Bollywood For Beginners: Part 5

Note: This series was originally posted to my Bollywood blogspot blog and represents the cumulation of the wisdom of a decade or so spent in the Bollywood trenches. It would have last been edited in about 2014.

Bollywood for Beginners 5

Bollywood Character Archetype: The Villain

Villains are a vital--though often misunderstood--part of Bollywood film. After all, a hero’s triumph can only as big as the villain he defeats. The bigger and meaner a villain is, the more heroic a hero must be to defeat him. (Or her, but usually him.) But crafting an effective villain is not as simple as slapping a Darth Vader helmet on an actor and writing a few menacing lines about raping the heroine. The best villains are complex, forged by the insecurities of the audience, reflecting the ideals of the screenwriter, and shaped by the actor or actress who plays the role. Villains stride across the screen, larger than life, invincible, until the hero strikes at their weakness and reveals them to be as human and vulnerable as we are.

A villain’s most basic function is to give the hero something tangible to triumph over. An idea can’t be punched into submission but a villains embodying “corporate malfeasance” or “ambivalence towards the police” can be dishoomed (an onomatopoeic word meaning “to hit” taken from the classic sound effect used for punching) into the next life. Films aimed at the average working man often have the hero fighting against entrenched political corruption on a local level while romantic films aimed at teenagers (and teenagers at heart) often feature a malicious and overly aggressive romantic rival. Villains can be inside the home--greedy relatives who usurp the hero or heroine’s rightful inheritance are a classic genre--and they can also be a threat to the community, or even the nation, at large. 

And villains also reflect the biases of those writing and, more importantly, financing the films. Due to a provision in Indian law (now repealed) that made it impossible to legally borrow money to finance a film, the films of the 1980s and 1990s were dripping in so-called “black money” borrowed from the mafia. And these mafia-financed films were very likely to feature heroes who worked outside of the law or at the very least portrayed gangsters in a sympathetic light. More recently, with corporate money being showered across film studios throughout Bombay, the evil capitalist of previous eras has been turned into an aspirational figure. Never mind that the hero of Mr. India (1987) fought against the same corporate negligence that led to a real tainted food scandal in 2013, for a certain film market, the hero’s place is now in the boardroom. Another example that digs deeper into Indian culture are the zamindars, unofficial royalty and feudal landowners. As written in the post-Independence era by idealistic left-leaning firebrands, wealthy zamindars were often villains who cracked their cruel whips upon the backs of the working class yet by the 2010’s, cosmopolitan writers aiming for a global audience were writing them as doomed, yet noble, relics of a more gentile era. 

The fate of a villain also depends on the prevailing mood of the day. Sometimes the villains are killed, sometimes they are sent to jail, and sometimes they are reintegrated back into the community. This last ending is one of the things that stands out in Bollywood storytelling and is one of the most difficult for Western audiences to grasp. Why would a community or family who spent 20 years being terrorized by a jerk be willing to accept and reform that selfsame jerk? The simple answer is that families and communities value the group identity. Punishing an outsider is one thing but when the villain is the hero’s mother, as in the 1992 film Beta (Son), it becomes trickier. The happy ending isn’t about exacting revenge but coming to a consensus. For a Hollywood example of how this can work, take a look at Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1982) in which the smiling human face of Darth Vader née Anakin Skywalker appears at the very end of the film, with all of his past ills forgiven. 

The third part of a villain’s character is provided by the actor him or herself. Just like the heroes they face off against, villain roles are almost always exclusively played by actors who specialize in villain roles. Their faces become a sort of shorthand for evil, a part of the filmi language that cannot be transmitted through subtitles. Once the audience spots one of these villainous actors in a film, we know immediately that the character will be up to no good. If an actor like Prakash Raaj, who specializes in villainous roles, shows up as a judge, the audience will just assume that the character is a crooked judge, even if that information doesn’t reveal itself to the hero right away. Where an uninformed viewer might see a sudden change of motivation or inconsistent characterization, Bollywood audiences would know from the beginning that the judge was up to no good… because he was played by Prakash Raaj! And this expectation is sometimes subverted by crafty filmmakers who will mislead audiences on purpose by casting a washed-up hero as a villain or by casting a villain in a role that ends up being morally just.