Amar Akbar Anthony • BOLLYWOOD, BROTHERHOOD, and the NATION • William Elison Christianlee Novetzke Andy Rotman
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Amar Akbar Anthony • BOLLYWOOD, BROTHERHOOD, AND THE NATION • William Elison ChristianLee Novetzke Andy Rotman Ill Ill HarvardUniversity Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2016 Copyright© 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Film stills reproduced from Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), directed and produced by Manmohan Desai. Hirawatjain & Co./ MKD Films/ Manmohan Films. Promotional posters in the Introduction and Appendix for Manmohan Desai's Amar Akbar Anthony (1977). Hirawatjain & Co./ MKD Films/ Manmohan Films. Reproduced from the collection of Andy Rotman. Libraryof Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-674-50448-6 (hardcover) Introduction OUTRIGHT HOKUM HE YEAR 1977 was a tumultuous one in India. The state of emer T gency that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared in 1975, allowing her to rule by decree, at last came to an end. During those twenty-one months of autocratic rule, the government's attempts to en force order led to many excesses: political opponents were imprisoned, the press was censored, and civil liberties were curtailed. When Mrs. Gandhi finallycalled for elections, the political opposition joined forcesto mount a campaign on the theme of "democracy versus dictatorship." The elec tions delivered Mrs. Gandhi a resounding loss and brought in the first non-Congress Party government since Independence. The mood of the times was mixed. There was a renewed feeling of hope, but also pent-up frustration and resentment. Going to the movies gave the nation a way to escape from this trou bled reality. Or did it? A bumper crop of filmsthat year dealt with themes of alienation and integration: families broke apart and were reunited, highlighting the plight of the disenfranchised as well as the possibility of the nation coming together as a kind of happy family. These twin ex periences were present not only in the content of films but also in the experience of watching them. Movie theaters, like the world outside them, were stratified,with the more moneyed customers-the "classes" up in the balcony and the "masses" close to the screen, so that the former literally looked down and past those in the cheaper seats. Yet moviegoing 1 2 AMAR AKBAR ANTHONY was also a bonding experience, with most viewers watching films with family or friends. Even a solitary viewer was likely to connect with others, singing along with a hit song or chatting over a snack during in termission. 1 It was a moment forfeelings of estrangement and belonging. And there was no place better to findboth than in Manmohan Desai's hit film the biggest blockbuster of the year. Amar Akbar Anthony was the year's top-grossing film (Figure 1), but its box office success was only the beginning. It became the talk of the town-and the village. It won awards, catapulted careers, and quickly be came a classic. The filmintroduced India to three brothers froma rough neighborhood of Bombay, separated as children from their parents and one another and adopted into differentreligious communities: Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. The tale of how they discover their kinship and rally against the forces of discord to redeem their long-lost parents took viewers on a madcap, musical romp. At the same time, the story's course ran along a cultural topography strewn with anxieties about religious plu ralism, gender, and modernity. And something about this hot mix hit the sweet spot, back then and so on to this day. Amar Akbar Anthony perfected the formula known as masala, a blend of generic elements combining music, comedy, melodrama, and morality play. Many of its songs, star images, and sequences have come to circulate as icons forBolly wood as a whole. There was, in a sense, nothing original about the film;Manmohan Desai, its director and producer, publicly disavowed any interest in origi nality. Instead, Desai and his team borrowed merrily and promiscuously fromsources in the literatures, religions, and folk traditions of South Asia, and from cinemas both Indian and Western. And in a phenomenon compa rable to the recycling of mythological tropes in epic traditions the world over, Amar Akbar Anthony has come into its own as a sort of supertext. It may not be the Mahabharata but it has taken its place at the center of India's popular imaginary.2 Since its release-to near-unanimous critical despair, as we'll discuss shortly-Amar Akbar Anthony has become recognized in its importance by industry professionals, Bollywood fans, music lovers, pop culture ma vens, and at least some academics. 3 Its broad and enduring appeal across the subcontinent and beyond has cemented its place as a cinematic mile stone and a cultural touchstone.4 Richly symbolic, the film can be read Introduction 3 MUSICLAXMIKANT PYARELAL , ! ' LYRICS ANAND BAKSHI FIGURE 1. Poster for Amar Akbar Anthony as a multivalent allegory encompassing the nation, the state, civil society, and the feel-good ideology of pluralist "secularism "-and simultaneously enjoyed as three hours of sheer entertainment. Ambiguity and critical dispute are evident in the academic writing on the film,in which we finda multiplicity of interpretations of its message. Vijay Mishra describes the film as one that "confirms the resilience of the secular nation-state [of lndia]. "5 Jyotika Virdi reads the film as "a testimonial ... to the limits ofNehruvian secular nationalism " because, 4 AMAR AKBAR ANTHONY in her account, the brothers remain with women "of their own commu nity," and this becomes a model in Indian cinema for a kind of "communal fraternizing."6 Rachel Dwyer understands Amar Akbar Anthony as "a film about a Partition separation" that "is now a byword in religious plurality."7 And Philip Lutgendorf describes how the filmsignals "(in properly de scending demographic order) the Hindu, Muslim, and Christian commu nities['] ... essential unity and harmony-within the copious bosom o� a (visibly Hindu) Mother lndia."8 What to do with such a multivalent text? In this book we will argue that Amar Akbar Anthony-too easily dis counted as a cheesy and cumbersome 1970s artifact-has risen to a stature well above its movie peers, and indeed now transcends its history, in large part because it serves as a multivalent metaphor. It is metonymic of reli gious pluralism, the nuclear family, the slum neighborhood, the state's ambiguous commitment to the principle of secularism, and so on, all the while inviting critique of these aspects of Indian society. While Amar AkbarAnthony is conventionally read in India as a film about national in tegration-and we don't altogether controvert this position-our argu ment will make room for the opposite reading as well. This is a comedy built of tragic elements: the venality and irresponsibility of the political class, the perceived backwardness of the masses, the compromised character of civil society, the limited compass of the state, and the vexed implications of secularism. Amar Akbar Anthony is filled with contestation and even confusion,in which the logical and the illogical are in harmony. The film'sthree epon ymous brothers find plenty to butt heads over, challenging one another at numerous points as they assert their identities. Yet in the end they find unity in their diversity and become, as one brother says late in the movie, "three in one." Our book takes this as inspiration and employs a meth odology of sibling rivalry, offeringdiffering and competing perspectives to create a kind of oneness-or three-in-oneness.For a cinematic corol lary, think of Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), in which various char acters offer self-serving and contradictory accounts of the same event, showing that reality is made up of multiple realities. One story is never the full story. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 each present the perspective of one brother, and this perspectival approach defines the whole chapter's analytic focus. Introduction 5 As with their celluloid counterparts, these brothers of the printed page do not agree. Between and among our chapters the reader will find naked contradiction. An argument in Chapter 1 may be met with an an tithetical argument in Chapters 2 and 3. Indeed, each is argued on the premise that the brother named at the chapter's beginning is the hero of the whole movie; each chapter, as such, is a hero's tale. Chapter 4, on Bharati, lets the three would-be victors offercompeting perspectives on their mother, and then gives Maa herself the final say.We have made no effortto declare a winner or to mediate these multiple positions. This is not a book with a single cohesive argument; it is, we hope, a book with many cohesive arguments that also happen to be contradictory. Some readers may findthis lack of a central authoritative perspective vexing. To help understand our approach, consider the oft-told Indian fable of the blind men and the elephant. Imagine that three blind men (scholars, in fact) happen to encounter an elephant. One of the men feels the elephant's trunk and says it is a snake; another feels its legs and says it is a tree; a third feels its belly and says it is a wall. "Snake!" "Tree!" "Wall!" each exclaims, certain of what he perceives. The men talk, listen, and argue, and eventually figure out that they are all describing an elephant. What we like about this allegory is not that the blind men finallyfigure out they have encountered an elephant. What we like is that they findthe elephant also to be a snake, a tree, and a wall. 9 They come to know they have an elephant before them, but they also have a deeper appreciation of the nature of the elephant, of its parts and the whole and the tensions among them.