Does Indian cinema shape our popular culture or merely reflect it?

Cinema like all other forms of creative expression is a highly complex entity. However the relative success of cinema vis-à-vis other forms of art at the popular level is because its ability to transcend barriers. Cinema of the 21st century has become is some sense a Meta art form. Most genres of popular cinema are actually much more than just visual experience or recording of a dramatic performance. Cinema encapsulates a range of creative work like literature, photography and music. Cinema’s enormous reach at the popular level is mainly because of this expansiveness in its content. Popular culture is also a term that is difficult to be boxed into a pigeonhole. Nevertheless for our purpose we can define popular culture as a matrix of tradition, sensibility and how we choose to express ourselves in our day to day lives. It manifests itself through what we wear, how we talk, our political culture, what we eat or how we choose to fashion our facial hair (the list goes on). All art forms are firmly embedded in our popular culture and cinema is no exception. Indian Cinema Indian cinema like most things Indian is not uniform. Sometimes it is very difficult to classify Indian cinema into a category because of its diversity. Just to cite an example Indian cinema is made in languages as different as English, Bhojpuri and Tulu. In some ways Indian cinema perfectly fits the idiom that Shashi Tharoor furthers in his book ‘India: From Midnight to Millennium’ and that is you find any stereotype for India and we will cite an exact opposite. Getting into the exercise of defining what really is Indian cinema, is probably much more gargantuan in its scope than the breadth of an essay so we will go by a simple definition. Any film made in an Indian language (including English) and produced within the territorial confines of our country is Indian. Cinema and popular culture A former gangster once appeared on a reality TV show in America. On asked about how gangster movies are perceived in the real life gangster world he cited the example of the film ‘The Godfather’. He said that after watching the film many real life mob bosses consciously started cultivating their personalities in line with the film’s characters. This example though anecdotal speaks a lot about the ability of cinema to shape popular culture. Cinema as reflection of popular culture v architect of popular culture is much like the structure v agency debate. Do human beings create circumstances? Or do circumstances shape human beings. The answer to both debates lies somewhere in the middle. In other words cinema both reflects and shapes popular culture and Indian cinema is no different. Cinema as a reflection of popular culture One of India’s most celebrated film makers Satyajit Ray once said that the hero of Indian film exists in a social vacuum. He said this in the context of India’s mainstream films but what he did not emphasize was that the Indian audience wants the Indian hero to exist in a social vacuum. In other words a majority of Indian viewers go to the cinema for an experience that is larger than life, that helps her to escape the mundane realities of her day to day life. The fact that Indian film makers react to the audience in a way that is so well synchronised with our tastes is itself a testimony to how well the Indian cinema reflects popular culture. If we trace the history of mainstream Indian cinema (in most popular languages like Tamil, Bengali Hindi etc) we find that it coincides perfectly with our social, political and economic history. As an illustration we can take the Hindi film industry that is based out of Mumbai and has a somewhat oriental name in Bollywood. The Hindi films of the 50s made just after our independence were imbued with the idealism that characterised our infant state e.g Mother India. Films like Pyaasa (Guru Dutt, 1952) were tragic but the protagonist was filled with idealism and was ready to die for it. As we progressed into the dangerous decades of the 60s and the 70s some of the disappointed that the common man felt became visible in Manmohan Desai’s films with Amitabh Bachchan as an epitome of the angry young man. Similarly films made in the pre liberalisation era (1991) can be contrasted with those made in the post liberalisation era. Post 1991 films much better reflect the culture of a prosperous Indian. The films are replete with sequences shot in exotic European locales and the main characters invariably being wealthy businessmen e.g Hum Aapke Hain Kaun, Kuchh Kuchh Hota Hai. In the pre reform era films the village, the family and thick social bonds were vividly portrayed and the brother who wanted to migrate or start his own household was seen as the villain and not simply as someone who was upwardly mobile. As we enter into the 2000s we see that the culture of the moffussil towns and the Hindi heartland too finds a place into mainstream cinema a recent example being Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur. If we trace the historical trajectory of cinema in other Indian languages we will find a similar trend. Indian cinema as an architect of popular culture Cinema impacts popular culture in many ways. We can come up with two broad channels through which the power of cinema feeds into popular culture. One of them is the medium itself i.e. a piece of good work has cascading effect on the future work in that field. So a Satyajit Ray is able to impact a whole generation Bengali film makers like Mrinal Sen, Ritwik Ghatak, Rituparna Roy Chaudhury et al. The second channel establishes itself by the direct interaction between cinema and viewers. Let us see how this relation works in the Indian context. Generations of South Indians have learnt and refined their Hindi speaking skills through watching Hindi films from the North (something that seemed to be impossible during the anti-Hindi agitations in Tamil Nadu). Similarly people in north India have been able to shed many stereotypes about the south mainly because dubbed version of Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam films are now easily available throughout the country. Karva Chauth as a festival was mainly celebrated in parts of North India but thanks to its regular portrayal on the silver screen it is now observed across India. The political culture of our country has also been deeply influenced by cinema. Films like Rang de Basanti had a huge impact on the anti-reservation protests of 2006 some researchers of social science have also pointed out that candle lit marches as a form of nonviolent protest became common only after the release of the film. The relative ease with which screen actors like NT Ramarao, Amitabh Bachchan or script writers like MG Ramachandran and Karunanithi could enter the electoral arena and perform spectacularly at elections is evidence of the intrinsic links between the silver screen and the mainstream political culture. Cinema also deeply affects our view of history. In an age where reading as a leisurely activity is at a historic low cinema is the only medium through which the current generation interacts with characters like Bhagat Singh, Surya Sen, Kalpana Dutt or even Gandhi. Films of Manoj Kumar have continued to inform many generations of Indians with an abstracted and sugar coated version of our national struggle. One of the little known ways in which moving pictures create lasting and salutary effects on the popular culture of our society is by inspiring artists and creative minds in nature. Few would disagree with the fact that a Salman Rushdie or an MF Hussain or a Arundhati Roy have fundamentally altered the landscape of popular art. What is not known is that they were all deeply inspired by Indian cinema. MF Hussain for his part even tried directing a few films (Meenaxi, Gajgamini). Salman Rushdie regularly cites the success of Bollywood as a symbol of freedom in Indian and Arundhati Roy was deeply impressed by the films of Pradip Krishen (also wrote for a few of them). Cinema as the message The most visible evidence of the implicit relationship between Indian cinema and popular culture is the establishment of the Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC). Any film that releases in India has to have a certificate from the CBFC. This itself tacitly implies that bad cinema negatively impacts its viewers and therefore it is important for a body of experts to know beforehand what the message of the film is and how it is being conveyed to the audience. Shreeram Lagu one of India’s finest stage and film artists wrote in his autobiography (aptly titled Lamadh meaning coolie in Marathi) that the whole apparatus of cinematic experience is just a vehicle for delivering the writer’s and director’s ideas. To think that such profound ideas would not have the potency of transforming popular culture is refusing to accept the truth.