisma, the
savouring of another kind of power once more, in an arena
where he was in absolute control. Finally, in 1988, unlike his
peer in Tamil Nadu, NI'R followed up on his announced
intention and began the shooting of V-,sbwamitm. The sole
difference with MGR was that he did not seek the permission of
the State Assembly. The film proved to be a big flop.
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111.E PAINTED FACE
XII
Singanellu Puttaswamaiah Muthurai, alias Raj Kumar, is to

Kamataka what MGR or NTR are to their own states. Hero of
187 fllim in 30 years, ~ record is not as impressi_v e as of Pre.11
Nazir in Kerala with his Guinness Book record of over 600 fllim.
But, as his fans tirelessly point out, he has acted only in films
in his own language, Kannada, unlike his Keralite compatriot.
Raj Kumar has all the characteristics of a southern superstar
capable of taking over the state. Handsome despite a long nose
(nicknamed naltasum or demon-n~ by some), his present-
day fans have never seen him smoke or drink or •do anything a
pure man is not supposed to do•. The majority of the fdrm in
which he has played are mythologicals or tJlrm about famous
saints like Kanakadasa, Kabir, Tukaram, Gora Kumbhara- and
Harishchandra and grand historical figures such as
Krishnadevaraya and Kanteerava. His very fU"St fdm was the
mythological Bedam Kannappa (1954). •Every punchline of
dialogue delivered by him on the Kannada screen is accompa-
nied by the kind of frenzied whistling that has to be heard to be
believed. Raj Kumar can speak or do no wrong in the ears and
eyes of his fans. He has fan clubs and fan associations all over
the state ofKamataka•.
Raj Kumar can also lay claim to a dictatorial status in and out
of the ftlm industry. He is producer, distributor, exhibitor and
actor rolled into one, able to do what he likes; among the masses
. he has millions of fans organized into clubs that do his bidding
or what they consider to be the duty of the followers of their
guni. With the full knowledge of his power, he refuses to align
hirmelf with any existing political party.
One of the points of pride for his fans is that their mentor not
only has not acted in a fdm in any language other than Kannada,
but that he does not speak any other language. In Bangalore,
capital city of Karnataka, the language issue is complicated by
the fact that the majority of the population is Tamil. As always,
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The Pain#tl Foce Qf Politic,
the frustrations of the man on the street seek a scapegoat in the

outsider; inevitably, too, the focus of th~ search for an object of
hate lies here in language. As the nothing-but-Kannada star, Raj
Kumar ~ the natural hero of this hatred. He became the
spearhead of the movement linked to the Gokak Committee
Report that gave sole ftrst-language status to Kannada. •we will
see that you step down•, thundered Raj Kumar's close associate
Dwarakesh, in a public warning to the then Chief Minister Gundu
Rao, •and Raj Kumar becomes Chief Minister to· implement the
Report•. Raj Kumar hirmelf urged the huge meeting. 1 1.et• our •
Jives go, but let the language live".

When h~ pronounceancnts demanding that every inhabitant
of Karnataka, regardless of their original home, must learn
Kannada sparked riots, Raj Kumar realized to h~ horror that he
could not control the violence, which had a life of its own. He
hurriedly retracted ·and overtly withdrew from politics. Under
the increasingly succcs.vul mediation of the then Chief Minister
Ramakrishna Hegde, he had to lie low. But whether he has given
up h~ political ambitions, and ~ waiting in the wings for his cue,
~ difficult to say. H~ best role, as he hilmelf said, is yet to come;
he may yet be 'Chief Minister by public demand•.
But the situation in Karnataka is ~tinct from MGR and NTR
land in certain ways. Firstly, there is a strong awareness of the
modern western world that has entered the body of tradition in
the novels ofR.K. Narayan and U.R. Ananthamurthy, the theatre
of B.V. Karanth and Girish Kamad - and, more significantly, in
the 'New Cinema'. Qitic~m of the superstitious aspects of
tradition is clearly voiced in Panabhi Rama Reddy's Samskara,
Girish Kasarabhalli's Gbatasbraddba, Prema Karanth's Phani-
yamma and many other outstanding ftlrm honoured in India and
abroad. For the forward sections of Kamataka's middle cl~,
therefore, there exists a superior cultural leadership to what Raj
Kumar can offer. Like Kerala, Kamataka may for that reason fail
to be a happy political hunting ground for the aspiring superstar.
The propitious conditions for dictatorship that Annadorai so
shrewdly recognised in Tamil Nadu are not as plentifully avail-
able in Karnataka as a star-politician would seem to require.
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11IE PAINTED FACE
XIII
The fundamental difference between the two star-Chief Min-
isters and other star-politicians of India lies in the fact that in the
case of the former, the fihm the~lves created the politics and
the politicians; the latter are merely film stars who decided to
move into politics or were persuaded to do so as vote catchers.
In the case of Amitabh Bachchan, for instance, the films which
made his reputation, instead of helping him now, put him on
the defensive. At the elections in Allahabad (his hometown) after
the ~ination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, Amitabh's astute
opponent Bahuguna, a politician of many years' standing, put
up ~ters showing Amitabh in violent action and asked: •Is this
the man you want to vote for?" The· fact that Amitabh won the
election may have been merely a part of the landslide victory of
Rajiv Gandhi's party, carried on the double wave of sympathy
for his dead mother and enthusiasm for her young son, the
reluctant debutant. The fact that alm~t anyone the party chose
won the elections makes the worth of the film star component
high,ly suspect.
Dismissing the effect of his violent image in films, Amitabh
said, "People don't go out and be aggressive because they have
seen an action film. They always distinguish between real life
and what they see on the screen•45• We have seen in the case of
MGR that they do not.
Whereas MGR and NTR were projecting the 'saviour' image
from the film screen on to real life without disjunction, Amitabh,
dressed in flowing white, signifying purity and simplicity and
mouthing patriotic sentiments in favour of the Constitution and
its upholders, presented an inescapable contradiction between
his screen image derived from a long series of falms, and the
political image he was seeking to project through a newly
accquired style of dress and content of speech. •My own son
expects me to fight tigers•46, he obseived, with a clearer under-
standing of the problem than his formal utterances indicated. As
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The Painud Faff<( Politics
a Congress(I) Member of Parliament he was on the side of the

min~ers and the law cnforcas; but at the end of Inquilab, made
after he was elected, he guns down a row of corrupt, inefficient
min~ers. Defending his violence ~ Mard to an interviewer
<-People feel that as an MP you should not have indulged in such
blatant acts ofviolence•), he said: "I wasn't representing Amitabh
Bachchan, Member of Parliament, in Mard. It was a typical
Manmohan Desai film, not to be taken serious!~.
. Obviously, it is difficult for the hero and his audience to live
with such a contradiction. After all, if Bachchan is taken seriously
it is only because he is known through his fahm; otherwise he
would not have been nominated for the elections. It is im~ible
to be known tbrougb one's films without being known/or them.
As the history of MGR and NTR shows, popular films have to be
talcen seriously. It is equally obvious from the MGR-NTR expe-
riehce:that people do not always distinguish •between real life
and what they see on the saeen11 (see Bachchan quote above).
This is especially so when .their films have a consistent pattern
to them - the saviour image in the case of MGR and NTR, who
managed to avoid being specifically known for their violence.
The contradiction between the Bachchan image in politics
and in films proved hard to overcome. When Amitabh tried to
improve the fortunes of his party in the.elections in Assam (after
the Assam Accord of 1985 signed by Rajiv Gandhi), he was
hooted at and stoned. The fact that he was enormously popular
in Assam as a film star did not help him as a politician - perhaps
because he was pc:>Sing an avuncular image totally contradictory
to the embodiment of primeval violence his ftlrm had built up
and therefore not credible for the political purpose.
The political debut of the Hindi cinema's foremost all-India
star was in some ways similar to the bandit Malkhan Singh's
surrender to the police. Addressing a public meeting, the bandit
claimed that he •had never allowed injustice in his area and that
he had taken up anm to serve society••. Despite his success
with character acting in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand when he
fll'Sl attracted real attention, then with the romantic role in Kabbie
Kabbie, and comedy in Cbuplflle Cbupke, Amitabh really came
235
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THE PAINTED FACE
into his own with ftlm., like Trlsbul, Deewar,_Zanjeer, Ada/at and
Kala Patbar. In these be, like MGR and NTR, is the man who
has no patience with the legal p ~ and dispenses instant
justice. In fact; where there is a ~ibility of the police redressing
a wrong, he dodges the law enforcer in order to hand out justice
hirmelf. Thus in Kala Patbarhe deliberately misguides the police
at the time when they are about to arrest the villain. In 7.anjeer
he reftises to tell the police the identity of the man who had tried
to kill him; in Adalat he will not tell them the name of the man
who has raped his sister - in order to wreak . his personal
vengeance, which is to be preferred to the law's impersonal
justice.
XIV
The C0111parison of Amitabh Bachchan with the two star Chief
Ministers merits further pursuit, but · before we do so, it is
necessary to survey the extraordinary career of the nation's
screen hero (popular even in MGR-NTR territory) and to know
the nature of the image his ft.hm created over more than a decade.
The fifties had belonged to Guru Dutt and Raj Kapoor. One
was the direct inheritor of the Debdas tradition generated by P .C.
Barua in (double-version) fdrm in Bengali and Hindi - of the
hero unable to fight for his cause, taking refuge in drink under
the wings of a golden-hearted prostitute and finally being
withered by tubercul~is. The poet .of Pyaasa is less passive th:l_!l
his mentor but shares his self-pity, the lyrical expression of which
finally b ~ him the success he sulkingly despises.,. Barua had
always looked as though he had tubercul~is; Guru Dutt was
built in more generous proportions and ·did not conform to the
conventional portrait of the artist as a weak man. He was more
of the ordinary man who was a poet but did not look like one.
The novel Debdas had been written by Saratchandra Chattopadh-
yay at the age of 17; the artist of Pyaasa or Kaagaz Ka Pbools
rejection of the world as an evil that disturbed his d r ~
236
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TM Painwd Fa« of Politics
resembled in these works, beyond Debdas, some of the early

poetry
.
of Jibanananda
.
Das in lines such as these:
I have aeen the aun red in the morning sky
Order me to lland up and meet the world face to faoe,
.And in response my heart baa filled with aoaow, hatred and blind
rage; . .
Under the attack of that sun, the earth squeals
With the vok:e of bJIIJons of skewered pip;
Some feativity!
I have tried to drowr,, d,at IUll
In the unreJentJng clarkneas of my heart
And to go to sleep again,
To mmerse myaelf eternally in the vaginal depchs of darlmeu,
To merge into it, like death itaelf
My soul yearns for this endless, dark sleep;
Why awaken me?
- n,.na,,nessSO
In other words, Guru Dutt, although closer in his naivete to

17-year-old Saratchandra than to the more complexJibanananda
Das, was not what the popular cinema, despite the success of
some of his ftlms, would call a 'hero'. His rejection of the world
was not a rejection of Indian society of the post-Independence
period as such.
Raj Kapoor, the second great figure of the fifties, also repre-
sented the ordinary man, in this case goodlooking, naive and
attractive to the girls, who pl~yed the slightly Chaplinesque
underdog with sincerity but also with ample flourish.
. In the anti-heroic protest of both these heroes against the
ways of society and the.decline of values, there was hope that
they would be heard by society and that something would be
done. Newly independent India was lashed by problems but was
buoyed by hope of deliverance through a kind of Fabian
sociali.ffll that Raj Kapoor in particular reflected. I am poor, so
what? I have a song in my heart and a future ahead - this was
the keynote of his carefree approach to life and love. It was a
kind of street translation of Nehru's broadly humapist sociali.ffll.
There was no trace of male macho in either Kapoor or Dutt.
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THB PAINTED F.4.CB
The sbta wa-e the cor1 of thi., hero in a more

romantic if less socialistic mould in Rajesh Khanna, and male
macho in . For Khanna, love was not a protest
agaJnst poverty or injustice but basically an aesthetic passlon for
beauty untainted by mmdemamhip and never divorced from
basic goodness of the heart. Dharmendra's macho, too, was
~ u t malevolence; he was •a sort of male Zeenat Aman who
only had to bare his hairy chest to have the women go gaga-s1•.
Hi., body was rugged but his face benign. Hi., musculature did
not di.tince him from the middle dass aura about him. Both
Khanna and men exuded a mood of hope that belonged
to India of the Nehru period, of Lal Bahadur Shastri (which saw
India's second victory over Pakistan in a war waged by the latter)
and the early years of Mn. Indira Gandhi, climaxed by the
liberation of Bangladesh.
The seventies saw the e1,11Crgence of cynici.ml on a large scale.
The. pre-Independence generation had grown old and 'with it,
the idealmn of the struggle against the BritWl was dying. Even
the patriots of old had grown 00i1upt; they had given a lot, now .
they wanted their share of the pie, and if p~ible a bit more.
The country was richer but the people poorerl The ,mask had
fallen off the slogan-mouthing politician. People had seen the
face of greed in th0.1C who were to deliver them from theif .
. miseries. Comumer goods production had proliferated; shop
windows were full of goods for the burgeoning rich. The majority
of.urban people, leave alone the rural, could not afford such
goods by honest means. The thought a~e that nobody was
going to give you what you did not grab. To many, therefore,
h~ty began to scan the virtue of fools. The new times needed
a cynical, violent hero, less bothered with love and romance and
more with grabbing money and power with his bare hands. It
found him in Amitabh Bachchan. .
The seventies no longer adored woman, but asserted openly
the right to treat them as chattel,. In many parts of the country,
women were molested, raped and burnt for dowry with greater
impunity than ever before, defying the newspapers which angrily
reported them every day. All thi.1 in spite of a C.Onstitut_i<>n. which
. .· -
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guarantees the equalky of all its dti7ms. Perhaps the Constkution ·
was already being seen by many as a dangerous thing. It had
been framed by a Wcstcrn-educated leadership which had
posuaded the provincials to accept it. Now they were waking
up to the dangers of secularmn, dciiaocracy and equality whlch
wu making the low castes, the tribals and the woman demand
minhnurn wages and equality before the law. So began the great
feudal backlash in the major part of the country. Along with the
taming of women it included Harijan baiting and the struggle to
perpetuate bonded labour - all better achieved with more
freedom from the ccntr.ll government, the guardian of the
Comtitution. All over the country, a struggle began between the
avant-garde of the P.nglish-knowing middle dass and a large
section of the rest - which included the lumpen, the feudal
landlord, and the illiterate but rich contractors and shopkeepas
in the urban scdor, the battleground of the cinema.
Amitabh's baptism in violence came in 7Anjeer (1975) but
reached mythical heights with Trlsbul (1978), an archetypal
product that mythologised the present,. made miraculous, divine
musde power see,11 to descend froc11 a dead mother in heaven,
enabling the hero to wreak revenge, to deny the call of sexual
love, and to plunge into battle for the family's honow&3.
Powered by mother's divine blessing from the other world,
Amitabh fells a large group of musdemen obviously stronger
than himself, making his prowes., see111 miraculous, akin to the
feats of gods and godmen in mythology. In Deewarthe mother,
the icon of family integrity, formally sides with the honest son
but seact1y pines for the wicked one and possibly loves him
more (for hi., macho?). The two brothers represent the horm of
the d i l ~ of the tb1a haunting the self. They arc the double
· (and arc therefore in some film, played by the same actor), with
the split identity clothed in-aepaclte bodies.
In Sbolay (1975) Amitabh i., the hired non-hero, the gunman
as coldly efficient as a machinc5', unconcerned with the morals
of " situation, with a controlled anger expressed in very few
words, in much stillness, and in sudden eruptions of violent but
precise action. As always, hi., only relationship with a woman
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THE PAINTED FACE
falls outside socially a<.Upted parameters. In Sbolay, where it.

C01nes nearest to 'love', she is a widow. wh~ ret11arriage is
prevented by her suitor's timely death. .
Inevitably enough, the n,c of the mother cult coincides with
an increase in misogyny and male camaraderie. In Deewar, the
night dub girl who loves Bachchan, tells him her name and he
retorts: "What's the use? Girls like you change your name as often
as you change your clothes•. The . Amitabh brand of hero's
attitude to love and romance is best expressed by him as the
bandit Don in the film of the same name (see earlier reference)
•
.
By contrast, in -samadb~ Dhannendra, · hero of the .previous
decade, fights for the hand of the woman he loves and the
wellbeing of his son. In Amar Pre,n, Rajesh Khanna, the other
star of the sixties, sticks to the pure-at-heart prostitute he has
loved all his life in a sentila.ental story by Bibhuti Bhushan
Bandyopadhyay (of the Apu trilogy fame). The seventies, macho
· figure does not go after women; they roll a~ his feet of their own
accord. Popular faJ.rm require romance and Amitabh obliges as
far as he can, which is not very far and usually means· camara-
derie with a woman on the fringes of society- a street performer
in 7.anjeer, a l,,otba dancer in Mukaddar Ka .Sikandar, a cabaret
dancer in Deewar, a re111ote, unattainable widow in Sbolay. In
place of the lady love, there is the mother; she motivates revenge
(as in Trisbul), makes him give his life (as in Deewar), drives
him to crime by her absence (as in Mukaddar Ka Sikandar). She
is the macho man's obsession54• He finds more satisfaction in
camaraderie with 11lell than in dalliance with women (as in
Sbolay, Silsila). In Do Anjaane, where he does get married, he
virtually rejects his wife at the end In Silsila he turns from a love
relationship to the prison of a dead marriage in order to preserve
traditional values. Woman is to be respected only as mother.
Even some of the nwginal women with whom the macho man
strikes up a relationship are surrogate mothers a la the prostitute
in Debdas, the archetypal mother surrogate of Indian cinema.
The attitudes inherent within the series of Amitabh faJ.rm of
the seventies and .eighties are mostly, as we have noted, anti-
Constitutional: take the la~ into your hands because of the law's
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11rt Painted Fact of Politics
inclefemible delays and because there is more satisfaction in

personal revenge; grab what you can, because honesty does not
pay; treat women as chattels because that is what they deserve;
the family is the only valid social unit, the state counts for nought
and since the state has failed, the individual must ad to obtain
justice for the wronged. There is no search here for the means
to change society or its system,, even through violence. Instead
it is the nihilism of the lumpen and the antisocial units and
groups. living outside the organi2:ed working class and waiting
· to grab the opportunity to become the privileged tyrants they
rage against. Time and again the Bachchan figure emerges from
among the oppressed to become the oppressor. The anger is
not of the rebel but of the violence- seeking psyche, no matter
how cool it may appear. The satisfaction of violence is greater
than the purpose of it. "We saw flashes of cold anger in Amit's
early f~•. reminisced Javed of the Salim-Javed team whose
scripts transported Bachchan to his pedestal, "and thought he
was ideal for action f~". It was on their recommendation that
Prakash Mehra gave him the historic lead role in Zanjeerwhich
created a longlasting legend in the box-office.
The appeal of violence for the lumpen is a remarkable trait,
developed as it is by a member of the intellectual and social elite.
Bachchan was educated at Sherwood College, Nainital and later
became an executive with the British fum of Bird & Co., Calcutta.
The son of the famed Hindi poet Harivanshrai Bachchan, he
looked, during Abbas' Saat Hindustani and the years immedi-
ately following it, like a student out of Tagore's Santiniketan in
his white pyjamas and brown kurta. He had found a conduit of
identification with the social dropout, the underworld killer, the
unemployed and unemployable lumpen, whose sole pastime is
the cinema where he can find satisfactions that cannot be his in
real life. He became the symbol of hope, the model of action
for those who feel wronged and denied of opportunities that
they vaguely feel are rightfully theirs, whose talents and abilities
have been ignored by a ruthless, unf~ing world. His illness in
1982 brought out the enormous regard in which he is held by a
vast mass of humanity. Millions of boys and girls prayed for his
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THE PAINTED FACE
well being. Thousands of· people thronged the gates of the

hospital where he lay fighting for his life. Like all his fights, he
won this one too. After his recovery, he had to give repeated
darsbans to the crowds below, like an emperor of old, or a
prime politician of today, ~ g his people that he was alive
and well and would continue to pour his blessings upon them.
It was as if his devotees snatched him from the jaws of death,
making 1982 the year of Amitabh Bachchan. No other f&lm star
in the.world commanded a following as wide and as devoted as
his at the height of his career. It is not the middle class that has
made Bachchan what he is today. It is the plebeians, the lumpen
proletariat, that took him to the pinnacle of success. With all
the popularity he has with the wide-eyed boys and girls from
schools and colleges, if one of his films did not click with the
lumpen, the petty trader, the semi-educated contractor, the entire
social section that has been the traditional breeder and supporter
of fascism, it would be a flop. Trouble arose when the rebel
suddenly changed sides, donned a khadi kurta-pyjama and
elected hi~lf MP, carried along by the mammoth wave of
sympathy-cum-confidence voting after the assassination of Indira
Gandhi. When he later went to Assam to help the CongressO)
campaign he was stoned by an electorate who liked his rebel
fihm, but not his new incarnation as a champion of the estab-
lishment. Few understood how the apostle of violence could
suddenly speak in honeyed tones and advocate the virtues of
official patriotism. When this stance continued for some time,
the Jekyll and Hyde of politics and cinema began to strain his
credibility in both. The contradiction between his cinematic
image and his C.Ongressite socialism in politics was becoming
untenable.
Sbabenshab (1988) broke the link between politics and
cinema in Amitabh's image, pulled in two directions. Its failure
at the box-office more or less coincided with the decision not to
contest in Allahabad. And no wonder, for Sbabensbah re-
inflated the image of the violent Amitabh to bursting point. In
fact, its conformity by day (Amitabh as a police inspector) and
rebellion by night (when the police inspector turns into a one-
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1be Painted Fau ofPolitics
man government) perfectly posed the dilemma of Amitabh's Ille,

tom between politics and cinema. One would have thought he
would es.uy a different kind of role, going back to the benign
figure of Anand or Kabbie Kabbie. But no; perhaps neither he
•
nor his producers would know how to cope with such a change,
how to alter the colour little by little, fwn by fwn, until the blood
was washed clean. Sbaben.sbab turned the police station into a
C011aic stage where the daily farce of law enforcernent is played.
The successful man it set up is the picture of corruption and
ruthless violence against society that the police bolsters up and
the honest press dies in denouncing. The case against the villain,
J.K. (Amrish Puri), is dismissed despite obvious evidence of his
guilt. In the courtroom itself Sbabensbab proceeds to demon-
strate true justice to the corrupt judge. He denounces the dreams
of independent India (azadi ke sapne) he used to nourish in his
heart; •gbatia log desb /,e neta bante bain (rotten people become
leaders of the country)•, he declares, without stopping to think
that people might comtrue that to be a reference to his friend,
then Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. Having tom off his police
insignia in style, and harangued the judge on true justice, he then
proceeds to show how it should be done and kills J .K. with his
usual supernatural strength.
The anger sat well on his face. The horrible violence he
perpetrated sea.ied for real, fully intended, not simulated for
cinema. But the audience was not convinced. Something had
turned sour. Under the angry fwn image lurked the goody-
goody one of the politician. The audience wanted the Jekyll and
I:Iyde game to end. Only when he withdrew from politics and
unified his image once more did the box-office slowly come back
to him. By contrast MGR's image was more consciously and
meticulously planned and executed than Hitler's or Stalin's
. cinematic strategy. Leni Riefenstahl was too talented to be useful
enough to Hitler for any length of time; Stalin had no end of
trouble with geniuses like Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Dovzhenko,
and had no joy out of the mediocre. MGR's directors, on the
other hand, served his every wish faithfully, with the result that
when MGR stood before the electorate, .his victory was a
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11lE PAINTED FACE
foregone conclusion. Indeed, his image was so strong, so

completely consistent, that when anything went wrong in real
life it was the bureaucracy which was blamed, not MGR.
MGR was never seen smoking, drinking or teasing girls in his
fihm; he was, consistently, the savior. His ftlrm always subtly
projected his party ideology; its villain was clearly defined as the
Brahmin north. NTR was identified with the gods of the Hindu
pantheon or the noble characters of the epics. Both of them
used violence but for a socially, morally, and even politically
defined purpose. Violence was not their credo, nor was it, as
with Bachchan, their imtrument of self-satisfaction, transmitting
a sense of vicarious fulfib1ient to the vaguely wronged who
wanted to be in a position to do wrong to others.
xv
It is a moot question whether cinemati_c divinity has a direct
psychological link with dictatorship. Gods have little patience
with the laws of man. DMK atheist MGR became God through
the· exerc~ of power shown to be invincible in his filrm;
God-playing NTR just slipped into Godhood; Amitabh, with his
miraculous muscle power, has a simulated divinity. An MGR or
an NTR or an Arnitabh in power, used to the adulation of the
masses praying at their gaudy temples, must find it difficult to
accept' democratic checks on their actions. Like their followers,
they too confuse myth and reality.
Both MGR and NfR tried to curb the Press, using the
ex--m-aconstitutional power of their millions of fans always at hand
as a dire threat, tried to keep intellectuals under control and
appropriate equality with them through politically awarded
doctorates, and by juggling with university appointments tried
to establish the rule of the loyal mediocrity instead of the
independent meritorious. Would Bachchan be different if he
came to power? It seerm unlikely.
Their followers, too, are as impatient with democracy as the
stars themselves. Ever ready to take the law into their own
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71,e Palnt«l Fau ofPolUics
hands, they question the right of other humans to control their

stars. An MGR fan-mob heckled Kannada film star Manjula for
having slapped MGR in a film even though the script called for
it.
Erik Erikson speaks of the attraction to totalism in those who
fail to graduate from the trauma of puberty and adolescence into
manhood Since the key to such graduation lies in the psychic
separation from mother, the glorification of the mother cult and
the attendant denial of honour to woman in any other role must
indicate the inability of large sections of the illiterate or semi-lit-
erate uprooted urban mass audience to cultivate the sense of
adult independence required in a respect for democracy. In this
sense, the growth of the fan cult of star dictatorship is not
unrelated to the growth of fundamentalism and intolerance of
social differences. Indeed it is possible to see a direct connection
between such illusioniml and fascism. Aided and abetted by
largescale unemployment among the semi-educated and its
resultant frustration and anger, star adulation explodes easily
from dream to reality. In Tamil- majority Bangalore, riots were
sparlced off by matinee idol Rajkumar's statement demanding a
compulsory Kannada proficiency test for all school children; the
Rajkumar Fan Association looted shops, damaged buses and
stabbed a Tamil boy55• It was not long after that the biggest film
star of Kamataka chose virtually to withdraw from political
stances and statements.
It is astonishing that the party in power at the C.Cntre, with
the entire development machinery in its hands, never understood
the need to project its philowphy through the popular cinema.
Had it planned such a campaign as meticulously as the DMK
once did it could well have, in four decades, won over the entire
urban population and its rural periphery to its point of view.
Many of the dangers to the unity of India, a country that can only
be called a honeycomb of religious, linguistic and regional
identities, could possibly have been minimised if not averted
altogether, since they are largely the product of the very classes
that patronire the cinema m~t heavily.
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THE PA/NTl:: D FACE
Despite its reverses in Tamil Nadu and in Andhra Pradesh,

where it once saw the cinema take over the state, the Congress
party simpl~ically tries, repeatedly, to capitalize on the popu-
larity of establi.ffled stars. Besides Amitabh Bachchan, it in-
ducted Sunil Dutt, one-time star Vyjantimala Bali and Rajesh
Khanna into the party juggernaut. Judging by the polls in Assam
in which Amitabh had tried to pull his weight-and West Bengal,
where Rajesh was ham~ · to the job, the effort to ma1c·e
simplistic use of star charisma has proved pitifully ineffective.
The party never evaluated the link between the image of a star
built by his fwm with what he might be able to achieve in politics.
In the case of Amitabh it was at least an attempt to make hay
while the star shone; Rajesh Khanna's glamour had faded too
much to reflect glory even though his screen personality had
been less at variance with Congress Party ideology. Besides, the
cerexistence of the two in the same fold created an additional
image confusion that any advertising expert would have detected
at once. Khanna's intervention in the 1987 West Bengal elections
proved predictably abortive in a highly conscious electorate with
a large middle class and an ideologically developed, organized
working class and a relatively aware peasantry.
One of the differences between the Keralite, Kannada and
Bengali audiences from those in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh
is in their world-awareness. A.K. Ramanujan has pointed to the
relative absence of modem western impregnation of Tamil and
Telugu cultures compared to Bengal, Kerala and Kamataka as a
~ible reason for the cultural insularity of Tamil Nadu and
Andhra Pradesh56• Significantly, the two states have been back-
ward in terms of the growth of a 'New Cinema', a serious and
conscious expression of the socio-political debate that has stirred
the areas more stimulated by the impact of modernity, such as
Kerala, Kamataka, Maharashtra and Bengal. It can be argued
that the 'seeing is believing' factor worked more in Andhra
Pradesh and Tamil Nadu with the merging of myth and fact in
their star-politician's hold over the populace. That belief is
further strengthened by the election results in recent years, which
show an erosion of faith in the leadership in the cities, with the
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The Painted Face of Politics
countryside remaining intact. By comparison the rural-urban

ideological differentiation is much less in West Bengal, as two
assembly elections have proved. The United Left Front led by
the highly culture-conscious Communist Party of India (Marxist)
captured a large majority of the seats. Congress politics appear
to have failed to get at the grassroots either through God (and
Godman) as in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu or simply
through man as in Bengal.
The 1989 elections in Tamil Nadu laid the ghost of M.G.
Ramachandran in the politics of the state. Both his wife Janaki
and his heroine and party colleague Jayalalitha initially failed to
capitalise on his legacy, which each claimed to have exclusively
inherited. The cinematic mantle of the extraordinary filmstar/
politician failed to settle itself on either; !t may be said that the
mantle itself melte4 into thin air. MG~'s arch rival of two decades,
M. Karunanidhi, leader of the opposition DMK, won a thundering
victory over all other forces. Sine~ Karunanidhi's l~s with the
cinema had steadily eroded during the years of MGR rule,
celluloid's power over politics may itself be on its way out. When
Jayalalitha staged a comeback, it was really without the help of
cinematic charisma.
A similar diminution of cinema's role in politics took place in
Andhra Pradesh. NTR's image had been tarnished nationally and
within the state. His return to film acting in Vishwamitra, his
extraordinary wealth reconfmned behind his professions of
asceticism and his impulsive and dictatorial actions led to his
downfall. The fascist and obscurantist nexus between cinema
and politics resulting from the equation of myth and fact ended
in disillusion. Whether the decline of the MGR-NTR mythologi-
cal vision of modem India will give way to a more realistic
separation of myth and fact in these two states may depend on
new, dominant forces coming into play, causing a cultural
revolution that would reflect itself in politics57•
247
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10
HOW
INDIAN IS INDIAN CINEMA?
he international accessibility of India's 'New Cinema' often

gives rise to the perverse thought that it is not Indian, or
.not Indian enough. The contention seen~ to be that any fully
indigenous product must be so culture-specific that perforce it
would be a closed book to the outsider.
On the other side of the coin, there is the proposition, graven
in the minds of some foreign votaries Qf Pop culture and their
Indian acolytes, that the big commercial cinema, the formula film,
is the essentially Indian product that adheres to the canom of
the Natyasbastra and carries on a tradition of two millenia. Thus,
Lothar Lutze: "Seen with<;>ut highbrow prejudice, the Hindi film
may well appear like a tree rooted deeply in Indian tradition and
reaching out, fumblingly perhaps, into the space age"1• Exactly
how the space age is assayed in this cinema Lutze does not
specify; but he easily succumbs to the seduction of finding an
enclosed, separate space for a cinema of Indianness and irideed
of 'Asianness'.
Anthropologist Akos Ostar draws a direct line from the
Natyasbastra to the Indian 'pop' ftlm, as did art critic Herman
Goetze. Goetze stated fmnly that, by contrast, Indian filrm "of .
the very highest quality, such as those made by Satyajit Ray...are
essentially international"2 • Perhaps Goetze understood more of
India's past than her present. Are 'Indian' and 'international'
mutually exclusive categories? Take classical Indian painting and
sculpture that Goetze admires and explains so well. They arc
Indian and at the same time international.
Original from
How Indian f.s Indian Cinema?
There seem, to be a firm conviction behind such theories that

Indian (and Asian) for11l:S must be seen as distinct from the
Western at the grassroots, free from the highbrow prejudices of
the 'westernized' elites of Asian countries. Many of these re-
doubtable scholars have the idea that Satyajit Ray became a
succ~ in India only after he became famous in the West. They
do not appear to know that Patber Pancbalt was an instant
box-office hit in Bengal long before it became famous abroad,
and that Ray has been one of the most successful box-office
directors within the Bengali cinema; Cbandata, for ir)stancc; was
the second-biggest box-office hit of 1964. Used to thinking in
terrm of a single-language homogeneous society, they are
surprised that Ray's ftlrm are not seen outside Bengal as often
as McDonald's hamburgers are eaten in any part of the United
States. So used are they to the pervasive soap opera of television
and Hollywood that they think it has to be a world phenomenon.
Some Americans are therefore appalled when they hear us
discuss serious cinema in contradistinction to the commercial
product, oblivious of the fact that the distinction often holds true
in Europe as well.
That this approach must preclude a universal significance for
international audiences of India's pop cinema is obvious from
the fact that neither the art circuit of film festivals nor the large
audiences of commercial western cinema are known to have
displayed any fondn~ for it. Britain had at one stage more than
50 theatres completely dedicated to big Hindi formula filrm, but
the audiences were overwhelmingly Indian and Pakistani with
Africans and other Asians at the fringes. The natives of Britain
have, with marginal exceptions, given these latterday Kalidasas
the go-by. The same is true of Indian enclaves in other western
cities, including the video availability in Indian spice shops
almost everywhere abroad. Exclusive expositions of Indian
cinema have occurred in places like Paris, New York and Pesaro
among others and have included a few examples of popular ·
cinema in their programmes. But nowhere have they created
any noteworthy response, except partly the films of Guru Dutt
and the early Raj Kapoor ones among cult-seeking groups. For
249
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11lE PAINTED FACE
the most part, they have been found, like films based on Peking
operas, merely curious. Their culture-specificity has been proven
beyond doubt by both the elite and the groundling in western
countries.
Yet it cannot be held that the art of one civilization will not
be understood in another because its idiom of expression is
different. Facts do notbear ~ut such a proposition. A good deal
of modem western music has been influenced by the Indian
musical system, both at the level of high art and pop music -
ranging from Philip Glass to the Beatles. The rather unusual
marriage of the latter to Ravi Shankar inevitably did not last long;
but the sitar and the tabla have remained a part of Briti.sh pop
music and have found their way into other pop group.5. No such
osmosis has taken place between Indian and western cinema. ·
Given the co-existence of the two over several decades in Britain
and America, it could haye occurred - if the potential had in fact
been there.
II
Most of the scholars who see Bharata's Natyasbastra as the
fountainhead of Indian pop cinema base their theories on
superficial similarities between the two and an inadequate
understanding of the Indian dramatic tradition. All variety shows
are not natyasbastra merely because they include song, dance
and drama. Is it their contention that Bhasa (4th century BC) or
Kalidasa (5th century AD) are aberrations from the models
Bharata codified because their works are considered master-
pieces in the West? Shakuntala has been translated into, and
successfully performed, in many languages. Obviously the fact
that it does not observe the Ari.stotelian unities of time, space
and action has not locked it into an exclusively Indian cultural
space. Bhasa's plays, made up of a mix of song, drama and
dance, have been repeatedly staged in Kerala and elsewhere in
India. Their form has come thtough as a thoroughly integrated
whole. Their humor and their theatrical unity and rhythm have
250
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How 1ndkm Is Indian Onnu,1
captivated audiences. If they are performed in western countries,

they are certain to find ready acccptancc as masterpieces of
world theatre, despite certain culture-specific characteristics that
distinguish them; It is well known that the Japanese did not send
Yasujiro Ozu's fdnw even to European film festivals because they
thought he would be too Japanese to be understood outside his
own culture. The fact proved to be the opposite; he was
immensely liked because he was so Japanese: and brought to
international audiences an altogether new approach to cinema.
That, alas. has not happened in the case of India's pop cinema.
It has, in.the case of Satyajit Ray; his Indianneu is as indisputable
as of Nehru or Tagore, and is imeparable from his universality.
If pop cinema has found favour in other Asian countries, the
reason is altogether different from what Lutze and others have
advanced in their excitement of the anthropological 'discovery'.
The fact is that I"dian pop cinema has been exported for decades
to non-Indian audiences in southeast Asia,·West Asia and c~in
African countries. Significantly, they do not go to highly indus-
trialiZed Japan; in Ouna, where they have been seen occasion-
ally, only their songs have found some acceptance with a few.
In other worm, their acceptance is confined to pre- industrial,
mainly agricultural societies that have thrown up large wban
lumpens in the process of industrialization and urbanization,
generating marginaliZed migrants to the cities whose adaptation
to a technological society has yet to begin or is at its earliest
stages. Yet it is this audience that gets catapulted into the
comumerist dream factories of the cinema theatres. Indeed the
forward section of these countries, the so-called 'elite', detests
the Indian product, in Thailand or in Mali. As their indigenous
cfnema develops its own identity, the popularity of the Indian
cinema dwindles. The entire phenomenon can be viewed only
as the result of the grafting of a technological medium developed
in the industrialized countries on to the body of a ·pre-industrial,
agricultural tradition, producing unusual fonm found in only the
culture of societies similarly placed at a particular historical
junction. In Pfleiderer and Lutze's book on the Hindi fdm, it is
only Anil Saari who recognizes this socio-economic fact when
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111B PMNIIJD FA.CB
he observes that -ln India 'modem technological society is

interlocked with a largely feudal pastoral mality".
It can be predicted with some confidence that as India wmote
C0111pletely industrialized and its people adapt theanselves to
technological transformations and their effects such as fast
communications, high social and geographic mobility and ho-
mogenization of tribal (in the semc of an enclosed group)
identities, the popular cinema in which they fmd sativaction will
also change. Its indigenous character will no longer preclude
universality of expres.,ion or understanding. I have elsewhere
shown that almost all of Indian popular cinema, particularly since
its bifurcation into high art and pop in the late fifties, has been
a continuation of the mythological film in different garbs.
Western popular cinema of Supennan and other comic-strip
characters mythologizes the future; Indian pop used to mytholo-
gi7.e the past and now does so with the present. It is by nature
a preoccupation destined to disappear as the socio- economic
scene is transformed into that of · an industrially developed,
socially and geographically mobile society. In saying this I am
in no way precluding the ~ibility, preferred by most Indians,
that the country's development will not follow western models
but shape its own directiom, absorbing the industrial phenome-
non and its fallout into its remarkable continuity over the
millenia.
m
An ingrained idea in the minds of western scholars is that any
western borrowing., must be equated with a le& of identity.
Indeed it is predicated upon a sort of general theory of Indian
development loaded with western dich& about modem India.
· It draws heavily on the fashionable western view that Indian
intellectuals, Jawaharlal Nehru included, are elitist, ape the West
and have no sense of the truly Indian. Implied in this is also the
thought that the West must tell us how to be true Indians. None
of these Westerners or expatriate Indians, it is dear, have seen
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•
the vast rural concourses that usc,nbled to hear Nehru and have
no idea of the degree of his rapport with it. In discusstna
economk planning, they lose sight of India's goal of real
independence, free from manipulation and economic imperial-
ism, to be found only in a substantial industrial- agricultural
self-sufficiency. They set up a dramatic opposition between
Gandhi and Nehru, painting one lrldlan. and the other western,
forgetting the western influence on the former and the Indian-
ness of the latter - both of which ran equally deep. What is also ·
forgotten is that despite their differences Gandhi did nominate
Nehru as his successor. The Nehruvian policy of non- alignment
is an extension of non-violence and the doctrine of import
substitution an extension of the cbarltba (spinning wheel), the
Gandhian symbol of individual self-sufficiency in the pre-Inde-
pendence period.
There is a lack of understanding here about the rcvcml
process that so-called 'westcmization' bring., in at the creative,
intclleetual level in an ancient civi1intion. Macaulay's educa-
tional policy sought to generate a b'ibe of 'brown Englishmen'
and partly succeeded in doing so, but he never foresaw that they
would in fact tum into a great force to liberate Indiam from the
British and to engage in a discovery of India. Indeed it can be·
shown frotn the history of the 19th and early 20th centuries that
in virtually all fields of aeative endeavour, it is the so-called
westemiZed segment which led a great movement for lndianiu-
tion. It is they who turned from European philosophy, literal\lJ'C
and art to a redi1covery of their roots in Indian tradition. It can
also be shown that tho.,e who did not go through the process
of reversal became victhm Qf cheap western mores and are today
celebrating ·a macabre marriage of consumerism and fundamen-
talism that is threatening the very integrity and unity of India,
creating a new di~lveness on religious, lingubtic and regional
axes. Pew western scholars understand the vital need in devel-
oping countries for a successful synthesis of tradition and
modernity that would trigger off progress without l0s.1 of identity.
An unchanged, unrnediated continuity would destroy itself by
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its very unawareness and its consequent imitation of the most

supcrfidal aspects of western society.
It needs to be argued that such an unmediated continuity in
an ancient country rapidly industrializin, itself is fraught with the
dangers of fundamcntaJism, sign, of which are evident among
SOtne sections d the urban public - sections mo.,t devoted to the
popular cinema. Transition from the ancient to the modem needs
within it a dynamic ~ of reinte1pretation and contempora-
nization of tradition. Unless an ancient tradition is infused from
time to time with fresh blood from outside, it becomes anaemic
and sterile. Its comtant inbreeding makes it recoil upon itself,
and renders.it incapable of inner change. As its vitality dwindles,
it can only adopt the superficies of changing contemporary
rcaJity without understanding their underlying forces or being
able to absorb and subordinate such forces with the metabolic
vitality of which Indian tradition has given ample proof through
five millenia. ·
If impiration from the- West were to be taken as the fountain-
head of 'un-Indian' international~ much of the vast creative
output of developing countries in the modem era would have
to be rejected outright. Pro.,e literature in maay Indian languages
began with foreign missionary translations of the Bible; the novel
as a fon11 was developed in 18th century England and has been
adopted in countries like India. Should the entire pro.,e literature
in at least ten languages and the modem Indian novel of the last
200 years be therefore dubbed un-Indian? Unfortunately, western
scholais who are troubled by ~ i.,sue of India~ of our
cinema are virtually unacquainted with the richness and variety
of modem India's literature and the depth with which it has
examined the country's probl~ of tradition and modernity.
For~ reason it is possible to see, in the exclusivity of Indian
cineina formulated by the apologists of the present popular form
of the Indian film, a desire to deny it all international communi-
cation and a seme of belonging to a world community. 1be fog
that is gathering around the whole discourse on the worth of
India's popular cinema can be dispelled by reading 'scientific-
industrial' for 'western'. The transition of pre-industrial societies
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How htdlan • 1ndlan an.ma,
towards an industrial ~olution is Ulllrw:c:ess • seen as wcst-

cmization. Similarly, the acative works that function as engines
of social change are.dubbed un-Indian. It has been the misfor-
tune of the fonnerly colonial countries to have first been thought
of as the 'white man's burden' and then as the targets of a
mummification drive which is merely the other side of the same
colonial coin. Two of Asia's most advanced countries today -
Japan and China - were never colonized by the West; yet they
both consciously sought technologies developed in the West in
the last century in order to modernize their economies. Japan's
entire history is one of cultural importation which, however,
alwa'f$ made it more Japanese instead of les.,. Among these
imports were, inter alia, a script, an administrative system and
a religion from China. To varying extents, this has happened in
India, China and the southeast Asian countries which, for nearly
a millinieum-and-a-half, imported culture from both India and
China. Until western pundits realise that the borrowing., are not
from the West per se, but merely an import of inputs neces.,ary
for development at a given historical juncture, their misunder-
standing of the problem of tradition and continuity will persist.
Besides, borrowing.,, indeed scene-by-scene imitations, are ram-
pant in pop cinema, which do not prevent il from· exploring
I11dian probl~ constantly in its products.
IV
Apart from the Natyasbastra stereotype, another line of
argument sometimes advanced is-that popular Indian cinema is
based on folk fonm (folk variants of the Natyasbastra modeO in
its sharp division of good and evil, its happy ending, and its
song-dance-drama combination. It is good because it exists. It is
great because it sells: that ~ to be the burden of the isong
in praise of our soap operas from some of our foreign commen-
tators. The apparent succes., of the big commercial cinema
dazzles the eyes of even some notable intellectuals who then
celebrate their discovery of the greatnes.s of what has been
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traditionally described by Indian CODlilJ.Cntators as the prime

expression of the lowest common denominator in entertainment.
There is a disconcerting note Qf populism in the newly
awakened Interest in popular culture. Its motivation appears to
spring from the awe with which consun1emt societies regard
anything that sells. What is.more, there is latent in its concei11s
and the nature of their manifestations; an aa.xiety to persuade
developing economies to adopt this awestruck view towards the
high-selling commodity, more particularly when that oommodity
is some fonn of art. At best, it is a part of existentialism that must
accept, without demur, anything that goes; at worst, it is an active
consumerist crusade; developing societies must S9MChow be
persuaded to exclude the pursuit of social goals and to learn to
accept what are considered the inevitable outcomes of the free
market proces.,. Economics, like politics, must be freed of any
ethical bias. Very often the interpretatiON of what is popular
read like rationali.1ation.1 of what may otherwise appear ethically
questionable to societies that want to direct their development
towards a human~ plan of performance.
It is necessary to observe here that populism in the ~ i o n
of popular culture is intrimically different from the traditional
Indian distinction between Margl and Desi s. Between the
episode of Kichakavadham in Vasa's Mababbarata and its
performance in Yaksbagana the difference is not one ot world-
view but styles; what makes a gulf between Valmiki's Ramayana
~d Ramanand Sagar's presentation of it is the humanism of one
and the fundamentalism of the other. Similarly, the l)<>Pular
cinema in India am be contrasted to serious 'New' cinema in-
teian., of the opposition to the secular-democratic values of the
Indian Constitution of the first and their espousal in the second.
The inability or unwillingness to differentiate popular and
high culture in ternas of values, particularly in the cinema, arises
from the unawareness, or disregard, of the vast manipulative
forces at work in mas.1-produced cultural commodities. One vital
dUference between folk and pop is that one is produced by the
256
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people themselves and is predicated upon their participation in
it in a two-way process, the other is entertainment manufactured
by corporate bodies in metro cities and injected into the mass
comdousness in a one-way hypode11nic model of communica-
tion. The advocates of emtential acccptmcc of popularity thus
act on behalf of its manipulators in consolidating and extending
thcii ernpite.
Besides, cinema is by nature incapable of achieving an instant
give and take rapport between entertainer and the audience. The
film on the saeen is complete in itsclt, autonomous; nothing can
be a ~ to it along the way.The audience reacts, but the screen
does not. It may, with the next film, but certainly not with the
present one. By and large; it is one-way traffic. Polk entertain-
ment presents no ·such fixed formulae. It demands, quite like
I"dian dassical mmic, a constant participation of it.s•
audience
and its interaction with the performer. Much of folk entertain-
ment is improvisation within known boundaries.
D1Kus.1ing the Ramlila in Bcnares, Richard Schcchncr talks
of "the constant crasings and supcrimpositiom" that go on in the
perfonnance in relation to it.s particular audience. 1be event
becomes environmental theatre, the basic form of folk entertain-
ment4.
Nor are film actors like folk performers, the fellow next door
who plays Rama on Ramllla day. Like the manufacturers of any
mas.,-produccd artides, they are inaocessible to the consumer.
They lie hidden behind the brilliance of the screen, living lives
utterly different from those of their audience. This relationship
between performer and audience is basically uncharacteristic of
folk tradition. Again, folk pcrfonnance is, traditionally, not tightly
timebound. It can go on for a whole day and night or longer.
The scope such an open form Qffers for adaptation, for the
intc.pretation of local events and their incorporation into tradi-
tional stories in many subtle, ever- changing ways, is almoa
infinite. Put on a stage for a one-and-a-half hour span, folk
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theatre bcca1K.S canned cabaret for the city-bred. It begins to

lookfllmi.
In the area of music, folk melodies have been a source and
an inspiration for 'high art', both in India and the West. The
pentatonic NB" Shivaranjani was fashioned out of the SOJllP of
Abyssinian slaves singing at night in the loneliness of their
captivity in Mughal palaces. One authority has it that Db,upad
was created by Haridas 5wami from the SOJllP of the Dhadhi
. community in Oudh. One can find hardly any trace of such a
trafflc of ideas frola, ~p opera to high art in the cinema.
Tbe intemely regional peculiarities of folk music were uni-
vcmlizcd by da.ical coo,po.,er-musidans at a high level of
courtly or spiritual sophistication and spread across the elite over.
wide areas. The process in cinema is deceptively similar; it rejects
the local features of regional forms and tries to mould them into
a nationally acreptable model. In doing so, it places the rural
and traditional elements of its content before a basically urban
audience, not at the level of the highest common denominator,
but at the lowest. 1bcn there is the concept of cinema as a
collective fantasy which is suJ)l)01CCI to have a healing effect on
large audiences caught in serious stresses in their lives. It is a
dream; therefore, it is good therapy. Some writers display this
attitude to an extent that suggests an indulgent, condescending
attitude towards the cinema as by nature an inferior medium.
Their attitude is totally amoral, non- judgemental; the question
of social good or aesthetic value does not enter their considera-
tion. It i., almost like the scientific enquiry of, say, an omitholo-
pt. Thus, in an otherwi.,e very perceptive article, psychologt.,t
SUclhir Kakar said some time ago: "Unlike the novel, the portrayal
of characters in film is neither intended to enhance our under-
standing of the individual complexities of men and women nor
to assist our contemplation of the human condition-s.
It is obvious that he equates the novel with its best and the
cinema with its worst products. But what can one say about the
mass of sentimental novelettes and pulp fiction that f0t111.1 the
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HOIII Indian Is Indian Clnffllal
bulk of bestselling literature? Do they not portray stereotypes of

character and situation in fantasy in alm<>R exactly the same way
as popular cinema? On the other hand, has all cinema - including
the work of Bergman, Antonioni, Kurosawa et a( proved itself
incapable of enhancing our understanding of individual human
beings or of the human condition?
There is another dimension of denial to this glorification of

what sells. Consumerist western societies to which these com-
mentators belong will not permit India a moral view of art
because they thermelves have promoted a hedonistic aesthetic
to which a stock exchange valuation of art is wedded. Thinking
Indians are deeply concerned that their pop cinema mostly
oppo.,es social change in conflicts between tradition and mod-
ernity, In the battle of equality guaranteed to women by the
Constitution of India, and the traditionalist view of woman as
chattel to be valued only as a reproductive agent and a nursemaid
for children, popular cinema will, almost invariably, side with
the latter. Because it felt the need for a cinema that would act as
a catalyst for change, the social leadership, the so-called 'elite'
of India, as represented by Jawaharlal Nehru, promoted the
harnessing of new talent in that direction. The Film Enquiry
Committee Report of 1951 led to the establishment of growth
centres such as the Film and Television Institute of India, the
Film Finance Corporation, the National Film Archives, National
Awards for the best work in cinema and so on.
By the sixties the process of creating .a new cinema to
re-examine tradition and support the forces of change was in full
swing. A whole new generation of talented ftlmmakers came into
being. But in the all-India field, it found its way into the cinema
theatres balTed by the vested interest. In their own language
regions, many of these ftlmmakers have had considerable suc-
cess. The Ninasam society in Kamataka found in its trials that
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1HE PAINIED FACE
rural audiences fust ~ e d to film were much more· open to

the best of cinema than had ever been supposecfl. In fact what
has been called the 'Heggodu (name of the village) experiment'
found the same audiences relatively h~ile to to the 'commercial'
product as iJ1u11oral. K.A. Abbas, writer of many of Raj Kapoor's
ftlms, called all his life for the nationalization of cinema theatres.
But this the Indian government, committed to a mixed economy·
·~that leaves the conrumer product to private enterpme, could not
do. And there is no doubt that audiences fed for generations on
the lowest common denominators of entertainment refuse to be
converted to the highest.
In all fairness to foreign critics advocating the natyasbastra
style legitimacy of the Indian pop cinema, it must be said that
they come from 'arrived' societies, where the basics of life are
already available to all and there is therefore no moral imperative
arising from the chasm that divides the elite from the common
man in India. One quarter of the population of India lives in
cities; this, ip absolute tetnis, means more than 200 million
people. The educated and better off sections of the rural areas
and the number of Indians who have stepped into modernity
and are part of rapid social and economic progress, would be
equal to the combined population of Great Britain, France, and
Italy or to the entire population of the United States. It is easy
for this privileged sector of the Indian economy to forget the
nearly three-fourths of the population or some 750 million
people who remain behind. That generates the moral need to
rouse the conscience of this sector and to keep reminding i~ of
how the rest lives. It is not easy for the sensitive artist in the
cinema to ignore the human condition and to drift within the
consumerist dream.
If the worst interpretation were to be put on it, the advocacy ·
of escapist entertainment could be seen as an anxiety to sell
laissez-faire economics to India and to stay the hands of those
who seek alternative modes of development. It could also be
suspected of continuing the thinly disguised imperialist doctrine
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of keeping the other half below where it belong.,, because of its
intrinsic inferiority.
The fact is that as consumerism grows, success i, measured
in harder material ternis, and the intellectual is increasingly under
pressure to accept that criterion. The traditional respect for
learning and wisdom begiris to go under and the intellectual feels
cornered, isolated; the only escape he can fmd from that
predicament is through a subtle exercise in self-deception,
dressing up this acceptance in justification and rationalization,
perha~ glorification, of the popular culture of the moment, no
matter what its values. A whole proce~ of homogenization is set
in motion when society's traditional ideological brakes on it are
eased. Mediocrity becomes the norm, and deviations from it have
to be di,guised. In super-industrial cultures this process is aim<>&
complete; in the developing co'l,llltries, it is becoming increas-
ingly evident. Yet they are in no ~ition to make a surrender
to emtentialism and give up all effort to bring about better
conditioris in the life of the mind.
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11 •
THE
VALUE OF TRASH
he degree of realism (see Chapter O in Phalke's Harisb-

cbandra .(1913). would not satisfy the average Indian film-
goer today. But this is what a literate viewer, one of a multitude
that felt the same way, said at the time:
•
All the movenents and exprc!SSions ol the characters on
the screen were so realisdc d1at the spectators felt that
tho6e moving characters we.re also speaking._.Hamh-
chandra and Taramatl of the screen bring .t eaIS to the
eyes of the spectators. Thi., would perhaps not happen
if one saw them in flesh and blood on the stage; the
scenes ol the forest, the forest fn, the rivCIS, the
harigman's house, the hen pecking around - all these
were unrivallcd1• '
The change in audience perception today is not merely

technological. Indian cinema's compact with its. audiences on
the threshold of suspension of belief has modified its te111~ over
the decades since Phalke's Harishcbandra in 1913. What was
acceptable as realism then is not acceptable today. For instance,
Dilip Kumar introduced a low-voiced, relatively natural, style of
delivering dialogue sharply different from Prithviraj Kapoor's
declaiming which was derived directly from the folk theatre
melodrama in the open air. The contrast was seen to great effect
in Mugbal-e-Azam, where Prithviraj is the father and Dilip
Kumar the son. Later actors like Ashok Kumar and Balraj Sahni
helped to advance further the strand of realism in the acting
tradition., developed within the commercial cinema.
Original from
1b, Vahw ofTrasb
However, the naturali.ffll of a Raj Kaw.or or Oilip Kumar,

Dharmendra, Rajesh Khanna and particularly Amitabh Bachchan
acquired an aggr~ive, ·self-conscious showmamhip, overplay-
ing attractive mannemim complete with pauses for the effect
to sink in, like the cricketer holding his pose for the cameras
after a stylish shot. Through ~ a tenuous link with folk
melodrama has been maintained. The script still does not call for
events to unfold in a casual relationship or the indication of the
psychological context with the p~ibilities it projects. This is the
~ c e of melodrama which is no longer dependent on music
(Greek meb. music). The operative aspect of this is to remove
the possibility of observing the non-verbal signals ~aturally
emanating from the physicality of the actor and his actions.
In that respect melodrama is the very opposite of what the
cinema does best. A child's face is reflected, let us say, on the
glass window of a train, with the light at a given angle conferring
a telling quality to it. In a split second the image may be gone,
never to come again. Because it is so momentary, it is uniquely
real and uniquely cinema, (as Virginia Woolf observed decades
agpZ). It is uniquely non-verbal, non-mel~matic, as indivis-
ible as an atomic particle whose agglutination with other such
particles make up the non-verbal texture of cinema.
In order to mature, the cinema must pass through the litmus
test of realism, if only to reject it later, after proving its ability
to distinguish fact from myth. This aspect of cinema has
remained almost completely outside the scope of India's popu-
lar film. All popular cinema tends towards melodrama by
telescoping the proc~ in order to stress the high points of
drama; but within that constraint, the best examples of it are able
to provide non-verbal resonances, often of a high order. Take,
for instance, the role of horses and landscapes in John Ford's
moneyspinning Westerns or in Kurosawa's Seven Samuraf, of
aeroplanes in the Bridges o/Toko Ri or the lights of spaceshi~
in Close Encounters of 7be Third Kind. Creative innovations in
imagemaking and the use of sound have been plentiful in soine
of the biggest moneymaking ftlim in world cinema. India's
popular cinema has largely failed to absorb the p~ibilities of
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11IE P.AlNIED F.ACE
the medium exploited by the _box-office product elsewhere.

Only glimmers of it are visible here and there, such as in Sbolay
or Sbaan and a handful of such fwm. In Qurban~ the sequence
of the driver (Feroz Khan) smashing up the boss (Amrish Puri)'s
Mercedes is effective, but is, alas, lifted wholesale from a
Hollywood ftlm.
Most of the time in the popular cinema, the actors are like
cabaret or circus performers. They are totally audience-oriented,
turned outwards. In 'art' theatre and cinema the actor is, with
some Brechtian exceptiom, anonymous, wrapped up within the
role and the action - except where the audience is deliberately
involved. The convention is that the audience observes the
actors without their knowledge, as it were. This quality of
self-absorption is also central to classical and folk dancing and
music. Folk dancing and music are almost completely participa-
tory; there is hardly any question of an audience. The creative
and technical demands of improvisation in classical music are
too great to permit a total audience-orientation. To the extent
that the quality of self-absorption is going out of classical
dancing, it is losing ~ts essence.
Being performers rather than actors, the cast of the popular
ftlm tend to cultivate their own roles at the expense of the others
in a way which would be impossible in serious theatre or
cinema because of the d~ipline of the director. In popular
cinema the director's own role is the exploitation of the actor's
most attractive mannerisms, so the question of discipline does
not arise. In any case, the overwhelming power of the star on
a film set puts aside the question of directional discipline. Hence
the rewriting of dialogues and the addition or removal of scenes
in a script by some famous stars in order to appropriate
attention to themselves and away from the others (hilariously
parodied in Ek Baar Pbir). Of course there are exceptions to this,
the most notable being Amitabh Bachchan. Also, the actors
orient themselves completely to the audience, as in a cabaret
show, not because they are incapable of self-absorbed acting but
bec~use the convention of the cinema within which they function
generally precludes it. Occasionally, in the odd film or a
264
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11» Valaw ofTm.sb
sequence within an o t h ~ conventional falm, the actor will

suddenly reveal his talents, nonnally suppressed in the service
of formulas. A random example is Rishi Kapoor's fully involved
performance in Elt Cbadar Maili S~ a ftlm d~usscd in some
detail in Chapter V.
Closely related to this is the flourish of dialogue in which
sentences are written in full (unlike much of cinematic dialogue
which combines words with gestures and actions to complete
the meaning). The audience is meant to savour the literary
flavour of the words, alm~t by thermelves and for their own
sake. Much of the dialogue is clich~ to the extent that the
audience knows in advance what the actor is about to say. It
gets a certain · pleasure out of that knowledge, and loves, like
children listening to fairytales, to hear the same thing., said
again and again in the same situations. The complete lighting
of all areas of the set is similarly mandatory; any dark, unex-
plained areas that alter the appearance from time to time are
resented; they are too realistic for the familiar game the
audience wants to play with the performing stars.
In song., (see discussion in Chapter IV) sound perspective is
taboo; no matter how the distance from the camera is varied,
and where the actor or a ~ is situated, the sound level must
remain constant. In Silsila, a fdm with many well-made se-
quences, what seeim to have caused its failure in the box-office
is the excess of realism. The man seems to have really fallen for
the girl; he is not playing a game. The actors overstep the rules
of performance and go into real acting. This the audience finds
unacceptable.
India's failure to creatively connect melodrama to the natural
genius of the fdm medium in reflecting the evanescent forms
of reality and in creating streams of non-verbal awareness
(except in the obviously sexual) has made it in essence provin-
cial (as op~d to universal). It is culture-specific to the point
of being its own prisoner (see Chapter X, How Indian is Indian
Cinema?).
The failure to come to terms with the non-verbal is directly
traceable to an overdependence upon myth and the inability to
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111B PAINTED FACE
separate it from fact. Kerala, with the highest literacy in the

country, a library in every village and a relative freedom from
extremes of maldistribution and lumpenization in what econo-
mists have called the 'Kerala model' of slow development
commensurate with social justice, reacted differently to cinematic
divinity from the two southern states of Andhra Pradesh and
Tamil Nadu (in the latter, cinema continues to flow into politics
even after the demise of MGR). When Prem Nazir, Guiness Book
record-holding actor in over 600 ftlms, announced his intention
of following the MGR-NI'R example, Kerala quickly made it clear
to him that he should stick to myth and not try to tum it into
fact. In Kamataka, also an advanced southern State, Raj Kumar,
its matinee idol, faded out of politics after his misadventure over
-language chauvinism led to anti-Tamil riots. In other words, with
certain exceptions, the larger part of India remains unable to
perceive myth and fact in a logical relationship, making it
vulnerable to totalist promptin~ within the cinema or outside it.
The myth-fact equation can also be seen as a concomitant of

lumpenization in pre-industrial societies under assault from the
industrialization and urbanization process. Early industrializa-
tion in Third World countries seems to be predicated upon the
maldistribution of wealth. In the current models of non-socialist
development (perhaps today that caveat need not be entered
any more), it is presumed that some justice in distribution can
be achieved only when enough wealth has been generated, since
the equitable distribution of poverty leads nowhere.
The rapid expansion of the working class and its earnings
have overwhelmed such increases as have taken place in na-
tional educational resources and their quality. Migration from
rural areas into the megacities has largely been a transfer of the
uneducated to the waiting areas outside industry and legitimate
and illegitimate urban occupations in the lower strata of society.
In other words, independent India has created a large lumpen
class and lumpenization continues as an important socio-
economic process. One reason for lumpenization has been the
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Tb. Value o/Trasb
nature of urbanization itself. Traditionally, urban growth has

been assessed to be an outcome of the rural surplus. 1be classic
instance of this can be seen in the United States, where small
populations held large tracts of land and created pressures
towards mechanization and rapid transportation'. The growth of
trade in the towns - ganjer bajar in Bengali and Mandi in Hindi
- produced ancillary services and supported technological inno-
vations, turning the towns into centres of growth. Industrial
development, in the classical model, issued out of agricultural
development.
In independent India, the growth of urban centres that we
see today has become dependent, not on the rural surplus, but
on rural deprivation. Dams bring electricity to the towns; high
prices in the cities draw out to them the milk needed for children
in the villages. On a small but steady scale, we are continuing
the principle of the British-made famine of 1943; food goes to
the towns while villagers get less nourishment. It is the story of
Mexico City's water all over again; the more it draws from deeper
inside the countryside, the more the countryside swells the
population of the city in order to get a share of the water which
was theirs in the first place. .
Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay shows us something of the life
of the lumpen in India's largest industrial-commercial city. The
nerve centre of Bombay's underworld is in prostitution, in that
it is the most essential form of lumpenization - prostitution not
only in the sense of a woman selling her body but of people
selling their children into slavery from the moment they are born.
In Nair's film, the Hindi cinema's presence is overwhelming; its
songs fill the lungs of the boys and spell the essence of their
existence at the edge of life, the tenacity with which they hold
on to it. It is their only instrument of escape, of sublimation of
their frustrated selves, supplied, as it were, by those who are
responsible for their deprivation in the first place. The Hindi
cinema, the standard model of the Indian popular film in any
language, is ordered by the semi- literate for the lumpen and
made by their intermediaries.
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II
The cultural closeneM of the entrepreneur of the a11.:1ndia
Hindi fdm to its lumpen audience is an inexorable determinant
of the end-product. The finance for these filim comes largely
from a parallel economy lying outside the pale of the legitimate
organized sector of banking and insurance and manufacturing
industries. Smuggling, profiteering and other components of the
substructures of traditional mercantilism have increasingly con-
stituted the Hindi cinema's lifeline since Independence. It is run
by a class that has not participated in what the Marxists call the
bourgeois- democratic revolution. The film fmancier is not the
MBA from Harvard or his Indian counterpart; he has descended
from the banta (mercantile) tradition and remains fumly wedded
to it, far removed from the industrial entrepreneur of the post-
colonial period. It is the class that Marxist analysis has always
regarded as the breeding ground of fascism. Its ideology is of
. fundamentalist adherence to tradition without contemporaniza-
tion, insular rather than open, basically intolerant of a multi-eth-
nic pluralist society, ready to use technology (developed by other
people) without being influenced by the science behind it, ready
to bum books that do not conform to the popular wisdom of the
majority community. Is it possible that such a substructure .of
unmodified traditionalism should not transmit its ideology to the
filim under its aegis?
The Hero of our popular film is the tall, fair, aquiline-nosed,
high-foreheaded, Hindi-speaking north Indian high caste Hindu.
Heroes in popular films in other languages are basically moq-
elled on him, and bear the stamp of his culture. The model was
established within the middle class in the period before Inde-
pendence and was consolidated thereafter despite the emer-
gence of the working class and the lumpen audience, and class
characteristics of the owners and manipulators of the medium.
The predominance, flJ"St of Pune, then of Bombay, Calcutta and
Punjab, all contributed to the making of the model. The late
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a1iagence and expamlon of regional cinemas caused an unwit-

ting absorption of the existing hero image. Today the south
foa11~ the largest chunk of the ftlmmaking map; but it attail}ed
its foarnidable size gradually and was thus unable to avoid the
influence of the models earlier established. Only in Tamil Nadu
was there a comcious non-Br(fu:ninical model cultivated, but it
resulted only in substituting one -style of hegemony by another,
as we have seen in Olapter IX (11,e Painted Face of Politics).
Thus today the basic hero typology is substantially derived from
what the Hindi film has established over the decades. This
includes the south, which produces more fil~ than those in
Hindi and, except in the language and certain incidental cultural
characteristics, otherwise replicates the Hindi film. It is also true
of the popular Bengali film of today.
The 'Hindi' film is a misnomer. The language in most of the
productions grouped under this rubric is Hindustani, with a bias
towards Urdu. The official 'national' language, with its predilec-
tion for sbuddb (pure) Hindi, is far removed from what passes
muster with the populace. The businessman out to make money
has succeeded in determining the practical ~ibilities of .an
all-India language of a culturally underdeveloped Oow literacy,
violence against women and low castes and religious orthodoxy)
area, naturally susceptible to totalist promptings, on relatively
superior cultures. It is widely suspected that what these states
seek is the economic and political predominance that the
adoption of their language would give them ·over others. The
film industry's interest lies in the widest ~ible acceptability
for the eclectic, open language its products use in sell~g
themselves to all comers of the country. Thus the Hindi film.is
accepted in the northeastem states where English enjoys pre-
dominance, in the south where local languages ( Tamil goes back
two-and-a-half rnillenia ) hold sway, in the east, in O~a which
has a rich and old history, and in Bengal, where Bengali literature
has reached very high levels of contemporary consciousness.
A look at the tides of major f ~ shows that Urdu names such
as Laaroaris and Bemisa~ Sbaan and Deewar, 7.akbmiAuratand
Halaat equal if not outnumber Hindi ones like Pratigbaat and
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I
111B PNNIED PACB
Agneepatb, Ram Teri Ganga Malll and Trldeu. Even where the
title is in Hindi, the dialogue is strewn wkh Urdu words. Love
is pyaarmost of the time; seldom is it pre,n. Kbamosb is prefared
to sbaant bo jao. Urdu See1m to have the appeal of a more
cultivated, if ilnperious, masruline grace and at the same time a
familiar earthiness and practicability.
Only very recently, with the revival of the mythological In the
overwhelming popularity of the Ramayan and Mababbarat
serials on Doordar , has pure Hindi made a mark as a
language of entertainment, although that has not influenced the
language of fillm with a .c . · content, in which it
sounds false because it is of such recent manufacture. Hindi,
made up from a group of dialects such as Avdhi, Magdhi,
Bhojpuri, Brajabhasha and Maithili, has had Samkrit self- con-
sciously iJnposed upon it in the search for an equation with
Hinduism. The large Sanskrit component of a language like
Bengali shares non~ of this self-comcious religious identity. A
language is natural only where it grows from the give and take .
of the daily life and creates its own means of exp.-ession for ·
things of the spirit when it is not manipulated for ulterior political
motives. Bengali is known for the catholicity of its borrowals;
sbuddb Hindi is known as much for what it excludes as for what
it includes. It is this communal divide equating Hindi with the
north Indian Hindu that the Hindi film, unlike the official Hindi
language, seeks to avoid in its search for a comprehensive
audience.
·Yet it does reflect the north Indian caste Hindu consensus In
the concept of the Hero. Despite the realism of its linguistic
approach to populism, it cannot be disengaged from the impo-
sition of a shallow, feudal and backward culture represented by
the assidous dissemination of the official national language
against which Tamil and the DMK movement have consistently
maintained their opposition. One corollary of this ilnposition of
the language of the Hindi-speaking middle class has been the
comistent marginalization of tribal culture. By many contempo-
rary standar~ such as respect for women and for nature as well ·
as for sanitary habits, tribal life is more civilized than that of the
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11» Vahw ofTrasb
maimtream into which it is sought to be appropriated. And orie

of the important cultural agencies for the process for this
appropriation is the cinema, which is perha~ why its popular
products do not reflect the dissident cultures or identify with the
low castes driven underground by the Brahmanical steamroller
- the barijan, the daltt, the tribal, the animist and so on, as fdms
like Satyajit Ray's Sadgatt, Benegal's Ankur, Nihalani's ~ b
o.r Gautam Ghosh's Paar to name ordy a few from the shelves
of the 'art' cinema, seek to do.
m
The basic social attitudes emanating from the c u character
of ownership of.the commercial cinema are, as we have seen,
~ t frequently exp.c:ssed in relation to the position of woman
in society, the judicial machinery and its processes, the immuta-
bility of religious tradition, the primacy of the family as a social
unit, the superiority of the village over the city and of the F.ast
over the West. Within these is subs>Jmed the more cautiously
articulated attitude to minorities- Muslims, Christians and latdy,
Sikhs. These minorities are not altogether absent from the
popular fdm, but are invariably shown as lone do-gooders
without family ties so that the problem of daily social interaction
between families, fraught with the risk of fall from the moorings
of caste, religion, language, region etc., do not have to be faced.
A south Indian can fall in love with a northener in Government-
owned television, but not in privately owned cinema. The hero
of the Hindi ftlm has rarely seen a northeastem girl. She does
not exist; she is not a part of India. India's polyglot, pluralist
society is thus reduced to the one dimension of the Hindi-speak-
ing north Indian Hindu, generally fair in complexion, with all
other regional dissonances in bone structures, height, customs,
clothiqg etc. more or less homogenized under western clothes
and conformist behaviour. This essential pattern is unruffled by
an occasional song like the one on 'I love you' in various
languages.
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. PNNIBD F.ACB
111B .
As we have seen in the discussion of televbion

. vcralons of
the epics (Chapter VIIO, the entrepreneur of the popular ismm
dosdy allied to the large group of north Indian Hindus who
believe that Rama, the hero of the Ramayana, built up over the
centuries into a god, was bom at a particular spot in today's
Ayodhya in Uttar Pradcsh. They not only da-ount the need fOI'
proof of this but violently deny hiQ<>riam and archaeologists the
right to enquire into the truth of the statement. The Turin Shroud .
underwent carbon dating and was proved to be false; indeed it
is now suspected that it was a fraud pc,petuated by the papacy
to reinforce, with the help of Leonardo da Vanci's skill, its image
.of Jesus ~ t as a white male of athletic build Such attempts
at finding physical proof would 111eet with violence at the hand
of the funclamentali.,t Hindu today. As we have seen, the Puri
Shankaracharya, one of the four pillars of traditional Hinduism,
refused to grant audience to Indira Gandhi when she was Prime
Minister because she was a widow. He fanally agreed on
condition that a cow should stand bet~ecn him and her So as
to cleanse him of the proximity to her widowhood, ~ /aclo
impure in orthodox Hindu belief.
The strands· of fundamentalism in India also need to be
disentangled from widely ·dispersed concentrations of it else-
where on the globe. In July 1989 the Israeli High Court gave the
Religious Council ofJerusalem 45 days to prove that tfie perform-
ance of a belly dancer in a restaurant prevents food from being
pronounced kosher. This comes close to the orthodox Hindu
notion of ritual pollution by which the shadow of a Muslim or
Christian or low-caste Hindu makes food unfit to eat.
However, the continuity of ancient faUm has not prevented
India from wresting its independence from industrialized nations
in devdoping substantial self-reliance. Fundamentalism in Iran
or Israel.or even among the Amish in Lanaster county, Penn-
sylvania, is by and large dependent for its swvival on the
technologies developed by non-believers. The basis of religion
is faith; the basis of sci~ is doubt. And doubt is not permiaed
to the people of the Book. They a~ thus forced to depend upon
those to whom doubt is allowed for maintaining the abilky to
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1JJ. Vahw q/Trmb
hold their own in a world that has departed from or gone beyond
the Book. Ayatollah Khomeini used the shelter of democracy in
Prance during hi.1 exile and flew back to Iran by a· jet hi.1 faith
could not have invented. Israel's Jewi.,h country could not
~ibly_survive Without generous suppo~ from the Gentile
majority countries of the West.
In India the majority community, the Hindus, revere the
scriptures but never became People of the Book preci.~y
because they have too many books shot With too many contra-
dictions, even though these have been skilfully and habitually
papered over through the centuries. India's Muslhm and Chris.
tiam have likewise, for the most part, learnt to accomodate and
assimilate. The Srefi tradition was enriched by its symbiotic
relationship with Hindu mysticism. The Mughal emperors defied
the Islamic injunction against the graven image to produce one
of the fmest genies of miniature portrait painting, adopted Indian
music and dance, enriched them and gave them the form they
have today in north India. Large groups of Christians in Kerala,
· especially the ancient ones owing loyalty to the Eastern churches,
ob.1erve the Hindu caste system and many Hindu rites and
custmm. Hinduism's accomodation thus permeates into ·c om-
munities that do not share any of its dogmas. Thi.1, ·however, only
heightem the tensions caused by pulls in contrary directions -
towards conservation and innovation, fundamentalism and pro-
gressivi.1m, unitary separatism and pluralwt inclusiveness. Under-
_n eath the unifying influence of the national struggle for Inde-·
pendence led by charismatic leaders that extended into the early
post-Independence period, these polarities lay dormant. Today
they are beginning to explode. A stable social order built up over
thousands ofyears has been churned up by-ideologies conducive
to an industrial revolution .and a democratic social org:1nintion
until every molecule i.1 clashing with every other imide the
system, threatening its cultural balance. .
The trauma behind this failure to synthesize tradition and
modernity (perforce equated with westemization since the in-
dustrial revolution came from the West) is caused by the fear of
the consequences of science. There is an inner realization,
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111B PA1NIBDPACB
however vque, of the challenge that the acx:eptance of adentific

artefacts poses to traditional faith. Religm has not·stood in the
way of industrialization in the West or in Japan; it has ab1lply
stood aside. ~I belief in Biblical oc Shinto cosmogony disap-
peared long ago; occasional la objedions to the
teaching of Darwin in the United states are perforce treated as
abelratiom.
Pre-industrial sodeti_es moving into the industrial ~
and trying desperately to save their minds ft0111 lhe C0111pulsive
transfonnation of scientific lhoought are caught in the sae.c:
uncertain compromi.,es. The anti-Darwinists ride motoc cars, fly
in aeroplanes; the A.rJmh in Penmylvania do not, but even they
buy bolts of machine-made doth from supermarkets in onter to
handstitch their 'simple' garments. Their primitive horse and
plough agrirulture would not have made them rich if they had
not been able to buy steel implements for it from the neam.t
town. The steel, needless to say, is devised by people who have
studied further than the eighth standard to which the Amish
confine their young. because they consider further education
'unnecessary'. In many ways this microscopic American corm11u-
nity of Dutch settlers_dcta111bled to live a Biblical life.is like the
fundamentalists of Iran. In her interview with Ayatollah
Khomeini, Oriana Fallad had asked him one telling question:
•How did you travel frotn France to Iran?" His answer: •Why, I
flew'. Fundamentalism must depend on the works, and therefore
finally upon the thoughts, of non-fundamentalias engaged in the
doubts and disbeliefs of science, pure and applied;
In Japan, on the other hand, the emperor had to declare in a
historic post-war broadcast during General MacArthur's occupa-
tion that he was not divine. The Japanese wept over this sudden
overthrow of a faith of two millenia; but the country could then
embrace science ful)y. It no longer imitated western technology
but innovated its own. Real faith in Japan's blend of Shintoism
and.Buddhism receded into ritual. Japan was thus·demythic:al-
izcd, heralding its entry into the modem world. India has not
experienced such a deaming of its soul. The continllity ol _its
religi9Us rituals is as disconcertina in the global context as it is
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11¥ Vala•• of'Trmb
impressive; how have faiths, rituaJs, symbols outgrown in other

parts of the world - like phallic w9rship or animal sacrifice, a
frozen caste system originally based on occupations, most· of
which obtained elsewhere extensively in ancient times - survived
in this country, and how do they coexist with comiderable
progress in scientific research? ·
1be effort to avoid the conflict of science and religion (for
tradition), to sidetrack it, push it under the carpet and gl~ over ·
it, must be as inevitable to such a society as the conflict itself. It
is here that the popular cinema fits in, because it tries to put off
the perception of the conflict, or to companmentalize the two
forces into separate worlds. It recommends ·that the new mani-
. · festatiom of our industrial society should not be allowed to
interfere with the values of a pre-industrial culture. At its heart
there is a gigantic dash between the traditiom and the comtitu-
tion of the couniry.
Hence the alignment of bipolar forces in the cinema is clear:
the 'art' favours change, challenges the immutability of religious
tradition, mediates between tradition and modernity, continually
contemporarizing and re-examining the received knowledge of
the past; redefines myths, bolsters the liberation of woman into
her individual identity and its fulfilment, supports the comtitu-
tional thrust towards ~larism and democracy, believes in a
future that will bring about a better quality of life for all, criti~iZes
the establishment for its failure to implement its declared agenda
of change and . the middle class leadership for its µitemal
contradictiom and weaknesses.
It does all this in an overt manner, wearing its heart on its
sleeve. Compared to it, the commercial cinema buries its mes-
sages deep within the 'entertainment' and activates them sub-
liminally, with comummate skill. The · word 'entertainment'
sounds so innocuous that it is ·hardly ever regarded with the
suspicion it deserves. Its manufacturers, in this age of mass
production, demand-manipulation and complex networking of
distribution in u~an India, claim for it a purity it cannot by
nature have. In reality, enterta~ent belongs to the world of
commerce, politics and populist, revivalist culture inclined to-
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111B PNN11/D P.ACB
wards benevolent dictatorship rather than demoaacy. In a

country where two large states were ruled for long by Olief
Ministers who became what they are because of their popularity
in the cinema this should be self-evident; unfortunately it is not.
· Where the interface with politics is not as direct, the example
of Asha Mathur, dMalSSed in detail earlier, should suff1ce. 'Ibis
'
adult unmarried woman left home because she did not wish to
marry but to pursue her studies and lead an independent life. In
Delhi she found work through a women's organization. Her
brothers, outraged by her decision to remain single, traced her
to Delhi and roughed up volunteers of the organization for
refusing to provide her address. The police joined the brothers
in harassing the volunteas. The case went to court, which
decided the issue in her favour as an adult citizen, free to pursue
her own options - much to the indignation of the family.
Now if this story were to be filmed by the 'new' or 'art' cinema. ·
on the one hand and the •c~ercial' cinema on th~ other, the
outC0111CS could almost be foretold In one the girl would come
out succes.,ful or at least, if she failed, the audience would be
made to wish that she did not; the other would make a great
spectacle out of the evils of modem city life and persuade her
in the end to return to the traditional custody of her father,
brother, husband or sons at various stages of her life, a la Manu
Samblta.
Of course, in all this, there .are the constraints of producing
the stuff of the box-office in a country as varied and as complex
as India. Cona11crcial populism all over the world deaccs that
the superstitions and stereotypes held dear by the consumers of
the medium should be conflfflled and reinforced rather than
challenged. The confmnation assures the membe1s of the audi-
ence that their notions are right and makes them feel secure and
e011lforted by their experience within the cinema theatre. In this
the cinema shares the populism of all media that seek legitimacy
by saleability. In a mass medium, questioning the faith of the
viewer/ reader/audience is fraught with risk because it can
distwb the self-ateen1 of the buyer of the product, whether it is
a cinema ticket or a glossy magazine. To varying degrees, this is
7:76
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true ofthe maas inedia in all countries, both developing and
developed,. whose continued p.roepalty Jcpends upon the eco-
nomic viability of the product. Thus a popular magazine in a
western country would not attempt to correct popular imprea
sions of India and other Third World countries; it would find it
safer to stick to the conftnnation, increasingly sensationalist, of
existing impresslom - even if they are mistaken, and thus stroke
the ego of the consumer. Only academic books and journals read
by a very few are entitled to swim agaimt the tide of.public
opinion, prccl.1ely because they do not affect it. The secret of the
suc:ccss ofloun Malle's fJbm on India or of Dominique LapiCJ•c•s
book, c,,y OfJoy, is in the constantly renewed justification of the
average westerner's perception of the ,nmnstc inferiority of the
Third World.
In addition, the nature of use of a medium in a given society
is determined by the culture of the owner as di.,tinc.t from his
conscious orientation to the tastes and perceplions of its con-
sumer. )"ou can think and say only what you are capable of
thinking and saying. ·He who·pa,s the piper can only call the
tune he knows. ·
What is remarkable is that both 'art' and 'commerce' in Indian
cinema should be equal_ly gravely concerned with such vital
social issues even though ranged on opposite sides of the fence.
Yet its roots are not far to seek. It is a modern, pro~-oriented,
.democratically inclined minority that led the country fU'Sl to
independence and then to a process of rapid industriali7.ation
and wbani7.ation. Its leaders had the charisma, helped by the
afterglow of the struggle for independence, to persuade a much
divided population to accept such a radical thing as the C.Omti-
tution of India and its declared goals. With the disappearance of
the leadership of Gandhi and Nehru, the traditional forces
gradually regrouped and have begun to assert thermelves to-
wards the continuity of an unmediated tradition of the kind
represented by one Shankaracharya's recourse to a cow in his
meeting with Mrs. Gandhi, a widow, or another's thundering
support of the practice of satl.
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111B PNNDJD P.ACB
Within the middle dass leadc1ship, the administration and the

overt supporters of the Constitution, there arc strong forces
working towards revivali.,t medievalisrn in· tradition combined
wUh the consumerism of a rapidly progrcs.,ing economy. The
core of the opposition to social change coa11cs not from the lowly
villagers but froa11 the rural overlorm and the urban petty
bourgeoisie, the illiterate or semi-literate rich gathering their loot
in the backyards of co11unercc, mainly outside the organized
sector - the very class that supplies entrepreneurship in the ·
production ofthe popular fdm. It is also the dass that traditionally
provides the thrust agaimt democracy.
. The basic struggle in the two kinds of cinema is·not so.much
between modernity (art cinema) and tradition (commercial cin-
ema) as between mediated and unmediated continuity of tradi-
tion. In unmediated continuity, comtant inbreeding makes the
body of tradition recoil upon itself and renders it incapable of
inner change of the kind that reformers like Vivekananda or
Gandhi looked for in the structure of the sys, m. As its vitality
dwindles, the body of tradition ·can only absc. rb the superflcies
of changing contemporary reality without understanding it·fro111
inside ..Therefore, to the soul of the popular cinema the best was
in the past; the past is the name of Utopia. All that has happened
since then is a fall from grace, into Kaliyug, the evil aeon.
IV
In this context, is the popular cinema to be seen as a fairytale?
•Some people daim that fairytales do not render 'truthful'
pictures of life asit is and are therefore unhealthy. That 'truth'
in the life of a child might be different from that of adults does
not occur to these people. They do not realize that fairytales do
not try to describe the external world and reality. Nor do they
recognize that no sane child ever believes that these tales
desaibe the world realiaically■•
Put 'fdm' in place of 'fairytal~•, and at once the adult audience
of the popular•
cinema is placed in the position of the child. The
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art film, the serious film, deals with reality for the adult, the
popular film for the adult<hild in need of fantasy to reconcile
his conflicts and allay his anxieties. Is it regressive for the adult
to surrender himself to child-fantasy? Apparently not. Discuuing
the attitude of rationalists who complain agaiNt the lack of
aedibility in the popular film, Sudhlr Kakar argues that the real
cannot be reduced merely to that which is factually real and
exclude what is psychically real: "Fantasy is the mis-e,r-scene of
desire ... the bridge between desire and reality", spanning the
chasm between what is ask~ for and what is gained. He quotes
Robert]. Staller's prai.,e of fantasy as •the vehicle of hope, healer
of trauma, protector from reality, concealer of truth, flXCI' of
identity, ttStorer of tranquility, cnen'if of fear and sadness,
deanscr of the soul•.
However, just when explanation is about to get identified
with justif\cation, Kakar is careful to point out that he is not
equating film with dream and fantasy but gn;>uping the two
together •only because of some perceived qualities in common•.
Like all metaphors of this nature, he goes on to say, this one
yields only partial knowledge, since it ignores those features in
which dreams are dissimilar from fihm. ·Nevertheless his con-
clusion is that ■Hindi movies are contemporary myths which,
through the vehicle of fantasy, and the process of identification,
temporarily heal for their audience the principal stresses arising
out of Indian family relationships•. Thus the equation of fairy-
tale-child, mm fantasy-adult child remains, and Kakar's reserva-
tion regarding the partiality of this knowledge does not negate
the equation for his p u ~ of interpreting the function of film
fantasy.
The same dilemma dop other psychological explanations of
the popular film, including some very astute ones advanced by
Ashis Nandy. Like Kakkar, he points out that the popular film i.,
•a spectacle, not an artistic endeavour■• Overstatement, he says,
is a crucial stylization of the Bombay film. •It is the form of
overstatement that is important. ..the popular Hindi film is not
concerned with the inner life of the viewers...characters do not
develop through situations in these films; rather the situation
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1HBPMN'Il1DPA.CB
.
develops ~gh charadcrs.. .spectades have to be anti- psy~
logical in their.content; they can only be psychological in their
. lnipact4'. • .
However, like Kakar, Nandy is consb-ained to observe that he
does not accept the popular Hindi movic- as an •alternative,
culturally authentic-art for1n•. He sec1ns somewhat more aware
of the p,oblem of values: "I grant the plurality of cultures and
the ·plurality of expres.1ivc
•
•sty1es•. All he exhorts the critic·to do
•
is to take into account •the needs of a society trying to cope·wkh

the simultaneous cmslaught on its older rriodcs of self-apression
in virtually every area of its life•.
Firstly, this assumption of the sodal psychologist that the
formal-qualitative-creative aspects of cinema have nothiilg to do
with its impres., upon the social consciousness may need to be
questioned. As I have tried to show, the traditional mindset
imposes clear limits to the creative ability to d~ver t h e ~
of a new-modern medium and thereby prefixes a form upon its
content. Mythological-analogical thinking dictates·its own style,
which few can accept as authentic in to 111.1 of art form. it simply
does not have the resources to cope with the demands that
dainguishes cinema from other, older media. It is the failure to
,wnfront this fact that causes the hesitancy in the psychologist
in regald to the validity of the popular film as it stands today in
to111S of an art form. (See Appendix I for a more c,letailed
discussion).
Secondly, this is itself bound up ~ his . unwillingness to
engage with the question of social value. The confusion of myth
with fact resulted in god-playing actor N.T. Rama Rao's election
as Oiief -Minister of Andhra Pradesh, with disastrous conse-
quences arrested only on his fall from power in November 198').
Earlier, Tamil Nadu actor M.G. Ramachandran's enacting god-like
qualities consistently in a very large number of fdrm had given
him a long tenture as Oiief Minister and an image '1lat withstood
the economic decline of the state even after his death. In
Kamataka, one anti-Tamil statement of matinee idol Raj Kumar
resulted in riots that coa many Tamil lives on the streets of
Bangalore. In Calcutta, large groups of young men from rich
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TN vai.,.. ofTrasb
Oiindi-speaking) families were arrested while molesting college

girls, fortifying their ·resolve by singing Oye Oye from Tridev,
1989's big hit. Oye Oye has indeed become the war cry of the
lumpen against all fonm of social order. Thus the 'collective
fantasy' of cinema is not a self-contained healing mechanism; it
has imrneme propensities for spilling over into social behaviour.
Having· turned fact into myth, it then turns myth into fact. Its
social arid. political outcomes far outweigh such healing values
as it may have for the psychology of its audience.
It is time to squarely face the question of the value of the

kitsch that is our popular cinema and to see its relationship to
'art'
ln _her famous essay on 'Trash, Art and the Movies', Pauline
Kael felicitously defines trash but studiously avoids defming art,
and· ends up by actually saying there is no art in the movies. It
is a spectacle of skilful shadowboxing in which art is taking all
the punches without being in the ring at all. When she tells us
that Sophia Loren is mistaken for a great actress because we like
her, all she is talking about is the nature of art in the cinema. If
we respond directly to the non-verbal signals of a personality,
i.e. to what an actress naturally communicates through her
person rather than strenously appreciate how she is trying to be
what she is not, we are not thereby rejecting art but only defining
it as it should be. Virginia Woolf understood this better when
she said, at a time when cinema was desperately trying to be
'art', that cinema, for her, lay in the newsreel. An oddly charming
face in the crowd, catching light at a certain angle, that you may
never see again; the shine of sweat on a race horse; scores of
people gesticulating uncontrollably as the ball nears the goal
post; that is where cinema expresses its genius. Kael contends
that Burt Lancaster has a natural flair for comedy - "...his comedy
seems to me to come out of his physicality ... In serious roles
(he is) an undistinguished and too·obviously hardworking actor".
281
Original from
1HE PA/NIED FACE
Then surely it is bad art to make Burt Lancaster strain at heavy

drama? It is because this happen., too often· in the cinema- that
Kael rightly observes, "Alienation is the most common state of
the knowledgeable movie audience". · Doesn't Jean Renoir use
the natural expt~iven~ of Michael Simon in Boudu Sauve des
Eaux (1932), and does not it look as though it was not staged,
but just happened, and isn't it for that reason that we ·feel
involved imtead of alienated? The nearest Pauline Kael comes
to defining art - and she does · so only once, in parenthesis, in
a whole long ~ay - is when, disc~ing techniques, she refers
to its art as "the expr~ive use of techniques". How can trash be
distinguished from art if art does not exist, as it would seem from
her discussion? She talks of the single m~t intense pleasure of
moviegoing as 'non-aesthetic', which is a non sequitur because
the 'aesthetic' can hardly be isolated from pleasure, being derived
from the Greek aistbetikos, which originally meant pertaining to
sense perception. Its modem meaning was given to it by 18th
century phil~opher Alexander Baumgarten. Pauline Kael comes
oddly close to the same conclusion when she tries to answer the
question "Does trash corrupt?.. .it does seem to me that they affect
the tone of a culture, that perhaps ... they may poison us collec-
tively though they don't injure us individually". However, it is
difficult to see just how the inqividual can remain unharmed by
a collective injury. ·
The non-verbal signal, which Kael stresses, is in fact what the
cinema is all about. It is not what the director consciously tries
to say but what the ftlm palpably conveys that is important. That
is why, when G.V. Iyer gives us his exquisitely romantic vision
of Hinduism in Sbankara, what we see is the luscious green of
his trees and grass surrounding the steel blue of his pond, the
satin smooth skins of the young, near-naked boys bathing at
dawn before their daily routine of learning, and the form of L.V.
Sharada shining forth through the translucence of her flowing
white dress backlit by the sun. Iyer has a very sensuous
appreciation of the visible, and it comes out in whatever he does
and affects us in a sensuous manner despite the ~tensible
spirituality of his subject matter. In other words we respond to
282
Original from
11w Valw ofTrash
what we see and hear through our senses (the non-verbal) more
than to the sentiments exptessed through words, which are
symbols we decipher intellectually and do better in reading than
in seeing fwm. The cinema cannot _e xpr~ what is palpable
through intellectual meaning; that meaning reaches us only when
it is expr~d through the palpable. We know that if the fly of
Hamlet's pants comes undone in the middle of one of his solemn
soliloquies, we will see only that and not hear about the fardels
he has to bear or the bare bodkin with which he could end his
life. On the stage it could be different but not in the cinema,
where the minute detail plays a vital part. So to set up an
opposition between the palpable and the intellectual in cinema,
as Kael does, is a confusion of te11ns.
One would thus put Kael's proposition on its head and say
that only what she enjoys is art, the rest is bunkum. Trash in the
cinema is what does not recognise the power of the non-verbal.
She is too het-up about the schoolmarm view of art, and the
pretentiousn~ of some critics, to see that. If there is a lot of
trash in the cinema, so there is in the other 'arts': pulp fiction,
ear-damaging music, bone-dislocating dances, and so forth. The
purpose in this too is a suspension of reason or good taste and
an abandonment of self to other. powers, such as that of a drug.
My concern in the area of Indian popular cinema is with 'the
poisoning of the system' through the constant exposure to trash
that she refers to.
In India and in most of the developing countries, the question
of value takes on importance because of the troubled conscience
of the intellectual in a society riddled with proble~ of an
elemental kind. The continued viability of Indian society, made ·
up of multiple ethnic, religious and linguistic strands, is so
predicated upon its ability to develop a pluralistic tolerance of
differences from the self in the other, that no cute, value-free,
amoral 'aesthetic' perception of public culture can allay the
anxieties that the awaren~ of social conditions must breed in
those who are seriously concerned with the social and political
consequences of 'art' or 'entertainment' - whether they are seen
as one entity or separate ones. a ear perception of the difference
283
Original from
11lE PAINIED FACE
between myth and fact (not the exclusion of one or the other)
appears to be the fll'Sl requirement in the transition from
pre-industrial to industrial society in which India is caught. The
fear of homogenization and loss of traditional self- definitions
and group identifies lying at the base of our popular cinema are
very real, as I have tried to show; the question is whether the
cinema seeks merdy to allay these fears by weaving myths that
seek to perpetuate pre-industrial conditions and values by
separating them from the realities of the contemporary or tries
to bring them together into an awareness and synthesis of both
for the purposes of facing the future without turning to danger-
ously simplistic, totalist shortcuts. Any examination of popular
cinema betrays its tendency towards totalism caused by the
inability to distinguish myth from fact, directly manifested in the
two star Chief Ministers of the south but indirectly traceable in
the popular cinema modelled oil the Hindi-Hindu-north Indian
product, as well. In view of its remarkable ability to overflow the
shores of art or entertainment onto the field of social and
political emergences, the question of public culture must be
viewed with a far more comprehensive awareness than we seem
inclined to bring to the discourse.
Original from
NOTES
PREFACE
1. It can be argued that in India there has always been a peaceful
~ between analytical and analogical thinking; but the availability
of both can make the switch from one to the other app-opriate, opportun-
istic and/or defeatist/defensive, the worth of the ~ depending upon
the manner of interaction between the two. •
2. Ibi-Sttauss, Claude: Tbe ~ Mind, Olicago, 1966.
3. Erikson, Erik: Identity, Youth and Crisis, Notl9n, New Yak and London,
1968. '
.,
OIAPTER 1: MYm AND PACT
1. c.ontinent Of Circe.
2. Daedalus, Pall 1989.
3. c.onversation with P.L Deshpande 1987.
4. Animals In Motion, ed. Lewis S. Brown, Dover Publications, New York,
1957.
5. On Photography, Penguin, 1979.
Lala Oindayal's pioneering work in photography did reflect an affinity with
D.G. Phalke's in the cinema, in its use of theatre backgrounds and hard
colouring designed to flatten out perspective. But unlike Indian cinema,
Indian photography did not stay put there; .It corrected course and went
off in search of the same values as the industrial world where photography
had been invented out of the feh needs of a changing society. In the work
of Asvin Mehta or Raghu Rai, the Indianness is not in the mechanical
features of the photographic language but in a subtle difference in ways of
looking, in .Its contemplative and compassionate aspects. It does not try to
change the nature of the language .Itself but introduces an alcheniy .that
Indiani,es.
6. Su,faces 0/Realily. Film Quarterly, Fall 1966.
7. See Raymond Williams· Cullure a n d ~. Cllauo & Windus, 1958 on
the use of the word 'Alt' in .Its present source.
8. Lewis Jacob: History OfAmerican Cinema, Harcourt Brace, New York,
1939. .
9. P. S. Cllawla, letter to Indian Expniss, 28 June 1987.
10. Tbe lnltmate Enemy, Oxford, 1983.
11. Tbe Savage Mind, Olicago, 1966.
12. In contrast, it is interesting to read the following comment of Stanley
Kubrick: 'lbere are certain aspects of a film which can be meaningfully
talked about, but photography and editing do not lend them<;elves to verbal
Original from
THE PAINTED FACE
aoaly,as. It is very much the- nme u the problem ooe has ~ about
palnd,. or mwc: 1be queadom of taste 1-:ivo1ved and dlie' dedsinn-maktng
aiferia are es.,entially nm-verbal ..• (Siaht & Sound, Sprma 1972).
In tandem, let us consider the following episode:
'Every time Rosban Seib, who acted the role ofJawaharlal Nehru Jn Sb.yam
. Bcnqpl'JII Dlsa>vffy CfIndia 1V series, changed Jn front of the publk: to
don Nehru's do«be<s, for the piblk he becanw Nehru. All the reverence
that Nehru htmself wcu1d have received was R0IDU' Sedl'a, Jn a Oasb•. (11¥
Indian II,tprm·Magan,w, 11 ()«lraober 1988).
aIAPTER2:SEEINGISBEIJEVING
1. All the movements anJ expasion., of the clwadera OG the saecn ·1!U'Cl'C
ao malWk that the spectators felt lhoee moving cbanacten we also
speaking...Hamhchandra and Taramati of the screen bring tears to the eyes
of spectatocs. 'Ihi., would not happen if one saw diem in flesh and blood
OG dir staae• 1be scerr,es d. the forest, the forest fire, the river, the hangman's
house, the hen pecking around - all these are unrivalled...(Letter to the
F.dttor of the XAlsarl, Pune 6th May, 1913).
2. Pritish Nandy, Interview wkh Kamlapatt Tripathl, 71w Jlh,strat«I w~
CfIndia, January 19&{.
3. Rudolf Amhehn: .ArtandViauil~ University of California Preas,
1954. .
4'. B. V. Dbarap: "Ibe Mythological, or Taking Fate for Granted', TM Indian
CinemaSupe1-bamar, «I. An.ma Vasudev and Philippe Lenglet, Vikas, Delhi
1983:
S. B.V. Dbarap, op. ck. From 70 per cent in the '20's, the share of
mythologicals out of India's total annual fllm production has come down
to 20 per cent.
6. For a discussion of the relevance of Jal Sanlosbl Maa to contempomry
urban Hindu aodety, aee Veena Das, '1be Mythological Film and its
Pramework of Meaning', India lnfemational Cenbe Quarterly, Delhi, March
1980.
. 7. See Cliapter VIII, 11¥ bfum Cf 11¥ Mylbologlcal.
8. B.V. Dhaiap, op. ck. ' .. .ao leas as iponnce, .iberacy, poverty, super-
sdtioo Nie the laf'F mass of people in this country...such pictures will
always have an audience and the sway of mythological films will rontinue'.
Also aee op. dt. reference to new aooiences beJng initiated to cinema
lhroush the mytholngical md accx,untq for .its survival.
286
Original from
CHAPTER 3: nm Vlll.AGE AND nm Ol"Y
1. MeJoic:k, 1974.
2. See Olapter n for a dian!SSim of how acienc,e bas reinforced falh in
mytholoSf by making Jt palpable. Mythology remain., the conduJt throuah
which new audiences from rural areas are .inducted into the cirlema-
3. 1"wSfatlfSma~ 9 August 1987. Urban population la expecud to So up
to 340 million by the end ol the cenluty.
4. M.N. Buch: 71w Jlw . <:y Prwlator CUNs, India International Cenare
Quarterly, Spring 1989.
5. 'Who • the Happy Mao?' aab Dharma, the aod ~,ised aa a ame, ol
Yudhisdtlra the wtuous ha-o of the Mababbt,rr,ta., '1he man who does
not live away from oorne•, ii put ol Yudhisdura"s reply.
6. See section on him in Chapter IX, 7'111, Poinl«I Paa <:yPolltk:s.
7. M.N. Buch, op.dt.
CHAPTER 4: WHY nm FILMS SING
1. l.ulze, Lod1ar. 71w HlndlPUm-: ~ and RI-Aaffll 0/CbanlJ-, Manohar,
New Delhi, 1985.
2. Baskaran, S. 1heodore: Music For7'111, Mas:#6· Pllm .son.,s C(Soulb India,
· a paper pRpared for dllC Sea>nd lntemational Conference on Indian Ocean
SCudiea at Perth, AI-ISbalia, Deit-ernber 1.984.
CHAPTER 5: nm OEDIPAL HERO
1. Otto Rank: 7'111, Myth ""IN Birth ""IN JJ,10, tr. by Philip Freund, Alfred
· Knopf, 1959.
2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: ..-tutunm "" II» P"""1rcb, tr. by Gregory
Rabassa, Harper &: Row, New Yodc, 1976.
3. Claude !hi-StraUM, KiMhip:
4. Veena Das: 'The Mythologka1 in o~•. India International Centre
Quarterly, Vol 8, No. 1, Delhi, 1981.
5. c.9. Jung: '1he Mother Complex', 7'111, . . - t ~ and IN Coll«Hw
Unconscious, ed. RPC Hull, Bollingen Series XX. Princeton Uoiven.ily Press.
6. SJamund Freud: 7'111,I ~ "°Drwuns, tr. by James Slrachey, 1he
Hoga,dl Preas and the Inatitute of Psychoanalysi.1, 1953.
7. C.G. Jung op. dL .
s. Bruno Bettclhehn:
9. Otto Rank, op. di
n,, cm "°EndHmh,wnt
10. 0.0. I<nsambi: Myth and ballly, Popular Prakashan, Bombay, 1962.
11m dlscusses Krishna's death by hJs twin brother Jaras' arrow which
entered hJs heel, as in the case of the Greek hero Achilles.
11. AK. Ramanujan, Ji,. Indian o.dipus, in Oedipus, A Polidore Casebook,
Lowell Ed:nunds and .Alan Owldes, Garland Publishing Inc. New York and
Londoo, 1983.
Original from
11IE PAINTED FACE
In the . notes on his article Ramanujan goes on to quote a passage in

Yogatalmli l.J,amsbad (.from Sudh.ir Kakar in 1be lmwr Work( A Psycho-
analytic Sludy of Childhood and Society in India, OUP, New Delhi, 1978):
'1llat breast from which one sucked before he now presses and obtains
pleasures. He enjoys the same genital organs f(OOl which he was born
before. She was once his mother, will now be his wife and she who is now
wife, mocher. He who is now father will be again son, and he who is now
son will be again father-.
12. Ibid.
13. Ashis Nandy: 'The Popular HJndi Film:Ideology and First Principl~•,
India Int.emational Centre Quarterly, Vol 8, No. 1, 1981.
14. Eric Neumann: 1be Great Molber, Pantheon Books, 1955
15. Ashis N!mdy, op. cl.
16. Bruno Bettelheim, op. cit
17. A.K. Raman.ujan, op. dL
18. Clue Nakane, lecture at India Inrernational Centre, 1987.
OIAP1ER 6: 1llE ICONIC M01HER
1. Hahan, Connie: Salbn-jawd's special contribulton to cinema, The
Screen, 3 April 1984.
2. Ibid.
3. Riencowt, Amawy de: Woman and Power In History, Indian edition,
Sterling Publishers, Delhi, 1989.
4. Wright, Will: Six Guns and Sociely, A sttuctwal study. of the Western,
U,niversity of Califmua Press, 1975.
5. Riencowt, op. cit.
6. Saving .Amb Girls.from llonourKulings, Indian Express, 13 January 1981.
7. Tweedie, Jill: Women ma Rage, The Times of India, 10 August, 1980.
8 . Begg, Ean: Cult<ftbeBlad,Matkmna, Arkana Books, New York, 1985.
9. ~lou, Alain: Sbwa and Dlcmysius, East-West Publications, London,
1982.
OIAPTER 7: WOMAN: PLAYMATE, WIFE AND TAWAIF
1. Ikvi-Slra~, Claude: Strvctural .Anthropology.
2. Saheli: The First Fo.ur Years, New Delhi, 1983.
3. Mababbamta 3/ 275/ 1~13
4. For a full disc.ussion .sec Chapter VIII, 1be Return oftbe Mythological
5. Riencowt, Amaury de: Woman and Power m History, Indian edition,
Sterung Publishers, New Delhi, 1989.
6. D.D. Kosambi, Myth and JlJ!alUy, Popular Praka.shan, Bombay, 1962.
7, Ibid.
8. Bose, M.K.: I.ate Classical India, A. Mukherjee & C.O., Calcutta, 1988.
9. Ibid.
288
Original from
10. 10/11. Amallf)' de lliena>wt, op. ck.
12. Fruer, J.G.: 7h Goldffl Boufb.
13. 1he Old Te-tiC:arnent, ~
14-17. Riencourt op. ck.
18. Bhattacharya, Sulrumari: 7h Indian ~ . Pinna KLM, CA!cuua,
1978.
19. Majm,dar op. ck.
20. Ibid.
21. DaniElou, Alatn, Shiva and Dlonjmus, Ed-West Publk:aUona, London,
1982.
22. Bhattacharya op. ck.
23. Kosarnhi op. ck.
24. •...the good modier whoee only pwpoee In ltfe is the welfare ol the
hero-as<hild. She is deYOCed to mJnlatering to the hero's smalleat needa
and umpnken wishes, eapeci.illy for food, often well Into adulthood.
Feecfin8 the son, ft b implJed, is the sre,test satkfactfon that life can offer
her. If, fa reasoM of the plot, the baby-hero t., unavailable, theft the'mocher
is often shown In the pivate world of the prayer-room where she is
abeorbed In devotion to the c:hld Krishna, the quJnlesaential son•. Sudhir
Kakar. 1he Cinema aa Collective Fanaasy, lndu:m .Onfmtl Sup,,6amar,
Vilcas, Delht, 1983.
25. Chowdhury, Neeraja: WNn 1h Woman 1unu, 1he Statesman, 13
March, 1982. .
26. MOIY A Cau.w 71Nm Film, Indian Eqxeds, 4 June, 1989.
27. Das Gupla, Sharnita and llegck, Radha: 7h P.t#mlll RM»ptacl,, paper
preaenaed at a aemfnar on popular culture at Knoxville, Tennesaee, 1984
CHAP1ER 8: nm RE1URN OF nm MY'IliOLOGICAL
. 1. Sananda. Qalcutta, 28 August, 1986.
2. 7h n,,.. Of India quoted ln 'Indian Cinema 1988', ed. Jagmohan,
Directorate ol Film Festivals, New Delhi.
3. Goswami, B.N.: The Essffla ofIndia, Mapin Publishing, 1988.
4. Sankalia, H.D.: T'I¥ Ramayana in Hlstorlcall'fi'SJ>IC.l#w, MacmOlan India,
1982; see Arany.akanda chapter pp. 6S-68 fa Sb'a aiddsm of Rama•~
Invasion ol bvana's territory and the killing of Raklbasas for no good
reason.
5. Ibid.
6. Cllakravarty, Uma, In SaffljG Sbaldi, quoted t,y.Neera aiowdhtr,', The
sra.man,·4 February, 1988.
. 7. Whaltng, Frank: 7h R'- ofd» bigfous Sflnljklmu ofRama, MotOal
Banarasidas, 1~. ·
8. 'God has made man superior to woman': 1he Qunm, Sura IV, .34.
289
Original from
THE PAINTED FAC£ ;
·.
9. Kamm bom out of ~ X61>-tn.p legitimate u-e of union by

Nfyoga, or the appoutD,-::«t of ancthe.r man ft\ imp«P.gnate the wife by her
husband's command (often the man so appomted would be a rlsbl or sage).
10. Bhattacharya, Sukumari: Pracbm Bbarrit: Sama} o ~ (Ber,plO,
Ananda Pub&hers, Calcutta, 1988.
11. Sukhtanka,, V.S.: .Crl&al Stud• In tb, Mababbarota., Pune, 1944.
12. Kri!lihnadlartua, Samsad Bankim Rachanaball. Calcutta.
13. Bhattacharya, Sukumari,- op. ck.
CHAP1ER 9: nm PAINIED PACE OP POU11CS
1. 1be Sunday Ob.wn.w, Bombay, 1967.
2. Hardgrave Jr., Robert L: 'Ihe Cellwoid God: MGR and the Tamil Pilm',
Soulb Arian Rfflftll, Vol. 4, No. 4, July 1971.
3. Bennett, Marguerite Ross: n- Politics <f Cultural Nalkmallsm m Soutb
India, Princet.oft Universky Presa, New Jersey, 1976. Most of the hbraica1
data in Sections D and m att haaeo on this book.
4. Ibid.
5. Possehl, Gregory (ed.): Andfflt CU. of II» l~us- llllrappan C""1lza..
lion), Okford & IBH, Nell D,lln, -1 982. .
6. RGK:· 'lledi-9awemg Tamil Nadu', 71- /UustnMJ WMrly Of India, 16
January, 1983.
7. Ibid.
8. Karthigesan Sivathamby, 1he Tamil fJlm as a Medium of Political
Communication, New Century Book House Private Ltd. The phenomenon
deacribed here was not confaned to the Tamils but was an all-India
phenomenon among the Hind~. 1he division between Ma'J' (daMicaO
and Desl (folk) Jn Sanskrit treatises on the sub;ect, such
as the Sa"lffl4
Ratna/tarr:a, was ~imilar in nature; so was the restriction of entry into lhe
temple a divide between the privileged and the underling in North India.
9-13. Ibid.
14. 1belmpad<(Rlm ons«Nly-amulyofTomtlNadu.
15. Interview with s. Krishnaswmly.
16. Interview with "P'tlm News" Anandan.
17. Interview with s. Kri.wlaswamy.
18. Hardgrave, Robert L , op. dl.
19. 1be Sunday Ol:w,ver, 11, July 1982.
20. Hardgrave, Robert L, op. dt.
21. TbellJustrat.d WeeWyoflndia, 16January 1983.
22. Laul, Brian, 1be IUustrrll«I Wea91 efIndia, 16 January, 1983.
23. S. ~ . F.ditor, Induslrlal Ecconomist, Wfflin8 in 'Ibtl lllusl'l'Uted
WeeWy ofIndia, 16 January 1983. ·
24. Ibid.
25. Cho Ramaswamy in The 0/ustrated Weekly ofIndia.
290
Original from
26. lb.id.
21. Indian E-<prm. 26 Septernher 1983.
28. Kartlugeaan, Slvathamby, op. ck.
29. ·' l'N Sunday Ol.w,wr, 11 July 1982.
30. lb.id.
31. Another version of the story Ja that thJs episode brought to a head an
already incipient reaolve.
32 v.s. Sharma, Indian bp,as.
33. Ibid •
.
34. 7'N 7Jmes oflndla, 24 August 1985.
35. 7be Statesman, 4 February 1987. •
36. Indian Exp,-ess, 12 February 1987.
31. TN 1imes oflndla, 9 October 1986 and 13 October 1986.
38. Ibid., 31 August 1985.
39. lndianExp,-ess, 23 May 1983 and 71» 7Jm&r <(India, 31 August 1985.
40. TI# Sla"1sman, 1 December 1983. ·
41. Indian Exp,-ess, 8 February 1987.
42. Binod John,. Sunday, 25-31 January 1987.
43. 71w Hmdustan 11,nes, 15 April 1978.
44. John, Binod, Sunday, 2S-31 January 1987.
45. India Today, 1-15 May 1980.
46. Ibid.
47. Pllmfarw, 1-15 August 1986.
48. Indian Exp,ws, 18 June 1982. Note'the similarity of thJs statement with
NI'R's utterance after assuming office (pg. 225).
49. See tramlation. of song from Pyaasa (pp. (JO, 61).
SO. Das Gupta, Chidanananda: ftbanananda Das, Sahilya Akademi, 1972.
5 i. Conversation with the critic Monojit I.ahiri.
52 For a detailed d.iscu.ssion of thJs film see pp. 70, 86.
53. Valicha, Kishore, 'How Amttabh Changed Commercial Cinema', The
Sunday Ol.w,ve,; February 1987.
54. Pa a discussion on the mother figure of the seventies, see 77,e Iconic
Mother, pp. 114 to 125.
55. 7be Sla"1sman, 6 March 1984.
56. C-onversation with authoc.
57. Although the pcesent tense has been used, in the pages on economic
indic:ators (Section VIO, the refeience is to condition., within MGR's )lf'ethJvo
and not later (he died in 1987).
291
Original from
11lE PAINTED FACE
OIAPTER 10: HOW INDIAN IS INDIAN CNEMA?

1. Lutz, Lochar, 1be ~ i Pim: Agent and Re-Agent of CUitural Ormse,
Manohar, 1985.
2. Ibid.
3.Shamgadeva,Sa,w.,ta~.
4. Schechner, Richard, ~ Circumsumasfro,,• tM AIKmt-Cartk
to Ram/al, Seagull Boob, 1983.
OIAPTER 11: 1HE VALUE OP DASH
1. Letter to the P.ditor cl the KMarl, Pwie, 6 May, 1913.
2. Virginia Woolf, op. dt.
292
Original from
APPENDICES
APPENDIX I
Notes on some ,eqntpsycbolqpcal theories cfpq,ularcinema
Two· noted aodal psydiolopta haw lately tumed ther rnic:roscopk

vi1ion onto the cinema aaecn and come up wth .remarkable Jnsight. Both
of them - Ashis Nandy and Sudhir Kakar - probably began to do so wilh
the Indi2 International Quarterly (Vol. VIII No. 1, 1991), gueat-ed.ited by
Pradip Iu,hen in 1981 in a pioneerins effort to plumb the deptN of popular
cinema, so far neglected by the intellectual commwlily. Whereas Nandy
has mainly analyud particular films or sroups olfJlms (e.g. olSatyaJl Ray's),
Kakar has gone into a sort of general theory ol popular cinema which
thetefore calls for discussion here.
A chapter in Kakar's recent book lnllmtll# blaHons: .&plorl"ll Indian
SauaHty (Voong, 1989) devel~ his earlier thesis of popular cinema as a
collective fantasy, a fairytale, a 8fOUP daydream dreamed by the audience
itself rather than by the f.dmmakers. It' is, to him, another name for that
'world of the iJnaSination which is fuelled by desire and whk:h provides
us with an alternative world where we continue our long-standing quanel
wJth reality'. 1k sees in inaeparable link between desire and fantasy and
describes fantasy u the m ~ o f dcsitt., ls dramatization in a visual
form.
Fantasy serves its psychological funaion by giving play to conftlcting
deucs that cannot be fulfilled b-, :ause they are largely dependent on
people and things over whk:h we have no control in real lJfe. "Ibe power
of fantasy, then, comes to our rescue by extending or withdrawing the
desires beyond what is possible or reasonable, by remaking the past and
inventing a future•. He goes on from there to demolish the film industry's
common argument that they provide escape to the poor from the rigours
of reality becau.,e, as he points out (without any supporting evidence or
defmitions): 'It .Is not the poor who constitute the bulk of the Indi2n film
clientele'. He fmds Indian cinema unique in its comistent manufacture of
fantasy: 'One does not know ol any other country which, even In the worst
periods of economic deprivation, uncertainty, dished out such unifarn
fantastic fare•. To prove the point, he cites the Instance of the German
cinema of the twenties and the Japanese after World War II, none of whk:h
churned out such a volume of fantasy.
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711£ PAINTED FACE
' .
But popalar Jwll•n .-wfflll•• mndel i . llwaya been Hollywood, net
Ga,--aoy, wtlh which .It viduaDj 1oat al ooract after Pranz Oaten, not to
ap,ak r,f Japan, wtlh which .It never bad any. Duma the Deprca8'on ol
1929 and ls aftermalb, Hollywood WU dnminated by the mbaJ1
00l'Mdies of Ptaok Cap-a and achera. It was very much a reaction to the
Depn:18ioft and, Ulre the Indian popular film deaai>ed by Kakar. vlc"Wd
the wood dvoup the _eye, of •••II Uld middle America ~ a baulegtouncf
for a Manichean llnagle of aood apinlt eril1 • Owold MandelbtuOi, 1978).
Aa a matter of fact, Hollywood's cnomla, rmJSfca!e, hoirol' and
pnpcrr flms, which llff! ti:txhlly b rn1t typnl and moc sucoeNWI
semes, cauy a huge load of fanrasy. . .
Hollywood has for genera~ done what the Hindi pop film does for
al.ldieoces m India and frt many 1hiid World counlriea. The Hindi cnenia
baa been, in fad, tbe pc>(¥ man's Hollywood. The difference is that as tbe
major counary to develop 1hr enema cio a large sea~. Hollywood was able
to spin out its fanr.asles .In a much more skJlled dnematk fashion, often
getting dose to tbe of the med••m, and has always poduced a
few aescbetically dJsdnauished fi1ms ~ the Cramework of tbe big bux
office - an art that has almoc always eacapcd tbe Indian. -popular <"inema,
partk:ulady since tbe doee of tbe flfties. .
. While tbe psychologi.,t adds a very important and so far abecnt ~ement
to flm atticism, he tenda to confne his disc:oune to tbe psyc:hological
dimension alone. A fuller engagement wilh tbe popular cinema's relatioo-
alup with aociety would .ne.a: saartly involve dlf' blsrnric:al, polltical and
economk: aspects. It ls obvious that fantasy is not a self-c:ontaJned pbe-
nomenoo. A fanmsy wood was built brick by brick by Annadora1 just so
thatM.G. RamachanclMshould take over the state in Tamil Nadu in reality.
The DMK leaders knew that l they built up MGR as the Good Man, tbe
Saviour and Leader, in film after film, in tbe context of all sections ofsoclcty
grid by grid, the fantasy would tum into realJty. lheir plan was exacdy
fulfilled. 1he fantasy that popular cinema wore thus poved to be tbe
batdcground of ideas in which tbe best sttategi.1t succeeded.
N.T. Rama Rao's meteroic rise to po'\Wf' also illustrated theI power of
fantasy - he played God or his vi0eroy on earth in some 260 films - to
overflow into hard fact. It is in this that Indian popalar drlema is unique,
because nowhere in the 'Mlfld has this equa~ of myth and fact taken
place on svcb ~ scale in the political uena.
When sane 80 8005 of busfnesc magnates .In atlcua:a tried w mnlat
pls coming out of a college, their war ay was (¥, a,.- tbe song firm
Trltllv. 1hus tbe ubiqwrous rape scene in popular cinema which ralcar
sees as fantasy on tbe put of bolh tbe men qd the women Jn tbe audience
Original from
can hardly be ,e co Na .telf~o-,.lned phenom,.nml lhat does not Influence
realky.
I ~ the aomewbat .lndulaent atlilude to rape u enllel1almnent and
all ol popal•r ct,wma as aelf'-<XJOtalned fanauy can be sem es a clear (and
v«y wate111 oonsumerist~ mnliaUs() refusal to ~ F wJlh the quesdun
ol wlue. It is perhaps a put of a c:ataJn amdc110ending alf#ude to the
ctneoa, denying boch b ~ and pocendalldes as art and b
mftuence upon ceality.
. Cultural lumpmtz:atioft, and eoooomic realtdea JJke nnl
11 -g; 1ti. , fragn
'r' • I-. ---•tation
,,,..don
of land holdmp etc, haw • peat Jeal to c:bwidi
ep
the particular chander ol tlm &ntasy devaoped in India. Who would

today fail to see the dtrec:t c:onnecliol, ben.een the style ol represe:ntatioa
ol the Rmna)¥m (and the Mababbaml) in the tdevisioo serial, and the
communal battleground ol the Ram J:a"IDaliloomi-Masjid dispute? An
· approach. tndudtng an undenwldJng of the aesthetic
dimension in relation to the odien is thus eseential to an understanding ol
. the popular.cinema, tn which psycbolcsy can play an Important put, but
not appropriate the whole.
• ••
APPENDIX D(a)
Indian.Thlditiols ~ - 1be C1:JnslituMn qflndla
II] Vlole~ agaln.,;r Hartjans (A.S. Abraham, 71w 11m«s cflndla, New Delhi,
August 16, 1985). .
II) Taking on the Teaaers (Pukmal'l G. Anandaol, 71w 11m«s ofIndia, New
Ddhl, August 2P, 1988).
U) Q:irnes Against flurnaolry (71w Slat&sman, Calc:uaa, April 9, 1990).
[!] Bthar: Altar of Death (Shannila Chandra, India Today, May IS, 1990).
[!]
While anti-Harijan atroocties are a universal feature ol rural India, as
successive reports of the Commissk>ner for Scheduled Casts and Tribes only
too eloquently establish, they are especially plentiful In a handful of states.
According to the 1979-81 report, from 1967-79 (except for 1973, when data
are not available), "lJtar PratiGJ:, and Madhya PratiGJ:, baw conslstffllly
occuplc,djirst and #cond positions in ,wp,ct of ca.ws ,wpo,t«I rvga,rlm,
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THE PAINTED FACE
Duma that period, Rl,J}altl,4,,

dti»uc:1#,s -on ScbldaJl«J Oarld.
lorJJSt ,,.,.,_,. ofanH-Harlj(m alrodlwsforftw ,-rs bad,,.
tbml
"'nm• (1967-71),
with Bibar m tbal posUkmforfour s u ~,-,rs (1976-79) followed by
Kera1a (1974 and -1975) and Tamil Nadu (1972). Gujarat, Mabarasbtra and
Odssa have variously wumed the fourth and fifth posldons. So a .Is in U.P.,
M.P., Rajaslhan, Bihar, Gujarat, Mabarashara, Orissa and Kerala that. unless
the pattern has radically changed in the ·last few years, state adion.
preventive and punltive, should be .lnkially c:oncenlnted, with U.P., M.P.,
Blbar and Rajastban, all m tl# ~ W, ~ tl# tnOtSI """"1dia#
and tlw g~Wllast li.tli?Jtlon.
(j]
Singularly unsuccessful in stoppng aexua1 harassment oo dy anceta,
New Delhi's poUcc force has l a ~ a new offawvc: self-defence
cb:saes for citizens. last month special police officers canvassed dooc-to-
dooc in south-west Delhi neighbourhoods to persuade reluctant parents to
send daughters to &cc judo da.soies.
Since vuJaar and violent behaviour Js commonplace in the Indian
capital, the drive showed some readts. About 200 'WOIPCn and children
attended dasscs in R.K. Puram, Vinay Nagar, Rajinder Nagar andJanakpuri.
Black belt judo .Instructors like national coaches Gurcharan SJnsh Gogi, bJs
wil'e Suman Gogi and colleague Shiv Kumar Kohli, gave free training foe
ooe month in the bare basics of how to defend oneself.
Among the JllOIC cndtu•iastic lcamcrs was Poonam Vcrnra, 30, a
houscwif'e of Janakpuri. Said Vemra, •Bcf~, travelling in a aowded bus
meant putting up with pawing men. Now I know that a jab of the elbow
in a man's solar plexus will get rid of tum•. Her new-found confidence also
enables her to get 1 ladica seats• on buses vacated on demand.
Pobce COIDD1iMioncr Vljay Karan st.ates, · 'Eve-tcasJng Js a chronic
problem in the capital. 1he police are conccmcd that their antl..ev.~asin,
meMJU'cs over the last one year ha-ve not made a dent in tM sinratlon'. He
says the police will fund more such dasses and demonstrations in women's
colleges. He hopes that schools, colleges and dubs will also take up judo
rlas1CS.
But one of Delhi's few female judokas, Manjcct Arya, ls cautious Jn her
appaisal of these clasv.s. "Sometimes a little knowledge ls more dangerous ·
than no knowledge•, says Arya. Apart-time judo-instructor at a girl's school,
she fccls judo must be learnt and practised for a minimum of one year
before it ls of true value as a mean., of self-<lcfcnce.
It .Is boys and men who generally attend judo, kara;te, and taekwondo
classes in Delhi. Girls lJkc 15-ycar-old Ravina Jain are exceptions. Jain, a
Original from
abldent ol. der - epcot two years acquirin& an cnnse belt jn judo.at the
'Nehru Stadium Sporta C-enare. 'I wanted to do eomethJns advenluroua,• abe
explained. •1 don't 1h people •yin& that boys are superior to pls, when
I know they are not. 1hia training gi\'es me aelf-confidence, a ,pail ol.
· 00111pdMk>n -and the will-pow.:r to achieve anytb.1ns-.
But Jt is subm!rive, mouldable, lv>mely and shy dauahtem chat are in
favour in the IndJan marriage market. O:mplalned JaJn, • ~ f<qeta
that evenlUally one baa to get married. Who will you fight with then, your
husband or your mocher-in-law?" Jan, Arya and Ve.ma 'MU among tboee
who demoostrated throwing t.echniquea at the dosing 0CICJllO(ly of the
mnnth-long cbMC:S at R.K. Pwam on July 7. They feel such classes should
be made a regular Ceanue, jf they are to have an lnpct. But more cynical
cidum believe dM'! claMea are just a publicity ltWll by a beleaguered police
fon:e, under fire for Jls dismal tnck recXlrd in aubingaime.sagainst women.
Madhu Kishwar, editor ol. the femini.1t jownal Manu.sb4 i., convinced
that the .police themaelvea are the wont offenders when Jt cnmea ID
haraaslng women. "1hey are wutin8 a lot ol. money on such publicity
campaigr\.t1•, said Kishwar.
Kishwar recalls how during an evening walk she was followed by two
men in a car. "1hey kept atopping and sayina obecme lhing,, perb.lps
waotmg to pck me up. Evenlually, they hit me with the bamper ,;,I their
car-.
She promptly phoned in a cnmpalnt to the police, givins the ~ -
tion 11umber of the car. The eame night, at 11.30 p.m, she got a call from
the police station. No1 they had not traced the car. But they 'WUC coming
to her house to question her. And to confirm that she had received inJuriea,
she would have to go with them for a medical examination.
She refused to be questioned or taken for an examination ln the middle
of the nigh.L In any case she had no injuries. •Does a man have to break
my limbs before the police ho!:>k him fol harassment?" she asks
College girls Jn Delhi are the JDO.$l vulnerable to harassment on the
stteets. About a year ago, two students of lady Irwin College had a knife
pulled on them by a gang of boys when they protested agairw harassment
in a bus. Nobody in the bus intervened. Three days later a much-shaken
mocher fmally managed to get through to a newspaper reporter and the
.Incident got publicity. 1he college girls and their teachers then protested
by stopping traffic on the busy highway outside the college.
A few months later, a student of Indraprastha College, Mon.I.ma Vernia,
had to single-handedly fight off the advances of f1Ve Delhi Tramport
Corporation employees, including the bus conductor. The young girl
happened to be an athlete and a flyin& jump out of the bus saved her from
their clutches. She knew how to b,reak her fall and got away with no broken
Original from
11lE PAINTED FACE
bones, jult a badly apaJned k+-« and foot. Paw days lam the complaint
abe had ftled widl the poUce WU atill shualJnj from police atation. to police
ata~ No adioG had been taken. Evenlually, college 5CUdents organi7.ed
a march to the ~ govemer's office, to demand arrest of the culprb.
A bla1.e of publidty may elicit action from the auahoritiea but most cases
80 unpublicized, p,udy because of women's reluctlfnoe to conplain and
have to deal widi the police and the courts. Pear of aocial disgrace aJ10
deters women from films a complai~ In any caae the law and its keepers
take • e v e ~ ll&hdY. ~ and rnok:ataticn are criminaJ offmces
and offenders can be an-ested.
But lheae offences are bailable and a simple peaonal bond of Rs 500
- Rs 1,000 Js all that isrequked 110 be let out 011 bal. If~ penoo Js poduoed
bef0te a maglmate, he may be let off widi a Wllfflin8 or apolosy or a
p.fibdll from Rs 5 upto Rs SOO.
In the first six monahs of this year, Delhi police's oima agaimt 'M)fflao
ceU dalrM t.o have aaeet.ed 373 men and let off 823 wMh a "warolng' dumg
a special anti-eve~ drive.
Meanwhile a Delhi eve-teasing (prohibition) bill, 1988 is pendmg
ratitlcation in Parliament. nm popoee! ti&htenln8 of existing provi.wlos
and stipulates a seven-<lay .mininium jail sentence iMtead of fines. 'But do
we operate by laws in this oountty?" asks a.tadhu Ki&hwar. Social attitudes
need to change. P ~ attiDJdes need to change. That is the C'Ol)/tr05\!S of
most women's oqpnizations here.
rn
Art important piece of infa11ation oooveyed by the Presideot In his
etart-of-che-year address to a joint meeting of boch Houses of Parliament,
but which may not have received adequate notice, related to the bw to
prevent crimes against the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes which
was passed last yea.: and has been in force sinoe January 30. The Scheduled
Castes ·and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Ab'ocities) Act Is a. fairly
far-reaching measure necessitated as much by the alarmJng lnm-,ise In
attack• on, and rnass killinp of, helpless peopJe belonging to these group,
as by the painful discovery that emtJns bws like the Protection of Qvil
Rights Act and the proviw>ns of the Indian Penal Code were siocssly
Inadequate to check brutality. The Act defines and codifies atrocltJes ~galmt
these castes and tribes for the first Ume. The off~ range fiom act.ioos
that are derogatory to -1'urnan diginJty such as being paraded naked to
wrongful d1spoacM!on of land or premises, md mm ndude oompolsioo
to vote for a particular.candidate and the giving of f a l s e ~ Jn cowt.
Original from
The allOdtles deftnec:I lnchlde, besides, more heinous aio'.W like rape,
araon and murder.
· Over a ac01e of such offences are lilt.ed kl the Act whk::h provides fcx
speedy trial through special courta ·in reap«t of all of them, and pacribes
deterrent punishmC!nt, not exdudmg.the death penalty. As the Government
atated at the time the law w pam:ed, the inaea5e Jn such atrodtiea
iq,rescnt5 the violent~dk>nofwiealthy landowners and the upper classes
who have so far dcmJnated the oounttyskle as the Scheduled c.astes and
Scheduled Tribes sought to usess their fi8hts, resist practices like untouch-
ability, and more irnportandy, demanded the statutory mlnJmum wages and
refused to suffer forced CX bonded labour. Others, who ~ tL,ed to
irupUcit acceptance of their supremacy, resent the new trend, particulady
because of its ecconomic. dimension and the advantage Jt gives to the
weaker sections. 'Ibis i s ~ offaur Stata In the Hmd, belt- Utar
Prru/esb, Rajastban and Btbar - wbkb tcppltl 1"' list of sucb crltMs
accwdt"ll to the lalflst statlstlcs(wbkb ,w/a# to 1987), lMar .PratJ.sl, alo,w
NCOrrlm, as many as 4,348 ,wpo,taJ casss.
States like Andhr.a Pradesh att also dearly n dus category, ahhoush
the statistics do not show it, po.wbly because practlcaHy no social aime is
reported there. However, the growing Naxalite movement povides tansi-
ble evidence of the commission of such aimes, for NaxaUtes obvioosly
thrive on the seething anger of the rural classes and tribals against the
dominant sectioM of society. It remains to be seen how effective the new
legislation will pove in chedting atroclies, especially since the C'nmmls-
sloner for the Scheduled C-astes and Scheduled Tribes seemd to be
pesslroWic about whedier they will at all end. One view is that Jt is the
absence of suong district officials wilh genuine sympathy for the weaker /
sections that is responsible for the continuation of such injustice. 1he ~w
Act seems to take dm into account, since tt prescribes somewhat stem
punJshment even for officials who tend to tum a blind eye to such offences,
but that alone will not be enough. A major and positive revamping of the
entire oft'acial dispemation now in charge of the countryside seCJM essential
jf society's trad1tional outcasts are to be released from the f'ear that has
haunted them fer genentions.
C-aste has long been an obstacle to nwriages throughout the country.

But in Bihar, so complete wthe opposition to inter-caste nwriages, that
virtually every couple attempting to break the barrier has a hanowing tale
to narrate: a tale of social ostracism, mental and physical' lwrassment, and
violence that at times amounts to cold-blooded murder.
299
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11IE PAINTED FACE
Take Satyendra Singh, 24, and Mira JCums!lr\ 21. Boch wae Rajpl.U, but
while Satyendra was a poor resident ol I.oyabad in Dhaobad tlistrict, Mira
came from a wealthy famUy. A year and a half ago they seaedy wed in
A.Nosal, West Bengal. On .muming to Loyabad, they informed the local
police about their marriage. Thus ended their short-lived marital bli.cs. The
bi::'~ was _detained for three days in ~ tbana and then forcibly sent to
her parent.a house. In one of her 1eu.ers to Satyendia, Mira wrote that her
family "washed off my slndoor with a bucketful ol water". Another letter
alleged that her famJ1y had given a bnbe of Rs 35,000 to the tbana.
. During the following one and a half years. Satyendra ran from pillar to
pc:>et, demanding unifacation ~ his wife. He filed a case against Mira's
family but to no avail. Meanwhile, Mira was packed off to Jehanabad to
her uncle's house from where she smuggled out several lettas to her
husband alleging brutal ~ and coercion. to remarry.
1heir love st.ocy caw- to a gruesome end on February 8 this year.
According to police investigations, Mira's brothers Vijay Singh, Ajai Singh
and four accm>plices dragged Satyendra to a lonely spot, beheaded him
with a sharp ln.sttwnent and then bwned his head to avoid identification.
It w only because Mira's name was tattooed on his left arm that his body
was eventually identified.
Satyendra's mother Ranl Devi charges: •When I heard that my son had
been dragged away. I rushed to the tbana, but the off'acer-in-dwge used
vile language and threw me out. He was obviously in ·league with the
aiminals.• Since the aime took place, local residents have in fact organised
several demonstrations against the off'acer-in-charge Yogendca Chowdhary.
Moreover, the poUce delayed arresting Mira's father and brothers for a
month, by which time considerable public anger bad 'build up. Though
Oiowdhary denies any involvement in the crime, his views on marriage
are revea.Ung. "I don't .recogruse this marriage.• he says. "Any marriage
taking place widlout guardians' approval Is invalid.• But the girl was above
18 and the law permits her to marry whoever she wishes. •So what?- retorts
Oiowdhary. •aurs 1., after all Indian culture.•
Dbanbad SP Ran<llir Verma also justifleS Chowdhary's stance, saying:
"1he offlCCI' comes from a certain background from which you can't isolate
him. 1he beliefs in Bihar are unbelievable and too well ingrained to change
overnight.• Par good measure he adds: "It's easy for Delhi toexpress outrage
at what happens in Bmar but to conceive what motivates the people in
Motihari and Clwnparan Is impos&ble for Delhi.•
While that may well be true, k deflects atte~n from the stack truth
that the pdice usually side with the powerful. For instance they haven't
even tried to contact Mira who, according to her own letters, js suffering
physical torture JnJehanabad. But that should not surprjse when even Mira's
300
Original from
AppntlJicu
OPtaer. R•rn Kumad DeYi, aecrna uncoocemed. "We don't approve of

.1n1.ercutemamaaea, We awry on the baua of dowry and • lot of give and
take,• she says. ·
Even if f.uniliH were to pamk an inter-<:aate manaJ&e, there are various
cute orgarusations wbidl take it upon themaelvea to dlly oppose an
allian,;ie between persons belongins to d1fferent castes. Vktually every
major ca,re is represented by an organiwtion: the Yadav Mahasabha, the
Kaayaalhas' CltMragupca Sarnaj, the Kunwar Sarnaj of the Rajputs, the
Kunnakshatrtya Mahasabha of the Kumus, the Bhwnihar Mahasabha, the
Bnhmins' Kanyakubp Samaj, Saryuparin Samaj, the Mailhil Brahmin Samaj,
and so on. 1he result is a aocial scructure where marriage is not the deci.1ion
ol two people to spend the rest of their lives together but a tramaction -
where dowry Js audal - belMlen two ltbandiumsoldie ,.~ cute_ And
anyane who dares to defy dlle8e dear-cut eocial rules Js punished - often
bnally.
Taite the cue of Golrul Sao, 26, and AnJta Pandey, 21. Having fallen Jn
love, the two tied the knot in a Paana court In 1987. But as Anita was a
Brahrnln and Golrul a Somi - one ol the backward castes - the girl's famly
would have none of l. As Anita's father, Siddheswar Nalh Pandey, was•
police da,oga, he organised for her to be dragged out ol Gokul's home,
beaten up on dM: stieet by a policeman and sent to her uncle's house Jn
.Arrah. Goku1 was threatened wMh nodung less than murder. "One of my
friends got sta~ as he was mistaken fa me by sc:xne goons who wae
on Anila's family's payrolls. He had to be hospitallse!d,e says he. Even Anila
was subjected to physical lOrtUiC by her uncle, a local Congress (0 leader
ol Arr.ah and his henchmen. -1hey didn't give me food, broke my right
.hand, scarred my face, damaged my right eye and holed an inch deep hole
In my back, all with my parents' pe,;;,IMJon,e she l'CC'lllls.
. By Ibis time a desperate Goku1 had filed a case- But Anita's farher
produced a certificate In c:owt staq lhat his daughter was merely 13 -
whicb made Goku1 guity ol facing a minoc girl into marriage. 1be result
was that the oowt sent Anita to the notorious Patna Women's Aft.er Care
Home. •Once theie; I thought rd. never be fiee again. But my husband's
penerverance pakl,• says Anita.
. Pa by this time Goku1 had decided to 80 on a fast unto death. And
aoon after, followtng the publidly generated, the chief·mn1.1ter ordered
that Anita be sent to her father's home. Anita then wrote to the court
demanding a medical check to ascertain her age. 1be upshot: a seven
member medical board was constituted which declared her age to be
bet<..een 18 and 19. 1be court then ordered lhat Anila be 8eftt to her
husband's house under police protection.
301
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1his however, was not the end of the c:ouple'a ordeal. Recalls Anita·
'Ewn when I was being brousbt out of the Patna Women'll Horne in a
police Jeep, my uncle's goom arr~ in cars and tried to take me away.•
It was finally thanks to some members of a volountuy orpnisation, the
<llhab'a Yuva Sangharsh Vahini, who lay on the road to stop the cars from
reac:tuns her, that Anita cowd return to her husband.
Since then Anita and Gokul have been together and today they have a
four-month old son. But the past counlinues to torment. Anita craves for
normal .relations with her parents but her father doea not recipcocate such
sendments. Said he: 'Anita is no Ionaer my daughter.• J. caste bias has thus
managed to permanently descroy a blood relati<>Mhip. But Pandey too can
be understood - if he accepts his .low caste son-in-law, he'll be oetnidwd
by his ltbandaan and dimlherited from the large family property.
'Society here will go to any length to prevent an inter-caste alliance,•
says Rakesh Kumar, 32, a Kayastha, who had to fJ8ht a long drawn case in
the Patna High Court before he could marry Rashmi Singh. 21, a Kurmi.
1
In.sread of going into the merits of the case, at one point the judge declared
that what I feh for Rashmi was not love but plain lust,• says he.
And Sushil JCumar Modi, the BJP MI.A from Patna Central, di.1covered
in the course of the recent assemhly polls that the main plank of his
opponents was his marriage to a Goan Christian. According to Bihar Cllief
Minister Laloo Prasad Yadav, 'the p-oblem is chronic in Bihar because of
lack of education and awareness. Worse, the police often align with the
higher caste of the two involved and harass the couple.•
Consider the experience of Khelanand Jha, 31, a Brahmin who wed
Minoti Pawan, 28, a Harijan, 11 years ago. Since then Jha has lost his job
as a clerk in the Darbhanga commissioner's off'ace and his village home w
set on fire. •1 almost. died,• says Minoti. 'It took me two months to walk
a&ian.• Jha then came to Delhi and beg:an a fast at the Boat Oub. Many
politicians came to see him including Bihar's then chief minister, Bindesh-
wari Dubey.
Dubey promkiecl help but on retummg to Bihar, Jha found the promv.e
was an empty one. He went from one government off"ace to the ocher, with
wife and two kids in tow, but justice evaded him. He returned to Delhi in
1988 and has been on a dbamas.inoe then wilh his family. 'Many politktaos
including Rajiv Gandhi and present Social Welfare Minister, Ram Vdas
Paswan, have promised action Nothing happened so far. But I'm q,timl-s-
tic,■ he says.
A6. is the case elsewhere, dowry is all-~nt in marriagea in Bibar
And marriages within the salJU'! caste that have blessing., of both CaroiUes
bring in ampl~ cash and goodies for the boy's side. Says Swlil JC'umar, 26,
. .
302
Original from
Ap~,rdi~s
. a VJahwabrma who wed a barlia girl after 8ghdng many a baale: 'My
puents were aesd'allen at lhe paspect of not getting any dowry.•
~ y, even girls' families don't oppoee dowry. "Hae Jl's • CMe
of mat,• explains Arvind N. Das, author of aeveral books on Bihar. He
adds: "Women are property and violation of property Js fought over in all
aodeties, And casfe ~ a form of 50Cial aecwity to be paerved at all ~ I
. Madan, an activist of the <llhaaa Yuva ~ Vahini, concurs: 'In
Bibar, caste is the fint and most important introduciion to a person. Its
dilution js met wilh oppnsit!,nn U all levels,I Explains Anand Bharti, 33, a
Bania who married Archana Urvashi, a Kayastha girl, after sunnounting
oomiderable opposition: 'Owe as a aodal identity is too w e l l ~ in
Bihar. Patients vis.it doctm of the .• me caste and proleuora enrol Ph.D.
students of their OWD CNCe. 1
In such an environment, opposition to violation of the sanctity of caste
- whk:h comes mainly from .Inter-caste marrlagea- cannot but be brutal and
barbaric.
• ••
APPENDIX II(b)
Crinu5 against women and weaker secto,s,
While anti-Harijan atrocllies are a univeml feature of rural India
suc~ive reports of the c.ommlcslnner for Scheduled Castes and T~
show that they are ~dally plentiful in certain states. According to th
1979-81 report, from 1976-79 (except for 1973 when data are not available),
'Uttar Pradesh and Madh.ya Pradesh have consistently occupied farst and
aecond pos1t1ons in respect of cases r e ~ regarding atrocities on
Scheduled Castes...state action, preventive and punitlve, should be initially
concentrated into U.P., M.P., Bihar and Rajasthan, all in the Hindu belt,
.receiving the ~ J.nunrdiate and the sreatest attention'. (Tlw nmas of
India, 16 Augu,t 1985).
Of course tlm is not to imply ia total lade of advanced culture in these
states or the absence of millions of hone!t citizen., in their midst; each has
11s own distinguished intellectuals, aeative peisonalWes. Madhya Pradesh
·has a unique all-Ind.la in.stitution in Bharat Bhavan, which promotes
universal and markedly non · cultural goals. Yet the pressures
of illiteracy, Oiteracy 26 to 2'7%), hJgh crime rate, acute caste discrimination
and hJgh incidence of violence agaiMt Harijan., and women cannot be held
up as the p.lcture of a culture that has a moral right to dominate the rest of
Ind.la through the si7.e of Jt.s population or the impo6ition of what, as sbuddb
Hindi, is actually a regional language. ·
303
Original from
THE- PAINTED FA.t;E
n>UCATION AND MA.a MEDIA

141. UIBACY IN INDIA
(afflll'dlna to 1911 0mm)
State/Ualoa N. .berofUlll1I• Pen:eanap of literate
Territory (',.,..)
Total Male Feeai. Total Male Pnnl•

Stale:
····-·
Blhw
•·-·••
183
·--
137
·-
-46
--
26.20
·-- ·•--
38.lJ.
13.62
•·••··-·· •·••··
...... ···-
..... .···-
..... ··--- ·--- ·-- :
•·-••·- ·--·- ·--- ·--··
......_.
MadJa:,a Pradel~ 145 106 39 21KI 39.49 15.53
·-·--·-···
•••••
.,.... ·--···- ·--
·--
·--·· ·-- ·---
·--. --·
·-- 38.76
Uaar Prides~ 301 228 73 27.16 14.04
Sowce: Rllp«ar Geaeral. ladla

Note: n. perclf'•...,. llave be• calaalated oa die total populalioa illdudl• '1l tbe
pclpllklioa la ap Group M
lnduslrlal Poe/wt Boal,, India, Tata Stw( 1987
CRIME Sl'A11STICS
Table 196-NUMBBR OP COGNIZABLE CRIMES REPOR'l'ED (1982)
State MwclerD-11:, Rollbeiy u- neft 1Uoda1 OdlelS Total
1Neui11
Stale:
·-··---
Biur
---
2,681
.........
3,419 . 1.935
♦I IU•II I l l
11.35' lA,719
-- --- -- ---
14,717 47,883 106,768
·-·-· -·-- ·-- -- •
..... --· - ---
--·- -- •
--- -·- -- ·---· --·- ...............
"
--♦Zlllll •
M.P. 2,516 436 2,706 22,915 .;rn 6,787 86,603 170,310
·-··-··
U.P.
--· ·-·-·· --·-
5,788 4,437 6,196 ----. .........
-·-··-- --
24,3'9 54,ffl 10,02'1 62,143 11,7,747
_. -··---
......... ........ ---· --·· ' ··---·· --- --·- ---··- ---·-
.
Soun:e: s.n. of Polk:e Raeudl ud Deve&opmeat MialsUy of Home Aff.ain
Original from
A.Pl'ffldicn
STAD-WISf' BBEA.JC.tJP OP RAPE CASES (UIWI)
STA1D/UNION llAPE MOJ.QTA110N

'DJUTORD'S 1986 1987 1988 1986 1987 1988 .
111 I I I IH -• I • I I • h M
-- -- -- -- ··---· ....... ...
Ma6y1 l'ladrs._ 1,526 NA
1,695 4,698 4,871 NA
·-··-··----
-·-··--·-···
--· --
-- - ----- ·---
--- ·- -
......... --
--·
M••-• 800 781 830 Z,724 Z,417 2,646
- ••-•- ••••••u••
UtarPrach ..
-·- -
1,192 1.291
.........
t.437
......
1,591 1,795 --
1,948
-··-··..··---· -·-· .. ,,.... - .........
•
-- .........
Sovos: Home Mlalmy
• NA ..... for Not Availallle
'Caste has long been an obstacle to marriages throughout the country.

But in Bihar, ao complete is the opposition to intercaste marriages, that
virtually every couple attempling to break the barrier has a harrowing tale
to narrate; a tale of social osttacJsm, mental and physical harassment, aod
violence that at times amounts to coldbloocled murder...•
'Here .It is a case of lz:zat • explains Arvind N. Das, author of several
books on Bihar. He adds: 'Women are property and violation of property
is fought over in all societies. And caste -" a fonn of social security to be
preserved at all costs. ..patients~ doctors of the same caste and prof~
enroll Ph.D. students of their own caste...• (India Today, May 15, 1990).
Newspaper reports constantly bear wtttnes.. to this charge. Here is an
example from 7J;e Telegmpb, Calcutta: ·
POQQ; HOUND PIMfllEP YOUIH, WIFE
SERAMPORE, JUI.Y 16: A polio stricken Harij:an youth from Bihar's VaJshali
district and his wife; a 21-year~d girl belonging to a higher caste, were
arrested here last night on dlf" basis of a w.urant issued by the Bihar police.
1be couple will be sent back to their hometown, Lakshroip•ll', soon.
Original from
11lBPMNIF.D F.ACB
The 26-year-old youdi, VJShwanath Das, roamed the girl, Mina Kumari,
reoendy agatost the wishea ol her family and came to Rishra to escape the
Ire of his in-laws. Mina's father is a well-to-<lo doctor in Lakshmipur. 1he
Bihar polke have registered a kidnapping case agaimt the youth.
Mina fears tbat V.ishwanath's angry neighbows or her parents may kill
him if he returns to Bihar. 1 Bhaiyya, please save my husband. He may be
a Harijan but he is as much a himan being as I am,• she pleaded with this
correspondent as she and her husband were being taken to court today.
Mina alleged that they had been kept in a dark, dingy c:ell and that the
police had even beaten up her husband. "Why have ~ been put behind
bars? What is ow offence? We were married Jn the Patna civil cowt,• she
said. 1he local police said they were helpless as :il case was pending against
the couple in Bihar.
According to Mina, Vishwanath and she have been in love ever since
they were Jn school. 1bey flnt met in 1984 when Vlshwanath was studying
in the junior section of Deodwld College in Hazipur in 1984. Mina was a
student of a nearby high school at the time. They eloped-when Mina's
parents started looking for a match of their choice for her.
1bey first~ to Patna and got .married in a tempi,., They later got the
marriage registered in court. When her parents and the police traced them
to Patna, they ran away to Bokaro and stayed for about a month before
shifting to Rishra. 'We thought West Bengal would be the safest state for
us to live in because we had been told that people here are free from ~
_piejudices,• Mina said.
Vs.shwanath, who is crippled since childhood, said he was initially
reluctmt to marry Mina because he was 'poor and a Harijan'. But he is
now fum in his resolve not to desert his wife. 'Come what may, I am not
going to leave her,• he said, adding that his neighbours and the girl's parents
had threatened to kill him.
Vlshwanath and Mina were living in a house at Panchanantala, near
here, foe .r,early a month. 1he youth was trying ~ start a business with the
help of his father who is employed in a factory at Rishra.
When this correspondent was trying to dick a photograph of the couple,
a Bihar police sub-inspector and the girl's brother began hurling abuses.
1hey even threatened this correspondent with dire consequences if this
report was published.
July 18, 1989.
• ••
306
Original from
~fas
APPENDIX Ill
Exanr,les qflnteroclion cfM)tb andFact
Myth reinforced Pact . ConfUct Raolution
or created by
cinema
PnHDaJital or Pamlly pressure Love \IS. Dowry (a) Bride

non-marital plus men's own bumina.
dalliance with urge to many
Radha-Krishna for dowry (b) Molesta-
undertone tlon olnon-
(Chapter Vll). bride.
A historical (a) Historians a Rationality vs. ' Communal

Ramaof1V atchaeologlsla faith violence
serial (Chapter assert lack of
VDO reinforces evidence ol
divinity ol Rama. historical R:ms . .
and hnpos.,lbility
of determlnlng
Rama., birthp-
lace.
(b) Popular
belief locates
Rama ln present
Ayodhya.
(c) Rama Janmab-

hoomi-Babri
Masjld dispute.
Original from
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Vatsyayana, Kapila: Trodttlonal Indian Tbeatrs, National Book
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310
Original from
- - -· - . · ·-·--····- - --------------..._,_-
INDEX
Aakrosb, 271. Awa910,; 118.

Abbas, K .A., 241, 260. Awara, 31, 45.
Abraham, 73, 118. Aya Sawanjboomlte, 110.
Acbbut Kanya, 89.
Ada/at, 52, 236. Baazi, 32.
Adib, Prem, 37, 165. Bachchan, Arn.itabh, 10, 12, 33, 52, 53,
Aeneid, The, 182. 70-71, 86, 88, 92, 107, 110, 116, 118-
Agnffpatb, 270. 119, 139, 153, 160-161, 234-236, 238-
Agnlhotri, Rati, 145. 244, 246, 263-264.
Ajanta, 22, 43, 168, 169. Bachchan, Harivanshrai, 241 .
Aftralba, 73. Bakshi, Anand, 62.
.AUHJrt Pinto Ito Gossa, 48, 57. Balachander, K., 216.
All, Muzaffar, 143, 146. Ball, Gita, 32.
Alvi, Abrar, 143. Bali, Vyjantimala, 246.
Aman, 2'.eenat, 130, 13J,, 154, 238. Balyogtn4 27, 208.
Amar, A•bar, Antbo11y, 42, 71, 88, Bandyopadhyay, Bibhutibushan, 46,
114, 117, 152. 113, 240.
Amar P,-em, 116, 240. Barua, P.C., 27, 29, 32, 92, 2.36.
Amaravati, 22. Bedara Kannappa, 232.
Amon, in Ctlta, 126. Bedi, Klran, 161 .
Amrohi, Kamal, 143, 146. Bedi, Rajinder Singh, 94.
Anadat Ponnu, 2~. B,mtsaJ, 269.
Anand, 235, 243. Benegal, Shyam, 47, 48, 170, 271.
Anandasbramam, 209. Bergman, lngmar, 259.
Ananthamurthy, U.R., 233. Bettelhelm, Bruno, 80, 90.
An Evening in Paris, 52, 157. Be-Abroo, 161.
Anjayya, 222. Bballta Prablada, 22, 42.
AMbion Ke ]barolton ~ 26. Bbaral MUap. 42.
Anku,; 48, 271. Bbasmasur, 35.
Annadorai, C.N., 116, 117, 120, 199, Bhattacharya, Basu, 'TI.
200, 204-'207, 210, 212- 214. Bhatvadekar, Harischandra, 20.
Antonioni, 259. Bhatt, Vijay, 165, 171.
Appaswam.y, Jaya, 168. Bbavni Bhava4 48.
Apte, N.H., 30. Bhonsle, Asha, 63.
Aravindan, G., 171. Bobblli Pul4 179, 222, 225, 226, 229.
Arjuna, 14, 15, 126, 179,183, 186,189. Bobby, 153, 154.
Amhelm, Rudolf, 19. Bohurupee, 75.
Ar.zoo, 153. Bose, Oebaki, 27, 30.
Asrani, 52. Brabmacbar4 28, 166.
Aural, 112, 113, 116, 120. Bridges of Tol,o Rt, 263.
Original from
1HE P.AJNTED FACE
Brook, Peter, 15, 184-186, 188-190. Dll El, Mandtr Ha( 156.
Dipika, 167.
Cagney, James 119. Don, 92, 152, 240. .
Campbell, Lewis, 78. Do .Anjaa,w, 240.
Cbbamana .Ala Gunia, "8. DoRoastt1, 117, 157.
Chakravarty, Mithun, 52. Dr. Kotnls, 30.
Cbala Murarl Hwo Ban,w, 52. Dunlya Na Maa,w, 29, 30, 45, 166.
Cbandasasanadu, 200, 223. Dutt, GUN, 31, 32, 45, 51, 60, 61, 92,
Cband#das, 27. 116, 117, 141-143, 154, 236, 237, 250.
Cbandralellba, 31. Dutt, SUnil, 246.
Chandralekha, 220.
Chandulal Shah, 27. Ebenstein, Se,sei, 19.
Chaplin, Charles, 19. Ell Baar P'11r, 264.
Cbanllata, 249. El, Cbadar Mafll S4 94 ,95, 265
Chattopadyay, Bankim Chandra, 180. Ekberg, Anita, 126.
Chatterjee, Saratchandra, 29. Eliot, T.S., 17-.
Chaudhuri, Nirad, 14. Erikton, Erik, 11, 245.
CbaudbvtnKa Chand, 141. EVR, 203-205, 214. ·
Chico Rei, 160.
Cbomana Dud( 48. Fallaci, Oriana, 274.
Chopra, B.R., 130, 131, 143, 145, 158, Fatehla~ 30.
178, 179, 181, 184, 186, 188, 189. Ford, John, 263.
Chughtai, Abdur Ralman, 21. Freud, Sigmund, 78, 79.
Cbupl,e, Cbup/fe, 235.
Close Encounlers of tbe Tbtrd Ktnd, Gandhi, Indira,9, 121, 133, 2'17, 221,
263. 222, 224, 234, 238, 242, 212, 2n.
Colbert, Claudette, ·27. Gandhi, M.K., 28, 36, 45, 180, 208,
211, 253, 2n.
Damle, 30. Gandhi, Rajiv, 235, 243.
Damul, 48, Ganesan, Shivaji, 207, 211, 212, 213,
Dard, 88. 215.
Das, Jibanananda, 237. Ganguly, Rupa, 188.
Da.staJ,, 124. Goon Hamara Sbabr 1umba,o, 52.
Debdas, 27, 29, 32, 33, 91, 92, 142, Caram Hawa, 128.
145, 236. . Ghatak, Ritwik, 51.
Dt1ewan/4 154. Gbatasbraddba, 233.
~ r , 70, 72, 87, 92, 153, 236, 239, Ghosh, Gautam, 48, 56, 155, 271.
240, 269. Goetze, Herman, 248.
Deoras, Balasaheb, 167. Godfather, Tb~ 119.
Desai, J.B., 88. Gokhale, Kamalabai, 38.
Desai, Manmohan, 235. Goldschmidt, Miriam, 186.
Daamun«ra,n, :zaJ. Goldwyn, Sam, 19.
Dw4 37, 46. Govil, Arun, 167.
Dhadda, Sukhwant, 94. Gudd( 52.
Dhannendra, 33, 116, 152-154, 238, Gunasundarl, 27.
240, 263.
312
Original from
Ha.laat,269. Khosla, Raj, 60.
Harlsbcband,o, 20, 35, 262. Xlnul-dar, 85.
Hegde, 129. Kbudgan, 52.
Hider, 136, 159, 243. Kondav.11 Slmba,n, 125.
Kosambl,D.D., .74, 85, 134, 152.
Ion, 83. Kouyate, Sodqul, 106.
Iyer, G.V., 171, "82. Krishnan, N.S., 114, 115, 209.
lnsaa/KA Ta,mu, 130, 131, 157, 158. Krlsbnarjunayuddba,n, 126.
Dlad, 182. Kubrick, Stanley, 171.
Inqullab, 1.30, 235. Kumar, Ashok, 262.
Kumar, DWp, 6", 118, 153, 155, 262,
Janak!, Ramachandran, 221. 263.
Jal SantosblMaa, 42, 119, 165, 171. Kumari, Meena, 81.
Jayalalltha, 216, 221, 247. Kumar, Raj, 146, 232, 233, 234, 280.
JMJan Prabbat, 89. Kumar, Rajendra, 52.
Jha, Prakash, 48. Kumar,Sanjeev, 69, 86.
Jung, C.G., 77, 79.
Laawarls, 88, 92, 269.
Kabbl XAbbt., 92, 235, 243. La:hiri, Bappl, 62.
Kael, Pauline, 281-"83. Lanca.ster, Burt, 281, 282.
Kagaz Ke Pbool, 33, 236. Lanlta Dahan, 35.
Kakar, SUdhir, 279, 280. Lapierre, Dominique, 156, 277.
Kala Patbar, 236. Uvi-Strauss, Claude, 11, 12, 26.
Kalpana,89. Lifeo/anAmerkanFinnnan, ~ 20.
Kamaraj, 1.10, 113, 11.9, '207. 217. Loren, Sophia, 158, 281. ·
XAncbanaSlla, 171. Lutze, Lothar, 139, 248, 251.
Kapadia, Dimple, 90, 154, 160. Ludhlanvi, Sahlr, 60.
Kapoor, Prithviraj, 6", 65, 262. Lurnla'es, 17, 20, 37.
Kapoor, Raj, 52, 149, 154, 236, 237,
249, 260, 263. Mahabharat (1V - B.R. Chopra), 123,
Kapoor, RJshl, 9". 130,132,135,147,151,167, 176, 178,
Kapoor, Shashi, 69, 92, 152. 180, 183-185, 188-190, 227, 270.
Karanth,·B.V., 48. Mahabharata (Peter Brook), 4, "8, 41,
Karma, 86, 155. 53, 59,67,71-74, 81, 82, 84, 9", 9.8-108,
Kamad, Girhh, 15, 233. 125,126, 143,175,179,181, 185.
Karunanidhi, M., 1, 114-117, 120, 1"8, Mabana.gar (The Big City), 56, 57,
138, '207, 210-214, 218, 231, 247. 113.
Karz, 42, 114. Mahapatra, Nirad, 37.
Kaul, Mani, 37, 47. Majumdar, Hemen, 21.
Khan, Feroz, 264." Malinl, Hema, 9".
Khan, Mazhar, 57. Malle, Louis, 156.
Khan, Mehboob, 112-114. Mand4 95, 149.
Khanna, Rajesh, 116, 238, 240, 246, Manjula, 245.
263. Mangeshkar, Lata, 63.
Khanna, Vinod, 71. Mani, s .v., 215.
Khomeinl, Ayatollah, 153, 154, 274. ManKaAngan, 157, 158.
313
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Marrl, 235. Paar, 48, 56, 155.

·Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 76. Padaltottl, 116.
Maya Mlrl&a, 56. Pado61, 30.
Mayaba.rar, 125. Pawam, 31.
Meenakshi, 28. Pa•• mb, 67, 78-81, 124, 142-144,
Mebffldl Ra"ll La.>"84 88. 146.
Mehta, Prakash, 53, 64, 134, 241. PancbvaN, 97.
Mehta, Ketan, 57. Pa,oma, 97.
Mehta, Sujata, 160, 164. Parsi theatre, 16.
M...a Gaon Merr:1 Dab, 153. Patb..- Pancbal4 113, 139, 249.
M"""'-'u Nattu llavam, 213. Paroma, 55.
M#ddleman, ~ 57. Paaollni, 96, 170.
Mm;b Masala, 57. Patil, Smita, 118.
Mirza, Saeed, 47,48, 57. Patwardhan, Anand, 29.
Mitra, Shambhu, 75. Phalke, D.G., 20-23, 27, 35, 38, 262.
Moblnl Savllrl., 35. Pbanlyamma, l29.
Motl#r Ind"", 112, 120. Porter, Edwin, 20.
Mr. cSMrs. 55, 116. Pratfsbaat, 90, 92, 151, 160, 164, 269.
Mr. Sampat, 31. Purab Aur Pascblm, 52, 89, 157,
Mugbal-+Azam, 64. Puri,Amrish, 73, 135, 148, 153, 243,
Multaddar Ka Slltandar, 71, 87, 92, 264.
114, 124, 153, 240. Pyaasa, 60, 142, 236.
Mukherjee, Hrbhikesh, 52.
Mul,N, 27. Qurban4 148, 264.
Muybrlge, Eadweard, 17, 39.
Radha, M.R, 211.
Nadodl Mannan, 212, 213. Ral, Himanushu, 30.
Nair, Mira, 47, 267. Rajagopalacharl, C. 206.
Nakane, Chie, 93. RajaHarlsbcband,a, 8, 17, 21, 94, 97,
Namal, Haram, 32. 123.
Nandy, Ashi.,, 89, 279, 280. Ram Tm Ganga Mal/4 52, 270.
Narayan, R.K., 233. Ramachandran, M.G., 9, 39, 41, 200,
Nazir, Prem, 41, 232, 2fi6. 201, 210, 211, 213-221, 229-- 236, 243-
Nehru, Jawahariai 90, 124, 132, 140, 245, 247, 280.
141, 145, 156, 161, 252, 253, 259, 277. Raman, B.N., 229.
Nihalani, Govind, 152. Ramanujan, A.K.,84, 85, 92, 246.
Nillaab, 80, 81, 88, 146, 158. Rama Rao, N.T., 9, 12, 39, 41,200, '1iJ7,
Nlsbant, 24. 211, 221-236, 244, 266, 280.
Nutan, 86, 155. Ramayan (TV), 120, 132, 167, 169,
. 171-173, 176, 178, 180, 270.
Odyssey, 97, 103, 182. Ramayana, 123, 140, 171,177.
Ol,a Oorle Katba, 48. Rank, Otto, 53, 72, 81.
Ostar, Akos, 248. .Rao, Gundu, 233.
o,-, 0~ 281. Rao, Rameshwara, K. 226.
Ozu, Yasujiro, 56, 251. Ray; Satyajlt, 37, 45, 46, 51, 55, 56, 90,
113, 189, 248, 249, 271.
314
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Reddy, B.N., 30. Shearer, Nonna, 28.
Reddy, Naga, 2-r1. Sbolay, 109, 156, 239, 240, 264.
Rehman, Waheeda, 69, 86. Sb,.• #20, 31, -'5.
Rekha, 52, 85, 92, 152. Stlslla, 92, 152, 157, 240, 265.
Renoir, Jean, 282.. Sontag. Susan, 19.
Riefenstahl, 136. Subramanyam, K. 27, 30, 208.
Rohmer, Michael, 18. Su}llla, 31.
Roy, Bima~ 51, 116, 117, 1S4.
Roy, Jamlni, 25, 39, 40. Tas<>re, Rabindranath, 7:1, 60, 106,
Roy, Nirupa, 72, 118. 140, 149.
Roy, Shannlla, 187. Tagore, Shannlla, 52.
n,a,..,., 11,an.r, 119, 212.
Saal Hlndustanl, 13', 241. "ThOlnaS, Ml", 21,168.
Sagar, Ramanand, 21, 120, 132, 167, 11,yagabbooml, 'E1.
169, 170, 172, 174, 176, 178, 179, 256. Thyagarajan, P.T., 119.
Saglna, 32. 7Wdftl, 151, 158, -r,o, 281.
Sahni, Balraj, 262. Trlsbul, 10, 42, 69, 72, s<H38, 92, 114,
Sahib Bibi Aur Gbulam, 31, 32, 142, 236, 239.
143. Tsuchltorl, Toshi, 187
Saiga~ 29.
SalaamBombay, 47, 267. Umroo Jaan, 67, 78, 79, 80, 81, 124,
Salim-Javed, 93, 118, 119, 241. 142-14", 146.
Samarth, Shobhana, 37, 165. cy,iaa,; 52, 117.
Sananda, 93.
Sangam, 149. Vasan, S.S., 31, 32, 214.
Sarabhal, Malllka, 188. '
Veilll»ari, 113.
Sasl, I.V., 88, 157. Verma, Ravi, 21-23, 28, 43, 168, 171
Sathyu, M.S., 47, 128. Vldamanen, 128.
Schechner, Richard, 257. Vijaya, K.R., 212.
Sen, Apama, C/7, 140. ·Vinayak, Master, 28, 166.
Sen, Mrina~ 48, 51. Vind, Leonardo da, 153, 'E12.
Senapati, Fakir Mohan, 49. Vlswasgbaat, 88.
Sbaan, 30, 148, 151, 264. Vt.rwamtlni, 221, 247.
Shankar, Ravi, 250.
Shastri, I.al Bahadur, 238. Wadias, 15.
Shahan!, Kumar, 45. Wahab, Zarlna, 52.
SbalHmsbab, 135, 242, 243. Woolf, Virginia, 263, 281.
Shah, Chandula~ -r,.
Sbanltara, 171, 282. Zal,bml Aun:it, 86, 90, 91, 151, 15-',
Sbaltt1, 88, 118. 160, 162, 163, 269.
Shantaram, V., 29, 30, 45, 166. Zanjffr, 110, 119, 152, 154, 161, 162,
Sinha, Shatrughan, 52. 236, 239, 240. .
Sinha, Tapan, 32.
315
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Chidananda Das Gupta - The Painted Face - Studies in India's Popular Culture. 315-Roli Books (1991)

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Chidananda Das Gupta - The Painted Face - Studies in India's Popular Culture. 315-Roli Books (1991)

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THE PAINTED FACE

Studies In India's Popular Cinema

u 35I for Asbts Nandy

All rights rescNed. No part of this publication

C Chidananda Das Gupta, 19')1.

Fll'St published in India by

Typeset in Garamond, 10 on 11 pts.

''When do people need 'escapr most? Wben they have little

his book marks the beginning of an effort, on the part of a

Bachchan, the biggest all-India box-office star in the hmory of

It seem important to try to acquire some freedom from

persona as against the real person ... in Indian traditional theatre,

The earliest falrm were documentary; they recorded facts

If the moving feet of an animal are one in advance of

When the train pulled into a station or workers came out of

volume called for a speed of perception that the stagecoach or

All of us bring to every situation, whether it be a business

inrerpretation of subde signs- a shad1ns .In the vok:e, an

In the silent cinema, the equivalent of the non-verbal element

THE PAINTED FACE

of the time. What the stage of knowledge of Im~ionism or

mythology in a new vessel - the moving picture. It helped to

thought of the painting, he said: "It is just like a photograph•.

Primitive societies, says Uvi-Strauu, have no sense of his-

Marathi actor-director, ridiculed everything and everybody, his

macbarl. His technique confonm to the cinema of the time,

dependence period, both in its daring subject and its cinematic

working class with more money than education, migrations into

commerical cinema - and at least two outstanding love scenes.

than in the stories of hi.1 own concoction. In Kasaz k Pbool

ne remarkable outcome of grafting the technological art

seen as lee/a, divine play, evoked by the bbakla or devotee in

conqueror's nonm, and inwardly conforming to traditional faitm.

-was marginal. The maker of an image or a water pot knew the

or determining them must be made, in industrial society,

the fonn in tern~ of geometry, gauging its solidity, comparing it

sion of the industrial-urban sector, the mythological as a genre

conquest of all he perceives, wh~e fulfilment ~ alm~t

Digitized by Go?gle Original from

ahatma Gandhi came from a well-to-do urban merchant

an impoverished Brahmin family in a village moves fust to the

Even though cultural activity persi&s in these pla<."O and not

Fakir Mohan Senapati's classic novel, cannot be labelled New

concentrated in the cities. Inevitably, the fil~ made at the time

widened. In 40-odd years of independence the increase in the

world, with its rapid communications and changing confagura-

The situation is better still in Mapdst-dominated K~la, where ·

ing, this is true of the commercial cinema as well. In the Hindu

here are a number of ways in which the popular film

proposes inductive and deductive syllogisms on the 'truths of

If ever there was a ~ionate romantic in Hindi cinema, it

What will I pin if I win this wcrld,

The lyrics and melodies of today exemplify a withdrawal from

up the action and dialogue sequences. From the illiterate lumpen

poor, at fairs, festivals, temple yards, wedding., and all celeln-

but directly from a human being with a miraculous pair of lungs.

verisimilitude changes from a primitive likenes., of reality to a

.cinema. The privacy of the song monologue, one must note, n

Man: A waman must be like this

This can also be read as an ode to regionalism; in sweet Tamil

charade, never suggesting the sa~faction., of a real, wet km

earlier. The need for music of these urbanites is met solely by