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Magazine
Cinema
Of stars and stories
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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This is a well-written book about the new Bollywood and its emerging narratives, aimed at a Western readership.
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It would be a mistake to skip the text and look only at the photographs in this new picture book on Bollywood. The real eye candy here is not the photographs but the writing. In Bollywood Today, Kaveree Bamzai entertainingly combin
es good prose with insightful analysis and deft behind-the-studio-scenes reporting. She writes of the camera zooming in on “Amitabh Bachchan’s grey wounded gaze”. Aishwarya Rai as “India’s first modern celebrity, who manages to sell more tabloid newspapers than she does movie tickets”. Shah Rukh Khan becomes “the ultimate poster child for middle class India, his rise coinciding with that of a newly liberalised nation”. “Amitabh Bachchan is probably the only person in Bollywood who can connect generations and blend clashing cultures”. Profiling the industry, Bamzai doesn’t take the easy way out that most oversized picture books do — simply interviewing people and letting them talk. Instead, she uses narrative, research, anecdote, industry talk and analysis to deftly (there’s that word again) evoke several iconic Bollywood careers spanning decades in miniature essays.
The references are contemporary enough to include (in passing), “Om Shanti Om”, “Sawaariya” and “Jodha-Akbar”. While star profiles form the chunk of the book, there are brief entries on filmmakers and producers. One wishes she had extended it to scriptwriters, choreographers, lyricists and music composers. (I’m sure she considered it but abandoned it for economy and focus.) If there is a theme in the book, it’s probably about new Bollywood and its emerging narratives. Through its young producers, filmmakers and stars, Bamzai examines this new Hindi sensibility: “That’s new Bollywood,”, she writes, “a mix of old and new, convention and audacity, feudalism and fearless risk-taking, nepotism and neo-corporatisation. Yet, Bollywood is India’s magnificent obsession, rivalled only by cricket. It is a national fascination which sells magazines and newspapers, makes news channel headlines and is used to promote everything, from sensual dreams to fabric softeners, from national integration to potato chips. In what the late American movie critic, Pauline Kael, would have called its trashy shameless heart, lie a thousand stars and many more stories.”
Familar ground
Written and produced largely for a foreign market, the book covers ground that is familiar to the desi movie buff. Yet, Bamzai manages to give us some rare glimpses of how producers, filmmakers and stars work: their typical workday routine on and off the sets and interesting behind the scenes trivia. For instance, we learn that Sanjay Leela Bhansali is a trained Odissi dancer with a keen ear for music. And that the music of “Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam” took him two years to record, while each song in “Devdas” took almost 15 days to shoot, with lighting for each scene taking hours, requiring the services of 700 light men who provided 30 lakh watts of power. The new Bollywood, Bamzai informs us, has swish canteens for the staff, butler service for stars, studios that can turn a floor into a Manhattan disco or a Mumbai bar and make up rooms in Mercedes vanity vans where lavish meals from home are served by silent valets. Keeping in character with eye candy books, Kaveree Bamzai is more sympathetic than critical about Bollywood, though she slyly slips in acerbic observations and witty personal takes. On Bollywood hypocrisy: “extramarital relationships are rife but divorces are not?” And Vidhu Vinod Chopra: “There is much to extol in his work — now if only, as Javed Akhtar says, he would stop praising himself long enough for others to start.”
Unlike most coffee table books, the photographs here are not originally commissioned and shot for the book. Sumptuous as they are, most of the photographs are reproduced from various sources (India Today, Getty Images, Corbis, etc.) and, as a result, the texture of the stills taken from various movies are so-so to stunning. What you also miss in the visuals is the style and character of a single, gifted photographer behind it. The photographs that introduce each personality (especially Ram Gopal Varma, Yash Chopra, Karan Johar, Vishal Bharadwaj, and Nagesh Kukunoor) have depth and character and are easily the most atmospheric visuals in the book. Next are the lush full-page stills from “Guru”, “Mangal Pandey”, “Black”, “Hum Tum”, “Pitaah”, “Taal”, “Faana”, “Don”, “Sholay 2”, “Munnabhai MBBS”, “Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna”, “Bunty Aur Babli”, “Veer Zaara”, “Kabul Express”, “Neal ‘N’ Niki” (“youthful but awful”) and “Devdas” — all of which are accurately chosen to showcase Bollywood at its vibrant, sexy, comic, romantic, violent and colourful best.
Surprise us
My little quibble with this book and nearly every coffee table book on Indian cinema is this: when are you going to produce a book for us, the desi fans here? Because every one of these books is obviously aimed for a Western readership — they all rehash what we nearly know to death. All these books celebrate and accept Bollywood for what it is, and are not ambitious — or perhaps not adventurous enough — to ask what it could be. Let’s have an eye candy book that takes us deep into the industry to tell us and show what its “trashy shameless heart” really looks like.
Bollywood Today, Kaveree Bamzai, Lustre Press/ Roli Books, p.176, price not stated.
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