AMRIT GANGAR

I

To this broad bibliography, Narendra Panjwani provides a welcome addition with his book Emotion Pictures: Cinematic Journeys into the Indian Self, that views some of the popular Hindi films from the prism of his own school days in a small Madhya Pradesh town of Hoshangabad. He charts out his romantic brush with “pictures”, stars and songs that have remained with him since then as an emotional connection. Calling motion pictures, “emotion” pictures, Panjwani in his ‘Introduction’ tells us rather the obvious, “Remember, cinema is not just a visual medium; it is also an emotional one”. He further states, “A successful feature film, goes the film industry’s unspoken rule, has to be an emotion picture”. And from viewerconsumer view point he again asks the reader to remember that the “source of cinema’s power is not the filmmaker, but the viewer”. To support his thesis, he says that some of the films such as Kismet, Awara, Baiju Bawra, Pyaasa, Mother India, Mughal-e-Azam, Mere Mehboob, Sholay, Amar Akbar Anthony, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge were made because of this emotional dimension. These are all established facts that anyway do not make the Indian film viewer a unique species.

On this familiar terrain, he transports us to his select nostalgia, his own cinematic journeys into the self, which is essentially an Indian emotional romantic middle class self. Within this romantic identity, he offers a substantial space to ‘ishq’, love – as he embarks upon his small-town story of romance: “Every film we saw revolved around the romance of young love” (p 28). “In all humility”, Panjwani disagrees with the belief that films are “just entertainment, just fantasies which have nothing to do with our lives” and he attributes the birth of this book to his self-confessed disagreement. Fair enough, but from this very disagreement (with whom?) emerges his condescending tone, which in the process short circuits, in the way it critiques dream merchants who fabricate their stories through sounds and visuals, songs and sensualities, wet sari in the cesspool of censorship. Panjwani: “The decision to ban the kiss from the Indian screen (from 1932 onwards) was not taken by filmmakers; it was taken by us, by our government, by self-appointed guardians of our morality” (p 43). This is factually wrong, since the official film censorship came under the Cinematograph Act in 1952, “to certify films for public exhibition”. In the British India, film censorship was more of political nature, and the police controlled it. The 1933 film Karma is well known for its prolonged kiss between Devika Rani and Himansu Rai; shot in London, this Oriental fantasy was shown publicly in India too. The mainstream filmmaker’s wet sari trick for the male gaze is by now an open secret. In fact, I would say, that it was Dadasaheb Phalke who used it in India’s first feature film Raja Harishchandra (silent, 1913), which had male actors performing female it for making his “motion” picture an “emotion” one. Emotion is a multi-track motion that Panjwani does not seem to be critically exploring on his Hoshangabad highway.

‘Three-Is’ of Indian Cinema

Panjwani introduces his Three-Is theory thus, “In our cinematic world and especially in the personalities of the heroes and heroines who dwell there, insaaniyat is one side of the coin, ishq is the other. The palm that holds this coin is izzat (honour): it is the third and the biggest of the “I” words in Hindi cinema. On the Indian screen, izzat is as much about self-respect as honour” (p 107). Within this theory, if we look at our popular film plots, we find the very izzat factor responsible for the mindless violence on screen, and off screen too, in places where the feudalist ego reigns. Panjwani carries forward his izzat argument in his relatively more interesting chapter The City in Popular Cinema where ishq becomes ‘pyaar’. According to him money and marketplace have coalesced in the city, providing filmmakers of the 1950s-1960s a ready-made demon, the archvillain against which to pit the protagonists of their stories. “Izzat (Honour) and Pyaar (Love) were at stake in these city films” (pp 201-02). While Panjwani claims ishq to be a secular agent, he at the same time says, “there is virtually no film in the entire corpus of popular Hindi cinema that features a Hindu marrying a Muslim. The exception that comes to mind here is Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995).”

Often the book pops up Raj Kapoor’s Shri 420 (1955), especially in the urban context. Talking about Raj, the hero, Panjwani mentions his encounter with the “poor fruit vendor”. To call the ‘kelewali’, the banana-seller, a “fruit-vendor” is misleading. The presence of the female banana-seller in Bombay of those days was “iconic” and to some extent it still is.

In the chapter ‘Enter, The Wandering Migrant’, Panjwani refers to “love and the housing question” and the Bombay ‘chawl’

– giving examples from the 1950s-1960s films as also a later film Katha (1982) “The cinematic chawl”, as Panjwani says, “is not just an image of utopia. It is a lens through which to see and grasp the living, unmanageable city in a familiar, manageable idiom.” The chawls were in complete contrast to the imposing commercial buildings in the Fort area; they provided accommodation for the working classes in the congested areas in central Bombay after there was a massive migration into the city, by 1921 as many as 2,36,000 people came to Bombay to work in the textile mills. A typical chawl with two or three upper storeys, contained 8 × 8 feet cubicles with washing areas and a common toilet block in a ground floor. In a single room, there lived five to 10 persons. These real chawls, as Panjwani rightly indicates were “marked (and divided) by ethnicity – families or male groups of workers clustered according to their village of origin, their language, their religion”. But as times grew, this reality also changed and there were also chawls with mixed ethnicities, some of them still exist. The so-called studiobuilt, cinematic chawl from the filmTanhai (1961) is not a good example (p 230). Panjwani could have given better examples in this context; strangely he completely avoids Basu Chatterji (Piya ka Ghar, 1971) and Saeed Mirza (Mohan Joshi Haazir Ho! 1983). In fact, Saeed Mirza is the only filmmaker who has evoked Bombay so consistently in his films.

The eight-chaptered book has over 230 well-produced black and white impressions from stills, song booklets, posters and magazine covers, although really vintage ones appear only when the author slips into pre-1950s, e g, Rose in Hamari Betiyan (1936). Raj Kapoor, Dilip Kumar and Bharat Bhushan and Madhubala dominantly populate the book’s visual world, the “Jubilee Hero” Rajendra Kumar or his later counterpart Rajesh Khanna occupy comparatively less space, even Dev Anand for that matter. Saigal, Suraiya, Khurshid and Ashok Kumar appear only once while Devika Rani is conspicuous by her absence. Going by Panjwani’s examples, it seems Hoshangabad of the mid-1960s, with “one cinema hall” showed only “A” grade films sans Wadia Movietone’s stunts and mythologicals and such others.

Email: amritg@mtnl.net.in

Manohar