Marxism With More Dancing: Bollywood’s Socialist Soul
I wrote this for the Street Fight Radio zine (RIP) but since the podcast is now defunct, I figured I’d put it up here for everyone to enjoy. This was originally written in July 2018.
The stereotype of Bollywood movies as nonsensical, blinged-out, romance-obsessed tripe is not entirely unfair. I mean, this is the movie industry that gave us Yaadein (2001, “Memories”), whose one lasting memory in popular culture is of Kareena Kapoor getting chased up a tree by a plastic crocodile and then falling into a coma for some reason. But judging all of Bollywood by its plastic crocodiles is doing the Hindi film industry a real disservice.
For one thing, it’s not a mistake that so many of today’s Bollywood films are so dumb. Films today are made by a second, third, and even fourth generation of Bollywood elites who grew up in a bubble of luxury, completely out of touch with the lives, concerns, and interests of ordinary people. It wasn’t always this way. Decades before Kareena Kapoor was escaping the plastic croc in her high heels, her great-grandfather, actor Prithviraj Kapoor, was a influential member of the Indian People’s Theater Association, a staunchly socialist, anti-colonialist organization that fused art and politics and whose members formed the backbone of early Bollywood.
Unlike the dreary “world cinema” poverty porn movies that experts can’t get enough of, these early Indian People’s Theater Association-influenced Bollywood films are actually really fun to watch. They’re full of music, romance, comedy, and underpinned with strong political messages about how the rich will keep you in bondage and politicians will tell you lies. These films both entertain and tell us the truth: that the world will try to trick us into betraying our fellow man for a measly couple of bucks. And they’re not subtle about it. I’m talking Sree 420 (1955, named after the section of the Indian penal code for cheating) in which the main character literally pawns his medal for honesty to get quick cash. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go so well for him after that.)
Up into the 1970s you could still reliably find these socialist message films at the box office and one of the last great filmmakers making them was Manoj Kumar. These days he’s generally only referenced as a punchline, a straw man standing in for a style of filmmaking that the slick, Hollywood-minded Bollywood of today finds embarrassing. But looking past the jokes about melodramatic acting and creative film angles, you find a filmmaker who loved his country so much that it brought him physical pain to see the way the wealthy and powerful stripped its resources and abused its citizens.
In Purab aur Paschim (1970, “East and West”) Manoj plays “Bharat” (a name meaning homeland) who goes off to study in London with the intent to bring back knowledge to help his people. What he finds in London disgusts him and not in a “they hate our freedoms” the infidel must die way, although Westerners generally read it like that. What Bharat finds in London are wealthy, idle people who have fled their responsibilities at home and lost touch with anything resembling real life. There are all these fabulous kaleidoscope scenes at the country club where the expats Indians hang out. Walls and ceilings decked in so much bling that you being to feel dizzy staring at the screen. Meanwhile, back home their fellow Indians are trying to build a nation they can be proud of, a fair country that works for everybody.
The heroine, Preeti, is played by a mini-skirted Saira Banu. Saira whips her blond wig around and flashes her fashion-forward eyeliner at the camera as she tries to figure out what to do with this growing attraction to the dark, serious Bharat. He’s unlike any man the idle young woman has ever met before. Where other filmmakers might treat the ditzy Preeti as a joke, Manoj Kumar doesn’t condemn her for her ignorance. He treats her with compassion; he lets her be fully human, learning and growing from her contact with the ideas that Bharat brings into her world. Preeti has an intellectual crush as much as a romantic one.
The pinnacle of the Bollywood socialist-entertainer has to be Manoj Kumar’s 1974 blockbuster Roti Kapada aur Makaan (“Food, Clothing, and Shelter”). With its all-star cast and no-holds barred script, the film is an action-packed assault on the complacent upper classes. Manoj is again playing a character named Bharat but in the span of four years his Bharat has gone from a student optimistic about the future to a cynical failson. His journey is something that Americans today might find relatable. After doing everything right and completing his degree in engineering it turns out that the promises made by society were all lies. The only jobs available are for those with wealth and connections.
Bharat stops his younger brother from getting mixed up in organized crime but eventually ends up turning to crime himself, stealing medicine for his dying father from the pharmacy after trying to pay with his only asset—the worthless engineering degree! (Take THAT educational-industrial complex and also capitalist medicine!)
In between robbing pharmacies, singing horny love songs, and beating up thugs, Bharat meets a trio of extremely memorable women. There’s Sheetal (played by the divine Zeenat Aman), who gets a job as a secretary for a kind but rich CEO before realizing that wealth can cut you off from your community; Poonam (one of Aruna Irani’s best roles), the gangster’s moll, whose unhappiness has led her to turn to drink but she won’t die before getting in a really great song and dance number; and the cheerful but guarded Tulsi (Moushumi Chatterji).
The title of the film is drawn from Tulsi’s story. After her father was injured so badly that he could no longer work, the two of them left their home village so they would not be a burden on their already impoverished community. In the big city of Mumbai they find anonymity but Tulsi can only earn so much as a laborer and expenses are high. When she goes one day to beg for more credit at the grocer’s, Tulsi is lured into a back room where she is raped by the grocer, the tailor, and her landlord on top of a massive pile of flour that the grocer had been holding in reserve. She’s both literally and figuratively raped by capitalism. This was India’s highest grossing film of 1974.
By the time the 1980s rolled around this earnest style of social commentary film would be almost completely gone. Filmmakers were swimming in a sea of black money and movies began featuring a lot more badass gangster heroes, bling, and plots about loyalty to the mob boss, and fewer guys with the unquestionably unhip name of Bharat who cared about things like getting clean water to farmers in rural areas.
And now even the gangsters are gone. The stereotype of Bollywood today comes from the films of the 1990s and 2000s. These were films made with an eye on the large global diaspora and their brand new VCRs. And the diaspora wanted films that were comforting. That reminded them of home. Themes turned inwards, on the family, on marriage. And as money kept rolling in, the wealthy playboy became the fantasy hero. He’s no longer the villain.
But the old formulas still live on in South Indian cinema. While Bollywood now concerns itself with the trials and tribulations of the ultra-wealthy you have filmmakers like Dhanush in Chennai. You can almost hear echoes of the earnest Bharat in Dhanush’s 2014 hit film Velaiilla Pattadhari (“Unemployed Graduate”) a rousing entertainer in which he plays, yes, an unemployed failson with an engineering degree. The big hit song from the film was called “Udhungada Sangu” (“Blow the conch shell”) and is picturized on Dhanush and some failson buddies dressed in lungis and ratty t-shirts, drinking whisky on a vacant lot. As they dance, Dhanush sneers the sarcastic chorus at the camera: “Blow the conch shell, I’m the king.”
And down amid all the call centers and tech companies in Bangalore, you have filmmakers like the deliberately difficult Upendra who makes films like 2002’s hit film H20 (a song-and-dance filled metaphor for the still ongoing Kaveri Water dispute) and a politically charged entertainer from 2010 that everybody just calls Super but the actual title was (and I’m not even joking) literally a picture of a hand doing the “OK” sign and which ends with an index finger pointing directly out at the audience telling them to go and make change happen.
Don’t let the language and cultural barriers scare you away. If you’re tired of sitting through self-serious reboots of various corporate-owned franchises and Oscar-bait wankfests about bullshit, why not watch a movie both entertains and tells you to overthrow the corrupt capitalist system?