Life, Love, and the Movies in India

by Faye Levine

AMERICAN influence in India has practically reached the proportions of a new raj; not so much through U.S. wheat, dollars, and diplomacy as through the products which are, ironically enough, beneath the attention of the customs officers. Smuggled in with Coca-Cola, cosmetics, the Peace Corps, and Hollywood movies is American propaganda of astounding effectiveness. Take ballpoint pens, for instance. In India, even in the hinterlands, every third shop sells ball-point pens, and at prices within reach of the hundreds of millions of people. Besides ball-points, the postindependence generation in India demands shoes — California beach-style “thongs,” or rubber sandals.

Undoubtedly the most significant demand in India these days, however, is for movies. In part owing to the astounding popularity of imported movies, India has gone wholeheartedly into this line itself. In number of full-length movies being produced each year, India is second in the world, some years to the United States, some years to Japan. It is to the film industry that one must look to get an idea of what is attracting the Indian masses.

In Bombay a small group of directors and producers and their plump, fair-skinned actors and actresses are furiously turning out what might be considered “formula movies,” guaranteed to fill the newly built movie houses all over the country. The crowds that rush to the opening of a new Hindi film are so great that a scabrous black market in theater tickets has developed. Recently, two students were shot by the police in a riot over the granting of concessions in tickets.

In a provincial town of 200,000 people, ten movie halls, with their weekly changes of show, provide the sole form of public recreation. All over India, every day, one can drop in on numerous showings of these mammoth three-hour features; and foreign films, mostly American, can be seen on Sunday morning.

Of course, the popularity of Hindi movies is somewhat less among two groups of people: those dedicated to traditional Indian culture, classical music, and regional languages; and those so Westernized that they only go to “English talkies” (meaning, usually, American, but not excluding British, Italian, and Russian films). But their numbers are insignificant compared with the millions of fans.

One effect of the explosion of the Hindi film industry is to create and circulate a popular-music culture that was nonexistent two decades ago. Classical Indian music, played mostly on the sitar, may sound like a monotonous, agonized whine, unmelodic and arhythmic, but its followers explain pridefully that it is music for an elite of initiates. To a majority of Indians it is a closed, if sacred, book. Music shops in Delhi and Calcutta say they sell virtually no Indian classical music recordings, but only Western rock ‘n’ roll and Hindi film songs. Adults as well as teen-agers know and love these songs. Often they have extremely melodic tunes, strangely syncopated rhythms, and simple words from the common language.

What thoughts are you lost in? Will there be a meeting?

Difficult to live. Difficult to die. Difficult, difficult, difficult, difficult.

God is in the clouds, God is in the sky. God is in you and me. God is everywhere.

The record stores report that their sales shoot up meteorically at the time of religious holidays. And sure enough, on the god Krishna’s birthday, processions of dancing men wind through town carrying statues and torches, the sacred word “Om” is painted on all the houses in six-foot-high red letters, and Hindi him songs blare at full volume from every radio. On such nights a Dionysian gaiety erupts that contrasts vividly with the ordinary daily life of restraint and order; and a crucial ingredient is the him songs.

It is not only on holidays; these songs are roaring from radios all over the subcontinent incessantly, day and night. The man on the street from Kerala to Calcutta knows the words. And speakers of Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi, Malayalam, Tamil, and the rest of India’s countless languages discuss their favorite movie stars as enthusiastically as speakers of the official Hindi. In a country whose great problem is linguistic and regional differences, this new common culture of films, personalities, and music is perhaps the strongest force for unification.

HINDI films are basically of two types, religious and romantic. The religious, preferred by older Indian women, resemble the American spectaculars, which were enormously loved in India: The Ten Commandments, The Robe, Ben Hur. In the local product, it is a Hindu god who performs three hours of miracles, maybe a rosy-cheeked little boy Krishna, the darling of an Indian motherhood more clinging than any Western counterpart. With the help of an adult god, perhaps Vishnu carrying a conch in one hand and a wheel of life in the other, the young god turns a plate of cobras into flower garlands, swallows poison, jumps off a cliff, sits in boiling oil, tames a lion, and walks through flames in safety.

Religious pictures have been around a long time, and largely reinforce the traditional features of Indian society. But within the last twenty years a new sort of Hindi film has appeared which, though exhibiting some traditional elements, has its major impact as an agent of India’s post-independence Westernization: the romantic film.

Romantic films are more popular with the boys and men, who make up 95 percent of the movie audience. (“Religious pictures are truer, perhaps, but dull,” says one young fan.) These romances are always in color, last three hours or more, and feature singing, dancing, adventure, and comedy. Sometimes they are epic in scope, following their chubby hero from birth through marriage, and including a good deal of patriotic material: a brief battle with some Chinese, some scenes from the recent Pakistani war, and, invariably, honeymoons in and eulogies of Kashmir.

As might be expected in the infant industry, there is an extreme paucity of themes, characters, and emotions. The story runs something like this: boy meets girl, perhaps by stepping on her toe in the bus; parents prohibit the marriage on grounds of economic or caste inequality or physical handicap; a villain intervenes; someone returns from a Western education (sometimes the villain, sometimes a comic figure); the young man proves himself through some heroic exploit; the commoner turns out to be wellborn after all; all obstacles to marriage are cleared up, and two huge families merge in song and dance. In one movie called Blue Sky, the heroine, Miss Blue, an airline hostess, marries the hero, Mr. Sky, a pilot, and they go off together in a beautiful Air India plane. Halfway through every show a nadir of grief and misfortune is reached, with profuse tears both on the screen and in the audience; but fate intervenes for the universal welfare in the second half.

There are exceptions to the formula, of course. Some recent films have advertised themselves as “murder mysteries,” but even here music, comedy, color, and romance make up the bulk of the program. Films now being made in Calcutta are distinctly more “arty”; but being in a regional language, Bengali (whose speakers claim it to be a much more literary language than Hindi), they are not widely distributed. Prizewinning Calcutta director Satyajit Ray, for instance, is unknown in India outside Bengal.

Though far from being “arty” in the ordinary sense, even Hindi movies display a technical smoothness and a richness of visual detail. Virtually every love scene takes place before breathtaking gardens (with Disneyish close-ups of the plants) or the Himalayas. Chorus lines of dancing girls in cascades of jewelry and multicolored costumes suggest Oriental harems more than the Roxy.

There seems to be a uniquely Indian color scheme and sound which these films manifest; iridescent and electric shades of bright pink, yellow, and blue combine with an echo-chambered, heavily sweet music for a total effect that is somehow mentholated. The movies are unabashedly pure spectacle; pure sensual, emotional palaver.

In these romantic fantasies, so apolitical and unhistorical that they seem like fairy tales, many traditional Indian social patterns are obvious. No marriage ever takes place without the ultimate consent of the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts. One movie was generally condemned as “immoral” because it treated the courtship theme simply as a problem of which suitor to choose, quite without mentioning the parents.

A further Indian characteristic is the prohibition of physical contact. Hero and heroine, courting or married, rarely hold hands, rarely embrace, absolutely never kiss. (Portions of “English talkies” which show physical contact are scrupulously censored. Cleopatra never got to kiss either Caesar or Antony. Sophia Loren in Two Women had practically nothing to do in the film when she was not allowed either to have an affair with Jean-Paul Belmondo or to be raped by the Allied army.)

But since love is invariably the theme, affection is shown in other ways. In most films hero and heroine content themselves with making Kewpie doll faces at one another, singing duets, and playing hide-and-seek stiff-leggedly through a convenient cornfield. In a rare case, the love scene manages to be quite flagrantly lewd, even despite the ban on contact: for example, the pair may lie on separate beds in adjacent bedrooms singing, through the wall, “I want you,” and writhing with emotion. If there should happen to be a sexual aggressor, it is always the woman; men are more likely to be the pursued and reluctant victims.

In a family, the mother and motherly love is operatically, exuberantly dramatic, clearly a thematic sacred cow. She is inevitably good (as proven by the constant expression of holiness on her face), wise (her ability to intuit what is happening to her absent children), and ubiquitous (when heroine is betrayed by villain, mother is always right on hand). Fathers are invariably drunken gamblers, absentminded (though kindly) fools, dead, or inexplicably absent. The upper-middle-class family is portrayed as being interested only in eating, buying saris, praying, casting horoscopes, and marrying off their children. No one is ever seen working. A man caught stealing from the bank where he works is scolded furiously by his boss but not punished. The hero, attacked by an aggressor, does not strike back but rolls into a ball on the floor, and passively resisting, has to be dumped out the door. The hero and heroine speak a little English, vising words like “girlfriend,” “dry-cleaning charges,” “good idea,” “puncture,” “shut up,” but any more English than that is spoken only by the most repulsive characters, socially pretentious, morally unscrupulous. People of explicitly low caste and economic class are often presented as comic figures; cheerful but bumblingly incompetent, married to fat, scolding wives, speaking incorrect Hindi or stuttering. Black skin is identified with low caste, class, and status; to the audience’s delight, one comic servant sings to the fair-skinned heroine:

Brahmans, or any religious devotees, are also often ridiculous characters, pompous, fat, and hypocritical; astrologers, however, are respectable.

DESPITE some coordination with traditional custom, romantic Hindi movies can be considered powerful instruments of change, for they depart in many instances from the existing situation and behavior. The setting, to begin with the most blatant departure from “realism,” is invariably in homes with an American high standard of living. Apartment houses with elevators and carpeted floors, apartments furnished in Danish modern, tile and enamel bathrooms, sumptuous meals highlighted by a mountain of fruit, grand pianos, young people driving their own cars: these are absolutely the rule in a Hindi movie, even when the protagonists are complaining of financial difficulties. And needless to say, these things are so rare in India, even among the wealthy, as to be for all intents and purposes nonexistent. But by the millions, Indians are taking in this dream of American suburbia for their own, and are beginning to want what they see on the screen.

Female stars now wear Western tight slacks and sweaters, and Western knee-length skirts, revealing a bare calf, still considered reprehensible. Woman’s dress in India is currently a matter of some contention, and the film star’s wardrobe is an important influence toward modernization.

The major impact of the movies’ invariable love theme (even though parental consent is formally respected) is to undermine the long-standing tradition of arranged marriages. In the overwhelming majority of Indian homes boy still meets girl only after they have walked seven times around the sacred fire together and are legally one person; they speak to each other for the first time on the fourth day after their wedding.

But in the pictures, Dharmendra accidentally comes across Padmini bathing in the river, and it is love at first sight. The older generations consider this behavior degenerate; actresses are, after all, no better than “temple dancing girls.” And in Hindi the phrase to express “love marriage,” or “marriage by choice,” carries with it the unmistakable connotation of reckless passion and haste. The young men and women in the movies further flout traditional Indian modesty by freely attending nightclubs, restaurants, rock ‘n’ roll parties, and by talking and joking with members of the opposite sex. They are, above all, relaxed, in pursuit of pleasure and self-interest, to the neglect of religious and social injunctions, prohibitions, inhibitions.

That such flirtatiousness and freedom are associated in the public mind with America can be seen in the rash of cheap Hindi magazines, which invariably set their torrid tales of romance in “the fleshpots of America.” Grade B Hollywood movies with titles like America by Night are highly popular. To much of India, to the hundreds of millions who know America from the movies, the magazines, and gossip, it is alcoholic, neurotic, and promiscuous. The very word “dating” sends a horrified shiver through the average Indian; it means to him “premarital sexual intercourse.” The frug and divorce are equally viewed as symptoms of an incredible moral decadence.

Nevertheless, a group of teen-agers in each of the big cities, Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras — but especially in Bombay, where the film industry and big business in general are located — have begun to ape these very customs. But in spite of drinking Coca-Cola, racing their motor scooters, smoking, twisting, and shaking, they do not have the ease of behavior with their contemporaries that American youths have. Though they might object briefly to their parents’ opinions, they ultimately bow to parental demand for an arranged marriage. The boys may dress in the pointiest shoes, the narrowest pants, the brightest jackets, and the girls may go to the restaurants in Fifth Avenue makeup and “ teased” hair, but they do not date.

The truly progressive youths, on the other hand, are likely to scorn such superficial Westernization as American clothing styles, slang, and the twist. These are the youths who are beginning to question the old Indian ways, their parents’ religious orthodoxy, religious, caste, and regional provincialism and prejudices, supremacy of the family, unimportance of the individual and especially the children, and arranged marriage and all it implies. For them most poignantly, but for all of India, Western courtship customs, both actual and as they are filtered through the medium of Hindi movies, present an enormous psychological problem. Love is obviously good in this system; happiness and freedom make an immediate appeal; the message of marriage by choice is as irresistible a call from the new world as gold in the streets. The most orthodox heart is often warmed despite itself when Dev and Meena’s parents finally approve.

The film songs that everyone knows are keeping up a constant propaganda war for love:

Read this, my love letter. Do not be angry. For you are my life.

Life is truly his who gives it away for love.

I am poor, my face is ugly, but still I am happy, because I am near you.

But though enchanting, a love match is still an impossible dream. “Yes, I know it would be better,” says an intelligent nineteen-year-old girl in a small town, “but how could I possibly arrange a marriage for myself?” Where she lives all schools and colleges are sex-segregated; all marriages are parentally arranged; young men and women do not speak to each other in a public place; boys and girls alike do not know how to respond if by chance an individual seeks to make friends despite the rules of this setup. Furthermore, this young girl’s parents are decidedly opposed to choice marriage, and she is not sure she wants to risk their disapproval. Timidity and economic insecurity keep her from going off to live by herself in New Delhi. Meanwhile, the thought of marriage by choice haunts her like the thought of freedom to a man in a totalitarian dictatorship. Perhaps she will not escape, but there can be no doubt that her children will.

The most important single product being sold by these hybrid Indian-Western movies is happiness. Happy endings are the inviolable rule; villains are always punished, parents appeased, lovers united, murders solved, economic problems disintegrated. To an American audience, happy endings are a little tiresome. But to an Indian moviegoer, happiness is almost an unknown element in his world view. Pessimism is universal in this country of poverty, filth, disease, malevolent climate, and rampant insects. Unhappiness is the rule, not only among the peasants and poor urban masses, but equally among the middle and upper class. When asked to write their autobiographies, Indian college girls will produce statements of such heartfelt gloom and depression as to startle a Westerner. “Life is a burden to be suffered; one must not expect anything good from it but simply learn to accommodate oneself to discomfort; desiring anything is destined to result in frustration and suffering.” Young people in India seem prematurely old, saddened, hardened by conditions of life and a culture which teach them stoicism and resignation from the very beginning.

But then, in the face of all this, come the Hindi movies, proclaiming happiness, the new salvation. Is it a direct borrowing from America and the West? The inevitable cultural by-product of a dawning age of mass consumption? A plot by the wealthy to keep the Indian people from thinking about their poverty? And what will be the effect, in the long run, if, as it seems, the dreams of a handful of newly rich people in Bombay, still lolling in the proceeds of spectacular success, are becoming the dreams of a vast unformed population?