OTHER SIDE OF MIDNIGHT | SHREE 420 (1955)
Plot: Idealistic youth led astray. Honesty triumphs
Sometimes a man’s life tells the story of a nation.
Few Bollywood characters encapsulate the moral dilemmas of a generation as Raju, the protagonist of this Raj Kapoor movie. When crooked glamgirl Nadira lures him with the song, Mud mud ke na dekh, she is actually telling him: Let me show you the way to success and riches. Raju’s predicament — the easy, immoral way or the honest, hard path — was a dilemma for many in Nehruvian India as post-Independence hopes slowly gave way to disillusionment. Corruption was already creeping into public life. In the movie, an unscrupulous capitalist gets Raju embroiled in a housing scam. Is it any surprise that India’s first major financial scam emerged two years later when LIC shares were manipulated by Delhi businessman Haridas Mundhra? The scandal also involved then Union finance minister T T Krishnamachari who resigned later. But in Shree 420, Raju forsakes Nadira (aptly named Maya or illusory wealth) and finally returns to Nargis (named Vidya or learning). You decide what happened to the generation.INDIA INVISIBLE | MOTHER INDIA (1957)
Plot: Indomitable rural woman battles fate’s rough cuts
If Shree 420 explored the urban pangs of Nehru’s India of Five-Year Plans, Mehboob Khan’s Mother India was rooted in Gandhi’s hinterland Hindustan. If Raj Kapoor’s movie explored changing values, Mother India hung on to time-tested values and proclaimed that dignity is non-negotiable even if it meant gunning down your own son as leading character Nargis does in the climax. Mother India is the story of 1950s’ India Invisible: of impoverished honest farmers, of mounting debts and the lifelong struggle to stay afloat. In a country where farmers’ suicides continue to dominate Page 13, who would say that this tribute to rural India is outdated? Sometimes a woman’s life also tells the story of a nation.
GEN WITHOUT A YEN | JUNGLEE (1961)
Plot: Rude alpha male tamed by virginal beauty
In pre-Independence India, mainstream Bollywood usually wallowed in timid romantic denial. The mood blended smoothly with Gandhi’s abstemiousness and Nehru’s idea of India. But by early Sixties, the anti-pleasure lobby was under siege. One primeval scream — Yaaahooo! — by Shammi Kapoor from the snowy slopes of Kashmir changed the texture of Bollywood love and got hardwired into young consciousness. Romantic ardour, both on and off screen, was never the same again. “With Junglee,” says filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt, “Bollywood unshackled itself from self-imposed seriousness.” Romping on ice, not stolen glances, became the new foreplay. Coming at a time when the youth was tiring of sermons, Junglee’s mindless fun became its strength. The hero offers no perspective on life; he has no cause barring Saira Banu (admittedly a decent cause), yet he is cast as a rebel. The new hero also wanted to enjoy life to the full. And a generation attaining adulthood in early Sixties India couldn’t agree more.
TIME OUT | WAQT (1965)
Plot: Three brothers lost and found
At first glance, Waqt appears to be the first of the lost-and-found movies that later became Manmohan Desai’s core competence. The outsider Raja (Rajkumar) also carries the seed of Amitabh Bachchan’s angry young man in the Seventies. But a closer inspection shows how this Yash Chopra-directed movie was also an acute observer of the evolving social reality. The three brothers grow up separately: one is a criminal, another a lawyer, the third ends up as a driver. Their life stories are representative capsules of India growing up and going in different directions. Waqt is also unapologetic about affluence. The flashy cars, the plush interiors, the private parties — as Bhatt points out, even the on-screen crooner of Aage bhi jaane na tu is phoren — offer a peepshow to the good life. As Bollywood academic Rachael Dwyer writes, “The film set the style for a whole new look for Hindi films, away from the drama of feudal riches to upwardly socially mobile groups.” The Waqt landscape dominates Hindi films today; its attainment a middle-class goal.
THE ANGRY YEARS | DEEWAR (1975)
Plot: Two brothers — a cop and a smuggler — fight for Ma
When Deewar was released, the discontent against Indira Gandhi’s regime was already being articulated by JP’s student movement. Rising unemployment and corruption had left the youth frustrated.Deewar captured this angst against the unfair system. The enraged outsider Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) became the doppelganger of many. Unlike other Big B superhits of the same period — Zanjeer (1973) and Sholay (1975) — Deewar also had a social resonance: it was the right film at the right time. In his dialogues with copbrother Ravi (Shashi Kapoor), one finds Vijay redefining right and wrong. That the audience clapped for him, not for his righteous sibling, showed he had found affirmative echoes in their hearts. Released 20 years after Shree 420, Deewar showed how dramatically we had changed as a people. The wrong way had become the right way.RISE, SUBALTERNS! | HIMMATWALA (1983)
Plot: Villainous village rich set right by shehri babu
In the early Eighties, the family stopped going to cinema halls, thanks to the VCR revolution. Consequently, until Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988) kickstarted the reversal,movie halls were the domain of the underclass. Himmatwala was one of the first movies that internalised this change to suit the new audience. The crass dialogues, the thunder thighs, the asinine lyrics — Ladki nahin tu lakri ka khamba hai, bak bak mat kar nak tera lamba hai — became the prototype for many other Jeetendra, Mithun and Govinda movies that front benchers patronized. Himmatwala could actually sixth-sense the changing social equation in a way politicians couldn’t. After all, the Mandal Commission report was submitted in 1980. V P Singh acted on it in 1990. It was the revenge of the underclass.
WEDLOCKED | HAHK (1994)
Plot: Musical romance in family setting
By the Nineties, the great Indian family was under threat: divorce rates were going up, newly married sons wanted to move out. Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun both reinvented and celebrated the great Indian family. Many thought the movie was a prolonged marriage video. But its impact was tsunami-like. Weddings were never the same again. “The film came when consumerism was beginning to rise,” says adman and social observer Santosh Desai, “HAHK showed that it is possible to balance tradition and consumerism. See the number of times Madhuri Dixit eats ice-cream and chocolate in the film.” The film also shows how the early fruits of globalisation were creating a happy upper middle class that had a sense of laughter. But the film also fed on nostalgia. “It told us the way we were,” says Bhatt. Many of us continue to be like that.
MERA GAON, MERA VIDESH | DDLJ (1995)
Plot: NRI kids fall in love. Parents object
This Shah Rukh Khan-Kajol starrer from the Yash Chopra stable anticipated the future. It brought the diaspora into our consciousness. The Pravasi Bharatiya Divas and dual citizenship for NRIs followed in the coming years. As an idea, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge sold the illusion of breaking new ground in the celluloid love game. But it was actually making an old plea. As Desai says, “It argues that modernity is nothing but tradition in a purified form. Shah Rukh’s method of winning Kajol in the second half is like a modern satyagraha.” The film also looks at NRIs as the repositories of tradition, rather than those who abandon it. A comforting thought for desis abroad.
YUPPIEDOM GETS A VOICE | DCH (2001)
Plot: Three cool buddies grow up
Farhan Akhtar’s debut film came at a time when India was in the midst of the call centre revolution that ensured jobs to thousands of the young and restless.With pocket money plentiful, attitude became everything. Smart, slick and with-it, Dil Chahta Hai touched the pulse of this cool-talking generation and stole its heart. The film’s triumph though lay in its storytelling. DCH had a fresh sensibility; it became both a date movie and a buddy movie. By 2001, new millennium trendwatchers had already pronounced that friends are the new family. DCH’s newness, says social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan, was underlined in the way it looked at friendship. “Earlier the notion of friendship was weaved around loyalty. DCH shifted the focus to companionship, laughter and remembrance.” According to Desai, the film also doesn’t demand any new choices from any of its lead players. In the end, the young guys take the conventional option. Attitude, and that includes the haircut and the goatee, is only skin-deep. Many would say that Gen-Next is exactly like that. Whatever it pretends to be, it is ultimately conservative at heart.
GEN NEXT REVOLUTION | RDB (2006)
Plot: Carefree gang finds life’s mission after pal’s death
Where political science lectures and student unions failed, Rang De Basanti succeeded: it introduced political imagination as an idea into the heads of an apolitical generation. Cool dudes too care for their country was the message. Even if it meant gunning down the home minister and getting shot in return. Aamir Khan’s RDB was fantasy fulfilment for an entire generation. “Both patriotism and angst were packaged in a consumable way,” says Desai. The film had spontaneous cool. It also showed, as Vishwanathan says, how a generation is at ease with the colonial past: the just-arrived white heroine easily blends with the crowd. In real life, RDB keeps showing up in candlelight protests, online blogs and the spunk to face water cannons.
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