On 1970s Nostalgia

Another old post written (if I remember correctly) with the intent of trying to submit it to a film publication. There was zero interest. So enjoy! Reading this made me want to watch all of those old classics again. (February 16, 2022)

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Hindi popular cinema, also known as “Bollywood,” is often maligned in the Western press for a number of stereotypes, including length, incongruous song-and-dance numbers, unoriginal plots, and a lack of realism. As the number and viewing power of Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) has grown, and as the middle and upper classes have returned to cinema halls in India after a long absence, Bollywood films have actually been moving closer in substance and style to their Hollywood counterparts. But along with, and perhaps because of, the imported Hollywood style, Bollywood films in recent years have also made a big effort to tie themselves to the films of the last great era of Hindi popular cinema, which stretched from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. The popular films of that era are often referred to as “masala” films, associating the blend of spices used in Indian cooking with the distinctive blend of film ingredients: broad comedy, improbable action (sometimes referred to as “dishoom-dishoom” after the sound used to represent the punches), uncomplicated romance, and copious amounts of melodrama. After the heroes traverse the plots full of coincidence, sit through at least one item number performed by special guest star Helen, and have some dishoom-dishoom with a henchman or five, traditional family values would be upheld, greed and dishonor would be punished by legitimate authority figures, and the world would be set right.

Modern films have attempted to borrow from these masala films in a number of ways. These efforts range from the superficial act of naming a film after a song title from a film from the ‘70s era like My Name is Anthony Gonsalves, taken from a song in Amar Akbar Anthony or Bachna Ae Haseeno, taken from a song in the film Hum Kisi Se Kum Nahin. Some films have incorporated film footage of masala films into the stories, such as Johnny Gaddar, which features clips from Johny Mera Naam and Parwaana. Hum Tum took things a step further by having Rishi Kapoor, cast as the hero’s father, sing a song from his 1973 blockbuster film Bobby, in which he played the hero. The song’s only purpose is to remind the audience of Rishi Kapoor’s past film career and to emphasize his film pedigree. However, while filmmakers are more eager than ever to emphasize a nostalgic connection to Bollywood of days past, audiences no longer want the substance of those masala films. Illustrating this point are two recent big-budget films to come out of Mumbai: Vijay Krishna Acharya’s Tashan, which released in April 2008, and Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om, which released in October 2007. The two films similarly drew on the masala films of the 1970s for inspiration, but while Om Shanti Om adapted the style of 1970s films and did very well at the box office, Tashan has bombed with both critics and audiences in large part because it adapted the substance of those 1970s films, which no longer suit the tastes of contemporary audiences, despite the nostalgia for them that pervades popular film culture.

A look at the two movies reveals major differences despite their outward similarities. Tashan’s playful script deceptively sets the audience up for a film in the style of recent “realistic” Hindi films like Hum Tum. While that film contained some broad humor, melodrama, and the requisite songs and dancing, the story was rooted in the everyday telling of a love story within a broader family drama. Tashan opens in this realistic style with Jimmy, played by Saif Ali Khan, who also starred in Hum Tum, narrating his very normal life for the camera. Jimmy (Jeetendra to his mother) is an anglicized, middle-class Mumbai-dweller who works at a call center by day and teaches English classes by night. He’s just an average man, albeit one with a curious fashion sense, favoring red leather belts and a carefully sculpted horseshoe moustache. He meets and instantly falls for mysterious-but-sweet-and-modest Pooja (Kareena Kapoor), who shows up outside his English school. But set up against this realistic opening is the appearance of Anil Kapoor as Bhaiyaji, a gaudily dressed, orange-tanned, highly emotional businessman who enlists Jimmy’s services to teach him English so he can become more international. Bhaiyaji shatters the realistic tone of the film and brings us into the realm of the masala film with his over-the-top theatrics. Taking the ‘70s-style plot capriciousness a step further, Pooja is then revealed to be a con artist, leaving Jimmy with the blame for stealing Bhaiyaji’s money. Enter Akshay Kumar as Bachchan Pande. He’s dressed as the Indian demon god Ravanna, riding a motorbike, with monkey god Hanuman perched behind him. In the hilarious scene that follows, Bachchan Pande arrives at a stage show to perform the villain role of Ravanna, only to be handed the hero role of Rama instead – foreshadowing Bachchan Pande’s switch in role from antagonist to romantic hero. After the grand entrance of Bachchan Pande, the set-up for the main action is complete. The rest of the film unfolds in a very ‘70s dreamy sequence of events following two main threads –Bachchan Pande and Pooja’s love story, and Pooja’s revenge on Bhaiyaji.

Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om, conversely, opens with a postmodernist wink to the audience. The viewer is taken directly into a recreation of the song “Om Shanti Om” from the 1980 film Karz, with Shahrukh Khan taking the place of the hero dressed in silver lamé and dancing on a stage-sized rotating turntable. This is revealed to be a fantasy of Shahrukh Khan’s character, Om Prakash Makhija – a fantasy punctured by the director herself in a cameo role. A self-referential, joking tone that shatters the “fourth wall” is immediately apparent, and the recreation of the song “Om Shanti Om” from Karz also foreshadows the use of certain plot elements from that film. Om Shanti Om follows the story of a junior artiste in the film world of the 1970s and his courtly love for a leading lady, Shanti, in the same studio. At the end of the first act, Shanti is murdered by her husband/manager Mukesh Mehra and is caught in the act by Om. Mukesh beats Om very badly; Om dies and is reincarnated as famous actor Rajesh Kapoor’s son. The second act takes place in modern times and is centered around an elaborate revenge production, much like Karz. The film is surprisingly modern – especially in the second half, where there is no love story at all, even though we do see a return of the heroine from the first half as an aspiring actress.

Even though Om Shanti Om billed itself as a return to the masala films of the 1970s, going so far as to reference Karz in the opening scene, it did not have many of the elements associated with masala films. For example, many masala films had two heroes. The two-hero film arose as the star system did in the 1960s when the end of the big studio system meant that a single flop could bankrupt a producer. No longer could the burden of return be spread across many films. This was proved by Raj Kapoor, a box office star and the man behind the R.K. Films production banner, when Mera Naam Joker flopped in 1970. Raj Kapoor’s epic vanity production showcasing himself as a tragic clown took six years to make, and it took Raj Kapoor another three years to scrape together the money to recover from it with the 1973 blockbuster Bobby, a teen romance starring his own son Rishi Kapoor. If even a giant of the industry like Raj Kapoor could be bankrupted by a flop, those with fewer resources at hand needed to make sure that the audiences would turn up at the theaters, and nothing brought out ticket buyers like their favorite stars. The hero of a film had a story, a family, and usually a romance, and two-hero films had double that – twice as much to entice ticket buyers with.

The key to the two-hero film is that both heroes have a story, and while the stories should come together at the end, they are separate stories. One hero could be good and one bad, as in Johny Mera Naam, which starred Pran and Dev Anand as two brothers on opposite sides of the law who unite and conquer their mutual enemy. One could be cool and collected, and the other an overly emotional drunkard, like in Sholay (1975), which starred Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra as a mismatched pair of small-time thieves who are hired to take down an evil bandit terrorizing a small town. Sholay also includes that famous ode to male friendship, “Yeh Dosti.” In the 1970s era, even single-hero films like Don also had a secondary male lead with a fairly significant role. Amitabh Bachchan has a double role in Don, as both the eponymous Don and a street singer, Vijay (who happens to look exactly like him). Don makes an exit fairly early in the film, leaving Vijay as the single hero of the film. But even in this one-hero film, the secondary male lead has a significant role in the form of a disabled tightrope-walker, Jasprit (played by Pran), who teams up with Vijay to take on Don’s gang and deliver them into the waiting hands of the police. While Don was technically a single-hero film, the secondary lead had many of the qualities of a hero, including an elaborate back-story and a narrative drive of his own, giving the film more story texture than a true single-hero film. Films with two heroes are still made today, such as Partner (2007) with Govinda and Salman Khan, but they are not as prevalent. More common for modern films with two stars is for one to be dominant and the other subordinate. The supporting star’s character exists only to further the story of the main star.

The two-hero formula is put to good use in Tashan. Jimmy and Bachchan Pande are opposite but equal. Jimmy is cool, urbane, polished, and fluent in English. Bachchan Pande has a violent temper and has a more traditional and small-town outlook. The film opens with the two of them bickering over which music to play in their car – “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC or “Kabhi Kabhie” performed by Mukesh; the bickering causes the car to crash into a lake. Though the action begins with a conflict, the viewer understands that the two will learn to work together before the end of the film. Each has his own narrative: Jimmy learns to get more in touch with his Indian heritage, and Bachchan Pande has a romance with mysterious Pooja and develops a moral compass. Om Shanti Om, on the other hand, has one hero: Shahrukh Khan as Om. He has a male best friend, Pappu, played by Shreyas Talpade, but this friend remains a secondary character whose sole reason for existence in the film is to support Om. Karz, from which many elements of Om Shanti Om were taken, also had one main hero, Monty, played by Rishi Kapoor. However, the secondary male lead, the heroine’s Uncle Kabira, played by Pran, has a sizable story outside of the main narrative. So while there were not two full-fledged heroes, Karz fit the format of the films of the 1970s era. The decline of the two-hero film is just one of the signs of the changing standards of Hindi film audiences.

Along with the two contrasting heroes, another common character in 1970s films who no longer appears in modern ones is the female criminal with a heart of gold. Whether it was Hema Malini in Johny Mera Naam, Saira Banu in Hera Pheri, or Zeenat Aman in Don, she was viewed as bad until events revealed that she was really good and just looking to avenge the death of her father, perhaps killed by the big mob boss, many years back. This is in contrast to the female criminals of earlier films, typically cast as vamps and therefore outside the morality of our hero. The vamp usually wore Western clothes, was sexually forward, smoked, and drank alcohol, and in the best-case scenario, she would die a sympathetic death after paying for her crimes. Sharmila Tagore played a female con artist of the vamp type in An Evening in Paris (1966), a cold-hearted criminal in the game for personal gain. As the masala films of the 1970s gave way to the ultra-violent, macho films of the 1980s, the heroine’s role diminished with them. So while Hema Malini’s character Basanti saves the two heroes in Sholay and Saira Banu’s character knows her way around a gun fight in Hera Pheri, the heroines of later films from the 1980s and into the 1990s are eye candy to be rescued or won. The feisty heroine has made a return in recent years with characters like Rani Mukerji’s con artist with a heart of gold in Bunty aur Babli and Urmila Matondkar’s vengeful travel agent in Ek Hasina Thi. While these modern heroines share some characteristics with their predecessors, they have more selfish motives. Babli wants adventure and material gain, and Sarika demands vengeance for herself.

On the other hand, Tashan has Pooja, the spunky, mysterious con artist with a story worthy of any 1970s masala heroine. Pooja’s father was murdered by the evil Bhaiyaji. She has been biding her time working as one of his henchman until the time comes when she can take her revenge, which she does, and in a very violent manner. Her revenge is one of the more modern elements of Tashan, as films of the 1970s would usually end with the criminal in the hands of the police, instead of run through with a sword like Bhaiyaji is. Pooja does end up falling for one of the heroes, a storyline that is introduced when it is revealed to the audience, in an elaborate flashback, that Bachchan Pande and Pooja were childhood sweethearts. Heroines did do some fighting alongside their heroes in the height of the masala era, such as Hema Malini fighting some henchmen off with a sword in Seeta aur Geeta (1972). Pooja’s swordplay is very much in keeping with this tradition, with her fatal revenge as the modern update.

Om Shanti Om did not have any underworld characters, and so did not have any use for the con artist heroine, although the heroine does participate in a “con” of sorts toward the end of the second act. Om Shanti Om’s heroine cannot be classified in terms of 1970s films. Deepika Padukone plays a double role, as Shanti in the first half of the film and Sandy in the second half. Shanti is the object of Om’s courtly love. He is very much in love with her, but she, as it is revealed to both Om and the audience, is secretly married. Unlike classic stories such as Devdas or Umrao Jaan, where one of the pair of romantic leads marries someone else during the course of the film, there was no possibility of Om and Shanti marrying, and so Shanti did not have a forward-moving narrative even as a love interest. He loves her, and that’s the end of it. In the second act, Deepika reappears as Sandy, an aspiring actress who is hired by Om because she looks like Shanti, to participate in an elaborate production mounted in order to fool Shanti’s murderer into revealing himself. Sandy, who is not Shanti reborn, has little purpose other than as a participant in the entrapment of Shanti’s murderer. Sandy has no romance with the reborn Om. Shanti does return briefly as a ghost to close up some loose plot threads in the second half, but the main narrative always belongs to Om. The heroine of Karz, on the other hand, does get a romance with the hero. Additionally, Karz had a strong female villain who also has a narrative and a romance with the hero. So, while the heroines in both Om Shanti Om and Karz are secondary to the hero, Om Shanti Om’s heroine is more in the mold of the heroines of the films after the 1970s, whose only purpose is to be the object of the hero’s affections.

The story structures of Tashan and Om Shanti Om differ as much as the character types. The story laid out in Tashan is very loose. Each of the characters has a narrative thread, and these threads end up tied together at the end. While the narrative plot threads make emotional sense, external events happen in a very unrealistic and free-flowing manner. Real-world explanations are not given for how and why the external events happen. This is in keeping with the tradition of the ‘70s masala films; explanations for why events occur are not important. Instead the character’s reaction to the event is the focus. In Hera Pheri, for example, the two heroes have a grudge against the villain because he killed one of their fathers many years ago. Although an explanation is given for why the villain killed the father, it is not a major part of the story and does not really matter. The hero’s grief and anger at the event are more important than the details of the event itself. In Johny Mera Naam, the evil brother has a change of heart when it is revealed that his enemy is actually his brother, from whom he was separated many years ago. Despite the evil brother’s many years of being a gang member and committing crimes, his past has no real-world consequences once he has that change of heart, because the narrative is not served by the evil brother serving jail time.

Tashan also focuses more on characters’ reactions to events than on why the events occurred. While we are told that Bhaiyaji is a gangster, his criminal activities are never detailed for the audience beyond his loan shark activities and counting money that arrives at his mansion. This is similar to the criminal activities in many masala films, like in Don, where Don seems to spend all his time handing off briefcases full of explosives and running away from the police. Modern gangster films, on the other hand, like Johnny Gaddar, fully detail the workings of the gang’s activities, in this case an illegal casino. The childhood romance of Bachchan Pande and Pooja is, of course, a great coincidence of the sort that rarely happens in real life, but happens all the time in masala films. One of the most popular film coincidences is to ensure that siblings separated in early childhood will always find one another later in life, like in Amar Akbar Anthony.

Om Shanti Om has one narrative – Om’s – and it is plotted very tightly. Although there is a reincarnation sequence taken from Karz, a concrete explanation is given for the rebirth, which is something that does not happen in Karz. Om Shanti Om lays out answers to any logistical questions the audience might ask, while Tashan does not, hoping that audiences would be carried along by the emotional resonance of the stories. This difference in narrative style is reflected in the audience reactions to the films. One of the biggest complaints about Tashan was a general confusion over the story, which means that the audience did not connect with the emotional cues in the script. Om Shanti Om did not have this problem for the reason outlined above: concrete plot explanations. Om Shanti Om’s story explanations are a concession to the changing expectations of Bollywood audiences involving stories. While previous generations may not have needed to know why in Karz, from which many elements of the narrative for Om Shanti Om was taken, the hero Monty was the reincarnation of an unrelated man named Ravi Verma, who was not even played by Rishi Kapoor, the modern audience would need an explanation. Of course, audiences may also have overlooked fantastical elements in the plot of Om Shanti Om because of the blatantly spoofy nature of its 1970s setting, which also allowed for jokes aimed at a present-day audience. Tashan, on the other hand, is not a spoof so much as it is an homage. The audience was unprepared for the 1970s narrative style used in Tashan because it was not set up in the more obvious manner of Om Shanti Om.

One of the narratives used in Tashan that is out of fashion with modern audiences is the conflict between NRIs and the homegrown hero. The anglicized Indian shows up again and again in 1970s films as either evil or just plain misguided. On the other hand, modern films are sometimes populated entirely with NRI characters, such as recent hit Salaam Namaste, and most of those that don’t have NRIs will have at least one scene that takes place in a foreign country, like Australia or Switzerland. A few recent films have even had a white woman as the love interest of the hero, notably Salaam-e-Ishq and Rang de Basanti. When there is a misguided and evil Western character, however, he is now white rather than Indian. Namastey London (2007) and Partner both featured white men who wanted to marry the heroine, taking her away from the hero. In this way, Tashan, with anglicized Jimmy rediscovering his Indian roots, contains a story trope that has not been seen in a popular film for a while. With NRIs now making up a sizable portion of the viewing audience, perhaps they do not want to see themselves as being less Indian simply for being familiar and comfortable with Western culture.

The growth of 1970s nostalgia is concurrent with the appearance of the more Western tastes of NRIs pushing content in Bollywood films and with the arrival of Hollywood money in Mumbai – for example, Saawariya (2007) was financed by Sony. While Tashan did have some 1970s references, they were not nostalgic. The chief of these was a mangled “Hinglish” version of a famous speech given by one of the heroes in Deewar, as performed by Bhaiyaji. The humor in this was character-based, allowing the audience to laugh at Bhaiyaji for thinking that he is the noble hero, not that Bhaiyaji was outdated. Conversely, Om Shanti Om was looking back nostalgically at Karz and all of its other references. Nostalgia expresses itself through a contrast between an idealized past and a cluttered and unstable future. The films of the 1970s are distant enough from the present to take on the rosy tinge of nostalgia. The young adults who enjoy the nostalgia today may have grown up hearing the songs from those 1970s films played by their parents. Remembering the 1970s films allows them to remember their parents and culture, even though the actual films themselves do not satisfy their desires. While the widely dispersed audiences of popular Hindi cinema no longer want the content of masala films, the nostalgic references to the masala films continue to fill a need for continuity and community as a common reference point.

(Originally posted June 5, 2008)