LAST year, an American friend, a film scholar, knowing of my interest in the subject of film, asked me to help him understand Bollywood. I found the prospect interesting and I put down this essay for him. I recently revisited what I wrote and thought after updating it a wee bit, it would make for an interesting post on my blog.

Your feedback will prove me whether or not I thought right. Do write to me with your comments.

Here’s looking at Bollywood

Bollywood doesn’t merely resemble Hollywood in name; it has most of the characteristics that are associated with the popular film industry in Southern California. It produces films in huge numbers, most of them are hopelessly formulaic and it banks on the appeal of stars and starlets to sell those films. Like Hollywood, three-fourths of the films made in Bollywood are irredeemably poor, most of them are also in poor taste and all of them are definitely kitschy.

Some film-makers through Bollywood’s most productive years have used their own considerable talent to succeed in working within the formula-ridden framework and yet making motion pictures that stand out. On the back of these few films and film directors rests Bollywood’s creative reputation.

Overall, Bollywood stands for nothing but blatant commercialism. If you make a film that hits the bull’s eye at the box-office you are God in Bollywood. If your film flops, your obituary is ready to be written. By and large any kind of deviation, much less innovation, from the standard formula is anathema to Bollywood film producers.

• In the late 1990s, a few films including “Border” and “Gadar” (Mutiny) became big hits at the box-office on the back of patriotic jingoism and Pakistan-bashing. In no time, most film producers were planning films along similar lines.


• The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of the Angry Young Man in Bollywood. Amitabh Bachchan, the biggest selling star of all time in Bollywood, personified this Angry Young Man, who was typically driven by personal tragedy to become a vigilante. He would look initially for law to help him fight gangs and gangsters but finding institutions of law corrupt or impotent, or both, he would dispense justice himself. This formula became so rampant that post-1970s roughly half the films made in Bollywood have been about one man against the system.


• The eternal formula, however, is romance. The typical storyline is this: a young boy and girl fall in love, want to marry but can’t because of parental opposition. The families get into feuds, the lovers stand firm; sometimes they sacrifice their love, at other times true love triumphs. In some films, the lovers decide that the world will not let their love bloom and decide to commit suicide.

It has historically been difficult for a film director who wants to make a film that has a different plot-line to raise finances. The name of the game in Bollywood is to stick to the formula for success—forget about trying to be different. “Give the audience what it wants,” is what countless producers advise film-makers day in and day out.

Music is an essential ingredient for success of a Bollywood film. Music companies and film producers tie up for the music of a film and the soundtrack in released before the film is and usually makes big bucks. The song and dance routine is staple fare in a Bollywood film. In most films little or no attempt is made to integrate these songs into the film’s narrative. The story-line of the film is usually chugging along, comes to halt to make way for a song and dance number, at the end of which we return to the story. A film without songs is a monumental risk in Bollywood and few people are even willing to consider walking that path.

Bollywood, even more than Hollywood, is dominated by superstars. They dictate the economics of film-making and in some cases the fee paid to a single star can exceed a third of a film’s budget. That’s how superstar-led Bollywood is. Films are almost never picked up by distributors on the basis of the director; “What’s your star cast?” is the all-important question that decides the saleability of a film.

The 1970s and 1980s saw parallel cinema in India take root. Financed and encouraged by National Film Development Corporation, a Government of India undertaking, several talented film-makers, fresh from studying cinema at the Film and Television Institute of India, made films outside mainstream Bollywood. These films had little or no viewership but survived on Government support. The Government also instituted the National Awards where serious cinema was feted.

The parallel cinema movement has virtually died. National Awards are now handed out to blatantly commercial films. But what has happened almost simultaneously in the recent past is that Bollywood has discovered some propensity for experimentation. In recent times there have been films that deal with serious issues of corruption, adultery, rape and the like. They are certainly less kitschy than run-of-the-mill Bollywood productions and represent the hope for more sensible, and sensitive, films in future. An interesting trend is that a few film-makers with refined sensibilities, who have tasted reasonable commercial success, have set up their own production houses and are raising money to help the making of films that go off the beaten track. These films have the commercial elements—for instance, song and dance is not entirely dispensed with—but they tackle serious issues and aim for great realism.

More recently, in the last few years, multiplexes have added a new dimension to Bollywood. Films made by competent, technically savvy filmmakers which would have earlier not found a distributor willing to put big bucks behind the venture, are now being exhibited at mulitiplexes. The content of these films is stronger, bolder and altogether more engrossing. Some examples: Life in a Metro, Bheja Fry, Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi, Yun Hota to Kya Hota, etc.

That’s not all. Filmmakers with a social conscience—for instance the makers of the likes of Black Friday and Parzania—are finding their films playing in multiplexes. Black Friday, directed by Anurag Kashyap and banned by courts for a couple of years on alleged grounds of being provocative, is about the investigations following the 1993 serial bomb blasts in Mumbai. The story is told through different accounts of the people involved—police, conspirators, victims and middlemen. It does so in a hard-hitting, uncompromising manner. Rahul Dholakia’s Parzania focuses on the travails of a Parsi family in Ahmedabad during the ruinous communal riots in 2002 aided and abetted by the incumbent government. It is a moving document of the trauma faced by the minorities in Gujarat following the train burning incident in Godhra.

That films like these are being commercially released is a cause for celebration. It represents true freedom of speech. The audience for Black Friday and Parzania is a minority, perhaps a minuscule minority, but the exhibition of these films that are the very antithesis of Bollywood’s bump and grind routine is an exhilarating change that has come about. In Mumbai, you may even be surprised to find an Anand Patwardhan documentary playing commercially.